#did some follow up work for class credit under my institution

[angelfrommontgomery]

Clocking in at 4200 words and 30 pages with figures and formatting stuff…….but really all that is done is the introduction and part I, which to be fair is the beefiest parts bc they have the most data and the most references and the most complicated method and discussion. Tomorrow I need to verify my math, rerun some simulations, look at the results, and then lock in and finish this. We are entering approximately 48 hours til it’s due but there’s a tiny bit of wiggle room………. I believe it can get finished . Presentation isn’t until a week from Wednesday so I’m taking a couple days off thesis stuff then making that. I also need to submit an embargo request cuz I don’t actually know who has the rights to all this data LOL. Mostly I’m just worried about journals requiring first dibs and not wanting it to be released anywhere else first bc some do that and we are trying to publish part I.

[virginiaprelawland]

House Passes $1.5 Trillion Bill

By Noreen Karam, University of Virginia Tech, Class of 2024

April 27, 2023

House Republicans narrowly passed legislation Wednesday pairing nearly $4.8 trillion in deficit reduction measures with a debt limit increase into next year — a move they argue should force Democrats to finally negotiate conditions for raising the nation’s borrowing limit.

The 222-member House GOP conference largely unified around the bill after weeks of tense negotiations, including last-minute changes leadership reluctantly agreed to include in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. 

Dozens of Republicans who supported the bill were casting their first ever votes for a debt limit increase. “For the first time we have a bill serious about controlling the reckless spending that’s destroying America’s productivity and its prosperity,” Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., who has opposed debt limit increases for 15 years, said on the floor. Ultimately, four Republicans — Tennessee's Tim Burchett, Florida's Matt Gaetz, Colorado's Ken Buck and Arizona's Andy Biggs — voted against the bill, the maximum number of defections GOP leaders could afford. The 217-215 vote was otherwise along party lines. 

Burchett said the measure did not include enough “real deficit reduction.” Biggs agreed, saying in a statement that the measure only lowers the projected gross national debt a decade from now from $52 trillion to $47 trillion. Gaetz cited a similar figure, saying in a statement that "gaslighting nearly $50 trillion in debt to America is something my conscious cannot abide at this time.” Buck explained his vote was for the same reasons. But a full-court press from Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other GOP leaders won over others who'd been leaning against the measure, such as Nacy Mace of South Carolina. 

Mace said after a Wednesday afternoon meeting with McCarthy that she'd back the bill after the speaker promised to work with her on future efforts to balance the federal budget, including a possible balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

Key components of the measure include:

· Raising the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or extending it through March 2024, whichever comes first. 

· Cutting and capping discretionary spending for the next decade, starting with a $1.47 trillion topline in fiscal 2024 and allowing for 1 percent annual growth over the following nine years. The first-year cap reflects a $131 billion cut from current funding levels, which spending wouldn’t catch up to until the end of the decade under the proposal.

· Repealing most of the energy tax credit provisions from Democrats’ 2022 climate, tax and health law, with the exception of some biofuel provisions Midwestern Republicans pushed to protect. 

· Rescinding unobligated IRS tax enforcement and climate-related grant funds from the 2022 law and unspent COVID-19 relief from various pandemic-era aid packages.

· Canceling President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. 

· Expanding existing work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and instituting new rules for Medicaid beneficiaries.

· Overhauling infrastructure permitting and other energy-related laws and regulations to spur more domestic production, primarily for fossil fuels.

· Requiring congressional authorization for major administration regulatory initiatives.

Republicans said the measure reflects the shared priorities of various ideological factions in the conference and serves as their opening offer to President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats, who want a clean debt limit increase.  “The whole purpose of this is to compel the president to negotiate — and to demonstrate to Washington, D.C., that Kevin McCarthy has the votes to raise the debt ceiling,” Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., said.

House Democrats all voted against the bill, arguing that Congress should raise the debt limit without conditions. They also slammed the spending cuts in the bill, saying they would have a massive impact on government programs Americans depend on, from health care and nutrition services to education and infrastructure. “There is no way Congress will agree to 10 years of destructive caps and the biggest single cut to nondefense programs in American history," House Budget ranking member Brendan F. Boyle, D-Pa., said during debate. The debt limit “x date” — when the Treasury Department is at risk of running out of cash and wiggle room under the borrowing cap to pay bondholders and other obligations — will hit as early as June. The exact timing will depend in large part on tax receipts the Treasury is still analyzing, but the department plans to release an updated forecast later this week or next.

The Senate is planning to ignore House Republicans’ bill but will be under pressure to either negotiate or act on an alternative plan. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer no indication Wednesday that the House vote would change his negotiating posture. “We think what Speaker McCarthy and the House have done is going to bring us closer to default, not further away from it,” the New York Democrat said. 

Senate Democrats have demanded a clean debt limit bill, but Schumer declined to say whether he planned to bring one to the floor. “Our plan has always been the same: to avoid default, pass a clean debt ceiling — no brinksmanship, no hostage-taking,” he said. Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith said Schumer’s position isn’t tenable. “They have to get off that because he can't even get his own Democrats to vote for it … and they’ve got to have 60 votes over there,” the Missouri Republican said. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his conference are backing McCarthy's insistence on spending cuts for raising the debt limit. “Until [Biden] and the speaker of the House reach an agreement, we’ll be at a standoff,” McConnell said. Biden has threatened to veto the GOP bill and continues to insist on a clean debt limit increase. The president has repeatedly said he would meet with McCarthy again only when House Republicans produce a budget. But on Wednesday ahead of the vote, the only condition Biden gave for meeting with the speaker is that raising the debt limit remains “not negotiable." 

The White House had previously signaled Republicans’ debt limit bill wouldn’t suffice as a plan to kick-start spending negotiations but on Wednesday issued a statement on the measure that characterized it as a budget. “House Republicans are selling out hard-working Americans in order to defend their top priority: restoring the Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest and corporations at a cost of over $3 trillion,” White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt said. “Budgets are a statement of values — and House Republicans have made clear who they are fighting for.” Republicans do��not extend any of the 2017 tax cuts in their debt limit bill and have not yet made that a request in negotiations, despite the White House repeatedly trying to make that connection.

It’s unclear if the White House intentionally referred to Republicans' debt limit bill as a budget to allow Biden to open the door to negotiations or not, but some congressional Democrats are predicting he’ll ultimately get there. “I think he will sit down, probably,” Rep. Henry Cuellar said. However, the Texas Democrat said the Senate would “not necessarily” be pressured into doing anything, noting that “the Senate is the Senate.”

Maryland Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, the former No. 2 House Democrat who stepped down from leadership at the beginning of the year, said negotiations are inevitable since the parties will need to compromise to avoid a crisis. “I'm sure there are going to be some negotiations because we don't believe that default is an option either. Both sides agree on something,” he said. 

But if Republicans expect Democrats to cut a deal, they need to offer something that will appeal to their party, Hoyer said. “We would want to have rational numbers,” he said, referring to discretionary spending levels. “And right now we're not even close to rational numbers.”

______________________________________________________________

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/04/26/us/debt-ceiling-vote-news

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/26/house-gop-debt-limit-debate/

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-gop-narrowly-passes-bill-raise-debt-ceiling/story?id=98881337

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-republicans-debt-ceiling-bill-vote/

[sukiglycerin]

call it fate (or a christmas miracle) || katsuki bakugou.

* pairing: bodyguard!katsuki bakugou x earthbending quirk!reader (gender neutral!)

* genre: bodyguard!au, fluff, some angst, fake dating, aNd thEre wAs OnE bEd

* words: 10.3k (help)

* warnings: swearing bc bakugou, too much backstory, idk what bodyguards even do, there’s a fight scene (in a similar lieu to the sports festival arc), hunter x hunter? no this is tsundere x tsundere, i want to hug bakugou, yes i imagine mr. tanaka to be the tanaka from kuroshitsuji, christmas is a very minor aspect of the story (but the title was too good to resist)

* original request from @apexqueenie​: Hnnnnnnnnnnnngh can I get a Bodygaurd Bakuboi x bratty reader who don’t like to be watched like a hawk cuz she wants to do fun things pretty please? // and from anonymous:  if it's ok, can I request Bakugou with a reader who has a quirk like earth bending please? // and from @killkurzyackerman​: ÒWÓ UR REQS ARE OPEN can u do a bakubabe with like lil sassy bad bitch vibe reader bc ive seen a lot of fics that sorta like softie or angel type and no offense theyre great but ya know sumthn diff this time please

* a/n: this is a very long fic, to say the least. i combined these three requests! though reader’s quirk doesn’t appear often, it conveys my thoughts on how bakugou would go about with that quirk. moreover, i hope this reader is badass? i realize that that characterization is quite hard for me. so, i hope you don’t see reader as super soft! i made them fight back against bakugou (literally, too) and kinda bratty hehe. i got to explore a lot of new things with this fic, so i hope they reach you well. this is a repost because it originally did not show up in the tags!

* synopsis: things had gotten boring with bakugou as your bodyguard. it was only until an interesting proposal by the man that things would change. well, maybe a little too much would change...

you, to be quite simple and honest, were getting tired of katsuki bakugou. he'd been your bodyguard for years (years! much longer than any other you'd hired!) and he was getting boring. dull. plain. any synonymous word would fit. he was boring like a 24 hour session of watching paint dry, monotone like a professor’s droning that never failed to put you to sleep. (perhaps he was even more spiritless than professor sato at the academy. he caught you sleeping no less than thirteen times in his class. the number didn’t even account for the times he didn’t catch you.)

to the untrained eye, katsuki bakugou is vibrant. he's aggressive, unruly, and ruggedly charming (somehow). he's a wonder in a suit-and-tie and the epitome of an oxymoron with his harsh words, rough hands, and crisp suit. it was that very reason you’d hired him; his personality excited you. it seemed unpredictable and it was a challenge.

like all other challenges, bakugou was not impossible. once the challenge was overcome, time flow was stagnant; you watched the ticking of a clock as the day passed by you. you’d gotten used to him and he’d gotten used to you. these days, he watched you like a hawk. you could never slip past those sharp eyes anymore, no matter what you did. he was not fazed by any of your antics (ticked off mildly, sure, but he could live with it).

“leave me alooooone,” you whined for the fourth time in an hour as you exited a mall. bakugou's hands were full of shopping bags filled with everything from clothing to the latest technological invention. you weren’t sure how he was supposed to protect you in that condition. though, to be candid - in the first place, you didn’t need protection. you attended a private institution designed to maximize the use of your quirk as a child and graduated with absolutely flying colors. on top, you’d taken various martial arts outside of school. you didn’t know why your parents were still concerned about your wellbeing. you handled it fine. around 99.9% of the time, you could easily beat your bodyguard in a fair fight. it was a regular practice for you; so common that there was a reward if a bodyguard could last longer than six months working for you. not that any of them liked to be called bodyguards.

“sweetheart, i would if i could,” bakugou gritted through his teeth. “pay’s too good to- goddamn, what did you even buy?” he’d stopped behind you to adjust his grip on one of the bags.

you hummed pleasantly, continuing at your same, leisurely pace. his question was a rhetoric; he watched you buy everything with your black credit card. you watched as a car pulled up in front of you.

“there’s our ride,” you said, brushing bakugou’s shoulder as you stepped into the car. he grunted in response, loading the car with your purchases.

“fight me with your quirk when we get home,” you said during the ride. “you have, what, a boom boom quirk?”

he made a noise in his throat, voice hard. “my quirk’s explosions. nitroglycerin.”

“dangerous,” you said through a smile. he’d never used his quirk around you, but you were already starting to see possibilities of strategies you could use.

“so says the master earthbender,” he retorted sarcastically.

you clicked your tongue. “we’ll see who wins in the fight, explodo-boy.”

“finally brave enough to challenge me, eh?"

“i was always this brave.”

“oh, give it up already, bakugou!” you directed another wall of rocky terrain toward bakugou, who blew up the land and sent rocks flying. his stance was hunched slightly, forehead matted with sweat. the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up to his elbows, coat long abandoned on the rugged terrain.

“tired already?” he snarled. he put his hands together, preparing for a bigger explosion. you didn’t let him have this opportunity, slinging a large rock to absorb the impact of the explosion. he dodged swiftly, to your disappointment, but his attack seemed to be subdued.

you used his delayed reaction time to try to trap him with terrain under his feet, but he was somehow a step ahead of you. you heard a popping noise; bakugou was propelled through the air, your rocks blasted already and a cloud of dust forming. you cussed under your breath, already moving yourself away from his estimated landing spot that was too close to you.

he sent crackling explosions to the bottoms of your feet, but you easily dodged them. you created a temporary platform of elevated ground to protect yourself from the small explosions, jumping off it and rolling away. he was already aiming a larger blast toward you, presumably expecting your escape route. you figured it’d be a directed blast to pierce through a wall. you knew that the explosion would be unavoidable. to counter, you created a line of walls resembling dominos. they acted as stairsteps; you quickly ran up to the highest you could conjure in the short time you had before bakugou hit them. you grabbed the closest piece of rock that you could and leapt as bakugou’s blast made contact with your steps, chucking the rock at him and aiming to kick him when you landed. you knew he had no power to counter, being unable to react quickly due to the powerful nature of the blast he’d conjured.

you were about to win when the door to the training facility opened. you froze, literally, in midair and frowned, turning to look at the intruder.

“fighting, young-?” one of the butlers, tanaka, said. he was an elderly man with a gentle voice, but his eyes always seemed to glint with a clandestine humour in it.

“you can call me by my first name. please put me down, tanaka,” you said, no malice in your voice. he nodded, and you softly landed on your feet next to bakugou. you’d known tanaka for far too long for him to use honorifics with you. he’d practically raised you as a child.

“you haven’t fought in a while,” tanaka commented. he conjured a water bottle (you never knew how he had the right things for the right occasions) and walked toward you.

you made a noise of acknowledgement. “and it seems i was just about to win.”

he smiled tenderly. “i’m sure.” he handed you the water bottle, which upon further inspection, you saw was ice cold.

“thank you,” you said, gingerly accepting the beverage. the water flowed soothingly down your throat, easing the aching that had formed due to all the dust you’d kicked up in the fight.

“mr. bakugou?” tanaka asked, offering another water bottle (seriously, where did he get that?).

“thanks,” bakugou took the bottle. he drank feverishly, quickly finishing the bottle in what must’ve been two seconds flat. so undignified.

“y/n, you have an appointment in 15 minutes with-” tanaka said as you capped your water bottle.

“oh, yeah,” you said, waving off the matter. “i got it.”

you brushed off the dust on your clothes and started toward the exit. bakugou was quick to follow you, nodding politely to tanaka.

bakugou stood outside the door during the meeting you had with your father. you were not a minute too late or too early when you stepped into your father’s office, freshened up and dressed in clean attire, the dusty clothing from your fight with bakugou long discarded. the smell of leather and mint enveloped you, reminding you of the days you’d play in your father’s office in your youth. the room was always dim, the light on your father’s desk being the brightest object in the vicinity when the curtains were pulled down. when you were younger, you liked to pretend the room was made of chocolate, as the color was so dominant on the interior. your father was not pleased to find five-year-old you trying to bite the corner of his desk, to say the least. 

the sight of his office was ever-so familiar to you, and once held a feeling of endearment in your heart. that was then; now, you only ever entered the room for a business-related matter. your face was blank, lips held in a thin line -  you anticipated the topic of the meeting since your father first scheduled it a week ago. it, quite frankly, was inevitable; you could be neither opposed nor favorably disposed to it.

“i’ve found a compatible match for you, y/n.” your father sat at his desk, eyes intensely trained on you. “they’re from a well-off family with a strong quirk.”

compatible. it didn’t mean they got along with you or would be a good partner; no, it meant that they matched the superficial criteria set by your family.

“yes, father,” you said indifferently. he nodded, as if already expecting the answer.

“you’ll meet them soon. we’re arranging the date,” he folded his hands on the desk. “tanaka will alert you of it when it’s finalized. that is all.”

you nodded, taking your cue to leave. giving the room one last glance, you started to push the door open, then paused. door halfway open, allowing outside light to stream into the dark room, you looked back at your father. it was now or never to ask, you guessed.

“father… we wouldn’t happen to be having a family gathering anytime soon, would we? for new years or anything...” you hadn’t had any in the recent years, but you’d figured you’d ask. the scent of homemade food and the comforting chatter of the gatherings always made your heart swell.

he grunted, not looking up from the papers he shuffled around in his hands. “no.”

“ah. okay,” you said, sighing quietly. you knew better than to get your hopes up for such things. you turned back to the light, where bakugou was awaiting you, and shut the door behind you with a thud.

you walked in silence.

“so, no plans for the holidays?” bakugou asked bluntly.

“eavesdropping, i see,” you deadpanned.

“shouldn’t’ve had the conversation in front of the whole damn world.”

you rolled your eyes. “what about it?” you asked. “my lack of plans, i mean.”

“well-” he coughed awkwardly into his sleeve, averting his eyes. “that old hag- my, uh, mom, somehow got under the impression that i’m no longer… single. probably because of my profession - she thinks it’s ridden with scandals like a damn drama - but, uh… she’s expecting me to bring… company home for our christmas dinner…. and i can’t ask any of my friends, ‘cause she knows them… i wouldn’t damn ask you if i had no other option…”

“thanks,” you interjected. you held your tongue from making a comment about how little friends he probably had. “anyway, why don’t you tell her no?”

he slouched. “have you met her?” he grumbled. “the hag won’t listen to me. trust me, i would’ve, but… you can’t refuse her, once her mind is set on something… she’s too stubborn for her damn good.”

“like you,” you remarked, earning a small shove from the man.

“pl-” he choked, “pl - ah, fuck - please can you go to the dinner with me? it’s just for a night and morning, i need you to fake being my date. i can tell her we broke up later or whatever, i just really need…”

your lip curled. a desperate bakugou was a rare sight, and you wanted to relish in it for as long as you could. you feigned further consideration.

“but there’s so much i would rather be doing…” you whined. it was a lie. all you wanted was some variation in your life; a dinner didn't sound too bad. perhaps there was a dark secret within the bakugou family you could exploit. 

“like what, wasting money?” bakugou muttered bitterly under his breath. you shot him a dirty look.

“fine, please?” he asked again. “there’ll be some damn good food… and, uh…” you tapped your foot with false impatience.

he cussed under his breath. “i’ll do whatever you want, damnit, just go with me! please!”

you cocked an eyebrow. “whatever i want?”

“yes, for a day,” he groused. “only a day.”

“alright!” you pumped your fist up. your father’s business training came in handy sometimes. “when’s the dinner?”

“this weekend,” bakugou said. “we also need to, uh, figure out how to act more… coupley.”

“...right,” you said. business class had not prepared you for that. “how the fuck do we do that?”

as it turned out, you two were not the best pair to fake a relationship. neither of you had actually been in a relationship prior to this. you didn’t really have time to date on top of your studies and such; you didn’t need to, anyway, because all of the people who were romantically interested in you bored you. their personality traits either consisted of rich or doormat. as for bakugou - well, he was bakugou. you couldn’t see anyone wanting to date that brute.

“i’ll pay,” you said upon entering a cafe. it was a big cafe, nestled in the midst of an even bigger mall. your tone was firm; there’d be no way bakugou would be paying. you looked up at the menu and said to him, “the usual?”

he was silent for a moment, and you almost thought he hadn’t heard you. he cleared his throat. “uh, yeah, sure. the usual.” weird.

you ordered yourself a drink and bakugou his usual order, a decaf iced caramel macchiato with light ice. he looked at you with a strange emotion on his face when you handed him his drink.you practically shoved it in his hands while he was too starstruck about god-knows-what.

the two of you settled at a booth (“table,” bakugou had argued. you eventually won the debate).

“so… trivia about each other, right?” you asked. “i guess we’ve got to get to know each other more.” he nodded. “well, first, you need to stop being so quiet. right now, you’re not my bodyguard or anything. we’re, uh…. dating. we’re partners. datemates. lovers.”

he choked on his drink at the word “lovers.” he sputtered, then gained composure. “yeah.”

“okay, i need to you to be more casual.”

“tch, who said i’m not casual right now?!” there it was; this was the bakugou you’d known when you first met him. he was awkward and amateur-ish, stumbling on his words and failing miserably at being polite. it was a fond memory. overtime, he’d obviously polished himself up (but only in the presence of you and your family).

“that’s more like it,” you said.

“tch.” he sipped his coffee, unrelenting to admit that you’d won.

“well, let’s cover basic facts. your birthday is april 20 and you like spicy food.”

he coughed again, setting his drink down. “yeah.”

“are you okay? d’you need water, or something? are the lights in here too bright?”

he shook his head, eyes still dazed with a certain unclarity. “‘m fine, idiot.”

you weren’t convinced. “...whatever you say.”

he took another sip, closing his eyes then continuing as normal. normal, in the standards of bakugou, of course. “i-i think i know damn well enough about you. don’t need to prove shit,” he grumbled the last bit.

“a little bit too well,” you muttered saltily. “well, this is a learning experience for me, take it or leave it. we need to get along at the dinner, don’t we?” you drummed your fingers on the table, eyes darting around at the cafe. the decor was pretty. 

he made a grievance under his breath, but nodded. “there’s my dad and my mom - the old hag - and me. i’m an only child.” figures. he continued, “they both work in fashion… yeah… my dad’s more quiet than my mom, she’s loud… apparently we’re a lot alike - don’t comment - but yeah, she’s my mom. they live in shizuoka, and it’ll be just them at the dinner. you’ll need to stay overnight...”

“seems… intimate,” you commented offhandedly.

he whistled. “you think?”

the gears in your head turned as you stared into the space over bakugou's shoulder at a large poster of some featured drink. it was all small talk to you, but you saw this meeting for what it was. an opportunity. it was your break from the uniform days plaguing you for the past week's - he wouldn’t need to watch over you, now your fake lover. lovers were equal. 

love - what was love? you didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. feigned or not, it was different. couples were moody, from what you could gather. one day they’d be hanging off each other’s limbs, and the next, they were bickering their heads off. it sounded fun, to be a couple with bakugou rather than his employer. you could say goodbye to normalcy and tedium.

you felt your lips turn into a smile as a plan developed in your mind, tapping the table at an increasingly faster tempo. who cared about the dinner? you were a fake couple! you could break away from the norm and find the things that made bakugou tick. you could gain a one-up over him. you could pick his personality apart piece by piece until it broke the monotony of daily life. you watched bakugou’s expression grow puzzled and frustrated. you pretended to be deep in thought, aware that bakugou was opening his mouth to make a snarky comment presumably about how the smile on your face was getting unnerving to him.

you didn’t let him speak, instead cupping your face in your hands and leaning in towards him. “how do you think we should become more intimate, kat-su-ki?”

you think you got soft over the years. when you first met bakugou, he was a rough little thing. being the same age as you, he was far less qualified compared to the other candidates to be your bodyguard. he looked out of place in his suit identical to everyone else. call it fate, or what you will, beckoning you towards him. when you first met him, you could’ve never imagined how far into the future you’d be stuck with the boy. all of the bodyguards you’d hired prior to bakugou’s appearance in your life didn’t last long. it wasn’t their fault; no, no, they were very competent. extremely competent - to the point it was boring, scrutinized under their meticulous gaze. you could do absolutely nothing under their watch, and where was the fun in that?

so, long story short, you hired bakugou for his incompetence. you’d low expectations for how long he’d last. you were surprised he could even put on a tie properly. from the way his hair spiked in every which way (“undignified!” your father had complained to you) and how his feet shuffled against the nice, newly polished cherry wood floors (“the scuff marks…”), bakugou was far from the epitome of a bodyguard. he couldn’t sit still and constantly made weird crackling noises (which you later learned were small explosions, not the concerningly incessant crack of his knuckles). the cherry on top to the disaster pie called bakugou, however, was his speech. he was polite, at face value, but also incredibly rough at face value. if you transcribed his words down, they’d be all standard formalities. it was the quirky way in which he presented his words; gritted out like somehow had forced him into this job. actually, scratch that, it was like this job was the be-all or end-all of his life. he was like an extremely tsundere shounen protagonist. he needed to win (“win what?” your father had laughed in disbelief) and be the very best. you'd… appreciate the sentiment more if you were his mentor in becoming a pokemon trainer.

of all the things bakugou was at the time, he was not a stoic old man nor a cold, indifferent boy who looked down on you snottily; he got the job. much to your father’s chagrin, of course. you’re pretty sure he had a backup bodyguard during the first month or so of bakugou’s employment, in case bakugou dropped out mysteriously for any reason. 

surprisingly, bakugou was competent, but not infuriatingly so. he had snark, and under any other employer he would’ve been fired in the first week. he did his job, and that was all. it was fun to tick him off, too, and so easy. it was - dare you say it? - cute. you wanted to watch him fall apart and leave, as so many others had. you waited for the day he’d get used to you or vice versa, when you’d wake up with nothing to look forward to. in the end, no one ever stayed with you. you could usually figure that out within the first week of a bodyguard’s services.

these days, you started feeling that way. bakugou was just becoming everyone else you’d ever hired. he was becoming everyone else. for some reason, though, you still clasped onto the thread of hope that maybe he was different, and that led you down a series of events trying to convince yourself he was different.

at the same time, you told yourself he was like everyone else. did you want him to stay or not? you didn’t know anymore. maybe fate would spin something good out of this, or maybe he would. you didn’t want it in your hands anymore.

being flirty was definitely not the best route of plan, but man, it was efficient. what better way to fake being a couple than organically develop that relationship? that was your bullshit reasoning to the logical part of yourself (when it was obviously far from the truth).

yeah, it was definitely not the best plan. you bored of it quite quickly, but couldn’t shake off the lasting feeling of fluttering in your stomach. you supposed it was because it was the most reaction you’d gotten from bakugou in months. you’d never seen him so disgruntled.

he was very, very blushy. you didn’t know how you hadn’t learned of it earlier. his cheeks were dusted strawberry red, matching the hue on the tips of his ears. ah, tsundere bakugou had returned for a short period of time. you wished you could've taken a picture of him.

you tapped the tip of his nose and he hissed at you, cheeks darkening a shade.

