#i confess i know nothing about this man other than his words during the 2010 abu dhabi radio rewind youtube video | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mishasminions · 4 years ago

Text

The Last Time I’ll Write a Long Post About Supernatural (15x18-15x20)

15 YEARS OF WATCHING THIS SHOW. 11 YEARS OF RUNNING A BLOG ABOUT IT. IT’S BEEN QUITE A RIDE.

[15x20 Speculation + evidence at the bottom]

First off, I just wanna come clean and say, after all these years, I still think they should’ve ended at Season 5.

If you’re going to come at me with “Then why’d you stick around to watch it if you didn’t like it?”, your question is immature, and the answer is simple: I just want to know what happens next (I also love the main characters and their actors too). You can watch a show and still think it’s shit.

Call me a clown, but despite all the disappointment and trust issues that this show has given me, I would still look forward to the day where it might just turn itself around and bring back the quality it once had, or realize the potential of each story it was trying to tell, or at the very least, do justice by my favorite ship.

Never happened.

They’ve had a few good episodes here and there. I can’t imagine the SPN Universe without The Man Who Would Be King, The French Mistake, and Scoobynatural. Seasons 6-10 were enjoyable at times. I blocked out most of 7 & 11-15.

If you’ve been following this blog since its heydays in 2010-2014, you’d know I’d try my best to defend Destiel and this show’s decisions regarding it no matter what.

Because you know what, as a CONCEPT, this show is good. If you take a look at all the worlds its storylines have birthed in fanfiction/fanworks, you’d see how much Supernatural has wasted its own story arcs. The writing got shittier as each season progressed, and they’ve obviously given up in production as well because the quality in the execution has noticeably gone down too, but if you take a step back and take a look at the bigger picture, you’ll see that this show still tries to make sense of itself.

[If you’re still following this post, please bear with me, I know this is long, but I just want you to understand how jaded and pessimistic I am with regards to this show, so maybe you can buy into whatever hopeful thing I’m about to say later on.]

SO LET’S TALK ABOUT DESTIEL

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that they would give us Castiel’s “I love you” speech. To the point where, if I weren’t so desperate for it, I would argue that it was completely out of character for him to word vomit the way he did (but I’m not gonna diss on that right now because I’ll take what I can get).

I’ve valued every meaningful and obscure exchange that Dean and Cas have had in the earlier seasons, and I was willing to accept their relationship as just that--undefined, without any clear boundaries as to what they really are. And I think that was beautiful on its own.

But now, they’ve chosen to define it.

After they’ve driven every possible wedge between Dean and Castiel in seasons 11-15, to try to explain away their feelings as something they offer to a collective.

Dean can’t mourn and pray for JUST Cas, he has to mourn and pray for EVERYBODY--even Crowley, even some chick he just met, because god forbid he cries about just the guy who has given up everything for him--that would be “too homo”.

They’ve even set Cas on a path to abrupt fatherhood just so he can care about something other than Dean. Make it seem as if Dean wasn’t his purpose through and through.

And after all these years of this stupid show trying to deny it, they choose to acknowledge it at the worst possible circumstance, at a time where they’ve been so far apart, that it seems so foreign for them to suddenly come together.

But here we are. And they’ve chosen to tell us.

Chosen to tell us that everything that Castiel has done leading up to his death, he has done it because he was IN LOVE WITH DEAN WINCHESTER.

Chosen to tell us that the ONE THING THAT WOULD MAKE CAS HAPPY IS DEAN WINCHESTER.

Chosen to tell us that BEING WITH DEAN WINCHESTER is something that CAS WANTS BUT KNOWS HE CAN’T HAVE.

And they’ve also chosen to tell us nothing about how Dean feels.

Sure, finding out your angel made a deal, the stipulations of said deal, his newfound happiness philosophy, his long-winded monologue of why he loves you and why you’re worthy of his love, and to top it all off he tells you that being in love with you is enough to make him happy while he subtly hints that he’s always wanted to be WITH you romantically, was a lot to process in the 5 minutes after you’ve just had an existential crisis.

It’s whatever, right? Let’s culminate 11 years worth of tension and feelings in 5 minutes. Let’s waste the entire episode with cringey expository dialogue, and irrelevant sequences. The whole season was a waste anyway.

You know what Supernatural? FUCK YOU FOR THAT. They deserved better. WE deserve better.

And I would love nothing more than to hurl every possible insult your way,

But for the last time, I’m going to HOPE that you’re finally going to try to make it better for the fans that stuck by you all these years.

No more baiting new viewers, no more placating casual viewers, no more excuses. 15 years. Bring it home for the people who have actually been around.

SO HERE’S HOW I THINK 15x20 IS GONNA GO

There’s two ways this series is gonna end. Horribly or Spectacularly.

First let’s all take into consideration what Andrew Dabb says about it:

So, let’s start with

ENDING HORRIBLY

In this scenario, Misha is telling the truth about his last day of filming being 15x18. His “camping trip” during the last few days of filming 15x20, was actually a camping trip. He doesn’t go to Vancouver to shoot.

Jensen wasn’t “being careful” during the zoom interviews that it was just him and Jared quarantining for the shoot, it really was just him and Jared (althought most of these were done pre 15x19) Supernatural isn’t smart enough to do misleading PR, and they’re once again oblivious to the potential of their own story.

Misha hasn’t posted a “Goodbye Castiel” tweet because he’s probably saving it for last episode or he forgot because it was overshadowed by the Destiel trend that night.

So what we get is:

Sam and Dean are on the road again, up against the monster of the week. Only their world no longer has actual Supernatural beings anymore, so the monsters they’re fighting are humans.

Humans end up killing the Winchesters (despite having gone up against literally every powerful being imaginable INCLUDING God himself). Dean and Sam end up in heaven and relive their greatest hits.

Meanwhile, Castiel rots in The Empty because he died after realizing that he was happy and gay. Jack doesn’t bother rescuing him—his surrogate dad, the guy who made this specific deal to spare him—even though it was so easy for him get Cas in and out of The Empty when he had a fraction of the power that he has now.

Dean never speaks of Castiel’s confession because despite all the hints of a profound bond in the earlier seasons, and the fact that Dean has never cared for anyone (who isn’t his actual brother) as immensely as he does Cas, Supernatural just can’t have its main macho character be “suddenly bisexual” because that would hurt the male ego or some shit.

His heaven would probably be living happily ever after with his family. “Family” meaning Mary and John Winchester--two of the shittiest parents ever (but they’re not going to include them in this episode like they were supposed to because of Covid) and Sam.

Sam also gets a dog. As usual.

I wouldn’t put it past Supernatural to do this. After everything they’ve pulled, this would be right up their alley. I actually expect this ending.

Anyway, onto the next possible ending

ENDING SPECTACULARLY

In this scenario, Supernatural tries to stick the landing, and Jensen’s whole “It didn’t sit well with me at first, but then I took a step back after talking to Kripke, and realized that I had to view it from an audience perspective, I am now really excited about it” (DC Con 2019) anecdote about his thoughts on the final episodes, were actually about Dean potentially ending up with Cas. (Which would totally make sense because Jensen at first didn’t see Dean as anything but hetero, but as of late, he has been throwing in Destiel jokes of his own, so he seems to have warmed up to the idea)

Backed with Misha’s tidbit (DLConline 2020) that he and Jensen had conversations about Destiel, and that they wouldn’t have gone through with it if Jensen wasn’t onboard with it, but Jensen didn’t push back at all. (Why would they need to check with Jensen if it was just Cas going all in?)

Robert Berens (writer of 15x18) also wrote the script at the beginning of Season 15, but made Misha privy to the concept a year prior (Season 14), so they went into this season knowing about Destiel going canon.

This one’s a reach, but this scenario also supposes that Misha was lying about his whereabouts during the filming of the final episode, and him saying that 15x18 was his last episode is part of the diversion to avoid taking away from the weight of Castiel’s death.

And that Supernatural is actually self-aware of its own material (similar to how they have wrapped things up in the past—lots of expository dialogue, poor execution, but fulfills the story arc)

Since Season 15 is basically a Meta Season (Chuck/God as a writer, pretentiously calling out how he created the worlds, its characters, and basically invalidating the past 14 seasons), and 15x19 is supposedly the finale for Season 15, written by two of the worst Supernatural writers, Brad Buckner and Eugenie Ross-Leming (Bob Singer’s wife), then we can assume that 15x19 is where the shitty writers kill themselves--as Chuck, of course.

So we get a badly written episode that produces a bad ending, or as Becky put it, “All action, and no Cas”

So we get the bad writers season ending at 15x19.

And 15x20 is where Sam and Dean write their own stories, and where the cast had a hand in pitching ideas for it.

Dabb has mentioned that 15x20 (Act Two) is a SERIES finale, where they try to resolve the characters’ journeys.

Because as everyone has acknowledged, Supernatural isn’t about the story, it’s about the characters.

So here’s what we can get out of it:

With no more Supernatural beings left to fight, Sam and Dean are in a stalemate. They’ve resigned themselves to fighting to the bitter end, but the “end” has passed, and they’re still standing.

So they try to figure out who they are now, and what they want out of the life they still have.

Sam still wants a normal apple pie life. Before Dean dragged him out of college to go hunting with him, he had a whole life planned out for him. Become a lawyer, settle down with a nice girl, and get a dog. He gave all that up because they had work to do, but now the work is finished, he can finally go back to wanting that for himself again.

Dean finally realizes his self-worth after Cas saves him again. His prayer to Cas in purgatory may have helped him come to terms with his anger, but the whole “you’ve done everything you did for love” speech finally put him in his place, and he learns not to hate himself anymore.

But of course, he cannot fully reconcile with himself if he doesn’t get Cas back, and tell him how he feels.

Because Dean actually wants something for himself this time. Something he knows he can finally have if he can just salvage it.

So maybe this time around, with the help of Jack (off-screen), Dean saves Cas. Grips him tight and raises him from perdition.

They bypass The Empty deal by turning Cas human, and he lives the rest of his days with Dean.

Dean and Cas know they deserve to be saved, and they know that they deserve to be happy.

(Wishful thinking, maybe they kiss a little)

Anyway...

I’m just saying, there’s NO WAY that they’d have Cas go through that whole rushed speech, if they weren’t going to do anything about it later on.

But again, after 10 years of disappointment, I wouldn’t put it past Supernatural to pat themselves on the back and say, “Okay, we sort of gave them what they wanted. We’re good now”

If that’s the case, Supernatural, I’m sorry I wasted my time on you.

Here’s to hoping 🤡

#THE LAST TIME I'LL CLOWN FOR THIS SHOW #SUPERNATURAL #DESTIEL #15x20 #15x19 #15x18 #UNTAGGED #INSIGHTFUL INSIGHTS

2K notes · View notes

css1992 · 3 years ago

Text

Guilty Pleasure

[Porn AU]

Summary: Peter and Beck used to be a power couple in the porn industry, but after Beck dumps him, Peter is forced to start over. With no money, no family and nowhere to go, he doesn’t have much choice other than to keep doing porn, so he joins Just4Fans to get back on his feet and then one day he gets a very generous tip from someone under the username of YKWIM.

All the warnings listed on Part I apply.

Read on AO3

Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV / Part V / Part VI / Part VII / Part VIII / Part IX / Part X / Part XI / Epilogue

-x-

Peter was unreasonably nervous on the way to Tony’s house – he felt like a teenage virgin, even though he was far from that. The problem was he knew the older man probably had certain expectations for what was about to happen, it was impossible for him not to have, of course. He watched all of his videos, he followed his Just4Fans, he had seen his wildest, sexiest, naughtiest side, but the thing was, that didn’t really come natural to Peter.

What most people didn’t seem to realize was that porn sex was very different from real life sex. Most of the things that looked good didn’t necessarily feel good, because porn wasn’t about getting off, it was about getting the viewers off, at the cost of the actors’ own pleasure sometimes. In Peter’s experience, most of the times.

Tony was older, experienced, Peter supposed he knew all of that, but he also met him through porn, he had seen him have sex with several people several times, so who knew, maybe he thought Peter actually liked being choked half to death or slapped black and blue. Maybe he thought he liked it rough, no prep and no lube, and maybe he wouldn’t understand that if he cried and begged him to stop, he wasn’t trying to be kinky, he just–

“Hey.” Peter jumped up in surprise when he heard the man’s voice to his left. Tony had both of his hands on the steering wheel, but his eyes were focused on him. There was a small frown between his brows and the younger man wondered if he had missed something. “I can still drive you home if you changed your mind, ok?”

“What?” Peter asked, a little too loudly, and the older man gave him a small smile.

“You just seem a little freaked out,” he clarified, and the boy blushed, dipping his chin down to stare at his lap. “There’s no pressure here, Peter. If I somehow made you feel like you have to do this, please –“

“Gods, no!” He cut him off, because that was the furthest thing from the truth, not even once did Tony make him feel like he had to do anything. “I’m sorry, it’s just – been a while since–” he started, but then he felt dumb, because he used to do that for a living and Tony knew it. “I mean, without cameras and stuff.” He mumbled, feeling his face burning in shame at the confession.

He was surprised when the older man’s hand came into view, grabbing one of his gently. Peter raised his eyes to look at him.

“Tell you what,” Tony started with that charming smile of his, squeezing his hand a little. “We’ll just have a few drinks and see where it goes. I’ll drive you home at any time you ask, just say the word.”

Peter sighed, feeling weirdly relieved by those words. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that, but it was still nice to hear. He could quit at any time. He was still in control of his body. He got to decide whatever happened next.

“Sounds nice,” he said, and Tony must have heard the honesty in his voice because his expression softened and the corners of his lips tilted up.

A few minutes later, Stark Tower popped into view as they turned a corner and the younger man noticed they were headed there, which confused him at first, but Tony explained he lived on the top floor of the tower. Peter was surprised to hear that, he always assumed he lived in some fancy building in Manhattan, but when he thought about it, it made sense. Tony living anywhere else could be a threat to his neighbors’ lives, what with his side job and all.

“I used to live in Malibu.” Peter remembered that. He also remembered his mansion was destroyed in a terrorist attack back in 2010, after Tony basically gave the Mandarin his home address. “When I moved here, I decided to turn the top few floors of Stark Tower into my home. It was all for me at first, but later it became the Avengers headquarters. A few of them lived there for a while, like Steve, before we… You know.” Peter didn’t know, actually. He remembered Captain America and a few others became fugitives at some point, but he didn’t really know the story behind it. To be fair, he didn’t think the public at large knew the whole truth either. “Now it’s just me again.”

Peter didn’t comment on the fact that he skipped the part where he probably lived there with Pepper Potts. The boy didn’t lie when he said he didn’t know a lot about the older man’s life, but some things were hard to miss, like his marriage to the most powerful woman in the world. Peter remembered it was literally all over the news, meaning the divorce, just a little over a year earlier, was just as covered by the media as well.

He decided not to ask, though.

When they arrived at the tower, Tony got out of the car and went around it to open the door for him. He blushed at the small act of chivalry, but the older man didn’t even seem to realize it. He once again placed a hand on the small of his back as he led him to a metal door that slid open with a quiet hiss after both of their faces were scanned.

Tony nudged him inside what looked like an elevator; there were no buttons or anything, but it started moving up as soon as the doors closed behind them. The ride up to the top floor was filled with “fun facts” about the tower, for which Peter was grateful, he could tell the man was trying to put him at ease and he appreciated it.

When the elevator dinged and the doors slid open to reveal a fancy living room, though, he couldn’t help the nervous sigh that left his lips.

“Okay, I know I promised drinks, but I think we had enough at the restaurant, right?” Tony’s warm hand never left his back, and it had a soothing effect on him. Peter nodded, because they did share two bottles of wine during the meal, plus half a bottle of champagne for desert. He wasn’t wasted, but he was definitely not one hundred percent sober either, so maybe it was best to to keep it that way. “How about some coffee, then?”

“Sure, sounds good.” He smiled politely, as the older man led him into the living room.

It was huge, Peter was positive it could fit his whole apartment and there would still be a lot of room left over, but it was also very empty and minimalist. There was a couch and a few armchairs, they looked expensive, but not very comfortable. Other than that, there were paintings on the walls, a few decorative pieces, but nothing that stood to attention, except for the huge floor-to-ceiling glass wall, from which he could see almost all of New York City.

“Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right back.” Tony gestured to the couch, but as he walked away in the direction Peter assumed was the kitchen, he headed to the window, watching the view.

He took a deep breath, trying to get his heartbeat somewhat under control. He wasn’t sure what was about to happen, what he wanted to happen, but most of all, he worried about the day after. About what would happen when he left the tower, when he left Tony behind. His brain told him that that whole night was a one time thing and that was it. But somewhere in his heart he hoped for… more.

He didn’t know what, though. He and Tony belonged to very different worlds, hoping for anything other than a one night stand seemed pointless.

“Here you go.” Tony walked back into the room, he had lost his jacket and tie, the top buttons of his shirt were open, exposing some of his chest, and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. Peter gulped, feeling a shiver run down his spine as he tried to focus on the coffee mugs in his hands, instead.

“Thanks.” He walked over to where the man was standing next to the couch, and accepted the drink, looking around the room, trying to find something that could distract him from his shaking hands. “Is that you?” He pointed at a barely visible black and white picture hanging on the wall of a hallway off to his right, leading away from the living room. Tony seemed surprised that Peter even noticed it, but he walked over there and waved for the younger man to follow.

“This is Dum-E, my first born, and this is me at sixteen,” Up close, Peter could see that it was a newspaper clipping and the headline read Tony Stark poses with the prize winning robot in his father’s workshop at Stark Industries. In the picture, he was crouching down next to a hydraulic arm robot, smiling proudly at the camera. Peter couldn’t help but notice that, of all the times he had probably made the newspapers, it seemed like that was the only one he chose to frame.

“You looked so cute,” he cooed, focusing on the kid in the picture. It wasn’t good quality, but he could tell Tony looked nerdy and maybe a little awkward. He wondered if he got picked on a lot in college. When he turned to look at the man’s face, he was smiling at him, amused. “What?”

“Nothing. I’m just glad you’re here.” Peter’s heart went so wild in his chest, he was worried the older man could hear it. “Thanks for agreeing to meet me, by the way, I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision.” Tony placed his mug on the console table next to them.

“I hope it wasn’t too disappointing.” He chuckled nervously, leaning against the wall and holding his mug with both hands so the man wouldn’t notice how they were still shaking.

“Actually, it was way better than I imagined, kitten,” he assured him, moving to stand right in front of him, leaving Peter trapped between him and the wall.

“What did you imagine?” He took a sip of coffee, before placing his mug on the console table too, watching as Tony discreetly took a small step closer to him, so the tips of their shoes were almost touching.

“That you might turn out to be a kiss-ass who would try to impress me with a fake personality or something, but you can’t fake this.” He pinched his pink cheek, which made Peter blush even harder. “What did you imagine? About me, I mean.”

“It varied.” He said, to put it lightly. “But when we first started talking, I got almost everything right.” He bragged, because, to his credit, it was true.

“Yeah?” Tony’s eyes widened a little in surprise.

“Yeah.” Peter nodded, eyes roaming the man’s face, remembering all the things he fantasized about over the past few months. “Your hair, your eyes… Your voice.” His voice was small when he finished, as Tony closed the space between them by leaning in closer, one hand resting beside his head on the wall.

“My voice?” He lifted a brow and tilted his head to the side, blinking in curiosity.

“Mm-hmm.” He agreed nervously, eyes flickering between the man’s eyes and his mouth.

“Did you think about it a lot?” Tony was almost whispering then, his voice sounded smooth and low, and they were so close Peter could feel his coffee scented breath on his face.

“All the time.” He admitted, blinking slowly, hypnotized. Tony looked at him for a few seconds, eyes searching his face for something. When he seemed satisfied, he placed his other hand on Peter’s hip, gently, barely there, caging the younger man’s body completely in his arms.

“What did you think about?” Tony’s eyelids were so low he might as well have his eyes closed, but Peter knew he was staring at his mouth, which made him lick his lips. His heart was going wild in his rib cage, his breath growing irregular, talking became such a difficult task he didn’t think he could answer the question if he tried. “What did you want me to say to you?”

“Uhm… I just… Nice things.” He breathed out, eyes fluttering closed as he felt the man’s warm breath in his ear.

“Nice things.” He whispered, and then Peter could feel not only his hand on his hip, but his whole arm wrapping around his waist, pulling him closer. He gasped. “Like how good you are to me, hmm? Want me to tell you how beautiful you sounded when you said my name for the first time? How bad I’ve been wanting to touch you, since the first time I saw you?” Peter whimpered and lost all the strength in his knees, but Tony had a firm grip on him, holding him up. “Can I take care of you, sweetheart?”

“Yes.” As if the answer could be anything different from that when Tony’s arms were so warm around him and his breath warmed his neck and his smell enveloped him in a dream-like state. His eyes were already closed when Tony’s lips crashed into his and it was all Peter expected it to be.

Tony’s kiss was demanding, but gentle; anxious, but slow. His mouth moved against his like he had been waiting his whole life for that moment, his tongue sought passage through his lips and Peter obliged, meeting him halfway, and if there was any shred of doubt in his mind, it went right out the window at that second as Tony devoured him whole.

He felt his back slamming against a solid surface, even though he didn’t feel his feet moving. It took him a second to realize he wasn’t standing anymore, Tony had lifted him up and pushed him against the wall, catching him by surprise. He wrapped his legs around his waist, as he felt the man’s hands sliding from his hips down to his ass cheeks, where he squeezed tight.

His fingers got lost in the locks of Tony’s thick hair and a shock traveled down his spine when he felt the older man’s cock pressed against his, hips rocking torturously slow. Peter let out a surprised cry and Tony swallowed it eagerly, sinking his fingers into his flesh, they were so hot Peter could swear he could feel them through the fabric of his too expensive dress pants.

“Tony...” The name slipped out of his mouth without he even realizing it, the sound got trapped between their lips, like a shared secret.

“Shhh,” Tony shushed him when he whimpered, overwhelmed with all the feelings – the heat of their bodies glued together, the intensity of their incessant kissing, the feel of Tony’s hardness pressing against his, his hands roaming his body like they owned him – it was almost too much, Peter thought it might drive him insane. “Come on, let’s get you comfortable.”

The older man let him down gently, but held him firmly by the hips as he did, which was a good thing, since it took him a minute to find balance again. He gave him a lopsided grin, grabbed his hand and started pulling him down the hallway.

He followed the older man to what he assumed was his bedroom – it was just as big as the living room, probably, there was a huge bed in the center, and one of the walls was entirely made of glass, just like in the living room, but it slowly grew darker and darker until it was a solid gray color, hiding them from the world outside and vice-versa. The room was dark, then, and it took a minute for his eyes to adjust.

Tony let go of his hand and turned around to look at him, as he calmly undid a few more buttons of his shirt, eyes fixed on Peter’s face. He felt his cheeks burning again, which made the corners of the man’s mouth tilt up.

He sat down on the bed behind him and before the younger man could wonder what he was supposed to do next, he felt Tony’s hands on his hips, pulling him closer, until Peter was standing between his spread legs and the man’s face was almost pressed against his chest.

“We can stop right here,” he said, looking up at him, and Peter had a sudden urge to run his hands through his hair, so he didn’t hold back. Tony closed his eyes and sighed, turning his head a little to kiss one of his palms. “Did you hear me, honey?” He asked, firmly, looking into his eyes, and he nodded.

“I don’t wanna stop.” He whispered back, cupping the older man’s face, leaning down for a kiss.

Tony groaned into the kiss, satisfied with Peter’s initiative. He reached for the back of the boy’s legs and pulled them until he got the message and straddled him. They both moaned softly when their bodies found each other again. It was amazing to Peter how much easier it was for him to feel comfortable when they were so close, when Tony’s hands were burning his skin and his tongue was claiming his mouth in the most possessive way.

Again, he barely felt when Tony maneuvered him, he just felt an incredibly soft surface against his back and realized he was lying down with the older man between his legs. He felt dizzy, a little out of his mind, like he was in a dream. The room was dark and so very quiet, the only thing he could hear was the sloppy sounds of their lips locked together – and he had to admit he was growing addicted to it, to his taste, to the way his kisses left barely any room for breathing and still he would rather suffocate than ask him to stop.

He whimpered when he felt the older man pull away. He opened his eyes only to meet his heated gaze staring down at him for a moment, before he sat back on his heels and finished unbuttoning his shirt, slowly revealing more skin as he went. Peter noticed the scars on his chest and for some crazy reason he wanted to touch them, kiss them better, even though he knew they probably didn’t even hurt anymore. He bit his lower lip, trying to hold himself back.

“Enjoying the view?” His eyes snapped back up to Tony’s face and the man was smirking down at him, as he slid the shirt off his arms and threw it carelessly to the floor.

“Can you blame me? It’s quite a view.” Peter felt bold enough to say, watching the smile grown on older man’s face, as he leaned down again, his arms caging the boy’s head when he placed his elbows on each side of his face. He brushed his nose along Peter’s cheek, until he reached his ear, biting down on the lobe as he blew hot, moist air against his skin. The boy shivered, closing his eyes, hands flying up to grab Tony’s naked shoulders as if he was afraid he would sink into the mattress if he didn’t hold on to something.

“You think you can just say stuff like that and get away with it?” The words were mumbled into his neck as he bit down with hunger, one hand sliding down his torso, reaching for his belt. Tony started undoing it as he kept whispering in his ear, “You wanna hear nice things, but you keep trying to drive daddy mad, how is that fair?”

“Oh God,” Peter gasped, when he felt the man’s hand slide down the front of his pants, under his underwear, wrapping around his cock without any warning. He started massaging it slowly, almost lazily, as if he didn’t even realize he was doing it. “Daddy, please...”

“Now that’s a good boy. So polite.” His lips came crashing down onto Peter’s as his hand tightened around his cock, jerking it at a faster pace. The boy wrapped his arms around Tony’s neck, hands finding their way into his hair for the hundredth time that night – God, he loved his hair, so thick and soft in his fingers – and pulled him even closer to his face, deepening the kiss in an almost desperate way.

Peter kept trying to get Tony’s hand to move faster, thrusting his hips up every chance he got, but the older man ignored it completely, keeping his own, steady pace, as his mouth slid from Peter’s lips to his neck. The younger man threw his head back, exposing his throat, allowing Tony to have his way with him, there was nothing he wouldn’t give him right then and there, he was his.

“You smell fucking delicious, baby.” He inhaled deeply, nosing the exposed skin right above the collar of his shirt, then both of his hands started working on unbuttoning it and Peter whined at the loss of Tony’s touch on his cock. “It’s okay,” he whispered as he slid the shirt down his arms, throwing it to the side. “I’ll take good care of you, baby, I promise.” He leaned back down and kissed along Peter’s collarbones, before sucking one of his nipples into his mouth.

Peter was so fucking hard, just hearing those words almost sent him over the edge, it was ridiculous. It didn’t help that the older man’s tongue was abusing his nipple until it was hard and oversensitive, before he attacked the other one.

He slid his hands from the man’s shoulders, down his sides, reaching for his belt, but before he could do anything about it, Tony grabbed both of his wrists in one hand, catching him off guard, and held them above his head. Before Peter could say anything, his mind was distracted by those delicious lips assaulting his again, and the pressure of the older man’s hands around his wrists and his solid weight on top of him was enough to tame him into submission.

“Don’t move,” he demanded in a whisper, giving Peter one last peck on the lips before getting off of him. He bit his lower lip, trying to contain any sound of disappointment he might make, and shut his his eyes tightly. He kept his hands where Tony left them, above his head, like he could still feel the man’s fingers around them.

In seconds, Tony was back, Peter felt him positioning himself between his legs again, but didn’t open his eyes. He felt the older man’s hands on his hips, grabbing the waistband of his pants, slowly sliding to bring them down along with his underwear, leaving Peter naked and completely at his mercy. The feeling was inebriating.

When he didn’t do anything else for several seconds, the boy opened his eyes, breath hitching when he saw Tony in all his naked glory, kneeling between his legs, holding the base of his rock hard cock as he looked down at him with hunger in his eyes.

Before Peter could say or do anything, Tony leaned down and, without any warning, enveloped his cock in the wet warmth of his mouth, swallowing him down in one single motion. Peter cried out in pleasure, head spinning, eyes watering, legs spreading wider to give the older man more room to do whatever he wanted to him.

He bit the back of his hand when the man started sucking him, head bobbing up and down in a steady, slow pace, before drawing back with a pop, only for his lips and tongue to circle the tip of his cock, swallowing it down again right after, until Peter could feel the back of his throat. He couldn’t avoid the moan that slipped from his lips, as one of his hands flew to bury into Tony’s hair, but he didn’t dare to apply any pressure, he just pulled a little on the soft strands, trying to get himself under control.

When Tony set a quick pace with his mouth, Peter started pushing his hips just a tiny bit, keeping up with him, skin burning, hands gripping the sheets as if it could hold him back. He felt something cold and wet trying to make its way between his ass cheeks, making his eyes fly open, widening a little. He panted, knees falling further apart, allowing the older man better access. He felt one finger pushing in, calmly, gently, as the man kept sucking him off just as enthusiastically, Peter barely felt the burn on his lower back when the finger was completely sheathed inside him.

He was overwhelmed by the double stimulation, but he’d be damned if he was going to ask Tony to stop or slow down. He rocked his hips at Tony’s pace, obediently following the rise and fall of his head, thrusting up into his mouth and then down against his finger, taking anything and everything he could get.

He was already going insane when Tony held his hips down, as he slowly introduced another finger along with the first, the burning sensation taking the edge off a little, to Peter’s relief. He stayed still for a few seconds, feeling Tony scissoring his fingers, trying to open him up as best as he could, until both of them were buried deep inside him, pressing all the right places, pushing all his buttons at once, and he knew he couldn’t take that for much longer.

“Daddy, please, please... Please...” He pulled Tony’s hair until he reluctantly lifted his head, letting his cock go with a pop, eyes meeting Peter’s head on, dark as midnight.

“Please what, baby boy?” He asked, still fucking his fingers in and out of his hole, pain and pleasure mixing and making it impossible for him to rationalize anything.

“Please fuck me,” he begged, watching a slow smile appear on the older man’s face.

Tony climbed on top of him and attacked his lips, to Peter’s delight, who wrapped his arms and legs around his larger body, pulling him closer, their heated skins flush together, the boy could feel every inch of him enveloped by Tony’s warmth, his scent, all of him.

When Tony pulled away, Peter quickly moved to turn his back to him and lay on his stomach, not sure if he would want him like that or on all fours, so he pushed his hips up, giving him the option to put him on his knees if he wanted to. It took Tony a few seconds to lay his weight on him again, his chest glued to his back in a delicious friction, hips aligned, his hard cock pressed against his ass, as he mouthed at his neck, sucking and biting.

“Will you turn around for me, baby?” He whispered in his ear, nudging him on the side. Peter blinked a few times, trying to look at him from over his shoulder, but the angle didn’t allow it. “I wanna see you.”

His breath hitched and he froze for a second, feeling both of Tony’s hands sliding down his sides. He put some space between them and nudged Peter again, but didn’t force him to turn, he let him choose. The younger man obeyed, after a few seconds of stunned silence. Tony rested his weight against him again, holding his gaze.

“Is this okay?” He whispered against his lips, waiting long enough for Peter to breathe out an almost soundless yes before devouring him. He closed his eyes and let himself go, gave himself over the other man, without a hint of fear, untroubled by the consequences of the day after.

He felt Tony’s hands, strong and rough, grabbing both of his thighs, lifting one of them to place his ankle on his shoulder, spreading him wide open. He felt the wet tip of his cock brushing against his hole, making it quiver in anticipation. Peter only had enough time to take a breath before feeling the older man start to press into him, but his moan was swallowed by Tony, who kissed him deeply as he forced his way into him, slowly and unrelenting, the burn was painful but so fucking good.

“Tony, please,” he begged, he didn’t even know what for, when he felt the man bottoming out. He wrapped his arms around his neck, burying his face in his shoulder, breathless, shaking all over. “Daddy...”

“I’m here, baby,” he whispered, holding still for a few minutes. Peter appreciated the gesture – he did – but he really needed more, he needed Tony to move, he needed Tony.

He rocked his hips and immediately felt his already swollen lips attacked again by the older man’s as he pulled his cock out slowly, and then gently shoved it back in. Peter squeezed his eyes shut, breathing through the pain, but he didn’t want to stop, he didn’t want time, he felt full and satiated and he just wanted that feeling to last forever.

Tony started picking up the pace, fucking into him with short, shallow thrusts at first, and then long and deep ones as Peter’s muscles relaxed and started to give in to the intrusion and suck him in deeper. Tony must have felt it because he held him down by the hips and started fucking him like he meant it, and the younger man threw his head back, crying in relief and pleasure and delicious pain, only to have his throat attacked with kisses and bites, Tony’s beard scratching against his smooth skin, leaving burns that felt like claiming marks.

