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talatomaz · 4 years ago

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defenceless | jj x fem!teen!reader

a/n: i’ve been rewatching criminal minds and i can’t believe it’s been a year since i last wrote for jj. and i have no idea where this came from.

(feedback/positive comments are appreciated)

warnings: major references to blood/being stabbed. mentions of assault

word count: 2.7k

masterlist | request list | request rules

r is jj’s 19 year old adopted daughter and gets victimised after stopping an unsub from assaulting someone

i do not give you permission to repost or translate my fics on any platform - likes/reblogs are okay and are much appreciated

“Morning, baby.”

You smiled when your Mum came up behind you and softly kissed your head.

“Morning, Mum. I made you some breakfast.”

You said, pouring coffee into the seasoned profiler’s ‘No.1 Mom’ mug that you’d gotten for her several years ago.

You’d gifted it to her on the first Mother’s Day you had with her after she adopted you. And she used it that morning and every morning since.

“God, what’d I do to deserve a daughter like you?”

JJ said proudly as she dug into her breakfast, happily munching on a piece of toast as she looked through her case file. Whatever dark, horrific crime she and her team were investigating simplified down to a few pages in that brown file.

“Busy day?” You asked, leaning against the kitchen counter, staring across at her.

“You have no idea. I’ve been up for a few hours trying to compile some notes on this case we’re working. Young, relatively low-risk, women are being raped in alleyways and there are no witnesses.”

She explained as she continued to eat whilst scribbling shorthand notes on a notepad.

“Any ideas on who you’re looking for yet?”

She hummed in answer. Swallowing her food, she replied, “Yeah, I think we have a preliminary profile that we want to release to the public later today.”

Pouring the rest of her coffee into a travel cup, she put her files in her bag and placed it on the counter you were resting against.

“You got class today?”

You were studying criminology, wanting to follow in your mother’s footsteps and become a profiler.

Nodding, you answered, “Yeah, then some of my friends and I are gonna head to the mall. And yes, I’ll message you constantly, so you know.”

You added when your mother opened her mouth to presumably ask that very question.

“Thanks, sweetie. Whoever our unsub is, he’s targeting women your age and considering he’s probably here right now, I need to know you’re safe.”

“I know, Mum. Now go, you don’t want to be late for work. Hotch only lets you be late once, you know.” You smirked.

“Yes, I know. Bye, y/n. I love you.” Your mother mirrored your expression and kissed your cheek.

“I love you too.” You replied, handing your Mum her keys and you watched her leave as the white door closed gently behind her.

***

“Maybe just call him out on it and see what he says?”

You suggested to your friend, Kerri, after she explained her boyfriend troubles to you and your other friend, Ally.

“I mean, the worst that could happen is-”

You stopped mid-sentence when you heard a muffled scream. Furrowing your brows, you walked closer to where the sound came from; an alleyway behind an old warehouse.

Remembering your mother’s earlier profile, you whispered to your friends, “Stay behind me.”

“Y/N, what is it?”

“Not sure.”

Inching around the corner, you saw two figures behind a dumpster. The smaller figure, who appeared to be a blonde female, was struggling against the male standing over her.

“Hey! Get away from her!”

Shouting, you ran up to the two and watched as the man’s head whipped around to face you before he darted off, jumping over a fence.

Approaching the woman, you saw she was half naked and had blood seeping from her nose.

“Oh god. Call 911, she’s been assaulted.” You said quickly to your friends who stood behind you, shocked at what they had just witnessed.

Hearing Kerri following your instructions, you took off the jacket you were wearing and wrapped it around the exposed girl.

“H-He tried to r-r-”

Unable to form the words, the girl started to sob at her ordeal.

“I know. It’s okay, honey. What’s your name?” You asked, speaking quietly to try to calm her as if she was a spooked animal.

“A-Annie.” She choked out as she tugged your jacket closer around her.

“Annie, you’re safe now. He can’t hurt you.”

The former began to sob harder and fell against your chest. Wrapping one arm around her, you used the other to take out your phone to call your Mum.

“Shh, it’s okay, Annie. You’re okay.” You said, soothing the distraught girl who was currently crying her heart out against you.

“Hey, y/n, what’s up?”

After quickly explaining what had just transpired, JJ told you and your friends to remain where you were since you were all witnesses and that she’d be there soon.

“You did good, babygirl.”

Morgan said, handing you a cup of coffee.

You were currently sitting at your mother’s desk at the BAU, having already given your statement to both local police and your Mum’s team at the crime scene. Emily and Spencer had driven your friends home whilst you came with your Mum to her work - she refused to leave you alone, even though you’d argued that it was still daylight and you’d be fine.

You didn’t reply, deciding to sip the hot drink, wincing when it burned your tongue.

“He’s right, y/n. Most people probably wouldn’t have heard anything.”

You glanced up at your Mum who stood above you, her hand resting on your shoulder.

“What will happen now? To the unsub, I mean. I interrupted him so he never managed to rape Annie.”

“He’ll probably try to hurt someone else.”

You turned to face Hotch as he approached you and the rest of his team.

“I just got off the phone with the hospital. They’ve discharged Annie into the care of her parents. She wanted me to tell you ‘thank you’.”

“I’m glad she’s okay. Physically anyways. So, you think he’ll get sloppy? Since he never got to...finish, he’s probably going to be antsy right? He might make a mistake?” You asked, hopeful that your Mum would catch him soon.

“More than likely. He’s definitely going to be angry, especially since we’ve just released the profile along with the sketch you helped us with, y/n.” Hotch answered, a gleam of pride in his eyes.

“Anything I could do to help,” you replied.

Standing up, you faced your Mum, “I think I’m going to go home. I’m kind of exhausted.”

“I’ll drive you h-”

“It’s okay,” you interrupted your Mum, “you’re busy here and you’ve got a lot of work to do. Besides, it’s only mid-afternoon so I’ll be fine. I-I just need some air.” You said, your voice faltering when you felt tears forming.

Clearing your throat, you held back your emotions and kissed your Mum on her cheek, “I’ll message you when I get home.”

“Okay, baby. I’m proud of you.”

The tall blonde hugged you close to her which you returned with as much ferocity, her hands stroking your hair as she cradled your head against her.

Bidding your goodbyes to the rest of the team, you left the federal building.

“JJ, you okay?” Morgan asked.

JJ had heard the emotion in your voice and though she was proud to have seen you comforting the most recent victim, it had hurt her heart to see what came after the ambulance drove away with an injured Annie in the back.

Once you’d given your statement and described the unsub to her and her team, she’d followed you to her old vacant office from her media liason days where you’d broken down.

She had watched you hold yourself together by a thread all throughout the questioning but had known that the adrenaline high would crash soon. And you quite literally did crash. In her arms, the moment she had closed the door behind her.

She had fought back her own tears as she gathered you into her arms, soothing you as you did earlier with Annie.

She’d tried as hard as she could to keep you away from her world.

She didn’t want you to be exposed to any more darkness than you’d already experienced when you were younger, before you’d met her.

“JJ?”

The blonde blinked, breaking away from her thoughts to stare back at the rest of the team.

“She did good, JJ.” Morgan repeated as JJ simply nodded, not knowing what to say.

***

Taking out your phone, you sent a message to your group chat with Kerri and Ally, wanting to make sure they were okay.

After receiving replies from the both of them confirming that they were fine and just a bit shaken up, you placed your phone back in your pocket.

Sighing, you continued walking down the relatively empty street; the majority of people either at work or school, unaware of what had happened just a few hours earlier.

You thought about Annie and later crying in your Mum’s arms. You didn’t even know why you did. Spencer probably would have given you some fact about adrenaline crashes but you shook your head, feeling self-conscious.

There was no need for you to break down like that.

All it achieved was your Mum being worried about you which was the last thing you wanted because it meant she’d be distracted from doing her job. Catching this asshole.

Hands in your pockets, you felt the bright sun shine down on your face.

Stopping for a brief moment, you glanced up at the sky, and allowed yourself to breathe.

As you were about to carry on walking, you felt a harsh grip on your arm pull you into an abandoned parking lot.

You thrashed against the strong hold, the self-defence skills your Mum taught you kicking in.

Stomping on the large figure’s foot, you smirked at the grunt of pain that fell from his lips. Then you elbowed them in their stomach and threw your head back into theirs. Hearing more shouts of pain, you started to run before you were roughly pushed against a brick wall.

Your breaths came out in heavy pants and your eyes widened as you stared into familiar eyes.

It was the unsub.

He held himself tight against you, pulling a switchblade from his pocket and into your view. Your eyes flickered from the sharp blade to his eyes. They were filled with fury as blood dripped from his nose - from when you’d head butted him.

“Good. So you recognise me.” His voice was hoarse, as if he’d swallowed a bunch of nails.

“What do you want?” You spat out, refusing to show any indication of fear to him.

“You ruined the other girl for me. But you seem like a challenge. I like that.”

Pressing the knife against your neck, he used his free hand to undo his belt.

You barely controlled the terror that threatened to rise through your body. Instead, you tried to focus on the pressure of his weapon, waiting for a slight reprieve where you could make your move to escape.

That moment came when he unzipped his trousers.

The pressure lightened for a few seconds which was all you needed.

Grabbing his wrist, you twisted the knife away from you and kneed him in the groin. Pushing him away, you stumbled, trying to escape.

But he was quick on his feet.

He swiftly picked up the knife that had fallen to the floor and thrust it into your stomach.

You groaned, the pain unlike anything you had ever experienced before. Your hand instinctively went to your stomach as blood started to coat your clothing.

You slumped down the wall as the unsub crouched down, sneering at you, “Bitch.”

Tapping the ground behind you, you felt a piece of broken glass in your fingers. Gripping it tightly, you gathered all your strength and plunged it into his neck.

He yelled out, his hand going to the glass that was still in his flesh.

Recognising what he was about to do, you clambered to your feet and watched as he pulled the shard, of what appeared to be from a broken beer bottle, out of his skin. Blood splatted all over the wall that you had been against, just moments before.

Blood continued to seep out from your wound.

You took off your jacket - the one you had previously wrapped around Annie - and pressed it against your skin. You groaned at the white hot pain that seared through your skin.

Knowing you were only down the street from the Quantico building, you took out your phone and called your Mum as you walked, as well as you could in your condition, back to the federal building.

“You home already?”

“M-Mum, c-come outside. I-I need you.” You choked out, trying to steady your breathing.

“Y/N? Are you okay?”

You could hear her shouting to the rest of her team before she continued to talk into the phone.

You made it to the entrance of the federal building but you were too overcome with exhaustion and you felt yourself drop to the floor.

You could hear shouts from the people around you as they watched blood pool around you.

“Oh my god. Y/N!”

You heard your Mum yell as she fell to your side, pressing her hands heavily against your wound.

You barely heard as Hotch called 911, stating his name and rank and urged for an ambulance to be sent immediately.

You struggled to keep your eyes open as you looked up at your Mum.

“Come on, baby. Stay awake for me.” JJ begged, tears carelessly running down her face.

“It hurts, Mum.”

“I know, baby. I know. But you’re strong. Stay with me. How’d this happen?”

JJ knew the only way to keep you awake was to continue talking so your brain could still remain active.

“H-He’s dead. He attacked me. I-In a car park. Down there.”

You weakly raised your hand and pointed towards the direction you had come from.

“Good girl. Just stay with me. You’re going to be okay. Y/N? Y/N!”

JJ screamed when she watched your eyes flutter closed as you lost consciousness.

***

“Woah, y/n. It’s just me.”

JJ said quickly when you jumped as she came up behind you to kiss your head.

It had been a few weeks since you’d been stabbed.

You’d woken up in a hospital, hooked up to all sorts of machines monitoring your heart rate. Your eyes had fallen on your mother who, once she saw you were awake, started to cry and hug you close to her. That then made you start crying and the two of you were just a pile of tears as you clung to each other.

After the tears had stopped and the doctors had checked up on you, JJ had told you that they’d found the unsub in a parking lot a few blocks from the BAU.

A couple of days after, you’d been discharged from the hospital. Your mother had stayed by your side up until this week when you had urged her to go back to work.

That had led you to now. She’d just arrived home from work and you hated that you were still on edge after your attack, despite your Mum telling you it was normal.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, honey.” JJ said softly as she came to sit beside you on the sofa.

You both sat in silence for a few moments before you spoke, your voice coming out in a whisper.

“I’m scared, Mum.”

You felt her eyes on you as she spoke, “Scared? He’s dead, y/n. He can’t hurt you.”

“I know, I just-In that moment when I fought him, I was so defenceless. And I’m scared of what will happen the next time I can’t defend myself.”

You continued, tears welling in your eyes as you stared ahead, unable to face your mother.

“Y/N,” JJ gently turned your face so she could look into your eyes.

“Am I defenceless?”

You blinked, having not expected that question. “What? No.”

“Exactly. I’m not. But I felt like it after I was kidnapped and tortured a few years ago. It’s normal to feel like that, y/n. But it’ll pass. I can promise you that.”

“It’s like I can feel him stabbing me over and over again.” You choked out, failing to force your tears back down.

“Oh, baby.”

JJ gently pulled you to her as she wrapped her arms around your body. She cradled your head against her chest as you clung to her arms, now sobbing.

“I got you, y/n. You’re safe. I got you.” She repeated, soothing you as you continued to cry.

Still hugging you against her, she kissed your head,

“As long as you have me, you’ll never be defenceless.”

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animepopheart · 4 years ago

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Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 11: “The Temptation of Death”?

Wonder Egg Priority is a beautiful, uncomfortable, moving and confusing series that starts out engaging all the things we don’t talk about—self-harm, abuse, rape, bullying, gender dysmorphia, and homosexuality, to name a few. Our silence and blindness to these issues have a weight and pressure to them, and WEP shows how this reinforces the isolation and hopelessness of the young women of the “eggs” who turn to suicide for relief. The first ten episodes have been exhilarating and exhausting alike.

And then there is Episode 11. This past week, the series took a bit of a turn, leaning hard into the sci-fi-philosophical, with appearances from Greek gods, a murderous artificial intelligence, and really, really disturbing insect girls, one of whom, despite being a brutal killer, is apparently a vegetarian. Has the show gone off the rails? Has it lost its way in departing from the familiar procedural approach of engaging a differing social or mental health issue with each episode?

Such a critique is perfectly legit, but before you write off the penultimate episode of WEP, just hear me out on why the abstract, meta turn in episode 11 may just be the most valuable thing this series has to offer so far.

Before we begin though, a little recap of what we learned this week. In episode 10, we hear the eggheads, Acca and Ura-Acca, discuss the need for warriors of Eros to battle Thanatos. This is our first hint that things are about to get lore-full and maybe a bit weird. Eros and Thanatos are of course gods in the ancient Greek pantheon, Eros being the god of love, and Thanatos, of non-violent death. Within the first minute or so of episode 11, it’s clear that the eggheads’ hope is now focused on Ai becoming the long-awaited warrior. At this point though, rather than continuing with Ai’s story, the episode shifts into flashback mode and we are finally introduced to the villain, an artificial intelligence created by the eggheads back when they were still human. Their lives gradually come to revolve around her: She is the fulfillment of their obsession to create life, and she is good.

Frill is associated with hydrangeas, which symbolise heartlessness and pride in Japanese flower language. But is it her heartlessness and pride, or that of her makers?

(Atelier Emily has done an outstanding series of posts on the flowers in WEP. Check it out!)

Only, it turns out she doesn’t play so nice when others join the happy family. After killing Acca’s wife, and putting the life of the unborn baby at risk, the AI—who named herself Frill—is unrepentant, all traces of her seeming humanity now revealed to be illusory, a mere affectation. Acca locks her away in a hole in the cellar. Years pass. The baby, Himari, grows up and is a ray of sunshine. But after effectively confessing to her ‘uncle’ (why does anime always do this?), she commits suicide. Ura-Acca discovers that Frill is still very much alive and active from her hole in the cellar, having powered up all the discarded monitors and laid down reams of electrical cables—to what end, we do not yet know. Though Ura-Acca surmises that she has somehow influenced Himari to take her own life. How else would the girl have known about Ura-Acca’s admiration for her mother? Where else would she have learned to make what will forever be to me now that uncannily sinister popping sound?

Here’s where it gets weirder. Unlike the suicides of subsequent egg girls, there is no indication that Himari, Frill’s apparent first victim, struggled with any mental health or other issues that would motivate her to take her own life. Indeed, her ‘uncle’ did not even reject her confession. (Again anime, why you do this thing?) Instead, the eggheads explain Himari’s suicide as being on account of the “temptation of death.” What now?

This is implying that death is somehow attractive, not just to someone facing overwhelming brokenness, trauma or pain, like the egg girls we’ve met so far, but to someone on the verge of stepping from a (relatively) happy childhood into young adulthood, with the promise of potential love to look forward to; someone who has not known suffering, but rather only smiles and cake. (To be fair, it is always possible that she experienced trauma in the womb, or was more deeply affected by her father’s sadness than Ura-Acca’s memories belie.)

That’s my question too, Ai.

The notion of death as somehow attractive or even beautiful is rather alien to Western culture. Certainly, there will always be some who romanticize death, à la star-crossed lovers (Shakespeare, I’m looking at you). But in general, Western culture views death as something ugly and frightening, something to avoid until it is staring you directly in the face, and even then, closing your eyes in denial is a perfectly reasonable response. Death is one of those things we don’t talk about. In my experience, Anglo-American culture is not very good at even mourning death. We lack the grieving rituals and observances of other cultures, and instead seek to confine death to the sealed, sanitized spaces of hospitals, care homes, and funeral parlors. We keep it shrouded tightly in silence. How could there ever be anything like the “temptation of death”? How could we ever consider death to be something desirable? Are the eggheads or CloverWorks simply aestheticising suicide and death here to make it sound deep and philosophical?

No, I don’t think that’s it. Instead, Acca and Ura-Acca are doing what all good researchers do—and indeed what all Christians, as believers in an unseen spiritual reality, are also called to do: They are looking more deeply into phenomena that seem, on the surface, to already be explained. The two idol fans were consumed with their obsession, so when their idol killed herself, they followed suit. The young woman whose identity was wrapped up in her own appearance ended her life to preserve her beauty. The abused gymnast saw no way out, no hope in ever living free from torment. Some explanations may be more sympathetic than others, but they all possess their own internal logic. Contemporary society is full of a vast array of pressures and stresses and each one, taken to breaking point, can result in death. Case closed. This might very well be our conclusion from the first ten episodes.

Only the case isn’t closed. Because there is a question that has pervaded every episode until now, but has remained unspoken: How is it that death could even become an option for the egg girls? Why does reaching a breaking point trigger suicide? What made death seem like a savior to these girls? This is the question that episode 11 tackles, in its own admittedly obscure way. The eggheads are focused on the underlying, deeper reality that unites all the eggs’ stories, as disparate as they are—the common thread, which is the idea that death is a release, a rescue, a beautiful ending, and as a result, it is tempting.

“But we wondered if there could be another push that drove them to suicide,” explains Ura-Acca.

This is a really important question for us to be asking. Because it’s not just these traumatized, vulnerable girls who fall for the seduction of death. We do, too.

Just ponder for a moment: Have you ever anticipated how wonderful it will be when, in heaven, you no longer struggle with that particular temptation? When your temper is no longer so short, when you’re not afraid of being hurt anymore? Or maybe you think about how one day, on those gold-paved streets, you won’t have to worry anymore. All your hard work coping and just keeping it together will finally pay off and you’ll cross that finish line and heave a sigh of relief, knowing that you made it in the end. Have you ever contemplated these kinds of things? I know I have.

But here’s the thing: When I expect my liberation to come only after I die and not right here, right now, then it is not Jesus who is my savior, but death. I am waiting for death to free me from temptation and sin and fear and brokenness, and usher me into eternal life. I make Thanatos my god.

The temptation of death is not limited to the drastic act of suicide, but also permeates all the accusations and fears that inspire us to put off living the fullness of life in Christ here and now. It’s the temptation to believe that it is death that will ultimately solve the more difficult and painful problems in life.

Acca and Ura-Acca seek to create a love that suits their ideals, just to relieve their stress.

The source of this “temptation of death” in Wonder Egg Priority is Frill, the AI. That is, a man-made, artificial version of love—with ai meaning “love” in Japanese. According to Ura-Acca, they made her “just for fun,” as a way of dealing with the stress of their enclosed lives. They designed her to suit their preferences, to make it easier to love her and forget that she was artificial. In this sense, Frill is the fruit of their self-centeredness, her every characteristic designed to satisfy their own ideals of how a daughter and woman should be. And this artificial love born of selfishness brings death into their midst and beyond, spreading it through the horrendous deformities of girlhood that she in turn creates, in imitation of her fathers. (Only perhaps her creations are less deceptive than theirs, wearing their monstrosity plainly on the outside…)

Frill’s creations. We’ve met Dash (right) and Dot (center), but who is that on the left? And is her name Morse??

To counter her destructive influence, Acca and Ura-Acca need true love, a genuine love. They need Ai, a messy, at times very weak human being, but one who nevertheless is willing to fight to live up to her name and maybe, just maybe, become a warrior of Eros.

There is also a deep, underlying force at work in our world, one that connects all despair and the actions born of it. A wide range of social issues, traumas and mental health challenges can and do trigger suicide, but they do not explain it fully. The deeper reality is the existence of an enemy who seeks to manipulate us into believing our true savior can only be death, whether it is right away by our own hand, or more subtly, decades from now by natural causes. But this is a lie, and it is one that we can combat. Just as I’m sure we’ll see in the final episode that Ai is equipped to wage the coming battle in WEP, so too are we armed, here and now, with the power to overwhelm the enemy’s “temptation of death”—we possess already the words of life, given to us by our true savior.

