#he's the kind of guy to carry a conspiracy board in his pocket to explain his passions to you

[adair-the-bard]

William Salisbury (he/him)

Couldn't decide which version of him I liked better, so here are both. He is the same base, just with really different aesthetics.

[antoine-roquentin]

Perfect equipoise: a perfect fantasy. A more realistic American tableau was unfolding in Chicago, where the conspiracy trial was at its entropic height.

During jury selection, the questions the defense wanted the pool to be asked included “Do you know who Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix are?” and “If your children are female, do they wear brassieres all the time?” In a pretrial hearing Judge Hoffman described the “intent” standard by which the defendants were to be judged: “The substance of the crime was a state of mind.” (That was just the way Time had defined Middle America: a state of mind.) To that standard, the defense was glad to accede. When the twelve jurors turned out to be middle-class and middle-aged, except for two girls in their early twenties, Leonard Weinglass, the lead defense attorney, moved for a mistrial, claiming his clients weren’t being judged by a jury of their peers—which would have to be chosen also from people not drawn from the voter rolls, because blacks, the young, dropouts, and misfits were not well-enough represented on them.

The government had selectively indicted to display a cross-section of the monstrous personages rending the good order of American civilization: the older guru (David Dellinger); two long-haired freaks (Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin); the by-any-means-necessary Negro (Bobby Seale); two SDS militants (Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis); two radical young faculty members (a chemistry professor, John Froines, and a sociology professor, Lee Weiner, who were supposed to have planned a bombing). The prosecutors warned on TV that the defendants might walk into court the first day naked.

That didn’t happen, though when court adjourned on New Year’s Eve defendant Froines and his girlfriend did pass out autographed nude posters of themselves.

The jury was sequestered every minute they were outside the Federal Building: if states of minds were on trial, even the cultural air was prejudicial (some stories they missed: the Mobilization, the Silent Majority speech, the Moratorium, the rise of Spiro Agnew, the second moon shot, the My Lai massacre). They received a respite from cabin fever the day after Christmas when they were treated to a Disney on Parade show. But even that was prejudicial: the monkeys in the Jungle Book number were go-go girls. Alice in Wonderland was done up in psychedelic patterns.

Jerry Rubin called his indictment “the Academy Award for protest.” Judge Julius Hoffman seemed to relish the notion. “Tell me something,” he asked New York Times reporter Tony Lukas, who had called up to ask for press credentials. “Do you think this is going to be the trial of the century?”

Outside, trial marshals confiscated spoons, books, compacts, nail clippers, attaché cases—and two pistols. Defense sympathizers waited half the night in line for a spot in the gallery; the judge gave seats instead to Chicago socialites (one hippie who survived the gauntlet leapt up in the spectators’ gallery during a defense argument to cry “Right on!” and was swarmed so badly a witness thought marshals might have broken some bones). When Bobby Seale’s family managed to get seats, Judge Julius Hoffman summoned a marshal and had these strange people with bushy Afros removed. The jury wouldn’t be able to watch his child’s and wife’s reactions when Seale was bound and gagged like a slave. They weren’t there on November 5, 1969, either, when Judge Hoffman sentenced Seale to an unprecedented four years in prison for sixteen counts of contempt of court and severed his case from the rest, turning the Chicago 8 into the Chicago 7. Reporters made a mad dash for the phones. The courtroom marshals unpinned their badges, put them into their pockets, and scoured the jammed courtroom for anything else sharp, fearing an outbreak of hand-to-hand combat.

The next day a defense lawyer argued the four-year sentence was illegal and asked the judge to explain himself. Judge Hoffman replied, “I have known literally thousands of what we used to call Negro people and who are now referred to as black people, and I have never heard that kind of language emanate from the lips of any of them.” That was the day Bob Hope sent out his letter to senators “FOR A WEEK OF NATIONAL UNITY.”

Judge Julius J. Hoffman was a strutting, little bantam cock of a man. On the first day of jury selection he read out the indictment to the jury pool like a nineteenth-century thespian. Defense lawyer William Kunstler objected. Judge Hoffman boomed, “Motion denied!” and said he’d never apologize for “the vocal facilities the Lord hath given me.” When one of his young law clerks was told to prepare a denial of the defendants’ motion to see the wiretap logs and replied, “But, Judge, that’s not fair,” citing the plain letter of the law, the old man flew into a rage that awed his clerk—who was told not to return to work after his vacation.

Federal judge selection was supposed to be random. But in Chicago, the fix was always in. In big mob cases, the state always angled to argue before Judge Hoffman: he always decided against the defendant and made the prosecuting attorneys look like heroes. He “is the bane of do-gooders who would give every bum a second chance, and a third and a fourth and a fifth,” Chicago’s American said. He was also a self-hating Jew who took willful pleasure in mispronouncing his fellow Jews’ names (Weinglass: “Fineglass,” “Weintraub,” “Weinruss,” “Weinrob”) and wouldn’t let one witness wear a yarmulke in court (“Take off your hat, sir”). He popped a vein when Abbie Hoffman called himself his “illegitimate son,” but hated David Dellinger (“Derringer,” “Dillinger”) most of all: he was a WASP who’d surrendered privileges the judge so dearly wished to possess. Hoffman was especially taken aback when one of the defendants informed him that the plaque for the Northwestern Law School classroom named after him had been ripped from the wall.

“The plaque?”

“Apparently while the board of trustees feels affection for you, the student body does not.”

The defense was determined to put the war on trial and the defendants’ lifestyle on proud display (the Boston 5 had “sat like good little boys called into the principal’s office,” Dr. Spock had pointed out, and were railroaded nonetheless). The Chicago defendants were determined to show why their state of mind was morally superior. The seventy-four-year-old they called Mr. Magoo was a hanging judge, hired to grease the rails for a conviction that would only be overturned on appeal. It was a show trial. So why not put on a show?

The prosecution presented its case first. Their witnesses were undercover infiltrators. Once, when a witness was called just as one of the defendants exited a side door, the rest of the Chicago 7 braced themselves: was one of their own a police spy? (Actually, he was just going to the bathroom.)

