#its about redemption after death & its about refusal to die at all

[acheronist]

peglarmitage is soooo........ you people really do not understand the insane relationship history that i am seeing in the lacuna of this dead man's wallet

[miami-lolz]

In hindsight, this quote hits a lot harder considering “Mortyest Morty” isn’t even his Morty. And he’s not the “Rickest Rick”.

Does not include any spoilers for Season 7.

I feel like this quote is slept on a lot because it makes you wonder if he was even aware of the implications of what he said or if he said it knowing Morty wouldn’t understand. I don’t even think he would want to admit it, but he’s not “The Rickest Rick” mainly because he cares. Specifically, he gives a shit about a Morty that isn’t even his.

It’s shown subtlety throughout the show, like in the Season 1 Finale, Ricksy Business, when Rick got teary-eyed over a slide show showing Morty throughout his life. In A Rickle in Time, where Rick is willing to let himself die to save Morty, his last wish is for Morty to grow up better than him. As jaded and backward as he may show it, Rick definitely cares. Rick has had to switch to multiple universes and watch various versions of his family including his original Diana and Beth die throughout the show. Morty was his only constant, though, and he’s grabbed onto that. But for as much as he cares, Rick has a habit of pushing away, which comes into effect in the later seasons. Morty tries to help and relate to Rick to an extend. He constatly extends a branch to Rick, who almost always puts him down.

However, the more Rick pushes away, the more frustrated Morty gets. He starts calling out Rick on his BS and has even cussed him out several times. He’s threatened to stop going with Rick in the early season, but those were practically mute. Rick could easily force him or make him forget he started refusing. Rick only started taking Morty seriously when he began acting out. The more that Rick pushes back, the more the Prime part of Morty comes out, usually at the expense of anyone around him. I think that is the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back and pushed him to leave in Forgetting Sarick Mortshall with the two crows thing. Something that still upsets Morty if someone mentions it in season 7.

It also makes you think that the reason Morty has gotten progressively more aggressive and violent over these past couple of seasons is that the Prime part of him is getting more prominent. For example, in Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat, Morty got so obsessive over a future that he didn't brutally die; he quickly brushed off Ricks's death. It's somewhat out of character for him, though. He also attacked other soldiers and the general populace, just for him to find out it wasn't really worth much. Rick is getting more combative because he sees that part of Prime in Morty, which scares him. The episode Looks Who’s Purging Now was the starting point for his volatile behavior; Rick seems genuinely shocked and somewhat horrified as Morty's anger problems get the better of him, and he lashes out, killing many people even when they are hiding. Rick lied to Morty because he didn’t want him to know what he could do. Near the end of The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy, Morty threatens Ethan with the machine Summer used after he ghosted her and messed with her body issues. In the after credit scene, we see a deformed Ethan stumbling in pain, implying Morty used the machine on him.

In Promortyus, Morty also showed little remorse for killing off all the aliens and went out of his way to cause damage, though he regretted it once he had to come back. A Rickconvenient Mort, Jerry was genuinely disturbed to hear Morty admit he murdered the Tina-Teers. And during the scene, Morty was extremely brutal. Its not the first time Morty has committed some diabolical crimes for someone he's interested in or generally cares about. In the episode Mort Dinner Rick Andre, his violent streak hits its crescendo. Once he got fed up with the Narnia people, he committed mass genocide out of frustration, and by the end, he didn't show much remorse.

I think the most damning evidence is the episode Rickshank Redemption, where during a stand-off, Morty is so fed up with Rick yelling at him during a standoff that he shoots Rick in the head. Not an arm or leg but in the forehead. He absolutely shot to kill. And yeah, you could say it was a spur-of-the-moment action based on frustration and impulse, but I think that was put in the episode not just a funny bit but a glimpse of what Morty is capable of. It was Morty basically saying "If were all going to die, Ive earned the right to be the one to take you out." There’s something symbolical about Morty killing both his best friend and the person that’s hurt him for years.

Its an interesting dichotomy as Rick seems to be mellowing out; Morty is slowly getting more comfortable with violence and generally more confident with himself. Rick is someone who gives off the bravado of a uncaring, cold hearted galactic criminal. However, the truth is Rick is someone who cares deeply for the people he's close to, and gets no enjoyment out of violence. Morty, on the other hand, is someone who tries to be caring, mercy full and forgiving. That being said, deep down he wants to stop having to constantly take the high road and give back all the pain and abuse he gets from others. These personality traits between the two constantly clash and the longer the live together, the more you see their original persona's corrode.

The season six finale, Ricktional Mortpoon's Rickmas Mortcation, adds to this as Rick compares Morty to a “suicide bomber” because he was reckless and says he gets that from Prime. But C-137 is the only constant in Morty's life. He’s been through multiple universes and timelines but has had the same Rick for most of his life. Most of Morty's issues stem from things he had done or witnessed with Rick C-137. For example, the Vat of Acid Episode is what I would consider Rick at his absolute lowest. It's almost the kinda behavoir you would expect Prime to pull. Messing with Morty's head and killing a bunch of other Mortys just to say, "I told you so." Even going as far as gaslighting him by saying he COULD have listened to Rick tell him how it worked, even though Rick probably wouldn't have told him either way. It caused communication between these two to break down. At that point, you can tell Morty doesn't have much trust or faith in him, and when Rick replaces himself with a robot that treats him just a little bit better, Morty immediately notices. He even thought Rick was messing with him and brought up the vat of acid episode. This is another example of how the Ricks action leaves permeate consequences and effects on Morty. Don't get me wrong, Morty is far from perfect and flawed, but so is Rick. They have real emotions and conflict, and it's these factors that separate them from Prime (at least from the glimpses of him that we have seen)

However, Morty does exhibit certain traits unlike what we've been lead to believe is normal "Morty" behavior. In Rickmurai Jack, Morty tries to lie to Rick and even goes as far as to age himself nearly 40 years to get him to come back. Another example is in The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy, Where Morty coaxes Rick into going on an adventure with Jerry to keep him from committing seppuku, though there's a good chance it was just to get a break from adventures. Rick can’t really blame most of Morty's behavior on Prime because any behavior he picks up past season one is from him and him alone. But even then I don’t doubt that there are behavioral similarities between him and Rick Prime. The Prime universe was everyone’s personality amplified.

Rick almost likes to pretend his the top dog, the Rickest Rick but as few others, including Bird Person and the toxic version of himself, has pointed out, he’s not. He’s highly capable but he’s also vulnerable. Season 6 ended with Rick getting Morty more involved in the search for Prime, forcing him to face the truth of Mortys origin. But regardless one thing is for certain, Morty is really the Mortyest Morty in the finite central curve, and that scares C-137.

[bonefall]

Nature spirit Star flower? Bleeding Clear Sky dry eight times over? I am curious please explain more

Here's the general idea of it, this would all come after the end of BB!DOTC, which closes out with the aftermath of the First Battle and the naming of Windstar, Riverstar, Thunderstar, Shadowstar, and Skystar.

NOTE: You're basically about to read notes. This is not solidified yet. I have "Moments" I want to build towards, but they're loosely strung together. Fragments.

First off, Hollyleaf's Century gave us the intro to the Four Gods of this region.

They go by many names, but each is connected to a season. Sol, Midnight, Rock, and the man of the hour himself, One Eye, God of Summer.

One Eye was last seen possessing Lion's Roar. It's established that you need a certain number of violent, blood-based sacrifices to invoke him.

And, of course, he is drawn to the smell of death, the reek of rot in the summer's sun. The First Battle called him here, investigating the wonderful scent.

Star Flower is his 'daughter'. Natural objects of great value can manifest into beings of their own once destroyed, and Star Flower was an extinct, localized species of forest flower back at the Lake.

Still working out the exact rules of that, but it seems like nature spirits do have to be born somehow (like Broken to Yellow). One Eye found her in his travels and took her under his wing.

So anyway back to the arrival of One Eye in the Clans

(WIP STUFF, basically put a bunch of ???s past this point, this is plotting stuff.)

He is currently still possessing the body of Lion's Roar, an old and ragged thing. He's not fancy like Sol, who likes to travel around through time with its change powers.

One Eye took a shine to Clear Sky and his warmongering, infiltrating his group, and eventually making his nature known by eating Tom

He has a palette for violent people and accumulated evil. He will promise you 'revenge' to get at your enemy and make you into a delicious meal as well.

Skystar is NEVER getting a redemption arc in BB!DOTC, but he's not a moron either. He realizes that Sharptooth is practically trying to season him, and the horrifying death of Tom is what makes him work with the other Clans

to save his own giblets

Thunderstar Did Not Like That, but there's a bigger fish to fry

(Side note: One Eye was probably deified long ago for being the inventor of fire... vague cooking motif, perhaps?)

The Clans worked together to get rid of One Eye. It's important that the person who landed the final blow was a Tribe-born cat-- probably Sun Shadow.

One Eye vows revenge on his killer's homeland as he dies... not realizing that Sun Shadow was not born here, he was born at the tribe.

(May shuffle this moment to later, you'll see why in a moment)

Star Flower at this moment begins her own work, buddying up close to Skystar, getting close to him so she can stab him in the back

And she does! She drags him to the place where One Eye was buried, and bleeds him slowly, exploiting his 9 lives with a horrible magic loophole;

If he dies of blood loss, StarClan heals THAT, not any of the tiny injuries she's put on his body.

So he's letting out 8x the blood of a normal cat.

But before he can die for the last time, she is interrupted, probably by Thunderstar

She offers him this; "Go on! Take the last sacrifice! One Eye will be grateful to you. You'll get what you want, have your revenge, and Skystar will never threaten you or your family ever again."

Seeing Skystar, pitiful, bloody, and helpless, he refuses this. This wouldn't be honorable. To kill to win his feud is not justice; it's revenge.

(Here's when I was thinking of shuffling that earlier Sun Shadow moment to, have the resurrection be incomplete and have a final fight of partially-summoned One Eye. Angrily lays that curse for having his plan thwarted. Boss fight against half-fossilized cave lion.)

After this, I'm not sure what to do with Star Flower. She just killed Skystar 8 times, so, SkyClan isn't going to take her back.

I could have her be wandering, a loner or rogue who is just part of the background now. Maybe I don't need to wrap it all up here just yet.

So, there you have it! This is pretty rough but it's where I'm at with her.

Since this is post-main arc DOTC, it may make for a very good redux of Thunderstar's Echo. Maybe Thunderstar's Justice? Something like that. Make the central conceit be Thunderstar vs Skystar, wrapping up their arc from the main series.

[pocketramblr]

If the ask game is still open, Izuku is Death (and I don't mean that metaphorically, or rhetorically, or poetically or theoretically or in any other fancy way. He's Death. STRAIGHT. UP.) and he is after AFO, who is very human. (Also, unrelated, but All Might survived way more near death experiences than in canon. He must have a guardian angel or something.)

gonna just combine those, for my own sake...

1- something Changed in the world the moment the first quirk came into being. Izuku doesn't know what it was, only that before, Death was Something Else, and that after, he Existed, and Was Death. It's a turbulent time to be Death, but maybe it had to be. Izuku watches with wonder life and how people use it, quirks in all their beautiful colored varieties. He has a very somber job, and it hurts, and he can't stop being Death, but he can keep himself well enough by deliberately appreciating life, and the world, and the quirks he's somehow tied to. It doesn't stop from hurting, but it helps his pain tolerance and lets him smile sometimes.

2- If Izuku has ever hated a human, he hates All For One. everyone else, he mourns. he gently takes children when its their time. he offers an ear to people's stories. He'll even tut over a killer, but give them space- usually they don't need judgement, their own's enough. And when it's not, they're scared of him as is.

All For One is different. he doesn't value life, or quirks, or the world, or even Death. just himself, as if he's apart of all of it. Just himself, and his brother, who he treats as proof of his control.

Izuku sits quietly with Yoichi in the vault, and promises AfO won't stop either of them, won't own Yoichi forever. At the very worst, Izuku will make sure he escapes eventually.

Izuku weeps when the vault is opened, and continues to go do his job, leading on from the bodies strewn behind Second and Third's bloody footsteps.

3- And then AfO kills Yoichi, and Izuku finally makes himself known. He snaps, because AfO's beyond any redemption, to him. He'll kill AfO himself, now.

But instead, it's the first time AfO's smiled in months- he's done it, become so strong, made himself such a legend, that no one but Death Itself could face him, beyond all mortals. Izuku doesn't particularly care about AfO's ego boost, since he's been annoyed by it so long anyway, and he figured AfO's cult would make up something like that anyway. not important, when he'll make sure they die out too.

But AfO kills everywhere he goes, and Izuku is Izuku, but he is also Death, and he must tend to those he leads away.

He won't let AfO think he's more important to Izuku than the many people he tramples.

4- When AfO start with Nomu, Izuku feels pain for the first time- he's felt agony, sure, emotionally. but not physically. It doesn't hurt any other after that, but he remembers. and he's even angrier, because Nomu spit in the face of Death, puppeted corpses on a cruel fragment of a memory of being alive.

And Izuku decides if AfO's going to break the rules, so will he.

Banjo should have died the first time he refused to give One For All up to AfO. but somehow, he didn't. En was the same.

Izuku had to focus on protecting Toshinori from the powerful blast AfO had to use to keep Nana dead this time, but then spent the next three decades keeping all sorts of things from killing Toshi that absolutely should have. So, when Izuku keeps him up and finally, finally sees AfO drop, he's thrilled. He makes sure Toshinori will survive, then goes to take AfO.

But a mere hour later, AfO slips away, grinning widely at Izuku's frustrated shriek.