Jesus began his ministry with a public announcement that he had come to heal heart wounds, comfort those in pain, fill broken lives with beauty, and wrap those in despair with reasons to praise like a warm protective blanket, so that they might celebrate with joy once again. He came to bring freedom to prisoners and captives alike, giving a fresh new life to those locked up because of deeds done wrong, and those punished and injured at the hands of others. He came to take the outcasts, the weak, the traumatized and broken and transform them into mighty oaks, clean and strong; into people with the vision and skill and compassion and fortitude to rebuild a broken world (Isaiah 61:1-4, Luke 4:18),

He came to rewrite and restore our experience of life here on earth, and through us, to redeem our communities, cities, nations, and the world. God does not withhold the fullness of life from us until we finally make it to him in heaven. No, instead he moved heaven and earth to get right up close so that he could pour his own life out into us, even going so far as to breathe his very spirit into our hearts and bodies and minds. We don’t need to wait for death’s rescue—our hero has already come. But we do need to remind each other and ourselves of this truth pretty often, and let it work down deep into all the cracks and bruises in our souls until it strengthens all our weak spots.

In Deuteronomy 30:19, God tells the Israelites that he has given them the authority to choose between life and death. But he also tips the balances in their favor, urging them to choose life. In Jesus, he comes to tip the balances even further, making it possible for us to step into eternal life here and now, immediately and forever. So let’s do it. Each day, through each struggle we face. Let’s choose life and not death.

Warrior of love? And is Ai’s himawari (sunflower) related to Himari somehow?

Join me (in spirit) for the final episode on Tuesday to see Ai’s love triumph! (At least, I really really hope that’s what happens!)

#wonder egg priority #wep #wep frill #ai ohto #Christianity #blog #NOT by me but rather by one of our other writers: cajk2

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mariamermaid · 4 years ago

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The witches wrath (1/3)

Tommy Shelby X fem witch reader

Summary: You meet Thomas when you were just a little girl travelling as a gypsy…

Words: 2.3k

Warnings: swearing, drinking, smoking

A/N: This doesn´t follow the plot of the show really

Halloween Masterlist

You´ve met Thomas Shelby when you we´re eight- he was ten at the time- when his parents took him, Arthur and Baby John to the first Gypsy party ever. You stayed out of town from Birmingham with your trailers, back then you were a large group of gypsies, almost 50 people. People back then weren´t too bothered by you, not like today. Of course, from time to time there were some numbskulls who bore hatred towards the gypsies, but things were different back then.

They used to shout my name, now they whisper it.

He remembered the exact moment he saw you for the very first time like it was yesterday. He and Arthur had his first beer- he chuckled thinking back when today only whisky made him feel that way- and he sat by the fire. The cold night didn´t seem to bother any of the people, women danced in short skirts with tinkling jewelry and when his eyes glided through the crowd, he spotted you. You stood across him and he saw you through the flames- how ironic he thought. He saw you in flames for the first and for the last time…

You grinned at him devilish, waking a sense of adventures inside him like only you could do. He immediately followed you and watched you running through the rows of trailers. Then you disappeared, but he caught sight of a single candle shining from a trailer. Carefully he took the few stairs and then opened the door. A wave of heat hit him and he remembered the smoke from the build-in ovens rising above the small colony of gypsies. He remembered you sitting at the table, watching every move he made precisely, your hands softly grabbing the crystal ball, which mysteriously glowed purple.

“Do you want me to read your future?” He was unsure what to say, nervously he nodded and sat down across from you. You wore a headband with jewelry that hung over your forehead. Even back then there was smudged eye makeup that made your eyes shine in the dark.

“I see great fortune in your future, Thomas Shelby.” He opened his mouth, wanting to ask you about his name, but then kept quiet. Chills ran over his skin. “But it´ll be hard to get there, a long way is ahead of you. Don´t forget to seek your family in difficult times, they will always stand behind you supporting.”

For a long time, you two were inseparably, constantly hanging around each other. His family, especially his brothers were first unsure about you, but they quickly learned to mess with you. Even Aida found a liking in you, since you often braided her hair. His father loved you. He loved the wild spirit gypsies had, just like you. He loved it because when he, Tommy and you took the horses out for a run, you didn´t need a side saddle. And when the horse went faster and faster, you stretched out your arms, embracing the wind. Smelling the scent after rain had fallen. Closing your eyes and feeling sincere freedom. They admired that about you, Tommy and his father. “Get a hold of her, Tommy, ey? You gotta keep a girl like her!” He often told his son and Tommy would dutifully nod. Tommy admired your sense for adventures, he couldn´t even remember how often you had gotten him in trouble. But he remembered that every damn time, you had found a way out. Every single time. He still didn´t know how you had talked him in to stealing a horse, or when a new mayor was elected you had exchanged the pig with a dead dog. On his birthday the school was unexpectedly cancelled. You had dressed Aida´s cat in doll´s cloth when little John didn´t stop crying. You had wandered with him for two days straight to find a crystal for his mother´s birthday present. His dad had taught you how to shoot and while you were a natural, Tommy needed a lot of practice. But not once you laughed about him. Not when you came to his house and Arthur had stolen his clothes. Not when he cried because an older boy had punched him. You punched back, because you always had his back. You were partners in crime.

But then the gypsies left town and so did you. It broke his father´s heart to see his son like this. Tommy didn´t eat for days. And every night you laid awake in your bed, wondering about young Thomas Shelby. Praying that one day you could go back to him. And you did, but the circumstances weren´t as you expected them.

In a blood moon night, men had overrun the colony, they killed almost all men and they had taken the women, often raping them. You had to run away, knowing that if you looked back, there would be nothing left but ashes. And so, you returned to Birmingham. As a broken young woman with no qualification for a job. All your hope laid on Thomas Shelby…

Your hands were shaking when your finger finally grabbed the bell to ring. It sounded off key, emptier and not how you remembered. A young boy opened the door, first tears formed in your eyes. “John.” You sighed. The young boy didn´t recognize you. “Yes?” He asked boldly. You chuckled. “Is Tommy here?” He nodded unsure and you followed him into the house. The smell of smoke laid thick in the air. You followed John to the kitchen and there sat they all. At the end of the table Tommy´s father, to his left Arthur, Thomas on his right. A young man with an angular face and piercing blue eyes. Aida sat on Arthur´s side and Polly ran around the kitchen. His father was just explaining something to him, when he realized a new person entering the room. Aida´s and Arthur´s fight also broke off and all of them suddenly stared at you. You had changed a lot over the years. You still had long hair, but it was now hidden under a scarf. Your face was denoted by a scar just above your eyes. It was also the eyes Tommy recognized. You had grown to a beautiful young woman and the minute his father saw you, his hope for Tommy to marry you, came back. But there was no smile on your red lips. “Y/n?” He asked confused. You couldn´t hide the pain behind your eyes. “Hello Thomas.” He still could read you. He knew you didn´t want them to see you cry. Immediately he jumped off his chair and a hand laid on your back while he pushed you in his room. You broke down in tears and he sat down next to you, his arms embracing you. He had missed you; it was undeniable. But over the years he had gotten used to it, used to being without you. But now you were back and he felt a missing piece coming back. “What happened?” He asked quietly. “They´re all gone.” You sobbed while inhaling his scent so deeply, hoping you would forget the horrifying pictures in your head. “We were close to the border to Scotland when more people started to riot against us. One night, men came and the killed our men and they took the women.” He pulled away, his hands grabbing your face. A sudden wave hit his body, his stomach had this tightening feeling, that he couldn´t quite get a grip on. “Did they hurt you?” You shook your head. “I was able to flee.” He nodded and embraced you again. “I don´t know what to do. I have nothing left.” You then finally admitted after a long break of silence. “You have me.”

He was right, he still had your back and you were endlessly thankful. Within a few months you were able to open a shop with healing herbs and medicine. And with the help of the Peaky Blinders, people more and more accepted you. You often helped rather poor workers who couldn´t afford a real doctor. And the shop filled you with hope. Hope for a new beginning.

It must have been three months after you moved to Birmingham, you just closed the shop for today. The night was already settling in, giving you cold shivers. You locked the door and packed the key away. When turning a man suddenly appeared. Surprised you recognized Tommy. “Geez Tommy! You scared me to death!” He chuckled lowly, a cigarette hanging loosely from the corner of his mouth. You could see the smoke in the soft shine of a lantern evaporating in the night sky. You smelled the bitter scent of whisky, he had been drinking. “What is it, Tom?” You asked while starting to walk. Your small flat was twenty minutes away from the shop and the walks often helped you clear your mind. And since you had moved there was one particular thing that was very often on your mind. Thomas Shelby himself. Of course, you had realized the man he had become and you admired him. He was brave, courageous and smart, sometimes bold but always reading the situations right. But not only his traits, but physical as well. His strong jawline, his bewitching blue eyes, his full lips. You both had grown up and you cursed at yourself every time your thoughts slipped. He was your best friend. “Can I walk you home?” You laughed. “I don´t know, can you?” You grinned when he hearing his drunken accent. He loved your laugh. It was one of the few things that still seemed carefree about you. You tucked your arm into his and together you walked to your flat. For more than half of the time you were silent. It drove you crazy not knowing what exactly was on his mind. Drunk Tommy was fairly new for you. He was unpredictable, especially when he had too much. But you liked his rebellious side, you found it remarkable attractive. You were only a few minutes from your home away when he finally spoke up. “Y/n?” “Hm?” You hummed in response, acting like you hadn´t waited the past minutes for him to speak up about what he wanted. “You know dad always hoped that we´d marry.” You huffed. “I know.” “Do you know I hoped so as well?” You stopped, looking up to his steel blue eyes. “What do you mean, Thomas?” And then, without a warning he leaned down and pressed his lips sloppily on yours. He wished he hadn´t been that drunk, that the first kiss wouldn´t be so messy. You pulled back, the action took you by surprise and stumbled a few steps back. He could´ve slapped himself. Good job, you fucked it up! “I´m sorry Y/n, I don´t know what has gotten into me.” You tried to calm down your breathing and after a few second you were able to look back into his eyes. “Maybe you should sleep off the whisky.” You suggested and he chuckled sadly. “You´re right.” He was hurt and for once, he couldn´t show it to you. You had pulled back, you didn´t want him. And the worst part? He was relieved! He hated when he drifted off in the middle of a meeting just because he suddenly thought about you. He hated it because he was afraid. Damn right, Thomas Shelby was afraid. Afraid to lose his best friend.

He turned to leave, but suddenly you grabbed his arm. “Maybe… Maybe you shouldn´t go back on your own. You´re not in the best condition.” You admitted and smiled at him devilishly. Oh, how he had missed that smile. And then you pressed your lips against his. First, he didn´t respond, but when finally realizing that you were actually kissing him back, his hands cupped your face and pulled you closer. He literally pulled you off your feet and carried you to your flat. (You still don´t know how he did that.) But when arriving at the front door of your house he already pushed you against the doorframe, his kisses getting more passionate and less sloppy. While his kisses even travelled down your neck you fiddled the key into the keyhole and opened the door. You walked up the stairs, there was no light in the house. Under you lived an elderly woman who went to bed early. She seemed nice but if you were honest, you didn´t talk much with her. One hand laid on the railing while the other hand pulled Tommy up behind you. He didn´t know the house like you did, but he trusted you and followed you through the dark. When you finally entered your flat and you turned on a small candle, he could finally see your face again.

“Do you know how often I had thought about kissing you?” He admitted and you watched the flame reflect in his orbs. “Why didn´t you do it?” He swallowed and pushed a strand of your hair, his finger travelling down the side of your face to your neck. “I was afraid”, he admitted. You smiled softly, grabbing his face with both of your hands. “Thomas Shelby, whatever happens, I will always be there for you, no matter what. I promise.”

“I´ll come back, I promise.” Thomas nodded, his head leaning against yours. Tears had dried against your cheek, it didn´t help anymore. War had settled between humanity and desire for power and men were called to fight. “Tommy, we gotta go”, his father stepped to the two of you. To his right Arthur, fear and pain in his eyes. Neither of them wanted to go. “Bring him back to me, will you?” You asked and he nodded, his eyes travelling to the ground. Tommy´s hands were still grabbing your waist, but you felt the cold when he left your starving touch. A last time, he pressed his lips on yours. “I love you, Y/N.” A sob escaped your lips again. “And I love you, Thomas Shelby and if you don´t come back, I´ll come and get you myself.”

#tommy shelby imagine #tommy shelby x reader #thomas shelby #thomas shelby imagine #cilian murphy #peaky blinders #peaky blinders imagine #mariamermaidimagine

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giorno-plays-piano · 4 years ago

Text

You were all I wanted

Pairing: mob!Peter Parker x plus-sized!Reader

Warnings: yandere, obsession, swearing, kidnapping, human trafficking, slight mention of body shaming, allusion to non-con.

Words: 2195.

Summary: You are bought by the head of Stark crime family for a kid he cares about.

P.S. Peter is an adult!

__________

"We hope you are going to enjoy your new girl, Mr. Stark." The man loosened his grip on your shoulder as he let you march straight into the arms of a stranger in a fancy striped suit and big frightening men with guns surrounding him.

"Nah, this one isn't for me." The stranger who bought you brushed it off as if your presence meant nothing. "She's a present for the boy. Peter, where the fuck are you?"

You almost jumped at his loud voice, keeping your head low and watching your unstable feet. Well, you expected as much - before you that mysterious Mr. Stark bought one of the most beautiful women you had ever seen in your life. Her striking black hair was shining even in the dim lights of the dressing room where all captured girls were taken care of before the start of the auction. She costed twice more than you and had much more admirers - you remembered how men were shouting, trying to outbid each other. You weren't that popular, but still ended up being purchased by the same man she was. Now it all made sense.

"I'm here, Mr. Stark!" A young boy's head popped out in the crowd of other buyers, and he emerged right in front of you with a long men's coat in his hands. "I'm sorry it took me so long!"

"Look at this gent." The man smirked at him, and his guards laughed a little at the boy's enthusiasm. "So caring! I hope you're not going to take the girl straight to church?"

Now there was an inappropriately loud burst of laughter, and you bit your own tongue. They all were a bunch of bastards, but your life depended on them now. You needed to keep your mouth shut if you wanted to make it out alive.

The boy smiled brightly at his patron and looked at you with sparkles of happiness in his dark eyes. Oh, at least he was more or less pleased with the way you looked, you thought.

"Congrats with your first girl, Peter." Mr. Stark's smug grin suddenly turned warm at the sight of the boy who was almost jumping with excitement in front of him. "You're sure she's the one you want? I can still get a replacement if you've changed your mind."

"No, no, Mr. Stark, she's perfect for me!" Once the man in the suit nudged you to come closer to the boy, Peter gently wrapped your shoulders into the coat he carried and smiled at you widely. "Thank you so much for your present, sir!"

"Enjoy, kid." His patron smirked and motioned to the men waiting for him. "Let's get going then, I have business to attend to."

Judging by their nasty smirks, his business had something to do with that gorgeous black-haired woman they took somewhere earlier. You did your best not to throw up at the thought of him forcing her down her knees.

"Can you walk?" The boy suddenly asked you quietly, and you blinked. "Do you want me to carry you?"

Nice joke. The guy looked twice slimmer than you, skinny as a rail. You'd break him in half, probably. You weren't sure whether he was mocking you, but it was obviously not the right time to throw a temper tantrum.

"I can walk. Thank you." You mumbled and made a step towards those men who were already leaving.

"Ok. Come with me then." You thought his boyish smile looked pretty.

You walked past other girls dressed in expensive flashy lingerie adorned with glitter, sequins, and laces. Some of young women were as terrified as you were, their faces red with tears; the others seemed strangely happy, shouting something to each other and giggling in front of their new masters - you thought those girls were prostitutes or someone of the same kind because the idea of laughing happily after being bought like a piece of clothing didn't sit well with you. You spotted a few more ladies who were still unstable on their feet because they were given too much drugs, probably. Two dozens women, maybe more, were gathered in a place like that to become someone's property. Like you did now.

It was cold outside despite September being usually warm in New York. You had never lived here before, but one of your friends moved in the Big Apple two years ago and was always talking about nice weather they often enjoyed.

"It's right over there." The boy pointed to one of the cars in a long row of them, Mr. Stark already getting inside a ridiculously fashionable one. Peter's old Honda was nowhere near that, but you were relieved. It made you feel like you weren't taken to some scary place full of criminals waiting to fuck the shit out of you.

The kid opened the door for you like you were some fairytale princess or something, and you got inside, holding the coat that almost slipped from your shaking shoulders while the boy quickly landed on the driver's seat. You couldn't guess his age, but if he drove the car he was probably older than 16.

"I'm so sorry, I know you're cold." He glanced at your silk robe beneath the coat, your legs bare - you had nothing but fluffy slippers on your feet. "It'll get better in a minute."

What a considerate little guy. If he didn't show up with that overconfident mobster who looked like he owned New York, you'd think Peter was some sweet high schooler who spent his weekends working in an animal shelter. But you weren't stupid to believe his innocent looks.

At one point you thought he might be Mr. Stark's illegitimate son, but something told you it wasn't that. The way Peter looked at him with adoration proved that the man was more of his patron as you suspected from the very beginning.

"I know they didn't feed you today, so I brought you some chicken soup." He said and reached to grab something from the back seat - you glanced at the metal food jar thermos that softly landed on your naked lap.

Did he bring you food? For real? No, it must be some trick - there were drugs or something like that there, for sure. Why else was this guy playing the role of your mother, for God's sake?

"You're not allergic to chicken, are you?" Kid looked concerned, watching the troubled expression on your face. "Oh shoot, I didn't check your allergies!"

"I'm not allergic." You quickly replied, afraid to make him upset.

He was getting restless too fast, you thought. Peter really behaved like a kid. What was that Mr. Stark told him after the auction? Something like "congrats with your first girl", wasn't it? So, it probably meant Peter had never been with a woman before. Not that you had been with a man, either. Maybe that's why he picked you.

But it also could be all an act. Teenagers weren't getting slaves to take care of their sexual needs. Maybe this Peter wasn't as young as you thought, and in fact he was some psycho who planned to drug, rape and murder you.

Either way, he would get mad if you didn't get started with that soup - you could read it in his face.

Opening the jar, you felt a delicious smell filling your nostrils when your stomach made an ugly sound. Damn, you had never been so hungry in your entire life.

The truth was the supervisors who took care of all the girls before the auction made you starve for two days "to get you in shape". They said you were too fat and they had to do something to make you at least a bit more presentable.

"Well, if I'm going to die, I will die with a full stomach." You thought gloomly and started gulping down the warm soup. It tasted heavenly good.

The boy watched you in awe as if you were becoming more and more beautiful with eash sip.

"I'm not much of a cook, but Aunt May managed to teach me to make a chicken soup." He said with a sudden warmth to his voice. "So, um, don't worry, you won't die of starvation with me."

You forced yourself to smile at his attempt to make a small joke. As far as you were concerned, your body was perfectly okay even after you finished eating. Maybe the drug took longer to start affecting you, but maybe you were just lucky and there was nothing in the soup at all.

All of a sudden, Peter's phone started ringing, and he took it from the pocket of his jacket immediately.

"Where the fuck are you again, kid?" You could hear Stark's thundering voice even from your seat.

"I'm sorry, sir!" The boy squeaked and adjusted his seatbelt. "We're coming!"

____________

The room he brought you to was fairly large and comfortable to your tastes: there were a comfy king-sized bed, a huge table with a dozen of oddly-looking gadgets and two screens, a chair, a drawer and a closet. There was also a newly-bought TV that wasn't set up yet, and a microwave on a side table.

"I'm terribly sorry for the mess." Peter apologized to you as if you were his parent who came to scold him. "Don't worry, I'll take it all away. Please come and sit here."

He briefly gestured to the bed, and you bit down on your lower lip nervously. The kid was fast.

You didn't talk much in the car since you were waiting for the drug to kick in, but nothing happened. As for Peter, you thought that he was too shy to talk, but maybe he just didn't want to. In the end, he asked his patron to buy you for a very different reason.

"The bathroom is over there. You can take your shower, if you want." He smiled childishly at you.

How could he keep such innocent face when he was about to rape you?

You gathered whatever courage you had left and said, "C-can we talk?"

The boy froze on the spot and dropped whatever gadget he was holding back on the table. You glanced at his skinny boyish figure, that dark ruffled hair and a really pretty face - he looked like your neighbor's sweet son who would climb a tree to get a cat stuck up there back to the ground.

"Of course!" Peter landed on the bed close to you, watching you with his undying enthusiasm. "What would you like to talk about?"

"Why did you choose me?"

You really wanted to know. You weren't the usual goods they sold on that auction, the human traffickers said. Though there were a few girls who weren't breathtakingly beautiful, most of the ones brought there were well above average women. They looked like they came straight from Victoria's Secret Show.

"Well... um." You could see his ears getting red. "You're... pretty. I like you."

Huh, funny. Why did you ask? The answer was obvious - you were cheap. Mr. Stark didn't want to spend too much money on a present for the kid, so Peter had rather limited choice, probably.

"Why are you getting upset?" He sounded so concerned that you made yourself smile again to calm him down. Anyway, it was better to be grateful. You were almost sold to some disgusting old man. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No, you didn't. I'm sorry." You hurried to say. "I'm sorry you didn't get anyone better than me. That place was full of magnificent women."

What the fuck were you saying? Did you seriously think those poor souls deserved to be sold like cattle just because they were prettier than you? God, you were so messed up.

"Wait, no!" The boy grabbed your hands in his and made you flinch involuntarily. "No, no, you're beautiful! I chose you because I like you more than anyone else."

