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diedbutterflies69 · 3 years ago

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Will you stay?- Bang Chan imagine.

Contains: friends to lovers au. , Divorce, smut, fluff, blindfolding, oral sex, explicit sexual stuff etc . Minors don't interact.

Never once on your life, you thought you could get your shit together and laugh genuinely at the worst in world. falling out of love is worse but it's even more worse if it's your it's not you who fell out of love. Married at 22 and the honeymoon phase hardly lasted for a year and by the age of 26 got yourself labelled as a woman who sabotaged her own marriage in thirst of money. Your ex husband was bitter about your success even before you got married. He thought as a woman, you just did bare minimum and got yourself a high positioned rank by sleeping with one of the rich rags. You tried hard enough to hold on to that rotten red string , but he had the scissors and just cut you off. You weren't willing to sacrifice your career just because of his Immature mindset, yes you loved him, but can't a women love her own hard achieved success more? That's the question you wished to ask everyone who pointed there fingers at you. After divorce you didn't feel pain just numbness. Your self-hatred coming more stronger than ever, even hating the job, you tried Saving since years, getting life on track seemed impossible and at the end just quitted. Moved out of the city just to move back to your home town, the root of your real pain. It wasn't really a town but rather a more flashy city, expensive shits which you were unable to afford in childhood but now it wasn't any big deal. Earth is round and sometimes precious people find you all by themselves. Your highschool friend, the only friend you had throughout your lifetime because of your anti social tactics.

Bang Chan, the social butterfly who almost knew every single student in whole school, he was the hottest guy you ever saw in your life and also the kindest. You had crush on him even before you both were friends, he was your senior,used to help you with those shitty math sums, crack jokes every now and then and scolded you whenever you procrastinated. He came to congratulate you even on your graduation day, even though there were many more students whom he met you were still glad atleast someone bought you a beautiful bouquet of tulips and bellflower. The last time you saw him was before you moved out in search of cheap collages without informing him, as you thought you were just one of many friends he had and won't ever notice someone like you existed.

But god, how much wrong you were.

You met Chan after almost 9 years in convince store and his reaction was almost priceless , like finding treasure. He was now more handsome, beautiful and god-like even after all this years his style of dressing didn't Changed much, he still looked like Kim Kardashian at 2021 met Gala. nevertheless his smile still had those healing properties with his Cresent moon eyes. He was absolutely stunning.

The first sentence he spoke after confirming your identity was 'I missed you' and then tons of lectures and questions . Knowing how narrow-minded you were he gasped dramatically. Cheesiest ways of saying how could I forget my best friend and so on. That day was probably the best day of your life and maybe even the day after years you really smiled. You both exchanged numbers and addresses and his home was just 10 minutes away from yours. Destiny indeed.

Now it's been over 7 months since you met Chan again and he never made you felt like you were just one of his 109 friends. Chan made you feel special, after knowing what kind of disaster you faced he was even more supporting of you, you both used to spend weekend together watching variety of shows and movies going to stargazing, best friend goals. After many years you knew even if Chan had many people to confide with he never really did. He was alone, just a night owl obsessed with work. You were happy. And he was happy too. Being just friends was enough for you, but not for him . He was slowly trying to find courage to confess his love to you. He liked you fuck from highschool days. He found you once randomly staring at him across the room and when you suddenly disappeared all his fantasies were scattered, he knew your dreams and was willing to help you with your every step. knowing how messed up your household was from your neighbours he felt guilty for not being able to give you happiness. He loved you, but was helded by his own insecurities.

Not anymore though, he wasn't the same coward who just stared at the love of his life from distance. Being the extra human he was, he bought you one of the most expensive restaurant of the whole country, man was loaded. After driving for almost 5 hours you both finally reached there .

Now a nervous Chan sitting infront of you. You being oblivious to the fact that he has a beautiful diamond ring and a confession to make. Chan handed you the menu card and every single dish had an extraordinary name, without much thought you placed the order.

"atleast tell me now, why are we here?" You asked the man infront of you who was behaving extra weird today, he looked sick and was occassionally asking you random questions.

"No reason, I was in mood for long drives and... You know have a nice meal" Chan said fidgeting with his fingers he was acting like a flustered high school guy it was clearly indicating that he was lying but you didn't really care, Chan was weird sometimes.

"Sounds fake, but okay. By the way you aren't sick right?" You asked Chan out of pure concern as he was sweating profusely even in an cold AC room.

"I am fine, just feeling a little hot. Don't worry", Chan said it was more like he was convincing himself that he was fine and shouldn't worry. He wasn't a teenager but a human with responsibilities who once again fell for someone out of his league, he used to think that and he still sees you as a literal goddess. While he was lost deep in his thoughts, the waiter came with food , and this was his opportunity to shoot his arrow. You both started eating and talked like being in paradise.

"did you liked anyone in highschool?", Chan asked you out of blue making you almost choke on food. The only person whom you liked throughout your highschool days was the guy sitting infront of you and you didn't really remembered much guys and the best answer was probably saying a lie with little truth.

"no one lol", you answered trying to sound chilled but since highschool crush topic was out you weren't able to keep your curiosity with yourself.

"What about you, liked someone?", You asked trying to sound nonchalant and not desperate and bitter.

This was the Exactly the conversation that Chan planned in his mind. And here started his way to either heaven or pit of rejection.

"I loved someone", Chan said and you this time you really choked from the depth of your heart, you thought Chan was anti romantic type of guy as he never talked about of his female friends with you or bragged about his non existent dating life. Trying again to not sound jealous or bitter you spoke again.

" Who was that lucky bit-- I mean girl yes girl? Who was she?", You asked, almost letting out the bitch loudly. You weren't sure but you saw Chan smiling cheekily, he was really getting old acting weird more and more everyday.

"Well... Someone from our school",Chan said and you swear you didn't made a disgusting face showing pure jealousy. The best human in your life and your first ever crush had crush on somebody, you didn't knew why you were feeling so fucking bitter but you weren't able to handle the curiosity anymore.

"Tell me her damn name", you asked Chan in a frustrating tone not being able to keep jealousy to yourself.

"Why you being angry", Chan asked followed by his small laugh.

"I am angry, just the food was a little spicy you answer me now, her name?", You answered Chan with your defenses up and still sticking with your previous question.

Chan in response got a little serious now,you thought he was being childish now, he wasn't a kid who was given a dare to name out his crush yet he was acting like one.

"You won't leave me right, I mean after I answer your question?", Chan asked you and you didn't knew what to say in response you were now a little sus about him.

"fine don't answer, keep secrets", you said and continued eating. The next thing Chan said made you now choke and die on food.

"I loved you and I still love you" Chan said looking down at the table head hanging down like his teenage self just confessed he watched porn infront of his parents. You were shocked, frozen and the your heartbeat 10x faster, you didn't knew how to react and tried to find humor in this extraordinary situation.

"Chan, you kidding right?", You asked Chan with a nervous smile on your face. Chan looked up at you , his eyes trying to find yours but you avoided the eye contact.

"I am serious, I liked you from HighSchool times, I saw you for the first time in library when you were looking at me, I swear you were so beautiful and even now after all this years after seeing you I can't, I can't help but fall for you all over again, sorry"

Chan confessed, his voice filled with sincerity and vulnerability his sentences were scattered here and there and incomplete explanation but still you understood everything he really poured his heart to you, you felt like crying even if you both weren't such stupid cowards back then, then today you won't have turned out a divorced women and Chan a guy who grew out lonely even if he had a world for him.

"What should I say Chan?", You asked Chan you were sounding like a girl whose bf told her to breakup even if the situation was exact opposite. Even if you love Chan , you didn't think about him reciprocating same feelings back to you. You were beyond insecure with your love emotions. One thing was sure you won't be able to love Chan without being a bundle on him. Your emotion Baggage was too big and you didn't want Chan to get his heart too with your stupid emotions.

"I love you and I will be really really good to you. Please try staying with me I will try really hard to earn space in your heart, please?" His confession was like literally begging. You weren't able to believe if he was real or not, if it was a dream that will end as soon as cruel morning comes, this felt like fantasy. Chan was a amazing man, he had everything money ,honour ,beauty a nice heart. He was like a character written by women so perfect so delicate yet strong, and he loves you this fact was enough for to lose your mind. but you thought you were a taint to his beauty, you were a character full of inferior complexes and a person too easy to dislike thats what illusion you made about yourself. A random extra in her own story.

"I will pay the bill, let's talk later", you said and walked away immediately to pay the bill leaving a clueless and disheartened human behind. Chan was able to see how you stopped yourself from saying love you too and throwing yourself in his arms. He wasn't same from HighSchool a guy who gets overwhelmed by his own emotions and gets unable to see others. He knew you had atleast a small space for him in your heart and to make a big room for himself he had to throw out all your insecurities and self hatred. He followed you like a lost puppy and he wanted to pay for food but you already did and now you were already out of restaurant searching for his car to get back.

Chan sitted beside you, without doing anything silence and awkward air surrounding you both.

"start the car", you said breaking down the silence, you were extremely worthless and trash as you made the only one person whom you love feel like nothing.

"Just answer me, will you try dating me please", Chan said his voice again passing draggers into your heart. Trying to form any logical explanation you spoke again.

"I am not looking for relationship right now, see Chan you are amazing, but I can't make you happy now and did you forgot that I am divorced, please understand" you said expressing your real insecurities and fear, fear of not being able to keep a man happy.

"you don't want relationship because you divorced that fucking trash of a man?", Chan asked he was getting frustrated you thought but he just wanted to make you happy and not deny what your heart wants.

"my mind isn't stable, I might just irritate you everytime with my mood, you will will get tired of me and leave me -- I don't want to be alone again I will die if you leave me", you confessed tears threatening to fall out of your eyes there wasn't any doubt that you loved Chan he filled the void in you in just months made you happy but you didn't wanted to just take and take and give nothing in return. Chan's hand found yours interlocking your fingers with so much delicateness that you might cry.

"you think so low of me, just stay by my side I will make you so happy that you will hardly get time to think about your past, trust me", Chan said his fingers slightly lifting your chin up to look into your eyes, you looked in his eyes filled with so much care and this was your last straw before breaking down in his arms.

"I love you, I love you so fuckin much, you were my first love my only friend, my everything, please-- please love me", you confessed tightening your arms around Chan, his scent making you feel safe and like home, his one caressing your hair and other wiping away the tears. Even though the scene was more like a dramatic clique scene whatever emotions you both felt was unexplainable.

"So you my girlfriend now hmm?"Chan asked you for first time in night his voice containing pure happiness and excitement.

"I have a sexy boyfriend", you said smiling from ear to ear against Chan's chest. The label boyfriend making your heart flutter, you didn't knew happiness like this can even exist.

"My love", Chan said his voice sweeter than honey, suddenly the night was more starry."now can we go home?" You asked Chan finally breaking the hug, reality hitted you now Home was 3- 4 hours away.

"I made a reservation in hotel, we gonna spend night there", Chan casually said making your heart jump out of your chest.

"pervert, you planned everything seriously", you said dramatically and giving him a playful digusting look.

"I booked two rooms", Chan said now starting the engine making you feel embarrassed. "Who is pervert now~" Chan said in air teasing you more.

The rest of the ride you both talked about anything and everything. Confessing how you used to find ways to always be in each others vision etc. Both of you finding a new thirsty side of each other. Nothing felt uncomfortable, it was happiness those inhumane laughs crazy tricks you both used to pull everything was heaven. After some time you both reached infront of a gaint hotel , it looked expensive af but regardless Chan knew how to waste money and you were tired of lecturing him about savings.

"let's go", Chan said removing your seatbelt and getting out of car to open the door for ya. He was being so cheesy gentleman and you were enjoying every minute.

"room 42 and 43" Chan said to the receptionist and she handed two keys to him. Thanking her then getting on elevator, you were a little disappointed that you weren't sharing room with Chan, yes you were pervert and total simp for Chan, he was too hot and your sexual drive was getting higher each passing second. The elevator doors opened and you got off. Chan handed you the room key and softly kissed your forehead, both you wished it was your lips.

"if you want anything, just knock okay?" Chan said in his lovely tone, I want you you internally screamed, nevertheless you gave him a nod and got inside that expensive room .

Starring at the ceiling while lying on the bed your mind was full of Chan, you knew he wasn't probably sleeping and was wasting time in watching random shit on internet and you were hungry, hungry for Chan, it wasn't your fault that Chan was so hot. Trying to fall asleep and fidgeting here to there you finally decided to knock on Chan's room door. A danger zone. You noticed how the door flunged open in less than few seconds.

"Hi" you said scratching back of your head and trying to think what next to say.

"Hi..?"Chan said being confused.

"there is cockroach in my room, let me stay with you" you said a clear white lie. Taking impulsive action were never good for you.Chan sighed before opening the door fully and signalling you to come. This was your happiest day ever.

"whY you lying", Chan asked you as you plopped yourself on sofa besides bed. He asked the sentence in a sarcastic way.

"Do you you wanna kiss me?", You asked Chan with a straight serious face catching him off-guard, you didn't wanted to waste more time, you wanted to do everything with Chan, yes fucking on first day of dating was a little too early but you fantasized about this gorgeous man since ages, in your eyes he looked total dom but his reaction to your question was making you doubt your thoughts.

"Are you sure", Chan asked you clearing his throat.

"Are you virgin?"you asked Chan, he was being too nervous.

"Obviously not"Chan answered you in duh tone, rolling his eyes. And it was getting awkward.

"The cockroach must have gone by now I should go, bye", you blabbered and got up ready to leave, you were about to open the door but Chan grabbed your hand and before you knew anything his hands were on your cheeks cupping them softly and his lips so close to yours, Chan's eyes were looking straight in your orbs , your heartbeat stronger than ever.

"Can I?", Chan asked your consent his thumb softly brushing against your lower lip. This man had totally made you insane, something stirred inside you. Chan was perfect he was everything you wished. You gave him a small nod and slowly his lips touched against yours, you wanted to cry, his lips felt so good, he didn't rushed his movements everything was happening in slow motion, he holded you with such a vulnerability like he was afraid that you will go, your hand reached his head, fingers moving through his soft locks. You felt his tongue inside your mouth , you felt a electricity run down your body when the kiss deepened.

We kiss again. The next kiss is the kind that breaks open the sky. It steals my breath and gives it back. It shows me that every other kiss I’ve had in my life has been wrong.

Breaking the kiss Reluctantly in need of air, Chan rested his forehead against yours. He was hot almost like burning, sweating.

"Why are you so nervous, Chan?", You asked Chan hugging him tightly clinging like the last leaf to the tree.

"I am scared, I just love you", He said engulfing you in his arms. And you Finally felt, what real love feels like.

"Love you too", you replied softly.

"Do you wanna continue..?"Chan asked you his tone little less scared.

"Off course", you said looking at him with smile, something inside you told it was okay to let out your freaky side infront of Chan. Chan smiled back and suddenly turned you around , the large bed infront of you.

"Lie down there",Chan whispered in your ears , his low register sending shivers down your spine. This was exactly how you pictured Chan to be, your inner submissive almost died. You followed Chan's word and laid on your back on the bed, now you were feeling like a virgin. His eyes roaming through the room in search of something.

"Are you okay with being blindfolded?", Chan asked you as he came back with the tie he wore today and was rolling it slightly in his palms, and you swear you never saw a man so hot in your entire life. Getting blindfolded was one of your unfulfilled kinks.

"ye- yes", you replied your tone filled with thrill and excitement. Chan came back to you standing near you, his hand softly cupped your cheeks , before bringing the tie to use it in sinistrous way tonight. The cloth felt strange to your eyes, his cologne smell hitting you and Chan caught your shy smile, His heart felt so fluffy. Tieing a comfortable knot Chan sat on bed near your waist. His hands slowly crept near your stomach leaving a direct lingering touch on the sensitive skin, eventually going upwards while giving a little squeeze to add stimulation, his hands reached your boobs, you didn't wore bra, and he wasn't surprised maybe your nipples perked up enough to get noticed, his middle and index finger Rolling your sensitive bundle of nerves, the blindfold making his every touch more intense, your breath was heavy you let out a suprised moan when Chan gropped your right boob in an erotic way, this sole action increasing your wetness down there you were getting impatient. You moaned his name a little loudly when his lips came in contact with your sensitive neck, sucking in a painful way, inorder to leave a hickey.

"Should I touch you here", Chan asked you as his hand reached to your area where you needed him to the most, hands going directly inside your panties ,but not touching he was a teaser.

"yes please", you moaned almost breathlessly too tired of intense foreplay. You just wanted Chan to rip off your clothes and fuck you till sunrise. Getting satisfaction with your answer Chan finally removed every clothing of your lower body, leaving you completely bare, all at his mercy. His finger moved up and down on your opening , the wetness making Chan easily slip his one finger deep inside you.

" my baby is so wet, because of who?", Chan asked you as his finger was moving slowly inside of you and thumb rubbing circles on the bundle of nerves.

"because of.. you", you admitted without any hesitation trying to grind yourself on his hand, begging for more.

"Good", Chan said and without saying anything he added another finger inside you moving a little faster inside your cunt, rubbing your walls with a little pressure, scissoring them inside you painfully and making way for a third finger too and by then you were a complete moaning mess, his fingers were pleasure yet torture the blindfold making your senses weak. Mind full of whatever Cham was giving you. Your legs were shaking sign of your orgasm approaching you, by one hand Chan holded your thighs tightly to their place fingers now moving more faster to make you reach the peak of pleasure.

"Chan.. I--I-I-- wanna cum please", you moaned your little squeaks and begs almost making Chan's cock cum right inside boxers. With some final thrust of his fingers, you cummed the hardest you could imagine, squeaky sounds coming as Chan was fingering you through your orgasm, you almost crying from overstimulation. Moaning his name like a chant.

"you did well",Chan praised you finally removing his fingers from you leaving you empty, but it won't have last wrong. Chan removed your blindfold , the bright lights hurting your eyes, you adjusted your vision and the image of Chan sucking his wet fingers coated with your liquid came directly in front of your eyes. Letting out a helpless whine.

Chan plopped himself on knees on either side of your thighs, finally letting his cock out, leaking with precum, and he was big, thick , you didn't thought he could get even hotter.

"Ready baby?", Chan asked you as he fully undressed himself as well as removing your top, your mind hazey . The scene which you pictured since highschool finally happening.

"yes", you replied Chan, he came down to kiss you passionately and slowly entering inside you. You moaned painfully, tears pulling your vision, it was a painful pleasure. Chan kissed away your tears and hand interlocking with yours after finally being fully inside you he started to move at slow pace.

"you feel so good Chan", almost screaming from pleasure, your whines were fuel to Chan's ego and he increased the pace. Body slapping sound filling the room, his groans were most sexy thing you ever heard. Again and again his tip hitting your deepest spots.

"I am close", you moaned out breathlessly, pleasure becaming too much to handle .you released around his cock, reaching the peak second time at night.

After giving a few more thrusts Chan cummed at your stomach, he was still sane enough to not curse you with kids while being lost in pleasure."I love you", he said as he settled beside you hugging you tightly. This was heaven.

"love you too", you said , your voice a little hoarse.

"by the way I forgot that I bought a ring to propose you", Chan said, realisation hitting him, that he forgot to say the long ass paragraph that he was supposed to say while sitting on one knee. You smiled at his guilty face.

"don't worry, propose me after having shower", you said heart filled with pure joy and happiness . Happiness of knowing that You love someone who will always love you back.

#skz smut #stray kids #stray kids smut #bangchan smut #skz chan smut #bang chan imagines #chan fluff #bangchan #skz chan x reader

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ahmedmootaz · 4 years ago

Note

For the writing, How about some fluff between Donald and the kids? :)))

Dear Anonymous,

Hello! I did it! Hah! Take that, laziness, I wrote the thing someone requested!...Yeah, sorry about that. The whole delay. Both to you and to everyone who kindly sent me requests. As said before, short things aren’t my style, so I hope you enjoy this!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/26468854

Do share your thoughts with me, if you would so kindly do that. I like receiving feedback.

Oh and for those of you that don’t want to go to Archive Of Our Own, here’s the magical Read More button:

Ah, McDuck Manor. It was a wonderful place, really. Its rooms were almost endless, the hallways spanned on for miles, and the collection of mostly lethal items and antiques that got expanded every other day certainly made it unique in a sense. It was where Donald Duck had spent most of his childhood, and it was often a pretty, if empty place.

Perhaps this was how monarchs envisioned their castles. Spotless, massive, elegant. Or perhaps this was...this was...oh, forget it! He wasn't good at descriptions anyway. What mattered was that this manor was large, expansive, eye-pleasing, and basically was everything Donald never had for the last twelve or so years. Though it was rather lonely at times.

Not the current times, however, as now it was privy to the footsteps of little paddles running around in it all the time, and Donald couldn't be happier about it. After all, who wouldn't be happy seeing his favourite little nephews running around happily in their new home? He still used his house-boat, admittedly for no real reason other than how hard he worked to get it, but the children were more than happy to stay in their new home, a castle in comparison to where they lived before.

Of course, Donald didn't get to see the kids much these days, what with their mother returning and all. He still couldn't believe it. Twelve years. Twelve years stuck on the moon because of a giant termite just had to rattle a dust storm. He honestly had to admire his sister's ability to not murder the thing and whatever hellspawn it had the moment she could. He would've. Maybe. Probably. He was still prone to fits of rage, but he felt the rage would've been justified at that moment.

Disregarding that, it was truly miraculous how the triplets loved Della so much. Duh, she was their mother, but they never saw her for twelve years. Not one single time. To them, she was the ghost they never asked questions about or he'd just remain silent and give whoever asked a glare. He truly feared that they may never get used to her as family. Luckily, however, a few near-death experiences and some adventures later, they learned to love her as what she truly was: Their mother.

At first, it alleviated some stress off of him, but then he realized he still needed to remain as mentor, not to the children, but to Della. She was doing a fine job, learning when to discipline and when to let things pass, but he still had to intervene to stop her from convincing Huey that crossing a piranha-infested river wasn't all that dangerous.

Still, whatever critiques he gave Della, his beloved sister had grabbed the boys' attention for the time being. He couldn't blame them; both as someone new and the person they longed for their entire lives, she was certain to outshine Donald as the parental-figure for the moment, something that he absolutely had no issues with. No issues at all. Nuh-uh. What, was he fifteen? He could handle being outside the lime light for a few weeks. Months. Whatever it took.

-"Yep...no issues whatsoever...", he mumbled to himself, listening to his distorted voice as it plopped unceremoniously with no echo. He was sitting in his house-boat's living room, situated in Scrooge's pool. He had to swallow quite a bit of ego to bring the boat this far, not because it necessitated Scrooge's help, oh no, that was the easy bit. The difficult bit was seeing the fact that his uncle's swimming pool was bigger than the boat he struggled to purchase.

Well, whatever. He could handle that. He handled many other situations that jabbed at his ego and you didn't see him crying. Not on the outside, anyway. He tapped rhythmlessly on the couch he sat on, sighing as he did so. Today was a slow day. A very slow day. No adventures, nothing that needed fixing, and Della seemed like she wasn't intent on putting herself in a life or death scenario, oddly enough. He was supposed to be happy about that, but honestly, it just bored him to death.

