#girl dad Shadow agenda coming soon >:)

[itz-pandora]

I saw everyone was making Sonic ship kids, so I decided to try it as well!

Spirit the Hedgehog. I could NOT decide on colors until I made a human design (this is the third version of him!!!)

Human design!!

I tried to make him look like Sonic and Shadow (cuz he's a Sonadow kid) but I also want him to be unique, but idk :P

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball GT 51

✨GT Stands For Gull Tactics✨

✨Positivity Page✨

Normally, I have a hard time coming up with something for GT to stand for with each episode, but this one has an embarrassment of riches.  Gyre Turbulence, Girl Tornado, Gross Tentacle, Guzzling Tequila, Grabbing Trout... I can’t lose.  So props to Episode 51 for satisfying a dumb bit I came up with 26 years after the show went off the air.

✨"Good" "Ideas", Poorly Executed✨

So it’s finally time for YOUR favorite Shadow Dragon.  The people have spoken, and it’s Oceanus Shenron, also known as “Princess” and “the one that looks like a chick.”

In fact, Oceanus looks a lot like a slimmed down version of Haze, but he uses spinning powers to cast an illusion.  This leads to the big issue I have with the episode’s plot, and Oceanus’ character.  Let me back up and explain the setup to this.

So Giru has tracked the next Dragon Ball to a quaint fishing village, but he runs out of power before he can pinpoint its exact location.  Before anyone can act on this, fish start dropping from the sky.  Pan flips the fuck out and screams for like... a full minute?  It felt like it anyway.  Pan, you’ve been to space and you’ve seen your grandfather nude.  Your parents got possessed by alien eggs and they tried to murder you.  It’s just fish.  Calm down.

Everyone in town rushes out to gather up the fish in wheelbarrows so they can make a quick profit selling them in town.  But one local kid, Bish, isn’t so happy about the situation.  Ever since “The Princess” started dumping free fish onto the village, the fishermen have stopped doing any work, and now they just drink all day and wait for more fish to fall from the sky.

Bish’s dad, however, disagrees with his son’s assessment.  His counterargument: “Shaddup, you blasphemous ingrate, or I’ll throw my hip flask at you.”  From what we see of Bish’s father, I’m pretty sure he’d be a surly drunk with or without this whole “free fish” deal.

Anyway, he throws the flask at Bish, and Goku catches it in his teeth because he won’t stand for child abuse.  You can bring your grandkids along on dangerous martial arts adventures, sure, but don’t throw shit at ‘em.  That’s where Goku draws the line.

Bish explains the whole bit to Pan while Goku cooks fish and then gives his frying pan to Giru.  Aw, this is kind of nice.  Everyone’s just chillin’ out, havin’ a fishfry.  I’m not sure why Pan is so bummed out, but Bish is worried because he doesn’t know who Princess is or where she came from, but he doesn’t like what she’s done to his village, and also the seagull population has been terrorized lately.  Bish has tended to their injuries, but they all hide inside a drydocked boat, because they’re too frightened to go out to sea. 

Bish thinks there’s a connection, and he’s right.  As soon as Giru recharges, he locates the Dragon Ball, and it’s on the forehead of the village’s Princess, who flies into dump more fish on them.  Goku and Pan recognize her as a Shadow Dragon, and it’s clear that this is just part of their “destroy the world” agenda. 

Here’s my question: How long has Oceanus been at this?  I say this because the Shadow Dragons only came to be back in Episode 48, and Goku and Pan have been tracking them down ever since.  They found Haze very quickly, and it seemed like they immediately went looking for Rage and found him without much delay.  So I just assumed that Episodes 48-51 all take place in the same afternoon.  Actually, if the entire Shadow Dragons Saga is just a single day, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. 

And yet, everything about Oceanus implies a long con.  Each Shadow Dragon seems to have picked out a “home base”, where they go to work ruining things.  I almost get the sense that they’re competing with each other.  Haze threatened to expand his territory until it covered the whole world, which would make it a paradise for himself.  Rage claimed to have stolen the whole world’s electricity.  Their individual goals don’t seem to mesh well, so I wonder if this is some deal where they’re all out to destroy the Earth, but only one of them gets to do it.  And this is all some weird contest to see who gets to pull the trigger.  By that logic, Oceanus seems to be doing her own thing her own way, but it feels like she’s been at it for a lot longer than the others. 

Like, okay, the disguise is a neat bit.  I just like her “Princess” design a lot better than her true form.  I wish the other Dragons had similarly diverse looks to them.  But why does Oceanus need a disguise at all?  Apparently she’s been giving free fish to the villagers for a while now.  They’re so used to it at this point that they call her a goddess and have given up working for a living.  She warns Goku that no one has ever seen her true form and lived to tell about it, which is a cool line, but not for a villain who’s only a few hours old.  Who else has seen her true form?

The premise for this story suggests that she’s been at this thing for weeks, or even longer, but that just doesn’t add up.  Maybe Goku and Pan stopped at a Holiday Inn between Episode 50 and 51. So at most, Oceanus has been operating in Bish’s village for a full day.  And yet the whole town has already gotten accustomed to her routine.  It doesn’t add up.

And what’s the point of this whole charade?  This is her only appearance, so she dies before we can find out her plan, but it seems like it would take forever to pull off. I mean, I guess her plan involves corrupting the village’s fishermen and damaging the local ecology, but wouldn’t it make more sense to just... I don’t know... use her wind powers to break stuff?   That’s what the other dragons are up to.  Haze was making land uninhabitable, Rage was forcing people to abandon cities, and when we get to Naturon we’ll find him digging tunnels and wrecking cities in the process. 

Oceanus’ strange tactics might be explained by a quirky personality, which brings me to the Underwear Wish that created her.  The Dragon Ball Wiki has a lot of words devoted to trying to connect each Shadow Dragon to the wish that birthed them, and while I respect the effort, it’s a lot of reaching.  Someone might suggest that Oceanus uses the Princess disguise because Oolong’s wish was so frivolous and pervy.  And maybe her weird plan is supposed to be tied to the nature of the wish.  Like Ooong only asked for panties in order to stop Pilaf from wishing for world domination, so maybe that has something to do with it. There are people who spend a lot of time trying to connect these dots, but it just doesn’t make sense.  

For example, Haze Shenron originated from the wish to revive Bora.  What does any of that have to do with pollution?  What does the wish to revive Goku have to do with electric slime?  Nothing.  These were just trivial matters that Toei slapped together. There is no underlying explanation for Oceanus Shenron.  Someone wanted to write a morality tale about a fishing village corrupted by a false goddess, and so one of the Shadow Dragons was tailored to suit the role.  It didn’t matter that the Shadow Dragons were only a few hours old, or that this one came from a wish for panties.  It all just got slapped together.

✨Is This Episode Worse than "The Roaming Lake"?✨

All right, so how is the fight?  Well, it’s a step up from Haze and Rage, but that’s not saying much. 

Goku gets his clothes shredded by her initial attack, but Pan has a spare dogi in her backpack, so they’re back in business.  Then Goku figures out that Oceanus just spins a lot, so he starts spinning too, and then they slam into each other really hard.  It’s very dumb, but at least they’re hitting each other.

Oceanus still gets the upper hand, though, and manages to keep Goku pinned down.  He just can’t get past the wind she creates.  It blocks all his attacks, even the Kamehameha.  You’d think Goku would try transforming to even the playing field, but maybe Rage Shenron spooked him out of that.

Anyway, all hope seems lost until the seagull Bish was carrying suddenly flies out of his hands and divebombs Oceanus from above.  It can’t do a whole lot to her, but it does manage to get through her defenses, which gives Pan an idea.  She flies directly over Oceanus and fires a Kamehameha straight down on her head.   It’s like how there’s no wind in the eye of a hurricane.  Oceanus is defenseless from that angle.

They make a lot out of this Kamehameha, like it’s Pan’s first, but I’m pretty sure she’s used it before in GT.  This is the first time she’s used it to win a battle..... or it would have been, except Goku fires his own Kamehameha at Oceanus to finish her off.  I don’t know if Pan’s was just meant as a diversion, or if the writers decided that Goku had to be involved in the finish because of Kozo Morishita’s rule against Pan actually getting to win fights or do anything cool. 

The main point I want to make here is that none of this would be possible without the seagull literally showing our heroes where to shoot.  As with the last two Shadow Dragons, Goku and Pan just sort of screw around the whole time, wondering why their attacks aren’t working, and then something else comes along to save them, like the underground spring Giru found, or the raincloud over Rage’s city, or this seagull. 

After the fight, the fishermen thank Goku and Pan for showing them the error of their ways, and all the seagulls come out of that one boat.  But they don’t have the budget for animating a flock of seagulls, so they use a bunch of still images instead.  Hey, maybe don’t write stuff into the episode if you know you’re not going to be able to animate it.

Bish asks Pan to teach him how to fly next time, and Pan responds by inviting him to Mt. Paozu for lessons.   Well that’s a brush-off if I’ve ever seen one.  Why should he schlep all the way out to Mt. Paozu, Pan?  You’re the one who can fly!

Then the episode ends with this shot of the four remaining Shadow Dragons.  This is the first time we’ve seen them since the arc started.  Episodes 48 and 49 had some shots of Rage and Oceanus, but the rest weren’t shown, which leads me to wonder if they hadn’t finalized their designs until this point.  But that’s a problem for later. 

Anyway, this episode is a lot better than the two that came before it, but that isn’t saying much.  I’m still annoyed with the way they used a seagull to expose Oceanus’ weakness.  Also, it’s kind of dumb that Oceanus’ weakness is just “attack from overhead”.  Imagine if you could defeat Frieza that easily.  But you can’t figure that out on your own, you need a seagull to demonstrate first. 

✨The Blade Braxton Memorial Haiku*✨

Can Goku restore

The cracked Dragon Balls? Or will

They Break like the Wind?

[unfriedough]

something with zuko seeing reader with kids and how they treat them and being super soft please !

luv you bestay

‘Spy’- Zuko x female!reader

Masterlist <3

An: Hiiii! GLAD TO SEE U! THANK YOU FOR THE REQUEST MY LOVE, ENJOY!

Summary:

Zuko comes to find you, only to find out a lot more about you.

Warnings: it’s literally just fluff dude 🫡

Zuko never considered himself the dad type, don’t get me wrong though, he loves kids. Just the innocence of being a young child, your only worry is what you're having for supper, every day free and new. That was a life anyone would want. It’s unfortunate he won’t get to reminisce on these times with a smile, he often found himself living vicariously through stories he’s heard, pondering what his life could’ve been, rather than what it was. The truth is, Zuko was scared he wouldn’t be able to give a child the attention and love and care they absolutely deserved, especially now as the newly appointed firelord.

Well not entirely ‘newly’. It’s been a couple years since he’s taken reign and responsibility over the nation, things were settling down, and he was getting more and more free time to spend with you. However, today was not one of the relaxing days he’d had before. Zuko’s schedule was practically full to the brim, barely finding time for bathroom breaks. He was scrambling from meeting to meeting, eyes becoming more droopy as he heard the fifth sour man ramble to him about the most miniscule problem and how he has to have it at the top of his agenda. He didn’t really care though. He had a country to run, trivial matters like renewing guard uniforms or getting a portrait didn’t really matter.

But these silly things mattered to you. You pestered him to get a portrait, you convinced him to redecorate the palace, you even helped redesign the new uniforms, they were a lot more appealing and practical now. The council was always so thankful for you, not to mention how much the crowds loved you. You were a perfect fit. You and Zuko were like the last pieces of a puzzle, satisfying to see together, a perfect match.

.

Usually, you would sit in the gardens daily, your hands with the ducks who swam mindlessly, carefree as ever, all whilst Zuko was away doing his job. But today, you were nowhere to be found. The staff told zuko you didn’t want to be followed by them when he asked about your whereabouts, so he went to find you alone. Zuko thought about the place you always resorted to: the town. He smiled as he walked down the path, a shortcut you’d shown him the first week in the fire nation palace. His footsteps echoed on the hot stone path, shoes tapping happily. It was an excuse to get away from the buzz of it all, the overwhelming feeling of the crushing weight of being the firelord on his sagging shoulders, he was bound to get gray hair anytime soon with this amount of pressure. He sighed, shaking his head as he finally reached the town square, a gentle smile tugging at his features when he saw the playing children, running around, clashing into each other and laughing it off. It was very cute. Then, amongst all the children, he saw you. But not just you, you and a toddler. The young laid in your lap comfortably, babbling while you listened intently. The tree you sat at the trunk of casted a harsh shadow, contrasting the gentle sunlight illuminating the nation.

Another child ran up to you, short legs fighting hard to stay up as they crossed the grass of the short hill you resided on. The little girl buzzed at your feet while waiting for you to start your tale telling. All the kids swarmed you due to your impeccable stories and captivating voice. By now there were a good five children along with a toddler with you, respective parents trusting you with their offsprings.

It was a good thing zuko slipped out of his formal robes before coming, a man much older nudging him from his hiding spot.

“Which one’s yours?”

Zuko furrowed his brows, and the man reiterated, “like, kids? Which one’s yours?”

“Oh no. I uh, don’t have a kid.”

The man displayed a shocked expression, and zuko realized how creepy he must’ve looked.

He quickly started waving his arms around frantically, “NO it’s not like that! It’s just, my wife’s here, I just wanted to see her,” he laughed awkwardly, visibly embarrassed.

“Ohh!” The man chuckled loudly, bringing the attention of lots of parents. He was undoubtedly embarrassed.

“That’s your wife?” Zuko turned back to the man, and nodded.

“You’re a lucky fella, she’s a real gem!” The wife of the man added, as if appearing out of nowhere, wrapping herself around her husband, who leaned in for a kiss.

The three turned to watch you again, and Zuko really took his time drinking in the scene.

The orange hues of the sky drowned you as the sun retreated, the grass colours becoming fainter by the second. Your body was littered with smaller ones. A child under each arm, the toddler on your lap, another two by each thigh, and one hanging by the tree you were sitting under. It was truly such a calming sight.

But really, the magic of it all, was just you. The light bouncing off of your features in the most enchanted way, your soft smile paired with it made you look absolutely divine. Zuko thought there was no way you could even be real, how could someone do something so mundane and look absolutely ethereal - and it be completely unbeknownst to them just how stunning they are. He was entranced.

“You don’t have any kids, right?” The man hummed, and Zuko nodded.

“I’m too busy at work, don’t have the time for it,” a sad expression was his.

“What do you do?”

“I'll tell you, but you can’t treat me any differently than now,” He swallowed thickly as they nodded, but alas, what’s the point of lying? “I’m the firelord,” he smiled a little at their shocked reactions.

“Oh.” The woman said, shocked.

Just a beat later, they both burst into laughter, “I knew I knew him from somewhere!”

“I just couldn’t imagine him being the firelord,” the woman shrugged, still smiling.

“Why not?”

“You're just so young and sweet. I mean, we caught you staring at your wife not even 5 minutes ago.”

He flushed, right, he was doing that earlier.

“Don’t be embarrassed!” The lady nudged his shoulder, “She's very pretty, I’d be staring too!”

He skipped a beat, looking at you again. He really didn't want to disturb you, but he would do anything to be with you just about now. To be held in your arms as you soothed his doubts and worries, a brush of your hand against his softening rough edges. He contemplated just walking up to you.

“So, she's the fire lady huh?”

“Well, duh!” His wife responded, to which the man chuckled.

“Just can’t believe it.”

Zuko swallowed harshly, still rather flustered from earlier.

By now, the sun began to fall, an red-ish hue upon the land, which is yet to be blanketed with the dark of the night. People began to leave, packing their belongings, retrieving their families. You yawned, stretching your arms as most parents picked up their children, only two remaining with you.

A little boy and his sister, twins, both four 7 years old.

“Hey Y/n,”

“Yes sweetie?” You replied to the boy.

“I don't mean to scare you, but there’s a man watching you. He’s been there since the morning.”

Your heart sank, eyes wide, but in a cool-calm voice, you replied, “Can you tell me where?”

He pointed directly at three figures, one of which immediately took cover.

You narrowed your eyes, the distance making it difficult to gauge out their identities.

“That’s mommy and daddy, idiot.” The girl replied, rolling her eyes.

“No, there was one more guy! I promise!”

“Well, I guess we'll find out soon enough,” you smiled, standing up and dusting your clothes off.

The kids followed in pursuit, carefully walking down the hill to make sure they won’t fall over the unstable sloped ground. Once at the bottom, the happily ran to their parents, you right behind them.

“Mommy!”

“Daddy!”

The kids were carried by their parents, held tightly in the embrace. Zuko held his breath - this was a very compromising position for him. You neared the couple joyfully, before slowly peeking behind the wall. There, you found your husband, looking as embarrassed as ever.

“Zuko?”

“Hey, Y/n,” he dragged out, walking slightly closer to you.

“I thought you had a meeting now?”

“Yeah well, I thought they could wait.” Zuko rubbed his neck sheepishly, knowing he’s gonna get an earful later.

You pinched his side, and he immediately squirmed, gasping.

“Hey!”

“You deserve it,” you giggled, before pecking him on the cheek.

“Eww!” The little girl stuck a finger into her mouth, fake gagging.

“Shut up! I think it's cute!” The little boy replied, staring with hearts in his eyes.

“Thank you, Zhao,” the little boy grinned, your approval warming his heart.

By now, the dark of the sky loomed upon you, the group deciding its best to head home. As you walked off, you heard a tiny voice,

“Y/n,” Zhao called to you just before parting, “I need to tell you a secret!”

His small hand guided you away from the group, and he pulled you down to whisper in your ears, “i think he was the man staring at you,” he pointed to Zuko.

You giggled, “Good to know,”

He smiled, before running back to his parents, and waving goodbye.

“Bye!”

“Bye!”

You bowed to the couple in respect, Zuko doing the same, and then you walked off, hand in hand. As you walked back in the comfort of the starry night, your feet moving in synch with his, you remembered what Zhao had said.

“So, spying on me huh?”

“Shut up.”

An: did this take forever? Yes. Do I love this? YES.

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

it wasn’t power i coveted; it was acceptance.

Titans 3.06

y’know, i was just thinking the other day that 1.06/1.07 and 2.06/2.07 were the best episodes of their respective seasons, so i have great hopes going in to this one. fingers crossed!

as always, typing this up as i see the episode.

SPOILERS AHEAD

1. oh! um... that was a Cold Open, all right. *nudges* get it? cold? because it’s snowing? and two people got murdered in cold blood? eh?

... oh, i’ve just started.

1.5. i wonder if “i want to be sipping pina coladas on a beach with you” is the new “i’m just one day away from retiring.” i was so on edge after that--i kept expecting that car to explode. even so, the way they died wasn’t an anticlimax: brutal, and quick. 

1.75. so i’m assuming that’s the titular lady vic! this show better bring up why this doll was important or why these two cops needed to be killed, and not leave it to the ether like jericho’s little mindscape jaunt in 2.08 (i’m still dying to know what that was about???)

2.

i love how deliberately unappealing wayne manor is. 

(sorry for the pic quality. i don’t have hbo max! ssshhh.)

2.3. i love the many references to “home” and “our house” when they’ve been here for less than a week and saw one of their friends get blown into pieces. i mean, i unironically love it: home is where family is, after all!

2.5. i’d like to say that kom is playing some sort of long game here, especially given the build-up we had last season and some of the more niggling details this season: why did kom choose now to use her bond to lure kory when she’s been on earth for months? why did justin call kory now, just around the time that she started getting kom’s visions? and what about kom’s ability to exactly imitate other people? hmmm.

2.75. the reason i wrote i’d like to say is that i’ve made the mistake of assuming plot complexity where there is none; i was so invested in the jason todd orchestrated his own death theory for instance, when it turns out that oops! ra’s al ghul just happened to leave a little lazarus puddle in gotham, and oh yeah! scarecrow just happens to have a network of henchmen working for him on the outside and a fully functional laboratory and a weapons cache fit for a new supervillain in the basement of the high security psychiatric unit/prison that he’s in! 

(no i’m not bitter, why do you ask)

2.8. iiiii don’t know what to say about the implications of sex slavery being a thing on tamaran, so i’m not going to say anything at all. for now.

3. gotham, six years ago... wasn’t it five years before s2 that jericho died and the titans disbanded? and when was the flashback from 1.06 where dick let zucco die? i think it was after the events of 2.08: jericho? i can’t seem to find any transcripts or reliable information online, so i’m going to have to rewatch 1.06 at some point. 

(i love the old-fashioned batman music in this heist scene)

3.5. “security is a joke... it’s my way of keeping my dad on his toes”. what you’re an ethical thief now, like an ethical hacker? i don’t think that excuse is going to sell, barbara, on the day you do encounter a decent security system and your father is forced to arrest you.

