#i’m posting real slow because i have no time thanks to covid

[achehex]

Digimon Ghost Game is now over. What a crazy crazy ride, thank you all for watching and for all the support. I didn’t actually contribute to this final episode, my last contributions were to episode #66 but the pressure last week was so high after the 3 weeks in between episodes that I couldn’t focus on drawing or writing anything, so I’m doing the catch up now. As always longer (way longer this time) thoughts after the cut. If you are curious about how I got this job the short story is knowing the right people at the right time, but the details are way more detailed so keep reading if you are curious.

I’m not sure how this is gonna go but I’m gonna write a whole reflection about my time in the show as opposed to just about the episode itself, so let’s go. Back in August 2021, Jake Ganz head of Yotta offered me to work on the new upcoming Digimon show. At first I said no, it sounded way too intimidating and I didn’t wanna make a fool of myself. But the next day I was scrolling facebook, and saw the poster announcement for Ghost Game, and it somehow clicked in my head that I had a real chance to participate in it. I tried my best to brush my fears aside, and said yes to Jake, as long as I was given a simple task. The process at the start was simple: Porkky, an animator broke down the basics of the tasks at hand, and he and Jubei9 met 1 on 1 with all of us at the Yotta team to deal with the specifics of our work. It was a fun learning experience and I feel like a lot of people really enjoyed it because a good chunk returned for when Toei asked us to help on episode 8. Episode 8 remains one of my favourites in the show, the high speed chase is so intense and the pace never lets up. It was very fun, but also a lot harder than last time. There were more digimon and with more complex designs, no frame could be static because of the wind, a lot of people had to draw go karts. Our next task assigned was Episode 9 right after, and this is the first time something interesting happened to me. The staff at Toei asked me to handle the 止め cuts, which basically means the cuts that don’t move at all, static drawings with maybe a mouth flap or a camera pan. At the time it was so incredibly honoring to be  asked to do a specific task, I felt noticed.  After that things slowed down a lot, Christmas 2021 was actually the first time since digimon ghost game had started airing where I wasn’t working on the show. So when we were offered to help in episode 18 I did not hesitate, I was actually so excited to be able to draw TeslaJellymon (who has become my favourite digimon!). However this time around our team was much much smaller, and also at that time I got Covid so I had to work through a lot of really annoying drowsiness. Episode 18 was definitely a turning point. I felt the excitement wear off in a lot of people that I was working with, but I was still just so excited to be working there, so it’s when I decided to keep working on Ghost Game outside of the Yotta team. Episode 22 was my first time working directly with Toei. It was honestly so cool that they accepted my offer. I did 6 cuts all by myself on episode 22. Next up episode 30 I did 7 cuts, and I felt ready to take a big leap and ask for a contract with Toei as opposed to the loose freelancing I was doing. That’s when you can see the leap to episode 36. In that episode I handled 25 cuts, a lot of them with very heavy action, a complete departure from anything I had done until then. It was incredibly difficult but it was the episode that really marked my start. After that I don’t have a whole lot more to say than what I’ve said in the respective posts for my episodes. I had so much fun drawing Gigasmon’s huge muscles on 36, Piemon and Flawizarmon’s scary smiles in 41, Kiyoshiro going over the top in 48, Canoweissmon and his butt wings in 56, Siriusmon’s super sick attacks in 62 and finally BloomLordmon’s super complicated cape in 66. It’s actually been incredible that I was able to be a part of this. I said this to someone before but when you are born in Colombia, growing up to draw Digimon never really felt like a possibility and yet here I am. This show completely changed my life, it filled me with excitement and ambition that I hadn’t felt since High School, it allowed me to move out of my mom’s house and live on my own, and afford incredibly important and personal things. I’m so glad I got to be a part of it, I know the episodic nature and wave-handy plot structure of the show was a turn off for a lot of Digimon fans, and I understand it. But around Episode 18 when my colleagues were happy moving on, I still loved this show. I don’t love it cus I worked on it, I worked on it cus I loved it. I could’ve moved on but I wanted to see this through all the way to the end and I’m glad that I did. Thank you so so much, to absolutely everyone, from the highest Toei staff to the newest Digimon fan. 

[bakugoushotwife]

happy thanksgiving everyone that celebrates. to me this day is just about eating and appreciating the good things in life especially today when those things seem fewer and farther between. so thank you, to each one of my followers that reads my work, supports it, and supports me even if i’m a bit slow to publish. thank you to everyone that makes this place cozy to be in still.

and of course my absolute angel gets a special section. i’ve always been an obnoxious kid. i was a theater kid and that tells you enough. my parents even reinforced the notion that i was horribly annoying and hard to love. so i’ve found it hard to be any authentic version of myself for a long time, because sooner or later, people become exhausted with me. my emotions are up and down. i’m dramatic. i’m a rambler. i have adhd so i bounce from subject to subject. sometimes i’m selfish. sometimes i’m so selfless it’s to my detriment. i’m impulsive and catty and the biggest arrogant brat on the planet. i also hate myself. so i always understood why people decided to back away, to decide the good things weren’t worth the bad. especially once quarantine happened, i was sure i’d never have a real friend. i met my boyfriend a bit after covid and i decided he was as good a connection as i would ever get.

so imagine my surprise once i come back to tumblr after a couple years away and start writing again, this time for jjk, and i happen upon a discord invite link in the tags one day. it was impulsivity that made me curious, i suppose. i thought if nothing else, i’d make surface level writing mutuals and that would be nice. but i met my absolute soulmate, and my bestest friend. she meets my criticisms about myself with total aghast. she loves that i like to talk and keep conversations bouncing around. she enjoys the fact that i am pretty clingy and won’t ever let her ghost me even if she wanted to. she’d have to buy a new phone. everything i’ve ever disliked about myself she has turned into something beautiful and i’d like to say i’ve done the same. she is inspiring and incredibly resilient, so brilliant in so many ways. she’s hilarious and honest and hardworking, protective and so loyal. i love her so very much and i don’t know how i ever survived without her :3 @suguru-getos

so for as much as jjk has done to me and as much as i hate how things ended, and have a PERSONAL vendetta for gege—i must admit he’s given me a lot more than he’s taken away.

and as far as sappy love posts go, @thekatsuki @theshoutotodoroki @ryomensukunax , i will be in your inboxes :3

[chuckabeth]

I don’t know why I’ve suddenly been imbued with the audacity of actually writing a real tumblr post instead of just reglobbing but um

On behalf of myself and all immunocompromised people

PLEASE GET YOUR SHOTS THIS SEASON

Please

I didn’t used to exempt myself from seasonal vaccines. I don’t even want to, I don’t even like it. But my body’s defenses and reactions are so frail and inflamed that if I take the shot, I will get sick. Really sick. Probably weeks of real pain and illness and slow recovery overreacting to the vaccine, and it will cost me my grades, my social life, my mental health, and that’s when a billion different logistical and health hurdles are already threatening my tenuous hold on those things as it is. I have to work so hard, and make decisions so, so carefully just to maximize the possibility that I’ll hopefully! Hopefully. Be well. Or at least well enough.

I have misunderstood and untreatable autoimmune disease(s) that have (in all likelihood) damaged my organs and decreased my ability to digest food and absorb vitamins on my own. I’m already in so much pain and fatigue every day that I (thank the Lord that I have this resource) use a wheelchair to help me get around without making myself sicker just from the strain of doing the regular stuff.

I have had COVID at least once. Thankfully I had taken the vaccine that time. But the vaccine reaction was almost as bad as the real thing. BUT if you’re healthy, (or at least healthier than me) THIS WILL NOT BE TRUE FOR YOU. You can afford a couple days of feeling a little under the whether. Right? I feel under the weather or worse literally every day of my friggin life, and often I just get on with things.

So…. Do it for me? So I don’t get long COVID? Or just like, the flu? Or other things that are popping up! Wear a mask and stay home if you can when you’re sick, thoughI know the latter is very difficult to get away with for so many. I just ask because these things could actually damage me in ways they might not damage you. And if you don’t do it for me, do it for the people that could just be straight up killed by a respiratory illness. That stuff spreads so easily, and they are likely locked up in their houses just as painfully as you were in lockdown trying to stay alive. Yet, like you, they have lives and hopes and dreams and are worthy of human decency and care and respect. But believe me, we don’t often feel enough of it, let alone from our doctors. All too often not even from our own families.

Or, you know, like, do it for yourself and other able bodied people who could suddenly find yourselves in our position through this Long COVID stuff. I know!! I know it feels like naw that would never happen to you. Is this stuff even for real? But trust me trust me, it can, it will. A lot of us sickies were like you once. And a lot of us still don’t have answers for what “went wrong.” And realizing that none of us are all that different, that we’re al in this together actually! Is one of the first biggest steps to compassionate and real, noticeable change. Caring enough about others and their needs enough to be mindful about simple stuff.

And hey, MAYBE just on your own, none of it will be enough. But at least you can look back and comfort yourself saying you tried. You didn’t take our lives for granted.

LOL anyway I’m just so nervous about school this winter please help me get my bachelor’s in as much peace as possible

[nsfwitchy2]

@mechagrrl No no that is so fair and honestly thank you for sharing your perspective, because I do really appreciate it. Because like, you’re not wrong. I am very much white, I live a… not exactly middle class but not exactly poor lifestyle. I do wanna fully acknowledge my privilege here in that I HAVE seen change coming from Biden, change that yeah I’m sure a lot of other people - specifically POC and people living in poverty have not seen. You’re also not wrong about Biden and Trump just sort of being pawns in a bigger game between parties bigger than the both of them, or even about the electoral college.

Like. Yeah man. The US government and its politics are fucked - and I understand why people would wanna give up or throw away their vote. I understand why people are angry. I understand the criticisms.

And I don’t really wanna say “Oh just put it aside” because people have every right to criticize their politicians. Although I won’t lie I do become a little worried when I see people criticize Biden - not because I don’t think he deserves it but because the internet is real good at creating slippery slopes where a criticism becomes “this person is bad and evil” and I think that’s dangerous as fuck.

I’ll be honest the way I see voting is like… ok. When that cat bit my arm, right? The first thing we did was clean the fuck out of the wound. It hurt like hell, it gave me the adrenaline rush of a lifetime - I had to literally sit down on the filthy salon floor to keep from passing out. Then I had to wait hours in urgent care. Then I had to go to multiple doctor visits, before being sent to wait hours in the ER. I was miserable, I had a miserable first night there where I sat in the hall and just mentally shattered while my mom was sick with COVID trying desperately to keep it together. I stayed there for four days - and even after that I had to take two huge pills, one twice a day and one three times a day. I had to wear a brace where I couldn’t move my right hand. I had to rub weird creams on it and wrap it and monitor it. It was shitty, and slow, and it sucked - but my arm got better. Eventually.

And choosing to not vote is just like… if I had chosen to just cut my arm off instead. Because I was sick of all the shitty parts that went into making it better. Nobody would blame me for being sick of the shitty parts - but choosing to cut my own arm off would just create even more and even worse problems for me.

The worst, the truly shittiest, part of US politics. Is how god damn fucking slow everything moves. There’s a post in my queue right now about good things happening in American politics - and they almost all have things tacked on like “in a decade” and “by 2025+”. I’m not surprised shit has gotten worse for people, I’ve seen the news. And I wish I could do more to help and to give everyone some sense of hope. I wish there was something magical I could say that would inspire everyone to like, rise up and fix everything. But I can’t.

I can say though, that right now we are in a rock and a hard place situation where our options are Guy Who Is Trying™️ and Guy Who Is Trying To Kill Us All™️. And if we keep voting for the guys who are making at least half an effort to make the world better, eventually the situation won’t be so dire. And then eventually we will have better options being presented to us. We will be able to pick and choose again without having to fear for our lives and the lives of our loved ones.

But first - we have to clean the wound and take the antibiotics and wear the brace and the IV and sit in the hallway and cry for a few hours.

I am very tired and very nauseous so idk if I will word this the way I want to but like,,,,

It’s real. Weird. To me how many people will reblog posts about supporting all queer people and supporting all trans people, and then talk about how they don’t wanna vote because Biden has done this or that terrible thing.

Like…. Idk man. If you can’t put aside your personal morals for .5 seconds to make sure a dictator isn’t put in charge of the country, I actually do question how much you care about your fellow man.

There are tons of people in this world I do not like, or I do not agree with. I think republican women and republican gays are the dumbest motherfuckers on this planet - but if I found myself in a position where I could choose to help one of them, or let them suffer - I would still choose to help them because that’s my fellow man. That’s another human being. I would be willing to put aside my personal feelings on this persons morals and ethics to acknowledge they are a person who needs saving.

And if you can’t put aside your personal morals and ethics for a fraction of a second to acknowledge that, at the end of the day, our options are a guy who wants to kill all minorities or a guy who could be doing better but isn’t actively trying to kill everyone - I genuinely question how much solidarity you have to your fellow humans. I don’t think you’re performing activism anymore, I think you’re angry and you don’t care who you hurt with that anger. You’d rather give up than acknowledge the world has gray areas and sometimes doing the right thing is uncomfortable and makes you feel icky inside.

[waitingformyfavoritesongs]

25 Jan u ary 2023 Wednesday 3:24 am pdt

I had awoken to pain and felt more heart ♥️ pain I think. When I am in the middle of doing something I sometimes 4get. 3:25 am pdt sometime soon after my parents separated my mom tells me things such as don’t make that face you look like your dad and something I think was I only love 💕 you because I am your mom which for some reason I took 2 be interpreted as she was obligated to love me and that she didn’t really like me. 3:29 am pdt I was probably 8 years old. 3:29 am pdt 8 or 9 years old I don’t remember 🤷🏻‍♀️ 3:35 am pdt but my grandma 👵 snipping my long hair was probably b4 the separation maybe when I was 6 or 7 years old when I had long black hair and I was probably 9 years old when my mom told me I looked like a sick old woman 👵 and she said “I know! You should get a haircut!” 💇‍♀️ Deshana barber 💈 Iranian Kurdish people hair cutting themes. 3:39 am pdt king 🤴 David mentioned in a song. 3:40 am pdt

3:30 am pdt ⏰ when I typed 8 million in the previous post 23 Jan 23 I thought 💭 I typed billion. I heard the population reached 8 billion. Hard 2 believe especially when COVID happened and shootings still happened. 3:34 am pdt

3:40 am pdt when I lived in king 👑 city 🌃 I saw 👀 the ring 💍 pop commercial and wanted one ☝️. When me and mom and probably younger sister went to a small store 🏬 2 get cookie 🍪 mix I found a small bin of ring 💍 pop but all were broken 😞 so I didn’t get any. Reminds me about my mom’s promise ring 💍 falling in2 the river and finding out her boyfriend was caught in bed 🛌 with the ex girlfriend and had a shotgun marriage after the ring 💍 fell into the river. 3:45 am pdt meant 2 b... go with the flow? Bcz dirty old men are in power 2 say it’s ok 👌 2 have extramarital?? Affairs bcz it’s meant 2b. If that’s the case then I guess there’s no real thing as loyalty long lasting until death old age together do you part love and he holds us to a double standard where he expects us to fall so deeply madly In love otherwise he calls us whores , so that when he leaves 🍃 us 4 another bcz love 💕 died he cannot feel it anymore so we weep 😭 deep rivers when he leaves but he’s bouncy happy Bcz he found a younger chick 🐣 to rob of her virginity, friendly unicorns 🦄 only liking virgins to devirginize. 3:51 am pdt is this what he wants????? But he 4got? 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️ 🎶🎼🎵🎤 3:53 am pdt

Sierra LaMar Twitter tweeted if you’re a bird I’m a bird say it with me the notebook 📒 movie 🎥 clip. 3:54 am pdt birds of a feather flock together???? 🤷🏻‍♀️ 3:56 am pdt sirens 🚨 half bird sea 🌊 gulls fallen angels 3:57 am pdt. 2 types of sirens 🚨: half bird 🦅 creatures, & mermaids. Tandem opposite meanings/definitions. Yin and yang ☯️? Chinese word was it shanyang? Can b used 2 mean goat 🐐 or ram 🐏 depending on modifying??? Addditional words. 3:59 am pdt but if you’re suffering that is probably a clear indication of a sacrificial lamb 🐑???? 4 am pdt

4:30 🕟 am pdt when I typed shanyang my head got VERY hot 🥵 maybe my brain 🧠 too 😞. I think it was about a year ago my aunt told me nobody likes me. Thanks 4 telling me that. If it’s the truth I need 2 hear 👂 it? I’m receptive 2 those comments/feedback. Ever since I was a kid since at least my parents separated I felt the need 2 change myself in2 the ideal person. I fall short all the time though. I practiced drawing ✍️ since probably kindergarten and somehow I lack technique like example drawing with geometric shapes and planning out spatially. Usually I look 👀 at something and tried 2 feel it out and hopes 4 the best. When I was in school 🏫 I was often distracted. Unfortunately. But high school 🏫 onward we were taught 2 b receptive 2 criticism because that was how we learned 2 see how flawed our work was I guess. 4:39 am pdt I wonder 💭 if my need 2 change was bcz I thought my mom didn’t like me. Maybe I feared no one would like me. And that I’d never have friends and a lover. I romanticized and thought I wanted a slow court ship the type that start off as friends and progressed into best friends then lovers. After my first boyfriend broke up 🆙 with me it got harder 2 find a guy who would take it that slow. A lot of them rushed into s*x. 4:43 am pdt I had wanted something that would take years 2 develope and I was willing 2 wait if my addictions? Didn’t kick in. If he was very attractive all it would take was a kiss 😚 2 get hooked 🪝. I’ve only been physically intimate (s*x) with 4 young men. 3 of them I tried not to, I fell into the hole 🕳 (rinpoche? Poem read from Karen sahlmonsen ? Spelling bounce back book 📚) and it wasn’t my fault bcz of addiction? And he wanted to and we only did it once through pants 👖 at my request but I don’t think I anticipated that semen was going to rocket 🚀 launch out through the pants 👖 until last minute and I don’t remember if I anticipated his 🍆 being felt through the pants 👖 bcz it was my first time doing that. I wore his sweat pants 👖. To be honest, that was the best s*x I had. He was a healthy skater 🛹 and very productive active person mellow artsy tall great voice. Probably not the most handsome but I think his 🍆was long enough 2 fit me well. The following 2, I believe I was somehow in someway psychologically ? Forced into it. I 4:59 am pdt ran my left middle finger 🖕 through my hair and it forced its way through a thick knot 🪢 pain, intestines pain 🐒💨 5 am pdt that was probably 4th knot 🪢 this morning. 5:01 am pdt with second guy, I had tried 2 tell him I needed 2 take it slow, but I said the wrong 😑 words. I said I wasn’t ready 4 a relationship yet after he kissed me. I did not want to kiss at that moment but some reason I felt like hugging him and he took that as a que to kiss me. 5:05 am pdt I even felt magnetism magnet 🧲 between us to pull me into hugging him. Uh oh incubus is trying to erase my memory of the magnet 🧲 feeling i felt between us. 5:07 am pdt bad incubus! 🤬😡🥵😤🥵😤🥵😰😱 5:07 am pdt

5:54 am pdt I remember he had I think this was the order: he had started to unbuckle his belt of his pants 👖 and I remember him asking me “you want to have s*x, right?” And then I told him through clothing. He did seem irritated when I probably told him to “wait” bcz I think I was trying to keep from going too far s*xually with him, bcz I think we had not been on many dates with each other yet but he was willing to jump into s*x without much discussion or verbal or written promises of a future together. We didn’t even know each other b4 we started dating. My sister might have known him a little b4, but I don’t recall her telling me how long. 6:01 am pdt I was stupid to think that through clothing (supposedly I assumed dry humping was this and that there wouldn’t be semen but I was wrong! 😓) abstaining is probably safer. 6:04 am pdt

6:18 am pdt I think that was the only time I had s*x with the 2nd guy. 6:19 am pdt 6:25 am pdt We both changed pants 👖 when I requested through clothing. The third guy I had sat on his lap and dry humped? Grinded? And probably each time I did that he said I was driving him crazy. Long before we had “s*x” but maybe some might call it rape? He drew/wrote my name with a lot of backward little 7’s in sets of threes??? I think I did not learn about triple 7 represented perfection until recently, maybe it was last year I learned this? Probably within last 5 years, and the drawing ✍️ was from summer 2007. 6:32 am pdt I am guessing backwards means =not perfect. 6:33 am pdt

6:39 am pdt we both wore blue jeans 👖 pants 👖 and it I think always happened in his car 🚗 6:40 am pdt.