It wasn't as if the kids somehow left him and only sent him greeting cards, either. They, alongside Webby, saw him everyday, talked with him, but somehow...he felt like a third wheel. He didn't want to force himself in, but even if he wanted to, what would he do? He never had to go to the kids, they always went to him. He was watching something on his T.V. and trying to focus on it. It wasn't Ottoman Empire, surprisingly enough, it was something about...Uh...The African Penguin's migration to the island of Mayotte to save the world from the evil Lepoard Seals...? He rechecked the program. Ah. It was a movie. And here he was thinking it was a documentary.

Donald was a fan of movies. He really was. But today, he wanted to move and do something. Anything He thought about that last sentence for a split-second before deciding he'd do anything that isn't life threatening. Last thing needed was for Scroo- sorry, Unca' Scrooge to somehow read his mind and send him down the Mariana Trench to search for some old treasure. He still needed to remember that he was living with his uncle again, and as such, politeness was due. Even in thought, because you never know when you'll think out-loud.

Knock Knock KNOCK!

He suddenly jumped. Well, not quite, he still ended up on the couch again, but he turned off the television, wondering if Mrs.Beakly was going to tell him he accidentally put an omelette on the mansion's cooker and then headed for his house-boat. He really didn't need to spend the afternoon putting out a fire before it reaches some mysterious artefact that shouldn't be touched. Not again. But at least it'll be something to do. He took a few quick steps, turned his door knob and opened it as quick as he could.

-"What is it, Mrs.Beakl-", he started, having thoroughly convinced himself that this was the situation before noticing nobody was in front of him.

-"Down here, Unca' Donald!", huh. How odd. She lost height and lost her deeper tone. He moved his head down, suddenly realizing the past conclusion was probably made by some part of his brain that decided intelligence is for losers. The red hues immediately told him all he needed to know. It was Huey, accompanied by Webby, an overexcited smile on her face and her eyes practically glowing. She was cute, but also...unnerving?

-"Oh, Huey.", he brought a hand to his forehead, suddenly feeling very relieved he was not going to spend an afternoon putting out a fire. "What brings you here? Do you need more information on the Marines? The Navy?", he asked, bringing a smile to his beak.

Admittedly, his time in the Navy was cut short because his sister suddenly disappeared into space, swallowed by the unknown dark abyss, and so he never really got to experience most of the...fun action the Navy got itself into these days. Still, he had enough knowledge to satiate Huey's thirst for information, and Webby's too, if the way her pupils dilated was any proof. He felt smug; he still had it in him.

-"Well, not really, I needed some help inside the mansion. I need someone to hold me some test subjects so that I can confirm whether or not the temporal anomalies the building sustained throughout the time changed the surrounding gravity or not. It would certainly explain why I've been having difficulties with liquids far more often now.", the younger Duck started, losing himself in an explanation that Donald tried to simplify into simpler terms. Huey's intelligence was most certainly gained from his mother's side. It wasn't that Donald was dumb, per say, it's that Huey was smart. Too smart for any duck his age.

-"Okay then.", the older Duck replied, happy to be of help. He took a few steps forward, closing the door behind him. Expecting a nod of acknowledgement from Huey, it was Webby instead who started speaking.

-"Hello Mr.Duck Unca' Donald sir!", she jumped in front of him, somehow managing to stick the landing and continue on walking backwards. Donald loved Webby. He truly did, as any responsible adult would love a girl her age with such a bubbly personality, but he couldn't ever shake off the feeling that there was something a little...off in her. He always shrugged it off as her superior training, and so he did at this instant. He wasn't one to make the poor girl feel alien, she already had difficulty with everyone else. "While we're on our way to test the stability of the mansion, do you mind telling me what the world's greatest adventurer did in the Navy? How many bad guys did you beat up? Did you have to stop Glomgold or Magica in the Navy? Did you fire guns? Are dreadnoughts still in action?", she shot question after question at the overwhelmed sailor as they entered the massive house.

-"Well...uh...I mean, they still have battleships. We don't have dreadnoughts.", he began, following Huey to the triplets' room. "As for my work...I had training. Aim-improvement firing sessions. I think I had an encounter or two with those chumps in The Navy, but it didn't really change anything; they still lost, after all.", he boasted, taking in Webby's amazed glare as he entered Huey's room, having gone up the stairs that lead to it.

-"Alright Unca' Donald, hold this tube for me, alright? Tell me if anything happens to the water inside it.", the cap-wearing duckling handed the former-sailor a tube of water. He was expecting it to be a bit more...interesting, but as he stared at it, he found nothing. Just a tube of water. "Now this could take anywhere from an hour to two, so if you think you can't do it-"

-"What? Pffft, of course I can do it! I can do anything!"

-"That's mom's catchphrase.", a lazy voice announced from his bed. It would've made Donald jump had he not been used to it. It did, however, ruin his dramatic affirmation.

-"Well, yes, but since I'm her twin, I have the right to use half of the things she says, Louie.", his uncle answered, not without some dignity. The hoodie-wearing duckling slowly rose from his bed, laying his laptop beside him as he stared at the sight unfolding in front of him.

-"Do you have legal documents for that? Because I believe you may have just broken a copy-right agreement, which could allow one to sue for monetary compensation...", of course, con-man that he is and trying to be sharper than the sharpies ever since Unca' Scrooge told him he can be, would find a method to make money out of this. Well, he was certainly impressive, Donald gave him that. In fact, every one of his nephews was impressive in his own way. But Donald also had methods to impress people.

-"Your mother still doesn't know why the gas pipes exploded two weeks ago.", he bluntly stated, and yet his nephew kept a wide, if forced smile.

-"Yep, that'll be all the documents I need. By the way, do you really want to teach your cute little nephews how to blackmail?!", he obliged, feigning shock at the end of his sentence.

-"Louie, I have literally learnt how to blackmail from you. Also, isn't it blackmail if you threaten me with a lawsuit for a catchphrase? I don't really think that has much legal basis.", came the reply, shutting down the last argument the cunning duck could hold onto.

-"Yeah, okay, fair point.", and that was that. For the moment, anyways, Louie would always fund something to argue with, and Donald would just have to find a counter-argument. Somehow. It has gotten a bit difficult these days, but Donald loved a good challenge. Well, actually, he didn't, but he dealt with them all the same.

-"Any new results, Huey?", the perky, energetic voice of Webby asked as she ran around, fixing some tubes and...balls attached to ropes? It was only now that he realized how unconventional the contraptions Huey set up looked. It was basically gears, nails, and various building materials cobbled up together to make a sort of...measuring device? And that was the least worrying one; the entire room was filled with makeshift machines of all shapes and sizes.

-"Nothing yet...If you could steady your hands Unca' Donald, that'd be great.", he said absently, prompting Donald to turn the tube in his hand a few centimeters. Well, he went from doing nothing and watching T.V. to doing nothing while watching his nephews. That had to amount to something.

-"Wow, you're really just going to stand there for Huey so he can prove that it wasn't his super shaky hands that made him spill the milk this morning, aren't you?", the smugly lazy voice of Louie called out, now under Donald. He'd heard him going down from his bed.

-"My hands are *NOT* shaky, Louie!", the older triplet yelled, outraged by such preposterous claims.

-"Okay, Doctor Butterfingers.", his sibling teased, keeping a neutral face. Donald knew that was what got to Huey; the teasing, he could somewhat handle, but Louie's lack of expressions simply made his mockery get to Huey more easily. Luckily for the inhabitants of Duckburg, Duck War One-Thousand and Whatever could wait, as Donald was there to interfere. For now.

-"Actually, I will. It's a bit unwieldy, but I'll do it for the greater good!", there. A nice, dramatic statement, that should prevent the 'Do you really want to say that' ultimatum. Man, he really had to be a diplomat someday.

-"I don't think you'll call it the greater good when Huey realizes he just has butterfingers.", the little schemer whispered to his uncle, and suddenly, a very dark future flashed in front of his eyes. Well...all in time, he supposed. "Still, I guess you must really have one heckuva patience to just keep holding this tube.", he continued, this time a bit louder before adding under his breath 'uselessly'.

-"Well, yes, I am the most patient person in the world, no? I couldn't dream of starting fights with even the most annoying of people.", the older duck proudly claimed before making an expression that clearly told Louie to shut up about the four-digit number of times he lost his temper. It was better than being five-digits, at least.

-"Yeah, yeah, whatever.", the green-wearing duckling dismissed without second thought before picking up his sentence. "Still, I guess the mad scientist over there has reason to trust you; you are pretty reliable."

-"Aw, Louie-"

-"Extremely reliable in fact!", Huey intruded on their chat, lifting his head from the calculations he was calculating. "I mean, really. Unca' Donald was there for us the entire time; remember that one time in the house-boat when the plumbing stopped working all of sudden and you tried going to the-"

-"Please, for the love of all that is Holy, remember any other time I was useful. Just not....that!", the once-calm sailor begged, his voice filled with dread and his eyes going blank. Well, that's untrue; he still had pupils, but he just wasn't...there. Lost in his flashbacks. The Great Toiletening. The horror.

-"Oh, right...forgot that we don't talk about it...well, either way, all I'm saying is that we really do appreciate what you do! Even if we never really talk about it. Or thank you.", the smarter duckling reflected, bringing a hand to his beak.

-"Well, it's the thought that counts!", Webby chimed in, positive as always. She was right. To an extent. A lot. Okay, maybe she was right, but Donald didn't have to let her know. He wasn't a mind reader, and so he appreciated whenever people spoke their mind to him.

-"I mean, yeah, she's got a point, doesn't she, Unca' Donald?", ah, Louie. Every time Donald thinks he cannot get any more smug, he goes and proves him wrong. "But I guess I should say thanks for everything. Even though you didn't buy me that self-refiling can of Pep Gyro offered...Hey!", he objected as his uncle ruffled his head-feathers with his free hand, a smile on his beak.

-"It was going to go evil and try to strangle us in our sleep and you know that.", he bluntly stated, keeping his smile.

-"I still think it was worth a shot.", the con-man replied, moving towards the room's door. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have a new method of getting richer than Uncle Scrooge, and I'll be accomplishing it by six in the evening.", he declared, opening the door to a beaten Dewey. "Dewey.", he nodded, passing by him.

-"Louie.", his brother nodded in return, waiting for him to close the door behind him. He looked horrible; a few scratches scattered on his face, his feathers were pointing in all directions, and his left eye felt less...firm than the other. "How much to you guys want to bet we'll have to save Louie from a demon or something by six?", he asked, pointing with a thumb to the door behind him.

-"What on earth happened to you, Dewey?! It's not even three in the afternoon and you look like you crawled out of the grave!", Donald yelled, heading over to the energetic duckling, almost spilling the water in the tube. "Are you okay? Can you see with your left eye? Did you disinfect the wounds?", he shot question after another, trying to judge the severity of the injuries with his free hand.

-"Yeah! What happened to you, Dewey?! Don't you know that the demon-scheme was last week? This week it's the 'Try-to-trick-a-rich-man-scheme'! We'll probably have to discuss some silly law-whatchamacallit with a bunch of angry lawyers by five at most!", Webby happily corrected him, looking just a teeny bit oblivious to Donald's source of worry here.

-"I'm fine, Unca' Donald. It's nothing big, mom was just...y'know. Doing mom stuff. Teaching me how to fight with the wilderness of the forest. It's no biggie.", the daring duck tried to deflate his uncle's worries, waving his hand nonchalantly, as if this was some regular occurrence he had to deal with. He failed.

-"Your mother took you to fight the wilderness?!", he repeated, grabbing his nephew's shoulder with his spare hand and trying to keep the other tube balanced.

-"Oh, come on, Unca' Donald, it's just basic stuff to learn!", he argued back, trying to shrug his shoulder before he winced from the act with an 'Ow!'.

-"Wha- Is your shoulder hurt? Did you encounter bears? How did you fight them?", he kept asking, barely giving the self-proclaimed adventurer any time to breathe.

-"I-It's nothing, just a bad landing, that's all. I mean, we were fighting bears, wolves, and flying beavers with nothing but our wits and bravery, the Heros of the For-Hey!", he tried to finish his sentence, only to be dragged by the sailor to his bed and forced to sit on it.

-"Oh, what am I ever going to do with your mother!", he grumbled, taking the first-aid kit they kept under the bed for emergency situations and trying to manipulate it with his one hand. "She just...she just thinks it's some jolly old fun to bring you over like it's nothing! Like you'll just bounce back from a fifty-meter jump and be okay!", he kept ranting himself as he took out some bandages and started unpacking them before heading to Dewey and starting to cover his wounds.

-"Heeeey! I told you I was fine, Unca' Donald.", the duckling huffed, unable to resist his uncle's medical aid as he kept putting bandages wherever he could reach. "And...Mom's trying her best, you know. No reason to get all mad, y'know...", he added, looking both offended and embarrassed.

-"I know she is.", Donald softly mumbled, putting the last of the bandages. Dewey's face wasn't too far from a mummy at this point. "It's just...sometimes her best isn't the best for everyone, and it's not her fault but...I'd rather you don't get mauled by a bear, Dewey.", he explained, taking a step back and paying attention not to let the tube in his hand tilt. Last thing he needed was to stand there again holding a tube full of water because the first one got spilled.

-"Yeah...me too, I guess.", he conceded, rubbing his arm and trying to chuckle. Donald responded in kind, trying to make his nephew be more at ease. "But she's so cool whenever she does it. How she kicked that bear and then it just turned over and winced in pain.", he dreamily recounted, looking to the ceiling before coming back to reality.

-"She kicked a bear and it just turned over?", Donald repeated, baffled; he knew his sister was strong, but weren't bears made for fighting harsh fights? Layers of fat and all that?

-"Well, I didn't get to see the fight in all its glory, but all I saw was that she flipped over the bear, managed to go behind him, and then she...kicked...", the young adventurer clenched his fists, enthusiastically recalling what his mother did until the realization dawned on all of them. 'Oooooh', was all he and Donald could say for a minute.

-"I don't understand. What did she do?", Webby asked, tilting her head as she carried some machines around the room.

-"O-Oh, it's nothing, Webby. Nothing at all.", he was lying through his teeth. Donald knew she knew. But as long as he wasn't the one who needed to tell her, all was going to be fine. "Ahem...Regardless of her strategies, you're not going to be your mother in one day, Dewey. De-, uh, sorry, your mom is an extremely talented person, but she also...slips. She needed years of broken bones, internal injuries and other injuries to reach where she is now. All I'm saying is that you can learn it all from her the easy way without breaking your neck. I know, not very fun to you,", he paused to add under his breath 'somehow', getting a glare from Dewey, "But it's what I think is better. You don't have to prove anything to us, you know.", he finished both talking and applying some extra bandages, looking at his nephew.

-"I can't promise anything; I can and probably will dew anything.", the blue-shirted duck began, receiving a sigh, "But it makes enough sense. I guess I don't have to be the star of every adventure, but...eh. Maybe I can sit back sometimes. The world needs a break from my awesomeness from time to time.", he finished, flashing his titular proud smile and forcing Donald to hold a smile, making the former's smile drop a bit. Oh, the world needed a break from Dewey alright. Just not for those reasons.

-"Yeah, Unca' Donald has a point, mom means well, but a bear's teeth are stronger than good will.", Huey added, though almost absently as he kept tinkering with the various machines throughout the room and re-reading his notes, as proven by his late response. "This just...this just...It doesn't add up! NONE of these numbers add up! The conclusion...it's wrong! Incorrect! It...It...", he yelled, almost unable to form a coherent sentence at the end. Oh, no. He was going into another rush of his. "Show me the tube, Unca' Donald!", he ordered as he made his way over to his older relative, who tried to remain calm. He did not succeed too well.

-"Uh, Webby? Did...did Huey take some sugar? What's going on in here?", Dewey asked the enthusiastic young duckling, who followed Huey to the triplets' bed.

-"Oh, it's nothing. Huey's been researching the surrounding gravity of the mansion to make sure it didn't change gravity or anything after it nearly got destroyed a couple dozen of times with us inside it!", clenching her fists and raising them to the air, her enthusiasm would've been infectious if Huey didn't look on the brink of a meltdown.

-"Riiiiight...", the blue-shirted triplet processed as his brother practically ripped the tube from his uncle's hand. "And he's doing this becauuuuse...?"

-"Oh, well, he spilled his milk this morning.", she immediately answered, reflecting on her words. "Yeah, not the best incentive, but it's for the greater good!", she confidently boasted, turning to her research-partner. "Right, Huey?"

-"The...The water's okay? How is it okay?! WHY IS IT OKAY?! I NEED TO KNOW!", said research partner was currently yelling at a tube of perfectly okay water, as any great man in history did. His eyes bulged and he ground his beak, looking ever so close to that breaking point.

-"Uh...Listen, Huey, I wasn't there this morning...but is a spilled milk cup really worth all of...this? Your hand probably just slipped. I spilled my milk last week, too.", well, that wasn't exactly true, but Donald didn't have to let them know that he mixed up which hand was holding the cup and which one was holding the brush. In his defence, he'd just woken up and...yeah, that was the only thing he could say for himself.

-"No, you don't understand! I've been pouring myself a glass of milk every morning for three years! I mastered a technique of holding the bottle and the cup for three years! What if I needed this technique for a dangerous artefact...or...or...Or maybe so Scrooge's keys don't fall down a drain! What if I needed to fly a plane with this knowledge and it fails me like it did now?!", ah, how Donald loved Huey's rants. He was just so passionate about the things he did. If there wasn't a chance of him picking up a knife or some other dangerous object and going around on rampage with it, he'd have encouraged him to do it more. No pent up feelings and all that jazz. It was also threatening that his left hand had a screwdriver that looked just a bit too sharp to be waved around.

-"Well...when the time comes to that, you'll come up with a solution. I know you will.", he smiled encouragingly, making his ranting nephew look at him and eyeing the screwdriver in his hand. "But sometimes, a glass of milk is just that. A glass of milk. There's no bigger meaning behind it most of the time and you don't need to beat yourself over it.", he argued, slightly snapping Huey out of his momentary madness. "And that's uncle Scrooge to you, Huey."

Well, yes, there were times when knowing how to play the guitar saved him and his family, and screwing that up would've killed them all, but in the end, you need to prepare yourself mentally for when the time comes, and not by beating yourself for every small or big mistake. There are times for that, but this was certainly not one of them. Donald would know. He did it as an emo teenager. Man, he missed those days. Why did going emo fall out of fashion?! It's all about gothic movements these days, and he wasn't about those clothes.

-"I...Yeah, you're right.", the mad-scientist in Huey gave the wheel back to his rational self. Thank goodness. No new paint-coats for this screwdriver. "Sometimes a glass of milk is just that. Milk.", he repeated, taking the tube out of his uncle's hand and letting the water fall. "Thanks, unca' Donald. I needed that. Don't know what came over me there for a moment.", he too smiled, allowing the houseboat sailor to pat his shoulder.

-"Bah, don't sweat it, Huey! We all had this moment when we went on an insane scientific adventure to prove something that's probably unreal because we...uh...Yeah, I can't dig myself out of that one.", Webby admitted, slumping near the end of her sentence as she suddenly looked a bit tired. Helping Huey all day on his quest probably wasn't the easiest thing to do today. The quadro of ducks shared a laugh.

-"C'mere, Huey.", the older duck held his arms out, allowing his nephew to nestle in for a hug. He gestured to the two other ducklings.

-"GROUP-HUG!", taking advantage of the situation, Webby grabbed Dewey's arm and threw the both of them onto the sailor, who felt the air get knocked out of him for a moment as the two ducklings slammed into his stomach. Regaining his breath, he wrapped his hands around the three duckling around him.

-"Okay that's enough.", Dewey was the first to pull out, never one for too much emotional content when he didn't need it. The other two slowly pulled out, looking satisfied.

-"Welp. I guess it's time to clean this mess up.", the former mad-scientist in Huey was now firmly dead, it seemed. He let out a sigh, looking at the various contraptions he had set up in the room.

-"Don't worry about it, Huey, we can help you out. Not like I'll be doing much like this, anyways...", his brother gave him a pat on his back, pointing with his other hand to the various bandages that covered his face.

-"And I can help you, too! I want to get back granny's knives and laser guns, you know.", the young Vanderquack chimed in, looking cheerful as always, but a bit more down-to-earth now that the experiment she was assisting in turned out to be a bust. She pointed at a strange device that was, surprise surprise, made with various knives and what looked to be laser guns tapped together. What was even the point of that thing? To look science-y?

-"Ah, goodie, I think I'll help, too.", Donald added, trying to encourage this little aide-circle. He didn't really want his nephews to live in what looked like a madman's dump, which...for a few hours, it was.

-"Actually...I think you'd better prepare to try and bail Louie out of a lawsuit.", Huey suggested, starting to pick up the papers and small machines that covered the floor.

-"Oh, come on, Huey, I'm certain Louie is smart enough to not get himself into much trouble!", even before the older Duck finished his answer, the room's occupants began laughing. Oh, what a scenario that would be. Louie, not getting himself into trouble while searching for fortune. What a joke. "Yeah, okay, you're probably right.", he finally concluded, heading to the room's door and opening it before turning his head back, "Now, if you kids need anything, you can tell me, alright?"

-"Yes, Unca' Donald.", the three ducklings replied in unison with their usual boredom to his patronising acts. Ah, how he loved that tone of theirs.

Closing the door behind him, Donald started going down the stairs, taking in a deep breath. Well. This wasn't really the way he thought he'd be spending his afternoon, but you know what? It wasn't like he was complaining. A small bonding session with the boys was as good as any, after all, and the little motivational speech at the end? Mhmmmm, peak uncle performance right there.

Good job, humble Donald, you did well. What, he was allowed some sort of internal pride, wasn't he? If Gladstone could do it externally because he's lucky, then he could feel some pride for being a good uncle. He hoped. Well, thinking about it now...a good uncle wouldn't have let Louie go get himself into trouble...Hmm...

Well, maybe he wasn't a perfect uncle, but with his uncle and sister promoting this adventurous life-style, there was only so much he could do. Besides, people learn when bad things happen to them. He just had to hope nothing too bad happens, which, luckily, it doesn't. Most times.

He shielded his eyes as he got out of the building and had his eyes blinded by the sun and thought back to the smiles Dewey, Huey, Louie and Webby gave him. What he would do to have them smile like this all the time. Take that, Della, today, Donald had won the...uh...race? The contest of who's a better parent-figure? Well...all of them were good parent-figures but...Oh, forget it! What mattered was that he felt he did something good today and that was it.

He basked in that feeling of pride for a moment, opening his houseboat's main door before noticing a small green figure running towards the mansion from an enraged older man. What worried Donald wasn't the situation; it was that whatever Louie did, it made this man, who couldn't have been any younger than eighty, manage to wake his dormant muscles.

Well, he thought, guess it's time for more uncle-business. Ooooh, that was good. Maybe he could make it a catchphrase and actually copy-right it.

Whenever he calmed this older gentleman, of course. He took a step forward, readied his mind, and mentally prepared to save Louie from a butt-kicking. Yep. Typical Tuesday, alright, and he couldn't be a happier uncle about it.

#ducktales #ducktales 2017 #donald duck #Huey Dewey and Louie #webby vanderquack #Milk murder attempts and bonding #we have it all

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sirens-scriptures · 5 years ago

Text

Pancakes

Summary: You and Jack share a heart-to-heart as the main three are out on duty. Your troubles and feelings can no longer be stored away and it gets emotional.

Words: 2350

Pairing: Jack Kline x Reader

Disclaimer: A bit sad and mentions of death. All fluff and wholesomeness ♡

Saturday.

The one day of the week where Dean forces you to rest your mind and body. He would never find you trying to get a case on these days because you weren’t looking for another one of his embarrassing, fatherly scoldings. Much like the Winchester brothers, you had a very difficult childhood and couldn’t seem to disappear from the hunting life, it always found some way to seep back through the cracks.

