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queerderpyturtle · 3 years

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some old rambles about discord and starswirl that I dug up

I been thinkin. Bout Discord and Starswirl. And how they probably knew each other. And what their relationship could've been. And what that means for the rest of their arcs in the show.

From what we know (and what I remember) Discord came into power after Starswirl and the pillars were sent to Limbo, but Celestia and Luna started ruling Equestria sometime between those two events, because they were too young to remember or care about the other pillars, but they banished Discord.

We don't know a lot about Discord's past, but I imagine that when he first came to Equestria (at which point I assume he was fairly young by draconequus standards), he wasn't exactly given a warm welcome. Ponies were probably absolutely terrified of this horse-headed, bat-winged, lion-pawed, snake-tailed freak of nature, and there's a good chance they would've driven him out of town full force. His first taste of ponykind was rejection.

So, later, he tries again. He makes himself a pony disguise-- a handsome unicorn stallion named Atlas-- and sets off to learn more about Equestria. And it works! He's able to make friends, live amongst ponies, and study Equestria magic. He actually gets pretty good at doing through his unicorn horn, so much so that he manages to get into a prestigious magic school for gifted unicorns. "Atlas" is of course still a troublemaker, though. He pulls pranks, annoys his teachers, breaks the rules, and just generally has no respect for authority. And why should he? The entire society that Equestria is built on is corrupt beyond all belief, stuck in its ways, and downright hostile towards any creature outside of it. They didn't deserve his damn respect. Equestria itself was fairly new as well, and the ponies themselves were still getting used to each other. It was all one giant powderkeg, and Atlas was honestly excited to see what would happen when it went off. So he stuck around, if only to cause more chaos in this personal playpen country of his. If he wasn't the best student in all of his classes, his teachers probably would've strangled him after a day.

And then one day, he found himself in a class with the famous Odin Starswirl, a magically gifted unicorn with a penchant for proving others wrong and keeping a clear head while doing it. He was proper, eloquent, studious, respectable-- a perfect pony for Atlas to torment. Except it turns out that Odin is ridiculously, insufferably hard to annoy. When Atlas knocked over his books, or spilled water on his cloak, or made fun of his sloppy hornwriting, Odin simply responded with a sigh and a quick cantrip to fix whatever the stallion had ruined with his antics. This did not please Atlas at all. He spent more time hanging around Odin than he did hanging out with his more troublesome buddies, just to try and get a rise out of him. But he never could. If anything, they were becoming... friends. Atlas's biting remarks turned into light-hearted jabs and playful scoldings.

"Odin, for heaven's sake, if you don't take a break from studying to shave for once in your damn life, I'm going to have to start calling you Starswirl the Bearded!"

His destruction of property turned into casual acts of kindness.

"Yes, I brought your saddlebag. I knew you'd forget it, you scatterbrain. We're lucky you even remember to eat."

His contempt for Odin's huffy nature turned into giving the unicorn an easy out for boring social events hosted by his equally uppity parents.

"C'mon, Stars, let's get out of here. I know a place nearby that sells elderberry tea."

"You know I can't leave. This is an important party."

"Important to whom, exactly, my dear?"

"To my parents!"

"Your parents. Well, last time I checked, they weren't you."

"...Fine. Thirty minutes, and then you're bringing me back."

Before long, Odin was regularly sneaking off to join Atlas and his friends on their escapades. He found himself strangely drawn to the unicorn, in spite of-- or maybe because of his rebellious and carefree nature. He was so different from the ponies Odin was used to, so sure of himself, so headstrong. Odin would be a fool to say he wasn't slowly getting attached to the scoundrel.

Atlas noticed this, of course. He was honestly surprised! Who knew a straight-edged young scholar like Odin would be so willing to stray from the path of monotony? And that was all Atlas wanted. To cause a little chaos in Odin's life. It wasn't as if there were moments in which he looked at the unicorn and considered giving up his whole scheme to enjoy a happy life alongside his... friend? Companion? Fellow associate? Lord, what even where they? Atlas had never really had a friend that was interested in any part of him other than the chaotic part, and Discord hadn't had any friends at all. He took a leap of faith one day to ask Odin if they were, in fact, friends, and Odin responded with an aloof "Yes, I do believe so." And that was that, wasn't it? He had a friend. A real friend.

Over the next few years, Odin and Atlas became inseparable. It was a thing to see, the two of them trotting down the streets of Canterlot together. They couldn't have been more different, from the way they walked to the way they spoke, but they were as close as ponies could get. Odin gave Atlas a safe place to practice magic, study Equestrian history, and discuss the library's old scrolls and texts from ancient unicorns. Atlas gave Odin an out from his mundane life as a trophy child of the wealthy Starswirl family. When Odin started tutoring two unicorn fillies with promising skills in arcane magics, Atlas was the first of Odin's friends he introduced them to (the fillies lovingly started referring to the stallions as their honorary uncles). When Atlas accidentally used too much sticking potion in a prank and stuck one of his teachers to the side of the school for three days, Odin helped him sneak into the Starswirl mansion to hide, scolding him between laughs the whole way. They each saw more in each other than the average pony could ever see; Odin was more than a prodigy, and Atlas was more than an annoyance.

And if there were, perhaps, by some miracle, some hint of... romance beneath their friendship that neither side would admit to, well. That was their own business. If they enjoyed cuddling up on the couch to read from the same book, nopony needed to know. If they relished each "accidental" brush of hooves or tails when they walked together, nopony would be any the wiser. If Odin longed for the day when Atlas would use those strong forearms of his to pin the stallion against the nearest wall and just kiss him already, and felt more alive than he'd ever felt in his life when Atlas finally did...

Then maybe that was just fine. And for a while, it was. But there was always that itch at the back of Atlas's mind, that knowledge that their relationship was fleeting, because it was all, in truth, based on a lie. If Odin found out who Atlas really was, what Atlas really was, it would all crumble to pieces like a biscuit that had been left out in the sun. Atlas... no, Discord hated that the thought of losing Odin-- a simple pony whose life was a speck of dust in his immortal existence, who would be a pile of ashes in the ground before Discord had even had his second molt-- made him so unreasonably upset. He'd known going into this that becoming invested in the lives of the ponies in Equestria was foolish. He'd never meant for it to get this far. He'd come here to futz with the government a bit, maybe start a few riots or terrorize a few queens. He never wanted to find Odin. So why wasn't he willing to let him go?

Shit, he really was in too deep.

And yet, Atlas and Odin found themselves ever-so-slowly, but ever-so-surely falling in love.

But nothing gold can stay.

Odin had always known Atlas was a bit of an anarchist. It was one of the things he admired about the stallion-- his ability to let go of the norms that Equestria had built for itself and be his own pony. The problem was that Atlas seemed to have a problem with how Equestria treated creatures who weren't ponies. Griffons, yaks, kirin, and the like. Equestria had never been a big trading country, or a big socializing-with-other-nations country. They kept to themselves. Of course, this meant that xenophobia was rampant, and that the fear of the outside world was instilled into the hearts of almost every pony there. But why should Atlas care so much?

Odin asked him as much when the two stallions were studying together in Odin's room, and Atlas became noticeably more tense. He gave Odin a simple "I just think it's wrong," hoping to avoid the subject, but Odin pressed him for more details. Sure, Equestria was problematic, but all in all, it was a good country. Was there really anything so bad about wanting to keep it the way it was? Atlas tried to keep himself from snapping, tried to keep himself from saying something he'd regret, but hearing these things from a pony he loved hurt him deeply.

"It's not about tradition or preservation, Odin. It's about the fact that Equstria has never been willing to change. Before the unifications of the species, it was conflict between the pony species. After, it was conflict between the classes. Now, it's conflict between countries. Just because the problems are external doesn't mean they aren't there," Atlas told him.

"But it isn't exactly a pressing matter. It hardly effects us at all. I guess I just don't understand," Odin replied.

"Of course you don't."

It was said so quietly that Odin couldn't quite tell if he'd been meant to hear it, yet with such venom that he couldn't ignore it. He chanced a confused look and a "What?"

Atlas stood. "Of course you don't," he repeated. "You're the perfect example of a high-class, magically advanced, want-for-nothing unicorn pony. You're perfectly content to live in your little bubble of mediocrity, never trying to do anything to change the world around you. You think there's nothing you can do to help others, so you don't even try. You think they'll sort themselves out. You're complacent, Odin. You've always been."

"Complacent! And just what is wrong with that? I'm doing my best in my own life and I have no responsibility to try and fix the lives of others! Is it so wrong to focus on myself?"

"Of course not! But you can't just pretend that you're the only one with problems! I see it every day, Odin. You act like you're on top of the world, like you're above feeling sorry for others. You don't even care about them. About me!"

Odin looked hurt. "Atlas, I-- of course I care about you! You mean everything to me!"

"And just how much would it take to change that? Telling you my real name isn't Atlas? Telling you I'm not from Equestria? Telling you I look like this?!"

In a flash, Atlas removed all the disguise spells he had on himself, leaving him-- Discord-- in his true form. A long, sleek body covered in brown fur. The misshapen head of a goat, framed by a shaggy black mane and two short horns. Wings, legs, and a tail that had all been taken from different animals, stuck together like a gruesome collage. Odin's eyes trailed up the creature's body slowly, trying and failing to comprehend what he was seeing. He began to back up.

Discord could feel each step he took like knives driving into his heart. Odin was afraid.

The draconequus scoffed. "You're all the same."

"A-Atlas, I..."

"Discord. My name is Discord. I am a draconequus from the tribe of the western Badlands, sent to Equestria to study its magic. When I first came here, I was avoided like the plague. Ponies wanted nothing to do with me. They saw what they were told to see in me-- a monster. A hideous, murderous, blood-thirsty monster. They threw me out because I was different."

Odin was silent for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice trembled. "I think I n-need some time to... to process all of this. Alone."

Discord couldn't have stopped the pain he felt from showing on his face if he'd somehow managed to summon all the magic on the planet. He gritted his teeth, blinked back tears, and disappeared in a shower of sparks.

It was the last conversation he would have with Odin for a millennium.

That night, Odin lay in bed, his mind racing, working overtime to try and figure out what in Tartarus had just happened. Firstly, he and Atlas had just had their first real lovers' spat. Except that those typically didn't lead to one of the ponies involved revealing that he was a creature from a faraway land, but whatever. Secondly, "Atlas" was a draconequus named Discord. That would take some getting used to, of course, but it was nothing he couldn't handle. Thirdly, Atlas-- who was actually Discord-- had stormed out in a huff without saying goodbye. Well, that's just how things were sometimes. Nothing to lose sleep over.

When he awoke the next morning, the first though this mind supplied him with was, "Oh sweet merciful heavens I've ruined everything." He rushed to school early, hoping to find his friend (Boyfriend? Lover? Shit, I love him and I just cast him out like an old dish towel), but the stallion was nowhere in sight. Odin asked around, tried everything to get into contact with Atlas/Discord, but nothing came up. He had disappeared off the face of the planet.

Instead of dealing with all the emotional turmoil that came with that situation, Odin threw himself into his studies. His magic grew stronger and stronger, fueled by rage and pain and sadness. He pushed Celestia and Luna to become powerful sorcerers like himself, pouring every hour that he didn't spend practicing magic himself into teaching them. He tried to forget about Discord entirely, and move on. He didn't need some handsome bad-boy keeping him sane to be successful. He only needed himself. That was all he would ever need. Odin was gone. There was only the great and honorable Starswirl the Bearded.

When the sirens invaded Equestria, he agreed to help defeat them. When Stygian came to him looking for friendship that Starswirl hadn't even offered to the other "pillars," he turned him away coldly. When he realized the only way to defeat the Pony of Shadows was by sending the seven of them into limbo, he refused, at least at first. But the citizens of Equestria persisted. He was the great Starswirl, he had a duty to protect them and keep Equestria safe. He tried to tell them that the consequences of the spell were too drastic, but they would not listen. Starswirl had no choice but to go through with it.

Discord, meanwhile, had been staying on the outskirts of Equestria, brooding and cursing Odin's name. When he found out that Odin had vanished, however, and the circumstances of his disappearance... well, he wasn't happy. Despite everything, he still loved the idiot, and he had never wanted something so terrible to happen to him. Odin would have never agreed to something like that without being pushed by the Equestrian citizens. What right did they have to decide who lived and who died? Why did they get to sacrifice their most beloved sorcerer for their own safety when there were other options? Was this the price they paid for harmony?

That wouldn't do. That simply wouldn't do at all. If these pitiful excuses for equines thought the pony of shadows was a threat to their delicate balance, he would show them true chaos. He dethroned the country's leader, took over, and made the ponies of Equestria suffer like he did.

And then Celestia and Luna came along. When had they gotten so big? So powerful? How had they grown wings? Were they seriously going to try and take him down? Lulu and Celly, the sweet little fillies who had once made him flower crowns and taught him songs and invited him to tea parties. They were going to try and make him surrender. How adorable. He wasn't going to fight them, of course-- he still held a great affection for them, no matter how long he'd been gone. He would let them do their little song and dance, and them send them on their way.

Of course it was hard for the sisters, too. They had looked up to Discord back in the day, he and Starswirl both. Now they were using the magic that Starswirl had taught them to defeat someone he had once loved. Someone he probably still loved. But freedom is never free, and the sisters were resigned to their fate. They harnessed the power of the elements of harmony, turned Discord to stone, and hoped silently that someday, somehow, he would return to them, and he and Starswirl would find each other again.

#Mlp #mlp discord #mlp starswirl #Starswirl the bearded #mlp Fanfic #fanfic #felt like throwing this in here too

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streets-in-paradise · 4 years

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Family Matters

Troy (2004) reader insert fanfiction - Part 5

The option to vinculate links on words is not working right now for me, i don’t know why. I will add the links to the previous parts later. For now, all can be found in the Troy (2004) tag of my blog.

Word Count: 2.858

Characters: Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, Myceneaean Princess Reader.

Relationships: Family relationships of the House of Atreus, Agamemnon and Achilles’ rivality.

Warnings: Agamemnon and Menelaus being dickheads, hints of casual sexism.

Summary: Agamemnon finds out about his daugther’s new friendship and his brother tries to stop him from making a big deal about it.

Disclaimers: As i explained before, i try to follow Troy’s characterizations of most of the characters as much as i can. The Atrides are going to be douchebags because that’s how the movie portrays them. I just discovered i have lots of fun writing about this two scumbags, this was super fun to write. I felt them like the fun kind of scumbags while doing this.

Tags: @yerevasunclair @hrisity12

Thanks for reading!!

Once the celebrations concluded and the guests started to return to their homelands the princess of Mycenae begged her father to let her stay in Sparta for a longer while instead of returning with him to their kingdom. Agamemnon didn't find major inconvenients on her request. He seemed pretty pleased with the image of family unity that the friendship of his daughter and his sister in law was reflecting. As long as Menelaus could be able to keep her under his watch and bring her back when she would wish it, he didn't have issues against it. For once, he didn't have anything to criticize.

They discussed the topic early because she wanted to make sure of having enough time to convince him in the case of getting a straight negatory as first reply. She did it shortly before saying goodbye to Odysseus and Penelope, so she would be able to count with her biggest supporters in case of need. Before leaving, the king of Ithaca reminded her in a teasing tone to keep going with the good behaviour. The queen showed her gratitude for the help she was providing to her cousin. She hugged both of them with a great amount of enthusiasm and love.

The situation became more complicated a short while after. Achilles was leaving the same day, joining his friend in the first stages of his travel. Without any consideration and staying true to his carefree style, he personally greeted the princess in front of her father.

It was then when the king found out about their meeting.

" Odysseus introduced us." she tried to excuse herself after seeing the horrified expression in her father's face. Achilles was trying to act in a cautious way because he didn't want to upset her, but the gesture was enough to make Agamemnon's blood boil and it was visible in his reaction. " It was just a formal introduction, very brief." she lied.

" I imagined it was a possibility. I wonder why I wasn't informed about it?" the king recrimined her, looking at her with a deadly serious stare.

" We didn't consider it necessary. " Achilles added. " As she said, it was very brief. Although, i felt i needed to approach her for a proper goodbye."

" Since when do you have good manners? You are a killer beast."

" I can be nicer when i want to be."

Anticipating a new fight, she interrupted them in an attempt to calm them down.

" There is no need for hostilities."

" I didn't give you permission to speak." her father shut her up.

" You should, your rulership would be more stable if you listened to her from time to time. She is very clever and she loves her country. She told me some very interesting things about it, her eloquence makes you feel curious. She does a better job than you in selling off your unity ideal. I have the feeling that she could rule the country better than you. '' Achilles mocked him.

She wished she could laugh openly at the comment.

" Like if you knew anything about rulership. You are nothing more than an insolent soldier!!!" Agamemnon replied, emphasizing the last sentence.

Before the argument could start to escalate they were interrupted by Menelaus. She felt relieved because all the work would not rely on Odysseus again.

" What's the problem, brother? He is just teasing you." the spartan king commented in a relaxed tone. " Great joke, very appropriate. Polite but innocent. I'm not entirely sure of which one of you is supposed to insult more."

" Why would it be insulting to me? " she asked, trying to hide her annoyance.

" Because it is so irrelevant that it's funny. '' Menelaus started to laugh." If he truly wanted to compliment you he should have said something about your face or your hair, he could have praised anything else instead of your talent with words. You are not a diplomat, you are a young princess. That's not how you talk to a girl, that's how you close a negotiation. If all he has to say about you is that you talk a lot then he doesn't have anything too valuable. If I was your father I would be very calm about it. "

" To praise a woman's intelligence is like to value a bird for its feet, absolutely pointless." Agamemnon added. " I must assume he is in the mood for strange jokes. "

" Take it as you prefer, but I wasn't talking to you. " the warrior replied, as sharply as usual.

The girl felt touched by his implícit defense.

" It was an honour and a pleasure to meet you. I wish you good luck and a safefull return to your home."

" You don't need to worry for him, darling. Danger itself is afraid of him. " Menelaus joked , interrupting them again.

" I'm as used to danger as your uncle is to chaze girls young enough to be your cousins. "

Instead of taking him seriously, the king of Sparta laughed again.

" You are a madman, but you never fail to amuse me. I think that the real reason why you two don't get along is because my brother doesn't get your sense of humour. He is a very serious man, always has been. "

His niece was very happy because she guessed Achilles said that sharp commentary as a hint for her. From the many they had over the week, at least he remembered their deepest conversation. He took the bother of acting as her voice, saying to Menelaus at least a bit of everything she wished she could yell at him. It was a beautiful, kind gesture, more than she ever expected of him.

She would have shown herself in absolute awe if it wasn't for the rampant rage she felt after witnessing her uncle laughing at something that would have enraged him if it would have been said by her. Pretending to keep engaged in the conversation, she defended Agamemnon. She hated to do it, but it was necessary to look less partial.

" The weight of the crown makes him more wary but he has his moments."

" It is the first reasonable thing i heard from you so far." he replied, with a bit of sarcasm." Go with your aunt... NOW!!"

The young lady obeyed because she had no other choice. Without daring to emit a single sound, her gaze followed Achilles's one last time in a silent goodbye. He smiled at her with the same intention.

She had to stand a long nagging session afterwards. Once the public gaze was no longer a concern Agammenon was free to show all his disgust and disappointment, threatening about how he was going to drag her back to Mycenae and lock her in the palace until she learned how to behave.

She barely listened to him, her focus was almost entirely centered in her happy thoughts about Achilles. She was thinking of his beautiful blue eyes, his sweet smile, how much she enjoyed his company and how amazing he was for defending her in front of the biggest authorities of the place. He was so subtle that neither Agamemnon or Menelaus noticed anything. It felt like a last secret gift from him, something only them understood.

Nothing else mattered anymore. Not in a hopeless way but in a happy one instead. She was there pretending to care while keeping the happiness in her mind. It was the strangest and most amazing sensation.

