#even with my transfer coordinator telling me a week ago it was for all intents and purposes done and dusted

[ravencromwell]

So as everyone's waiting to see which way the world tips, I'm in a fierce personal joy bubble. Acceptance letter just arrived, and I've, in what still feels numinous and miraculous, made my way in to four-year uni. I started community college almost three years ago now, a decade out of high school, barely remembering to keep the I voice out of academic papers. And somehow, I'm graduating in December with an associate's in history, a 4.0, and a bizarre awe because yeah apparently I can do this academia thing pretty damn ok—at least ok enough other institutions want me to keep taking a crack.

[shemarmooresfedora]

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Series Summary: After being arrested, Spencer Reid desperately tries to get back home to his daughter, Camellia, who was placed into foster care in your home.

Pairing: Single!Dad!Spencer x Foster!Mom!Reader

Word Count: 1.7k

Content/Warnings: mentions of Diana’s Alzheimer’s and Schizophrenia, prison, separation of father and daughter, swearing

A/N: i hope you guys enjoy my new fic! this may be about 8 chapters or so! i’m not sure yet, going to see how interested people are in the plot :) (also quick disclaimer: i have never been in the foster care system so please excuse any inaccuracies)

Masterlist

Chapter 1

Spencer never wanted his daughter to see him like this, being brought into the BAU bullpen in handcuffs. He was supposed to be the good guy.

Right now, he couldn’t tell if he still was. He had good intentions going down to Mexico to get non-FDA approved medicine for his mom but he may have killed someone in the process. If only he could just remember.

Camellia ran into his arms to hug him, a hug he so desperately wanted to return if it wasn’t for these stupid cuffs around his wrists.

“They can’t just take you away, Dad,” she cried.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m going to get back to you as soon as possible,” he promised, kissing the top of her head.

Spencer felt absolutely crushed as the guards had to drag his crying 11-year-old off of him so he could be taken to his holding cell.

-

You had just gotten off of work when your phone rang. Eileen, the head foster care coordinator, was calling.

“Hello,” you answered.

“Hey Y/N,” she greeted you, “I know you haven’t had a foster kid in a few months but I kind of have an urgent case. 11-year-old sixth grade girl. Mom has been out of the picture for a while, Dad recently imprisoned and on trial for murder. There are a bunch of family friends willing to take her but no direct family,” she explained.

“I can take her for as long as she needs,” you told Eileen.

“Great! I’ll text you the address, it’s the FBI headquarters.”

-

When you walked into the BAU, still in your dino scrubs and white lab coat, Eileen was surrounded by a frantic group of people.

“As I said before, I don’t doubt any of your credentials but this is the law. We can only give away a child to direct family at this point in time. If you are not direct family, you will need a lawyer to fight for custody as well as permission from her father but that process could take months,” Eileen stated.

“Spencer hasn’t spoken to his father in years and his mother is in a facility for her schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s,” a dark-haired woman spoke.

“Exactly so she must be turned over to the foster care system. I apologize to you all but this is how it works. We can’t bend the rules,” Eileen said.

“I don’t want Callie fending for herself in a house with 20 other kids,” a blonde-haired woman argued, “I’m her godmother. She stays with me all the time. She was staying with me while Spencer was in Mexico.”

“Sorry, my answer is still no. But, hopefully this will squash your concerns, Y/N!” she called you over, “This is Y/N. Jo will be placed with her. She is a pediatric doctor and currently has no other foster kids at the moment but all of her past kids have absolutely adored her. She always passes her surprise safety and wellness checks with flying colors.

“Hi,” you waved, intimidated by this huge group of frustrated people with guns on their hips.

“A doctor? So she isn’t even going to be home most of the time,” a curly-haired man scoffed.

“Actually, I own my own practice. I don’t work at a hospital so I usually have a regular 8-4 shift unless one of my patients needs urgent attention,” you clarified.

“JJ, don’t make me go,” a girl, who you could only assume was Callie, sobbed.

They were all staring at you like you were the worst person on Earth. You wanted to shrivel up and die. When you went through the process of becoming a foster parent, you thought this was a very admirable thing to do. You just wanted to provide a good home to kids in need.

“Do any of you have a key to Dr. Reid’s residence so Camellia can pack a bag?” you asked politely.

The woman closest to Callie that must be JJ pulled a key off of her chain and handed it to you.

“I’ll-um-leave my phone number and address here so you guys can contact me at any time or stop by. I understand your concerns but please know I try my absolute hardest to make sure all kids feel welcome and safe in my house,” you scribbled your information down on a scrap piece of paper.

“Are you ready to go, Camellia?” you asked softly.

She went around hugging everyone in the circle before solemnly nodding to you.

God, you felt like such an asshole.

-

After Callie finished packing her things from her bedroom in relative silence, you returned to the car.

“I don’t know what you like to eat but we can stop at the grocery store so we can get stuff you like and any other things you need,” you said.

You were met with silence from the backseat. You offered for her to sit in the passenger seat but she declined.

“Listen, I’m really not trying to be the bad guy here. Please don’t make me out to be one. I know you are having a tough time with your Dad’s situation right now but shutting everyone else out won’t help,” you spoke softly, “Trust me, I know.”

You sighed when the silence continued. You pulled out of the Reid’s driveway and headed to the grocery store.

-

You let Callie lead when you entered the grocery store, opting to follow behind her with the cart. She went immediately to the frozen meal section and started throwing them in.

“Camellia, that’s fine if those are what you want but just so you know, I love to cook so I can make you anything you want,” you offered.

“This is what I’m used to,” she spoke sharply, “My dad is not a bad dad, he just usually doesn’t have much time.”

“I never claimed he was,” you defended yourself.

After that, you kept your mouth shut. Clearly, she was a very independent girl and she had her own routine she liked to stick to.

-

You hauled all the grocery bags inside the house and unloaded them as Callie brought in her suitcases.

“So Camellia, I put all the food you picked out in these two cabinets. I mean obviously, you are welcome to anything in the kitchen but I just wanted you to know where the things you picked out were. I always have a grocery list on the fridge that you can add to,” you began to give her a tour of the house, “Bathroom is in there. There’s another upstairs. Here’s the living room with a TV,” you headed up the stairs, “Here’s my room.”

On your bed was an adorable toyger kitten cuddled up on your pillow.

“Oh! This is Winnie like Winnie the Pooh. I just got her a few weeks ago from a shelter. She is super friendly and loves snuggles so she will probably try to sneak into your bed unless you keep your door closed.”

“I don’t mind,” Callie spoke softly as she petted Winnie.

You smiled softly. These were the first words you got out of her that weren’t a rejection.

You continued the tour, “There’s a bathroom between our rooms but I tend to use the downstairs one so feel free to make it your own. And here’s your room,” you opened the door to a white room with a queen bed in the center, a small bookshelf, a few plants, and paintings.

“I hope this is good enough for now. We can go out this weekend to a home goods store if you want to redecorate. I’d even be open to repainting it if you want,” you offered.

Callie just set her bags down and nodded.

“Alright, I’ll leave you be. I’ll probably be downstairs for a while watching TV if you want to join. Let me know if you want me to make you anything,” you began to shut the door but Winnie slipped in first.

“Good night, you guys,” you smiled softly.

-

“Do you want me to wait out here or come in with you?” you asked softly.

Spencer had been denied bail, meaning he was transferred to a federal prison and Callie was going to be staying with you for a while. She had taken the news rather hard as expected when the team came over to your house to tell her. You still weren’t really accepted by the group so you mostly stood in the corner of the kitchen while they were all in your living room.

You had spoken to Eileen several times about Callie’s current situation. She gave you permission to do whatever you saw fit. This means you could opt her out of school one or two days a week if she wasn’t feeling up to it as long as she emailed her teachers and got her missed work in on time. You were researching different therapists for her to talk to because she didn’t seem to want to open up to you. You were also given a schedule of visiting times for her to visit her dad in prison.

“I’ll just go in alone,” she walked in the door to the visiting room, leaving you in the waiting room.

-

“Dad,” Callie tried to hug Spencer but the guard pointed to the ‘No Touching’ sign posted on the wall.

They both sat down defeatedly at opposite ends of the table.

“How are you?” Callie inquired, wiping her tears away from seeing her father locked up.

“I don’t want to talk about me, sweetheart. How are you? Emily and my lawyer visited yesterday and told me you had to be placed into foster care,” Spencer asked, concerned.

“It’s okay. Not the best,” she sighed.

“What’s happening? Are they hurting you? Are they not giving you enough to eat? Callie, I’ll have my lawyer on the phone and you out of there so quick,” Spencer frantically stated.

“No, Dad. Y/N is fine…nice, even. But she’s not you,” Callie cried.

Spencer’s face softened, “I’m so sorry, Callie. You don’t deserve to be dealing with any of this.”

“Just please come home,” she sniffled.

“I’m trying, sweetheart, I’m really trying,” he replied earnestly with tears in his eyes.

A/N: i will also be starting a series taglist if you don’t want to be added to my main taglist so just clarify which one you want to join! also i recommend listening to the song Home by Phillip Phillips because it is kind of like the theme song for this story

main taglist (just ask to be added/removed!): @samuel-de-champagne-problems @g0lden-cth @spencerreid9 @averyhotchner @coldlilheart @k-k0129 @ickleronniekinsemotionalrange @harrystylesandthegoobs @cmily @jswessie187 @rem-ariiana @hoodpankow @mochionly @spencerreid-187 @babymetaldoll @fics4arainyday @ssavanessa22 @all-tings-diego

series taglist: @ilovespencerreidmarryme

[consumeconstantly]

Small Buff Girl Sightings Ch. 2

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | ao3

It’s now the end of Damian’s first week in Paris, and everything is ready for him to transfer into Francois Dupont. He really thought he had dodged the pointless education bullet by coming to France, but of course his father wouldn’t let that slip. However, if he has to continue getting an education he doesn’t need, he will at least get something productive done during the hours of his experience; he will explore the so-called akuma class that he has read up about. One Caline Bustier’s class, the same class that the Ladyblogger is in. The same class that Marinette is in.

He hopes it’s the same as it was in Gotham, or at least similar enough. He expects his reception to be a little different, since his last name has been changed to Grayson to avoid any unwanted attention. Maybe this means that his classmates won’t try to talk to him solely for the purpose of connecting to his family. That doesn’t mean that he wants to talk to any of them. Unless they’re all like Marinette; his brief interactions with her have been bearable, bordering on pleasant. He doubts her class will be similar, though, judging by the quick sweep that he does on all of the student’s social media accounts and the hours that he’s spent on the Ladyblog. From what he has gleaned, the social situation in the akuma class leaves much to be desired. Lila Rossi, who appeared on the Ladyblog multiple times two years ago in rather ridiculous interviews that have since been taken down, seems to be the crux of the class currently. The rest of the class, other than Marinette, who hasn’t appeared in most of the group pictures that her classmates take for the past two years, seem to have little common sense.

When he walks into the classroom, there is a huddle around Lila Rossi, who sits near the front of the classroom and looks astonishingly bored as her classmates talk to her. The members of the class don’t even look up at him when he comes in, instead looking at Lila with almost cult-like devotion, despite the awful shade of lipstick that did not look good on her-- seriously, who wore orange lipstick on a day to day basis? He spares them a moment of observation, decides that he’s not going to get along with his classmates at all, then takes a seat in the back. There is only one desk that has both seats empty-- or is at least currently unoccupied, judging by the lack of items on it. The desk in question is near the back of the classroom next to an exit. He prefers this to sitting in the front, at least.

Right before class starts, a girl drops into the seat next to him, the one that’s closer to the aisle instead of the exit, but the way that she pauses for a moment makes him think that she typically sits where he is, now. 

“Damian?” 

What luck. Marinette is his seat partner. One of the only people in Paris that he’s talked to that seems to be fairly tolerable. With the added bonus of her being fairly intelligent and able to hold her own. There isn’t much more that he could ask for in a seatmate. 

He is confused as to how such a girl is still in this seemingly god-awful class, but small blessings. He’s not going to complain about having Marinette by his side.

“Oh, you must be the transfer from America.” She pulls out a binder from her bag, sends a quick glance sent to Lila, then settles into her chair. Lila sends Marinette a look that Damian can’t quite decipher, but it’s not unfriendly. “If you want to get acquainted with the school, you can ask Lila or Alya. Lila’s the one with orange lipstick and green eyes. Alya’s the one in plaid with glasses. They’re the class president and deputy this year.”

Damian takes a few more moments to observe the class dynamics, particularly how Lila and Alya interact with those around them. The former holds a blonde boy that Damian is fairly sure is Adrien Agreste, and while he seems accustomed to having Lila hang off his arm, he doesn’t exactly look comfortable either. Lila’s eyes unsettle Damian. They look eerily similar to his mother��s, though there is much less ill intent held within them. Alya looks spineless and clingy, clearly uneducated about topics that she brings up one after another. He can’t hear what they are saying clearly from this distance, but he is certain that the small blonde girl was asking Lila to tell the story of how she saved Jagged’s kitten one more time, even though that story’s years old because Lila’s just so humble and modest and amazing. Surprisingly, Lila turns down the girl’s request, and continues to barely interact with her classmates while she continues to hold onto Adrien’s arm.

Jagged as in Jagged Stone, Damian assumes, and though he’s no fan himself, factoids about the rock star’s life have been shoved down his throat by Tim and Dick for the past five years, so how the hell could he not know that a) the star’s manager was deathly allergic and b) the star said that Fang was the best pet that could ever be and he could never want for anything more. 

“You can tour me around instead.” To be completely honest, he doesn’t need a tour around the school at all; Damian did do reconnaissance before starting this mission. He knows the school’s layout like the back of his hand after pouring over maps and information about Francois Dupont. However, he is particularly interested in the dynamics of the akuma class, and he might as well get insider information while he still can.