“Please, I’m gonna–“ Peter didn’t have to say anything, soon there was a hand wrapped firmly around his cock, pumping it at the same pace as Tony thrust into him, and it was too fucking much, Peter bit down on the man’s shoulder and squeezed his eyes tight as came with a blinding force, body shaking all over. Tony thrust a few more times, hard and deep, as he grunted, before he pushed one final time and fell on top of him with a sigh.

Peter panted, trying to catch his breath, what proved to be tricky with the larger man lying on top of him, but he made no effort to get him to move. On the contrary, he gathered the last of his strength to hold him by the shoulders, keeping him close for as long as he could.

He must have drifted off at some point, because he was startled awake by someone sitting by his side on the bed. When he opened his eyes, the older man smiled sheepishly down at him.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he whispered, leaning down to peck his lips, before sitting up again. “I’m just gonna clean you up a little, ok?” Peter blinked a few times in confusion, until he looked down and noticed the older man had a wet towel in his hand, which he used to slowly clean his chest, belly, legs and between his butt cheeks.

The young man blushed a little, surprised by his actions, but said nothing, just watched as the Tony threw the towel to the floor and lay next to him, propping his head on a hand to look down at him.

“Do you want me to go?” He asked quietly, after a few seconds, not wanting to be an inconvenience, but Tony frowned.

“Why, do you want to go?” He asked and Peter bit his lower lip, looking into the warm, brown eyes, trying to figure out the answer the engineer wanted to hear. He shook his head no and Tony smiled softly, lifting a hand to stroke his cheek. Peter all but purred. “Then stay, kitten. I make great pancakes.”

“You don’t say.” He raised his eyebrows in honest surprise, because he didn’t think a billionaire genius would worry about mastering such a mundane task as making pancakes.

“I do say. You’ll see tomorrow morning,” he answered quietly, like a secret, as his hand traveled from Peter’s face to his hipbone, where his fingers made small circles that tickled his skin lightly. He let his head rest on the pillow next to Peter’s, their faces so close he could feel Tony’s breath on his lips.

“I saw you the other day.” Peter whispered, because it felt intimate, like they were keeping secrets from the world. Tony lifted an eyebrow in curiosity. “Well, Iron Man, I guess. Flying over Central Park.”

“Oh, yeah. I went to a meeting in the UN Security Council, but then I had to come back here in a hurry, or Pepper would kill me.” Tony had a contagious, cheeky smile, but Peter couldn’t help but notice a little sadness hiding in his eyes when he talked about his ex-wife. He wondered if Tony could see the same sadness earlier, when they were talking about Beck.

“Hmm. Trying to decide if that meeting was incredibly boring or incredibly cool.”

“Weirdly, it was both.” They laughed quietly and Tony slid closer, until their chests were almost touching. “Is this ok?” He asked and the younger man just nodded, before he arranged himself to rest his face on Tony’s chest, legs entwining in the process until they were both comfortable. They fit well together, Peter couldn’t help but think in secret.

He knew it was stupid to hope for anything other than what they’d just done, he knew it was pointless to want more, he did, he truly did. But when he closed his eyes, he imagined things were different. He imagined he had a different past and Tony had a different life, and things were simpler and easier.

He drifted off to sleep with a smile on his face, lulled by the gentle rise and fall of Tony’s chest.

-x-

Tag list (please let me know if you’d like to be added or removed from the list): @sadachmesarthim @iamnotparticularlyproud @staticwhispersinthedark @bluestarker

#starker #tony stark x peter parker

32 notes · View notes

bean-pole-art · 4 years ago

Text

Ed’s Borderlands Fics Masterpost

well finally

here is the masterpost of all of my Borderlands fics posted. most of them are Rhysothy focused to various AUs. I’m gonna update it as I post more but here it is, along with some of my commentary

right from the start big big BIG shoutout to @spoks-illogical-art, my partner in crime, my biggest inspo, without them honestly most of these fics wouldn’t exist, please check out their amazing art <3

(latest edit - 21/02/2021)

Atlas AU - our main timeline, follows events of Moxxi’s Heist. lots of different concepts and ideas but the core really is Tim moving to Promethea to get help from Rhys. gonna sort em here with posting date, check the ao3 series for the “timeline”

Hypothetically - 2240 words summary: Rhys talks a lot, but usually thinks about it too little.

coffee, cats & monographs - 2880 words summary: “Hey hey, easy. You don’t want to repeat the accident from last week, do you?” Rhys cooed towards the cat and picked her up, just as Timothy instructed him to. Hearing these words, Felicity meowed. “Oh, don’t say that. This is my office and I have the power here,” he answered, carrying her back to his personal space.

Or Timothy's cat pays a visit to Rhys' office in the morning. note: I am a stupid mofo and at this point Tim would also have Loader Bot fkjbfd just imagine hes not mentioned cause hes wandering off, typical LB

Have Faith - 1470 words summary: During the 7 year lockdown at the Handsome Jackpot, Timothy couldn't really have any hope for himself. But maybe on Promethea it could be different. note: sudden feelings while watching JoltzDude139′s stream

Warm Cheeks, Cold Hands - 1170 words summary: Rhys comes home early and wants to say hi to his husband. With no ulterior motive. None at all. note: first fic Ive ever posted where characters are married, actually. fuck it, Rhysothy Real, his name is Rhys Lawrence

the battle (and the aftermath) of the ages - 2970 words summary: In a situation like this everything was possible, they could pull any punches they could think of. Four beasts playing against each other, every single one of them thinking of striking the winning blow.

Or Promethea Squad plays UNO. And then watches a movie. note: I love Promethea Squad with my whole heart

okurimono (贈り物) - 4/4, 17170 words summary: “Not a bomb. Just a device with a message for Rhys. Trust me on that,” this time an emoji of both winking and showing off a tongue [;P] appeared on the surface of Zer0’s helmet. Ah. So they were definitely trying to mess him up. In a way. Unfortunately, he really didn’t have any other options. Almost with a defeat, Timothy took the ECHOrecorder right from their hands and looked around it again. Or Zer0 gives Timothy a peculiar mission. note: my first ever multichapter fic. took me legit abt 8 months to finish but I am absolutely satisfied with this. also the bonus ending. yes

(there is) something I see in you - 8690 words summary: How one Rhys Strongfork met one Timothy Lawrence and how they fell for each other. More or less. note: best to go into this one blind, I swear. dumbest fic Ive ever written and please take this as a recommendation

this world is gonna pull through - 14380 words summary: Timothy really hoped it wasn’t anything important. He had that tendency to forget things easily, even if he tried to fight it. But Rhys kept on smiling and went by his side. So it couldn’t have been that bad. Still dumbfounded, he felt Rhys leaving a kiss right on his cheek.“November 11th?

That- That seriously doesn’t ring any bells?” Rhys continued, brushing his hands against his shoulders. Or how Timothy spent one of his birthdays. note: also a love letter for Tim but a nicer one I guess kdjfnb dont ask how old is he i have no gdamn idea man

Strawberry Sweet - 3560 words summary: Rhys surprises Timothy with a gift for their date night in.

Happy Mercenary Day, Mr. Lawrence - 4670 words summary: How Timothy spent his first Mercenary Day on Promethea. note: I swear this is the best writer night Ive ever had. Ive written this whole thing in one night on Christmas day, solely on the inspo of that song I linked

Don’t Go Wasting Your Emotion - 4/4, 17080 words summary: Afterwards, he went around with his usual duties. Getting a quick roundabout from his PA, checking several sectors himself and looking through the thousands of messages already sent to him via ECHOs. Rhys was ready to finally take on the day, yet when he made his way to the office, he saw the unusual envelope right by the edge of his desk. “For Rhys” was written on it. Straightforward enough. Or Rhys gets a letter from a secret admirer. note: another multichapter fic!! this one also took some time and well. its inspired by ABBA songs. cause only I would write a Rhysothy fic inspired by ABBA

Ratchet Effect - 7130 words summary: Knowing just how much overworked Rhys has been, Timothy wants to let them have a nice getaway in Lazy River Land. There's only one problem to overcome - ratch infestation. note: first fic of 2021!! Ive been playing a lot of bl3 suring the writing of it so it has a lot of stuff I had observed both on Promethea and on Jackpot

Reflections - 2250 words summary: Sometimes, Timothy needs a reminder.

Tales AU - second most important timeline. it’s Tales but Tim is a part of the group. sorted chronologically

A Story For Another Day - ongoing, for now - 2/25, 15280 words Tales AU main fic. it’s gonna be a big one

Connection Interrupted - 3240 words summary: With his driving shift finished, Timothy checks up on Rhys and Vaughn's plans.

Completely Hopeless - 1040 words summary: In which Fiona notices that Rhys behaves differently in front of a certain doppelganger.

infinity times infinity times infinity - 3460 words summary: Rhys and Timothy share some dreams and secrets underneath the stars. note: the beautiful combination of Sleeping At Last and Minecraft parodies. I promise it makes sense

reality can be whatever I want - 11420 words summary: “Hey, Tim?” Timothy didn’t even spare him a look, “Are we alone, or is he there with you?” Oh, this definitely won’t be pretty.

After the confession of Handsome Jack's AI in his head and his plan to infiltrate Helios, Rhys needs to set things right with Timothy. Somehow. note: thanosdancing.gif to Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” 80′s remix and a guest appearance from Ferocity but I cant legally say her name here

still here - 2820 words summary: It all had to go down, after Helios crashed. note: I have...a love/hate relationship with this one kjdfbfg I like it but it’s honestly an alternate ending and doesnt fit within our usual bad ending, so take it with a grain of salt. i ten jebany błąd językowy w summary, kiedy ja go poprawię

together at last - 5590 words summary: It all struck him down in an instant, in this one minute. They were all safe. And they were all alive. Nothing was threatening neither him, nor Timothy, nor Fiona. He could finally breathe out.

They all found each other again. note: I am multitasking most time of my life but I dont relate any other fic to multitasking more than this one. I was honestly doing 10 things at once while writing this dfkjbndf

David AU - this one is a sub AU to Tales AU and the plot is kind of complicated dfjkbfb please check the fic for further explanation

building in curved lines - 22490 words summary: “To be fair, you look terrible. You’re barely standing in one piece and none of your coffees will hold you together for that long,” Lilith paused, seemingly weighing the correct words in her head. “You haven’t really been holding on since… We rescued The Double.” Rhys sighed heavily. Why did she have to be so right about everything. Or how Rhys and Timothy adjust to the reality after the Handsome Jack AI. note: bday gift for Spok, EASILY one of my absolute faves and the longest fic Ive written thus far

outside of AUs - some concepts I play with that are honestly outside any of our concrete timelines/concepts + fics not focused on Rhysothy

Real - 770 words summary: Reconciling with your past is a little easier, when you have someone you love right in your arms. note: first blands fic I’ve ever written. the characterization isn’t really there yet but as a first shot at the game and my kind of “introduction”, I am still satisfied of it

(Un)Familiar Faces - 9620 words summary: Timothy pursed his lips and leaned over the wall a little. He’s had enough of this solitude of closed doppelganger cabinet. Today wasn’t the day for another self-loathing session. Today, he should go off on Helios and do something for himself.

Or Timothy spends the night at a Helios bar. But not as Handsome Jack. And not as Timothy Lawrence either. note: personal favorite of mine, tough love letter to Timothy Lawrence. I have so many fond memories of writing this, including getting drunk out of my mind just like Tim and Rhys here

basics of survival - 2010 words summary: Athena taught Timothy everything he needed to know about survival. Now, it was time to put these skills into use. note: wrote this right before rona outbreak on last day in my dorms. thats all

#borderlands #fic masterpost #fanfiction #fanfic #rhysothy #rhys strongfork #timothy lawrence #just tagging characters that I write the most #fiona the con artist #zer0 the assassin #lorelei the coffee commander #athena the gladiator #Ędi's writing

39 notes · View notes

rawiswhore · 4 years ago

Text

Shawn Michaels x Fem Reader- “Nothing Compares 2 U”

In July of 1998, one of the most iconic, influential pro wrestlers of the 1990's made a return to the WWF.

Who is it?

Shawn Michaels!

You're so happy he's returned to the WWF, not only is he a legend and icon in pro wrestling, but he's arguably sexier than ever before in July of 1998.

His hair is somewhat shorter, not a buzzcut like John Cena and Randy Orton have, but he's cut a few inches of his hair off.

At the end of July 1998, when he returned to the WWF and it was the week of his birthday, you were lying in bed with him one night in a hotel room.

You were snuggled up next to Shawn, he not wearing a shirt and his arm wrapped around and behind you while your hand was caressing up and down his bare chest.

The lamp was on sitting on top of the nightstand next to the bed you and Shawn were sharing, you're hoping Shawn doesn't fall asleep yet.

"I've missed you so much" you confessed to him, your face looking at him.

"I've missed you too" he admitted, his fingers stroking a few strands of your hair. "I think the audience in general misses me!"

While Shawn did make a few appearances during the WWF's Attitude era from 1998 to 2002, some could even say 1997 and even 1996 is the Attitude era, it's a shame he wasn't there all throughout this era.

Though, would he have fit in with this era?

This is an era notorious for being very edgy, violent and downright shocking.

Then again, he was in D Generation X, who helped initiate the WWF's Attitude era and are part of the reason the company calls itself WWF Attitude.

When your hand caressed up and down his chest, he felt a rush travel throughout his body, your touch giving him tingles where you touched him.

He had an erection poking through his boxers he was sleeping in.

"You know how sexually promiscuous I was" you said "Do you know what the word 'promiscuous' means?"

"Of course!" he replied. "I've been a bit promiscuous myself too!"

You chuckled when he said that, at least he admits his promiscuity.

"You know I've fucked most of the roster, because some of them are sexy" you admitted "But you're the hottest out of any wrestler I've fucked"

You looked into his eyes when you confessed that, your head raising from the crook of his neck and leaning your face to his.

You also tried sounding sexy when you confessed Shawn is the sexiest wrestler you've fucked, your voice sounding huskier but sultry and sexy.

"Really?" he asked "Well, thanks!"

He probably agrees he was the hottest man in the WWF.

You nodded your head when he asked "really?", replying with "you're welcome" afterwards.

When your hand was caressing up and down his chest, his chest hair was slipping and sliding in between your fingers.

"Triple H, Hunter Hearst Helmsley is almost as sexy as you are" you admitted "But he's also a bit like Sable...in some angles he looks good, and in others he doesn't!"

Shawn probably disagrees with you about Sable and how she looks.

"You don't think Sable's all that hot?" he asked.

"Sometimes in a few angles and pictures she's beautiful" you admitted "But in other angles, she looks so much older than her age. I can't believe so many men go nuts over her!"

Debra is also that same way, yes, the same Debra who was married to Stone Cold and was Jeff Jarrett's valet.

Most of the WWF's audience in the Attitude era are horny teenage boys, and do these boys lust over Debra and Sable, despite them looking older than their age occasionally?

I've seen some people online admit they didn't like Sable and Debra when they were horny teenage boys and that those 2 WWF divas looked older than their age.

But you aren't here to talk about WWF divas. You're here to talk about the wrestlers you've fucked.

You have a bit of relationship OCD with Triple H.

Sometimes he looks hot as hell, but other times he doesn't, and you look at him to see if he's th

"Jeff Hardy, from that Hardy Boyz duo" you brought up "Oh God, now he is someone just as sexy as you are"

Your voice was using a lot of emphasis when you gushed over Jeff Hardy's appearance.

"I know who Jeff is" Shawn mentioned "They remind me of the Rockers duo I used to be in"

He should know who Jeff is, you've had a few orgies with Jeff and Shawn.

The Hardy Boyz eventually would be the Attitude era's equivalent to the Rockers, and Jeff would become the Shawn Michaels of the duo.

Jeff would eventually become a major sex symbol in the WWF/E, where teenage girls would shriek and scream their lungs out when he took his shirt off, and 95% of wrestling fanfiction in the early 2000's would be slash fanfiction shipping Jeff and Matt Hardy.

Doesn't Jeff sight Shawn as a wrestling influence?

Since Shawn brought up the Rockers...

"Speaking of the Rockers" you mentioned "Marty Jannetty, he has such a cute little baby face, like a Cabbage Patch Kid"

You moved one of your hands to your face and pinched your cheek with your fingers.

Shawn chuckled when you demonstrated that, smiling at your confession.

His chuckling spread to you, and you couldn't help but laugh and giggle at that.

"Even though Marty is pretty cute" you admitted "He looks a lot older than he is, doesn't he? And mullets are starting to get outdated, aren't they?"

Shawn would agree with you on that, nodding his head, chuckling and smiling.

"That's why I got rid of that mullet!" he chirped.

"I'm glad you got rid of it" you confessed "You look so much sexier without it"

You put emphasis on the word "so" when you gushed over his looks.

"Thanks!" he chirped.

"You're welcome" you replied, grinning at him from ear to ear.

Marty actually got so much hotter as he got older, and surprisingly, he aged better (in the looks department) than 2010's Shawn in my opinion...

Since you're on the subject of the Rockers...

"Leif Cassidy, that other new Rocker" you mentioned, though Shawn knows who Leif Cassidy is, he even "He was pretty cute, though his hair sometimes looked terrible"

His gimmick was terrible too; his character was meant to be someone completely stuck and trapped in the 1970's and his name is a combination of 2 70's teen heartthrobs.

"He lost his looks when he grew facial hair" you admitted.

Fun fact: Leif Cassidy would eventually become Al Snow, yes, THAT Al Snow who held a female mannequin head and started those sexual innuendo laced "Head!" chants during the Attitude era.

And since you're on the subject of tag team duos...

"Billy Gunn, he was the hottest one in that New Age Outlaws duo" you confessed "But I hate that bowl cut he has now"

You frowned and pouted after you admitted your opinion on his haircut he'd have throughout 1998.

"Is he gonna have that bowlcut for the rest of his wrestling career?" you asked Shawn.

He shrugged his shoulders.

He probably won't, since most popular hairstyles don't last forever.

"Even though he is pretty cute" you admitted "He does have a big forehead and beady little eyes"

He looks slightly like a caveman.

"Bart Gunn, his former Smoking Gunns partner" you brought up "He's getting so much sexier now that his hair has grown longer"

He looks like Val Kilmer as well as a cross between 2 WWE stars: John Morrison and Randy Orton.

"I feel sorry for Bart, though" you admitted, frowning and pouting "Now he's in that stupid Brawl for All that no one likes"

"That Val Venis wrestler who plays a porn star" Shawn brought up "Did you fuck him behind the scenes?"

"Oh yeah!" you confessed, nodding your head and laughing, embarrassed that you admitted you've banged him.

Of course you had to bang him, both on "Monday Night Raw" where your character plays a promiscuous nymphomaniac and behind the scenes when the cameras weren't rolling.

Even though he's a major sex symbol in the WWF, his looks, though...

"Val Venis is both ugly and sexy at the same time" you confessed. "There's some techno musician out there called Aphex Twin, and Val looks like the guy from Aphex Twin, I swear!"

"I think I've heard of them before" Shawn admitted. "I'll have to look them up"

"The resemblance is uncanny!" you added.

You didn't want Shawn to fall asleep too soon, and your eyelids were fighting to stay awake.

Though, Shawn pretty much is up all night hearing you chatter about wrestlers you've banged, as well as up all night from you caressing his bare chest, try to guess that double entendre...

"What about that Rob Van Dam guy from ECW?" he asked and brought up.

"Oh, now he's just as sexy as you are!" you gushed "He almost was in the WWF but wasn't for some reason..."

Probably because you kept letting him fuck you during his short stint in the WWF circa May and June 1997.

Since you're discussing wrestlers and other wrestling companies...

"Bret Hart is sort of like Triple H and Sable" you confessed "As in, sometimes he looks sexy, but other times he doesn't, especially when his hair is way too curly"

There's another hot member of the Hart Foundation who you could say was the British Bret Hart...

"Davey Boy Smith, he's definitely pretty sexy" you admitted "Though he does have a bit of a lazy eye and he's a bit on the big side"

Oddly enough, Shawn would develop a lazy eye 2 decades later.

"I can't decide if Davey was hotter with short hair or long hair" you admitted "Though, what was up with those cornrows he used to wear? Who told him that was a good look?"

Shawn chuckled and laughed hearing you complain about that.

And you didn't find it racist about Davey wearing cornrows because it was the 1990's and cultural appropriation wasn't an issue back then like it is today.

Nowadays, Davey would get bashed badly for cultural appropriation for being a caucasian British man wearing cornrows.

"Since when do British white people wear cornrows?" you asked. "That's the first thing I think of when I think of England, fucking cornrows"

You saying that was making Shawn laugh and helping him stay awake.

Wonder if the people in the rooms next to you can hear your conversation with Shawn?

Even though the two of you aren't having sex, you are talking about men you've fucked and banged.

There's another member of the Hart Foundation you fucked backstage...

"And there's Brian Pillman" you huffed, getting sad when you bring him up. "He was pretty handsome back in October of '96, though I'm wondering if he's the least sexiest of all the wrestlers I've fucked"

Your mood is changing when you're talking about him, hopefully tears won't well in your eyes considering he died last year.

You tried changing your mood and tone of your voice to bring up someone else...

"Scott Taylor, y'know, Too Hot Scott Taylor?" you mentioned "He is a little bit cute, even though he has a mullet"

Scott Taylor looked terrible back in 1994 when his hair was a completely straight mullet with no curls, you wouldn't bang THAT Scott.

Fun fact: 2 years later, Scott Taylor would eventually become Scotty 2 Hotty in that 2 Cool group/faction who were like the Attitude Era's equivalent to The New Day, yeah, THAT Scotty 2 Hotty who did the Worm in the ring, you even danced with 2 Cool in the ring 2 years later.

He lost his looks when he became Scotty 2 Hotty, though he was at least updated for the year 2000 with that spiky frosted tip hair and trimmed boyband beard.

"Lex Luger" you brought up. "I actually do think he's pretty handsome, though he kind of looks like he has some sort of facial disorder"

He looks like that infamous "tanning mom", the mom who infamously tanned herself to oblivion.

But you and everyone else didn't know about who the Tanning Mom was since this fanfic is set in the 90's.

"Why are you bringing all of these men up?" Shawn asked.

It's about time he asks why.

"Because I've had sex with them" you confessed "But I even wonder if it was worth it for me to bang them"

Sexual promiscuity is dangerous, especially unprotected.

It leads to STD's, HIV and AIDS that kill you.

He nodded his head.

"I've worried about you being promiscuous" he admitted.

"I haven't been all that sexually promiscuous this year, or even all that sexually active" you confessed "I've only really it done it with maybe..."

You paused at finishing your sentence to count on your fingers how many wrestling related people you've fucked this year, so far, anyway.

"7 people" you admitted. "And you're one of them"

You smiled, grinned and looked into his eyes when you said that.

He smiled and grinned right back at you, chuckling.

Shawn knows about who some of the other people you've fucked this year, he was even involved in some of those orgies with them!

Since you're mentioning people in the WWF you've banged this year, as well as last year (and the year before that)...

Since you're on the subject of wrestling related people you've fucked this year (as well as last year and the year before)...

"Don Callis, that Jackyl commentator and manager" you brought up "He actually is pretty hot, he looks like a sexier, gothic Howard Stern almost"

Shawn laughed and chuckled hearing your comparison, agreeing he does look a bit like Howard, but hotter.

"Also, that Truth Commission group he managed" you mentioned "I thought of fucking one of the Truth Commissioner guys, he had blue eyes and made these really funny facial expressions"

Shawn was trying to think of his name after hearing that.

"It's not that really big one Kurrgan" you stated. "He's ugly"

Since you're speaking about the Truth Commission...

"They actually had a match with 3 jobbers last year in the summer" you brought up "One of those jobbers, I think his name was Al Brown, was wearing a really ugly dark green singlet, but he's cute"

Even though he's a bit on the hefty side, though he is thicc and his ass was protruding through his singlet.

"I feel sorry for jobbers" you confessed "Not just because they always lose, but they're barely ever used and pushed in wrestling"

Shawn probably can't agree with that, considering he always wanted to win matches like the selfish prick he was in the 90's.

"Some jobbers are cute" you admitted "I'm sure some people would like to see them more, myself included"

You've banged a few jobbers and thought of doing them, and while you're on the subject of jobbers...

"There's one jobber named Jerry Fox who I think is pretty cute" you admitted "He has long brown hair, usually tied in a ponytail, he's surprisingly had matches with Hunter Hearst Helmsley and Mankind!"

Your hand wasn't just rubbing his chest, but drawing circles with the tip of your index finger on his chest as well.

"There's one jobber I thought of fucking, his name is Sonny Rogers" you confessed. "He had a match with Stone Cold last year and I think even won the match against Stone Cold, surprisingly"

"I think I know who you're talking about" Shawn stated.

"Stone Cold beat the crap out of Sonny" you added. "Which is what should happen"

You don't hate Sonny, but Stone Cold could easily kick Sonny's ass.

"Another one I've contemplated fucking is Brian Christopher, he's Jerry Lawler's son" you confessed. "He, I mean Brian Christopher, is a little cute, but he looks like a bootleg Davey Boy Smith"

Shawn laughed hearing that.

Brian Christopher really does look like a Great Value Brand Davey Boy Smith.

"At least Brian Christopher is better looking than his father" you stated.

You'd never fuck Jerry Lawler, that fat, bloated, woman objectifying, Trump supporting, statutory rapist pedophile creep.

"Scott Putski, he's in WCW and had a short lived stint in the WWF last year" you brought up. "He is quite sexy, though he looks more Mexican or Native American, not Polish"

You're not trying to sound racist when saying how he looks like he could be Mexican or Native American.

Shawn nodded his head and agreed with you about how Scott looks Mexican or Native American.

"He's Ivan Putski's son, isn't he?" Shawn asked "I used to watch Ivan growing up"

You nodded your head after Shawn asked if Scott is Ivan's son.

Shawn shouldn't have asked if Scott is Ivan's son, he knows it.

"I regret asking if Scott is Ivan's son" he admitted.

"It's fine, really" you consoled. "Bob Holly, a.k.a. Spark Plugg, Spark E. Plugg who used to have that racecar driver gimmick"

Shawn knows who you're referring to, he's even had some matches with Bob.

"Bob is pretty handsome" you admitted "But he has such an overbite, I was skeptical in fucking him"

You moved your hand in front of your mouth and made your hand talk by pronouncing his overbite, making your hand pull away from your mouth and your fingers scrunch up into the palm of your hand as your hand pulled away from your mouth.

Shawn chuckled and laughed hearing you talk about Bob's teeth.

"He's in that new Midnight Express with Bart Gunn, isn't he?" Shawn asked.

You nodded your head.

The New Midnight Express was one of the few things from the Attitude era that was a complete flop.

"He has blond hair now" Shawn mentioned "He looks like Ric Flair in the early 80's with that blond hair"

It isn't just wrestlers you've fucked, but 2 commentators as well.

No, it isn't Jim Ross, Jerry Lawler and Vince McMahon, though you have banged Shawn Michaels, Triple H, Brian Pillman and Bret Hart, who've all sat at the commentary table (Shawn is even sitting at the commentary table during his stint in the WWF during the summer of 1998).

They're these commentators in 1997 dressed in tuxedos at the commentary table, I can't remember their names, but they look way better than the typical commentators at the WWF table.

"There were these 2 commentators I fucked last year" you admitted "I can't remember their names, it isn't Jim Ross, Jerry Lawler, Vince McMahon, or Jim Cornette, these 2 men were dressed in tuxedos"

Shawn can't think of what their names are either, they might've even spoken French too.

"They were pretty handsome" you admitted "At least they looked better than who's usually sitting at the commentary table, but they're not as hot as you are"

Your eyes looked at Shawn and you grinned wickedly when you looked at him, the tip of your index finger gently scratching his chest.

No pro wrestler will ever be hotter than Shawn Michaels.

He's the hottest pro wrestler of all time. Of ALL time.

"Even though I've banged a lot of men in the WWF" you confessed, which Shawn already knows "You're the hottest I've fucked"

You said this as you looked into his eyes and leaned your face into his.

"Nothing, no one compares to you" you admitted "Nothing compares, nothing compares to you"

You sang that to the tune of Sinead O'Connor's biggest hit and signature song.

"Awwwww, thanks" Shawn said, smiling and having an "aaw, shucks" expression on his face.

"You're welcome" you replied, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. "I wonder if I should've fucked some of those men I've mentioned? They're not as hot as you are"

You mostly only have sex with men you think are sexy.

"I don't want you to die from AIDS" Shawn confessed.

"I know" you frowned "I don't wanna die either"

"You're so beautiful" Shawn gushed, putting his hand on the side of your face and pushing it so your face will look at his. "I love you"

"I love you too" you admitted.

Shawn leaned his face into your face and planted a kiss on your lips, where you kissed him back.

You've talked enough with Shawn tonight, so you lifted your hand and switched the lamp to off, where the room was now completely dark.

Even though it was dark, you can still somewhat see him in the dark.

"Goodnight Shawn" you said to him.

"Goodnight" he replied, where the two of you kissed each others lips again, until you buried your head into the crook of his neck and shut your eyes.

He puckered his lips to your forehead one more time until he closed his eyes, waiting to drift off to sleep.

Remember that episode of "South Park" where there was a list of the cutest boys at South Park elementary, and Kyle was the lowest?

Shawn would be at the top of your list of the hottest wrestlers you've banged, and Jeff Hardy, Rob Van Dam, Triple H, even Bret Hart would follow.

The ones at the bottom?

Al Brown (the chubby jobber who was in one "Monday Night Raw" match and never used again, Brian Pillman and Val Venis.

Even though Shawn is undeniably attractive, he does have some flaws to him.

For starters, he was inexplicably rude and disrespectful to people, just look at what he did to poor Davey Boy Smith when Davey wanted to win a match in his native England to dedicate it to his dying sister, and he made Vader cry.

And, while Shawn is sexy, he does have somewhat of this "80's/90's" cheesy guy vibe and look to him, the types of cheesy guys who wear those tight jeans in the 80's and 90's with smarmy, smug smiles and facial expressions.

Months and years later, there would be more men in the WWF/E that would become sex symbols as well as 2 men who joined the WWF you fucked.

Who are they?

Christian and Test.

Christian is absolutely gorgeous, he's easily the hottest member of the Brood, and Test is quite pretty as well, though that facial hair on him makes him look a bit redneck like.

You also banged Stevie Richards, the same Stevie Richards who was in that infamous Right to Censor group in the year 2000 and was in the Blue World Order in ECW.

Stevie's hot when he doesn't have facial hair...or that tacky Billy Ray Cyrus mullet he had in 1995.

You even banged Brian Kendrick/Spanky back in 2003, he's so cute.

Even though you'd love to bang Dean Ambrose, CM Punk and John Morrison in the late 2000's, Tyler Breeze, Adam Cole when he was in CZW and maybe even the Miz and Matt Riddle, you're married with children now.

Your sexual escapades and pro wrestling are similar to one another, why?

The hottest, best looking ones are the main events (Shawn Michaels, Davey Boy Smith, Bret Hart, Triple H), the mid carders are pretty cute but not enough (Billy Gunn, Val Venis, Marty Jannetty and Leif Cassidy), and while the lower card jobbers are pretty cute, they're not much to write home about.

Though, there's some hot mid carders and jobbers and some ugly wrestlers that are main events (Vader, Hulk Hogan, Macho Man, Undertaker, etc.).

There's probably some other cute/hot wrestlers in the WWF circa 1996/1997/1998 I haven't mentioned in this fanfic that I haven't seen.

#shawn michaels #wwf #1998 #90s #attitude era #wwf attitude #fanfiction

6 notes · View notes

saiilorstars · 4 years ago

Text

The Beginning of Everything

Ch. 30: Running To You

// Story Masterlist //

Fandom: Doctor Who

Pairing: 10th Doctor x Female OC (new face claim alert!)

Taglist: @ocfairygodmother @anotherunreadblog @maaaaarveeeeel

~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~0~

Chapter summary: The Doctor has made the worst possible mistake a Time Lord can make. He can't bring himself to face Renata even when she's so close to death so when he gets pulled back to Earth to face the Master one last time before his death, the Doctor takes it without a second though. But would Renata ever let him run on his own again?

6 months after Gabby's unveiling.

The Doctor had heard the screwdriver ping several times but there was so much going on. At first, he didn't answer because there was a unique distress call coming from Mars. He told himself he'd only pop in, make sure everything was going according to Time, and then he would see what Gabby needed. But when what he finally thought the Mars trip was a done deal, things went terribly wrong. He'd gone too far on his own. He always knew that he couldn't be alone, but he still fell. And this time he'd fallen too deep to be rescued. The bells were ringing and death was coming for him.

It scared him to the bone. How could he face Renata after his monumental screw up? She was always so proper, so law abiding, and he had broken their biggest law. She would hate him. She would hate him for real this time.

But the sonic kept pinging, and pinging…

With another sigh, Gabby lowered the sonic in her hand and looked back to where the glowing golden energy was swallowing up her friend. "He's not answering," she shook her head.

Zhe was at Renata's bedside, gripping Renata's left hand while the Time Lady writhed in pain. "I don't think she's going to last much longer."