5- not one minute later, Toshinori has a dream in his comatose state- he can see all the vestiges again, but there's an extra figure, who speaks to him.

"I'm Death- no, stop, you're not dying any time soon. But All For One returned to life when he should not have been able to. I don't care what he or his followers will think of it- I can take a physical form. If i do, and have One For All, I know he'll never come back. I swear it."

[sseanettles]

nothing grows in corpses (in the earth of me)

dream x hob gadling || mature || Finally cross-posting my take on the fandom classic of the show progresses as the comics do, even to The Wake. Until Death resurrects Morpheus and forces the choice of "redemption" upon him instead of suicide. It goes...horribly. No good. Very bad. Instead of learning the lesson, Morpheus (in his infinite wisdom) opts instead for a highly effective existence strike until one day Hob Gadling stumbles upon his ghastly handiwork and immediately decides that this just won't do. Man Who Refuses To Die vs. Man Who Refuses To Live: fight.

Dead Dove, Do Not Eat for the following: graphic depictions of starvation, illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, blood and gore, loss of autonomy, etc. etc. This is some classic old world whump, folks! But I promise it's also supremely healing in the end.

CH. 1: wait for me (reprise) | 7.4 k | AO3 link | prev part | next part

(or: the one where The Siblings spin their web, & Hob has a dream.)

In the Dreaming, upon Grecian cliffs, Death finished her proposal and awaited her companion’s response with a smile that was no less beaming for its lack of teeth.

“I think it’s perfect,” she prompted cheerily when no reply seemed forthcoming.

Dream of the Endless’ young brow only furrowed more intensely.

“Will he not be angry?” he asked after a long moment, the words as equally uncertain—as if doubting themselves even as they were spoken, as if certain he must have missed something obvious because surely his comment should have been apparent.

Death looked over the sea, and her smile now gleamed in the last strains of the sun.

“Oh, he’ll be furious.”

Dream’s puzzlement only deepened. His hands moved with studious concentration to clasp at the small of his back.

“And…that is reason alone to do it?”

“Oh, Dream…” Death sighed and dropped her boots to the earth to clap a hand on his melodramatically flared shoulder. She beheld him with a fond sort of exasperation. “I’m your big sister, and I’ve always loved you dearly. But Morpheus has never learned a lesson without being furious the whole time.” She patted him once. “Especially the ones he needs to learn most.”

Dream’s head tilted, and she watched that distant look come over those black eyes that she had only ever seen in Despair before now—the new one. It was the look of summoning that which was not him but was. Her brother’s young face briefly twisted in a begrudging concession, and his head straightened once more upon his shoulders.

“I seem to recall this,” he admitted in a manner to match his expression.

Death clapped her black-nailed hands together and rocked onto her toes until they buried beneath the earth.

“So, it’s decided then! I’ll give him one last lesson.” She landed, flat-footed once more, and side-eyed him with an arched eyebrow. “That is, if you’re okay with it?”

She watched him once more retreat into the multiplicity of the self, watched that ponderous distance come over him. When he returned, it was with quiet decision.

“…Yes,” he said. “I believe we are.”

Death’s beam returned.

“Peachy keen.”

They stood together on the cliff’s edge, basking in the golden warmth, and watched the sun sink into the Aegean Sea. For a time, there was only them, the sound of gulls overhead and surf as it rolled in and out…an endless, cosmic metronome.

Dream turned.

“Thank you, my sister.”

Death smiled at his quiet earnestness, the deep well of gratitude in a voice that had not yet forgotten how to give it.

“You’re welcome, little brother.” She sighed and bent down to pick up her boots. “You should call him now. Tell him to piggyback off my exit.”

She waited, watching as he stepped aside to one of the trees for a modicum of privacy. It was not really necessary, but it was cute to see how awkward he still was about it all. Like a young foal still learning how to coordinate his limbs. Those black void eyes slipped shut in a porcelain pale face set aglow by the sun, and he spoke under his breath with a bowed head as he raised his hands before himself, palms up, in quiet supplication.

He was just wrapping up when there came a flutter of wings, and a raven lit upon his shoulder.

Death smiled and waved as she moved to leave. “Hello, Matthew.”

The bird pivoted to face her, balancing himself with his beak as he moved and flapping his wings a bit as he negotiated the extravagant garment.

“My Lady,” he bowed, suitably situated.

Dream turned back, and Matthew gurgled indignantly as he once again had to shuffle around.

“He has heard me,” he said and returned to her side at his graceful pace.

She nodded and tapped the back of her fingers to his elbow with that soft smile of hers.

“Then, I’ll see you around.”

Hob Gadling finally let his hands tug free of his hair with a heavy, body-wracking sigh and his anger enough released to leave him now with only utter exhaustion. He surveyed the derelict pub.

“Suppose there’d be an awful neatness to dying here, wouldn’t there?” he murmured and rocked to his feet with the aching slowness of ancient, rain-deadened joints. “Goin’ on to whatever it is one goes on to…” He ran his fingers along one of the pillars. Splinters of wood flaked away with him, rotted and termite-shredded. “Like coming full circle…”

Death rose from her seat in a whisper of silver-grey, her dark fingers still laced together. Hob moved cautiously about the room. The shadows grew long in his face the further he drew from the lamp; the hollows of his eyes grew dark.

“Like the last six hundred and thirty-five years were nothing more than a dream I had in the White Horse…” He continued to slowly circle, to drink in and memorize and feel and smell and see and taste all that he could in his shrinking world. “One last wondrous tale sparking between the failing synapses in my brain….” His softly treading feet carried him back to where he’d begun, and he stared at the empty table between him and the bench where he had sat, both then and now. The whole space glowed in the lamp light just as it had in 1389, and for a moment, he could see himself.

Could see him slumped face-first beside his shitty ale, just as Death had promised.

That pressure pulsed once more in his chest and jaw and arm, a church bell’s sepulcher toll.

“But really, I never left,” Hob mumbled, as if to himself, as if alone in that mausoleum of a time long past. Death watched him in shadowed silhouette and waited. “I was always just there, fading into oblivion over a pint. None the wiser.”

“Is that what you want, Hob?” He looked to her: leaned there against the mantle where he had stood. “If it is…I can give it to you.”

Death’s hands parted. And one lifted, a warm, earthen shade amid the dark, until it reached for him through the gloom.

She no longer smiled.

“Just take my hand.”

The lamp flickered as its batteries neared their own ends. For a moment, Hob Gadling swore he saw the shape of mighty wings in the shadows behind her, rising from their slump in the dust like great, welcoming arms.

His Stranger’s eyes flashed in his memory: pale, mournful ocean eyes that glistened with tears as they beheld him at his lowest. As they watched him drowning and drowned in turn beside him in pity, in sorrow, in…in now, Hob knew, the deepest empathy. He heard that voice as deep as seas even now, as velvet black as the night he walked.

“So, do you still wish to live?”

Hob Gadling breathed in until he could breathe no more and stepped back with a shake of his head. If he had been paying attention to the face above the hand he now refused, he would have seen the flash of relief in Death’s eyes.

“I appreciate the offer,” he said and was startled by how dry his throat was, a desert where once it had been gummed shut, “I really do. But,” he shook his head again, firmer now, surer, and hiked up his tunic hem to shove his hands into his jean pockets—just to make his choice unmistakable. “I don’t think so, love, thanks. I’m not ready to die.”

A wry smile touched his mouth that even now tried on reflex to curve back into its customary expression. But even it broke a touch on his next phrase.

“I’ve got so much to live for.” The full saying, the full oath, was not hers to hear. It belonged only to Him. He scuffed a toe in the dust and straw, the humidity dampening the cloud that followed and settling it almost as soon as it rose. “Anyway,” he shrugged. His smile half-heartedly returned, sheepish this time. “Gwen’d kill me.”

Death took back her hand and shoved off the wall with an understanding nod.

“Alright,” she gently smiled and made her way to pass him for the door. “See you in 2089?”

Hob stifled a small, pained noise of surprise. She had meant nothing cruel by the simple question, he knew, but all the same he swallowed its gut punch, even as he felt the wetness resurge in its wake. It was cold this time, cold and sucking, like mud and peat and bogs and moors in the winter. It came on faster than the volcanic heat of anger, and Hob felt the beginnings of panic as it flooded his eyes, his nose, his heart—as it filled him with the swift mercilessness with which water filled a drowning man.

Hob was built to survive Hell’s flames, to temper himself within rage’s forge. He had done it many times before and would do it many times again. He was a man born of spite and lived as such.

But drowning…oh, Hob had so frequently drowned.

This he could not withstand for long and could not bear to fall to it in another’s company.

“Y-Yeah,” he managed to answer, as wobbly as a still-wet fawn. “Yeah, sounds good.”

His hand flexed at his side, and he counted how many heartbeats fit within each unsteady breath he took as Death passed him by, squeezing his shoulder with a gentle smile as she went. He might have returned the expression and gesture. He certainly had intended to do so. It was His sister, after all. But he might have also just stood there like a casting, fighting to keep his fault lines together as finally, finally they shook apart.

Those levees, first fissured by heat then turned brittle by cold, creaked and groaned and split in a racing domino, and he begged Death’s Angel in jaw-aching silence to leave as quickly as she could, to please spare him this indignity—

The door creaked shut with that dying breath.

And then, there was only him and the dark and the lamp and the table where a meeting would never come again, and Hob bowed his head to his dirtied hands with a loud, ugly sob. It tore through him just shy of a wail, nearly dropped him at his knees, and he stumbled hard into the table and bench. His shins shrieked, his knees quick behind them, and he would have sworn, as loud and foul as a sailor, if he hadn’t instead used the precious, rattling gasp of air he took to keep himself from passing out as, finally, the tears came in full.

He sagged atop the table, very much alive, and downed the rest of his crappy beer between sobs. Finally, he could see the bottom of the blasted tankard, and he hoped this would be the final bit to kick him over the edge to wasted numbness.

All the while, his Stranger sat opposite him with that smile…that honest to god smile with blood in his cheeks and a foreign, settled air about him that was so strange to behold but suited him so well….

Late but there.

He was slouched a bit, not sitting all proper and stiff and practically perched at the edge of his seat in readiness to flee as he had been in every prior meeting they’d had. His long, lanky legs extended beneath the table as he settled in, boots bumping briefly against Hob’s own before quickly correcting back into their own space.

Late, but there….

A tiny, broken part of Hob still held out desperately for the fake pub doors to open with that ghastly sound, one last time.

Please, just once more, he begged. Just once more as I finish this pint.

C’mon, Stranger. 

The door did not open. There was no one left to open it.

He hid his face within the folds of his arms atop the table, and he finally succumbed to the weight of water that dragged at him like hands, vanishing below the surface. His shoulders quaked in jack-knifing inhales and sobbing exhales. His hands alternated between desperate claws that held to nothing at all and helpless, trembling fists that closed on all they could touch and even that which they could not: his clothes, his hair, the lamp-lit dark. And his voice disintegrated to piteous sounds of heartbreak and lonely sorrow honored in song and tragic tale for as long as humankind had breathed.

His Stranger smiled opposite him.

His Stranger would never smile again. Would never pointedly avoid food or drink around him again, would never give cryptic advice and sarcastic commentary again, would never set foot within Hob’s dreams or his New Inn again, would never….

Gone. Lost. Finished. Over. Ended.

Dead.

‘S not fair, Hob wanted to sob to the universe, wanted to yell and scream and berate. I just got him back—it’s not fair.

Instead, he used the meager breaths he stole between sobs to keep afloat and to fuel the next heart-rent sound.

I hate you.

Stranger, I hate you.

Dream of the Endless watched Death vanish around a bend in the cliff trails, watched her hair move with her barefooted gait, watched the sun glow off her salt-kissed skin. He had barely begun to reflect on how he could only hope that she knew what they were doing, that this was, in fact, the best course of action, when a rumbling warble struck the Dreaming. It was the metaphysical shift of something Other, of intrusion undetectable to any but the newly reborn plane itself, and it resonated in the land’s very fabric and so in turn resonated in him. The young King’s calm demeanor stuttered into something that could almost be named a flinch and then, with little warning, deepened.

“Whoa!” Matthew flapped as the boy beneath him swayed, and a pale hand extended for the tree beside them as his equilibrium wavered alongside his Kingdom’s. “Whoa, kid—” Matthew nipped at the boy’s white tresses in an alarmed preen, his taloned grip shifting on his shoulder. “You okay?”

Dream blinked: tight, slow, deep, a clearing of that obsidian vision as he stared far beyond the sands beneath them. He leaned a touch more firmly against the tree, grounding himself in the scent of its leaves and the feel of its bark—things wholly of his own creation. The disruption in the core of his being, in those spaces where Daniel had once held bones and viscera and Dream now only held the unfathomable, eased.

“He has entered the Dreaming.”

Matthew’s feathers raised in a vibrating ruffle that left him nearly twice his already impressive size, and his head whipped to and fro as it lowered from the height of his Lord’s temple to his jaw. His wings snapped open in low-hanging challenge. His talons flexed and pried from their embedding within Dream’s extravagant pauldron, preparing to take flight at the slightest command.

“Who?” he demanded, the croak all but a growl, and a flash of warmth pulsed through his Lord at the display.

Posturing as if he were as mighty as the Palace guardians and not a bird approximately the size of a Jack Russell Terrier.

“Such protectiveness,” he murmured. Matthew let out an indignant grumble of a trill at the equal measure of gentle ribbing and affection in that voice that still seemed too big, too grand, for its body. Dream recovered, straightening with all the grace of a sleep specter, and answered his companion’s question. “My brother.”