Marinette looks at Damian appraisingly. “I don’t know about that, Damian. Lila and Alya are fine at giving tours. You’d be in capable hands.”

“Hands capable of what?” Damian can’t imagine that Lila’s claws are good for anything except skewering people who tried to disprove her seemingly outlandish tales. He almost feels bad for Adrien, then thinks better of it; he doesn’t seem that uncomfortable with Lila, he just doesn’t seem to like her hand on his arm.

Marinette laughs, softly, focusing on the group. She moves her mouth so little that if anyone looks, it will appear as though he is talking to her without response. “Very funny. Seriously, if you want a tour, ask Lila or Alya. I’m really not the best person for the job.”

The teacher comes into the room, and the students slowly disperse back into their seats. 

#

When lunch comes around, Marinette packs her stuff up and gets out of the classroom so quickly, he wonders if she’s not some sort of athlete. 

“You’re Damian, the transfer from America!” Lila puts a manicured hand on his arm, and Damian almost thinks that he sees her lick his lips as his forearm flexes at the unexpected contact. He restrains himself from his initial thought to deck her, but barely.

He takes a deep breath and gets his disgust under control. He can control himself. Alfred and Dick have spent years ensuring that he knows what a normal reaction is to someone touching him. When his eyes aren’t seeing red anymore, he turns his attention back to the hand on his arm. Her nails are the same garish orange as her lips, and it’s the case of the chicken and the egg all over again. No matter which came first, though, the color looks bad on both. Jason will say that Damian can’t criticize the girl because of his own awful sense of color coordination, but there’s a reason why he doesn’t have any color in his wardrobe besides his Robin suit. 

“Come, sit with us.” Orange’s voice is nauseatingly fake.

Damian doesn’t outright refuse, but he does shake off the girl’s hand. She feels too similar to Talia up close. Her eye shape is eerily similar. She must be manipulative and cunning to have such a hold on the class. But, he might as well see exactly what the akuma class is all about.

He is escorted into the cafeteria, pushed next to Adrien, then given a lunch tray that has foods that look decidedly less than nutritious and possibly stale. At Gotham Academy, the food was always prepared by the best, so this is unusual for him.

“My name is Adrien. It’s nice to meet you.” Damian thinks the blond boy is nice enough, but he sounds tired and worn out. 

Moments later, Lila comes back from the bathroom and squeezes herself between Damian and Adrien, looping her arm through Adrien’s and then attempting to do the same with Damian. But his arms are so tightly at his side, that it’s impossible for her to wiggle her hand through. Damian is glad that he trained himself to eat with both hands, and quickly takes up a fork with his left. Her laugh is high and breathy, like she’s changed her voice to sound different.

He has to say that it feels disgusting, because it feels like she’s treating him as some sort of arm candy. For the first time in his life, he actually thinks about his gender and is very glad that he was born a boy. Had he been born a girl, there is no doubt that this kind of situation may have happened more often; Damian knows he’s attractive. His mother and father both have very good genes both look wise and talent wise.

Not even ten minutes go by, and Damian sees why Marinette high-tailed it out of the classroom so quickly. He wishes that he went with her instead, though he gets the feeling that he isn’t welcome to do so. 

The stories that Lila weaves for her life as of late are more convincing than the ones that his classmates have told him of her heroic deeds in the past. Damian can almost believe that they’re true-- helping out with food drives, volunteering with the Red Cross occasionally-- but he doubts the validity of any statement that comes from her mouth after finding the cache of interviews from three years ago. She’s focusing more on friends, she says as she tries to catch his arm again. She leans closer, and Damian can smell the floral perfume on her so strongly that it makes him nauseous. His mother never wore perfume. Nobody from the League of Assassins did. Perfume is something that’s traceable. After he was introduced to Gotham City, all of the women he came into contact with rarely wore perfume and when they did, it certainly wasn’t this floral fruity-fresh fragrance that Lila was drenched in.

She leans on him, and Damian’s pretty sure by the curve of the girl’s smirk and the glint in her eyes that he’s supposed to find the slight touch of her cleavage on his arm attractive. This paltry attempt at seduction is laughable. Even as a nine year old, his mother had him training against attacks like these. He was taught never to give into lust, and after living in a family like the Waynes, girls and boys alike threw themselves at him. If he wants a relationship, physical or otherwise, he can have one. He certainly doesn’t want a relationship with this Lila Rossi. Still, he doesn’t see why she has so much control over the classroom and certainly doesn’t see why Marinette is so excluded from their class. 

It’s the longest hour of his life, but Damian makes it through and nearly flees for the safety of the back seat in the classroom. Nearly, but not quite.

#

By the time Damian gets into the room, Marinette is already sitting at the desk again. She looks up, looks at Lila who has looped her arm with Adrien’s and is smiling at Damian like a cat who got the cream. Damian reads sadness and maybe a touch of concern when she looks at Adrien.

“Lunch was awful.”

“Was it.” It’s phrased like it should be a question, but it doesn’t sound like Marinette is curious.

“You could have told me.”

Her lips purse. She’s copying notes from the last class over again, making them neater and more organized. “That’s not my place.”

“You’re my seat partner.”

“So?”

“Somehow, you seem a lot more morally righteous when you’re out on the streets.”

“That’s different. Paris is Paris; class is class. There’s a time and place for everything.”

From the cacophony near the front rises Lila’s high pitched voice. Damian thinks that she’s modulated it in order to seem more innocent, more believable. “Oh, Adrien, I’m so happy that we’re going to have dinner together with your father tonight.” 

Marinette’s eyes raise from her paper. They search for Adrien. Adrien, whose shoulders are hunched in a way that speaks of tiredness and defeat. Adrien, who has eye bags that even concealer cannot fix. Adrien, who looks down at his hands and refuses to meet Marinette’s eyes and their soft, sad questions. 

Slowly, Marinette’s eyes lower. She blinks at her paper, then continues copying her notes. 

At the very least, Damian is glad that he’s sitting back here with the only sane person in this class. It isn’t like Damian is here to make friends anyways. It might have been helpful, but he doesn’t need other people’s help. He can manage on his own.

#

Scratch that, he could not manage. 

Damian now understands why Hawkmoth had not been captured even though it had been three years since his appearance. Magic is really annoying. 

He reports back to the Justice League that yes, the reports were true and no, he did not think it was a good idea to send anyone in yet and yes, he would continue to work on reconnaissance and figuring out who Hawkmoth was.

Despite three more akuma attacks(of increasing intensity) and hours prowling the internet, clues about Hawkmoth’s identity are few and far between. Early on in his mission brief, he was encouraged to not make contact with the Paris superheroes unless the situation got really bad and not to go patrolling the rooftops as Robin at all. They didn’t want to destress the Parisian heroes who had, at first, asked them for help, and then pleaded with them to not send anybody. All of the lack of information and lack of action gave him undue stress, more so than when he was back in Gotham. At least back there, the high stress situations he encountered would promptly be worked off by fighting a villain, sparring his brothers, or patrolling. He can’t do any of that here. 

The coffee he ordered finally arrives, and he downs it in one shot, surveying the streets in front of him. Parisians are weird. His classmates have one collective brain cell that resides with the orange monstrosity, Lila, and the people he meets on the streets are way too open and friendly for people who have been terrorized by a supervillain for three years. They should be more like the citizens of Gotham-- keeping their heads down, minding their own business. Instead, he’s been approached by countless people as he wandered around the city-- unsurprisingly, mostly from girls sent by a larger pack in attempts to get his number or ask him on a date-- and also by random people who want to cheer him up. What kind of person tries to cheer up random people on the streets? Apparently it’s something that many Parisians have taken to doing, in attempts to prevent more akumas. Damian doesn’t think it’s very successful on that part, and is more just an excuse for people who want to stick their noses where they don’t belong.

Marinette is the only Parisian who was better than decent at holding her own Damian’s seen so far; in the past week, he’s stopped three bag snatchers, two stalkers, and two random fights. It’s surprisingly lively for a city that is plagued by a villain who takes advantage of strong emotions. He asks one of the people he saves why this is so.

“Well, it’s been three years. For the first year, yes, we very much lived in fear. But Ladybug and Chat Noir always come to save the day, and they told us that holding in our emotions is even more unhealthy.” This, a man he saved from his stalker. “That talk came after they fought off a stream of very strong akumas that totalled the city, all because they had been repressing their emotions until the breaking point.”

That is useful information. It definitely explains why the city is the way it was, though with the number of tourists that Paris has, he’s surprised that this hasn’t become headlining news internationally. He finds a few threads on Twitter talking about it, but most people are convinced it’s some ongoing stunt for attention. Apparently there’s a movie out about Ladybug and Chat Noir? Damian knows that Mayor Bourgeois put an initial block on information about the akumas from getting out, but that shouldn’t have stopped the Justice League from getting their hands on information about the situation in Paris. However, the teams that have been looking into the situation since they found out have had very little luck finding anything other than conspiracy theories. If Damian hadn’t seen an akuma battle with his own eyes, he’d have thought he was sent on a wild goose chase. 

Damian feels a cross of pity for the Parisian superheroes and a brief moment of anger at Hawkmoth. From what he’s gathered, the Ladybug and Chat Noir are largely on their own. In that first year, there were a few other heroes in the mix-- a fox, a bee, a dragon, and a snake-- but their appearances became sparse and after a mass akumatization, they never appeared again. Ladybug and Chat Noir definitely stepped up their game in that second year, with Ladybug taking the lead so strongly that Damian isn’t sure that he can call them a pair of superheroes. 

Sure, the battles end more quickly with Chat Noir there, but there are plenty of occasions where he doesn’t show up at all and other fights where he stays out of the battle entirely. Oftentimes, in the second year, both heroes looked extraordinarily tired and peaky. Then, something had changed, and Ladybug no longer seemed to be bothered. That was when Chat Noir started staying out of more and more battles, and the few times that he showed up, he always ran off first. Their media appearances, which had been rather heavy in the first year, dwindled down to a few periodic and important announcements. Other than that, they never gave more interviews to smaller blogs, like the Ladyblog. He has to say that he’s not surprised; even though Alya has taken them down, Lila’s interviews were still riddled with lies and she had posted them. Ladybug must have felt that the blog's integrity decreased. 

All of this meaningless information leads him nowhere. The Ladyblog and several other news sources have contemplated Hawkmoth’s identity and purpose, but they all seem far fetched. Motivations include everything from world destruction to believing that this is all just a ploy to get Ladybug and Chat Noir media attention. There’s not even any concrete conclusion on Hawkmoth’s gender, though the majority opinion holds that he is a man.

He sees Marinette from the coffee shop windows. It’s amazing that this girl seems to be everywhere all at once. She always ends up near the akuma attacks, but he never spots her during them, which is curious. There’s only so many reliable places to hide. Today, she’s facing down some adult while holding a child behind her. The lady looks furious, red-faced and spittle flying. In contrast, Marinette looks calm and cold, and addresses the woman cordially, though not with respect.

A crowd gathers, but as in all things that might be dangerous, they form at a distance, with phone cameras at the ready. Damian joins them and watches the situation unfold.

“He’s my child. I get to decide how to discipline him.” The lady is wearing an expensive looking suit that is a little over the top. Her hair is perfectly coiffed, and her handbag costs at least two thousand dollars. 

“Even if he is your child, that doesn’t mean you can hurt him like this. Mademoiselle, I suggest that we go to the police station now.”

“I don’t have time for that. This brat already cost me an hour of my time to pick him up from school because he was misbehaving, and I have to get to the office now.” The lady hisses, draws closer, ready to push Marinette and grab her child. Marinette side steps, pulling the child behind her. 

“You’re a mother. Make time for your child. We are going to the police station, Mademoiselle, or I will call the police here.”

“I am one of the head managers of Silverstein and Company’s Paris branch. You are just a teenager. You have no place arguing with me over parenting tactics.”

“I am only a teen,” Marinette conceded, “But even a child knows when something is wrong and should be stopped. And abusing your child, Mademoiselle, is very clearly wrong.”

Marinette brings out her phone-- she must have the station on speed dial. Now, the woman approaches Marinette with a heavy hand, ready to slap her. The kid is hiding behind Marinette and quivering, very much afraid of his mother. He’s holding Marinette’s hand so tightly that Damian can see her fingertips have begun to turn blue. 

Damian figures this is as good a time as any to intervene, so he puts himself between Marinette and the lady. Marinette backs up a little more, bends down to the kid and pats his shoulder. 

“It’ll be okay,” Marinette says to the kid soothingly. She seems like the type to babysit. Good with kids, creative enough to keep them out of trouble, but with enough of a backbone to make sure they grow up right. 

The police show up in record time, and Damian wonders whether Marinette has Special Privileges that make officers show up more quickly. It would make sense, since she always seems to be getting people out of trouble. Too bad she seems too much on the side of the law to ever become a vigilante. The world could use more people like her, active in helping others.

The four of them are instructed to go the police precinct; the woman says that she’ll take her car, and looks expectantly at her child, thinking that he’ll come with her. Marinette pushes the boy even further out of the woman’s view and meets the lady with a glare. 

“Do you mind if we ride with you in the back, Officer?” 

The three of them pile into the back of the cruiser, and Damian feels like this is some sort of twisted irony. He’s sent many a villain to jail, but he himself has never been in the back of such a police car. In the back of a high security one, once, when he was on an infiltration mission, but the back of such a normal one? Never. It’s an interesting experience to say the least; there’s mesh between the officer and themselves, and no way to get out from the back themselves. It’s also decidedly hot in the back, with plastic seats and no air conditioning. 

Marinette is cooing at the child now, who is gripping her hand only slightly less tightly. “Don’t worry, Renee, we’re going to make sure that you don’t get hit like that again.”