6:59 am pdt I need 2 clarify that I did not learn the word shanyang until last year? Or the end of the year before last year. 7 am pdt

7:19 am pdt From 2009 onward there were guys I hung out with who were 3 or 4 years younger than me who seemed they wanted more from me than friendship. One of them reminded me a little of my ex in some way but I wanted to friend zone him and hopefully 🙏 grow a brotherly type of friendship with. He touched me inappropriately during a hug at the olive 🫒 garden 🪴 parking lot without permission. There wasn’t any open discussion about feelings. Such as him saying I like you and I want to date you and see if this can be a long term romantic relationship. Nope. 7:27 am pdt it was for Q’s birthday 🎂 maybe 🤔. 7:28 am pdt It was very awkward when he decided to pull me down to sit on his lap in front of everyone and I felt as if I was cornered into playing along bcz I might embarrass him and hurt his feelings and I would end up 🆙 looking like a b*tch from the awkwardness and conflicting feelings and the confusion it was probably causing (I think I felt angry head hot 🥵 7:46 am pdt). For some reason I met men that wanted to have s*x with me without knowing me 4 long. I texted a guy giving him a chance bcz my mom wanted me to back when I still had a job and b4 we could go out on a one-on-one date in person (which never happened) he already was telling me he wanted me in his bed 🛏. 7:37 am pdt 7:38 am pdt I never played love 💕 like it was only a game. I had hoped for feelings to grow that would often plateau, stagnate? And die off b4 or after feeling the butterflies 🦋 and amourous feelings. One guy that I thought I fell in love 🥰 with twice I thought he was going to be the one, but periodically he rejected 🙅‍♂️ me and told me I was going to make blonde 👱‍♀️ blonde 👱 hair babies 👶, (that was his funny line to tell me he rejected me, which is more likely to happen if I married a blonde 👱 man). 7:42 am pdt 7:43 am pdt weird watery gurgle like sounds from left side 🐒💨 7:44 am pdt

8:27 am pdt roku = 6 nihongo. I read something online that god is also referred to as a rock 🪨? If you want to be funny you can break the syllables differently and say rok-u instead of ro-ku. 6 is even. But 7 is odd. Aud-Rey Hepburn? Au = gold. Go ill 🤒 d. D= dominus or devil? Devil = lived backwards. How does someone live backwards? What does that mean? Lucifer? Or Lucia/Lucy? I love 💕 Lucy. Backwards 7? 8:33 am pdt @_@ audi car 🚗 au-di?? 8:34 am pdt we all die 2 things are for certain death 💀 and taxes mark Twain? And if you drop 3 objects you can probably draw ✍️ a triangle between the three. 8:36 am pdt rock 🪨 and roll 🎸 chuck berry???? 8:36 am pdt

8:47 am pdt roll, turn over? High turnover???? 🥵😤🥵😳😖😭😞 Head hot 🥵 they’ve punished me for putting ice 🧊 on my head. 8:49 am pdt 😖😭

8:52 am pdt I have read stuff online that when you meet someone new it’s probably best in a public place and to tell some friends and probably not go alone. I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ Maybe also take public transportation? I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ my head is hot 🥵. If you read previous posts probably should take precautions also if introduced by someone else you have been hanging out with for a while. Unfortunately I never know 😑😖😭😤🥵😤🥵 or I did not back then???? 8:58 am pdt

8:59 am pdt clarification my mom probably did not know that guy like longer than I did, which was not at all, the one she wanted me to give a chance to who I texted. 9:01 am pdt

9:03 am pdt the sudden thought 💭 popped n2 my head that some people divorce and say “irreconcilable differences” ? I heard 👂. Can you date someone a long time and still find irreconcilable differences after saying “I do”? Sometimes you just bite the cookie 🍪 and hope it works out. Movie 🍿 5 year engagement? 9:07 am pdt I don’t remember going on any dates incubus. We are still at negative square 1,000,000 the way it’s going. 9:08 am pdt 😑😭😖😭he thinks he can trick me?! 9:09 am pdt I don’t want you anymore! I told you in 2017 (9:14 am pdt and preferably divorced is what was also in my head) we have 2go on dates 2 get 2 know each other 2 see if I can like you. Preferably in public in a group setting 2 allow organic spontaneous partnerships 2 happen. 9:11 am pdt

12:13 am pdt call me crazy but I think I like structure in social relationships: I like for a father to only be my father not my husband; if I had a brother I would only like him to be my brother ideally not my husband; I think I would like my cousins to only be my cousin not my husband no matter what weird feelings incubus wants 2 give me 🤬😡🥵😤🥵😤😖😭. With polygamy I think that makes it more difficult, what I mean is more likely to cross those lines if they secretly cheat. I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ what happens if you do do it with a cousin or half brother; I don’t want to find out. It’s not only about genes 🧬 but I like to think about relationships in general having their designated roles. 12:20 pm pdt my grandpa cheated on my grandma so I should probably b more cautious about my mom’s home country and try 4 someone different ethnic identity? And I don’t really know many people on my dad’s side either 😞 but I don’t think my grandpa cheated on grandma 👵 on that side, I guess my grandpa was maybe ugly? My mom said it’s better to like a man not every woman 👩🏻 wants. Steve Harvey said an ugly man is probably the most well behaved man 👨 (I don’t know if it’s true 4 all men but maybe 🤔 it’s true 4 some?) 12:27 pm pdt

1:20 pm pdt funny how I remember things after I type about it. I did have a few drawing books 📖 📚 one for Pocahontas, my dad had Spider-Man and X-men. I stupidly gave the X-men one to Scott when he probably didn’t need it. And my sister had one for horses 🐴. I practiced those but I don’t really recall applying that method/technique much when I wasn’t looking at those books. 1:24 pm pdt

1:29 pm pdt if I had mastered the technique I would have drew a lot more drawings in the amount of time I spent drawing ✍️ probably. In 2015 I tried coloring in a skeleton copy to help myself learn anatomy drawing and then tried to draw ✍️ it but I was slow. I remember also trying to play the guitar 🎸, to learn it on my own but I started falling asleep 😴. So I had to decide to focus on my health and I remember I slept 🛌 a lot, probably between 10-14 hours a day. 1:34 pm pdt

4:14 pm pdt I 4got 2 type uncles, whether blood 🩸 related or in-laws; if there potential 4 cousins 2 b born then an uncle idk 🤷🏻‍♀️ probably b considered like a father figure? Are cousins similar to half-siblings? 4:17 pm pdt

10-14 hours a day would have given incubus a lot of time with me. I remember times when I slept 🛌 I had nightmares and felt my body being weighted down. I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ if this is the time incubus was on top of me. I remember feeling the need 2 scream and my mouth 👄 opening and no noise coming out. I might have written a little about it in previous posts. 4:22 pm pdt it’s getting difficult 😞 4 me 2 remember. 4:23 pm pdt incubus tried to dig a hole 🕳 into my right ear about 40 minutes ago and I woke up 🆙 with a dry throat again. Immediately after I felt the pain in my ear 👂 I heard a loud bass booming sound then minutes later heard a text message alert 🚨 sound from this cellphone 📲 and it didn’t sound as good. I’m hoping that it was bcz of something it was touching, otherwise I would have 2 anticipate that the phone 📲 speakers 🔊 are degrading suddenly, even though this phone probably cost a lot of money 💰 in its original msrp? What does it stand 4 again 4:30 🕟 heard a loud sliding click don’t know if that’s my mom coming back. 4:31 pm pdt my mom bought me this phone 📲 at a clearance price of ≈$300 which is still expensive 4 an electronic device that only fits in your hand ✋ & I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ how effective it is to editing on it other than very simple little stuff. Back in 2005 when I took fashion classes we were told China 🇨🇳 would sew 🧵 garments 4 a few cents a piece, she mentioned 7 cents I think 🤔. I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ if that’s accurate but that’s what I remember. 4:37 on pdt It is a lot nicer than the cheaper android phone 📱 which I tried last year. If everyone recycled would it bring down the cost? Or would inflation continue 2 rise? 4:41 pm pdt I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♀️ enough of anything 2 probably b helpful. 4:42 pm pdt

I believe the twitch is really dead 💀. I believe incubus will drive me to the point of wanting 2 commit suicide. I believe he will control me like a muppet and make me walk 2 the train 🚊 and get hit by it/smashed by it similar 2 his maps video. 4:46 pm pdt

6:49 pm pdt I believe incubus is running 🏃‍♂️ the same game on me that he did on other women. On Q in particular years b4 me. Q’s bday is one day after my grandma’s bday. Incubus is yelling “NOOOOOO!!!” Usually that means they’re going 2 do more stuff 2 kill me. Even though he has a lot of knowledge of what’s going 2 happen b4 hand, would make me believe it’s all actually his own decisions. He owns what 3 mansions? Many cars 🚗? Stocks in several companies? A fashion line? A fragrance? The verve? Royalties? Am I missing something? He throws a basketball 🏀 from far away and it seems to fly a tremendous? Distance. I see pictures that it looks like he’s doing poses in mid air as if he has powers to levitate. He may have had me half fooled, & telling me things I want 2 hear 👂 but aren’t you spreading yourself thin incubus? How can you have much genuine feelings romantically deeply 4 that many women? How are you carrying on with all these relationships if we are only capable of having 150 connections???? 7:01 am pdt you keep on running game incubus, rapist, murderer. 7:01 pm pdt the train 🚆 passed by and it shook the place. It’s going too fast past a residential area. Cramps after gurgle feels like burning diarrhea 🐒💨

7:03 pm pdt nihongo has different counting systems? To = ten-> net backwards which looks like a spiderweb 🕸 to like toe tag 🏷 on cadavers. 7:04 pm pdt

7:22 pm pdt time goes by too fast 💨😖😭 he’s playing love 💕 like it’s a game pretending to feel love ❤️. With memory loss, he can con anyone. 7:24 pm pdt head is hot 🥵 came back from bathroom 🚽 7:19 pm. Not good. 7:25 pm pdt

In December 2012 me and Q went to a restaurant with karaoke 🎤. Met some people Q was friends with and some acquaintances or new people I guess. 3 of the men were actually from my high school 🏫 I wonder if they are still alive. I was interested in a blonde-ish haired man 👨 and I thought 💭 he might have been interested in me bcz he started talking 2 me. But I said something that turned him off and he lectured me without asking anything else about me. I thought 💭 maybe we can see eye 👁 to eye 👁 on somethings and maybe I could respect him. But when we said goodbye 👋 he was totally shunning me I guess if I’m using that word right. I had hoped if he knew me more that he would not be so strict? Like if he had noticed that I was completely shy ☺️ around him, and that I had suffered a lot and I do try to work even with my difficulties? 7:34 pm pdt and the only vacations I took were to visit family I don’t see often and once bcz of my eczema. After we left the building, in the parking lot Q told me she thinks she likes him and if it would be ok if she could have him, and she said I could have his twin brother. If you’ve ever watched sister sister or met identical twins 👯‍♀️ you might notice they have slightly different personalities?? Is that right? One might be extrovert and the other introvert? Or did I jump to conclusions? I didn’t think about that back then , but it bothered me that Q asked 4 me 2 back off. I didn’t tell her, but if someone asks an introverted person to do something without really asking their feelings... it seemed like my feelings didn’t matter. I told her I think he likes you more anyway. And then I chose not to hang out again sometime after that. I think it was after another time of hanging out there again with almost the same people but he didn’t show up 🆙. One of the other guys tried to invite me to the house party coming up 🆙 but I felt unwelcomed by his twin brother. Twins 👯 friends with twins 👯. So I tried not to be too disappointed at feeling unwelcomed probably and I stopped trying. 7:44 pm pdt it almost feels like Q is cock blocking me selectively. Even though she put music is her boyfriend on MySpace. 7:45 pm pdt 7:46 pm pdt the twin I felt unwelcomed by was dating one of Q’s friends and was friendly with Q in front of me. 7:47 pm pdt

7:55 pm pdt once my mom gave me an ultimatum that she would leave me unless I took accounting classes, so I enrolled. 7:56 pm pdt unfortunately I didn’t finish the certificate program. I started getting too scared to go and I made excuses. 7:57 pm pdt my eczema started flairing a lot anyway and it was getting harder for me to get to class on time with anxiety. 7:58 pm pdt

12:18 am pdt incubus has been pouring vinegar down my throat I suspect. If this is his way of giving me diverticulitis/crohns whatever it’s called that’s a very cruel way to make someone die especially when you’ve already put me through a lot. 12:20 am pdt divorce relationship came up in auto fill correct. Permanent divorce 2 an imaginary husband. If you were dating stroh 4 a year I wonder if your children ever see you that much and probably don’t know you. Every one thought he was being a stay at home dad. Guess NOT. 12:23 am pdt 26 Jan u ary 2023 Thursday

12:32 am pdt incubus is probably the reason why dusty rose is so short in comparison to gio grace. 12:32 am pdt

12:37 am pdt incubus destroyed love.

that tattoo should be “you’re so cold you’re so cold you’re so cold” 12:39 am pdt

[miscelunaaa]

spin cycle 7 | jjk

pairing: jungkook x female reader

genre: drabble series, slow burn, idiots to lovers, fluff, lil bit of angst, eventual smut

summary: This random guy has started doing laundry at your favorite laundromat each week (at the same time as you, no less!) and to be honest, it’s going to be a problem. You’re just not sure how yet.

rating: 18+ for eventual smut

word count: 500 exactlyyyyy

warnings: Jungkook being a simp for sweater paws. Both reader and Jungkook being socially awkward. A teeny Namjoon.

notes: Special thanks to @thatlongspringnight and @illneverrecover for helping me out with some language at the beginning, I really appreciate it! Also, a reminder that the tag list is open for this series! Message me or send an ask if you want to be added. Enjoy!

note 2: I know I said that I post, generally, on Mondays, but I’m getting my fourth covid vaccine dose tomorrow (it’s my booster! I’m immunosuppressed) and will likely be in bed chugging water and cuddling husbeard’s pillow for most of the day. So, with that in mind, have a drabble! Happy Sunday and see you soon :)

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Jungkook isn’t expecting you to look that cute in his sweatshirt. At all.

He’s not sure what came over him. He’s going to get cold without it, but, then again, he’s got two identical black hoodies (oversized, as he prefers) in the wash right now. He’s happy to lend it, he decides, because you look so fucking cute. It fits you perfectly, though the sleeves are a bit long. It gives you sweater paws. He’s never going to complain about a girl having sweater paws while wearing his hoodie.

“I’m Jungkook, by the way,” he says awkwardly.

“I’m Y/N,” you reply quietly. Your voice is soft, but not weak. Strong, but not louder than necessary.

“Sooo—” Jungkook feels his social anxiety creeping up his spine, “—Two AM laundry, right?” Nice, Kook, real smooth.

“Yeah, never thought someone else would do laundry at the same time as me. Ever.”

Are you annoyed? You sound annoyed. Jungkook’s brain is running about as fast as it can to find a subject to switch to.

“Yeah, I just moved at the beginning of the school year because my roommate started teaching at the university so new place, new laundromat, I guess.”

“Seems like an awfully novel time for laundry,” you press. You seem less annoyed, maybe? Maybe its just wishful thinking. Your brow is still furrowed—wow, you have nice eyebrows—but your jaw is no longer doing that weird, tense thing. Namjoon’s does it too actually. It’s scary.

“I’m in freelance and I’ve got a few clients who have weird schedules. This time just works for me as a wrap up to my day.” Okay, that was pretty good actually. Jungkook’s making the work he’s doing for Jin’s passion project sound way cooler than it actually is.

The look on your face is blank, as if you’re trying to decide what to say.

Jungkook scratches his neck. “So, um, what are you doing here so late?”

Your gaze flickers up to his, meeting it for a fleeting moment before falling back to the ground. “I’m a night owl.”

That’s it. That’s all you give him.

“Cool, same honestly.” At least it’s the truth. God, he’s so garbage at talking to you. He can almost picture Namjoon rolling his eyes at how awkward this conversation feels. Too bad he’s not here to do all the talking.

“Cool,” you repeat back quietly. “I’ve got work I need to get done. I can wash this next week and give it back to you, if that’s okay?”

“Oh.” Right, the hoodie. Do you smell good? Jungkook wonders if you smell good, and if there’s a way to find out before next week. Maybe he can keep you from washing it so that it stays smelling like you.

Is that weird?

Somewhere in his mind, there’s a tiny Namjoon haunting his neurons. At this question, the tiny Namjoon shouts “YES” and then laughs at the way it echos against his skull.

“Yeah, that’s totally fine. No rush.”

Thank you for reading! Drop me an ask and tell me what you think. Find me in various places at my carrd :)

©miscelunaaa 2021-2022. My work is only found on this blog and under my ao3 pseud. Do not, under any circumstances, copy or repost my work. Thank you.

posted: 1.30.2022. updated: 4.2.2022 with front matter fixes.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

ltdan2288 asked: As a fellow veteran of the Afghan Campaign, might I ask if you have any thoughts about the imminent end of Allied air support & combat-advisory operations over there? The fall of large swaths of the country to the Taliban is already underway, which can only be seen as an unspeakable tragedy for the people there. From a strategic perspective, there’s no reason to believe that we won’t have to return in some capacity of AQ or ISIS reestablish themselves under Taliban sponsorship. At the same time, it’s not clear to me that our presence did anything beyond kick the can down the road and delay this inevitable outcome. As someone with such a deep knowledge of military history, I’m curious if you have a different perspective.

I have been avoiding answering this post for a while now because Afghanistan dredges up so many conflicting emotions inside me. I wrestle with so many memories of my time there with my regiment to fight in a war that we all didn’t really understand what we were fighting for.

Deep breath.

Almost two decades of conflict in Afghanistan has cost British taxpayers £22.2billion, or $31.3 billion according to UK government figures. As British troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, the 20-year deployment bill could be even higher. As of May 2021, the total cost of Operation Herrick (codename for the deployment of British soldiers to Helmand province) is £22.2billion. There were 457 fatalities on, or subsequently due to, Op Herrick. Of which 403 were due to hostile action. During the operation between January 1, 2006 and November 30, 2014, there were 10,382 British service personnel casualties. Of these 5,705 were injuries and the remainder being illness or disease. The UK’s remaining 750 troops in Afghanistan, involved in training local forces, started exiting the war-devastated country in May. Most of them will return home by the end of July.

They, like every one of us who went to fight in Afghanistan, will ask the same questions, ‘Why did we go there?’ ‘What was the real purpose of the mission?’ ‘Was it worth it?’

Both my older brothers fought there with special distinction and I later fought there too. I have very mixed emotions when I think about my time in Afghanistan. For all its faults and tortured history, I love that country and love its many ethnic people. I even started to learn Pashtu as I already had a spoken command of Urdu because I had been raised partly in both Pakistan and India and it’s where many Afghan refugees living in the UN camps for over a generation had learned Urdu too.

It’s not just that my family has history in Afghanistan going back to the days of the East India Company but I had a sincere respect for its culture and history as one of the central hot spots for great civilisational achievements, but also as a stubborn and unruly country who proudly defied the Great Powers to bend the knee and turned it into a ‘graveyard of empires’. Most of all I think of the friendships I made there and how my perspective on life changed as a consequence of knowing such resilience and fortitude in the face of catastrophe and death.

I’m sure like everyone else I wasn’t too surprised by President Biden’s announcement that he was announcing the imminent withdrawal of all American troops in Afghanistan. He wanted to pivot to something else when asked about it. “I want to talk about happy things, man!” He said. Who could begrudge him given that America has been at war in Afghanistan for a better part of 20 years and has nothing to really show for it. Except of course the loss of its brave service men and women as well as the death of thousands of Afghan civilians. It spent more than $2 trillion to kill Osama bin Laden, the architect behind 9/11 attacks and failed to convincingly snuff out both murderous terror groups, Al Qaeda and ISIS.

When the Secretary General of Nato announced back in April 2021 all alliance troops were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, it was made to look like a nice, clean, enunciation of a joint decision. The end date was set for 11 September, 2021 - 20 years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington - and it was in line with the oft-repeated alliance maxim: we went in together; we will come out together. Except that, on closer examination, it was all rather messier.

This was partly because the withdrawal from Afghanistan had actually been Trump’s policy, so here was Joe Biden, the anti-Trump, co-opting a policy from his predecessor (a policy Trump had been so keen on that he tried to accelerate the withdrawal after he lost the election). Biden then tried to detach it from Trump by slowing down the withdrawal date a little and expressing it in terms more comprehensible to the Washington establishment and to US allies.

Where Trump had essentially done a deal with the Taliban and set a withdrawal date of 1 May, Biden left the Taliban out of it and invoked the totemic date of 9/11. This does not mean, of course, that the withdrawal will not be completed a good deal sooner - once you announce a withdrawal, you might as well get on with it.

In fact, Biden had to make a decision one way or another, given the rapid approach of Trump’s 1 May withdrawal date. And, whether it came from Washington or Nato, it was pretty low key for an announcement that a 20-year military involvement that had cost 4,000 allied lives was ending. Indeed, many people beyond Washington and Afghanistan might not quite have registered the news, given the considerable noises from Nato’s simultaneous dire warnings about Russia massing troops on the Ukrainian border, the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in the UK, and the Covid pandemic everywhere.

