#i do think they eventually go to america but i think they live an expansive life after all that

[variousqueerthings]

post-canon klinger still makes and wears clothes and soon-lee is supportive + maybe discovers some elements within herself related to sexuality and gender through their journey together... (I wanna see rosalind chao in a nice suit)

[kaithonks]

So I’ve had some Thoughts about Marvel Rivals

Well, this is a bit of a change-up from what I normally post. But it's still kind of about comics, I guess. Marvel really isn't my area of expertise. I like most people enjoy Spider-Man, but I also like Hawkeye and I actually think North's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is really good and so funny. That "choose your own adventure" issue lives in my head.

Anyway, I started playing this week, and I've already played for about 40 hours at the time of writing. And I feel I might as well toss in my two cents, especially since I am a support player to my core. For example, I was Mercy Main when I played Overwatch, and now I'm maining Clock and Dagger and have a decent enough win rate. And while I know Marvel Rivals and a large portion of its fans want a competitive scene, I don't think that should be its focus. Marvel Rivals has a lot of people coming in either from the movies, the comics, or gamers particularly people who play hero shooters. So honestly you have a large mixed bag of people and I don't see that many people really wanting the competitiveness, that balancing, and ultimately the limiting that would come with that. It doesn't help that they also aren't going to want people screaming about meta into their ears. I have seen so many different tier lists at this point and generally, people have yet to agree on "who's broke" and who's not yet. Yeah, it's still early days but that variety is a great bonus in Marvel Rival's favor. It means you can still play your favorite and not get screamed at.

Now you be like "But Kai! Don't you hate it When 5 people autolock DPS?" and my answer actually is "No" because I play in a casual experience. Yes, I would like to win, but I rather just have a fun game and you can still have a fun game if you lose. If Marvel Rivals takes a more competitive focus, a lot of that casual fun I have would be lost. People will take even quick play and Bots seriously. Like I care more about my team having fun and being able to play who they want. I Like support because I can support because it's arguably one of the most useful classes but I have fun being able to heal and save people even if we don't win. Since I'm a DC person, I don't have the investment some comic people and movie people will have so if I'm not that attached to the character it's easy for me to step back and just pick and pick a heal so the person who really fucking love Spider-man can play him, even if they don't know how to.

What definitely helps is that in Marvel Rivals I am not totally team-dependent as a support and I can put down or escape people coming into flank or poke. I have survived a diving Captain America and Thor before too, that was stressful but I managed. I'm not saying there shouldn't be a competitive space, but people undervalue the causal space. For example, causal gaming has been Nintendo brand and how many Sim expansion packs are there? And AstroBot just won Game of the Year, so there is a lot of value in making some that are accessible to people who are here to get competitive.

Now a person may counter might ask me "But doesn't being Psylock being OP bug you? Isn't Jeff the Spwan of Satan?" And again I'm gonna say no. Psylock is good if someone is really good with her kit and I'm not running into that a ton in quick play, and Jeff? You know you can dodge right? When you hear his line look at the the floor and don't group up. Also, I don't know about you but he can't ult that often. Like every in Rivals feels very manageable to me at a casual player level and when you don't take it all so seriously it all just rolls off my back.

So yeah. I don't want a role queue because it would limit what people can play. And even when I want to play DPS I just do. I've been in only one that came without a support… and that was like four tanks and someone eventually did swap to a healer. Heck, I've had several 3 support games.

My ultimate hope with Marvel Rivals is that it keeps up its current play style. That rewards using the Teams and different comps. I am ultimately also hoping that it brings more people into reading the source comics. Yeah, I can't escape talking about that, because I do want people to read Fraction's Hawkeye or North's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. And maybe come over and read new Watter's Nightwing and Brombal's Batgirl. There are so many good comics out there and while I enjoy Marvel Rivals for what it is right now I like it even more as a gateway into getting people into the great art form of comics.

[beardedmrbean]

Oh right the pan African movement…my middle name is a result of that…anyways

Problem because I lived in the Midwest, then the south, and back to the Midwest. Of course there are lot of overlap. But I wonder how many black people up north knows our people still live in the country?

But as you mention with the nyc boroughs,

If we Americans goes “Savages savages, barely even human!” To a state right next to each other

What the hell you guys expect from Africans?

Also Hurston mention that red rope myth…actually I watching a YouTuber Blair white podcast where she made a comment towards a member of the view show is that does she think life is a Disney movie.

This got me thinking and slowly realize that Africans Americans even into middle age maintain the sanitized version of the slave trades we were told

And we never updated in middle school, seriously I didn’t know about the Africans selling other Africans things until I was a teen on tumblr

Just curious….especially since the left been in control of education for decades-oh wait they scared shitless the racism of 1st and 2nd wave feminism and the damage they did with the sex revolution

Look I’m not a purist…let just a lot of shit my community and other poor ones went through make sense

(Also why my people suspiciously make up 50% of abortions but that another story)

And African nations want reparations? Hmm here what I would probably go like in a un meeting

“Now while slavery is a big stain on human history, the Americas and Europeans countries who participated in the Atlantic slave trade acknowledge it was terrible and made sure to end it. While giving reparations to slaves if they can. But beyond that, the Africans nations who were part of slave owning kingdoms such as the Dahomey will not get refunds…wait, you guys think we wouldn’t eventually find out the truth? After the women king film, the False Eden of Africa you exploited many Americans of slave dispora from don’t work anymore.”

Also like if I ever go to Africa, I’m not trying to spiritually to connect there. I’m genetically mostly Yoruba, but I’m culturally Anglo-Saxon. I’m just want to do research, where my ancestors were from, the environments, the kingdoms and empires they lived in.

But unless I’m married someone from a Yoruba tribe, I’m at the end of day an American. I think my community haven’t come to the realization even when interacting with African immigrants

Problem because I lived in the Midwest, then the south, and back to the Midwest. Of course there are lot of overlap. But I wonder how many black people up north knows our people still live in the country?

I imagine you'll get some of the city folk that will picture them in a very Uncle Remus/Song of the South way, not the whole racist bit so much as just the same way you'd picture the white yokels like Cletus and Brandine on the Simpsons, not racism there just classism.

This got me thinking and slowly realize that Africans Americans even into middle age maintain the sanitized version of the slave trades we were told And we never updated in middle school, seriously I didn’t know about the Africans selling other Africans things until I was a teen on tumblr

I still don't even know how that all got started, if you stop and think about it logically obviously there's going to be people in Africa working with the slave traders, the ruling group wants to remain the ruling group so when someone shows up with boomsticks that make all that being the ruling group even easier they'll take them up on it.

Native Americans were big on that too, territorial expansion and slaughtering and subjugation of your foes is a universal constant in the human species, several species in the rest of the animal kingdom too.

(Also why my people suspiciously make up 50% of abortions but that another story)

Negro Project

They look to be attempting to rehabilitate Margret Sanger in various publications and what not, but the simple fact of the matter is that planned parenthood was founded, in part, to control the black population. Now was it a we don't want any more black children born or was it gotta see if we can help them out of poverty and having 12 kids is not going to make that goal any easier or any other reason the founding of the group had the control of the black population in mind.

They haven't moved away from that really.

And African nations want reparations? Hmm here what I would probably go like in a un meeting “Now while slavery is a big stain on human history, the Americas and Europeans countries who participated in the Atlantic slave trade acknowledge it was terrible and made sure to end it. While giving reparations to slaves if they can. But beyond that, the Africans nations who were part of slave owning kingdoms such as the Dahomey will not get refunds…wait, you guys think we wouldn’t eventually find out the truth? After the women king film, the False Eden of Africa you exploited many Americans of slave dispora from don’t work anymore.”

There's some African countries that have actually apologized for their role in the slave trade, Libya being one of them gaddafi before all that "fun" went down there during the arab spring had done it,

no that it solved anything, Slavery in Mauritania is still a big issue,

In 1981, Mauritania became the last country in the world to officially abolish slavery, when a presidential decree abolished the practice. However, no criminal laws were passed to enforce the ban. In 2007, under international pressure, the government passed a law allowing slaveholders to be prosecuted.

2007, but you know whippo bad or something.

Also like if I ever go to Africa, I’m not trying to spiritually to connect there. I’m genetically mostly Yoruba, but I’m culturally Anglo-Saxon. I’m just want to do research, where my ancestors were from, the environments, the kingdoms and empires they lived in. But unless I’m married someone from a Yoruba tribe, I’m at the end of day an American. I think my community haven’t come to the realization even when interacting with African immigrants

Ya I'd like to see the place where my DNA is from some day, get some drinks and some food and a couple shirts and a coffee mug, end of the day I'm still a purebred American Mutt though, can trace bits of the family tree back to when there was only one Virginia and it was a colony, some pre civil war stuff in Florida too.

Besides, I'm red green colourblind what am I going to do in Ireland besides be handicapped, lol.

[murshili-ii]

Celtic Month Bonus Piece: Techtosagii

~ ~

Our seventh and final Celtic Month piece doesn’t correspond to any holiday; it’s a bonus piece in honor of the ancient Galatian Celts who invaded Greece and entered Anatolia during the 3rd Century BC. They settled in the land that would become known as Galatia; and they were by far the easternmost of the Celts. They’d later go on to become some of the first Gentile Christians, to whom Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians was written.

Before you read what the piece means to me, share what it means to _you_. I’m just the artist; you’re the beholder.

Leave a comment.

~ ~

The only Celts around today are the Insular Celts, who survived on the British Isles. Even the Bretons, who do live on the mainland, are the descendants of Britons who fled overseas during the Anglo-Saxon Invasion of Britain.

But the Celts used to be a prolific people; they once dominated Europe. The Celtic Gauls lived throughout what is now France, Switzerland, Belgium, northern Italy, southern Germany, and Austria. What is now northeastern Spain was home to the Celtiberians.

They were unstoppable warriors. A Gaulish king named Brennus invaded and sacked Rome in the 4th Century BC. Gauls later invaded and settled the Balkans, and even briefly invaded Greece, during the 3rd Century BC. At the height of their expansion, a group of Gauls known as the Galatians turned east from the invasion of Greece, and settled in central Anatolia, the region of what is now Turkey that would be known as Galatia for centuries thereafter. This was the high-water mark of Celtic expansion; the farthest afield they would ever expand.

The signature Roman sword, the gladius, was adopted from the Celts; and so were other weapons and tactics that made later Classical armies powerful. The Greeks and Romans alike romanticized the Gauls for their courage and virtue, even while scorning them as barbarians, in a way that’s highly comparable to the way European settlers in North America would later view the Native American peoples.

Following Julius Caesar’s conquest of Transalpine Gaul, the Continental Celts began to be assimilated into Latin culture, losing their Celtic language and identity; and the Celtiberians were to follow, along with their other mainland neighbors.

Even after their conquest by the Roman Republic in the 2nd Century AD, the Galatians continued to speak a Celtic language at least until the 4th Century AD, and likely until the 6th Century AD; making them among the latest-surviving Mainland Celts. They would eventually be absorbed into Greek and, later, Turkish culture; leaving the Insular Celts as the last Celts left in the world.

When the Apostle Paul wrote his Epistle to the Galatians in the 1st Century AD, it appears that Christian communities were already forming in Galatia; making the Galatians some of the earliest Gentile Christians. Christianity wouldn’t begin to spread in Ireland for another several centuries.

The exact same region of central Anatolia that became Galatia was also, about a thousand years prior, the heartland of the Hittite Empire, one of the most powerful Bronze Age nations, ruled by speakers of the Hittite language; the earliest Indo-European language of which we have written record, an ancient relative of the Celtic languages as well as most of today’s European, Persian, and North Indian languages.

I like to think that, while moving into the exotic new land that would become their home, the Galatians came upon the ruins of ancient Hittite cities, and maybe even the Hittite capital, Hattusas.

What you see in the foreground of this piece is a Hittite fortification inspired by the Lion Gate at Hattusas.

In the background, you can see the convoy of the Galatians, traveling, with their Greek spoils of war, into this new land.

In the near foreground, we see a Galatian prince and his Greek war-captive exploring the ruins.

(That penannular brooch that the Galatian prince is wearing is really more of an Insular Celtic thing; but penannular brooches are so distinctively Celtic that I couldn’t resist.)

The Techtosagii (or Textosagii, or in Latin, Tectosages) were one of the three Galatian tribes that participated in the Invasion of Greece and ultimately settled in Anatolia. Their name seems to consist of two words also found in other Celtic languages, and can be compared to Old Irish “techtaid” (“to have, to possess”) and “saigid” (“to seek out, to strive for”). It could be translated as “Possession-Seekers”, “Estate-Seekers”, “Wealth-Seekers”, or “Home-Seekers”; and that’s exactly what they were: people on the move looking for a new land to be the source and substance of their prosperity.

It isn’t known what drove them to leave their original homeland; some writers say it was greed; others say it was overpopulation; others say it was famine. In the end, they found the new home they were seeking. They would make the land their own, and their descendants would prosper there.

[msbarrows]

Okay, this was going to be a tag essay, but the tags kept being too long and it would have taken more than twenty of them, so f- it, full essay it is.

I cannot see the name "Mike Harris" and any words about transit in Toronto without losing my shit. Like yes, I know this article is about current problems due to Uber (and thank god Olivia is in, as someone who spent most of my years in Toronto living adjacent to and then in her neighbourhood, she is fantastic), but I was actually working for the TTC in the Engineering & Design Department as a receptionist/admin assistant (initially as a temp placement and then on contract for a few years) during the end of the Let's Move program, so this is a red button issue for me.

That *there are not enough expletives* asshole cancelled plans that were literal decades in the making and millions of dollars of investment in design, approvals, etc. for lines that would be in use today, alleviating so many of the traffic problems the streets and the existing transit lines have. IIRC the furthest out planning at that point was an estimated end of construction by 2012, which I think was for the subway line running west under Eglington all the way out to the airport (it's been 30-ish years the details are fuzzy now - though I very clearly remember that they had actually imported the boring machine for it, and had it down the hole and digging started at the point the Toejam In Chief cancelled everything).

Out of everything that was allowed to continue, there were only three projects - one station on the west University line (Finch West, which was already nearing completion), the new transit control centre (which was desperately needed, they had people ransacking junk stores across North America to find the vacuum tubes to keep the old one running - no I am not joking, it was that badly out of date), and the Sheppard line, which was meant to be eventually extended much further east beyond the initial section being built. (Say what you will about Mel Lastman, he at least fought for his constituents' best interests, and saw to it that the Sheppard line was not outright cancelled as well.)

So now Toronto has transit that is horrifically short of being able to move the kind of population it needs to, and has several times been forced to compromise and build "LRT" lines (aka dedicated streetcar lines) instead of new subway lines, because building a new subway line is expensive and takes time, and politicians tend to care more about short-term costs than long term infrastructure investment. Unless of course it's an f-ing multi-lane highway which eats up many more times the space required than any variety of improved train access (above or below ground) would, and sucks up vast amounts of money to maintain, but can be flogged off to their corporate buddies to profit off of (no I'm not bitter about the toll highway in the least, why do you ask).

I am glad that mass transit has again become something that Toronto and the various levels of government are improving, and that improvements and expansions of the transit system are ongoing. There's nothing like a stint in the budgeting arm of the maintenance department (where I also worked on contract for a while) to make you horrifically aware of just how dangerously underfunded and precariously maintained a lot of the system was back then. Like stuff still in use decades beyond its expected end-of-life year, and sometimes only still in use because the TTC's machine shops were manufacturing replacement parts themselves. Because doing a planned replacement of something would have come out of the city budget, iirc, but emergency repair was from a provincial fund, so why not pass the buck. Even if the emergency repair cost more, the equipment was arguably unsafe, and it was not a sustainable practice in the long term.

Politicians. Ugh. (See also: why I am a life-long anti-conservative).

Lies, damned lies, and Uber

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 10-11), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.

Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.

Here's how they did it.

For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.

These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.

Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.

Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.

It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:

https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."

Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:

https://ricochet.media/en/4039/uber-is-lying-again-the-company-has-no-intention-of-paying-drivers-a-living-wage

Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):

https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf

Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.

Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings-how-uber-wasted-2-5-billion-on-self-driving-cars

After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:

https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division

The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/

The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.

How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-nine-despite-massive-price-increases-uber-losses-top-31-billion.html

But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.

In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Image: Rob Sinclair (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_skyline_of_Toronto_May_2009.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[sacredsorceress]

Secrets (Two) || Bucky Barnes

pairing: bucky barnes x reader

summary: after your conversation on the phone, bucky returns home with sam and natasha to find that you’ve been kidnapped. everyone begins to discover that the super soldier has been lying to them for far too long.

a/n: second chapter! once again the first few chapters are pure angst, but you can find fluff on my masterlist below! reblogs/replies are super appreciated!

word count: 2.9k

warnings: angst, mentions of kidnapping, swearing, description of violence (the fight scene from ca:tws)

Prologue One

masterlist || request || taglist

“What do you mean your wife?” Sam asked, following Bucky into the hallway.

When Bucky didn’t stop walking to answer his question, Sam’s hand landed on his shoulder, forcing him around to face him.

“Buck, man, what’s going on?” He asked. “You’re married?”

Bucky snatched Sam’s hand in his, yanking it off of his shoulder. “Yes, I’m married and no, I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anyone. Can I go now?”

Sam stared at the man in front of him. Although he had apparently not known him well enough to know that he was married, he had known him long enough to recognize that underneath his tough exterior he was scared.

There were very few times that Bucky Barnes was genuinely scared and the fact that Sam could see the feeling etched on his friend’s face now, terrified him.

“Buck, whatever it is- let me help you.” Sam said.

Usually Bucky would have handled it himself. He had been handling his problems- his secrets- for years in his own, but as he thought about you and possibly even your children in danger because of him, he knew he would have to take all the help that he could get- not for his- but for your sake.

-

As soon as Sam stopped the car outside of Bucky and yours shared home, Bucky swung open the door of the vehicle, pulling a gun out of the holster at his side with Sam quickly following behind. With no sign of any unknown vehicle in the driveway, Bucky swung open the front door of your home.

“Y/n?” He called. “Rebecca? Grant?”

When he heard no reply, he felt his heart drop into his stomach and his hands begin to tremble. You had to be there. His family had to be there- safe and sound. If you weren’t... if something had happened to you all because of him... he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

Remembering what he had told you on the phone, he jogged towards the basement door, pulling it open and rushed down the stairs, Sam close behind on his heels.

As soon as he saw the rug on the basement floor he threw it to the side, swinging open the hatch he had hidden in the ground.

Being met with his children’s faces staring back at him, he breathed a sigh of relief, slipping the gun back into the holster. He reached out his arms, pulling his daughter from his son’s grasp into his own and reached out his hand to pull his son to his feet on the ground above the crawlspace.

“Oh my God.” He heard Sam say from beside him. “You have kids? What.. what haven’t you been telling us?”

He felt guilty as he stood there, both of his children in his arms. Sam was his best friend since Steve’s passing and had done more for him than anyone else possibly would. He felt guilty standing there, knowing that he had not only been keeping secrets from him, but from you too. He had been burying the truth from everyone for so long and he felt idiotic for not realizing that it would eventually come to the surface.

Before he could say anything however, Sam softened, kneeling before the boy stood at Bucky’s side.

“Hey buddy.” He said. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m-”

“You’re Captain America!” Your son exclaimed, pulling his tumb out of his mouth- a habit you and your husband had tried to break him out of years ago, but that he still slipped back into when he was nervous.

A smile stretched across Sam’s face at the fact that the child had recognized him. Pushing himself up and onto his feet once again, he pointed at your son.

“I like this one.” He said to Bucky.

Without an answer, Bucky handed his daughter over to Sam who took the young girl in his arms. Your husband kneeled in front of your son now, placing his hands on either of his shoulders.

“Grant,” He said. “Where’s your mom?”

He felt awful as he watched the young boy slip his thumb into this mouth once again, just now noticing his tear-stained cheeks.

“I- I don’t know.” He told his father. “There was yelling and- and-”

“And what, bud? What happened?” Bucky asked desperately, feeling his heart race in his chest, praying that nothing had happened to you.

“I- I think they took mom.” He said finally.