“a boop?” he scoffed indignantly in disbelief. “who calls it that? a five year old?” but you could tell that he really enjoyed it on the inside.

“what- what are you playing at, dumbass?” he swatted your hand when you tried to boop him again.

“c’mon, couples need to do coupley things, katsuki,” you cooed. “like overly affectionate pda~”

you didn’t know someone could get so red.

“since when did you call me by my first name?” he grumbled, unable to form any other type of response.

“since we started ‘dating,’” you teased back, realizing that watching bakugou become more and more uncomposed was more fun than you’d expected. he'd never become so open around you; after all, you'd had a strictly professional relationship prior, so bakugou never expressed any hint of a personality other than his behavior when he was first hired. it was a good change, in your eyes.

then, as you did of most things, you bored of it. sure, flustering bakugou was fun because he was so outwardly tsundere, but your attention span was short. he was already starting to recollect himself in record time, face cooling from a startling scarlet to pink and remarks becoming increasingly cohesive.

you're not even sure if he was aware of your gaze resting upon him as you half-assed responses and watched the gears in his head furiously turn. when he got real worked up, he pouted when speaking and occasionally slurred words together. his eyes tended to veer away when he thought of a response and he always got fidgety. 

eventually, you stopped teasing him. by this time, the ice in his drink had already melted and you were dangerously close to kissing him on the cheek (it was an impulse thing! you were not catching feelings!).

if there was one thing you learned, it was this: bakugou was truly a sight in his emotional state, though you could argue his unassuming state was equally, if not more breathtaking.

you noticed it as morning light illuminated him through the window of your room, hitting the silky fabric of your bedsheets around him. he was reading some book, dressed in comfortable attire that felt oddly domestic. maybe it'd be the most casual you'd ever see bakugou.

the thought struck a chord in you, making you wonder what'd happen after the dinner. it'd be awkward, for sure. it dawned on you that these moments with katsuki would vanish and things would go back to normal. they'd disappear into thin air, like nothing had ever happened. you weren't well educated in horology, but you were pretty sure that the time you'd spent with him would vanish as well, not to be spoken of or referenced ever again. time would keep trudging forward and you'd only be able to stare back as it disappeared on the horizon line.

you wanted to grasp the time that flooded your hands, encase the moment in glass and hold it in your palm forever.

"oi, idiot, what are you staring at?" and maybe it was the first time you truly heard bakugou's voice. it was rough on the edges with a soft core, you realized. maybe, after these couple of days, bakugou had started to care for you.

"nothing, stupid," you mumbled, returning your attention to your phone, but you couldn't shake off the newfound feeling that holed up in your heart. bakugou didn't care about you, you told yourself. you had a strictly professional relationship with him, and that was only broken for the time being because he needed a favour. 

right. this was all for a favor.

nights spent testing each other on the most miniscule of facts and afternoons spent telling each other stories about each other - it was all nothing. it wasn't a big deal, you repeated to yourself.

still, you couldn't help but to look back up at bakugou and let your imagination run. he wore a black shirt and sweatpants, a complete 180 turn from the typical three piece suit he normally wore. maybe this is what he'd look like in the mornings if you were a proper couple, not client and bodyguard - maybe in another universe. you could imagine his bedhead, hair all messy and eyes still worn with sleep, vastly different from the professional persona he had around you.  you'd wake up inhaling the scent of caramel and feeling his warmth surround you, feeling secure merely in his embrace. it'd be him and you in your own little bubble, unperturbed by the entire world.

wait, caramel? you wondered. where did that come from?

"you're staring again, dumbass," bakugou grunted, not looking up from his book.

"zoned out on the blandest thing i saw, sorry," you replied.

you sat in silence like that for a while. you weren't not exactly sure how it was bonding time for the dinner (were you sharing telepathic waves?), but it was comfortable like a fluffy comforter on a frigid winter day. it felt secure, like a home you never had in your own bedroom. every now and then there was the sound of a page turning from bakugou and a tap on your phone from you, and things never felt so normal. it was too short an eternity for you; before you knew it, you had some event to attend to for your father, solely there for the image of his company.

you didn't see the bittersweet look on bakugou's face as he watched you leave, or how he hadn't even finished a chapter of his book during the hours he'd sat with you. as his eyes followed your disappearing silhouette, bakugou wondered if he'd ever be able to see you like that again.

a foreign giddy feeling filled your chest as you got ready for the dinner with bakugou’s parents. you’d brought a bag for light travel packed with essentials (pyjamas, toothbrushes, and things like that), having planned ahead. you were typically indifferent to gatherings of any kind, having attended so many for your father. besides, this was a favor for bakugou. you weren’t sure why you were being so indecisive choosing an outfit for the dinner, or why your heart felt light as a feather, fluttering about in your rib cage boundless. this was no big deal, you told yourself. it’d only be bakugou and his parents; you’d spoken at gatherings of far more people with less nerves. you penned it down to only being excited for the food which was so coveted by bakugou. his mother, mitsuki, was apparently an outstanding cook (bakugou was apparently good as well), and you had to admit, you missed the heartening scent of homemade dishes. her specialty was spicy curry - your mouth watered at the thought. 

yes, you reassured yourself as you walked out of the door and met the fresh, winter air outside, you were only in it for the food. you had an abnormally fast heart rate and a spring to your step (as noted by bakugou) solely for the food. 

shizuoka prefecture was two hours away from your hometown, tokyo, and you forced bakugou to drive. the trip didn’t really feel like two hours, anyway, in your opinion. according to bakugou, that was only because you were sleeping the majority of the time and he was stuck with the dull task of driving and only the low hum of the radio to entertain him. 

“well, this is it,” you said to bakugou, approaching his parents’ home, bag in hand. it looked quite elegant on the outside, snow thinly blanketing the well-kept greenery in the front. you turned to look at him. his suit looked nicer than usual, on full display because he refused to wear a coat despite the frigid air biting at any bit of bare skin unsheathed on your body. (“just the perks of having a great quirk like mine,” he’d said. you punched his shoulder.) you huddled closer into the warm padding of your coat, watching your white breath dissipate in the air.

“it is,” he belatedly said. his face was atypically solemn, eyes downcast and seemingly lost in thought. you didn’t comment on it. something about the nippy winter air numbed the atmosphere, as if all warmth had subsided only to your coat. 

“do i look alright?” you asked him, trying to wipe away any last bits of drool you might’ve had on the corner of your mouth.

“yeah. you look… really nice,” he commented quietly. you didn’t mention that your bulky coat was covering the entirety of your attire. a heavy silence fell over the two of you.

anyway, the mood was quickly relieved by the presence of mitsuki bakugou, who greeted the pair of you at the door with her husband, masaru. bakugou really was a spitting image of his mother, sharing the same spiked blond hair and annoyingly clear skin with her. they also had similarly loud personalities, you observed later on. they’d often bicker with no real malicious intent. they were both much different compared to bakugou’s father, masaru, who was a gentle, soft-spoken man with brown hair and glasses. 

mitsuki met you with enthusiasm, eagerly asking you questions about yourself and your relationship with bakugou. it was strange to see bakugou so quiet; though, at some points in the conversation, he looked like he was going to be sick. you didn’t have time to ask him about it, occupied by his mother’s unending but well-meaning questions. you’d expected to fib for most of them, but the truth easily slipped from your tongue. even compliments about him were half-truths. 

"when we first met, he was like a fish out of water!" you recounted to mitsuki. "he stumbled on his words and my father didn't approve of him as my bodyguard. but, i pushed through, and here we are! right, katsuki?"

"r-right," he coughed, unable to look you in the eye and fidgeting nervously.

"it amazed me, too," mitsuki admitted. "i'd never seen our katsuki looking so polished before - it used to be a trouble getting him to even wake up at a decent time." she smiled at you. "you've brought a blessing on him."

bakugou cleared his throat. "don't talk about me like i'm not here," he grumbled.

"oh, katsuki," mitsuki cooed, pinching bakugou's cheek. "masaru, let's prepare dinner." she looked at you and bakugou. "the two of you don't need to worry about a thing - oh, you still have your bags! i’ll put them in katsuki’s room."

upon the absence of bakugou’s parents, the two of you sat beside each other without a word. 

“are you… feeling alright?” you asked suddenly, breaking the silence. “you don’t look so well.”

“fine,” he grunted. “i’m fine.”

“are you sure?” you teased in an attempt to lighten the mood. “not nervous meeting the parents?”

he cracked a small smile, but his fingers still nudged each other in his lap. you touched his shoulder, first in an attempt to comfort him, but soon realized that he was very toasty. you scooted towards him; he stared at you with an surprised, indecipherable expression. you linked his arm with yours and leaned into him, inhaling his cologne and bathing in his warmth.

“what?” you mumbled. “you’re warm.” you intertwined his fingers with yours. “warm,” you happily cooed, eyes slipping shut. 

“jesus christ,” bakugou hissed. “you’re freezing. is it humanly possible for your hands to be this cold?” his other hand enveloped your hand (still being held by his), rubbing his thumb soothingly on the heel of your palm. a bubble of warmth fizzed inside you, heart effervescing like a carbonated beverage. he held you long after your hand had passed room temperature, and you sensed that maybe the fuzzy feeling jittering about you wasn’t his quirk. it was like some sort of low fire, crackling deep within you. you hadn’t much time to dwell on the thought when your eyes jolted open, smelling really, really good food wafting from somewhere near.

“look at the lovebugs,” you heard mitsuki murmur, standing in the doorway connecting the kitchen to the living room leaning on her husband. “dinner’s ready,” she softly said upon noticing your eyes on her. 

your eyes widened, looking down at the hand entwined in yours, and you look at the man next to you. bakugou was sound asleep, tranquil slumber having sheathed itself around him. his head leaned against the top of the couch, mouth slightly agape and chest falling rhythmically.

“hey,” you whispered. reluctant to let go of his hand, you used your opposite hand to tap his shoulder lightly. “hey, sleepyhead.”

bakugou groaned, eyes still closed and body unmoving. “five… more… minutes…”

“sure,” you said easier than you expected. you immediately let go of the man’s hand (he reached out toward you blindly at this) and stood up. “i’ll just eat all of that food you've been looking forward to by myself…” mitsuki and masaru looked at you fondly.

“nice try, dumbass,” he said gruffly, standing up and putting a hand on your shoulder. his eyes were lidded with torpor and his voice was an octave deeper. it sent shivers down your spine - you hadn’t ever heard his voice like that - and a part of you wanted to hear it again. sadly, the effects of sleep passed him quite quickly; by the time he’d said “let’s eat, dumbass,” and made his way to the dining room, his voice was back to normal.

dinner consisted of scrumptious-looking (and tasting!) chicken katsu, curry, and even more conversation. your mouth watered as you spooned yourself the perfect ratio of rice, curry, and chicken in one bite. you politely raved to bakugou’s mother about her heavenly cooking, and bakugou never looked so proud or embarrassed in his life. masaru discussed fashion with you, mitsuki occasionally chiming in and offering to show you pictures of young bakugou modelling. you courteously declined for the fear of bakugou’s face getting any redder than it was already. 

“y’know, katsuki really wanted to be a pro-hero when he was younger,” mitsuki reminisced. “he even was accepted at that really prestigious hero school, ua.”

you looked at bakugou with questioning eyes, and he shook his head dismissively, hesitant to the topic. you wondered what he was doing here, as your bodyguard, rather than the hero he aspired to be. it wasn’t like he’d be unable to become a sidekick once out of ua, so what happened…?

at the end, you seemed to have gotten the approval of mitsuki and masaru. your heart twisted in pain realizing who you were and why you were here; this was asked of you, nothing real. you pushed the thought away, returning to the dining room after washing your hands. 

“oh, my!” mitsuki exclaimed as you entered the dining room. “it’s getting late.” she turned to you. “we don’t have a guest bedroom, so you’ll have to share a room with katsuki, if that’s alright?”

you looked to bakugou, who seemed lost in his own thoughts. “sure, i don’t mind,” you replied. 

“i’m sure you’d love to see bakugou’s childhood room.” this brought bakugou abruptly to his senses; his eyes rounded, face looking like a deer caught in headlights. 

a smile tweaked your lips. “i’d love to.”

you didn’t know what you were expecting when mitsuki opened the door to bakugou’s room. certainly, though, you were not expecting this. his room was decorated from head to toe with all might merchandise, carefully collected through the years. it could’ve been worse, you admitted to yourself, but bakugou’s interest in all might surprised you. the level of admiration bakugou had for the former symbol of peace was clear, plastered on the wall posters and figurines which dotted his bookshelves. 

“of course,” misuki said, “this is all really from his middle school days. he had to move to a dormitory system in high school, and i’m afraid he didn’t take much along with him…”

you tilted your head at bakugou, who’d taken particular interest in the ground with his hand sheepishly on the back of his neck.

“it’s cute,” you reassured him gently.

“though katsuki’s bed is pretty big, we could pull out a futon if you’d like…” 

“it’s alright.” shit. why did you say that? noting the bewilderment on bakugou’s face, you added, “we are dating and all…” you mentally smacked yourself for assuming bakugou would be comfortable sleeping in the same bed as you. “yeah,” bakugou said, much to your shock.

“that settles it!” mitsuki smiled. she winked. “don’t stay up too late.”

after mitsuki and masaru bade you goodnight and closed the door behind them, you were left alone with bakugou.

“hey, is that a picture of you?” after looking around the room, your eyes fell on a framed photo sitting on bakugou’s dresser. you reached for it, recognizing a familiar spiky haired blonde boy proudly holding a trophy.

“wait-” the frame was already held in your hands.

“aw, you were such a cute kid.” you teased, “can’t say the same about now.”

he huffed, ears reddening. “there’s a photo album on the bookshelf,” he mumbled, pointing to a thick looking book on his bookshelf. you eagerly plucked it from the shelf, holding it like a precious treasure in your two hands. he shoved his hands into his pockets and rested his chin on your shoulder, watching you open the photo album. 

the first photo was a baby photo, of course, and you could feel that it was taking every part of bakugou not to rip the book from your hands and scorch it all out of embarrassment. the first few pages were those of baby bakugou, eating food with his hands or playing with his parents. as the book progressed, you watched him develop a quirk (blowing up a vase) and become interested in pro-heroes (clutching an all might doll to his chest with a big smile on his face). the photos became more scarce as bakugou grew, but he seemed to grow happier. paging through photos of him in high school, the man’s gaze seemed to grow softer and fonder. his high school pictures consisted of him either standing in front of the famous ua or making an indifferent face with a group of his friends, who looked vaguely familiar from somewhere. upon further inspection, it dawned on you. you could recognize them all - they were young versions of the pro-heroes red riot, pinky, chargebolt, and cellophane. they regularly appeared on your newsfeed for one heroic deed or another, so it came no surprise to you that they attended the famed ua high. 

as for bakugou, though? you couldn’t understand what he was doing there, or rather, here. if he graduated ua, he’d be right on track to become a pro-hero, not a bodyguard. 

bakugou already sensed your revelation, shutting the book and putting it down. sitting on the bed, he squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“i know what you’re thinking,” he stated. he took a shaky breath. “i’m- i’m not ready to talk about it.” 

“okay,” you replied. “i think… we should get some sleep. you have to drive back tomorrow.”

he snorted. “me?” 

you nodded like it was a given.

the night was long, dragging in the same manner that you’d trudge through deep snow with weights on your ankles. it wasn’t that bakugou’s old bed was uncomfortable; it was surprisingly plush. you laid awake, though, as the clock ticked by and the house went silent. you felt as stiff as a wooden board, staring at the dark ceiling and thinking about everything and nothing.

your thoughts first strayed to bakugou’s childhood, and how he’d seemed the poster child for an aspiring pro-hero. how could he have given that up? he had friends, dreams, and a path open to his aspirations. yet somehow his life had deviated into this, pretending to date you for his parents’ sake.  

it felt strange to lay in his bed in his parents’ house and not to really call him yours. not that you wanted to call him yours outside of this scenario. definitely not. it was just the guilt gnawing at you that impaired your proper judgement - your conscience felt pity. you pulled off a large lie to bakugou’s parents that you were dating when in reality, you’d never even gone on a proper date with the man; for all you knew, he could be a terrible person. he could have terrible dating manners and leave to the bathroom when the check comes in an attempt to force his date to pay. it was hard to imagine, but hey, you reasoned to yourself, it was a possibility.

“can’t sleep either?” bakugou’s deep voice startled you. you thought he’d fallen asleep hours ago.

“yeah,” you snorted. “and here i thought you were in the habit of always sleeping early,” you referenced his mother’s stories of him in middle and high school. you turned on your side to face the man.

“kinda hard with five different all mights staring at me,” he joked, gesturing to his plethora of all might-themed decorations.

you imitated all might’s larger than life voice. “i am here! … to watch you sleep!”

bakugou first snickered, which then transitioned into a full-blown, unrestrained (yet somewhat hushed) laugh. you couldn’t help but laugh too, watching his features crinkle and gummy smile widen. your heart felt peculiar in your chest, but you couldn’t figure out the feeling. in the years you’d known him, you’d never seen him so relaxed or open. you knew you’d miss moments like this in the morning, when you’d drive back and the deal would be over. it sent a bittersweet pang to your heart - why couldn’t moments like these last forever?

you woke up to find bakugou gone, leaving you alone in the bed with only a warm indentation next to you letting you know he’d just left. you rubbed your eyes groggily, sitting up and pushing the covers aside. you swung your legs over the edge of the bedside, standing up and making the bed once again. you padded out of the all might-furnished room to the kitchen, where you could hear quiet footsteps and the sizzling of a frying pan.

“someone’s finally awake,” bakugou’s husky voice remarked. he was standing at the stovetop, wearing an apron over his nightwear and frying eggs. sleep had worn his voice deeper; you swooned at the domestic sight before you. no, it wasn’t swooning, you told yourself. just… appreciation. you really wanted to make a comment on his muscles, bulging from his short-sleeved shirt.

“that looks really yummy,” you said, in no way whatsoever referencing his biceps and definitely referring to the egg in the pan.

“i’d like to pretend that was an innocent comment, but the direction your eyes are looking at beg to differ,” bakugou deadpanned. you looked away, flushed.

“so, whatcha making?” you said, plopping yourself on a chair. 

“eggs, rice, natto, miso,” he said. “but nothing for you until you change and brush your teeth.”

you stuck your tongue out at him. “who are you, my mom?” you continued, “i used to hate natto when i was younger.”

“it’s good for you,” bakugou said, moving the egg onto a plate of steaming rice.

“you sound a lot like my mom,” you replied. “but i like natto now, just not too much of it.”

“i liked natto when i was younger,” bakugou said.

“really? all of my friends hated it. they complained about the smell.” you reminisced about your childhood days, when your biggest worry was whether you had homework or not.

“speaking of smell? your breath. go brush your teeth.”

“wh- i’m so far from you, there’s no way-”

“no hygiene, no food.”

“who even says that?” but you were already out of your chair and heading towards the bathroom.

“oh, by the way,” bakugou said as you were halfway through emptying your plate with rice in your mouth, “what do you want?”

“wha?” you said, chewing the egg-natto-rice mixture in your mouth. “what?”

“the deal,” he said. “before my parents wake up.”

“the deal-?” you racked your mind for any deal you’d made in the recent days, as you weren’t much a gambler, then it hit you. the deal. in an attempt to convince you to pretend to be his date, he’d said he’d do whatever you wanted for a day in exchange. you hadn’t thought about it at all.

“um,” you said intelligently. what did you want? you wanted to spend more time with him, but there would be no way…

“take me ice skating.” he choked on his rice.

“what?”

“i really want to ice skate…” you lied. “i’ve never been.” another lie.

“you want to go ice skating with me?”

“pay for me.” you could’ve paid for yourself. “and, you have terrible dating skills. how are you supposed to get a real partner? consider this beneficial for yourself.”

he blinked, taken aback. “...okay,” he agreed, dumbfounded. you hoped he couldn’t see through you. “when?”

“today, duh.”

by the time you finished your plate, bakugou’s parents had woken up to bid the two of you farewell. hours later, you found yourself at an outdoor ice skating rink in tokyo.

the rink was decorated festively; surrounding trees had been wrapped in golden lights and there was something in the atmosphere which bustled with cheer. those skating were either children or couples, laughing and skating together. you told yourself not to pay too much attention to them, but there was something about the way they looked so happy that made you yearn for the same.

you clumsily clomped toward the entrance of the rink itself, clad in four layers of warm clothing and worn rental skates. cold air nipped at your cheeks and your breath was a snowy white before your eyes. patting your cheeks in an attempt to half hype yourself up and half warm yourself up, you tensely stepped onto the frozen water. clunk. clunk. 

“you look like an idiot,” bakugou said as you made your way onto the ice with slow clunks. he was surprisingly cocky about his skating prowess once he’d gotten his skates on, despite his lack of experience on the ice. he was unaffected by the chilly weather, wearing a thin jacket and denim jeans despite the vast majority of other skaters wearing winter coats. 

“it’s cold,” you responded. slippery ice beneath your feet, you suddenly felt a great deal less confident in your ice skating abilities. it might as well have been your first time skating, in the eyes of bakugou. you took baby steps on the ice, both hands gripping the side rails while bakugou glided breezily past you. 

“c’mon, idiot, loosen up~”

easy for him to say. “i’m- trying,” you gritted out, attempting to copy his fluid motions. 

“hey, dumbass, take my hands.” bakugou stopped in front of you, both hands outstretched for you to hold. you looked at him warily, then accepted the offer, his hands replacing the railings. 

“don’t hold them that hard,” bakugou said. “i’m not going to drop you. relax.”

you nodded, gulping as you released your death grip on his hands. starting to skate backwards (an incredible feat in your eyes), he slowly guided you along the edge of the rink. you spent most of the time staring at your own feet, trying to keep your balance and rhythm in time with bakugou’s. once you seemed to get the hang of it, he sped up ever so slightly, loosening his grip on your hands.

“just like that,” and his voice was much gentler than you’d ever heard it. you looked up to meet his soft gaze. your heart leapt and he quickly averted his eyes. “um,” he coughed awkwardly. “i think you’ve gotten the hang of it.”

“okay.” you started to let go of his hands, testing your balance skating without anything to hold onto. in small amounts at first, you start to let go, allowing your strides to become longer and longer. bakugou matched your pace beside you and eventually, the two of you fell into conversation. you’d both forgotten your own words about how this was for him to gain dating experience; it felt too real to be practice.

“the truth is, i was really, really close to becoming a pro-hero,” he confessed, “but i was injured in my third year. i had to take a break for a year or so, but by that time, i was too rusty for the job.” 

“but-” you said, almost stumbling on the ice at the revelation, “didn’t you do all that training-?”

he shrugged. “it’s the reality of it,” he said dismissively, a momentary shadow crossing his face. he recomposed. “i’m over it now.”

you had the slight suspicion that his words didn’t ring quite true, but let go of it. still, you couldn’t help but think about all of his all might decor - he must have idolized the man, only to fail at his dream. his room was like a memento to everything he wanted yet couldn’t reach. “you wouldn’t have met me if you hadn’t become a bodyguard,” you said cheerily in an attempt to distract both him and yourself.

“true,” he smiled. then, almost to himself, he added, “i don’t regret that.”

the two of you skated a couple more laps around the rink. conversation faded and your feet became more and more sore after skating for so long. a chill had settled itself onto your bones as the sky tinted in anticipation of the evening to come.

“we should get going now,” bakugou said. “before it gets too cold.”