Her uncle was trying to defend her, but that didn't matter as well. She knew he was doing it for his own selfish reasons. He needed her there so she could stay to keep Helen calm, helping her to adapt and teaching her to ignore how much she hated him. She was going to use him for her own reasons as well, making him believe she was helping him when in fact her only objective was to protect Helen from him.

" Look at how happy she is. I can't be more pleased, I would love to have her around some more time" Menelaus was claiming.

" SHE SHAMED ME!!! DO YOU WANT TO PRAISE HER FOR WHAT SHE DID TO ME ??" his brother complained, yelling annoyingly.

" Achilles was going to find another way to laugh one way or another. That's how he is, you don't need to punish her for it. "

" Can you stop protecting her? We always face the same situation. She does something wrong and you want me to ignore it. Why was she talking to Achilles in the first place???"

" Because we were in a party, a place where it is expected for you to meet people, and we were introduced to each other? " she answered, trying to reflect some logic.

" An introduction shouldn't last more than the time and words required to say your name and rank."

" I wanted to make you look good in front of him. As you always say, I'm representing you. You wouldn't have liked me to act rude, you say it looks terrible in a woman. Some casual talk is needed to keep the appearances. He is important to you, I needed to keep him happy. " she defended herself.

" Circunstancies force me to need of him, he is not important. You don't have to make him feel important. It is the worst thing you can do. Do you have any idea of how hard it is for me to deal with his ridículous pretensions???? "

" You didn't give me proper instructions on what to do. I had to guess and I did what i would had done in any formal meeting. "

" YOU TREATED HIM LIKE A KING!! He is nothing but a soldier!! You don't owe him any sort of formality, kindness or attention. He is nothing to you, NOTHING!" Agamemnon emphasized.

Menelaus did his best to soften his speech.

" What your father tries to say is that he thinks a soldier, despite his fame and recognition, doesn't deserve the same treatment you would give to a royal. A lady of your position shouldn't bother with him, not even regarding positive impressions. That kind of behaviour, even with good intentions on your part, feeds his idea of considering himself higher and greater than his general and king. " he explained to her in a condescending way, like if she was completely ignorant on the matter. " You can't treat him like you would treat Odysseus. It feeds his ego and that makes things harder for your father.”

" I just tried to be nice. I heard he is a bad tempered hero who gets easily offended. " she fakely apologised.

Menelaus was smiling at her with his usual enthusiasm. It hurted her a bit to not be able to correspond it but, in her cheerful state, fake it was easier than ever.

" I know, you did good." he praised her." It's not your fault, you weren't sure of how to react. Nobody prepared you for it."

" NOW IT IS MY FAULT??? WHY DID YOU HAD TO INVITE HIM???" Agamemnon complained, hysterically.

" Have you seen my wife? She is the prettiest thing i have ever seen. I wanted her to be seen by everyone, you can't blame me. I bet not even Achilles himself had a woman as beautiful as mine. I had to ask him myself."

" Did you actually ask him? His niece questioned him, laughing a bit and hiding her awkward reaction. Something of that did make her laugh for sure. Both kings were talking of Achilles like if he was a nobody that didn't matter, yet Menelaus had the need of proving himself in front of him. He made him come to his wedding so he could satisfy his masculine needs using Helen as a symbol. He wanted to show off to a godlike handsome man desired by many women that he got a particularly splendid woman he could only be able to dream of having. She was very amused while hearing his response.

" Sure i did. He had to recognize I was right. There is no woman on this lands as gorgeous as mine. We may have our differences but nobody denies that. It's the only fact every greek agrees with. "

" A good symbol of unity, the best idea you came up with lately. " she added, keeping the facade of cheerful approbation.

" You always get me so quickly. That's my girl!!" he replied, hugging her sideways.

" I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR PRETTY WIFE, MENELAUS! THAT'S NOT THE POINT NOW!!" Agamemnon kept shouting.

" Brother, you know i follow and support all your choices but you don't need to question her now. She had good intentions. "

" Intentions don't justify terrible results. MY DAUGHTER , OF ALL PRINCESSES, WAS THE ONE TREATING HIM WITH HONOURS!! "

" I already told you i'm sorry. What do you want me to do? Insult him the next time I see him?" she joked, fed up of his stupidity.

"Let's hope there will be no next time. " her father assured her. " I try very hard to gradually trust you in the spaces a woman of your age should start attending. I know it is important but you keep bringing me more headaches. You are my daughter, ACT AS SUCH!"

" Ajax says I'm lovely." she excused herself.

" I CAN'T GET YOU MARRIED TO A BRUTE FROM AN INSIGNIFICANT KINGDOM!!"

That was all he seemed to care about, his only obligation as a father. She was so relaxed that she barely cared about the mention of that delicate issue. Her good mood was a good push to keep inventing excuses to delay the talk.

" You have plenty of time to think about it but the world is not going to be conquered by itself. Soon you will rule every corner, being crowned as the greatest emperor of our history. I will be swimming in a sea of suitors, maybe even bigger than Helen's. This little incident will feel funny, we will be so powerful that men would embarrass themselves in front of me to get my approbation regardless of my behaviour. "

" Did you hear that? She is proud of you" Menelaus teased.

" Of course i am. My dear father is the greatest conqueror this world has ever seen. Free cities tremble to the mention of his name. " she exaggerated to flatter him. As always, she was going to get what she wanted with lies. " I know some people like to spread lies and exaggerations claiming that you would be nothing without Achilles but the truth is that he would be nothing without you. You made him who he is, that ungrateful bastard is becoming a legend because he is fighting for you." She said exactly what he wanted to hear, knowing she would get a positive response.

" That's what i always say but nobody listens!! Nestor and Odysseus expect me to stand back and accept his pressures, your uncle thinks everything is a joke. That man doesn't respect me, he never listens to me! He is a threat to my position as commander of the army, I can't allow him to do as he pleases. What kind of example is that to other soldiers? To the kings whose armies are under my command???"

" A seed of rebellion, you can't hold a weapon you can't control. That's why you do your best to keep him at bay. " she reassured him. " I'm sorry if my intervention ruins your plans. I tried to be a pleasant company to show off and make you proud. "

Agamemnon was backing off slowly. He never used to make his changes of mind evident. She noticed it because his expression, still severe, didn't show the same rage anymore.

" I can let it pass... for now," he sentenced.

She gave him her sweetest fake smile, pleased with the outcome of her manipulation.

" You are the best."

" Don't make me regret it. "

" You never asked how the meeting with Achilles felt for me. '' she reminded him, trying to stay on his good side. " He is the most insufferable vain man I have ever met. He thinks he is the best thing that happened to mankind since the flame of Prometheus. I don't know how you stand him. I deceived him because making him feel important was all I could do to keep him calmed. "

Her lie amused both kings and they laughed in approbation.

The young lady considered the discussion concluded in her favour. Explicit recognition was impossible, but she read it in their attitudes. Usually, hostilities ceasing and the matter being dismissed was the clearest sign. Disengaging was their way of losing without admitting it. They simply changed the subject and continued as always. She didn't even need to ask again if she could stay in Sparta, the agreement was implicit between both brothers.

She left the family meeting with airs of triumph, secure of her possibilities. She managed to deceive Agamemnon and Menelaus at the same time. Her ability to fake was intact after all. As she handled both sons of Atreus at once, she started to feel perfectly capable to keep doing it with just one of them for the sake of Helen's wellbeing.

#troy (2004)#troy 2004 #troy #troy 2004 fanfiction #troy fanfiction #agamemnon #achilles #menelaus #brian cox #brad pitt #brendan gleeson #reader insert fanfiction #period drama movies

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piratemadi · 4 years

Note

I would like to hear the Silvermadi backstory please

i put it under the cut cuz it got long LMAOO

madi went to a state school in missouri for undergrad and then got into a masters program at yale. in late 2001, silver decides to leave new york city where he’s been living for the last few years in part bc theres a lot of hostility to him in this particular time in history in this particular city lol so he packs his bag and just starts wandering around. he isn’t originally going to stay in new haven for long bc he generally prefers big cities but he meets madi and he doesn’t have anywhere else to be so basically just week by week he considers leaving or staying and he has plenty of reasons for both but madi always seems to sway it towards staying. part of it is that he can’t really figure out how someone out of his league as madi to genuinely like him and he kind of knows that it wont happen again

madi is really enjoying her work and her classes but its also kind of fatiguing to be putting so much of her time and energy into such an elitist pwi as yale. and silver honestly starts as a fling for her but he’s such a comfort to her that soon they’re more or less exclusive. he’s also one of the most interesting people madi’s ever met like he has all these crazy stories and sometimes he just pulls out a new language she’s never heard him speak (”where the hell did you learn mandarin?” “oh, you know”) and somehow he always manages to surprise her when she asks him thoughtful questions. and she sees how he talks to other people, how he charms them (how nobody else is ever really surprised by him, because he tells them exactly what they want to hear from him), and it’s exciting for her that she seems to be the only person to know him

so pure circumstance throws them together, and theyre completely head over heels for each other within six months. by their one year anniversary (which like they dont really Have? because they never officially went official. but it’s in november, madi’s pretty sure) silver is actually starting to think in the long term w madi, which he has never done w anyone in his life. they move in together when madi’s lease w her roommate runs out, and it’s paradise, at first. (”you should teach me yoruba.” “teach you yoruba? why?” “so i can impress your dad when i meet him.” “it’s the 21st century, john, impressing my dad isn’t what relationships are about anymore.” “okay, fine, then teach it to me so i can teach it to our kids.” she teaches him yoruba. he picks it up stupid fast.) (even now, after everything, they still speak it to each other sometimes, and they do teach it to their kid.)

it’s coming up on the end of madi’s masters program in mid 2003, and silver is buzzing with all kinds of plans. he (rightfully) figures they’ll be out of new haven the second she has her degree, but he has these ideas for a life together, about seeing the country and then making a bunch of money and settling down for a white picket fence life. he doesn’t really seem to understand what she’s even doing at yale in the first place, and her work seems to factor only peripherally into his plans. madi keeps quiet at first even though she knows that silver’s imagining of their life together is nothing like hers, because she also knows that once she says something she wont be able to take it back, and all this is going to end.

and it does. silver walks it all back the second she tells him what kind of life she’s planning, but that isnt what she wants from him. she looks at him and she says “be honest with me. dont just tell me what i want to hear. Do you think that we want the same thing?” he looks her right in the eye and he lies to her. they break up that night.

when madi leaves new haven a few weeks later, it’s the prettiest summer silver’s ever seen. he hates it. madi, wistful and sad, sends him a postcard that says “look me up if you’re ever in town.” on the front, there’s a picture of the lake of the ozarks. so silver starts all over again. he puts all his things in the trunk of his shitty car and he heads to missouri in late summer.

when he finally reaches madi’s town, he cant bring himself, at first, to look her up. he looks for familiar, crowded places, but in this little town he can only find a couple dilapidated bars. still, silver’s good at this, so he ingratiates himself to the owner of danny’s bar and gets to know everyone who passes through. when he finally gets the nerve to go see madi, she seems happy. he tells her he misses her, that he wants her back, and she gets upset. she says the postcard was friendly, and nothing more, but if he can’t understand that, well, they shouldn’t even be friends. truthfully, she misses him, but that’s easier to bear when she’s home with all her old family and friends, and she assures herself she’s made the right decision as she watches him drive off.

so silver leaves, and finds himself at his new friend’s house on the edge of town. week by week, he considers leaving or staying, and he has plenty of reasons for both, but max always seems to sway it towards staying.

#damn...real tragedy of that fic was silvermadi tbh!#to make a life #asks

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pricechecktranslations · 5 years

Text

OSS: Crime; Chapter 3-Project “Ma” -Adam-

Original Sin Story: Crime infomine under the cut

Scene 1

Just a reference to the song—Project “Ma” was a failure, yada yada.

Scene 2

From a young age Adam has had primarily two strong emotions: Loneliness and anger at the world.

When he was tossed in a river as a baby, a whale took him into its mouth and deposited him at the coast, where he was found by a fisherman. The only thing he had on him was a small bottle he was carrying. A piece of parchment inside read “Adam Moonlit”—so they assumed that was his name. He lived a relatively peaceful life for about five years, though he doesn’t remember that time well.

One night, his home (I think this may have been the orphanage he mentioned) was destroyed in a tsunami (killing a whole bunch of people, possibly the other orphans). Adam somehow survived off of beached fish, making a crude home out of rubble. Every so often, the white whale that saved him (though he didn’t have any way of remembering that) would appear to keep him from being too lonely.

One day, Adam asks the whale’s name, and he hears it reply (it doesn’t show what the whale says, noting Adam could be hallucinating), learning its name is Catherine (katoriinu). He keeps talking to the whale, thinking of it as his mother (and then there’s this heartbreaking part where he’s just asking it questions, which devolve into demands to know why he’s alone and abandoned). Adam does not grow up well.

Scene 3

Adam, armed with a harpoon, reacts with hostility when Horus (who wears glasses) shows up before him one day (I think he is still five at this point, or perhaps six), as most of the people who show up are hostile to him and steal from him. Horus isn’t bothered and tells him to relax. He says he is here to adopt Adam on the orders of his mother. Excited, Adam gets into the carriage with him.

Just then, Catherine pops out of the ocean and calls to him in his head, saying that Horus is lying and won’t reunite him with his mother. Horus says that Adam is being tricked by Catherine, as she is a familiar of Held (who is, of course, still viewed as an evil god). She can’t deny that she used to be a forest spirit (a small fish one), which enrages Adam.

He throws his harpoon, and it strikes her. She tries to say something to him to calm him down, but he cuts her off, ranting about how it’s obvious she isn’t really his mother. Horus and Adam leave her, and head to the capital.

Scene 4

Of course, Horus says Adam can’t see his mother immediately. So he ends up living with Horus in the research facility (I guess it has living quarters for the both of them?). Eventually Adam becomes Horus’ adopted son. He would always brush it off as Adam needing to study more, to work harder, as he can’t meet with her as he is now. Adam believes him because Horus is very persuasive.

Adam doesn’t feel like a human being the way that he’s raised. He gets only what he needs in terms of food and clothing, and is only allowed to leave the facility when Horus orders him to go shopping—he doesn’t want for things like knowledge and shelter (all he does is study, really) but he is severely deprived emotionally.

When Adam grows up he becomes more persistent in asking about his mother, but Horus only says it’s not time yet. Horus becomes older and weaker, and ends up relying more and more on apprentices. Adam ends up working with them more.

Scene 5

Adam only learns his mother’s identity when Horus is almost on his deathbed (interesting note: Horus refers to his body as an “inferior good”). Horus tells Adam to take over as institute director in his stead, which Adam agrees to.

Adam asks why Horus adopted him, thinking that he merely lied about knowing his mother. That’s when Horus reveals that Alice Merry-go-Round’s true name is Maria Moonlit (note—whoever becomes queen of Levianta receives a new name and has their past identity sealed by the senate. It does not say that every single one has been named Alice, but imo that would fall in line with the whole “alice has always been queen” thing in the OSSCE crossfade).

Horus explains the situation—that Maria didn’t want to get rid of Adam, but that it was all Miroku’s fault, and that furthermore he has turned Maria into his puppet using the brainwashing drug Venom (which he claims was made through collaboration with Horus’ “greatest apprentice”, Seth, who he says will probably show up in person at some point later on).

Horus has put a notebook full of names and locations in a drawer—these are his allies, those who wish to overthrow Miroku. Adam has a million questions, but before he can ask them Horus goes to leave—he has decided that when he dies, he will be alone. Adam never sees him again.

Scene 6

There are roughly ten other researchers at the institute—none of them object to Adam taking over, given Horus has been training him since he was young. Adam is a prodigy, and he has a keen interest in researching the legacy pieces (while at the same time upset that the research is being used for political squabbles).

One day Gammon visits the institute, claiming to be looking for Horus. Adam figures that he’s probably dead, and just wanted to die alone in peace, especially given the state of his health when he vanished. Adam then reveals that he knows Gammon was one of Horus’ collaborators in his secret revolutionary efforts. Of course, it wouldn’t look good for either of them if it got out.

Adam isn’t sure what side he wants to be on. He both respected and hated Horus. But for now he would like for them to look out for each other (sort of blackmailing him into it). Then he offers to get him some coffee. From then on they develop a sort of uneasy allyship.

Gammon is the eldest son of the Loop Octopus family, but he was cast out of being the heir due to being born without magic (wasn’t treated well by his family, basically). He became skilled with guns and swords due to fervent study, and worked his way up to being head of the security division.

He also has purple prophetic dreams, which he admits to Adam while they’re drinking at a bar one day. He is an inheritor of Rahab—all Loop Octopus members are, to some extent (this implies that there may be differences in the strength of inheritor powers between individuals). He says that because his family can foresee the future, this means that a queen (who is only important because she can tell the future via divine revelation) is not necessary. Note also that Adam has not told Gammon he’s Maria’s son.

This leads to a lot of speculating and reflection on Adam’s part (on if Gammon intends to rule the country, the possibility of someone who does not have divine revelation being in charge, whether the gods are even worth revering in the first place, etc). He starts to think that maybe the country should go back to being a kingdom with a hereditary ruler—that this would end the power struggles among the senate. And of course, Adam is a great candidate for king.

Gammon interrupts Adam’s thoughts to bring up that his father is very cunning. So much so that if, hypothetically, the real queen died twenty years ago (as she hasn’t shown herself to the public in that long), no one would have found it out. Miroku was, himself, the one who established the rule that only the head of the senate can interact with her.

Adam dismisses the idea—Horus told him Miroku was manipulating her with drugs. He’d have no reason to kill her. Either way, though, Miroku is clearly the real power in charge of the country.

Gammon is sort of sprawled on the bar right now, drunk. Adam tries to wake him, and then he is suddenly approached by a new person. A man who looks identical to Horus, appearing to be the same age that Horus was when he first approached Adam on the coast all those years ago. He is Seth Twiright.

Scene 7

Adam has no proof that this is the real Seth Twiright, of course, but him looking identical to Horus is a pretty big deal. While he looks roughly the same age as Adam, Seth claims to be older, saying he studied under Horus long before he became head of the institute (roughly twenty years before, which would be about five years before Horus adopted Adam).

Seth claims he came to help now that his mentor is dead (and yet pretty much none of the other apprentices have even heard of him until now). Adam tries to brush him off, but Seth persists, sharing knowledge of the Next Queen Project—something only those involved are supposed to know about. This makes it clear that he does have a connection to Horus.

Seth clarifies that he isn’t Horus’ child or anything, despite them looking alike (he says they might have a distant relation or something).

Adam obviously can’t trust him given what Horus said, and it’s hard to read what Seth is after. But he’s a lead regarding Adam’s real mother, so he can’t just dismiss him. He lets Seth join the institute.

Seth is, like Horus, very persuasive and affable, and gets along well with the rest of the staff. He’s also just as brilliant, his assistance revitalizing the “Next Queen Project” which had come to a bit of a standstill after Horus’ death.

Seth is the one who brings them the “God Seed”, which is held in a small black box (Adam is examining it while Seth fiddles about with some of the machinery in the room). It’s a living liquid, Seth explaining that it was extracted from Sin, and that it is part of LeviaBehemo. Adam speculates that they can create people with magical power with this. He asks how Seth got his hands on it, and Seth says he was allowed below the temple by Miroku due to being an old friend of his (he did not go through the Glass Hallway, but rather a different route, and claims to have never met the queen himself).

While Seth is just as interested in the legacy of the Second Period as Adam, his area of research isn’t machinery so much as living things (biotechnology, basically). Adam asks him about his knowledge of drugs—Seth eventually tells him to stop beating around the bush, as it’s clear he’s asking about Venom.

Seth explains that there were once people who were Inheritors of Levia, and that they were able to manipulate people’s minds. They have all died off, but Seth claims he found the grave of one such inheritor. He took the body back to his home, experimented on it, and at the end of this experimentation and analysis he produced Venom. He then analyzed his success and devised a recipe to make Venom with—but then says that he never used it, because it’s outside of his interests.