And distractions were needed not just because Biden was implementing a Trump policy. It was also because he was ordering an unconditional withdrawal – which he justified, correctly, by saying that setting preconditions would mean that the troops could be there forever. It was a risk Biden knew all too well, given that Barack Obama had been persuaded by General David Petraeus – against his election pledges and his better judgement – that what Obama really wanted was not a withdrawal, but a ‘surge’ with conditions attached before a withdrawal could take place.

Distractions were also useful for London, where the timing was hardly ideal. Imagine you were in government in London, you had watched the dismal failure of the UK’s Herrick operations in Helmand Province between 2006 and 2014, you knew that your armed forces had suffered 456 deaths in 20 years, with many more severely injured, but you had hung on in there.

Your government had also just released a blueprint for foreign and security policy, setting future priorities even further from home, in the Indo-Pacific, and your Prime Minister was about to make a high-profile visit to India as part of his post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ branding . In those circumstances, an announcement that the US had decided to leave Afghanistan, giving you no choice but to follow, was almost exactly what you did not need. Rather than showing the UK as a powerful, autonomous military actor and a valued ally, it showed the exact opposite.

It also reminded an unhappy British public about a costly conflict it had rather forgotten. And those who did more than bother to remember - like the families who lost loved ones on the battlefield - and who over the years have blamed successive governments for moving the goalposts and lacking an exit strategy (all true too).

All of which might explain why the UK’s Foreign and Defence Secretaries followed the US example by changing the subject to the iniquities of Russia and China, rather than issuing a joyous pronouncement to the effect of: hooray and thank goodness, our boys and girls are coming home.

The UK’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter gave a subdued, unenthusiastic response to Biden’s announcement. I cannot remember such open acknowledgement of UK-US military policy friction in recent decades - or such an abject admission by the UK of its defence dependence on the US. What Carter said was that the unconditional withdrawal was ‘not a decision we had hoped for, but we obviously respect it and it is clearly an acknowledgement of an evolving US strategic posture’. In other words, the UK had opposed Biden’s decision – or would have done, if asked (which is not clear). Also, that it was Washington’s ‘strategic posture’ that had ‘evolved’, not the UK’s. He suggested there was a real danger that progress made could be lost and that there could be a return to civil war, with the Taliban maybe returning to power - again, all true.

Given that the UK officially has only 750 troops in Afghanistan at present, and most of them are there in a training capacity, to dissent from the US position so openly would be considered decidedly rude in the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps to that end, General Carter played the dutiful soldier and had to - through gritted teeth - put a positive gloss on Afghanistan’s future, insisting that the objective in going into Afghanistan, ‘to prevent international terrorism emerging from the country’, had been achieved which was ‘great tribute to the work of British forces and their allies’.

He also said that Afghan forces were ‘much better trained than one might imagine’ and that the Taliban ‘is not the organisation it once was’, so that ‘a scenario could play out that is actually not quite as bad as perhaps some of the naysayers are predicting.’ Blah blah blah. He’s wrong, and I think he knows it but only in the sanctity of his gentlemen’s club might he truly admit it.

I know he’s wrong because the chatter amongst ex-veterans I know is that we’ve made a balls up of Afghanistan yet again - by ‘again’ I mean from the past 200 years of us Brits trying to bring order to chaos in Afghanistan and getting burned for our troubles.

Both my father and my older siblings tell me what their friends and ex-service peers (some very senior indeed) have been nattering over a drink at their gentlemen clubs where ex-veterans haunt the club bar. Many just shake their heads in sighed resignation before burying themselves in the Times crossword or drowning their sorrows with a beer or two at how lock in step we’ve become to the Americans at a time when the British army is re-branding itself as a more independent nimble hi-tech impact army (the creation of a new ranger regiment being but one example).

Still if President Biden wanted to tie a neat bow on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan - saying, as he had, that the logic for the war ended once al-Qaida was gutted and Osama bin Laden killed - then it reveals a stunning lack of introspection about the United States’ role in the conflict that will continue in Afghanistan long after the last American and British troops leave.

Less than three months after President Joe Biden declared that the last American troops would be out of Afghanistan by September 11th, the withdrawal is nearly complete. The departure from Bagram air base, an hour’s drive north of the capital, Kabul, in effect marked the end of America’s 20-year war. But that does not mean the end of the war in Afghanistan. If anything, it is only going to get worse.

It is true that the president had no good choice on Afghanistan, and that he inherited a bad deal from his predecessor. There are never good choices when it comes to Afghanistan: only bloody trade offs.

But in announcing an unconditional withdrawal, he made the situation worse by throwing out the minimal conditions U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad had negotiated under the Trump administration. U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has delivered to the Afghan government and Taliban a draft Afghanistan Peace Agreement - the central idea of which is replacing the elected Afghan government with a so-called transitional one that would include the Taliban and then negotiate among its members the future permanent system of government. Crucial blank spaces in the draft include the exact share of power for each of the warring sides and which side would control security institutions.

The refrain now from the Biden administration is that the United States is not abandoning Afghanistan, that it will aim to do right by Afghan women and girls, and that it will try to nudge the Taliban and Kabul toward a peace deal using a diplomatic tool kit.

But the narrative ignores much of the reality on the ground. It also ignores history.

In theory, the Taliban and the American-backed government had been negotiating a peace accord, whereby the insurgents lay down their arms and participate instead in a redesigned political system. In the best-case scenario, strong American support for the government, both financial and military (in the form of continuing air strikes on the Taliban), coupled with immense pressure on the insurgents’ friends, such as Pakistan, might succeed in producing some form of power-sharing agreement.

But even if that were to happen - and the chances are low - it would be a depressing spectacle. The Taliban would insist on moving backwards in the direction of the brutal theocracy they imposed during their previous stint in power, when they confined women to their homes, stopped girls from going to school and meted out harsh punishments for sins such as wearing the wrong clothes or listening to the wrong music.

More likely than any deal, however, is that the Taliban try to use their victories on the battlefield to topple the government by force. They have already overrun much of the countryside, with government units mostly restricted to cities and towns. Demoralised government troops are abandoning their posts. In the first week of July 2021, over 1,000 of them fled from the north-eastern province of Badakhshan to neighbouring Tajikistan. The Taliban have not yet managed to capture and hold any cities, and may lack the manpower to do so in lots of places at once. They may prefer to throttle the government slowly rather than attack it head on. But the momentum is clearly on their side.

America and its NATO allies have spent billions of dollars training and equipping Afghan security forces in the hope that they would one day be able to stand alone. Instead, they started buckling even before America left. Many districts are being taken not by force, but are simply handed over. Soldiers and policemen have surrendered in droves, leaving piles of American-purchased arms and ammunition and fleets of vehicles. Even as the last American troops were leaving Bagram over the weekend of July 3rd, more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers were busy fleeing across the border into neighbouring Tajikistan as they sought to escape a Taliban assault.

As the outlook for the army and for civilians looks increasingly desperate, so do the measures proposed by the government. Ashraf Ghani, the president, is trying to mobilise militias to shore up the flimsy army. He has turned for help to figures such as Atta Mohammad Noor, who rose to power as an anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban commander and is now a potentate and businessman in Balkh province. “No matter what, we will defend our cities and the dignity of our people,” said Mr Noor in his gilded reception hall in Mazar-i-Sharif, the key to holding the north (sounds like Game of Thrones). The thinking is that such a mobilisation would be a temporary measure to give the army breathing space and allow it to regroup and the new forces would co-ordinate with government troops to push back hard on the Taliban.

However this is Afghanistan. The prospect of unleashing warlords’ private armies fills many Afghans with dread, reminding them of the anarchy of the 1990s. Such militias, raised along ethnic lines, tended to turn on each other and the general population.

With America gone and Afghan forces melting away, the Taliban fancy their prospects. They show little sign of engaging in serious negotiations with Mr Ghani’s administration. Yet they control no major towns or cities. Sewing up the countryside puts pressure on the urban centres, but the Taliban may be in no hurry to force the issue. They generally lack heavy weapons. They may also lack the numbers to take a city against sustained resistance. On July 7th they failed to capture Qala-e-Naw, a small town. Besides, controlling a city would bring fresh headaches. They are not good at providing government services.

Perhaps the Taliban have learned their history lesson and might refrain from attacking Kabul this time around. Their best course may be to tighten the screws and wait for the government to buckle. American predictions of its fate are getting gloomier. Intelligence agencies think Mr Ghani’s government could collapse within six months, according to the Wall Street Journal. So clearly the momentum is on the side of the Taliban and they just need to chip away at Ghani’s forces one district after another until the inevitable and hateful surrender of the central Afghan government to their demands.

At the very least, the civil war is likely to intensify, as the Taliban press their advantage and the government fights for its life. Other countries - China, India, Iran, Russia and Pakistan - will seek to fill the vacuum left by America. Some will funnel money and weapons to friendly warlords. The result will be yet more bloodshed and destruction, in a country that has suffered constant warfare for more than 40 years. Those who worry about possible reprisals against the locals who worked as translators for the Americans are missing the big picture: America, Britain and other allies are abandoning an entire country of almost 40m people to a grisly fate.

Nothing exemplifies - at least in Afghan eyes - of all that has gone wrong with American involvement in Afghanistan than in the manner of their leaving.

The U.S. left Afghanistan's Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base's new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans' departure more than two hours after they left in the middle of the night without raising any alarms.

They left behind 3.5 million items, including tens of thousands of bottles of water, energy drinks and military MRE's (Meals Ready to Eat ration packs to the uninitiated). Thousands of civilian vehicles were left, many without keys to start them, and hundreds of armoured vehicles. The Americans also left small weapons and ammunition, but the departing US troops took heavy weapons with them. Ammunition for weapons not left for the Afghan military was blown up.

Now that is some feat considering the logistics of this mass exodus without drawing any attention. You have obviously been to Bagram and so you will know just how big and sprawling it is. Bagram Airfield is the size of a small city, roadways weaving through barracks and past hangar-like buildings. There are two runways and more than 100 parking spots for fighter jets known as revetments. One of the two runways is 12,000 feet long and was built in 2006. There's a passenger lounge, a 50-bed hospital and giant hangar-size tents filled with furniture. And all those shops to remind Americans of home from familiar fast food restaurants and hairdressers and massage parlours to buying clothing and jewellery and buying a Harley Davidson motorbike (or so I’ve been told).

I’m guessing that the Afghans were certainly outside of the wire and probably had not been inside Bagram Airfield for months. So from the outset they would not have had any reason to think anything was going on until the generators probably ran out of fuel and it started to go a little too quiet. The inner gate was probably discretely left unlocked and when the US stopped answering the radio/phone and then they probably investigated.

Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour's drive from the Afghan capital, Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan troops. Afghan military leaders insist the Afghan National Security and Defense Force could hold on to the heavily fortified base despite a string of Taliban wins on the battlefield. The airfield includes a prison with about 5,000 prisoners, many of them allegedly Taliban members.

I’m pretty sure some bright spark in the US Pentagon public affairs dept convinced his military superiors that it was important to avoid the optics of Americans leaving in the same way they did in Vietnam in case it depresses the American public and the US military. Instead it demoralised its allies, the Afghan national army who are now the only line of defence against the Taliban.  In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area. The manner in which the Americans left Bagram air base amounts to a resounding vote of no confidence in Afghanistan’s future. It just looks bad.

The U.S. choice came with costs attached to each decision. With staying, the cost was potential U.S. troop casualties and a fear that things would not change on the ground. With leaving comes the cost of a deeper conflict in Afghanistan and a backsliding of progress made there over the past two decades. In many ways, the costs of staying seem shorter-term and borne by the United States, while the costs of leaving will be predominantly borne by Afghans over a longer time horizon. Yet, even if those costs seem remote now, history tells us that they will be blamed on the United States.

Biden perhaps reflective of history of Americans getting into quagmires abroad didn’t want to be seen exerting time and energy for a losing cause. His decision also reflects his administration’s foreign policy for the American middle-class paradigm, which focuses on domestic considerations over international ones (and is this so different from Trump’s “America First”? No, it is not). The irony, though, is that the American middle class largely doesn’t care about Afghanistan - their ambivalence gave way to support for this decision once it was announced, but it wouldn’t be hard to visualise the public approving of a scenario that kept a couple thousand troops there for a while longer.

What’s perhaps most disturbing is the narrative the president has presented along with the rationale for withdrawal: that America went to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaida after 9/11, that mission creep led America to stay on too long and, therefore, it is time to get out. This takes an incomplete view of U.S. agency in the war in Afghanistan. The narrative implies that the civil conflict in Afghanistan today did not originate with America - that this more than 40-year war began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, preceded America’s interference in Afghanistan, and will follow our departure.

The fact of the matter is that, by beginning the campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrowing the Taliban, who were then engaged in their draconian rule, and installing a new government, we western allies began a new phase of the Afghan conflict — one that pitted the Kabul government and the United States/Britain/NATO against the Taliban insurgency. The Afghan people did not have a say in the matter. That we allied powers are leaving Afghan women, children, and youth better off in many ways after 20 years is due to us, and we should be proud of that. But that we are leaving them mired in a bloody conflict is also due to us, because we could not hold off the Taliban insurgency, and we must all reckon publicly with that.

I have to ask myself why did we fail?

I’m only speaking about us Brits now as I’m sure you have your own thoughts as an ex-Marine officer of what you thought of the American military effort. Yes, I’m copping out of really bashing the yanks because first, I have too much respect for those fantastic American service men and women I did have the privilege to fight alongside with; and second, we Brits have nothing to crow about as we fucked up in lots of ways too, and to make things worse, we should have known better given our imperial history with Afghanistan.

The seeds of our failure in Afghanistan lies in not learning from history. We didn’t have a mission that was properly defined nor did we have a strategy that was clear, coherent, and easily communicated to both its fighting men and women as well as to the British public.

Were we there to get our hands bloody and to root out and destroy extreme Islamist terrorists or were we there to indulge in state building out of some idealistic notions of liberal humanitarianism? This question was at heart of our failure within our government and also within the British army as well as our relations with America and our NATO allies and finally the Afghans themselves.

Although never colonised in the same manner as other central and south Asian countries, the modern Afghan state is very much a creation borne out of great power rivalry. A land occupied by a number of different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups, it is a country whose borders were defined by, and whose sense of national identity was forged in response to western great power competition. Its geopolitical position - landlocked, mountainous, and surrounded by past great powers and present regional rivals - lends Afghanistan a dual role of geographic obscurity and great strategic significance, and has as such frequently been treated as little more than a buffer state between empires and a proxy of local powers. Its shared historical border with Russia and British India made it an object of imperial intrigue and, by consequence, has been subject to five European military interventions in the last 175 years.

The first three interventions of these occurred during the era of ‘the Great Game’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which Britain and Russia (latterly the Soviet Union) competed for influence and control over Afghan politics in order to protect their respective imperial holdings in India and central Asia.

The fourth and fifth interventions, ranging from the late 1970s to the present day, similarly involved attempts by Soviets and then by an American-led international coalition to remove political leaders acting against their interests and to protect their favoured candidates.

The unifying feature of all these conflicts was the idea of Afghanistan as the site of potential threats to the interests and security of more powerful states.

Britain’s legacy in Afghanistan in particular set the tone for the country’s historical pattern of conflict and political contestation, fuelling both the intermittent emergence of Afghan national consciousness and a fractious political lineage that saw thirteen amirs in just eighty years. Interventions by the Empire during the Great Game set the conditions for the assassination of ostensibly national leaders by their compatriots (Shah Shuja Durrani in the First war) or their exile by the British (Shere Ali Khan and Ayub Khan in the Second).

Despite the British achieving their aim of protecting India in the second and third conflicts by maintaining Afghanistan as either a pro-British buffer state or as a neutral party, the Afghan narrative tends to emphasise successes such as the massacre of British forces retreating from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842, the defeat of British and Indian forces at Maiwand in 1880, and the gaining of sovereignty in foreign affairs in 1919.

Soviet intervention in the late 1970s and 1980s further buttressed this identity of resistance, and the failure and ultimate overthrow of the Communist-backed Najibullah government, as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly after their drawdown from Afghanistan, led to a sense amongst the victorious mujahidin of the country as the ‘graveyard of empires’.

Afghanistan’s modern history should thus be seen as inextricably linked to the ebbs and flows of great power politics. Each intervention exacerbated extant internal power struggles between rival elite individuals and groups vying for nominal control over the country. Foreign intervention in Afghanistan was met on each occasion with fierce resistance from tribal militias coalesced around religion; as has been remarked upon by one historian of the country, the threat of external domination has been one of the few means of uniting its disparate population around the concept of an Afghan ‘nation’, and in most cases this shared sense of identity cohered around religion, not nationalism.

Indeed, the presence of intervening powers and the development of the Afghan state may be seen as mutually supporting: whilst most Afghan leaders throughout the last two centuries have asserted their sovereignty over the country, the reality has in most circumstances been one of competing tribal chiefs and/or ‘warlords’ rather than a single dominant leader.

Where leaders have managed to cohere the disparate tribal and ethnic groupings of the country under one banner - most notably under the regime of Dost Mohamed Khan (1826-1839, 1845-1863) – this was due in large part to their diplomatic abilities of compromise and co-optation with Afghanistan’s regional power- brokers. In other cases, such as that of the reign of Abdurrahman (1880- 1901), power was maintained by an unflinching ‘internal imperialism’ and the use of punitive force against rebellious factions.

The challenges of maintaining and projecting centralised power in Afghanistan allow us to see the relationship of its leaders with world or regional powers in the last two centuries as one of mutual exploitation. Throughout the Great Game and the Cold War, whilst the British/Americans and Russians/Soviets would use threats and bribes (and occasionally force) to compel Afghan rulers to comply with their geopolitical needs, Afghan rulers themselves often deftly manipulated those powers to maintain and extend their own power.

The pattern followed by Afghan leaders from the nineteenth century to the present day is remarkably similar in the respect that most have relied upon a rentierist economic model, seeking external aid in order to sustain the cost of security and administration. The plan of modern rulers was to warm Afghanistan with the heat generated by the great power conflicts without getting drawn into them directly. Abdurrahman, for example, used British subsidies to fund his military campaigns against rebellious factions; the Musahiban rulers of the mid-twentieth century used American capital to develop its nascent economic infrastructure and Soviet finance to bolster its armed forces; and, following the overthrow of the last royal leader of Afghanistan, Mohamed Daoud, in 1978, the quasi-communist leadership of Babrak Karmal, Hafizullah Amin, Nur Muhammad Taraki, and Mohammad Najibullah during the late 1970s and 1980s relied in the main on Soviet money and military assistance in its ultimately failed attempt to implement socialist policies and put down the American, Saudi and Pakistani-backed mujahidin.

These trends continued into the post-Cold War period in respect to both the Taliban movement (essentially directed and funded by Pakistan), the Northern Alliance (funded largely by former Soviet central Asian states) and the regime of Hamid Karzai (maintained in economic and military terms by the American-led, NATO-operated International Security Assistance Force and the wider international community). In the former cases, occurring in the main in the period of civil war between 1992 and 2001, rentierism was limited to the maintenance of proxy parties and the continuation of conflict.

By contrast, the ISAF mission bore similarities with the Soviet-backed socialist regimes of the 1980s, insofar as it focused huge amounts of capital and military resources on stabilisation and state-building efforts. Both intervening parties made the error of ignoring Afghanistan’s political history and focused their efforts on bolstering the authority of a centralised state, both promoted policies that were deemed ‘universal’ in their application and were, unsurprisingly given such hubris, vulnerable to accusations by Afghan opposition to being alien and imperialistic ideologies, and both expended enormous amounts of blood and treasure in order to sustain the regimes they supported.

The UK’s struggle to locate a coherent strategy for Afghanistan should, therefore, be seen firstly in the light of the historical problematic of Afghan state-building. This is important in narrative terms because difficulties of defining strategy imply similar challenges in explaining strategy. As with its efforts to ‘think’ strategically, Britain’s ability to explain the strategy(ies) for the war in Afghanistan have been frequently criticised by various commentators. The most strategically debilitating aspect of the Afghan campaign has always been the incoherence of the mission’s purpose; indeed the question ‘‘why are we in Afghanistan?’’ has never really been settled in public consciousness. The international community massively underestimated the difficulties of state-building and greatly overstretched themselves in the commitments made to Afghanistan, and that they did so because ‘strategies’ for Afghanistan rested on assumptions of the universal applicability of liberal state-building.

The international community from the start (meaning from the Bonn Conference of late 2001) fundamentally misunderstood the nature of an Afghan society deeply ravaged by decades of conflict, and failed to foresee the malign effects state-building ventures would have on the country. Specifically, the Bonn Conference, which set out the parameters of the post-invasion Afghan state, implemented a centralised state system onto a state whose experience of such was limited, and where the success of such a system in extending its authority beyond the major cities was predicated on coercion and the use of force.