Whatever defiance Matthew possessed fled like blood from a struck jugular, like a shock correcting an attack dog’s bullish posturing. His feathers slammed flat once more, his grip redoubling into Dream’s regalia, and his hunch snapped up to the tallest crane he could manage. His legs and neck stretched to their limit as his beady eyes scoped all they could set their sights upon for the slightest sign of the only brother that came to mind.

“Destiny?!” he squawked and nearly startled right off the Endless’ shoulder as one slim, paper-white hand rested upon his trembling back with steadying calm.

“No,” he assured and only lifted his hand away when he felt the feathers relax and settle into their usual light ruffle as the raven processed his words in first bafflement and then mild dismay. “Leave us, Matthew.”

“Uhh,” Matthew gurgled. He leaned forward with a tilted head to peer into the closest of Dream’s black eyes even as he prepared to begrudgingly obey. “You sure?”

“I am,” Dream promised with a mild, amused smile playing at his lips for a moment before once more stilling into their usual solemn line. He offered his hand to the raven, and he reluctantly stepped up onto the steel-cord fingers. “Lucienne will have also felt the disturbance of his arrival,” he said and moved at an easy yet careful pace to extend his arm for Matthew’s departure. “Assure her that all is well. It is merely a family matter.”

Matthew cast him a truly baleful eye.

“I don’t think those two things go together,” he began and sighed with a still-so-human shake of his head, “but okay, kid. You got it.”

And with a bow, a bend, and wing-spreading leap, Matthew took to the air, setting off swiftly in the direction of the palace where Lucienne was no doubt pacing in worry and summoning staff to scour the Dreaming for the source of the incursion. All would be well.

Dream reflected that this would be a perfect time to take a deep breath, if that was something he needed to do. He tried it. It felt…nice, he supposed. He took another one. Yes. Nice was the correct word. His hands rested at the small of his back, loosely looped together by his fingers and hidden within the cascade of his sleeves.

All would be well.

“You summoned me?” a great voice echoed.

Dream looked in the direction Death had departed and watched a hulking figure with long red hair and a well-kept, once-wild beard hike toward him. He had a bindle propped over one shoulder, and his boots, work pants, and pullover were stained with every kind of paint, dye, and chalk known to man, all of which Dream knew were presently crammed in the most haphazard of manners into the messenger bag slung heavily across his chest.

“I was not sure you would come,” he admitted, and the Prodigal shrugged.

“I was intrigued,” he said at a volume that was somehow both quieter and still just as loud. “Figured I’d risk it.”

He closed the last of the distance between them and after a moment smiled down at his sibling with a mischief that had Dream’s eyes narrowing.

“Besides,” he grinned, “I think you’re cute, little brother! Look at you—” He moved with a swordsman’s surprising speed to pull Dream close with one arm around the shoulders and pinched his still slightly baby-faced cheek with the other. “—you’re all soft and squishy still!”

Dream intercepted him too late and a touch more slowly than Destruction knew he was capable; he smiled to himself as he was pushed away but commented nothing further.

“I believe I am still your elder,” Dream scolded and adjusted the lie of his clothes.

“Sure, you are,” Destruction smirked. “So….”

He drove his bindle in the ground, gripping the wood with both hands like the hilt of a great sword planted tip-first into the soft earth, and let his weight shift to a single leg. They stood there, side by side, and watched the coast for a bit. The Prodigal squinted into the lengthening sun and the gentle wind while beside him Dream weathered the coastline unbothered.

It was…peaceful. Wonderfully so.

Despite his best efforts, Destruction found he did not do peaceful. He let his attention drift from the both beautiful and tragically familiar vista to his brother.

“…What did you need?”

Dream looked to his feet, and if Destruction did not know better, he would have said that, for a moment, the Great Dream Of The Endless seemed unsure of himself.

“…A favor,” he eventually said.

Destruction’s brow raised.

“Oh?”

“Death and I are about to grant…” he hesitated, seeking a word, and ultimately decided upon “…a boon.” He looked to the sun, to the sea it ignited, and to the azure blue waters that met the glowing sand. He looked to the beach and tried to prepare himself for what was to come next. He spoke, and he spoke with the weight of one who had put a great deal of thought into his words and who uttered them now with the grim resolve of a monarch issuing a solemn decree. “I would ask that you be present after the fact. To…help him settle.”

Destruction leaned now upon the bindle itself as he peered into his brother’s face. He still refused to meet his eye, and after a bit, Destruction shook his head in slow marvel. He felt like he should grin at the fact that his brother was obviously, finally, partaking in some inter-sibling troublemaking. But Dream’s strange, dogged gravity kept him from jumping too quickly to celebrate.

“What did you two cook up?”

Dream supposed this would be a time that mortals swallowed. He tried it. It did not ease the anticipatory anxiety that hummed away lowly within him.

“A final lesson.”

At the Renaissance Faire, in Ye Olde Pub, Hob had finally, finally tipped over the edge to drunk. He knew he had reached that blessed milestone at last because his thoughts were now maudlinly poetic, the sort of heavy, soul-crushing lyricism that only anciently long life could grant. In this state, he could’ve put Will fuckin’ Shaxberd to shame, if only he were coherent enough to connect mind to tongue and then to hand, to pour the thoughts and emotions that sparked abstractly within his drowned mind into something that lasted.

He'd never quite managed it over the centuries though he had tried, and here in the graveyard of an age past, he seemed doomed to fail at it again. He was thinking the most lyrical things of symmetry: of life’s start and its end and how there were multiples of each that all fed and led into each other and that could not be quantified by most until they had already reached the end of it all, and it was such a waste to only see it all then, wasn’t it? Such a waste to not see it, to not see the grand design of chaos and cause and effect until there was no more of it to have, and so here he sat—the man behind the curtain of it all, if he chose to pay attention. And hoo boy, was he paying attention now.

He thought of his Stranger, as old and expansive as he had been, so sure in his immensity that the true grasp of existence was to see the forest for the trees, when really it was always the other way ‘round. It was the other way ‘round, it always had been; the wonder of life, the purpose of it, the why of it, it was in the trees…it was always in the trees, in the people around them, in playing cards and handkerchiefs and electricity and lightning captured in a bottle, in the same jokes they told century after century, in children’s handprints in Paleolithic caves placed on walls far higher than they could have reached because parents have always lifted their children to participate in the world they could not touch even thousands of years ago, in people and the choices they made and then made again and again and again and again, until they learned better—and God’s wounds, did Hob hope and dream that they each and all reached a day when they learned better—and that everyone held within themselves their own symmetry.

Everyone was what they once were and what they would be, a start and an end, a beginning and a finish. Everyone was dead and alive all at once, all the time.

They only had to pay attention.

One day, Hob knew, he would end. Law of nature, wasn’t it? Earth would one day burn in the heart of an expanding star and would become uninhabitable long before then. Even if he could finagle his way to be granted continued life on another habitable planet, just to see how it would all continue to go, this universe would falter, gutter out, and die. One day, Hob Gadling would end. He would go on to what came next, if for no other reason than the lights were going out on the whole universe and there was no more life to be had, by anyone, by anything, anywhere.

It would just be him and Death, alone at the end of all things. Hand in hand, going out of the universe.

And he found himself thinking, as his head sagged upon his arms atop the tacky table, how much he would like to see His Old Friend again at the end of all that. He found himself thinking of taking a pale white hand and looking into shining pale blue eyes cut by a mess of bedraggled inky hair as he did, instead of earthen warm skin and full kinky hair and grave dirt eyes that all glowed with the comfort of a fading hearth. He wondered if she would allow it…if she would allow him to come with her to collect him.

At the end of all things, Robert Gadling, upon Earth’s scorched remains or upon the surface of some foreign world as the last of the stars went out, wanted to look up and see him. He would pull that threadbare, weathered glove from where he had tucked it against his chest—snatched up and pressed there ever since his Stranger had cast it between them in a year once called 1389 upon a planet once called Earth—and hand it back to him so very, desperately well-loved.

What tales he would have to tell him then, enough for eternity.

And his Stranger would take it…

And his Stranger would take his hand with it….

And then, they’d…

And then, he’d…

…fall asleep.

Destruction laughed, a guffawing sort of thing, and both he and Dream gazed over the edge of the cliff to the far end of the beach as a fissure split along the rockface where the coastline curved out into the sea. That disturbance returned, different from the Prodigal’s arriving. This sounded like the rush of a great flock taking to the sky. It rippled through the Dreaming, vibrated like wind through wing feathers…like the slow, final exhale that passed from failing lungs. 

The split widened and molded and grew until the mouth of a cave remained.

Dream swore, for a moment, that he heard a whisper of a song that would have taken his predecessor out at the knees, would have felled him like a brittle tree long dead and hollow.

Would’ve ripped him to shreds with all the mercy shown by Dionysian revelers in lawless woods.

“Ohh,” Destruction sighed with a wicked delight. He had his arms crossed over his chest now, hugging his bindle to himself. “He is not going to be happy with this.”

“No,” Dream agreed. “No, he is not. But it is…necessary.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” his brother replied, still smirking, and watched beyond the bulky cross of his arms as a vague shape emerged from the cave mouth far below. It started as a shimmering, a shade against the beach that gradually took form until a dark-clothed figure with pale skin and a shock of black hair remained to pick its mindless way along the sand. He angled his head toward his sibling but took care to turn only so far so as not to take his eyes off the newcomer’s progression. “Desire and Despair know about this, yet?”

Dream watched the figure, too, his inkwell eyes glittering in a painstakingly neutral face.

“No.”

“Del?”

“No.”

“Destiny?”

“One would assume.”

Destruction laughed and laughed and laughed, and it sounded of thunder and mortar fire. He grinned, as broad as the side of a barn.

“This is gonna be terrible.”

Terrible, fantastic—Dream was not yet familiar enough with the Prodigal to know for certain which meaning that delivery carried, and he was not sure if even his predecessor would have had any better insight. But he watched all the same as his hulking sibling stepped off the cliff’s end with a careless sort of grace to land in an earth-shaking kneel far below. And as he rose from the resulting crater in the sands, dusting off his pants, another form began to take shape further down the beach.

Hob Gadling sighed in the warmth of the sun, the salt air heavy in his lungs and the sand hot about his half-buried feet. His throat was not sore. His eyes were not swollen. His chest did not hurt, and his mind was not fogged with the haze of alcohol. For a moment, he lingered there, in that orange-red-pink of sun-backed eyelids gently shut. The driftwood beneath him had been polished to smoothness by a combination of the waves, wind, and sand, and when he opened his eyes to look down, he found the aged wood peppered with lichen and tufts of ice plant where sprouts had taken hold in the pockets of earth and sand that filled in the wood. The trunk itself was massive, the remains of a tree that had been felled and, at some point, washed back up by the sea where it now lay, half-buried upon the coast from whence it had come by the storms and tides and winds.

He reached for one of the blossoms, rubbing the fuchsia petals between his fingers, and looked about the beach.

He didn’t recognize the cliffs. Nor did he recognize the vibrant aqua-azure waters or the curving beach that led into them. Perhaps it was Greece…he did not believe he’d been to Greece in the last couple centuries, but life was a long thing for him, and he had seen a great many coastlines in his time. So, who could say for sure?

He must have been recently enough, though, because the longer he spent wondering where he was, the more certain he became that it was Greece. Somewhere in the Aegean Sea, even.

Hm. Odd, but he had experienced odder.

And there were certainly far worse places to be.

He had just closed his eyes again, breathing deeply, sinking into the sensation of being, when he became aware of footsteps behind him.

They were methodical even in the shifting sands, placed with a quiet focus Hob knew as well as his own stride. And as he turned to face the small dune rise behind him, he spied the top of a very familiar head of wild raven hair. And he could only watch, transfixed with wide eyes, barely daring to breathe, as….

“Stranger?”

There he stood! As plain as the daylight that illuminated them both and reflected in those pale blue eyes that smiled down at him in that ever-enigmatic way of his. It ignited his paper pale skin until it looked almost human, lent a liveliness to his angular features and a comforting warmth to the long coat that came to close about his black-booted feet as he stilled.

Just as tall, just as sharp-boned, just as skinny and decked out in head-to-toe black as he had always been.

The Stranger’s lips curved in that barest smirk of his, the one that had set Hob’s heart racing back in 1389 and never once let it slow since.

Hello, Hob Gadling.

He had not spoken the words, but Hob heard them in his heart, borne on his memory and spoken in the curve of those lips, and just like that he was on his feet. He vaulted the driftwood in a practiced leap, and his Stranger only had time to widen his eyes, to take the smallest of steps back, before Hob locked his arms around him.

“My Friend!” he laughed, the sound as bright and glittering as the setting sea beside them.

…As bright as his eyes that burned and stung as he fought the urge to bury his face into the meeting of his Stranger’s neck and shoulder. He forced his hands to stay open and lift to pat the spindly back beneath them, to not fist into this inky coat that he had never once even dared to touch before now.

“Oh faith,” he pulled back, holding his friend at arm’s length and grinning that eye-creasing, beaming grin of his, that contagious thing that lit up rooms and defied Death to her face with raised glass and a winking eye. “It’s good to see you, Old Friend.” He clapped his shoulder, drinking him in head to toe with that same, head-shaking wonder. “What are you doing here?”

His Stranger seemed uncertain, his gaze shifting from Hob’s face to take in the beach in turn as if he, too, did not quite know where they were or why they had come to be here. But as his lips began to part, the barest of openings, a boisterously loud voice burst forth.

“We’re going on a journey!” it boomed, and Hob jumped. “Don’t you know?”

Who’s this now?