One prosecution witness was simultaneously a member of the executive committee of Veterans for Peace, the Chicago Peace Council, the New Mobilization Committee to End the War—and the Chicago Police Department Red Squad. The people most useful in the movement, radicals often learned too late, were the ones later revealed to be spies; being paid for their time by the government, they were the most avid “volunteers.” Another had enrolled in the Northeastern Illinois State College SDS and had led a group that pushed Northeastern’s president off a speaker’s platform. (The most militant activists, radicals also discovered too late, were often police-agent provocateurs.) He testified that Rennie Davis said their plan to recruit for Chicago was to “lure them here with music and sex”; at the meeting where he claimed he heard that, he himself had suggested disabling army jeeps with grappling hooks. A third prosecution witness was a college newspaper reporter hired as a spy by the Chicago’s American columnist Jack Mabley. A fourth had worked as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin’s dirtbag motorcycle-gang “bodyguard.” A fifth was a policewoman who’d dressed for her work in Lincoln Park every day in white hippie bell-bottoms carrying a .38 Colt in her bag.

This witness, Officer Barbara Callender, testified blushingly, “Every other word was that F-word.”

Cross-examination: “Haven’t you ever heard that word in the station house?”

The government objected to the line of questioning. The objection was sustained. Part of the prosecution’s strategy was to establish that the defendants were obscene. Ten days later, when another Red Squad member testified, he said he’d told a newsman “to turn the censored cameras around because of that civilian brutality.” His side believed it was obscenity to say [censored] without blushing; the other believed it was obscenity during an evil war to save your shame for mere words: the war was the obscenity. (A joke going around the New Left: a policeman tells a protester to come back after she has removed the obscenity from her FUCK THE WAR placard and she returns with one reading FUCK THE.)

The prosecutors, U.S. Attorneys Richard Schultz and Thomas Aquinas Foran, were perfectly cast. Schultz was so ploddingly literal-minded he could call the most obvious Yippie put-ons devious incitements to riot. Foran was a Democrat who said he had been a closer friend of the late Bobby Kennedy’s than Tom Hayden had been. In his summation he spoke of his empathy for the kids, who “feel that the lights have gone out in Camelot.” But “these guys take advantage of them. They take advantage of it personally, intentionally, evilly, and to corrupt those kids, they use them, and they use them for their purposes and for their intents. And you know what are their purposes and intents?…This is in their own words: to ‘disrupt.’ To ‘pin delegates in the Convention hall.’ To ‘clog streets.’ To force the use of troops. To have actions so militant the Guard will have to be used…. ‘Tear this city apart.’ ‘Fuck up this convention.’…‘We’ll lure the McCarthy kids and other young people with music and sex and try to hold the park.’”

The prosecution’s aim was to reduce a complex stew of motives, interests, approaches, and personalities to a concentrated, unified plot. They said David Dellinger, the Gandhian who had little direct role in Chicago, was only pretending to be a pacifist and was really the rioting’s “chief architect” (“Oh, bullshit. That is a complete lie,” Dellinger shouted. “Did you get that, Miss Reporter?” Judge Hoffman replied, and revoked Dellinger’s bail). Prosecutors said the ham-handed self-defense training in Lincoln Park was combat training. Patrolman Frapolly described a meeting in which he claimed he heard plans to throw burning flares at the cops.

Mr. Foran: “Were any of the defendants present?”

The Witness: “Yes. Weiner and Froines were at this meeting. So was Abbie Hoffman.”

Mr. Foran: “Do you see Mr. Hoffman here in the courtroom?”

The Witness: “Yes, I do.”

Mr. Foran: “Would you step down and point him out, please.”

The Witness: “Mr. Hoffman is sitting with the leather vest on, the shirt—he just shot me with his finger. His hair is very unkempt.”

The hippies’ hippie-ness was on trial; style was a battleground. Abbie Hoffman, asked why they lured innocent youth to Chicago with sex and rock bands, replied, “Rock musicians are the real leaders of the revolution.” Posture was a battleground. When Judge Hoffman admonished William Kunstler not to slouch on the lectern designed by the Federal Building’s distinguished architect Mies van der Rohe, Abbie replied, “Mies van der Rohe was a Kraut.” He added that the courtroom was a “neon oven”—thus deploying his Madison Avenue brilliance in the service of the defendants’ pet theory that America was becoming Nazi Germany. Pencils, even, became a battleground: “primly squared off and neatly sharpened beside a few neatly stacked memos on the prosecution table,” the Evergreen Review’s John Schultz wrote; “askew and gnawed and maybe encrusted with a sliver of earwax,” a proud part of the “unholy clutter,” on the defense table. (When Abbie Hoffman, a very hard worker, took the stand, he said, “Work is a dirty word instead of fuck is a dirty word.”)

Humor was a battleground most of all.

The judge fancied himself a rapier wit. But when the defense table laughed at him, or with the defense—as when Abbie and Jerry showed up in judicial robes—he made sure the court reporter got it in the record, for in the courtroom laughter wasn’t appropriate. Which jurymen laughed when was how both sides kept score.

Based on that calculus, when the prosecution rested on December 9, the day after the Nixon press conference that earned him a snap 81 percent approval rating, movement sympathizers predicted a hung jury. That prediction led to a debate in the defense camp. Tom Hayden said that, since they weren’t going to be convicted, they could best get on with the revolution if they rested their case without mounting a defense, ending the affair in a mistrial. Others—Abbie, Jerry—said the trial was the revolution. The Yippies won: they would use their defense to introduce “Woodstock Nation”—the title of Abbie’s new book—to America. They would fight through the jungles of TV.

They spoke at colleges, women’s clubs, and churches to raise money for their defense, to warm receptions. At a tony synagogue in suburban Highland Park, Illinois, fourteen hundred turned out to hear them. At universities they were treated like the Beatles. At a University of Chicago rally, Rennie Davis announced he would continue fighting the way he was fighting even if they put a pistol to his head: “How can you be a young person and have any other position?”

Thomas Aquinas Foran would have said the same thing, if asked about his own position.

It seemed an auspicious week to indict an Establishment gone mad. As Wednesday night, December 3, 1969, became Thursday morning, December 4, what the Chicago Tribune had called the “wild gun battle” at Black Panther headquarters in a West Side apartment building left two Panthers, twenty-one-year-old leader Fred Hampton and lieutenant Mark Clark, twenty-two, dead. Lewis Koch, the young New Left producer for the local NBC affiliate, smelled a rat in the cops’ claim they were met with “a shotgun volley.” He’d seen film of the cops leaving the building: smiling, embracing, exulting as if they’d won a football game—not the behavior of men who had just survived an ambush. He put Panther Bobby Rush on the afternoon news the next day, who called it cold-blooded murder and invited viewers to the apartment to see for themselves. The Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko took him up on his offer. The morning that the conspiracy-trial prosecution rested its case, Royko published a column called “The Hampton Bullet Holes.” According to the police account, Royko wrote, “miracles occurred. The Panthers’ bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction—namely, at themselves.” Royko had examined the building with a ballistics expert, who identified at least seventy-six bullets coming in, including twenty-four in the wall near Hampton’s bed—and not a single one coming out.

