#half of me living in this house has just been me terrorizing the local wild life to Get Off My Lawn

[bagginsluck]

I know this is kind of just what I get for living in the country in a house that is very easy to crawl under, but I need every skunk in my vicinity to Fuck Off. Stop trying to move in under my house every 6 months. I Don't want to wake up to my house smelling like hell and I Don't want to wake up to skunk fucking noises. Fuck Off.

[clare-with-no-i]

one-word prompt: thunder

this one got away from me, lol...thank you for the prompt!

The footsteps are small claps of thunder across the quiet house, rending the silence with a heartbeat's off-center rhythm. All of the heads in the room turn toward the doorway. Mad-Eye Moody must be back from London.

Lily catches James Potter's eye as she peers over her book. His hair has grown a bit longer over the past few months; it's starting to form little curly-cues over the expanse of his forehead, some strands tucked behind his ears. She's seen him brush them back when he puts oh his specs more than once, like they might hinder his vision.  He raises his eyebrows at her—has she been staring?—and she blinks before moving her gaze to the doorway.

“Four of them,” announces Moody once he arrives.  He nods toward Lily and Marlene McKinnon, who sits to Lily’s left. “Two in Derbyshire.  One in Devon, one in Suffolk.” 

Out of the corner of her eye, Lily watches as James’s shoulders tense.  She feels bad for him; his parents live in Devon, on some massive, sprawling estate.  He’ll probably be warning them tonight, in the subtle coded language they’ve all learned to use in case they’re being monitored.  

Pack of wolves in the forest nearby you, he might say.  Invasive species growing in the garden.

She remembers the day she found out he’d joined the Order—it was a Tuesday in July, and headquarters was sticky with heat.  He walked in through the door in a breezy linen shirt and jeans; the first time she’d seen him in muggle clothes since school.  

The first time she’d seen him at all since school, actually.

“Cells?” Marlene asks, and Moody nods, looking grim.

Cells.  Small, self-sufficient units of Death Eaters concentrated in one area, taking over the local businesses, mind-controlling any muggles they might find to be of use.  Little micro-economies of terror.

Lily and Marlene exchange a quick look between them.  They’d been the ones to predict at least three cells; they gave Moody the information necessary to take it to his men at the DMLE.  It’s a good look they’d been keeping such good track of activity in the muggle newspapers, or the Order would be none the  wiser.

“Evans and McKinnon to Derbyshire, then,” submits Kingsley Shacklebolt with a nod. “There’s a potioneer there that they might be trying to use.  We’ll need Evans for potions and McKinnon for recognizing the Imperius.  We’ll split the others between Devon and Suffolk.  Potter—you know Devon, don’t you?” 

James wipes a hand over his face. “As well as anyone else, I reckon.”

“Didn’t you grow up there?” Lily can’t help herself from asking.  He pins her with a hard look, so quick before it shifts into blankness that she thinks she might have imagined it.

“I traveled,” he says, vaguely.

Behind him, Remus Lupin, who entered shortly after Moody, snorts.  He covers it up with a cough when James turns around to look at him.

Kingsley clears his throat. “Where d’you reckon you’d be the most useful, then?” 

For some reason, Lily knows what he’s going to say before he says it.  

She thinks for a moment it might just be some sort of uncategorized intuition about him, and then, fleetingly, that she just knows how well he likes to annoy her out of everyone here.  

And then she remembers her last mission in Cornwall, the one he was on as well.  She remembers the way they’d worked together, symbiotic and easy; the silent communication they developed after so long spent in some maybe-more-than-friendship limbo at Hogwarts.

She remembers the way he found her after a battle with the cell, his clothes half-burnt and his eyes wild.  She remembers the bandages across her stomach.  She remembers the way he looked at her, and she at him; the unfathomable urge to cover his mouth with hers, rationalized by the fact that she really didn’t want to get a lecture about her recklessness.  She remembers the way the muscles of his back felt under her palms.

Her face must be absolutely puce, she thinks with a shudder.  For fuck’s sake, she could camouflage herself in her hair.

When James turns back around, he isn’t exactly smiling, but his eyes are alight, like he’s holding back some master plan that the rest of the room would be lucky to hear.  He only looks at Lily for a half-second before turning to Kingsley.

Don’t you dare, she thinks frantically—if not only for her pride.  If not only for the fact that she’d kissed him and left Cornwall that same night in silence, too confused and overwhelmed by his softness in the wake of war, by the way she’d crumbled in the face of it.  

Who should be able to hold such multitudes inside them, to adapt so easily to the turn of the world? How long had he had such depth within him?

“Potter,” she warns, though she knows it’s steeped in futility.  For all that she might or might not know him, she does know one thing: James Potter loves a challenge.

“I’ve grown quite fond of Derbyshire,” he says, and he doesn’t even blink when she sucks in a loud, furious, ecstatic breath. “I think I’ll be quite useful there.”

[asleepinawell]

Book Recs

I was gonna do one of these at the end of the year, but I’ve somehow managed to read 26 books this year already (12 novellas, 14 novels), almost all featuring queer authors and/or characters so this is already a long list.

Note: There’s a few on here I was kind of meh about, but in most of those cases it was a ‘book might be good but it’s not for me so i’ll mention it to put it on people’s radar anyway’ type of thing. Insert the usual necessary tumblr disclaimer about all of this being only my opinion and your opinions are valid too etc etc.

In order of when I read them:

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir - Fantasy novella from the author of gideon the ninth that’s a twist on the classic princess trapped in a tower waiting for a prince story. Quite fun. (novella)

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht - Dark fantasy about revenge and magic. m/m couple but like I said it’s pretty dark and twisted all around so definitely not a happy queer romantic story. My opinion was interesting premise that could have been executed better and probably should have been a full novel to embellish on the world building potential. (novella)

A Memory Called Empire & A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine - Probably tied with murderbot as the best things I read this year. Scifi, f/f couple, wonderfully done exploration of what it means to fall in love with a culture that is destroying your own. More of the many queer anti-imperialist books that have come out recently and certainly some of the best. The second one is a direct continuation of the first. (2 novels)

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson - This is the third in the Baru Cormorant series (The Masquerade) and was my favorite so far. The second and third book were originally one book that got split I believe and the second book didn’t stand alone as well (though was still great), but the third book really made up for that. Dark fantasy world starring a queer woc whose country and culture is destroyed by the imperial forces of that world colonizing and assimilating them. She vows revenge and decides to work her way up within her enemy’s ranks to enact it from within and bring an empire to ruins. Really really fascinating study of so many different aspects of our own world and the systems which enable and allow bigotry and how bigoted and violent narratives are used to control minorities. This is definitely a darker series and I was particularly impressed with some of the commentary on the racism prevalent in non-intersectional feminism as depicted through a fantasy world. Can’t wait for the last one to come out! (3 novels, 1 forthcoming)

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells - There’s six of them--5 novella and a novel--and the first is All Systems Red. Told from the point of view of a self-aware droid/android that is rented out by a corporation to provide protection in a dystopian capitalist hellhole future that isn’t that unlike our current capitalist dystopia but is in space. Muderbot hacked the chip that controlled it and instead of going rogue just wants to be left alone to watch its favorite tv shows. Murderbot is painfully relatable and the books are both funny and poignant. Highly recommended. (5 novellas and a novel).

Winter’s Orbit - Everina Maxwell - This was a m/m romance novel with a scifi backdrop of royal intrigue. Generally I’m more into scifi with a queer relationship in the background than vice versa, so it wasn’t my favorite, BUT I think it was still well written and someone looking for more of the romance angle would enjoy it. Has all your favorite romance tropes in it, especially the yearning. (novel)

The Divine Cities - Robert Jackson Bennett - Three book series. I’m very conflicted about this one. Set in a fantasy world where an enslaved nation overthrew the country enslaving them and now rules over them. It’s a story of what happens after the triumphant victory and within that it’s also a murder mystery tied into the dying magic of the conquered nation. It also has a six foot something naked oily viking man fist fight a cthulhu in a frozen river. The second book was by far my favorite, mostly due to the main character being brilliant. My conflict comes from the fact I don’t feel like the story treated its women and queer characters well. Like it had really great characters but it didn’t do great by them overall. That and the third book didn’t live up to the first two. But still definitely worth a read, can’t stress enough how cool some of the world building was. (3 novels)

Into the Drowning Deep - Mira Grant - This might be the only one on here I disliked. It’s got a doomed boat voyage and creepy underwater terror and monsters and a super diverse cast of characters, but I just didn’t enjoy the writing style. While having a diverse cast is great, there were a lot of moments where it felt like characters were pausing to explain things about themselves that felt like a tumblr post rather than a normal conversation you might have while actively being hunted by monsters. I also bounced off all the characters. But a lot of people seem to have liked it so if you’re into horror and want a book with a f/f main couple then maybe you’ll enjoy it. (novel)

Dead Djinn Universe - P. Djèlí Clark - Around the early 1900′s, a man in Egypt discovers a way to access another world and bring Djinn and mysterious clockwork beings called Angels through. As a result, Egypt tells the British to get fucked and Cairo becomes one of the most powerful cities in the world. So Egypt, magic, djinn, a steampunk-ish vibe, oh and the main character is a butch queer woman who enjoys wearing dapper suits and looking fabulous while she investigates supernatural events. Her girlfriend is also mysterious and badass. And she has a cat. There’s three novella (one of which technically might be considered a short story) and then the first novel. You should absolutely read the novellas first (A Dead Djinn in Cairo, The Angel of Khan el-Khalili, The Haunting of Tram Car 015). Super fun and imaginative series. (3 novellas and a novel, more forthcoming)

River of Teeth & Taste of Marrow - Sarah Gailey - From the book description

“In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true. Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two. This was a terrible plan.”

Queer hippo riders!!!! Very much a western but with hippos. Main couple included a non-binary character. Loved the first one. The second one I was more meh about due to one of the characters I was supposed to like having obnoxious man pain that a woman had to take the brunt of the whole time. Also there were less hippos. But queer hippo riders! Definitely read the first one, and they’re both novellas so no reason not to read the second as well. (2 novellas)

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers - I may be the only person who hasn’t read the long way to a small angry planet at this point, but I did grab her new novella and I loved it. It made me want to go sit out in the woods and feel peaceful. The world it’s set in feels like a peaceful post-apocalypse...or diverted apocalypse maybe. Humans built robots and robots gained sentience, but instead of rebelling they just up and left and went into the wilderness with a promise that the humans wouldn’t follow them.The remaining human society reshaped itself into something new and peaceful. It’s the story of a monk who leaves their habitual monking duties to go be a tea monk and then later wanders into the wilderness and becomes the first human in ages to meet a robot. Very sad there’s no fan art yet. (novella, more forthcoming)

The March North - Graydon Saunders - This was such a weird book that I’m not sure how to explain it. The prose style is hard to get used to and I suspect a lot of people will bounce off it in the first chapter. There’s no third person pronouns used at all and important events get mentioned once in passing and if you blink you’ll miss them. Set on a world where magic is extremely common to the point that rivers sometimes run with blood or fire and the local weeds are something out of a horror movie and most of the world is run by powerful sorcerer dictators, one country banded together (with the help of a few powerful sorcerers who were tired of all the bullshit) to form a free country where powerful sorcerers wouldn’t rule and the small magics of every day folks could be combined to work together. The story revolves around a Captain of the military force on the border who one day has three very powerful sorcerers sent to them by the main government with the hint that just maybe there’s about to be a big invasion (there is) with the implication of take these guys and go deal with this. The world building is extremely complex and very cool...when you can actually understand what the fuck is going on. There is also a murder sheep named Eustace who breathes fire and eats just about everything and is a Very Good Boy and belongs to the most terrifying sorcerer in the world who appears as a little old grandma with knitting. It had one of the most epic badass and wonderfully grotesque battles I’ve ever read. But yeah, it is not what I would call easy reading. Opinions may vary wildly. I did also read the second one (A Succession of Bad Days) in the series which was easier to follow and had a lot more details about the world, but overall I was more meh about it despite some cool aspects. The chapters and chapters of the extreme details of building a house that made up half the novel just weren’t my thing. (novels).

The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson - In this world parallels universes exist and we’ve discovered how to travel between them, but the catch is you can only go to worlds where the ‘you’ there is already dead. This turns into an uncomfortable look at who would be the people most likely to have died on many worlds and how things like class and race would fit into that and what we would actually use this ability for (if you guessed stealing resources and the stock market you’d be correct). The main character is a queer woc who travels between worlds with the assistance of her handler (another queer woc) who she has the hots for. She accidentally stumbles on a whole lot of mess and conspiracy and gets swept up in that. Really enjoyed it. (novel)

Witchmark - C.L. Polk - Fantasy world reminiscent of Victorian England (I think?) where a young man with magical gifts runs away from his powerful family to avoid being exploited by them. He joins the army and fights in a war and comes home to try and live a quiet life as a doctor, but a murder pulls him into a larger mystery that upturns his life. Also he’s extremely gay and there’s a prevalent m/m romance. This one was a fun-but-not-mind-blowing one for me. (novel, 2 more in the series I haven’t read)

The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon - This was one of those that everyone loved but I couldn’t get into for some reason. I tried twice and only got about halfway through the second time. It’s got dragons and queer ladies and fantasy world and all the things I like, but I wasn’t that invested in the main story (which included the f/f couple) and was more interested in the smaller story about a woman trying to become a dragon rider. There are few things that beat out a lady and her dragon friend story for me and that was the storyline that felt neglected and took a different turn right when we got to the part I’d been waiting for. But, I know a lot of people whose reading opinions I respect who loved it, and if you like epic fantasy with dragons and queens and treachery and pirates and queer characters then I’d say you should definitely give it a try. (novel)

Bonus: I didn’t read these series this year, but if you haven’t read them yet, you should.

Imperial Radch (Ancillary Justice) - Ann Leckie - Spaceship AI stuck in a human body out for revenge for their former captain, but that summary does not come close to doing it justice. Another one examining imperialism and also gender and race.(3 novels)

Kushiel's Legacy Series - Jacqueline Carey - This is two series, six books total, and starts with Kushiel's Dart. Alternate universe Renaissance-y Europe in a fantastical world where sex isn't shameful and sex workers are respected and prized. Lots of political intrigue and mystery. A lot of BDSM and kinky stuff too (the main character is a sexual masochist, oh and also bi!). I first read this series when I was fifteen or sixteen and it definitely made a big impression on me. Same author also wrote the Santa Olivia series which I’d also recommend. (6 novels)

The Locked Tomb (Gideon the Ninth) - Tamsyn Muir - I mean, if you follow me, you know. If you don’t follow me you still probably know. I’d have felt remiss to have left them off though. Lesbian Necormancers in Space. Memes! Skeletons! Biceps! Go read them. (2 novels, 2 forthcoming, 1 short story)

Books On My To Read List:

Fireheart Tiger - Aliette de Bodard

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - Zen Cho

Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse

This Is How You Lose the TIme War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Ninefox Gambit - Yoon Ha Lee

Also, if anyone has any recs for scifi/fantasy books starring queer men (not necessarily having to do with a queer relationship) and written by queer men I’d love them. There’s a lot written by women, and some of them are great, but I’d love to read a story about queer men from their own perspective.

[reversecreek]

ziggy strutting up to me like this gif as i hold up a crucifix n say begone begone vile beast BEGONE from my vicinity i will NOT buy u a happy meal wretched little boy...... some live action rp to start this off..... and SCENE. takes my bow. his pinterest is here n his playlist is here.

* dylan minnette, cis male + he/him  | you know ziggy benson, right? they’re twenty-four, and they’ve lived in irving for, like, all of his life? well, their spotify wrapped says they listened to hand crushed by a mallet by 100 gecs like, a million times this year, which makes sense ‘cause they’ve got that whole glitching televisions impaled by remotes, nonchalantly texting the babes as a stove fire ravages your kitchen & cartoons turned up so loud it fries your eardrums thing going on. i just checked and their birthday is november 24th, so they’re a sagittarius, which is unsurprising, all things considered. ( nai, 24, gmt she/her  )

HISTORY;

from the second ziggy ws born he didnt stop screaming. within the first hours of his life he gave his father an ear splitting headache tht prompted him to say “that uncooked chicken’s fucking demonic” n joke abt popping “it” in the oven to roast. when this understandably received disgusted glances frm the nursing staff he ws all like “jeez alright alright i’m kiddin i’m kiddin can’t a guy have a joke around here?” n i feel like that sets up their dynamic so nice n sweetly <3 (sarcasm) (lips pursed)

frm day one he ws just honestly a rly hyperactive child. when he laughed he’d shriek it out at the absolute top of his lungs bc he’d just get this huge giddy surge of energy all the way to the very tips of his toes n it’d hit him like a shock from a fork in a plug socket. their parenting style ws rly just lazy tbh.... they didn’t have much time for disciplining him. ziggy’s mum wld halfheartedly be like “ziggy quiet now....” n then go bk to nuking whatever vegetables she’d defrosted until they tasted like dinosaur bones..... this wld not make any difference in ziggy’s behaviour

his father rly just took the stance that it ws ziggy’s mum’s job to discipline him or raise him in general which is. 🔪 please enter the 20th century sir.... get ur noggin sorted..... needless to say he wsn’t much involved in ziggy’s life n honestly generally jst didn’t like him. ziggy was a responsibility he didn’t want (accidental prregnancy) n in his literal words once said (blatantly while ziggy ws watching cartoons on the sofa) tht ziggy just “harshes my fucking vibe a lil bit”. 

he wound up leaving when ziggy was six ish.... ziggy watched thru a crack in the blinds as his mum tried to grab at his jacket to make him stay as he lugged out his suitcase..... she even tried to physically cling onto him so he cldn’t get in his ride bt the door wound up slamming n she sat on her knees watching the lights pull out the drive n even long after they were gone. ziggy didn’t rly kno what to do abt this (emotions hd never been smthn he particularly understood, his own or how to handle other people’s) so after watching her fr 5 minutes he went out n gently shook her shoulder n was like. mom come inside u look weird out here. FKGHSFHGSFHKGFHKSGSFGHK. this was him trying to show love <3

ziggy’s mum is like.... rly relationship dependent. she gets all her self worth n validation frm whtever man she’s dating.... so she went on this like.... wild rampage of jst. dating a very large string of men. they ranged frm dreadfully boring to downright awful n were always below her standards. ziggy quite literally hated. all of them. every last one. even one that tried to b nice to him by offering to help him do his math homework when he ws 13 (bc ziggy was struggling a lot w this) n in response ziggy loudly barked until the man gt scared n stumbled backwards into a dining chair on his way out of the room. KGHFHKSJHFJGSHKFG

while him n his mum hv a kind of strained situation (there’s a great deal of resentment from her end n kind of. blaming him fr “driving his father away” n it’s never spoken abt bt it’s very much Present in their relationship n honestly ziggy kind of resents her too fr bringing some of the men into their lives tht she did) there is. love there...... sometimes she’ll like. reach out to cup the back of his head n he’ll duck his head away n be like wtf are u doing checking me for lice? n she’ll jst smile like :)...... knowing that’s how he loves. KHSFGKJGHKSFGFHKGSHF. ugh we love men who know how to process their emotions yesssss king give us nothing <3

(abuse n violence tw) idk i won’t go into it too much bt even tho ziggy’s constantly like 🙄 when his mum shows him affection he wld quite literally. kill fr her n almost did one time.......... narrowly avoided getting charged w assault when one of her bfs was drunk n evil n he went into protective mode.... idk he. has gone thru a lot n seen a lot n so has his mum. they look after each other the best they kno how despite the negatives in their relationship.... it’s complex <3

literally got in trouble so. often. at school. he ws always hyperactive (undiagnosed adhd n also probably not helped by the fact he ws jst allowed to eat sm junk food w 459729457952 sugar percentage all hours of the day) bt when his dad left n like. dealing w acting out so severely at home where his mum’s bfs were concerned it rly escalated..... i jst think he ws like. literally a terror. probably got suspended so many times. maybe even was permanently expelled before he cld get his diploma honestly. set off a firework in school hallway. smthn absolutely reckless n stupid.

hs hd a bunch of jobs mostly in the service industry...... usually ends up getting fired.... worked at mcdonald’s fr a while n then one day he went in rly high n ate three cheeseburgers in front of a weeping child who hd ordered one.... promptly gt fired bt he ws like yo fuck this place i’m quitting n threw off his apron n was like who’s with me??? who’s joining the union??????? to the rest of the staff n they were all mostly like >_> <_< before security approached to forcibly remove him n he grabbed a cookie n crammed it into his mouth in rebellion mid frantic n frankly possessed escape.....

in terms of wht’s going on to this day w his living situation i honestly think he still lives w his mum. i can just see this. KHGFSKGHSFGKSFGH. in like. a ramshackle bungalow in delphinus heights.... having said tht she probably isn’t. there tht often nw she’s dating her latest man (jonas, somehow always sweaty no matter the weather, wears too many gold rings n smells like shoe cleaner) who owns a car dealership n thinks he’s a kingpin for it. still home sometimes tho.

