#document custody services

[avinashsharma12]

The Crucial Role of Documents Safety Services in Information Protection

In this fast-growing legal age, documentation and data hold a significant role, words that are legalized can be decisive and defining. Safeguarding these documents is crucial and for the same purpose, there are document custody services that provide high-security storage and management of physical documents.

[so-i-did-this-thing]

FLORIDA TRANS PALS, IT IS TIME TO PLAN

Especially if you are on HRT!

HB1421 is a bill that severely affects access to gender affirming care, including for adults. It outlines goals to:

1) Prohibit changing gender markers on birth certificates

2) Require that gender affirming care only come from physicians (not nurse practioners) who take on liability insurance for 30 YEARS after they provide care to a patient

3) Require informed consent forms at every single appointment, including distributing literature to dissuade patients

4) Ban transition care completely for minors

5) Make it so providers who accept state funds cannot provide gender affirming services (this is the big one that stands to affect anyone who takes medicare/aid, is a university, etc.).

6) Make it so providers who accept state funds cannot reimburse for gender affirming services.

We are facing a return to the Harry Benjamin days, or worse, an effective ban unless you are fortunate/wealthy enough to find a willing provider.

If it passes, this bill would take effect July 1, 2023. That is not a lot of time.

I would not count on any Rx or refill request to be honored after this date if the prescribing and dispensing sources no longer are allowed to grant care or decide to drop care because of the penalties.

July 1, 2023. Unless we hear otherwise, that is your clock.

This sucks, but there is comfort in seeing a clear date to plan around and the worst case is no longer completely unknown. It begins July 1.

--------------------------------------------

YOUR HOMEWORK, DUE ASAP:

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1) Get any and all your HRT appointments in now, including picking up your meds and doing bloodwork promptly.

2) If you think you will be living in FL come July, start looking now for providers where physicians - not NPs - provide the care. Get an appointment on the books for July. Be prepared to go in person for everything after July 1, because I believe telemed will also be shit-canned. Here is a map of informed consent providers.

3) If you are an old like me, also dig up your HRT permission slip from your therapist. Fuck, make a packet of all your transition documents, including Rx history.

4) If you are on private insurance, start budgeting now to prepare to pay out of pocket.

5) Create a simple spreadsheet of all your HRT dates (pls forgive, my experience is with shots on a 2 week cycle, so this is pretty easy for me to do) and plan out how long your current supply will last. Then, forecast how long all your upcoming refills before July 1 will last. Update it every time you pick up and take your meds. Refer to it for decisions like moving or finding backup providers.

6) Subscribe to the bill to get notified of changes asap

7) Follow this site to keep tabs on other very scary bills happening in Florida, including a bathroom ban and a child custody bill that is effectively kidnapping

8) If you need to change your birth certificate, do it now, pay the rush fees and write RUSH on the envelope. The Department of Health has the most up-to-date forms. Processing time for rush I last saw was around 18 business days.

9) Now that your own oxygen mask is on, so they say, boost mutual aid and recruit allies to assist in any way possible.

-----

Do try to continue seeing your current provider as long as possible, as they likely will need your support. Talk to them frankly about their plans if the bill passes.

Now. I am just a little guy and not a legal expert, but the aggressive enactment date on this bill makes me feel like everyone should plan now instead of waiting to see if it passes.

Be safe, plan, and then get a little rest. Do not lose hope - this bill could still fail.

[satellitebroadcast]

Israel has killed 1,151 workers in Gaza’s healthcare system since October 2023, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Among the dead are 260 nurses, 184 health associates, 165 physicians, and 76 pharmacists, along with hundreds of management and support staff. While most of the victims’ names have been confirmed by health authorities, over 150 confirmations are still pending due to Israel’s refusal to release the martyrs’ bodies. In addition to those killed, hundreds of health workers remain imprisoned, where they face abuse and torture, as documented by international organizations. Ziad Muhammad Al-Dalu, a physician from Al-Shifa Hospital, was among those who died in Israeli custody, as reported by the Ministry of Health. His death serves as yet another example of Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza’s healthcare workers and infrastructure, actions that violate international humanitarian law. The ongoing attacks on healthcare have left tens of thousands of people with life-altering injuries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 25% of those injured between October 2023 and July 2024 have suffered burns, severe limb injuries, or amputations, with no access to rehabilitation services. Dozens of physiotherapists were killed in the attacks, and inpatient rehabilitation services have been shut down for months. “Even the most essential assistive devices, like wheelchairs and crutches, are lacking due to the restricted flow of aid,” the WHO said. Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid continues to choke Gaza’s healthcare system. At the moment, one of the most urgent problems is the shortage of soap and detergents. With the cost of a small bar of soap reaching USD 10—a price that could buy approximately 2 kilograms of soap in Germany—many families in Gaza are unable to afford basic hygiene supplies. “A family relying on cash-for-work income would spend 60% of the unskilled income on consumable hygiene products,” warned organizations monitoring water and sanitation in Gaza. With soap being an omnipresent product, it might be difficult to imagine how severe the effects of a shortage might be, particularly for children. Health and hygiene officials estimate that adequate access to soap in the Gaza Strip could reduce respiratory infections by 20% and diarrheal diseases by up to 40%. This would potentially prevent illness in at least one in three children currently suffering from diarrhea. However, humanitarian organizations estimate that delivering the 5 million soap bars needed each month to meet demand in Gaza is basically impossible under the existing restrictions. Despite this situation, Gaza recently completed the first phase of its polio vaccination campaign, with an 87% coverage rate among children—just below the 90% benchmark. The campaign is set to resume in the coming weeks, but incidents of Israeli forces obstructing access to those taking part in it persist, jeopardizing future public health efforts. As winter approaches, the need for essential medicines, hygiene supplies, and nutritious food in Gaza becomes even more urgent. Concerns about potential floods and worsening living conditions highlight once again the critical need for an immediate ceasefire and rebuilding of the health system.

[feminist-space]

"Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate.

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs.

Many common foods and medications — from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines — can prompt erroneous results.

The morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor — she didn’t even like taking Advil. “You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances — for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job — she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.

But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.

...

To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country.

Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.

Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women.

After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show. In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation. And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show. It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care.

Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds — which come from the same plant used to make heroin — are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests.

Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results."

Read the full piece here: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/09/09/drug-test-pregnancy-pennsylvania-california

[strawberrystepmom]

to forgive is divine & to err is human

pairing: Natsuo Todoroki x F!Reader (romantic), Touya Todoroki x F!Reader (familial)

word count: 7.5k

about: when Touya is released to Natsuo’s care following his 8 year prison stay, the fragility of the dynamic between the three of you threatens to derail everyone involved.

contents: cw: contains descriptions of depression, trauma, smoking, bad coping mechanisms, alcoholism, Touya dyes his hair black in a white sink (ugh). angst with a happy ending, set in canon universe but not canon compliant, established relationship between Natsuo and reader (married), Touya and reader are both assholes at certain points.

notes: tbh I've been meaning to repost this and since I'm currently in my "yes girl give us nothing" era, the time has come. Thank you to everyone (then and now) that has read this baby bc I did indeed put my ol' Kendussy into it so I didn't really change anything about it other than fixing grammar and I'm sure there are still mistakes. This is is how I wrote a year ago and that's okay and I'm proud of how far I've come.

Posting this as a double feature bc it feels too idk self promo-y to split them up again so enjoy my creature feature with my beloved Natsuo and his stinky brother. chain divider thanks to @/cafekitsune ♡

The large, red letters across the paperwork make your eyes hurt by simply gazing at them. 

“RELEASED” stamped with what you can tell was a mostly dried out ink pad, the red darker at the beginning of the word than at the end. You wish you could close the growing pit in your stomach knowing Natsuo will soon arrive back to your home, rehabilitated brother in tow, but the uncertainty makes it hard to settle as you re-stack the documents given to you by the Hero Public Safety Commission when they formally announced they would permit Touya’s release so long as someone would be responsible for him.

When the conversation came up, Natsuo volunteered without a second thought. It hurt at first that he did not ask you before making the decision but after having spent nearly a decade at his side, you trusted his judgment. Six months after the initial inquiry, you still do. Touya is a practical stranger, someone you have only met through grainy video chats, but you have been briefed by many HPSC coordinators. They have conducted home visits, interviewed both of you as if you were the criminals, combed through every bank account and piece of mail to ensure that they are putting their inmate into good hands. A good word from Endeavor, something your husband reluctantly accepted, sealed the decision. Your eyes scan over the handwritten letter from Enji, tucked in the stack of documents. 

“No one is more qualified to care for his brother Touya than my son Natsuo. He is a licensed medical professional, specializing in psychology and mental health services and has experience in dealing with traumatized children. I ask that the Commission consider no other placement for Touya.”

A tired sigh escapes as you flip through a few more pages, squinting through descriptions of you and Natsuo. Your personalities, your hobbies, where you work, who you associate with - all vital information, the panel assured you. The final page of the documents has the official ruling, the top left corner of the page curled in from how many times the pair of you have read over it.

“Todoroki Touya, thirty two years of age, is to be released to the custody of his brother Todoroki Natsuo, twenty eight years of age. Todoroki will be required to wear a location monitoring device at all times per the agreed upon terms of release. He is not permitted to be in contact with any of his prior associates. If contact is initiated, he will be required to return to the custody of the HPSC immediately and will no longer be eligible for release.”

Your eyes scan the document again and again, searching for some kind of strange loophole that could prevent all of this from happening. Guilt crawls up your spine and makes you shudder at the thought. How could you not want this for your husband? He has spent years dreaming of having a second chance to love his brother differently, to help him heal. It makes you feel vile to even entertain negative thoughts about Touya. 

Touya. You know little about the man aside from his name, or names, rather. His time as Dabi concluded, he was sentenced to 8 years of rehabilitation instead of prison. A victim of child abuse needed recovery, the commission reasoned, and they were willing to give him the space to do so within reason. The entire Todoroki family agreed with and supported the commission and their decision, his siblings and parents being granted permission to visit him if they chose to do so. 

Natsuo went as frequently as possible, excitedly telling you how much his brother has improved after every visit, eagerness infectious. You listened to his every word, rapt, as he talked about how different Touya looked now that he was eating well, how far he had come, how he seemed emotionally stable for the first time in his life. Genuine excitement danced in his eyes at the thought of having his brother back, not a shell of a boy or a man. Not Dabi but Touya, someone who was cruelly taken from him when he was too young to fully understand why. 

The true agony was seeing the metaphorical stitches ripped open, cruelly and callously. The entire country was witness to the explosive truth - Touya Todoroki was alive. Even Fuyumi with her limitless poise gnawed her lower lip hoping it would ground her enough that she could stay strong for everyone else. “I can handle this,” she assured you as you wrapped your arms around her shoulders the day after the video aired. She knew the person who would need you the most was her brother. Looks were deceiving - Natsuo was big and strong, a grown man, but his feelings were delicate. She trusted no one but you to look after him.