As soon as he had heard the confirmation from his own son’s mouth, he stood up and began pacing the room before rushing up the stairs, Sam calling after him as he did so. When he reached the top of the staircase he couldn’t help but tug at his own hair, pacing back and forth, thoughts of you running through his mind.

You were taken because of him. It was all his fault. He was the one they wanted- not you, but you got caught in the crossfire because you cared about him- because he didn’t tell you the truth. These people came in here looking for him and they took you. You didn’t deserve to suffer because of his past or because of his mistakes. He couldn’t bare the thought of you spending a minute with people who would do anything to get back at him.

“Barnes?”

Being pulled out of his own head he turned and saw Natasha Romanoff standing in the doorway.

“What- what are you doing here?” He asked, suddenly aware of how fast his heart was beating- so much so he could barely take a breath to speak.

“Wilson texted me when you guys left the Compound.” She said.

Just as she mentioned him, Bucky heard Sam come up from the basement, both of his children in tow.

Natasha glanced between Bucky and the two children attached to Sam’s hip.

“What-” She began. “Wilson said you were married, but...”

Too consumed in his own mess, Bucky didn’t even bother explaining the situation to the woman standing in the doorway, instead just continuously tugging at his hair, willing himself not to fall apart.

Watching the scene unfold, Sam was the first to speak.

“Alright.” He said, turning to Natasha. “Why don’t we take these kids back to the Compound. They’ll be safe there.”

Although he said nothing, knowing that his children weren’t safe in his own home because of him made Bucky sick. He moved over to the couch, falling back onto it.

“Okay.” Natasha nodded seriously at Sam before turning her attention to the young girl in his arms, smiling. “Hi hon. Why don’t you come with Auntie Nat?”

Natasha reached out her arms for the young girl and she immediately fell into them, grasping at the woman’s shirt and laying her head against her shoulder.

“I think she likes me better.” Nat joked to Sam who rolled his eyes in return.

“Don’t take it personally, Sam.” Bucky finally spoke up from his seat on the couch, hand over his eyes. “She likes her mom better... everyone likes her better.”

The two Avengers gave each other a look, silently communicating their concern for the super soldier in the other room. Although he had been known as the grump for a good expanse of time, they had never seen him so miserable or so lost in despair- even after spending eighty years as a brainwashed assassin.

“What’s your name?” Natasha asked the young girl, taking her tiny hand in hers.

“Becca.” She replied.

“It’s Rebecca.” Your son corrected her. “I’m Grant.”

She smiled patting the boy’s head. “Hi Grant. I’m Nat.”

“Grant?” Sam asked, glancing at Bucky. “Isn’t that Steve’s middle name?”

Hands still over his eyes, Bucky replied. “Yeah.”

A silence hung in the room for a brief moment.

“I um... I’m going to get these kids to the Compound, alright?” Nat said, guiding the children out the door. “I’ll be back soon.”

When Nat left the house, shutting the door behind her, Bucky sprung up from the couch. The only thing holding him back from rushing out the door was Sam stepping in front of him, laying his hands on his chest.

“Woah man- slow down.” Sam said.

“I have to go get my wife, Sam.” Bucky nearly shouted, throwing his hands up in the air. “Somebody took her! I have to get her.”

Sam felt his heart break in his chest to see his best friend so distraught in front of him. He understood- of course he understood. If anything like this had happened to his own family, he couldn’t say that he wouldn’t be doing the same thing, but Sam understood that despite Bucky’s feelings, nothing would get done without a clear mind.

“I understand that, Buck.” Sam said. “But you can’t help her if-”

“Somebody took her because of me, Sam!” He shouted. “This is all my fault! Don’t you see that?”

“Buck,” Sam attempted to ease him. “I know that, but she knew what she was getting into when she married you, man.”

At the sound of his words, Bucky allowed his hands to fall to his sides, the anger falling from his face as he looked down at the ground, ashamed.

Watching how quickly the rough exterior and fury had been drained from the man, Sam grew worried, backing up from Bucky.

“I mean- she knew, right?”

Silence.

“Buck...” Sam said slowly. “She knew... right?”

Silence.

“Bucky!” Sam shouted.

“I didn’t tell her!” Bucky finally shouted, shoving Sam away from him. “Are you happy? I didn’t fucking tell her about any of it!”

“Shit, Buck!” Sam shouted. “You lied to her! You lied to your own wife!”

“You don't think I know that?” Bucky continued to yell.

“Fuck!” Sam exclaimed. “How could you lie to your own wife about all of this!”

“I thought I was protecting to her!” Bucky replied.

“Yeah? Well look what you did!”

Bucky knew he was right. He knew this was partly his fault keeping this all a lie from you. It was wrong even before you had been kidnapped, but Sam pointing out the situation to him only reminded him further of how much he had completely and utterly fucked up.

Sam watched as the anger drained from Bucky’s face once again and he felt that he had gone too far. He was no doubt furious that Bucky had kept his life a lie not only from his team, but from his own family- hurting innocent people such as you along the way without even realizing it- but he understood that making Bucky feel like shit about it wasn’t the way to handle the situation.

“Buck-”

“Forget it, Sam.” Bucky said. “You’re right. You don’t have to apologize. This is my fault.”

“That doesn't matter now.” Sam said. “What matters is getting her back. We’re going to get her back.”

“You don’t have to do this for me, Sam-”

“I’m not doing this for you.” Sam sighed, shaking his head at who he thought was his best friend. “I’m doing this for her.”

-

When you woke up again, you were overwhelmed with the feeling of your right temple throbbing. Opening your eyes you took in the dingy, wide room surrounding you. Attempting to move, you felt the rope tying your hands and ankle to the chair you were sitting in, burning your skin as you struggled in its grasp.

“Hello?” You called, your voice echoing throughout the wide room. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Barnes.”

At the sound of the familiar voice you leaned back in your chair, just now noticing the balconies hanging over the room, your eyes catching the figure standing above you on one of them.

“Where am I?” You asked.

“Old S.H.I.E.L.D operations camp.” The man told you as he climbed down a flight of stairs from the balcony to the floor your chair was sat on.

“S.H.I.E.L.D?” You asked. “What does that have to do with me? What does any of this have to do with me?”

“You know, Mrs. Barnes,” He said, strolling up to you, hands behind his back. “I feel sorry for you... really... I do. I pity you for living in the lie your husband has held you in for so long... it’s sad really. However, you should consider yourself lucky to not know your husband. The rest of us aren’t so lucky.”

“What are you talking about?” You asked.

You were exhausted, cold, scared out of your mind and you were tired of not understanding a single word this man said.

“What does this have to do with my husband?” You asked, the memories of the conversation you had in your home flooding back into your mind. “Who’s the winter soldier?”

As you asked the question, the man finally moved his hands from around his back, a tablet in hand.

“As I’ve explained to you, Mrs. Barnes,” The man said, pulling up the tablet in front of him. “Your husband is the winter soldier. Your husband is James Buchanan Barnes, correct?”

“Yes,” You replied. “But I don’t see-”

Cutting you off, the man in front of you pulled the tablet up and began reading off of it.

“Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes born March 10th, 1917-”

“1917?” You repeated. “That’s ridiculous-”

Without answering, the man continued.

“Known associate of Steven G. Rogers AKA the former Captain America.”

“You have to be joking.” You said. “1917? Friends with Captain America? You have the wrong-”

Rather than arguing you, the man held the tablet in front of you.

Just as you were about to scoff and once again inform the man of how ridiculous this situation was and that there was no possible way your husband could be the man he was looking for, you looked at the screen and saw a photograph of a man that was unmistakably your husband besides none other than Steve Rogers...  a photograph from 1942.

Glancing at the man in front of you back to the photo, you began to feel the pace of your heart quicken in your chest. Why did he look like your husband? Why is this man who you immediately recognized as Bucky in a photograph with Captain America from over 80 years ago?

“That can’t be him.” You said. “It- it can’t.”

Swiping the screen, the man displayed another photo for you- one of who you were sure was your husband beside not only Steve Rogers but the entire lineup of Avengers.

Watching the realization click in your brain, the man continued to swipe, photos upon photos of the man who you thought was your husband dated from the 40′s to just months ago.

“How... how did you get these?” You asked the man, feeling sick to your stomach, slowly coming to the realization that your husband had been lying to you all this time.

“There are many out there who are not your husband’s friend.” The man said.

“O- okay, why?” You asked, trying your hardest to come up with words when your brain became flooded with thoughts and memories- trying to comprehend how you didn’t know or why your husband wouldn’t tell you even after all this time who he really was. “Because he’s an Avenger?-”

“Because he’s a murderer.”

Before you could even comprehend his words, he shoved the tablet in your face once again, clicking play on a video displayed on the screen. You watched as a man with long hair, a metal arm and a mask over his face emerged from behind a vehicle, a gun in tow. The man pulled a grenade out from his waistband, throwing it underneath a car and you jumped as you watched the car explode on screen, seconds later a woman pouncing onto the soldier, trying her hardest to take the man out before being thrown off. When the soldier picked up the gun once again, you recognized the woman as none other than Black Widow, throwing some sort of device at the soldier, watching as his arm sparked and she quickly ran away.

You watched as she shouted for the civilians to get out of the way and you felt your heart race in your chest as you watched people escape from their cars, terrified of the soldier going after the Black Widow. Seconds later you watched as she felt to the ground, a bullet piercing her shoulder. You felt like squeezing your eyes shut, but you knew the man beside you would never allow you to do so.

Just as the soldier was about to take his final shot against the Avenger, Steve Rogers and his shield ran into view, going against the man with the metal arm, the bang of his metal fist colliding with the shield ringing in your ears. The fight didn’t end there as the soldier continued shooting at the former Captain America before they collided, each trying to take the other out- Steve Rogers with his fist and shield and the soldier with his knife.

Just as you were beginning to feel sick, wondering why the man was showing you the video you watched as Steve Rogers flipped the man over, and when he emerged, the mask had fallen from the soldier’s face.

Meeting each other face to face, you finally caught who the soldier was.

It was almost as if they were reading your mind when you heard his name.

“Bucky?”

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

You couldn’t help but ask yourself the same question.

[chrisevansluv]

Here is the 2012 Detail Magazine interview with chris evans:

The Avengers' Chris Evans: Just Your Average Beer-Swilling, Babe-Loving Buddhist

The 30-year-old Bud Light-chugging, Beantown-bred star of The Avengers is widely perceived as the ultimate guy's guy. But beneath the bro persona lies a serious student of Buddhism, an unrepentant song-and-dance man, and a guy who talks to his mom about sex. And farts.

By Adam Sachs,

Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

May 2012 Issue

"Should we just kill him and bury his body?" Chris Evans is stage whispering into the impassive blinking light of my digital recorder.

"Chris!" shouts his mother, her tone a familiar-to-anyone-with-a-mother mix of coddling and concern. "Don't say that! What if something happened?"

We're at Evans' apartment, an expansive but not overly tricked-out bachelor-pad-ish loft in a semi-industrial nowheresville part of Boston, hard by Chinatown, near an area sometimes called the Combat Zone. Evans has a fuzzy, floppy, slept-in-his-clothes aspect that'd be nearly unrecognizable if you knew him only by the upright, spit-polished bearing of the onscreen hero. His dog, East, a sweet and slobbery American bulldog, is spread out on a couch in front of the TV. The shelves of his fridge are neatly stacked with much of the world's supply of Bud Light in cans and little else.

On the counter sit a few buckets of muscle-making whey-protein powder that belong to Evans' roommate, Zach Jarvis, an old pal who sometimes tags along on set as a paid "assistant" and a personal trainer who bulked Evans up for his role as the super-ripped patriot in last summer's blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger. A giant clock on the exposed-brick wall says it's early evening, but Evans operates on his own sense of time. Between gigs, his schedule's all his, which usually translates into long stretches of alone time during the day and longer social nights for the 30-year-old.

"I could just make this . . . disappear," says Josh Peck, another old pal and occasional on-set assistant, in a deadpan mumble, poking at the voice recorder I'd left on the table while I was in the bathroom.

Evans' mom, Lisa, now speaks directly into the microphone: "Don't listen to them—I'm trying to get them not to say these things!"

But not saying things isn't in the Evans DNA. They're an infectiously gregarious clan. Irish-Italians, proud Bostoners, close-knit, and innately theatrical. "We all act, we sing," Evans says. "It was like the fucking von Trapps." Mom was a dancer and now runs a children's theater. First-born Carly directed the family puppet shows and studied theater at NYU. Younger brother Scott has parts on One Life to Live and Law & Order under his belt and lives in Los Angeles full-time—something Evans stopped doing several years back. Rounding out the circle are baby sister Shanna and a pair of "strays" the family brought into their Sudbury, Massachusetts, home: Josh, who went from mowing the lawn to moving in when his folks relocated during his senior year in high school; and Demery, who was Evans' roommate until recently.

"Our house was like a hotel," Evans says. "It was a loony-tunes household. If you got arrested in high school, everyone knew: 'Call Mrs. Evans, she'll bail you out.'"

Growing up, they had a special floor put in the basement where all the kids practiced tap-dancing. The party-ready rec room also had a Ping-Pong table and a separate entrance. This was the house kids in the neighborhood wanted to hang at, and this was the kind of family you wanted to be adopted by. Spend an afternoon listening to them dish old dirt and talk over each other and it's easy to see why. Now they're worried they've said too much, laid bare the tender soul of the actor behind the star-spangled superhero outfit, so there's talk of offing the interviewer. I can hear all this from the bathroom, which, of course, is the point of a good stage whisper.

To be sure, no one's said too much, and the more you're brought into the embrace of this boisterous, funny, shit-slinging, demonstrably loving extended family, the more likable and enviable the whole dynamic is.

Sample exchange from today's lunch of baked ziti at a family-style Italian restaurant:

Mom: When he was a kid, he asked me, 'Mom, will I ever think farting isn't funny?'

Chris: You're throwing me under the bus, Ma! Thank you.

Mom: Well, if a dog farts you still find it funny.

Then, back at the apartment, where Mrs. Evans tries to give me good-natured dirt on her son without freaking him out:

Mom: You always tell me when you think a girl is attractive. You'll call me up so excited. Is that okay to say?

Chris: Nothing wrong with that.

Mom: And can I say all the girls you've brought to the house have been very sweet and wonderful? Of course, those are the ones that make it to the house. It's been a long time, hasn't it?

Chris: Looooong time.

Mom: The last one at our house? Was it six years ago?

Chris: No names, Ma!

Mom: But she knocked it out of the park.

Chris: She got drunk and puked at Auntie Pam's house! And she puked on the way home and she puked at our place.

Mom: And that's when I fell in love with her. Because she was real.

We're operating under a no-names rule, so I'm not asking if it's Jessica Biel who made this memorable first impression. She and Evans were serious for a couple of years. But I don't want to picture lovely Jessica Biel getting sick at Auntie Pam's or in the car or, really, anywhere.

East the bulldog ambles over to the table, begging for food.

"That dog is the love of his life," Mrs. Evans says. "Which tells me he'll be an unbelievable parent, but I don't want him to get married right now." She turns to Chris. "The way you are, I just don't think you're ready."

Some other things I learn about Evans from his mom: He hates going to the gym; he was so wound-up as a kid she'd let him stand during dinner, his legs shaking like caged greyhounds; he suffered weekly "Sunday-night meltdowns" over schoolwork and the angst of the sensitive middle-schooler; after she and his father split and he was making money from acting, he bought her the Sudbury family homestead rather than let her leave it.

Eventually his mom and Josh depart, and Evans and I go to work depleting his stash of Bud Light. It feels like we drink Bud Light and talk for days, because we basically do. I arrived early Friday evening; it's Saturday night now and it'll be sunup Sunday before I sleeplessly make my way to catch a train back to New York City. Somewhere in between we slip free of the gravitational pull of the bachelor pad and there's bottle service at a club and a long walk with entourage in tow back to Evans' apartment, where there is some earnest-yet-surreal group singing, piano playing, and chitchat. Evans is fun to talk to, partly because he's an open, self-mocking guy with an explosive laugh and no apparent need to sleep, and partly because when you cut just below the surface, it's clear he's not quite the dude's dude he sometimes plays onscreen and in TV appearances.

From a distance, Chris Evans the movie star seems a predictable, nearly inevitable piece of successful Hollywood packaging come to market. There's his major-release debut as the dorkily unaware jock Jake in the guilty pleasure Not Another Teen Movie (in one memorable scene, Evans has whipped cream on his chest and a banana up his ass). The female-friendly hunk appeal—his character in The Nanny Diaries is named simply Harvard Hottie—is balanced by a kind of casual-Friday, I'm-from-Boston regular-dudeness. Following the siren song of comic-book cash, he was the Human Torch in two Fantastic Four films. As with scrawny Steve Rogers, the Captain America suit beefed up his stature as a formidable screen presence, a bankable leading man, all of which leads us to The Avengers, this season's megabudget, megawatt ensemble in which he stars alongside Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Hemsworth.

It all feels inevitable—and yet it nearly didn't happen. Evans repeatedly turned down the Captain America role, fearing he'd be locked into what was originally a nine-picture deal. He was shooting Puncture, about a drug-addicted lawyer, at the time. Most actors doing small-budget legal dramas would jump at the chance to play the lead in a Marvel franchise, but Evans saw a decade of his life flash before his eyes.

What he remembers thinking is this: "What if the movie comes out and it's a success and I just reject all of this? What if I want to move to the fucking woods?"

By "the woods," he doesn't mean a quiet life away from the spotlight, some general metaphorical life escape route. He means the actual woods. "For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival," he says. "I was convinced that I was going to move to the woods. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by the time I'm 25, I have failed."

Evans has described his hesitation at signing on for Captain America. Usually he talks about the time commitment, the loss of what remained of his relative anonymity. On the junkets for the movie, he was open about needing therapy after the studio reduced the deal to six movies and he took the leap. What he doesn't usually mention is that he was racked with anxiety before the job came up.

"I get very nervous," Evans explains. "I shit the bed if I have to present something on stage or if I'm doing press. Because it's just you." He's been known to walk out of press conferences, to freeze up and go silent during the kind of relaxed-yet-high-stakes meetings an actor of his stature is expected to attend: "Do you know how badly I audition? Fifty percent of the time I have to walk out of the room. I'm naturally very pale, so I turn red and sweat. And I have to literally walk out. Sometimes mid-audition. You start having these conversations in your brain. 'Chris, don't do this. Chris, take it easy. You're just sitting in a room with a person saying some words, this isn't life. And you're letting this affect you? Shame on you.'"

Shades of "Sunday-night meltdowns." Luckily the nerves never follow him to the set. "You do your neuroses beforehand, so when they yell 'Action' you can be present," he says.

Okay, there was one on-set panic attack—while Evans was shooting Puncture. "We were getting ready to do a court scene in front of a bunch of people, and I don't know what happened," he says. "It's just your brain playing games with you. 'Hey, you know how we sometimes freak out? What if we did it right now?'"

One of the people who advised Evans to take the Captain America role was his eventual Avengers costar Robert Downey Jr. "I'd seen him around," Downey says. "We share an agent. I like to spend a lot of my free time talking to my agent about his other clients—I just had a feeling about him."

What he told Evans was: This puppy is going to be big, and when it is you're going to get to make the movies you want to make. "In the marathon obstacle course of a career," Downey says, "it's just good to have all the stats on paper for why you're not only a team player but also why it makes sense to support you in the projects you want to do—because you've made so much damned money for the studio."

There's also the fact that Evans had a chance to sign on for something likely to be a kind of watershed moment in the comic-book fascination of our time. "I do think The Avengers is the crescendo of this superhero phase in entertainment—except of course for Iron Man 3," Downey says. "It'll take a lot of innovation to keep it alive after this."

Captain America is the only person left who was truly close to Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man), which meant that Evans' and Downey's story lines are closely linked, and in the course of doing a lot of scenes together, they got to be pals. Downey diagnoses his friend with what he terms "low-grade red-carpet anxiety disorder."

"He just hates the game-show aspect of doing PR," Downey says. "Obviously there's pressure for anyone in this transition he's in. But he will easily triple that pressure to make sure he's not being lazy. That's why I respect the guy. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in his skin. But his motives are pure. He just needs to drink some red-carpet chamomile."

