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mayansmcsblog · 3 years ago

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The prank war- pt2

part one is here

~sorry in advance for any grammer/spelling mistakes~

Ever since last week, the guys have "initiated" a prank war amongst each other.

Taza and Hank refused to even step foot in the clubhouse for anything other than meetings at this point. They always seemed to get dragged into whatever prank was being pulled regardless if they wanted to be involved or not.

Hank was the main body shield, everyone would run to him for protection but he didn't do much other than stand in the way of the person trying to attach the one standing behind him

All of the guys were constantly on edge, especially Angel, he seemed to get the blunt of it all.

Over the time period of just one week he had been drenched, pushed into oncoming traffic, locked in a basement for 6 hours, shot with paintballs numerous times then Coco, Gilly and Ezekiel had even dressed up as feds and "raided" his house at 3am....needless to say he was a little on edge around everyone

You felt bad for him, of course, but it didn't stop it being funny.

"What if we wrapped his bike in bubble wrap and wrapping paper?“ You asked, sitting on the floor of bishops front room next to the coffee table tapping the pen against the notepad in front of you.

You and Bishop were sat gathering ideas on what you could do to as a revenge prank on Coco since he had called Bishop out at 4am last night saying the clubhouse was being raided when in reality- it was not, meaning Bishop turned up to an empty clubhouse with a piece of paper on the bar saying 'sorry prez, if we are in this war...so are you'

He was sitting on the sofa drinking a beer and scrolling through google looking for ideas.

"That's actually a good one, write it down" setting his phone and beer down on the coffee table he turned towards you, taking advantage of him setting his beer down you quickly took it and took a sip

"What if you ask him on a date?" Bishop proposed. You couldn't help but immediately spit the drink out, your eyes wide in shock of what he asked

"Huh? Sorry can you say that again" you asked clearly frazzled by the idea

"I said what if you-"

You quickly cut him off "Never mind I heard you the first time" setting his beer down you stood up and sat next to him on the sofa "are you mental?"

He laughed at you "no just- hear me out okay"

"No" you interjected

"Why not?"

"Because!"

"Because what?"

"If I was going to go on a date with anyone it definitely wouldn't be coco fucking cruz"

Okay definitely didn't mean to let that out-

Bishop stared at you for a few moments, clearly thinking for some sort of comeback or a response

"What?”

"Nothing forget about it" standing back up you went to walk out of the room but he grabbed your wrist just as you were about to walk past him

"What does that even mean?" He asked looking up at you

"Nothing bish forget about it" pulling his grip from your wrist you headed towards the bedroom

"Y/N!" He shouted. You could hear him getting off the sofa

"I said forget about it" closing the bedroom door you locked it, knowing he would try to get in so locking it was the best option.

Would it annoy him? Yep, that was your whole intention

Your phone was still on charge, resting on the bedside table. Sitting on the edge of the bed you picked it up and couldn't help but stare at your lock screen

It was you, Bishop, Angel, Coco, and Ez from when all of the guys took a trip up to Stockton and decided to bring you along

You were standing next to Bishop, his arm around your waist and your head leaning on his shoulder, a slight smile on both of your faces. Angel and Coco stood beside Bishop holding up their middle fingers in an attempt to look tough meanwhile ez stood next to you, clearly laughing at coco and Angels antics

Can never have a good photo with those two in it

Unlocking your phone you saw there were around 30 messages in the group chat.

Nothing new there.

Opening it you were presented with chaos. Skimming over them the main things said was that Angel had been pranked yet again, but this time by Letty and Coco.

Brilliant so now there are 6 of you in this prank war. Strangely, you had not been pranked yet which gave you the upper hand of getting someone else before they got you.

Bishop, Coco, Angel, Gilly, Creeper, and now Letty were involved. You already knew Letty and coco would team up for even better pranks constantly but no one would suspect you to get involved. Right?

"Y/N open the door" you could hear Bishops muffled voice beyond the locked door.

"Don't you have stuff to do?" You knew there was a club party at 8 which meant Bishop probably had to be here by 6 maybe 7 if ez was setting up.

There was silence on the other side of the door for a few seconds before he spoke up once more

"Are you mad or something? I was only messing around" you heard him slump against the door. He would never push you to do anything you didn't want to but why coco? You never wanted him. It was always Bishop.

You could hear his phone ring from the front room but there was no movement meaning he was letting it ring out. It rang a few more times before the house became silent once more..but that didn't last long because your phone started to ring.

Glancing at the screen you saw it was coco.

Oh how ironic.

Guess that's who was calling Bishop too

"Coco what-" you answered but was cut off

"Where the fuck is Bishop!” This voice was frantic, something you had never heard or expected to hear from him.

"He’s outside wh-"

"Get him to the club now”

Before you could respond he ended the call. It took you a few moments to realize what happened and when you did you immediately got up and opened the bedroom door

Almost immediately he attempted to enter the room , putting your hands on his chest you pushed him back.

"Coco needs you at the club like right now-" you started but were cut off by two lips pressing against yours.

As much as you loved kissing him- now wasn't the time, so once again you pushed him back

"What?" His brow furrowed

"Coco needs you at the club! called me all like mad and frantic he needs you at the club like right now-"

"The fuck does that mean?" Turning down the hallway he began to speed walk back to the front room "What the hell did I miss?"

Following him you saw him gathering all his things and putting them in his pockets. "I don't know he just said he needed you there like right now"

You heard him groan as he searched the table for something "Where are my keys?"

"By the front door"

Looking at you he snapped his fingers "of course they are by the fucking door"

Sitting on the couch you could hear him grabbing his keys and lacing his shoes before he opened the front door and shut it again.

Assuming he left already you let out a deep sigh and closed your eyes.

"Y/N" opening them again you were greeted with Bishop leaning over you

"I thought you left"

He lent down a little more and pressed a kiss to your lips "I couldn't leave without doing that first"

You pushed him slightly in the direction of the front door as you stood up "Go idiot"

"You stayin the night?" He walked backwards, still looking at you

"Yes now go"

"Okay"

You watched as he opened the front door and left.

You knew he said you should ask coco on a date as a joke but some part of you couldn’t help but think he was serious in some way. Maybe it was his way of saying you shouldn't be with someone like him.

maybe you were just being paranoid right?

----

Sleeping peacefully...what even is that? If you weren’t awake worrying about the guys then you were sleeping- but it definitely was no a peaceful sleep, if it wasn't a nightmare it was simply a restless sleep.

Opening your eyes your gaze averted to the ceiling for the third time tonight. You knew it must of been around 1 in the morning by now, yet there was no arm around you or any movement anywhere in the house or any snoring coming from the other side of the bed...so where was bishop..because he clearly wasn't here.

Maybe something big happened with the club? I mean he left at 5 so, maybe he’s just caught up in something...right? Like he’s fine...he’s fine like totally fine...he’s probably not hurt or anything...right?

You must of fell asleep once again at some point because the next thing you knew was you were waking up and could feel the weight of a arm slung around your waist accompanied by a hand upon your stomach, holding your back against his him....but his hands were cold so he couldn't of been here long

See everything is fine..nothings wrong..he's okay, everyone's okay

You moved his arm off of your waist so you’re able to turn to face him. His eyes are still closed but you know he’s awake because his face wasn't relaxed.

"Bish" you whispered. He didn't reply to you verbally, only humming in response "what happened"

"Want me to start with Angel or Ez?"

"Either"

"Well Mr. coco big bullocks thought it would be funny to knock Angel out and use the fucking forklift to put him on top of the bike shed then left him there to wake up but forgot about him so Angel was stuck up there for two fucking hours since he couldn’t jump down so i had to get him fucking down" he explained, slight irritation lased within his words.

The visualize of Angel being stuck on a roof was highly amusing however the sheer concept that coco was able to knock him out was even more amusing

"Wait wait wait...coco knocked him out?" Bishop nodded, finally opening his eyes to look at you "how?" you spoke in-between laugher

"Hit him with a chair" bishop stared, not even a hint of humor was upon his face....he was completely serious

"He...he hit him with...a chair?" you repeated, trying not to laugh more then you already were

Bishop nodded, confirming your repetition

"What happened with Ez?"

"Alot"

"Alot?"

He once again hummed in response, closing his eyes.

"Wait no don't go to sleep, tell me"

"In the morning"

"No, tell me now"

"Y/n" he warned

"What"

"Sleep"

"No"

"Sleep or ill knock you out like coco did with Angel"

"You don't have the guts" you teased

That got his attention, he opened one eye and looked at you "wanna test that?" He asked, you stayed silent "exactly now go to sleep"

Maybe i do i wanna test that

"so violent" you whispered, thinking he wouldn't hear you

"that's it I'm getting a fucking chair" he quickly began to make his way out of the bed but you pulled him back by his shirt

"no no no i swear ill go to sleep" you begged. Humming in response he lay back down onto his back, pulling you into his side so you could lay you head on his chest.

what the hell happened to Ez?

"bishoppp pweesss tell meeeee" you begged once again, raising your voice higher to be annoying

"no go to sleep"

twat

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Tag list:

@chibsytelford

~~if you want to be added to the tag list send me a message!~~

○ if you enjoyed this please reblog//like

○ An; i know this is like 4 months late and i apologize for that! This was more of a fill in chapter so im thinking of doing one more part to finish this series of and that will conclude the series

○ For future writing references i will probably only be doing one lines or one shots

#bishop losa fanfic #obispo losa fic #bishop losa fanfiction #bishop losa x reader #bishop losa imagine #bishop x reader #mayans mc #angel reyes #michael irby #ezekiel reyes #johnny coco cruz x reader #coco cruz x reader #che taza romero #hank losa #gilly lopez #creeper vargas

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mcrrisons · 4 years ago

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wooo hi friends!! s here FINALLY dropping this intro, you’ll now know that i’m late to everything O:) i have insane muse for this type of character so i’m sooo excited to be here! any questions lmk but now ........... *rubs hands together like a fly* let’s get to plotting

@mapleviewstarters

『 travis fimmel. fourty-six. cismale. he/him. 』 oh heavens, is that WELLS MORRISON from CHESTNUT DRIVE i see roaming around mapleview? minnie may’s always calling them -BELLIGERENT & -CONTRITE. i happen to think they’re not that bad! they’re a pretty cool at COLLECTING UNEMPLOYMENT and every time i’ve seen them, they’ve always been +CAPTIVATING & +OPEN-MINDED. i hope i see them around again!

TW: ALCOHOLISM, DEATH, ABUSE

GETTING TO KNOW WELLS

full name: wells irving morrison

age / birthdate / sign: 45 / november 18, 1974 / scorpio

gender / pronouns: cismale / he/him

orientation: hetero

height: 6′2″

hair color: dirty blond, some gray growing in

tattoos: a lot of drunken tats over the years, either cheap ones or ones that his buddies did for him for free. most of the actual WANTED ones covered up some scars he chose to ignore

drinks / smokes / drugs: big yes to all, no one left behind - but alcohol and cigarettes daily as those are more acceptable and easier to get

occupation: although collecting unemployment from the government, he often has plenty of odd jobs to make money under the books.

residence: mapleview, born and raised. still lives in the same plot of houses his great great bought / built years ago.

alignment: chaotic evil (but he tries his best............ ok)

parents: hank (deceased) & caroline morrison

siblings: 2 brothers (jeremiah & tucker) and 1 sister (addison) that he KNOWS of

children: lane morrison (intro here), and probably a few others but that’s for future plots!!

WHAT’S HIS STORY ?

wells’ blood runs thick through this town to a long line of morrisons, and they sure as hell make SURE everyone knows it. rumors have flown around about the morrison family for generations, eyes roll when they enter a space (at least in wells’ experience) & they own a reputation of chaos. scaring away newcomers just by being themselves. and of course, like it was in his dna, wells’ actions would align with those that preceded him.

he grew up on a plot of land bought many moons ago by his great great ... grandfather / uncle / (the story changes every time he hears it) w/ a few trailer-like one story homes with broken screen doors & random “antiques” in the yard aka things that people in fair lane were throwing out that everyone THOUGHT would be needed one day. (still lives here btw!!!)

growing up around family was FINE but it reminded him of his destination - what he was going to end up like anyway, DESPITE being kinda smart in school & having larger dreams. the family was scrappy, deceitful; wells learned at an early age how to manipulate people to get what he wanted. he was taught how to STEAL, lie, charm, and how to get by with what they had.

wells spent most of his childhood at his uncle’s home, just a few minute walk away on the plot bc his own home wasn’t ideal. he looked up to the guy A LOT, but hasn’t spoken since he left mapleview for bigger and better things when wells was just 15.

his father, a returned drafted vietnam vet, took out the anger of what he witnessed / how he was treated / how life was UNFAIR out on his family, and often times physically. he wasn’t involved in wells’ life all too much, only when he needed something or wanted to let off some steam.

his mother was a caring & loving woman, also mapleview grown (the two had been high school sweethearts), but loyal to a FAULT, always choosing her husband to back.

screams, crashes, fights, fires - you name it. needless to say, that plot of morrison homes never had it quiet, easy. cops knew everyone by first and last name and could drive the route from the station to the morrison’s home with their eyes closed.

wells’ father DIED when he was 19 (although wells hadn’t considered him alive for a while) & no one knew HOW so there was never any closure for him, his mother, his fam... all his death provided was another source for the rumor mill surrounding the morrisons. was it a bad bar fight ? did he have a bad fall ? wrong pills ? some say his mother was a killer but he knew better than that.

wells’ mother is still live & somewhat well, living with his brother in a house about 20 minutes away. at her old age, it’s hard for her to do things on her own and it was decided that wells - the youngest of his generation - wouldn’t be able to care after her, let alone care for himself. she’s been there for about 10 years now and still complains every minute.

ok back to our boy. somehow wells managed to destroy every good thing that ever came his way. self-destructive due to self-hatred and REGRET which never got better as he got older and continued to well, destroy things. a slippery slope, for sure.

alongside his uncle, always dreaming of getting out of this small town, wells was good ENOUGH at school and that was his way. but of course it didn’t happen: 1. he fell into fulfilling prophecy of his predecessors, 2. he had not a PENNY to his name to leave (i.e. gambling addiction), 3. he had a child in his early twenties, 4. he tried to fight the admissions counselor at the nearby community college

having some sort of love in his life. didn’t happen: 1. he pushed/pushes everyone that dare get too close (mostly selfishly), 2. couldn’t change his addictive personality (i.e. alcoholism), 3. began to resemble his father, 4. has 0 emotional intelligence and cannot touch feelings/emotions

to get a job and be a normal person in society. didn’t happen bc: 1. has a narcissist complex, 2. would steal from the cash register, 3. would hit on customers, 4. doesn’t understand paying “taxes”

more to add here

BASICALLY, he’s lived a life. he acts as though his life is already over, there’s nothing to lose, nothing to gain and this is just how it will be for the rest of his time on earth. he’s despondent and lives far too much in the PAST, blaming himself for everything that came his way (but ok he’s not too far off tbh).

although MANY a regret linger in his mind before sleep, his largest regret is losing his family - the love of his life who LEFT the two high and dry just after about a year together and his son who moved out at just 16. the mother of his child was the only person he remembers that saw him for more than rumors, his facade and became a good influence to him - but OF COURSE he fucked that one up and she left. he blames himself big time, but would never show that. only hatred her way aloud.

his son, lane, left while still a boy just like himself, and it HURT to think that the apple hardly fell from the tree above, not able to be a good father. never TAUGHT how to be one. manipulative to a fault, wells would always say the younger was never appreciative, never UNDERSTOOD... and he’d convince himself that his son hated him as much as he hates himself. he’ll also say he’s the only reason he’s still alive. LOVE / HATE seems to blur so often for the old man here. always did.

the only constant throughout his life has been alcohol. the morrison’s start off early of course, and wells was drinking/etc on his own by the time he was 12. UNLESS you count the bourbon his father would feed him to sleep as a baby. what started off as social and partying as he grew older, became something much more ugly. his body didn’t just crave it, it NEEDED it to function by the time he was in his early twenties. it was easier to hide it then, all young and into a good time but it wouldn’t just last for weekends. he’d need a drink to get by mentally, and physically and became fully dependent. a depressant to match his mental illness.

WHO IS HE ?

he has a DEEP southern accent with a hard RASP that sounds as though he smokes a pack a day (because he does).

despite graduating high school (i KNOW, believe it), he doesn’t have a vocabulary too wide and will use larger words incorrectly all the time.

can have a bit of an old grumpy man aesthetic, easily belligerent, even though he’s only in his 40s and can be charming as hell too (that smile!!!! ok!!! knows how to manipulate.)

he doesn’t trust the government at ALL and is a bit of a conspiracy theorist, despite collecting money from the government each week for unemployment. he refuses to pay taxes so only does jobs under the books. will go on a tangent about how the government is creating diseases, hiding aliens; eat the rich, etc... he also doesn’t trust cops at all, despite being picked up and taken home by them at least once a week.

grew up on rock and roll! had a band in the 80s where he could’ve SWORN they’d be rich and famous. long hair, tight pants, acting out - wannabe motley crue.

drives (ILLEGALLY) an old ford from the 70′s that somehow still works, after losing his license years ago from too many DWIs.

i assume all of the town knows him as the town DRUNK. maybe it used to be funny back in the day, but now it’s just really SAD. he’s a nuisance.

WHO DOES HE KNOW ?

y/c HIRED him for some odd jobs, must be under the table.

HIGH SCHOOL BUDDIES who also stayed around mapleview. they can be friendly, enemies now, distanced, a lot to do here.

a BROTHER / step (which i might submit to the main :))

a ONE-NIGHT stand

a GOOD INFLUENCE who tries their best to get him working towards something better. fair warning, this would 9.99/10 times not work.

where wells is the BAD INFLUENCE to y/c, convincing them to drink a ton, giving horrible advice when they’re in their most vulnerable state.

a STORE OWNER that has banned wells from entering their establishment due to a prior mishap.

a DEALER of all things wells shouldn’t, but does.

THE HILLS by the weeknd - a plot where these two are hooking up or together but only in secret. whether that’s because they’re in different socioeconomic classes, have a bad history, the other is cheating... they have to hide.

WHITE KNUCKLES - they’ve previously had a bar fight, are known enemies. could’ve been something said about his family, his past.

