#emaciated in regards to their more human characters

[daily-souls]

meli again 243/365 - 06/06/24

[captainbobbin]

Hi- I have somehow survived the depths of completing a whole game in one sitting, grinding for the talents of a character in another game, and completing one of 3 endings for undertale as well as attempting to art. So how are you? <3

Also would love to make you aware your Saix/isa, Xemnas, and Terra are the reasons I question if I'm truly AroAce because of the FOUL, down right HEINOUS things I want them to do to me.

Also, I was going to ask this on Retrospring but I have no idea if the ask button was either tricking me by looking like it was doing nothing or if it just wasn’t up to doing its job, but, I scroll through the Saix tags often and there was this one post that pointed out that he has a hourglass figure and I could not for the life of me tell if you draw him with one too or not so, are you aware of this? If I’m wrong about him having that figure or if you do actually draw him with one then you can just ignore this.

Also, finally looked at your twitter since I don’t usually use it and there was this one thing you said and while I can’t exactly pinpoint what it was I know it was enough to make me audibly gasp and then mentally agree. Anyways that’s all, have a good night or morning I’m still trying to figure out time differences. (Also if I ramble too much feel free to tell me I’ll gladly shut up a bit….maybe- I can’t even trust myself to remember to breathe actually so- nvm)

long response so -

ayyy I'm glad that you've been doing okay lately bud - its always satisfying to complete a game that you've been sucked into, and I hope you had a fun time with it!

You know. You'd be surprised how many aro and/or ace people have said such things to me/are actively in my chat encouraging me to make more nsfw content regarding my blorbos lmaoooo I actually had a message on retrospring the other day regarding my portrayals of certain characters making people question their orientation and I'll put what I responded to them here - 'there's a post that I love and its like. If you are really into something and are passionate about it, you will accidentally convert others to enjoying it. By making content where you genuinely show how much you love a certain thing and you project your headcanons onto it and display the depths of your inner love about a certain concept, character, body type, topic, etc, that people will see it and connect with it whether you mean for it to be convincing or not hahaha. Sometimes just really loving something inspires others to love it and see it your way too.'

Saix undoubtedly has a pretty curvy silhouette, yes lmao there is no way I wouldn't realise that hahaha - Its harder to see it in his KH3/Unreal Engine model due to the stylistic overhaul but his original (and superior imo) model has notably wide shoulders and hips compared to a small waist, yeah. All of the original Org members had really distinct shapes so you can tell who is who, even with the hoods up. I do tend to draw Saix with fairly muscular thighs and broader shoulders, but in general my artstyle is what I would say is 'not very anime proportioned' in that I try to have a decent amount of realism in my anatomy/shape rather than super lean or angular bodies. I don't ever want my blorbos to appear emaciated or for them to have the 'ideal standard' body, if you know what I mean, I really enjoy drawing my faves to look like real people that have folds and bulk and 'imperfections'. I do typically try to draw Saix as fairly broad, with a balance between topheavy upper arms and chest and a more rounded hip area compared to his waist. (some examples below, including a super super old sketch I did to visualise lfotr isa and terra's size difference). I do try and make all of my usual blorbos have identifiable yet still human proportions; I tend to draw Xemnas slightly softer and chubbier around his middle but he is still broad and powerful. Saix is curvy but still noticeably strong and while not entirely lean he has a sleekness to him. I draw Hendrik with a lot of padding, hair and with much more unique facial features. Sylvando is probably the only character I draw that has a body close to the canon source - he is lean and muscular and tbh the only character I really draw with pronounced ab muscles, the same way that in canon he is shown to be very cut - but in all fairness he's a gymnast/acrobat/performer/contortionist/dancing clown so drawing him as noticeably and suprisingly ripped tracks imo. Plus I sprinkle on so many of my own headcanoned features regarding his hair, skin tone, freckles, etc that it doesn't feel too weird to me haha. so tl;dr yes I do draw Saix with somewhat of a curvy shape (when I do fullbody draws of him, its been a little while) however I think my version is pretty masculine and doesn't read as disproportionate or exaggerated.

Anatomy and stylization are things I always want to push myself on and develop more - my biggest fear is having 'same face syndrome' or for my work to feel like my love for the characters don't come through haha - though by the sounds of it, the way I portray my blorbos is definitely doing something for you, so I must be going in the right direction haha

oh I yap about all kinds of bullshit on twitter lmao I use it as a place to talk about my blorbo thoughts often :p for those who don't follow me on twitter, you can find me here, although I'll warn you that I do most some n/s/f/w stuff there that I do not post here. Let me know if you find out which post I made that vibed with you, I'd love to hear which thing I said resonated with you and why haha! I am somewhat more active on twitter than on here/I tend to share more of others work and do general updates on twitter just because its easier, but I think interacting long form with others is a lot easier on tumblr for sure. Long asks and chats like this area always nice!

[babyjakes]

forever and a day | 50. trapped.

〈 disclaimer: this blog posts content not suitable for individuals under the age of 18. minors are strictly prohibited from viewing, sharing, or interacting with this blog. for more information on this blog's commitment to protecting minors, read our full statement here. 〉

← last chapter | series masterlist | next chapter →

summary | a story in which america’s favorite captain gives a new life and family to a five-year-old girl who has suffered well beyond her years at the hands of hydra.

characters | dad!steve rogers, girl/willa rogers (original character)

warnings | AU similar enough to OU to include spoilers to many Marvel movies (Age of Ultron and beyond). action and fight scenes with violence and killing. injuries/mild gore. mature themes related to and semi-graphic depictions of child abuse/neglect, past CSA and CSM, and their aftermath (emaciation, wounds, scarring, etc). medical abuse (including sterilization) and experimentation.��ptsd/trauma symptoms in a child (developmental discrepancies, de-humanized behavior, detachment, extreme fears). medical treatment of CSM and other aftermath of abuse.trauma-informed therapeutic treatment of ECT. minor mentions of disordered eating. themes relating to abuse of power/authority and immoral interrogation tactics including SA (with brief depictions.) evil!Tony Stark.

[Steve]

Looking over the piles of paperwork in front of me, I suck in a deep breath, leaning back against the kitchen chair I’m seated in. For almost the entire afternoon, I’ve been stuck here reading over legal documents regarding the case Bruce and I have been building against Tony. It’s been a long, tedious process, but each further step we’ve taken has felt unmistakably right. Finally, it seems like the scientist will be put in his place and held accountable for his terrible treatment of my sweet little girl. Finally, I believe, I’m getting Willa her justice.

It’s been a few weeks since the child and I moved into our apartment, and during this time we’ve mostly just been focusing on getting the poor kid feeling better. Bruce has been coming over every few days to check in on how her incision is healing, and we’ve had to make several adjustments to our normal routine to accommodate her recovery process. Instead of baths, we’re doing showers for now, due to the fact that she can’t be submerged under water. As she’s still fairly weak, I’ve been standing in the tub with her in a pair of swim trunks, holding her in my arms while helping her wash herself. It’s been a heartbreaking experience every single time, cradling the tiny girl’s quivering body against my own as she’s too frail and frightened to do the simplest of tasks. She’s also been requiring a lot more rest than before, and she’s generally too tired to engage in much substantial play. Honestly, it’s been miserable for the both of us, for her because she’s living it, and for me because I hate to see her this way. Thankfully, though, the past few days have brought some signs of improvement, so at this point, we’re just being as careful as we can and hoping.

Deciding to take a break from the paperwork, I push my chair out from the table, rising to my feet and heading over to the fridge. As I open it and grab out the carton of orange juice, I hear light footsteps running back in the hallway, followed by a door shutting abruptly. She must’ve run to the bathroom, I think to myself.

Willa’s been playing in her room for most of the afternoon, something she does often. Many times I join her, and I always love to do so, but it’s also nice that she’s old enough to play independently when I need to get other things done. She’s loved every new toy she’s tried, but her favorites so far have definitely been the set of animal puzzles ‘Uncle Clint’ got her, as well as her superhero coloring books and box of crayons from Wanda. The first time she tried them out, she colored in a picture of Captain America with all the colors of the rainbow. When she finished, she tore it out and gifted it to me, one of the best presents I’ve received in a long, long time. None of the colors were accurate, but that just made it even more special, and I could clearly tell she had put so much time and effort into it; it simply melted my heart. The picture now hangs on the wall beside my bed where I can look at it every morning when I wake up. I figure it’ll be one of those things I’ll treasure forever as a parent.

Closing the fridge up and grabbing a glass from one of the cabinets above the countertop, I hear water start to run from the back of the house, which I’m guessing is the sink. Tiredly, I pour myself a full glass of the juice, taking in several gulps at once before stopping and setting the cup down on the counter. Gazing back over at the mountains of work left to do on the table, I sigh, deciding that I’ve done enough for the day. More than anything, I just want to relax now and hang out with Willa. As soon as she comes out of the bathroom, I’ll ask her if she wants to watch a movie or something, I tell myself. Maybe we’ll invite Buck over and order a pizza.

Picking up my glass once more and taking a few more swallows, I pull my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it with my thumb and swiping the screen open. Aimlessly, I begin to scroll through my email, finding nothing new. Thankfully, these past few weeks have been quiet in terms of issues needing to be addressed by the Avengers. There have been a few small missions that’ve popped up here and there, but Nat and Clint have tackled all of them, which is usually how slower times go.

Getting bored with my inbox fairly quickly, I switch off my phone, finishing off my glass of juice and rinsing it in the sink before loading it into the dishwasher. Still hearing the water running from the back of the apartment, I decide to find something else to occupy me while I wait. I shut off the kitchen lights as I head out into the living space, slumping down onto the couch and kicking my feet up on the coffee table. Grabbing the remote, I flick on the television, not looking for anything in particular. As the screen lights up, a news channel begins to play mid-broadcast and coincidentally enough, Tony Stark’s face appears in a photo next to the news anchor as she vaguely reports on the 'legal dispute between Captain America and Iron Man.’ I sigh, immediately switching the channel, and a cooking show pops up. Deciding it’ll do for now, I take in a deep breath, setting the remote back down on the couch and shifting my position slightly against the pillows behind me.

The show barely keeps my attention, but I do my best to focus on it, not wanting to think about anything related to Tony or the legal situation. Surprisingly, a commercial break comes, then another. And before I know it, the whole episode has ended. As the credits roll, I pick up the remote again, muting the television. I pull my phone out from my pocket again and check the time. It’s been almost an hour since I was checking emails. My stomach twists as I focus my attention on the noises in the apartment, finding that somewhere in the back half of the house, water is still running.

Putting my phone away once again, I rise to my feet, swallowing dryly as I begin to make my way back through the apartment. A million questions start racing through my mind as I come up to the closed bathroom door. What’s Willa been doing in there for almost an hour? Is she sick? Why is the water running? As I pay closer attention, I realize that the sound isn’t the sink at all; instead, it’s the tub.

“Willa?” I call out, knocking against the sturdy wood in front of me. “Everything alright in there?” There’s no response, and my gaze falls down to the light peeking out from under the door, my anxiety only worsening at the silence I’m receiving.

“Honey, you’ve been in there for a while. Is everything okay?” I try once more. Again, there’s no response, and I sigh, deciding at this point I don’t have a choice whether or not to investigate further.

“I’m coming in,” I say a little bit more firmly as I reach out and twist the knob, pushing the door open in front of me and stepping inside. My eyes immediately scan the room, and at first, I don’t see the child anywhere. The room seems completely empty as I look it over, noticing the faucet in the tub running steadily. Then, something catches my eye. A hint of brown hair peeking out from above the off-white porcelain.

Quickly stepping further into the room, my breath catches in my throat at the sight before me. Willa is laying in the tub on her side, distanced a few inches away from where the water is running down into the drain to avoid getting wet. Her mouth is clamping down on a damp washcloth, her face soaked with tears as she cradles her left arm to her chest, her hand caught up in something. As my eyes focus on the contraption, everything finally registers in my brain. “Shit,” I curse under my breath, immediately piecing together what’s happened. Somehow, Willa found the rat trap I set up under my bed after Bucky mentioned spotting a rodent in the parking lot. It was in the one place I decided she would be completely safe from it, but clearly, I was gravely mistaken. Remembering the passage of time, I realize she caught herself in the trapnearly an hour ago, and it seems like she’s just been trying to hide it from me ever since.

“Willa, sweetheart,” I begin, bringing my voice to a volume that just barely rises above the rushing sound of the water. Noticing my presence for the first time, the little girl’s eyes lock with mine; when they do, a wave of terror completely washes over her face. My heart aches in my chest as she bites down harder on the cloth shoved between her lips, letting out a frightened cry that’s barely audible over the water.

As I take another step towards her, she lurches back, hugging her trapped hand closer to herself, clearly terrified that I’m about to try to hurt her more. “Hey- it’s okay. It’s okay, Willa,” I begin to soothe even though she most likely can’t hear me. As carefully as I can, I make it the rest of the way to the side of the tub, kneeling down on the shower mat and reaching out to shut off the water. The child cowers under my extended hand, appearing to brace herself for a blow. My heartache only grows at her actions as I send her a reassuring look while twisting the shower handle to turn it off, the room finally falling silent as the water stops. But almost instantly, the quietness is filled with muffled whimpers and sobs coming from the frightened girl through her makeshift gag.

“Willa, hey,” I murmur, guilt rising in my stomach as I eye her injured hand, now able to fully see the damage that’s been done by the powerful contraption. If it had been just a common mouse trap, that would’ve been one thing. But I had opted for the much larger version, hoping of finding the little creature before it found Willa and frightened her. Looks like that plan backfired, I sigh to myself. The poor girl’s tiny fingers have turned black and purple all the way through, caught painfully under the metal trap’s heavy force. “Sweetheart, hey,” I call softly, trying to gain her attention as she chokes and heaves into the cloth, seeming to be having a hard time focusing on me through the agony. She flinches at my voice, her body shaking so violently against the tub beneath her that it sends a faint rattling noise through the wall behind her. “Hey- shhhh,” I soothe, feeling absolutely awful for how terrified she is of me in the current moment. “Shhh, sweetheart. It’s okay,” I hum, not sure what my next move should be. My first instinct is to get her hand out of the trap as soon as possible, but judging by how hard she’s trying to keep that hand away from me, I wonder if removing the cloth from her mouth first might not be a bad idea.

“Here honey, let’s get that towel out of your mouth, okay?” I suggest gently, not wanting to startle her with any sudden movements. The child’s eyes widen at my offer and she simply sobs in response, shoving her little body up against the back of the tub as much as she can, trying to get as far away from me as possible. “Here, it’s okay,” I coo, reaching out and taking what I can of the cloth in my hand. Willa squeezes her eyes shut in fear, her bottom lip trembling horribly as I remove the gag from her mouth. As soon as it’s pulled out, she begins sputtering and whimpering, and my guilt only worsens as I realize that the part of the cloth is soaked through with vomit, meaning she was using it not only to stay quiet, but to keep from becoming sick from the pain as well. “Oh sweetheart,” I choke out, unable to hide my pure heartbreak. While I have seen Willa in many sad states, I think that this could very well top them all.

“P-p-ple-ease,” she chokes through her tears, her breaths heavy and choppy as she struggles through the pain. “’m s-sorry, learned m-my lesson, p-please.”

“Shhh, it’s okay,” I murmur, her terrified pleas tearing my heart in half, “you’re okay. Can you tell me what you mean, Willa-bug?” I ask sadly, raising my brow at her. “What lesson, sweetheart? There’s no lesson.”

“W-won’t play under D-D-Daddy’s bed again, ’m s-sorry, p-please,” she sputters, hiccupping violently every few syllables from her heavy sobs.

“Sweetheart, hey,�� I shake my head as my heart drops even further in my gut, trying to catch the girl’s gaze with mine, though I find no success; she’s much too scared to look me in the eyes. “Can you listen to me, Willa-bug? Please honey, let Daddy explain.”

“Won’t d-do it again, never do it ag-gain, p-please,” she implores, gasping pathetically between almost every word for air.

“Willa, baby, please- please listen,” I try, desperation seeping into my voice as I struggle to reason with the child, “the trap wasn’t set there for you, sweetie. It’s meant for mice and rats, not people. I put it there the other day when Bucky called and said- hey, hey,” I soothe as she begins coughing on her tears and spit, her breaths only becoming more uneven as the moments pass. “Sweetheart,” I whisper defeatedly, wishing more than anything that I could just wrap her up in my arms and make all the pain go away. “Hey, you gotta breathe for me, Willa,” I plead, not wanting her to hyperventilate or vomit.

“P-please, won’t d-do it again… won’t ever, I-I-… please, p-please,” she squeaks, only continuing to work herself up into more of a panic.

“Willa, Willa,” I call to the poor girl, trying desperately to just get her to listen to me. “Come on, honey. I need you to breathe for me. In, and out. You’ve gotta breathe, sweetheart. You’re gonna make yourself sick.” Turning my attention back to her hand, I sigh, realizing that a large part of her reaction is probably being fueled by the pain. “Here, let’s get you out of that thing, sweetie,” I decide, reaching out towards her. But as I do, she flinches back harshly, letting out a terrified whimper, clearly perceiving my advancement as a threat.

“Please no, p-please,” she begs despairingly, “d-don’t hurt me, ’m s-sorry, please…” Tears continue to pour from her eyes as she holds her injured hand tightly against her chest, her fearful gaze locked on my outstretched hand.

“I won’t hurt you, sweetheart; I just wanna help you get out of that thing. You’re not in trouble, Willa-bug. Nobody’s here to hurt you, it’s okay,” I reassure her, though I know my words will probably do little to help.

“B-bad, was p-playing under D-Daddy’s b-bed,” Willa insists. “P-please, learned m-my lesson,” she whimpers. “D-don’t hurt me m-more, please don’t hurt m-me more.”

“No sweetheart, you were not bad. Not bad at all, Daddy didn’t put the trap under there for you, Willa. It’s meant for rats. Bucky saw one in the parking lot the other day, so I set up a trap just to make sure it wouldn’t come and chew up our stuff. I didn’t think you’d be playing under there, honey. It wasn’t set up to punish you.”

“W-will be good,” Willa chokes, and at this point, I realize she might just truly be past any threshold of reasoning.

“Okay Willa,” I murmur, coming to the decision that for right now, what’s most important is to free her from the rat trap. Damage control will have to come after that. “Here, we’re gonna get you out of that thing,” I tell her as I reach out, ignoring her flinching and heartbreaking protests as I gather the small child in my arms, pulling her out of the tub and onto my lap. She completely withers as I set her down on top of my legs, collapsing into an even more fearful puddle of tears than before. “It’s okay, baby-bug,” I coo as I gently but firmly take her hand in mine, prying back the metal clamp and releasing her poor fingers from its grip. Due to my super-soldier strength, I end up breaking off the metal piece completely from the wooden board, dropping the broken parts on the ground beside us. Once the broken trap is out of reach, I take Willa’s tiny fingers in mine, causing her to jump as I hold her gently upright with my other arm.

“N-no, please,” she begs, her bottom lip wobbling uncontrollably as her big green puppy-dog eyes peer up at me.

“I won’t hurt you, sweetheart. I’m sorry, Willa. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think you’d get caught in the trap; I had no idea you liked to play under my bed. But it’s not your fault, honey, and you’re not in trouble. I should’ve told you about it so you knew it was there, or I shouldn’t have put it out at all,” I soothe, rocking the trembling child back and forth as gently as I can. Looking down at her discolored fingers, another wave of guilt hits me; my guess is that most if not all of them are broken, or at least severely bruised. “Bruce is coming over before dinner, remember? We’ll have him take a look, okay?” The little girl sniffles, not saying anything as she continues to look up at me. Judging by the amount of fear that’s still left on her face, I can tell it’s gonna take more than just some reassuring words to ease her worries.

“Here, let me show you something,” I say softly, lifting her up in my arms as I stand up, carrying her out of the bathroom and through the house to the kitchen. Opening up one of the drawers where we keep office supplies, I pull out the package of traps, showing it to her. “See? Those are mice,” I tell her, pointing to the pictures on the cardboard packaging. “These things are meant to catch them if they’re in your house. They’re not made for people, sweetheart. Not made for hurting or punishing.”

“M-mice,” Willa mumbles, her tears beginning to slow as she looks over the package.

“That’s right, doll. Meant for mice, not people.”

“N-not p-people,” she repeats, her trembling finally beginning to die down as she seems to settle into this fact.

“Not people,” I say again, putting the traps back in the drawer and shutting it before reaching up and brushing her hair back out of her tear-stained face. “See? It wasn’t set up to hurt you, sweetheart. I would never hurt you, especially not for something like playing under my bed.” Willa sniffles, swallowing down another round of tears she was holding back before I proved my point to her. “What were you playing in there?” I ask, hoping to start easing the conversation in a lighter direction.

“D-om'noes,” she tells me, “lining them up, like Daddy showed me.”

“Dominoes, huh? Do I get to see what you were making?” Willa nods, leaning the side of her head gently against my chest, seeming to be completely exhausted after the whole ordeal. “Hey sweetheart?” I ask, causing her to look up at me tiredly. “You know how we’ve been trying to work on coming to Daddy when something’s wrong instead of hiding it away?” The girl shrinks back slightly at my question, a look of shame appearing on her reddened face.