(then again, gotham’s security is piss-poor. did you know that you could just walk into arkham asylum without any official clearance, ply one of its most dangerous inhabitants with contraband, and said inmate could get away with having an entire laboratory and weapons cache--NO I’M NOT GOING TO LET THIS GO)

3.8 so that flashback between dick and barbara was really cute! and also illuminating:

a) dick sounds so light, so... um. look. i have some apologies to tender to mr thwaites, because while i’ve always thought he does a fine job as dick grayson, i’ve never been terribly fond of his cadence as he delivers dialogue. it’s often monotonous, i thought, but then again, he’s usually delivering exposition or dealing with one soul-crushing crisis or the other. so i was pleasantly surprised to hear dick sound so carefree and alive in his conversation with barbara, laughing frequently, his emotions so bare and bubbling to the surface. it’s really a fantastic contrast to the traumatised and world-weary dick grayson that we see now, even more so than the costume department just bunging a backwards-baseball cap on mr thwaites’ head and hoping that will convince us of his relative youth. 

b) and god, when he wakes up from that memory, all alone in his bed, bleeding from bullet holes in his shoulder (bullet holes that are--in a somewhat convoluted way--barbara’s fault)? yikes. it’s great. you have my apologies, mr thwaites!

c) can you imagine dick just... crawling back to wayne manor, trying not to be seen by anybody, shedding his suit and just... collapsing onto his bed without even tending to his wound? the sheer emotional and physical exhaustion of it? 

d) it’s so interesting to see how barbara and dick approach the idea of legacy--a big theme on the show!--in this flashback. barbara is the one bucking the idea that she should follow in her father’s footsteps, while dick seems pretty content with the batman-and-robin setup, and even tries to get barbara to join their team (robin-girl. pfffft). obviously after this several traumatic things happen wherein dick ends up questioning and then resenting his role as robin, his relationship with batman or even returning as a vigilante at all. and barbara... ends up replacing her father as commissioner. it’s tragic, really. 

e) the dynamic between dick and barbara in the flashback reminds me of how it was between dick and donna in 1.08 and even between kory and dick in early s1. it’s like having an older, strong-willed woman by his side means he gives over the steering wheel for a while and lets himself... unspool, a little bit. it’s kinda endearing.

also:

*pinches his cheeks*

3. you know, we talk about dick and Eldest Daughter Syndrome, and that’s definitely valid, but here gar seems to me the embodiment of it, with all the emotional gardening and firefighting that he’s expected to do. he’s kind of the guy expected to keep his shit together and take care of everyone else while they are falling completely to pieces, unable to carve out time to process his own trauma. he’s also picked up dick’s and kory’s tendencies to bottle up their struggles and shun appearing vulnerable, and he’s struggling in the shadow of both dick and kory undergoing acute crises, his best friend (and frequent confidante) on the other side of the world, and seeing hank die, utterly helpless to stop it. 

i’m glad that he got a chance to tell dick even a smidgeon of what he really feels, and i hope this is at least a semblance of a wake up call for dick to actually sit down and work with the people he repeatedly calls family.

3.5. it’s heartening to see that dick immediately makes it his priority to go talk to gar. but don’t blow off kory in the process, man!

4. i’m really loving this dynamic between kom and conner--i get the idea that both of them consider each other as Unknowns, alien two times over. but conner’s only ever known the titans, who embrace being different, and kom’s only ever known... well. 

anyway, kory is Really Stressed, and honestly? #relatable. 

when you’re forced to bring an estranged family member to hang out with your friends...

4.5. i love that the titans are spending so much time in the kitchen. a real family!

5. jonathan crane is a creep and i absolutely cannot stand him.

5.25. how did he get a whole lab setup (in the basement of a hospital...?) with a bunch of whitecoats to work for him? how did he just waltz into the viewing room of an operation theatre when he’s one of the most wanted men in gotham right now? why is jason wandering around maskless when--presumably--as the adopted son of the most famous person in gotham he’d be a tad more recognisable than your average joe?

why do i expect this show to answer anything anymore?

5.5. that’s not necessarily a criticism, mind; i’ve said since season 1 that titans is very comics-like in this aspect, all about the Aesthetic and the splash-page splendour rather than the niggling unimportant details of how or when the characters got to said location. like. the camera gliding over the operation being set-up, lady vic bursting in and doing her murder dance (imagine the luck of the poor intern who chose this day and this surgery to assist) and jason, shocked and slack-jawed, framed by blood.

5.75. it’s a sobering reminder for jason that, though he chose this path in order to gain control over a world that seemed like it was rapidly spinning out of his grip, he’s only succeeded in handing over even more control to a man with an agenda that is very clearly not aligned with his own. he’s in too far to stop now, though.

5.9. i have a lot more thoughts about jason! saving it up for the end of this recap, though.

6. more kitchen time! i better see dick do some cooking soon...

(”our kitchen”! it still delights me! kitchens are So Important)

6.25. so much of dick’s issues have revolved around his relationship with bruce, so it’s completely understandable that in the wake of a huge crisis where bruce literally asks dick to replace him and be a “better” him, dick would default to all the worst things he learned from the man. and i’m glad kory’s having none of it, but come on, guys. the woman’s literally fetched her fratricidal sister out of a hole in the ground with no idea what said sister is going to do next and experiencing a burgeoning sense of guilt far, far beyond her history with the titans, and dick’s too far into his autocolonoscopy that he can’t see that she needs help.

6.5. “he services your urges”--well, as far as we know, kory is the last person he had sex with...

7. “i hope [gar] isn’t angry with me...” SIR! i thought you’d already spoken to him! smh, as the kids say. kory wouldn’t be needing to reassure you if you just took the effort to build two way emotional relationships with the rest of the team. @superohclair​ was taking about dick’s relatively low emotional intelligence? i agree.

7.5. “i got my own problems [...] you and barbara? fix it.” YOU TELL HIM, KORY

8. man i really like this weird, sad tension between dick and barbara--this sense that both of them are approaching the other based on how they remember them and are ultimately disappointed by the truth. barbara thought she could trust dick to... well, be a better batman, but dick has not only failed at that in her eyes, but repeatedly undermined her while exploiting the authority that she gave him. in dick’s eyes, this is nothing like the barbara that he knew, rebellious and ready to do whatever it takes to find something. 

like. this show sometimes really hits me in the chest about the ways it shows kids grow into adults and into caretakers, and the way it’s stop-start, the ways nothing can happen at all for a long time and then it’s Crisis Central all at once and there’s no space to breathe. the weird sort of sadness that comes with nostalgia. 

8.5. oracle name drop! i agree with barbara, any system that can just randomly tap into gotham phonelines is a monster.

8.7. (i don’t know if it’s my imagination, but is dick holding himself... differently in this episode? like that wound is definitely bothering him, and he’s running on fumes)

9. man, that was a really sweet scene between kom and conner. “feeling alien in your own world”... “not quite here nor there”

honestly this team runs on conner and gar’s faith in their value as a family, and it’s a sign of conner’s generous heart that he extends that opportunity to blackfire. this arc of maturation for him, where he’s now able to consciously choose which parts of himself he can use to do the thing he wants to so--save people--has been so fulfilling to recognise. this baby’s grown with the titans! and what he’s learnt is that people can get fucked up, but the titans is a place where they can be fucked up, and grow.

MY MAN CONNER

10. oh man i’m drinking in the gar-dick interaction in this episode like i’m three days into the desert and it’s the only source of water for miles around!

a) gar is absolutely not dealing with dick’s bullshit this episode and I LOVE IT. it’s such a far cry from the man who was idolising dick/robin back in s1 and expecting him to solve all their problems. dick is fallible, dick is fucked up, but he Tries His Best and that’s ok.

b) dick, huffing and puffing through that vent, unable to put any pressure on his left shoulder, trying to have a heart to heart with gar... fuck i love this asshole. 

c) bruce took in a kid who was suffering... “and made him into a weapon”. well. i absolutely agree with dick that it was bruce who put these kids into these horrible situations with him and they came away with a bucketload of trauma to add to the one that they already had. but we know that bruce was really trying with jason, and at the end of s2, dick was coming to acknowledge that bruce had offered him something that wasn’t just darkness. jason’s death and bruce’s reaction to that shattered that fragile progress.

d) “gotham got to me too.” i feel more sympathetic towards dick running off on his own than most, and it’s not just because i’m an unapologetic stan.  we’ve seen before that dick... devolves when overwhelmed, and he lashes out and makes ill thought out decisions and just Does Not Deal. it happened after hearing the news that deathstroke had returned in s2, and it didn’t help that everyone around him was reeling at the news, either. this time, however, he has his salvation in his family, and despite some stupid decisions like running off and kidnapping supervillains without telling his team, he’s been really on the ball this season. thinking clearly and logically, holding it together and working on a plan, thinking two steps ahead of the villains... yes.

e) gar needing to believe that jason isn’t beyond redemption... there’s a lot of blood on his hands, too, from when he was manipulated by cadmus last season. it makes sense why he’d relate to jason’s predicament, and i hope dick picked up on that.

f) my head just added a plaintive ow after dick jumped feet first into the storage room

i need, crave gifs of this scene!

11. *sits on hands* i’m going to talk more about red hood, i promise!

12. more gar and dick! is it my birthday??!!

(actually, according to the tamil calendar, it is my birthday! my “star” birthday)

12.5. excellent. dick using some implausible training that bruce taught him to solve a mystery? passing some of that knowledge onto gar? that proud smile when he sees gar perfectly execute moves that he taught him? MY HEART IS EXPLODING

13. aw, i love flashback!dick and barbara, they’re so cute <3

13.25. why does it not surprise me that the way he proposes a relationship to barbara is by saying “we make sense”? this guy can deduce exactly who was present where and what weapon they were holding from a garbled audio recording but other times he’s utterly clueless, and that’s a consistent character beat right from s1

13.5. so.... that’s why lady vic has it out for... barbara....? i don’t get it. it’s flimsy. but hey! the fun thing about titans is that i don’t have to get it. the payoff has nothing to do with the plot.

14. i can’t believe that barbara fell for that, but at least that wheelchair fight looked awesome, so.

15. oh yeah, i forgot that red hood bullied the mob into helping him and scarecrow... at least that explains the whitecoats and the elaborate set-up.

15.5. honestly i love how this dynamic between kory and kom is developing, though i wish more of the team would pay attention to it. time to call justin, i think!

16. i wonder what happened after that second flashback where barbara got hurt during that heist. did she give up on doing any more (maybe jim caught her)? was it because dick was called away by bruce and then the titans and got caught up in his own issues? maybe barbara froze him out because she wasn’t looking for the relationship that he was looking for? maybe the idea of doing that with someone turning into batman-lite was just... unappealing? scary?

whatever it is, it doesn’t look like dick ever processed the end of that relationship. it’s very intriguing to see where their dynamic goes next.

17. so.... what, did vic deliver some fear toxin to barbara? i... what?

17.5. and i TOLD YOU that they would never explain that doll or why vic attacked those two cops at the beginning! oh, titans. never change. 

18. did jason just randomly have tim’s restaurant burgled? god, i’m feeling a bit nauseous... are they going to kill tim’s father?

18.25. i feel like the rest of the season is going to wrestle with jason’s culpability in the horrible stuff he’s doing and i’m already seeing that prospect divide fans. on one hand, his story is taking a lot of oxygen away from other equally interesting story arcs, and he’s done some truly awful things, like indiscriminate murder, threatening to kill children, blowing up hank, and potentially killing tim’s parents. 

there’s something to be said for the kind of hold that crane has over him, and the so-called ‘anti-fear’ drug that he keeps plying jason with--he’s alone, drugged almost constantly (to the level of dependence), fresh from the trauma of being bludgeoned to death. he hasn’t conquered fear; he’s ruled by it. on the other hand, given that he’s the one character on the show given an obvious and identifiable ‘mental illness’ arc (maaaaybe dick too), one can argue that it’s irresponsible to show this progress into such violence: jason was vulnerable because he was struggling, and that left him vulnerable, but it took only a push before he became a fucking serial killer.

but that could mean we underestimate the degree of that vulnerability, and the mechanics of this universe where he fell into the clutches of the one supervillain perfectly designed to exploit that vulnerability. that helpless spiral into further and further self-destruction is all too real. it’s valuable to know that someone who has sunk that low can still seek help--actual help--and get it. 

18.5. i don’t know. it’s not a question i’m going to resolve at the end of an overlong recap at 1 in the morning. i don’t believe it’s even a question that titans can resolve. but i am interested in where they’re going next with jason.

19. this episode was genuinely great! i’m pumped for the rest of the season!

[wandlores]

Royal Treatment

Pairing: Pansy Parkinson x Narcissa Black Malfoy  Words: 2,093 You can also read this on AO3.  Warning: This is rated Explicit on AO3 for some smut.  This is for the @hprarepairnet Pansy Parkinson Challenge! I am also dedicating this to all my faves in my rare pair net server. You guys have inspired a lot of this plot based off of our discussions about Narcissa and Pansy. 

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The war was over, and they had finally finished their eighth year at Hogwarts. They were officially ready to become adults, and Draco was the last of them to turn eighteen on this very night. Whenever it was Draco's birthday, that meant a sleepover at Malfoy Manor with a lot of firewhiskey. That had become a tradition starting their fifth year. Pansy's first time ever experiencing pure intoxication was at this manor, and she remembered explicitly how Narcissa held her hair back as she threw up. Pansy could not stop staring at her chest even then.

Some things never change. Narcissa Malfoy was as beautiful as ever, and she made Pansy quiver with excitement from her own fantasies. It was never going to happen, Pansy knew that. It was wrong to fuck your best friends mom. Even Pansy had some morals, but she could not stop thinking about it. Some desires that you discover at the age of fifteen never leave.

It was the usual crew. Pansy, Goyle, Draco, Blaise, Daphne, and Theo. They never talked about Crabbe; maybe it was too painful. Pansy wasn't sure, but she knew this group of friends were never the type to become overly vulnerable. They were known to bitch about others, gossip, and drink the night away. It was how Pansy preferred it, though she did have vulnerable relationships with each one of these friends on an individual basis. Particularly Draco. That is how it had always been. So Pansy was surprised when Goyle drunkenly mentioned that they should play truth or dare. To Pansy, that screamed potential vulnerability overload. Vulnerability was not something that ever happened at Malfoy Manor. Especially on Draco's birthday.

"Guys, we seriously need to play truth or date," Goyle pushed, "I want to see some of you squirm out of your skin." He was smirking, and Pansy could feel that he had an alternative agenda. She just wasn't sure what.

Pansy watched as Theo whispered in Daphne's ear and kissed her cheek on the couch, and Blaise rolled his eyes at their public display of affection. Draco pounded another shot.

"This is my eighteenth birthday party, Greg, not my fifteenth," Draco said, "Isn't that a little, juvenile?"

Daphne snorted, and Draco looked up to meet her eye.

"What is that about?"

"We are all a little juvenile when we are drunk, Malfoy. Don't act above that," Daphne replied.

Draco didn't argue back, and Pansy had a smile spread across her face as she brought her shot glass to her lips. The firewhiskey burned the back of her throat as it went down, but she stopped herself from wincing. The pain was nothing.

"So who is going first then?" Blaise perked up, with a smirk playing at his lips.

"Well," Pansy started, "Since you are initiating it, why don't you go first, Blaise?"

His smirk spread wider, "My pleasure, Parkinson."

Pansy leaned back against Daphne's legs and now pulled out a muggle cigarette. She closed her eyes as she lit it and took a drag. She could feel Goyle's eyes on her while he was having a wet dream. They were never going to happen, but that never stopped him from trying.

Blaise noticed Goyle practically drooling over Pansy, and his eyes lit up with an idea. Pansy knew that look. He was about to cause some problems.

"Greg," Blaise asked, "Truth or dare?"

Pansy braced herself for his answer. She knew what it would be. He eyed Pansy as he replied, and she watched as he licked his lips.

"Dare."

"I want you to kiss the person of your choice in this room."

Goyle's eyes sparkled at the prospect. Pansy watched as he cracked his knuckles in preparation to move over towards her. Pansy could feel Theo protectively put his arm around Daphne on the couch. He would never admit it to anyone, but he was territorial over his girlfriend, even if he tried to act constantly nonchalant.

Pansy braced herself mentally. She put her cigarette out knowing what was coming and looked at the red lipstick stain on the end of it. She sighed, at least her lipstick was already ruined.

Greg had scooted himself over to her on the ground. As he faced her, he suddenly looked nervous. He looked like the shy boy who asked her out at fourteen, and suddenly, Pansy felt empathetic towards his nerves and constant rejection.

"Are-are you okay with this?" Greg now asked under her breath. His cocky confidence was gone; she assumed his plan was out the window.

Her breath hitched. She didn't want this, but she didn't want to insult Greg any further. All she did was nod. He leaned forward and kissed her. His tongue didn't even slip into her mouth. He knew. It was just a peck, and he pulled away. She watched as he got up and poured himself another shot.

Draco rolled his eyes as Blaise booed, "That was it? Really Goyle?"

"I'm not the type to kiss a girl that doesn't want to be kissed by me," he told them honestly. He took another shot, "Pansy is my friend, too."

Pansy wanted to thank him, but instead, she turned her attention to Blaise. It was time to get him back.

"Blaise, truth or dare?" She smirked.

His eyes twinkled, "Truth."

She was surprised. He was always the type to take a dare. Maybe he was too nervous she would get him back. Pansy thought for a moment.

"What is up with you and the Weasley girl?"

She watched as Blaise's neck heated up, and Theo stifled a laugh by choking on his shot. Draco smirked from his arm chair, and Goyle took another shot.

Pansy lit another cigarette as she waited for his response.

As soon as the cigarette touched her lips, he replied, "She's a good fuck, actually. If you are wanting me to be honest."

"It is more than that, though," Daphne taunted, "I have seen the way you look at her."

"Yeah, he is completely smitten," Draco teased.

"Just like you are completely enamored by Potter," Blaise shot back.

"You both clearly have a type for heroes," Pansy murmured as she took another drag.

Blaise and Draco bickered back and forth for awhile about their new romantic prospects, until Blaise turned his attention back to Pansy.

"Truth or dare, Parkinson?"

She had embarrassed him. She knew that. She could feel revenge coming, but she was enjoying her cigarette too much to take on a dare.

"Truth."

It was then that she remembered. One drunken night during their sixth year in the Slytherin common room, Pansy admitted to him her crush on Narcissa. He thought it was hot at the time, but now, she had a feeling he would use it against her.

"If you had to fuck any of our parents, whose parents would you fuck?"

Draco rolled his eyes, and Daphne gave him a disgusted look, "Why are we even thinking about that Blaise? Considering that Theo and his dad are not on.."

"It's okay, Daph. We know Pansy would never choose my dad to fuck."

They all laughed at that, but Pansy swallowed the ball in her throat. She knew he knew the truth, but would she answer honestly with Draco there? She wasn't sure, so before answering, she took another shot and a puff off of her cigarette.

She figured she could blame it on the alcohol later, so rather than back down from Blaise, she answered honestly, "Narcissa, obviously. She is the definition of a MILF."

Draco pretended to gag and everyone in the room smirked. Goyle laughed like it was a joke.

"Good answer, Pans," he joked.

Pansy didn't say anything other than take another drag off her cigarette. Daphne started playing with her hair, and that is when Pansy swore she saw Narcissa's shadow walk past the entryway. She figured it was just the alcohol finally taking over, and they all continued on with their little game.

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Two hours later, Pansy was exhausted. She stumbled down the hall to her designated bedroom at Malfoy Manor. She practically lived here all summer, so it was even decorated to her liking. She closed her eyes as she opened her bedroom door to try and get a hold of herself, and when she opened her eyes, she saw Narcissa lying on her bed wearing the sexiest black lingerie she had ever seen.

Pansy felt her mouth drop open, and she hoped she wasn't drooling. Knowing her, she probably was. She was shocked. What the fuck was Narcissa doing in her bedroom in the middle of the night in lingerie?

"It took you long enough to get back," Narcissa said nonchalantly, "Can you give me one of those muggle cigarettes? That's what they call them, right? Lucius has never let me try one."

Pansy shut the door behind her and then pulled her pack and muggle lighter out of her pocket. She handed Narcissa a cigarette, and she watched as she put it in-between her lips. Her cherry lipstick had already stained the end.

"Can you give me a light?" Narcissa asked seductively. Pansy gulped and leaned forward with her lighter lit. She watched as it engulfed the end of the cigarette and as Narcissa breathed in. Narcissa smirked as she blew the smoke out directly in Pansy's face.

Pansy had to clench her thighs to stop herself from losing it as she breathed in the smoke.

"I heard your little game earlier," Narcissa remarked. She got up from the bed now, and all Pansy could focus on was her legs in her fishnets and heels as they clicked across her bedroom floor. Pansy attempted to collect herself by sitting on the edge of her bed.