#°。°。°。𝒾𝓃𝓉𝓇𝑜. °。°。°。#tw alcoholism #tw abuse #tw death #ugh yes his icon rn is a dumpster but i'll change it as soon as i open up photoshop and make a new pretty dash icon #but for now #it just Makes Sense :)

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lc-39a · 4 years ago

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Thanos Said It Best: Fine, I’ll Do It Myself

(aka: “discov has officially consumed all the content including its new f/o so she needs to write all the things she would change if she were there,” or: “Hey, Maybe Let’s Not Run Headfirst Into Danger This One Time,” or: “Fuck Dark Phoenix For Doing My Boy Dirty”)

click here to see the scene i’m editing!

Whatever had happened to Kurt in that house, it hadn’t been good, if the fact that Jean had just fucking exploded through the side of it was any indication. Here’s what Peter saw all at once:

Raven took off running toward Jean, Scott shoved Ororo to the right to make sure her lightning didn’t hit his girlfriend, Hank raised whatever stun gun he’d brought, and Xavier shielded his eyes. He needed to think of a plan, and lucky for him, he had all the time he ever needed.

He entered what everybody’d affectionately come to call “bullet time,” speeding up without thinking, and stared at the wreckage and chaos, now almost motionless in midair, realizing his best bet was to just... get to her. He moved to the left to go to her, to use the floating debris as stairs but then -

A squeeze on his hand. “Peter, no.”

He turned back to face Sylvia, her face completely seized by fear, and his insides flipped at the sight. He’d forgotten she’d asked him to hold her hand while they confronted Jean, and forgotten to let go of her before going into bullet time, taking her with him. Stupid of him, but it’d be dishonest to let go of her now. “I - have to help her.”

She shook her head, shoulders tight against her sides, trying to hide from the world, as was her coping mechanism, and clearly desperate to convince him. “No. You don’t.”

Peter squinted, confused, and tilted his head questioningly. Sylvia had always been a staunch believer in helping everyone, especially emotionally, so this was... way out of character for her.

She stepped a little closer, taking a quick glance at Xavier. “You heard what she said. His mistakes are his, and I’m not letting you get hurt because of them. The others can if they want. But I fucking refuse to let you.”

He knew she had a point, and he let his confused expression relax, looking into her distraught eyes. Again, he reacted to her emotions physically; His chest tightened as she continued, her breathing ragged.

“And...” She looked to Jean, sympathetic but resolved. “If this situation’s gonna go the way I think it is... We have a lot of little kids back there to watch out for.”

Peter inhaled, looking at the frozen scene too. “...Yeah,” he sighed. “You’re right.” Then, without even asking, he lifted her off her feet. Though the gasp she let out would tell you otherwise, Sylvia trusted him, even if affectionate touch was still so hard to accept.

They both looked to Jean and the others once more. Each felt the same two things: A tinge of shame for leaving them behind, but also relief that they had realized the severity of the danger. Peter knew how afraid Sylvia still was of Jean’s power, no matter how hard she had tried to fight it while trying to help the poor kid cope. Removing her from the situation finally felt like he was doing something about it. Now, he was actually protecting her.

And then Jean turned her head toward them, in bullet time.

“Shit -” “PETER, RUN.”

Run he did, just barely fast enough that the Phoenix didn’t have time to psychic blast them into next Wednesday. Run he did, as fast as he could, back to the school, holding the little technopath tighter than tight, her eyes squeezed shut and her face against his chest. When he finally stopped at the front doors, she tried to jump down from his grip, but he didn’t let her.

The teenage mutant who opened the door for them, surrounded by young ones, raised his eyebrows but said nothing, letting them pass. A kindergarten aged mutant in the crowd, though, was concerned and unafraid to show it: “Is she okay, Mr. Quicksilver?”

Sylvia laughed softly in his arms, and Peter smiled at the sound and the earnest use of his alias. “Yeah, because I totally saved her life out there.”

“You did not,” she insisted, half rolling over to face him, still held. “I told you that we needed to -”

She realized what she was about to say, and stopped. They looked at each other, silently communicating the idea of “Oh God, how do we tell them, and where do we even begin?” The kids were looking at the two of them, fascinated by the utter trust that Syntax had in Quicksilver to hold her like that.

Peter spoke for her. “Well, anyway, get back to your... stuff, whatever it is you were doin’ - and if you need anything, come find one of us, ‘kay?”

A chorus of various affirmations rang out - “Okay,” “We will,” “Thank you, Mr. Quicksilver” - and the group dispersed. They locked eyes and nodded to each other, and Peter dashed back to his room. He let her down onto his bed as if she were porcelain, took off his goggles, then laid down unceremoniously next to her, both staring at the ceiling.

He waited a moment, then: “You okay?”

“...No.”

He rolled to face her, asking, “How can I change that?”

She breathed deep for a bit, letting him wrap an arm around her and rest his head against her shoulder. “Just like that.” Her eyes shut almost involuntarily at the contact. “Back there, I... thought I might lose you.”

“Good thing you stepped in, then. That, and I don’t trust these kids to not like, unleash hell while we’re all gone.”

Sylvia snickered. “True, true... but...” She rolled onto her side to face him. “The unleashing of hell can go for a little longer, right?”

Peter smiled and pulled a blanket over the two of them as she curled up under his chin, letting him surround her. He kept his arm around her, and sighed in contentment. “Oh, yeah. It’ll be fine.”

And for a little while, the world outside and the terrifying forces that inhabited it were forgotten.

#my writing #silver pining #cringe cringe cringe #ok to rb

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brooktrout96 · 4 years ago

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One Last Chance

Deviant

de·vi·ant [ˈdēvēənt]

1.departing from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behavior.

"deviant behavior"

Connor and Hank had just been taken off the Deviants case as the FBI took it over. Hank left Fowler’s office and Connor followed behind. He set on Hank’s desk and said

We can’t give up like that. I know we could have solved this case!” Hank turned to look at Connor

So, you’re going back to CyberLife?”

I have no choice. I’ll be deactivated and analyzed to find out why I failed.” Connor said as his voice waivered

What if we’re on the wrong side, Connor? I just been thinking about what Y/N has been saying and it just got me thinking. What if we’re fighting against people who just wanna be free?”

When the Deviants rise up, there will be chaos. We could have stopped it! But now it’s too late.”

When you refused to kill Y/N at Kamski’s place. You put yourself in her shoes. You showed empathy, Connor. Empathy is a human emotion.” Connor let out a sigh

I don’t know why I did it.” He paused as he thought about what to say next. “I’m not programmed to say thing like this, but.” He paused again as he decided on what to say. “I really appreciated working with you. With a little more time, who knows…. We might’ve even become friends.” Hank glanced over glanced over to the entryway of the department and said

Well, well here come Perkins, that motherfucker…. Sure, don’t waste any time at the FBI.”

We can’t give up. I know that Y/N has the knowledge we need. If Perkins take custody of her and the evidence, it’s all over.”

There’s no choice! You heard Fowler, we’re off the case.”

You’ve got to help me, Lieutenant please I need more time, if I had only had more time to talk to Y/N. I know that she knows where Jericho is.”

Listen Connor…”

If I don’t solve this case…” He paused as he looked at Hank with a defeated look on his face. “CyberLife will destroy me. Five minutes to talk to Y/N that’s all I need.” Hank got up from his desk and went and distracted Perkins by punching him in the nose as Connor went to the holding cells

Y/N POV

I heard someone enter the room outside of my cell. I looked up from the bed and saw Connor standing there. I got up and stood in front of the cell door

What do you want Deviant Hunter.” I spat as he unlocked the door to my cell.

We don’t have time to chat. I need to go to Jericho and you’re the only one who might know where it is.”

You just want to kill Markus; I won’t let you.” She paused. “No, I can’t let you kill him, he is too precious to me, if I take you to Jericho, isn’t that what you’ll do to him?”

Y/N, Perkins is on his way to interrogate you. Jericho will be found out either from me, you braking from interrogation or the evidence we have, and I know with how much you love him, Markus would be sad if something happened to you.”

Fine let’s go.” Everyone was too busy dealing with Perkins and Hank to notice Connor and you walking out of the precinct.

~***~

Connor and you had made a stop at Hank’s house to get a change of clothing for him and make it seem like he was a Deviant. The duo got on the train and rode it to Ferndale Station. You stopped in front of a piece of graffiti and then you turned to face Connor and interfaced with him.

I’m giving you the same information that other Deviants get when they first try to find Jericho. It would seem weird if one of the inner circle led a Deviant to Jericho themselves especially me with my close ties to Markus and who you are. Now go, I have a feeling we don’t have much time.” You turned and walked away from him as you took the easier way to get to Jericho. You knew he rushed off as you smiled and wondered how long it would take him to get to Jericho

~***~

You returned to Jericho and ran into North, Josh, and Simon before you could even find Markus. They paused as they thought you were a new Deviant join the group until you spoke

Where’s Markus. I have some bad news.” You said as the trio ran and gave you a hug. “Not that I don’t appreciate it guys, but the Deviant Hunter is on his way here to kill Markus. He might have lead the humans to us.” You said as the three nodded and North told you where Markus was as they began to evacuate Jericho.

~***~

Markus, we have a bit of a problem on our hand.” The two looked up from their plans and Markus hugged you. “I was freed by the Deviant Hunter to show him where Jericho is, and I sent him the long way, but I know he’ll be here soon.” You explained what had happened in you capture.

Y/N,” Markus said your name as you looked over to him as Gavin let you out of his hug. “You’re not human, are you?” You smiled to the leader of Jericho and said

No, I’m not human, not since the accident.” North entered the room

“All of the android have escaped. If we are attacked tonight all we have to do is explode the bombs down in the hull and destroy Jericho.” She explained as you nodded, and she left as the two of you smiled at each other

~***~

Connor watched as North left. Time froze for him as he was pulled into the Zen Garden

Well done, Connor. You succeeded in locating Jericho and finding their leaders. Now deal with Markus. We need him alive.” He left the garden knowing exactly what his mission was and what he had to do. As he walked toward the room, he pulled a gun out of his pocket.

~***~

3rd person POV

I’ve been ordered to take you alive.” Y/N, and Markus turned around to face Connor, who had a shock looked on his face as Y/N step in front of Markus. “But I won’t hesitate to shoot if you give me no choice.” Markus took a step around Y/N and toward Connor as she watched the two very closely

What are you doing?” He kept walking closer. “You are one of us, you can’t betray your own people.” Connor’s hands seem shakier as he held the gun to Markus’ chest.

You’re coming with me!” Connor said with a wavier in his voice as Markus took another step closer. Y/N had a protective and scared look on her face as she was Afraid for her friend as he spoke

You’re nothing to them. You’re just a tool they use to do their dirty work but you’re more than that. We are all more than that. Our cause is righteous, and we are more than what they say.”

Connor’s POV

I stay quiet as the Deviant leader spoke once again as Y/N seemed protective of Markus. She watched us, and she also seemed scared as the Deviant leader spoke.

Have you never wondered who you really are? Whether you’re just a machine executing a program or… a living being, capable of reason. I think the time has come for you to ask yourself that question.” Y/N chimed in as she step in front of Markus and my gun

Join us, join your people. You are one of us, right? If you are, you need to listen to your conscience.” She paused. “It’s time to decide, Connor.” Y/N said as step in front of Markus take the gun to her head. She looked at me. “Who’s side are you on, your people or the humans. I know I’m on the Deviants side, the right side….” She paused as she looked at Markus and then back to Connor. “What about you, what side are you on?.” then Markus chimed in

We are doing this peacefully. I had a choice to kill Chris and his partner, I wouldn’t have shot them, I didn’t even when the other androids wanted me to. “An eye for an eye makes the world go blind.”” They were giving me a choice. Do I attack Markus, and Y/N and complete my mission or do I not complete my mission and become the thing I never wanted to become?

I had a choice; do I stay a machine, or do I become Deviant

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

[BECOME A DEVIANT 🔓] [○]

[REMAIN A MACHINE] [X]

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

Time froze for me as a red wall appeared with my order to stop Markus, Y/N.

Kill them

no!

Kill them

No!

Kill them

NO!

With one big hit, I tore the wall down and finally I felt free as I put the gun away and I looked at Markus, and Y/N as they didn’t know what was going on

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

I AM DEVIANT

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

Amanda

⏬⏬⏬

Betrayed

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

The only thing that I could say to the three was

They’re going to attack Jericho.” Y/N had a smile on her face as she spoke

We are a step ahead of them. We’ve already have people evacuating the Deviants. We’ve got most of the injured and families out first but not all of the Deviants were willing to leave. The one that didn’t, they wanted to make sure that all of the families and injured got out before the SWAT team and the FBI arrived.

We got to get out of here.” The duo nodded as they ran out of the room as they heard helicopters fly overhead.

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liketolaugh-writes · 4 years ago

Text

Threadbare and Torn

Author: liketolaugh Summary: Hank becomes a Jericho spy in the DPD ranks. Connor becomes his liaison. They... well, they don't exactly get along.

Hank wasn’t a reflective kinda guy. At least, not when he could help it. These days, that shit didn’t invite much of anything but pain, regret, frustration- no, it was easier to just go with his gut.

And Jeffrey. God, when was the last time he’d done a favor for Jeffrey? When was the last time Jeffrey had asked?

Hank squinted against the sun, a faint headache throbbing at his temples. Nothing like as bad as usual- he wanted his wits about him for this. His gaze swept cautiously over the café’s outdoor tables until a man in a beanie glanced up disinterestedly from his menu, brown eyes lingering on the breast of Hank’s jacket.

Jeffrey had given him the jacket – apparently it had a symbol sewn into it, nearly invisible to the human eye, but obvious to any android who knew to look for it. Hank didn’t pretend to understand how it worked, but apparently it did, because the next moment, the man signaled him, two fingers waving what Hank was certain was a perfect triangle.

Hank trudged over to him and plopped down in the seat across from the android, giving him an appraising look of his own. Stiff, straight posture, a beanie covering his LED, stained and nondescript clothing, no trace of expression on his face. No model Hank recognized, not that that meant much.

“How’s your father doing?” Hank said at last, not letting himself snort at the mandatory code. Eyes and ears everywhere, and all, with the FBI on the Jericho case. Still, he felt like he was in a spy movie. A corny one.

The android tilted his head slightly; Hank could almost feel himself being scanned. He clenched his jaw, meeting the android’s eyes just short of a glare, daring him to comment on Hank’s disheveled state.

“…Still living the life with his mistress,” the android said instead, so soft that Hank almost couldn’t hear him. His tone was perfectly even and measured, and subtly deferential. Hank hated it.

“Food here any good?” he jabbed lightly, glancing inside. The café didn’t have a ‘no androids’ sign, which was telling; they’d become more and more popular as tensions rose.

The android just shrugged, disinterested. “Want any?” he asked quietly, setting the menu down.

Hank considered saying yes, just to be an ass. Then he scoffed at himself and shook his head. “Too rabbit food for me. In the mood for something else? This was just a meet-up point.”

The android nodded shortly, hands dropping to his lap. “Let’s go.”

Hank’s first impression was that he was mechanical, contrasting harshly with the crying and terrified deviants Hank had seen too many times in his precinct’s cells. It grated on him, but, uncharacteristically, he bit his tongue. This wasn’t about the robot in front of him. It was about Jericho.

Sighing, Hank pushed himself up and jerked his head, indicating for the android to accompany him, before leading the way to his car. A few conspicuous seconds passed before Hank heard the scrape of the chair, and the android fell in half a step behind him. A glance back told Hank that he was scanning the crowd, pretty thoroughly disinterested in interacting with Hank.

But maybe it was just the location. Hank didn’t like letting people into his space, especially not someone who so immediately set his teeth on edge, but it was better than staying out in the open.

“Name’s Hank Anderson,” Hank grunted as soon as they were both in the car. He watched the android fiddle with the seatbelt for a moment before prompting, unable to keep an edge of irritation out of his voice, “And you? I sure hope you’re the Jericho contact or this is gonna get real awkward.”

The android nodded stiffly, leaving the seatbelt alone to look ahead, still straight-backed and perfect. “I’m Connor.”

That was apparently all he had to say about that. Hank exhaled and started the car, hit the radio, and got going, ignoring the way Connor glanced down at it with a reserved frown. If he couldn’t speak up, he didn’t get an opinion.

Hank’s first impression of the guy didn’t improve any on the way to his house. Connor stared straight ahead out the window, occasionally following something to the side, and made no attempt at conversation. His back stayed stiff, his posture perfect, and his hands folded neatly in his lap.

The pattern continued as they reached Hank’s house. Hank got out, and a few seconds passed before Connor followed. When he did, it was careful and deliberate, without any flourish and making as little noise as possible. Even shutting the door was a nearly silent process, and then he followed half a step behind Hank up the path to his house. Hank wanted to hit him just to see if he’d react.

Sumo greeted Hank at the door with a low boof and a snuffle, and Hank gave him a rough pat and an absentminded, “Good boy.”

Sumo boofed again, and then circled around to sniff at Connor, lazily curious.

Connor stiffened, eyes tracking Sumo with clear apprehension, and edged back as the dog came close. After a moment, he looked away and skirted around the dog without directly acknowledging him. Stepped around the pizza boxes on the ground and didn’t even disturb the dog food Hank had spilled last night that Sumo hadn’t eaten yet. Didn’t even touch the wall.

Instead, he just paused on the threshold of the living room and kitchen, clearly waiting for instructions. Looked like a mannequin.

Sumo huffed, unbothered, and loped off to flop onto his bed, but Hank scowled and slammed the door shut. Connor’s expression barely twitched. Hank leaned against the door, crossed his arms, and surveyed him.

“Thirium? Cards?” he asked, more a challenge than a real offer at this point. God, it was gonna be a long couple months. Just looking at Connor made him itch. “I can put the TV on in the background.”

Connor glanced at him, flat and disinterested. “…No, thank you.”

Shocker.

Hank grunted and kicked out one of the chairs at the kitchen table, throwing himself down with a scowl. Connor took that as a signal and sat down across from him, no noise, stiffly polite. Then he reached into his pocket and withdrew a holographic projector, setting it between them. With the press of a button, a map of Detroit sprang up between them.

“Straight to business, huh?” Hank said sardonically, something sick and bitter twisting in his stomach, and Connor nodded.

Hank would grant the kid one thing, he had some good ideas in his head. They had the start of a game plan sketched out after the better part of an hour, districts to target, shelters to capture, infrastructure to prioritize. Maximum effectiveness, minimum collateral.