Gabby bit her lower lip until she drew blood. Zhe was absolutely right. She didn't understand why the Doctor wasn't calling back. The few times that she'd paged him, he'd been very dutiful and returned the call within minutes. What could he possibly be doing right now that was more important than Renata!?

"C-can't hold it…" Renata groaned loudly and twisted her body to each side every minute. "I'm going to…"

"Don't use up your energy," Zhe tried calming her by passing her hand through Renata's hair. She didn't pull away when she realized how damp Renata's hair had become.

"There's no energy left!" Renata cried out in pain. She screwed her eyes shut and tried to think of anything but her impending death. She could feel it this time. It was a proper ending. Her entire body was on fire and unlike all the times before, she wasn't expelling it on the spot. Her head was pounding too. The Time Vortex inside her was making everything in her mind feel like it was being crammed. That was definitely new too. The Time Vortex was mixing, at the very least, with the other energy invading her body and if she didn't regenerate then it would be a real, proper death.

Gabby's heart broke hearing her friend crying in what had to be agonizing pain. She rushed to Renata's other side and took her hand, gripping it as tightly as Zhe was. "You'll be okay, I promise!"

Renata forced herself to open her eyes and see Gabby for the last time. "Oh Gabriella, this is it. This is my goodbye."

"No, no, don't say that," Gabby's eyes filled with tears. "The Doctor probably has a cure already and he's on his way."

"There's nothing left to do," Renata hissed as she felt a new piercing pain cutting through her stomach. "I'm...I'm not sure about regeneration so...so I just...need to thank you for being here. Both of you," she glanced at Zhe. "I don't want to die alone. The last time I died, I did it all by myself and I died during the war. I think maybe that's why this life was never a good one. I died in a war and I was reborn from a war. This life was useless. I never knew how to live happily. I was a nuisance."

"No you weren't," Gabby wanted Renata to laugh with her, to banter until Gabby could convince Renata that she was a good person.

Renata scrunched her face and whimpered. "I don't want to die without the Doctor. I had hope that…" she swallowed hard, "I had hope that maybe I would get a second chance..." Her body seemed to jerk forwards but she didn't have the strength to actually sit up. Instead, gold energy wafted from her body. Renata wanted to hope that it was regeneration energy trying to heal her body. "I need the Doctor," she closed her eyes as tears pooled in them, "I want him here with me. I want him holding my hand, telling me that he's going to make everything better even though I would argue that he couldn't. I want him here��" She gagged only to release more energy. "I need him here...I love him."

"Oh Ren," Gabby felt a deep fury ripple through her at the Doctor's tardiness. Where the hell was he!? Renata looked like a scared kid. Gabby didn't know what to do.

But then she heard something from a distance...a wheezing noise…

Gabby's anger was forgotten in a snap when she heard the beautiful noise of the TARDIS. "Oh he's here! Renata, he's here!" she left a sloppy kiss on Renata's hand and dashed for the door. "Doctor! Doctor!" she yelled all the way down the hall, and to the TARDIS. But she nearly crashed into the door when somebody opened it inches from her face. Gabby fervently shook her head and blinked fast to get her sight back. When she did, she saw who had come. "...Doctor?"

~0~

Earth, 2010.

He was back.

He was back and he was ready to cause havoc wherever he went.

The Doctor thought himself a quick-paced man most of the time. But right now, as he chased after the Master, he seemed like the slowest man in the universe.

The Master - mighty disheveled and even crazier than the last time he'd shown up - ran through a dumpsite. He roared with all his might, letting his voice echo through the dumpsite, before he leaped into the air and landed on a pile of dirt. He stood on his spot, laughing maniacally, and allowed the Doctor to witness his newest abilities. Electricity as it seemed, crackled and shifted his body to a skeleton for a brief moment.

"Please, let me help! You're burning up your own life force!" the Doctor begged to him in vain. The Master jumped off the mountain of trash and continued to run. The Doctor intended on doing the same thing but he was suddenly surrounded by humans.

Wilfred Noble was responsible for it. He'd engineered an entire search party to find the Doctor, and Renata, and was glad to have found at least one of them. The Doctor was bombarded by everyone suddenly around him. He wanted to keep following the Master but it was no use. He was long gone. Now he had to deal with Wilf, and a handsy human. Eventually, he gave in and followed Wilf to some cafe shop more close to the city. With any luck, he might get an idea on how to better catch the Master. His mind spiraled with so many thoughts.

Wilf was nervous pi is himself and that mildly grabbed the Doctor's attention. "I keep seeing things, Doctor, I...this face at night." He continued having horrible nightmares at night, nightmares that seemed relentless to terrify him each night. He didn't know what else to do but find the Doctor and Renata and get them to help him and everyone else having the same nightmares.

"Who are you?" the Doctor suddenly asked him, fixating a suspicious gaze on the man.

"I'm Wilfred Mott," Wilf answered with a light smile.

"No, people have waited hundreds of years to find me and then you manage it in a few hours." The Doctor didn't want to point out that not even Gabby had managed to find him and she had Renata and the sonic. Sometimes, a coincidence isn't one at all.

"Well, I'm just lucky, I s'pose," Wilf gave a light shrug of his shoulders.

"No, we keep on meeting, Wilf. Over and over again, like something's still connecting us."

"Yeah, but what's so important about me?"

"Exactly. Why you?" the Doctor muttered not so quietly and he knew it. If Renata was around, she would've scolded him for being blatantly rude. Renata. His hearts ached knowing that she was so far away from him and...that he might not see her again. This him had expended all his time and what had he done with it? Nothing. He hadn't found anything to help Renata, not even a bit. She was in agonizing pain and right now he wasn't even dedicating his time to find a cure for her. The Master was using that up. He was using his last moments to find the Master.

"Doctor, I've been meaning to ask," Wilf unknowingly yanked the Doctor out of his thoughts. "Where's Renata? I thought she'd be round by that box of yours." But she had yet to make an appearance.

Something flashed over the Doctor's face and Wilf wasn't sure if it was guilt or despondence. Either way, it was grim and overwhelming the Time Lord.

"I'm going to die," the Doctor finally confessed. If he was lucky, Wilf wouldn't completely grasp the implications...not like Renata would, or even Gabby. He had come across the final warning that his ending was near just after making the biggest mistake of his life. He'd crossed the line and this was his punishment.

"Well, so am I, one day," Wilf said, not truly understanding like the Doctor assumed.

"Don't you dare," he warned, almost finding it in him to chuckle.

"All right, I'll try not to."

The Doctor inhaled deeply and leaned his arms over the table. "Renata is far away right now. She's sick and I was supposed to help her, but I haven't been able to live up to my word. No, instead I went out and did something really bad. Something that, if someone had been with me like Renata, maybe I wouldn't have done at all." That's who he was, somebody who couldn't be on his own anymore. The darkness inside him only waited for his friends to leave in order to come out and wreck things.

"Where is she?" asked Wilf out she curiosity and concern.

"On a planet very far away from here." The Doctor exhaled heavily. "I was told. 'He will knock four times.' That was the prophecy. Knock four times, and then…"

"But I thought when I saw you before, you said your people could change, like, your whole body…?"

"I can still die. If I'm killed before regeneration, then I'm dead. Even then. Even if I change, it feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away. And I'm dead." And a new man will go and find Renata and give her what he couldn't. Maybe the next him would find the cure and heal Renata, like a true doctor.

"Hmm…" Wilf's gaze drifted to the window, specifically at something across the street.

"What?" the Doctor picked up on it and followed Wilf's gaze out the window. There he saw his best friend, Donna Noble, heading down the sidewalk.

"I'm sorry. But I had to. Look, can't you make her better?" Wilf desperately asked. Part of his reason to conduct his search for the Doctor and Renata was to help Donna be the happiest she could be. "You're so clever. Can't you bring her memory back? Look, just go to her now, go on. Just run across the street. Go up and say hello."

The Doctor would want nothing more than that. He would give anything to go back and travel with Donna, Gabby and Renata all together like the little family they'd become. "If she ever remembers me, her mind will burn, and she will die."

"Don't you touch this car!" Donna's loud yell made both men laugh. She was having a go at a parking meter employee in regards to her car.

"She's not changed," the Doctor remarked with a smile.

"Nah. Oh, there he is…" Wilf nodded to a dark skinned man who had joined Donna and was holding her shopping bags. "Shawn Temple. They're engaged. Getting married in the spring."

"Another wedding." The Doctor was happy to know that Donna was at least living a good life without them. Something needed to go right after all the chaos that happened. "Hold on, she's not gonna be called Noble-Temple? Sounds like a tourist spot."

"No, it's Temple-Noble."

"Right. Is she happy? Is he nice?"

"Yeah, he's sweet enough. He's a bit of a dreamer. Mind you, he's on minimum wage, she's earning tuppence, so all they can afford is a tiny little flat. And then sometimes I see this look on her face. Like she's so sad, but she can't remember why."

"But she's got him," the Doctor said, sparing the window another glance. Donna had just stopped talking to a dark-haired woman on the street. "That's all she needs." God knew one person could make a huge difference in one's life. And right now, his person was light years away.

Unknowingly, the same woman Donna had been talking to walked into the cafe. She went directly up to the counter and greeted the current waitress. They had a few words that prompted the woman to look around until she found the Doctor. She froze for a moment after catching his eye. He tilted his at her, eyes scrutinizing her appearance as she started walking towards their table.

"What is it?" Wilf turned slightly in the booth to see what the Doctor was looking at.

The young woman stopped by their table, wearing a warm smile across her face. Her dark brown - almost black - hair cascaded down her shoulders, stopping shortly above her elbows. There was a bright white flower tucking behind her left ear. She was a bit light skinned as if she was sun tanned. Her eyes were dark but there was a lighter shade right in the center of her irises. She wore a flower patterned dress with a few buttons going down her chest, the top one left unbuttoned.

"Can we help you?" the Doctor asked her, getting a faint feeling that he was supposed to know her from somewhere.

The woman smiled but said nothing. Instead, she reached for a necklace around her neck - the Doctor hadn't even realized she was wearing one! She unfastened it and let it gently fall to the table. The Doctor only briefly studied it before he got a tingling sensation in his head. It was the same as the Master. He looked up at the woman with widened eyes. As the seconds passed, the sensation got stronger, deeper, until he started seeing things.

1914. John Smith had just bumped into Renata Cartwright.

Then they were on the Titanic dancing sweetly moments before they would argue.

They met Donna, then Gabby, and they visited Zhe's gallery. Butterflies, so many butterflies clouded his mind.

The Doctor's body jumped from the booth, hitting his side on the corner of the table in the process but it didn't register to him. He faced the woman and re-scrutinized her whole body. She reached up to his ear, maybe slightly less, which wasn't that big of a difference from her last body…

When he met her eyes, he realized they were both teary. Although his teariness stemmed from a very dark spot and hers was a happy one.

"Hello, Doctor. I'm glad I finally found you," she whispered.

"Renata?" He suddenly had no air in that bypass system of his. When she gave a confirming nod, he nearly crumpled in pain. "You regen...you regenerated!?"

Renata hated to nod again but she did. He looked ready to fall so she quickly dove to hold and hug him. "N-n-n-no, Doctor! It's fine! It's fine! Look at me!" she cupped his face and sweetly smiled at him. "Look at me," she whispered. "I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm okay."

Few tears rolled down the Doctor's cheeks. "I failed you …"

"No, you didn't," Renata fervently shook her head. "You did everything you could but my time was up. I only got time to say goodbye." The Doctor's head wanted to lower but Renata had a firm grip on him. "Doctor, it's okay. I'm okay now." But he failed her, he was seeing her now. She had regenerated without him there at her side. No, he had been too busy running from his mistake. "Doctor, stop it," Renata scolded lightly.

Their minds were still connected, for the moment and she was seeing all of his mistakes...all of them. When the Doctor realized this, his head hung low this time. He was ashamed and embarrassed. Renata wouldn't want anything to do with him. And she would be right. He failed her so many times.

Renata's thumbs cleared the tears off his face. "Shh, I'm here. I'm here for you." She raised his head so that she could see his eyes. "And it looks like there's trouble aboard so…" she kissed his nose and lifted his head so that he would straighten up. "Let's get to work." She fixed his tie until it was straight. The Doctor nodded but it was done mainly out of instinct.

Renata looked past him and smiled at Wilf. "Nice to see you again, Wilf. I just talked to Donna - just a bit - and she seems like herself."

Wilf stared at her, logically confused until he could find his words. "You're…Renata?"

Renata nodded. "Yes. Look a bit different now, which is why I took advantage and snuck to see Donna. Broke a rule." She chuckled to herself and missed the Doctor's stunned face beside her.

She...broke a rule?

"But are you alright?" Wilf stood up from the booth and, like the Doctor, looked Renata over. If she changed her face then it meant she'd died.

"I am just fine, Wilf," Renata nodded. "But you aren't. I hear there are some bad dreams you're having?" Wilf nodded affirmatively. "Well, you did the right thing trying to find us. Tell you what, you go on home and we'll do a few things on our own for a couple hours."

"But I don't-"

Renata put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "I promise you that we will be back. There's just a couple things I'd like to discuss with the Doctor in private."

"You promise?" Wilf was more inclined to believe the woman, but he still wanted to hear her say it.

Renata went as far as raising her hand when she promised him again. It proved true to Wilf and so he felt confident enough to leave the cafe knowing that they would find him again. It left Renata an open spot on his side of the booth. She slid in and smiled casually as she picked up a menu from the table's rack. Her eyes gazed over the menu, humming a tune like she was truly there for breakfast or lunch. The Doctor only stared at her, trying to figure something out.

But once again, Renata knew.

"It is me, and I did regenerate." Her eyes flickered from the menu to meet his. Her lips slightly pulled for a wider smile. "I'm not going to lie I still have a headache but I think...I think with some time the Time Vortex will finally find a stabilizing level."

"But the other energy—"

"May have combined with the Time Vortex during my regeneration. Isn't it ironic?" Renata lowered the menu to the table. "I had to die in order to have a chance to live. All my regeneration energy managed to ease the outrageous levels of toxins in my body and I think, if we check later on, it might be forming a new stabilized energy."

"But you died…" the Doctor could barely string the two words together. All he knew was that he missed her death. She must have been so lonely...

"Yes, I did but I didn't die alone." She was still reading his mind. It was rude but for the moment she would leave it open until he got everything off his chest. Plus, it was kind of nice having his presence inside her head. "I had Gabby and I had Zhe...and I had somebody else." Her hand reached the white flower resting behind her ear. The Doctor saw the movement and couldn't help question the gentle stroke she gave it, like it was so precious to her. "I admit I was scared. I wasn't sure if I would make it through regeneration but...here I am."

"I'm so sorry, Renée," the Doctor barely got to say when Renata grabbed his hands on the table.

"No, no, you don't have to apologize for anything."

The Doctor swallowed a lump in his throat while he shook his head. "No, I should have been there like I promised! I told Gabby I would call back whenever she paged! I told her I would do it...but instead I made a huge mistake."

Renata's face softened as his grew deeper into a dark grimness. "Oh Doctor, I know what you have done. I know it all. You don't have to be ashamed. It was a decision that pushed you to the edge. Everyone has that moment."

"You would never," the Doctor said with the utmost certainty. It brought new tears to his eyes. Renata would never make such a terrible decision that would break all the rules their people stood by. He was never going to reach her level; he never had. He started below her and he would never be good enough for her.

Renata knew every thought of his right now and there was such a determination to prove him wrong, it shocked her...but it didn't deter her. "I'm not a proper Time Lady, Doctor. I have made my own choices that aren't becoming of our people."

"You?" the Doctor almost laughed at the idea, but Renata was quite serious.

"Yes." Renata nervously licked her lips before she continued. "I've been afraid of telling you this for a while, Doctor. It's one of my most shameful secrets, but you deserve to know that I'm not as proper and classy as you think I am. At the end of my time in the Time War, I was brought into the High Council. Word had spread that you had stolen the Moment." Once more, the Doctor's head fell in shame. "And my sister had formed a plan. The Assessor had disclosed my affair with you to the Council and they theorized that I could get you to stop from using it."

"But you never came…" the Doctor only raised his head to give her a puzzled look. His memories were a bit fuzzy in that life but he knew exactly what he did in the end.

"I didn't," Renata agreed with fresh tears glistening in her eyes. "The Assessor made an offer to me. 'Find the Doctor, take the Moment back and the High Council will grant you a new regeneration cycle'."

The Doctor's eyes widened. The High Council was always strict about their regeneration cycle. Twelve and no more. Once your number was up, your number was up. There was no getting around it unless there was a really good reason behind it, but even those were rare.

"But I convinced them to give me the new cycle first," Renata went on. Now it was her gaze that was slowly falling. "I told them that I would find you and that I would take the Moment back...but I needed the new cycle first. I only had 2 left. One left," she added for her current state. "And so they did. I was granted a whole new regeneration cycle and I was sent on my way to find you with the promise that I wouldn't let Gallifrey be destroyed."

"But you never…" the Doctor whispered and trailed off when Renata sniffled.

"I lied to them. I was so angry with them all. They plunged our planet into bloody war where I lost my entire family. I had lost my parents, Elek...my unborn child. I lost everything and nobody up in the high ranks seemed to care." A deep, still raw, fury rippled through Renata as if those events had just happened yesterday. It made her body shake from such a feeling that the Doctor had to grip her hands already around his. She exhaled deeply and found courage to look at him. "I wanted them to pay. And I wanted my sister to pay for what she did to us. So I took the new cycle and I ran away. I escaped and I let you do what you did. So you see, Doctor? I'm not proper, I don't follow all the rules. I've made my own terrible choice. You don't dare be ashamed with me because I don't care. I know who you are and nothing has changed."

The Doctor was stunned, astonished even, to hear such a story and that Renata was the protagonist of it. He studied her sweet nature, a nature that had turn slightly less grim than her last incarnation, and simply couldn't see her doing it. "You…?"

Renata nodded her head. "Oh yeah. Lied straight to their faces. I took what I thought I was owed and I ran."

"Do you regret it?"

Renata raised her eyebrows. "I regret lying to my sister but I don't regret taking the extra cycle. I never got to live. The irony is that even with the extra cycle, I still don't know how to live." She wouldn't get lost in that right now, though, not when she knew what was at stake. "So," she straightened up in her spot, "I know the Master's around here. We should find him."

"How do you know?" the Doctor asked then realized he had no idea how she even got to Earth without the TARDIS. "And how did you get here?"

A secret smile spread across Renata's face. "Somebody brought me. He told me everything that was going on. That's why I understand you couldn't return Gabriella's call."

"You're not going to tell me how you got here, are you?" the Doctor knew the answer from that wide, almost teasing, smile on her face. It was a rare sight because Renata never teased...at least not in her last life. Previous life. He swallowed hard.

"It's fine, Doctor," Renata told him again.

"Where's Gabby?"

"I left her with Zhe. If the Master truly is here and something is going wrong with Time then I wanted Gabriella to be far away from here." Renata briefly gazed at the menu in front of her and lamented that they wouldn't be able to order. "You know, I think this body is going to really like pancakes. I've never had them while I was hiding on Earth. Pancakes. Hopefully later." She slid out of the booth then held a hand out for the Doctor. He was practically in awe of her more carefree demeanor. His stunned face made her chuckle. "I know, I'm surprised myself," she said as she grabbed his closest hand and gently made him slide out of the booth.

They left the cafe hand in hand and since they had no TARDIS to get around, they settled for walking. They followed their senses to find the Master and it eventually brought them into a warehouse of some sort. It was near the dumpsite, something that made them wonder why the Master would choose such an...interesting site to reside in. He was, after all, Harold Saxon at one point.

"My nose is definitely more sensitive now," Renata crinkled her nose as they crossed further towards the warehouse. There were piles of trash and of course, being the Doctor, he had climbed the biggest one he could find. Renata sighed and watched him take a spot at the top. "Do you see…?" but she trailed off when she got a specific type of tingle.

He was near.

Renata whipped her head to the left and saw a figure coming towards them. He wore a hoodie but with the hood down. For a few seconds, the Master didn't acknowledge Renata's presence. Instead, he fired an electric beam of energy towards the Doctor, but missed.

"Stop that!" Renata yelled in outrage. They hadn't even been in the same spot for a minute when already there was a fight.

The Doctor rushed down the pile of dirt, thinking Renata would be the next target but the Master was solely focused on him for the time being. Again he shot and this time the Doctor took the blow against the chest.

"Doctor!" Renata exclaimed and dashed to help him off the ground.

The Master then sent a wave of energy at her, purposely missing so that it would only force her into a skidded stop. "Always coming to save him, aren't you?" Renata's face was a deep scowl and it was a shame it was already learning the marks considering it was only hours new. "New face," the Master remarked, barely giving her a look. "What? You thought going younger might do something for him?" his nod at the Doctor evoked a pure hatred from Renata.

"You're maniacal."

"And you're a cheater."

Renata felt anger bubble inside of her, making her fingers twitch, but it wasn't the normal type of anger she would get. It made her feel kind of sick, actually, like something was swirling inside her stomach.

The Master was satisfied with her silent reaction and so he turned for the Doctor on the ground. The latter was attempting to stand but that energy was stronger than he thought.

"Your resurrection went wrong," he strained to say. "That energy... Your body's ripped open. Now you're killing yourself."

But the Master didn't look very concerned with his situation. He turned towards the sight of the city and grinned. "And that's human Christmas out there. They eat so much. All that roasting meat, cakes and red wine! Hot, fat, blood food!" Renata grimaced at his frantic, spitting description. "Pots, plates of meat and flesh and grease and juice. And baking, burnt, sticky hot skin. Hot! It's so hot!"

"Oh my God, stop!" Renata yelled, demanded, but the Master seemed to be on automatic. The words kept coming out.

"It's mine! It's mine! It's mine! It's mine! Eat it! Eat it! Eat it! Eat it!" the Master sucked in a sharp breath and that seemed to get him some control back.

"What if we ask you for help?" the Doctor knew with that question he would at least buy them 30 seconds of his attention. Of course he didn't see Renata's reluctant expression over his decision. "There's more at work tonight than you and us."

'Are you sure asking him to help us is a good idea?'

The Doctor flinched when he heard Renata's soft voice in his head. He couldn't help but shoot her his stunned look. She could understand his reaction, given her behavior in the past when it came to this precise ability, but the situation called for it.

'We're in trouble, Doctor. I will not stand in the way because I don't want you to peek into my mind. You know me now and all my secrets. There's nothing left to hide.' Renata was at peace with that, and she could only wait for the Doctor to fully grasp the fact she'd lied about being 'proper'. They would have to discuss that later when everything was over.

The Doctor gave her a nod then returned to the conversation with the Master. "I've been told something is returning."

The Master raised his arms to present himself. "And here I am!"

"No, it was something more."

That was a disappointment. The Master's arms dropped but his hands soon found his head after a particular jab of pain struck him. "But it hurts."

"I was told the end of time…"

"It hurts, Doctor, the noise...the noise in my head, Doctor!" the Master bobbed his head at a tune that only he could hear. "One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four,

stronger than ever before! Can't you hear it?"

"We really can't," Renata said quietly from her spot. Even though the Master was crazy, she always believed him about the drums in his head. There was no way anyone could fake that type of insanity.

"Just listen!" the Master practically barked at them for silence. "Listen, listen! Every minute, every second, every beat of my hearts, there it is...calling to me. Please, listen!"

"We can't hear it," the Doctor told him.

The Master groaned in frustration and stalked towards the Doctor, ignoring Renata's cry for him to stop. He grabbed the Doctor's head and pressed their foreheads together. For a split second there, the Doctor heard the famous drums drumming away...nonstop.

He shoved the Master away with a face of horror. "But that's…!"

"You heard it?" Renata blinked at the Doctor, wondering if perhaps the Master had tampered with his mind.

'No, it was there,' the Doctor promised her, his eyes still glued to the Master. 'He truly does hear something.'

Well, that changed things. Renata took a stride towards the two men and pulled the Master to her. "There can't actually be a noise in your head so-so…" she couldn't begin to comprehend the layers that went behind that 'noise'. She was flabbergasted and it showed on her face. "What is inside your head, then?"

The Master pulled his arm out of his grip to laugh as if he'd finally won something. "It's real! It's real! It's REAL!" he suddenly launched himself into the sky, as if it were that easy, and landed at the top of a pile of dirt and rock. "All these years, you thought I was mad. King of the wasteland. But something is calling me, Doctor, what is it? What is it? What is it?"

"If we knew, you wouldn't be up there!" frowned Renata. "Now get down!"

They were suddenly taken over by the whirring blades of a helicopter coming towards them. A beam of light struck down over the Master, then the Doctor and then Renata. Two ropes swung down the air, allowing for two men to rappel down. Between them, they tranquilized the Master and hoisted him up.

"No, stop!" the Doctor dashed for the pile, as if he would ever catch them in time.

Two other soldiers appeared in the area, one of them forcing Renata to put her hands up while the other started firing at the Doctor. The Master was taken before the Doctor ever reached him, but even then somebody got the idea to smack him unconscious.

"If you hit me with that I swear to God you'll regret it," Renata pointed a warning finger at the soldier holding the gun on her. The soldier didn't appear that intimidated, but they did leave her be.

When she could, Renata rushed to the Doctor's side. She called his name twice before seeing the mark of the smack on the left side of his face. It was deep enough to keep him out for a decent amount of time.

~ 0 ~

By the time the Doctor came to, it was nearly dawn. But the strangest thing was that he wasn't even outside. He was inside the TARDIS, his body unceremoniously sprawled over the Captain's chair.

"What the—" he gave a jump and nearly fell to the floor.

"Please don't hurt yourself," Renata poked her head around the console. "It took me a good deal to drag you to that chair. You're heavier than you look."

The Doctor briefly paused to shoot her a mock-glare. "Thanks." He straightened himself up a minute afterwards and brought a hand to his head, precisely over the spot he'd been smacked.

"Yeah, I wouldn't touch that," Renata said after catching him wince. "They got you really good, not that I'm complimenting the enemy. That's what you do." For the second time, the Doctor mock-glared at her. "Sorry," Renata bit her lip and awkwardly smiled at him.

"How'd you find the TARDIS?" he asked after realizing she had to have gone off in the night to find the box while he'd been unconscious.

"With enormous difficulty," Renata leaned her body forwards on the console and sighed. She had to wander through the streets, following her senses to find the TARDIS and it involved a certain degree of thinking like the Doctor. She came to the conclusion that she wasn't meant to think like the Doctor.

"You didn't think to check my mind for the location?"

"That's rude," she said matter-of-factly.

So, not everything had changed in her. She was still cautious about rules. The Doctor strode to her side and gazed at the monitor she'd been working at. "How long has it been?"

"It's nearly morning and I've got nothing," Renata admitted with frustration. "Whoever took him knows exactly how to hide his, well, Time Lord sense. I couldn't do it and the TARDIS couldn't do it. What else can we do?"

The Doctor considered every last option they had which, honestly, wasn't a lot. Although, there was one option he bet Renata hadn't thought about. He wouldn't have thought about it either because it was a minuscule thing, so small that Renata wouldn't consider it important.

"I've got one idea," he said and prepared the console for their next destination.

~ 0 ~

"This was your idea?" Renata had her arms folded and one of her feet was tapping against the cement. They stood just across the street from Donna's house, waiting for Wilf to come out.

"He's got to be involved," the Doctor insisted but Renata scoffed so deeply that it actually made him wince. She also retained the same - if not stronger - scolding voice too.

"He is a human who just got lucky!"

"Exactly. How many humans can get lucky finding me?"

"Well I found you twice and I wasn't very happy about it." Renata kept her eyes locked on Donna's house in case Donna might pop out and they had to hide. The Doctor, on his part, glared at her again. So this incarnation had more tongue. Something to look forward to.

Eventually, Wilf came out of the house but he crossed the street in a rush. "Listen, you can't park there, what if Donna sees it?"

"So she is in the house?" Renata shot the Doctor another disapproving look. "See? It's much too dangerous."

"Oh give me a break, you talked to her!" went the Time Lord.

"Yeah, with a new face and for like 2 minutes! That was all I was ever going to get!"

"Listen!" Wilf spoke over the two before things got more heated. "You really can't be here! Can't you move that thing?"

The Doctor shook his head at Renata and turned to Wilf, getting straight to the reason they were there. "You're the only one, Wilf. The only connection I can think of. You're involved. If I could work out how. Tell me, have you seen anything? I don't know. Anything strange, anything odd?" Wilf made a face initially, ready to say 'no' when something popped into his head. "What, what is it?" the Doctor caught onto his expression fast. He'd been right. "Tell us!"

"I mean, it could be nothing…" Wilf said, for a second believing he was being ridiculous. How could a book be important?

"Think, think, think! Maybe something out of the blue. Connected to your life, something!"

"Alright, Donna was a bit strange. She had a funny little moment, this morning, all because of that book."

"What book?"

Wilf said nothing and instead hurried back towards the house.

"See? Told you!" the Doctor smugly smirked at Renata who groaned in return.

"You're ridiculous!" she went after Wilf instead.

The Doctor followed her and while Wilf went inside the house, the two Time Lords moved towards the back to wait for him. When the man returned, he held a book in his hand.

"Here you are, his name's Joshua Naismith!" Wilf pointed to the dark-skinned man on the front cover of the book.

"That's the man!" the Doctor exclaimed. "I was shown him, by the Ood."

"By the what?" Wilf asked, no hope of understanding that bit.

Renata took the book from Wilf's hands and examined the front cover. Joshua Smith certainly seemed human. She checked for the summary on the back and scowled. "Why would a human billionaire be important to this all of a sudden?"

"This is all part of the convergence, maybe…" the Doctor said, mildly lost in thoughts. "Maybe touching Donna's subconscious. Oh, she's still fighting for us, even now. The Doctor-Donna!"

A warm smile came to Renata's face, albeit sad in the end. "I miss her." Before the Doctor could say he did too, Sylvia emerged from the backdoor and nearly yelped at the sight of the pair.

"Get out of here!"

"Well, that's not a way to greet visitors," Renata lowered the book in her arms then frowned at Sylvia.

"She can't see you!"

"And a Merry Christmas to you," the Doctor sighed.

"Mum, where are those tweezers?" Donna's voice froze the group outside. It was as if the fact they froze would keep Donna from spotting them.

"Go!" Sylvia hissed at the pair.

"Yeah, alright, we're going," the Doctor grabbed Renata's arm and pulled them towards the street.

"Yeah, me, too!" Wilf declared and rushed after the pair, completely ignoring his daughter's hiss for her to stay where he was. In fact, it just made him run faster.

"Dad, I'm warning you!" Sylvia was hot on his trail when they were near the sidewalk.

"Bye, see you later!"

"Stay right where you are!"

The Doctor hurriedly unlocked the TARDIS. He wasn't in the mood to deal with Sylvia's personality, and he assumed neither was Renata. But he stopped when he heard Wilf's goodbye to Sylvia. "You can't come with us!"

"You're not leaving me with her!" Wilf responded, sounding more like a warning. He gave a nod to Sylvia who was yelling and coming towards them.

"Fair enough," the Doctor relented.

"Oh get in!" Renata pushed him in first then ushered Wilf after. "And you—" she called over to Sylvia, "—better be nice to Donna! My threat still stands!" She then went into the TARDIS, leaving behind the screaming human.

~ 0 ~

The TARDIS eventually materialized in the mansion of Joshua, in a lab room. The Doctor walked out of the TARDIS with Wilf in tow. He only made it three steps from the TARDIS when Renata called for him to stop.

"Hey! You can't just walk out of the TARDIS without a plan!"

The Doctor turned around, not exactly surprised she had also kept that trait in this new incarnation. "I do have a plan," he argued but she scoffed loudly. "I do."

"Yeah, what is it?"

The Doctor shifted a bit and caught Wilf's amused stare. "We...are going to find the Master! There! That's the plan!" Renata huffed and crossed her arms. The Doctor pulled out a remote to lock the TARDIS completely. "Just a second out of sync. Don't want the Master finding the TARDIS, that's the last thing we need. Now c'mon!"

He led the way out of the room kept to the walls of the hallways until they could make their way outside. The mansion turned out to be an incredibly huge manor with multiple buildings in the property. They had to be careful while they came close to an archway but they were almost caught by two armed guards.

"That book said he's a billionaire. He's got his own private army," Wilf remarked after Renata's gawked expression.

"Down here," the Doctor used his sonic on a small door nearby to go into before the guards could catch them.

"I don't suppose you know where this is going to lead?" Renata asked as they crept down the hallway towards the only source of light.

"Uh, no, I do not," the Doctor shrugged. "But I thought it was better than being caught by the armed guards.

Renata would give him that.

As the trio neared the room they began to hear two voices of presumed employees. Before walking straight in, the Doctor did his due diligence - something Renata truly appreciated given the fact they had Wilf with them - and spotted a man and woman discussing over a particular device set up against a wall.

"Nice gate!" the Doctor startled the pair as he walked on in. "Look, sorry, don't call security, or I'll tell them you're wearing a Shimmer. Cos I reckon anyone wearing a Shimmer doesn't want the Shimmer to be noticed or they wouldn't need a Shimmer in the first place."