The kid’s eyes are glassy, then he’s all tears, and he’s crying into Marinette’s shirt. She just pats him on the back, slowly, and lets him cry it out. It’s very different from the approach that Batman, the Nightwing, Red Hood and Robin take with their victims. Most times, they just let the victims be ushered wherever the police need then to be, and then, they never see them again. Damian justifies this with the fact that fundamentally vigilantes and regular people are different. It makes sense that Marinette has a more human touch to her. She’s not wearing a bodysuit. It’s all Marinette, and that makes the whole situation more powerful.

It only takes a few more moments for the boy to cry himself to sleep. 

“I want to file with Child Protection Services.” Her voice is soft, low. She speaks carefully so as not to wake the kid up. 

“Yes, we should file with CPS, but if this is just a one time thing there’s not really much that we can do about this.” The officer sounds sad, like he’s dealt with situations like this before.

“As long as we have proof that this isn’t a one time thing, we can make sure that Renee doesn’t go back with her unless he wants to?” There’s a flash of steel determination in Marinette’s eyes, and it almost makes Damian uncomfortable. It’s the look Barbara gets when one of them get really badly injured. 

“Yes, but that kind of proof is hard to get.”

“I see,” she says, like she really does see all of the situation and knows exactly what needs to happen next. She says it like she’s going to make Renee’s mother go to jail if it’s the last thing she does.

They arrive at the precinct, and Marinette carries the boy like its nothing. Damian offers to help, but he’s shaken off. Renee is already asleep in her arms, after all, and she doesn’t want to risk waking him up. She’s sure that he's tired, after all this. It’s a curious thing, how softly and lovingly she looks down at the boy, even though Damian suspects that Marinette has never met the boy in her life before this fiasco.

Their party arrives more quickly than the mother, so they take seats in a small office, Renee still on Marinette’s lap. She’s now scrolling through her phone, assessing whatever’s on her screen with a clinical eye. Damian pulls out his phone as well. To be honest, he’s not quite sure what he’s doing here. He only stepped in at the last second, though he doesn’t have any real complaints about being here. His father would say it’s an experience, and his siblings would joke that he finally ended up in the hands of the police.

When the lady arrives, she looks nothing like that woman he saw on the streets earlier. She looks every inch a professional. Her makeup has been touched up, and there is a smile plastered on her face that screams dealing with an unpleasant situation. 

“I’m so sorry about that,” she says to Marinette like she’s an old friend. “You know how it is-- sometimes it’s really hard to keep a level head with all that goes on in the city. I was so scared for my little boy-- I heard there was an akuma attack near his school, and rushed out to get him, but he wanted to stay with his friends.”

Marinette has a polite smile fixed on her face as well. Her face doesn’t show the slightest bit of reaction to the lady.

“Kids, am I right?” The lady tries for a joke, tries to sway Marinette and the officer and Damian to her side. “So just let me pick up Renee here, and I’ll bring him back home.”

The lady reaches for Renee, and Damian stops her because Marinette has both her hands full with Renee, who has woken up with shuddering sobs. 

“Officer, is it possible if Renee can wait outside of the room while we talk? Surely there’s somebody who can watch him out there.” Her voice is still kept soft and soothing. She looks at Renee and smiles, doesn’t bother looking at the rest of her surroundings. “Is that okay, Renee? Do you mind waiting outside for a little?”

The little boy nods, and he is swept up by some other person who works at the precinct, and then it is only the four of them in the room.

The lady looks frustrated, but she keeps her mouth shut as the officer goes through the proper procedures that they must follow, and that CPS is getting involved. 

“But officer, there’s no need to get CPS involved. I take very good care of my darling Renee. He gets to go to all the classes he could ever want to and I love him very much. I’m so sorry that he got bruised. I’ll make sure that it never happens again.”

Marinette’s hands are carefully laid on her pants. Her fingers are splayed open and the entirety of each palm rests on her thighs. A gesture that makes her look relaxed, were it not for the slight tremble that Damian detects. She is holding her hands in that position so tightly that Damian has good reason to believe that she is withholding herself from hitting the woman. 

“Madame DeVries.” Marinette’s voice is clipped. “CPS must be involved. I insist. It’s very clear to me that this is not the first time that you have hurt Renee, nor will it be the last.”

“How can you say that?” The lady wails. She is an okay actress, but not able to fool any of those present in the room. “I love my darling boy. I would never hit him. Never!”

“Regardless of whether this is the first time you hit him, there are more ways to hurt a person than just physical abuse. Renee’s fear of you makes it clear that you have induced some sort of psychological trauma on him.”

The lady’s face contorts into a sneer when she realizes that nobody in the room is on her side. “You have no evidence. You can’t accuse me like that. I’ll call a lawyer.”

“Go ahead and call a lawyer, Madame. I think that would be for the best. Don’t worry about the evidence. There’s plenty.” She turns to the officer. “Please call someone from CPS here. I don’t want Renee going home with her until the trial is over.”

“You can’t do that to me.” The lady is standing now, towering over Marinette and trying to intimidate her. “I have a reputation to uphold. You will not sue me for child abuse. You cannot.”

“Any parent who truly cares for their child would care more for their child’s well being rather than their own reputation. I wonder what that says about you, Madame. There is no reason why I can’t sue you and too many reasons that I should.”

She lowers herself to Marinette's ear, whispers in soft tones that she’s certain will not be caught by any recording devices. “You will not take me to court, or I’ll make sure that you are blacklisted wherever you want to work. You underestimate how much power I have.”

“Madame, please move away from me. I was only going to attempt to remove Renee from your custody, but please be assured that I will now pursue you for threatening a minor, abusing a child, and whatever other charges that I can come up with. I will refuse to settle. The trial will go public, and the reputation that you care so much about will be ruined, even if you win.”

Celia Devries’ face shifts to an almost cattish grin. It looks like she’s won. “Please, I understand that you’re distressed, but I haven’t threatened you at all.”

Marinette simply pulls her phone out again and plays back a recording of the exact threat that Celia just made to her. 

She splutters. “I never agreed to be recorded! It’s illegal under French code.”

“Madame DeVries, when you come into the precinct, you agree to being recorded. This recording might be from my personal phone, but it is still within legal jurisdiction. In addition, the code is different for gathering evidence against a crime. Everything that is said and done in this office can be disclosed during trial, and there are cameras and voice recorders in here. Please, return to whatever you had to do, and you will be served your court orders soon enough.” Damian is impressed. Has Marinette done this before? She’s too prepared to know this just by spending a few minutes on her phone.

Celia pales, then storms out of the room, frightened that she’ll say something else that will incriminate herself. 

“At least Hawkmoth has already filled his daily quota,” the officer jokes. 

“There’s that much, at least,” Marinette smiles, but there’s something frigid behind it. 

“You’re always getting caught up in something,” Damian says.

“I really am. Some day I’ll become a recluse.”

“And let the world’s horrors move without you?”

Marinette shrugs and all of the tension that was holding in her hands and shoulders dissipates. 

“Since this is a child custody case, it will be the government against Mademoiselle DeVries. The two of you can come to testify, and if there’s any evidence that you have, you can go ahead and give it to me now. If you want to sue her for threatening a minor, you can do that as well; I’ll get you in contact with a lawyer.”

“I don’t have any evidence.” Right now, at least. When Damian goes home, he’ll do a little digging about the woman, see what he can find. 

“I do. I was recording the whole encounter on the street, and I also have several eyewitnesses who have recorded as well. Let me send them to you.” Marinette fiddles with her phone. “And if it’s possible, I think it would be a good thing for Renee to talk to a psychiatrist. In the interim before he goes home, who will he be staying with?”

“He can choose to stay with his next of kin, or can stay in a  temporary foster home.”

“Please email me the date that I should come in to testify, and give me the lawyer’s contact information as well. I’ll email him any additional evidence that I can get.”

“I’d like the email address of the lawyer as well.” Damian might only have a moral conscience because his family beat it into him, but Renee seems like a sweet kid. He’s willing to help.

They’re out of the precinct in another half hour, after Marinette pulls the person from CPS in so they can talk to Renee about what’s going to happen next. The kid takes it surprisingly well, saying that he doesn’t want his mom to get hurt, but that he’s excited to see his Nonna and Nonno again. Marinette tells him that he can contact her any time he wants to talk at her cell phone number, and if he ever wants him to visit, just call.

#

All the buzz of the world seems to die down when they get out of the precinct, and Damian asks whether she’s done this before. 

“I haven’t done anything like this before, but I’ve certainly dreamed of it.” Her eyes look off to a distance. “Abusive parents are the worst.”

“Yours?” Damian can’t imagine this girl’s parents as being abusive, but he should have known better to believe that. Just because someone is stable and competent doesn’t mean that they have a good family-- just look at him and his brothers. They’re competent and stable on good days.

She gasps and looks shocked, verging on offended and embarrassed. “Of course not! My parents are both very sweet people. I love them so much-- I can’t believe I gave you that idea! No, I was talking about a friend’s parent. Anyways, thank you for stepping between me and that woman. You always seem to help me right when I need it.”

Damian doesn’t really think that Marinette needed his help much in any of the situations that he’s seen her. He doesn’t mind the false gratitudes, though it does irk him that he’s never actually helped her. Odd, considering that what little morality he had mostly pertained to life threatening situations, and Marinette’s issues were more in line with everyday annoyances. “And yet you refuse to help me out with Lila.”

Her face immediately sours. “Like I said; class is class. It’s different at Francois Dupont.”

“And why is that?” 

“If you want help catching up or something, I don’t mind helping you outside of class, but you can’t tell anyone. It’s better for you if you’re not seen with me.” Her hand is tight on her purse.

At the risk of feeling like a whiny child, Damian asks again. “But why shouldn’t I be seen with you?”

Marinette sighs, heavily, then looks around at the people on the streets, almost like she’s looking for somebody. “Let’s just say that Lila and I have come to an agreement. The rest of the class isn’t the fondest of me, and if you’re seen talking with me, that will be bad for both of us. I don’t want any problems.”

“Tt. I see.” It seems as though he will also spend some time tonight looking into the history of his class. 

[kdtheghostwriter]

SNK #119 - Jaeger ni Kissu

Let me get some Fs in the chat, pls.

So, what the hell? Shiganshina am I right? What’s the deal with that crazy place, huh?

You would think this fandom, more than all the others, would be used to getting the slider when they expect a fastball. (That’s right! I know baseball stuff!) Even I have to admit, though, Isa got me with this one. It’s all pretty thrilling to me as a reader. I’ll explain why later but first, some housekeeping. Remember when I said this a few months ago? That Eren’s expression was less relieved and more shocked leaning toward concerned? Welp.

Arm extended; mouth agape. The universal signs of “No, not that you asshole!” It’s also masterful paneling to have Colt’s cry of “Wait!” superimposed onto the Attack Titan, which we know can’t speak. Eren was mortified by the idea of his hometown being overrun with Titans yet again. That was hardly surprising. What did surprise me was Zeke’s look of shock as the Grice brothers revealed themselves. He still screamed, of course, as should have been expected. But that moment of hesitation…hmm. I guess he really did like Colt. It’s not out of the question. He just liked his plan more.

And since we’re on the topic, I’d like some words about this panel right here.

Dammit all, this one hit more than any of the others for me. See, Zeke, it’s not just you who understands the joys and the sorrows and the burdens of being an older brother. I do myself. Falco realized what was about to happen and tried to save his brother’s life by pushing him away. Colt refused and held him tighter.

Don’t worry, Falco! Your big brother will always be with you!

Fuck me, how am I supposed to keep my chill after a scene like that? Sure enough, Colt was scorched as his brother transformed into a mindless, lumbering monster which transitions me nicely into something else I said in the aftermath of #117. Someone did indeed have to die. I only guessed wrong who.

Reiner is going to survive this manga whether he wants to or not. More importantly, what a champion Porco is. Knew he was cooked, so he put all his energy into healing his body. Then he left the cockpit to distract Falco’s Titan and save two people. The fact that he did this right after seeing the memory of his brother confessing to Reiner that he lied is no accident. He wasn’t just proving to Reiner he was better; he was getting one back at his big brother. It’s equal parts heroic and tragic which is par for the course of this series. He died in almost the exact same way Marcel did all those years ago – saving Reiner’s dumbass from being nommed up. I’ll miss you Porco, but at least you’ll live on in the memories of the little one.

 Speaking of little ones: maybe we should start calling her “Deadeye” Gabi Braun. This was such an inspired choice. Not just because of who pulled the trigger in the end (and partly because of whose gun she used), which got the intended reaction, but also because of who she hit. I thought for sure she would have taken aim for Zeke. It would have made sense. A wounded, stationary target is a lot easier to mark than one sprinting at full speed. (That’s what MGS3 taught me at least.) She’s a soldier, though, and the main reason she hijacked the blimp in Liberio was to kill The Usurper. It’s unclear to me if Magath’s mission here is strictly Dead or Alive or if they were trying to capture him but either way her mission, for now, appears to be accomplished. I say “appears to be” because it’s time for my favorite monthly mini-game:

WHY, SWAY, WHY??

There’s a lot we don’t know yet about Titan powers, Eldian biology and the transference from one vessel to another. If Marley’s goal specifically was to recapture the Founder instead of simply stopping Eren from using it, this is what Zeke would call a miscalculation. We know that Titan Powers get transferred Avatar-style to a rando newborn Eldian when a Shifter dies before succession. I actually believe there’s a lot of story left to go. But! There isn’t enough left to now try and track down, out of all the Eldians still in the world, which one holds this terrifying power. (That would make a great AU, though.) Not to mention, we don’t know what happens in the case of a Shifter holding more than one power. Do all three Titans go to one child? Do they get split up back into three by the P A T H S? We don’t know. All of this is reason to expect some chicanery in the next few months or so. Besides any of that we are no closer to knowing what Eren’s true intentions are in regards to why he wants to use the Founder. Isayama Hajime is absolutely the kind of author to blast his main character into oblivion before the story has concluded. He is not the kind of author to leave a stone unturned. We found out about the Shifters and we found out about the basement. Whatever knowledge was revealed to him will not be kept secret, even if it isn’t by his own hand.