Natsuo had only asked you to be his girlfriend weeks before his brother revealed his true identity publicly. You will never forget the way grief was etched into all of his features, his strong brow downturned for weeks; retraumatized. It took every ounce of strength in his body to muster a smile, much less anything else, but he did it. For Fuyumi and Shouto, for his mother. 

You can remember every moment of the years following Touya revealing himself. The nights when Natsuo woke up sobbing, burying his face into your chest and balling the fabric of your shirt up between his fists as if it would keep him from losing touch with reality completely. He stopped eating for days at a time, depression sinking him into depths he didn’t know existed. You were always there with a soothing touch and okayu, a rice porridge Fuyumi taught you to make for him. 

“When Touya died, it’s all he would eat,” she explained. Your heart crumbled at the thought of a 13 year old version of your beloved future sister in law having to keep her 9 year old brother moving through the pain of loss. How did they keep themselves together?, you wondered more than once as she breezed through the difficult times with a tight smile. 

The more you watched the man you love sink, the more conflicted you felt about Touya. Those feelings lingered even into today. Natsuo is healing, therapy and love and compassion all coming together to create a whole man instead of pieces of a hurt child in a big body, but you can’t help the simmering anger you feel when you think about watching him experience the hurt in real time. Some memories stay etched forever. 

Natsuo continued to live despite the difficult times. You helped him study and make his way through medical school - a feat that he often credited you wholly for. It wasn’t true but the praise always feels good. Three years after Touya was sentenced, Natsuo opened his clinic that offers a variety of therapeutic services for children with difficult quirks or those who have suffered because of them. A year after that the two of you were married. 

“I knew you were the one when you gave me a reason to keep trying,” he tearfully admitted as you exchanged vows during your small wedding ceremony. The details weren’t for everyone else to know, but the pair of you knew exactly what he was talking about and the admission still makes you feel weepy if you start to think about it for too long.

Love feels like too shallow of a word to explain how you feel about him which is why you agreed to this in the first place - your love for Natsuo is stronger than your distaste toward Touya. You remind yourself of the mantra as you hear voices outside of your front doorstep, one immediately recognizable as belonging to Natsuo. You stand and take a deep breath, composing yourself and closing the file folder on the table as the door opens and the two white haired men crowd into the small genkan, talking amongst each other. 

“We’re here!”

A practiced, measured smile is what you can manage as you watch the situation carefully. Touya scratches the back of his head and offers a small and impersonal wave and you’re surprised by how different he looks. Thin but healthy, his skin grafts have been properly secured, his lashes are the same white as the ones that frame your husband's kind, gray eyes. The similarities between the two are striking but so are the differences - Natsuo greets you with a smile and a peck on your forehead and Touya glowers from the doorway. 

“Welcome home, Touya,”

He looks around, eyes narrowed as he takes in the sights of your well lived in home. It reminded you eerily of the way the representatives from the commission sullied your safe place away slowly, searching every corner to make sure you would not enable any more bad behavior from the man standing in the doorway. Your home had only just begun to feel like yours again.

“Nice place. Guess that’s what being married to a doctor gets you.”

His crass comment made you feel stricken, flinching slightly as your practiced smile wavers. You aren’t Fuyumi, full of endless grace and forgiveness - you can’t fake it. You aren’t Natsuo who believes in the potential of people more than anyone you’ve ever met. You are you and right now you are angry. Clenching your fists in a way you hope is imperceptible, you fake a laugh and your husband looks at you with wide eyes, noticing your change in demeanor.

“Well, it’s your place too now. Guess that’s what being a doctor's brother gets you.”

Touya purses his lips and nods, arms folded across his chest. You look over his scars, his healed skin, his cold eyes. “Do you want to show him to his room, babe?” Natsuo asks, voice shaky, as if he’s anxious for your response. “I can find it myself,” Touya answers for you, heavy boots in his hands as he pads through your home toward where his room lies. You spent weeks helping Natsuo prepare it for him, filling it with photos and books to help him gain back the time he lost while he was away. The taste in your mouth is nothing short of bitter and sour as you think about it.

“I don’t know what that was about, I asked him no-,” you raise your hand, cutting your husband off mid sentence as your fake smile finally falls and gives way to a slight frown, corners of your mouth downturned. “Don’t worry about it.” 

Touya has always felt suspicious of you. Your intentions, your affections for his brother, your involvement with his family - it’s hard not to be uncertain about someone who fits so flawlessly in the dysfunctional outline created by being a Todoroki. What are you hiding? What do you want? 

He tosses his boots down on the floor of the room at the end of the hallway. Instinctually, he knows this is his space. Covered with childhood photos of the Todoroki family, a quilt he received as a child covering the bed, he wants to be impressed with the effort put in but instead he feels hollow. This life never fit him in the first place, happy smiles for photos and dinners and whatever the fuck was expected of him, and now he had no choice but to live it. 

It is a hell of a lot nicer than the four white walls that housed him for eight long years. The bed looks a lot more comfortable, he thinks as he settles down on the edge of it, lying back with his arms behind his head. Fixing his gaze on the ceiling, he takes a moment to think in the silence of the space. The entire car ride his brother talked about you and your life together. Touya eventually began to tune him out, watching the trees pass by the window with the occasional red light flashing on his monitoring anklet catching his attention.

Rehabilitated. The connotations of the word weighed heavily on Touya - one fuck up and it would be so easy for you to convice Natsuo to send him back. You could never understand him the way that his family does. You couldn’t forgive him the way they had either, something both of you would never communicate to each other. 

“Hey,” Natsuo’s voice rasps from the doorway and Touya sits up slightly, grunting his response. “You like it alright?”

“It’s fine.” 

Natsuo sighs, carefully entering the room and shutting the door behind him as he slumps down on the bed next to his brother, shoulders sagging beneath the weight of the huge change that has come over his otherwise peaceful life. “You don’t have to lie, Touya.”

Touya sits up, using his elbows to support his weight, and offers a half smile toward his brother. “I’m not lyin’, it’s fine. Just feels like too much.”

Natsuo nods, trying to tamp down his urge to play therapist instead of brother. It was something he did all too often growing up and probably why he has made fixing people his mission in life. Touya was no exception.

“It’s the least we can do. You’ve been through a lot.”

We, Touya thinks to himself. Always we. He wonders how much Natsuo has surrendered of himself for your sake. Does he have any hobbies besides being a doting husband? Is his world filled with anything besides this little bubble the two of you live in?

“Don’t act like she had anything to do with all of this, Natsu. I was released to you.”

Touya slips a hand in his jacket pocket and fishes around for his pack of cigarettes, popping one out of the packaging with expert precision and sticking it between his lips as his brother sits next to him silently. “Lemme guess, need to do this outside?” 

Natsuo nods and Touya sighs, sliding off of the bed and leaving a rumpled quilt behind him. Heavy footsteps trail down the hallway as he peers into the kitchen and notices the backdoor, quietly slipping through it only to be met with a glowing red cherry on the other side, smoke streaming from your mouth as you stand with a cigarette between your fingers.

“Didn’t take you for the type,” he starts, pulling his lighter from his pocket and clicking it until a bright flame catches the cigarette dangling from between his lips. Once upon a time he would’ve just used his quirk but the prescription blockers he was given by court order prevented that. “All he ever talks about is how perfect you are.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” you shoot back, flicking your cigarette ashes onto the ground below before taking another drag. 

The mutual distrust permeated the air between the two of you. Touya reminded you so much of your father in law it was like looking at another version of him. You reminded Touya of everything he hated about this world - false pretense and unattainable perfection. He doubts you have ever walked around without a hair out of place, a Todoroki would never.

“Any other deep dark secrets I should know before being trapped inside of this house with you 24 hours a day?”

You chuckle, dropping your cigarette on the ground and stomping it out, bending to pick up the butt once you’re done. 

“Your brother won't let me drink anymore,” you start, hoping the vulnerability warms your brother in law. His steely gaze convinces you otherwise and you begin to walk away, arms folded over your chest with a cigarette butt in your fist. “Just another fun part of the aftermath of your little warpath.”

Touya knows he fired the first shots but he’s taken aback at your accusatory tone. 

“Anything else you want to question me about? Figured the commission briefed you on all of my dirty laundry.”

He shakes his head and exhales smoke through the corner of his mouth, the plumes drifting in your direction. “Good chat, Touya.”

The back door slams as you enter your home through it, windows rattling slightly. Your first instinct is to pour a drink but the reminder of your rock bottom lingers on your mind as you instead toss your cigarette in the trash and turn down the hall and head to your bedroom, Natsuo sitting on the bed.

“Why does he hate me so much?”

You hate how hysterical your voice sounds, anxiety rising like bile. Rising to his feet, your husband gathers you against his chest and presses a kiss to the top of your head. 

“Give him time, he’ll warm up.”

You don’t share your husband’s boundless optimism as you hear the back door slam and hear footsteps heading to the bedroom opposite yours. Natsuo plants another soft kiss atop your hair and squeezes your hand gently as he walks back over to Touya’s room. 

“You alright?” Natsuo asks and Touya rolls his eyes, shrugging off his jacket and draping it across a hook on the back of the door. “Fine. Thanks for the concern.”

Natsuo slips through the door completely and closes it softly behind him, leaning against the solid wood.

“What happened out there?” 

Touya chuckles and shrugs, sitting on the bed in the same place he had left. “Nothing worth mentioning. I’ll make sure I keep my bottles hidden from her though.”

His eyes widened, Touya’s antagonistic tone nothing new, his shock coming from the fact you told him about your struggles with substance abuse in the first place. It wasn’t a secret but it certainly wasn’t a fun fact you gave out at trivia night. 

“Uh, yeah, thank you.” Natsuo fumbles through his words, unsure of the right thing to say. “That would be great. She has come a long way but there are still times that are difficult, especially when big changes occur.”

Your substance abuse issues began about a year after your marriage. Blissful happiness wasn’t enough to numb the intense pain of the years prior but copious amounts of whiskey while Natsuo was busy with work were good enough. Blind confidence convinced you he didn’t notice a thing, not your sunken eyes or decreased appetite, but he did and he confronted you as gently as he could.

The next day you started therapy of your own and have continued to go to meetings for others struggling with addiction since then. Nothing drastic has happened in your life since you quit drinking, calm falling over the Todoroki household, making it easier for you to maintain your wits.

He would never say it but Natsuo truly worried about your sobriety. Every time he left for a trip or wine was passed around at family dinner, he wondered if it would be the day you changed your mind. Sticking with you was easy, though. You did the same for him at his low point and he would never stop doing it for you.

“She smokes, you know that?”

Natsuo nods, Touya’s raspy voice breaking the silence caused by his brother’s overthinking. “Have to let her have one vice, you know?” 

“I think you forget that you weren’t the only person who had to live through that fucking horrifying life! It didn’t just go away when you did.”

Your voice cracks as you raise it at your brother in law, his turquoise eyes wide as he watches you yell with an intensity that leaves your hands shaking. He has never looked more like your husband than he does now, the same white hair sticking up on top of his head, his fingers carding through it and yanking the strands as he paces your living room floor. 