Adam wonders why (it seems he was commissioned to make it, but Seth doesn’t look like he’s interested in things like money or power).

Scene 8

The Project “Ma” stuff starts one year after Horus went missing. This chapter is basically a reflection on Adam’s motives (how he is empty inside and is doing all these things to try and fill that emptiness, how he blames Miroku for not being able to live a normal life with a family that loved him, how he wants to control Levianta’s future by making his own puppet queen, etc).

He will fill the hole in his heart. If it’s for that, he will even become evil.

Scene 9

Adam goes to get Gammon to collaborate with him. He reveals that he is Maria’s son (though he has no proof), and tells Gammon that if it works he will become the next head of the senate. Adam plans to have the next queen change the laws so that succession will be hereditary again—and as the son of the former queen, Adam will become king.

Gammon doubts that’ll work well, but Adam says that if he becomes king, Gammon will become the new prime minister. Gammon points out that it’ll be the next queen’s relatives who will be in line for succession, not Adam, to which Adam says he’ll just marry the next queen. And her children will be the Twins of God—no one would object to them being next in line for the throne.

Adam also reveals that he has mixed his own genes in the Divine Seed that he’ll be using for Project Ma, so that those children will also be related to him.

Adam prepares to kill Gammon if he refuses, but Gammon agrees. He too is dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. And he also had a purple dream about Adam. But he doesn’t say what it was about.

Scene 10

Through Gammon’s contacts, Adam is able to get the recipe for Venom. He is also able to get his hands on Miroku’s journal. Though, it’s really more of a memo pad used to secretly write down Miroku’s private thoughts (and as such, it’s very scattered and brief, providing little detail on what its entries are referring to).

In brief: Miroku discovering Maria’s children and having a young retainer throw them in the river. The queen freaks out, and has to be quieted down. Miroku thought he killed the servant to keep the secret safe but this guy shows up again. Miroku decides to keep him around, as he’s useful. The servant makes Venom—evidently, this person was Seth, though it doesn’t say his name. Miroku drugs the queen and then Ceci Vaju as well, saying that when he is dead he will inherit what he leaves behind.

This next part—I can guess what it means based on something I glimpsed in Seth’s chapter but I don’t want to say outright in case I’m wrong, so…Miroku’s notes become scrambled—basically saying first that he’s had dreams (purple ones) then amending that they are prophecies, and, I quote, “I am Alice/Queen Merry-Go-Round”. His notes then detail the Project Ma prophecy.

There’s more that isn’t shared. The only thing Adam can glean from it is that what Horus told him about Miroku is true, and that what Gammon suggested in his drunken stupor might not be total nonsense.

Scene 11

Adam reflects on what he’s learned—Seth was the one who tossed him in the river, and he has (or had, at least) a twin sibling. He figures he’ll need to put some restrictions on Seth—now that he has Venom, he no longer has a use for him.

Adam has received information on a potential Ma candidate—Meta Salmhofer. Gammon warns him against recruiting her, as she’s a member of Apocalypse. Adam points out that one of their founders, Raiou Zvezda, is listed as one of Horus’ collaborators. Though it was different when Raiou founded it (evidently they weren’t a terrorist organization then), and he has since ditched it.

Even leaving aside the matter of Apocalypse, given that Meta is Pale’s girlfriend it’s unlikely she’s a virgin.

Gammon is against going to fetch Meta, as it would be dangerous. Adam, on the other hand, sees it as an opportunity for Seth to die in an “unfortunate accident”,

Of course, the plan was a miserable failure. Basically, Adam planned for Seth to be in one spot that would be attacked, while all the other researchers were safe. But instead the researchers were in the danger zone, and Seth was safe. Adam’s not sure how that happened. And all Seth has to say about it is that they better do their best just the two of them from now on (Seth seems a bit happy-go-lucky, really).

Scene 12

And so, Adam meets Eve, someone who would be perfect to manipulate. He didn’t plan for everything that happened—the fight with the White Army, Meta attacking Nemu (she was likely looking to punish Raiou for his desertion)—but ultimately, he was able to get Eve to the capital. He drugged her with Venom by mixing it into her coffee.

Even with the drug, getting her to like him was a little tricky—he wasn’t charming like Seth and Horus. But he tended to her needs, spent time with her, was understanding, etc. Fortunately, Seth didn’t pop into the lab much due to his recovery, so he wouldn’t catch on that Adam was using Venom.

He and Gammon are drinking in a bar, and he’s complaining about women (kind of typical “why are women so hard to understand blah blah blah”). Being the perfect boyfriend is stressful. He’d like to have Gammon switch roles with him (I think he’s drunk), but Gammon evidently already has a wife and kid(s). Gammon also thinks they make a good couple, and that Eve would like him even without the Venom. Adam cuts him off, saying their being a couple is just for the plan.

He shifts the conversation to Vaju. Apparently they’re waiting for him to die (he is getting sickly) before they move ahead, so that if Eve becomes queen it doesn’t appear to be solely Vaju’s work. Miroku is in a similar position—once Vaju dies, all of his stuff goes to Miroku (I guess because he doesn’t have an heir, so Miroku used the Venom to get him to make Miroku his heir). This includes the institute, so that he can continue being head of the Senate even if they produce a different queen.

Adam asks if Gammon has any hesitation over killing his father. But apparently there’s no love lost between them.

Basically—Gammon is all ready to overthrow the current government. The only reason he was waiting this long is because he didn’t have a lynchpin to pull it together. But Eve, once she’s queen, will be able to allow him to do as he pleases with restructuring the country.

Scene 13

The queen trial was Adam’s one chance to ascertain the queen’s condition, but of course Eve remembers almost nothing of it (which is to be expected). The moment Adam heard that Zelarana Zellana was dead, he started worrying about Eve. He’d been confident she’d succeed, but she isn’t back yet. He can’t go get her, though, because it might tip people off that they’re more than just scientist and patient.

He’s concerned for her, which surprises him, but denies his feelings as being for his plan’s success only.

Eve suddenly arrives, and he goes to hug her (again denying that it’s for anything other than his charade). She seems a little mad at him, but also doesn’t act on it.

Scene 14

Eve is impregnated with the God Seed, with twins. Now all that’s left is to wait for them to be born. Meanwhile, Vaju dies, leaving everything to Miroku.

Gammon is going to do his small rebellion after Eve becomes queen, and Miroku will get mixed up in it and die. Then Gammon will be captured, and executed for his crimes. This is what Adam’s real plan is regarding him.

Scene 15

Eve gets restless and mood-swingy as the due date approaches. Earlier she’d been scared all day, having dreamed that she saw a bear. Adam thinks this might be because she’d drunken too much Venom.

Seth hasn’t shown himself since Eve became pregnant. He hasn’t gone home either. Adam, fearing that Seth has cottoned on to the plan and will tell Miroku, increases surveillance on Miroku and has his people look harder for Seth.

Adam takes Eve out of the institute for a bit. She says she wants to go to the Western coast, to meet Adam’s “mother” (the whale). He hasn’t gone back since Horus picked him up—he wonders if she’s still there.

He picks a car that won’t sway much, and they arrive at the coast. They gaze at the ocean together, Adam glancing over at Eve and noting her simple beauty. He starts to wish that they had met in some other way, without all these plans and prophecies and such, before forcing himself to drop the thought.

Eve suddenly announces that she’s going to name the babies Cain and Abel, though when pressed she says that there’s no real meaning behind those names.

Right as they’re going to leave several hours later, Catherine calls out to Adam in his mind. She explains that her physical body is gone (not because he speared her with a harpoon, but because it was a natural end result of her leaving Held’s power). She is now part of the ocean.

She was once a small fish, but one day she rebelled against Held and left. Unlike the other spirits, she had fragments of her memory remaining from their past (her past of being one who served the creators of the world).

Apparently in Levianta they are taught that LeviaBehemo is the only true god, and all others are false gods. Catherine explains the whole deal about Levia and Behemo making humanity, and Held suggesting the gods merely watch over the world, etc. Catherine hadn’t agreed with this, which is why she left the forest. Her body became a large whale—this is what she wanted, but it also signified that she had lost the physical immortality that she had with Held. Hence why she’s invisible now.

Eve can’t hear Catherine, as a note.

Upon being asked, Adam tells Catherine that Eve is his wife, which pleases her. She’s also relieved to hear that Horus is dead, saying that he was dangerous. Adam apologizes for his anger when last they saw each other, and they part on good terms.

Scene 16

Eight months into the pregnancy, Eve is moved to Alicegrad. That way she can be attended on and also be under greater security. The due date is very close now.

Once Adam receives word that she’s in labor, he rushes to Alicegrad from the institute. The sun has gone down, and there are no stars or moon in the sky. He’s stopped before he can get in her room by a guard, who informs him only those assisting with the birth can get in (which apparently includes a priest). He does reassure Adam that she’s with the best doctor available—not Dr. Moreno, who drowned in a river the other day, but Seth Twiright (he doesn’t say it’s Seth, but it’s Seth).

The door opens. Adam sees Seth there, and also can’t hear the sound of babies crying. He had no information on Seth being a doctor in this regard—apparently his informants haven’t been telling him everything (Seth chides him for trusting them so much).

Adam pushes past Seth. Eve is fine, but the things she’s holding in her arms are not babies. They are darkish “things”. Eve is delusional, calling them her and Adam’s babies (despite the fact that she shouldn’t know Adam put some of his semen—yes it specifies semen—into the God Seed), thinking they’re alive.

Adam tries to get her to hand them over, but she freaks out. Enraged, Adam goes outside to see Seth smoking, initially assuming he was behind it. But Seth claims he did his best. He says the babies simply died while they were inside Eve’s womb.

Rather, he says that this was Adam’s fault, because he was doing something “extraneous” (being vague on what exactly Adam did that caused it). He calls him out, basically insulting him as a researcher, but also won’t tell Miroku what he was planning. He leaves Adam there (Seth just seems really amused it all went to crap).

Scene 17

Adam is drinking alone in the furthest corner of a bar when Gammon comes in and sits across from him. He says they’ll have to start again—find a new candidate, and deal with the traitor in their informants.

Eve is infertile now. And she’s gone mad. Adam speculates that her spirit was weak already, due to the drugging, and she lost it when the twins were born dead. She’s still following the delusion that she has children.

Gammon tries to get him to perk up—they still have plenty of time before the prophecy comes to pass. But Adam’s had enough—he’s giving up on everything, telling Gammon to go back to his original rebellion plans.

Of course, Gammon’s not liable to leave Adam as a loose end, so he figures he and Eve need to flee the capital together.

Scene 18

This is an internal monologue. Adam apologizes to his mother for failing to save her, not even knowing if she loved him or not. He’s tired of chasing his past, though. He also apologizes to Eve for what he’s done, realizing he does love her and wanting to go live in Held’s forest with her (a reference to the song, basically). He also wonders if Catherine might be able to find them there.

He loves Eve, even if that love is just a result of a brainwashing drug.

#ec activity feed #this chapter was so grim and intense that it sort of rolled into black comedy for me by the end #i am starting to think I know why mothy self-published this novel #meanwhile seth is fantastic and the infomine isn't doing him justice

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exobyharu · 5 years

Text

PCY - Ch1

Chapter 1: Nothing’s a coincidence

(Part 2)(Part 3)(Part 4)(Part 5)(Part 6)

Summary: You didn’t die because you weren’t exactly trying to. Also, Chanyeol does not want you to take pictures.

⏰ 10:46 PM 🌏 42nd floor of some fancy hotel (S), City of (L) 🌚 Moonless night, but light pollution drowns the stars out 👥 YN, Park Chanyeol, Kim Jongdae (mentioned), your best friend Jane (mentioned)

Notes: A little mention of suicidal ideation, but nothing really happens. Not even close. And I love you, PCY. How he acts or what he says here has nothing to do with his true nature or his real opinions on anything. It’s fiction! All from my head. Hate me, not PCY. Jk. No hate please.

Words: ~1,900

💙💙💙

Even though your hands were loose on the railings as you leaned too far over the edge of the balcony, you were not afraid. Frankly, despite your volatile impulses, better judgment prevailed. You were not going to kill yourself - that much you were certain of. Not tonight. But just what would happen if you did manage to lose your balance and tip over? Wouldn’t that be a way to go?

It was almost like a curse to stay where you once worked abroad and if you were to be honest with yourself, it should not feel like this. It had been years. Three? Four? You did not keep count. In your efforts to leave everything behind, your mind would refuse to consciously to take you back – to depict an accurate picture of what happened, how, and why.

Because your brain would not cooperate, you only trusted your psychiatrist who prescribed you three daily tablets that you would take on time, more often than not; and a change of environment, which you had been pursuing for the past six months. This was why you decided to move back to your home country, in hopes of putting the past behind you, and starting anew in the same city where you once grew up as a child.

You’re pretty darn privileged if you have all the time to be depressed, you remembered your mother saying over last night’s phone call, and frankly, it did nothing to lift your spirits. If your mother had intended it to be a wakeup call, you ought to let her know that it only made her loving daughter spend the entire day sleeping in and unable to come to terms with her not-so-wretched circumstances.

And now this loving daughter was draining all of her internship savings to spend five straight nights in a ridiculously overpriced suite room at Hotel (S), as her final attempt at self-exploration after constantly moving from one neighbourhood type to another. This city was your last stop and here, you hoped that what you were looking for at a proverbial level was already patiently, and eagerly awaiting your discovery.

Whether you liked it or not, you had to work soon. And if you did not know what you wanted, it looked like you were going to take your parents up on their offer of an old-fashioned arranged marriage and take over your family’s small business enterprise in your hometown.

If the problem is within you, it won’t matter where you are. You got this, you willed, as the evening breeze gently shook the umbrellas by the sky pool just a couple of floors below. The air was surprisingly cool and thin, which was a sharp a contrast to how humid and saturated with smog it was about forty floors down. And maybe it was just you, but when you closed your eyes, the wind made you feel as if you were truly by the shore.

Somehow, an unusual minty scent managed to reach you too. It smelled more like musk, now that you focused harder. Or almonds? You screwed your eyes shut even tighter to concentrate on what it was exactly.

Vanilla?

“You okay over there?” a voice called out.

Certainly, it was now more than just your nose – or your head, for this matter, that was messing with your senses. As far as the functional part of your brain can remember, the voice in your thoughts never spoke to you in clear baritone.

So despite the distrust that you equally harboured for all strangers, you did mean to look past the frosted glass boundaries of your balcony territory to what seemed like an even more spacious accommodation that was your neighbour’s. There, you saw him: a tall and remarkably well-proportioned guy, whose princely face you cannot quite put a name on yet. If only you could get him to drop the cautious glare - because you swore that even though you looked like it, you were not going to jump - maybe you would remember. Anyone would recognise his smiling face. Anyone who had wi-fi service, a television, or a pair of legs to take the subway to work. You knew that you did, even though you had only been back in this country for about a month.

“I recognise you,” you responded, as an immediate segue to conveniently avoid the lie, while passing to let him in on your pity party. You would have spent a few seconds ignoring his reaction while pondering how rude you may had just been, but as your eyes travelled from his nameless face and down to what was written on his purple pullover hoodie, all that overthinking flew right by you.

The words SEXUAL FANTASIES were printed in bold, right across his chest.

You chuckled. He did too, although you were not entirely sure what that was about.

“S-sexual fantasies, I know,” he finally said with a cheeky grin after what seemed like a split-second of hesitation. His cheeky grin though made it unclear to you, whether he was pertaining to the jacket or himself. Sensing the ambiguity and seeing the face you were making, he made a gesture of tugging at the hem of his jacket and pointed at the print for emphasis.

That did not really help. But okay.

“Can’t say I’m surprised to find a world-famous somebody right next door,” you started, almost smiling. “BTS, right?”

In response, the guy craned his neck sideways as if telling you to think harder. When you did not, he finally figured that he had to correct you himself. “That would be EXO, actually.”

EXO. Right.

It was your only other guess. Your friends only ever mentioned those two groups to you, anyway. It was a regretful matter, how you paid so little interest in what they always gossiped about in your group chat. Now, all you could do was avoid eye contact and read the words on his jacket over and over with an unfocused stare.

“R-right,” your mouth said, because the awkwardness was escalating quick. “Kim Jongdae?”

Instantly, the guy’s smile fell and it made your unease quickly turn to embarrassment. Not only did he catch you in a rather intense olfactory investigation while you were on your tiptoes, sniffing with your eyes screwed shut and your nose up in the air, you even got their group name wrong even though you had a fifty percent chance of guessing it right.

And now here you were, fucking up three times in a row, calling this man Kim Jongdae as a knee-jerk reaction, only because your dumb mouth had a mind of its own and that mind only knew to speak that name. This dashing guy’s mouth, on the other hand, despite his forced smile, was now revealing to you a perfect set of teeth that confirmed your mistake because Jane always raved about this certain Kim Jongdae’s adorably mis-aligned lower incisor. In terms of Kim Jongdae’s appearance, you at most knew that much. Besides, because of your best friend, you only ever listened to the vocally-gifted balladeer’s painfully sad music.

Still, this person was certainly not Kim Jongdae.

Ultimately, you gave up and let your head fall to your hands. There was no way that you were meeting his eyes now. “Look, I’m not gonna pretend to be a fan anymore, I’m sorry.”

Nameless™ probably made a face before saying, “funny, because a lot of fans like to book rooms next to ours and pretend that they don’t know us.”

“What about coincidences?” you asked nicely, and his answer came almost immediately.

“What of coincidences?”

You did not like his tone very much, but you had to make sure that it was not just your imagination. You decided to finally face him and what you saw was the same guy, looking as smug as he sounded, with his chin tilted upwards and his arms crossed. He towered right beside the glass baluster that separated the two of you and now, you noticed how much taller he looked up close.

Still, that had done it for the short-fused you. Ten-feet-tall or not, you were not going to take anything from a dignified snob. Mirroring his body language, you took a step forward, making sure to remember the smell of his perfume as a warning sign to leave the balcony as soon as possible next time.

With one deep breath, you looked at him and said, “honestly? I truly don’t care who you are or what you do. The hotel just got me this suite room and I only happen perfectly match your fan demographic. I’m just saying that this time’s a coincidence.”

“Well then, I’m just saying that maybe you’re pretending to pretend. Maybe this time isn’t a coincidence.”

You blinked rapidly in astonishment. How was this guy a freak for arguments as much as you were? He was basically just like you, stubbornly distrustful and borderline hostile, just taller and much more attractive, which in your opinion, only contributed more points to his intimidation and shade factors, respectively.

“You’re a lot cynical, you know that?” you told him, surprisingly more curious than upset this time.

Unfortunately, the observation made Nameless™ more upset than anything else. “I don’t care what you think. I just don’t appreciate people who call themselves fans but do not respect our privacy. All the way up here? Come on. We’re people too!”

“Uhuh,” you responded, his exasperation not getting through you because only a fraction of your attention entertained his minor outburst. Your fingers were busy flying over the keys on your phone, going over the roster of the world-famous EXO and trying to find the name of this world-famous jerk before you.

Park Chanyeol.

“Got it. This is you, no?” you finally asked him, who was now looking up to the sky, arms still crossed and skin still bunched between his eyebrows. When he turned to you, you waved your phone at him, showing a photo of a Park Chanyeol of the smiley variety that the world knows, wearing a similar sweatshirt and some kitty headphones that one of your friends has. “Look, I know you must be tired of having stalkers follow you everywhere you go, but trust me. I’m not one of them.”

The rapper only seemed to believe the first part of what you said. “Look, just stay out of my way, all right?”

“Stay out of your way? I was minding my own business here, you know?” You answered back. You could feel your voice rising along with your temper once again, but he was no longer listening.

“…and no pictures,” he told you, waving you off to head back inside his room, making it clear that you had just ruined his night.

Left alone sighing on your side of the balcony, you figured that it was at least an eventful evening for you. Also, for the record, at least tonight, you had a discovery and it was something that online pages would probably never say and those die-hard fans would never know about The Park Chanyeol: He’s tired and he’s done. He’s just so done he takes it out on anybody.