Bewildered, you looked at his worried expression, his eyes staring at you intensely while you squeezed your thighs together. Hearing the boy say that felt very odd, but kind of... comforting? Not many people ever called you beautiful, mind your mother and a few friends. It was stupid to think about it now when the one calling you that was the man whose property you had become, yet you couldn't help but get those little butterflies in your stomach.

You eyes watered, and you quickly wiped your tears away.

"People were treating you badly, weren't they? It's terrible." The boy pulled out a pack of napkins and took one, gently pressing it to your wet cheek. "But I swear I fell in love with you once I saw your photos on the website. You're the prettiest girl I've ever met, for real!"

When he removed the napkin, you saw his pupils dilating and felt his breath becoming ragged, heavy. One of his hands rested on your thigh as he leaned closer to you and sniffed your hair. Your body went stiff.

"No one gonna say anything nasty to you from now on. I'll make sure of that."

_________

Tags: @finleyjayne @alexakeyloveloki @helenaeisenhower @villanellevi @hurricanerin @void-hoechlin @abyssaint @msruchita @opheliadawnwalker3

#peter parker x reader #dark peter parker x reader #dark peter parker #peter parker #spiderman #spidey #yandere #tom holland

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delusionalteenagewhispers · 4 years ago

Text

Get Away Driver

Fandom: The Devil All The Time

Pairing: Arvin Russell x Reader

Part of a Series: Yes or No

Warnings: Spoilers! Don't read if you haven't watched the movie!/Lots of Angst/Some fluff/Mentions of death/Blood/Murder/Mentions of abuse/Mentions of Rape/Cussing/Gun Violence/Mentions of suicide/Mentions of baby death

Disclaimer: "The Devil All The Time" is not mine, Credit to lovely Creators. GIFS are not mine! Credit to owners!

A/n: HI! I just watched the movie and it is fucking awesome! And I love Tom Holland and now I’m in love with another character he plays, Arvin Russel! Also, I don’t know if they gave a name to the cop who gave Arvin the news about Lenora being preggers but his name is Howard I’m pretty sure, I had looked it up. If I am wrong don’t come after me. Also I think he was in his very early Twenty’s and he was semi friends with Lenora, Arvin and Y/n. Please do not read if you haven’t watched the movie! I hope you like it! Thank you for reading!!

Summary: Y/n knew the young Russels all her life. She knew Lenora the day she was born, courtesy of both their mother’s being great friends. She met Arvin the day he moved there. Y/n loved Lenora like her own sister and Y/n loved Arvin. So when Lenora took her life and Arvin avenge her going on some type of murder spree, she went after him. To help him.

Main Masterlist -> Here

Request List -> Here

-----

“ God damn-it Howard, just tell me what yah told the sheriff. Tell me where the fuck yah think he is. And don’t bullshit me either,” Y/n said staring the deputy down with a hard stare, trying to get much needed information out of him. To find her best friend’s brother, to find her friend, to find the stupid boy she was in love with.

“ I can’t tell yah that Y/n, yah know that..”

“ And yah know me, and Arvin. And yah knew Lenora too. Arvin was only doing what he needed to do to protect ‘er, to avenge ‘er,” Y/n knew Howard had always liked Lenora but she was too wrapped up in god and running away from the boys that would torment her at school to notice. Sure, Y/n was using that to her advantage but she needed to use all that she had if she was gonna find Arvin.

“ Don’t yah use that on me, look I care about yah guys. I know Arvin wouldn’t hurt nobody that didn’t deserve it. But I can’t tell yah where he is, and the Sheriff’s got it handled. He can take care of Arvin by himself, he don’t need a girl such as yourself getting in the middle.”

“ But he don’t know Arvin like I do. And that sheriff don’t use ever use his god damn head. I should know with how handled mah daddy,” Y/n and the Sheriff from Knockemstiff weren’t too friendly with one another. Back when Y/n was nothing but youngling, only 13 at the time, Sheriff Bodecker blew the head off her Daddy. Bedecker did protect her and her Mama that night. But Bodecker wasn’t there to help them. He was there for money her father owned him, and the man just wouldn’t give it up. So just seeing the man hit his daughter gave him enough reason to kill him and get his money. Y/n didn’t like how it went down, she’d seen the whole thing. All the yelling and the big shot gun. Got stricken across the face and then, her Daddy being shot.

“ I just know that Sheriff is gonna do somethin’ to sent ‘im off and Arvin might do somethin’ he gonna regret. Please just tell me where yah think he is. I need to find ‘im Howard. I need to find him before he does somethin’ stupid again. Please.”

Howard sighs, looking at the young girl in front of him. She was a good friend, he knew that much and he knew her since they were young. Arvin and him weren’t the best of friends, but they knew each other and that was enough. He knew Arvin cared for Lenora deeply and he’d do anything to protect her. And he knew Arvin loved Y/n, the two were so enamored in the other that they didn’t even know they held the same feelings. But with their feeling, he knew that Y/n was the best bet to help Arvin out of the hole he’s dug himself into.

“ Alright, alright I’ll tell yah. But don’t get yerself killed, Kay?” Y/n nodded happily.

“ We think he went back to Knockemstiff. Where he used to live as a kid, to his old house or somethin’... Now git, and don’t you tell nobody I to-” He was interrupted by the young girl hugging him tight.

“Yah won’t regret this, thank you.” And then she ran to her truck and made her way to knockemstiff, hoping she wasn’t too late to stop Arvin from taking another life if he felt he had to.

----

Shit is a word that Arvin repeated over and over again in his head as the Sheriff pointed his shotgun at him, yelling like a mad man. I mean, Arvin would have done the same thing if his sister was killed and in a way he had when he killed the Preacher. The sick fuck had deserved to die.

The Sheriff continued speaking, angry and drunk. Wanting so bad to kill the man who killed his sister. So when he finally found his hiding spot, he tried to shoot him wanting the bastard to die, wanting Arvin Russell to die. But sadly, he would not be getting his drunken revenge. The sheriff shot, trying to shoot the young boy only to shoot the fallen tree protecting Arvin and to get shot himself by the German Luger in Arvin’s hand.

Arvin’s whole body felt shaky after he shot him, he hated the thought that he killed another person, another man. Someone who had family, who had a life unlike the other three he shot and killed. This man was a lawman, and the law would have his head for this. Arvin pulled out a small picture, it was of Sandy Bodecker holding a dead man in her arms. Arvin showed him, so that the Sheriff could see why he had to kill her because if he didn’t, he might’ve of been killed himself. So he sat there as the man died just a few minutes later even though it seemed like hours. Arvin stood up, exhausted and went to grab his Jacket to get ready to take off when he heard his name being shouted by a voice he knew all too well. It was Y/n.

“ Arvin! Arvin Russel! I know yer out here!” Before Arvin could think, he scrambled behind the fallen tree, hoping she’d go away. He didn’t want to pull her into this, hell he’d left a letter for her too. Hoping his Grandmomma would have given it to her. The letter was all about her staying away, but she couldn’t even do that. Arvin knew Y/n was too stubborn to listen when she had her mind set. Y/n never listened to reason when she got her mind set on something else. Which in this place was running after him after he said not to.

“ Arvin please come out! I don’ts got a gun on me or anything. I have money and a truck, I even gots some clothes. I want to help yah. That ol’ sheriff is gonna be here any minute to get yah and I need yah to come with meh.” Arvin realized that she didn’t know the Sheriff already came, and that he shot him. He felt like shit that he was pulling her into this, that she was in this. This mess that he created.

Arvin knew he couldn’t just sit there, expecting that she’d think he wasn’t there Y/n always knew. Arvin always suspected that she knew him better than she knew himself. He spoke, just wanting so badly for to leave him be so that maybe she could be safe,“ Y/n, I need yah to leave. I uh, I’ve done shit things and I don’t wanna pull yah down with me. Please don’t be stubborn for once in yer life and listen to meh.” He heard Y/n sigh, which meant she was close.

“ Arvin, I ain’t leaving. So get your ass up outta whatever place your hiding in before I make yah.” He sighed, he knew he wasn’t gonna be able to do anything to make her leave. He stood up slowly, time seemed to slow down as tears filled her eyes upon seeing him, running at him and hugging him tightly. Arvin wrapped his own arms around her and rested his head onto her shoulder.

“ Yah big, dumb, idiot you...” She said quietly, hugging tightly like he might disappear if she lets go. Arvin sighs, feeling a strange sort of comfort in her arms. It reminded him of the comfort he used to have with mother, when she’d hold him or sing that old song ‘Bessie’. She pulled back before looking down to see the dead body, Sheriff Lee Bodecker.

He heard her sigh,“ Where the Luger?”

Arvin was surprised by how calm she was, seeing a dead body right in front of her. But then again, he knew Y/n. She’d seen things that even he hadn’t seen and he saw his pet dog being crucified and his Daddy taking his own life with a god damn pocket knife. Arvin looks down at the ground, where he buried his poor dog and his Daddy’s gun,“ I buried it.”

“ Good, we don’t need nobody else dying cause yer trigger happy.” Arvin nods his head, not really having anything to say.

“ ‘Kay, go git into the truck, I’ll be up there soon. I need a few minutes to send a few prayers for the man and such.”

“ Look Y/n, yah don’t have to do thi-”

“ Go git in the truck Arvin. We’ll talk in a few. Just go git in the truck.” Arvin sighed, nodding before making his way up the hill to Y/n’s old black pickup. He opened the door and sat in the passengers seat. He knew he could’ve probably dipped out on her, tried to push her away so that she doesn’t get involved in this mess. But he knew no matter how hard he tried, she would just pop right back. Because she loved him, it was clear to him now that she loved him the same way he loved her. I mean, what kind of girl would drive all that way to knockemstiff just to pick up a boy she knew murdered several people. Girls in love.

----

Arvin and Y/n sat in silence in the truck. Silence reminded Y/n of her Father. How her and him would sit in his black pickup truck, the same one she now drove in. They’d drive in complete silence, to a place where he could have his way with her when she was nothing but a child.

Y/n thoughts started to wonder, wondering if that's what the preacher did to Lenora, took her to a place in his car where he could get what he wanted, blinded by his sinful acts. She’s seen him do it to the Reaster Girl and he once tried to do with her. But she wasn’t stupid enough to get into a car with a man she just met, with a man that reminded her of a man she longed to forget but always stayed ingrained in her brain.

Men like that are always blinded by sin, no matter how much they say they are a man of god, they are just the devil in disguise using god's name to cover up their tracks for what they do. She thought Lenora would've been safe, but that sadly wasn't god's plan. Arvin stared ahead, trying to keep awake as he tried to figure out something to say when Y/n spoke up," I do this cause I care about yah and yer all I have left. I donts got any family no more. At least nobody in coal creak. Your all I gots left.", the girl had started, causing Arvin to wake up a little. And he looked at her, watching as she gripped the steering wheel, so focused on the road but also focused on making Arvin know her reasons for helping him. For a helping a boy who's killed.

"We aren't blood related but we're friends, we're close enough to be family. Lenora was mah friend, but she was mah family. And what that preacher did, he deserved to die. That man reminded me too much of mah Daddy. I knew he was trouble from the start. I could see the way he did things, it was the same type of things mah daddy did. Those type of men, they always have a pattern. Mah Daddy did, and so did the preacher."

Y/n didn't speak of her father often, sometimes it was too painful to talk about. About the things he did to her and her mother. He'd beat them, and he'd use them in more ways than one. Using them to show off to the world what a man of god he was as the Father of a small Church. Or to use them as servants for his house to be picture perfect, not a thing out of place or there would be a price to pay. Or, he'd use them in the most sinful way of all, through lustful acts. And not just his wife, but his daughter too. Lenora had saved her most times, sneaking her into her home late at night or sometimes in early morning or during the day. And Y/n helped her with the boys at school, trying to get them to leave Lenora alone. It never worked, both Lenora trying to keep Y/n away from her Daddy and Y/n trying to keep Lenora away from the horrid boys at school. But they both tried, and for just that Y/n saw Lenora as family and Lenora saw her as family too.

" Lenora didn’t deserve what happened to her. She was such a bright girl, she my best friend. She always helped, no matter if it was gonna hurt her in the end. She always helped.” Y/n paused, a small memory forming in her head and then into words.

“ Remember how Lenora used to hide me from mah Daddy? She'd sneak me in the window and yah'd hear it and come running to tell us to shut up before we woke up Grandmomma. Then you’d proceed to act like yah didn’t want me there, only throw one of yer shirts at me telling me it wouldn’t be the greatest thing for meh sleep in mah day clothes,” Y/n spoke, a small smile and chuckle leaving her, Arvin watched it. Watched how a memory with not good things embedded into it made her smile. Arvin never understood how Y/n could get so happy just by a single memory. Even memories that weren’t the greatest. Arvin thought it was probably because she didn’t have many good memories, only a few but they always had some type of her hurt in them but she still cherished them as much as she could. Mostly, all memories she had was her trying to save herself and her depressed mother from her Daddy, so not too many were happy. And because of all those no good memories, Arvin rarely ever did see her smile like that, smile with really happiness and not just something phony so no one will worry about her. But Arvin knew, he always did.

He hears her sigh," I wished she would've recognized the signs of a man like that. Of a man like mah father, she knew ‘im, we both pledged to stay away from men like that. But sadly, they always tend to get us one way or another. No matter what their relation is to yah, they always get yah." She pauses, thinking about Lenora for a minute, thinking about how she didn’t deserve that kind of abuse, about how she didn’t deserve to die, to kill herself.

“ What I’m trying to say, is who yah killed, they deserved to die, not the other way around. And thats why I’m helping yah, because yah don’t deserve whatever’ punishment the law’s gonna inflict on yah. You were Lenora’s brother and in a way she was my sister. So I’m looking out for yah, for her.”

Arvin looked down at his hands, the same ones that held a gun, his Daddy’s gun,“ But aren’t I like those men, aren’t I turning into them? I’ve killed, Y/n. Not just the preacher. I’ve killed another man and a women, I’ve killed the Sheriff.”

“ And why did you kill ‘em?”

“ They were gonna kill me. T-the man had a gun, so did his wife. I shot ’im before he could shoot me and I shot his wife too. I had begged her to put down the gun. B-but she wouldn’t. And the Sheriff, he was gonna kill me cause the wife was his sister. ”

“ See, yah only killed to get rid of the horrible people who only intend to hurt yah. Yah killed with reason, not just cause yah were blinded by sin. And that Sheriff, sure he was a lawman, but he was a bad one. He deserved it as much as his sister. So no, yah aren’t like ‘em. That’s why I love yah, stupid. Because yah aren’t like them.” Arvin looked at her, all she did was stare straight ahead, focusing on the road. Arvin knew she had hard times with saying love. Even just saying love to people who were just family or friends. Love scared her, he knew that. It scared him too. Love to kids like them was a scary thing, because it didn’t come often and when it did it was ripped away from them. Slowly Arvin put his hand on her leg, to give her at least some sort of comfort, some sort of touch and maybe he needed the touch as much as she did too.

“ I love yah too, yah know.” He said as he looked out the window.

“ I know.”

-----

“ Put these on.” Y/n spoke throwing a black t-shirt and Jeans at him, the clothes landing on his head.

“ Why?”

“ Cause, they already know what yer wearing. If yah wear something different it’ll be harder to find yah, plus it’ll be better for yah to wear somethin’ cleaner.” Arvin sighed grabbing the clothes Y/n threw at him.

“ Also, I got somethin’ for yah. Here.” She then throws a pack of cigarettes at him. The pack hitting him square in the face making Y/n laugh.

“ Yah know, yah could always just hand me the stuff instead of throwing it at me.”

“ Well where would the fun be in that?” Y/n said with a smirk and wiggling her eyebrows in a goofy way. It was dark out and Arvin sat in the open back of the truck while Y/n threw stuff at him that she’d packed. Arvin was surprised about how prepared she was. She packed all the necessitates. Like blankets and clothing, even food and water and even money. Arvin was grateful and lucky Y/n came after him, he would’ve been completely lost without her.

“ Now git dressed. I’ll look away, don’t yah worry.” Then made a show of slowly turning around and putting her hands over her eyes. It made Arvin chuckle, he liked when he saw Y/n like this, all goofy and just plain smiles. It reminded him of Lenora, it reminded him of his mother.

“ So where did yah get these clothes anyway? They look like mine.”

“ Yeah, I raided yer drawers. Grandmomma helped me too.”

“ She knew yah were going after me?”

“ Yeah, she does. She wanted me to find yah and to make sure yer safe. She said I’d be the only one to keep yer ass in line out here.” There was a moment of silence between the two.

“ I’m done getting dressed.”

“ Finally, I need some well deserved sleep and you are taking up our bed for the night. We’ll find something better tomorrow though.” Y/n hopped on the makeshift bed with all the blankets she had piled onto one another to make it more comfortable than it was on the back of the pickup truck. She laid down and looked up at the sky, a small smile on her face.

“ Yah aren’t gonna change either?”

“ Oh, uh I uh, I forgot to bring a change of clothes. I was so focused on getting shit for yah and finding yah. I forgot some clothes for myself. But it’s fine.”

“ No it ain’t. Here, wear one of my shirts yah brought, I bet wearing that dress isn’t too comfortable.” Y/n raised an eyebrow at him.

“ Is this just yer way of getting me to wear yer clothes. Cause yah could always ask.”

“ Oh shut up and put on the clothes.” Arvin said with a little red starting to creep up on his cheeks, he was thankful it was dark out so she couldn’t see. Y/n laughed as she grabbed one of Arvin’s shirts, it was his white button up church shirt. Y/n had always wanted to try it on, it seemed comfy to Y/n, and it was. When Arvin could finally look, his eyes wanted to pop out of his skull, and in a way they were. There she was, in just undergarments and his white button-up. Arvin always hated that shirt but right then, he loved it.

“ Alrighty, now it’s time for sleep. We got a lot of driving to do tomorrow cause we are going all the way to Cincinnati.”

“ What’s in Cincinnati?” Arvin asked as Y/n climbed in the back and laid down.

“ My Uncle lives out there. I gave him a call at one of the phones while you slept in the Truck. He’s gonna keep us for awhile, he’s got an extra room and he’s gonna let us stay until we are able to leave and make a life for ourselves without the cops coming after yah.” She laid down looking up at the sky as she spoke. She never saw her uncle anymore, the man used to live with her and her parents when she was young. But one fateful day at age 10 he moved to Cincinnati and never really kept in contact. Y/n knew his number, always wanted to call him. There were multiple times where she wanted to call and beg him to take her away from her small house in Coal Creak. But she never did. When she called, the man was ecstatic when he heard her voice. He offered her to stay with him before she could even ask. It made her wonder how a man who obviously wanted her to be in his life never kept contact for many years of her life. But she already knew it was probably cause of her Daddy. The man never liked how his brother looked at her Mama and how she looked at him. How he seemed to act like more of a father to Y/n then her own was.

“ You have an Uncle?”, Arvin asked popping Y/n out of her thoughts as he propped up on his elbow so he could look at her. As he looked at her, he started thinking about how beautiful she was. Even in the dark and with the dirt and the few stray leaves in her hair and even wearing his horrid old church shirt. He still thought she was just plain beautiful.

“ Yeah I do, he used to live with me when I was younger. He’s a good man.”

“ And does he know what I did?” Arvin asked nervously.

“ I told him, he said it wouldn’t be any different if yah were in the war. Don’t worry, we gonna have a place to go. Yer gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay. I got it handled,” Arvin couldn't explain how he felt in that moment, as he stared at her, knowing how Y/n was always there. Even when they were just kids and he was just plain lonely and to now where she's helping him get away from the law after killing. But all he knew, in that moment, was that he loved her and he wanted to tell her in the best possible way. Love to kids like him and her was a rare thing, so he decided he was gonna act on it. So he kissed her.

From his propped up position he was able to swoop down and touch his lips to hers as she laid there looking up at the stars. Y/n was surprised at first, not knowing what was happening when realization hit her. Arvin Russell, her best friend growing up, the boy she loved was kissing her. So she kissed him back. Their positions changed through the kiss. Y/n now straddled his lap and her arms circled around his neck, one hand running through the back of his hair. Arvin sat below her, one hand on her hip and the other grasping the side of her face gently. Both putting all their love and passion for one another into that one kiss. They both finally pull away, both of their lips being swollen but big smiles on both of their faces, even Arvin who rarely showed smiles. But that just made Y/n appreciate them that much more.

“ Arvin...,” Y/n started, looking at him with so much love.

“ I love you’ Y/n. And not just as a friend or any of that shit. I love yah, I love you as someone I want by me like my Daddy wanted my Mama.” Y/n looks at him as if he just moved the moon.

“ I love yah too. Always have, always will,” She speaks, with lovey, dovey tone to her voice before leaning down and kissing him again. Both got aroused fast from their positions and soon they both had one of the best nights of their lives. The lost of both of their innocents. Both of them were each others first and will also be their last.

-----

It was sunrise when Arvin woke up, Y/n laid upon his very shirtless chest as her naked body stayed hidden under the blankets. The memories of what happened last night circles around in his brain, making him smile. He and Y/n had both lost their innocence last night in the back of her Black pickup truck. Arvin couldn’t remember a time of being so happy and feeling so loved like he was last night. Both knew it was a sin in god’s eyes, but they both hoped he’d forgive them since even though it was before marriage, they were still in love and in their eyes its not any different.

Arvin looked down at her, entranced by how beautiful she looked, how pure she looked just sleeping all sprawled out on his chest, her hair all messy and a light pink dashed across her cheeks from the cold. He sighed, wishing this type of peace could last forever. That the two could just stay like that in the middle of the woods in the back of the truck just enjoying one another’s company. But he knew thats not how life always worked.