“There are times I don’t think you realize that your actions have always had consequences because you’ve truly faced so few of them,” you feel your face flame as Touya’s expression turns from surprised to angry. “You didn’t have to clean up the messes. I did.”

Seeing the similarities makes something inside of you crack, a piece of your heart perhaps, your chest heaving. Regret consumes your mind; you’ve gone too far. You struggle to catch your breath, rubbing your fingers over your cheeks to hide evidence of your tears. Silence blankets the room like a dense fog.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Your voice sounds meek and thin even to your own ears, the screaming match you have been engaged in rendering your throat raw. Painfully, you swallow what little spit you can and shut your eyes tightly as you listen to Touya’s rhythmic footfalls. Taking a deep breath, you sink into an armchair and dab at your eyes with the back of your hands, opening them long enough to see Touya staring intently at you. You drop your hands and sigh. 

“I can’t imagine what you have been through,” you hiccup, warm tears sliding down your cheek and dripping onto your wrists where they sit in your lap. “But you weren’t the only one going through it and I hope your brother can forgive me for saying all of this to you.”

The white haired man remains silent as you rise from your chair, hands balled into fists at your sides. Your gaze turns directly to him and you sniffle, tears subsiding. 

“He has always loved you despite everything you’ve done, exactly as you are. Please remember that.”

The words feel cathartic to say aloud, astute eyes narrowing to watch you as you turn on your heel and begin to walk away. Your tense posture tells him exactly how you feel about the entire situation and you reason that giving Touya space seems like the best option to end the strange battle of wills the two of you have found yourselves in. 

The gravelly sound of Touya’s voice from over your shoulder stops you in your tracks. 

“Then I owe it to him to try.”

There is no apology to be found in the words but you swear you can feel it as he says them, looking over your shoulder. For the first time you don’t see Dabi or Touya, you see someone completely new - your brother in law. A blank canvas, someone you could perhaps get to know under better circumstances. 

“We both owe it to him,” you respond as you turn around and make your way back to the chair you were sitting in moments ago, sitting stiffly against the back of the chair, shoulders still held tensely by your ears. “But how do we begin?”

Touya sighs and sits opposite you, rubbing his hands over his face as he rests his elbows on his knees.

“Hi, I’m Touya.” You laugh for the first time in a week and he can’t hide the half smile that comes across his face. “I did some fucked up things and spent eight years paying for them but I fucking love my family.” He stomps his foot, emphasizing his point. “That includes you now so we better get our shit together, yeah?”

Another tear falls as you nod, a watery smile settling over your features.

“Yeah, we should.”

A year later, when you think of your brother in law Touya, a memory from your childhood comes to your mind.

You are six, maybe seven and at the zoo. Your parents hold both of your hands dutifully to make sure you don’t run off, squeezing your tiny palms between theirs as you excitedly gasp and croon at birds, snakes, and butterflies. A flamingo makes you shout, a duck makes you quack.

Steps slow down as the three of you approach a large glass enclosure. “Black panther - panthera pardus” says the sign extending from the ground in front of the glass. You don’t know that, of course, until your dad reads it aloud to you, asking you to repeat the name.

“Panthera,” you repeat, a tiny voice bouncing back at you off of the glass.

As if you summoned the cat itself, it appears and you flinch. Black, lithe, wild eyed with muscles wound so tightly you can see the shape and size of each of them. You wonder if the panther knows how to relax, the same way your mom tells you to when you cry too hard. Maybe he needs to take a deep breath. 

“Why does he look so nervous?” 

In your young mind, the question surfaced before you had time to think about it. Of course he’s nervous, you reason, all of these people are staring at him like the attraction that he is. A dazzling thing to see locked between four glass walls. 

“He isn’t nervous honey, he’s probably just thinking about what he would do if he were outside with us.”

Pondering your mom's polite whisper, you nod and accept the answer. Grown ups always know best anyway. 

As a keeper enters the enclosure and carefully stalks toward the cat, your eyes widen in surprise. How can he let someone so close? You wonder if you could ever get that close to him. To see the sunlight in his fur just enough to reveal the spots under the dark of his coat or to watch his ears twitch as he listens for sounds of danger. Would he ever trust you? Could you trust him?

The crowd around the glass increases in size, delighted whoops as the keeper dangles the cleaned carcass of a large bird above the panther. You drink in the way he crouches and springs, tight muscles unwinding for a moment as large paws capture the food between them. 

A sight you’ll never forget.

A sight you see as Touya stalks through the living room of your home, tightly running his fingers through his hair. Muscles taut, standing and walking but trying to simultaneously fold in on himself.

“What the fuck would they even want to talk about?”

You sigh, shrugging at his words. The “they'' in question is the Commission and one year after his monitored release, he has been asked to return before the panel and answer some questions. Natsuo sits next to you on the floor in front of the chabudai, sorting through the papers sent to him to review ahead of Touya’s scheduled meeting. The three of you only found out about the date today.

“I dunno, Touya,” your husband shoots a bit impatiently toward his brother. “Let me read this and then I’ll tell you.”

Silently, you watch as he scans the documents, flipping them between his fingers. You hear the heavy pounding of Touya’s footsteps across the floor, reverberating through the otherwise silent room. Your house is too quiet. There is no crowd to filter out the silence.

“Potential restoration of privileges,” you hear Natsuo mutter from beside you. He continues to read to himself and you wonder what that truly entails. Would Touya be released from his supervised period completely? Would he be allowed to wander more than 50 feet away from his guardians? 

“God Natsu, read faster.”

Natsuo’s eyes shoot a frosty glance toward Touya from over the top of the papers in his hands. Placing them on the table, your husband sighs.

“They want to see your progress and maybe give you a little more freedom.”

Touya freezes in place for a mere second before turning on his heel and rushing to the edge of the table to snatch the documents and look over them, brows furrowed in concern that this is some evil trick the two of you have decided to pull on him. Revenge for the last twelve months of him and his fits, his angry words, his snarling. 

You’ve realized during the months he’s more meow than he is hiss.

“But,” Natsuo starts, clearing his throat, Touya tossing the papers back on the table and interrupting his brother with a clear as day “fuck!”, beginning to pace once again. “We have to give testimony.”

The royal we is something Touya has hated since the day he moved into your home. It always makes him feel as if it’s two against one, no separation between yourself and Natsuo and how you feel about the situation. He assumes if you’re mad at him, his brother is too. If you’re frustrated with Touya drinking the last of your nice matcha, Natsuo must be too. If you’re angry at Touya for dying his hair black in your bathtub and staining the shiny white tiles, Natsuo must be too.

He’s wrong about that, of course, his brother never holding any of his minor blunders against him. You don’t either but it would be tougher to convince Touya to believe that than it would be to build a house by hand, despite the tentative peace that exists between the two of you. You’ve allowed him into your home, your world, your once peaceful little family and have found that you are better for it. Natsuo is better for it. But there will always be a level of distrust. 

Like that panther you think of so often, Touya must wonder what it would be like to be free and trusted. 

“Touya, I don’t know how to say this,” Natsuo says, trying to keep his tone even and calm despite how anxious you know he must be feeling. You feel your stomach drop as well, balling the fabric of your linen pants between your palms to keep your hands from shaking. You looked at the date on the documents and noticed that it was a day you knew he’d be unavailable, working on a particularly tough case with multiple children from one family. “I can’t do it.”

Touya chuckles, a bitter and hollow sound that makes you flinch. “Of course not.”

“She can, though.”

Unexpectedly, Touya’s bitter chuckle turns into a belly laugh. You wonder if he’ll double over from the strength of it, scarred hands clutching his middle. Natsuo stands, approaching his brother carefully.

“Her?” He points at you and you feel like the one being questioned. Despite the grasp on the thighs of your pants, your hands do shake and your fingers slip. “She probably wishes I would have died every single day despite the little “play nice” bullshit she does for your sake.”

Gasping at the accusation, you hope he can’t see the way your eyes glance downward. You had assumed the two of you were past this, arguments coming to a halt around six months ago when you told him you simply didn’t have the energy for them anymore. 

You then began taking him to pick up cigarettes every other day, riding in your car together silently but comfortably. His fingers always drum against his thighs impatiently and you clear your throat, mouth dry until you arrive. You have to be close to him the entire time but you linger on the edges of the small shop in your neighborhood, giving the elderly shopkeeper time to fuss over Touya the way he needs. 

The two of you then silently ride back to your home.

“How could you say that, Touya?”

Much like the smaller version of you felt compelled to speak outside of the gleaming panther exhibit, you do the same now. Your voice sounds weak, thin, defeated. Natsuo rushes to your side, kneeling back down and placing one of his large arms around your shoulder.

“Oh here we go, gotta rush to defen -” 

Touya’s words are cut off by a sharp glance from his brother, a look he has never seen before. Smothering all of the fire inside of him, hurting the one person who has endlessly forgiven him, he is doused by humility.

“I don’t hate you,” you look up and see Touya’s turquoise eyes that are narrowed and hard staring directly at you. “I don’t wish you were dead,” you continue as you shrug your husband’s arm off of you and begin to stand. “In fact, I was stupid and thought we were finally fucking past all of this!”

Punctuating your shout with a frustrated grunt, you stomp off down the hallway and leave the brothers to figure it out amongst themselves. Natsuo would simply have to find a way to make the date work for him because you couldn’t bring yourself to beg the Commission to be merciful toward someone who detests you so much. You aren’t a big enough person for that, lacking the careful compassion of your husband.

“Are you fucking serious, Touya?”

Natsuo cursing at his brother makes his steely gaze falter, eyes glancing downward toward the floor. Touya remembers a time you went too far, not long after he first moved into your home, and he feels guilty knowing he has done the same.

“Whatever,” Touya responds dismissively as he stomps off. 

Natsuo hears the back door slam and rubs his hand over his face, eyes fluttering closed for a moment. He’s transported back to 12 long months ago when he didn’t even want to be in the same room as the two of you, the tension making him incapable of dealing with his own uncertainty about the ability to rehabilitate his brother. 

As Touya steps outside into the cool air, far less suffocating than the inside of the house, he fishes around in his pockets for his lighter and mutters obscenities as he realizes it is inside. Of course, he still can’t use his quirk thanks to the very strong suppressants he has to take daily as part of his release, so he flings the door back open and stomps inside. 

Hearing hushed muttering from the living room, he closes the door quietly and creeps to the doorway of the kitchen. He shoves himself against the wall, trying to hide from view as he hears your voice.

“I don’t understand why he won’t give me a chance, Natsu.”

His brother sighs and Touya sinks further against the wall. He knows the sound - fed up, frustrated, struggling. Natsuo is the last person he ever wanted to create those feelings in and shame, a bit of an unfamiliar feeling for him, creeps up his spine and makes his stomach turn. 

“You didn’t exactly make the best first impression, of course he doesn’t completely trust you.”