PERSONALITY:

ziggy spends his days working shifts at an ice cream parlour (one he got fired from once bc he broke in high n ate sm ice cream he was lay on the floor in the bk pants unbuttoned stomach bulging sm calling himself garfield saying he had too much lasagna. they hired him bk tho bc he has a harem of middle aged women who lust after him n it brings customers....) or like. cruising parties...... setting off fireworks.... skateboarding...... breaking into abandoned buildings.... filming stupid jackass type tricks....... playing guitar hero...... getting drunk at the arcade..... sometimes busking fr cash in a tossed dwn hat (very badly) (thinks he’s sick at it however)........ or alternatively...... fucking chicks aha...... fuck.......... not exclusive to chicks tho just had to sound despicable bt :smirk: he’s bi Baby.... 

i won’t lie he’s kind of an asshole................ never rly was taught properly how to empathise with ppl so like he struggles w that....... sometimes he’ll say smthn tht’s genuinely just quite mean n doesn’t need to be said but he doesn’t rly realise it’s like bad. n he’s like. what’s the deal haha why are u mad...... 

fuckboy. genuinely jst. rly summarises it well. insatiable. sleeps around wildly. will say he’ll call u back n then will not call u back. lies like oh babe i’m moving to france tomorrow fuckkkkkkkkk sucks so bad that we can only have one night but let’s make it special yeah? tits? n then they’ll see him casually skating past them on the street a week later n be like well clearly he’s not in france. ziggy doesn’t care.

calls himself a “genius inventor” bc he once gutted a vintage analog television n made it into a fish tank. it literally leaked water a bit. still convinced he is a literal visionary never seen before never done again. he’s like i’m on the brink of greatness. i’m the next einstein.

has a bit of a god complex where he thinks he’s the sexiest person in any given room n it’s kind of funny bc like dylan minnette’s sexy to me bt tht isn’t a widespread opinion n ur being a bit bold ziggy...... regardless has confidence thru the roof tht isn’t rly deterred by anything or anyone.....

dyes his hair 49729572459752 colours every colour under the sun. sometimes all at once jst different patches. wears lots of tie dye tshirts n basketball shorts even tho he doesn’t play basketball. rly colourful sneakers. just lots of loud colours tbh. often wears a paper clip in his ear as an earring. pierced it himself. someone probably recorded him doing it fr his insta story. probably was drunk.

drives a vespa around tht is baby blue with pastel yellow polka dots. it has lots of tin cans attached to the back by string like on those cars when u just got married. he did not just get married. u can hear him arriving frm over a street away.

almost never pays fr anything bt is always like “yo it’s my treat” n then either dine n dashes or u have to pay

his idea of romance is nuking a hot pocket as breakfast in bed n then complaining he’s hungry n eating half

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

fuckboy antics: he’s insatiable. rabid. notorious. mayb they fkd n he didn’t call........ jst completely ghosted........ mayb they were genuinely into him n he honestly built up kind of false pretences abt them having a connection n then jst dipped..... cld  b good fr angst n drama <3 someone please egg his house he deserves it <3

high skl heathens: locals tht were equally chaotic in hs..... just picture him having this group of misfits tht were like so loud n always getting up to no good doing god knows what god knows where.... probably gt arrested together breaking into an old abandoned hospital one time........... rly just doing the absolute most at all times............. probably so loud........... drinking n smoking far too much.....

an attempted teenage relationship: i’m like. tentative to even put this one bc i just feel like ziggy wld be a shit bf. KJHGFSHGFHGSFHGFKGHFKSG. but. maybe it ended in drama.....i’d say this wld probably be a girl bc in hs he probably ws less open w his sexuality... maybe ziggy cheated on her or she cheated on him................ angst........ strife.... we love it we love it........ i crash my car into the bridge... i don’t care... i love it... sudden icona pop moment me stood on stage singing karaoke.... it’s just gone 7am as i write this so i apologise if this is losing any. coherency. smiles so sexy....

last adolescent plot i swear: i picture when ziggy was expelled he somehow amassed a large group to protest w signs outside the school fr him to be accepted back. it didn’t work. he threw a party when he received news he hadn’t got back in anyway. maybe ur muse was involved or helped organise this or was violently opposed.

enemies: ppl who just. don’t like ziggy bc like honestly that’s so fair n valid. KJHGFKGHKSFGHSGKHSFHG..... mayb he like. exploded their mailbox one time when they were younger. mayb he skated over their toes. mayb he fucked their bitch aha fuck................. (joking btw) (don’t condone misogyny) (hashtag feminism). cld be fun to play around w

fwb: probably hs a few of these......... mayb they’re cool w things being no strings attached n lax n at ease w ziggy being the mess tht he is in general..... mayb they want more bt ziggy cannot provide...... mayb they literally don’t get on at all n this is their only mutual ground n they keep coming bk to each other.... :smirk:..... whatever u Farncy....

maybe ziggy’s mum dated ur muse’s dad at one point???? we can discuss this if u think it fits..... cld be fun to play around w............

coworkers: past or present r fun..... mayb they were like WTFFF is this guy fking ONNN at a past job (he’s had a few in the food service industry so pretty open in tht area)... mayb they work w him at the ice cream parlour now..... cn discuss the dynamic probably wld be dependent on the muse involved fr like. how he’d act n stuff.... :yum:

[stone-man-warrior]

June 13, 2020: 2:05 pm:

Neighborhood Assessment: A ten minute view while standing on my front walkway was largely unremarkable. It’s overcast and cool outside. There is no wind, no rain. It’s almost silent. Distant freeway traffic can be gleaned from the silence. A goat made goat sounds at Monroe’s terror cell. A big rig air-horn sounded twice with two short tones from somewhere nearby to the south, and sounded as if it was neither on Jackpine or Russell road, but somehow seemed as if the big rig was in the forest area behind Myers terror cell. The horn sound was accompanied by the sound of a truck moving through two gears to a stop. There is nothing to see from my front walkway other than trees, grass, my out buildings and my old broken car projects that are never going to happen because of the terror take-over. From my front walkway I can see the Chapman driveway, and some outbuildings there, and the Monroe Offensive Surveillance Travel Trailer is ever present and visible from my front walkway. Other than that, nothing but trees and forest. I have been noticing a slight increase in small bird diversity, but not an increase in number of small birds in the area. I am seeing a few species of small birds that I don’t recognize as being a local variety There are still no small forest critters other than grey squirrels. ===========================

I said some things yesterday about the offshore lumber mill, and how the lumber may have played a role in the housing of terror soldiers in Southern California in the 1980′s. I want explore that some more. The lumber mill offshore, has been there longer than I know. I learned of it in around 1985 when the lumber we were getting at the job-site had some Asian signature stamps printed on the lumber. Asian people use a wood block printing method to sign their name, it’s an Asian alphabet symbol that is unique to the person who made the stamp. Like a rubber stamp that you keep with you for signing. Every once in while, on a piece of lumber, there was one with a few of those Asian signature stamps randomly stamped onto the wood. Sometimes there were two or three different symbols, other times it was just one symbol on a two-by-four in the stack of new lumber that had been delivered to the job-site. I cut a piece of two-by-four that had one of those symbols on it, and took it to Ventura Blvd where I new of a man who was Asian, and might know what the stamps were about. The man was shocked, excited, and thanked me for bringing that into his shop. I did not understand what he was saying it meant, other than the explanation of the signature, and that it’s someone’s name, and some other information, all contained in small, one-inch by one and one-half inch stamp, or two, or three. I left the piece of two-by four with the man on Ventura. Later, more information about slaves on a boat invented the OSB Omnidimesional Structural Board product, and that is the stuff we were going to be using on the job-site instead of plywood. The carpenters hated the OSB at first, but we got used to it, and it became what it is, a staple in the construction of buildings. Later, the OSB was incorporated into the manufactured truss joisting products, and served as the web between cords... that’s all TMI, but is exemplary of the importance of a product that was developed by slaves on a boat. “The guys on the boat invented this stuff, we are going to use it instead of plywood, and see how it holds up.” Said the foreman. So, in 1980, USA had 20% interest rates to borrow from a bank to buy a house. It was a set-up. Business was stymied. The same way Corona Virus Lockdown is a set-up. People are stymied. Then, Reagan shows up, and suddenly the interest rates are suitable to borrow money again, and a (planned) housing boom happened in California. With Corona Virus, George Floyd murder created another kind of “Boom”, (planned) demonstrations, people all pissed off having been on “lockdown” for three months. I am asking that you see the #SAGcoup pattern, and tactic they use. It repeats. “Lock things up, then turn it all loose explosively” is the tactic.

So the boats making cheap lumber offshore with logs from US West Coast Forests in the years preceding and through the 1980 Ronald Reagan Housing Boom, was a set-up. The logs were going offshore. The lumber mills, in a housing boom, had to compete for access to logs. Lumber mills fell. They closed during a high demand time for the products they make. That was what  the set-up was for, control of the lumber, all of the lumber. With fewer lumber mills around, the lumber industry is much easier to take-over. I have done absolutely zero research about this, it’s all from memory, so, if there are interested people who look at ways the terror takes over, the Reagan Housing Boom combined with the offshore slave lumber mills, to gain control of the entire US Lumber industry, while simultaneously building housing for the Ronald Reagan Commemorative Canadian Terror Army, is a good place to find some truth. The work necessary for that, was orchestrated by shill SAG Governors in Washington State, Oregon, and California, at minimum. That sudden reduction in interest rates from 20% is going to show the extent that the banking industries had been hijacked by the early 1980′s. That kind of “Lock it up, then release the Kraken” idea is one that repeats. It provides a “Known Control Point” when planned ahead of time. Puts a handle on an unwieldy, wild, thing, and does so, at a time of perceived chaos, SAG Style. There was no person by the name of George Floyd. The whole thing was/is staged to produce a time when the people who had been couped up for half of the year, were already about to pop like a ripe zit. The demonstrations that followed, came in the midst of lockdown, for a disease that does not exist. All planned, so the the killing of many thousands of people could take place in the resulting chaos at the demonstrations. The people who arrange the demonstrations provide the enticing bait for the ones who are locked up, and want to get outside anyway they can, they are the intended Victims. News Media is the boat the demonstrator event planners are riding on, and they throw the bait with use of Twitter, to many hundreds of thousands of people in a geographic area, where the police were already hijacked by SAG. The result is a mass taking of Victims, in the midst of live demonstrations and chaos, but offscreen. The show stays front and center, drawing in ever more Victims. The actual methods of kill, are varied and many within the chaos. Capture, torture, farm of assets and personal information, gain the cellular telephone of the Victim where the contact list is at, and then kill, and replace with suitable look-a-like impostor citizens from Canada, with help from the State Police who control the DMV, and with the blessings of the State Governor SAG Shills, US Congress, and US President. California Housing Boom, Ronald Reagan, 1981 helped to make the events taking place today, happen, by providing housing for the Canadian terror army, free of charge. End terror report: 3:15 pm.

[thekrazykeke]

You’re Perfect

Fandom(s): Attack on Titan, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Batman: the Animated series, Bleach, Black Butler, DragonFable, Dragon Ball Z, Fruits Basket, Fullmetal Alchemist, Hellsing, John Wick, Naruto, Ouran Highschool, Persona 5, SkipBeat!, Suicide Squad, Telltale the Walking Dead, Tokyo Ghoul, Vampire Knight, and more!

Relationship(s): TBD.

Rating: K+ through MA.

Summary: What would you do if had the ability to ignore the boundary between reality and fiction? To be with your ideal person who only exists in anime, manga, movies, and games, etc.? With the power to go wherever you want to, would you stay in a fantastical world or return to reality?

Warning(s): Will be tagged appropriately per chapter and fandom, etc. etc. 

Taglist: Click here to be added.

Tagging: @misspooh​ @ginghampearlsnsweettea @naomithenerdgirl @wojtud-widvut-fecret​ @indigorose049​ @queenofhearts579 @fallinoutoforbit @ashthebootyholetickler​ @one-twisted-bee​ @stichpatched

Those with the strikethrough in their name, I’ll be sending the link through to your DMs, so please leave it open. I’d like to say that the listed fandoms is a cursory overview, and is prone to change. If you have something you’d like me to write about, a fandom and anime you want me to watch, don’t hesitate to tell me. I intend this to be a long running thing for all of us nerds to enjoy together. With that said, this is only the prologue and I hope to improve the chapter length and such from here onwards. 

Stay so stay tuned, hit that like button, reblog, comment, whatever you prefer. Ciao~

~

Prologue

A Normal Day Turned...?

December 11, 20XX RealityLux, Inc. 5:36 P.M.

It never stopped being so jarring.

Being outside, or even, just surrounded by people, no, by strangers, all hustling and bustling, either on their way to some type of appointment, or work, or a friend/family member’s house, or, or something... Everyone always seemed to have a set destination in mind, and they were determined to get there.

Sometimes you found yourself unwillingly swept up in the crowd, with the vibe, the urge, to actually go along with the flow, curious to see where that feeling would take you.

The outcome for occasionally submitting to these whimsical flights of fancy led to awesome destinations, such as a brand new internet cafe that you’d never heard of but quickly fell in love with because of the decor and ambiance, or the park that boasted some of the best up-and-coming local urban artists, and even the black owned businesses which sold your prefered clothing style at a reasonable price.

During days like those, it felt as if you truly had the best of luck.

Well, honestly, the past several years felt like that. 

Unluckily for you, you’d grown up into and been around long enough to witness the travesty and endless tragedies that plagued this crooked nation due to warmonger presidents like Bush. Cried with overwhelming joy when President Obama was elected, and cried again when his final term ended. 

You’d wept furious tears over the fact that Hilary had not been elected, even though she was really just more of the same, and could not sleep peacefully during the four years that President Orange was in the White House. You’d lived through terror and injustice and bigotry. Or, well, correction, people stopped pretending to care whether or not they were labeled as racists and Neo Nazis. You learned to keep your head down even more during that time, to watch out for people not just at night time, but also during the day. 

America has always been a terrible country instilled with hypocrites to the extreme but those four years had aged you well beyond your years. After Trump’s impeachment, although his Vice President tried to step up to the plate, it would seem that a higher power decided to have mercy.

Michelle Obama decided to run for President, and she won.

During her time in the White House, many things, both gradually and quickly, came to pass. Things that were long overdue, such as the rich and elitist members of society paying more on taxes, minimum wage being increased, pedophiles and rapists getting the maximum sentences, college tuition was lowered to an affordable price or free altogether, increased salary for women, etc. There just isn’t any possible way that Michelle would be able to undo the ugliness and rot that infected America for so many years.  You still hated this country, but with her in charge, you learned to hate it just a little less. 

Pop!

With a blink, you found yourself smiling on autopilot. Two of your coworkers, Jessica and Kate, were laughing and giggling as they poured themselves some bubbly champagne before going around the room.

“Aaaand youuu,” The bubbles are floating to the top, the scent of the champagne wafting upwards to your nose, “Get the rest because you clinched that deal with Bandai.” Kate praised, flashing her bleached white toothed smile in your direction. “Go, [Your Last Name]! Woo!”

“Ohh, we’re cheering now! Woo-wooo!!” Jessica joined in, raising her free hand in an enthusiastic wave. 

Raising the glass in a faint salute, “Mm, c’mon, guys.” You took a sip of your drink. “This was a team effort.” Actually it wasn’t, but it sounded better to say it that way.

“Don’t be so modest, [Your Last Name].” One of the few random guys at the party piped up. “C’mon, give us a speech!”

Before you knew it, several more people had took up the call. 

“Speech! Speech! Speech!”

Closing your eyes briefly, you inhale and then exhale. Raising your glass, you smiled a bit wider, and waited until they settled down. “It’s been an honor to work with you all for so many years. I hope to be working with you for many more years to come.Thank you.” 

Short, sweet and to the point.

It gained a few good natured groans and people wanting to hear more, but they were quickly distracted by the caterers who brought in food and more wine and champagne. That was the perfect opportunity for you to sneak off, claiming that you were going to use the bathroom, placing the flute of half drunk alcohol on the nearest table while on the way out the door. 

As soon as you were in the hallway, away from your colleagues, the (fake) smile that’s been plastered on your face all day fell off. You walked as quickly as possible with the four inch heels you’re wearing, reaching a flight of stairs and held onto the railing as hustled down them. 

There’s a smile is on your face again as you take that last step, and this time, it’s genuine, because of the man holding his hand out to you so gallantly. You took his hand with a little laugh, accepting the small bouquet that he offered with his free hand. 

“Cinderella rushing off from her ball before it’s even midnight. Classic, I love it.” He winked. You rolled your eyes and whacked him on the arm lightly. “Oh! Ow.” Feigning injury, he clutched at the ‘hurting’ part. “Violent. I guess you’re not Cinderella but that kick ass girl from Ella Enchanted.” 

“Shut up. You’re so ridiculous, Mr. Hunt.” Shaking your head, you pretended to be upset, looking away with a huff. Only to really huff with annoyance when your ear is flicked. “Eli, stop~”

“That’s right, you better call me by my first name. ‘Mr. Hunt’ is my father, as you well know, little girl.” Eli grabbed you by both your hands, tugging you ever closer. 

And closer. 

Close enough that you catch a whiff of his cologne that he’s wearing and it smells expensive, woodsy. 

Perfect.

“Eli, you found her!” 

The moment is broken. 

You jerked your hands free and smile automatically as another woman came running up to you and Eli, holding onto a wrapped, square box. “Kymbrea, hey!” You open your arms and laugh slightly as she handed off the package to Eli before wrapping her arms around you in a hug. After a few minutes, you patted her on the back to signal her to let go and she did, accepting the package back again, before holding it out to you.

“Congrats on getting that deal with Bandai. Knew you could do it. So proud of you, best friend!” Kymbrea happily proclaimed. “C’mon, open it, open it, open it.” With a needling voice, she gently cajoled you.

“Kym, hey, baby, that’s enough.” With a slight laugh, Eli tugged her out of your space. A pang went through your heart and the smile on your face felt a little brittle. Neither of them seemed to notice, thank god. “I’ll take this wild woman off your hands.” As he glanced at you, smiling as if nothing was amiss, as if he hadn’t been... Hell, you didn’t even know anymore. Maybe it’s all in your head? With an awkward nod and smile, that he accepted without issue, he wrapped his arm around her waist, leading her up the stairs, “We’ll see you later, [Your Name].”

You watched them go upstairs for a minute or two, feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed and dismissed. Swallowing the lump in your throat, hands still full with the gifts, you instead push those unnecessary feelings to the side.

Walking out the lobby to the front entrance, where the valet already has your car pulled up and ready for you, key dangling from his hand. You ignore his curious, slightly concerned stare, tossing the bouquet inside and on the backseat, the wrapped package getting only slightly better treatment. 

Snagging the car key, you hand him a tip and then go around to the driver’s side, climbed in and then closed the door after you. Adjusting the heat in the car and the mirrors, you put the key in the ignition, made sure no one was behind you before taking off. 

The further and further away you get from the rented out hotel, the less the feeling in your chest aches. It’s something you don’t take much stock in, you can’t afford to. For awhile, you drive around, only to eventually come to your favorite market.

It was getting dark, so you decided to do a quick in ‘I’m feeling sorry for myself’ and out run. So chocolate, poptarts, bottles of Lipton tea, the usual. All in all, less than fifteen minutes and then you were driving to your apartment. Seeing it from a distance still took your breath away. 

You’d done this, this was your life, after all this time, you’d achieved that which seemed unachievable. 

Living at the top, finally. It didn’t matter that it felt a little like a hollow victory.

After having a small conversation with the doorman, politely declining his help with your groceries and the two gifts you’d received. Your neighbor, some white guy you didn’t know the name of, didn’t allow you to refuse, citing reasons for why it wouldn’t be decent to let you suffer this alone, and eventually you agreed if only to get to him to stop; together, you and he caught the elevator for the top floor where your apartment is. Letting yourself in first, you told him thanks for the help, and he smiled, lingering. You handed him whatever was left in your wallet, a generous amount and still he lingered. It was starting to be uncomfortable so you slammed the door in his face, locking it shut quickly. quickly kicking off your heels and slipping on your flip flops. 

Tossing the flowers into the trash, you began to put away most of the groceries, leaving only a couple boxes of poptarts and a case of tea out. The sound of running water is loud in the apartment, but familiar. Cleaning out a mug, you pour the bottled tea inside, along with a few ice cubes, grabbing the matching saucer. 

Walking into the living room, you turned on the TV, placing the mug of tea on the coffee table side the couch. Reaching into your back pocket of your pants, you pull out your cell phone, also putting it on the coffee table after putting it on ‘read’. 

Much more comfortable.

Sitting on the couch with your feet tucked neatly in criss-cross applesauce style, leaning back against the pillow, you grabbed the PS4 controller, pressing the power button and quickly choosing the game that you’d digitally downloaded. Thankfully, it’s fully downloaded and updated, ready to play. 

For hours, you lose yourself in the combat, grunting with dissatisfaction when your on screen character is overwhelmed, or cheering with triumph when you finally beat a mini boss or passed a quest. 

Only once your fingers started to cramp and you couldn’t ignore the urge to drink the tea, did you press pause. Sipping at your tea, you flexed your fingers, pressing the button on your cellphone and it lit up, showing off your message from Kymbrea which read simply ‘U play it yet?’ and inadvertently, you gaze drifted to the package sitting by your front door, which you’d dropped carelessly. 

Feeling guilty, you huff out a sigh. 

Getting up again, lightly tossing the controller back onto the couch, you walk over the package, picking it up and returning to your original spot. Carefully peeling off the wrapper, you reveal a totally pitch black box except for the bright red logo XR on it. 

Raising an eyebrow, you opened the box and pull out a VR headset, a tiny controller, and instructions. Shaking the box, wondering if that’s it, out fluttered a piece of paper in pretty, delicate cursive, ‘I’ve already uploaded everything I knew you’d like. Happy early Christmas! xo, K.’

Shrugging, you sighed and completely decided to let what happened earlier go. Kymbrea had done nothing wrong, she is your best friend. If anything, you’re the problem. With that little (depressing) pep talk finished, you fired off a text, telling her thanks and that you were checking out her gift now. Once that’s finished, you set up the VR headset, all the cables and cords, and then put the headset on after making sure everything is up to date. 

After some labels and companies that you didn’t know about and you assumed were associated with the game popped up in front of your vision, after that, that’s when things got a bit weird. There’s a black woman, who looks terribly, terribly familiar, walking straight towards you. Before she gets too close, she stops and tilts her head in that same weird mannerism that you know, but--

/Welcome to HTC Vive, the virtual reality which caters to all your needs. Before we can move on to the first chapter of the game, we’ll have to go through the registration to make sure everything is in order. Is that okay?/

Resisting the urge to groan out loud by Kymbrea’s utter cheesiness, yet also grudgingly appreciating the gesture, you decide to fight through the embarrassment because the AI looks so familiar to you because she was created, designed, whatever the term, to look exactly like you.

Once you finish up registration, verifying that yes, you’re over 18, and yes, you’re over 21, you don’t mind violence or gore, you know to take breaks and be careful of flashing lights, etc.

/So, the initial set up is complete. Some chapters will be better established with voice recognition, but can be played without. Do you wish to install this software?/

Literally going to kill Kymbrea, just shove a pillow over her face and smother her to death. Unwittingly, you groaned in sheer torture, before saying yes, feeling your skin heat with embarrassment. 

/Understood. Voice recognition approved./ 

The AI’s voice changed to suit yours and whoa, that was kind of freaky but also pretty awesome? 

Whatever, you’d think seriously about it later. 

/We’re about to start your journey. Please make sure that you’ve done everything you needed to do beforehand because this chapter will be shorter or longer to suit your needs./

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, come on. Once you answered the last minute questions, such as what you wanted to be called, your preference for your partners (male/female or otherwise), and other 18+ questions that you refused to admit got you hot under the collar, as soon as you hit the ‘Accept’ button, that’s when things really, truly honestly got weird. 