“Th-thought you’d hurt me more,” she admits softly. I nod, wishing I knew a way to truly prove to her that she’s safe with me, no matter what. This has been an ongoing problem ever since she entered my care; she simply refuses to ask for help. And in situations like this, it just makes things a hell of a lot worse, for everyone involved. “D-don’t be mad, please,” she adds weakly.

“I’m not mad, Willa-bug. Not mad at all. I know you only hide things because you’re scared; I know you can’t help it, sweetheart. We just need to work on it, okay?” She nods warily, not seeming entirely sure that I’m not angry with her for it. “Why was the water on, honey?” I ask, guessing I might already know what the little girl’s about to say.

“D-didn’ want you t'hear me crying,” she mumbles. Proven correct and saddened, I nod.

“And that’s what the cloth was for, too?” I ask, earning a nod in response. “Okay doll. We’ve gotta work on it, okay?” I tell her again. “You’re only five, sweetheart. You’re too little to handle everything by yourself. That’s what Daddy’s here for; he’s here to help you, remember?” Willa nods, but I can tell by the look on her face that she doesn’t completely believe it. Not sure what else to say about the matter, I sigh, making a mental note to talk with Bruce about the issue. I don’t know how we’re going to solve this problem, but things can’t go on like this. The bottom line is: I can’t be a good dad to Willa if she won’t let me.

← last chapter | series masterlist | next chapter →

[faelornfel]

Character Profile

––––‌ ‌The Basics‌––––‌ ‌

● NAME:‌‌ Faelorn Shadowsworn

‌● AGE:‌ 237

● RACE:‌‌ ‌Sin’dorei

● GENDER:‌ ‌‌Male 

● SEXUALITY:‌‌ ‌Demiromantic Demisexual (If I had to give it a name )

● ALIGNMENT:‌‌ Chaotic ‌Neutral / Sometimes more evil leaning

‌● MARITAL‌ ‌STATUS:‌‌ Single

‌● SERVER:‌‌ ‌Wyrmrest‌ ‌Accord‌

––––‌ Physical Appearance ‌‌––––‌ ‌

● HAIR:‌‌ Shaggy black ponytail with bangs that hang nearly into his eyes, the front is streaked with a bright green color.

● EYES:‌ Burning Fel Green

‌● HEIGHT:‌‌ 5′9″

‌● BUILD:‌‌ Rail Thin, almost seems a bit emaciated 

‌● DISTINGUISHING‌ ‌MARKS:‌‌ ‌Black Tattoos over both eyes, runic scaring down both of his arms and larger runic tattoo’s on his back.

‌● COMMON‌ ‌ACCESSORIES:‌‌ ‌A long black metal staff, chokers and necklaces, and an old leather cross body bag full of books.

● AESTHETIC:‌‌ ‌Leather, body horror , horns, Green, runes, magic, books, black, white, and demons.

‌––––‌ ‌‌Personal‌ ‌––––‌ ‌

● PROFESSION:‌‌ ‌Warlock / Demonologist / Dabbling Alchemist and Engineer 

‌● HOBBIES:‌‌ Reading, Demonology, Alchemy, Chemistry, Oddity Collecting, Anatomy Studies, Biology, Engineering (mostly with Fel), and Entomology.

● LANGUAGES:‌‌ ‌Thalassian‌ ‌,‌ Demonic, ‌Common,‌ ‌and‌ ‌Orcish.‌ ‌

● RESIDENCE:‌‌ Silvermoon City, small and hidden laboratory and apartment.

● BIRTHPLACE:‌‌ Quel’thalas

● FEARS:‌‌ ‌Enslavement

‌––––‌ ‌Relationships –––-‌ ‌

● SPOUSE:‌‌ ‌None.‌

‌● CHILDREN:‌ ‌‌None.‌

‌● PARENTS:‌ ‌‌Dead, and he does not seem to care.

‌● OTHER‌:‌‌ His demons are all very close with him, he considers them all to be his friends in a more traditional sense rather than contracts. He also has a  Homunculus ( @felformed�� ).

‌ ‌–––-‌ ‌Mentality‌ ‌–––-‌

‌● Social‌ ‌Level:‌‌ ‌Anti-social, hates most of humanity, occasionally gets along better with Warlocks but not often. Demon characters will find him very agreeable however.

‌● Optimistic‌ ‌View(s):‌‌ ‌”No man should live in the grip of another”

‌● Pessimistic‌ ‌View(s):‌‌ “Humanity is a cruel and unnecessary evil. It does more harm then good to every corner of the world and beyond, and gods forbid anyone be different.”

‌● One‌  ‌Positive‌ ‌Personality‌ ‌Trait:‌‌ Outspoken

‌● One‌ ‌Negative‌ ‌Personality‌ ‌Trait:‌‌ ‌Mean

● One‌ ‌Personality‌ ‌Warning:‌‌ ‌Incredibly mean character in most regards, does not get along with many people at all. Be warned for darker themes and adult story content!

‌● Random‌ ‌Quirk:‌ Invented and built his own staff!

● Addictions:‌ ‌‌Fel Energy and Alcohol 

‌● Habits:‌‌ Chewing his hair, growling at people, sometimes loitering.

––––‌ ‌Additional Information ‌––––‌ ‌  ‌‌

SMOKING‌ ‌HABIT:‌‌ ‌never‌ ‌/‌ ‌rarely‌ ‌/‌ ‌sometimes‌ ‌/‌ ‌‌frequently‌ ‌‌/‌ ‌to‌ ‌excess.‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

DRUGS:‌‌ ‌never‌ ‌/‌ ‌rarely‌ ‌/‌ ‌‌sometimes‌‌ ‌/‌ ‌frequently‌ ‌/‌ ‌to‌ ‌excess.‌ ‌  

‌‌ALCOHOL:‌‌ ‌never‌ ‌/‌ ‌rarely‌ ‌/‌ ‌sometimes‌ ‌/‌ ‌‌frequently‌‌ ‌/‌ ‌to‌ ‌excess.‌

‌––––‌ ‌Possible RP Hooks ‌––––‌

Those that attended Dalaran before the scourge invasion may recognize him, some for his rather violent criminal history, also the fact that he was never properly prosecuted. (Ask First)

Those that hail from Silvermoon and the surrounding areas may have seen or encountered him in the past more then once or twice, likely not on good terms.

Faelorn may have business relations with other warlocks for supplies and sharing research and knowledge. those that do have likely found him to be an odd and unfriendly sort (Ask First)

Demons seeking contract but to keep their freedom and own lives and will may do very well with him! 

( @wraconnect / @wracentral )

[talk-to-me-devil-again]

Did anyone else notice the eerie similarities between Joker and Black Swan? (major spoilers for both films ahead) Like two sides of the same coin:

- Protagonists start out as virginal, socially awkward, emaciated, somewhat childlike, TENSE people: so tense you can see it in the muscles in their bodies and on their faces

- Live alone in claustrophobic city apartments with domineering, possessive mothers, father was never present or is never even alluded to, in Nina’s case

- Get bullied by callous coworkers in dressing rooms where they apply their makeup

- Experience tense and demeaning experiences on the oppressive subways they have to ride: Arthur is brutally beaten, Nina sits frozen in fear as nasty old man sexually harrasses her

- Everyone in their lives just seems to PUSH and PUSH them with no regard to the effect on their sanities, as if they are seen as less than human

- As both protagonists are beginning transition to chaotic alter egos, they hallucinate encounters with beautiful, unavailable women (ok, Nina does have a BIT more of an explicit hallucination shown to viewers lol)

- Both films even contain nearly identical frames of protagonists staring into mirrors covered with writing in bright red lipstick, though at different stages of their transition

- Both protagonists use white face paint to signal takeover of new personas - After Nina realized what truly happened in the traumatic and murderous encounter in dressing room, she instantly gains composure, you can literally SEE her face transform as she becomes the Black Swan the very split second she begins applying her white face paint, it’s less of a decoration than an armor, more war paint than mere makeup for both Nina and Arthur

- Transformation from past selves into new alter egos is signalled with powerful, triumphant dance - they’ve become more alive, more confident than they ever were as their past selves, they’ve been reborn through power of dance

- Transition is also accompanied by both characters passionately kissing people who weren’t expecting it, something the old Arthur and old Nina ever would have dreamed of doing

- Climax of both films shows Joker and the Black Swan triumphant, seen and loved by crowds like never before in their lives, perfect, the peak of their lives thus far

- Ending is left purposefully ambiguous, though Nina’s fate is strongly implied - nevertheless, their fates don’t diminish from their perceived triumphs

Anyways, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while, also it would be a SHAME if any talented authors were to ship these two characters somehow ;)

Hope this was thought-provoking or at least interesting

[hushedblood]

TASK 001 --- an event that irrevocably changed your character’s life. For Soojin it was meeting Da Hwan-Jae. From that moment on their lives were intertwined. Without his protection, Soojin would have died that night in the forest. Without his selfish love, Soojin would have died from smallpox. And without the enemies he had made? He would have never become a hybrid.

@whispertempted​

The corpse was bloated, though how was beyond his comprehension. He had watched as the leader of their hunt sliced the smooth plane of its chest, waiting with bated breath for blood to bubble forth. They were greeted with no such sight, a fact that wasn’t surprising considering the number of blood drained corpses that had littered the roads around their village in the past weeks. Something was out there, that much they were sure of --- but what? That was another matter entirely. 

That night the stars were their only light. It seemed fitting to hunt a creature as dark and dangerous as this on the night of a new moon. The woods were foreboding, a place he’d happily walk for solace on a rough day was now cloaked in shadows. Strangely though, the boy was not afraid. For what did he have to fear from death? It had already succeeded in taking the most important things away from him --- a father, a mother, two brothers and a wife. What was death if not another adventure? If anything he would be reunited with those who died in the flames, his heart sizzling in the blackened char of their hands. 

The group of men stumbled forward, noisy, as only humans can be as they traipsed along the forest path. It was there, singled out at the back of the group, that Soojin saw a shadow move in the peripheral of his line of sight. Something massive and lurking, the kind of beast that could be responsible for the carnage plaguing their village. Young and reckless, he was lured away from the hunting party and deeper into the woods. It was there that he was met with the snarling fangs of a massive hound, a shadowhound, he would later learn. In that moment Soojin embraced the knowledge of his impending death like an old friend --- and was saved by a figure with crimson eyes and a map of freckles. 

“Are you afraid?” The other had asked. From the wasted corpse of the shadowhound at his feet Soojin knew this person, this boy, was something to be feared above else. And yet? His deep brown eyes met the boy’s stare head on. “Death is another adventure, isn’t it?” Soojin had replied, the images of his lost loved ones held close to his heart. The figure regarded him with renewed curiosity, his head tilting under the dim light of the stars. “What do you know of death, human?” The question confirmed his suspicions --- the boy was inhuman. Soojin stepped towards the boy and dropped his weapon in the dirt beneath his feet, his last wish saccharine on his tongue.

“I suppose that is for all of us to find out.”

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

Three years passed in a twisted domestic bliss. His lungs ached almost as much as his heart did as he climbed the final hill into their village. It had been another long two weeks spent traveling to the nearest trading point and there was nothing he wanted more than to be wrapped in Jae’s embrace. Clasped in his hand were hibiscus flowers he had gathered just outside of town, picked for the way their bright demeanor reminded him of the vampire he had grown to love. The day felt unusually cold for late summer and goosebumps peppered his arms alongside the raised rash he assumed had been picked up from sleeping on straw mattresses during his travels. A smile bloomed on his face as he knocked on the door of their hanok and was met by the sight of his lover. That sight faded as he collapsed, unconscious and ridden with disease. 

The days passed in a blurry fog of doctors and pain, so much pain. In brief moments of lucidity he would watch as Jae sponged his forehead with a damp cloth, worry etched deeper in his expression than the centuries had ever appeared. His body, once strong and solid wasted away in the prison of their home. The rash became blisters that popped and bled, giving way to liquid that gurgled and rasped in his lungs. The doctors and shamans confirmed their worst fears --- his sickbed would become his deathbed.

As Jae cradled his emaciated body in his arms, Soojin whispered through cracked and bloody lips. “Will you promise me one thing, jagiya? Let me die --- please?” Tears rained down on him from above as he forged on. “These past three years have brought me more happiness than I could have ever hoped for. I had the chance to love you, which is the greatest gift the gods could have bestowed upon me. Now that they’re calling me back home, who am I to deny it? It’s their will.” Satisfied with the murmured agreement of his lover, Soojin let the topic rest, content to spend his remaining hours soaking up enough love to take with him in death. 

The next day he slipped into a fevered dream state. The end was so close he could feel it in the way his heart was beating in frantic, slow thumps and his breath came in shallow gasps that rattled his core. Despite not being aware of much else, he could feel Jae beside him --- his hand a lifeline in his own grasp as he was led into the light. 

Peace. Followed by the metallic tang of blood, the pressure of a wrist clamped against his mouth that was struggling so hard to breathe. The realization of what was happening set in just a second before Jae’s hand slipped out of his own with a whispered “I love you.”  The strong hands he had come to love so dearly cupped his head gently and twisted with practiced precision. 

Burning pain ravaged his body and with it came unrelenting hunger. His fingers twitched with new strength as he came back to life with a heaving breath. Awareness set in with sharpened senses, his ears tuned in to the figure who had betrayed him waiting at the back of the room. And with a frenzied rage, Soojin opened his newly golden eyes.

[erickadracula]

The Legacy continues - Second & Final part

   Van Helsing was in his room, he just woke up a few minutes ago and he had been informed that they were waiting for him.

   To Ericka, this notion of meeting them up in his rooms and not in his library or his study or in any other part of the house and the fact that he did not met up with them immediately when they arrived was very strange. Her great-grandfather was a man of customs and oddities.

   That room was completely disorganized, with the curtains completely shut, books and artifacts placed in no specific order on the floor, furniture here and there, boxes, it was as if he were moving out. That space was easily triple of the room her parents had and there was a heavy atmosphere, and despite the size, it was as if the air did not circulate.

   In the midst of all that chaos were three desks, in the middle, in the largest solid wood carved with oriental motifs, he was there among mountains of papers and notebooks.

   "I brought you here, because I made a decision. In these documents that are classified by properties, accounts, investments, funds, and the inventory of what is in this, and other properties, such as works of art, airplanes, cars and of course, in a separate folder, everything related to the cruise that I know it is what matters the most to you. As you well know, you are my universal heir. I fixed things so that it is easier for you to manage everything and for you not having to come continuously. You will be able to realize that my secretary and my lawyer will be present to advise you.”

   She turned quickly to see those gentlemen in dark suits, who were in the other two desks, Ericka had only been able to have a few moments alone with her great-grandfather when they came to take their places. After many months without seeing him and wanting to talk to him, her expectations fell to the ground when her great-grandfather sent for them and began talking about all that in the coldest way possible.

   "What is happening?. I’m asking for an explanation, I’m not asking it, I’m demanding it from you. You make me come here and you are not happy to see me, without wanting to tell me anything, very typical of you, but still ... without telling me you give me all this, I do not know why I’m still surprised with your attitudes " astonished by that bombing of information, while making a sign with her hand so that the lawyer would stop putting those folders in front of her.

   Drac had noticed Van Helsing tired and with little vitality, even his voice was much lower and he looked much more emaciated and pale than when he had last seen him. According to his wife, he acted erratic and he also believed it, this man had persecuted him for years and had been anything but erratic and less regarding the elaboration of his plans, if he had not been a vampire, he accepted that Abraham's strategies would have been lethal .

   “You may leave us alone”

   The gentlemen immediately got up and started making their exit, Drac considered that it might be appropriate if he left too and let them talk with more privacy.

   "No, not you Dracula, you are my great-granddaughter's husband and she is going to need you"

   Van Helsing had agreed that the two would get married, he had even gone to the castle a few times and had stopped making inappropriate comments about him, but what he had never done was to accept his position until that day "

   Dracula, still very surprised at those words could see what was going on, clairvoyance was not necessary at this time and he was holding Ericka's hand, he had to let her know that she was not alone anymore.

   "Ericka" he cleared his throat to get more clarity "I know that our relationship has not been easy but I want you to know that everything I have done is for your own good and even so ... if I have made a mistake I apologize, I did not with a bad intention "

   "What is your intention with all this, I come to this house for the first time, where I was born and where my parents lived, maybe looking for something more than your answers, maybe affection, surprised even that you have my room exactly as it was and you…"

   "Ericka" Drac interrupted her as he interlaced his fingers even more with hers "let him talk, I ask you, please"

   Seeing his seriousness and the he had intervened for her great grandfather, made her even more confused, she did not understand what that was about and because even he seemed to be aware of what was happening, everyone in this place, except her. Breathing deeply, trying to hold back, she heeded the vampire’s words.

   "Thank you" seeing him with a look of complicity "Now I see you as a fulfilled, happy, successful woman and even making a career in hospitality and starting your own family, as I was saying I have made a decision and I can take it with a complete peace of mind because I finally feel that I’m leaving you in good hands" looking directly at Dracula and without any kind of grudge in his eyes.

   Walking through the Hall of the Honorable, named like that because there were portraits of all the Van Helsing throughout history, Ericka and her great-grandfather were having a moment alone.

   She looked visibly affected and her eyes were red, she had finished crying and Abraham had too. Ericka had knelt at his height, giving him her hand and listening intently.

   "I'm going to tell you the story of our family again, so that you won’t forget it, remember it and learn from it."

   In that hall, there were easily dozens of paintings but only three stood out.

   The first portrait on the left was of an elderly man with a fearsome face dressed in a traditional red suit, dating from the time of Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian monarch to adopt the title of Czar. On his shoulders was the skin of a black bear and he was holding a saber. His ancestor had commanded the troops of the czar himself and it is believed that thanks to his tactics they conquered more territories for the Russian Empire, including Siberia, then he decided to form a select group of monster hunters trained by himself. He was known as “the terrible one” by his own troops for his bloodthirsty methods.

   On the portrait on the right , which bore a striking resemblance to Abraham as a young man, dressed in full gala uniform, had been the first of the Van Helsing’s to formally settle in the Netherlands at that time known as the 17 provinces, thanks to his intervention in the 80 years war the Netherlands obtained their independence from the Spanish Crown. Following the legacy of his ancestors he continued with research and development of new types of firearms to be used against the monsters.

   The portrait in the middle, of the only woman who was there and was part of the outstanding Van Helsings, was the one that caught her attention the most, and it was one of the oldest. She had never seen a look as terrifying as that woman's, who wore a heavy armor from head to toe and wielded a sword. She was the most prominent of all, the one who had managed to cause the most terror and had proclaimed herself to be the first vampire hunter. The legends told that after days in an arduous crusade against vampires, of a massacre, almost ending with everyone, and she being one of the few survivors, the leader of them arrived and seeing his subordinates massacred instead of lashing out against the person in charge, he congratulated her, for her braveness, she without fear knowing that she was going to die, confronted him and he spared her life, because of the great battle she had given, even being a simple human, from that day they knew her as the “Queen of Steel”.

   Dumbfounded about that fact, had she not been the first Van Helsings to which a vampire had spared its life it made her see that in one way or another her life was always going to be linked to them.

   "Ericka, for days she fought against them without caring for her life, with only a fixed idea, that she was doing good" it was hard for him to breathe, with a weak complexion, visibly agitated.

   "Great-grandfather, you want us to go back to your room?, being here is getting bad for you" standing up in order to go ask for help and looking around if Drac or the butler were close.

   "Now I can see it well, it was no coincidence that this happened, the vampire she faced was Vlad" holding his hands together as his eyes fell on that imposing painting, looking at it searching for the right words.

   The mention of that made her feel dazed

   "That's already in the past, you do not have to get upset” she was worried that internally, he could continue feeling resentment against the vampires, he did not want his husband to listen to him, not when everything seemed going better between the two of them.

   "She could not stand it, for years she tried to survive with that and decided to commit suicide, it was a more honorable death than to continue living because a vampire took pity on her and what I mean ..."

   Never in her life had she seen her great-grandfather like that, so helpless, confessing those things and looking so miserable and somehow, she also felt anger.

   "There's no point in telling me all that right now" she wiped some tears from her eyes trying that him wouldn’t notice them "I think we talked enough about this, it's better to go back"

   “It really is the whole point, little one" looking at her tenderly "you are the only one who deserves to be here, the one who could see the truth, strong enough to see her mistakes"

   All this caused a lot of confusion in her head, first he was telling her about their ancestors in such a proud way, that at the time, when she was young, her breast also swelled with pride and today, she could only feel pity and some shame to belong to a family that had lashed out against innocent monsters for centuries and then he ended up saying that he was proud of her, when the only thing she had done was to defect, and she had not had any outstanding achievements as those characters.

   "Your courage and your heart, Ericka, have left me a lesson that I will never forget" Approaching the only painting covered with a canvas, of the same dimensions as the previous ones. "You can come out now, Dracula"

   Ericka, surprised turned to see both directions of the hall, when she saw that from the top of one of the walls, emerged a very familiar bat.