“yeah-” your phone buzzed in your pocket. “hang on, give me a second.”

it was tanaka, telling you that you had a date scheduled by your father in two hours. it took you a moment, it really did, to remember who you were and what your priorities truly lay.

you made it a point not to tell bakugou what the call was about on the way back. you told him it was about a business deal, and he pretended to buy it. the car ride was desolate, lacking all warmth despite the heater blasting. you felt guilty; why had you lied to bakugou? you and he both knew you were lying about the business deal. was it pity? why had you felt the need to protect him?

you could only amount it to the fact that maybe bakugou was becoming a friend. maybe bakugou was becoming someone you never wanted to hurt. your thoughts were the only thing you could hear over the buzz of the car’s heater. you looked to the sky with imploring eyes as if some cloud on the lavender-tinged atmosphere listened and could provide you an answer. 

you weren’t sure if it was the clouds’ doing or some star hiding behind the sun’s light that washed a sense of solemness by the time you returned to meet tanaka at the gates. it was almost enough to make you forget the sad feeling you held whilst looking at bakugou one last time before stepping out of the car to greet your old butler. the feeling was unfathomable to you; in your daze on the ride back, there’d seemingly been no reason for such a feeling to linger in your heart. why had you felt so much guilt, so much sadness for this man you were supposed to be strictly on business relations with?

not that you’d done this, anyway. your business relationship with bakugou ended the minute you agreed to that favour he’d proposed, and was further broken when you ice skated together. you wondered if he felt the same as you, or if things would return to the way they had been after this date tonight. somewhere deep in you hoped it wouldn’t - hoped he wouldn’t forget it all. (“stay here,” you’d told him when you stepped out of the car. his stare was vacant; would he? you weren’t sure why you even asked.)

“tanaka,” you said stiffly. the air was frigid around you (when had the temperature dropped so suddenly?) and a breeze wrapped itself around your legs. an impulse told you to turn back, look at bakugou, and tell him the things you left unsaid - but you didn’t. 

“y/n,” he nodded. it was like a wake-up call. this was who you were, truly. your father’s pawn, his company’s pawn. you were a face used for business and nothing more. you traded your feelings for your father’s wealth - that’s who you were.

yet it was the past two days that made you feel more like yourself than ever before. the time spent with bakugou, of all people, made you feel genuinely happy. he made your name feel more like yours than your father’s. it seemed it was he who could only coax this feeling out of you. you, certainly, couldn’t imagine it being anyone else. there was something unlike anything you’d experienced before which bakugou gave you. but you couldn’t let your father down, could you?

“y/n, we must go now,” tanaka urged. 

you didn’t look back.

bakugou watched you leave with an inscrutable expression. as soon as you vanished from his sight, he let out a deep sigh and bashed his head on the steering wheel, then rubbed the spot of contact. that would leave a mark.

he wished he could pretend he didn’t know what your sudden meeting was about. he couldn’t. what kind of bodyguard was unaware of his client’s schedule? you were going on a date, on account of your father’s absolutely superb matchmaking skills. he wanted to strangle the bastard. 

god, he was an idiot to have gotten his hopes up about you. just like countless other things in his life, you were unattainable. he was constantly in pursuit of the impossible, it felt, yet none of his endeavours’ ends had quite felt like this. it started when he was a child with a newly developed quirk. constant words of praise fluttered around his ears, all applauding his strong quirk and natural intelligence. it continued when he entered school, winning academic and athletic awards for what everyone called his talents. (he remembered looking up the definition of “talent” in a dictionary in his elementary school’s library and being sorely disappointed. no one had seen the hours he’d dedicated to practicing and studying after school - all of that couldn’t amount to what everyone else had called natural talent.) 

in doing so - winning all those competitions - he’d somehow earned the approval of all those around him. it was never something he’d wanted or aimed for, but it soon started to fit him like a custom-tailored outfit. somewhere along the way, he started to seek out the approval of others, flaunting his accomplishments to do so. however, as years went by, one thing became apparent: the tactics used on his peers and teachers would never gain his parents’ approval. he so yearned for a tad of his parents’ praise or satisfaction; even an “i’m proud of you, katsuki,” from them would’ve sent katsuki to the stars and back. he never was quite sure, as a youth, how to gain this prize, so to speak. and so, for the sake of his parents, he became stronger and stronger and thus began his journey to attain the first impossibility in his life.

high school, at once, came knocking on his door in the midst of this endless journey. with it came izuku midoriya, the boy katsuki had bullied in middle school. this time, though, it was izuku who was stronger; katsuki had so wanted to atone for all that he’d done to the boy, but it proved something impossible. on the physical level, izuku had already forgiven him and moved on. it wasn’t enough for katsuki, who’d really done nothing to deserve izuku’s kindness. so katsuki set off, trying to truly deserve the boy’s forgiveness and make up for everything he’d done. in katsuki’s mind, there would be nothing he could do that would balance out the weight of his actions to izuku. hence unraveled the second impossibility katsuki set up for himself.

the third impossibility found itself in katsuki’s third year at ua academy. he was working for his parents’ approval and atonement for izuku; this impossibility, though, would send everything crumbling down. impossibles, unlike any math equations covered during his schooling, could not be cancelled out the more brought into the equation. it was perhaps katsuki’s only salvation and lifeline, his passion to become a hero. fate snatched this very possibility from katsuki’s hand, snapping the lifeline and dangling it just out of his reach. all of it was cruel - the sympathetic words spoken from recovery girl’s lips and the weeks katsuki had to sit out of hero training. even worse was how katsuki watch his grade drop from one of the top in the class to only passable in general studies, no longer sharp enough to qualify for a pro-hero. by the time he healed, he was rendered unable to rejoin the hero course. his goal was thrown away easily, becoming another impossibility.

katsuki trained himself physically for a new job. an acquaintance had introduced him to being a bodyguard, and katsuki figured that was close enough to being a hero. not that he particularly enjoyed the notion of waiting on someone’s every beck and call. but through and through his countless impossibilities and misfortunes, he had to move forward. he was tired, so tired - hearing his parents’ disappointed voices on the phone and looking up to see a billboard of the newest top pro-hero, deku. when he foolishly and naively got his hopes up about you, the logical part in him knew it was doomed. he knew that as he stared at you, illuminated by a golden light in your bedroom, it was ill-fated. you were a miracle opening up a new life to him - but miracles weren’t real.

of all the impossibilities in his life, you were the most painful. why was he cursed in such a way? where had the happiness in his life gone, if not with you as you walked away from him? he stared at his suit cuff, suffocated in the stupid attire. he should never have taken this job. 

a knock. another knock. three more rapid knocks, and he finally looked up to see your eager face looking at him from the passenger side window. he hastily unlocked the car door with a click.

“finally,” your exasperated voice said to him, tinged in a happy hue that he’s confused by. 

“wh-where’s tanaka?” katsuki stuttered. “your date-”

“i did it, bakugou.” you beamed at him. “i refused. i said no.”

“wha-what? you refused what?” 

“the date, duh!” you laughed. you grew quiet. “i realized something. i realized that all i want is you, and it’s… it’s about time i start taking control of my life.”

katsuki cracked a smile. a real one, not painful like so many others he’d faked before. “you’re a dumbass, you know that?” and it was endearment, bringing you close to his heart. 

maybe fate had decided to bless him. maybe it was all the impossibilities in his life that had cancelled each other out to give him you. 

“oh, and by the way,” you said, changing the topic. “i’ve been thinking a lot about it recently. we need to have a rematch for that sorry excuse of a fight we had the other day. i will have an undisputed victory over you.”

“you’re on, moron.”

it was definitely fate that brought katsuki to you.

[i-know-my-value-darling]

Supernatural stars reflect on the show's undying legacy

Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, and Misha Collins discuss 15 years of fantasy, family, and flannel. 

"We only get one shot at this." Sam and Dean Winchester are surrounded. The monster-hunting brothers are standing on the edge of a cliff. They look to Castiel, their brother in arms — or is it wings? — but even he can’t help. One move in the wrong direction could ruin everything. After years of fighting demons, going toe-to- toe with Satan himself, and saving the world multiple times, they once again find themselves in a position of having to perform under pressure. But this situation is unlike anything they’ve ever dealt with before. All eyes are on them as they have one shot…at getting the perfect picture.

It’s a dry, hot August day in Malibu — when people were still allowed to gather outside — as Supernatural stars Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki, and Misha Collins prepare for the last setup of their final Entertainment Weekly cover shoot. With a bottle of champagne in each of their hands, Ackles once again reminds them they get “one shot” to do this right. But if their characters can shoulder the weight of the world, surely these three can handle a photo. Read the whole story below

The champagne soaking is meant to be a celebration of 15 years, of making television history. Supernatural, the story of two brothers destined to save the world, is the longest-running genre show in the history of American broadcast television. (So old, the first three seasons shot on this thing called film.) What started as an underdog story, living its first few years on the verge of cancellation, has become an institution, a milestone to which other shows aspire. Supernatural not only survived the move from The WB to The CW after its first season — it’s now the final WB show left standing — but became the backbone of the now highly successful CW network. Over the years, the sci-fi series has aired on every weeknight, helping to launch shows including Arrow and The Vampire Diaries. The network moved it one final time, most recently, to Mondays, to help Roswell, New Mexico expand its audience. “Supernatural is a major link to many of the shows that we have successfully built to market,” The CW’s chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz says. “Almost every one of our shows has had it as a lead-out or a lead-in.”

And to think, it all started as a promise to bring horror to television. After Supernatural creator Eric Kripke had finished working with Warner Bros. on 2003’s Tarzan series, he pitched the idea of a reporter who travels around hunting urban legends. As he puts it, it was a Kolchak: The Night Stalker rip-off. But when he realized the story would benefit from having brothers at its core, he started writing. “At the time, The Ring and The Grudge were huge hits in theaters,” Kripke remembers. “We said, ‘We’re going to take that experience and we’re going to put it on TV,’ and the initial goal was to be scary.” After Warner Bros. passed on his first, what he calls “uptight,” draft, Kripke had to reassess the kind of show he was creating. “I canceled all my Christmas plans and wrote that second draft in three weeks,” he says. “That was when the show got its sense of humor, because I was locked alone, over winter break, in my office. I couldn’t do anything fun, so I started entertaining myself.”

The show was still scary, but it was also funny and, over the years, would continue to evolve. Sure, you could say it’s a little bit X-Files — in its early days, the show often used the line “The X-Files meets Route 66” — and there were definite Star Wars influences (Sam and Dean were originally based on Luke Skywalker and Han Solo). But no combination of pop culture is going to perfectly describe Supernatural because the show has managed to do something remarkably rare in the age of peak TV, where audiences are so overwhelmed with content that an original idea seems foreign: It’s created a truly one-of- a-kind experience.

For starters, it’s a show about two flannel-wearing, beer-loving, blue-collar dudes from Kansas who for a good chunk of their lives traveled from cheap motel to cheap motel, paying for gas and greasy diner food with a mix of fake credit cards and money they earned scamming people at the pool table. “Almost all television is about rich people or, at the very least, middle-class people,” co-showrunner Andrew Dabb says. “The fact that we’ve been able to take this Midwestern blue-collar approach to this genre feels like we’re breaking the mold.”

But the mold-breaking didn’t stop there. Supernatural might’ve started out as a horror show with some snarky one-liners, but it evolved into some of the boldest, most experimental (and certainly strangest) stories on the small screen. “We’re a show of big swings,” co-showrunner Robert Singer says. “I used to say, with every idea, ‘This will be a home run or they’ll cancel us,’ but every year we wanted to do something really nuts." And when he says nuts, we’re not just talking about the episode with the talking teddy bear or the murderer targeting imaginary friends. Those are just some standard monsters of the week. We’re talking about the black-and-white episode shot like a classic Hollywood monster movie, or the episode that introduced Chuck (Rob Benedict), a prophet — who’d later reveal himself to be God — who was famous for writing a book series called Supernatural. That, of course, led to Sam and Dean attending a Supernatural fan convention as the show continued to redefine what it meant to inject a series with meta humor. And the swings never stopped. Season 13 featured a Scooby-Doo crossover as an animated Sam, Dean, and Castiel solved a case alongside the Mystery Inc. gang. And in season 14, after giving God a sister a few years prior, the show made the Big Man Himself its final villain. “I don’t think any idea, barring some production concerns, has been viewed as too crazy,” Dabb says. “Because we know that our fans are smart and that they’ll follow these guys anywhere.”

So long as each episode features Sam and Dean — and the occasional heartfelt talk on the hood of the Impala — the show can do just about anything, which is another reason Kripke had to rewrite his first draft of the pilot. Originally, Dean was the only brother who knew about monsters growing up, bringing Sam up to speed later in life. It wasn’t until Kripke figured out that they needed to be in this together that the series snapped into place. Because at the end of it all, they’re two brothers bonded by the loss of their mother and a life spent on the road with an absentee father. (It just so happens that their mother was killed by a demon and their father hunted them.) The familial dynamic — the irrational codependency, as the angel Zachariah (Kurt Fuller) once called it — is the most important part of the show. “The first inkling I had that we had something special was shooting the pilot,” Kripke says. “It was the scene on the bridge when Sam and Dean talk about their mother. It was the first time that you really saw their chemistry and their connection as brothers on full display. Because I’ve always said this show begins and ends with whether you believe that sibling relationship.” But Sam and Dean weren’t just the center of the show. For many years, they were the show.

Supernatural has never been an ensemble drama. For the first 82 hours of the series, Ackles and Padalecki were the only long-running series regulars — Katie Cassidy and Lauren Cohan briefly joined for season 3, appearing in 12 episodes combined. But Sam and Dean weren’t just in every episode; they anchored every episode. (They skipped table reads because there would’ve been only two actors there.) “I had many moments of not only questioning, ‘Can I keep this up?’ but an answer of ‘I cannot keep this up,’ ” Padalecki, 37, who’s been vocal about his struggle in the early seasons, says. “I borrowed strength from Jensen.” But even Ackles, 42, admits it was a tough job. “The 23-episode seasons were nine and a half months of filming,” he adds. “It was a lot of work, but I always came back to: I still enjoy it, I still like telling the story, I still like these characters and the people I work with.”

Not only did the guys stick around, they built a reputation of having created one of the warmest sets in the business, with a number of crew members staying with the production all 15 seasons. It all dates back to a talk Kripke had with his stars during the filming of the series’ second episode. “I said, ‘The show is about your two characters, and with that comes this responsibility,’ ” Kripke says. Padalecki remembers the exact setting of what he calls their “Good Will Hunting moment,” a bench in Stanley Park in Vancouver, where they film. It was a chat both actors took to heart. “We’d both been on other sets,” Ackles says. “We knew we wanted to enjoy it, to have fun with our crew; we wanted them to like us and us to like them and to have fun doing what we do.” It’s an attitude Pedowitz hopes bleeds into other CW shows, an attitude that launched an annual tradition where the CW chairman/CEO takes his new casts out to dinner with the Supernatural guys, a chance for the vets to share advice. “It’s always the most flattering situation,” Padalecki says, recalling a moment he had a few years back with the late Luke Perry, who was a part of the Riverdale cast. “Luke was sitting next to me and he was like, ‘What y’all have done and what we hear about you guys, it’s really cool to be associated with y’all in some way, shape, or form,’” he recalls. “And I’m sitting there pinching myself.”

It’s a behind-the-scenes legacy that’s perhaps just as impressive, if not more so, than the onscreen legacy. Collins, 45, who started as a guest star and the show’s first angel in season 4, has become the show’s third-longest-running series regular, and he still remembers walking onto set his first day. “When you’re coming onto a show as a guest star, it can be a little bit nerve-racking,” Collins says. “Coming to this set, it was an immediately different vibe. Think- ing about working on other shows in the future, that’s something that I aspire to bring with me.”

A similar reputation extends to the fans as well. Not only is the #SPNFamily one of the most dedicated fandoms out there, it’s also known to be a pretty nice one. (Not many fandoms can say they’ve helped launch a crisis support network for their fellow fans.) But their dedication isn’t just about seeing what crazy twist God throws at Team Free Will next. Thanks to fan conventions and social media, the viewers are just as invested in the lives of the actors. Supernatural’s not just about the words on the page, it’s about the actors saying them. “When you’re dealing with the public taste, there’s an alchemy of great writing, a great idea, and the close-up that’s required,” Peter Roth, chairman of Warner Bros. Television Group, says. “You need stars who you want in your living room.” And you need stars who want to be in your living room, and who, even after 15 years, care so deeply that they get emotional while taking photos in Malibu.

"It's going to be a long eight months," Ackles declares. Standing on that same ledge, an hour before the champagne shot, Ackles, Padalecki, and Collins walk away from a group hug after unexpectedly starting to tear up. It might be the setting — looking out over the ocean — or the occasion: their last-ever photo shoot. Or maybe it’s the fact that they’re almost a month into filming their final season.

It had been a question posed to the stars for years: How long will this show continue? How long can it continue? “Even my mom and dad were like, ‘When are you going to be done with this?’” Ackles says with a laugh. It was a decision the network and studio had ultimately put into the actors’ hands, and it was a conversation they’d been having for a while. Back in 2016, Padalecki told EW, “If we don’t make it to [episode] 300, I think Ackles and I will both be truly bummed.” But in season 14, they hit 300…and then kept going. While filming episode 307, they announced the upcoming 15th season would be the end, which will bring them to a total of 327 episodes when all is said and done. “[Jared] and I were always married to the fact that we never wanted to go out with a diet version of what we had,” Ackles says. “We wanted to have enough gas left in the tank to get us racing across the finish line. We didn’t want to limp across.” Padalecki remembers the moment it hit him — not the decision to end it, but rather the opposite. “We had that moment where he and I both realized that we didn’t want it to end,” he says. “It finally got to a point, ironically, where it was like, ‘I never want to leave this. I could do this until the day I die, and then if I get the choice when I’m dead, I’ll re-up!’ But you never want to be the last person at a party. We just knew. That’s not to say there haven’t been vacillations, but we all trust the decision that was made.”

Starting in July 2019, the cast and crew returned to Vancouver to begin filming the final season, but in March 2020, with two episodes left to go, they were sent home. For years, fans had wondered what, if anything, could stop the Winchesters, and now it seems we have the answer: a global pandemic. As sets closed amid social-distancing measures due to the spread of COVID-19, it didn’t take long for fans to start connecting the dots, sharing relevant GIFs from episodes that featured viruses, most notably Chuck telling Dean to hoard toilet paper “like it’s made of gold” before the end of the world in season 5’s “The End.” (Did we mention that Supernatural is also kind of psychic? In a season 6 episode, Dean calls Sam “Walker, Texas Ranger,” which just so happens to be the role Padalecki has lined up after this ends.)

When production paused, it all felt a little like we were living in an episode of the show, just waiting for Sam and Dean to drive up in Baby, open those creaky doors, and save us. They might not be able to do quite that, but the thing with the Winchesters is that they never stay down for long. When Supernatural is able to safely resume production, it will. And though there are only two episodes left to film, fans will enjoy a total of seven unseen hours, including the return of Charlie (Felicia Day) and a mystery woman who visits the bunker and, for some reason, gives Sam and Dean all the holidays they never got to celebrate. “She makes Christmas for them and Thanksgiving, birthday parties, and all that. It’s a very good episode,” Singer says, adding, “I don’t know when it’s going to air.”

That’s the thing—no one knows, not even the guys who took out Yellow Eyes, stopped Leviathans, defeated Death himself, and are supposedly destined to be the messengers of God’s destruction. But Sam and Dean do know the value of a good plan B. “Obviously it’s a horribly unfortunate situation we’re in, but the silver lining is that it gives us an opportunity to recharge,” Ackles says. “We had just finished episode 18, we shot one day of episode 19, and I was reading these two monster scripts thinking, ‘It’s like we’re at the end of a marathon and they want us to sprint for the last two miles.’ I feel like this almost gives us an opportunity to refocus and go into the last two episodes and hit them with everything we got.” Because when they do return to set, shave their quarantine beards, and step back into Sam and Dean’s shoes for the last time, they’ll have one shot at ending this thing…and they’re determined not to miss. 

Photos: Peggy Sirota for EW 

https://ew.com/tv/supernatural-stars-cover-ew-to-reflect-on-the-shows-undying-legacy/

[nobodyfamousposts]

Welcome the Demon School, Marinette!

Because I’m bored and you’re here. Presenting a Miraculous take on Iruma-kun.

_____________________

It was shaping up to be the worst day of Marinette's life. 

She woke up late. Again.

This only happened because her alarm didn’t go off. Which was because said alarm was in her phone, and the battery had died. And she had no time to charge it.

The small lizard that she had been taking care of the past couple weeks had disappeared that morning with no sign of where it had gone. She was worried her parents may have found it or that it could have gotten lost somewhere. 

She got to school just on time, only to be tripped and have her belongings scattered across the floor (much to the snickers and commentary of certain observers who of course did nothing to help), forcing her to take time to collect them all and resulting in her actually being late to class.

Lila was regaling the class with some new and most likely completely made up story as everyone seemed to gather around her and stare at her in wonder like she had hung the stars (and given their gullibility, Marinette couldn't put it past them to not fall for that if Lila HAD claimed it). Marinette quietly shuffled past them and slipped into her seat in the back, feeling the weight of their cruel glares and mocking smirks. All in all, an indicator that Lila's takeover of the class and even the school was still in effect. The only thing that saved her from any biting or passive aggressive comment was the teacher starting the lesson.

Except then she learned that her homework had been one of the things to fall out of her bag, but one of the items she had failed to recollect afterwards. The fact that Lila presented a project that just "happened" to look exactly like hers and even had the name smudged out and replaced with her own clearly meant nothing as far as the teacher was concerned.

This resulted in a failing grade for Marinette, and any attempt that she made to argue were quickly shot down as Lila pretended to cry at the "horrible accusation" and the teacher proceeded to lecture Marinette in front of the class for trying to steal credit for another student's work. Marinette's evidence (which included pictures and video of herself making the project at multiple stages of the process, pointing out the smudged name, or her own scraped knees from when she fell earlier and the project went missing from her bag) meant nothing and was disregarded as the teacher forced Marinette to apologize for something she hadn't done before sending her off to the principal's office.

Which resulted in her being suspended for "continued bullying" and sent home to her no doubt ready to be disappointed parents, who seemed all too willing to believe the worst in their daughter based off a liar they barely knew. Not that Marinette was bitter about that or anything. (Lie. She totally was.)

She trudged home in dismay. And as she made the walk of shame from her school to her home, much to the snickers and cruel comments of her former friends, the upturned noses of her teachers who once believed in her, and Lila's own smirk at yet again getting another win over the poor girl, Marinette could only ask herself:

"Can my life get any worse?"

Which clearly turned out to be the exact wrong thing to say, because yes, in fact, it could.

As Marinette soon discovered when she was kidnapped by a demon.

"Wait—WHAT?!"

Introducing one Jagged Stone. A Demon Lord of the Demon Realm. Well known for his wild appearance and unusual style, even among demons. He was popular. He was eccentric.

And he was apparently Marinette’s new guardian as of today.

“Wait, wait! I’m sorry—WHAT?!”

“Just call me Dad. Or Uncle Jagged! Oo, I like the sound of that. Uncle Jagged! Yeah, call me that!” He told her, not really seeming concerned with why she would have reservations about this entire thing, how sudden it was, or the fact that she was a human who was not only being faced with the prospect that demons exist, but that one had officially claimed her as a ward.

“No wait, can we back up to the part where I’m adopted now?” Marinette questioned, confused and frustrated and just shy of freaking out.

“I thought that was rather clear.” Jagged stated, grinning widely and outright spinning with glee. “I’ve always wanted a kid! And now I have one! Thank you, Fang!” He turned to the crocodile-looking creature hovering nearby.

“Of course.” It replied—and okay, the thing could talk.

Jagged stared at it teary-eyed before hugging it—him? “You’re the best familiar, Fang. Finding me the perfect child to spoil and eventually become my heir.”

O…kay…

“But…I have parents?” She tried to interject weakly, still confused about all of this.

“Oh, we’ve taken care of that.” Jagged explained vaguely, waving it off.

Marinette’s eye twitched. “Meaning…?”

Please don’t say they’re dead. Please don’t say they’re dead. They may not have trusted her and she may be unhappy that they believed Lila over her, but she didn’t want them hurt. His other demonic assistant, apparently named Penny, answered. “You are now officially the ward of Jagged Stone.”

“Isn’t it great?” Jagged grinned.

Well, that was…not completely horrible, at least.

Still, it begged a question.

“I’m a ward of a demon? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?”

“Well, if you remember…” Fang started.

Marinette sighed pitifully as she stared out a window.

“Oh, how my life is horrible and filled with pain and sadness! If only there was a magical demon familiar to rescue me and take me somewhere rock and roll.”

With a poof, a much bigger and scarier looking Fang appeared and grinned down at her.

“How fortunate for you, for I happen to be a magical demon familiar!”

“Le gasp!” Marinette exclaimed in shock.

“And as I am very grateful to you for taking care of me, I shall happily take you with me to a better place and destroy your enemies. Not necessarily in that order.”

Marinette clapped gleefully.