Sidebar: decapitation is weird, even in messy circumstances like this one. The electric signals in the brain often keep firing for minutes after the head has been removed. This is how beheaded snakes continue to hiss and bite after the fact. My troll prediction would be Eren’s head landing in Zeke’s hand like so many baseballs in his lifetime; the Coordinate is activated and Shiganshina proceeds to have a bad time.

I don’t know, folks. I couldn’t help but think of one very important rule as I read the closing pages.

Always Double Tap, dude. Gabi just had to go for the swag. See, if she had popped Eren’s head like a bloody firework I would have said, “Welp, you had a good run, kid.” But nope. You went and left the most powerful being in existence an outside outside chance of survival, and if he does, even for a few seconds more, everybody is screwed.

No segue, I just love these two teaming up. It makes sense that Mikasa and Armin have gotten closer as Eren has gotten more distant. I think seeing how that dynamic evolves as the story builds to its conclusion will be very important. For now, on the surface level, they just really care for each other.

 The last time I got a feeling like this, I was a young lad watching Samurai Jack in the early 00s. I would watch every week without fail on the Cartoon Network, engrossed for the entire runtime. And then, oh, the long and nagging wait. I can admit that having most stuff On Demand is impossibly handy for this particular moment in history, but goddamn do I remember having to wait a whole ass week for my favorite show to come back. Fans of Shingeki no Kyojin don’t realize how good they have it.

Replicating that feeling is almost impossible, not just because of how product is released now. Every story has been told before, in some way. Sometime in the last Millenia or so, our slimy lizard brains have come to expect certain beats and structure from stories. It makes the stories good, but also predictable. I can tell you as a writer, it’s so very difficult to find a way to surprise people in a genuine and engaging way.

This is going to sound more cold and callous than intended but, it does involve manipulating an audience to achieve your desired outcome. You want to lead them to the place you want to go and let them think it was their plan all along. This is the Art of Storytelling: I know what you want better than you do. This involves knowing your audience, and I think it’s safe to say after his “I want to hurt people with this,” comment that no writer on the planet right now knows his audience better than Isayama.

Fans of SNK should be happy. I’ve said this before: it isn’t the best book out right now (that’s still OPM, read that shit) but it is the most unpredictable. That doesn’t always make a story good, but in this case, it’s the greatest factor. Feel free to speculate and discuss. That’s what fandom is for. Just give up now on trying to work out what comes next. Only one person knows that. Isa has had this story plotted out for years with diversions here and there. We won’t know until it all ends. Enjoy this ride now. I can promise you we will never see anything like this manga ever again.

  Stray Thoughts

- Still no Kyomi. Still no Tiny Queen. I know the main character just got his head yeeted but let’s get some deets now, pls.

- I was so looking forward to the memes and am happy to report that I wasn’t let down. Well done, friends.

- The 104th Squad continues to persist, as does Yelena. We’ll earmark this for later.

- The fact that both the Jaeger Brothers got shot before Floch Forster is high dark comedy.

- In a battle this chaotic, things like skill and experience are often nullified. It makes perfect sense that Eren would be caught off-guard by a soldier he didn’t even know was there, child though she may be. Right place, wrong time. These Things Happen.

- Armin taking out the Cart’s turret gun was a slick little callback to when he bought time for Eren to take down Bertolt.

- I’m interested in Armin’s game plan here. Marley’s infantry is about to be overrun by Titans, so what else does he aim to do? And how will Yelena interfere?

- Nile said he wouldn’t see his family again. We all knew he was right but man, the look on his face when his number was called. That’s tough. Shout-outs to Pixis, getting one last sip in. You a real one.

[fallout2282]

The Office of the President, Hall of Congress

Shady Sands, New California Republic

Yulia Arteaga sat in her office chair, fiddling with the Two Headed Bear Flag pin between her fingers. She unclasped it, bringing it up to her chest so that she might wear it at her heart, as was customary. It was a gift from her predecessor, a symbol of office. She wanted nothing of Kimball’s and she refused to watch as her staff moved his portrait into storage, replacing it with a painting to rival it, depicting her own visage. She stood for four hours so that the artist they commissioned, someone from her home state, the Boneyard, could accurately transfer her image to the canvas. She wore the pin in the painting too, a detail added afterwards. It had originally belonged to President Tandi, the Great Mother, before being passed along to Tibbett, Peterson, Kimball, and now her. It was a symbol of office, no matter what she wore, as long as she carried that pin it was like she like she radiated with the commanding aura of high office. Her predecessor, now retired against his will to some ranch outside the Hub, preferred old world style suits where as Yulia was often accused of looking something like a cross between a field hand and a factory worker. She liked the brahmin leather vest her Bear Flag was now pinned to, and the earthy tones of her checkered button up and slacks. She wore the same outfit in the painting. The artist thought it fitting, she was the young populist who was taking California by storm. Her majority in Congress was secure, now that Chief Hanlon won the race in Redding and was now Senator Hanlon. She was going to need the allies in the months to come as it became apparent making peace was far more complicated than making war. A detail Kimball neglected to mention when he handed over the keys to the Republic. Her train of thought was interrupted when the door to her office flew open.

“Yulia! You’ll never believe it. Dennis Crocker agreed to stay on until the drafting process for the treaty is finished. It’s just like you said, maybe he really is different from those other Kimball holdovers after all. He thinks you should meet with Chief Executive-” It was her aid, Maxim. He had been with her since her days as a labor organizer in Adytum. He managed her campaign for an Angel’s Boneyard council seat and didn’t even ask for an appointment to some cushy job in the bureaucracy. Although, being aide to the president came with similar guarantees of job security and long term financial security. 

“It’s Madame President now, Maxim.” She made the deals, led the censure, and cast the first vote of Kimball’s downfall. She earned her position. Now she just had to keep it, and that meant any deal with New Vegas had to insure the lights stayed on. At least until the project she arranged with the Followers of the Apocalypse was complete. It would be funny if it wasn’t so frustrating. The Mojave Campaign was Kimball’s war, and he lost his job over it. Now it seemed most of her job was picking up the pieces, when she had campaigned on an extensive program promising to fix the many problems at home. 

“The answer is no. I’ll give it my signature, but Crocker can shake that man’s hand. He knows if the deal screws us, I’ll screw him harder. I like the good Ambassador, but if he expects to come back to a career he has to earn it. Speaking of which, draw me up a list of candidates to take his place once the negotiations are finished. If his plan does work I’ll want him running for a seat here in the next election. I know Thaler’s will soon be up for grabs, and he might act like a friend, but we all know he didn’t vote with us when we got rid of Kimball. His days on the council are numbered.”

“Yes, Madame President. My apologies Madame President. I will send out word to the State Department to have a list drawn up at once. As for Councilman Thaler, we should avoid alienating him until after the vote tomorrow. He has been more than supportive of the Crimson Caravan inquiry. Alice McLafferty was forced out of her post in the Mojave branch, it’s practically an admission of guilt on their part. If he thinks we intend to endorse someone else for his seat, he could end up voting with Senator Morales. And if Morales rallies the governors then they will certainly shut down the investigation and shut down this investigation” her aide said with great uncertainty. She couldn’t blame him for his skepticism. Aaron Kimball was wildly popular until he wasn’t. All Yulia had to do was alienate the wrong person and she could lose her majority. Then it would be all over. 

“Have a little more confidence in me, Maxim. I didn’t win the Presidency for the novelty of it. I intend to hold on to this seat for as long as I can. The people aren’t so fickle as to turn on me yet. Thaler will vote for me because if he doesn’t again, then it is a certainty he will lose his seat. I might have been a councilor for Adytum, but I was born in Shady Sands. Now I represent all of California. And it’s about some time someone stood up to the merchant houses. And don’t call the representatives from Hub that, their heads are already big as it is” She was right, and Maxim knew it too when she said it. Yulia had always spoken truth to power, and now she was the power. Not the only one, granted. That’s just how it was in democracies. Still, that wouldn’t stop her from using the authority she was given to hold her colleagues to account.  

“We can discuss tomorrow’s vote later. There’s still a lot of other work to be done. Have we received a report from General Hsu yet? What’s the status of the withdrawal?” Military matters were the one aspect of governing she was new to. She had coordinated with the military in the past, back in Adytum during one of the multiple operations against the raider gangs that are pervasive in the Boneyard. Yet she only ever acted as a point of contact then, now she was Commander in Chief. 

Maxim cleared his throat, “Slowly, but surely Madame President. The General and the Ambassador were able to convince the new management in New Vegas to allow a handful of our forces to remain at the Dam and watch over our civilian personnel that will stay there. Long term arrangements haven’t been decided yet, but the General is unsure of the prudence in leaving the Dam in the hands of those... robots. He seems uncertain if we even have a choice in the matter. You’ve already seen the projections. A renewed conflict is not likely to be in our electoral interests. As for the full withdrawal to Mojave Outpost, we are expecting the last of our forces to be safely within the border in three weeks time.”

“Sooner we conclude this business the better. What of the Legion? The rangers set out after the battle to scout their territory and I’ve yet to see a report land on my desk. I would hate to leave our new friends on the Strip defenseless against such savages.” Yulia folded her arms, leaning back against the desk. 

“The robots were actually quite thorough in their assault on Fortification Hill. The military seems to think the enemy was quite completely demolished. Caesar had died three months earlier, reportedly of a botched attempt to remove tumors from his brain. As for the rest of the Legion’s leadership, they are all believed to have perished in the battle.” Now he was just rehashing what she already knew.

“What about the east? Arizona... New Mexico. Those places. I recall from the archives we sent scouts out that way decades ago. There are people out there. The Legion’s people. What will happen to them?” That was the real question. If Kimball had succeeded, if the NCR had annexed New Vegas, would they have been next? Would the NCR have kept going? Just like the old world. That she didn’t like to imagine. 

“Our commanders speculate what is left of the Legion will converge on Flagstaff. That I suppose you would call the Legion’s capital. It’s also where Caesar left his heirs, supposedly. General Hsu has assured us that the Legion isn’t a threat to the Mojave, let alone us here in California.” Maxim knew as much as she did. They would both be left to wonder until the rangers they sent east reported in. It could be months, and that’s if any of them managed to cross back over the Colorado. 

The Mojave Campaign began decades ago, back then the NCR only had to contend with the same raider tribes they had been fighting and beating for generations. Jackals, Vipers, Khans, all scattered to the wastes. The war with the Legion only began in 2277 when their warband attempted to seize Hoover Dam the first time. All the while her country was being bled try. More lives and more money than she could imagine. Costlier than every other war fought in California combined. Not mentioned in official reports, the rumor was General Lee Oliver died not at the hands of the Legion, but after the battle had already ended. Thrown off of the side of the dam by one of the robots that now defended New Vegas. She chose not to ask if it was true when she received her first briefing from the military, after all it allowed blame for the defeat to fall squarely on Kimball’s shoulders. And he deserved it. She wouldn’t make his mistakes. 

“I can’t tell if we were lucky, or unlucky. We won the battle and still lost the war.” She chuckled at the irony, at the sheer stupidity of it all. “We saved the damn... dam, and it doesn’t even seem like we’ll be able to keep it. First we get strung along by the seemingly-immortal Mr. House, and now we’re negotiating with a former Vault dweller with a gambling addiction? We clearly didn’t play our cards right, even though for all intents and purposes we had a winning hand.”

Maxim nodded in agreement, ever willing to play the sycophant. “Poor governance ultimately makes for poor policy decisions, Madame President. I believe you will lead us towards a much brighter future. One where the people of New Vegas are our friends, not subjects.” 

“Friends? We’ll just see what terms Crocker wins for us. I’ve no intention of getting us into another war, if that’s what your concern is. Still need to see about making states out of the territories up north before I go looking for more outside of our borders. Congress can’t deny the territories real representation forever. We give Arroyo and Klamath statehood, and I won’t have to worry about losing my majority for as long as I’m President.” She sighed, “First we need to see about officially ending this war and bringing our men and women in uniform back from the front. Once the withdrawal is complete we’ll set up the podium in front of the statue of Tandi in Republic Square. It won’t just be to welcome the troops home, but another state of the republic address.”

“Very good, Madame President. I also brought that report you requested last week. It took some time for the rangers to compile it. This one’s complete at least. I thought you would want to have a look at it before the committee did.” On the desk next to Yulia, her aide placed a folder that was so full of paper that it was nearly as thick as some of the books in her office. 

Yulia took one look at the folder’s contents, thumbing through the various pages of eye witness testimony collected in the Mojave and official statements by other officials in the NCR. This one file alone would could take up the rest of her afternoon just to read. “One question, Maxim.” She pursed her lips, her curiosity piqued. 

“What’s that Madame President?” “Who the hell is this Courier?” 

[thepilotanon]

Prelude xiv

...in nova’s place {masterlist}

I’ve been super busy with work, so there will most likely be plenty of errors on this chapter. I hope you all will enjoy anyway, and will let me know what you thought about this chapter! Hearing back from you all really means a lot. Please enjoy!

warning: death and murder, depiction of military tactics (suicide attempt)

Kylo stared without his mask to the dark haired doctor, fully intending to be intimidating and threatening to anyone passing by him to the private office that belonged to the doctor. The more locked doors and security, the more Kylo realized how serious Antona was taking for his patient currently dozing off the effects of the bacta tank. She still refused to sleep, and the older doctor allowed her to wait for the both of them to return to her heavily guarded quarters. Kylo dismissed any sort of stormtrooper to be present inside the chambers, recognizing how his lover projected her anxiety and distrust of herself around them. He wanted her to be comfortable as possible, and the doctor wasn’t going to argue with the Commander. Instead, Antona requested to speak to Kylo within his office in private…

To discuss what he discovered.