   Transfiguring, leaving a trail of purple fog behind, he stood next to the platinum blonde woman, seeing her with a little guilt.

   “Drac, what are you doing here?”

   “I asked him dear, you need him by your side besides, what I have to show you also involves him" seeing him gratefully . "Do me the honor”

   Drac nodded his head, uncovered the painting with a single pull.

   She, without words seeing that oil, could recognize herself in her captain attire and next to her was Drac, both holding hands with an expression of happiness.

   "What ... is ... this"  she found it hard to pronounce the words while Drac and his great-grandfather smiled at her.

   "Your own legacy, I do not think it deserves to be in this place, it should be somewhere better"

   "Thank you very much, Abraham" moved by that detail while Ericka collapsed and he held her wrapping his arms around her.

   It had been two days since Abraham had decided to take his life support and die with dignity. He died peacefully, taking the hand of the person he always adored and with a smile on his lips and after many years, being completely him. In his other hand was his diary full of photos and memories of those who had left and with whom he would soon be reunited.

   “Live 10, 100 or 1000 years, but lived them being happy”

[theculturedmarxist]

Is there a doctor in the house?

“How do you expect anyone to do anything in Communism? If a doctor is paid as much as a janitor, why would I do all the work to be a doctor? Checkmate, commies.”

Trying to talk to people about Communism, and the general conception of what that entails, can be a tricky sort of process. Generally speaking, communist thought is contingent on at least passing knowledge of the principles derived from the broad and numerous bodies of socialist thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. There are innumerable books, pamphlets, essays, and so on full of rigorous thought and speculation about the circumstances of today and what they entail for our future, and how we as communists should go about ordering that future.

One of the greatest difficulties though when introducing someone to Communist thought is trying to coax them out of the bourgeois conception of society that most people have been ingrained with more or less from birth. The above is a tiresome refrain of those believing they’ve btfo Communism. It frequently jockeys with the whole ridiculous mudpie “argument” for the most popular brainlet thought-ending cliche.

If you look back to the media of the previous century, with the advent of the Space Age and then the Computer/Information Age, you can see a variety of imaginations trying to conceive of what all these radical changes will mean for society. Disease would be banished. Poverty would be impossible. Racial and religious differences would be treated as irrelevant, just as they truly are. Humanity would have bases on the Moon and Mars, toeholds that set the stage for mankind embracing its spacial destiny. There would be plenty for all, onerous work would be obviated, and the potential of the individuals of the world would finally be enabled to expand to its fullest.

In short, people were imagining a world beyond what they had then. What of now? Popular media, especially in the realm of science fiction, is emaciated. There is no future, no daring or imaginative alternatives. “Now” stretches on and on into forever, even when it would make no sense for such an arcane system as Capitalism. This isn’t because people are content with things as they are, but because their conception of what is possible has been carefully curated so that any alternative is branded as “utopian,” and anyone with a burning need or passion for change is only a single step away from the ever-lurking Liberal geist of “fanaticism.” Robespierre did his job only too well, apparently.

The soil of the imagination has been salted by the bourgeois enamoration with things as they currently are, and in seeking to maintain the status quo, anything as dangerous as an alternative to Capitalism has to be either excluded from public thought to the greatest degree possible, or else slandered and lampooned until all that’s left is a ridiculous straw man of anything or one that could endanger the unmitigated flow of profit.This is why in popular media, Capital is an omnipresent force, whether in fantasy, historical or contemporary drama, or projections into the future. “We’ve reached the end of history,” blah blah blah.

It’s difficult then for people to understand what Communists want, and how Communism is conceived. There are innumerable dogmatic conventions on what Communism should look like and how, which to describe them all in an exhaustive sense would be beyond this post, so for now I suffice with an unspecific, generic meaning when I’m speaking of “Communism.”

As Capitalism is the absolute, when non-Communists listen to Communists describing the things they want and the changes they make, they don’t consider what any of these alterations would mean, or what would need to happen in order to make them possible. For whatever reason, they can only conceive of now, but different, as if such a thing were possible.

Inevitably the question gets asked, “why would I be a doctor instead of a janitor?” It immediately gives away how deeply subsumed they are by their ideology. Health isn’t an interest of the individual or community, it’s not something to be cultivated, or even a fundamental human need; to them, it’s a service or commodity to be dispensed by a “professional.” Their class character is exposed, along with their ignorance of life outside of their comfortable cell. The suffering or need of others is dispensed with, and human life is devalued to whatever baubles this person believes they should be showered with for all of “their effort.”

Do they imagine that people would simply do without? Just lie down and die if people refused this tyrant’s “expertise?” It flies in the face of reason and precedent. Previous to modern times, educated medical professionals (to the standards of their time) were vanishingly rare. Most ailments were treated with a variety of home and traditional remedies. Do they really imagine then that a parent would sit idly by as their child wastes away due to lack of a doctor? As reckless as it might be, if the likely ultimate result either way is death, then WebMD and a prayer is certainly preferable to looking on in impotence. 

This hypothetical would-be doctor imagines that society as it would exist then would be society as it exists now, only with a mandatory minimum wage. “No one would become doctors if they didn’t get rich doing it.” Again, reason and evidence shows them definitively to be in error.

I am not a fan of Cuba’s interpretation of Socialism, but I can’t help but admire their resourcefulness in such extreme deprivation. In retribution, the criminal blockade by the United States starves and isolates the island, but examining the circumstances of life there and the accomplishments they’ve managed despite that are quite remarkable. It isn’t much talked about, how Cuba, immiserated by poverty as it is, has an astonishingly small ratio of doctors to patients. They export their medical expertise to other countries, trading doctors for necessary resources. They’ve managed to eliminate mother-to-infant HIV transmission, and have even developed a cure for a certain cancer. Doctors are well respected, but they aren’t nearly as privileged in Cuba as they are elsewhere in the world.

I doubt every last one chooses their profession out of simple altruism, but to my understanding they aren’t made rich, either.

One of the most remarkable manifestations of Cuba’s adaptations to their radically changing circumstances was its reaction to the disappearance of the Soviet Union. The USSR provided most of Cuba’s industrial needs, and their sudden collapse meant not only the disappearance of Cuba’s most significant trading partner, but also the immediate evaporation of the means to maintain their existing industry and produce new goods.

Unable to provide for their people, they took the radical step of providing the people with the knowledge and expertise they needed to provide for themselves. Technical and engineering manuals and textbooks were distributed. Everything was recycled as needed. Motors from broken washing machines were cannibalized to motorize bicycles.

As the crisis grew more severe, people’s creativity grew more powerful, and everywhere you looked you saw solutions. Ernesto Oroza

In Trotsky’s 1934 article, If America Should Go Communist, he makes a very salient point.

At present most Americans regard communism solely in the light of the experience of the Soviet Union. They fear lest Sovietism in America would produce the same material result as it has brought for the culturally backward peoples of the Soviet Union.

American and Russian circumstances were and are worlds apart. Russia’s expression of Communism resulted from the dire situation it was left in after the first World War. Its industry was smashed. Its people were starving. The interim Liberal government that came to power after the abdication of the Tsar continued to fight the ruinous war against the Central Powers, pouring millions of men into the theater of industrial murder. No sooner do the Bolsheviks take power and end the war than every industrial power on the planet invades. On top of years of misery under the Tsar, are compounded years of civil war the most vast country on the planet. After this, it is scarcely another decade before another World War washes over the CCCP, killing tens of millions of people and leaving Russia’s industrial and agricultural heartlands in devastated ruin. Despite all of this, the CCCP managed not only to industrialize, expand education and literacy to its large population of impoverished, illiterate peasants, but managed to make it the number 2 power, and eventual superpower, on the planet, and the first space-faring nation to boot.

America would not have such problems, Trotsky says. Is he wrong? The US is majority literate (more or less). They have already a sprawling (if crumbling) infrastructure, the benefits of the Internet, already existing industrial and technological capacity, to say nothing of the country’s rich farmland and abundance of natural resources, much of it mapped and explored and exploitable at need. They have over 200 years of democratic experience and tradition, and one of the most educated populations on the planet.

Believing that the United States, were it to adopt communism, would look anything like Soviet Russia in form or function, is nothing but ridiculous. It’s an immature bogeyman, a ghost story the bourgeois use to convince workers that, like children, they should be afraid of the things they imagine lurking under their bed.

Adopting Communism would mean dispelling the bourgeois fiction of private and intellectual property (as opposed to one’s personal property). It would mean an end to the dictatorship of capital, and the social controls that the bourgeoisie have erected to constrict human activity in order to farm us for profit.

Instead of educating our children to prepare them for “a career,” they could be educated in the skills of living. Our health and physical education classes could indeed return to teaching health and physical education. The whole population could be given the basics of medical care and the rudiments of identifying and treating disease.

Freed from the anxieties and pressures of Capitalist society--no longer having to worry about where one will live, or how one will eat, or where all the other necessities of life will come from--at a stroke much of society’s afflictions would be eliminated, improving health dramatically without a single pill or incision. With no profits to sustain it, the sugar industry would wither and die, severely impacting national obesity rates. Imagine the impact the elimination of the automobile industry would have as well, reducing the number of wastefully produced luxury vehicles and their billions of tons of emissions, clearing our air and skies. The ridiculous regime of mandatory testing, and the poisonous “education” that has evolved to support it, would vanish. With access to higher education a guarantee, and no private property to starve such “unproductive” members of society, our children could enjoy the simple pleasures of recess again. No longer cooped up in jobs that they loathe and indeed make them ill, Americans would have uncountable hours instead to spend in recreation with their friends and family, enjoying among other things their country’s wealth of natural beauty.

Technology changes more and more day by day, and we’re rapidly approaching the point where even the most rural areas have access to the sum of medical knowledge on the internet. Where infrastructure or remoteness limit the availability of medical care, an internet connection to sophisticated medical AI can provide millions with immediate and accurate medical advise. Consider technology like the epipen or asthma inhaler. While I don’t imagine it’s possible to simplify all medical devices to such pick-up-and-use types of equipment, with the medical education they receive in school and access to reliable medical information via the internet, it would be possible to make equipment and techniques that any able individual could use to treat themselves for common and mundane afflictions. Medical care need not be the exclusive province, or entitlement, of some wealthy elite class of privileged gatekeepers.

Yet, still, what about the doctors? There would still be a need, however improved living conditions and education become. Some things cannot be left to amateurs, however enthusiastic or skilled, and specialized training will remain a necessity to one degree or another for some time. Would we need then to elevate doctors above the mean of hoi polloi, just to ensure that these necessary skills exist in our society?

I believe that assumption to be fundamentally false, and indeed another unconscious betrayal of the pervasiveness of bourgeois ideology. The popular belief that money is the primary, if not only, motivating factor for people. Despite the use of money being the exception rather than the rule throughout history, the fantasy that people are indigent and lazy without cash in their pocket or a knife at their back has been relentlessly cultivated in the popular mind, and yet we know that this simply isn’t true. Most people aren’t motivated by money, and compulsion only breeds misery.

Without the constant population shuffling caused by the modern market economy, I believe that people would begin to settle as they did in bygone decades. Individuals would no longer need to leave home to “find a job.” Friends and family and other social connections would congregate, and the community could rebuild itself. This would be the source of your doctors and surgeons, the natural human instinct toward community participation and effort, and those remarkable people that feel this most strongly. Those individuals who become physicians only to grow rich would be excluded--and rightfully so--from the profession, and the quality and abundance of medical care would rise. That’s aside from the salutatory effects of the diminishing alienation resulting from strengthening communal ties. Happy people, surrounded by friends and family, secure in their bodies, homes, and livelihood, are fundamentally healthier people. This would be the most major contributing factor in expanding the availability, access, and quality of medicine: to begin with, there would be fewer sick people. There would be fewer sick doctors, too, no longer burdened by the insane costs of medical school and the large debts accrued from long years of study.

This is a rather rosy estimation, but I think it is the correct one. Communism doesn’t mean poverty; it doesn’t mean now, but different; nor does it mean Capitalism, everyone makes the same wage. Communism is the complete transformation of society, by our own hands, by our own rational actions to satisfy our own needs and those of our community, in the absence of all the coercive and exploitative forces by which we’ve been imprisoned and to which we’ve been conditioned. Just the thought makes me feel better already.

[unsettlingshortstories]

Rappaccini’s Daughter

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844)

We do not remember to have seen any translated specimens of the productions of M. de l'Aubepine—a fact the less to be wondered at, as his very name is unknown to many of his own countrymen as well as to the student of foreign literature. As a writer, he seems to occupy an unfortunate position between the Transcendentalists (who, under one name or another, have their share in all the current literature of the world) and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude. If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy, and unsubstantial in his modes of development to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular to satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of the former, he must necessarily find himself without an audience, except here and there an individual or possibly an isolated clique. His writings, to do them justice, are not altogether destitute of fancy and originality; they might have won him greater reputation but for an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions. His fictions are sometimes historical, sometimes of the present day, and sometimes, so far as can be discovered, have little or no reference either to time or space. In any case, he generally contents himself with a very slight embroidery of outward manners,—the faintest possible counterfeit of real life,—and endeavors to create an interest by some less obvious peculiarity of the subject. Occasionally a breath of Nature, a raindrop of pathos and tenderness, or a gleam of humor, will find its way into the midst of his fantastic imagery, and make us feel as if, after all, we were yet within the limits of our native earth. We will only add to this very cursory notice that M. de l'Aubepine's productions, if the reader chance to take them in precisely the proper point of view, may amuse a leisure hour as well as those of a brighter man; if otherwise, they can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.

Our author is voluminous; he continues to write and publish with as much praiseworthy and indefatigable prolixity as if his efforts were crowned with the brilliant success that so justly attends those of Eugene Sue. His first appearance was by a collection of stories in a long series of volumes entitled "Contes deux fois racontees." The titles of some of his more recent works (we quote from memory) are as follows: "Le Voyage Celeste a Chemin de Fer," 3 tom., 1838; "Le nouveau Pere Adam et la nouvelle Mere Eve," 2 tom., 1839; "Roderic; ou le Serpent a l'estomac," 2 tom., 1840; "Le Culte du Feu," a folio volume of ponderous research into the religion and ritual of the old Persian Ghebers, published in 1841; "La Soiree du Chateau en Espagne," 1 tom., 8vo, 1842; and "L'Artiste du Beau; ou le Papillon Mecanique," 5 tom., 4to, 1843. Our somewhat wearisome perusal of this startling catalogue of volumes has left behind it a certain personal affection and sympathy, though by no means admiration, for M. de l'Aubepine; and we would fain do the little in our power towards introducing him favorably to the American public. The ensuing tale is a translation of his "Beatrice; ou la Belle Empoisonneuse," recently published in "La Revue Anti-Aristocratique." This journal, edited by the Comte de Bearhaven, has for some years past led the defence of liberal principles and popular rights with a faithfulness and ability worthy of all praise.

A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble, and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings of a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time out of his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked around the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.

"Holy Virgin, signor!" cried old Dame Lisabetta, who, won by the youth's remarkable beauty of person, was kindly endeavoring to give the chamber a habitable air, "what a sigh was that to come out of a young man's heart! Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of Heaven, then, put your head out of the window, and you will see as bright sunshine as you have left in Naples."

Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as cheerful as that of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden beneath the window and expended its fostering influences on a variety of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care.

"Does this garden belong to the house?" asked Giovanni.

"Heaven forbid, signor, unless it were fruitful of better pot herbs than any that grow there now," answered old Lisabetta. "No; that garden is cultivated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of as far as Naples. It is said that he distils these plants into medicines that are as potent as a charm. Oftentimes you may see the signor doctor at work, and perchance the signora, his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers that grow in the garden."

The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect of the chamber; and, commending the young man to the protection of the saints, took her departure.

Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down into the garden beneath his window. From its appearance, he judged it to be one of those botanic gardens which were of earlier date in Padua than elsewhere in Italy or in the world. Or, not improbably, it might once have been the pleasure-place of an opulent family; for there was the ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however, continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man's window, and made him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song unceasingly and without heeding the vicissitudes around it, while one century imbodied it in marble and another scattered the perishable garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which the water subsided grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and in some instances, flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem; and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough to illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. Every portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less beautiful, still bore tokens of assiduous care, as if all had their individual virtues, known to the scientific mind that fostered them. Some were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and others in common garden pots; some crept serpent-like along the ground or climbed on high, using whatever means of ascent was offered them. One plant had wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus, which was thus quite veiled and shrouded in a drapery of hanging foliage, so happily arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study.

While Giovanni stood at the window he heard a rustling behind a screen of leaves, and became aware that a person was at work in the garden. His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man, dressed in a scholar's garb of black. He was beyond the middle term of life, with gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly marked with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart.

Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among themselves in hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of this deep intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself and these vegetable existences. On the contrary, he avoided their actual touch or the direct inhaling of their odors with a caution that impressed Giovanni most disagreeably; for the man's demeanor was that of one walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatality. It was strangely frightful to the young man's imagination to see this air of insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and labor of the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? And this man, with such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow,—was he the Adam?

The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the dead leaves or pruning the too luxuriant growth of the shrubs, defended his hands with a pair of thick gloves. Nor were these his only armor. When, in his walk through the garden, he came to the magnificent plant that hung its purple gems beside the marble fountain, he placed a kind of mask over his mouth and nostrils, as if all this beauty did but conceal a deadlier malice; but, finding his task still too dangerous, he drew back, removed the mask, and called loudly, but in the infirm voice of a person affected with inward disease, "Beatrice! Beatrice!"

"Here am I, my father. What would you?" cried a rich and youthful voice from the window of the opposite house—a voice as rich as a tropical sunset, and which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable. "Are you in the garden?"

"Yes, Beatrice," answered the gardener, "and I need your help."

Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and compressed, as it were and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone. Yet Giovanni's fancy must have grown morbid while he looked down into the garden; for the impression which the fair stranger made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they, more beautiful than the richest of them, but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden path, it was observable that she handled and inhaled the odor of several of the plants which her father had most sedulously avoided.

"Here, Beatrice," said the latter, "see how many needful offices require to be done to our chief treasure. Yet, shattered as I am, my life might pay the penalty of approaching it so closely as circumstances demand. Henceforth, I fear, this plant must be consigned to your sole charge."

"And gladly will I undertake it," cried again the rich tones of the young lady, as she bent towards the magnificent plant and opened her arms as if to embrace it. "Yes, my sister, my splendour, it shall be Beatrice's task to nurse and serve thee; and thou shalt reward her with thy kisses and perfumed breath, which to her is as the breath of life."

Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so strikingly expressed in her words, she busied herself with such attentions as the plant seemed to require; and Giovanni, at his lofty window, rubbed his eyes and almost doubted whether it were a girl tending her favorite flower, or one sister performing the duties of affection to another. The scene soon terminated. Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his labors in the garden, or that his watchful eye had caught the stranger's face, he now took his daughter's arm and retired. Night was already closing in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the plants and steal upward past the open window; and Giovanni, closing the lattice, went to his couch and dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful girl. Flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape.

But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun's decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni's first movement, on starting from sleep, was to throw open the window and gaze down into the garden which his dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was surprised and a little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact an affair it proved to be, in the first rays of the sun which gilded the dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter beauty to each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced that, in the heart of the barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could not determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both was due to their own qualities and how much to his wonder-working fancy; but he was inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter.

In the course of the day he paid his respects to Signor Pietro Baglioni, professor of medicine in the university, a physician of eminent repute to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction. The professor was an elderly personage, apparently of genial nature, and habits that might almost be called jovial. He kept the young man to dinner, and made himself very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness of his conversation, especially when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan wine. Giovanni, conceiving that men of science, inhabitants of the same city, must needs be on familiar terms with one another, took an opportunity to mention the name of Dr. Rappaccini. But the professor did not respond with so much cordiality as he had anticipated.

"Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine," said Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of Giovanni, "to withhold due and well-considered praise of a physician so eminently skilled as Rappaccini; but, on the other hand, I should answer it but scantily to my conscience were I to permit a worthy youth like yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son of an ancient friend, to imbibe erroneous ideas respecting a man who might hereafter chance to hold your life and death in his hands. The truth is, our worshipful Dr. Rappaccini has as much science as any member of the faculty—with perhaps one single exception—in Padua, or all Italy; but there are certain grave objections to his professional character."

"And what are they?" asked the young man.

"Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so inquisitive about physicians?" said the professor, with a smile. "But as for Rappaccini, it is said of him—and I, who know the man well, can answer for its truth—that he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge."

"Methinks he is an awful man indeed," remarked Guasconti, mentally recalling the cold and purely intellectual aspect of Rappaccini. "And yet, worshipful professor, is it not a noble spirit? Are there many men capable of so spiritual a love of science?"