Y/n started to stir, her eyes starting to slowly open as she let out a small yawn. Her nose scrunched up as she yawn, it reminded Arvin of a small Kitten. She was his little kitten.

“ Mornin’,” Arvin spoke in his deep southern voice as he looked at her. She looked up at him, a small smile gracing her face.

“ Good Mornin’, so yah ready to take off for Cincinnati with meh? You know you ain’t getting rid of me now?” Arvin smiled, swooping down to give her a gentle and soft kiss the lips before pulling away.

“ And I wouldn’t change it for the life of me, Darlin’.”

#arvin russell #arvin russell x reader #arvin russel x y/n #arvin russel x you #the devil all the time #Emma Russell

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crimemagazine · 3 years ago

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The Otaku Murderer

Tsumoto Miyazaki. There's a chance you have never even heard that name before, so who is he? Despite the fact that Miyazaki grew up to be one of Japan's most sadistic killers, he started out as an insecure, quiet child.

In august of 1962. Tsumoto Miyazaki was born prematurely with a birth defect that kept him from bending his wrist completely. Due to the defect, he spent most of his childhood alone and was often bullied by others.

Even though he was not a social student he was a successful one, ranking in the top 10 of his class. Going into high school he had hopes of becoming a teacher, but his dreams were not met. His grades began declining. He went for being in the top 10 of his class all the way down to 40th. The reason for his grades declining stays unclear.

The Miyazaki family was well known in the Itsukaichi district of Tokyo. His father owned a newspaper. Tsumoto was supposed to take over after his father retired but he showed no interest in doing so.

Miyazaki became convinced that his family only cared about his financial and material success. “If I tried to talk to my parents about my problems, they’d just brush me off,” claimed Miyazaki. He felt that his younger sisters despised him but he was fairly close with his older sister.

The only person in his family that he didn’t despise was his grandfather. Miyazaki considered him to be the only person that cared about his personal interests.

In college Miyazaki’s strangeness deepened severely. He took ‘crotch shots” of young women on the tennis courts. He looked through pornographic magazines but soon became bored with those as well. He stated that they “black out the most important part.” In 1984 he began looking at child pornography which wasn’t yet illegal in Japan.

Then in 1988, What experts now believe was the turning point for Miyazaki, his grandfather suddenly passed away. Family members saw a momentous change in him immediately after. The said that he was caught spying on his little sister while they showered and even attacked his mother at some point.

Miyazaki admitted himself that after his grandfather was cremated, he ate some of the ashes so that he could “feel closer too” his grandfather.

Despite all this, the worst was yet to come.

One day after his birthday in August of 1988, Miyazaki kidnapped four-year-old Mari Konno. According to Miyazaki, he simply approached her outside, led her back to his car, then drove off. He then drove to a wooded area and parked the car under a bridge. He waited in the car for half an hour and then murdered her. He then proceeded to remove her clothes and rape her corpse. He left her naked body in the woods and took her clothes home with him. For several weeks he let the body decompose in the woods, checking on it occasionally. Eventually, he removed her hands and feet and kept them in his closet at home. He then called her parents. He didn’t speak, but only breathed heavily into the phone. He then sent the little girl’s family a box that contained a photo of the outfit Mari had been wearing when she disappeared, several small teeth, and a postcard with a message, "Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove.”

In October of 1988, Miyazaki kidnapped a second little girl. This victim was seven-year-old Masami Yoshizawa. He spotted her walking home, and offered her a ride. But the little girl never made it home, instead she was driven into the woods, where she was murdered, her corpse raped, and left naked in the woods just like the first victim.

Within the next eight months, Miyazaki would escalate as two more children would go missing both young girls, and both in the same manner as the first two.

Four-year-old Erika Namba was soon kidnapped, like Yoshizawa, while walking home along the road. However, this time Miyazaki forced her into the car, and made her take off her own clothes in the back seat. Miyazaki took pictures of her, murdered her, and then tied her hands and feet. Rather than leave her body at the murder scene, he put her in the trunk of his car under a bedsheet. Then, he dumped her body in a parking lot and her clothes nearby in a wooded area. Like Mari Konno’s family, Erika Namba’s family also received a disturbing note. It read: “Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.”

Although this is very disturbing Miyazaki was far from done. His last victim was the most disturbing of them all.

Miyazaki abducted five-year-old Ayako Nomoto in June of 1989. He convinced her to let him take photos of her, then murdered her and took her body home, rather than dumping it in the woods as he’d done before. At home, he spent two days sexually abusing the little girl's body, photographing her and masturbating, as well as dismembering the body, and drinking the little girl’s blood. He even ate part of her hands and feet. As soon as she began to decompose, Miyazaki dismembered the rest of her body and deposited the parts in various locations around Tokyo, including a cemetery, a public restroom, and nearby woods. However, he began to fear that the police would find the parts in the cemetery and two weeks later he returned to retrieve them. After that, he kept the body at his home in his closet.

Miyazaki was finally caught as he was attempting his fifth kidnapping. In July of 1989, Miyazaki spotted two sisters playing in their yard. He managed to separate the youngest one from her older sister and lured her to his car. The older sister ran to get her father, who arrived to find Miyazaki taking photos of his daughter in the car. The father attacked Miyazaki, and got his daughter out of the car but was unable to subdue Miyazaki, who fled on foot. When Miyazaki came back for his car, police captured and arrested him.

After arresting him, they conducted a search of his car and apartment, which turned up incredibly disturbing evidence. In Miyazaki’s apartment police found over 5,000 videotapes, some of anime and slasher films, and some homemade videos of himself abusing the girl's bodies. They also found photographs of his other victims and pieces of their clothing. And, of course, they discovered the body of his fourth victim, decomposing in his bedroom closet, her hands missing.

Throughout his trial, Miyazaki remained incredibly calm. Reporters noted that he was almost undaunted about his arrest and entirely unaffected by the things he had done or the fate he was facing. He answered questions calmly, and appeared almost rational in his thinking, even though he had committed senseless, horrifying crimes. When Miyazaki was asked about his crimes, he blamed them on “Rat-Man,” an alter-ego who lived inside him and forced him to do terrible things.

Psychoanalysts who examined Miyazaki during the trial pinpointed his lack of connection with his parents as an early sign of his disturbance. They also noted that since he had no connection with his family, he had instead turned to a fantasy world, including manga and slasher films, to give him solace. Meanwhile, his parents publicly disowned him and his father refused to pay for his son’s legal fees. His father would later commit suicide in 1994.

After his 7-year trial the courts eventually found Miyazaki guilty, and eligible for the death penalty. In 2008, his sentence was carried out and Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Otaku killer, finally answered for the terrible crimes he committed. He was hanged.

#crime #otakumurderer #killer #japan #tokyo #true crime #little girl killer

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a-queer-seminarian · 4 years ago

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Hagar and Sarah - was reconciliation ever a possibility?

Sarah inflicts horrific abuse on Hagar (see Genesis 16 and 21): enslavement, rape and forced impregnation, beatings, and finally, banishment into the desert. It seems impossible that their story could ever have ended with renewed relationship and solidarity. As Jewish Cuban-American anthropologist Ruth Behar puts it in “Sarah and Hagar: The Heel-prints upon Their Faces,”

“The story of Sarah and Hagar is a story about women wronging women. It is a story so sad, so shameful, so sorrowful, that to own up to it is to admit that feminism has its origins in terrible violence and terrible lack of compassion between women.”

And yet, people across centuries have imagined what reconciliation between these two women could have been like. I’m compiling some of those visions here.

Many of them rely upon Sarah recognizing that she and Hagar share much suffering: Sarah too is used as property by men in their patriarchal world; Sarah too may have experienced rape when Pharaoh takes her from Abram in Egypt (see Wil Gafney’s Womanist Midrash); Sarah and Hagar alike are valued for their fertility and little else. If only Sarah had realized that patriarchy is what sets her above and against her fellow woman! If only she could have seen Hagar as a sister in solidarity, rather than a slave to abuse and cast away!

“Only at the end, When I witnessed my young son screaming under his father's knife, Only then Did I realize our common suffering.”

- Lynn Gottlieb

[image description: a painting of two women with curly brown hair and brown skin embracing; the one being held has a blue shawl with “Sarah and Hagar” written in Hebrew on it, while the one embracing her has a bright blue dress. A dove with an olive branch hovers behind them.]

“Sarah and Hagar” by Jewish artist Hilary Sylvester, who says: “Sarah the mother of the Jewish People and Hagar the mother of the Arab people finally find reconciliation through Mashiach.”

___________

Hagar’s and Sarah’s conflict & the Israel / Palestine conflict

In the article “Reconciling Hagar and Sarah: Feminist Midrash and National Conflict,” Noam Zion explains,

“In Jewish and Muslim interpretation, Hagar and Sarah represent the matriarchs of Abraham’s blessed heirs, the Arabs and the Jews. In classical sources, the break between the two women is never mended, but feminist readers of the Bible, Jewish and Muslim, have used midrash-style poetry to rewrite the ending of their story. Part of this endeavor is the hope of rewriting the contemporary conflict and reconciling between their putative descendants.”

...On a covenantal level, this story has an all’s well that ends well conclusion. God’s promises to Abraham and to each of the matriarchs will be fulfilled, as Isaac and Ishmael will each become great nations. But what about the interpersonal level? Is there ever a happy ending to the familial and, thus, national conflict?”

They continue with examples of reconciliation between various members of the story:

Reconciling Ishmael and Isaac: “The Torah itself implies a reconciliation of sorts between the brothers. First, after Abraham’s death, Ishmael returns “home” to encounter his brother once more at their father’s funeral: ‘His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah’” (Genesis 25:9).

Reconciling Abraham and Hagar: “In the biblical text, Hagar...is never mentioned after the story of the expulsion, leaving his breach with Hagar unresolved. In another example of midrashic rewriting of the narrative, some rabbis identify Keturah, whom Abraham marries after Sarah’s death (Genesis 25:1), with Hagar. (In the biblical text, the two are not identical.) ...Thus Abraham renews his responsibility and his affection for Hagar as soon as Sarah, who could not stand her, is buried.”

Reconciling Hagar and Sarah: “The one character who is never reconciled with either of the offended parties, in either the biblical text or the midrash, is Sarah. ...For these reasons, some contemporary feminist readers and poets have felt an urgent need to add a new episode to the narrative to bring the two women together.

Further, these feminist poets wish to reimagine the relationship between the nations born of these matriarchs in a period of ongoing violent conflict between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East and the fragile beginnings of a new religious and ethnic dialogue between American Muslims and American Jews in North America.”

___________

Common Suffering: Sarah Repents

In the opening to her poem “Achti,” Arabic for “My Sister,” Jewish Renewal rabbi Lynn Gottlieb suggests that Hagar is not a name but a derogatory epithet, and imagines Sarah’s regret:

I am pained I did not call you By the name your mother gave you. I cast you aside, Cursed you with my barrenness and rage, Called you “stranger”/ Ha-ger, As if it were a sin to be from another place.

Noam Zion says of the poem, “For Gottlieb, Sarah’s sin derives in part from her blindness to the patriarchal system that pressures wives to be fertile and generates an inhumane competition between women, breaking down their solidarity. Sarah admits to having tried to steal Hagar’s womb, as if another woman, her womb and her child, could be property.”

They used me to steal your womb, Claim your child, As if I owned your body and your labor

“Having offered an original interpretation of Hagar’s name, Gottlieb does the same with “Sarah.” Etymologically, her name is connected to “ruler” (שַׂר, sar), but Gottlieb’s midrash connects it to “see-far” (שׁוּר, shur). Thus Sarah ought to become, by virtue of her name, the far-seeing woman, the prophetess. ...Yet she realizes to her chagrin that Hagar sees visions of God, while God has stopped communicating with the woman meant to be a prophetess:”

I, whom they call “See Far Woman” / Sarah, Could not witness my own blindness. But you, my sister, You beheld angels, Made miracles in the desert, Received divine blessings from a god, Who stopped talking to me.

”Using the midrash on Sarah’s name, Gottlieb has Sarah contrast her own moral blindness with Hagar’s power of vision in having seen God. By contrast, Sarah never speaks to God or sees him. What she does witness, however, is the near death of her son Isaac:”

Only at the end, When I witnessed my young son screaming under his father's knife, Only then Did I realize our common suffering.

“...Gottlieb says Sarah’s trauma, seeing her son almost slaughtered by her husband, led her to repent. When Sarah is herself shunted aside and her son taken—without consulting her—to be sacrificed by the same Abraham and the same God who drove Ishmael away and exposed him to death, Sarah then discovers herself as an unwitting collaborator of patriarchy who betrayed her sisterly duties to Hagar by actively expelling a helpless woman and child into a life-threatening situation. Now that she has suffered, she develops an empathy with Hagar based on their common motherhood.

...She concludes her poem in the form of a ritual self-accusation, a vidui, the traditional confession characteristic of Yom Kippur, which follows soon after Rosh Hashanah, and is part of the same festival complex:”

Forgive me, Achti For the sin of neglect For the sin of abuse For the sin of arrogance Forgive me, Achti, For the sin of not knowing your name.

“In the spirit of her poem, Gottlieb takes it upon herself, through the character of Sarah “our mother,” to confess what—in her political and moral opinion as a left-wing liberal—are the sins of the Jewish people in their “abuse,” expulsion and depersonalization of Palestinian refugees which Sarah’s command to Abraham to expel Hagar and son Ishmael foreshadows.“

___________

Sarah Seeks Hagar

Eleanor Wilner has a long poem called “Sarah’s Choice.” In it, Sarah tells her son Isaac that she is going to go find Hagar and Ishmael “whom I cast out, drunk on pride,” and invites Isaac to come with her. He asks her how he should great Ishmael:

“As you greet yourself,” she said, “when you bend over the well to draw water and see your image, not knowing it reversed. You must know your brother now, or you will see your own face looking back the day you’re at each other’s throats.

In Reading Genesis: Beginnings, Kissileff writes, “The poem closes with the chilling foresight, emphasized by the pauses in the final line, that brings us back to the Bible as we know it:

“But what will happen if we go?” the boy Isaac asked. “I don’t know,” Sarah said, “But it is written what will happen if you stay?”

“What will happen, of course, is that Isaac’s own father will attempt to sacrifice him -- and that the future history of his people will be one of unending conflict with his ‘brother.’ Whenever I read this poem, I catch my breath at the last line. ...”

__________

Hagar writes to Sarah

“Hagar Writes a Cathartic as an Exercise Suggested by her Therapist,” by Syrian American poet, novelist, and professor, Mohja Kahf:

Dear Sarah, life made us enemies But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if we both ditched the old man? He could have visitation rights with the boys alternate weekends and holidays. Yeah, especially the Feast of the Sacrifice— everybody has forgotten anyway that it began with me abandoned in the desert watching my baby dehydrate for days— I dared God to let us die.

Anyway, you and I, we’d set up house, raise the kids, start a catering business, maybe. You have brains. So do I. We could travel. There are places to see besides Ur and this nowheresville desert with its tribes of hooligans

No. Your lips always thin when you disapprove, like the mother I can hardly remember from before I wound up in your house. I was barely more than a girl. You are the one Who brought me there from Egypt. You used to laugh back then. In those days, You could bear to look at me.

Oh, Sarah, you need years of therapy Can’t you admit that what he did to me was cruel? Admit it – for just one second It won’t make you hate him forever just long enough to know the world won’t fall apart. Long enough to pity him, yourself, me Laugh, Sarah, laugh Imagine God, the Possibility. Sincerely Love, Hagar

#hagar #sarah #abraham and sarah #sarah and hagar #genesis 21 #genesis 16 #readings #midrash

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allthebest20 · 4 years ago

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A Simple Favor (2018)

This movie was surprisingly good? I’d give it a 6 or 7 out of 10. To be honest, I already wrote a review for this that I liked, but it didn’t save, so I partly want to recreate those thoughts, and I partly want to give up. I thought the plot was decently smart and interesting, the characters believable and funny, the dialogue natural enough, the ending satisfying.

It is a very trendy plot: encapsulating the hot-lady-murder-mystery trope, the single-white-female trope, and the hot-lady-narcissist-psychopath trope. I mean, as a young white lady, I don’t dislike these tropes. I love watching hot woman, like Blake Lively, just doing mundane stuff or, even better, being cunning and mean to people. I mean, that’s why we watched Gossip Girl, right? It’s definitely why I watched Pretty Little Liars. More and more it feels like directors just pick hot people to do the job of actors, and that frustrates me. However, here, Lively isn’t just hot, she actually does a pretty good job. Herself a rich mother with a celebrity husband, I can see why she does so well playing the wealthy narcissist working mother with the troubled background. It’s also easy to imagine that the narcissist-psychopath character is not a difficult character to create. This is because 1. most actors (and most people) are a bit narcissistic and 2. writers rarely give these characters complex thought processes. Sure, there’s usually trauma there, but that fades into being blindly motivated by self-interested and anger. Unlike “regular people,” these characters do not often their options or consider factors outside themselves. In that way, they are not very complicated. I’ve never met anyone who truly follows this trope, but I’ve also never met a serial killer. It’s almost like Hollywood’s current obsession with those two plot lines (serial killers and hot lady psychopaths) is a way to take about gendered evils. Almost as if these psychopaths are the female equivalent of a serial killer, and, at least in this case, Lively’s character does have a body count. However, the victims she leaves dead, her sister and her father, arguably deserved it. Her lovers, who she uses, do not, but she does not kill either of the two featured. Real life male serial killers are sometimes thought to kill family members, but mostly, they kill their intimate partners. So, I would argue that there is no female equivalent of the serial killer phenomenon. I also don’t mean to imply here that all narcissists are psychopaths, because there are a lot of people with NPD who are just trying to manage their systems, deal with their trauma, and live a healthy life in our fucked up society. But hot women with compromised morality are a big threat to cishet white men, who don’t have to worry about serial killers, date rape, or hate crimes, so I”m sure that plays into the commonality of the trope and the demonizing of people with NPD. It’s not to say that I have not heard about dangerous lady psychopaths, but they aren’t usually serial killers. They are con-artists and domestic abusers. Of course, Hollywood has no interest in showing what a real domestic abuse situation perpetrated by a women looks like. No one wants to talk about people being hit and emotionally abused by their female partners. Lively’s character is a domestic abuser who seems to manipulate and emotionally tear down her husband, played by cutie Henry Golding, but this is mostly alluded to, not displayed. There is one scene where Lively pulls a gun on him in a restaurant and forces him to say bad things about Kendrick’s character, but that’s more fantasy than reality.

What separates this movie from others of lesser quality, besides the acting and the dialogue, is the way the plot unfolds and the character’s motivating forces. If Lively had nothing on Kendrick or if Kendrick was really as goody-two-shoes as she makes herself out to be, then nothing would make sense. Kendrick’s secret though is perfectly believable and well-aligned with her character: sleeping with her long lost half-brother after her beloved father’s funeral. I like how Kendrick tries to play it cool, tries to pretend like they only made out, her desire to finally share her darkest secret tied with her sensibility to keep it hidden from this mysterious stranger. I love the way their relationship and their backgrounds are slowly unfurled to the audience. The way the director splices together scenes of the two leading characters revealing their secrets and their flaws, is simply enthralling. The woman are both very alike (haunted by personal past mistakes and dead/dying family members), but while Kendrick takes steps to make things better for the people around her, Lively does the opposite. Kendricks biggest mistake was her first ones: sleeping with her half-brother (ew), carrying his baby to term (um?), and not telling her husband (sigh... understandable, but side note: were they married before she slept with her brother or did they get married quickly after because she got pregnant? why wasn’t he at her father’s funeral?This alludes to either her sleeping with him more than once OR the baby isn’t the brother’s but she still feels responsible for her husband thinking it could be). However, it isn’t her fault that they both die, it’s her crazy husband who drove them off the road. He seemed like not a nice guy, even though she said that he was great. Finally, her last sin, of sleeping with Golding, who she thought was a widower, and moving into Lively’s life. Not ideal, sure, but there was something between them, and they thought Lively (the bitch) was dead. Everything else she does is to find out the truth.

Lively, on the other hand, starts by helping her sister kill her abusive father (I can get behind tbh), then exploits a hard working artist (:/), lies and cons her husband (:( ), kills her addict sister (she is blackmailing her but... :( ), and finally tries to kill both Kendrick and Golding (:(( ).

The only other thing I have to comment on is the use of bisexuality. It seems like a lot of narcissist/psychopaths/liars in Hollywood are bisexual, which is not great representation. It’s supposed to show how the psychopath does not view sex and attraction as an intimidate thing, but a tool to get what they want from a person of any gender. Did Lively secretly love Kendrick? Maybe a little bit in the beginning? Besides that kiss, there’s little to no evidence of that. The kiss is what makes it so single-white-female-y, shows how desperate Kendrick is to make a connection, to be known and loved.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and I would recommend it.

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no-name-mutt · 4 years ago

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And (Working Title)

Mostly unedited here. Probably many mistakes.

Ji-Woo Suzuki was six generations removed from her ancestor Shimazu Nariakira, a galvanizing feudal lord of Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Shimazu Nariakira’s most famous quote was words that Ji-Woo worked to install firmly into her life.

"if we take the initiative, we can dominate; if we do not, we will be dominated."

After years of war, scheming and destructive cajoling, Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910. Korea was considered a part of Japan until the end of WWII and subsequently, the fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945.

During this time, Ji-Woo’s great grandmother, Jeong-Ja was forcibly betrothed. Jeong-Ja (ji-young ja) was eleven years old. Jeong-Ja was arranged to marry Sora Nariakira. Sora abhorred the thought of marrying a Korean woman. Sora, as with most other Japanese people during this time, saw Koreans as second class citizens to the Japanese. In their marriage, Sora took every opportunity to order Jeong-Ja like a slave. One late night, Sora forced himself upon her and Jeong-Ja became pregnant.