The woman chuckled nervously as she glanced at her co-worker. "I'm sorry, what's a Shimmer?"

"For a second, pretend we're not stupid," Renata said flatly. She would've been nice if they weren't on crunch time. The Master was somewhere in the building and these humans actually thought he was their prisoner. The Master was no one's prisoner. But the two technicians continued with the charade.

The woman, who went by Addams, laughed. "I'm sorry, what's a Shimmer?"

With a straight face, Renata raised her sonic screwdriver (her dress had pockets!) at the woman and dismantled the disguise. She was a green woman with small spikes sticking out from her head. It gave Wilf a gasp. The Doctor was more stunned with the fact Renata had done that.

'The Master is on the loose. I will not let him hurt people again.' Renata said without making the smallest of expressions on her face. 'I will apologize later.'

Now that sounded like her. The Doctor put away his smile after a moment and got Addams to disclose everything they had on Joshua and his experiments. He and Renata surfed through their recent results but as much as they studied, they couldn't understand what this huge project was about.

"What are you doing!?" cried a man as he walked into the room to find the intruders.

This time it was the Doctor who took the disguise off and left another green skinned humanoid in its place. "Shimm-err!" Renata struggled hiding her smile. "Now tell me, quickly, what's going on, the Master, Harold Saxon? Skeletor, whatever you're calling him, what's he doing up there?"

The man, Rossiter, helplessly glanced at Addams for some type of explanation. She was beyond trying to stop them. "But I checked the readings. He's done good work. It's operational!"

"Yeah but that doesn't mean it'll do whatever you think it'll do," Renata turned around and looked him and Addams over. "And I'm sorry but who are you? We met another you but, uh, he was a bit small and quite red."

Addams seemed displeased by the comparison. "No, that's a Zocci!"

"We're not Zocci, we're Vinvocci! Completely different!" the male Vinvocci exclaimed, sounding just as offended as his co-worker.

"Alright, sorry," Renata raised her hands over her chest to show she truly had meant no offence.

"And the Gate is Vinvocci. We're a salvage team!" Addams explained before they got any ideas that they were also intruding. "We picked up the signal when the humans reactivated it, and as soon as it's working, we can transport it to the ship."

"But what does it do?" the Doctor frantically waved a hand for them to start explaining the useful stuff.

"Well, it mends, it's a simple as that. It's a medical device to repair the body. It makes people better!"

"No that won't do," Renata shook her head, confusing the two Vinvocci for a second. "The Master would never help fix a machine meant to heal people."

The Doctor agreed. "There's got to be more. Every single warning says the Master's going to do something colossal." He needed to figure it out before the machine was actually used.

"So that thing's like a sickbed, yes?" Wilf asked just to make sure he wasn't completely lost. He was still trying to get over the two cacti people.

"More or less," Addams said.

"Well, pardon me for asking, but why is it so big?"

"Oh, good question," Renata gave him credit where it was due. "Why is it so big?" She frowned when Addams scoffed at the condescendingly, as if they were neanderthals compared to them.

"It doesn't just mend one person at a time!"

Rossiter scoffed along with Addams. "That would be ridiculous!"

"It mends whole planets!"

That revation froze Renata and the Doctor. They simultaneously stared at the Vinvocci, not that their expressions would do anything for them.

"Yeah that'll do it," Renata gave a nod afterwards. That would definitely get the Master's attention.

"It transmits the medical template across the entire population," Addams thought simplifying it further would get the two aliens to stop staring at her so wide-eyed. They looked like the bugs this planet had, the ones that buzzed so much. "What?" she asked when the two still hadn't taken their eyes off her.

The Doctor suddenly bolted from the room.

"What's going on!?" Addams called out but he was too far gone to even hear her.

"The Master, that's what," Renata sighed before breaking into a quick run herself.

The Doctor was good at what he did best, but not even his speedy legs could get him to the main room on time. The Gate was full on running and despite the Doctor's insistence to turn it off, nobody would listen to him. In fact, all he got were rifles aimed at him.

"No, no, no, no. Whatever you do, just don't let him near that device!" the Doctor desperately looked at the Master at the side of the room. The straight jacket on him meant nothing.

The Master seemed to agree with the Doctor's thoughts because he smirked. "Oh, like that was ever gonna happen." He destroyed the straightjacket with a burst of energy then leaped into the Gate with a scream. It forced everyone away out of sheer fear. "Homeless, was I? Destitute and dying? Well, look at me now!"

"Get out of there right now!" Renata ordered as soon as she ran inside. She was out of breath, more so than her last body but to be fair it had been mere hours since she regenerated. Her body strength wasn't entirely back yet.

"Deactivate it. All of you, turn the whole thing off!" the Doctor ordered in vain again. Everyone just stood there.

"God, humans are so frustrating!" Renata exclaimed at everyone. The Doctor started to realize it wasn't so much that they weren't listening but that they couldn't.

"He's...inside my head," Naismith said, frantically rubbing the side of his face.

"Get out of there!" the Doctor snapped at the Master and was shot back in retaliation with an energy bolt.

"Uh, Doctor? Renata?" Wilf came into the room with a stumble. "There's this face…"

"What is it!?" the Doctor rushed to the man as a last resort. He and Renata weren't being affected by whatever the Master had done to the Gate. "What can you see!?"

Wilf shook his head like everyone else was, as if that would shake whatever inside. "Well, it's him. I can see him! I can see his face."

Renata noticed the television was on and whoever it was currently giving a speech seemed to be under the same situation. "Is that - is that the President of the United States!?"

The Doctor ran past her towards the gate to try and shut it all down but the Master had thought well ahead.

"I locked it you idiot!"

The Doctor knew it was useless so be did what he could. He ran back to Wilf and ran towards the booths, grabbing Renata along the way.

"What!?" Renata cried as she'd nearly fell on her own feet from such a sudden pull.

The Doctor pushed Wilf into one of the booths and then pulled Renata with him into the second booth mirroring Wilf's. "I just need to filter the levels so it won't affect us!"

"Could've said something instead of just yanking me away for the ride!" Renata huffed and assisted with the shields.

"Bit in a rush!" He exclaimed.

"Oh! I can see again. He's gone!" Wilf blinked rapidly out of relief. His mind was clear of that maniacal man!

"Radiation shielding. Now, press the button, let us out!" the Doctor pointed to the control pad on Wilf's side. Of course the human didn't understand at the first instruction.

"You what?"

"We can't get out until you press the button, that button there!"

"Oh, okay!" Wilf pressed the button the Doctor pointed to and allowed the two aliens to get out.

"50 seconds and counting!" the Master laughed deliriously at his grand plan.

"To what?" Renata demanded to know but he laughed.

"Ohhh, you're gonna love this!"

The Doctor once again went for the Gate in a last attempt to shut it down. For a moment, Renata wondered if putting a good smack against the Master's head might do some good.

You're not a child, she berated herself. No, she wasn't. She rushed to help the Doctor again, thinking maybe between the two they could come up with a quick solution. Neither of them noticed Wilf accidentally pulling out his revolver while he meant to take his ringing cell phone out.

It was Donna calling, at first, frantic that everyone was acting weird. It both shocking and relieving to learn that she wasn't being affected. Soon after, a friend of Wilf's called saying the same thing.

"What is it? Hypnotism?" the Doctor asked, though Renata wasn't sure if he was asking her or himself. Either way, neither of them knew the answer. "Mind control? You're grafting your thoughts inside them, is that it?"

The Master shook his head condescendingly. Oh, he couldn't wait for them to figure it out because by then it would be too late. Well, he might as well give them the answer. It might be more fun that way. "Oh, that's way too easy. No, no, no, they're not gonna think like me. They're gonna become me. A-a-a-and, zero!" Right at his command a wave of energy burst from the Gate and made its way around the entire globe.

It was then that they realized what the Gate would truly be. Every single human was turning into the Master.

"Doctor! Renata! She's starting to remember, Donna!" Wilf cried from behind. He turned a glare on the Master. "What is it? What have you done, you monster?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, are you talking to me?" the Master, the original, gestured at himself before gesturing to the other versions of himself in the room. "Or to me?"

"Or to me?" a second Master asked, followed by another, and then another. And then another.

'Breaking news - I'm everyone. And everyone in the world is me!' Even a reporter on television joined in.

Renata felt her head spinning. One Master was more than the universe could handle. She was stunned, and terrified. Very, very terrified.

The Master walked across the floor with his duplicates standing behind him. "The human race was always your favorite, Doctor. But now, there is no human race. There is only... the Master race."

Renata had the good sense to back up as if that would make a difference. She didn't know when it happened but her hand had found the Doctor's in the midst of their horror. He didn't even realize it either.

Everywhere around them the Master laughed thinking his victory was certain, if only he knew the greater work that was being planned ahead…

…or in the past.

~ 0 ~

Doomsday was coming for Gallifrey. The once mighty planet was now crumbling to its last pieces. The citadel barely had any glass in place thanks to the ongoing firing from both sides. Most of its buildings were down or currently smoking from put out fires. There was barely anything left, including hope. But, just because there was barely anything left didn't mean it was over. Lord President Rassilon would never submit to such a travesty.

He sat at the head of a long table in the Council's chamber room. One hand held a long staff while the other hand was covered in an ornate gauntlet. "What news of the Doctor?" he demanded from the other Time Lords in the room.

"Disappeared, my Lord President," one Time Lord answered with a bowed head. It was no secret what that meant.

"But we know his intention," spoke a Time Lady, this one with a head held high. She had a sharpness in her dark, space-like, eyes that would typically scare the others, for when they saw sharpness it meant there would be consequences. "He still possesses the Moment and he'll use it to destroy Daleks and Time Lords alike. The Visionary confirms it."

Rassilon said nothing in the beginning as he focused on the old woman at the other end of the table. She was the only one not subjected to his terrible mood. Right now, she was part of the solution. Her straggly, gray hair covered most of her tattooed arms and face. She wrote fervently on a sheets of papers sprawled around her.

"Ending, burning, falling, all of it falling, the black and pitch and screaming fire, so burning," the Visionary rambled to herself as if she was the only person in the room, perhaps the world.

"All of her prophecies say the same, that this is the last day of the Time War, that Gallifrey falls, that we die, today," the first Time Lord from before spike up again. Before he could say more, the Visionary entered a loop of one word that backed the conversation.

"Ending... Ending. Ending. Ending!"

"Perhaps it's time," said a second Time Lady, this one seeming a bit more nervous than the other and yet she was struggling to keep it at bay. The first Time Lady was staring at her with beedy eyes, but the second Time Lady went on. "This is only the furthest edge of the Time War. But at its heart, millions die every second, lost in bloodlust and insanity. With time itself resurrecting them, to find new ways of dying, over and over again, a travesty of life. Isn't it better to end it, at last?"

The second Time Lady cocked her head to the side, her expression cold and calculating. What a fool. She had no idea what she was saying and much less to who. Their Lord President would never allow for them to die. Gallifrey could not and would not fall. They would survive because they would, because she had the perfect way. That's what she always did, she found solutions to problems. She found the best ones and kept other opinions and suggestions - like the one they just heard - out of the public's ears. She wasn't the Assessor for nothing.

"Thank you for your opinion." Rassilon rose from his chair, turning sideways to the second Time Lady. His expression bore no emotions but what he did next wasn't surprising. With his gauntlet-covered hand, he disintegrated the Time Lady with one hit of energy. Nobody flinched when the woman screamed into oblivion, but they did when Rassilon yelled. "I will not die! Do you hear me?! A billion years of Time Lord history riding on our backs. I will not let this perish. I will not!"

"My Lord," the Assessor stepped forwards, letting her hands reside in front of her, "I do have another solution." Her lips quirked only slightly when Rassilon gave her the attention. He always did. Her reputation preceded her. The Assessor was known for her logical, calculating solutions that had often brought them the best results. She was first and foremost professional, even when it was impossible to be. Not even the loss of her parents and her own husband months ago knocked her off. She kept going because that's what needed to be done. That's what was expected of her. And she always did what was expected of her.

"My sister, Renata, could help capture the Doctor before he uses the Moment. She could convince him not to use it."

However pleasing that sounded, Rassilon could not fully believe that one woman was smart enough to outwit the Doctor. "Explain yourself at once, Assessor."

The Assessor nodded, though she would struggle explaining the story given the contents of it. It was something she forced her mind to erase over the centuries but now was the time to bring it all back for their salvation. "Forgive me my Lord, for this is...an embarrassment to my family. Centuries ago, before the Doctor and my sister were each married, they had a relationship. I don't know how long it had been but when I caught them, I forbade it." Her darkness settled nicely over her tone, as if she used it constantly...and perhaps she did. Her eyes still turned ice cold whenever she thought of that horrifying period in their lives. How her sister could have done such an atrocity to their family was still beyond her now. "But I suspect that Renata never truly moved on. I suspect the same from the Doctor. If we shall do one more thing may I suggest we use this as a strategy?. Who else to convince him than someone he could never reject?"

"You are sure this could work?" Rassilon questioned.

"It was known that the Doctor's family has since been deceased. There is no one left, only my sister. Her word would carry an immense weight."

Rassilon remained silent for a few minutes. There was no telling what he would decide on. Ultimately, he gave a nod. "Bring her in. Find her and bring her here now."

"Of course," the Assessor bowed her head and hurried out of the room in a purposeful stride.

"My Lord," the first male Time Lord Lord up after the Assessor had gone. like everyone else, he didn't doubt that the Assessor knew what she was doing - her previous doings had given her a high standing reputation amongst their people - but the Time Lord felt like this was something that needed to be addressed. It could be part of their saving. He grabbed one of the Visionary's scrolls and brought it to Rassilon. "There is one part of the prophecy. Forgive me. I'm sorry. It's rather difficult to decipher. But it talks of three survivors, beyond the Final Day, two children of Gallifrey and one child of the Vortex."

Had Rassilon been human, the snap 'excuse me?' might have come out of his mouth. He did a double take at the Time Lord in front of him. "Child of the...Vortex?"

The Time Lord swallowed hard as he nodded. He assumed he was about 2 seconds away from being disintegrated. "Y-yes, my Lord." The symbol, albeit surrounded by incoherent scribbles, was quite clear. Everyone knew the symbol of the Vortex and there it was. However he did denote another symbol, one that took a moment of study, that did make things just a bit more credible. "The Visionary drew a-a...I believe humans call it a butterfly."

Rassilon all but snatched the scroll from the Time Lord's hands. He needed to see for himself but even as he confirmed the Time Lord's words, he didn't understand it. And that wouldn't do. "Names. I want names." He chucked the scroll back to the Time Lord who scrambled to catch it.

His hands shook as he hurriedly searched for the names on the scroll. "It, uh, it foresees them locked in their final confrontation, the enmity of ages, which would suggest…"

Rassilon understood that part perfectly. Everyone knew it. "The Doctor! And the Master. And the third? Who is the third?"

"A-A, uh, a…" the Time Lord scanned the scroll as best as he could, "A daughter. The Vortex Butterfly."

Rassilon glared at the man before him. That made absolutely no sense. His gauntlet may have raised halfway, prompting the Time Lord to quickly add more.

"Renata! Time Lady Renata! She-she merged with the Vortex! The butterflies are part of a human's mind - imagination - and together they were turned into new creatures."

The confusion washed off Rassilon's face to be replaced by utter disgust. Behind him, the rest of the Council exchanged confused glances. Humans were known to be quite simple and primitive. They never questioned the Doctor's fascination with that race on account of his own odd behaviors, but everyone knew Renata was a proper Time Lady. She belonged to a noble family, a family that was well respected for always being the prime example of what was expected of a Time Lord. Though she ran a questionable charity foundation, after she married she went on to become one of the most respectable Time Ladies of Gallifrey.

And now they heard she had merged with a human's mind and created herself anew? That couldn't be.

"But one word keeps being repeated, my Lord, one constant word. Earth," the Time Lord finished just so that he wouldn't be directly under Rassilon's eyes. If he was to be furious let it be with those at fault.

The Visionary gasped at the mention of the blue planet. Her head snapped up, revealing her widened eyes. "Earth. Earth. Earth! Earth! Earth...!"

Rassilon knew not what their clear plan was, but all things pointed to the primitive planet. So be it. "Maybe that's where the answer lies. Our salvation on Earth."

#ocappreciation #doctor who #10th doctor #dw fics #10th doctor fics #dw imagine #10th doctor imagine #doctor who fics #doctor who imagines #oc: Renata Cartwright #fic: the beginning of everything #new faceclaim alert!!!

7 notes · View notes

raeynbowboi · 6 years ago

Text

My Two Cents on Female Characters in Animated Television Shows

Recently, while discussing my disappointment with the lack of development for the girls in My Hero Academia, I received a rather pointed response that accused me of not caring about female characters at all. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as often girl characters are usually some of my favorites in most shows, but where I think this person got confused is that they mistook my criticisms for contempt. You can criticize something without disliking it. Although I laughed and rolled my eyes at the accusation being the staunch feminist that I am, I figured it was a worthwhile topic to discuss: the portrayal and characterization of female characters in media. Particularly, animated television products.

Even though I wasn’t alive at the time, let’s rewind the clock back to the 1980s. During this decade, most animated television series were more focused on selling toys to go with the product than telling a good story, and this was also the time when gendered products exploded. Boys watched He-Man, G.I. Joe, and Transformers. Girls watched My Little Pony, the Care Bears, and Jem and the Holograms. The biggest shows usually had a gender division, though there were some shows that catered to children as a whole. What we usually got out of the boy shows is a cast almost exclusively male with maybe one or two female characters, such as with the 80s Voltron series were Allura was the only female character on the side of good. Likewise with girl oriented shows, most of the cast was girls with only a small handful of boys, though the Care Bears was an outlier due to having a rather fine mix of the two. During this era, if a girl was on the team, she usually didn’t do much. She was the damsel to be saved or the love interest to be smooth talked. She rarely had much more personality than “is a girl”. They were just kind of cookie cutter stereotypes who existed to be saved and supported by the real heroes. Some shows however did focus on strong warrior women such as She-Ra and Spider-woman. However, both of these were female spin-offs of boy shows and were again gendered products aimed only at female viewers.

The 1990s saw the emergence of shows with female leads that weren’t necessarily aimed exclusively at girls, but more often than not, it was more of a case of shows aimed at girls that just happened to attract a male audience. This happened with shows like The Powerpuff Girls or Daria, with Daria being a spin-off of Beavis and Butthead created to give MTV a female icon to draw viewership, as well as serving as a feminist icon and a voice of the disaffected nihilism of 90s teens. Shows aimed at a broader audience like Recess, The Magic School Bus, and Captain Planet started a trend of including more female characters, but it was still very common for the ratio to be tipped in favor of male characters. And this trope still remains at large to this day. This ratio is usually about 3:2 or 2:1 in a smaller group. Unless it’s aimed at girls or designed specifically to appeal to both genders, most products have more boy than girl characters.

Now with the 2000s, this is when my earliest childhood memories come back to me, and it’s the girls from this era of media that turned me into a feminist. I grew up on shows like Teen Titans, Avatar the Last Airbender, Kim Possible, and Totally Spies. This is when I would argue girl characters were really starting to really leap out and become actual people, though there were shades of this in the 90s as well. They were far more deep and complex than girl characters were in earlier media. Katara was still a maternal figure and a healer, but she had pride, a temper, and could be bossy. Starfire was a beautiful alien princess, but she was a warrior princess who was just as good in a fight if not better than her male teammates. Kim Possible was a super popular cheerleader, but she was also an honor roll student and a kick ass secret agent who retained her humbleness about it most of the time. While Clover was totally boy-crazy and fashion obsessed, she was balanced out by the academic Sam and the sporty Alex, and all three spies had episodes where they were the one saving the day and figuring out the problem. Fortunately, the 2010s have continued this trend of fleshed-out female characters, as shows have allowed female characters to exceed the normal parameters or expectations of their genders to treat them more like people, such as Flame Princess in Adventure Time donning very traditionally masculine clothing when she raps, both of which are not stereotypically feminine.

However, where Western Animation has progressed greatly, Shonen Anime has fallen majorly by the wayside. A common criticism of Naruto is that Sakura spent most of the time standing around doing nothing, and this sadly applies to all of the women. Kurenai is a Jonin level ninja, but she’s only ever shown in a single fight against Itachi and Kisame where she uses exactly one technique, and it’s used to show off how strong and cool Itachi is because he could counter her illusions with his own. Hinata is driven to become stronger due to being inspired by Naruto, but barely gets any screen time or skill improvement, and her only notable fight in part II is against Pain where it was a vehicle for her confessing her feelings for Naruto, and then triggering Naruto’s 6 tailed form so that Naruto could win the fight. Heck, Ino was standing ten feet away from the wanted terrorists that killed her teacher and she did nothing the entire fight. It’s not like she had mind control powers that would have been useful or anything. Sure the arc was for Shikamaru’s character growth, but even Choji did something and Choji sucks. And Tenten... Well she doesn’t matter. You could literally replace her with a lamp and nobody would be able to tell the difference. She’s just there because every squad must have a girl character.

So, now it’s time for the big feelings ouchie word: Strong Female Character. When people hear this they assume it means a character like Calhoun in Wreck-It Ralph, that tough as nails no bs cranky type of female who don’t need no man and yes, Calhoun is a Strong Female Character. And so is Katara. And Sadie Miller in Steven Universe. And Quinn Morgendorfer from Daria. Being a Strong Female Character isn’t about being tough or being a walking tank. Strong Female Characters simply have strong characterization. They’re well-constructed. Katara lost her mother when she was young and she had to take on her mother’s responsibilities, causing her to become very mature at a young age and to feel like anyone in need of help should get it because that’s her ‘job’ in a sense. Taking care of others is what she’s done since she lost her mother, it’s become her identity, and she could never reject that self-appointed duty without losing who she is as a person. Raven from Teen Titans pushes people away because she’s destined to destroy the world, and she hates herself for what she was created to do. She views herself as a living curse, and she doesn’t want to let people get close to her because it’ll hurt that much more when she has to fulfill her destiny and hurt the people that she cares about. Sadie Miller has only ever poofed one corrupted gem, but there’s a clear personality at play. She has low self-esteem and puts up with people telling her what to do because she’s a pleaser. She likes to make other people happy. Quinn is as classic girly girl as you can get. She’s shallow, vain, and bows to peer pressure. However, she voices that she doesn’t always like having to be like this, but that if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have anything in common with her friends. She’d rather be a shell of her real self surrounded by friends than her true self and alone. As Daria points out, Quinn wears superficiality like a suit of armor because she’s afraid of looking inside and finding nothing. But in later seasons, she begins to embrace the things that make her stand out by becoming more openly invested in her studies regardless of what it makes people think of her, and honestly, nobody really cares. A Strong Female Character doesn’t have to lead an army to be strong, she just has to be a fully defined person. So, now let’s bring the discussion full circle back to My Hero Academia. Earlier I mentioned the standard 3:2 ratio for larger groups. That is to say, if there’s an odd number of main characters, expect one extra boy for every boy-girl set. Too bad in My Hero Academia, it’s a 2:1 ratio of 14 boys and 6 girls. That’s 30% of the class size. They barely make up 1/4 of the class. And of those six maybe three of them have strong personalities. Tsuyu Asui, Momo Yaoyorozu, and Mina Ashido all have very distinct personalities, stand out in the class, and and have been given noteworthy character traits. Tsu tends to favor logic over emotion but doesn’t always like that this is her go-to response because she’s afraid people will think she’s heartless. Momo has high expectations for herself, and had a whole arc dedicated to her disappointment from the tournament arc. And Mina has a clearly defined personality, flaws, and tends to speak the most of the girls in the class. While Jiro’s not necessarily flat, we know less about her than the other girls. Uraraka’s character is so fixated on being the cute love interest that she doesn’t have any other personality traits. And Hakagure’s only real gimmick is that she’s invisible, but other than that is just a stereotypical girl. There’s nothing wrong with a female character not being a central figure in the narrative. What is wrong is when female characters are left to being window dressing. Jiro’s parents are both musicians and Jiro seems to like music too so why is she trying to be a hero? We know next to nothing about Hagakure. Sure, there are boy characters we don’t know very well either. Shoji, Koda, Sato, and Aoyama are still largely underdeveloped. But see, it’s problematic not only because the ratio is so heavily slanted, but because the girls that need character development don’t get much screen time. Uraraka has used the disarming training she got from her internship a few times, but that’s not a personality or a character development. And what happened when she went to the Yakuza secret hideout? She got left outside with the rest of the girls while most of the plot happened inside with the boys. Heck, Nejire who is part of the Big Three, we saw the backstories and training for both Mirio and Tamaki, but Nejire was just sort of ... present. She wasn’t given a character. Now, does that mean that I hate the girls in My Hero Academia? Of course not! Tsu is one of my favorite characters, and I like Jiro. She’s cool. But that doesn’t mean that I’m happy with the level of development and focus they’ve gotten. They’re characters too and they should be allowed to be more fleshed out in the story.

#my hero academia #mha #boku no hero academia #bnha #feminist #strong female characters #girl character #girl power #uraraka ochako #tsuyu asui #yaoyorozu momo #kyoka jiro #hagakure tooru #mina ashido

178 notes · View notes

lovelybones81 · 7 years ago

Text

Unthinkable- Updated

Summary: Seven years, three movies, two people, one story. But before they can get their happily ever after, Sebastian Stan and Camille Solis must learn to trust in each other and in themselves, before allowing the unthinkable to happen.

Warnings: Fluff, future smut, Language, Angst, mental health, WOC lead character

Rating: NC-17

Note: I finally finished it! yay!! Anyway thank you so much those who have been reading, and all those new readers. You have no idea how motivating that is. xoxo! Again feedback is much appreciated! xoxoxo

Chapter 13 Concrete Jungle

New York, 2010

“Charles, the lights aren’t even on right now!” Sebastian growled in annoyance. “Take off the damn sunglasses.”

“It’s fucking bright man!” Charles snapped back.

Grunting Sebastian answered. “That’s what happens when you decide to drink a bottle and a half of whiskey.” Setting Camille’s cup of coffee on the counter, and taking a swig from his own. “Mother fucker!” he cursed, burning his tongue on the steaming liquid. Charles snickered and Sebastian quickly turned to glare.

Charles slipped the sunglasses over the top of his head, narrowing his eyes. “Whoa. What’s up your ass dude?” sitting down on the stool and opening the paper bag with the warm bagels and cream cheese.

Sebastian sat his cup of coffee on the counter. “Nothing.” But in reality he was feeling a bit irritable.

“Seb- about last night, I’ll pay for it.” Charles said in an almost ashamed voice.

The crashing Sebastian had heard a few hours before, had been Charles bumping into a hall table and lamp. Apparently he had been looking for the bathroom, which had been hard to find while intoxicated. He waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad you didn’t end up getting hurt.” And that was the truth. After the initial displeasure of being interrupted while in bed with Camille, the feeling quickly turned to fear when he and Camille made their way out of the bedroom to find Charles sprawled on the floor, the broken lamp in his lap. Camille had swiftly helped Charles off the floor to make sure he hadn’t been hurt (just a few cuts) while Sebastian cleaned up.

After that excitement, Camille had gone back to the extra bedroom to sleep for a few more hours. Sebastian had been too wired to try, so he had gone out for a run. When he had gotten back, Charles had sobered up enough that they had walked down to the corner shop to grab coffee and bagels for breakfast for the three of them. He would have liked to make Camille a nice breakfast, but realized there was nothing in his refrigerator to make, since he hadn’t been home in months. His idea was to have them munch on a bagel and then grab brunch once they were out and about. Because apparently Camille had not forgotten about the promise he had made in Manchester about letting her drag Sebastian around the city.

Taking out a bagel, he insisted. “I’ll send you a check.” Then changed the subject. “Are you going to spill whatever has you looking that way?”

“What way?”

“You know for an actor- you have the worst poker face.” Charles said with a light chuckle and a shake of his head, pulling the lid off the container that held the cream cheese. “I’m assuming it has to do with Camille?” He guessed. “And why she was in your room?”

Sebastian narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “For someone who was drunk out of their ass last night you sure are hell observant.”

“Exactly- I was drunk.” Making sure to put emphases on the word. “Not stupid.”

Sebastian’s mouth twitched, but brought his coffee back up to his lips instead to keep from snapping. He had to keep reminding himself that Charles had not meant to crash into the table and lamp. It was an accident. And it could have happened to anyone. Hell, Sebastian was sure it happened to him before.

But if he hadn’t then maybe-

Sebastian stopped himself. Then what? He would have confessed his love to Camille? And was it even love? Maybe all those feelings were just because of the closeness they had been sharing the last 4-5 months. Besides it was not fair to throw this at her right now. She had too much on her plate. He still had shit to deal with. He cursed in Romanian as his lips touched the searing coffee again. He slammed the Styrofoam back on the counter. Obviously he had been in his own world, he had forgotten about the damn hot cup.

Charles snorted and said sarcastically. “Oh yeah, nothing...” Sebastian didn’t respond. His oldest friend continued. “Obviously there is something going on between the both of you-“ At the comment, Sebastian opened his mouth to protest but Charles raised his hand and continued. “Whether you recognize it or not. And I know I gave you shit about it yesterday, but if you aren’t ready to go there then don’t. Especially since it sounds like Camille has to figure things out herself.” He paused before letting out a large exaggerated sigh. “Okay, those are my only wise words on the subject. Don’t ask again.” Pointing an accusing finger.

Smiling in spite of himself, Sebastian mumbled. “Thanks.”

“Mmmmm coffee...”

Both Charles and Sebastian turned to the sound of Camille’s voice. She strode toward them, a bounce in her step and beaming as she eyed the coffee on the counter. Sebastian smirked. She did love her coffee. His bad mood slowly began to fade at the sight of her.

Charles spoke first, making a tsk sound. “Shit! Sorry Camille. We forgot to get you some.” He teased.

The beaming look slowly faded, a small pout on those lips. Sebastian interjected. “Listen man, one thing I’ve learned-don’t mess with the girl’s caffeine. Especially in the morning.”

Camille scrunched up her nose. “I’m not that bad.” She protested, reaching for the cup. “It smells so good.” She hummed in appreciation, cupping the container that held the elixir that would give her energy in both hands. She grinned widely at Sebastian. “Thank you.”

“Welcome.” he responded with a sincere smile, pushing the flutter in his stomach away. “Bagels are in there.” Pointing to the paper bag next to Charles. “I figured we could get brunch before you drag me around the city.” He said the last part with a disgusted look. He heard Charles snicker. Sebastian scowled back at him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like New York, quite the opposite, Sebastian loved it. But doing the tourist thing had never been appealing to him. Sure his mom, stepdad and him would drive down to Rockefeller Center around Christmas, but other than that, the urge to do Time Square, or the Empire State Building never crossed his mind. And he knew part of it was because he lived here for most of his adult life. But he had vowed Camille a good time while she was here, and it would be a distraction for her and maybe even for him.

Sipping on her coffee, she glanced innocently at Charles. “You aren’t coming with us?”

Charles shook his head, a feign look of disappointment on his face. “I wish I could, but I already made plans with the parents.”

Sebastian coughed into his mouth while uttering. “Bull shit.”

“You don’t have to lie.” Camille started, giving Sebastian a wink before turning to Charles. “I mean after last night’s debacle…” Blinking sweetly at him and peering down before continuing. “How is your hand?”

Angling his head down, Sebastian tried his best to hide the smug look, as he listened to Camille. He knew Charles was feeling embarrassed about what happen. Sebastian had seen him act like an idiot plenty of times during the years, but it was another thing to do it in front of a girl. And it seemed Camille had picked up on it. But if Sebastian knew Charles, he wasn’t going to let her have the last word. In a matter of 24 hours they had adapted an almost brother/sister relationship.

“The hand is good. Want to see it?” he challenged with a wicked smile.

He had a feeling, Charles was about to show her the finger. “The two of you are worse than teenagers.” Sebastian intervened, reaching again for his coffee, hoping it had cooled down.

“You think he be happy we get along?” Charles murmured, as Camille sat on the stool next to him. Camille only giggled before taking another sip.

Before Sebastian had the chance to reply, the doorbell rang. Frowning he looked between them, confused to who would be at his door this early in the morning. Especially when not many people knew he was back in the city. With the cup still in his hand he marched in the direction of the front door. He peeked through the peephole, his eyes widening when he recognize who was on the other side. Without hesitation, he unlocked the door, and swung it open.

“Ma!” he exclaimed in surprise. “What are you doing here?!” Taking a step back to let Georgeta in.

His mother furrowed his eyebrows at her only son. “Nice to see you too sweetheart.” She teased, placing a tender kiss on his cheek.

Sebastian shut the door behind them. “That’s not what I meant.” He stammered, fretfully running his fingers through his hair. “I thought you were in Los Angeles with Anastasia?” he asked. “Weren’t we supposed to be flying back together?” Had he misunderstood their conversation from earlier in the week? She had flown down to see his godmother for a few days, and it just happened to interchange with his schedule.