And if he wanted you to stay out of his way, then so be it. It was the least you can do. If it was to prove a point, it was just like you to take it that far anyway. After all, relocating to another room was for free and you would not seem to enjoy staying in a balcony right next to his either.

💙💙💙 - to be continued -

#chanyeol #chanyeol scenarios #park chanyeol #exo scenarios #exo #park chanyeol scenarios #exo fanfiction #kpop scenarios

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manifestoonmoralmanlove · 5 years

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Gormless Ch. 8 - I’d rather these ball sacks havers had haverballsacks.

A well-meaning friend gave me a book series that is hilariously bad. The first book was Souless and my riffs were entitled brainless. This second book is entitled Changless and these riff are then gormless.

I mean to say I have entitled them gormless! Not that my riffs are dumb, and the effort I spend on them stupid since I’m the only one who enjoys them. HAHA!

The story is SUPPOSED TO be about how a badass lady wearing a rad-looking carriage dress hits baddies with her umbrella and bangs her hot werewolf husband. In reality it’s mostly poor attempts at being witty, flirty, and superior.

For the last book check out the brainless tag.

If you want the TL;DR version but want to read these new riffs anyway?

This story is set in supernatural Victorian steampunk England. Alexia is our NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS protag. She is a soulless, which means she’s able to negate the abilities of vampires and werewolves by touching them. She’s recently married a big oaf, named Lord Connel Maccon. He’s the manchild in charge of the supernatural police with a zillion dollars and he’s totes super hot too ok. Their relationship is mostly arguments about how Maccon can’t tell her fucking anything. Alexia has also recently become head of ~Soulless affairs~ in Queen Victoria’s government. She has a dumb friend named Ivy, a gay vampire friend named Akeldama, a family who’s evil because they do the same shit as her but while being blonde, and most importantly Alexia is better than everyone cause…cause.

Last time on Gormless:

There’s some mysterious force that’s turning the Vampires and werewolves into humans. Alexia is in charge of figuring out that deal, and she is doing a bad job at it. Her husband is in charge of the Supernatrual Police (BUR) so he’s going to Scotland about it.

Alexia is also going north to help her husband with a crew crafted for a comedy. and oh boy I can’ts wait.

Chapter 8 – I’d rather these ball sacks havers had haverballsacks.

The next day they touch-down on Scottish soil and immediately Maccon is there. He was on his way, smelled her…what near 2,000 feet in the sky and just followed the dirigible until it landed. Yeah okay sure suspension of disbelief or whatever. You know what I’m not going to suspend my disbelief for? The fact that apparently all werewolves, including Maccon travel in wolf form and only bring a basic cloak to hide their nudity with when they transform. Apparently all places just have outfits, for every conceivable body type and size, set aside in case they have werewolf visitors. I guess they’ll all just have to never bring any food, weapons, paperwork, books, toothbrushes, gifts, or literally anything else when they travel. That seems highly practical.

He could just hold a bag in their mouth or give him a doggy back-pack. Hell, since this is a fantasy, I might suspend my disbelief if you told me that these ball sack havers had haverballsacks which were just infinity scrotums that they can literally pull whatever they felt like out. I KNOW THIS IS A DUMB STICKING POINT BUT SHE PURPOSEFULLY MADE IT SUPER UNPRACTICAL AND FOR NO FUCKING REASON RRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!

So back to reality, Ivy officially rejects Tunstell. Tunstell then starts flirting back with Felicity and being mean to Ivy. Okay sure. LeFoux convinces the crew she should go with because the pack they’re going to see (Kingair) has a broken aethographor she says she’ll fix. By broken aethographor she means women, and by fix she means fuck.

I don’t believe I said it in full yet, but the spanker ship I mentioned earlier was housing the Kingair clan of werewolves. The humanization seems to follow these werewolves who can’t change shape, and it seems to have started when there Alpha mysteriously died. Maccon used to be Alpha of this pack but mysteriously moved over to his current pack by killing the leader there. So off to the center of the mystery everyone!

When they get to the big old dingy castle, there is a huge middle aged tough-ass Scottish woman telling them to piss off. Maccon says he’s there for BUR (the supernatural police) and not cause he used to be the Alpha there. She seems cool with this, despite having obvious animosity to him personally. Her name is Sidheag. Alexia instantly endears herself to everyone by remarking very loudly that the castle is filthy. When Sidheag threatens to throw her in the rain again, Alexia says if Sidheag would mind if she would do some dusting. This ~endears~ her to Sidheag. I suppose anybody else would think she’s a rude spoiled little shit but its protags the best day here in shitty self-insert novel #84zillion.

Half the people in the clan seem to hate Maccon, while the other half like him. Also a weird moment where Maccon introduces his whole merry band but totally leaves out Angelique…and I’m pretty sure the only reason is that the author forgot. She’s the slave of the group anyway HAHA!

We also learn that Sidheag is apparently Maccon’s great-great-great granddaughter. Alexia is not happy that Maccon was previously married before he was a werewolf and had living descendants that she doesn’t know about. 4 things about this:

1.) I couldn’t be less surprised. Maccon literally says nothing to Alexia besides, “You’re unbearable, let’s have sex woman.” We’ve all known he’s a fucking sack of dogshit.

2.) None of these relations attended Maccon’s wedding? Do they ALL hate him? That bodes well, and also isn’t surprising because I believe we have established he is a pile of puppy poop.

3.) I can forgive it, but it’s irritating to me that Alexia had never got sexual tingles, or kissed another boy before they got married. However Maccon? 100s of lovers and his spawn litter the Scottish country-side. I don’t think it was the author’s intent to wave that huge double standard around but it just bugs me.

4.) The reveal about how Sidheag is related to Maccon would have been a MUCH BETTER CLIFF-HANGER AND ENCOUNTER!

Imagine, if you will, the crew goes to the castle looking for Maccon, they run into a hostile Sidheag, Alexia introduces herself as Lady Maccon and it instantly sets off Sidheag. Perhaps calling Alexia a trollop, and says that Maccon is HER last name as well.

DUN DUN DUN! GOOD CLIFFHANGER!

We open up the next chapter with an Alexia/Sidhaeg scuffle, Alexia perhaps assuming that Sidheag is Maccon’s ex-wife or maybe even a current wife. That TRASHMAN! AREN’T THESE BOOKS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN? MORE ACTION PLZ! However before anybody is seriously injured Maccon intervenes after he heard a gun go off and settles the dispute with the truth.

So back to this sad reality. Maccon goes to talk with the Beta of the pack and the rest of the crew settle into their rooms. Alexia overhears Felicity asking Tunstell if she’s ~safe~ since they have rooms next to each other.

*YUCK BARF*

Tunstell does probably what I would have done, GET THE FUCK OUTTA THERE!

Alexia has the brilliant idea of hiding her bag (which was attempted to be broken in before) in Ivy’s room. She convinces Ivy this is a good course of action by saying that she’s hiding a gift she got for Maccon in the bag. Socks, like really good socks that she needs to check on every now and again. That’s dumb but fine.

Alexia goes back to her room to get dressed for dinner. (God that sounds so annoying, why do people like this time period again?) Maccon shows up and fails to seduce her. They then have one of their OH SO DELIGHTFUL back and forths. Where basically Alexia tries to ask Maccon about why he leaves without telling her anything? (but tells Lyall) What is going on with the Kingair clan? What’s his history with the Kingair clan? Why he didn’t tell her he used to be married? Why he didn’t think it appropriate to tell her he has great-great-great grandchildren running around? And if he has other great-great-great grandchildren running around?

These are all great questions, and I wish the writer wasn’t such a hack that answering any of them would spoil this or future books. So the most we get out of Maccon is, “I didn’t tell you because you didn’t ask and you were supposed to have children before you turned into a werewolf. Also the person who is Beta wolf now, wasn’t Beta under me.”

HAHA GREAT! Meanwhile Alexia off-handidly mentions she took a tumble (in a really forced way) so Maccon can get mad in turn for her not sharing everything with him. Alexia does this really annoying thing of pretending to be demure and sweet in order to avoid telling him. Which like,

1.) Ew

2.) Maccon is clearly not into the wilting flower business I have no idea why you think acting all coy is going to make him forgive you or whatever.

3.) Why are you hiding this from him anyway? She puts herself in danger all the time and Maccon acts like it’s, at best an annoyance. He is shown to have gotten way more upset when she does stuff like ‘Not sit with him at dinner’ and ‘Want to know anything about him.’

But in the end Alexia tells him that she fell off the dirigible but is fine. You know the reason why Alexia tries to hide the ~tumble~ from him by acting like a ninny? It’s to make their two situations seem equivalent when they’re super not.

On one hand we have a woman who didn’t immediately tell her husband about a dangerous situation she was in, even though it only happened the day before, and she wasn’t injured. She, when pressed, tells him about it.

On the other hand Maccon leaves her totally in the dark about a lot of relevant information about his past, present, and the current situation they’re in. Also Maccon doesn’t properly answer any of her questions. He just dodges it and shirks responsibility the entire time. Yet we’re made to believe that they are equals in the relationship with matching baggage. BULLSHIT! Like in all these dumb fuck titles, the man has vastly more power and we feign female empowerment because the woman pouts at this injustice even if nothing fucking changes. This is summed up best with the last lines of this chapter.

“Are you going to tell me the real reason you came back to Scotland Do not think you have thrown me off the scent so easily.”

“I never doubted you, my sweet demure little Alexia.”

Lady Maccon gave him her best, most fierce, battle-ax expression, and they went down to dinner.

THAT’S HOW THE CHAPTER ENDS! He just doesn’t answer and the author just moves the plot forward on clumsy legs regardless.

Say something nice Faps:

Sidheag is cool. I hope she’s not ruined.

Castles are cool.

The sock back and forth between Alexia and Ivy was actually kinda cute and funny. Even if it was dumb as hell.

#soulless #changless #gormless #riffing

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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WARNING: LONG ARTICLE! (It’s worth it, though)

It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.

By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting.

The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

Bruenig, the Post columnist, is perhaps the most prominently placed of a small but increasingly visible group of young writers unabashedly advocating for democratic socialism. In writing her attention-grabbing article, she helped elevate a discussion that has long taken place on Twitter. Of course, the relative merits of socialism—and Marxism, Maoism, anarcho-syndicalism, you name it—have been debated in lefty journals and academic circles for a century or more. Members of this new generation, however, aren’t just talking among themselves; they’re trying to take socialism mainstream. And unlike their predecessors, they have reason to think Americans will take their ideas seriously.

They’ve got a double challenge. The first is to convince skeptical Americans that, despite what they may have learned in high school, socialism doesn’t have to mean Stalinism, and it doesn’t lead inexorably to the gulags of Soviet Russia or the starvation of Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. The second may be even trickier. They must explain how their version of socialism fits, or doesn’t, into the American political system while showing how, specifically, it is distinct from traditional Democratic Party liberalism. In other words, they must not only defend socialism in the twenty-first century; they must define it.

Nathan Robinson hated Bernie Sanders before he loved him.

It was the fall of 2015. Robinson, a doctoral candidate at Harvard and, at the time, a recent law school graduate, had been steeped in socialist thought since high school, when he discovered the writings of anarchistic socialists like Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky. Socialism has always been dogged by the question of whether it’s possible to participate in electoral politics while remaining truly radical. Like many leftists, Robinson initially saw Sanders as an example of intolerable compromise.

“Based on Senator Bernie Sanders’s public statements, one of the following things must be true,” he declared on his blog in October 2015. “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it.” Sanders, he explained in a follow-up post, was “not asking for public ownership of the major sectors of the economy,” but merely calling for expanded welfare and regulations. “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.”

(Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, sees socialism not as an economic platform, but as a strong commitment to certain principles.)

Those turned out to be among Robinson’s last blog posts. In January 2016, he launched Current Affairs, a deeply irreverent leftist magazine, with backing from a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Despite being essentially a one-man operation, Current Affairs quickly developed a substantial following on the left thanks to Robinson’s extraordinary writing talent—especially his knack for composing viral takedowns of conservative intellectual hucksters like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

By 2017, Robinson seemed to have fully shed his earlier hostility toward Sandersian socialism. Here he was, last summer, writing on the difference between leftism and liberalism: “As Nancy Pelosi said of the present Democratic party: ‘We’re capitalist.’ When Bernie Sanders is asked if he is a capitalist, he answers flatly: ‘No.’ Sanders is a socialist, and socialism is not capitalism, and there is no possibility of healing the ideological rift between the two.”

That’s a long way from calling Sanders an ignoramus or a liar. What happened?

Much has been made of how Sanders has pulled the Democratic mainstream to the left. Presumptive 2020 presidential candidates are racing to capture the Bernie vote by declaring their support for policies—single-payer health care, free college—that once seemed impossibly radical. But Robinson’s evolution on Sanders is representative of a complementary phenomenon that has received less notice: Sanders seems to have also pulled the far left closer to the mainstream. The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

“Those of us who consider ourselves on the more radical left were kind of disdainful of the political system,” said Robinson. “It was a real minority within Occupy saying you should even contest elections.” Sanders’s tantalizingly strong primary run—roughly equivalent to the MIT basketball team making the Final Four—made some lefties reconsider. For the first time, it seemed as though they could actually win. But winning requires engaging in politics, and politics requires some degree of pragmatism—a recognition that the achievable will always fall short of the ideal. That, in turn, requires giving up the ideological purity of the fringe.

Consider Jacobin magazine, the leading publication of the Millennial far left. It’s a magazine that wears its Marxist affections on its sleeve, with the tagline “Reason in Revolt.” Across the first seventeen issues, by my count, the word “Marx” or its derivations appeared an average of about forty times. But, since then—that is, beginning in summer 2015, when people started feeling the Bern—that’s fallen to only about twelve times on average.

Bhaskar Sunkara founded Jacobin in 2011, while an undergraduate at George Washington University—which now makes him, at age twenty-nine, something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists. The magazine doesn’t have a strict party line. In May 2015, its website ran dueling pieces on Sanders’s candidacy. One, by Ashley Smith, called Sanders’s campaign an “obstacle” to the formation of a new left. But the other, by Sunkara, argued that the left should welcome Bernie’s run, “even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.”

Since then, while Sunkara continues to distinguish in theory between Sandersism and full-blown socialism, Bernie has practically become the magazine’s mascot. A Jacobin Facebook ad, which reads, “It’s not you, it’s capitalism,” features an image of Sanders superimposed over the Jacobin logo. The winter 2016 issue featured a cartoon of Sanders on its cover, alongside Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party. And a health care–focused issue from earlier this year reads as an extended brief in favor of Medicare for All, Bernie’s single-payer plan, featuring a fawning Q&A with Sanders. The editor’s note that opens the issue begins, “When future historians chronicle how Medicare for All was finally won . . .” To cast Medicare for All—not even fully socialized medicine, since it would nationalize insurance, but not providers—in such grandiose terms is a striking shift of the socialist goalposts.

(Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, is at age twenty-nine something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists.)

“We push for social democratic reforms in the here and now,” Sunkara told me, though he insisted that his long-term vision remained as radical as ever. “There’s a need to at least dabble a little bit more with strategy and some more policy-oriented stuff, instead of just merely trying to build an opposition movement and mainly talk about theory.”

Not everyone on the left is happy about it. Socialists, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote last year for Current Affairs, “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it, sliding rightward as we talk about a reinvigorated left, slouching towards liberalism.” At its core, he argued, socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy, or perhaps social insurance, but not democratic socialism. Taking issue with an op-ed by Sunkara in the New York Times, deBoer worried that the Jacobin editor’s “alternative” vision “does not look very different from a more humane, more nurturing liberal capitalist state.”

Nathan Robinson, who published deBoer’s piece, and is currently at work on a book about what socialism means to young people, doesn’t deny that his own thinking has become less doctrinaire. “I’ve sort of come around to the idea that ‘socialism,’ the word, should less be used to describe a state-owned or collectively owned economy, and more used to describe a very strong commitment to a certain fundamental set of principles,” he said. “It should be used to describe the position that is horrified by solvable economic depravations, rather than a very specific and narrow way of ordering the economic system.”

For Robinson, the heart of socialism is not this or that policy, but rather the fundamental values that should drive our politics. During the election, Hillary Clinton bragged about having the support of “real billionaires” like Mark Cuban and Michael Bloomberg, in a shot at Trump’s refusal to disclose his finances. Obama, after he left office, was promptly seen vacationing on Richard Branson’s private island and partying with celebrities on billionaire David Geffen’s yacht. That makes someone like Robinson skeptical that the Democratic Party is actually committed to reducing inequality—which, after all, would require taking back some of the wealth of people like David Geffen.

A socialist, in other words, is hungry for a little class warfare. Sunkara, in the intro to his Sanders interview in Jacobin, wrote that while Sanders “may share some of the same policy goals as progressives like Elizabeth Warren,” the difference is his “confrontational vision of social change,” which involves calling out “the millionaires and billionaires” who are hoarding too much wealth.

Or, as Robinson put it in a Current Affairs essay (published under a pen name, a habit he has since dropped) titled “It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich,”

After all, there are plenty of people on this earth who die—or who watch their loved ones die—because they cannot afford to pay for medical care. There are elderly people who become homeless because they cannot afford rent. There are children living on streets and in cars, there are mothers who can’t afford diapers for their babies. All of this is beyond dispute. And all of it could be ameliorated if people who had lots of money simply gave those other people their money. It’s therefore deeply shameful to be rich. It’s not a morally defensible thing to be.

If Sanders and the prospect of political power have made some preexisting radical leftists start talking more like New Deal liberals, the even bigger effect of his prominence has been compositional: by defining socialism in an especially capacious and inviting way, he pulled in people who might otherwise still identify as liberal or progressive. “What Roosevelt was stating in 1944, what Martin Luther King Jr. stated in similar terms twenty years later, and what I believe today, is that true freedom does not occur without economic security,” he said in his Georgetown speech in November 2015. “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.”

This kind of talk is enough to make a certain kind of liberal’s eyes roll clean out of her head. What Democrat doesn’t believe in those things? But Sanders couldn’t have claimed this ideological real estate if his overwhelmingly Millennial supporters didn’t feel that mainstream liberals—embodied by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment that lined up behind her—had abandoned it.

Briahna Gray, a contributing editor at Current Affairs who was recently hired as a politics editor at the Intercept, told me she probably wouldn’t have identified as a socialist in 2015. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said. Gray, a Harvard Law School–educated lawyer, has made a name for herself by embodying an intersection of identities that’s rare in media: a leftist, Sanders-supporting black woman. That has given her credibility to puncture the “Bernie bro” stereotype and take on Sanders critics who dismiss his movement as insufficiently attuned to racial or gender issues.

(Briahna Gray, an editor at the Intercept, came to socialism more recently. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said.)

“The most disappointing part of the 2016 primary was centrist candidates convincing Americans that policies that are implemented in wealthy nations all over the world, much less wealthy than ours, are completely a fantasy world,” she said. (Clinton declared during a primary debate that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to pass,” and later ridiculed Sanders in her campaign memoir for essentially promising Americans free ponies.) This was a recurring theme in conversations with young socialists. To their ears, the term “liberal” has come to represent an intolerably unimaginative posture toward politics: less “Yes we can” than “Not so fast.”

Still, the worldview Gray sketched out—“where socialism is used to mitigate the negative effects of capitalism”—sounded like good old Keynesian liberalism. If you’re someone who believes a word should have a fixed meaning over time, or who believes in the importance of the liberal tradition, then this approach—socialism as liberalism, just more liberal—can be deeply exasperating. Sean Wilentz, a historian and longtime friend of the Clintons, captured some of this frustration in a recent essay in the Democracy journal. “[T]here is something essentially dishonest about trying to assimilate the New Deal legacy as ‘socialism,’ ” he wrote, referring to the speech in which Sanders tied himself to Franklin Roosevelt.

