#let's say this is for any law enforcement characters ( although if you can think of a way to spin things

[stillresolved]

"See the sign there?" He's pointing to it before he goes back to wiping the glass. "Doesn't matter if you're off duty. We don't serve cops here."

[fandomtrash-whataboutit]

Fairy Tail Freed Justine Thesis

Part 1 (of ???)

Magic

The most detailed explanation I have found describes Freed’s magic as having two distinct parts: Dark Ecriture and Jutsu Shiki. The former is responsible for everything enacted on people, things like Pain, literally inflicting pain, and Darkness and Absolute Shadow (we’ll come back to this. Jutsu Shiki is responsible for the barriers of all kinds, both from season 1 and season 9.

First, and most important, point: what got me started on this insanity? Well, when activating Jutsu Shiki on several occasions, the terminology is ‘Enchatment Activated’ in the English dub and similar vocabulary across the board. But,,, Wendy’s magic is enchanting? To make a long story much shorter, I agonized until I came to a true epiphany: Wendy enchants people and objects, whereas Freed enchants TIME AND SPACE.

Let’s talk about that. Freed’s enchantments are, for the most part, absolute, but I can’t just leave it at that. As far as I can tell, there are two (main?) types of barriers: those that are laid out ahead of time and those that need to be maintain. The former of which are ones that are absolute. As of season 1, Freed is able to keep Makarov himself contained without any strain. For further clarification, the absolute barriers are presumably laid ahead of time and have set rules once activated. The maintainable barriers are presumably shorter notice and/or covering much larger areas, resembling magic shields. Very significantly, I would like to clarify the unintentional details of this magic to desperately try to justify how insane I am about Freed. Thus far I have explained the steps in my thinking so I would hope to justify the assumptions I have had to make because this awesome character has been sidelined. Operating under the assumption that Freed is enchanting space itself (and what else am I supposed to assume?) that means that in the areas that Freed enchanted (think those squares and rectangles in the battle of fairy tail) are spaces in which Freed has absolute domination over the laws of reality in every cubic millimeter of space within his runes.

And, now that that tangent is done, let’s talk about runes. I’m willing to admit that I am not super sure about the exact canon lore surrounding the Magic Counsel’s Rune Knights, because their appearances are so sparse, but I am simply going to try my best. There isn’t as much to say here as one might think, at least for me, but a couple of points still exist. For one thing, as the rune knights are THE enforcement agency of the magic counsel and possibly the government depending on the circumstances, the government’s default way of apprehending people is literally inaplicable to Freed. The counsel’s cops literally can’t do shit to him. And Freed can outclass the government officials.

Next we can get on to the very important thing:

Dark Ecriture: Darkness and Dark Ecriture: Absolute Shadow.

Both of these are runes that Freed can enact on himself to take on entirely new forms. I specifically want to talk about Darkness, although most everything I am about to say applies to both forms. You see, Darkness is a demonic form. It is, presumably, similar to take over magic. except Darkness is Freed’s demonic form. The implication of this is that Freed first used the technical strength of rune letter magic to REINVENT take over magic and then pulled a ZEREF and MADE A DEMON. Of course, obviously, it wasn’t actually a zeref thing, but you can presume he embutes himself with demonic magic, curses?, to turn himself into a partially demonic creature. WHICH IS INSANE. Im so normal about him.

Honorable mentions include: his ability to teleport, his ability to fly, and a never displayed spell that presumably causes INSTANT DEATH.

Finally, let’s talk about his power level. The first point I want to make is that, judging by the displayed battle and the circumstances of the fight between Freed and Mira at the battle of Fairy Tail as well as the circumstances of the trials, Freed could be considered at the level of an S-Class wizard. I’m not going to say he’s as strong as Erza or Mira or try to say that OOO he COULDVE beaten Cana or if he ended up fighting someone else in the trials he would’ve beat them, because pitting characters against each other is always just confusing and frustrating. However, in terms of a test, like the way we say Gildarts acting with Natsu, I think Freed could succeed in an EXAMINATION against one of the S-Class wizards, and therefore earn the rank. The next big thing is the very obvious: in season 9 Freed single handedly maintains a barrier around the entirety of Magnolia against the combined might of all the long range weapons of 50 of Alakitasia’s flying warships. Come on.

[superconductivebean]

#986: aesop sharp headcanons - 1

Imelda Reyes: >>>1 || >>>2 (nsfw) || >>>3 || >>>4 || >>>5 || >>>6 Poppy Sweeting: >>>1 || >>>2 || >>>3 Mirabel Garlick: >>>1 Victor Rookwood: >>>1

Once again raising my head from the Brainrot fog to share some character headcanons with the world. Brainrot is a fic I’m working on.

Writing Aesop into this silly little series would be no easy task, he is one of the main characters in the Brainrot. Linking other characters' posts because posts about them have some bits about him.

A light cw/tw for alcohol abuse, perhaps, depression.

Tags: @thriftstorebabayaga @endeavour12345 @mrs-sharp

He is deviously clever, painstakingly stoic, but wistful;

Brainrot: When he joined the ranks, the Office and the Law Enforcement Department were already in its conjoined heyday, slowly encompassing itself with every shade of the law sun. Injury only brought forth the thought to eventually call it quits, however, the resignation didn't go as planned, but unlike many other Aurors going to the early retirement, Aesop decided to keep the badge;

The badge is the symbol and the reminder of who he once was. He went through hell and high water to be able to come and try to save lives; that being said, an idealist he is, he can get upset, sharp or portending. He doesn't tolerate ill-mouthed, petty verbal fights;

Albeit he isn't the one to cheer himself on being a remotely good teacher, he takes pride in what little he can do: observing patterns, discerning causations of ill-suited behaviour, stopping someone's meander from spreading into a disaster. Suffice it to say, he prefers teaching troublemakers to drawing O's and E's, as in his mind, kids with a penchant for mischief aren't hiding their utter dishonesty;

You could say, he fully acknowledges the role of being the bane of someone's otherwise peaceful existence. If that was what fate truly wants him to do, he wouldn't debate it;

Brainrot: Injury made him considerate of superstitions and other Signs From The Beyond. A way of coping after being ruthlessly severed from what he once had in his previous life, yes, to add to his addiction to heavy beverages and mind-numbing potions;

Aesop is always visible, as he is around 6'2. His gait has a tune to it; you've heard it once, you'd always know it's him nearby. To many students, he is the second most talked about staff member, first being Mirabel Garlick. Yet, barely anyone knows him as a person, him as a potioneer, him as an Auror, Him in any capacity. Aesop is a lone wolf, and to a pack animal, it's an onerous existence. Unable to confide in anyone, constantly questioning himself, afraid to stop and look back at his progress -- and at his age, -- he tries to follow paths he can barely recognise, navigate and make sense of. The Ministry doesn't teach its most prised and powerful force to adapt beyond sharking through the criminal underworld;

Brainrot: Drinking isn't for the leg, although Aesop enjoys the soothening warmth of the firewhiskey, tiding the pain away for a while. Drinking is for silencing the inner demons and their ghastly suggestions;

Aesop is prone to make a cautionary tale out of himself, his life and choices; he can easily turn his success into an espying for potential mistakes and his shortcomings into a valuable lessons of how not to shortcut -- and if the one has to, how to do them right;

Terribly low self-esteem and shy attempts at self-reflection through taking someone's ear off are noticed by some but never read as such. Some students and the majority of the staff think highly of him, a demand he always meets, but some also notice Aesop is never quite alright, yet aren't sure how to help -- nor how to approach and to ask; and some just think to let sleeping dog lie.

Aesop doesn't know if how he usually feels is normal. He can only describe it as emptiness, awkward darkness where it used to be him being a derpy smartass, beaming with life. It never lets go of him nor he tries to fight it back, but strands of hope -- for a cure, for getting back into the ranks, for a life better and fruitful -- matter a lot to him.

[dragonflight203]

Mass Effect 2 replay, recruiting Jack:

Osun

-Erinie has element zero. Quite a bit of it. Why does a garden world in its last stages with a small salarian colony have so much?

I suppose if it was colonized in the last cycle, the element zero may be from various crashes at that time.

-Purgatory is run by the Blue Suns. So this is yet another Blue Sun mission. Why are they central to so many?

-The Blue Suns were started by humans or a batarian, depending on the story you go by. Yet they sure seem dominated by turians. Warden Kuril runs this place.

-When Warden Kuril gives that little intro speech he sure sounds like he’s selling Purgatory to Shepard. You can tell how proud he is of it.

I suppose it could be viewed that he’s warning Shepard how secure it is, so they don’t try to escape later.

-Kuril and Garrus are actually very similar. They’re both from Palaven, both former law enforcement, and both chose different career paths because they thought governments weren’t strict enough. They hate letting criminals get away.

In a different universe, I could easily see Garrus running Purgatory – although to his credit, I don’t think he’d sell criminals.

(Yes, I know Garrus has special dialogue for this mission.)

-I think Kuril generally does believe he’s doing the right thing. Or at least he’s convinced himself of it.

He’s also just very greedy, and thinks he can perform a public service and line his pockets.

And since criminals aren’t “real people”, it’s okay to beat them up and sell them off.

-Why are all the prisoners we directly encounter human?

The one being beaten, 780 whom we speak to, 403 who’s hearing things, Jack…

Bioware, c’mon. How hard would it have been to make one of them a salarian or an asari?

-Shepard has some autodialogue when Jack is released.

-Jack’s outfit is so bad. I don’t know why she’s even bothering with any kind of top. What was Bioware thinking?

(Between Jack and Miranda, I’m not sure the character designers were thinking.)

-Kuril’s threat to blow out all the airlocks if the prisoners don’t stand down is empty; that might cost him money.

-I think I’m slowly getting the hang of charge, but I am dying so many times. Charge was not designed with insanity in mind.

One of the biggest problems is that Shepard can’t dodge and is so, so slow. If I could run to cover this wouldn’t be so bad.

-The Kuril battle is much easier than the battles before it. One of the easiest fights so far in the game.

-If you ask Jack why it’s a problem that you’re with Cerberus, Miranda says she’s destroyed Cerberus people and property. I don’t think she knows that Jack was raised by Cerberus.

Jack says Miranda will die first. Lovely to see them get off on the right foot.

-Miranda also says Shepard is not authorized to give Jack full access to the databases. This is the first time Jack calls her a cheerleader.

It was hate on first sight.

Normandy

-Crew: I’ve never worked with so many aliens so far.

Strange line. I’ve recruited two so far – Mordin and Grunt. Last one I picked up with Jack. This should have played later in the game.

-Jack tends to respond better to neutral or renegade lines. Paragon tends to make her defensive or think you’re weak.

-The image of Jack’s silhouette in the shadows holding a gun is very well done.

-One of the biggest mysteries is why Jack doesn't bail at the first opportunity. She knows how dangerous Ceberus is. She doesn't give a damn about the Collectors. Why does she stick around?

-Grunt says humans, salarians, and asari are soft. Quarians are not – why?

Tell me more about Qurarian biology, Bioware!

-Okeer wanted Grunt to hate aliens. Why? I didn’t get that vibe when we spoke to him.

-More of Grunt’s complex is starting to come out. He’s strong, but he didn’t earn it. He just is.

The dead may have been weak, but at least they tried. He never had to.

-You don’t get this line if you go renegade and tell Grunt you need him to be strong. He tells you he’ll be strong enough to kill your enemies, and that’s all you need.

Grunt may respect you if you go renegade, but he doesn’t necessarily trust you.

-The amount Grunt thinks is itself telling. Krogan intellect is often mocked – they have no scientists. They just exist to kill.

But Grunt is the perfect krogan, and he spends a lot of time thinking. About what he was told, about what he believes, about who he wants to be.

That’s the antithesis of the view most people hold of krogan, even other krogans.

But they are capable of it. Grunt is proof. Violence is baked into krogan culture, but that’s not all they have to be. They’re capable of much more – they just have to break the cycles they’re trapped in.

It doesn’t even necessarily mean leaving violence behind; Grunt loves violence. But it can be productive violence, for the betterment of their people and the galaxy as a whole.

If Wrex is the Urdnot clan leader in ME3, he touches on this. With him, Bakara, and Grunt I think they do have a chance to rewrite the future of the krogan people.

[everlasting-rainfall]

I have a question, regarding the yandere society au. I think it's SUPER INTERESTING BTW.

How does an Abnormal, or even a regular darling like, reject a yandere? Without being called Abnormal? Like for something like, not being interested in dating for person school/work/life reasons or opposing personalities making them uninterested in the yandere that happened to start pursuing them? Are darlings not allowed to have a say in the yans they might be interested in?

I’m glad that you like my AU, dear! It makes me happy to hear that and trust me that I will be writing more for it in the future just like with Skin into Fur/Animal Shifter AU!

In the meantime, do feel free to send in any asks about it as I’ll be more than happy to answer them even if it’s like “Insert Character with Yandere Society” just be aware though that unless I’m told otherwise then I will more than likely be taking liberties like you gotta tell me if you won’t want something specific in it

Anywho! I’m getting off topic! Let’s get into it, shall we?

!-MINORS DO NOT INTERACT AT ALL-!

!-POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNINGS-!

Murder, Stalking, Blood Mention, Delusions Trauma Mention, Forced Relationships !-POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNINGS-!

!-MINORS DO NOT INTERACT AT ALL-!