Narcissa took another drag from her cigarette before she continued. She leaned her head back as she blew the smoke out, "Is it true what you said? You would fuck me out of any parent of your choosing?"

Out of anyone of my choosing, Pansy thought. She didn't say anything. Pansy had never been brave, but she nodded. This could not be happening.

Narcissa licked her lips and took the last drag off of her cigarette. She put it out in the ash tray by Pansy's bedside, and then she got down on her knees in front of Pansy.

"Well good," Narcissa told her, "Cause there is something I would like to try."

Before Pansy could respond, Narcissa had spread her legs apart, wetness was already between her legs, and as Narcissa undid her pants, she could see it already through her panties.

"I excite you this much, huh?" Narcissa teased.

Pansy didn't say anything as Narcissa leaned forward. Her tongue was now on her, and Pansy had to stifle a moan.

Before Pansy knew it, her clothes were off, and Narcissa was straddling her on the bed, still in her pesky lingerie.

"Please.. please take it off," Pansy begged.

Narcissa smiled as she started to unzip the back of her lingerie. Her breasts popped out, and Pansy instantly went up to feel them in her hands.

"Better than you imagined?" Narcissa teased. Pansy nodded and her mouth went up to Narcissa's nipple. Narcissa moaned and rubbed up against Pansy. Pansy was in heaven. This was the definition of ecstasy.

But it was over too soon; Narcissa had managed to make Pansy orgasm five times in the past hour. She was out of breath as Narcissa laid next to her on her bed and leaned over to grab one of Pansy's cigarettes. She lit another one and handed it to Pansy to share. Pansy grabbed it and took a drag.

"That was incredible," Pansy told her, "Truly."

Narcissa smiled, "Anything for Draco's best friend."

Narcissa then leaned over and kissed Pansy deeply on the lips. Pansy was leaning in for more when Narcissa pulled away. Pansy watched as Narcissa put a black robe on over her body. She walked to the door and turned back to look at Pansy naked in her bed one last time, with a cigarette in-between her lips that she had given her. Narcissa quivered at the sight, but Pansy could not read Narcissa's mind.

"Until next time," Narcissa whispered. She gazed over Pansy's body one last time, licked her lips, and left.

Pansy was going to ask Draco if she could move in tomorrow, especially if she was going to receive the royal treatment while living there.

That was the night that Pansy's wildest dreams came true and continued on.

[aperrywilliams]

A Normal Conversation Ch09 (Spencer Reid x Maxine Brenner)

Masterlist

Ch01 Ch02 Ch03 Ch04 Ch05 Ch06 Ch07 Ch08 Ch09 Ch10 Ch11 Ch12 Ch13 Ch14 Ch15 Ch16 Ch17

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Chapter 9: The worst third date

Summary: The third date for Max and Spencer

Word Count: 3312

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Reference to kidnappings, sex, gunshot wounds and deaths

A/N: Attention!!!! A lot of spoilers for "Date Night" (15x06)

——————–

Max knocked on the door of the apartment and Spencer hurried to open it with a smile on his face.

"Hey!" Max said standing on the threshold of the door.

"Hi... come in..." Spencer replied, inviting her in. Max immediately noticed a rather strong cleaning products smell. Had he just cleaned up the apartment? It was only supposed to go get him for a coffee.

"Wow!... you cleaned" said Max.

"Yes, I did" Spencer replied standing a steps forward the door.

"Spencer ... if we only agreed to pick you up for a coffee ... why did you bleach your apartment?"

“Well, you wanted to see my apartment… which at first seemed odd. Then I remembered I had invited you here when I told you about my books collection. Well, since I haven't received anyone here in at least 4 years… I thought it was good to clean and air the place… ” Spencer said almost without breathing. Max started to worry a little.

"Are you okay with this?..." Max asked.

"What ... this?" Spencer asked.

"Taking things slow...". Max was trying to figure out what was going through Spencer's head right now.

"Yes! Sure ... I'm... coo… good with that" Spencer replied.

"Good... because times I've been fast... I've ended up disappointed" Max pointed out letting out a sigh.

"Yes... I know the feeling…" said Spencer. "But... I understand what going fast is for me ... but in your book... when you said going fast you mean...?" Max had started to laugh knowing what Spencer was talking about, but he couldn't say anything because his cell phone rang. "Sorry… so sorry" he turned to answer.

Max was nervous. She didn't know how to respond to the definition of "going slow." She knew Spencer was referring to physical contact, but she thought it wise not to discuss it, so she was thinking of something else to say. But something made her forget that thought: his voice on the phone. He sounded concerned, rough, distant. Not like when he was talking to her. Something had to have happened. When he hung up she knew it.

"Work…" Max hastened to say.

"Yes..." Spencer nod.

"Don't worry, coffee can wait." She tapped him lightly on the chest before walking to the exit. "Go save lives..." Before Spencer could say a word, Max had already come downstairs.

He wished he could stop her. He would have liked to tell Emily she would have to wait. He would have liked to tell Max what was going on. But there were people in danger and he couldn't afford that... not him. This is how he got out putting the key to the lock on the way to the BAU... again.

When he arrived went directly to the meeting room. He needed to catch up and make this happen as quickly as possible. Looking at the Cat Adams file, it was as if a bucket of cold water fell right on his back. The three months in prison, the kidnapping of his mother... it was too much, still. However, his sense of duty, of having to do the right thing, gave him no choice. He would have to face her again, would have to play her damn game again. A shadow fell on his head and the smile stamped on his face early in the morning was already completely gone.

He come into interrogation room earlier to wait for Cat to be brought in, leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets. He was trying to focus. He wanted to convince himself he could take advantage and get this over with.

When Cat was brought into the room, he couldn't help but shiver inside. By all possible means he sought self-control, while staring at her without saying a word. "What the hell you want?" he wondered as no muscle moved in his face. She had that challenging look of knowing exactly what to say to introduce him to her twisted game again.

He tried to focus, but when Cat said she was fed up and her execution would soon come it brought him back to the fact that he hated that woman so much to the limit he was glad to know eventually they would stick a needle in her arm. That scared him internally. Could he really be wishing for her death? What the hell happened to the compassionate Spencer Reid? Without even moving, he tried to take advantage and throw his indifference at her as a strategy to nullify any hint of compassion he might express. Well ... what did she want if it wasn't her release? If it wasn't her freedom...?

"A date". She must be kidding. But no, she wasn't. Her express request was a date with him. Spencer wanted to end this from the moment she entered the room, but clearly this was not going to be easy. Again it was not going to be easy. In his head he could only be heard cursing over and over again. “What kind of game is this?” he thought.

He left the room suffocated. His head was spinning, pulse racing. For a second he did not know what was happening to him. But his brain thought enough to notice that his post-traumatic stress was there again. He got in an office, untied his tie, and tried to breathe to control himself. He could not avoid a fit of anger that made him collapse everything on the shelf in front of him. Definitely a form of release. Did it work?... for now. He helped him calm down and return to the team to tell them what he thought was going on with Cat.

As a way to get out even for a second of that torture he thought it was a good idea to call Max. After all, he ruined their morning coffee date. He would have to compensate her in some way. It was nice to hear her, he'd bet she was in a coffee shop. The noise was unmistakable. He asked about her day and she enthusiastically told him about a new job opportunity at the Smithsonian. Of course she would get the job, he had no doubts about that.

Max knew that something was up anyway, Spencer's voice was not like she was used to hearing. She thought it was a good idea to try to see what was happening. His brief explanation did not surprise her, but she would at least try to get a second out of what was sure to obfuscate him: how about a date at night? They could talk about the case clearly seemed difficult. Effect accomplished: Spencer sounded more animated on the phone until he misstopped... "I don't want to spend another minute on her". So the case is about a woman. "Her?"... "It" Spencer tried to correct, but he couldn’t do more about it. He would have to explain everything, but when it was over. Not now.

He wished didn't have to go into that room anymore, but eventually Cat would get away with it and for the safety of the hostages, they'd have a "date". Spencer and the team hoped at some point in the night she would misstep. That was the only thing finally had him composed to accept this idea of ​​Cat.

It was clear she enjoyed it. It was evident everything Cat had planned was working. Spencer hated knowing there was a secret agenda and he didn't have a single clue what it was about. He hoped could reverse the situation to his favor.

On ice skating date he tried to look confident in the things he asked. The goal was try Cat would taking a wrong step. She clearly knew he was looking for that. Spencer tried to push her a little: "The last time I saw you… you were pregnant and you insisted it was mine" "I do not want to talk about that". Spencer wondered if that would help get her out of her comfort zone. Cat responded with a direct attack: she appealed to the physical attraction between the two. Spencer was unable to play along. Huge mistake.

Should he lie? Say he had feelings for her? He should, since Cat was one step away from finishing the game without giving him anything in return. So he tried to convince her she was an important woman in his life, he couldn't get out of his head despite being dating another girl. In saying it, he couldn't help but think if it was really a lie or a truth he didn't want to reveal. She wanted to know more, so at least it seems to have worked. He had to admit hadn't even kissed Max and the only thing he had done with her was show her his apartment. Spencer didn't quite know why he said exactly that, it could have been anything, but at the time he had to keep Cat's attention. "Take me then" Another sign that night was far from over. Spencer wondered what difference it would make, could he accomplish anything with that strategy? He just had to try.

On the doorstep of his apartment was Cat's next test. "Do it right". He knew exactly what she was referring to and could not pretend. It was not the first time he had to "taste" something with a kiss. The last time the result was fatal: Maeve had died in that attempt. Spencer's stomach clenched in a knot that caused deep pain to his guts. And though he burned inside, his exterior remained still. Is that what Cat wanted? How far could she go?

It had to be intense, it had to feel realistic. Doing it for real. He held her neck and cheeks with both hands and launched himself to her lips. Everything it was going through his mind and through his body was routed through that deep and intense kiss. “Fuck Cat! What are you doing to me? I feel like I'm dying again in this…” he was thinking at the time door opened. Spencer was not leaving Cat yet, until he noticed a presence within the department. He turned his head and there was Max, with an expression in her face could have gone through him in a second. It was the last thing I expected to see.

"What are you doing here?" Spencer managed to say, with clear confusion about what was happening.

"Take her away!" Luke said hinting at Cat.

"No, no, no ... she's going to kill them" Max pleaded.

"Kill whom?" Spencer asked anxiously.

"My dad and my sister ..." Max said nervously.

“Michelle?” Spencer was trying to put together the puzzle was laid out right then, in front of him.

"No, my younger sister ..." Max tried to explain what was happening.

"He kidnapped your family..." As much as Spencer thought, the closer he was to understanding what the hell was going on. What were the odds? The whole time it was about him. But how stupid. Mexico was also about him. How not to see it. It was obvious. What sick him most was that she dragged Max into the matter. It wasn't enough to hurt him. She also had to ruin those around him.

He tried to think fast. Max's sister was still missing. He knew Cat was capable of killing, his mother hardly survived. He had to have a strategy. He didn't know if Max would understand, but he tried to explain the importance of she follow his lead. Max's bewildered face was a knife buried deep in him. It was precisely these things that should not have happened between them.

Cat's insolent gaze was something Spencer could tolerate, but her scrutiny on Max was disgusting. In his head it only echoed "leave her alone, leave her alone...".

Too late. Cat precisely wanted to “make a point” and it was always planned to have Spencer and Max face to face and she around crushing everything that could exist between them. First was the kiss. On that, Cat tried to bring out the most primitive feelings in Max with such an affront.

"He is not my boyfriend" said Max. She was right. He was just a man with whom she had managed to have two dates and a significant number of text messages and phone calls. Just that. Spencer regretted there was nothing he could do to contain her, to protect her from that moment of discomfort and fear.

"Did you throw her against a wall?". And yes, with that he was already ruined, what could he say? To lie? It was not a lie, just a truth charged with anger and despair. She had to hear it from him: "and she was pregnant when I hurt her". Spencer could no longer bear the torture, of revealing himself as a monster. The Spencer Reid before prison was not like that, but how to explain it to Max at that time? He couldn't.

"I thought you were a decent man." Spencer felt like every joyous memory he could have with Max in that short time made it ashes on the floor of his own apartment. "I’m sorry". It was the only he could say.

Was Cat done with this? Of course not. Now it was Max's turn. Spencer would have wanted to get her out of there right now. "Tell me the story". It was obvious she sought to revive in Max the pain of her past relationships. She had already made Spencer see himself as one of her love failures, now she wanted to show had never been different in her life.

"Mike Davis, two years of relationship..." Max began to relate, unable to exclude the detail he attacked her. Spencer could only look at her compassionately and embarrassed as she had to be talking about such intimate things in her life in front of a psychopath. She didn't want to even look at him back.

"How it ended?" Cat asked. Spencer expected to hear a sad story of abuse and escape from an abusive relationship. He wished just hug her right then.

"In Virginia it takes 60 days to get permission to carry them..." Max continued with the story and had a clear effect on his two interlocutors: Cat was delighted, taking Max's cell phone to reward her with proof that her sister was alive; Spencer for his part, just wanted Max to stop talking. He knew exactly where the story was going. He was only able to say "Max, stop talking ... stop talking right now". She didn’t.

"And I shot him ..." Max said between sobs.

"Self defense, he was attacking you..." Spencer was looking for a logical explanation to justify what he was hearing.

"That's what I told 911 and that's why they didn't prosecute me... but then, seeing him lying on his kitchen floor, I shot two more times..." Max just admitted guilt in a murder. Spencer felt like he could throw up right now, he felt dizzy, overwhelmed, guilty. He only managed to say "She’ll beat it"

"Probably ... but you two are done" was Cat's sentence. She returned the phone to Max with a photo of her sister as proof she was alive and fine. Max only run to the door to meet Prentiss who was in the hallway to ask her for help with the photograph of her sister. The last thing she did was watch Spencer who was devastated looking her from the living room as she left the apartment and unable to say anything.

"I won" was the last thing Cat said. Spencer could barely hear her, because he already knew it and there was nothing to say. Cat accomplished exactly what she was looking for all this time, to rip him apart, again.

Then everything becomes blurry. Spencer remembers being in the van with Cat taking her back to jail. She knew well what had done, although it was clear she did not regret anything. She just wanted to make sure Spencer never forgot her, even though she would be dead in no time.

It was dawn and Spencer had to return to the BAU. He wasn't sure how to deal with all. He knew Max would no longer want to know anything about him. He had ruined it. Again. He only cursed and kicked anything got in his way. He felt destroyed, exhausted, useless.

He got out of the 6th floor elevator where Prentiss was waiting for him: "We need a deep brief". Spencer knew she was right, and although he didn't feel like it, it was his job. After all, this entire mess became a case... involving him directly, but a case after all.

In the bullpen his expression of reluctance and sadness changed to infinite curiosity. At the back of the room was Max, who upon seeing him could only say "Hey, we have a lot to talk about…"

"What is this?" Spencer asked. Word by word the team members began to relate what had really happened last night and all he believed he knew was not in such a way.

The team related how they connected Cat to Max. They did must to have a strategy in which he must not have knowledge since was the weak point of the operation. He was surprised to discover Max had actively participated in the strategy. "But she is not trained for this..." Spencer said, trying to make sense of the things was hearing at the time. He was simply stunned and confused.

What seemed most incredible to him was how in 5 minutes his brain turned 180 degrees. She knew it, she participated in the game to beat Cat and get her sister back. She made up a story with such credibility and he was amazed. He just didn't believe it, but he wasn't going to complain. It was as if the weight of a truck had been removed from his shoulders.

He looked at her again, and this time she didn't look away, smiling at him. Spencer felt her chest swell and his stomach tickled again. And without wanting to, he met her family: her dad and her younger sister. Too bizarre to believe it.

Spencer didn't expect Max would accept his offer to take her home. He wanted to explain things, he wanted to try to apologize at least. They both walked to the elevator. Max couldn't help but mention the kiss with Cat.

"You can't fake something like that" said Max. Spencer nodded.

"But they say with the right girl is much… better" Spencer said. Max smiled but couldn't help but make another observation.

"You like bad girls…" she said.

"Truthfully… sometimes... but now... I think I like the good girl better" Spencer replied back to praise her.

"Is your life always this exciting...?" Max asked.

"No, at least my personal life isn't…" Spencer replied as they get in to the elevator.

"Such a relief... because probably... this is the worst third date ever" Max sighed. Spencer smiled nervously.

"Do you think there is anything I can do... to salvage it?" Spencer asked trying to find some way to make up for the disaster. Max stared at him as she thought about what to say.

"Yes, maybe there is one thing..." Spencer understood perfectly what he was referring to. There was no need to put it into words.

He walked over to Max, cupped her cheeks with both hands, and placed his lips on hers to kiss her, as the elevator doors closed. Both could feel a heat running through their bodies. Unlike the kiss with Cat, this one was unhurried, soft, warm, youthful. It was a good way to show despite everything they had experienced in that fateful night, they were not ruined as Cat expected it to be.

[camillemontespan]

hope you’re good up there [drake walker]

Just a one shot I thought up and broke my writing break to get this down. Now, writing break, re-commence!

Fluff, angst, fluff. Hope you enjoy. 

@jovialyouthmusic @fromthedeskofpaisleybleakmore @pug-bitch @sirbeepsalot @moonlightgem7 @emceesynonymroll @burnsoslow @i-bloody-love-drake-walker @of-course-i-went-to-hartfeld @gardeningourmet  @katedrakeohd @be-still-my-aching-heart @rainbowsinthestorm @stopforamoment @dcbbw

****************************************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re going good up there. Bet in your heaven, you’ve got a glass of whiskey in your hand and you’ve got Clover at your feet. She was a good dog, wasn’t she? 

So, I’m back in Cordonia. College didn’t work out.. I know what you’re thinking, ‘what the hell, son?!’ 

I’m back because of Liam. He needs me. He was targeted in an assassination attempt and I was in a fucking lecture about economics. As soon as I heard, I packed my bags and now, here I am. 

I know you wanted me to forge my own path; get away from Cordonia and live life my way. But you can’t always get what you want, dad. Sure, it would have been nice to get a degree and an apartment and just be normal, but you know me and Li. We’re like brothers. I’m more of a brother to Liam than his own blood. When he feels pain, I feel pain. When he’s happy, I’m happy. It’s crazy. So I can’t leave him, I refuse to. He needs support and I’ll be damned if I go back to the states, back to college and find out that he’s gone while I’m learning about fucking economics. 

Sorry for the swearing. I’ll put a euro in the swear jar like mom always told us to do. Didn’t stop us though, did it?

             *****************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re doing good up there. You know how you used to say that the court is cruel and you have to look out for yourself? I get it now. As soon as the court found out I was back from college, they went back to treating me like the social pariah I had been when I was ten. Why are they all assholes, dad? Were they assholes with you? Did you ignore them? Did you put them in your place? 

I’m just going to keep to myself. I’ll stay in the shadows, I’ll drink their shitty wine while secretly I want a whiskey - I’ve started drinking whiskey because of you, I can see why you like it- and I’ll just treat them with the contempt that they treat me with. Why not, huh? Why should I go out of my way to be nice to them when they act like I’m the shit on their shoe?

Olivia and Madeleine are the worst. Since Madeleine got engaged to Leo, she’s been all high and mighty because she’s now the future queen. Fuck her. I know you hated her too, well guess what, she’s still the mean girl she’s always been. 

Olivia is still glued to Liam’s hip, laughing at his jokes and trying to get him to fall in love with her. It’s pathetic. Meanwhile, she keeps bringing up how I’m a commoner riding along on Liam’s coat tails. 

I hate this life, dad. I know I shouldn’t complain; I have my own room, I get free meals and I don’t want for anything. I just feel so out of place. I don’t belong here. I just wish I had someone here to tell me, ‘this is how your life should look.’ Why aren’t you here to do that? You were my compass, my one true north. I listened to everything you said, absorbing everything, so keen to be you. Well, tell me what to do. Please.

Sorry, that was a bit heavy. You’re probably sat in a chair right now with a whiskey and Clover, shaking your head, muttering, ‘Jesus, my son is a wuss.’ 

I’ll deal with it. 

       **************************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re doing good up there. So, Leo’s abdicated. I know, right? He just suddenly announced this morning at breakfast that he didn’t want to be king anymore. It was like word vomit, he just burst out saying it and everyone went quiet and stared at him. Liam was beside him and god, his face. He looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

Liam’s next in line now. He doesn’t want to do it. He wanted to just be the spare but come on, you remember Leo right? Leo acted like the spare more than Liam did- he never acted like a king in waiting. He was always going out, getting drunk, cheating on Madeleine. If it wasn’t for the fact Liam now has to be the king in future, I’d say good riddance. Cordonia would have suffered under Leo’s rule.

I can hear you laughing by the way. I know, I’m so knowledgable about Cordonian affairs ha! Someone give me a microphone and a stage, I can sort this in seconds!