There’s no denying that much of what today’s socialists are demanding fits within the liberal tradition of a Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone. Advocating something like single-payer health care, but calling yourself a socialist, can look like mere positioning. In fact, the socialist writers I spoke with didn’t really have a problem with that. “Part of it is just a rhetorical claim,” said Ryan Cooper, an opinion writer at the Week who identifies as a democratic socialist. He said that the core aspects of his political agenda are creating a “complete welfare state” and reducing inequality by democratizing ownership of capital. Why use a term as loaded as socialism to describe those ideals? “The point is to say, ‘Here’s a left,’ in a way that just could not possibly be co-opted by Andrew Cuomo types.”

Nathan Robinson echoed the sentiment. “I used to call myself ‘progressive,’ and then the term became used by everybody, and now it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “If you’re trying to say, ‘I’m further to the left than Obama and the Clintons,’ you’re stuck!” (Disclosure: I’m friendly with Cooper, who is a former Washington Monthly web editor, and Robinson.)

The divide may owe as much to differences in memory as to ideology. If you’re old enough to remember Democrats getting absolutely creamed in three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s, then you’re old enough to remember them seemingly needing to pivot to the center to regain power in 1992. They didn’t compromise their core values (they would love a complete welfare state, if only it were possible), they just did what they had to do to win votes from what looked like an overwhelmingly conservative electorate. That included getting cozier with Wall Street and members of the plutocracy to ensure a stream of campaign funding that could rival the right’s.

But if the 1980s are when you were born, that’s not your experience. You remember that the Bill Clinton years were pretty good—but yielded George W. Bush. We got eight years of Obama—then Trump. If cautious, corporate-friendly liberalism gives way time after time to revanchist Republican administrations, is it really doing its job? If liberal figureheads stop even talking about a truly ambitious social safety net, how long should we keep assuming that’s what they want, deep down? Someone under thirty-five years old has no memory of a Democratic presidential nominee, let alone president, to the ideological left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, that young person is broke: a report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve recently warned that households headed by ’80s babies have 34 percent less wealth than expected based on earlier generations at that age, and are thus “at greatest risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ for wealth accumulation.”

Telling a young radical that, despite all their sharp disagreements with the liberal mainstream, they’re really a part of it, is a bit like telling a football fan that the Cleveland Browns are actually good because they won some championships in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s fair to wonder how many years a political movement can distance itself from certain principles before it runs the risk of a rival movement claiming them for its own.

(It must be said, too, that “liberal” is an unfortunate term. It belongs to that category of words—like “sanction” or“oversight”—that mean both a thing and its opposite; thus a “classical liberal” is really a free-market conservative. An acute instance of this problem is the even more awful “neoliberal,” which itself has two meanings: one is simply Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire capitalism; the other, elaborated in the pages of this magazine in the 1980s, is more akin to the “New Democrat” philosophy of Bill Clinton. But these definitions overlap, because Clinton added financial deregulation to the agenda.)

It’s a bit unfair to ask the term “liberal” to cover every political position to the left of conservative and to the right of seizing the factories. The socialist label might be annoying, but it’s useful. Of course, the policies Bernie Sanders and many of his followers are calling for fit within the American liberal tradition, if you go back far enough. But to insist that they therefore owe loyalty to liberalism itself is to get the point of political movements backward. Ask not what you can do for your ideology; ask what your ideology can do for you. If young people increasingly feel like liberalism as it exists today doesn’t represent their values, then perhaps it’s up to liberalism to win them back.

If you think the Millennial socialist movement is only about protesting Clintonism, however, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

The tricky part of advancing ideas under the banner of “socialism” is threading the needle between two contradictory critiques. The first is an evergreen: that real-world socialism inevitably leads to catastrophe and dictatorship, and only someone totally ignorant of history could deny this. (A representative headline in the National Review: “Despite Venezuela, Socialism Is Still Popular in the U.S.”) The second critique, as we’ve seen, is that self-identified socialists actually aren’t socialists. (David Brooks managed to make both these points at once in a recent column. The idea that capitalism is inherently flawed, he wrote, has “been rejected by most on the left.” Nonetheless, today’s progressive left, drunk on populism and identity politics, “seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.”)

Few people seem to be working harder to tackle that challenge than Matt Bruenig, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of the People’s Policy Project, a one-man socialist think tank—and the husband and intellectual teammate of Liz Bruenig, the Washington Post columnist. I met them for lunch near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., in April. Former high school sweethearts who met on the debate team in Arlington, Texas, they’re an odd couple, by which I mean both that they are different from each other and that they are individually odd. Matt is tall and scruffy, with a paunch and a patchy beard. Liz is barely five feet tall and had her hair pulled into a tidy bun the day we met. He is hyper-analytical and obsessed with economic policy. She is a religious Catholic—her pro-life views have made her enemies on the left, whereas Matt, she joked, “loves abortion”—and more concerned with philosophical questions than policy specifics. “I make a much more romantic case for socialism than Matt does,” she said.

(Matt Bruenig’s one-man think tank, the People’s Policy Project, specializes in left-wing policy wonkery.)

Matt gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was fired from his part-time blogging gig at Demos, a liberal think tank, after directing a stream of Twitter insults at the head of a different liberal think tank. At the time, Liz was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with their daughter, Jane. I asked what happened after the kerfuffle.

“We went to Twitter boot camp,” Liz said.

“Who was the drill sergeant?”

“Me.”

In 2017, Matt launched his crowd-funded think tank, which immediately began being noticed in liberal policy circles. His work, which in its faith in winning arguments by marshaling the right facts calls to mind a socialist Ezra Klein, is often cited in places like the Atlantic and Vox, and he has been quoted as an expert by CBS News and elsewhere. Even among prominent young lefties, his Twitter presence, even post–boot camp, stands out—277,000 followers as of June.

(Elizabeth Bruenig, a twenty-seven-year-old columnist at the Washington Post, has devoted columns to making the case for socialism.)

The Bruenigs argue, as Liz has written in the Post, that “it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.” Much of Matt’s work revolves around making the case that real socialist policies have been implemented successfully in other countries, particularly Nordic nations like Norway and Sweden. The question of how to describe the governance of these places has become quite contentious, because if these healthy, happy, rich nations are meaningfully socialist in some way, it’s hard to argue that socialism always ends in disaster. Conservatives protest the most loudly, but liberals, too, deny that socialism is afoot in Scandinavia. These countries are, we’re told, “mixed economies” or “social democracies”—bigger welfare states, sure, but fundamentally capitalist systems.

But in a post last summer, Matt used data from the OECD library and the International Labour Organization to show that a strong welfare state is only one part of the story. Most strikingly, at least some of the Nordics come out ahead on that textbook aspect of socialism, state ownership. In Norway and Finland, he wrote, the government owns “financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP,” compared to 26 percent in the U.S. Norway’s government owns around 60 percent of the nation’s wealth—nearly double the level for the Chinese government—including a third of its domestic stock market. “There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world,” Bruenig wrote a few months later—“and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN’s 2017 World Happiness Report.”

The Norwegian example figures prominently in what is probably Matt’s most interesting policy proposal. In a New York Times op-ed last November, he argued that the easiest way to combat American inequality would be a “social wealth fund,” which he described as akin to an index or mutual fund, “but one owned collectively by society as a whole.”

Norway has such a fund, he pointed out, which is valued at over $1 trillion and is used to pay for its generous welfare state. Alaska has one, too, paying its citizens cash dividends from the proceeds of a diversified investment fund that, like Norway’s, started with oil money. Under Bruenig’s idea, the federal government would create an investment portfolio—perhaps by selling federal assets, or through “taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy,” or by redirecting recession spending by the Federal Reserve—and distribute a regular cash dividend to every American, or every American adult, each of whom would have one equal share in the fund. If the fund came to own a third of the nation’s wealth, he calculated, that would have meant an $8,000 payout to everyone between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four in 2016.

In addition to arguing for a social wealth fund, Bruenig published a long paper authored by Ryan Cooper, the writer at the Week, and Peter Gowan, a Dublin-based researcher, arguing that the best response to the problem of housing affordability would be a massive new “social housing” project, in which the federal government would pay to build ten million homes over the next ten years. Unlike traditional American public housing, this would be “designed to cater to people of various income levels, rather than just serving the ‘deserving poor.’ ” Again, they point to Europe for proof of concept: in the 1960s, facing a housing crisis, Sweden built one million social-housing units over the course of a decade, increasing its housing stock by a third. In Vienna, Austria, they report, “3 in 5 residents live in housing built, owned, or managed by the municipal government.”

(Continue Reading)

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ruminativerabbi · 6 years

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Hatred, Fear, Hope

Like most Jewish Americans, I was caught off-guard back in 2017 by the sight of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, and carrying aloft the flags of the Confederate States of America and Nazi Germany. (That they were also carrying the so-called Gadsden Flag that was originally used by the Continental Marines during the American Revolution—the one designed back in 1775 by Christopher Gadsden featuring the words “Don’t Tread on Me” beneath a coiled-up, scary-looking rattlesnake—struck me primarily as a sign of how little these people know about the values upon which the nation was founded in the first place.) The sight of those flags being held aloft proudly and defiantly was beyond upsetting, but not particularly confusing. But what was confusing—to me and I suspect to most—was the chant “Jews will not replace us,” which I hadn’t ever heard before and which I now realize I misunderstood, taking it to mean something entirely different than what it apparently does mean.

Taking the slogan at what I thought was face value, I understood the marchers to be declaring their determination not to allow themselves to be replaced by Jews eager to take over their jobs and leave them without work and eventually destitute. In other words, I imagined this somehow to be tied to the marchers’ skittishness about the job market and their need to find someone to blame in advance for losing jobs they fear they only haven’t lost yet and in which they fear they will eventually, to use their own word, be “replaced.” It hardly seems like a rational fear, but that’s what it felt like it had to mean, and so I ended up taking it as just so much craziness rooted not in anything corresponding to actual reality but in the malign fantasy that, left unchecked, we Jewish people will somehow take over the world and install our own people in whatever jobs we wish without regard to where such a move would leave the people currently holding them. And that is what I sense most Jewish people—and maybe even most Americans—hearing this chant took it to mean.

But now that I’ve read more, I see that that is specifically not what “Jews will not replace us” means and that the slogan specifically is not about Jews replacing Christians at work at all. Instead, the chant encapsulates the marchers’ fear that we Jews are working not to take over their jobs ourselves but to replace them at work with third-party others chosen specifically to deprive them of their livelihoods and their places in society. And who might these other people be? That, it turns out, is where anti-Semitism and racism meet: the hordes of jobseekers the marchers fear turn out not to be Jews at all, but hordes of dark-skinned immigrants feared already to be pouring over our borders and insinuating themselves into an already-tight job market. And it is those people who, because they are presumed ready to work at even the most menial jobs for mere pennies, are imagined to be threatening the white (i.e., non-immigrant) people who currently hold those jobs and who earn the American-sized salaries they use to support themselves and their families.

To say this is crazy stuff is really to say nothing at all. Yes, we have a huge and so-far-unresolved issue in this country with illegal aliens living in our midst and I’m sure that those people do take jobs that legal residents might otherwise have. And lots of non-crazy people, myself definitely included, are eager to find a way out of this morass that we ourselves have created by failing to police our borders adequately and by allowing the number of undocumented illegals in our midst to grow from a mere 760,000 or so in 1975 to something like 12.5 million today with no obvious solution in sight.

So wanting a reasonable solution to be found—one that is fully grounded both in settled U.S. law and in our national inclination to be just, fair, kind, and generous, and one that doesn’t make after-the-fact chumps out of all those countless millions of people who followed all the rules and immigrated here fully legally—is not crazy at all. What is crazy is the fantasy that Jewish Americans somehow possess the secret power to order Walmart’s and Costco and every other American business to fire specific employees and replace them with pre-selected others regardless of whether those others are or are not here legally. Crazier still is the contention that American Jews somehow control American immigration policy, and that we are somehow able imperiously to issue instructions that must be obeyed both to Democratic and Republican administrations. But craziest of all is the belief that, precisely because American Jews are so supremely powerful, we must be attacked violently before we order the administration to let even more immigrants into our nation. That, after all, was the specific reason the Pittsburgh shooter gave for his savagery in a comment posted online just before the attack: to give the officers of HIAS pause for thought before they work to bring in any more “invaders [to] kill our people.” My post-Pittsburgh proposal is that we stop dismissing that line of thinking as aberrant looniness that no normal person could actually embrace and start taking it far more seriously.

It feels natural to consider the various kinds of prejudice that characterize our society as variations on a common theme. And in a certain sense, I suppose, that is true. But these pernicious attitudes are also distinct and different, both in terms of their root causes and the specific way they manifest themselves in the world: misogyny, racism, and homophobia, for example, are similar in certain cosmetic ways, but differ dramatically in terms of the specific malign fantasies that inspire them and thus should (and even probably must) be addressed in different ways as well. And we should also bring that line of thinking to bear in considering anti-Jewish prejudice: similar in some ways to other forms of prejudice, anti-Semitism also has unique aspects that it specifically does not share with other forms of bigotry. Indeed, the fact that the anti-Semitism put on public display in Charlottesville was rooted in the haters’ groundless yet powerful fantasy about the almost limitless power imagined somehow to have wound up in the hands of the hated is all by itself enough to distinguish anti-Semitism from other kinds of prejudice. And not at all irrelevant is that it appears not to matter at all how impossible it feels to square that fantasy about Jewish powerfulness with the degree to which powerless Jews have suffered at the hands of their foes over the centuries, and particularly in the last one. In that regard, I would like to recommend a very interesting essay by Scott A. Shay, the author and Jewish activist, that was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few days after the shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue and which readers viewing this electronically can access by clicking here.

Nor is this a problem solely of one extreme end of the political spectrum. In the wake of Pittsburgh, the spotlight is on the anti-Semitism that characterizes the extreme right, but the same light could be shone just as brightly on the anti-Semitism of the extreme left…and particularly when it promotes hostility toward Israel’s very right to exist and to defend itself against its enemies. Indeed, the assumption that Israel—instead of being perceived as an outpost of democracy smaller than New Jersey trying to survive in a region in which it must deal with nations and political terror groups that openly express their hope to see Israel and its Jewish population annihilated—is perceived as an all-powerful Goliath seeking to eradicate its innocent opponents militarily rather than to negotiate fairly or justly with them, is part and parcel of this fantasy regarding the power of the Jewish people. Coming the week after Hamas fired over five hundred missiles at civilian targets in Israel, each capable of killing countless civilian souls on the ground, the image of Israel as the aggressor in its ongoing conflict with Hamas sounds laughable and naïve. But maybe we should stop laughing long enough to ask ourselves how this myth of Jewish power—whether focused on American Jews imagined to be in control of American foreign policy or Israeli Jews imagined to be intent on crushing their innocent victims for no rational reason at all—perhaps we should ask ourselves how we might address, not this or that symptom of the disease, but the disease itself.

Distinct (at least in my mind) from theological anti-Semitism rooted in the supersessionist worldview promoted for so long by so many different Christian denominations, this specific variety of anti-Semitism seems rooted not in messianic fervor but in fear. And that, I think, is probably how to go about addressing it the most effectively: by pulling that fear out into the light and exposing it as a fantasy no less malign than inane. By forcing young people drawn to the alt-right to look at pictures of the innocents murdered in Pittsburgh and to ask themselves if they truly have it in them to believe that U.S. government policy was until two weeks ago being dictated by 97-year-old Rose Mallinger or by Cecil or David Rosenthal, both gentle, disabled types whose lives were built around service to their house of worship. By forcing young people poisoned with irrational hatred of Israel to look at the portraits of the 1,343 civilians murdered by Palestinian terrorists since 2000 and to see, not predators or fiends, but innocent victims of mindless violence. By insisting that young people drawn to fear Jews and Judaism be exposed to the stories of Shoah victims—and, if possible, to surviving survivors themselves—and through that experience to understand where groundless prejudice can lead if left unchecked and unaddressed.

To hope that no one is drawn to extremism is entirely rational, but it really can’t be enough. Just as young people who seem drawn to a racist worldview should be forced—by their parents and their teachers in school, or by society itself—to look into the eyes of those poor souls gunned down in the Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston on June 17, 2015, after welcoming their murderer into their midst for an hour of Bible study, so should society itself rescue young people from themselves once they are perceived to be embracing the kind of anti-Semitism that led directly to Pittsburgh…and be forced to confront the bleak hatred that has taken root in their hearts and to see it for what it is: a fantasy rooted in fear that can be overcome and eradicated by anyone truly willing to try.

#anti-Semitism #racism #Pittsburgh synagogue massacre

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animentality · 6 years

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How could Americans NOT love guns?

Every fucking action movie pretty much slaps you in the face with its gun-shaped dicks.

The American dream, American individualism, the desperate fear of conformity, and social cohesion, the desire for “freedom” against perceived tyrants, and alien influences, I mean.

America’s love for guns comes from the ground up.

You were raised on gun violence as a solution to everything.

Bad guy?

Shoot him.

Don’t talk to him, that’s dumb, he’s beyond help, as some humans just are, you know.

The end all, be all solution is just to kill people who upset you.

I honestly roll my eyes at my liberal friends who just don’t understand why Americans cling so fiercely to their guns.

Like, even in movies that are “against” violence, guns are placed on this aesthetic and almost theological pedestal as civilization against nature.

Guns are like our cultural staple, they’re a symbol of our “freedom” and “protection” against a tyrannical government.

People living in the country need guns to shoot wild animals. People in the city need guns to shoot wild people.

It’s the middle class suburban moms who hate guns just cuz their five year old got shot in a elementary school, i mean big deal right, she can just have more. Guns aren’t a problem in America, it’s PEOPLE.

People who are the problem, people who need guns to protect their opinions and their bodies from other people.

The world we NEED to live in is the one where everyone has to protect themselves from others.

That’s a civilized society.

Not a society where an assault rifle with only one purpose isn’t allowed.

But a civilized society where it IS allowed, because the hords of zombies that’re coming to kill you can be held back until dawn.

Guns just tap into this American imagination of a hostile social and natural environment, and they- that is to say we- just don’t want to give it up.

And we don’t care who gets hurt, because it’s no one we know, so who cares?

Someone else’s kids, someone else’s problems.

Honestly, gun control, environmental degradation, abortion, who cares?

People shooting one another isn’t even an issue.

Global warming is going to drive our race to extinction long before we could even begin to thin our populations out by mass-mob-sponsored gun executions.

We might as well shoot one another.

Hand me your pistol, if you can bear to part with it for two seconds, and I’ll get us started.

#i dont even think im mad anymore about gun violence in america and im sorry if that offends you #i just dont care anymore its so hard to care when nothing changes #how could i care #after all these years #ive heard so much #its just #why does the human race deserve to exist?#does it?#why because we're intelligent? because we feel something?#whats so special about that if we refuse to exercise either trait?#let us die #all of us #im so edgy but i dont care #just let us die

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cykosis · 4 years

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pt 3.

part 2 is here

part 4 is here

For all he’d heard of how this man’s family did important international work, he could not help but be spectacularly underwhelmed when they arrived at a house identical to every other one on its block and his companion proclaimed that they had arrived. The only distinction was the small plaque held on the edge of the property, stating that the “Natale” family resided here. Now at least, he had a name to go off.

“This is it?” He knew it was rude, but he could hardly contain himself. “I would have thought- “

“Right. You would think.” His companion interjected, rolling his eyes dramatically and throwing up his arms in irritation. “Welcome to my life. My parents are the worst.” He led Calus inside and turned on the lights, illuminating them both. “Oh, wow. You really are infected.”

Before he could register any of his companion’s appearance, Calus looked down at himself. His skin had faded into a dusty death-like complexion, and the mold had only upkept its presence. But if he came off as being afraid of it, surely that would uproot his claims that he wasn’t contagious.