From behind Hob trudged a mountain of a man, with long, wavy red hair pulled back in a ponytail by leather cord and both a beard and a bear-like physique that would’ve put a lumberjack to shame. This was a man who could split wood with his bare hands if not fell the whole tree, and yet he carried with him naught but a bindle tied off at the end with a red handkerchief spotted with white polka dots. His boots were stained with chalk, as were the knees and shins of his paint-streaked work pants, and his green pullover bore the faded marks of old stains he’d managed to scrub clean.

Wait. Hob did know him. In London, ages ago—he’d met a pavement artist armed with an impressively expansive chalk kit. He’d been nice enough but a bloody useless artist despite the quality of his tools. Hob had stayed, chatted with him for a bit, fumbled to find something nice to say about the mess scrawled across the ground between them, and gone on his way.

Now, what was he doing here?

“The three of us?” Hob asked.

“In a fashion,” the artist said and settled between them with a broad grin of his own. It was not a grin like Hob’s. It was bigger, yet emptier at the same time. It made Hob think of battle frenzy, and if he had been anywhere and any-when else, he thought he might have reached for a subtle weapon of his own. Here though, it only made an odd sort of sense. As if, despite the initially bewildering nature of his arrival, of course the pavement artist was supposed to be here. “Think of me as The Ferryman.” He waggled the bindle atop his shoulder. “Got my stick and everything.”

Hob looked to his Stranger and the last of his confusion faded away beneath his friend’s persevering smile. They were all meant to be here: the three of them.

It was a bit odd for his Stranger to be so silent, let alone to hold that smile of his for so long. It was as if he were waiting for something, processing the world on a bit of a lag or through a fog. And looking at him, Hob became so sure that there was something he had to ask him. It had been important, it was….

His Stranger patiently, silently, held his eyes. And that Mona Lisa smile dimmed in tandem with the shift in Hob’s own mind as he realized.

No. No, not realized. As he remembered.

The question didn’t really matter, did it? It didn’t matter, because….

Hob swallowed. His hand, he realized, still held his Stranger’s arm.

“You’re dead, aren’t you?” The Stranger’s gaze fell for a moment; Hob’s heart twisted. “…And this is just a dream.”

That dark head nodded, wordless still even as the pavement artist began to laugh a laugh as loud as cannons that set Hob’s ears ringing, and he couldn’t help but laugh along in that way that one did things in dreams that they wouldn’t have in life. The Stranger remained silent and still as Hob’s hand left him to bury in his hair in marvel.

Because of course he was. Of course.

He’d been the King of Dreams, hadn’t he? This…this was just a gift of farewell from a newly-coronated successor.

Hob quieted and sniffled, wiping briefly at his nose as he squinted into the sun. It was almost gone now, sinking below the sea and setting it aflame as it went.

Well, that was alright, then. He knew how to accept a gift.

“Alright, then.” He smiled softly at his Stranger, his King. His Endless. And he did the other thing he had never dared to do in life, for he knew now it would have no consequence.

He held out his hand.

“You ready?”

And because this was a dream, his Stranger peered at his hand, blinked owlishly once, and then reached to take it in the same measured way in which he walked.

He was cooler than Hob had anticipated given the sun, his skin a touch firmer than natural with an odd sort of yield to it. As if he were more packed down into something that was only human shaped.

He was everything Hob had ever dreamed, and his smile grew back into that boundless thing. He ignored the watery burn in his eyes.

“C’mon then,” he winked. “I’ve got so much to show you.”

And the three of them walked off together, the pavement artist straying from them a bit and leaving Hob and his Stranger to walk alongside one another—shoulders knocking on every other step, tightly clasped hands hidden in the folds of the coat.

“Robbie?”

Into the sunset.

“…Robbie…”

Into the end of the story.

“…it’s time to wake up.”

Destruction paused and looked back as three sets of footsteps in the sand became two and sighed as he saw only Morpheus, standing alone in that same sort of baffled, half-awake manner on the shores of a kingdom that had once been his.

“Looks like our friend had to wake up, then, huh?” he said and glanced to his left as Dream of the Endless made his way to them across the beach, his white gleaming in the sun’s last rays. “That’s alright. You and I have to do the rest of this on our own anyway, brother.”

Morpheus blinked again, struggling to straighten thought from perception. The world felt far away, felt heavy and light at the same time, felt like grabbing at mists and impressions. The Sunless Lands worked quickly, it seemed.

Destruction. He thought that great figure ahead of him might be Destruction. And this…this beach, it felt familiar, the very fabric of it, the taste of its particles in some near-forgotten way. The visual of it of course, too, was familiar in a manner that seemed great and terrible all at once and warned him to not try too hard to remember. But the issue of the space’s essence occupied more of his attention, perturbed him further.

…The Dreaming?

Yes. Yes, it must’ve been. Hob Gadling had certainly been there. While much else had been fogged and difficult to discern, that had been crystalline. He could still feel the weight of the man’s hand in his own, the crush of his arms around him in a lingering echo, and he recalled enough about his existence to know the immortal would not have yet relinquished Death’s boon. Given that and the fact that this was certainly not the Waking, that left only one place they could have been.

Even his friend’s name rested heavy upon his tongue and mind, grounding and real and true.

…Gadling.

It had been…good to see him, one last time.

Perhaps that was all this had been: a final mercy from his sister and the Prodigal, a chance to say the one remaining farewell that mattered free from the weight of impending doom. A chance to apologize for not fulfilling his final request.

I worry, Gadling had said that final night in the street, staring into his eyes with such earnest concern while the snow fell about them. His breath had fogged before his cold-bitten lips, his breath as passionately warm as the rest of him. The air before Dream’s mouth had remained undisturbed. He’d not practiced consistent breathing since Burgess suffocated him for a century, after all, and when he’d reattempted it since, especially of late, he’d found his breath to be cold. You take care of yourself. 

Take care of himself.

If Morpheus had the energy or cogency, he would have laughed. But as it stood, all he could manage was this listless, half-present stand amid a sunset-bathed beach. He was tired, so very tired still. All of this—the surf, the sand, the sun, the azure waters that all wailed with grief and pain in parts of his withered mind he fought to keep forgotten—belonged to Then. He had made his choices in that time; he existed Now. In the Now, he had accepted his consequence, and as…as good as it had been to see his friend again, it was time to go once more.

“You know,” Destruction said as he watched Morpheus’s dazed attention begin to wander, searching, no doubt, for their sister and the road back. “I almost pity him.”

Dream looked on beside him, his eyes almost sad.

“The realization will not be pleasant,” he agreed.

“Sweet dream,” Gwen smiled in a parking lot outside a Renaissance Faire in North Carolina and prodded her still yawning boyfriend toward their car as he finished his tale. The rain had stopped, and the day’s sun began its own setting arc. “So…what was it?”

Curious. Morpheus did not see Death anywhere. Perhaps…perhaps this was something different, then. Perhaps…

A figure in white stood beside the man he had since confirmed to be Destruction, and Morpheus faltered. It was a face he had once known and at an age he had not seen since the dawning of the universe. It watched him now with such a complicated expression he couldn’t parse in his current state.

But he knew the creature’s name. It had once been his own.

Was…was this Lucienne’s offering extended to him, then? The existences of Cain, Abel, and Eve now made his own? Continuation as a dream, rather than the Dream?

Perhaps.

Dream of the Endless started toward him, solemn beyond his years.

His head hurt.

“What was what?” Hob asked as they reached the car.

Gwen gave him a look that clearly warned him to stop playing; the headlights flashed twice as the car unlocked. Overhead, the oil-slick storm clouds began to part, and the sun shone through.

“The end of the story,” she needled and ducked into the driver’s seat.

Morpheus watched Dream come, like a rabid animal barely able to see straight, awaiting its executioner. But there was no such cruelty in the young Endless’ face as he arrived before him, the same height as his predecessor by nature and yet somehow so much greater at the same time. He regarded Morpheus with immense weight, the heaviness of a monarch above his subject with passing judgement ready in his waiting hand.

“You will appreciate this in time, Morpheus,” he intoned with mercy-filled eyes.

The New King of Dreams raised his hand in a motion intimately known, and Morpheus barely had time to register his fate, the truth of it, its horror, before the sand beneath their feet began to rise.

“Forgive me the coming shock.”

“Ah, well.” Hob teased as he buckled in. “There’s only one way to end a story, really.”

Gwen twisted the key in the ignition.

“Don’t tell me,” she groaned. “They all lived happily ever after?”

“This dream…”

Hob’s sunshine smile hesitated, bathed in the golden hour that filtered through the dusty windshield. The distant highway roar turned to surf, near-forgotten in the Waking.

“…is over.”

Morpheus awoke in knifing panic, sprawled on his back in the dark. And promptly sucked down two lungsful of warm Aegean seawater.

Hob recovered and grinned.

“…That’s the one.”

[cactusringed]

hi! its t! i hope you dont mind me spamming your inbox abt this, i dont have any other scardubs shippers who i can talk to. you can let me know if you do! :]

youre so right about bdubs not being cruel and calculating enough

just imagine bdubs not quite understanding the weight of scar offering him his life. to scar, it feels like lilacs and poppies and can we still be friends. to bdubs the offer feels like no kill passes, clocks covered in blood, and scar's fire aspect sword burning through his back. salt on top of a ready existing wound

bdubs furious in a way nothing but scars blood on his hands could ever describe or soothe. but he can't do it yet. all he can do is snap at scar about, 'just you wait until im red,' and tell him that hed really appreciate it if scar went and jumped off a cliff or stood on a cactus.

but it all just rolls off scars back like water with a laugh and a joke. it makes bdubs see red, but hes not red. theres nothing he can do to get it through to scar that hes serious

i dont know if its better or worse if scar knows hes serious or not

maybe scar is completely clueless. sure, the ribbing is angrier than he remembers, but the routine of teasing and joking around an anger that doesn't really mean anything is familiar enough. and its not like the world theyre on hasnt made everyone darker, scar's done things to people hes not proud of too

but maybe scar knows. hes not an idiot. its a right there in your face answer that someone hates you when they keep threatening to kill you when they can and asking you to just go die already.

maybe scar thinks he can fix it. even after he makes himself useful to bdubs, dedicates himself and this life of his to bdubs, it doesn't make him any less angry. and i think scar knows that it doesnt, but just cant accept that he cant fix it. cant accept that he hurt bdubs, someone he cares about, so greatly that bdubs hates him and wants to hurt him. wants to kill him. is going to kill him, and no amount of making himself useful is going to change that

either way, whether he sees it coming or refuses to, i think when bdubs does turn red and kills him it hurts the exact same. it stings with betrayal and grief and, worse, the knowledge he deserves it. that he's the villain in bdubs book. that the only redemption hes getting is through death

i cant decide what route from here i like better

1) bdubs feels completely satisfied. the bloodlust in his veins is gone. none of it matters to him anymore... but it still matters to scar.

scar being terrified that even dying couldn't fix things, only to find out that his death fixed things and feeling worse. he pledged his life to bdubs (it feels like im sorry im sorry im sorry) and that means nothing to him.

scar means nothing to him anymore.

scar thinks hed prefer if bdubs hated him still. at least him pledging his life means something then, at least his death means something then, at least this whole situation means more than scar pulling one stupid prank

2) bdubs is still angry

scar thinks it's fixed now, with his death, but hes wrong. bdubs is red, and he wouldnt be if scar hadn't taken his green life

when scar comes back to bdubs smiling and asking if its all even now, bdubs sees red. scar thinking this is all something transactional, an eye for an eye, a debt he can pay off, pisses him off

scar treated bdubs' death like a joke. then his own like a joke. and bdubs decides hes going to make sure scar isnt laughing by the time hes done with him

3) bdubs feels horrified

seeing scar getting torn apart by the zombies was what he wanted. and for a long moment he feels euphoric.

until he realises scar isnt yelling or screaming or anything. just quiet pained grunts and heavy breaths

until he realises that scar doesnt even bother trying to fight back

until he realises the heavy breaths are sobs, and the look on his face is betrayal not pain

he realises just a moment too late and scar is dead. bdubs doesn't even have time to say he's sorry, let alone try and help. all at once scar pledging his life to bdubs feels like when grian attacked the two of them in third life screaming betrayer, his voice so heartwrenching bdubs felt bad for him even on red

scar pledging his life feels different

it feels like an apology, utter devotion to making things right with someone you care for, trust and love built on a pillar of death.

and bdubs doesnt know if he can fix it

Hiii don't worry I love talking to people I just hope u don't mind how slow I can be replying to asks ^_^ hehehuhu my ask box or dms are always open either way xoxo

See your idea of Scar third lifing in and pledging his life to bdubs is to tasty when, well, you take third life into consideration. Scar who knows what it's like to die to a prank but who was quick to forgive in exchange for complete and utter devotion. Scar who believes he can offer the same, and receive the same forgiveness he once gave Grian.

Only to realise he isn't trusted. It's a transaction. The same as a no kill pass. Meaningless unless given value by the person receiving it. And bdubs giving it no value, not believing in Scar anymore, not after he was burned one too many times.

For Scar to think he can fix it with what anyone else would call a 'deal' is an insult, after all the lies and frauds and betrayals - and bdubs, who should be familiar with in-the-moment, hot blooded betrayals for one's own safety - has none of it.

I think he would regret it and feel not only pity but horror, after killing Scar. He'd think of killing Tango in last life, and Skizz in limited life. How even in his rage Skizz offered a fair battle to settle scores. How he didn't afford the same kindness to Scar, whom one could argue pushed Bdubs (and Impulse!) into the zombie horde as a means to self preservation, with the same sort of red hot fear that a boogeyman might have. But whom one could also argue did it out of a bout of sadism and cruelty instead.