"The majority of the world is empty space," Chris Evans says, watching me as if my brain might explode on hearing this news—or like he might have to fight me if I try to contradict him. We're back at his apartment after a cigarette run through the Combat Zone.

"Empty space!" he says again, slapping the table and sort of yelling. Then, in a slow, breathy whisper, he repeats: "Empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people, it's all empty space. That's amazing!" He slaps the table again. "You want another beer? Gotta be Bud Light. Get dirty—you're in Boston. Okay, organize your thoughts. I gotta take a piss . . ."

My thoughts are this: That this guy who is hugging his dog and talking to me about space and mortality and the trouble with Boston girls who believe crazy gossip about him—this is not the guy I expected to meet. I figured he'd be a meatball. Though, truthfully, I'd never called anyone a meatball until Evans turned me on to the put-down. As in: "My sister Shanna dates meatballs." And, more to the point: "When I do interviews, I'd rather just be the beer-drinking dude from Boston and not get into the complex shit, because I don't want every meatball saying, 'So hey, whaddyathink about Buddhism?'"

At 17, Evans came across a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and began his spiritual questing. It's a path of study and struggle that, he says, defines his true purpose in life. "I love acting. It's my playground, it lets me explore. But my happiness in this world, my level of peace, is never going to be dictated by acting," he says. "My goal in life is to detach from the egoic mind. Do you know anything about Eastern philosophy?"

I sip some Bud Light and shake my head sheepishly. "They talk about the egoic mind, the part of you that's self-aware, the watcher, the person you think is driving this machine," he says. "And that separation from self and mind is the root of suffering. There are ways of retraining the way you think. This isn't really supported in Western society, which is focused on 'Go get it, earn it, win it, marry it.'"

Scarlett Johansson says that one of the things she appreciates about Evans is how he steers clear of industry chat when they see each other. "Basically every actor," she says, "including myself, when we finish a job we're like, 'Well, that's it for me. Had a good run. Put me out to pasture.' But Chris doesn't strike me as someone who frets about the next job." The two met on the set of The Perfect Score when they were teenagers and have stayed close; The Avengers is their third movie together. "He has this obviously masculine presence—a dude's dude—and we're used to seeing him play heroic characters," Johansson says, "but he's also surprisingly sensitive. He has close female friends, and you can talk to him about anything. Plus there's that secret song-and-dance, jazz-hands side of Chris. I feel like he grew up with the Partridge Family. He'd be just as happy doing Guys and Dolls as he would Captain America 2."

East needs to do his business, so Evans and I take him up to the roof deck. Evans bought this apartment in 2010 when living in L.A. full-time no longer appealed to him. He came back to stay close to his extended family and the intimate circle of Boston pals he's maintained since high school. The move also seems like a pretty clear keep-it-real hedge against the manic ego-stroking distractions of Hollywood.

"I think my daytime person is different than my nighttime person," Evans says. "With my high-school buddies, we drink beer and talk sports and it's great. The kids in my Buddhism class in L.A., they're wildly intelligent, and I love being around them, but they're not talking about the Celtics. And that's part of me. It's a strange dichotomy. I don't mind being a certain way with some people and having this other piece of me that's just for me."

I asked Downey about Evans' outward regular-Joe persona. "It's complete horseshit," Downey says. "There's an inherent street-smart intelligence there. I don't think he tries to hide it. But he's much more evolved and much more culturally aware than he lets on."

Perhaps the meatball and the meditation can coexist. We argue about our egoic brains and the tao of Boston girls. "I love wet hair and sweatpants," he says in their defense. "I like sneakers and ponytails. I like girls who aren't so la-di-da. L.A. is so la-di-da. I like Boston girls who shit on me. Not literally. Girls who give me a hard time, bust my chops a little."

The chief buster of Evans' chops is, of course, Evans himself. "The problem is, the brain I'm using to dissect this world is a brain formed by it," he says. "We're born into confusion, and we get the blessing of letting go of it." Then he adds: "I think this shit by day. And then night comes and it's like, 'Fuck it, let's drink.'"

And so we do. It's getting late. Again. We should have eaten dinner, but Evans sometimes forgets to eat: "If I could just take a pill to make me full forever, I wouldn't think twice."

We talk about his dog and camping with his dog and why he loves being alone more than almost anything except maybe not being alone. "I swear to God, if you saw me when I am by myself in the woods, I'm a lunatic," he says. "I sing, I dance. I do crazy shit."

Evans' unflagging, all-encompassing enthusiasm is impressive, itself a kind of social intelligence. "If you want to have a good conversation with him, don't talk about the fact that he's famous" was the advice I got from Mark Kassen, who codirected Puncture. "He's a blast, a guy who can hang. For quite a long time. Many hours in a row."

I've stopped looking at the clock. We've stopped talking philosophy and moved into more emotional territory. He asks questions about my 9-month-old son, and then Captain America gets teary when I talk about the wonder of his birth. "I weep at everything," he says. "I emote. I love things so much—I just never want to dilute that."

He talks about how close he feels to his family, how open they all are with each other. About everything. All the time. "The first time I had sex," he says, "I raced home and was like, 'Mom, I just had sex! Where's the clit?'"

Wait, I ask—did she ever tell you?

"Still don't know where it is, man," he says, then breaks into a smile composed of equal parts shit-eating grin and inner peace. "I just don't know. Make some movies, you don't have to know…"

Here is the 2012 Detail Magazine interview with chris evans:

The Avengers' Chris Evans: Just Your Average Beer-Swilling, Babe-Loving Buddhist

The 30-year-old Bud Light-chugging, Beantown-bred star of The Avengers is widely perceived as the ultimate guy's guy. But beneath the bro persona lies a serious student of Buddhism, an unrepentant song-and-dance man, and a guy who talks to his mom about sex. And farts.

By Adam Sachs,

Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

May 2012 Issue

"Should we just kill him and bury his body?" Chris Evans is stage whispering into the impassive blinking light of my digital recorder.

"Chris!" shouts his mother, her tone a familiar-to-anyone-with-a-mother mix of coddling and concern. "Don't say that! What if something happened?"

We're at Evans' apartment, an expansive but not overly tricked-out bachelor-pad-ish loft in a semi-industrial nowheresville part of Boston, hard by Chinatown, near an area sometimes called the Combat Zone. Evans has a fuzzy, floppy, slept-in-his-clothes aspect that'd be nearly unrecognizable if you knew him only by the upright, spit-polished bearing of the onscreen hero. His dog, East, a sweet and slobbery American bulldog, is spread out on a couch in front of the TV. The shelves of his fridge are neatly stacked with much of the world's supply of Bud Light in cans and little else.

On the counter sit a few buckets of muscle-making whey-protein powder that belong to Evans' roommate, Zach Jarvis, an old pal who sometimes tags along on set as a paid "assistant" and a personal trainer who bulked Evans up for his role as the super-ripped patriot in last summer's blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger. A giant clock on the exposed-brick wall says it's early evening, but Evans operates on his own sense of time. Between gigs, his schedule's all his, which usually translates into long stretches of alone time during the day and longer social nights for the 30-year-old.

"I could just make this . . . disappear," says Josh Peck, another old pal and occasional on-set assistant, in a deadpan mumble, poking at the voice recorder I'd left on the table while I was in the bathroom.

Evans' mom, Lisa, now speaks directly into the microphone: "Don't listen to them—I'm trying to get them not to say these things!"

But not saying things isn't in the Evans DNA. They're an infectiously gregarious clan. Irish-Italians, proud Bostoners, close-knit, and innately theatrical. "We all act, we sing," Evans says. "It was like the fucking von Trapps." Mom was a dancer and now runs a children's theater. First-born Carly directed the family puppet shows and studied theater at NYU. Younger brother Scott has parts on One Life to Live and Law & Order under his belt and lives in Los Angeles full-time—something Evans stopped doing several years back. Rounding out the circle are baby sister Shanna and a pair of "strays" the family brought into their Sudbury, Massachusetts, home: Josh, who went from mowing the lawn to moving in when his folks relocated during his senior year in high school; and Demery, who was Evans' roommate until recently.

"Our house was like a hotel," Evans says. "It was a loony-tunes household. If you got arrested in high school, everyone knew: 'Call Mrs. Evans, she'll bail you out.'"

Growing up, they had a special floor put in the basement where all the kids practiced tap-dancing. The party-ready rec room also had a Ping-Pong table and a separate entrance. This was the house kids in the neighborhood wanted to hang at, and this was the kind of family you wanted to be adopted by. Spend an afternoon listening to them dish old dirt and talk over each other and it's easy to see why. Now they're worried they've said too much, laid bare the tender soul of the actor behind the star-spangled superhero outfit, so there's talk of offing the interviewer. I can hear all this from the bathroom, which, of course, is the point of a good stage whisper.

To be sure, no one's said too much, and the more you're brought into the embrace of this boisterous, funny, shit-slinging, demonstrably loving extended family, the more likable and enviable the whole dynamic is.

Sample exchange from today's lunch of baked ziti at a family-style Italian restaurant:

Mom: When he was a kid, he asked me, 'Mom, will I ever think farting isn't funny?'

Chris: You're throwing me under the bus, Ma! Thank you.

Mom: Well, if a dog farts you still find it funny.

Then, back at the apartment, where Mrs. Evans tries to give me good-natured dirt on her son without freaking him out:

Mom: You always tell me when you think a girl is attractive. You'll call me up so excited. Is that okay to say?

Chris: Nothing wrong with that.

Mom: And can I say all the girls you've brought to the house have been very sweet and wonderful? Of course, those are the ones that make it to the house. It's been a long time, hasn't it?

Chris: Looooong time.

Mom: The last one at our house? Was it six years ago?

Chris: No names, Ma!

Mom: But she knocked it out of the park.

Chris: She got drunk and puked at Auntie Pam's house! And she puked on the way home and she puked at our place.

Mom: And that's when I fell in love with her. Because she was real.

We're operating under a no-names rule, so I'm not asking if it's Jessica Biel who made this memorable first impression. She and Evans were serious for a couple of years. But I don't want to picture lovely Jessica Biel getting sick at Auntie Pam's or in the car or, really, anywhere.

East the bulldog ambles over to the table, begging for food.

"That dog is the love of his life," Mrs. Evans says. "Which tells me he'll be an unbelievable parent, but I don't want him to get married right now." She turns to Chris. "The way you are, I just don't think you're ready."

Some other things I learn about Evans from his mom: He hates going to the gym; he was so wound-up as a kid she'd let him stand during dinner, his legs shaking like caged greyhounds; he suffered weekly "Sunday-night meltdowns" over schoolwork and the angst of the sensitive middle-schooler; after she and his father split and he was making money from acting, he bought her the Sudbury family homestead rather than let her leave it.

Eventually his mom and Josh depart, and Evans and I go to work depleting his stash of Bud Light. It feels like we drink Bud Light and talk for days, because we basically do. I arrived early Friday evening; it's Saturday night now and it'll be sunup Sunday before I sleeplessly make my way to catch a train back to New York City. Somewhere in between we slip free of the gravitational pull of the bachelor pad and there's bottle service at a club and a long walk with entourage in tow back to Evans' apartment, where there is some earnest-yet-surreal group singing, piano playing, and chitchat. Evans is fun to talk to, partly because he's an open, self-mocking guy with an explosive laugh and no apparent need to sleep, and partly because when you cut just below the surface, it's clear he's not quite the dude's dude he sometimes plays onscreen and in TV appearances.

From a distance, Chris Evans the movie star seems a predictable, nearly inevitable piece of successful Hollywood packaging come to market. There's his major-release debut as the dorkily unaware jock Jake in the guilty pleasure Not Another Teen Movie (in one memorable scene, Evans has whipped cream on his chest and a banana up his ass). The female-friendly hunk appeal—his character in The Nanny Diaries is named simply Harvard Hottie—is balanced by a kind of casual-Friday, I'm-from-Boston regular-dudeness. Following the siren song of comic-book cash, he was the Human Torch in two Fantastic Four films. As with scrawny Steve Rogers, the Captain America suit beefed up his stature as a formidable screen presence, a bankable leading man, all of which leads us to The Avengers, this season's megabudget, megawatt ensemble in which he stars alongside Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Hemsworth.

It all feels inevitable—and yet it nearly didn't happen. Evans repeatedly turned down the Captain America role, fearing he'd be locked into what was originally a nine-picture deal. He was shooting Puncture, about a drug-addicted lawyer, at the time. Most actors doing small-budget legal dramas would jump at the chance to play the lead in a Marvel franchise, but Evans saw a decade of his life flash before his eyes.

What he remembers thinking is this: "What if the movie comes out and it's a success and I just reject all of this? What if I want to move to the fucking woods?"

By "the woods," he doesn't mean a quiet life away from the spotlight, some general metaphorical life escape route. He means the actual woods. "For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival," he says. "I was convinced that I was going to move to the woods. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by the time I'm 25, I have failed."

Evans has described his hesitation at signing on for Captain America. Usually he talks about the time commitment, the loss of what remained of his relative anonymity. On the junkets for the movie, he was open about needing therapy after the studio reduced the deal to six movies and he took the leap. What he doesn't usually mention is that he was racked with anxiety before the job came up.

"I get very nervous," Evans explains. "I shit the bed if I have to present something on stage or if I'm doing press. Because it's just you." He's been known to walk out of press conferences, to freeze up and go silent during the kind of relaxed-yet-high-stakes meetings an actor of his stature is expected to attend: "Do you know how badly I audition? Fifty percent of the time I have to walk out of the room. I'm naturally very pale, so I turn red and sweat. And I have to literally walk out. Sometimes mid-audition. You start having these conversations in your brain. 'Chris, don't do this. Chris, take it easy. You're just sitting in a room with a person saying some words, this isn't life. And you're letting this affect you? Shame on you.'"

Shades of "Sunday-night meltdowns." Luckily the nerves never follow him to the set. "You do your neuroses beforehand, so when they yell 'Action' you can be present," he says.

Okay, there was one on-set panic attack—while Evans was shooting Puncture. "We were getting ready to do a court scene in front of a bunch of people, and I don't know what happened," he says. "It's just your brain playing games with you. 'Hey, you know how we sometimes freak out? What if we did it right now?'"

One of the people who advised Evans to take the Captain America role was his eventual Avengers costar Robert Downey Jr. "I'd seen him around," Downey says. "We share an agent. I like to spend a lot of my free time talking to my agent about his other clients—I just had a feeling about him."

What he told Evans was: This puppy is going to be big, and when it is you're going to get to make the movies you want to make. "In the marathon obstacle course of a career," Downey says, "it's just good to have all the stats on paper for why you're not only a team player but also why it makes sense to support you in the projects you want to do—because you've made so much damned money for the studio."

There's also the fact that Evans had a chance to sign on for something likely to be a kind of watershed moment in the comic-book fascination of our time. "I do think The Avengers is the crescendo of this superhero phase in entertainment—except of course for Iron Man 3," Downey says. "It'll take a lot of innovation to keep it alive after this."

Captain America is the only person left who was truly close to Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man), which meant that Evans' and Downey's story lines are closely linked, and in the course of doing a lot of scenes together, they got to be pals. Downey diagnoses his friend with what he terms "low-grade red-carpet anxiety disorder."

"He just hates the game-show aspect of doing PR," Downey says. "Obviously there's pressure for anyone in this transition he's in. But he will easily triple that pressure to make sure he's not being lazy. That's why I respect the guy. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in his skin. But his motives are pure. He just needs to drink some red-carpet chamomile."

"The majority of the world is empty space," Chris Evans says, watching me as if my brain might explode on hearing this news—or like he might have to fight me if I try to contradict him. We're back at his apartment after a cigarette run through the Combat Zone.

"Empty space!" he says again, slapping the table and sort of yelling. Then, in a slow, breathy whisper, he repeats: "Empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people, it's all empty space. That's amazing!" He slaps the table again. "You want another beer? Gotta be Bud Light. Get dirty—you're in Boston. Okay, organize your thoughts. I gotta take a piss . . ."

My thoughts are this: That this guy who is hugging his dog and talking to me about space and mortality and the trouble with Boston girls who believe crazy gossip about him—this is not the guy I expected to meet. I figured he'd be a meatball. Though, truthfully, I'd never called anyone a meatball until Evans turned me on to the put-down. As in: "My sister Shanna dates meatballs." And, more to the point: "When I do interviews, I'd rather just be the beer-drinking dude from Boston and not get into the complex shit, because I don't want every meatball saying, 'So hey, whaddyathink about Buddhism?'"

At 17, Evans came across a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and began his spiritual questing. It's a path of study and struggle that, he says, defines his true purpose in life. "I love acting. It's my playground, it lets me explore. But my happiness in this world, my level of peace, is never going to be dictated by acting," he says. "My goal in life is to detach from the egoic mind. Do you know anything about Eastern philosophy?"

I sip some Bud Light and shake my head sheepishly. "They talk about the egoic mind, the part of you that's self-aware, the watcher, the person you think is driving this machine," he says. "And that separation from self and mind is the root of suffering. There are ways of retraining the way you think. This isn't really supported in Western society, which is focused on 'Go get it, earn it, win it, marry it.'"

Scarlett Johansson says that one of the things she appreciates about Evans is how he steers clear of industry chat when they see each other. "Basically every actor," she says, "including myself, when we finish a job we're like, 'Well, that's it for me. Had a good run. Put me out to pasture.' But Chris doesn't strike me as someone who frets about the next job." The two met on the set of The Perfect Score when they were teenagers and have stayed close; The Avengers is their third movie together. "He has this obviously masculine presence—a dude's dude—and we're used to seeing him play heroic characters," Johansson says, "but he's also surprisingly sensitive. He has close female friends, and you can talk to him about anything. Plus there's that secret song-and-dance, jazz-hands side of Chris. I feel like he grew up with the Partridge Family. He'd be just as happy doing Guys and Dolls as he would Captain America 2."

East needs to do his business, so Evans and I take him up to the roof deck. Evans bought this apartment in 2010 when living in L.A. full-time no longer appealed to him. He came back to stay close to his extended family and the intimate circle of Boston pals he's maintained since high school. The move also seems like a pretty clear keep-it-real hedge against the manic ego-stroking distractions of Hollywood.

"I think my daytime person is different than my nighttime person," Evans says. "With my high-school buddies, we drink beer and talk sports and it's great. The kids in my Buddhism class in L.A., they're wildly intelligent, and I love being around them, but they're not talking about the Celtics. And that's part of me. It's a strange dichotomy. I don't mind being a certain way with some people and having this other piece of me that's just for me."

I asked Downey about Evans' outward regular-Joe persona. "It's complete horseshit," Downey says. "There's an inherent street-smart intelligence there. I don't think he tries to hide it. But he's much more evolved and much more culturally aware than he lets on."

Perhaps the meatball and the meditation can coexist. We argue about our egoic brains and the tao of Boston girls. "I love wet hair and sweatpants," he says in their defense. "I like sneakers and ponytails. I like girls who aren't so la-di-da. L.A. is so la-di-da. I like Boston girls who shit on me. Not literally. Girls who give me a hard time, bust my chops a little."

The chief buster of Evans' chops is, of course, Evans himself. "The problem is, the brain I'm using to dissect this world is a brain formed by it," he says. "We're born into confusion, and we get the blessing of letting go of it." Then he adds: "I think this shit by day. And then night comes and it's like, 'Fuck it, let's drink.'"

And so we do. It's getting late. Again. We should have eaten dinner, but Evans sometimes forgets to eat: "If I could just take a pill to make me full forever, I wouldn't think twice."

We talk about his dog and camping with his dog and why he loves being alone more than almost anything except maybe not being alone. "I swear to God, if you saw me when I am by myself in the woods, I'm a lunatic," he says. "I sing, I dance. I do crazy shit."

Evans' unflagging, all-encompassing enthusiasm is impressive, itself a kind of social intelligence. "If you want to have a good conversation with him, don't talk about the fact that he's famous" was the advice I got from Mark Kassen, who codirected Puncture. "He's a blast, a guy who can hang. For quite a long time. Many hours in a row."

I've stopped looking at the clock. We've stopped talking philosophy and moved into more emotional territory. He asks questions about my 9-month-old son, and then Captain America gets teary when I talk about the wonder of his birth. "I weep at everything," he says. "I emote. I love things so much—I just never want to dilute that."