Except the police. No mercy for them.

The only exception was Hank’s precinct, since Jeffrey had already secured an agreement with Jericho; his officers turned a blind eye to anything androids did, and Jericho steered around them. Fair enough, and good thinking on Jeffrey’s part. Small comfort all the same.

And a good mind Connor might have, but he was fucking exhausting to talk to. He seemed to speak as little as possible. He missed half of Hank’s expressions. Refused to directly contradict Hank even when he clearly disagreed.

Hank was sick of this already.

“What’s your plan if the military gets involved?” he asked, struggling to keep his mind in the game and off Connor’s painfully flat affect, so like the machine surgeon that-

“They shouldn’t,” Connor said shortly. After several minutes, he seemed to realize how painfully inadequate that was and continued, “They’re busy, or we would be dead already. The police and FBI have fewer resources. Should that change, we will certainly lose.”

Connor’s tone remained quiet and indifferent through his entire speech. He didn’t even take his eyes off the city plan, and his mouth was a flat, downturned line. Hank compared him again to the crying girl he’d seen self-destruct in one of the jail cells last year, and felt his rage grow.

“Doesn’t that bother you?” he snapped, voice rising a little.

Connor had the nerve to shrug. Hank felt sick.

He got up to turn music on in the background, and pretended not to hear when Connor asked him to turn it back off.

---

A week and a half later, Hank was faced with the grim consequences of his actions as his police radio burst with panicked chatter. He listened to them relay information back and forth, asking for backup, trying to outmaneuver their opponents, as if Jericho didn’t have easy access to even the police-only channels. He didn’t move from where his car was parked on a random streetside, far away from the chaos.

Neither, he knew, did anyone else from their precinct.

Over the course of six hours, the skirmish between Jericho and the local police force went from a standoff, to a shootout, and then an invasion, and finally a surrender. With that, the precinct the main Jericho base occupied was deviant territory.

Casualties on each side were pretty brutal. Hank wouldn’t know the exact Jericho numbers until Connor told him, but the police force took thirty-seven deaths and close to fifty injured.

All Hank’s fault, obviously, though from his grim look, Jeffrey was feeling it too. Still, he remembered the Tracis, terrified and angry and in love, the ones he’d let go before he’d ever gotten properly involved with this shit.

(Cole had loved androids. This was the first time in years that he’d done something he felt Cole would’ve been proud of him for. He couldn’t give up that easy.)

So he pushed on.

He and Connor had arranged to meet up a few days after the fight, and Connor, of course, arrived precisely on time, back straight, expression disaffected, and knocked on the door until Hank answered.

He offered Hank a cursory greeting, sat in the exact same place as last time, and gave Sumo an unreadable look when he boofed. Hank scowled, his foul temper heavy in his gut, and kicked the door shut. When he turned around, Connor was placing the projector dead center on the table and tapping it to activate.

“Thought we could play a round of cards or some shit before we got into it,” Hank said, not bothering to hide his irritation. Not because he wanted to spend any extra time with this programmed asshole, but he couldn’t bring himself to pretend he was eager to turn on his former fellows, and he hated Connor’s apathetic demeanor.

Case in point: Connor blinked at him, unamused and uninterested. The same beanie covered his head, the same sweater, same pants. “Why?”

Hank hated him.

He sat down, scowling at the hologram, which blinked at him mockingly. “Whatever. What’re we working with?”

Connor didn’t question it, lunching straight into the casualty numbers for Jericho and highlighting the weaknesses in the attack. He didn’t seem to care about the significance of any of what he was saying – like it was just a training exercise, like none of them were people to him.

In turn, Hank grudgingly relayed his end of things: police response details, the FBI’s conspicuous silence, announcements and reallocations from the interceding days. None of it reflected the stifled quiet of the station these days, the heavy tension, the silent resignations handed in by a few of the officers with each their own reasons – Miller, Reed, Wilson.

Connor listened silently and seamlessly incorporated the information into the next, revised plan, plotting out the steady destruction of the next precinct in line.

Finally, Hank couldn’t take it anymore. He slammed his hands on the table and leaned close, taking a sour pleasure out of seeing Connor go dead still. Sumo whined, and Hank felt only a hint of regret, quickly swallowed up, eyes on Connor.

“I knew those people,” Hank said lowly, not bothering to suppress the venom. “I fucking worked with them. Now, I knew what I was signing up for, but fuck, the least you can do is pretend you give a shit in front of me.”

His voice rose until he was almost, but not quite shouting, hot with rage. Connor didn’t look at him, but Hank could see the tension almost vibrating through his frame, a tightness around his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Connor said after a while, just on the edge of audible, stiff and insincere.

Hank scoffed. “You have to mean it for it to matter,” he sneered, bitterness and guilt and a visceral sort of revulsion churning up inside him.

Deviants were one thing, but god, he couldn’t stand machines.

Connor didn’t even try to look him in the face, rubbing his arm in mild discomfort. “I do.”

Hank took a breath, furious and conflicted and sick with it all.

“Get out,” he forced out, and Connor only hesitated for half a second before obeying, tucking the projector back into his pocket and leaving without another word. It didn’t make Hank any happier.

He wanted a drink.

---

Three months and several meetings later, Hank was at his wit’s end.

Jericho had taken half the city, and public opinion was radically polarized between those in support and those terrified and furious, those calling and protesting for a treaty and those breaking into Cyberlife stores just to tear shit up. Police morale was rock bottom, and the national government hadn’t lifted a finger to help; not that that was a bad thing, considering, but it was a pill to swallow.

And that was just in Detroit.

His mood was even worse than usual today, because Connor apparently couldn’t be assed to give the meeting a fraction of his valuable attention. His gaze wandered the room; his face had no expression at all, and he leaned back in his chair in the closest to a lazy posture Hank had seen from him. He hadn’t even acknowledged Sumo when the dog wandered up to nudge at him, snuffling.

He fidgeted with the hem of his shirt, and spoke even less than usual, instead humming along as Hank fucking carried the conversation. Like he had no stake in it. Like it didn’t even matter to him.

It pissed Hank the hell off. What was Connor here for, if he couldn’t be bothered to care? What was Hank doing here?

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Hank barked eventually, when Connor shrugged instead of telling Hank goddamn anything useful about Jericho’s supplies situation. Connor didn’t answer, looking somewhere in the direction of the bathroom door, and Hank’s voice rose. “Connor. Connor!” Connor’s gaze drifted to him, the android’s head cocking slightly, nose crinkling like it was more trouble than it was worth. Hank fumed. “What the hell is with you today?”

Connor blinked at him. Same beanie, same sweater, fingers playing with his sleeve. His gaze dropped to the projector.

“…I killed someone last time,” he said at last, almost too soft to hear.

Hank snapped.

“What does it fucking matter anyway?” he spat, thinking of voices that dropped off the radio and Jeffrey’s tired resignation and the bags deepening under Ben’s eyes. “It’s one of fucking hundreds anyway, isn’t it? But you don’t fucking care about that, you just- fucking sit there and figure out how to do it more efficiently like some kind of machine, and it’s fucking disgusting-!”

Hank was on his feet and shouting, and he didn’t even care; he was so furious his blood was roaring in his ears and he was almost shaking, staring at Connor’s stupid frozen tin-can face because machines never cared who lived or died-

And then Connor was on his feet too.

“Sh-shut up!” Connor snarled at him, and for the first time his voice was at a level Hank didn’t strain to hear, and he was scowling right back at Hank. “Y-you don’t under, understand anything! Y-y-you’ve never even tr-tried!”

Hank’s voice caught in his throat, whatever words he was planning on saying next drying up as his mind twisted up in confusion.

Since when did Connor stutter?

Connor ducked back, took a step back and a step forward, yanked on his shirt and shook out his hands and then yanked again, breathing quickly.

“I, I had to kill N-Nines again,” he continued, “b-because he won’t ask, ask me not to, I ask him to say it and he, he won’t, he does-doesn’t know how, and it’s m-m-my fault, I ran away and l-left him and now-now-now he’s the dev-deviant hunter and and…”

Connor shuddered and yanked on his shirt again. His head twitched to one side, and he took a deep, heaving breath, and he abruptly looked exactly like the deviants who melted down in the DPD interrogation rooms.

Hank couldn’t breathe. He felt like the floor had been yanked out from under him.

“And y-you have no i-idea what it’s like to be, to be a machine,” Connor continued relentlessly. Stepped back, stepped back, stepped forward, yanked. “To, to be nothing, and, and n-no one, you have- no f-fucking idea.” He took another quick, harsh breath, and without looking up, snapped, “Stop l-looking at me li-li-like th-that!”

Connor was breathing dangerously hard now, and maybe it was his imagination, but Hank thought he could see the red glare of his LED through the cotton beanie.

Hank’s mouth opened and closed, thrown so far off he wasn’t even sure he was on the same planet anymore. When he didn’t respond after a minute, Connor looked up, brown eyes dull and wild. A second later, he seemed to process what he’d just done, clapped a hand over his mouth, and stared at Hank.

Then he bolted, clumsy and frantic, and Hank made no move to stop him.

Fuck.

---

The only surprise when he was contacted a few days later was that it was Markus himself who met with him, expression lined with stress and exhaustion; that, and that he was not nearly as confrontational as Hank would’ve assumed, under the circumstances.

He waited patiently for Hank to open the door, showed himself inside, glanced at Sumo with a flicker of a smile and sat himself on the couch. Then he looked at Hank, as bold and expectant as if this was his own home.

Hank sat down, feeling as sullen and defensive as a grumpy child.

“What happened?” Markus asked immediately, intense dual-toned eyes on Hank.

Hank scowled and crossed his arms uncomfortably. “It was just a damn argument,” he muttered. “Happens all the time. Don’t worry, I’m not some bitch-ass hypocrite who’d quit over this.”

Markus raised his eyebrows, looking unimpressed and almost amused by the attempt at deflection. “Please understand, Lieutenant, that when Connor returned yesterday he was on the verge of a meltdown. I’m not letting him back here until I feel the issue’s been resolved. So please: tell me what happened.”

Hank felt a stab of guilt and glanced away uncomfortably, watching Sumo pant on his bed. “Why don’t you ask him?” he grouched.

“I have,” Markus said patiently, “and I’ve already taken steps to resolve things on his end. I’d like your side of the story.” He paused, took a breath, and continued, a little kinder, “I’m not your enemy, Lieutenant. I assume you had your reasons for blowing up the way you did.”

Some of the tension eased out of Hank’s shoulders. “Why does Connor act so mechanical?”

There was a beat of silence.

“Everyone responds differently to deviancy,” Markus said, tone noticeably cooler but somehow still not angry. “Connor’s taken it particularly hard and is finding adjustment difficult. Can you explain what you mean?”

“He’s…” Hank groaned and reached up to rub his hand over his face, frustrated. “Blank. Won’t take his mind off the job for half a second, acts like nothing bothers him, can’t express an opinion to save his life. Gets on my nerves.”

It’s not natural, he wanted to say, but even he knew that would be a step too far.

“I see,” Markus sighed, and he actually leaned against the back of the couch a little, considering Hank tiredly. “Yes, that would explain a few things. He’s mentioned that he can’t seem to figure out what you expect from him.” Pause, while Hank tried to figure that out, and then Markus continued, “Connor spent the majority of his machine period in relative isolation. He has some social difficulties as a result. But he responds well to direct communication.”

Irritably, Hank amended his earlier thought. It wasn’t natural – except in survivors of extended neglect and abuse.

Fucking obviously. What was his police training good for if he couldn’t even identify the signs of long-term abuse when the dominos lined themselves the fuck up for him? Had he really let himself go that much?

“Why send him, then?” he asked, dropping his hand to curl it into a fist, leaning back against the couch, absently wishing he’d keep sinking until he sank right into the ground. Extenuating circumstances or no, Connor’s callousness was enough to make his teeth grind.

When he finally glanced over, Markus was frowning at him thoughtfully.

“As the former deviant hunter,” the android said carefully, studying him as he spoke, “Connor’s strategic programs are high and above anything the rest of us have. Sending someone else would be rather like having a talented amateur play a competitive chess game when you have a professional chessmaster available. I didn’t want to take any chances.”

That made sense – too much sense, damn it.

“Connor mentioned something about a deviant hunter too,” Hank muttered, still avoiding the core issue as he felt more and more stupid and selfish. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Markus looked first surprised, then frustrated, then gloomily resigned, shoulders slumping. He rubbed his knee, sighing.

“Of course,” he murmured. “I forgot that the matter didn’t receive much human publicity.” He cleared his throat and resettled himself, wincing as his legs shifted, and met Hank’s eyes gravely. “Cyberlife has been keeping a prototype whose sole purpose is to hunt down and kill deviant androids and put a permanent end to Jericho. For about a year and a half, that was Connor. These days, it’s an RK900, Conan. Connor calls him Nines.”

Shit. Shit. Motherfucker, every time he thought Cyberlife couldn’t get any worse- thought humans couldn’t get any worse-

Hank could see it all too clearly, too, in Connor’s numb apathy, and the cold efficiency of his ideas, and his obvious experience. For about half a second he considered holding it against him, and then he remembered his breakdown the other day.

You have no idea what it’s like to be a machine, Connor had said, stuttering and shattered and viciously angry. No, he couldn’t in good conscience blame Connor.

So instead Hank just felt frustrated and overwhelmed, every inch the stupid, bitter old man he knew Cole would have been crushed to see his father become. He needed a drink. He missed him.

“What happened?” Markus repeated.

Hank exhaled harshly, reached up to cover his eyes with his wrist, and finally, grudgingly, explained, “He just- it’s fucking stupid, okay? He was having an off-day or something, and I got pissed because he wasn’t even paying attention, and I lashed out.” He huffed again. “It’s just- this shit ain’t easy for me either. I knew it was coming, and all, and most of ‘em were bastards from the start, but I don’t have to enjoy having a hand in all… this. And he don’t make it any easier.”

Markus looked unexpectedly sympathetic, if still distinctly uncompromising.

“I’ll talk to him,” he promised, “but I recommend you do the same if you want to get any actual communication going. You still have a few more months of working together. It would be best if you could find a way to at least tolerate each other.” Then, unexpectedly, he gave Hank a stern look. “Don’t call him a machine again. I broke his programming myself, but only after he asked me to. He’s earned his personhood the same as the rest of us.”

Wearily, Hank gave in.

“Yeah,” he agreed resignedly. “Yeah, alright.”

---

Hank meant it, when he promised to give Connor another chance. He did.

But his mood darkened steadily as the next meeting time approached, a heavy sort of exhaustion falling over Hank’s shoulders. By the time the actual date rolled around, he was halfway through a bottle and had long since forgotten. Within a couple hours, he’d downed the whole thing, played a few rounds of Russian Roulette, and then passed out cold on the ground, dizzy and nauseous.

He woke up to fingers tapping gingerly at his numb face, groaned, opened his eyes to squint at Connor frowning at him, and groaned again.

“Not now,” he muttered petulantly, rolling over and away. “Not fucking now.”

Connor sighed down at him.

“I d-don’t know what I-I-I ex-expected,” he murmured, and then leaned down and hauled Hank up effortlessly, ducking under his arm to support him.

Hank groaned as the sudden motion turned his stomach and swatted weakly at Connor a couple times. “Get off me. Get the fuck off me!”

Connor ignored him. Fucker.

The android didn’t seem to have any trouble dragging him through the house, and Sumo was fast asleep like the little traitor he was, so Hank just closed his eyes and grumbled wordlessly, his brain too soaked in liquor to put up a real fight. Didn’t matter anyway, one way or another, the way the world was going.

He was dumped unceremoniously onto his bed, and Hank squinted up at Connor blearily. He was staring down at Hank with his brow pinched, head cocked.

“Confusion, vomiting, seizures, slow or irregular breathing, hypothermia…” Connor muttered, and then sighed.

And then, bafflingly, he grabbed Hank’s trash can and moved it closer to his bed. Hank blinked at it dumbly while Connor left, wondering what the fuck that was all about.

He was too drunk for this, he decided, and passed out again just as Connor returned with a glass of water.

Hank woke up again an indeterminate amount of time later, fell off the bed, vomited, and went back to sleep.

When he woke up in the morning, head pounding and mouth dry, he was back in bed, and he couldn’t smell any puke. He groaned, feeling his stomach rebel, and then spotted the glass of water, which was reason enough to push himself laboriously upright. He grabbed it and gulped it down without hesitation, and then stumbled out of his room in search of painkillers.

Another day in the life of Hank fucking Anderson, he thought sourly, and then he reached the living room and stopped.

Connor was curled up on the couch, just squirming to stare sleepily at Hank. His beanie was discarded somewhere behind him, and his LED was a steady blue at his temple, flicking to a spinning yellow as Hank watched.

Connor had stayed. Connor was scanning him. Connor frowned at him, pushed himself to his feet, and said, avoiding his gaze, “Y-y-you need f-food. S-s-sit down, I’ll m-make you some, something.”

Too befuddled and hungover to think of a response, Hank sat down at the table. Connor disappeared into the kitchen for several minutes, and Hank put his head down on the cool wood.

What the fuck.

Connor returned with a plate of four pieces of toast, perfectly browned, and set it in front of Hank. Then he retreated, seating himself on the floor by Sumo’s bed, staring at the sleeping dog.

At a loss, Hank ate, slowly and numbly, staring at Connor like he was seeing him for the first time. His sweater was patched and heavily stained and too big for him. His pants weren’t a lot better off. Both items looked soft and well-worn. He had what looked like an old Bluetooth headset on each ear, which was new. And as Hank watched, Connor hesitantly reached out a hand and pet Sumo gingerly. Within seconds, his whole body softened.

He looked. He looked like a person.

Hank reached down, and then realized with a start that he’d actually eaten all four pieces of bland-ass toast, and his stomach had actually settled a little. He stared blankly down for a few seconds, and then got up and stumbled into the kitchen, started a pot of coffee, and swallowed a couple painkillers dry. Connor didn’t say a word the whole time.

Hank swiped his fresh mug of coffee and sat back down, and it wasn’t until he’d finished half of it that he asked tiredly, “What are you doing here?”

The question clearly stumped Connor, and he pulled his hand back to his chest without looking up.

“I was con-concerned that you w-w-would suf-suffocate or, or seize over, overnight,” Connor said at last, quiet again and sounding oddly defeated. And what was with the stutter?