So an Abnormal rejecting a Yandere is absolutely nothing new in the world of Yandere Society as Abnormals will almost always say no to the Yandere that has decided to pursue them and almost always a Yandere won’t give a shit as they’ll continue their pursuit

Even when it comes to Darling x Yandere which is usually summed up as Yandere x Yandere, the person who was rejected typically doesn’t really care as they’ll continue their pursuit of the object of their affections

Rejection really isn’t a thing that you can do in Yandere Society unfortunately although I guess in some circumstances you could hypothetically reject someone but that’s a long and hard process that would probably result in injury or death of a person

Like let’s say for a moment that you and your partner got together then later on, some asshole who bullied the two of you or just one of you latches on romantically to one or both of you

Neither you or your partner want this person around as you both hate them but they refuse to take no for an answer because Yandere, this would result in the long process of Rejection in order to get this person to stay away from you and your partner

Killing them is an option especially if they really won’t leave you alone as these circumstances would make it an innocent crime but if you don’t want to spill any blood then get ready for a long process of getting the asshole to leave you alone without any bloodshed

You could simply move somewhere where they wouldn’t find you but you could also ignore them until they hopefully lose interest which would possibly cause them to cling onto someone else eventually

Boom! Yandere successfully rejected!

There is always the outcome of the Yandere turning violent and attempting to hurt you though but in that case just talk to law enforcement as they’ll handle it from there as law enforcement are fairly trustworthy in this world

Well… Unless you’re an abnormal, I guess…

Also for people who aren’t interested in dating, if the person being pursued would truly wind up being hurt by a relationship then even if you are a Yandere or an Abnormal or a Late Bloomer or anything, no Yandere’s will come after you until it’s considered that you can enter into a relationship without damage

And I’m not talking about like I have a lot of stress on me at the moment with school and work or I’m just not looking for a relationship right now sort of stuff

Yandere’s will only not pursue you if being in a relationship will truly hurt you like let’s say that there’s some pretty serious trauma going on or you just lost someone dear to you like your previous partner just died or you lost someone very dear to you

People can still feel attraction to you but even Yandere’s know that now just isn’t the time to do stuff like that so a lot of people will still gather around you but they won’t be there to make any moves on you as they’ll just be trying to ensure that you’re alright and try to get you help

Maybe they do have a few ulterior motives like getting closer to you by comforting you but their main goal here is to just help you through this then afterwards once you’re alright, that’s when they can start the Yandere stuff

Because remember, everyone! Even a Yandere knows the correct place and time for these things!

Anyways if this isn’t the case then Yandere’s don’t really give a shit as they’ll still be trying to enter a relationship with you regardless of what’s going on in your life like they’ll be taking it a bit slower as to not further stress you out but that kinda depends on the person as well

Like for example characters like Coby, Buggy, and Sanji would pull back a little on things as to not further stress you out but meanwhile characters like Luffy, Akainu, and Roger wouldn’t pull back although all for separate reasons of course

Like Luffy isn’t pulling back because he knows that if he can get you to come with him then you won’t have to stress anymore but meanwhile someone like Akainu isn’t pulling back due to sheer determination to have you

Also as for the thing that you mentioned with opposing personalities? Personally I think that what would wind up happening there is likely a sort of “You’ll learn to love me” kinda situation if it was the Darling that didn’t like the Yandere

As for if Darling’s are able to have a say in the Yandere’s that they’re interested in? Well like the example that I gave earlier about rejecting the asshole, they only sometimes do

Like if the pursuing Yandere is someone who actively hurt them in the past or they’re someone who hurt people that they care about to an extent where it was considered ridiculous even in the eyes of the Yandere Society then yes, they are allowed to have a say

There are some other exceptions too but let’s not get into those as it’s based around law and shit so let’s continue on

Other than those examples, Darling’s aren’t really allowed to have a say in who pursues them

[myassbrokethefall]

xf rewatch: squeeze and conduit

(As if this wasn't already apparent, I'll warn you that any off-the-cuff posts I manage to spew out as I rewatch are going to be rambly, unorganized and rudderless. I am tagging all of these "xf rewatch rambling." And I will be kind to us all and put in a cut.)

Eps 3 and 4, and we're still building some real foundational XF DNA here. Squeeze of course is our first MOTW and it's all nicely laid out for us: Colton and the jackass squad are all like, hurrrr it's ol spooky mulder he thinks a flying saucer did the murders, and even Scully is like, so whaddya think, these are the stretchy fingerprints of ALIENS? And it gives him a great opportunity to say, please Scully, I have range, we don't ONLY do UFO episodes cases on this show in this basement, sometimes we might have a "week" where we are investigating a "monster"! That will keep us busy!

It's also really interesting to see Mulder interact with the rest of the federal law enforcement universe for the first time, and how he plays into it in a smartass way, but how it really is relentless (with Colton in particular like physically blocking him from the crime scene even before he calls off the stakeout). Mulder doesn't get really mad about it until it gets to the point where he knows they've let a killer go and no one will listen to him about that. He's just such a fundamentally Good man, and it's a lovely thing to once again see through Scully's eyes how he is not the unreasonable one here, that despite his willingness to connect the dots to make a picture that is Beyond the Realm of Science, he IS, in fact, connecting dots, he's not just making shit up, and none of these dudes making fun of him are actually listening to him. I am loving watching how they draw his character in these early days.

Then with Conduit we're back into UFO stuff and it's our first Gordon/Gansa ep. This is the first episode I don't know like the back of my hand, although I remember it pretty well (and I don't know Squeeze AS well as Pilot and DT). It is quite solid, and MUCH more based on Carl Sagan's Contact than I remembered. As I rambled to a friend earlier today and will now do here again probably even less coherently, this whole thing was great for me until it falls apart at the end with the pieces of paper forming the portrait of Ruby. Despite this being a nifty reveal, the portrait is just SO GOOFY!!, and it is just a step too far for me. The aliens are sending numbers through the TV to Ruby's little brother — sure. And he's compelled to write them down and they turn out to be, in binary, the aliens repeating back to the humans what they've heard in transmissions from Earth, in what is assumed to be a way of reaching out or saying hello (this is what happens in Contact). I love all that, it's very spooky, it's a fun side-swerve when M&S get interrogated by the NSA because Kevin was accidentally transcribing top-secret military info, and it is undeniably a great moment when Scully goes upstairs and looks down and has the realization that it's a picture of Ruby. But... how can the 1s and 0s be BOTH encrypted satellite transmissions AND the precise sequence that makes a physical picture of Ruby's face? Also, is it like, a school portrait? Why is she smiling so hard? Did the aliens tell her to smile and snap a photo of her on the spaceship? Are they reading Kevin's mind and that's how he pictures her, with a giant cheeseball grin? It just kind of falls apart for me and it is silly enough that it breaks the momentum of the episode. 

On the other hand, I get that they wanted to make it unequivocal that the aliens were communicating to Kevin about Ruby specifically — and to make that explicit tie between this situation and Mulder's memories, as expressed in the hypnosis in the (very emotional) last scene, about Samantha's abduction: the voice saying that she's ok and she'll be returned to him. This is a touching consistency that I never really picked up on before, that it is the aliens' MO when abducting a kid to make an effort to let a nearby loved one know that they don't have to worry. So working instructions for how to arrange the papers on the living room floor into their tv transmissions in order to make a giant Sears portrait of Ruby is another way of delivering this ultimately benevolent, hopeful message, I guess. 

You couldn't keep it this way indefinitely, but I really do feel wistful about these early days when there was such a sense of wonder with the possibility of aliens, and so much unknown, before it all got bogged down in super soldiers and magnetite and consortiums and viruses and black oil and impregnating people with science against their will. You can FEEL Mulder's agitation and urgency in wanting to get Ruby's story and his agony at being blocked from it, and yet also understand Darlene's refusal to let this crazy-sounding stuff that has branded her a kook her whole life define her daughter's life as well. Just good stuff.

I will note though that there have been 4 episodes here so far, 3 of them dealing with UFOs, and in all 3 of those they have done the thing where you think you're seeing UFO lights and then it turns out to be a vehicle Very Much Of This Earth. I think you could give that one a rest for a little while, show. 

Let's get real, this is all prelude to Jersey Devil, up next. Yeah baby. 

[bentosandbox]

Some thoughts on Chen and the summer event story (TL)

(Sees event discourse on TL) oh yeah there was this blog post I translated a while back about Chen’s characterisation in Dossoles and the writer let me share it sooo (you can read a summary here)

Overall the story feels average, there are parts that I like very much and parts that I think could be better. Lungmen group interaction is the biggest bright colour in summer! From their casual clothing to their beauty to dialogue... It's all so cute!

But the failure of Chen's characterisation is obvious. Maybe it doesn't matter to a non-chef(someone who doesn't make fanwork), but I can clearly recognise that the character I like and love is not the Chen here. From the very first time I looked at her file: "When an idealist finds out the world may not be so black and white, "Chen doesn't know? Chen wouldn't know? Chen Hui Chieh, Chen Sir, Chief Lungmen guard Department Special Inspection Unit wouldn't know?! even if you want to express this kind of meaning you shouldn't be using such silly words (not saying hoshiguma but the [copywriting]) you make her look like a hot blooded fool who has yet to experience the world.

And then the event is like this, the art(the whole chen art sucks debacle) made a group of people quit, and the story probably made another group do so. Is Chen's character that hard to grasp, or has HG given up on shaping her character just to make her seem like she's grown?

I remember the Chen from the main story, she clearly knows plenty of evil exists but is not afraid to stain herself with the blood of others, is aware of the blood on her hands, and will adhere to her own bottom line and sense of justice. Her justice is never false and empty. She will treat the infected harshly, while going to the slums to leave them some hope, she will resort to covert operations to achieve her goal, but never involve the innocent. She will firmly enforce the laws of lungmen and procedures that she approves of, and will put up a resistance when wei yanwu does more than what should be done.

"It's because I am like this, that I should see, and must see."

She will not run away or back down.

Which is why I was so dumbfounded when she rebuked Lin for sending people into the residential areas to steal bombs for the fun of it. I felt so powerless in my anger as she repeatedly emphasised her confusion and lack of understanding. I just wanted to sneer when her voice and file implied that she wasn't so sharp anymore.

I'd be disappointed if her epiphany and dissimilarity stemmed from the things she couldn't change in this strange city...were all the cases she worked on before absolutely black? Is lungmen that peaceful? No class conflict at all? Did the conflict between the infected and non infected not cause any tiny ripples in her psyche? If she was really incapable of empathy, how could she have said this line when Amiya faced Misha:

"If you want to hate, then hate me."

She will bear it and take responsibility.

"Fate is unfair."

"Everyone has to bear the consequences of the choices they make.

Infected or not, it makes no difference."

"Make your choice and bear the consequences of it."

Her incisiveness isn't reckless from not understanding the cost, it's not that she has never been in pain and does not know the severity of things, but that she understands she will be bruised and may even be betrayed, but she still wants to reach out to those who ask for help.

She will bear the consequences of her own choice.

Kindness requires a price, she understands this, but she still chooses to be kind.

Return my incisive Chen to me HG.

About the conflict between Chen and Lin. Procedural justice presupposes recognition of the process, and Chen also recognizes Lungmen's system of regulations to work there, but when it comes to Dossoles, these do not apply. They both need to re-adapt, although because of the different positions Yuxia will adapt faster, but their essential conflict has no place to stand, they just want to prop up their biases and give them a reason to be angry at each other. You could say they were trying to explore the concept of "don't follow the ways of the ones before you" But if it's just because of this that they fight, it's really easy to make Chen look quite reckless and unreasonable......

When a modern person meets a feudal society, will they sincerely recognise and adhere to their rules? Will they not live to rebel against the revolutionaries who rise up to say "bloodshed is injustice"? Even if the insurgents may not know what a right path is, or that history proves they won't improve things, it doesn't prevent the rulers from being wrong. Criticism can be more grounded in reality, such as the consequences of resorting to foreign forces, rather than saying that there should not be bloodshed and resistance.

But another thing I appreciate in the story is the portrayal of Candela, who "entertains everything and is under her own rules" (not that I agree with her philosophy), like when DDD woke up and thought it was worth writing a song about their "conversation". Candela is not crazy or absolutely evil, she does it because she believes it is the only way - the way shaped by money and desire. This is her limitation, but instead of giving in to her desire, she wants to control it completely - just as she would not compare herself to the sun. The sun is 'great', and the ideal in her heart is as well, but she maps it out perfectly. From this point of view, she and Wei Yanwu are indeed characters who can stand side by side.

Both of them have a lot to live up to. Young people have to progress and question, but that shouldn't stop us from offering applause for the previous generation that had flawed but worked hard to build the paths that brought us to where we are today. But after the applause, you'll still have to find your own way.

From this point of view, it is not inappropriate to say that this is a supplement to the (Lungmen crew's) main story, the core is very similar and a dedicated event that is not easily dispersed by the huge amount of information. It also puts several of them in a more unfamiliar environment, pulling them out to re-examine their choices and thoughts.

The subject matter and intention is well chosen, but unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, the characters can not stand on their own, the conflict is not sharp enough, a determined but also entitled and powerful person (Candela) versus a confused person (actually tequila's character is written really well), a person who only wants to fight (Pancho), and a person who just wants to follow her dad (la pluma)... and then the outsider (Chen) blanks out for a few times, and then everything is over... (is it not) too much of a farce? How could a combination like this depict a serious ideological tragedy?