Historically this has rarely been a credible option for Afghan rulers or their international backers, and was even less so under the self-imposed restrictions of liberal war-fighting and state-building. Rather, re-creating a centralised state required Afghan and international actors to enter into the same methods of co-optation and compromise as those of the past; in necessitating these kind of measures – as opposed to implementing a looser, federal system of governance – the centralisation of the Afghan state paved the way for a reconstitution of a ruling order based on tribal elements and ‘strongmen’. This produced something of a paradox for state-builders, as the creation of a strong, central state capable of implementing liberal policies across Afghanistan came at the cost of entering into alliances with ‘warlords’ known for their illiberal and coercive political approaches and illicit economic activities.

Another unintended but unavoidable consequence of centralised state-building identified by scholars is the re-constitution of the rentier state in Afghanistan. Post-Bonn, Afghanistan returned to its historical norm of maintaining the state via the extraction of external security and development rents, without which it would almost certainly implode due to the ruinous state of its economy and taxation system. Studies have shown that his new rentierism differed from previous patronage systems at the state level insofar as it was fuelled by an unprecedented influx of capital and resources into the country. This had the effect of introducing regulated systems of ‘neo-patrimonalism’, where departments were to be distributed as rewards to the various factions that took part in the Bonn conference, and there had to be enough rewards to go around.

In other words, the structure of the post-invasion Afghan state was, to a great extent, defined not by the demands of good governance, the needs of the country or the demands of post-conflict stabilisation and reconstruction – the purposes for which the centralised model was chosen to promote – but rather by the first-order need to avoid the derailment of the centralised state by co-opting regional power brokers.

Because of the imperative of shoring up a nascent state by securing support from potential competitors, the gulf between the ends of liberal state-building and the illiberal means required to facilitate its functioning can therefore be seen to a certain extent as inevitable.

A major issue, however, was that the patrimonial linkages created by the state for its regional proxies was not comprehensive, as it did not extend to the Taliban’s Pashtun heartland and, as such, fuelled resentment and alienation as much as they placated and co- opted extra-state power brokers. Key players in the Northern Alliance - the primarily Tajik opposition to the Taliban - received prestigious posts within the state, whilst the predominantly Pashtun Taliban were themselves excluded from such arrangements. Because those rewarded by the state tended to be given ministerial or governorial roles in cities, the conflict dynamic tended to reflect an urban – rural divide similar to that of the Soviet occupation. Along this reading, the neo-Taliban insurgency was in many ways a product of the political miscalculations and deficiencies of post-invasion state- building activities.

Given this starting point, such a view concludes that the strategic problems encountered by the international community in Afghanistan were, to a large degree, problems created by (or at the very least exacerbated by) the state-builders themselves. They misread Afghan politics in a way that reflected their own philosophical assumptions about the state and society.

Strategy in Afghanistan suffered because the coalition effort, comprised of multiple national actors and the United Nations, rarely took on the form of a unified effort. Part of the reason for this was a divergence of opinion between actors as to the ultimate purpose – counter-terrorism or state-building – of the intervention.

In the first years of the Afghan campaign, the United States’ Bush Administration remained staunchly opposed to what it called ‘nation building’ and opted instead to pursue a policy of capture- or-kill missions against suspected terrorists. For the United Nations and most of the United States’ European NATO allies, however, state-building was considered a necessary element of any counter-terrorist strategy. This difference of opinion was manifest from the start by the creation of two parallel missions – the US-led, counter-terrorism-focused Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and the stabilisation missions of the European Union, United Nations (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)) and NATO (International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)) – engaged in seemingly incompatible aims of military prosecution and peace building.

Opinion on the impact of this dual approach varies. Some scholars have noted, along lines similar to those critiquing the state-building efforts of the international community that the approach taken by the UN, EU and ISAF was too ambitious, naïve and unrealistic, and therefore bound to fall short of their liberal political and economic goals. Both Europe and these international agencies ignored the necessity of paring down the international community’s state-building efforts to core, security-centric capacity building within the Afghan National Security Forces. But of course one can make the counter argument, as many have of course, that on the contrary it was the insufficiencies of state-building approaches vis-à-vis OEF’s counter-terrorist approach that led to subsequent failures in UN and ISAF efforts; specifically, that a disproportionate focus on counter-terrorism missions meant that opportunities of peace- building were irreparably compromised.

Within NATO there was a division not just of opinions but also one of mission relating to different political perspectives about the purpose of the Afghan mission and its ultimate referent object – whether it was primarily about the interests of the coalition member states or concerned in the main with Afghanistan itself – and, from that, the methods to be employed in pursuit of one or another objective. This was not merely a debate bounded by strategic necessity, however; rather, such debates stemmed as much from institutional disagreements over who would or could do what in Afghanistan, which in turn arose from the differences in political constitutions and cultural attitudes towards counterinsurgency and counter- terrorism.

These ‘national caveats’ or ‘red cards’ of participation created significant problems for NATO in Afghanistan, both political, in terms of the relations between states and the abiding sense amongst some that others were ‘free-riding’ on the collective security system and, and strategic and operational, in the sense that command-and-control capabilities and cohesion between forces were limited by the engagement restrictions placed on certain armed forces. Indeed, the disproportionate burden placed on combat-oriented states like the United States, the United Kingdom, and several new member states in Eastern Europe led to political statements denouncing Europe’s perceived transgressors of collective security participation; former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates argued, for example, that NATO had effectively become a ‘two-tier alliance’ ‘between members who specialise in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks and those conducting the ‘hard’ combat missions - between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership... but don’t want to share the risks and the costs’.

A lack of strategic unity was the natural consequence of a structural compromise that produced two distinct strategic authorities that were, in many ways, competing with one another. Along similar lines to the political arrangements between the Afghan state and its regional proxies, the NATO alliance structure can be seen (and evidently is seen by officials such as Gates) as patrimonial: states participated on the basis of fulfilling their own interests and along operational lines that were complementary to those interests, for the purposes of securing an alliance structure that accommodated all participants ahead of the imperative of creating a coherent strategy for stabilising Afghanistan. As with the neo-patrimonialism of the Karzai regime NATO’s efforts would be dictated by the limitations imposed upon it by circumstance.

Thus, in the cases of Afghanistan’s and the international community’s internal political dynamics, strategy was confined by the structure of the Afghan state and society, the structure of the international community and NATO, and the interplay between those structures. The implication here is that the agency required for the possibility of a workable strategy may have been illusory from the start.

Leaving Afghanistan was never going to be pretty, but the latest turn is uglier than expected.

No one quite expected the speed of collapse within the Afghan National Army to hold of attacks of the Taliban. I don’t think it’s do with the lack of training or their professional skills is lacking (though there may be some truth in it). A big driver in the collapse is the money for wages, food and medical care for troops is syphoned to Dubai, so the Afghans who want to fight, and there are quite a few who hate the Taliban, get less replenishment than the 6th army in the last weeks of Stalingrad. They have arms, ammo and boots for this season only and that is it. Both money and morale are in short supply for these soldiers.

If I was a trained soldier in the Afghan National Army I would desert. I would say to them abandon the fixed defences these ‘ferenghis’ (foreigners) have gifted you and move to the hills and seek refuge with your tribal clan, who will be glad of the arms and experience you bring. Or get over the border if you are lucky to be in the North, if in the West you hire yourself to the Narcos in the badlands on the Iran border. Most other places it is either a last stand or defection, your Government and their relatives have already got their planes fuelled up in Kabul ready to move to their villa complexes in the UAE.

I’m being a trifle cynical but for good reason. Everyone who has been to Afghanistan sees the veil lifted on the corruption of aid and how the elites protect themselves ahead of defending the masses who bear the brunt of the bloodshed.

The corruption has been endemic from the get go, but the international community ignored it all for 'progress'. Any Afghan politico you hear on the media complaining about the West abandoning Afghanistan has at least $30 million parked in Dubai that should have gone to the soldiers, teachers, doctors, builders etc.

As spectacular as the collapse of the Afghan National Army has been it’s been even more scarier seeing how swift the Taliban has been in taking over vital provincial areas through propaganda, civilian intimidation, and rapid attacks. One by one, the Taliban has been taking over areas in a number of provinces in northern Afghanistan in recent weeks. The Taliban says it has taken control of 90 districts across the country since the middle of May. Some were seized without a single shot fired.

The UN's special envoy on Afghanistan, Deborah Lyon put the figure lower, at 50 out of the nation's 370 districts, but feared the worst was yet to come. Most districts that have been taken surround provincial capitals, suggesting that the Taliban are positioning themselves to try and take these capitals once all foreign forces are fully withdrawn. On a map, it's easy to see the point Lyon is making. A stark example is Mazar-i-Sharif, the biggest city in the north and a significant power centre in its own right. It was the rock upon which the Northern Alliance fought against the Taliban.

It is significant the Taliban are kicking off this offensive in the north, not their heartland in the south and east. The north was the toughest part of the country for them to crack last time. Their expectation is if they have victory there, success will flow much easier in their traditional homelands further south.

The strategy of taming the north extends to emasculating and profiting from trade routes to neighbours. On Monday night they captured the important border town of Shir Khan Bandar, Afghanistan's main crossing into Tajikistan. Earlier in the day, top Tajik government officials had met to discuss concerns about the growing instability next door. There is no indication that the Taliban intend to take their fight north of the border, but in the past Tajikistan has been a vital conduit for supplies flowing to the militants' northern enemies.

The last time the Taliban controlled the city was 20 years ago, when they left hundreds of captives in steel trucking containers to suffocate and die in the scorching desert heat. Now, the militants are back at the city gates once again, as part of a lightning offensive against Afghan government forces that has set alarm bells ringing from Kabul to Washington. So it should worry us all where will all this lead to.

America's drawdown seems to be the game changer. The Taliban have been beaten back several times in recent years, notably from Kunduz in 2015. The Taliban captured it briefly before US airstrikes were called in. Civilian casualties were high but the militants were driven out. The militant group has never been able to withstand the heavy US and NATO air assaults backing Afghan ground forces, but now the US and NATO are leaving, so is much of the threat of sophisticated and sustained air power. And the Taliban are well aware of this.

It seems to me behind the choice of withdrawal by the Biden government lies a bigger assumption that drives that choice. That is the Taliban militants' perceived desire for international recognition. This has been the mantra underpinning the American exit. The logic of the American argument has been simple: The Taliban wouldn't renege on their agreements with the US because they crave international acceptance. The events of this past week and more appear to blow a hole in that assumption.

Another assumption that’s currently being blown out of the water is the US establishing some presence outside of Afghanistan so that if it needs to intervene again to combat terrorism or flush out militants then it can do so from the safety of a neighbouring country. But so far no country has come forward to reciprocate. And why would they? Like the Afghans, no one likes foreign troops with boots on the ground in their country. Only the central Asian republics and possibly Pakistan would come close to allowing that but there would be a political cost those governments would pay with their people. Moreover by welcoming the Americans in, they also allow the militants to target that country too.

Another assumption is the nature of the Taliban support and links to terrorist groups. The U.S. may not face any serious post-withdrawal Afghan support of extremist threats to the United States, even if the Taliban does take over. It is all too true that the Taliban continues to talk to the remnants of Al Qaeda, as do elements of the Pakistani military. It is unclear, however, that these remnants of Al Qaeda focus on attacks on the U.S., and the Taliban does seem to oppose ISIS. It is also unclear that the Taliban will host other extremist movements that focus on attacking the U.S. or states outside the region.

It is unclear that any key element of the Taliban has an interest in such attacks on the United States. Even Al Qaeda now focuses largely on objectives inside Islamic countries, and it is unclear that some other major extremist force will emerge in Afghanistan that do not focus on regional threats and on taking over vulnerable, largely Islamic states.

At the same time, one needs to be careful about the assumption that the U.S. can defeat any such threats by launching precision air and missile strikes against extremist targets. It is unclear that the forces in Afghanistan involved in any small covert attacks on the U.S. will be easy to target and cripple if they do emerge. The Taliban is unlikely to tolerate major training camps and facilities for extremist forces, and any such strikes will present major problems for the U.S. if the extremist threat consists of scattered small facilities and small expert cadres that shelter among the Afghan population.

It is also far from clear that more intense U.S. air attacks on Taliban forces from outside Afghanistan will have any decisive effects. The loss of limited numbers of Taliban fighters as well as some key Taliban leaders and facilities will not offset the pace of their victories in the countryside or enable the central government to survive. A continuing U.S. ability to target and kill some key Taliban leaders and fighters also does not mean that the risk of such strikes will deter future Taliban willingness to let small, extremist strike groups conduct well-focused, well-planned strikes on U.S. or allied territory, especially if such groups in Afghanistan sponsor attacks on the U.S. or it strategic partner by strike units or cadres based in other countries.

At the same time, it does seem more likely that the Taliban, and/or any independent extremist groups, will focus largely on Iran, Pakistan, Russia, China, and the other “-Stans.”

Going forward I think we need to re-evaluate many of our assumptions about the war in Afghanistan.

The objectives of the Authorised Use of Military Force approved by the US Congress in 2001 have long been accomplished. Once Osama bin Laden was killed in Operation Neptune Spear in 2011, the last element of the AUMF was met. The American and British mission in Afghanistan was complete. But America and Britain did not leave because we wanted to do a spot of state building to curb the spread of militant islamist terror. That was a mistake as it turned out.

Post-Neptune Spear, The American, the British, and their  allies’ conventional mission should have been ended, adopting instead a laser focus on intelligence collection and offensive special operations to prevent al-Qaeda (or any terrorist organisation) from re-establishing safe havens and training areas.

What was needed for an acceptable ‘victory’ and a ‘saving face’ withdrawal  was to embrace the use of Afghan Militia Forces the same way the Allies did for our initial entry way back in 2001.

In 2001, Western powers won the initial military engagement in 42 days using special operations forces with local and regional allies - we need to return to this format - and through a combination of special operations and specific information operations efforts, regaining the high ground and influence over ‘centres of gravity’. The issue is not the number of troops, but the mission of the forces there. Once the mission is defined, the number of forces needed would be clear.

It has never been about the number of troops - it’s been about the lack of an achievable mission assigned to our forces in Afghanistan.

The US engaged in ‘nation-building’ for the wrong reasons - and has seen bad results. We installed Hamid Karzai, served as his praetorian guard to protect the new central government and abandon our AMF allies and attempted to build a large, bulky, expensive and ineffective Afghan National Army - a force that is now evaporating before our eyes. It was folly.

Americans will never make the Afghan people more like them - nor will they be able to instil what my American colleagues used to fondly refer to as ‘a Jeffersonian democracy’ in Afghanistan. That day may come but only when the Afghan people wish it to be so. Lest it be forgotten Americans sought independence in 1776; the Afghan people seek self-reliance and independence from foreign influence. This is their defining historical DNA: escape from any outside control.

The Afghan people are not ungoverned, they are self-governed - with no tradition of central democracy and no desire for our version of democracy or ‘prosperity’. By pushing ‘prosperity’ we had become targets for both the Afghan government and the Taliban. This has ended, but we must draw a distinction between the end of nation-building and the continuation of our own interests in Afghanistan and the region.

It is time to adopt a practical policy based on what will work and is in our allied interests, rather than by funding the aspirations of progressive politicians who have no real understanding of Afghanistan.

First, we must establish a clear post-‘state-building’ strategy - with achievable objectives. We must return to the policy and operational format we know will work - cooperation with Afghan tribal leaders and militia. This type of force was used to achieve the initial victory in 2001. Empowered warlords and regional leaders were the force multiplier that worked as the Afghan Militia Forces - and can again, in partnership with our Special Operations Forces work now. Intelligence collection and limited military operations should be our focus.

There is no way around it. One has to play the Great Game. Think tribal rather than central. Afghan nationhood is a liberal Western wet dream.

The central government is weak and corrupt just like all the other rulers of the past. The Afghan National Army is not as strong as it is on paper. It can hardly prop itself up rather than any government. Most of the Afghan National Army troops have stronger tribal loyalties than to the concept of a nation. Since the tribal chiefs play both sides to hedge their bets, it's no wonder 'their' people do what they're told. The Taliban know this because that has always been the Afghan way, so the tribes go with them. Provided the Taliban honour their promises to the tribal chiefs, the Taliban can do what they want.

On one hand, the tribes won't now be too bothered by central government and have a large pool of Western-trained troops to prop them up. On the other hand, they now have to do business formally with the Taliban again. Largely in order to get their hands on Western-supplied aid that will surely follow after the Americans leave.

Second, we must accept the reality of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan - and work with the Pakistanis to counter al-Qaeda and the other militants now attacking Pakistani targets within Pakistan. Pakistan has made great advances in securing the tribal areas on the other side of the border and they have always been the de facto control of much of the Taliban force capacity, such as the Haqqani network. Working with Pakistan is the best option within the current circumstance.

‘Endless wars’ are not an American value. The use of the US military must only be used in response to genuine threats, when American interests are at stake or lives in danger. Withdrawal of conventional military forces and discontinuing nation building is in the US interest: leaving Afghanistan is not.

Third, make Afghanistan China’s problem. Afghanistan could easily become a hotbed for growing Islamic extremism, which would to some extent affect stability in Xinjiang.

It is not without reason that Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires”. The ancient Greeks, the Mongols, the Mughals, the British, the Soviet Union and most recently the US have all launched vainglorious invasions that saw their ambitions and the blood of their soldiers drain into the sand. But after each imperial retreat, a new tournament of shadows begins. With the US pulling out of Afghanistan, China is casting an anxious gaze towards its western frontier and pursuing talks with an ascendant Taliban. The burning questions are not only whether the Taliban can fill the power vacuum created by the US withdrawal but also whether China - despite its longstanding policy of “non-interference” - may become the next superpower to try to write a chapter in Afghanistan’s history.

Beijing has held talks with the Taliban and although details of the discussions have been kept secret, government officials, diplomats and analysts from Afghanistan, India, China and the US said that crucial aspects of a broad strategy were taking shape. An Indian government official said China’s approach was to try to rebuild Afghanistan’s shattered infrastructure in co-operation with the Taliban by channelling funds through Pakistan, one of Beijing’s firmest allies in the region. China is Pakistan’s wallet.

It has been reported that Beijing has been insisting that the Taliban limit its ties with groups that it said were made up of Uyghur terrorists in return for such support. The groups, which Beijing refers to as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, are an essential part of China’s security calculus in the region. The ETIM groups were estimated by the UN Security Council last year to number up to 3,500 fighters, some of whom were based in a part of Afghanistan that borders China.  Both the UN and the US designated the ETIM as terrorists in 2002 but Washington dropped its classification last year. China has accused the ETIM of carrying out multiple acts of terrorism in Xinjiang, its north-western frontier region, where Beijing has kept an estimated 1m Uyghur and other minority peoples in internment camps.

In a clear indication of Beijing’s determination to counter the ETIM, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, exhorted counterparts from the central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan this year to co-operate to smash the group. “We should resolutely crack down on the ‘three evil forces’ [of extremism, terrorism and separatism] including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement,” Wang said in May according to Chinese news media which I follow.

The importance of this task derived in part from the need to protect large-scale activities and projects to create a safe Silk Road. Silk Road is one of the terms that Chinese officials use to refer to the Belt and Road Initiative, the signature foreign policy strategy of President Xi Jinping to build infrastructure and win influence overseas.

An important part of China’s motivation in seeking stability in Afghanistan is protecting existing BRI projects in Pakistan and the central Asian states while potentially opening Afghanistan to future investments. China would have to more actively support efforts to ensure political stability in Afghanistan. So make them work for it. Western powers need to leverage China’s problems in Xinjiang to be more active in Afghanistan.

International media outlets and intelligence agencies worldwide have been circulating reports pointing toward the creation of a Chinese military base in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province for a while now. Although China has not embarked on militarisation programs on foreign soil historically, and has profusely denied the rumours about building an Afghan “mountain brigade,” China’s first overseas military base in Djibouti provides an example of China’s newly adopted strategy of leveraging economic influence to further its strategic objectives. There’s even some chatter amongst Chinese officials that Beijing may entertain the idea of being part of a future UN international force should one be needed in Afghanistan (a bad idea but hey, let China find out first hand for itself).

The Afghan government was able to maintain a measure of stability largely because of the superiority of US air support. The drones, gunships, helicopters and heavy air artillery were unmatched by the Taliban. But when the US leaves, that advantage will evaporate. China’s imperative to create overland trade routes to Europe and the Middle East may draw it inevitably into Afghanistan’s domestic strife.

Of course China’s forward policy in the Wakhan Corridor needs to be assessed with a critical eye. Although on one level it seems to be motivated primarily by the threat of radicalisation, China’s interest in the region is also contingent on the strategic role that Afghanistan is capable of playing in the larger scheme of things. Despite China’s vehement denial, there seems to be sufficient evidence available indicating a definite military build up in the region, which provides China with an opportunity to showcase its ability to transform into a balancing force in the regional dynamics. I think that is a trade off that both America and Europe can afford to concede under the current circumstances.