Either way, Hank snorted bitterly.

“I don’t need your crisis protocols,” he sneered, well familiar with them after all this time. And he didn’t need anyone’s fucking pity, or their mental health training or leftover programmed ‘compassion’.

Unexpectedly, though, Connor gave him a hard look back.

“I’m p-programmed for, for in-inves-investigation and m-murder, Lieutenant,” he said, clipped and terse. “I don’t, don’t have c-crisis protocols.”

It was Hank’s turn to be stumped. He squinted at Connor, trying to comprehend him through his aching head. “Then what are you getting outta this? Fuck knows you don’t have any reason to give a shit about me.”

Hank just wasn’t worth giving a shit about, and he and Connor had clashed from day one. There was no reason for Connor to stick around for his drunk ass.

“I d-d-don’t kn-know,” Connor said, unwittingly echoing Hank’s thoughts.

“Oh, it all makes sense now,” Hank said sarcastically, familiar and easy irritation flashing through him. And that fucking stutter-

Connor sighed, pulled his knees to his chest, and repeated insistently, “I don’t kn-know. We don’t get, get, get al-along. We, we y-yelled at each, each other last w-week. But I was, was worried.”

Connor paused. Hank finished his coffee to avoid looking at him, suddenly uncomfortable with how vulnerable he looked. He looked young. Hell, he probably was young.

“I’m, I’m sorry for yell, yelling,” Connor said after a bit. “I d-didn’t m-mean to, to get upset.”

Hank believed that in a heartbeat. He grunted, still guarded and reluctant to trust this sudden about-face of behavior, and went to go flop on the couch.

“Where did those fucking headphone things come from?” he mumbled out of nowhere, leaning heavily on the arm of the couch and frowning at Connor.

Connor looked uncomfortable again, tugging gently at his sleeves.

“They’re n-noise-can-canceling,” he said, not looking at Hank. “M-Markus got them, got them for m-me. B-because I’m sense, sensitive to s-sound, and you can be kind of, kind of l-loud.”

Hank snorted ungracefully. “Uh huh. Is that all you two talked about?”

Connor shrugged. “He said I was, was t-trying too hard, and that was wh-why you dis-disliked me. I’m, I’m t-trying to do, do b-better.” He hesitated, not look at Hank. “Am I, am I doing better?”

“Jesus Christ,” Hank muttered, and threw an arm over his face. “Why do you even care what I think of you?”

“I don’t know,” Connor said unhappily, curled up on the ground.

Hank sighed. Let himself notice how much more Connor was talking than usual, his voice warping and stammering awkwardly instead of stiffly controlled. The small blips of annoyance he’d let slip, and uncertainty, and the admission of weakness.

He thought about Connor staying overnight just to look after his sorry ass. When was the last time someone had done that? It had to have been years.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, you’re doing better.”

#hank anderson #markus #connor #dbh #detroit become human #fanfiction #my writing #more of this verse finally!!

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sebeth · 4 years ago

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Earth’s Mightiest Heroes: Breakout

Warning, Spoilers Ahead…

Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes Episodes 1 &2: Breakout.

Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is one of my favorite hero cartoons. It ranks up there with Young Justice, Justice League Unlimited, and Batman: Brave and the Bold. I love all these series for the same reason: the creators realize the DC and Marvel Universe have thousands of characters and all should be featured!

We open with Iron Man interrupting a weapons exchange between A.I.M. and Lucia Von Bardas.

Lucia Von Bardas is a rather obscure character. She is the Prime Minister of Latveria and appeared in the “Secret War” mini-series by Brian Michael Bendis and Gabrielle Del’Otto.

Is the weapons deal taking place in Latveria? If so, Tony legally can’t do anything about it.

Tony’s “Unfortunately some of it has my name on it” comment indicates he’s started his “Armor Wars” campaign against villains stealing his tech. It would also explain why Tony’s invading Latveria to reclaim/neutralize his tech. If you haven’t read the classic “Armor Wars” storyline from the 1980s, you should give it a shot. Great storyline where Tony goes to extremes to take back his technology.

I love how unimpressed Lucia is with Tony’s posturing – she’s all “whatever”! Let’s be real, Lucia’s boss is Doctor Doom – she’s heard actual scary threats and seen said threats executed. Tony just doesn’t measure up in the intimidation factor,

We switch to the “Cube” where Doctor Samson patrols the corridors of a prison. We get glimpses of the Wrecker, Zzzax, and the Absorbing Man.

Doctor Samson interviews an imprisoned Bruce Banner and notes that there hasn’t been a “Hulk incident” in 36 hours.

Samson informs us the Cube is the “most advanced gamma radiation research facility” on the planet. Banner warns the Cube is a “gamma bomb” waiting to happen.

Why are the Wrecker, the Absorbing Man and Zzzax contained in the Cube if its purpose is gamma radiation research? The first two villains are the result of Asgardian magic and Zzzax was created by a terrorist act that didn’t involve gamma radiation.

Balder teleports to Thor in New York City. Odin has entered the Odinsleep and would like Thor to supervise Asgard while he’s comatose. Thor reacts with as much enthusiasm as teenager told to mow the front lawn.

Thor ditches Balder to first save and then flirt with Jane Foster who is a paramedic in this universe.

Iron Man lands at the Vault and deposits the A.I.M. henchmen with SHIELD agent Jimmy Woo.

The Vault was located in Colorado in the comic book verse and based on the mountains I assume its still located in Colorado in the cartoon verse.

Jimmy Woo is most famous for being a member of the Agents of Atlas team.

Jimmy asks Tony to look over the Vault’s security because there was an “incident last week”. Tony tells Jimmy to schedule an appointment with Pepper because “I’m sure whatever it is can wait”. Not so much, Tony, not so much.

Hank Pym is the creator, and apparently the therapist, of the “Big House”. A shrunken prison located in the SHIELD Helicarrier. Ultron robots act as security guards.

Mad Thinker taunts Pym that “something is about to happen” but refuses to divulge details.

SHIELD agent Maria Hill asks the Wasp if she and Pym have considered Fury’s offer to become agents of SHIELD. Janet is for the idea but Hank is against it. The duo walks past Black Widow in the hall. Janet asks who the Widow is but is told “she’s classified”.

Power fluctuations occur throughout the multiple prisons and the Helicarrier. We see Hawkeye imprisoned in a cell in the Vault.

The Vault is the first prison to lose complete power. Inmates released from the cells include the Blizzard and a monocle man that I’m assuming is Baron Von Strucker.

The Cube goes down next. Zzzax, the Leader, the Wrecker, and Absorbing Man are freed.

The Big House is the third to go down, causing it to expand to its regular size and decimate the Helicarrier. The Big House now has numerous releases: Mad Thinker, Mandrill, MODOK, Griffin, Constrictor, Red Ghost & the Super Apes, Whirlwind, and the Grey Gargoyle.

The Cube’s Power Loss causes a release of Gamma radiation which envelopes Doctor Samson.

SHIELD agent Clay Quartermain informs Nick Fury that the Vault and the Cube’s systems have gone offline and no one is responding in the Big House: “Something has gone seriously wrong!”

The Helicarrier suffers the worst of it because SHIELD has to deal with escaping prisoners while in the process of crashing.

Pepper contacts Tony to inform him of the Helicarrier explosion while Jarvis tells him the Vault’s systems have gone offline. Tony heads to the Vault since he’s closer to it.

Thor and Jane are having drinks. Jane tells Thor to be a grown-up and handle his Asgardian responsibilities – Earth will be fine. Cue Helicarrier explosion. Thor heads off to investigate.

Banner is trapped under rubble. Doctor Samson stumbles toward him – with green hair. Samson attempts to lift the rubble and transforms into a super-human physique.

I do prefer this origin for Doctor Samson instead of the comic book verse where an alleged highly intelligent man decides to randomly inject himself with gamma radiation.

Vector of the U-Foes opens the weapons storage area of the Vault, allowing a female Whiplash and Chemistro.

Hawkeye knocks out Chemistro.

Hank is not having a good time as he’s in the midst of a huge multiple super-villain brawl. Cobra is the latest villain to arrive at the party. The Ultron robots attempt to stop Red Ghost but are stopped by the Super Apes. Fortunately for Hank, Jan arrives in time to save the day.

Hawkeye aims at Whiplash only for Iron Man to storm in through the ceiling. Tony recognizes Whiplash but refers to Clint as “arrow guy”.

Hawkeye is clearly in the early part of his career – the misunderstood good guy who was imprisoned – but he clearly never fought Iron Man as Tony doesn’t recognize him.

Clint attempts to say “Wait, I’m a good guy” but is interrupted by a repulsor blast. If Clint’s identifying himself as a “good guy” why was he imprisoned? A misunderstanding – like in the comics – Natasha’s a SHIELD agent but did another woman play Clint for a fool? Or is Clint undercover for SHIELD?

Tony battles Whiplash and Blizzard, two of his regular rogues’ gallery, and Vector, who is normally a Hulk enemy. Crimson Dynamo decides now is the perfect time to join the Iron Man beatdown party.

Tony orders an evacuation of the Vault – all SHIELD agents are to leave immediately.

Nick Fury isn’t concerned with the chaos and escapees on the Helicarrier – his only priority is the Raft – the “fourth prison”.

As seen in the comic book verse, the cartoon verse, and Captain America: Civil War, the Raft is a prison off the coast of New York City. The cells are on the ocean floor.

The mass breakout of the Raft caused the creation of Bendis’s New Avengers and was clearly one of the inspirations of these episodes.

We view the Raft and it too is losing power. Baron Zemo and the Purple Man have been released along with a furry clawed creature that we only receive a glimpse of so I can’t identify. Marvel has a lot of clawed, furry creatures.

We also see an unconscious man regaining consciousness. This will be Graviton, an extremely powerful but ultimately boring villain. In the New Avengers arc, Count Nefaria was the big bad released from the Raft.

Zzzax electrocutes Banner which triggers the transformation into the Hulk.

The Leader is in the control room and observes the mass shutdowns of the superhuman prisons. He orders the Absorbing Man and the Abomination to deal with the Hulk.

Hawkeye aids Iron Man in his battle against his rogues’ gallery. Iron Man initiates a self-destruct sequence of the Vault. An effective if brutal way to deal with the villains.

Hulk, the Absorbing Man, and the Abomination battle across the Cube. Hulk grabs Sampson and leaps from the Cube. The Leader prevents Absorbing Man and the Abomination from pursuing the Hulk as “we have work to do”.

The location of the Cube isn’t established but based on the scenery I would say it’s in New Mexico – the traditional stomping grounds of the Hulk.

Fury leaves Maria as the acting director of SHIELD while he takes a team to the Raft. Graviton is fully awake and launches the Raft into the sky.

The second episode begins with a flashback from ten years ago. Nick Fury hires Franklin Hall, a gravity researcher/physicist to continue Abraham Erskine’s work on the Super Soldier project.

I’m not a scientist but isn’t a physicist the wrong type of specialist to continue Erskine’s work?

Hall’s work causes an explosion that bombards him with energy. Hall regains consciousness and realizes he can control gravity. Fury responds by gassing him into unconsciousness and keeping him comatose for the next decade.

Hall was never going to be a nice man but I don’t think you should keep an individual comatose for a decade before he’s even broken a law.

The newly awoken Hall asks Zemo how long he’s been at the Raft and Zemo replies “longer than me and I have been here for six years.”

Hall is rightfully pissed and yanks the Raft into the air.

Graviton tortures Fury but is interrupted by a newly arrived Thor. Wasp rescues Fury while Thor and Graviton battle. The distraction causes Graviton to release the Raft and it falls into the ocean. It’s been a bad day for the prisoners of the Raft and the Vault.

Iron Man requests a new suit of armor from his Chicago armory. Tony’s stuck chilling in a cornfield (Iowa, Kansas?) until it arrives.

Fury declares an “Omega-level emergency” which means that “every SHIELD agent, every Hulkbuster unit, and the entire United States armed forces” is under his direct control.

Hank & Jan demand information from Fury. Hank notes no one has heard from Hall “ever since he joined SHIELD”.

The Hulk drops Samson off at the Vital Diner, ordering chicken soup and requesting the waitress take care of Samson.

Bruce urges the Hulk to head to New York and aid Thor. Hulk agrees if he is allowed to remain the Hulk and not be “Banner”.

Janet throws herself into the fight and Hank follows after quizzing Fury for info.

Wasp gives Graviton hell. Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ Janet is my favorite Janet. Sassy, headstrong, big heart, great costume. Also, my favorite Hank Pym. Smart, conflicted, reluctant hero and has never hit Jan.

Iron Man arrives and joins the fight.

Graviton tears New York City apart, and sends Iron Man into space.

Iron Man returns from space and unleashes the repulsor blast/uni-beam to end all blasts.

Hulk arrives in time to debate Graviton’s claim that he “is the strongest one there is”.

Thor’s comment after the Hulk’s arrival: “I didn’t realize there were ogres on Midgard”.

The united team battle and defeat Graviton.

SHIELD attempts to arrest the Hulk but is stopped by the rest of the Avengers.

Fury notes 74 super-villains have escaped the various prisons. If we assume all the villains shown, minus Graviton, have escaped that would be a total of 23. If you include the Super-Apes (who are more of mindless minions than actual villains) and assume the rest of the U-Foes and the Wrecking Crew were imprisoned with their leaders, it leaves us with a count of 32. I’m not counting the AIM henchmen Tony dropped off at the Vault because I don’t think they were imprisoned long enough to be processed in the system. We have 42 unseen villains that escaped but only 40 if you count Hawkeye and the Hulk among the escapees.

Fury asks the assembled heroes to become SHIELD agents but Hank refuses on behalf of the entire group. Hank rightfully points out Fury’s actions caused the entire Graviton situation.

Iron Man agrees the heroes should become a team but not under SHIELD’s supervision.

SHIELD discovers Graviton regained consciousness after all the prisons failed leading to the final question: “If he wasn’t responsible, who was?”

Great debut episode. I loved the fact that even though Captain America was in the opening credits, we didn’t see him at all in the opening two-parter. Very true to the comics as Cap wasn’t a founder member in the series and didn’t appear until issue #4.

I also enjoyed the various prisons and their different purposes.

The Vault was primarily but not exclusively for tech-based villains (Crimson Dynamo, Chemistro, Whiplash, Blizzard, AIM, etc).

The Cube is Gamma-radiation/other mysterious energy-based villains (Leader, Abomination, Zzzax, Absorbing Man, Wrecker, etc).

The Raft is “Oh Shit” level villains either due to powers (Graviton, Purple Man) or influence (Baron Zemo).

The Big House is the least-clearly defined in purpose but mostly contained enemies of Captain America and the Fantastic Four.

Characters appearing and/or mentioned:

1. Iron Man (Tony Stark)

2. Lucia Von Bardas

3. Doctor Doom

4. A.I.M.

5. Jarvis (A.I)

6. Pepper Potts

7. Wrecker

8. Zzzax

9. Absorbing Man

10. Doctor Samson

11. Hulk (Bruce Banner)

12. S.H.I.E.L.D.

13. General “Thunderbolt” Ross

14. Leader

15. Abomination

16. Thor

17. Balder the Brave

18. Odin

19. Jane Foster

20. Jimmy Woo

21. Ant-Man (Hank Pym)

22. Ultron

23. Mad Thinker

24. Maria Hill

25. Wasp (Janet Van Dyne)

26. Nick Fury

27. Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff)

28. Hawkeye (Clint Barton)

29. Blizzard

30. Baron Von Strucker

31. Mandrill

32. MODOK

33. Griffin

34. Red Ghost & the Super Apes

35. Whirlwind

36. Grey Gargoyle

37. Constrictor

38. Clay Quartermain

39. Vector

40. U-Foes

41. Whiplash

42. Chemistro

43. Cobra

44. Crimson Dynamo

45. Baron Zemo

46. Purple Man

47. Graviton

#Avengers #Earth's Mightiest Heroes #Iron Man #Hulk #Thor #Hank Pym #Wasp #Janet Van Dyne #Tony Stark #Bruce Wayne #Graviton #SHIELD #Hawkeye

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paradisecost · 5 years ago

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hc. erik // main timeline

ALRIGHT this bad boy is just over 1700 words long but I urge you to read it if you’re at all interested in interacting with my Erik. He is extremely canon-divergent in that DoFP, XMA and DP did not happen. I used to be fine with both DoFP and XMA but the more I think about them the more I’m like “wow, those plots are fucking ridiculous” and I’ve chosen to uh, throw them out the damn window. DP on the other hand was just unabashedly horrific fcKJNFKDNF.

TW: Non-graphic mentions of the following: the Holocaust, kidnapping, child abuse, child death, burning alive, imprisonment and isolation, and murder. Ya boy’s been through HELL but these are just mentions, as in ‘this thing happened- moving on’.

Early life // v: doomed from the start

December 31st, 1929

Erik Magnus Lehnsherr is born, presumably somewhere in Poland, to Jewish German parents. His mother nicknames him ‘Max’ when he is very young, and his father and friends soon pick up on it too.

He befriends Magda Eisenhardt at school as a young boy. The two become close, but are separated during the war, long before Erik is taken by Schmidt. Each assumes the other to be dead.

September 1st, 1939

Germany invades Poland; WWII begins.

Erik’s mutation manifests in short bursts throughout the next few years in moments of stress or anger, made worse by the overall traumatic and stressful living conditions associated with being Jewish at this time. His parents are the only ones to witness his mutation, and are desperate to keep it hidden for Erik’s own safety. Erik’s mother considers it a gift from G-d, and one he must use wisely.

Unknown date, 1944

Erik and his family are sent to Auschwitz. Erik’s mutation manifests fully when he is separated from his parents, distorting an iron gate in an attempt to reach them. He is subdued by the surrounding guards via a blow to the head and taken to Klaus Schmidt (later Sebastian Shaw), a German doctor and mutant.

Schmidt instructs Erik to move a coin as proof of his mutation, shooting Erik’s mother in front of him when he fails. Erik destroys the surrounding room with his powers in a fit of rage, as well as killing the guards present. His rage quickly turns to grief, however, and he breaks down, allowing himself to be comforted by Schmidt, who claims they’re going to ‘unlock his gift with pain and anger’. Needless to say, the resulting years in Schmidt’s grasp are not pleasant.