My two most favourite lines in the story is what appears to be a hoshiswire interaction on the outside:

"You know what Chen would do."

"Then my answer is the same as hers."

They're the same (kind of) person after all. I love them so much. I love Lungmen.

[usaigi]

Seminar: How To Talk To Law Enforcement

Lunar sys au character cards | Read all chapters on ao3

‘After last week's situation with the DODC which resulted in us getting jailed for the night, I’m hosting a seminar on proper behavior when questioned or detained by a governmental official. Ms. Daniela, sit down.’ Mr. Knight says, standing in front of the projector screen, glaring down at Daniela who had gotten up as soon as Mr. Knight mentioned ‘seminar.’ 

‘This is stupid, I’m fine at talking to the pigs. I’m great with animals,’ Daniela with a deep-set frown and an irritated expression, arms crossed against her chest. 

‘Ms. Daniela, may I remind you are responsible for this situation? All you had to do was inform the agents that you were assisting Captain America on a case and you stayed behind to offer first aid to the victims. Instead, you were extremely aggressive and verbally assaulted the agent.’

‘All I did was tell my truth, I don’t see what I did wrong.’

‘You got us arrested. Luckily, we were in New York, and therefore Mr. Murdock and Mr. Wilson were able to assist us.’

‘So problem solved.’

‘Had it been anywhere else, who knows how complicated the situation would have been.’

‘Why would I take advice from a love child of James Bond and the Punisher with the emotional grace and awareness of an absent father?’

‘Ms. Daniela, this is for the safety of the system. If you want to keep the system safe, sit down and listen.’ And with a deep sigh, she drops back down to her chair. Face with scowling at Mr. Knight, plotting all the different ways she can enact her revenge. 

Before Mr. Knight continues, Steven raises his hand to ask, ‘Mr. Knight? I love the idea for this seminar, but may I ask why are we here?’ Pointing at Marc, Jake, and himself. 

‘Unlike Ms. Daniela, I’m not concerned about your aggression but your inability to shut up, Mr. Grant. I need you to understand that under no circumstances are the police or any government agents your friends and anything you say can be held against you. Unlike the Avengers, we are not offered any legal sanctuary. The United States Department of Damage Control has been particularly aggressive towards all enhanced individuals recently and therefore we must take extra precautions,’ Mr. Knight explains. 

‘Yeah, all right. Fair enough,’ Steven grumbles, dropping his face onto his hand, slouching down on his chair. 

‘Ms. Bird, Mr. Kid, I sincerely hope that you two will never be involved in a situation like this. Since everyone is here, I would also like to suggest we start implementing ‘fire drills’ practice and create a safe space for the children to hide in case of a triggering or unsafe situation. Essential practicing raising some dissociative barriers for your safety.’

‘I’ve been doing that since we were in the military and all through the mercenary/Moon Knight years. Whenever we were in a scary situation, I’d lock Birdy up in her room. Starting doing the same with Kid after I found him,’ Jake adds on. 

'I don't know about Kid but Birdy has definitely slipped through a couple of times. She's too noisy, it's not safe,' Marc says.

‘Hey!’ Birdy exclaims, with lips curling inwards. 

‘Palomita, you know what happens,’ Jake shakes his head.   

‘Her arms were cut off, her legs were cut off…’ Birdy mutters, quoting that one TikTok that had Layla laughing so much her face turned red. 

‘I appreciate that Mr. Lockley but I think we should grate the children more autonomy and let them evacuate without you. We can discuss the details at a later date, but I think Ms. Bird should be in charge of it. However, if all of the adults are incapacitated and unable to assist and one of you is in the front, we need you two to be aware of how to behave properly when it comes to cops.’

‘Act like Marc and run away, got it!’ Birdy says proudly, getting Kid’s nod of approval. 

‘No, no, don’t do that. They have guns. Although, Ms. Daniela, I do want to thank you for masking as Marc. Please continue to do that when dealing with the authorities.’

‘Why? Is my regular accent too ethnic for you? Do I sound too much like a paisa campesina? That’s fucking racist,’ she growls, seemly making her accent even heavier just to get her point across. 

‘Yes Ms. Daniela, that’s the point. The police are racist and ableist and it’s safer for all of us if they perceive us as an American singlet who sometimes has a British accent.’  

‘Mr. Knight, I don’t understand any of this. The police are there to protect us, my parents and teacher told me that we should call the police if we need help,’ Kid says. 

‘I admire your optimistic naïveté,’ Mr. Knight says, giving Kid a gentle pat on the top of his head. 

‘Anyways, now let’s ‘roleplay,’’ Mr. Knight says, making air quotes around the word. ‘The police, DODC or SWORD detains you, they offer you a snack, what do you do?’

‘Thank them…?’ Steven says, pitch getting slightly higher towards the end. 

‘No. Ms. Bird?’

‘I want a lawyer.’ 

‘Good. They reply: ‘why do you want a lawyer if you have nothing to hide? Unless you’re actually guilty.’ Ms. Daniela, how do you answer?’

‘Thank you for your insight, smartass. Call my damn lawyer,’ Mr. Knight covers their face with both hands in frustration. 

‘This is going to be a long night,’ Mr. Knight mutters under his breath, taking an exacerbated sigh.  ‘Mr. Grant, an officer asks you why you referred to yourself as ‘we,’ what do you say?’

‘I’m talking on an earpiece.’

‘No, try again.’

‘I… want an attorney?’ 

‘Correct.’

[firelxdykatara]

You’re doing a LoK rewrite, correct? Would be really interested in hearing how you plan on fixing Suyin’s character and the Lin-Suyin conflict because……. oh boy. Man there’s a lot to unpack there. This is what happens when we don’t let Toph just raise her fucking kids for the sake of pushing a stupid as hell narrative about working women and single motherhood.

I am indeed!

In... you know, the way I'm doing most of my big potential projects, in that I have a folder with some documents that have plot notes and... some day I may actually get full, finished fics out of them (h2o AU is in there, as is my voltron!atla fusion AU, and uhhhh my book 3 atla rewrite, and a few other things), so... but I will say that the docs I have for my LoK rewrite so far amount to roughly 4.2k words of just Plot and Character Notes, which may some day turn into words of Story, hopefully.

ANYWAY, POINT IS: yes, this exists, and I have Many Many Thoughts.

Including how the Gaang kids would shake out! Cause I know I'm doing Zutara, and maybe Tokka???? Although I don't wanna just leave Suki out either... maybe a throuple??? Or Sukka having an amicable breakup before Sokka and Toph get together--maybe she already has Lin by then, and Sokka helps support her through the grief of losing Kanto???? Idk honestly, I haven't actually figured any of that out definitively yet except that Aang was perfectly happy to settle down with an Air Acolyte from one of the rebuilt temples because he grew up and out of his crush on Katara pretty easily once he hit puberty and matured a bit.

UHHH none of which is actually an answer to your question, because it's a valid one! Which is why I've been sitting on this a while (10 days I'm so sorry) bc I haven't made any solid decisions but I've been letting it percolate around my head a bit. And the more I think about it, the more I really like the Sukka -> Tokka idea (and I don't want to kill off Suki since the kids all deserve their awesome Kyoshi warrior auntie in their lives, and also I want a Sukka kid to be besties with Iara [zuko and katara's youngest] so maybe she gets with someone else after she and Sokka split? I could be talked into Ty Lee/Suki actually, the more I think about it....), but obviously having a stable father figure and a Toph who is... not what LoK made her out to be will dramatically change the Beifong family dynamic.

That said, I think I actually have a solution. (I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do.) Toph has Lin with Kanto--and he passes away when Lin is two or three, which is why she has very few memories of her father. (Although none of this 'she doesn't even know his name until she's 50+ cause Toph didn't tell her daughters about their fathers' bullshit.) Sokka is there for her through it all (all of the gaang is, of course, but you know that it sometimes just hits different when it's someone you're also starting to fall in love with, especially when there are older and much more deeply buried feelings there that are now resurfacing, because at least in my version Toph was deeply in love with Sokka when they were teenagers, but he was in love with Suki and she also loved Suki so she didn't want to mess up anything about their family or the group dynamics by making her feelings anyone else's problem), they fall in love, get married and have Suyin.

(Sokka may jokingly refer to it as a shotgun wedding, but the truth is he wanted to propose well before he found out she was pregnant, his attempts just kept getting messed up in increasingly comedic fashion.)

Throughout all of this, Republic City has been established, Sokka is Chancellor, Toph is something of a defacto police chief--mostly because, at the time, no one else was willing to volunteer, and she jokingly offered to whip the law enforcement, but unfortunately everyone else at the meeting took her seriously. However, she is also the founder of the probending league, and basically her feelings about law enforcement are complicated and she actively discouraged her kids from joining the force which is part of why Lin did. How else do you have a teen rebel phase with a parent like Toph? (Which, in this instance, means tough and firm but fair, with a 'you break it, it's up to you to fix it' attitude and very little desire to actually control her daughters and their behavior.)

Ah, but here's the rub.

Suyin is ten years old when Sokka dies, and Lin is sixteen. I'm not sure how he's killed--maybe by Yakone, to tie it into my plans for Amon and book 1. (Note that I'm not sure when the Yakone bloodbending trial happened in canon, but it doesn't matter. The timeline I'm gonna build will be completely different post-comet, and I'll eventually write it all down so that I can keep things straight.) Which would incidentally provide excellent means of having Katara have a very personal stake in the Amon conflict, and perhaps color the fight between him and Iara, but I'm getting off track. And I think Sokka being killed by Yakone, and Toph being unable to protect or save him, or deliver her own brand of justice to avenge him (because Aang is there to stop her and.... shit probably got ugly, I suspect she didn't talk to Aang for at least twenty years after Sokka's death--and this isn't to say I think Toph is particularly violent or murderous, but in that moment, she absolutely wanted to kill the man with her bare hands, and however much she may have regretted it afterwards, she took a very long time to forgive Aang for stopping her in the first place), is what results in Toph stepping down as police chief.

She didn't withdraw from her daughters or fuck off into the swamp or anything (words cannot express how much I hate that part of her canon history), but she did grieve for a very long time. Lin, meanwhile, felt like it was up to her to keep her family together, while also feeling a desperate need to... prove herself, I think. And because her mother was so adamant that she not join the police force, that's exactly what she does. I think Lin completely misread Toph's intentions, too, and believed that the discouragement was because her mother didn't think she had what it takes, when in reality I think Toph was scared of Lin losing herself in the job like she herself had begun to, and eventually coming up on something she couldn't change or fix and making the same mistakes she had.

(I think Toph and Lin have communication issues largely because they are both headstrong and willful, but where Toph thought she was giving her daughters the room they would need to make their own way, what Lin desperately craved was direction and she felt like that was something her mother simply couldn't understand.)

Suyin, on the other hand, fell in with a bad crowd like in canon. I think that what she desperately needed was attention, similar to Lin craving direction, and Toph was trying so hard not to be her own parents that she went a little too far in the other direction and Suyin began to feel like it didn't matter what she did, her mom wouldn't care, or get angry, or discipline her, or anything. Lin and Suyin butted heads a lot growing up, too, especially after Sokka's death, because Lin tried to rein in her sister's behavior and this was met with resistance and derision because Suyin felt like Lin was trying to be both mom and dad and she was neither but her big sister would never admit to being just as lost as she was and it made her furious.

So when Suyin is sixteen, and Lin is twenty-two and new to the force, The Big Rift happens. Lin catches Suyin and her gang, tries to apprehend her, gets a scar on her face in the ensuing conflict. But instead of abusing her power and sending her problem child off to her mother before fucking off to the swamp to avoid the consequences of her actions, Toph tries to actually fix things. Suyin cools her heels in prison for a while, because she was paralyzed by guilt at the time when she hurt her sister (a few inches lower and she could have slit her throat), and was still there when Lin's backup arrived.

Uhhhhhhhhhhh..... I'm so sorry I rambled for so long, BUT THE UPSHOT IS: I think Suyin learned a bit about culpability and taking responsibility for her own actions, Toph realized that her daughters had different needs than she did at their age (and I think a lot of the problem was that grief clouded her own ability to connect with her daughters, and in trying to not be her own parents she lost sight of how to be the parent her own daughters needed), and Lin, I think, had to realize that she had never fully processed the loss of not one but two fathers and had turned to her job in order to avoid actually confronting the grief that had overshadowed her childhood.

However, she did not forgive Suyin, at least not right away--and she wasn't forced or expected to. Suyin understood that she crossed a serious line, she took her lumps and did her time, and no one shamed Lin for her anger. I think, as a result, she had less reason to hold onto that bitterness, and perhaps by the time the story actually begins, she and Suyin are on much better terms, though I haven't worked it out exactly yet.

UHHH yeah I went on for days lmao. All of this is subject to change, too, depending on the needs of the story whenever I get around to actually writing it all down, BUT these are my initial thoughts, at least.

[saezurufeels]

Handling the cards we are dealt

Since I can't get enough of Yashiro, last night I started thinking about possible explanations of what might be going on in his mind, post-timeskip. Obviously, my ideas here are completely hypothetical, because there is not much information about Y's internal state/thoughts since the timeskip. I'll be using a lot of my imagination, and less actual "primary evidence." So, I don't expect any of this to necessarily be true; I'm moreso looking into possible explanations of character-change, because it's fun to theorize :-) So, if you're interested keep reading.