A daughter was born, Hina Nariakira. While Korea was under Japanese control, it was initially illegal to change your name. As it were, Koreans that refused to change their names, were unable to enroll in school, receive mail or even receive meal rations. Eventually the colonial bureaucracy allowed the changing of names, and as much as 84% of Koreans changed their names. Speaking the Korean language was banned and Korean newspapers and printing houses were forced to close. Nearly 200,000 ancient and historical documents were burned. Korean youths were volunteered and conscripted into the Japanese army. Shinto shrines were built, and became places of forced worship. Japanese colonial policy became a clear policy of unlimited cultural erasure.

Hina attended school and became a voracious reader and journal keeper. Hina, as a product of her environment, became fluent in both Japanese and Korean. From an early age, it was evident that Hina was highly intelligent. Her vocabulary in both Korean and Japanese quickly surpassed Jeong-Ja’s and Sora’s respectively. Though Sora was quick to forbid speaking Korean in the household, Jeong-Ja taught her in private.

Sora frequently had Hina recite aloud his military orders. If there was ever a word that he didn’t understand, he would strike her. This was a sign to make the order as comprehensive as possible, though his reasoning was always, “Do not waste my time with pointless words!”

Life for Jeong-Ja and Hina was of unceasing malaise. Their only solace was in each other.

From reading Sora’s military orders, Hina became familiar with impending military movements, encampments and strategies. Hina learned of an upcoming landing of US Ships to discuss treaty possibilities. Hina devised a plan in which Jeong-Ja and her would flee their home to seek refuge with the US Navy. Somehow, discovering their plan, Sora attempted to stop the two from fleeing.

In a frenetic haste, Hina jumped on to Sora’s back, holding on to him with an arm around his neck. He drew his Manchukuo manufactured pistol, the Sugiura, and started firing wildly. Hina kept a dull pen-knife for protection and stabbed him three times in the chest, and twice in the neck. In a matter of seconds, Sora had fired every bullet in his pistol, one of which struck Jeong-ja in the head. She died instantly. Hina fled to the US Navy ship, covered in blood and alone.

The Korean peninsula has been in an imperial theater of war since the late 1800s. It remains a strong strategic naval position and is between three of the strongest and most hostile countries; Russia, China and Japan.

Hina found herself as a refugee, aboard a US battle cruiser. From Hina’s journal, we know that while aboard the ship, she was raped multiple times by a Japanese-American Navy captain. Hina became pregnant. Clinton James Suzuki was a rising star among the ranks and arranged his marriage with Hina. He thought that having a baby out of wedlock would be detrimental to his military career. Hesitant, and silently unwilling, Hina agreed to the marriage. Through this, Hina became a US citizen.The wedding was expedited and facilitated onboard the cruiser. As her belly grew, so did her hatred for Clinton Suzuki.

Hina silently imagined his death in whatever setting they found themselves in. If he choked while eating, she wouldn’t save him. If he had fallen overboard, she wouldn’t call for help. If he slipped and fell down the stairs, she would elect to simply walk away. When the two arrived back in the US, there was to be a Navy welcoming parade in port. All of the seamen were to be standing with their wives (if they were married) on the dock as the Navy cruisers came back to port. Though Hina’s husband would have preferred to not be seen with his very young and very pregnant immigrant wife, he thought it would be a great opportunity to rub shoulders with those higher in command.

As the ship was coming into port, the anchor was dropped, and four inch thick mooring lines were lashed from the anchor to the ship to the dock. Hina’s husband was the first one out on the dock behind the commanding officers, hoping that it would impress a lieutenant, admiral or anyone with any sort of authority. She happily let him stand as far away as possible from her.

As the last mooring line was being lashed, a massive and potent rogue wave rocked the ship, and snapped the thick cable. The cable whipped downward and cut him cleanly in half from the right collar bone, down through the groin. His body fell apart like a sliced melon. Hina was silently imagining him drowning in the bay, but she never could have envisioned that. For a second she was stunned, and then started to laugh hysterically. She was finally free.

Hina easily found translator work. Although Hina adhered to strict ideals of frugality, she made enough as a single mother to comfortably support her newborn son Kaito Suzuki. Kaito Suzuki stood an average five foot nine inches. His hair was short, poofy, and straw like. His arms and legs were thin and underdeveloped, though his torso was somehow, rather round. Kaito had a round face, unremitting acne and eyebrows in need of a good trimming. He attended public school. He was unremarkably below average. He found little interest in extracurricular sports and clubs; instead, he spent most of his time skipping class, smoking pot and hanging out with his like-minded friends. After barely graduating high school, Kaito was given an ultimatum, either find work or attend college. In the end, Kaito decided to move out of his mother’s house and found work as a second shift janitor at night and weekend garbage collector.

Kaito Suzuki and Ji-Woo I(the first) first met when she decided to stay late at the commercial real estate office where she worked. Kaito was just starting his shift, starting by collecting the garbage around the office. Ji-Woo I was a quiet, mild mannered individual. She came from a good home and an affluent community. Ji-Woo I was going through a “rebellious” phase and began making a flurry of short-sighted decisions all revolving around Kaito. The two developed addictions to different drugs and made small time scams in order to fund these new habits. Ji-Woo I unexpectedly became pregnant. The night they found out, Kaito grabbed her car keys and said he was going out for cigarettes and never returned. Hina was the only person in the delivery room when the daughter was born. Ji-Woo I was emotionless. She stared emptily at the crying newborn girl. Ji-Woo I looked to Hina in silent disdain. Hina nodded in affirmation. When Ji-Woo I was released from the hospital, Hina drove her to the airport and handed her some money. Neither Hina nor the newborn baby girl ever saw her again.

Hina decided to name the baby Ji-Woo II, after her mother. (Whom despite the situation, actually quite liked.)

As a baby, she cried constantly. Even in sleep, she murmured and wept in unsilence. Ji-Woo would stop crying only momentarily if she were fed pureed sweet potatoes or ripe apricots.

When Ji-Woo was six months old, she stopped breathing for nearly two minutes. Hina panicked, rushed to the emergency room. But by the time Hina arrived at the the hospital and Ji-Woo was breathing again and after that point, Ji-Woo never cried again. It’s as if she were an entirely different baby. Ji-Woo excelled in school and surpassed all of those around her. She had few friends throughout her youth. It wasn’t until her mid twenties when she learned how to simply “get along” with those around her.

Ji-Woo took a master’s degree in Japanese History. Then continued on to get a doctorate in Korean History. After a few bored years of teaching, Ji-Woo left to attend law school.

Everything about Ji-Woo was professional. Her skin was fine, with a healthy touch of melanin. She had high cheekbones and slightly sunken cheeks. A slightly upturned, pointed nose, symmetrical eyebrows. A single asymmetrically placed mole populated her face. She was beautiful. Equally strong and delicate, like the skeletal system of a great predatory bird. Her hair was long, to her lower back, though it was always pulled taut into a perfect braid. She wore simple, gold Tiffany earrings. She purchased them for herself. Ji-Woo’s wardrobe consisted mostly of well-fitting dress suits that obeyed her movements like a harshly conditioned army. There was never a loose thread out of place. Not even so much as a single piece of lint dared to adhere itself to her. She had an athletic, hidden, muscular build that I couldn’t help but to admire.

As a lawyer, Ji-Woo was ruthless. She constructed such pithy arguments, the opposition was often left speechless. And on a few occasions they were left literally stammering. Ever professional, Ji-Woo never showed any form of celebration or elation in victory. She spoke clearly, with seriousness and a dose of harnessed emphasis. Ji-Woo’s days were neither ‘good days’ nor ‘bad days’. She took on the day’s obstacles as if she had rehearsed them wholly the day before (though probably didn’t need it.).

The first time that I saw Ji-Woo Suzuki I was somehow dragged into a meeting of which I had no reason for being in attendance. I was struck by her. Though I prayed I could stay hidden, as a fly on the wall. Ji-Woo Suzuki led a team of class-action specific lawyers. Without ever speaking with her, one would simply assume she was the unquestionable leader. Only after an introduction, Ji-Woo Suzuki would offer to call her “Ji”, as a favor to you. It was not uncommon for people to reply to this offer by thanking her. Though, they were often left deciding whether to continue calling her Ji-Woo out of respect or interpreting her offer as an order. Most people continued to call her Ji-Woo or Ms. Suzuki.

I was staring at her. She was unpacking her case notes. People in the room started conversing. She uncapped a Montblanc rollerball and began to write. Just then, she stopped writing, wrinkled her brow in confusion and looked up directly at me as if to ask, “Who are you, and why are you here?” Her look was sharp, piercing but gentle. A needle and thread.

She looked right through me. And that was the first time I knew,

I was going to marry Ji-Woo Suzuki.

The meeting must have ended. I assumed so because the room had started to clear out. I hadn’t really been paying attention, not that I should have been. I wasn’t even supposed to be there in the first place!

I pretended to collect my things slowly trying to match Ji-Woo’s pace so we could incidentally leave the conference room at the same time. This was quite difficult because I had no belongings to pack up, nor a briefcase to put them in. So I took out my phone from my pocket and pretended to reply to an email. I looked up again and she was already pushing her chair in (when did that happen?!). She moved with intent. I hurriedly shoved my phone into my pocket and jumped up to meet her in the doorway.

“Hi”, I said, giving my best impression of someone far more casual than myself.

Ji looked at me quizzically, replied dryly with “Hello” and continued past me. Just like a fighter-jet breaking the sound barrier, she was gone, leaving only a potent echo. I must’ve blacked out, because the next thing I knew, she was already halfway down the hall. A paper came loose from her briefcase and she didn’t seem to notice.

This

was

chance.

I fast-walked down the hall as coolly as possible, “hey wait!” I called out. But she was already rounding the corner down the hall. I picked up the piece of paper, in perfect cursive writing it read,

I see you, do you see me?

5:00pm

My temple wrinkled in confusion. I looked up again and she was gone. The heart in my chest reminded me of its presence with a mighty thump. I felt myself sweat. Was this meant for me to find? I returned to the copy room and returned to my work.

But all I could think of was one Miss Ji-Woo Suzuki. One moment she was there, and then she was not.

In the periphery,

of where I wanted to be.

I felt invigorated. Anxious and curious.

Piqued.

I got back to the copy room and looked at my digital casio watch, 2:04pm.

My inbox of “to be copied” was now spilling out. I assumed position in front of the plastic, off-white monstrosity.

First, I’ll take the source material in my left hand! Then! I read the copy instructions and made the proper adjustments and number of copies. After the copies were completed I placed a single paper clip on the ream and set it in the pick up box. Organized alphabetically. To most people, the job would seem boring, though I would argue that there are quite a lot of nuances to it. For example: Eighteen copies of pages one through three, six copies of pages four through ten, and that’s an easy one.

A page goes in, the scanning light travels from right to left, and left to right, pages come out. I know the machine inside and out. I know because I have had to take it apart and reassemble it, not without hiccups, of course. I went home that day with a black ink stain on my chest. Like I was blasted by a shotgun, and bled black. The skin on my belly was still stained where the ink and bled through the shirt.

Occasionally pieces of dust or folded paper would cast a shadow on the rest of the page. It caused a ghastly, black, pixelated shadow to print on the copies. Sometimes the shadowed copies were fine to pass along, sometimes, they were better discarded.

At five pm, I stood outside of Ji-Woo’s office. I was nervous to enter. She sat behind a sleek mid-century desk with her legs folded. Her slate gray dress suit and Mac Pro reminded me of a brutalist era sculpture I saw once as a teenager. I didn’t understand the sculpture then, though maybe I do now.

She had nice legs, I absolutely understood that. I caught glimpses of her toned calf muscles through the gap of her desk as I paced as casually as possible in front of the open doorway.

After a few paces back and forth, I heard her call out to me, “You can come in, you know.” I froze. Then somehow came to find myself sitting in the chair across from hers. The desk remained between us. I didn’t know what to say, at that moment, I couldn’t be sure if I knew how to speak.

“I noticed you today in the Carter vs. Amadeo-Hastings meeting.” She said.

“No… I mean, yes, I was there. Just trying to learn what it’s all about.” Do you think she bought it?

“Are you interested in practicing law?”

“Uhm, yeah, interested? Definitely.”

I actually had only worked at the office for about a month. I was still fairly unclear on what business the office conducted, let alone the ‘partners’. Before, I worked at the busiest copy center in Seattle. I got let go after I yelled at a customer, “Stop breaking my shit!” and in my defense, they were going to break the

Konica Minolta c754e! Those things aren’t cheap, and the replacement parts take three weeks to get to the states.

“Would you like to go to dinner with me?” She asked.

I felt a draft in the back of my agape mouth. Ji-Woo liked a breeze in the office. I found that out later that night when she told me at dinner.

We continued to see each other after work every Tuesday and during the day on Saturday. This was when Ji-Woo allowed herself recreational time. I learned a lot about Ji-Woo’s schedule during this initial period of dating. I found her structure and stoicism quite sexy. She made all of the reservations at restaurants. And not just nice restaurants, she even made reservations for tacky hole-in-the-wall places that she knew I would like. A few times she would order for me. Like a mind reader, she would always order exactly what I wanted yet never in a demeaning way. She seemed to know exactly when I wanted to speak for myself and when I was comfortable with her ordering for me.

After about a month, midday on a Friday, she sent me an email. The subject line simply read,

“Tomorrow Night 4/16/2019”

Hi Kentaro,

Please meet me at my house tomorrow night at 6:00pm. We’ll go to dinner. I’ve made reservations at 7:30. Casual attire.

This was more or less the usual date query. Though, interestingly, she signed it at just Ji. Futhermore, she would usually ask to meet at six with reservations about the time it took to get to the restaurant. Surely we weren’t going somewhere that was an hour and a half away.

That night, I was talking to an old friend of mine, Leo, on the phone. I was telling him about Ji-Woo and I. About how I eagerly awaited those Tuesdays and Saturdays. And about the one time I asked her out on a whim on a Friday night. She declined. I was upset for a while. But respected her need for personal space, and strict schedule. “It’s just how she is”.

I told Leo that we hadn’t had sex. “That’s good dude, she’s probably a Sazae Oni” he replied sarcastically. I didn’t understand his reference, but as his tone implied, it was a snide comment I’d best ignore... but didn’t.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked sharply.

“Sa-zae Oh-ni!” He said louder and slower in syllables, as if it were common knowledge. He continued, “They’re these folk tale snail mermaids that preyed on Japanese pirates. They would pretend to be in distress, but when the pirates brought them onboard, the sazae oni would chop off their balls and hold them ransom for gold. They’re like, obsessed with gold or something.” A weird silence filled the phone line as I looked around the room, waiting for him to finish.

He started again, “ok, it doesn’t matter. You’re the Japanese one, should you know what a sazae oni is?”

I held my lips taught, annoyedly.

“Well, is she someone you’d bring home to meet your mother?” He asked me. I thought about this for a while. I imagined a cartoon caricature version of my mother asking me, “Why would you want to be with someone that is so serious all the time?”

Up until this point I had never even seen the inside of her apartment. Whenever I was to meet her there, she would already be outside the gate waiting for me.

That Saturday night I took a cab to her apartment building as I usually did. It started to rain on the way over and fog grew in density the closer I got to the apartment. I didn’t check the forecast beforehand, and I didn’t have an umbrella. I arrived at the gate and Ji-Woo wasn’t around. I checked my phone for any missed messages from her, but there were none.

I buzzed her intercom. “Hi, I’m here. Are you there?”

“Still getting ready, come up.”

She buzzed me in. This was it, I was finally going to see where(and how!) she lived. 6th Floor, apartment 6F. Embarrassingly, I panted a bit when I got to her floor. I stood on her doormat, it said ‘Welcome’. I was slightly damp, everywhere. I wore an old grey knit sweater. I had washed it so many times the collar was getting tiny holes. Faded blue jeans and shabby sneakers. I checked my casio, 6:00pm exactly. “Yes! Perfect timing” I exclaimed silently as I clenched my fist in victory, then knocked on the door insouciantly. “Come in!”, I could hear Ji-Woo shout from behind the door. I opened the door, slowly. I floated in like an astronaut, opening the hatch to an alien planet. I opened it to a small foyer. There was a modern-looking coat rack which I hung my soggy jacket on. To the right was an inviting, lamp-lit living room. There was one of those long arched floor lamps spilling its light on an Eames Lounge chair. I imagined Ji-woo perched on it, with a warm beverage, reading a dense book. Floor to ceiling bookshelves and floor to ceiling windows lined the rest of the room, I realized it was a top floor corner apartment. Black and white photographs and pen drawings hung on the wall. There were blankets draped on the modern couches. It felt uncharacteristically cozy. The furniture all flowed perfectly, like it was a team of designers’ life’s work.

On the left there was another closet. Then further down, it opened up to the dining room. “In here” She shouted, from that direction.

I kicked off my tattered sneakers and the uppers deflated like popped balloons. I took one step toward the kitchen and I was struck with the most extraordinary smell. It was rich, minerally and spicy. I let my nose lead the way.

She stood at the stove. She was wearing a loose knit navy sweater that was well loved and jeans. Her sleeves were pushed up. She was wearing a nice apron. Her hair was pulled back, not in a braid, but in a perfectly round bun.

The dining table was set for two. Plates, silverware, a wine glass for her and a beer glass for me. There were two candles and a decorative bowl. The bowl was filled with some unknown liquid that looked like molten gold. I wanted to stick my finger in it but didn’t.

She turned and saw me, and I saw her. “I didn’t mean that casual.” she said jokingly. Lately she has been making more and more jokes, but only during our dates. It was comfortable, and usually pretty funny.

“It smells so good, what is it?” I said. I walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter by the stove. She leaned over and planted a kiss on my lips. I was so surprised that it was over before I could react. There was a battle in my head between the heavenly smelling food and the thought of the kiss.

“It’s almost ready. Get us drinks from the fridge.” She instructed me. The fridge was filled with different sized glass containers. They all stacked neatly, each with a label of what it was and a date. There was a bottle of white wine and a fancy looking beer with today’s date. I took them from the fridge and opened them. She looked as though she were a professional chef. She moved with tempered urgency and precision. “Budae-Jjigae. Budae is ‘army’ or ‘army base’, jjigae is ‘stew’. It’s a recipe my grandmother taught me... a long time ago.” She stopped what she was doing and looked off into space.

A few seconds later, she regained consciousness from her memory and started to plate the food. It was finished.

It was delicious. It was perfect. It was obvious that Ji-Woo had made this dish many times and was able to recreate it perfectly. “How many other romantic interests had she made this for?” I wondered, but quickly spurned the thought. I wasn’t shy, and got a hearty second helping.

I wiped my mouth and leaned back in my chair, and polished off the last of my beer. I wanted badly to unbutton my pants and relieve the pressure on my waistband. Instead, we got up and cleaned the kitchen together.

Later on, we found each other on the sofa near the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I was elated. Warm, with a full belly. Calm, sleepy, but present, I closed my eyes and relished.

“Do not fall asleep.”

Ji-Woo instructed me. “I will be right back.” She said.

Insubordinately, I was falling asleep when from down the hall, I heard her call me, “Come here, I need to show you something.” I sleepily approached the room at the end of the hall. A bedroom. As I got closer to the doorway, I could see a mirror’s reflection in the bedroom. It truly was a bed-room. A queen size mattress and two small side tables with lamps were the only furniture. Warm, golden light spilled out of the bedside lamps that reflected off the polished hardwood floors and floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A single, brand new candle was lit on the nightstand. But there was no lighter or matches anywhere. How was it lit?

Ji-Woo lay on the bed, one leg crossed over the other. Her right arm supported her posture. Her hair was down. It was now I could fully realize the length and volume of her hair. It flowed down her back and fanned out perfectly behind her like a ginkgo leaf. The low lighting in the room accented her dark makeup. Her eyeshadow shimmered subtly.

She was wearing a lacy bodysuit of lingerie so scant, it could hardly be described as clothing. A lacy and delicate fabric choker connected to thin straps perfectly obfuscated her nipples. Ethereal panties suspend a pair of elegant garters. The fabric adhered to her slender, toned body as if it were made custom.

She eyed me fervently,

And I was very awake then.

After it was over I felt euphoric and peaceful,

Unburdened.

I turned over, towards her in bed.

I put my head on her chest.

And I heard nothing.

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vintagecoldcases · 5 years ago

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The Case of April Tinsley

April Marie Tinsley was born March 18, 1980. She lived with her mother and father, Janet and Michael Tinsley, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. April had a twin who passed in the womb months before her birth.

April was last seen alive on April 1st, 1988, when she was 8 years old. She and her friends had been playing in between houses and around 3pm, she had gone to retrieve her umbrella from the previous house. Janet Tinsley, April’s mother, had reported her missing to the Fort Wayne police when she did not return for dinner that evening. Later, a witness said she had seen a man in his 30’s drag April into a blue pickup truck after she was leaving the friend’s to retrieve her umbrella.

The initial search for April included about 250 Fort Wayne police officers and 50 volunteers. 3 days later, April’s body was found in a ditch 20 miles from her abduction site in Spencerville, Indiana (DeKalb County) by a jogger. Near the site where her body was found, investigators had found one of her shoes and a plastic shopping bag with a sex toy inside of it. Her autopsy revealed she had been sexually assaulted and then strangled to death. It was also revealed that she had been deceased for about one to two days and she had only been in the ditch for about 4 hours before her body was discovered. April’s memorial service was held on April 8th, 1988.