Technicolors burst across your vision. The AI lady took steps towards you and she wasn’t stopping. You were freaked the fuck out something terrible, cussing up a storm and as you reached up, about to pull the headset off, figuring this had to be some kind of mcfucking joke or jumpscare or something, and then her hand is touching yours and that shouldn’t be possible at all.You open your mouth to scream but nothing comes out, or you don’t think it does? 

You hear static and your vision turns black.

                                »»————-　　————-««

Stay tuned for the next update of You’re Perfect! You wake up in the bed of........?

[ttime42]

2018 Fic Roundup

This is a list of fics (in no particular order) I read last year. Many of these I finished. Some of them I started and didn't finish because it turned out they weren't for me. Others are rereads. Thanks to all the wonderful authors who fill fandom with life.

Watson's Folly by Diana Williams

John Watson, the new Earl of Saughton, is madly in love with the beautiful Mary Morstan. But he has returned from the Peninsular War to find his family on the brink of ruin and his ancestral home mortgaged to the hilt. He has little choice when he is introduced to Mycroft Holmes, a civil servant of apparently unlimited wealth and no social ambitions for himself - but with his eyes firmly fixed on a suitable match for his only brother, the unorthodox and irascible Omega Sherlock Holmes. Can John forget the woman he loved and find happiness with a man so very different from his lost love?

To the Sticking Place by blueink3

Renowned Shakespearean actor Sherlock Holmes has finally burned all of his bridges in the theatre industry save for his constant director, Greg Lestrade. John Watson has made a name for himself in the musical theatre circuit, but age and injury are working against him. Can they reinvent themselves for an all-male Macbeth without killing one another? 

The Yellow Poppies by SilentAuror

Sherlock is threatened and assaulted in the hospital immediately after having been shot in the heart, first by Mary, then by Magnussen. As he recovers at Baker Street with John and plans the attack on Appledore with Mycroft, he fights to work through the trauma caused by these two visits. Set during His Last Vow.

The Vapor Variant by 88thParallel

They stood face to face in the middle of a clearing. The dim light of the moon barely allowed Sherlock to see the glassy terror in John’s eyes and the sweat that glistened off his forehead. His nose was bleeding again, blood dripping in a slow stream from his right nostril.

They were both gasping for air, John’s eyes locked on Sherlock’s. There was no recognition there, just wild animal fear.

Time stood still for an eternal few seconds, and Sherlock took a shaky breath. “John—”  

Spell broken, John spun and bolted back into the woods.

Still heaving for air, Sherlock took off after him.

The Sock Index by distantstarlight

John and Sherlock live at 221 B Baker Street. Everything is back to normal with the long-time friends....or is it? 

The Shop Boy by EventHorizon

Sometimes, taking care of Sherlock had its benefits...

The School Boy by EventHorizon

As Mycroft and Lestrade pursue their own relationship, Sherlock learns the meaning of friendship with the new boy in his school, John Watson.

The Science of Musicality by circ_bamboo

Classical musician AU: Sherlock is a professional solo violinist, and John is his new accompanist collaborator. They've got a recital in three months, and someone doesn't want them to do it.

The Riven Crown by The_Kingmaker

‘We may have won the battle, but I fear the war with winter is just beginning.’

The aftermath of war is no laughing matter. Those who died must be honoured, those who are wounded must be healed, and those who remain need food and clothing, peace and sanctuary. With Thorin's life hanging in the balance, it is up to Bilbo and the rest of the Company to rule the rag-tag remnants of Erebor in his place.

Then there is the matter of the gold...

Can Bilbo save both king and kingdom, or is Erebor destined to fall deeper into ruin?

The Men Who Talked Between the Words by Odamaki (locked to Ao3)

John expected to be a father some day; he expected to have the house, and the wife and the nice suburban job. Sherlock never expected to have children, in part because he never expected to make it past 30. As it turns out, you don't get a choice. Crammed into Baker Street with a baby, John struggles with single-parenthood and his own fears, while Sherlock treads the fine line between doing too little and saying too much.

The Guarded Secret by mycapeisplaid

After his war injury, John feels broken, small, and useless.  On a whim, he takes a position as a security guard of sorts at the gorgeous Holmes Hall in Yorkshire.  As it turns out, he is not as broken, small, or useless as he thinks.  A story of beauty and blossom, murder and mystery, loss and love. 

The Clash of Storm and Sea by QuinnAnderson

Music School AU. The first time John heard Sherlock play, he knew he was done for. Johnlock.

The Burning Heart by May_Shepard

When Sherlock dies, John Watson feels like his life is over too. He’s completely shut down, until Mark Morstan, a new nurse at John’s medical clinic, catches his attention, and helps him uncover the long buried truth of his attraction to men.

Although he’s certain he’ll never get over Sherlock, John plans to move on, and build a new life with Mark, unaware that Sherlock is not quite as dead as he appears, and that Mark is hiding secrets of his own.

The Bluest of Blue by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John

John Watson's 10th season as a Denali National Park Ranger was shaping up to look like all the years before.

Until a special team from Europe was flown into the Park for a summer-long wolf-tracking research project, and the head of that research team was wearing a perfectly tailored suit.

Gimme Shelter by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John

All John Watson wants is the feeling of a freshly waxed surfboard under his feet and the hot California sun baking down onto his back. To finally go pro in the newly formed world of professional surfing and leave the dark memories of his past behind him as he rips across the face of a towering blue barrel. To lounge beside the beach bonfire every evening with an ice cold beer tucked into the cool sand beside him and listen to Pink Floyd and the Doors while the saltwater dries in his sun bleached hair.

That's all he wants, that is, until the hot young phenom taking Oahu and the Hawaiian shores by storm steps up next to him in the sand in the second round of the 1976 International Surf Competition.

A Further Sea by i_ship_an_armada and ShinySherlock (locked to Ao3)

Here be a tale of adventure for both body and soul, but beware if ye be not of stout heart, for this be piratelock, ya savvy? Luckless ship's surgeon John Watson takes a chance, and finds himself eye to eye with The Ghost, the scourge of the seven seas and a definite thorn in the side of the blaggard, James Moriarty. But when John finds there's more to this most cunning pirate than be meetin' the eye, he has to choose--is it a pirate's life for him?

The Bells of King’s College by SilentAuror

It's only been two weeks since Eurus Holmes disrupted their lives when Mycroft sends John and Sherlock to Cambridge to pose as an engaged couple at a wedding show in the hopes of solving six unsolved deaths...

Summit Fever by J_Baillier

After graduating from medical school, John Watson followed his heart to the Himalayas. Ten years later, he's a haunted cynic working for his ex-lover's trekking and mountaineering company. Will leading an expedition to Annapurna I—the most lethal of all the world's highest mountains—shake John out of his reverie, and who is the mystery client added to the group at the last minute?

Share the Stars with You by EventHorizon

Set in Victorian times, we find Mycroft as a sedentary man of wealth and power and Greg as an explorer, a true man of action.  Given their opposite natures, could it be these two might actually achieve the one thing neither has ever thought possible - finding someone to love?

School for Scandal by rubberbird

Sherlock lusts from afar. John tries to fool himself.

Saving Sherlock Holmes by earlgreytea68

Sherlock Holmes, schoolboy. Yeah, that basically sums it up.

Performance in a Leading Role by Mad_Lori

Sherlock Holmes is an Oscar winner in the midst of a career slump. John Watson is an Everyman actor trapped in the rom-com ghetto. When they are cast as a gay couple in a new independent drama, will they surprise each other? Will their on-screen romance make its way into the real world?

Paradigm Shift by distantstarlight

Sherlock Holmes is the world's only consulting detective. He's also a virgin, and has staunchly remained that way. One night he's on a case like normal but he sees someone who after a single glance turns everything Sherlock thought he knew about himself completely around. Enter one John Watson, doctor, soldier....stripper?

In the Still of the Night by SilentAuror

As locals on the Northeastern coast begin to report UFO sightings, life at Baker Street becomes significantly awkward as John brings up his desire for more than friendship and Sherlock refuses him. They embark on the investigation from the confines of the tiny cottage Mycroft has rented for them, attempting to navigate both the clues of the case as well as their own inability to communicate...

In Search of a Word: A Symphony of First Times by queenfanfiction

There is a new concertmaster at the London Symphony, and John Watson is starting to fall a little bit in love with both the music and the man making it.

How Long? by TheBritishBourbon

Sherlock never got to jump off the roof of St. Barts, he never got the chance. Sherlock was abducted and held for 5 years, but now he has escaped. What awaits him as he returns to reality?

Every Star in the Sky Knows Your Name by Jaune_Chat

Mal's latest pair of passengers slowly reveals they have more of a connection to the crew than anyone would have thought, when Simon discovers that Sherlock and his sister had been in the same government program over a decade and a half apart. Sherlock's friend John, his rescuer and keeper, tells the crew the story of living a life on the run, something that is both less and more familiar than anyone expects.

Enigma by khorazir

It’s the autumn of 1941, war is raging in Europe, German U-boats are raiding Allied convoys in the Atlantic, the Luftwaffe is bombing English cities, and the cryptographers at Bletchley Park are working feverishly to decode their enemies' encrypted communications. One should consider this challenge and distraction enough for capricious codebreaker Sherlock Holmes. But the true enigmas are yet waiting to be deciphered: an unbreakable code, a strange murder, and the arrival of Surgeon Captain John H. Watson of the Royal Navy.

Electric Pink Hand Grenade by BeautifulFiction

"If Sherlock's brain is a hard drive, then these attacks are an electro-magnetic pulse." Sherlock Holmes does not do anything by half, not even a migraine. It falls to John to witness one of the greatest minds he has ever known tear itself apart, and he must do his best to help Sherlock pick up the pieces.

Butterbeer by green_violin_bow

One of very few students left at Hogwarts over the Christmas holiday, final-year Slytherin student Mycroft Holmes finds himself thrown together with Gryffindor Quidditch team captain Greg Lestrade. An unlikely friendship, but one that blossoms in the huge, mostly-empty castle.

Boyfriend Material by PoppyAlexander

Boston Brawlers' team captain John Watson longs for two things: a championship before he retires, and a boyfriend. Assigned to room with goaltender Sherlock Holmes--known around the league as both a genius and a "weird dude"--on Brawlers' roadtrips, John discovers the things they have in common that lead to an easy friendship and a convenient arrangement.

Slow-burn, adversaries-to-friends-to-lovers, romantic comedy.

Alternate Universe - Sports/Ice Hockey

Babylon by BeautifulFiction_FMA

Two years after retrieving his brother's body from the Gate of Truth Edward Elric is still paying the price. Will his debt ever be repaid, or will it finally cost him everything? (Originally published 2007 on fanfiction.net and livejournal)

An improbable love by slowroad

Sherlock is a famous violinist who is going through a bit of a slump. He's lonely and miserable. It has been three years since John was invalided home from Afghanistan. He's slowly getting his life together, but he's lonelier than he's ever been. And then, the the two of them meet… 

Albion and the Woodsman by Glenmore

Post Series 3. Sherlock and John are devastated after Mary Morstan makes her final moves. Sherlock relapses at the crack house, John walks around the world ...and a lot happens in between. Parentlock, in the good way.

A Hundred Crimson Sols by elldotsee

Will Holmes is a chemical researcher recognized widely for his contributions to the new Mars exploration program. Thanks to his ground-breaking developments, the IMMC (International Mars Mission Corporation) is one step closer to Martian colonization. Will and his team of scientists are headed out on the first of three manned missions before the first group of settlers arrive. Three days before launch, one of the crew has to be replaced. Will panics because...new people. The replacement is of course one John Watson, biomedical engineer and space hottie who was pretty sure he had retired from actual space exploration and was now content to work in the nice, quiet research lab.

Can the crew survive this TOTALLY ROUTINE trip? Will they be able to endure each other for the looooooong trip in close quarters?

{SPOILER: Of course not. That would be boring.}

Guarantee there will be drama. And explosions. And Will is gonna do something cocky and stupid. Really good chance for some zero-gravity boinking (bet ya didn't even know you needed that in your life).

Gonna be a wild ride... prepare for blast off.

A Fold in the Universe by darkest_bird

Alpha Sherlock and Omega John are in a relationship. Prime Sherlock and Prime John are not. So what happens when a freak fold in the universe switches one John for the other?

[mattyslittleworld]

Snowbirds & Townies

1:42 am / Tick Tock Diner 34th & 8th Ave New York City. I don’t know what keeps bringing me back here. I was in Hoboken and grabbed my skateboard and hopped the path into the 9th street station in Manhattan. As soon as I got above ground it was snowing. Blizzard shit. I skated in the snow over to Union Square to see the punks but it was ghost. So from there I got lost in my headphones and skated all the way up 20 streets to 34th. The most free I’ve felt in awhile. I want to be so far from music. So far from anything and anybody I’ve ever known. It felt like I was a different person. Music isolates me, especially now, and it leaves me depressed and alone. During these dark lows I would stay at Bepa’s and talk to him in the kitchen over coffee and then hop the train to the ferry - into manhattan and get lost in a fake identity. Be whoever I want. Start over just for a little. But here I am, again. At the same diner that I lived above before I started touring heavy as a kid. Right before I took my first swing. The same closet sized room I’d leave late night and meet all my friends and just run wild in the city spray painting, skating, and terrorizing. But secretly deep down, hurting. Wanting something more. Edge of offing myself. Wanting companionship. Wanting love. Wanting to get the fuck out. Wanting everything I have now - and will have. I’m back here only difference is I worked with Cage. I sang for Shai Hulud, I’ve gained the respect and shared the stage with everyone I looked up to, I toured 14 countries, I worked with every top respectable rapper from the east coast, I’ve sold out shows, I released the album I wrote here, I did a song and video with Danny Clinch, I did a song with Jesse Malin, I played with HR from Bad Brains, ive played a sold out show at The Stone Pony (without an album), ive played a sold out show at The Bowery Ballroom, ive sang Clash songs with Brian Fallon and Craig from The Hold Steady  - I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do sitting in that room. I fell in love then out of love then back in love with my high school crush. I’ve been heart broken. Shooting the music video with Danny Clinch was intense for me. He’s become my bro and I’m mad grateful for his friendship, but damn was that wild. I was on a 3 day run. I hung out with a beautiful lady and passed out in my jeans after she stuffed my face with orange soda and candy and made me watch Ryan Gosling fuck a doll. I stayed up till like 5 am. Woke up in my clothes at like 7 am two hours later. Had the video shoot at noon and I was mad far from my house. Woke up shot up north with my Dunkin and picked up Rob. SOOOOO TIRED and sick from the soda and candy. Changed real quick and went to the studio where we shot the video. We set up the scene for 2 hours and got angles and then Danny got there and I’m tipping over tired and flustered from this pretty girl. We shot for a half hour then took a break and I was nodding off on the floor during the break. Came back and killed off the video by a piano. After that me and Rob were mind blown over this goal being accomplished. Gratitude isn’t even the word. Next day I get hit by Tsu Surf with a time and place for a session last minute so me and rob drop our shit and shoot over and bang out this hit song that’s got a summer vibe that I made off the influence of this pretty girl. He killed it. I’m an actual fan of him so it was mad cool we could get in the room together and knock this out. That was the first time ive ever collabed in a “Industry” setting where its all bout business - very corporate. I had to adjust to that environment and put a suit on. Times like those make you realize your love for music, your passion, and your “art” simply just don't matter. These managers and shit just don't give a fuck about your grandpa dying and the song you made out of it, or the girl you love and the song you made out of it - they're like yeah fuck yourself lets get money - and you have to jump in or jump out. I jumped in and learned my place. It’s wild to think of what he’s been through over the past few years. Getting out of prison for attempted murder then getting lit up 5 times, surviving, and then while you’re healing you make a tape and it goes up the charts to number 2 in a day, unsigned. Mad funny seeing local level bands desperate to get signed - they don't even know what that means now. My pleasure to work my man, I salute you with honor and respect. After that session I went home and took a week off, after non stop grinding for the past 2 years. The Danny Clinch video shoot right into the Tsu Surf session killed me off. In Surfs studio I couldn’t even keep my head up. I’m so burnt out. What am I searching for here at this diner? What is my soul lacking? What is my heart lacking? I spend many nights here alone, staring out this window drinking coffee. Missing Bepa. Missing people. Missing a certain time of my life when everything was free. But not in a I need to get a life and move on kind of way. It’s not pathetic. I have moved on. I did get a life. I did pretty damn good on my own. I got it from the mud. So why look back? It’s hard for me to mix my social personal life with people I know from music. They don’t know the memories I have, they don’t give a shit. They don’t know anything about me. They don’t want to find that liberating freedom that I am searching for when I come to this diner - that I had when I lived here. I still don't want to get drunk or high. I don't want to watch you get drunk. You could be sober and grinding with a clear head. I want to spend time with people like that. Gorilla promotion. Animalistic work ethic. The snow is coming down fierce and I gotta skate back to the path to go back to Hoboken, then drive all the way home. I won’t be home for awhile. Hopefully till the sun comes up. I want to be lost. I want to be gone. I want to be bliss. I want to walk into this pharmacy across the street again and get cherry coke 12ozs and just sit on my bed and watch blacklisted videos on YouTube. I want to go to pen station and grab a soda and a magazine and take the LIRR to a hardcore show and not get home till the next morning. Strung out after a night of fucking mayhem and laughing. Love, friends, and just fucking beauty. We can still be beautiful. After the money - you can still be whoever the fuck you want. Let’s be beautiful and reckless and never sleep. I love my life. I hate my life. I’m happy. I’m depressed. I want to live. I want to die. I am alive. I am dead. Now on the train back home, braved the blizzard. I noticed a void in how music has been touching me lately. Anything hip hop related seemed stale. Any Americana or folk seemed dead and expired. Rock n roll boring. Even heavy hardcore was horrible. I ended up in a wormhole of bands like Thursday and From Autumn To Ashes. Poison The Well, even weirdo shit like It Dies Today. Folly really hit me hard. I have specific memories to these records and they’re so beautiful and god damn I miss these people. Being in middle school and debating the differences between FATA and PTW. As I’m typing this I just got noticed on the path train for music and they complemented my shattered realm hoodie and I showed him I was listening to from first to last and he died laughing. He said he heard my career was “bumping” and I’m sitting here soaking wet freezing and hungry on a train in all black curled up in a ball around my skateboard. Emily by FFTL is the best song ever written. Even better than Bob Dylan. Fight me. 

[elizadoolittlethings]

Mark Gatiss: ‘There’s nothing quite like the sheer bloody terror of theatre’

by

Mark Shenton

- Sep 29, 2016

By a strange sort of coincidence, October sees Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton all appearing on the London stage.

No sooner does Gatiss open next Tuesday in The Boys in the Band at the Park Theatre, than the very next night Shearsmith begins previews for a West End revival of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, and three weeks later Pemberton leads the cast of Dead Funny. The three men were, of couse, all co-founders (with Jeremy Dyson) and stars of The League of Gentlemen, a TV comedy troupe that was born as a stage act (and won the Perrier comedy award at Edinburgh in 1997), before making three TV series between 1999 and 2002 and then a feature film in 2005.

“This is a sort of two-yearly story now, when we all seem to be doing plays at the same time,” says Gatiss, talking in a lunch break from rehearsals a couple of Saturdays before previews begun. “But we’re just working really.”

Today he tells me frankly: “I owe everything to the League – and we’re talking about doing something else now, as it has been 10 years since we worked together and we’d love to again.” Yet it also keeps reappearing in his life anyway: “It goes in cycles of rebirth. People come up to me and say they loved it when they were kids, which makes me feel ancient; but then kids come up to me who’ve just found it, too. It goes round and round.”

During those League years – “we were together for 11 years” – he and the others made a total commitment to it. “We made a pact that we wouldn’t get distracted. We’d seen a few of our contemporaries go off and do other things, but we didn’t want to lose sight of what we were doing, so if we did anything else it would be only short things that we could fit in.”

If the League will forever be a marker for him, another has become Sherlock, the modern version of Sherlock Holmes that he has written with Steven Moffat, and for which they’ve just completed a fourth series of three episodes.

“That takes it to 13 we’ve done in six years. People ask why we don’t do 10 a year, but it’s hard enough doing three every 18 months. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, like bottled lightning; it just came together, the idea of doing a modern version, the writing, the casting and the timing of it. Conan Doyle spent all his life trying to work out why people liked Sherlock Holmes; Steven and I just go, ‘fine’. It’s been astonishing; it sells to more places than there are countries, which is something to do with oil rigs and other territories. And Benedict [Cumberbatch] and Martin [Freeman] have become superstars through it.”

Gatiss is himself far too modest and self-effacing to consider himself a star, though as an actor earlier this year he won his first Olivier award for best actor in a supporting role for his appearance in Three Days in the Country at the National Theatre, and said in a post-award red carpet interview: “I’m over the moon, I really am. It’s a thrill, I’ve always wanted one and I am really pleased.”

https://youtu.be/0cAIHJ6f6zQ

He had every reason to be; as Kate Kellaway put it in her review in The Observer: “Mark Gatiss, as the ‘maestro of misdiagnosis’ Shpigelsky, gives a comic tour de force, and his immodest proposal to middle-aged Lizaveta brings the house down. He sinks to his knees to propose, but lumbago prevents him from rising and he crawls, in a most undignified style, across the stage, bottom up. It’s funny, but it is the more subtle aspects of Gatiss’ performance that fascinate most: the way he holds a smile, lets it go beyond its sell-by date: there is Shpigelsky’s vanity and misplaced confidence in it.”

He tells me he never had confidence in that comic routine himself: “Una Stubbs once told me that when she was doing a play at the Donmar Warehouse a friend told her how she loved that thing she was doing with her hands, and she never got a laugh from it again after that. It’s the old saw about a good review being as dangerous as a bad one. With the entire back routine in Three Days in the Country, I couldn’t remember what I had done about three months in; I lived in mortal dread of it going away, but it was also good because it kept it fresh.”

He keeps himself fresh by combining two careers, one as a writer, the other as an actor. “I’ve always done both. In an ideal year, I do half and half. Sherlock takes a long time to write, then four months to film; I then like to spend three months on a play.”