I’m obviously joking. Since I’m on the sidelines, I find that I watch everyone closely. I know everyone’s agenda and they aren’t aware of it; they forget I’m there. I’m in the shadows, like a ghost. 

Let me guess, you’re calling me Casper now.  You are, aren’t you? Fuck off, old man. You’re the one who’s dead.

Oops. Sorry. Bit harsh. Yeah, I’ll put a euro in the swear jar.

     *********************************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re doing good up there. Okay, so picture this for me, okay? You died before reality TV became big but there’s a show called The Bachelor and it involves a rich guy with all these women who are competing for his love. 

Sounds really sexist, doesn’t it? Really archaeic?

Yeah, well, Cordonia is holding a suitor competition to find Liam a wife. All the Duchesses are taking part. 

I can hear you laughing your head off. I know! How ridiculous! It’s such a fucking farce.

Sorry, swear jar.

Anyway, yeah. We’re in New York now, about to go out to this bar as part of Liam’s ‘bachelor party.’ He isn’t even married yet and he’s having a send off. Jesus. He’s begged us to take him somewhere normal where nobody knows who he is, which I get. 

I’ll get him drunk, don’t worry dad. 

   ********************************************************************************

Hey dad, hope you’re good up there. I know we spoke last night but I kinda need to talk again? Right, get a whiskey. 

Our waitress at the bar is coming to Cordonia to take part in the competition. 

A waitress. She’s not noble. 

Dad, she’s going to be eaten alive! I’m not noble either so I think I have the authority to say that she is going to be torn apart by these duchesses and she’s going to wish she never came. 

Her name’s Camille. Camille Montespan. French name but she’s from New York. She’s really pretty. Like, my type. Caramel skin, dark hair, these huge gorgeous brown eyes that have gold flecks in them like an owl. 

Fuck, stop laughing at me. 

Swear jar, got it. 

Anyway, she sat on the plane and she looked so calm about the whole thing? Like, ‘sure, I’ll get on a plane with these random guys to compete for a king’s hand in marriage! Spice it up a little!’

I didn’t talk to her. If she said anything to me, I’d look away or respond sarcastically. 

Why? Uh, because she’s fucking naive and doesn’t get how awful this is going to be. Also, looking at her is painful because I feel like she should be with me. 

Did I say that out loud? Fuck. 

Well, we’re both American. She’s beautiful. She’s fun, she is good conversation and I just think.. she’s the first normal person who I’ve come across in years. She’s not noble. She’s refreshing. Just would’ve been nice to get to know her, you know? But Liam’s got her now. He really liked her at the bar. He wouldn’t stop talking about her when we got back to the hotel and I stayed quiet. This is his competition, his girls. Fuck.

Four euro. Damn it, you’re really emptying my wallet, you know that right?

***********************************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re good up there. I can’t sleep. I may be a little drunk. I’ve started drinking whenever she appears in my dreams. Like, I dream we go on a date or we kiss or we get married or we have fucking babies, that kind of shit. Call them nightmares. They’re nightmares because my mind is taunting me, showing me what I’ll never have. 

I watch her dancing with Liam and I want to stab a fork into my eye. 

She’s always near me though. When Liam’s busy entertaining the other ladies, she is with me. We started talking more, joking and now we’ve got inside jokes. Fuck, inside jokes are what get you. I keep trying to push her away, call her by her last name so she can’t get close, but it doesn’t fucking work. She is too good, she keeps bringing down my walls and I try and build them back up. I know it’s not healthy to keep walls up but it’s the way I am now. Nobody can hurt you and the fact is, if I let my walls down for Camille, she will be chosen by Liam anyway and I’ll have hurt myself for no reason. 

So excuse me for not wanting to be all cosy with her. 

I need another whiskey. Yeah I know, swear jar, fucking got it. 

  ********************************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re good up there. So things have changed.. a lot. Um, so long story short, I may have kissed her in the Beaumont study and now we’ve been meeting up in secret and kissing some more and being all angsty and shit, but fuck, it’s so good? Yeah, I’m a little drunk again, you can’t judge, you loved a whiskey. 

We’ve danced together at the balls and I hold her close and pretend she’s mine. She smells like coconut; my own personal paradise. 

I found out today that this is 20 years since her parents died. She was in her room, drinking whiskey - I know, I taught her well- and she begged me to make her feel better. I know she wanted.. well.. you know. I kept trying to say no but she got more upset and eventually, I just gave in. 

She told me that I’m the only person in court who knows about her parents. She hasn’t even told Hana or Maxwell. I feel like I have to keep her safe. Keep her protected, keep her together. I want to be there for her. 

Cheers dad.

*******************************************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re good up there. So, the suitor competition is over. Camille.. Camille chose me. Liam proposed and she said no, she loved me. 

I can hear you celebrating, stop it. I’m a bad friend. 

Seriously, stop cheering, it’s fucking deafening. 

I am really happy though. She chose me. The woman I love - yeah, I love her- chose me. She was offered a life of luxury, diamonds and prestige and she chose me. 

I will never be good enough for her. I know I won’t. I keep thinking she’s going to turn around and tell me she made a mistake. But if she stays with me, I’ll never stop trying to prove my love for her. I am going to worship that woman and make her feel happy and safe. Us against the world. 

I’m really happy, dad. 

*******************************************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re good up there. Have you got a glass of whiskey to celebrate? Okay well, I’m married. 

I married Camille today. 

I know! I’m a married man!

We married at the ranch. The jetty by the lake. Where me and you used to set off fireworks on 4th July. That jetty. I married the love of my life on the jetty in front of all of our friends. 

She’s taken our last name. Camille Walker. 

I told her to keep Montespan for Duchess stuff -oh yeah, I’m a Duke now. She’s a Duchess. Stop laughing. Please stop laughing. Dad, stop it or I’m gonna come up there-

Fucks sake, anyway. She’s Camille Walker. She suits it. She was so happy when she started saying her new name, testing it out for fun, the Walker rolling off her tongue. 

You’d love her, dad. She’s got this throaty laugh and she’s just so kind and caring. She likes football, though she’s a Giants fan, and she has even gone camping with me and enjoyed it. 

I’m feeling good, like everything is falling into place.

 *********************************************************************************

Hey dad. Hope you’re good up there. So, I’m raising my glass to you right now to congratulate you on becoming a grandfather. Well done, you. 

Lily was born yesterday morning at 5am. Camille’s exhausted but she was such a trooper. Seriously dad, I’m not gonna complain about being kicked in the balls again. 

I have a daughter! She’s the miniature of Camille, she’s gorgeous. Downy dark hair, big brown eyes with the gold flecks. 

She’s got my smirk though. Sorry, our smirk. 

I’m happy but terrified. Actually terrified. What if I break her? What if she doesn’t sleep enough? Seriously, I sat up for three hours while she slept, just watching over her. I’m never gonna breathe easy again. 

I hope to be a dad like you were. You were caring, you were fun and you were brave. You showed us how to appreciate the simple things like campfires, smores, sunsets, all of the stuff that most people don’t bother with. I’m so glad you instilled that in me. I hope to pass it onto Lily. She’s half Walker- she needs to learn this stuff!

So yeah, just thought I’d check in and give you the good news. We’re home now and Lily’s sleeping, hopefully sleeping nice dreams and she’s all cosy and warm. 

I did it. I’ve found my place. It’s with my wife and daughter. Thank God, right? 

Hey, look at that. I didn’t swear. 

Check in with you soon, dad. Love you.

   ***************************************************************************

‘Drake?’

Drake whipped around to find Camille standing on at the door, watching him out on the balcony. She looked confused. ‘Were you talking to yourself?’

Drake chuckled, embarrassed. ‘Um.. talking out loud?’

Camille stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his neck. ‘Trying to make sense of the world now you’re a daddy?’

‘Actually.. I was talking to my dad.’

He held his breath. He had never told anyone that sometimes, he liked to sit outside and talk openly up into the sky, pretending he was talking to his dad and that Jackson Walker himself was listening. 

Drake bit his lip. ‘It’s just something I do when I want to.. sort things out in my head. It helps. I know its stupid, I’ll stop-’

Camille placed her index finger on his lips. ‘Shut up, Drake,’ she said quietly. Her eyes glimmered with tears. ‘Don’t you dare stop talking to your father. He’ll be listening, trust me.’

‘Nah, he won’t. It’s just something I started doing after he died-’

‘Please, Drake,’ she whispered. ‘I love that you talk to your dad. Don’t stop doing it. He’s still part of you, okay? He lives on in your memories and when you talk to him, so don’t stop now because you feel embarrassed. Got it?’

Drake nodded mutely. Camille gave him a smile and kissed him softly. ‘Coming in to watch a film?’

Drake squeezed her hand. ‘Sure thing.’ 

Camille then threw her head back and hollered, ‘Hi Jackson!’ 

Drake let out a surprised laugh and shook his head when she looked at him, her eyes now dancing. ‘Come on, let’s snuggle up on the sofa,’ she said. ‘Lily’s asleep but she’ll be wanting my boobs in an hour, I bet. Still feels so weird!’

She took his hand and dragged him back into the manor. Drake cast one last look at the night sky and the stars twinkled above. 

[imissthefire]

Kierarktina Kids Headcanons pt 4

Before we get into this, as usual, here are the links to part: 1, 2, and 3

In this set of HCs, we finally get to meet the second kierarktina kiddo! Before that, we get to see some more wholesomeness that is the family just being iconic, and also another guest appearance by the Wild Hunt! I hope I do this wonderful family justice! Now, without further ado, here is the long awaited part 4 of my kierarktina kids HCs!

·         When we last saw the family, Mark, Tina, and Lia were visiting the gang of the LA Institute, Cristina had revealed to Emma that she was expecting

·         By the time that Mark and Cristina and Lia decide that they ought to head to Faerie, Emma is the last to say her goodbye for now and congratulates Mark, and asks him to pass on her congrats to Kieran too

·         Kieran doesn’t know yet, and they’re excited to tell him when they get back

·         So, the three hold tight to each other as Cristina pulls out the Eternidad, taking them to the forest outside of the cottage

·         Because of wards, they can’t transport directly inside the cottage, even with the power of the Eternidad

·         So once they arrive, they notice the sun is setting

·         They unlock the door and are met with what looks to be an empty cottage

·         They take Thalia to her room, helping her get changed into a comfy pair of pajamas

·         When Mark heads to their bedroom he’s met with the sight of Kieran curled up asleep, cuddling a pillow to his chest

·         His hair is a very pale blue, usually a sign that he’s happy

·         Mark gently climbs into the bed next to him, which startles Kieran, his hair darkening immediately as he shoots up

·         When he realises that it’s Mark, his hair pales again, furthering this family’s Wholesome™ agenda

·         When Cristina gets into the room, she’s already mentally preparing herself to tell Kieran about her pregnancy

·         She gets in bed, but slides over Mark so that she’s in-between them

·         Kieran is not opposed to this new sleeping arrangement, but usually when they switch up how they sleep, there’s a reason

·         Cristina has a huge smile plastered over her face, so Kieran sees she isn’t upset about anything

·         She leans in and whispers to him that she’s pregnant, her eyes welling up with happy tears

·         His hair flared a very pale blue, nearly white, when he heard the words

·         He’s so happy and excited about it that he nearly jumps out of bed

·         He chooses to express his happiness and excitement with a big ol’ kiss and a tight embrace

·         He vows to protect and love their next child as much as he loves Thalia, stating that they will of course be regarded as a Prince or Princess of the court too, despite not being his blood

·         If that’s okay with Tina and Mark of course

·         Which it totally is, they’re a family of royalty and this baby is going to be as much of a Prince/Princess as their Lia

·         The next nights that they are together, the boys are sure to keep Cristina between them protectively

·         They start wondering how and when to tell Lia

·         They know that she has expressed interest in having a little sibling, but there’s still that lingering fear that she could have changed her mind

·         So, about a week and a bit after they told Kieran, Cristina takes Lia out for the day

·         They have a girls’ night (which they often try to do, they also have daddies-daughter days where she is just with her dads and it’s wonderful)

·         (they also have times where it’s just one of them and Lia because they feel that although it’s fun to all be together, individual bonding with their daughter is super important too)

·         But anyway, today, Tina really wants to try and get that emphasis of how much she loves her Lia and wants to assure her that their girls’ nights will always be theirs, even if a baby comes along

·         So, nearing the end of their night out, the girls go and get some ice cream, and at the ice cream parlour, there’s a mother and a fairly young baby

·         Tina feels her heart flutter a little, just looking at the sweet mother and child

·         Lia looks from the baby and mother to her own mother and asks when she’ll get another baby

·         Wow, perfect timing, Cristina thought, but in the moment sort of dismisses it being like “that would be nice, huh?”

·         After the girls get their desserts, Cristina takes Lia to a table outside the parlour

·         She asks her what she thinks about having a little brother or sister

·         Lia goes on about how she really wants one someday because then she can have someone to play with

·         She also says that she would protect them no matter what, saying that she would make sure they are safe

·         Cristina feels like she might cry just a bit, like wowie Lia is so sweet and she is so excited to tell her

·         So, not long after Lia’s explained all the things she would do with her baby brother/sister, the girls have finished their desserts and Cristina tells Lia that she has something very important to tell her

·         Lia, knowing the gravity of the word “important” immediately puts on the most serious look, her little eyebrows furrowing together, her eyes regarding her mother’s with 100% focus

·         Cristina moves to be squatting down in front of Lia’s chair, matching her serious look, but smiling big as she says to Lia

·         “I’m glad that you are so excited for a little sibling,” she takes Lia’s hand, “because inside my tummy, there’s a little baby growing.”

·         Lia’s hair flairs up a light blue-green, a huge smile on her face.

·         She throws herself from the chair she’s in into a hug with her mom, squealing as she talks about how the baby should be born soon so that they can become best friends

·         Lia then backs down for a moment and pats her mom’s tummy

·         She goes up closer to it, and whispers “hi, baby, I’m gonna be your big sister!”

·         Cristina feels a little tear escape, the night only continues to get more sweet

·         Jump ahead a few weeks, Cristina’s now, like, 3 and a half months pregnant and is really showing a lot more than she had at this point with Lia

·         She isn’t too put off by it, but it does slightly concern her as at this point, she’s feeling more pregnancy symptoms sooner than last time, and a lot more aggressively

·         Like, she’s getting a lot more back pains and more pressure on her abdomen, and more morning sickness than she had when she was pregnant with Lia

·         Upon sharing these concerns with Kieran and Mark, they urge her to get it checked out

·         Since Silent City has had very limited access, she had to opt for calling up a warlock, and who better than one who doubles as a nurse?

·         Catarina Loss is summoned to a small apartment just outside the city of New York (where Cristina and Mark often stay when they aren’t in Faerie)

·         She does some tests with Tina and the baby is completely healthy, she explains to Cristina that it is very common to experience increased sensitivity during one’s second pregnancy, and that she and the baby will be fine

·         While she’s there, she can’t help but ask Catarina about the sex of the child

·         She’s adamant that it doesn’t matter to her, but she’s just curious and also Lia has been asking if she’s gonna have a baby brother or a baby sister and not being able to know really thins out the child’s patience

·         Catarina smiles and tells her that she’s having another girl

·         With bubbling excitement, Cristina can’t help but share a hug with Catarina before she’s off

·         That night, Cristina stays in the apartment, speaking quietly to her growing belly, telling her little girl how excited she is to know more and more about her

·         Despite only having travelled back to the mundane world that morning, she was advised to stay the evening as to be able to rest before making another trip to Faerie

·         She sends a fire message back to Kieran and Mark (who are both staying at the cottage with for daddies-daughter time) about how she’s found out the sex of the baby, but wishes to tell them in person

·         Doing this only makes them all more excited about their growing family

·         The next morning Cristina sets out to make her travel back to Faerie

·         When she arrives back, she walks the short distance from the edge of the forest to the cottage

·         It always startles her when she seed a flash of dark reddish-brown clad Fae whilst she walks through, even though she is well aware that the cottage is always surrounded by redcap guards

·         She is met with Lia running to the door once she opens it, her daughter smiling a big smile at her

·         Once they’re all inside, Tina goes on to explain that there’s nothing to raise any concern with the baby

·         Lia is quick to ask if she knows if she’s gonna have a baby brother or sister yet

·         Finally, Cristina looks up to Mark and Kieran with a smile and says: “we are going to have another girl”

·         Both Mark and Thalia actually jump up and down briefly with excitement (well, Thalia continues to jump around the room, her hair shifting to a bright green and to a pale blue as she bounces around with a huge grin on her face)

·         Kieran’s reaction was definitely more subtle, as he tends to be a bit less openly expressive

·         However, much like their daughter, his hair takes over him and it melts into a pale blue streaked through with light green

·         The quad celebrate with many hugs, and Thalia is determined that now she knows that she’s gonna have a sister, that she will be sure to let her play with all her favourite toys, and she will teach her how to be a Princess

·         Thalia lowkey loves getting dressed in her fancier clothing and making pretend court hearings with her stuffed animals, pretending to be a ruler of both Faerie and the Shadow World

·         It highkey makes all three of her parents cry just a little because it’s so Wholesome™

·         Hopping back a little to a thing I mentioned in my previous HC, we got some more stuff about the Wild Hunt

·         So ever since the Wild Hunt had been acquainted with the Princess of Unseelie and they all adore her, they’ve begun leaving her little tokens from their hunts on occasion

·         When they go on raids, and ravage the dead, they collect the finest of items, often bringing her gifts

·         Like, sometimes outside the cottage, there’s a random necklace, or a pretty ring and they all have a leaf tied to them with Thalia scratched into them

·         One time, there was a diadem that was left on the steps of the Mexico City Institute when Cristina and Lia were staying there

·         Again, it had a leaf strung to it, addressing it to the Princess of Unseelie

·         There was a day when the Lia and her parents were out for a walk in the fields of Faerie

·         They like taking walks as a family, but are always sure to stay in the safest parts of Faerie that they can be in, even though not everywhere is the safest when with a three year old Princess of a powerful court

·         The peaceful walk was interrupted by the horn of the Hunt, low and booming

·         Mark and Kieran panicked a little knowing that the horn was an announcement of their arrival, and usually a warning of imminent death or danger

·         Out of instinct, Mark puts an arm out to shield Cristina’s belly, and Kieran dashes ahead for Lia (who always is in their sight, but often likes to wander a few steps ahead of them)

·         Suddenly, hundreds of white blossoms fall from the sky all around them, Lia starts dancing around in the raining flowers, happily waving to the Hunt as they pass overhead

·         Kieran, Mark, and Cristina all smile at the flowers and their daughter dancing happily around

·         The event of it raining flowers spreads around Faerie quickly as it was quite the magnificent feat

·         Not everyone heard the Hunt’s horn, so stories are quick to form on the reason for the spurt of floral rain

·         Some say that the Princess of Unseelie has powers to summon the most beautiful rains

·         Some say it was a blessing to the Princess by the highest powers

·         And some know that it was the Wild Hunt, but not all know why they brought down flowers around the royal family

·         When word gets out to the Wild Hunt that Cristina is expecting another baby girl, there was a baby rattle delivered to the doorstep of the cottage

·         Instead of being addressed to Lia, it had an ivy vine tied around it, the leaves on the vine forming a message: for the next Princess of Unseelie

·         It felt too odd to take the possession of what was assumedly a deceased infant, but it was the thought that counts

·         Instead of giving the rattle to the baby, Kieran and Cristina decided that it would just be a decorative piece in the room that she would share with Lia

·         The Wild Hunt, despite being a group of fearsome warriors who ravage the dead, really do have some gentleness hidden within their brutal ways, and it always makes the family smile when there’s a new token left for them

·         Going ahead a few months, Tina’s about 8 months in, and she and Lia are out and about with Emma having a girls’ day (Lia loves her aunty Emma, and finds herself often following her more closely than her own mother when the three of them are out)

·         Mark is off with Julian, having a bros day, hanging out with Ty who is back on a break from Scholomance

·         Anyway, the girls are out walking along the beach, Lia stopping every now and again to collect shells and sea glass

·         Cristina and Emma reminisce on their early days of friendship, when they first met four years ago, how things have changed

·         Emma watches Lia with a wistfulness, wishing she could go back to when she was a young child, playing on the beaches with her parents, and Julian and his family

·         Of course, she says nothing, but Cristina sees the expression on her face, one that shows a longing and also a hopefulness

·         Being brought up during a war, having lost loved ones during it, both Emma and Cristina can only hope that Lia won’t have to suffer through a similar fate

·         Meanwhile, Mark and his brothers are catching up while simply enjoying each other’s company

·         Both Julian and Ty express their excitement about the new addition into their extended family, talking of how exciting it is to have a new baby

·         Of course they still consider Lia their family, but she is determined that she is “not a baby anymore” and is fully prepared to become a caregiver to her baby sister

·         Julian envies Lia in a way that he cannot fully explain to the others

·         He hopes and prays that she won’t have to ever be forced into having to become an actual caregiver to her baby sister