Chicago cops failed to secure the crime scene. People lined up around the block to tour the open-and-shut evidence. Years later it came out that the FBI COINTELPRO had provided Chicago cops with the floor plans of the apartment, and an FBI infiltrator had slipped secobarbital in Fred Hampton’s drink the previous evening to make it easier to murder him in his bed. Such revelations would only have confirmed what the Chicago 7 defense already knew: the “justice system” wasn’t a system of justice, “law and order” was a cover for state-sponsored crime.

Those same days the last cop indicted for crimes during convention week was on trial. The jury absolved him of beating a twenty-year-old hitchhiker after only an hour of deliberation. The prosecution was so convincing, the defense so obviously false, the shocked judge implored of the foreman, “Are you certain, not guilty?”

The Silent Majority was practicing jury nullification, just as the Chicago 7 opened their defense.

The first defense witness was a supervisor at a candy factory. He displayed slides he had taken of police chopping their way through a crowd, kicking kids when they were down—without provocation, he said. The next day he was fired from his job. And any pretense to a straight defense was abandoned. The prosecution said the Chicago 7 had lured lambs to slaughter with music and sex. So the Chicago 7’s defense would be…music and sex.

Jacques Levy, director of Oh! Calcutta! (the off-Broadway play where the cast took off their clothes), Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Country Joe McDonald were all called to the stand. (“Dr. Leary, what is your present occupation?” “I am the Democratic candidate for governor in California.” “Doctor, can you explain what a psychedelic drug is?”) Judy Collins broke out into a chorus of “Where have all the flowers gone?” (Judge Hoffman: “We don’t allow singing in this court.”) William Kunstler presented folksinger Phil Ochs with exhibit D-147, the guitar he’d used to perform “I Ain’t Marching Any More” at the Festival of Life. He, too, tried and failed to sing.

The following colloquy ensued: Abbie Hoffman had “led the crowd in a chant of ‘Fuck LBJ,’ didn’t he?”

“Yes, I think he did….”

“Now, in your plans for Chicago, did you plan for public fornication in the park?”

Allen Ginsberg had been in Chicago helping calm things with his Buddhist chants. Judge Hoffman had once been an ally of Ginsberg’s. He’d ruled in 1960 that the avant-garde Chicago literary magazine Big Table wasn’t obscene, noting that William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch was intended “to shock the contemporary society in order perhaps to better point out its flaws and weaknesses,” quoting the Ulysses decision on the subversive necessity of art. But that was a different age, when such nuances were possible. Now everyone had to choose a side.

One day a clerk at Barbara’s Bookstore in Old Town saw a middle-aged man pacing around. A member of the prosecution team, he asked, “Do you have any of Allen Ginsberg’s books?” She went to hunt some down. He said, “Could you hurry up? The future of the country may depend on this.”

Later that day, on the stand, Ginsberg explained, “I was chanting a mantra called the Mala Mantra, the great mantra of preservation of that aspect of the Indian religion called Vishnu the Preserver.”

Thomas Aquinas Foran leafed through one of his newfound literary treasures.

Mr. Foran: “In The Empty Mirror, there is a poem called ‘The Night Apple’?”

The Witness: “Yes.”

Mr. Foran: “Would you recite it for the jury?”

The Witness:

THE NIGHT APPLE

Last night I dreamed

of one I loved

for seven long years,

but I saw no face,

only the familiar

presence of the body;

sweat skin eyes

feces urine sperm

saliva all one

odor and mortal taste.

Foran, sarcastically: “Could you explain to the jury what the religious significance of that poem is?”

Ginsberg, earnestly: “If you could take a wet dream as a religious experience, I could. It is a description of a wet dream, sir.”

Defense witness Linda Hager Morse was a pretty Quaker girl from Philadelphia who had won the Kiwanis Decency Award and first marched for peace on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1965. She was now a revolutionary. The defense wanted her to talk about why it was necessary to overthrow capitalism. The judge ruled that out of order. The prosecution, however, was glad to pick up the thread in cross-examination, and the judge was glad to let them. What Morse said encapsulated the strangeness of the last four years of American history. One part sounded quite like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society speech: “My ultimate goal is to create a society where everyone is fed, where everyone is educated, where everyone has a job, where everyone has a chance to express himself artistically or politically, or spiritually, or religiously” (Johnson: “a society of success without squalor, beauty without barrenness, works of genius without the wretchedness of poverty”). The other part couldn’t have been further afield from Johnson’s consensus bromides. Assistant DA Schultz posed the question: “You practice shooting an M1 yourself, don’t you?”

The Witness: “Yes, I do.”

Mr. Schultz: “You also practice karate, don’t you?”

The Witness: “Yes, I do.”

Mr. Schultz: “That is for the revolution, isn’t it?”

The Witness: “After Chicago I changed from being a pacifist to the realization that we had to defend ourselves. A nonviolent revolution was impossible. I desperately wish it was possible.”

Rennie Davis thought this was the defense’s most effective witness with the jury. He asked a reporter what he had thought of Morse’s testimony. The reporter’s answer spoke to the polarization: “It certainly was a disaster for you. Now you’ve really had it.”

Could your daughter kill?

The defendants had intended to win the sympathy of the big jury out there, the general public. Their message was seen through a glass darkly. “What did go on in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom?” asked the back cover of one of the many paperback books that appeared later reproducing court transcripts. With no cameras to record it, it was hard to know. Afterward a friend asked Tony Lukas of the Times which of the defendants had defecated in the aisle of the courtroom.

Most newspaper coverage came from secondhand wire reports, built from a written record that the judge made sure reflected every defense outrage and whitewashed every prosecution one. The Times’s Lukas paid careful attention to such unfairness, but his editors pruned him ruthlessly: Abbie Hoffman always “shouted”; Judge Hoffman always “said” (even if it was really the other way around). To much of the public, the presumption was that the defecation was nonstop.

William Kunstler offered his summation to the jury on February 13, 1970: “I think if this case does nothing else, perhaps it will bring into focus that again we are in a moment of history when a courtroom becomes the proving ground of whether we do live free or whether we do die free…. Perhaps if you do what is right, perhaps Allen Ginsberg will never have to write again as he did in ‘Howl,’ ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’ perhaps Judy Collins will never have to stand in any courtroom again and say, as she did, ‘When will they ever learn?’”