“Did you not get my message?” she asked, setting down her purse on the edge of the couch. “I decided to leave a day early since Anastasia had to leave for some meetings in Chicago.”

He groaned, shaking his head. “My phone has somehow been eating my messages since coming back to New York.” He hadn’t even bothered to check them in the last 24 hours. The plan was to stop by the store and have them look at it before Camille and he started anything today. Sebastian realized that even though she had placed her purse down, another bag was in her hand. He peered curiously, quickly becoming distracted. “What’s in the bag Ma?”

“I thought I would make breakfast.” She explained showing him what was inside. “Since I know there is no food in the house.” She said in an accusing tone, taking a step in the direction of the kitchen.

“I haven’t been here!” Sebastian protested, glancing over his mom’s shoulder to find Charles getting up from the stool to greet Georgeta. He felt a small twinge in his chest when he saw the look on Camille’s face. She had not been expecting this. In truth, Sebastian had been a bit relief when his mom had informed him she was going to be out of town when he came back to the states. Camille meeting Georgeta had not been part of the plan. And it wasn’t because Sebastian would mind it. It was more of self preservation. He had just gotten out of a 2 year relationship and even though she was the only one who knew the full details of what had happened, he had a feeling she would not truly understand his relationship with Camille. Especially because he was not one to bring along friends to meet her. And his intention had not been to add more on for Camille. Yes, he talked about his mother to Camille and vise versa, but hadn’t prepared for this impromptu meeting.

"Charles!" Georgeta proclaimed. "I didn't know you were going to be here!" Reaching to wrap her arms around his best friend in a motherly hug. Her back to Camille.

Charles smiled widely. "Just for a few days." Letting go of each other and grabbing the bag out of her hand to place it on the counter.

By that time, Sebastian had made his way toward Camille, placing one hand on her shoulder, feeling her stiffen a bit at the touch. Peering down, he gave her an apologetic smile. But as quickly as he felt her stiffen a few seconds ago, Sebastian felt her rapidly relax. Clearing her throat, Camille stood up from the stool.

Sebastian knew this shouldn’t be a big deal, yet it felt like a big deal.

Georgeta turned around to face Camille and Sebastian. Her eyes widen in surprise for a moment, but quickly warmed up when they landed on Camille. If there was one thing he could always count on was his mother knack of making people feel welcome and at ease. It was like she somehow sensed it. Beaming with a smile, she spoke up. “Camille…right?” extending one hand out.

Camille gave a slight nod, giving Sebastian a side look in surprise. “Yeah-yes.” She stammered. “Nice to meet you.” Reaching out to shake Georgeta’s hand.

Georgeta stretched out her arms, but stopped abruptly as if realizing that not everyone liked to be touched. “If that’s okay?” she asked.

“Sure! Of course.” Camille said in surprise, giving Sebastian a quick look over her shoulder as Georgeta enveloped her in a quick hug.

After a few seconds, they broke away and his mother spoke up. “It’s so great to finally meet you! Sebby has talked a lot about you.”

“That’s not true.” Sebastian interjected with a shake of his head. “I maybe mentioned you once or twice.” Trying his best to hide the superior look, and he could have sworn he heard Charles snicker.

Georgeta waved a dismissive hand at her son. “He is lying. He has talked a lot about you.” She reaffirmed with a knowing smile. Camille raised an eyebrow at Sebastian but didn’t say a word. He felt his cheeks flush. And this time, Charles did snicker next to him. She continued. “I was going to make breakfast. I’m not sure if you or Charles have eaten? I know sometimes hotel food is not always the best.”

Charles piped in excitedly. “I will gladly stay for breakfast!” If there was anything Charles enjoyed was Georgeta’s Romanian mealtime.

Sebastian felt Camille’s eyes narrow in at him. Slowly, he met her gaze. Okay, so he might not have mentioned to his mother about Camille staying with him for the few days she would be in New York. It hadn’t seemed like an important detail when they had last talked. But if it was any indication by the way Camille was glaring at him at the moment, Sebastian should have mentioned that small tidbit.

Georgeta must have caught the way Camille was looking at him, because she wrinkled her nose and asked. “Is everything okay?”

Clearing his throat, he looked sheepishly at Georgeta. “Actually Ma, Camille is staying here…with me.”

Georgeta glanced over at Charles. And he quickly shook his head. “I’m staying at my parents.” Sebastian frowned. It was amazing how quickly they all turned to almost teenagers when parents were around. Especially him.

His mother quickly turned her head to face him and said in Romanian with a knowing look. “So that’s why you didn’t answer my call.”

Sebastian’s mouth twitched with a roll of eyes. “It’s not that way at all.” He replied back in his native tongue. Ah yes, this was the other reason why he had wanted to avoid this meeting. Because his mother always presumed some- if not all- the women in his life were girlfriends.

She squinted her eyes at him, the same way he had done plenty of times before, and then said in English. “It’s a good thing I brought plenty suncilita taraneasca. (Fatty piece of meat that still has the pork skin on it.)” She teased with a light smile. Taking a step in the direction of the kitchen, and rummaging through the bag she had brought in. “There is another bag missing…” she mused to herself, taking out a large container with a lid.

He let out silent sigh. Good. She wasn’t going to push it-at least for the time being. He eventually wanted to sort out his feelings, and he wanted talk to Georgeta about it, but he just wasn’t ready to do so right now.

“I’ll go grab it.” Charles volunteered. “In the car?” he asked, already trudging toward the front door.

Georgeta took two glass containers of zacusca. (Romanian vegetarian spread), and franzela (Romanian typical bread) out of the bag. “Oh shoot! He doesn’t have the car key!” she cried, quickly grabbing her purse, and jogging to follow Charles. She came to a quick halt before stepping out of the apartment. “Please start getting the oven ready.” She ordered Sebastian in Romanian.

As soon as the door shut, Camille spun to Sebastian, with glowering eyes. His own widen in alarm. “I’m sorry!” he apologized before she had the chance to gripe at him. “I thought she was still in Los Angeles…” He argued, noticing for the first time her hair. The straight hair was gone, instead her dark auburn curls were back, still damp, clanging to her head and neck. A heavy smell of vanilla clogged his nostrils. Swallowing, he stopped talking, letting his eyes admire how striking Camille looked in the mornings.

“Sebastian!” she hissed.

He blinked out of his daze, eyes locking with her. “What?” he asked stupidly.

“I said- I don’t want your mom thinking that I’m trying-“

“Camille,” He soothed. “I promise its okay.” Closing the gap between them, cupping her face with both of his hands. “I could have mentioned the little detail about you staying with me.” He admitted with a light shrug. “But that’s it. And if anyone is going to get an earful- it will be me.” He finished, giving her his famous half smirk and puppy eyes.

Knitting her eyebrows together, Camille leaned in closer. “You’re lucky your so-“ but stopped herself, biting on her lower lip.

Sebastian raised an eyebrow expectantly. “That I’m what doll?” he pushed.

Camille pinched the bridge of her nose. “Don’t call me doll.” She ordered in annoyance.

But he ignored her request and pressed. “I’m lucky that I’m what Camille?” God, how he loved the teasing/flirty banter between them. She gave a nonchalant shrug, looking anywhere but his face. Using his index finger, he tilted her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. Unable to keep the coy look off his face, as she squirmed under his touch.

“Stop.” Camille whined, giving his front door a quick glance.

He didn’t budge, he squinted his eyes, mouth twitching to one side. He still wasn’t sure of what he was doing, but it obviously had an effect on her and he found it slightly adorable. “I’m not doing anything.” Breaking into a huge grin, unable to keep the other look going.

His smile must have caught on, because a grin began to tug on her face. But the grin slowly spewed out a slight giggle out of her. She was visibly trying to keep a straight face through this little banter they were having to see who would break first. It was humorous, because at times even when they were having tiny moments just like this one- they still managed to bring the silliness out of each other.

Giving him a gently shove, she asked. “Didn’t your mom say to start the oven?” He raised a brow in a surprise. She raised one back. “I kind of got the gist of what she was asking.” Taking a small step back toward the oven, while making a funny face.

“You’re really not going to finish that sentence?” following her into the kitchen, but not before reaching one arm out to try and grab her wrist or waist.

“No.” she replied with a shake of her head.

“Why not?”

“Because,” Camille started, turning on the oven. “It will just give you a big head. And I don’t want to be responsible for that.” Dramatically placing a hand over her chest.

“Uh huh. Whatever you have to tell yourself doll.” Repeating the nickname she disliked so much. But Camille didn’t respond, instead stuck her tongue out. “You should put that away before you hurt someone.” He snapped back wittily, dropping his eyes down to her mouth for effect.

“Hmmph.” Was Camille’s only response.

He gave her a cheeky grin. “Actually- I can think of other places where you can put that tongue on.”

As those words left his lips the front door flew open, Georgeta and Charles reappeared, each one with a bag. His mother eyed him. “Did you turn the oven on?”

He pointed to Camille. “She did.” Grabbing the bag out of his mother’s grasp and placing the bag on the counter.

“Thank you.” Georgeta said, making a point to look at her with a heartfelt smile.

Smiling back, Camille answered. “You’re welcome. Anything else I can help with?”

“Would you mind cutting into slices the franzela to put in the oven?” As she began to take the rest of the ingredients out of the bags. “Charles? You want to start on the vegetables?” Charles nodded without saying a word.

While his mom gave instructions, Sebastian was showing Camille where his cutting knifes, utensils, etc. were located. But he quickly twisted around, facing Charles with a reproachful look. “Uh-didn’t you say a few minutes ago you had plans with your parents?”

His oldest friend opened then quickly shut his mouth, throwing daggers with his eyes. “Not until later this afternoon.” He replied with an indifferent hand way, as he reached for the cutting board and knife, quickly getting started on slicing the cucumbers, tomatoes and spring onion like Georgeta had asked.

“Are you sure?” Camille piped in over her shoulder, an accusing look in her eyes before giving her attention back to the bread. “It sounded as if you needed to leave ASAP.”

Georgeta laughed lightly. “It sounds to me as if these two are trying to rid of you Charles.” Bending down in front of a cabinet and seizing a frying pan.

Glad to have an ally, Charles glare faded, a sweet smile tugged at his lips instead, gazing at Georgeta. “They are.” He stated innocently. “They want this amazing Romanian breakfast just for themselves.”

Both Camille and Sebastian snickered. Sebastian spoke up. “Ma, I’m just repeating his words before you got here.” Opening the big plastic container, he assumed had the delicious meat he was so used to. His mouth watered when he finally took the lid off. Hell yeah. He would take Camille to brunch tomorrow. Feeling eager to share this breakfast tradition with her now. “Do you want me go ahead and put it in the microwave?”

Georgeta had begun frying the eggs. “Da.” She responded with a nod.

A sudden feeling of warmth, love and gratitude washed over him at the sight of his mom. He took a step in her direction, wrapping one arm around her shoulder, squeezing gently before planting a big kiss on her cheek.

Amused with laughter, Georgeta broke from his kiss, blinking in surprise. “What was that for?”

Grinning back, he said simply. “Because I love you.” Giving her shoulder another squeeze. “And because I’ve missed you.” Placing another kiss on the other cheek. “And because I’ve missed your amazing home cook meals!”

She tossed her head back with a short laugh. “I wouldn’t necessarily call this a home cook meal.” Patting Sebastian’s cheek mildly before turning to the stove.

“We spent a lot of time eating out.” Camille added, taking a step in their direction. “But all of this looks and smells delightful.” Eyeing the fried egg Georgeta was working on.

“We cooked sometimes.” Sebastian scoffed, emphasizing the word ‘sometimes’ before hitting the timer on the microwave. “You made your aunt’s chicken noodle soup recipe.” He reminded, folding his arms across his chest before leaning back against the counter. Trying his best to make easy conversation. Because even though she looked fine at the moment, he had feeling Camille was still a bit anxious in the presence of his mother.

And almost as if on cue, she let out a nervous laugh. “I wouldn’t necessarily call it culinary.” Opening the oven door, setting the slices of bread in it.

“If it’s anything like Sebastian’s cooking then its’ definitely culinary.” Charles mumbled.

“Hey! I’ll have you know, I make a mean bowl of cereal and toast.” Feigning a look of hurt.

Georgeta chuckled. “Sweetie, the last time you were home you burnt toast.”

He heard Camille giggle next to him, he turned and scowled. For the next 5-10 minutes, they continued to badger Sebastian about his cooking skills- or lack thereof, as Charles, Camille and himself helped Georgeta with the food. All four of them filled their plate up with the delicious food breakfast food. When Camille came to the zacusca, Sebastian explained what it was and how much was needed on the bread.

As they made their way to the dinner table, Camille peered at his plate and pouted. “How come you have more zacusca on your bread than I do?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sebastian answered, setting his plate down and turning back to the counter for his coffee and Camille’s.

Taking the coffee out of his hand, she raised a suspicious eyebrow, sitting down next to Georgeta. His mom leaned a bit into Camille and said in a not so loud whisper. “We usually had to have two separate containers when he was growing up because he would eat most of it.” Winking, before reaching for her fork.

Camille shoved a slice of tomato into her mouth, wiggling her eyebrows at this revelation. He tried to scowl but instead his lips twitched into a small grin. Sitting across from both women, he glanced at Charles. “Thanks for the support.” He uttered sarcastically.

Charles stopped mid chew, looking at Sebastian for the first time. “What? I knew that already.” His fingers reaching for a slice of bread.

Sebastian elbowed him in the ribs before taking a sip of the coffee. “I didn’t want it to go to waste.” Georgeta looked amusingly at him first then at Camille. Sebastian watched as Camille thrusted another piece of tomato in her mouth, trying to suppress the smile. Sitting up straight, leaning into the table, Sebastian squinted his eyes at both of them. “I don’t know how I feel about the two of you...” pointing an accusing finger. Yet, couldn’t help but feel a big pleased and relieved they were getting along. Even if it was at his expense.

His mom squinted back playfully, taking a bite of her food at the same time Charles spoke. “He just doesn’t like that Camille has come in and quickly turned everyone against him.” Throwing Camille a wink as he put more food in his mouth.

Camille’s eyes widen. “That’s not true.” Shaking her head and meeting Georgeta’s gaze.

“Ha! It’s not as funny when people start picking on you is it?” He teased, closing his eyes for a split second to enjoy his zacusca on his bread. Opening them back up, he saw the look on Camille’s face. She must have thought Charles comment would offend Georgeta, but Sebastian was sure it was quite the opposite of it.

“But it doesn’t take much to pick on him.” Georgeta’s eyes dancing with amusement as she met his gaze.

There it was! He thought to himself smugly. She could be playful when she wanted. “Thanks Mom.” He said sarcastically, chewing on a piece of bread himself.

“I think Georgeta just gave us permission to keep picking on him.” Charles said to Camille. But she still looked hesitant to say anything. “Now, you stay quiet?” he asked in a blaming tone.

“Charles…” his mother warned. “I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with the both of them.” Giving Camille a sympathetic smile.

“It hasn’t been easy.” Camille said, a sheepish look on her face when she met Georgeta’s eyes.

“Imi place de ea.” She said in Romanian to Sebastian.

From the corner of his eye, Camille smiled shyly. “Who has the big head now?” he teased, looking back his mother. “She understood what you just said.” Nodding in the direction of Camille when he saw the look of confusion on Georgeta’s face.

“Oh!” She exclaimed. “You speak Romanian?”

Sebastian chuckled softly to himself. It was always exciting when you found someone else who spoke Romanian.

“Just what Sebastian been teaching me.” Camille answered. “Not fluently.”

“In exchange, she’s teaching me Spanish.” He explained. “Or trying to anyway.”

“Seriously?” Charles asked in an incredulously voice. Sebastian gave him a warning look. Charles pressed his lips together to keep from saying anything else. Instead he feign a look of innocence as he went back to his food. He didn’t’ even need to hear Charles to know he was about to make a smart ass remark.

Georgeta didn’t seem phased, and instead focused her attention back on Camille. “Sebastian said your parents are from Central America?”

Camille gave Sebastian a quick glance. Obviously still surprised he shared so much of Camille to his mother. Was it really that weird? She just sort of came up in conversation, or was it he brought her up in conversation? Camille was part of his daily life now. He talked to Camille about Charles, and the rest of his friends. So what was the difference?

“We migrated from El Salvador when I was about 4 years old.” She responded, tugging a strand of curly hair behind her ear.

“We?”

“Mmm hmm.” Nodding before setting her cup down. “My mom was here first, then a year later my dad and I followed.”

“After a year?” Charles repeated.

“Yeah.” Her fingers reaching for a slice of a vegetable on her plate. Giving an almost awkward look over at Sebastian. He gave a small nod of encouragement to let her know it was okay to continue if she wanted. “My mom had to save some money before she could try and get us here.” Pausing for a split second, then laughing nervously. “Apparently it’s not cheap trying to find a good coyote.”

Sebastian carefully watched Charles and Georgeta’s reaction change when Camille’s words slowly begin to register with them. One of the things they had quickly bonded over was the fact they came from two different cultures/countries and migrated to the United States, finding that in someone was not an everyday thing. But somehow finding that in each other had been a good interest point for the beginning of their relationship. Sebastian did not know many people who could relate to the difficulty of coming into a new environment without knowing the language and being teased about it. And the more they got to know each other, it was obvious Camille did understand that growing pain.

But the more Camille had shared, he realized how very different paths their parents had taken to get them to the states. He remembered the first time she had brought it up, almost hesitant in the idea of sharing that detail with him. Almost as if she was afraid of being shamed for it.

Sebastian heard his mother. “It takes a lot of courage to do what your parents did.” All Sebastian wanted to at the moment was give her a huge hug in appreciation. It never crossed his mind that she would be any less understanding, but he also knew sometimes things just needed to be said out loud. And Sebastian knew this was one of those moments.

Camille tilted her head slightly, chewing on her lower lip. “I thought so too.” She said in a whisper then looked over at Charles from across the table. “No comment from the peanut gallery?” she joked.

And Sebastian knew that was as much as she was going to share about her experience.-at least for now. That was clear to him. If there was one thing Sebastian quickly learned about Camille was how she hated people feeling sorry for her. Even if that was not the case, it was always a fear. And Sebastian assumed it had a lot to do with how she was told to act after her parents’ death.

Breaking out of his thoughts, Sebastian watched as Charles shook his head, leaning back against his chair. “It’s not a laughing matter. Georgeta is right. Obviously your parents knew what was right for them and you. I understand that completely.” Pausing for a split second. “And if anyone ever thinks it is a laughing matter, I’ll kick their ass.” A small grin appearing on his face.

“He doesn’t even get this protective with me.” Sebastian scoffed, pretending to be hurt. “And he hasn’t even known her for 24 hours.” Yet, Sebastian couldn’t help but feel delighted at how quickly his friends, and now his mother gravitated to Camille. It only vindicated to him the kind of person Camille was. It wasn’t just him that saw the goodness in her.

Damn. He really did have it bad didn’t he?

“The older they get the worse they start to act.” Georgeta said to Camille with a wink.

“You know I can hear you right?”

“Oh I know you can sweetie.” Georgeta quipped. Charles snickered shoving more food into his mouth. “I was also talking about you.” Narrowing her eyes across the table at Charles.

“Ha!” Sebastian taunted, chewing on a piece of bread.

“You should have seen them when they were younger-“

“Ma...” Sebastian interrupted, his face quickly flushing at the stories his mom could tell about him. Camille quickly sat up straighter, with one arm resting on the table, an enthusiastic look in her eyes. “She doesn’t want to hear any of those stories.” He stated, but her face said otherwise.

Giving him a side look, Camille replied with a smirk. “Of course I want to hear about them. I make you listen to all of mine.”

So as they all continued to eat breakfast, Georgeta told Camille a few stories about Sebastian growing up. Thankfully they weren’t the truly embarrassing ones, silently he thanked his mother for that. But some of her stories did have Camille in fits of giggles, which only fueled Georgeta to keep telling more.

“Overall he was a good kid.” Georgeta concluded, leaning in and pressing a kiss to his forehead, then seized the dirty plates off the table, trudging back to the kitchen sink.

Sebastian followed suit, quickly taking the plates out of her hands, giving her a light shake of his head. “I got it.”

She didn’t argue. Instead she continued talking. “He was a cute chubby bebelus.” She gushed, placing both elbows on the counter.

He groaned, hanging his head forward in embarrassment as he turned the faucet on. Great, now that she started, she wasn’t going to stop.

“Aww I would love to see pictures!”

“She has plenty of naked baby pictures at her house.” Charles supplemented. Grinning from ear to ear at the look Sebastian was giving him at the moment. “What?” he said innocently. “It’s the truth!” While handing Sebastian another dirty plate. “She has them in frames and on the wall.” He continued, looking over his shoulder at Camille.

With the smile still on her lovely face, Camille met his eyes. “Why, Sebastian Stan I believe your blushing.” she teased, leaning into the counter from the other side, her legs swinging gently behind her in giddiness.

“Uh huh. Keep laughing.” He warned, scrubbing one of the dishes down. “I can’t wait until we hit Los Angeles.” Referring to the future meeting of Camille’s sister.

“Okay, okay. Let’s stop teasing him.” Georgeta ordered with a hint of smile on her features. She peered back at Charles and asked instead. “Is there a reason why you were trying to rush out of here?” Charles looked startled by the question, but quickly recovered with a shake of his head. But Georgeta was not buying it. “And don’t you lie to me.”

Camille spoke up. “He doesn’t want to be dragged around all of New York City.” Setting herself down happily down on the bar stool. Obviously the coffee had started to kick in. Because just like him, Camille had maybe gotten about 2 hours of sleep since their outing the night before. “I’m making Sebastian do the tourist thing for a few hours today.” She explained, batting her eyelashes playfully over at him. He wrinkled his nose, before continuing the task of washing the dishes. Why did he agree to this again? “Even though he doesn’t want to. He’s being a good sport about it.” Camille finished.

“It sounds like fun!” Georgeta said enthusiastically.

“Yeah, for someone who’s never been to New York.” Charles wisecracked. But he quickly shut his mouth and pressed his lips together when he saw the look Georgeta was giving him. His best friend looked like a little kid who had just been caught stealing candy.

Sebastian shook in head in amazement. It was telling how his mother or any mother for that fact, could intimidate a grown man with just a look. It just showed the power a mother had.

“Sometimes it’s nice to see or experience things through someone else eyes. You never know what you could be missing.” Georgeta said, looking meaningfully between Sebastian and Camille, as if she knew something they didn’t know.

tag: @thewintersadie @its-daydreamer23 @jhangelface0523

#Sebastian Stan #Sebby #sebastian stan fandom #sebastian stan fanfiction #unthinkable #fanfic latina

14 notes · View notes

viduamor-moved · 7 years ago

Note

do u have any headcanons abt natasha's religion? i'm always interested how marvel chara muns tie in their muse's religion w/ the myth based nature of the marvel universe, and with natasha's cultural background it's especially interesting! xoxo

OF LOVE / OF DEATH. thank you SO MUCH for sending this in !!! & in fact, i do !! i’ve been meaning to write about it for … more than a year, honestly but just never got around to it. but that’s changing ———— SHORT ANSWER : I SEE NATASHA AS AGNOSTIC, with a tendency towards belief in some kind of higher power. whether that be GOD or FATE, she has yet to decide.

but i’m sure you’re here for the long answer. IT’S IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT SOVIET RUSSIA WAS MILITANTLY ATHEIST. the government seized land & property that was owned by the orthodox church, persecuted & publicly ridiculed or arrested religious followers, & did all that it could to erase orthodoxy ( or even pagan superstitions that were both separate from or intwined with orthodox beliefs —– this marriage between superstition & christian orthodoxy was one of the biggest contributing factors to pre - soviet russia’s rich culture ) from the face of russia. natasha was born about six years after the soviet union was established, & was raised by a soviet soldier for the first ten years of her life before she was put into a soviet orphanage / training facility for about three years ( after which she returned to ivan’s care ). needless to say, natasha grew up without religion. & whatever tidbits of religion she did encounter were heavily implied to be foolish little habits, or archaic beliefs that nostalgic laymen who were useless to the soviet stubbornly clung to. but that would be an oversimplification, i think. there were still people who had not yet reached their middle age when nat was reaching her adolescence, who were born before the bolshevik revolution, who still held to orthodoxy or tradition in some way, who found it hard to let go no matter how much they tried to in public. in reading DEATHLESS by catherynne m valente, i found a small passage that i think perfectly sums up these people born before the revolution, still holding to their traditions:

IVAN HISSED THROUGH HIS TEETH & MADE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS. IT WAS A BAD HABIT, CROSSING YOURSELF, BUT LIKE BITING FINGERNAILS, HARD TO BREAK. catherynne valente - deathless, chapter 14.

no matter what the people soviet or the government did, they could never truly erase religion from russia. still, they tried their best, & their best meant a generation born into the USSR that found itself to be atheist. NATASHA WAS AMONG THEM. in her prime, she became a member of russia’s ELITE, married to the premiere test pilot, previously trained under THE WINTER SOLDIER himself, becoming the BLACK WIDOW in the early 1960′s. the concept of ‘ GOD ‘ was never on her mind. the only higher power she looked to was THE STATE, MOTHER RUSSIA, & THE PEOPLE SHE SERVED. but that changed when she defected in the late 60′s.

it is nothing less than understandable that once natasha defected from the USSR to the west, she underwent a major shift in thinking. she doubted her identity, she doubted her homeland, she doubted everything they made her believe, & when she finished doubting, she started BELIEVING.

I GAVE UP ONE COUNTRY FOR ANOTHER. ONE COUNTRY FOR AN IDEAL. I DIDN’T THINK OF IT THAT WAY AT THE TIME. CALL ME CRAZY. BUT I JUST WANTED TO BE FREE. natasha romanova, name of the rose (2010), #1

& free she became. free to love, free to choose, free to THINK & BELIEVE in what she wanted, how she wanted. the atheism she was raised with, she looked upon the same way as everything else the soviets tried to make her believe. she looked at herself critically, & she made herself someone new. but in terms of direct beliefs, natasha did not rethink them immediately. i’d say it was a slow process, via exposure rather than searching.

during the 60′s - 70′s, america was still a very protestant / evangelical nation, & belief in God was pretty commonplace, & natasha definitely picked up on this. her first real, substantial interaction with a devout believer was MATT MURDOCK, her on/off boyfriend for nearly a decade, her fwb ever since, who as we all know is fundamentally catholic. though never addressed on - panel in the 70′s daredevil run, i’d say that natasha was shifting from atheism to agnosticism during their relationship. however, religiously, things got a little more complicated when natasha began a relationship with HERCULES. yes, that hercules. ancient greek god, heracles, son of zeus, figure of myth. of course, we cannot forget that natasha also had a teammate in THOR when she joined the avengers. as someone who was not exposed to the concept of a god for the first thirty or so years of her life, this was no doubt somewhat of a shock, even if she never showed it. assimilating into a nation that believed freely, being close to a devout catholic, knowing two separate gods from two separate pagan religions … it threw her for a loop. but it also opened up a whole new world for her in terms of how people actually view their religions.

as a christian myself, God is a being that is so intrinsic to my life —— i literally do not know how i could live without Him. & i think that through the people she was around, especially matthew, natasha saw this. & through interacting with hercules & thor, natasha realized that all these ancient beliefs, these religions, could have some truth in them since their deities actually EXISTED. but still, there remains a distinction between how natasha views pagan religions whose figures she personally knows, & how she views a God that she cannot see. she knows hercules exists, she knows thor exists. she has been to mount olympus & conversed with the pantheon, she has seen odin, fought alongside brunnhilde, against loki ——– she knows without a doubt that these deities exist. but she does not pray to them, she does not devote her life to them, she merely acknowledges that they are there. & frankly, if we’re just talking about hercules, she’d much rather tell him what to do in a team setting, & sleep with him, than offer him prayers & supplication.

but if there were a God that natasha would believe in, if there were a God that would define natasha’s agnosticism, it would be the abrahamic God. she knows the pagan gods exist, but from what she sees of them, their power is limited. they fight, they make the worst of humans, & are far too hot headed & proud for her taste. what she has heard of the abrahamic God, however, is that he is good, merciful, perhaps omnipotent, & grants salvation even to those who do not deserve it. AS SOMEONE WHO HAS DONE SO MUCH WRONG IN HER LIFE, is steeped in sin, kills like it is nothing, & hides so many secrets within her heart, this God, this concept of a higher power is one that is attractive to her. but for a person this complex, it’s not that simple. as someone described above, she is also a person who has SEEN so much evil in this world. she has seen men fight, millions of people die in war & of starvation, & it is extremely difficult for her to reconcile such a world with a creator that lets it fester like it does. but she also believes that without a higher power, without anything watching over the world, she & everyone else is practically screwed. in terms of her own belief & how it applies to her, she also can’t quite … wrap her head around sin, & how her own sins can be forgiven. in MARVEL KNIGHTS vol. 1, natasha visits a church & goes to confession. the first time in a very long time, she admits, & what she says is quite telling.

BEGIN WITH THE LEAST OF YOUR SINS.AREN’T ALL SINS EQUAL ? DOESN’T EACH ONE OF THEM CONDEMN US TO THE SAME FATE ? IS THERE REALLY A DEGREE TO SIN, FATHER ? AM I EXCUSED BECAUSE THE SINS I COMMITTED WERE IN THE CAUSE OF GOOD ? CAN HE SEE THAT THE DEED IS SOMETIMES ISOLATED FROM THE SOUL ? DOES GOD SOMETIMES LOOK AWAY ? natasha romanova, marvel knights vol. 1, #1

these are not the words of a woman who does not entertain the belief in a higher power. NOR are these the words of a woman who believes with clarity that this higher power can be defined. & at the end of the day, though she may mull over what she believes about God when she drifts to sleep, she does not have the time nor energy to devote herself to a higher power, especially when her life is already given to helping people herself.

though she does not yet know where she stands, she does have a high respect for those who do practice religion, or even just for the concept of a God. & it has seemed to me that she thinks it is a concept that SHOULD be respected, & untouched by those who would seek to taint it. there are two instances that come to mind ( both from black widow vol. 5 ), the first when natasha is fighting against a man who calls himself the HAMMER OF GOD. natasha thinks this is ridiculous, insane, & tells him that she thinks that somehow, God cannot hear his prayers over his machine gun. the other instance is when the ‘ translator ‘ of CHAOS / the PROPHET, is offering natasha a part in their new movement to rid the world of evil, through means that natasha does not support. she ridicules him by saying that he cannot pretend to be jesus, that he does not have the right to be the final arbiter of good nor to take away people’s will. both of these instances are never explained in terms of natasha’s beliefs, & i think are left there to be interpreted as one wishes, but to me in context of natasha’s entire history, they are indicators of a leaning towards belief, of an acknowledgment of a God, a higher power, but nothing further.

ALL OF THAT SAID, i return to my short answer: natasha considers herself agnostic, & perhaps with a side of deism that she can’t quite put a finger on. to me, she is definitely NOT atheist, which is what fanon / fandom so loves to pigeonhole her as. but it’s not that simple, & there’s ample evidence sprinkled across her canon that says otherwise, much of which i probably haven’t even touched on here. i hope this answers your question, & i’m sorry if this was messy or complicated ——- there’s just so much to consider. religion is never something easy, because it isn’t just a set of frivolous beliefs, it’s a way of life. this is no different for natasha. & since she herself is so complex, so multi - faceted, it only makes sense that her own beliefs are the same.

#i. OSNOVNOY. ❝ ʰᵉᵃᵈᶜᵃᶰᵒᶰ / ᵐᵉᵗᵃ ❞ › remain hidden.#oh my go jfkdlsfsd this is so freaking LONG #i'm sorry this took a while too !!!#but this is ..... this is like two years of thought finally written down #i've been putting this off for so long but here it is finally LMAO #ii. VNE. ❝ ᶤᶰᵇᵒˣ ❞ › anonymous.#ii. VNE. ❝ ᶤᶰᵇᵒˣ ❞ › response.#long post for ts

9 notes · View notes

fear-god-shun-evil · 6 years ago

Photo

I Knew How to Distinguish Between the True Christ and False Ones From a Meeting on Facebook

By Ouyang, United States

Afraid of Being Deceived by False Christs

I migrated to the United States in 2010. Because my job was keeping me busy and the place where I stayed had no Chinese churches, I didn’t attend any meetings. I only read the Bible at home or listened to some sermons downloaded online.

There was one time when I was reading the Bible, I saw the Lord Jesus said, “Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many” (Matthew 24:4-5). The Lord reminded us that when He returns, there will be false Christs and prophets deceiving men. At this moment, I thought about how I myself had been drifting through the world, had not been to any meetings or gone to church to listen to any sermons. I was very worried that I would be deceived by false Christs because I didn’t know how false Christs deceive people and I lacked discernment. When I saw the video End Time Events talking about how disasters were getting greater and greater and that the Lord Jesus would return at any time, I was especially more worried. I could only often pray to the Lord asking Him to protect me so I wouldn’t be deceived by false Christs.