·         He knows that the new baby will be born into love and happiness, but he can’t help the looming memory of what it really means to be the primary caregiver to siblings when you yourself are but only a child

·         There are a lot of feelings shared during this visit, and when it’s finally time to go, Mark, Cristina and Lia bid their farewells and they all hang on to each other as they take the Eternidad out and head back home to the cottage 

·         When they arrive, they are inexplicably separated

·         Mark and Lia head in to the cottage after alerting a group of redcaps of what was happening

·         She was found not too long after a bit deeper in the forest, unwell

·         The travel and the shock of their immediate arrival must’ve set something off, and she had realised that she was going into labour

·         A healer was sent for, and a messenger was sent to Kieran to alert him of what was going on

·         Cristina is brought into the bedroom, the healer arrives shortly after and boots Mark from the room

·         When Kieran arrives nearly an hour later, he is lacking his usual composure

·         His hair was a mess, his eyes were frantic, he looked as though he had rolled through dirt on his way

·         Kieran asked Mark for updates, but Mark hadn’t much to tell him other than that things were going well, at least he believes they are

·         Lia was in her room, when she heard that her little sister was coming, she was set on making her and her sister’s room look pretty, so she went off to clean her room

·         It was usually a nightmare trying to have Lia clean her room, as she had always had it all to herself for the most part, and was very adamant that her toys didn’t like being put away

·         Anyway, back to the Panicked Dads™

·         He and Mark asked to be able to be able to see Cristina

·         The healer would not allow him or Mark in to see Cristina, believing that their panicky, anxious state could harm the delicate energy that was filling the bedroom

·         Kieran tried to be all “I’m the King here, let me in” but the healer just straight up shuts the door in his face

·         After several hours of long, excruciating labour, Cristina was relieved to hear her baby crying, knowing it was a sign of her good health

·         Finally, her boys are allowed to come in, and Mark’s eyes immediately well with tears

·         He looks down at their new daughter, marvelling at her pale skin, dark brown tufts of hair, and plump cheeks

·         She’s so adorable and everyone is all around quaking

·         Mark and Kieran are asking Cristina how it was, if she’s doing all right, if she needs anything

·         Cristina is beyond exhausted, she has the baby resting in her arms, but asks if either of them would like to hold her

·         Both of them put their arms out, but it’s Kieran who ends up holding her first

·         Mark stands beside him, running the back of his hand ever so lightly along her cheek when she reaches a hand up to grab his finger

·         He cries again

·         The fathers move to sit on the edge of the bed, Cristina is resting but still facing them

·         She watches the beauty in their expressions as they marvel at the newest addition to the family, smiling as Mark’s arm goes to cradle under Kieran’s

·         The pair of them hold her, and as if she knew what was happening, Lia peeks her head into the room

·         She hops up on the bed and looks at her baby sister and smiles big, leaning over to kiss her on her cheek

·         Lia crawls over to her mother and cuddles up to her, thanking her for giving her a sister

·         Cristina pulls her eldest daughter in for a hug, telling her that she knows that she will be an excellent big sister

·         The question that hangs in the air is finally asked by Lia, who gets up from her mother, and moves over to sit beside her dads and new sister

·         “What’s her name?” she asks, peering over at her

·         Kieran, Mark, and Cristina had talked endlessly about names before coming to their conclusion

·         Her name is Kalliope (keeping with the theme of Greek Mythology based names that I just, ugh, I love them)

·         (also, idk if I mentioned it before, but Thalia was one of the Greek Muses, and so was Kalliope, and that was unintentional on my part, I just love those names)

·         Then, again as with Thalia, even though a “faerie name” wouldn’t hold any power over her, they gave her one, it’s Nereida which is the Spanish version of Nerissa, so we paying homage to Mark’s birth mother and also I just really like the name, oops

·         Anyway, Lia looks over at her baby sister, and she smiles at her

·         “Hi, Kalli, I’m your big sister,” she beams

·         The parents all share an adoring look, loving the nickname that’s already spouted, and just adoring their baby girls being so Wholesome™

·         Before long, Kalli starts opening her eyes

·         The parents are still too busy marvelling at Lia interacting with Kalli, so they didn’t notice until Lia pipes up with:

·         “Look, papa,” Lia point to Kalli, “she has eyes like one of yours!”

·         Sure enough, little Kalli is looking around at her family with Blackthorn blue-green eyes

[allspark]

It’s time for our weekly Diamond Comics Shipping List! Check out some great titles IDW has in store for us next week like Transformers, My Little Pony, Spider-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and more! All coming your way for May 29th!

TRANSFORMERS #6

Brian Ruckley (A/CVR B) Bethany McGuire-Smith (CVR A) Jack Lawrence

All your favorite Transformers characters as you’ve never seen them before! Optimus takes the spotlight! Even a bot as wise as a leader of the Autobots needs guidance now and again, so Optimus turns to Codexa-a Cybertronian who has grown into the very planet itself. Will she help Optimus settle his problems with Megatron or will she lead them both to ruin? Transformers-now shipping twice monthly!

AMBER BLAKE #3

Jade Lagardère (A/CVR) Butch Guice

Amber Blake is a woman on a mission. She’s going to destroy everyone who has hurt the people she loves. But not all is as it seems, and some of her allies have agendas of their own…

BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES ROGUES GALLERY

Sen-Foong Lim, Jessey Wright (A) Chris Fenoglio, Jack Lawrence, More (CVR) TableTaffy

Defeat the Batman to rule the city! Gotham City’s coffers are ripe for the robbing, but one thing stands in the way of the city’s supervillains-the reviled Batman. It’s time someone finally took out that nuisance! Choose your favorite villain, then go on crime sprees, steal powerful upgrades, recruit nefarious accomplices, and race to complete your master plan and be the first to defeat the World’s Greatest Detective!

3-5 players o Playable from ages 12+ o 30-45 minutes

•   Roll dice to go on crime sprees, collecting cash and avoiding capture. •   Purchase various gear and accomplice cards on the black market. •   Push your luck at the right moment to attract and defeat Batman.

DICK TRACY FOREVER #2

Michael Avon Oeming (A/CVR A) Michael Avon Oeming

Dick Tracy is Sisyphus, pushing the law boulder up the hill as he struggles for reason and order in a world with none. His attempts at law and order are met with crime and chaos, in the form of unpredictable and absurd villains. But Dick Tracy will never give up trying, no matter the era or incarnation. Join Eisner Award-winning creator Michael Avon Oeming on a startling case through time and space! Each issue has an exciting new take on one of the most iconic comic-strip heroes of all time!

FOUR SISTERS, VOL 02: HORTENSE

Cati Baur, Malika Ferdjoukh (A/CVR) Cati Baur

Second book in the series! Since the deaths of their parents, Hortense and her sisters have been on their own. Winter arrives, and, as the world is buried in snow, eleven-year-old Hortense buries her life in books. She wonders what she will become: a character in her favorite show? A surgeon of incurable diseases so she can save her new friend Muguette? Or world famous actress? But to go onstage, Hortense would have to overcome her shyness, which seems unlikely for a girl who’d rather write in her diary than express her feelings out loud. It’s in her diary where she exposes her innermost thoughts and shares the ups and downs of her life as a girl and a sister.

JUDGE DREDD TOXIC TP

Paul Jenkins (A) Marco Castiello (CVR) Mark Buckingham

Advance solicited for June release! Dredd’s investigation into the death of a seemingly unremarkable sewage worker spirals into a waste management crisis that could destroy all of Mega-City One, which has long used genetic modification on its waste workers to control the deluge of filth that flows under the city each days. When Dredd discovers that some of them have foregone that disfiguring procedure in favor of hosting protective alien symbiotes, it sparks a groundswell of anti-immigration fervor. Soon the toxic atmosphere spills into the streets, undermining the very infrastructure that makes the city tolerable. Can Dredd find a solution to save the now-indispensable aliens from the angry mobs? A perfect mix of satire and social commentary!

LIFE ON THE MOON HC

Robert Grossman (A/CVR) Robert Grossman

From an artist who reveled in illustrating “the un-illustratable,” a historical graphic novel based on the “Great Moon Hoax,” the most successful newspaper hoax ever. In 1835, New York newspaper The Sun published a series of six articles declaring the discovery of life-and even civilization–on the Moon, which the paper attributed to the famous contemporary astronomer Sir John Herschel. According to The Sun, the lunar inhabitants included unicorns, bison, bipedal tail-less beavers, and intelligent humanoids with bat-like wings.

Life on the Moon is a full-length graphic novel capturing this mythical world. Creator Robert Grossman said the book is set in a time when “many of the signal achievements of the 19th Century still lay well in the future, Andrew Jackson was president, the steamboat was the summit of technology, and news traveled slowly.” The unfettered novel includes real historical figures such as P.T. Barnum, Jean Jacques Audubon, Lorenzo Da Ponte, Charles Goodyear, and Edgar Allan Poe.

MARVEL ACTION CLASSICS SPIDER-MAN TWO IN ONE #1

Marc Sumerak, Peter David (A) David Nakayama, Mike Norton (CVR A) Patrick Scherberger

Two classic Spider-Man tales, pulled from the legendary Vault of Heroes! First-a chance encounter with the Enchantress pits Spidey against Thor-with the whole of Asgard right behind! Then, when Flash Thompson gets a bite from a werewolf, Spidey seeks the aid of the sorcerer supreme-Doctor Strange!

MEN IN BLACK UNDERCOVER

Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim (A) Dan Schoening

Aliens exist! In Men In Black: Undercover, you’ll join one of three groups: the Men In Black, who work to hide aliens, the Shadow Government, who seek to capture and weaponize aliens, and the Conspiracy Theorists, who try to expose alien life. Join a side and influence the aliens to join your cause, but don’t reveal your true intentions-you’ll need to stay Undercover to win!

3-6 players o Playable from ages 12+ o 30 minutes

•   Recruit various aliens to your faction’s cause by playing influence cards. •   Target unique aliens to gain advantages over other players in your own faction. •   Uncover your opponents’ faction affiliations while hiding your own.

MY LITTLE PONY NIGHTMARE KNIGHTS TP

Jeremy Whitley (A/CVR) Tony Fleecs

Equestria’s in danger! Powerless and threatened by a great evil, Princess Luna discovers she can’t count on her sister or any of the usual heroes of Equestria. Running out of time and with nowhere to turn, Luna assembles a team specially suited to save the day… made up of former villains! Will Luna, Capper, Tempest Shadow, Trixie, and Stygian all be able to work together and find a way into the most dangerous place any of them have ever been? Can Princess Luna and a team of reformed villains save the day?

MY LITTLE PONY SPIRIT OF THE FOREST #1

Ted Anderson (A/CVR A) Brenda Hickey (CVR B) Tony Fleecs

The Cutie Mark Crusaders are back! When Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle take a trip into the woods, they find a forest filled with trash! Just what could be causing this mess?! Looks like it’s another mystery for our favorite fillies to solve-and one where not everything is as it seems…

The Cutie Mark Crusaders return in this brand-new mini-series!

PUNKS NOT DEAD LONDON CALLING #4

David Barnett (A/CVR) Martin Simmonds

Butch and Sundance! Bonnie and Clyde! Laurel and Hardy! History is littered with great double acts, but the ultimate boy-meets-ghost odd couple is no more as Fergie and Sid go their separate ways. While Sid heads off to look up old mates, Fergie finally meets his dad in LONDON CALLING: “To the Imitation Zone.”

STAR TREK TNG HC MISSIONS CONTINUE

Brannon Braga, Scott Tipton, More (A) David Messina, Gordon Purcell, More (CVR) Joe Corroney

Follow the intergalactic adventures of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D as they explore new worlds. Collects The Space Between, Intelligence Gathering, Last Generation, Ghosts, and Hive.

Collects five complete graphic novels into one oversized hardcover edition.

STAR TREK YEAR FIVE #2

Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly (A/CVR A) Stephen Thompson

As the last year of their original mission begins, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise will have to use all of the skills they’ve acquired along the way as they prepare to face the biggest challenge of their lives-a dark threat that doesn’t just threaten their existence, but the existence of the entire Federation as well…

TMNT ONGOING #94

Tom Waltz, Kevin Eastman (A/CVR A) Dave Wachter (CVR B) Kevin Eastman

“City at War, Part 2.” As battle lines are drawn in the criminal underworld of New York City, Old Hob takes his mission to the next level, and he’ll have unexpected help from one of the TMNT!

TMNT URBAN LEGENDS #13

Gary Carlson (A/CVR A&B) Frank Fosco (CVR B) Erik Larsen

The entire TMNT Volume 3 run-all 23 issues-reprinted in full color for the first time! Culminating in 3 brand new issues to close out the series! The search for Deathwatch continues! The infamous killer’s trail leads Leo, Mikey, and a robotic Donatello to Sheldon, Arkansas, where they find themselves face-to-face with more murderous mayhem. Meanwhile, Raph, back home in New York, makes a chilling discover during his duel with the mob. Could it be… Shredder’s inner sanctum?!

UNCLE SCROOGE #45

Francesco Artibani (A) Alessandro Perina (CVR A) Marco Gervasio

When one of Gyro Gearloose’s inventions allows Donald Duck to “hear” what his plants are saying, Uncle Scrooge gets one of his biggest money-fueled ideas ever. But in true Scrooge fashion, the road to riches is anything but smooth-in fact, it’s downright magical! Find out how in “The Captain’s Sequoia!”

  Join the IDW Hasbro Shared Universe related conversation here in our Comics Discussion and Reviews section and here for all other franchises, superheroes, or general comic book discussions! Not a member? Join our community by creating your own free account here! Or jump right into the live chat on our Discord server or our Facebook Group!

IDW Comics Shipping List for May 29th! It’s time for our weekly Diamond Comics Shipping List! Check out some great titles IDW has in store for us next week like…

[mattkennard]

Haiti: Creating a Modern Day Slave State

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

I was standing open-mouthed outside the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince 18 months after the earthquake had devastated the city when a man approached selling his paintings. “What do you think of that?” he said, pointing to the collapsed palace behind us. I told him the truth: I was finding it hard to come to terms with the completeness of the destruction. The man, who later told me his name was Charles Renodin, smiled slightly. “Tell the world how we are living,” he requested. “Let them know.” He paused and added, “I live in the camp there,” pointing across the road, where opposite the crumbling presidential palace a vast expanse of tents – emblazoned with the logos of the US, China, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, all competing shamelessly for brand recognition – spread out as far as the eye could see. “After the earthquake I lost my mum, my dad, one daughter, so I had to move to this camp. I don’t like it, it’s full of corruption, it’s run by gangs, and the little girls have to sell their bodies to eat,” he told me. “Little girls,” he added for emphasis. “Maybe eight or nine years old, getting raped every day. The police don’t do anything about it, the country has no law.” He told me that the Haitian people refer to the palace behind us, which should be a point of pride, as the “Devil’s House”. “It’s full of so much corruption, they don’t care about the people, they just want to make money, when the money comes they take it for themselves.” He was waiting on a house now so he could leave the camp, but he didn’t think it would happen any time soon: “The government has no plan.” In the camps, it was particularly bad news for women: “Because there is no work, women have to sell their bodies just to eat, the only job they have is to have sex for money. Men have to steal stuff – they have no choice.”

Like most in Haiti, Charles had an ambiguous feeling toward the thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in his country. “Some come to help, some come to make money, they like us living like this because they make more money.” It is easy to dismiss such sentiments, but the global “rescue” industry really is big business. There is often a direct and positive correlation between American influence over smaller countries and the crises they experience. “After the earthquake they would give us food, water, but now everything has stopped. If you go inside this camp you don’t see water, people have to walk six miles to get water. That’s why crime is up.” He became more agitated. “Everything is crazy right now, we’re living just like animals. There is no everyday life, nobody has a job.” Haiti has arguably had more US intervention in the last hundred years than any other country in the world – that it ended like this is not wholly accidental. As Doctor Maigot poignantly says to Mrs Smith, an American, in Graham Greene’s The Comedians: “In the Western hemisphere, in Haiti and elsewhere, we live under the shadow of your great and prosperous country. Much patience and courage is needed to keep one’s head.”

The following day, I was driving down a long, dusty and typically bumpy road in the middle of Port-au-Prince when I came across some imposing metal gates. Behind them stood the E-Power electricity plant. The site was unlike the rest of the city, which lay in complete ruin, even a year and a half after the earthquake: it had burnished sheet-steel doors and perfectly tarmacked roads. I was on assignment with the Financial Times and being escorted in a 4x4 by the World Bank, which had its own particular kind of tour that seemed to ignore the massive tent cities whizzing past our windows. Here was the optimistic vision, they told me. In a capital city where electricity blackouts were a nightly occurrence, E-Power was the kind of company the international financial institutions (IFIs) running Haiti believed would lead “reform” – by taking power away from the state-run company, and running the business for profit. My World Bank guide was adamant that this was the way out of Haiti’s tragic past and present. I soon found out the company was founded in 2004 by a group of Haitian venture capitalists excited by the departure of social democratic President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The aim, they said, was to “offer a solution to power generation in Haiti”. Sure enough, some years later, in 2006, the new US-backed President René Préval launched an open bid for a contract to provide electricity to Port-au-Prince. Seven companies took part. E-Power won.

For many in the Haitian business elite, such economic liberalization was to be the model for the new Haiti being built after the devastating 2010 earthquake. “The earthquake created trauma that could have been better exploited,” Pierre-Marie Boisson, board director at E-Power, told me as we sat in the upmarket air-conditioned offices at the plant. “Because of the political process that took place after that, it took too much time.” He added: “Earthquakes should be an opportunity because it destroyed. Where it is destroyed, we have to build. When we have to build we can create jobs, we can create a lot of changes, we can change a country.”

However, Mr Boisson’s cynicism about the slow rate of “exploitation” of the “opportunities” provided by the earthquake was not quite accurate. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the opportunity afforded by the destruction wreaked on Haiti was capitalized on immediately. As the dust was still settling in Port-au-Prince, the World Bank, the IMF and their regional analogues, alongside various US agencies – what became the de facto government in the absence of a Haitian alternative – carved up the society’s different sectors and doled them out among themselves. The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) got education and water, the World Bank bagged energy, while the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – a body that will be examined later in this book – gratefully accepted the planned new industrial parks. Alexandre Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, told me how it worked: “We basically have agreed that where we have each of us the competitive advantage, we then divide … the sectors among ourselves, and add in some sectors which go together.”

The mass privatization of state-run assets and the turning of Haiti into a Caribbean sweatshop – via an export-led garment production and cheap labor model that the US and the IFIs had been pushing from the mid-1990s through the 2000s – were now distinct possibilities. This could be enforced with minimal push back from a decimated civil society and a denuded government. All the extra-Haitian bodies, particularly the US government, shared this vision. “There is a lot of agreement, so I would say one of the unusual and very positive aspects about this project is that it is really done in partnership,” Jean-Louis Warnholz, a State Department official working on Haiti, told me when I was back in New York. (Mr Warnholz asked not to be named, but Haitians deserve to know the officials who are designing their destruction.) Haiti was to be the next Top Model on the World Bank and IMF catwalk. The “partnership” (in which the Haitian people had no part) believed that rebuilding the capabilities of the Haitian state should play no role in its reconstruction. Instead, the solution to Haiti’s problems lay in the creation of a flourishing private sector. “What’s really going to change Haiti and make this process different from all the previous ones is the development of the private sector, and I think there’s a consensus in that,” Agustín Aguerre, the Haiti manager for the IADB, told me. The bank disbursed $177 million in grant money in 2010 – more than any other multilateral source – to push this agenda. “Private sector is the big difference, it’s what will be creating wealth, creating jobs, not the public sector,” he added. It seemed there was no alternative.

After the election of President Michel Martelly in May 2011, things remained easy for this private-sector-led “consensus”: the IFIs and US not only had their Shock Event, but also their Shock President. Aristide, who was president in 1991, 1993–94, 1994–96 and 2001–04, continues to be the most popular politician in Haiti, but is banned from standing again for the presidency. In Martelly, the US government had found its “Chicago Boy”, a more-than-willing partner for their economic program (“Chicago Boys” is a term which refers to the University of Chicago economists who helped dictators impose neoliberal capitalism in its early stages). All the major business groupings and IFIs I spoke to in Port-au-Prince were effusive in their support for the president. Carl-Auguste Boisson, general manager at E-Power, told me: “I am pleased by what I heard Martelly saying about the importance of private investment, especially when he was campaigning he was talking about things like providing private provision of public services.” Kenneth Merten, the then US ambassador to Haiti, was similarly excited about the new president’s privatization agenda. “A few privatizations of flourmills, but aside from that you haven’t had much of anything in past decades,” he told me. “That’s the element that’s been lacking here, you need a government that understand investment and I think Martelly and his folks do.” For the US, a pliable figure like Martelly had been a long time coming. Despite many decades of effort, Haiti had not completely succumbed to the plans that its major patron had for it. And such recalcitrance had been causing increasing consternation in Washington.