First thing I want to mention is, plot wise, using a timeskip gives the author a lot of room to surprise us (just look at AoT); so as an audience we won't know anything at all, until it's completely over. Super fun, right?! So, that's why I think it's important to look at Saezuru chapter by chapter, and change any ideas or expectations we had from before. At least, I find that I'm constantly questioning my previous convictions when I see a blurry, out-of-context, cropped-out panel from a 40-page chapter that hasn't even been translated yet. Life is so fun.

That being said, let me begin by saying that since the timeskip, it occurred to me that we, the audience, have not seen Yashiro have sex at all. Remember in the first three or four chapters of the manga, Yashiro's sexual endeavours were the focal point of his character? Yoneda Kou made sure to add it everywhere, including other characters' descriptions of Y, Yashiro's own admissions and thoughts, but most importantly, in actual sex scenes. It was to reinforce this idea that Yashiro is reliant on sex; he couldn't remove it from his daily life, because it was a dependence.

In my first post on this blog, I talked about this phenomenon as Yashiro having sex addiction. In that post I said that many experts believe that sex addiction is an obsessive-compulsive disorder. To give you a quick run-down of how that works in relation to Yashiro, I'll quote myself:

"When individuals with SA begin to feel anxiety, they engage in sexual behaviour (the compulsion) to get rid of the cause of their anxiety (their obsession). For Yashiro, feelings of worthlessness (due to being unloved, alone and abused) cause him anxiety, which compel him to be on the receiving end of sadistic sex so that he can convince himself that he is a masochist and likes to suffer, thereby relieving his feelings of worthlessness."

So, in line with this definition, Yashiro was having rough sex constantly because he was constantly feeling unloved (or in the way I described above, worthless). Keeping up with this logic, then, what has changed? Why aren't we seeing Yashiro have sex all the time? Keeping something visually hidden keeps it ambiguous. Let's discuss.

Remember, seeing an action play out in fiction is different from hearing it about it from other characters, because those characters can be unreliable narrators, or simply unknowledgeable. So, although Nanahara tells Yashiro not to pick up random strangers for sex, it doesn't mean that he understood what actually happened when Yashiro "almost got kidnapped." Yashiro even said, "what does that have to do with my sexual tendencies?" The scene is ambiguous because we didn't see Yashiro have sex and because we know that Y isn't always forthcoming about his private life, even with Nanahara.

More evidence to suggest that Yashiro isn't the same as before is evident in his reaction to Misumi's aggressive attempt to get him naked and riled up. Yashiro claimed that Misumi was "so sexy," but based on his attempt to stop him during the act, we can just as well guess that Y wasn't being truthful.

Before I move on, I'll mention that I do believe Inami and Yashiro have a sexual relationship, but I think it's out of necessity, rather than lust. Yashiro needs a guy in law enforcement to know when to switch casino locations and to keep up with other yakuza dealings. I've talked about this lots before, so I won't bore ya'll with it again. Okay, moving on.

If we assume that Yashiro isn't having sex anymore (other than with Inami), then we can assume that he isn't dependent on rough sex anymore. So, if he's not dependent on rough sex to relieve his feelings of worthlessness, does that mean he doesn't feel unloved anymore? Yes, that's exactly what I'm arguing. I believe Yashiro feels very much loved by Doumeki; it's what helped him overcome his OCD (I'm not a mental health expert, so please don't take this as actual advice in your real life; this is just for the purpose of fictional character analysis). But the more important aspect I want to talk about is: if Yashiro wants to be loved and treated gently deep down, what is keeping him away from Doumeki now? I think the answer to that lies in what he experiences when Doumeki treats him gently.

This is where I get more hypothetical, because I really don't know why Yashiro doesn't like being treated gently in bed. I've tried figuring it out for a long time, but it's beyond my understanding. Maybe it's because I don't have the same experiences, maybe it's not meant to be understood, or maybe it wasn't fleshed out properly (I'm not suggesting that's the case here, but it's a possibility that's worth mentioning). It could be because it reminds Yashiro that he's a victim of abuse, or because of the scene where his step-father equates him to a girl during an assault; maybe it's something that was never brought up explicitly in a flashback. Either way, because I can't find a reason that I can stand behind confidently, I'm not going to focus on the question of why. Instead, I'll focus on the question of what Yashiro is feeling while he's intimate with a gentle Doumeki.

So, what is Yashiro experiencing when he's intimate with Doumeki? Well, the first time, Yashiro was refusing lots; they did it anyway, and afterwards we see Yashiro cry for the first time as an adult, while remembering an abuse incident as a child. This is post-traumatic stress disorder and it happens when a stimulus in our environment (something we see, hear, smell, taste, feel) triggers a memory so profound that it feels like we are re-living a traumatic incident again. It's more intense than "normal" memory and is very difficult to go through. Shortly after sleeping with Doumeki, Yashiro let Hirata attempt to kill him. I'm not saying one caused the other, but I think they are strongly linked to each other. Chapter 46: Doumeki takes his glove off and touches Yashiro tenderly; Yashiro gets a vision of Doumeki touching a naked woman, one thing leads to another, and suddenly Yashiro is reminded that Doumeki is being too gentle. He pulls Doumeki off of him and lands sweating, ungracefully on his stomach. This is just my take, but it seems like that was a scary moment for Yashiro. He wasn't there in the moment with Doumeki; he was in his head, reframing the situation. While Doumeki was trying to be sexy and alluring by taking his glove off with his teeth, wearing this sultry expression, Yashiro's face was literally like: 🤨. The point I'm trying to get at, if I ever get there (jfc), is that Yashiro becomes triggered when he's having sex with Doumeki. He's not having a good time at all. It doesn't mean that he can't be close to Doumeki, because we all know he was imagining that Doumeki would passionately kiss him in the elevator and in Tsunakawa's guest bathroom. But sex is a different story.

Gentleness versus roughness is like a double-edged sword for Yashiro (idk if that's the right expression lol), on the one hand, Yashiro doesn't like being treated rough, because it's not loving, and on the other hand he doesn't like being treated gentle, because it's not rough. Whichever way Yashiro goes, he's up against a wall. There is no path for him to turn, because either one will lead him to his trauma.

And that's the point. I think Saezuru is trying to suggest that some things can't be so easily changed, or at all. It makes the argument that we must to come to terms with the cards we are dealt, and that the healthiest way to deal with unfavourable circumstances is to adjust to them, instead of forcing our conditions to change. Forcing change onto someone, when it simply isn't possible can do more harm than good, as we saw with Yashiro's suicide attempt, following Doumeki's insistence on showing Y that he's "beautiful, inside and out." Post timeskip, Doumeki is trying a different approach to "change conditions": now he seems to be a little more cold, rough, BLUNT (smh), and seductive; is it working on Yashiro? Based on what seems to be a whole-body jerk to get Doumeki off of him, I'd say no.

What would it look like, then, if Yashiro and Doumeki adjusted to the circumstance, instead of forcing change? Again, this is hypothetical, but it could mean that they have to accept that Y can't have sex. He can kiss, hug and touch, non-sexually, because it is not triggering. If anything, tenderness is a comfort for Yashiro. Whereas sex for him has always either been a trauma response or a trauma trigger. I'd like to be proven wrong though :) And again, this is all just hypothetical. There still is not enough evidence, and as I said above, about 50 pages ago (sorry), things are always changing and evolving with every chapter.

[true-blue-megamind]

FAN THEORY THURSDAY – Why Did Metroman Retire?

Happy Almost-Friday, everyone! And even though Minion threatens to smother everything he cooks in old Limburger cheese each time I say it: SPOILER WARNING!

Yes, I know, it’s three a.m. and it’s technically Friday, but I’m still calling this Thursday night, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Okay, let’s be honest, Metroman is a character who seems, on the surface, to require little explanation in the film Megamind. He’s only present in the beginning and end, and we spend half the movie believing he’s dead, and we learn that Metroman has done something almost unheard of among superheroes: he’s chosen to retire. The question is: why? There is a tendency to think that he's simply a spoiled rich boy who, (in his social life, at least,) does what he wants without regard for others, but is that really fair? Or could there be other possible reasons? Well, let’s take a look at a few fan theories that may explain why he chose to abandon heroism for a music career.

Metroman Didn’t Want to Be a Hero

Although he’s clearly based on—and perhaps even poking a little fun at—the Man of Steel, Metroman was no Superman. (I mean, okay, he was technically a super-man, since he had strength, speed, and powers far beyond what a human would possess.) Except, here’s the thing: he’s not a carbon copy of the Man of Steel; Metroman and Superman have completely different lives and personalities. This remains true despite the fact that they share a similar origin—that of being aliens from a dead planet—and identical powers—including laser-vision and flight. Even their code names are comparable. However, if we look deeper, it becomes obvious that Metroman and Superman are two very different characters.

Superman is all about being an upstanding hero. Although he can be annoyingly persnickety, and sometimes displays nearly oppressively unyielding strictures about right and wrong, one thing you can say about the Man of Steel is that he’s generally integral. He is exactly what his public image portrays him to be: a Good Guy through and through. The same isn’t true of Metroman, and in some ways that makes him a more complex and interesting character.

The childhoods of the two heroes are extremely different. As I’ve mentioned in Why Was Megamind Raised in Prison, when a boy, Metroman was a bully, not only making young Megamind an outsider and the object of everything from teasing to physical attacks, but also inspiring other students to do the same. Superman, on the other hand, far from being a bully was bullied by Pete Ross. Rather than using his powers against others, he was too responsible and good-hearted to use them even against Pete Ross. Metroman is adopted by super-wealthy parents, and is essentially a trust-fund baby, while Superman was adopted by a farm family. He grows up with a good work ethic and hometown values. Indeed, this economic discrepancy continues into adulthood. As far as we can tell, Metroman doesn’t need to work and has no job outside being a superhero. Superman, conversely, has to earn a living as a journalist. Finally, in the majority of comics, Superman avoids most public appearances, unless he feels they serve some beneficial social purpose. Indeed, he goes to great lengths to keep his identity a secret and avoid the public eye as much as possible. The first time we see Metroman in the film, however, he is basking in a crowd’s adoration at the dedication of a museum in his honor. Indeed, in the original script, then called Mastermind, Metroman’s real identity seems to be widely known. (In case you’re wondering, this is where the name Wayne Smith, commonly used in the fandom, originates from.) So, we see that these character are actually very different: one is a hero strictly for the greater good, and the other, while he certainly does a lot of good things, is also in it for the fame.

This may seem like I’m being harsh toward poor Wayne Smith, but his flaws do not, in fact, make him a bad person. The issue is that we’re comparing him to Superman who, while still certainly imperfect, is intended to be a better-than-average person in every way, including moral. Make no mistake, Metro City’s former hero isn’t any sort of villain; what he is is normal. If we’re honest, most of us would be pleased by wide-spread accolades and honors. He reacts to positive fame the same way nearly anyone would because, at his heart, he’s really just a typical guy. That is the material point: Wayne Smith really only wants to be an average citizen—a music star, perhaps, but still a relatively ordinary person. In that way, he and Megamind are alike: they both desire, more than nearly anything else, to be normal. The key difference is that Megamind’s sincere and driving concern for his city also makes him ideal for becoming a hero. (You can learn more about this particular fan theory in The Warden and in Megamind and Identity.)

So, why did Wayne Smith become a Defender in the first place, then? Again, I’ve briefly touched on this in previous posts, but it appears likely that Metroman was pushed into heroism just as much as Megamind was pushed into supervillainy. Because he was a bully with superpowers, it’s likely that adults around him realized something had to be done about Wayne. Otherwise he was a danger. So, they constructed an environment—the Li’l Gifted School—where he could be conditioned to seek the praise of others as well as to fight Megamind, who had been singled out as his future nemesis. (In fact, that conditioning is probably why he opted for a career that would put him on stage, aside from a probable love of music.)

Because the path chosen for Megamind involved more hardships and pain, it’s easy to forget that Metroman was in essentially the exact same plight. However, the fact remains that these were both children, and they were both being coerced into perceived destinies they didn’t want. Neither of them were given a choice and, in the end, both of them cast off the expectations pressed upon them to become the people they really wanted to be. The difference is that, because of our natural biases, Megamind’s rise to Defender of Metro City seems more noteworthy than Metroman’s step into Mr. Average Joe. The truth, however, is that both characters were basically doing the same thing: being true to themselves.

Metroman May Have Had Health Concerns

We know Megamind and Metroman are close to the same age—although the latter appears to be about a year rather than days old when he lands on Earth—but what that age is is open to supposition. We know, however, that they are almost certainly in their thirties, probably in their mid- to late-thirties. (Take a look at How Old is Megamind for more information about that.) However, we can see that Wayne is already going gray around the temples. Of course, some people’s genetics simply cause them to go gray earlier, and that’s certainly a possibility, but one fan theory suggest there may be more going on. The idea has been put forward that Wayne’s super-speed may be having an adverse effect on him, forcing his body to work overtime to keep up. The resulting physical stress could be making him age prematurely.