It's that uncertainty that hurts, and makes it difficult, in the end, to know if his anger was warranted. It's that uncertainty that makes it difficult to feel true satisfaction as he's torn apart just like he was.

[charyou-tree]

I know how everyone here feels about Apollo's Dodgeball of Prophecy, now that I've gotten enough distance from the pandemic, I need y'all to know about the band that predicted it.

This is a recent studio album by the Dutch symphonic-metal band Delain.

The album is called Apocalypse and Chill, and it released February 7, 2020. This of course means it was composed/written/produced/recorded months or years before 2020.

Its about how society handles (doesn't handle) some unspecified catastrophe, and then how the survivors pick up the pieces.

Here's a breakdown of the tracklist:

One Second: The before times, when all we cared about was falling in love and having fun

We Had Everything: We had no idea how good we had it

Chemical Redemption: This won't be so bad, right? We can (probably?) fix this.

Burning Bridges: Cracks in society start to show, widened by the stress of the impending disaster, friends and family turn on each other

Vengeance: "GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON TO SPARE YOU. GIVE ME ONE HINT THAT YOU'RE STILL THE PERSON I ONCE KNEW OR YOU'RE FUCKING DEAD."

To Live is to Die: pretty self explanatory, death comes for us all, might as well accept it

Let's Dance: Not "lets party in the club", but "let's fucking dance", whispered to yourself under your breath, just before charging into an unwinnable battle. Its an admission of "the only way out is through". Ok apocalypse, Let's Dance.

Creatures: We're all changed, hiding, sneaking, trying to survive in this more dangerous world.

Ghost House Heart: Mourning for those we lost

Masters of Destiny: Choosing to exist on purpose makes you in control of your own destiny, no matter what life throws at you.

Legions of the Lost: Hey, how come only a handful of powerful/rich people are "recovered" from this? What about the rest of us? How can we fix this if you refuse to take care of the people of this world? <---- IRL, You Are Here in the recovery process

The Greatest Escape: The After Times, turns out things won't be bad forever

Combustion: Instrumental, kickass guitar solo, always relevant.

[danthepest]

Its kinda funny rewatching and rereading Dragon Ball and noticing significant shifts in the roles of Piccolo and Vegeta.

Piccolo was VERY quickly shafted during the Saiyan arc. He went from being Goku’s arch enemy and technically the big bad of two arcs back to back to being yet another guy who has to hope Goku will show up quick enough to save the day. And he never really gets out of that spot. Yeah, sure he gets his little power ups with Nail and Kami, but they’re very blink-and-you-miss-it in terms of relevancy. He gets his short scuffle with Freeza in the manga and a longer one in the anime, the exposition dump with Cell and the scuffle with #17 that ultimately do nothing but stall for time before its back to the “oh noes where Goku” corner for him. He essentially pulls a Tenshinhan during the Piccolo Daimao arc, right down to the extremely quick change of heart.

The Boo arc handled him the best, all things considered. Toriyama stopped trying to give him quick fix power ups to play catch up with all the Super Saiyan stuff and utilized him as a trusted and wise mentor figure for the younger generation. Granted, Gohan and Gotenks achieved diddly squat in the end, but still. And it’s always funny comparing his psychotic self from the 23rd tournament and his frustrated grandpa self from the whole Gotenks vs Boo fight. Though I wish he was more proactive or active in general. Him giving up against the Kaioshin? What the fuck was that? And they took his one cool moment where he sliced Babidi away from him with the little scrotum sack surviving.

As for his redemption, while I absolutely love it (especially in the anime), it was done far too quickly. You could still have his love for Gohan and keep his animosity/rivalry with Goku up until he merges with Kami. Now an argument could be made that him actually killing Goku freed him from his vow/debt/mission/goal/purpose/whatever and thus led him to change so quickly, it would’ve been interesting to see him still be that ally who wasn’t fully trusted for a bit longer.

Vegeta on the other hand has a change in characterization that I have yet to decide if its genius in its subtlety or just Toriyama settling on how to write him.

Vegeta in the Saiyan arc and the Freeza arc is prideful, yes, but he was also cunning and fought dirty. If someone was stronger than him? He’d acknowledge it and try to gain any advantage he could. Ginyu Force too tough for him to handle on his own? Fuck it, he’ll team up with Gohan and Krillin to stand a chance. An opponent’s back it exposed to him? Stick the knife in the back and twist, twist, TWIIIIIST. Anything to score a win and survival.

But then the Cell arc happens and he becomes a Super Saiyan. Now he’s all about this so-called “saiyan pride” garbage and deluding himself into being the besterest fighter manz who has no equal. Refusing to admit anyone could possibly be better than him even when he gets his shit kicked in twelve times over. Now he has issues with teaming up because it goes against his saiyan/warrior pride and nonsense like that. Outright stating that if it came down to teamng up with Piccolo, the earthlings or Goku, he’d rather fight alone and die. Its why we get dumb moments like him wanting to let Gero activate #17 and #18 so he can fight them and letting Cell absorb #18. And that personality more or less sticks until he comes back to help Goku fight Boo.

His “redemption arc” that everyone fawns over is also one of the sloppiest character developments I’ve ever seen in fiction or even Dragon Ball itself.

Take off your headcanon glasses off for a moment (and the dub’s coloring of Vegeta’s entire character *cough his dying speech to Goku on Namek cough*) and you’ll see that he shows no redeeming qualities until he sacrifices himself against Boo.

So after leading the mini-invasion and being responsible for the deaths of Yamcha, Chaozu, Tenshinhan, Piccolo and then the Namekian villagers, the Dragon Team, especially Bulma, just kind of...accepts this guy into their circle even though he’s shown no remorse for what he’s done barely a year ago, nor shown any affection for anyone or even done a single selfless act. At least with Piccolo, you had Goku, Krillin and of course Gohan all be there to vouch for him because they saw him protect Gohan or help out when he could without any of the “I simply need you alive” excuse. And Bulma and Chi-Chi were still afraid and distrusting of him at the time so he wasn’t fully accepted quite yet. But Vegeta? Nah, he cool.

And then he and Bulma bang because dammit, we need more golden haired fighter dudes. Nevermind he was responsible for your last boyfriend’s death. Does that somehow give way to any redeeming qualities?

...not really. When Gero attacks the aircraft Bulma and baby Trunks were in, Vegeta didn’t even fart in their direction and when Future Trunks confronts him about it, he plainly states he doesn’t give a damn. And we’re never shown otherwise. He even kills the truck driver without so much as a second though during his fight with #18.

Its only when Cell kills Future Trunks that he shows any kind of affection for anyone.

Then the Boo arc happens. And this may just be me, but I never got the feeling he really cared or loved Bulma and Trunks up until his iconic sacrifice. He came across as if he was merely tolerating them, because without Goku around, he’s lost his goal. His motivation. So he settled on living and training at Capsule Corp because what else is he gonna do?

Then the whole Majin Vegeta spiel happens and everyone is so shocked and surprised that the murderous space mercenary who has shown zero redeeming qualities in all these years would turn against them?! Who could have seen this coming?! And its where the saiyan pride speeches come out swinging again.

:/

At this point he’s such a far cry from the scheming, smart and pragmatic Vegeta he was during the Saiyan and Freeza arc and I simply can’t chalk it up to any real “character development” rather than just Toriyama needing another punching bag to show how powerful the new baddie is.

But when he comes back? Oh yes, that’s when we finally see the change in mentality and behaviour Not simply told in a final speech or gesture before death. No, we’re shown it in how he interacts with Goku, how he thinks, how he fights, the absolutely hellish beating he takes to let Goku rest up or charge the spirit bomb. THAT’S when he becomes a natural mix of the two opposite personalities he’s given. That’s when Vegeta was smart and interesting again.

I know this has devolved into a rambling tangent about Vegeta’s redemption arc, but its still interesting to see and I wish more people discussed stuff like this rather than the constant who is stronger debates or which rainbow colored transformation is better.

[samasmith23]

Jane Foster: Bridging the Gap Between Godhood & Humanity

The Death of the Mighty Thor is hands down one of the most thematically rich and character-centric storylines I've read from not just Jason Aaron's Thor run, but from his body of comics work as a whole!

It actually took awhile for me to fully unpack all my thoughts about this arc after I initially finished reading it, but that's only because there's just so many layers of meaning & symbolism which makes it a truly worthy finale to Jane Foster's saga as the Mighty Thor!

I stated before that Jane Foster is basically the Anti-Gorr in a previous post linked here:

After I read "The Death of the Mighty Thor" in its entirety, I realized that there was far more meaning to that initial description than I previously thought. Jane is the anti-Gorr the God Butcher not just in how she defends the gods from annihilation, but also in that unlike Gorr who was repulsed by the fact that he was becoming the very thing he despised so much, Jane Foster makes a conscious effort to bridge the gap between mortals and gods.

Jane is similar to Gorr in that she too has witnessed first hand the gods' arrogance & failure to protect those they've been sworn to uphold, and has directly suffered as a result. But where Jane ultimately differs from Gorr is that simultaneously has witnessed and recognizes the god's ability to love and protect others. This why when Odinson becomes unworthy and Jane hears Mjolnir's call in his place, she answers that call. She wields the power of Thor to not only live-up to the standards that the gods who came to her were never able to achieve, but also to provide the gods who have simultaneously failed and loved her a chance for redemption. Jane wants the gods to finally live-up to the ideals that they claimed to represent, to finally become truly worthy of the mortals who worship them.

Consequently, Jane is willing to sacrifice her own life in order to save the Asgardians from complete annihilation at the hands of the Mangog, a monster who sees only the negative traits of the gods, believing that they're incapable of self-improvement or change. Jane dies for love, whereas the Magog dies for naught but hate.

But dying is not the end of Jane Foster's story, as Aaron effectively illustrates that while suffering and dying for the sake of others can be meaningful, it's even more meaningful and important to live for yourself and others. Continuously sacrificing one's own well-being for others is a godly ideal that is unhealthy for the human body, which is demonstrated by Jane's cancer worsening every time she lifts the Mjolnir and the the transformation into Thor purges all toxins, including the chemotherapy drugs (which are essentially radioactive poison), from her body.

While Jane does more than once debate on whether or not this means she should completely cast aside her mortal half and remain as the Goddess of Thunder forever, she inherently recognizes that doing so would mean sacrificing her very humanity. And that scares her since while mortal life is painful and filled with unavoidable hardships, life simultaneously contains simple and unfathomable joys and beauties that are priceless and worthy of preserving, cherishing, and experiencing.

This is a point that was repeatedly emphasized by other characters in earlier in narrative. For instance, while Odinson recognizes that for all the happiness Jane has for provided others as a goddess, he states that she still has plenty to give by living as a mortal as well. Additionally Jane's friend and former S.H.I.E.L.D agent Rosalind Solomon makes an incredibly valid counterargument to Jane's desire to control her own fate and refusal to die due to forces outside her control like cancer. Regardless of whether or not Jane desires to die in battle protecting what she loves versus dying from cancer, dead is still dead either way.

So when Jane quite literally sacrifices her life to give the gods who failed her a second chance, in a deliberate Christ parallel she is resurrected with the assistance of Odinson, Odin and the sentient Mother Storm which previously dwelled within Mjolnir. And upon her revival Jane fully commits to living for herself and those who love her by dedicating herself to combatting her cancer with chemotherapy, while entrusting Odinson and the Asgardians to protect the realms which she had protected in their place.

"There must always be a Thor."

There must always be a Thor because Thor in all their various incarnations represents the ideal version of what a worthy god should be: a being whom continuously strives to protect others, questions and improves upon themselves, and cherishes love and humanity. A humanity which extends to not just humans and the various other races inhabiting the Ten Realms, but also to the Asgardian gods themselves, who are idealized representations of humanity. Jane recognizes the humanizing symbiosis wherein God compliments humanity, and humanity compliments God.

And while Jane is a mortal who lives up to godly standards by sacrificing herself to continuously protect & save others her mortal perspective also serves to remind the gods of their own humanity, thereby successfully bridging the gap between humanity and the divine.

Jason Aaron's run on Thor functions as an insightful inverse of real-life theological teachings for humanity to live by the god's standards, by instead teaching the gods to live by humanity's standards. In essence, Jane Foster is the anthesis to Gorr the God Butcher in that she conversely recognizes the gods as being human instead of inhuman.

And The Death of the Mighty Thor arc effectively serves as the enthralling apex of both Jane Foster & Jason Aaron's thesis on godhood.

[holyfvkc]

ts stans still hate demi? even after their recent positive interaction? i guess its bc demi is "a flop" and "wants to use taylor", bc they are still hyping up olivia when shes against taylor now just bc olivia is also successful. or they're "taylena" stans and we know no one hate demi more than selena stans lol.

Naaah, in the real world, caring about charts isn't a thing.

It seems to me that people are still stuck in time, some of Demi's comments made in 2014 or 2015, I don't remember exactly, it's like, almost exactly 10 years of this shit, Demi was 22/23 years old, I'm 23 years old and the amount shit I said this year and regretted it, it's impossible to describe on paper, life is a constant learning process, I always liked Taylor (and still do!) but it was thanks to Demi's comment about the "squad" that I realized how much looking up for models contributed for my eating disorder, TAYLOR ADMITTED THIS YEARS LATER (and I still struggle with this shit), let's not act like the video and the whole context that Taylor created with bad blood MV wasn't extremely problematic too, fuck, like, Katy Perry was extremely stalked by fans and Taylor kept silent about it, regretted it years later and as redemption, invited Katy to a music video.