In conclusion In the face of failure, there is an impulse to move on and not ask “what led to this?” But to avoid a reckoning with our follies is to risk their repetition, or worse.

it is probably too late to salvage either the civil or military situation in Afghanistan. It almost certainly is too late to salvage it with limited in-country U.S. forces, outside U.S. airpower and intelligence assets, and with no real peace agreement or functional peace process. Limited military measures are not the answer, and neither is simply reinforcing the past processes of failure. Tragic as it may be, withdrawal may not solve anything and may well make conditions worse for millions of Afghans, but reinforcing failure is not a meaningful strategy.

I do feel strongly that both the American and British governments must establish a clear path of redemption so that those who served and the families who sacrificed loved ones know that their loss was not wasted. At the same time our civilian governments must limit missions to intelligence collection and counter-terrorism missions that will prevent the metastasis of al-Qaeda or Isis in the region should the Afghan government fall. How we balance these two is going to be very interesting to follow in the next chapter in Afghanistan’s tortured history.

I apologise for the length of this post. This has been a hard post to write because of the subject matter and the many conflicted emotions and memories I have of my time in Afghanistan. I wish I had all the answers but I suppose the beginning of wisdom would be to know how to ask the right questions. Because we didn’t ask the right questions when we went in, we ended up making a real mess of it.

There is an understandable desire to bring all our allied troops home safe and that not another life is lost there. Yet I doubt this policy of withdrawing all troops will bring peace to anyone, not to us and most of all, the Afghanis themselves. As always in war it is the native population that will bear the real cost of war, in this case women, girls, and others brutalised under Taliban rule. What lies for them if the Taliban regain power to govern the country in their image is something I care not to imagine but retain a deep foreboding of their continued suffering. Ordinary Afghanis just want a respite from war and have a chance to live in peace, but without having us foreigners or the Taliban around. It is hard to imagine that happening at all. Our desire to save our soldiers’ lives set against ordinary Afghanis being left at the mercy of the Taliban is one of those humbling and brutalising trade offs that any war can only offer.

Near the end of his famed novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described two of his privileged characters, Tom and Daisy, as “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures” and then “retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness” to “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

That description applies to America as a whole but also to we Brits and other Europeans, especially when we tire of a misguided war. Americans and we Brits are a careless people. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we smashed up things and human beings with abandon, only to retreat into our materialism. No scratch that, returning soldiers retreated into themselves struggling with PTSD whilst the rest of our citizenry carried on with their own material struggles and their insipid culture wars. The point is we always leave others to clean up the mess in a very bloody fashion that never troubles our conscience.

Count on us, probably sooner rather than later, doing precisely the same thing in Afghanistan. Again.

Thanks for your question

[calaisreno]

2021 Fic Year in Review

Total number of completed stories: 22

Total word count: 329,041

Fandoms written in: BBC Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes ACD

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected? I wrote about what I planned. It was my goal to slow down, give the stories more time. Two years ago I was writing a lot, had tons of ideas. I still have plenty of ideas, but I’m less impatient now. One goal I had this year was to write longer stories, more BBC canon AU, especially focusing on pre-season/series 3. 

What’s your own favorite story of the year?  Each one is my favourite as I write and post. Of the longer stories this year, I’d choose Synchronicity, mostly because I liked the Sherlock and John I created and had fun writing their voices, especially Sherlock. Another I enjoyed writing was Blank Slate. I’m also fond of the one I ended the year on: The Real You. A sudden inspiration (love those) that came out as I envisioned it. 

Did you take any writing risks this year? I finished some old stories and had some new inspirations. I tried new tropes (enemies to friends to lovers; Synchronicity) and wrote an ACD/Jane Eyre crossover (A Chamber to be Haunted) for Halloween. I wrote the immortals fic I’d been trying to figure out forever (Waiting for You). And I added a fifth part to a series I had not considered in several years (We Remain, part 5 of Random Strangers).

Do you have any fanfic goals for the new year? I’d like to continue on pretty much as I have, writing new ideas, resurrecting old ideas, adding to series (Conductor of Light) and maybe doing a few sequels (currently working on one for Wooing Sherlock Holmes). I think I’ve found a good balance. 

Most popular story of the year?  Synchronicity.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: Really, none of them. The ACD stories get fewer hits/kudos, but that’s expected. I think the universe has been pretty fair to me this year. (Except for the time I got covid. But like the universe, viruses don’t care about fair. And I wasn’t that sick, thanks to two vaccine shots 😊.)

Most fun story to write: The Short Tragic Death of John Watson, mostly for all the comments it drew, and the enthusiastic squeeing with which readers greeted each new chapter. 

Most unintentionally telling story: The Silence Between Us. I see a lot of myself in this John Watson.

Biggest disappointment: In retrospect, none. 

Biggest surprise: Every idea, every story that gets written is a happy surprise to me. 

Tagging: … Most people did this four weeks ago, I think. But if anyone sees this and would like to take part, jump in!

[engagemachine]

"You're so gentle," she tells me. They all say it. I hear it from my patients every time I take their arm to wrap the blood pressure cuff around it, or when I place my stethoscope on their belly, or when I rub circles into their back when I've helped them sit up on the side of the bed for the first time in three days. Sometimes they cry, because it's the first tender touch they've felt since they've been in the hospital. It's very humbling and at the same time very concerning -- why has no one else offered this tenderness to you? Why am I always the first?

But I don't feel gentle. Not when a pair of ribs are cracking beneath my hands as I'm doing chest compressions on a Covid patient who's stopped breathing--the second time I've administered CPR on a Covid patient in two days. I don't feel gentle when I'm wrestling with a patient and begging for them to keep their oxygen mask on. When I have to hold them down and hold them still so my coworker can draw a blood sample. I don't feel gentle when I'm inserting a nasogastric tube down someone's nose, then throat, and into their belly while they're gagging around the tube and their arms are flailing. And I don't feel gentle when I'm washing a sacral wound with bleach and they're crying because it hurts. I don't feel gentle when I have to shout, beg, and plead for patients to listen, when I tell patients they're going to die if they don't keep their oxygen mask on. I don't feel gentle when I have to place a patient in restraints, or when I call a family member and tell them that their loved one's condition hasn't improved. I don't feel gentle when a patient tells me they can't breathe, they can't breathe, I can't breathe, and I'm yelling for coworkers to call the doctor while I'm cycling through different oxygen masks and trying to administer medication to slow their respirations and calm their anxiety.

I'm writing this because I feel like I've been living a little bit behind a veneer on here, although I know deep down that's not really true; I have always wanted my blog to feel like a positive space for anyone and everyone, including myself. I come here to have fun and destress and that's why you usually don't see me reblogging content having to do with politics or global news. I think it's possible to create a healthy space where one does talk about those things and spreads awareness for important causes, but for me, Tumblr is where I come when I need to escape the harsh realities of real life. This is my platform where I can indulge in my fictional proclivities and interests, where I can appreciate art, photography, beautiful writing, my favorite films, music, and cute animals. That's what this space is about. I also have loved meeting new people and getting to know my readers and making new friends and chatting about my stories. That's why I'm here and I thank you all so, so much for indulging me in my passions and for encouraging my writing the way that you have: it has helped me weather the current storm of stress I am feeling in more ways than I could possibly convey.

But I have to be very honest with you all about how much I've been struggling lately, as I feel like I'm reaching a breaking point and I'm somewhat at a loss for how to handle it.

Since September of last year, I've been on an accelerated track to finish the degree I'm working towards, which is a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. I've been a nurse for four years, but I graduated from a two-year nursing program versus a four-year program because I wanted to get into the field earlier than some of my peers, which has been great. Anyway, my school counselor/mentor and I agreed that I could obtain my BSN in a year if I really pushed myself. The program I'm in is self-paced, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Most of my classes I have finished in about three to four weeks. Other classes, like biochemistry, took substantially longer, about seven or eight weeks, if I remember correctly. All of the classes have relied on my ability to self-teach, as there are no scheduled lectures to attend, only assigned readings and videos to watch, if you choose to do so. Fast forward to the end of May, when I went to visit some family, and, upon my return home, really started to lose some of my motivation to complete my classes. I was meant to finish my program in August (this month) but agreed with my mentor that I would take a short break and put my last three classes on hold so that I could resume the program in September. I've enjoyed approximately a month off from school, but "enjoyed" is a term I use loosely here as I was also picking up extra shifts at work because we've been so short staffed and losing nurses left and right.

Which brings me to the main cause of my stress. This pandemic has completely changed the landscape for how I administer care to my patients, and the stress of the care itself has been so utterly overwhelming at times I can hardly bear it. I broke down in tears at work on Sunday morning, shortly after 4:30 am, right there at the the nurse's station, and was sobbing so hard that my supervisor had to pull me away so that I could have some privacy. I wish I could tell you that I sobbed harder than I have in a long time--but I had sobbed at work with that same intensity just four weeks prior, only, I had been alone at the time. It's becoming a trend--I either cry at work or I cry at home--because the stress of this job has become unbearable.

I wish--I desperately wish--I could convey to you the seriousness of Covid. I think so much of the world has already decided to move on from it because they're so tired of having to deal with it and, quite simply, are ready to return to normal. I don't even know what normal is anymore and when--or if--we'll ever be able to return to it. And that has caused me a fair amount of stress and anxiety in and of itself. I miss traveling so much and I don't know when I'll be able to do it again. I haven't seen one of my best friends since the fall of 2018 for this reason, which kills me.

I've seen so much death. Transferred so many patients to the PCU and ICU. Frantically chased patients' oxygen saturation, trying to keep them from circling the drain. Being responsible for six or seven human lives at one time is a stress you cannot fathom unless you have done it yourself. I have cried with a patient, a young woman, who had lost her husband to Covid only hours before in the ER, a young woman who was now faced with battling Covid herself but also planning the funeral of her high school sweetheart from her hospital bed. I have wheeled a patient to the ICU so that he could say one final goodbye to his wife--married for over 50 years--before they pulled the plug and removed her from the ventilator. I have raced down the hallway with my patient on BIPAP, pushing his bed to the ICU and praying that he doesn't stop breathing on the way there. I've had to console crying family members over the phone who are worried about their loved ones, not to mention my crying coworkers who are as overwhelmed as I am. These are just a handful of experiences from the past month alone. There are so many more.

The discomfort of my job has become secondary. I expect, now, to be wearing an N95 for a full twelve or thirteen-hour shift because there isn't time to take it off. Not having a chance to pee or go to the bathroom during that time. Not drinking any water until I'm in my car and taking off my mask and finally taking a deep breath.

On a more personal note, I am continuing to lose weight and it's so discouraging. In high school I used to wear a size 2 or 4. Now, depending on the brand, I wear a double 00. My hair is falling out because of my stress. I haven't slept during the night in... I don't even know how long. I'm constantly tired. Exhaustion hits me like a great tidal wave and I am powerless to stop it. I expect now to crash during the middle of the day on my couch, only to wake up at 11pm and be wide awake for the rest of the night, and, if not wide awake, then in an out of nightmares and sleep paralysis. I have thought about leaving my job, but the idea of job hunting during a pandemic, and while I'm in school... it just makes me feel even more stressed.

I need a break, but it feels like there's nowhere to go to escape. I fantasize about some great adventure, going somewhere I've never been, but I also really miss my family and I'm scared to go home to visit.

This post doesn't really have a conclusive ending. I'm just exhausted and overwhelmed. Any prayers/thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[liloelsagranger]

Night shift - finally a new Rocketshipping-fanfiction

My dear friends,

it’s been a while since I last posted an entry. Let me tell you why and what, besides Covid-19, made me pause from publishing fanfictions over the last couple of months. Of course, Switzerland was very affected by the pandemic and still is today. We had numerous lock-downs or as Swiss people call it “slow downs”. My mother got very sick last year, I almost lost her. The doctors said she would only live two or three more days, but my mom is a fighter. She had to stay at the hospital for months, she endured countless medical examinations, had to take meds and slowly learned to live again. I’m so proud of my mother that she was strong and determined to get better. When she turned back home, I started to take care of her and I hate to leave her on her own, even if we’re talking about half an hour or less. Right now, she’s doing quite good, actually, we’re on vacation and she makes a great effort to participate in life in Italy. She’s my role-model! She will never be the same as before, but she won’t give up, she wakes up every morning to make progress. I prayed for her and her well-being, I prayed every single night she might get another chance and now we’re here at the beach and dining in fancy restaurants. It’s been a horrible year for everyone, a year full of sorrow, tears and desperation, a year where I was constantly afraid, the hospital would call me with some bad news, but she did it! She survived and she fights for her life! So proud! Good news is: I passed my doctoral exams and I’m officially allowed to call myself Dr. phil. des. Melanie C. but that won’t ever stop me from loving Team Rocket so here it is - a brand new Rocketshipping-fanfiction for you guys. LOVE YOU! Night shift

Chapter 1:

It was past ten o’clock when that miserable looking guy entered the diner. He inconspicuously sat down in the farthest corner of the café and immediately hid his face behind the menu card. Nevertheless, Jessie the waitress could make out the pathetic expression on his face, how he was cowering like a whipped dog. She had seen quite a bit in this diner. Drunks, thugs, addicts and other needy people who asked for a sympathetic ear, compassion and understanding, but that guy was different. He suffered terribly, but did not dare to communicate, instead he hid from the world so as not to attract attention and quietly endure his fate. Jessie had to do something about it. Of course, she didn’t want to play the Good Samaritan. She knew the tricks of the men who entered this diner. Most of the time, they told the waitress tall tales, hoping to be comforted, whatever they meant by that. But this young man did not make a shady impressionHe was well dressed, looked well-groomed, and Jessie was especially struck by his bright emerald green eyes, the only thing in his face that had not yet been veiled by grief and sorrow. She decided to do something about his displeasure.

“Did you have a rough day?” she asked while disinfecting the table.

He looked briefly into her eyes and nodded. “That’s one way to put it,” he answered, the gaze immediately lowered again.

This would be a taciturn conversation, but Jessie didn’t give up easily, she was a natural at making even rocks talk.

“Listen! No matter what happened, I’ve seen or heard some things. If I can help you in any way, my name is Jessie and I’m in charge of this table today. Let me just get the gum out from under your seat and get you a cold drink. What would you like?” She pulled a spatula from her apron and rubbed away the remains of the spoiled brats that marred her diner.

‘Wow,’ the young man thought to himself. ‘A strong, self-confident woman who lends a hand herself and who’s not above cleaning up dirt.’ Their eyes met briefly, and he forced a wry smile.

“You know, kid. You can’t rely on anyone. If you want to get everything done, do it yourself and don’t trust anyone. This world doesn’t give you anything for granted!” She briefly wiped the back of his chair before disappearing behind the counter and pouring the young man an ice-cold Coke.

“I have rarely seen you so concerned about a customer. Normally you show yourself aloof and only take the order, so as not to get involved in embarrassing conversations. Must be a really great pike, this pathetic creature in the far corner. Could it be that you’ve got a tiny crush on this guy?” For Eddy, teasing his best friend was the greatest pleasure. He didn’t know her like that. Jessie usually resisted any kind of small talk. This was due to her dark past, when she had repeatedly fallen for advances from men who were never looking for a steady relationship, but for a quick fix. Eddy had witnessed this bad time of his friend, how her heart was broken, how she was badly played with, and how she was simply dropped like a hot potato. Jack was the worst example of them all. While Jessie was already hearing the wedding bells ringing, he was making love to the women of the Strip and deceiving Jessie night after night with other broads. Jessie was devastated when she found out Jack was cheating on her. She was furious, not even at her lying boyfriend, but at herself for having been so stupid as to trust a man.

Jessie gave Eddy a light pat on the head. “Don’t be silly! That time is over. I can take care of myself, I don’t need male support for that. I’m a big girl, I make my own dough, and I keep my head above water pretty well. No, not a chance, I’ve sworn off flirting.” Nevertheless, she caught herself as her gaze wandered to the young man in the corner. “Oh yes, this time is definitely over,” Eddy smirked.

“Jessie, could you bring us a side of fries, please?” Misty’s order echoed throughout the hall. The twenty-year old waved her hands. She was used to speaking loudly, almost shouting, to attract guests to her daily water Pokémon show. Sometimes she walked up and down the streets of the Strip all day in the blazing hot sun, trying to win people for her underwater attraction. As an excellent student, she could have taught at any college, but she had decided early on to get into show business and make her living doing what she really loved, joined by Dewgong and Starmie. Her parents had not agreed with this decision at all, it was wasted talent, they had claimed, and had summarily turned Misty out the door. Since then, she had been struggling through life on her own, but could always count on Jess, the diner and her two best friends, Ash and Brock, young people who were also not favoured by fate.

“Temper your voice, twerp!” Jessie couldn’t help but grin. She spread the ketchup bottles around the table, hoping Ash wouldn’t spill on himself and the diner again. His constant companion Pikachu immediately hopped on his shoulder, grabbed a fry and popped it in his mouth. Ash and his Pokémon were carnies. He had trained his friend well and attracted many spectators with his performance. Most of them felt sorry for the guy and tipped generously. That’s why Ash was able to invite his friends to the diner every night, a place that gave them hope where they could experience security. They were convinced that nothing would ever disturb this idyll and that fate, for better or worse, had taken its course.

“Who’s that guy over there?” Brock wanted to know. He had barely sold chocolate and roses tonight. The others held back, but they were certain that their friend was just too pushy with women and that’s why he only collected rejections instead of green bills.

“I’ve never seen him here before. Must be from another area. I can’t tell you for the life of me why he’s wearing a suit at theses temperatures, he looks pretty pathetic to me anyways,” Jessie replied.

“Maybe his car has stalled,” Ash suggested, “and now he was forced to wander through the desert until the tasty aromas from your diner brought him back from his delirium.”

“Or,” Brock interfered, “he had to flee his own wedding because his wife is a real pain in the ass, unlike our sweet Misty,” Brock oohed at his friend. “Forget it, Brock! You and me, this will never happen!” She gave him a gentle poke.

“Enough now with your naïve speculations! Just let him enjoy his drink. We’re closing soon, so get going,” Jessie dismissed their absurd ideas with a wave of her hand, but at this point no one knew how right Brock was.

Dark thoughts hunted the young man. He knew what he would face at home if he was late. Beatings, torture, rebuke, harassment, were just a few words to describe his failed relationship. Unconsciously, he stroked his scarred arms.

“Can I get you something to eat?” Jessie pulled him out of the maelstrom of bad thoughts, of course she had noticed the wounds, but maybe he had gotten those injuries at work. The young man rummaged some coins out of his pants and let them jingle on the table. “Is that enough for a cheese sandwich?” Jessie hated small change, but she would make an exception for him. A friendly smile, a quick nod, and she passed on the order.

“Something’s wrong with this guy,” she whispered to Eddy. “He’s scarred, bruised and pays with penny coins. Possibly a vagrant.” Eddy couldn’t help but grin. “That guy’s been keeping you busy all night, Jess. What’s the matter with you? Are you getting weak?”

The young man could not overhear the conversation between the waiters, but he was sure they were talking about him. He sure made a rather frightening impression, but that was a private matter and not something you shared with a waitress in a diner.

His gaze drifted to the daily paper, which had two faces emblazoned on it: Butch and Cassidy. He had never heard of this odd couple, but according to the news, theses two were causing quite a stir and were terrifying the Strip.

“Oh, so you’ve already spotted them, those two knuckleheads! They keep the Strip in suspense, and heads roll when the taxes don’t add up,” Jessie served him the cheese sandwich and gave him a slight smile.

“Can I get you anything else?” He thanked her and took a hearty bite of his dinner.

The last half hour flew by and the remaining guests left the diner to spend the night on the Strip, as very few had a roof over their heads. Jessie set about cleaning up and Eddy checked the register.

The young man stood up and made his way towards the door. But before he left the diner, he glanced back at Jessie for a moment. A sigh escaped him. What if…?

Jessie returned his gaze and watched him go until the young man disappeared. She walked right up to his table and found a little note on the receipt.

“Thanks for treating me like a human being, James.” 

[sorryjustafangirl]

mascot mysteries

a/n: me posting something that isn’t at like midnight? wow. anyway i thought this was a super cute idea so i hope you all enjoy it :)  this is also a gender neutral reader! and this is a covid-free AU

Pairing: Nolan Patrick x reader

Word Count: 1.8k

warnings: a few couple words, a little bit of anxious movements, Gritty (if that needs to be a warning)

disclaimer: this is a work of fiction and real person fiction if you don’t like that, please don’t read! also the gif isn’t mine! all credit to the incredible gif-maker!

tagging: @barzypatty​

You walked into the Wells Fargo Center, admiring the arena. This was your dream job ever since college. Honestly you couldn’t believe you got it. You pull out your phone with the emailed instructions of where to go. You look for the “hallway next to the washroom” only to discover there are three different hallways that have signs directing to the washrooms. 

Well fuck. 

“Are you good there?” You look to your left to see two guys, likely players based on their attire. One was taller, with longer hair and a small smile. The other one was shorter but looked more rambunctious. It looked like there were in a little bit of a rush, but you were really lost. 

“I’m actually kind of lost. I’m looking for conference room B8? But the instructions I have are really vague, so I have, like, no idea where I’m going,” you admitted, folding into yourself a little bit.