Thomas Foran offered his summation: “At the beginning of this case they were calling them all by diminutive names, Rennie and Abbie and Jerry, trying to pretend they were young kids. They are not kids…. They are highly sophisticated, educated men, and they are evil men.”

The jury returned their verdict after five days. All seven were acquitted on the conspiracy count. Froines and Weiner were acquitted of the charge they’d constructed an incendiary device. But Dellinger, Davis, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin were found guilty on the indictment’s counts two through six, which cited Title 18, United States Code, Section 201—the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, passed to honor the martyr Martin Luther King, outlawing the “travel in interstate commerce…with intent to incite, organize, promote, and encourage a riot” and to “speak to assemblages of persons for the purposes of inciting, organizing, promoting, and encouraging a riot.”

The liberal editorialists praised the jury’s ruling as judicious and well considered, a complex split decision: the system worked. Spiro Agnew called it an “American verdict.” It was indeed an American verdict: almost as soon as the trial began, the jury had split into polarized camps. One believed the defendants were not guilty on all accounts. The other believed they were guilty on all counts. Only three jurors actually agreed with the decision as rendered.

They had socialized apart, eaten apart—and, when together, spent most of their time in the jury room debating child-rearing philosophy. One of the convict-on-all-accounts jurors talked about the time she took her willful daughter to see a shrink who said she just needed “love and patience”—and how she stalked out saying of her daughter that she needed to have something “shoved down her throat.” They voiced their fears that their children would end up hippies, said things like “They are evil” and “This is like Nazi Germany—hippies want to take over the country” and “They had no right to come into your living room.” The liberal jurors argued that slovenliness wasn’t a crime, the prosecution was corrupt, and that for the first time they were afraid the government might be spying on them. They wondered whether the antiriot statute was constitutional. At that, the conservative side wondered, if the law didn’t protect decent people from this, then what did it protect them from?

A journalist later observed the sociology that divided the two groups. “The convict-on-all-counts jurors tended to be people who had moved recently from the city of Chicago itself to the suburbs. They were the hard-line we-worked-hard-and-won-our-way-according-to-the-standard-rules-of-social-mobility-people…. The acquittal jurors tended to be those who had been longer situated in the suburbs or outlying parts of the city, and were easier in their attitudes about raising children.”

Franklins and Orthogonians: they hated each other too much to agree on anything. They sent out notes to the judge that they were a hung jury. The judge refused to accept them: “Keep deliberating!” A juror finally brokered the split-verdict compromise. Judge Hoffman still was not satisfied. So he exercised his discretionary power. Over two long days, he called each defendant and each defense lawyer before the bench and delivered contempt specifications for each act of schoolboy naughtiness, sometimes reading out long stretches from the record: “Specification 1: On September 26, during the opening statement by the Government, defendant Hoffman rose and blew a kiss to the jurors. Official Transcript, Chapter One.”

Abbie Hoffman got a day in jail for that. He got six days for calling the judge, in Yiddish, shanda für di goyim. (The judge read the phrase, which meant “a Jew who shames Jews in front of the gentiles,” from the transcript haltingly and pronounced, “I can’t understand the following words.”) David Dellinger had insisted, on Moratorium Day, on reading a list of the war dead. For that, he got six months.

The law had spoken. John Lindsay responded, “The blunt, hard fact is that we in this nation appear headed for a new period of repression—more dangerous than at any time in years.” Foran, at a booster club rally at a parochial high school, said, “We’ve lost our kids to the freaking fag revolution.” Rennie Davis said that when he got out of jail, “I intend to move next door to Tom Foran and bring his sons and daughters into the revolution” and “turn the sons and daughters of the ruling class into Vietcong.” Jerry Rubin signed his new book—Do It!—to “Judge Hoffman, top Yippie, who radicalized more young Americans than we ever could.” And Tom Hayden said, “Our jury now is being heard from.”

In Ann Arbor, five thousand students and hangers-on marched to city hall busting windows and wrecking cars. The FBI put a “White Panther” on the ten most wanted list, who wrote from exile in the Michigan woods, “I don’t want to make it sound like all you got to do is kill people, kill pigs, to bring about revolution,” but “it is up to us to educate the people to the fact that it is war, and a righteous revolutionary war.” In Madison a student stole an Air Force ROTC training plane and tried to bomb an army ammunition plant (just as a student radical stole a plane in the newly released Zabriskie Point).

The preliminaries in the trial of the “Manson Family” were all over the news: Manson had hoped, it turned out, to foment a race war. Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn said of the murders, “Dig it, first they killed the pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” On February 17, what appeared to be a copycat crime emerged, a hideous attack on a military family: a Green Beret captain, Jeffrey MacDonald, reported regaining consciousness from a knife attack to find his wife and two children, Kristen and Kimberly, dead. He remembered what one of the intruders, a woman wearing a “floppy hat” and carrying a burning taper, chanted: “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.”

In St. Louis, at 2 a.m. on February 23, the Quonset hut housing Washington University’s Army ROTC program was burned to the ground. In frigid Buffalo, on February 24, the president of the State University of New York campus summoned cops to control the threatened disruption of a basketball game. The next night, forty students stormed his office. A police squad chased them into the student union. Eight hundred students attacked the police. At the precinct house, amid the Jewish-looking haul, one arrestee heard a cop say that America “should have let Hitler win, he’d have known how to take care of these fuckers.”

That same day, William Kunstler, facing two years in jail for contempt of Judge Hoffman’s court, gave a speech at the UC–Santa Barbara stadium. Ten years earlier he had dropped out of the executive-training program at R. H. Macy’s; how things had changed. “I have never thought that [the] breaking of windows and sporadic, picayune violence is a good tactic,” he now said. “But on the other hand, I cannot bring myself to become bitter and condemn young people who engage in it.” Students whistled and cheered. Hundreds strolled to a rally in the adjacent town of Isla Vista. One of them idly swung around a bottle of wine. The cops, thinking it a Molotov cocktail, arrested him. Violence broke out. Kids burned down a Bank of America branch. Ronald Reagan ordered his attorney general to look into charging Kunstler with crossing state lines to incite a riot.

On March 6 a mysterious explosion collapsed an entire town house in Greenwich Village. Cops searching through the rubble pulled out three dead bodies and enough live-wired dynamite bombs to blow up the entire block if detonated at once. The house had been a bomb factory, and one of the bombs was intended to slaughter attendees at an upcoming dance at Fort Dix. One decapitated body was identified by a print taken from the severed little finger of the right hand: Diana Oughton, a Weatherman. Another was a leader of the 1968 Columbia University strike. The third was a Weatherman based at Kent State University, in Ohio.