Both of your parents, hunters themselves, had been murdered on a case together. You were surviving by yourself for a couple of months until the Winchesters had traced the fallen hunters back to you. From that moment on, they had taken you under their care; not wanting to leave a teen to fend for herself with no option but to dig through the trash for dinner and steal from convenience stores under the radar.

You already knew the Winchesters from the stories your parents told you while growing up. When they arrived at your house you were grateful that you had family left that wasn’t dead, or desired to kill for the fun of it. The bunker became your new home, the angel and his two brothers, your family. For the first time in months you felt secure and didn’t have to clutch a dagger in your hand every day and night.

Curled up in your warm, soft bed, you slept soundly through the early morning; this week’s hunt had you so exhausted that the loud slam from the main door didn’t even wake you. You stretched out your limbs and rolled uselessly onto your left side, the blanket crumpled from your constant tossing and turning. You often had nightmares from your parents’ death and particularly arduous hunting trips that you couldn’t ever forget nor accept.

While life was exceptionally better with the Winchesters compared to how alone you were a year before, it still wasn’t anything easy or simple. One of the only ways your mother could make you start your day early was the promise of food. Coincidentally, a sugary scent drifted throughout the halls and into your quiet room, awakening you from your deep slumber.

For a moment you thought you were back in your old bedroom, the smell of your mom’s cooking and your father’s complaints about people who drank coffee cold and not boiling hot drafting into your nose and ears and stirring you up at dawn. Realizing where you were, you couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed, but you were happy to live here regardless.

You stared about the small room and the posters of your favorite musicians on the walls. Dean insisted that good people needed to listen to good music, and funny enough, his good music meant ancient music. You dragged yourself out of bed and stumbled to the washroom to clean up before any of the boys could set eyes on you. After pulling on some jeans along with loose t-shirt and taming your hair, you made your way down the halls and into the kitchen.

You saw only but one figure standing over the stove. His head turned down, shoulders tense, working away at the contraption he created. Eggs, water and butter was scattered about on the counters. A box of pancake mix laid on its side, spilling out at the top and a bottle of syrup beside it. You tried your best to suppress your laughter, knowing that if you even giggled in the slightest he would be confused, or even hurt.

“Um, Jack?” You said in a wavering voice.

The whole situation was unusual for him. You’d never imagined him being so tense over making breakfast. You and the boys usually ordered food or prepared your meals whenever you felt peckish. He turned away from his creation and set his blue eyes on yours. His light brown hair looked a bit disheveled and he gave you that giddy smile he has when he’s really happy about something. You noticed that he wore his typical brown jacket and t-shirt and that his shoulders finally relaxed when he saw you. You imagined it was due to the heat radiating from the stove when the slightest bit of pink settled on his face.

“Hello, Y/N” Said Jack, in his usual polite manner “Sam, Dean and Cass are out right now, they left early this morning. Something about some strange activity a couple hours drive from here. They said it was best I stayed here with you, so you wouldn’t be here by yourself.”

You tore your eyes away from his and found that the smudge on your shoes suddenly became more interesting. It was just you and him.. alone. No Dean for you to trod after, Sam to chat about computers with, or Cass to teach you fighting techniques. You kept yourself busy in these ways to ignore how your stomach flipped every time you saw the nephilim. You began focusing your attention back on the subject of pancakes and not his smile.

“What’s this all about? Are you hungry?” You prompted.

“Actually, I made this for us. I’ve wanted to give you something for some time now. I’ve.. seen how tired you’ve been recently.” He scratched at his wrist.

You felt your heart swell and couldn’t hold back your smile anymore and gazed back at him. You hoped you weren’t still asleep in your bed in a crazy dream.

“Thank you, Jack. That’s really kind of you.” You ended your explanation in a rush. “To be honest, I haven’t been feeling the best, but this.. I needed it."

Jack visibly blushed at your words this time and you blushed too when you noticed it wasn’t the stove to blame after all. He smoothed his hair down and you looked away once again. After a couple of seemingly unending, frightening heartbeats he finally spoke.

"You’re welcome, Y/N. Please sit down over there and I’ll set the table."

You settled down at the bench as Jack placed a plate of pancakes and tea before you and taking the seat across the wooden table. He entered a CD into the old radio and music scared the silence out of the room. He sat upright, but with a slight hunch that you imagined was from the weight of the wings on his back. You’ve always wondered what it was like to be half-human, half-arch angel. It certainly wasn’t a slice of pie for him, he was the only of his kind in existence and dark beings constantly attempted to use his power for their filthy desires. Jack saw the best in everyone; he was naive and that often caused him to make mistakes. But it was that very kindness and ambition you admired so much about him, not to mention his painfully handsome face.

You severed the stack of pancakes in four, drizzled the sweet syrup atop of them and took a mouthful of it. Something about it was so nostalgic, awakening a feeling of joy in your chest. You’ve tasted this warm, fluffy cake before; it was your mother’s pancakes. Tears began to drip from your eyes at once and you put your utensils down on the table with a trembling hand. Jack looked up with you with wide, concerned eyes, still just as blue and beautiful.

"Y/N! What’s wrong? Did you not like the food?” He got up from his seat and made his way around to you in a rush. He knew that his teleportation abilities made you uneasy and didn’t use them often.

“No.. no it’s wonderful, don’t worry. It’s just, it tastes just like the ones my mom used to make, you know before she..” Your words were cut short by another surge of tears.

Your parents’ death was still fresh on your mind and you hadn’t really opened up about it to anyone yet, no one wanted to pressure you. Sobs racked through your body and the tears didn’t seem to end. Jack didn’t utter a word as he pulled you into a warm embrace, your arms wrapping around his waist, head buried in his shirt. After a while your crying ceased and you started to feel more at ease, yet slightly self-conscious when you realized you did indeed have feelings for Jack. You never broken down in front of him before, or anyone for that matter. Your breathing slowed back to a normal pace, allowing you to hear the heartbeat in his chest. As you pulled away from his body he reached out his hands and held your face gently.

“I’m really sorry” You murmured “I didn’t mean to cry in front of you like that. The pancakes are delicious, thank you for making them for me. You’re not to blame, it’s just me..being me, I suppose.”

He wiped the remainder of the tears away from your cheeks and slowly released his hold from you as the music continued to play on the radio, echoing throughout the cement room.

“Please don’t apologize. I understand, Y/N. I understand completely..” said Jack.

A sudden glint in his eyes make you realize he was thinking of his own mother. He stood up from the bench and offered you his hand; you took it and he led the way to his bedroom, only a few doors down from your own.

“I wanted to show you this.” He said.

He opened up a drawer and took out a rectangular photo.

“It’s my mother. She captured it for me before she passed away.”

His voice had a hint of sorrow in it that you recognized all too well whenever he mentioned his deceased mom. The thought of him being in pain made your heart twist. The picture showed his mother, smiling into the lense. She was quite pretty and you saw how she resembled Jack in some ways. She shared his iconic blue gaze and the shade of dark brown hair that streaked throughout his own.

“She was beautiful Jack, that must be where you get your looks from.” You said.

He turned his head from the photograph onto you and smiled. You both felt a closeness unlike ever before and less alone in this frightening world that gave Hell to people like you. You smiled back at him, and for once, didn’t shy away from showing all your emotions about him. He leaned down and kissed your forehead and wrapped you up in another one of his wonderful hugs. You returned his hug and felt a gush of happiness in your chest, never wanting to leave that moment. You swore that you felt soft feathers brush against you, but didn’t mind because you weren’t frightened of him like others were. You could even say you loved it and loved him too.

You both brought your pancakes onto the couch and turned on the television. There was an agreement that Scooby Doo was the most sufficient show to watch at that moment, besides Charmed which everyone in the house knew about Jack’s infatuation with it. You and Jack recalled the time where Dean, Sam, and Cass had gotten themselves trapped in the show and laughed uncontrollably despite how horrible it could’ve turned out for the brothers in the long-run. Once the food was finished you leaned into him as he ran his fingers through your hair. This was the first time you felt normal in ages and thought you could even fall back asleep. No words were spoken except for the occasional teasing about who each other were in the show whenever a character did something silly.

You were longing for a moment like this and he had wanted the same. The half-angel was yours from the beginning and he had always been watching over you since you two met. A sudden opening of the door broke you out of your doze and Jack threw the blanket out of the way. You broke away from him and flew to the other side of the couch. Castiel stood in the doorway with confusion clouding his gaze when Sam and Dean walked in, both smelling of the outside air, boots knocking on the ground, and stared at the both of you.

“Er, hey guys. We finished up the case and we’re home now. I hope you got some rest finally, Y/N?” Said Sam with furrowed brows.

“Oh yeah, I did, thanks.” You sounded stupid and Dean laughed through his nose. Castiel remained in the doorway, looking like a confused goldfish. Jack sat again with his usual perfect posture and looked at Cass.

“Hello, Castiel.” said Jack and smiled.

“Hi, Jack, how are you doing?” Castiel looked at him with warmth in his eyes and then to you.

You felt your heart leap, not only from Jack sitting beside you but from nervousness and uncertainty you felt when they had emerged the room. Suddenly Sam and Dean burst into laughter. Dean tried to say something but failed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hands and Sam turned behind himself, still trying his best not to laugh.

“Well, you kids keep watching Scooby, I’m going to get a drink. A strong one.” Said Dean.

Sam followed him out of the room but Castiel stayed in place, dumbfounded.

“Wait, why are you two laughing, what is so hilarious?” Asked Castiel with a serious and grumbling voice.

“CASS COME HERE I’LL TELL YOU THE SECRET!” Yelled Dean from the hall.

You heard Sam start laughing again and the beginning of gossip between pair.

“I knew it, I freaking knew it.” Said Dean as his voice faded down the hall.

You and Jack exchanged glances and started laughing too.

Castiel smiled with understanding and started to make his way out of the room before turning back to say something.

“Jack, take care of Y/N. And Y/N, inform me if he starts acting out” Castiel closed the door behind him.

You and Jack retrieved the plush blanket again and went back into your original places, falling asleep as the show played on and the sky grew darker outside until the stars dazzled in the night.

- Faie

#supernatural #supernatural fanfiction #supernatural fandom #supernatural one shot #supernatural fic #jack kline #jack kline x you #jack kline x reader #jack kline x y/n #jack kline x #fluff #×reader

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fallingin-like · 5 years ago

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november 12

peu à peu by @zombiesolace [requested by @jsteneil]

see which other fics i’m reviewing this month! / my review request post!

this is a really interesting character study on post-canon kevin and how he finds his place within the foxes and deals with the aftermath of the events within the series. this fic has a lot of introspection and does a really great job of unpacking everything.

this is such an intriguing fic to me, i don’t see that many that really delve into kevin and his thoughts. i can’t imagine how difficult of a time he must have, both throughout the series and during post-canon events. this fic really made me better appreciate the struggles that he goes through because it’s really common to have his actions portrayed without any of this explanation or why he acts in certain ways. we always see his single-mindedness with respect to exy and just kind of write it off as kevin being kevin. i think you effectively explored his character and inner thoughts.

some parts that stood out to me:

“it goes like this: they lose.” uhm somehow you were able to break my heart in the first two lines of the fic? i love the simplicity of the way you worded this, it contrasts really well with the significance of what it means, for the foxes, but especially for kevin.

kevin yelling at the team after the loss feels very in character. it reminds me of what he was apparently like when coaching the foxes prior to playing, and we see a little bit of it in the books themselves. it really comes down to the fact that kevin is desperate. for a lot of the foxes, the loss stings, but at the end of the day it’s just a loss. the criticism is harsh and they don’t understand why kevin is so hard on them. to kevin, it’s his life. not just because of the fact that he’s definitely trying to go pro and have exy as his career and not just because the moriyamas are definitely watching over him, but because that’s how he was raised as a child. kevin’s terrible childhood is somewhat overshadowed by the rest of the foxes, but he likely still has trauma from how he was raised in the nest, under the master and riko. so much pressure that it feels natural that he wants to try and regain control in some way.

”they’re a team, they fall together. and yet after each game this year, kevin has found himself falling apart alone. biting shame and swallowing frustration as he tears into each overanalyzed mistake” i find in life it’s so easy to isolate yourself from the people around you. the foxes probably find it hard to be sympathetic towards kevin, but they probably don’t realise that as harsh as he is to them, he is exponentially more critical of himself. in your own head, mistakes can be an unending loop, constant and distracting. this fic is really opening my eyes to what kevin is dealing with and appreciating him so much more.

”their win last year was a fluke. a gift given to them by virtue of the trojans. a simply byproduct of the hardiness of the foxes and the instability of riko’s collapsing domain.” ohmygoodness nooo it’s always so hard for me as an outsider to see kevin (and really anyone) struggle with the imposter syndrome. so many people (including many talented fanfic authors!!) write off their talent, skill, and hard work as fluke or luck as opposed to the many hours spent bettering themselves and practicing.

”it is with an overwhelming sense of dread that kevin thinks of his death. with each day the reality of riko’s loss feels more sure… kevin wishes riko’s ghost had followed. he wishes riko were still alive. he wishes he were alone, he wishes he weren’t.” wow i love the way you wrote this, with his conflicting thoughts. since we experienced the series through neil’s pov, riko’s death feels more like victory and less like a loss. it’s something to be celebrated. but i think it can almost be seen as similar to mary’s death, which neil mourned. both characters were abusive and did things that were wrong. and yet, they were loved. whether we like it or not, riko was kevin’s family and though their relationship was twisted and manipulated, especially as they grew older, riko was the person that kevin was closest to. emotions are so complicated and i bet kevin feels like he can’t discuss this with the other foxes, who don’t quite understand.

”he knows that his commentary is far more nuanced by virtue of being a fox. kevin takes the out and opens the folder he has on the roadrunners.” this is kind of small, but i find it has some significance. it can be so easy to do the thing that you know is self destructive and get caught in a rabbit hole of pages and articles of bad. good on kevin for not doing that.

”the name wymack clings to his tongue. coach sits temptingly at the back of his palette. my dad, his mind whispers, the words clear and intrusive.” ugH it must be so so hard for kevin to work through this. i love these lines.

”andrew pokes his head out of the bedroom. he stares blankly at kevin, his hair mussed… he leaves the door partially ajar. kevin feels something in his chest loosen.” oo i really really liked this part. andrew has his own unique way of showing that he cares and i love seeing the small things that he does.

the whole conversation between dan and kevin is so interesting. the actual information that you’re sharing about exy and the way that they interact. i think you did a great job of showing a realistic back and forth.

”riko was always right there. kevin never had to call him.” these two sentences, and actually that whole section is really just so heartbreaking. you do a great job of making me understand kevin, something i haven’t really done so before.

”that’s not true. he does know. he enjoys having the ability to express his opinion. it’s a novelty he’s still getting used to.” oh, kevin.

”kevin can’t see any of the foxes. they disappeared into the store moments upon arrival and three out of the four are too short to be seen over the aisles.” lol what a mood (i am short)

kevin’s interaction with the fans is so interesting. i wonder if he often dealt with actually meeting fans during his time as a raven. it’s also really interesting to see neil from this point of view, he almost seems… unfamiliar? but not in a bad way. it kind of really brings us into the perspective of kevin.

abby-kevin relationship is so nice. i think it’s great that kevin has a maternal figure that he can find comfort in

the section on kayleigh is just so so sad. it makes me feel grief for someone i never knew. it aches knowing that she was such a wonderful woman, that kevin had her and now he doesn’t.

”’wooo!’ nicky shouts, ‘now that was a wake up call i didn’t need.’” ohmygoodness i love the way that you write nicky! it really lightens the fic a bit more.

honestly the bit about jean being waterboarded is horrifying to me.

i like that wymack took kevin to riko’s funeral. there’s a sense of closure that has to do with it, kevin being with his real family while saying goodbye to what used to be his family

”he doesn’t recall riko breaking his had. he remembers before, and he remembers after but he doesn’t remember the moment his life changed.” i really appreciate the formatting you used with this, the line separating the first sentence, the way that you broke up the second sentence into two lines. it feels more impactful, more significant.

”he can see nicky and aaron showing off their most ridiculous dance moves in the corner for one another” oh my goodness this is amazing

“he wonders if they’ll call him an ex-fox when he graduates or if he’ll always be labeled an ex-raven. the nest had a quiet energy that fox tower doesn’t.” oh oh i like this a lot

also i like how you broke up the texts with paragraphs of kevin’s thoughts. it shows the gaps between his texts more and i feel his loneliness more keenly. the double-texting with the periods between reminds me of when i am at my loneliest

i love kevin’s conversation with jeremy. he’s known as one of the nicest, brightest characters in the series, but we really see why. how he is able to relax kevin and just speak to him.

your explanation of kevin choosing history as his major is so insightful, i’ve never really considered it, but now i wish i had

”i want andrew to enjoy himself. he does it rarely, kevin, you’re aware of that” renne is just so great.

the part about kevin using twitter, especially as a way to try and connect with thea is so interesting to me.

”’does he know you’re better than he is?’ she’d whispered in his ear” I LOVE THIS LINE what a turning point in kevin’s journey

ahh the part about nicky telling andrew about the conspiracy station, it’s so nice to see the way they are bonding like his

andrew is such a complicated character, i absolutely adore the way that you write him. a lot of the time i read a softer side of him, through the perspective of neil. kevin and andrew have a fascinating relationship, i love seeing it from kevin. “he gives kevin a thumbs up”, “i hear you, andrew says” these are so perfect

wymack giving kevin an extra jacket is peak dad behaviour.

recently i’ve been so fond of seeing authors incorporate the title of their fic into the writing. this is no different, it makes the title have that much more meaning “little by little, the bird builds his nest” i love this. how did you come across this quote? it’s so fitting for this fic

the dynamic between dan, wymack, and kevin is so so interesting. wymack and kevin are so similar that sometimes i guess it causes a distance because they’re not the best at communication. and it must be hard. they’re related, but still have so much to learn about each other. i guess i’ve never though much of how close dan and wymack are. you do a really good job at capturing the tension that exists, the interactions.

”he thinks a lot of people would rather he never spoke again” oh no this hit me hard

the little part where kevin and dan are talking about neil’s shot, i like this little bonding that we see. exy is the thing that has brought them together

”’you’ll make a good wymack,’ he says. dan jerks back, her mouth open, and her eyes stunned.” oh this is so nice

”he wants to say he’s my dad, but he’s hers too; hers more so and that’s dan’s point. what would he know? ‘he saved me too,’ he says instead” oh my goodness i love this so much

sorry but neil and kevin teaming up and nicky and aaron teaming up so that andrew loses is the best part of this fic and anyone that believes otherwise can fight me!!! “when they arrive in columbia andrew makes an aborted move like he will shut neil out of their room and it’s the first time kevin hears something like a laugh from neil.” this is so soft i needed this

go thea!!! thank you for making her so amazing in this fic!!! i like how you write their relationship, it’s refreshing and really interesting, we don’t know that much about thea

THEA TAKING OFF HER NECKLACE WHEN KEVIN CHANGES HIS TATTOO THIS IS THE BEST

there’s so much that you covered in this fic. kevin’s relationship with exy, riko, the rest of the foxes, wymack. i love the way that you worked through everything. the gradual improvement of the foxes following with kevin’s mental health improving. but we can really see how far he has come when they lose and he’s okay with it. you made me feel so close to kevin. your writing is wonderful, so many little details that just build to make this fic amazing. thank you so much for writing this!

#peu à peu #aftg fic review #raelle writes

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lena-in-a-red-dress · 6 years ago

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A New Kind of King

An alternative version of my alternative Kid Arthur concept:

Merlin doesn't catch up with Arthur until the man is already grown, and firmly middle aged. He and Morgan have remained friends all throughout childhood-- through Morgan getting kicked out by her homophobe parents at age 15, Arthur's injury that effectively ends his promising professional football/rugby career, and assorted adult trials and tribulations.

They've weathered it all, and now they live separately in London, with Arthur working construction and enjoying it fairly well. When his excavator unearths Excalibur, Arthur picks it up without thinking twice.

After that, things start... happening. Odd little moments he can't explain, glimmers at the corner of his eyes that are never there when he turns to look closer.

When Merlin announces himself, it's almost a relief to get the explanation he offers. King of Camelot sounds pretty rad. Merlin is certain to show Arthur the best glimpses of his past life as King of Camelot, enticing him into his role.

There's just one catch-- an evil witch, fated to destroy Arthur. If they can find her, and end her before her powers catch up to her, then Arthur and his true legend will rise.

Luckily, Merlin knows just where to find her.

He leads Arthur to the heart of London, to a gentleman's club. They find seats just as a new dancer comes on stage. As she begins to dance, Merlin points. "There she is."

The dancer is beautiful, and fully comfortable in her role. She moves with grace and power, and the audience sits, enraptured.

"She may not have her powers yet, but she has the old magic even now. Look at the way she wraps these weaker men around her finger. Another month, and they would turn on you at a single word from her."

Arthur takes a swig of his beer, and watches.

They close the place down, and as they filter out with the other stragglers, Merlin grabs Arthur's arm. "She's alone-- we should move now."

They slip in a back door, and find the dancer in her dressing room, still in a silk robe. "Um, excuse me?" she says, rising to her feet. "You can't just--"

She freezes when Arthur locks the door behind them.

"I'm very sorry about this, miss," Merlin says. "You may be a very lovely person, but if you knew what you'd become in just a few weeks time, you'd thank me."

"What?"

"He means to kill you, love," Arthur tells her.

"Oh? Well..." Morgan's eyes sharpen, then gleam in a languid smirk. "Fuck you too."

Now it's Merlin's turn to pause.

"We've known you were coming for some time now," Morgan delivers smoothly, even as her hands curl into fists. "I admit, I expected more than...." Her eyes rake him up and down. "This."

"The magic has spread more quickly than I anticipated. Arthur, quick, Excalibur--!"

His words die with sickening crunch, as Excalibur's blade thrusts through his back and out his front. His eyes bounce from the source of his end to Morgan, who steps forward with a frame shaking with rage.

"You presumed you would be the only one to remember Avalon, sorcerer. That you would be the only one to remember the times you've murdered me. Not this time."

She grabs him by his filthy, ragged hoodie, and leans in to look him dead in the eye.

"It's my turn to live."

When Merlin dies, he disappears like the magic he lives in. There's no blood, no trace he was ever there, save for the sword in Arthur's hand and the tremble in Morgan's limbs as she steps away with a gasping sigh.

"You all right?" Arthur asks, looping her into a hug she melts into. She nods against his chest. "That was him? The geezer from your dreams?"

She nods again. Those dreams she had as a child never went away. They only grew sharper, clear enough to discern the story they'd try to show her. And they'd been preparing ever since.

"Thank you, Arthur."

"What are friends for?" He presses a kiss to her hair and gives a final squeeze before releasing her. "Give Gwen a kiss for me."

"You meeting Lance later?"

Arthur nods. "Gwaine's back on shore leave-- we were gonna take him out for a pint before he ships off again. Think you might wanna join?"

Morgan smiles. "Just might."

When Arthur walks out of the familiar club a few minutes later, it's with a jaunt in his step and Excalibur propped comfortably on one shoulder. See, what Merlin had forgotten about Arthur is that he isn't interested in fame and glory.

He protects his kingdom first-- however small it may be.