“That’s on our way! Come with us, we’ll show you where it is,” the shorter one said, motioning you over to where the two of them had stopped. “So, you’ve never been here?”

“It’s actually my first day on the job, so, um no. I haven’t been here before either, I, uh, grew up in Canada,” You cursed yourself. This was your first impression with the organization and you couldn’t even make a conversation without the stammering.

“Cool! Me and Patty are from Canada too! Shit, sorry, I’m TK and that’s Patty,” He said, motioning to the taller guy beside him. “And don’t worry about getting lost, Pats here got lost on his first day too,”

“Good to know I’m not the only one whose bad with directions,” you directed your comment to Patty, making brief eye contact with him. A rosy blush brushed his cheeks and you caught a mumbled “yeah”

“What do you do….?” Patty prompted, his voice quiet, but somehow you still heard it. He couldn’t deny you were pretty. 

“Oh, sorry, I’m Y/N. And I’m in media? I don’t know my exact title, but working for one of the best marketed media teams was too good for me to, uh, turn down so…” You said, slightly talking in front of TK so you could answer Patty’s question.

“Oh cool! Maybe you’ll get to meet Gritty, he’s the fun residence troublemaker,” Travis popped in.

“I thought that was your job Teeks,” which earned a jab from TK into Patty, who just snickered. 

“Travis, bud!” The three of you stopped to see someone else motioning for TK, who jogged over to the other man. 

“C’mon, the conference room isn’t too much further, I’ll walk you there,” Patty said, already making some steps forward. After a small comfortable silence, he stopped in front of two double doors. “So, uh, this is it. Good luck on your first day,” 

“Oh! Thanks. And, um, thanks for showing me where it was,” You tugged down on your jacket. “I guess I’ll just….” you motioned behind you to the doors.

“Oh right, yeah, I’ll, uh, let you go,” You gave a small wave and turned towards the conference doors and he turned back to go where he came from, only to turn around after a few steps. “Hey Y/N?”

“Yeah?” You took a few steps back towards him.

“You’re in media, yeah? So you might be at games or maybe even practices?” He scratched the back of his neck, slightly mumbling towards the end.

“Uh, yeah maybe. I’m not too sure where they’ll put me just yet but I like being in the action. I know that might seem weird ‘cause I’m sorta shy and quiet but..” You wrung your hands together. 

“No, no, I get it. It’s like being a different person, when you’re behind the camera or something. You get to be someone else and it’s nice. I get like that on the ice sometimes. I can make the big hits and stuff and no one treats it like it’s different from being quiet outside the game,”

“Yeah, like a different person. That’s exactly it,” You met his eyes again. Holy shit, why is he so gorgeous?

“Y/N Y/L/N?” A head popped out from behind the conference room doors. “We’re ready for you,” 

“Great, thank you,” You turned back to Patty. “That’s, uh, that’s me, but I’ll hopefully see you around, Patty?” 

“I’d like that a lot. And uh, you can call me Nolan,” The blush came back to his cheeks but you could barely notice over the heat in your own cheeks. 

“Bye Nolan.” You gave him one last smile before entering the conference room and closing the door, slowing entering the room. Once you came into sight, the people around the table jumped up. 

“Ah! There they are! Our new Gritty!”

***

After that first encounter, you seemed to bump into Nolan more. Before work, sometimes after work. You would make casual conversation, both mumbling, but you just got each other. And it didn’t take too long for him to muster up the courage to ask you on a date. While you were slightly hesitant, he was quick to assure you that “I may have asked G to ask management if it’d be okay with our jobs and, uh, everything’s fine, so…?” which earned him a kiss on the cheek and a yes. 

The problem was your job. You loved being a mascot. Seriously, you did. You were hooked after that first varsity game you went to in college. The energy of the crowd, interacting with the players and fans, the anonymity. The anonymity was the issue. Behind the costume, no one knew it was shy ol’ you. You could do anything and no one would tell you that you were being too rowdy or obnoxious. No one expected anything out of you except fun. It was perfect. And being Philadelphia’s beloved mascot/political figure was the dream. Telling Nolan risked the anonymity of the job. But to not tell Nolan was becoming an issue. He understood you had to work during game days, but it was becoming increasingly difficult not to see you with the other better halves in the stands, especially since you worked here. There was no reason for you not to be there. Every other teammate of his got to see someone they loved in their jersey but he didn’t. 

When he brings this up, all timid, you are so quick to make a compromise. Before every home game, you’d meet in the tunnel for a good luck handshake. It might seem ridiculous but he got to physically see you before each game and it was a fun, quirky ritual. 

“It’s like a different person right? You get in your zone and I’ll get in mine,” You told him. He responded with a kiss. 

But you were running out of excuses why you were late either before your handshake or after his game, where you would also meet him in the tunnel. You had used the “I caught up with work” at least four times, “I saw a coworker who wanted to talk” a few times, and even resorted to “I got lost” once. You could see it was throwing him off a little. He was still playing perfectly fine, but it didn’t have that same “umph” he sometimes brought to the ice. 

It was the home game against the Penguins when he finally snapped. That’s how you knew it was bad. Gritty was asked to do the fun pre-show, and you hadn’t had time to change to see Nolan before the game. He threw more hits, had more aggression, and more than the normal Pennsylvania rivalry. You couldn’t help but think that part of it was because you didn’t show up before the game. He’d even gotten in a fight with Tanev early in the second period. 

So, during the intermission between the second and third, you asked your team to lead you down to the tunnel and grab Nolan out of the dressing room. The Flyers were up 3-0 so you didn’t think it’s be a huge issue with Coach. 

He quietly exited the room, confused on why he got pulled out. A member of your team just gestured to you in your costume, which did little to clear up his confusion. You held your hand up in a fist for a fist bump, the first move in your handshake. When he still gave that bewildered look, you softly grabbed his gloved hand and pushed it against yours. When you lifted your hand up for a high five, he still needed some prompting. But when the down low high five came, you started to see the gears in his head turning. He gave a small chuckle and slowly worked through your handshake, ending with a pinky promise and a kiss to your respective thumbs. When you’ve finished, he just gives you that small side smile and shakes his head, with a chuckle. 

You can hear the boys getting hyped up in the dressing room, and then the buzzer goes, so you break away from Nolan, but stay in the tunnel. As the boys single-file pass you, you give them each a boop on the head, with some extra love given to Nolan. 

That third period, Nolan seems to have his “umph” back. An assist and a goal, and he celebrated both by glancing up to you, celebrating as per usual with the fans, especially after his goal. 

After the game, you go and have your own shower, all sweaty after the 5-0 Pennsylvania battle. You took your time, knowing you’d have to have a semi-serious conversation with Nolan. But when you join him in the tunnel, he’s all smiles. He wraps you in a hug, spinning you around, before setting you on the ground and nuzzling into your neck. You run your fingers through his own freshly washed hair. The two of you stand there for a bit before he mumbles into your neck, barely audible. 

“Like another person, eh?” You smiled and tucked your head into his chest. 

“Oh shut up, I don’t even know if you’re allowed to know.” A hearty laugh escaped him.

“Secret’s safe with me, babe,” He wrapped an arm around your shoulders and kissed the top of your head as you started to make your way out of the arena. “Fuckin’ Gritty, I can’t believe it. I thought you were ignoring me,”

“I’m sorry, Nols. It’s just a lot to take in. Didn’t want to scare you off,”

“Well, I’m sticking around if that’s alright with you.” You looked up at him, and his cheeks started to redden, and not just from the game.

“Yeah. That’s alright with me,” You leaned into the crook of his shoulder, glad you didn’t have to hide any part of yourself from Nolan anymore. 

Bonus: “Did you ever actually punch a kid?”

“Oh my gosh, I’m not answering that,”

“It’s a valid question babe! I’m not going to stop you, I just wanna know,”

feel free to let me know what you think! thanks for reading

[it-was-summer]

Video Killed the Radio Star- Chapter 8 (Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader)

A/N: Hello!!! After a very very very long hiatus, school is over and I am ready to write again. I'm sorry for dropping off the face of the earth, but I did indeed get burnt out this semester and I just needed some time to recover. I also got sick with COVID-19, so I'm sorry that chapter 8 took so long to write. As regards to the things in my ask box, I will be answering them as soon as I post this chapter today. I will be working over the Summer, but I promise to write over the Summer. Thank you all for being kind and I hope that this chapter or two nerds being nerds makes up for some of it... a little at least? Also the text will be italicized

Warnings: One? Curse word? Fluff and texting?

Plot: Spencer and you fight against all judgement and ignore the growing feelings the two of you have for each other. Spencer sends you a text.

Word Count: 2.1K

Spencer had come and gone, and now your couch carried the faint smell of peppermint and old books. The moon peered through your living room window as you poured steaming water into a mug, the smell of peppermint making your stomach flip pleasantly. Your mind wandered dangerously, thinking about how sweet Spencer’s laugh sounded when you nitpicked something the Doctor had said.

Thinking about how he stood in front of your bookcase and how bright his smile became seeing The Nightingale and the Rose amongst the masses, his fingers brushing the spine for a second before he let out a soft ‘oh’. You shook your head from side to side gently, trying to shake the recent memories from your brain as you took a short sip of your tea.

You couldn’t help but feel dirty thinking about Spencer. If you were just thinking about him you would’ve felt better, but you weren’t thinking about Spencer necessarily. You were thinking about how soft his hands felt in the split second the two of you reached for the remote. You were thinking about how he used that same hand to push back his hair from his eyes, how the dying sunlight outside reached his eyes, and how he looked when he lingered for a second too long at the door.

That wasn’t right. You weren’t supposed to think about him like that, you didn’t want to. Every lingering thought was shoved into the back of your mind in a forceful act of rebellion. You needed to remain grounded, you couldn’t let yourself get carried away. He was your friend and he was going to remain your friend, just a friend.

The peppermint tea felt thick as it went down your throat, a soft chime bringing you back to reality. Your hand shot over to your phone, feeling desperate for any kind of distraction. Your mother had texted you a simple ‘Hi’ and you felt your shoulders relax instantly. You hit the call button.

___

Spencer stood in the middle of a park, he wasn’t there for a case or to play chess, he was just there-- sitting on a red blanket. His head raised to the sky as a breeze shook through his hair sweetly. He heard a gentle and familiar laugh beside him, his head snapping away from the blue sky to look at you. “What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing,”

Spencer frowned, sitting up on his elbows, eyes locked onto yours, silently interrogating you. You waved him off with a smile, “Fine,” you said, leaning your head into the palm of your hand. “I never get to see you like this, so free.”

“I’m always free, thank you very much,” Spencer taunted uncharacteristically as he felt your hand shove into his shoulder with a gentle jab.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” soft wind blew your hair into your face and Spencer could already feel his hand moving to push the hair out of your eyes, “You’re always worrying about work or a case or something else, sometimes it feels like you’re running a thousand miles a minute and I can’t catch up, but sometimes it’s nice to just see you be still for a while.”

Spencer felt pleasant shivers pass through his spine, opening up his mouth to whisper something sweet to say to you, but the words never got the chance to leave his throat as he woke up in his dark bedroom.

His eyelids fluttered gently, begging him to fall back asleep against his will. Spencer forced his eyes open, turning his head to the side to look at the time glowing on the digital clock that sat upon his nightstand. Four in the morning.

Spencer felt his face grow warm as he laid awake in bed, thinking about you. Your laugh, your smile, your eyes, your hands. Spencer didn’t like to touch people, being a slight germaphobe, he tried to avoid touching other people as much as possible. So why was he so comfortable with it in a dream? He didn’t believe that dreams reflected the subconscious, but sometimes he ignored that gnawing feeling inside his brain and believed in dream analysis.

This was one of those times. He knew that if he mentioned anything to Derek, he would make fun of him, and then he would tell Penelope and then everyone would know. So maybe this was something he was going to keep to himself. He wordlessly decided that he wouldn’t tell anyone, it felt wrong to tell anyone. You were hurting. Recovering.

Besides, if he said something-- if he reacted to it, wouldn’t that make this feeling grow? He bit his lip, rolled over on his other side, closed his eyes, and tried to resume the dream he had just woken up from.

__

A lump filled Spencer’s throat as he stepped through the elevator, coffee’s in hand. He wasn’t the best at lying about things and he worked with profilers. Literal people that could look at him and dissect his brain without him saying a word. Usually, he had the upper hand, usually, he didn’t feel so different. He had no reason to feel so strange, he was just happy, was it so strange that he felt happy? When Prentiss’s eyes fell on him, he decided yes.

The team didn’t always say something when they noticed something was off with Spencer, but most of the time they made a habit to say some teasing remark in passing. Spencer wasn’t sensitive, nor was he immune to throwing out some special one-liners of his own, he was just skittish about receiving them.

“Spencer,” Emily’s voice cut through the room, snapping Spencer’s head up from his coffee. “You seem,” she paused “Weird.”

“Weird? Reid?” Derek chuckled softly, eyes meeting Spencer’s for a quick second.

“Yep, always weird.”

“Yeah, okay, he’s being weird,”

Spencer took a long sip of his coffee, his fingertips gripping the cup a little tighter in a desperate attempt to calm himself down. He had no reason to feel weird, no reason at all. It’s not like his dream was real. It had just been so long since Spencer had liked someone as much as he liked you. That wasn’t the right way to think about it; he simply had a crush on you. That was all it was, a crush.

“I just had a good night,” he muttered nervously into the lid of his cup.

“Yeah, with a cute little miss thing that lives in Richmond.”

“Richmond?” mused Emily with a smile.

Spencer frowned at Derek, “Who even told you that? Was it Penelope, because she told me she wouldn’t tell,”

“When she says that, she means she won’t tell Hotch, but she’ll most likely always tell me.”

Emily waved her hand from side to side, “Wait go back,” she pointed at Spencer “Did you have a date yesterday?”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“No, it wasn’t a date. It was coffee. We drank coffee and talked.” Spencer argued quickly, making him seem guilty in a matter of seconds.

“Can she even do anything with that boot on?” Emily teased, earning a laugh from Derek.

“Come on, Prentiss. Reid only makes moves on girls in the middle of a case, not after.”

“That was once!”

“So you made a move on her then?” Emily implored gently, letting the interrogative teasing be cut short.

“No, we went back to her apartment to watch a show, and then I went home,” Spencer answered, trying to let his nerves settle down, when he said it out loud it sounded like it was nothing. It sounded silly. Derek and Emily shot each other a glance, shared a smile, and then both mouthed a simple ‘okay’, before going their separate ways.

Spencer knew that Emily was probably running over to whisper something to Rossi or J.J and Derek was probably heading over to Penelope to tell her what just happened. He could care less, he needed to work, and they all needed to work judging by the way Hotch walked into his office.

__

You had woken up near noon to a text that simply read; Hello.(: It was short, sweet, and from Spencer. To be fair, he had mentioned that he wasn’t the best with texting people, so the fact that he sent you a text said something.

You didn’t want to seem too eager as you texted Hey, did you have lunch yet?

You set the phone down, trying to get over the initial feeling of embarrassment that caused your cheeks to flush, remembering in a second that you were a nerd. You couldn’t text people for shit and as you stared at the message you had just sent Spencer it showed.

You sat up, sliding off to the edge of the bed, hand reaching for the phone as another chime made your heart burst. No, I spent lunch on a plane to Georgia.

Georgia?

Chime.

We got another case and the whole team is running on coffee.

Eat something soon.

Chime.

Can’t ignore a demand like that.

Good, don’t.

Chime.

Text me later?

Absolutely (:

You pressed your lips together, fighting back the growing smile on your lips as you left your phone on your bed, today already seemed promising.

Being out yesterday made you realize how much you missed being outside, the only downside was it took forever for you to get anywhere. So, you called your mom out for lunch. You found the slow walking easier to deal with when you were talking to someone else and she was worried about you, so it was a win-win.

The restaurant was crowded, crowded areas usually made you feel nervous like you were being watched. Being watched wasn’t so bad, being kidnapped was worse, and being physically abused was worse than being kidnapped. So you could deal with some crowds.

Certain things kept catching you by surprise, like the way slow-moving cars rolling down the street made you tense up, and the way you clenched your jaw as the waitress’s name tag shined ‘Heather’.

Your mother was kind enough to reach over the table to hold your hand in hers, a smile brightening her eyes effortlessly, “You look lovely today,”

You let out a small sigh and shrugged “I had a good morning,”

“Really?” she repeated, smile growing wider.

“Yeah,” you squeezed her hand gently “I went out for coffee yesterday with Spencer, too.”

“The F.B.I agent, Spencer?” You nodded quickly, hand leaving hers as you looked through the menu. “Was this a date?”

“Mom,” your eyes peered up at her, lips turned down into a gentle frown “I just went through something very traumatic, I don’t think it was a date.”

“What was it then?”

“A friend, being nice to another friend.” You replied quickly, trying to move your focus back onto the menu in your hands. You heard a small sound from your mother that reassembled an ‘okay’ before she went silent, but you could tell she was burning with questions.

You didn’t blame her, you never got out much but when you did, she was the first one to know. You had mentioned over the phone last night that the two of you were friends and he was helping you through so of the tougher things that recovery involved, but she seemed to ignore that then. You had yet to mention the addictive tendencies you were feeling, the yearning for a release, an outlet of some kind. You knew it would break her heart, so you kept quiet.

“I like him,”

“Mom,” you scolded with a smile, setting down the menu. “You met him once.”

“And he made a good impression,”

“You left the room!”

“I can read body language,”

“Okay, mom,” You scoffed as you took a sip of your water.

“All I’m saying is,” she put her hands together “Recovering doesn’t mean you have to ignore every opportunity that comes your way because you don’t think it’s the right time.” She met your eyes and let out a tiny laugh, “I know you and you won’t let anything happen if you feel like it’s not the right time, sometimes it’s not a bad thing to let things happen. Romantic things or otherwise.”

You opened your mouth to say something but instead, you let out a tiny sigh, nodding slowly. She didn’t need to know how miserable the night made you, how suffocating a day alone was for you, so you nodded. After all, maybe she was right, she was your mother.

[tundrainafrica]

Note: Instead of posting a meta or a fic today, allow me to take a quick break from that because I think I really need to appreciate some people here and the fandom overall.  

February 7, 2021. 

Today, I turned 24 and my boyfriend surprised me with a gift I think I’ll be taking to heart for a very long time. 

The story behind the gift was as precious (or even more precious) as the gift itself and I thought I’d share it since it turned out some content creators were involved in this gift and I very much want to express how much this gift has defined this day for me and will place my 24th birthday as one of those birthdays I don’t think I’ll ever forget. 

Apparently, I had casually dropped both my tumblr and my ao3 account during one of our conversations and somewhere around November he had started looking through my bookmarks, my posts on tumblr and some of my interactions with people in the fandom.

I should have seen it coming. It had started with my boyfriend suddenly asking about my hyperfixation with Levihan.

Sav? Shipping? Sav? Binge reading ships and meta posts? Sav? Gushing about a fictional ship?

And I remember gushing about this with my seemingly uninterested boyfriend a long night after explaining what was oddly the most out of character thing for someone like me. 

I was sharing with him my metas and hcs and maybe, I was dropping a few of my favorite quotes along the way and it turned out he was interested. Suddenly he was asking me about my favorite fics, my favorite scenes. Suddenly, he was rereading my favorite fics with me and a few times, he was quoting those same scenes. I did find out he was looking through my blog when I got a random message from a really sketchy tumblr telling me to open my facebook. 

I suspected a few times that he could be planning something. December passed with nothing and eventually he stopped asking so I clocked that as a fevered dream or unnecessary assuming on my end and didn’t think too much of it after. 

It turned out my boyfriend had messaged my favorite authors about their fics and he commissioned one of my favorite artists (if not my favorite) to draw a few photos and bound them into a Levihan Anthology 

And it feels fucking amazing to receive something like this. To get Levihan which helped me through the worst of 2020, bound forever as a book I can just open up and read anytime. And I guess tearing up at receiving such a gift had me thinking of a lot of things at once (which were always at the back of mind) but I thought of sharing now. 

The past year wasn’t easy. Actually. don’t think it’s an understatement to say this past year was dog shit. With the covid pandemic and all plans after that cancelled, I’m sure we can all agree we had our ups and downs. 

I had a lot of my own plans completely thrown out the window for numerous reasons. I had plans of going to law school part time while building a career. And, I got a job right after college to make these plans come true. In September the law school I got accepted to (after working so damn hard the past year to get accepted) denied my appeal for night classes. I decided to drop my enrollment to focus on my career. A week later, my job laid me off. 

And for once in my life, I wasn’t going anywhere. And I lived in a house where everyone was always doing something and as soon as I lost my job I was pressured to find another one. But as we all know, searching for a job during this pandemic isn’t easy. I was still reeling after having dropped my enrollment just to focus on my job only to lose that job the week after with no prior notice. Everyone around me was busy doing their own thing. I had no one to talk to and for a while, I was falling into this pit of depression. 