Antona’s office was simple and boring, as usual to any other doctor offices within Starkiller Base. Kylo knew that the doctor had more decor and items within his sleeping quarters, but was monitored from periodic sweeps; the office would remain untouched for the fact of classified files and material that medical professionals would be allowed to choose. He knew it would be safer to speak here, after the buzzing rumors and fear quickly spreading throughout the Base. Antona had managed to form a personal team of three officers to take the underground tunnels above the Kyber mines to Kylo’s location, once the Commander made contact. It was really thanks to Antona’s careful planning and picking out very selected few to retrieve the two Force-sensitive beings during the lockdown and bring them back, but he knew the job was only halfway finished.

“Please, Commander, take a seat,” Antona offered casually as he made his way to his desk. Looking up to see that the man hasn’t moved from his spot, he cleared his throat cautiously. “Or not, that’s fine as well…”

“I do not plan on keeping Nova waiting,” Kylo explained simply, yet his voice low for emphasis of his goal.

Antona didn’t need to ask him to elaborate, instead sitting in his own chair while pulling out his holopad. “I managed to collect samples as soon as you left the base to find Nova,” he began, turning on the device. “I have said before that Nova contracted a virus that is supposedly extinct before either you or I were born. It was an airborne disease formulated to bring an end to Force-sensitive individuals, created by an ancient species who were experts with creating deadly illnesses. They were wiped out a long time ago, and their practices lost, but…”

Pulling up a hologram of Nova’s file, a completely different scale of dangerous numbers and rates, Antona highlighted a diagram of what was labeled at the woman’s toxin levels. “If you look here, the percentage of the virus she obtained should have killed her weeks ago. I have a suspicion that Nova, herself, managed to withstand it spreading with the unknown toxin in her body - with the Force. The vaccine I provided was meant to cure roughly eight people infected.

“With the samples I took from the hospital room, I managed to track the virus from the IV she was hooked up with. Doing a body scan with Nova when she was brought back, within the bacta tank, most of the toxins were within her stomach, meaning that she ingested it.” Antona flipped to a new projection, showing a cycle calendar to Kylo as his eyes darted to how far back she had this poison inside her. “Now, First Order distributes food from the same source, and the delivery droids don’t come in contact with any other sort of droid or beings that can tamper with the food. Since Nova ingested it, I managed to rule out that she didn’t consume it through the food, but from the pills she has been given to help with her sleeping ha -!”

Raising his hand, Kylo shoved Doctor Antona against the wall rather hard, knocking the breath out of him. He wasn’t choking the man, yet his temper was rocking to pour over the brim the further he spoke about medicine - which Antona was in charge of prescribing since their arrival to the makeshift planet.

“You prescribed those medications, Doctor,” Kylo reminded him in a dark voice.

“I prescribe the medication, yes,” Antona admitted, trying to move from Kylo’s restraints. “However, I was never the one to prepare them for Nova! I left that in the care of my assistants when it was transferred from the Supremacy...”

Instantly dropping the doctor, Kylo approached the desk and narrowed his sights on the man. Antona took a deep breath to collect himself. “Mara was the only person given access to Nova’s medication and other supplements. I managed to track Nova’s file to be false from my assistant’s holopad; it went back to a stormtrooper back on the Supremacy, set in the same cycle schedule as Nova, where Mara was transferred from. Mara was the one who has been giving her the virus, all the way back on the Supremacy, Commander Ren!”

Feeling a new sort of emotion rise within him, Kylo’s hands tightened to hard fists all while Antona pressed a button on the projection. It wasn’t even a split second until Kylo’s own holopad signaled him to let him know that there was a notification of coordinates. “I already had her apprehended and locked away while you were with Nova during her ejection from the tank. I understand that protocol calls for the highest rank to deal with any sort of prisoner activity, so...I leave it to you, Commander Ren.”

He could read that the doctor didn’t particularly care for his assistant, allowing him to let his plan to follow through, with or without consent from any sort of higher ups. There was no stopping him as he turned around and left the office with intent on keeping to his promise Nova.

Mara was restrained by her wrists and ankles, each stormtrooper by her side on guard to keep her in place, as if she could escape at any time without extra eyes on her. As soon as Kylo Ren entered the holding cell with the singular chair, he instructed the ‘troopers to leave him with the silent woman staring right back at him. She didn’t express any sort of emotion, and neither did he. Approaching closer to the prisoner, Kylo could sense that she was trying her best to hold back - her eyes holding some sort of fake pride, as if what she had done was something to be complimented about. A part of Kylo was so tempted to strangle her slowly and kill her now, yet he knew there was more than what he, or Doctor Antona, knew, and she held the answers.

Green eyes snapping to the Commander, Mara took a deep breath and kept her composure. “Whatever you want to know, I won’t tell you anything,” she said defiantly. “I have been instructed to keep quiet about whatever I know.”

“You won’t need to say anything,” Kylo responded in a bland tone, as if bored of her attempt to be strong. It was nothing to admire about.

Raising a hand towards her flame-colored hair, Kylo peeled back her thoughts to the point that the pain for Mara was instant. She cried out and screamed in agony as Kylo dug deep and relentless into her memories, snapping and shattering her emotions and strength into nothing but dust as he raked the nails of his Force abilities to find everything he wanted to know.

Mara, back on the Supremacy as she entered the throne room. Snoke and General Hux present inside as she stood before the both of them.

Snoke giving her instructions to manipulate Nova’s sleeping medication to conduct their “experiment”, being given complete access to all laboratories. The holochip giving classified files of the Old Republic illnesses and poisons, supposedly lost to time…

Give Nova the poison that brings her to a state of comatose, where she won’t recognize her current surroundings. Record the reaction from her and the planet, and send everything back to the Supreme Leader.

Mara entering the restricted lab that held Nova’s sleeping pills, injecting a thick, mucus-like substance before giving it to the delivery droid every night. How she modified the droids to ensure that she would take the medication every single time to obtain the poison. Entering the hospital room while the patient was asleep - Kylo didn’t miss how uncomfortable Nova’s slumbering face looked, whether it was the toxins or the bed, he didn’t know - and injected the poison into her IV tube.

Mara watching from inside her quarters as the holopad showed the security footage of Nova’s hospital room, where the ill woman woke with a sudden jolt and began screaming in terror at the sight of droids. The redhead woman watching the security footage break, turning boredly to the real, accurate medical records keeping track of Nova’s rampage.

During the lockdown, Mara collected data of unusual activity within the empty Kyber mines while projecting the actual file of the sick woman’s heart rate and vitals that were hidden from the head doctor and Commander. How she emotionlessly watched it all falter from the bacta pump Kylo had given her before her body succumbed to the outdoor storm, locking the files down into a private archive directed towards the Supreme Leader.

Holding the capsule of instant poison - a getaway - Mara was about to take the pill before Antona’s trusted ‘troopers broke into her quarters and hauled her out before she could get away.

Pulling out of her mind as roughly as possible, Kylo watched the woman release a painful cry before slouching forward and breathed heavily through her mouth in desperate gasps for air. Reaching with his hand out to grab her red hair within his leather hand and yanked her head back, making her whimper fearfully while keeping her eyes shut, Kylo stared distastefully down at her. She was exposing her fears like a weakling, a crybaby prisoner who was borderline ready to beg for mercy from the intimidating Commander. A part of Kylo wanted to see her beg for her life, yet the flashes of Nova’s tears and her own personal horrors entered his mind on a whim, and Kylo felt his lips curl into a sinister snarl.

“If only you had taken your way out just a moment sooner,” Kylo spoke with venom on his tongue. “If only you were smart enough to slip passed my radar and never be held personally responsible for the near death of someone who means so much to me.”

“W-wh..?”

With his other hand, Kylo curled his fingers into a fist, each digit causing a reaction of her throat tightening, blocking air coming through. He watched as Mara gasped, her green eyes growing wide with terror as she struggled to breath the more fingers Kylo curled.

“If only I had the desire to give you a quick death. Unfortunately, for you, I have all the time I need to let you suffer in ways Nova did.”

Once to his thumb, Kylo held still as he released her hair as her head hit the back of the chair. Mara was desperately gasping for air, choking and shaking within her restraints with tears in her eyes. Her face changing color from fair, to pink, to red...then, slowly to blue with her rolling back to her head. It was only when Kylo relaxed his hand did she inhale desperately, only for him to start over again with choking her - prolonging her suffering with less and less time for her to breathe each time he let her go.

Kylo dragged out her slow death for as long as possible before leaving the room to return to his personal quarters.

Doctor Antona was examining Nova’s toes as she laid down on the bed in her side of the chambers. Using his writing utensil to poke and prod each of her toes before tickling up and down her foot, the doctor chuckled when his patient peeped and pulled her foot back at the sensation. Bringing the heavy blanket back to cover her feet, Antona carefully patted her covered legs and gave her a gentle expression when she stared distantly to her lap.

“You’re making a wonderful recovery, Nova. I don’t doubt that you’ll make a full recovery within a few days before attempting to walk; the bacta patches will continue to do their work to the frost bite, so please leave them on,” he explained carefully to her with a reassuring smile. “Remain in bed until so, unless you need to use the refresher, and make sure to eat all your food portions and take in fluids. It will make you feel better.”

Getting up from the corner of the bed, the man went over to the closet to retrieve another blanket to keep near the patient. All while doing so, Nova’s head lifted to watch him move about as careful as possible, as to not disturb her with sudden movements. Since she had came out of the bacta tank, she was given new bacta patches to her joints and cheekbones and an ointment applied to her lips to heal the bleeding cracks and frost. Nova bathed with the help of female officers and was dressed in fresh pajamas, yet she hadn’t had much to say as she struggled to figure out what everyone around her was thinking - of what happened, and what she had done. The bacta was making her drowsy, and her focus with the Force was off, yet she was desperate to figure out what damage she had caused before Kylo returned to her. Glancing briefly to the nightstand, she frowned a bit deeper at the sight of the silver whistle that was removed from her after being taken out of the tank. It wasn’t completely cleaned, and still had some remnants of her blood on it.

“Antona...”

The doctor turned his head, hearing her voice for the first time since she was brought back. He was glad to hear her speak - although hoarse - so willingly to him, after everything that has happened. He was almost worried about her mental state of being emotionally traumatized by the ordeal. Returning to the edge of the bed, Antona kneeled down to her level and offered her a careful smile.

“How are you feeling, Nova? Can I get you anything?” he asked her gently.

“I want to know how many I killed,” she told him softly, her eyes looking to him with determination to find out.

Frowning, Antona was about to reject her kindly when her wrapped hand grabbed the collar of his uniform. She didn’t pull him with force or anger, but a support to keep him to her level as she gazed to him desperately.

“Please,” she spoke quietly to him, “I just want to know… I did something horrible to innocent people, and I want to acknowledge my terrible mistake.”

Swallowing, Antona looked down to her slightly shaking hand still holding on to him. Reaching to take her wrist with careful fingers, the doctor held onto her healing hand with his palm on top of her covered knuckles. “Through your fever, which you had no control over,” he began in a soft voice, “we have counted that sixteen medical nurses, over twenty-five officers and an estimate of a dozen or so stormtroopers were killed. There were also eleven patients in the same ward that didn’t make it… There are still others we haven’t accounted for, as of yet.”

Nova nodded slowly, and Antona was quick to squeeze her hand. “But, you must know, Nova, that this was not your fault, okay? You will not be held accountable for what has happened here and will not be in trouble. You were ill and hallucinating, what you did was not your fault in any way, and we know that.”

Looking to him with a empathetic, yet sad smile, Nova pulled her hand back to settle them on her lap comfortingly. “I appreciate all your help, Antona. Thank you, but I would like to try and rest now, and I’m sure you have work to do.”

As if on cue, the door to the quarters hissed open and Kylo charged in, startling the doctor. To him Antona guessed that Nova sensed the Commander coming closer, disregarding their private conversation for his sake. Nova remained passive and exhausted, letting the doctor stand up and face Kylo.

“Is she recovering?” Kylo asked Antona with a stern voice, expression empty.

Nodding, Antona patted the extra blankets on the edge of the bed. “I will check in within a few cycles before we will try walking. I would rather we take some time, but she is healing very well by far.” Passing by Kylo and waiting for the door to open, Antona offered him a farewell nod. “Should you need me, do not hesitate to contact me directly.”

Waiting until the doctor disappeared with closing doors, Kylo slowly turned to face the woman remaining in bed. He eyes her for a moment, seeing her lightly touch the dark patches on her knuckled out of curiosity. “You asked him how many…”

“Yes,” she answered honestly, making his brow twitch with stress.

He carefully approached the bed and sat on the edge beside her legs, facing her way as she still refused to look directly to him. “Why would you ask him that, Nova? It shouldn’t be of any concern to you,” he spoke low, as if the guards outside the thick walls could hear. He knew her Force wall was back and fully functional, as he couldn’t sense Snoke or any other being disturbing their rooms.

“I have made a mistake, and it took the lives of innocent people who didn’t deserve to die,” Nova said sourly, swallowing a lump in her throat. “No one was attacking me, but I still killed them because I thought they were my past coming back to get me. Now, people are scared of me all over again, because I’m a weapon…”

“No, you’re not -”

“You saw what I did, Kylo. What I’m capable of doing!”

“That doesn’t -!”

“I’m a monster, Kylo!” she snapped at him, tears filling her eyes as she stared at him with such sadness that it made his heart twist painfully. “I’m a bloody monster, born and meant to breed killers, like an animal! I come from nothing and will remain nothing but someone’s weapon!”

Taking her face with both hands, Kylo angled her head up to him as he connected their foreheads together, eyes burning into hers with tears forming within them, biting his lip between his teeth. He was trying so hard not to raise his voice, his thumb tracing her pouting lip carefully, shaking his head gently to her.