A Chance Encounter With an Evangelist

On Thanksgiving Day 2017, I met Sister Yang on Facebook, and I got to know Sister Li from her. The three of us would have meetings together whenever we were free. Sister Li’s fellowshiping was fresh and had new light, which I had never heard before, such as fellowships on the origins of the Bible, the mystery of God’s incarnation, the difference between being saved and attaining salvation, the difference between God’s work and man’s work, and so on. Sister Li also often sent us words from spiritual books that were very beneficial. Seeing that Sister Li knew so many truths, I told her my concern.

I said, “Sister Li, I have a question. The Lord Jesus said that there will be false Christs in the last days. I have small stature, I’m very worried that I will be deceived by them because I have no discernment. Could you please fellowship with me on how to distinguish between the true Christ and the false ones?”

Sister Yang also said, “It is very important to understand this aspect of truth. If we do not have discernment and condemn the work of Christ as the work of a false Christ deceiving people, won’t we be the ones that blaspheme the Holy Spirit and resist Christ? The consequence would be very serious!”

How to Distinguish the True Christ From the False Ones

Sister Li agreed happily and fellowshiped with us, “In actuality, the vital point to discern false Christs is to have a knowledge of the substance of Christ. Once we have it, it is not difficult for us to discern the deception of false Christs. We all know that Christ is the embodiment of God’s Spirit and possesses a divine essence, so Christ can do the work of God Himself, and He is able to express truth to save man, to bestow life upon man and show man the way to practice. Just as the Lord Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). I’ll send a passage of words to the group so that you can understand this aspect of truth better.”

I read it carefully, “To study such a thing is not difficult, but requires each of us to know this truth: He who is God’s incarnation shall hold the substance of God, and He who is God’s incarnation shall hold the expression of God. Since God becomes flesh, He shall bring forth the work He must do, and since God becomes flesh, He shall express what He is, and shall be able to bring the truth to man, bestow life upon man, and show man the way. Flesh that does not contain the substance of God is surely not the incarnate God; of this there is no doubt. To investigate whether it is God’s incarnate flesh, man must determine this from the disposition He expresses and the words He speaks. Which is to say, whether or not it is God’s incarnate flesh, and whether or not it is the true way, must be judged from His substance. And so, in determining whether it is the flesh of God incarnate, the key is to pay attention to His substance (His work, His words, His disposition, and many more), rather than external appearance. If man sees only His external appearance, and overlooks His substance, then that shows the ignorance and naivety of man.”

Sister Li fellowshiped with us, “To determine whether He is the incarnate God, we cannot look at His external appearance, but should look at whether or not He can express the truth and do the work of God Himself. Christ can express the truth to supply man and save man, and the work Christ does cannot be done by anyone. Just like the Lord Jesus Christ, who brought the work of the Age of Grace based on that of the Age of Law. He healed the sick and cast out demons, made the lame walk and resurrected the dead. Besides, according to the needs of people at that time, He gave many preachings to make man confess and repent their sins, and taught man to love their enemies, forgive others seventy times seven, love one another and so on, which brought people the way to practice. From the work of the Lord Jesus, we can see that He possesses the authority and power of God, and that the work He does and the truth He expresses cannot be achieved by man. While most false Christs are possessed by evil spirits. They are extremely arrogant and absurd, and in substance they are demons and evil spirits. They cannot do God’s work or express truth, nor can they bring forth new paths for us. Even if they talk of profound knowledge and theory or speak false prophecies, these false Christs do nothing but deceive us, harm us. Nothing they do is edifying to our life. So we should differentiate between the true Christ and false Christs from their words and work.

After listening to Sister Li’s fellowship, Sister Yang and I kept nodding our heads. Especially the paragraph of words she sent to us seemed extraordinary, and I kept thinking: Who said these words? Sister Yang also felt these words were so good.

Sister Li continued fellowshiping, “Regarding how to distinguish false Christs, the Lord Jesus has clearly told us the manifestation of them. The Lord Jesus said, ‘Then if any man shall say to you, See, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; so that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect’ (Matthew 24:23–24). From the words of the Lord Jesus we can know that the main manifestation of false Christs is performing signs and wonders. Because they don’t possess truth, they are unable to conquer man, nor do they possess the authority and power of God. All they can do is imitate some simple work the Lord Jesus did. They can only carry out signs and wonders, heal the sick and cast out demons to deceive those muddle-headed people without discernment. But they are incapable of copying what Jesus did of raising the dead and feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, or rebuking the wind and sea, which is totally beyond them. There are two passages of words clearly clarifying the truth about how to distinguish false Christs, and I’ll send them to you.”

Then Sister Li sent these two passages which say, “If in the last days a ‘God’ the same as Jesus appeared, one who healed the sick, cast out demons, and was crucified for man, that ‘God,’ though identical to the description of God in the Bible and easy for man to accept, would not, in its essence, be the flesh worn by the Spirit of God, but by an evil spirit. For it is the principle of God’s work never to repeat what He has already completed.” “In the conceptions of man, God must always display signs and wonders, must always heal the sick and cast out demons, and must always be just like Jesus, yet this time God is not like that at all. If, during the last days, God still displayed signs and wonders, and still cast out demons and healed the sick—if He did exactly the same as Jesus—then God would be repeating the same work, and the work of Jesus would have no significance or value. Thus, God carries out one stage of work in every age. Once each stage of His work has been completed, it is soon imitated by evil spirits, and after Satan begins to follow on the heels of God, God changes to a different method; once God has completed a stage of His work, it is imitated by evil spirits. You must be clear about these things.” After I was done reading these words, I confirmed from within my heart that these words are extraordinary and that they come from the Holy Spirit.

Sister Li continued her fellowship, “These words clearly told us that God doesn’t repeat His work and He performs new work in every age. Just like Jehovah God decreed laws to lead the lives of man in the Age of Law, the Lord Jesus didn’t do the work of issuing laws. Instead, He carried out a stage of the work of redemption based on the work of the Age of Law. If the Lord Jesus also issued the laws, then the work God did in the Age of Law would be of no significance or value. Similarly, when the Lord Jesus returns in the last days, He will surely end the Age of Grace, bring new work and express new words. He will absolutely not repeat the work of healing the sick, casting out demons or being crucified on the cross. According to the principle that God never repeats His work, we can be certain that anyone who is unable to do new work and express truth but can only imitate the work God did in the past, even if he can perform many miracles and calls himself God or Christ, is the counterfeit of an evil spirit, a false Christ.”

Where Do These Words Come From

After listening to the words sent by Sister Li and her fellowship, I understood that the key to distinguishing between the true Christ and false Christs is to see whether he can express truth and do God’s own work. I also came to know that the substance of false Christs is evil spirits, and that they are not possessed of the truth, but can only imitate the work God did in the past. Having understood this, I was not so worried about being deceived by false Christs. But I was still eager to know where these words came from, so I asked anxiously, “Sister Li, where do these words you sent to us come from? Who said them? I’ve never heard them before. They are so good!”

Sister Yang agreed, “That’s right. I felt these words came from the Holy Spirit. After I read them, I felt a special kind of brightness in my heart. They are not something that can be said by any ordinary person.”

Sister Li said with excitement, “Thanks be to God! God’s sheep hear His voice. These words indeed cannot be said by any ordinary person. They are the words expressed by God in His work of the last days, the words of the Spirit to the churches.”

I said in astonishment, “God’s words? Has God come? Are these words you’ve been reading to us these days God’s words?”

Sister Li answered with certainty, “Yes, what I’ve been fellowshiping with you these days and what I’ve sent to you are all God’s words. The Lord Jesus has returned, and He uses the name of Almighty God to perform a stage of His work of judging and cleansing man on the foundation of the Lord Jesus’ redemption work, ending the Age of Grace, beginning the Age of Kingdom and bestowing upon us all truths for our purification and salvation. This fulfills the Lord Jesus’ prophecy: ‘I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will show you things to come’ (John 16:12–13). And now, Almighty God’s words have already been published on the Internet and translated into dozens of languages, so God’s new work can be sought and investigated by people around the world who seek the truth and love the truth. Almighty God’s work of the last days has been spreading on a grand scale throughout the world, and it will soon conclude with glory. We should be wise virgins, listen to the bridegroom’s voice and follow Him closely so that we won’t be cast aside.

Recognizing God’s Voice and Welcoming His Return

When I heard Sister Li saying that the name of God is Almighty God, I thought of the negative propaganda on the Internet and my heart pounded for a moment. But through Sister Li’s fellowship, I was convinced and believed that she is a true believer of God and has no relation to rumors being spread online. Thinking of these words sent by Sister Li, I felt there is the truth in these words. If they are not God’s words, who can clearly speak the truth about the mysteries of the Bible, the mystery of God’s incarnation and how to distinguish between the true Christ and false ones? I should be a wise virgin and investigate the work of Almighty God.

Later, Sister Yang and I downloaded the app of The Church of Almighty God and watched movies on it. After a period of studying the work of Almighty God, I was fully determined that Almighty God is the returned Lord Jesus. Sister Yang and I happily accepted Almighty God’s work of the last days. Looking back on the days I believed in the Lord Jesus, I was always too busy with work to attend meetings regularly. So I deeply felt that I was unworthy of God’s salvation. But God shows His grace and tolerance to me, and gives me the chance of salvation. My heart is full of gratitude to Him. I give thanks for God’s wonderful arrangement that leads me to return to the home of God. All the glory be to Almighty God!

#Lord Jesus #Bible #being saved #believe in God #pray to God

0 notes

lateniterhymesandjustifiedcrimes · 7 years ago

Text

I haven't been here in a while...

And wow I’d forgotten I used to write. I miss that part of me. I guess getting older really does change a person. I’m 25 now and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I have so many dreams. I wanna move to Korea and make a life there. It just looks so beautiful and fresh. I want that, Fresh. I want to start a YouTube channel. I’m even working on a concept now, but it’s proven to be tougher than I thought. Well, not really tougher, but unforeseen obstacles are presenting themselves. I want a dance studio. But nowadays I’m more broke than my boyfriend trying to sell his mixtape (inside joke).

Oh I have a boyfriend.

He’s a guy I loved 7 years ago. A guy I ruined a perfectly good 2 year relationship for. I literally crossed an ocean to tell a man I loved I was leaving him for a man I loved 7 years ago. Why? I don’t fucking know. I’m just a terrible person. I need to start from the beginning.

My stories normally don’t include names but here’s an exception. I met Anthony in fall 2010 when I first started college. He was this scrawny Filipino guy and idk but I wanted him. He was kind, innocent, a little shy, and really funny. I was into that back then because I was this little virgin girl who wanted another virgin to lose her virginity to, kinda like equivalent exchange (that didn’t happen, but that’s another story). I made an effort to be his friend (and through that effort, I met the people who would eventually became my family). Our friends totally shipped us, too. Anthony and I went on 1 date. To Mr. Taco. And we walked there. Yeah, neither of us could drive at the time. But, we had great conversation and I popped his horchata cherry. I really thought we connected.

Unfortunately, Anthony only saw me as a friend. For the first time, I knew what true friend zone felt like. I say true friend zone because people like to complain about being in the friend zone but never let the object of their affection know they’re interested and then stay in the friend zone. I made my intentions perfectly CRYSTAL clear. Men can be such idiots.

Anyways, time went by and we added another girl to our group. Anthony was totally into Maribel and no matter how hard I fought for his affection, he only saw her. They would date for 4 years. During those 4 years I had lost contact with him because she was the type of girl who commanded all of his attention. He had lost contact with all of us and broke some friendships because of her. During those 4 years, I’d managed to date 3 guys; Darek (most annoying dude on the planet and I have no idea why we’re still friends today), Phil ( the man I regret losing my virginity to, who is now engaged to a woman I’m pretty sure he cheated on me with), and Sammy.

I met Sammy through tinder. I joined tinder to feel wanted again (this was after my breakup with Phil and I was feeling incredibly empty because I was no longer pure). I didn’t expect much from Sammy. I just wanted to casually date. Of course this guy had other plans. After our first date (movie and accidentally meeting most of my friend group…awkward), he kissed me goodbye and that had to be the most passionate, sexy thing I’d ever experienced. Which is why I agreed to a second date…and a third date…and having sex with him…on my period…in his car…yup. On our 4th or 5th date (I can’t remember) he asked if we should make us exclusive.

Now in my head I was like hell fucking no. Sammy was in the navy and I knew from the get go I wasn’t into long distance shit. Plus I just wanted to be a slut. He wasn’t my type at all. He was a bit shorter than me, not super attractive (shallow I know, but I’m thinking about my future children here), he liked music I made fun of, and he didn’t dance. And I told him this shit. So we continued fucking around until he left for Hawaii.

Shortly after he left he told me the ship was taking a trip to Santa Barbara for a weekend for supplies or something. Idk why but I didn’t hesitate when he asked if I could meet him there. And it was best weekend of my life. We finally boned in a bed. We talked so much. We drank and danced and sang and kissed. We kissed a lot. And sometime during that weekend, not at the same time, we told each other “I love you.” He would be gone for 2 months and when I finally got to see him again, I knew we were in this for the long haul.

When you’re in love with someone, the things that didn’t initially attract you to them start to become attractive. Like his body. And his taste in music. And his style. And his personality. We were a great couple. He taught me responsibility and I taught him acceptance. And what I mean by acceptance is that I wasn’t his type of girl either. I dance, I love the gays, I’m irresponsible af, and I’m black. But we both became more open and better people because of each other. I had never so physically and spiritually attached to a person. I learned to do the long distance thing and for the first time really truly understood the need for your love's presence. I craved Sammy like nothing I'd ever craved in my life.

A little over a year passed and I was convinced this man was god sent to be my husband. We had met each other's families and were accepted. Sure, we would fight and argue a few times, but that's healthy and the make ups were well worth it. We talked about baby names and our future. A future that included Japan. His ship was moving to Yokosuka and we would be apart for 2-5 years. I was devastated and reminded why I didn't want this relationship early on, because of the long distance. But because of how much I loved him and how strong I believed our love to be, I stayed. We made plans for me to visit 5 months after he left. It would be the longest amount of time I would be without him. But I believed in our love.

Until Anthony came back into my life. I got invited to his 23rd birthday out of the blue and we reconnected. It had been a while since we'd been with our old group I started college with (he left because of Maribel and I left because of Darek). We both were a little lonely so we started hanging out again. Just the 2 of us. And we TALKED so much. I'd forgotten how close we used to be and the things we had in common. I thought it felt like we were dating, so I invited the whole group out for a day in LA so we wouldn't be alone. Those fuckers agreed and I went ahead and made plans and the day before everyone canceled, except Anthony. They were shipping the hell out of us again. The problem was that I was already happily taken. Our group trip turned date was really fun. And I was afraid of that. We got home late that night and I ended up sleeping over at his house. This wasn't the first time I slept over in his room. But this time was different. There was this tension between us that had never existed before. He was gonna give up his bed for me, but I insisted he sleep in his own bed. We both ended up in his bed. We didn't cuddle. And I couldn't sleep. So I rolled over to face him. And he rolled over and put his hand on my arm, like a really awkward cuddle. And I asked him, "How different would our lives had been if we had dated all those years ago?" (Or something very similar.) I don't remember his response, but I do remember my breathing suddenly getting ragged and me leaning in to kiss him.

First kisses are so fucking magical. Just something about kissing a new person for the first time oh my god. My first kiss was pretty bad, so every kiss afterward was mind blowing because I started kissing guys that knew what they were doing. The way he kisses me and holds me and his eyes and that thing he does with his tongue ahhh it's different for every guy and it's a fantastic and wonderful and different feeling every time. I live for those feelings. In that moment kissing Anthony, I forgot I had Sammy. And in that moment I knew I was never quite over Anthony. Anthony and I knew what we were doing. But staying away from each other was just too difficult. We never had sex, but with all the time we were spending with each other, we might as well have.

I was so conflicted. I started hating myself all over again. I never imagined myself as the cheater in a relationship. Sammy and I made a rule that if either of us cheated, that would be the end of the relationship. And at this time, I had already bought my ticket to Japan. Non refundable. I was going whether I liked it or not. And my 2-week notice was already in at work. I was so disgusted with myself for not being strong enough to stay faithful to my man. But I was also happy because of Anthony. He had a way of making a problem disappear. But eventually I had to tell him that we couldn't be together. I loved Sammy and I planned on marrying him one day. We had plans to move to New York together after Japan. Anthony cried and his crying made me cry. Nobody was a winner here.

I flew to Japan and met up with Sammy. It was supposed to be a beautiful magical reunion, but I was clearly bitter. I spent the whole flight thinking about how to tell him I cheated. He noticed but didn't comment. I spent a week getting settled in, going on dates, taking in the sights. Every moment with Sammy in Japan made me want to stay with him forever. But I knew that wasn't going to happen. I told him what I did after I had a dream of me confessing. We talked for so long. He was willing to take back our rule if we both agreed to look over this and stay together. And I almost agreed. The words telling him yes we're on the tip of my tongue. But that's also the moment I realized it didn't matter how in love I was with Sammy. I wasn't trustworthy nor grateful enough to be his forever. He didn't deserve someone as unworthy of his love as me. So I told him I was choosing Anthony. I felt the weight of that decision immediately. He started crying. I never want to be the cause of such sadness ever again. I've never hurt anyone the way I hurt Sammy that day. He told me he had bought a ring and was planning on proposing the second month I'd be in Japan in Kyoto. It was a proposal only he could pull of and super cheesy and so much better than the proposal I'd fantasized about. And that's when I started crying. We spent the next week trying to figure ourselves out and angry fucking (best sex of my life, hands down). He tried to salvage our relationship but it was quickly made apparent that what we had was broken. My last night in Japan we had our last date. And was wonderful, but bittersweet. And the next day, I was all packed up to leave. He walked me to the elevator and as the door closed told me I can still stay if I want to. To this day, I still question if I made the right decision.

Anthony picked me up from the airport and our relationship blossomed from there. A year and a half later and we're still together. Sammy and I stopped talking, but I'm still not over him. I know that's unhealthy especially since I'm with someone else, but I can't help but still love him. I never wanted to leave. But I knew staying wasn't any better. That's not to say I don't love Anthony. I just don't love him the same way. The connection between Sammy and I is completely different than the one between Anthony and I. Both different, but both amazing. In hindsight, I should have taken more time to be single before jumping into another relationship, but I just couldn't stay away (slut).

I drank almost every day and watched any and every romance movie on Netflix when I got back. I was unemployed, lazy, and emotional. I stopped dancing. I gained weight. I developed a loathing for myself. This lasted for 8 months and Anthony wasn't having that shit, so he pretty much forced me into a summer dance intensive and made me get a dance job. I also got my job back at Ihop and went back to school to get more AA's. I think that's what made me really love Anthony, how he pushed me.

I don't want to get too into our relationship because I feel that should be a separate story. I just feel compelled to tell the story of the man I would literally cross an ocean for and the expensive breakup that followed. I guess only time will tell if I made the right decision. It's 4am and I have to be up in 3 hours so it looks like I'll just end the story here. Good night.

#StoriesToMyChildren #JameyRobinson

2 notes · View notes

nebris · 7 years ago

Text

The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning

Her disclosure of classified documents in 2010 ushered in the age of leaks. Now, freed from prison, she talks about why she did it — and the isolation that followed.