"God forbid," answered the professor, somewhat testily; "at least, unless they take sounder views of the healing art than those adopted by Rappaccini. It is his theory that all medicinal virtues are comprised within those substances which we term vegetable poisons. These he cultivates with his own hands, and is said even to have produced new varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world withal. That the signor doctor does less mischief than might be expected with such dangerous substances is undeniable. Now and then, it must be owned, he has effected, or seemed to effect, a marvellous cure; but, to tell you my private mind, Signor Giovanni, he should receive little credit for such instances of success,—they being probably the work of chance,—but should be held strictly accountable for his failures, which may justly be considered his own work."

The youth might have taken Baglioni's opinions with many grains of allowance had he known that there was a professional warfare of long continuance between him and Dr. Rappaccini, in which the latter was generally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to certain black-letter tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of the University of Padua.

"I know not, most learned professor," returned Giovanni, after musing on what had been said of Rappaccini's exclusive zeal for science,—"I know not how dearly this physician may love his art; but surely there is one object more dear to him. He has a daughter."

"Aha!" cried the professor, with a laugh. "So now our friend Giovanni's secret is out. You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men in Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had the good hap to see her face. I know little of the Signora Beatrice save that Rappaccini is said to have instructed her deeply in his science, and that, young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified to fill a professor's chair. Perchance her father destines her for mine! Other absurd rumors there be, not worth talking about or listening to. So now, Signor Giovanni, drink off your glass of lachryma."

Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated with the wine he had quaffed, and which caused his brain to swim with strange fantasies in reference to Dr. Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his way, happening to pass by a florist's, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers.

Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near the window, but within the shadow thrown by the depth of the wall, so that he could look down into the garden with little risk of being discovered. All beneath his eye was a solitude. The strange plants were basking in the sunshine, and now and then nodding gently to one another, as if in acknowledgment of sympathy and kindred. In the midst, by the shattered fountain, grew the magnificent shrub, with its purple gems clustering all over it; they glowed in the air, and gleamed back again out of the depths of the pool, which thus seemed to overflow with colored radiance from the rich reflection that was steeped in it. At first, as we have said, the garden was a solitude. Soon, however,—as Giovanni had half hoped, half feared, would be the case,—a figure appeared beneath the antique sculptured portal, and came down between the rows of plants, inhaling their various perfumes as if she were one of those beings of old classic fable that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding Beatrice, the young man was even startled to perceive how much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so vivid, was its character, that she glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered to himself, positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals of the garden path. Her face being now more revealed than on the former occasion, he was struck by its expression of simplicity and sweetness,—qualities that had not entered into his idea of her character, and which made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might be. Nor did he fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gemlike flowers over the fountain,—a resemblance which Beatrice seemed to have indulged a fantastic humor in heightening, both by the arrangement of her dress and the selection of its hues.

Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate embrace—so intimate that her features were hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets all intermingled with the flowers.

"Give me thy breath, my sister," exclaimed Beatrice; "for I am faint with common air. And give me this flower of thine, which I separate with gentlest fingers from the stem and place it close beside my heart."

With these words the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini plucked one of the richest blossoms of the shrub, and was about to fasten it in her bosom. But now, unless Giovanni's draughts of wine had bewildered his senses, a singular incident occurred. A small orange-colored reptile, of the lizard or chameleon species, chanced to be creeping along the path, just at the feet of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni,—but, at the distance from which he gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything so minute,—it appeared to him, however, that a drop or two of moisture from the broken stem of the flower descended upon the lizard's head. For an instant the reptile contorted itself violently, and then lay motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice observed this remarkable phenomenon and crossed herself, sadly, but without surprise; nor did she therefore hesitate to arrange the fatal flower in her bosom. There it blushed, and almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a precious stone, adding to her dress and aspect the one appropriate charm which nothing else in the world could have supplied. But Giovanni, out of the shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank back, and murmured and trembled.

"Am I awake? Have I my senses?" said he to himself. "What is this being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?"

Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden, approaching closer beneath Giovanni's window, so that he was compelled to thrust his head quite out of its concealment in order to gratify the intense and painful curiosity which she excited. At this moment there came a beautiful insect over the garden wall; it had, perhaps, wandered through the city, and found no flowers or verdure among those antique haunts of men until the heavy perfumes of Dr. Rappaccini's shrubs had lured it from afar. Without alighting on the flowers, this winged brightness seemed to be attracted by Beatrice, and lingered in the air and fluttered about her head. Now, here it could not be but that Giovanni Guasconti's eyes deceived him. Be that as it might, he fancied that, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet; its bright wings shivered; it was dead—from no cause that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere of her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily as she bent over the dead insect.

An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the window. There she beheld the beautiful head of the young man—rather a Grecian than an Italian head, with fair, regular features, and a glistening of gold among his ringlets—gazing down upon her like a being that hovered in mid air. Scarcely knowing what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet which he had hitherto held in his hand.

"Signora," said he, "there are pure and healthful flowers. Wear them for the sake of Giovanni Guasconti."

"Thanks, signor," replied Beatrice, with her rich voice, that came forth as it were like a gush of music, and with a mirthful expression half childish and half woman-like. "I accept your gift, and would fain recompense it with this precious purple flower; but if I toss it into the air it will not reach you. So Signor Guasconti must even content himself with my thanks."

She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then, as if inwardly ashamed at having stepped aside from her maidenly reserve to respond to a stranger's greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so great a distance.

For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that looked into Dr. Rappaccini's garden, as if something ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a glance. He felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the influence of an unintelligible power by the communication which he had opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself at once; the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar and daylight view of Beatrice—thus bringing her rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all, while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near this extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility even of intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing. Guasconti had not a deep heart—or, at all events, its depths were not sounded now; but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever pitch. Whether or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath, the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his breast, alternately vanquishing one another and starting up afresh to renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.

Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit by a rapid walk through the streets of Padua or beyond its gates: his footsteps kept time with the throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to accelerate itself to a race. One day he found himself arrested; his arm was seized by a portly personage, who had turned back on recognizing the young man and expended much breath in overtaking him.

"Signor Giovanni! Stay, my young friend!" cried he. "Have you forgotten me? That might well be the case if I were as much altered as yourself."

It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever since their first meeting, from a doubt that the professor's sagacity would look too deeply into his secrets. Endeavoring to recover himself, he stared forth wildly from his inner world into the outer one and spoke like a man in a dream.

"Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro Baglioni. Now let me pass!"

"Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti," said the professor, smiling, but at the same time scrutinizing the youth with an earnest glance. "What! did I grow up side by side with your father? and shall his son pass me like a stranger in these old streets of Padua? Stand still, Signor Giovanni; for we must have a word or two before we part."

"Speedily, then, most worshipful professor, speedily," said Giovanni, with feverish impatience. "Does not your worship see that I am in haste?"

Now, while he was speaking there came a man in black along the street, stooping and moving feebly like a person in inferior health. His face was all overspread with a most sickly and sallow hue, but yet so pervaded with an expression of piercing and active intellect that an observer might easily have overlooked the merely physical attributes and have seen only this wonderful energy. As he passed, this person exchanged a cold and distant salutation with Baglioni, but fixed his eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness that seemed to bring out whatever was within him worthy of notice. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar quietness in the look, as if taking merely a speculative, not a human interest, in the young man.

"It is Dr. Rappaccini!" whispered the professor when the stranger had passed. "Has he ever seen your face before?"

"Not that I know," answered Giovanni, starting at the name.

"He HAS seen you! he must have seen you!" said Baglioni, hastily. "For some purpose or other, this man of science is making a study of you. I know that look of his! It is the same that coldly illuminates his face as he bends over a bird, a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in pursuance of some experiment, he has killed by the perfume of a flower; a look as deep as Nature itself, but without Nature's warmth of love. Signor Giovanni, I will stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of Rappaccini's experiments!"

"Will you make a fool of me?" cried Giovanni, passionately. "THAT, signor professor, were an untoward experiment."

"Patience! patience!" replied the imperturbable professor. "I tell thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scientific interest in thee. Thou hast fallen into fearful hands! And the Signora Beatrice,—what part does she act in this mystery?"

But Guasconti, finding Baglioni's pertinacity intolerable, here broke away, and was gone before the professor could again seize his arm. He looked after the young man intently and shook his head.

"This must not be," said Baglioni to himself. "The youth is the son of my old friend, and shall not come to any harm from which the arcana of medical science can preserve him. Besides, it is too insufferable an impertinence in Rappaccini, thus to snatch the lad out of my own hands, as I may say, and make use of him for his infernal experiments. This daughter of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned Rappaccini, I may foil you where you little dream of it!"

Meanwhile Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route, and at length found himself at the door of his lodgings. As he crossed the threshold he was met by old Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently desirous to attract his attention; vainly, however, as the ebullition of his feelings had momentarily subsided into a cold and dull vacuity. He turned his eyes full upon the withered face that was puckering itself into a smile, but seemed to behold it not. The old dame, therefore, laid her grasp upon his cloak.

"Signor! signor!" whispered she, still with a smile over the whole breadth of her visage, so that it looked not unlike a grotesque carving in wood, darkened by centuries. "Listen, signor! There is a private entrance into the garden!"

"What do you say?" exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about, as if an inanimate thing should start into feverish life. "A private entrance into Dr. Rappaccini's garden?"

"Hush! hush! not so loud!" whispered Lisabetta, putting her hand over his mouth. "Yes; into the worshipful doctor's garden, where you may see all his fine shrubbery. Many a young man in Padua would give gold to be admitted among those flowers."

Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand.

"Show me the way," said he.

A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with Baglioni, crossed his mind, that this interposition of old Lisabetta might perchance be connected with the intrigue, whatever were its nature, in which the professor seemed to suppose that Dr. Rappaccini was involving him. But such a suspicion, though it disturbed Giovanni, was inadequate to restrain him. The instant that he was aware of the possibility of approaching Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence to do so. It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was irrevocably within her sphere, and must obey the law that whirled him onward, in ever-lessening circles, towards a result which he did not attempt to foreshadow; and yet, strange to say, there came across him a sudden doubt whether this intense interest on his part were not delusory; whether it were really of so deep and positive a nature as to justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position; whether it were not merely the fantasy of a young man's brain, only slightly or not at all connected with his heart.

He paused, hesitated, turned half about, but again went on. His withered guide led him along several obscure passages, and finally undid a door, through which, as it was opened, there came the sight and sound of rustling leaves, with the broken sunshine glimmering among them. Giovanni stepped forth, and, forcing himself through the entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance, stood beneath his own window in the open area of Dr. Rappaccini's garden.

How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance. So was it now with Giovanni. Day after day his pulses had throbbed with feverish blood at the improbable idea of an interview with Beatrice, and of standing with her, face to face, in this very garden, basking in the Oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching from her full gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence. But now there was a singular and untimely equanimity within his breast. He threw a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father were present, and, perceiving that he was alone, began a critical observation of the plants.

The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several also would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery, of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God's making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably the result of experiment, which in one or two cases had succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the questionable and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth of the garden. In fine, Giovanni recognized but two or three plants in the collection, and those of a kind that he well knew to be poisonous. While busy with these contemplations he heard the rustling of a silken garment, and, turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from beneath the sculptured portal.

Giovanni had not considered with himself what should be his deportment; whether he should apologize for his intrusion into the garden, or assume that he was there with the privity at least, if not by the desire, of Dr. Rappaccini or his daughter; but Beatrice's manner placed him at his ease, though leaving him still in doubt by what agency he had gained admittance. She came lightly along the path and met him near the broken fountain. There was surprise in her face, but brightened by a simple and kind expression of pleasure.

"You are a connoisseur in flowers, signor," said Beatrice, with a smile, alluding to the bouquet which he had flung her from the window. "It is no marvel, therefore, if the sight of my father's rare collection has tempted you to take a nearer view. If he were here, he could tell you many strange and interesting facts as to the nature and habits of these shrubs; for he has spent a lifetime in such studies, and this garden is his world."

"And yourself, lady," observed Giovanni, "if fame says true,—you likewise are deeply skilled in the virtues indicated by these rich blossoms and these spicy perfumes. Would you deign to be my instructress, I should prove an apter scholar than if taught by Signor Rappaccini himself."

"Are there such idle rumors?" asked Beatrice, with the music of a pleasant laugh. "Do people say that I am skilled in my father's science of plants? What a jest is there! No; though I have grown up among these flowers, I know no more of them than their hues and perfume; and sometimes methinks I would fain rid myself of even that small knowledge. There are many flowers here, and those not the least brilliant, that shock and offend me when they meet my eye. But pray, signor, do not believe these stories about my science. Believe nothing of me save what you see with your own eyes."

"And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?" asked Giovanni, pointedly, while the recollection of former scenes made him shrink. "No, signora; you demand too little of me. Bid me believe nothing save what comes from your own lips."

It would appear that Beatrice understood him. There came a deep flush to her cheek; but she looked full into Giovanni's eyes, and responded to his gaze of uneasy suspicion with a queenlike haughtiness.

"I do so bid you, signor," she replied. "Forget whatever you may have fancied in regard to me. If true to the outward senses, still it may be false in its essence; but the words of Beatrice Rappaccini's lips are true from the depths of the heart outward. Those you may believe."

A fervor glowed in her whole aspect and beamed upon Giovanni's consciousness like the light of truth itself; but while she spoke there was a fragrance in the atmosphere around her, rich and delightful, though evanescent, yet which the young man, from an indefinable reluctance, scarcely dared to draw into his lungs. It might be the odor of the flowers. Could it be Beatrice's breath which thus embalmed her words with a strange richness, as if by steeping them in her heart? A faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni and flitted away; he seemed to gaze through the beautiful girl's eyes into her transparent soul, and felt no more doubt or fear.

The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice's manner vanished; she became gay, and appeared to derive a pure delight from her communion with the youth not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island might have felt conversing with a voyager from the civilized world. Evidently her experience of life had been confined within the limits of that garden. She talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or summer clouds, and now asked questions in reference to the city, or Giovanni's distant home, his friends, his mother, and his sisters—questions indicating such seclusion, and such lack of familiarity with modes and forms, that Giovanni responded as if to an infant. Her spirit gushed out before him like a fresh rill that was just catching its first glimpse of the sunlight and wondering at the reflections of earth and sky which were flung into its bosom. There came thoughts, too, from a deep source, and fantasies of a gemlike brilliancy, as if diamonds and rubies sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and anon there gleamed across the young man's mind a sense of wonder that he should be walking side by side with the being who had so wrought upon his imagination, whom he had idealized in such hues of terror, in whom he had positively witnessed such manifestations of dreadful attributes,—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother, and should find her so human and so maidenlike. But such reflections were only momentary; the effect of her character was too real not to make itself familiar at once.

In this free intercourse they had strayed through the garden, and now, after many turns among its avenues, were come to the shattered fountain, beside which grew the magnificent shrub, with its treasury of glowing blossoms. A fragrance was diffused from it which Giovanni recognized as identical with that which he had attributed to Beatrice's breath, but incomparably more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it, Giovanni beheld her press her hand to her bosom as if her heart were throbbing suddenly and painfully.

"For the first time in my life," murmured she, addressing the shrub, "I had forgotten thee."

"I remember, signora," said Giovanni, "that you once promised to reward me with one of these living gems for the bouquet which I had the happy boldness to fling to your feet. Permit me now to pluck it as a memorial of this interview."

He made a step towards the shrub with extended hand; but Beatrice darted forward, uttering a shriek that went through his heart like a dagger. She caught his hand and drew it back with the whole force of her slender figure. Giovanni felt her touch thrilling through his fibres.

"Touch it not!" exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. "Not for thy life! It is fatal!"

Then, hiding her face, she fled from him and vanished beneath the sculptured portal. As Giovanni followed her with his eyes, he beheld the emaciated figure and pale intelligence of Dr. Rappaccini, who had been watching the scene, he knew not how long, within the shadow of the entrance.

No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than the image of Beatrice came back to his passionate musings, invested with all the witchery that had been gathering around it ever since his first glimpse of her, and now likewise imbued with a tender warmth of girlish womanhood. She was human; her nature was endowed with all gentle and feminine qualities; she was worthiest to be worshipped; she was capable, surely, on her part, of the height and heroism of love. Those tokens which he had hitherto considered as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her physical and moral system were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle sophistry of passion transmitted into a golden crown of enchantment, rendering Beatrice the more admirable by so much as she was the more unique. Whatever had looked ugly was now beautiful; or, if incapable of such a change, it stole away and hid itself among those shapeless half ideas which throng the dim region beyond the daylight of our perfect consciousness. Thus did he spend the night, nor fell asleep until the dawn had begun to awake the slumbering flowers in Dr. Rappaccini's garden, whither Giovanni's dreams doubtless led him. Up rose the sun in his due season, and, flinging his beams upon the young man's eyelids, awoke him to a sense of pain. When thoroughly aroused, he became sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand—in his right hand—the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own when he was on the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers. On the back of that hand there was now a purple print like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist.

Oh, how stubbornly does love,—or even that cunning semblance of love which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into the heart,—how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist! Giovanni wrapped a handkerchief about his hand and wondered what evil thing had stung him, and soon forgot his pain in a reverie of Beatrice.

After the first interview, a second was in the inevitable course of what we call fate. A third; a fourth; and a meeting with Beatrice in the garden was no longer an incident in Giovanni's daily life, but the whole space in which he might be said to live; for the anticipation and memory of that ecstatic hour made up the remainder. Nor was it otherwise with the daughter of Rappaccini. She watched for the youth's appearance, and flew to his side with confidence as unreserved as if they had been playmates from early infancy—as if they were such playmates still. If, by any unwonted chance, he failed to come at the appointed moment, she stood beneath the window and sent up the rich sweetness of her tones to float around him in his chamber and echo and reverberate throughout his heart: "Giovanni! Giovanni! Why tarriest thou? Come down!" And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous flowers.

But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still a reserve in Beatrice's demeanor, so rigidly and invariably sustained that the idea of infringing it scarcely occurred to his imagination. By all appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered by the way; they had even spoken love in those gushes of passion when their spirits darted forth in articulated breath like tongues of long-hidden flame; and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress such as love claims and hallows. He had never touched one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment—so marked was the physical barrier between them—had never been waved against him by a breeze. On the few occasions when Giovanni had seemed tempted to overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore such a look of desolate separation, shuddering at itself, that not a spoken word was requisite to repel him. At such times he was startled at the horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns of his heart and stared him in the face; his love grew thin and faint as the morning mist, his doubts alone had substance. But, when Beatrice's face brightened again after the momentary shadow, she was transformed at once from the mysterious, questionable being whom he had watched with so much awe and horror; she was now the beautiful and unsophisticated girl whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty beyond all other knowledge.

A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni's last meeting with Baglioni. One morning, however, he was disagreeably surprised by a visit from the professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole weeks, and would willingly have forgotten still longer. Given up as he had long been to a pervading excitement, he could tolerate no companions except upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his present state of feeling. Such sympathy was not to be expected from Professor Baglioni.

The visitor chatted carelessly for a few moments about the gossip of the city and the university, and then took up another topic.

"I have been reading an old classic author lately," said he, "and met with a story that strangely interested me. Possibly you may remember it. It is of an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as the sunset; but what especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath—richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander, as was natural to a youthful conqueror, fell in love at first sight with this magnificent stranger; but a certain sage physician, happening to be present, discovered a terrible secret in regard to her."

"And what was that?" asked Giovanni, turning his eyes downward to avoid those of the professor.

"That this lovely woman," continued Baglioni, with emphasis, "had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have been poison—her embrace death. Is not this a marvellous tale?"

"A childish fable," answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his chair. "I marvel how your worship finds time to read such nonsense among your graver studies."

"By the by," said the professor, looking uneasily about him, "what singular fragrance is this in your apartment? Is it the perfume of your gloves? It is faint, but delicious; and yet, after all, by no means agreeable. Were I to breathe it long, methinks it would make me ill. It is like the breath of a flower; but I see no flowers in the chamber."

"Nor are there any," replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the professor spoke; "nor, I think, is there any fragrance except in your worship's imagination. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the sensual and the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this manner. The recollection of a perfume, the bare idea of it, may easily be mistaken for a present reality."

"Ay; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks," said Baglioni; "and, were I to fancy any kind of odor, it would be that of some vile apothecary drug, wherewith my fingers are likely enough to be imbued. Our worshipful friend Rappaccini, as I have heard, tinctures his medicaments with odors richer than those of Araby. Doubtless, likewise, the fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her patients with draughts as sweet as a maiden's breath; but woe to him that sips them!"

Giovanni's face evinced many contending emotions. The tone in which the professor alluded to the pure and lovely daughter of Rappaccini was a torture to his soul; and yet the intimation of a view of her character opposite to his own, gave instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim suspicions, which now grinned at him like so many demons. But he strove hard to quell them and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover's perfect faith.

"Signor professor," said he, "you were my father's friend; perchance, too, it is your purpose to act a friendly part towards his son. I would fain feel nothing towards you save respect and deference; but I pray you to observe, signor, that there is one subject on which we must not speak. You know not the Signora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore, estimate the wrong—the blasphemy, I may even say—that is offered to her character by a light or injurious word."

"Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!" answered the professor, with a calm expression of pity, "I know this wretched girl far better than yourself. You shall hear the truth in respect to the poisoner Rappaccini and his poisonous daughter; yes, poisonous as she is beautiful. Listen; for, even should you do violence to my gray hairs, it shall not silence me. That old fable of the Indian woman has become a truth by the deep and deadly science of Rappaccini and in the person of the lovely Beatrice."

Giovanni groaned and hid his face

"Her father," continued Baglioni, "was not restrained by natural affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing."

"It is a dream," muttered Giovanni to himself; "surely it is a dream."

"But," resumed the professor, "be of good cheer, son of my friend. It is not yet too late for the rescue. Possibly we may even succeed in bringing back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature, from which her father's madness has estranged her. Behold this little silver vase! It was wrought by the hands of the renowned Benvenuto Cellini, and is well worthy to be a love gift to the fairest dame in Italy. But its contents are invaluable. One little sip of this antidote would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias innocuous. Doubt not that it will be as efficacious against those of Rappaccini. Bestow the vase, and the precious liquid within it, on your Beatrice, and hopefully await the result."

Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver vial on the table and withdrew, leaving what he had said to produce its effect upon the young man's mind.

"We will thwart Rappaccini yet," thought he, chuckling to himself, as he descended the stairs; "but, let us confess the truth of him, he is a wonderful man—a wonderful man indeed; a vile empiric, however, in his practice, and therefore not to be tolerated by those who respect the good old rules of the medical profession."

Throughout Giovanni's whole acquaintance with Beatrice, he had occasionally, as we have said, been haunted by dark surmises as to her character; yet so thoroughly had she made herself felt by him as a simple, natural, most affectionate, and guileless creature, that the image now held up by Professor Baglioni looked as strange and incredible as if it were not in accordance with his own original conception. True, there were ugly recollections connected with his first glimpses of the beautiful girl; he could not quite forget the bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the insect that perished amid the sunny air, by no ostensible agency save the fragrance of her breath. These incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might appear to be substantiated. There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such better evidence had Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice, though rather by the necessary force of her high attributes than by any deep and generous faith on his part. But now his spirit was incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which the early enthusiasm of passion had exalted it; he fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts, and defiled therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice's image. Not that he gave her up; he did but distrust. He resolved to institute some decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all, whether there were those dreadful peculiarities in her physical nature which could not be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul. His eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the insect, and the flowers; but if he could witness, at the distance of a few paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and healthful flower in Beatrice's hand, there would be room for no further question. With this idea he hastened to the florist's and purchased a bouquet that was still gemmed with the morning dew-drops.

It was now the customary hour of his daily interview with Beatrice. Before descending into the garden, Giovanni failed not to look at his figure in the mirror,—a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man, yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character. He did gaze, however, and said to himself that his features had never before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his cheeks so warm a hue of superabundant life.

"At least," thought he, "her poison has not yet insinuated itself into my system. I am no flower to perish in her grasp."

With that thought he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which he had never once laid aside from his hand. A thrill of indefinable horror shot through his frame on perceiving that those dewy flowers were already beginning to droop; they wore the aspect of things that had been fresh and lovely yesterday. Giovanni grew white as marble, and stood motionless before the mirror, staring at his own reflection there as at the likeness of something frightful. He remembered Baglioni's remark about the fragrance that seemed to pervade the chamber. It must have been the poison in his breath! Then he shuddered—shuddered at himself. Recovering from his stupor, he began to watch with curious eye a spider that was busily at work hanging its web from the antique cornice of the apartment, crossing and recrossing the artful system of interwoven lines—as vigorous and active a spider as ever dangled from an old ceiling. Giovanni bent towards the insect, and emitted a deep, long breath. The spider suddenly ceased its toil; the web vibrated with a tremor originating in the body of the small artisan. Again Giovanni sent forth a breath, deeper, longer, and imbued with a venomous feeling out of his heart: he knew not whether he were wicked, or only desperate. The spider made a convulsive gripe with his limbs and hung dead across the window.

"Accursed! accursed!" muttered Giovanni, addressing himself. "Hast thou grown so poisonous that this deadly insect perishes by thy breath?"

At that moment a rich, sweet voice came floating up from the garden.

"Giovanni! Giovanni! It is past the hour! Why tarriest thou? Come down!"

"Yes," muttered Giovanni again. "She is the only being whom my breath may not slay! Would that it might!"

He rushed down, and in an instant was standing before the bright and loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment ago his wrath and despair had been so fierce that he could have desired nothing so much as to wither her by a glance; but with her actual presence there came influences which had too real an existence to be at once shaken off: recollections of the delicate and benign power of her feminine nature, which had so often enveloped him in a religious calm; recollections of many a holy and passionate outgush of her heart, when the pure fountain had been unsealed from its depths and made visible in its transparency to his mental eye; recollections which, had Giovanni known how to estimate them, would have assured him that all this ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel. Incapable as he was of such high faith, still her presence had not utterly lost its magic. Giovanni's rage was quelled into an aspect of sullen insensibility. Beatrice, with a quick spiritual sense, immediately felt that there was a gulf of blackness between them which neither he nor she could pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came thus to the marble fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, in the midst of which grew the shrub that bore gem-like blossoms. Giovanni was affrighted at the eager enjoyment—the appetite, as it were—with which he found himself inhaling the fragrance of the flowers.

"Beatrice," asked he, abruptly, "whence came this shrub?"

"My father created it," answered she, with simplicity.

"Created it! created it!" repeated Giovanni. "What mean you, Beatrice?"

"He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of Nature," replied Beatrice; "and, at the hour when I first drew breath, this plant sprang from the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I was but his earthly child. Approach it not!" continued she, observing with terror that Giovanni was drawing nearer to the shrub. "It has qualities that you little dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni,—I grew up and blossomed with the plant and was nourished with its breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a human affection; for, alas!—hast thou not suspected it?—there was an awful doom."

Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and trembled. But her faith in his tenderness reassured her, and made her blush that she had doubted for an instant.

"There was an awful doom," she continued, "the effect of my father's fatal love of science, which estranged me from all society of my kind. Until Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, oh, how lonely was thy poor Beatrice!"

"Was it a hard doom?" asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.

"Only of late have I known how hard it was," answered she, tenderly. "Oh, yes; but my heart was torpid, and therefore quiet."

Giovanni's rage broke forth from his sullen gloom like a lightning flash out of a dark cloud.

"Accursed one!" cried he, with venomous scorn and anger. "And, finding thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me likewise from all the warmth of life and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!"

"Giovanni!" exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his face. The force of his words had not found its way into her mind; she was merely thunderstruck.

"Yes, poisonous thing!" repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion. "Thou hast done it! Thou hast blasted me! Thou hast filled my veins with poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature as thyself—a world's wonder of hideous monstrosity! Now, if our breath be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others, let us join our lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die!"

"What has befallen me?" murmured Beatrice, with a low moan out of her heart. "Holy Virgin, pity me, a poor heart-broken child!"

"Thou,—dost thou pray?" cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish scorn. "Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip our fingers in the holy water at the portal! They that come after us will perish as by a pestilence! Let us sign crosses in the air! It will be scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols!"

"Giovanni," said Beatrice, calmly, for her grief was beyond passion, "why dost thou join thyself with me thus in those terrible words? I, it is true, am the horrible thing thou namest me. But thou,—what hast thou to do, save with one other shudder at my hideous misery to go forth out of the garden and mingle with thy race, and forget there ever crawled on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?"

"Dost thou pretend ignorance?" asked Giovanni, scowling upon her. "Behold! this power have I gained from the pure daughter of Rappaccini."

There was a swarm of summer insects flitting through the air in search of the food promised by the flower odors of the fatal garden. They circled round Giovanni's head, and were evidently attracted towards him by the same influence which had drawn them for an instant within the sphere of several of the shrubs. He sent forth a breath among them, and smiled bitterly at Beatrice as at least a score of the insects fell dead upon the ground.

"I see it! I see it!" shrieked Beatrice. "It is my father's fatal science! No, no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never! never! I dreamed only to love thee and be with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass away, leaving but thine image in mine heart; for, Giovanni, believe it, though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God's creature, and craves love as its daily food. But my father,—he has united us in this fearful sympathy. Yes; spurn me, tread upon me, kill me! Oh, what is death after such words as thine? But it was not I. Not for a world of bliss would I have done it."

Giovanni's passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips. There now came across him a sense, mournful, and not without tenderness, of the intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice and himself. They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would be made none the less solitary by the densest throng of human life. Ought not, then, the desert of humanity around them to press this insulated pair closer together? If they should be cruel to one another, who was there to be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, might there not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice, by the hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an earthly union and earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice's love by Giovanni's blighting words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders of Time—she must bathe her hurts in some fount of paradise, and forget her grief in the light of immortality, and THERE be well.

But Giovanni did not know it.

"Dear Beatrice," said he, approaching her, while she shrank away as always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, "dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Behold! there is a medicine, potent, as a wise physician has assured me, and almost divine in its efficacy. It is composed of ingredients the most opposite to those by which thy awful father has brought this calamity upon thee and me. It is distilled of blessed herbs. Shall we not quaff it together, and thus be purified from evil?"

"Give it me!" said Beatrice, extending her hand to receive the little silver vial which Giovanni took from his bosom. She added, with a peculiar emphasis, "I will drink; but do thou await the result."

She put Baglioni's antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused; his bent form grew erect with conscious power; he spread out his hands over them in the attitude of a father imploring a blessing upon his children; but those were the same hands that had thrown poison into the stream of their lives. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously, and pressed her hand upon her heart.

"My daughter," said Rappaccini, "thou art no longer lonely in the world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub and bid thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now. My science and the sympathy between thee and him have so wrought within his system that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then, through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all besides!"

"My father," said Beatrice, feebly,—and still as she spoke she kept her hand upon her heart,—"wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?"

"Miserable!" exclaimed Rappaccini. "What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy—misery, to be able to quell the mightiest with a breath—misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?"

"I would fain have been loved, not feared," murmured Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. "But now it matters not. I am going, father, where the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will pass away like a dream-like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?"

To Beatrice,—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini's skill,—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim of man's ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunderstricken man of science, "Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is THIS the upshot of your experiment!"

[7r0773r]

The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim

Elsewhere people came and went, played card games and chess, tended to one another’s injuries, chased the bats. These men’s lives seemed, for the moment, untouched by fear. But I did not envy them. I felt the way humans must have felt in earlier times, at the dawn of our history, when the world was alive with primitive dangers and life depended for its preservation on the graces and fancies of hateful gods. 

“Go ahead, kill me,” I commanded the dog. He held on to his bone. What was he thinking? There was no way of knowing. He was just a dog. 

Winds blew and the music played. Snow piled up. People talked but I was not paying attention to their conversations. I felt the cold air. Gunner’s eyes shimmered and I held my book close to me. It was easy, looking into the dog’s mouth, at those white teeth and black gums, to imagine the power and authority our ancestors must have felt with companions like Gunner at their sides. 

What an animal. What was he doing with an alcoholic like Chuck for a master? “You understand about death, don’t you?” I said to him. He growled quietly then readjusted the bone, expertly, in his teeth. Snap snap. I regarded this as an answer of sorts. I confided to the Doberman, “Once upon a time men celebrated the seasons of death and rebirth with sacrifices and burnt offerings. The world was cold and forbidding, and if you didn’t watch out, your enemies would come up behind you and kill you with a spear or a club. A single night’s foul weather could destroy your crops, and then you might starve. Each day brought terror. Angry spirits unleashed thunder and lightning, diseases and pestilences, every species of ferocious beast. Men developed language to communicate their terror to one another. People were in pain all the time. They believed they would be rewarded for their pain. This is what is known as the human condition.”

 It seemed to me that the dog was paying attention. What a fierce nose Gunner had. Perhaps he knew, from my serious tone of voice, that I was speaking on weighty matters. I told him, “Over the years mankind has devised many ways to alleviate the pain of living, and much of human history can be understood as a death march toward this goal. Although suffering in life can sometimes be postponed, it can never be avoided. This is the central lesson of the world’s religions. Please don’t drool on the book. All right, Gunner? Good boy. This is the central lesson of the world’s religions. Where was I? The pain of existence is ours to bear. In order to bear it we must make sacrifices. We must offer ourselves up before God and our fellow man. That is the function of the Corn King.” 

The dog really did appear to be listening. It was as if he knew—was letting me know that he knew—what I was talking about. Of course I realize it would be going too far to suggest that animals comprehend the symbolic realm. But I gave Gunner the benefit of the doubt. “The Corn King is an archetypal harvest spirit. His story is as old as recorded time. In rude societies, before the dawn of civilization, when it was believed that spirits resided in all things, in the mountains and lakes, trees and grasses, cats and dogs” —I gave Gunner a smile; his ears pricked up and I went on —”no spirit was regarded with greater awe than the spirit of the corn. From corn came food and grain alcohol. Life depended on the harvest, and so human beings were routinely sacrificed to ensure the fertility of the crop. These were martyrs. While alive—and death was painful, very painful, Gunner—the Corn King’s human representatives were worshiped as gods. It was their blood that enriched the earth, their tears that brought the rains, their flesh that fatted the land. They died so that others might live. Today, mimicry of this ancient practice is common in many popular religions.” At this point the dog began to lose interest. He made a yawning sound and fiddled with the bone in his mouth. I quickly said, “In some instances, the Corn King’s still-beating heart was cut out and devoured!"

I felt nervous telling Gunner this. That blood on my shirtfront was a perfect target. We’ve all heard the frightening stories of domesticated animals regressing into feral states and tearing their owners limb from limb. Gunner had made short work of that pork chop. The dog’s nose twitched. Perhaps he had eaten enough. I explained to him that modern men had lost touch with ancient rhythms of death and regeneration, but that it was possible—if you took intoxicants and wore the right mask and costume—to regain connection with the primeval aspects of the Self, and to enact, in ritualized form, the important celebrations of sacrifice and abasement; that this was, in some respects, what family get-togethers were all about. I wrapped up, “You see, Gunner, the Corn King is my gift to my brothers. Every year I have a few drinks, then get in costume, and they try to catch me. Luckily, most of those guys are out of shape. Ultimately, the Corn King must die. In this way the family of man can prosper and thrive.” 

This ended my talk with the dog. But Gunner did not back off right away. First he allowed me to pet his head. What a pleasant creature. He only wanted what we all want from time to time, to submit and feel love. “Gunner, how would you like to be my dog?” 

My fear of him was gone. In fear’s place was a new self-possession; I understood why people keep animals. I rose from my chair—carefully holding A Complete Guide to Heraldry in front of my body, just to be safe—and I didn’t even bother pretending to have a hurt foot. So what if Lester said something? It was late and the time had come at last to go over to the African masks, choose a colorful headdress from the wall, put it on my head, then run around and shout the kinds of obscenities that get people mad. 

“Come on, Gunner.” (pp. 166-70)

***

There is nothing quite like the primitive ecstasy of pissing somewhere besides the bathroom. I rate the act very highly. Pissing in nature or in some dark corner, as I was, captures and brings into consciousness certain archaic versions of a man’s most secret Self—those aspects of character and identity that remain, in civilized daily life, veiled, disguised, sealed away: the messy, narcissistic, bodily Self of infancy; the wild, magnificent, feral Self of mankind’s prehistoric beginnings; that communal, loving Self expressed in each man’s deep bond with his fellow men; and of course the sovereign, assertive, fiercely territorial Self that announces, Get out of my way! I’m taking a leak! 

Feeling such emotions, it was impossible not to elevate the stream and hose down, as they say, a few literary masterpieces. 

I may as well point out that I was able to hit titles all the way up on the third and fourth shelves. When you get into your middle years, as I have, these things matter. 

I shook and put it away. Since I’m being frank, I ought to say that I went through the mature man’s generic process of shaking: several rapid shakes followed by a brief rest followed by more jiggling, and the whole ordeal repeated until everything feels comfortably dry and secure. As I grow longer in the tooth, I find myself shaking off for greater and greater stretches of time, and I always use this time to fret morosely about my health in general, and about the likelihood that a grave illness, conceivably located in the bladder region, will overtake me in the future, maybe imminently. In this way a pleasurable, natural act becomes the catalyst for somber reflections and an unnatural, incipient depression. So much of life follows this pattern exactly, I think. We begin to lose ourselves in a joyful or gratifying act—it can be a creature comfort or something complicatedly emotional like stimulating conversation or the solitary immersion in a poem, a beautiful landscape, or a work of art—and we forget, in the moment of serenity, all the pain and trouble of life. Until, quite suddenly and, as a rule, shockingly, this very forgetfulness, our fleeting holiday from care, becomes nothing more than another occasion to remember how truly infrequently happiness comes to us, and how likely we are to die in some horrible way. Then, disgusted with ourselves over our inability to enjoy life, we halt the pleasurable activity and move on, as speedily as we can, to other business. It was precisely this kind of dispirited self-loathing that led me to give myself only a few cursory shakes, so that when I replaced myself in my trousers, I felt urine dribbling down my leg. As always when this happens, I became enraged. I became angry and irrational. The night was cold, and I struggled against despair. 

The struggle, however, was unavailing. 

I wept. 

At first I wept for myself—for my incontinence, obviously—and then for my entire, ridiculous existence, and for the loneliness I felt, not only there in the literature section in the late hours on that snowy night, but all the time, constantly, ever since I could remember feeling anything at all. As I wept, I felt lonelier and lonelier and lonelier. I envisioned, one after another, my brothers, the bloated, red faces of my brothers, all my beloved brothers but in particular Hiram and Virgil and Maxwell. These three I loved best. And also George. Would we ever see George again? After a while I was weeping for the rose garden and the former grandeur of our trees and lawns, those green fields where we played as children. We had always hurt one another in our games; hurting was the object of our games; and this made me cry more, and I held the blue pillow to my breast. I wrapped my arms around the blue pillow, hugged it to me, and let the tears come. I was standing in water up to my ankles, and this for some reason became another pressing sadness. I suppose it was because the water was rising that I felt so affected. Before long I was crying for, it seemed, everything. Everything in the red library was deserving of tears. Those eyeless, emaciated, deaf and dead animals on their barren squares of wall always reminded me of past Dougs, the Dougs who perished as youths; and, as I wept, they reminded me, the animals, of myself and of what would surely become of me one day, maybe soon. I was nothing but another Doug. Hiram was the oldest. Father I know really, only from his occasional, shadowy appearances above the lights, his intermittent manifestations as a damp stain. Actually, this is not, strictly speaking, the whole truth. It is true in the sense that it describes the way I have felt for as long as I have known my feelings. I remember, I think, our father's face and his voice. I remember his mustache. I remember our father in his underwear at night. I remember the hair on his legs. I remember the smell in the bathroom after he left it. I remember his unhappiness and his dread of our happiness, and I remember him saying, “How's my Doug?” I remember his body’s smells, his smells of tobacco, of course, and of alcohol and cologne, a cologne like lavender you never smell anymore. I remember the pleasure of seeing him enter the room. I remember certain stories and jokes. Actually, I forget the stories and the jokes, though I remember that these existed. I remember his conviction that he was hated, and I remember the thunder his footsteps made crossing the floor. Time after time my brothers and I have joined together to eat, drink, and bury that man. All we ever did was eat, drink, and injure each other. The sadness of our cruelty was more than I could bear. Tears rose in waves that washed up from the center of my body. The muscles in my sides felt as if they would tear from the strain of that sobbing. The water around my feet was steadily rising. I knew it was prideful to overinterpret broken pipes and a leaking roof, but on the other hand it did seem that I was not completely alone in my crying, that the red library was dripping and pouring out its own tears, its own remorse. 

I thought these things because I had failed to shake off after urinating. What a degenerate I was. What sadness, to come to such a point in life, this point at which the simplest acts, acts that promise pleasure, give access only to terrors and an overriding impression of loss. (pp. 183-87)

***

There is an impression, held true in our society, that the father is surpassed, overtaken, outlived, and in these and other respects, killed by the son.