Natsuo’s words make you blow out air in frustration. Touya can’t see you, but he imagines you look as downtrodden as you always have after these little battles. His brother’s defense of his behavior is surprising, though, and he idly rubs his thumb across one of the graft scars on his hands.

“I know,” you relent with a sniff. “I know.”

Your words shift Touya’s perspective, precious humility trickling over him and making his left eye twitch - a stress reflex he tried to hide for years. 

You were the first person who noticed it and on your usual trip to the small store to pick up his cigarettes after, you passed him a box of anti-inflammatory medication and a bottle of eyedrops wordlessly as you buckled into your seat. He hasn’t twitched since.

Acknowledging the hurt you’ve caused is the first step of atonement, he remembers reading in a book Natsuo brought him while he was still locked up.

He peeks from around the wall, stretching his arms over his head and locking his fingers on the back of his skull, buried in poorly dyed black hair. Natsuo looks up through his light eyelashes at his brother who approaches carefully, settling on the opposite side of the table from where the pair of you sit.

“You can do it.”

The words are simple and cause both you and Natsuo to look up. Touya refuses to meet your puffy eyes and rises back to standing as quickly as he sat, slapping the tabletop once before skulking down the hallway to grab his lighter.

You and Natsuo resolve not to ask questions, with only two weeks until the panel meets time is of the essence and your testimony will be key to helping Touya if you choose to help him. 

Sitting in front of the panel is more nerve-wracking than you expected. A group of five familiar faces all staring at you with discerning eyes as you shuffle the hand-written pages of your testimony between your fingers.

These people have rummaged through your home on more than one occasion, interviewed all of your close friends and family, sifted through every piece of your dirty laundry and you’re at their mercy once again but this time you’re more willing.

“You may begin as you wish, Todoroki-san.”

Nodding respectfully toward the head of the panel, you clear your throat and exhale as you look down at the papers in your hands. You can feel Touya looking at you from across the room, Fuyumi and Shouto seated beside him and Rei on the other side of his sister, but refuse to look up at them for fear it’ll make the little courage you’ve summoned disappear.

“When Touya first moved into our home, I was uncertain of his ability to be rehabilitated.”

You spent the last two weeks reading this exact same speech to Natsuo, rehearsing it in your bedroom while pacing across the floor. The ink on the page is smeared in places from wet tears that dripped down onto the paper, black bleeding into blue and drying into rippled and raised spots. Those spots remind you of Touya, the way he has woven his way into part of your everyday existence. 

“The process of allowing him into our lives felt very invasive. Respectfully, our lives were torn apart in preparation for him. Our home was combed through, our mail was intercepted, my husband was followed by a member of this committee on his way home from the clinic he tirelessly uses as a means to help others on more than one occasion.”

You keep your tone even to avoid sounding accusatory. These are all facts the Commission themselves have confirmed via their own documentation but standing in the face of the very force that can decide your future as well as Touya’s is more intimidating than you expected.

“The day Touya moved in, our lives shifted in a way that no amount of preparation could have made us anticipate. Difficult interpersonal dynamics forced us to take a good hard look at the future of our family and the future of what we desired for Touya. How did we want his rehabilitation to look?”

Taking a breath, you look up from the sheet of paper for a moment to meet Touya’s gaze and it strikes you as odd to see something almost tender. You sniff, nose twitching, vowing to hold yourself together until you’re alone or with Fuyumi or anywhere but sitting in front of people who have made their living off of judging, doling out punishment, changing lives for better or worse.

“While we’ve had many difficult times, I am not here to talk about the difficulty I caused Touya with my inability to coexist for the first several months. Rehabilitation takes a team and I was not a team player,” you pause and hear shuffling from the seats across the room. “Despite this, Touya has dedicated himself to improvement and has continually adhered to every request the commission put forth in the original terms of his release.”

While you don’t want to continue to air out your dirty laundry, there is a therapeutic feeling in knowing you’re publicly admitting to handling things wrong. In front of Natsuo’s family, nonetheless. Touya’s family. Your family. 

At the end of this lies the fact that you are all a family and forgiveness is inherently woven through the relationships and bonds you share.

“It is the recommendation of both my husband and I that Touya’s privileges of release be expanded upon, including reduction of supervision and permission to travel to the homes of his mother and siblings independently if he chooses.”

Rising to your feet, you bow before the panel once more before walking toward the back of the room and quietly exiting as they take time to deliberate and make their decision. 

Touya rises and comes to the front of the room, standing before them. He hates the way he feels, like a caged animal with his muscles tensed, in a suit that doesn’t even belong to him because why the fuck would he ever own a suit? The sleeves are too long, it is Shouto’s after all, and he pulls the cuffs over his hands with his thumbs.

The panel head speaks and the room is so quiet you’re even unnerved from the other side of the door. Pressing your ear to the wood, you listen.

“Our decision will not be immediate. You can expect further communication from the panel in the coming weeks. As of right now, your terms of release remain the same until you are otherwise notified. Thank you for your time today, Todoroki-san.”

Touya bows and joins his family, missing the member he wishes to see the most.

You back away from the door as you hear the knob turn and rest against the wall, arms over your chest as you greet your in-law’s with a subdued smile. 

“Natsu will be so proud of you!” Fuyumi beams, rubbing your bicep in a comforting gesture. You just shrug, unable to speak. You exchange a few additional pleasantries with Shouto and Rei, wishing them goodbye as they leave you and Touya standing on opposite sides of the hallway.

“It’s okay, you know.”

Touya’s voice is a rasp, as always, and you look up through your eyelashes at him. Fiddling uncomfortably with the cuff of your shirt in the same way he’s been fiddling with his own cuffs all day, it just further emphasizes the similarities you share. It isn’t just love for Natsuo you have in common anymore.

“None of this shit has been easy and you’ve done your best. I’m not exactly a fuckin’ easy person to get along with.”

You chuckle, tension diffusing.

“I think you’re going soft, Touya.”

He chuckles back and your eyes meet, the two of you walking toward the center of the hallway to leave the building together and walk back to your car. Your footsteps are quiet and so are his, both of you slumping as you saunter out of the door and into the bright midday sun.

“Nah, just tired of being an asshole all the time.”

The news comes as you stand at your kitchen sink, Touya bent over as you help him rinse black hair dye down the drain. Your hands are wet, his shirt is soaked, but you agreed to help him after noticing a huge white patch still at the back of his head from his attempts to do it himself. 

“I dunno why you want it to be black so bad, don’t you want to look like Natsu?”

Touya snorts and the sound echoes through the steel basin. “I have to keep a little edge. Let me live.” You shut off the clean running water, allowing the dark droplets to work their way out of your sink. There was more rinsing to do but you wanted to be sure of how much more.

“It’s here!” Natsuo shouts from the doorway and you hear his hurried, large footsteps trek into the room, ripping of paper ringing in your ears.

You want to leave Touya’s side and go to Natsuo, to read over his arm, to see for yourself but you resolve to be patient and continue to lightly massage Touya’s scalp. He needs comfort right now, you can tell.

“Expansion of privileges,” Natsuo mutters to himself, scanning the page as quickly as he can. “Unsupervised access to other family homes! Holy shit!” 

Tossing the papers onto the counter, your husband bolts toward you and wraps his arms around your waist. “No, no, no,” you chant as he picks you up and you accidentally pull Touya’s wet strands of hair. He yelps and you let go, hissing apologetically.

“God Natsuo, down boy.”

Your snarky brother-in-law draws a giggle from you as your husband presses a kiss against your cheek and reaches down to slap him on the back. “Do you wanna tell mom or should I?” Touya looks up, head still dripping, and rolls his eyes at his brother. “I could just show up at her house, that’d have more impact.”

Wiggling away from Natsuo, you reach for the towel on the counter and wrap it around Touya’s neck so he can sit up and not drip black water all over your floor. He gives silent thanks in the form of a tight half smile and you smile back, stepping away to let the brothers converse about how they’re going to break the news to their siblings.

As you watch the two of them, the panther and his handler once again come back to your mind. 

The reason that the handler was able to come so close to the cat is because he trusted him. The cat could learn to trust others, to let people in, to let them be on his side. You won’t have to wonder if you could have gained the panther’s trust any longer and he won’t have to wonder what it’s like to be on the outside with the rest of us. 

[padawansuggest]

Bail: Okay, I don’t see why I need to sign these papers, I’m only interim chancellor until a new one can be elected-

Mace: Oh, don’t worry about that. Palpatine made the Jedi Order custody decision a lifetime one.

Bail: …I’m not sure that’s even legal to do temporarily?

Mace: :) yeah, really showing that Sith spirit, huh?

Bail: …is this binding? Do I need to sign these so the Jedi and clones keep getting funds?

Mace: Yes.

Bail: wtf wtf wtf omfg I don’t think I can do that, I can’t morally tie you to the republic for the rest of my life, you all have the right to leave whenever you want, especially after being abused by the last house in power.

Mace: Well, if you rewrote an agreement, in maybe, a few weeks, we could sign a new one. We can fund ourselves indefinitely but we can’t provide service to the galaxy or reparations to the clones without the money we’re owed.

Bail: Okay. Um. *pulls up a file to start outlining what a new agreement should have* Where do you want to start?

Mace: Well, around a hundred years ago, our initiates stopped receiving their stipulations when they got chosen as padawans, and only if they filed the correct documentation with the senate for formally leaving the order. So. That’s a lot of backpay I’d say.

Bail: *nearly breaks his stylus in half* …do you guys want to leave the republic after reparations are made? I’m starting to think that might be your best choice at this point.

Mace: Eh. Maybe. We might want to move to another temple, though.

Bail: *soul deep sigh* This is going to be a long list.

Mace: Sure is.

[edutainer2022]

A little thing riffing off the concept of Scott, probably, getting mistaken for Alan’s father quite often. It turned out sadder than I hoped.

DAD

The loose end of his scarf got tugged lightly and he swiped his hand low to catch baby brother's palm, without shifting attention from the rows of pasta on a stall. Allie had hop-skipped away to the end of the aisle, mumbling something about waffles for dinner, and now probably demanded his immediate input. His hand grasped nothing but thin air. A scarf, however, got another insistent tug.

The scarf was not an eye-wateringly expensive brand-name cashmere that would usually go with his coat and the "Tracy Industries appropriate" look, but was infinitely more precious. Long, blue, hand-knitted and a bit loopholed, it was a gift from Virgil his last Christmas on leave from WAF. It was rediscovered in one of Dad's drawers on the island, apparently a keepsake of the things the GDF returned to the family after Scott himself was lost in That Place. Now it was Scott's keepsake after Dad... A full circle.

Scott peripheral vision detected a movement of blond and skinny far down the aisle, as Allie was, it appeared, reaching up for his waffles. They were in NYC together. Not only the Tracy Industries Board demanded a piece of him for one reason or other, but Tracy Legal and the family private solicitor required tweaks in the custody documentation. Scott took the opportunity to show pre-Christmas NYC to Alan. The boy was only seven when they visited the last time, bar Dad's massive public memorial service Allie barely remembered, wrought with grief. Scott hardly remembered much of it himself through the blur of shock, pain, doubt, and a kind of fatalistic determination. Anyhow, it wasn't a ten years old Alan demanding his attention now. Scott looked down.