He talks about how close he feels to his family, how open they all are with each other. About everything. All the time. "The first time I had sex," he says, "I raced home and was like, 'Mom, I just had sex! Where's the clit?'"

Wait, I ask—did she ever tell you?

"Still don't know where it is, man," he says, then breaks into a smile composed of equal parts shit-eating grin and inner peace. "I just don't know. Make some movies, you don't have to know…"

If someone doesn't want to check the link, the anon sent the full interview!

[nickjunesource]

Full article below.

Max Minghella is sitting in his backyard in the LA sunshine, his t-shirt an homage to the French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve, his adopted shepherd mix, Rhye, excited by the approach of a package courier.

“You okay, sweetheart?” he asks — the dog, not me — tenderly.

Minghella, who at 35 has dozens of screen credits to his name, is best known as The Handmaid’s Tale’s cunning chauffeur Nick Blaine, a character who it’s difficult to imagine saying sweetheart. In airless Gilead, of course, a cautious hand graze with Elisabeth Moss’ June can pass for a big romantic gesture. In a Season 1 episode featuring child separation and hospital infant abduction, Nick’s major contribution is to trade stolen glances with a sex slave while “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” pumps discordantly along. I ask Minghella about playing the series’ closest approximation to a dreamy male lead against the show’s dark narrative of female subjugation.

“I know this is not the answer you want to hear,” Minghella says with none of Nick’s hesitation. “But I like that stuff, right? In the pilot, I think Nick only had a handful of lines. It wasn't clear that this is what the character would turn into. And it's quite fortunate for me personally, because I'm not a massively sort of intellectual person in my real life. I love Fifty Shades of Grey. That's like my Star Wars. It suits me to play a character like him.”

Minghella surmises that this enduring romanticism is an outcome of nurture. His father, the late British director Anthony Minghella, made grand romantic dramas like Cold Mountain and The English Patient. And there was the young, cinema-mad Max sitting on the living room sofa, absorbing everything. “It’s taken me a long time to understand this,” he says of his prolonged childhood exposure to love stories. “My dad made The English Patient when I was 10. So it was two years of watching the dailies to that movie and then watching 50 cuts of it. And then [The Talented Mr.] Ripley he made when I was 13, and it was the same thing.” These were an adolescent Max Minghella’s alternative to reruns. “I think they did shape my perspective on the world in a lot of ways, specifically The English Patient. That was a complicated love story, and I wonder sometimes how much it's affected my psychology.”

Some sons rebel; others resemble. Minghella’s co-star O-T Fagbenle, who plays June’s other lover from before the time of Gilead, got his first job acting in Anthony Minghella’s romantic crime film Breaking and Entering. “Anthony is one the kindest, most beautiful men that I've ever had the privilege of working with before,” Fagbenle says. “And Max has his gorgeous, sensitive, open-minded soul.”

Though Minghella spent his childhood on the set of The Talented Mr. Ripley, playing an uncredited Confederate soldier role in Cold Mountain, and tooling around with a Super-8 camera Matt Damon gave him, he insists his upbringing was normal. He grew up in South Hill Park overlooking Hampstead Heath in London with his father and mother, the choreographer Carolyn Choa. (Minghella also has a half-sister, Hannah Minghella, who is now a film executive.) Yes, technically, it was London, but that’s not how it seemed. “I feel like I grew up in a very small town. Every school I went to was in Hampstead. I was born in Hampstead,” Minghella says of the small map dot of his life before university. “When I went to New York, I felt I was going to the big city.”

Despite his illustrious surname, movie-watching was far from restricted to the classics. “Beverly Hills Cop is definitely the movie I remember having an unhealthy obsession with. I think I saw it when I was 5 for the first time, and I'd watch it just two or three times a day for years. I'm just obsessed with it.”

Plenty of actors can trace their love of movies back to a love of stories, but for Minghella the relationship seems to flow in reverse. When he left for Columbia University, Minghella opted to study history for its connection, through storytelling, to film. It was during the summers between his years of college that he started taking acting more seriously. Before his graduation, he’d already appeared in Syriana, starring Damon and George Clooney. Soon, he’d make a splash as Divya Narendra in The Social Network in 2010 and be cast in Clooney’s Ides of March. As all young actors eventually must, Minghella moved to Los Angeles.

It’s been over a decade since he last lived on the Heath, but, perhaps unusually for a person who’s chosen his profession, Minghella is adamantly not a “shapeshifter,” in his words. Home for Christmas this year, he started sifting through old journals stored at his mother’s house, “just like scraps of writing from when I was extremely young up through my teenage years,” before coming to America. “It was hilarious to me,” Minghella says of staring at his childhood reflection. “My review of a movie at 7 years old is pretty much what my review of a movie at 35 will be. My taste hasn't changed much. And when I sort of love something, I do tend to continue to love it.”

Which brings us back to his enduring love of romance, born of his bloodline, which is all over Minghella’s own 2018 directorial debut. Teen Spirit is a hazily lit film about a teenage girl from the Isle of Wight — the remote British island where Max’s father Anthony was born — who enters a local X-Factor-style singing competition. (It stars Minghella’s rumored girlfriend of several years, Elle Fanning.) The story is small, but its crescendos are epic.

Minghella calls the movie — an ode to the power of the pop anthem — “embarrassingly Max.” Max loves a good music-driven movie trailer — he’s watched the one for Top Gun: Maverick “many” times. And Max loves the rhythmic beats of sports movies like Friday Night Lights. Max loves movies with excesses of female energy, like Spring Breakers. He likens Teen Spirit to an experiment, his answer to the question, “Can I take all these things that I love and find a structure that can hold them?” The result is a touching “hodgepodge” of Minghella’s fascinations, inspired by the songs from another thing he loves: Robyn’s 2010 album Body Talk (itself a dance-pop meditation on love).

Minghella hasn’t directed any films since, but he sees now how making movies fits his personality — organized, impatient — more organically than starring in them does. Directing also helped him to appreciate that acting is “much harder than I was giving it credit for,” which, in turn, has made him like it more. Besides The Handmaid’s Tale currently airing on Hulu, Minghella appears in Spiral, the ninth installment in the Saw horror franchise and, from where I’m sitting, at least, a departure.

“I do like horror movies, but the thing that was really kind of magical is that I was feeling so nostalgic, right? We talked about Beverly Hills Cop earlier. I was just missing a certain kind of movie,” Minghella explains of his new role as Chris Rock’s detective partner. He was yearning for simple story-telling, like in the buddy cop movies of his youth, especially 48 Hours. It almost goes without saying that a buddy cop movie is another kind of love story. “And then I read the script and it was very much in that vein.” He clarifies: “I mean, it's also extremely Saw. It's very much a horror movie.”

His renewed excitement for acting translated onto The Handmaid’s Tale set, too. Veteran Hollywood producer Warren Littlefield describes casting Minghella in the role of Nick as an effortless choice: “Sometimes you agonize over things. [Casting Minghella] was instantly clear to me, and everyone agreed.” Now in its fourth season, the tone of the Hulu hit is graver than ever. Gilead is more desperate to maintain its rule, and so more audacious in its violence. Perhaps it’s fitting that the show’s romantic gestures finally match that scale.

In one particularly soaring moment, Elisabeth Moss’ June and Minghella’s Nick meet at the center of a bridge and crush into a long kiss. It’s been two seasons since they held their newborn daughter together, and it’s hard to see how this isn’t their last goodbye. Littlefield, like Minghella, is here for the romance among the rubble. “It's spectacular when they come together. In the middle of all of the trauma is this epic love story,” he says. “Max is just magnificent in the role.”

For Minghella, the satisfaction is more personal. He works with good people, he likes his scenes, and he thinks Nick is a complex character. Minghella read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time in college in 2005. Like all the things Minghella has ever liked, he still likes it. He’s as proud of this most recent season as he is the show’s first. And he watched Nick and June race recklessly back to each other across the expanse of the screen exactly how you might expect. “I watched it like a fan girl.”

[yournameyn]

Feeling Deeply: Chapter 3

Genre: Fluff so much fluff. Arranged Marriage Fic.

Pairing: Namjoon x OC

Summary: The story of two deeply feeling nerds who find themselves in an arranged marriage. Something neither of them really wanted but are now discovering just how much each needed. Away from their childhoods, their families & their homes, Namjoon & Brishti (the OC) are privileged immigrants who slowly build a home, a family & a true sense of self, together in 1960s London. Please note this is not the typical immigrant experience of that timespace and I’ve taken many-a-leap to write the fluuuufffiness I wanted to write.

A/N: It’s unabashed fluff. And eventual smut but I hope you’re okay with a really slow burn. Like, reaaaally slow. Both our characters are introverts & met as strangers so it’s going to take them a while to get the *ahem* fire going.

Big big big love to @sahmfanficbts, @mintjoonlep, @holdinbacksecrets, @sunshyngal, @xjoonchildx - who give me so much love and encouragement & whose straight up genius writing makes me swooooon!

Characters: Brishti is our OC. She’s a feminist, obviously. She’s Indian, wheatish in colour, curvy & slightly short. Brishti is bengali & her name means ‘Rain’. Her pet name is RimJhim which means the sound of rain. (Namjoon calls her Rim & she calls him Joon) This whole story is a tribute to Forever Rain.

The Namjoon in this fic is what I imagine he would have been had he not followed his dreams at the age of 13. Hopefully, I’m able to do justice to the idea as I write ahead.

Current Chapter: London, late 1963. Brishti & Namjoon meet her colleagues. They listen to the then-rising band The Beatles & take a strong liking to one particular track, if you know what I mean. Again, sorry to spoil but there’s no smut yet. I was not kidding when I said it’s a slooooow burn. Next chapter, it’s happening. There's not much conversation in this chapter, either. Is this almost 3k words of just CONTEXT to the actual smut or just a tease - you tell me!

Also, someone else we love is also introduced in this chapter!

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Previously in Feeling Deeply: Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2

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Namjoon loved his weekends now. They were like a real couple, Brishti and him… setting the never ending “final touches” in their home, together. They went out to pubs and gardens, libraries and cafes together. And yet, to both their secret dismay, they hadn't moved ahead from that one hug they had shared. They'd played, instead, with words and been more and more intimate in their conversations.

Brishti introduced him to her colleagues - her group among the staff at the British Library. Working there was her pride & these folk were her joy. This was nerve-wracking for Namjoon because he knew how much she loved them. These were her people. Her true tribe. It was almost like he was meeting her parents. Instead of two indian elders (whom he had spoken to on the only international call she had made since their wedding), he found himself faced with a weird band of strangers. An English couple Harry & Kate who had adopted the library instead of a child, an elder woman from Japan, Sayuri-san - whose stories Brishti narrated to Namjoon all the time, a Korean guy (his age!) & Yana, a girl, Brishti’s age who was half English, half Iranian & completely in love with Sam, the black historian from America, as Brishti had reported. As they settled in for their picnic in Hyde Park, Namjoon tried his best to hide his shock when he found Sam was - one, a girl & two, as tall as him. He wondered which attribute threw him off more. Still, he was completely enjoying himself with Brishti’s Unlikely Gang of Weirdos that Will Save The World. That’s what she called them. Sayuri-san agreed - They were all groovy outcasts who had somehow clawed their way into the (apparently) cutthroat world mainstream librarians.

Brishti was glad to see Namjoon really hit it off with the only other Korean she knew, the guy who’d told her about the only place in London that sold black bean noodles, made the right way. Namjoon had almost cried when she had brought them over from work. The two of them spoke as if they had been thick as thieves for years. They talked about Korean poetry and the folk music they had to participate in their childhoods. They spoke about the music archive section of the library, which was heaven for Min Yoongi. The passion in Yoongi’s eyes when he spoke about maybe someday taking a class about world music appreciation was something Namjoon wished to have too, but wasn’t yet ready to admit.

As they were packing up their picnic, the conversation flowed to a new band in the country. Brishti spoke about how every young girl she had met recently just could not stop talking about how groovy The Beatles are. The elders in charge of the music archive brushed them off as a fad but she was insistent to bring it up every meeting - after all, it was teenage girls that had popularised & helped usher in the lyrical music of Vivaldi. Or of Lisztomania - that popularised the soft romantic tones of Liszt which formed the base of the modern love song. Namjoon loved to see her almost up in arms, struggling to find a better word for the admiration that girls had for music and musicians.

“It’s not hysteria… or fanaticism… it- it’s just love.” She had said. No one disagreed. In fact, everyone in her group was persuaded to (at least) give The Beatles a listen over the weekend.

And so, This evening, A Hard Day’s Night played as they arranged books & records at home. Brishti was arranging the books, apparently not having had enough of the task despite working as a full time librarian. Namjoon’s heart ached when he thought about how Brishti loved her job. Thankfully his mind never stayed on that thought for long. Namjoon wished he could pay attention to the song. These days, paying attention to anything but Brishti was almost impossible. The smallest movement in her, the smallest stir intrigued him.

Meanwhile, Brishti had been trying to figure out a way of getting him to touch her &… as silly as that sounded to her rational mind she couldn’t really come out and say it. Night after night when they’d stayed up talking about things or listening to music or just simply reading their respective books, on the floor or by the window with their legs sprawled out in front of each other, she wished he’d touch her… that somehow maybe he’d notice her feet. Strange as it was, she kept thinking about his hands, his fingers tracing the contour of her ankle while she didn’t turn one page of her book for almost an hour.

She understood the problem - both of them were so hyper-aware of each other while pretending not to be that an accident couldn’t really occur. Things had to be done & Brishti thought about how she shouldn’t let tradition dictate who makes the first move. She also kicked herself for not following tradition and stopping him from taking his pillow & blanket away to the couch on their wedding night they were supposed to sleep on the same bed. It made her heart race that she could sleep next to this Korean Greek God-like feminist man. Ufff. She was covered in tense knots everywhere and anytime she even thought of making a move, the fear in her would make her do something else - like unpack all the books into a makeshift bookcase.

They were facing in opposite directions in the same room and Brishti couldn’t help glancing back at Namjoon again and again. The broad expanse of his back made her long to hug him again. They hadn’t touched each other since she let go of the hug. It made her ache, the memory of him moving away from her. Next time they touch, she wouldn’t let go first - of this she was certain.

Brishti looked at him again & smiled, wondering how someone so tall could look so tiny & cute. Namjoon did look surprisingly tiny, poring over the vinyls & neatly arranging them. She smiled thinking about how he had spent some time wondering if the records should be kept chronologically or alphabetically.

Finally, he had announced, “Ofcourse! I have it! The category has to be mood! The...” Brishti loved the small pauses Namjoon took to find the perfect word. “The story of each album and the feeling it brings out!” The way he smiled, pleased with his decision created a flutter in her heart.

Looking at him poring over each song in each album trying to discern what the overall feeling of it was, she felt an unbearable urge to tease him, to disturb his cataloguing. She would go over and irritate him… probably tickle his waist or blow in his ears. Or maybe just nuzzle his neck. Brishti wondered if these things would actually irritate Namjoon or perhaps lead to something else... The thought made her blush so fiercely, she turned to face her pile of books. Brishti wished she could walk over, silently demand a space in Namjoon���s lap, he would throw out anything that crowded his lap & she would sit there, being cuddled, enveloped in him & talk about songs… if she could talk, at such a moment that is.

She needed to stop staring at him and yet, she couldn’t help but look... She was a warm-blooded woman after all. And Kim Namjoon was a particularly delicious man. It wasn’t so much that he was tall… plenty of men were tall. (She rolled her eyes thinking how most everyone was taller than her.) Unlike other men, though, Namjoon was not awkward or gangly. He had wide shoulders and a gorgeous neck. She had to actively keep her eyes focussed on something else when she could see the contours of his chest.

In that first week of them living together she wanted him. She felt the heat of being seen by those sharp beautiful eyes that held a deep fire in them. Brishti found herself thinking more and more about how his back looked, how it would feel to be cuddled up against that broad beautiful chest, how it would feel to touch him and to be touched by him. She blushed & laughed to herself when her spontaneous thought was that she’d like to “climb that tree” - whenever Namjoon stood up after being scrunched over his table, writing. That yearning awakened a much fiercer part of Brishti -

Why couldn’t she?! He was her husband. They have to come closer at some point, so what was she waiting for? Without a second thought, her body moved to get up & walk over to him. But as it had happened every time, her mind caught up to her at the very last minute. As Brishti walked over, bent, stretched out... for a pile of books close to him. She was close enough to touch him. And still, she just picked up the books & walked back. Thankfully for Brishti, she had a natural sort of nonchalance. Something Namjoon envied. Brishti did not know what this little stunt of hers did to him. Namjoon, with his fists balled, had to hold himself back in that moment. He had to stop himself from grabbing her; from pulling her into his lap and having his way with her.

The gentle thread-like tug he had felt when he’d first seen Brishti’s photos... it had become a magnetic pull now. Shocking and also somehow inevitable.

It had been more than a month of them living together and Namjoon was wrestling with something. An idea, apparently. It was as though an idea was caught in a vast net that he had laid out across the ocean of his mind. But he was having trouble fishing it out. He understood there was no point forcing it, that the idea, the thought would emerge when it, or when he was ready.

Taking his time, slowly, Namjoon was understanding how he had done the perfect thing for her, accidentally. He was confused too, when his instinct told him to let his bride sleep alone on their marital bed the first night they had moved in this flat. He had reasoned that it was the decent thing to do. Unknowingly, he gave her the time to explore, to own that space; Not crowding her with his body. Not invading her with expectations that, no matter how silent, would be blaringly evident. That was the right thing to do. Then.

Now things felt different. Now, it felt like she had made that space, this whole home hers. But then that’s where his thought-net felt stuck. The thought he wanted to fish out kept pulling at him, telling him she needed something else now. Like Brishti craved something else now. He wondered if she, like him, craved touch. Was that why her body instinctively moved, stretched, inched closer towards him these days. Was this why he’d found his shirt among the blanket instead of the laundry basket the other day?

Namjoon tried to shake off these thoughts again - they felt dangerous, explosive. What was happening? He looked back at his beautiful wife and saw her stretch her arms, then her abdomen, all the way till her hips and then bend forward to touch her toes. She mewled, very softly when she did that. Namjoon felt the familiar flip in his stomach again. This time, thankfully, the thought leapt up within reach too.

Namjoon suddenly understood just how feline Brishti is. Somehow, it was a key he needed. The idea surged through him & made him stand up. Because it wasn’t just an idea, it was an epiphany. Brishti looked at him, her eyes asking, saying, expecting something he didn’t understand fully.

The tingle that ran down his spine told him he was about to.

“You okay?” Brishti asked, concerned & embarrassed because the move she expected hadn’t come. But then again, it was probably too much to think Namjoon had stood up to carry her & throw her on their bed. Wasn’t it?

He was standing awkwardly in the middle of the room looking confused. Namjoon recovered & asked, “Coffee?”

Brishti smiled & nodded. Namjoon rushed to the kitchen. The catching of this thought excited him. Because after living with her for almost a month, he had just now realised it is this attribute - of being feline-ly feminine or femininely feline - that is what makes his body almost overpower any semblance of restraint his mind had imposed.

At first it seemed silly but soon Namjoon realised it isn’t. Not at all. It really clicked in place like the right key, the precise note does - he understood how to BE with her. Be there for the feline creature-like woman that Brishti was revealing herself to be: The way she walked, slowly almost moodily… letting her feet touch and caress each surface her feet felt. She would be walking across the room but would stop just to walk back and forth, softly, in a way that one can’t really call pacing at all. And everytime she touched something she liked, or saw or tasted something she loved, she made these small sounds that would make Namjoon’s heart melt. They were always half-way between a purr and a moan and they made him wonder what pleasure would make her sound like. Namjoon thought about how Brishti is graceful but her grace, like the curves of her beautiful body, aren’t timid; How, it’s a grace that announces itself... sometimes even before she walks in.

It isn’t the only thing that attracted him to her, not by a far cry. Namjoon thought about how he loves her mind, her words. But this felt, somehow, more… more visceral or... wanting to be. Could something formless long to be touched?; To become tangible, touchable? This feeling, in his chest and his gut. This feeling within him, it jumps, flips every time she walks by. These days it seems like Brishti walks by closer and closer each time she passes him. Like she needs to feel the texture of his skin the same way she needs to feel the slight drag of the rug on the soles of her feet. And it just adds more depth to this deep cavernous feeling within him. Instinctual whispers echoing within-

Why does it feel like he needs to touch a fragrance?