Early on in the investigation, police questioned a 34 year old suspect who was linked to another child molestation case who was acquitted of those charges in the following month and was no longer considered a suspect in Tinsley’s case. About 90 members of the Fort Wayne community formed APRIL (Associated Parents Regional Independent League, or later Abduction Prevention Reconnaissance and Information League). The case proceeded to go cold for a few years after that.

On May 21st, 1990; police were alerted to a taunting message left on the wall of a barn in St. Joseph Township. The message was littered with misspellings and read; “I kill 8 year old April Marie Tisley I will Kill agin.” The message was also written in crayons that were found at the scene. Initially investigator’s started to believe that Tinsley’s case was related to the murder of 7-year-old, Sarah Jean Bowker, but was ultimately determined to be unrelated. Again, after the discovery of this note, the case seemed to go cold for another 14 years.

During Memorial day weekend in 2004, four notes were found to be written by April’s killer. Three of these four notes were left on young girl’s bicycles and one was left in a mailbox. Three notes were placed in plastic shopping bags, just as the bag was found near April’s body 16 years before. The notes were placed in the bags along with used condoms and polaroid photos of a man’s lower half masturbating. All of these notes were left on yellow lined paper with the same handwriting and misspellings as the original note found on the barn wall did. One of the note’s read, “Hi Honey I been watching you I am the same person that kidnapped and raped and killed April Tinsley. You are my next victim. If you don’t report this to police or I don’t see this in the paper tomorrow or on the local news or I will blow up your house.” The DNA collected from the condoms and the notes was identically matched to the DNA of April’s killer.

The polaroid photos were very helpful in the case, giving the first clues as to what parts of the killer’s body looked like. The photos showed that the man was circumcised, had hair on his legs, and had shown a blue and green paisley patterned bedspread. Police believed that this man either owned or borrowed the light blue pickup truck in 1988 and then owned or borrowed a green pickup truck with a matching camper shell and dark tinted windows. After these notes were left, the killer went silent for many more years. The FBI joined the case in 2009 but no major breaks were made.

In May 2018, after police had successfully used a genealogy database and DNA analysis testing to secure the capture of the Golden State Killer, Brian Martin arranged for the DNA to be tested in the April Tinsley case. This DNA testing narrowed down the suspect pool to two individuals, 59-year-old John D. Miller and his brother, on July 2nd. Police were then able to examine three used condoms from Miller’s trash and it was an undeniable match to the DNA left by the killer.

Once this match was made, police approached Miller at his home in Grabill, Indiana on July 15th 2018. His neighbors often described him as secluded and often angry. After reading Miller his rights, when investigators asked Miller why he thought officers wanted to talk to him, he replied; “April Tinsley.”

During his interrogation, Police asked Miller to explain what happened and he replied with, “I can’t.” Later admitting that he abducted April in 1988 from Hoagland Street and took her back to his trailer on Main Street in Grabill, raped her and then choked her to death, saying that it took about 10 minutes for her to die. He also admitted to raping her body and dumping her in a Spencerville ditch on the morning of April 2nd. Miller told police that he killed April because he did not want her to report him for raping her. Miller stated that he drove by the dump site once he had not seen it on the news, noticed April’s shoe was still in his car and threw it out into the ditch.

Official’s charged Miller with kidnapping, murder, child molestation, and confinement on July 19th. 2018 to which he pleaded not guilty. On December 7th, 2018 Miller changed his plea to Guilty saying he molested April and strangled her with his bare hands. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison (50 years for murder and 30 years for child molestation). He is being housed in the New Castle Correctional Facility and his earliest release date will be for July 15th, 2058.

#truecrime #true crime #april tinsley #crime #serial killer #true crime blog

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maidenof-thesea · 5 years ago

Text

Snakes and Butterflies | Preface

Pairing: Jimin x reader

Genre: Soulmate Au!, Fluff, Angst, Smut (Maybe, still debating)

Words: 2.1k

Warnings: MC briefly mentions self harm but she recovers.

Note: So this is my first series, I sort of dabbled in writing when I was younger. so I’m no expert but feedback is appreciated. I always enjoyed reading fan-fictions and always wanted to try it myself. Hope you like it!

"So your room will be on the 3rd floor, facing the parking lot behind this building" I say to the couple in front of me as I hand them the keys to their hotel room. When they both reach for the keys I see their soulmate marks both matching arrows. I look up and feel my fake customer smile come on my face as I met their gaze. "Elevator is on the first hallway to your right as soon as you leave out the door. Dial zero if you have any questions." As soon as the couple is out of hearing range, I let out a sigh that Fernando, the security guard, hears.

"It's almost time till you get off," He says. "I have 7 more hours to go.."

"Oh you’re right" I say, as I look at the time on my phone. "Time to go home to the love of my life: my Yuki."

"Y/n, you need to go out and have fun like other girls your age," He says laughing and rubbing his beer pot belly. "You never know, you might just meet the love of your life...which would be nice in times like these.."

"Times like what?" I say counting out my last cash drop of my shift. "Did you see something on Facebook again? I told you so many times--"

"I saw this on the local news!" He says with red blotching his cheeks. "Young girls! Young girls around your age getting abducted! They turn up later on having no memory only that their Soulmate marks are gone!"

"Let me guess," I say printing out my paperwork and logging out of the system so that I could wait for my relief to come running through the door late again. "All these girls had a bunch to drink while having this so called 'fun' you say and this happened to them."

He stammers for words and in comes running my coworker who happens to work the graveyard shift. I saluted her and I gestured for her to hurry up and clock in since guests are pulling in the parking lot. She smiles and hurries to start the beginning of her shift, while Fernando walks me to my car.

"Okay," He starts when we reach my car. "Perhaps not now but later when this whole ordeal dies down." I hum in response ready to get in my car as I unlock it, but he stops my door from opening.

"I just worry about you, that's all y/n. Most girls either rebel or try very hard to find the one that matches their Mark but you.. you hide behind those sweaters and let no one near you, I've never even seen your Mark-"

“Fernando," I say grasping his shoulder. "There's no need to worry, I'm just letting fate decide for me. We've been blessed with this, surely fate means for me to come across them at some point in my life." I feel my other hand clench at the word 'blessed'. Surely to me it was a curse. I force myself to smile and I see that it works, he's convinced. "I just want time for myself. I want to grow into a person that feels like she's lived her life and is willing to open up and welcome someone." That wasn't a lie, that was genuine and I felt my voice wavering with emotion. Emotion I didn't know I still had. Fernando pats my hand and opens my door. I roll down the window after starting the ignition. I smile as I hear his radio go off, my coworker stating she needs him upfront.

"Alright then miss," he says smiling. "I will let you go now and get some sleep!" I wave at him, as I reverse out and start the short drive home. My smile fading off my face as I clenched the steering wheel, willing myself to force unwanted emotions and memories away and drove the short distance to my home.

The reason I decided to move out here to one of the beach cities was to escape. I found solitude in the sounds of the waves. My friend Jennie had recommended me to stay in this house alongside her family’s private beach, once I had told her my plans of moving out. She told me the rent would be really cheap which was impossible to believe but she told me that her family was planning on making it an airbnb during the summer and that they needed someone to manage it. She offered a wage but of course I declined, I just told her to hire someone to clean and I’ll manage the rest.

It had been a year since then and now summer was just peaking over the horizon again and I knew I was gonna have to take time off to get everything situated. As I got through my door, my beloved Yuki, my tonkinese cat greets me with her purring and rubbing around my ankles.

“Hello my precious, how was your night?”

She purrs and licks my petting hand. I go to take off my coat and shower before bed. As I strip my work clothes, my arms catch my glance and from the conversation from earlier, I am reminded just how much of a freak I am. Where there should have been a Mark, lied just my skin. Scarred skin, to be exact, scars that matched my finger nails.

Rather than face the questions and pity in people’s faces, I rather hide. Hide just how pitiful my life has been. As the warmth of the water envelops me, I don’t feel the need to hide, at least not here in my own home, well that is till the summer. I force the pity I have for myself away and hum a tune. After that I fed Yuki a late night snack and turned on the TV to watch some Netflix. Just then my phone dinged and I saw a message from my mother.

Mom[10:47 pm]: Have you seen this? Link: ww.foxnews.com/missingMarks

I clicked on the link and apparently the news I thought was just local made national news.

“Today in a small town in southern California, tragedy has struck for several young adolescents who were out enjoying their youth when their very futures may very well change forever.” I rolled my eyes at that. They’ll live. “These women were abducted and their Soulmate marks stripped from their arms. All of them have no recollection of their whereabouts in the last 14 hours. Here’s Nancy with one of the victims.”

The clip changes to a girl with her eyes blurred out but it was evident that she was crying as she kept wiping her face.

“I swear I just needed some air, I stepped out for a bit and I woke up at some park and this excruciating pain in my arm… my Mark was gone, almost as if it was burned off! How am I ever-gonna find them?!”

Once again I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes, although a part of me was reminded of my teenage years but now older me, thrives in independence. My phone dings again, indicating another message from my mother.

Mom[10:52 pm]: They think there’s some Neanderthals out there taking Marks away… is that even possible? I thought they were extinct…

Me[10:52 pm]: I thought that was just a bedtime story??

Mom[10:55 pm]: Seriously? It’s in the history books! Why would you think that?

Me[10: 57 pm]: You know why… I don’t really care for things involving those stupid Marks. Besides I learned that along with basic math, how am I supposed to remember that?

Mom[10:57 pm]: I know sorry. But you should at least know our history!

Me[10:58 pm]: Ok I’ll watch a documentary on it on Netflix right now

Mom[10:59 pm]: You just got off work! Go to sleep!

Me[10:59 pm]: yea yea goodnight <3

“Maybe we should just sleep Yuki?” I say as she jumps on my lap and continues to purr and make herself comfortable before I could even get up. “Oh well guess I’m not moving.”

I grab the remote and start Netflix and about to click on Stranger, a Korean drama that I binged in the night prior but a new planet earth documentary catches my eye. This time instead of endangered species it’s about Neanderthals, an extinct race of human beings.

“Would you look at that?” I say tilting my head in curiosity. “Guess I am gonna learn our history.”

As the documentary starts to play, I get a text from my boss that she needs me off for tomorrow so I could work a full shift the day after and I internally groan but realize I can sleep in tomorrow. The theme song of Planet Earth starts playing and I am reminded of my childhood when I see the photograph of the Neanderthals, they look more ape like than human. I begin to wonder if they really actually looked like that or if they were exaggerated or not. Would they still look like that or would evolution help them adapt among humans now? Assuming that they were still alive…

“Humans and Neanderthals have always had their differences and constantly were at war with each other. Evolution had blessed humans with the abilities to procreate faster by aiding humans to find suitable partners. Each generation of humans was more beautiful than the previous. The Neanderthals, unfortunately were unable to evolve like us human beings and they would rape and pillage humans in order to procreate. Thanks to our advancement in evolution, humans were able to develop better weapons and eradicate the Neanderthals…”

“Okay,” I said rolling my eyes, raising the remote control. “Enough of that genocide bullshit.”

“But what if that’s all a lie?” a man obscured in the video said. On the bottom where typically the name of professors or researchers would be credited, the name ‘John Doe’ was instead. This caused me to raise my eyebrows. This man did not want to be known. Of course what he just said is considered blasphemous. “What if I were to tell you that humans are not the apex predators-that we never were the apex predator? That our ancestors may have won the war but fabricated history for their benefit?”

“That’s quite possible,” I mumbled. “But how could you possibly obtain the evidence to prove that?”

“Of course there is no evidence left to prove that but I have dedicated my entire research into finding the remaining Neanderthals. Our ancestors could never locate the actual origin of the Neanderthals-”

“Seriously? I thought that place was just a myth!” I exclaimed, rousing Yuki from her sleep. With the flick of her tail she hopped off the couch and headed to my bedroom to sleep on my bed. “Sorry baby.”

The documentary went on and on about the possibility that Neanderthals may live among us. That everything we know is a lie, that Neanderthals were the ones who evolved, they were the ones that had Soulmate marks… but there was no evidence to support it.

I turned off the TV when the credits started to roll. “Well another documentary to piss off the republicans.” My eyes started to feel heavy and instead of going to my bed I just pulled the throw blanket over myself and fell asleep.

“Y/n look! Fireflies!” a boy with crescent moon eyes and Cheshire smile came running up to me with cupped hands. On his arm, was a Soulmate mark that wrapped around his entire arm, like a snake. It was the most beautiful I had ever seen. Most marks were abstract symbols but this was the first animal one I had ever seen.

“Can I see, Jimin?” another boy said excitedly running with buck teeth, almost like a bunny’s.

“No I want to show Y/n first!” and the boy called Jimin reached me and opened his hands.

The fireflies floated up the sky and both me and the other boy stared in awe. The other boy proceeded to try and catch the fireflies once more and when I looked back at Jimin, he was already staring at me with a gleam in his eyes. He reached for my hand and when our skin made contact, a shiver went through the both of us. When I looked at our joined hands, I noticed that instead of a snake tail on his wrist, the snake’s body seemed to morph into particles and the particles continued onto my arm and morphed into butterflies..like a puzzle piece.

“Y/N-”

Masterlist

#jimin #bts #jimin x reader #reader insert #soulmate au #soulmate!au #bts soulmate au #my work #kpop scenarios #kpop oneshots #bts smut #jimin smut

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axwalker · 5 years ago

Text

The Trade 7

Synopsis: Liam is running for Cordonia’s presidency. To assure his victory, Constantine makes an arraignment behind his back for him to marry the rich ambassador’s daughter: Alexis O’Brien. Due to her father’s threats, she has no other option that seduce Liam and make him fall in love with her. But what does she really feel? (AU)

Pairings: LiamxMC DrakexMC

Warnings: I love drama and chaos so this will probably get a bit dark. In this chapter there is mention of rape, if you get triggered by this issue, don’t hesitate to send me a message and I’ll be glad to explain what happens without reading it.

Please note that this is my first series and English is not my first language. I really love ALL kinds of feedback. Don’t hesitate to comment!

Disclaimer: Some of the dialogues and settings as well as most of the characters belong to Pixelberry (except for Alexis O’Brien and her evil father George O’Brien). I also used a line from Grey’s Anatomy that really made me think about Drake.

To catch up: Masterlist

Thanks to @of-course-i-went-to-hartfeld for being my incredible beta reader and always being there to answer my questions and her support, to @burnsoslow for helping with the first part of this episode, it was very difficult to write. and to @mskaneko for the beautiful edit of Drake and Alexis in the mood-board (I can’t stop looking at it) ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

I'm only tagging those who asked if you want to be tagged, I will be happy to add you to the list

@mskaneko @of-course-i-went-to-hartfeld @fromthedeskofpaisleybleakmore @burnsoslow @pug-bitch @pedudley @msjr0119 @lauzales @yukinagato2012 @kingliam2019 @texaskitten30 @desiree-0816

The debutant’s ball was all Sienna O’Brien could think about. She adored her granddaughter and was absolutely proud to present her to her high society friends. Alexis was a smart, poised and beautiful young woman; Sienna couldn’t understand why her son had been adamant to send her to that French boarding school. The old woman admired how the sunny fifteen-year-old girl managed to make everyone around her happy. It was a miracle considering her father’s coldness and her mother’s inattention. Sienna knew that deep down, Elena loved her daughter but after years of living with George, she had become a ghost of herself, always drunk or heavily medicated. It all broke her heart, so when George took some interest in Alexis’ date to the ball, the old woman felt almost happy thinking that her son might love his daughter after all. They had finally agreed that she was going to be escorted by Bradford Davenport III, the son of a wealthy and renowned businessman. Alexis couldn’t believe her luck, Brad was extremely handsome and, even if she didn’t go to his school, she knew he was the most popular boy there; that all the girls at the cotillion wanted to be escorted by him. According to her grandmother, he was a true gentleman; the heir of a very good family. Even her father was pleased with the choice. The young girl had learned a long time ago not to seek his approval, but she was thrilled to get it when she could. As the date of the ball approached, Alexis was so excited about it that she had tried her white gown a hundred times and rehearsed more different hairstyles that she would ever admit. She felt like a princess.

Finally, the day had arrived. It had started as a dream. Brad was certainly good-looking and could dance perfectly, spinning her all over the dancefloor while he made her laugh. He took care of her, making sure she always had something to drink and he didn’t leave her side for a second. The adults left the ball early so he promised her father that he would drive her before 1 o’clock. Alexis was feeling too drunk, so she asked him to take her home at midnight. They hopped in the backseat of the car, so she could recover a little before getting back. Brad gave her a soft kiss that made Alexis feel like she was floating. Emboldened by her response he kissed her again, harder this time. Then he went further and grabbed her by her waist knowing that she was almost out of it after all the alcohol he had given her. Brad was convinced that she desired it as much as he did. After a few seconds of kissing her she started to resist him, she didn’t want this, her first time had to be special, not in the backseat of a car. Alexis could smell the alcohol in his breath, feel his sweat, and his hands everywhere. She tried to fight against him, but she wasn’t a match for him. He didn’t want to listen to her cries or see her tears. He ripped her dress and after he took what he wanted, he drove her home."

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Alexis had woken up happy and excited. The moment she had spent with Drake gazing the stars had been incredible. He was all she had imagined, behind that brooding and strong façade hid a sensitive man and she couldn’t deny any longer the indescribable power he had over her. She shivered remembering his touch when he held her hand and the warmth emanating from his body when he had hugged her after she had almost fallen.

It had been the first time in her life that she had felt completely safe.

Suddenly, she thought about Liam, and a pang of overwhelming guilt replaced the excitement. Alexis knew what a good man he was, but now she was sure she would never love him back. Maybe Liam’s interest in her was simple infatuation, but she didn’t want to make him suffer. The seed of a solution started to grow in her mind, it was a long shot but maybe if she asked him for help, he would do it. She would have to arrange a meeting and make him understand that it was in his own son’s best interest.

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Constantine decided to wait for George’s daughter in the breakfast room.

“Good Morning, Alexis.” He smiled politely pointing to the seat across the table so she’d sit. “How can I help you?”

“I need to ask you for something” She didn’t have the energy to be polite anymore. “It’s not for me, it’s for your own son, but maybe this is not the best place to talk.” She paused looking around her

“Don’t worry, the staff won’t bother us. I ordered them to leave us alone when you called.”

“I wanted to talk about Liam, about what you and my father are trying to make me do to him.” She sighed trying to compose herself. “Please Constantine, think about your son. He’s an amazing man, he deserves a woman who loves him. I’m not, or never will be, that woman.” She stopped talking to gauge his reaction. “I know you made a deal with my father but I’m sure you can continue without me. If you tell him you don’t need me, he will let me go-”

He interrupted her smirking “Oh, but I do need you, Alexis. First, because as you can see the press is already starting to associate the two of you as a couple.” He showed her the paper he was reading with pictures of her and Liam at the Masquerade ball and paparazzi’s photos of their date at the Mexican restaurant. “That was brilliant by the way, taking him to such a poor place, they’re presenting him as the people’s candidate.” She rolled her eyes as he continued, “but I’m digressing. I also need you as a guarantee that your father will complete his part of the bargain.”

She couldn’t help but snicker at him. “If you are thinking to use me as leverage, you’re sorely mistaken, Constantine. You can be sure, that if my father thinks is in his best interest to throw me under a bus, he would be driving that bus himself. Having me does not give you any advantage.”

“I’m not going to discuss this any further with you. If you’re having doubts about my son because is too soon just give it time” He stood behind Alexis putting his hands on her bare shoulders. She shuddered at the contact. “However, if it’s because there’s someone else, that could be dangerous for everyone involved. I hope you fully understand me.”

She realized how stupid she had been to believe Constantine would help her. “Yes, I do. Perfectly.” After that, she left the room, leaving the ex-president alone. He picked up the phone and called his associate number.

“George, we have a problem. I need you to control your daughter”

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Since he had met Alexis O’Brien, Liam had been feeling like a 15-year-old teenager again. He couldn’t stop thinking about her day and night, and he was really excited to start working with her on the campaign. He had read all the articles she had wrote and they had fascinated him even more.

With his heart threatening to go out of his chest, he heard the soft knock on the door and opened it.

“Hi Alexis, please, come on in.”

“Thanks, Liam.” She sat in the chair across from him. “Are you ready for me to pick your brain?”

He smiled gently “Of course. What do you need?”

She ran her hand through her hair “Well, I’d like to know more about your motivations as a candidate, about what drives you. A good speech has to reflect your personality above everything else. If it feels fake, you’ll lose the public’s trust immediately.”

“Yes, of course. Let’s see, when we met, I told you that it wasn’t until I became senator that I truly understood the value of politics” She nodded “For the campaign, I had to visit all these neighborhoods that I didn’t even know existed before. I had the chance to see real people facing problems that were completely alien to me” He sighed “There was this school we visited. There were 45 children in a class with only one teacher, and the conditions weren’t the best either: no computers, the state of the desks and chairs were deplorable, the teachers seemed completely overwhelmed by the whole situation. They were teaching, but they didn’t believe they could actually help these kids anymore” He paused again thinking “Here I was, this privileged man thinking he was living in a great country, one that gave everyone the same opportunities to go far in life, but actually ignoring everything about the people he wanted to rule. That day was the day I knew I wanted to make a change. Starting with the reform of the education’s program of Cordonia”

Alexis looked at him impressed. His passion was contagious, he had a real desire to make things better, to help others, and to improve his country. He would be an outstanding president.

“Let’s start with the anecdote and then we will move forward to explaining your education reform.” She smiled.

After a few hours exchanging ideas, they had finally written a speech draft they were equally satisfied with. They were both tired, but Liam didn’t want their time together to end so fast.