On March 11 a bomb gashed a chunk out of the corner of the Dorchester County Courthouse in Maryland, site of pretrial hearings for H. Rap Brown for inciting the burning of the schoolhouse in Cambridge in 1967.

The next night, in Buffalo, hundreds of students fought a running battle with police, throwing Molotov cocktails at the faculty peace monitors trying to keep the two sides apart.

Three days later Judge Hoffman received an enthusiastic clap on the shoulder from Richard Nixon. He was a special guest at the president’s weekly Christian service in the East Room, where the Reverend Billy Graham preached that America’s “differences could melt in the heat of a religious revival.”

In New York City one day in March, fifteen thousand people were evacuated from office buildings from three hundred separate bomb threats. On April 4, Governor Reagan, in a reelection campaign speech to the Council of California Growers, said of government’s dilemma of beating back the mounting violence, “If there is to be a bloodbath, let it be now.” That America was in the middle of a civil war had once been but a metaphor. How soon before it became real?

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

[rezares]

Wildcard || War & Peace

Reading order of posted threads:

Spill The Tea (August 22, 2019)

Bullshit Cover Story (November 10, 2019)

Bullshit Detective (November 10, 2019)

Word Count: 2166

Date: November 10th, 2019

tl;dr: Rory follows Reza to the airport because he’s a shit liar

@spindlesandrosethorns

AURORA

Aurora was probably making a bad decision. 

It wasn’t as if she and Reza didn’t have enough bullshit muking up their friendship; somehow she didn’t think inviting herself on his murdercation would endear her to him in the slightest. But Aurora refused to let him go and face his former student alone, and so when Reza had evasively said he was going to be out of town for a while, she had bribed Lamia into getting her his itinerary and bought her own ticket on the same flight.

Not that much bribery was involved. Rory had said “I’m following your brother to Tunisia” and Lamia and Fadela had given her all the help she didn’t think to ask for.

The ticket she had bought was burning a hole through her bag and against her hip, but she walked through the terminals like nothing was wrong. If he wanted to fight her, fine, but she was getting on that plane by hook or by crook. She had arrived with plenty of time to spare, and was even able to get some tea before making her way to their gate. Reza was easy to spot - not because he stood out, but because she simply couldn’t miss him if she tried - and taking a deep breath, Aurora walked up to him calmly. Might as well be upfront.

“That seat taken?” she asked, one hand on her hip.

REZA

Reza’s heart wasn’t racing. In fact, he was more at ease than he’d been in years. Soon enough Mekki Masmoudi wouldn’t be breathing, let alone be a problem, and that was the greatest comfort of Reza’s life. It was time to put down the monster he’d unwittingly created.

His eyes were cast down at the book in his lap he brought for some plane reading when a voice said something about a seat.

“Yeah, yeah, go ahea-” y’allah. He knew that voice. 

“Rory!” He jumped in his seat, knocking his book to the floor. To hell with losing his page, what was she doing here? “How- why-? The fuck?”

AURORA

Calm as anything, Aurora ignored his spluttering and instead sat down in the available seat with a casual toss of her curls. She scooped up his book and held it out to him.

"I'm doing my father a favor picking up some papers from a business partner of his in Tunisia," she said evenly, her eyes not leaving his. "Maybe checking out the fibre scene while I'm there." She silently dared him to call her out on her fib. "Lamia and Fadela were kind enough to tell me when you were flying out so I wouldn't have to fly alone." At this, she gave him a smile. "Hope you don't mind."

Read: I'm coming. Suffer.

REZA

He took his book, grip weak as most of his strength went to his brain to try and processes this scene. Rory was here. Rory knew. Rory was barging in on his plans to kill a man.

She sat down next to him and Reza wanted to scream. He wanted to pick her up and carry her to the exit and tell airport security she had knife or something. Anything to keep her from boarding that flight to Tunisia. 

She shouldn’t be here.

“Go home, Aurora.” Reza said darkly. “Go home.”

She needed to leave.

AURORA

Aurora knew she was currently treading water in the depths of Reza's anger; that any second now she was going to be sucked under. But she refused to back down or be cowed by her sorcery master.

"Would," she said with a shrug, "but I already bought my ticket. Buggers are impossible to refund. 'Sides," she said, resting her chin on the tips of her fingers. "You look like you need a travel companion too. It's a long trip to make alone, and I don't mind flying."

Reza was a smart man, he'd be able to hear the words between her words.

REZA

No, no, no. She needed to be far away from him while he was this version of himself. She didn’t need to see this, or watch him wash blood off of himself, or have any part in this. 

“You can’t come. You’ll feel cramped. My dad’s apartment is small, we’re poor.” Reza deadpanned. 

“I’ll give you the ticket cost money.”

AURORA

Aurora gave him a deadpan look in return that clearly said "Really, dude?"

"I don't know if you've noticed, but I am like… half your size," Aurora said. "I'm not concerned about space. Worse comes to worse, I rent a room somewhere."

REZA

“Then you can’t come because you can’t be an accomplice in a homicide. You can’t go to a country where the punishment for being a sorcerer is vigilante murder.” Reza said, gripping his book tight to keep from raising his voice. 

Was Aurora this in love with him or just this stupid?

“I know you know. Fadela has a big mouth.”

AURORA

"Fadela didn't have to have a big mouth because you left your conspiracy folder on the desk we both use," Aurora replied, leaning in so she could keep her voice under a whisper. "You've been attached to that thing at the hip for weeks now, I got worried. Also, notice how I didn't mention any of that in public? Keep up, Reza."

Her expression was calm even though she could see the anger dancing around him. She honestly did not want to be fighting with him, but there really was no other alternative. "I'm coming," she said, quiet but firm. "You are not doing this alone. So either I fly in with you or I travel there by myself and track you down once I arrive."

REZA

Why can’t she just leave? He didn’t want or need her here. Why did she have to do this?

“You can’t track me down, you don’t speak Arabic.” Reza countered. “And Tunisia is dangerous for foreign women who don’t know the Middle East to travel to unless they go with a local.”

“And I don’t have time to be a tour guide and translator. I’ll ditch you at the airport in Tunis and continue to my hometown alone.”

AURORA

Aww, he thought a language barrier would be enough to stop her. That was cute.

But she didn't say that. She didn't point out that she could defend herself more than well enough. That she could always call Lamia or Fadela for help.

All Aurora did was stare into his eyes and quietly ask, "Would you?"

(They both knew the answer was no.)