Theatre has become a mainstay for Gatiss. “I usually do a play a year, sometimes two,” with credits that stretch from the National (where as well as Three Days in the Country he also starred in Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings) to the Donmar (The Recruiting Officer, Josie Rourke’s first show at the helm), Hampstead Theatre (Howard Brenton’s 55 Days), and London’s Old Vic (All About My Mother). “I can write while I’m in a play, too, and I like that – it gives structure to the day – but I always forget, like the amnesia of childbirth, how tired I get. When you do a play you shift into a different pattern, and become more of a night owl, although I’m very much a morning person. When you’re in the theatre, you eat late and sleep later so that has an effect on the day.”

Theatre has also always been in his blood, ever since he first attended a drama club at school and an after-hours youth theatre, before going to study at Bretton Hall in Yorkshire, where he first met the other Leaguers and they formed The League of Gentlemen. “It’s such a different experience to sitting in a caravan waiting to film something. There’s nothing quite like the sheer bloody terror of theatre – and the smell of a freshly painted set is exactly the same wet paint smell I remember from drama club at school. It gives me the same tingle of anticipation and nerves and excitement.”

Being in a play is like a holiday romance – it’s very intense, then it dissipates

Of course, one of the joys of working in the theatre is that it is much more social than the solitary act of writing. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been chained to a desk for months, so there’s nothing nicer than joining a new group of friends and everything that comes with it. It’s like a holiday romance – it’s very intense, then it dissipates.”

There’s no room for holiday romances, or ‘showmances’ as I’ve heard them dubbed, though: for the first time, he is working on stage with his actor husband Ian Hallard, whom he married seven years ago. “We’ll be like Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray now,” he quips. The ceremony was held at Middle Temple, the ancient Inn of Court in central London, and he can’t resist telling me: “The ceremony took place beneath the portrait of Edward Carson, the man who prosecuted Oscar Wilde. Who’d have thought? He’d be turning in his grave.”

Doing The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley’s 1960s play about a group of gay men, together now was prompted partly by Hallard’s involvement in a rehearsed reading of the play four years ago, which Gatiss saw and tells me how much it resonated.

“One line that stood out was: ‘If we could only not hate ourselves quite so much.’ I thought it was brilliant. And then [producers] Tom O’Connell and James Seabright got a production together and the Park Theatre said yes, and I had a gap, so I joined, too. Ian was doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Theatr Clwyd in the first three months of the year, and then I went straight off to do four months of Sherlock, so this is a good way of seeing each other now.”

There are other perks, too: “Jack Derges is utterly delightful – being kissed by him every day is all right. But Ian gets kissed by him first,” he hastens to add. The Park is also local to them – they live in nearby Islington – and he says: “I love this theatre. It has an indie feeling to it, and has a really loyal, local audience. But I’ve also wanted to play this part since I saw the film when I was 12 or 13. It’s an important play – it’s fascinating to see where we were, where we’ve got to, and between that, where we think things have changed or not at all. You know that a play is good when you stage it at different times and it means something different each time.”

Continues…

Q&A: Mark Gatiss

What was your first non-theatre job? I worked as a gardener in a hospital across the road from where my dad worked.

What was your first professional theatre job? Working at Darlington Arts Centre, now sadly gone, which in its day was second only to the Barbican in terms of size. I was a deputy stage manager.

What is your next job? I’ve got a lot of things to write, most of them secret at the moment.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Who or what was your biggest influence? My greatest inspiration is Alan Bennett – I’ve never worked with him, but he is it. My acting hero is James Mason, who as a screen actor was unsurpassable; on stage, it is Mark Rylance – his Richard II was a life-changing experience for me, it was breathtaking.

What’s your best advice for auditions? Don’t go, leave them to me! But apart from that, whenever I’m involved in producing things, I try to get actor friends to come in and read in for those auditioning. It’s very unusual for actors to sit on the other side of the table, and they always find it revelatory. At the end of the day, they realise it is very rarely about not being good, but about the fit, and that’s reassuring to know. So my advice would be that if you can, try to get to sit on the other side of the table sometime – it will make you feel so much better when you don’t get a job.

If you hadn’t been an actor and writer, what would you have been? I’m very blessed to do this as I can’t do anything else. The only other thing I really wanted to was be a pantologist, but I didn’t have Latin.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals? I try not to as I’m quite a rational person, but in the face of the terror, I can’t tell you how many times I find myself whistling in the dressing room and having to go out in the corridor and turn around three times and blow a raspberry, hoping no one notices.

He goes on: “There is a lot of stuff in this play about self-loathing that is very relevant. The idea that that has gone away is a fallacy. The levels of mental illness and suicide in young gay men particularly is awful. I was talking to a friend recently who told me about a friend of his who struggled to come out. We imagine, living in our metropolitan bubble, that it is easy, but he had gone through hell – it sounded like something from the 1950s, but was to do with what was going on in his own head.”

The play premiered in 1968, a year ahead of Stonewall and the new age of gay liberation that ushered in, but it was a landmark play for portraying gay lives on a mainstream stage so unashamedly, and maybe critically. Some activists have resisted its portrait of these gay lives as too hostile and unhappy; but as Gatiss points out: “I hate the notion of things having to wear the weight of everything on their shoulders. This is actually a particular view of nine particular men, written from a very autobiographical standpoint by Mart Crowley. I feel very like I’m on a soapbox about this, but why should this play have to shoulder everyone’s stories? Obviously it was different when there were very few gay plays, but it’s not like that now that there’s a multiplicity of them, so we can look at it in its context.”

Photos: Tristram Kenton1 of 4

That context is also, of course, pre-Aids – though it’s a sad fact of that disease that it claimed no fewer than four of the play’s original New York cast. During the 1980s, the play duly fell off the gay theatre syllabus entirely; as Gatiss puts it: “There was a period when clearly this was the wrong thing to put on, when we were absolutely under siege. But the last time it was done in New York, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that it was apparently all right to like Boys in the Band again. As time passes and things shift, it is not just ripe for revival, but also still relevant. It’s a false assumption that all battles have been won. There’s a massive debate in the gay community about masculinity, for instance. And what really interests me is the notion how, in any community or cause, when you start to achieve victories, the things that give you common cause start to fray and then you start to turn in on yourself. It’s a bit like the Labour Party is doing now. But so much has been achieved.”

Yet the gay community is facing new challenges now, such as the disturbing rise in chemical drug addictions. “A friend has a really interesting theory about the perhaps subconscious feeling among gay people that we are somehow ‘other’. There’s that wonderful line in Inherit the Wind that you invent the telephone but lose the charm of distance; so for everything you gain, you lose something, too. And maybe the rise of chem-sex is a way for men to say, ‘Yes, I can marry and adopt children now, but I’m still not like you.’ And that’s really interesting.” Addictions are a way to try to cure, or at least temporarily relieve, pain, “whether it’s drugs or sex or booze, which this play is about. And from the outside, all looks fine now – you have Craig Revel Horwood and Bruno [Tonioli] on the TV, and Ian and I were on Graham Norton [on BBC Radio 2] this morning, so visibility is not an issue. Obviously huge steps have been made, but it’s folly to think that everything is rosy now.”

Continues…

Mark Gatiss’ top tip for an aspiring writer and actor

• As Churchill said, keep buggering on, that’s the only thing you can do. For writing, there’s no such thing as a would-be writer. You do it or you don’t, so just get on with it. People are scared, they think they’ll be judged – but the only person doing that is yourself.

Some may still resist the portrait of these bitching, unhappy gay men all over again, but Gatiss is ready with his answer to them: “If someone says that’s not me, it’s not supposed to be. I find repellent the closing down and over-policing of things; it suffocates debate.” That’s a debate he wants to have. And apart from working with his husband, the play has an added resonance for him, too: in it, he plays Harold, whose birthday party provides the setting for the story, and he tells me, “I’ll turn 50 during the run, though we don’t have a show that night.”

After the run finishes, he plans to take a holiday at last: “I’m going to try to have an actual month off, to see if I can do it. People ask me if I’m a workaholic – I don’t think I am, but I love to work. Noel Coward once said work is more fun than fun, and I finished a script the other day and gave myself a day off work and I went off for a massage. But I was quite bored by the end of the day.”

CV: Mark Gatiss

Born: 1966, Sedgefield, County Durham Training: Bretton Hall College Landmark productions: All About My Mother, Old Vic, London (2007), Season’s Greetings, National Theatre (2010), The Recruiting Officer, Donmar Warehouse, London (2012), 55 Days, Hampstead Theatre, London (2012), Coriolanus, Donmar Warehouse, London, with Tom Hiddleston (2013), Three Days in the Country, National Theatre (2015) Awards: Perrier award for comedy for The League of Gentlemen at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (1997), BAFTA for The League of Gentlemen TV series (2000), Royal Television Society award for The League of Gentlemen TV series (2000), Golden Rose of Montreux for The League of Gentlemen TV series (1999), Writers Guild award for best short-form TV drama for Sherlock (2012), Olivier award for best supporting actor for Three Days in the Country (2016). Agents: Sarah Spear/Grace Clissold at Curtis Brown

The Boys in the Band runs at the Park Theatre, London, until October 30

[the-magnus-archives-archiver]

The Boneturner’s Tale

Case:9991006

Name: Sebastian Adekoya Subject: New acquisition at Chiswick Library Date: June 10th, 1999 Recorded by: Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London

Books are amazing, aren’t they? I mean, when you think about what they really are. People don’t give the actuality of language the weight it deserves, I feel. Words are a way of taking your thoughts, the very make-up of yourself, and giving them to another. Putting your thoughts in the mind of someone else. They are not a perfect method, of course, as there’s plenty of scope for mutation and corruption between your mind and that of the listener, but that doesn’t change the essence of what language is. Spoken aloud though, the thought dies quickly if not picked up. Simple vibrations that vanish almost as soon as they are created, though if they find a host then they can lodge there, proliferate and maybe spread further. Still, it is not a reliable method in terms of a thought’s endurance, as humans are fragile creatures and rarely last a century.

A book, though, is another story. There are written texts that have outlived the civilisations that created them. Imagine, thoughts hundreds, thousands of years old, preserved and ready to be taken again. Corrupted, or translated, perhaps, by a culture that does not understand them, but still, ideas that have outlived by lifetimes the mind that first conceived them. Will the thoughts that first ran through Shakespeare’s head ever stop being thought by someone, somewhere? And a book, so dense with a mind’s fossilised creations, is it any wonder they have been ascribed such power throughout the ages? Or that an old library, with heavy tomes covering every wall, seems to have such a weight to it, beyond the physical presence of the texts it holds?

I used to work at Chiswick Library. I didn’t have such ideas back then, though. I just knew I loved books, always had, and so when the opportunity arose to work in my local library I jumped at the chance. I had been a voracious reader ever since I was old enough to hold a book for myself, and even before that my mother tells me I would pester her constantly to read to me. I suppose you might say my mind has always been receptive to the thoughts that lurk in the written page. Still, Chiswick Library is a long way from the cramped and austere libraries you’re probably imagining. It’s light and airy, with bookshelves and carpets that speak more of cash-strapped local councils than of the rich majesty of knowledge. It has an extensive children’s section and the vast majority of its stock are dog-eared paperbacks of true crime, literary fiction and reference books. It has a modest collection of books on tape and the atmosphere, though quiet, is far from oppressive. In a word, I would sum the place up as ‘unthreatening’.

It was three years ago when this happened. I had already been working there for about a year when the book first turned up. Now, we used to buy all of our books new, and I never did any of the acquisitions for the library, so I couldn’t say when or where it might have been bought from, but it looked old and pretty beaten up when I first noticed it. It was handed back with four other books at the front desk, and as I was scanning them through I noticed that one of the barcodes didn’t seem to match up. The barcode and ISBN both registered as being that of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, but the book itself was an almost featureless black paperback, with a title on the front in a faded white serif font: The Boneturner’s Tale.

I was a bit confused, and called the librarian, Ruth Weaver, over to ask about it. She didn’t recall seeing it ever before, but stuck in the front was the ex-libris bookplate of Chiswick Library, as well as a lending label with a handful of stamps going back several years. Ruth shrugged and told me not to worry too much about it – we’d get it recorded and put on the system properly, but something about the situation bothered me, so I decided to check the record of the man who had returned it. His name, at least according to his library card, was Michael Crew, and sure enough three weeks ago he had borrowed four books from us. Specifically, the four others he had returned. I suggested to Ruth that perhaps he was a self-published author who was trying to trick his way onto our shelves, and she laughed, saying it was probably it, although why anyone would go to the trouble of faking it just to get on the shelves of Chiswick Library was beyond her. The book even looked worn, though, like it had seen decades of being read, with a line creased down the spine and one half of the cover faded from the sun. Nor, from what I could see, did it list any author at all.

It was at that moment that Jared Hopworth came in, and I had to put the book to one side. Jared and I had once been fast friends; growing up on the same road, attending the same schools, we had spent much of our early life as inseparable. But he had always been, well, not to put too fine a point on it, thick as mud, and when I went away to university, he stayed behind. I think he saw it as something of a betrayal, and when I finally returned, I knew immediately something had changed between us. He spent the time I was away becoming a bit of a crook, and upon my return began what would eventually become a campaign of petty terror. He was always very careful to stop before he did anything that might get the police involved, and I guess there was enough leftover affection from a childhood spent together that I never really thought about reporting him. It wa–

[John: Oh, erm, hello Elias.

Elias: Do you have a moment?

John: Not really, I’m sort of in the middle of something.

Elias: I understand, it’s just that Miss. Herne has lodged a complaint.

John: A complaint? I could just as easily complain about her wasting my time!

Elias: That’s not how it works, Jonathan.

John: I wouldn’t even have had to do the recording if Rosie kept her equipment in better condition.

Elias: Regardless, I would prefer that you not antagonise anyone connected to the Lukas family. They are patrons of the Institute, after all.

John: Fine, fine, I’ll be more lovely. Now, can I get back to work?

Elias: Very well. By the way, have you seen Martin?

John: Oh, he’s off sick this week. Stomach problems, I think. Blessed relief if you ask me. Statement resumes.

It was worst when Jared visited the library, because that inevitably meant that he was bored enough to seek me out for harassment. Sure enough, he started chatting with me, meaningless jibes that served to wait it out until Ruth, who didn’t know about Jared’s problems with me, returned to her office and closed the door. As soon as she had done so, he turned and in a single movement tipped over the metal returns cart, spilling the recently received books all over the floor. He smiled at me and apologised. I did my best not to show any irritation, or indeed any reaction at all as I slowly walked around and bent down to start collecting them. As I rose to my feet I felt an impact on the back of my head and staggered. Behind me, Jared stood holding the book I had put aside, The Boneturner’s Tale, and had apparently picked it up to hit me with. But rather than offering me a fake apology or further violence, instead his eyes were locked on the book. We stood there in silence for a few seconds until he said something about needing something new to read, turned around and walked off.

I was, I will admit, a bit unsettled. As far as I could recall I had never seen Jared read... well, anything, really. And the look in his eyes when he had left had something in it not entirely unlike fear. Still, it was a welcome relief to have him gone, and I quickly tidied up the rest of the books before Ruth noticed anything amiss.

There was nothing else I recall that happened that day at the library, but on the way home afterwards I passed by Jared’s house. I had moved back in with my parents while I got everything sorted out after university, and he had never moved out of his childhood home, so we still lived on the same street. It was late September at this point, so by the time I had walked back from the library it was dark, and I noticed a small shape moving in the pool of orange light below the streetlamp.

As I got closer, I realised with a slight start that it was a rat, and not a dirty, wild rat but a large, white one, quite well-kept and clearly once a pet. But there was something very wrong with it. It was dragging itself slowly, pulling from the front legs, and I saw that the back half of it was flat, as though deflated somehow. I thought it must have been run over, but there was no blood or sign of crushing, nor did it seem to be in any actual pain. It just had a back half that flopped and twitched obscenely as it made its gradual way across the lighted pavement and out into the darkness. I just stood there and watched, transfixed by it, until it disappeared from view. Thinking about it now, I remember its head was turned at a strange angle, far further round than it should have been, although I might be getting confused. Many of these experiences run together when I look back on them. There was no light on in Jared’s house, but I hurried home quickly after that.

I didn’t see Jared again for some time. At first I was just happy for the space, but as the days turned into weeks I started to feel something I wouldn’t have expected to – worry. If it hadn’t been for the way he had left last time it probably wouldn’t have bothered me, but he had looked so strange, and even without him coming to the library it was rare I would go a week without seeing him. By now it had almost been a month. Still, I resisted the urge to go to his house and check. If it turned out he was fine, then I’d be inviting a whole world of unpleasantness, and besides that, I reminded myself, he wasn’t my problem anymore.

It was late October when Jared’s mother came in. It was near the end of the day, and outside was already dark. I was putting up a display about good Hallowe’en reads before heading home, when I heard the door open. I turned around and there she was. It took me a few seconds to recognise her, if I’m honest. I hadn’t seen much of her in the years since Jared and I had been close, and she had aged noticeably. Mrs. Hopworth wore a bulky overcoat, though it wasn’t that cold yet, and her arm hung down in a sling. Something about the angle of the arm and how it hung there seemed faintly abnormal, and I wondered if she had broken it.

When I asked Mrs. Hopworth if she was okay she just stared at me, her eyes burning with hatred. With her good arm she reached into her coat and pulled out a small, black paperback. She threw it on the floor without saying a word and turned to leave. I couldn’t help myself, I asked her if (17) was alright. She spun back and started to swear violently at me, told me I had no business with her son and that I, and my books, were to stay away from him. As she spoke, I couldn’t look away from her arm and the odd ways it twisted as she gestured. How her fingers seemed to bend the wrong way. I was glad that Ruth had gone home early as I didn’t want her to witness the disturbing confrontation I had now apparently caused.

When she had finished, Mrs. Hopworth spat towards me, though I noticed she was careful to avoid spitting at the book that now lay on the floor between us, and left. I put down the copy of Stephen King’s Misery that I now realised I’d been clutching, and approached the discarded volume that lay on the carpet. The battered black cover seemed the same as when I had first seen it weeks ago, with that faded white title on the front: The Boneturner’s Tale. I reached down to pick it up, but before I did so a thought flashed across my mind, a memory of the last time I had seen Jared, and I grabbed some tissues from the desk before using them to pick up the book. Even then I felt my skin crawl as I held it.

I decided not to deal with it that night. I wasn’t entirely sure that reading it in the daytime would be that much better, but shadows cast from outside seemed to have gotten that much starker since the book had been brought back into my library, and it scared me. I placed it in the book returns cart and left, double-checking I had firmly locked the door behind me.

It rained heavily that night. My room is in a converted attic and when the weather is bad it’s as if I can hear every raindrop against the window that is just above my bed. It wasn’t a storm, there wasn’t the wind for it, it was just that heavy pounding rain that drummed and beat on the glass above me. I couldn’t sleep. There was a nagging apprehension in my mind, something that after three hours lying in bed had turned into almost a panic. How could I have just left the book? There was something wrong with it, that much was obvious. What if Ruth came in earlier than I did tomorrow and took it? What would happen to her? Should I have destroyed it?

That last thought was quickly pushed away. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to destroy a book, even one with such a strangeness to it. It surprised me just how easily I accepted that The Boneturner’s Tale had dark powers, but I suppose I’ve always felt that books have a sort of magic to them, so it was really just a confirmation of what I had suspected, deep down, for a long time.

It was two in the morning when I decided that I couldn’t just leave it there overnight. I got up, dressed and, quietly, headed out into the rain towards the library, making sure to take my gloves. My coat was supposed to be water resistant but still managed to soak in the twenty minutes it took me to walk there. I had the key from locking up that night, and deactivated the alarm as I entered.

It was almost pitch black inside, and part of me wanted to keep it that way, but I turned on as many of the lights as I could without it being immediately obvious outside the building. It wasn’t many, and I still had to half-feel my way through the foyer and into the library proper. As I approached the desk and the book returns cart where I had left The Boneturner’s Tale I began to step less cautiously. It was darker in that corner of the library and I put a hand out to steady myself against the handle of the small metal cart. I’d taken my gloves off at that point and my hand came away wet. I quickly fumbled for the torch I had snatched before heading out and turned it on. Red dripped and pulsed from the cart, soaking the pages and forming a small pool around it. The books were bleeding.

I laughed at that. It seemed so appropriate somehow, so utterly correct that those neighbouring books should suffer, should be contaminated by it. Just as it seemed right and proper that, when my torch found The Boneturner's Tale, it was dry, unmarked by the gory scene around it.

I put my gloves back on and carefully took out that sinister volume and placed it on the desk. Perhaps I should have fought harder against the temptation to look inside but my curiosity was too strong. The thick gloves made turning individual pages almost impossible, and I still had enough good sense to keep them on, so I just opened it on a few random pages and started reading. Perhaps I was being paranoid. After all, I touched the book with my bare hands when it was first given in to the library, and had no problems, but the image of Jared’s mother wouldn't leave my head. How her arm had twisted when it moved. I decided to keep the gloves on.

It was written in prose, and certainly seemed to be a story of some kind. The part I read dealt with an unnamed man, at various points referred to as the Boneturner, the Bonesmith or just the Turner, watching an assembled group of people as they made their way into a small village. It's unclear from what I read whether he is travelling with them, or simply following them, but I remember being unsettled by the details he observed in them: the way the parson would move his hand over his mouth whenever he stared too long at the nuns or how the cook looked at the meat he prepared with the same eyes that looked at the pardoner. It was only at that point that I realised the book was describing the pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales.

Now, this certainly wasn't some lost section of a Chaucer classic. It was written in modern English, with none of the archaic spelling or pronunciation of the original, and besides that the writing itself was of questionable quality. There was something compelling about it, though. The debate about how finished The Canterbury Tales were... well, it's a very real debate. In the Prologue, over a hundred tales are promised, but the most complete surviving version doesn't even reach two dozen. The book just sort of ends, with Chaucer adding a short epilogue imploring God for forgiveness. A plea that is generally read as sarcastic or rhetorical.

I flicked ahead a few pages, and found the Bonesmith had apparently crept up to the Miller while he slept. It described him silently reaching inside him, and... it's a bit hazy. All I remember clearly is the line “and from his rib a flute to play that merry tune of marrow took”. And as for the rest, I don't recall in detail, but I know that I almost threw up, and that the Miller did not survive. This was on page sixteen, and it was a thick book.