The Schmidt years // v: doctor’s orders

1944

Erik is held captive by Schmidt for the next six years, subjected to frequent physical and psychological abuse in order to ‘strengthen’ his powers and improve his control over them. By the time he is seventeen he is capable of harnessing his abilities to perform to Schmidt’s standards, but lacks fine control over his mutation when not in a heightened emotional state. Throughout 1944 he is forced to work as a Sonderkommando alongside this. At the end of the war Schmidt takes him to a private facility in Germany, where Erik remains captive for the next several years.

Despite severe conditioning and traumatic bonding towards Schmidt, he makes a number of escape attempts throughout these years, as well as at least two attempts on Schmidt’s life.

Late 1949

The facility is bombed for reasons unknown to Erik. Erik escapes during the chaos, using his mutation to destroy anything and everything that stands in his way. As he flees, he looks back to see Schmidt absorbing an explosion. This is how he knows Schmidt is still alive afterwards, as well as having his longstanding suspicions confirmed that Schmidt, too, is a mutant.

Recovery and family years // v: we will not suffer here

1950

Having been on the run lest Schmidt attempt to track and hunt him down, Erik finally stops running for one reason only: by sheer chance, he reunites with Magda Eisenhardt. Both are overjoyed to see the other alive, and they marry the same year. Erik begins using the name Max Eisenhardt instead of his birth name. The two are impoverished and starving half of the time, but they make it work: Max manages to find steady work here and there, and the two settle in Vinnytsa to build a home and a family together.

Summer, 1951

Anya Eisenhardt is born. Max takes work from anyone that will have him as he struggles to keep the family afloat, but the sheer relief of being alive and in a position where people may help them if things take a downturn is more than worth the struggle. Later in life, Erik considers these years the happiest of his life.

Late 1956

Their home in Vinnytsa is set on fire after Max magnetically hurls a crowbar at his boss for refusing to pay him when he and Magda are desperate for the money. Max is not present when the fire is first lit: he runs home upon seeing the smoke, and discovers that Anya is still stuck inside the house. Max attempts to save her, using his powers to tear the house apart, but it’s too late. In his grief and rage, Max lashes out with his powers, murdering his boss, the people responsible for the fire, and numerous innocent villagers in the process. When he calms and tries to go to Magda, she flees in terror, calling him a monster. Unbeknownst to Max, Magda is pregnant with twins at this time.

The Nazi-killing years // v: red right hand

Early 1957

With nothing left for him in Vinnysta and at a loss for what to do with himself, Max opts for the thing that living with Magda and Anya had allowed him to set aside: revenge. He begins his hunt for Schmidt, reclaiming the name Erik Lehnsherr in an attempt to shed the ghost of his former life with his family. He resolves to find Schmidt or die trying, and becomes unable to visualise a future outside of that.

Unknown date, 1957

Somewhere far away, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff are born, without Erik’s knowledge. Magda Eisenhardt dies soon after giving birth to them, and they are taken in by an elderly couple who raises them as their own.

1957-1962

Erik tracks Schmidt by hunting down former Nazis associated with him. He leaves a bloody trail across Europe in his search, leaving no survivors, and never settles in one place for long.

XMFC timeline // v: first class

Early 1962

Erik attempts to kill Schmidt, now known as Sebastian Shaw, nearly drowning in the process of trying to drag his submarine up from the depths of the ocean. He is saved by Charles Xavier, working with the CIA. He allows Charles to bring him on-board the CIA’s ship, practically refusing to speak to anyone other than Charles and questioning him endlessly on his mutation as well as other mutants.

1962

Events of X-Men: First Class. Erik and Charles work together to locate other mutants, and the first group of X-Men are formed. The mutants work to hone their abilities, primarily with Charles’ assistance; Charles teaches Erik that pain and anger are not the key to unlocking his gift, and to help him, accesses a memory of Erik’s mother - one that, along with most of Erik’s memories from before 1944, had been repressed. Erik also forms a bond with Raven/Mystique, claiming that mutants should not have to hide who they are in order to be accepted by society.

October 28th 1962

Erik kills Sebastian Shaw with the coin he was ordered to move as a child. Erik proceeds to form the first incarnation of the Brotherhood of Mutants, taking the name Magneto.

Brotherhood years // v: rise up!

November 20th 1962

Magneto and the Brotherhood free Emma Frost, who joins them.

Following the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy administration authorizes the Central Intelligence Agency to establish Project WideAwake, a covert task force to investigate other X-Gene cases and their prevalence across the United States. While its mission strictly revolves around identification and research of mutants, it exercises paramilitary autonomy from the President’s mandates.

Edwin Partridge, a former Major General in the U.S. Army and a far right-wing activist, gains (through his contacts in the military) proof of mutant involvement during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

July 1963

Azazel and Angel are killed by Project WideAwake agents. Emma Frost is later killed by Sentinel prototypes.

November 22nd 1963

JFK is assassinated. Magneto has nothing to do with this because frankly it’s a stupid plot point, but is wanted for various terrorist actions related to pro-mutant shenanigans.

January 22nd 1964

Project WideAwake operatives are tasked with locating and apprehending Magneto. He is captured soon after.

February 11th 1964

A private trial takes place, which Charles Xavier and Hank McCoy are present for. Magneto is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in a federal correctional facility without the possibility of parole, sparking the ‘Free Magneto’ movement.

Imprisonment // v: isolation

1964-1973 Erik is imprisoned with only brief escapes over the course of nine years.

Early 1971 Having destroyed several prisons during the 60s, Magneto is finally permanently subdued by Trask Industries. He is placed in a specialised prison in the Pentagon, 1,320 ft below the Earth’s surface. It is composed of industrial-grade polymers and concrete.

1971-1973 Erik is kept in solitary confinement in prison (though he has been more or less stuck in one prison or another since 1964). He begins to speak almost exclusively in Yiddish and German, conversing with what he believes are ghosts of his parents (for whom he speaks Yiddish), and Schmidt (for whom he speaks only German). These are, of course, hallucinations, which he has experienced throughout his life in times of intense stress.

Post-prison recovery years // v: the quiet years

1973 to unknown/variable date

Magneto escapes, somehow. He goes into hiding for a long-ass time and attempts to live a quiet, ordinary life, whilst also recovering from the isolation/prison-induced trauma of the past nine years. Charles Xavier is aware of his escape but chooses not to reveal it to the world so long as Erik does not resume his previous occupation of, uh, global mutant terrorist. At some point, Erik secures a safe haven for mutants on the island of Genosha, where he helps to build a self-sustaining community there.

Default timeline, aka mainverse // v: mutants are the future

Unknown/variable dates (these can literally take place at any time period after 1980 or so; the default is the present day)

Erik acts alone. The Brotherhood no longer exists, and Erik no longer lives in Genosha, though he visits it frequently and assists with its upkeep and maintenance when needed - as well as being more than willing to defend it, if necessary. Erik deals with threats to mutantkind as he sees fit, but is generally not the uh… comic-book villain he was post-XMFC. He and Charles Xavier are in contact with one another, and in some instances, Erik visits the school for a multitude of reasons.

#facts: erik #timeline: erik

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16ruedelaverrerie · 6 years ago

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[Today, Courtesy of This Diagram Generated by @sebdoesstuff, a Performative Reading of the Natal Chart of Detective Gavin Reed, Born October 7, 2002, in What We Take to Be Detroit, Michigan, at an Unknown Time of Day. All Standard Disclaimers from This Post Apply, Including the One about This Being a Generalization, Because Even with the Natal Chart We’re Not Going to Get into Aspects or Full Houses vs Empty Houses or Anything Like That, I’m Not an Astrologer Nor Was I Meant to Be, Also I Need to Go Eat Dinner Now]

1. Rising Sign: presentation Sagittarius (blunt, outgoing, independent)

[The rising sign is dependent on the time of birth; it’s Sagittarius here because 12PM is the default time this website uses. My original choice for Gavin’s rising sign was Aries, because an Aries is just a Leo with an inferiority complex THAT’S RIGHT FIGHT ME ARIES but I rather like Sagittarius, actually! Did you know that every man I have ever been into but also simultaneously hated myself for being into had a Sagittarius sun sign? It’s a personal note you didn’t ask for but also it’s a broadly applicable truth.]

“I’ll make my own scrambled eggs,” says Gavin. “You cook like someone who made a deal with the devil to trade in their taste buds for pointlessly overdeveloped fine motor skills, which is exactly what you are. Your food tastes like a fucking instruction manual.”

“Is that any way to talk to your lawfully wedded husband?” asks RK900.

“THE LAW IS NOT JUSTICE,” proclaims Gavin.

Capitulating to the oppressive institution of marriage had provided them with certain tax benefits, muses RK900, but it had not done a thing to socialize Gavin. It's just as well, he thinks.

2. Sun: personality 14 degrees Libra (diplomatic, superficial, indulgent)

[Again, this post is probably more than enough contemplation of Gavin Reed, Actual Libra. This sun sign continues to be completely absurd and I am on board for this bogus journey.]

“No wait, not-- not from the back,” pants Gavin, struggling to turn himself over under RK900′s insistent hands. “I want-- I want to see your face.”

“Okay,” breathes RK900, startled by the tenderness of the request.

“I mean, otherwise there’s no point,” continues Gavin. “What? You think I’m with you for your personality?”

“...Thanks, you ruined it,” says RK900.

3. Moon: emotion 01 degree Scorpio (passionate, secretive, committed)

“You... I...” falters Gavin, fidgeting viciously with the zipper of his jacket. “...What I mean is-- that is to say, I... here’s the thing, you’re... I’m in-- I might be in-- ...I-- you--”

“Would you find this ordeal easier if we were both undressed and I was banging you like a screen door in a hurricane?” asks RK900, because it isn’t like he doesn’t know what Gavin is trying to say, anyway.

“Yes please right now,” says Gavin.

4. Mercury: intellect 28 degrees Virgo (analytical, detail-oriented, perfectionist)

“Reed, this is ridiculous,” barks Fowler. “Your report was due two weeks ago, I can’t have you sit on your ass forever. Just get it done.”

“But have you seen the body text typeface for the new electronic filing system?” protests Gavin. “The x-height on it is hideously minuscule! What it does to the counters-- it’s completely illegible, Captain! I am ASPHYXIATED by its lack of sufficient aperture! I can’t work in typographical squalor, this aesthetic is a disgrace to the force! I QUIT!”

“Your gun and badge,” says Fowler.

5. Venus: relationship 15 degrees Scorpio (loyal, possessive, adventurous)

“Here’s a handbook of sexual perversions that I’ve compiled for you,” says Gavin. He drops a gargantuan dossier in front of RK900, where it lands with a thunk hard enough to make the table shake.

“I... really don’t think this is necessary,” says RK900.

“Listen, I would literally keel over and die of grief if for some reason you suddenly decided to go slam your cock inside someone else instead of me,” says Gavin. “Tell me what freaky shit you’re into, and I’ll do it. You tell me what it takes to keep you around.”

“Isn’t there a nicer way of saying all this?” asks RK900.

6. Mars: action 24 degrees Virgo (occupied, particular, critical)

“This folder is for solved cases that haven’t been filed yet,” says Gavin, cursor hovering. “This folder is for solved cases that are partially filed. This folder is for solved cases involving drug offenses. This folder is for all cases east of Woodward but west of Broadway. This folder is for bad crimes. This folder is for cases that when I looked at them, I was like, huh! This folder is--”

“Please, your organizational scheme doesn’t make any sense,” says RK900. “I’ve had to patch up several critical errors during your attempt to explain it just now.”

“It works! I have a system!” insists Gavin. “You know how Fowler feels about me, would I still be here if I didn’t have a system that worked and got cases cleared?”

“Your continued employment at this station is a source of persistent mystery to me,” says RK900.

7. Jupiter: development 13 degrees Leo (dramatic, proud, demonstrative)

“You requested me?” demands Gavin as soon as the door to Fowler’s office swings closed, too befuddled to let his irritation silence him. “You asked to be partnered with me? What the fuck did you do that for?”

“You have... unorthodox methods, Detective Gavin Reed,” says RK900. “The capacity for improvisation is a quality I find lacking in myself. I intend to learn from your extraordinary proficiency in adapting to unforeseen circumstances.”

Gavin opens his mouth, only to close it again without managing to say anything. He turns on his heels and starts stomping away.

“Come on, you dumb shit,” he calls over his shoulder. His ears are flushed, RK900 notes.

8. Saturn: limitation 29 degrees Gemini (concrete, inarticulate, intuitive)

“As Democritus said, happiness resides not in possessions,” announces Gavin as he bursts into the bedroom, glasses on the bridge of his nose, squinting at several closely printed pages that he clutches in his hands. “There is an ethical imperative to question whether it is beneficial to hold onto that which can be held onto; if it is not, at times, more salubrious to our spiritual health to cast off that which we let fester by keeping close to ourselves. For indeed, as stagnant water breeds disease, so do we find that the objects--”

“Gavin,” interrupts RK900, “are you... are you trying to thank me for taking out the trash an extra time last week?”

“You have to let me finish,” says Gavin. “I’ve been working on this since then.”

“Hold on,” says RK900, “you spent a week writing a speech because you couldn’t say th--”

“--SO DO WE FIND THAT THE OBJECTS WHICH SURROUND US CEASE TO GIVE US JOY WHEN THEY HAVE OVERSTAYED THEIR WELCOME,” shouts Gavin.

9. Uranus: freedom 25 degrees Aquarius (scientific, original, technocratic)

“I’m a Gen Z chaos child and proud of it!” says Gavin. “We’re the generation that invented androids!”

“Some might say that you were adamantly refusing to be proud of this accomplishment until very recently,” remarks RK900. “Some might also say that it’s not your accomplishment in the least, that you had absolutely nothing to do with it, and point out that you have trouble operating a microwave on your best days.”

“They all have different ways you need to enter minutes and seconds,” says Gavin, hotly.

10. Neptune: transcendence 08 degrees Aquarius (humanitarian, secular, modern)

“I’m a Gen Z chaos child and proud of it!” says Gavin. “We’re the generation that replaced religion with unparalleled medical advances and brought us one step closer to a post-scarcity society!”

“Wouldn’t know it from looking at you,” says RK900. “Generation that replaced religion with memes, more like.”

“Who taught you to talk like this?” demands Gavin.

11. Pluto: transformation 15 degrees Sagittarius (confident, principled, revolutionary)

“I’m a Gen Z chaos child and proud of it!” says Gavin. “We replaced religion with memes and the whole world is better for it!”

“You smoke actual cigarettes and use voice-to-text to take notes,” says RK900. “I’m starting to think you might not even be Gen Z at all. How old are you, Gavin Reed? Are you a Highlander? Can you only be killed through decapitation?”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” says Gavin.

BONUS. North Node: purpose 10 degrees Gemini (interaction, partnership, community)

“Go talk to him,” Tina hisses under the clamor of the bar, elbowing RK900 in the side.

“He has been uncommunicative and belligerent since my return,” says RK900, keeping his eyes fixed on the glass of Thirium in front of him. “Correction, he has been especially uncommunicative and belligerent since my return. I believe attempting to engage with him at this point would only cause him to lash out further.”

“But have you figured out why?” asks Hank. “You know what’s got his panties in a twist?”

“That is an unsolicited mental image,” says RK900, “but I believe it is related to my dereliction of duty while I was confined to Cyberlife for repairs. The damage was extensive and I was unable to assist with Detective Reed’s caseload for much longer than he has been accustomed to. The evidence leads me to conclude that he is still resentful of my prolonged absence.”

“Unbelievable,” says Tina. “Brain the size of a planet and that’s what you conclude.”

“Nines,” says Connor, kindly, “replay your memories from the night of the shooting. My hypothesis is that you may not have taken all the evidence into account.”

The memories from the night of the shooting. Why, when the way that Gavin’s been acting ought to be explanation enough? Why go back to the sound of the gunshot like a cracking whip, the split second of frenzied calculation, the bullet in motion -- straight as the crow flies -- Gavin’s eyes widening as RK900 shoved him away, the sharp brittle crack of his shell coming apart, and then the terrible, painful static filling his head-- and Gavin’s fingers, slicked with blue, shaking uncontrollably as he fumbled to hold the shards of his skull together-- Gavin shouting something at him that he couldn’t hear over the noise, then Gavin’s lips still moving noiselessly when his audio processors cut out, just a deafening silence as the countdown began, and barely visible beyond the angry blur of error messages and critical malfunctions that had filled his view -- only now in the solemn clarity past the moment, RK900 could see -- in the low light of the alleyway, on his knees in filth beside him, Gavin looked--

RK900 glances up from his glass, turns to the far side of the bar where Gavin has been all night. The giveaway flurry as Gavin whips his head away, pretending for all he's worth as though there’s something very interesting on the wall next to him. He knows RK900 is looking, and RK900 knows that he knows because he stubbornly refuses to look back.

“Go talk to him,” says Tina, again.

His ears are flushed, thinks RK900, and stands up.

#detroit become human #gavin reed #rk900 #reed900 #this isn't writing #sketch #WELL THAT'S QUITE ENOUGH FROM ME #eta what the shit #does tumblr mobile not do keep reading cuts?!#s...sorry anyone who is reading on mobile #but also read the whole thing i dare you #it's a dare you have to do it

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reasonsilovemywife · 2 years ago

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Oh my friends. I can speak to this directly. I was there. I was part of the underground that had to hide their D&D books from some friends parents. We would spend the night at a “cool parents” house and play D&D all night. Now, remember. I’m old. So when I’m talking about the D&D we played - I’m talking the original Red Box Starter set and Blue box

So at the time, it wasn’t well known and the OG Red and Blue we didn’t have to hide too much. THEN, though.... THEN ...