“Yay! Do that! Blow up that evil institute of learning and fry everyone inside! And then eat my parents because they're jerks who tried to smack you with a broom and flush you down a sewer drain.”

Fang smirked.

“Certainly!”

And thus Fang flew off to destroy the school and devour everyone inside—

“Okay, I’m pretty sure that’s not how it happened.” Marinette exclaimed dryly, interrupting the amusing and clearly wish-fulfilling fantasy.

“Well, it could.” Fang replied. “If you want me to, I can.”

“NO THANK YOU.” She exclaimed with a shriek before getting her emotions under control. “Just…why? Why me?”

The demonic crocodile-like familiar floated in a circle around her. “Well, it made sense. Jagged wished for a child to become his heir. You wished for an escape from your life. And you were quite helpful to me when I had been injured, proving yourself to be a human of kindness and honor. If anyone was to be worthy of being taken in as my master’s fledgling, you seemed most deserving.”

Well, that made her blush.

Wait…

“The lizard that I’d been caring for? That was you?”

Fang smiled and nodded.

Jagged rested a hand on the creature’s head and smiled at Marinette. “I have to thank you for looking out for my little Fangy. Who knows what could have happened to him all alone in the human world. Isn’t that right?” He spoke to Fang directly in a rather baby-ish voice as he nuzzled the creature.

Fang nuzzled Jagged back. And…okay, this was kind of cute—crazy situation aside.

“I’m…honored.” Because she was, strangely enough. Craziness and kidnapping aside. “But I already have parents. And a life.”

“Not a good one.” Fang growled out in irritation.

Jagged nodded solemnly. “Right. Fang told me all about it. Your school sucks. Your classmates suck. Your parents…” Seeing her unhappy expression, he coughed. “Well, they’re taking a liar’s word over yours. All in all, it’s been incredibly un-rock and roll. You definitely deserve better.”

“Well…” She trailed off because yeah, they weren’t wrong.

The demon smiled. “Which is why we’ve erased their memories.”

“WHAT?”

“This way, no one will question your disappearance!”

“WHAT?!”

“So this way you can stay here without having to worry about anyone trying to find you! Isn’t it great?”

…

“WHAT?!”

______________

Things that would follow may include but are in no way limited to:

Demon Miracuclass. (Meaning Alya, Nino, all of them are demons in the demon world Marinette will be befriending and not Marinette’s former human friends whom shall remain nameless extras).

Otaku Adrien (aka: a secret human fanboy because of course he would be).

Flower demon Rose.

Mermaid Juleka.

Siren Luka.

Kwamis as teachers.

Plagg as Fluff Fluff. And abusing it to get out of work. (Tikki: DAMMIT PLAGG!)

Gabriel still being horrible.

Lila exiting the story after chapter 1.

And more!

[smashboxgirl26]

vengeance / chapter 6: a new perspective

chapter 5: befriending | chapter 7: helping

vengeance masterlist

You and Midoriya both walked through the doors, Midoriya following close behind as you swiped your keycard at the entrance and guided him to the center of the floor. Your heels clicked in rhythm against the cold, hard floor as you made your way to the front to see Mina sitting at the front desk.

She liked to take over for you during your lunch period since hers was earlier and she didn’t want you to come back stressed and worried about what to do. She would take the calls, write down notes for you, and direct people if they needed any basic assistance.

Her eyes looked up at the sound, widening as she saw the green-haired male that was trailing slowly behind you. Midoriya was more concerned with the atmosphere of the building, his eyes glancing in every direction as he took the place in.

His eyes stopped once he saw Mina stand up from the desk, in realization of her being one of the friends that was featured on your instagram account.

She was another Pro Hero. Somehow, it seemed like everyone else had achieved that dream except for him. But now, he’d have the chance to achieve something much greater, and much more meaningful than what they were doing.

“Hey Y/N,” Mina waved slightly before gesturing to Midoriya, “Who’s this?”

“A good friend of mine,” you answered, waving off her suspicions.

She raised her eyebrows in response to your answer but didn’t say anything as she reached her hand over the counter to shake Midoriya’s.

“Mina Ashido, or also known as the hero, Pinky!”

Midoriya returned the gesture before replying, “Izuku Midoriya. Nice to meet you.”

You interrupted their greeting as you stepped behind the desk and placed the messenger bag down, before turning to Mina.

“Is Katsuki still here? Or did he leave for patrol already?”

“Sorry, he left just a couple minutes ago,” she answered, staring at the paper bag and cup in your hand, guessing that was the reason for your question.

“I can put those up in his office for you if you’d like,” she said, gesturing towards them. “I have to go up and finish some paperwork now anyway before I leave.”

“Yes, please,” you nodded.

She smiled as she plucked them off the desk and nodded to Midoriya to say goodbye, before heading to the back of the building towards the elevator.

“Sorry about that,” you said, as you turned back to Midoriya. “Usually he’s still here,” you frowned.

He never left for patrol without saying goodbye to you. Maybe something urgent came up and he had to leave immediately.

“Don’t worry about it, he’s a pro hero so I understand,” Midoriya replied as he rubbed the back of his nape and looked around awkwardly.

“I don’t want you to wait here. Sometimes he comes back way later than normal, and if something happened that he had to leave in a rush he’ll definitely take a while.”

You stood up from the desk once more as you walked him out. Midoriya thanked you for the lunch before heading off into the direction of the bookstore, but not before glaring at the man from last night who passed him as he made his way back towards the building from lunch.

…

After you left his office, Bakugou stared down at the files you’d given him, having no motivation to open them and finish his paperwork. He mostly stared at the little sticky note on the top one, the little heart that was at the end of the note telling him who to call.

He shifted his chair so he could stare at the window, watching as the sun moved along with the clouds overhead.

Hearing Deku’s name for the first time in so long was starting to affect his mental capacity. He was scared. He remembered all the terrible things that happened between them before he left. And he regretted it. He regretted everything that he said and did.

But hearing about Deku again reminded him of that guilt, something that he’d pushed down a long time ago and left to sit on its own.

Would Deku even understand him if he explained his actions now? Would he forgive him, even?

More than anything, he didn’t want you to look at him any different if you found out what happened. Ideally, no one would tell you but he wasn’t so sure that was going to happen.

Watching the people pass by outside the window without awareness of his gaze seemed to ease him as the clock ticked by slowly. He finally turned away when he felt he’d thought over the situation enough. He was going to tell you when you both got back home and then hope for the best.

He swivelled the chair back to face the desk and stared at the note on the sticky note, reading:

Call from the Hero’s Commission, (###)###-####

Call back soon! ♥

He reached over his desk to grab the phone and typed in the numbers before pressing it up to his ear.

He turned back to stare at the world outside the window as the phone rang, the noise finally ending when he heard the other line pick up.

“Heroes Commision secretary Whitney speaking, how may I help you?”

“I got a call earlier, I was in a meeting,” he answered gruffly and bluntly.

“Ah yes, Mr. Dynamite? Give me a second and I’ll transfer you to the Director’s line.”

Bakugou rolled his eyes slightly at the thought of having to be on hold for longer. He hated the seemingly endless ringing.

So he was thankful when the other line opened up promptly, the Director clearing his throat noticeably before answering.

“Thank you for calling back so quickly. Usually we don’t get an answer back from your agency for a couple of days,” the director chuckled lightly.

Bakugou rolled his eyes in response to his comment. He despised the Director’s needless attempts to create mindless conversations when on business calls. He just wanted the news or information he wanted to tell him, and then he would hang up with no further notice. Which is probably why, he always put off calling them back for a couple of days.

Why he decided to actually call back promptly, was weird.

The director gave another small laugh as he imagined Bakugou’s reaction to his statement, deciding not to agitate him further.

“Listen, I’ll cut to the chase. I understand that back in UA, your class in particular had many run-ins with the group known as the League of Villains.”

“Yeah, we did,” Bakugou responded with his eyebrow raised. He was concerned as to where the direction of the conversation could be heading.

“And as you know, after the last large fight that occurred between the heroes, including your class, and said group ended in them being put away to top-security prisons and psych wards.”

The Director paused afterwards, the silence becoming louder by the second. Bakugou had a feeling about what he was going to say next. He didn’t want to admit it to himself though. His mind glanced back to you, thinking about how you were probably walking around the city without a care in the world. He wanted it to remain that way.

“Well, some of the staff at those institutions have expressed that there have been more and more behavioural incidents lately. They’ve been seeing more and more suspicious behavior coming either from the way they act with staff or the way they communicate with other prisoners. They are coming to fear that something big will occur soon. Of course, law enforcement has been notified and detectives are looking into the old case files and other pieces of evidence left behind to look for clues. So far, they think that there might be someone still out there that used to work with them. They have no direct evidence pointing to that fact, but from what I can see that’s what it looks like.”

“So why’re you dragging me into this mess, huh?”, Bakugou interrupted quickly. “Of course there are some people left behind. The underworld is huge, and is twisted in ways we don’t even fucking understand. Who knows how many goddamn people could’ve been working under or with them on the side?”

“As perceptive as always, huh Dynamite?”

Katsuki was about ready to jump over to the office and blow the old man up. He was tired of his overdramatic, round-about way of speaking. He wanted to be done with the call so he could finish his paperwork and eat the lunch you brought him before going out for patrol. He didn’t want to deal with the nonsensical drama the Director always tried to bring in his news.

“Don’t kill me, I swear I’ll tell you,” the Director reassured when he swore he heard Bakuogu’s seething breaths from the other line. “Why I’ve chosen you, Katsuki Bakugou? Because you’re capable. You’ve been in enough missions that you know rushing in at this stage in time is useless, but also know how to quickly take action when necessary. I trust that you won’t screw this up. Not to mention, you are the number four hero. And that the heads of police have been riding up my ass to get some heroes assigned on the case. A big name hero such as yourself will get them to shut up for a while. And then, when nothing pans out, you’ll get credit without having to do much.”

“...So, you’re basically telling me that you think the entire point of the case is useless. And that you want me to go help them, so they shut up.”

“Exactly,” the Director nodded intently. “Besides, since you’ve worked with these specific villains before, I’m sure that you’ll be able to tell them that nothing’s going to happen. We don’t want the public having an outcry, do we? It would wreak utter devastation otherwise.”

Bakugou shifted the air out of his nose harshly, choosing not to respond to his last comment. He bit his tongue before opening his mouth, yet feeling no words forming in his throat. What was he supposed to respond to him with?

So instead, he opted to just hang up the phone. The Director wouldn’t care, he was used to it.

He stared back at the desk in front of him, but not really looking at it as he began overthinking the Director’s words in his mind. He glanced down to the sticky note that you’d left him, specifically at the little heart at the end of the note.

While he hadn’t expressed his genuine fear to the Director, he was worried about where the investigation was going to pan out. He didn’t want anything dangerous to be found, obviously, but finding something and reporting it was better than sweeping it under the rug.

And since he now had no choice but to join, you bet he wasn’t going to half-ass it like the Director thought he was going to. He always put all of his effort into everything he did for his hero work, and this was no different.

And the little heart at the end of the note urged him further. He wanted to deal with the issue so you could be safe. That was his main job. No one else mattered if he couldn’t protect you first.

His consciousness began to slip out of his mind and back into the present moment, looking at the many files of paperwork littered across his desk. His hand reached out slightly as if it was an attempt to reach them, yet he recoiled it quickly, getting a sense of anxiety just looking at the pile.

He turned back behind him to look out the window, and stared once again at the blue sky and the lazy clouds that floated slowly across it. He needed to be there, where he could think about it.

Not to mention, he now had to tell you about his whole story with Deku and prepare himself for your reaction to his adolescence.

He barely even thought twice about it as he walked swiftly out the door and into the sunlight, mostly forgetting about the lunch you were bringing him.

[tiredcowpoke]

TITLE: Of Lines PAIRING: Arthur Morgan/Reader REQUEST: @all-good-things-have-a-ending requested for a college/university au with Arthur x Reader. WARNINGS: Not really? Some mention of divorce and cheating (in the past).  NOTE: This is long again, sorry. lmao Really, this is such a broad idea that it could be a whole thing, so it was hard to figure out where to end this for a sort of one-off thing. Anyway, just some stuff to note. I did shift around the idea of student x professor because it’s got a power dynamic that I’m not a fan of, despite both Arthur and reader being consenting adults in this. So, instead I went with a professor x professor thing with some compromise on that. However, I hope it’s still good. I rewrote parts of this multiple times so I hope it worked out nice in the end. lol This can also be read as gender neutral, there’s not much focus on the reader’s gender.

With it being a familiar university, you figured it would curb some of the anxieties you had about this. 

Yet, you felt like a new student.

However, it had been a good couple years since you were a student of anything. This time it would be a role reversal where you weren’t the one sitting in one of the chairs in the lecture hall, hoping the professor had a good vibe about them and that the course material wouldn’t be too brutal. No, you were the one standing in front of that student and many others just like them. Thankfully, you didn’t have to deal with the eight-in-the-morning stares of a way too early history course but the idea had your stomach twisting something bad at points. 

You were in charge. You knew the material and you had your lecture notes, just had to...give a little introduction to yourself and the course layout and worry about the content the next day. 

The thought pulled a small sigh from your nose, something grounding as another dull ding of the elevator told you that you were arriving at the floor you needed to be on. 

Thankfully, the first thing you had was an office hour that could allow you to collect yourself before you started your day of lecturing. You weren’t expecting any students, not on your first day. The university was still pretty small, newly minted and trying to make a name for itself, and you knew the office building was a bit of a mix and match. You knew you would be sharing the office space with someone, as it had been in your previous institution. 

Walking down the hall toward the door you were looking for, having chanted the name a couple times coming in order to find it, you were greeted by a somewhat animated student stepping out of the door, talking quickly with someone sitting just inside. Well, there went your hopes of having the space to yourself for a bit. You tuned out the conversation for a moment, glancing up at the names beside the threshold of the door. Only two, your name, seasonal instructor, and an Arthur Morgan, Phd. 

The name gave you pause, your eyes narrowing a moment as a small pang of familiarity hit you. Morgan. Morgan…

“Well I’m gonna go over that project in class, so don’t go worryin’ too much about it right now, alright?” 

You glanced up at the voice, now much clearer as a man stepped out from the doorway as the student he was talking to slipped by you with a small nod and wave. His face hit you instantly, though you knew he had aged some over the last couple years. Little less lively, looking somewhat tired, despite the somewhat friendly and inquisitive stare he gave you in return. 

“You here for the office hour?” he asked, “I got some time right now for a couple minutes, if that works. What course you in?”

“Oh, I’m not in any course,” you replied quickly with a small chuckle--he didn’t recognize you. You weren’t sure if you were relieved or a little disappointed about that.

“I’m actually just looking to get into my office…” you continued, pointing slightly toward the empty desk space behind him. 

“Oh,” he replied, the surprise that touched his expression a little amusing, “Ah, right--course you ain’t. I’m sorry, it’s been...a mornin’.” 

“Yeah, I can relate,” you said, stepping in after him once he had turned with a somewhat heavy sigh. 

You placed your things down on the desk, letting out a small breath through your nose. This was an interesting turn of events. You knew you might run into the professors you had been taught under, coming to teach at the college, now university, that you had got your degree from before moving on. He had aged a bit in appearance from what you remembered of him, but you recognized his voice. Out of all the people you could have been sharing office with, it was that old professor you had wished you could have strangled when you were a student. 

Taking a Fine Arts course for the credit had been required for your degree, and taking a fundamentals to traditional drawing had seemed like easy credit. Maybe it would have been, if it hadn’t been Arthur teaching it. He had seemed nice enough--laid back teaching style, admittedly nice to listen to and you had certainly heard enough comments about how he wasn’t hard to look at either. Yet, when that first project rolled around, things changed. Sandwiched between a couple heavily essay focused courses, trying to work on a drawing seemed easy enough that you hadn’t given it much thought, and he had been quick to kick you in the teeth for it. The grade had been bad and his comments seemed...overly nit-picky at the time. His previously laid back attitude had started to come across as arrogant to you soon after, making him your least liked professor that semester. 

You had finished his course decently enough after that, making it a semester goal to make the final project to his liking as a sort of metaphorical flipping off. ‘I am listening and did retain your lessons, you ass.’ 

You had drank after finals to moving on from his course. 

“You teach here before?”

The question pulled you from long dead and buried frustrations, your gaze lifting from one of your lesson plans toward where he was leaning back against the chair. You wanted to laugh--if only he knew. 

“No, this is my first year here at least. I did teach at another institution in the city for a couple years, but got a better deal here.” 

“That explains it,” he said with a small nod, pausing a moment before he extended a hand out toward you, “Arthur Morgan, Fine Arts professor.” 

Yeah, you knew. 

“History. Seasonal, for now,” you replied after gripping his hand, followed by your name. 

There was a touch of something in his expression, a slight narrowing of his eyes. You thought for a moment that it clicked and he remembered you. However, if he did, it wasn’t commented on as you broke the handshake, turning back to his work after a small grin and nod. 

A part of you was feeling somewhat grateful for the conversation being dropped. 

                                                             ***

After the first initial weeks, putting names to faces and breaking into the course material, things started to fall into place for you a bit more. 

Really, it started to feel more like how it was at your other institution. Though, with it being a smaller university, that meant smaller classes. Your introductory ones were a little fuller with people taking them for the required credit, your higher level ones thinning out a bit. However, that wasn’t a terrible thing, those courses starting to feel a little more relaxed than your others and it put less on your plate in the long run. 

Your continued office hours with Arthur were going alright, too. The two of you managed to work around each other, knowing you tried to tune out the conversations he had with his students and Arthur doing the same with the odd one that would come to you for advice. However, from the office hours you remembered having with him, the ones he had these days seemed a little more...forgiving. Granted, you had avoided going to him for anything while you were a student likely on pride alone, but the odd time you had it was an experience that you had wanted over with quickly. 

Perhaps he could tell. Still. 

Yet, there was the odd time you would be interrupted by his cellphone and the odd grumble about it, Arthur usually hurrying out of the room to answer it. There was the odd time he would shoot you and/or the student you were advising an apologetic smile before slipping out. 

You didn’t want to dip into his personal life. He had his good days and bad days. 

Though, you really weren’t expecting to walk in on it. The campus had a small coffee shop that it seemed both professors and students frequented, yourself included during the time you had between classes to eat. However, you were surprised to see a familiar figure waiting in line, talking quietly into his phone. You really didn’t want to surprise him or eavesdrop, but with how the line was currently set up, it was kind of hard not to. 

However, much as you had your gripes about him from your time as a student, you wanted to respect his privacy. Still, he seemed to be in some heated argument with someone, his tone quick and stiff. You were somewhat familiar with it, though not in this context. Yet, he fell silent as the other person on the line seemed to talk, Arthur bowing his head as he ran a hand across his face. 

Though, you found your gaze dropping as he seemed to look around himself as he listened. His gaze landed on you for a moment before he continued on in a more even tone with his conversation, seeming to wrap it up as he hung up with a sigh. You bit the inside of your cheek, trying not to look as awkward as you felt. 

“The food here any good?” he asked, casting you a glance over his shoulder somewhat. You pulled your gaze away from his own to glance toward the menu, twisting your mouth to the side somewhat. 

“I think they’re locally made, so I don’t want to say anything bad. Could be worse, I haven’t gotten sick or anything.” 

Arthur hummed lightly, somewhat amused but it wasn’t hard to see the tension lingering. 

“Well, it’s either this or nothin’ for me today, so guess I’ll have to take your word for it.” 

“The coffee seems to be the popular choice, anyway,” you continued, shrugging before glancing down at your phone to check your email a moment while you waited. A couple automatic reminders, students telling you of sickness, and a few questions you still had to answer. 

“You wanna eat with me?” Arthur asked, causing you to glance up with slightly raised eyebrows. 

“Sure, why not?” you replied with a small shrug. You were colleagues, it wasn’t some taboo thing. 

Not that you were thinking of him in any other way. That train of thought pulled a small tightness to your brow, a frown tightening somewhat on your face. You really didn’t want to think too deeply on it, but being back on this campus pulled a lot of interesting acknowledgements forward. Perhaps you had to set aside your judgement you had made of him as a teacher, and...well, there had been a part of you, even back then, that had wanted to impress him. You had told yourself it was some wounded pride, yet you had to wonder why it was that class. It had been something taken just for the credit. 

Maybe we should stop carrying on like a child. 

You placed your order, picking up the coffee and one of the pre-made sandwiches from the stand before following Arthur toward one of the free tables. 

“I...I’m sorry ‘bout the phone calls,” Arthur said after a moment once you had sat down across from him, causing you to raise your eyebrows slightly before shrugging. 

“They’re not as disruptive as you think,” you replied around your own shrug, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Universe seems to know when you’re around so you can witness ‘em…” he muttered into his own cup, removing the lid as he tested the heat of the beverage. 

You watched him for a moment, knowing you should just leave it at that. Enjoy your food, at least as much as you could, and move on. Yet, you found yourself biting the inside of your cheek, the cardboard sleeve of the coffee cup warming the tips of your fingers as you hovered your hand around it. 

“...You okay?” you asked, bracing yourself to pull back if you crossed some sort of boundary. 

Arthur glanced up at the question, meeting your gaze for a moment before dropping it again and shrugging as he took a sip from his own cup. 

“Sure,” he replied, leaning back in the chair somewhat, “Just...some personal issues. It’ll be resolved in a couple weeks, can just...move on from it.” 

“It can be hard to leave that stuff at home,” you replied, nodding your head, “Went through the ringer myself in my second year teaching.”

Arthur let out a small sound from the back of his throat, something close to agreement. You started to eat a little in the silence that followed, though the admission that followed had it hard to keep the touch of surprise out of your expression. 

“I’m gettin’ a divorce,” he stated, not looking up from where he was studying the surface of the table. 

“...I’m sorry to hear that,” you replied after a moment, watching his expression as he shook his head. 

“Picked the worst month for it, feels like I’m goin’ through the motions here with all that in the back of my mind. Ain’t so bad when I know I’m not gettin’ a call in a bit, but feels like she’s expectin’ me to drop everythin’ because she’s still tryin’ to move out. I know my schedule isn't makin’ that easy.” 

“That’s...messy business,” you replied with a small nod, glancing down. “I, uh...I got cheated on a couple years back in the middle of a semester. Had to try to run a lecture during the same week, fielding the...stupidest questions while holding that in my chest and had to look the bastard in the face at the end of my days trying to split up our stuff. It really feels like you’re going through the motions, but...it’ll feel more natural again after a while. Though, I imagine I went a little hard on undeserving students during that point.” 

“Hell I’m probably doin’ it, too,” Arthur returned, causing you to chuckle lightly. 

“Eh, I wouldn’t say that.” 

“Why’s that?”

You glanced back up at him, a small grin pulling at your expression as you raised your eyebrow. “You really don’t recognize me, huh?”

The completely confused expression that tightened his expression almost had you laughing again, Arthur taking a moment to really look at you. Being under his gaze had you almost wanting to squirm and glance away, but you had started this whole thing. Eventually, there was a shift in his expression, his head lifting somewhat before he was leaning back. 

“You were in one of my classes,” he stated around a small huff, causing you a nod with a grin bit back. 

“A good couple years back, yeah,” you said, “You made it hard to forget, considering I was pretty convinced you made it your mission to rake me over the coals for a fundamentals to drawing course.” 

You were expecting some defensive remark, for him to lean into that small voice in the back of your head that told you that you hadn’t really applied yourself in that class until he forced you to. Yet, he just ducked his head slightly, letting out a small huff of a chuckle. 

“...I was a bit of a cocky bastard when I was younger,” he replied, “Might’ve been feelin’ a little showed up by some of my students. Y’know, ‘those who can’t do, teach’.”

“Ah, I’m sure that’s not true,” you muttered, rubbing the back of your neck somewhat, “Though, I’m happy to see you stepped off that a bit over the years.” 

“Sure,” he said, meeting your gaze with a small grin pulling at his lips, “Though, I grade fair. Always have.” 

“Yeah, well...I might not have been giving much of an effort until you showed me that wasn’t going to work. I thought it would be easy credit.” 

“Well, guess we both had somethin’ goin’ on with that.” 

“...It was still an introductory course.” 

“Alright, alright.” 

You both shared a bit of a chuckle after that, the tension somewhat stepping off. You weren’t so foolish to think it wouldn’t exist after, but it felt nice to sidestep some awkwardness about you having to share space with him multiple times a week. You shared some small talk about your classes for a while before separating to finish off your days. 

Though, when you returned to your office to collect some things, you found a note sticking to one of your folders that you hadn’t put there. Pulling it off, you were met with unfamiliar handwriting. 

               I feel like I crossed a line today by telling you all of that. If I did, I’m sorry. Still, I didn’t get the chance or really thought to say so, but thank you for listening.  - A. M. 

                                                                  ***

This really wasn’t turning out to be your day. 

A hell of a day, too. The last day before a reading week and you could tell most of your students had checked out, something you were close to doing so yourself. Teaching a class at seven at night was always a bit brutal, but after knowing your car had sputtered out a final goodbye as you were pulling up to campus that afternoon and that you would have to take the bus home? Well, it sucked. 