I believe the main reason is Scooter Braun, and c'mon, Lovatics despites him too, but ts fans ignore or refuse to understand that Demi went through a literal near-death event, overdose, 3 heart attack, abandoned by her career team, rap3d, left to die own their own by her former career team career, Demi must have felt like they owed Scooter a lot, after all, he was the one who reached out to Demi when no one else wanted it...

I don't think Selena has much to do with it, obviously, Demi has already stated that she has great feelings for Selena and that they just aren't friends anymore and it's okay, life is made of cycles.

Sorry for any typos

[coelacat]

my final thoughts on the matter is that theres always been a reason we as humans have been obsessed with the morbid and grotesque. there is a certain level of familiarity with bad things every person must have. you must grow to be familiar with death, with disease, with bigotry, with things you dont like to think about, because you Will have to handle them at some point. you have to think about war its all around you. you have to think about pollution its all around you. dont grow comfortable with these things, but grow familiar. you have Got to be able to handle when a media wants to be About a topic like this. i cant control what you do with media like this. however its a very bizarre choice for you to want to get into a media about abuse and then be shocked when people wanna explore that abuse. like im sorry to say but if you refuse to acknowledge the characters as racist or you only engage with the story through "they characters i like live happily ever after and the characters i dont like die!!" aus, maybe Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2 is just a bit too much for you to handle right now and you should go back to your childrens shows or something. if you dont wanna talk about death and suffering dont get into Death And Suffering: The Game

[bonefall]

And now, part 2!

I really don't like the idea of Skystar not just being the most xenophobic of the Founders, but also refusing to join his clan in exile to maintain power in StarClan? That's… wow. Way to strip all of the character development and intriguing aspects of Skystar's character from him.

Like… half the character development we see about Clear Sky is learning to move past his xenophobia and be more willing to listen to others, to be less stubborn and fearful. I truly can't see him being the most xenophobic of the founders… and, in the end. SkyClan is all that Clear Sky has left in the end. He lost his mate two times over, his eldest son is the leader of ThunderClan and they are not on speaking terms. His brothers are in different clans as well, and while they settle some differences, I don't think it was a perfect ending either. SkyClan is his legacy. It is everything he worked for, everything he sacrificed for. The bloodshed, the pain inflicted, the bonds broken. Everything was for SkyClan.

It just… makes no sense for Skystar to refuse to follow his clan in exile for personal power. Not after all he sacrificed for the clan. And… if anything.

If anything. Skystar would be the leader of the Dark Forest. Star clan's greatest sin, abandoning one of their own. Out for revenge. SkyClan has been revived yes, but it is separate, and its culture has changed so much, is it truly SkyClan anymore? How many cats in StarClan feel no shame over their crimes? How many cats are still in the Dark Forest, due to this decision?

Sure, a Tigerstar v. Firestar fight would be fantastic… but that would still be through violence and battle. What better way than to cap off Firestar's story, by healing old hurts, and bringing peace where there was previously violence? Ending the battle, not by defeating its leader in combat, or through tactical ability. But by reaching out to the other side with compassion and empathy? Truly, what better way is there as a statement against the war culture of the clans?

And what better way for Firestar to save the clans one last time?

See, I don't think that Skystar ever actually developed. I don't think those are traits he ever ended up possessing, and furthermore, the absolute failure of his "redemption" arc is the worst idea that DOTC ever even THOUGHT about doing.

"Interesting" doesn't mean slapping sympathetic traits onto an extremely consistent antagonist. It just ruins good characterization.

-Skystar learned to be less xenophobic

No he didn't. He was nasty to Micah up until his death in Moth Flight's Vision, he was going to kick him out for letting Moth have sap. From a tree. A tree he was already climbing. Sap that he already had, in his mouth. That would save a cat in another clan.

He only let Micah into his Clan at ALL because StarClan TOLD him to, and even then, he was sitting there whining and crying that no OTHER clan had to take in a rogue. Furthermore? He probably wouldn't have even listened to StarClan if HIS kit wasn't sick.

Before his aggressive, selfish, xenophobic actions get Micah killed, he refuses to trust him. He forces him to take Acorn Fur as an apprentice. He's shouting at him all the time, screaming that no one is allowed to leave HIS Clan without permission, throwing his weight around about the borders AGAIN despite all his lessons in DotC...

Oh but maybe THIS time he's Really Learned His Lesson? Absolutely not. He is a xenophobe and he will die one.

And hey, let's not forget how he slashed Moth Flight across the face for telling him he was being an asshole for denying her the sap! Or how he was one of two primary suspects for the murder of Bumble, the battered housewife!

-He learned to listen to others

Clear Sky’s gaze flashed with fury. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to take in a rogue.” Wind Runner’s tail twitched irritably. “You’ve taken in plenty of rogues before, Clear Sky. You just don’t like being told what to do.”

This is constant. This is every scene Skystar is in. Someone saying,

"Clear Sky you should do this very obvious and good thing"

"NO!!! THIS IS MY CLAN AND MY TERRITORY AND YOURE STINKY AND I MAKE THE RULES AND YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO MEEE"

And you know what? HE is the reason Tiny Branch died, and YET, the takeaway he has from that lesson is that it's Wind Runner's fault, because he can never take blame for his own actions.

He got Micah killed. He didn't let Moth Flight finish training the apprentice he foisted on him. He STOPPED Acorn Fur from getting outside help until it was much worse. Then he blames Wind Runner, the ONLY outside force with any influence here, for holding up Moth Flight at the border.

He is categorically incapable of listening to others, or taking responsibility for the consequences of his own actions.

-He sacrificed for his clan

No? He doesn't sacrifice anything, he just loses people because of his horrific, violent personality and then post-hoc justifies it as a sacrifice.

HE abandoned his baby infant son, and rejected all of Thunder's desperate attempts to reconnect with him

HE threw his brother Jagged Peak out of SkyClan for breaking his leg

HE keeps starting fights

HE primarily instigated the battle at Fourtrees and got DOZENS of people killed

It's INSANE that the books tried to bend over in later DotC to say "awww he was just being protective uwu" In WHAT WORLD

IN WHAT

WORLD

DOES A "PROTECTIVE PERSON" KICK THEIR BROTHER OUT INTO THE WILDERNESS FOR BECOMING DISABLED??

-Everything was for SkyClan

My friend, you have it 100% backwards.

SkyClan is for Clear Sky.

Listen. To him, SkyClan is a thing he has made and he owns. LISTEN to his dialogue, CONSTANTLY, "MY clan" "MY territory" "MY kit" "MY cats" Mine mine mine. Everything he does is about him.

Yes, he can be protective at times. Protectiveness is the Dr. Jekyll to Possessiveness' Mr. Hyde. He sure wasn't protective of his disabled brother. Or his medicine cat. Or the safety of SkyClan as an extension of that. The primary trait here at play, for all it is, is absolute, abject selfishness.

And the worst part about the narrative is that it doesn't LET Clear Sky play the villain that he really is. It has this absolutely ridiculous "ohh he's a good boy deep down!" mindset which is absolutely undeserved

He's Ashfur on steroids, fire scenes every other book meanwhile "his only crime is that he loved too much," only there isn't 10 years worth of fandom condemnation yet to make the Erins backtrack and acknowledge it.

There is no redemption arc. There can be no redemption arc; because Clear Sky is not the sort of person who would ever want to change.

-So... Bonefall Skystar

Skystar is EXTREMELY respected by Clan Culture. He's THE symbol of War itself, he embodies the idea of the challenge, the might-makes-right. Without Skystar, they wouldn't have been Warriors. They would just be hunters.

First and foremost, he cares about respect. The tradition of the Clans. He's a fearsome spirit, and the exile of SkyClan... the most fitting way to describe the emotion he has would be offense. He's offended by it. But not enough to give up his position as the avatar of combat itself.

Respected spot on the council, more influence here than he ever had in life, he loves it. Why would he ever entertain the idea of the Dark Forest, a place full of power-stripped nobodies? Just for his namesake clan?

Aye, he founded it. And it was the strongest in the forest... for a time. In his day he would have FORCED ThunderClan to move over. He would have lead SkyClan into a furious war the likes of which no one had ever seen, all-out assaults, the leaf litter would have washed away in a torrent of blood! The fact that Cloudstar just rolled over and lead his Clan away, without a fight?

Well... it becomes pretty easy for him to justify it. And for any coward StarClan warrior who follows them. As a warrior, when you want something, you take it.

If anything, he probably threw a life to Ripplestar. Curious to see how much he could tank, how far he could get. Probably even ruled in his favor to bring him into StarClan, but of course, he was easily outvoted... and, he argues again, that if those dead SkyClan cowards hadn't left, well, maybe they could have voted with him.

In any case, you're free to interpret a character however you choose. I do hope my take on him is still appealing in its own way; but I will never entertain the idea that Skystar is any less than the violent, irrational, self-absorbed xenophobe he is in-canon.

[mtdthoughts]

The Twins' Relationship Pt. 11 (Migi & Dali Analysis)

This is Part 11 of the discussion of the twins' relationship and its evolution throughout the story.

Click here to return to the top of the thread (Part 1)

Note that I will use scenes from both the anime and manga wherever I see fit, and of course spoilers are discussed.

This post will be about Episode 11 and part of Episode 12, which revolves around Dali's struggle to understand Eiji.

After the whole truth was revealed by Reiko and Eiji, Dali refused to accept Eiji out of a mix of confusion and anger.

Still, Migi tried to convince Dali to bring along Eiji using their mother's words, though Dali quickly shut him down, almost as disobeying his own mother. This was interesting considering Dali was more passionate than Migi in avenging their mother, which suggests that his revenge was about more than just their mother. But I think we all know that by now.

On some level, it makes sense. How could Dali just suddenly be buddy-buddy with someone who he blames for his miserable childhood?

Still, Dali was willing to listen to Migi, and I think he genuinely wanted to know why he should accept Eiji. Notice how he didn't directly justify his rejection of Eiji, and instead asked Migi for his opinion (albeit in an intimidating manner). He wanted to know what Migi's true feelings were regarding the matter, rather than a simple "Because Mom said so", though it seemed that Migi wasn't able to produce any real acceptance of Eiji either.

Dali's main struggle to understand Eiji was set up once again when everyone was trapped in the confinement room, as Migi asked him questions for which he has no answers, to his frustration.

There's not much to say here, though it is worth noting that Dali paid close attention to Migi's distress, and as always Migi relied on Dali for answers, as they always have.

Then, after many desperate attempts to break down the door to escape, Migi attempted to break it using his head as a battering ram, even snapping at Dali after he tried pulling him away.

Once again, Migi was motivated by the happiness at the Sonoyama house, as well as his brother's happiness, even willing to sacrifice his own well-being for him. Dali, realizing this, was touched by his brother's sacrificial love, though he still couldn't bear to see him hurt himself anymore.

After the twins escaped and realized Eiji attempted to die (like Dali did before), Dali finally understood Eiji as he ran back into the burning house to Migi's confusion.

If I was Migi I'd definitely be confused as to why my brother suddenly (and stupidly) rushed into a burning building.

Dali realized that Eiji struggled with self-expectations, loneliness, and guilt, much like himself. He hated Eiji because he also hated himself, as he always suppressed his own feelings and pushed away others (including Migi) to preserve his image, just like Eiji did.

But thanks to Migi, the "fool" who was always honest about his feelings, Dali was never truly alone, and it was through Migi's love that Dali was able to find joy and hope in living. I really liked how Dali smiled as he said that Migi always ruined his plans, as it shows how much he hated what he was doing before and how grateful he was to Migi for always being there for him, despite everything that's happened. He realized that Eiji never had someone like Migi in his life, and so his "revenge" was to set things right, to put an end to the solitude and suffering that haunted them both by giving Eiji a chance that he never had. By doing this, Dali could find redemption and finally overcome their mother's death.

[joylinda-hawks]

Reasons are just a nicer name for excuses. WOH, episode 24, part 4. ZZS drinks tea served by WKX. ZZS sits on the bench and WKX sits opposite ZZS on the ground. ZZS puts the empty cup on the bench and continues the story, he says that the master was taken away by illness and before his death he entrusted ZZS to Siji Manor. Saying this, ZZS can hardly control his emotions and tears. ZZS adds that as a young leader he did not have the strength to defend him. All the forces in Jianghu, both good and evil, continued to hinder them. ZZS suffered like this for two years, seeing older brothers die one by one in defense of our sect. ZZS couldn't take it anymore, so I ran away. WKX tells ZZS not to blame himself and asks what happened next. ZZS once again claims that he escaped. WKX does not agree with this, explaining that ZZS must have had its reasons for this. ZZS replies that reasons are just a nicer name for excuses. ZZS says that his father was once Prince Jin's assistant, and the current Prince Jin is ZZS's cousin, who was worried that he had no one he could trust. That's why he wrote to ZZS asking for help. ZZS returns to the past and remembers how he came to Prince Jin. The prince, whom ZZS addressed by his official name, asked ZZS to call him cousin. ZZS asked what happened, because his cousin looked bad, he was worried that something had happened to the prince's father. The prince replied that it was about their teacher, who was dead. ZZS is surprised and asks how this could happen. The prince explained that his father had heard slander about their teacher and had him imprisoned and sentenced to torture. Their teacher refused to do what was demanded of him and eventually committed suicide in his cell. This news saddened ZZS. The prince asked if ZZS knew what the teacher had done before his death and explained that out of despair he had written poems all over the walls and floor. The prince quotes one of them: "The river flows, Tian Chuang leads to the afterlife, gossip threatens justice. "The clouds are covering the sun." The prince explains that he was looking at these bloody letters on the walls and floor. After a while, he gets angry and asks what kind of world they live in. Their teacher served this country and its people throughout his life. This is the next part of This long touching scene. ZZS understood that the best medicine for him is only to let go of what hurts and torments him. This will allow him to cleanse himself internally. This is a path to redemption for him. He doesn't even think that WKX will understand why he did it and that it will be a comfort to him. WKX is horrified, horrified at how easily this strong young man fell apart. Throughout the time they were together, ZZS was always strong, never showing his weakness like he does now. WKX is not sure how it can help ZZS, because it has also experienced a lot of evil. Now she can only listen to him. ZZS, on the other hand, knows that since he has already started telling his life story, he will have to tell WKX everything, he will have to admit that he is a coward and a traitor, he may even want WKX to confirm what he thinks about himself. For WKX, ZZS is not a coward or a traitor, he is simply a man who made bad choices and it was not his fault. ZZS also looks back into the past to explain why it did what it did. I love this scene because of how beautiful ZZH looks and how great ZZS is at showing emotion.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Full article under the break

Dec. 17, 2020

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — On Thursday evening, I sat in the lobby of a Marriott hotel in Terre Haute, Ind., as Shawn Nolan and Victor Abreu tried to save a man’s life. Both wore bluejeans, button-down shirts and a day or more of scruff — Mr. Nolan’s salt-and-pepper, Mr. Abreu’s black. We shared a bottle of red wine in plastic cups as the two men, public defenders whose caseloads are strictly death penalty appeals, discussed the merits of pleading with the Supreme Court for a stay of execution.