I turned to the frontispiece, desperately curious as to how this book had ended up in our library. In the harsh light of the torch, I could see the creases and peeling edges of the Chiswick Library label, which usually meant it had been removed and re-stuck, or taken from another book entirely. I could even see the edges of another label underneath. Using a pair of scissors, I carefully peeled off the top one, but was disappointed. It was the label for another library, probably the last place it had been left, although I think it must have been in Scandinavia, because it was something like the library of Jergensburg or Jurgenleit or Jurgerlicht or something like that. It didn't help me.

I was all set to return to reading the thing, when I heard the sound of breaking glass behind me. I turned around to see Jared Hopworth standing in front of the shattered window. Or at least, I assume it was Jared, as it demanded the book from me in Jared’s voice, but wore lose fitting trousers, and a thick coat with a hood that almost completely covered his face. Or its face.

He was longer than Jared had been, and stood at a strange angle, as though his legs were too stiff to use. When he gestured for the book, I saw that his fingers looked... sharp, as though the skin at the ends were being pushed into a tight point by something inside. I told him that the library was closed, because at that moment I could think of nothing else to say. He ignored me, and demanded again that I give him the book. That was when I did something a little rash, which is to say I punched him.

I had never really thrown a punch in anger before, or even desperation, so it came as quite a shock to me when I managed to drive a single, solid fist into his solar plexus. But as I did this, and this is the part that still gives me nightmares, I felt his flesh give way and almost retract, drawing me in close. And then I felt his ribs shift, shut tight around my hand, as though his ribcage were trying to bite me. They were sharper then I would have thought possible, and at last, this was what actually started me screaming. Never before or since have I ever screamed like that, and I'm still a bit surprised I'm capable of making such a noise, but there you have it.

In my panic I dropped the copy of The Boneturner's Tale and, in less than a second, Jared was on it. He released my hand and grabbed it with a frantic desperation, before he turned to run back out the way he came in. I started to chase after him, until I saw how he was moving. How many limbs he had. He had... added some extras. That was the moment it finally all got too much for me; I stopped running. It wasn't my book, it wasn't my responsibility and I had no idea what I was dealing with, so I didn't. I just stood there in a daze and watched the thing that was once Jared disappear out into the rain. I never saw him again.

The police turned up soon after. Someone had apparently heard my screams and called in a report. I spun some tale about falling asleep at my desk and being woken up by an attempted robbery. God knows how I explained the bloody books, because it wasn't some disappearing phantom. It took weeks to get out. Everyone seemed to believe me, though, and miraculously I kept my job. I haven't seen Jared in the years since, and I haven't done any further research on the book. The best scenario I can possibly imagine is that this statement is the last I ever need to hear or speak about Jared Hopworth or The Boneturner's Tale.

Archivist Notes:

Well, this makes me... deeply unhappy. I've barely scratched the surface of the archives and have already uncovered evidence of two separate surviving books from Jurgen Leitner's library. Until he mentioned that, I was tempted to dismiss much of it out of hand, but as it stands now I believe every word. I've seen what Leitner's work can do, and this news, even 17 years out of date, is still very concerning to me. I'm going to have a discussion with Elias as to what we can do to address the issue. I know he'll just give me the old “record and study, not interfere or contain” speech again, but I at least need to make him aware of it.

Tim and Sasha have cross-referenced the events here with police reports, and sure enough there was a warrant issued for the arrest of Jared Hopworth for breaking and entering, as well as assault. He was never found, though, and the crimes weren't serious enough to keep the case active for very long. I've been doing as much research myself as possible, but the book seems to have vanished along with him. I asked Martin to try and hunt down Mr. Adekoya himself for a follow-up, but have been informed that he passed away in 2006. He was found lying dead in the middle of the road on the night of April 17th.

Despite the fact that there were no crushing or trauma marks on the body, the inquest ruled it a hit-and-run car accident due to the mangled position in which he was found. It was a closed casket funeral.

Source: Official Transcript and Podcast (MAG 17 The Boneturner’s Tale)

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Two ideas puzzled me deeply as a child growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930’s in what today would be called an integrated neighborhood. One of them was that all Jews were rich; the other was that all Negroes were persecuted. These ideas had appeared in print; therefore they must be true. My own experience and the evidence of my senses told me they were not true, but that only confirmed what a day-dreaming boy in the provinces—for the lower-class neighborhoods of New York belong as surely to the provinces as any rural town in North Dakota—discovers very early: his experience is unreal and the evidence of his senses is not to be trusted. Yet even a boy with a head full of fantasies incongruously synthesized out of Hollywood movies and English novels cannot altogether deny the reality of his own experience—especially when there is so much deprivation in that experience. Nor can he altogether gainsay the evidence of his own senses—especially such evidence of the senses as comes from being repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated.

And so for a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me. During the early years of the war, when my older sister joined a left-wing youth organization, I remember my astonishment at hearing her passionately denounce my father for thinking that Jews were worse off than Negroes. To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews—indeed, than all whites. A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate? Yet my sister’s opinions, like print, were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.

It had not always been so—that much I can recall from early childhood. When did it start, this fear and this hatred? There was a kindergarten in the local public school, and given the character of the neighborhood, at least half of the children in my class must have been Negroes. Yet I have no memory of being aware of color differences at that age, and I know from observing my own children that they attribute no significance to such differences even when they begin noticing them. I think there was a day—first grade? second grade?—when my best friend Carl hit me on the way home from school and announced that he wouldn’t play with me any more because I had killed Jesus. When I ran home to my mother crying for an explanation, she told me not to pay any attention to such foolishness, and then in Yiddish she cursed the goyim and the Schwartzes, the Schwartzes and the goyim. Carl, it turned out, was a schwartze, and so was added a third to the categories into which people were mysteriously divided.

Sometimes I wonder whether this is a true memory at all. It is blazingly vivid, but perhaps it never happened: can anyone really remember back to the age of six? There is no uncertainty in my mind, however, about the years that followed. Carl and I hardly ever spoke, though we met in school every day up through the eighth or ninth grade. There would be embarrassed moments of catching his eye or of his catching mine—for whatever it was that had attracted us to one another as very small children remained alive in spite of the fantastic barrier of hostility that had grown up between us, suddenly and out of nowhere. Nevertheless, friendship would have been impossible, and even if it had been possible, it would have been unthinkable. About that, there was nothing anyone could do by the time we were eight years old.

Item: The orphanage across the street is torn down, a city housing project begins to rise in its place, and on the marvelous vacant lot next to the old orphanage they are building a playground. Much excitement and anticipation as Opening Day draws near. Mayor LaGuardia himself comes to dedicate this great gesture of public benevolence. He speaks of neighborliness and borrowing cups of sugar, and of the playground he says that children of all races, colors, and creeds will learn to live together in harmony. A week later, some of us are swatting flies on the playground’s inadequate little ball field. A gang of Negro kids, pretty much our own age, enter from the other side and order us out of the park. We refuse, proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor. There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience of cowardice. And my first appalled realization that there are people in the world who do not seem to be afraid of anything, who act as though they have nothing to lose. Thereafter the playground becomes a battleground, sometimes quiet, sometimes the scene of athletic competition between Them and Us. But rocks are thrown as often as baseballs. Gradually we abandon the place and use the streets instead. The streets are safer, though we do not admit this to ourselves. We are not, after all, sissies—that most dreaded epithet of an American boyhood.

Item: I am standing alone in front of the building in which I live. It is late afternoon and getting dark. That day in school the teacher had asked a surly Negro boy named Quentin a question he was unable to answer. As usual I had waved my arm eagerly (“Be a good boy, get good marks, be smart, go to college, become a doctor”) and, the right answer bursting from my lips, I was held up lovingly by the teacher as an example to the class. I had seen Quentin’s face—a very dark, very cruel, very Oriental-looking face—harden, and there had been enough threat in his eyes to make me run all the way home for fear that he might catch me outside.

Now, standing idly in front of my own house, I see him approaching from the project accompanied by his little brother who is carrying a baseball bat and wearing a grin of malicious anticipation. As in a nightmare, I am trapped. The surroundings are secure and familiar, but terror is suddenly present and there is no one around to help. I am locked to the spot. I will not cry out or run away like a sissy, and I stand there, my heart wild, my throat clogged. He walks up, hurls the familiar epithet (“Hey, mo’f—r”), and to my surprise only pushes me. It is a violent push, but not a punch. A push is not as serious as a punch. Maybe I can still back out without entirely losing my dignity. Maybe I can still say, “Hey, c’mon Quentin, whaddya wanna do that for. I dint do nothin’ to you,” and walk away, not too rapidly. Instead, before I can stop myself, I push him back—a token gesture—and I say, “Cut that out, I don’t wanna fight, I ain’t got nothin’ to fight about.” As I turn to walk back into the building, the corner of my eye catches the motion of the bat his little brother has handed him. I try to duck, but the bat crashes colored lights into my head.

The next thing I know, my mother and sister are standing over me, both of them hysterical. My sister—she who was later to join the “progressive” youth organization—is shouting for the police and screaming imprecations at those dirty little black bastards. They take me upstairs, the doctor comes, the police come. I tell them that the boy who did it was a stranger, that he had been trying to get money from me. They do not believe me, but I am too scared to give them Quentin’s name. When I return to school a few days later, Quentin avoids my eyes. He knows that I have not squealed, and he is ashamed. I try to feel proud, but in my heart I know that it was fear of what his friends might do to me that had kept me silent, and not the code of the street.

Item: There is an athletic meet in which the whole of our junior high school is participating. I am in one of the seventh-grade rapid-advance classes, and “segregation” has now set in with a vengeance. In the last three or four years of the elementary school from which we have just graduated, each grade had been divided into three classes, according to “intelligence.” (In the earlier grades the divisions had either been arbitrary or else unrecognized by us as having anything to do with brains.) These divisions by IQ, or however it was arranged, had resulted in a preponderance of Jews in the “1” classes and a corresponding preponderance of Negroes in the “3’s,” with the Italians split unevenly along the spectrum. At least a few Negroes had always made the “l’s,” just as there had always been a few Jewish kids among the “3’s” and more among the “2’s” (where Italians dominated). But the junior high’s rapid-advance class of which I am now a member is overwhelmingly Jewish and entirely white—except for a shy lonely Negro girl with light skin and reddish hair.

The athletic meet takes place in a city-owned stadium far from the school. It is an important event to which a whole day is given over. The winners are to get those precious little medallions stamped with the New York City emblem that can be screwed into a belt and that prove the wearer to be a distinguished personage. I am a fast runner, and so I am assigned the position of anchor man on my class’s team in the relay race. There are three other seventh-grade teams in the race, two of them all Negro, as ours is all white. One of the all-Negro teams is very tall—their anchor man waiting silently next to me on the line looks years older than I am, and I do not recognize him. He is the first to get the baton and crosses the finishing line in a walk. Our team comes in second, but a few minutes later we are declared the winners, for it has been discovered that the anchor man on the first-place team is not a member of the class. We are awarded the medallions, and the following day our home-room teacher makes a speech about how proud she is of us for being superior athletes as well as superior students. We want to believe that we deserve the praise, but we know that we could not have won even if the other class had not cheated.

That afternoon, walking home, I am waylaid and surrounded by five Negroes, among whom is the anchor man of the disqualified team. “Gimme my medal, mo’f—r,” he grunts. I do not have it with me and I tell him so. “Anyway, it ain’t yours,” I say foolishly. He calls me a liar on both counts and pushes me up against the wall on which we sometimes play handball. “Gimme my mo’f—n’ medal,” he says again. I repeat that I have left it home. “Le’s search the li’l mo’f—r,” one of them suggests, “he prolly got it hid in his mo’f—n’ pants.” My panic is now unmanageable. (How many times had I been surrounded like this and asked in soft tones, “Len’ me a nickle, boy.” How many times had I been called a liar for pleading poverty and pushed around, or searched, or beaten up, unless there happened to be someone in the marauding gang like Carl who liked me across that enormous divide of hatred and who would therefore say, “Aaah, c’mon, le’s git someone else, this boy ain’t got no money on ‘im.”) I scream at them through tears of rage and self-contempt, “Keep your f—n’ filthy lousy black hands off a me! I swear I’ll get the cops.” This is all they need to hear, and the five of them set upon me. They bang me around, mostly in the stomach and on the arms and shoulders, and when several adults loitering near the candy store down the block notice what is going on and begin to shout, they run off and away.

I do not tell my parents about the incident. My team-mates, who have also been waylaid, each by a gang led by his opposite number from the disqualified team, have had their medallions taken from them, and they never squeal either. For days, I walk home in terror, expecting to be caught again, but nothing happens. The medallion is put away into a drawer, never to be worn by anyone.

Obviously experiences like these have always been a common feature of childhood life in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, and Negroes do not necessarily figure in them. Wherever, and in whatever combination, they have lived together in the cities, kids of different groups have been at war, beating up and being beaten up: micks against kikes against wops against spicks against polacks. And even relatively homogeneous areas have not been spared the warring of the young: one block against another, one gang (called in my day, in a pathetic effort at gentility, an “S.A.C.,” or social-athletic club) against another. But the Negro-white conflict had—and no doubt still has—a special intensity and was conducted with a ferocity unmatched by intramural white battling.

In my own neighborhood, a good deal of animosity existed between the Italian kids (most of whose parents were immigrants from Sicily) and the Jewish kids (who came largely from East European immigrant families). Yet everyone had friends, sometimes close friends, in the other “camp,” and we often visited one another’s strange-smelling houses, if not for meals, then for glasses of milk, and occasionally for some special event like a wedding or a wake. If it happened that we divided into warring factions and did battle, it would invariably be half-hearted and soon patched up. Our parents, to be sure, had nothing to do with one another and were mutually suspicious and hostile. But we, the kids, who all spoke Yiddish or Italian at home, were Americans, or New Yorkers, or Brooklyn boys: we shared a culture, the culture of the street, and at least for a while this culture proved to be more powerful than the opposing cultures of the home.

Why, why should it have been so different as between the Negroes and us? How was it borne in upon us so early, white and black alike, that we were enemies beyond any possibility of reconciliation? Why did we hate one another so?

I suppose if I tried, I could answer those questions more or less adequately from the perspective of what I have since learned. I could draw upon James Baldwin—what better witness is there?—to describe the sense of entrapment that poisons the soul of the Negro with hatred for the white man whom he knows to be his jailer. On the other side, if I wanted to understand how the white man comes to hate the Negro, I could call upon the psychologists who have spoken of the guilt that white Americans feel toward Negroes and that turns into hatred for lack of acknowledging itself as guilt. These are plausible answers and certainly there is truth in them. Yet when I think back upon my own experience of the Negro and his of me, I find myself troubled and puzzled, much as I was as a child when I heard that all Jews were rich and all Negroes persecuted. How could the Negroes in my neighborhood have regarded the whites across the street and around the corner as jailers? On the whole, the whites were not so poor as the Negroes, but they were quite poor enough, and the years were years of Depression. As for white hatred of the Negro, how could guilt have had anything to do with it? What share had these Italian and Jewish immigrants in the enslavement of the Negro? What share had they—downtrodden people themselves breaking their own necks to eke out a living—in the exploitation of the Negro?

No, I cannot believe that we hated each other back there in Brooklyn because they thought of us as jailers and we felt guilty toward them. But does it matter, given the fact that we all went through an unrepresentative confrontation? I think it matters profoundly, for if we managed the job of hating each other so well without benefit of the aids to hatred that are supposedly at the root of this madness everywhere else, it must mean that the madness is not yet properly understood. I am far from pretending that I understand it, but I would insist that no view of the problem will begin to approach the truth unless it can account for a case like the one I have been trying to describe. Are the elements of any such view available to us?

At least two, I would say, are. One of them is a point we frequently come upon in the work of James Baldwin, and the other is a related point always stressed by psychologists who have studied the mechanisms of prejudice. Baldwin tells us that one of the reasons Negroes hate the white man is that the white man refuses to look at him: the Negro knows that in white eyes all Negroes are alike; they are faceless and therefore not altogether human. The psychologists, in their turn, tell us that the white man hates the Negro because he tends to project those wild impulses that he fears in himself onto an alien group which he then punishes with his contempt. What Baldwin does not tell us, however, is that the principle of facelessness is a two-way street and can operate in both directions with no difficulty at all. Thus, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I was as faceless to the Negroes as they were to me, and if they hated me because I never looked at them, I must also have hated them for never looking at me. To the Negroes, my white skin was enough to define me as the enemy, and in a war it is only the uniform that counts and not the person.

So with the mechanism of projection that the psychologists talk about: it too works in both directions at once. There is no question that the psychologists are right about what the Negro represents symbolically to the white man. For me as a child the life lived on the other side of the playground and down the block on Ralph Avenue seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street—free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic. I put the word “erotic” last, though it is usually stressed above all others, because in fact it came last, in consciousness as in importance. What mainly counted for me about Negro kids of my own age was that they were “bad boys.” There were plenty of bad boys among the whites—this was, after all, a neighborhood with a long tradition of crime as a career open to aspiring talents—but the Negroes were really bad, bad in a way that beckoned to one, and made one feel inadequate. We all went home every day for a lunch of spinach-and-potatoes; they roamed around during lunch hour, munching on candy bars. In winter we had to wear itchy woolen hats and mittens and cumbersome galoshes; they were bare-headed and loose as they pleased. We rarely played hookey, or got into serious trouble in school, for all our street-corner bravado; they were defiant, forever staying out (to do what delicious things?), forever making disturbances in class and in the halls, forever being sent to the principal and returning uncowed. But most important of all, they were tough; beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything. To hell with the teacher, the truant officer, the cop; to hell with the whole of the adult world that held us in its grip and that we never had the courage to rebel against except sporadically and in petty ways.

This is what I saw and envied and feared in the Negro: this is what finally made him faceless to me, though some of it, of course, was actually there. (The psychologists also tell us that the alien group which becomes the object of a projection will tend to respond by trying to live up to what is expected of them.) But what, on his side, did the Negro see in me that made me faceless to him? Did he envy me my lunches of spinach-and-potatoes and my itchy woolen caps and my prudent behavior in the face of authority, as I envied him his noon-time candy bars and his bare head in winter and his magnificent rebelliousness? Did those lunches and caps spell for him the prospect of power and riches in the future? Did they mean that there were possibilities open to me that were denied to him? Very likely they did. But if so, one also supposes that he feared the impulses within himself toward submission to authority no less powerfully than I feared the impulses in myself toward defiance. If I represented the jailer to him, it was not because I was oppressing him or keeping him down: it was because I symbolized for him the dangerous and probably pointless temptation toward greater repression, just as he symbolized for me the equally perilous tug toward greater freedom. I personally was to be rewarded for this repression with a new and better life in the future, but how many of my friends paid an even higher price and were given only gall in return.

We have it on the authority of James Baldwin that all Negroes hate whites. I am trying to suggest that on their side all whites—all American whites, that is—are sick in their feelings about Negroes. There are Negroes, no doubt, who would say that Baldwin is wrong, but I suspect them of being less honest than he is, just as I suspect whites of self-deception who tell me they have no special feeling toward Negroes. Special feelings about color are a contagion to which white Americans seem susceptible even when there is nothing in their background to account for the susceptibility. Thus everywhere we look today in the North, we find the curious phenomenon of white middle-class liberals with no previous personal experience of Negroes—people to whom Negroes have always been faceless in virtue rather than faceless in vice—discovering that their abstract commitment to the cause of Negro rights will not stand the test of a direct confrontation. We find such people fleeing in droves to the suburbs as the Negro population in the inner city grows; and when they stay in the city we find them sending their children to private school rather than to the “integrated” public school in the neighborhood. We find them resisting the demand that gerrymandered school districts be re-zoned for the purpose of overcoming de facto segregation; we find them judiciously considering whether the Negroes (for their own good, of course) are not perhaps pushing too hard; we find them clucking their tongues over Negro militancy; we find them speculating on the question of whether there may not, after all, be something in the theory that the races are biologically different; we find them saying that it will take a very long time for Negroes to achieve full equality, no matter what anyone does; we find them deploring the rise of black nationalism and expressing the solemn hope that the leaders of the Negro community will discover ways of containing the impatience and incipient violence within the Negro ghettos.1

But that is by no means the whole story; there is also the phenomenon of what Kenneth Rexroth once called “crow-jimism.” There are the broken-down white boys like Vivaldo Moore in Baldwin’s Another Country who go to Harlem in search of sex or simply to brush up against something that looks like primitive vitality, and who are so often punished by the Negroes they meet for crimes that they would have been the last ever to commit and of which they themselves have been as sorry victims as any of the Negroes who take it out on them. There are the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize Negroes and pander to them, assuming a guilt that is not properly theirs. And there are all the white liberals who permit Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment, and who lend themselves—again assuming the responsibility for crimes they never committed—to cunning and contemptuous exploitation by Negroes they employ or try to befriend.

And what about me? What kind of feelings do I have about Negroes today? What happened to me, from Brooklyn, who grew up fearing and envying and hating Negroes? Now that Brooklyn is behind me, do I fear them and envy them and hate them still? The answer is yes, but not in the same proportions and certainly not in the same way. I now live on the upper west side of Manhattan, where there are many Negroes and many Puerto Ricans, and there are nights when I experience the old apprehensiveness again, and there are streets that I avoid when I am walking in the dark, as there were streets that I avoided when I was a child. I find that I am not afraid of Puerto Ricans, but I cannot restrain my nervousness whenever I pass a group of Negroes standing in front of a bar or sauntering down the street. I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them. And knowing this I feel ashamed and guilty, like the good liberal I have grown up to be. Yet the twinges of fear and the resentment they bring and the self-contempt they arouse are not to be gainsaid.

But envy? Why envy? And hatred? Why hatred? Here again the intensities have lessened and everything has been complicated and qualified by the guilts and the resulting over-compensations that are the heritage of the enlightened middle-class world of which I am now a member. Yet just as in childhood I envied Negroes for what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for what seems to me their superior physical grace and beauty. I have come to value physical grace very highly, and I am now capable of aching with all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the dance floor, or a Negro playing baseball or basketball. They are on the kind of terms with their own bodies that I should like to be on with mine, and for that precious quality they seem blessed to me.

The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone.