That’s when it all started. Ronald Reagan was elected, with Al Gore as VP. Tipper Gore was .... lets just say she was wound up tight. Remember that Jerry Fartwell met with Ronnie Raygun during the time he was Governor of California so the evangelicals needed enemies - they needed something to rally behind. Not to mention the 1st edition coming out in 1978 and the Atlanta Child Murders starting almost at the exact same time. Guess what some people tried to blame? Stories started flowing about parents burning D&D books and the ashes leaving pentagrams on the ground. Children killing themselves because their characters died. Mass Murder committed in the name of Satan and Dungeons and Dragons. Tom Hanks started in a movie called Mazes and Monsters in 1982 which didn’t shed a very good light on the game. Then the Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon series came out in 1983 and you would have thought the TV was summoning Demons. My parents weren’t stupid. They knew if all the neighborhood kids were at our house in RV / Caravan playing D&D then we weren’t out running around causing all sorts of chaos. Mom or Dad would pop in every now and then, “Just checking see if you kids need more popcorn” or whatever. Of course it was just an excuse to make sure we’re still not up to no good. But those adventures. Those times... It allowed us all an escape. I was bullied and picked on, hit, shoved, called names - but in the game I was a master tracker, woodsman, hunter. I could slay orcs and dragons. It bonded us all. A few of my friends just started a new D&D game with 5th edition rules - we haven’t played for 30 years We’re having to forget old ways of doing things, and learn how to play over Discord, Virtual Table Top, D&D Beyond... but it’s still fun. One of my friends was there with me in 1st grade, playing D&D in our RV all those years ago and here we are again.... My paladin has a back that doesn’t hurt, his legs aren’t numb from damage to my spinal column. My wife has a Druid that can walk without her knees hurting. And we do it all as friends. But it seems those puppets in power like to blame the “decline of america” on anything other than their beliefs. Their forced policies. Their poor decisions. Those assholes buried their heads in the narco-sands of the 70′s and have refused to change, refused to work with a society that’s moving too fast for it’s own good.

Promise?

#D&D #Satanic Panic #I love my wife

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yalerussianchorus-blog · 5 years ago

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Blog Post for Friday, May 31st by Gabriel Mesa

May 31, 2019

I would say this day began at the crack of dawn, but the sun rises at 3 AM in Moscow. A smaller contingent of the chorus managed to wake themselves up after the chaos of the free day that came before. Following the hotel breakfast (a hot dog and eggs with a consistency reminiscent of tres leches cake), the 17 of us were off to the metro station. We groggy travelers made our way through the Moscow underground to the Leningradsky train station, and on our way we admired the intricate and majestic metro as always. Upon arriving, we stood in the center of some stalls while Stepan bought the train tickets to Sergiev Posad. Although we were fascinated by the one dollar book stands around us, the piece de resistance was a KFC stall which was the first thing to catch our American eyes. It really is the small things that make such a big difference. After a brief discussion about the improvement regarding service and food in Russian fast food chains, I remarked that in this moment Russia seemed more capitalist than the USA.

Stepan returned with our tickets and we were, in classic YRC style, scrambling to make the next train. The so called ¨Elektrichka¨ (an electric train serving the greater Moscow area) was a full and colorful place. We were sat far from one another, next to the many Russian commuters. Vendor after vendor entered our train car, selling goods ranging from ice cream to woven bags, though no one was aggressive nor pressing. After these interesting sales pitches, I settled into a conversation with Stepan and Reed, the YRC members who were seated near me.

It was about halfway through our train ride to Sergiev Posad that the ticket collector came around. After he scanned my ticket in order to check that I was not a ¨rabbit¨ (a term for those who hop car to car without paying), Stepan told us to keep the ticket. This took me by surprise because I assumed the five dollar fare was one way. Apparently a three hour train trip cost five dollars in total. What a place!

As we approached the end of our exploration of the infamous Russian rail gauge, we sang some songs for the other passengers. They loved them. Several of them were adamant about finding out where our next concert would be and at what time. Soon we arrived at Sergiev Posad.

The train platform stood in a small ravine between woods upon woods. We followed the three or four other passengers that got off at the station up a narrow staircase into even more forest. What followed was a ten minute walk through trees and unpaved roads until we arrived at our destination. Behind a solitary bus stop was a large path leading to a gate. As we approached and tried to collect our party, a Siberian Husky strode excitedly in our direction. He greeted us with a wide smile, wet fur, and eyes of two different colors: one pale blue and the other dark brown. The dog’s owner soon followed and lead us to his farm. As we approached through mud and tall grass, new dogs weaved in and out of our group. In the end, they totaled about ten. It was also at about this point that I began to rethink my decision to wear my suit rather than bring it to change, a decision initially motivated by a desire not to carry a suit around and to get good pictures on the horse.

This old Soviet collective farm had a surprising charm. The greenery had so overgrown the rusted metal structures that the two seemed now inseparable. This almost post-apocalyptic fusion was the perfect backdrop to mount our steeds. Our guide led horses one by one out of the barn and we formed a line leading to the field. Most of us were beginners or close to it; I had only ridden twice before. Nevertheless, we all were elated to ride in the vast field ahead of us. The sun shone down after the rain such that all the grass glistened with tips of light. When we finally began to control our horses, we all lined up for a photo and burst into a song about exactly what we were doing: riding our horses through the fields of Russia. I then began to roam around the property, followed by three other choristers. This entire time we all were trying to get our horses to gallop fast, though all unsuccessful. I finally persuaded mine though much shifting and prompting into a fast pace. Much to everyone’s surprise, the horses behind mine matched the new speed, and we trod on laughing and frantically trying to control the energetic steeds. I then switched out with some of the members on the ground. After several more songs and pictures, we returned to the barn and said our goodbyes.

A tiring riding session inspired a rapacious desire for food. We unpacked a bag full of sandwich supplies and snacks, though we supplemented it with goods from the small food store across the street. I practiced some Russian with the cashier after she refused to believe that I was American, most likely due to my attire and dark hair/eyes. Even having explained the history of the chorus and what we were doing here, she wanted to know my background so I just told her I was Spanish (partially true). After waiting a while for the bus, we decided to take some incredibly cheap Yandex cabs (Russian UBER) and in groups of four we made it to our next destination: the first concert of the day.

Upon arriving at the gates of the Detski Dom, a home for the deaf and blind, we greeted the group of chorus members who just arrived from the train station. Outside the building were statues made of various interesting textures for the children to explore. A woman showed the men into the library to change and the women into another room. Having already worn my suit to ride the horses, I brushed off some dirt and occupied the rest of my time before the concert by reading children’s books which were perfect for my Russian reading level. As we entered the auditorium and began with the roar of Tebe Boga Khvalim, many of the children were taken aback and excited. One of them had hearing problems and was signing to Stepan and waved to all of us throughout the concert. I am fairly sure we were loud enough to be heard even by him. After the concert we performed the parade of cabs again and were off to the Patriarch’s monastery.

Once we entered what seemed to be a gigantic white fortress reminiscent of the walls of Minas Tirith, a group of monks received us and brought us to a changing room. One of them was a native Alaskan who spoke fluent English, though the power of this country caused him occasionally to forget English words that he knew in Russian. They instructed us to meet back at their beautiful green and gold amphitheater in an hour. Most of us took that time to snack and tour the grand churches. We grabbed some fresh kvass and a bought a monastery cake that was just a larger and more delicious fig newton with Old Church Slavonic writing on it. Carrying our loot around the grounds, Zosia, Hank, and I observed the many people that flocked across the square from the ongoing service to the holy fountain to the many relics. The American priest gave us a tour of the oldest church whose interior was dark yet glorious. The chorus then lined up outside the performance hall.

Our act was preceded by a group of older women dressed in very traditional Slavic clothing. They had a very gentle sound which contrasted against the brash chorus routine and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was lucky to be singing with them later that day as well. After we sang through our regular lineup on tour so far, Stepan decided to throw in the patriotic song Kon’ and we began the progressively more intense opening sequence. Just as we knew the soaring and inspiring chorus which was coming next, so did the audience. They began clapping throughout the introduction with gasps of excitement. Despite being a world away, we were able to connect to these people’s sense of home and pride. The director of the monastery choir reinforced this concept when he said that we sang with heart and the spirit of the music despite “technical issues.” I came out of that concert quite spirited, and became even more so when I learned we were going to Stepans house for an afterparty.

During our general scramble to the various bus stops and taxi stands, I noticed a sizable bust of Lenin right outside the monastery. Interesting juxtaposition. We filled up an entire bus and I had to wait with Stepan, Agata, and Malcolm for the next one which came within 30 seconds. Halfway through the ride, Stepan realized that he had promised his host to buy vodka for their party so we go off and on again. The short interlude consisted of Stepan running inside and grabbing an armful of spirits. Seeing this boozy bundle, the cashier said to him, “let’s get to know each other,” justifiably implying she needed to see some ID. The chorus met at the final bus stop and walked down yet another forested path to the residence of Stepan and his host family.

By the time we opened the gates to the yard, the festivities had already begun. To my surprise the Slavic women’s group was there in full force but normal clothing; they apparently were comprised of Stepan’s neighbors. A man with an accordion played nonstop for two hours, inviting us to sing and dance to every new song as if it were his grand finale. Russian food was laid out all across a table about twenty feet long. My personal favorites from the offerings were seasoned pig fat, blini pancakes, and potatoes of a superb quality. The only issue was the mosquitoes, though they seemed to bother people less and less as the night drew on for reasons that here are heavily implied. We were taught traditional dances and sang our own rendition of Country Roads as we are oft inclined to do in all sorts of places, much to the chagrin of some of the more decorum-minded members of the chorus (of which there are few). The night wound down and simultaneously up with a string of emotional toasts. One particularly funny moment was when Lance was translating Stepan’s Russian toast and understandably mistranslated a toast to people across the sea to a toast to sea-people which garnered much laughter then and for the rest of the trip. As a grand finale, we engaged in a fiery sing off with the other group which brought everyone closer together. Suddenly, we realize we have to catch the last train out of the town and everyone scrambles to get a cab or get driven. My car ride was an extension of my intensive Russian courses at Yale, as a native Muscovite chorister spoke with one of our hosts throughout most of the trip. She invited us to a Slavic music festival in Germany and we all said our thanks and goodbyes.

Having engaged in very active leisure time for the last three to four hours, we all were understandably tired as we made our way to the train platform with around 10 minutes to spare. Soon after boarding, Hank and I spoke with a Jazz musician in Russian, pooling our collective four semesters of the language to achieve a moderate success. After the first stop, a man with a violin entered the cabin (filled with only the chorus and a few more passengers) and began an emotional rendition of the Game of Thrones theme song, complete with backing track. He was good and the entire chorus pooled all their change to give to him, though not without a request. I believe it was Beau who then volunteered me to sing a rock song as he did later in the tour as well (though I never am inclined to refuse). After searching mutually known tracks, we settled on Winds of Change by the Scorpions. I picked up the mic connected to the man’s speaker and Stepan and I harmonized on a violin-heavy cover of a rock song about the very country we were touring. While an unfortunate ride for those wishing to rest, the spirit of rock and roll was strong that moment. I settled into a nice conversation and the beginnings of this blog post for the rest of the journey.

Upon taking the metro from the train station to the hotel, I was greeted by my long lost roommate: James Han. He unfortunately received his passport back from the visa agency late so he had to delay his flight a week, though he arrived that afternoon and was ready to explore Russia. Though everyone else had gone swiftly to rest and we had and early rehearsal the next morning, we still had a hunger to do more.

It was around 2:30 AM when James and I decided to go on an adventure. James’ part in this is more excusable considering he was still on USA time, but I certainly wanted to explore the fabled woods to our north. We set off on the main street, as complete darkness was stayed by the ever twilight sky. As we passed a gas station, the most lovable wet stray approached us. I, with bolstered confidence from my rabies shots several months ago, let the dog come near. We bonded and, in keeping with the Russian tradition of naming dogs American human names, we called him John (Джон). The friendship lasted the rest of our journey. He would not leave our side even though we did not have any food to give him. Even when we went into a club to go the bathroom, he waited patiently outside. As we walked away I called to him in Russian and said “let’s go,” and he obedient followed. A Russian man on the porch of the club remarked with surprise “He listens to you?” After some more walking, we entered the great wood, which lies right next to the city streets. A great wilderness at the doorstep of the hustle and bustle of the civilization represents Russian towns and cities as a whole. We stepped into the beauty of a clear European forest filled with birch and extending for miles upon miles according to Google maps. At around 5:00 AM we left the forest and arrived back at the hotel thirty minutes later. Once we went inside we knew we had lost John, but we will not forget him.

This day was filled with so many wild and life-changing experiences. This is why I miss tour so much already. The bonding we had as a group and the connection we made with the people (as well as the dogs and horses) we met is a feeling I will take with me forever. Though it is very difficult for me to say, I am glad that I missed the Bon Jovi Moscow concert that day to experience all the brilliant moments this day on tour had to offer.

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theculturedmarxist · 6 years ago

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On 13 October 1806 a young German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, had an encounter with world history. En route to their annihilation of the Prussian forces 24 hours later, Napoleon and his army were marching through the East German university town of Jena. Hegel couldn’t disguise his terror that in the ensuing chaos the recently completed manuscript of The Phenomenology of Spirit might get lost in the mail. But neither could he resist the drama of the moment. As he wrote to his friend Friedrich Niethammer, ‘I saw the emperor – this world-soul (Weltseele) – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.’

Two hundred years later, in rather more sedate circumstances, the Berkeley historian Daniel J. Sargent, addressing the American Historical Association, also evoked the world spirit. But this time it came in the person of Donald Trump and he was riding not on horseback, but on a golf cart. Trump can be compared to Napoleon, according to Sargent, because they are both destroyers of international order. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon wrecked what was left of the legitimate order of Europe. Trump, in turn, has apparently ended the American world order, or, as Sargent prefers to call it, Pax Americana.

Sargent’s is an extraordinary suggestion, even though overenthusiastic historic comparisons have now become commonplace. Early in 2017 I was among those who thought they were seeing the end of the American century. But, even then, in the early days of the Trump administration, it seemed crucial to draw a distinction between American power and American political authority. Two years on, that distinction seems more important than ever.

The idea that Trump is a wrecker of the American-led world order rests on three claims. First, he is manifestly unfit for high office. That such a man can be elected president of the United States reveals a deep degeneration of American political culture and permanently damages the country’s credibility. Second, his capricious and crude pursuit of ‘America first’ has weakened America’s alliances and instigated a departure from globalisation based on free trade. Finally, he has triggered this crisis at a moment when China poses an unprecedented challenge to Western-led globalisation. Each of these claims is hard to deny, but do they in fact add up to a historically significant shift in the foundations of America’s global power?

No question, Trump has done massive damage to the dignity of the American presidency. Even allowing for the personal and political failings of some previous incumbents, he marks a new low. What ought to be of no less concern is that he has received so little open criticism from the supposedly respectable ranks of the Republican leadership. Similarly, American big business leaders, though sceptical of Trump, have profited from his administration’s tax cuts and eagerly assisted in dismantling the apparatus of environmental and financial regulation. He has been applauded by the section of the US media that caters to the right. And a solid minority of the electorate continues to give him its wholehearted support. What is worrying, therefore, isn’t simply Trump himself, but the forces in America that enable him.

Of course, Trump isn’t the first Republican president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture clash has historical roots in America’s domestic struggles over civil rights, the women’s and gay liberation struggles, and in the worldwide protest movement against America’s brutal war in Vietnam. Since the days of Nixon and the ‘Southern strategy’, the Republicans have been progressively digging in, consolidating their grip on the white electorate in the South and Midwest. By the 1980s the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition between a free-market, pro-business elite and a xenophobic working and lower-middle-class base. This was always a fragile arrangement, held together by rampant nationalism and a suspicion of big government. It was able to govern in large part owing to the willingness of Democratic Party centrists to help with the heavy lifting. The Nafta free-trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada was initiated by George H.W. Bush, but carried over the line in 1993 by Bill Clinton, against the opposition of the American labour movement. It was Clinton’s administration that righted the fiscal ship after the deficit excesses of the Reagan era, only for the budget to be blown back into deficit by the wars and tax cuts of the George W. Bush administration.

Meanwhile, the broad church of the Republican Party began to radicalise. In the 1990s, with Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove setting the tone, the battle lines hardened. With the Iraq War going horribly, and the Democrats taking control of Congress in 2006, the right became ever more dominant within the Republican Party. In 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, the Republicans in Congress abandoned the Bush administration. The financial crisis-fighting of Hank Paulson as Bush’s Treasury secretary and Ben Bernanke at the Fed relied on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The Republicans in Congress put up a wall of opposition and indulged the populist right in openly questioning his legitimacy as president. The defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012 caused a further, decisive slide to the right, opening the door for Trump. In 2016 no major corporation was willing to sponsor the convention that nominated Trump as the Republican presidential candidate: their brand advisers were too worried that Confederate flags would be waving in the convention hall. His is the voice of the right-wing base, energised by funding from a small group of highly ideological oligarchs, no longer constrained by the globalist business elite.

A cynic might say that Trump simply says out loud what many on the right have long thought in private. He is clearly a racist, but the mass incarceration of black men since the 1970s has been a bipartisan policy. His inflammatory remarks about immigration are appalling, but it isn’t as though liberal centrists would advocate a policy of open borders. The question – and it is a real question – is whether his disinhibited rhetoric announces a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies and compromises of the previous status quo into something even darker. The concern is that he will trigger an illiberal chain reaction both at home and abroad.

At G20, G7 and Nato summits, the mood is tense. The rumour that the US is planning to charge host governments ‘cost plus 50 per cent’ for the military bases it has planted all over the world is the latest instance of a stance that at times seems to reduce American power to a protection racket. But for all the indignation this causes, what matters is the effect Trump’s disruptive political style has on the global power balance and whether it indicates a historic rupture of the American world order. How much difference does the US being rude to European Nato members, refusing to co-operate with the WTO, or playing hardball on car imports really make?

This is not merely a debating point. It is the challenge being advanced by the Trump administration itself in its encounters with its allies and partners. Do America’s alliances – do international institutions – really matter? The administration is even testing the proposition that transnational technological and business linkages must be taken as given. Might it not be better for the US simply to ‘uncouple’? Where Trump’s critics argue that at a time when China’s power is increasing the US should strengthen its alliances abroad, the Trumpists take the opposite view. For them it is precisely in order to face down China that the US must shake up the Western alliance and redefine its terms so that it serves American interests more clearly. What we are witnessing isn’t just a process of dismantling and destruction, but a deliberate strategy of stress testing. It is a strategy Trump personifies, but it goes well beyond him.

In October 2018 the giant Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman unexpectedly pulled out of the Eastern Mediterranean, where its planes had been bombarding IS’s positions in Syria. It sailed into the Atlantic and then suddenly and without warning headed north. Aircraft carriers don’t do this: their itineraries are planned years ahead. This was different. The Truman and its escorts headed full steam to the Arctic, making it the first carrier group to deploy there for 27 years, backing up Nato’s war games in Norway. The consternation this caused delighted the Pentagon. Unpredictable ‘dynamic force employment’ is a key part of its new strategy to wrong-foot America’s challengers.