My days consisted of me hiding under the covers of my bed in between the few interviews I would take day to day. Around that time, I decided to binge watch Attack on Titan as well 

I was never one to get hyper fixated in ships. In fact, this was the first ship since Royai and Victuuri which I have been so passionate. And this is a whole new level of passion. I think this is the first time I’ve ever written so much in this small amount of time. It was slow going. Just like Levi and Hange’s relationship, my fixation with this ship was a slowburn. 

Those days alone, I was reading fanfiction by the bundle, I was scrolling through the Levihan tag like a simp, leaving kudos in ao3 on a throwaway account and just scrolling through random people’s tumblr accounts. 

What happened during the one month? And when I was alone, sad, lonely and stagnant with no one to talk to, when everyone around me was living their own lives, all I had alone in the bedroom was Levi and Hange’s stories to keep me company between interviews. 

And the meta analyses and headcanons I had about their relationship were teaching me things. They were teaching me that life was never about how quickly you progress or how far you go. Maybe the real winners in life are the ones who can build good relationships, build relationships so mutually satisfying they keep each other growing and in those few moments reading, headcanoning ships, I did realize, maybe even as stagnant as I was at that moment, my life wasn’t dogshit. 

No one’s life is dogshit for a few small bumps along the way. Sometimes it just is part of the process of growing, learning to get past the worse, learning to manage relationships. And maybe it’s these relationships which make life worth living. Maybe it’s these struggles depicted in these stories and the bounce back. Maybe it’s the love, the life, the emotions so carefully described and depicted in every single story which makes life, life. 

With every single fic I read and every single fan art I scrolled through. Levihan was teaching my things about love, loss and life. 

Sometimes, these fandoms are the things which can catch people before they fall too low into something. These works and stories authors and artists shared so generously were what pulled me out of this state and are what inspired me to explore this relationship for all the potential its worth and maybe share my own stories and headcanons which people may learn a thing or two from or maybe just find some comfort and hope in.  

And these inspirations eventually evolved to writing. Writing 10,000 words in a day in between three interviews? I never was a writer but somehow, I found myself spending hours exploring the themes of love, loss and life with our favorite pairing 

I didn’t start writing out of nowhere. I didn’t start making metas out of nowhere. I needed the right inspiration, the right content to get me into this point where I could continue writing, reading, meta-ing, appreciating, headcanoning and everything in between.

And I just wanted to express my gratefulness to every single person in the fandom who had made it possible for me to pull out of that blackhole. Fandoms are underrated and I believe there are so many lessons which can be learned from the right content and from the right people. 

To the people who so willingly went along with my boyfriend’s little project: 

@faerielleart​ I saved A LOT of your art and they’re sitting in my google photos under a folder called Levihan and maybe I did share a few of your photos (the cheeks one and the beast titan one and the les miserables) ones to my boyfriend unsolicited just to show him how beautiful Levihan can be. Thank you so much for these beautiful drawings.

@lizaloveslevihan​ You were one of the first people I talked with in this fandom and dreams really was one of those stories that fucked me up a little bit, had me make a few misses on the commute on the way home one day but maybe it did have me explore the angst genre a little more, maybe it did have me explore Levi’s character a little more. 

@ariadneamare​ YELLOW. OH GOD. You know those letters? The ones which Hange left Levi at the end of the story? I ended up copying and pasting them and sending them to my boyfriend right after reading and I remember talking to him about this. We might be facing that same type of story in the future and I guess that ended up becoming a lot of foundation of our discussion and I guess, it’s just proof that there is so much to learn from fanfiction. There’s just so much to explore and fanfiction as a genre just does not get the credit it deserves.

@fanmoose12​​ I was exploring your works even before I started this tumblr up again. Maybe it was even your works which got me building my own headcanons from Levihan and writing from there. And I think I did leave a few anonymous messages telling you how I started exploring other genres because of your fics. Your works got my out of my dark place, it got me exploring a lot of other genres and for that I’m eternally grateful.

And somehow, my boyfriend picked that all up from late night discussions and one-on-one metas. Surprisingly, he wasn’t just playing along to humor his girlfriend. He was exploring the themes of love, life, loss and Levihan right along with me. (And got spoiled about Hange’s death along the way… Oops.) 

And I am eternally grateful for that and I made sure to shower him with a lot of kisses after he kept me in the loop with what has been going on these past few months with his sudden interest in Levihan.

And this huge thank you goes out to all content creators (authors, artists, gif creators, shitposters alike). Sometimes you never know who’s thinking about your work, who’s shoehorning your works and quoting them to their best friends. Sometimes, you never will find out but your work had pulled someone out of a blackhole which they’ve been stuck in and sometimes you never know that your work has been that seemingly small thing that had taught them a lesson in love, life or relationships. Sometimes, that one work turned out to be an inspiration which got them writing and sharing their own stories or making their own drawings

And I guess, the point is, keep writing. Keep drawing. Keep sharing pouring your love, passion and emotions into works of art because you never really know whose heart you touched or whose life you changed.

I have a job now. I decided to push law school a few years back and maybe take the time to work on myself now and maybe spend the next months or maybe years writing metas and fanfictions. I was pulled out of my hole. I was inspired. I have my own stories to tell and I don’t think I would have been here if I hadn’t spent the last few months reading fic after fic, meta after meta, appreciating art after art, 

So anyway, I just wanted to share some pics of my favortie fics, immortalized in one anthology, all organized by my boyfriend. And I think he made some great decisions with these.

(Bookbinding credits to @mayerwien)

[your-eternal-muse]

All I Wanted (Was You) Pt. 2

Part 1

Summery: Reader finally gets to talk to Spencer about the events of their relationship

Words: 2.5k

Warnings: Swearing, description of an arrest, manipulation, signs of a toxic relationship, JJ slander, slapping,  reader isn’t a good person in anyway shape or form, just you wait

Pairing: Criminal!Reader x Eventual Criminal!Spencer

A/N: Hey....it’s been a second...how y’all been? So this has been burning a hole in my google drive for weeks now, and I’m gonna be honest I’ve just been too damn lazy to post it. I truely started my new job, and guess what? I got covid, so that was real fucking fun. Plus I’ve been dealing with some personal shit that has not been entirely good for my mental health, but do not fret! I am doing much better than these past few weeks and weather its because of the iron supplement I’m remembering to take daily, or the fact that because I had covid, means the chances of me getting it again are slim, and I just don’t have it in me to care anymore is up in the air. And I do care. I wear my mask and social distance, but when it comes to me personally.....I couldn’t give a fuck. Anyway here it is, the long awaited part two. There are already four parts I have planned, so yay! Another series! Enjoy!

I’ve decided. I hate this fucking room.

I’ve also decided that I hate Agent Jareau. Or A.J. Or whoever the fuck she was.

I openly glare at her from across the table, since I can’t actively do the things that I want to do to her.

The man sitting next to her introduced himself as Agent Hotchner.

He’s the one that pulled Mathew back. Or Dr. Reid. Fuck.

“Ms. Y/l/n and I have spoken, and she has agreed to answer any and all of your questions. You have her full cooperation. On one condition.”

The annoyed grimace spreading across Jareau’s face slaps a smirk on my own.

“What’s the condition?”

I speak now, staring at my reflection in the mirror before moving eye contact back to Hotchner.

“I want to speak to Mat- Dr. Reid. Alone, with no surveillance, for a half hour.”

The room runs cold.

“No.”

“I will answer anything you ask. But only after my own questions are answered.”

I lean forward onto my elbows, still smirking. “You gotta give a little, to get a little.”

“We can answer any questions you have.”

“That’s not what I want. This is my one condition. You don’t give me this, you aren’t getting shit from me.” I spit, wishing I could grab her collar and throttle her.

“Listen here you little-”

“Stand down, JJ.” Hotchner has his arm outstretched in front of her, keeping her from jumping across the table.

“Yeah, JJ. Stand down.” I purr, and her jaw sets.

A cell phone rings.

Hotchner picks up, breaking eye contact with me for a second while he quietly asks, “Are you sure?”

Someone answers, and he doesn’t respond before ending the call and turning back to me.

“He’ll do it.”

Is it bad my heart jumped?

“What?” Jareau is staring at the side of Hotchner's face, but he keeps eye contact with me.

“You get a half hour. And if anything happens inside that room-”

“I don’t appreciate you threatening my client when she has just agreed to cooperate. Now, will you please uncuff her so she can go to the designated room?”

His face is a stone, barely showing any sign of his thoughts.

But he reaches into his pocket, and pulls out the keys while moving around the table to where I sit.

They fall from my wrists, and I pull the sleeves of the sweater Sheila gave me down to cover the red skin.

“Follow me.” he says, and I stand, free for the first time since this morning.

Running only crosses my mind for a second before I follow him through the hallways, glaring eyes burning into my back.

He opens the door to another small conference room, allowing me and Sheila to enter.

“We’ll send him in once you’re ready.” he says and without another word, he closes the door.

Sheila turns to me. “Are you sure this is what you want?” She takes my hands in hers.

“Positive.”

“Okay. You get a half hour. Use it wisely.” She lets go of my hands.

“That’s the plan.” I shove them into my pockets.

She nods, before opening the door, and leaving.

My heart pounds in my chest.

I wring my hands.

The door closes.

He stands, staring.

“Hi.”

I swallow, anger rippling through my bones.

I storm forward, and I see him hold out his hands to try and stop me, but he doesn’t put up much of a fight.

My open palm meets the skin of his cheek and fire eats at my fingers.

We’re both quiet for a moment before I reach forward, feeling his chest, his sides, his pockets.

I feel a bulk under his shirt beneath his waistband on his back.

“Are you fucking serious?” I pull up his shirt, grabbing the phone from his hip.

He doesn’t meet my eye as I see it’s on a call. With a certain agent's name flashing across the screen.

I throw it to the ground, stomping into it with my heel until I hear it crack before picking it up and opening the door.

“Y/n please..”

I throw it into the room of agents.

I meet the eyes of the person who made the initial call.

“You’re fucking lucky the deals still on, Jennifer. Or those people's deaths would be on your hands. So thank your lucky stars that I want to prove my innocence because if I didn’t give a fuck, you would have a lot to fucking explain right now.”

I slam the door shut, locking it behind me. 

I stand, heaving, staring at the swirls in the wood of the door.

I wait until my breathing is less erratic to speak.

“You must think I’m fucking stupid.” My voice is oddly calm for the anger burning through my veins.

“I don’t. I’ve never thought that.” He moves to stand a few feet behind me. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

I turn then, moving into his face.

“How the hell was it supposed to happen!?”

I hear footsteps approach me as I stir the creamer into my coffee. 

Hands are on my waist, and I barely have time to set my spoon down before he’s turning me around, and capturing me in a bone crushing hug.

I laugh nervously, hugging him back. “Good morning to you too.”

He pushes me back a little bit, and his eyes are red rimmed and frantic. 

“Hey,” I cup his face, running my thumb over the apple of his cheek. “Talk to me baby, what’s wrong?”

Different scenarios run through my mind, all of them terrible.

None of them are what he actually says.

“If I asked you to run away with me, would you?”

My thumb stops. “What?”

His eyes dart back up to mine, and the sheer glow of urgency shining in his pupils makes my heart rate pick up.

“I need to tell you something.”

“What’s going on? You’re scaring me.” My hand starts to fall from his face, but his hands come up to grip my wrists.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry for what? Matty, just talk to me. Whatever it is, we can fix it, I can fix this.”

His eyes dart to the clock on the oven behind me, and his breathing picks up. “Shit.”

He licks his lips. “I-”

My front door slams open.

I jump back, hitting my coffee cup on the counter, spilling the contents.

Officers spill in and my stomach drops to my feet.

“Y/n y/l/n?” An officer comes forward, gun lowered, but finger still on the trigger.

I slowly raise my hands. “Yes? What’s going on? Matty, what’s happening?”

His grip on my arm is like steel, but officers come and pry him away from me, twisting my arm behind my back. His eyes dart between me and the people swarming.

“No! Please, this isn’t-, stop!” He’s shouting, looking around at the officers pool into my house.

I am acutely aware of the gun aimed at my chest.

My arms are pulled behind tight behind me, and it’s instinct to fight.

“What are you doing? Let go of me!”

“Y/n y/l/n you are under arrest for-”

I don’t hear the rest. All I hear is Matty’s voice, his fight to remove himself from the officer who was trying to cuff him.

No.

“Let him go! He didn’t do anything!”

He looks annoyed and frightened and tired all at once.

I’m being pulled away from the scene towards my front door.

“No! No Mathew! Don’t touch him!”

My wrists pull against the handcuffs, burning into my skin.

“Stop! My name is Dr. Spencer Reid! I’m an FBI agent with the behavioral analysis unit.”

I stop.

The officer stops.

The world stops.

“My badge is in my back pocket. I’m going to reach for it now.” He reaches back into his pocket and pulls out a leather badge, opening it to show the officers.

One nods, and they back off of him, letting go of his arms.

“What?” It’s broken and barely a whisper.

His eyes meet mine, and tears are freely rolling down my cheeks, and I blink to try and get rid of them, but it doesn’t work.

“You- You’re a-” I can’t breath. “What?”

My chest hurts.

“Y/n-”

I’m out the door.

The world is in slow motion.

Black coats and red and blue lights are everywhere.

I’m in the back of a police car.

He’s in the yard.

Staring.

“It wasn’t even supposed to. I got the call 5 minutes before they came. I didn’t have any time, I couldn’t do anything.”

“You couldn’t do anything?” I look at him in disbelief.

“You could have, I don’t know, not have lied to me?”

“It’s not that simple.”

His cheek is red.

I fight back the urge to reach forward and hold it against my palm.

We didn’t move, and I realize that this was not the best idea.

I move past him, going to stand by the window.

I never realized  how high up we were.

He turns with me, watching me as I go.

“Who are you?”

I hear him shift. “I’m Dr. Spencer Reid. I’m an agent with the Behavioral analysis unit.”

“Doctor? What are you a doctor of?”

A doctor? A friggin doctor?

“I have 3 BA’s and PhDs in mathematics, chemistry and engineering.”

 I can’t help but let my mouth fall open.

I see a small smile twitch on his face. “I also have an eidetic memory and can read 20,000 words per minute.”

I shut my mouth and scoff. “That just proves that I know absolutely nothing about you.”

I start to pace, wanting to scream from the silence.

I go back and forth inside my head, wondering which question I should ask next. So many bubbled inside my head, it made my brain hurt.

“Why did you go undercover?” is what I settle on.

“We wanted proof that you had part in the murders. We couldn’t get that without inside information. I volunteered because from watching you, I know you’d take pity on me. It’d be believable that I didn’t know what I was doing. You wouldn’t feel intimidated by me.”

His hands are on my shoulders now, stopping back in front of the window. 

He’s close enough now that I can feel his body heat against my back.

I hated that he was right.

“You get defensive around women you consider a threat, and you don’t trust men bigger than you. I was a good middle.”

I really wish he would talk louder. It’d make me feel like he didn’t care. The soft tone he was using was sending comforting signals down my spine.

I don’t want to be comfortable.

I want to be angry.

“So it was all for your case then? Everything you told me, everything we did, all those promises was a lie?”

I take a chance, and turn to face him.

I wish I could stop crying.

“Was anything you told me true?”

“Yes!” His hands tighten around my shoulders, startling me. Realization flashes over his eyes and his hands hesitantly remove themselves from me.

He takes a breath. “At first, work was all it was. I was just supposed to observe you, your behavior and report back to my team. But after a few weeks, something changed. You were fragile, and compassionate. When I looked at you, I didn’t see a cold-blooded killer, or a sociopathic dominate. I saw you. I saw the way you cared for people, how you stood up for your clients, and I couldn’t help myself. I feel in love with you.”

His hands are back on me, now resting just above my elbows.

“I love you. Everything I told you about us and what I wanted to do, that’s the truth.”

I wipe my tears away with my fingertips.

“You asked me this morning, before they took me away, if I wanted to run away with you. Do you still mean it, or was that just a ruse?” I worded the question carefully.

“I mean it.”

I sigh, finally looking up into his eyes. “You don’t think I had anything to do with those murders, do you?”

He shakes his head.

I set my jaw. “I want to hear you say it. It’s the least you owe me.”

He swallows. “No. I don’t think you do. I never did.”

My fingers play with the fabric of his shirt. “Spencer suits you.”

He smiles softly. “Thank you.”

“What are you going to tell your team?”

“Nothing. I can’t. And even if I could I wouldn’t want to.”

“Why? I would think you’d want to tell them everything.”

“Usually I do. But they don’t see you like I do. It’s just better if they don’t know. For everyone.”

I can’t help it.

I lean my head against his chest, and let his arms wrap around me.

We stand like that for what seems like years before I feel wetness on my hair.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

I just hold him tighter.

I know that he’s talking about the present situation. But I can’t help but agree for an entirely different reason.

If he hadn’t been the one to come in that day, we wouldn’t be here.

He wouldn’t feel guilty.

I wouldn’t be licking my wounds, going over every conversation we’ve ever had, trying to figure out what’s true and what’s not.

I’d be sitting in a jail cell, wondering where I went wrong, and he’d be helping his team, with no personal connection to me.

I’d be alone.

I hug him tighter, closing my eyes wishing I could be anywhere else with him.

My pocket feels heavy.

There’s a damp spot on his shirt when I pull away.

“I’m bad for you, Spencer.” My voice breaks.

“Is it bad that I don’t care?”

“You should care. I’m not a good person.”

He places his hands on either side of my face, swiping away me tears with his thumbs.

He doesn’t respond.

He just leans down and kisses me.

Kisses me like it’s the last time he’s able to.

Which may very well be the case.

There’s a knock on the door and he breaks, still keeping his hands on my face.

Another knock.

He drops his hands, sighing, before walking over to the door.

His hand hesitates over the knob.

Another knock.

He unlocks it, and opens it. 

Agent Hotchner stands there, stone faced and slightly angry.

Spencer keeps eye contact with me, until Hotchner speaks.

“Reid.”

He looks down, and then turns and walks away.

Sheila walks in after they leave, closing the door once more behind her.

“How did it go?”

I shove my hands into my pockets. “I just want this to be over.”

She walks over, pulling me into a hug I don’t reciprocate. 

“It’s about to be.”

I remove my hand from my pocket, and set the recorder on the table.

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[sonyabrightbooks]

A mother’s anger has boiled over on national television as ACT Senator Katy Gallagher slammed the Federal Government for its slow vaccine rollout after revealing her teenage daughter Evie has contracted COVID-19.

“When I saw the fear in her eyes, her red cheeks and fever, that shaped my decision to speak out,” she told Region Media.

“There is nothing to protect these kids because there wasn’t enough supply of vaccine and there wasn’t enough urgency.”

Senator Gallagher said that it would not have been her initial decision to go public, but as the rumour mill went into overdrive, she felt her family had little choice.

“Overwhelmingly, there have been lovely people just giving support,” she said of the response. “It is actually really comforting and appreciated. A lot of parents have been saying thank you for voicing the concerns we all have.

“There’s clearly an undercurrent of anxiety among parents who are worried about what’s happening to their kids. I’ve had a minority of people saying I shouldn’t use my kids for political purposes, but I don’t want to feel shamed or for Evie to be some pariah.”

While quite unwell, Senator Gallagher says that her daughter has been cheered by the messages of support and contact from friends and schoolmates.

“The point was not to feel sorry for me and my family personally. This is the reality of what’s happening in households right across Australia. We need more urgency and vaccine supply to get the job done.

“People are being left completely unprotected and I think my story has tapped into that parental concern about keeping your kids safe. I couldn’t feel like I’d done that for Evie.

“Something has really gone wrong when millions are in lockdown, your child is sick, and the best you can do is put on a mask and give them some Nurofen.”

Senator Gallagher said that the Pfizer vaccine has been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration for use on 12 to 15-year-olds on 23 July, but is currently only being used for children with serious underlying immune issues.

Earlier, she told the ABC that after such a good start at dealing with the pandemic, young people had been left vulnerable and that the government had let them and their parents down.

“People in government have got to take it seriously,” Senator Gallagher said.

“My little girl is lying in bed on her own with terrible symptoms, and I can’t do anything about it, and my son’s in the next room waiting to catch it.”

She urged people to get vaccinated if they could, but supply was an issue, even though there was a very willing population in the ACT.

“It’s still only 30 per cent that have been fully vaccinated and that level is not enough,” Senator Gallagher said.

“For me, it’s taken a personal turn and I’m living the real-life impact of that low vaccination rate. It’s not been enough to protect Evie, and Evie’s like thousand of other children.”

As the main carer, Senator Gallagher must wear PPE such as a face shield, mask and gloves, and use a lot of disinfectant. She cannot spend prolonged time with Evie and this is frightening when she needed reassurance and physical comforting.

“There’s plenty of parents around Australia that are in the same boat as I am, maybe not directly touched by COVID but anxious and worried about what this virus means for our young people,” Senator Gallagher said.

She feared the situation would get worse before it got better.