This, then, is where I am; it is not exactly where I think all other white liberals are, but it cannot be so very far away either. And it is because I am convinced that we white Americans are—for whatever reason, it no longer matters—so twisted and sick in our feelings about Negroes that I despair of the present push toward integration. If the pace of progress were not a factor here, there would perhaps be no cause for despair: time and the law and even the international political situation are on the side of the Negroes, and ultimately, therefore, victory—of a sort, anyway—must come. But from everything we have learned from observers who ought to know, pace has become as important to the Negroes as substance. They want equality and they want it now, and the white world is yielding to their demand only as much and as fast as it is absolutely being compelled to do. The Negroes know this in the most concrete terms imaginable, and it is thus becoming increasingly difficult to buy them off with rhetoric and promises and pious assurances of support. And so within the Negro community we find more and more people declaring—as Harold R. Isaacs recently put it in these pages2—that they want out: people who say that integration will never come, or that it will take a hundred or a thousand years to come, or that it will come at too high a price in suffering and struggle for the pallid and sodden life of the American middle class that at the very best it may bring.

The most numerous, influential, and dangerous movement that has grown out of Negro despair with the goal of integration is, of course, the Black Muslims. This movement, whatever else we may say about it, must be credited with one enduring achievement: it inspired James Baldwin to write an essay3 which deserves to be placed among the classics of our language. Everything Baldwin has ever been trying to tell us is distilled here into a statement of overwhelming persuasiveness and prophetic magnificence. Baldwin’s message is and always has been simple. It is this: “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.” And Baldwin’s demand is correspondingly simple: color must be forgotten, lest we all be smited with a vengeance “that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.’” The Black Muslims Baldwin portrays as a sign and a warning to the intransigent white world. They come to proclaim how deep is the Negro’s disaffection with the white world and all its works, and Baldwin implies that no American Negro can fail to respond somewhere in his being to their message: that the white man is the devil, that Allah has doomed him to destruction, and that the black man is about to inherit the earth. Baldwin of course knows that this nightmare inversion of the racism from which the black man has suffered can neither win nor even point to the neighborhood in which victory might be located. For in his view the neighborhood of victory lies in exactly the opposite direction: the transcendence of color through love.

Yet the tragic fact is that love is not the answer to hate—not in the world of politics, at any rate. Color is indeed a political rather than a human or a personal reality and if politics (which is to say power) has made it into a human and a personal reality, then only politics (which is to say power) can unmake it once again. But the way of politics is slow and bitter, and as impatience on the one side is matched by a setting of the jaw on the other, we move closer and closer to an explosion and blood may yet run in the streets.

Will this madness in which we are all caught never find a resting-place? Is there never to be an end to it? In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction. And when I think about the Negroes in America and about the image of integration as a state in which the Negroes would take their rightful place as another of the protected minorities in a pluralistic society, I wonder whether they really believe in their hearts that such a state can actually be attained, and if so why they should wish to survive as a distinct group. I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive (though I am less certain as to why we still do): they not only believed that God had given them no choice, but they were tied to a memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption. What does the American Negro have that might correspond to this? His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.

I share this hope, but I cannot see how it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the “so-called Negro leaders” of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal. The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution; obviously there are even greater barriers to its achievement than to the achievement of integration. What I am saying, however, is that in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way.

I have told the story of my own twisted feelings about Negroes here, and of how they conflict with the moral convictions I have since developed, in order to assert that such feelings must be acknowledged as honestly as possible so that they can be controlled and ultimately disregarded in favor of the convictions. It is wrong for a man to suffer because of the color of his skin. Beside that clichéd proposition of liberal thought, what argument can stand and be respected? If the arguments are the arguments of feeling, they must be made to yield; and one’s own soul is not the worst place to begin working a huge social transformation. Not so long ago, it used to be asked of white liberals, “Would you like your sister to marry one?” When I was a boy and my sister was still unmarried, I would certainly have said no to that question. But now I am a man, my sister is already married, and I have daughters. If I were to be asked today whether I would like a daughter of mine “to marry one,” I would have to answer: “No, I wouldn’t like it at all. I would rail and rave and rant and tear my hair. And then I hope I would have the courage to curse myself for raving and ranting, and to give her my blessing. How dare I withhold it at the behest of the child I once was and against the man I now have a duty to be?”

[sascerides]

Between the Stitches - A Short Story

Every house in the village has a piece of her work. An embroidered cushion on the armchair, a tablecloth hidden in the drawer, a tea towel hanging by the oven.

She stands by the market on Sundays and sells her labour for five pounds apiece. The countless hours and years of her needle running through the cloth. Her old gnarled fingers bending the thread to her will. Every house in the village has a piece of her work but they barely see her when they buy them. Not the real her.

Hers is a magic as old as the land. Hers is the power and the mercy and the word. With a flick of the wrist, she could bring about the end of an empire. The beginning of an age. She could weave you a tidal wave, a wedding dress, the promise of a child.

Hers is a rage as old as time. But time has moved on without her.

And here she is. Standing in the local supermarket of a half-dead provincial village. Here she is, trying to get something as mundane as canned sweet corn. 

And he. He is in her way.

This man. She has seen him grow up. From a pig-coloured screaming toddler in a polo shirt to a pig-coloured stern-faced man in a suit and tie. She has known him all his life and to him she is invisible. Or at least it would seem so. Standing there with his tie-half undone, his phone to his ear and his shopping cart blocking an entire aisle.

He is in her way.

“Excuse me,” she says and he turns to look at her but he does not move. He waves his hand dismissively and he continues talking on his phone.

“I’m telling you, Todd. You’ll regret not making this investment” he says and she says “Sorry. can you move?” He looks at her and he does not know who he is looking at. A little old lady. A villager. Someone who is in his way. She who has been here since before he was born. He does not know her face.

The people of this village do not know that she has been here since before the village was built. She has been here since the first apple blossoms fell with the first autumn sun sinking in the western sea. They do not know, how could they? They do not know and they would not care.

“Sir,” she says again. And she is moments away from anger. His name could be a curse in her mouth. His fate could be crushed in her hands. But all she does is mutter under her breath. And he does not hear her whispers. He does not hear her, just like everybody else. They don't hear her whispers, they don't hear her songs. To them, she is nothing but a seamstress, and oh, she thinks, with an almost venomous satisfaction. Oh, they have no idea. They have no idea what is coming for them.

The man covers the phone with his hand and he turns to her “Can you keep quiet, please? Can’t you see? I’m in the middle of an important phone call?” and before she can say anything else he has turned away from her again. 

She wishes she could call a thunderstorm on him right here. Right here in the canned food aisle under the fluorescent lights. She wishes she could open up a sinkhole and watch him fall, fall deep beneath the floor and the village and every safety he has ever known. She wishes she could be back on her porch with her needle and her threat.

She brings forth from the cloth the legends of old. An apple tree on an island in the lake. A sword sinking deep, deep beneath the waves. The old man in the hills, the young man on the cross, the woman with her sword screaming wildly in terror or rage. She brings the flowers in the spring and the golden light of autumn. She will leave you gasping for air in the waves of blue-green thread she stitches into a sea. If she wants to, she will leave you spell-bound. Tied into the stitches of her work. If she wants to.

Some might call her wicked. Cruel. Heartless. But she has no time for the morality of man. She has been here too long for that kind of trifles.

Now, she is tired and old and all she wants is to buy her sweet corn and return to her porch. But this man. This man who, like so many men before him, has no idea of the danger he is in. This man who thinks an old woman can be dismissed. That he is the one who has any sort of power here. This man has no idea what she could do to him.

There was a time when the land was full of magic. A time when the people believed. A time when they saw and feared what she could do. A time when she was young and strong and carefree dancing through the night. Before their church bells and their bank notes and their television screens.

Now, she is old an bitter and all she feels is the chill. All she feels is their hollow voices and their empty eyes. Their feet moving in patterns they learned from when they were children. Walking like a wind-up toy from one box to the next never leaving the paths on which they were set. She has watched this village grow and age and sink into quiet desperation, shrouded in a mist.

“Sir,” she says again. “I have to ask you to move” and again he ignores her. And for a second she gathers up all the magic of the land that sleeps within her. All the rage and the anger that has dwelt in these valleys for centuries before him. Every thunder strike and every hurricane. Every evil spell that she could throw in his face. And for a second, above them, clouds are gathering and winds are starting to blow. For a second, every can and jar in the aisles around them starts to shake. For a second even this man, oblivious as he is, feels a chill in his bones and he looks at her with a sudden fear in her eyes. Then, she breathes. She counts to three and she walks over to him. She pushes him away, with her frail old arms, and she takes her corn and walks away. He shouts behind her and he curses. He has dropped his phone on the floor. He is angry but she does not turn. She does not spare him a look. 

“Sorry” she mumbles, but she does not apologise for what she did, she apologises for what she is yet to do.

Hers is a rage as old as time. And as she walks out of the supermarket she can feel it boiling. Walking past the duck pond she is clenching her fists, whipping up waves on the surface as she passes. 

At home in her living room, she lets the silence settle in. The deep silence. The old silence. Hidden underneath the traffic noise and the cawing of the crows. Underneath the whisperings of her neighbours and the echo of a shouting man in a supermarket aisle. She sits there, quietly, watching the clouds go by. Slowly, slowly whispering beneath the sounds of the village. She sits there, patiently, as the darkness fills her living room. The shadows of the longest night of the year. As the moon starts his pilgrimage across the sky.

And then. Then she begins.

She takes out her needle and her thread. Her cloth and her tiny, round glasses to help her see. She sows by moonlight in the silence of the night. Up goes her needle through cloth and night and silence. Down goes her needle through cloth and life and time. Stitch by stitch by stitch she devises a world yet to be. A fate yet to be told. A story no one in this village will tell. 

From her needle springs a landscape. White as snow and cold as death. Hills and valleys and the cliffs, beaten by the waves. From her cloth grows a village. Tiny houses with their tiny doors and chimneys full of smoke. A cross-stitch church tower shooting up between the roofs. From her gnarled old fingers, she brings forth a supermarket and a high street. A dozen tiny houses full of tiny people in suits and dresses and faces that will soon begin to scream.

She stitches long and she stitches slow. Drawing her needle carefully, pulling the thread through the fabric of existence with every single stitch she makes. Pulling tight the future and the past and the very darkness of this night. She works and she whispers and she does not stop. And by the time the moon has made his way to the top of the sky, she has stitched out a village. Complete with shops and people and cars driving down the streets. She has stitched a village, not unlike the one that she is in. Exactly like the one, she is in. And if you showed it to the villagers they would marvel at her work but none of them will ever see it.

When she has finished her village, the real work begins. She has mimicked what is. Now is the time to create what will be. Now, the real magic begins. As the moon grips his walking stick tighter and hurries on towards the dawn she brews herself another cup of coffee and picks up her needle again.

She stitches up a flower, then a flowerbed. A forest on the outskirts of town. She stitches the duck pond bigger and the waves in it wild. She stitches a tree at the village square stretching her branches over the roofs. Bigger and bigger it grows as her needle dances through the cloth. Bigger and bigger until the moon is all but blocked out by the branches. She stitches the trunk of the tree, growing strong at the movement of her hand. Roots shooting up through the cobbled stones of the high street. Piercing the supermarket floor.

There was a time when she was patient. There was a time when she was kind. Before the monks marched into the land carrying their dead god of dust and sin and sacrament. Before the men in suits with their pitiful paper gods conquered the ground. Tamed the wind herself and lay barren all that had been meadows and flowers and song. There was a time when she was young. But now, now she is old and bitter and she is done with it all.

Hers is a rage as old as time and she cannot tame it anymore. Will not tame it anymore.

In the infant hours of the morning. While the sun is a mere glimmer on the horizon. When the moon is weary and footsore and nearing the end of his journey. Every embroidered flower in the village blooms. Every vine grows tall and strong bursting through the cloth from where they grew. Bursting up from cushions and coin purses and carpets in every house on every street. Every fairy tears through the cloth that binds her and soars through the stale living room air.

And in one house. One house in particular. A house with an angry middle-aged man in a suit. A man who dropped his phone today and shouted at a little old lady. In one house hangs an embroidered picture frame over the fireplace. A silent forest scene with quiet deer grazing. Sunlight streaming in from above. It is a piece he has inherited. From his mother and her mother before her. From a woman long ago who bought it from a lady at the marketplace. A lady with old tired hands who had been in the village for longer than anyone remembered. 

In the home of an angry middle aged man, sleeping soundly on his pillow hangs a landscape. And in the infant hours of the morning, the trees in that forest start to grow. They stretch their branches like limbs after a long sleep. Their roots shoot through the frame of their quiet, happy world and run towards the floor. Their trunks grow thick and strong and on their branches, new leaves shoot out every second. As the man sleeps on his pillow, the deer leave their meadow and jump through his living room. Antlers and all. The branches of the trees work their way through his ceiling and into his bedroom. Their leaves grow strong and bold and green. And on every twig a flower blooms taking up every spare inch of the house.

In the infant hours of the morning, the home of the man in the suit ceases to be a home. Instead, it becomes a forest bursting with life. Trees breaking through his roof shooting for the moon. Bushes in every corner and hares and badgers jumping the couch. In the middle of the living room, cross-stitched deer drink calmly from a forest pond that grows with every minute.

And somewhere deep, deep in this forest, under the roots of an ancient oak. Behind worms and dirt and what seems to be a century of growth. Somewhere in a dark cavern hidden in the trees. There sleeps an angry man who shouted in the supermarket. There sleeps soundly a man who would wake to find his home overtaken by life. But this man will never wake. For this is the magic of the needlework. In the world that she creates only her creation will blossom, and she did not stitch him waking up.

Hers is a magic as old as the land. Hers is a rage as old as time. And he. He was in her way.

In the childhood hours of the morning. When the sun peaks over the horizon and the moon takes off his walking boots. When the birds wake from their slumber, she puts her needle down. On the tapestry in front of her was a village. Now it is a forest. A land full of magic and trees. Of horses running wild and fairies dancing on the hills. Where the village was is now nothing but a lake. Deep and blue and quiet.

There was a time when she would have been pleased. But she is tired and bitter and old. There was a time when she would have been proud, but pride is far behind her. Now, all she does is lay her needle on her floor and crawl into her bed. Aching fingers and tired eyes and a quiet smile on her face. As she closes her eyes and goes to sleep her spells do their work and as the sun begins his journey over the sky, every stitch of hers will come to be.

As the moon rests on the horizon glancing back for a glimpse of his bright lover on his shining steed. As darkness retreats into the morning. She closes her eyes and sleeps. And all across the village embroidered duck ponds and ocean waves and forest lakes grow pregnant with purpose and power. All across the village they overflow their frames and overflow their quiet, decent living rooms, and overflow the houses they were in.

Hers is a magic as old as time. And this is her magic. What she has foretold will be true.

Every stitch of hers will come to be. And every house in the village had a piece of her work.

Thank you for reading. You can find more stories here. 

[garywonghc]

The Natural World

by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

If there is one area in which both education and the media have a special responsibility, it is, I believe, our natural environment. This responsibility has less to do with questions of right or wrong than with the question of survival. The natural world is our home. It is not necessarily sacred or holy. It is simply where we live.

It is therefore in our interest to look after it. This is common sense. But only recently have the size of our population and the power of science and technology grown to the point that they have a direct impact on nature. To put it another way, until now, Mother Earth has been able to tolerate our sloppy house habits. However, the stage has now been reached where she can no longer accept our behaviour in silence. The problems caused by environmental disasters can be seen as her response to our irresponsible behaviour. She is warning us that there are limits even to her tolerance.

Nowhere are the consequences of our failure to exercise discipline in the way we relate to our environment more apparent than in the case of present-day Tibet. It is no exaggeration to say that the Tibet I grew up in was a wildlife paradise. Every traveller who visited Tibet before the middle of the twentieth century remarked on this.

Animals were rarely hunted, except in the remotest areas where crops could not be grown. Indeed, it was customary for government officials annually to issue a proclamation protecting wildlife: Nobody, it read, however humble or noble, shall harm or do violence to the creatures of the waters or the wild. The only exceptions to this were rats and wolves. As a young man, I recall seeing great numbers of different species whenever I travelled outside Lhasa. My chief memory of the three-month journey across Tibet from my birthplace at Takster in the East to Lhasa, where I was formally proclaimed Dalai Lama as a four-year-old boy, is of the wildlife we encountered along the way.

Immense herds of kiang (wild asses) and drong (wild yak) freely roamed the great plains. Occasionally we would catch sight of shimmering herds of gowa, the shy Tibetan gazelle, of wa, the white-lipped deer, or of tso, our majestic antelope. I remember, too, my fascination for the little chibi, or pika, which would congregate on grassy areas. They were so friendly. I loved to watch the birds: the dignified gho (the bearded eagle) soaring high above monasteries and perched up in the mountains; the flocks of geese (nangbar); and occasionally, at night, to hear the call of the wookpa (the long-eared owl).

Even in Lhasa, one did not feel in any way cut off from the natural world. In my rooms at the top of the Potala, the winter palace of the Dalai Lamas, I spent countless hours as a child studying the behaviour of the red-beaked khyungkar which nested in the crevices of its walls. And behind the Norbulingka, the summer palace, I often saw pairs of trung trung Oapanes blacknecked cranes), birds which for me are the epitome of elegance and grace, that lived in the marshlands there. And all this is not to mention the crowning glory of Tibetan fauna: the bears and mountain foxes, the chanku (wolves), and sazik (the beautiful snow leopard), and thesik (lynx) which struck terror into the hearts of the normal farmer - or the gentle-faced giant panda (thorn tra), whi.ch is native to the border area between Tibet and China.

Sadly, this profusion of wildlife is no longer to be found. Partly due to hunting but primarily due to loss of habitat, what remains half a century after Tibet was occupied is only a small fraction of what there was. Without exception, every Tibetan I have spoken with who has been back to visit Tibet after thirty to forty years has reported on a striking absence of wildlife. Whereas before wild animals would often come close to the house, today they are hardly anywhere to be seen.

Equally troubling is the devastation of Tibet's forests. In the past, the hills were all thickly wooded; today those who have been back report that they are clean-shaven like a monk's head. The government in Beijing has admitted that the tragic flooding of western China, and further afield, is in part due to this. And yet I hear continuous reports of round-the-clock convoys oftrucks carrying logs east out of Tibet. This is especially tragic given the country's mountainous terrain and harsh climate. It means that replanting requites sustained care and attention. Unfortunately there is little evidence of this.

None of this is to say that, historically, we Tibetans were deliberately 'conservationist'. We were not. The idea of something called 'pollution' simply never occurred to us. There is no denying we were rather spoiled in this respect. A small population inhabited a very large area with clean, dry air and an abundance of pure mountain water. This innocent attitude toward cleanliness meant that when we Tibetans went into exile, we were astonished to discover, for example, the existence of streams whose water is not drinkable. Like an only child, no matter what we did, Mother Earth tolerated our behaviour. The result was that we had no proper understanding of cleanliness and hygiene. People would spit or blow their nose in the street without giving it a second thought. Indeed, saying this, I recall one elderly Khampa, a former bodyguard who used to come each day to circumambulate my residence in Dharamsala (a popular devotion). Unfortunately, he suffered greatly from bronchitis. This was exacerbated by the incense he carried. At each corner, therefore, he would pause to cough and expectorate so ferociously that I sometimes wondered whether he had come to pray or just to spit!

Over the years, since our first arriving in exile, I have taken a close interest in environmental issues. The Tibetan government in exile has paid particular attention to introducing our children to their responsibilities as residents of this fragile planet. And I never hesitate to speak out on the subject whenever I am given the opportunity. In particular, I always stress the need to consider how our actions, in affecting the environment, are likely to affect others. I admit that this is very often difficult to judge. We cannot say for sure what the ultimate effects of, for example, deforestation might be on the soil and the local rainfall, let alone what the implications are for the planet's weather systems. The only clear thing is that we humans are the only species with the power to destroy the earth as we know it. The birds have no such power, nor do the insects, nor does any mammal. Yet if we have the capacity to destroy the earth, so, too, do we have the capacity to protect it.

What is essential is that we find methods of manufacture that do not destroy nature. We need to find ways of cutting down on our use of wood and other limited natural resources. I am no expert in this field, and I cannot suggest how this might be done. I know only that it is possible, given the necessary determination. For example, I recall hearing on a visit to Stockholm some years ago that for the first time in many years fish were returning to the river that runs through the city. Until recently, there were none due to industrial pollution. Yet this improvement was by no means the result of all the local factories closing down. Likewise, on a visit to Germany, I was shown an industrial development designed to produce no pollution. So, clearly, solutions do exist to limit damage to the natural world without bringing industry to a halt.

This does not mean that I believe that we can rely on technology to overcome all our problems. Nor do I believe we can afford to continue destructive practices in anticipation of technical fixes being developed. Besides, the environment does not need fixing. It is our behaviour in relation to it that needs to change. I question whether, in the case of such a massive looming disaster as that caused by the greenhouse effect, a fix could ever exist, even in theory. And supposing it could, we have to ask whether it would ever be feasible to apply it on the scale that would be required. What of the expense and what of the cost in terms of our natural resources? I suspect that these would be prohibitively high. There is also the fact that in many other fields-such as in the humanitarian relief of hunger-there are already insufficient funds to cover the work that could be undertaken. Therefore, even if one were to argue that the necessary funds could be raised, morally speaking this would be almost impossible to justify given such deficiencies. It would not be right to deploy huge sums simply in order to enable the industrialised nations to continue their harmful practices while people in other places cannot even feed themselves.

All this points to the need to recognise the universal dimension of our actions and, based on this, to exercise restraint. The necessity of this is forcefully demonstrated when we come to consider the propagation of our species. Although from 'the point of view of all the major religions, the more humans the better, and although it may be true that some of the latest studies suggest a population implosion a century from now, still I believe we cannot ignore this issue. As a monk, it is perhaps inappropriate for me to comment on these matters. I believe that family planning is important. Of course, I do pot mean to suggest we should not have children. Human life is a precious resource and married couples should have children unless there are compelling reasons not to. The idea of not having children just because we want to enjoy a full life without responsibility is quite mistaken I think. At the same time, couples do have a duty to consider the impact our numbers have on the natural environment. This is especially true given the impact of modern 'technology.

Fortunately, more and more people are coming to recognise the importance of ethical discipline as a means to ensuring a healthy place to live. For this reason I am optimistic that disaster can be averted. Until comparatively recently, few people gave much thought to the effects of human activity on our planet. Yet today there are even political parties whose main concern is this. Moreover, the fact that the air we breathe, the water we drink, the forests and oceans which sustain millions of different life forms, and the Climatic patterns which govern out weather systems all transcend national boundaries is a source of hope. It means that no country,  no matter how rich and powerful or how poor and weak it may be, can afford not to take action in respect of this issue.