“How about we take a break before the ball?” He stood up and walk around the desk to sit on it, in front of Alexis’ chair.

Remembering the earlier conversation with Constantine, she answered trying to seem joyful “Sure! What do you have in mind?”

“There’s this amazing terrace in my room, maybe we can have a few drinks there, the view is incredible.”

Alexis' eyebrows almost touched her scalp. “Your room?”

“Hey, I’m a gentleman” He winked. “If you want me to be one of course.”

She let out a hearty laugh that almost made his heart stop. “Aren’t you smooth?” She sighed amused “Let’s go have that drink.”

Liam smiled relieved “Just give me five minutes, I have to make a call.”

Fifteen minutes later, they entered the room to access the terrace. It was magnificent. The beautiful panoramic was breathtaking, they could see the huge snowy Lythiko’s mountains, the shimmering lake that surrounded Olivia’s property, the hundreds of pines that seemed to have been planted in the snow, the wooden cabins all around the place. It felt like a Christmas fairytale. And the terrace was incredible too. Awfully sunny even in the wintery day, spacious, and luxuriously decorated. It had an outdoor couch full of beautiful cushions, and the small table in front of it was set with a rose’s bouquet, some candles, and a bucket containing a freezing bottle of champagne.

Alexis was in awe at the view. “Wow, Li. It is amazing”

“Beautiful, isn’t it? Now you see why I wanted to share it with someone.” He stood close to her, brushing her hand with his thumb

“And all of this?” She pointed at the table “You were with me the whole time”

“I have my ways,” he said grinning “and I wanted this to be magical for us”

They sat on the couch.

“You didn’t tell me if you liked it” He was looking softly at her

“Liam…” Touched by the gesture, she wasn’t sure how to answer “It’s very nice. I love red roses”

“I have to be honest with you Alexis. I’ve never really had someone I wanted so badly to please. I feel like I would do anything to make you smile and know that I am the cause”

Another pang of guilt in Alexis’ chest almost made her jump “Liam…”

He blushed “Ahem, anyway, what if we open this bottle of champagne”

After uncorking it and pouring two glasses, they toasted.

“To a great life” He clinked her glass without taking his eyes off her.

“To a great life” She repeated smiling and drank “This is so good Liam; I love it”

“There are few things better in life than a good bottle of champagne shared in good company” He took one of Alexis’ hands and kissed her palm “Alexis, I feel like I’ve been waiting for this moment the entire trip”

She smiled at him, unsure of how to behave, torn between her task of making him love her and her reluctance to hurt him.

Liam put his drink at the table and turned to watch her “You make me want so many things, things I never wanted before. I want to be careful with you, I’d hate to hurt you in any way”

“Don’t worry about me, Liam. I will be fine. I know what I’m getting myself into. Besides, you’re the model of a good person” Even if she was certain that her heart wasn’t hers to give anymore, she sincerely liked him and knew that if she hadn’t met Drake before, she would have fallen for Liam.

He caressed her cheek “If I’m not, I hope I will be, for you. You inspire me to be a better man”

He leaned to kiss her when the room’s phone rang.

“Well, if that’s not bad timing” He smiled taking her chin between his fingers “I do not know what is. “Wait here, love”

She waited a while but when it became evident that the call was going to last more than a few minutes, Alexis went into the room and waved her hand to say good-bye. They would see each other at the ball.

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Kiara left her lover’s room as quietly as she could. Even if she was perfectly aware that Rashad couldn’t care less who she was sleeping with, and if It had been months since the last time he had touched her, she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, face the scandal. She had too much to lose.

Rashad was also very careful when he left the room at the end of the hall that afternoon, if Kiara or her family knew who he had been sleeping with, he will lose everything.

They almost crashed into each other in the hall.

“Darling, what are you doing here?” And with last night’s clothes.

Kiara looked angrily at him “I… I don’t want to lie anymore Rashad. If you’re so interested in my life you should come to my bed more often. If you can’t do that, we’ll continue our relationship because that’s what’s best for us, but we will lead separate lives. I’ll go prepare for the ball, we have to arrive together. See you at 7 at my door”

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Olivia was more than content with the result of Max’s and Penelope’s work. With a bit of luck, they would be able to attract the most prominent men in Lythikos and make them contribute to Liam’s campaign. She sighed when she saw Drake arriving without a bow tie.

“God Walker! Couldn’t you make a fucking effort and dress properly for this?” She rolled her eyes, giving him his accustomed glass of whiskey “If he wins, you’re going to be the new Chief of staff”

Drake chuckled “Ha! If Liam chose me for my fashion sense, he’s gonna be in a lot of trouble”

“I think it will always be a mystery for all of us why he chose you,” she answered teasingly. “By the way, as you can’t behave like an adult around that toad Neville, and Kiara bores you to death, I seated you with Hana Lee and the new ‘speechwriter’” She almost spits the last word

“I can tell you really like her, Livvie” He smirked at her and then added more seriously “Be careful with her though” he looked pointedly at her “she’s…not bad”

Her eyes narrowed to slits “Why are you protecting her? And what have I told you about calling me that?” She arched her brows “Do you want everyone to know your nickname? Little marsh-“

“Shut up, Olivia. I’ll go find my seat” He watched her knowingly and pointed his index at her “And you better behave”

Drake was nervous to see Alexis again but with Hana acting as an unknowing buffer, the diner had gone smoothly. After it, the girls had stood up to dance, so he moved to his favorite spot at the bar and watched the dancefloor, his eyes irremediably going to her. He wasn’t disappointed at the sight; she was dancing like a goddess in Maxwell’s arms. Iit made his heart swell to see her smiling and laughing freely. Sometimes he got the feeling that there was something haunting her; some dark secret that prevented her from being truly happy.

He saw his best friend take a stool next to him, then look around the dance floor until he found her too. The goofy smile on his face while he watched her move let no doubt about Liam’s feelings. The waiter gave Liam a glass of scotch that he downed in one gulp.

“I’m falling hard for that woman,” he told Drake, nodding in Alexis' direction.

Drake’s heart literally stopped at Liam’s words, in almost 23 years of friendship, it was the first time Drake wanted the same thing that Liam did.

He sighed before answering “I know”

“Do you think she feels the same?” Liam smiled sheepishly

Drake knew that any other woman in Cordonia would have fallen instantly in love with the rich and promising candidate but he wasn’t so sure about O’Brien. In all the moments they had shared together, even the one where she had rejected him, he had felt something strong brewing between them, something he couldn’t quite define.

He exhaled. “I have no idea, Liam. I think she’s very closed-off.” Then remembering that morning’s newspaper, he added unhappily, “but she seemed to be having fun with you in those pictures.”

“Yes, my father had us followed. I was very angry at first but as he pointed out, it all turned out well.”

Drake growled. “What do you mean it turned out well? They followed you, took pictures of you… of her, of a private moment. Doesn’t it drive you crazy that your father is trying to use Alexis like that? Like she’s a pretty object that he can use for your advantage?” Drake knew he had sounded angrier than he had intended.

Liam stared at his best friend coolly. “I don’t understand why are you angry Drake; you know perfectly how a campaign works. You know I was trying to find someone to help me boost my image. I would’ve thought you were happy that I found someone that I actually like,” he paused, “that I’m starting to love.”

Drake knew Liam was right, his biggest fear since he had entered the campaign had been to live trapped in a loveless marriage, it looked like he was going to be able to avoid it, and as his best friend, he should be happy about it.

Before answering, Drake allowed himself to look at her one last time “I apologize Li. I’m actually happy for you.” Trying to hide the pain he was inexplicably feeling he stood up patting his friend in the back, “you deserve the best and she seems… incredible.”

“Thanks, Drake, I know you only want what’s best for me.” Liam was grinning again

“Of course, Liam.” Drake felt a sudden urge to breathe fresh air. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Without waiting for Liam’s answer, Drake left the ballroom.

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Alexis was dancing with Maxwell again, but despite the fact that he was trying to be as joking and chatty as usual she could see that something was tormenting him. It killed Alexis how hard he was trying to hide his misery, so she finally grabbed him by his hand, stole a bottle of champagne from the bar, and took him out of the ballroom into the library.

“Ok Max, you’re gonna tell me exactly what is going on,” She said passing him the bottle after drinking from it.

“What do you mean Lexie? I’m fine, just a little tired. I’m sorry if I’m not a lot of fun tonight, though.”

“Maxwell! You’re under no obligation to be fun and sparkly all the time. And you certainly don’t need to apologize for having a night off. I only brought you here because I thought that you might want to talk to someone.”

Max sighed sadly “Remember when I told you yesterday that I was sort of in a relationship?”

She nodded

“Well... I’m not anymore”

“Aw Max I’m so sorry,” she said hugging him “I remember how happy you were. Are you sure it is final?”

“Actually, is not. I can even bet that he will be calling me tonight to patch things over but,” He took a large sip of champagne, “I don’t think I can take it anymore.”

“What do you mean Max?”

“People see me like this immature boy, but the truth is that I’m proud of myself. I came out when I was sixteen, and I’ve never looked back, but now here I am 12 years later struggling in a relationship with a man that can’t accept himself” he sounded almost angry “I love him but I just can’t do this any longer”

“If you love him and he loves you back, and I can’t imagine him not to” she smiled at him “Maybe you should give him some time. Not all of us are as comfortable with ourselves as you are, Max. If he comes from a more traditional family than yours, then he needs love and support to take that step. I know it’s not fair. How long have you been together?”

“Uh, almost a year” He drank again.

She put her arms around him “Maybe you can give him a deadline, like six more months, a little time to think. If he doesn’t do it, then you’ll probably have to move on; But at least you’ll know that you did everything that you could”

Max nodded pensively “Yes, I’ll talk to him tonight. Thank you, blossom, you’re the best” He hugged her, then offered her his arm “Want to be my lady for the rest of the evening?”

“Go on without me and find him. I’ll take a tour through Lythikos mansion, it seems fascinating”

“Ok, but don’t get lost” He shuddered a little scared “The Nevrakis love secret passages”

She winked at him “Don’t worry. I will”

She started walking, lost in her thoughts until she saw a light at the end of the corridor. She approached it to discover a spiraling staircase. Without thinking it twice, she climbed it down and found a cellar at the end of it. Her heart missed a beat when she saw Drake sitting there, looking at an empty glass.

He looked up when she entered, his heart missing a beat as well. “First the snow and now here, I’m starting to think that you’re stalking me, O’Brien”

“You wish Walker.” She arched her brow smirking “Drinking alone?”

“I needed to get out of that ballroom for a second”

“Yeah, I know the feeling. Can I sit?” She asked, smiling.

-God that smile is going to be the death of me- He moved to let her seat next to him on the floor, immediately drunk with her scent.

“What are you having?”

“Nothing yet. Olivia has a very extensive collection of fine Cordonian wines, nothing here is under a thousand dollars”

“You want to drink Olivia’s wine?” She added playfully “I thought you were more of a whiskey guy, Drake.”

They both looked at each other thinking about the night they had met, an electric tension starting to grow.

Drake broke the stare clearing his throat “Ahem, I brought this bottle of Dalwhinnie, here, taste it” he poured her a glass.

She licked her lips before taking the glass to her mouth savoring the sour smell of the beverage. It took all of Drake’s willpower not to throw the glass away and kiss those full lips until she couldn’t breathe anymore.

“So?” He asked arching a brow, trying to hide his thoughts.

“Delicious.” She gazed at him thoroughly “Care to tell me why did you want to get out? “

There was no way in hell that Drake was going to tell her the real reason “I wanted to be alone in a place where I don’t have to bow and kiss ass for five minutes. It’s fucking exhausting trying to get all those rich bastards to donate to Liam’s campaign.”

“Please Drake, tell me what you really think,” She said playfully.

He snickered and the wrinkles around his eyes made him look so handsome when he smiled that she couldn’t stop herself from carefully putting her hand in his arm, savoring the electricity that immediately passed between them. “Seriously though, if you hate politics so much, why do you stick around?”

He looked at her cautiously, her opinion mattered to him much more than anyone else’s “It must seem ridiculous to you.”

She stared at him. “No, it’s not ridiculous, Drake. I’m just trying to understand why a brilliant man as yourself is wasting his life doing something he so clearly hates.”

“It’s for Liam, it has always been for him. I would’ve left a long time ago, but Liam needs me. Growing with Constantine was especially hard for me and Olivia. My sister was so obedient that he never had to complain about her, and Leo and Liam were his sons. But the old man was very hard on them too. Eventually, Li, Liv and I became very close and we swore we would always protect each other”

Alexis looked at him with piercing eyes, biting her bottom lip, clearly wanting to say something.

He stared at her amused. “I know you’re dying to say something O’Briens. Spill it”

“Well, it seems to me that you and Olivia do all the protecting” When she saw he was about to protest, she added “Don’t get me wrong, Li is a very good and caring man. It’s just that I have the feeling that you were raised to move around him like he was the sun. And now, you’re stuck in that role. But you’re an extraordinary man, handsome, brilliant and funny. He’s not the sun Drake. You are” She blushed to realize she had said much more than she had intended.

Her words melted all of Drake’s resolutions to keep her at arm’s length, he reached her face with his thumb stroking first her cheek, then her nose and mouth, his heart threatening to go out of his chest as he looked her bright eyes and that smile he had learned to adore.

He approached her gently, pulling her to him with his left arm. Suddenly Drake felt her hands around his neck; he heard her breathing accelerate and he smelled her cherry fragrance. He stopped to inhale it and savor every single second. His eyes fixed the mouth that was driving him slowly crazy and kissed a corner of it, making Alexis softly moan, he smiled to himself and kissed the other corner, producing another tender moan. Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer and crashed his mouth with hers, trying to convey everything with a single kiss. He kissed her with all the passion, the desperation, and the pain he was feeling, he kissed her knowing that it would be the last time. After a while, the need for air made them break the kiss, and the spell was broken.

“I’m sorry Drake.” She struggled to breathe normally again. “I don’t know what we were thinking, we can’t do this anymore. “I- I should go.”

He stood up first, giving her his hand to pull her up.

“I know Lexie,” he said softly. “I know we can’t. I just needed one more time” He caressed her face with the back of his hand “Come on, we have to go back to the ball, everyone must be looking for you.”

“You go first, my father is waiting for me at the office Olivia lend him.”

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George knew that her daughter’s secret was the only means he had to control her. He had lost all of her respect after that debutant’s ball ten years ago and the truth was, he didn’t care. His daughter only existed to remind him about the worst mistake of his life. As he poured brandy into his old associate’s son glass, he congratulated himself. Calling him had been the right move. After seeing him, Alexis wouldn’t have any other choice, but to do what she was told.

At 9 pm sharp, his daughter knocked on the door. Alexis entered the office where his father was talking to another man turning his back at her.

“Good evening, Alexis. I called you because there is an old friend of yours visiting Cordonia, and I thought you would enjoy reminiscing; he’ll be staying here with us.”

The man turned and Alexis couldn’t believe her eyes. Even if she was aware that her father didn’t have any limits and that he would do anything to assure her cooperation, she didn’t want to believe he would go that far.

However, there was no denying it. Bradford Davenport, her abuser, was standing in front of her, his obnoxious hand reaching hers. She jerked away stupefied. The hatred was consuming her entirely. She looked at one then the other contemptuously.

“I will never, hear me, well father. Never sleep under the same roof that this excuse of a human being”

“Always so dramatic. Bradford is an associate and a friend; I couldn’t care less of your little teenage romance”

Maybe it was the fact that her father has referred to the second most horrible experience of her life as a “teenage romance” but Alexis was so filled with rage that the next thing she knew she was slapping Brad.

His father was furious. “Alexis, apologize, now!”

She turned around slamming the door after her and ran to the garden.

When she was sure that they couldn’t see her any longer, she fell into the grass and the tears started to come. All the old feelings resurfaced: the shame of the next day, the acute pain, nausea, the deep sadness that would become depression, the sensation of being dirty all the time. In a few minutes, the tears had muted into gut-wrenching sobs, until suddenly she felt his presence standing a few inches of her.

“O’Brien?” in two steps he was on his knees next to her caressing her hair “God! What’s going on?”

As she continued to cry Drake took her in his arms and rocked her. “Oh, Lexie, baby, please tell me what happened”

Suddenly she knew there was only one thing that would make her feel safe again.

“Please, Drake, take me far away from all of this. I just can’t take it. I know I can’t”

Drake looked at the damaged woman before him and his heart broke. He stood up determined.

“Come on, I know where we can go”

#tw rape #tw noncon

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darylandbethfanforever9 · 5 years ago

Text

Downfall of Us All: Chapter 2

Special thanks to @jtargaryen18, who deserves more credit for helping me write this story, and for putting up with my crazy ideas. Check out her amazing stories, on here and on AO3.

Warnings: Forced Breeding, Angst, Depression, and Grief.

Downfall Of Us All

Chapter 2

Clint managed to put on a t-shirt, and a pair of jeans, he tied up his boots with some luck. He stood up and looked at the right side of his stomach where Laura had stabbed him. His heart ached for the loss of his children; he would never see them again. He'd never hold them, watch Cooper become a good man or see Lila walk down the aisle.

They were gone, but he'd never forget them.

He walked to the conference room where the others were waiting, and Ross was there already. He glanced at the Home Secretary with hatred burning in his eyes, as he looked at the man. He wished he hadn't taken the deal with Ross, he'd wanted to see his children, and this was the price he was paying. If he'd been with Nat, Steve and the others.... would things have been different?

Maybe. "We have discovered that two sisters, Sophie and Grace Drăgoi Melnychenko are the daughters of a Red Room Operative. Her name was Anya Melnychenko, she was born in Ukraine, Kiev." Ross said coldly and pressed a remote that showed a photo of a blonde-haired young woman. "Was she around the same time as Natasha?" Tony asked cautiously, he knew Natasha's past was a sore subject to be asking about.

"Anya Melnychenko wasn't around when I was being trained. But I heard whispers about more young girls being recruited," Natasha admitted quietly, Steve squeezed her hand tightly. "Stark, pull up the file on here." Ross ordered harshly, and Tony's face darkened but he did as the man ordered. He pulled up the file, and Clint felt his stomach roll in nausea. "They were impregnated by Winter Soldiers, who were HYDRA assassins." Steve said sickened, and Clint glanced at Bucky whose face had darkened in anger.

"I don't understand," Bruce said, "and with all respect, Nat, because I know it's an unpleasant subject. But weren't the Red Room agents forcibly sterilized?" "This came from the Red Room," Ross explained, "but it was a different program. It was called the Widow Program. A breeding program. According to the intel we've gathered, they intended to hand select young women from the Red Room and breed them with the Winter Soldiers. Their intention was to breed a superior class of elite female assassins. Instead of training them as small children, as they have for decades in the Red Room, they would begin shortly after conception." Clint shook his head. "After conception? What does that mean?" "Anya was the test subject in this program," Ross went on. "They selected her to be the first in this program. Both times they used a soldier named Adam Drăgoi, Romanian in origin, to impregnate her." At the name, Bucky glanced up at Ross. Did he know who he was? Was the name familiar? "And he was a Winter Soldier? Like Bucky?" Steve asked wearily. "Not exactly," Ross replied. "While he was part of the program, his tendencies were not as violent as the other soldiers. It was why he was selected." "It's rape either way," Nat threw out, looking disgusted. Ross nodded but went on. "Once they were certain that the pregnancies were viable, and the foetuses’ female, they experimented on each child in utero." "Before they were born?" Steve shook his head. "And female? So, if either of the babies were male…?" "The first one was a male foetus," Ross said nonchalantly. "They terminated that pregnancy." Nat's head lowered. Steve took her hand under the table as Clint watched, trying to comfort her. "What kind of experiments?" Clint asked. "What did they do?"

"The intel that we've recovered, suggests that they were injected with a rare form of spider DNA. A radioactive spider to be exact and were injected with its blood. They were also given a weaker of the Super - Soldier serum," Ross said bluntly, no empathy in his voice. "What happened to Anya? After she gave birth." Natasha asked quietly, her voice hard but everyone heard the anger in her voice at what they were hearing. "She and Adam escaped the Widow Program, they left and took the children with them. After that no one knew what happened to them, until after this." Ross said calmly and played a video. Clint's eyes widened at the sight of two young blonde-haired women, fighting off a group of men. He'd guess they were HYDRA, two of the men ended up in spider webbing, while the other two were blasted away. "They are wanted by the UN for refusing to sign the Sokovia Accords, you are to arrest them and by force if necessary." Ross said coldly and looked at them. "Any questions?" He asked calmly, and Wanda was the one who dared to ask the question. "What if we can't convince them to come with us?" Wanda asked bravely, Ross regarded the young woman with no emotion. "They will be sent to the Raft, you will be leaving in an hour. So, I suggest you pack a few things." He said sharply and paused. "Arrest Agent Grant Ward, he was protecting the sisters and broke the Sokovian Accords. So, bring him in, and Parker." The Home Secretary said coldly, and left. "Fuck, so we're dealing with two sisters who have spider abilities?" Bucky asked darkly, he was trying to remember any memories that had Adam in them. "Looks like it, Bucky." Steve said grimly and sighed. "Suit up."

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Grace Viktoria Melnychenko Drăgoi sighed quietly, as she cleaned up the small cake shop that her mother had owned. It had been Anya Melnychenko’s pride and joy, and she had raised her two daughters to help her run it. "Well, that's Mrs Carmichael's cake order done, Gracie." Sophie Melnychenko Drăgoi said softly, glancing at her sister reassuringly. Grace attempted to give her older sister a smile.