REZA

Reza blinked at her and wanted nothing more than to physically carry her back through security and out of the airport. This wasn’t a world for her. She was never meant to see his darkness, his hatred, and bloodlust so clearly.

If she fancied herself such a good friend, couldn’t she see this hurt him?

“Without hesitation.” They both knew he was lying.

AURORA

He was bluffing and she knew it, so Aurora just turned to her phone with a small hum. "Guess I'll meet you in Hammamet then," she said. 

After he had a moment to steam, she leaned closer and whispered in his ear "I'm not coming along while you actually find the guy, I know better. I'm just here to make sure you come home. I promise I'll stay at your da's place like a good girl and won't get in anyone's way."

It was aggravating, religating herself to the kids' table so to speak just so Reza didn't throw more of a bitch-fit than he already was, but Aurora knew where her strengths were. And they weren't in battle magic or any sort of fighting. She'd be dead weight. No, her skills lay in other places; pulling Reza's head out of his ass was practically listed on her resume.

REZA

“You don’t know where my father lives.” Reza mumbled childishly, looking away from her and staring out the window overlooking the tarmac.

He laughed mirthlessly as he bit down on a curled knuckle to stifle it and relaxed his legs...yeah, manspreading a little. ‘Making sure he comes home.’ What does that even mean? As if he was going to stay in Tunisia. As if he could. He was revealed as a sorcerer, he couldn’t stay forever. Sabiha was the only reason he’d ever wanted to move back there one day but now she was in Swynlake. He wanted to be where his daughter was, wherever that may be.

“I don’t need you to do that.” He said quietly. “Like I could possibly be apart from my daughter ever again.”

AURORA

She knocked her knee against his reflexively, the motion almost habit from long nights sitting together on his couch either going over magical texts or Board documents. “That’s not what I mean,” she said softly.

Physically, yes, Reza would come home. Sabiha was enough incentive for that. But he would leave a piece of himself in Tunisia wherever Mekki met his end if someone wasn’t there to guide him back. She couldn’t just stay home and wait for him to come back in pieces, left alone with his thoughts for too long. No, she would be there. What exactly she could do, she didn’t know - this was the most the two had talked in one time about something that wasn’t in a lesson plan in months, whatever care he’d had for her thoughts and opinions had vanished when the bruise on her chest had bloomed on her skin - but she wasn’t going to let that keep her from trying.

REZA

A silence fell between them. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t awkward either. It just was.

“You need to do everything I tell you to do.” Reza finally said, opening up the front pocket of his carry on to pull out a notebook and pen. “Tunisia is one of the best places in the MENA region to be a woman-” he explained, writing quickly. “- but the whole area is trash for magicks, so that kind of cancels out our strides in gender equality. There should be some of Lamia’s and Fadela’s old clothes in their room at baba’s house, so if I think an outfit needs some...Tunisia-fying, just add whatever I hand you.”

“Hammamet is a larger northern city, so total modesty isn’t all but demanded like in the south of Tunisia. And you’ve traveled to Africa before and been hanging out with Tunisian Muslims long enough to know, so I’m not implying you aren’t prepared, but-” he shrugged. “ - just don’t get offended if I toss you a shawl for your arms. Did you pack sunglasses? Like a good pair? The sun is bright in Tunisia year-round, you will need them. We can buy some there if we need to.”

He kept writing until he was satisfied, and ripped the page from his notebook, extending it to her.

“You’ll get around just fine with English and French - and I’m not letting you go anywhere alone anyway - but you’ll impress people if you learn just this much Tounsi. Learn it, live it, love it.”

AURORA

Aurora didn’t grin when Reza accepted that she was coming along, but it was a very near thing. He could probably see the satisfaction and relief curling around her, and really, that was telling enough. She sat up and listened to him carefully, watching his pen fly across the paper.

She didn’t mention that she had packed most of her clothes she wore when visiting Mozambique with her mother, including enough head-scarves to keep even Aurora’s wild curls contained and tucked away. Her mother’s home wasn’t Tunisia, so if Reza thought her outfits weren’t to snuff, she’d listen.

“I did,” she reassured, patting her carry on bag. Fadela had basically given her the same speech over the phone while she and Ella had packed. Aurora took the page from Reza, looking over his familiar handwriting carefully. There were several words that Aurora couldn’t read without her accent tripping over itself, but darn it, she was going to learn them.

“You’re going to have to help me with pronunciation,” Aurora admitted. “But I’ll learn them.”

REZA

Reza nodded. 

“Good.” He went back to staring at the tarmac. This was a terrible, horrible, awful idea. He should shout ‘she has a bomb!’ but ah, neither of them were white. Probably not the best idea for either of their very brown asses.

“Aurora, I can’t stress enough how dangerous going to my country is. If you so much as think the word ‘magic’ I will kick your ass. Metaphorically. A lot of metaphorical ass-kicking will go down. Clear?”

AURORA

“I will be on my best behavior,” Aurora promised, catching his eye so he could see how serious she was. This wasn’t a decision she had made lightly, no matter how easily it had come to her. She knew what the risk was; it just happened that she thought Reza needed her more.

[jencey86]

Angels Have Wicked Schemes (Chapter 16)

Author’s Note: This was written with a friend of mine who has since deactivated her account, these are reposts so I can update my chapter list for you guys.

Summary: No one would have known if not for one slip-up.  She can hide her pain well but one wrong move changed everything in her life.  She’s just not sure if it’s for the better or for worse. Dantana

Rated: M for physical and emotional abuse

Warnings: Major, major trigger warnings.  You’ve been warned.

Angels Have Wicked Schemes

Chapter Sixteen

 Dani set her notebook aside and ran her fingers through her hair as she let out a breath. She looked around the coffee shop and noticed a new set of people has occupied it since she last looked. She wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting there but just finished off her second cup of Tazo tea. That’s when she noticed her phone light up and she wondered how long the text message has been sitting on her phone.

 Santana: Hey, I just got off of work. Stuck at school?

 Dani: At the Starbucks across the street from the park near the loft actually, decided to change the scenery to my studying. Wanna join me?

 Dani let out a yawn as she stretched.  She looked down at her notebook.  She sighed. It was the most difficult thing she’d ever written.  She had to relive those moments from home.  She was at the part of her life where the abuse with Anna began.  And all she wanted was some company.

 Santana: Sure. On my way. Be there soon. <3

 Dani felt her own heart flutter at the heart that Santana sent her.  It was how they usually ended their conversations via texting.  The simple gesture said three words that they were unable to actually say to one another.