#morgan le fay #morgana pendragon #arthur #knights of camelot #kid arthur au #i guess this one is more a modern noir au #dark rainy nights lit by neon #and a dark but moralistic arthur #protecting his family #as unconventional as it may be #merlin can choke #king arthur

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waywardnerd67 · 6 years ago

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Make It Official

Summary: (Y/N) is visiting her childhood best friend, Jensen Ackles, during his Dallas Convention. All of his cast mates and friends teasing them constantly to make things official. None of them knowing just how much (Y/N) wanted that to come true. Characters: Jensen Ackles, Reader (mentions of various SPN Cast) Pairing: Jensen x Reader Warnings: Fluff Word Count: 2447 A/N #1: @supernatural-jackles Weekly Writing Challenge Prompts: “I don’t care what anyone else thinks.” / “Why are you crying?” (BOLD) A/N #2: @wonderfulworldofwinchester Dancing Into 1500 Song Challenge (BOLD/Italic) A/N #3: As always this is unbeta so all mistakes are mine. Likes, comments and reblogs are splendid and I will love you doubly for them! Enjoy! Special Note: This is a work of FICTION and should be enjoyed as such. I mean absolutely no disrespect to the Ackles family as I truly adore and admire them.

(Y/N) finished up her last customer phone call with a big smile on her face. All her co-workers had been giving her trouble all day for the great mood she was in. “Seriously, (Y/N) what are you doing with your extended weekend?”

She looked over to her co-worker, Mindy, smiling widely. “I told you, I am going to a Supernatural Convention with my best friend.”

Mindy rolled her eyes, “Still can’t believe you watch that show. Even if the main actors are hot. Well enjoy your weekend.”

(Y/N) grabbed her things and waved goodbye to all of them. Walking out to the parking garage she noticed a someone in a dark hat leaning against her car. Clutching her cell phone in her jacket pocket she slowly approached him.

“Hey pretty girl.” The all too familiar voice of her childhood best friend sent her running into his arms.

“Jensen! What the hell are you doing here?” she asked hugging him tightly.

He chuckled setting her down giving her a bright smile, “I came into town early to see the family and I came to kidnap you for dinner.”

(Y/N) nodded excitedly, “Dinner with the Ackles? I’m in! Did you get dropped off or should I meet you there?”

Jensen pointed over to his SUV, “I drove. It was nice having a couple of hours to myself on the road. Just come on over whenever you want. We’ll eat, drink and catch up.”

He hugged and kissed her temple before they parted ways. Once (Y/N) was back at her apartment she took a quick shower and put on her favorite pair of jeans with nice green top along with her Chucks. She put her hair up in a messy bun and grabbed her purse.

The drive to the Ackles’ home was only about twenty minutes. No matter how many times she had been there her stomach always filled with butterflies. (Y/N) met Jensen on the first day of Kindergarten when a boy was picking on her because she wore glasses. Jensen stuck up for her pushing the boy down and getting into trouble for it. From that moment on they were inseparable until he moved out to Los Angeles to start his career.

The day he drove off in his Pathfinder he took part of her heart with him. That part has continued to be with him throughout all this time. (Y/N) had never been brave enough to tell Jensen about her feelings for him. Even though everyone around them could see it and mercilessly made fun of her for it. She walked up to the front door and could hear everyone outside in the backyard.

(Y/N) made her way to the back seeing all the Ackles family and Jared Padalecki spread out around the large table. “(Y/N)!” Kenzie called out as everyone turned to look at her.

(Y/N) made her way hugging everyone until Jensen slipped his arm around her shoulders, “Alright, alright back off my best girl. Let her breathe for a moment, vultures.”

She laughed leaning into his embrace as he led her over to the cooler that held all the beer. (Y/N) fell into easy conversations throughout dinner with everyone. After dinner (Y/N), Jensen and Jared ended up sitting out in the yard drinking and talking.

“Seriously, you two need to just make it official.” Jared said sitting cross legged in front of her and Jensen.

(Y/N) was leaning back against Jensen comfortably nestled between his bowlegs. She quickly put her beer to her lips drinking the last of it. “Look at that I need another.” She said starting to get up.

“I’ll go get it.” Jensen said getting up and taking her empty bottle.

“Spill it.” Jared said looking pointedly at her.

(Y/N) scoffed, “I have no idea what you’re talking about Padalecki.”

His intense stare was making her anxious, “Oh my god. You’re in love with him.”

“W-What… I mean, no.” She stammered trying to think quickly but her beer clouded mind was not functioning.

“(Y/N), come on don’t play dumb. You’re in love with Jensen and he has no idea.” She looked behind her to see Donna and Kenzie talking with Jensen at the cooler.

Looking back to Jared she moved closer to him speaking quietly, “Alright, yes I have feelings for Jensen. Yes, he has no idea and it’s going to stay that way. We’re best friends and I don’t want anything to ruin that.”

“Not even if he’s in love with you?” Jared asked a small knowing smile on his lips.

(Y/N)’s heart leaped in her chest and her hands trembled at the possibility of him loving her other than just a friend. “Jared, he doesn’t. He doesn’t love me…”

“Who doesn’t love you?” Jensen asked sitting back down next to her while handing them both a beer.

“Oh no one. That jerk I was dating a few months back.” She said quickly.

Jensen scoffed rolling his eyes, “I don’t know how you keep end up with these losers. They have no idea what they’re missing. I think you’re amazing and I love ya.”

Jared coughed while saying, “Told you.” (Y/N) glared at him as he cleared his throat.

The next day she spent with Jensen and Jared hitting some of their old stomping grounds from high school including sitting out the benches on the baseball field of their high school. That night they had gone out to a few local bars the boys getting recognized immediately any place they went. (Y/N) was used to fans being all over Jensen, but for some reason that night it was bothering her a lot.

Saturday had ended up being a lazy day for (Y/N) as Jensen and Jared were at the convention center. However, that night she went with them to the Saturday Night Special concert. Standing off to the side with Clif, she watched as all the talented cast got up on stage to sing. The crowd roared when Jensen took the stage singing Whipping Post and Like A Wrecking Ball.

After the concert, (Y/N) and Jensen had stay out drinking with some of the band in the backstage area. They were both stumbling up to his hotel room giggling like kids. (Y/N) flopped down on his couch kicking off her shoes.

“Man, I haven’t had this much fun in a long time.” She said as Jensen sat next to her.

He laid his head down on her lap looking up at her with a lopsided grin, “Yeah it was fun tonight. I should have dragged you up there with me to sing. You’re the better singer.”

“Oh hell no. I wasn’t the one who was always getting the lead in the musicals for drama. I am happy to stay behind the scenes and ignored by everyone.” She said gently running her fingers through his thick sandy brown hair.

Jensen rolled his bright olive eyes at her, “(Y/N) tell me the truth… is everything okay?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

(Y/N) bit her lip nervously not knowing how to answer that question without opening a can of worms she was not prepared to open. She took a deep breath before speaking.

“I feel like something is missing in my life. I have a decent job that allows me to pursue my writing goals. I have great friends and well you know my family has never been picture perfect, but things are calm. I don’t know… I just…” she let her sentence drift away.

Jensen took her hand resting on his chest in his, “Feel like there is something more that you’re missing out on?” She nodded as he continued, “I’ve been feeling the same way lately. That’s why I was excited to come back home. Hoping to see if that helped.”

“Did it?” she asked as he smiled up at her.

Jensen smiled softly, “Yeah it has, really I think it’s being around you that makes everything better.”

(Y/N) felt her heart thumping against her chest trying to not let his words go to her head before she could stop herself she said, “I feel the same way, Jay.”

The next morning, they got up getting ready for his early panel with Jared. Before they went out on stage he pulled her into a hug and she kissed his cheek. (Y/N) took her spot next to Clif again to watch their panel.

“Dude, hold it a second.” Jared said reaching over to touch the cheek she had kissed. Jensen backed away as Jared chuckled, “You have lipstick on your cheek, I’m just trying to help you out.”

(Y/N) felt her cheeks burning as Jensen started laughing wiping his cheek with the back of his sleeve. The audience was awing as he just shrugged his shoulders. He stepped up to his microphone, “Alright, alright before any rumors start. My best friend is here, and she had lipstick on. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek.”

She knew that would not keep the fans from asking about her and now she just wanted to disappear, so no one could see her. (Y/N) felt Clif rubbing her back reassuringly as she put her head in her hands. The first few questions were about the upcoming season and she was allowing herself to relax hoping the fans were satisfied with Jensen explanation.

“Hi Jared, hi Jensen. My question is for Jensen, I was wondering if you were ever going to make things official between you and (Y/N)? I mean you two seemingly are great together and she’s your best friend.” The fan asked as (Y/N)’s body filled with panic.

Jared was now walking away from his microphone laughing. Jensen glared at him before answering, “You’re right, (Y/N) is my best friend and I would never want anything to happen to that friendship. We’re just friends, nothing more and nothing less.”

Hearing Jensen say those words were more than she could handle. It was the final nail in the coffin that held her feelings for him. Feeling the tears welling up in her eyes she walked backstage to the green room where no one was in yet. Sitting on the couch alone in the dark room, she let the tears flow freely as her heart felt like it was slowly breaking apart.

There was a knock on the door several minutes later. (Y/N) remained silent and then the door opened flooding the darkness with light. She heard the click of the light switch and the door shutting. She refused lift her head from her hands as more tears came down her face.

“Why are you crying” Jensen asked sitting next to her.

When his hand touched her back she flinched, “I know everybody wants you. That ain't no secret, asking ‘Hey baby what's your status? And tell me are you tryna keep it?” she said looking up her make up running down her cheeks.

“What?” he asked confused bringing over a box of tissues for her.

Everything (Y/N) had been feeling slipped through her lips in that exact moment, “Well, they can all back off cause I know what I want and while I got your attention, did I mention? If you got a kiss on your lips that you're lookin' for somebody to take heyy. If you got a heart that ain't afraid to love ain't afraid to break heyy. If you've got a Friday night free and a shotgun seat, well I'm just sayin', I ain't got nowhere to be. So, baby I'll take whatever it is you've got to give, yaa I'll callin' dibs.”

“(Y/N), I… I don’t know what to say…” He looked down at his hands as she stood up.

“You don’t have to say anything. I know you don’t feel the same way and even if you did it wouldn’t matter. I’m not the type of girl you’re meant to be with. The media would have a field day with me not perfect and I know you can’t upset your fans because we all know what they think.” She said pacing now.

Jensen stood up grabbing ahold of her shoulders making her face him, “I don’t care what anyone else thinks, (Y/N). If they don’t know how amazing and beautiful you are then they don’t know you like I do.”

She rolled her eyes, “But now everything has changed since you know I have feelings for you. I’ve ruined our friendship now.” Sadness filled her chest and the need to run from him was making her body restless.

Suddenly, Jensen’s hands were on either side of her face and his lips were on hers. Her hands were braced against his firm chest as she felt her body relax against his. When his lips left hers, she looked up at him wide eyed.

“You always assume the worst. I always thought that my life and schedule would be too crazy for you. That is why I never admitted to having feelings for you. I didn’t think you would feel the same and I didn’t want to lose you. So, my lips, my heart, my shotgun seat is all yours if you want them.” He said smiling widely.

(Y/N)’s mind was reeling as he slipped his arms around her waist. “Boy, I'm callin' dibs on your hand, on your heart, all mine. Make everybody jealous when I take you off the market” she said bring out a wonderful laugh from him.

“I was hoping you would say that. So then, it’s official?” he asked a hint of nervousness in his voice.

“Come on and show me what I'm missin', yeah. If you got a kiss on your lips that you're lookin' for somebody to take heyy. If you've got a heart that ain't afraid to love ain't afraid to break heyy. If you've got a Friday night free and a shotgun seat well, I'm just sayin' I ain't got nowhere to be. So, baby I'll take whatever it is you've got to give, yaa I'm callin' dibs!” (Y/N) said wrapping her arms around his neck hugging him closely.

Jensen was laughing as he picked her up and spun her around. Just then there was a knock and Jared walked in, “You two okay?” he asked.

They both nodded, “Better than okay. It’s official.” (Y/N) said as Jensen leaned down kissing her.

“About damn time! Hey Speight, you owe me twenty bucks because it’s official!” Jared called out as he walked out of the room.

“You ready for this whirlwind life with me?” Jensen asked as (Y/N) slipped her hand into his.

“Absolutely.” She said following him out into a cheering crowd of cast mates and closest friends.

If you enjoyed this story then check out my Masterlist!

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years ago

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Socialization techniques through which the UC / FFWPU members were able to influence

by Geri-Ann Galanti, Ph.D.

Abstract This article reports on the experiences and thoughts of an anthropologist who, under an assumed identity, participated in a 3-day Unification Church workshop. Although the author’s expectation that she would encounter “brainwashing” techniques was not met, she was, nevertheless, struck by the subtle, yet powerful, socialization techniques through which the UC members were able to influence her. She concludes that, to be effective, preventive education in this area must address the subtleties of the socialization processes that can bring about major personality changes.

__________________________________________

I recently had an encounter with what has been termed “brainwashing,” when I spent a weekend at Camp K, a Moonie training camp in Northern California [in circa 1981-83?]. As a result of my experience there, I would like to offer a few comments on the nature of brainwashing from the perspective of an anthropologist. I went to the camp to do research for a project on deprogramming. I thought it was important to see what the “programming” was all about. I pretended, however, to be a young woman who wandered into their church by chance, and who knew little about Rev. Moon or Moonies.

To begin with, I was allowed plenty of sleep and given a sufficient amount of protein. Both mornings, I got out of bed around 8:30 or 9:00 – when I was tired of laying around. No one made me get up early. We were given eggs, fish, tuna, something that looked like “chicken spam,” lasagna (meatless, but plenty of cheese) and other foods. We were constantly being fed – three meals and about two snacks per day. Most people looked a bit overweight. In any case, the two things I was looking for that might “brainwash” me were not present.

I was further disarmed by the fact that the group let me know right up front that they were the Unification Church, and followers of the Reverent Moon. The San Francisco Bay area center had earned a rather bad reputation for hiding that fact until a new recruit was already well entrenched in the group. Apparently, this is no longer true. I walked into the church on Bush Street in San Francisco on a Friday evening, and the first thing that was said to me was “You understand that this is the Unification Church and that we’re followers of the Reverent Moon?” They also had a permanent sign on the front of their building stating “Unification Church.” The first evening at Bush Street, after showing some interest in the Church, I was shown a videotape about the Church and Reverend Moon. In order to go to their camp for the weekend, I had to sign a release, which clearly stated that I was going with the Unification Church. However, the fact that they were now being honest about who they were, in contrast to their past deceptiveness, served to weaken my defense.

The first night, I heard the word “brainwashing” used four or five time, always in a joking context. I finally asked John, my “spiritual father,” why that word kept cropping up so often. He said it was because people often accuse them of being brainwashed. The explanation I heard several times that weekend in this regard is that “people are so cynical and they can’t believe that we can be happy and want to help other people and love God and each other. So they think that we must be brainwashed to feel this way. Ha! Ha!” I was also told by two different Moonies about a recent psychological study comparing Moonies with young adults from other mainstream religious groups. They told me that Moonies came out much better in terms of independence, aggressiveness, assertiveness, and other positive characteristics. The group is apparently meeting the criticism leveled at them head on. Their explanations seemed so reasonable. They would ask, “We don’t look brainwashed, do we?” And they didn’t.

I somehow expected to see glassy-eyed zombies. I didn’t. There was one new member – he’d been in the group only a month and a half – who seemed to fit that stereotype. When I talked to him, his gaze wandered, his eyes not fixed on anything. But everyone else seemed perfectly normal. They were able to laugh and joke (about everything except themselves, which I’ll discuss later) and talk seriously about things. The only thing that really struck me as strange was a kind of false over-enthusiasm. Any time anyone performed, which was often, everyone would clap and cheer wildly. They were good, but not that good. During lectures, they would underscore points with a hearty “yeah!” I must admit, however, that by the end of the weekend, much of the enthusiasm seemed more charming than odd.

Since the issue was brainwashing, I was constantly monitoring my mental state. During lectures (three per day, each lasting about an hour to an hour and a half), I would sit there and smugly critique the lecture (to myself) as it was presented. My intellectual faculties were as sharp as ever. I was able to note the kinds of techniques they were using as well. Immediately before each lecture, we would sing songs from their songbook, to the accompaniment of a guitar. Their songs are very beautiful, and the lyrics always upbeat. As a result, you start off the lecture feeling good from the singing. The lectures are always ended by singing a few more songs. This puts a whole aura of “goodness” around the lectures.

The lectures were carefully orchestrated so as to create a feeling in the listener that they must be “learned,” rather than analyzed. I could discuss this in greater detail, but for now, I will return to the issue of brainwashing. Despite the use of questionable and manipulative educational techniques, I was constantly aware of the functioning of my intellect and of my beliefs, and at no time did I feel that they were being influenced. This may not be the case with an individual who has not spent 13 years in college, but, as will become clear, it only underscores the power of brainwashing. As an anthropologist, I found their beliefs interesting; as an individual, I found them ridiculous. Nor did I experience any altered states of consciousness to indicate that I was being hypnotized in any way. So I thought I was safe.

What I didn’t realize is that the “brainwashing” – or to use a better term, “mind control” – doesn’t come until later. And what is really being talked about is a process of socialization, one which goes on in every household around the world. Human beings are not born with ideas. Ideas are learned. Anthropologists, more than any other group, perhaps, are aware of the variety of beliefs that are held by people around the world. We acquire these beliefs through a process that involves observation, imitation, and testing. Beliefs that are acquired in childhood are generally the strongest, although they may be changed through experience as one grows older. When we have experiences that conflict with our world view, we either rationalize the experience (e.g., I couldn’t find my necklace in the jewelry box yesterday, but today it’s there – I must have overlooked it, or someone must have taken it and put it back), leaving our beliefs intact (e.g., objects don’t magically disappear and reappear), or, if it happens too often and we are presented with an alternative world view which accounts for it, we may change our beliefs. (This is the stuff that Kuhn writes about in his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.) it is possible to explain the same event in many ways. What cults do is to offer an alternative way of looking at things. When everyone holds the same belief but you, their view starts to make sense. Society, especially the smaller scale societies we had throughout most of human evolution, could not operate smoothly if everyone were to hold a different belief about the nature of reality. Millions of years of evolution have selected for a human tendency to be influenced by the beliefs of others. If this were not the case, how could any child be socialized to be a member of the group? There are, of course, rebels and visionaries, people who do not accept the beliefs of the group. But they are much fewer in number. Furthermore, adolescence seems to be a major time for group conformity. Teenagers appear to have a strong need to belong, to look and act like one of the group. And it is these adolescents and post-adolescents who are most strongly attracted to cults.

How does mind control work? Let me rephrase that. Even “mind control” is too strong a term – for it, too, conjures up visions of men reaching invisible fingers into your brain, controlling your thoughts and actions like a puppeteer. I think of it more as a socialization process in which one is led to think like the rest of the group. Robert Lifton, in his seminal book entitled: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China, outlines the eight conditions that result in ideological totalism: milieu control, mystical manipulation, need for purity, personal confession, acceptance of basic group dogma as sacred, loading the language, subordination of person to doctrine, and dispensing of existence. As I see it, all of these features conspire to do two things: (1) isolate the person within a particular cultural context so that that context becomes the only reality, and (2) make the individual feel that if he becomes a member of the group, he will be special. These features are an inherent part of any culture, and not necessarily purposefully contrived to achieve particular aims. Let me give an example.

Several years ago, I spent a summer doing fieldwork in Guatemala. After a month in the field, I couldn’t remember a lot of things about home, e.g., my husband’s voice. He was back in the U.S. Reality was where I was, in Guatemala. One regret I have is not buying more of the beautiful Indian weavings. The reason I didn’t was that they were “too expensive.” The finest cost approximately $30. To buy something similar here would cost well over $100. But I had internalized the Guatemalan standard of money. That summer, no one was purposely trying to control my environment. It was controlled by virtue of the fact that I was spending most of my time in a small rural village. Though I retained most of my American ways and beliefs, my sense of reality was slowly changing, and Guatemala became the standard by which I tested reality.

Regarding the notion that ideological totalism functions to make an individual feel that if he joins the group, he will somehow be better than everyone who is not a member – this is not a new concept. All cultures promote this idea about themselves. The attitude is called “ethnocentrism.” Everything we do is right and natural; everything outsiders do is unnatural, barbaric, etc. The names that most small scale societies use to refer to themselves generally translate into something meaning “the people” or “human beings,” implying that everyone who is not a member of the group is somehow less than human. Perhaps I am overstating the case, but what I saw the Moonies do was to do on a smaller scale what all cultures do with their members.

The techniques they use are for the most part, not very sinister. They are things we encounter in everyday life. They are how we become socialized. The cult becomes a total subculture.

Which brings me to what I think is the most important part. In the beginning, they don’t influence you by changing your beliefs. As I said earlier, they did not affect mine in the least in that short weekend. (although I should point out that my beliefs are very clear and strong. Most people who join the church are self-described “searchers”: they’re looking for answers.) the way they get to you is emotionally. If you stay with an isolated group of people long enough, you will eventually begin to think like they do, act like they do, see the world as they do. It’s part of human nature. It’s what we anthropologists mean when we talk about enculturation. The degree of enculturation (taking on the culture of another group) will depend upon the relative amount of time you associate with people from your own culture and from the new culture, among other factors. If you associate only with members of the new culture, acculturation will generally be much more rapid.

So how do they get you to stay? By giving you a good time, by being likeable, by being happy. Of all the things I expected to happen that weekend, the last thing I expected was to have a good time. Except for the lectures, which I found rather boring and insulting (I thought they were aimed at about a third grade level), I really had fun. We sang a lot, people performed songs and poems, we put on a group talent show, we played volleyball. We became children again, with no responsibilities. It was like being at camp; in fact, it was called camp: Camp K. the setting was beautiful – in the mountains, along a creek, with lots of trees.

They also make you feel really good about yourself. One of the famous Moonie techniques is “love bombing,” which basically consists of giving someone a lot of positive attention. For example, one morning, Jane said to me, “You know, you’re really one of the most open people I’ve ever met. You don’t put up any defenses. You’re really open. I think that’s so great.” When she said this, part of my mind went “flash. Love-bombing, love bombing.” But the other part of me went, “Yeah, but it’s really true. (Don’t we all like to believe the best about ourselves?) She probably really means it.” In any case, it made me feel good. Despite my intellectual recognition of what she was doing, emotionally, I bought it.

Another technique they use is to make you feel part of the group. New recruits were constantly encouraged to take part in the many performances that were put on. During one of the initial group sessions, when we were introducing ourselves, I mentioned that I like to dance. That night, when we were making up our presentation for the “talent show,” everyone kept urging me to choreograph our musical number. I felt a bit shy about it, but then figured, why not? I had never seen a more supportive group in my life. There was no way to fail – except not to take part. I had about 5 minutes to make up and teach a number to a group of 15. needless to say, my “dance” was simple and rather silly. But it was all in fun and didn’t matter. It made me feel a part of the group. It also gave them ample opportunity for more love-bombing. After the show and all the next day, at least a dozen people came up to tell me what a “great” dance it was. Despite the fact that I knew it wasn’t, it still felt good to have people compliment me on something that is important to me. I was made to feel good by being part of the group.