Like all he needs to do is reach out?

Like the moment he will reach out, an essence, an aroma will become an experience?

It felt like Brishti was calling out to him silently. That magnetic pull was stronger than ever and it was pulling him, drawing him to her, telling him to reach out, so she can find her way to him. That feeling, the way he was being pulled… that was feline. Like she needed him to reach out so she could make him hers too. And then, then it happened. The first four notes of ‘And I love her’ played and pulled him to her.

In that moment, in their 7th week together, as Brishti was tracing the lines of Namjoon’s back, gawking at him, thinking about this man - this gorgeous, curious, wonderful man - as her husband… a thought so fantastical it would make her squirm in her seat. Just as she was recovering from the thought, releasing the tension in her shoulders. The knots he didn’t know he caused, Namjoon kept the cups of coffee aside and extended his hand.

‘I give her all my love, that’s all I do…” To him, the instant she did it again, - the stretching her arms all the way up. The little moan she made every time she did that, the way her back arched and highlighted all her curves… it drove him, his body, his instinct to reach out.

“And if you saw my love, you’d love her too.”

The stomach flipped, again. This time, though, his instinct acted before his mind knew what he was supposed to do. Thankfully, his mind caught up -

He had just reached out. Reached out for her to claim him. But to one who didn’t know everything that had been going on inside both their hearts, it would look like he was inviting her to dance. Brishti looked at his hand and then at his eyes and suddenly Namjoon understood the reason for this magnetic pull... these lyrics is what she was saying all along -

“A love like ours could never die, as long as I have you near me...”

She took his hand & left no distance between them. Brishti realised there was music playing in the room only after she took Namjoon’s hand. Before this, she could only hear her own heartbeat, sharpened to an intensity never before experienced. Sharpened to a glint in a way that only love can. Love… and unmistakable, undeniable lust. Her heart had been beating with so much longing it had clouded everything else.

Now, in this moment, with his heart so close to hers, she could finally hear the music. This is what she had needed. This is what her heart had been pining for. And she knew. Without the shadow of a doubt she knew... he had heard her.

Brishti moved to the simple guitar strings that were tugging them both. The melody deepened each time the same four notes played. And each time they rooted deeper in the soil of her heart, she moved him too. His hands on her waist, caressing her curves everytime the four notes played. And they played over and over again… Namjoon followed the lyrics and sang along with his beautiful deep dark chocolate voice in her ears, saying -

“And I love her...”,

And his strong arms around her. How could she… Brishti, even if her name didn’t mean the rain, how could she have resisted pouring?

“Bright are the stars that shine, dark is the sky, I know this love of mine will never die...”

This evening was the first time they’d really touched each other. Stood so close to each other. Moved together.

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

Oooooh god you read it?! Thank you so much! Please let me know what you think! Get into my messages about it! I would love to hear what you felt about this!

This is the song that's mentioned here in case anyone is curious.

[writeroutoftime]

power couple

pairing: tommy shelby x reader (requested by: anon)

summary: when michael and gina try to push everyone out of shelby company limited, you and tommy remind them who the real power couple of the family business is

warnings: swearing? (it’s peaky blinders, what can I say) 

word: 1356

a/n: I know that this request has been floating around a bit, so I hope you enjoy my take on it. my hope was that the reader came across as a badass, but I’m nervous it comes across as kinda cringey. anyway, I had a lot of fun writing this story, and I like what I came up! please enjoy, stay safe, and have a lovely day! 

oOoOo

Even after so many years, the people of Birmingham parted the streets for you and Tommy, just like the Red Sea parted for Moses. Royalty could be another way to describe the power the Shelby family name had – not that you would ever abuse your power. Everyone knew not to threaten the authority you and Tommy has as a couple. Well, almost everyone.

When you and Tommy entered the Garrison, you entered with your arms linked together. It was an equal share of power in your relationship; no one followed in the shadow of the other. You had been with the Shelby’s since the beginning and had ‘risen the ranks’ with Tommy as the company grew.

“Alright, let’s get this meeting started.” you said and gathered the attention of the room. “Let’s make this quick. I promised Charlie I’d be there for his violin concert, and I’m not going to let my baby down because you fucking lot can’t get along.” 

While there was a laughter around the pub, they knew there was truth to your statement. Tommy chuckled as you settled against the bar, drink in his and your hand, before he started the meeting. It wasn’t until he gave Michael the floor that you gave your full attention, particularly worried at Gina’s smirk.

Michael began to explain a new business opportunity for the Shelby Company Limited and called for a restructure as well. It was thorough and seemingly legitimate, but you couldn’t get behind his justification. Eventually, Gina chimed in with her two cents. “It’s simple mathematics.” she stated.

“Is it now?” you asked sarcastically, though before you could continue, Tommy subtly squeezed your hand.

The next thing you heard Michael say shocked you even more. “…I will organize an expansion into America.”

Internally, you wanted to slap Michael, but instead you kept a cool exterior for the moment. Who did Michael think he was? After everything this family did for him, he wanted to organize a coup. After all that money he lost, and Tommy taking him back, he wanted to go back to America on another business venture. As Michael went into more detail, you caught Gina’s eye, and she offered you a proud smirk over her husband’s speech. In return, you stared her down and smirked yourself when she was the first to back down.

At the same time, Tommy remained uninterested and dissatisfied with Michael’s presentation. He looked around, sipped on his whiskey, and even lit you a cigarette, which you gladly accepted. Once Michael began to talk about the ‘new generation’ and what they could offer, you scoffed.

“Tommy, y/n, you both can still do the good work you’ve always wanted to. And you can be around for Charlie’s life and any other children you have.” How dare he make any remark about your lifestyle when he led a similar one, or on your parenting style.

Your anger continued to simmer as Michael addressed the other’s in the room, but it boiled when he got to Finn. There was no way that Finn would betray his family and galivant off to New York with Michael. Besides, if he did, it would almost definitely break your heart. Finn was like a brother to you – sometimes even a son – after you had been around nearly his whole life.

Gina then handed Michael a folder. “Here is my proposal.” he said. The smack of the papers against the table echoed throughout the almost silent room. “I will be managing director, and you can be non-executive chairman.” he told Tommy.  

“And what about me?” you all but spat because you weren’t about to let Michael pushed you out of the company you had helped to scale.

Michael sensed the tension and chose his next words carefully. “There’s a spot for you too, y/n. Take a look at the future.” he said, now to both you and Tommy.

Tommy shared a look with you, and you nodded, your minds in sync. “It’s quite cold in here, Michael.” Tommy spoke as you accepted the proposal and promptly threw it into the fire, satisfied with the crackle as the flames destroyed Michael’s vision.

“Tell them the truth.” Gina injected, her eyes narrowed, as Tommy tried to move on to the next matter of business. “They can take it.” she mocked, then took a long drag of her cigarette.

Your eyes shifted expectantly towards Michael, as did Tommy’s. “Tell us the truth, Michael.” Tommy said calmly, though his voice was low and dangerous.

There was a tense pause before Michael looked between you and Tommy. “The Americans don’t want to deal with an old-fashioned backstreet razor gang. Those days are done.”

No one spoke at first after Michael’s profound statement. You heard Arthur shift, uncomfortably, in his chair, and the others in the room cast their eyes toward the ground. You walked towards Michael, and with each step, your heels reverberated throughout the room, menacingly, and you only stopped when you were mere inches from Michael’s face. “This backstreet razor gang made you who you are, Michael. You’d be nothing without us.” you snarled.

Before Michel or Gina could retort, a Lee burst into the pub, claiming that Barney had escaped. Tommy yelled at them to get him back, which left only you, Tommy, Michael, Gina, and Polly in the bar. Though, not before Arthur whispered to Michael fuck the Americans, and you gave your brother-in-law a smile and a nod of approval.

“I’m doing this for you, Tommy.” Michael said, ignoring everyone else in the room in a last-ditch attempt to save face. “It’s time, and you know it. Mum’s leaving, John’s dead, and Arthur needs help. Do you want y/n to meet a similar fate?” he asked as Tommy turned his back to Michael and leant against the fireplace. “You’ve fucked up one too many times.” he added as a low blow when Tommy didn’t respond.

Everyone, but you, flinched when Tommy threw a bottle of liquor into the fire and watched as the firer grew larger. There was a moment when you felt the heat that stifled the room, and it just wasn’t from the fire. Then, when Tommy turned back around, Michael shoved a blade in his face.

“Go on, cut me. Like the good old days. Or,” Michael proposed. “see this for what it is. A natural succession that must happen.” he pleaded with Tommy.

Tired of Michael’s bullshit, you stepped between him and your husband. “Listen here, Michael. Tommy and I gave you a place in this company, but you’ve betrayed us. Now, I’m glad you’re so worried about me, but you should be worried about yourself if you keep talking like that. Because us ‘razor gangs’ can still mess with you and your wife. You may be delusional enough to believe that you’re helping us, but don’t believe everything the Americans tell you. We’re family, Michael.” you said, feigning sweetness. “We know everything about you, and we can make your lives a living hell.” you threatened.

Tommy, proud of you and finally satisfied with Michael’s shocked expression, offered you his arm once more. “Don’t mess with me or my wife, again, and don’t be here when we come back.” Tommy spoke with finality.

As the pair of you left, you stopped next to Gina and stopped down to her level. “And you, tell your family”

“Let me guess.” she interrupted, bored. “Don’t fuck with the Peaky Blinders.”

“That’s right.” you responded condescendingly. “And don’t forget which couple holds the power in this company. Really, it’s just simple mathematics.” you said as you and Tommy began to walk towards the pub’s doors. “And wipe that smirk off your face, Michael.” you added even though his back was to you.

Michael and Gina’s confidence waivered as they watched you and Tommy saunter down the street, arms linked again. If they believed they could dethrone you and Tommy with the prospect of an American business expansion and money to keep your docile, they had another thing coming. You and Tommy ruled Small Heath, and you weren’t going to let anyone take that away from you.

[falquinold]

MY FORMAL DEMAND TO BE GIVEN THE RIGHTS TO (1) JOAQUIN TORRES.      ( AKA - The Big Canon Expansion Post™ )

steve vc: so.... you got played by the writers. you put your trust in them when you probably shouldn’t have. they lured you in with a false sense of security and promises of representation, and then ripped the carpet from below your feet. and the sad thing is... this isn’t the first time. 

hey! stupid opening aside, this is gonna be my explanation of torres’ backstory up to his presence in the falcon and the winter soldier, including the character arc that i believe he would have had if the show had been allowed to keep its original 10 episodes. this is mostly based around my own personal headcanons, so i please ask that you don’t steal or reblog this! 

anyway, putting it under a cut since it’s longer than i thought it’d be!

PART 1: PRE-IW.

like in the comics, joaquin immigrated to the united states from mexico with his mother and grandmother when he was 6 years old. they moved to sonoita, arizona, where they soon found a place to live and started to settle into their new life. while the first half of his school years consisted of him working twice as hard as any of his classmates due to the faults in the american public education system, he eventually shot up the class list, earning his spot as valedictorian by the end of his high school career. 

this caught the attention of multiple military recruiters, who came to his school with hopes of swaying as many teens (specifically teens of color) to join the forces as possible. with promises of great pay, free housing and healthcare for himself and his family, and the opportunity to use his intelligence to help ‘change the world for the better,’ the eager 17-year-old didn’t even have to think twice. that very same week that they showed up at his school, joaquin had taken the asvab test and passed with flying colors, soon putting in his application for the air force academy. 

the next 3 years went by in a flash - joaquin moved out of his home and to the academy in colorado, along with 1000 other teenagers who had found themselves in a similar position. he remained at the top 5% of his class, though all of his studies did nothing to prepare him for the day that thanos and his army broke through the atmosphere.

PART 2: IW --> ENDGAME.

in the 3 years that joaquin had been a student at the academy, the strict schedule of his day had never been broken. however, when the giant spaceship hovered over new york, thousands of students crowded around any available tv to stop and stare. he watched for what seemed like hours, frantically texting his mother to make sure that she and his grandmother were safe back at home in arizona. everyone watched with baited breath, until the students in the mess hall started disappearing. everything went in slow motion after that, with the blaring alarms ringing and the remaining teachers instructing everyone to go back to their dorms. the halls filled with dust and the yells for people that had vanished into thin air. 

calls and texts weren’t going through, and the news stations that everyone had been anchored to soon showed nothing but static. after a day, the school allowed for people to leave, and joaquin took his car and made his way back to arizona as fast as he could. he burst through the doors of his childhood home, to see dust settled on the couch in front of the tv that still blared on. he was alone. 

the few weeks remaining of the school year had been cut short, and in that time joaquin found himself spiraling. at the advice of one of his teachers, he sought out peer counseling, and eventually was able to come to terms with what had happened. at the end of that summer, the true nature of what had happened had finally dawned on the population - the avengers wouldn’t be saving them and their family members. nobody was coming back. the world continued to spin on, and with that, was the air force academy sending for the remaining students to finish out the rest of their time there. joaquin, now a senior and only 21 years old, was left with no choice but to sell his childhood home and pack as many family memories as he could into the trunk of his car, making his way back out to colorado to finish what he had started. 

the school looked like a ghost town, and the air of dread and grief hung around all year. at graduation, there were still the same 1000 seats on the football field. however, half of them remained empty - memorials for the dead scattered amongst the living. 

after graduation, joaquin started his service. he started renting a small one bedroom apartment outside of langley air force base in virginia, where he had been recently stationed. he threw himself into his work, moving up the ranks and proving himself for 4 years, up until the very moment that the dead started coming back to life. he found himself right back at his childhood home, where the new inhabitants had freaked out over the people that had revived themselves in the living room. after realizing what had happened outside, they had allowed them to stay there until joaquin could make his way down to find them. after a series of long hugs and tears shed outside the house that he grew up in, he took them back to his apartment where they tried to make sense of what had happened. 

PART 3: THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER.

six months after the dead had returned, joaquin’s family still lived in his small apartment. it was nearly impossible for anybody to find a new home when half of the world’s population needed places to stay. relieved that his survival meant the avoidance of the rapidly-filling grc camps, he and his family were more than happy to make do with what they had. he’d become the sole supporter of the household at 26 years old as his mother struggled to find somewhere to work, and he yet again poured himself into his own job, but he brought a new sense of optimism into the mix. the family that he mourned for years had returned to him. in his eyes, anything was possible. 

he soon found himself working alongside sam wilson, acting as his ‘boots on the ground’ and as his intel provider for his missions alongside the air force. after a successful rescue of one of his supervising officers from batroc and his crew, he found himself starstruck at what the man was able to accomplish completely on his own. the two quickly bonded and joaquin offered his help wherever he could give it, especially after sam seemed to take an interest in the flag smashers, a group that joaquin had been following since the creation of the grc camps. promising that he’d continue to watch the group’s movements online and notify sam if things started to escalate, joaquin found himself in switzerland just a couple days later, figuring that the best way to get information would be to get in the mix himself. that lands him with a broken orbital thanks to a man that has super strength, hinting at the possibility of the flag smashers being much more than meets the eye.

after the reveal of john walker as captain america, the air force immediately puts both him and lemar on the newly formed flag smasher case. due to his discovery of the group, joaquin is recruited onto the team as the only intel officer, helping to locate any and all information on the group and keep walker and hoskins up to date as they go and try to apprehend them. at the same time, sam is running his own mission on the side, as he’s able to use redwing to track the flag smashers to an abandoned warehouse in munich. joaquin drops everything to fly the plane and take them there. he doesn’t know that the ops department put a hidden tracker inside of redwing, but that revelation makes him start to become weary of them when sam tells him. 

after he returns to langley air force base from munich, he’s immediately spoken to by his superiors. he’s no longer under orders to help sam wilson, as that was a one-time mission to save captain vassant, and is told to instead focus his energy on what he was assigned to - assisting walker and hoskins. he’s not punished for his actions, but there’s a threat should he get caught helping someone with air force resources again. he agrees, though has no intentions on stopping his contact with sam. joaquin calls him after that, letting him know what went down and how he had to be more careful if he wanted to keep being able to help with things. he keeps his head down for a while, just doing what’s asked of him while trying to keep an ear out.

eventually, he’s called by sam and asked to find information on donya madani. he finds out that she and karli were registered at the camp in riga, lativa, and that she appeared to hold a loved position within the community. because of the rising threat of the flag smashers, the air force adds two more intel officers onto the case, which keeps joaquin from being able to delay information from getting to walker. he’s only able to buy sam and bucky a couple hours, before walker and hoskins meet them in latvia and the rest of episode 4′s events unfold. 

joaquin sees the video of the murder in the plaza along with the rest of the world, and immediately watches as the base turns to chaos with the higher ups seeking to take control of the situation. his scene with sam remains the same, and he excitedly picks up the bag with the wings and keeps it in the trunk of his car. he then goes back to dc (?), where walker’s punishments are set to be read to him. as a part of the team, he’s told to stand at the back of the room and bear witness, and he hears the accusations that he spews to the government officials. he doesn’t expect them to make sense, taking the seeds of doubt that had planted themselves after being told to work against sam and sprouting them into a genuine distaste for the air force. 

before he can leave, he’s stopped by the major from the vassant mission, a man that he’s known since his first days out of the academy. he reminds joaquin about the upcoming run of promotions, and how he’s been a first lieutenant long enough to apply for captain if he wanted to. with the reputation that he got after being the one to discover and report about the flag smashers, the major tells him that he was almost guaranteed to make the promotion if he applied for it. with walker’s voice still echoing in his head, and the wings now passed down to him, he hesitates and plays it off as being humble, telling the man that he’ll think about it. 

during the time that passes during the montage, joaquin spends his time trying to locate the flag smashers while fixing his wings in secret back at his apartment, until he finally realizes that their next target is new york. since the wings aren’t finished by that time, he offers to help as himself, pushing the fact that he told sam he was his boots on the ground, and he meant it. meeting them in new york, joaquin worked to evacuate people from the buildings, and was the person to hack into the flag smasher app to apprehend them. he’s also there with the big circle of people as sam has his speech to the government official, a giant smile on his face. it’s in that moment that he makes his decision regarding his promotion - sam was able to help countless more people in just a week (?) than joaquin had in the four years after his graduation from the air force academy. he doesn’t put in an application for promotion, and makes a mental note to leave the air force in the next couple months, once his 5 years of contractual post-grad service are completed. 

a few days later, joaquin video calls sam to show him the fixed wings, extremely proud of himself. sam then starts training him to take over the falcon mantle, and joaquin starts getting accustomed to the superhero world that he’s found himself in and everything that it entails. 

[sasarahsunshine]

Criminal Obsession | Prologue

Warnings: Rated M for Mature. Murder, drugs, alcohol, sex, swearing, the whole shebang. 

A/N: I’m finally getting around to my mafia!AU for Criminal Minds! I’m very excited, because unlike my other fics where I write whatever comes to mind, this one is actually planned out. I’m already almost done with chapter 3, and I hope to have an upload schedule for this one. We’ll see! This is a HotchReid fic.

You can also read this on AO3.

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The leader of America’s largest Crime Ring is lonely. He’s surrounded by his friends; people who he trusts with his life. He has his son. But he's lacking something more meaningful in his life. He’s lacking companionship. After the death of his wife a year ago, maybe it’s time to find someone new?

How did he end up there? Standing at the top of a marble staircase, blood splattered across his face as he watched his first kill tumble and roll to a stop on the red carpet below, eyes vacant of life. Nothing but the echoes of their dying breaths in his ears, a memory he won’t ever forget. Their blood drips from the knife in his shaking hand, his grip tightening. He’s only 14 years old. Only 14.

A pat on his shoulder, a glint in his father’s eye, a pearly white smile. “You did well, son.”

You did well. 

He did well. 

He didn’t feel well.

He spun around, vomiting over the railing to the floor below. Just another mess for the Help to clean, he thought glumly. That wasn’t his intention. 