As far as the individual is concerned, the problems resulting from our neglect of our natural environment are a powerful reminder that we all have a contribution to make. And while one person's actions may not have a significant impact, the combined effect of millions of individuals' actions certainly does. This means that it is time for all those living in the industrially developed nations to give serious thought to changing their lifestyle. Again this is not so much a question of ethics. The fact that the population of the rest of the world has an equal right to improve their standard of living is in some ways more important than the affluent being able to continue their lifestyle. If this is to be fulfilled without causing irredeemable violence to the natural world-with all the negative consequences for happiness that this would entail-the richer countries must set an example. The cost to the planet, and thus the cost to humanity, of ever-increasing standards of living, is simply too great.

[freyjaiam]

Rise of the Siren (3/3)

Dis: I don’t own LOT

Summary: Black Siren gets a deal she can’t pass up from Sara Lance to join her team of misfits to travel around time. Black Siren starts to wonder just what she’d gotten herself into and wonders just how long she’ll feel like honoring the deal. She’s no hero, but then again, they claim they aren’t either…

read on AO3

Laurel rolled her eyes at Jefferson’s back. The others were on a mission in the Victorian Era. Looking out the window from the main area, Laurel could see all the plague-infested Europeans in their sick, germ infested hovels. The place was disgusting. She didn’t want to be here any longer than was necessary. Apparently someone wanted to recreate the plague for the Earth-1′s time era. Something that could kill millions. Laurel had gotten many scoffs about her chime in of letting it be the survival the the fittest. When she insisted she’d been joking (she hadn’t) no one had really believed her. Which was fine with her. The one they called Jax had offered to stay behind. His fear came off of him in waves. He didn’t want to get sick. Despite the assurances that they would be immune to the disease, he still hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near it. Sara agreed to let him stay behind saying he could play babysitter. So now she was stuck, watching him pace to and fro, and if weren’t for the fact she didn’t want to be stuck HERE of all places, she’d be doing her best to escape.

“Would you stop?” Laurel twisted away from the window to find a place to sit, crossing her arms and legs in the process. Her eyes narrowed at the nervous teenager. “You’re making my head hurt with that sniveling look on your face.”

“It’s just... They’ve been gone a long time,” he said, ignoring her insult.

“So?”

“So?! I’m worried.”

“They’re big boys and girls. They can handle it,” she said, checking her chipped, black nails, her crossed leg bouncing slightly in boredom. 

“Still...” He started pacing again and she huffed out a breath while leaning back in the uncomfortable chair. “I should go out there and look for them. Make sure they are okay.”

“Then go.”

“And leave you on the ship by yourself? Yeah right!”

“Like I could go anywhere anyway,” said Laurel. “You all locked me out!”

“That’s right,” said Jax, a sneaky smile on his face. “You are. And if something happened to them? You’d be stuck here. Forever.”

“So would you! It’s not like you’d stay here.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going out there now. Without my powers. So if I end up in trouble...” He smirked. “You’d be out of luck.”

Laurel sighed. Maybe it wouldn’t be bad. Live out the rest of her days on this ship. Alone. Away from people. Perhaps go back out to terrorize the locals. But, that would hardly be any fun... Not with how sick they were. And she’d still have this damn collar on!

“Fine,” she said, not happy about it. “Let’s go.”

.

.

.

“Not many people out. What with the plague and all.”

Laurel slowly walked down the cobbled sidewalks. Her all black outfit fit not only the time period, but the atmosphere of the town. The dress was layered, the hem dragging slightly on the ground. Her boots were also black and clicked against the stones with each step. The bodice was tightly cinched, thanks to a blushing Jax, and she had a shawl to cover her shoulders. The finishing touch was the hat. Laurel looked like a first-class citizen. Beside her was Jax. He’d made a fuss about wearing tights, much like Mick had, and had on brown pants, a white shirt, a buttoned vest, and a jacket with coat tails. 

“Which will hopefully make this easier.”

“You know what would make this easier...”

“I’m not taking off that collar.”

Laurel rolled her eyes. “Are we close to the address they were going to?”

“Yeah, it’s just-” He cut himself off, grabbing her elbow and pulling her behind the nearest carriage. The horses snorted at them and Laurel wretched her arm out of his grip. She was about to yell when he brought up his hands and started talking in a whisper. “Chill, Laurel, it’s just we got a situation over there.”

“What?” she asked, huffing a stray piece of hair out of her face. 

“Time pirates. I see their weapons from here. Not good!”

“Ah...” Laurel peeked out from behind, studying the men. “There are only four.”

“Only?”

“Hm... Yes. I’ll be back!”

“What?” Jax tried to stop her but she walked back out onto the sidewalk, skirts swishing as he watched. He held his breath as she got closer to the pirates. He’d heard stories about her fighting skills... And he was about to get a front seat to them. He heard her giggle and say something to the guards. One of them came forward, a predatory grin on his face---which transitioned to one of pain as she bunched up her skirts and promptly kicked him between the legs. Jax watched, impressed, as she disarmed another pirate and knocked him out. He frowned as she shot the other two, jogging up to stop her from killing the third. “Wait! No killing!”

“From what I hear you’ve all been killing,” said Laurel. “So get off that high horse of yours.”

“Only when we need to. We don’t need to here.”

Laurel looked to think it over for a bit before sighing in annoyance. She then promptly licked out her leg to kick the man she’d gotten between the legs, square in the face, leaving him in the gutter unconscious. 

“Have it your way.”

They turned to look at the dark house the others would undoubtedly be in. 

“Ready?”

.

.

.

“This place is empty. No one is here and this has been a waste of time.”

“No... There’s gotta be a reason for those guys on the street.”

“Well, that reason isn’t here,” said Laurel, walking around the dark and dank living room. She looked out the back window and could make out fire in the distance. She tapped the window, looking over her shoulder to the younger half of Firestorm. “Though maybe it’s there.”

“Let’s go.”

They walked out the back door and went into the woods. Everything was black and Laurel embraced the dark as she easily maneuvered through the woods. While her feet barely made a sound, Jax’s footfalls snapped twigs and russled leaves. She shot him a look of annoyance as they stopped at the perimeter of what looked to be a site burning bodies of the dead. Individuals were wearing masks with the elongated beak. Everyone who was being tossed in the pits were dead, their stench making both Laurel and Jax not want to breath through their noses. 

“See them?”

“No,” said Laurel. “They’re not here, either.”

“Then let’s go. This place is giving me the creeps.”

“We should go ask the men we left on the street. Before they wake up and leave.”

“Good idea.”

They left the burning site and went back to the house. They groaned when seeing that their only answers to where the others could be were gone. Laurel chose that time to search the pockets of the others while Jax tried, once more, to reach them by comms. They were ready to go back into the woods to ask those burning bodies if they’d seen anything when a commotion had them looking down the street. They shared a look before running down just in time to see Mick, a wild look in his eye, punch out the same pirate Laurel had fought. 

“Mick!” Mick twisted around, ready to fight, but stilled when seeing Jax. “Whoa man, calm down, it’s us.”

“Ah, Kid... Good to see you...” Mick then turned to Laurel and smirked. “Pipes.”

“Where are the others?”

“Pirates got them. I got away. Tried to free the others but the Boss told me to come get you instead. The cuffs they slapped on us were state of the art. I only knew how to get out of them because of my time as Chronos.”

“Damn... Well, there’s three of us now. We could-”

“It’s a tough crowd, Jax... Gunna need some more fire power. And I don’t mean my gun... Though it would be useful right now.”

“Then what do you suggest?” asked Jax, whose eyes widened when Mick pointed to his throat then eyed Laurel. “Oh no. No, no, no. I’m not taking that collar off. Sara would kill me!”

“You don’t have to-” said Mick, starting for Laurel, but Jax stepped in front of him. “Out of my way, Junior.”

“Mick! Think about this!” pleaded Jax. 

“If I wanted to kill you Jax, I’d have done it already,” said Laurel, speaking calmly, something that made him uneasy. Who talked so calm like that when talking about murder? “I’m willing to play nice to get out of here... and let’s face it. You need me.”

“I... I... Ah, hell, when this blows up, I’m not taking the blame,” said Jax, relenting as Mick moved to Laurel to take off the collar. 

“Fine by me,” said Mick, reaching up as Laurel exposed her throat. She watched his face as his fingers slid over her skin before fidgeting with the device. Within the minute it was off and she brought her hand up to her throat as he stepped aside, dropping the collar into his pocket. “We good there, Pipes?”

“Yeah...” A slow, gleeful smile spread across her face. “We’re good.”

“Great, we’re all good, can we go save our friends now?” asked Jax. 

“Under one condition,” said Laurel, crossing her arms, making Mick and Jax share a look. 

“What?” they both asked. 

“This collar stays off.”

“We can’t promise that,” said Jax, who rushed onward as she glared. “But... But we can speak for you. I mean... You are fighting with us.”

“Even though its for your benefit more than ours,” said Mick with a wink. 

“Fine.”

.

.

.

“I can’t believe we’re entrusting our lives to Mr. Rory of all people,” complained Stein, pulling as the cuffs behind his back. “What is he to do anyway? Bring Jefferson and the impostor? That version of Ms. Lance would rather see us dead than help us!”

“Yeah, well, what choice do we have?” asked Nate. “The rest of us are a bit tied up at the moment!”

“Bad joke, man,” said Ray. “Any luck with your powers to break free?”

“No, I tried, these cuffs are blocking them somehow. Sara? Hows the lock-picking going?”

“Harder than expected, even with Mick’s quick tutorial,” said Sara with a wince. She looked to Amaya, who also had a problem with her totem. “Any luck on your end?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“So we’re just sitting ducks,” complained Ray. “I don’t like this.”

They were all quiet as the leader came into the room. He chuckled, watching them all, slowly taking them in while pulling out a cigar. “I must admit I expected more from the team who took down Vandal Savage. Despite one of you getting away it is no matter... We got what we came for. Soon, your friends and families will be dying on the streets. Or, perhaps will be part of the projected twenty percent who will live.”

“Why do you want to kill all those people?” asked Ray. 

“Because... The pay is great,” said the man with a grin, putting the cigar in his mouth just as a blood curdling scream was released downstairs... Everyone’s eyes widened as the house shook. “What the-”

“He didn’t,” started Amaya.

“He wouldn’t,” said Nate.

“Jefferson would have stopped him,” interjected Stein.

Another scream, this one rocking the house even more. Dust fluttered down from the rafters, pictures fell from the wall, and everyone shifted uneasily as someone slowly made their way up the stairs. The pirate dropped his cigar and brought out his weapon. He was shaking, because the loud bolstering of his companions was no longer audible in the house. It was quiet, save for the person coming up the stairs, the dull thud of their boots against the wooden steps ominous. He reached for Ray, pulling him to his feet and putting the gun to his head just as Laurel kicked in the door. Her head tilted to the side and she brought her hands behind her back as she surveyed the room, eyes falling to the pirate before speaking.

“We have your men beat, if you surrender now, we won’t hurt you,” she said, voice sounding bored. She then smirked. “Resist. Then I’ll hurt you. Which I might find more fun than giving you a chance.”

“I’ll kill him!”

She snorted. “Go ahead.”

“Wait... What?” asked Ray. “No!”

“You think I care about him? Any of them? They kept me prisoner. Put a collar on my neck like I’m some sort of dog. I’d let you kill them all if it didn’t mean I was stuck here.”

“You bitch,” hissed Sara. 

“Ouch, Sis,” said Laurel, hand to her chest while her tone turned sickeningly sweet. “That hurt my feelings. I might cry! Isn’t that what your sister was known for? Sweet Laurel, always crying because she deserved better than a cheating man and a whore of a sister.”

“Shut up!” shouted Nate. 

“I knew taking you on the team was a bad idea. You’ll never change!” said Stein.

“Well, duh, I’m the bad guy...” She then looked to the pirate. “What do you say, Handsome? Take me out of this century and somewhere far from here?”

“What about them?” he asked. 

Laurel shrugged a shoulder. “Kill them. I don’t care.”

“You killed my men!”

“Anyone who points a gun at me gets killed. Besides, bigger cut for you... Am I right or am I right?”

The Pirate slowly started to relax. He smiled at Laurel who smirked back. He tossed Ray down to the floor and aimed his weapon at him. Laurel went to stand at his side. She looked down at the Legends... Her hate for them evident in her gaze. The pirate made his move to kill them but Laurel made her move and in a blink of an eye she had the pirate down on the ground after flipping him onto his back. He was stunned and she grinned down at him, her foot on his wrist so he couldn’t raise his weapon. 

“You... You tricked me.”

“Oldest trick in the book. How could you be so stupid?”

“You fucking-”

“Uh-uh-uh...” said Laurel in a sing-song voice, wagging her finger while increasing the pressure on his wrist. “Watch what you say or I’ll kill you for the fun of it. I wonder how long I could scream before you head exploded.”

At that moment Mick busted in with Jax. 

“It... It was all a ploy?” asked Stein, stunned. 

“Disappointed old man?” asked Laurel. 

“I never doubted you for a second!” insisted Ray, voice only slightly shaky. 

“Whatever,” said Laurel as everyone was freed. She stepped away and let Sara deal with the pirates. They were all cuffed and deposited in the room downstairs before the group headed to the ship. Before entering, though, Sara put a hand on Laurel’s shoulder to stop her. Laurel turned and then stumbled back as a right hook hit her in the jaw. “What the fu-”

“That was for what you said about Laurel,” said Sara, murder in her eyes. 

“You heroes,” said Laurel, bringing her hand up to dab at her bleeding lip. “So sensitive. Little snowflakes that melt at the first insult.”

“What you said was out of line... But... You still saved us.”

“Didn’t really have a choice. I’d have been stuck here.”

“You could have sided with the pirates,” said Sara. 

“That...” Laurel shrugged. “Whatever. What do you want? A hug? I don’t hug.”

“Neither do I,” said Sara, looking away. In the distance she could see the embers of multiple fires in the city, burning those who were infected with the plague. Today had been a good day. They’d saved millions. They’d taken down a group of pirates and sabotaged their ship so that THEY would be the ones stuck in this era with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the cuffs they’d left them in. “Look, Laurel... I still don’t trust you...”

“Surprise, surprise...”

“BUT... Unlike those back in 2016. I’m willing to give you a chance. We’ve all done bad things. Horrible things. Except maybe Ray. Just... Work with us. You’d be surprised how much you have in common with everyone here.”

“But I don’t want to be a hero.”

“Neither do we.” Sara headed to the ship. “You come back on this boat... I’ll treat you like an equal. We all will. We aren’t heroes, Laurel. We’ve lied, cheated, and killed---but we also like to make sure the world keeps spinning.” 

“And the collar?”

“It stays off.”

Laurel nodded then followed behind Sara. 

“It’s a deal...” Laurel hummed. “For now.”

“That’s all I ask for.”

END

[holisticpanda]

she kills with her guitar

Title: she kills with her guitar 

Summary: She plays the guitar as though she was born with it in her hands—like it was a part of her own body.

Kurlish Week Day 2: AU

Notes: The first time I saw Bart I thought ‘huh, she vaguely reminds of Tash Sultana.’ So if you want to look up some of her vids to get an idea of Bart’s appearance and musical style, That’s sort of who I’m challenging here.

A surprising amount of people have absolutely no idea how hacking works. Most just picture a guy sitting in the dark in front of multiple screens, typing furiously for hours at a loud, mechanical keyboard while techno music blasts in the background.

And they’re not completely wrong. He is currently listening to disco, techno’s long dead ancestor, but that’s where the similarities end. What usually happens is that he types a few commands into the command line to run a program that either he or one of his fellow hacker buddies wrote and spends the next few hours fucking off while the application does its work. If it weren’t for the movies making hacking look like something only a genius could do, he’d for sure be out of a job.

A job he doesn’t particularly like if he’s being honest. Besides the moral greyness of what he does, jobs that pay well don’t come along all that often. He can usually scrape together just enough in a month to eat, pay the rent on his shoebox of an apartment, and also indulge in his more extravagant hobbies—if visiting the local strip clubs can be considered a hobby, anyway. He doesn’t lead a particularly happy or exciting life, but at least it’s a relatively free one.

He’s currently running a brute force hack into some rich girl named Lydia Spring’s Facebook account—her dad was convinced she was dating older men—when the doors to the Waffle House he’s relaxing in slam open, loud enough to scare the shit out of him even through his earpods. A woman who looks to be a little older than him, somewhere in her mid to late twenties if he had to guess, stomps into the diner.

She’s wearing a large black t-shirt that looks two sizes too big for her and a pair of rippled, baggy black pants stuffed into scuffed, oversized boots. Her wild brown hair is tamed only by a backwards blue cap while her wrists are adorned with a few beaded and woven bracelets. A variety of tattoos litter the rest of her arms that he can see, creeping up from her forearms to her biceps, and he spots the glint of a stud in her nose in the bright lighting. In short, combined with the wild expression in her piercing blue eyes, she looks like a completely deranged hippie.

Her gaze flickers about the restaurant before eventually settling on him, her face morphing from annoyance into furious rage, and she stomps her way over to his table to grab him by the front of his shirt.

“Dirk Gently, you are a dead man!”

It takes him a minute to find his voice because it isn’t everyday that a random hippie chick mistakes him for someone else and tries to kick his ass, but he manages to squeak out a reply. “Who’s...who’s Dirk Gently?”

She pauses, blinks, and looks around the restaurant again in confusion. Besides an older couple sitting at the bar and the wait staff, he’s currently the only one in the diner. Her eyes shift back to his, eyebrows furrowing. “...You’re not Dirk Gently?”

“No!” He wrenches himself from her surprisingly strong grip to put as much distance between them as possible—which isn’t much since she’s blocking his way out of the diner and his booth only goes back so far.

“What, are you kidding me right now? Why didn’t you just say ‘I’m not Dirk Gently’?!”

He can only stare back at her, incredulous. “Because I don’t know who that is!”

Frowning, she huffs and plops down in the booth across from him, looking less like a crazy, murderous flower child and more like a little girl who’d just been told she couldn’t ever eat ice cream again. Judging by the way she’s slumped down in her seat, whatever’s bothering her has her pretty bummed.

Once he’s (reasonably) sure that she’s probably not going to kill him, he considers hearing her out to see if there’s something he can do to help. Plus there’s also the fact that the faster he can fix her problem the faster he can get her to go away. He has a rich girl’s account to sift through for evidence of possible child abuse, after all. “So...why are you looking for this Dirk Gently guy? You know, beyond wanting to kill him.”

The woman scoffs but grudgingly leans forward to rest her forearms on the table, swiping a few of his fries to stuff down her throat in the process. “My last drummer quit on me so I went to that Craigslist place to find a new one. This Dirk Gently guy on there said he’d help me out, but every time we’re supposed to meet up and practice, he bails on me!”

He nods gravely, doing his best to appear interested. “I’m guessing he was supposed to meet you here?”

“Yeah, and of course the dickhead didn’t show. Again. It was the last chance we had to practice, but now I’m gonna have to cancel my gig tonight. This all fucking blows.”

After hearing her reasons for accosting him he finds that he actually feels a little bad for her. He knows firsthand what it’s like to be constantly let down when you needed help the most, and it’s no wonder she was steaming mad when she came in. Maybe she’s not so crazy after all.

He taps his fingers on his keyboard, trying to figure out a possible solution to her problem (maybe she should try Reddit?) when she snaps her head up to stare wide eyed at him. “Can you make songs on that thing?” she asks, pointing to his laptop.

He glances down at it, confused. “I mean, I guess in theory? I do have a program on here that you can make music on. It simulates the sound of nearly every musical instrument ever invented, and—”

“Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Can you make that thing sound like drums ?”

“Um, yeah?”

A sudden grin breaks out on her face. Before he can react she jumps up and drags him to his feet with a strength belying her small stature. “You’re my new drummer. C’mon, let’s go.”

She ignores his protests and pulls him from the restaurant to a yellow, beat up old car that looks like it used to be a taxi cab in another life. All he can do is hug his laptop to his chest as she books it down the street until they get to a run down storage unit in the middle of nowhere. She then unlocks and pulls up one of the garage-like doors to reveal her studio space. It looks like she also lives there if the futon, empty pizza boxes, and cases of water are anything to go by.

“Sit there, where I can see you,” she says, pointing at the futon covered in snack wrappers while she goes back to her car to get something. He clears a space on it to sit, and when she comes back, she has a guitar case slung over her shoulder. She then plops down on the empty seat next to him.

After spending half an hour turning his computer keyboard into an improvised beat machine under her impatient gaze, they spend the next two and a half going over some of her songs. Their practice session mostly consists of her terrorizing him for missing cues or having a complete lack of rhythm, and by the end, it feels like they haven’t gotten anywhere. He doesn’t even have the slightest idea what type of music she plays let alone how any of her songs go.

Yeah, they’re for sure going to bomb.

He tries to say as much but the woman rushes him back into her car so that they’re headed to where he assumes her gig is. She turns to look at him, taking her eyes off the road in front of her for an alarmingly long time.

“It’s really good you decided to help me.”

“I didn’t decide anything . You said you’d smash my laptop if I didn’t help you.”

“Well, you decided it was better to help me than lose your laptop. It was nice.”

He can only gape back at her incredulously. He takes it back. She’s insane. She’s literally insane.

It doesn’t take much longer for them to pull into a surprisingly full lot next to a derelict looking dive bar. “We’re here,” she says, shutting off the dangerously rattling car. She suddenly reaches across his body—causing him to reflexively flinch—and opens his door for him. ”Get out.”

He scrambles out of the passenger side while she takes her time pulling her gear out of the trunk, and it’s at that moment that he strongly considers making a run for it. She can’t see him with the trunk open, and he could be a full block away before she even notices that he’s gone.

But then he remembers the dozens of times he’d been let down in life; by friends, by family—hell, by the fucking world. He can’t do that to her, even if she hadbasically kidnapped him and forced him to join her band. It was only a few more hours, and it wasn’t like he had anything better to do that night.

They walk through the front doors of the rundown venue and it’s pretty much exactly what he expects. It’s dark, the air is thick with cigarette smoke, and most of the clientele already looks half drunk. He’s not exactly uncomfortable in the bar since he’d spent more than his fair share of time in places just like these ever since he’d moved out of his parent’s house at seventeen, but it’s not a place that he particularly likes to hang out in if he can help it.