That’s not the only factor to consider. As hard as heroism may have been on his body, the effects on Metroman’s mind would have been even greater. Before the events in the movie, Metro City’s authorities—and, indeed, all its citizens—became too reliant upon their superhuman hero, and as a result that hero was run ragged. That isn’t a mere hypothesis. A scene that was storyboarded but never included in the final film makes Metroman’s plight perfectly clear. We see him being called from one end of the city to the other for everything from a massive explosion to an old lady needing help opening a jar. Keep in mind that, when hearing a cry for assistance, the hero would likely be unable to tell who truly needed him urgently and who was simply making unnecessary demands, thus he would have to rush to every call he heard. Even the city’s law enforcement seems to take him for granted, refusing to take criminals he just hand-delivered to jail because they’re on lunch break. The cumulative effect is that Metroman looks nearly frantic with stress.

This is important because, aside from the obvious mental and emotional concerns, this sort of stress accelerates aging as well. According to an article in the Huffington Post, when glycation and telomere shortening, as well as the over-oxidation, are caused by enduring heightened stress for prolonged periods of time, it can result not only in graying hair and premature wrinkles, but heart trouble as well. Even the memory can be affected, as one study by the University of Wisconsin found that stress can age a person’s brain up to four years faster than normal, and contribute to cognitive problems later in life. (The study was part of a presentation—you have no idea how badly I wanted to write that word in all-caps—and is thus currently unpublished, but information about it can be found in an article from Over Sixty.)

Metroman Retired for the Good of Everybody

As you can see, in a strange way, having a super-powered Defender was actually crippling Metro City. In fact, it may be truly damaging to the local infrastructure and official organizations. Youtuber Olaf Scholtens, in his video Megamind: Power and Identity, uses the metaphor of an airplane manufacturer to explain what’s going on. (If you’ve read my own post Megamind and Identity, you’ve seen this before.) Engineers and factories put a lot of effort and expense into making certain aircraft are as safe as possible, but what would happen if they felt they could confidently assume a superhero would simply catch any plane that crashed, saving everyone on board? Safety standards would probably become far more lax, and people might be in far more danger as a result. Given the way that nearly everyone in Metro City seems to assume Metroman will always save the day, it’s possible that, within the urban area, the same thing could be happening with things like building code enforcement, large construction projects, and even public safety measures. Bridges might not be properly built, fire hazards might not be addressed, and, given the blasé attitudes of the cops in the storyboard, law enforcement officers might not even be bothering to keep an eye on things. By retiring, Metroman forced the city to become more self-sufficient again.

That, however, may not have been the only problem Metroman was trying to solve. Remember the whole discussion about the former Defender’s school boy bullying and the apparent conspiracy to turn one boy into a hero and the other into a supervillain? It’s possible Wayne may have felt remorse for the former and found out about the latter. Having battled Megamind so much in the past, he also may have realized that the blue man never actually hurt anyone, and in fact went out of his way to stage their confrontations in abandoned places. (Again, you can read more about that in both Megamind and Identity and The Warden.) It may be that Metroman real “brilliant plan” wasn’t simply to fake his death, but in doing so to prod Megamind into becoming a hero and thus accepted by society.

There is an alternative theory, put forward in a Reddit post, that Megamind and Metroman’s parents may have known one another, and may have sent both children to Earth with the intention of them becoming a dynamic duo, fighting evil together with Megamind as the brains and Metroman as the brawn. This could have been what Megamind’s father meant when he told his son: “You are destined for greatness.” While there is very little support for this in the movie, it would explain why, in the vast cosmos, both of the young survivors were sent not only to the same planet, but even to the same city.

Whatever the reason may have been, one thing is certain: there certainly is some evidence that Metroman intended his one-time nemesis to become a hero. One of his lines, after Roxanne and Megamind discover he’s still alive, supports this. You know the one. “If there’s bad, good will rise up against it. It’s taken me a long time to find my calling; now it’s time you find yours.” Then, of course, there is another line, when Music Man is watching his former enemy take the role of Defender of Metro City: “way to go, Little Buddy. I knew you had it in you.”

If Metroman really did purposefully help Megamind step into heroism, that could also explain why he didn’t stop Megamind from taking over the city—perhaps he trusted the blue man not to harm anyone and to eventually come to his senses—as well as why he refuses to overtly help defeat Titan. He does, however, clearly subtly assist Megamind, as the latter almost certainly went back to Wayne’s hideout to scan his appearance and voice into the holowatch. All of this together makes it seem quite plausible that Metroman not only wanted to retire, but also wanted the blue man to take his place.

Megamind and Metroman by White-Night-56 on Deviant Art

Maybe this means that, now that Megamind is the Defender of Metro City, he and Music Man occasionally get together to commiserate over the more difficult aspects of being a superhero and joke about the old days.

It’s also quite possible that all of these fan theories could be true. The film Megamind is, among other things, surprisingly subtle, complex, and subversive for an animated movie. Every time I dive deep into some aspect or other of the plot, I am once again impressed by the amount of thought and detail that went into this work. No wonder Megamind—and its characters—have so many dedicated fans.

[mrs-tsunderemeitantei]

DISCLAIMER: HUGE, LONG RANT AHEAD!

ALSO SPOILERS IN CASE YOU'RE NOT UP TO DATE WITH THE MANGA OR WITH ZERO THE ENFORCER!

Soo in case you missed it, Gosho released the SDB Justice Plus some time last month:

The biggest shocker was the answer to Question number 4, shown below:

Basically this translates to:

Q4: On the Mystery Train, he (Amuro) said to Miyano Shiho that “My comrades who are tracking us have made arrangements in order to retrieve you”, but were those comrades from PSB? If that’s the case, I’m curious about how he planned to deceive Vermouth...!

A: Those were comrades from the Black Organization, so there was no need to deceive them.

Ummmm...what??

Idk about y'all but when I read this, I was livid. It didn’t make any sense to me. And quite frankly, I didn't want it to. Maybe because I am one of those (very rare) people who thought Rei and Shiho could eventually end up together (Don't laugh, it would have made sense, and I'll write about that in a separate post).

Anywho, safe to say Gosho's latest confession left me in absolute confusion. Like why? Just why? Then I realised I'm more butt-hurt about this because I was fixated on a certain idea of Rei's character and chose to ignore his other sides, as if they didn't exist. It didn't help that his past is so freaking depressing which got me sympathizing with his character and led me to either ignore or make excuses for any red flags.

But now that I think about it, it sadly makes sense. It also explains why he didn't show any sadness or regret when he saw Shiho supposedly ‘die’ in the luggage cart in the Bell Tree Train Arc.

Now to let me wrap my head around this, I needed to breakdown his three "faces":

1. Amuro Tooru is a cheerful, friendly, generous, carefree, outgoing man.

2. Furuya Rei is a serious, law-abiding, calculating, patriotic police officer who is willing to die for Japan's security.

3. And Bourbon is a devious, manipulative, cunning, deadly agent.

Yet, ever since we found out he was in fact an NPA agent, we (or at least I), seem to have forgotten about those dark sides he possesses. Also with Zero's tea time showing us a softer side of his character it was easy to get caught up in "he's 100% one of the god guys" when in fact, he's a complex, grey character. 

He has shown on multiple occasions, just how far he is willing to go, to achieve whatever goal he’s set his mind on. Let's not forget how in Zero the Enforcer, he completely flipped the switch. (I know this isn't Canon but...) The man went as far as to create a suspect and jail the innocent Mori Kogoro so he can legally investigate the case and emotionally manipulate Conan into unkowningly help with the investigation.

Also, in the Detective Nocturne’s case he deliberately didn’t tell Ran as soon as he noticed Conan might have been kidnapped by the criminal because he hadn’t finished investigating the apartment.

And in the Scarlet Arc, he was willing to harm Jodie's teacher friend, so he can lure out the FBI and advance his investigation on Akai’s death. Let’s not forget once he figured out the truth, he was willing to expose Akai’s fake death (which I get it he's out for revenge), but by doing so, he would have also gotten Kir killed (even though I'm pretty sure he knew at that point, she was in fact a NOC).

As we can see, be it Bourbon, Furuya Rei or  Amuro Toru, he will stop at nothing to reach his goals, even if it means throwing innocent people under the bus. So, now when Gosho says his "partners" were in fact BO members and not the PSB, I'm no longer surprised.

I mean, why wouldn’t he sell Shiho back to the organisation? Because he knew she was Sensei’s daughter, and that should have meant something to him? Alright, let’s talk about that.

Did he love Shiho’s mum? Yes, he did, there’s no doubt about that (one of the reasons he joined the joined the police in the first place was to find her, so you can't convince me otherwise).

But what if he loved Japan even more? (It's not canon, but he did say in Zero the Enforcer that the safety of this country matters most to him, even if it means he’d end up paying with his own life).

So, I'm going to take a wild guess as to how he could have felt when he found out the woman he loved as his own mother, willingly joined the deadly organisation that threatened the safety of his country. Based on his memories, he remembered her encouraging her husband to join the Carasuma group.

So, if through his investigations, he was able to realise she is the same woman from his childhood, I’m pretty sure he would have been very disappointed.  I’m not sure the extent of his knowledge about the drug, but if he also found out their research created the poisonous APTX-4869, I reckon it would be more reason for him to be upset.

Now let's talk about Haibara/Shiho. To any outsider who's unaware of the truth of her past, she is a woman born into the organisation, then was groomed and taught from a young age by the syndicate and promoted to take on their research. A research that produced a poisonous drug, just like her parents did. Also, she only ran away after the organisation killed her sister. Before that, she was a high-ranking member. With all these facts, why would he think of her as anything but a criminal just like the rest of the BO members? It’d be rather foolish for him to not hand her back to the organisation just because she is the daughter of the woman he once thought so highly of. If anything, he’d be killing two birds with one stone, by executing a criminal, while also gaining higher standing in the organisation.

As fans of Haibara, we are rightfully upset by his intentions of returning her to the organisation because we know her truth. He doesn't. It wasn't until we learnt more about her painful past and kind and caring nature that we grew to love her. We know she never wanted to create a poisonous drug. That she already hated the organisation for using the drug as a poison. That she had to develop the drug to protect Akemi’s life.

There is no way Rei would have known about any of the bullying she or her family faced from the BO. By nature, Shiho is very secretive and reserved and very little of her personality or history would have been known by any of the BO members (except maybe Gin). Therefore, apart from the files the BO would have kept on Shiho and her role in the organisation, that’s all Rei had to learn about her. So, I can’t really blame him for choosing to hand her back to the organisation.

Some people who are still in denial, argue that if he planned to kill Shiho, why was he willing to kill whom he thought was Vermouth instead of handing her over?

Shouldn’t that prove he was going to take Shiho to safety to the PSB, not the BO? Before Gosho's statement, I would have agreed but now...sigh. Now, I get why he did that. If Shiho were to die BEFORE she was returned to the organisation, he wouldn’t have gained the trust he was seeking. If she were to die AFTER he delivered her, I highly doubt it would have mattered to him. Although I'm still hoping he maybe he had a plan of not leaving her in the organisation's clutches after "handing her back" and he never truly intended on getting her killed. But since Gosho also said there was no need to deceive Vermouth, I highly doubt it. (Heart breaking).

After such an explanation, does everything make more sense now? Maybe. Am I ok with it? Hell no! I’m quite angry and annoyed that this is how things turned out to be, but it is what it is. We have to accept that Rei is not a good character, and he's not a bad character. He's a grey character and when you think of it that way, it's easier to understand his behaviour. Not that I agree with it. After Gosho's statement, I think pretty sure Rei is in dire need of some character development. He could stand to learn a thing or two from Conan who manages to reach his goals while preserving as many lives as possible (Akai's fake death being the burst example while managing to drive Kir back to the BO).

For now, I’m looking forward to the developments that will entail. I’m curious to see how Rei and Haibara will react once they eventually meet each other. It'll be interesting to see what will go through his mind once he figures out her true identity. One thing I'm sure of is once they're introduced to each other, emotions will be running high and things will get intense. Which honestly, I can't wait for and I'm counting down the days till I get a proper Amuro/Haibara interaction.

[cursedchilddrarry]

Harry and Ginny are heading for divorce

‘But Harry is canonically straight and married to Ginny!’ said - well, honestly, said no-one ever in the history of Tumblr, but regardless, I want to address this because I have thoughts.

In this essay I will... no, seriously.

(Note I have nothing against Lucy Goleby’s fantastic portrayal of this character in the Melbourne cast!)

Spoilers, I guess? Do I even need to say that at this stage?

Harry and Ginny married and had babies extremely young. Pre-Cursed Child, myself and most other people I speak to found the epilogue of DH fairly uninspired and disappointing, and I was again somewhat disappointed when I first saw the play to learn that it opened on that same scene (in my opinion it actually manages to salvage that terrible epilogue, but that’s another conversation). I think it’s fairly unrealistic that teenagers who suffered so much trauma would instantly get married, get jobs and have babies.

Anyway, per the canon that did happen, and now (in the Cursed Child), far more reaslistically, the situation is thus: Harry is a fairly terrible father, having no example to base himself on (or terrible examples only), and clearly never properly recovered from the trauma of his teenage experiences - how could he? He went instantly from a literal warzone into being married and having three children in quick succession, at the same time as being promoted extremely quickly through the ranks of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement (and probably undeservedly - let’s face it, Harry probably isn’t smart enough or mature enough, even by 40, to be in the job he’s in - however, a white male being given a position he doesn’t deserve is certainly something I can accept as realistic, unfortunately, and wizards aren’t exactly the most tolerant or progressive bunch). Plus, I didn’t see his and Ginny’s relationship as particularly great. It could be argued much of this is due to the conflict of the events in the show, but I felt (whether intended by the writer or not) it ran deeper. Hear me out on this.