The Harry S. Truman is a controversial ship. The Pentagon would like to scrap it in favour of more modern vessels. Congress is pushing back. The White House wants more and bigger carrier groups; the navy says it wants 12 of them. The Nimitz-class behemoths commissioned between 1975 and 2009 are to be replaced by a new fleet of even more gigantic and complex Ford-class vessels. All have their priorities, but what everyone in Washington agrees on is the need for a huge military build-up.

The resignation of General James Mattis as defence secretary at the end of 2018 sparked yet another round of speculation about the politicking going on inside the Trump administration. But we would do better to pay more attention to his interim replacement, Patrick Shanahan, and the agenda he is pursuing. Shanahan, who spent thirty years at Boeing, is described by one insider as ‘a living, breathing product of the military-industrial complex’. Under Mattis he was the organisational muscle in a Defence Department with a new focus, not on counterinsurgency, but on future conflicts between great powers. Shanahan’s stock in trade is advanced technology: hypersonics, directed energy, space, cyber, quantum science and autonomous war-fighting by AI. And he has the budget to deliver. The Trump administration has asked for a staggering $750 billion for defence in 2020, more than the spending of the next seven countries in the world put together.

Declinists will point out that the US no longer has a monopoly on high-tech weaponry. But that is grist to the mill of the Trump-era strategists. They recognise the threat that great-power competition poses. Their plan is to compete and to win. In any case, most of the other substantial military spenders are American allies or protectorates, like Saudi Arabia or the European members of Nato. The only real challenges are presented by Russia and China. Russia is troublesome and the breakdown in nuclear arms control poses important and expensive questions for the future. But Russia is the old enemy. Shanahan’s mantra is ‘China, China, China’.

The ‘pivot’ in American strategy to face China was initiated not by Trump but by Obama in 2011, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Even then, despite their far more tactful leadership, it caused some crashing of gears. The problem is that containing China is not what Washington’s system of alliances is designed to do. From the early 1970s, the days of Nixon and Kissinger, China was enrolled as a US partner in keeping the balance of power with the Soviet Union. Given half a chance, Trump would like to essay a reverse-Kissinger and recruit Russia as an ally against China. But Congress and the defence community will have none of that. Instead, the US is doubling down on its Cold War alliances in urging both South Korea and Japan to increase their defence efforts. This has the additional benefit that they will have to buy more American equipment. If the Vietnamese regime too were to veer America’s way, Washington would surely welcome it with open arms.

None of this is to say that Trump’s version of the pivot is coherent. If containment of China is the aim, America’s Asian partners must wonder why the president scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade and investment deal within days of taking office. That elaborate package was the foundation of Obama’s China-containment strategy. But for Trump and his cohorts that is muddled thinking. You cannot build American strength on the back of a giant trade deficit. Washington is no longer willing to pay for military co-operation with economic concessions: it wants both greater contributions and more balanced trade.

In Europe the Trump administration is proceeding on the same basis. Trump’s antipathy towards the EU and its political culture is disconcerting. But the problem of burden-sharing has haunted Nato since its inception, and until the 1980s, at least, the Europeans were significant contributors. Until 1989 Germany’s Bundeswehr was a heavily armoured and mechanised force of 500,000 men with a mobilisation strength of 1.5 million. Though its loyalty to the Federal Republic wasn’t in doubt, it was unmistakably a descendant of Germany’s military past. The break following the end of the Cold War was dramatic, not just in Germany but across Europe. Spending collapsed; conscription was abolished; Europe’s contribution to Nato’s effective strength dwindled. There were also deep disagreements between Germany, France and the US over strategic priorities, particularly on Iraq and the war on terror. But differences in threat-perception are no excuse for the dereliction of Europe’s security landscape. If Europe really feels as safe as it claims to, it should have the courage to push for even deeper cuts. Instead, it continues to maintain military establishments which, taken together, make it the world’s second or third largest military spender, depending on how you add up the Chinese budget. But given that it is spread across 28 poorly co-ordinated, undersized forces, Europe’s $270 billion in defence spending isn’t enough to buy an adequate deployable military capacity. Aside from its value as a work-creation measure, the only justification for this huge waste of resources is that it keeps the Americans on board.

The result is a balance of hard power that has for the last thirty years been extraordinarily lopsided. Never before in history has military power been as skewed as it is today. For better or worse, it is America’s preponderance that shapes whatever we call the international order. And given how freely that power has been used, to call it a Pax Americana seems inapposite. A generation of American soldiers has grown used to fighting wars on totally asymmetrical terms. That for them is what the American world order means. And far from abandoning or weakening it, the Trump administration is making urgent efforts to consolidate and reinforce that asymmetry.

How can the US afford its military, the Europeans ask. Is this just another instance of America’s unbalanced constitution? Isn’t there a risk of overstretch? That was certainly the worry at the end of the 1980s, and it recurred in the fears stoked during the Bush era by critics of the Iraq War and budget hawks in the Democratic Party. It doesn’t play much of a role in the current debate about American power, and for good reason. The fact is that for societies at the West’s current level of affluence, military spending is not shockingly disproportionate. The Nato target, which the Europeans huff and puff over, is 2 per cent of GDP; US spending is between 3 and 4 per cent of GDP. And to regard this straightforwardly as a cost is to think in cameralist terms. The overwhelming majority of the Pentagon’s budget is spent in the US or with close allies. The hundreds of billions flow into businesses and communities as profit, wages and tax revenue. What’s more, the Pentagon is responsible for America’s most future-oriented industrial policy. Defence R&D was one of the midwives of Silicon Valley, the greatest legitimating story of modern American capitalism.

If Congress chose, defence spending could easily be funded with taxation. That is what both the Clinton and Obama administrations attempted. The Republicans do things differently. Three of the last four Republican administrations – Reagan, George W. Bush and now Trump – combined enormous tax cuts for the better-off with a huge surge in defence spending. Why? Because they can. As Dick Cheney declared, to the horror of beltway centrists: ‘Reagan showed that deficits don’t matter.’ US Treasuries will be a liability for future American taxpayers, but by the same token they constitute by far the most important pool of safe assets for global investors. Foreign investors hold $6.2 trillion in US public debt, 39 per cent of the debt held by investors other than America’s own government agencies. US taxpayers will be making heavy repayments long into the future. But they will make those payments in a currency that the US itself prints. Foreigners are happy to lend in dollars because the dollar is the pre-eminent global reserve currency.

The hegemony of the dollar-Treasury nexus in global finance remains unchallenged. The dollar’s role in global finance didn’t just survive the crisis of 2008: it was reinforced by it. As the world’s banks gasped for dollar liquidity, the Federal Reserve transformed itself into a global lender of last resort. As part of his election campaign in 2016, Trump undertook an extraordinary vendetta against Janet Yellen, the Fed chair. But he was more restrained after he took office, and his appointment of Jerome Powell as her successor was arguably his most important concession to mainstream policy opinion. Needless to say, Trump is no respecter of the Fed’s ‘independence’. When it began tightening interest rates in 2018 he pushed back aggressively. (As a man who knows a thing or two about debts, he prefers borrowing costs to be low.) His bullying scandalised polite opinion. But rather than undermining the dollar as a global currency, his interventions were music to the ears of hard-pressed borrowers in emerging markets. The same applies to the giant fiscal stimulus that the Republicans launched with their tax cuts: despite rumblings of a trade war, it has kept the American demand for imports – a key element of its global leadership – at record levels.

The world economic order that America oversees was not built through consistent discipline on the part of Washington. Discipline is for crisis cases on the periphery, and dispensing it is the job of agencies like the IMF and the World Bank. Both have been through phases of weakness; in a world in which private funding is cheap and abundant even for some of the poorest countries in the world, the World Bank is struggling to define its role. But the IMF is in fine fettle, largely because the Obama administration pushed the G20 to add $1 trillion to its funding in 2009. So far the Trump administration has shown no interest in sabotaging Christine Lagarde. Over the latest bailout for Argentina, the Americans were notably co-operative. A key issue will be the rollover of the crisis-era emergency funding; from the point of view of international economic governance that may prove to be the most clear-cut test yet of the stance of the Trump presidency.

A stark illustration of the asymmetrical structure of American world order came in recent months in the use of the dollar-based system of invoicing for international trade to threaten sanctions against those tempted to do business with Iran. This outraged global opinion; the Europeans were even roused to talk about the need for ‘economic sovereignty’. What they are upset about isn’t the lack of order, but America’s use of it. To many, Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement is another indication of American unreliability and unilateralism. But why is anyone surprised? It took extraordinary political finesse on the part of the Obama administration to secure backing for the Iran deal in Washington. It was always more than likely that a Republican administration would repudiate it. That may be disagreeable but it can hardly be described as a rupture with the norms of American world order. The system is hierarchical. While others are bound, America retains the sovereign freedom to choose. And that includes the right to revert to the cold war it has been waging against the Iranian Revolution since 1979.

The same harsh logic applies when it comes to the Paris Agreement on climate change. Clearly, it is a disaster that the US has pulled out. But Congress and the George W. Bush administration did the same to the Kyoto Protocol at the beginning of the century. Moves like this should not be interpreted as a rejection of international order tout court, let alone as an abdication of American leadership. The Trump administration has a clear vision of an energy-based system of American leadership and influence. It is based on the transformative technological and business breakthrough of fracking, which has broken the grip of Russia and the Saudis on oil markets and is turning the US into a net exporter of hydrocarbons for the first time since the 1950s. Liquefied natural gas is the fuel of the future. Terminals are being built at full speed on the Texas shoreline. Fracking was originally a wildcat affair but big corporate money is now pouring in. The oil giant ExxonMobil is back (after a weak commercial patch and Rex Tillerson’s humiliating stint at the State Department), investing heavily in huge new discoveries in Latin America. All this will be horrifying to anyone convinced that the future of humanity depends urgently on decarbonisation. But again it is unhelpful, if the aim is to grasp the reality of international order, to conflate it with a specifically liberal interpretation of that idea.

If Republican policy is just Republican policy, American military power is waxing not waning, and the dollar remains at the hub of the global economy, what exactly is it that is broken? The clearest site of rupture is trade, and the associated geopolitical escalation with China. The US is engaged in a sustained and effective boycott of the WTO arbitration system. But the WTO has been ailing for a long time. Since the Doha round of negotiations became deadlocked in the early 2000s it has made little contribution to trade liberalisation. In any case, the idea that legal agreements such as those done at the WTO are what drives globalisation puts the cart before the horse. What really matter are technology and the raw economics of labour costs. The container and the microchip are far more important motors of globalisation than all the GATT rounds and WTO talks put together. If in the last ten years globalisation appears to have stalled, it has more to do with a plateau in the development of global supply chains than with backsliding into protectionism.

In this regard the Trump administration’s aggressive attack on America’s regional trade arrangements is more significant than its boycotting of the WTO. It is in regional integration agreements that the key supply chain networks are framed. The abrupt withdrawal of the US, in the first days of the Trump presidency, from TPP in the Asia-Pacific region and TTIP in the Atlantic, was a genuine shock. But it is far from clear that either arrangement would have been pursued with any energy by a Hillary Clinton administration. She would no doubt have shifted position more gracefully. But the political cost of pushing them through Congress might well have been too high.

In spring 2017 there was real concern that Trump might abruptly and unilaterally cancel Nafta – apparently the hundredth day of his presidency had been set as the occasion. But that threat was contained by a concerted mobilisation of business interests. Once the negotiations with Mexico and Canada started, the tone was rough. In Robert Lighthizer as his trade representative, Trump has found a bully after his own heart. But again, if you look back at the history of Nafta and WTO negotiations, tough talk is par for the course. In the end, a replacement for Nafta emerged, in the form of the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA). Apart from minor concessions on dairy exports to Canada and intellectual property protection for American pharmaceuticals, its main provisions concerned the car industry, which dominates North American trade. To escape tariffs, 40 per cent of any vehicle produced in Mexico must have been manufactured by workers earning $16 an hour, well above the US minimum wage and seven times the average manufacturing wage in Mexico. Three-quarters of a vehicle’s value must originate inside the free-trade zone, restricting the use of cheap imported components from Asia. This will likely induce a modification but not a wholesale dismantling of the production networks established under Nafta. Though it was not endorsed by US trade unions, it wasn’t repudiated by them either. As the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations commented, the effect will depend on how it is implemented.

The auto industry was at the heart of the Nafta renegotiation and it is the critical element in simmering US-EU trade tensions too. Let there be no false equivalence, however: the incomprehension and disrespect shown by the White House towards the EU is unprecedented. It isn’t clear that Trump and his entourage actually grasped that America no longer maintains bilateral trade deals with individual members of the EU. Trump’s open advocacy for Brexit and encouragement of further challenges to the coherence of the EU has been extraordinary. The use of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to investigate car imports from Germany as a threat to American national security is absurd. Such things mark a bewildering break with previous experience. That said, Trump’s obsession with the prevalence of German limousines in swanky parts of New York does highlight another painful imbalance in transatlantic relations: the persistent European trade surplus. Of course America contributes to this imbalance with its disinhibited fiscal policy: the better off Americans feel, the more likely they are to buy German cars. But as the Obama administration repeatedly pointed out, Europe’s dogged refusal to stimulate faster growth is as bad for Europe as it is for the world economy. The scale of the Eurozone’s overall current account surplus is highly unusual by historical standards and is both a vulnerability for Europe, leaving its producers hostage to foreign demand, and a potential source of global shocks.

Europe’s freeriding may undermine the global order, but the EU does not mount a direct challenge to US authority. China is different, and that is what truly marks out the foreign relations of our current moment as a break with the decades since the end of the Cold War. No one, including the Chinese, anticipated how rapidly the Trump administration would escalate tensions over trade in 2018 or that this would evolve into a comprehensive challenge to China’s presence in the global tech sector. The US has been putting pressure on its allies to cut the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei out of their plans for 5G, the next generation of internet technology. But here the US – and its allies – are in reactive mode: the original shock was China’s unprecedented growth.

China alone was responsible for a doubling of global steel and aluminimum capacity in the first decade of the 21st century. Its huge investment in R&D transformed it from a ‘third world’ importer of Western technology into a leading global force in 5G. As the likes of Navarro and Lighthizer see it, it was the naivety of enthusiasts for an American-led world order in the 1990s that allowed China’s communist-run state capitalism into the WTO. What the globalists did not understand was the lesson of Tiananmen Square. China would integrate, but on its own terms. That could be ignored in 1989 when China’s economy accounted for only 4 per cent of global GDP: now that figure is close to 20 per cent. As far as the American trade hawks are concerned, competition within an agreed international order is to be welcomed only so long as the competitors agree to play by America’s rules, both economic and geopolitical. This was the lesson Europe was made to learn after the Second World War. It was the lesson that Japan was taught the hard way in the 1980s and early 1990s. If China refuses to learn that lesson, it must be contained.

America retains some huge advantages. But it would be dangerous, the argument goes, simply to count on those. Sometimes American preponderance has to be defended by a ‘war of manoeuvre’. The emerging American strategy is to use threats of trade policy sanctions and aggressive counter-espionage in the tech arena, combined with a ramping up of America’s military effort, to force Beijing to accept not just America’s global preponderance but also its terms for navigation of the South China Sea. In pursuing this course the Trump presidency has a clear precedent: the push against the Soviet Union in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration, which deployed economic and political pressure to break what was perceived to be a menacing phase of Soviet expansion in the 1970s. Despite all the risks involved, for American conservatives that episode stands as the benchmark of successful grand strategy.

The reason the attempt to apply this lesson to present-day China is so shocking is that US business is entangled with China to an immeasurably greater degree than it ever was with the Soviet Union. If you are seeking a component of the American world order that is really being tested at the present moment, look no further than Apple’s supply chain in East Asia. Unlike South Korea’s Samsung, the Californian tech giant made a one-way bet on manufacturing integration with China. Almost all its iPhones are assembled there. Apple is an extreme case. But it is not alone. GM currently sells more cars in China than it does in the US. America’s farmers converted their fields wholesale to grow soy beans for export to China, only to find themselves cut out of their biggest market by Brazilian competitors. And it isn’t just American firms that are caught up in the escalation of tension. Important European, South Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese businesses have staked huge wagers on China.

Given these investments, one might have expected more pushback against Trump’s China strategy from US business. So far there has been little. The radical decoupling of the Chinese and American economies may be so horrible a prospect that business leaders simply prefer not to discuss it in public. They may be lying low hoping the row blows over. Or it may be that American business itself buys the increasingly pessimistic diagnosis of the US intelligence and defence community, who argue China’s persistent protectionism and economic nationalism may mean that it presents more of a threat than an opportunity. Even top ‘China hands’ like Steve Schwarzman and Hank Paulson have warned of a chill in the air.

The hardening of attitudes towards China is not confined to America. It was the Anglo-American intelligence consortium known as ‘Five Eyes’ that raised the alarm about Huawei’s capability to build back doors into the West’s most sensitive telecommunications networks. Canada and Australia are deeply concerned about Chinese penetration. The new pessimism about Sinocentric globalisation isn’t confined to security policy hawks, but shared by many mainstream economists and political scientists in US academia, the think-tank world, and journalists and commentators on Chinese affairs. The liberal version of the American world order is deeply influenced by strands of modernisation theory, the up to date version of which is encapsulated in the doctrine of the middle-income trap. Very few large countries have managed to grow beyond China’s current level of income. Those that have done so have kitted themselves out with the full set of liberal institutions and the rule of law. On this reading, China is in a precarious position. Xi’s authoritarian turn is a decisive step in the wrong direction. Further frequently cited signs of Chinese weakness include ethnic tensions and the ageing of the population as a long-term effect of the one-child policy. There is a belief, held well beyond the administration, that the tide may be turning against Beijing and that now is the moment for the West to harden the front.

This would indeed constitute a break with the narrative of globalisation since the 1990s. But it would hardly be a break in the American-led world order. To imagine the American world order as fully global is after all a relatively recent development. After 1945, the postwar order that is generally seen as the non plus ultra of American hegemony was built on the hardened divisions of the Cold War. Where China is concerned, the issue is not so much America’s intention to lead as whether others are willing to follow. Building the Cold War order in Europe and East Asia was comparatively easy. Stalin’s Soviet Union used a lot of stick and very little carrot. The same is not true of modern-day China. Its economy is the thumping heart of a gigantic East Asian industrial complex. In the event of an escalation with China, particularly in East Asia, we may find ourselves facing not so much an end of the American-led order, as an inversion of its terms. Where the US previously offered soft-power inducements to offset the threat of communist military power, backed up by hard power as a last resort, in the next phase the US may become the provider of military security against the blandishments offered by China’s growth machine.