The cold hand on his shoulder gripped him tighter, malice in the voice which only seconds before was praising him, “You’re weak! I am so ashamed to have you as a son! You can’t even handle a little blood on your hands- how do you expect to survive in this world if you can’t even defend yourself in a fight? Pathetic.”

Ten years later, he thought over those words as he twisted the knife in his father’s gut, making sure to watch the light fade from his eyes. His father coughed, blood seeping from his blue lips, “Why?” He asked, his voice a whisper. He leaned closer, humming into the old man’s ear, “Not so pathetic now, am I, father?”

Twenty years later, on the anniversary of his father’s untimely death, he sits at his desk, his throne, and nurses a glass of the finest whiskey. It tastes like shit. Like every other alcohol that’s touched his tongue throughout his life. But it gets him drunk, and it burns his throat in the way he needs. 

His suit is black, form-fitted, custom-made. His fingers tap an unknown beat on aged oak, his eyes set on the door. His office is enormous. Practically a library. But as he stares, it begins to feel smaller. The walls close in on him, his lungs aching for the oxygen he is being deprived of. He could open the window. But that would require him to turn around. So instead, he sits, he drinks, and he stares. 

He’s very aware of who is on the other side. He knows what they want. He waits for them.

And, eventually, the door opens, creaking on old hinges as it’s pushed open with little care. The man who saunters in is not who he was expecting, and he finds himself allowing the smallest twitch of a smile to grace his lips. 

He is thankful, for this man is his friend. He is thankful, for this man is his left-hand. He is charismatic. Charming. A breath of fresh air after the week he’s had. 

There’s a twinkle in his eyes as he takes a seat in the chair opposite of the desk, one leg going over the other as he leans back. He chuckles, running his hand over his shaved head. There’s dried blood speckled on his knuckles, on his disheveled button-up. The top two buttons are undone, and his tie is nowhere to be seen. There’s a brief moment where he wonders where the tie and jacket had gone to, seeing as his friend was wearing them both earlier in the day. 

“You don’t need to worry about the threat anymore,” his left-hand says, flashing his white teeth in a smile that reveals small dimples. He pulls out a pocketknife, flipping it once in his hand before setting it on the desk, offering it as a gift. It’s covered in blood. The blood is going to stain the old oak of the desk.

“You’re sure?” He asks, finally setting his now empty whiskey glass down on a coaster. He can’t help as his eyes flitted behind his friend, taking in the large hallway behind him. A dead man is being dragged away by someone in a black suit, blood smearing on the floor behind him. “There was only one?”

“There were two,” he replies, holding up two fingers, “The first was in the kitchen. But don’t worry, I made sure they were the only ones. You’re safe. Jack’s safe.”

He allowed a sigh to escape. He didn’t need to be as stoic, as stern, in front of the left-hand; he knew that. He could finally relax. The room didn’t feel so small anymore. He could breathe again.

Sitting up a little, the vertebrae in his back cracking as he did, he nodded his head once, “Thank you, Morgan.”

“No problem, Hotch,” Morgan replied with a grin, “I had fun doing it.”

I’m sure, Hotch thought to himself. If anyone liked beating people to death, it was Morgan. That was probably why he discarded his jacket. Beating was messier than just shooting someone. He could never understand the so-called thrill of being covered in blood. He’d rather stand further away and just shoot someone between the eyes. Cleaner. Colder. Easier.

“Feel free to take the rest of the day off,” he replied, finally turning his chair around to look out the window at his expansive property, “But I want two men posted with Jack for the rest of the day. Just in case.”

“Right, boss,” Morgan said. Hotch could hear him stand and leave, not closing the door behind him. How irritating. Typically he would have called after him, but instead, he stayed silent, watching the soft breeze blow fallen leaves around in the yard. There weren’t that many yet, as it was only September, but the colder months were fast approaching. It wouldn’t be long before the auction season starts again. 

“Door’s open,” he said as footsteps approached. He hated when people knocked. Turning his chair around, he found himself looking at the last person he wanted to see. He sighed, running his hand through his hair, “What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what?’” The older man scoffed, walking into the office with an air of confidence. His hair was greying, salt and pepper sprinkled in his beard. He arched an eyebrow, “I was just told that there were only two assassins in here this year. Are you sure that’s the end of it? It’s only 2pm, you know.”

Hotch drummed his fingers on his desk, scowling, “Morgan said that was it. He double-checked the property. But if you’re so concerned, Dave, why don’t you just make yourself at home here in my office? Be my babysitter?”

Dave smirked, sitting down in the authentic leather seat with a chuckle, “Why, thank you, Aaron. I think I will.” 

Hotch rolled his eyes, pulled the bottle of whiskey from his cabinet, and poured it into his glass. Dave procured another glass from somewhere, holding it out for Hotch to fill. He did so, but not without shooting his oldest and dearest friend a glare of disapproval. Dave was the only person who could get away with such blatant disrespect. And he knew it, too. That was why he did what he did so regularly: getting on Hotch’s nerves. 

The two allowed silence to fall over them as they sipped on their alcohol, Dave smirking at the furrowed brow of Hotch when he tasted the burn. They shared several minutes like this, enjoying the quiet. Their lives weren’t often slow, so when it was, it was nice. 

Perhaps ten minutes passed, maybe a little more, before Dave spoke, his eyes studying the swaying oak tree outside the window, “Have you gone to see Sean and Haley yet?”

Hotch peered over the rim of his glass at him, frowning, “No. My priority was making sure Jack was safe.”

“Yes, I know that. But normally, you would have gone by now. What is really keeping you locked in your office?”

Hotch scoffed. Damn Dave and his ability to read people. He shrugged his shoulders, his fingers once again drumming along the table. He chose not to dignify his friend with an answer. He decided to stay silent. 

David sighed, leaning forward a little, “Is it because today isn’t just your father’s death-versary?” The use of that word was one only the two of them shared. 

Hotch’s frown deepened as he stared at the whiskey in his glass. Thirty years ago, he killed someone for the first time. Twenty years ago, he killed his father. Ten years ago, his brother was murdered in retaliation. One year ago, his wife was murdered. He was not going to allow this year to be the year his son was taken from him too.

He didn’t need to say anything. David nodded in understanding, a thoughtful look to his eyes. He let a beat of silence fall between them before he spoke again, “It’s been a year since Haley. And longer since you two were intimate-”

“Dave,” Hotch warned, his eyes growing dark as he glanced at his right-hand man. David shrugged, choosing to continue speaking anyhow. He could get away with it. He was the only one who could. “All I’m saying, is that you can’t hide your loneliness from me. It was there before she died, and it’s there now.”

“I won’t bring anyone else into my life who can be ripped away just as quickly,” Hotch responded, setting his glass down. He no longer wanted alcohol. He wanted to punch someone. Probably Dave. 

“Since last year, your empire has doubled!” Dave argued, leaning forward with interest, “And with that, so has your personal guard! Nobody is going to touch you, Jack, or anyone else you might find love with. Aaron, please, I’m begging you, you’re a miserable old man who is letting your emotions control your business sense.”

“My business sense? Old man? Watch it, Dave, you’re older than me,” Hotch scoffed, rolling his eyes, “And since when has my empire growing been a bad thing?”

“I’m not saying it is,” Dave countered, “But don’t you want someone to share your wealth with?”

Hotch let his shoulders slump a little as he leaned back, swiveling his chair from right to left, “I’ve had plenty of women to spoil in the last year-”

“Not escorts,” Dave scolded, “someone more permanent. Someone you can have hanging off your every word when you speak. Someone to take with you to the galas and the auctions. Someone like Haley used to be for you.”

Hotch was about to retort, but the echoing of little feet running down the marble-laid hallway broke his concentration. He smiled as his son came barreling into the office, dark hair wild and unkempt, giggles and squeals coming from him as his nanny was on his heels. Her face was that of exasperation, but she smiled at her boss upon seeing him, “Sorry, sir,” she said as Jack climbed into his father’s lap, wrapping his little arms around his neck and shouting, “Daddy! For Halloween this year, I want to be Spiderman!”

Dave chuckled. Hotch widened his eyes, “Oh yeah, buddy? Why do you want to be Spiderman?” Jack leaned in and whispered into his father’s ear, “‘Cause we just watched Spiderman, and he can swing from webs in the air. Kinda like when we’re in the ‘copter ‘cept he doesn’t need a ‘copter! He can just do that!”

Hotch smiled, planting a kiss on his son’s forehead, “Wow, that sounds super cool, buddy. Halloween is still almost two months away, though, so you have time to think about it if you want to change your mind.”

“Nope!” Jack shook his head proudly, “I’m going to be Spiderman!” He then turned and smiled wide at Dave, his front two teeth missing, “Uncle Dave! What are you going to be for Halloween?”

David laughed, setting his glass down and leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, “I don’t know yet, kiddo. Maybe I’ll be Superman.”

“You can’t be Superman,” Jack scrunched up his nose. 

“Oh? Why’s that?” David asked, peering from him to Hotch then back. 

“Cause daddy’s Superman,” Jack said matter-of-factly. His nanny gave a tight-lipped smile at that, “That’s right, Jack,” she said. Hotch just smiled warmly at his son before picking him up and setting him down on the floor, “Well, Superman is still very busy right now,” he said, “so why don’t you go with Miss Clara and finish up your schoolwork, okay? I’ll see you at dinner.”

“Okay,” Jack nodded, smiling back at Miss Clara, “I only have some coloring left!” He declared. Miss Clara nodded, “Yep, so let’s go back to that, okay?” She looked up at Hotch, “Sorry again. He was just so excited to tell you.”

“It’s fine,” Hotch waved her off, watching her and his son hurry back down the hall. Thank goodness the Help was quick at cleaning up the bloody mess Morgan has left behind. He didn’t need Jack seeing that. He was only five. 

Dave chuckled to himself, shaking his head a little, “Don’t think our conversation is over, Aaron,” he warned, “I’m not done trying to convince you to find a good woman to love.” 

Hotch frowned. Of course, Dave wouldn’t drop it. He sighed and rolled his eyes, standing from his chair for the first time all day. His knees protested. “I don’t really have time to date, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Then pay for a girlfriend.”

“But you said no escorts,” Hotch knitted his eyebrows in confusion. 

“Not escorts,” David used his hands for emphasis, “But what about a Sugar Baby?”

“A what?”

It was Dave’s turn to roll his eyes, “Oi, you’re younger than me, and you don’t know what a Sugar Baby is? Jesus Aaron, you haven’t been out of the game that long, have you?”

Hotch made a pointed look at Dave, expecting an explanation, not a taunting tone. Dave sighed, “Sugar Babies are girls who are paid for sex, but long-term. And not always with cash, although some take a certain amount upfront. They get spoiled by their Sugar Daddies with gifts, dinners, money, cars, whatever it is they want. A girlfriend you pay for. Someone to be your arm-candy at events. Someone to keep you company and to get your rocks off so you’ll stop being such an ass.”

Hotch scowled a little, leaning against his desk, his hands folded in his lap, “How is that different than an escort?” He was tense.

“Escorts are temporary. You fuck ‘em and dump ‘em,” Dave shrugged. Hotch furrowed his brow at his friend’s language. After a beat of silence, he exhaled, “That isn’t exactly a true girlfriend, either,” he pointed out. 

Dave stood up, pulling a cigar out of the pocket on the inside of his suit jacket, “But it’s a step closer. Plus, you can shop around until you find one you like. You got money, Aaron. Might as well spend it.” He lit the cigar before inhaling on it deeply, blowing the expensive spice-scented smoke into the air. Hotch hated when he smoked inside. 

He waved his hand in a motion to tell Dave to leave. Dave shrugged again, “Think about it, Aaron. I bet Penelope could put her feelers out there for you.”

“I can’t bring anyone in here,” Hotch warned, “With the business and all.”

“That’s why you have Penelope check them all out first. I’m sure there’s plenty of bad girls out there who have been Babies for other Crime Lords.”

Hotch flinched. He didn’t like being compared to other “Crime Lords.” He wasn’t like them. He didn’t deal in people. He didn’t murder for fun. He did what he needed to survive. This was survival, nothing more. Even though it was illegal. 

Dave started walking out, waving his hand in farewell, “Think about it,” he said again, his smoke following him.

Hotch scoffed, going back to his desk and pulling out a file. He glanced it over, sitting down slowly. Financial reports from the last year. Boring. 

He couldn’t help his mind from wandering a little, debating on the idea of a ‘Sugar Baby.’ A girl that had to be interested in what he said, what he did. Someone to wear extravagant dresses that he bought for them, custom-made, tailored to their body perfectly. Someone to hang off his arm at every event of the year. Many were coming up. The amount, he wasn’t sure, but he would have to ask Penelope. She would know. 

Maybe it would be nice to have someone pay attention to him again. Someone to have in his bed for longer than one night, even if it was a paid arrangement. 

His eyes flickered to the phone on his desk. 

He hadn’t wanted a girlfriend before now because he couldn’t fathom the idea of even finding one. His life was too busy. If he wasn’t at an event in New York, he was in D.C. or Vegas. He just didn’t have the time. The only eligible woman on the property was his son’s nanny, and even though she was pretty, she was not his type. 

But, if he could skip the formalities? If he could just have someone there for him without needing to date them first?

He picked up the receiver and dialed. After a beat, Penelope answered on the other end, “Yes, sir?”

“Garcia,” he started, “I need you to look into something for me.”

[accio-moony]

Not My Type || George Weasley x Reader Angst/Fluff

Request: { @jxsminedrxgon​ asked @eleven-times-lively​: “Hi! I was wondering if I could get a George Weasley x transfer student (female) Ravenclaw angst that turns to fluff?”}

Word Count: ~6K [way too fucking long but I had originally planned more] [not completely proofread]

Summary: you’re a transfer student, new to Hogwarts, and a particular Weasley seems to be infatuated with you, and you deny it to yourself that you’re equally as infatuated. Jealousy makes you admit it to yourself, and eventually to him. [takes place during The Goblet of Fire/1994/George’s 6th year, but there is no tournament. There is quidditch as usual and there is a yule ball as if it is a yearly thing.]

WARNINGS: angst? Exploding potion, detention, idk

*not my gifs*

Being a transfer student is rarely easy, that’s for sure. It’s not often that someone jumps the pond, already knowing people on the other side. As you try not to scare yourself, you stare out the misty, wet window to the expansive hills flying by. Your father got a new job, which meant moving from North America to England. At your previous school, Ilvermorny, you were familiar with everything as you had gone there for the better part of the past five years. By second year, you knew the halls like the back of your hand, and you belonged to a group of friends within your house, Thunderbird. But now, as you ride the Hogwarts Express to your new school, you can’t help but feel nervous. Everything will be different, except that you’ll still be learning magic, something you were born into, and your parents were over the moon that you’d attend the same school they did — the school they met at. Until now.

Yet, now, as the train screeches to an eventual halt, everything is beyond your imagination. You aren’t quite sure what to expect, or what to do exactly, but you know you’ll keep to yourself and follow the rules. A new start isn’t necessarily so bad.

You stand on your toes, grab the handle of your new trunk, and haul it down, almost crushing yourself with its weight. You open the compartment door and check the halls for a clear spot to step out; they’re bustling with people greeting their friends and trying to get off the train first. As soon as an opening comes, you step into the corridor and struggle to drag your case and keep up with the crowd at the same time. The mild September heat engulfs you as you near the door of the train cart, and you can hear the shouts of other students as they scurry around in the rain.

As you step into the rain, you look at the world around you, finding a sign reading Hogsmead Station. You could’ve stood there all night, rain or shine, and taken in the new scenery, but the crowd jostled you along with them and towards some carriages. Many groups piled into the carriages together, still wrapped in conversation. You stood back, waiting for an empty one, and seized your moment when you saw one pulls forward, drawn by seemingly nothing. 

“Leave your trunk here, miss,” you hear a raspy voice from behind you. 

You turn to see an older man with many wrinkles and thin, messy grey hair standing next to a pile of hundreds of trunks. “Sorry, sir,” you apologize to him and give him your trunk. “I’m a transfer student.”

“Evidently,” he sneers at you, looking at you as though he smelled something fowl. 

“Right,” you say to yourself and run back to the carriages. The one that you were about to get on before being called for your trunk was now almost full. Quickly, you nutty up to the back and muster up all your courage to speak to them. “Excuse me?” You clear your throat, and the two boys who were sat turn to look at you. “May I- uh- may I ride with you?”

The girl in the wagon lifts her head finally, her bushy hair bouncing around her. “Oh, hi! Of course,” she smiles and motions to the seat in front of her. 

The two boys fall back into conversation as you sit down next to a tall red-headed boy. The girl had returned her head to be buried in the book she holds, and though you don’t want to be rude and interrupt her, you also don’t want to sit in awkward silence while the two boys talks loudly. “Uh, what’re you reading?” You ask, shyly.

She looks up at you, a big smiling growing on her face. “Oh, goodness. I like you already; these two gits never care for books.” She hands you the book, and you look over the colorful cover. “It’s called A Wrinkle in Time.” She explains. “It’s a muggle novel by Madeleine L’Engle.”

You look up at her, almost confused. “I don’t think I’ve ever met another witch who reads Muggle books,” you state.

“Oh, well,” she chuckles. “I’m muggle-born.” She almost shrinks, as if she’s scared of your reaction. 

“Oh, that’s awesome!” You smile, and hers returns.

“Oi!” The red-headed boy next to you calls, and you and the bushy-haired girl look over at him. “You’re from America aren’t you?”

“Oh, uh,” you scoff to yourself, knowing you should already be expecting this question. “Yeah, I am.”

“Is this your first year at Hogwarts?” The girl asks. 

“Yeah, it is.”

“Welcome! I’m Hermione Granger. This is Ronald Weasley,” she motions to the redhead next to you, “and Harry Potter.”

“It’s wonderful to meet you guys. I’m Y/n Y/l/n.”

“You can call me Ron, by the way,” says the redhead. “Hermione and my mum are the only ones who call me Ronald.” You nod.

“And fair warning: my older brothers — they’re twins and loud so you can’t miss them — anyway, I’m pretty sure George has a thing for American girls.”

“Great.”

When the carriage rounds the next corner, a castle beyond what you could dream of glows against a lake and mountains. Your jaw drops as you look up at it.

“It’s truly beautiful,” says Hermione. “You’ll get used to it soon enough though.”

“I’m not sure I want to get used to it,” you say, still awe-struck until you realize how that may have sounded rude. “I mean — it’s so amazing I could look at it forever. I never want to feel used to something like this and not be in awe every time I see it.”

The boys look at you with blank looks on their faces. 

“Sorry, that didn’t make any sense.”

“I know what you mean,” Hermione places a hand on your arm. “The first years take little boats across the lake to the castle for their sorting ceremony. And now that I think of it, I wonder if you should’ve gone with them. That’s okay though, I’ll introduce you to Professor McGonagall — she handles the ceremony every year.”

Hermione stays to her word, and once the four of you have dismounted the carriage, the boys go ahead of you two, and Hermione walks with you to the front doors of the castle. “What year are you, Y/n?” She asks you as you both walk up the stone steps.

“Uh, sixth,” you say.

“Oh, goodness,” she laughs. “What?” You say, on the verge of panicking.

“Ron, Harry, and I are fourth,” she says simply. “But Fred and George — Ron’s brothers — they’re sixth years.” She looks up at you and raises an eyebrow suggestively.

“Oh, great,” you sigh.

“Professor!” She calls when the two of you cross the threshold. 

An older woman with grey hair tucked under a large witch’s hat turns toward her, her emerald green robes falling down her tall figure.

“Welcome back, Miss Granger!” Her sharp tone intimidating but still welcoming. “Is there something you need help with, dear?”

“Oh, not me, Professor. This is Y/n Y/l/n. It’s her first year at Hogwarts — a transfer student.”

“Yes, of course,” she smiles warmly. “Welcome, Miss Y/l/n. You can stay here with me until the ceremony begins. Hermione, dear, go take your seat.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she smiles and turns on her heals, beginning to walk away.

“Hermione?” You call after her, and she turns back to you. “Could I borrow that book when you finish it?”

“Of course!” She says, her smile wide enough to tear her cheeks. 

After the main herd of students had filed into the Great Hall, a much smaller group of students enters the Entrance Hall, though they may have seen like a much smaller group not only because there were fewer of them, but also because they were smaller children, especially next to the very large bushy man accompanying them. You follow them and Professor McGonagall into the Great Hall and listen to her introduction speech.