History’s long shadow

In 1990, after the first democratic elections in Haiti’s 200-year history, the US became hopeful of breaking up the corrupt state institutions which had been run as the personal fiefdoms of Papa and Baby Doc, the US-backed Duvalier dictators who had ruled Haiti viciously for nearly 40 years. Private capital would then be able to penetrate deeper into the country, and an economic model conducive to the interests of the rich countries could take firm root. But it wasn’t going to plan. Instead of the US-orientated “reformer” many in Washington had hoped for, a huge mass movement, named Lavalas (“the flood”), propelled the social democrat priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide to a landslide victory. Over the next 20 years, the democratically elected Aristide would be ousted twice with US support, while the democratic hopes and dreams of Haiti’s people would be quashed time and again. Aristide had become a nuisance in the eyes of Washington and so when he was put back in power in 2001 it was under the tacit agreement that he would allow the World Bank, the IMF and the US to institute their plan. It had been 11 years since the democratic elections, and still economic “reform” was slow. Something had to change: democracy was fine, but it had to be of use.

In this period, René Préval, a former ally of Aristide who served as president from 2006 to 2011, seemed to offer some hope for the Americans. “In the context of the developing world, we would most accurately describe him as a neo-liberal, particularly in that he has embraced free markets and foreign investment,” notes one of the US embassy’s diplomatic cables, released by WikiLeaks, sent from Port-au-Prince in 2007. But the leader the US was really after in that period looked more like Haitian-American businessman Dumas Siméus. A resident of Texas, he assured the US embassy, according to a diplomatic cable sent in 2005, “he would manage Haiti like a business”. The same cable added: “Displaying abundant charm and energy, the 65-year-old said he had decided to run for President not only for Haiti’s benefit, but also as a gesture of thanks to the United States.” He was very clear about how he would do this: “The University of Chicago alum pledged to bring the ‘Chicago Boys’ to Haiti and establish a road map for change, promising investors would return.” It was exactly what the US embassy wanted to hear; Siméus was the candidate they had been searching for. The cable concluded by noting that the millionaire Texan was a “potentially viable candidate” who could, unlike Aristide, “govern responsibly and maybe effectively” – code in this case for “in the US interest”. The US deemed Martelly similarly “responsible”.

But in many ways, US exasperation at the apparent reluctance of Haiti’s leaders to sell off their country’s assets and create an economic playground for foreign capital remains hard to understand. From the mid-1990s through the 2000s, the “Chicago Boys” had to all intents and purposes come to Haiti; the process of opening up Haiti’s economy to the predations of foreign capital was well under way. The fetish of foreign investment was firmly rooted. In 1996 for example, the Haitian government had already, as one diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks noted, “established legislation on the modernization of public enterprises, which allows foreign investors to participate in the management and/or ownership of state-owned enterprises.” Moreover, a November 2002 law explicitly acknowledged the “crucial role of foreign investment in assuring economic growth and aims to facilitate, liberalize, and stimulate private investment in Haiti”. The law gave foreign investors exactly the same rights and protections as Haitians. Months earlier in 2002, the Haitian parliament had voted for a new free trade zone law which provided “zones” with fiscal and customs incentives for foreign enterprises – for example, a 15-year tax exemption. In other words, post-Aristide, the government had “seen the light” and embraced the US-led vision for the post-dictatorship Haiti.

But these steps, it seems, were not enough. Only a “Chicago Boy” would do. Another WikiLeaks cable noted that in 1996 a “modernization commission” was set up to decide whether management contracts, long-term leases or capitalization was the best option for each of the companies to be privatized. The commission would also decide how much the Haitian government would retain of each asset, with a cap at 49 percent – a minority stake, stripping the Haitian people of control over their own industries.

This had an immediate effect. In 1998, two US companies, Seaboard and Continental Grain, purchased 70 percent of the state-owned flourmill. Despite this “progress”, a diplomatic cable from 2005 lamented, “Some investments, however, still require government authorization,” adding, “Investments in electricity, water and telecommunications require both government concession and approval. Additionally, investments in the public health sector must first receive authorization from the Ministry of Public Health and Population.” It sounded like a reasonable demand from a sovereign country, but a sovereign country is exactly what the US didn’t want Haiti to be. Two years after Aristide had been spirited out of the country by the Bush administration and the local oligarchs, and just before the victory of the “neoliberal” Préval in 2006, the US embassy noted witheringly: “Since the privatization of the cement factory, privatization has stalled and appears to have been put on hold.” It added plaintively: “None of the major infrastructure-related enterprises (the airport, seaport, telephone company or electric company) have been privatized.” The document continued: “Although these entities were supposed to have been privatized by 2002, persistent political crises, strong opposition from the former administration, and a general lack of political will have delayed the process indefinitely.” The cable then noted a more plausible reason why this massive privatization program had not been enacted quite as smoothly as the US had hoped: ”Some opposition to the privatization of state enterprises continues from groups such as employee’s unions who have expressed opposition to workforce reductions that privatization might entail.” Those pesky Haitians.

By 2008, then, the US embassy was disconsolate at the slow rate of progress and local intransigence. “Despite assurances that privatization is still a priority for the government … we are increasingly skeptical that privatization, in whatever form, will happen,” one cable noted. “Time is running out.” The US, however, remained steadfast. “We will continue to advocate strongly on behalf of privatization and/or private management,” one cable noted. It further advocated using IFIs such as the World Bank and the IMF to bribe the democratic government of Haiti, one of the staples of the “structural adjustment programs” explored later, although it is rare to see it spelled out in such clear language. “[The US embassy] repeats its recommendation … that privatization be a requirement under future agreements with the IFIs … to be negotiated with the new government,” the cable to Washington noted.

The shock

Bribery might prove an effective strategy toward the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but it would still be messy. There was after all a Haitian parliament, populated with nationalist elements, which could continue to stall or even kill the massive privatization program the US favored. But as the US was honing its strategy for its latest push, on January 12, 2010 a huge earthquake hit Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises in the history of the world. More than 300,000 people were killed, while millions became homeless. The capital city lay in ruins, including the majority of government ministries as well as the presidential palace. What was left of an already strangled civil society and social institutions was destroyed. Haiti was a blank slate.

The US and its allies in the IMF and World Bank did not waste any time – this was their opportunity to push through the radical neoliberal program from the 1990s with little resistance. The opposition to this privatization program – which had ranged from quasi-nationalist politicians to worker-based collectives – had all but disappeared. Without a government in place to agree or disagree with the US and the IFIs, which were soon running the country, Haiti was ready for the “shock doctrine” – the radical economic prescriptions enforced throughout the world and outlined in Naomi Klein’s eponymous book. Klein’s argument was that these policies were so unpopular among the populations of the target countries that the agents of big capital, such the IMF and World Bank, would wait until there was a crisis “real or perceived”, when people could not organize resistance, to push the reforms through. This is what happened in Haiti.

The first step was to entrench a decision-making system that took all power out of the hands of accountable democratic institutions run by Haitians. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which became the country’s most powerful decision-making body in the aftermath of the earthquake, was the perfect example of this move. The IHRC was set up ostensibly to coordinate the response and spend donor money in the absence of a Haitian government. It had 26 members, 12 of whom were Haitian, leaving them without a voting majority (just as they were not allowed a majority stake in their industries). To those Haitian members, it was obvious they were window-dressing. In a December 2010 letter of protest to the IHRC chair, former US president Bill Clinton, they complained of being “completely disconnected from the activities of the IHRC”, as well as having “time neither to read, nor analyze, nor understand – and much less respond intelligently – to projects submitted”. According to one journalist based in Port-au-Prince: “These twelve board members surmised that their only function is to rubber-stamp, as Haitian-approved, decisions already made by the executive committee.”

That was exactly the perception that the US and the IFIs were trying to avoid. When officials from the US and international agencies in Haiti were interviewed they were at pains to explain how they were “working for the Haitians” and the phrase of the day was “Haitian-led”. It was the same all over the world – the US and its agencies were adept at making their domination be seen as demanded by the victim. In truth, there was, and continued to be, minimal Haitian involvement in the reconstruction (outside the business elite). An article in the Washington Post put it bluntly in January 2011: “There is a dramatic power imbalance between the international community – under US leadership – and Haiti. The former monopolizes economic and political power and calls all the shots.” The financial benefits to the American private sector of this set-up were immediately obvious. An Associated Press investigation found that of every $100 of Haiti reconstruction contracts awarded by the American government, $98.40 returned to American companies. The focus was never on building up indigenous capacity; any work was to be outsourced to foreign companies or NGOs by the IHRC. It was about making money for rich Americans. After Michel Martelly was sworn in as president in May 2011, it took months for the former pop star and former member of the savage Tonton Macoute militia (formed by the US-backed dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier) to form a government, as his candidates for cabinet positions were repeatedly rejected by parliament. By the time his administration was in place in June 2011, 18 months after the earthquake, the coordinates of the economic reconstruction were already in place. Martelly’s hands were tied by the very IFIs which claimed to be subordinate to the Haitians. Though in Martelly’s case his hands didn’t even need to be tied – he was a willing “shock president”.

There were three elements that the US and IFIs wanted to build the “new Haiti” around: high-end tourism; export-processing zones; and a resurgent private sector in control of the previously state-owned assets. It was the racket’s standard playbook. The architects of the reconstruction actually had other countries in mind that they believed could serve as a model. One was the Dominican Republic, the country next door to Haiti, which had long been an oasis for private capital in the Caribbean. In Haiti, using the model of its Hispaniola neighbor, the IADB planned to spend $22 million on a high-end tourism resort near the 19th-century citadel at Labadee, a port on Haiti’s northern coast. Mr Almeida, Haiti manager for the IADB, told me the bank’s money would “provide the means for the private sector to come and invest”, adding that “in [the Dominican Republic] everything they have is all private. The airport is private, the roads are private, even the internal roads. So we could do the same thing [in Haiti].” (In the initial carve-up of Haitian society, the IADB was given road infrastructure.)

The other opportunity that had to be taken advantage of was speeding up the privatization process. The World Bank used the example of Teleco, formerly the national telecom operator, which in 2009 the bank’s private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), had helped partially privatize. (The IFC was, incidentally, the brainchild of Nelson Rockefeller in 1951.) Mr Naim, the private-sector Haiti manager for the World Bank, told me that Teleco was an example of what the government should do to the ports and the airport. “[They can] really transform these assets that generally the government handles poorly,” he said, adding that “It’s better for the government to focus on social things” and let these assets be privatized. Teleco itself is now due for complete privatization under the guidance of the IFC. For the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it is hard – possibly even suicidal – to argue with the World Bank. In March 2010, the bank promised $479 million in grants; the IFC put $49 million-worth of direct investment into Haiti’s private sector.

With Teleco on its way to privatization, the IADB had its own plans for the national water and sanitation authority (Dinepa), which had come under its domain in the initial carve-up. The bank soon handed over the authority’s management duties to the giant Spanish company Aguas de Barcelona, which won a three-year contract to train and assist workers, and for which they received millions of dollars. “Many local companies are taking control of small towns’ water systems,” Mr Aguerre of the IADB told me excitedly. This essential commodity and basic human right was now being turned into a for-profit venture. “We are seeing good examples of places where no one paid for water services, and little by little they are paying,” he added. Experts from Aguas de Barcelona became the leaders of discussions concerning the investment needed in Haiti’s water system and the process of opening bids to different contractors for the completion of new pipelines and other systemic improvements.

In education, the IADB’s plans were no different. Thanks to decades of neoliberal policies that prioritized the private sector above the Haitian ministries, even before the earthquake 80 percent of educational services were delivered outside the state (primarily by international bodies or the private sector). As a result, only half of school-aged children in Haiti went to school. For the IADB, this did not prove the folly of their enterprise. Contrariwise, they concluded that it meant they had not gone far enough. “It’s too ambitious to think you can turn it around,” Mr Aguerre said. The IADB settled on a voucher program that will allow the government to retain some “quality control”, but means that education will be completely privately run. To ensure full access, the plan creates a publicly funded but privately run education system. The small print is that this public subsidy will cost the Haitian government about $700 million a year, seven times what it spends now on education. With no new revenue streams evident (in fact, as we shall see, the government’s tax base was being all but destroyed), the obvious implication was that full access was not an aim (or even a hope). When the IADB’s promised $500 million over three years runs dry, more than half of Haiti’s children will still be locked out of the school system. The IADB rationalized this arrangement by arguing that the private sector would pick up the slack – explicitly holding Haiti’s kids ransom to Hollywood film stars. “There are many private actors willing to put money in,” added Mr Aguerre. “Half of Hollywood is interested. Everyone wants their Susan Sarandon School of Arts.” Incidentally, Martelly has been approving of both vouchers and subsidizing private schools as methods to rebuild the Haitian education system.

With the complete privatization of telecoms, water and education, the final piece in the jigsaw for the IFIs and the US became the new “industrial parks” or “integrated economic zones”. These, so the propaganda went, would ensure the economic growth that could put Haiti and its people back on their feet. But two years after the quake, more than 500,000 Haitians still lived in ad hoc camps around Port-au-Prince and 8 million still lived without electricity. The throngs of jobless who lined the capital’s streets are a reminder of the 70 percent unemployment rate. “We need to be realistic and understand that it’s still five years after Katrina and New Orleans is still being rebuilt, it’s 10 years after September 11th and that site isn’t rebuilt complete, the process takes time,” Kenneth Merten, then US ambassador to Haiti, told me, adding, “One of the things Haitians can really do themselves is to move quickly on making a business-friendly climate.”

It might perhaps be hard for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in ad hoc campsites to do that. In Haiti, I went to the La Piste camp, a barren enclosure with rows of one-bedroom “houses” on steeples. The owner of one, a middle-aged woman, spoke to me slowly via an interpreter. She was a single mother with three children with no means of income. She was living off money the Red Cross had given her, alongside selling some trinkets, although customers are few and far between. “It’s much better here than the last camp,” she told me. In the last place she and her children lived, like most others, in a tent, which meant they were subject to the rain and animals who decided to look in. “This is a house, it’s safer,” she said, but added that the fence of the camp should be higher, or be turned into a security fence because of the burglaries. She also said the lack of lighting puts them in danger: it is pitch black at night and easy for people to break in. You realize walking around La Piste that these people are completely at the mercy of nature – be that the elements, or their fellow man or woman. There is no security, there is no rule of law, and there is no place to go with grievances; there is merely the hope that someone is looking out for you. Hope cannot thrive in such an environment. “I would like to have hope,” she told me, her face blank, refusing any emotion at all. “I just don’t know who is going to make anything happen.” It seemed rude to ask how she planned to make a business-friendly climate for foreign investors in Haiti.

Therapy

The 30-minute drive to Codevi industrial park from the airport in northern Haiti is the smoothest in the country. In a place famed for its poor infrastructure, particularly its undulating roads, the park and the surrounding area are something of an oasis. Beyond the small bridge and metal gates which divide Codevi from the town outside, there’s everything that the average Haitian doesn’t have: paved roads, a functioning health service, employment and even a (small) trade union – the only one in the country. The 2 million square foot Codevi Park was originally built by a Dominican textile company, Grupo M, on the Dominican side of the border, but operations were expanded to Haiti in 2003 (with the help of a large investment by the World Bank).

“It was created as a vision of expansion that Grupo M had to look for as the Dominican Republic became more complicated competitiveness-wise,” Joseph Blumberg, vice-president of sales for the company, told me as we sat in his air-conditioned office inside the park. “Haiti offered us the competitive edge that we needed in this region to maintain ourselves with the US market.” He added: “It had a labor cost which was the lowest in the region.” The minimum wage in Haiti now is 150 gourdes ($3.70) per day, which is nearly half that in the Dominican Republic. This “competitive edge” – in a layperson’s terms “slave wages” – combined with favorable trading terms with the US had caught the eye of the IFIs in the aftermath of the earthquake. The aim was to rebuild Haiti as a Caribbean sweatshop that could enjoy the full fruits of the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity for Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act, which was passed by the US Congress in 2006, granting tariff-free access for Haitian textile exporters to the US market. This was followed by increasingly favorable terms through HOPE II, in 2008, and the Help Act after the 2010 earthquake.

Parks like that at Codevi are known in the IFIs’ literature as integrated economic zones (IEZs): places where infrastructure, welfare services and other services are provided for the lucky few behind imposing metal gates. The literature justifying their existence argues that prospective foreign investors put off by the decrepit or non-existent roads, electricity-grid and water system throughout Haiti would here have access to a ready-made mini-city. There was already a huge industrial park of this kind near the airport in Port-au-Prince called Sonapi, which is fully owned by the Haitian government and had, at one point, nearly 40 companies based there. But the new IEZs would be under the sole control of its initial investors – mainly USAID and the IADB. This raises the question of what will happen outside these so-called “poles” of economic activity. What would the incentive be for the central government to develop infrastructure and social services throughout the country if they are being built on this micro-scale? And where would the money come from? Alexandre Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, admits this is a problem; he told me that industrial parks “may not be sustainable if you were to do it as a policy everywhere”.

Codevi is essentially an “export-processing zone” (increasingly common in the “developing” world) where exports pay no tax to the central government and there is no customs duty on imported materials. “You’re in an extra-territorial concept so that your goods come in and out very quickly without much paperwork,” said Armando Heilbron, a senior private-sector development specialist at the World Bank working on the IEZs in Haiti. Therefore, Haiti’s reconstruction will take place in isolated small “poles”, primarily in the northern part of the country, while the rest of the country’s infrastructure and welfare services will fall further into disrepair.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the industrial parks is the unscrupulous nature of the companies that populate them. The public relations tour of Codevi, with its stops at the local doctor and training facilities, is a relief after experiencing the destruction that has been wrought in the rest of the country. But the tour does not include many of the most important episodes in its establishment. Codevi was originally built on farmers’ land against their will – a process that destroyed the region’s agricultural infrastructure to create sweatshops. It was a parable for the economic reconstruction that occurred after the earthquake. The diplomatic cables recount that there had been a “long-standing labor dispute between Dominican manufacturer Grupo M and workers in Ouanaminthe”. One said: “According to Yannick Etienne, a labor representative, the fight has its origins in the closed-door negotiations that established the Free Trade Zone (FTZ). The farmers were left out of the negotiating process until the day of the FTZ ground breaking ceremony in 2002, when they were told their land was being expropriated. Grupo M eventually published a social compensation plan in 2003, however, it came too late for the farmers whose land was already gone, and whose suspicions of the Dominicans were already aroused.”

Grupo M and its patrons at the World Bank do not, of course, tire of outlining the countless benefits that accrue to the local population because of Codevi. Every program of exploitation has an ideology bolted on to legitimate it to the world – but also to those benefitting: very few people want to look in the mirror and see a monster staring back. When I asked to speak to workers, two were dutifully brought out to give monosyllabic positive comments about their jobs, perhaps wary of the manager sitting next to them. Neither was a member of the union, I soon found out. In fact, Grupo M claims it has no conception of how many workers are in the union. “Very little,” is all Mr Blumberg would tell me. “It’s not part of their priority. They’re happy and when the workforce is happy they don’t mind if anybody is doing anything for them or not.” However, according to the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the soothing words of Mr Blumberg do not reveal the whole story. “Dominican unions allege [Grupo M] discriminates against labor organizers, fires their members, and has created a fraudulent ‘scab union’ in order to circumvent the legitimate one,” one cable notes.

It is clear that something similar has happened in Haiti. Grupo M did have a stronger union once – before it was busted after trying to exercise its rights. Just months after Codevi opened, the workers began complaining of “exploitation and mistreatment” by the management of Grupo M. Rounds of strikes and violence by union members were followed by a “series of employee terminations by the company throughout that summer”.

Mr Blumberg explained it thus: “When we had the first union, there was a lot of growing pain. They didn’t have the right groups guiding them, there were a lot of radicals, a lot of leftists.” But, he added: “In the end, everything was straightened out and we’re in peace and we’re fine with the union.” The union had been co-opted. Workers’ rights would not be a high priority for the economic model that would design the new Haiti. In fact, the plan was predicated on the lack of rights for workers. In an internal IFC document that was presented to the Haitian government, the administration was implored to amend the labor code in order to “lift restrictions on 24/7 multi-labor shifts” while “streamlining” the process by which night-time salary supplements could be done away with. The plan was also predicated on a lack of tax revenue. Another incentive for the foreign companies was the so-called “economic free zones” (EFZs), which offer companies tax and duty-free rights if they set up operations in Haiti. In reality, these zones do not exist in physical space but rather constitute the whole country. In other words, Haiti would now be tax-free for foreign investors – further disabling the Haitian government’s ability to rebuild any public institutions. In 2011, the Haitian government brought in an estimated $1 billion of revenue, much less than the per-capita rate in sub-Saharan Africa.