She leads them over to the back corner of the building where a small stage has been built. An older woman is busy setting up the equipment and she looks up as they approach. “You two the Holistic Assassins?”

The hippie chick pulls her guitar off of her shoulder and sets it down on one of the stools resting against the wall. “That’s us.”

The older woman nods and stands, stretching out her back as she finishes setting up the last amp. “I’m Barb, the owner here. You go on in five.”

“What’s a...holistic assassin?” he asks as the owner disappears into the darkness of the bar.

After plugging her guitar into one of the amps, she turns to look at him with a pleased grin. "’Holistic’ is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I don't do your whole deal with structure, or finding inspiration, or writing drafts. I just...I play whatever I feel like playing all day, and if it works, then it becomes a new song.

Her eyes are nearly shining as she explains it to him, though for his part all he can do is stare dumbfounded back at her. “The connection between cause and effect is much more, you know, subtle than you would otherwise think. I mean...you wouldn't believe it. Things, they double up. They parallel . Everything is chaos, but it’s, like, synchronized? It's like, there's always something ready to mirror itself. Life endlessly turning inward.”

Yup. Crazy. “Don’t get me wrong, but it seemed like you were just playing a bunch of random notes when we were practicing.”

“I never played a bad song,” she says, somewhat defensively. She picks up her guitar and slings the strap over her shoulder. “Come on, time to play.”

He follows her onto the stage and plugs his laptop into the other amp—then tries to find the darkest shadow to hide in. They were going to bomb spectacularly, and the less people who saw him, the better.

“I’m Bart Curlish, and we’re the Holistic Assassins,” she grumbles into her mic, sounding like she’d rather be anywhere else. Which was odd since this was her gig.

He then belatedly realizes that it’s the first time he’s heard her name. What the hell kind of a name is Bart for a girl? She looks back at him and nods, giving him his cue to start, so taking a deep breath, he begins to tap out the first rhythm she’d shown him a couple of hours before on his keyboard. She bobs her head with the beat for a few seconds, eyes closed, and then begins to play. He feels his jaw drop when the smoothest sound he’d ever heard comes from the amp next to him, and then he feels his jaw scrape the ground when she begins to sing.

She’s a completely different person. Her voice is husky and gravely, just like her speaking voice, and it’s surprisingly more pleasant than he expected it to be. And it’s still only secondary to how well she plays the guitar. She plays as though she was born with it in her hands—like it was a part of her own body.

Thankfully it’s easy enough for him to keep up with her. Her music is slower than he expects, and more mellow. If he had to compare it to anything it sounds sort of like a mix of folk and reggae, but even that’s inaccurate—it’s completely and totally hers.

He makes a couple of mistakes during her short forty-five minute set, but overall, he thinks he did a pretty good job for his first time. Sure, he’s absolutely exhausted and is sweating buckets from being under the hot lights of the stage, but he’d survived.

“We’ve been the Holistic Assassins. Thanks,” she all but spits at the audience. Unsurprisingly she’d reverted back into her old grumpy self once her fingers left her guitar.

The crowd isn’t that big—only around fifty or so people—but everyone’s on their feet and clapping, even the tough looking bikers who seemed more likely to eat them than cheer her on. A few people are even bold enough to approach her as she leaves the stage but she only gives them the barest amount of attention, nodding courteously as they compliment her and shrugging off any questions they have. Eventually they all give up on getting anything more than a couple of words out of her and the owner of the bar approaches them with an excited smile.

“I had my doubts about you when you first asked if you could play here, but you know what? You put on a hell of a show.” She hands Bart a stack of dirty bills. “I know it ain’t much, but come back soon and I’ll double it.”

Bart takes the money with a grunt, gives him half, and grabs him by his arm, pulling him towards the door leading to the parking lot. It’s not until they make it back outside to her car that she relaxes and gives him a small, meek smile. “You did good.”

A little surprised by the praise—she didn’t seem the type to dish it out all that often—he shakes his head. “It was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, and you’re really good. Amazing, actually.”

They lean silently against the hood of her car together for a few minutes, both still coming down from the high of performing live. He’s just about to make his exit when Bart suddenly stands and turns to look at him.

“So...you did the thing up there on stage, And now that you did it maybe you’re gonna leave, and...You can do whatever you want, you know, because I forced you to help me, and...and like, it must’ve been really bad for you, you know I didn’t think about your feelings and all that, and…

She takes a deep breath and lets it out again, looking distinctly uncomfortable with everything she was saying to him. It was obvious this wasn’t something she was used to. “I don’t want you to go. I think.” Her eyes are misty as she speaks, surprising him since they’ve only known each other for at most six hours and yet she already seems to care so much for him. It pains him to admit it, but he can’t remember the last time anyone had been so sad to see him go.

He considers her request, and after a little thought, realizes that he was truly, genuinely happy up there making music on stage with her. He had been doing nothing everyday of his life and thinking it was just that—nothing. It was nothing. Even if he’s just providing a backing beat for her amazing songs, he’s found some semblance of a purpose and hell, maybe a little happiness too.

“Hey,” he says, nudging her to get her attention. “I’m not going anywhere.”

A wide grin breaks out on her face, and laughing with unconcealed relief, she throws her arms around his neck. She’s still sweaty from their show but so is he, so rather than try to squirm away from her touch like he usually would with any other person, he awkwardly returns it. She smells like musk, dirt, and sweat, and though the smell isn’t exactly pleasant, it isn’t altogether unpleasant either.

Still smiling, Bart pops the trunk to put her guitar inside. “Our next gig’s tomorrow night. Come on, we gotta practice.”

He slides into the passenger seat with his laptop and leans his head out of the window to talk to her. “You ever think about selling some merch? Maybe putting out a CD or at least uploading your music to BandCamp for people to download? I’m pretty good with a camera, so I could help you get your face out there a little more.” He’s vaguely aware that he’s being a little overeager, but he’s inspired by her. He believes in her. She has something special, and with his help, maybe she could become one of the biggest indie artists of all time. “I’ll bet I can sync my computer up to the stage lights. You know, add a little pizzazz to the show.”

She slams the trunk closed and laughs as she slides into the driver’s seat. “Pizzazz? Ken, you’re a riot.”

He rolls his eyes and shrugs. Well, whatever. He’d get her to see the appeal of his ideas eventually. He’s about to suggest they get a bite to eat before they spend the next who knows how long practicing when something she’d said stops him cold.

“...Wait, how do you know my name?”

[floggingink]

Riverdale: “Chapter Twelve: Anatomy of a Murder”

this is the penultimate episode of Riverdale, I can’t believe this is happening, I’m frothing at the mouth

Veronica was rich: “We’re not talking about the Vogue closet here, B.” the sheer fabulous gall of Veronica is—is exhilarating. “It’s not the Met ball.” this is the trailer of the man she just BURGLED

Archie > Dawson: the same goes for Archie’s newfound, forthright belief in truth, justice, and the American way: “My dad will know what to do.” isn’t Archie on Jughead’s side the greatest thing you’ve ever seen? isn’t this BETTER than inexplicably outing him as the son of a trans-Canadian mobster? isn’t this BETTER than letting the Mongol hordes swarm into his house in the middle of Jughead’s birthday party? isn’t this the BEST THING EVER?

the Andrews have some truly calm nature scene reproductions hanging on their walls

Please protect Betty: Betty, who does not know where Jughead is, is close, CLOSE to strangling Alice: “MOM, no, we JUST told you.” “MOM. YOU were the one ASKED Veronica to break IN.”

Certified pedigree: the dynamics among the four parents: “ALICE.”

Archie looks quite nice, in his own dopey soft bro way, with his dress shirt untucked under his blazer, and his Converses

Fred’s comment how “FP may have ruined Jughead’s life” puts into words something awful

our girl Betty wears ankle-cut sky blue Polo Ralph Lauren socks to bed. to, you know, go with her boxers

the female gaze: Archie is so stressed that he’s put a shirt on

I love the dumb thing people on TV do when they text and then use that person’s name in the message, or sign off with their name, as if the receiver doesn’t know who they themselves are or don’t have their friend in their contacts and would be getting such a text anonymously: I’m sure there’s something like “Meet me at 8 - Blair” a thousand times on Gossip Girl, you know

God, that show was terrible

HOWEVER, Betty very sweetly capitalizes “Arch” but not “jughead,” which is extremely realistic and she’s nervous right now so “Arch” is for emphasis, okay

his friends going behind his back, his father arrested for murder, and the family trailer torn to pieces, Drama Prince Jughead Jones goes straight to THE BUS STATION to get a TRAIN TICKET to go to OHIO

then has a moment of Type-B forethought and calls ahead

his slow, delayed delivery of “I...got a bus ticket...to Toledo” betrays his TERROR at committing to this weirdness and being potentially rejected

he’s rejected

by his mother

can’t sleep in the bus terminal!!! REJECTED

Veronica’s shimmery silky blue pajama set

“Pack a bag, just in case”: what would Veronica put in an emergency overnight bag? character study prompt

Gay?!:  Archie has YET ANOTHER brainwave and leads them to the bus station, and I don’t care how long the delay is until he learns he was right, he just missed Jughead by a half-hour, HE WAS RIGHT. Archie is basically Jughead’s Sam Spade

I like the run-around of missing and finding Jughead, which serves no purpose other than passing time tensely and demonstrating that Archie can think of things and Veronica can think of things

the implied conversation Betty and Archie had wherein they live next to each other and can run somewhere quickly together and that there was “no time” to wait for Veronica to get over there

Jughead eats: Jughead, in his sorrows, ordered a very hot cup of coffee

Fwoopy hair is the best hair: and plopped his hat on the tabletop, out of exhaustion

his ANGUISHED WHISPER, “What are you talking about?” Jughead, honestly, this child, JUGHEAD

BRILLIANCE having FP lie about stealing the murder files to cement his innocence. obviously he couldn’t have murdered Jason because he’s been arrested for murdering Jason and this would betray television. but Keller’s like, “You broke into my house?” and FP is like...someone broke into this shit’s house and I have to fucking say yes to this? Did I fucking kidnap the fucking Lindbergh baby too? What the fuck?

Veronica put her Homecoming jacket back on? round of applause for Veronica

Jughead STARING at his father being LED AWAY in HANDCUFFS having CONFESSED TO MURDER YEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS

the WOOOOOM. WOOOOOM. soundtrack is very Dust Brothers’ Fight Club

the Blossom breakfast spread is NICE. waffles, lots of mixed berries, raspberry mimosas or something, like, waffles, WAFFLES!!!

Cheryl is either wearing a massive choker or else her sweater itself has metallic studs on the high neck, with a spider pin ON TOP OF THEM, like an insane Elizabethan lady

Polly’s aborted “He killed Jason? Not…” is like—WAY too dangerous! Jesus, Polly!

Penelope’s black blouse with the red poppy print is the most normal mom-thing she’s ever worn

Clifford Blossom was ALLOWED to sit with FP in the interrogation room? I have never seen THAT on Law & Order

Archie at lunch that day is in a tight, bright blue Henley like Steve Rogers wears under his Captain America suit in The Avengers

Archie is also eating some sort of vanilla pudding in a cup

SECRET HOLDING HANDS!!!!!!

Jughead walking into the cafeteria is the stuff of legends, but there’s a girl sitting at one of the tables as he walks past, and she’s in a denim romper with a lavender pastel turtleneck and a curly bob and a pink smokey eye and she must be SEEN to be believed

Cheryl’s sheaths: Cheryl is wearing a red high-waisted miniskirt, cropped black sweater, off-black hose, red velvet leg warmers, shiny red pumps

remember how Cheryl ruined his birthday party like last week and now he’s coming up to her to apologize for something he didn’t do?

CLASSIC!!!!! CLASSIC!!!! WALLOPING on the chest of a boy who only tangentially did the Bad Thing as he stands there and takes it out of STOIC GUILT

you think Cheryl “knows” FP didn’t do it and decides to pity-guilt-love-hate slap the shit out of Jughead anyway? I have a lot of feelings about Cheryl and Jughead that I didn’t know I had, especially in the wake of RAS’s “two sides of the same coin” tweet. the operatic tragedies of their lives are so parallel, or at least perpendicular, that honestly they’re going to be intertwined, as emotional empathetic humans, for the rest of their Riverdale lives. Jughead’s tragedy sleeps on the floor and Cheryl’s is luxurious terror and ABSOLUTELY SILENT dinner parties with honey-glazed hams, but really if you rebrand Jughead from the “son of a local gang leader” to an “heir to a Mafia family,” you almost create a Cheryl. look, he wears a hat, she wears a lot of red. they’re both odd. they’re obsessed not with murder, but with Jason’s murder. they’re obsessed with themselves. they crave spectacle, drama, gossip, and they trust no one, and they know they are alone, because they’ve isolated themselves and no one quite speaks their language. and they’re fixated on the Cooper girls. CHERYL AND JUG

it all comes to a sadomasochistic head, anyway, luridly, really greatly, with Cheryl beating the hell out of Jughead’s chest, as the Drama Ho just stands there and clearly plans on standing there until Cheryl stops

Archie HAULS her off of him like Moose HAULED Jughead off of Reggie

“He was apologizing! He didn’t do anything wrong!”

Cheryl’s a psychopath: “I barely touched him,” says Cheryl, as Jughead’s mouth bleeds

it took twelve episodes for Jughead to call someone “a dick”

honestly my favorite Jughead moment of the night is the way he stops walking and rubs the inside corner of his eye, out of fucks to give, a little repeating Jughead tic, perfectly timed

just as Jughead told Betty she was the only thing holding her family together, right now frankly Betty is holding the Joneses together too

What damn high school in America: the Bee certainly knew to call Mr. Andrews specifically to talk to about Jughead

“Well, can we call? The school board?” PRECIOUS ARCHIE. there’s always someone else he can try and talk to. always another recourse. it might be dumb as fuck but he is out there trying

“Good thing mom’s a lawyer!” Archie’s Step Two is his father adopting Jughead Jones. I am throttling wild animals for Archie rn

Archie’s voice cracks at “Jug.” after Jughead says he’s sleeping in the garage

Jughead is sleeping in the GARAGE. when was the last time he slept in a real bed? literally years?

Mädchen Amick, MÄDCHEN AMICK: Alice is clearly thrilled at possibly getting to shoot someone

I want it on the record that I said “He WAS a Blossom” right BEFORE Hal said it and thus should receive screenwriting royalties from the CW

Betty has to tell everyone she’s a Blossom by blood now. she has to go to Archie and tell him she’s related to Cheryl. she has to tell Jughead. over the next couple of days, I’m going to try and imagine Jughead’s reaction

These students are legally children: remember the pilot of Riverdale? where Betty’s biggest problem was that her mom didn’t want her to be a cheerleader? look now, children. poisoned milkshakes. Jughead Jones in a white tank top. Catholic pregnancy asylums. football drug mules. psychologically astute references to Romeo and Juliet. the concept of a “Dark Betty.” a symbolic pearl necklace, of familial blackmail. murder, over maple syrup. and incest: so much incest that we thought it was going to be one kind of incest, but it turned out that that incest was just a red herring and the actual incest was this other incest

Thornhill has some incredible glass windows inside the foyer. like some Tiffany Deco shit. am I making this up? yes. it’s nice glass~

Best costume bit: Polly’s pajamas are black with a white bow print, because Polly

bit rich of any hypothetical Riverdale character to cite their family as the “mentally stable” family

Alice has a butterfly pin on her trench coat that she just keeps there, or else she tosses it on en route, Hal driving furiously

“Nothing could be more purely Blossom than those babies.” OOOOOOOOOOOH MY GOOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDD SHE SAID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Every triangle has three corners, every triangle has three sides: Polly is HORRIFIED, she is no longer carrying “her boyfriend’s babies,” she is now carrying “intra-Blossom spawn”

Cliff trots out the third cousins/“Jane Austen people did this all the time” defense, “Tutankhamun’s mother was also his aunt,” “This is why Alexei had hemophilia”

actually I think Polly and Jason (and Cheryl, and Betty) are second cousins, if they share the same great-grandparents. the number of G’s is the number of cousins

the look on Penelope’s face when she grabbed Betty and tried her last “You’ve made a mistake” move and Betty DOESN’T look taken aback in the least

Jughead at Pop’s after he got some sleep has turned the corner from utter despair to channeling his pain into quips, all is back to normal: “Don’t forget that pesky confession.”

his morbid, defensive flippancy grosses Archie out, as it did in the second episode

Jughead reading the list of his father’s sins aloud, starting to cry

the pervasive blues and greys inside the cell

FP still dressed in his T-shirt and flannel, lounging on his cot like some possibility, some paralyzing tarot card of Jughead’s future

Fifth period is AP English: clearly what cuts deepest for Jug was his father only reading his writing to see what he thought about the murder, TENDER CHILD

FP yells at him! this propels Jughead across the floor! FP stands to join him at the bars! dynamic emoting, blocking!

“I’m sorry I got caught. We done?” is FP’s version of the thing, I don’t even know where it’s from, like a little boy trying to get his dog that he loves to run away from him: “Go! Go on! Get out of here! GET OUT OF HERE YOU STUPID DOG I LOVE.”

the miniscule instant between his father telling him never to come back and him saying “Got it,” Jughead is figuring some SHIT OUT! this boy should be bathed in overcast blue Pacific Northwest lighting all the time, because it makes his astrological beauty marks stand out and his lips look violet like he’s drowned and Jughead should always look a little post-mortem, like a little consumptive, a little ill. The Ring had really good cinematography, okay

the frankly Ingmar Bergman shot of FP bearing down on Jughead with the prison bar perfectly bisecting his face

Kevin coming through at Joaquin’s interrogation! already better at this than his dad!

Jason LITERALLY wore that all-white outfit for his “running through the woods tf out of here” errand, Jesus, the Blossoms

Kevin, choking back tears: “You. Are a criminal.” yeah, you knew this, Kev

Jughead doubts it: THANK YOU, JUGHEAD IS FINALLY TALKING TO BETTY AGAIN FOR REAL, THANK GOD, HOLY GOD LET’S ALL GET BACK TOGETHER HERE GUYS

good JESUS Mustang’s corpse covered in like infected needle marks and shit???? but we can’t say “abortion” in this time slot???

unexpected touching moment of Archie starting to cry in his dad’s truck, overwhelmed by the awfulness of seeing a dead body, a local motel

honestly it’s about time Hermione Lodge dramatically collapsed into tears

Sixth Period is Intro to Film: OH YOU KNOW JOAQUIN’S ON A BUS TO SAN JUNIPERO

Gay.: nice kiss too boys!!!!!! Joaquin is getting out of town before FP has him killed from prison

Cheryl’s pins: the brooch clasped at Penelope’s throat over her deep purple blouse is old school

Cheryl’s hair: the perfect coil of red hair over her left shoulder is BACK

something about Cheryl calling them “mommy” and “daddy” and “Jay-Jay” is like so self-aware-ed-ly infantilizing and treading-on-glass and pretending there’s like a status quo to the hierarchy of their family and it’s how careful Cheryl has to be navigating her house and how she like adores her Blossomity yet fears the Blossoms, YOU KNOW? CHERYL? GOD?

Penelope is going to dissociate at this fireplace until she is forced out of it

uuummmmnnnnn honestly when Penelope purred “So many questions, Cheryl,” I thought Cheryl was officially going to be killed

I missed you, Murder Board

Penelope hauling Cheryl out in the squelchy mud to the big red barn, speaking of The Ring

“The police found another dead body.” “Okay, maybe not that.”

okay, so FP told Joaquin to leave for his own safety from...other people. turns out FP is kind of decent

I’ve seen Brick like thirty times: there are officially tears of overstimulating in Jughead’s eyes as their flashlight beams all highlight “Jason”

Jughead has moved on to the “acceptance” stage of processing his father’s guilt, which in turn cements Betty’s doubt into refusal

“Betty, this is weird.” no, this is PERFECT

Veronica is confused but game, Jughead looks politely interested

Summer + Blair = Veronica: Veronica, chiming in: “Or my Mont Blanc.”

the Blossom corpse: Sad Breakfast Club were some nervous children watching the snuff tape, but I’m willing to be they were not as nervous AS ME WATCHING THEM WATCH THE SNUFF TAPE, SPEAKING OF THE RING

I also like the in-character blocking of the way they sat and took it in: Veronica leans forward, Archie and Betty are very still, Jughead has his hands steepled in front of his mouth, Betty’s eyes water

Veronica, again the Queen of Bedside Empathy, finally bursts her dam and starts to cry, Archie puts his hand on Jughead’s shoulder in soft bro comfort

I’m writing a scene where it’s gay.: BETTY TELLS CHERYL THE PHONE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE HER HOUSE

I WAS ONE TENSE BITCH WHILE CHERYL WALKED DOWN HER STAIRCASE

Riverdale absolutely delivered with the extreme close-up of Cheryl’s Realizing Eyes, like the extreme close-up of Betty’s Realizing Eyes at Homecoming, her spidery black mascara and pink smokey eye, the single tear

Cheryl FOR REAL descends this staircase like the most tragic betrayed princess, like a Tudor queen, walking to her death, of all time, ever, if only Jughead could see this

Mother and Father are apparently eating salad and rolls without her

there are truly no words to totally encompass the magnanimous drama, the scope, the lurid horrifying beauty, the undiluted essence of Riverdale, Riverdale in one cosmic blip, one instant of true art grasped from the void that is Cheryl standing at her mother’s side and saying “You did a bad thing, daddy.”

more surprising to me than the fact that Clifford did it is the fact that Penelope didn’t know

LOL turns out FP was being a great father all along! but he was doing it in the most FP way possible!!!!! by going to prison LOLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!

was Clifford Blossom going to SHOOT JUGHEAD IN THE FACE? aiight, you’d have to find him first, dude

“My dad was protecting me from a monster.”

WHAT IS JUGHEAD SAYING TO SHERIFF KELLER, TELL ME

Mary Andrews picks up her bag and walks out into the mist like the priest at the end of The Exorcist

the TOTEMIC MASTERPIECE of Penelope and Cheryl, mother and daughter, at their staggered heights, pointing simultaneously towards the fucking barn

“Damn good coffee”: Clifford committed suicide old school, like Penelope’s brooch, he didn’t shoot himself in the mouth, okay, he hanged himself on a barrel full of syrup & drugs. RIP the OG Riverdale gangster

NEXT WEEK: Archie punches the snow!!!!!!!!!