After several moments, she stands next to the old hat, which then tells a poem through the rip in the brim. 

“We’ll start with our transfer student,” she smiles down at you, and you straighten your posture. “Miss Y/l/n, if you will take a seat.”

You walk to the front of the group and sit on the short stool in front of the podium. The hat lowers onto your head, and you can hear it humming as it thought.

Next to Ron, at the Gryffindor table, Fred and George look at you, and then between themselves, then back to you. “Wicked,” they say in a unison that would make it seem like they share a brain. 

“RAVENCLAW!” The hat bellows through the hall.

“Damn,” the twins say together, and look down at their plates in identical movements, the trio also seeming disappointed. Though Fred and George aren’t going to give up that easily — at least George isn’t going to give up that easily that is, and he drags Fred along with him through everything, not that Fred ever minds.

Once the feast is over, and you’re following the other Ravenclaws to the common room, you almost run into two people, when they practically suddenly appear in front of you, having been running and then suddenly stopping. You look up as you stumble so as to not physically run into them. You’re met with the faces of two identical boys, both of them with shoulder-length, shaggy red hair, and you conclude to yourself that they must be Ron’s older twin brothers.

“You’re the new girl,” one twin says matter-of-factly. 

You nod and plaster a painfully obvious fake smile onto your face.

“I’m Fred,” says the other twin, gesturing to himself. “And this is my less attractive brother, George.”

Despite your best efforts, as you look back and forth between the two boys in front of you, noting the subtle differences so you can tell them apart, you can’t help but think how handsome they both are, and undeniably charming. You have to remind yourself that you’re not a social person, at least not yet to those at Hogwarts, and you’d like to keep your head down and out of trouble. 

“Hi,” you entertain them. “I’m Y/n.”

“Pleasure,” George cheerily bows before you.

You giggle, not being able to stop yourself. “The pleasure is mine,” you smile and give an equally cheesy curtsy.

“Say, how do you feel about Quidditch, Y/n?” Fred asks.

“I love Quidditch!” You pipe. “I was a Chaser for my house back at Ilvermorny.”

“Well, George and I play,” Fred explains, George being left quiet, almost seeming suddenly shy. “We’re Gryffindor’s Beaters. And we heard that Ravenclaw is short a Chaser.”

Your face lights up, excited by the opportunity for a familiar past time.

“You should ask Flitwick,” George finally speaks again. “He’s head of the Ravenclaw house.”

“And the Charms Professor,” Fred continues. 

“Well, thank you for the heads up then, boys,” you smile, and walk off after the rest of your house without another word.

Next day, the first day of term, you end up having a Charms class with both of the Weasley twins. You notice the two of them turn and pay attention to you as you walk up to Professor Flitwick. 

“Professor Flitwick?” You call, standing politely behind him. 

The extremely short man turns to you. “Ah, yes,” he claps his hands together. “Miss Y/l/n, welcome to Hogwarts and to the Ravenclaw house!”

“Thank you, sir,” you smile. 

“How can I help you?”

“Well,” you start. “I got a tip from someone that one of the Chaser positions for the house team is open. I was wondering if I could try out for the spot? I was a Chaser at Ilvermorny.”

“Oh no need to try out, dear. No one else seems to want it. It’s yours!”

“Wow, ok. Thank you, Professor.”

You turn and take a seat at one of the desk rows across the room from the twins, but closer to the front of the room, closer to the blackboard. You pull your reading glasses out of your bag along with your Charms book and quill. You put your wand neatly in front of you on the desk, and your ink pot in the corner of your area. 

Professor Flitwick clears his throat from the front of the room as he climbs onto a stack of books to be well seen by the students. You slide you glasses up your nose, quickly glancing at the twins, subconsciously hopping that they’ll have already been looking at you, but they were huddled into a small group with another Gryffindor boy in a deep discussion. 

As class begins, and Professor Flitwick explains what to expect from this term, the boys don’t break their herd until their names are called loudly by the shrill voice of the Professor.

“If both Misters Weasley and Mister Jordan would pay attention,” he called them out, quickly pulling their attention to the front. “While I know that the first day of class is usually the most boring, if you pay attention, it will save from questions you will have later.”

Fred, George and their friend turned to the front for just a moment, but as soon as Professor Flitwick had turned to find the papers he was going to hand out — well float out — the boys turned back to their huddle and continued their conversation like nothing had happened. 

“Detention, Mister Fred and George Weasley, and Mister Lee Jordan,” the Professor called, without even turning to see that they were back to talking. “And 10 points from Gryffindor —“

The Gryffindor students, including the group of three that have just cost their house points, groan loudly as they start the term with negative points. 

“— each,” Professor Flitwick finishes, and the groaning becomes louder. 

One student on the opposite end of the class threw something across the room at the three boys, an apple that Professor Flitwick caught with a simple flick of his wand and returned to the students desk. 

“Detention for you, too, Miss Johnson.”

For the remainder of class, you did your best to pay attention to the lesson, but found it increasingly difficult. While the boys kept the talking to a minimum, you could feel George’s eyes on you the whole time. The moment Professor Flitwick dismisses class, you gather all your belongings in a handful — something you never do due to the level of unorganizedness — and bolt from the room, but not quick enough. 

“Oi, Y/n!” You heard the twins call after you in unison, and sigh as you politely stop and turn to them with a half smile. 

The events of the last hour and a half had left you disappointed to say the least. After your encounter with the twins after the feast the night before, you had begun to think maybe befriending them wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but seeing them not pay attention in class and get disciplined on the first day of term harmed your hopes, though you weren’t going to start being rude to them.

“Hello, boys,” you greet them as they approach you. 

“Say,” Fred begins, “we were wondering if you’d like to do our Charms homework?”

George remained silent once again as you gave them both a look of astonishment. 

“Absolutely not!” You scoffed, changing your mind slightly on the ‘not being ride the them’.

“You’re our only Ravenclaw friend,” he continues, “and with Quidditch and planning, we hardly have time to eat and sleep, so we thought we’d at least try.”

“Fred thought,” George corrects him, and Fred subtly nudges him with his elbow. 

“I don’t mean to be rude,” you say softly, “but we’re not friends. We only met twelve hours ago, and now that I’ve seen the way you two are, I’m not sure I would consider becoming friends with you.”

“What do you mean, ‘the way you two are’?” Fred laughs. “We’re two fine lads if I do say so myself.”

“Fred,” George says, almost pleading.

“Y/n!” Another voice calls behind you, and you wonder how there are already so many people who know you. You turn away from the boys and down the hall to see the trio you met on the carriage marching down the corridor. “I finished the book,” Hermione smiles at you and pulls the book out of her bag, handing it over to you.

“Thank you, Hermione!” You smile. “I’ll be sure to give it back once I’m done. Shouldn’t be too long.”

“No worries.” “Say, George,” Ron says, looking quizzically behind you. “You’re awfully quiet; are you feeling okay?”

“It’s nothing,” George mutters and leaves to walk down the hall, almost at a jog.

Fred winks at you before following his twin, and you turn back to the trio blushing.

“Don’t let those two morons bother you, Y/n,” Hermione assures you, putting a hand on your forearm kindly.

“I’ve never seen anyone make George nervous before — much less quiet,” Ron admits. “You must be one hell of a girl in his eyes.”

“Uh, yeah,” you mutter, looking down at your black flats against the beautiful stone floors as you shyly rub the back of your neck. “I’ve got to get to my next lesson,” you smile to the three fourth years. “I’ll see you guys later.” Without waiting for a response from the group you continue down the hall, but stop at the corner before turning it and look back over your shoulder in time to see Ron shrug at something Hermione said as they enter the Charms classroom.

Fred and George end up being in several of your classes, including Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts. One fall morning, on your way down to the dungeons for Potions, you hear the two familiar and almost identical voices talking outside the hall. Before you could turn the corner and see them, you hear your name being mentioned.

“It’s obvious you like Y/n, George,” Fred says.

You stop in your tracks behind the corner, thinking about how throughout the term so far, Fred and George have been restless. You’ve witness their pranks and loud jokes. During Quidditch games, Fred forces the bludgers at you, nearly knocking you off every time. The one time he actually managed to, George quickly flew down to the ground to see if you were okay, but you rolled your eyes as you got up with Hermione’s help. “Fuck off, Weasley,” you had jeered at him as you stumbled off the pitch and towards Madame Pomfrey to be cleared to continue the game. Once you were cleared, you worked harder than you had before at Hogwarts, and though Harry caught the snitch, Ravenclaw was only two goals away from having won without the snitch. You feel a bit bad about having told him to ‘fuck off’ when he didn’t do anything wrong, but you’re also mad that Fred thinks that’s a suitable way to get your attention. 

“Well, no shit, Sherlock,” George scoffs at his brother, still out of your line of sight. “How could I not? She’s the most gorgeous person I’ve ever seen. She’s smart and funny and dorky and adorable and everything I’d ever want. Her being good at Quidditch is always a plus, but because the move you pulled at the game last week, she’s bound to still be mad at me.”

“Make it up to her then!” Fred protests. “I’ve seen the way she looks at you — like you’re an idiot, but a handsome idiot, you know?”

“Thanks?”

“You just have to try, brother. You’re the George Weasley, you can do anything you want.”

“Whatever,” he sighs and you hear footsteps retreat down the corridor.

You take this as your signal to stop hiding, to stop ease-dropping, and go to class. You quickly turn the corner and hurry into the Potions room, finding everyone standing around the room instead of in seats. 

“What’s going on?” You ask a fellow Ravenclaw girl. 

“New partner assignment, I think,” she explains, without really even looking up at you, keeping her nose in the Potions book, turned to the page which you assume is what today’s lesson will be, though you can’t see what the title of the page is.

“Quiet!” Professor Snape’s deep nasally voice echos through the dungeon over the loud conversations of the students, effectively quieting them.”You have new partners as of today,” he said, then began to call out last names in pairs.

“Y/l/n,” he calls, then pauses to think of who to pair you with. “Weasley,” he decides, and you swallow the lump in your throat.

“Which one?” Fred pipes from across the room.

“I don’t care,” he says, then continues to pair off students.

You quickly take a seat at a desk in the second row, waiting for whichever twin to join you, but you had a feeling it would be George because of what you just heard in the hall.

“Hi, Y/n,” he says as he takes the seat next to you.

“Hi, George,” you say with a smile, but don’t look up from your Potions book to look at him.

“How’d you know I’m George and not Fred?” He says, and this time you do look up at him.

“Uh,” you hesitate, “gut feeling?”

“A Befuddlement Draught,” Snape begins as George sits down next to you and slouches back in his chair. You try not to pay attention to George and his demeanor, comparing it to your own, instead of paying attention to Professor Snape’s pre-lesson speech. “Is a potion that causes the drinker to become belligerent and reckless.” He looks between the Weasley twins. “The ingredients are scurry grass, lovage, and sneezewort.”

You wrote quickly as he spoke, taking notes to help you with studying and homework later. George looked at you, then pulled our his own piece of parchment, but he wasn’t writing notes. He wanted to seem like he was, but really he was righting a sort of journal entry about how beautiful he thinks you are, so paying attention even less than if he wasn’t “taking notes”.

“These plants are most efficacious in the inflaming of the brain,” Snape continues, and you recognize his words as a passage from the Potions book you had read to get ahead. “And are therefore much used in Confusing and Befuddlement Draughts, where the wizard is desirous of producing hot-headedness and recklessness.”

You laugh to yourself slightly, just loud enough for only George to hear, and he quickly looks up at you at the beautiful sound. 

“What’s so funny?” He whispers.

You hesitate a moment while you smile to yourself. “You wouldn’t need this potion to be reckless, would you, Weasley?”

His face turns beat red, and as you look over at him, he quickly folds his piece of parchment and stuffs it into his bag haphazardly.

“You will be making this today,” Professor Snape said, waving his wand at the blackboard, making the chalk write the instructions on its own. “It is nearly impossible to mess up.” He looked around the room down his long nose, examining every student. He sees your readiness and eagerness to start, and he notes the twins lack of interest as they look across the dungeon at each other mouthing in conversation. Snape rolls up the papers in his hand and walks towards you and George’s desk. He lifts the parchment and brings it down rough on George’s head and making you gasp while he looks sternly at Fred. “Get started.”

You tie your hair up effortlessly, and George can’t help but notice how beautiful and natural you look. Then as you walk off to go get the ingredients listed on the board and in the book, he looks after you longingly, following you like a lost puppy as he grabs random ingredients from the shelves.

When you come back, you slide your house robe off your shoulders and drape it over your chair, getting to work as you roll up the sleeves of your jumper. 

“Are you going to let me help?” George asks.

You look at him, silent for a moment as you think. “Are you going to actually help, or blow it up like every other potion you and your brother make.”

“I’d like to actually help.”

“Okay then, would you put the sneezewort into the cauldron?” You ask him politely. 

He picks up an ingredient, not paying quite enough attention to what and holds it over the cauldron as he looks over your book. 

“George, no!” You yell and reach out to grab his arm. “That’s —“ but it was too late. 

George had dropped what he was holding into the pot, and it immediately blew up. You screamed as you covered yourself with your arms and ducked, but George was too shocked by his own action to react, and his face was left covered in dirt. 

You stand back up and look over at him. “That was an Erumpent horn!” You exclaim. George looks down at his hands, not knowing what to say. The clicking of boots fills the dungeon as everyone had gone silent and was staring at the two of you. You look up and see Professor Snape approaching you. 

“You’re quite right, Miss Y/l/n,” Snape says, and you blush deeply. “Maybe you should have been watching him more carefully.”

“I thought I was, I thought I could trust him,” you mutter, more to yourself than anyone else. 

“50 points from Gryffindor,” he sneers, and you jerk your head to look at George, who’s face is almost expressionless. “And Ravenclaw as well.”

“But sir —“ you begin. 

“And detention, Saturday evening.” 

Your jaw drops, practically hitting the floor. You had never gotten points taken from your house before, much less gotten in trouble. 

“For now, there is no coming back from this mistake,” Snape looks at George intently. “You are both excused from the rest of the class.”

Without thinking much, you shove George with both your hands, and he stumbles backwards, watching after you as you grab your bag and hurry out of the room. He’s frozen in his spot a moment, until Snape clears his throat. George grabs his own belongings and hurries after you.

“Y/n!” He calls when he gets into the hall, but you’re already turning the corner without even a glance back at him. 

Later that evening, at supper, you sit alone at the Ravenclaw table with a book, but you weren’t paying much attention to it, rather just staring at the page as you push the food around on your plate. 

“Oi, Angelina,” you hear a familiar voice call, and look up to see the twins looking down the Gryffindor table at one of the house chasers. You see George as he reaches across the table towards her. “Will you go to the ball with me?” 

You barely hear him from where you’re sitting, but you hear him enough and can read his lips enough to know he said it. Your eyes shift over to Hermione, who’s looking across the tables to you. Your mouth thins into a line as you fight back the tears, though you know they shouldn’t be there. Not knowing what else to do, and not wanting anyone else to notice your dismay, you grab your book up and leave the Great Hall.

You’re already on the grand marble staircase when you hear Hermione, Ron, and Harry all call after you. You don’t stop and pick up your pace. 

“Y/n, please!” You hear Hermione call, and you can’t help but stop. 

You turn around and wipe the tear off your cheek.

“Why are you crying?” She asks as she pulls you into a hug.

“Why would he do that?” You snuffle out. 

“I don’t know,” Ron says. “He’s so infatuated with you, I couldn’t believe it. But I thought you despised him?”

“He got me detention, I do despise him,” you say, but continue, “did — I did despise him. At least I thought I did.” You slump down and sit on the staircase with your head in your hands. Hermione its next to you and sets hand on your back. “He’s really not my type of person. I’ve never been in trouble before! And he’s constantly in trouble! I don’t know what it is about him. He’s handsome and funny, and I’m only now realizing it, but I can’t help but like him. Merlin, I’m so stupid.”

“You are not stupid,” Harry says. “He’s stupid.” “That’s not news, mate,” Ron says. 

“Well, yeah,” Harry says, “but we didn’t know he was this stupid.”

You sniffle a laugh at his words and look up at him, only, you notice a pair of fiery red hair, just like Ron’s, standing in the corridor behind Harry.

You swallow the lump in your throat and quickly run up the rest of the stairs, sprinting to the Ravenclaw tower. 

“I—“ George begins from behind Ron, but doesn’t know what to say and just closes his mouth.

“You’re fucking stupid,” Ron scoffs at his older brother and turns and walks away with Hermione and Harry. 

George looks over to Fred, who’s face reflects the same disbelief as his own.

That night, for the first time, you didn’t touch your homework, but instead went straight to bed and cried yourself to sleep. 

When Saturday’s detention rolled around, you arrived early as is normal for you. Snape let you start on the task he decided to assign you for detention. You were to go through one box of old discipline reports before you could leave. You sat in the corner of the room and pulled the lid off a box, beginning to sort it. It wasn’t long until George joined, but Snape gave him a rag and told him to clean all the desks. George sighed, and Snape walked out of the room. 

You could feel George’s eyes on you from where he stood unmoved. 

“Y/n,” he beings. “I’m sorry.”

You refuse to even look at him as you give him the silent treatment. 

“I shouldn’t have been so cocky with the potion,” he continues. “I just wanted to seem like I knew what I was doing.”

You remained silent as you shifted through the box. 

Throughout the unnecessary hour George was taking to wipe down the tables, he continued to try and apologize or make conversation, but you still ignored him.

When you finished the file box, you closed the lid and pulled out a bit of parchment. You put the box on Snape’s desk, along with a note offering to continue to file to earn back the points you had lost the House, and you leave the room without a word. 

“Y/n!” George calls down the dungeon corridor, his voice echoing off the stone walls. 

You don’t respond and keep walking, but you hear his heavy footsteps running closer to you, until you feel a hand wrap around your wrist, sending sparks through your skin. You snatch your hand back instinctively, but he holds his grip

“Don’t touch me, Weasley,” you say punctuated. 

“Why won’t you talk to me?” He asks, almost yelling. 

“You’re not good, George Weasley,” you shout back. “Never have I ever gotten in trouble before. But you made me get detention! You don’t study, you don’t pay attention, you probably don’t even think! Please, just leave me alone.”

You twist your wrist from his grasp and turn up the stairs, walking away from him again.

You managed to avoid him for the most part, besides Potions, where you just refused to talk to him. 

One day, a few weeks after your detention, you’re sitting in the court yard wrapped in a blanket, leaning against a pillar as you read in the snow. You’re the only person in the courtyard, but you liked it that way. People had started congregating inside because of the cold, and the library and common room had become too crowded. 

You hear a group of feet crushing snow as they walk towards you, but you don’t look up, too enveloped in your book. 

“Hey, Y/l/n!” A cold voice jest. “What’s you doing out here all alone?”

You look up to see the school bully, Draco Malfoy laughing at you with his posse. He loved poking fun at everyone outside of the Slytherin house. 

“I’m reading,” you smile. “You should try it sometime. Maybe you’ll learn how not to be such an ass.” Your voice remains steady and polite as you speak. 

“How dare you!” He announces, and reaches towards you, pulling your blanket off of you, leaving you cold.

“Give it back!” You demand. 

“No.”

You open your mouth to speak, but a flare of red light comes over your shoulder and hits Draco in the chest, sending him several feet backwards, your blanket still in hand. The caster walks out from behind you and over to Draco on the ground. He pulls the blanket out of Draco’s grasp with difficulty, but kicks him in the side to get him to let go. Draco cries out in pain, his friends bustling away.

The caster turns towards you, and you see the red hair poking out from under his beanie, and the familiar face. George.

“Here,” he says softly, as he hands the blanket to you.

“Thank you,” you say simply, reaching for it, but before you can touch it, George pulls it back, and you sigh in frustration.

“Actually,” he starts. “I’ll give it back if you come with me and let me talk.”

You knew you weren’t getting out of this, so you stood up. “Let’s go then.”

He leads you up the the astronomy tower, and you look over the untouched white canvas of the grounds. “I’m sorry,” he continues. “I’m sorry I got you detention. I’m sorry about the bludger. I’m just sorry, for everything.”