The answer to this dilemma for the IADB was the “multiplier effect” whereby companies supplying services to the population would in turn have more income and therefore pay more tax to the government (at some time in the distant future). “It’s on that side that we see the benefits of anchoring in the zones and having these companies come, even if under the current regime they do not pay taxes for a while,” said Mr Almeida, IADB country director for Haiti. The idea essentially is that around the industrial estates other smaller Haitian businesses, such as travel agents and grocery stores, will pick up the slack of lost tax revenue. The problem for the IFIs was that even with slave wages and lax labor regulation it was proving hard to attract foreign investment. In the face of such reticence from investors around the world, Haiti should have focused on building indigenous capacity, perhaps through a massive public works initiative and the construction of state-owned facilities, like Sonapi. Haitians were instead again put at the mercy of international capital and its “race to the bottom”. For the US embassy, the only thing going for Haiti was that its people were made to work for peanuts. “Haiti has the lowest wages in the western hemisphere,” boasted one US embassy cable. To Haitians it was nothing to boast about. Camille Chalmers, a local economist, told the Financial Times that the wages paid in the textile sector, Haiti’s biggest industry, were a “veritable scandal”.

Amid manifold reservations from both international investors and labor-rights groups, the IADB and USAID finished the construction of the flagship project in the economic reconstruction of Haiti: the Caracol industrial park (CIP), just 40 miles down the well-paved road back toward the northern capital of Cap-Haïtien. The CIP was inspired by the perceived success of Codevi, with those designing Haiti’s new-look economy trying to attract investment with the benefits that drew Grupo M into the economy: cheap labor and geographical closeness to the US, the world’s largest market, where its exports are duty-free. It is one of five planned. The US poured millions of dollars into the CIP, but only Sae-A Trading, a South Korean textile company, has been enticed to set up shop in the park (and according to people involved in the deal, Sae-A was promised a rent holiday of four years). Sweatshop-based development had, in fact, never provided more than 100,000 jobs even in the 1980s.

The fact that the US taxpayer is building industrial parks for the benefit of South Korean companies also raised eyebrows. The US may be the most active foreign country involved in the reconstruction, but even its companies are still keeping their distance. “We are professional beggars,” Mr Aguerre, the Haiti manager for the IADB in Washington, told me. The Haitian people would become beggars, too. For example, an internal IFC document on proposed IEZs argues that the reconstruction should be “propelled by private-sector-led development” even though the same document admits that “the existing Haitian Free Zone, Industrial Park and Investment Code policy and regulatory regimes have not been effective in attracting investments that are needed to create jobs”.

“To say that the private sector is rushing into Haiti right now would not be exactly what’s happening,” Pamela Cox, the World Bank’s vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean, told me when I met her in Washington. So why were these institutions focusing so much on a foreign-investment-led reconstruction, rather than building up domestic and public Haitian capacity? Was the fact that this would not make any westerners rich merely a coincidence?

There are still further complications; namely, that offering generous inducements to foreign companies will adversely impact businesses already in Haiti. Grupo M, for example, is fearful of what the incentives offered for the CIP and other IEZs being planned might mean for it. “[New foreign companies] have to train their workforces, they have to prepare themselves for what is coming,” said Mr Blumberg, vice-president of sales at Grupo M. “We want a level playing field if you will. We understand that [foreign companies] are getting a lot of things via grants and via sponsorships from different sources.” But if investment is not forthcoming or indigenous industries are stifled, as many predict, Haiti will suffer stagnation and destitution for another generation.

Enthusiasm from donors for aid and other forms of sovereign investment is now dwindling as the international community loses interest and the financial crisis continues to bite. The Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF), which aggregates funds from countries and NGOs to fill gaps in investment, has raised $352 million so far, but, “We’ve reached a plateau,” Mr Leitman, head of the HRF, told me. “I think the donors have been cautious and reluctant to contribute new money.” In March 2010, at a major pledging conference held in New York City, $4.6 billion was promised for the first two years of reconstruction. Only $1.9 billion of that ever materialized. “If you look at estimates made about rebuilding Haiti after the earthquake, they were huge, you know $15 billion, even more than that,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington DC, told me. “They haven’t come up with anything like that, even a fraction of that. It’s a small country but it’s still 10 million people and so if you don’t clear the rubble, you don’t have roads, you don’t have housing, you don’t have water, you don’t have sanitation, so what kind of economy are you going to get out of that? That’s the real problem.”

The real fear back home in Washington, however, especially among politicians, is migration and drugs. “They feared Aristide was a Castro want-to-be,” Larry Birns, an analyst in Washington, told me. “US policy has never been concerned with building a viable economy. The policies they followed destroyed Haiti’s economy.” On assuming power, Ronald Reagan proposed the Caribbean Basin Initiative to try, in a familiar story, to bring foreign investment to the region. It was a method of regaining control of the region, which seemed to be going on an independent path. Reagan even invaded Grenada on spurious grounds in 1983 to push that effort. The initiative was a failure, bringing little to no investment, but control was exerted. In that respect it was like John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin America, which sought to bring the region away from Soviet influence, under the guise of “development” and “investment”. The prevailing sprit now in Washington is that Haiti is messy, and people will openly tell you (off the record) that Haiti is beyond the capacity to be reformed, a “loser situation”. They favor what they call “keeping it on life support” so that the US doesn’t get too many people coming in (Haitian refugees dying on the beaches of Florida caused havoc for Southern politicians in the 1980s). But what the US never seems to understand about Haiti and elsewhere is that you cannot have a society operate like clockwork when you have for years persistently undermined all credible efforts for that society to function in an effective way. Haiti is now actually well below its per capita income of 1960, the only country in the hemisphere to have made no progress in that period. Ironically, the economy grew from 1960 to 1980 under the Duvalier dictatorships because, despite their brutality, they actually had a development strategy. It wasn’t great but it did move the country forward. This is true for a lot of the region where many countries had more growth under dictatorships because they had more control over policy than they did in a more democratic era when, in the subsequent neoliberal phase, the World Bank and the IMF controlled policy, and nobody allowed them to have a development strategy. From 1991 to 1994 and from 2000 to 2004, in fact, there was a deliberate strategy to destroy the economy, and that’s how they got rid of President Aristide both times. “This is more about power. It’s hard for people to believe this, but the US really does care who runs the government,” said Mr Weisbrot. “They’ve overthrown the government twice, the US, Canada, France, and their allies. 1991 was more covert but it did come out that the CIA paid the people who did the coup, and they also financed death squads in the period after.”

Robinson Deese’s story shows the human side of this brutality. “After the earthquake everything turned terrible,” he told me, as we sat in his bedroom. He lost his home and moved with his four children and wife to Golf, one of the biggest camps in Port-au-Prince on the capital’s only golf course. But he was given a lifeline. The Red Cross – one of the most influential and powerful NGOs working in Haiti – offered him a rent subsidy to move his family into permanent accommodation. The charity gave him 4,000 Haitian dollars toward the yearly rent of 6,000 Haitian dollars. (Prices have ballooned since the earthquake because of the squeeze on supply.) Now he lives in one small and sweltering room with six other people, including his wife, children and brother. Formerly a tailor, his working life was destroyed when he lost all his sewing machines in the earthquake. “We have to manage with this because we have no means to rent a bigger place right now, I have to work for other people now,” he said. “I preferred to take the subsidy because I didn’t have a piece of land where I could build a shelter. I decided the best option would be to start a small business for myself while I tried to save money, maybe get a piece of land.” He was also awarded a $500 Livelihood Grant to start a business, which he said was not going well so far. In these conditions, saving is hard for a family like this, as he has to stump up money for tuition for his kids’ schooling as well as for books and uniforms. The Red Cross has helped countless people this way – it is one of three options they offer to some of the 500,000 Haitians still living in tent cities around Port-au-Prince. The other two are building a T-shelter on a greenfield site, or finding someone who will let them do it. But the program is a parable of the short-termism that has overtaken the reconstruction of Haiti. Mr Deese only qualifies for this subsidy for a year. After that, he and his family are back at square one unless he finds a job, which with 80 percent unemployment seems unlikely. “I can’t say I will have enough to cover next year’s rent,” he admitted. “It doesn’t stress me out right now, I know that I can work, I have two hands to work with.”

No room for an alternative

Haiti is a notoriously difficult country to operate in: its institutions are frail, weakened by years of underinvestment, and the system is riven with corruption. For the economic managers post-earthquake, this was the default reasoning for their reliance on the private sector and “export-led” reconstruction. But there was nothing inevitable about such a program. There were plenty of reconstruction plans that could, most likely would, have created a fairer and more sustainable future for Haitians. The problem was and remains that these plans go against an ideology purveyed by the IMF, the World Bank and the US. For example, the Haitian government could have rebuilt the country’s crumbling infrastructure with a modern-day equivalent of the Marshall Plan from donors, which would have created public-sector jobs for Haitians to construct roads, ports and energy infrastructure which has either been non-existent or in disrepair. Everyone, after all, puts infrastructure as among the top problems for making Haiti work. Some 10,000 jobs could have been created just clearing the rubble. The Red Cross has, for example, created hundreds of jobs for Haitians reusing the rubble to build bricks and other building materials, clearing the city and creating employment. “We’re the only ones doing it,” the co-coordinator of the program in Port-au-Prince told me. “At the moment, now, all the rest goes down the dump, and the cost of processing it is about the same as taking it down to the dump.”

Perhaps most importantly, Haiti could have focused on creating a new agrarian economy, a sector which had been thriving before President Clinton dumped tonnes of US rice in the country in the 1990s, destroying Haitian agriculture by completely distorting trading terms, something that will be explored in a moment. About 60 percent of the Haitian population, or 4 million people, live in rural areas. Promoting community-owned agricultural land would have instantly depopulated the overcrowded capital and provided a sustainable way of feeding its people (with any leftovers ready for export). It was never even discussed.

“Agriculture is still missing,” Mr Naim at the IFC told me. The IFC is yet to make one loan to an agricultural small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), instead training its focus on agribusiness rather than the smallholders that Haiti needs. Likewise, the World Bank has admitted that not enough priority is being given to agriculture. It has put $55 million into a new agricultural program (in the grand scale of things in Haiti, peanuts). “This is our first true agricultural project,”  Mr Abrantes acknowledged. The US government claims it is not ignoring agriculture. The ambassador to Haiti told me the US has invested $200 million in the sector already; but, once again, the focus remains on produce for export as opposed to providing for the Haitian population, large portions of which are starving. The IADB, on the other hand, contends that infrastructure is important but “there are other needs” (such as “investing in the private sector” in order to import seeds). The bank has a plan to get a private company to buy the mangoes, centralize them, distribute them and then send them to the exporters. “We’re changing the dynamics of how we can do agriculture in Haiti,” said Mr Almeida at the IADB. This new dynamic is straight out of the neoliberal guidebook: providing vouchers to small producers so they can buy seeds through imports. With no public or community-held land, such ventures have to date not got very far. “It’s not a big number of jobs,” Mr Almeida admitted.

The internal Haitian market continues to be ignored by all parties, a travesty considering that 90 percent of eggs and poultry consumed in Haiti come from the Dominican Republic, while 80 percent of rice is imported. Changing that state of affairs through publicly funded subsistence farming is not an option. “When I say agriculture I say agribusiness,” said Mr Almeida. The alternative, which is unthinkable in the world of these institutions, is that money is provided to subsidize domestic small-scale rice production.

An emblematic project of this “new dynamic” was brokered by the IADB: an initiative with Coca-Cola which has created a new soda called “Mango-Tango” that will be supplied with mangoes from newly developed producers. A similar deal with Starbucks coffee seeks to transform individual micro-farmers into cooperatives and then supply coffee to Starbucks and market it as Haitian coffee. Critical analysts call this the “sweatshops and mangoes” development model. “They need roads, they need irrigation in the countryside, but that’s the one thing these guys won’t do,” said Mark Weisbrot, the analyst at the CEPR. But the Martelly administration’s agriculture policy has so far followed the export-orientated agribusiness model of the Bretton Woods institutions to the letter. “What I hear from [the Haitian government] is that they want to go into the export mode, including the agriculture,” said Mr Abrantes. In fact, Martelly had pushed the IFIs to go even further. “We were preparing traditional agriculture projects for Haiti which were basically focused on poverty alleviation, on the small farmers,” added Mr Abrantes. “When the Martelly administration came in, they looked at the project and said, ‘We would like it to have a different slant. We would like to have significant components on stimulating agribusiness’, which is quite a different thing from what we had anticipated, and so I think the overall view is, even in agriculture, to encourage parts of the agricultural sector to move into export-production.” Haiti remains a majority agrarian country; it needs an agrarian-based development model that distributes land among its homeless people for community-based subsistence cultivation. The economic managers of the country are not interested. The long-held dream of a Caribbean sweatshop is being born instead. Out of one of history’s worst human catastrophes we have Mango-Tango. The racket’s victory was Haiti’s defeat, but this was no accident.

[anotherquirkypie-blog]

[ISTJ: How Parent’s Personality Affects My Personality]

Parenting styles are the parents’ perceivable attitudes towards the child, and these styles create an emotional climate in which the parents’ behavior is expressed (Darling and Steinberg, 1993) (1). Belsky argued that parenting is multiply determined by three general sources of influence: child’s individual characteristics, contextual sources of stress and support, and parent personality. He further stated that of those three, personality is the most important source of influence (2). Parenting style does affect child’s personality, and it’s proven by dozens of researchers (1).

 I am the first child of a single parent mother (since about 12 years ago). So basically, I have been exposed to my mom’s way of parenting for a long time (well, duh, for the rest of my life). I type my mom as an ESFJ.

As you all (might) already know, ESFJ’s dominant function is Fe (extroverted feeling). She feeds me with it. She shows me that every day. As a child who mimics what my parent does, I follow and learn her way of thinking, making decisions, and dealing with people. My dad passed away when I was 10, and I assume he was an INTJ.

From her, I learn about social values; what is “good” and what is “bad” according to mainstream society a lot. I also learn how to care for people and how others are above anything. I, as a child/tertiary Fi user, am inclined to question those values and making my own values. But as my exposure to that kind of values is higher than my cynical Fi asking the root of the value (as it is tertiary), it becomes my Si and to me, it’s the “normal” thing. And I learned that I shouldn’t be abhored by people in order to maintain harmony and peace (I soon added myself that it would give me additional profits – pardon my Te), so I shall not disobey the “moral conduct”. Her Fe has been becoming my Si. And it affects my Fe too, of course. My Fe is higher than my Fi in my keys2cognition tests (42 vs. 17, respectively).

My Fe is on the 7th stack of personality, also called by “Trickster”. Trickster, as described by Beebe, is what put us in a double bind (a situation in which a person is confronted with two irreconcilable demands or a choice between two undesirable courses of action). Beebe explained that for example, a parent (ESFJ) with Ni on her trickster to imply damage when an adolescent child threatens to make a choice that the parent does not approve of (3). In my case, it applies to my decision making. Trickster bothers “Parent” (Secondary function) much. And yes, my Fe always put me in a double bind. When I’m about to take a decision that maybe unpreferable for other people, my Fe kicks in and makes me uber confused. It makes me indecisive and unable to hold my opinion and preferences because Fe would agree that holding things to oneself is selfish. I tend to over consider people’s feelings because I don’t want to be hated by people (hence destroying my credibility). To this date, I am still not able to tame this.

Beebe also mentioned specifically about how a developed trickster should be. He picked a story about Alfred Hitchcock who was an ISTJ used his trickster Fe nicely. He was able to make people in a double bind with his Fe in order to cater his Te (parent/secondary) and Fi (puer/child/tertiary). That applies to me as well. I always look nice and agreeable to people, hiding my agendas and willings. I am usually mistaken as an ISFJ due to this demeanor. I persuade them to do my agendas with my Fe. This works well most of the time and they usually listen to my “commands”. I understand that giving direct orders without any sweet talking won’t be effective to make people move, therefore I ask them nicely, minimizing the sweet talks (I hate it so much) but still in an acceptable manner (sometimes I include innuendos).

Trickster is also a “rebel child” in Beebe’s archetype, so just like rebel children do, I rebel with Fe a lot (this might be in cooperation with my Fi, in attempt to make my own moral values). I question social values, reject them, and try to find a logic behind my rejection. But as much as I rebel, I usually comply with what’s normal (remember that my mom’s Fe has become my Si?). For instance, lately, I’ve been questioning why men and women can’t be in a platonic relationship. Why men always took my kindness in a wrong way (romantically involved). That time I was having a lot of male friends on my network, without feeling anything specifically to one of them except pure friendship, but still, they want something (love) from me. My Fe rebels, because the society says that men will /always/ want something when it comes to women. And as a dignified woman, you can’t go out with different men privately because it will spread bad news about you (playgirl, two-penny girl, blah blah). I can’t reckon WHY. It doesn’t make sense at all, at least for me. For me, it’s purely the men with expectations fault. And that time I won’t budge from what I believe. But as the guys keep on coming with expectations that I can’t fulfill and realizing how sucks it is, I quit. I won’t be that woman again. I can’t bear the people’s opinion about me doing this – even my close friends view me differently that time.

My questioning habit indicates my Fe is on stage 3 of function-attitude lifecycle according to Dario Nardi. He stated that on that stage, “We “grasp” the function in its many forms; we question, alter, personalize and make it our own, as a tool with many options; its use is complex and flexible” (4). As a shadow function, it is surprising that it develops much better than my Fi that I assume is in stage 2 (“We accept and follow a social/cultural version of the function, or we passively follow the functional process; we are in its grip; its use is rigid or adolescent”). This is plausible because my mom as a dominant Fe user can’t teach me about how to use Fi nicely because she doesn’t possess it (or maybe dismissing it).

 Her Si, as parent function and the one which is visible exteriorly (by keeping things “normal” for those she loves – everyone) might has a role in making my dominant function Si. Because parent function tends to nurture people, therefore it becomes my dominant as I follow her guidance a lot.

I don’t really remember how my dad used to teach me. But as I mentioned earlier, I assume he was an INTJ. I deduce there’s where I ‘gain’ my Te but I’m not really sure. He did show me much of his Te, due to his parent function and he taught me about leadership, managing things, etc. But the Te doesn’t get too dominant, maybe due to lack of exposure from him after he passed away and my mom has the main role of educating their children since the beginning.

So, how does your parent’s personality affect yours?

Resources for further readings:

1.         Brand S, Hatzinger M, Beck J, Holsboer-Trachsler E. Perceived parenting styles, personality traits and sleep patterns in adolescents. Journal of Adolescence. 2009;32(5):1189-207.

2.         de Haan AD, Prinzie P, Dekovic M. How and why children change in aggression and delinquency from childhood to adolescence: moderation of overreactive parenting by child personality. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines. 2010;51(6):725-33.

3.         Beebe J. Type and Archetype Part Two: The Arms and Their Shadow. Typeface. 2007;18:22-7.

4.         Nardi D. A Fresh Understanding of Function Development 2003 [Available from: http://www.darionardi.com/functions.html.

[ghoulluck]

Wish That You Were Here

| NOTES: Anything canon after season two of Scream is not included. This is time line and canon divergent. There are MANY mentions and allusions to other pieces of literature and horror films so if you get even a few of them congrats. If It’s reblogged enough, I could make a part two.Be aware there will be spelling and grammar errors. |

SUMMARY: Inspired by Florence + the Machine’s Wish That You Were Here. Audrey comes home to Lakewood after a fourteen year period serving Special Forces. There she has to resolve the demons she thought she buried years ago in her violent military history and realizes her definition of home could be blonde hair and brown eyes. (braudrey. one shot? no rating. warnings for graphic/triggering etc content. if reception is well, there might be a part two or more.)

PLEASE REBLOG, DO NOT REPOST. THIS IS AN ORIGINAL WORK.

Audrey turned the key over in her fingers. She felt the weight of her dog tags slide towards her on the chain. “Here’s your coffee ma'am.” The woman blinked and remembered where she was.

“Uhm, t-thanks. Sorry.” Putting the chain down, she stared at the cup in silence. The diner’s red neon sign washed in through the dirty window casting Audrey a pale pink.She glanced at her green beret sitting on top of a pile of unopened letters. She had never written back, but the letters had never stopped coming even if they had slowed in volume. Nearly every single one was from Brooke.

She let her icy eyes fall on the Christmas card sitting on table as she touched the old house key sitting among the dog tags around her neck. Opening the card one more time, she read Brooke’s near immaculate hand writing.

[WISH THAT YOU WERE HERE.]

Audrey took in a deep breath as she closed it. It had been very easily at least a decade since she had set foot in Lakewood. She hardly ever breathed her home town’s name out loud in fear of it catching up to her.