By MATTHEW SHAER JUNE 12, 2017 On a gray morning this spring, Chelsea Manning climbed into the back seat of a black S.U.V. and directed her security guard to drive her to the nearest Starbucks. A storm was settling over Manhattan, and Manning was prepared for the weather, in chunky black Doc Martens with an umbrella and a form-fitting black dress. Her legs were bare, her eyes gray blue. She wore little makeup: a spot of eyeliner, a smudge of pink lip gloss. At Starbucks, she ordered a white-chocolate mocha and retreated to a nearby stool. Manning has always been small (5 foot 4), but in her last few months at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, she jogged religiously, outside in the prison yard and around the track of the prison gym, and her body had taken on a lithe sharpness, apparent in the definition of her arms and cheekbones. She looked healthy and fit, if a little uneasy, as people who have served long spells in prison often do. She had been released only eight days earlier, after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence. Her crime, even in hindsight, was an astonishing one: handing WikiLeaks approximately 250,000 American diplomatic cables and roughly 480,000 Army reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Collectively the largest leak of classified records in American history, the disclosures cleared a path for Edward Snowden and elevated the profile of Julian Assange, then little known outside hacker circles. “Without Chelsea Manning,” P.J. Crowley, an assistant secretary of state from 2009 to 2011, told me recently, “Julian Assange is just another fringe actor who resents what he sees as American hegemonic hubris.” To an extraordinary extent, Manning’s actions, in the words of Denver Nicks, the author of a book on her case, represented the “beginning of the information age exploding upon itself”: a new era in which leaks were a weapon, data security was of paramount importance and privacy felt illusory. In January 2017, after being locked up at five different facilities, in conditions a United Nations expert called “cruel” and “inhumane,” Manning had received a surprise commutation by President Barack Obama. Four months later, she was free, trying to adjust to life in a world she helped shape. Finishing her coffee, she fished her iPhone out of her purse and asked her security guard for a lift back to the apartment where she was staying while in Manhattan. The one-bedroom was furnished sparsely, with a wide glass table and a tan couch, opposite which Manning had set up an Xbox One video-game console. The art was of the anodyne motel variety — an old-masters-esque tableau, a canvas of a zebra standing in a forest. We were many floors up, suspended in the storm clouds, and through the window, I could see the spires of the skyscrapers on the other side of the Hudson River. Manning, who is 29, tapped an unplugged microwave next to the door and asked me to place my laptop inside: The Faraday cage in the microwave would block radio waves, she explained. But the unplugged microwave was already full of devices, including two Xbox controllers. “You can put it in the kitchen microwave,” Manning said; then, intuiting the strangeness of the request, she added with a shrug, “You can’t be too careful.” She recalled that she last gave an in-person, on-the-record interview to a journalist in 2008, on the occasion of a marriage-equality march in New York. For almost a decade after that, barred by prison officials from communicating directly with the public, she remained silent as her story was told in books, an opera, an Off Broadway play and countless magazine articles, almost all of them written before Manning had come out as transgender. “It wasn’t the whole story,” she told me, “my whole story.” Absent her own voice, a pair of dueling narratives had emerged. One had Manning, in the words of President Donald Trump, as an “ungrateful traitor.” The other positioned her as transgender icon and champion of transparency — a “secular martyr,” as Chase Madar, a former attorney and the author of a book on her case, recently put it to me. But in Manning’s presence, both narratives feel like impossible simplifications, not least because Manning herself is clearly still grappling with the meaning of what she did seven years ago. When I asked her to draw lessons from her journey, she grew uneasy. “I don’t have. ... ” she started. “Like, I’ve been so busy trying to survive for the past seven years that I haven’t focused on that at all.” But surely, I pressed, she must have some sense of the impact she had on the world. “From my perspective,” she responded, “the world’s shaped me more than anything else. It’s a feedback loop.” As far back as Chelsea Manning can remember, to her earliest days in Crescent, on the far edge of the Oklahoma City metro area, she suffered from a feeling of intense dislocation, something constant and psychic that she struggled to define to herself, much less to her older sister, Casey, or her parents, Brian and Susan. During one of our interviews, I mentioned that I heard a clinical psychologist compare gender dysphoria to a “giant, cosmic toothache.” Manning flushed. That was it exactly, she agreed: “Morning, evening, breakfast, lunch, dinner, wherever you are. It’s everywhere you go.” At the age of 5, Manning recalled, she approached her father, an I.T. manager for Hertz, and confessed that she wanted to be a girl, “to do girl things.” Brian responded with a lengthy and awkward speech on the essential differences in “plumbing.” But Manning told me, “I didn’t understand how that had anything to do with what you wore or how you behaved.” Soon she was sneaking into her sister’s bedroom and donning Casey’s acid-washed jeans and denim jackets. Seated at the mirror, she would apply lipstick and blush, frantically scrubbing off the makeup at the slightest stirring from downstairs. When she was still in elementary school, she came out as gay to a straight male friend. The friend was understanding; the other kids at school, less so. Manning tried, unsuccessfully, to retract her confession, but the teasing continued. “I would come home crying some days, and if my dad was there, he’d say: ‘Just quit crying and man up. Like, go back there and punch that kid in the face,’ ” she said. It was the late 1990s, when the trans movement was very much on the fringes of American society. “The closest I came to knowing anything was from the portrayal of drag-queen-style cross-dressing on sensational TV shows” like Jerry Springer’s, Manning told me. She spent more time inside, on the computers that her father was always bringing home, playing video games and dabbling in basic code. Her parents had issues of their own. When Manning was about 12, Susan swallowed an entire bottle of Valium. Casey called 911, only to be told that the nearest ambulance was a half-hour away. Casey loaded her mother into the car; Brian, who Manning says was too drunk to drive, sat shotgun, leaving a terrified Chelsea in the back to make sure her mother kept breathing. She told me the incident was formational. “I grew up very quickly after that,” she said. (Brian could not be reached for comment.) In Susan’s native Wales, where Manning moved with her in 2001 after her parents split, Chelsea says she took over full control of the household, paying bills and handling much of the shopping. There was freedom there, too: She could buy her own makeup at the convenience store, wear it for a few hours in public and jam it into a waste bin on her way home. She passed many evenings on her computer, in L.G.B.T. chat rooms. Her worldview shifted. While in Crescent, Manning had imbibed her father’s conservative politics — “I questioned nothing,” she told me. But at Tasker Milward, a school in the town of Haverfordwest, she studied the civil rights movement, the Red Scare, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In a term paper for a history class, she expressed skepticism about the rationale for the American invasion of Iraq. When Manning returned to the United States in 2005 to live with Brian and his new wife in Oklahoma City, she was a changed person, if not a wholly transformed one: She wore eyeliner and grew out her hair and dyed it black. “I thought, Maybe I want to just eradicate this gender thing and be gender neutral, like androgynous,” she told me. She found a job at an internet start-up and, through a matchmaking site, met her first boyfriend, who lived 70 miles away in the town of Duncan. But her stepmother, Manning said, forbade her from setting foot in the kitchen: “She felt that I was unclean.” Manning confided to no one what she was increasingly coming to understand: that she wasn’t gay, wasn’t a cross-dresser. She was a woman. In the summer of 2006, she and her boyfriend parted ways, and she lit out from Oklahoma for good, all her belongings piled high in the cab of her red Nissan pickup truck. A spell of itinerancy followed — out to Tulsa, Okla., to work at a pizza parlor; up to Chicago to work at Guitar Center; east to the suburbs of Washington to live with her aunt, with whom she enjoyed a connection she never shared with her parents. She did four sessions with a psychologist, but got no closer to unburdening herself than she had with friends or family members. “I was scared,” Manning said. “I didn’t know that life could be better.” Brian Manning had often fondly recounted for Chelsea his days in the military: It had given him structure and grounding, he said. Manning hadn’t been ready to listen then. Now she was. Enlisting might be the thing to “man her up,” to rid her of the ache. Besides, while her ideas about American foreign policy had become more nuanced, she still considered herself a patriot — in the Army, she could use her analytical skills to help her country. “I remember sitting in the summer of 2007 and just every single day turning on the TV” and seeing the news from Iraq, she told me. “The surge, the surge, the surge. Terrorist attacks. Insurgents. ... I just felt like maybe I could make a difference.” That fall, Manning reported for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks; within a few days, she had suffered injuries to her arm. “The drill sergeants were acting like I was malingering or something,” she said. “But I was like: ‘No, I’m not trying to get out of anything. I just really can’t feel my right hand.’ ” A soldier who spent time with Manning in Missouri later recalled for The Guardian that Manning was routinely called a “faggot.” “The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone. And he tried. He really did,” the soldier said. The Army, in need of more bodies to fight the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, allowed Manning another shot at boot camp. In 2008, she graduated to intelligence school at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which to her felt like a kind of community college. There, she was trained to sort what the military terms “SigActs,” or significant actions — the written reports, photos and videos of the confrontations, explosions and firefights that form the mosaic of modern war. Manning told me she fit in well with the intelligence types at Fort Huachuca, who shared her intrinsic geekiness. “There were more like-minded people there,” she said, adding, “It wasn’t ‘Rah, rah, you need to do this.’ They encouraged us to speak up. They encouraged us to have opinions, to make our own decisions.” At her first official duty station, Fort Drum in upstate New York, Manning was charged in part with helping to build a digital tool that would automatically track and sort SigActs from Afghanistan, where Manning’s unit initially expected to be deployed. For hours a day, she watched spectral night-vision video and read reports from distant battlefields. Already, she was being exposed to the bloodshed that would serve as inspiration for her leaks. But she was handling the material at a spatial and emotional reserve: She remained, she told me, “eager” to get to the front lines. “I was hungry.” Through a gay dating site, she met a bookish Brandeis student named Tyler Watkins. She started driving to visit Watkins in the Boston area, where she became a regular at Pika, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-op, and visited Boston University’s Builds, a hub of the local hacking community. At the Pika gatherings, she found friends that approached coding the same way she did: as outlet, pastime and calling. She often stayed up late into the night talking. Yan Zhu, then an undergraduate student at M.I.T., remembers Manning as “obviously intelligent,” if “nervous.” It was clear to Zhu that Manning was “haunted by something.” But she never had a chance to find out what: That fall, Manning’s unit was deployed to Iraq. In October 2009, Manning hopped a Black Hawk from Baghdad to Forward Operating Base Hammer, 30 miles east of the city. In the cabin, strapped into the chopper’s jump seats, she began putting names to places that had long been digital abstractions. “I had seen imagery for nine or 10 months prior,” Manning recalled, “I knew the landscape so well from the air that I recognized these neighborhoods, and it woke me up to see people walking around and to see people driving and to see the buildings and the trees below.” Ringed by desert, the low-slung buildings of F.O.B. Hammer baked in the summer and coursed with mud in the fall. Every night, Manning rose from her bunk at 9 p.m., dressed in standard-issue visual camouflage and grabbed her rifle. After quickly eating dinner for breakfast, she walked to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, to report for duty. Manning’s SCIF was a glorified “plywood box” with lousy airflow, situated on a basketball court. She sat at the free-throw line, in a reclining office chair, where she spent her overnight shift facing three laptop computers. Manning’s isolation took on a new form: Hidden away in the darkened SCIF, she would work for eight hours at a stretch, sifting through reports filed securely by American troops in the field, making sense of the raw data for senior-level intelligence officers. She remained sealed off from actual conflict, though she could hear the shudder of car bombs and sometimes ran into soldiers, dazed and dusty, on their way back from a firefight. At that early juncture, Manning told me, she was too busy to give much thought to the larger import of what she was seeing. “Doing my job, you couldn’t even really read all the files,” she said. “You have to skim, get a sense of what’s relevant and what’s not.” Still, to an extraordinary extent, she had a more comprehensive view of America’s role in Iraq than the infantry in the field did — often, literally, a sky-level view — and as October ground into November, she found herself increasingly dismayed by a lack of public awareness about what seemed to be a futile, ceaselessly bloody war. “At a certain point,” she told me, “I stopped seeing records and started seeing people”: bloody American soldiers, bullet-ridden Iraqi civilians. On rare reprieves from the SCIF, Manning accompanied senior officers to meetings with the Iraqi military and the Iraqi federal police, sit-downs that further entrenched her disillusionment. “There would be these tea sessions, where you’ve got the Iraqi federal police in their blue uniforms, you’ve got Iraqi Army in, like, the old chocolate-chip camouflage and the Americans in our smeared green digital camouflage,” Manning said — everyone speaking in different languages, frequently at cross-purposes. “I’d come in thinking things would be black and white. They weren’t.” Manning told me she heard the name WikiLeaks for the first time in 2008, at a computer security training course at Fort Huachuca. By the end of 2009, she had started logging on to internet relay chat conversations devoted to the site. (I.R.C., a semisecure protocol, was then the preferred method of communication for hackers.) Initially, she was an observer: She was intrigued by the work that Julian Assange and his team were doing, if not quite ready to endorse their argument for total transparency. She told me that she believed then, and believes now, that “there are plenty of things that should be kept secret.” “Let’s protect sensitive sources. Let’s protect troop movements. Let’s protect nuclear information. Let’s not hide missteps. Let’s not hide misguided policies. Let’s not hide history. Let’s not hide who we are and what we are doing.” She was edging closer to acting but said nothing about the I.R.C. channel to her friends at F.O.B. Hammer, nor about her own personal tumult. She was now fighting to keep what amounted to two life-altering secrets. She couldn’t discuss her identity openly: The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was still in effect, and it would be years before transgender people were allowed to openly enlist. “I binge watched TV shows on the internet,” she said. “I was smoking heavily. I was drinking an enormous amount of caffeine. I was going to the dining facility and eating as much as I could. Just any little tiny escape or way to feel like I’m not there anymore.” Her boyfriend was little help: Manning could feel him slipping away. “I was in denial about it, but I had a sense ... that I was being forgotten,” she told me. Manning had a two-week leave coming up. She planned to spend time in Boston, trying to patch things up with Watkins, and in the suburbs of Washington with her aunt. She dreamed about using the occasion to come out to her family and friends as trans. “I kept having this moment in my head,” she told me, “where I just yell it at the top of my lungs.” But she knew, in her heart, that she’d never be able to go through with it. Before leaving F.O.B. Hammer, Manning downloaded, from the government’s Combined Information Data Network Exchange, almost every SigActs report from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and burned a compressed version of the data onto CD-RW discs, one of which was labeled “Lady Gaga.” She did it in full view of her fellow soldiers. But what she did next violated the most important precepts she was taught at Fort Huachuca, along with the Oath of Enlistment she swore in 2007: She uploaded the contents of the discs onto the personal laptop she planned to take home to the United States. She had not decided what she would do with the data. Days later, Manning put on a blond wig and ran in a low crouch from the side door of her aunt’s house, out of view of the neighbors, and drove to the train station. She wore a dark coat and, under it, business-casual woman’s wear she bought at a local department store; she claimed it was for her friend who needed it for a job interview. In Washington, she went to a Starbucks, ate lunch at a busy restaurant and wandered through the aisles of a bookstore; later, she climbed back on the Metro and rode it aimlessly around. She took great pleasure in being seen as she knew she was and comfort in how easily she passed — rarely did anyone give her a second glance. “Before I deployed, I didn’t have the guts,” Manning, who was then privately referring to herself as Brianna, told me. But her time in Iraq was changing her. “Being exposed to so much death on a daily basis makes you grapple with your own mortality,” she went on. She no longer wanted to hide. The expedition was the high point of a disappointing two-week leave. The Army had bumped up her departure from F.O.B. Hammer, and her family hadn’t had time to readjust their schedules: Manning’s aunt was on a trip abroad, and her sister had just had her first child — it would be tricky to carve out time for Chelsea. Manning took a train up to see Watkins at his home in Waltham, in Massachusetts, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t really want her there, so she cut her stay short by three days. At that point, it would have been possible for Manning to return to Iraq with the files unshared — her actions had been illegal, if reversible. But Manning told me that being in the United States had prompted an epiphany. At home, she says, she realized how invisible the wars had become to most civilians, whose awareness of Iraq extended as far as the occasional newspaper article or chyron on cable news. “There were two worlds,” she said. “The world in America, and the world I was seeing [in Iraq],” She went on, “I wanted people to see what I was seeing.” A blizzard hit Washington. Manning’s aunt still wasn’t back from vacation. Alone, Manning transferred parts of the files to a small memory card and prepared an anonymous text file she wanted to accompany the information. “This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare,” she wrote. “Have a good day.” Manning told me her decision to provide the information to WikiLeaks was a practical one: She originally planned to deliver the data to The New York Times or The Washington Post, and for the last week of her leave, she dodged from public phone to public phone, calling the main office lines for both papers, leaving a message for the public editor at The Times and engaging in a frustrating conversation with a Post writer, who said she would have to know more about the files before her editor would sign off on an article. A hastily arranged meeting with Politico, where she hoped to introduce herself to the site’s security bloggers, was scrapped because of bad weather. “I wanted to try to establish a contact in a way that it couldn’t be traced to me,” Manning told me. But she was running out of time. She describes a clearheaded sense of purpose coming over her: “I needed to do something,” she told me. “And I didn’t want anything to stop that.” On Feb. 3, 2010, Manning signed onto her laptop and, using a secure file-transfer protocol, sent the files to WikiLeaks. Back at F.O.B. Hammer, time sped up; everything seemed to be happening at once. Manning had been away two full weeks, and there was a lot to catch up on — “I had to triple my work,” Manning told me. There had been no sign that WikiLeaks received her files, nor any indication that the Army knew anything was amiss. She remembers being in a perpetual state of heightened anxiety. She slept less, smoked more. In mid-February, on break from the SCIF, she noticed an interesting thread on the WikiLeaks I.R.C. channel, where participants were discussing the financial crisis in Iceland — a collapse that Manning, reading through the library of secure diplomatic cables available to her as an analyst, concluded was roiling onward because of the inaction of the United States and what she described as diplomatic bullying by the Netherlands and Britain. “From my perspective, it appeared that we were not getting involved due to the lack of long-term geopolitical benefit to do so,” she would later testify. Following the same steps as before, she leaked several diplomatic cables pertaining to the Iceland crisis to WikiLeaks; this time, within hours, WikiLeaks published the documents. Manning was thrilled: If the cables had reached WikiLeaks, the much larger leak of SigActs had almost certainly made it, too. Around this time, Manning had several I.R.C. conversations with a person whom Manning identified in her online address book as “Nathaniel Frank,” after the author of the book “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America.” Frank was almost certainly Assange, although Manning declined to discuss the matter with me — the bulk of the chats are classified and could be used in future legal actions against Assange. Manning followed the transmissions of the SigActs and the Iceland cables with a leak that was harder to ignore. Published by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” the three-year-old video, captured by a camera mounted on an American helicopter, showed two gunships approaching a group of men in an area where there had been reports of small-arms fire. The helicopter crew repeatedly requests permission to engage — “Let us shoot!” a voice is heard saying — before receiving it and opening fire. In total, at least a dozen people were killed in the 2007 strike, including several civilians and two staff members of the Reuters news agency. Manning says she knew that Reuters, under the Freedom of Information Act, had asked the United States government for a copy of the video but never received it. This was symptomatic, she said, of the worst impulses of a government obsessed with blanket classification. “It makes sense to keep some information secret for a few days, maybe a few years,” she told me. “The problem is, more and more, everything is secret by default.” In long chat threads, Manning’s relationship with Nathaniel Frank deepened. She warmed to the role of truth-teller, handing over a small library of Detainee Assessment Briefs, or D.A.B.s, from the American holding facility at Guantánamo Bay. “Living such an opaque life, has forced me never to take transparency, openness and honesty for granted,” she wrote the former hacker Adrian Lamo, whom Manning had reached out to as a confessor and who was, unknown to Manning, already working with government investigators. Privately, however, she was coming apart. Army investigators looking into her case would later detail several episodes of what they termed “bizarre behavior,” including blank stares and an incident in which Manning was found on the floor of a supply room, having carved the words “I WANT” into a nearby chair. She recalled that the unit, as a whole, was “on edge,” breaking out into verbal arguments and brawls. Their deployment was coming to an end, “and that’s when people start getting sick of each other and the personal animosity breaks out.” In April, Manning emailed an Army superior a photo of her as Brianna that she took in Washington while on leave. “Now I knew who I was,” Manning told me. “But the people I’m around the most didn’t.” She titled the email “My Problem.” The issue of her gender identity was “not going away,” she wrote. “Now, the consequences of it are dire.” (Manning said her captain confirmed receipt of the email but “swept it under the rug.”) Manning told me that she had resolved, in May, to go public with her role as whistle-blower, even as she was wrestling with how to express her gender identity. She was never able to settle on an approach. At the end of May, she was summoned to a conference room, where two agents from the Army Criminal Investigation Division were waiting. Manning was terrified, but she tried not to show it: “I was focused inward at that time: who I am, what my values are,” she recalled. She retreated “inside [her] head.” Days later, she was shackled, flown to Camp Arfijan in Kuwait and locked in a large steel cage. Kneeling down, she read the engraved words on the bars: Made in Fort Wayne. Seven years later, it remains difficult to overstate the impact of the Afghan and Iraq war logs, or the later publication of the diplomatic cables. “The material touched on virtually every relationship the United States had around the world,” Crowley, the former State Department official, says of the cables. Repercussions came swiftly: Carlos Pascual, the United States ambassador to Mexico, resigned over cables in which he cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Mexican war on drugs, a revelation that poisoned Pascual’s relationship with the Mexican president. Ambassador Gene Cretz was recalled from Libya after his cables detailed the peculiar workings of the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, including a squad of female Ukrainian bodyguards. The release of cables regarding the Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali are often credited with helping to inspire the uprising in that country. The Afghan and Iraq documents brought home, in exactly the way that Manning had hoped, the messiness of the two conflicts. “These war logs,” The Guardian wrote in an introduction that the release of the material from Afghanistan revealed a war in stark contrast with the “tidied up and sanitized ‘public’ war, as glimpsed through official communiqués as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting.” American officials, caught off guard by the leaks, were furious. Elizabeth Dibble, a State Department official, later testified that the release of the cables prompted “horror and disbelief that our diplomatic communications had been released and were available on public websites for the world to see.” The issue of whether American interests had been adversely affected by the release of the cables remains a charged one. In the full text of the Afghan war logs that appeared on the WikiLeaks site, Julian Assange made only partial redactions, leaving intact the names of some of the Afghans who had collaborated with coalition forces. (He showed what CNN later described as a “much heavier hand in redacting” names from the Iraq war logs.) In 2010, Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, said that “we know for a fact that people will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed.” Subsequent reviews by The Associated Press and McClatchy found this risk to be “overstated,” and at Manning’s sentencing, government witnesses testified that no American deaths could be attributed to the leaks. Still, Crowley said, a lack of evidence of fatalities was not the same thing as a lack of damage: “She burned a number of intelligence sources,” he said. “She placed Afghans in danger who were telling us what the Taliban was doing in their villages.” In her cage in Kuwait, Manning registered none of the fallout. “I was completely isolated,” she said. At a certain point, she concluded, “I’ve been forgotten about, and I’ve just disappeared.” She figured that Lamo had turned her in, but she wasn’t sure if word of her involvement in the leaks had been made public. It was the start of the hot season in Kuwait, and dust swirled in from outside, lodging in her teeth. Her only human contact was with the guards who brought her meals. “I had told the detention center when I got there that I was trans,” Manning told me. “ ‘I’m a woman,’ I said matter-of-factly. They laughed.” In utter isolation, Manning found herself consumed with rage and sadness. Officials observed what Manning’s attorney called an episode of “yelling uncontrollably, screaming, shaking, babbling, banging your head against your cell and mumbling.” Manning told me: “I was afraid I was going to be in that little cell or something like that little cell for the rest of my life. And that bad things were going to happen to me.” After a week, she fashioned a noose from bedclothes and made what she told me was a “halfhearted attempt” at suicide. “I kind of knew it wasn’t going to work.” It got the staff’s attention, and according to a medical evaluation later obtained by Manning’s legal team, a military doctor would diagnose anxiety, depression and “probable gender identity disorder.” She was given an antidepressant, which made her nose bleed and caused serious nausea. She couldn’t eat. Her skin eventually turned sallow. In late July, four days after the Afghan logs appeared in The Guardian and other papers, Manning was shackled and loaded onto a chartered military flight. She said that previously, guards had told her she would be “whisked away to a Navy cruiser” for months; now her escorts said she was going to Guantánamo. Halfway through the flight, the story changed a final time: She was going to the brig at the Marine base at Quantico, in Virginia. It was there, on arrival, that she learned the world knew who she was. “So you’re Manning!” a heavyset Marine said with unnerving enthusiasm. Manning was all over Fox News, he added. In transferring Manning to Quantico, the government said it was providing Manning with facilities better suited to her fractured mental state. But a 2011 military investigation, undertaken in part as a response to Manning’s treatment, would reveal the opposite: At Quantico, Manning spent 23 hours a day in a 6-by-8-foot cell, for nearly nine months, much of it on Prevention of Injury, or P.O.I., status, in conditions that a United Nations special rapporteur later said could qualify as torture. While on P.O.I. watch, Manning wore what’s known as a “suicide smock,” a white nylon garment that is all but impossible to twist or rip into a noose. She had no pillow, no sheets. She was required to give regular verbal confirmation during the day that she was O.K. (After the investigation, the military ordered that Quantico’s whole pretrial confinement area be shut down.) When I asked Manning this spring to describe those conditions, she answered in the present tense. “Emotions can be more intense,” she said. “There isn’t any release for them. A mean comment by a guard” — commonly a gibe about her gender — “can set you off. Completely off. I know I have stood in a cell at times, locked down with nowhere to go, pacing with anger and frustration. It just stews inside of you, and you’re helpless,” she went on. “I just start yelling, at no one in particular, or singing at the top of my lungs.” But Manning could occasionally receive outside visitors, and her aunt came to the brig. “Even though it was behind a Plexiglas window and we couldn’t talk without recording equipment around,” Manning told me, “it was one of the most powerful meetings I’d ever had.” They whispered to each other. “We love you,” her aunt told her. “We miss you.” They made plans to hire an independent attorney, eventually selecting David Coombs, a forceful lawyer in his early 40s who had served more than a decade in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Word of Manning’s treatment in Kuwait and Quantico had begun to filter out, reaching legal eminences like Laurence Tribe and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who signed an open letter criticizing what they described as “conditions that are illegal and immoral.” In the spring of 2011, the government transferred Manning again, this time to the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth. In Kansas, she was released into general population; it was, Manning recalled, “an utter shock to the system, because I had been in shackles everywhere I went or in a small room or a cage.” At the facility, inmates weren’t required to work, so she spent her time in the library, helping Coombs and his assistants prepare her case. She faced a staggering number of violations, 22 in all, from circumventing security mechanisms to aiding the enemy, an offense that carried with it the possibility of life in prison. For two months that spring, with Manning moved to a civilian prison outside Fort Meade, in Maryland, Coombs sparred with government lawyers, highlighting what he termed the general “lawlessness” of Manning’s unit and the poor security protocols in place in her SCIF. He eventually argued that Manning’s gender dysphoria — and the inability of the Army to provide treatment — might have affected Manning’s mental capacity and judgment. A few days later, the judge found Manning guilty on all but two counts. Manning was spared a conviction for aiding the enemy and avoided a life sentence. Manning told me that she was relieved, and not only for the obvious reasons: She worried that an aiding-the-enemy charge would set a frightening precedent for the prosecution of whistle-blowers. “I still worry about how that charge can be misused,” Manning said. She herself had resolved not to make her own gender identity public during the court-martial, worried that it would complicate an already unwieldy trial. But listening to the testimony of Lauren McNamara, a transgender friend who testified at the sentencing hearing, she found she had reached a breaking point. “I was tired of pretending,” she told me. She wrote a statement identifying herself as Chelsea, a name she used as a child for her handle on the Sims video game. On Aug. 22, David Coombs appeared on NBC’s “Today” show. The co-host Savannah Guthrie read from the statement: “As I transition into the next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am female.” Manning didn’t see the segment or the reaction to it. She was on a plane, on her way to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. The U.S.D.B. lies at the far northern end of Fort Leavenworth, not far from the headquarters of the 40th Military Police Internment and Resettlement Battalion. The maximum-security complex, with its 515 beds, is reserved for the military prisoners serving the longest sentences, housing offenders like Robert Bales, the Army staff sergeant convicted in 2013 of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians. For almost the entirety of her time there, Manning lived on the second floor. Her cell was narrow and small; there was a cot, a toilet, a mirror and a sink. The one window faced north, affording her a view of the surrounding landscape. In the vacuum of prison, the weather became theater: The snow that piled up against the cyclone fencing. The forked lightning that spidered the sky, sending deer and rabbits skittering for cover. At Manning’s court-martial, Coombs had introduced as evidence the photo his client emailed to a superior in 2010. The image was later distributed to the news media, and by the fall of 2013, it had appeared alongside hundreds of articles on Manning’s transition. To Manning, the idea that it should come to define her was painful. “It was just so far from her experience at Leavenworth,” Evan Greer, a trans activist and friend, told me. “And I think some people saw that image, that luscious wig, and figured she was given that kind of freedom behind bars.” In reality, every aspect of Manning’s appearance was being governed by Army rules, from her briefs to her hair, which she was required to wear, per Section 670-1 of Army regulations, in a “neat and conservative style.” Manning was in a position that can be difficult for non-trans people to understand: She had come out as female but was still being addressed and treated as if she were male — often pointedly, by the Leavenworth staff. Vincent Ward, one of Manning’s attorneys, recalls observing the way the prison guards treated his client. Ward, a former military lawyer, said he knew “who these people were. I knew the personality types. From the minute that you walked in, you could sense the bullying, the smirks, the comments.” It is a kind of isolation that can induce drastic action: Clinical psychologists who work with trans prisoners have documented high levels of suicide and depression in inmates not given appropriate medical treatment. In worst-case scenarios, prisoners have tried to alter their own genitalia by hand. To friends and the members of her legal team, Manning spoke regularly, and with despair, of feeling “poisoned” by the testosterone in her body and of a ghostlike invisibility: If people couldn’t see her as she actually was, what use was living? On entering the U.S.D.B. in 2013, Manning requested access to the regimen of estrogen and anti-androgen drugs prescribed to people undergoing a male-to-female transition. She was refused: The Army did not yet sanction hormone therapy for soldiers, let alone for prisoners. Manning’s treatment would be limited to antidepressants and counseling sessions with a psychotherapist. “Permitting Mr. Manning to live as female, much less begin to feminize his body, will create operational challenges as the inmate population respond to these changes,” prison administrators wrote in an internal memo later obtained by the A.C.L.U. The prison was unbending in its stance for nearly a year. Meanwhile, one of Manning’s lawyers — Chase Strangio, who himself is trans — grew increasingly worried that his client might try to hurt herself again; eventually, he filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense. The suit cited a clinical evaluation from the psychologist Randi Ettner and said Manning was “experiencing significant distress and is at high risk for serious medical consequences, including self-castration and suicide.” In the summer of 2014, the Army agreed to send women’s underwear to Manning’s cell — a first for any branch of the military. (A civilian judge in Leavenworth County had granted Manning’s request to change the name on her birth certificate to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.) Hormone therapy followed in early 2015, with the drugs distributed in pill form from a medical dispensary near the cafeteria. To Manning, the early stages of hormone therapy were deeply fulfilling: her skin softened, her body hair thinned. But with the welcome physical changes came unnerving intellectual ones. “I’d built all these defenses and walls around my emotions over the years, since being a teenager,” Manning told me. “When my testosterone levels plummeted, I suddenly became more vulnerable emotionally. I could no longer just hide my emotions: I had to deal with them, usually right there and then.” And the emotions often came faster than Manning could process: “Good ones, like confidence, and a sense of connection with my friends, mixed in with a lot of bad ones, like doubt, loneliness, uncertainty and loss.” For support, Manning spoke regularly to others in the trans community: Strangio and Annie Danger, a trans artist and activist. Danger listened as Manning experimented with her voice, “putting it in different pitches in an effort to find out what felt right,” Danger told me. “I tried to talk her through that searching process, that evolutionary process, which can be so important. You’re literally finding your voice.” At the U.S.D.B., Manning’s days took on a mundane, lulling rhythm. Most mornings, she woke up at 4:30 a.m. and, shrugging off the green sheets, dressed in the light of the bare bulb that hung above her bed: the white sports bra; the oversize prison uniform that hung, scarecrow-like, off her thin frame; the Army-issue boots. “O.K.,” she would say, examining herself in the mirror. “You can do this.” After a quick breakfast in the cafeteria, it was down to the prison wood shop, where she and a crew of inmates built, from scratch, the furniture sold at the base commissary. On the invitation of another prisoner, she joined a weekly Dungeons & Dragons game, playing as Esvele Dundragon, a female noble. Manning told me that even as she transitioned, she never felt physically threatened by the other prisoners, as she did the staff. “Of all the people in my entire experience” in government custody, she said, the ones “who have been consistently good to me were the other inmates — like, I’m not saying they were excited or happy or approved of me or anything.” Manning says she counted a handful of inmates among her close friends, among them Clint Lorance, an Army platoon leader convicted of second-degree murder for ordering his men to open fire on three unarmed Afghan civilians. “Remember that all these folks were active military before they were incarcerated,” David Hammond, a lawyer assigned to Manning by the Army’s Defense Appellate Division, said in describing the dynamic to me. “The discipline carries over.” In April 2014, the Army denied Manning’s clemency application, choosing to uphold, in full, her 35-year sentence. There remained the distant possibility of a presidential pardon or commutation, but Manning had no reason to expect one: The White House had condemned the leaks, as had the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. The best option, Manning knew, lay in the formal appeal. But Manning’s fight with the prison authorities was grinding into its third year, and she was tired. Her hair was still being cut to male standards. The guards were relentless. “If you were trying to get them to be more gender neutral, they would make a point of being very gender specific,” Mannings said. And a request for gender reassignment surgery had been met with silence. (According to Manning’s lawyers, the Army approved the surgery last September, but set no timeline for its completion.) The U.S.D.B., in her mind, was “creating, often deliberately and knowingly, situations that cause high levels of stress on any given number of people. This breaks people down. Good people break down.” In July 2016, one of Manning’s closest friends at the U.S.D.B., Anthony Raby, was seated at a bench in the embroidery shop, sewing name tapes for Army recruits, when a fellow prisoner dropped a note onto his table. “It’s from your girlfriend,” the man said. Raby didn’t have to ask who the man was referring to. A former Army specialist serving three decades for the rape of a young child, Raby had first met Manning in 2013, shortly after her arrival at the U.S.D.B. It was his first encounter with a transgender person; he recalls thinking Manning resembled a “sad, strange little man.” In a letter from the U.S.D.B., Raby wrote: “The idea that someone could believe they were a gender other than what they were born was akin to believing a chicken was a hat. I just didn’t understand. However, as a Christian, I fully believe in showing everyone love and compassion, so we talked.” Raby admired Manning’s intelligence, her wit, her unapologetic weirdness. “I’m all right with the weird,” Raby wrote. Manning visited his cell frequently to talk or vent or cry — taking care not to stay too long and violate the prison policy of one person to a unit. Raby, more than anyone else at the U.S.D.B., seemed to understand the toll that incarceration was taking on Manning. “Prison isn’t the best place for anyone who actually has actual emotions besides hate, anger, bitterness, apathy or indifference,” he wrote. Now his worst fears were confirmed. Unfolding the note, which was folded and sealed shut with spare adhesive from a stamp book, Raby read the header: “Chelsea E. Manning, re: My Final Letter.” He scanned the first page. Manning wrote that she would kill herself after the base’s Fourth of July fireworks display came to a close. The fireworks had ended at 10 p.m. It was already 12:25 a.m. Raby notified a guard in the embroidery shop and handed over Manning’s letter. “About 1 a.m., I heard an announcement over the guard’s radio about an alert in Manning’s housing unit,” Raby told me. “I was pacing like a madman, sure they had not gotten to her in time.” Not wanting to aggravate the staff, Raby struggled to keep his composure. Around 3:30 a.m., he was approached by an Army investigator: Manning was alive. Officials have declined to provide details about the incident, and Manning told me she only remembers waking up in an ambulance. But people with knowledge of the situation said Manning tried to hang herself and was recovered by guards, breathing but unresponsive. Manning told me that in the days leading up to the suicide attempt, she felt unusually low and alone. She had been determined to push through to the end of the long weekend, when her psychologist would be back on base. “I didn’t make it,” she said. In early September, she embarked on a hunger strike to protest what she called the “constant and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials.” She ended the hunger strike when the prison vowed to provide her with gender-reassignment surgery, an unprecedented accommodation. By the end of September, Manning was sentenced to an additional two weeks in solitary, with one week suspended. Her crime was conduct that threatens the orderly running of the barracks — her suicide attempt. If prison, as Manning has said, made her feel like a ghost — alive in her supporters’ thoughts but unable to be with them physically — then her time in solitary was akin to erasure. Isolation “changes you; it makes you angry,” she said. “You start to forget about the world outside — it’s not relevant or relatable anymore. The darkest part of solitary confinement is that you start to forget about cars, and jobs, and families, and weather, and politicians, and all the things that make up a society.” Manning again tried to kill herself, but a guard spotted her before she lost consciousness. A week later, she was returned to general population. She was beside herself with anger and fear. She was also, she told me, most likely suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — from Iraq, from Quantico. It was during her second stretch in solitary that Manning experienced an episode that the Army has no record of, and that, on the heels of the suicide attempts, seems to be indicative of severe mental anguish. In a legal brief, Manning details a vivid kind of fever dream that she still puzzles over — hearing “several reports of suppressed or silenced shots from a pistol” and listening as a group of strangers described their plans to remove her from the U.S.D.B. She refused to leave her cell, she says, and the next morning, the staff carried on as if nothing had happened. To Manning’s attorneys, it was obvious that their client was running out of time. “Chelsea needs help, and she’s not getting it,” Strangio told me this winter. He viewed a commutation application, filed in November, as Manning’s best hope. In the petition, Manning’s lawyers appended a letter from Manning. “I am not Bradley Manning,” she wrote. “I really never was. I am Chelsea Manning, a proud woman who is transgender and who, through this application, is respectfully requesting a first chance at life.” On the afternoon of Jan. 17, Manning was in the prison workshop, covered head to toe in wood shavings. She remembers looking up to see a team of security personnel enter the room. “I’m like, Oh, God, I’m in a lot of trouble,” Manning told me. “I don’t even know what the hell I’ve done now.”’ The prison’s head of security told her to come with them. “Am I coming back?” she asked. No, she was told. She grabbed her belongings and followed the guards to the Special Housing Unit. Assuming she was going back to solitary, she started to take the shoelaces out of her boots. The lead officer shook his head: She was headed for Protective Custody. In the common area, a television was playing CNN. She saw the banner on the screen: Manning’s sentence commuted, it read. Manning told me she went numb. She never let herself think about a commutation, lest she be thrown back into a deeper darkness. “It was so hard for me to process and deal with it,” Manning recalled. Obama later addressed the decision with an implicit rebuke to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. “Let’s be clear: Chelsea Manning has served a tough prison sentence, so the notion that the average person who was thinking about disclosing vital classified information would think that it goes unpunished, I don’t think would get that impression from the sentence that Chelsea Manning has served,” he said. Four months later, on the morning of May 17, Manning was marched out the front door of the U.S.D.B. and loaded into a Ford Explorer. The driver steered the S.U.V. up a short slope and onto the curved road that winds south, past the gates of the overgrown U.S.D.B. cemetery, where 14 executed German prisoners of war were buried in 1945. A constellation of brick buildings appeared in the distance. Close to 1 a.m., the Explorer drew to a halt in a parking lot, where Strangio and Hollander were waiting. Manning was so eager to hug the two attorneys that she clocked Strangio in the face with her elbow. The week I spent with Manning in New York felt like a moment of suspended animation: the days between all the chaos of her life before and whatever was going to come next. In her final months at the U.S.D.B., Manning put together 300 pages of memoir, and she’s acquired an agent to shop the draft around. This fall, she will appear in a documentary called “XY Chelsea,” produced by Laura Poitras. Her attorneys, meanwhile, continue to work on her appeal. Even if she is exonerated, it is hard to know how comfortable her life will be in the years to come, given that some of the nation will never likely reconcile itself to what she did. But she is determined not to dwell on her reputation, and for that week in Manhattan, she seemed happy being free. We trudged, unnoticed, through busy city streets, ordered chicken nuggets at McDonald’s, ate in restaurants and cafes and went to a weekend screening of “Alien: Covenant.” On the way into the theater, the man collecting the tickets asked to check Manning’s bag. I held my breath, thinking she would be recognized. But kneeling, Manning unzipped the main compartment, revealing her laptop. She was waved through: The famous whistle-blower and former military prisoner had become just another Sunday evening theatergoer. It occurred to me that if Manning sometimes seemed to have difficulty interpreting the effect her actions had on the world, it was in part a result of the extraordinary isolation she had experienced even before her arrest, in her childhood in Crescent, when she longed for a solution for her pain. Later, in solitary in Kuwait or Quantico, or in the special housing unit at the U.S.D.B., that isolation had been made physical: The “feedback loop” she had spoken of to me had been torn. Now she had the ability to live publicly and openly as she always knew she was, and she was adjusting to the idea, sinking into it as if it were a cold pond. More than once, as we walked the streets of New York, I felt I was in the presence of someone coming fully alive for the very first time. Manning told me she understood that her identity and the actions that led to her arrest have long been tangled up in the public imagination, sometimes in uncomfortable ways: An appellate brief filed last year by Manning’s legal team implied that the Army’s inability to treat Manning’s gender dysphoria was a contributing factor in the leaks. Manning didn’t want to discuss “hypotheticals,” what would have happened if circumstances were different, but she was adamant on one thing: “What I can tell you,” she said, “is that my values would have been the same. The things I care about would have been the same.” One morning, at the end of an interview, Manning handed me a white envelope. Inside was a note from a 14-year-old trans boy. “I just wanted to say that I’m glad you’re gonna be free in a few months,” the boy had scrawled in pen, “and that I’m proud of you (is that weird thing to say?). You’re an inspiration.” Manning placed the note back in the envelope. If she was being honest, she said, she never particularly wanted to be a role model. I asked if Manning’s life would have been different if she’d had such a person. She stared down at her hands. “I don’t know how,” she said finally, “but it would have been better.” A couple of days later, we spent an hour sitting on a park bench. The skies were bruised, but the air was warm and fragrant. A flock of pigeons nearby. Manning cooed at them. She told me that at Leavenworth, not long before she learned of her commutation, a robin had alighted at her window, a small messenger from the world outside. Hadn’t it been a sign? She had taken it as one. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/magazine/the-long-lonely-road-of-chelsea-manning.html?emc=edit_ta_20170612&nl=top-stories&nlid=47522647&ref=cta&_r=0

#chelsea manning

2 notes · View notes

shoutatthadevil · 8 years ago

Note

Watch "devils knot" on Netflix, I believe the WM3 are innocent

Thanks but I don’t need to. I’ve seen all three paradise lost documentaries and once believed they were innocent too. However like most documentaries, it was biased, and left out incredible amounts of evidence that did not go along with what they were trying to prove (their innocence). Let’s look at that evidence. This first section is taken from Reddit user luckyballandchain. Everything he posts is sourced straight from court documents and evidence:

No substantial evidence? Excuse me

Damien has never come up with an Alibi for where he was during the murders. Well, actually he has, per Damien: > “At the time the police say the murders took place I was actually on the phone with three different people. The problem was, my attorneys never called them to the stand.” - Damien Echols (source)

Really? Lets examine these three (actually four) other peoples testimony, shall we? Do they exonerate him like he suggests? In a word, no. They weren’t called because they exposed Damien’s alibi for the total lie it was.

Holly George - Damien claimed he talked to Holly George on May 5th, 1993. Holly told police she didn’t talk to Damien that evening. She said she spoke with him much earlier in the afternoon, around 3:00pm or 4:00pm. (source)

Heather Cliett - Damien claimed he spoke with Heather Cliett on the evening of May 5th, 1993. Cliett said she’d been unable to reach Echols until 10:30pm. She also mentioned that Holly George told her that Echols had been “out walking around” on May 5th, 1993. (source)

Domini Teer - Damien’s girlfriend, Domini Teer, said she last saw Damien around 5:00-5:30pm on May 5th, 1993. She said she did not speak with him again until Damien called her around 10:00pm that night. (source)

Jennifer Bearden - The one Damien misses out because it’s most damaging. Bearden told police in a 9/10/93 statement that she called Jason’s house between 4:15pm and 5:30pm on May 5th, 1993. She says Jason answered the phone and she talked to Jason and Damien for about 20 minutes. Damien told her he and Jason were “going somewhere” and to call him back at 8:00pm. When Bearden called Damien’s house at 8:00pm his grandmother answered. Damien’s grandmother told Bearden that Damien “wasn’t there.” In her police statement, Bearden says she finally reached Damien around 9:20pm. (source)

So where were Damien and co for four to five hours that happen to coincide with the time of the murders? Well we don’t know. Damien told Jennifer that Jason’s mom had driven them somewhere… which was a lie because she was at work til 11pm (source). It’s strange that he can’t come up with an alibi that holds up isn’t it? Surely if he’s innocent, he just needs to tell us where he was? So why doesn’t he?

Jessie Misskelley has no alibi either. I know, you’re about to say he was in a karate tournament, but he wasn’t. The so-called photos depict a different event a month prior, and the “witnesses” all gave conflicting testimony. This alibi only emerged after a previous alibi (he was at a party with 12 other people) fell apart (source)

And nor does Jason Baldwin, after an attempt to get his brother and a friend (Ken Watkins) to lie for him, he stopped trying to construct one; to the point that in 2008 his lawyer stood up in court and said he couldn’t find a reliable alibi witness for Jason. (source). It’s really weird that three totally innocent men all tried to fabricate alibis for the same period of time that just happens to correspond with a murder they’re suspected of. Really weird that.

Blue wax found on the bodies matched wax found in Damien’s room and a candle belonging to his girlfriend (Photo of candle taken during search)

The Knife - multiple people testified it was Damien’s knife, including his ex-girlfriend Deanna Holcomb (source). She said Damien’s knife stood out because it had a compass, and the knife manufacturer testified that the knife found was missing a compass (source)

But it doesn’t end there. The so called “bitemark” on Stevie Branch (photo) perfectly matches the diameter of the compass slot, complete with central wound for the pin (picture of knife with compass to compare). It’s shocking that an innocent man’s knife would match not just the knife wounds, but other contusions on the body too.