But this is, I think, actually not the case. In truth, I think, it is always the son who is killed by the father. Couldn’t it be argued that each man dies the death made for him by his father? (p. 205)

[bigyack-com]

Joaquin Phoenix accepts he was a scoundrel and cruel, talks animal rights in Oscar speech. Watch - hollywood

Joaquin Phoenix won his first Oscar on Sunday for his terrifying performance as an isolated loner who becomes one of the world’s best known comic book villains in Joker, and invoked his late brother River Phoenix in one of the most emotional acceptance speeches of the night. Phoenix, 45, won the best actor Oscar after three previous nominations, crowning an awards season that has seen him sweep every major prize for his role in the standalone origin story of Batman’s archenemy. Joaquin Phoenix is a living legend. He uses his large platform for the greater good, and to speak up on not only humanitarian issues, but issues regarding all species. He’s a true vegan king, and we should all strive to be like him. pic.twitter.com/I28YoCmCm1— David Ⓥ (@VeganGenesis) February 10, 2020 “I’ve been a scoundrel in my life, I’ve been selfish, I’ve been cruel at times, I’ve been hard to work with. I’m grateful so many of you in this room have given me a second chance,” Phoenix said while accepting his award. “When he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric, he said: Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow,” he said in concluding his speech tearfully to a standing ovation. River Phoenix died of a drug overdose at a Hollywood night club in 1993 at age 23. Also read | Oscars 2020 live: Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, 1917 favourites to win Academy AwardsPhoenix also talked about animal farming and cruelty. “I think that we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world, and many of us, what we’re guilty of is an egocentric worldview,” Phoenix said. “The belief that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources, we feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and put it in our coffee and our cereal. And I think we feel the idea of personal change is that we have to sacrifice something, to give something up, but human beings at our best are so inventive, and creative, and ingenious, that I think that we…. When we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment,” he added. Joaquin Phoenix is now the second actor to win the Oscar for portraying the iconic super villain Joker after Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan's THE DARK KNIGHT. That is poetic cinema, baby. We don't know how to lose. #DC #Joker🃏 #Oscars pic.twitter.com/SX9oaG2aoF— Jesabel (@JesabelRaay) February 10, 2020 Phoenix is a big supporter of animal right and recently went to a slaughterhouse right after accepting his SAG Award to comfort pigs with other animal lovers. The actor, known for playing brooding or emotionally troubled characters, dropped more than 50 pounds (22 kg) to play Arthur Fleck, an emaciated mentally ill clown who finds fame through a random act of violence in 1980s era New York City.His Oscar win made Phoenix the second person to get an Academy Award for playing the Joker character. Heath Ledger won a posthumous best supporting actor Oscar in 2009 for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight. Joaquin Phoenix just made me feel really guilty about putting milk in my coffee. What we do to animals—artificially inseminating a cow, stealing the baby, and robbing the mother of her milk meant for her baby to put in our coffee is really evil yet so damn routine. #Oscars— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) February 10, 2020  I just watched Joaquin Phoenix’s acceptance speech. I must say that I truly appreciated it. No politics; no virtue signalling; no platitudes. A simple call for compassion toward one another and to our animal cousins. Newfound respect for this great actor. He proved me wrong!— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) February 10, 2020 Dark and unsettling, Phoenix’s Joker is far removed from the comic book characters traditionally seen on screen. Matthew Belloni, editorial director of the Hollywood Reporter, described it last year as “among the most chilling characters I have ever seen in film.”Publicity averse and intense, Phoenix has a reputation for completely inhabiting characters that have ranged from country singer Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line,” to Jesus Christ in “Mary Magdalene” and an impressionable drifter who enters a cult in “The Master.”In 2010, he almost succeeded in fooling the world that he had given up acting to try to become a rapper in the fake documentary “I’m Still Here.”A strict vegan and advocate for the environment, Phoenix was born to missionary parents who traveled through Central and South America before settling in Los Angeles, where he became a child actor.Follow @htshowbiz for more Read the full article

[hismalice]

EVERYTHING !!! JK, EVERYTHING THAT STARTS / HAS THE # 2 IN IT!!

CHARACTER SOLIDIFYING / accepting !

djkdgjdj jesus. ok this is going under a readmore

2. Their mother? How do they think of her? What do they hate? Love? What influence - literal or imagined - did the mother have?

     komaeda’s mother was distant, as was his father. she had good intentions, but often executed them poorly; constantly busy with work. she contributed massively to his self esteem complex, often scolding him for the symptoms of his illness such as oral fixation or slow, awkward speech. after her death, komaeda generally stopped thinking about either of his parents entirely; fixed on the belief that there’s no point holding onto memories of the dead. her passive criticisms continue to influence him, though, partially explaining his constantly self-deprecating sense of humour.

12. How does their education and intelligence – or lack thereof - reflect in their speech pattern, vocabulary, and pronunciations?

   naturally, komaeda is very intelligent, and has an innate knack for problem-solving; on top of that, his parents sent him to prestigious schools due to their wealth. after he was diagnosed with cancer he stopped attending school regularly, but his education continued through correspondence; due to the high-class, repressed environment, his way of speaking became very formal and polite, even when talking to people he’s familiar with. 

    however, a symptom of his dementia is slow, repetitive or confusing speech; he became very attached to decorative affirmatives such as ‘right’ and developed a tendency to repeat himself; as a result, the complex reasoning that goes on inside his head doesn’t always communicate well, meaning his actions often seem utterly nonsensical and impossible to justify by any logic.

20. What were the most deeply impressive political or social, national or international, events that they experienced?

    komaeda paid next to no attention to world events throughout his life, simply because he was so socially isolated. the most important social event he’s experienced would likely be the tragedy and ultimate despair. 

21. What are your character’s manners like? 

     komaeda is, technically, very well mannered - he doesn’t swear, always bows deeply; at a first impression, he’s very respectable. however, his dementia has left him somewhat socially impaired; an extended conversation with him will therefore almost always result in him saying something entirely inappropriate, making a tasteless joke, and just generally behaving in a socially unacceptable way. 

22. Who are their friends? Lovers? ‘Type’ or ‘ideal’ partner?

    he can happily be friends with almost anyone, due to the fact that he’s genuinely interested in and supportive of most people he meets (though whether they’d consider him a friend is another matter). he likes potential and people he can’t predict; generally, he’s drawn to strong, talented, charismatic or impressive people. when he decides he likes someone, it’s very easy for him to hyper-fixate on them, and build them up to practical godhood in his mind. sadly, he’s rarely interested in people who treat him well. 

23. What do they want from a partner? What do they think and feel of sex?

   komaeda is unfortunately very self-destructive in relationships and intimacy. what he really wants isn’t what he actively seeks out; usually he will look for a partner that makes him feel useful to them - unlike most people, komaeda feels genuinely empowered by being used for another’s gain.

   in accordance with his own masochistic nature, he’ll often try to provoke a partner into injuring or otherwise abusing him. in reality this is because he thrives off attention, and doesn’t care whether it’s positive or negative; since he’s unused to positive attention, he rarely seeks it out. 

   sex, in the same vein, isn’t an entirely healthy experience for him. his interest in sex is less for his own pleasure and more to being used for someone else’s, in the belief that’ll make them like him, and want to keep him around. 

  while he does invite and request violence from sexual partners, though, he is in reality just looking to feel wanted and valued. kissing, being embraced, hands in his hair; those are more likely to genuinely help support him, rather than knock him down further. unfortunately, he’s incredibly hard to love, and while he craves it, he will probably reject tenderness or gentleness most of the time. 

24. What social groups and activities does your character attend? What role do they like to play? What role do they actually play, usually?

komaeda doesn’t take part in many activities, and generally is more of an observer of social groups rather than a part of them. when he is involved, though, he prefers to play supporting roles, helping other people shine. 

25. What are their hobbies and interests?

he doesn’t really have many beyond uh, ‘plotting’ and ‘puppeteering’ and ‘being choked’ 

26. What does your character’s home look like? Personal taste? Clothing? Hair? Appearance?

it’s very impersonal; he’s accustomed to not having many possessions or personal space, given all the years he spent at the hospital. however, he likes pretty things like ornaments and postcards, and collects them when he can. his clothing is generally very simple and loose, and tends to be in very muted colours; he rarely wears colour at all except for dark greens or reds. 

his hair is messy, overgrown and unkempt. it’s very thick and unruly; as a result he rarely brushes it. as a result of his devastating illnesses, both his hair and skin are dry and lack life or luster. his body is emaciated and underweight, bones jutting out and bright blue veins visible under the skin. if he were healthier, he could be called objectively attractive in a feminine way, but his pallor and personality both take away from beauty he might hold. 

27. How do they relate to their appearance? How do they wear their clothing? Style? Quality?

he hates his appearance and has no confidence in it, having often been put down for it as a child. as a result he doesn’t put much effort into how he looks beyond washing. most of his clothes are oversized or ill-fitting, other than his jeans.

28. Who is your character’s mate? How do they relate to him or her? How did they make their choice?

this is verse depending so!! however, komaeda is canonically in love with hinata/kamukura, both because of his talent and simply because he finds him fascinating.

29. What is your character’s weaknesses? Hubris? Pride? Controlling?

where to begin - he’s insensitive, apathetic, inappropriate, cruel at times; socially impaired, violent, no impulse control, horrendously manipulative, morally deranged with little regard for most human life, unmotivated, both overly pessimistic and optimistic at the same time; quick to give up or deem people of no worth; self-destructive, rude without realising, overfamiliar and unbelievably sycophantic. 

32. How does your character react to stress situations? Defensively? Aggressively? Evasively?

generally he’s unresponsive to stress situations, and will meet them with a smile and overly optimistic or nihilistic attitude; sometimes both. he is very used to stressful situations, given his entire life has basically been one, so they don’t (visibly) affect or shock him. 

42. What does your character want most? What do they need really badly, compulsively? What are they willing to do, to sacrifice, to obtain?

love; belief that there’s a reason for him to exist; hope. 

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Colonising Common Sense: The Right’s greatest victory and how the Left can fight back

 --

In the political discourse of British politics at the moment there is a vision of a fertile, uninhabited political land which drips like honey from the mouths of political correspondents. Mystic, smoky visions of its verdant plains come back piecemeal in euphoric, Oxbridge-inflected descriptions from the brave explorers who venture to the dark and strange hinterlands from which the disastrous horror of Brexit has been the only audible communique in recent years. The modern missionaries of the City and Westminister have to daub the saliva from their lips when they think of this perfect, unspoiled potential political colony known only as “The Centre”.

This mysterious ‘centre ground’ is treated with reverence by the journalistic set which writes about politics not as a force by which to achieve positive change in the lives of ordinary people but instead views politics in the way one might view professional sports: a self contained system whereby a number of elite players attempt to wrest power from one another through the use of celebrity personalities and archaic systems of strategies. The most coveted play of all in this horse-race political reporting is the play on this ‘centre ground’, the supposedly objective and rational middle path between right and left ideological deviations. Of course this avaricious slobbering over the centre ground has emerged from the now reconfirmed leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a figure portrayed as a raving, lunatic leftist out to seize our freedom and property.

This, of course, is an illusion.

Talking to any person who counts themselves as a member of the radical left will quickly throw up a view of Corbyn which is positive but also sceptical. The idea that Corbyn’s proposals, if not his historical political character, are somehow ravingly far-left is an absolute nonsense. Corbyn, much like his counterpart Bernie Sanders in the states, presents a vision of state-backed, welfarist social democracy that often is not meaningfully to the left of the domestic positions of the likes of Dwight Eisenhower. It is this sober-eyed look at the actually political coordinates of the positions of the supposed “raving Trotskyites” of whom the media warn us which reveals for us the true nature of the “centre ground” which the Corbyn leadership have supposedly ceded to the Tories: it is in fact intensely right wing.

The greatest victory of the right wing in the past forty years has been their colonisation of the ideas of “common sense” and “the centre ground”. The things which we regard as being “beyond ideology” or somehow objective and rational are in fact, by the standards of the post-war welfare state, intensely right wing propositions. The most famous proponent of the centre ground in recent political history was of course Tony Blair with his “Third Way” philosophy which was in fact an extremely right wing doctrine riven with rolling back the meagre protections the post-war state had built up for the destitute and unashamedly increasing state power when it came to surveying citizens and waging atrocious wars. The right has taken the supposedly apolitical idea of ‘realism’ for themselves, ensuring the reality that we appeal to is one of hyper-privatisation and endless war. The once lunatic doctrines of the fringe right, whether the law-and-order neoconservatism of Leo Strauss or the dream of corporate tyranny feverishly spewed from the mouths of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek, have in fact become our political reality. The Right have captured common sense and by their mastery over what appears as our reality have allowed criticism of capitalism or imperialism not only to be portrayed as misguided or incorrect; but in fact as aberrations from reality, as arguments which are tantamount to critiquing the law of gravity.

But what can be done about this?

In the coming decades the revolutionary left is faced with two monumental crises which we must seize, talk about and respond to if democratic and left wing notions are to shape the new reality. The first is automation and the mass unemployment crisis. Political analysis is useful because it can reveal that things which we take as the factual basis of reality (Capitalism is an efficient economic system, war is necessary, women are inferior) are in fact feverish ideological statements which come from the paranoid fantasies of a privileged mindset. One of the most closely held tenets of modern capitalism is that everyone much be engaged in productive and directly profitable work in order to have value to our society. Our view of work and employment under capitalism has drifted beyond the rationalism into the fetishistic, we elevate work to the point where we murder the disabled in an attempt to manufacture them into worthy and productive citizens. But all that will soon change. The age of mass automation of at least the services sector of the economy will force us to rethink our notion of employment. Self driving cars and McDonald’s service kiosks are only the glowing larvae of a technological locust swarm which will eat away at our notions of the necessity of productive work as a moral force. Increasingly we are coming to believe that machines will soon replace human workers at a greater rate than people can be upskilled. We will soon be confronted with a future where many people will be unable to find employment and there we must make a decision, do we continue our moral belief that human beings must crush their spirits pouring hot water through beans on zero hour contracts in order to earn the right to a meagre existence, or do we absolutely affirm a human being’s right to exist by virtue of their birth and give them the space and resources to pursue their own interests and innovation? The first choice, the natural choice of our current right-wing paradigm, is a world of contradictions and misery where society is run by those who already have the wealth to control the machine-mind which has replaced human labour. The latter, the choice which the left can seize and consistently affirm, is the one which could lead to an age of endless creativity and genius, where human beings are unshackled by the moral requirement of soul-crushing and unnecessary employment.

The second great reality-shaking event in the coming decades will be climate change. The political centre ground has reacted to the scientific data and the emaciated polar bears first by shoving their fingers in their ears and lately by proposing corporate paydays posing as meagre reforms such as emissions trading. But the left can grasp this apocalyptic vision of environmental destruction in the same way the religious right of Ronald Reagan and Bush used the vision of Christian rapture to drive terrible wars in the Middle East The looming reality of climate change can be a useful tool to critique one of the centre ground assumptions of “rational politics”, that only the unending, vampiric exploitation of our global resources by corporate oligarchs can drive forward the engine of human technological progress which always has been, of course, a machine run on the blood and tears of the developing world, sucking in the lifeless bodies of Third World civilians and growing more sophisticated in its harvesting of their livelihoods and environments the more of them it cripples in its cogs. The left can use the first awful pangs of environmental destruction to articulate a new vision of human progress founded on eco-socialist ideas; intertwining human technological development with a push for environmentally conscious innovation that drives the tendency toward popular democracy as communities are intimately connected with the decision-making process surrounding the use of their land and resources.

For now ‘common sense’ is a barren idea, appeals to reality are merely the surrender to a reality created for us by the wealthy corporate elite. The left should not retreat into the comfort of the social democratic past, but seek to forge a new future by utilising global upheaval to make the reality of the coming decades a defiantly left reality; a reality of abundance, democracy, sustainability and justice.

[babyjakes]

forever and a day | 35. better in no time.

〈 disclaimer: this blog posts content not suitable for individuals under the age of 18. minors are strictly prohibited from viewing, sharing, or interacting with this blog. for more information on this blog's commitment to protecting minors, read our full statement here. 〉

← last chapter | series masterlist | next chapter →

summary | a story in which america’s favorite captain gives a new life and family to a five-year-old girl who has suffered well beyond her years at the hands of hydra.

characters | dad!steve rogers, girl/willa rogers (original character)

warnings | AU similar enough to OU to include spoilers to many Marvel movies (Age of Ultron and beyond). action and fight scenes with violence and killing. injuries/mild gore. mature themes related to and semi-graphic depictions of child abuse/neglect, past CSA and CSM, and their aftermath (emaciation, wounds, scarring, etc). medical abuse and experimentation. ptsd/trauma symptoms in a child (developmental discrepancies, de-humanized behavior, detachment, extreme fears). medical treatment of CSM and other aftermath of abuse.trauma-informed therapeutic treatment of ECT. minor mentions of disordered eating. evil!Tony Stark.

[Steve]

“I know it’s not ideal,” Bucky mumbles almost bashfully as he locks the door shut behind the three of us after we’ve entered the small, rundown apartment he’s lead us to in a little Romanian town. “But it’s the safest place I know of. I was never found here. I always told myself, even in New York, if I ever needed a place to come back to… this would be it.” My eyes scan the space, taking in the sight of the place my best friend spent so much time hiding away from the world in. The main room at the front consists of a small kitchenette, along with a little round dining table. A couch and a set of old armchairs sit in front of an ancient-looking television. The far wall breaks off into a small hallway holding two doors, what I’m guessing might be a bed and bathroom. “There’s only one bed,” he adds. “You guys can take it. I slept most nights on the couch, anyway.”

Walking up to the set of windows beside the kitchen counters, I run my hand over the thin newspaper sheets that cover them from top to bottom. “I would say these seem suspicious, but this is normal around here, right?” I ask in regards to the window coverings. Bucky nods.

“It’s a quiet town. People like their privacy here,” he tells me as he walks over to the green couch, lowering himself down onto the sagging cushions. “There’s a market in town with food. I left some of my stuff here, clothes and whatever; I assume it’ll still be here. It’s not too hard to disguise yourself. Not like anyone here will be looking for us, though.”

“And we have… protection?” I ask, hoping we won’t regret the decision of leaving all weapons on board the jet.

“Two guns under the sink in the bathroom,” he responds. “Never had to use ‘em. Hoping to keep it that way.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Willa shrinking back slightly against the front door, peering around with frightened eyes. I have to admit, Bucky was right: this isn’t ideal at all. I hate to think that things escalated between Tony and I so much that we ended up here. If he would’ve been willing to listen, to overlook his ego and face the fact that he was wrong, we could’ve worked things out. While I know we have everything we need to survive here, it still doesn’t feel right. This isn’t where Willa belongs. She should be back in New York with her new friends, her new family.

“Willa-bug, let’s have Bucky take a look at you, yeah?” I murmur. The little girl tenses more at my words, her big green eyes pleading with me silently.

Taking a few steps towards the child, I offer her my hand. Willa eyes it warily before accepting, allowing me to lead her over to the couch beside my friend. I take a seat beside him, patting my lap for the girl to join me. She hesitates, an unintentional pout forming its way onto her rosy face. “Was I bad? Don’t hurt me,” she worries.

“No, you weren’t bad,” I assure her, “you’re okay; there’s no need to be afraid. Buck’s just gonna have a look at your face, sweetheart. That’s all.” Willa keeps her eyes locked on me, waiting a few more moments before giving in and climbing up onto my lap. Turning her around by her shoulders, I position her so that her back is up against my front and wrap my arms around her lovingly. Bucky turns to us as I turn inward as well, giving him a better view. His eyes land gently on the little girl and she cowers back into me, letting out a frightened huff of air through her nose.

“Wait, p-please-” she rushes out, her head turning frantically from side to side. “Bad? Didn’t mean t-to, will do better- please.”

“No baby, not bad. You’re okay, you’re alright, doll,” I hum softly, rubbing a hand over her unburnt shoulder in a soothing manner.

“I just wanna check and make sure Steve didn’t miss anything on the jet,” Bucky explains patiently, reaching a hand up towards her scorched cheek. To his despair, the child lurches back at this, squeezing her eyes shut.

“D-don’t hit me,” she pleads.

“Never, bunny. I won’t ever hurt you, never ever,” he swears, running his eyes carefully over the burns. “They’re bad, but they’ll heal,” he notes. “Hopefully when all of this is over, Bruce can see her again and do his thing. I had a lot of marks I thought I’d carry forever coming out of Hydra, but… that guy works wonders.” I nod, silently wondering if it’ll actually ever end. It doesn’t seem likely that we’d be stuck here forever, but after all I’ve been through, I guess I can’t ever be sure of anything anymore. “I’m going to run to the market and pick up some groceries. Anything in particular you need?” Bucky asks the both of us. Willa stays quiet, settling back into my embrace. I think for a minute, shrugging.

“Fruit would be a good idea. I don’t suppose you have a blender around here, do you?” I ask doubtfully. My friend shakes his head.

“No, but there’s an electrics shop I can check. They’ve probably got those kinds of kitchen gadgets,” he responds. “I’ve got my phone on me, so just call if anything comes to mind.” I nod and he stands, turning and leaving out the front door without another word.

Standing up, I collect Willa into my arms, copying Bucky’s steps to the door. I gingerly slide the lock shut once again, pulling out my phone from my pocket. Walking over to the kitchen with Willa on my hip, I pull up my text conversation with Bucky. As efficiently as I can with just one thumb, I type out a quick message and hit send before setting the little girl down on the counter beside the sink.

Steve: Text when you’re back and I’ll come let you in. Don’t want to take any chances. Be safe out there.

Within a matter of moments, a response appears.

Bucky: Ok boomer.

Furrowing my eyebrows at the line, I pull up an internet tab, beginning to type in the phrase: ’What is a boo-“ when a little voice catches my attention.

"Juice?” Willa asks innocently. Switching my phone off, I look around the kitchen before turning back to her with a frown.