(“Audrey?” Sheriff Acosta’s voice sounded tight over the telephone. “Did I get a ticket again?” she half joked as she wiped the candy counter down. “I’m sorry for this news.” The teenager stopped a moment as she stared at a scratch on the bright red counter top. Audrey scratched at an itch in her throat that never seemed to go away. “Your dad was hit by a drunk driver off highway 45.” Audrey tried to swallow the itch down. It became a tickle that would turn into a hiccup of a sob.)

She squeezed her eyes shut to prevent the tears that still burned as if she had heard the news only yesterday. Joining the special forces had never been part of her own agenda. Hell, her agenda had been to get back into film making and not letting anything ruin that for her again. The idea had been a footnote given to her by her Dad. She recalled him laughingly mentioning it while they were making pancakes one morning.

(His eyes were starting to regain a little bit of their light. Her mother had passed only four years before. Audrey was in eighth grade and Emma sat across the table. They were playing footsie and laughing while stuffing their gross pimply faces with pancakes. She could barely hear him talking on the phone with Uncle Mike. He was laughing about her newborn baby cousin, Thomasin. “Our girls are tough, I’m sure Audrey or Thomasin is gonna carry on the Jensen military legacy.” )

At the time Audrey would huff and roll her eyes. She hadn’t gone home since the funeral. She had thought about chucking the house key in Wren lake, but she didn’t have the guts. Her rough fingers hesitantly reached for the pile. She was almost afraid of what they would say. Tearing open the second most recent letter. A few pictures fell out, they were of Emma and a tiny little baby. Turning them open carefully, she read the notes on the back.

[Emma & Eisley].

She picked up the letter for answers.

[Hey its me again. Just keeping you updated on stuff. Emma had her first baby. Her name is Eisley and she’s the cutest. Her eyes look a lot like yours. She’s so lucky to have colored eyes since her dad has brown eyes. Emma was scared she was gonna look more like her dad, but she's a good 50/50. Love ya, hope to hear/see you soon]

It took Audrey hours to sort through the letters backwards. Emma had met some guy in med school. Noah was a big time crime writer -- Brooke was kind enough to include his debut Vanity Fair article about the Texas Debutante killer. She had to laugh about the irony about it all. She touched these items as she read to make their lives more real to her again. Stavo and Brooke had divorced amicably and according to Blondie he was doing pretty well with his foot in the animation department. He was working with Konami for a new generation of horror gaming.

They had done so much in her time away. She touched her split lip which was a reminder of what she had accomplished in her own time away from them. Audrey had polished her steel and sharpened her edges. She had channeled her grief and anger into power and bloodshed. Picking up the letters, she filed them into her duffle bag’s side pocket. Putting a dollar bill under her untouched coffee cup, she slowly moved out of the diner’s booth. Her wary eyes flicked around carefully to take in the people around her.

In her nearly twelve hour seating, the diner had acquired a new set of hard asses. Most of them were from the near by base and Audrey made her way to the restroom with her green beret in hand. The bathroom resembled one she would find at a shitty seven eleven.

Dropping her bag on the floor she took a look at herself in the mirror. She had retained some of her baby face, something she was thankful for. Her blue eyes had gotten paler with age. Maybe it had something to do with extended periods of staring into flood lights. There was a shadow of a black eye around her left eye. Her jaw clicked when her mouth parted to observe the split in her lip.

Shrugging out of her uniform carefully, Audrey noted had more freckles on her bare shoulders probably from sun exposure. She passed a finger over old bullet wounds on her right arm. Some scars were uglier than others. The brunette pulled her white tank top over her head quickly to pull on a loose fitting charcoal colored tee. Her shoulder still ached from tearing her rotary cuff.

Shucking her uniform pants off, she pulled the metal belt from it to lace it through her black jeans and sighed at the new space. Her clothing was cold and at least a few years old. Her jeans were worn at the knees and if she had been a few years younger she would have thought it stylish. She put her arms into her trusty leather jacket before carefully pulling her long brunette hair over it’s collar. She made a note to cut it when she got the chance.

The dog tags clinked as she finished dressing and she put her uniform back into her duffle bag in a neatly folded and now empty corner. She lugged the green bag over her shoulder as she pushed her way out of the restroom.

“Bye ma’am! Happy holidays!”

Audrey cast a glance at the waitress and for a moment she didn’t know what to say as she went out the door, “--T-thanks.”. The cold air hit her and her breath fanned out into the air in cool white clouds. Making her way to her beaten red jeep she threw the duffle into the back seat. The vehicle wasn’t warm, but she had spent time in places colder than hell in less clothes. Tying her hair back, she turned on the GPS to set it.

CURRENT LOCATION - BARROW, ALASKA

SET DESTINATION - LAKEWOOD, LOUISIANA

She gave a white puff as she plugged the key in the ignition and sparked up a cigarette.It was a bad habit she had picked up when she was alone. She let the jeep’s engine warm up before cranking up the heat. The windows fogged and she looked at the gold watch on her right wrist to hide a scar. It was her mother’s, a gift from her dad before she had passed from cancer. The piece was delicately detailed and it reminded her that her parents were finally together somewhere.

Looking at the watch made her feel as if a hundred years had passed since she was eighteen. Covering it up with the leather jacket, she wiped away a spot on the passenger’s window to see the mirror. Her limbs were starting to feel heavy. Rolling her head back against the jeep’s headrest, she debated if she was really going to go home on such a shit impulse.

“Fuck it.”

Audrey glanced at the rear view mirror as she pulled out of the parking lot and made her way down to the first high way. For the next five days, she spent her time seeing things she had missed and stopping at scenic routes to take short videos and quick pictures before coming across a beauty salon.

She put down her camera. She was only about thirty minutes from home and suddenly, she didn’t like the idea of parting with her long locks just yet. Audrey had changed too much to go back to who she was. Entering against her best instinct, the brunette was greeted by a bored looking stylist, “Hi, how can I help you?”

“Uh yeah, I’d like to get a hair cut? Maybe some color?” She had dyed it once a long time ago, a glossy blue black and she was offered an array of books and color samples. Determined not to be overwhelmed, she chose out a short crop that would sit just below her chin and a glossy black color. The process took longer then she had expected and Audrey was starting to feel the nerves when the excess was being washed away.

She closed her pale eyes to avoid looking at herself in the mirror until it was all done. Audrey had to laugh at the stylist’s commentary. “You kinda look like Kate Beckinsale-- what was that movie?” She shrugged, she was laughing too hard at her own reflection to remember as the cape came off. The shorter crop made her feel a little lighter. Not bothering to hear a price, she shelled out a hundred and made her way out. “Happy holidays,” Audrey stated through a sigh before the door closed behind her.

She slid on her sunglasses as she ran a hand through her wet black hair and stared up at the sun with a grimace. She looked back down at her watch. With every step, her dog tags felt heavier and the key seemed to be the heaviest weight on her chain. Climbing back into the jeep with a groan, she sat in the driver’s seat.

The rear view mirror declared Louisana’s temperature at a nice solid 60.

Audrey gave a sigh as she drove her way out of the parking lot. She didn’t have anymore excuses between her and Lakewood. “Fuck --” she hissed under her breath as she sped down highway 45. Out of the corner of her eye she caught her Dad’s worn old cross with fresh flowers. It wasn’t like he was fucking buried there and she made a sharp u-turn to take a good look at it before peeling out.

She stared at her GPS as she navigated the town’s streets. She recognized various things here and there, but it had changed so much Audrey almost felt lost. Who the hell in their right mind had sunk so much money into Lakewood? She spied a street sign [Quinn Maddox Memorial]. It was a grisly reminder of why she wanted to leave Lakewood. It took everything special and turned it to shit.

She raked her calloused finger through her hair as she drove slowly to see what had changed. Maggie had sold her house to be closer to Emma and Eisley from the looks of it. Unfamiliar faces played in the front yard with their children and grandchildren. Audrey found herself driving by Noah’s house to see his dad and mom pleasantly still settled in their house. She passed her house without a blink and sighed as she tried to ignore the weight of the key around her neck.

She found herself navigating to the familiar address on one of the letters. It was Stavo’s old house. When Sheriff Acosta had been fired, he had been relocated and Brooke had followed, initially as her letter depicted and she had come back. It was hard to imagine the Maddox princess living so humbly in the old Acosta house. Bringing her jeep to a stop across the street, she stuck her head out the window to see who lived in the house as she put a cigarette in between her lips.

‘Stalker alert,’ she thought to herself as she put the lighter to the menthol and exhaled it’s poison into the cool Louisiana air. Setting her head back into the jeep, she let her head rest as she watched the house and finished off her cigarette. Lakewood still smelled like Wren Lake and she took in a deep breath of that cold sweet water air. She waved away her cigarette smoke and sighed when she saw nothing moving.

She peered at the bright red envelope sitting in her passenger seat. Taking it in her hands again, she passed her thumb over the date. It was the most recent and the only dated for the current year. She passed her fingers over the glossy picture of Emma and Eisley before sticking it in her in her sun visor like they were going to look over her and hopefully keep her safe, mainly from herself.

Audrey had more than one demon to pick a bone with. She glanced at the gold watch. Slowly she moved to unclasp it. An angry red scar stared back at her. She couldn’t forget how she had acquired it. She closed her eyes a minute and even with all her anxiety she couldn’t ward off the tiredness she felt to her core.

When she slept, she never dreamed and if she did, she never remembered what she had dreamt about even when the feeling of fear remained. If there was anything she hated most in the world, it was the feeling of being powerless.

(The knife slashed at her arm. The burning red pain of it had her gasping as the killer stepped back. She could hear Piper’s laugh ringing in her ears still to this day. “What the fuck, Piper! That’s not funny! I was scared you were gonna kill me!” She hissed this low and under her voice as she clutched her arm. Small rivets of blood ran down her pale skin.

“Audrey live a little, geeze,” Piper stated as she flipped her long brown hair much like Emma did when she didn’t really think about it. It made Audrey think of a shampoo commercial. “What the fuck are you doing with the mask? And dressed like that! There’s a real killer on the -- loose--- ” Her words were starting to die in her throat.

She could see Piper’s visible irritation and also the gaff of a mocking laugh, “Yeah, I fucking know, Audrey.” The slow pronunciation of her name brought chills to her spine. The cold knowledge of suddenly putting everything together set in and Audrey felt the itch in her throat she hated so much. “Y-y-you lied to me--?” 

She hated the shrill sound of her voice as it turned to anger, “You bitch!” The teen froze when she heard shouting. Her first instinct was to protect anyone else from harm and her head shot to the left. When she turned back, Piper was gone before Audrey could give the bitch a piece of her mind.)

Whenever Audrey fell asleep, she dealt with the dark dreams. She would never be fully rid of the guilt. She would always carry it with her like the key around her neck. It was humbling and grounding. She ran her fingers over her chain as she glanced at her watch.

It was almost nine and the sky was dark.

She took in a deep breath through her nose and the cool air had turned sharp in her lungs. Louisiana had always been less industrial then the east and west coast. That was probably why the gulf had always been her favorite. She wiped at her tired pale eyes and glanced at the house. It was still vacant. Her tongue swiped out to taste the scab on her lip as she debated staying the night at the Crescent Palms hotel.

Did the place even exist still? The question suddenly seemed more realistic when she realized that her house had been unoccupied for a few years. She leaned over to turn on the GPS and the headlights of an oncoming car blinded her. The GPS page presented her several options for hotels in the area.

A hard knock on the jeep’s metal jolted her nearly out of her seat.

“Audrey?”

Brooke had changed so much since she had last seen her, yet not at all. She still had the biggest, saddest eyes she had ever seen. Like someone had really gone and broken her heart. Audrey opened her mouth to say something. The Maddox princess was as pristine as ever, dressed in white like an angel and she reached out to touch the birth mark on Brooke’s cheek.

She pushed open the jeep door slowly and Brooke made her way around to meet Audrey half way. The blonde in her arms was a little more filled out then she had remembered and she smelled a little more like sandalwood than vanilla, but she made no arguments against the pleasant scents. She felt Brooke squeeze her back harder.

“I-I I thought I was never going to see you again.”

[katybudgetbooks]

YA Books We’re Anticipating in April 2017

Alex, Approximately by Jenn Bennett (4/4):  Seventeen-year-old Bailey moves to California to live with her father and, perhaps, finally meet an online friend and fellow film buff, but soon finds herself attracted to an annoying co-worker.

The End of Our Story by Meg Haston (4/4): Every love story has a breaking point... From the author of Paperweight comes the star-crossed romance of two high school friends in a tale rife with deeply buried secrets and shocking revelations. BEFORE: Bridge and Wil have been entangled in each other's lives for years. Under the white-hot Florida sun, they went from kids daring each other to swim past the breakers to teenagers stealing kisses between classes. But when Bridge betrayed Wil during their junior year, she shattered his heart and their relationship along with it. AFTER: When Wil's family suffers a violent loss, and Bridge rushes back to Wil's side. As they struggle to heal old wounds and start falling for each other all over again, Bridge and Wil discover just how much has changed in the past year. Though they once knew each other's every secret, they aren't the same people they used to be. Bridge can't imagine life without Wil, but sometimes love isn't enough. Can they find their way back to each other, or will this be the end of their story?

Shadowcaster by Cinda Williams Chima (4/4): From New York Times bestselling author Cinda Williams Chima, this is a thrilling story of the unfathomable costs of war, the allure of dark magic, and two principled and conflicted characters drawn together despite everything they stand to lose.Alyssa ana'Raisa, the reluctant princess heir to the Gray Wolf throne of the Fells, feels more comfortable striking with a sword than maneuvering at court. After a brush with death, Lyss goes on the offensive, meaning to end the war that has raged her whole life. If her gamble doesn't pay off, she could lose her queendom before she even ascends to the throne. Across enemy lines in Arden, young rising star Captain Halston Matelon is being sent on ever more dangerous assignments. Between the terrifying rumors of witches and wolfish warriors to the north and his cruel king at home, Hal is caught in an impossible game of life and death.Lyss and Hal's intricately linked fates become inseparable when they fall under the shadow of a new enemy--a force that threatens to extinguish the last rays of hope in the Shattered Realms.

Alex & Eliza by Melissa de la Cruz (4/11): 1777. Albany, New York. As battle cries of the American Revolution echo in the distance, servants flutter about preparing for one of New York society's biggest events: the Schuylers' grand ball. Descended from two of the oldest and most distinguished bloodlines in New York, the Schuylers are proud to be one of their fledgling country's founding families, and even prouder still of their three daughters--Angelica, with her razor-sharp wit; Peggy, with her dazzling looks; and Eliza, whose beauty and charm rival those of both her sisters, though she'd rather be aiding the colonists' cause than dressing up for some silly ball. Still, Eliza can barely contain her excitement when she hears of the arrival of one Alexander Hamilton, a mysterious, rakish young colonel and General George Washington's right-hand man. Though Alex has arrived as the bearer of bad news for the Schuylers, he can't believe his luck--as an orphan, and a bastard one at that--to be in such esteemed company. And when Alex and Eliza meet that fateful night, so begins an epic love story that would forever change the course of American history. In the pages of Alex and Eliza, #1 New York Times bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz brings to life the romance of young Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler.

The Freemason’s Daughter by Shelley Sackier (4/11): Saying good-bye to Scotland is the hardest thing that Jenna MacDuff has had to do--until she met Lord Pembroke. Jenna's small clan has risked their lives traveling the countryside as masons, secretly drumming up support and arms at every stop for the exiled King James Stuart so that he may retake the British throne. But their next job brings them into enemy territory: England.Jenna's father repeatedly warns her to trust no one, but when the Duke of Keswick hires the clan to build a garrison on his estate, it seems she cannot hide her capable mind from the duke's inquisitive son, Lord Alex Pembroke--nor mask her growing attraction to him.But there's a covert plan behind the building of the garrison--a secret that cannot be revealed. Will Jenna hide her family's mutinous plot and assist her clan's cause, or protect the life of the young noble she's falling for?In Shelley Sackier's lush, vivid historical debut, someone will pay a deadly price no matter what Jenna chooses.

Given to the Sea by Mindy McGinnis (4/11):  Kings and Queens rise and fall, loyalties collide, and romance blooms in a world where the sea is rising--and cannot be escaped. Khosa is Given to the Sea, a girl born to be fed to the water, her flesh preventing a wave like the one that destroyed the Kingdom of Stille in days of old. But before she's allowed to dance, an uncontrollable twitching of the limbs that will carry her to the shore in a frenzy--she must produce an heir. Yet the thought of human touch sends shudders down her spine that not even the sound of the tide can match. Vincent is third in line to inherit his throne, royalty in a kingdom where the old linger and the young inherit only boredom. When Khosa arrives without an heir he knows his father will ensure she fulfills her duty, at whatever cost. Torn between protecting the throne he will someday fill, and the girl whose fate is tied to its very existence, Vincent's loyalty is at odds with his heart. Dara and Donil are the last of the Indiri, a native race whose dwindling magic grows weaker as the island country fades. Animals cease to bear young, creatures of the sea take to the land, and the Pietra--fierce fighters who destroyed the Indiri a generation before--are now marching from their stony shores for the twin's adopted homeland, Stille. Witt leads the Pietra, their army the only family he has ever known. The stone shores harbor a secret, a growing threat that will envelop the entire land--and he will conquer every speck of soil to ensure the survival of his people. The tides are turning in Stille, where royals scheme, Pietrans march, and the rising sea calls for its Given.

The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli (4/11): From the award-winning author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda comes a funny, authentic novel about sisterhood, love, and identity.Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love. No matter how many times her twin sister, Cassie, tells her to woman up, Molly can't stomach the idea of rejection. So she's careful. Fat girls always have to be careful.Then a cute new girl enters Cassie's orbit, and for the first time ever, Molly's cynical twin is a lovesick mess. Meanwhile, Molly's totally not dying of loneliness--except for the part where she is. Luckily, Cassie's new girlfriend comes with a cute hipster-boy sidekick. If Molly can win him over, she'll get her first kiss and she'll get her twin back. There's only one problem: Molly's coworker, Reid. He's a chubby Tolkien superfan with a season pass to the Ren Faire, and there's absolutely no way Molly could fall for him. Right?

Bang by Barry Lyga (4/18):  A chunk of old memory, adrift in a pool of blood. Sebastian Cody did something horrible, something no one--not even Sebastian himself--can forgive. At the age of four, he accidentally shot and killed his infant sister with his father's gun. Now, ten years later, Sebastian has lived with the guilt and horror for his entire life. With his best friend away for the summer, Sebastian has only a new friend--Aneesa--to distract him from his darkest thoughts. But even this relationship cannot blunt the pain of his past. Because Sebastian knows exactly how to rectify his childhood crime and sanctify his past. It took a gun to get him into this. Now he needs a gun to get out. Unflinching and honest, Bang is the story of one boy and one moment in time that cannot be reclaimed, as true and as relevant as tomorrow's headlines. Readers of This is Where It Ends, The Hate List, and Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock will appreciate this extraordinary novel.

Grendel’s Guide to Love and War by AE Kaplan (4/18):  Tom Grendel lives a quiet life--writing in his notebooks, mowing lawns for his elderly neighbors, and pining for Willow, a girl next door who rejects the -manic-pixie-dream- label. But when Willow's brother, Rex (the bro-iest bro ever to don a jockstrap), starts throwing wild parties, the idyllic senior citizens' community where they live is transformed into a war zone. Tom is rightfully pissed--his dad is an Iraq vet, and the noise from the parties triggers his PTSD--so he comes up with a plan to end the parties for good. But of course, it's not that simple. One retaliation leads to another, and things quickly escalate out of control, driving Tom and Willow apart, even as the parties continue unabated. Add to that an angsty existential crisis born of selectively reading his sister's Philosophy 101 coursework, a botched break-in at an artisanal pig farm, and ten years of unresolved baggage stemming from his mother's death . . . and the question isn't so much whether Tom Grendel will win the day and get the girl, but whether he'll survive intact.

Legion by Julie Kagawa (4/25): From the limitless imagination of Julie Kagawa comes the next thrilling novel in The Talon Saga.The legions will be unleashed, and no human, rogue dragon or former dragonslayer can stand against the coming horde. Dragon hatchling Ember Hill was never prepared to find love at all--dragons do not suffer human emotions--let alone with a human, and a former dragonslayer at that. With ex-soldier of St. George Garret dying at her feet after sacrificing his freedom and his life to expose the deepest of betrayals, Ember knows only that nothing she was taught by dragon organization Talon is true. About humans, about rogue dragons, about herself and what she's capable of doing and feeling.In the face of great loss, Ember vows to stand with rogue dragon Riley against St. George and her own twin brother, Dante--the heir apparent to all of Talon, and the boy who will soon unleash the greatest threat and terror dragonkind has ever known. Talon is poised to conquer the world, and the abominations they have created will soon take to the skies, darkening the world with the promise of blood and death to those who will not yield.