A pair of huge grey eyes regarded him from under a gigantic pink bow. A small hand was tugging his scarf again, like a doorbell string. Up from Scott's height the little girl seemed positively tiny. He folded himself down, not to intimidate the child. Even crouching, Scott was still towering over her.

"Hey, sweetheart! Are you lost?"

Attentive eyes regarded him, then a pink clad arm shot out to point at the general expance of the rest of the supermarket.

"Mommy 'der!"

In between Gordy and Allie, Scott was proficient enough in three year old speak. Johnny, it seemed, was communicating at AP English level all the way back at two, or not at all.

The little girl's mom was, obviously, "there" - but nowhere to be seen down the aisle and behind the shelves. Out of a years ingrained habit Scott kept half and eye on Alan, engrossed in comparative analysis of the various boxes of waffle mix. The prudent thing to do wound be to call a store employee - Scott was aware it would send an alarm if he, all of the imposing 6'4, Armani coat and a Young Jeff Tracy face of him, walked away with a little girl. But the nook of the store was empty of anyone in telltale uniform. Huge grey eyes kept regarding him in expectation of some effective Mom-finding action. An idea occurred. Scott bent down some more and made sure to smile.

"Is it okay if I pick you up, sweetie?"

The child gave it a moment's thought and nodded. Scott sprung up easily, the girl securely in his hold, and propped her up on his shoulder. Tiny pink shoes kicked the air (and his ribs a bit) excitedly. There was some enthusiastic waving going on above Scott's head, well above the shelves, and even more delighted squeeing:

"Mommy! Mommy! Look'er! Mommy!"

That produced a young woman with a shopping basket AND Alan, running to him from the opposite side of the isle. He transferred the eager girl into her mother's arms in a fluid motion and reached out without looking again, to stop Allie from colliding with him full force. Alan bounced in place and looked up at him quizzically. Scott put an arm around the boy's shoulders. He saw the mother's eyes widen in surprise, once she was done thanking him for helping out a lost Polly.

"Oh, is he yours? So big already!"

Scott's hand tightened on Alan’s skinny shoulder on instinct. He could see the boy's face shift from curiosity to confusion. And it could be a matter of seconds before confusion gave way to anger or worse - tears.

Scott himself was used to that. He was getting those questions ever since Mom was gone and he had to pick Allie up from nursery after his own classes. Tall for his age, athletic and marred by grief and way too many worries - he was definitely spawning a "teen Dad" rumor among the pick up line Moms and babysitters more than once. He didn't have the energy to explain to anyone not in the know back then, no more than he had the energy to explain their whole situation now.

"Um... Alan is ten. You have a Merry Christmas, Polly! Don't get lost again!"

He could see the math recalculated in an instant behind the young woman's eyes, as she counted silver threads at his temples, stark in supermarket lights, and dark circles under his eyes towards a higher age bracket she thought he was. He wasn't. Dad's explosion in Zero-X and everything that followed added to the silver That Place wove into his hair. And he hadn't been doing much sleeping anymore. He didn't think he ever would again. Before the conversation could lead any further down those lines, he offered another polite smile and steered Alan away toward the exit.

Scott managed to order a hovercab without breaking a stride. The original plan was to walk back to Tracy Tower, maybe look at some Christmas window exhibits. They spent the afternoon gift shopping for everyone back at home and Scott could tell Alan was getting tired. But the boy seemed exited for their special time together, even if part of it was spent in the boring opulence of the family law-firm. Scott promised to cook dinner, not wanting to foster with baby brother his own habit of take-away Tai and more work crunched through the night.

Now, pressed to the window of the cab, small frame leaning away from Scott (a fact that was sending sharp pangs through his chest), Allie was quiet and listless.

"Are you my Dad now?"

Alan was still looking outside the window.

Scott was seriously dreading that conversation, but the incident at the store, apparently, accelerated the inevitable.

He reached a hand to ruffle soft blond hair. Then landed his palm between hunched little shoulderblades. Alan didn't flinch, which was maybe a good sign.

"Allie! Dad is always Dad. But I am your guardian now, and I will do EVERYTHING to protect you! Just as always!"

Small bony shoulders shifted in a sigh. Alan was puffing fog on the glass and drawing shapes with his finger. The hovercab stopped by the entrance to Tracy Tower, but Scott made no move to break the moment and leave just yet.

"Can I call you Dad sometimes? I told Nikky you were my Dad, back in Kansas. Mom didn't come to pick me up, so I didn't want to not have Dad pick me up too, so I told him you were Dad. Is it okay?"

The words came out a bit jumbled and interlaced with pending tears. Huge blue eyes turned to look at Scott finally, anxious and glistening. His own eyes were burning. So was his heart. His very soul.

"Oh, Allie... Of course it's okay! Always!"

His arms opened invitingly and were instantly filled with a crying child. He leaned down to press a kiss on the top of blond head and hug the boy closer, wrapping his coat around a little trembling body. It took a moment to conquer his own heaving sobs, but he still didn't trust his voice at full volume.

"I love you so much, kiddo! I've got you!"

Scott ended up just carrying Alan, quiet by then, but firmly clinging to him, to the penthouse, while a concerned head of security shift helped out with the shopping bags. Allie was probably feigning sleep - Scott didn't care. He toed off his own shoes, shrugged off the coat, settled against his headrest, the child still in his arms, and shifted to tighten his hold. There would be no sleep for him that night either, but that was just as well. He had been watching over little Allie (and little Gordy) since he was born and a tenfold that after they lost Mom. No name or legal capacity could change much about that, till Scott was breathing.

He wasn't anyone's son, though. Not anymore. Not ever. And that made breathing so much harder.

[kirain]

Saw your comment on a post about Sound of Freedom and I came here to say.....shame on you. Shame. On. You. Since when is child trafficking a political issue? Since when is calling pedophilia bad a political issue? If you have a problem with this movie then maybe YOU'RE the problem. No better than the big Disney fat cats who tried to suppress this movie and keep it shelved. Or theaters messing with the ac and saying seats are sold out when they're empty. Shame on you! God's children are not for sale!

I wish people would do a little more research on this topic. If Hollywood and the "powers that be" didn't want this movie being seen, it wouldn't have been released in over 3000 theatres countrywide. It's being shown in major and minor locations all across America and Canada, and the vast majority of those locations aren't having any problems.

Case and point, my own mother and her friend went to see it last week and everything was fine. No issues whatsoever and the seats were packed. The movie isn't being "suppressed". This is all a marketing gimmick from the production company Angel Studios, a Christian streaming service. The movie is jam-packed with lies and only serves to glorify Tim Ballard, the man the movie is based on, and Christianity as a whole. I truly wish this wasn't political, but it is. They made it political.

Tim Ballard has provably exaggerated or fabricated many, if not most of his "rescues", and his organisation, Operation Underground Railroad, has been widely criticised by professional anti-sex trafficking organizations (including other Christian-based ones) for years. He has accumulated millions of dollars for his so-called "non-profit" organisation, and he runs several for profit organisations on the side. Most of this money is presumably pocketed by Ballard and his cohorts, as millions is unaccounted for and only a sliver goes to OUR. It's not about "saving children", it's about money and spreading Ballard's religious ideology.

This is compounded by the fact that Ballard, before he left the CIA, was almost always the last officer to arrive on any scene where child sex trafficking was involved, yet he somehow has hundreds of stories where he's singlehandedly rescued children. In fact, the "true story" the film is based on, where Ballard apparently saved a five year old boy—who, by Ballard's own account, ran up to him, hugged him, and begged to be taken away—didn't even happen. According to court receipts from the arrest and trial of Earl Venton Buchanan (the pedophile in possession of the little boy), Ballard arrived at the scene long after the boy was rescued and taken into custody, and he was barely involved. The documents can easily be found online under the San Diego incident reports.

Ballard was also caught lying about saving one particular girl named Liliana, the literal poster child for OUR. As it turns out, Liliana rescued herself by escaping her captors when she was seventeen and being trafficked in New York. Even more egregious, every time Ballard told her story, he would lower her age to garner more sympathy ... as if her being seventeen wasn't sad enough. In one instance, he claimed she was 14. In another, he claimed she was 11. Ballard also exploited Liliana's story as a reason for needing stricter border patrols and a better wall, despite the fact that she was being abused in America. There is no evidence to suggest OUR had anything to do with her rescue.

Ballard and his "organisation" have even ruined entire legitimate rescue operations in other countries and put children at risk, like in the Dominican Republic, where he endangered the lives of 26 girls by playing vigilante, being followed around by a camera crew, and causing a shootout that effectively traumatised the children he used as a prop to lure in buyers. His response to the mishap and rightful criticism by the Dominican police was basically, "Well ... you win some, you lose some."

The children were released without receiving any therapy or rehabilitative care, and Anne Gallagher, the leading global expert on the international law on human trafficking, said that OUR has an "alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled" and went on to call the work of OUR "arrogant, unethical, and illegal". Those children easily could've been shot and killed. This occurred in 2014, but Ballard still insists that his "rescues" be filmed, and he even pitched it as a reality TV show. His reasoning for this, he says, is to "spread awareness", but we all know it's because he loves the spotlight.

Entire law enforcement agencies have actually cut ties with or even condemned OUR, such as Washington State Law Enforcement, as a result of Ballard's proclivity to conflate child sex trafficking with consensual adult sex work. Ballard and OUR regularly set up sting operations and lambasted the men who showed up for kink play, publicly branding them as pedophiles, even though the men in question were under the impression that they were meeting for sex with consenting, adult women. This led to several lawsuits against OUR, all of which they rightfully lost.

Ballard's means of gathering intelligence is also questionable, as he, by his own admission, sometimes consults psychic mediums for information on missing children and asks where they're being held captive. I genuinely wish I was joking about that.

The main actor in Sound of Freedom, Jim Caviezel, also has ties to the Qanon movement, and Caviezel himself is a hardcore conspiracy theorist. He believes that Donald Trump is "the new Moses" and that "liberals [literally] drink the blood of children". This is ironic, considering Caviezel and Ballard both met Trump several times, yet never pressed him for information regarding Epstein's client list. Moreover, Caviezel and Ballard both donate to the Catholic Church, which funds the largest child sex trafficking ring on the southern border and has a history of rampant sexual abuse of children. Even more insane, Caviezel admitted to watching child porn, to apparently "get in character" for the movie. He claimed that if Ballard had to watch it, it only "made sense" that he'd have to watch it, too. To "motivate" him to fight child trafficking.

...Alright, bud.

Surprise, surprise, both men are also outspokenly anti-LGBTQ+, despite the fact that children/teens in that community are statistically more likely to be trafficked. The majority of child trafficking is not the result of random kidnappings, as the movie would have you believe. The majority of children are actually recruited into sexual exploitation by a family member or friend/boss. The majority of those children are also not generally passed around in Mexico, like this racist, white savior-oriented movie would have you believe, but they actually either stay in or end up in America. America is, in fact, the largest consumer of child porn and child sex slaves this side of the globe (and nearly the largest producer), yet the movie depicts almost every pedophile as Mexican or some other non-white race.