They argue a lot (without resolution)

One of the sub-conflicts/resolutions is Ginny wrongly assuming Harry is at fault for Albus running away, and though she later apologises, she makes a particularly harsh comment something like ‘the more mistakes you make, the harder to forgive you it gets’

Albus is honestly a bit of a little shit (I love him! Don’t throw things at me! Scorpius tells him he’s being selfish and he needs to get over his stupid issues with his dad, and Albus himself agrees) and though Harry definitely goes too far in his arguments with Albus, Ginny doesn’t really try to see Harry’s view at all or accept that Albus may be also at fault

Ginny endlessly tells Harry off and lectures him on his parenting, though I don’t see any evidence of her being parent of the year

Ginny makes a snarky comment about how ‘Harry does most of the cooking’, not her - yet we are told multiple times through the play that Harry works very long hours in a very high-stress, high-pressure job. Ginny is a sports editor. Seriously? He does the cooking?

I don’t get any chemistry between them. In fact, I feel she acts FAR more like a mother to Harry, rather than a wife

Which actually kind of makes sense, right? Harry always wanted to be part of the Weasley family and to have a mother like Molly - well, in Ginny, he kind of got that. And he always wanted a family, which explains why he rushed into having so many babies so quickly when he clearly wasn’t ready

I’m not trying to shit on Ginny - on the contrary, it looks to me like she’s in a difficult position with a rather immature husband who she needs to parent as much as her actual children. She constantly feels excluded from the golden trio (she says this explicitly), and even from the canonically-intense relationship Harry has with Draco; her role and her work are constantly overshadowed by Harry, and she has to fight every time for a place at the table, for her opinion to be heard (leading to her shouting a lot) and I honestly felt like she must be thinking maybe she’d be better off without Harry.

And on Harry’s side, in contrast to Ginny, he has fireworks and lightning-strike type chemistry with Draco; he has a lot of maturing he needs to do, which Draco seems to have already done, being far more together and a more natural father (although a bit stiff), and he has a deeper conversation with Draco in five minutes than he has with Ginny in the entire play; and also, although Ginny seems to know about Harry’s trauma, she doesn’t seem to understand it in the same way that Draco does. She just doesn’t have the same experience. Yes, she experienced a lot, but not to the extent Harry or Draco did. Although she listens to and tries to comfort Harry through his nightmares/flashbacks/general angst and misery, it’s more in a practical mode of ‘let’s get past this and move on’ whereas it felt like Harry was nowhere near ready for that - may not ever be ready for that.

In conclusion, my headcanon is (though they seem to make amends at the end of the play) that their relationship continues to deterioriate until Ginny leaves. And then Harry and Draco find each other, which is another topic.

If anyone read all of this, firstly I’m amazed, but also I want your thoughts on whether you agree with this analysis. As I said, I’m not hating on any of the characters or actors, this is just what I felt really strongly in the subtext, and I actually love this dynamic for these characters.

[bluegreenandpurple]

A beard through seasons- Chap 2

Second installment of this four chapter series... let's see what moment is Ron's beard bringing to us!

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of the characters from HP Books nor do I get a single pound/penny/peso (money) out of this. Rated M because of Hermione's thoughts.

You can also find this work in AO3 and FFN.

Chapter 2: The dad’s beard

Hermione Granger-Weasley hadn't slept one single night alone since five years ago when the news of the conception of her daughter had been delivered to her husband. When Ron found out that he would become a father, he made a resolution to never miss a milestone of his child’s life and spend as much time as he could with his family. And so, he resigned his position with the Aurors and took a full-time job with George in the joke shop. Although, at the insistence of the Minister himself, Ron agreed to keep a connection with his former work as a Consultant for special cases and Professor of Strategy and Planning for the Auror Training Program.

Hermione Granger-Weasley hadn't slept one single night alone in five years until two weeks ago when her new position as Deputy Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement had required for her to present the British Wizarding Community’s advances in the abolition of blood-related laws and regulations for the International Convention of Magical Law.

Actually, Hermione Granger-Weasley hadn't slept one single night alone in five years. Because whatever she had been doing the past two weeks surely couldn't be counted as sleeping. The king-sized bed of the hotel room seemed extremely big and frighteningly deserted without her husband. Despite applying impeccably performed warming charms one after the other, the bed remained cool. And the silence. Hermione could sleep with cold, she had done it countless times during her younger years in the Horcrux hunt. But, as had been proved during said hunt and reaffirmed in the past two weeks, she couldn’t sleep without the soft soothing sound of Ron’s light snores.

Each night for the past fortnight, Hermione had spent hours in bed recalling the warmth of Ron’s body and the comforting feeling of his arms encasing her in a fortress where only his signature smell and his purring breaths could trespass. She would concentrate on every sensation in an attempt to convince herself that he was there and overcome her insomnia. But he wasn’t there and she would subdue herself to night after night of what little hours she could accomplish of restless sleep.

When time passed and Hermione was finally able to return to her loved ones, she was bouncing on her feet in anticipation. The second she stepped out of the fireplace, she heard the muffled voices of Ron and Rose coming from the second floor. Eager to see her family, she sprinted and took off her cloak halfway up the stairs, discarding the garment on the floor. This level of disorder was anomalous coming from her, but the familiar smell of her home combined with her husband and daughter's voice had made her desire for Ron’s warmth and her children's stickiness almost unbearable.

Hermione followed the sound towards Rose’d bedroom and was frozen on her spot at the sight of her family. She was itchy to go and hug them but the scene on display was so adorable that she had to take a minute to commit it to her memory. Ron and Rose were sitting on the petite chairs of her tea time set and she was decorating his beard with a variety of her hair clips. He was curled on himself in an unnatural position, with his knees almost beside his ears and his hands resting palms down on the carpet, probably for balance. He would've been more comfortable on the floor than scrunching to fit on the chair, but Hermione had the suspicion that he was doing it for their daughter.

Hermione’s heart warmed watching as Rose was adorning his father's facial hair with a grin so wide that her eyes were closing from happiness. He was cottoning to her about how beautiful he felt with his new beard style and Hermione chuckled internally as she focused on said beard. She could clearly remember the last time Ron's beard had stolen her attention for so long. It was the day she’d noticed that he was no longer a boy, but a man. And now she was realising that her man had become a full proud and accomplished father. No, not a father. Her colleague's husbands who they continually complain about for not contributing to their children’s care were fathers. Ron was a dad. A fully committed, capital “D”, Dad.

‘Are you done ogling me, or shall I give you a few more minutes?’ Ron was glancing at her from the corner of his eye twitching his lips with the effort to stop a smile.

Hermione shook her head amused by his boldness. Oh, you are so full of yourself, are you? Well, two can play this game . She thought, and narrowing her eyes at him, she asked, ‘What makes you think that I was looking at you?’

Ron chuckled, triggering a reprimand from Rose at the sudden movement of her model. He apologised to her and promised to remain still before he answered, ‘Because if you would’ve been looking at Rosie with that eyes, love... I’ll be calling child support and the Aurors.’

Hermione gawked but recovered quickly, deciding to ignore her husband's ridiculous comment and walked into the room. ‘‘Where is Hugo?’ She queried, noticing the absence of her youngest son, as she squatted next to Rose and wrapped her in a bear hug. The little one immediately left her task at hand to snuggle into her mother.

‘He’s already asleep. Little Rosie here put her brother to sleep - with my help,’ Ron hastily added, as Hermione’s incipient protest died in her throat. ‘And now is my turn to give her night night.’

They ended up putting Rose to bed together, stealing glances at each other, trying to convey through their eyes all the longing from the last two weeks. Once in their bedroom, Ron and Hermione fell into their well practiced bedtime routine. As usual, she was first in bed. Ron didn’t know it, but she had trained through the years to perform the routine in record time so she could watch him peel off his clothes with no interruptions. Contemplating as Ron undressed was one of those little simple pleasures of life.

Whilst Hermione rejoiced with the view of her naked husband, she remembered the story Ginny had told her about the name she’d heard her coworker’s daughter called Harry. Ginny had been so full of herself recalling how she’d caught the girl saying to her friends that Ginny’s husband was a total DILF. When Hermione asked what that meant, Ginny’s grin could have lightened an entire city. “Dad I’d Like to Fuck”.

Hermione surveyed her husband. He was absolutely a DILF. If she’d been a teenager she was sure she'd have a crush on him. She had had a crush on him when they were teenagers and he was still a work in progress. If she’d have to choose, Hermione was completely sure that Ron had never been more appealing than he was at that moment. He didn’t have the body of his early twenties but he was still stunningly fit compared with her colleagues’ husbands. And maturity had brought an air of wisdom that mixed with his sarcastic humour made him more attractive than ever. In addition, seeing him as committed as he was to Rose today, made his sex appeal rise to the sky.

‘Ready to sleep, love?’ Ron had suddenly stopped mid-movement putting on his pyjama bottoms. One leg in the air, contracting his entire body to remain balanced. Hermione bit her lower lip to contain a moan at the sight of is firmed and perfectly sized for a small hand arse.

‘I think there are some other things I’d like to do with you before we sleep.’

Ron’s eyes went wide with want as he dropped his pyjamas and as he kneaded his hands he huskily said, ‘Then what are we waiting for?’ Then jumped on the bed and crawled between the sheets.

[dwellordream]

“…In modern English, we often use oath and vow interchangeably, but they are not (usually) the same thing. Divine beings figure in both kinds of promises, but in different ways. In a vow, the god or gods in question are the recipients of the promise: you vow something to God (or a god). By contrast, an oath is made typically to a person and the role of the divine being in the whole affair is a bit more complex.

…In a vow, the participant promises something – either in the present or the future – to a god, typically in exchange for something. This is why we talk of an oath of fealty or homage (promises made to a human), but a monk’s vows. When a monk promises obedience, chastity and poverty, he is offering these things to God in exchange for grace, rather than to any mortal person. Those vows are not to the community (though it may be present), but to God (e.g. Benedict in his Rule notes that the vow “is done in the presence of God and his saints to impress on the novice that if he ever acts otherwise, he will surely be condemned by the one he mocks.” (RB 58.18)). Note that a physical thing given in a vow is called a votive (from that Latin root).

(More digressions: Why do we say ‘marriage vows‘ in English? Isn’t this a promise to another human being? I suspect this usage – functionally a ‘frozen’ phrase – derives from the assumption that the vows are, in fact, not a promise to your better half, but to God to maintain. After all, the Latin Church held – and the Catholic Church still holds – that a marriage cannot be dissolved by the consent of both parties (unlike oaths, from which a person may be released with the consent of the recipient). The act of divine ratification makes God a party to the marriage, and thus the promise is to him. Thus a vow, and not an oath.)

…Which brings us to the question how does an oath work? In most of modern life, we have drained much of the meaning out of the few oaths that we still take, in part because we tend to be very secular and so don’t regularly consider the religious aspects of the oaths – even for people who are themselves religious. Consider it this way: when someone lies in court on a TV show, we think, “ooh, he’s going to get in trouble with the law for perjury.” We do not generally think, “Ah yes, this man’s soul will burn in hell for all eternity, for he has (literally!) damned himself.” But that is the theological implication of a broken oath!

So when thinking about oaths, we want to think about them the way people in the past did: as things that work – that is they do something. In particular, we should understand these oaths as effective – by which I mean that the oath itself actually does something more than just the words alone. They trigger some actual, functional supernatural mechanisms. In essence, we want to treat these oaths as real in order to understand them.

So what is an oath? To borrow Richard Janko’s (The Iliad: A Commentary (1992), in turn quoted by Sommerstein) formulation, “to take an oath is in effect to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it is false.” Following Sommerstein, an oath has three key components:

First: A declaration, which may be either something about the present or past or a promise for the future.

Second: The specific powers greater than oneself who are invoked as witnesses and who will enforce the penalty if the oath is false. In Christian oaths, this is typically God, although it can also include saints. For the Greeks, Zeus Horkios (Zeus the Oath-Keeper) is the most common witness for oaths. This is almost never omitted, even when it is obvious.

Third: A curse, by the swearers, called down on themselves, should they be false. This third part is often omitted or left implied, where the cultural context makes it clear what the curse ought to be. Particularly, in Christian contexts, the curse is theologically obvious (damnation, delivered at judgment) and so is often omitted.

While some of these components (especially the last) may be implied in the form of an oath, all three are necessary for the oath to be effective – that is, for the oath to work.

A fantastic example of the basic formula comes from Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (656 – that’s a section, not a date), where the promise in question is the construction of a new monastery, which runs thusly (Anne Savage’s translation):

These are the witnesses that were there, who signed on Christ’s cross with their fingers and agreed with their tongues…”I, king Wulfhere, with these king’s eorls, war-leaders and thanes, witness of my gift, before archbishop Deusdedit, confirm with Christ’s cross”…they laid God’s curse, and the curse of all the saints and all God’s people on anyone who undid anything of what was done, so be it, say we all. Amen.”

So we have the promise (building a monastery and respecting the donation of land to it), the specific power invoked as witness, both by name and through the connection to a specific object (the cross – I’ve omitted the oaths of all of Wulfhere’s subordinates, but each and every one of them assented ‘with Christ’s cross,’ which they are touching) and then the curse to be laid on anyone who should break the oath.