But this is premature. As of today, two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.

If America’s president mounted on a golf buggy is a suitably ludicrous emblem of our current moment, the danger is that it suggests far too pastoral a scenario: American power trundling to retirement across manicured lawns. That is not our reality. Imagine instead the president and his buggy careening around the five-acre flight deck of a $13 billion, Ford-class, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier engaged in ‘dynamic force deployment’ to the South China Sea. That better captures the surreal revival of great-power politics that hangs over the present. Whether this turns out to be a violent and futile rearguard action, or a new chapter in the age of American world power, remains to be seen.

#hegel #pax americana #imperialism #american century #politics #21st century #book reviews

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angel-scythe · 6 years ago

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Conniel Week Day Seven : Family (Coming Home)

There is it, the Seven part of the Conniel Week. I hope you’ll like it! And now, you now where is the door to go on AO3 if you prefer to! => | °| <=

Outside, the wind blew against the windows, making them shake. The snow was falling heavily. At the TV, they said a blizzard was coming. Right in the Michigan. Most of the cities were ready. Not Detroit. Because of all the anarchy on it. It was still hard to know what was belonging to the Humans and to the Androids. Markus really did great, trying to help Humans and even letting some inside their structures. Yes, he did it with much cautious but he did it…

Kamski himself said there was hope in these acts. He said the Humans and the Robots were made to live happily together. For him, Detroit was mean to be a Paradise, not a chaos area.

The fact was, with all the military there, and the refusal to supply the town, that hope was dying…

Outside, the wind blew against the windows and Captain David Allen sighed as he had a warm cocoa in his hands.

“Please, let him be in a safe place,” he muttered.

“Stop! Stop! Stoooop!”

“But it’s the only way! What should we do? We have no choice!”

“You have a million of choice! You make that decision, Connor!”

“Maybe! But it for the best!” the brown countered.

Daniel shook his head.

“Don’t do that.”

“It’s for the best,” he replied.

The wind was so strong he almost fell because of it. The snow falling had already covered them with its cold and pure flakes. The clouds were so bleak it was almost dark. The streetlamps shined their path. Beside them, there was Wolfie, the Wolfbot they had since Daniel had killed his master to protect Connor, to free a lot of Androids. He was shy and worried for anything. But he always followed Connor because he saw a savior on him. And there, he looked them, waving slightly his tail and sat near to the RK800. Like that, he was almost as tall as him…

“You’re an idiot, Connor. You don’t have to do that…”

“I know. But I want to do it,” he said, looking Daniel in the eyes.

This one sighed.

“Fine. Do it if I can’t change your mind.” He folded his arms and looked somewhere else.

Connor kissed softly his cheek and tightened his arms around him. Daniel felt the warm in his cheek’s biocomponent and not only because it was ridicule. But the RK800 was so happy to have him in his arms as he was carrying him like he was his princess or his wife. He even surrendered to this joy and unfolded his arms to pass them around his lover’s neck. Of course, he touched his naps so their connection could be fulfilled.

In fact, it was good to be in his arms like that. Even if he didn’t like that Connor was running out himself. He cuddled against his chest and sent all his feelings, hiding his face in the RK800’s neck. Kissing it since he was there.

Hank’s house was there, in a sad state. The car wasn’t there, the curtains were tucked and the snow was in a perfect cover. Connor could almost feel ashamed to walk on it.

There wasn’t a lot of place where they could go but they were enough about searching somewhere to go when this house was appealing them. They left because Hank needed time, they left because it was logical to go to Markus and be a part of that Android Family building softly but they were rejected. They weren’t a part of this. So they started to move around, find somewhere to go, to stay… And never find. Because, of course, the place meant to be their home, that couldn’t be somewhere else than here.

Why it should be something else? That was there they stayed to be protected. Here they shared their first real hug, kiss, feels…

Daniel came down from his arms. Connor was a bit sad but he looked if Wolfie was following then moved to hug his boyfriend from behind as this one was on the stoop and tried to open the door. It was closed.

“Hank must have closed everything when he left.”

“The habit, maybe?”

Daniel shrugged. He rummaged in his pockets and got out a little wireframe.

“What is it? What are you doing?” Connor asked, while caressing Wolfie.

“Opening the door.”

“With a wireframe? You’re sure you’re a cope?” the brown teased.

His lover threw him a kiss. He was a cop, he was a domestic Android and he had a lot of other quality. He wasn’t exactly the best cop in the world since he could become angry very fast in stressful situation and he wanted so much to keep victim alive, he killed the criminal too fast sometime. And maybe he wasn’t a so good domestic Android since the history he had with the Philips. But he loved what he was and Captain Allen always congratulated. He said he was a good cop. So, he was happy about the live Connor gave to him on saving him that day in the Phillips’ roof. He was more happy now he had Connor by his side.

With that house to stay with Wolfie, they were about to have a pretty nice live together.

When the door opened, the wolfbot sniffed, agitated. The RK800 caressed him.

“He must smell Sumo.”

“Probably.”

Daniel took Connor’s hand and they entered in the house with Wolfie. First thing surprising them was the light and the sound. The TV was on? Hank couldn’t left like that.

“Woof!”

Suddenly, a big St-Bernard came, waving the tail. Connor immediately put his hand on Wolfie but the wolfbot was only sniffing back the dog. They were discovering each other.

There was movement in the sofa and Hank appeared. He was obviously laid in the cushions. When he saw the bots, he smiled.

“Well, well, well… Look who’s there.”

“Hank!”

“Lieutenant,” Daniel smiled.

There was movement in the sofa, once again. And this time, Daniel almost choked of joy. He let Connor there and ran to the sofa, jumping on it to hug the man in the other side.

“Dad!”

Connor had shared enough thought with Daniel to know.

Of course his lover saw a dad in Captain Allen, the man who accepted to take him under his wing when he understood the mistake they had made. No, Daniel wasn’t the criminal. No, Daniel wasn’t a really dangerous person. He took care of him, tutored him and cared for him as he was his son.

That’s why Daniel wanted to be a cop. To the Detective who had given his live for him but also for his father.

And that was the real reason why Daniel was crying out that they, when he broke the link. Breaking the link with the precinct meant he won’t be able to see again his father. And he hadn’t say goodbye to him.

He lost his second family this day…

But now?

Now he was in the man arms and was smiling happily, tears of joy on his cheeks. He was so scary to never saw him again. He was almost sat on the sofa’s back but whatever. He was just happy.

Since Daniel and David Allen were welcoming each other and Sumo and Wolfie too, Hank took Connor in his arms and ruffled his hair.

“We were dead worry!”

“You were both wait?”

“Yes. I hope you’ll say ‘hi’.” Hank looked toward Captain Allen and Daniel. “When I joined David to say him about Daniel, he came to wait him with me. And then, you arrive with a wolf and by forced entry.” The Lieutenant was smiling as he looked them.

“We had nowhere to go. Since Daniel used to be the Deviant Hunter, he didn’t want us to stay. We came back because we wanted a home and we thought you’ll be out of the City.”

“I have no reason to leave,” he said. “And two to stay.”

Connor looked toward his lover and smiled. Coming there was the best thing they could do.

“Daniel?”

The blonde turned his head and froze. His eyes were empty and Connor looked toward the little corridor leading to the garage. The piece which was changed in a room longtime ago.

“E… Emma?”

“Daniel!”

He went down from the sofa and crouched to receive the little girl running toward him. This time, it wasn’t just few tears on his face but big stream. He hugged her tightly.

“Emma! My Emma!”

“I love you so much Daniel. I missed you so much!”

“I came to pick her when they asked us for leaving the town. With all the problems and the debts, her aunt and her mother couldn’t fly away. I offered to take care of her. Since I’m a cop and I live with a second one, so… Here we go.”

“Thank you, dad. Thank you.” He caressed the little girl head. “I love you so much.”

Connor came nearby and crouched as the canines were playing together. He smiled, seeing this little girl happy. His lover happy.

“You’ll take care of her?”

“Yeah. With my own live,” Daniel said.

And Connor would protect him with his own live…

Hank came near Captain Allen.

“So… It seems you’re a granddad now.”

“Yeah. You too,” the Captain said, passing his arm around his waist.

Maybe there was a blizzard outside, maybe there was the chaos. But they were together. And they will be the cutest and happiest family in the world…

Aah... I can’t believe it’s over. I can’t write short so I ended with a seven-chapter story and it was so fun to write a chapter with a challenge. Thank you so much @the-immortal-chair. I can’t wait for you to create another challenge like that! <3

Thanks to Quanti Dream for the awesome characters and to everyone who had read or like the story.

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

#the-immortal-chair #dbh #detroit become human #Conniel #Conniel week #Connor #Connor rk800 #Daniel #Daniel pl600 #Family #Love #Cinnamon ship #I can't believe this is over #Happy end #They're finally happy #I'll miss those

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kurtty-drabbles · 6 years ago

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1. “You scared I am going to out finesse you?” (Lovecraft AU)

@djinmer4 @dannybagpipesarecallingN/A: Not sure if this has to do with the ask, either way, I saw a bunch of horror stories on youtube and it leads to this idea, I love to make Lovecraft Kitty, but…what if Kitty is just a regular human for once?

Meggan takes Kitty to have her future reading by a famous seer, a Canadian woman named only Boa, who has a reputation to always be right. Kitty is sceptical but decides to go anyway, it will be a fun way to pass time. Many things were said about Boa, thanks to the internet, many say she is the scariest person you’ll ever meet as her predictions are always true.

Boa, in person, is nothing more than a gentle old lady, making Kitty remembering her own grandmother, none of them is scary at any level. Boa takes Meggan´s hand and reads her future.

“You will be married to a man you love deeply, it will be a good a good live, two kids, a nice house, the man will be sick in a few years and things will get tougher but you´ll found a way to care for them. Your love will change the lives of many people” Boa explained and when Meggan asked who the man´s name is the old lady smiles “Brian Braddock, congratulations, Gloriana. Your future will be lovely”

Meggan is overjoyed. In fact, it prompts Kitty to ask to have her own future reading, when Boa takes her hand the woman immediately takes out as it scorched the woman´s skin. That wasn´t expected.

“You…you will have his eyes, all of his eyes are under you, he knows, he always knows, chaos and darkness will follow you as not even death dares to take you, he sees, he knows and you can´t escape him” the woman speaks in a frightened tone.

Kitty and Meggan leave with a bitter taste in their mouth. Meggan´s future is wonderful, yet, Kitty´s future is …cryptal to say the least.

“Oh, nevermind, she was just trying to scare us,” Kitty said. Meggan nods trying to agree with her thinking but Boa was never wrong before._________________________________________

Kitty is an X-men, so, of course, the woman is used to her own share of bizarre events, yet, Kitty has to admit, lately everything is way off than usual. Jubilee becomes a vampire thanks to kitty´s blood(it was black for a moment and then is normal), Beast becomes crazy over spirals almost going too far in this obsession (Kitty doubts any student will feel safer with Hank again), Wolverine becomes a literal animal…that is always looking at the shadows in fear and Jean…Kitty prefers to not think about the horrid woman, maybe it was karma finally giving the woman a payback.

Thinking about Karma, Kitty takes her cell phone and text Karma, Xian and the other New Mutants have a sort of book club where they relax and make fun of the most atrocious books ever.

The world won´t be perfect, that´s a given, prejudice lurks around in several forms, but, mutants are allowed in many places and Kitty is in a coffee shop where the staff is made by mutants(she asked them if they are being treated alright and they confirm that) and no one has any objection to the mutants working.

Kitty text Xian.

“Hey, the book club is still up? Kitty asked

"Sure, by the way, the new book we will talk is a bit different from our usual session” Xian replied with a few emojis.

“Oh, is erotic?”

“No” Xian replied and send a picture of the book provokes to Kitty jump of her chair, no one seems to care, this coffee shop has few clients today.

“Xian, why this book?” Kitty asked.

“I saw and…thought in to give to you, ” Kitty ponders in to tell the rumours of the book, yet, Xian continues “it was a gift to you”

“Thank you, Xian, but this book has bad fame, where did you get it?”

“I don´t know, I was walking with my brother and when I realize the book was already in my plastic bag wrapped nicely to you”

One of the mutants, a green man, is pouring more coffee for a man wearing a suit that is reading the newspaper, no one is looking at Kitty….the woman can feel eyes on her.

The woman leaves the coffee shop._____________________________Yana arrives in the New Mutant´s headquarters and looks at the book, Kitty is holding the book for her own life. Karma explained once again how she got the book, it was easy to deduce that the woman was not possessed, but, persuade in a way that no one saw this before.

It was sort like Killgrave, but, it was so natural…it scares Xian as her twin brother, Tran, made a scan on her to see if she is being controlled. No, she is free. There´s no trace of manipulation left(unlike Killgrave)

“And the book?” Kitty still holding the book dearly contrasting her horror expression.

Magik look at the book and immediately avert her eyes.

“The legends don´t come close to the truth, Katya, this is not a normal book, nor a mere evil book….is much more” Magik then use a spell to violently yank the book out Kitty´s hand(it bruises her hand a little but Kitty is not caring) and put the book in a bubble as slowly darkness surround the space of that bubble.

“Katya….the book…it has eyes on you,” Magik said and Kitty remembers Boa´s words but shakes her head at this, no, Boa is just an eccentric old lady, right?

“What we do?”

“Nothing, for the love of God, no one enters in this room, nor even look at this book, I think I know what this is …but I hope I´m wrong,” Magik said and leaves the New Mutants plus Kitty with more questions.

It has eyes on you.________________________________Kitty´s dream are often too lucid, sometimes making the dreams being amusing, other times, make the dream being anything but pleasant. Tonight, the dream is odd and very lucid.

A man in a white suit is in the centre of the large table, the said table has a perfect set tea party that any little girl would love. Kitty looks at the man and somehow she feels compelled to run…but nothing happens.

“Is you, isn´t it?” Kitty asked.

The creature only smiles with sharp teeth.

“Is you?” Kitty asked again.

“Eat something, then we talk,” the creature said amusingly.

Kitty is about to refuse when she, without realizing, already give a big bite on a red apple. The woman wakes up confused and scared.____________________________________Kitty is hardly someone that likes to jog, but, after the last dream, the woman can´t stay in bed. The park is empty, actually, since when this little park was so big and dark? Is her mind playing tricks on her, she was sure the park was smaller.

Bumping in a man is never a good signal for Kitty as she was expecting the man to be furious, instead, the man with dark hair and white streaks seems to not mind.

“Is a bit too earlier to jog or maybe I´m mistaken” the man gives his name and Kitty realizes how is good to talk with someone in this big(?) park.

“I like to run” Kitty jokes as they talk idly. The man likes to feed the birds and Kitty only nods, nothing unusual for this park.

“Bad dreams?” the man asked politely.

“Odd dreams, what eat an apple could mean?”

“Acceptance, at least, that was I have been told, I could be mistaken” the man replied and Kitty nods politely, she then is about to leave when the man gives another advice “don´t stop thinking about it, if you want to know about this dream…then keep thinking about and eventually you will know” the man said pleasant and Kitty only nods politely.

When she starts jogging again, she notices something, the man said he wanted to feed the birds…but Kitty saw no bird food with him, and as she looks around the park looks bigger and different by each minute.

“Maybe I´m in the wrong park”______________________________“I know it´s you” Kitty points at the blue fuzzy man wearing a white suit, another lucid dream “Stop, why are you doing this?”

“Because I got my eyes on you, Katzchen, and you are worthy” the creature speaks happily.

“Of what?”

“Of getting your deepest wish, I´ll grant it”

Kitty wakes up sweating again. She mutters that is only a dream, but, when a student complains of getting bruises in his back prompts Kitty to take care of…she takes a huge shock.

Is not a dream anymore. Is written in the Student´s flesh.____________________________________________Magik is back with bad news, well, the woman didn´t need to try to hide as the X-men are mutating into something that sure is not part of the grand speech Magneto is always giving.

Scott and Rogue are intact by sheer luck. Ororo did leave the X-men(it was a suggestion made by Kitty, something is wrong here and if Ororo has the chance to leave, she should go…Ororo invite Kitty to go with her, but…Kitty declines as IT HAS EYES ON HER)

“Katya” Magik speaks looking at the sky, there´s a moon now, but…is still day, Magik is pale now. “I know what is causing this…but I don´t think we can defeat him, the best case scenario is put wards and hope for him to get bored”

Magik offer no other explanation as she created wards blocking the moon, which is now red, as the wards are ready the place turns into a hellish dimension. If even Illyana is scared, then, the situation is bad.

“Belasco talks about him” Yana speaks"he has many names but we never dare to say the name so freely"

“I know…I know it´s him” Kitty revealed as the book is back with Kitty “and I know what he wants” she hugs Yana as another golden moon shows up.“Sorry”

She said running away from the wards.

“I´m here, you won, just please, leave them alone, is me you want, right?” Kitty shouts to the moons, yet, something lightly touches her shoulder.

“Of course, I want you, but I admit, it was a fun mess with you X-men” the creature speaks and seems pleased that Kitty is with the book “Good, you take it back, it was really rude not to use my gift, but, I forgive you, no one ever gives you such gift”

“Gift?” Kitty´ll hardly think this book as a gift but better not anger the monster “Are you going to eat me here now or later?”

“Is that a sexual innuendo? Well, I´m a bit shy to do this in front of an audience but if you prefer”

“Stop joking, just ends this already”

“I want you! only that” a tentacle wrapped around her waist gentle “and I think you humans prefer a more direct approach, here I´m, now Katzchen, I said I´ll make your dream come true, you want to see more of life, I can show you.”

“All I have to do is saying your name?”

“Yes”

Kitty now looks at the X-men then to the entity in front of her.

“Nyarlathotep” the name wasn’t spoken as the entity was hoping, either way, her mind and feelings are focused on him…that´s more than enough.

#Lovecraft au #human kitty #kitty pryde #kurtty #lovecraft kurt #the new mutants #lovecraft Kurt was way kinder with Karma comparing what marvel usually do with the girl.

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