“Oh, yeah it looks worse than it is.” Calus laughed, though he kept his arms crossed tight so the worst of it was hidden. “On the plus side, I don’t have to sleep or eat really. And I can absorb the life out of anything.” While they weren’t the most appealing abilities, he was hoping his obvious stupidity would inhibit any fear he was dangerous. “So, Natale? Is that your name?”

“My name is Judah.” He replied dryly, giving Calus a small glare through a slightly upturned nose. “Judah Natale. I don’t know why you’d act stupid. You clearly aren’t.”

While he had been acting stupid, it hadn’t been then. He couldn’t help but feel offended, but there was no objection he could yell out. Instead, he looked away from Judah’s smug gaze and pretended to not see it. “So your parents are humanitarians, and they live here? Like normal people?” Somehow, he had imagined helping people internationally would have implied more material wealth. Though, if they had the money to spare, he supposed the governments wouldn’t have been outsourcing the problems in the first place. “What…do they do?”

Wordlessly, Judah led Calus deeper into the home and up the stairs into a bedroom of moderate size, the clutter of life making it seem smaller than Calus knew it to be. They sat there on the bed side by side, and Judah gave him a look of unknown emotion before beginning.

“They go everywhere and fix everyone’s problems that they caused.” He said simply, motioning around the room. “All of this stuff, this is theirs. The stuff they bought. And it’s not with them. Because, instead, they’re living off of everyone else. But it’s not even their fault.” He rolled his eyes and sighed loudly. “Basically, other countries don’t know how to do anything, so they always have people who allegedly need help. I don’t understand how these places have managed to stay afloat for so long if they apparently need help all of the time. And I don’t know why my parents would have left these places that have such a hard time to move somewhere where there aren’t these problems just to leave immediately as soon as someone needs help again.”

What Judah was raving about was concepts beyond what he knew of the outside world, but he couldn’t help but feel he should have known this information before now. Especially since he was raving about it; this had to be something he knew Calus could understand and talk about. And, faintly, he remembered learning about the rest of the world because he knew the continents. For some reason, though, he could not remember anything else.

“Are they because of the current problems, or has this been going on since…last time?” Calus asked slowly, trying to find his footing in the conversation. “I mean, have they really been called back to the same places? That often?” Judah was around his age, so for him to have this perspective, it really must be frequent.

“I mean, yeah?” Judah half-asked, looking ever more disgusted. “If you don’t know about something you don’t have to lie. I know people here aren’t educated the same way I was outside of here. I’d really rather just talk about something else then.”

For some reason, Calus felt offended by this, particularly because of Judah’s snide remark about everyone here. He had reason to not know, because he’d been isolated for so many years. But not everyone else; everyone else had gone beyond that, but he wasn’t going to dig into his backstory for validation. “So if you knew I wouldn’t know why bother bringing it up to me?” Who was he to get so snide?

“Relax.” Judah said, raising his arms in surrender. “I didn’t know how much you knew. I was ranting. You didn’t need to answer.” He rolled his eyes again. “So what about you? How’d you manage to survive that?”

While he had the opportunity to swallow his embarrassment, he was going to. Thus far, he knew he was making a less than favorable impression. “I don’t know.” He admitted but knew that wouldn’t be good enough of an explanation. “I got infected with it when my parents moved from Yvas to Garudia like, maybe four years ago now. I can just control it now.”

“You can control it?” Judah seemed hesitant, like he didn’t believe what he was hearing.

That was the kind of reaction Calus had been hoping for at the reveal of his ability. Proudly as he could, he nodded and smiled a bit smugly. “Totally and entirely. Whenever I want.” He hadn’t yet had the chance to boast and figured this was good a time as any.

Where Calus had been anticipating amazement, he was met with a kind of smugness. Judah folded his arms over his chest and stood up, staring down at Calus quizzically for a few moments. “And are you proud of what you’ve accomplished?”

The weight of knowing this was a trap for his ego slammed into him. As he braced himself, he glanced up at the ceiling and clenched his jaw. “Yes. I’m very proud of myself.” If he came off as self-hating initially, Judah would have less to jab into him with.

“You can’t go near civilization again.” Judah sneered, continuing to chuckle under his breath. “Did you realize that? I don’t think you realized that.”

Of all the things he had been expecting Judah to nail into him about, it had not been that. He snapped his head to look at his companion, tightening his arms over his chest. “Excuse me?” Not when Judah had just been in the forest saying how he didn’t have a choice but to trust him. Had that really all gone away on the presumption that Calus had been telling the truth? It was warranted, Calus wanted that fear to be gone, but not like this. Judah should still be not comfortable enough to be rude.

“Has nobody told you you’re ugly before?” Judah laughed, bewildered. “You’ve got mold growing out of your skin. Why are you offended by things that are, like, literally true?” He couldn’t believe it; it was plastered on his face.

Everything Judah was saying was true, but it still hurt to know people would qualify him as “ugly”. Even with the mold growing in full bloom over his skin, he did not deserve someone to sneer at him over his appearance.

“I’m infected.” Calus said, horrified that Judah would be telling him so matter of fact that he was ugly, he couldn’t be near civilization again. It wasn’t his fault that this was happening to him. He hadn’t asked to become infected with this.

“Right.” He started, trailing off as though he had been expecting Calus to say more. “Oh. Oh, that was your argument.” A scoff. He leaned down over Calus, inspecting him closer. “But you’re proud of that. So you can’t be upset when you have god powers but somebody doesn’t want you near civilization. Why do you want to have everything?” They weren’t questions or statements, they were accusations. Deadpan, emotionless accusations, but accusations, nonetheless.

Once again, he was forced to move on with the conversation as to not embarrass himself further. “I don’t want everything, I just…I haven’t been around other people since I got infected like four years ago. Nobody’s told me that. So. I just wasn’t expecting that to be the critique.” Even as the words were leaving his mouth, he didn’t know the purpose of them.

Judah just rolled his eyes and backed off, moving to the doorway. “Tomorrow I’ll see what I can find out about getting you to Kylan.” He said, shaking his head slightly but enough to make sure Calus took note of it. “If I didn’t have the worst reputation in all of Virolia I’d kick you out, but I’m sure somebody around here would make up a conspiracy about me trying to kill everyone. So you’re safe here. But stay inside where nobody can see you.” And then he was gone, slamming the door slightly on his way out.

From the second he was alone, Calus threw himself back on the bed and screamed silently into his hands. At every possible opportunity, he had made everything worse. There was no point during their interaction once they had come here where he had felt assured that they were still on good terms.

Judah hated him. He knew he did. Tomorrow, he would have to try and make amends for everything that had transpired. He’d made himself look selfish, stupid, and ignorant, and all for the sake of humor and deflection. And then to say he hadn’t been around anyone, so that was why he was justified to get defensive over being called unattractive. He was worse than a child.

Maybe he should leave and take this into his own hands; it was clearly what Judah wanted him to do. He got up and left the room, standing for a moment in the hallway before realizing he didn’t know where the room was. Hesitantly, he walked down the hall, peering slightly into the other rooms until he saw Judah standing in one, staring blankly into the doorway.

“Did you need something?” His face was suddenly hostile and irritated.

Well, at least that justified why he was here. “I’m going to leave. Since you don’t- I just think maybe I should take this into my own hands. Since it’s my problem.” Calus stammered, cursing himself for the stumble.

“I invited you here.” Judah said slowly, as though he were confused. “If you want to go, fine, but don’t pretend like you came here uninvited when you were…invited. To stay here to wait out my parents helping you get to Kylan.” He waved for Calus to leave. “You are dismissed or whatever.”

Again he was left feeling foolish, but this one ached less. Despite his initial aggravation, Judah had calmed down during the interaction. At the end, it had even leaned towards playful. “I thought you were angry with me?” It came out as a question though it hadn’t been meant to be. “Because of the whole…everything.”

“Oh.” Judah perked up and shook his head. “You like, aren’t a real person. So it’s fine. I know you don’t know how to act around people yet.” He shrugged mildly. “Plus, my parents told me about milstrun. It’s tricky stuff. I heard it eats your brain, so I figure you’re probably just, you know.”

Calus nodded, feeling the warmth of understanding bloom inside of him. Finally, someone understood. It wasn’t as though anybody had ever given him grievance of it beyond his parents, but they had also been the last people he’d been around. With time, once he got back from Kylan, he could worry about being the most likeable person. Then, the realization hit him.

“Your parents know about milstrun?” Had he known that? He felt like he should have known that, but it still came as a shock. Maybe it had been an assumption because of Judah’s indifference towards it. “How much do you know?”

“Enough to tell you that you are not in as great of shape as you…are acting like you think you are.” He said stiffly, smiling weakly and suddenly turning serious. “I’m amazed you can see, with that stuff in there.”

“Do you have a mirror or something?” Calus sputtered out, swallowing his mild irritation that all Judah seemed to want to talk about was how physically bad he looked. “I have not seen myself in four years.”

Judah clucked his tongue as though to comment on how he should have known, but remained silent as he rose stiffly, dramatically suppressing a laugh, and motioned for Calus to look at the mirror on the other side of his room. He gently pushed Calus along, making a great deal of trailing down his arm until he reached the edge of Calus’s sleeves where the mold grew before pulling away.

And though it hurt, when Calus looked in the mirror, he could not help but begin to agree with the disgust he was being shown. In his face, there was the image of a terrified young man in front of him, his eyes crosshatched aimlessly by black threads of milstrun that seemed to gleam the faintest of green he had seen back in the Garudia swamp. His skin, a faded brown, was weakly adorned with spots of mold by his ears and neck. But beyond that, the blackness had taken his arms and hands, and while the characteristic fuzz had been worn off, the unevenness of the skin made his stomach turn.

He looked like death. He looked like a corpse brought back to life by some unholy magic, and he could not help but fall to the ground in a pile at the sight of himself. It looked like he was trapped in a body that was decaying around him, and that is what he began to realize is what he was. One day, his body would give out. Unless he paid special attention to exactly consume more energy than the milstrun took from him, he was going to rot away.

“Hey,” Judah offered, crouching down beside Calus, touching his shoulder. “It’s okay. You just need to cover this stuff up. You’re still okay looking. Maybe you’ll even be handsome once all this is covered up.” He was laughing, but it was sincere all the same.

What Judah was saying wasn’t helping, but it would be rude to say so. Even he knew that. Rather, Calus opted to nod and pause for a few moments, feigning getting over his outburst, and sighed triumphantly. “Sorry, it was a shock.”

“You don’t have to keep apologizing. I don’t know why you keep doing that.” Equally quickly, the kindness was gone from Judah’s voice. “The rudest person ever, but you apologize for things you’re not rude about. Weird.” He shook his head. “So when you say you can control milstrun, is it the kind that’s in the ground still, or…?”

This was a topic he could navigate much easier; he hardly minded Judah jumping from ridiculing him to this. “I think it might be both, but I know it’s at least the stuff that’s in my body.”

As soon as he was about to continue, Judah raised his hand. “Please stop talking like a child. If you use the word ‘stuff’ again instead of referring to what you’re talking about I am going to feed you weedkiller.” And then he lowered his hand and motioned for Calus to continue.

The only way he could describe to himself how he was feeling was whiplash, and it took the words out of his mouth. Any time he said anything, Judah was there with objection or snide remark. It was infuriating, really, that he kept managing to put himself on a pedestal between the two of them. But what really bothered him was the mention of weedkiller; it set an anxiety in his stomach he could not describe. There was something so personal about it, something sinister in the way Judah said it.

“I am able to control the milstrun directly inside of my body.” Calus spat, seething with rage at Judah and his attitude. “With it, I am able to absorb the life out of anything. Just like the fungus does independently of me.”

Though his tone was apparent, Judah pretended to remain ignorant of it and instead lit up at the mention of Calus’s ability. “That’s incredible. Anything?” There was a sense of glee in his voice, of glowing opportunity, that filled a void in Calus’s heart he had not known existed. Someone appreciated what he could do; they felt the potential of this ability. Judah would not exile him from society over an arguable ailment.

Calus nodded excitedly, overcome with emotion. “So far I’ve killed animals and people. Just two people, though, because they were trying to-, uh,” quickly as he could, he scrambled for a coverup of his warranted quarantine. “keep me contained to use me for energy.” That would work, Judah wouldn’t know what they were doing in Garudia. “My parents brought me to the swamp on purpose. They wanted to infect me because they wanted to reverse engineer me, to get rid of the threat of milstrun so they could develop it more.” He breathed out the rest, biting his lip to feign shyness in place of frantically thinking of more details. “I don’t really know the rest, because, you know, I escaped.”

Judah’s eyes widened and his face stiffened at this. “Your own family?” His face melted into pity, and he rubbed Calus’s shoulder gently. “That had to have been the work of the entire city, wouldn’t it? How far along did they get where they had you contained? Did you live your whole life like that?”

Though he knew the right decision was to admit he had been lying, there would then be the question of why his immediate instinct would be to lie. Even if their time together would be brief, he did not need that impression, especially considering Judah was getting his family involved. Calus was very easily a public health crisis; he needed to tread carefully. For now, he would lie. Judah would be the last person he would lie to.

“I think it was.” He shrugged, twisting his hands together idly to relieve his anxiety. “They had it all set up, they were containing me to I guess make sure everything was going to work okay.” It was hard to keep things vague when, as he was realizing, this was an extremely hard story to lie through. “Basically, I think it was supposed to be like a huge science experiment where they ran through my body and tried to figure out how to kill the fungus. I don’t really know, though.”

The conversation dropped into a deep sense of discomfort, neither of them knowing where to go from there. Judah weakly nodded a few times, looking away in shame. “I had no idea. That sounds insane. I’m surprised you got away.”

Calus knew it was up to him to move the conversation along, but this was the first time Judah had shown any semblance of human emotion. Coming from that type of backstory, trying to move on immediately would be cause for suspicion. It wouldn’t hurt to bleed this microcosm of sympathy dry. “I’m very strong. They couldn’t stop me once I figured it all out.”

“Well,” Judah sighed softly before returning the previously abandoned eye contact between them. “It’s a shame they couldn’t brainwash you into having some humility. I guess I can’t blame you for your superiority complex, though.”

That was now two comments that Judah had made and made his blood boil, but Calus still couldn’t find an angle to come after him with. Solely being angry would give Judah an easy opportunity to cut down his argument, but he could tell from the man’s smug demeanor he was learning Calus wouldn’t talk back.

“You have a problem with your parents not being adored for being decent people.” He reminded Judah, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t think I’m the one with the superiority complex.” Or the need to have humility brainwashed into them.

The room went still with tension as Calus winced away in mild panic. Suddenly, they weren’t having a simple conversation anymore. That comment had gone deep, and he could feel the swell of the wave coming towards him as his host got up and stood over him.

“Do not talk to me like that.”

Calus blinked dumbly. It was almost funny; of all the things Judah could have said in response, he had chosen that. “I don’t belong to you. I can talk to you however I want.” What would he do, get angry?

The expression that darkened Judah’s face was one of hatred. Pure, vile hatred for Calus and everything he stood for. He towered over his guest, shaking as his eyes flashed with imagination of what he could do. “I’d watch out if I were you. I’m sure an energy source isn’t something your townspeople are going to drop overnight. Now get out.” There was no break between the points, no distinction of what he’d said was a threat or a promise or even both.

On the other side, Calus was unbothered. He knew he could shred Judah to bits if there were ever a true dispute. All the same, he rose with purpose and placed his hands on his host’s shoulders, moving him out of the way before stepping out of the room and back into his own with a slight grin all the way.

Judah couldn’t do anything to him. His incompetence was blatant; he cared more about upkeeping this image of perfection to do anything. Only an hour ago, he had been raving about how Calus had to stay indoors for fear of his neighbors spreading conspiracy; now he was claiming he’d turn Calus in at the first opportunity.

As he laid on his bed in the borrowed room, he stared up at the ceiling and pondered what to do next. There was no set timeframe for when Judah would reach out about Kylan; he’d said tomorrow but in the wake of their argument, Calus had to account for the possibility he would become difficult purposefully, to try and create some variant of a hostage situation. He seemed to be the petty type.

If it didn’t happen tomorrow, Calus would leave. One trip to another continent wouldn’t be worth the ordeal of tolerating Judah for any longer than necessary. If the news came back that they needed to wait for more information, he would go directly to the source of that news and ask them directly. He didn’t have time to waste on this.

Tonight was one of those nights where he found himself wishing he could fall asleep as he knew his host was doing only a few rooms down. While it brought him amusement knowing he had all evening to plan to how to deal with his host in the coming days, it brought him no peace. The longer he had to cycle through the possibilities, the more it seemed inevitable that Judah was going to try to keep him here against his will. He’d mentioned feeding him poison, made remarks about how him being brainwashed would be a better option.

No. Calus shook his head in disapproval. As he’d already realized, his ability to recognize what was appropriate in social settings had dissipated due to his isolation. If it really bothered him, he should tell Judah directly. While he’d been responsive to the fake story, it clearly hadn’t sunken in how insensitive he was being.

Knowing Judah, Calus realized, this was likely a test. If he didn’t say anything, he’d probably get interrogated about the specifics of his condition because something didn’t line up. For whatever reason, he’d been extremely suspicious this entire time. It would be the better idea to confront these problems directly before he got caught in a lie.

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scriptmin · 7 years

Text

21 Grams [Pt.1]

Prologue | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Final

Pairing: Jimin x Reader Genre: Sci-fi, dystopian au | Length: 9.8k

Summary: There was little to be learned from an Android when all it knows, humans have taught. Yet when a bright boy of dark hair had come into your home, eighteen years in academia would mean next to nothing against the universe he had brought along with him.

Note: pls read the prologue first.

They gave you a week to mourn her.

Along with every other child who had failed the test. It was funeral after funeral for the entirety of seven days—seven days of forced smiles and stiff handshakes and accepting condolences as if it were not you yourself who had caused her death.

But after that it was a week of celebrations, for those who won, those proved themselves worthy to remain in a world bursting at the seams with mouths to feed and too little to go round. And at your parties, there were feasts. The district was affluent; each family strove to parade their new pride, their precious survivor, as best as they could. You had attended close to twenty parties that week alone, and in each one, even your own, the existence of the fallen child was easily erased, like he was not missed, like there was not a room on the second floor whose owner was alive just two weeks ago.

We are sisters from the same womb, a part of me will live on in you, as you will in me. May the better warrior win.

It was not fair—to either of you. She claimed a part of you had lived in her, yet she was dead. Now there would always be an element of your soul that could never be made up for—a chasm that could never be sealed. Your sister had taken something away from you, and the world had taken your sister. A girl as brilliant as she was may only claim a small fraction of your mind; eighteen years of life reduced to seconds-long memories that burst only in the deepest recesses. All of her was now a part of you, in what twisted world would that be fair?

“This is the most emotion I’ve seen on you in your entire life.”

You watched the man, tall, broad, regal in his own right, approach you with calculated steps. His platinum hair, bright as a spotlight amidst the browns and blacks, dusted the top of his thick, straight brows, positioned over gladiator-like eyes; sharp, invasive, unnerving. You knew fear as well as you knew Kim Seokjin.

“I’m only holding a plate of sandwiches.”

The plush, pink flesh of his lips smirked into his response, “May I join you?”

His words sought permission, but it was his own continuously advancing steps that gave him an answer. You said nothing as the man arrived beside you, his herculean shoulders towering over yours, ensnaring you in a whirlwind of pinecones and dead leaves. Seokjin brought the season of Fall everywhere he went; it was almost comforting.

“This is your victory, why do you look like you just saw someone kick a puppy?”

You had nearly sighed beside the older boy. Seokjin was only three years your senior, but it was precisely because of his still young age and the position he held that made him all the more formidable. You had ever witnessed some elders bowing their heads in front of him. “It saves me the trouble being talked to, I don’t intend on changing it.”

Seokjin halted a waiter to pick a glass of champagne. You could not bring yourself to watch the server leave, but the man beside you had all but missed the notion. “I see what this is about.” The grin in his voice irked you. For the first time in your conversation, you had brought yourself to look him in the eye. You tried many times to convince yourself if had been a mistake, but you could not mistake it now—the glowing silver rim around his left pupil. The mechanism that had saved half his sight after an accident some years ago. It was quite the talk around town; Seokjin became known as the boy with a robot eye, amongst many other things. “I’d almost thought you were upset about your twin.”