“Days of life matter,” Mr. Nolan had reflected as we spoke earlier that afternoon.

Their work, never light, had recently increased. After a 17-year hiatus, the Department of Justice had resumed federal executions in July, wedging 10 deaths into the latter half of the final year of President Trump’s term. Two of those inmates were their clients.

Mr. Nolan and Mr. Abreu debated whether it would be worthwhile to bring a procedural claim before the court for their client Alfred Bourgeois, who was scheduled to die in less than 24 hours, at 6 p.m. on Friday.

Mr. Nolan’s office already had litigation pending over whether lower courts had fairly considered Mr. Bourgeois’s intellectual deficit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit had denied their claim that judges had discounted Mr. Bourgeois’s disability based on standards that have been superseded by diagnostic criteria from organizations like the American Psychiatric Association. Since the Supreme Court has ruled that the government cannot execute someone deemed intellectually disabled, the question of whether Mr. Bourgeois’s diagnosis had been given due consideration was crucial.

With that still on the Supreme Court’s docket, Mr. Nolan felt reluctant to submit a second petition, claiming the law required more time between the scheduling of Mr. Bourgeois’s execution and the killing itself. The court had already rejected similar claims, he said, and a rejection of that claim might make the justices take their other filing less seriously.

Mr. Abreu paced, took a call from a colleague, then sat again, contemplative.

“I’ve known Alfred for 15 years, almost,” he said. “I know as much about his life as any other person in the world does. And I care about him … as much as any other person in the world.”

As the lawyers conferred, the blue light of Mr. Abreu’s phone suddenly lit his face. The Supreme Court had denied Brandon Bernard’s request for a stay of execution. And despite a clemency campaign by celebrities like Kim Kardashian West, jurors from Mr. Bernard’s trial and a prosecutor who helped secure his sentence, President Trump had refused to intervene.

Mr. Bernard’s case was compelling: He had been only 18 in 1999 when he joined several of his friends in a carjacking that concluded with the murder of a married couple, and he had played a subordinate role. Since then, he had expressed deep remorse for his actions decades earlier. Terre Haute had been flush with protesters advocating for Mr. Bernard that day. The fact that all that support and his tale of redemption amounted to nothing arrived as an ill omen for Mr. Bourgeois. His case was much worse, or so it seemed.

You could miss the Federal Correctional Institution at Terre Haute from the flat strip of State Road 63 along its eastern perimeter. From that remote vantage, its buildings are nondescript, red brick and beige stone rising up on the plains. The Wabash River runs along the campus’s western side, carving a ravine between stands of winter-bare black walnut and white ash. Only upon closer inspection does the shimmer of looping barbed wire emerge, and then the shadows of stadium-style floodlights, dormant in the noonday sun. Signs warn against trespass; armed guards patrol the entrances and exits. This is where all federal executions are carried out, and where Alfred Bourgeois was waiting to die.

Mr. Bourgeois’s was the kind of offense often adduced in advocacy for capital punishment: cruel, senseless, depraved. In 2008, a federal prosecutor opened a pro-death penalty essay in the Texas Tech Law Review with a brief, brutal description of Mr. Bourgeois’s crime. Mr. Bourgeois “systematically tortured and sexually and physically abused his two-year-old daughter, culminating in her murder by ‘grabb[ing] her by her shoulders and slamm[ing] the back of her head’” into the cab of his tractor-trailer in 2002, wrote Richard Roper, formerly the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas.

Jurors attending Mr. Bourgeois’s trial heard more, and worse. Court records show Mr. Bourgeois had a history of domestic violence, extramarital affairs and aggression.

In 2002, Katrina Harrison, a former lover, claimed her 2-year-old daughter, JaKaren, was Mr. Bourgeois’s child. He agreed to a paternity test, which came back positive in May of that year. Immediately after the resulting child support hearing in East Texas, Ms. Harrison sent JaKaren with her father, who set off for Louisiana with the toddler, his two older daughters and his wife, Robin.

Mr. Bourgeois was a truck driver and routinely took his family with him on his routes. For the last month of her life, JaKaren rode along with her father, sisters and stepmother, spending most of her time tied to a training potty. Mr. Bourgeois could not manage her toilet training and beat the girl in frustration with his fists, with electrical cords, with a shoe, with a plastic bat, with a belt. He bit the child, his jurors were told, and once forced her to drink urine from a bottle he used to relieve himself while driving.

Then, on June 27, 2002, Mr. Bourgeois made a delivery at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. While he backed into a loading dock, JaKaren accidentally jostled her potty chair, tipping it over. Incensed, Mr. Bourgeois’s elder daughter testified, he spanked the girl, grabbed her by the shoulders and slammed her head into the interior of his truck with such force that witnesses standing outside recalled the vehicle shaking. He then left the toddler, now mortally injured, to finish his work.

His wife pleaded with bystanders to call an ambulance. Mr. Bourgeois told hospital personnel that she had fallen from the truck, but the extent of JaKaren’s injuries belied his story. There was blood behind her eyes, her extremities were swollen, and she was covered in bruises and healing scars, some of them suggesting burns. She died less than 24 hours after arriving at the hospital, and Mr. Bourgeois was arrested. Since the girl was murdered on the military base, the case was tried in federal courts.

The worst allegations emerged from JaKaren’s autopsy, when a government expert testified that rectal swabs had tested positive for semen.

“Was he laughing when he bit her, or he burned her, or he put his filthy semen in her little body?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Patti Booth prompted the jury during the sentencing phase of Mr. Bourgeois’s trial.

In the news stories and legal opinions that followed Mr. Bourgeois’s conviction and subsequent death sentence, JaKaren’s suffering is vivid, palpable, fleshly.

At her father’s trial, JaKaren’s older half sister testified that as Mr. Bourgeois had bashed her sister’s head against the interior of his truck, JaKaren’s expression had turned “real sad.” She was a child at the time of her testimony and perhaps lacked the words for the kind of agony, terror, betrayal, anguish, humiliation and sorrow that a face even so young could register. But it comes through in her rendering nonetheless, and it haunts me.

The pain pierced deeper when I noticed that JaKaren’s family had nicknamed the little girl JaJa, the same one we had given my daughter Jane as a baby.

It put me in mind of a theme prominent in Mr. Roper’s essay. Arguments against the death penalty tend to be abstract: moral declarations about taking human life, conclusions from academic studies of legal procedures, dissections of prosecutions, or philosophical concerns about the limits of government power. But arguments for the death penalty are visceral: the blood of a baby girl seeping out into her eyes, the tangled scars crisscrossing her soft skin.

I oppose capital punishment, as did 39 percent of Americans questioned for a 2018 Pew poll. I have written for years that it ought to be abolished. I believe that it is too absolute a penalty for a trial process so utterly limited, and I’m convinced that it is both arbitrary and prone to bias. In the purest and highest reaches of my spirit, I detest the idea of killing.

And yet the impulse to erase from the earth every trace of a crime as monstrous as Mr. Bourgeois’s still arises in me, at times, pitting my emotions against my intellect. On some irrational level, it occasionally feels not only appropriate but also crucial, urgent. Some would say this is proof that execution satisfies a natural impulse, and a good deal of human history supports their claim. When I arrive on the brink of agreement, a favored verse from Jeremiah echoes in my thoughts: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: Who can know it?” I don’t credit those impulses with any righteousness, but they persist nevertheless.

It’s nearly impossible to live with a conflict between feeling and belief. You end up feeling the way you believe you should, or believing the way you feel you ought to. I have known for a long time — certainly since the murder of my own sister-in-law in our Texas hometown in 2016 — that I had emotions related to the death penalty that had to be reckoned with.

I began to think I wouldn’t know with certainty what part of me was being honest about capital punishment until I saw it for myself.

By midday Friday, a sharp wind had pushed slate-colored clouds over Terre Haute. Mr. Bourgeois’s lawyers had decided a second petition would be futile. The decision was a hard-won consensus, required, they felt, so that they would not tear themselves apart later if one lawyer prevailed over another.

So they pinned their hopes to the appeal concerning Mr. Bourgeois’s intellectual disability and anxiously awaited the Supreme Court’s decision as the minutes ticked down to 6 p.m.

Mr. Nolan and his team only encounter their clients’ cases post-conviction; they don’t have the opportunity to represent them at trial. Instead, they have to make the best of what they’ve got once convictions are handed down. And in Mr. Bourgeois’s case, what did they have?

Mr. Bourgeois’s upbringing in southern Louisiana was difficult, though he was reluctant to present that element of his biography at trial. He never knew his father, and statements by friends and family members revealed that his mother singled him out among her seven children for abuse. Mr. Bourgeois eventually took refuge with an elderly neighbor, who effectively raised him.

“Alfred was this little pretty baby,” Mr. Bourgeois’s older brother, Lloyd Ferdinand, told me. “Everybody wanted him. OK? So, he went and stayed with … this old lady called Miss Mary and she pretty much raised him.” Mr. Bourgeois saw his siblings living happily with his mother and one another, but he could not join them.

Miss Mary tried to provide Mr. Bourgeois with a moral foundation. Alton Preston, a longtime friend of Mr. Bourgeois who, as a Baptist minister, served as his spiritual adviser in his final days, told me that she made certain he was acquainted with the gospel.

But Mr. Bourgeois still struggled with anger, impulsivity and cognitive problems. “Alfred did have a temper, but once he got to that point, it was kind of hard to calm him down,” Mr. Preston said. And when it came to managing adult life, Mr. Bourgeois needed help. “I told him about the checkbook and checks and how to do it and balance it and that kind of stuff,” Mr. Preston said. “With many decisions that he made, he would come to me and ask me what I thought and make sure he was doing it the right way,” he went on. “When he purchased the house, he asked me definitely to come with him” to read and complete the necessary paperwork, Mr. Preston told me. “And after reading them, I would pass them to him and let him know that it was OK for him to sign it.”

During his trial, Mr. Bourgeois was given two I.Q. tests, scoring 75 on one and 70 on another, placing him, in the words of an expert witness, “in the borderline to mildly defective range.” Despite those results and the testimony of people like Mr. Preston, who had known Mr. Bourgeois for many years, the courts determined that because Mr. Bourgeois had kept a job as a long-haul truck driver and owned a home, it simply wasn’t possible that his I.Q. scores and learning difficulties indicated a real impairment.

Mr. Ferdinand tried to explain to the prosecution that his brother’s capacity to hold down a job wasn’t a function of his mental acuity. “You see Alfred, he had a gift from God,” he remembered insisting in an interview with the prosecutor outside court. “I said, ‘Alfred can get out that truck and back it up to the dock standing on a running board. Not many people can do that.’” Mr. Bourgeois hadn’t needed to take a test to earn his commercial driving license; he received a test waiver, Mr. Ferdinand said, because he had been employed in shipping for some time.

As futile as the effort to prove he was mentally disabled was, Mr. Bourgeois faced a greater hurdle, his lawyers told me. What doomed him, they said, was the allegation that he had raped his daughter before killing her.

When a witness for the government claimed the autopsy had revealed the presence of semen in JaKaren’s rectum, what he referred to was the discovery of prostatic specific antigen, more commonly called P.S.A. or P30, on two of the swabs taken during the autopsy.

But whether the presence of P.S.A. confirms the presence of semen is hotly debated in the forensic sciences. It occurs in high concentrations in semen, but also in smaller concentrations in other bodily fluids. Studies have shown that P.S.A. appears in female urine and other fluids, which is perhaps why the F.B.I. has stopped using the presence of P.S.A. alone as confirmation of semen.

The other curious fact about the accusation is that a sexual assault nurse examiner in the hospital recorded no trauma to the girl’s anus. The prosecution implied that Mr. Bourgeois could have used a lubricant, leaving no sign of abuse.

Mr. Bourgeois’s lawyers — and there were many over time — were ultimately unable to overcome the lurid accusation. Media reports inevitably focused on the appalling notion of a father raping his own toddler.

Trials create conflicting realities. There is a version of Mr. Bourgeois who was impulsive and cognitively impaired, who had little skill as a caregiver and even less capacity to limit his fury once it flared. In that universe, Mr. Bourgeois’s offenses are the accumulated results of poorly contained anger under stress. That’s still reprehensible and still worthy of severe punishment, but it is distinct from the other version of Mr. Bourgeois — a pathological sadist who derived amusement from suffering and who raped his baby daughter without a shred of remorse.