You let out a tired sigh as the elevator came to a stop on the floor you needed, planning on just picking up a couple things from your office for the break before taking this adventure home. The evening was darker than you had been expecting with the rain that had come over the afternoon, falling steadily now as you noticed through one of the windows in the open doors you passed. Great. 

Though, you were surprised to see a light on in your office. You had been under the impression that Arthur’s classes had wrapped up well over a couple hours ago, catching him moving between reading something and checking his computer in the light of the desk lamp. Pausing at the door, you couldn’t help but curse your luck somewhat. 

You could admit that things had been pretty well between the two of you after that one lunch, even having a couple more over the months that followed. Perhaps things even started to lean a bit into a solid friendship, though it was hard to deny that small part of you that spoke to some type of attraction toward him. It really was something you kept shoving down as the days went along--he just got divorced, you should just keep things somewhat distant from that. Yet, it was hard not to notice the growing closeness, the shared jokes, the knowing looks and smiles when getting done with dealing with particularly difficult students. 

At the moment, however, you really just wanted to pick up your things and wallow in a bad day on a bus ride home. 

Yet, it was hard to do so in a particularly silent building, walking over to your desk and rummaging through your folders had him jumping slightly, glancing in your direction before letting out a breath. 

“Christ, could’ve knocked or somethin’,” he remarked, causing you to glance his way somewhat sheepishly. 

“Sorry, just needed to grab this.”

“You usually workin’ this late?” he asked as you turned around, placing your things down on the desk beside you. 

“This semester, yeah. I just got done with my last class,” you replied, shaking your head, “Now it’s just a long bus ride home. Hell of a way to start my break.” 

“You takin’ the bus? In this?” he asked, glancing toward the window with the heavy droplets of rain still hitting the pane. 

“I don’t have a choice,” you said with a shrug, “My car gave up after driving here, I had to get it towed.”

“Well…” he started around a sigh, glancing back toward his things before checking the time on his laptop. You caught onto the next part of his statement, your hands raising somewhat at your sides. 

“It’s not really a big deal, you don’t need to offer…” 

“You guessin’ my words before they leave my mouth?” he returned around a small huff, glancing back toward you, “Where in the city do you live?”

“Just a little outside it, about fifteen minutes from here,” you replied, “By car, at least.”

“That ain’t too bad,” he replied, “I can drive you--if you’ll let me.”

“...Well, I’m not exactly excited to be taking the bus at night and standing in the rain,” you remarked around a soft chuckle, “I...wouldn’t mind that, I guess. I’ll have to return the favor someday, if I can.” 

“Eh, sure. It’s fine. Just give me a couple minutes here.”

You nodded, feeling a touch of relief at not having to take the long way home, yet there was now a twist of anxiety about taking this car ride with him. Things had been pretty friendly and professionally distant for some time, the odd line stepped over every now and again but nothing extreme. Now this? 

It’s a sweet gesture, you thought as you flipped open one of the essays you had to grade over the week break, there’s probably nothing more to it. 

Still, you found yourself accepting it in the long run anyway, following him down toward the car park a couple minutes later. A bit of a beat up old truck, actually, though it still looked modern enough--which you should have expected from him. Much as he was spending his day teaching artistic young adults, he still had a way about him that made him stick out a bit. You knew you hadn’t been expecting the southern drawl when you had him as a professor those years ago. 

“Air conditionin’ sucks, but the heater’s good at least,” he remarked as you climbed into the passenger seat once he had unlocked the door for you, “Though, considerin’ the night, that’s probably for the best.” 

“Good winter car, at least,” you remarked, doing up your seat belt as he fiddled with the air and radio a moment. You could pick up on the familiar voice of the local talk radio host, something your own father listened to quite a bit. 

Interesting choice, you thought while trying to hold back a chuckle. 

Arthur started up the truck, finally pulling out from campus as you gave him your address. Really, it was hard not to feel a little awkward to be sitting in his car like this, much as you were grateful for the offer. You tried not to give into the urge to dig around, a nervous habit--always had to do something with your hands. Instead, you let the lull in conversation fall off somewhat as you listened to the rumble of the engine, the faint voice of the radio host, and the rain against the roof and windows. Still, you couldn’t really help yourself--

“You really are a lot more modern cowboy than I had been expecting,” you commented, earning a quick laugh, something genuine. 

“Yeah, goes a little deeper than the accent. Just the way I grew up.” 

“So how’d you end up here?” you asked, glancing toward him. You were aware it was a bit of a bold question, but you had been feeling a little more comfortable about that lately. With him, at least. It was something you could overthink later (or kick yourself over later if he brushed it off.)

“What, the city?”

“Sure, teaching.” 

“I can draw,” he said around a small chuckle, “Had a friend get my foot in somewhere, allowed me to get into college and it took off from there.” 

You nodded, taking that in. You knew he really wasn’t all that older than yourself. You had started college as a mature student after giving up on the idea for a while, going back after you found yourself considering it again. 

“I wish I had a more interesting story, but mine lines up pretty well with that,” you replied around a soft chuckle, “Minus the foot in the door, but I had a couple people push the idea after drifting around a bit after high school.” 

“Yeah, that sounds pretty common,” he remarked. 

“Thanks for doing this, by the way,” you said after a beat, “You could have left it at a ‘that’s too bad’ and let me sort it out, and I wouldn’t have been mad.” 

“Eh, it’s nothin’,” he said, glancing toward you for a moment, letting out a small sigh through his nose as he looked back out at the road. “Don’t have anythin’ waitin’ on me back home, anyway.” 

You hummed, nodding your head lightly as he seemed to let the conversation fall again at that. You noticed the tightening of his hands on the wheel for a moment after. The written words of that little note sat in your mind a moment--more about crossing lines. Really, you found yourself wanting to ask how he was doing with all of that. You had noticed the phone calls had become less, Arthur’s energy picking up a little but it was hard to tell sometimes if he really was doing alright. Still, if he wasn’t going to expand on that, you weren’t going to push it. 

Really, the weight of the day seemed to press down on you a bit, making it hard to keep up with heavy conversation anyway. You watched the scenery roll by, familiar at this point. Eventually, you could pick up on the landmarks that suggested that your neighborhood was coming up. You directed him around the turns until the familiar building came into view, Arthur pulling up into the driveway. 

“Well, this is it,” you said around a somewhat tired sigh, “Thank you, again.” 

“Yeah, it’s no problem,” he returned. 

You paused a moment, knowing you should just open the door and get out. However, his little offhand comment seemed to sit in your mind for a moment, making you bite the inside of your cheek. You knew you were going to leave it be, yet--

“You, um...are you going to be okay?” you asked, meeting the somewhat confused look he had been settling you. 

“Oh--yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he returned quickly, waving a hand. “Not even sure why I said that, just slipped out. I’ve been...gettin’ used to it again, you don’t need to worry.” 

“Well...in the vein of saying things we maybe shouldn’t say, I do find myself wondering about how you’re doing anyway,” you replied, “But alright. I’ll see you after the break.” 

You opened the door at that, stepping out into the cold spray of water before shutting the door. You knew your last words were bold, but you had found yourself saying them anyway. Perhaps a part of you wanted him to know that someone did care. However, you didn’t get to linger too much on that thought as Arthur’s voice cut across from the driver’s side of his truck. 

You paused as he lowered his window, stepping back toward him as he leaned against it somewhat. 

“I...you’re free to forget I even asked, but you doin’ anythin’ for the break?” 

You blinked against the slight sting of rain in your eyes for a moment before shaking your head with a shrug, feeling the wetness starting to soak into the neck of your shirt and jacket. 

“You want to...I don’t know, get coffee? Have a meal?” 

“...Is this as friends? Colleagues?” 

“Well...I wasn't quite thinkin’ of it that way,” he remarked, almost lost to the sound of the rain around you. You could feel your heart thud, a shiver ripping through you from the cold as you felt the rain soaking the top of your head but you could feel some heat touch your face. 

“Alright, sure. Why not?” 

The relieved grin that touched his face was almost enough to make your night. You knew there was a part of you that would question this, already feeling that pulling at the back of your mind as you put your cellphone number into his phone. He just went through a divorce, you didn’t want to deal with this if he was just looking to use you to sort through all of that. 

However--well, it was just a meal. You could figure that out from how that goes. It wasn’t enough to quell your excitement, at least. 

You would have laughed at the idea all those years ago that you would be willingly going on a date with professor Morgan, bane of your existence, but the thought left a smile on your face for the night anyway. 

[letterboxd]

Noir Zealand Road Trip.

Breakout noir filmmaker James Ashcroft speaks to Letterboxd’s Indigenous editor Leo Koziol about his chilling new movie Coming Home in the Dark—and reveals how Blue Velvet, Straw Dogs and a bunch of cult New Zealand thrillers are all a part of his Life in Film.

“Many different types of feet walk across those lands, and the land in that sense is quite indifferent to who is on it. I like that duality. I like that sense of we’re never as safe as we would like to think.” —James Ashcroft

In his 1995 contribution to the British Film Institute’s Century of Cinema documentary series, Sam Neill described the unique sense of doom and darkness presented in films from Aotearoa New Zealand as the “Cinema of Unease”.

There couldn’t be a more appropriate addition to this canon than Māori filmmaker James Ashcroft’s startling debut Coming Home in the Dark, a brutal, atmospheric thriller about a family outing disrupted by an enigmatic madman who calls himself Mandrake, played in a revelatory performance by Canadian Kiwi actor Daniel Gillies (previously best known for CW vampire show The Originals, and as John Jameson in Spider-Man 2). Award-winning Māori actress Miriama McDowell is also in the small cast—her performance was explicitly singled out by Letterboxd in our Fantasia coverage.

Based on a short story by acclaimed New Zealand writer Owen Marshall, Ashcroft wrote the screenplay alongside longtime collaborator Eli Kent. It was a lean shoot, filmed over twenty days on a budget of just under US $1 million. The film is now in theaters, following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it made something of an impact.

Erik Thomson, Matthias Luafutu, Daniel Gillies and Miriama McDowell in a scene from ‘Coming Home in the Dark’.

Creasy007 described the film as “an exciting New Zealand thriller that grabs you tight and doesn’t let you go until the credits are rolling.” Jacob wrote: “One of the most punishingly brutal—both viscerally and emotionally—first viewings I’ve enjoyed in quite a while. Will probably follow James Ashcroft’s career to the gates of Hell after this one.”

Filmgoers weren’t the only ones impressed: Legendary Entertainment—the gargantuan production outfit behind the Dark Knight trilogy and Godzilla vs. Kong—promptly snapped up Ashcroft to direct their adaptation of Devolution, a high-concept novel by World War Z author Max Brooks about a small town facing a sasquatch invasion after a volcanic eruption. (“I find myself deep in Sasquatch mythology and learning a lot about volcanoes at the moment,” says the director, who is also writing the adaptation with Kent.)

Although Coming Home in the Dark marks his feature debut, Ashcroft has been working in the creative arts for many years as an actor and theater director, having previously run the Māori theater company Taki Rua. As he explains below, his film taps into notions of indigeneity in subtle, non-didactic ways. (Words in the Māori language are explained throughout the interview.)

Kia ora [hello] James. How did you come to be a filmmaker? James Ashcroft: I’ve always loved film. I worked in video stores from the age thirteen to 21. That’s the only other ‘real job’ I’ve ever had. I trained as an actor, and worked as an actor for a long time. So I had always been playing around with film. My first student allowance that I was given when I went to university, I bought a camera, I didn’t pay for my rent. I bought a little handheld Sony camera. We used to make short films with my flatmates and friends, so I’ve always been dabbling and wanting to move into that.

After being predominantly involved with theater, I sort of reached my ceiling of what I wanted to do there. It was time to make a commitment and move over into pursuing and creating a slate of scripts, and making that first feature step into the industry. My main creative collaborator is Eli Kent, who I’ve been working with for seven years now. We’re on our ninth script, I think.

But Coming Home in the Dark, that was our first feature. It was the fifth script we had written, and that was very much about [it] being the first cab off the rank; about being able to find a work that would fit into the budget level that we could reasonably expect from the New Zealand Film Commission. I also wanted to make sure that piece was showing off my strengths and interests—being a character-focused, actor-focused piece—and something that we could execute within those constraints and still deliver truthfully and authentically to the story that we wanted to tell and showcase the areas of interest that I have as a filmmaker, which have always been genre.

Do you see the film more as a horror or a thriller? We’ve never purported to be a horror. We think that the scenario is horrific, some of the events that happen are horrific, but this has always been a thriller for me and everyone involved. I think, sometimes, because of the premiere and the space that it was programmed in at Sundance, being in the Midnight section, there’s a sort of an association with horror or zany comedy. For us it’s more about, if anything, the psychological horror aspect of the story. 

It’s violent in places, obviously, but there’s very little violence actually committed on screen. It’s the suggestion. The more terrifying thing is what exists in the viewer’s mind [rather] than necessarily what you can show on screen. My job as a storyteller is to provoke something that you can then flesh out and embellish more in your own psyche and emotions. It’s a great space, the psychological thriller, because it can deal with the dramatic as well as some of those more heightened, visceral moments that horror also can touch on.

Director James Ashcroft. / Photo by Stan Alley

There’s a strong Māori cast in your film. Do you see yourself as a Māori filmmaker, or a filmmaker who is Maori? Well, I’m a Māori everything. I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a friend. Everything that I do goes back to my DNA and my whakapapa [lineage]. So that’s just how I view my identity and my world. In terms of categorizing it, I don’t put anything in front of who I am as a storyteller. I’m an actor, I’m a director. I follow the stories that sort of haunt me more than anything. They all have something to do with my experience and how I see the world through my identity and my life—past, present and hopefully future.

In terms of the cast, Matthias Luafutu [who plays Mandrake’s sidekick Tubs], he’s Samoan. Miriama McDowell [who plays Jill, the mother of the family] is Māori. I knew that this story, in the way that I wanted to tell it, was always going to feature Māori in some respect. Both the ‘couples’, I suppose you could say—Hoaggie [Erik Thomson] and Jill on one side and Tubs and Mandrake on the other—I knew one of each would be of a [different] culture. So I knew I wanted to mirror that.

Probably more than anything, I knew if I had to choose one role that was going to be played by a Māori actor, it was definitely going to be Jill, because for me, Jill’s the character that really is the emotional core and our conduit to the story. Her relationship with the audience, we have to be with her—a strong middle-class working mother who has a sort of a joy-ness at the beginning of the film and then goes through quite a number of different emotions and realizations as it goes along.

Those are sometimes the roles that Māori actors, I often feel, don’t get a look at usually. That’s normally a different kind of actor that gets those kinds of roles. And then obviously when Miriama McDowell auditions for you it’s just a no-brainer, because she can play absolutely anything and everything. I have a strong relationship with Miriama from drama-school days, so I knew how to work with her on that.

Once you put a stake in the ground with her, then we go, right, so this is a biracial family, and her sons are going to be Māori and that’s where the Paratene brothers, who are brothers in real life, came into the room, and we were really taken with them immediately. We threw out a lot of their scripted dialogue in the end because what we are casting is that fundamental essence and energy that exists between two real brothers that just speaks volumes more than any dialogue that Eli and I could write.

Matthias Luafutu as Tubs in ‘Coming Home in the Dark’.

What was your approach to the locations? [The area we shot in] is very barren and quite harsh. I spent a lot of time there in my youth, and I find them quite beautiful places. They are very different kinds of landscapes than you normally see in films from our country. We didn’t want to go down The Lord of the Rings route of images from the whenua [land] that are lush mountains and greens and blues, even though that’s what Owen Marshall had written.

I was very keen, along with Matt Henley, our cinematographer, to find that duality in the landscape as well, because the whole story is about that duality in terms of people, in terms of this world, and that grey space. So that’s why we chose to film in those areas.

Regarding the scene where Tubs sprinkles himself with water: including this Māori spiritual element in the film created quite a contrast. That character had partaken in something quite evil, yet still follows a mundane cultural tradition around death. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I’m not really interested in black-and-white characters of any kind. I want to find that grey space that allows them to live within more layers in the audience’s mind. So for me—and having family who have spent time in jail, or knowing people who have gone through systems like state-care institutions as well as moving on to prison—just because you have committed a crime or done something in one aspect of your life, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room and there aren’t other aspects that inform your identity that you also carry.

It’s something that he’s adopted for whatever reasons to ground him in who he is. And they can sit side by side with being involved in some very horrendous actions, but also from Tubs’ perspective, these are actions which are committed in the name of survival. You start to get a sense Mandrake enjoys what he does rather than doing it for just a means to the end. So any moment that you can start to create a greater sense of duality in a person, I think that means that there’s an inner life to a world, to a character, that’s starting to be revealed. That’s an invitation for an audience to lean into that character.

Erik Thomson and Daniel Gillies in ‘Coming Home in the Dark’.

What is the film that made you want to get into filmmaking? The biggest influence on me is probably David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. I saw that when I was ten years old. A babysitter, my cousin, rented it. It’s not a film that a ten-year-old should see, by the way. I was in Lower Hutt, there in my aunty’s house, and it was very cold, and there’s a roaring fire going. My cousin and her boyfriend were sitting on a couch behind me, and they started making out. I sort of knew something was going on behind me and not to look. So I was stuck between that and Dennis Hopper huffing nitrous, and this very strange, strange world opening up before me on the television.

I’ve had a few moments like that in my life [where a] film, as well as the circumstance, sort of changed how I view the world. I think something died that day, but obviously something was born. You can see what Lynch did in those early works, especially Blue Velvet. You don’t have to go too far beneath the surface of suburbia or what looks normal and nice and welcoming to find that there’s a complete flip-side. There’s that duality to our world, which we like to think might be far away, but it’s actually closer than you think.

That speaks to Coming Home in the Dark and why that short story resonated with me the first time I read it. Even in the most beautiful, scenically attractive places in our land, many different types of feet walk across those lands, and the land in that sense is quite indifferent to who is on it. I like that duality. I like that sense of we’re never as safe as we would like to think. Blue Velvet holds a special place in my heart.

What other films did you have in mind when forming your approach to Coming Home in the Dark? Straw Dogs, the Peckinpah film. The original. Just because it plays in that grey space. Obviously times have changed, and you read the film in different ways now as you might have when it first came out. But that was a big influence because there was a moral ambiguity to that film; those lines of good and bad or black and white, they don’t apply anymore. It just becomes about what happens when people are put under extreme pressure and duress, and they abandon all sense of morals. The Offence by Sidney Lumet would be another one, very much drawn to that ’70s ilk of American and English filmmaking.

‘Coming Home in the Dark’ was filmed on location around the wider Wellington region of New Zealand.

Is there a New Zealand film that’s influenced you significantly? There’s a few. I remember watching The Lost Tribe when it was on TV. That really scared me. I just remember the sounds of it. Mr. Wrong was a great ghost story. That stuck with me for a long time. The Scarecrow. Once I discovered Patu! [Merata Mita’s landmark documentary about the protests against the apartheid-era South African rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981], that sort of blew everything out of the water, because that was actually my first induction and education that this was something that even occurred. I think I saw that when I was about eighteen. That this was something that occurred in our history and had ramifications that were other than just a rugby game.

And Utu, every time I watch that, it doesn’t lose its resonance. I get something new from it every time. It’s a great amalgamation of identity, culture, of genre, and again, plays in that grey space of accountability. Utu still has that power for me. It’s one of those films, when it’s playing, I’ll end up sitting down and just being glued to the screen.

It’s a timeless classic. I will admit that when I watched your film, The Scarecrow did immediately come to mind, as did Garth Maxwell’s Jack Be Nimble. Yeah. [Jack Be Nimble] was really frightening. Again, it was that clash of many different aspects. There was a psychosexual drama there. You’ve got this telekinetic mind control and that abuse and that hunkering down of an isolated family. There are plenty of New Zealand films that have explored a sort of similar territory. They’re all coming to me now.

Bad Blood has a great sense of atmosphere and photography and the use of soundscape to create that shocking sense of isolation and terror in these quick, fast, brutal moments, which then just sort of are left to ring in the air. But I love so much of New Zealand cinema, especially the stuff from the ’80s.

Kia ora [good luck], James. Kia ora.

Related content

Leo’s Letterboxd list of Aotearoa New Zealand Scary-As Movies Adapted from Literature

Dave’s Cinema of Unease list

A Brutal Stillness: Gregory’s list of patient, meditative genre films

Sailordanae’s list of Indigenous directors of the Americas

Follow Leo on Letterboxd

‘Coming Home in the Dark’ is available now in select US theaters and on VOD in the US and New Zealand. All photographs by Stan Alley / GoldFish Creative. Comments have been edited for length and clarity.

[raleighliving]

Budget Living Raleigh

Living in any city you’re gonna look at higher costs of living.  Rent, utilities, and insurance all add up before you even factor in groceries.  But just because you’re living in the city doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have nice things.

If you find all your money is being eaten by rent, and your bed is supported by the ground itself, then this article is for you; cause we’re going to talk today about bargain hunting in Raleigh and what to look for when you want a good deal on good furniture.  Maybe I’ll do this again for groceries or other such things but for now we’re just focused on general niceties.

Best part of this is it’s gonna be fairly general too.  Anything I mention here you could probably find or do in any American city or small town since the institutions are fairly ubiquitous.  

If you find yourself lacking furniture, decorations, or just general quality of life enhancers my answer boils down to two main points:  Thrifting and Resale stores.  At times they can seem similar enough but there are fine differences that separate the two using fairly recognizable criteria.

“RL,” I hear you say between fistfuls of knockoff Cheetos and self-loathing, “Of course if you want bargains  you go thrifting! Did you JUST hear about Goodwill recently?”  

Yes, in terms of hot takes this is especially dull but what I can lend to the conversation isn’t about how prices at thrift organizations are cheaper than retailers, how you should support your local thrift organizations, or even the general good they provide to low-income communities; what I’m looking at is knowing what you have and what you can expect to find when visiting.  

Take Goodwill, for instance, since everyone has seen at least one in their life. Outside of their larger outlets where you’ll find more furniture, walk into any Raleigh Goodwill and you’ll have seen all of them.  90% of the floorspace is dedicated to cheap clothes with a backwall full of knickknacks and a small bookshelf.  If you’re lucky, there may even be a sofa or two and some paintings along the wall but most of what you’ll find is cheap clothes.

Now, if that’s what you’re looking for that’s great! However, I’ve grown to have a deep distaste for the homogeneity of local GCF stores.  Customers can donate their clothes, toys, and other items to GCF at any store locations; but those items are shipped to processing and then distributed to other GCFs across the country based on inventory need and sales patterns.  What you see in one donation center/store you’ll likely see in every other with maybe the odd rare find if you’re lucky. 

GCF aside your options for Raleigh include org thrifts, mom and pop stores, and discount thrifts to provide some much needed variety in your day-to-day shopping. Each with their pros and cons, yet all sharing the glorious benefit of providing furniture and clothing for a fraction of the price of bigger brand stores.

Org thrifts (short for organization thrift stores, creative I know) are exactly what they sound like.  Thrifts run by an organization or charity, similar to Goodwill's, with a stated goal of helping others and supporting the organization financially over seeking a profit margin. 

Cause 4 Paws, Raleigh/Durham Rescue mission, and Dorcas thrift stores all provide a wide variety of products while using the store proceeds to help the less fortunate; but with phenomenal prices.  It’s not uncommon for a thrift store run by one of these organizations to have fifty cent books, clothing sold by the pound, and furniture/power tools under the $40 price tag if you’re lucky.  Plus, not to sound like a broken record but, your proceeds go towards good causes like animal adoption and feeding the homeless.  

Most thrifts of this nature are run by religious organizations, so if you’re at odds with supporting that sort of thing you might be more interested in the other two options; but otherwise this type of thrift store typically comes with very few downsides. 

|Image Credit:  Dorcas Thrift on Nextdoor

Of course, one of those other options is the standard mom and pop operation.  Not linked to any specific organization or franchise, these tend to be small businesses run by local families serving a smaller radius.  

Prices as a result tend to be a little higher than your average thrift store since it’s, y’know, a business; and the selection can be a little below average, usually consisting largely of estate sale leftovers, but this also works to their favor.

There’s no central distribution center for these businesses, so what people sell/donate to these stores comes from nearby communities typically.  So if you find one near an upper class area like Honeycutt Rd or Ebeneezer Church Rd, they’ll typically have nice furniture, art, and electronics for thrift store prices. 

There’s not too many of these, but my personal favorite is Fabulous Affordable Treasures in Southwest Raleigh.  A decent assortment of clothes and decorative pieces (and a very relaxing general environment) makes it a positive visit even when I’m just browsing. 

|Image credit:  Affordable Treasures Facebook

Finally there’s Discount thrifts.  They’re not too common, and are usually supported by an organization additionally although not all are, but if you find one check back with them regularly because it’s almost guaranteed to be worth it.