Your fingers clench around the pearlescent evening dress. “You know nothing.”

“On the contrary, I know many things.” The man had swiveled to stand before you, his broad chest filling up most of your vision space. You could only be forced to look up, to be pulled into the rhythmic flashes of his silver eye. “I know more things than you care to admit. You don’t like the Droids.”

Pricked by his ever-accurate perception, your face fell like a sulking child, and the boldness that had allowed you to hold eye contact for that brief moment had dissolved into nothingness. Your gaze skidded across the ballroom, ignoring your guests but harping on the workers. The Droids. Robots took over the menial jobs people thought they were too worthy to hold. It was the country’s proudest achievement, though you all but took pride in it.

“You’re scared of them—”

“I am not—”

“But you are scared of me.”

His robotic eye flashed silver once more. He was exactly like them, the Droids. Their eyes flashed whenever they stored something into their memory. It was the one way to tell them apart from humans. This was what you disliked about being around him; Seokjin was always storing information about people, but unlike the rest, he could remember things for a long, long time. What information was he gathering? What was he going to use against you?

“I am not.” A weak declaration, both in voice and body language. Anyone else would have jumped at the opportunity to stomp you to the ground, seal the deal, but Seokjin was not acting predator here. He was not trying to take advantage, he wanted to understand. “I am guarded, not afraid.”

“And with good reason,” he acknowledged with flourish, if only to patronize you. “The Droids are still a minority, and I am unique. Truly… unique. Some are like you, cautious, some are afraid, some are just ignorant. What do they say about me?” He peers down at you, smiling. “That after my eye, I’ve gone on to replace the entire left side of my body with mechanical parts? That I am half oil, half blood?”

“Some say you have a silver heart. That if someone put a hand on your chest, they would feel a steady hum instead of a pulsing heart.”

He stepped closer to you, warmth now emanating from his skin alongside his Fall scent. “Why don’t you try?”

It was a murmur that sent shivers throughout your body despite the dampness on your back and palms. Seokjin’s smile did not falter, and seemed to egg you on. Do it. Slowly, almost robotically, your hand lifted from your side, an outstretched palm reaching for the chest that was only a few inches away from the tip of your nose. You pressed against the muscle and bone. For a chilling second, you felt nothing, but though faint, there was surely a rhythmic pulse beating against your palm.

“I have a proposition.” His voice had delivered a current beneath his heartbeats, a vibration of near electric quality. Startled, you withdrew your hand and returned the appropriate distance between your bodies. If anyone saw… “I know you’ve had more than enough people try to talk you into joining their organizations tonight, but I urge you to work with me in the Institute.”

“In the birthplace of Droids.” Your response was a near-scoff, the closest you had gotten to putting one toe out of line with Seokjin. “I decline.”

“Never mind that. But at least allow me to change your mind.” His towering stature shifted from one foot to the other, bubbling champagne liquid swirling gently in his glass. “It involves a gift that you might not like, but a gift that you will accept nonetheless.”

Two taps on a microphone echoed from the speakers hanging overhead. Your attention eager to be stolen by anything excluding the man standing two feet before you, you were quick to avert your eyes to the stage up front, where your father now stood. “Ladies and gentlemen, before we conclude the night, I would like to invite my daughter to deliver her reflection speech.”

Despite your figure being concealed by Seokjin’s larger one, you had sensed every attendee’s eyes on you in a matter of seconds, the trail of applause equally quick to follow. If the man in your company had not been so thick of skin, you were sure their gazes would burn holes in his back.

“What makes you think I’ll accept?” You challenged.

Lips stretching into a smoldering grin, Seokjin had sidestepped, allowing the spotlights to hit you and bathe your skin in white. As your feet brought you to the front of the room, the man murmured back: “You are only as afraid as you are curious.”

There was no way of knowing this before, but it turned out your parents had another custom surrounding the test—a gift. Gifts, as you understood it, were meant to bring relative surprise and joy to its receiver. In that sense, it would not be accurate in the slightest to call the abomination that you were glaring down much of a gift at all.

His eyes flashed silver. “It’s nice to meet you, Y/N.”

You were determined to scream, to rage, to chase it out with a broomstick. But your feet had planted firmly on the carpet, fists balled into white knuckle behind your back. Turning to your parents, you questioned, “What is this?”

“With the upcoming release of the third gen, we believed it would be wise to reward you something suitable for our family’s image, and your new position in society.” Ever the reasonable ones, your parents were. You hated it, but you could understand their logic. “Only a countable few families have gotten their hands on the pre-release.”

Is that supposed to make you excited? It took more willpower to withhold your frustrations in front of your parents than Kim Seokjin, and that said a lot considering how effortlessly the man could infuriate you.

“We thought you should be the one to choose a name,” your father continued. Droids didn’t need names, you were tempted to reply, but the awareness of the constant silver flashing just a few feet away had put a cork in your throat, effectively plugging all attempts at an eloquent retort. If it sensed your hostility towards it, would it then reply with the same behavior?

That was what you hated about them, and all learning machines for that matter. They were always watching, always trying to pry and read into what was not theirs to understand. The fact that their creation was even possible in the first place still boggled you—the amount of coding and programming put into something to make it as humanistic as it was now, you simply could not fathom it. It was terrifying, but it was also a wonder.

“Did Seokjin send this?”

Your parents shared an intrigued glance, one that communicated so much and so little at once. “Did he make an offer?” Your father queried back, “I saw him speaking with you the other night.”

“Seokjin is a fine man…” Your mother supplied thoughtfully, and then tacked on, “Though a pity, his accident.”

“You’re not answering the question,” you breathed, exasperated. You had almost missed the tilt of a head from the machine in front of you. It was still observing, trying to make sense of your family dynamics.

“No, this was our idea,” he finally replied, “Is it not to your liking?”

You had to be careful with your words now, not because you feared hostility from the machine, but because you did not want to offend your parents who perhaps only had good intentions, just rather ignorant ones. “I just… never felt the need for it.” This was true. While most households had at least one or two Droids to do chores, your parents had raised you and your sister into independence. Your future plans never calculated enough space for a Droid in the house; the fourth presence was always to be your sister’s. “That sentiment hasn’t changed.”

“If that’s the reason for your apprehension, don’t worry. When you begin working, there will be little time or energy for house work. You might even need someone to assist you on the go.”

A warm hand had come upon your shoulders; your mother’s. She was softer, gentler, a ghost of the mother you knew for a fleeting moment as a child. “At least give it a try?” She urged.

Seokjin was only half-right. You could not reject it, but it didn’t mean you accepted. You made a mental note to confront him the next chance you got, but for now—for now, you had to deal with this.

“What do you know how to do?” You said to the machine. His narrow black eyes blinked once, twice, before they lifted into crescent moons; a smile. You cringed.

“Anything you want me to.”

You briefly met the expectant gazes of your parents, who were practically radiating approval and impression of the machine’s performance thus far. It was as if they were watching their little girl interact with a new toy. Or worse, the other way around.

“You can cook, then? Cook dinner.”

He nodded eagerly, fluffy black hair bouncing with the motion. “What would you like?”

By then you were too ready to leave, and had tossed out whatever was at the top of your head. “Chinese. I’ll be in my room now, I have proposals to consider. Please have dinner without me.”

This time your parents were fully understanding, their proud whispers encouraging you to carry on. It appeared even a new robot in the house was not enough to distract them from their champion. But was it enough to replace your sister? Your fists tightened, nails digging mercilessly into palms—no, your parents couldn’t be that cruel.

You had climbed the stairs to your room against the diminuendo of your mother meticulously instructing the Droid on the layout of your kitchen. Everything beyond had been muted by the firm shut of your door.

It was only in the privacy of your room that you could feel his searing, electric gaze be lifted off your skin. You had never felt anything like it before, then again you had never met a Droid in your own home. They were a frequent sight in public, doing labor at the markets, cashiering in grocery stores, mowing lawns and the likes. But even then, they had not felt as real. Apart from the upgrades the Institute so claimed to have implemented in their latest release, it was also the appearance that had set apart the third generation from its predecessors.

Those were simple in nature, designed for trivial and repetitive tasks society no longer had the patience for; and they had been released in a time where people were still reasonably guarded against automatons, so the Institute was reluctant to craft them too closely in the image of a human. Only the faces and limbs of the older models were skin, the rest of its body was steel and wire. You would much prefer that design to the current one—at least you knew they were different.

Expelling all redundant thoughts of the Droid, you had sat before your laptop to review the employment offers sent to your mailbox after your success at the test. Your sister’s ghost was nearly tangible in the first moments, hovering over your shoulder and giving her commentary on which proposals were worth considering, and which ones you could trash. For a while, you listened to the whispers of her voice. But like all other things that threatened to take away your rationality, you were able to push away and subdue; at least, for a time.

Passing the test with an Honours had nothing to do with good fortune, as many tend to believe when it came to close shaves with death. To call it a mere stroke of luck would be tremendously offensive, not just to you, but to your entire family, who had lived and breathed the last eighteen years for this result. You made quick work to separate the emails into three folders, dividing it up into those you lacked interest in but kept around to have a peace of mind that you could look back on it if ever need be, those you were interested in, and those you’d fall back on should your desired choice become unavailable.

It was easy to navigate from there—studying for the test would not have carried you so far if you didn’t have a goal in mind. Getting a job in the Council was first priority, except unlike your sister, you didn’t aim for a specific position. Then there was also medicine, a field in which many of your cousins were greatly revered. Advancing there would be piece of cake with their name power. If not, there was research in the Institute, an option considered only out of the fondness you had for your uncle, who was an expert in genetics there. You admired his work, was fascinated by the idea of playing god when he described to you how scientists would pick apart and only insert the best genetics that eventually led to the birth of people like you. Elite, superior, unrivaled in every aspect.

But now that fascination was tainted by the splash of a silver ring and heartbeats beneath your palm. You did not want to give Seokjin the satisfaction of thinking that his bullshit proposition had gotten you interested in the Institute, yet at the same time, you didn’t feel like compromising yourself by closing this door just because he had said something to you at a silly party. Either way, you were beginning to think that this was his true intention after all—to slither into your mind and torment you despite his importance being so negligible, at least in your heart. He seemed like the type to enjoy having that kind of power. To you, Kim Seokjin was to be avoided at all costs, and it wasn’t just because of his eye. The man had always been a little unsettling; only a lunatic would dare keep him close.

“Excuse me, Y/N?”

But you figured you couldn’t be too far from that when his little gift was now a resident in your own home. You shut your eyes and closed the laptop, swiveling your chair to face the door before you granted the visitor permission to enter.

Carefully, the door pushed open and a head of black hair peeked through the crevice. He seemed to hesitate for a moment before allowing the rest of his body to slip through the gap and into your private quarters. Even though their design varied, the Institute never produced unattractive Androids. This particular one appeared muscular and sturdy, albeit only of average height compared to a human male. He had skin of light honey, smooth and blemish-free, yet not artificially so. With a youthful, boyish face, you’d compare him to a human in his late teens, or at most early twenties. He looked beautiful, and most frightening of all, he looked real.

“What is it?” You demanded, trying to sound tired. “I thought I asked not to be disturbed.”

His fingers tangled over his abdomen, expressing caution and hesitance. He was afraid of offending you. “Your parents wanted me to check on you.”

You relaxed against the leather cushioning of your chair, losing interest in his business almost immediately. Deadpan, you spun away from the door, returning to your work. “Well, now that you have…”

“And also, I was curious.”

Your fingers froze over the keyboard as you wondered if a machine could be programmed to feel curious. No, you eventually decided, arms falling onto the wooden surface of your desk, expression was different experience. He was only expressing curiosity. Machines did not feel anything.

“About?” You replied evenly, careful with the tone of your voice.

The response came angelically, full of genuine curiosity. “Are you getting married?”

Bewildered, you swung your chair back around to peer at him. He stood like he did from the beginning, except his hands were now pulled behind his back, his black eyes noticeably wider than usual. “What on earth made you think that?”

His pupils shifted, taken aback as it registered that his assumption was completely unfounded. “I… I thought I heard you say you had proposals to consider.”

Your head fell back, both exasperated and amused by his naïvety. “The word ‘proposal’ has more than one meaning, surely they must’ve installed a better dictionary in you. I meant that I had business offers to look over. I have to choose a career, and many people want to hire me.”

“Ah, I see.” From this distance, the flash of silver around his pupils couldn’t be visible, but you knew they must have been there. “I’m sorry to have disrupted you over something like this…”

“It’s fine. If there’s nothing else, I’m busy.”

“O- Okay. And- Y/N?” You spared a glance back over your shoulder. He had receded halfway behind the door now, and took your silence as indication to go on, “You are going to name me, right?”

Your eyes rolled. “I’ll think about it.”

“Okay.”

When one spent eighteen years running towards the finish line, the days after crossing it naturally lacked purpose. Your textbooks were quickly shelved and boxed, save for the ones you felt could serve you even beyond the test. The sight of an empty desk was difficult to get used to, but not as much as the vacant chair beside you at the dinner table. If your parents felt it, they didn’t show. At times you thought they were closer to robotics than the Android in your house.

He lived quietly in the spare room on the first floor, and for the past three days he had barely gotten in your way. The only times you ever felt his presence was when he knocked on your door to bring you dinner, or to serve you a glass of water on instructions from your mother. There was little furniture in your house, whatever that was in it delivered both function and opulence. The Android had little work to do; you wondered if he ever got restless.

But you supposed you had yourself to worry about first. Sleep never came easy to you. If scientists had their way, they’d never have a trait like insomnia pass. Nights got even more severe after the test, and you knew exactly why. The wall separating your room from your sister’s was thin, and as little girls the positioning of your beds was always on either side of this division. It started off as just the childish whim to be close to each other, but became habit and custom as the years went by. Most nights as girls were spent murmuring through the wall before bed, and when she slept, you’d hear the occasional knocks of knees against the surface when she tossed and turned. Nights were so silent now. It could almost swallow you whole.

To your annoyance, the sleeping pills you kept close in your drawer had already run out. Squinting through the dark, you were careful with your climb down the steps, knowing that some of them would whine and creak under enough weight. Descending into your living room, a lamp was quickly flicked on, its orange glow illuminating the rest of the room, along with its secret occupant.

“Holyshitfuck—”

The Droid immediately rose to his feet, although you did not miss the split-second stillness of his entire body before he sensed your presence, as well as your mortifying shock. Was he sleeping? Rather, was he charging?

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, “are you hurt?”

You huffed through your nose and skirted around the sofas, wanting to slip into the kitchen with as much room as possible between your bodies. Even though you’ve declared him harmless, you always reminded yourself of the destruction his bionic arms could do to yours. “I’m fine,” you said, reaching for the cabinet. “What are you doing out here? Didn’t mom give you a room?”

“She did. It’s very lovely, but it doesn’t have windows.” You watched him point out the glass panels beside him. “Your neighbourhood is very interesting at night.”

What a creep. “You shouldn’t stare. People will think you’re a lurker.” Filling a glass with water, you popped two pills which you’d punched out from the foil and swallowed it in big gulps. As you returned the first aid box to the cabinet, you continued, “What do you see?”

“I saw the neighbours from two houses down sitting on their swing. They seemed to talk for a very long time.”

Two houses away and a swing. Jungkook and Taehyung, you realized with a pang of despair. They were twins who planned to take the test in the second round in Winter. Very close, very affectionate, horribly sentimental about the world, almost naïve, easy to be around, and dear friends. Even though the mournings were over and done with, the smell of death still hung faintly in the air. The new absence in the neighbourhood was a constant reminder of one of their fates once winter came.

“Are they still there?” You asked softly, walking towards the living room.

The Droid peered out the window and answered, “No, not anymore.”

“Good.” You gripped the rich wooden banister, exhaling a small breath. You began climbing back up to your room. “Don’t stay up too late.”

His voice was faint, a slowly dying whisper. “You too.”

You didn’t return to your room, and had instead passed by your door to one after it—your sister’s. Her room had been left the way it was during her last night, your parents hadn’t made any plans for it, and you did not possess the courage to enter without her presence. It felt a lot like cheating. It was difficult to admit, but you had been so caught up in relief that all this was over that the reality of the situation was given little to no chance to sink in. Nothing was over. This was just another beginning; for some, the race was still on. Jungkook and Taehyung had reminded you of your sister. The four of you were rowdy playmates and competitive students—although, if memory served you right, the older twin, Taehyung, was least interested in academics of the four of you.

The brass knob was beginning to warm under your palm, yet you had not found the courage to twist it. What kind of emotions would you go through in her room? Would you feel sad, mournful, relieved, or even glad that it wasn’t you? You couldn’t afford to think that way. The system was fair, it measured merit and you were the better one, the more worthy one to society. But did they really have to take her away?

Your wrist twisted and the door clicked open. Her scent flooded your senses like a broken dam, and you barely found the strength to push forward and enter. Everything was indeed the way she left it. She was always the more organized twin. Only little messes like open books and crumpled clothes ruined the perfect mirror image of the layout of your own room. Her bed was pushed against the left wall, duvets roughly spread over the mattress, her pajamas strewn atop it. It was almost as if she was still here. You could feel her, could hear her padding footsteps as she paced about the room, memorizing topics for the test. Slowly, you moved to sit at her table, turning on the lamplight..

The desk was brightened by a yellowed glow, worn with excessive use. On her desk was various reference materials pertaining to the extra languages she studied. You barely understood them, so you had closed the books and arranged them neatly by the side. Beneath the pile of bound papers and printed notes was a rather peculiar book, no bigger than the size of your hand. It was bound in rust-coloured leather, the surface badly peeled and spotted with age. There was a small golden lock to seal the book, but the flap had been left to hang open. It looked like a diary, but surely not your sister’s. She didn’t have the commitment to keep one.

Intrigued, you flipped to a random page of the journal, its white pages stained with yellow and brown. The handwriting was neat and elegant in cursive, written with what you believed to be a black fountain pen. The page read:

Day sixty-two. I miss him dearly. Father-in-law only permitted me thirty minutes to speak to him today. When I saw him, I was frightened. He looked the same, glossy black hair, smiling crescent eyes, yet he was different. Gone was the glow of the man I fell in love with, gone were the sparks that set his eyes ablaze. Jimin sat there before me, our palms touched on either side of the glass divider, but he was gone. I do not know how to get him back.

It was grim. You never expected your sister to be able to stomach all of this, for she had always been rather… susceptible to negativity. Nothing in the journal contained a reversal. As you read on, the entries became more and more dreadful. The writer no longer mentioned anything about the man named Jimin, it appeared they didn’t have the luxury of worrying about others anymore. When you turned to yet another entry, it had startled you to have a square photograph fall out from between the pages. You caught it on your lap and brought it under the light, squinting as you tried to make out the weathered image.

From the descriptions you’d read, it almost felt as if you recognized these two people. The woman you knew only from the silver band she wore around her ring finger, the same one as her husband; it was referenced fondly throughout the journal. And then there was black hair, smiling eyes, plump lips—Jimin. On his finger was the same silver ring. It looked to be taken at a wedding. The couple stood under a flowery arch, arm in arm, dressed in a suit and beautiful white gown. You had no idea what the writer meant by the glow Jimin possessed, but you saw it in him here. He looked strong, powerful, confident; and she, independent, loving, intelligent. What on earth happened to these two formidable forces?

You slipped the rare artifact back between the pages it had fallen from. Nobody ever used photographs anymore. The owner of this journal, the woman, was from much deeper in the past than you could ever have thought. It was at least a century old, according to what you gathered from her entries. But why had your sister been in possession of such an antique? Had these people been your ancestors, or was the journal something she picked up from the old bookshop at the Market? You knew your sister had a liking for those sort of things.