They also made me feel that I was a lot like individual members of the group. Part of my “cover” was that I was a third grade school teacher. (I did teach 3rd grade for 10 weeks once.) when I told this to my “spiritual father” he replied, “I used to be a school teacher too.” He kept emphasizing how much alike we are. (We’re not.) He also told me how much I remind him of a close friend of his. Someone else told me how much I reminded her of her sister-in-law. Other people told me that I look “so familiar.” It was rather transparent to me that this was merely a technique to make me feel that we were not so different and I could be a part of them. (Actually, this technique was too obvious and not effective on me.)

Socialization also works through subtle peer pressure. At the end of Saturday evening, we once again got in our groups to discuss “what we liked best about the day.” As we went around the circle, people mentioned things like the lecture we had on Rev. Moon, or the movie about the Unification Church, or something that was said in the lecture. As it was coming around to me, I was thinking, “My honest answer would be the volleyball game. I really had a great time playing volleyball. But if I say that, I’m going to sound really shallow compared to everybody else. And I know I’m not shallow.” So I chose something that was also true, thought less so, but which sounded much better. When my turn came, I said, “I really enjoyed meeting a lot of really nice people.” Because of a general human tendency to try to create a positive image of ourselves, I was slowly becoming socialized into the ways of the group. If this were a group that valued physical activity, my true response would have been appropriate. But this was a group that valued God, love, ideals, and so I found myself shaping myself in a way that emphasized the aspects of my being that were most acceptable to the values and standards of the group. We are all multi-faceted. It is a common experience to find that different people or groups of friends being out different aspects of our personality. Generally, we change subtly as we interact with each group, thus emphasizing all aspects of our personality. In a totalist group like the Moonies, however, the group values are so strong and so consistent that only one side of ourselves is elicited and reinforced. We thus shape our personality as we become socialized into the group.

The most powerful aspect of the whole experience was the personal relationships. At the beginning of the weekend, I remember thinking that there really wasn’t anyone there that I would want to be friends with. But by the end of 2 ½ very intense days, I had developed a few attachments, especially to two of the women, Susan and Jane. I also felt very guilty about deceiving them regarding who I was and why I was there. Yet I couldn’t tell them the truth because then I couldn’t be sure that they weren’t treating me differently from others – non-researchers. Even though I knew they were deceiving me in subtle ways and that the ultimate goal that was shaping their behavior toward me was the desire to get me to join the group, I still felt guilty. I honestly liked them. They seemed so open and honest with me, although I still don’t know how open and honest that really was. They seemed to like me. My ego wants to believe they did. The whole cult issue is very clouded in my mind. It is exceedingly complex. If their main motive was to get me to join the group, it was because they believed that by doing so, they were helping to save the world and my soul. Is that so dishonest? Yet how honest is it to consciously use those very effective techniques? I see them as both victims and victimizers. Simultaneously.

They presented a lifestyle alternative that was very appealing. Community, love, idealism. They presented a picture of true happiness. Yet we learn from ex-members (who admittedly have their own biases) that this picture is false. Or at least, only part of the picture. What is left out is the fear and guilt and the loss of self.

What the “brainwashing” is all about, in my view, is grabbing you emotionally. Giving you a good time, showing you others, like yourself, who are fulfilled. People who, like you, were searching for answers to life’s basic questions and found them. Why not stay a little longer, and learn a little more about them? You don’t have to believe in the doctrine right away. You can still think critically at the end of the weekend, when you make the decision to stay on for the 7-day seminar. But you’ve begun to develop emotional ties that will keep you there. To learn a little more. Until they have finally socialized you into their way of life. They grab you emotionally until they can keep you long enough to completely socialize you.

I am writing this article because I think it is important to understand what is going on. I know that I didn’t understand, despite having done a lot of reading and talking to people about it. I think it is because most of us have too many strong associations with the words “brainwashing” and “mind control.” They seem so overt. They’re not. The process can be extremely subtle. But because we have such strong associations, we do not recognize the process in its other manifestations. I think that in part it is because it is so familiar. It is something that happens everyday to every child that is born on this planet. Society is possible only because socialization techniques are effective. Socialization isn’t sinister. The problem I see with the cults is the context. As an anthropologist, I am aware of the existence of what we would term cults in other societies. I think that cults have a greater and more damaging impact in our culture because we value the individual so highly. From discussions with ex-members, it appears that one of the most negative effects of cult involvement is a loss of self. Many other societies value the group over the individual. Although I am not a psychiatrist, I would guess that it is not so damaging to the psyche to give up your individual identity to the group (the cult), if you have always been raised to value the group over the self. But in our culture, where the opposite is true, this can be devastating to many individuals.

I think it was the contrast between my expectations and my experience that allowed the weekend to have such a strong emotional affect on me. I was looking for something big and evil and what I found was very subtle and friendly, so I didn’t recognize its power. I was also mistaken in believing that the socialization process (or the influence process) was intellectual. It’s not. It’s emotional, and thus touches a deeper and more central part of one’s brain. When I left at the end of the weekend, a friend who had been in the Moonies and worked for a while as a deprogrammer picked me up. One of the first things I said to him was, “I had a great time. Remind me again what’s so bad about the Moonies.”

The next day I was interviewing a former deprogrammer. About half-way through the interview I asked her to describe exactly what she did during the deprogramming. She looked me directly in the eye and said, “Exactly what I’ve been doing with you.” This shocked me, because I didn’t think I needed any deprogramming. I didn’t buy their doctrine. They didn’t brainwash me. But they did get to me. I had forgotten all of the organization’s abuses of church members: the long hours of fund-raising, sometimes in dangerous areas, late at night; the lack of proper nutrition; the suicide training; the fear and guilt; the relative poverty the members live in, while the leaders live in splendor; the munitions factory owned by a church which is supposedly striving for world peace; the divisions created between family members; the deception; all of the horrors. Part of me remembered them, because I remember asking questions about what exactly the church does to make the world better, knowing that most members spend them time selling flowers. But that knowledge didn’t seem important. The people seemed good, so by association, the group did too. I had been influenced. The emotional truth was so much stronger than the intellectual one that it was the only one that seemed important.

I have mixed feelings about the use of the term “brainwashing” with regard to cult indoctrination. Because of the general effectiveness of the techniques in influencing a person’s thoughts and actions, I can understand the persistence of its use. If someone like Patty Hearst is going to be defended on such a basis, it needs to be recognized as a powerful and legitimate technique (although degree of susceptibility will vary). However, if the goal is to keep people out of cults, I am afraid the contrast between the stereotypic notion of brainwashing (which I don’t think we can escape) and the experience a new recruit has is to sharp, that people are disarmed and no longer aware of the techniques being used on them. Instead, I would advocate seeing the brainwashing process in the context of socialization. This is something with which we are all familiar and about which we hold few, if any, negative connotations. At the same time, it is something that we are aware of the power of. I would contend that the process of “brainwashing” can best be understood as an intensified socialization experience. I may be quibbling over semantics, but given the fact that the words in question are so loaded, I feel that semantics are important here. The Moonies take the raw material of our human needs – to be loved and to be accepted – and use the same techniques that for centuries cultures have used to shape individuals into members of the culture: peer pressure, reward and punishment, and the experience of being surrounded by individuals who all view the world in the same way.

My weekend with the Moonies was intended to answer some questions I had. Instead, it raised many more. The most solid thing I came away with, however, and my reason for writing this, is a new understanding of brainwashing. If we are to avoid it, we must first learn to recognize it.

__________________________________________

Geri-Ann Galanti is a medical anthropologist, and lecturer at the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. Galanti was formerly on the faculty of California State University’s Department of Anthropology and California State University’s School of Nursing, where she developed the curriculum for the BSN program’s Cultural Diversity in Healthcare course. Dr. Galanti is a consultant to Civility Mutual.

Geri-Ann Galanti

This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Journal, 1984, Volume 1, Number 1, pages 27-36.

__________________________________________

Moon’s ultimate truth is … absolute obedience – Allen Tate Wood

Video: Paul Morantz on Cults, Confession and Mind Control

#Geri-Ann Galanti #Socialization techniques #influence #FFWPU

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sending-the-message · 6 years ago

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The Red Door by CynicHappy

"Never open the red door."

I wish I could tell you the exact number of times I heard those words throughout my childhood, but math has never been my strong point, and I don't think I can count that high. It was usually my grandfather who spoke them. Sometimes my mother or father, but usually Grandpa. He was a stern Greek-Canadian man, tall and heavyset with shiny black hair and stern features. He had many rules to keep the household in check, but the one concerning the red door was by far the most important.

"Never open the red door! Don't ever open the red door. You will regret it." The intensity in his eyes as he laid down the law never failed to frighten my sisters and I. We never dreamed of disobeying him.

My family was wealthy, and lived in a towering brick manor with too many rooms. Most of the doors leading into these rooms were white; the red door was the only one of its kind. It was on the second floor, located right between the bedrooms occupied by me and my sister Callie, respectively. It remained locked at all times; Grandpa kept the key, and twice a day, he would enter the room, and after thirty minutes or so, emerge, looking pale and shaken, and brushing off anyone's enquiries about his health.

Every now and then, my sisters and I gathered up the nerve to stand outside the red door and listen while Grandpa was in there. All we ever heard were his heavy footsteps, and muttering in Greek. Whenever he caught us lurking, he would pin us with a look that made our blood run cold.

"Stay away from the red door!" he would bark, before stalking down the hall. He would disappear into his study, shutting the door behind him.

This behaviour frightened me, of course, but as I grew up, the my curiosity intensified. I simply couldn't stop fantasizing about what might be hidden behind the red door. Silver and gold. Rare gemstones. A unicorn. More candy than one girl could ever eat. Maybe the door even led to another world, like in the Narnia books. Since I couldn't question Grandpa about it without risking his wrath, however, I turned to my parents for answers.

They couldn't tell me anything either. Mum, Grandpa's only daughter, told me the red door had been off-limits since she was my age, and that her father never offered her an explanation either. Dad told me I should just let it drop. I could have screamed. I wanted to know what was behind the red door. It was an intense thirst, a desperation that felt like a raging storm in my head. There were times when I couldn't sleep at night, my mind was whirling so violently with possibilities. I knew my sisters-Callie, Gabriella, and Marguerite-were curious as well, but they did a better job containing it.

"Grandpa probably has a good reason for keeping the door locked," said Callie. "Maybe it's best we just stay away."

"No way!" I shrieked. "One day, I am going to see what's behind the red door! I don't care what Grandpa says."

I was a child, naïve and stupid. I never considered the danger, never took into account how drained Grandpa looked whenever he walked out of that room, never cared about anything but my own curiosity. I had made a vow that one day, I would see behind the red door, and I didn't intend to break it.

It wasn't until I was about eight or nine that I got a little taste of the fear Grandpa felt.

Late at night-around 11:00 PM, if I remember correctly-I woke up to sounds that made my breath catch in my chest. Loud banging that shook the walls and made me worry that the roof would cave in; shrill wailing that felt like shards of glass piercing my eardrums. Crying for Mum, I stumbled into the hall-and found my family gathered around the red door.

"Father!" Mum yelled, clutching a crying Gabriella and Marguerite to her sides. "What the hell is going on in there?" That was the first time I ever heard her swear.

Grandpa, standing tall admits the chaos, looked like he was going to keel over. His face was whiter than bleached bedsheets, his hands clenched into fists so tight it would have taken a crowbar to pry them apart. He didn't answer Mum, just slid a hand into his pocket and retrieved the key. He unlocked the red door and stepped inside.

As I had so many times before, I tried to peer around him and get a glimpse inside, but Dad grabbed me and pulled me back.

"I wanna see! I wanna see!" I wailed, more out of habit than anything else. To tell the truth, I was terrified, especially as the sounds grew louder, mixed with Grandpa's angry shouts.

"Silence, Rebecca," Dad whispered, clamping a rough, calloused hand over my mouth.

We stood there in the darkened hall, listening for what felt like hours, until the terrible noises suddenly stopped, as if sucked into a vacuum cleaner. My ears were ringing, and I was trembling like a tuning fork. Grandpa stepped out minutes later, slamming the red door behind him and locking it.

"I dont ever want to hear you girls speak about this," he hissed at me and my sisters. "Do you understand?"

We nodded. He stalked off, his head and shoulders bowed as if pulled down by a string. Mum and Dad sent us girls back to bed, but nobody got much sleep that night.

For a while after that, my curiosity was quelled, replaced by fear. I gave the red door a wide berth whenever I walked down that hall, and would hide in my room whenever Grandpa went in, instead of standing outside and listening. My sisters were terrified as well, but while my fear eventually subsided, theirs didn't.

"What the hell are you doing?" Callie snapped at me when she caught me outside the red door again. It had been four months since that terrifying night, and I was still scared, but my intense curiosity had returned.

"I want to know what's behind the red door!" I protested. Callie's anger frightened me; she was one of the calmest people I'd ever known, and rarely raised her voice.

"You're insane," she hissed. "Whatever's behind that fucking door, it's going to kill somebody. If you ever go in there, you'll never come out."

"But Grandpa goes in there!"

"He's the only one of us who can survive in there!"

I stared up at my sixteen-year-old sister in shock, wondering how she knew all this. Looking back, I realize that, being older, she simply had a better perspective on the situation. Callie was nothing if not intelligent.

Just like that, the anger seemed to drain out of her, and she wrapped me up in a hug. "Rebecca, I'm sorry. I just... I don't want you to get hurt."

I nodded against her chest, but deep down, I knew I wanted to see what was inside the room with the red door.

Many years later, I finally got my wish.

Grandpa died when I was eighteen. He simply went to sleep one night and never woke up. He had kept us away from the red door and maintained his habit of going in there twice a day until the very end, even as his health took a slow trajectory downward. He left behind the key, which I snuck out of his bedroom on the day my parents went to pick out a coffin.

By then, my sisters had all moved out; Marguerite and Gabriella were away at college, and Callie was married, with a baby on the way. None of them had expressed a desire to see what was behind the red door in a long time. But I had never forgotten my vow.

The rusted silver key felt cold and heavy in my hand as I stood before the red door, eyeing the peeling paint and worn brass knob. In the back of my mind, I could hear Grandpa chanting "Don't open the red door. Don't open the red door" over and over again; I felt sick with guilt, knowing I was disobeying him. But I couldn't turn back. Not when I finally had the key.

Holding my breath, I slipped it into the lock and turned. There was a harsh click, and the red door creaked open.

After years of anticipation, I stepped inside.

I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't what I found. Memories of all the wonderful things I'd imagined ran through my brain as I stared ahead in disbelief. I was standing at the mouth of a cave. A fucking cave. Jagged with rock, dark and gaping like a giant mouth.

"What the fuck?" I spluttered, and was answered by the red door swinging shut. I didn't even look back; I was too stunned. Slipping the key into the pocket of my jeans, I took a step forward.

The air inside the cave was hot and muggy, and I immediately began to sweat. I was still in shock as I moved deeper inside, using the flashlight on my phone as a guide. The cave floor was caked with dirt, the walls etched with deep scratches. All I could hear were my footsteps-and my own heavy breathing.

I was dreaming. I had to be. This couldn't be happening. No way. So I kept going. My logic was that if this was a dream, then no real harm could come to me.

Sweat trickled down my back in tiny rivers. It really was hot, and I kept reaching up to wipe the moisture off my forehead. I had been walking for a long time, and my legs were sore. I spotted a flat rock and sat down to rest.

My head was still spinning with confusion. I still believed I was dreaming, but this was by far the weirdest dream I'd ever had. It made no sense to me, how the red door could lead to a freaking cave, of all things. Was I underground? That made no sense, considering the room was on the second floor. Nothing about this made sense.

I contemplated turning back, to lock the red door behind me and forget about all this. But my curiosity still wasn't satisfied. I wanted to at least make it to the end of this tunnel, to understand the truth about this place and what my Grandpa had seen in here. I wanted to unlock the mystery of my childhood.

I wanted to know why Grandpa had been so adamant no one ever come in here.

As I stood, ready to continue, I cast my light across the cave floor, and spotted something that made me do a double take. Footprints. Not those of a human, however. Cloven hooves. Like those of a goat. Or a sheep. Or a demon.

You would think that I would have gotten the hell out of there after seeing that. But I still believed this was a dream, and couldn't comprehend that I was in any danger. So instead, I followed the footprints.

It had been slowly growing hotter the deeper I went, and by now, I was soaked with sweat. My clothes clung damply to my skin. Uncomfortable, I peeled off my T-shirt and continued on in nothing but my bra. The footprints eventually faded away, but I kept going in their general direction, convinced this was the right way-wherever I was going.

So dazed was I that I didn't notice the object in my path until I tripped over it.

I landed on my knees, hard, and cursed, before turning around so I could see what had been in my path. Something smooth and round, something that may have once been white, but had grown yellowed with age. I reached out to pick it up, and let out a thin shriek.

A skull. A human skull with a big crack in the front, most of the teeth missing. The empty eye sockets stared up at me, hollow and lifeless.

"Oh, my God," I muttered, letting the skull slip from my shaking fingers. "Holy fucking shit."

That snapped me back to reality. I had to get out of here. I didn't care about what might be awaiting me at the end of the tunnel-in fact, I didn't want to see it. I scrambled to my feet and whipped around, only to freeze when I saw I wasn't alone.

There was another person crouched just a few feet away. I use the term "person" loosely, because it hardly looked human. It was so wizened and bony, its pale skin hanging off the sharp bones like an oversized suit. Ragged, stringy strands of brown hair hid its face; it crouched on all fours, glaring up at me with beady dark eyes.

I don't remember screaming, but I must have, because the creature lurched back and let out a startled hiss, showing off jagged yellow teeth.

I began to run in the opposite direction, as fast as I could. Thankfully, the creature didn't give chase. But I began to hear sounds: piercing shrieks, angry growls, and the crackling of flames. I considered turning back and taking my chances with the emaciated horror behind me, but before that could happen, I saw that I was heading for the edge of a cliff, and skidded to a stop.

Falling to my knees once more, I let out a harsh, dry sob, releasing the tension that had been building inside me since I first opened the red door. The terrible noises filled my ears, louder than ever before, and I forced myself to peer over the edge.

The drop wasn't too far-only about twenty feet. Below me was a scene I can only describe as a glimpse into Hell. Perhaps it really was Hell.

At the centre of it all sat a giant goat's skull-about the size of a city bus. Sharp, curving horns the size of trees protruded from the top. There was no skin or hair attached-nothing but bare bone. The only thing alive about it was the eyeball in the right eye socket; a giant yellow eyeball with a square pupil. This horrible eye kept rolling around, staring in all directions, and every minute or so, the colossal jaws would creak open with an ear-splitting screech and release a cloud of black smoke.

Dancing around the skull were what I can only describe as demons. Some were vaguely human in shape, but with skin rotting off their bones and mouths full of needle-like teeth. There were bipedal goats with gnarled horns; monstrosities with scaly skin and spiky tails; skeletons with flames in their eyes, shrieking with laughter.

I began to cry. I was just so terrified. I wanted to run, but I couldn't move. I was quite literally frozen in fear.

Then I felt a presence. A shadow fell over me, and an angry voice boomed out.

I told you never to open the red door!

I looked up and saw Grandpa standing over me. Or, what had once been Grandpa. His skin had gone a horrible, blotchy shade of purplish-red; his eyes were fogged over with cataracts; his hair was torn out in chunks, revealing a scalp covered in crusty sores and pus-filled blisters.

"Grandpa!" I gasped.

Get out! Get out now! he screamed.

I saw the goat skull's giant eye focus on me, and the pupil contracted to the size of a pinpoint. It let out a screech that rattled my bones, that sent me stumbling back, crying hysterically.

Get out! Grandpa bellowed, waving his hands wildly. Get out now!

Somehow, I got my legs to cooperate. I stood back up and ran faster than I ever had in my life. The howls and shrieks of demons followed me down the tunnel, ringing in my ears even as the red door finally came back into view.

I slammed the red door behind me as hard as I could, locking it with the key that, thankfully, hadn't fallen out of my pocket. Then I slumped to the floor, vomited up the contents of my stomach, and curled into the fetal position, crying and trembling.

Something slammed against the door, with such impact that I went skidding forward a few feet. I sat up and watched, heart in my throat, as whatever it was threw its bulk against the red door, two more times, before giving up. Something retreated back down the tunnel, moving on all fours.

I sniffled, wiping my nose on my arm. I could still smell smoke, however faint, as it wafted through the large crack that had formed in the red door.

My parents and sisters never learned of my expedition past the red door, but I knew they suspected it anyway. How could they not, given my jumpy demeanour for the next several weeks and the heavy-duty padlock I bought?

After finishing college, I moved out of that house, married, and started a family of my own. My parents still live there, and it is now Dad who keeps the key. It is him who enters that terrible place two times a day. I don't know what he does in there, but it keeps the demons at bay.

What haunts me most about that day is seeing Grandpa in there, seeing how he looked, surrounded by those monsters. I know he's still there, and it terrifies me. My greatest fear is that Dad will end up there too. It seems whoever guards the red door is destined to be trapped behind it after death.

I often visit my childhood home with the kids; my parents adore their grandchildren. Being curious, as children often are, they have asked me many times about the red door.

I tell them what Grandpa always told me: "Never open the red door."

I only hope that they will be more sensible than I was.

I hope that they will listen.

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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myafterlifewithjarchie · 7 years ago

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Looking for a Partner in Plot

So, here’s the thing. I’ve been wanting to write fanfics since ever, but the plots I come up with are too complex and overly ambitious and I find myself unable to actually get to write anything cause I get stuck during the planning.

I’ve always been looking for collaborators to work on the plot together, but I haven’t been very successful at that either. This is why I ended up dropping one project after another, with my great displeasure since I had spent months racking my brain on certain projects.

Now I decided to give some of my fics one last chance trying to find a collaborator. In this post I’ll present an outline of the most prominent fan fiction projects I’ve been working on hoping that some of you reading this post will be interested in working with me on it.

As of now, I’m not looking for someone to actually write the fic with (although of course if you are a good writer I’ll be very happy to know that you are interested) I am looking for a partner in plotting, someone who, like me, relishes in coming up with plots, imagining narratives and seeing the connections between stories. My primary aim at the moment is to complete the planning of the plot for one of these fics. Writing will come after that.

Btw i know that some of these fandoms are long dead, but I still hold dear my fanfic projects, so I’m still very willing to work on them and give them one last shot with this post. I’m not very good at summaries, so pardon me. English is not my first language.

Now, presenting the projects (working titles):

Archie Andrews & Jughead Jones - The Great Beyond Fandom/type: Riverdale - Hogwarts AU Pairs: Jarchie (main), Beronica (side), Jughead x Jason (past) Complexity: 8/10 Progress: 5/10 Plot outline: Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica are students at Hogwarts and during their fifth year the vanishing of Jason Blossom sends the school into shock. In an attempt to solve the mystery of the boy’s disappearance they will uncover a dark secret about the Second Wizarding War and they will be faced with a conspiracy that threatens the entire wizarding world. All the while having to deal with teenage problems. In this fic we’re expanding the mythology of the wizarding world and we’ll be delving in mysteries untackled by the books. Sabrina and Salem will be prominent characters. Also the fic is set one year after the events of Cursed Child and will feature characters from it.