He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t frustrated to the point he wanted to destroy the room with his abilities. No, Kylo was not angry.

“Never,” he mumbled under his breath, making Nova blink and tears slipped down her cheeks. “I have never seen you as a monster, never a weapon. You are no one’s weapon, Nova. You’re not a monster. You are so much more than what you believe, and nothing is going to change the fact that I love you.”

Feeling her jaw tighten from a hiding sob, Kylo closed his eyes while pulling her into a embrace, his leathered hand cradling the back of her head. Pressing his lips under her ear, he whispered carefully to her. “Your feelings and emotions - they’re beautiful, and you wonder so much about everything you see, Nova. I have never seen you as a pawn of a weapon, or any sort of a monster,” he told her, feeling her pulse quicken and her breath tickle against the back hairs of his neck. “You’re a beautiful creature who holds so much power and curiosity, and I could never ask you to do anything you don’t want to do for my satisfaction. You remind me of what it means to continue on from the past, Nova; you let your past die, you don’t want to continue to be what you were.

“I promise to take it, Nova. I promise to make people see the real you: the one who wants to live on and be by my side willingly,” he confessed. “No matter what you’ve done or what may happen, I won’t let anyone take you away from what you want, okay? Just...don’t ever believe for one second that you’re a monster. You’re not a monster. You’re not a weapon.”

Feeling her head shift, her mouth right beside his ear as she sniffed back her cries, Kylo held her tighter against him. Her hands sliding up his ribs, one hand gripping his tunic while the other wrapped around his collar and held on for dear life as she buried her eyes to his shoulder. He could sense how she projected her constant fear slowly dwindling to mere bewilderment by his words making him push an invisible response of his honesty to her and how he intends to keep that promise no matter what.

“Please,” she whimpered to him, desperate, “please, say it again?”

“You are not a weapon,” he responded willingly, not hesitating. “You are not a weapon or a monster, Nova. I love you.”

“I love Kylo, too,” Nova sniffed and lightly tugged on his clothed. “I love Kylo. I love you, Kylo.”

Finally having her laying down on the bed, her tears cleaned away by his hands and lips, Kylo managed to remove majority of his clothing while keeping a close eye on her. After checking all the bacta patches on her shoulders, hands and face, Kylo began unfolding the extra blanket for extra measures of making sure Nova was warm. Although already having a few already covering her body from the waist down, she remained quiet while lying on her side and stare aimlessly at her whistle still on the nightstand while he draped it over her.

Following her line of vision, Kylo picked up on a sensation tickling the back of his mind that he didn’t recognize before.

“You worry for Snoke’s opinion for what I have done,” Nova spoke when he stilled. “You found out who...made me sick, and it had to do with Snoke, didn’t it.”

Gazing to her back, his eyes softened a bit with his own sort of worry as he crawled into bed. Propping himself with his elbow, his free hand reached to lightly trace the skin of her upper back, exposed by the fabric of her shirt being too wide for her body. The tip of his fingers lightly touched the edge of the thick, diagonal scar with the most gentle care. Nova didn’t flinch away from the touch, instead leaning back for his palm to press against her otherwise soft skin. Kylo felt his heart skip a beat at the gesture, letting his thumb brush against her shoulder blade.

“Mara - the assistant who was suppose to help Doctor Antona - had been giving her a poison by instruction from the Supreme Leader,” Kylo answered, although hesitant in how much detail he should provide to her until he can figure everything out for himself. “The Supreme Leader knew…”

“Will he dispose of me?”

“No,” Kylo growled under his breath, causing Nova to turn her head to look at him from over her shoulder. Realizing what he had said, Kylo felt his throat tighten, looking down to trace the tip of his fingers on her scar. “He...he can’t dispose of you, you’re too important.”

“I am important to Kylo, not to Snoke,” she corrected him. “If Snoke was willing to risk my life to have that experiment take place, with the chance of me dying, then he does not care for my health or well-being, Kylo. He doesn’t care for me. You and I know that very well, don’t we?”

There was a moment of silence between them, and Kylo slipped his arm around her frame and pulled her close to his chest. Keeping her voice quiet and calm, Nova placed one of her wrapped hands ontop of his. “Would you fight Snoke, if he were to harm me?”

Kylo didn’t answer right away. Nova slowly turned around in his arm to meet his conflicted eyes as her hand slipped up his arm to cup his cheek, her fingers stroking his jaw when she offered him a small, sad smile. Kylo bit his lip and looked away from her gaze, pressing his mouth into her palm as a sort of apology, yet the woman scooted closer before resting her head into the pocket under his chin. Her nose pressed to his collarbone, she closed her eyes and leaned her weight on him. Kylo could feel her warmth mingling with his own, and he wanted nothing more than to just melt against her and hold her close. Shutting his eyes, he pressed his face further into her hand.

“You will get what you want to achieve, Kylo,” Nova whispered, and his breath hitched when she raised her head to press a gentle kiss to his forehead. So gentle that it made his eyes feel a bit heavy without shedding tears at feeling the small smile against his skin. “You will get it, Kylo, don’t worry.”

“He can’t do anything to you,” he shuddered under his breath. “I just - I need to prove-”

“I understand, Kylo,” she hushed him softly, stopping him with soft nuzzles and more kisses. “Don’t worry, Kylo, please.”

“He can’t take you, Nova. I promised you.”

“You’re keeping your promise to me, Kylo. He won’t take me,” Nova said with a kiss to his cheek, his arm wrapping tighter around her with his nose burying into her hair. Cuddling against him more, the healing woman rest her cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat against her ear.

“I love you,” Nova whispered to him, her fingers brushing his chest gently before circling her arm over him. “I love you, Kylo. I trust you with my life, and I hope you feel the same with yours in my hands. I promise I’ll protect you, too, Kylo.”

“Yes,” Kylo answered honestly. “I know. I know.”

Fun fact: Mara actually comes from a canon Star Wars character, Mara Jade, who also contracted an illness that was meant to wipe out Force-sensitives in the book series, Legends!!

taglist: @ayatimascd @ymariejp @yippee-ki-yay-motherfucker460 @formerly-anonhamster @rosalynbair @redhairedfeistynerd @imyourdreamwife

Remember, if you would like to be tagged for future chapters, please don’t hesitate to message me! I’d be more than happy to add you. Thank you for reading and I hope to hear from you!

[shirlleycoyle]

The High Price of ‘Making the Numbers’ at the USPS

This article was sent on Tuesday to subscribers of The Mail, Motherboard’s pop-up newsletter about the USPS, election security, and democracy. It is the second in a multi-part series about working conditions at the USPS. Subscribe to get the next edition before it is published here, as well as exclusive articles and the paid zine.

This is Part II of a multi-part series looking at working conditions at the post office. If you missed Part I, click here.

For a brief period, it looked like the post office would finally be changing. On Valentine's Day in 1992, eight union leaders and USPS management signed the Joint Statement on Violence and Behavior in the Workplace (JSOV). Spurred by the Royal Oak shooting we covered last week, the one-page document was much more than the "thoughts and prayers" style platitudes we have since become accustomed to after a mass shooting. Instead, the JSOV declared that "grief and sympathy are not enough. Neither are ritualistic expressions of grave concern or the initiation of investigations, studies, or research projects." 

The statement went on: "This is a time for a candid appraisal of our flaws and not a time for scapegoating, fingerpointing, or procrastination." It affirmed that "every employee at every level of the Postal Service should be treated at all times with dignity, respect, and fairness…'Making the numbers' is not an excuse for the abuse of anyone."

But among the missing signatories was the American Postal Workers Union, one of the biggest and most influential unions representing postal workers. 

Years later, APWU Eastern Region Coordinator Mike Gallagher wrote a position paper to stewards about the continuous problem of workplace violence at the post office. He explained that his union chose not to sign because "quite frankly, we knew that the USPS would apply the principles of the Joint Statement against bargaining unit employees and not against managers." The APWU's position was this statement wouldn't change much, because the causes of workplace violence at the post office were fundamental to how it operated. Even a blanket zero-tolerance policy wouldn't change that.

Over the last few months, I have been interviewing postal workers about what it is like to work for the post office. They express a range of sentiments, from pride to gratitude to frustration and exhaustion. As I have said before, the post office is an impossibly vast and diverse organization that defies simplicity. 

The most common sentiment I hear is postal workers are proud to work for the post office because it is inherently meaningful work. But they also wish it was a more humane place to work, that problems actually got fixed instead of ignored or passed along. Most of all, they wish the USPS was a place where being a good boss or being a good worker actually mattered. There is a maxim at the post office that doing your work well only gets you more work. It was a maxim 30 years ago, and it's still a maxim today. 

I found the most revealing part of this reporting process came when I asked a few of the postal workers I interviewed what they thought of a 1994 Government Accountability Office study, its results succinctly summarized by the title: "U.S. Postal Service: Labor-Management Problems Persist on the Workroom Floor."

The seven postal workers from around the country who volunteered to read the study unanimously agreed the basic characterization of the postal service from 1994 is still accurate. It is an authoritarian, top-down organization in which policy is set by higher-ups who have often never done the work of sorting and delivering mail. The people actually doing the work—or even the people managing the people doing the work—have little to no say in how the work is done. There is a widespread perception that supervisors are not selected based on their management skills. As a result of the basic metrics and incentives upper management creates for both supervisors and workers, an "us vs. them" mentality between labor and management dominates daily routines.

To the question of "have things gotten better since the 'going postal' era?" I received a resounding "no."

"I cannot even begin to tell you how incredulous I was reading this," a 27-year-old mail handler at a processing and distribution facility in Oklahoma wrote in an email. "To know that my same daily complaints and laments were a problem back nearly as far as when I was born—and that they haven’t been resolved in the slightest!!—is so disheartening to me."

Another processing and distribution facility worker from the Pacific Northwest echoed similar sentiments. "That was 10 years before I started, and I have to say overall, No. It has not changed much."

Today's edition of The Mail is going to be about why so little has changed even after the rash of shootings that resulted in dozens of dead and wounded and permanently tarnished the post office's reputation. But it's important to acknowledge this is not just about the post office. Violence—both verbal and physical—in the American workplace was not a new phenomenon when Patrick Sherrill killed 14 coworkers in Edmond, Oklahoma in 1986. The U.S. workplace too often treats workers as little more than extensions of the machines they operate, measuring success and failure by "hitting the numbers," callous to what that sort of treatment does to human minds and bodies. We often think of the post office as a quintessential American institution. Unfortunately, when it comes to how it treats its workers, it is.

In 1994, two different letter carriers filed grievances against supervisors who were allegedly harassing them. The cases were consolidated into one national-level arbitration hearing in 1996. The national-level arbitration was not about the specific harassment allegations, but whether the JSOV, by then four years old, was an enforceable agreement. In other words, could a carrier file a grievance against an abusive manager for violating the JSOV and have that supervisor disciplined, transferred, or even fired? Or was the JSOV just another empty promise from management?

The JSOV itself appears to be quite clear on this question. "Let there be no mistake," the statement concluded, "that we mean what we say and we will enforce our commitment to a workplace where dignity, respect, and fairness are basic human rights, and where those who do not respect those rights are not tolerated."

But by 1996, USPS management didn't see it that way. They argued the JSOV was merely a "pledge" and did not override its right to manage the workforce as they see fit. They said the JSOV was nothing more than an effort to "send a message to stop the violence."

Just as the APWU predicted, management was using the JSOV to punish rank-and-file employees for offenses like cursing at managers while simultaneously arguing the JSOV was nothing more than a toothless document when wielded against abusive supervisors.

The arbitrator sided with labor. "The Joint Statement marked a departure from the past and pointed the way to organizational change," the arbitrator found. "This was a document that evidenced an intent to take action rather than a mere statement of opinions and predictions." 

It's difficult to objectively evaluate the JSOV's effectiveness in curbing workplace violence at the post office. But the broad consensus among postal workers and union stewards I've spoken to is the JSOV is better than nothing but hasn't done much in practice. 

On the one hand, there is some evidence that working conditions at the USPS have gotten better. In 2000, there were 10,553 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints filed against the USPS by employees out of a workforce of 786,516, or a rate of 1.34 percent. By 2018, the latest year for which these statistics were available, there were just 4,081 complaints out of 633,641 workers, or a rate of .64 percent, less than half what it was in 2000. But factors besides working conditions at the USPS—such as the perceived worthiness of filing complaints with the EEOC—can also impact those rates. 

Likewise, grievances that went to arbitration show some tentative signs of progress. Since 1996, when the JSOV became contractually enforceable, there have been 1,195 grievances involving the National Association of Letter Carriers with a JSOV-related complaint, or about 50 per year on average, according to a copy of the grievance database reviewed by Motherboard. Of those, 611 of the complaints were denied by an arbitrator, leaving 584 cases ruled at least in part a violation of the JSOV.

But, again, this data is not capturing the whole picture. These numbers are not the total JSOV-related grievances, just those that reached arbitration for this one union. And although the years with more grievances came prior to 2000—the most was 145 rulings in JSOV cases in 1997—this is probably because workers had this new avenue to file grievances they didn't previously have, so it captures events dating back several years and conflicts that have been stewing for a while. Rulings per year gradually declined until 2008 with a low 14, before rising again to about 35 per year in recent years.

Source: NALC arbitration database obtained by Motherboard

Moreover, some of the rulings detail that postal management continues to look the other way on problem supervisors, a key issue highlighted by the Congressional investigation into the Royal Oak shooting. 