At the end of the movie, Ballard comes on screen and asks people to donate/buy tickets for others, so that the movie can spread awareness. This is why so many seats in certain theatres are empty, despite websites saying the seats are sold out. Whether or not Angel Studios is also shadow purchasing tickets to boost sales can't be proven, obviously, but I wouldn't put it past them. These "conspiracies" have all served to market the movie and boost ticket sales.

As for Disney trying to keep the movie shelved, that's also a lie. Yes, Disney did technically shelve the movie when they bought Fox, since it didn't exactly correspond with its family-friendly brand, but they had no problem with the movie being released under a different studio. The actual reason Sound of Freedom was in "production hell" for five years was because Tim Ballard kept trying to milk donations. Despite the fact that filming wrapped up in 2018, he kept asking for more and more and more. He used people's faith and understandably emotional response to something as wicked as pedophilia to rake in millions. That's what Ballard is really about, money and stardom. In the movie, there's even a post-credit message where Jim Caviezel says the movie was held back to "maximize its distribution and raise awareness about child sex trafficking".

Translation: Ballard greedy.

Ballard himself admitted the accuracy of this movie "isn't important", and that he just wanted to get the movie out to "spread the word". By that, he of course means the Christian word—but why should fighting child sex trafficking be tied to religion? At the end of the day, Sound of Freedom is a vanity project, and it spreads incredibly dangerous misinformation. Stranger still, Ballard left the OUR just prior to the debut of Sound of Freedom, a fact he's neglected to mention in every interview regarding the movie. It's not clear why he left, but it seems that he fled after an internal investigation into the organisation began. That's not too suspicious or anything. My guess is authorities are trying to find out were all that missing money went, and Ballard doesn't want to be there when they figure it out.

By the way, that final line you hit me with; "God's children are not for sale", the line from the movie that Ballard claims a fellow agent whispered to him while on a case, as well as the title of the movie, which another agent supposedly said to Ballard after a giant rescue operation—those were lies, too. No agents ever said that to him. The police reports for those cases, as well as the agents Ballard supposedly quoted, all said he was the last to arrive on the scene and those conversations never happened.

Ballard cannot be trusted and Sound of Freedom is based on a lie. It's a scam. Everything he does is a scam. All he cares about is spreading his ideology, making money, and looking like a superhero. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Look into his other companies, and into the ex-military soldiers and police officers who left OUR because of how poorly trained their people are when it comes to rescue operations.

Every sane person knows pedophilia and human trafficking is wrong, but giving your money to Qanon-adjacent, right-wing leaning, LGBTQ+-hating, Catholic Church-sympathising, fame-chasing, money-hungry, perpetual liar Tim Ballard isn't going to help.

The best way to help out is learning about the signs of child trafficking. Keep an eye out for any children that might be getting abused. If you suspect something, report it, don't be a silent bystander. Volunteer within your community to make sure the children in your area have food and resources, support LGBTQ+ youth, and watch the other adults around you to ensure they're not acting inappropriately. You can also donate to social programs that create safe spaces for children and even apply for jobs that specialise in these fields. Don't go to see a movie just because it aligns with your religious beliefs, feel sad for a little while, then sit on your ass and let Tim Ballard handle everything.

[wisdom-devotee]

Just some things for fellow Americans to keep in mind. Lock down your social media accounts now, and if you’re an adult make sure you purge anything that could make you a target of accusations by the alt right agenda, unless you have a plan to deal with that. They plan to crack down on pornography and any LGBTQIA+ content is being classified as such. If you are able, secure a passport. Keep in mind that children require both custodial parents consent to get a US passport, and the card can only be used for land crossings. Carry your birth certificate and/or citizen paperwork and/or visa paperwork on your person at all times; last time Trump was in office ICE was detaining and deporting even US citizens who didn’t have their documents on their person. Many states with legal abortion have extra OBGYN providers right now, so that is a decent option for if you are in need of permanent birth control, in case they ban contraceptives. If you are trans, begin applying for jobs and schools in safer countries if you’re able, because it is looking like things are going to get much worse for us. If you regularly use services like Amazon that have a large amount of imports, account that there will be across the board price rises on that platform once the tariffs are enacted, so especially if you’re reliant on Amazon for essentials, stock up. There is also potential that they’re going to try to ban several medications to enact their contraceptive ban, so stock up on your medications. Some doctors will give you extra hrt too, because they understand we are going to be targeted. Stay safe everyone, and get prepared. We will get through this by taking care of one another.

.

[sfblah]

The Cleanup Crew - Chapter 3

[Previous Chapter]

[Next Chapter]

Finally it's time to get dangerous. This is almost twice the length of the previous chapters, which is like fine, but I was originally hoping to keep installments in this series on the shorter side. I guess you can take the writing out of the blah but you can't take the blah out of the writing.

Female sneezes - Feathers

cw: Guns, Violence

Operation "Porcupine"

All things considered, Bucket’s first day at the cafe wasn’t terrible. Not too many customers, and she spent all of her time shadowing Duster and Mop anyway. It was like the first day back in school, when all your teachers just make sure you have all your stuff and don’t even assign any homework.

That evening, however, was like the second day back in school.

The four maids gather around the table in the staff room, where Kerchief had laid out several stacks of papers. The manager pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and glances around at her subordinates, then she turns her attention to the documents below.

“We’ve received a request for turndown service,” she says, her voice flat and serious as always. “A straightforward retrieval mission, which should also serve as a fine opportunity to show Miss Bucket how we do business after hours.”

Bucket’s eyes unfocus and stare into the middle distance. Time for actual work.

“Our client is an engineer with the ExTech corporation who has been leaking information regarding dangerous products to various journalists over the past several months. He was recently outed as a whistleblower, and has already been taken into protective custody. However, he was forced to leave several important items behind at his apartment, and it’s our job to collect them.”

“Sounds easy enough,” says Duster, grinning as she manages to somehow rub a finger under her nose but in an arrogant sort of way.

“Due to the sensitive nature of the situation, we will only be told what to look for once we arrive in the client’s apartment, but we have also been assured that there won’t be anything we can’t carry on our persons.”

Bucket realizes she’s zoning out and tries to resume paying attention. It wasn’t even a conscious choice on her part, it was like her mind had a mind of its own and would simply switch off if she wasn’t thinking about video games or food. Whatever. Hopefully nobody noticed.

“Miss Duster, Miss Bucket, and I will enter the building as cleaners and make our way to the client’s apartment on the eleventh floor. We’ll go in light and quick, with concealed equipment only. Miss Mop will provide surveillance from this nearby billboard, where you’ll have a view of our client’s apartment’s windows. Let’s…”

Kerchief trails off, closing her eyes with a deep breath. She pushes her glasses up her nose once more before continuing.

“Let’s try to keep collateral damage to a minimum, please.”

Neither Duster nor Mop give any sort of response, standing stock still. Bucket blinks. Just what kind of collateral damage are they expecting?

“Any questions?” Kerchief concludes, looking around the table at her maids.

“Um, yeah. Hi,” interjects Bucket, shakily raising a hand. “Was I supposed to, um… Bring my own guns? Cuz, I, er… Kinda don’t have one.”

Kerchief gives a hand sign for the others to move out, and then she leads Bucket over to the weapon wall. Part of her hopes she’ll be allowed to pick her own, but she buries any urge to complain when the manager selects a diminutive, blocky pistol.

“Here, this should suit you nicely. Glock 19, compact nine millimeter.”

“Thanks,” Bucket mumbles as she accepts the gun, hoping she doesn’t sound ungrateful. She kinda is, but she hopes she doesn’t sound like she is. After checking the chamber and holstering the weapon under her ruffles, she skips after Kerchief to avoid being left behind.

For better or worse, the apartment building is a relatively short van ride away. Duster holds a one-sided conversation with Mop as Kerchief drives, and Bucket silently spaces out all over again. The rookie maid is jolted from her trance when the van stops early and Mop climbs out alone, SRS precision rifle in tow. Bucket briefly wonders how Mop can use a scope with her hair covering both eyes before deciding to spare her remaining functional brain cells.

“Oh yeah, almost forgot,” says Duster as the van slows to a stop in the parking lot. She holds out an earpiece to Bucket, who accepts it and slips it into place after a nod of thanks. After a brief pop of static, she hears what she assumes to be Mop’s voice over the radio.

“I’m in position. Approach looks clear, no sign of movement in the client’s apartment.”

“Thank you, Miss Mop,” Kerchief replies, coming in differently through each of Bucket’s ears. “Keep us apprised of anything unusual.”

Kerchief’s voice is flat in a stilted, socially awkward sort of way, while Mop’s is flat in more of a ‘can I go home now?’ fashion. Bucket assumes they each simply have their gimmicks. Duster’s customers at the cafe probably want her to lift them off the ground with a big hug, and Mop’s want her to step on them.

The three maids hop out of the van, showing nothing to set them apart from any other group of housekeepers. Kerchief casually flashes a key fob to open the building’s front door, and Bucket takes a detailed mental image of the patterns on the carpet as she follows to the elevator. The ride up to the eleventh floor is silent aside from Duster cracking her knuckles. No pre-battle elevator music or anything. Maybe this really would be an easy in and out. Surely there’d have to be thematically inappropriate and royalty-free jazz if they were about to walk into a gunfight.

Nothing out of the ordinary in the hall either. The door to each apartment was neatly shut, with no trash or bodies strewn about, no ninjas waiting in the rafters, and no rafters in which ninjas could be waiting to begin with. Kerchief unlocks unit 11-38 and the squad slips inside without incident.

“Don’t shoot, Mop. It’s just us,” teases Duster, giving a casual salute in the direction of the nearest window.

“Tempting,” Mop drones, though the glass remains unpunctured.

Kerchief brings a hand up to her earpiece as Bucket takes a look around the room. It’s a small, simple suite apartment. Decently sized living room, and a door on one side that presumably leads to the bedroom.

“We’ve arrived, Master,” Kerchief says into her radio. “What would you like us to retrieve?”

“O-oh, right, of course, thank you,” comes a nervous voice that Bucket hasn’t heard before. Time to walk out of here with an armful of classified documents that will surely get her disappeared in the coming weeks.

“It’s, um… My limited edition commemorative Boom the Porcupine plushie.”

Bucket’s head jerks up to stare across the room at Kerchief. The bespectacled maid’s glasses spontaneously slip down her nose just a smidge.

“...I’m sorry?”

“I-it’s the most important thing I own! Only ten were ever made! P-please, find it…”

Neither Bucket nor Kerchief give any sort of reaction. The manager’s eyes darken as she stares vacantly into the middle distance, but still she says nothing.

“Um… M-miss Maids? A-are you there?”

”heh… HRESHoooh!”