Life is Strange in Riverdale Fandom/type: Riverdale - Life is Strange AU - Dishonored mythology Pairs: Jarchie (main), Beronica (side) Complexity: 8/10 Progress: 5/10 Plot Outline: Jughead and Archie have grown apart the last few months, but when Jughead witnesses Archie’s death in the school bathrooms. He discovers he has time powers and uses them to save his old the best friend. However, he’ll soon realise Archie’s life is being endangered on a daily basis by some evil workings of fate and so Jughead will try to save Archie’s life time and time again. He’ll have to come to terms with the fact that his meddlings with time disrupt the reality and because of this the town of Riverdale is endangered by higher forces. Jughead’s life is soon turned upside down by Jason’s ghost, a coven of witches and goodly entities outside of time. All the while he also tries to come to terms with his feelings for his best friend and the possibility that he may have to let Archie die in order to save the town. The fic will borrow some characters and mythology from Dishonored while presenting situations similar to the ones in Life is Strange. Riverdale will provide the setting and the character. Sabrina and Salem will also be featured.

Once Upon a Time in Neverland Fandom/type: OUAT Cannon Divergence Pairs: not focus but many involving Pan, Swan Queen (background) Complexity: 10/10 Progress: 7/10 Project outline: Peter Pan is not Rumple’s father but his brother. His aim is to conquer all the realms and he needs Henry’s heart to do it. This will be an alternative story to what happened in OUAT after episode 3x08 and will see Pan as the protagonist. It will be focused on Neverland and will feature a plethora of characters and stories. It is an expansion of the OUAT universe way beyond what we saw in the show. It will follow Peter Pan in his rise to power, from his origins, when he was chosen to take over the role of Pan, the protector of Neverland, from the Pan who came before him, to when he was corrupted by darkness and started craving for more power. His search throughout the many realms for the Heart of the Truest Believer and his plans for the conquest of the universe once he got it. We will see Pan moving the island from one world to another. Then the battles for the domination of Oz, Wonderland, the Land Without Color, Atlantis and the many other realms. Pan’s fights against the Olympians and the other gods and higher powers. We will see Pan facing the eternal rivalry between magic and science in the battle against Tomorrowland. We’ll witness Pan make alliances with many villains across the lands. His plans unfolding and being defied by the Resistance of the people of Storybrooke and the other havens who stood up to his growing empire. Ultimately we’ll see Pan attempt to conquer our world, working with the power of belief. We’ll see the workings of the people trying to take him down and his eventual demise. We’ll delve in into the back stories of many characters such as Pocahontas, the Nutcracker, Pinocchio, Jim Hawkins, the Golden Fish, Dracula and lots more. We’ll expand the mythology and set clear rules to magic. We’ll discover the origins of Neverland and the first Pan, we’ll see how the forces of Light and Darkness battled for the Heart of the Truest believer since the dawn of time. We’ll also see Pan’s many love interests (he’s pansexual after all). It will be one hell of a ride, if you’ll care to bear with me.

more details here

Rise of the Nightmare King Fandom/type: ROTG sequel Pairs: Jack x Jamie Complexity: 7/10 Progress: 3/10 Plot outline: This is the story of how Jack watched Jamie grow, how Jamie grew up with the ghost of Jack but he never stopped believing in him. They eventually realized they were in love with each other and decided they wanted to be together despite all odds being against them. It’s the story of their journey seeking help from other spirits and legend (Valentine, Father Time, Mother Nature, and other characters from the Guardians of Childhood), looking for a way for a spirit and a human to be together. This is also the story of how the boogeyman played Jack and Jamie and got them apart while he restored his power and took over the world.

Descendants - A Prologue Fandom/type: Descendants prequel Pairs: not focus Complexity: 3/10 Progress: 8/10 Project outline: This is supposed to be a short narration in which I tried to come up with an explanation as to why the land of Auradon came to be. Explaining how Auradon looks the way it does today. A mix of concepts from OUAT and Kingdom Hearts in an attempt to give a shred of plausibility to the world of Descendants. Honestly what the creators should have come up with to legitimize their world in the Disney canon but didn’t.

If you are interested in any of these projects you can contact me and let me know if you want to take part to the plotting or you can ask me any info you need. If you’ll decide to work with me i’ll let you know all the details about the plot so far.

Anyway, if you like my concepts, you can show your support with a like or a reblog, this way i’ll have a better chance at finding a partner in plot!

Contacts: you can message me on tumblr, skype ([email protected]), email ([email protected]), hangouts ([email protected]),

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writefasttalkevenfaster · 7 years ago

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Nick Amaro / Strange Bedfellows (Part One)

Part Two

As per @yesthemaggot‘s request: Prompt: Imagine if you were Nick’s childhood best friend, and you meet Sonny who you end up kissing and falling in love with, leaving Nick with unresolved feelings for you. But then, months later, you show up at Nick’s door, crying that Sonny had cheated on you.

Wooo! This was fun to write. I started writing this and immediately realized this was going to be waaaaay too long to be one fic, so I split into parts. I’m still working on part two at the moment, but I hope to have it out later tonight. Enjoy!

Nick Amaro was nothing, if not loyal. He was dedicated to his work, helping to put away criminals guilty of some of the most heinous crimes; he was a loving father to his daughter and son, always there for anything they needed; and he was supportive of his friends, always supporting them in whatever choice they made, even if he didn’t always agree. However, it was a double-edged sword. There were times where he wished he wasn’t such a bleeding heart. It often interfered with his work, caused problems with his family and friends, and made him too soft. But when you showed up his doorstep crying, his heart didn’t just bleed, it broke.

You had been his childhood best friend, growing up beside him, throughout his father’s abuse of his family and himself. At the age of eight, he had found himself defending you from bullies pulling on your braids and who had stolen your purple lunchbox. He got beat up pretty badly during that tussle, but he managed to get your lunchbox back for you. He handed it back to you, as you cried, before you threw your arms around him and hugged him tightly. As thanks, you had taken him to your house to your mom, who fixed him up before dropping him home. After that, the two of you were inseparable.

But times then got rougher for Nick. Your house had been become a refuge for him, a place he could run when things at home became too hard. You would call him and stay on the phone with him while his parents fought. You would take him in anytime, day or night, even you had to sneak him in. You would spend the night comforting him, and wiping his tears. But then the day came when his mother moved him and his family to Florida to escape his father. Nick never had gotten to say goodbye to you, and he never did see you again. You did cross his mind from time to time, he even considered trying to find you through social media, but he always never did. There was a part of him that was afraid that you wouldn’t want to even see him again. The boy who had abandoned you without an explanation or even a goodbye.

That was, until, you walked into the 16th precinct behind Barba, and headed right into Liv’s office where Nick was speaking to his Lieutenant. Your hair wasn’t in twin braids anymore, but rather it was straightened and brushed against your shoulders. Your pink shirt and blue overalls had been replaced with a sharp, black coat and pencil skirt. And, instead of a purple lunchbox, you had a leather brown briefcase bag. But Nick would know that face and those big, brown eyes anywhere. Nick immediately stopped what he was saying, staring at you, as you rifled through your bag before looking up at him. You wrinkled your brow in confusion at his stare, before your eyes widened. “Nicky?”

After the meeting you four had, Nick invited you out for coffee to catch up. He took you to a shop around the corner from the precinct sitting across from you in disbelief. He kept staring at you, to which you smiled. “Cat got your tongue?”

He shook his head. “I just can’t believe I found you, Y/N.”

You quirked an eyebrow. “More like I found you, after all I walked into your precinct.”

His lips curled into a grin, “How do you know I didn’t plan it like that?” You laughed, and Nick felt a rush of nostalgia. Though your voice had changed, with maturity and age, your laugh was still as carefree as he remembered. “What have you been up to, Y/N?”

After catching up for an hour, it was time for Nick to get back to work, and you joined him, walking him back into the precinct. You made plans to meet up again tonight, to finish catching up, of course. You walked side by side with him, and he couldn’t help but smile at you. “Are you protecting me now?” Nick quipped, hoping to hear your laugh again, but you only chuckled.

“Yes, you only have a gun, I have motions and briefs. I can bore anyone to death!” You exclaimed, as you held the door open for Nick, before turning to leave. That’s when you realized something. You turned back towards the door, pulling it open, while you dug through your purse for a business card. “Nicky, I never gave-” You walked right into someone, almost tripping over yourself, but two long arms steadied you. You glanced up, staring into the smiling, friendly face of Dominick Carisi Jr. At a loss for words, you stuttered an apology and greeting, as Nick watched you from two feet away, walking over. He watched the two of you interact, trying to keep a neutral expression on his face.

Carisi was introducing himself when Nick walked over (“My name is Dominick Carisi Jr., but you can call me Sonny.”), and Nick waited, wanting to know what you had come back for. “You work for Barba? That’s incredible. I’m actually going to night school at Fordham, I hope to work in a D.A.’s office one day.”

Nick’s hands were in his pocket, waiting for you to realize he was there. He cleared his throat. “Y/N,” You shook yourself out of your stupor, turning to Nick. “Did you forget something?”

“I forgot to give you my number, so we can catch up.” You realized you were still holding the business card. Nick took it, sliding it between his fingers to allow reveal a duplicate behind it. “Oh shoot, I gave you two.”

“I’ll take the other, if you don’t mind,” Sonny interrupted, smiling like an idiot, Nick noted with a hint of annoyance.

“Carisi, don’t-” You waved Nick off, much to his surprise.

“No, Nicky, it’s fine.” You stared up at Sonny with a smile. “I look forward to working with you…Sonny,” Sonny practically grinned so wide, Nick was surprised it hadn’t fallen off. “And Nicky, I’ll see you tonight at the bar?” With that, you bid the two of them goodbye, leaving Sonny in a cheerful mood, and Nick in a bad one. He didn’t know why it bothered him so much that you were interested in Sonny, but you had just come back into his life, and he wasn’t sure whether he was ready to share you.

After work, Nick headed to the bar you two had agreed on to meet up at. He spotted you at the corner of the bar, and you waved him over. You were wearing the same skirt and blouse, but no jacket. Your hair was tied up, and you looked tired, but when you spotted him, you brightened immediately. Again, Nick found himself smiling and laughing for the first time in ages. You were still such a comforting presence, it almost felt like nothing had ever changed.

“Nicky,” You were a few drinks ahead of him, a bit drunk. “When you disappeared all those years ago, I thought I’d never see you again.”

“I know, I did too,” He brushed his hand against yours, and you giggled. He smiled at your behavior, becoming more self-assured and then resting his hand over yours. “I wouldn’t have ever guessed you would become a lawyer like Barba,”

You rolled your eyes. “Rafael is a bit uptight, but he’s a good guy. I can tell you two don’t get along. Too much testosterone.” You concluded, to which he raised an eyebrow. You giggled once again. “How about you and Carisi?”

“Why do you want know about him?”

“I don’t know,” You took another drink. “Just curious.” You quickly changed the subject, and the two of you continued to enjoy each other’s company. Nick realized he had finally gotten his best friend back. But that’s when his phone rang. You shook your head, telling him not to pick up, but he wasn’t that drunk. He picked up, it was Liv. They had caught a case, and she needed him down at the hospital ASAP. He hung up sighing. “I have to go. We caught a case. Liv is coming to get me. It should only take about an hour. I’ll ask Liv to take you home,”

You shook your head, seeming soberer now than before. “No, it’s okay, Nicky, go. I’ll call a cab or an Uber or something. Go.”

He hesitated, but then his phone started dinging again. “Are you sure?” You reassured him that you would be fine, and would text him when you got home. Right as he left and got into Liv’s car, he spotted a familiar figure walk into the bar; it was Carisi. Nick always regretted that he didn’t get out of that car and just take you home at that moment. But he didn’t, and he let it happen. And then, when you showed up at his doorstep, crying about Sonny, he realized that his bleeding heart had let someone else’s break as well.

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arplis · 5 years ago

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Arplis - News: How a Dangerous, Exploitative Railroad Industry Created J.P

Morgan’s Fortune Before the Jupiter of Roman myth could become king of the sky and thunder, he had to overthrow his father in a mighty battle. Not so for the Jupiter of Wall Street. J.P. Morgan had trusted his father to set him on the right path and steer his career, and even when his father was overbearing, Morgan never mounted a challenge. The creator of the biggest companies the world had ever known was, himself, very much the creation of paternal influence. The young Morgan, once established, proved instinctively suited to the times in which he lived. It was an era of raucous, unfettered competition: chaotic capitalism that he would try to order. John Pierpont Morgan was born in April 1837 into a wealthy family and inherited his father’s European connections and tastes, along with part of his fortune. He grew up in the river town of Hartford, Connecticut, a thriving center of trade and, by necessity, insurance. John preferred to be called Pierpont, though schoolmates nicknamed him Pip. As the eldest of five and the only son to live past childhood, he was also entitled to a lifetime of moral education and cautionary advice from his father, Junius, and continual redirection when he strayed. His mother, Juliet, was troubled by depression and lived at a sullen remove from the family. She once scolded Pierpont for writing home too often. Pierpont suffered physically as a child. For months before and after his first birthday he was so frequently overcome by convulsions that his parents feared he might not survive. In adolescence, he missed school because of sore throats, headaches, earaches, boils on his face, and ulcerated sores on his lips. When Pierpont was fifteen, his father sent him to the Portuguese Azores, hoping the warm climate would cure his rheumatic fever. He stayed there, with only a family friend and a doctor to check on him, for four months. Junius moved Pierpont into and out of boarding and public schools—transferring him nine times in thirteen years—without explanation. Pierpont didn’t complain. He was an indifferent student in most subjects other than math: “full of animal life and spirits . . . and not renowned as a scholar,” one classmate later described him. Pierpont sought order in the only ways he could. He collected and organized, first stamps and autographs of Episcopal bishops and then his own accounts. When he traveled, he noted the latitude of his destination and the time of his arrival, and wherever he was he kept a leather-bound journal of daily expenses: paper and postage, ice cream and strawberries, beaver hats, silk gloves, buggy rides, opera tickets. In 1854, the family moved to London after Junius accepted a partnership in the British office of the premier American private bank, run by George Peabody, to help direct European capital to the United States. Junius would one day take over, and he hoped Pierpont would do so after him: a Morgan dynasty. Pierpont was seventeen. He had graduated from the English High School of Boston, which specialized in math, and was eager to begin his career. But Junius wanted him to learn French and German and enrolled him at a school near Lake Geneva. Pierpont considered the accommodations too sparse and the studies uninteresting. “Adapts himself very slowly . . . Answers back . . . sulky,” the headmaster wrote of the new student. Outside the classroom, he was happier. He enjoyed the camaraderie of the other American students and soon made himself their unofficial leader. If they went on an expedition, he planned it; if they hosted a party, he arranged it. Taking charge would become a lifetime impulse—one, though, that Pierpont would have to curb around his father for years. At the University of Göttingen, where Junius sent him next, Pierpont was such an exceptional math student that his professor thought he could one day join the academy. Neither Morgan considered that a suitable career path. The possibilities for making a name and a fortune were so extravagant and, initially, the oversight so minimal that railroads naturally attracted uninformed investors and unscrupulous brokers. In 1857, Junius arranged a first job for Pierpont, as an unpaid clerk at a New York investment firm linked to his. It specialized in financing the railroads eager builders were haphazardly laying across America. The industry was all raw hustle. Lines overlapped each other or ran parallel, creating a tangle of tracks of different widths and trains running on different time clocks. Operators constructed as much as they could afford and then stopped, requiring passengers to regularly switch cars to complete their trips. When Abraham Lincoln traveled from Springfield, Illinois, to New York in 1860, he had to change trains four times (and take two ferries) over the course of four days. Pierpont moved into the city’s most fashionable neighborhood, around Union Square, and lived comfortably on the two hundred dollars his father sent every month. In exchange, Junius expected Pierpont to ignore the chance to make a quick profit in the stock market. But there were many chances. When Pierpont bought shares in a steamship company benefiting from a large government subsidy to carry mail, Junius disapproved. “Bring your mind quietly down to the regular details of business,” he advised. Pierpont was to become a banker beyond reproach, trusted to handle other people’s money and not speculate with his own. “Never under any circumstances do an act which could be called in question if known to the whole world,” Junius wrote. Integrity would give the Morgans a competitive edge in America. After Pierpont served as an apprentice for two years, Junius decided his son should resign. The firm’s partners praised their clerk’s “untiring industry,” and suggested he would be even more successful if he approached colleagues with “suavity and gentle bearing” instead of impatience. Pierpont, recipient of regular job evaluations from his father, graciously accepted this one. He may also have been distracted. He had fallen for Amelia Sturges, known as Memie, a bright, well-read, high-spirited member of his social circle. They planned a rendezvous in Europe that autumn. On their way home, Pierpont moped when the ship’s captain seemed to take an interest in Memie. “One of my friends very blue all day. Disappeared from dinner very suddenly,” she wrote in her diary. “No cry of Man Overboard so concluded he was all right.” They were engaged in August 1860. That November, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and within half a year, the North and the South were at war. But Pierpont was happily preoccupied by Memie and the autumn wedding they were planning. He didn’t even mind that Junius hadn’t found the right firm for him yet. He tried some freelance work instead, helping to finance a controversial deal to supply the ill-prepared Union Army with five thousand Hall carbines, refurbished rifles left over at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Pierpont didn’t see the sale through but earned a generous commission for his efforts. A congressional committee called the entire transaction profiteering. The Supreme Court didn’t. It ruled the government had to pay as promised, twenty-two dollars for each altered rifle originally priced at $3.50. More troubling for Pierpont, Memie had taken ill with a severe, lingering cough. A week before the wedding, she was still unwell, vomiting and sleeping badly. She looked so thin that she decided to keep a veil over her face during the entire marriage ceremony. It took place in her parents’ Manhattan home at ten in the morning on October 7, 1861, in front of a small group of friends and family. Two days later, the newlyweds left New York for a European honeymoon. The couple consulted specialists in Paris, who determined Memie had tuberculosis: cause unknown, cure undiscovered. Pierpont didn’t share the diagnosis with Memie, only the doctors’ recommendations, which included rest and warm air as well as turpentine pellets, cod liver oil, and donkey’s milk. Nothing helped. Not the roses and geraniums he brought or the apples he roasted, not the nightingales and canaries that sang in their hotel room. By December, Memie was too weak to stand. Pierpont asked his mother-in-law to cross the Atlantic as soon as she could and meet them in Nice. Memie’s father had come to regard Pierpont as a hypochondriac and thought he might be exaggerating the danger of her condition, but he sent Memie’s mother and brother over in January. After they arrived, Pierpont relented to pressure from Junius and traveled to London to discuss business. By the time he could wrest himself away ten days later, Memie was much worse. She threw her arms around him when he arrived at her bedside, and just that took all her energy. Morgan’s days came to be consumed by the railroads: a sprawling, overextended, indebted industry that was growing with careless speed and changing everything it touched. Pierpont stayed close to her throughout the day. At eight thirty the next morning, he was called from his bedroom to hers. She died moments later. They had been married four months. Back in New York, Pierpont formed a business partnership with his cousin and hoped “constant occupation” would keep him from dwelling on his grief. His loss hung on him, and so did his regret. No one blamed Pierpont for failing to save Memie—except for Pierpont himself. His gaze intensified, his hazel eyes seemed to darken, and his constitution weakened again. In the days following her funeral that spring, sores appeared all over his body, a mild form of smallpox, and once he recovered, headaches would sometimes overcome him. Throughout those months, and for many afterward, Pierpont stayed in touch with Memie’s parents and held on to her Bible. He acquired his first oil painting, of a fragile young woman, and hung it over the mantel in his library. He read poetry about lost love. The Civil War provided opportunities to trade foreign exchange and new government bonds, and, eventually, offer railroad financing. But Pierpont exhausted himself and suffered new breakdowns of his nerves and body. “I am never satisfied until I either do everything myself or personally supervise every thing done even to an entry in the books,” he wrote to his father in September 1862. Those periods of helplessness were also the only times when the pressure from Junius let up, and Pierpont was forced to relax his own exacting standards. His vigor returned by the next summer, and on behalf of his father’s firm and his own, he was issuing short-term loans, brokering securities, and financing commodity trades. That year, he, like many men of means, paid a substitute three hundred dollars to take his place in the army. He went on to earn fifty-eight thousand dollars from his firm. Lincoln’s salary that year was twenty-five thousand dollars. Pierpont supplemented his salary by manipulating the market for gold. He and a friend created an artificial shortage by shipping gold they had bought on credit to London. When prices in America went up, they sold, and each took a profit of sixty-six thousand dollars. Other Wall Street brokers admired the scheme. Junius was furious, believing Pierpont had been reckless and greedy and had violated the Morgan code of conduct. Junius at first threatened to cut professional ties, then decided instead to arrange for a senior partner to join his son in New York. For much of the next two decades, Pierpont would have to be the junior. In March 1865, as the world watched the war draw down, Pierpont proposed to Frances Louisa Tracy. She was twenty-two; he was close to twenty-eight. They lived in the same neighborhood, worshipped at the same Episcopal church, occupied equally comfortable positions in Manhattan’s social hierarchy. Fanny, as she was called, enjoyed attending the opera and concerts with him, and he enjoyed the idea of being married again. The nation was still in mourning for the slain President Lincoln when, on May 31, Pierpont and Fanny wed at St. George’s Church. She gave birth to their first child, Louisa, nine months and ten days later. They had three more children over the next seven years: John Pierpont Jr. (who always went by Jack), Juliet, and Anne. Fanny, too, could be overwhelmed by melancholy, but while Pierpont craved work and social distractions, she needed quiet. She wanted to move to the suburbs of New Jersey. He told her he couldn’t survive there. Eventually, they began to create separate lives for themselves in different homes, cities, sometimes continents. By 1871, a new national optimism had taken hold, a confidence in an expanding economy of steel and oil and electric power, of perseverance and luck. It was a time that Mark Twain would soon call the Gilded Age. Americans paid to hear a lecture titled “The Aristocracy of the Dollar,” and Walt Whitman was paid one hundred dollars to compose “Song of the Exposition” in celebration of the country’s industrial strength. John Sherman, a Republican senator from Ohio, wrote to his brother, General William Tecumseh Sherman, of how the wealthy “talk of millions as confidently as formerly of thousands.” With the massively popular serialized novel Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s fictions of social mobility made it seem as if anyone who worked hard enough could elevate themselves. Personal thrift for some; stock market speculation for others. Pierpont grew weary amid this thronging hopefulness. He was so strained by his dealmaking and worn out by his perfectionism that he wanted to retire at age thirty-three. His father refused to let him. Instead, Junius allowed Pierpont to take his family to Europe for a year. When he returned, Pierpont started a new partnership with Anthony Drexel, head of a prominent Philadelphia banking family. Drexel, who was twelve years older than Pierpont, had a reputation sound enough to satisfy Junius. Drexel’s name came first at the firm, and Junius still held sway, but Pierpont was permitted to manage the New York office. He had more authority than he was used to, which allowed him to reveal his vaulting ambition. But Drexel, Morgan & Company it was for the next two decades, until Drexel died and Morgan renamed the firm. Drexel set Morgan up nicely. He paid more than $900,000, in gold, for several lots on Wall Street. Number 23 sat at the intersection with Broad Street across from the New York Stock Exchange, and when Drexel purchased the land in 1872, no comparable property in any city in the world had been sold for more. The six-story building was known simply as “the Corner.” It was constructed with white Vermont marble, a grand mansard roof, and statues representing Europe and America above the main entrance. Its interior was finished in black walnut and mahogany, with marble floors, steam heat, and, after Morgan financed Edison’s electric company, six hundred lightbulbs. It was among the first buildings to be illuminated entirely by electricity. The firm rented out office space on the upper floors, and several railroad companies relocated their headquarters to take up residence there. Morgan’s days came to be consumed by the railroads: a sprawling, overextended, indebted industry that was growing with careless speed and changing everything it touched. It absorbed more money, mostly from European investors, than any enterprise before and more natural resources than any other in America. Some 170 million acres of the country’s public land would become the private property of the railroads, given, not sold, to them. Lincoln hoped transcontinental railroads would be a nation-building project after the Civil War. For every mile of track laid, the government awarded companies 12,800 acres, along with a bonus: any coal or iron underground. Railroads relied on the labor of Chinese immigrants in the West and Irish, Italian, and Greek immigrants in the East. They first brought Scandinavian immigrants to the Midwest, then Eastern Europeans. The cars carried citrus, timber, cotton, grain, gas, pigs, cattle, mail, and mail order catalogs across the country. They advocated for public schools to create a ready supply of clerks. Their need for precise train schedules helped standardize time itself. Railroads altered the geography of opportunity. Their lines determined which towns became impoverished and which prospered. Billings, Cheyenne, Tacoma, Reno: these were not places that would have otherwise attracted populations of any size. The companies’ shipping rates, adjusted as owners saw fit, influenced the economics of small and big businesses. They handed out free passes to the politicians they hoped to sway. The railroads had a greater impact on people’s well-being than the government, and though Americans might not have liked that feeling of dependence, they had to live with it. The possibilities for making a name and a fortune were so extravagant and, initially, the oversight so minimal that railroads naturally attracted uninformed investors and unscrupulous brokers to take advantage of them. They sold overpriced stocks and bonds to build lines with little prospect of success. Owners bribed politicians, bought off journalists, pushed aside Native American tribes, and dismissed environmental concerns as a matter of business. Safety precautions were especially lax. Tens of thousands of railroad employees died or ended up mangled every year. “It was taken as a matter of course that the men must of necessity be maimed and killed,” wrote one railroad commissioner hoping to improve that record. Many of the railroads were built cheaply. Repairs weren’t timely. Lines ran in both directions on single tracks with rudimentary signal systems. Men had to climb on top of freight cars traveling 20 miles an hour to activate the hand brakes. Then they had to jump to the next car to do it again. If the train lurched, they could tumble to the ground. A low overhead bridge could knock them out. Men linked or unlinked cars by maneuvering in between, and inevitably some fell underneath. In Winona, Minnesota, one day in February 1873, E. Campbell, the engineer on a passenger train, didn’t sound the alarm or apply the brakes when he saw a freight train on the tracks. The trains collided and both engines were smashed. Campbell jumped off in time. But J. C. Reilly, the baggage master, was badly burned when he fell onto the stove. Conductor Arthur Lindsley lost his right arm after he was run over by a freight train at Janesville, Wisconsin, in April of the same year. Fireman R. Brown was killed in an accident at Vincent Station, Ohio, in July. In November, an employee named Amandas Hagerty was bent over the track repairing a switch at the Mauch Chunk station in Pennsylvania on a Wednesday afternoon. Maybe he heard the No. 4 passenger train backing in. Maybe he didn’t. But he didn’t have time to escape. Two wheels severed his body, and he died immediately. The mere fact of working on the railroads shortened a man’s life expectancy. But if a brakeman or switchman or fireman proved himself and managed to avoid injury, he figured his job was secure. Then, in 1873, one of the Morgans’ most prominent American rivals, Jay Cooke and Company, went bankrupt. Cooke, who had assembled his own army of agents to sell government bonds across the Union, was known as the financier of the Civil War. Afterward, he turned his considerable talents for promotion to the railroads. He would finance the construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad, meant to traverse the sparse, frigid lands of Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Cooke promised a temperate climate, tropical vegetation, and a broad fertile belt “within the parallels of latitude which in Europe, Asia, and America embrace the most enlightened, creative, conquering, and progressive populations.” Instead, the land through which the Northern Pacific would pass was disparagingly called “Jay Cooke’s banana belt.” When wheat prices fell and farmers failed, trouble followed for Cooke. He couldn’t find enough buyers for one hundred million dollars’ worth of bonds. His firm went under, and the shock set off a series of bank failures that caused a panic on Wall Street and shut down the stock exchange for ten days. Banks collapsed. Businesses failed. People lost their savings and their homes. By 1876, an uncounted number of adults were unemployed and underemployed, and tens of thousands roamed the country looking for food and work, sleeping in police stations when they could. The railroad men’s expectation of lifetime positions was revealed as empty hope. Some tried to leave the country. Two hundred or so accepted work building a railroad in Brazil. After their ship sank off the coast of North Carolina, hundreds of other desperate men applied for the jobs. The Long Depression ground on for six years, contributing to an international financial crisis. European investors lost six hundred million dollars in American railroad stocks. It was a scare for the Morgans. Pierpont’s health faltered; he stopped exercising. Friction in the office sank him lower. Amid the dreariness, he tried again to retire in 1876, and, failing to secure permission from his father, left for a summer abroad that lasted until the following spring. In July 1877, firemen and brakemen in Martinsburg, West Virginia, walked off the job in a spontaneous protest against the second wage cut in a year by the Baltimore & Ohio. Railway workers across the country joined them, stopping train traffic in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago. They took control of switches, uncoupled rail cars, blocked trains, and set fire to railway buildings and bridges. Breweries and flour mills idled in St. Louis. Banks closed. Bridges burned. In Pennsylvania, anthracite coal miners stopped digging. The railroads oversaw the mines and transported the coal. “Bread is what we are after and, sir, we have not had enough to keep our families from suffering say for nearly two years, and it is written that man should not live by bread alone,” one miner told the governor after being granted an interview in his private rail car—an unusual gesture of conciliation. But to no avail. Coal fields flooded and steel mills shut down. Executives called on state officials for help. “There are two military companies at Martinsburg, armed and supplied with ammunition,” the governor of West Virginia replied to a Baltimore & Ohio vice president. But the local militia sympathized with the strikers. The governor called for federal intervention. “Please send in addition 100 men and two pieces of artillery,” he said in a telegram to the secretary of war. The military campaign against Native Americans out west had sapped the Army’s coffers. Pierpont—whose firm held almost a million dollars of the Baltimore & Ohio’s short-term debt, while his father’s firm held another four million—offered to lend the federal government money to pay Army officers. The military moved into the cities, subdued the streets, and took control of the railroads and mines. Pierpont assessed the credit risk. The Baltimore & Ohio’s losses required it to take on longer-term debt, which he knew would be a hard sell. Instead, he and Junius organized a banking syndicate to buy and hold the railroad’s bonds until circumstances changed. “Affairs for a time looked very critical and gave me much anxiety for many days and nights,” Pierpont told one of his father’s partners that August. It took years to sell all the bonds. More than one hundred thousand workers around the country protested that summer of 1877. One hundred were killed and a thousand jailed. The public called it a rebellion; the government called it a riot. Later, it came to be known as the Great Upheaval. In November, the country’s business and political elite set aside any lingering worries and came together at Delmonico’s Restaurant on Fifth Avenue to commend Junius for upholding the nation’s credit and “honor in the commercial capital of the world.” That capital was still London. The Morgans had become trusted advisers on both sides of the Atlantic, just as Junius had wanted. “A kind Providence has been very bountiful to us,” Junius said. “And under this guidance, the future is in our own hands.” By the 1880s, business was humming again. The railroads comprised 80 percent of the listings on the New York Stock Exchange, brought in revenue about two times as great as the federal government’s, and added an average of seven thousand miles of track each year. They couldn’t all survive. But in their construction, promotion, and dissolution, they provided possibilities of all kinds. When William Vanderbilt wanted to secretly sell shares in the railroad his father, Cornelius, had built, Pierpont helped. Vanderbilt’s nearly exclusive ownership of the New York Central was becoming a liability, likely to provoke either new restrictions or taxes. He wanted to avoid both. Pierpont persuaded the British investors he and his father had cultivated to buy the shares and give him the voting power, which meant he could take a seat on the company’s board. He made half a million dollars in the process. Pierpont’s firm had also made a killing easing the Long Island Railroad into and out of bankruptcy. His most conspicuous deal involved helping sell forty million dollars’ worth of Northern Pacific bonds in November 1880 so the company could lay down the final sixteen hundred miles of track required to reach the Pacific. It was the largest railroad bond offering in the country to date. Before the Panic of 1873, Jay Cooke’s aggressive salesmanship on behalf of the Northern Pacific had helped inflate the railroad bubble in the first place. Now Pierpont was reaping the rewards. The Northern Pacific would become pivotal to his ambitions—and his conflict with Roosevelt. New York thrived too. Plans were set for the city’s most expansive apartment cooperative, a twelve-story redbrick Victorian Gothic pile on West Twenty-Third Street, with the top floor given over to artists’ studios. It would be the tallest building in the city. (Later, it would become the Chelsea Hotel.) The Brooklyn Bridge was almost complete after more than a decade under construction. Luxury department stores opened on Broadway, and carriages lined the streets of Ladies’ Mile. Morgan’s share of his firm’s profits was eight hundred thousand dollars in 1880 and nearly one million the year after. He acquired his own notable address at 219 Madison Avenue, in a neighborhood where he already knew everyone. The brownstone was renovated to his uncompromising requirements: walnut doors at a new entrance on Thirty-Sixth Street; a stainedglass dome and stained-glass sliding panels opening onto the front hall; twin white oak staircases; a two-story safe in the butler’s pantry. The mansion was the first private residence to rely completely on Edison’s lights. Morgan installed a private telegraph wire connecting the house to 23 Wall Street. The telegraph was meant for business but proved useful at other times, including when he accidentally locked the family’s French poodle in the wine cellar and carried off the key. The drawing room took up the entire west side of the house, with a ceiling painted to look like a mosaic. The library was decorated with octagonal panels of allegorical figures representing History and Poetry, painted by Christian Herter, the premier interior designer of the time. On the shelves were Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy from 1621, a copy of the John Eliot Indian Bible from 1663, sixty-six volumes on Napoleon and His Generals, and hundreds of other leather-bound treasures. Morgan wanted the best of everything—“Nothing but masterpieces,” a friend said. “And he can afford to have them.” Morgan devised a plan whose legality might have made others hesitate, but he was willing to take the risk. That year, Morgan also purchased his first yacht, Corsair. It was a 185-foot black-hulled steamer, the largest and most technically sophisticated in the country. His close friends began to call themselves the Corsair Club and Morgan himself the Commodore. During summer weekends, he would steam up the Hudson to Cragston, the country estate near West Point where his family lived in the hot months. There he maintained kennels for his show dogs, collies mostly; he liked to give their puppies as gifts, but only to those he held in the highest regard. On Sunday evenings he and his guests slept aboard the yacht so they could get under way at daybreak. By the time they arrived on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, a hearty breakfast was ready. As they finished, around nine, a launch pulled up alongside Corsair and everyone went ashore. Morgan’s carriage waited to take him to 23 Wall Street. He worked on the ground floor, in an office with glass walls, at a large desk, plain and businesslike. He kept the door open. Sometimes he could be seen swinging in his pivot chair, if anybody dared look. He usually had a long cigar, banded in gold, often unlit in his mouth or in his left hand. His Chesterfield topcoat and silver-tipped mahogany walking stick were set aside. Mr. Morgan, as everyone called him, attended to matters large and small: the daily flow of cash and accumulation of debt, the stream of potential dealmakers and advice seekers. He would concentrate intensely, maybe for a few moments, maybe for more, then arrive at a decision, dispatch instructions, and move on. That focus was his genius, but it was the genius of a monarch not a democrat. It kept him isolated, made him severe, and sometimes left him exhausted. Morgan said he could do a year’s work in nine months, but not twelve. His impatience could be withering. When a church organist gathered the nerve to ask a favor, Morgan gave him a minute. “I’m struggling to . . .” the man stammered. “So am I,” Morgan supposedly replied. “Keep struggling. Good day.” Then he walked back to his desk. Morgan became more than a banker in the 1880s. His transformation wasn’t gradual, it was absolute, and it happened in a day. Morgan worried that European railroad investors were wearying of American imprudence, of accounting fictions and expensive rivalries that wasted their money. He made up his mind to remedy some “sore spots” in the industry. One of them ran right past his summer home. The West Shore line had been built to compete with the New York Central, operating parallel to it from New York City to Buffalo on tracks close enough to be visible. There wasn’t enough freight traffic for two lines, though, so each reduced rates until the West Shore was insolvent and the Central was heading that way. Morgan devised a plan whose legality might have made others hesitate, but he was willing to take the risk. He invited the railroad executives onto Corsair and didn’t let them off until they came to an agreement to end their hostilities. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get any more money from him. They ate a lovely lunch and smoked cigars as they sailed to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, then up the Hudson to West Point, where they could view the military academy high on the bluffs, and back again. “You must come into this thing now,” Morgan said to the lone holdout, and then said little else. By day’s end they had a deal. The Central would buy the West Shore out of bankruptcy. In exchange, the West Shore owners could buy from the Central’s owners a line in Pennsylvania to combine with the one they already operated there. Because such a monopoly was unlawful in Pennsylvania, Morgan would step in as a proxy buyer. That didn’t fool everyone. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court eventually ruled against the merger, but by then the rivalries between the railroads and the men had dissipated. Each had been able to raise their rates, and their stock prices and dividends soon followed. Only their customers paid. Morgan continued to apply his remedies, and to be strained by his work. As he reached age fifty, even his father warned him to slow down and stop responding so intensely to every entreaty, however desperate. (“Let the ‘small fry’ go to some other Doctor,” Junius said.) But the business community had come to believe that Morgan was indispensable. He was seen as the one man who could convince antagonists to cooperate. Even though they didn’t always heed him, he would continue trying throughout the next decade. Morgan sought money and its rewards—the homes, the yacht, the art—but as America’s economy expanded, he sought something bigger and more fundamental, too. He wanted to rationalize the free-for-all of capitalism—to make it orderly and concentrated, directed from above by the powerful men who, he was certain, knew best. __________________________________ From The Hour of Fate by Susan Berfield. Used with the permission of Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2020 by Susan Berfield. #TheHourOfFate #NewsAndCulture #Politics #Railroads #Features

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wawerrell · 5 years ago

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Nana

I lost my grandmother early in the morning on New Year’s Eve. Nana was loving, funny, and intelligent; she taught me how to read and how to love reading; she took me in her arms when I was upset; she showed me time and time again that I would never defeat her in Scrabble; she forgave me even when I did not deserve it; she stayed up past midnight to say, "Hey, Teach!" and enjoy champagne with me when I got my job. She changed the lives of those whom she met and loved and made me the person I am today.

She was my best friend.

Nana loved being a mother, a grandmother, and—as of just a few months ago—a great-grandmother more than anything else in the world. As we gathered by her bed and held her hand as she began to let go, “To the Lighthouse,” one of her favorite books, seemed to sing from the shelf. Nana’s writing adorns the opening page. She remarks how the book improves upon each reading, and then writes: “Philosophy is what we don’t know, want to know, tried to know—but only God knows.” Flipping through the worn pages, I traced her annotations throughout Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. It is clear and unsurprising that Nana loved Mrs. Ramsay and Lily, for she connected with so many of the women’s interior monologues about emotional understanding and frustration. More than any other, though, one early passage stands out. Unlike many other passages with marginal explanations, Nana underlined and starred: “She would have liked always to have had a baby. She was happiest carrying one in her arms.” Just a few days before she died peacefully in the early morning, Nana held her first great-grandchild in her arms and laughed: she was happier in that moment than she had been in a long while.

Nana paused over—and could not find words for—a passage in which Mrs. Ramsay reflects on why children grow up so quickly, on why they seem so determined to rush toward the trials and pain that come with age, on how she wishes she could freeze time to protect them from the vicissitudes of fortune. I remember how clearly Nana echoed both the wishes and the frustrations of Mrs. Ramsay when Yaya, my mother’s mother, was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer: “Sugarfoot, I wish I could take all the pain and the sadness for you—I wish that I could shield you from loss. But I can’t. Because that’s life.”

Nana knew that life and love lead inevitably to death and loss. But she also knew what we can learn from “To the Lighthouse”: not just that life and death, like love and loss, are inextricably bound together, but that, more importantly, loss and continuity coexist within our hearts and memories. Love has within it the power to defeat time. In one of my favorite poems, John Donne reflects on sickness and death:

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown That this is my south-west discovery, Per fretum febris, by these straits to die,

I joy, that in these straits I see my west; For, though their currents yield return to none, What shall my west hurt me? As west and east In all flat maps (and I am one) are one, So death doth touch the resurrection.

His doctors surround his bedbound body and map out his ailments like constellations across the cosmos—and all see that his sickness points toward the setting of the sun in the west as surely as the North Star guides sailors at night. Donne reminds us, though, that flattened maps are misleading: for the further west one goes, the sooner one arrives in the east. Just so, he writes, death does not mark the end of love, but the continuation of it.

Like the effervescent Mrs. Ramsay, who dies suddenly and unexpectedly and unexplainedly in the middle of the night, Nana has died. And like Mrs. Ramsay, Nana will never really be gone. For, just as Arthur Hallam speaks once more to Alfred, Lord Tennyson as the poet turns over an old letter from his dear, dead friend, Mrs. Ramsay appears to Lily in a moment of sublime love and memory:

“Her heart leapt at her and seized her and tortured her. ‘Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!’ she cried… Mrs. Ramsay—it was part of her perfect goodness—sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat.”

Nana will be a wonderful part of all of us forever. Near the end of her life, Nana told the loving family gathered around her bed: “It’s time for me to go home.”

“Home” probably resembles her enchanted childhood, for the love that she gave us was the love that had surrounded and defined her life: not a day of her young life went by without visits from and to doting uncles, caring aunts, trifling cousins, and those familial taskmasters who never let little hands sit idle. Nana was the second child of Lee Roy and Alberteen, who had three daughters and one baby boy, John Leroy, whom the girls simply adored—and spoiled. From her father, Nana received a twinkle in her eye that never dissipated. Family meant everything to him, a trait that he passed on to his own children and grandchildren. From her mother, a gifted schoolteacher, Nana learned to love literature and poetry. Nana admired her mother’s intellectual curiosity, which had often landed her in hot water as a young girl “working” on a ranch: Teenie loved to read, but simply hated to churn butter. Teenie would spend all morning reading in the light of dawn, but always with open ears: whenever she heard somebody coming, she would hide the book under her apron and start churning away.

Many of Nana’s fondest childhood memories were of her visits with her own grandmother, a great student of the Bible named Zemma Yett. “Oh, here are my girls!” Grandmother Zemma would cry whenever Nana showed up with her sisters, Billie Marguerite and Nora Lanelle. Evenings on the screen porch were filled with the nighttime sounds of Texas and Zemma’s intonations of Scripture. For much of Nana’s childhood, Zemma read by the light of a kerosene lamp—until one day, when Nana watched from her lap as President Roosevelt’s trucks wove electrical wires throughout sleepy Florence, Texas like thread through a loom as part of Rural Electrification.

Nana grew up in a Texas that no longer exists: a verdant and lush place defined by neighborly care and compassion. Texans of all backgrounds came together around the porch of her father’s grocery store, the gathering place for the neighborhood. As the sun went down, neighbors would sit around and tell stories or listen to the radio. Nana recalled with pleasure the excitement of the entire town listening to the bout between Max Schmeling and Max Baer—and remembers how the town would grind to a halt whenever Joe Louis, “the best of all,” stepped into the ring.

But with World War II came rationing, the end of the family grocery, and loss: two of Nana’s cousins joined the Air Force but did not live to see peace. Any romanticizing of war a young girl might come to believe in in the shadow of the Alamo died alongside Edwin and Charles, who loomed in Nana’s memory as the handsome man with shining cowboy boots and jodhpurs—not as the bloated body that washed ashore when his plane went down. Nana, Billie, and Nonie spent afternoons anxiously awaiting the local newspaper’s updates of war casualties and kept tearful track of the losses in their yearbooks. But the dark clouds of violence across either ocean brought Nana closer to literature and poetry.

Literature brought with it both balm and escape, and, at college, Nana fell feverishly in love with Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She studied those Victorian works alongside Professor A. J. Armstrong, the head of the English department at Baylor, and became his academic assistant. Annotations in her neat-yet-illegible cursive sprawl across every single page of her textbooks; when space proved too tight for all she felt about her favorite poem, “Pippa Passes,” she inserted additional leaves.

She was working for the newspaper on a story about Christmas celebrations for soldiers when she interviewed about the handsomest man she had ever laid eyes upon: James MacDonald Werrell, who, forty years later, would be called Papa. Papa had returned to Texas, where his father was stationed at Fort Hood, to recover from a debilitating injury received during the Battle of the Bulge and to finish college. Although they fell for one another quite quickly—he was charming; she was witty—Jim fell out of touch over the Christmas holiday. Lee Roy did his best to comfort Nana, but she was broken-hearted.

And then, at long last, the phone rang. Nana gleefully accepted Papa’s apology—he had been on vacation with his parents, who, being nearly as cheap as he was, would not tolerate a long-distance telephone call no matter how in love he claimed to be—and hung up the phone in the kitchen only to find that her father had disappeared. Her mother stood next to the pantry door with her ear flat against it. As Nana walked toward her, she, too, heard her father’s crying: “Don’t worry, sugarfoot,” Alberteen whispered to her daughter, “Daddy just knows you’re going to be married now. He doesn’t want you to leave.”

They were married on December 20, 1947 and honeymooned in San Antonio in Papa’s yellow Jeep. Papa’s parents were not at the wedding both because they were stationed in Paris and because there was little love lost between in-laws: Angus Werrell was a Colonel in World War I, while Lee Roy had been a private. “It’s no man that blows a whistle,” Lee Roy remarked about commanders who stayed behind in trenches and sent men over the top and to their deaths. When Papa finished his studies at Baylor, he and Nana worked as fire lookouts in Colorado parks before going on a second honeymoon to visit his parents in Europe.

Nana saw many of the most beautiful sights in the world for the first time, while Papa saw them again, but in a vastly different light: with no heavy rifle, no wet socks, no constant vigilance or fear. Nana and Papa, alone in the Sistine Chapel for an hour, lay down on the floor to look up at the ceiling, then illuminated only by candlelight. They held hands through the streets of Paris and enjoyed picnics throughout the Austrian countryside—except when Jeanne, Papa’s sister, packed the food and placed the ham next to the petrol tank in the trunk of the car.

Nana continued her love affair with the world of art when she and Papa moved to New York City upon their return to the United States. In particular, Nana found herself under the spell of Bidu Sayão’s voice. Growing up, she had only ever heard the voice of Amelita Galli-Curci on the wind-up Victrola at her grandmother’s house, and so nothing prepared her for the clarity and beauty of the soprano singing Mimi in “La bohème,” Gilda in “Rigoletto,” or songs of her native Brazil. Papa’s days were filled with classes at the Columbia School of International Affairs, during which time Nana combed the hallways of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his evenings were dedicated to practicing his German nightly with their landlords, Josef and Emma Ledwig. But Nana, a natural learner, picked up the language faster and more fluently than Papa; more than seventy years later, Nana could still recite Goethe’s “Der Erlkönig” from memory.

Papa joined the State Department following his graduation—work that brought Nana and Papa and their first baby, James MacDonald Werrell, Jr., then just a few months old, to what was then called Siam. While Papa conducted spook-work, Nana walked baby Jamie hurriedly away from prowling Varanus monitors, visited temples, and became the most frequent customer at C. J. Chan & Co., an English bookshop in downtown Bangkok, where she discovered the works of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Upon their return to the United States, two sons—William Gresham Werrell, my father, and Timothy Savage Werrell—shortly followed their older brother into the world. And that was just the beginning of her adventures.