 “Ma’am?” Dani looked up from her phone and saw a man smiling at her.  He was a younger man, about her age.  “I saw you were empty,” he gestured to the cup on her table.  “So…” He handed her a cup full of the tea she’d been drinking. “On me.”

 She smiled at him. “Thank you.  That’s very kind of you.” Dani had seen the man in the shop before. He seemed like a nice guy.  He worked there and knew her order by memory. She knew his name was Jason but that’s as far as it went.  “You can take a seat if you want to.”

 “Thanks,” he smiled at her. “So… What are you working on?” He asked, gesturing to the notebook.

 “An assignment for school. It’s kind of personal,” she added so he wouldn’t pry.  “How long have you been working here?”

 “About a year.  It’s just a side job while I’m in school.”

 “Yeah, I know how that is. I’m going to school full time while working full time at my job,” Dani yawned and took a sip from her tea.

 “Wow… How do you do that?”

 “Well, you have to have a lot of patience, for one,” she laughed.  “Thankfully, I was born with a lot of patience.”

 About five minutes passed since they started talking, but he needed to go back to work.  “My break is over, but hey… Um… Do you want to go out, maybe?  Go on a date with me?” He fiddled with his apron.

 Dani smiled at him sadly. “I’m so sorry but I’m a lesbian…”

 “O-oh!  Well that’s awesome,” Jason laughed.  “Sorry, I didn’t know.”

 “That’s fine,” Dani smiled. “I’ll see you around?”

 “Yea, sure.” He returned her smile before going back to the counter.

 Dani lifted her cup to her lips to take a sip as her eyes landed back on her notebook. Just as she placed her cup back onto the table, she felt a familiar set of arms wrap around her neck from behind. “Hey you.”

 “Hey yourself.” Santana pressed her lips to the side of Dani’s head before looking down at the notebook, “you haven’t gotten very far, have you?”

 The blonde’s head whipped around to glare up at Santana. She just scoffed at her before rolling her eyes. “You know how hard this is going to be for me.” Dani leaned back further into Santana’s embrace before she yawned.

 “You’re running yourself into the ground, hun.” Santana pulled her arms away and moved to the chair beside Dani.

 “I’m fine, really.” Dani reached into the front pocket of her backpack to grab her wallet. “Come on, I’ll buy your coffee.” She stood up and grabbed Santana’s hand to drag her up to the counter. A soft giggle escaped her lips when she felt the taller woman press against her back and wrap her arms around her waist. “What do you want?”

 “Hmm, I don’t know.” Santana looked at the board as the person in front of them was being waited on.

 Dani rolled her eyes before she led Santana to the counter. She smiled when Jason raised his eyebrows at her. “Peppermint white mocha…” she glanced at Santana, who just stared at her with wide eyes, “grande.”

 “You know my drink order?”

 “Um…” Dani suddenly blushed as she handed over a ten dollar bill to pay.

 “How do you know my drink order?”

 “I… well…” she stumbled over her words some, “I remembered.” She then shrugged as if it were no big deal.

 Santana kept her eyes on Dani for a moment as they stepped to the side to wait for the order. She didn’t understand how Dani would know. She’d only ever ordered the drink once or twice around the other woman. She couldn’t help but smile as she watched Dani carry on a small conversation with the man behind the counter. The blonde had been a regular at that Starbucks since she started school, that much Santana already knew. So, she figured that she knew most of the people that worked there.

 “Here you go,” Dani handed the cup over to Santana, but before she got too far away, the taller woman stopped her and leaned in for a soft kiss. “What was that for?”

 “Am I not allowed to kiss you now?” Santana spoke with a pout on her face.

 “I never said that.” Dani led the way back to the table she had already occupied for a majority of the afternoon.

 Santana sat down on the chair that was to Dani’s left side and reached for the notebook to see what the girl had written down. “How do you know my coffee order?” She asked as her eyes skimmed the written words.

 “I pay attention to things like that.”

 “But I’ve only had it like once or twice around you.”

 Dani sighed, “it was expected of me…”

 Santana’s eyes narrowed for a moment before she looked at the woman beside her. “What do you mean it was expected of you?”

 “I had to learn things quickly with Anna…” her voice trailed off. She still didn’t look at Santana as she reached out for her notebook, then picked up her pencil. She finally lifted her gaze when she felt Santana’s hand rest on top of hers. “After once or twice… if I didn’t know something…” she didn’t have to finish for Santana to just nod at her. Dani was thankful that she didn’t have to finish her sentence for Santana to understand.

 “Well it’s not like that with me. If you don’t know something after just a couple of times, I’m not going to go all Charles Manson on you.” She smiled when Dani giggled. “What?”

 “Charles Manson was a cult leader who was charged with the murders under the joint-conspiracy rule.” She quickly bit her lip when Santana just raised an eyebrow at her. “Okay… sorry.”

 “What I’m getting at, is he was a psychopath who wanted people to die. No need to get all psychological about it on me.” She smiled when she saw the slight blush appear on Dani’s cheeks. “It’s cute by the way.”

 “What is?”

 Santana took a sip from her cup before putting it down on the table, “you are… just remember that a lot of this stuff you might ramble on about… I’ll have no idea what you’re talking about.”

 Dani turned her hand around and carefully slid her fingers between Santana’s. She reached for her pencil again and turned her notebook so she could prepare herself to write. “You know how I told you about this paper, right?” She glanced over in time to see Santana nod. “Well… I think I told you that I wanted your input for it… as well as Rachel’s and Kurt’s…”

 She gave the blonde’s hand a reassuring squeeze before she spoke, “I was terrified when I found you.” She watched Dani write a few words before she continued, “at first I didn’t think much of it. Like… I saw the bruises, but thought it was like rough sex or something.”

 “Santana!” Dani quickly looked around to make sure nobody had heard the brunette.

 “What? You asked me for my input, so I’m giving it to you.” She took another sip of her coffee before sighing, “Rachel thought the same thing… but then, I saw the bandage on your arm.” She reluctantly pulled her hand out of Dani’s to trace her finger of the faint scar that was on the woman’s forearm from what had happened. “Right then, I knew something was off. I knew you were hiding something. Dani, I wanted so bad for you to tell me, but I knew you couldn’t.”

 Dani frowned.  She remembered that moment.  The moment Anna threw that cup at her, causing it to shatter against the wall next to her.  She shook the memory from her head.

 Santana knew what Dani was thinking about.  "What happened, Dani?"