Yet there was something stranger about the photo than the fact it had been printed in physical form. You studied every corner of the image, from the champagne fountain in the background to the bride’s bouquet. But it wasn’t until you went back to look over at the faces that you realised what it was that had unsettled you.

The Android.

The Android looked exactly like Jimin.

You had only intended to rest your eyes for a moment when you nestled your head in your arms. But when you had opened them again, you found blue light streaming through the window looking over your sister’s bed. Faintly, the crickets in the trees outside had begun to sing, and you lifted yourself upright. You couldn’t remember the last time you had been in her room at such an hour, during one of your sleepovers perhaps, but even those days were deep in the past now.

The journal was still in your cradle. You had dreamt about it so vividly you were convinced the item belonged to the realm of fantasy. But there it sat, in it’s wrinkled leather skin and antique glory. You still couldn’t believe your sister had kept such an item—what more, you couldn’t believe she didn’t tell you.

Standing from the desk, you arranged her books and papers as best as you could remember it from before you moved them, the journal included. Then, you had escaped her embrace and receded back behind the closed door of reality.

Unable to find solace in sleep anymore, you had entered the kitchen to prepare breakfast, as you often did before. You were intent on resuming every activity you practiced before the test; it was your daily life, and even if you had to go through routine alone now, you would do it. It was the only way to move on. You couldn’t live in your sister’s ghost forever.

It was a little early to be up, even with your family being morning birds in general. Even the Droid was still in his room; either that or he was busy lurking by some other window in the house. Thinking about him gave you chills, more so than ever. Images of the old photo and the Android’s face flashed back and forth as you stirred the pancake mix. You had no way of forming a bridge between these two, though you did have some idea, considering the Jimin written about in the journal was certainly being held captive somewhere during his days alive. You had read the entire thing from front to back, yet for a wife who had missed her husband so dearly, there had not been a single mention as to who and where Jimin was held captive. The only possible explanation was that the writer herself did not know.

The last entry detailed the day she had become a mother. Jimin’s captors must have been extremely cruel people, for they did not even permit him the right to be at his own child’s birth. You wondered if there could be more journals, and if your sister had been in possession of them too. Preparing breakfast had sped up from there, and soon, the table was set with chocolate chip pancakes, eggs, bacon and toast. Your father was first to be at the table with his usual paper and morning brew, the Droid had gotten up and about cleaning in the kitchen (you figured he didn’t need to eat), and finally, the table was complete with the arrival of your mother.

Your parents were Council members. They oversaw agriculture and international trade. Much of the country’s food supply would have been under their hands, which was why they had raised you and your sister rather strictly when it came to food, even though the family could well afford to buy groceries outside of the rations given. You could have feasts only on the account that every plate had been scraped clean. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, they always said. But apparently that never applied to academics. In that area, you were taught to swallow no matter how big the mouthful was.

“Have you chosen a name for him yet?” Your father asked over his coffee. “I don’t think I’ve heard you call him anything.”

You were aware the Droid was listening, even though he hadn’t looked up from the sink. “I will. Today.”

“Alright. Ration tickets are in the drawer as always, together with extras for whatever else you might want. Bring him with you, let him learn the route.”

“One would think with how advanced the Institute claims them to be, they would’ve built a GPS in him or something,” you muttered lowly.

“They claim them to be as close to human as ever achieved, having such a program in him wouldn’t be very human at all,” said your mother. Miffed, you glanced over at the Droid, who was busy wiping down the countertops. Surely he had heard the conversation.

“Also,” your father began, “your mother and I have come to a decision.”

“On what matter?”

“We want to clear your sister’s room by Thursday.” He had said it like he was commenting on traffic. You’d nearly heaved up the breakfast in your stomach. “We’ve kept it around much longer than we should. Look through it, keep what you think has sentimental value. We’ll donate what we can and rid the remaining.”

“But… but isn’t it too soon?” You tried to protest. Neither of them could look you in the eye. “Why do we even have to clear it? Isn’t the government satisfied with taking her, why do they have to take her stuff too?”

The man at the head of the table remained poised, cool, stern. It made your outburst look so much more immature than if he had reacted with the same aggression as you. Instead, he only set down his papers, nudged his plate away, and clasped his hands over the table. With frost in his eyes and icicles in his voice, he posed one question: “Do you blame the government for your sister’s death?”

Yes, you had wanted to scream, why don’t you too? But the words had lodged in your throat, clamped down only by thin logical resolve. “No,” you finally uttered, “the government is fair. They gave us life and equal opportunities. Her failure is her own and same goes my merit.”

Still, your father was not convinced. “If that were what you truly believed, why are you upset?”

“It’s just too soon.” You rarely cried, but it felt as if you might at this moment. Only heat prickled the back of your eyes, but no tears fell. You wouldn’t allow it. “One week to mourn eighteen years, and even that was just ceremonial. I was close to her. I loved her. I need more time.”

The adults shared a glance, one that looked almost empathetic. You had no idea how they could manage it. How long did they take to come to terms that they were bringing two lives only on the condition that they had to give up one? You felt like an outsider at your own table—a very angry one at that.

“Until Sunday. Wounds fester when you wait too long, don’t let it get to that, do you understand?”

Pajamas balled in fists, you swallowed hard. “Yes, father.”

Once your parents had both left for work, you wasted no time in retreating to your room to bury everything under work. You were down to three offers now, and joining the Institute was not part of the options. It was basically set in stone from here, you might take another night to mull over it, but the position with the Council would be your final decision eventually. That was just the way it always was. Families like yours were Council born and Council raised, it might even be considered an elite insider ring of sorts.

But then there had also been a part of you that had become interested in the Institute beyond your beloved uncle’s work. Much to your dismay, the journal which you’d come across had in fact ignited a spark that burned to uncover the secret of Jimin and how he and the Android in your house could share the exact same appearance despite being creations from a century apart. How deeply rooted was the history of these AIs, how much of the future had Jimin’s captivity served to establish? Did your sister manage to learn anything about it?

If she were here instead, would she have chosen the Institute over the Council?

“God.”

Your forehead sank carelessly unto the edge of your desk, pounding with the force of a thousand warhammers. It was a miracle your skull had not split in two. Was the journal even worth it? You could not figure out. The people involved could have nothing to do with you in the first place. And surely, there was no point in trying to dig up a secret buried so well under the years that had passed in peace. You had lived just fine not knowing, hadn’t you? You could remain that way. You could… right?

Angling your head to the left, you had reached for a small white button at the corner of the desk, pressing it down gently. A projection shot out from the surface, hovering inches above your desk. The image flickered as it came to life, then began rotating in place. It was of you and your sister, some time in the summer when it was hot and you had been playing in the yard with the garden hose. You almost forgot how easy it was to smile around her, now even the smallest attempt at such a gesture threatened to leave cracks on your face.

What would you do? Ironic it was that at the one true time you needed to hear her voice, the whispers that floated in the atmosphere were nowhere to be heard. It was now more than ever that you fully felt your sister was gone. Truly gone.

When you had returned to the living room some time after noon to gather the ration tickets you needed, you had felt no more alive than a newly resurrected undead. The Droid was pacing about the room with a duster in hand, trying to find work out of the smallest messes. He would be useful in carrying the groceries, so you had ordered him to put away the duster and follow you out. You felt almost bad for him seeing how fascinated he was with the outside world, and just being outside. Even the most exquisite dolls lose their luster when shelved too long.

“You act like you’ve never seen a neighbourhood before.”

The Droid turned to you, his smile lingering. “I haven’t. Not from beyond your window, at least. The Institute always kept me inside.”

“You’ve seen the inside of the Institute?” You asked, intrigued. How much did he know?

“I was inside indeed, but didn’t see much apart from white walls.” Now, the curve on his lips had fully neutralized. You could even swear they had become a very tiny frown. His gaze fell to the grey pavement. “They kept me in a glass box for a very long time.”

“Why didn’t they… turn you off?” It was difficult to say those words, even for you. His grimace made things a thousand times worse, but you couldn’t find a better way to phrase it. As lifelike as he was, he was primarily still a machine, and all machines had switches.

“I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things, to be honest. Like the route to the Market.” He finally lifted his head, staring down the empty afternoon street. “How will we get there? By foot?”

You shook your head. “By train. Try to remember the way, you’ll be going alone from now on.”

“I don’t mind. I like it outside.”

“Is my house that much of a nightmare for you?” You asked, deadpan.

“No! No, that’s not what I meant. It’s just, your family are very neat people, there’s not much for me to do.”

You rolled your eyes, unwilling to reply. Soon, you both had descended a flight of stairs to the underground trains, shortened as Undertrain. You had purchased the Droid a destination-ticket first, making a mental note to arrange him a transport card on the way back. For now, you had to get to the Market before the shops closed.

Every district shared a common Market, the districts comprised of neighbourhoods for the affluent, the middle class, and the poor. Grocery trips were the few times you got to meet people outside of the cushiony life. Those people relied purely on government provided ration tickets, depending on their family size, there was only ever just enough. During bad years, there was less. But your father said the country hadn’t had a bad year since before you were born, and will likely to continue this streak if the merit system continued to serve its purpose.

It was fair, you thought to yourself, the unworthy shouldn’t be allowed to remain, taking up space and resources. That was how your country not just survived, but thrived for the past century despite the worldwide food shortage. Outsiders made snide remarks about the cruelty of your government, but who were they to say anything when their own people were dying left and right from hunger?

“Stay close,” you said to the Droid once you had emerged from the underground. The Market, despite being in its last hours of opening, had still been packed with citizens. Though he was walking behind you, you knew he was absolutely marveling at the sights unfolding before him. You had to admit, you enjoyed the Market quite a bit yourself.

The life and vigour of the place was a cheerful contrast to the solemnity of your peaceful neighbourhood. There, everything was organized, everyone was polite and respectful and elegant. But here, people were truly people. Shopkeeps were hollering their final sales, children played tag between the maze of stalls, carts and pop up stores. There was the aroma of all kinds of delicious and greasy street snacks being cooked, the earthy scent of the florist, musky old bookshops, and just the general smell of people, of life. You still spotted the occasional Droids carrying out labour, but it was easy to look past them here.

“Come, this way.” You glanced behind to make sure the Droid was still following before turning away from the busy pedestrian street, down to the next block which was comparably tamer, laid back. Ration tickets were given according to status; your family’s permitted groceries from higher quality Hypermarts, which were clean and comfortably air-conditioned. He was obviously disappointed to be away from the crowd, but you had said nothing in regards to it, already planning to return to the street to pick up some extras before going home.

As you passed through the automated doors, you were doused with a puff of sanitizer. You had been used to it, but the Droid flinched and sputtered, waving his hand over nose and mouth. He picked up a basket on your instruction, before dutifully following you down aisle to aisle as you filled the basket with items your rations accommodated. Despite supposedly designed to be humanlike, the weight of the basket as it got filled didn’t strain him in the slightest like it would most men. So the Institute had cheated in certain convenient ways.

In half an hour, you had brought the groceries to check out. As you waited in line, you had noticed the Droid become vividly fixated on the figure behind the cashier and smirked to yourself. Had the Institute also implemented some sort of kindred sensory in their Androids, or had the robot beside you simply gathered enough information to infer that there had been another one of his kind standing just two feet away?

You were curious to see what kind of interaction might unfold between the two machines, so you had given the Droid the ration tickets for him to exchange with the groceries you had selected. When it came to your turn, the second gen Android had offered a greeting as per custom. It then went on to scan the items in the basket before transferring them to paper bags. You side-eyes your companion, who grew stiffer by the seconds, his black irises revealing both caution and intrigue. Despite the generous display of emotion on his synthetic face, no words had come from his mouth. The ration tickets were crushed in his tightened fist.

It was interesting. He had an awareness the second gen lacked. You left the Hypermart carrying two of the smaller and lighter bags, while the Droid carried the heaviest. You led him back to the Market street.

“Go on, take a walk. Use this money to pick whatever you like.” You slipped a small purse into his hands. “I’ll be in the bookshop here. Meet me in fifteen minutes.”

“You’re not coming with me?” He asked, not quite willing to pocket the purse yet. He looked almost apprehensive.

But you had already turned to enter the bookshop, leaving him at the mouth of the Market. “I’ve got things to do.”

Whether he continued to stand there like an idiot, or had followed your demeanour and ventured away, you didn’t know, but he wasn’t following you into the shop. This bookstore was one you often visited with your sister, she with more enthusiasm than you. You usually lingered by the magazine and newspaper section, scanning headlines of the various daily papers while she browsed the tall, aged shelves. She was close with the shopkeep, Grey, and perhaps spent more time chatting with him than looking at books. The old man was always nicer to her than he ever was to you, not that you minded, since you weren’t exactly vying for his friendship. You hadn’t visited this place since the test. What would be his reaction when he saw you?

“Grey?” You called out. The store was deathly silent. Perhaps in the time you hadn’t visited the old shopkeep had laid on his deathbed and was replaced by a son, or even grandson.

Finally, a head of white-grey hair had peered up from below the counter. “It’s you,” his raspy voice near-whispered. It was as flimsy and fragile as the oldest book in his shelves.

“Yeah. Me.” Sorry to disappoint, you almost added. “How are you?”

With a wheeze, the man had lifted a stack of books from behind the counter to dump atop the surface. He dusted his hands, smoothed his beard, then replied, “Kicking at everything but the bucket.” He gave you a thoughtful regard. “And you?”

“I’ve been well,” you were quick to answer. “I was wondering if you had journals here. Old journals written by old people, probably dead by now.”

Grey shifted the stack of books aside. “Whose journal are you looking for?”

“I don’t know her name. But it was likely written between 140 to 150 Old World. There was a photograph in it, I know people stopped using photographs after that. If you could just point me to a section…”

“Try F-14. It contains anecdotes from 125, you might find something there.”

“Right, thank you.” You had turned to go, but paused in your steps when a thought occurred. Carefully, you asked, “Did my sister ever ask for something like this?”

The shopkeep stared at you long and hard, his grey eyes coming close to sucking you into the storm that swirled within his irises. “No,” he said at last, “I don’t recall.”

You nodded, then disappeared between the shelves. You spent the next ten minutes picking through every book on the particular shelf, studying the cover and the handwriting, but none had matched the journal you found in your sister’s room. There surely had to be continuations. The journal had run out of space and the writer had so much more to pen down. Grey’s bookstore was the biggest one yet, and if he didn’t have them, it was highly unlikely other stores did. Maybe your sister already found them all?

The last book was barely shoved back into place before you were turning and sprinting out the shop, sparing a quick goodbye to Grey as you sprang out onto the street. It wasn’t time to meet up yet, but you wanted to leave. The Droid couldn’t have gone too far, so you had sped down the street, eyes keening over the crowd for the shine of glossy black hair.

You faintly registered the haggling of buyers and the beeps of a loading truck, never thinking much of them for they were common Market sounds. But by the time you had made sense of your surroundings, there was commotion around you, bodies were scrambling away, and you were trapped beneath the shadow of a tumbling tower of crates. You were positive you would be crushed there and then.

But like the sudden danger, there had been a sudden rescue. There was warmth against your back and a few nudges to your shoulder as the crates made sickening cracks as they collided together, yet you felt no pain at all. You were still standing on your own two feet. It was quiet for an instance, shock reigning over the Market, before life ebbed its way back into the streets.

“Are you alright, boy?” You heard a man ask.

“Jimin!” You whipped around, coming face to face with black eyes and honey skin. There was a silver flash around his pupils, but his eyes appeared dazed.

“What on earth happened here!”

“—You could’ve killed these children!”

“Jimin, are you alright? Are you hurt?” His face was warm to the touch. Under your fingers, he finally regained some bearings, lifting his chin to look at you.

“I’m okay,” he muttered, staring blankly at you. You watched him worriedly, unable to form words of your own. But then he had added on, “Is that my name? ‘Jimin’?”

“What?” The adrenaline was beginning to fade, rationality returning to your mind. You at last realised what you had said. “I… I- … Yes. That’s your name, you bloody idiot. Now stand behind me and look damaged.”

Finding your resolve and strength, you had pushed the Droid behind your smaller frame, shoving through the crowd to march right up to a red-faced, wide-eyed man. He watched you approach from beside his truck, unable to run because of the crowd surrounding him.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?” You hissed to his greasy face.

“I- I- was-”

“That was a rhetoric, you blundering fool. Judging by the look on your face you know protocol instructs that all loading vehicles are to park at the loading bay, and the goods delivered by trolley, yet here you are. It looks like you deliver mandarin oranges. Imported, expensive stuff. Only a few companies can ship these in.” Your line of sight fell to the fruits crushed against the pavement. With mild disgust, you kicked one away. “My father is the minister of trade, I’m sure if I pull the right strings, you can forget about doing business in this district. Suppliers are liable to ensure their deliverymen adhere to protocol, do you think anyone would want to work with you knowing that your negligence nearly killed the minister’s daughter?”

“Y- You’re not even hurt!” The man retorted, tipping his chin, his shoulders squaring up. A juvenile protest. It was like sticking a leg out and watching a child trip himself over it. “It was that boy, and even he looks fine to me!”

You had merely scoffed. “Boy? Your ignorance is beyond me; for you to have passed the test over your brother, I wonder just how imbecilic he had to be.”

The man raised his palm, ready to strike. You weren’t afraid of the pain, but had instinctively shrank away. His arm froze mid-swing when he looked past you, perhaps at the Android who was more than ready to retaliate should he lay a finger on you. Taking advantage of his fear, you continued your threats, stomping him into the dirt once and for all.

“That boy is a third gen pre-release, courtesy of the Institute to my father. He’s not even fully my property yet. Can you handle damage lawsuits from the Institute? Then again, can they really blame you, when you cannot even tell Android from human?” You dared take a step closer to him. The smell of sweat and cigarette smoke was nauseating. “Who knows, they might even reward you. You are living proof that their creations have indeed lived up to their reputation. If only our country were populated with buffoons like you.” With nimble fingers, you had snatched a small white card from the man’s shirt pocket. His business card. “Anyhow, I’ll hold on to this. In the case where your punishment does not satisfy me… I’ll take matters into my own hands.”

You wasted no extra second on the seething man, grabbing the Android by the wrist and leading him out the crowd before they realised your condescension had partly triggered them as well. You didn’t feel guilty, however, for they were facts. Except of course the part about the Android being a gift from the Council, or the Institute—that was still suspicion, you had to question Seokjin to confirm it. You had noticed some dents in his back, and made a mental note to send him to the Institute to get it fixed. Trading the GPS feature for superhuman strength and durability had paid off, you mused dryly.

“I’ve never seen you like that.” It was only when the Droid voiced up that you realised you were still holding onto him. Flustered, you released his wrist.

“You haven’t seen much of me at all.”

“That’s because you don’t like me. You don’t like being around me.”

Your pace slowed, allowing him to catch up to step with you. Composing your features, you looked at him. “You’re right, I don’t like you. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care for you. My parents gave you to me, it’s my responsibility to take care of you.”

“Do you truly think of me as property?”

You had stopped walking altogether. His midnight eyes bore into yours, almost setting you on fire. There was near tangible tension in the air between you, which was appalling, for a conversation with a mere Android could not be enough to produce emotional sparks. But you felt it. He felt it.

“I’ll think of you as however I like.” Leaving him a cold glare, you had turned swiftly, continuing your pace towards the underground. You made sure to be nothing but diplomatic in your tone now. “When we get back, I’ll ask father to send you to the Institute—”

A force tugged at your wrist this time, the inertia swinging you backwards into him. You braced your arms against the impact of his chest while he steadied you with one strong hand to your waist. Your heart drummed in shock and adrenaline, but slowly, you began to pick up on a steady hum against your skin. It was low and faint, the sensation hypnotizing—it was his heart.

“Don’t send me back,” he murmured, sounding genuinely fearful, “Please don’t send me back.”

You shoved him away, goosebumps rising, your ears singing with heat. “I’ll do whatever I want with you.”

“You don’t like me—”

“We’ve gone over that.”

“—how do I make you like me?”

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