“I don’t have anything to make you juice with right now, sweetheart; I’m sorry. Bucky’s out grabbing it, though, so you can have some as soon as he gets back. Okay?” The girl nods, turning and looking at the sink.

“W-water?” she asks hesitantly, as if I might be angry at her for making another request.

Softening my expression, I nod with a smile. “Of course you can have water. Let me find you a cup,” I say, beginning to rummage through the cabinets and drawers. Finally, in the cabinet above the fridge, I find a set of glasses. Taking one out, I return to the sink and fill it with water. “Here you go, kiddo,” I offer. Willa takes the glass from me with a grateful nod and holds it nervously, the sturdy kitchenware dwarfing her tiny hands. “Sorry we don’t have any of your sippy-cups,” I add with another frown.

The child raises the glass to her lips and takes a few swallows, her hands beginning to tremble violently before finally the glass slips out of her grasp entirely and drops to the floor, shattering across the white tile. Willa’s eyes grow wide, darting up to look at me.

“M-m- I-I- p-p-please,” she blurts out before I can say anything to reassure her. “W-wait, please- I-I-…” Her chest begins to rise and fall rapidly as tears begin pouring from her eyes.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, sweetheart. It’s okay, it was just an accident,” I murmur gently, holding my hands out in front of me to show her I’m not going to harm her. “You’re not in trouble. I should’ve known the glass was too big and heavy.”

“S-sorry, will c-clean it up- d-didn’t mean to, please-” She begins to lean down to jump off the counter towards the mess, but I reach out in front of her to stop her, causing her to flinch back sharply, a terrified whine coming from her throat. The frightened girl’s eyes squeeze shut briefly, anticipating a swing.

“Hey, hey, easy, Willa. It’s okay, sweetheart. Let me take care of it, okay? I don’t want you to cut yourself on the glass,” I soothe. Willa gazes down with teary eyes at the tile and stays frozen, not wanting to disobey.

Going back into one of the cabinets I searched earlier, I pull out a dustpan. Keeping my movements slow, I crouch down onto the ground, a sharp pain rising from my knee. “Shit,” I curse under my breath, looking down to see that a jagged shard has sliced through my skin. I quickly brush all of the glass into the pan, making sure to check all around the area before standing up again and disposing of the garbage into the bin. Returning to the counter, I run the sink, wetting my fingers and rinsing off my knee gingerly.

“You- it’s- you’re bleeding?” Willa’s little voice asks warily. I turn and look at her again, tears now running silently down her face.

“It’s okay, sweetie. I’m okay,” I assure her quickly, heartbroken at the sight of her crying.

“G-got hurt. ’m really sorry,” she sniffles.

“It’s alright, honey. I’m okay. It’s just a little cut, doll. I’m super tough; I’m sure it’ll heal up in no time.”

What happens next catches me totally off guard. An unfamiliar look builds in Willa’s eyes as she reaches out slowly, placing a shaking hand on my arm. Before I know it, the sharp stinging sensation from my leg is gone. The little girl in front of me tenses, a pained expression forming on her face. Faintly, a purplish-red mark forms on Willa’s own knee.

“Wait- no, sweetheart-” I stutter out, but it’s too late. The child gazes up fearfully at me as I wrap my arms around her, causing her to jump slightly before relaxing into my hold.

“You’re okay,” she whispers to me, her voice imitating the soothing sing-songy tone I use when trying to comfort her. “Y-you’re okay.”

“You don’t have to do that, honey; you never have to do that. Please don’t,” I beg, burying my face in her apple-scented hair.

Willa hiccups slightly against me, and her next line seems to slip out before she can think to stop it. “You’re okay. All better, Daddy.”

← last chapter | series masterlist | next chapter →

[babyjakes]

forever and a day | 29. the real bucky.

〈 disclaimer: this blog posts content not suitable for individuals under the age of 18. minors are strictly prohibited from viewing, sharing, or interacting with this blog. for more information on this blog's commitment to protecting minors, read our full statement here. 〉

← last chapter | series masterlist | next chapter →

summary | a story in which america’s favorite captain gives a new life and family to a five-year-old girl who has suffered well beyond her years at the hands of hydra.

characters | dad!steve rogers, girl/willa rogers (original character)

warnings | AU similar enough to OU to include spoilers to many Marvel movies (Age of Ultron and beyond). action and fight scenes with violence and killing. injuries/mild gore. mature themes related to and semi-graphic depictions of child abuse/neglect, past CSA and CSM, and their aftermath (emaciation, wounds, scarring, etc). medical abuse and experimentation. ptsd/trauma symptoms in a child (developmental discrepancies, de-humanized behavior, detachment, extreme fears). medical treatment of CSM and other aftermath of abuse.trauma-informed therapeutic treatment of ECT. somewhat evil!Tony Stark (eventually).

[Steve]

“Willa, please… can we just talk about it?” I try desperately, now on at least my tenth attempt at calming the child down. Willa’s been crying for the past hour or so since I broke the news to her about Bucky coming later; up until now, she’s been too upset to even have a conversation about the matter. This time when I ask, she just slumps her shoulders, miserable tears continuing to trail down her whitened cheeks.

“Please, please d-don’t. ’m sorry. W-will do anything,” she whimpers.

“Sweetheart, hey. He’s not coming here to hurt you, Willa. Let’s just talk about it, okay? I know this is really scary for you, but there’s a lot about the situation that you don’t understand,” I try to reason.

I’ve moved us over to the couch in hopes of getting a little more comfortable. Willa’s pressing herself against the cushion she’s leaning on, looking absolutely inconsolable at the news. I sigh, my heart breaking a little bit in my chest at the sight of the panicked child. I hate to put her through so much stress, but I think that healing this relationship between her and Bucky could be really beneficial for both of them. The more safe, supportive relationships Willa has, the better. And I know that making amends wherever he can is important to Buck regarding the things he did when the Winter Soldier took over.

“You know how I told you that I was frozen in the ice for a really long time?” I begin, not sure how much my story will ease her fears. Willa nods, her gaze cautiously meeting mine. “Well, Bucky and I were friends even before that happened. All the way back when we were just two teenagers looking to enlist in the army. He protected me whenever I would get bullied on the streets,” I explain. The girl blinks, still not saying anything. “Bucky was always a good guy. The only reason he ever hurt people was because he was forced to. He was captured by Hydra, and they controlled his brain to make him do things he would never do willingly. He never wanted to hurt you, sweetheart.” By the look on her face, I can tell that what I’m saying is having little to no impact on how the child feels about the man. “Remember when you said he would come in and take care of you before he became scary?” I ask, earning a silent nod. “That’s the real him. He did that before he was fully under their control. And now, he’s completely free of Hydra. He’s back to his real self.”

“Not safe anym-more,” Willa mumbles, a tear still falling from her reddened eyes every once and a while. “Too scary.”

“He’s safe, doll. I promise. I pinky promise,” I try, offering her my little finger, but she recoils back from it, refusing the commitment. “Please, Willa. I know you’re scared now, but you’ll see when he comes; he’s a really good guy. And he misses you, too. He was so excited to hear that we found you, that he could see you again.”

“To hurt m-me more,” she whimpers weakly. Fighting back tears, I shake my head.

“No, that’s not what he wants,” I restate, knowing that unfortunately, nothing I say at this point is likely to change her mind.

“Mornin’ guys,” a familiar voice chirps from across the room, breaking Willa and I out of our conversation.

We both gaze over to see Peter approaching, shuffling through something on his phone. After another moment, the teen clicks the device off, shoving it in his pocket and looking up with a smile.

As his eyes fall on Willa, though, his expression quickly turns to worry, and in an instant he’s made his way over to the couch, asking, “Oh no- what’s wrong, Willa?” Peter sits down on the other side of the child, reaching out and placing a hand on her shoulder. She turns to face him, and before anyone can say anything more, she completely crumples into his arms. The boy holds onto his friend steadily, looking up at me in total alarm. “Wh-what’s going on, guys?” he asks, probably looking for a response from me more than Willa at this point, given her current state.

“S-Steve’s b'inging him here to hurt me. I-I was bad and now- now he’s coming, didn’t mean to be; will do better, please,” the small girl rambles through her tears, revealing her true worries: that she’s done something to deserve being hurt, and that’s why I’m bringing Bucky here. My heart drops to the pit of my stomach as the child’s words settle in the tense air.

“He’s what? Bringing who?” Peter asks, clearly confused by the whole ordeal.

“No sweetie, you haven’t been bad,” I soothe, reaching out and placing a hand on her back. Willa lurches away from my touch, clinging to Peter like her life depends on it. “Willa-bug, come here. Please sweetheart,” I reason, but she doesn’t move an inch. I sigh, looking back up to Peter. “Bucky’s coming over later,” I explain.

“Oh,” the boy says slowly, still seeming unsure as to what the problem is. “That’s great! I haven’t seen him in a while, but last time he said something about wanting to play Mario Kart with me and Thor.” I smile slightly, nodding as I remember their conversation. “S-so- so that’s what Willa’s so afraid of?” I nod.

“Willa knew Bucky before we rescued her, when they were both stationed in Hydra,” I tell him. “Bucky was the Winter Soldier then.” A look of clarity finally rolls over the teen’s face, and he nods, now understanding.

“Ohh,” he replies knowingly, “so she knew him when he was… evil,” he puts together. I nod. Turning his attention back down to the little girl hiding away in his arms, Peter pulls back slightly to look her in the eyes. “Hey, hey Wil, can you look at me?” he asks, the nickname now familiar as something he uses quite frequently with the girl. Willa’s eyes struggle to meet his, and he smiles at her gently, the soft Peter smile we all know and love. “Wanna know something? I was pretty scared to meet him too, at first,” he tells his friend. “I mean, Cap told me he was a good guy, so I wasn’t too concerned, but still; Tony told me about his past at Hydra.”

The child sniffles, thankfully at least giving Peter a chance to try to reason with her. “He’s super nice, Willa. Last time he was over, we all played board games and Nat made pies. Bucky and Steve had a pie-eating contest. Steve won, of course, with his increased metabolism and all.” I chuckle slightly at the memory. “I promise he won’t hurt you, friend. Steve would never let someone near you who he thought would hurt you, never ever. He loves you more than anything-” the teen reasons, though he quickly pauses when he realizes what he’s said. “I-I mean, he-”

“That’s okay, Peter,” I tell him. “You’re right. I do love Willa more than anything.” Peter seems unsettled by my sudden openness with the word, which makes sense given the fact that he wasn’t present yesterday during our discussion about love. “That’s something we’ve started saying now,” I let him know.

“L-love Steve,” Willa says weakly. Peter looks even more shocked at this.

“Oh- th-that’s great!” the kid smiles, trying to hide his surprise.

“Who else do you love, sweetheart?” I ask, hoping to give her a chance to express her feelings to her closest friend.

“L-love Peter,” she responds quietly, so soft I can barely hear her. Peter’s eyes widen, and to my (maybe not so) surprise, they fill with tears. He holds his friend at an arm’s length away, looking her in the eyes.

“I-I love you too, Willa. I love you so much; you’re my best friend in the whole wide world,” he professes, pulling her in for a hug. Her little arms wrap around him and he holds her close, a smile forming on my face as warmth settles in over me. The friendship they’ve developed is truly incredible; I’m so glad they have each other. I think Willa’s a whole lot better off with Peter by her side.

Though I know it’s a stretch, a part of me hopes she could become this way with Bucky; I want for her to be able to love him again. They’ve clearly both been critical in each other’s lives; I think that especially for Buck, finding people to love isn’t an easy process.

“Mr. Parker,” a voice says out of nowhere. We all look up to see Vision who’s appeared suddenly in front of us.

“What- where did you-?” I stumble over my words.

“Oh, hey Vision,” the teenager greets, unphased by his abrupt arrival. After a moment of confusion, I realize that he must have just teleported himself into the room. I sigh, shaking my head. Sometimes the future is really too much.

“Mr. Stark is waiting for you down in the lobby,” the red man states.

“Oh, that’s right! I totally forgot.” Peter turns back to Willa, a pained look on his face. “Hey, Mr. Stark is taking me out to train offsite today,” he tells her carefully. “I don’t know when we’ll be back, but I promise we’ll play later, okay?” The little girl’s face drops as she realizes her friend is leaving her, and she clings to him momentarily, as if to beg him not to go. The boy’s face further contorts with guilt, but he gently removes her little hands from him, standing up and joining Vision. “I’ll see you guys soon,” he says, nodding at both of us before he and Vision head for the elevator.

Like always, Willa simply watches as he goes, her wide eyes settled on the elevator long after its doors have opened and closed again, taking her friend away. After a few moments of silence, I scoot closer to her, reaching out a hand and rubbing it gently over her arm. “D'you wanna come sit in my lap?” I offer.

Willa peers over at me warily, her bottom lip sticking out ever so slightly. I pat the space on my legs gently, and a look of longing flashes in the girl’s eyes, but it’s soon replaced by hesitancy. The fear that she’s done something wrong in order to deserve Bucky’s visit has clearly not left her. I sigh, opening up my arms to her, an offer she would usually never resist. This time, though, she just looks over sadly, not even feeling safe enough to try.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” I encourage, but Willa stays frozen in her place, probably worried that anything more she does might worsen her situation. As difficult as it is to watch her go through this, there might really be nothing I can do to show her she’s safe until Bucky’s actually here.

Willa was four years old, curled up in a ball on the hard concrete floor of the small, empty room she had been thrown in by one of the guards. She knew the place well; Room Nine, it was a correctional cell. The little girl wasn’t sure exactly what she had done this time to deserve more punishment. It could have been any of a number of things, really. Sometimes they beat her for crying. Sometimes they beat her for not being able to use her powers like they wanted her to. Sometimes they just beat her because she existed. No matter how hard she tried to be good, they still beat her anyway. As she stared at the blood-stained floor, the child longed for the earlier days of her toddlerhood, where the worst she was subjected to was her shock collar and remote. All Willa could do was hope her punisher would be one of the more lenient guards. Though they were all strong and brutal, some consistently went easier on her than others.

When the door opened to reveal the one she formerly knew as ‘Bucky’, but whom everyone now referred to as 'soldier,’ all Willa’s hopes of being let off easy disappeared. The tiny girl cowered in the corner of the room as the tall man with long dark hair approached her, the door slamming shut behind him.

The sight of the pitiful child had no effect on the Winter Soldier; his brain was freshly wiped clean of any feelings or cares. He did not have any memory of the child, even though months before, when he still had a partial hold of his mind, he had occasionally snuck in to check on her, bandaging her wounds and giving her what little food he could offer. All recollection of that was erased completely by a machine. And when he had voiced his readiness to comply, the mission he was given was simple: Force the girl to self-shift. Use whatever means may be necessary.

The soldier walked straight up to the little body on the floor, leaning down at the waist and grabbing the girl by the throat. He held her up off the ground with his hands gripping the backside of her neck, lodged right underneath her head. At any time, he could simply close his fist and completely cut off her airflow. Willa whimpered in fear, tears springing from her eyes.

“Shift,” the man demanded, his voice low and gravelly, almost distorted in sound. The word caused more fear to shoot through the little girl’s veins. She knew what this meant, that pain was coming. She knew also that she couldn’t fully control her shifting yet. Panic set in as she realized that she was being asked to do something that she had not mastered.

“P-please, w-wait,” she stumbled, her body far too lost to fight-or-flight mode to comply with her attempts to reach equilibrium. “C-can’t, sorry,” she tried, but that was not an answer the angry man was willing to take. The soldier pulled back a fist and slammed it into the poor child’s cheek, blood instantly flooding to the surface in an angry purple flush. Willa cried out in pain, biting down on her tongue instinctively to try to silence herself.

“Shift,” he ordered once again, his voice much louder this time.

“P-please, will try harder, p-p-please,” the girl sputtered out, her whole head throbbing in excruciating pain. In response to her pathetic-sounding pleas, the soldier began to tighten his fingers around her neck. Willa choked and gasped for air, her arms and legs flailing as she struggled to breathe.

“Shift, or you’ll faint,” the ruthless man threatened. Big warm tears flooded Willa’s cheeks as she tried again to control her powers, but she was still met ultimately with failure. Black spots started clouding her vision.

The soldier saw her reaching unconsciousness and eased up his grip, not wanting to make her completely black out, for that would only make his mission take longer. Once Willa was able to get in a few good breaths, he struck her cheek again, his own face red and hot with anger. She sobbed loudly at the stinging sensation, unable to hold in her agony. This only irritated the soldier more, causing him to drop the girl to the floor. He then reached down and picked her up again, this time entirely by the hair, and then, without warning, he stood back up and swung her against the wall, her whole body colliding with the hard concrete. He slammed her again and again against it, skin being torn from her frail frame and blood beginning to train down her arms and legs.

The soldier then held her up again in front of him, still dangling by her hair, and yelled directly in her face, “SHIFT!” Spit sprayed her bloody face.

Willa could only whimper in reply, her whole body seething with pain. Though she had learned to be quiet during a punishment, her four-year-old mind was growing foggy, and she began crying out for her mother, even though the woman had already been dead for years.

Frustrated, the man swung her back and threw her again against the wall, this time letting go of her hair in the process. She hit the concrete head-first, warm darkness surrounding her as the room and the soldier disappeared. She did not know if it was sleep or death that had swallowed her up; she did not mind. She would welcome either with open arms.

[Bucky]

I fidget slightly with the metal on my left hand as the elevator rises steadily through the building; I haven’t been over on this side of town in a considerable amount of time. I’ve missed Steve and all the others, truly. I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m out of place whenever I’m over. They’re a group of superheroes. And then, there’s me. I’m no super-anything.

After a few minutes, I’ve reached floor fifty, and the doors slide open as the bell goes off, letting those inside know of my arrival. I step out into the large living space, looking around. At first, I don’t see anyone, but as my gaze travels from right to left, I spot Steve sitting on the couch, a small figure curled up in a ball beside him, shaking.

Steve waves over to me and I nod back at him. I’m hesitant to say anything or make noise due to the small child at my friend’s side. From what I can see from here, she looks to be a little bit bigger than what I remember, but not much. They’ve obviously cleaned her up, given her some real clothes and fixed her hair. She’s in nowhere near the kind of state I found her in when I would sneak in to try to help her back at Hydra, but she’s still clearly malnourished, not to mention terrified at the moment. I sigh, not sure if I should move any closer or stay put.

“Willa, someone’s here to see you,” Steve rouses gently, causing the child to cower further into herself, letting out a frightened sob. “Hey, c'mon sweetheart,” my friend murmurs, turning the small girl’s body towards him and scooping her up onto his lap. Her little hands grip onto his shirt as she buries her face into the fabric, still shaking violently with fear.

Guilt builds up in my chest as I watch the girl cry. Steve looks up at me sadly and motions over. My feet feel like they’re being held down by weights as I drag myself over to the two, sitting down on the edge of the coffee table in front of them, a safe few feet away.

“P-please, please St-Steve,” a little voice begs. “Will b-be good, won’t ever be bad again, please.”

“Hey Buck,” Steve greets, stroking up and down the girl’s back soothingly.

“Hi,” I force out. At the sound of my voice, the child jumps in Steve’s arms, now shaking even harder somehow.

“You look good. Didn’t know you chopped the hair,” he comments.

“Oh, yeah. I don’t know; I decided I might like it short again,” I reply, the small talk feeling completely forced given the current circumstances.

“Willa-bug, can you come say hi?” Steve eases, but the little girl in his lap shakes her head fiercely.

“Please, please don’t let him h-hurt me, please don’t, p-please,” she whimpers.

“He won’t hurt you, sweetheart. You’re safe, I promise.” As he continues to comfort the child, Steve lifts her slightly in his arms and turns her around to face me, rocking her back and forth lovingly. The little girl’s gaze warily meets mine, the green in her eyes sending sparks shooting up and down my spine; it’s the same green I saw so long ago. “You’re safe, you’re safe,” the man behind her murmurs again, stroking the child’s cheek gently with his thumb.

Taking a deep breath, I muster all of my courage, saying as carefully as I can, “Hello, little one.”

The girl - or Willa, as Steve now calls her - looks up fearfully at my words. I soften my gaze as much as I can for her, letting my shoulders lower a bit in hopes to appear less intimidating.

“I’m very glad to see you again. It looks like Steve’s been taking good care of you.” Tears stream down the kid’s cheeks as she begins to struggle in the man’s arms. “You don’t have to be scared,” I tell her gently. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Please, too scary, pl-please,” she squeaks. The look on my friend’s face is full of sadness and confliction; I can tell that he hates putting her through so much emotional distress, but he also seems just as set on our reunification as I am.

“Not scary, sweetie. Shh-shh shh, there’s no scary here,” Steve tries to reassure her, though the girl only continues to squirm in his arms, struggling against him until eventually, he sits her down firmly in his lap, his arms crossed over her so that she can’t escape. Willa’s eyes squeeze shut in fear as she realizes there’s no escape for her.

“I-I’ll be good- will shift, won’t cry, please, please don’t,” she begs in terror, and as her pleas come to an end, a new look of horror washes over her face as she lets out a quiet cry, a dark wet spot forming underneath her on Steve’s pants. A look of pure heartbreak forms on his face as the little girl freezes up, entirely too scared to speak, move, or do anything.

“Oh sweetheart,” Steve sighs, standing up and lifting her in the air. “I’m sorry, Buck, let me take care of this,” he apologizes tiredly, but I stand as well, shaking my head.

“Here, let me,” I offer. He eyes me hesitantly, clearly worried that I might just do more damage at this point, but I honestly don’t know what damage there’s left to be done; I just want to show her that I’m safe now. I open up my arms to take in the child, but he shakes his head, saying, “At least let me carry her.” I nod, not wanting to push him past what he’s comfortable with.

Steve quietly turns, starting to lead me to the hallway. The walk is silent past the many doors before we reach the very last one on the left. We walk in and the man stops at the dresser to grab a new set of clothes before leading me across the room to another door that opens to a bathroom. He walks over by the counter and sets the child down on the floor; surprisingly she stays standing on her feet. Steve then steps back and sets the clothes on the counter, glancing over at me, unsure.

I send him a comforting nod before I turn to the small girl, approaching her carefully. When I’m a foot or two away from her, I lower myself to my knees, hoping that being on the same level as her will ease some of her fears. At this point, though, she seems to have almost completely shut down. Her body is still tensed up, her eyes wide with trepidation, her mouth clamped shut. I recognize this response right away; she thinks there is no fixing what she’s 'done’ at this point. She’s just trying to be 'good’ now to not make it any worse.

“Let’s get you cleaned up, little dove,” I say warmly, a faint look of recognition setting off in the child’s gaze as I the clothes off the counter and unfold them. Then, I reach out and pull down the little girl’s dirty clothes, slipping them off her feet one by one.

Willa stays silent, probbaly too afraid to even protest.

Looking through the cabinets, I find a tub of skin-safe baby wipes. As gently as I can, I wipe the little girl clean, apologizing when she flinches, “Sorry, bunny. I know they’re a little cold.” She looks completely surprised when I don’t do anything to hurt her, but instead throw the wipes away in the waste bin. Putting the box away in the cabinet, I pick up the clean clothes, holding them up for her to step into. Willa does so warily; once she’s fully clothed again, I stand back up, washing my hands in the sink. She stays quietly down at my side, not moving an inch or making a sound. As I scrub with the lemon-scented soap, I look over at Steve who’s watching in shock. He was probably expecting her to freak out, which honestly, a part of me was too, but luckily it all went smoothly.

Drying my hands, I kneel back down in front of the girl. “How about you and I go start on some dinner while we let Steve get cleaned up?” I suggest, offering her my hand. To my complete surprise, Willa takes it, accepting my offer. Rising back up to my feet, we turn back to face Steve who still looks completely lost.

“O-okay, then. You guys get to it. I’ll be out in just a few.”

← last chapter | series masterlist | next chapter →

[babyjakes]

forever and a day | 30. the sokovia accords.

〈 disclaimer: this blog posts content not suitable for individuals under the age of 18. minors are strictly prohibited from viewing, sharing, or interacting with this blog. for more information on this blog's commitment to protecting minors, read our full statement here. 〉

← last chapter | series masterlist | next chapter →

summary | a story in which america’s favorite captain gives a new life and family to a five-year-old girl who has suffered well beyond her years at the hands of hydra.

characters | dad!steve rogers, girl/willa rogers (original character)

warnings | AU similar enough to OU to include spoilers to many Marvel movies (Age of Ultron and beyond). action and fight scenes with violence and killing. injuries/mild gore. mature themes related to and semi-graphic depictions of child abuse/neglect, past CSA and CSM, and their aftermath (emaciation, wounds, scarring, etc). medical abuse and experimentation. ptsd/trauma symptoms in a child (developmental discrepancies, de-humanized behavior, detachment, extreme fears). medical treatment of CSM and other aftermath of abuse.trauma-informed therapeutic treatment of ECT. somewhat evil!Tony Stark (eventually).

[Steve]

Slowly rolling open the bottom drawer of my dresser, I sort through until I find a pair of clean black jeans. I’ve already peeled off the old bottoms and washed off my skin with a wet rag pumped with soap. Sighing, I lean against the dresser slightly as I slide the new pants on. Then, I slide the drawer closed with my foot, glancing up at myself in the mirror.

I look tired, probably more tired than I actually feel. It’s been a long day, to say the least. To be honest, I’m surprised that everything was resolved so quickly. I wasn’t too sure at all when Bucky decided that he would take over, but I guess he knew what he was doing. Poor little Willa was terrified; I never wanted to put her through any of that. It was important that she faced her fears in regards to Bucky to rekindle their relationship, but when it became so much that she actually wet herself from fear, I was seriously considering putting a cap on the whole situation.

I guess I’m just thankful it all seemed to work out in the end.

Not wanting to leave the two alone for too long in case Willa needs anything, I make sure to waste no time in getting back out of my room and down the hall. I can hear Bucky talking as I enter the living space, his tone slightly raised and softened to accommodate the young child he’s with. He stands in the kitchen over a pot of something that’s steaming; Willa sits near him on the counter, listening to the man intently. “I’ve never been much of a cook myself; Steve can tell you that. I’ve gotten better, though, ever since I was rescued and started living on my own. Hopefully this doesn’t turn out too bad,” Buck chuckles.

“What’re you guys making?” I ask as I walk over to join the two. Willa lifts her head a little bit when she hears my voice, and I smile at her. Bucky turns to me and gestures to the pot.

“I thought we could make some soup. I saw chicken and veggies in your fridge,” he explains.

Shifting over to Willa, I offer a nod, fine with the idea. The child tenses as I near her and looks up at me, her eyes wide. “I’m s-sorry,” she apologizes quickly, “I didn’t mean t-to, won’t do it again; I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, sweetheart. I know you were scared,” I tell her reassuringly. Though the girl still seems uneasy, she says no more about it. “I’m gonna make something separate for her, since she’s still transitioning from her restricted intake at Hydra,” I explain to Bucky as I go into the fridge, retrieving the ingredients needed to make a smoothie. The brown-haired man nods, a hint of sadness in his eyes as he looks over the child in front of him.

Pulling out the blender from the cabinet above the sink, as well as a cutting board and a knife, I cut up the fruit, throwing it in the blender along with some protein powder, supplements, and yogurt. “Big noise,” Willa tells Bucky, a warning she’s gotten in the habit of giving everyone before Bruce or I turn on the blender. Buck and I both smile at her adorableness, and my friend nods at her.

“Okay, dove. Thanks for letting me know,” he plays along. Pressing down on the power button, the machine whirs to life as I glance over at Willa to see her covering her ears slightly. Just as I’m turning the blender off again, once the mixture is smooth, my phone vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket to read the screen. It’s a text from Tony in the team’s group chat.

Tony: Team meeting in 10, 50th flr- mandatory.

I raise my eyebrows at the text, wondering what it means. It’s not often that we call group meetings, especially only ten minutes in advance. “Hey Buck, Tony’s calling a meeting here in ten,” I inform him slowly. The man nods. “I don’t know what it’s about, but you and Willa can always go hang out on the balcony or something if it’s something he doesn’t want you listening in on.”

“Sounds good to me,” Buck replies as I turn to take out a clean cup from a cabinet and pour the smoothie into it, handing it to Willa.

“Thank'ou,” she cheers sweetly, bringing the cup to her mouth and taking a sip. When she lowers it back down, a thin line of the smoothie has formed on the precious child’s upper lip.

“Looks like you have a smoothie-stache, little missy,” Bucky teases, poking at the girl’s cheek. Willa giggles and I take a napkin, gently wiping off her mouth. My phone vibrates once again; this time it’s a text from Thor. Moments after, Tony responds.

Thor: I am not on your planet.

Tony: Fine. Sit this one out.

“Bucky,” a soft voice says from across the room. The three of us turn our attention over to Wanda who’s entered from the hallway. “I didn’t know you were coming over. How are you?” The older girl makes her way over to us, giving the man a slight hug.

“I’m alright. Just wanted to meet the newest member of the team,” Bucky replies with a smile, nodding at Willa. Wanda nods as he begins to add ingredients he’s been preparing to the pot.

“Do you have any idea what Stark wants to talk about?” Wanda asks me, seeming a little bit unsettled.

“No,” I sigh, wishing I could reassure my friend. “But whatever it is, we’ll handle it together, okay?” Wanda nods, leaning in to give me a half-hug as well. Then, she turns her attention to Willa, who’s still happily sipping on her smoothie.

“And how are you doing, little love?” she asks the younger girl, ruffling her hair slightly. Willa smiles up at her, the green shimmering in her eyes with affection.

“Matching,” Willa replies proudly, pointing to her shirt, then mine. I grin, nodding.

“What are you cooking? I can’t smell anything,” Wanda frowns, turning back to investigate the pot on the stove. Bucky huffs, a frown forming on his face. Wanda pushes him aside and stirs the contents a few times, a look of disapproval washing over her. “Americans have no idea how to cook,” she shakes her head, pulling some spices out of the rack beside the stove. As she shakes in various amounts of each one, the scent vividly comes to life.

“How does she do that?” Bucky asks incredulously.

“You’re no better than Vision,” Wanda sighs.

From across the room, the elevator’s bell can be heard, and soon Sam, Clint, Nat, and Bruce have all made their way out into the common space. “Hey Buck,” Clint greets. Sam, Nat, and Bruce wave over at him as well. “Haven’t seen you in a while. What’s cooking? It smells great in here.”

“That would be my doing,” Wanda grins. As I notice Willa scooting herself a tiny bit closer to me, I wrap an arm around her gently. Whenever there are more than a few people in the room, she tends to become a little bit more clingy, which I don’t blame her for. Living with so many people can become quite a lot, at times. Especially a cast of characters like this. The four who have just joined us all settle down on the couches, resuming a conversation they were probably in the middle of when they came up.

Willa leans her head slightly against me as she takes another swallow of her smoothie, her eyes scanning the room that’s now become rather loud. I lean my head down a little bit and whisper, “I’m not a big fan of meetings.” The girl nods, and I assume she maybe feels the same way.

“This is going to need to sit for at least an hour to let everything thicken,” Wanda tells Bucky in regards to his dish. He frowns again, sighing.

“I should’ve ordered a pizza,” he mumbles.

Another ring of the bell can barely be heard, and the elevator doors open again, this time revealing Tony, Peter, and Vision. The three walk in and Tony’s eyes scan from left to right, counting heads. He then nods, pleased that everyone’s in attendance. In his hands, he holds a large stack of paper. Oh boy, I think to myself. A stack like that always means something’s going down.

“Hey everyone. Hey, hi, hello- could we all zip it? We’re having a meeting here, remember?”

Slowly, the buzz of the room dies down, and Tony makes his way over to the long dining table, finding a seat at the head. Beside me, Wanda adjusts the burner to low, swallowing hard. I send her a comforting smile, and she returns it, though I can see her fear lingering in her eyes.

“Can we gather around? That’s it. Get nice and comfy,” Tony encourages us as we all start to make our way over to the table. To Tony’s right is Vision, followed by Clint, Natasha, and eventually, Bucky. Peter sits to Tony’s left, followed by Bruce, Sam, and Wanda. I wrap my other arm around Willa and lift her onto my hip, slowly walking over and taking a seat at the opposite end of the table from Tony, by Bucky and Wanda. “Oh, soldier. Didn’t see you there. Good of you to join us,” Tony nods to Bucky, causing him to stiffen slightly at the chosen nickname.

“Okay, what’s this all about?” Bruce asks somewhat impatiently.

“Yeah- c'mon, man,” Sam shakes his head, “I was just about to kick Natasha’s ass in the training room for the first time in-”

“You mean the first time ever?” Nat cuts him off with a grin. Sam scoffs and shakes his head again, but clearly knows she’s right.

“Yeah, yeah, that can wait,” Tony dismisses. “We’ve got something serious to talk about. So you all better listen up.”

Setting the stack of paper down on the table in front of him, face down, the man pulls a small cube out of his pocket. Tapping the smooth surface of the device, a blue light flashes to life, suddenly shooting an image into the air in front of Tony, like a mini projector that doesn’t need a flat surface; the screen just structures itself. It’s blank, but with a few more taps on the side of the cube, the scientist pulls up a real picture, one of a city.

“We are… the Avengers,” he begins, “a group of superheroes who have saved the day in times of mortal peril, time and time again. We fight evil, protect those who can’t protect themselves, and risk our lives routinely to get the job done, whatever it takes. We’re the good guys, and the world knows it. They love us, and they’re thankful for us.” My stomach twists as I sense can begin to sense where this might be going… somewhere different than just how much good we’ve done for the planet.

“But…?” Sam asks, also sensing that Tony has more to say.

“But, while most see us as heroes, there are some who… struggle, to accept that label,” Tony reveals.

“What label would you use, Tony?” Nat questions.

“How about, dangerous?” the man suggests, a hint of venom coating his voice. He taps the cube again; suddenly, the picture of the city has turned into a running video. On the screen, a giant green figure busts through an entire building, sending it toppling to the ground. “New York,” Tony states simply. Bruce grimaces at the sight, and I turn Willa away in my lap so that she can’t see what’s being presented to us. Tony taps the cube again, and a new video appears. “Washington D.C.” Several cars have all smashed into each other. To my left, Bucky sinks down in his chair, and I almost have the urge to tell Tony to stop. With another tap, the video shifts to an entire chunk of land being lifted into the air. “Sokovia.” The film shows people falling off the sides of the raised city, bodies piling up under crumbled buildings. Finally, Tony taps the device one last time and shows a view of a building. “Lagos.” Suddenly, a large mass of red and orange glowing light enters the shot as it’s thrown into the side of the structure. The camera zooms in on a young girl’s face, her eyes wide open and empty, all the life drained out of what’s now just her pitiful dead corpse. Hearing Wanda let out a whimper beside me, I finally decide to step in.

“Okay. That’s enough,” I say firmly. Tony switches off the cube, and the whole room seems to let out a deep breath.

“We’ve been operating for four years with no supervision. The governments of the world can no longer accept those conditions,” Tony informs us. “But, we’ve been offered a solution.” He flips over the stack of papers. “The Sokovia Accords.”

Vision takes the stack and glances over it before he passes it down to Clint. Everyone starts looking it over as it’s passed around, while Tony continues to talk.

“Approved by 117 countries, it states that the Avengers shall no longer be a private organization. Instead, we’ll operate under the supervision of a United Nations panel, only when and if that panel deems it necessary.” My eyebrows furrow in confusion as the packet is put in front of me. Bucky glances at me, the look in his eyes matching exactly how I’m feeling. This isn’t right. Then, I look to my other side, and Wanda seems to be having the same exact thoughts.

“The Avengers were formed to make the world a safer place,” I counter steadily. “I feel we’ve done that.”

“Can you tell me, Cap, where Thor is right now? If we misplaced a 30-megaton nuke, you can bet there’d be consequences,” Tony shoots back. I gaze around the room to find a mixture of expressions falling on the faces of the team. Handing our power over to politicians? Something about that just doesn’t sit right with me. “Compromise and reassurance. That’s how the world works,” Tony continues to reason. “Believe me. The government guy I spoke to, Mr. Secretary Ross, he made it very clear. This is the middle ground.”

“So, there are… contingencies?” Bruce assumes.

“Three days from now, the UN meets in Vienna to ratify the Accords,” Tony confirms. “We need to talk it over.”

“And if we come to a decision they don’t like?” Nat raises an eyebrow.

“Then we retire,” Tony tells her coldly. Nat nods, a smirk on her face, but I can tell that none of us find any actual humor in the situation.

“Tony, I don’t like this,” I start.

“You know what? I knew you’d say that, Cap, and quite frankly, I don’t love the idea of handing over the wheel to new hands, either, but sometimes we gotta make tough decisions for the greater good,” he spits through his teeth, nodding down at the little girl in my lap. I sigh, not ready to get into a conversation about Willa now; not when we clearly have other things to discuss. Luckily, Tony doesn’t go any further down that path.

“I don’t know about this, either,” Sam interjects. “We’re the ones doing the fighting. I don’t want someone else picking our battles.”

“This is the UN, Sam. It’s not like we have much of a choice,” Bruce reasons.

“Exactly. We don’t have a choice. There’s a clear answer here,” Tony agrees, nothing short of exasperated at this point. “We sign them. We give them what they want, before they take everything from us.”

“They’ll come for me?” Wanda asks meekly.

“We would protect you,” I reassure her, but it doesn’t stop her from sinking down in her chair. Willa looks around at the room, her little body beginning to shake. I’m not sure how much she’s picking up about what’s going on, but I know she can tell that a storm’s brewing among us, and however it ends, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be peacefully.

“I have an equation,” Vision informs us.

“Oh great, this’ll clear everything up,” Sam groans.

“Ever since Mr. Stark revealed himself as Iron Man, the number of enhanced individuals presenting themselves has increased exponentially. As has the number of potentially world-ending events,” the computer-man says.

“So you’re saying it’s our fault?” I ask in confusion.

“What I’m saying is, our existence invites challenge. The challenge turns into chaos. Chaos… breeds catastrophe.”

“I think Tony’s right,” Nat says out of the blue.

“Excuse me?” the man with the glasses stutters. “Am I- did I miss something? Or did you just agree with me?”

“Oh, I wanna take it back,” Nat warns with a groan.

“No, no- there’s no taking it back. Continue,” Tony encourages.

“We need to earn their trust,” the redhead explains. “If we have one hand on the wheel, we can still steer. Staying together is more important than how we stay together.”

“I’m sorry, but… I just can’t accept that,” I say, shaking my head. Tony sighs, the annoyance growing on his face. “The safest hands are still our own. We don’t want them sending us places we don’t want to go. Or not letting us go places that we need to go.”

“Jesus, Rogers. Do you ever just think- could you ever just, even for a moment, just- just stop and listen to yourself? It’s ignorant; you’re so goddamn- no. It’s not even ignorant. It’s just reckless,” Tony grits through his teeth.

“He’s trying to keep politics out of this, Tony, don’t you see that?” Sam tries.

“There’s no sane way to keep politics out of anything! Especially not something like this,” Bruce fires back.

“Oh god,” Clint mumbles. “There’s no way this’s ending well.”

And with that, the room erupts into a whirlwind of voices, all talking over each other, all trying to press their view of the situation. I sigh, trying to find a single person to listen to, but it’s impossible. It’s not a conversation anymore; it’s a chorus of yelling.

The little body settled on my lap has begun to shake more violently, snapping me out of my thoughts. Looking down at Willa, I find that her eyes are wide with fear. This isn’t good for her; these are adult issues, things she should be removed from as best we can. “I have to go,” I shake my head, standing up with the girl in my arms. Tony glares at me, but I speak again before he can stop me. “You’ve said your piece. We can talk more later if we have to.” At that, the noise resumes, though Tony is still staring at me, his eyes narrowed in anger. Before anything more can happen, I turn and make my way out of the room.

“It’s okay, doll. We can find somewhere quieter,” I soothe as I carry Willa down the hall. She buries her face in my shoulder, only letting out a quiet whimper as a response.

We reach her bedroom and I walk in swiftly, closing the door behind us. Making my way over to the girl’s bed, I sit down, leaning back against the pillows that are propped up. Willa is curled up in a ball on my lap, her breathing becoming short and uneven.

“Hey, sweetheart,” I ease, stroking the child’s hair. She flinches slightly, a look of panic in her eyes, and I can tell that she’s just about ready to collapse into a full-blown anxiety attack. “Can you take some deep breathes for me, Willa-bug?” I ask. “In, and out,” I show her. “In, and out. There you go; you got it.”

“L-loud,” the poor kid mumbles as her shoulders curl in towards themselves, her entire frame shaking hard. “P-p-please,” she stutters, struggling to make out the word.

“‘Please’ what, sweetheart? What’s wrong?” I frown, concerned that she’s having such a hard time speaking.

“C-can’t breathe, it-… l-loud,” she hiccups, a few tears escaping her eyes.

“Oh honey,” I croon sadly, my heart aching at the sight of her crying. “It’s okay, Willa. You’re okay; it’s quiet now. It’s nice and quiet, see?” I try. But my words seem to do little to help.

Reaching over onto her nightstand, I grab her pacifier, holding it out in front of her. The girl cowers back, her repeated reaction to the object, but I know that as soon as she has it, she’ll feel better.

“It’s okay, babydoll. It won’t hurt; it helps, remember? Not gonna hurt you.” Thankfully, my reassurance seems to ease her fears ever so slightly, and she allows me to slip the nub into her mouth. Like magic, her body instantly starts to relax, and she rests against me, still shaking, but much less intensely than before.

I rock her back and forth, continuing to brush her hair down gently as we sit together in the quiet. Sighing, I think about what Tony proposed. I can see where he’s coming from, but in the end, I still don’t think it’s right. And judging by some of the other responses from the team, I’m clearly not alone. All I can hope is that things will be resolved peacefully.

Though, I have the burning feeling in the pit of my stomach that they won’t be.

← last chapter | series masterlist | next chapter →