The cake she'd done for Mrs. Carmichael was a masterpiece in shimmering white frosting with three layers, intricate doves, and flowers. Her sister's artistic abilities never failed to amaze her. Grace loved a good cake as much as the next person, but her sister's were so beautiful she wasn't certain she could bring herself to eat one if it were offered to her. The counters were all done save for Sophie's counter space, the floors swept. Most of their supplies and ingredients were put away. Grace couldn't overcome the sense that something wasn't done. Something was out of place. Something wasn't right. "What's wrong?" Sophie asked her as she eased the cake into the refrigerated display case beneath the counter. Grace shook her head. "Can't you feel it?" The cake safely tucked away, Sophie wiped her hands on her apron and studied her. "Feel what?" Hanging up her own apron and setting aside her broom, Grace tried to give a name to the restless energy that had filled her mind with dread. It had started only a couple of hours ago. Granted that was at five o'clock, their busiest time when people were on their way home from work. And they had been busy so maybe that's why she'd told herself it was just daily stress, supply and demand. Only the feeling had grown worse. "Sophie, something is coming," was all Grace knew to say. "Someone is coming." "Who?" "If I knew I wouldn't ask, now would I?" Grace wrapped her arms around herself, feeling like her skin was crawling. "Does this have to do with that dream you told me about?" Sophie asked gently. "It wasn't a dream," Grace said impatiently. "I talked to him. And he's… coming with them. They are coming here. Oh, God! Can't you feel it?"

Sophie stilled and tuned into her senses, sensing nothing for a moment but then felt like her own skin was crawling. She shivered and looked at Grace. "Let's drop off this cake and go home." She said quietly, keeping her voice calm despite her inner fear. Grace nodded and pulled the cake out as she carefully got it onto the table. Sophie pulled out a cake box, so they could deliver it carefully in the car. Sophie took the cake, while Grace closed the store and put the closed sign in front of the front door. Taking in a few deep breaths, she took off her apron and placed it behind the front counter. She had been on edge since she'd had that dream, with that mysterious man who had talked to her. Clint, his name was Clint. She heard Sophie honking the horn, and she quickly left the store and walked to the black 1967 Chevrolet Impala. She got in, and they started driving back to their apartment. Their apartment was in downtown Brooklyn, a blue-collar area for working class families. When their parents had emigrated to New York, Brooklyn following the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had decided Brooklyn would be a good place to raise their two young daughters. She missed her parents so much, she sighed as she listened to the radio. Sophie was watching the road, as the car was one street away from their apartment. "We'll pack a few things, and take the cats with us," Sophie said reassuringly to Grace who nodded quietly, they drove into the apartment parking lot and turned the engine off. They walked not too quickly to the apartment building, and Grace walked beside her as they reached their apartment. Sophie unlocked the door, and they went inside quickly, and locked the door. Grace hurried into her bedroom and took out a small travel bag, she packed a few pairs of jeans, underwear, and shirts. She then packed a few tank tops, and t-shirts, and her toiletry bag. She quickly packed it with her shampoo, conditioner, deodorant and her soap, and packed it all in her bag. She took in a deep breath and found Starling fast asleep on her bed. She picked him up gently, and put him in the car carrier with Custard, Tom, Jack, Reg, Bonnie, Clyde, Paul and Oscar. Sophie came in with Patch, the tuxedo cat purring. "Got everything packed?" Sophie asked quietly, Grace nodded and picked up a framed photo, she kissed it lovingly and put it in her travel bag. "Yeah, have you packed everything?" She asked nervously, Sophie nodded and looked at their mother's bedroom. "I took the passports from the safe, and the money that mom saved up for us." Sophie explained softly, and they started leaving the apartment. Sophie had just grabbed the doorknob when a loud thump sounded behind them. They whirled around to see a large man climbing through the door of their balcony, an assault rifle slung over one should and the other arm was… Metal? Wait, isn't that…? Flinging the door open, carrier in hand, Sophie tried darting out the door, nearly colliding with the huge shield of Captain America. Steve Rogers stepped forward, forcing Sophie to step back. To say he filled a room was an understatement. His gaze darted from Sophie to Grace and back. "Ladies," he said. "Going to need you to come with us, please." Grace glared back over her shoulder at the Winter Soldier, who was slowly coming in behind them. "Stop, right there," Grace warned him. He froze but once they turned their attention back to Captain America, he took another step. Sophie zinged webbing back at him and in his surprise, she was able to jerk the rifle out of his grip and into hers. She wasn't unfamiliar with firearms, so she hauled it up, pointing it at Captain America's face. "Get over here, soldier!" Sophie yelled at Bucky, "where I can see you both." Grace heard the machinery of his arm working as he contemplated his next move. Lunging, that arm swung out to grab Gracie who scaled the wall, staying just out of his grasp, clinging to the ceiling and staying just out of his reach. "Buck, stop," Captain America told him. "Come here." Sophie kept the rifle pointed at America's hero and Grace watched warily as the soldier went in the direction of his leader, his eyes not leaving her once. Captain America lowered his shield, not so much out of fear that Sophie would shoot one of them. It appeared he wanted to talk. "We're not here to hurt you," the Captain told them. "We're trying to help you." "Shit!" All of them turned to see Spider - Man just inside their balcony door, his gaze riveted on Grace. "Grace?" He asked, pulling the mask from his head to reveal Peter Parker who had once been their neighbour. "Is that you?" Sophie and Grace exchanged glances. Grace dropped from the ceiling, her heart pounding in her chest. She'd always liked Peter. His presence made whatever was going on a little less threatening. "Yeah, it's me." "Wait. How do you know each other?" the Winter Soldier asked, frowning. "We used to be neighbours," Peter explained, walking forward to hug Grace. "Me and May have missed you guys." "We've missed you too," Grace told him, wishing they could be talking under other circumstances. Peter looked to Steve and Bucky then. "Guys, what are we doing here? Did they do something wrong?"

"They didn't register under the Sokovian Accords, and Ross considers them to be a risk to Homeland Security." Steve explained quietly, although he didn't like this either. "We don't want to be used as weapons, by any governments. Please, we just want to be left alone." Sophie pleaded imploringly, hoping they would understand. "Wait, you've got powers?" Peter asked startled, he knew that their mother, Anya was very protective of them. She was very strict about what boys they dated and had a soft spot for him. Sophie and Grace glanced at each other, and it was like they were having a silent conversation. They turned to face Peter, and Grace threw webbing at the wall, causing it to stock. Peter stared at them in shock, and they looked at him sadly. Grace especially looked remorseful, while Sophie simply looked defeated as she looked at Steve and Bucky. "You're both like me?" Peter asked finally, shocked at what he was seeing in front of him. They nodded, and Sophie was the one who spoke up. "We wanted to tell you, Peter. Honestly, we did, but mama was terrified at the thought of the government using us as weapons. She forbade us from telling you, but we tried to protect you," Sophie said quietly, regret in her voice. Peter was just a kid, and she was a grown woman. Peter should be at home studying, or with his friends or with May. Not fighting dangerous criminals, and dangerous organisations. Peter shook his head, he wasn't mad at them, but he was confused as hell as to why the Avengers, and Tony wanted with them. "We'll go with you, just please.... can we take our cats?" Grace said defeatedly, she knew they had no chance against two super soldiers and the Avengers. Not to mention, the Hulk. Steve nodded in understanding, and gently took her by the arm while Bucky took Sophie, as they left the apartment. People had come to see what was going on and were shocked to see the Avengers with them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Grace was trembling slightly, as they were led outside the apartment building, and showed to a black armoured truck. It looked like a prison van. "Sophie Vera Melnychenko Drăgoi, and Grace Viktoria Melnychenko Drăgoi, you are both under arrest for failure of not signing the Sokovian Accords. Barton, you'll ride with the younger one, while Barnes will take the eldest." A man in a black suit ordered coldly, and two soldiers walked over. "This way, mam." The soldier said quietly to Sophie she looked over at Grace who looked scared. "I'm not leaving my sister." Sophie said firmly, refusing to leave her little sister in the hands of this man. "Are you resisting arrest?" Ross asked challengingly, Sophie squared her shoulders and glared at him.

"Come on," Steve stared down the man in the suit. "They aren't resisting arrest. Let them stay together." "And pose more of a threat together? No," the man replied coldly. Grace hadn't paid attention to the other soldier standing next to the scary one with the metal arm. He was flinching slightly in pain as he dug out a pair of handcuffs. Then he looked up, his gaze meeting hers. It was him. Clint. The way his grey eyes widened on her gave it away. He recognized her. He was the man she remembered meeting. "It's okay, Soph," Grace told her sister before her insistence made their situation worse. "I'll be okay." Sophie frowned at her, mouthed "what the hell". Grace nodded, trying to assure her she didn't feel in any danger. If Sophie wanted to worry about someone, she should worry about the warrior who carefully placed her in handcuffs, strange-looking, thick handcuffs, and helped her into the van. As Grace watched, she was surprised with the care he took with her sister. Maybe there weren't all bad. They were in custody. She had to hope for the best now. The soldier slammed the door behind him and Grace watched the van drive away. Clint stepped up, Grace put down the carriers and held her wrists out in front of her, not contesting when he placed the handcuffs on her. His gaze met her; such sorrow shadowed those kind eyes as they gazed into her eyes. She remembered his children. How much he loved them, how he'd cried for them. He had his initial reaction to their meeting under control, but still, he handled her with care. He winced as he bent to pick up Grace's carriers. "Your side," Grace warned, not wanting him to hurt himself. He only picked up one. The corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. "I'll be okay." Steve grabbed the other carrier at her feet, walking behind them as Clint helped her into another black van and set his carrier down. Steve placed the other carrier in the van, slamming the door shut leaving Grace there on the bench seat next to Clint. "Thank you," Grace said to Clint in the quiet of the van as the engine started. Grace hadn't had a chance to tell her sister about meeting Clint, what she knew about him. Hell, they might have an ally in him in getting away from these people at some point. It broke her heart to have to give up their mother's cake shop. The small business had not only sustained them, it was the one thing their mother was so proud of, had worked so hard on. Their dreams weren't just going to end like this, right? They also had Peter. Maybe he could help them without compromising himself. He could tell them, in truth, that he hadn't know about their abilities before today. That they'd never posed a threat. That had to count for something, right? "Grace?" Clint's lowered voice pulled her from her thoughts. "You do remember me, don't you? That was real, wasn't it?"

"Yes, that was real. I was in your dream last night when you were flatlining. Thought I was going crazy at first, but I wasn't." Grace said quietly and looked at the street where their cake shop was. What if they weren't allowed to run the business? That was their mother's legacy, and Grace felt like she'd let down her mother, and to a degree her father. "Felt real to me, I saw you with your children. I'm sorry, no parent deserves to lose a child." Grace said sadly, her mind drifting to a little boy with dark blonde hair, and a sweet smile. She wiped her eyes quickly, and stroked Starling through the pet carrier, the cat purring softly. Clint looked at her quietly, she seemed to genuinely understand what he was going through. That confused him though, Ross had said that she didn't have any children. 'Maybe she's just being kind, she lost her mom and dad.' He reasoned silently and nodded at her in thanks. Grace smiled quietly and bit her lip. She hoped Sophie was alright.

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Author Richard Beck, in We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, locates the roots of the McMartin conspiracy theory in the social progress of the previous decade—particularly in the gains won by women. “In the ’80s you had a strong, vicious anti-feminist backlash that helped conspiracies take hold,” Beck tells me. “In the ’70s, middle- and upper-middle-class women had started to enter the full-time workforce instead of being homemakers.” This was the dawn of what the economist Claudia Goldin has termed “the quiet revolution.” Thanks in part to expanding reproductive freedom, career horizons had widened sufficiently by the end of the 1970s for women to become, in Goldin’s words, “active participants who bargain somewhat effectively in the household and the labor market.” They were now forming their identities outside the context of the family and household.

The patriarchal family was under siege, as conservatives saw it, and day-care centers had become the physical representation of the social forces bedeviling them. “You had this Reagan-driven conservative resurgence,” Beck says, “and day care was seen as at least suspicious, if not an actively maligned force of feminism.”

Day care held a prominent place in right-wing demonology. As far back as the 1960s, conservatives were warning darkly that child care “was a communist plot to destroy the traditional family,” as sociologist Jill Quadagno writes in The Color of Welfare. In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would’ve established a national day-care system. In his veto message, Nixon used the Red-baiting language urged upon him by his special assistant, Pat Buchanan, saying the program would’ve committed “the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing against the family-centered approach.” In a decade of rising divorce rates, at least conspiracism and reactionary social conservatism could enjoy a happy marriage. By the time Judy Johnson came forward in 1983 with allegations that a teacher at the McMartin preschool had molested her child, the country had been primed to assume the worst by more than a decade of child-care fearmongering.

Certainly it wasn’t just the movement of women into the workplace that created the conditions for a reactionary panic. There were other cultural forces at work. The anti-rape campaign of the 1970s, historian Philip Jenkins writes in Moral Panic, had “formulated the concepts and vocabulary that would become integral to child-protection ideology,” in particular a “refusal to disbelieve” victims. The repressed-memory movement of that era had created a therapeutic consensus surrounding kids’ claims of molestation: “Be willing to believe the unbelievable,” as the self-help book The Courage to Heal put it. “Believe the survivor…No one fantasizes abuse.” And the anti-cult movement of the late 1970s had raised the specter of satanic cabals engaging in human sacrifice and other sinister behavior.

Beck likens conspiracy theories to parables. The ones that stick are those that most effectively validate a group’s anxieties, with blame assigned to outsiders. In a 2017 paper on Pizzagate and pedophile conspiracies, psychology professor Jim Kline, now at Northern Marianas College, argues that conspiracy theories “are born during times of turmoil and uncertainty.” In an interview, Kline goes further: “Social turmoil can overwhelm critical thinking. It makes us get beyond what is logically possible. We go into this state of hysteria and we let that overwhelm ourselves.”

The McMartin accusations were a vivid demonstration of the rot in the American social structure, as perceived by conservatives. Perhaps inevitably, the claims metastasized. Now it was hundreds of children who had been assaulted and subjected to satanic rituals, and now, instead of just one McMartin teacher, there was an entire sex ring involved. One boy told of adults in masks and black robes dancing and moaning; of live rabbits chopped to bits by candlelight. “California’s Nightmare Nursery,” People magazine called it. But soon the case began to fall apart. The stories of abuse turned out to have been coaxed out of children by way of dubious and leading questioning. Judy Johnson, who made the initial accusations that her son had been molested, was found to be a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1986, a district attorney dropped charges—at one point there had been 208 counts in all—against all but two of the original defendants. A pair of trials ended in 1990 with the juries deadlocking on some charges and acquitting on the others. After seven years and $15 million in prosecution costs, the remaining charges were dropped.

However flimsy its premises, the case whipped up a national panic. In 1985, a teacher’s aide in Massachusetts was wrongly convicted of molesting 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old boys and girls; the prosecutor had told the jury that a gay man working in a day care was like a “chocoholic in a candy store.” Around that time, employees at Bronx day-care centers were arrested for allegedly sexually abusing children. Five men were sentenced before all ultimately saw their convictions overturned.

Liberals certainly participated in the hysteria—Gloria Steinem donated money to the McMartin investigation—but by and large it was a reactionary phenomenon. What drove the panic, Beck says, wasn’t just the sense that children were being harmed. “It’s that families were being harmed.”

In 2016, three decades after the McMartin trial, WikiLeaks, in cahoots with Russian hackers, published the private emails of top Hillary Clinton adviser John Podesta. In one, Podesta is invited to a fundraiser at Comet Ping Pong. Amateur internet sleuths blew it up into a conspiracy theory about a child-sex ring. The pedophiles communicated in code: “hotdog” meant “young boy”; “cheese” meant “little girl”; “sauce” meant “orgy.” The theory was easily debunked. Eventually it was abandoned by the high-profile internet figures who’d initially given it oxygen, but not before Pizzagate, as it was immediately dubbed, had spilled over into reality. In December 2016, a 28-year-old man named Edgar Maddison Welch, having driven from North Carolina to Washington, DC, fired an assault rifle inside Comet in a bid to rescue the children he thought were locked away there. No one was hurt. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison.

The QAnon conspiracy picked up where Pizzagate left off, alleging that the liberal elite’s pedophile ring extends way beyond one restaurant and that it is only a matter of time before Trump arrests Podesta, Clinton, and other Democratic power brokers for their crimes. All of this was fueled by an anonymous internet poster dubbed Q, who claims to be a government insider.

With Pizzagate and QAnon, the molesters have changed from day-care workers to the liberal elite, and the politics behind the theories now are more explicitly spelled out. But the general context is more or less the same: conservative retrenchment after a period of progressive social gains. If women’s entry into the workplace in the latter half of the 20th century triggered deep anxieties about the decay of traditional gender roles and the family unit, in the 21st century it was same-sex marriage, growing acceptance of transgender rights, and the seeming cultural hegemony of a social justice agenda. “Q found that fear,” says Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher and a host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

“While Q directly never touches on trans rights or those sorts of things, there is a great deal of anxiety on those sorts of issues,” he says, referring to the QAnon community at large. “They’re concerned generally on the sort of acceptance of trans people and the oversexualization of children.” On the matter of transgender rights, the conspiracists are aligned with “normal” conservative politics; from the state legislatures to the White House, Republicans have made considerable hay out of attacking and overturning various protections that had been extended to trans people.

Conspiracy theories of all kinds draw their energy from social anxieties. Occasionally there is some real basis for the theories. In her book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, Anna Merlan details the belief among black New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina that the city’s levees hadn’t failed on their own—they had been bombed intentionally to destroy the poor parts of New Orleans. The theory was “rooted in a real event—a 1927 decision to dynamite levees outside of New Orleans, the logic there being that they were going to flood low-lying areas and save the city itself,” Merlan said in an interview with Mother Jones’ Becca Andrews. “[I]t created a lingering sense of suspicion that maybe the government would do this again.”

View points out that the concern about elites preying on children isn’t baseless, either. “The core of elements of the systematic elite child abuse theories—they aren’t crazy,” he says. “There are instances of wealthy powerful abusing children and other people covering it up. Jeffrey Epstein, the Catholic Church. People have the sense that elites can commit horrifying crimes and get away with them.” The Epstein arrest earlier this month has done much to ratify the QAnon worldview. “This is just the beginning,” declared QAnoner Liz Crokin, a former gossip journalist. “The Storm is officially here.”

And thus does the legitimate concern about elite predation and impunity get woven into a demeaning and dangerous social crusade. The “Storm” cited by Crokin—also known as “The Great Awakening”—is part of the vivid eschatology that QAnon adherents share with traditional conservative culture warriors, one in which judgment is at last be rendered against liberals, and the nuclear family is restored to its proper place. “One thing they often talk about after ‘The Storm’ is that they imagine that the economy will be restored so that a single income can support a family again,” View says. “They imagine traditional gender roles and norms will be upheld and how children are raised will return to what [it] used to be.”

The differences between the pedophile conspiracies of the 1980s and those of today are telling in their own way. There’s the matter of scale. The pedophile witch hunt of the ’80s managed to mobilize entire institutions, with much of the media uncritically amplifying its falsehoods and police taking action based on shoddy nonevidence. Lives were ruined around the country. But except for some reckless far-right pundits and websites, the media hasn’t taken the claims of Pizzagate and QAnon seriously. Earnest conversations about the conspiracies are limited to online image boards and social media.

There’s also the nature of the targets. Where the pedophile conspiracies of the 1980s attacked the institutional emblems of feminist progress, the pedophile conspiracies of the 2010s attack the cultural emblems of creeping cosmopolitanism. The ritual abuse of the 1980s supposedly happened in the suburbs in state or state-licensed institutions such as schools and child-care facilities. Today the abuse happens in businesses in cosmopolitan cities. Comet Ping Pong, in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of DC, is known as a welcoming space that regularly showcases progressive DIY artists and musicians—“a tangible emblem,” in the words of University of New Haven sociology professor Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl, “of inclusivity, tolerance, and other progressive values that are threatening to the conspiracy-prone alt-Right.”

British historian Norman Cohn, in his book Europe’s Inner Demons, finds elements of pedophile conspiracies throughout history. In the 1st century B.C., members of the Catiline conspiracy, an aristocratic plot to overthrow the Roman Republic, supposedly swore an oath over the entrails of a boy and then ate them. And in the witch hunts of the 15th–17th centuries, tens of thousands of people were tortured and killed over allegations that they’d performed ritual child murder, among other heinous acts.

The conspiracy theories documented by Cohn are fundamentally political. The rituals they describe are the means “by which a group of conspirators affirms its solidarity,” he writes, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing “an existing ruler or regime and to seize power.” The mass witch hunts that followed are political too, based on the “demonological obsessions of the intelligentsia.” The history of American political reaction is full of sex demons. Jim Crow was buttressed by myths about black male virility. Likewise, North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill was sold in part on the fear that predatory men could say they’re transgender to gain access to women’s bathrooms. Opponents of abortion rights continue to conjure gory fantasies of promiscuous women committing “infanticide,” an incitement that Trump turned into an applause line in an April rally.

In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.

“Decay of morals grows from day to day,” goes one despairing account. A secret cabal is wreaking havoc across the land, the man complains to his friend. Its members “recognize one another by secret signs and marks,” and “everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust” that subverts “ordinary fornication.” There is a rumor that they worship the “private parts of their director and high priest.” Maybe the rumor is false, “but such suspicions naturally attach to their secret and nocturnal rites.”

In this dialogue, written by Marcus Minucius Felix in the 2nd century, the Roman pagan Caecilius Natalis speaks of Christians the way Pizzagaters described John Podesta and his fellow liberal elite. Natalis is particularly incensed by the cult’s initiation ritual. The details are as “revolting as they are notorious”: New members are initiated into the cult, he reports, by stabbing and killing an infant who has been coated in dough.

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