“Okay,” you say.

“I really like you, and I know it’s obvious. I’ve never been so nervous around someone before. I’ve never felt like I needed to actually try to make a good impression, and when I did try, I fucked up and got us in trouble. I just don’t know how to act around you.”

“You really like me?” You ask.

“Yes, of course.”

“Then why did you ask Angelina to the ball?” You murmur. 

“I didn’t think you liked me. I was trying to just move on before I made anything worse, but then that made it worse. I heard you talking to Ron and them in the hall, and I heard you say it. I immediately cancelled the ball with her so I could ask you once I’ve apologized but you never let me. You’re all I can think about, Y/n.”

You look up into his soft eyes, and your heart melts. “I forgive you,” you mutter.

“Really?” He asks in disbelief.

“Yes,” you blush and look down at the grounds from the ledge as you avoid George’s eyes.

He clears his throat. “Will you, Y/n Y/l/n be my date to the Yule ball, and my date to everything else from here on. Will you please be mine?”

You couldn’t control the smile on your face as you looked back at him. “Under one condition,” you giggle. 

“Anything,” George pleads.

“Kiss me,” you say, building up your confidence to straighten your posture and look directly into his eyes.

“Definitely.”

George grabs your face softly and leans down, putting his soft lips on your own as you both smile ridiculously as the fireworks blow within the both of you.

[random-thought-depository]

Continuation from this post: some other “these events happened at about the same time or close together in history” things:

- The French Revolution happened shortly after the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution happened shortly after the French Revolution, and the big wave of revolution that freed Latin America from Spanish control happened shortly after the Haitian Revolution. I think this wasn’t a coincidence: these revolutions were connected!

- The first civilizations arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia at the end of the great drying of the Sahara and Arabia. Again, I think this wasn’t a coincidence! The drying climate meant people had to rely more on big labor-intensive irrigation works, which meant that cooperation and coordination on a large scale became more important. The great drying probably drove refugees into the Nile valley and the lands around the Tigris and Euphrates, increasing the population density of those regions. This would have meant even more reliance on labor-intensive large-scale irrigation, and also those extra people would have helped staff the work-gangs, work-shops, and armies of the new kings. The influx of refugees probably also meant a mixing of cultures, which probably stimulated technological, cultural, and institutional innovation.

- The peopling of the Americas and the first experiments with grain farming in the Middle East might have been happening at about the same time.

- The Norman conquest of England was within living memory at the time of the First Crusade.

- The Classical Maya period was 250-900 CE, roughly coinciding with the late Roman Empire and the Dark Ages in Europe. The collapse of the Classical Maya centers was during the 900s, about a century or two after Charlemagne’s time (IIRC the 900s CE is around the end of the Danelaw period in England).

- The moai (the big heads) of Easter Island aren’t ancient; they were built during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.

- New Zealand was peopled during the Middle Ages, IIRC some centuries after the peopling of Iceland. New Zealand was one of the last lands on Earth to be peopled.

- Lady Murasaki lived in the late 900s and early 1000s CE; a little before the Norman conquest of England. To me Heian-period and pre-Heian Japan feels like the Bronze Age, but it’s from a completely different period of history; it existed in the same world as Vikings and Charlemagne and the Tang Dynasty; I think that’s interesting. Speaking of Japanese history, the Japanese warring states period and the height of classic samurai feudalism was the 1400s and 1500s.

- Australia was peopled at least 30,000 years before the Americas, and Homo sapiens expansion into northern Eurasia seems to have taken much longer than Homo sapiens peopling of Australia. There’s a lesson in this: cold seems to have been a more daunting barrier than ocean. That makes sense in a way: the Homo sapiens out-of-Africa migrants were likely tropical/subtropical coast-dwellers, and they could have just followed the tropical/subtropical southern coast of Asia all the way to Java (which you could have walked to from Asia back then because sea levels were lower), never leaving warm coastal regions. After that they would have needed just one big innovation to reach Australia: sea-worthy boats. Adapting to the cold northern regions of ice age Eurasia would have required more radical changes to their tool-kit and lifestyle. I think something similar happened in the Americas: there are surprisingly old signs of human presence in South America, and I suspect what happened is the first Americans were fisher-whaler-beachcomber people who lived on a stretch of ice-free coast between the Pacific and the ice age North American glaciers, and as they expanded they mostly just followed the coast south, and they kept doing that until some of them reached Tierra del Fuego within maybe a few centuries. If an alien visited Earth around 13,500 BCE I think they might have found a few tens of thousands of people living along the west coast of the Americas from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and the rest of the Americas still almost uninhabited (maybe there’d be a few thousand people living in the inland hills of California and the inland jungles of Central America, but that’d be about it). Only the most adventurous early Americans moved inland, where they’d have to survive without the resources of the sea and the beach, and became the Clovis People and other inland early American hunter-gatherer cultures. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were humans living along the shores of the Straight of Magellan before there were humans living in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

A somewhat different but related thing: communicating the sheer length of ancient Egyptian history:

- Sargon the Great gets called the first empire-builder, but I think that title really should belong to Narmer, or whoever the first Pharaoh of a unified Egypt was. We often don’t think of Narmer as an empire-builder for the same reason we often don’t think of Qin Shi Huangdi’s great empire as an empire: the empire was so successful and enduring that it eventually started to look like a natural fact of human cultural geography. You know your empire has really succeeded when most people don’t think of it as an empire! Sargon the Great lived about 800 years after Narmer, so the difference in time between them is similar to the difference in time between Julius Caesar and Charlemagne.

- The Great Pyramids were built in the 2500s and early 2400s BCE, about 500 years after Narmer’s reign. This was early in Egyptian history! I think it’s interesting that the Egyptians did this huge construction project early in their history and never did anything like that again. I really wonder what happened there. Did building the Great Pyramids ruin the economy? Did the mobilization of the huge workforce needed to build the Great Pyramids stir up the disease pool and cause plagues (did something similar happen when Amarna was built and populated and did that contribute to the failure of the Atenist reformation?)? Anyway, like I said, the Great Pyramids were built relatively early in Egyptian history ... though the time difference between Narmer and the builders of the great pyramid was comparable to the difference in time between us and Columbus and Henry VIII!

- There were three most ancient centers of civilization that emerged at about the same time: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley Civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization collapsed around 2000 BCE and we don’t know much about it; we can’t read their writing. I think it’d be fascinating if we could learn more about the Indus Valley Civilization! Were they politically fragmented, like Mesopotamia, or were they a single state, like Egypt? There’s some evidence that might suggest the latter, but it’s impossible to know! So many unanswered questions!

- The Thera eruption that might have contributed to the decline of Minoan civilization happened around 1600 BCE. This was around the same time as the Hyksos rule in northern Egypt; if I’m reading my Wikipedia skimming right there’s a record of the Thera eruption recorded on a stelae set up by the Pharaoh who reconquered northern Egypt from the Hyksos!

- Tutankhamun lived in the mid-1300s BCE. Tutankhamun lived more than a thousand years after the Great Pyramids were built! The builders of the Great Pyramids were as distant from Tutankhamun as the Vikings are from us!

- And Cleopatra (the famous one, Cleopatra VII) lived about 1300 years after Tutankhamun! Tutankhamun was as distant from Cleopatra as Charlemagne is from us! And the Great Pyramids were about 2500 years old in Cleopatra’s time; their construction was about as distant from her as Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates are from us! As that meme says: Cleopatra lived closer to the construction of the moon rockets than the construction of the Great Pyramids.

Remember when I said Pharaonic Egypt and the US kind of remind me of each other? Well, the US is less than 250 years from its founding. 250 years from the founding of the unified Egyptian state they’d just recently stopped doing human sacrifice (the earliest Pharaohs were buried with human retainer sacrifices, about a century or so into the Pharaonic period they stopped doing that and switched to burying the Pharaohs with little dolls that were supposed to substitute for the servants) and they were just building the Step Pyramid of Djoser, just beginning the pyramid-building tradition that would culminate in the Great Pyramids centuries later.

Alternately, the other culture that really reminds me of Pharaonic Egypt is China, and its Narmer-equivalent lived after Alexander the Great. The Chinese still have about 800 years to go before they can say their civilization-state is as enduring as Pharaonic Egypt!

I really wonder if the Pharaonic Egyptian religion would still be going strong if Christianity and Islam hadn’t come along. It survived for so long!

[antoine-roquentin]

This year marks Harold “Hal” Rogers’s twenty-first consecutive electoral victory in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District, making him the second-longest-serving Republican in Congress. He rode into office on the wave of the Reagan Revolution in 1980, and the governing style he’s employed in the Fifth District—which covers the rural, mountainous, Appalachian region of southeastern Kentucky—can mostly be described as Reaganite: pro–War on Drugs, pro–prison expansion, anti-regulation of extractive industries, and pro-family. The congressman has had to improvise a little over the years in response to changes in the economy and political system, but he’s well-positioned to do so: as a former Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the elite “College of Cardinals” that manages the government’s budget, and the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, he’s one of the most powerful men in Washington. Rogers has extraordinary discretion over where and how the government exercises power domestically and overseas, especially within the border regions; he can coerce other lawmakers to support his policies by withholding funding; and, crucially, he can funnel tons of “pork” back to his home district.

If you were to mention that to the average American, however, you’d probably be met with confusion. Hal who? Most people, when they think of powerful politicians from Kentucky, think of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who over the last decade or so has singlehandedly reshaped how Congress functions, and has all but ensured the prioritization of corporate interests within the federal judiciary. So you’re telling me there’s another powerful congressman from Kentucky who has control over virtually every aspect of my life? That is indeed what I’m telling you, my friend, and it’s no coincidence that both of these men come from the mostly rural state of Kentucky.

How did Kentucky come to mean so much at the national level? McConnell’s story isn’t that compelling. He is deeply unpopular statewide, but every six years he hyper-focuses on a handful of places in the state—Paducah, the Cincinnati suburbs in Northern Kentucky, the rural counties around Louisville (his hometown), and the rural counties in southern Kentucky—and makes enough empty promises and assurances to carry him to victory. He then launders his success as a success story for all of Kentucky, claiming that it allows the state to punch above its weight at the national level against states like New York and California. His voters eat this up, and McConnell plays off of it to increasingly cringe results (see: “Cocaine Mitch.”) At the end of the day it’s a pretty standard story of electioneering, manipulation, and voter suppression; Kentucky consistently ranks among the bottom ten states in terms of “electoral integrity.”

But whereas McConnell is motivated by the long-term viability of corporate domination of the United States, Hal Rogers is motivated by the long-term viability of corporate and personal domination of southeastern Kentucky. Make no mistake that this benighted region—long one of the poorest in the country—is Rogers’s personal dominion, his fiefdom. The fact that his name is on just about everything you see should be enough evidence to support this claim. To enter and exit the region you have to travel on the Hal Rogers Parkway, which used to be the Daniel Boone Parkway until Rogers renamed it after itself. Want to take your family on a weekend getaway vacation? You can check out the Hal Rogers Family Entertainment Center in Williamsburg, which contains a wave pool, water slides, and a mini-golf course. Or perhaps you’re addicted to drugs? Rogers has just the thing for you: the Hal Rogers Appalachian Recovery Center, which has outposts all across the region.

This last “amenity” that Rogers so graciously offers—drug rehabilitation centers—is rich with irony. In 2003 he created a program known as Operation UNITE (Unlawful Narcotics Investigations, Treatment and Education). UNITE is a brilliant form of rural social control. It ruthlessly enforces drug abstention through the traditional methods of law enforcement—undercover policing, kicking down doors—and, at the same time, encourages community members to snitch on fellow community members who they suspect of being involved in drug activities. The result is that no one trusts anyone: everyone is a suspect, all of the time. UNITE is the sort of program that engenders alienation, making it less likely that people will mount meaningful political challenges against the region’s political institutions, such as Rogers himself.

But Rogers’s UNITE program is even more ingenious than that. It sweeps you up in raids and undercover stings, and then sends you to treatment (likely in a building with Rogers’s name plastered on it), and then uses you as an example to the rest of the community about the harms of drug abuse. You will become a poster child, an educator, a warning from the future: Do not become me; I was lucky enough to make it out alive, and even then it was only through the help and compassion of good old Hal Rogers. In other words, Hal giveth and Hal taketh away. He is simultaneously good cop and bad cop, or, if you’re feeling biblical, the Old Testament God of Vengeance and Wrath and New Testament God of Redemption and Forgiveness. If you’re a drug user in southeastern Kentucky, you will eventually come under his all-seeing eye.

Of course, if you do not make it to (and through) the rehabilitation stage, you can go to prison, in which Rogers is also deeply invested. When southeastern Kentucky’s coal economy started going south in the 1980s and ’90s due to mechanization caused by an increase in strip mining (facilitated by Rogers’s loosening of environmental regulations), Rogers became the biggest advocate for prison expansion in the region. During his career he’s brought no less than three federal prisons to his district, and he’s currently working on bringing a fourth, to Letcher County, right on the border of Kentucky and Virginia. Either in jail or on the anti-drug education circuit, your story will eventually be used for Hal Rogers’s personal glorification.

This does not mean that all power is consolidated within the person of Rogers, however. The intricate system that’s slowly grown to facilitate the expansion of drug courts, rehabilitation centers, jails that counties rely on for revenue, and prisons is its own network of feudal control and peonage. Hang around outside any county courthouse in eastern Kentucky for long enough and you’ll see, like I have, people begging judges to sign off on this or that paper granting them this or that level of re-entry into their community (previously restricted as a result of being caught with this or that drug). Or hang around outside any drug counseling office long enough and you’ll hear, like I have, people casually discussing which local judges are the strictest and which are the most lenient. A lot of people’s lives are tied up in a system that is ruled mostly by whimsy and fiat.

If and when Rogers ever kicks the bucket—and this will have to be the way he leaves office, because he will likely never be defeated at the ballot box—all this will have been his legacy. Not just the buildings and highways and rehabilitative centers with his name on them. Not just the prisons and the beefed-up law enforcement agencies. Not just the ominous office building in Somerset, known colloquially as the “Taj Ma-Hal,” which houses a number of nonprofits with boring names like “Center for Rural Development” that Rogers helped create in order to vacuum up federal grant money from agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission. It’s all these things, but it’s also something bigger: the remaking of rural political economy. Rogers’s model has been exported across the United States.

As the nation’s rural regions experienced deindustrialization, out-migration, drug-assisted suicide, or a combination of all the above over the last three or four decades, rural elites had to figure out a way to maintain control over their constituents. Many of them turned to Rogers’s example. For example, when Rogers launched UNITE in 2003, John Walters, then the White House drug czar, said that it would “serve as a model for the rest of the nation.” It doesn’t go by the name “UNITE” in every community, but if you go anywhere in rural America and listen long enough, you’ll hear the voices of people who are trapped within similar systems of manipulation, coercion, and foreclosure on the future. And you’ll also see, lording over them, the names and faces of men who have carved out their own kingdoms, which from the outside seem impervious to pressure from below. But that’s the thing about power: it doesn’t last forever, and it can always be beaten. It’s up to us to figure out how to do it.

[gravitascivics]

A PANTHEIST IN THE MIX

The purpose of this posting is to review, in a few words, the effect of Ralph Waldo Emerson – known to his acquaintances as Waldo – on the Transcendentalist movement in the US.  This account will be spotty but hopefully cover the importance of Emerson in advancing and, at times, inhibiting federalist values.  He initially set out to do his work in religious venues – he trained to be a minister – but in time he left that behind.

         Probably his most utilized stage was that of an essayist.  Originally, his efforts usually appeared as lectures that he then converted into written form.  His overall messages portrayed him as a champion of individualism and as a social critic.  As such, he portrayed an uncanny ability to foresee developments as he repeatedly set out to dispense good advice in relation to countervailing societal forces.  

In that effort, he described how and why those forces did what they did. For that, he enjoyed an expansive audience that grew not just across the nation but extended into Europe.   From his 1500 or so lectures, one can find the core of his thinking in the first two published collections of his essays, those being Essays:  First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844). A few of his well-known essays include “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “Experience”, “The Poet”, “Self-Reliance”, and his most famous piece, “Nature”.  

And underlying his main themes was his transcendent view and reliance on the role of intuition in determining one’s knowledge and the direction one takes in life.[1]  As a cited source puts it, using Emerson’s words,

… he explicitly identifies Transcendentalism as a form of philosophical Idealism. Emerson wrote:

As thinkers, mankind have ever been divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell…Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude. Everything real is self-existent. Everything divine shares the self-existence of Deity…[Kant showed] there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by way of experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms.[2]

         On more political topics, he espoused the potential of the individual and of his/her freedom to seek those potentials.  This individualism should not be seen as the one seen in the twenty-first century.  It was more a concern for the integrity of a person and his/her challenge to overcome his/her weaknesses or other obstacles in life.  

And in true Romantic spirit, he extoled the virtues of nature.  Some would consider his philosophic bent to eventually become a pantheist or pandeist.  He is quoted as saying, “In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.”[3]  His political contributions gained steam during the Civil War years.  

An antislavery person, he initially shied away from entering that arena.  But probably as a reaction to the number of his friends and family members being outspoken critics of the institution, he eventually joined the fray. Besides a series of lectures opposing slavery in 1837, he began taking a more active role in 1844.

Beyond giving speeches, he hosted John Brown in his home in Concord.[4]  During the war he met with Abraham Lincoln and upon meeting him, changed his estimation of the President.  His initial concern with Lincoln was that he was not as committed to ending slavery as he was in saving the Union.  His face-to-face meeting convinced him that his judgement was not accurate and became one of Lincoln’s great admirers.

So, on the pro-federalist side of the ledger, Emerson strove toward inclusion of blacks into the political partnership of the nation.  In that, he had no hesitation in promoting his belief in the need for a civil war and seemed to consider it as a rebirth of the nation.  On the not so federalist end of the scale was Emerson’s attraction to Thomas Carlyle.  Apparently, the Scot had a profound effect on Emerson.  

As alluded to earlier in this blog, Carlyle was a strong proponent of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon “race.”  In this, one can sense an exclusionary trait and the degree to which Emerson shared this belief is not clear.  Emerson wished for Carlyle to visit America and served as a sort of agent for the historian on this side of the ocean.  The two kept up an ongoing correspondence until Carlyle died in 1881.[5]

In this blogger’s opinion, Emerson did much to secularize American thought.  His opposition to slavery helped bring an end to that scourge on American federalism.  His travels, both domestic and in Europe, led him to meet just about everyone of any note in the literary as well as the political world of his time.  Early on, while living in St. Augustine, Florida, he even met a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Prince Achille Murat. They became close friends as they discussed the heady topics of the day such as religion, philosophy, sociology, and politics.[6]

That stay in Florida was where Emerson witnessed slavery firsthand and noted that on one of his outings to a Bible Society meeting, there was a slave auction taking place nearby. He is quoted as expressing, “One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with ‘Going, gentlemen, going!”[7]  

         The history of Emerson’s time and his influence betray much of American culture of the 1800s.  While his family’s background spanned the European experience in North America up to his time, he helped further define what the espoused political values of his countrymen should be.  In his efforts, he was more a force for liberating the prevailing federalist thought than adding to its parochialism.  In that, he helped Transcendentalism as a movement stay true to the nation’s basic moral stand in defining its political proclivities.

         Eventually given the title, Sage of Concord, he is judged to have upgraded the art of lecturing.  Reported are the later thinkers and writers who were influenced by Emerson’s work, and they include William James – who happened to be Emerson’s godson – and Nietzsche.  And despite his anti-establishment religious turn, he is credited by some as having a great influence on American theology.  With the focus this posting gives this great American lecturer/essayist, the blog ends its review of the Romantic/Transcendentalist movement in the US.

[1] David Boersema, “American Philosophy,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:  A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource (n.d.), accessed September 20, 2021, https://iep.utm.edu/american/#H2 .

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal entry, April 7, 1840.

[4] Len Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero:  Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens, GA:  University of Georgia Press, 2010). 

[5] Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson:  The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1995).

[6] Peter S. Field, Ralph Waldo Emerson:  The Making of a Democratic Intellectual (Lanham, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 

[7] Richardson, Emerson, 76.