For example, in 2008, an arbitrator found a supervisor in Oakland, CA had "a history of cease and desist orders…at stations throughout the Bay-View Postal District." Management was aware of these previous violations of the JSOV and the history of worker complaints against this one supervisor, but management "failed to take appropriate action." The arbitrator said the supervisor's actions of calling his employees "muthafuckers" and "bitches" was "exactly the type of work place behavior that the JSOV was intended to prevent." The arbitrator ruled the supervisor could no longer be anyone's boss, but only in the Pacific Area region. 

Sometimes, the arbitrators themselves do little more than shuffle off problem supervisors to other locations. In 2009, a supervisor in Gaithersburg, MD repeatedly threatened and harassed workers, which the arbitrator found to be "abusive behavior which holds open the potential for violence." Nevertheless, the arbitrator's ruling was to reassign the supervisor to another nearby post office and receive sensitivity training. 

Also in 2009, a union steward and postal supervisor in Stockton, CA got into a physical altercation when, after an increasingly escalating shouting match, the steward accused the manager of sleeping with the postmaster in order to get her job. The manager then slapped the steward, who restrained the supervisor and left. Despite the police being called and a statement taken, the supervisor received only a written warning while the steward was suspended for 21 days without pay. The arbitrator discovered this was not the first time local management had looked the other way on complaints of this particular supervisor violating the JSOV.

And these are just a few of the examples that have been documented. More often, postal workers and union officials say, violence and harassment in the workplace goes unreported as an accepted part of the job. In 2018, NALC Branch 343's newsletter succinctly summarized just how little has changed since the "Going Postal" era:

It has been my experience that seasoned carriers often times will ignore or shrug off this type of behavior because they have been exposed to it for such a long time. This speaks volumes. Many of these carriers have seen worse and nothing happened. 

Why is the post office such an enduring hotbed of workplace conflict? This is a question I've asked postal workers around the country over the past few months. And the most surprising element of reporting this story, at least to me, is there is absolutely no mystery about it. Everyone knows exactly why the post office is rife with workplace conflict. It's even right there in the JSOV: "making the numbers."

Until recently, Josh Sponsler was a letter carrier in Ohio. He decided to quit the post office despite being a "career" employee with solid pay, good benefits, and a decent pension waiting for him at the end of the road. But he quit because the mounting stress and tension in the workplace took a toll on his mental health. When I asked what it was about the workplace that made it so stressful, Sponsler brought up "the 96."

The 96, officially known as Form 3996, is the form carriers have to fill out if they expect they will have to work overtime to deliver the mail that day. In the morning, when carriers show up for work, they will look over the various types of mail they have to deliver: the pre-sorted mail, the magazines and other "flats," and the packages. If they think work that day will take longer than eight hours and therefore trigger overtime, they reach for the 96. 

But supervisors also have their own opinion about how many hours each route should take. The machines that pre-sort the mail automatically generate statistics about how much mail is going to each route. Those stats are then sent to supervisors each morning. Then, supervisors literally measure each route's unsorted mail with a yardstick. After plugging that number into the same software, the computer generates a final estimate for how long the mail should take to deliver.

Often, Sponsler says, the carrier's estimate will be very different from the computer's. For one, neither the computer programs nor measuring mail by the yard captures the most important factors about how long it takes to deliver mail. For example, what's the weather like? Are there mailers going to every business along the route? Every residential address? Is there road construction along the route?

And the computer's estimate is based on the regular inspection every route gets, where a postal supervisor will literally time with a stopwatch every move the carrier makes to determine how long that route "should" take. This estimate then becomes the baseline for that carrier's route estimates until the next inspection is done. But, for various reasons, that inspection may not be representative of the route year-round.

These two estimates for how long the day's mail will take to deliver is, as Sponsler put it, "the first thing that would cause tension" every day.

The tension is heightened because these estimates, multiplied by the thousands upon thousands of mail routes around the country are, in many ways, the main metric for how the modern post office functions. Supervisors are not given budgets in terms of dollars but in terms of work-hours. The more hours carriers say they'll need to finish their routes, the harder it gets for supervisors to meet their work-hour budgets, which will get them in trouble with their bosses.

The same goes for supervisors overseeing workers who don't deliver mail, such as mail handlers and other workers in processing facilities. In fact, for them it can be even worse, because they never leave the facility and are therefore constantly watched by their bosses. Throughout the JSOV grievances reviewed by Motherboard, workers report supervisors timing their bathroom breaks with stopwatches, looming over them so the workers can "feel their presence" while they work, or filing official warnings if they're too slow on a machine by a matter of seconds.  

When carriers, union stewards, and post office managers talk about "making the numbers," they're talking about these numbers, the work-hour budgets. And they're also talking about the increasingly unreasonable requirements postal management puts on supervisors and postal workers alike, bringing mail to more and more delivery points every year with fewer and fewer workers, relying more and more on overtime that management consistently wants to slash. Talking to postal workers, an analogy that often comes up is that working for the post office feels like working in a pressure cooker. Everyone is being squeezed.

Reaching for the 96 has become an increasingly common occurrence. In August, the USPS Inspector General reported on the agency's soaring overtime costs which it largely attributed to "staffing challenges." Because the post office has consistently cut the number of people it employs even as it delivers to more locations, it relies on overtime to deliver all the mail every day. But, in many ways, keeping employees from filing their 96's is the most important thing a supervisor does from USPS management's perspective, because it saves the post office money. 

Source: USPS OIG

There are, of course, good ways and bad ways for managers to handle this dynamic. Most postal workers I've spoken to said they've had at least one good boss who was reasonable and treated workers with respect. But, they are the exception, not the rule, because doing so requires actively ignoring or competing with the incentives put forward by their bosses. 

For the not so great bosses, they have every incentive to bully workers that take longer to do the job, have routes with the greatest discrepancy between the computerized stats and the carrier's own work pace, or, as is all too often the case, just pick on someone they don't like for whatever reason. And they often do it under the guise of achieving operational efficiency, of hitting the numbers.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, this conflict by design can easily devolve into being about anything other than delivering mail. Mail carriers get frustrated and feel like they're being gaslit into doing a job that cannot be done. They get frustrated being told to do a job in a way they think will be slower while also being told to work faster. Their bosses think they're a liar for saying the work can't be done in eight hours. Supervisors tag carriers who they perceive as constantly asking for unjustified overtime as problem workers who need discipline. 

This dynamic was represented in an extreme but not anomalous way in the Gaithersburg case. The supervisor testified to the arbitrator on the record that he "thinks that Carriers that apply for overtime are 'thieves.'" This view, he added, was the reason he felt empowered to harass carriers who said they would need overtime to finish their rounds. It was also backed up by his postmaster, who expressed similar sentiments.

"You just know there's a very good chance that, by filling this sheet out, you're getting into an argument about time," Sponsler said. And sometimes those arguments get out of hand.

If things haven't gotten any better at the post office, it's fair to wonder: why don't we hear about "going postal" anymore? 

I put this question to Northeastern University Professor James Alan Fox, who has studied mass shootings and workplace violence since the early 1980s. He said shooting trends are more like a "general contagion," in that once they get publicized, a small group of people identify with the shooters and replicate their actions. For example, once the Edmond shooting was covered by the media in 1986, other postal workers started to think that might be a way for them to address their grievances, too. In a situation where these shooters likely saw no way out of their problems, they now had one.

But these trends pass just like any other. "There are fads in crime as there are in other aspects of life," Fox said. "Back in the 80s, the way that postal workers expressed their anger and grievance was with a gun…but that is not part of the culture now."

There is, however, a cohort of postal workers who report regularly higher job satisfaction than everyone else. They're called rural mail carriers. They do the same job as the so-called "city" carriers, even many times out of the same offices with the same supervisors, but for complex historical reasons, they fall under different salary structures. Whereas city carriers are hourly employees that get overtime for working more than eight hours in a day, rural carriers are given an annual salary to deliver the mail however long it takes. As a 1994 Government Accountability Office report put it:

"Rural carriers do not have to negotiate daily with supervisors regarding the time it will take to complete mail sorting or delivery, and their performance is not closely supervised. Rural carriers generally control their own workdays as long as all the mail is delivered on time each day."

I asked Sponsler if he thought putting everyone under the rural carrier structure would solve the workplace issue. He said he had never thought about it before, but he doubted it could ever happen because the entire organization, workers and management alike, have become too addicted to overtime. Many of the workers like the extra money and management won't hire enough people to avoid it. 

Instead, he proposed different solutions, ones I had heard many times before. Abandon the autocratic management structure. Get rid of the computer metrics, or at least drastically curtail how they're used. Empower supervisors to run their post office the best way they see fit, not just follow orders from on high that apply to all the post offices in the area. They're big ideas, but not impossible ones. 

Sponsler ended our interview by saying he didn't really want to quit the post office, but he had to. He liked most of the people he worked with. The carriers really do care about delivering the mail in that cheesy way you always hoped was true but never wanted to ask. It really is true, he said. 

"Even with my experience, it can be a very good place to work," he assured me. But it's a far cry from making sure that experience applies to more than just a select few lucky ones with a good supervisor. "The service needs to work on a lot of stuff to get there."

The High Price of ‘Making the Numbers’ at the USPS syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[ewingmadison]

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[63824peace]

Tuesday, 22nd of november 2005

A friend pulled me into conversation this morning without even saying hello. "I saw a Quake-Cloud last week. It was terrible, frightful... just awful."

He claimed to have clearly seen a cloud shaped like an arrow, pointing from the sky to Roppongi Hills. He said it was obviously a Quake-Cloud... a premonition that Roppongi would suffer tremors.

The sight had shocked him so severely that he couldn't tell anyone about it until today.

"Last week?" I said. "But when? Which day?"

"I don't remember... perhaps Thursday."

"I hadn't heard any news of this."

"No, there's no mistaking it!" he insisted. "I saw a Quake-Cloud!"

He usually watches all sorts of television programs related to these matters. He's probably an expert by now.

"A Quake-Cloud, eh?"

What do Quake-Clouds even look like? Are they magnetic fields created from seismic distortions in the bedrock? I'm clueless on these matters.

I listened to him doubtfully, and he seemed to lose patience. The prophet muttered his forecast: "A huge earthquake will hit within two weeks." He appeared somehow relieved, and then he hastily tottered away.

A big earthquake, huh... maybe it'll come, and maybe it won't. If I start to worry about something as small as this, I might as well worry forever.

I should still prepare for the worst though. I have readied myself for the reality that a huge earthquake will hit someday.

I relayed the story as a joke to Matsuhanan, and he reacted with a serious expression.

"What's wrong?" I said.

Matsuhanan lowered his voice. "I'm not saying this to scare you, but--" His voice cut on the word. He leaned closely and hardened his expression. "I dreamed of an earthquake over the weekend."

"So?" I said. "What about it?"

"I had a dream, and in it we all got hit by an earthquake."

"Hmm. Well, still, that's just the sort of thing you'd expect from a dream, right?"

"However," he said. "On top of that, my wife also dreamed of an earthquake that very same morning."

Two similar events can happen, and we can still dismiss them as coincidences. Something more enormous than mere coincidence emerges when three similar events occur. How ominous....

Everyone who had not paid attention to our conversation earlier now listened intently. The air thickened, and the very atmosphere changed immediately.

Matsuhanan and I had both experienced the Kobe Earthquake. Memories from that time bubbled to the surface of my thoughts. I don't ever want to experience or see anything like that again. I decided to shut off these negative emotions as soon as possible.

"So you and your wife both dreamed of earthquakes? The answer's pretty simple here--you must have been on top of your wife without knowing it!"

"H-hey! That's not true!"

"Sexy Matsuhanan!"

"Oh, be serious."

I managed to ease the tense, nervous atmosphere with a little juvenile obscenity. We settled the matter with laughter.

We've seen some pretty scandalous problems lately regarding cover-ups of some buildings' vulnerability to earthquakes. The news broke when everyone concerned themselves with earthquake preparations. "How can we prepare for the big earthquake?" they asked. "And what will we do after the earthquake actually hits?"

I heard that some buildings can topple even under a small earthquake. If a building will collapse under just a small one, what will we do when the big one hits?

Dangers fill our world.

An earthquake will definitely hit us one day. No one knows when, of course, but Tokyo can't avoid its fate. It may hit tomorrow, within ten years, or even fifty years from now.

Still, we can't squander time worrying. We live in Tokyo, and we can't leave it. We certainly won't abandon it. We live with the possibility of disaster every day. Most importantly, we must avoid panic while also keeping ourselves prepared for our future quake.

A long time ago, Toho produced a movie called Jishin Retto (1980). Kaneto Shindo wrote the film's scenario; he's one of my favorite directors. The last scene disappointed me because it was just a rehash of the famous panic movie, Earthquake (1974).

The film's contents aside, the advertisement copy was great. It went something like this: "I knew it would hit one day... but I never thought it would hit today."

Over the past weekend I finally got to watch the bonus disc's extra footage from War of the Worlds. It lasted a total of 165 minutes.

They presented the Previsualization Method developed by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). The method draws out the full potential of scenes that use a lot of CG and CGI.

Film-makers traditionally edited the CGI and V/A composition into the film after they had finished shooting. There's a problem with that method though. According to these traditional methods, we needed to shoot the film against a blue screen background. We could have a hard time feeling out where the non-existent objects, scenery, and atmosphere belonged in the shooting studio.

Each person's imagination differs from other people's imaginations. We have a lot of room for miscommunication and misunderstandings. The shooting studio only becomes more chaotic when everyone on the set works out of sync with the total scenario conveyed on the blue screen.

ILM invented Previsualization to solve this problem. Think of it as a storyboard transferred into 3D images.

Each person can coordinate himself with the total scenario when he examines the Previsualized images in the shooting studio. People can arrive at a consensus understanding among themselves before they shoot... the actors, the special effects team, the stuntmen, and the CG team.

We can use this to determine how all the visual elements will correlate. We'll also work more efficiently with ILM's Previsualization Method. Production costs will drop. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

James Cameron made a small model of his set while working on Terminator 2 in order to shorten his production period. He used a small camera to test various angles, and then he started to shoot. He cut back on the time needed to make his set that way.