Earlier, she posted the news on social media, saying the household was in strict quarantine until ACT Health advised it didn’t need to isolate anymore.

The rest of her family, including herself, have all returned negative tests.

“I am lucky as I am fully vaccinated. Unfortunately, too many Australians have not had that opportunity,” she said.

“My focus right now is on my little girl and getting her through this – but these events bring a sharp personal focus to the consequences of our government’s failure to ensure a prompt, efficient national rollout of vaccines.”

[amwritingmeta]

15x20: New Beginnings

I’d like to speak of the cause and effect of the ending.

I agree that the execution could’ve been skewered just a tiny bit and it would’ve made the overall impression more palatable, but assuming production was at the very least hampered by COVID restrictions, we know that this wasn’t actually Dabb’s final vision. It’s what we’ve got, though, and it still leaves us with a lot of tying up of narrative threads. 

How?

We have a final image of Dean and Sam together and I understand why this is irksome and why it feels regressive. Here’s why I think it actually isn’t:

Dark Side of the Moon tells us that Dean and Sam are most definitely not soulmates meant to share a Heaven. Dean’s memories are focused on Sam while Sam’s memories are completely devoid of Dean. Dean also needs to find Sam (and is helped to do so by Cas). Ie. they brothers are not in a shared Heaven, the way Jimmy and Amelia and Mary and John are highlighted to be.

We also know that Heaven’s system is basically a prison for the mind of the souls of those who have died, right? You get stuck in your best memories. This is simply Heaven’s idea of benevolence, because Heaven, and the angels, have never understood how much choice and free will matter to humanity.

So. No matter how much Dean and Sam succeeded in saving the world throughout our narrative, they were still always headed for forced separation and this prison for their minds and being filed away behind one of those white doors, in essence ceasing to exist, and the point of all their trials and tribulations would have been what? Living a long and happy life, only to die and go to what Dean wouldn’t have chosen for himself with a gun to his head? Eternally brainwashed into thinking he’s content? 

Can you think of anything more horrible to be waiting at the end of their road?

So the point to this ending we got is, to me, gloriously clear and it’s this:

The journeys of these men, throughout this entire narrative, made the new Heaven possible. 

This new Heaven, where there’s freedom of choice and endless possibility for exploration. Where human souls are now granted an afterlife worth actually living, where everyone can reconnect with the people they’ve cared about, the people they’ve loved. 

(Buddhists have six Heavens and believe life exists on multiple planes meaning when you die you simply transcend to the next plane where there’s more living to be done) (Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren explored the death of two brothers through sacrifice and illness in her novel The Brothers Lionheart and in the mythology of this book the first Heaven one enters just after death is called Nangijala, and once you die in Nangijala you move onto Nangilima and so on) (etc.) 

What we get in the Supernatural mythos is that there’s no more prison for the mind. No more only soulmates get a shared Heaven: ie. family genuinely doesn’t end in blood.

So look at what this means for the entire structure of our narrative and our character journeys -->

The Road 

If Dean and Sam hadn’t been codependent, they wouldn’t have made those bad choices that brought Cas into the narrative. 

If Cas hadn’t been influenced by Dean to rebel and start making bad choices of his own, he never would’ve made Heaven fall apart by trying to stitch it together and teach angels free will and stepping into a leader role he wasn’t quite ready for, and he wouldn’t have begun on the journey that brought him right to the moment when he expressed his need of bringing back a win for Dean, and for himself.

That win, turns out, was Jack. 

Cas’ faith in Jack, Cas fighting for Jack, Cas feeling responsible and stepping into the Good Father Figure in order to keep his promise to Kelly and protect Jack was what led to Cas making a bad deal with the Empty, but that bad deal also left Cas with the opportunity to save Dean’s life when death was threatening to break down that door and kill them both.

The remarkable truth that’s added to this moment is that Cas’ journey has brought him to a place in his progression where he’s no longer afraid of his feelings, he’s no longer questioning them or thinking they mean a weakness he shouldn’t let define him, because he realises that what he needs isn’t Dean to love him back for that love to be real, to be valuable and valid. His fear of alienating Dean through loving him is the lie. That’s where his happiness stems from, him recognising and finally embracing this truth. 

Because the love he feels isn’t a weakness. It never was: it’s his strength. It’s always guided him, even when he didn’t realise it.

And the strength of it lets him tell Dean exactly how he sees him and that he loves him, and opening up to and being honest with himself is what allows Cas to integrate with his shadow. The Empty takes him, but Cas is at peace, because he no longer fears and avoids his unconscious, he no longer needs to engage in suppression and repression of his emotions, and so his shadow no longer holds any sway over him, which is a fact given to us by how Cas’ ending in this narrative means him being free of the Empty. 

A freedom that never would have been granted, never would have been possible, without his faith in, his fighting for and his protection of Jack.

Cas’ words to Dean makes Dean begin his final steps into integration as well, meaning Cas’ declaration of love directly affects the outcome of the fight against Chuck, because Dean wants Cas back, but it’s not everything he’s focused on, since it shouldn’t be everything he’s focused on. 

It can’t be, since there are bigger fish to fry, and because of Cas’ view of him, Dean is opening up to his true self, to trust, to having faith in himself, which allows for a letting go of the need for control and thinking it’s all on him and everything is his responsibility or everyone dies. 

Thanks to this, we get Dean in teamwork mode with Sam and Jack, the three of them together figuring out how to manipulate Michael into bringing Chuck to them in order for Jack to de-power him. 

Dean’s integration is complete, and given to us through the symbology of his inner child (Jack) sucking the power out of his shadow (Chuck) and is then underlined by the ego (Dean) telling his de-powered shadow that it’s to be forgotten. Dean’s shadow, which has fed on and also fuelled the need in Dean for repression and suppression, no longer holds any sway over him. 

And Dean’s understanding and embracing of his true identity is highlighted by how he refuses to kill Chuck. 

Because that’s not who Dean is: he’s not a killer. He’s internalised Cas’ view of him. Cas’ truth making way for Dean’s own truth to shine a light. 

Dean is done with self-denial. And self-destruction. 

Which is what 15x20 is all about: that lack of self-destruction and the finality of goodbye.

Because Dean being shown to accept the finality of the loss of Cas has such direct bearing on Dean’s ability to accept the finality of saying goodbye to his brother.

The Greatest Love Story Ever Told

All of this, all of it, is because of and thanks to Cas’ LOVE for Dean. 

Thanks to the moment that allowed Cas to express it and to SEE Dean for who he truly is. 

Thanks to the moment of Cas’ integration we get Dean integrating.

And it’s so beautiful that it’s the loss of Cas this time that allows for Dean to do this, because he’s always plummeted into despair without Cas. His progression has slowed to a crawl without Cas in the narrative. His entire sense of self, his entire source of faith in anything, being drained out of him. 

This has been romantic and lovely and fabulous, but it’s also so unhealthy. 

Dean being shown to mourn, to want Cas back, to expect Cas at the end of that phone call, only for him to move away from the need and want to have Cas back, recognising that it’s possible Cas’ return is now an improbability and choosing to look to the future, because now he’s feeling worthy of a future, this is such an important detail for the love story to move from profound bond territory...

(where Cas used the bond forged by Heaven as an excuse for why he kept hanging around Dean) (Dean was his charge, his mission, he was meant to protect him) (a view shattered by Hester in S8) (and properly dismantled by the human!Cas arc) (at least the way I see it because that’s where Cas got that love he feels brought into actual stark relay like oh fuck I’m in love with him)

...to the healthy, selfless, loving side to that bond, which isn’t about self-deception, miscommunication and fear, but about blowing all of that apart, letting feelings flow freely, opening up to the truth of them, the strength of them, and these two men being able to finally free themselves of all those past doubts by embracing their true identities.

I realise there’s frustration that we only got part-textual Destiel. I felt it too. But I never expected canon Destiel. I hoped and wished, but up until Cas’ declaration of love, I questioned whether the studio would be onboard, and it turns out they weren’t okay with making SPN an overtly queer narrative. Was Cas’ declaration of love baiting or BYG? I hope my meta reading in this post will tell you how little I feel it was.

So then. Letting go of the initial shock of it all, I’m leaning on what I did expect: the love story so strongly highlighted in the subtext that we were all left with zero doubt that we’d been seeing it there for a reason.

Subtext is part of the text. For any writer worth their salt, subtext is more important than the surface text. Text without subtext is flat and dull. The text we’ve been dealing with for fifteen years has always had layers upon layers.

These final three episodes, as I’ve already pulled on above, brings it in spades and our subtext tells us plainly:

Dean Winchester is in love with Castiel, just as much as Castiel is in love with him. 

How does it tell us this plainly?

Cas is finally able to integrate because he opens up to the truth he’s carried with him for so long: his love for Dean. Unconditional. He no longer needs Dean to say it back, to validate the emotion, Cas is realising that happiness in the feeling itself, in acknowledging it and allowing it free rein. Cas moves into making peace with himself, for himself.

Now, we know Cas loves Dean because, well, declared, but why is it plain that Dean loves Cas back?

Firstly, because of the episode being entirely structured around people in love losing one half. That’s as much of an in-our-faces use of mirroring as underlining of the subtextual love story that we’ve ever gotten from Berens. 

Even stronger than the mirroring, for me, is the fact that Cas’ love for Dean allows Dean to finally move into integration. 

Cas’ words infuse Dean with a sense of self-worth that immediately paves way for him beginning to have all that faith in himself that Cas has always represented to him. The build from 15x18 through to 15x20 is like a gentle moving away from Cas being the external source of Dean’s faith, to Cas’ love and expressed faith revealing Dean’s internal source of faith in himself.

A source which has been suppressed and repressed out of a whole layer of different fears, which have in turn brought on the belief that a toxic masculinity armour was necessary for survival and that all feelings are weaknesses, but because of Cas’ faith in him, because of Cas’ expressed love, Dean is able to no longer need an external source of faith, because he’s now internalised and embraced the truth of what makes him who he is.

Just like Cas is shown to do, we’re given Dean recognising that the love he feels isn’t a weakness, but a strength, because Cas’ words is about Dean’s capacity for LOVE. It’s this love that takes away Chuck’s ability to tell Dean who he is. 

No one can tell you who you are -- you choose who to be. 

For his entire life, right up until that moment in that room with Cas, facing death (literally) all Dean can see himself as is someone who can do nothing and who knows nothing except how to give into his anger (he’s never been able to control it because he’s never recognised the source of it) and find something to kill.

This view of himself has been constantly whispered to him and reinforced by his unconscious, his Shadow-side, who’s kept Dean thinking that he doesn’t have good things last for him, ever, so he can’t have love in his life or a future to look forward to, because he doesn’t deserve it. A perpetual emotional roundabout where his Shadow-side has stayed in complete control.

One might argue this has always been the source of Dean’s anger: his inability to dare open up to his true identity that has kept the toxic masculinity armour in place, kept the performance up, kept him more often than not lying even to himself of who he is and who he wants to be, because he never felt there was a choice in the matter. 

Truly allowing himself to recognise and feel all that longing for love that’s been like a tight ball in his chest always, meant giving into weakness meant getting Sammy killed or himself or both of them meant failure.

But the only way to beat back and conquer our Shadow-side is by recognising and accepting our flaws and no longer feeling unworthy because of them.

That’s what Cas’ words and his love does for Dean. 

That’s right there in the subtext: Dean, even in the moments before certain death, being unable to open up to the truth of who he is and what really drives him; Dean needing his external source of faith, this man that he’s loved for a long time, to tell him that how he sees himself is wrong, to afford him a different view of himself, to bring the truth to light so that Dean can finally feel worthy it, because Dean couldn’t beat his Shadow back on his own, his dark view of himself was much too ingrained for that.

It had to be Cas. The narrative tells us it always had to be Cas. And so it is Cas who saves Dean from himself. And saves Dean’s life. And saves Dean from having to spend his afterlife in a prison of the mind.

Love wins.

And Cas only ever entered the narrative due to Dean’s need to Protect Sammy at all costs, because that has always been such a huge identity marker for Dean, his entire self-understanding and sense of self tied to whether he can keep his brother alive and out of harms way, which, as he grows up, then translates itself into Dean’s enormous capacity for selflessness and caring about others. 

His core trait was never weapon, it was shield. It was protector. Stemming directly from all that love he carries around and can’t allow himself to feel because it means weakness and that means death and that means he’s failed and is worthless and around it has always gone.

And would always have gone, too. If not for Cas.

Love fucking WINS.

I mean. DAMN! It’s so gorgeous.

(this angle still holds even if Dean in any way was ever meant to actually reciprocate in that scene, because it’s made so clear to us how Cas never expects Dean to say it back) (if Dean is meant to say it back and the love story is meant to be textual that would be mind-blowing head-exploding joyful news) (but it doesn’t change the subtextual move away from unhealthy holding on to healthy letting go) (the textual would only ever strengthen the fact that we have subtextual confirmation) 

But what about...?

Yeah, but what about that ending then? What about the last twenty minutes? What about all the focus on the brothers? 

Was the execution of the finale perfect? No, I wouldn’t say it was, but I could see, when I watched the finale again on the 21st, that there was efforts made to make something good enough. Something geared toward tying our narrative up as best as possible with the means presented to Dabb. 

I understand why people feel stuff is missing.

Because stuff is missing. Dabb told us they had to change the ending, that they were supposed to have a whole lot of people back to populate Dean’s Heaven. Found family galore. Misha said the same thing. They couldn’t (I’m not going to speculate on why, it’s just clear that they couldn’t) and so the ending had to be modified. To me that’s fairly plain in how it’s structured.

Did they have to focus so hard on the brothers?

Well... given the restrictions, I think this was the only way to end this narrative, because the story has always been centred on these two brothers and the bad choices and sacrifices they’ve made, and the blood, sweat and tears they’ve shed in order to remain together.

Their absolute inability to let the other go actually kick-started their onscreen journey.

Because this is a story about dependency, and letting go of that dependency to make way for a healthy, equal coexisting; which is what, to me, that final shot is all about.

Should Cas and Jack have been there? Sure! There will always be stuff missing from the final two eps that I’ll wonder about. Like, if Cas was never meant to be in the story (as per Misha he was but let’s say for argument’s sake) then why didn’t Dean just ask, very calmly, in 15x19 of Jack our New God: “What about Cas?” and then Jack our New God could’ve answered gently, but plainly: “He’s at peace.” Simple. Why didn’t we get an establishing of Eileen as Sam’s wife? And it would’ve helped so much to have Charlie and Stevie reestablished in the visual narrative as alive, however plain it is to me that Jack will have brought them back with everyone else who were away-ed by Chuck.

Sure, there could’ve been more.

But what I love about that final shot of the brothers is this canonical fact:

It would not have been possible without Cas. 

Cas learning and growing and integrating to the point that he knows exactly how to fix the home he’s broken more than once, and how to bring free will, at long last, to Heaven, to the benefit of humanity.

And Dean’s little sideways smile (his “I want this smile”) when Cas is mentioned, when he realises that Heaven is different thanks to Cas, well, isn’t that just the darnedest thing? 

*forever headcanon that Dean was expecting to see Cas again somewhere somehow he just didn’t know when and now... here Cas is* 

When Cas went, it took a little time to adjust, but Dean let go of Cas and didn’t make a deal and didn’t go crazy or self-destructive, there was no nosediving into depression, because Cas’ words made those types of coping mechanisms no longer necessary. 

Dean drinks and indulges at the start of 15x19 because he’s still processing, but by 15x20 Cas’ words have been fully internalised, Dean has integrated, and he’s looking to the future. Set on living, because otherwise he’d render Cas’ sacrifice meaningless.

Dean’s death has zero blaze and glory to it. He didn’t expect this day to be the day. But it is. And he accepts it. And because he does, because he’s open and honest with his brother, because he tells Sam all the words he needs Sam to carry with him, gives Sam all the faith in himself that Cas left Dean with, he’s brought to a Heaven that has been readied for him by the love of his life. 

Cas is right there. And he’s been waiting. And he’s used his time well, because Heaven is now the afterlife that Dean deserves. The ultimate salvation. Love and happiness and companionship and LOVE LOVE LOVE. Forever.

If that isn’t the biggest reward for the both of them after everything they’ve been through, I don’t even know what is!

Sam arriving is a given, but I have to say I genuinely do not see Sam as living his life in pain and grief. He’s happy. He loves his kid. He’s a good father. Just like Dean was, and Bobby, and Cas. All the Good Father figures threaded through 15x20. And this narrative has been about these two brothers. It ending on them together, at peace, feels fitting. 

Yeah, but shouldn’t Dean have gotten to live his life?

Sure, this is my interpretation 100%, but Dean’s death feels softly ironic and fitting because it is unexpected. 

I can’t hit on this enough: there’s no blaze and glory.

Dean was ready to make the most of life, but through accepting death and accepting separation from Sam, Dean is brought into the same moment Cas was brought into, a moment of recognising what’s important, where Dean opens up fully to vulnerability and hands over his trust and faith in that Sam will be fine without him, which pushes Sam into the same integration that Cas’ words afforded Dean. Voicing trust and faith will do that for a person.

And Sam’s arc was always dependent, narratively, on the progression of Dean’s arc, so it makes a lot of narrative sense that this needed to happen for Sam to get pushed out of the nest and forced into having proper faith in himself. Because there’s no other choice. 

He’s left doing what he has to and it results in a balance between that family life he’s always wanted (foreshadowed in 15x01) and staying aware of and raising his son to be aware of the reality of their world, given to us via the tattoo on Dean Jr.’s wrist. (oofta I wish he’d had a different name but since everything had to be done in the visual narrative it’s the easiest way to connect us with Dean still being present in Sam’s life so I get it)

There’s also that romantic in me that feels as though Dean is greatly rewarded for all his suffering and struggles, for all those years of living his life in fear and feeling as though he doesn’t matter by not only bringing him into a Heaven he made possible, but by reuniting him with the love of his life and this time they’re equally immortal, equally made of light, equally eternal, equally integrated and balanced and ready to accept all that love and happiness.

That just makes me fucking happy. For them both.

Bring on the New Beginnings

The fact that the narrative has opened itself up to being interpreted as somehow glorifying death or saying that happiness can only be found in death is distressing, but I hope that the threads I’ve pulled on here gives enough of a basis for me to say how I truly feel like this is simplifying why the choice was made for Dean to die.

It’s not about happiness only being found in death. 

It’s not about devaluing living your life, it’s about the idea, the soft hope, even the narrative promise that death, for our characters, not for humanity as a whole, but for these specific men, who have always avoided it and made bad deals and feared separation and been brought into a crisis of identity (Dean because he doesn’t know who he is without Protect Sammy as purpose and Sam because he genuinely and continuously seem convinced that he can’t hunt without Dean to lead the way) whenever death has touched them have now reached a point where the separation is an accepted part of life.

And this acceptance is rewarded: because the separation isn’t forever.

Death is not the end. It makes way for new beginnings. For all three of TFW. Actually all four, because of course Jack is included in this endgame.

There’s a transformation that takes place, thanks to them integrating. They get to transcend what’s come before and move onto the next plane of existence together. 

Together.

TFW 3.0!

Death on this show has always been about a moment of rebirth, of entering a different leg of their journeys.  

I don’t find it out of place at all that the ultimate moment of death for our characters mean just that. 

Not an ending, but a new beginning.

In conclusion

Could there have been more? As said, yes. Absolutely yes. But I doubt Dabb isn’t aware of that. I don’t think this is the ending he originally intended. It might have been a brothers focused ending, because I think Dean was always meant to die and go to Heaven, but Dean’s Heaven was meant to be a celebration of found family. 

The subtext of this narrative is what I’ve been reading and what I’ve been hooked on for four years, and what I’ll continue to be hooked on for the rest of my life, I’m fairly sure. I wish it could be celebrated, the way it always has been, the way we’ve always known to look deeper.

I hoped Supernatural would turn out to be a vehicle for overt representation. I always hoped that, and believe that was what the writers wanted. The fact that we didn’t get overt bisexual Dean and Destiel as unquestionable canon was distressing to me too and I’ll always think of this ending as a missed opportunity and I wish the CW would learn and fucking do better already. 

I understand the frustration, I understand the anger, I just wish we could all look at the richness of this ending and everything it says about the narrative, about our subtext, about our love story, about our character journeys, and lean into the treasury of it.

And omfg we got Cas as canonically queer. 

We got a main character on our show that is overt representation, on a journey towards a moment where he gets to express love and hope and clarity and this in turn moving through and enabling the integration of Dean and ultimately of Sam as well.

Truth begetting truth. Happiness begetting happiness. And love saving the day.

So, my friends, I will say this: saying that all the writing is bad, or claiming that there’s no depth, nothing to pull on, that it all just plain sucked, that doesn’t quite cut it. These three final episodes, just as any episode ever of this goddamn show, contain all of those layers and layers, especially when looked at together and certainly when taken into the context of the show as a whole.

And yes, you are, of course, more than welcome to your own interpretation! 

To finish I’ll quote Bruce Almighty: 

Lovelovelovelovelovelovelove!!