 Taking a deep breath, she opened her mouth, “I made her drink wrong.” She had started off softly. For a moment, her eyes closed as she vividly remembered everything from that day. “She threw the glass at me, and it shattered on the wall right next to where I was standing. The glass cut me…”

 “That explains the stain I saw on the wall then.” She watched Dani nod. “Why didn’t you try to leave?” Santana asked gently.

 “I wanted to… but part of me still loved her. I guess I had faith that she would change back into the woman I fell in love with. She wasn’t always like that to me.” Dani suddenly swallowed the lump in her throat and shook her head again.

 “Hey,” Santana reached out to gently brush some hair away from Dani’s eyes so she could look at her. “We don’t have to talk about this now, okay?” She allowed her fingers to trace along Dani’s cheek, then down to her jaw. “I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.”

 "Santana, it's for school.  I have to open up.  This is me letting go of the past to create a new future.  If I don't write my... story, how am I going to be able to do my job when I graduate? ��How can I help others if I can't help myself first?"

 “I know that. But there’s still time. It’s still kind of fresh for you too. Don’t try to force yourself to get past something.” She rested her forehead down against Dani’s. “I’ll never think of you any differently based on whatever it was that happened. Always remember that.”

 Again, Dani nodded. She knew Santana wouldn’t judge her, but that didn’t help the fact that it made her nervous to talk about her past. Anna had always judged her for the things she had said, as did her parents. She forced out a small smile and lifted her hand to rest on Santana’s.

 Santana pulled back some and tilted her head when she spotted the cross tattoo that ran down the side of Dani’s right hand. “Tell me why you got that?” She gently grasped the girl’s hand and ran her thumb along the cross.

 Dani looked down at the tattoo and smiled.  "I was born Christian.  Most people find it funny that I'm a lesbian but yet I believe in God.  Plus, I love crosses."

 “That is kind of funny actually.” Santana chuckled some. “I was raised Catholic, hope that doesn’t bother you.”

 “Why would it?”

 “I’m just saying.” She held up her hands in self-defense before smiling some more, “okay, I’ve always wondered about the birds.”

 Dani twisted her arm some so she could show Santana, “I got this one just a few days after coming to New York.” She looked at her own tattoo for a moment before looking back at Santana, “I felt… free. Free from my parent’s rule once I came here. Kind of like how birds are free. I kind of felt like I was released from the metaphorical cage I was trapped in.”

 She reached out to trace one of the birds on her arm. “I like them. They’re beautiful,” she lifted her gaze to look into Dani’s eyes. “You’re beautiful.”

 “You make me beautiful.” Dani leaned in to press her lips softly to Santana’s.

 As if on cue, Santana's phone rings.  She pressed her forehead against Dani's.  "Sorry..." she mumbled.  She looked at her phone and rolled her eye.  "It's Rachel.  I forgot I was going to make dinner tonight..."

 Dani smiled. "Go.  I'll be home in an hour or two."

 Santana stood up and kissed Dani's lips.  "I'll be waiting for you." She stole one more kiss before reaching for her coffee cup. “I’ll save you a plate.”

 “Okay, sounds good.” Dani kept her eyes on Santana until she was out of the café, then turned back to her notebook to continue working on her essay.

 XXXXXXXX

 Dani was supposed to be home an hour ago.  Santana had tried to contact Dani, but the only thing she got was voicemail.  She called Starbucks and the man told her she left an hour ago.  It was a 10 minute walk from there to the loft.

 She glanced at the time on her phone before she started toward the door to grab her coat. She was going to find Dani. Just as her hand wrapped around the fabric, the door to the loft slid open and Dani walked through with her backpack on her shoulder. “Oh, thank god.” Santana sighed before approaching the other woman. “I was literally about to go out looking for you.”

 “I’m only a little late, San.”

 “Like an hour,” Santana slid her arms around Dani’s waist to hug her, “I was worried.”

 Dani bit her lip as she hissed some. Her body instantly tensed some under the contact. “I’m okay.”

 “You don’t seem okay.” Santana pulled her arms away so she wouldn’t hurt Dani anymore. “What happened?”

 “Okay, first off, calm down.” Dani smiled at her before putting her backpack on the table. She went back over to the door to slide off her shoes.

 "Dani, what happened? Did I hurt you?" Santana was concerned.

 Dani laughed. "No.  You didn't hurt me.  It's just tender."

 Santana’s concern only grew at Dani’s words. “What’s tender? What happened? Are you okay?”

 “Relax, San. Calm down.” She rested her hands on Santana’s arms. “I’m okay, I promise.”

 “What’s tender?”

 “Do… you want to see?”

 “See what? Dani, what’s going on?” Santana wanted to pull the woman back into her arms, but not after the last touch had hurt her.

 Dani rolled her eyes before she reached for the bottom of her shirt. She moved closer to the lamp that was by the sofa as she lifted the side of her shirt, revealing the words 'You make me beautiful'  tattooed into her skin.  "I want to expand on it later... Maybe with some feathers or something..." Dani explained as Santana's fingers touched the skin around it.

 “You just got this…” Santana couldn’t pull her eyes away from the black ink.

 “I thought about what I had said to you at Starbucks.” Dani finally pulled her shirt back down to cover it up again. “It’s true, Santana… you do make me beautiful.”

 Santana walked over to the couch and sat down.  Her heart stopped when she heard those words come out of Dani's mouth.  'You do make me beautiful'.  Dani was beautiful on her own... Santana had nothing to do with it. "Are you okay...?" Dani walked over to Santana.

 As soon as Dani's hand touched her shoulder, she started to cry.  Santana buried her head in her hands and wept.  She wasn't upset, far from it actually.  She was happy.  Dani was okay... or she was going to be.

 "Hey..." Dani wrapped her arms around Santana and pulled her close.  "Shhh... What's wrong, San?  Did... Did I do something wrong...?"

 “No.” Santana quickly shook her head. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” She took a deep breath to calm herself down. “I… How… Dani, you’re beautiful on your own… I-I didn’t do anything.”

 “You did.” She looked into the other woman’s eyes for a moment before lifting her hands to rub her thumbs under them – wiping away the tears. “You did everything… Santana, if it wasn’t for you, I’d probably still be there. I’d probably still be with Anna. I… I’m happier now, I’m comfortable with myself. I actually feel beautiful,” she leaned in to press a kiss to Santana’s lips. “You… make me beautiful.”

 Santana’s hand lifted up to cup Dani’s cheek, keeping her close to kiss her again. Their kisses slowly deepened before Santana finally pulled away and stood up. She offered the blonde a soft smile before leading her into their shared room where she planned on showing her just how beautiful she truly was.