Previsualization uses the same idea. We can decide how to adjust our special effects and our camera placement by moving character models through scenery in 3D space. We can decide how to handle our set, visual characteristics, props, and CGI usage after selecting the camera location.

This is how they produced War of the Worlds so quickly. Spielberg is known for a quick turnaround on his films, but Previsualization made this one possible.

I thought about how similar Previsualization seems to resemble our own development methods when I saw it in motion. We naturally used those methods when games became 3D in the late 1990s. We didn't pick it up from anyone... it's simply necessary to make our games.

We first construct the game using simple models and scenery. We treat the cutscenes the same way because they require cinematic effects. We test the module while minimizing all our resources, such as processing speed, MGS-defining characteristics, camera, and general operations. We must reduce everything to its bare qualities in our Previsualization Phase.

Once we fix everything using trial and error, we move on to full-scale production. The film industry's shooting phase equates to this.

Likewise, we don't use the older methods of making the game's map. Instead of drawing it directly, we structure the game according to the script team's provisional map. Once we've done that, we hand everything over to the designers. The pre-production period always lasts the longest while making a game.

The film industry could only have realized its Previsualization Method through digital technology. Film has finally evened out with the game-making process. Some aspects of game-making are behind the times. Other parts, however, are well ahead.

I ate lunch at the Nishi Azabu restaurant La Brace. I ordered spaghetti with ground chicken and Chinese cabbage. I wanted a drink of wine, but I controlled myself. Customers all around me wet their throats.

It's only on the lunch menu, but that was a big salad.

The pasta tasted delicious too. I paid a cheap price considering how much I ate.

We held our hiring interviews in the afternoon. After that we worked on our projects for MGS4 until evening, just like yesterday.

The project certainly is fun. I'd love to work on it twenty-four hours a day. I only want to create.

I'll totally shift my focus onto MGS4 once our new PSP project gets off the ground. I'll try to avoid entanglements such as interviews, clients, meetings, or lectures. I have to focus on my work during the pre-production and Previsualization periods.

At the bookstore I bought the fifth volume of Complete Cobra. I buy manga to read at a later date these days. I haven't got time to read any of them now, and the same really goes for novels. I finished reading Mr. Kurokawa's book Ansho, and I have started reading Parker's latest, Melancholy Baby.

I received my copy of NewWORDS, an entertainment magazine for mature adults. Kadokawa Publishing will release it November 25.

The cover really impacts the reader. It's a shot of Natalie Portman with her head entirely shaved! It will catch the attention of people in the bookstore. The magazine's first issue comes with a UMD Video that contains an episode of Blood+. I think it's really hip that they're not just including a regular DVD.

I wish this mature entertainment magazine great success.

I am actually helping NewWORDS by giving them an interview and writing introductions to movies. I'd like many adults to read it.

People in the past used to call Otaku a new type of subculture. Now we have all become adults. These Otaku now work as members of society, and they pay the usual taxes. They register to vote, and they participate in politics. They have married and now take care of families with children. They have become aware of their larger human community.

The Otaku's loneliness has disappeared, but his responsibilities have increased. These Otaku swore never to grow up -- yet they grew up without even noticing.

Nonetheless, games and anime still mean a lot to them.

People started calling manga "graphic novels." Manga became acceptable as dignified adult entertainment as time moved on. We also ought to have anime and games made specifically for adults.

But here's the question: will supply or demand come first?

Nothing will happen if we just wait for an answer. We're not looking at an issue of "When will it happen?" We're dealing with an issue of ‘Who will do it?’"

Who will innovate products to serve this market?

Now that I think on it, people in the last century used to call Otaku a new type of human being or an alien race. I think that Otaku should take a lesson from War of the Worlds -- they should return as adults from underground.

Our bodies retain the sturdy weight of our time's residue. As adults at last, we shall shed the filth on our own.

[canaryatlaw]

Okay, so today was all around a pretty good day. I woke up to my alarm at 8:45 and got out of bed (even though I didn’t really want to) and started getting ready for church. It was supposed to be like, ridiculously hot out today, which is kind of annoying because it was 40 like two weeks ago and now it’s 90. like, why can’t I have spring dammit?? sigh. but this meant I can wear one of my summer dresses to church for the first time this year, so that’s cool. I grabbed some snacks and headed off. the way my public transit schedule has been going lately isn’t great, because I end up just missing a train out of the station when I get off the bus and then have to wait 11 minutes for the next one, which makes me like, a minute or two late to church (which I know isn’t a big deal really but I hate being late) but like, going earlier means I get there way too early and it’s like, awkward. so I’m a tiny bit peeved about that but it’s not a big deal. Got to church, worship was great, and it was Baptism Sunday, so the message was on Acts 8, not a passage I’d particularly studied before, but it has to do with a guy from the early church named Phillip encountering the eunuch (it’s never really clear if that’s an accurate translation, but not the point) who he talks to about the church and Jesus, and the guy is really getting into it, and is basically “what’s stopping you from baptizing me right now?” and Phillip was basically like shit you right and they went to the presumably close by body of water and he baptized the guy, just off the side of the road they had encountered each other one. The message was specifically focusing on how sometimes people think they have to clean their lives up before they can get baptized, when in reality God wants you to come to Him just as you are. And of course at the end of the sermon they make the call for any person in the church wants to be baptized, they will do it right now, and they do. they always get a ton of people. my service ended up being super long because 41 freaking people were baptized, and that was just in one of three sermons. To add some context to this, the church I grew up in is easily 4 times the size of my church now, if not larger, and they do baptisms like once a month, and there’s like, 4 people on any given Baptism Sunday. And here’s where I really appreciated the sermon and my church’s way of conducting baptism, because that church that I grew up in makes this huge deal about it, before you can get baptized you have to take a 6 week course about I don’t even really remember, but I guess about baptism and its significance. And like, that requires a lot more effort, and it does kind of communicate the message that you do have to clean up your life and make things right before coming to God and that’s just....straight up unbiblical, honestly. Whereas my church says we want you to come right here, right now, and experience the holy spirit. I also appreciated a comment my pastor made about those who were baptized as babies, in general catholic and like traditions, and he said that adult baptism doesn’t do anything to cancel out that, but rather that infant baptism showed an intention for your parents to raise you to follow God, and getting baptized as an adult is the fulfillment of that intention, which is definitely the best way I’ve ever heard it described, he basically attributed the purpose behind baby dedication, which we do, not infant baptism. Adult baptism is never a you have to do this to get into heaven thing, it’s an expression of your faith and a intention to follow God. And man, standing there singing and watching person after person get baptized, I cried so many tears, because it was honestly so moving. Two of the girls who were sitting next to me went up and did it, and their friend was recording it, and I was just like, I feel so happy for them. I just love that we take a we want you to come as you are, come right now, if you’re feeling it we’re going to make it happen, and like.....I just love it all so much. I’m gonna really, really, freaking miss my church if I end up leaving Chicago. I’ve never been to a church like it before, where I felt so much like I belonged and the other members feel the same way I do about the things I consider important (let’s just say we don’t have any Trump supporting gun crazy “evangelicals”, that’s for sure), and like, I now know we have several gay couples who regularly attend and like, that just makes my heart so happy to see, to see people who have been largely rejected by the church, but yet they press on because they want to know God, and they’ve now found a place that accepts them for who they are, tells them that yes, they are made in God’s image, and anybody telling you that you were made wrongly is on the wrong side of the gospel. Well that was a tangent, but I hope you appreciate it. I ended up ducking out a few minutes early because we had huddle up for the kids ministry before the next service, and the current one was pushing an hour and a half, a solid 20 minutes over regular. So we had our huddle and got sent off, I was the only person technically signed up for the babies/walkers room, so one of my friends who’s recently taken on more of a leadership role helping coordinate things stayed with me, for good reason because things ended up being a bit hectic. At first we had 4 kids, and 3 of them were screaming their heads off, (the 4th was seriously the cutest little girl, she was all smiles the whole time even when she took a bit of a tumble I held her for like 15 seconds and she was done crying). So that was a bit much, to say the least lol. One of them is a girl who’s been coming for months and months now and has always been fine, but for some unknown reason she was shrieking her lungs out today, like that really high pitching blood curdling scream that just makes you wince, and she was not calming down, so we ended up texting her parents and they came and picked her up. I have to wonder what happened there. Some kids do just spontaneously develop anxiety issues about being left when they used to be fine, but this was such a drastic difference, it had me wondering if maybe she witnessed something potentially traumatic (I mean, traumatic from the point of view of a 1 year old) but it’s definitely not my place to be suggesting such things, I just wonder about it from a child psychology perspective. I think we ended up with 6 overall, so a pretty solid number. There was a very cute little baby, I think about 3 months or so, and like most babies at that age she mostly just ate and slept, with some minimal crying mixed in. There was a little boy I played with for a while, he was kind of jumpy and definitely could easily fall back into crying, so I had to be careful with him for a bit but then he started engaging and he was fine. Then there was that super adorable little Indian girl I was talking about last week, who is in her prime my parents cannot leave me stage, so her mom was in with her for a while, and like, every time her mom tried to edge somewhat closer to the door she would be all over her pulling her back. Her mom did end up leaving, probably with about 15 minutes left in the sermon, which of course resulted in her furiously crying, but she was definitely improved from last week as far as lulls between crying fits and seeking out comfort from us, so that is progress at least. It can be really hard with some kids, and sometimes it just takes time, but it’s so much easier to get the situated at this age rather than waiting until they’re older, because a screaming 1 year old is much easier to deal with than a screaming 3 year old, trust me. But yeah, overall not bad, there were a couple of moments that were touch and go but we made it through. Headed home after, and once I got here I jumped right into bar prep. I guess what they’re doing is having the lectures during the week and then doing review questions over the weekend, which was the majority of my work today, and then there was a essay writing workshop thing that was.....interesting, I know I need to get over my ego when it comes to writing and accept what I’m being taught, but like.....I know how to write essays lol. I can talk the structural tips and all sure, but I know how to write. so that was not my favorite thing, but we’ll see how it goes in the future. They started with a “reading comprehension” test where they had you read a passage and then fill in the blank of sentences from the passage and like, I got almost all 30 of them right lol. No surprise there tbh. At some point I decided I wanted sushi for dinner, so I ordered that and it came here surprisingly fast, the app said to expect 60 to 70 minutes, but it was here in under 30, so I was impressed with that. I finished up my work around 7, so a solid 4 hours of work, not bad. Then I transferred over to the couch and sat down to watch my great british baking show episodes intercut with the “masterclass” episodes where the hosts show their version of the challenge they just had them made, and that’s mostly what I ddi for the rest of the night, while doing some other computer things like updating the company tumblr like I do every Sunday. And yeah, I watched that until I decided it was time to go to bed, and damn it’s 2:20 already?? I’ve been writing for a long time, clearly, so I’ll end it here. Goodnight friends. Have a lovely Memorial Day tomorrow.

[shhshine]

Gratitude Journal 1/28/18

Long time no post! Life’s crazy busy right now -- I’m still settling back in from my US trip, while also getting ready to move in two weeks and finish my job in three. Planning excursions with study abroad friends as well as a solo Korea trip, plus trying to coordinate doing some more modeling for my hair salon. There’s a lot going on! But there’s also a lot to be thankful for, so here are a few things.

My students and their parents. Especially the ones I’ve known for my two years at this company. It’s been really hard to tell them all that I’m leaving, and tears have already been shed on both sides, but I’m thankful even while I’m sad about it. That sadness means that we made a real connection, and I’m so, so grateful for that.

Recognizing how much I’ve grown as a teacher since I first started at this company two years ago. I’m much busier now, but I’m also much more confident and organized, and I can handle curveballs when they’re thrown at me.

The Emergency Teacher who’s been working at my school off and on most of this year. He’s helped me out a lot, both with lesson planning/organization and with getting ready to train the incoming teachers. Really thankful for that support. I’m still freaking out, but I’d be freaking out a lot more without him to ask all my questions to.

Infinite’s album. It’s crazy how much strength I can get from hearing those boys sing. Sunggyu’s voice is so warm that it’s like a hug and a warm blanket for my fried nerves.

Getting things done on my own in Japanese. I’ve had a few good Japanese days recently. Sometimes I think I can’t do it and ask if there’s an English speaker available just as a reflex, but it was reassuring last week to find out I didn’t actually need one.

I ran into one of my former students in Shinjuku station, the busiest train station in the world, a year after she left the English school to go to university in Tokyo. She recognized me and called out to me by name and hugged me, and that was so, so nice. Good timing, since I’m sad about leaving my students behind, and I had been remembering what it was like to say goodbye to other students like her. It’s good to know that the connections we made won’t be forgotten, and that we’ll still remember each other and be able to speak with each other even months later. I’m planning to get coffee or lunch with her soon!

My laptop. It actually felt kind of freeing to get rid of my old one, which died in a freak coffee accident. This new one is so much lighter and faster. It’s crazy that it can restart in less than a minute! And thank goodness for the Time Capsule program, because almost all of my data was saved and easily transferred.

The boy told me recently that I’ve become prettier recently, more “pretty” than “cute”. I was a little irritated at the time (I WANT TO BE CUTE), but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I appreciate the compliment and kind of agree with him. I’m growing up, and I do feel pretty. It’s a pretty good feeling.

Snow! We had a really great snowy day last Monday, and it was so much fun to play in the snow with my friends. I’m a bit over the cold at this point, but the snow makes it worthwhile.

Making time to listen to music. I’d almost forgotten how much power music has. It really does refocus and reenergize me, and the right song can absolutely pick me up out of a bad mood.

Spending less time on YouTube and more time being intentional about the things I’m watching. Thinking more about what I really want to be spending my time on.