Nana lived to be so old in large part because she stopped driving. Like my high school English teacher Mrs. Chanson and so many other Southerners, Nana did not drive well, but instead casually: she did not always bother to open the garage door before reversing, for instance. While this might seem to suggest that she was just another little old lady from Texas, Nana was a political firecracker. She named her favorite dog, a territorial Jack Russell, after Lady Jane Digby, whose sex life created diplomatic tidal waves across two continents. She hated Viagra commercials with a passion because she believed they promulgated unhealthy and misogynistic views of sex: “They imply that it’s all up to the man: as soon as the man is ‘ready,’ one is supposed to drop everything one is doing to accommodate him. But what if I have a casserole in the oven?”

Indeed, one of the drawbacks of living for close to a century, Nana remarked this past Christmas, was that she had lived long enough to grow ashamed of Texas: her heart broke watching the most violent and vituperative voices attempt to speak for Texas and redefine Texan values. She loved her little brother so much that she could tolerate his support of Nixon—even when her sons and husband could barely stand to be at the dinner table with him. But politics changed, and so did her patience. Because nothing was dearer to Nana than her family, she knew in her heart that children belong in the arms of their loving family—not in cages. She could not abide hatred or vitriol; she could not understand why anyone would knowingly embrace cruelty, ignorance, or bigotry.

Driving to Charleston after leaving her now-empty home, I remembered the weeks she spent living with us and sleeping in my bedroom. We both kept one another awake with chatter and with snoring. During those late nights—Papa was in the hospital at the VA, reliving the Battle of the Bulge over and over again—we looked up at the phosphorescent stars on my ceiling and talked about school, books, friends, Papa, and memories.

I’ll always hear her voice.

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rememberstilinski · 8 years ago

Text

saudade || stiles stilinski

word count: 3075

warnings: major character loss

prompt: none

author’s note: double post! beware, the feels may get to you.

masterlist

For people memories come and go. Most of the memories that left were good ones. Somehow the bad always stayed with a person. Y/N had one terrible memory. It had no chance of fading or being lost somewhere inside her head. For the aftermath of the memory left her in such a terrible place, that it made a permanent scar on her heart.

Y/N remembered the day she lost Stiles Stilinski. It may have been better if they just broke up. At least he would still be here. Y/N was strong. She always had been. Being a teenager in a supernatural world was always going to end with tragedy. Y/N knew that from the start, but she didn't admit it to herself until she lost Stiles. Until Stiles died.

Stiles and Y/N were practically joined at the hip. They started out as childhood best friends that eventually grew into something more. Something more beautiful. It was a kind of relationship meant for the pages of a novel or movie screens, it seemed like a fairy tale. Their relationship was something so beautiful and unreal that it was rare. They loved one another more then they could fathom into words or actions. That only made losing him worse.

Losing Stiles was like a piece of herself. Y/N had nightmares for months, all about Stiles and how she found his body. She would have to scream herself awake every night. Each night she hoped Stiles would be there to hold her and tell her it was all just a bad dream, that he was okay. Y/N just wanted to keep calling his name until he came back home. Then reality would hit her at four o'clock in the morning and she remembered that he was gone. And he wasn't coming back.

Weeks of these these terrible encounters turned into months and months eventually became a year. When Stiles died, Y/N didn't dare stay in Beacon Hills. Right after his funeral, Y/N fled Beacon Hills and moved to Italy, hoping a change of scenery could save her. Each day she thought of Beacon Hills and all the people she'd left behind. Scott, Lydia, Malia. She left them all and didn't even say goodbye. Y/N cut off all ties with them and she hated herself for it. But being with them reminded her of him.

After a year of staying from that small supernatural town, she knew she had to go back. It just felt like it was time. It was time to see her parents, her friends, Stiles’ father. She owed them an explanation. Over the next few weeks, she booked a trip to Beacon Hills. She made reservations at a hotel and used some money in her bank account to fly herself out to California. Y/N didn't have the phone numbers of anyone she'd been friends with so she didn't know how to reach them, which meant she wouldn't be telling anyone of her arrival.

The only phone number she knew was Stiles’. She knew it by heart. Y/N had to get a new phone many times because it was always broken after a supernatural encounter so she'd use a payphone to call Stiles. She hadn't called it since that day. The day he… died. Granted, she thought of it many times, but she never called it. When the day came for her to go to Beacon Hills, she did call the number. She just wanted to know if it was out of service.

Picking up her phone, she dialed the phone number she would forever remember. 555-6208. She held the phone up to her ear and she took a deep breath. It rang a few times, until the voicemail came.

Y/N’s eyes watered as she heard his angelic voice. “Hey, it’s Stiles! Sorry I couldn't get to the phone, my wonderful girlfriend had my full attention so I didn't hear the ring. I'll get back to you later!” And then it was cut off. Slowly lowering the the phone from her ear, tears rolled from her eyes. She hadn't physically heard his voice in so long, but sometimes she could still hear it in her head.

It was finally time for Y/N to leave her small apartment and go to the airport so she could make her way back to Beacon Hills. A year ago, Y/N would've said home. But to her, Beacon Hills was not home anymore. No house could ever be home, no town could ever be home. Her home was Stiles and it would always remain that way.

She arrived at the airport and boarded the plane. The whole ride was a total of thirteen hours. During the flight, Y/N was anxious. Her stomach erupted with butterflies and as she got into the states, her head began spinning with possibilities. Would everyone be mad? Would they be hostile towards her? Were any of her friends even in Beacon Hills anymore?

After the plane landed, Y/N called a taxi and it drove her to her hotel. She decided to hide out for the rest of the day and recover from the jetlag. The next day she would go into town and find someone she recognized. Throughout the rest of her day, Y/N thought about where she would go tomorrow. Everyone had graduated besides Liam and his pack, so she didn't know where to go. It was summer break so maybe Scott and the rest of the pack were home.

The next morning she got up and got herself ready for the day. Not fully prepared to see everyone after so long, but she knew it's what was best. Y/N made her way to Scott’s house because she wanted to see him first, see how he was doing. Even after a year, she still knew where to go and what streets to take that would get her to the house she spent a lot of time in.

The familiar house came into view as she pulled into the driveway. The dirt bike was still there, but a car was parked next to it. Maybe it was Melissa's. Y/N took a deep breath and got out of the car. She walked up the pavement and up the steps. When she got to the door, she rose her fist to knock. She hesitated before taking another deep breath and tapping her knuckles on the hard surface.

A few seconds later the door opened and there he was. Scott McCall. He had a smile on his face when the door opened, but when his eyes met with Y/N’s it faded. Y/N worried that this might have been the wrong idea.

“Oh my god.” Scott mumbled. Before Y/N could say anything, Scott pulled her in for a hug. “Where have you been?”

Y/N didn't hesitate to wrap her arms around Scott. “It doesn't matter.” She said.

They pulled away and Scott looked at her in awe. “I'm so happy to see you, come in.” Scott opened the door wider and Y/N walked in, looking around and seeing how nothing really changed.

“Would you like anything to drink? Water, tea, coffee?” Scott queried, running his palms over his jeans.

Y/N shook her head. “No, I'm good. Thank you though.”

“Let's sit?” Scott offered. Y/N nodded and they both sat down on the couch.

“So, how have you been?” Y/N asked awkwardly.

Scott furrowed his eyebrows and nodded. “I've been good. Busy with school.”

“That's nice. Where'd you end up going?”

Scott grinned. “UC Davis.”

“Scott, that's amazing! I'm proud of you.” Y/N smiled.

“Thanks.” Scott scanned her features. “You look tanner. Where have you been?”

Y/N looked at her fingers, her favorite ring still on her finger. “Italy. Particularly Rome.”

“Rome?” Scott exclaimed, his bright smile on his face. Y/N nodded with a soft smile. “That's a lot of pizza.” He mumbled.

Y/N giggled at Scott’s expression. “There's more Italian food than just pizza. There's lots of pasta and rice dishes. I really like risotto.”

“Risotto?”

“It's a classic in Italy. It's made with rice, butter, cheese, stock, and wine.” She nodded.

“Sounds good. You'll have to make it for me sometime.” Scott insisted. The light mood suddenly got a little heavy.

“How have you been?” Scott asked sincerely.

Y/N sighed and looked back at her hands, playing with her fingers. A habit she picked up from Stiles. Whenever he was nervous or thinking about something, he would close his eyes and wiggle his fingers or just look at the lines and that would lead him to some type of conclusion. “I've been.” Was all she said.

“You kind of just left. We were all worried about you.” Scott said softly.

“I couldn't stay here, Scott.” Y/N shook her head.

“I get it. We all do.” He rubbed her back.

“What about Lydia and Malia?” She changed the subject and looked at the boy sitting next to her.

“Lydia got into MIT.” Scott chuckled.

A smile grew on Y/N’s face. “I'm not surprised.”

“As a junior.”

Y/N’s eyes widened. “Wow. She really is a genius. What about Malia?”

“Malia is at the community college. She was really excited about it.”

“That's good. Do you know how I could get a hold of one of them?”

“They're actually both back for the summer. I can give you their numbers.” He offered.

“That would be great.” Scott did as he said and gave her the phone numbers. They talked for a little longer and Y/N made her way to Lydia’s house.

She saw Lydia’s car in the driveway as she parked. Y/N made her way to the door and knocked. Lydia's mom, Natalie, opened the door. “Y/N?”

“Hi, Mrs. Martin.” She waved. Mrs. Martin smiled and called Lydia down the stairs.

“Lydia, there's someone here to see you!” She called out. Footsteps came down the hardwood stairs and Lydia popped in the doorway, eyes widened when she saw Y/N.

Lydia automatically pulled Y/N into a hug and Y/N wrapped her arms around her. “You're back. Oh my god. I've missed you!”

“I missed you, too, Lyds.” Y/N murmured and buried her face into Lydia's neck.

“Does Scott know you're back?” Lydia asked as she pulled away. Mrs. Martin had disappeared into the kitchen while Y/N and Lydia hugged.

“Yeah, I just came from there.”

“Well, let's do something? Coffee, lunch?” Lydia offered. Y/N nodded.

“Let's invite Malia.”

Lydia called Malia and plans were made to meet up at a small café not too far from the Martin house. The two drove in separate cars and met up at the small restaurant. Lydia didn't tell Malia about Y/N being back, but she did say she had a surprise.

Lydia and Y/N sat a table in the corner and waited for Malia to arrive. When she did, her eyes trailed over the room, looking for a strawberry blonde. Malia spotted her and saw the person next to her.

“Y/N?”

“Hi, Malia.” Y/N smiled.

“When did you get back in town?”

“Last night.” Y/N told her.

Malia smiled and hugged her friend. “It's good to see you.”

Y/N was happy that not one of her friends was hostile towards her because she left. They all greeted her with open arms and they were all relieved to see her in such great condition. The three girls sat at the table and talked for hours.

Lydia talked about some guy she'd met at MIT, who was just as smart as she was. He seemed perfect for her and Y/N was glad to hear such a thing. Lydia deserved all the happiness in the world.

Malia told Y/N about her life in college and she really enjoyed it. Malia had grown closer with Peter, which took Y/N by surprise, but made her happy nonetheless. Seeing that all her friends had done so good and kept themselves together gave her ease knowing that all the terrible things in their life didn't slow them down.

After Y/N had met up with Lydia and Malia, she went to a small shop that made plaques. It wouldn't take long to make so she waited a couple hours.

She knew the exact picture she wanted on the plaque and the exact words engraved on the plaque. Once it was finished, she paid for it and then went back to her hotel. Y/N placed the plaque on a table in her room and got ready for bed.

The next morning, she got ready for the day and grabbed the case the plaque was in, then drove until she reached her destination. Turning off the car, she grabbed the plaque from the passenger’s seat and opened the case so she could look at it.

A soft smile grew on her face as she looked at the picture and read over the quote. It was perfect. Y/N got out of the blue rental car and walked into the sheriff’s station. She went to the front desk and greeted the secretary lady. “Hi, can I speak with Sheriff Stilinski?”

“Of course, he's just down the hall, dear.” The older woman smiled. That was surprisingly easy, but she shook it off and walked through the station. Nothing in town had really changed. Everything still seemed so familiar. The station was even the exact same. The same busyness swarmed over the station and the desks were in the same spots.

Y/N remembered her and Stiles would come in here all the time with a lead on something. Sometimes they would have lunch or dinner here with Stiles’ father. All the time they spent here were full of joyful memories. She arrived at Sheriff’s office and the door was open. She knocked lightly on the window and sheriff looked up from his stack of paperwork.

When he saw who was at the door, a smile grew in his face. “Hey, Sheriff.” Y/N said as she walked in.

“Hey, Y/N.” He stood up and walked around his desk, over to Y/N. She set the black case down on his desk before he could hug her. He pulled her into a welcoming hug, that made her feel content. “Your know, I get flashbacks when you walk in here and say that. Good ones.” Sheriff said as he pulled away.

Y/N exhaled the breath she'd been holding in. The two sat down. Sheriff took a seat next to Y/N instead of sitting behind his desk. “How are you doing?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that.” Sheriff sighed.

“Well, I hear you've been a rock for everyone. I know that that means sometimes you don't get to grieve for yourself.”

Sheriff Stilinski nodded. “I'm okay… I mean, I'm, I'm really not okay, but, uh, yeah. I'm-I'm okay. More importantly, how are you?”

Y/N sighed and she could feel the stinging sensation of tears in her eyes. She shook her head as she spoke. “I have no idea.” She let out a trembling sigh. “I talk to him a lot. I can still see his face and hear his voice so clearly.”

“Do you think that I'll ever forget it? ‘Cause I'm afraid that one day I will.” She looked down and closed her eyes. Her chin trembled as she spoke and she looked as if she was about to cry. And she was. She was on the edge of breaking down.

“What do you talk to him about?” Sheriff inquired. His voice was soft, as it usually was.

“I mean when we were dating, it was pretty much him talking all the time and me just pretending to listen, so it's a big change.” She said.

Sheriff chuckled. “Yeah, that boy loved to talk.”

“I had it all planned out.” Y/N sniffled. “I was going to make it big on Broadway. Maybe do a Woody Allen movie. And then when we were ready, I would just come back. He'd be working here with you.” The tears rolled down her cheekbones as she laid out the picture and saw the image in her head.

Y/N looked at the door to Sheriff Stilinski’s office. “Then I would walk through that door and I would just say, “I'm home”. And then we would live happily ever after.”

“That's a good plan.” Sheriff agreed. “Did you ever tell him?”

Y/N shook her head. “I didn't have to. He knew.” She gave a brief smile.

“And, now what?” He pondered.

“I don't know, something different.” A stray tear fell down her cheek, leaving a wet mark in her soft skin.

“Maybe something better?”

Y/N swallowed the lump in her throat. “I, just… I don't think that that's possible. He was my person.” She touched her chest and felt the necklace that Stiles had gotten made for her when her and Stiles were dating. It was his name, written in silver cursive.

She wiped away her tears and continued speaking. “I didn't know if I'd ever be able to step into this town again. It just doesn't feel right without him. Now I know that I can, but I can't stay here. I didn't plan on it and I still don't.”

Y/N grabbed the black case and set it in front of her on the desk. “I know that there have been a lot of memorials for him, but I had this made and I was hoping that we could put it up here, in the station.”

Taking off the lid, she pulled the plaque from its case and Sheriff Stilinski looked over her shoulder so he could see what it looked like. It had Stiles’ senior picture on it and the years of his birth and death. It had a small quote that he said underneath the years and it made the sheriff chuckle.

“Did he really say that?” He asked with a smile on his face.

Y/N giggled. “Stiles was the most sarcastic person I knew. He said this one night when we were on a supernatural search and it kind of stuck with me.”

“I'm 147 pounds of pale skin and fragile bones. Sarcasm is my only defense.”

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pariiahs-blog1 · 6 years ago

Text

— ✧ MICHAEL TREVINO ?? no, that’s just ALEXANDER DAVID XANDER SOLIS !! he’s the TWENTY NINE year old son of ROBERTO “ROBBIE” REYES, and is, in addition to being a SOUS CHEF at peach and pomegranate, a member of CAFETERIA STAFF at paragon academy. i hear he’s STEADFAST & BENEVOLENT, but tends to be ALTRUISTIC & FOOLHARDY. his file says that his ability is COOKING A PERFECT SOUFFLÉ ( WITH A PREDISPOSITION TO GAINING A SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE CURSE ). his stats page can be found HERE and his pinterest board can be found HERE.

be careful with that one, love he’ll do what it TAKES to survive.

SECTION ONE OF TWO: BULLET POINT HISTORY trigger warnings for talk of child neglect throughout & drug mentions

there isn’t actually much to xander’s life so this time when i tell u that i’ll be short and sweet, i rly will be.

four years prior to xander’s birth, robbie reyes and carla solis met, fell in love, and conceived their first child and xander’s older brother, tentatively named zachary ( because i’ll be sending in a wc soonish and don’t want to keep those details set in stone ). their relationship was amazing at the start, okay in the middle, and disastrous, when it came to an end. carla didn’t like to be tied down, never had, and having both a committed boyfriend and a baby sort of did that. luckily for her ( not so much, for him ), robbie having to deal more and more with the consequences of selling his soul meant that he, eventually, became something of a danger - and one night while he was gone, she took their son and hightailed it out of east los angeles. they relocated to a small town somewhere in new york, and half convinced his ex had done the right thing, robbie never came to visit - though if he had, he would have known about their second son, born a few months later, and christened alexander david.

he dropped the first part of his name pretty early in life, coming to be known as XANDER ( or xand, to a very select few ).

carla solis wasn’t cut out for motherhood. she never really had been. kids were not something she had factored in to the whirlwind life she had imagined for herself, and her relationship with robbie had been an unexpected sidetrack. she LOVED her sons. she really, really did - but she never really cared for them, and she never learned to factor what they needed or wanted into the equation. xander grew resenting his father, a man who didn’t even know he existed, for his apparent abandonment - and he learned to resent his mom, too, for her constant neglect. she was never present, one foot in the door, one foot out, and zachary became his primary caregiver.

three years after he was born, carla met the next love of her life - and after another kind of whirlwind romance with the man that later became her husband, she packed up their stuff and moved them all again, to grand rapids, michigan, where they moved into a nice suburban home. to the outside, they’d gained a lot in this move. a father figure, a big house, money, for the first time in both their short lives. but they’d lost a lot, too. carla might have had some attention to spare for them, at one point, but her focus was now solely on being a TROPHY WIFE. she and her husband, brian ( a generic name for a generic man ), were very caught up in living their best lives and making sure their neighbours and “friends” knew about it. zach and xander had babysitters to take care of them. and so did their younger sisters, when they came along - nadia, four years xander’s junior, and sofia, a year younger than her - but they didn’t have their parents.

xander started acting out right around the time that sofia was born. he was kicked out of the fancy playschool that he’d been enrolled in for being an absolute terror, and kicked out of the first elementary school he was enrolled in for the same. he was only five, six, seven, and his mom was never really present and his stepfather didn’t much care for him, and he didn’t know how to deal with the emotions brought on by either of those things in any sort of productive way. he was full of anger, and as a child, that manifested in those bouts of rebelliousness, extending from trouble at school to trouble in the neighbourhood as he started fighting with the kids his age and keying cars of their fancy next door neighbours.

he was kicked out of his second elementary school, and a month later, brian and carla’s marriage crumbled. neither of those things are related - but one night, after they had moved away and into a new home, carla got drunk enough that she told him they were. he’s never forgotten.

they moved around a lot for the next few years, and xander didn’t have much of a chance to cause more trouble. neither did zachary, for that matter - though his older brother had always been more reserved than he was, anyway.

when i say “the next few years” - read it as the next five. they only stopped after they moved to paragon when xander was 12, and it was only then because that year, zachary ran away. he was almost seventeen, and he’d spent most of his life taking care of his younger brother and their sisters. he was older than he should have been at an age where his only focus should have been school and girls, and in the middle of the night, he disappeared. carla got worse, after that - and the responsibility of taking care of the girls fell onto xander’s shoulders.

he tried to fight that, at first. family was everything, but xander wanted more - he had dreams of becoming a tv chef, and marrying his childhood sweetheart, a girl named ruth who still holds half his heart. but as he learned, the hard way, life doesn’t give you what you want. carla started to disappear for weeks at end right around the time he graduated from high school - and the girls needed him. his life had to be put on hold, for a while, and he thought it’d get right back on track, but instead, it unraveled completely.

working as a dishwasher in a diner in town, he didn’t make enough to support the family - so he started to deal as a way of paying the bills. he kept dealing, cause he realized that with the money he made would put nadia and maybe even sofia through college. he kept on keeping on, because he thought maybe, just maybe, it’d get him his dream, too. wrong - after years of putting up with it, and hoping that with her presence she would eventually put him back on the right track and they would get married, maybe start a family of their own - ruth left, after realizing that wouldn’t be the case. she broke his heart.

it was late - WAY TOO LATE, to bring her back - but xander realized soon after that he had strayed pretty far from a good life. he decided to get clean and stop using himself, and he also decided that dealing wasn’t the answer. he cleaned himself up, for the girls, for himself, and he got himself a better job ( TWO better jobs, after his sisters school started looking for cafeteria staff ), and he’s doing better. he really is. but he’s lost a lot of time. and he’s not exactly sure where he can really go from here - so life’s a little up in the air right now, BUT, xander’ll make it work. he always does.

SECTION TWO OF TWO: HEADCANONS

xander first met robbie when he was a mouthy eighteen year old who didn’t know just how much he had to lose. he didn’t want anything to do with him, then, because he was a tough boy with a hidden heart, and he made that abundantly clear. it took a while, but they met again when xander was twenty five - and now, their relationship can be described as STRAINED, but a little bit better. now that he’s a bit older, with a better worldview, xander can see there’s a lot he never knew, and a lot more he’ll never understand. robbie isn’t a bad guy. in fact, now he doesn’t hate his guts, xander can see how SIMILAR they really are in their views, especially when it comes to family and taking care of them - but it’ll be difficult for a while. nothing’s ever easy.

he hasn’t seen his older brother since the day he left, and frankly, he doesn’t want to, either. as far as xander is concerned, zachary is DEAD. a bit dramatic, but also, in his eyes, fair.

he was, in the words of percy jackson, a troubled kid. he did some STUPID shit. getting involved in any sort of way with drugs speaks to that well enough, but he was also just... terrible, when it came to things like property damage and whatnot. he had a lot of anger that was very pent up and he directed it in the wrong places - but at least xander can say that he’s always been, at his heart, a good guy. he treats the women in his life with the utmost respect. he’s loyal to his bros, and the only fist fights he ever had were for other people’s honor. he did the wrong things for right reasons, and made mistakes, just like anyone. but he was never a dickhead. that, he can say proudly.

he’s ! a ! good ! chef ! it needs the explanation marks, cause it’s important. he’ll succeed. i love him for it. this is where his passion lies, and he has real talent. he might be stuck in the cafeteria for now, but someday, he’s gonna own some real top notch restaurant. mark my words.

the girls live with him, now! they didn’t, at first - he got his first own place when he turned 20, but he didn’t have much room for lodgers, so it took moving into some place bigger at twenty four for them to be able move in. nadia is doing law at paragon, and sofia is pre-med. they’re gonna be really great, successful women, and he’s so proud of them.

#「･ﾟ ♔ ･ * few can resist a bad boy that’s a very good man ― alexander david solis. 」#sidekick.intro

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