…With those components laid out, it may be fairly easy to see how the oath works, but let’s spell it out nonetheless. You swear an oath because your own word isn’t good enough, either because no one trusts you, or because the matter is so serious that the extra assurance is required.

That assurance comes from the presumption that the oath will be enforced by the divine third party. The god is called – literally – to witness the oath and to lay down the appropriate curses if the oath is violated. Knowing that horrible divine punishment awaits forswearing, the oath-taker, it is assumed, is less likely to make the oath. Interestingly, in the literature of classical antiquity, it was also fairly common for the gods to prevent the swearing of false oaths – characters would find themselves incapable of pronouncing the words or swearing the oath properly.

And that brings us to a second, crucial point – these are legalistic proceedings, in the sense that getting the details right matters a great detail. The god is going to enforce the oath based on its exact wording (what you said, not what you meant to say!), so the exact wording must be correct. It was very, very common to add that oaths were sworn ‘without guile or deceit’ or some such formulation, precisely to head off this potential trick (this is also, interestingly, true of ancient votives – a Roman or a Greek really could try to bargain with a god, “I’ll give X if you give Y, but only if I get by Z date, in ABC form.” – but that’s vows, and we’re talking oaths).

…Not all oaths are made in full, with the entire formal structure, of course. Short forms are made. In Greek, it was common to transform a statement into an oath by adding something like τὸν Δία (by Zeus!). Those sorts of phrases could serve to make a compact oath – e.g. μὰ τὸν Δία! (yes, [I swear] by Zeus!) as an answer to the question is essentially swearing to the answer – grammatically speaking, the verb of swearing is necessary, but left implied. We do the same thing, (“I’ll get up this hill, by God!”). And, I should note, exactly like in English, these forms became standard exclamations, as in Latin comedy, this is often hercule! (by Hercules!), edepol! (by Pollux!) or ecastor! (By Castor! – oddly only used by women). One wonders in these cases if Plautus chooses semi-divine heroes rather than full on gods to lessen the intensity of the exclamation (‘shoot!’ rather than ‘shit!’ as it were). Aristophanes, writing in Greek, has no such compunction, and uses ‘by Zeus!’ quite a bit, often quite frivolously.

Nevertheless, serious oaths are generally made in full, often in quite specific and formal language. Remember that an oath is essentially a contract, cosigned by a god – when you are dealing with that kind of power, you absolutely want to be sure you have dotted all of the ‘i’s and crossed all of the ‘t’s. Most pre-modern religions are very concerned with what we sometimes call ‘orthopraxy’ (‘right practice’ – compare orthodoxy, ‘right doctrine’). Intent doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting the exact form or the ritual precisely correct (for comparison, ancient paganisms tend to care almost exclusively about orthopraxy, whereas medieval Christianity balances concern between orthodoxy and orthopraxy (but with orthodoxy being the more important)).”

- Bret Devereaux, “Oaths! How do they Work?”

[wylanvnneck]

This 2 part fic was written for the Secret Snusband Gift Giveaway hosted by @jurdannet​ and @jurdannetrevels​ for my lovely Knife Wife @lilacs-with-lavender​.

Rating: T for Tyrannosaurus

Summary: Inspired by an episode of my favourite Cop TV show, ‘Castle’, in which a bet takes place with pretty high stakes, although the plotline has been tweaked to fit this fandom. My Knife Wife said she loved the Enemies to Lovers trope so that’s what I’ve (tried to) write here and I hope you enjoy the story of Homicide Detectives Jude Duarte and Cardan Greenbriar and their mutual enmity.

Warnings: Not so graphic descriptions of murder and mention of drugs. (Really not sure what I need to tag, so please let me know if I’ve missed something.)

Posted as a Gift on AO3 | Part 2 | Masterlist

Part 1

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“Victim’s name is Taryn Santorini, a metal sculptor by trade, she was found by her doorman fifteen minutes before we traced the address in Chloe’s hand back to her.” 

Detective Jude Duarte looks down at the motionless face of a scared looking brunette, a crimson splatter painting the tiled floor around her lifeless body. The room around her is a mess, clothes scattered everywhere, bed ruffled and unmade and metal figurines placed haphazardly throughout the little apartment.

“Lil, talk to me, what are we looking at?”

Before the white-blonde haired medical examiner crouched on the floor by the body can answer, a smooth dark voice that Jude so detests cuts through the air behind her.

“Why, Duarte, I’d say that the fact that Tara What’s-her-name was shot and killed is rather obvious.” The despicable excuse of a detective steps forward, a smug grin pasted to his face. Cardan Greenbriar, entitled little rich boy, over-confident bastard and sadly, her partner.

Patience, Jude reminds herself, patience was a virtue. 

“I meant, as I’m sure Lil knows, with what model was she killed and when?”

Liliver shoots her an amused sympathetic look before turning her gaze back to the victim.

“Looks to be a gun with a 45 caliber, same as the one used to kill Chloe Tatterfell. I’d say Taryn here has been dead for about 12 hours so pretty close to Chloe’s time of death, maybe just a half hour or so afterwards.”

“So chances are it’s the same killer.” Cardan interjects, the smug smile a little less vibrant now. 

“Yep. I’ll have to get her back to the morgue so  I can do a full inspection, see if I can find anything helpful.”

Jude steps back from the crime scene to give her some space, almost bumping in to the officer taking pictures of the area for later use. 

“Thanks, Lil.”

“Just doing my job, sweetie.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jude clips a glossy picture of their latest victim onto the precinct’s murder board. “Garrett and Van questioned practically all known associates of both Chloe and Taryn and none of them could recognise the other victim. There’s no obvious connection between the two and yet, for some reason they were both killed on the same day, by the same person.”

“And with the same gun.” Cardan is leaning back in his chair, his posture insouciant and his curly black hair falling lazily over his forehead. Surely that was a violation of precinct dress codes? Not that he’d care either way, rule breaker that he was. God knew it was only because of his daddy’s clout that he’d even graduated from the academy in the first place, whilst people like Jude had to work hard and save every penny and fight to get anywhere in the field of Law Enforcement.

“Ok, I’m going to head to the morgue whilst Van and Gare check through the victim’s phones and financials, see if Lil has anything for us.”

“I suppose, being the dutiful partner that I am, I should come with you?” Cardan’s drawl is as irritating as usual and Jude can hardly wait to get out of the proximity of his stupid raven locks and smoldering eyes.

“Please, you’d be doing us both a favour if you didn’t.”

“Aw, come now Jude you know you’d miss me.” He lets out a dramatic sigh as he half heartedly stands from his chair to join her as she speeds by towards the exit and she just barely resists the urge to throttle him.

Lil bustles around her examining room as she adjusts the fluorescent lamps shining down on both the victim’s bodies’. 

“So, apart from the type of bullets that killed them, the only similarity that I could find between the two victims is the fact that they both have tattoos.”

Jude raises a brow. “Everyone has tattoos.”

From across the autopsy table Cardan’s eyes gleam as he smirks. 

“Oh really? You got some ink on you, Duarte?” 

His tone is disbelieving and Jude can’t resist messing with him a little.

She pastes an obviously fake flirtatious smile on her face and drawls in a sugar sweet voice, “Guess you’d have to find that out on your own, Greenbriar.” 

She bites at her lip for good measure and thinks once more of how bad she would be at flirting in earnest. Lil certainly couldn’t keep the laughter out of her gray eyes. Cardan, however, has a strange look on his face, one that Jude can’t quite decipher, but she’s pretty sure she’s just one-upped him and she can’t deny the slight sense of triumph that the thought gives her.

 She turns her attention back to the victims. “You were saying, Lil?” 

“I’m saying that these tattoos seem to have been done by the same artist. Look,” she pulls back the white cloth covering the body of Chloe Tatterfell, gently pushing a strand of brown hair off of her shoulder to reveal the cartoonish character of a rose, inked in with dark black ink.

She then turns to Taryn’s body to reveal a similarly styled tattoo of a mermaid on her wrist. Just as she’s pulling back the cover Jude’s back pocket vibrates and the sound of her plain ringtone travels through the air. Quickly she swipes upwards to answer the call and it’s Garrett.

“Yo, so we looked through the victims’ phone records and found a connection. Both Chloe and Taryn made a phone call on the day that they were killed to the same number, belonging to a Locke McCutchins, he’s got priors including robberies and domestic assault.”

By the time he’s finished speaking she’s already waved a quick goodbye to Lil and turned to walk out the door, not bothering to check if her partner was behind her.

“Alright, text me his address, let’s go pick him up.”

“Locke McCutchins, open up, it’s the NYPD!” Garrett bangs on the door and the force is so strong that the wood vibrates as Jude clutches her pistol in her hand, body flat against the wall of Locke’s apartment with Cardan right beside her.

There’s no answer and the door is broken down as she, Cardan, Garrett and Van file into the room in a practiced motion that’s as familiar to her as breathing.

Right in front of them, sprawled across his couch, lies the dead body of Locke McCutchin, his tawny eyes still open and gazing unseeingly up at his ceiling, a dried red patch visible on his shirt.

Garret drops to the floor beside the couch, his sandy hair falling over his face as he leans over to check Locke’s pulse whilst the rest of them look on after having taken note that the apartment was clear.

“Body’s cold, he’s been dead for hours, entry wound looks to be about the same size as the other victims.”

Jude scrunches her eyebrows as she stands in front of the murderboard for the second time that day.

“So, Chloe Tatterfell, Taryn Santorini and Locke McCuchins were all killed within the span of 24 hours, all with the same gun, presumably by the same killer and yet so far the only connections we’ve found are Taryn’s address that was found written on Chloe’s hand, the phone call from both women to Locke and the similar tattoos on both Chloe and Taryn, but not on Locke.”

“Hmm.” Cardan seems to materialise out of nowhere, carrying a paper cup of what smells like freshly brewed coffee. Jude was convinced that he took his coffee with added alcohol but she had yet to prove it.

“What’s with the glare?” he asks.

“It automatically deploys itself when you're around.”

He scoffs. Twirls his coffee around. Takes a long, slurping sip.

“Hey, Duarte? Don’t get me wrong, I mean, the feeling is mutual, but what exactly is it that makes you despise me so much? I’d like to know so I can make sure to keep doing it.” 

Jude barely deliberates over her answer before she responds. 

“Being an overly cocky, obnoxious jerk who has only managed to get this far thanks to his Daddy’s fat purse will definitely be the best way to make me hate you, trust me.”

He grins but there’s no humour in the curve of his sensual lips, his eyes are cold metal.

“You think that the only reason I’m a detective is because of my father?”

“Yup.” She makes sure to add plenty of emphasis to that one word.

Cardan opens his mouth as if to speak, stops, presses his lips together so hard that they turn pale before the colour returns to them when a slow smile spreads across his face, this time full of humour, but the decidedly darker kind.

“Let’s make a bet. If you can figure out what the connection between our three victims is before I do, I’ll go right up to Captain Madoc myself and request a change of partners so you can be rid of my ‘overly cocky, obnoxious’ self. Deal?” 

He was extending a challenge and Jude was never one to back down from those. Besides, the chance to be rid of him with no cost to herself or her reputation was too good to pass up on. Still, there had to be a catch, with Cardan, there was always a catch.

“And on the complete off-chance that you figure it out first? What happens then?”

“If I figure it out first...you have to come with me as my date to this party that my dad’s having in a couple days.”

Those last few words come out in a rush and Jude has to take a moment to decipher their meaning. Followed by another moment to wonder if she’d somehow completely misunderstood what he’d said.

“You want me to what?”

“Be my date to a party. Honestly Duarte, do you have any idea how many women would jump at this opportunity?” His tone is disgustingly nonchalant. 

“I-” she struggles to find the words. “Take one of them then! Don’t you have a girlfriend, Nicasia or something like that? Blue hair and eyes? High pitched voice? Talks a lot about how much she gets seasick?”

“You know, for someone who’s only met Nicasia once you do remember quite a bit about her.” His steady gaze on her is intense.

For some incorrigible reason Jude has to resist the urge to flush.

“I’m a detective. It’s my job to study people.”

“Right. Sadly, Nicasia and I are no longer together, if we ever were. I got bored. Hence, why I need a date.”

“I’m sure you could just take one of your scores of female admirers, you don’t need me.”

“Is that jealousy that I detect in your voice?”

“Cardan.” 

“Look, the point is, I can’t be bothered having to deal with yet another simpering female who thinks that one night on my arm means a promise to a life-long relationship complete with marriage, a fancy mansion and exactly 2.5 kids. All I want is a companion for one night so I don’t get hounded by my mother for not having a girlfriend by which she can procure some grandchildren.”

“Oh so now you want me to be your fake girlfriend?”

He rolls his eyes up at the ceiling and she fights the urge to slap him. 

“It’s just for one night! Besides, I thought me winning was barely even a possibility to you.”

She makes a noise at the back of her throat. “It is.”

“Then I don’t see what the problem is. Do we have a deal, or not?” He holds out his hand, sculpted eyebrows raised in confrontation.

She doesn’t really think he has much of a chance of figuring it out before her, but he had admittedly also proven adept at figuring certain things out in previous cases so there was definitely no certainty that he wouldn’t win, for all her bravado. Yet, her competitive nature couldn’t bear the thought of surrendering, so she pushes her unease aside and grips his hand in a firm shake. 