These thrift stores operate by having a degrading price scale; setting prices when the object comes into inventory, and then lowering them based on how long its been with them or the condition it was received in.  

Stores like Habitat for Humanity ReStore and Petersons Consigning Design use this, and typically offer discounts upwards of 60% if you wait long enough.  On top of having equally large selections of product from org thrifts, they offer plenty for the savvy shopper. 

The downside is, the best possible price you can receive for any given product is a gamble.  That sweet leather armchair you have your eye on might be dropped from 40% to 50% in the next two days, but if someone finds the price acceptable where it is then that products gone forever (or at least until something similar winds up in inventory).

|Image Credit:  Petersons Consigning Design website

Regardless of which thrift store you choose though, you’re bound to find a bargain in one eventually if you check back every once in awhile.  I’ve only mentioned a fraction of the stores available in Raleigh, if you find a few favorites of your own and check back regularly, you’re bound to find something you’ll love at a price you couldn’t find anywhere else.

Of course, if you’re looking for more niche deals you could always use programs like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist for people just looking to get rid of their junk.  They’re easy to use and both are incredibly active for the Raleigh area; but if you’re looking for something a little more...interesting then I’d recommend checking out liquidation stores.

There’s not many of them in Raleigh, but recently this past week a store by the name of Treasure Hunt Liquidation opened up with an interesting premise.  They buy tons of returned and opened merchandise from places like Amazon and sell them to other people on a degrading price scale similar to the thrift stores we mentioned above. 

Fridays the price-per-item is $10, and then day by day it drops till it hits $1 per item on the following Wednesdays (and they close Thursdays for inventory).  large bins full of boxed or repackaged goods line the floor with everything from car parts to 3D printing filaments depending on when you can get there. 

Additionally, you can purchase pallets of goods as well; with some of the more high ticket items ranging from $300 up to $1500; but generally containing some of the more desirable items like bikes and kitchen equipment.  

Overall, the whole experience is like a giant rotating lootbox; you’re never quite sure what you’re gonna get when you go but you’re likely to find something that at least catches your eye, even if it doesn’t come home with you.

|Image Credit:  Treasure Hunt Liquidation facebook group

You can’t find everything you’ll ever need at stores like these, but you’ll definitely be able to find affordable furniture and clothes even on a college student’s budget. Even a few dollars saved can make a huge difference though, so if you get the chance or see a store on the side of the road that catches your eye, be sure to at least stop in and see what they have for sale. 

Or, if you’ve read this and have some books/clothes/toys to donate please consider donating or selling them to your local thrift location.  These secondhand finds can make all the difference in the world to a kid who wouldn’t be able to get them otherwise.   Regardless, hopefully at the very least this article kept you entertained, and I hope everyone reading has a great day!

[godslayingenthusiast]

https://qgpennyworth.com/portfolio/baby-steps/

Baby Steps is a work from Holy Nonsense, a Creative Commons project. View Holy Nonsense 2020 here.

Each entry (single page or multiple pages of the same work) is released under an individual CC: Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives license. That means you can repost this work as-is anywhere for any non-commercial purposes.

THIS WORK IS AN EXCEPTION! In keeping with the wishes of the author, Baby Steps is released CC: Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike. For the original full text, see http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis

Image descriptions, including transcriptions of text, are expressly allowed, but just make sure you include the credits that are baked into the image when you do them. Image Description after the cut.

Three pages in black and white, each page has a frame made of a black background with white dots in a radiating pattern. On the second page, a classically illustrated woman in medieval European dress is holding a baby, and has a speech bubble saying "Refusing to believe women is a tradition among male physicians." There is also a white apple marked with a K at the center of the dot pattern in the frame on this page. The full transcript of the excerpt reads as follows:

Baby Steps – An Excerpt from The Raw Nerve by Aaron Swartz

In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just 4%. Expectant mothers noticed this — some would get down on their knees and beg to be admitted to the Second Clinic. Others, hearing new patients were being admitted to the First Clinic that day, decided they’d rather give birth in the streets.

Ignaz Semmelweis, an assistant at the First Clinic, couldn’t bear it. He began desperately searching for some kind of explanation for the difference. He tested many things without success. Then, in 1847, Semmelweis’s friend Jakob Kolletschka was performing an autopsy when a student accidentally poked him with a scalpel. It was a minor injury, but Kolletschka got terribly sick and ultimately passed away, with symptoms rather like the what the mothers had. Which got Semmelweis wondering: was some “deathly material” on the corpses responsible for the deaths?

To test this, he insisted the doctors begin washing their hands with chlorinated lime (which he found best removed the stink of death) before handling the pregnant women. The results were shocking. In April 1847, the mortality rate was 18.3%. Semmelweis instituted handwashing in mid-May and by June the mortality rate had crashed to 2.2%. The next month it was even less and later that year it reached zero — for the first time ever.

You’d think doctors would be thrilled by this incredible discovery. Instead, Semmelweis was ridiculed and attacked. He was fired from the hospital and forced out of Vienna. “In published medical works my teachings are either ignored or attacked,” he complained. “The medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph written in 1859 in which my teachings were rejected.” Even in his native Vienna, hundreds of mothers continued to die every year.

Semmelweis turned to alcohol and his behavior became increasingly erratic. In 1865, he was committed to a mental institution. There he was beaten by the guards, placed in a straitjacket, and locked in a dark cell. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 47, from an infected wound.

Why did doctors so stubbornly reject Ignaz Semmelweis? Well, imagine being told you were responsible for the deaths of thousands of your patients. That you had been killing the people you were supposed to be protecting. That you were so bad at your job that you were actually worse than just giving birth in the street.

We all know people don’t like to hear bad news about themselves. Indeed, we go out of our way to avoid it — and when we do confront it, we try to downplay it or explain it away. Cognitive dissonance psychologists have proven it in dozens of experiments: Force students through an embarrassing initiation to take a class, and they’ll insist the class is much more interesting. Make them do a favor for someone they hate, and they start insisting they actually like them. Have them make a small ethical compromises and they’ll feel comfortable making bigger and bigger ones. Instead of just accepting we made a mistake, and shouldn’t have compromised or done the favor or join the class, we start telling ourselves that compromising isn’t so bad — and when the next compromise comes along, we believe the lies we tell ourselves, and leap at making another mistake. We hate hearing bad news about ourselves so much that we’d rather change our behavior than just admit we screwed up.

It doesn’t help much when our friends point out what we did wrong. If we’re so scared of hearing from ourselves that we made a mistake, just imagine how much we hate hearing it from someone else. And our friends know this: the answer to “Does this outfit make me look fat?” is not supposed to be “yes.” We may joke about our friends’ foibles behind their back, but we rarely do so to their face. Even at work, a lot of effort goes into making sure employees are insulated from their superior’s most negative assessments. This is what we’re taught: make five compliments for every criticism, sandwich negative feedback with positive feedback on each side, the most important thing is to keep up someone’s self-esteem.

But, as Semmelweis showed, this is a dangerous habit. Sure, it’s awful to hear you’re killing people—but it’s way worse to keep on killing people! It may not be fun to get told you’re lazy, but it’s better to hear it now than to find out when you’re fired.

If you want to work on getting better, you need to start by knowing where you are.

[dontcallmecarrie]

One Step Forward...

just realized that while I have quite a bit on Tony’s time in college for BDEL, it’s pretty general so here’s an attempt to remedy that. Bear in mind that there’s a timeline squish going on, otherwise things won't make sense.

. 

Tony looked around the enormous lecture hall with wide eyes, practically vibrating in his seat. He knew he stuck out like a sore thumb, but he didn't care: his shiny new student ID was burning a hole in his pocket, his messenger bag was a near-clone of his neighbor’s, and in the next few minutes he’d start on the next chapter of his life. 

This was the first time he’d set foot in an institute of higher learning, for the express purpose of learning. Sure, he still had to lay low, since Tony Stark was still #1 on America’s Most Wanted Missing Children [even if his twenty-second birthday came and went months ago, take a hint already Howard], and living with someone still getting used to the world after an involuntary ice nap, but...for the first time in his life, he could let loose. 

Could finally poke at some of the things he’d been itching to try with like-minded individuals, could research and leaf through theses and journals without having to sneak around anyone who might be curious as to what a ten-year-old was doing with a textbook on fluid mechanics.

Child prodigies were easy to pick out; enterprising college students, though?

When everyone was broke and scrambling to stand out, especially in a university big enough for some of its courses to have upwards of 300 students, while also having some cool-sounding research going on? 

Nobody’d look too closely at some freshman asking too many questions. 

That’s what he was counting on, anyway. 

The professor strode up to the podium, and Tony straightened up in preparation for his first day of college.

.

Mistakes were made.

Many, many mistakes were made.

.

Tony walked out of the latest round of exams with a bounce in his step, already thinking about whether or not he’d be able to make it to the guest lecture in time to find a seat...only to pick up the dark muttering of some of his classmates. 

“Ugh, that was brutal and I think there was a typo somewhere in there because how—”

“—had like one slide covering it during lecture, why was it—”

“—an I’m going to fail, this stupid class is going to tank my GPA, fu—”

Some were almost in tears, some were fuming. More than a few were bleary-eyed, clearly having pulled an all-nighter cramming for the test that made up a good chunk of their grade.

Tony tried not to feel too guilty about wrecking the grading curve because he had no doubt he’d aced it, and had done the extra-credit question too just because he could and it’d seemed like a fun thought exercise.

Then he checked his watch, bit back a curse as he clutched at his messenger bag, and started to jog towards the building he’d seen on the flyer about public health talks.

.

Culver University had several of the typical crypids for a college campus: that one bookstore five minutes away with just about every book under the sun, that hole-in-the-wall restaurant that somehow managed to avoid getting written up for health code violations, that one professor who was always listed on the roster but hadn’t been seen since the first day of class.

However, not three months into the new academic year, a new cryptid was being added to the roster: Caffeine Rush Undergrad. 

.

If Tony hadn’t known just what the hell he was doing, he would not have managed to secure a space for his research project. As it was, his obvious interest and experience in computer programming had been a plus, so even if he’d had to bullshit his way out of declaring a major while also convincing everyone he knew what he was doing— it was worth it. 

He now had a bench dedicated to his work on cloud computing, and even if Culver didn’t know his end goal was getting JARVIS even more mobility than before on top of seeing what else he could do with what resources he now had at hand, well...this place was a goddamn candy store, alright?

Also, as a bonus he was now a familiar face to several departments he hadn’t quite gotten around to checking out, including a free pass to continue arguing with that one philosophy chair whenever office hours were slow and his code was compiling.

.

Caffeine Rush Undergrad had a name, presumably.

However, when looking at short freshmen and transfer students and seeing the only one in the room who looked actually excited about the upcoming exams, well...it was hard to remember to ask. 

. 

Tony met Bruce Banner and Betty Ross after he found some of their publications, and his glee at discovering that they were working on something a few wings away from his own bench was...something. 

Not explosive, because he knew better than to attract the wrong sort of attention, but something. 

Sure, they’d eyed him suspiciously at first, but after seeing he knew what he was doing and that he had no interest in stealing their research, they got along swimmingly!

Well, at least they didn’t treat him like a younger sibling the way Foster and Selvig did, anyway.

More like a second set of eyes, and even if Tony didn’t entirely get the finer points he was able to follow along well enough. Kind of like the way Bruce was a great rubber duck whenever he shared what he was doing with JARVIS, even if he sometimes seemed more than a little amused by the comparison. 

.

Caffeine Rush Undergrad was like a goddamn puppy, all wide eyes and running around all the damn time, leaving behind towering stacks of books whenever he went to the library and sneaking into lecture halls for classes he wasn’t even in just to ask the speaker questions later.

It was impressive. And exhausting, and intimidating, especially when word got out that Caffeine Rush somehow had managed to secure a research position in one of the most competitive programs on campus.

...and then he disappeared after the Green Incident, which only cemented his notoriety.

.

Tony had two coffees in hand, one for Betty and one for Bruce, and nearly dropped both the moment he glimpsed General Ross in the hall, headed towards—

Oh.

He turned on a heel and ducked into the nearest office he could find, before Howard’s old golf buddy could spot him and risk putting two and two together.

.

“You didn’t tell me your old man was Thunderbolt Ross.” Tony said as he passed over a cup of now-lukewarm coffee. His voice wasn’t accusing; he was better than that. But his hands were this close to shaking, and there was a tension he couldn’t shake because he’d foolishly, naively assumed he was safe here, why had he—

“What’s wrong?” Bruce asked, eyes sharp and damn it he was slipping if some civilians could see it. 

“Nothing.” Tony plastered on a smile, and shoved his cup in his direction as he mentally readied himself as to what he’d need to do now because if his mom hadn’t picked up chatter then they were okay, but...

Oh, right. 

Geez, seeing Ross had really shaken him up. But his family was safe, and he had a plan and a story and he could bullshit with the best of them, he just had to get a grip.

Deep breath, steady hands. DUM-E was pressing against his leg in his messenger bag, while Butterfingers was a comforting weight in his jacket pocket. He could handle this. 

“Nothing,” he repeated to their disbelieving looks, “it’s just that my mom was a... Vietnam protestor. She broke a lot of shit, and... may or may not have several warrants with her name still out there.”

He hated lying to his friends, but his family was on the line. Uncle James was still living with him, his mom didn’t need any more stress than she already had. 

Also? It wasn’t actually a lie. Technically, his mom was a kidnapper. Jury was still out on the treason charges, though, because enough people counted her as a whistleblower that Howard hadn’t been able to get those charges to stick.

Bruce relaxed, but frowned in concern. “You recognized Betty’s father from that?”

Tony didn’t hide how awkward he was feeling now, after the fact. Especially because it was the truth, in a way. If only even weirder.

“There’s a strong resemblance going on, and he...mayormaynothavebeenlookingforherpersonally.”

Misleading? Yes. Did he regret it? Nope.

Betty shared a look with Bruce, then looked at the doorway and blanched before surging forward and shoving him behind her desk.

Fortunately, Tony knew enough to roll with it and so ducked and curled himself the best he could just as the footsteps got louder and General Ross’ voice came from the doorway.

“Oh, almost forgot— Banner? What are you doing here?” 

Bruce’s shoes had a very distinctive squeak whenever he shifted his weight nervously. Tony’d noticed it before, but never quite like now.

“Hello, General Ross—” He started, before Betty cut in.

“Dad? I wanted to tell you this in person. I have a boyfriend.” She must have gestured or made a face, for the choked noise coming from Bruce’s side of the room and how did he get himself in these situations, seriously?

[mrwinterr]

Death of Me (Chase Collins x Dark!Witch!Female Reader) - Part 1

Series Masterlist || Main Masterlist

Pairing: Chase Collins x Dark!Witch!Female Reader

Summary: The reader is addicted to the idea of love and Chase is addicted to the idea of ultimate power – both can help each other out.

Warnings: Movie spoilers for The Covenant (2006) and The Love Witch (2016). Supernatural elements [witchcraft], dark themes [mentions of death and really bad people] and smut [18+ only please].

Disclaimer: This story contains dialogue, characters and references taken from both films. It essentially follows the plot of The Covenant with a reader insert. The reader is loosely based on the main character of The Love Witch. I take no credit for any of those elements used. They belong to the creators of the films. I just wanted to try my hand at having these worlds crossover.  

Title Inspiration: “Death of Me” by New Politics

A/N: I don’t know who still reads Chase Collins fanfics, but I wanted to get this one out. This will have multiple parts. Comments, likes and reblogs are all appreciated! Enjoy!

Now entering the town of Ipswich.

It’s a bit dreary, but that didn’t bother you. It always appeared as if a dark cloud followed you. Miles and miles away from the city you last called home, driven away by another failed attempt at a relationship – you were no stranger to those – was becoming somewhat of a routine for you.

The earliest unsuccessful relationship of yours recorded was with your parents. They were hardly a part of your life to begin. It wasn’t like you didn’t try at building one with them; they were the ones that didn’t. You might as well had been invisible to them. A parents’ love was the first kind of love one was supposed to encounter, and it was to be unconditional. They simply didn’t care for their own daughter and it hurt you. Maybe if they showed you any ounce of love or what it was really like perhaps you wouldn’t be so obsessed over trying to understand it. Ironically for two individuals who expressed no love at all, you had so much of it. It was just the matter of finding the right person to give it to.

For as long as you could remember, you’d been fending for your own. So, the first thing you did when you managed to save enough money, you packed up and left your parents. The next city was supposed to your second chance, but you were so young. You hadn’t even begun to plan your own future. Hell, you were living in the car you’d purchased on your own by accepting countless odd jobs and getting paid under the table. For a few months, you had waitressed at a small restaurant, where a group of interesting people, to say the least, caught your attention.

They were regulars to the eatery and had been watching you with a purpose. They could smell you were somewhat of a troubled youth that needed guidance. They welcomed you to their inner circle and soon into their coven. Yup, they were witches and surprisingly that didn’t bother you about them. They were good people to you. You owed it to whoever these people worshiped because they helped provide you an education, shelter, food and lessons in magic – practicing spells and concocting potions – and even more so in taking back control of your own life. This was now your family. You finally felt a sense of belonging with this group.

None of them had any actual internal powers, but they each individually excelled in different aspects of the craft. They taught you how to focus on concentrating energy, using your magic, to gain results; if you could achieve that you’d be the one in control, and essentially have power over the subject. You also learned that there were different types of witches – ones that were made into witches and ones born as witches. You had never known to encounter one that was born into a bloodline, but you had been warned that they would be much stronger than you, so that alone motivated you in perfecting the craft should one come to you as a threat.

You became enamored by witchcraft. You felt reborn through it. In a sense, it saved you. On top of that, you had nothing to lose, so why not sell your soul, right? While you certainly felt loved by the witches, you still yearned for a different type of love.  

The first failed relationship in which you were intimately involved in was with a guy your age at the time. Looking back at it, you can’t help but to laugh. Oh boy, what a mistake that was.

With the help of your newfound family, you were able to enroll into the local high school. Unwanted attention came with the territory of being the new girl and you were no exception to one of the most sought-after guys in your class. The next thing you knew, you were losing your virginity to him then only for him to leave you the following day. At that tender age, you thought you loved him, and you wanted him to love you. This is why it was comical. What did you know about love at 16 anyway? So impressionable and so naive.

This was the first time you experimented with love spells and potions and he was your first victim. You had been warned about messing with love spells before, but what spell didn’t come without a warning? It seemed to work, but the more time you spent with him the less you wanted to. It turned out he wasn’t in any way what you wanted at all, an even bigger mess than you were portrayed...and maybe even loved you too much. At least that’s what was mentioned in his suicide note.

His death traumatized you for the first few months and the High Priestess decided it was best you continue elsewhere. Initially, that scared you because you thought they were kicking you out, but you were bonded to them and, with another warning about love spells, she assured you that there are plenty of their kind willing to take another in, you’d just have to be sworn in all over again.

As soon as you recovered a year later, with the immense support of your new coven, you were almost an adult and ready to find the one...the new one. And this one seemed to have it going for him. He was attractive, smart and respectable, but he just had too many feelings and it turned you off. He was a fucking pussy. You swore you could still hear his sobs ringing in your ears. You wanted to love a man, not care for a child. The mental institution he ended up being committed in would be able to give him that.

You moved on fairly quickly not wanting to be reminded of the previously failed conquest, however, you should’ve seen the next one coming, but, again, you were hopeful. Third time was not a charm, it was a tragedy. Two lost individuals, one with a broken past and the other battling with substance abuse, trying to find solace in each other was a recipe for disaster. His problems were soon becoming humdrum. As if you didn’t have any problems of your own to deal with, but who was ever there for you? He constantly ached and ached for you, begged for your help. Fucking clingy. You just couldn’t bring yourself to feel remorse for him anymore. Long story short, he’s six feet under a makeshift grave. Metaphorically, he had dug it on his own a long time ago.

Determined to bounce back, you found yourself traveling to a quaint colonial town in Massachusetts. A member of your previous coven recommended Ipswich and believed you would find the one in your cards there. Not sure whether or not to believe them or if “the one” really existed and was waiting for you, the notion of having nothing to lose decided for you and made Ipswich your new destination.

You’re unloading box after box in your single dorm room, a special request you made so you could practice magic in peace, when someone pokes their head in the door you left opened. It was only open because you weren’t able to drag in some of the larger boxes inside yet and they must’ve spotted them.

“Need any help?” The deep voice causes you turn to the doorway, where a guy, who’s tall, no doubt athletic, a head full of dark hair, a hint of innocence surrounding him, greets you with a sweet smile.

“Um, yeah actually,” you reply with a smile to match the tone. You could carry your own, but why turn down the free labor and perhaps even a show. He was cute. That much you deduced from watching the way his body moved, the skin that peeked out from when his shirt would ride up as he bent down and lifted boxes of your belongings into your room.

“Oh! Please be careful with that one!” You warn seeing the box he was currently handling marked as fragile. It contained some of your bottles and they were practically sacred to you. He absorbs the warning and places the particular box gently aside.

“I’m Tyler by the way,” he says after setting the final box next to your feet and standing upright with a respectable amount of distance between you two. You introduce yourself and offer a now genuine smile. You didn’t want to fall victim to yet another nightmare of a relationship, but you kept thinking about what your fellow member told you – the one is in Ipswich and the one could be in front of you right now.

Tyler ends up staying a little longer as you expected that night and you let him. He had a presence you didn’t feel with towards the others. There was just a different kind of energy there.

The two of you were getting along just fine, but you decided to take it upon yourself for safe measures with him and sneak in a little something you made. You say to yourself maybe he’s worth a shot. And he was. You went on a couple of dates with Tyler, met his three closes friends Caleb, Pogue and Reid, but you wouldn’t consider yourself close with them; they just came with the territory. Yet that energy Tyler had around him kept haunting you.

You weren’t sure if you were losing your touch or had a typo in your spell book, but you began to notice the effects didn’t last long with him in particular. He was almost immune to it. The spells were designed to enhance qualities and features about the other person and if you noticed any trend in using love spells was that it showed one’s true self.

Tyler started to become dull to you, like there was no sense of excitement with him. Harsh, not even magic could help you. Afterall, you can’t work with what’s already there. He had his looks going for him, he was a nice boy, and he was certainly several steps above the others in bed, but he never challenged you and you began forgetting he was even in the same room as you. You could’ve sworn he was about to cry when you told him you wanted to just be friends, but he accepted it because he was whipped. No backbone whatsoever. Well, at least he was still alive.

His loss would’ve probably hit you a little different because he was still a sweet guy…and you didn’t need to be given a reason to leave Ipswich too soon. You were just getting started here. His friends didn’t even seem to hold anything against you, not that you really cared. You weren’t interested in going down the line of the Sons of Ipswich; a little history lesson you learned from Kate, Pogue’s girlfriend, whom you unwillingly also formed a friendship with by default. Apparently, these boys were a little prominent here descending from four of the five families that colonized the town. Besides, if Tyler was boring, you weren’t willing to get into the whole mama’s boy routine Caleb kept up with and Reid proved to be too obnoxious for your own taste.

A private school full of rich kids like Spencer Academy, there were bound to be more guys at your disposal. You internally praised the member of your coven for recommending Ipswich. Your conquest to find real love never wanders too far off, but why not have some fun along the way?

Lately, you kept to yourself in your dorm; biding by with your teenage life in regularly attending your classes, occasionally hanging out with Kate – shopping or listening to her rant about another one of Pogue’s jealousy episodes – show face at Nicky’s once in a while and of course practice magic. There was a party tonight near the woods and almost everyone who was anyone was going to be in attendance. You thought you could use a break after a long week.

You parked your car nearby a bunch of others and managed to spot Kate waving you down to join her. Next to her was someone you hadn’t seen before. Kate introduced her to you as Sarah, her new roommate this semester. She seemed nice. Being in her shoes not too long ago, you decided to try and make her feel welcomed.

“So, tell me. Who is who that’s here,” Sarah asks, loosening up and it’s nice to see a sense of normalcy in your life; making new friends and having a good time like a person your age should. There’s a sense of danger and risk being at this party with violating trespassing signs, a huge fire and lots and lots of drugs and alcohol with underaged teenagers.

“First things first. Him over there,” Kate starts pointing at a source of one of your disgust, “that’s Aaron Abbot. He’s a prick. He treats girls like shit; just ask y/n.” Sarah looks at you with a look of curiosity and hint of concern, but you just give her a mix between a shrug and nod letting her know you’re okay and that Kate is right.

Aaron was someone you messed with in private to test a new potion out after failing with Tyler. You’d seen guys like Aaron before. If you learned anything from the first one it was that guys like Aaron were your textbook high school jackass. Thinking about it made your blood boil. The humiliation you felt when you realized he had only pursued you because you were fresh meat and to become just a notch on his bedpost. How’d that saying go? Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice…

If there was one other thing you loved more than the idea of love, it was sweet revenge. You anticipated for it to be nasty with Aaron after you cut ties with him. No one even seemed to believe him when he tried to spread awful things about you. You had a decent reputation at Spencer. You mentally praised yourself at job well done with that one. Maybe you weren’t losing your touch after all.

You briefly excused yourself from the girls to look for a drink. You scan the perimeter trying to locate a cooler, but you become distracted when you see a hint of a flash between some trees in your peripheral. As it occurred something seemed to also blow right past you; something you only felt with when in proximity of other supernatural elements, but yet unlike any other. You look to the other attendees and realize no one noticed anything unusual. When you look back towards the direction where the light came from, you see a figure walking out from the woods.  

You take a hard look at the person trying to recognize them, but you don’t. A new guy. He’s got a certain swagger in his steps, dark hair tousled and a little spiked at the ends, a sharp jawline and eyes that were too dark for you be able to tell what color they really were, and it being nighttime didn’t aid you in figuring it out.  

He must’ve caught your gaze because he’s now staring right back at you. His stare is cold, and you feel frozen, even unable to turn away. And yet again, something feels different and it only gets even more prominent the longer you look at him. You try not to ponder too long about it and decide to avoid him. You concentrate enough energy on your body until you were finally able to get yourself to walk away. Not wanting to stick around long enough for anything to come out of that, you continue your quest to find a drink, not looking back.

Unsuccessful, you head back towards the girls that were clearly in a scuffle with mega bitch Kira Snider, who is actually dating Aaron and has a personal vendetta against you. How were you supposed to know he was already dating her when you were fucking with him? Poor girl doesn’t love herself enough to be with trash like that.

You notice the Sons of Ipswich have already arrived and are trying to defend Kate and Sarah. Right before a fight is about to ensue, someone intervenes and successfully calms both parties down...well sort of. Kira didn’t really take too kindly at his words and Aaron at the puke that was dripping off the back of his letterman all of a sudden.

It was him. He looked a lot nicer up close. The guys thank him for helping diffuse the situation and you hear him introduce himself as Chase Collins. You can feel his eyes on you, but before the line of introductions could get to you, the DJ is announcing the party is a bust and the cops are zoning in. Soon, you break away from the group and take off in the direction of your parked car.

You happen to notice that Sarah is struggling to get her car started. You think about helping her, but see Reid is already on it. The sons are always saving the day, aren’t they? Was your last stance on that before you drove away from the scene. The adrenaline didn’t subside until you were on a clear road back to the housing buildings.

You just about have the key inserted and are about to unlock your door when you hear a voice.

“Some party, huh?” It sounded like just a couple of steps away.

You look down towards the hallway and see Chase standing a few doors down.

“It was kind of boring,” you admit. The only thing that would’ve probably made it exciting was if someone almost died.

He laughs lightly at that and nods showing he agreed to some degree.

“You didn’t have the least bit fun at all?” He asks.

You cock your head to the side a bit for show and pretend to think, but your mind was already made up. The party was a total bust and waste of your time, so no, you didn’t have any fun at all, but you could have some fun now. Hot guy you barely knew in front of you, attempting conversation – you thought he just had to have wanted something.

“You want to have some real fun?” You challenge as you reach deep into your coat pocket and produce a custom flask. It sparkles slightly from the lights of the hallway reflecting it as you wave it around giving him a devious look. 

Chase presses his lips together and brings a hand to the back of his neck to rub at it, showing some form of nervous or conflicting habit, before looking around to see if anyone was watching this happen. You’re not sure what he’s thinking, but you don’t give him much time to reply and proceed to push open your door and walk in. You don’t close it though.

You’re shrugging off your coat and kicking off your shoes when you hear the door shut behind you. You smile to yourself because he’s fallen right into your trap.

“You know, I never got your name,” he says while admiring your room. The only source of light comes from a dimly lit lamp and the strings of light surrounding the tapestry against the wall next to your bed. You always kept your secret hidden and out of plain sight in fear of someone breaking in, so as far as you were concerned, you weren't at him catching onto anything. 

“It’s y/n.”

Chase nods and says he likes it. You try not to roll your eyes at that before you turn his way, throwing the flask you were flaunting earlier in his direction and then plopping down on your bed. He swiftly catches it and walks towards the bed.

“You’re trouble, aren’t you?” He teases taking a seat next to you.

“Why don’t you find out?” You sit up matching him.

He smirks while unscrewing the cap and taking a swig. You watch as his initial reaction is to cringe at its contents. His eyes wring shut, nose scrunched up, lips pressed tightly together and the rest of his expression showing his body’s response at an attempt to process the hard liquor.

“Shit! That’s fucking strong,” he comments staring at the flask as if he could see through the silver and inspect the liquid.

“Finish it,” you command, your voice was smooth but still assertive – a deadly combination. He’s almost hypnotized by your cold and striking stare, he only feels compelled to listen. You observe the way his lips shone from the liquid that coated it, the way his throat contracted when he swallowed it down and how he peeked through one of his eyes to get a look at you watching him ingest every last drop and when he’s done he lunges at you. Chase doesn’t miss a beat when his lips meld with yours.

You pull him down and closer by the lapels of his thick coat before you’re kicking at the ends of it with your bare feet trying to help you rid him of it. You momentarily feel all his weight press into you as he nimbly tries to remove the outerwear, his lips never leaving yours. You hear a click at your door and pull away from him to see if someone had entered.

You don’t see any sign of disturbance, but you could’ve sworn you heard something. Chase doesn’t let that distract you as he brings you in by grabbing the back of your neck to reconnect your lips with his. The moment he slips his tongue in to meet with yours you melt. You had to stress this one, but he was a really good kisser. You might’ve met your match as his tongue continued to show dominance against yours.

His drive only fuels you and you’re able to summon enough strength to roll over and get him underneath your body. You place a few kisses on his face and neck, running your hands down his clothed chest before you lift the end of his shirt up to reveal his toned torso and also begin planting kisses there as well.

Your fingers deftly unfasten his belt and pop open the front of his dark jeans. Chase lets out a small sigh in finding relief to the sudden tightness in his clothing. The sound of you slowly dragging down his zipper is loud. It’s only that excruciating because you’re taking your sweet time. You pull apart his pants to get a close look at what you’re going to be dealing with. The outline of his cock just with what you can make out through his boxers is rather impressive. It twitches from your hot breath due to the close proximity.

You shoot him a crooked smile before wrapping a hand around his length. He hisses at the action and tries his best to keep his hips grounded as you continue to stroke him and every now and then give a little squeeze to his heavy balls, the soft vibrations of your nails scratching through the fabric torturing him. Cute. He’s trying to hold back. So, you kick it up a notch by licking a fat strip along the base and ignoring the fabric that sticks to your tongue.

It works because suddenly Chase props himself with one hand behind him and using the other to grab yours, the one that is still gripping at the waistline of his jeans and he stares you down. This is the first time you’re getting a good look at him; at the eyes you couldn’t make out earlier and make a mental note of what color they were. He’s fucking gorgeous. Clouded with lust, you don’t even sense it but it’s almost like you’re under a spell until you feel the tight grip he has on you loosen up and he lies back down allowing you to carry on.

You sit up, between his spread legs and reach around to pull his footwear off. He instinctively lifts his hips up when your fingers sneak their way into the elastic of his boxers. You expertly pull them down along with his jeans before they’re joining the rest of his clothes on the floor.

You reclaim your position back on top, your dress draping over his exposed bottom half as you straddle him. Chase’s hands start bunching up the material to caress the soft skin of your thighs and hips before he’s tugging at it. You help him and cross your arms to pull the material over your head and leave you in your undergarments.

Chase runs his tongue along his lips and sucks in a harsh breath taking in your appearance. You love the way he’s biting his lip when you add pressure into grinding your clothed core onto his bare one; so much you want to see him draw blood. The material of your underwear is so thin, it slides off to the side with each passing grind of your hips that get sloppier and sloppier than the next, it’s now skin on skin contact. You feel the ridges and prominent under vein scrape across your growingly wet pussy along with the way the crown of his engorged cock nudges deliciously against your clit.  

You’re gripping harshly at his shirt; it starts to stretch when you pull it in a downwards motion because the sensation you’ve both created from the constant gyrations causes a rise out of you. You feel Chase grab at the rolled-up material and pull it down your legs. When you’ve discarded of it, he takes over reigns this time and kicks your legs apart to make room for him.

The unseen and unspoken tension between you two was enough foreplay in itself. There’s no hesitation when he slips right into you. It’s a smooth entrance from how wet you from the grinding and the cum that managed to escape prematurely from him. There’s an abundance of euphoria that the each of you emote from the ragged breathing, provocative moans to the sting of your skin slapping. 

You think this isn’t anything more than pure want, but with a snap of his hips, you feel another strange feeling blow right through you. It was like the one you felt at the party, only a little more intense, but you didn’t even have time to mull over it when he finds the right spot in you. He hits it repeatedly and he’s not missing at all.

Chase sees the spaced-out look on your face, so he starts kissing you again. Your limbs wrap themselves around his body as you tightly cling onto him. Your hands desperately rake themselves on his back, trying to hold on from the immense pleasure he’s brewing in you, but you have a hard time with his pesky shirt still on until you finally manage to pull it over his head and have him fully naked.

His grunts and moans increase in volume when your walls retaliate by clenching around him from the perfect aim of his thrusts. You bring his head up to yours and smoosh your lips together with his. Chase then hooks an arm under one of your legs and hikes that leg up higher for a better angle. It’s so good you let out a string of lewd moans that causes your lips to repeatedly pull away from his. You curse at the insane amount of pleasure that he’s giving you like none of the others have before. You even catch the stupid smug look on his face when your orgasm washes over you. You grip tightly a handful of his cheeks, your hips lifting off the bed as they press against his to leave absolutely no space in between and in the process effectively allowing him to completely bottom out. You wanted to feel every inch of him when it happened.

He places a hand next to your head to help his stance, it’s a shaky one because he’s just about ready to bust. The tempo Chase sets, so relentless, had caused your breasts to bounce out of the confines of your bra.

“Fuck, I’m gonna cum,” he warns shamelessly. The way your breasts swayed, the harsh intake of each breath evident from the sight of your stomach tightening and untightening, your legs quivering around him and the fact that you were still riding through the aftershocks of your release, your walls were helplessly fluttering around him – just watching you wrecked with the satisfaction he brought on should’ve done it for him right then and there.

“Then cum,” you dare at him, your lips brushing his with each word that comes out next, “inside me…do it.” And like a snap of your fingers, you feel Chase spill deep inside you. You open your eyes wide enough and see something unusual when you look at him. A ring of fire flashes in his eyes very briefly before he closes them from the exhilaration. Each pump of cum that shoots out of him is followed by the accompanied throb that causes the head of his cock to poke at your sweet spot again, and in doing so initiates a small tidal wave of pleasure to crash right through you again.

Once he regained some composure and control of his breathing, his eyes reopen and they’re back to normal. Guess you were just seeing stars, or fire, in him. You carefully cup at his face with both hands and absentmindedly trace along at his boyish features; from the brow line of his eyebrows to the tip of his nose. He’s a fucking work of art. A lethargic smile splays out across his mouth and you return the display of affection with a smile of your own and giving him a kiss, which he immediately reciprocates to; no tongue or fervor in it, just of sweet contentment.  

While it was good, more than good, you’re too sensitive, you’re not sure if you have enough in you for a second go. Careful to not elicit another round, you wiggle your hips a bit with him still inside in hopes to get him to move off of you.

Chase slowly and cautiously pulls out, and you feel the trickle of his cum leaking out of you. He inwardly praises at the filthy sight of it all before settling next to you. As you’re about to drift off into sleep, your mind starts turning. Something about Chase made you feel strange. There was a different aura about him, and it was evoking a certain emotion from you.

A/N: This is me holding back on smut. This series is going to be quick because as mentioned, it’s The Covenant just with a reader and her own agenda caught in the crossfire...and an excuse for me to write Chase Collins smut, so if you're craving some of that then stick around! 

[comrade-meow]

This past week, screenshots of a private chat between well-known YouTube Marxist The Finnish Boleshevik, and a 16 year old girl emerged, in which FinBol describes in graphic detail his grotesque fantasy of raping this underage young woman. 

There is a common thread among these YouTube “Marxists” who have a love for sexual deviance and degeneracy like Jason Unruhe, Matt Florence, Pierre Tru-dank, et all: they are LARPers. For those unfamiliar with the term, LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. It’s basically Dungeons and Dragons in real life with foam swords, but it can also be applied to a certain type of bad praxis; i.e. talking a lot and doing little. 

Given the fractured state of the revolutionary left in the United States (to the extent that a revolutionary left actually exists), and in many cases, the western world in general, it should come as no surprise there has been a proliferation of “Marxist” LARPers; self-proclaimed leftists who (literally) wave the red flag, and make numerous YouTube videos about how Stalin did nothing wrong, but are unable to engage in any meaningful way with workers in their own real world community. For “Marxists” like the aforementioned, Marxism is not a guide to action, but a means to gain an identity (and be an edgelord).

Other types of LARPers should be familiar to those who have spent any time on the left: Third Worldists like the Red Guards who publish incomprehensible screeds on how first world workers are parasites; Trots who show up at every vaguely progressive event selling newspapers; keyboard cult leaders with authoritarian fantasies who are obsessed with demanding ideological purity and absolute obedience; that one guy who goes everyone with a print-out portrait of Bashar Al-Assad pinned to his shirt, handing out fliers on why we need to “defend” the Taliban; third world petite-bourgeois students who love queer theory and chose kissing the ass of western academia over working with revolutionary movements in their home countries. I could go on. 

Because of the modern capitalist state’s extraordinary means and ability to coerce, co-opt, and outright repress any nascent revolutionary movement, we are all to some degree LARPers. This is as much a self-criticism as it is a criticism. It is difficult, if not impossible, to envision a socialist revolution in the west, let alone in the United States, without some kind of major outside support. 

But this is not an excuse to do nothing, and wallow in nihilism and cynicism. Any amount of education and engagement will help further our goals in the long run, even if immediate tangible results are minimal or non-existent. The following are some guidelines to help avoid the pitfalls of LARPing. Most of these are developed based on my own firsthand experiences and investigations, and should in no way be considered comprehensive or definitive.

As the great African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral said, “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” There is a tendency to get over-excited when discussing revolutionary theory and practice, and often it falls into the camp of romanticism. Building a viable revolutionary socialist party is hard work, and will not happen overnight. Potential comrades need to know from the start that victory is neither easy nor imminent; treating it as if it is will only attract flakes. Similarly, success must not be treated as a substitute for victory. For example, Socialist Alternative continued to trumpet Kshama Sawant’s election to the Seattle city council as a major victory for socialism in the US, even though in the big picture, it meant very little, and the restraints of using bourgeois institutions as anything other than a bully pulpit emerged quickly. Instead of using her election to illustrate these points, they chose the easy way out of treating a small success as a major victory. To their credit, they have made progress in moving in the opposite direction; the SAlt website home page contains not a single article about Sawant.

Drop the fixation on political correctness and crude identity politics. Sorry, but “queer liberation” is not the future, and attacking workers for using words like “faggot” isn’t going to win you points. Political correctness is a product and tool of the ruling class. The overwhelming majority of workers don’t have time to worry about if their language meets the standards of blue-haired campus activists. This is not to suggest that misogyny, homophobia, racism, and other reactionary behaviors should be ignored, but behaviors are different from words, and battles need to be picked carefully. Tone policing the single mother janitor who works all night for minimum wage isn’t going to win you a comrade, but it may win you a kick in the ass.

The Beatles may have been reactionary bourgeois popstars, but they were right when they said “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow”. Look at the Communist Party of Great Britain-Marxist-Leninist; all they do is show up at rallies with giant Stalin portraits and banners. Save the Stalin and Mao for the initiated. Most people don’t care about the Moscow Trials or the Cultural Revolution. They care about making ends meet. By all means, once they’ve been won over to revolutionary socialism, break out the Little Red Book, but until then, engage with them on their terms, not your terms. When picking material for new recruits, go for the accessible and succinct; for example, Mandel’s An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory over the unabridged edition of Capital, or even short video lectures by David Harvey or Richard Wolff. Material that people can engage with when they have a few minutes of free time. There’s a reason reformist organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America are growing while more theoretically robust Marxist-Leninist organizations are ossified and stagnating.

Have a sense of humor. Few things are more alienating than being overly serious and gloomy. There’s a tendency among many leftists to look down on humor, and some of that ties in with the fixation on political correctness. Humor isn’t politically correct; it’s often crude and offensive, but it is an excellent way to present complex ideas in a way that is accessible and engaging (I can’t keep emphasizing the need to be engaging enough, it’s the foundation of both recruiting and keeping cadre).

Center women. And by women, I mean humans of the female sex (it’s sad that needs to be said). Women are not just oppressed, but straight up exploited, and they bear the brunt of capitalism in a very thorough way. Many leftist organizations remain male dominated, using women as tokens, or as gophers. Denounce pornography and prostitution, and exercise vigilance against sexual harassment; transgressors should be dealt with firmly and swiftly. Since most women are mothers, and perform more labor outside their “official” jobs, there needs to be child care at events so that mothers who don’t have the means to arrange it themselves aren’t shut out from political activity.

Read as much material as possible. Having good practice requires good theory, and reading Wikipedia pages isn’t enough. And don’t limit yourself to just reading Marxist texts, read bourgeois theorists, too. Mao was an expert on all of the major classics of Chinese literature and philosophy; he was able to attack reactionary traditionalism in such a thorough and pointed manner, because he had researched what it was he was attacking. And remember Marx studied under Hegel, who considered the Prussian Catholic absolute monarchy as the ideal form of state. If this sounds like a defense of the well-rounded classical education, that’s because it is.

As I’ve already said, the above suggestions are not meant to be comprehensive or definitive, nor are they listed in any particular order. The main purpose of this piece is to be a conversation starter. If we have any hope of building a socialist future, we need to get serious about how we approach our own practice.

Originally published at longestmarch.blogspot.com on April 12, 2018.

[sataniccapitalist]

As we watched the dangerous scenes of protesters interacting with riot police and the ransacking of banks and businesses in cities across the United States this past weekend, a warning from the 19th century abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, came to mind:

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

The protests last week and this past weekend were sparked by unspeakable cellphone videos of a Minneapolis policeman, Derek Chauvin, torturing and murdering George Floyd with his knee crushing his throat for almost nine minutes as Floyd lay handcuffed and pinned face down on the ground by Chauvin and three other police officers. Only Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder and manslaughter. The three other police accomplices have not been charged – adding more fuel to the outrage and protests across the country.

Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, spoke on CNN on Saturday night, saying that Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s throat was like he was a hunted animal. In fact, Chauvin seemed to be exuding bravado in the video with his hand placed confidently in his pocket in the moments before Floyd became lifeless. Tragically, it reminded us of trophy photos we have seen of hunters and their dead prey.

Floyd’s death comes on the heels of what some members of the black community are calling a string of extrajudicial killings of African Americans by police.

Chelsea Peterson, a white protester in Portland, Oregon on Friday night, told CNN she wanted to “show my solidarity with my black brothers and sisters.” Peterson added: “It was important for me as a white person to actually show up because it is our responsibility to dismantle the systems of oppression that we have created.”

Two of those systems of oppression are the Wall Street mega banks and the Federal Reserve, which have institutionalized enforced inequality in the United States, particularly in minority communities.

Let’s start with Citigroup, one of the largest Wall Street banks and a serial predator. On July 20, 2001, Gail Kubiniec, a former assistant manager at a Citigroup affiliate, CitiFinancial, testified to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the predatory lending habits of the firm. Kubiniec stated:

“Employees would receive quarterly incentives, called ‘Rocopoly Money,’ based on how many present borrowers they ‘renewed’ (refinanced) into new loans…Typically, employees would only state the total monthly payment amount in selling a proposed loan. Additional information, such as the interest rate, and the financed points and fees, closing costs, and ‘add-ons’ like credit insurance, were only disclosed when demanded by the borrower…When quoting the monthly payment, I frequently quoted the payment with coverages already included, telling the consumer only that it was ‘fully protected.’ This was a common practice used by employees at CitiFinancial…The pressure to sell coverages came from CitiFinancial’s Regional and District Managers. Each branch had monthly credit insurance sales goals to meet…If these goals were not met, the District Manager would call and put pressure on the Branch Manager to get the branch up to par.”

Kubiniec testified that this is how Citigroup determined its prey: “I and other employees would often determine how much insurance could be sold to a borrower based on the borrower’s occupation, race, age, and education level. If someone appeared uneducated, inarticulate, was a minority, or was particularly old or young, I would try to include all the coverages CitiFinancial offered. The more gullible the consumer appeared, the more coverages I would try to include in the loan…”

The black community is particularly unattuned to the ways of Wall Street because Wall Street, for the past four decades, has systematically refused to hire and train black people as financial advisors. In 2008 we wrote the following:

“Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or the last plantation in America, has defied courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for decades in its failure to hire blacks as stockbrokers. Now it’s marshalling its money machine to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. Why isn’t the press curious about this?

“Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you’ll see a self-portrait of upper management’s racism and sexism: women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy offices occupied by predominantly white males. According to the EEOC, as well as the recent racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between 1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of stockbrokers – this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.”

Having a black man in the Oval Office and a black man in the U.S. Attorney General’s office (Eric Holder) when Obama was President helped to mollify the outrage and anger as black communities across America saw their wealth evaporate in the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010 – an era of corruption on Wall Street that has had no precedent since the late 1920s.

Instead of putting the serial predators at Citigroup in jail and letting the bank fail when it became insolvent in 2008, the Federal Reserve secretly made $2.5 trillion cumulatively in revolving loans to Citigroup, at below-market interest rates (some at less than ½ of one percent interest) for two and one-half years. And despite the Justice Department receiving multiple referrals for potential criminal prosecutions of Citigroup executives from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Obama’s Justice Department did not prosecute one Citi executive for their crimes before and during the financial crisis. And that was despite having a clear road map of corruption provided by internal whistleblowers, Richard Bowen and Sherry Hunt.

While Citi was getting this $2.5 trillion in super cheap loans from the Fed, it continued to charge high double-digit interest rates to struggling consumers on their credit cards and foreclosed on the homes of thousands of minorities who had been thrown out of work because of Citigroup and other Wall Street banks’ corruption. To keep its foreclosures out of the press, Citigroup used an alias.

Proving that the Trump administration is not an aberration in Swamp Building, the Obama administration allowed a Citigroup executive to hand pick key staff and cabinet positions, according to leaked emails. Citigroup was receiving the largest bank bailout in U.S. history at the time. No one involved in those emails has denied their veracity. See here and here.

In addition to the $2.5 trillion in revolving loans that Citigroup received secretly from the Fed (the loans were revealed in 2011 by a government audit), Citigroup also received $45 billion directly from the taxpayer under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). How does that compare to TARP money that went to help distressed homeowners that were jobless because Wall Street had collapsed the economy?

In 2017 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study showing that the government had only disbursed $22.6 billion to help distressed homeowners. That compares to $16.1 trillion in revolving loans that a GAO audit revealed that the Fed had funneled to Wall Street banks and their foreign counterparts from December 2007 through July 21, 2010. (See page 131 of the GAO audit.)

In April 2017, when Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered an analysis of how Wall Street banks had conspired against wealth building by blacks, she was censored by major business media, including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, the New York Times, Reuters, the Financial Times and CNBC.

Warren’s analysis came at a symposium hosted by Howard University, a predominantly black university. Warren told her audience that communities of color had been specifically targeted for wealth stripping by Wall Street through devious means in the leadup to the financial crash of 2008. She said this was preceded by a U.S. government conspiracy against them from 1934 to 1968.

Warren, who sits on the Senate Banking committee and is the most knowledgeable member of Congress when it comes to Wall Street, revealed that within two years of the onset of the financial crash of 2008, 8.8 million American workers had lost their jobs and within three years more than 4 million homes had been lost to foreclosure. “The financial crisis wiped out as much as $14 trillion in household wealth,” Warren told the crowd. But the losses were not evenly distributed. Warren explained:

“Before the crisis, big financial institutions specifically targeted communities of color with mortgages that were full of tricks and traps, stripping wealth from families and their communities. And when the financial crisis came, those same communities of color got hit a second time with some neighborhoods nearly destroyed by the concentration of foreclosures.”

As for the federal government’s conspiracy from 1934 to 1968, Warren explained:

“There is a long and shameful history in this country of discrimination against African Americans when they try to buy homes. From 1934 to 1968, the Federal Housing Administration led the charge. In a largely segregated America, FHA actively discriminated against black families by refusing to insure mortgages for qualified borrowers in communities of color, while helping white families finance their plans to achieve the American dream.

“Its policy wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t the product of a handful of racist government officials. Nope. It was the official policy of the United States government until 1968. That’s in my lifetime. And because the Federal government had set the standard, private lenders enthusiastically followed Washington’s lead.”

Warren also cited a study in the Boston Globe which found that “the median net worth of white families in Boston is $247,000” while the median net worth for a black family “is $8.00.” That’s not a typo. Warren said “That’s something that all Americans, regardless of race, should be ashamed of.”

What is the Fed doing today to level the playing field? Absolutely nothing. In fact, it’s doubling down on its 2008 bailout policies to broaden the wealth disparities in America. The Fed is making repo loans (repurchase agreement) to the trading houses of Wall Street at 1/10th of one percent. It is making its Primary Dealer Credit Facility loans to the same trading houses at ¼ of one percent. Some of those trading houses are owned by the biggest Wall Street banks that are still charging an average of 16.01 percent on their credit cards to struggling Americans.

One of the protesters in Los Angeles on Friday night carried a handmade sign that read: “White Silence Is Compliance.” To that we would add that silence by mainstream media on what the Fed and Wall Street banks are doing today must become part of the national conversation.

[obsessedwiththebatman]

Joel T. Schumacher

(August 29, 1939 – June 22, 2020) was an American filmmaker. Schumacher rose to fame after directing three hit films: St. Elmo's Fire (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), and Flatliners (1990). He later went on to direct the John Grisham adaptations The Client (1994) and A Time to Kill (1996). His films Falling Down (1993) and 8mm (1999) competed for Palme d'Or and Golden Bear, respectively.

Director of films, including: The Incredible Shrinking Woman, 1981; D.C. Cab, 1983; St. Elmo's Fire, 1985; The Lost Boys, 1987; Cousins, 1989; Flatliners, 1990; Dying Young, 1991; Falling Down, 1993; The Client, 1994; Batman Forever, 1995; A Time to Kill, 1996; Batman & Robin, 1997; 8 mm, 1999; Flawless, 1999; Mauvaises Frequentations, 1999; Tigerland, 2000; Bad Company, 2002; Phone Booth, 2003; Veronica Guerin, 2003; Phantom of the Opera, 2004. Director of television movies, including: The Virginia Hill Story, 1974; Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill, 1979.

Awards:

National Association of Theater Owners (NATO) ShoWest Director of the Year Award, 1997; NATO ShowEast Award for Excellence in Filmmaking, 1999.

Sidelights

After more than three decades in the film industry, Joel Schumacher has earned a reputation as one of the most respected and well–liked mainstream

Joel Schumacher

filmmakers around. Schumacher's films are glossy; he delights moviegoers with his staggering sense of style. Movie companies love Schumacher as well because he completes his films on time and on budget. Over the years, the costume designer–turned–director has generated a long list of credits to his name, including the 1985 hit St. Elmo's Fire, which helped launch the careers of the "brat pack" kids, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Emilio Estevez. His biggest blockbuster was 1995's Batman Forever, starring Val Kilmer in the feature role and Jim Carrey as his nemesis, The Riddler. That movie grossed $184 million at the box office. For Schumacher, it is a dream come true. "I'm very lucky to be here," he told Jim Schembri of the Age. "I have a career beyond my wildest dreams. I've wanted to make movies since I was seven. I have my health, I conquered drugs and alcohol.… I've survived an awful lot."

Schumacher was born on August 29, 1939, in New York, New York, and grew up an only child in the working–class neighborhood of Long Island City in Queens, New York. Speaking to the New York Times 's Bernard Weinraub, Schumacher referred to himself as an "American mongrel." Said Schumacher: "My mother was a Jew from Sweden; my father was a Baptist from Knoxville, Tennessee."

When Schumacher was four, his father died. To make ends meet, his mother went to work selling dresses. She worked six days a week and also some nights. "She was a wonderful woman, but, in a sense, I lost my mother when I lost my father," Schumacher told Newsweek 's Mark Miller. By the time he was eight, the unsupervised Schumacher was on the street taking care of and entertaining himself. He found comfort reading Batman comics and spent long afternoons in darkened movie theaters watching Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant on the big screen. "Those were my two biggest obsessions before I discovered alcohol, cigarettes, and sex," Schumacher told Miller. "Then my obsessions changed a little bit. I started drinking when I was nine. I started sex when I was eleven. I started drugs in my early teens. And I left home the summer I turned 16. I went right into the beautiful–people fast lane in New York at the speed of sound. I've made every mistake in the book."

As a child, Schumacher also dabbled in entertainment. He built his own puppet theater and performed at parties. To help his mother make money, he also delivered meat for a local butcher. Walking the streets, Schumacher became interested in window displays and volunteered to dress the store windows in his neighborhood.

After he left home at 16, Schumacher lied about his age and landed a job at Macy's selling gloves in the menswear department. From there, he became a window dresser for Macy's, as well as Lord & Taylor and Saks. Later, Schumacher worked as a window dresser at Henri Bendel's and earned a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He also attended that city's Fashion Institute of Technology. Next, he worked as a fashion designer and helped manage a trendy boutique called Paraphernalia, long associated with Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. In time, Schumacher found work with Revlon, designing packaging.

With a keen eye for style, Schumacher became a big star in the fashion world, but sunk lower into drugs. He favored speed, acid, and heroin. Schumacher refered to this period of his life—the 1960s—as his "vampire" years, according to Newsweek 's Miller. He stayed inside all day, covering his windows with blankets. He only went out at night. One day in 1970, something snapped, and Schumacher quit the hard–core drugs. "I guess it was the survivor in me," he told Weinraub in the New York Times. "I just knew I had to stop." He did, however, continue drinking, a problem that plagued him for two more decades.

In 1971, Schumacher relocated to Los Angeles, California, and got his foot in the film industry door when he landed a trial job as a costume designer for Play It As It Lays, which was released in 1972. From there, he picked up jobs as a costume designer for movies like Woody Allen's Sleeper and Blume in Love, both released in 1973. Through these movies, Schumacher made contacts and landed his first directing job for the 1974 NBC–TV drama The Virginia Hill Story. He also began writing screenplays, including 1976's Car Wash, and the 1978 musical, The Wiz. Finally, in 1981, he got his first shot at filmmaking, directing Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Reviewers frequently commented on the atypical color scheme he chose for this film.

One of Schumacher's early successes was a 1983 film about a metropolitan cab company run by a group of misfits. Called D.C. Cab, the film featured Mr. T. Other early hits included 1985's St. Elmo's Fire, and 1987's The Lost Boys. The latter film, a vampire flick, helped launch the careers of Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, and Kiefer Sutherland; it was a hit with the teen audience. He followed up with the 1990 thriller Flatliners, and the psychological drama Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas, in 1993.

By the early 1990s, Schumacher was coming into his own. Legendary author John Grisham asked Schumacher to adapt his best–selling legal thriller, The Client, for the big screen. Schumacher cast Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon in lead roles in the film that told the story of a street–savvy kid in danger because he had information about a mob killing. The movie, released in 1994, was well–received and Sarandon received an Oscar nomination for best actress.

Next, Schumacher earned directorial rights to Batman Forever, released in 1995. The first two installments of the series were directed by Tim Burton, but were thought to be too dark and serious. Schumacher was charged with brightening the series. Val Kilmer replaced Michael Keaton as Batman, and Jim Carrey joined the cast as The Riddler. Under Schumacher's direction, the movie became the blockbuster of the summer, raking in $184 million. Batman & Robin followed in 1997 but was terribly unsuccessful, putting an end to the Batman series.

Over the years, Schumacher has become known for his perceptive ability to cast unknown actors and turn them into hotshots. His films have given rise to the careers of the "brat packers," as well as Matthew McConaughey, cast in Schumacher's 1996 adaptation of another Grisham novel, A Time to Kill. Schumacher also "discovered" Irish actor Colin Farrell, giving him the lead in the 2000 Vietnam drama Tigerland, which proved to be Farrell's breakthrough performance. Schumacher later cast Farrell in his 2003 suspense thriller Phone Booth, which was shot in an amazing 12 days.

Another actor who gained prominence under Schumacher is comedian Chris Rock, who starred in 2002's Bad Company. Like many actors, Rock enjoyed working with Schumacher and was amazed by Schumacher's ability to handle the whole operation of movie–making. As Rock told Film Journal International 's Harry Haun: "Joel is like a general, like Patton or something. He really knows how to whip up the troops. Doing a big movie is a lot of directing. It's coordinating a whole town. It's like being a mayor, and he's totally up to the task—of being a general and making it artistic."

What makes Schumacher stand apart from other directors is his eye for style. Characters in his films appear polished and classy, yet sexy. According to Haun, a Movieline article by Michael Fleming once proclaimed, "Why Don't People Look in Other Movies Like They Look in Joel Schumacher Movies?" For that, Schumacher credits his childhood spent in movie theaters where he inhaled a steady diet of films with stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Cary Grant, and Marilyn Monroe. As Schumacher explained to Haun, "You went to the movies and saw—Grace Kelly—these staggering images on the screen, so I think my early film influences are these archetypes—Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper. It's very much how I see film."

With about 20 films under his belt, Schumacher has had nearly every kind of review possible but says, for the most part, that he ignores them. Speaking with Film Journal International 's David Noh, Schumacher said he does not read reviews. "Woody Allen taught me a long time ago, 'Don't read them. If you believe the good, you'll believe the bad.' When they think you're a genius it's an exaggeration also, so somewhere between genius and scum is the reality of life."

After his foray into the blockbuster, high–budget world of the Batman series, Schumacher pulled back from big–name titles and returned to making grittier, chancier films. In 2003, he branched out into true crime, directing the film Veronica Guerin, which starred Cate Blanchett as the Irish journalist of the title. Guerin was killed by a heroin kingpin in 1996, who was angered by her investigative reporting. Schumacher made the movie in Ireland on a budget of $14 million—whereas $70 million is the average cost for a studio film. Once again, Schumacher was like a general. He kept everyone focused, shooting at 93 locations in 50 days.

The film won praise for its straightforward approach to the topic. Schumacher refused to glorify Guerin post–mortem, a trap many directors fall into. Speaking to the Age 's Schembri, Schumacher spoke about true stories this way: "You want to be sure that you're approaching the subject matter with integrity and not just trying to glorify the person, but trying to be honest with the facts, even if it upsets some people." Schumacher has also tried his hand at producing a musical. His film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical masterpiece The Phantom of the Opera, was set for release in 2004.

Schumacher is also openly gay but refuses to get into discussions about how his sexuality affects him in the movie business. "It never was an issue," he told Film Journal International 's Noh, noting he does not believe in labels. "I think we're all villains and victims, as long as we live in a culture which keeps defining people as African–American lesbian judge, gay congressman, Jewish vice–presidential candidate, etc. You would never say that Bill Clinton was a Caucasian heterosexual WASP president, you just say he's Bill Clinton. That means the only norm is white WASP male, because everyone else must be defined. I'm totally against that."

Despite his success, Schumacher has no plans to rest on his laurels. Though he is considered a veteran filmmaker by many, Schumacher still sees himself as a student. As he told the Guardian 's Peter Curran: "I hope I haven't made my best one yet, I'm still trying to learn on the job. So I keep stretching and hopefully I keep making better and better films.

[punkrockpolitix]

Strap in for an Ugly Ride

by Mitch Maley — This week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden did the most Joe Biden thing left to do in announcing that centrist NeoLiberal Senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate. The establishment left swooned and suburban liberals rejoiced, while the lunatic right clutched their collective pearls at such a “radical” choice. Meanwhile, the rest of us yawned as the stage was set for an absurd, bizarro world, alternative-reality election that will take place in the midst of the most unstable American society in modern history.

The chaos created by the 45th President of the United States has a way of wearing the reasonable mind rather thin. After all, who aside from the angry mobs of nativists does not long for a return to the normalcy of the early aughts when all we had to worry about was forever wars in the Middle East, an infinitely-expanding wealth gap, 50 million Americans without healthcare, and trade policies that had hollowed out the middle class. Sure, the children of white collar elites would continue to thrive (so long as they could avoid pill mills and heroin needles). Meanwhile, the offspring of former factory workers who couldn't afford an increasingly cost-prohibitive college education would toil in Amazon warehouses with few benefits and no shot at the kind of modest defined-benefit pensions that had allowed their parents to enjoy some modicum of prosperity in their twilight years and increasingly gloomier chances of even enjoying the social security payments that have kept millions more from abject poverty once their working days were behind them, but that was certainly a little easier to swallow than 2020 has thus far been.

Sure, automation had already begun eating away at more jobs than even offshoring had, we'd done nothing to address the climate crisis beyond symbolic, feel-good policies that avoided pissing off the wrong special interests, and the only amber waves of economic growth in the past 30 years had been driven by engineered bubbles. So what? Wall Street was happy (the stock market tripled under Obama) even if the big party was being floated by artificially-cheap credit, and besides, we could all go to sleep each night relatively certain that we wouldn't face a zombie apocalypse type situation on any given morning which is more than you can say about our current situation.

But let's not forget where things had gotten by 2016 when populist spasms on both sides of the ideological spectrum saw our traditional two party-driven political process totally upended. Harnessing the power of the internet had been largely responsible for President Obama successfully splintering the Democratic establishment in 2008, but let's not over-romanticize the grass or the roots. Obama was the product of an inter-party schism that saw a large number of career Dems break from the Clinton dynasty and its requirement for complete fealty to the party's grudge-bearing first family.

Obama was not an anomaly. He was Wall Street approved, Bilderberg-blessed and mainstream media anointed because, regardless of what others projected upon him, he was a typical center-right Dem who wouldn't rock any of those boats. Yes, the right labeled him a dangerously-radical liberal, but those who paid attention in the 2008 primary will recall that the actual semi-progressive candidate, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, had to be actively cropped out of the debates in order for that narrative to take hold. After all, it wouldn't do to have Kucinich onstage talking about Medicare for All and explaining how to get out of Iraq tomorrow any more than it would do for Ron Paul to be onstage in Republican debates calling out the NeoCon likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Under Obama, the war machine kept rolling, taxes remained at historic lows, deportations skyrocketed and we expanded warrantless surveillance and other Big Brother police state tactics, including sending "surplus" tanks and other military armament to your local police forces. In other words, most of the things liberals hated most about the Bush era continued only they didn't hate them as much anymore. That said, institutional norms remained in place, our allies were quite happy and Americans, or at least those who weren't driven mad by the thought of someone with brown skin holding the highest public office, could hold their heads high knowing that they had an intelligent and articulate statesman at the helm who wouldn't embarrass them with Bush's tangled English or Clinton's infidelities. He was a family man who loved his wife and children and treated even his most vile-mouthed opponents with the courtesies of polite society. Yes, it's easy to grow nostalgic for such normalcy in the age of Trump.

However, years of bailing out Wall Street banksters who'd crashed the economy, allowing hedge fund managers to pay lower tax rates than teachers and failed companies to hand out huge bonuses often paid for by the taxpayers themselves took its toll. Millions of Americans who'd seen their homes foreclosed upon were scolded for buying into the worthless products being pushed by those same banksters—reverse mortgages, sub-prime interest-only loans, etc.—and lectured about "personal responsibility" and the "moral hazard" of bailing them out, even as those same fat cats who'd been rescued themselves swooped in to buy up all of those empty houses for cheaply-borrowed pennies on the dollars in order to make money hand over fist renting them back to the creditless schmoes who'd been kicked to the curb. It turns out a lot of people were fed up.

Enter Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump, two men, as different as can be, who nonetheless each managed to harness enough of the sometimes dangerous power of populist anger to finally upset the apple cart that had been two-party politics. While their platforms were radically different, the essential nature of their messaging was the same: you're getting screwed and have been for a long time. Their message was particularly well-received by working-class whites in formerly industrial states who'd been ignored by both parties for decades, beyond rhetoric from the right about it being the fault of illegal immigrants and rhetoric from the left about educational programs that would retrain the working class for the jobs of tomorrow. Regardless of whether they believed in or even understood the solutions either candidate was offering didn't matter so much as someone at last acknowledging that the reality they'd been experiencing actually existed.

The Clinton machine, with the DNC's foot on the scale and the MSM distorting perception, was able to (barely) keep Sanders at bay. Meanwhile, the GOP may have been able to do the same had it not been for the sheer giddiness of legacy media outlets like WAPO, the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN for what they saw as the death of the modern Republican party should it actually nominate a crass, foul-mouthed blowhard of a third-rate reality TV star (who'd until recently been a Democrat) for President. Make no mistake, Clinton's people desperately wanted to take on Trump, believing it amounted to not only an easy win, but a path toward retaking Congress, despite having been gerrymandered out of contention (for those of you who came to politics late, the GOP's electoral success in 2010, saw them take over a majority of state legislatures just ahead of the once-every-decade reapportionment that follows a census, allowing the party to gerrymander Congressional districts to such a degree that Democrats could not gain ground, despite regularly receiving millions more total Congressional votes than Republicans each cycle).

Everyone inside the beltway was caught sleeping in 2016. The Republican establishment never saw Trump coming and didn't know what to do with him when he arrived. Remember how sad Jeb Bush seemed in the debates? Remember how ineffective Marco Rubio was when he tried to sink to Trump's name calling? By the same token, the Democrats were so tone-deaf as to who Bernie was appealing to (far more aging New Dealers and working-class labor Democrats than the teen radicals they imagined) that they actually thought making trans-bathroom laws a wedge issue would drive turnout for their side. Imagine living in Michigan and working the counter at a Dollar General because the stamping factory you used to work at moved to Mexico, wondering whether your kid's rehab from Oxycodone would finally stick this time while being told that the real fight to be won was about where the gender fluid would take a leak.

That's not to say that trans rights aren't a worthy issue, so much as to point out how out of touch you would have had to have been to think it was a winning one in that moment of time. And if you think there was something more altruistic behind it, ask yourself how much energy has been expanded by the party on the same subject since. Like abortion-related ballot referendums used by Republicans to drive evangelicals to the polls, out-of-touch Beltway Dems thought that identity politics was the path to uniting the left-wing of their party and getting the Bernie crowd to turnout for Hillary, even after the DNC got caught smoothing her path to victory. After all, the donor class Dems never mind looking woke, especially if it prevents them from having to get behind things like a living minimum wage that might actually mean less coins falling into their coffers. And that my friends is what created the relatively small yet curious "I voted for Bernie in the primary and Trump in the general" demographic, not sexism, spite or misogyny.

Fast-forward to 2020 and Bernie is finally poised to emerge as the resistance candidate. Despite the MSM again selling alternative facts that kept explaining away his success, his path to the nomination looked inevitable until the Democratic establishment again intervened, this time with Obama in the role of Clintonesque king maker, convincing moderate establishment favorites Pete Buttiegeg and Amy Klobuchar to take one for the team ahead of Super Tuesday so that a path could be cleared for a sputtering Biden campaign to claim the nomination. For his part, Biden's 40-year record is as right of center as a Democrat can be without going full Joe Lieberman, so the remaining question was how not to repeat 2016 in alienating so much of the left-wing as to ensure Trump another four years.

Then, like a gift from the political gods, Trump began shooting himself in the foot so frequently in his responses to the pandemic and civil unrest that his approval rating—which has never even hit 50 percent even once during his presidency (not surprising considering he won the White House with a smaller share of the vote than either Romney or John Kerry managed in losing)—sunk to a pathetic 35 percent, convincing the NeoLiberal bosses that it was no longer necessary to kiss any rings on the far left. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and even Tulsi Gabbard and AOC had already bent a knee to Uncle Joe, imploring their supporters to vote blue no matter who, so why not instead go after the moderate Republicans and Bush-era Never Trumpers whose ideology make the Democratic donor class feel much more comfortable than the progressive left’s anyway?

Enter Kamala Harris, who, to the Democratic donor class at least, signals nothing less than a female Barack Obama. And they’re not exactly wrong in that she’s a highly-articulate, ideologically-flexible politician capable of putting a friendly, progressive veneer on the modern NeoLiberal platform. That’s probably why the left-leaning corporate media outlets tried so hard to give her a push in the primary, even though voters simply didn’t find her to be a compelling candidate. Despite a healthy fundraising machine and the focused attention of MSNBC and CNN, Harris didn’t even make it to Iowa, dropping out ahead of what surely would have been a bottom tier finish in her home state of California. In that sense, it’s hard to see what she brings to the ticket in terms of electoral success. Fortunately, she won’t have to deliver her home state, but while much has been made of the fact that she’s the first woman of color to be on a major party ticket, it’s worth noting that there’s little to suggest she’ll help turn out the African American vote as most polls had her fourth of fifth even among black voters, who preferred Biden, Warren and even Sanders over the Senator from California.

As long as we’re on the subject of Harris’s race, however, it’s worth noting that the we're-not-racist right immediately went down the rabbit hole with birther conspiracies disgustingly-similar to those used against Obama that, within moments of the announcement, were used to question her eligibility to ascend to the presidency and fear monger that it was all a plan to install Nancy Pelosi when an aging Biden stepped down soon after being elected. Harris was born in the United States and, furthermore, born to two U.S. citizens. Her eligibility shouldn’t be in question to anyone who’s taken a junior high civics class, yet from what we’ve seen already, I’m sure it won’t be long until someone asks to see her birth certificate.

That said, despite the RNC's painting Harris as the most radical choice possible, her politics are no more progressive than Biden's, as evidenced by the two articles in the Wall Street Journal about Wall Street “breathing a sigh of relief” at her selection. In fact, one of the audition rounds for the veepstakes included hosting a Biden fundraiser and insiders have suggested that it was deep-pocketed Obama donors and not Uncle Joe himself who put her over the top. In Harris, the NeoLiberal establishment has all but cordoned off the progressive wing of the party, perhaps for a decade to come. Like Obama, she allows them to market a progressive package to make affluent suburban liberals feel good without making Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, or the military industrial complex the least bit nervous. In fact, in a communication to investors, Goldman Sachs essentially said that even if it means the Trump tax cuts go away, the stability and predictability of a Biden administration would be at least as good for the 1 percent's bottom line.

To hear the Trump campaign tell it, however, Biden's selection of Harris is nothing less than a signal that, in his cognitive decline, Sleepy Joe has acquiesced to becoming nothing more than a puppet for far left radicals like Bernie, AOC and the rest of The Squad. In their narrative, if elected, he’d be doing the bidding of Antifa, while doing away with everything from God and religion to guns and even the suburbs, and the dangerously radical Harris is only further proof of that. In one of their weirdest turns yet, the Trump campaign is literally showing clips of what America has become under Trump himself and warning that this is what will happen if Biden is elected and only by reelecting the man that brought it to you in the first place and has failed to end it by uniting the country (or even trying) can you stop our present from becoming our future. When taken literally, it is a message that says the world I brought you is the world my opponent will bring you and the only way you can stop that from happening is by keeping the guy who brought it to you! If that doesn't make sense, congratulations, you're not an imbecile.

However, if you buy the narrative that the radical left has taken over the Democratic Party then I'm sorry to report that such may not be the case. Biden-Harris is literally the most Law & Order ticket I can imagine either party fielding. It’s the guy who brought us the Crime Bill, supported the private prison industrial complex and paved a smooth road for Clarence Thomas paired with the AG who wanted to jail young single mothers whose kids missed too much school, blocked access to DNA evidence of the wrongfully convicted, supported marijuana criminalization and pretty much accumulated the least progressive record any prosecutor could ever hope for. 

So no, Harris's pick wasn't to appease the progressive left. It was a middle finger to them, just like the initial convention lineup which didn't even feature AOC or Andrew Yang, the two stars of that set. Meanwhile, NeoCon warmonger John “life starts at the first heartbeat” Kasich is in primetime, along with Jeb Bush acolyte Anna Navarro. AOC finally got space for a 60-second pre-recorded (read vetted) afternoon spot, and the Yang Gang was able to kick and scream until their candidate was given a low-billing slot as well. In other words, if you don’t see that the progressive left is not only not running the show at the DNC but is all but powerless in the party’s politics, you’re simply not paying attention.

Why are NeoLiberals more interested in Bush-era Republicans than the media rock stars on the left who seemingly hold the future votes of the party in their hands? Simple, there's less of a difference in platforms, which means unlike working with the left, they don't really have to give anything up to court NeoCons. That’s because the age of Trump has seen those Republicans give up on social issues they never actually cared that much about from gay marriage to abortion in exchange for a seat at the table on the issues they do—things like energy policy, deregulation, aggressive foreign policy and, above all, jockeying their snoots into the trough of money that the winning team gets to eat from.

Excited because a Black Lives Matter protester is going to Congress? Slow down, Ace, as the hallowed halls are also about to get their first QAnon member. We've reached peak lunacy under Trump, this much is true, but the wheel has spun back to same old song and dance, remixed for 2020. The American empire is falling apart and one side is offering four more years of the lunatic king, while the other is betting that such a thought will scare voters enough to accept the same brand of politics that brought us that President in the first place. All that remains to be seen in whether Dems finally got the calculus correct. Are progressives so infuriated by life under Trump that they'll vote blue no matter who, or have they picked off enough white suburban Republican women for it not to even matter? We'll find out, though likely not until weeks after November 2, assuming we aren't fighting each other in the streets by then.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.