A necklace was found (too late to be included in trial evidence) in Damien’s possession that was covered with blood. Tests proved that the DNA on it was consistent with Damien, Jason and… Stevie Branch. (source)

The three boys were tied with three, distinct, unique knots. This usually points to three distinct killers and is almost unheard of in cases involving just one suspect (source)

Paradise Lost claims “there was no blood at the crime scene” which is… wrong. Completely. Here are the Luminol test results. “It lit up like a Christmas tree […] there was a lot of blood there”

Damien was seen, by a family that knew him very well near the crime scene on the night of the murders. The Hollingsworth Family, who correctly described Damien’s clothes, thought they saw him with his girlfriend. They have never retracted this statement and gained nothing by coming forward, except to have their credibility attacked again and again by WM3 researchers looking to discount their sighting. Despite this, one of the key reasons Narlene Hollingsworth was called to testify was her reputation for brutal honesty, even when it came to her own children. (more info on The Hollingsworth Sighting)

Green Fibres found at the crime scene matched a shirt in Damien’s home (source). Red fibres that the police suspected were from a bathrobe in Misskelley’s home but stressed that they couldn’t match them, were retested by the defense in 2008 and found not to match. It’s odd that they would retest the fibres known to not be a match, but not the ones that were a match, isn’t it? What’s even odder is that they neglected to mention that owing to evidence decay, most crime labs refused to retest for the defense, saying that after all this time they would have decayed too much and that “any findings, would be deeply suspect - no matter which side they favored”. Odd that they forgot to mention this.

Damien is a liar. Straight up. He lies to his supporters to make his innocence seem more compelling and lies to make himself seem more of a martyr. A few examples:

“I lived 15 miles away from West Memphis and the crime scene” (2010 interview, Larry King interview). He lived in a trailer park in West Memphis, less than two miles away from the crime scene.“I never went to West Memphis… Hardly at all” (2010 interview). He was known for walking around West Memphis constantly, and testified in 1994: “I walk around frequently… there’s not much to do”“I wasn’t familiar with Robin Hood Hills before the murders… it was a residential area, and I only went to West Memphis to go to Walmart and stuff” (2010). In 1994, in response to the question “how often do you go to Robin Hood Hills?” Damien responded “two, three times a week? Probably more”.He literally agreed with the prosecutor on the stand that he was moving events around depending on what time he needed to cover. You see him cover for this in Paradise Lost by saying he was “Daydreaming”In his book “Almost Home” Damien claims he “barely” knew Jessie Misskelley. The testimony of Domini Teer, Jim McNease, Jason Crosby, Deanna Holcomb, and about 15 others testifies to a friendship between the two, with everyone mentioning them walking around town together, attending events, turning up at people’s houses together and so on. It’s a total lie, and a poor one.Claimed Marc Gardner “raped” him in prison. He later retracted the whole thing after investigation proved he hadn’t. The prison at the time said he retracted the claims after he was told a report would be published that called him “a manipulative pathological liar”. He was concerned about the effect this would have on his supporters.Claims his mom and sister never visited him in prison (“maybe one or two times… but not often.. my sister only came twice and stopped coming after”). Prison records prove he’s lying and that his mother visited weekly, while his sister came fortnightly or once a month when she was busy.He told Piers Morgan that the prison forced him to “eat with his hands”. “I had to learn to use a fork again”, a claim that is demonstrably bullshit.Odd that an innocent man lies enough to be called a “manipulative pathological liar”.

Misskelley and Echols failed their polygraph tests (Echols’ results | Misskelley’s results). Not conclusive, but interesting.

It’s frequently claimed that Jodee Medford and the Softball Girls (the girls who heard Damien brag about the murders) have recanted their stories. They haven’t. It’s based on a misunderstanding of a declaration by Medford’s mother and ascribing her words to Jodee: http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/d_medford_declaration.html

The Confessions - Jessie didn’t confess “once” after hours of questioning. That’s another lie.May 6th 1993 - The day after the murders, Jessie told his friend Buddy Lucas that he’d “hurt some boys” the day before. He then cried and gave Buddy a pair of sneakers (source)May - June 1993 - Jessie is heard crying, praying and apologizing in his room. He would later be diagnosed with PTSD, after witnessing a “traumatic event” that people still think he completely made up.June 3, 1993 - Jessie arrived with his father for questioning and confesses. This is where people imply he was questioned for 12 hours. He wasn’t. He arrived at 10am and confessed at 2:20pm. Only two hours of that time was interrogation (source)June 11, 1993 - Jessie confesses to his attorneys (source)August 19, 1993 - Jessie Misskelley met with his attorney, Dan Stidham, at the Clay County Detention Center and confessed again (source)February 4, 1994 - On the day he was sentenced, Jessie confessed to the officers driving him to the prison (source)February 8, 1994- Jessie put his hand on a Bible and swore to his attorney (Dan Stidham) that he, Damien, and Jason committed the murders. As proof, he told Stidham that he was drunk on Evan Williams whiskey during the murders and the broken bottle could be found where he threw it on the ground under a bridge in West Memphis. Stidham told prosecutors he would be force to believe his client’s confession if he could find that bottle. So Stidham, WMPD, and the prosecutors drove to West Memphis to look for it. They found a broken Evan Williams bottle in the exact area that Jessie said it would be. (source)February 17, 1994 - Jessie confesses again, this time to the prosecutors. His attorneys begged him not to give this confession, but he gave it anyway (source)October 24, 1994 - Jessie’s cell mate wrote to the prosecutors begging him to keep the WM3 in prison, saying Jessie had repeatedly confessed to the crime in detail and describing it as “awful” and “cold”. He had no reason to do this, it was no benefit to him.. he was simply disturbed by the campaign to release the WM3 after what Jessie had said (source)1994 - Present Day - Jessie continued to confess, possibly to prison counselors (heavily rumored and hinted at by his own attorney and said to be the reason Damien Echols fell out with him) but definitely to fans, most notably one known as TrueRomance, who as a result of what Jessie told her switched from one of their most vocal supporters to the total opposite and her story can be read here

Oh let’s finish on my absolute favorite one: Satanic Panic.

Worried that the case would be branded an example of “Satanic Panic” the trial was moved over an hour away to Jonesboro (Echols and Baldwin) and Corning (Misskelley) in order to give the defendants a better shot at seating fair, unbiased juries. All those “damning” stories in the West Memphis papers? The jury never saw them. All those damning rumors? The jury never heard them. The jury was mostly under 30, with very little religious influence (Jonesboro is a college town, and it was thought the younger Jury pool would favor the WM3, to the point that the state was accused of bias against the prosecution…)

During his initial police interview, Echols stated that the killer probably urinated in one or more of the boys’ mouths, apropos of nothing.

Urine was later found in the stomachs of 2 of the victims, but that information was given by phone only to Gitchell, and not before May 16th, 1993. There is no possible way Damien Echols could have had case- specific information unless he was there or knew someone that was that told him what occurred, as the detective interviewing him at the time was clueless to that fact during the interview. At the time Damien mentioned this detail, no one would have known about this, except those directly involved with the crime. Damien attempted to explain this away by saying he was “thinking about what I would have done if I was the killer”.

Source: https://amp.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/4mw5nl/what_case_has_kept_you_up_at_nightdoesnt_sit_well/d41kjxq

The above link contains every source link that’s missing above, I’m just too lazy to source it myself.

Also there is this website, the owner has literally combed through every piece of evidence, read Damiens books, transcribed his interviews, etc

https://thewm3revelations.wordpress.com/author/wm3revelations/

I totally suggest looking through that website. Most people I know who think they are guilty were at one point convinced that they were innocent due to the movies and documentaries. It doesn’t have to change your opinion but you’re doing yourself an injustice by only knowing one side.

#wm3 #west memphis three #damien echols

57 notes · View notes

believermag · 8 years ago

Text

Something Happened on the Day He Died

Jordan A. Rothacker on David Bowie

On Friday, January 8th 2016, David Bowie turned sixty-nine and his final album Blackstar, was released. I purchased it that morning, having waited for months. On the following day I sat for a black star tattoo straight from the album cover; a recent writing project was lousy with black stars and I felt more than ever that Bowie and I were on the same wave. After a weekend of listening to the album I was awoken Monday morning, January 11th 2016 by my wife, “before you look at your phone, Bowie passed away yesterday.” She was right, my text messages were as full as my Facebook feed with tearful and shocked notifications from friends, but I was glad I heard it from her first.

It took until December of 2016 for me to finally read Simon Critchley’s little book, Bowie (OR Books/Counterpoint, 2016). I’ve wanted this book since it came out in 2014 and I remember reacting, “a book by one of my favorite living philosophers on one of my favorite living everythings? Yes, please.” Luckily I put it off until this 2016 re-issue with extra chapters treating Bowie’s death and final album. Although most of the book was written more than two years ago it is hard not to read the whole thing eulogistically. His spirit goes on though, now more than ever, as the last dreadful year has come to a close. I lost of close friends and faith in my country, but now my thoughts turn back to Bowie with hope his art can carry me forward.

What have I lost in Bowie? For the most part, the same things we all have: the chance for more music, more movie appearances, and just the knowledge that he is out there being brilliant and dashing, making art, and giving a wry smile to a paparazzo. What have I lost personally? True confession time. I have always dreamed of knowing Bowie (I’ve never even seen him perform live), but more so, and more embarrassingly, I’ve always wanted him to know me. I’d hoped one day he would read one of my books and like it. That moment of mutual respect between artists, that bump to my sense of worth from an artist who has helped shape my understanding of the world, art, and myself.

This is why sometimes Critchley’s book feels like it’s talking to me or for me. I haven’t read much about Bowie. He is mine and my feelings for him and about him need not be mediated. Critchley’s book however is now added to a small list of my favorite Bowie books which also includes Hugo Wilcken’s Low and Steve Erickson’s These Dreams of You.

Critchley’s book praises Wilcken’s so I’ll start there and circle around back. Wilcken’s Low (Continuum, 2010) doesn’t need a book review; it’s kinda perfect (I say kinda since perfect is such a strong word). It’s one of the best 33 1/3s I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot. I’m a sucker for this series of tiny books on albums of music as I have always suffered from that most Cartesian of obsessions in regards to my most beloved art works, the need to know how he, she, or they did it. The reverse engineering of a work gives me faith that maybe I could also do or make something comparable. Wilcken’s Low is like the sweetest of candies; I wanted to devour and savor all at once, which is difficult with such a short book. Wilcken chose Low because it was a definitive turning point in Bowie’s body of work and during maybe the most beloved period in the myth of the artist. In 136 pages the reader experiences a thorough historical context for the album and detailed production notes for each song as well as each song. The most important moments I savor from this book are descriptions of his work ethic and the well-researched information about his time in Berlin.

After a teenage obsession with Ziggy Stardust, the Berlin years have always been my favorite period and that’s where Erickson’s These Dreams of You (Europa Editions, 2012) comes in, illustrating the Berlin years in the subplot of a larger novel. The book is about a white novelist, Alexander “Zan” Nordhoc, and his family. The narrative opens with the election of Barack Obama not long after their adoption of a little Ethiopian girl with gray eyes named, Zema (mostly called, Sheba). The structure involves small paragraph vignettes familiar from Erickson’s last Europa novel, Zeroville, but otherwise from the start of my first read I wondered, “is Steve Erickson actually writing a domestic family novel? Where is the trademarked weirdness I love so much?” My worries were for naught, for after about fifty pages it started getting weird, and oh so wonderfully weird. Ultimately it is a novel about race in America and therefore about America itself. On the second page, watching the first black president’s victory, Zan wonders, “Do I have the right… as a middle-aged white man, to hold my face in my hands? and then thinks, No. And holds his face in his hands anyway, silently mortified that he might do something so trite as sob.”

It is the only book by a white guy that I included in my African Diaspora Literature course, and only in a summer section to follow complementarily Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father. The book captures the spirit of Obama’s election, his place in history, but never directly names him. This is Erickson’s way of writing historical fiction since Zeroville, never naming names. But what does this have to do with David Bowie? We can only assume that he is the “British extraterrestrial in a dress” or “the man who sings the hero song [with] red hair” whom four year old Sheba/Zema is obsessed with. These Dreams of You is a complicated work that shows all of Erickson’s narrative deftness, the twisting, ellipsing Mobius strip orchestration of strands and timelines that all interweave and make total sense by the end. One of those twists that proves essential to the whole follows a black woman named Jasmine, who while working in the music business is assigned to assist a rocker who seems a lot like David Bowie. She accompanies him and his friend Jim (Iggy Pop?) to Berlin where they record music with a man called The Professor (Brian Eno?). In his not so covert way, Erickson depicts the recording of the albums Low and “Heroes” and all of the escapades of that period: the lingering Crowley occultism, the conviction to kick cocaine through copious amounts of alcohol, the transvestite clubs, the obsession with kraut-rock like Can, Neu!, and Kraftwerk. Moreover, Erickson captures what drew Bowie to Berlin, what first enticed him through the writing of Christopher Isherwood. Berlin was not just the City of Ghosts, it was the City of the Wall, both East and West, Old World and New, Weimar burlesque and pulsing kraut-rock. It was a time and place that inspired Bowie to create two of his greatest albums (and eventually Lodger, which is still pretty good) that both helped take “pop” music to a whole new place, along with great solo work from Iggy Pop (The Idiot and Lust For Life, both produced and co-written with Bowie). In the almost caricatured portraits by Erickson are a stylized ideal of the artists at work, inspired by this liminal space, the guards posted on the Wall just outside the Hansa studio windows. It is a space where maybe the most emblematic theme in Bowie’s work comes out: love as defiance. “I can remember/Standing, by the wall/And the guns, shot above our heads/And we kissed, as though nothing could fall/And the shame, was on the other side/Oh, we can beat them, forever and ever/Then we could be heroes, just for one day,” as he says in the song “Heroes.”

But now, what does this have to do with a book about race in America? The Bowie character in the book tries to explain to Jasmine why he’s in Berlin and what this new work is all about. “Look, the whole century has been about black and white fucking… New York Jews like Gershwin, Kern, Arlen cumming southern Negro music while Duke Ellington ravishes Nineteenth Century Europeans like Debussy,” he says. Erickson’s use of “Bowie” gets at the heart of another central theme in Bowie’s oeuvre, the embracing and merging of binaries.

This is why I chose the book for my class and why I believe the students responded so well to it. The narrator explains, “Zan began pondering race when he was younger only because he began pondering his country, and knew that it wasn’t possible to understand his country without pondering slavery and it wasn’t possible to understand slavery without pondering race. He considered how his countrymen from Africa were the only ones who didn’t choose to be there; Africans were compelled to come and only once they were made to come did they choose to stay. Did that make them, then, the true owners of the country’s great idea, by virtue of having accepted the country in the face of so many reasons not to? If the country is more an idea than a place then are those who were so compelled its true occupants, given how the country’s promise to them was broken before it was offered?”. This is to support a conversation Zan has about race in America a little earlier where he says, “what the zealot or the ideologue really believes in is the zealous nature itself, the devout embrace of hard distinctions—the crusade against gray.”

As this book illustrates, grayness is what Bowie was all about. This AND that. Andro and gyne. Like how gray is both black and white, Bowie was masculine and feminine, straight and gay, artist and pop star (one could be critical and declare that all of this grayness is aspirational and point out that Bowie never escaped being a white, straight male whose aesthetic endeavors were all rooted in privilege and appropriation, but right now I am most certainly here to praise Caesar). Bowie helped destroy binaries by embracing them. His place in Erickson’s wonderful novel helps express this. If you think Erickson might be alone in this sentiment some tangential support might be found in the Acknowledgements of the 2016 novel, Underground Railroad, where Colson Whitehead says, “David Bowie is in every book [of mine].”

It is especially the last duality, Artist and Pop Star, which always excited me most about Bowie. He was legit and fun. Dissertation-worthy and danceable. He was the first side of Low and the second. He was references to Greta Garbo and the Golden Dawn all in one song. Maybe this is what makes David Bowie the quintessential Pop Star to many people. In Low, Wilcken explains how “popular music as it developed in the fifties and sixties turns the cultural paradigm on its head. With pop, postmodernism always came before modernism. Pop culture didn’t actually need any Andy Warhol to make it postmodern. Rock ‘n’ roll was never anything but a faked-up blues—something that the glam-era Bowie had understood perfectly,” and then quoting Brian Eno: “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like the definition of pop to me.”

This now brings me back to Critchley’s book in which early on he describes the “inauthenticity” of Bowie. “The ironic self-awareness of the artist and their audience can only be that of their inauthenticity, repeated at increasingly conscious levels.” Bowie clearly understands this as is evidenced in his song “Andy Warhol” off Hunky Dory (1971) in which we find the line, “Andy Warhol, silver screen/Can’t tell them apart at all.” On this topic Critchley continues, “Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion;” and, “Bowie’s genius allows us to break the superficial link that seems to connect authenticity to truth.” Finally, after more Heideggerian digressions, he brings it all home with: “In my humble opinion, authenticity is the curse of music from which we need to cure ourselves. Bowie can help. His art is a radically contrived and reflexively away confection of illusion whose fakery is not false, but at the service of a felt corporeal truth.”

I might not have been able to express this better myself and that is why I’m so grateful Critchely did. He and I are of the same world, a world he describes “of people for whom Bowie was the being who permitted a powerful emotional connection and freed them to become some other kind of self, something freer, more queer, more honest, more open, and more exciting.” Critchley also helped me understand that what makes Bowie’s music so successful in reaching people is that what is at its core is a yearning for connection. For all of Bowie’s lyrics about tragic characters, dystopian settings, solitude, and loneliness, there is a romantic notion about the ability of love to triumph in some small way, to make us heroes even, just for one day. The song that ends the album Ziggy Stardust (1972), that ends the eponymous tragic character’s narrative, is called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” and it sure hit a nerve with me as an angsty teenager. It can still bring a tear to my eye as the pleading bombast of final lyrics (which Critchley writes about in a short chapter titled, “Wonderful”):

Oh no love! You’re not alone No matter what or who you’ve been No matter when or where you’ve seen All the knives seem to lacerate your brain I’ve had my share I’ll help you with the pain You’re not alone Just turn on with me and you’re not alone Let’s turn on with me and you’re not alone (wonderful) Let’s turn on and be not alone (wonderful) Gimme your hands ’cause you’re wonderful (wonderful) Gimme your hands ’cause you’re wonderful (wonderful) Oh gimme your hands.

Critchley’s little book is heartfelt and thoughtful. I’ve read it twice now—almost as many times as the other two books—and it is another element in my connection to a great artist that I will never know but always love. What these three books reinforce to me about David Bowie, the thing I take the most away from him after sheer aesthetic pleasure, is a deeply committed artistic discipline. Critchley dwells on the fakeness and inauthenticity of Bowie’s artistry, and while I like what he makes of that philosophically, I’ve always understood this about Bowie to just be professionalism. Bowie wasn’t some bright shooting star of a rocker, burning himself out and dying young, although he did get to experience that with his Ziggy Stardust personae. David Bowie was a consummate artist who mostly worked in the medium of popular music and created great work until the end of his life, a year ago today.

Jordan A. Rothacker is the author of the novella, The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), and the novel, And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016). He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and a MA in Religion from the University of Georgia. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

13 notes · View notes

cruisador-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Mr. Right

After rambling on and on, I remembered a story. It was 2010 and my long time boyfriend and I had been together for about 10 years. We would have a blissful 6 months then we would be angry or fighting with one another. I was actually surprised that it lasted as long as it did. Some of our longevity centered around the fact that he was gone for sometimes 3 weeks in the summer. That made it very easy to get out of town to see the boys. Anyway, without getting into a lot of detail it was a couple weeks till Christmas and I all of the sudden found out I would be alone for the first time in my entire life ! While if the sudden circumstances had happened to me, I would have done the same thing as my boyfriend. That didn't matter and I put the blame straight on him. A week and a half to Christmas I decided to call the boys and let them invite me for Christmas. I didn't want to be alone, I spoke to both of them and dropped lots of hints. They got the hint and invited me. I did tell my boyfriend I was going down to Atlanta. I left it at that.

I couldn't sleep Christmas and I was out the door and in the car way before 5:00am. I was at their house a little after 9:00am. Luckily they had moved from downtown and were now on the north side of Atlanta somewhere off of Jimmy Carter Blvd. They put a Bloody Mary in my hand and we climbed in the Monty Carlo and went to spread Christmas cheer. I was drinking hard but luckily was eating appetizers all day also. We got back to their place and they had a gift for me. I had gotten them a gift also as I knew they had recently just moved into their new place. They had gotten me a negligee that was not something that your would lounge around in. It was see through and lets be honest, very slutty. They said the one that I had was over 20 years old and needed to be replaced. It was over 20 years old and I think I brought it every time I came to see them. I didn't necessarily wear it every time I saw them. It was a very conservative negligee not meant to turn anyone on. I was surprised at how similar the one they gave me was to the one I had. The color was almost identical and the cut and length was almost identical. The major difference was that with theirs my nipples and pubic hair was in plain sight.

I modeled it for them and it stayed on for about 5 minutes before they were all over me. I ended up staying for two nights which I had never done with them. Typically I would be on my way back home in between 18 to 28 hours, depending on if I got their at night or in the morning. I left after lunch on the 27th. When I got home I had to figure out where I was going to put their negligee. My boyfriend of course had seen my negligee and if by chance he stumbled upon it, I would have some explaining to do. Seeing how my closet doesn't have a light, I decided to put it where I used to keep my other one. On a hanger way in the back.

About 14 months later we broke up. After I had found out that he was indeed married I decided to take a drive and clear my head. Oh yeah, we'll get back to the negligee. About an hour north of town I saw a sign for a private university that I knew of, but had never been to the campus. I took the exit and found my way to the downtown section. The campus was all around the downtown. I went in and out of all of the stores and when I was running out of stores on the strip I walked up to the corner and looked to see if anything else was around. I saw a Catholic church not more than a hundred yards away and figured I would go inside to see if it made me feel any better. I opened the doors and could smell paint. Part of the vestibule was roped off with wet paint signs. I made it inside the church and went over to the back right and sat in the last pew. Not five minutes had gone by and I heard a door from inside the church close and footsteps coming toward me. It was the Priest and he said something to me but I didn't understand what he said. I smiled at him as he walked by. Five minutes later he comes back and said something about confession had been canceled. I didn't know what he was talking about but smiled again at him. He was just about to start walking again when he stopped, sat down beside me and said that we can do confession here. I had been to confession one time in my life and that was when I was in Sunday School. I might had been 10 years old ? I was going to say no when he started praying and then he asked when my last confession was. I shocked him when I said 40 years ago. I was stuck and all I could think about was someone coming in during my confessing. I was rambling just as quick as I could when I got to the part about the boys. The Christmas with the boys had weighed heavily on me. I was drunk all day on Christmas and then had sex that was very....let's say not lady like. I think we had sex twice the next day. Anyway, if it had been any day but Christmas....I would have been OK with it. So I told the Priest that I had been drunk on Christmas and fornicated with two homosexual men. I immediately started saying that I wasn't a bad person and blah blah blah and somehow said that I would never commit adultery and blah blah blah. I finally stopped and shut up. He didn't say a word. Then he said something that to this day I wish I could remember. It was something like it is easier to go from the light to darkness but more difficult to find the light from the dark. I can't remember, then he informed me that adultery was any sex outside of marriage. I had thought adultery was having sex with a married man. He gave me my penance and when I got out of the church I did feel better. I'm sure he was shaking his head when I left.

I felt so much better that the next morning, which was a Sunday, I decided to go to church. It was within walking distance of my house. Being the not that great Catholic, after communion I am walking out the door while everyone is standing and walking back to their pew. I decided to grab a cup of coffee at the restaurant on the main street. As I was walking in the door I felt someone grab the door and hold it for me from behind. I waved at the owner whom I have known for years and asked for a table. I headed for the restroom. When I came out, the owner, with menu in hand led me to a table. There was a guy sitting at the table. I was stunned at first and then the guy said that he was a bad Catholic also and he walked in right behind me. He informed me that he didn't bite and being a nice looking guy, I sat down. Not two minutes with him, I knew it was Devine intervention. We sat and talked for 20 minutes before ordering and afterwards strolled around the downtown together. He was also a professor, but in another college of the University. I gave him my phone number and that week we met for lunch at a middle eastern restaurant. I was scared at first, but it was actually very good. We attended a auction for the school together a couple weeks later and by that time I was ready to spend every waking hour with him. I know now a lot of that was because my ex was already married. He had kids and didn't want to introduce his children to women right off the bat. I was the same way and understood. Luckily, my daughter was in college and that wasn't as important anymore. He had two girls in high school and felt that they were impressionable. He didn't want to parade lots of women in front of them. It was difficult for me, as I was having to wait till every other weekend to physically see him. Actually, that was not all that correct. We did try to meet up at least once a week. We were both busy. However, when we were together, he was not coming on to me like I was wanting. I would give him hints like once we were walking down the street and it was a little chilly and I ducked into a store front entrance to get out of the wind. I was faking the chills hoping he would put his arms around me to warm me up. Nothing. I would confide in a girlfriend of mine and she told me that maybe he just needs a friend. Not what I wanted to hear.

One evening during the week, I got a call from him. He said he had forgotten some stuff in his office and was having to drive all the way back to his office. He said he was planning on watching his favorite reality TV show and now he would probably miss it. I told him I was sitting around with a glass of wine in my pajamas watching TV and he was welcome to watch it at my place. He said OK if it wasn't going to be an inconvenience. I was not sitting around drinking wine in my pajamas but sitting around grading papers. I got up and ran to open a bottle of wine, to put on some pajamas, hide the papers from class, etc. My Micky Mouse pajamas were nowhere to be found. Finally, I get to my closet and I am going through everything to find something that even closely resembled pajamas to put on. I'm going through my drawer and then I see my negligee. Definitely could not wear that. All of the sudden the doorbell rings. I grab the negligee and put it on. I knew I could put my robe on over it and all would be OK and it would still appear that I was not doing anything of importance.

I open the door and let him in. He gives me a quick hug and then kind of stumbles with his speech and starts to apologize for intruding on me. I guess he thought I was ready for bed or something. He says he should probably go and that we can try to do something later next week. I told him I was OK and then he stopped and said that he needs to be honest with me. Usually not a good thing to hear. Then he says that he likes me but that he doesn't know how to act around women, he had only 2 girlfriends his whole life and that his marriage was a disaster. He didn't know if he should put his arm around me or hold my hand and that he was a complete mess around me.

I told him that I was not sitting around drinking wine in my pajamas and I told him the story of running around the house trying to get ready for him. I told him that I was grading papers and that I wanted him to come over. Then I told him that if he wanted to, he could kiss me. I'm thinking that it had been 7 or 8 weeks since we had coffee after church. In the time we had been together he had given me a peck on my cheek once and kissed me at the door several times when he was leaving, but nothing ever that would say, "I want you". That's it. He did come and kiss me kind of passionately and I remember thinking, finally ! We started watching his show on the sofa and at every commercial we would kiss a little more. By the 3rd or 4th series of commercials we were making out like high school kids and the robe that I had put on was constricting me like a venomous snake! I guess every time I would twist to be able to kiss him, the robe was twisting tighter around me. Towards the end of the show the robe was twisted around me so tight I couldn't take it anymore and while we were making out again, I got up, cursed my robe, let it fall to the floor and straddled his legs so I could get to his lips easily. I was so worked up by him. I got up and grabbed my robe when I heard the show was back on and sat back down beside him. When the show was over, he said he needed to get back and I immediately went to bed. I went in the bath to get ready for bed and hung my robe on the hook. That's when I noticed that the negligee I was wearing was the one the boys had given me for Christmas 2 years earlier. The one worn by more French whores than all others combined. I had forgotten all about putting it in the closet in place of the other one. I gave him enough time to get home and I called his apartment to apologize and tell him I was in a hurry looking for something to wear and I'm not trashy or something. He acted as if he hadn't paid attention and that he didn't notice anything. It made me feel better but I knew otherwise. When I went to pick up the robe off the floor, I didn't kneel down and pick it up, I bent over and got it. So a fifty year old with D-cups bending over in a see through negligee and he didn't notice anything ? I'm sure that was a sight.

Sometime during the next week he called me and said there was a festival in a town about 1 1/2 hours away and asked if I wanted to ride down there with him. He said we could leave at noon and we should have plenty of time to see everything by the time it was over, which at the time I thought was six o'clock.

I asked if he wanted to go earlier as there was a town with lots of antiques on the way and I was looking for an old roll top desk. As I think I mentioned, he got his kids every other weekend and two weeks had gone by since our make out session. It was difficult waiting that long to see him, although we did always meet for lunch on Tuesdays and had a date on the Thursday before he got his kids. Still, suggesting that we also shop for antiques would buy me a few more hours with him.

After an unsuccessful day looking for a desk we rolled into the festival at about two in the afternoon. By the time six o'clock rolled around we were both exhausted from being on our feet all day and were about ready to start our ride back. Then we noticed a big sign about this band from "our era". I think it was Three Dog Night or Stepenwolf or some band like that which was playing that night at the festival. The festival was not over at six like we thought and we talked about staying but that would put us coming back home at midnight or later. I suggested we could get a hotel room and that I would split it. We found a cheap room 10 miles away and decided to stay. I told him about the story of the confession and the priest and that I couldn't sleep with him. He was fine with that and getting a room with two beds made it easier not to be tempted.

We got to the hotel at about 10:30 and luckily we were able to get a couple tooth brushes from the hotel and he had bought me a T-shirt of the band to sleep in. We were all snuggled up in our individual beds when I got up to use the bathroom. I didn't see any harm in the two of us sharing a bed so when I came back out I blurted something like, "I can't remember which bed was mine". He moved over and opened up the covers. I crawled in backwards and made my way over for him to spoon me. We both did pretty good for a while resisting temptation. Then he started nibbling on my neck. We started making out again and before long he was pretty well established on second base. I wouldn't have stopped him if he wanted to go to third, but he didn't.

The next morning we both were up early. We both teach 7:00am classes so it is hard to ever sleep in. He said that he was going to take a shower and I was debating it also, but without a good brush and long hair, I was thinking I would just wash up in the sink. I was at the sink when he went into the shower and I told him that if he needed me to wash his back to just knock on the wall. I was still washing up when he opened the door and said he was ready for me to wash his back. I was a little caught off guard. I wanted him to say something like that, but I didn't think he would. It took me a while to decide what to do. I wanted this guy so badly. I stripped down and went in the bath. I told him to close his eyes and got in and went straight to him and buried my head in his chest. I don't think he thought I would do it. We just stood there under the water with our arms around each other for what seemed like an eternity. Then we were kissing and touching and grinding into each other. When he went back to second base with his lips, I reached down and started stroking his dick and he headed for third base. I let his fingers penetrate me but had to pull away before I got to worked up. I pulled him toward the middle of the tub, I pulled the shower curtain up a little and sat on the edge of the tub. I pulled him closer to me and began to give him a blowjob. I heard him moan and was quickly told that I was doing that at my own risk and shortly after he was screaming and cumming in my mouth. I think it took about three swallows to get it all down. I had wanted his cum in me for a long time. Being a professor I know better, however, I have always had this feeling that if I swallow a man's cum then part of his body becomes part of my body and that somehow we become physically connected. Probably not the case but you never know.

After that morning everything changed ! Thanks to Bill Clinton I did not have sex with him. So I was still okay with the adultery thing. We began seeing each other more during the week and he was much more affectionate towards me. So another funny incident I remember. It was a Friday afternoon and it was a weekend that he had his kids. Which meant that I wouldn't see him for a while. He texted me in the afternoon and asked where I was. I told him I was in the dungeon. That was my lab and office. My office had no windows and my lab which was about 20 x 20 had two vent well windows that were like 1 foot by 1 and a half feet way up at the top of the wall. He came over and I gave him the tour and we walked into my office where he immediately pushed me up against the wall and started kissing me. I was pretty hot and bothered and knowing I wouldn't see him for days I was wondering what was going to satisfy me. I still wasn't fucking him but every other weekend we were having slumber parties and doing anything and everything but having sex. I thought I would give him a blowjob in my office as nobody ever comes down there. I get on my knees and pull out his dick and start to suck him when I get this weird feeling. I got up quickly and told him to get his pants up. A half a minute later there are two knocks and the door is pushed open. It was the head of the department. No one had come down to that lab unexpected in years! I introduced the two of them acting like my boyfriend was a colleague and the two of us were in my office strictly on business. My boyfriend left and I told him I would be in touch in a very professional voice. The department head only needed me briefly and when he left I texted my boyfriend to meet me at my house if he wanted me to finish him off. I ripped off his pants as soon as he walked in.

I think it was the following weekend during one of our slumber parties when we were messing around before going to sleep. We were talking about birth control during a lull in our fooling around. He said he had a vasectomy. That solved that. We started back to fooling around and I got on top of him and was grinding my pussy on his dick. I was soaking wet and somehow his dick slid in me and I pushed down to get it in all the way, then got off of him and did it again. That was about all I could take. I had done real well for probably 15 weeks but now I couldn't take it any more. If he hadn't had a vasectomy I probably would have made it a few more weeks. I jumped off of him and laid down and literally pulled him on me and begged him to fuck me. He jumped on me and stuck it in as fast as he could. Not being used to sleeping with each other I bet we woke up 3 or 4 times that night and each time he was back on top of me.

TBC

0 notes