“Deal.” 

There’s an awkward moment when he takes a little too long to release her hand from his grip. Once he finally does, the rather pointy tips of his ears reddening, they both turn back to the murder board and the view of their murder time line and crime scene pictures, furiously trying to connect the dots in their heads.

A random thought intrudes in her brain.

"Wait, what if Garrett and Van figure it out before we do?”

As one, she and Cardan both turn towards the opposite side of the office where the two officers in question sat in front of their computers.

Van was typing in data on his computer, eyes glazing over and the tuft of black hair atop his head trembling whilst Garrett, or, The Ghost - as he was sometimes called thanks to his tendency to take months before answering non-work related messages - stood eating glazed donuts with one hand and speaking to someone on the phone held in the other. Jude loved the both of them but she had to admit that they didn’t exactly paint the most inspiring picture. 

Once again she and Cardan are in sync when they promptly turn back towards the murderboard and proclaim, “Nah.”

Van’s excitement is clearly written on his face when he walks straight up to Jude’s desk the moment she arrives at the precinct the next morning, slamming down a manila folder with the NYPD crest printed on it onto her neatly arranged table top.

Immediately she reaches out to open it, desperate for a break in the case that would not only put a three time killer behind bars but also ensure that she herelf wouldn’t commit murder if she lost the bet and had to pretend to be Cardan’s girlfriend for a night. The thought makes her want to shudder.

“So, I was looking into all of our victim’s financials and I noticed an anomaly. Two weeks ago on the 7th they each deposited 95 hundred dollars into their savings accounts, but we’ve got no way of tracing the money back because the amount is under the IRS’s investigative limit” Van takes a quick pause before continuing, “but that’s not all, both Taryn and Chloe have credit card charges for small amounts at a tattoo place called Fair Folk Inks down in Queens.”

“Great, that’d be the place where they both got tattoos, I’ll go down there and ask the owner a couple questions, thanks Van.” She puts the sheaf of financial accounts back into the folder and takes a quick swig of her usual morning coffee, black, no sugar before preparing to head out once more.  

“Going somewhere, partner?” 

She’d bumped straight into Cardan when stepping into the elevator and she lets out a small groan of frustration as she steps back from his sturdy form. He looks annoyingly chipper, usual cocky smile in place and laughter in his tone as he looks down at her slightly shorter self. His cologne is strong and emanates the scent of the woods and sunlight in the small elevator. The woods and sunlight? Clearly foregoing the rest of her morning coffee hadn’t been a good idea.

She’d thought she could make it out of the building before he finally arrived, necessitating in having to take him along as well, but clearly fate had other ideas. 

“Tattoo parlour. Queens,” she grits out.

“Let’s go then,” his tone is sickly sweet.

“Hi there, you guys lookin’ to get inked?” asks the pink haired girl behind the counter in fishnet tights and a tank top, looking up from where she is perched on a stool behind the counter when she hears them enter.

The parlour itself is shiny and white, the smooth metal counter and two spaced out black leather tattoo chairs complete with wheeled stools are the only pieces of furniture in the small space. Mounted on the walls are designs, each of them evoking a sense of fantasy. A pixie there, a selkie here, an ornate dragon, all staring right back at Jude as she takes in their surroundings. She takes note of the fact that the pictures staring back at her were very reminiscent of Chloe and Taryn’s tattoos, solidifying her suspicion that this was where they had got them done.

Before she has time to explain the reason for their visit, Cardan pipes up.

“You know, I’ve been thinking of getting one of a slithering snake, maybe across my back? I believe it would add to my already abundant sex appea-”

“Actually,” Jude cuts him off with her most scathing glare, to which he irritatingly responds with a grin. “We’re here on official business, NYPD, we need to speak with the owner of this establishment.” She holds up the badge that she’s just extracted from her plain black wallet as she speaks.

“That would be Vivi, hang tight a sec I’ll go get her.” With a sway of her hips Heather trounces off behind a curtained section at the back of the parlour. 

Unable to stand still for even a few moments, her partner has already wandered over to the corner of the room, pointing at a pinned up design, ““That goblin over there reminds me of Van.”

She ignores him. 

“Oh come on Duarte, you have to admit, there’s a definite resemblance.”

She spares the quickest of glances at the design and it’s true, there’s a striking similarity, but she isn’t about to give him the satisfaction of agreeing so she simply makes a non-committal grunt of recognition.

“Tell me, are you always this tightly wound or is it just for the majority of your day?”

“Excuse me?” Her eyebrows have inadvertently traveled upwards on her face and she can’t believe he has the audacity to say what he just did, although really, she shouldn’t be so surprised.

“Come on Duarte, we’ve been partners for quite a while now and I don’t think I’ve ever even seen you laugh.” He’s standing a few feet away from her, his expression serious, not backing down.

“It’s called being professional.” She can feel the muscles working in her face as she hisses out the words through gritted teeth, blood pounding furiously. 

“Ahem.” She whirls around to find a tall bronze haired woman with striking cat-like eyes that were currently meeting her gaze wearing a lazy look of amusement.  

“Heather said there were some policemen who wanted to ask me some questions?”

Jude cannot believe that she had just gotten so sidetracked by her insolent partner that she’d forgotten why she was currently standing in the middle of a Tattoo parlour in Queens, clutching a set of regular sized close ups of three now dead people. She tamps down the irritation at her own actions as she thrusts out the photos in front of the woman facing her, Vivi, the pink haired girl had said.

“Yes, ma’am, do you recognize these people?”

She watches intently as Vivi carefully peruses the pictures before answering, “I know the two girls, Taryn and Chloe, we’re friends, I’ve even tattooed the both of them. I’m not really sure who he is.”

“Are you sure you don’t know him? Look carefully.” Cardan is all business now, stepping up to Vivi.

“I’m sure.” Vivi’s tone is almost defiant, daring him to question her again.

“You said that you were friends with the girls, how close were you?” 

“They came into the tattoo parlour at the same time about a month ago and we started up a conversation, we exchanged numbers and would meet up for a drink from time to time.” 

“Did they ever meet up with just each other?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Can you think of any reason as to why they’d both be killed by the same person?”

“They’re...they’re dead?”

Jude had intentionally asked the question in a way that would require a reaction and she wasn’t sure that she was entirely convinced by the shocked undertone of Vivi’s voice.

 “I’m afraid so, ma’am.”

“She’s hiding something.” Once again Jude is back in front of the murderboard, furiously capping and uncapping a whiteboard marker as her mind whirls. She’s full of nervous energy, on the brink of a precipice and she wants nothing more than to be able to push herself off of it.

“Agreed.” Cardan is pacing the floor between her and the murder board and his posture indicates that he’s just as worked up as she is.

“But what I can’t understand is why she would kill two of her acquaintances plus a random vending machine operator, I mean, there’s no clear motive.” She’s barely conscious of the slight pain that tingles as she worries at her bottom lip.

Cardan halts in front of the board, takes a hard look at the scrawled timeline on it before once more resuming his brisk walk.

 “And what the hell is the connection between these three victims? They lived in opposite neighbourhoods, worked in completely different areas and fields, never seemed to have been in the same place at the same time and yet somehow they were killed by the same hand. Also, where did all that money come from?” 

His phone chooses precisely that moment to start ringing and the sound of ‘Horns’ by Bryce Fox cuts through the tension. 

“It’s Liliver,” he mouths as he swipes upwards to answer and puts the medical examiner on speaker phone.

“You got something for us Lil?’

“You bet I do. I had scraps from the victims’ clothings tested to try and find a common link. What I found were traces of bleach, acetone, sodium chloride and ammonia.”

“Drugs. They were making drugs. That would explain all the money.” Jude is burning and luminescent with victory, until Lili’s next words cut her down.

“It’s not drugs.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because of what isn’t there. If your vics were making drugs, there’d need to be a couple more ingredients. That being said, they were definitely up to something.”

She lets out a sigh of defeat. “Thanks, Lil.”

Cardan hangs up before bringing his fingers up to his temples, massaging the sides of his head as he burns a hole into the board in front of him.

Jude bites back a scream. “This is like the start of a bad joke, a teacher, a sculptor and a vending machine operator walk into a tattoo parlour…”

He scoffs, “Yeah, except we don’t really have a punchline.”

“Other than ‘they made a bunch of money and got themselves killed.’”

There’s a lull in the air and the frustration is palpable. There was so much more than just their bet at stake here, there was the need for justice for these three victims, who regardless of their crimes likely didn’t deserve what had befallen them. Besides, there was no way that they could let a ruthless killer roam the streets freely.

Suddenly, Cardan whirls around to face her, once again bringing his pacing to an abrupt stop, with a speed to rival that of the animal that was his tattoo inspiration.

“Made a bunch of money,” he repeats. 

He sounds like he’s just jumped off of the precipice. She, on the other hand, remained firmly mounted to the ground. 

“What?”

“A sculptor who works with metal, a chemist and a vending machine operator...I know what they were up to.”

Slowly, the light starts to dawn on her and her pulse speeds up. Yes, she thinks.

“Think about it, when counterfeiting money, what’s the biggest problem you face? Finding the paper,” he continues.

“And a vending machine operator would have an endless supply of one dollar billls!”

“Exactly, then the chemist would come in, using the chemicals that were found on the vic’s bodies to white wash those bills.”

“And then the sculptor would be able to fashion a set of metal plates with which to type in fake serial numbers’ so they can get larger denominations of money…”

“Right! So, plates, paper, there’s just one missing ingredient.”

Beaming smiles break out on both their faces when, in unison they reach the same conclusion. 

The 12th Precinct’s interrogation room had contained many suspects from the time it was built. Some were innocent and some were guilty, but there was no doubt in both Jude and Cardan’s minds that the feline woman currently seated across from them with her legs up on the table was one hundred percent guilty. 

“So you think you’ve figured it all out, huh?” Vivi’s drawl is deceptively flippant.

“I think so.” Jude answers calmly. “For instance, we’ve figured out that you were involved in and likely the mastermind behind a counterfeiting operation that raked in a substantial amount of money. You provided the last ingredient needed, the ink from your tattoo parlour stocks that was used to print on the bills.”

Cardan leans forward. “We’ve also surmised that you killed your partners in said operation; Taryn Santorini and Chloe Tatterfell, both of whom you met through your tattoo parlour, just like you said.”

“And our third victim, Locke McCutchins? Yeah, we know he was your cousin, once removed on your mother’s side wasn’t it? A distant enough relationship for you to not be flagged when checking his family, but close enough for you to enlist him in your scheme so you had access to vending machine bills.” Jude continues, she and Cardan having perfected the art of interrogating together ages ago, their tactics working smoothly together alongside each other. 

Vivienne sneers. “So what? You have no proof.”

“On the contrary, ma’am, we do. You neglected to hide the metal plates that you got Taryn to make for you in a place that wasn’t under a loose floorboard of your room, easily found with the aid of a search warrant.” Cardan smiles.

“You also tripped up when you stored your used gun with matching ballistics to the weapon that killed our victims in the same place as the plates.” Cardan’s smile is copied on Jude’s face.

Vivi’s skin pales and her cat’s eyes narrow into slits as she bangs the table, hard, before slouching back in the metal chair, the fight leaving her.

“Well, I suppose the jig is up, as they say,” she drawls.

Satisfied, Jude stands up and gathers the notepad and pen that she’d left on the desk and then bends over the interrogation table to meet Vivi’s gaze.

“What I can’t understand, though, is why? Why would you kill them if you’d already paid them?”

The Accused smirks. “It was all that idiot Lockes’s fault. He’d gotten himself into debt with some mob shark and needed more dough to bail his sorry self out. I wasn’t about to give it, he had his cut and that was all. But then, he threatened to go to the cops and tell them about what we did. Couldn’t let that happen, so I figured I’d kill ‘em all of. Just to be safe.”

The casual way in which she speaks of her deeds chills Jude to the bone. Wordlessly, she turns her back on yet another cold hearted murderer and exits the room with Cardan right behind her.

They come to a stop in front of the now empty murderboard, its surface shiny and white, devoid of words, but not for long. There was always a murder happening somewhere or the other, Jude had been a detective long enough to know that.

“So, now that Vivienne Insmire, tattoo artist, mastermind and ink supplier of counterfeiting operations and killer of ‘friends’ and distant male cousins is safely behind bars, I think you and I have a certain matter to settle, Duarte.”

She’d been trying hard to avoid this moment all day, pushing back thoughts of her close defeat and what its consequences would be. It seemed like now, she'd run out of time. She gulps.

“I suppose-” she almost can’t bring herself to say the words, “I suppose you won our bet, then.”

“Yup.” He’s not even trying to hide his gloating, “and you know what that means.”

The noise she emits is one that is resigned. She knows what’s coming.

“I’ll pick you up at eight tomorrow.”

“Or I could just take a ca-”

“Don’t be late, Duarte,” he calls over his shoulder as he leisurely strolls towards the precinct exit, slinging his leather jacket over his shoulder.

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If you’ve made it all the way down here, congrats! Here’s a link for part 2.

Tagging the lovely people on my short but treasured TFOTA taglist; @cupcakesandkittens​ (who helped immensely during the writing of this fic and who suggested adding in the interrogation scene❤) and my very own talented Secret Snusband, @aelinfeyreeleven945tbln​

Please let me know if you’d like to be added to or taken off of my taglist💕