A sudden thundering sneeze startles both maids out of their stupor. Bucket looks in the rough direction of the noise to find the door to the bedroom wide open and Duster nowhere to be seen in the living room.

“hh-hhh-! RAAHshooh! Uh. I think I found it.”

Duster’s scratchy, nasal voice sounds even scratchier and nasally-er than usual. Bucket and Kerchief follow into the bedroom, and while the living room seemed completely untouched, the domicile appeared to have been completely torn apart. Papers and broken drawers are strewn across the floor, and the pillows and mattress are ripped open and covered in loose feathers. Duster stands beside the bed, a green plush toy held limply in one hand as her head tips back toward the ceiling.

“HAESHHoo!”

A few feathers stir at the disturbance, and the stuffed animal falls to the floor. It rolls toward Bucket, at which point she picks it up and turns it over in her hands.

“Looks okay to me,” she says, unable to find any obvious damage. Her eyes briefly flick up to Duster, who is busy frantically rubbing two fingers back and forth under her nose. “Gesundheit, by the way.”

“Please forgive Miss Duster,” Kerchief interjects, leaning over to inspect the plushie herself. “I’m afraid she’s allergic to feathers.”

“No I’m dot!” protests the boyish maid. “It’s just sobethig id the eh… heh… HERSHHoooh!”

“Care, care. Another van is pulling into the parking lot,” comes Mop’s voice. “Will keep- Get down, get down!”

Before Bucket can react, she finds herself being yanked into the bedroom closet. The sound of breaking glass just barely reaches her ears as the door slams shut, plunging her and the others into darkness.

“Talk to me, Miss Mop,” Kerchief half whispers.

“At least six unidentified contacts, and they’re… They’re climbing the side of the building.”

“They’re what!?” snaps Duster, prompting Kerchief to clap a hand over her mouth.

“Hold fire and keep me updated,” commands the manager. “The apartment has already been searched. We’ll let them see that for themselves and they should pass us by.”

“Understood.”

Silence falls once more. Bucket ponders pointing out that whoever these people are, they’re definitely going to check the closet. But surely Kerchief already knows that, right? Plus, with eleven floors worth of wall to climb, she and the others would probably have time to simply go back the way they came.

“First unknown entering the window now,” Mop says. Okay, that was a lot faster than Bucket expected. Sure enough, the crunch of someone stepping on glass shards soon follows. In spite of the apparent danger, however, the maid begins to tumble down another mental rabbit hole. In the sliver of light coming around the closet door, Bucket spots a little scrap of feather fluff stuck to the plush porcupine. She casually plucks it off and flicks it away, leaving it to flutter about in improbable aimlessness until it comes to rest right on the upturned tip of Duster’s nose.

“hh… heh…”

The muscular maid’s reaction is immediate, and Kerchief’s is only slightly behind. The manager presses an outstretched finger firmly against Duster’s nostrils, silently urging her to hold it in. 

“hegh… ghh…”

Duster shudders, unable to suppress the occasional hitchy wheeze. The footsteps in the bedroom continue, sometimes moving closer, sometimes away. But, if someone else had already turned the apartment upside down, why were they-

“ah-ahh-CHOOOO!!”

Bucket doubles over with a sudden screamed sneeze, leaving Duster too stunned to finish her own. The closet door flies open and the maids find themselves facing a white, featureless… Face? A pair of glowing blue eyes stare out from behind what Bucket can only assume is a robot’s plastic outer shell. She sheepishly rubs her nose as the machine regards her and each of the maids, but none of them offer any reaction. Finally the robot settles on the stuffed animal in Bucket’s arms, and its eyes blink in seeming recognition.

“Attention, female. Surrender the porcu-”

Kerchief quickdraws her Sig P229 sidearm and delivers two rapid shots from the hip to the robot’s torso, then she takes a split second to aim before putting a third bullet through its head. She strides out of the closet without missing a beat, checking for danger in both directions before turning in the direction of the window and firing again. The maid takes her finger off the trigger, raises her weapon slightly, and looks back to her subordinates.

“Time to get tactical, ladies. Miss Mop, weapons free.”

Bucket blinks a few times before fumbling to draw her own pistol.

“Uh. Yeah. Yeah, sure,” she stammers, awkwardly stepping into the bedroom. A grappling hook had pierced through the window and secured itself to the wall below, giving the robotic attackers their means of ingress.

“ehh… hHRESHHoo!”

Bucket jumps as Duster heaves out another explosive sneeze. By the time Bucket can turn to look, her snuffly companion has already produced and readied a Scorpion Evo 3 submachine gun. Where she’d been hiding it all this time remains a mystery. With a harsh sniff and a firm rub under her nose, Duster walks up to the fallen robot and gives it a kick.

“ExTech,” she grumbles, pausing to mash her nostrils upward with the palm of her hand. “And they’re really here for this heh… ehgh… HESHH-hooh!”

“Porcupine,” Bucket amends, assuming Duster was trying to sneeze her way through ‘hedgehog.’

A distant POP interrupts the banter, and a moment later the sounds of crashing and clattering issue through the window.

“Remaining climbers dispatched,” says Mop. “Doesn’t look like they survived the fall. Are they… Robots?”

“ExTech drones, here for the same thing we are,” Bucket mumbles. “I didn’t think stuff like this existed, but I’m a maid with a gun, so I guess anything’s possible.”

“Oh, more good news. ExTech helicopter inbound,” Mop alerts. Kerchief’s hand flies up to her earpiece.

“Hold fire, there’s no way to control where it’ll crash.”

“I hope you can make a quick exit, then. They’re headed for the roof.”

Bucket looks around at her companions, bristling slightly as the sound of beating rotors draws nearer.

“So, uh… Elevator? Do we have to take the stairs cuz it’s an emergency?”

Kerchief and Duster each remove a climbing descender from under their ruffles. Bucket twitches.

“H-hang on, what are those? I don’t have one.”

“Just hold on to me,” says Duster with a grin, clipping her device onto the rope the robots had courteously provided. Not wanting to be left behind, Bucket immediately hops onto her back and clings for dear life. She squeezes even tighter as Duster braces against the windowsill, forgetting all about the porcupine plush as it gets squished in between them.

“Wait, can this thing hold two people?” Bucket screeches. Duster glances back at her with a wink.

“Only one way to find out!”

Duster kicks off from the window, and the pair begin to glide down the rope toward the parking lot below. Bucket lasts a whole two seconds before starting to scream at the top of her lungs, but she runs out of breath before they reach the ground and manages to silence herself.

“So, how’s this for your first day of work?” Duster shouts over the rushing wind. Bucket does her best to shrug without letting go.

“Beats retail, I guess!”

“Damn straight! I think you’re… Y-youre… heh… eh-hehh…”

Their descent becomes a touch choppy as Duster’s breath starts to waver. Filled with a renewed sense of panic, Bucket tries to maneuver one hand to put a finger under her lifeline’s nose, but…

“heh… hEH! HRESHHHoooh!”

Completely consumed by her sneeze, Duster loses her grip on her descender. She and Bucket plummet to the ground, a treacherous two feet of remaining distance. Both maids lay on top of each other on the pavement in silence for a few stunned seconds before starting to moan and groan.

“Gesundheit…” breathes Bucket, reaching between herself and her companion as she remembers the flattened plushie. Duster snorts inelegantly and rubs her fingers in a rough circle under her itchy nose.

“Yeah… Sorry. You break anything?”

“Nah. Just your fall.”

[theskeptileptic]

My life is crazy and writing is slow, but I hope to be done with this chapter by Friday. Have a very tiny crumb!

(From a pending-not-yet-completed Ch. 27 of Northern Attitude)

————————————

SOAP:

Patient presented to hospital with GSW to spleen resulting in rupture, mild-to-moderate traumatic brain injury, ecchymosis of stomach, legs, contusions on neck, arms, abdomen, distal radius fracture and cardiac arrhythmia. He entered Gotham General ER accompanied by father and was promptly admitted for surgery.

Pt life-flighted to Gotham Children’s for acute care after concerns presented by GG medical team. GC admitted patient into PICU for critical illness. Immediate concerns include neutropenia, sepsis, and dyspnea—medical team elected for ventilator, broad spectrum IV antibiotics, among other interventions.

Pt is mostly unresponsive to RN, MD, and SW interactions, sleeping about 18 hours throughout the day, and demonstrating confusion when awake. Pt on feeding tube until able to self-feed. Visitors prohibited at this time, contact and droplet precautions required. Pt has strong support system, including father, three brothers, and a grandfather.

Pt’s youngest brother is currently admitted downstairs in PAC for bronchial pneumonia with pyrexia. Pt has extensive history of abuse from bio-mother and husband (both deceased). Bio-father has full custody.

Father demonstrates high levels of anxiety and concern for Pt and Pt’s brother resulting in conflict between doctors and family, intervention should include allowing father immediate, full-time access (with appropriate PPE) in Pt’s room, social services referral, and mental health referral.

Immediately moving Pt to youngest brother’s room when level of care eases is encouraged. Increased counseling with medical staff on complex grief, trauma, and family systems. When Pt is lucid, social service intervention includes active listening and age-appropriate counseling/explanation for upcoming internal fixation for wrist.

Pt’s prior history with social workers may be a challenge in earning trust. If this is the case, Social Services should find a trusted therapeutic contact to take over caseload as not to cause further anxiety. Referral to OT and PT pending. Possible animal, music therapy as Pt recovers, since youngest brother has also expressed interest.

This note is considered HIPAA protected information—as Pt’s family is high profile, it is important to document that any staff member leaking this to the press will be persecuted prosecuted by both the hospital and the Pt’s family. (Don’t even try it, assholes.) — Leslie Thompson, MD

[vicenovirtues]

This document is the private property of the Gotham Child Protective Services (GCPS) and contains confidential and privileged information. It is prohibited to share this document and any/all attachments outside of GCPS and associated/relevant organisations.

Vincent Amos Elroy

Born February 19th, 20XX. (Age 12)

Child was surrendered into GCPS custody at Madison Avenue Hospital, 4:58 am. Parents forfeited all parental rights and guardianship of the child. Parents requested to remain anonymous and denied providing contact information. Relevant medical histories were taken from both parents and a name was given before the child was taken into GCPS custody and entered into the foster system.

Child was placed into the care of John SCHMITT and Kathryn SCHMITT from ages 0-3. SCHMITT family was unable to continue fostering the child due to hospitalisation and financial difficulties. GCPS was contacted and the child was taken back into custody.

Child was placed into the care of Patrick DUNN and Samantha DUNN from ages 3-5. DUNN family was unable to continue fostering due to concerns regarding the child’s safety*. GCPS was contacted and the child was taken back into custody.

Child was placed into the care of Ginger LAPROS and Tracy BLAKE from ages 5-6. LAPROS and BLAKE were unable to continue fostering the child after several reports were filed against them by neighbours concerned with how they acted around the child**. Despite nothing substantial being found upon investigation of the claims, the child was taken into custody due to the sheer amount of reports after much deliberation within GCPS.