By the time I arrived at the Federal Correctional Institution at Terre Haute at 4 p.m. on Friday, which version of Mr. Bourgeois corresponded to reality no longer mattered. His appellate lawyers had done what they could, and the long appeals process appended to every capital conviction had come down to one final petition. All that remained to be seen was whether it could save him.

Night fell by 5:30. Somewhere on the prison campus, Mr. Abreu and two other team members were sequestered in a room designated for staff training, awaiting news from the Supreme Court. Mr. Nolan said that the execution would not proceed until the court responded to their petition — a courtesy the federal Bureau of Prisons pays to the highest court that it does not extend to lower courts; some prisoners die with litigation still pending.

In another staff training building set aside that evening for members of the media, I joined five other journalists to put on identification badges and stay put until a decision arrived.

Elsewhere, behind prison walls, Mr. Bourgeois was receiving his last meal. A Louisiana native, Mr. Bourgeois opted for a spread from Red Lobster: seafood-stuffed mushrooms, a platter of fried shrimp, shrimp Alfredo pasta, six buttered biscuits and cheesecake.

At Terre Haute, death row inmates with scheduled execution dates live in the same area and get to know one another. They are permitted to bequeath their worldly possessions, few that they are, to their compatriots shortly before they are taken away to be killed. (Mr. Bourgeois, for example, had the wristwatch of his friend Brandon Bernard for a short time.) One of Mr. Bourgeois’s lawyers told me that this recent spate of federal executions has progressed so rapidly that condemned men have been passing down unfinished food to their friends along with sentimental objects.

As inmates are put to death, those next to die are sometimes moved into the dead men’s former cells. Mr. Bourgeois, for instance, was moved into the space previously occupied by Orlando Hall, who kidnapped and raped a 16-year-old Texas girl before dousing her with gasoline and burying her alive. He arrived so shortly after Mr. Hall’s execution that, he told his attorneys, he could still smell Mr. Hall’s chewing tobacco lingering there.

The 6 o’clock hour came and passed at the media center. I stepped out with a friend, George Hale, of Indiana Public Media, to visit the Dollar General up the road from the prison complex.

Mr. Hale, who has witnessed four federal executions this year, told me that while prison officials permit protesters to gather in certain staging areas, they generally prefer to congregate in the parking lot of the Dollar General, where they hold signs and banners, light candles, use their phones and sit in folding chairs. The night before, protesters and foreign media had gathered. Friday night, there were only a handful of protesters in a dark corner of the lot, some of them Franciscans in their rope-belt habits, with banners and tea lights fading against the rain that had just begun to fall.

Inside the store, Mr. Hale and I were startled by notifications on our phones: The Supreme Court had declined to hear Mr. Bourgeois’s final appeal, and the execution would proceed immediately.

What happened next transpired quickly. Prison officials herded us into unmarked white vans, three journalists to a vehicle, and ferried us to a security screening center where our shoes and coats were X-rayed, our bodies scanned and our masks inspected for contraband. Once cleared, we hurried back into the vans, which trundled down a dark lane named, I noticed, Justice Road.

There was a pause. The vans stopped and we waited. Rain fell. No one spoke. On the radio, festive music played faintly, Bing Crosby’s “Christmas Song” and Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” There is staff housing on the complex grounds, and I had seen Christmas trees glittering warmly in their windows; I wondered if the men sent to their deaths could see them, too, even once before the end. I lay down in the seat to settle my nerves.

The vans lurched ahead, then turned onto a paved driveway abutting a white vinyl frame tent that housed a guard and a metal detector. We passed through it into a small cinder block room with mottled blue institutional carpet. Plastic chairs were arrayed in front of a pair of windows, shades closed.

In a moment the shades lifted, and there in the center of a tiled chamber was Mr. Bourgeois, tightly strapped to a gurney.

Everything there was some shade of green: Milky jade tiles lined the walls, emerald paint framed the windows, a sickly green sheet was draped over Mr. Bourgeois’s body from the chest down, the cushions of his deathbed were teal. Two U.S. marshals stood on either side of him, and a camera and microphone were suspended above. The intravenous line was already in his arm. I could see his eyes, and they, too, were green.

It was hot in that strange, horrible little room, which someone seemed to have deduced; a fan had been situated under the windows, where it oscillated with a dull hum, blowing hot air.

A hiss of static signaled that the microphone above Mr. Bourgeois was live, and then he began to speak. With his last words, he denied murdering JaKaren. “I did not commit this crime,” he said. “I ask God to forgive all those who plotted and schemed against me, and planted false evidence,” he said, adding that he had never raped or sexually molested anyone, ever, in his entire life.

He commended his soul into the hands of God and asked forgiveness for his sins and those of the people who had put him where he was just then, in a tile panopticon in Terre Haute, with a plastic tube snaking away from his vein into a hole in the wall obscured by a metal flap. One of the marshals read Mr. Bourgeois’s sentence aloud, and then the other picked up a black telephone mounted on the wall, requesting final clearance to kill the man. The Bureau of Prisons later confirmed to me that was the moment — 7:53 p.m. — that the federal government began piping pentobarbital into Mr. Bourgeois’s body.

And I am transfixed, I am breathing consciously, I still have yet to accept that this is really happening. Mr. Bourgeois’s trim white beard dips and rises as his jaw begins to work, and then his mouth gapes once, a wide, ghastly gulp for air. His belly begins to twitch and then convulse rhythmically, as mine did, I realize blankly, when I was nine months pregnant and my daughters would jab at my insides with their little fists and feet. That was the precipice of life and this is the precipice of death. Mr. Bourgeois’s eyes flutter and widen and then close, and somehow I’m still convinced he will survive. I am certain of it. I am watching his breast as its shuddering slows, and I realize only when a doctor steps into the chamber that the motion I thought I could see there was just my reflection trembling in the window.

Mr. Bourgeois was pronounced dead at 8:21 p.m., Friday, Dec. 11. It had taken him more than 20 minutes to die. A prison official startled me minutes later when she called me by name, gesturing that it was time to duck back into those white vans and leave. I followed her out of the charnel house into a cold, heavy rain, spitting bile onto the pavement.

That night, I joined Mr. Nolan and his team in their hotel room, where they’d gathered around with cups of wine and beer to share pizza and commiserate.

“When you do death penalty work, there’s no hindsight,” Mr. Nolan had said the night before. “It’ll just make you crazy.” I watched them, one more client lost, trying not to sink into despair contemplating what they could have done, what might have worked. Now there were other clients, other cases, other executions scheduled for January, before Joe Biden takes office.

Capital punishment is often framed in terms of closure for victims’ families, but JaKaren’s mother was stabbed to death by her boyfriend in December 2002. Her grandmother later died as well. No one from the family observed the execution. The Bureau of Prisons released a brief statement from JaKaren’s family celebrating Mr. Bourgeois’s death, but it was unsigned, and the bureau has declined to provide me with further detail on the provenance of the statement.

Mr. Ferdinand had not been there to see his brother die. Family members of the condemned and of their victims are permitted to witness executions, but he chose not to. “I don’t want to have to remember or have that stuck in the back of my head, him strapped down,” he told me.

Mr. Preston stood in the room with Mr. Bourgeois as he died, having prayed with him in the hours before. He had served as his spiritual adviser, but, he reminded me, “it was my friend laying there strapped down about to be put to death.” Tears strained his voice as we spoke.

“I always knew that I was against the death penalty,” Mr. Preston said later, almost offhandedly. Witnessing Mr. Bourgeois’s execution had eliminated all room for doubt. “I saw the realness of it,” he told me, and that definitively settled the matter for him.

It did for me, too.

The idea of execution promises catharsis. The reality of it delivers the opposite, a nauseating sense of shame and regret. Alfred Bourgeois was going to die behind bars one way or another, and the only meaning in hastening it, as far as I could tell, was inflicting the terror and the torment of knowing that the end was coming early. I felt defiled by witnessing that particular bit of pageantry, all of that brutality cloaked in sterile procedure.

So much time and effort goes into making executions seem like exercises of justice, not just power; extreme measures are taken at each juncture to convince the public, and perhaps the executioners themselves, that the process is a fair, dispassionate, rational one.

It isn’t. There was no sense in it, and I can’t make any out of it. Nothing was restored, nothing was gained. There isn’t any justice in it, nor satisfaction, nor reason: There was nothing, nothing there.

Elizabeth Bruenig (@ebruenig) is an Opinion writer.

[bookoformon]

Alma Chapter 28. "The Widows."

The Lamanites are defeated in a tremendous battle—Tens of thousands are slain—The wicked are consigned to a state of endless woe; the righteous attain a never-ending happiness. About 77–76 B.C. זזז‎‎‎ו‎, "Moving along." ‎

1 And now it came to pass that after the people of Ammon were established in the land of Jershon, "the place of produce" and a church also established in the land of Jershon, and the armies of the Nephites were set round about the land of Jershon, yea, in all the borders round about the land of Zarahemla "place of enlightenment"; behold the armies of the Lamanites had followed their brethren into the wilderness.

2 And thus there was a tremendous battle; yea, even such an one as never had been known among all the people in the land from the time Lehi left Jerusalem; yea, and tens of thousands of the Lamanites were slain and scattered abroad.

3 Yea, and also there was a tremendous slaughter among the people of Nephi; nevertheless, the Lamanites were driven and scattered, and the people of Nephi returned again to their land.

4 And now this was a time that there was a great mourning and lamentation heard throughout all the land, among all the people of Nephi—

5 Yea, the cry of widows mourning for their husbands, and also of fathers mourning for their sons, and the daughter for the brother, yea, the brother for the father; and thus the cry of mourning was heard among all of them, mourning for their kindred who had been slain.

6 And now surely this was a sorrowful day; yea, a time of solemnity, and a time of much fasting and prayer.

7 And thus endeth the fifteenth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi;

When there is inner conflict between the Nephites and the Lamanites, the wisdoms and the ignorances, there are certain transitions that take place. Thousands of deaths resulting in widows, orphans, and empty nests means some kind of new pure state has been achieved, just at the cost of redemption.

The mention of widowhood in particular invokes the story of Er and Onan "wild ass and vigorously troublesome" who got in trouble for failing to intercourse with a foreign woman in order to maintain diversity in the flock:

So Judah said to his daughter-in-law Tamar, "the fertile palm tree" "Wait as a widow in your father's house until my son Shelah "the inevitable peace" grows up," for he feared lest he also die as his brothers did. So Tamar went to live in her father's house. (Gen. 38:11)

Shelah, the peace that waits in exile for Tamar, the future plenty is analagous to what is called Mashiach, "universal agreement":

"Shelah refers to the Jewish people in exile. The Shechina is destined to mate when Shelah attains his mature form, Shiloh. Shelah and Shiloh are spelled exactly the same, except that Shiloh possesses an additional yud.

"Shelah" is spelled shin-lamed-hei; "Shiloh" is spelled shin-yud-lamed-hei.

Shelah remains in exile "until Shiloh will come", filled [with the yud]. This refers to the Mashiach, who [will possess the soul of] Moses."

The Book of Mormon refers not to the Jews so much as all Americans, who have effectively been in exile because our government is corrupt and ineffective at dealing with injustice at the behest of overly religious people that refuse to grow up.

All the racism, violence, greed, the lying, and languishing in sin of our government is not new. These "Lamanites" should have passed away a long time ago, champions of the law and its precepts should have died getting rid of them.

The time for this, as in the passage from Genesis, is surely in our future but for now we wait like young widows for another forever husband.

It would be so easy for Joe Biden, for example to enforce the law and get rid of the Republicans, Evangelicals, Mormons and Pro-Lifers and protect the nation and the planet from evil, but until someone does, we must all wait in mourning for all the moments of peace and happiness that are being lost from our lives.

How good life will be when we uproot the filth and move on:

8 And this is the account of Ammon and his brethren, their journeyings in the land of Nephi, their sufferings in the land, their sorrows, and their afflictions, and their incomprehensible joy, and the reception and safety of the brethren in the land of Jershon "uprooting of the weeds". And now may the Lord, the Redeemer of all men, bless their souls forever.

9 And this is the account of the wars and contentions among the Nephites, and also the wars between the Nephites and the Lamanites; and the fifteenth year of the reign of the judges is ended.

10 And from the first year to the fifteenth has brought to pass the destruction of many thousand lives; yea, it has brought to pass an awful scene of bloodshed.

=8264, ח‎ב‎ו‎ד ha-vad, "to become a council"= the heaps of persons considering the consequences of the affairs of the state:

11 And the bodies of many thousands are laid low in the earth, while the bodies of many thousands are moldering in heaps upon the face of the earth; yea, and many thousands are mourning for the loss of their kindred, because they have reason to fear, according to the promises of the Lord, that they are consigned to a state of endless wo.

12 While many thousands of others truly mourn for the loss of their kindred, yet they rejoice and exult in the hope, and even know, according to the promises of the Lord, that they are raised to dwell at the right hand of God, in a state of never-ending happiness.

13 And thus we see how great the inequality of man is because of sin and transgression, and the power of the devil, which comes by the cunning plans which he hath devised to ensnare the hearts of men.

14 And thus we see the great call of diligence of men to labor in the vineyards of the Lord; and thus we see the great reason of sorrow, and also of rejoicing—sorrow because of death and destruction among men, and joy because of the light of Christ unto life.

So if we council and counsel ourselves as to the causes of inequity and inequality, just like God says we are supposed to do, then the Book of Mormon says life will turn around. We can get remarried to a younger, faster, sleeker model like Una Ferrari with better gas mileage and roar down the freeway like nothing bad ever happened.