Child was placed into the care of Neil GREEN and Maria GREEN from ages 6-8. GREEN family was unable to continue fostering due to court order***. However GCPS was unable to take the child into custody at the time due to the location of the child being unknown.

GCPS and GCPD worked together to track down the child, finally finding him and taking him back into custody after three (3) years at age 11. The child claims he had run away and begun living on the streets of Gotham, frequenting Crime Alley to avoid being found by GCPS and GCPD.

Child was placed into the care of Jacob WESKER and Naomi WESKER at age 11 and has remained under their care since. WESKER family runs a group home that houses nine (9) other foster children.

* Samantha DUNN was reported to have been neglectful and was documented striking the child on several occasions. Reports were filed but no further action was taken against the family other than the removal of the child from their care.

** Ginger LAPROS and Tracey BLAKE were discovered to be in a same-sex relationship. While there was no law at the time of the placement preventing same-sex couples of fostering/adopting, GCPS case workers may have let biases and prejudice impact their decisions.

*** Maria GREEN was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of murdering her husband of seven years, Neil GREEN on September 15th. The child witnessed the act and was able to give a detailed account of the crime once located and taken into custody. Further appointments with the resident GCPS psychiatrist has been advised. Refer to legal case no. 091521 for eyewitness account.

ADDENDUM

Vincent has been reported missing by his current foster parents. He was last seen on the 26th of September.

Local law enforcement has been notified and any sightings are to be immediately reported to GCPS and the GCPD.

[germanpostwarmodern]

For decades several of the iconic photographs of the Bauhaus master’s houses have been published without proper credit, omitting the authorship of a significant photographer: Lucia Moholy (1894-1989), between 1921 and 1928 wife of László Moholy-Nagy and thus during his time as master at the Bauhaus. The photographs she took during this period to this day dominate the reception of her work, a major mistake in view of the quality and wide range of her oeuvre. Currently and up until 28 October the Kunsthalle Praha aims to make up for past neglect: with „Lucia Moholy: Exposures“ the curators compiled the first major retrospective of Moholy’s work from the 1910s to the 1970s and reveal a fascinating multidisciplinarity that went beyond the borders of art: in 1939 Moholy e.g. published “A Hundred Years of Photography 1839-1939”, a book that broke with previous techno-historical and art-historical paradigms and took into account the cultural richness of photography as well as its place in history in order to represent a cultural history of the medium.

Another ungraceful story unfolded after the end of WWII when Walter Gropius didn’t bother to return the negatives of many of Moholy’s iconic Bauhaus photographs that had her ex-husband left in his custody after Lucia abruptly had to flee Berlin in 1938. The case was eventually settled in 1957 after years of back and forth between international lawyers…

On another note Moholy escaped to London and opened a portrait studio that was sadly destroyed in a German air raid. Left without means she found employment in the emerging microfilm industry and supported the British war efforts by copying smuggled German scientific publications. While she also explored the archival use of microfilm Moholy gained significant knowledge in the field of documentation and consecutively she established her firm „Documenting Services“. Owing to her expertise she was hired by the Unesco and extensively traveled the Middle East in close collaboration with Ankara University.

In 1959 Moholy finally settled in Zurich, Switzerland, which would be her home base until her death in 1989.

Moholy’s life story is comprehensively illuminated in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, published by Hatje Cantz, which not only contains a wide selection of her photographic works but also a wealth of insightful essays that further enlarge upon the different aspects of her oeuvre. In view of this the present catalogue is an indispensable reference for future research into the work of Lucia Moholy and highly recommended!

[mariacallous]

The informant accused of fabricating a story about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden taking $5 million each in bribes allegedly had high-level Russian intelligence contacts, according to newly filed court documents.

In the filing, Special Counsel David Weiss reveals that after his arrest last week, Alexander Smirnov told the FBI "that officials with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story" about Hunter Biden.

Prosecutors argued in their filing Smirnov should be held pending trial, with Weiss saying that Smirnov's claims he has active contacts with "multiple foreign intelligence agencies" and had planned to leave the U.S. just two days after his arrival in the U.S. last week "for a months-long, multi-country foreign trip."

However, a judge late Tuesday ordered Smirnov released from custody, under the condition that he surrender his passport, wear an ankle monitor, and be restricted to traveling only to Nevada and to California for court purposes.

In Weiss' filing, he wrote that "foreign intelligence agencies could resettle Smirnov outside the United States if he were released."

Furthermore, "Smirnov's efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues," the filing states. "What this shows is that the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November. In light of that fact there is a serious risk he will flee in order to avoid accountability for his actions."

Smirnov's assigned defense counsel disputed Weiss' claims that Smirnov misled the court's pretrial services officer about his personal wealth.

Attorney David Chesnoff said that when Smirnov met with the officer he was "only asked about his personal assets and not the business account."

His attorney did not directly address the other claims raised by Weiss regarding Smirnov's claimed extensive ties to Russian intelligence or other issues they say present a risk he will flee prosecution.

The developments come as Hunter Biden's team suggested that the informant's alleged fabrications helped tank a plea deal.

Attorneys for Hunter Biden claimed in court filings on Tuesday that a bribery allegation made by the newly indicted ex-FBI informant may have contributed to the demise of their client's plea deal with prosecutors last year.

According to the filings, the lawyers largely base their assertion on the fact that Hunter Biden's deal unraveled around the same time that the Justice Department began scrutinizing the informant's claims of Biden family corruption. In court papers filed Tuesday, Abbe Lowell, an attorney for the president's son, slammed Weiss for allegedly following the informant, Smirnov, "down his rabbit hole of lies."

But it's not clear from court records that the downfall of Hunter Biden's deal was connected in any meaningful way to Smirnov's allegations. And it's not clear that Weiss ever found Smirnov's allegations credible.

Weiss opened his investigation years after senior Justice Department officials determined that Smirnov's allegations were not worth pursuing further. And the investigation came around the same time that Republican lawmakers publicly released an FBI document detailing the informant's allegations, which the Justice Department now says were completely "fabricated."

Specifically, Weiss filed felony false statement and obstruction charges against Smirnov last week for telling his FBI handler in 2020, as Joe Biden was running for the White House, that Biden and his son had accepted $10 million in bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch.

In Weiss' indictment of Smirnov, he noted that in July 2023, investigators pursuing Hunter Biden launched "an investigation of allegations related to" the informant's prior claims – shortly before a July 26, 2023, court hearing where their negotiated plea agreement with Hunter Biden fell apart.

In court papers filed Tuesday, Lowell tried to tie it all to his client's doomed plea deal.

"Having taken Mr. Smirnov's bait of grand, sensational charges, the [plea deal] … that was on the verge of being finalized suddenly became inconvenient for the prosecution, and it reversed course and repudiated those agreements," Lowell wrote. "It now seems clear that the Smirnov allegations infected this case."

Lowell's allegation appeared in filings intended to convince a judge to order the Justice Department to hand over even more government documents related to his client's case.

Investigators spent five years probing Hunter Biden's foreign business deals before reaching a deal last summer that would allow him to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax crimes in exchange for probation. Hunter Biden also would have agreed to a pretrial diversion on a separate gun charge, with the charge being dropped if he adhered to certain terms.

But that deal fell apart under questioning from a federal judge, whose line of questioning about the deal exposed fissures between the two parties, prompting prosecutors to threaten Hunter Biden with additional charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

It was the specter of potential FARA violations that led Lowell to accuse Weiss' team of inappropriately reviewing Smirnov's claim years after the FBI determined them to be incorrect.

Weiss ultimately brought three felony gun-related charges against Hunter Biden in Delaware and additional tax-related charges in California. Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty to them all.

Sawdust or cocaine?

Meanwhile, in the same filing Tuesday, Lowell pointed out what appears to be an embarrassing gaffe by prosecutors: mistaking sawdust for cocaine. Weiss' office included in a previous filing an image of what he said were lines of cocaine on Hunter Biden's phone around the time that he purchased a firearm.

But according to Lowell, the photo was sent by Hunter Biden's then-psychiatrist and showed not cocaine, but sawdust, which Lowell said, "sounds more like a storyline from one of the 1980s Police Academy comedies than what should be expected in a high-profile prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice."

[beardedmrbean]

A 6-year-old and 8-year-old were left alone in an apartment as their mother went on a cruise, Texas deputies said.

The 29-year-old mother was seen leaving the Houston apartment building with luggage on April 4, neighbors told authorities. After multiple days, building residents noticed she hadn’t returned, according to court documents.

McClatchy News is not identifying the mother to protect the identity of the children.

Neighbors told Harris County deputies it was ”not the first time” a similar incident had happened, documents said.

Deputies were called to the apartment on April 9 for a wellness check, according to the documents.

They found the two young children alone in the apartment, which was in “complete disarray,” deputies said. Trash and food were scattered around the floor, and there was a “potent smell of urine” in the apartment, deputies said.

The mother had watched and communicated with her children through a camera in the apartment, the documents said. The 8-year-old also had a phone used to text the mother, deputies said.

Child Protective Services was contacted and the children’s aunt took custody of the children, deputies said.

The mother was arrested on April 11 on a charge of child abandonment. She was booked into Harris County Jail on a $40,000 bond, according to jail records.

Attorney information for the mother was not listed.

She is scheduled to appear in court on April 15.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

"A Toronto police detective is facing discipline after allegedly making derogatory remarks about “certain races” and sexual orientations, some within days of an apology by the former police chief for disproportionately targeting the city’s Black community.

Detective Jeffrey La Fosse was accused in the Toronto Police Service’s tribunal of committing misconduct several times on June 2022 for a range of remarks and for not helping a victim of domestic violence, saying he would “not help these low lives” and “degenerates.”

Some of these remarks were caught on body-worn cameras, according to a Notice of Hearing obtained by CTV News. That notice starts a formal discipline process against the officer in the tribunal.

“In so doing, you committed misconduct in that you did act in a disorderly manner or in a manner prejudicial to discipline or likely to bring discredit upon the reputation of the Toronto Police Service,” the document reads.

Between June 2, 2022, and June 23, 2022, La Fosse made derogatory comments regarding LGBTQ2S training, members of a “certain race,” “stereotypical assumptions about a victim of crime,” and sexual orientation generally, the Notice of Hearing alleges.

In another incident that month, a young man was arrested and brought to 43 division.

“You made comments including asking the accused if he did not have data on his cell phone because he was poor and advising the victim she would never get money because the accused was poor. You also made comments about the colour of the accused skin as well as several other derogatory comments,” the Notice of Hearing says.

On June 21, a victim of domestic violence called 43 Division seeking assistance and asked why she hadn’t been notified that the accused in the case was released from custody. La Fosse read her the bail conditions over the phone but didn’t give her a copy, even though another officer reminded him he could make arrangements for it to be done.

“Once you were off the phone, you made a disparaging remark about how you were ‘not helping these low lives’ as well as saying ‘screw her’ about the victim. You made other remarks about ‘not helping these degenerates,’” the document says."

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada