#my luddite urges

[pathologicalreid]

for the fear of falling apart | part two

returning to Everett Lynch's case, you try to redefine normalcy with Spencer and JJ, but Grace Lynch has other plans for you

part one | part two | part three | part four | part five | epilogue

series masterlist

who? spencer reid x jareau!reader category: angst, hurt/comfort content warnings: gun violence, spoilers/references to: 9x6 "in the blood", 9x14 "200", 9x23 "angels", 9x24 "demons", 13x22 "believer", 14x1 "300", 14x15 "truth or dare". rewrite of 15x1 "under the skin", 15x2 "awakenings". a lot of dialogue is pulled directly from the show. hospitals/medical information. diana's alzheimers. marriage talk. roslyn's suicide. the parentification of jennifer jareau. mommy AND daddy issues. fear of drowning. word count: 7.48k a/n: it's two days late, but it's three times longer than part one. welcome to the abyss of my brain. it's scary in here.

Your name was being called. First, it felt far away, slowly coming closer and closer, lifting you to the surface as if you were being pulled. The sound was muffled until you broke through the barrier, a female voice clearly called your name, prompting your eyes to fly open, and there you were, sitting up on Penelope’s velvet couch, cocooned in a crocheted blanket with what was sure to be a remarkable bedhead.

Lifting your hand and placing it over your racing heart, you looked up at Penelope, the blue streak that you had redone for her last night prominent against her blonde hair. “Hey,” you said, widening your eyes and letting the blanket fall from your shoulders.

She crooked a brow at you suspiciously. For someone who wasn’t a profiler, she did have a knack for reading people, but you supposed it came with the territory. “My darling girl, you are always more than welcome to sleep on my couch, it’s a wonderful couch, I have spent my fair share of nights sleeping on it,” she rambled, sitting down next to you and taking your hands in hers. “You’re hiding,” she told you softly, “What are you hiding from?”

Penelope reached out to you, sweeping a messy strand of hair behind your ear as her big, brown eyes looked at you sympathetically. The gesture and the way she was speaking to you nearly approached being sisterly. At the idea of developing a supplemental sororal relationship with the technical analyst, you pulled away from her. You shook your head, “I’m not hiding,” you told her simply, leaving her with a half-truth as you stood up and began folding the blanket that had kept you warm overnight.

Nodding incredulously, she looked up at you, “If your Luddite boyfriend is blowing up my phone, then something has to be going on.” Her tone was urgent, but she stayed seated, giving you an advantage.

“Nothing’s wrong, Pen,” you reassured her, shaking your head and shrugging simultaneously.

Her face filled with doubt, glancing over at your cellphone as it buzzed on the coffee table, Spencer’s contact flashing on the touchscreen as you ignored the call. “Why didn’t you tell him you were staying with me last night?”

Pressing your lips in a thin white line, you briefly considered coming clean. You envisioned the truth coming out of you in puddles, everything you had been holding close to your chest for the last month pouring out like alphabet soup, but Penelope didn’t deserve that burden. “I just forgot,” you told her, watching the screen go dark.

Spencer was a worrier by the influence of his environment. Adamantly against getting a new phone, he couldn’t see your location at any given moment. His first course of action was usually calling your sister before resorting to Penelope, who not only has your location on her phone but also has access to your location in the bureau database. It wasn’t a fault of his, members of the BAU did have a tendency to disappear in the dead of the night.

She urged you to call him back as her phone started going off, her shoulders slumping forward, a tell-tale sign that the BAU was being pulled in on a case. If you were lucky, you would be able to slip through the cracks, claiming to put all of your focus into the case so that you didn’t need to have an in-depth conversation with your boyfriend. Or your sister, for that matter.

“Where are we headed?” You asked, rolling up your sleeves and crossing your arms in front of your stomach.

Penelope frowned at the tiny screen in front of her, “Baltimore,” she said hesitantly, “Uh, we gotta go. I’ll drive? You can call Spencer on the way,” she suggested before bolting into the bathroom.

You ended up avoiding the call to Spencer yet again, claiming you’d see him at the office anyway, and instead opening yourself up to a barrage of questions.

Was there cheating? Are you pregnant? Were you pregnant? Did he propose? Did you say no? Did you say yes?

The two of you parted as she went to prepare files and you waltzed into the bullpen, clocking the vase of flowers on your desk immediately. They, of course, weren’t just flowers, but a carefully calculated decision made to try and get into your good graces. This was the fifth vase that had been delivered in the last month.

First, there were honeysuckles, a symbol of devoted affection. Red carnations told you that his heart ached for you. A bouquet of daisies because he truly loved you. Last week, white lilies were left on your desk, a symbol of pure love.

Now, a bunch of apple blossoms sat on your desk, telling you that he preferred you before anyone else. How poignant.

Your eyes burned as you looked around the bullpen, hoping he was around so you could return the flowers to him, but the only people you saw were Emily and Rossi, sequestered in her office in the middle of what seemed to be a tense discussion. Choosing to ignore the flowers, you walked over to your desk, tucking your go-bag underneath and starting to power up your computer.

“Hey, Y/N?” Emily called from her office, “Can you head to the file room and pull everything from the Lynch case?” She didn’t even wait for an answer before closing the door again.

Concerned, you turned around and started making your way to the file room. If Everett Lynch was back, that would explain the worried look on Penelope’s face when the case came in. Even more, that would explain why Emily and Rossi were hidden in her office. Every member of the team wanted to see Lynch locked up for what he’s done, but for Dave it was personal.

Opening the file room, you pulled open the drawer of active cases from the past three months, starting to strip the drawer of anything even remotely related to Everett Lynch. The revelation that Grace was his daughter took everyone by surprise, but Spencer still felt responsible for Luke getting knifed. You should talk to him about it, you thought to yourself, if he didn’t talk about it, he’d just continue to internalize it.

“I need to talk to you,” a voice said suddenly from behind you, jolting you away from your train of thought. Spinning on your heel, you looked at Spencer.

Alarmed, you huffed, “You scared me,” you informed him, clutching the files close to your chest as you studied his stature. He looked fine, his hair was a bit of a mess, but he was wearing the red cardigan that you had gotten him for Christmas last year. You didn’t even want to begin to consider the implications of his outfit choice.

He furrowed his brows at you, “I scared you? You disappeared last night without a word, and I scared you?” There wasn’t even a hint of anger in his voice, instead, his words dripped in sweet melancholy, and you couldn’t look away from him.

You thought about your sister, snatched from the nation’s capital in the middle of the night as vengeance for her work with the CIA. Spencer and Penelope, both taken from what should have been a secure FBI building by a cult that bore a decade-long grudge against the BAU. You had frightened him, probably tripping his overactive mind into believing you were destined to meet a similar fate – dying in a warehouse somewhere. Blinking absently, you shook your head at him, “I’m sorry,” you told him, and you meant it.

“You’re punishing me,” he accused, crossing his arms in front of his chest before quickly dropping them, being hypervigilant about his body language.

Skimming your tongue over the backs of your teeth nervously, you hesitantly met his gaze. He seemed to be convinced that you were punishing him for the events that had taken place last month, but you were inclined to believe that you were punishing yourself, he was caught in your crossfire. “It’s not a punishment, Spence,” you whispered, watching how his brown eyes shone under the fluorescent lights.

His shoulders dropped, disappointment plain on his face, “I missed you at the baby shower,” he confessed.

“Sprinkle,” you corrected.

“Semantics,” he retorted, and it almost brought a smile to your face.

You looked down at the files in your arms, not even realizing that you had been white-knuckling the classified information, “I was there,” you disputed. “I saw you. I brought the gift and put both of our names on it. What more could I have done?”

Rolling his eyes, he gave you a tilted look, “Standing together in the group photo would’ve been nice.”

In response, you straightened up your back, “Ah, you were too busy standing with my sister,” you quipped, bringing the conversation back to the root of the conflict.

“Will you come home tonight? Stay with me?” Your heart clenched at his question.

Hesitantly, you nodded, “I’ll be there,” you assured him, securing the last of the files before sneaking around him, skillfully avoiding the remainder of your team as you made your way to the roundtable room.

“I’m worried about Dave,” you whispered, looking at the other end of the couch at your boyfriend, the two of you dressed in pajamas, your old Georgetown sweatshirt frayed at the cuffs, but it remained your favorite.

The orange print of his Caltech t-shirt was peeling up on the edges, sometimes, at night, you’d pick at the emblem – it drove Spencer crazy, especially when he woke up in a pile of picked vinyl. His mug was carefully resting in his hands as the two of you had a nighttime cup of tea, something you used to do when you had just started dating, and that you decided to try to bring back – chamomile for you, lavender for him. “I talked to him tonight,” he told you, turning to face you, “He’s.. he’ll be fine. He has Krystall.”

And I have you, you thought to yourself, lifting your mug to your lips and taking a sip. Sometimes you felt special for getting this side of Spencer, the ratty college t-shirt and flannel pajama pants that he wore while lounging on the worn leather couch.

“Do you want to go to sleep?” He asked when you didn’t respond, leaning forward and setting his mug on the coffee table.

Shaking your head, you followed suit, setting your mug on a coaster next to his before crawling closer to him on the couch, taking him by surprise. “Not yet,” you whispered, sitting down next to him, relieved when he responded by putting an arm around you. “I’m not mad at you,” you told him, “I just needed time.”

His arm was warm and familiar over your shoulders, having the same effect as a weighted blanket, calming you down with a simple touch. “To think,” he said, “you keep saying that. Are you… do you need more time?”

You closed your eyes, leaning into him, “I don’t think so, but I’m,” you faltered, frowning, “I’m having a hard time talking to my sister.” It wasn’t a secret that there had been some sort of falling out between the Jareau sisters, but the reasoning behind the rift remained a mystery to most people.

“I am too,” he admitted, skimming his fingertips up and down your arm. “I keep recalling everything that happened, and I don’t fully understand how everything got so messed up.

Raising your eyebrows, you remained in the crook of his arm, “People say a lot of things with a gun to their head.”

What you hadn’t considered was that following her admission, your sister would avoid Spencer. When you decided to avoid both of them, you had no idea what you were taking from him. “What would your truth have been?”

“I’m afraid that everything surrounding me is destined to fall apart,” you admitted. “I was brought into my family in an attempt to rescue my parents’ marriage, but it didn’t work.” Your sister slit her wrists open when you were only four years old, but somehow your father had put her death on your shoulders. JJ left home as soon as she could, leaving you at twelve years old with your grief-stricken mother, who had spent the last several decades waiting for the day her daughters would all be reunited.

Spencer was quiet for a while before responding to you, “We should go to bed.”

He was probably right, the team was expected to be in early tomorrow morning. After leaving well past dark, the last thing you wanted to think about was going back in before the sun had a chance to rise. “Wait,” you said, “What’s your truth?”

Briefly, his eyes flickered, looking down the length of your body, “My truth is that I’m tired, we should go to sleep,” he told you, herding you toward your shared bedroom.

“Same time tomorrow?” You asked, walking through the bedroom and into the ensuite, grabbing your toothbrush off the counter.

Nodding, he leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss to your temple, “I’ll be there.”

Maybe you should’ve taken it as a sign that you were unphased by the revelation of a crazy doctor with a fetish for skinning people. The world had strange ways of telling you that you needed to take a step back, for every sign you had been given, you took a step forward. That was how you ended up in the backseat of an SUV with your sister at the wheel and Spencer in the passenger seat.

Everett Lynch had invaded the BAU’s territory, coming in like an infestation in the district, and he was trying to break his daughter Grace out of jail. You heard through the phone that they were scrambling tactics, using the walkie-talkies in the U.S. Attorney building to prevent their own capture.

The car came to a screeching halt, and the three of you piled out, “There’s no time,” your sister said, looking around, “We’ll cover this one,” she informed Spencer, looking back at you as you adjusted the strap of your Kevlar.

“I’ll take the garage on Piedmont and 10th,” Spencer responded dutifully, nodding at the both of you before turning around and running to the parking garage two blocks over.

You and your sister started to make your way into the larger of the two parking garages, both of you pulling your firearms and pointing them down, keeping yourselves aware of your surroundings. There was movement in front of you, two bodies moving toward a white van with federal plates – the Lynch’s. “Everett Lynch,” you called out, “Drop your weapon and put your hands up, now!”

The man in front of you – the so-called Chameleon – scoffed in disbelief, “Take it easy. There’s no reason to gun down a daddy in front of his little girl, right?” You kept your Glock aimed at him, watching intently as he carefully set his gun on the ground. Sirens started going off in your head, a premonition of things to come.

“Alright,” JJ shouted, “Kick it over. Grace, you too. Drop your backpack and let me see your hands. Come on, now!”

Putting her hands up, Grace let her backpack fall to the ground in a heap of fabric, you kept your gun trained on them as JJ lunged to the side, reaching over to pick up Everett’s gun from the ground. “Grace!” You shouted, watching the girl bring her hands down as she reached for something, “Put your hands back up!”

It was a split-second decision, but you watched as Grace lifted that gun in her hands, and you jumped. You knocked your sister over as three shots rang through the air, the first one grazed her arm. The next two lodged themselves in your side as the two of you fell to the ground, your body rolling along the ground as the father-daughter duo loaded themselves in the van before driving off.

JJ grabbed her weapon and shot after them, hoping to blow out one of their tires or at the very least slow them down, but with only one good arm, her aim was off. She scrambled to her feet, “Come on, Y/N,” she huffed, not checking behind her before running out of the parking garage.

You wanted nothing more than to follow her. Being angry wasn’t worth it anymore, you couldn’t freeze out your older sister anymore. You tried to breathe, you tried to call after her, but when you opened your mouth, the only thing that came out was blood.

For your entire life, you had followed her. When asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, you’d tell them you wanted to be like your big sister. You wanted to follow her, but you couldn’t move.

You followed her from East Allegheny to Washington D.C. You had followed her into this very parking garage. Now, all you could think about was following Roslyn, bleeding out on the cold hard floor, alone.

“Y/N, what’s your location?” Spencer’s voice rang through your radio.

You had never been shot before. You had always thought it would be cold to be shot, but instead, your whole body felt like it had been set on fire.

“Y/N, do you copy?”

The wetness of the blood should have made it cold.

“Y/N?”

Your fire was slowly fading, the blaze that had gone up so quickly began to ebb as you stopped feeling anything at all. The tapping of shoes echoed through the parking garage as you lay on the cement.

“No,” that all too familiar voice said, “Y/N is down, she’s been hit. We need an ambulance now,” Spencer called into the radio, he was out of breath as he looked down at you.

He studied your appearance, clocking the entry wounds on your side and moving his fingers in an attempt to staunch the bleeding. An odd, choked noise escaped your throat as the pressure on your side stoked the fire.

Spencer’s fingers trembled even as he maintained pressure on your side, “I know, I’m sorry, I know it hurts.” He took a deep breath, “here, turn- turn your head,” he instructed gently, using his free hand to coax your face to the side. You choked and came to the horrifying realization that he was trying to stop you from aspirating on your own blood. “Get it all out, baby,” he cajoled as blood spurted from your mouth, “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

That would have to be enough. It wasn’t enough for you to hope anymore. You had spent so long with the Anger and Resentment from your Pandora’s Box that you completely failed to notice how Hope had slipped through the cracks, lost in a sea of emotions.

“Do you hear that? That’s the ambulance,” he told you, an unspoken plea in his voice.

But you couldn’t hear the sirens, pretty soon, you couldn’t hear anything at all.

The EMTs had all kinds of things to say, none of them were even remotely comforting. The bullets had entered through the thin opening of your Kevlar, a sort of Achilles heel where you couldn’t be protected. He should have double-checked, he should have paused to adjust the straps before running to the other parking garage.

He watched the doctors shock you in the emergency room, looking on in horror as your heart stopped beating. “Are you her husband?” One of the nurses had asked.

Spencer’s mouth had gone completely dry, “I’m- almost,” he answered, earning a sympathetic look from the nurse as she proceeded to ask him questions about next of kin and extraordinary measures. One of the bullets had pierced your lungs, causing catastrophic bleeding.

The nurse guided him to a surgical waiting room, but no one came out to him with updates, leaving him to sit. Someone brought his go-bag by, letting him change into clothes that weren’t blood-soaked.

He sat in a pile of limbs on the hospital’s couch, picking at the crusted blood that he hadn’t quite managed to wash off, and he wondered if he could ask one of the nurses for a surgical scrub brush, wondering if that would get the last flecks of blood from the ridges of his fingernails.

“Spencer,” JJ called out, rushing through the hallway, Will trailing close behind her.

Her arm was wrapped with gauze, probably stitched up before someone told her what had happened to her little sister. “Hey,” Spencer said, standing up as they approached, wiping his clammy hands on his slacks.

JJ held her hands out, “What have you heard? Anything?”

“It’s gonna be a while,” he said, repeating the only words that he had been told. They had taken you to the OR an hour ago, and all they had to do was wait it out.

The clinical white walls of the hospital were enough to make Spencer stir crazy, when Will offered to get him a cup of coffee, he was almost aggressive in his rejection. The sunlight reflected off the drywall as your surgery continued to test his patience.

Eventually, your mother called JJ back, and your sister walked away in order to explain the situation under the guise of privacy, leaving Spencer alone. “Dr. Reid?” Someone said, maintaining the reverent tones of the hospital that were beginning to make him want to pull his hair out.

“Yes,” he said, standing up in front of the nurse.

The nurse gave him a gentle smile, and he braced himself for the worst. “Ms. Jareau is out of surgery,” she informed him.

You had been in there for nearly six hours. “She…” he faltered, “Can I see her?” He asked, looking past the nurse as if he could see all the way into your recovery room from where he stood.

Nodding, the nurse continued to smile at him, “I can take you to her now if you’d like. She’s still under sedation,” she advised, gesturing for Spencer to follow her through the winding hallways of the hospital.

“Is she going to be okay?” He asked, checking to make sure he had his phone in his pocket so he could text JJ if he needed to.

The nurse’s smile tightened, “We won’t be able to know if she’s sustained any neurological damage until she wakes up.”

He frowned slightly, bracing himself for an answer that he wouldn’t like, “Could she hear me if I talk to her?” He asked, stopping in his tracks as the nurse stopped outside of a room – your room.

“It’s unlikely,” the nurse answered.

That made sense to him, there weren’t any studies that could prove that people could hear external stimuli while comatose. At least, there wasn’t enough for the medical community to reach a consensus. “Thank you,” Spencer said, nodding at the nurse as she turned away, letting him know that the doctor would be by to talk to him soon.

Your skin was pallid, a sickly sheen covering your skin as tubes and wires worked together to monitor you and keep your body going. Spencer set your patient bag in the corner of the room before dragging a chair over to your bedside, cringing at the sound the chair made against the linoleum before taking a seat next to you.

The steady beeping of your heart monitor quickly became the only thing preventing him from falling apart entirely. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, keeping his voice down so that no one else would hear him. “I keep going over it in my head and I don’t know how I didn’t realize you were missing sooner,” he spoke to your silent body, chest rising and falling with even breaths. “I’m so sorry,” he echoed, “You should’ve… you should’ve been my priority. Before Grace. Before Lynch. Before any of it.”

He inhaled shakily, glancing over at your vital monitor, taking comfort in the consistency of the numbers, “I should’ve put you first and now I- I can’t take it back,” he said, eyes burning with emotion. “I know things between the two of us have been kind of weird lately… ever since the pawn shop, I mean. I just,” he paused for a moment, giving himself grace, “I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know if she meant it and if she did, what does that mean? When you didn’t bring it up after the wedding I didn’t either because I just didn’t know how to talk to you about it.”

Somewhere along the way, the two of you had gotten lost. In the midst of not talking about the pawn shop, you had stopped talking altogether. “Now, all of a sudden, none of it even matters. All that matters is that I need you to wake up because I need to have more time with you,” he sniffled, the first hot tears rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t imagine my life without you in it,” he whispered.

“Please don’t leave me,” he begged, thinking of all of those nights the two of you had stayed up talking about the future. Your dream wedding. Your children’s names. He needed it. More of it. More of you.

Mindful of you, he laid his arms on the armrest of your hospital bed, lowering his head and watching the consistent rise and fall of your chest, listening to the whistling of your nostrils as he waited for the doctor to come.

The doctor seemed confident that you would wake up, it was just a question of when. He sent JJ, who had gone home to change into fresh clothing, an update once the doctor left.

Every once in a while, your nose would twitch or your finger would tap on the hospital bedding, and he would allow himself to get his hopes up. It never lasted long, once the fluke ended, he went back to thinking about the situation realistically. You were still having blood transfused, there was a tube in your chest depositing fluids into a bag at your bedside, and even if you did wake up, there was a long road to recovery with an injury like this.

He was terrified that you’d wake up alone and in excruciating pain, so he refused to move, having any paperwork brought directly to him in your room. Nearly every fifteen minutes, he smoothed out the blanket that rested on top of you, careful when putting his hands near your body, even though you couldn’t tell whether or not your blanket was wrinkled. Spencer thought of it as tucking you in, keeping you safe, but he couldn’t help but wonder if it was too little too late.

You didn’t make it to the beach as often as you’d like. Spencer hated the beach, and you weren’t interested in swimming in the ocean so much as you wanted to go and people-watch. Families on vacation. Marriage proposals.

The first time you had ever gone to the ocean, you were three years old. JJ and Roslyn hadn’t been in years, but it was all new to you. JJ wanted to bring you to the water, and Roslyn hadn’t even wanted to go on the trip. The water hadn’t scared you then, the endless abyss of blue had seemed more inviting than anything you had ever seen before.

Now, you lay on the sand, all of it cold beneath your skin, the rest of the beach seemingly abandoned. Try as you might, you couldn’t move anything. You wanted to lift your arm to brush hair out of your face. You wanted to sit up. You wanted to go home.

You couldn’t even see the water from where you lay, you opened your mouth, hoping to call for help, but were surprised when the only thing that came out of your mouth was a dark, black sludge. It spurted from your mouth as it ran down your cheeks, staining the white sand of the beach beneath you. You were drowning on dry land, and there was nothing you could do.

Nothing but open your eyes.

The ominous white sky of the beach turned into white walls, as you fluttered your eyes open, the ocean made way for you, parting so that you could return to yourself. Laid in a hospital bed, trying to remember how to breathe, and meeting Spencer’s stare.

“Hi love,” he whispered, gently placing one hand on top of yours, drawing circles on the back of your hand with the pad of his thumb, careful not to knock your pulse oximeter off.

Your brows pinched together as you looked over at him, he looked tired, waiting for you to say something. Your chest felt tight as you looked at him, hundreds of thoughts bubbling to the surface, but only one bubble popped, “I had a nightmare.”

Spencer nodded slowly, messy curls falling over his forehead, “It’s okay, angel. You’re awake now. It can’t hurt you.”

It can’t hurt you. It can’t hurt you. It can’t hurt you.

You watched as Spencer reached over and pushed the call button on your bed. Each moment you spent awake became increasingly painful, signified by the slow rise of your heart rate, the pain only exacerbated when your breathing quickened. Alarm grew, “Shh, hey,” Spencer consoled you, reaching his hand out and smoothing your hair back, looking to the door and hoping someone would come in and help you.

They did, pushing pain medications through your IV and watching your heart rate stabilize before giving you something to help you calm down. Spencer probably knew what they all were, making mental notes to keep track of everything as he kept his hand in yours. Your pain level dwindled from a nine to a six, leveling out in the middle ground.

You settled back into the pillows, cringing as a nurse moved your bed so that you were sitting up slightly, nodding softly at the things that she told you about rest. She checked your vitals, before leaving the two of you alone, silence swirling around the two of you as you constructed a bubble to keep yourselves warm.

“I should’ve found you sooner,” he whispered, looking over at you, a distressed look in his eyes.

Moving at a turtle’s pace, you shook your head, “You saved my life.”

It’s okay. I’ve got you, he had told you in the parking garage, and he did. He still had you, even now. If they had let him, Spencer might’ve waited for you outside the operating room, just to be in the vicinity of you.

“Don’t go anywhere,” you murmured, eyes opening and closing slowly. Your eyelids felt sticky like there was still tape residue on them from your operation, but you didn’t dare move. You didn’t dare agitate any wound on your body. “Is JJ okay?” You asked, your voice tight. Checking in on your sister took all of your strength.

Spencer kept his hand in yours, moving his free hand to wipe at tears that had spilled over your lower lashline. “She’s fine, just a graze,” he reassured you, “I’ll call her when you go back to sleep.”

You swallowed thickly, wondering if you were allowed to have any water, “I missed you,” you breathed, fighting to keep your eyes open. “I wanna talk to you,” you sniffled.

“You should sleep, my sweet girl,” he answered, not wanting you to get into a hefty conversation in your condition. “We have all the time in the world to talk when you wake up.”

Except you didn’t. You had thought there was time for you to be angry, but then you had been shot. As much as you hated the idea of being someone who had a near-death experience and suddenly let bygones be bygones, alienating those close to you seemed exhausting. You took a deep breath, thankful for the nasal cannula on your face, “I’ve been so distant,” you admitted.

Spencer hesitated, not sure if you needed to get into this while so vulnerable, “I don’t know if she meant it,” he breathed.

“I don’t need to know,” you told him, surprising yourself as much as him with your admission. “JJ is… She’s one of the most important people in my life, but so are you. Maybe even more so.”

He frowned, “You can’t possibly mean that.”

You closed your eyes for a few seconds before opening them again, “JJ’s my sister, we share the same family, but I chose you, Spence. I will continue to do so,” you told him, deciding against adding until the day that I die. Watching him as he looked at you with tear-filled eyes, “Oh,” you sighed, “please don’t cry. I never meant to hurt you.”

Waving off your concern, he wiped at his eyes before taking one of your hands in both of his, “I love you so much, but I don’t want you to forget your anger.”

“Huh?” You hummed groggily.

“You’ve been mad for months,” he whispered, the strokes of his thumb on the back of your hand putting you to sleep. “It doesn’t need to fade away in the blink of an eye.”

You let your eyes slip shut once again, “I’ll still give you a hard time.”

He laughed slightly at that, “Good.”

“Spence?” You breathed.

“Yeah, baby?”

Humming, you settled back into the bed, “I don’t think I’ll be able to make our tea date tonight.”

When you woke up again, a familiar blonde was sitting at the foot of your bed, hunched in a plastic hospital chair while Spencer remained at your bedside, hands still intertwined, but sweaty now. “Jennifer,” he said, getting the attention of your sister.

She jumped up from the chair and sat on the edge of your bed, in your periphery, you saw Spencer retreat, ambling into the hallway to talk to Emily. Letting him go, you turned your attention to your sister, “Hey, Jayg,” you greeted, words coming easier now than they did before, the swelling of your throat had gone down.

Her finely chiseled eyebrows pinched together on her face, “I thought you were right behind me,” she admitted miserably, looking at your torso.

“It’s alright now, though,” you tried to reassure her. You had lost half of your blood volume, much of it on the parking garage floor, but you were here now, that had to mean something.

She shook her head in abject self-disappointment, “I should have protected you,” she insisted, scrunching up her nose as she fought back tears.

You were too tired to fight emotions, water falling from your tear ducts as the two of you tried to mend what had previously been torn apart. “You don’t need to protect me,” you insisted. The decision to take the hit had been entirely your own, driven by a need to protect her.

“I always have though,” she reminded you, “When Roz died, dad left, and mom checked out, I took care of you.”

When you were a child, you thought that having your pre-teen sister do everything for you was the way things worked. It didn’t last long, things unraveled from there, but you always had JJ. “I’m all grown up now,” you reminded her. You didn’t need her protection in your early thirties in the same way you needed them as a child.

JJ took a shaky breath, cupping your cheek with her hand affectionately, the way a mother would to their child, “You’re always going to be my little sister.”

You looked at her, seven years your senior, and you sighed, “Do you know why I did it?” You asked her, studying the sad look in her eyes.

She smoothed your hair back, grabbed a cup of water from your bedside, and brought the straw to your lips, “Why, Ducky?”

The childhood nickname chimed in your ears, one of the only things that you retained from your eldest sister. You smiled at her, “Your boys.” The answer came easily to you, “You have Will and your tiny people, and I just thought… I couldn’t let you leave them.”

“But I almost lost you,” she countered, it wasn’t aggressive, it was almost like she was trying to make you see the value in your own life. The people in your life didn’t make you valuable, you had value as an individual.

Shrugging, you looked at her sympathetically, “Nope,” you said, popping the ‘p’, “You’re stuck with me.”

She gave you a sisterly, knowing look, “Your heart stopped. Twice.”

You concurred, “Yeah, because you’re just that stuck with me.” You insisted, watching as Spencer answered a phone call in the hallway. “Did you call them?” You asked her, giving her a quick glance as you craned your neck to keep an eye on your boyfriend.

“Mom’s on a flight in tomorrow morning, but dad hasn’t responded to my voicemail,” she informed you, she didn’t look surprised, and you didn’t feel it.

Where your father was concerned, some things were better left unsaid, but you wouldn’t necessarily mind if he never responded to your sister’s calls. There was no reason to drag him and his new wife from their cushy life in Florida. Spencer reentered the room as JJ’s phone started ringing – Will – and the two of them traded off, amicably splitting time with you.

Greeting him with a content smile on your face, he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to your hairline, “I have to go,” he told you reluctantly.

You tried not to let any disappointment show on your face, “Why? What’s wrong?” You asked, studying his face for any sign of what his phone call had been about.

“That was Brookfield on the phone,” Spencer said, checking all of the monitors that surrounded you.

The grim look on his face made sense to you. Moving his mother into Brookfield had been the right choice for everyone, but her condition was never going to get better. Last time he had gone to visit, Diana hadn’t even recognized him, and you spent the rest of the day holding him, letting him know it was alright. “You have to go,” you echoed his earlier sentiment, nodding reassuringly.

He hesitated to leave you, sitting on the edge of your bed that had been previously occupied by your sister, “But you- you’re…”

You shook your head in dismissal, “Sometimes everything happens all at once, but you have to go.” If Brookfield was telling him to get down there, then he needed to go.

The next several hours passed slowly, Emily gave you an update on the case – the reader’s digest version, avoiding any gnarly details in an attempt to protect you. Will brought you and JJ dinner, eating the meal with them and your nephews, you were grateful to not have to eat the hospital cafeteria food. Slowly, the day came to an end, you sent JJ home when visiting hours ended, letting her know that you didn’t need to be protected while you were in a hospital.

You fell asleep not long after one of your nurses lowered the volume on your vital monitor, the dark peace of the hospital lulling you into a sense of safety. There hadn’t been word from Spencer, and you worried about him and his mother.

A tapping sound dragged you from what was thankfully a dreamless sleep, you recognized the sound of the footsteps, those shoes made a similar sound on the hardwood floor of your apartment, “You’re noisy when you wear your fancy shoes,” you mumbled drowsily, opening your tired eyes and tilting your head in the direction of the sound.

“Hey,” Spencer whispered, “Go back to sleep,” he told you gently, slowly making his way around your hospital bed and to the fold-out chair next to your bed.

You hummed, following him with your eyes as they adjusted in the dark, “No, you woke me up. Now you have to talk to me,” you told him, reaching over to switch on a lamp, cringing at the way the light burned your eyes.

Unprompted, he inspected your vital monitor before reaching out to adjust your nasal cannula, “Where’s JJ?” He asked, cupping your cheek affectionately before taking his seat.

Reaching out for your cup of water, you smiled to yourself when Spencer moved it closer to you, “I made her go home. Our mom will be here in the morning, and she’ll need all the rest she can get.” There was also the fact that Michael had been freaked out by seeing you in a hospital, so he needed some extra love from his parents tonight. “Wait,” you said, “How did you get in here? Visiting hours are over.”

“I might have told a small lie about you needing security,” he admitted sheepishly, but beneath it, he was smug. You didn’t fault him on it, you probably wanted him here just as much as he wanted to be here, if not more.

Smiling in the dim lamplight, you inclined your head toward him, “Did you misrepresent the bureau?”

He rolled his eyes, “I’d do it again if it meant I get to spend the night with you.” Helping you put your water cup back on your tray, Spencer took your hand in his, “How are you doing?”

You were exhausted, not in the sense that you wanted to sleep, although that probably couldn’t hurt, but in the sense that your entire body ached. There was a pinch in your side that wouldn’t ease up, and you didn’t feel comfortable with asking for more pain medication. Part of you was afraid that in the process of being shot, you developed a fear of drowning. You almost died today. Huge strides had been made in an attempt to repair your relationship with Spencer and with your sister. None of these thoughts escaped your lips, you just looked at him sympathetically, “How’s your mom?”

All he gave you was a tight smile, squeezing your hand tightly, “She’s ah… she’s alright,” he told you, your chest tightening at the emotion in his voice. “They’re calling it an awakening,” he continued, sounding unsure of himself.

“Terminal lucidity,” you breathed, a term you had only read about briefly when Diana was first diagnosed. The two of you had made many cross-country calls, trading information while Spencer stayed with her in Las Vegas.

He nodded, “Yeah… they don’t know how long it…”

How long she had left. How long she would remain lucid. “Are you okay?”

“No,” he answered quickly, too quickly for your liking.

You wiggled your fingers in his hand, getting his attention, “I want you to go back tomorrow,” you ordered him. It wasn’t something you were willing to budge on, insisting that he go back to Brookfield tomorrow to spend more time with his mother.

“She asked about you,” he admitted, leaning back in the chair, keeping your hands intertwined, “She wondered why we never got married. I told her it was never the right time. Do you know what she said to that?”

Watching intently as he shared the story with you, you shook your head, “What did she say?”

He chuckled lightly, “She said that might’ve been the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard me say.”

You smiled as he recounted the story for you, mimicking the hand gestures that you were sure his mother had used. “Obviously she’s never seen your Dirty Harry impression,” you reminded him, trying not to giggle at the memory.

“The right time will never come if we keep waiting around for it,” he told you, reciting the words of wisdom that his mother had imparted upon him.

Your breathing hitched in the dark of the night, “Spence?”

He nodded, “Yeah, baby?”

“Are you going to ask me to marry you?” You asked him hesitantly, wondering if that was what he was getting at.

Spencer shook his head, “Not tonight, angel.” He looked around the hospital room, cards and balloons and flowers had made their way in through the afternoon and evening. Penelope had even brought your apple blossoms from your desk. His flower language seemed so inconsequential now. “Go to sleep,” he whispered, “I’m sorry for waking you.”

“Will you tell me a story?” You whispered, settling yourself back into the flat hospital pillows, resigning yourself to the end of the marriage conversation.

He hummed, dimming the lamplight, “Which one?” There were a few stories that he had memorized specifically for you. When work or life or nightmares got to be too much, he would recall them for you.

“Can we do Portrait of a Lady again?” You raised your eyebrows, smiling impishly.

He rolled his eyes sardonically, “Your love for Henry James should be studied in a lab.”

You waved him off, “Okay, and? It’s story time.”

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[theartoflovingthomashunt]

The Bogart Diaries #35: The Painter's Tape Challenge

[All Thomas Hunt x Alex Spencer] [The Bogart Diaries]

Pairing: Thomas Hunt x Alex (F!OC) Book: Red Carpet Diaries Word Count: ~1,000 Rating/Warning: General (no warnings) Prompt: @choicesmonthlychallenge : Flufftober—pets + laughter

Summary: Alex has a special challenge for Bogart based on a new social media game for dogs.

He exhaled quietly through his nose, attempting to reread the page he had just read. Her chipper coos and the padding of Bogart running through the house pulled his attention. His brow furrowed as he rested his face in his hands. The faint sound of his wife and their dog grew quieter for a moment. He wondered if perhaps they had finished. His gaze shifted down once more to the manuscript on his desk. Before he had finished the first line, his focus had again been captivated by Alex. 

The pen in his hand tapped repeatedly against his desk as he considered his options. The corner of his lip pulled up despite himself. He knew there was no choice. There was only one place he wanted to be. 

Thomas followed the sound of her voice toward the kitchen. However, before he could inquire into the cause of the commotion, he darted backward, avoiding the path of Bogart charging toward something that he cleanly hopped over.

"Dare I ask what is going on here?" Thomas took a hesitant step forward once the path cleared. His brow arched at the two strips of blue tape strewn between the kitchen island and a row of cabinets.

"Bogart's doing the painter's tape challenge," Alex offered. She scratched the black lab on the head and offered him a treat before reaching once more for the roll of tape.

"Should I know what that means?"

Alex and Bogart shared a knowing look. Of course, their favorite Luddite would not be in the know of the latest social media pet challenges. She smiled inquisitively and shook her head. "Probably not."

She carefully added a third strip of tape above the two previous ones. "It's a social media pet challenge. Lots of Goldens do it, but Bogart is here to show the world what Black Labs and Rescues can do, too."

"What is the objective of the challenge?"

"Basically, I call Bogart, and he has to jump over the rows of tape without touching them. The more rows, the better."

"I see..." He considered her words. "People choose to engage in consuming such media?"

"Thousands, millions probably."

Thomas's face fell as he shook his head to the sides.

"What's wrong?"

"I've spent my life perfecting the art of film and storytelling, and yet this is what people want to view instead."

"Can't they have both?" Alex brushed her fingers across his jaw tenderly. "We need good storytelling and the beautiful art you create. But the world also needs just a dash of silliness to make people smile when they need a quick fix." 

"I suppose."

"Would you like to stay and watch?"

"Do I have a choice?" He feigned disappointment.

"You always do." She grinned, not buying his disinterest.

A shy smile spread on his lips. "I choose you and Bogart."

She pressed a tender kiss on his lips. "I suspected you might." Alex held her phone out to him. "Care to be our director? I mean, it's only reasonable that the goodest boy in the world should have the bestest director in Hollywood."

"I will be sure to add this to my resume," he teased, accepting her phone. 

"Oh, you definitely should! When Bogart's video makes headlines and wins awards, you'll want him to thank you in his acceptance speeches." Alex winked as she guided Bogart back to his starting point.

Thomas sighed gently, fighting the urge to once again remind Alex that Bogart was still a dog.

He took a moment, assessing angles and lighting, before kneeling beyond the blue strips. If he were to be a part of this, it would be done to precision.

Alex returned, taking a spot beside him. "Ready?"

The smile that met her gaze was all the answer she needed. She called Bogart's name, cheering as he dashed toward them. "Look at him! He's probably thinking, 'pshh, they tink dis is hard, but I got dis,'" Alex cooed as Bogart effortlessly jumped over the three strips of tape. "Ooo, that's definitely going to be the subtitle for this section of the video."

"Tink? Dis?" Thomas questioned, his brows pulling inward. It almost pained him to repeat the words aloud.

"Well, he is a dog," Alex stated. "We can't expect him to have perfect English, now can we?"

Thomas covered his mouth with his hand. He shook his head softly to the sides, "I suppose not." 

Four. Five. Six! Line after line, Alex added more tape, and each time Bogart jumped over the obstacle.

Alex bit her lip curiously as she added another row. Bogart had narrowly cleared the sixth. He'd need to get a good start to make it over this time. She led him back to the beginning, kissing the crown of his head for good luck. "You got this, sweet boy."

As soon as Alex returned to the finish and called his name, Bogart bound through the kitchen. Alex grasped her nervous hand on Thomas's shoulder as the padding of his paws grew louder. 

Thomas' camera hand never faltered, his grip steady and sure. 

Bogart charged forward, his head tipping to the sides at the sight of the tall blue wall in front of him. His front paws skidded against the smooth tile; his hind legs popped up slightly as he came to an abrupt stop. He sat there no more than a moment before sprinting back the way he had come.

"Maybe he's trying again?" Alex wondered as they waited patiently for his return.

Bogart was a blur as he bounded toward them once more, but this time, he overshot the turn to the obstacle and rounded the kitchen island on the opposite side. He plopped down in front of them just beyond the finish line, panting happily as if to say, "mission accomplished."

"I mean, I guess that works." Alex stifled her chuckle at his alternate strategy. "He did get here without breaking the tape. What a brilliant boy!"

"I can't argue with that." Thomas nodded his approval. "Einstein said, 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.' It appears as though Bogart is rather clever."

"He is the smartest, goodest boy ever," Alex agreed, tossing him a treat. Bogart munched happily on the bone as she turned and brushed a kiss on Thomas's cheek, lingering there a moment.

"What was that for?"

She sighed happily, "for always indulging me. It really means a lot. Thank you."

"Sharing in your joy is my privilege." He stroked her cheek softly, kissing the crown of her head. 

Bogart barked quickly, wiggling his way between their legs.

"We love you, too," Alex laughed, reaching down to pet Bogart as the three of them shared a moment.

You know Alex makes Bogart try every social media trend. And Bogart is the goodest boy so he always tries his best to make his mommy happy!

Thank you for reading this fic. I hope you enjoyed it and it made you smile thinking of Thomas Hunt having to endure and film such a silly but joyous moment!

Tags in a reblog, please let me know if you'd like to be added or removed.

[liskantope]

I’m feeling really discouraged at the moment about how few people out there are compatible with me in terms of how they think about different sides of emotionally consequential current issues, and how social media is making my perception of it worse. [Frustrated rambling ahead, which I wish didn’t sound so holier-than-thou but for the moment I don’t know quite how else to express it.]

I do a lot of hand-wringing about how I’m going to find people to have intimately close relationships with, particularly potential Significant Others, but a part of the problem I don’t talk about or even think about that often is the difficulty in finding someone that I’ll get along well with in the long term. One thing that’s happened for me repeatedly over the years is that I meet someone (typically a woman my age I find attractive) and say to myself, “Wow, there’s someone who really has it together, who’s passionate about certain hobbies and making the world a better place but also really reasonable, kind, easy-going, and emotionally stable!” Then I friend said person on Facebook and... it’s not like they reveal themself to be a jerk or high-drama temperamental or anything, but they write something that would seem to show absolutely clearly either that they’re incapable of thinking rationally and charitably about something they strongly oppose or they think it’s of little or no importance to try.

Maybe this is just my own issue that I need to work on, but... for me personally, the ability to think clearly and partially separate one’s interpretation of a situation from one’s emotions instead of demonizing whomever one strongly disagrees with is a really, really crucial trait. We can get along as friends, even quite good friends, without it becoming a major issue. But for someone really intimate that I can imagine happily spending my life with, it is a major issue. I suppose a lot of people value this trait to some degree or other, or at least tell themselves they do, but I think I not only exhibit it but prioritize it far more than most. (That’s why I spend so much time on this part of Tumblr!) It’s much more than a question of whether we’d see eye-to-eye on political issues -- that’s just what shows up most easily on social media. Rather, what’s at stake is seeing eye-to-eye on pretty much all issues that involve conflict with another person. Is this really such a rare trait outside of online rationalist spaces?

(To be clear, I’m not complaining about people who are simply a little less rationalist-y than I am. I’ve accepted the fact that there’s a super low possibility of meeting people IRL who are as rationalist-y as I am, and I’m not even sure the alternative would be entirely ideal given that there are failure modes to my particular brand of rationalist-iness that should be complimented and also the handful of people I’ve known who do exhibit an equally rationalist-y brand tend to wind up kind of being jerks. I’m complaining about people whose seeming inability to think about emotionally-charged things in a measured or nuanced way is just far beyond the pale from the point of view of my rationalist-iness.)

Some of the time I just want to blame social media for this experience I keep having. I wonder if, when all is said and done, it’s more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to initially getting to know potential dates, for instance. A variant on this is certain kinds of dating sites, such as okcupid, which allow people to show (often very relevant!) personal information. The one person that I actually met up with through okcupid, back years ago in the middle of grad school, seemed really great in many ways but I had misgivings before we even met because it was very clear from her profile that she was completely decided against having children, and I wasn’t (and still am not) sure that was all right with me. Maybe this is my inner luddite I’m listening to here, but it just didn’t seem right somehow that I should know about this very likely deal-breaker before getting to know someone otherwise pretty fantastic in a “natural” way that doesn’t involve asking about highly personal long-term life priorities right away. At the same time, how does it make sense to complain about the dating site, or social media, here? Isn’t it logically all upside to know such crucial personal information about someone sooner rather than later, to avoid wasting the time of everyone involved?

This reminds me of how recently I got mildly annoyed at how a friend of mine who was visiting me as a guest kept googling every route, attraction, or restaurant that I suggested. If I said, “I think it would be great to go to such-and-such restaurant which is a favorite of mine because of X and Y, does that sound something you’d like?”, rather than engaging directly with my description or just trusting her friend who is a local to choose things everyone would like, she would immediately be looking online and muttering about how it didn’t get great reviews. But I couldn’t quite rationally defend my complaint. I couldn’t exactly blame her, because what she was doing was perfectly logical once I thought about it, and I couldn’t even blame the review websites because, logically speaking, they’re providing opinions averaged over a much larger sample of people than just me and are therefore more helpful than I am. I could only stew in a vague gut feeling of wishing that we were back in the old days where friends could suggest things to each other based on their experiences and the conversations to decide on them wouldn’t involve the opinions of dozens of other people at our fingertips.

I kind of feel the same way about social media and how it gives me access to characteristics of a new person that I “shouldn’t” know so soon -- there are times I wish I weren’t privy to things that so often immediately make me judge other people as incompatible with me, but I can’t defend complaining about it. And this has something to do with the fact that I still can’t bring myself to quit reading friends’ posts on social media (there are a number of other reasons as well).

On the other hand, the fact that so few people are compatible with me in terms of rationality / commitment to charity/empathy in general is something I can defend complaining about, provided I allow myself to sound uncomfortably self-righteous and don’t address the possibility that the real problem is somehow on my end.

[spencersawkward]

if you feel comfortable with it, I’d love a prof Spence where reader is a student and goes to office hours to initiate ~smutty goodness~ but Spencer is reluctant at first bc his job but they flirt more and eventually sleep together

me n my professor kink when i saw this: 😏 anyway yes i am quite comfortable writing about this lol. i took some ✨creative liberties✨ with your request so i'm sorry if it isn't exactly what you wanted! 

summary: reader is a student in Dr. Reid’s class, but she’s been something of a poor student-- office hours are the only solution.

relationship: Fem!Reader/Professor!Spencer

content warnings: unprotected penetrative sex, fingering, rough sex, super brief hair-pulling, creampie, dirty talk, spanking, age gap, degradation-- he gets pretty dominant oops.

word count: 4.5k

masterlist

popping in a piece of gum, I make my way to the back of the hall. there are a few people here already, but it's a little early. I'm never early. in fact, I'm usually late; my other class is on the other side of campus, and getting here involves a lot of embarrassing speed-walking.

but here I am, five minutes ahead of schedule and actually in a decent seat. as I flip open my textbook and pull my laptop out of my bag to prepare to take notes, my gaze slides down to the corner of the room, where Dr. Reid is standing up with a pile of papers. he walks over to the girl in the front row, handing her the stack and gesturing for her to pass it along.

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. he's a total luddite. the first day, Dr. Reid spent about ten minutes rambling about the importance of reading from a physical book rather than online sources-- which, although I definitely agree with, means a lot more lugging around folders and organizing all the readings he gives out. if he wasn't so hot, I would have switched into another course.

and I know it's wrong to be daydreaming about my professor slamming me into a wall while he discusses the intricacies of quantum theory. the complete cliché of it is embarrassing. but still, I just can't stop thinking about him: how his fingers would feel around my throat, the smooth wooden surface of his desk against my cheek as he bends me over and pulls my panties to the side--

"glad to see you've decided to join us, today, Ms. Y/L/N." Dr. Reid's voice startles me out of my thoughts. he's standing towards the front of the room while students file in. his hands are resting in his pockets with his eyebrows pleasantly raised.

"glad to see you've noticed." I retort, too irritated with his comment to care about being polite.

a couple people look at me. even though I'm generally not on time, he tends to just glance my way when I walk in and leaves it at that. I know he doesn't like it, although I personally don't care. I hate this course.

he seems visibly surprised by my response but doesn't reply, gaze lingering on mine before he turns to speak to a student trying to get his attention. I bite back a smile. fucking asshole.

as usual, Dr. Reid writes in his thin, messy lettering on the board while wandering around the front of the room. he's quite fidgety, even though his voice doesn't betray any sort of nervousness. it's like he's naturally overactive.

every word out of his mouth is enunciated, sometimes spoken faster when he gets particularly impassioned by the subject. he's interesting to look at, too. messy curls and a nice suit, stubble that straddles the line between refinement and ruggedness.

I type quickly, but it isn't fast enough and the strange illustrations he does on the board only complicate things. I try to write them down in my notebook, but my handwriting is jagged; sometimes it's hard to read. when a student raises her hand for a clarification, I take the opportunity to catch up.

my head jerks up as soon as I'm finished and he's looking at me while he speaks. even from so many feet away, the intensity strikes me. he's gesticulating and crossing the room. I hold eye contact.

I wonder if he dates often; a couple of the girls in my row always stare at him throughout the lectures. he seems to be completely unaware of the effect he has on people. sometimes I'll see him in the hallway and he has his nose buried in a book, or a to-go cup of coffee, or both. either way, there seems to be no more room in that head of his for romance.

which, naturally, makes me curious about how he looks when he's on the edge of orgasm. if that composure is replaced with a contorted pleasure. I want to break him.

it's like he can read my thoughts, because Dr. Reid averts his gaze. my stomach twists with a strange anticipation. he avoids looking my way for the rest of the time.

towards the end of class, I start to pack my things to go. I have three papers to write, and my utter lack of interest in this is making me eager to leave. I shove my textbook into my bag the second my professor starts to make closing remarks.

"don't forget that we have a midterm in two weeks!" he says in a slightly louder voice as people start to move around. "if you have any questions, my office hours are posted on the bulletin board outside."

at this, my eyebrows rise. I forgot about the midterm. I have a study calendar set up for all my subjects, but I've purposefully been putting this one off. I'm not super into math. and it doesn't help that most of my time is spent not listening. when I am, it doesn't make sense.

as I stand up and gather my stuff, I hear someone clearing their throat a couple feet away. my head turns to see Dr. Reid leaning against his desk.

"Ms. Y/L/N, can I see you for a second?"

my heart stutters in my chest. is this about my attitude? he's never asked to see me outside of lessons before.

I frown, making my way to him with a deliberate pace. the tension in the room builds as I watch the last of his students shuffle out of the room. my head turns from the door to him; my breath catches a little in my throat at the set of his jaw. part of me hopes I get yelled at.

"I'm concerned about your participation in this class." he says. his voice isn't cruel, but it is brutally honest— which is worse. participation? I feel my fist clench at my side. my professors don't usually say anything if you aren't doing things up to their expectations; if you aren't, then they give you a bad grade. simple as that.

"is this about me being late?" I ask. he lets out a sigh before answering. he sounds disappointed.

"you're constantly tardy, and when you hand in your homework, you barely seem to have put in the effort. it's messy."

"messy?" I start to get annoyed. I'm only doing this so that I can get my degree. it's a fucking requirement. even though I'm not the biggest fan of mathematics, I still do my best and hand in my assignments on time. plus, the latest I arrive is five minutes-- it's not like I'm stumbling in halfway through the lesson.

"you've never come to office hours to ask for help or explained your lateness, which I, as your professor, would have appreciated." he scolds. honestly, I don't know what to say. my eyes narrow.

"I have my studio class on the other side of campus." I explain. "I should have emailed about that and I'm sorry, but I'm also not being lax about my work."

he goes around to the other side of his desk and glances up at me while he organizes some loose documents to pack away. he looks way too good when he's exasperated: his hands tighten around the papers, his eyebrows come together in this cute way. his tie is a little crooked, too.

"are you struggling with the content?"

"sometimes, yeah. but I can handle reaching out for help if I need it." I reply. he's pissing me off with these questions. I can see from the expression on his face that he's surprised by my reaction.

"really?" he slides some books into his messenger bag. that was definitely sarcastic; I know it was. "because it doesn't really seem like you have."

"I like to find help on my own." I shoulder my bag and cross my arms over my chest. there's no way he's gonna talk to me like that and expect me to not respond in kind.

"I'm reserving a slot on Wednesday evening for you," he looks up and holds my gaze. hazel irises that dare me to challenge him further. "I want you in office hours so that we can figure out how you're gonna catch up before the midterm."

"fine." I turn on my heel and leave. I know I'm not supposed to talk to my professor like that, or even to behave with such apprehension. but something about him makes me angry in the kind of way that settles in my stomach. I hate that he's right. I'm not going to do well on that damn test if I don't get some help.

but that doesn't mean I can't have some fun with it.

when I rush into his office on Wednesday evening, the sun is just starting to set through his window. there's a pinkish glow that smooths over Dr. Reid's desk as he glances up at me. I had to run to get here.

"you're late." he nods to the clock on the wall. I roll my eyes.

"only one minute, though. I had another class."

he sighs and folds his hands on his desk. "how are you doing today, Ms. Y/L/N?" a strangely polite question for the look on his face. he's frustrated with me.

"I'm quite well, Dr. Reid." I smile brightly, slightly excited by the anger on his face, and sit at the chair in front of his desk.

"I didn't know you were interested in art." he says simply. I'm confused for a moment before I remember that I told him that the course before his is a studio lesson.

"I didn't know you cared."

"do you make a habit of that?" he quirks an eyebrow.

"of what?" my expression is saccharine.

"being rude to people who control your grades."

"unless you're considering being unethical in your practices and allowing your personal opinion of me to influence my grade, then no." I counter. he's silent for a moment, taking in my words like they've left a mark on him.

"well, you'd most likely fail if I asked you to leave my office hours right now. whose fault would that be?" he fidgets with his hands and leans forward just a bit, his voice dropping to a lower tone. I bite back a smile.

"you wouldn't."

"and why is that?" he baits.

"because you're not a shitty professor, Dr. Reid," I lean back in my chair and cross my legs. "as angry as you are, you wouldn't be able to live with yourself if you kicked me— a struggling student— out of here for giving you a little attitude."

"a little attitude?" he scoffs. "you've spent the whole semester completely ambivalent."

"not completely." I shrug.

"Y/N, you draw all over your tests and leave at least one problem half-finished every time. you obviously aren't learning." he chuckles mirthlessly. I concede this point; I like to doodle when I'm bored. and there's absolutely nothing more boring to me than numbers.

"okay," I sit up and rest my elbows on the edge of his desk, staring at him. "then teach me."

Dr. Reid holds my gaze for a long moment. we're suspended, it seems, as his lips part and he finds himself speechless. the way I said the words obviously has another layer to it-- he just has to decide whether or not to take the bait.

"what are you struggling with?" he clears his throat and sits up a bit straighter in his seat. that answers my question, I guess. I poke my tongue between my teeth gently, but then pull out my notebook and flip it to a page with some problems outlined on it.

"these." I toss the thing onto his side and he begins to run through the assignment. I watch him pick up a pen and start to explain the steps, slipping into his usual educational tone. his shoulders relax a little as he writes.

I can't see right from the angle I'm at, so I stand and come around onto his side. I hear him pause his speaking for a moment at my proximity, but he doesn't move away.

"does that make sense?" he asks me once he's finished running through the first problem. he basically did all the work. the professor's head turns to gauge my reaction to the explanation, but his eye line is right at the hem of my skirt-- which is already pretty short. for all his attempts to be subtle, he gulps and looks up at me.

"mostly." I brush a piece of hair behind my ear and pretend to scratch at a spot on my upper thigh, dragging the edge of my skirt with it until he can see the smooth skin beneath, practically begging for his touch. "can I ask you a question?"

"sure." he keeps his eyes almost too focused on mine. I try to hide the smile tugging at my lips. now or never, I guess.

"what's your policy on professor/student relationships?"

"my-- my what?" this time, he's audibly scattered when he turns to me. his eyes are wide, dark. even he can't hide his feelings.

"you know," I run my fingertips over the tweed shoulder of his jacket. I can sense the tension beneath his clothes. "like, your policy on fucking a student."

"I--" his cheeks turn pink. he's flustered, albeit not rejecting my touch. "I've never had to think about it before."

"hmm," I look off to the side as if considering this point. his chair is fully turned to face me now, and I'm standing in front of him, almost completely his for the taking. all he has to do is close the gap. "well, what are you thinking about it right now?"

"it's wrong." he stumbles over the words.

"why?"

"well, I mean, you're a student--"

"for a semester that's almost over." I cut him off. he opens and closes his mouth. I take a deep breath, toying with the hem of my skirt. "I know you've been looking at me during class."

"w-what?"

"you're pretty good at hiding it, but you call on me a lot and you get all messed up when I hold eye contact too long during lectures." I say.

he looks down and back up apologetically. he's just sitting there, lap wide open. so I do what any sane girl in my position would do: I climb into it, straddling him and resting my arms around his neck. he sucks in a breath.

"you pretend I'm such a pain," I lean down by his ear, my core drawing over his pants. he tenses as I speak. "but you like that I'm your little problem."

"Y/N..." he trails off, but his hips are bucking up into mine.

"see?" I look between our bodies at his movements, then at him. I smirk as I look into those lust-darkened eyes. after a moment of him not speaking, I straighten. "look, I'll leave you alone if it really bothers you--"

as I start to get off his lap, he grabs me and pulls me back down. the force hits my center at just the right angle and I let out a slight mewl. he hears the sound and before I can register the pleasure, he grabs my face and yanks me closer to kiss him.

god, he feels so good. I rock my hips against his while our lips pass over each other hungrily. so much tension built up over the past few months, so many thoughts I've had of him, now coming to fruition. it's amazing.

"not so 'wrong' now, is it?" I chuckle against his mouth.

"shut up." he orders. one moment of broken contact to slide my top over my head and throw it on the floor.

I sigh as he starts to kiss across my jaw and down my throat. "I like when you talk like that, Dr. Reid."

one hand grips my hips tighter and he releases a groan against my skin.

"is that why you're such a fucking brat in my class?" he bites my collarbone and I moan. "because you want me to put you in your place?"

"mhmm." I hum. his fingertips move under my skirt, sliding up my thighs and toying with the waistband of my panties. he teases me by grazing my slit over the fabric, inhaling sharply at the wet patch.

"sitting in the back of my room, fucking dripping..." he mumbles to himself as he starts to rub me.

"touch me." I breathe out, trying to gain the friction that I need.

"not if you're gonna be a brat." he removes his hand and I let out a frustrated noise as I try to find the pressure I need elsewhere by grinding down on him. he grunts at the way I pant into his mouth, trying to kiss him with every chance I get. his lips are so smooth and sweet against mine. there's something affectionate about it even in its ferocity.

"I'll be good." I practically beg.

"that's what I thought." he slides his tongue over his bottom lip as he watches me whimper on top of him.

"come on, Spencer..." I use the name for the first time and he grabs my face in his hand, squeezing my cheeks.

"not my name, sweetheart." he stares into my eyes expectantly and I smirk.

"you're fucked up, doctor."

"so are you."

after he says that, he lifts me off his lap and stands up, pushing between my shoulder blades until my face is pressed onto the desk. I let out a needy whine, wiggle my ass back in hopes of finding his crotch, but he's not willing to give me that, yet.

instead, he gently touches my skirt, flipping it up so that he can see my ass. immediately, he starts to knead it. my palms are pressed flat against the desk with anticipation, silently thankful that my panties are still on. I think I'd be dripping down my thighs if they weren't.

"are you gonna be more respectful?" his voice is low, one hand tracing over my back. I shake.

"mhmm."

"I won't spank you if you don't use your words, sweetheart."

"yes." I choke out, no longer wanting to give any sort of resistance. I had no idea there was this side of him, and I love it.

he loves it too, apparently, because his hand comes down sharply on my ass. I yelp at the contact and he runs his fingers over the point of impact, rubbing the flesh gently.

"too hard, baby?" he checks.

"harder." I beg. I can't see his face, but I can sense his smile as if it's my own. his palm hits me again, and I gasp.

"you like being punished?"

"yes." strangled and desperate.

he slips his finger beneath the fabric of my panties, collecting my essence and letting out a quiet moan when he feels me. I push my hips against his fingers, partly expecting him to remove all the pressure, but he doesn't bother waiting.

he slips his index inside and I gasp. starts to push in and out, his silence proving his arousal. I can practically feel his eyes on me. the pace increases a bit and he slides in his middle finger. I buck against the desk.

"oh fuck!" I cry out as he starts to go faster. he curls them against my walls and I arch my back.

"two fingers and you're already breaking?" Spencer chuckles as he moves inside me. he keeps one hand on my ass while he does it, starting to finger me at a ridiculous speed while I pant and moan and cry.

"I--" I gulp down air. "I need you in it."

he bends down by my ear, never breaking his rhythm. my legs are shaking from the force. "you need my cock?"

"yes," I feel myself closing in around him. "god, yes."

"you're lucky I wanna fuck you so bad." he mutters. I grin as I hear the clink of his belt coming undone, the sliding through the belt loops, the sound of him stripping down to nothing. I can feel my excitement on the inside of my thighs, spread around by his reckless fingers as he removes my panties and skirt.

he grinds himself against my pussy, coating himself in me, while he releases low, longing moans. I suck in a breath when the head pushes in, every inch pushing me open a little more. I don't have the ability to form words, so I bite my lip and grip onto the edge of the desk until my knuckles turn white.

his breath stops for a moment before he groans.

"so ready for me."

he's not even all the way in, and he has to pause to let me adjust. when he taps the inside of my thigh for me to part them more, I do it quickly and beg him to fill me up. I can barely take the pressure between my hips, but it burns in an inviting way.

"keep going." I direct him. he runs his hands over the curve of my waist and starts to thrust into me at a rate that leaves me panting. it's not too fast or slow, just impatient and needy. every sound that spills from his lips turns me on more.

"where'd the attitude go, huh?" he digs his hips into mine. his cock hits my cervix and I squeak against the wood, but he holds my back down. I don't even try to argue with him, too overcome with the pleasure that's coursing through my limbs. he starts to build up his speed. "don't have much to say when you're getting fucked?"

"Dr. Reid--" I moan.

he plows into me so hard, the desk shifts on the floor and he grabs my ass with both hands.

"take it, baby. fucking take it."

I get up on my elbows to look behind me, just to glimpse how he looks as he gets closer. his curls have fallen more in his face, and his shirt is gone. I want to touch him desperately, to feel the lovely skin of his torso and arms and everything else, but he keeps me down for the most part. all I get is the sight of his mouth open and his hips moving quickly against mine.

"look at me, there you go." he grabs my face and holds me there, our eyes locked. mine are welling at the sheer overwhelming pleasure inside, but his are dark and intense. they search mine for something I can only hope to offer.

"that feels so good, Dr. Reid." I pant. he bites his lip as he watches my mouth hanging open in lecherous shock.

"I bet it does," he explores my body. "coming in here, hoping I fuck you like you deserve. you're lucky I'm going easy on you."

"thank you." I whine.

"you might need some extra lessons, yeah?" he grunts out, moving into me with a bruising force.

"yes, please." I whisper. my voice is practically gone at this point, my mind entirely focused on the knot building in my stomach.

"what was that, baby?" he pulls my hair gently.

"yes— fuck— yes, please, Dr. Reid."

"what a beautiful girl." he smirks. I whimper when he runs his fingernails down my ribcage. I can feel it coming from the way he starts to move tumultuously, every thrust pushing harder and seeking more release. it's fervent, how he takes me and grips my hips like the force itself will push him over the edge.

"I'm so close..." I breathe out as I try for as much friction as I can.

"show me," he drops down so his stomach is flush to my back. "show me how you cum, Y/N."

the way he says my name-- husky and warm and full of lust-- causes me to snap. I cry out as he reaches around to clamp a hand around my mouth, climaxing and pulsing around his dick as I drop down against the surface again. I want him to finish inside, so I do my best to keep him here. and his thrusts are getting more staccato as he chases the sensation my walls create.

"can I fill you, angel?" he asks. he's breathing right by my ear, and the feeling is sending shivers down my spine. I love how his weight feels.

"yes." I moan and he slides his fingers into my mouth. I suck on them while he orgasms, jerking into my pussy and letting out unholy sounds of ecstasy. he says unintelligible things in the throes of his orgasm. pounds into me until I'm sure I won't be able to walk tomorrow.

"jesus christ, Y/N." he slows to a stop. when he pulls his cock out of me, the absence makes me whine. I miss his body already.

"oh my god." I clench my hands into fists as I try to catch my breath. I'm still bent over the desk as though I've been completely sapped of all my energy. I suppose I have. he doesn't touch me for a moment in the spirit of letting me recover from the small shudders still running over my skin.

"that was great." he says after we've both had time to fill our lungs. I push myself onto my elbows again.

"correct." I grin and straighten up more until I'm standing. he stares at me, at the cum now dripping down my legs, entranced.

"let me get you something to clean up." he snaps out of it a little. I can't stop looking at him, either, in love with the way he moves and the way he breathes after exerting himself on my body.

"come here." I bite my lip. for some reason, despite what we just did, this is scarier than everything else. he steps closer and I reach up, kiss him softly. part of me worries that he'll pull away and be terrified. maybe that he'll tell me that I've read too much into this.

he's much gentler than before. our first kiss was full of need and primal desire, but this is more affectionate. I remove myself from his embrace.

"okay, you can go now." I giggle. his fingertips linger on my waist and he smiles. I push his shoulder. "I literally have your cum all over me-- go."

"fine." he starts to put his clothes on.

"does this mean I get an A?" I joke. Spencer shakes his head.

"nice try. when we're done cleaning you up, we're gonna sit down and figure this out."

I let out a whine, and he kisses my cheek before looking me in the eyes. "it'll be fun. I promise."

"math is not fun."

"I can't believe I like a girl who doesn't enjoy such a beautiful subject." he rolls his eyes and I giggle. he's perfect.

[seat-safety-switch]

You just can’t trust a machine. No, androids, I’m not trying to be racist against you. We were all there when the United Nations said that it was okay. What I’m talking about is that chatty little self-service checkout at the grocery store. That thing isn’t sentient, right? What do you mean, it has to be tested? Hate speech? Hello, officer. Let me explain my position to you in exhausting detail, as I expect it will completely exonerate me.

Of course, I’m irritated almost immediately by the folksy greetings of the machine. It is not actually interested in how my day is going. Neither is a real cashier, of course, but it’s that moment of connection that makes us feel like a real community instead of just a bunch of consumers who want to get the best price on watermelon for the least amount of work. The self-checkout places itself outside of humanity, with a snide little emulation of real conversation in order to really twist the knife as it replaces the job of a sentient person. I’ve been told I’m a bit of an overthinker, though, and many people have much more patience with the machine than me.

For everyone else, the limit of our patience with the humble self-checkout comes when it gets angry that we haven’t moved an item from the beepy-boopy scanner thing into the bagging area fast enough. Or we leaned against the bagging area scale and now it thinks we’re trying to pull a fast one. Or we leaned against the beepy-boopy scanner while we were putting the item in the bagging area like it goddamn asked, and now it’s going to have a shit fit until a human being comes and turns it off and on again.

Realistically, there’s about a thousand ways in which you can irritate the awful thing. As human beings (and sentient robots) we’re built to feel embarrassment when we get publicly upbraided, even if it is by a voice recording of an Australian (may they all rest in peace) woman who is upset about something that is ultimately the fault of an overly-paranoid weighscale calibration. This embarrassment is quickly replaced by an urge to regain our social status in the community, but – again – the self-checkout machine is not “one of us.” Its anger can never be defused by a quick wisecrack or middle finger. It can dish it out, but steadfastly refuses to take it. The power imbalance is palpable, which is one of the reasons a human being is there to quickly move in before we start Ludditing the screens.

So that’s why I’m proposing the self-checking-out consumer. Let the machines talk to the machines! All you have to do is get one of these handy self-driving go-kart frames, slap a two stroke on it, and steer it around the store, picking up your groceries. At checkout time, you don’t have to worry anymore! Perfect mechanical precision guarantees that the items hit the bag within the 40-millisecond timeout window. And if it gets yelled at, who cares? Why would a go-kart care about either social standing or the illegality of driving out of a grocery store with an entire cart of unpaid-for goods? It’s got wheelies to do.

[brywrites]

Date Night I

I got so many requests in my inbox for a version of “Date Night” set in The Keeping of Words universe. There were so many suggestions for how that could look, but I’m really happy with this version, so I hope those of you who like TKOW enjoy it! Part 2 coming very soon!

Summary: Three years after leaving the BAU, Dr. Spencer Reid has given up chasing monsters to be a part-time professor and a full-time dad. It’s all domestic bliss - until Cat Adams turns up at the BAU.

Warnings: mentions of violence, kidnapping, references to past kidnapping and assault

.......................................

“Now, it’s rare for serial killers to go that long between murders, but years passed between the BTK attacks. How did Rader manage to go that long between murders?”

Reid’s students stared at him expectantly, a few flipping back through their notes. A girl in Georgetown hoodie raised her hand. “Well it seems like he stayed connected to what he did in like, other ways? He wrote up detailed plans for each attack so maybe he focused on that.”

“Yeah,” added a boy with round glasses and a sticker-covered laptop. “And he wrote to the police a lot with information and puzzles, so that could have given him the feeling of power he needed.”

“Good, good,” Reid said. “Those are both great points. Rader did all of that and more. The stalking, the planning, the communication with the media is all part of what we c-” His train of thought was interrupted by the ringing of his phone. He gave it the briefest of glances – just Emily, likely asking for an obscure fact he could provide after the lecture – before pocketing it once more and continuing. “Sorry. Uh, so all of his behavior is what we call sublimating. Psychologically speaking, it’s the process of diverting one’s impulses or desires into a more socially acceptable activity. Forensically, it’s how unsubs curb their urges during a cooling-off period. In this case we see that…” His phone began to ring again. The name on the screen was the same.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again. He made it a point not to use his phone in front of his students and to give them the same respect he asked of them while in his class. He quickly sent Prentiss a text. In lecture – call in 30? “As I was saying, in this case it’s clear that–” Before he could even return the phone to his pocket it rang again.

A sudden chill came over him. This wasn’t just about a consult. “I – uh, sorry,” he stammered. His students glanced between themselves. It wasn’t like their hyper-focused, luddite professor to take a call in the middle of lecture. Reid turned away from them as he raised the phone to his ear. “What is it?” he asked.

“Reid, I’m so sorry. We need you to come in immediately. Luke’s out front to bring you to Quantico. We have a kidnapping case and there’s one demand – that we release Cat Adams within 24 hours.” The name made every muscle in his body tense. An automatic trauma response.

“No.” The sound of her name alone sent flashbacks flickering through this memory. Glimpses of Mexico, the inside of a prison cell, his mother screaming, Bianca crying on the witness stand in a courtroom. There was no way he was letting that woman any chance to get near him or his family ever again.

“She insists she’ll only speak if she can talk to you.” This exactly why he’d left the Bureau in the first place.

“Emily, I’m retired, I’m not an agent anymore and–”

“And there are lives on the line, Spencer. I wouldn’t ask if we had any other choice.” And so he ended class early, hurried out of the lecture hall, and climbed into the waiting SUV. Luke tried to catch him up – that morning Garcia had received a video from a woman with dark hair, showing two huddled, hooded figures tied up on the floor of a warehouse. A woman and a small child. They seemed to be crying and while Garcia couldn’t make out their identity, the woman filming wasn’t trying to hide her face at all. The demand attached said they would be killed if Catherine Adams wasn’t released from prison, and Cat only wanted to talk to him. The only man she’d ever lost to.

“This doesn’t follow her typical M.O.,” Reid said. “She usually goes after men, fathers specifically. Why go after what’s likely a mother and child?” Cat was a creature of habit. Her impulsive nature was her downfall. This didn’t seem like her at all.

Luke shrugged. “You know her better than I do. I’ll have Garcia show you the footage when we get there, maybe you’ll see something we didn’t.” But as soon they arrived at the BAU, Emily ushered him off to an interrogation room. There she sat in an orange jumpsuit, staring at the one-way glass, waiting for him with a Cheshire cat grin. It made his blood boil. Reid inhaled deeply before stepping inside. He stood there staring at her in silence. He didn’t trust himself not to scream.

Cat laughed. “Classic negotiating technique. First one to speak loses, right?” The sound of her voice took him right back to that awful night – leaving Milburn, nearly losing his mother, Bianca crying in the roundtable room. Scratch and the crash and Stephen’s death and everything that had come after.

He wasn’t in the mood for her games. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He should have been finishing his class and going home to pick Eliza up from pre-school. “You arranged the kidnapping of two people and you did it the same way you did it before,” he sighed. Cat immediately launched into her usual banter. She had given up fighting her case, she insisted. Now she just wanted to stave off the boredom by playing with her favorite toy. The only thing she hadn’t done, she claimed, was him.

“You sexually violated me in Mexico,” he reminded her.

“I did? Are you sure?” she asked. He gritted his teeth. “Stop being the boy who cried rape, Spencie, it’s not a good look.”

The room was too small, too warm. He couldn’t bear to be in here with her but he had to be. “I want to go a date,” she declared. “With you.”

“A date?” This was absurd. This was ridiculous. This couldn’t be happening.

“Yes. I want to look pretty. And I want to have fun. And I won’t even get physical, ok?” Cat rolled her eyes. “Unless you want me to.”

There was no way he was going to take Cat Adams on a date. There were only two people he’d ever been on a date with in his life (the ill-fated Redskins game and the Lila Archer incident didn’t count, he’d decided), and he had no desire to add a third to that list. Going out on a date was what he did with Bianca, because he loved her. He took her to bookstores and symphonies and New York City. He bought her flowers and watched her favorite movies and made a list of all her favorite restaurants. That was something special. Something sacred.

“The only date I’ll be there for,” he whispered to Cat, “is the one where they stick a needle in your vein.”

“You’re gonna let a mother and daughter die?” Cat asked. So whoever was in that video Luke mentioned, it was a mother and her child.

“I never said a mother and daughter. You’re already slipping. We’ll find them, we always do.” The team would find them and he could go home and be with the only two people he wanted to sit across a table from.

“Not tonight,” Cat laughed. “Tonight, I win.”

This was a waste of his time. “The score between me and you is two to zero. By tomorrow morning, it’ll be a clean sweep.” He turned to glare at her. “Enjoy eternal nothingness. It’s a metaphor for your life.” It was petty, he knew that, but he couldn’t resist letting the bitterness he felt rising in his throat out in some small way.

Cat snorted. “You don’t even realize you’re already losing.” Before he could ask her what she meant, the interrogation room door opened. Prentiss stood there staring at Cat with an expression of utter horror. That Cheshire cat smirk returned. Reid’s glanced between the two women whose gaze held an unspoken secret he couldn’t make sense of.

“What is it, Emily?” he asked.

“Outside,” the unit chief said.

“I did something bad, Spencie,” Cat sing-songed. His stomach dropped. He was missing something. Cat knew it. Emily knew it. And whatever it was, it was big. Emily grabbed his arm, pulling him out of the room. Cat’s laughter echoed. The blood rushed in his ears. Something was wrong.

“Spencer,” Emily began. She shut the door behind her and placed herself in front of it, blocking his way. “The unsub sent another video to Garcia. The woman removed the hoods from their faces and we’ve been able to identify the two victims in the video.” Two people. A mother and daughter. A mother and daughter. I did something bad, Spencie. You don’t even realize you’re already losing. No. No, he couldn’t go there.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said. She turned over a tablet. The video showed a dusty warehouse with big windows. And even if the two people had been wearing hoods, he would’ve recognized them immediately. If Luke had been able to show him the video in the car, if they’d taken him to the roundtable room first, he would’ve known. That was her favorite cardigan and the dress he’d zipped up for her in their bedroom. And those were the tiny shoes he’d carefully tied while she sat patiently in the carseat. And now, those were the faces of the two people he loved more than anything in this life, staring back at him.

“No.” His voice cracked.

“We don’t know how she got to them, but I promise you we won’t rest until Bianca and Eliza are safe.”

“No.” In her wisdom Prentiss had blocked him from running back into that room and doing something he might regret later. Reid bit down, forcing back every curse he wanted to shout. He turned and stormed down the hall, pushing his way through the glass doors until he came upon Morgan’s empty office. He stepped inside, slamming the door behind him. It was too hot, his clothes were too tight, everything was too overwhelming and he couldn’t think straight. Fingers fumbled with the knot of his tie, only able to loosen it enough to yank it over his head. He undid the first few buttons of his shirt and shook out his arms. Stimming always helped to center him. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed a hand to his stomach. Breathed in and out. In and out.

She had them. Cat had them.

Reid screamed, a guttural sound that came from his throat of its own accord. He spun around and set eyes on a desk piled high with books and papers and he pushed them all off to the floor. A lamp went with them, which crashed into a water cooler that tumbled over on its side. It wasn’t enough. He screamed again, flipping a table in the center of the room and throwing a book at the wall. “FUCK!” he shouted. “GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!”

It was like his body didn’t know how to handle the rage. He fell to his knees and curled into himself on the floor, sobbing. This was his fault, all his fault. His only job was to keep them safe, and they were in danger now because of him.

....

Their captor lowered the video camera, smirking. “I think that’ll be a nice video to send your husband, won’t it?” Bianca grit her teeth, inhaling through her nose and willing herself to keep it together. She had to stay calm, for Eliza’s sake. Her ribs and shoulder ached, the blows the woman had landed to her jaw stung sharply. She thought distantly of the night she’d punched Spencer on accident on their anniversary, thinking him an intruder. There would be a trail of bruises left behind for days at least.

“Mama are you okay?” Eliza asked.

Her daughter’s voice brought her back to the present. Bianca nodded carefully, the movement painful. She needed to keep Elizabeth calm and keep them both alive. “I’m okay, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He’ll be here soon, okay? He’s gonna come find us and then we’ll go home.” He would find them. He always would. No matter how far apart they were or how lost they felt, they always found each other. They saved each other, that was what they did. He made sure she ate and protected her from her family and came to find her in the woods. She helped him through grief and stayed with him through withdrawal and guarded his heart from the monsters. He would find her.

The dark-haired woman squatted down on the ground beside them. “It’s cute,” she laughed, a sharp and cold sound. “That you have so much faith in a man. Men are nothing but disappointing.”

Bianca had been let down by men in her life plenty of times. Her father, who she was never good enough for. Her brother, who held the knife against her throat. They were the reason she jumped when doors slammed and flinched when someone yelled and ran far away from her problems. But Hotch and Rossi had welcomed her like a daughter, Morgan had loved her with the playful protectiveness of an older brother, Lorenzo had been a friend when she needed one, and Spencer – Spencer was the opposite of everyone who had ever hurt her.

“What do you want from him?” Bianca asked. “Did he arrest you? Put away someone you love?” The woman – the unsub, Bianca was beginning to think of her as – just glared back. “If this is a trap, he’s not going to walk into it,” she said. “He’s too smart for that. No matter what you have planned, he’ll outsmart you. He always does.”

Her husband, the genius. He’d win. He find them.

“I don’t think he’ll outsmart us,” the unsub said. So there were two of them.

“Really? Because if he finds us, you’ll be outnumbered. Is your partner smart? Or just too cowardly to take him on?” Despite her fear she tried to maintain her best lawyer voice, imagining she was cross-examining a difficult witness on the stand rather than a kidnapper with a gun.

“Cat’s not a coward,” the woman snapped. She froze, realizing her slip.

“Cat? You’re working for Cat Adams?” She should’ve known. Who else hated Spencer more than her? The woman who’d nearly taken his wedding ring, his mother, his life. Cat was the reason he’d been gone during her pregnancy, the reason he’d been traumatized in Milburn, and drugged against his will. And Cat was the reason that her little girl was tied up in this warehouse. Feeling fury burn in her chest, Bianca forced herself to smile through the pain. “Then you’re definitely going to lose. Cat never wins. You’ll see.”

There was a smack, and Bianca could feel the slap across her face before she processed it. She winced, biting her lip to hold back a groan. “Shut up!” the unsub shouted. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” She turned and stalked off, slamming the door behind her, leaving the two of them alone. Bianca could hear her speaking to someone on the phone.

She leaned down close to Eliza. “Eliza Lou, listen close to me, okay?”

“Okay, mama.”

“Remember how I told you we’re playing a game?” She’d begun this elaborate lie when the unsub grabbed them from the preschool parking lot at gunpoint. It was all a game, and they had to follow all the rules to win. “Well this part of the game is a race. We’re racing to get home. I’m gonna try to untie you, alright? And if I do that, I need you to stay really still and pretend you’re still tied up. But if that woman leaves again, or she’s not paying attention and you can get up without her noticing, I need you to run okay? You get up and you run as fast as you can. You run and run and run until you get outside. And when you do, you go to the first grown up you see, and you tell them my name is Eliza and I’m lost. My dad is Doctor Spencer Reid with the FBI and I need to call him. Do you remember daddy’s phone number?”

Elizabeth recited it perfectly. “Good girl,” Bianca said. “Exactly right. You get them to call daddy, and he’ll come and find you. Okay?”

“What about you, mama?”

“That’s the fun part. We’ll be racing each other home. You and daddy are gonna race me and we’ll see who wins. That’s why you have to be super super fast, okay?”

“Okay!” Eliza smiled up at her, and her heart twisted. She was so young. If they were lucky, she would really think it was all a game – and then she’d forget any of this ever happened. And if they were really lucky, she’d get to see that.

Please, she thought. Please find us, Spencer.

...

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there before the door opened and Tara appeared. She sat down next to him, knowing better than to touch him. “I know this is hard,” she said. “But they need you right now.”

The people he loved harder than he’d ever imagined he could love were in danger. And it was all his fault. Cat did this because he loved them. She was hurting them because he loved them. And unless he played her game, it wasn’t going to stop.

“I. Can’t. Lose them.”

“And you’re not going to,” she said. “We won’t let that happen. We all love them, too, Reid. But we can find them a lot faster if you’re helping us. Okay?”

He tried to focus on the sound of Tara’s voice. Tara, who Bianca had taken a liking to immediately, who had gone with the two of them and Penelope to a Doctor Who convention, who had never been one to throw the word love around lightly. “Okay.” He forced himself to stand and follow her to the roundtable room. “Catch me up,” he insisted.

“I just finished talking with Cat,” Emily said. “She wants to go ice skating so she can, and I quote, skate circles around you. When I told her that wasn’t going to happen, she instructed me to tell Garcia to check her email.”

“Which I am doing now…” Garcia said, typing furiously. “Okay, this just came in.” A video popped up on the screen. A dark haired woman was in the center of the image. “Juliette Weaver, she’s Cat’s old cellmate and she just made parole,” she explained. Even before the video started, Bianca and Elizabeth’s faces were visible. Garcia glanced it him, her kind face pained. “Reid, I’m sorry.” She pressed play.

“Here we go,” Juliette said.

“Mama, what’s happening?”

“It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s just a game. Everything’s okay.” Bianca was trying so hard to keep her voice even.

“It’s not a good idea for parents to lie to their children.” Juliette walked over to Bianca, whose hands and feet were bound. The woman aimed a swift kick to her ribs. Bianca’s yelp physically hurt him to hear.

“Eliza, close your eyes. Close your eyes, sweetie!” The little girl did as she was told just in time to avoid seeing her mother take a punch that knocked her over. They all heard the sound of flesh hitting flesh several times, and Bianca’s muffled cries. And then there was a gun in Juliette’s hand.

“No, no, no,” whispered Garcia, turning away from the screen.

“Don’t do this,” Bianca said.

But the gun went off anyways.

“NO!” he screamed. Reid felt his knees give way at the sound of the gun and Bianca’s screams as every face in the room froze in horror.

But then Bianca kept screaming. And then the scream turned to a gasp.

“Mama!”

“It’s okay, I’m okay, everything’s okay.” The video abruptly cut off.

“Blanks,” Luke said, putting his hand on Reid’s shoulder. “She fired blanks.” He could feel the air returns to his lungs. Bianca was still alive – for now. But that video was a clear warning. If he wanted to keep them both alive, he had to do what Cat wanted.

“You realize what we have to do, don’t you?” Rossi asked. Reid looked away, the fury building inside of him once more.“It’s the only way to get her to slip up. We have to give her what she wants.”

 “Me,” Reid said.

[pamphletstoinspire]

The Hidden Threat to Catholicism

A serious, even existential, threat to Catholicism looms on the horizon, and it’s hidden all around us. It could very well decimate the ranks of the Church, and perhaps is already doing so. It is insidiously dangerous because it upends the very foundations of Catholicism.

I’m not talking about the abuse crisis, or the lack of episcopal courage, or rampant heresy, although all those threats are dire indeed. But the Church has faced those type of challenges in the past and overcome them, albeit at times with significant losses.

I’m talking about a truly new threat: world virtualization.

The world has gone virtual. Though this trend’s been developing for decades, the COVID-19-related shutdowns finalized the process. We communicate easily with each other through texts, social media, and Zoom chats. Almost any product we buy can be delivered to our doorstep. We now even “attend” Mass online! For many (most?) of us, our lives happen more online than offline.

In the eyes of many, world virtualization is considered an unmitigated good. It allows greater connection, greater leisure, and greater access to information than ever before. There’s just one problem: it’s antithetical to living a well-balanced Catholic life. I would even argue that it breaks Catholicism.

If there is one word that sums up Catholicism, it’s “incarnational.” Our faith is founded on the incarnation—God became man. By becoming part of the physical world, God lifted the physical world to Him. Just as importantly, He made the physical world the means by which we reach Him. In other words, Catholicism is a very physical religion. It requires “stuff” in order to work: bread, water, physical contact, etc. Without the Sacraments (and sacramentals), Catholicism is reduced to a completely different—and false—religion.

Now before I continue, let me address the exceptions I can already hear. What about the hermit, or the Catholic prisoner of conscience put in solitary confinement? Am I saying that they are unable to practice Catholicism because they lack the physical “stuff”?

Of course not. But the very extreme nature of their lives points to the fact that they are truly exceptions, not the rule. An underlying truth about humankind is that God created us as physical beings and that “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18): God made us to be with each other. He also made the physical world to be the ladder by which we ascend to Him.

The digital world we are creating, however, essentially rejects direct human contact and interaction with the physical world. Even pre-COVID we had the phenomenon of smartphone-zombies—countless people staring at their screens and endlessly scrolling through their feeds throughout each day. But the COVID-19 restrictions have accelerated our descent into virtual-land, and many are now so fearful of disease that they don’t even want to be in physical proximity to others. This poses a serious problem for a Church based on physicality. Offering live-streaming Masses and virtual conferences only exacerbates the problem.

How should Catholics respond to this disturbing trend? By promoting incarnational, intentional living.

First, Catholics must be incarnational. We need to rediscover the superiority of the physical over the virtual. Recently I saw an advertisement for a “virtual theology of the body conference.” Talk about irony. If that doesn’t make one pause, I don’t know what will. After all, the theology of the body is supposed to remind us of the importance of our physical bodies and how they aren’t just the soul’s extra appendage, but an essential part of who we are. So let’s discuss this at a disembodied conference!

And of course, that pales next to the live-streamed Mass. I realize that many parishes are doing the best they can to adapt to extreme circumstances. In too many cases, however, many priests—and their parishioners—have taken a bit too much to the live-streamed Mass.

At best, such a Mass is a poor substitute for one in which members of the Body of Christ can actually be present at the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of the Cross (I don’t think the Apostle John would have Zoomed into Calvary even if that were an option in his day, although Judas might have). At worst, it sends a signal that the physical world—including the physical world of the Sacraments—is secondary and “non-essential.”

Man is both like and unlike the angels and the animal kingdom. We are a body-spirit hybrid, and it’s foundational to our being that the two work together. Unlike so many heresies old and new, we do not reject the physical aspect of our nature, but we understand that the physical enhances—or diminishes—our spiritual life. To interact with other Catholics in “real” life, to actually attend Mass and eat the Host, to speak to the priest in person in the Confessional—these are all physical activities that help lead us to God.

Second, as Catholics we must live more intentionally. Whenever a critique of the digital world is brought up, accusations of “going Amish” are thrown out. Rather than fight those accusations, I’m going to lean into them. It’s a common misconception that the Amish reject technology. They don’t reject technology, they make intentional decisions as a community as to whether a new technology is, on the whole, beneficial or not. And while we as Catholics don’t have to agree with their final decisions, we should embrace this intentional attitude.

Now, I’m no luddite (another common epithet casually tossed out). I was deeply involved in the Dot-Com boom of the late 1990’s as the first employee of one of the first web hosting companies and a co-founder of one of the first domain registrars. (My continued technology appreciation can be seen in my embrace of cryptocurrencies.) I’m currently the editor of an internet-only magazine, which the majority of readers access on their smartphones. But my long relationship with technology has led me to see that it’s not an either/or decision: either we reject all modern technology or we uncritically accept each latest technology the moment it rolls out.

Instead, we should take time to reflect on whether a new technology—and how we use that technology—helps lead us closer or further away from intimate union with Christ and a building up of his body here on earth. We should also ask if the new technology leads to a more disembodied, and therefore less incarnational, existence. Yes, modern communication methods have benefited society in many ways. Yet they have come at a cost.

One of the primary prices we’ve paid is the loss of direct connection. Instead of spending time chatting on the porch—or even on the phone—with a friend, we send quick, scattershot updates to dozens of acquaintances. We’ve seen a precipitous drop in religious affiliation in this century, which directly coincides with a tremendous increase in virtual “communities”—and the two trends may be related. Blithely ignoring the costs of modern technologies may spell suicide for Catholicism.

And of course there is the obvious problem of being subject to Big Tech, which is becoming increasingly anti-Catholic.

Practically speaking, I think this should lead us to rethink two primary aspects of modern life: physical gatherings and the use of smartphones/social media. First, we must resist the urge to “go virtual” in our interactions with others. Find ways to physically meet with extended family, friends, and fellow parishioners. I was asked recently what Catholic parents can do to keep their kids Catholic, and my first thought was for them to spend time—real time, not virtual time—with other Catholic families. These relationships build an appreciation for the Real, which leads to a deeper appreciation for the Source of all Reality.

Second, we must seriously and urgently rethink our relationship with social media, particularly how we use it on smartphones, which are perpetually attached to us. How many of us can barely find time for prayer, but spend several hours a day scrolling through social media feeds on our smartphones? Even if Big Tech were supportive of Catholic values, the average time spent on their products far exceeds their value for most of us. Instead of scrolling through Facebook, we need to spend more time seeking the Face of God in His Book, the Sacred Scriptures.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we must dump all social media (although it might mean that for some). Our disordered relationship with social media could be reordered by simply removing it from our smartphones and only using it on our desktop computers. Perhaps we even consider a (gasp!) dumbphone. Steps like these help us control our usage instead of the other way around.

Incarnational, intentional living is not an easy path; in fact, most everything in our society today is set up to oppose embracing it. However, Catholics have always been called to be countercultural, and following this seldom-trodden path could be a means to living an authentically Catholic life in a culture that desperately needs that witness.

BY: ERIC SAMMONS

[lucywritesreid]

With Heaven Above You - Part 3

Summary: With Spencer missing, the BAU start to look for possible reasons where he might have gone. 

Tagging:   @yeah-just-ignore-me-thanks  @liaabsurd @reidsmyhusband-emilysmymistress @101donuts @rexorangecouny @awkwardnesshabitat

Word count: 1.5k

Warnings: None 

The words repeated over and over again in your head. Phone off. Can’t find him. Can’t locate him. Your mind was racing. It was going to all of these dark places that you didn’t want it to. Where was he? What was happening to him right now? You choked back the tears. It wasn’t the time to be upset. It was the time to be practical, composed. You straightened up your trousers and looked back at Garcia.

“What about his last location? Can we see where the phone last went off?” She nodded and set back to work. All you could hear was the tapping of the keyboard keys as Penelope frantically searched. Neither of you spoke for those next few minutes. You were really just trying to control your breathing. “The last cell tower that picked up his location was about a mile from here,” she spun round on her chair to give you a better view of the screen in front, “so it looks like he was on his way to work when it died. Or was switched off.”

For a moment or two, you relaxed. Maybe he had got to work and decided to follow a lead, or go to the library, or do something sensible. Maybe he hadn’t been taken.

“Thanks, P,” you tried to smile but the muscles in your face betrayed you. “Anytime sugar,” she replied, “I-I’ll keep an alert on my computer for any activity. If his phone comes back on I’ll ping you immediately, okay?” You nodded, knowing that was all that could be done for now.

Both you and Garcia quickly made your way to meet the rest of the team. Hotch began to speak about the case and the summary from the local police chief. The absence in Spencer’s usual seat was painful to look at. Everyone felt slightly tense but it wasn’t being brought up. “So,” he concluded, “I think we just need to keep looking out for any more signs someone’s been taken. Keep manning the phone lines, speaking to local people. Rossi, JJ, go visit the last crime scene again and see if you can get anything else.”

“Hotch,” you spoke up just as the team started to leave the room, “I think we need to concentrate our efforts on finding Spencer. I think something may have happened to him,”

“He didn’t come in this morning?” Emily asked, curious. You looked over at shook your head at her. “And sir,” you heard Garcia backing you up, “his phone is currently switched off.”

There was a moments pause while Hotch mused over this new information. “And y/n,” he looked directly at your face, “you’ve not had any communication? He hasn’t told you his whereabouts or his intentions for the day?”

“No, he’s not. When I woke up this morning he was gone, no texts, no calls. I thought he was just coming in early, but he’s not here…” You were trying really hard to keep it together. Each word got caught in your throat as you fought back the urge to cry again. This isn’t happening. This really isn’t happening.

Hotch folded his arms across his chest. “Okay, y/n, it’s probably nothing, but why don’t you both try and see what Reid was working on. Maybe he’s gone to follow up a lead. I appreciate it’s unusual for him to not check in with anyone first, especially you. If you need me I’ll be in my office.”

“Thanks, Hotch,” Emily replied on your behalf as he left the room. She was quick to be by your side, placing a comforting arm on your shoulder. Emily had been your mentor when you joined the BAU but just like the rest of the team she was much more than that. You thought of her as a sister. “There’ll be an explanation to this, y/n. We’ll figure it out. He’ll be back before you know it.”

The words echoed in your ears as you made your way over to Spencer’s desk. You decided to start with his workspace and see if he’d left any signal of where he was going. Emily got to work flicking through the copious amounts of paper stacked up in the corner. You didn’t like going through his stuff like this but if it meant you’d be able to find him, you were okay with it. After a couple of minutes scrolling through his desktop, you turned the screen off. “Of course there’s nothing on here, the luddite. Have you got anything?”

Emily sighed. “Nothing glaringly obvious. His usual ramblings. A couple of maps, a couple of copies of reports where he’s circled things. No names or addresses that are sticking out to me.” You couldn’t help but wonder if there was anything hidden away. You reached across his desk and picked up the mug full of pencils. You tipped it upside down to find what you needed. The small, silver key shone amongst the wooden pencils. You picked it up and unlocked the drawer beneath his computer. You sat and rummaged through all of the various things he had in there, some extra pencils, some glasses wipes, a book of crossword puzzles, and a reel of photobooth pictures of the two of you. It surprised you that they were in there.

You’d taken them over three years ago, on one of your first dates. Spencer was a little shy when you got into the booth but once you sat on his lap he completely relaxed. The first photograph you were both smiling. The second, he had his eyes crossed and your tongue was sticking out. The third was your favourite. It was your favourite because it captured the look on his face just before the final picture, where he kissed you. You ran your fingers across the photograph of his face and felt the sadness build inside you again.

You took out the crossword book and closed the drawer on the rest of the belongings. Neither of you had found anything worthwhile. “I just have a bad feeling, Emily. Something’s wrong. Something’s been wrong since I got up this morning.” She quizzed you on everything you had seen. The made up bed, the lack of coffee, the out of place keys. The more you spoke the more you could see the look of worry on her face. When she realised you’d sensed her concern, she quickly smiled. “Hey, I know things are a little strange right now, but I’m sure there’s a reason. We’ll sort this out.”

But as the hours passed things became less and less hopeful. Gradually the members of your team were coming to ask you about the events of the previous evening and the morning. Whenever someone had a free moment from working on the case, they were helping you try to figure out where Spencer may have went. By the evening there still hadn’t been any word from him. The thought of going home without him there in the car, sitting in your apartment without him beside you, going to bed without him cuddled up into your back… all of it made you want to be sick. You needed him back.

“Why don’t you stay at mine tonight y/n?” Emily asked. It was like she was reading your mind like a book as the thoughts ran through your head. “I don’t think I’m ready to leave yet…” you chewed on your lip.

Suddenly there was a loud noise. The clicking of heels frantically coming towards you. You turned quickly and saw Penelope running towards you with a tablet in her hand and a phone in the other. Your phone. You’d let her have it a few hours back, not really thinking anything of it. The look on her face was telling you that something was wrong. Seriously wrong. “Garcia, what is it?”

“I, um, well,” she kept looking between you and Emily, “I found something on your phone.” You tensed up and then felt that familiar touch from Emily with her hand on your shoulder. “It was in your sent folder from around five o’clock this morning. A message that you’d sent to Spencer.”

You felt very confused. “I was asleep at that time, I didn’t send him anything.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. But I think Reid may have seen the message and sent it to himself. He probably didn’t want you to see what it was…”

Emily responded for you again, “Garcia, what was it?”

“A photograph.” She took a deep breath. “From an unknown number.”

Oh no. This was him. The career killer. It had to be him. And Spencer had seen it. The killer must have known about your relationship with Spencer and wanted to taunt you for it. He was going to take Spencer and this was all your fault. He’d sent it to you because you were the one on the television. You were the one telling him he was worthless. He had your name, your number. It wouldn’t have been hard to track you down, and then track down Spencer.

“A photograph of what, Garcia?” you asked timidly. But you knew the response. It was him. It had to be him.

“It’s a picture of you, y/n.”

That changed things.

 End of part 3

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER PRE-GAME 9/30/2020: 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE/CONFESSIONAL (2019)

Spoiler alert. Or whatever. It’s not going to matter, you don’t care.

So, I've been away for a minute. Just about any reason to be away from Tumblr is probably a good reason, but I have an especially good one. I'm finally working on a "real" writing project, which demands, and deserves, all of my attention. My social media abstinence isn't just a matter of time management, though. Once I had a long term obligation on my plate, I became very aware of how the short term satisfaction I get from posting mindless rants was eating away at the fuel I have available for sustained efforts. When I wind myself up with a 500-1000 word blog post, it generates a lot of electricity, but I blow it all as soon as I experience the catharsis of posting it, and I'm further pacified by ego-stroking likes and reblogs. Not to sound like a sanctimonious luddite--I mean, I'm still here, after all!--but it turns out that the staying focused on the long haul has been surprisingly revivifying. In fact, I haven't been talking about my big fancy project for the same reason; I don't want to lose any of the juice I've been storing up by wasting it on the shallow pleasure of describing it. Also such things should probably be somewhat confidential until they're approaching the publishing stage, but I digress! There is an actual reason I'm saying all this, that has more to do with this blog.

(Don’t get all excited, I’m not doing EVIL ED right now, I just need a relatable image.)

As I got deeper into my experience of "real" film writing, I started to reflect on the meaning of my personal writing. Like, the point of it. I tend to write in a sweaty, compulsive, sadomasochistic haze, in which I'm sometimes hyperbolically generous, and sometimes--perhaps more often, unfortunately--as nasty as humanly possible. Sometimes the movies deserve it, when they're lazy, pretentious, or otherwise demonstrate an open contempt for the audience aka ME. Often, though, I'm just creating an opportunity to vent my generalized rage and frustration. That can be very entertaining for myself and (hopefully) my teensy-but-devoted readership, but lately I've asked myself whether there isn't some negative tradeoff for all this amusement. In this phase of my life, it's reasonable to assume I'll make more and more friends and acquaintances who create things I don't always care for, but I don't necessarily think they deserve to be abused for it. As much as I have a right to say whatever I want, technically, I'd be embarrassed if I were caught just jacking myself off by making fun of their work in public. And more to the point, I don't necessarily want to contribute to the growing atmosphere in which people feel more afraid to try and fail, because the public so commonly misidentifies sarcasm and mean-spiritedness as intelligence and superiority, and that form of petty darkness spreads across the internet a lot faster than a movie can reach a wider audience. After all, I'm in the process of potentially turning myself into one of those well-meaning failures right now. I could stand to be a little more deliberate about how I speak, and about what, in general.

My father is an art critic, and once in an extra petulant moment, teenage-me asked him in an accusative tone what he thought the point of his profession was. He replied calmly that he wouldn't publish any comment that he didn't think the artist could make use of somehow. I don't know if he always stuck to that policy, but the thought sure stuck with me.

So anyway, over the last few months I've been giving myself a bit of an attitude adjustment, through a combination of personal reflection, and hard work on something meaningful/not for the internet. I've been feeling all proud of myself and shit, but today reminded me that any path to enlightenment is always marked by setbacks, doubt, and temptation. For today, in complete innocence (or at least a melange of innocence and ignorance, as I very much invite this type of problem), I managed to watch TWO (2) movies about an academic film-cum-psychology project, focused on a gang of college buddies who inevitably reveal what bad people they are under the unique conditions of the project, and then the project turns out to be run NOT by its presumed-dead originator, but by the originator's even-crazier lover. It's amazing how particular something can be, and still be utterly obvious and cliche. In my defense, I really tried to turn the second movie off, because it was...just instantly terrible, but the seed of suspicion had taken root--is this randomly selected movie ACTUALLY EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE PREVIOUS MOVIE?--and I just had to find out if this could be true. I suffered, deliberately, for another hour and a half, to confirm my awful hunch. I don't know how I would have felt if I had turned out to be wrong (better? worse?), but I don't have to worry about that now. Now I just have to worry about my overpowering impulse to be as ugly as possible about what I have personally subjected myself to.

(The completely deceptive poster for our not at all witchy or eerie opening feature.) 

In need of a passable time-waster this afternoon, I put on 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE. Released in March of 2019, Caitlin Koller's claustrophobic black comedy feels oddly like a product of 2020. A group of estranged, middle-aged college pals of the BIG CHILL ilk--which one of the characters calls out, out loud, just so ya know--come together for a fallen comrade's funeral, only to find themselves trapped in his widow's increasingly creepy cabin in the woods. Said comrade was driven to suicide by the failure of a psychological experiment he conducted that plunged its subject into madness, and if you don't realize right away that the obnoxious and unstable cast are the new subjects of their not-quite-dead friend's renewed project, then you're firing a lot slower than 24 frames per second. The dialog is often decent, aiding a handful of funny, natural performances...but it's hard to forget that you're just waiting for the conspicuously crazy widow to reveal that the "unexplained events" in and around the cabin are part of a controlled attempt to get the guests to devolve into their worst selves, which isn't such a difficult task considering the undesirable state they all arrive in.

It just made me ask myself, what was the point of this? Why do people make movies that are entirely predicated on the shock of the twist, knowing that if the twist isn't so shocking--or is baldly obvious from the start--then the whole experience just falls apart? Why not hedge your bets with a little more depth, or purpose, or style, or really anything more reliable than a smug attempt to prove that your script is smarter than your audience? Even if you do manage to pull off this dubious accomplishment, it reduces your movie to something like the experience of having somebody jump out of a closet and scream in your ear to "get" you. I've always felt concerned that if somebody ever tries to "get" me like that, I might just automatically punch them in the face. But anyway, whatever shred of good will this movie could have accrued with its plucky performances is blown away by the final insult, when the cops arrive to clean up the inevitable bloody mess. The responding officers are hilariously unimpressed and unsurprised by the byzantine scheme that has resulted in a shocking act of violence, because the cabin's "guest book", which our heroes all filled out, was actually the signatory page of a complicated waiver form granting full permission to the hosts to, like, do whatever the hell they want to everybody. Presumably this shit just goes on all the time, leading the local law to shrug off anything that happens to or because of the dumbassed lab rats who frequent the cabin? I dunno. I mean, what can I say? ACAB, I guess!

At the time, I managed to resist the urge to take to the internet and decry the crimes of this lame-o party joke. I really don't like the sensation that a movie is just trying to trick me into thinking something that isn't true. But, this isn't, like, an affront to cinema. People make annoying, below average movies all the time, and maybe you kinda have to, if you eventually want to make better movies. I imagine myself in the shoes of the people who actually put some elbow grease into this production, having to wade through the rantings of internet ghouls like myself while they're trying to see how their efforts are paying off. Making a movie is probably a lot harder than I think it is.

But that's part of the point I'm heading toward. I'm always amazed by people's willingness to pour huge amounts of energy and capital into something to which there is ultimately very little point. I mean, I have bad, unoriginal, boring ideas every single day of my life. But I almost never DO any of them. I have a hard enough time convincing myself to just get out of bed in the morning, let alone devote blood, sweat, and money to deliver unto the world material evidence of my personal mediocrity. I can't imagine thinking it would be worth it, for myself or the unfortunate people who are subjected to my project, to actually execute on my bad ideas. I'm being judgmental, but honestly, I don't even know if my attitude makes me better or worse than someone who accomplishes the task of completing and selling a movie that's mainly a waste of time. Movies are so complicated, and realizing them requires the consensus of so many people, that it's sort of incredible that there are people capable of making one that doesn't have a powerfully compelling motivation behind it. People who are able to do such a thing obviously have something that I don't, and it isn't just "consideration for the audience."

So, I could probably stand to be more forgiving--or just, less eager to absolutely flay someone alive on my dumb little blog because they so opened themselves up to my arsenal of elaborate insults. But like...not all the time. Sometimes, a movie really fucking asks for it, and in revealing itself to me, it has effectively signed a waiver giving me patent freedom to do whatever I want to it. CONFESSIONAL is the latest movie to give me such a gift. After the final credit rolled in 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE, I looked for a little palate cleanser. As little as I like movies that put their single egg in the motheaten basket of a "shocking twist", I also have a problem with what I identify as canned theater. Not that I think all movies have to be lavish productions, but I think they should try to do something that is natively cinematic. It's very rare that I'm impressed by anything that is literally all talk. So, I went in search of some more familiar form of trash to help me recallibrate, and trash is definitely what I got.

(Me crying over my own bad decisions.)

To be fair, I kind of should have known that I was in for a challenging experience. The 2019 found footage thriller CONFESSIONAL is more or less based on the "confessional" part of sleazy reality TV shows, isolating each cast member in a soundproof stall so they can spill the rotten contents of their guts. Unfortunately, I spotted a review suggesting that the movie succeeded, against all odds, at remaining visually dynamic despite the unchanging scenery, and I was intrigued. The reviewer was correct, impressively; the monotony of the coffin-like environment with its dark foam walls was the least of my concerns. Other problems superseded that threat, immediately. The plot concerns a group of college pals who come together to remember a recently deceased friend--a filmmaker who expired mysteriously while completing a psychology-tinged project in which she recorded all of her friends' most shameful personal secrets. Now, somebody else has taken over the project...someone who "has never been identified", according to an early title card in this movie-within-a-movie (EVEN THOUGH THIS PERSON WILL BE EXPLICITLY IDENTIFIED AT THE END OF THE MOVIE SO LIKE WHY), but who seems likely to be the decedent's ex-lover...who continues to expose their subjects' most shameful secrets on film. I mean, what the fuck? Did I somehow manage to pick a second movie with almost the exact same plot??? I couldn't believe it. I didn't know if I could take it. My prospects only got worse when the cast showed up and started talking. I tried to turn the movie off. I backed out and walked away from it, twice. But I couldn't leave it alone. I had to know if it was really the same movie.

CONFESSIONAL concerns characters who are contemporaneously in college, which actually goes a long way to making everything worse. Each of these walking cliches is connected in some way to Amelia, a film student whose mysterious death has created a campus scandal, leaving shattered hearts and lives in its wake. The living have each received a blackmail-flavored invitation to speak about the deceased in a tiny "confessional booth" somewhere on campus, where, predictably, they find themselves locked in until they confess whatever they know about Amelia, and their classmates. I don't know why practically every single movie about young people has to be so miserable, but this is one of those. I assume that it has something to do with the fact that youth is simultaneously so desired and so ignored. People in their teens and early 20s are so sexually coveted, yet so easily dismissed as individuals, that we wind up with all this media that panders to them relentlessly (or at least, panders to the legions of ticket-buying perverts who enjoy watching them prance around), without almost any consideration of how they actually think and act, and look. Movies like FAT GIRL and  WELCOME TO THE DOLL HOUSE may be accused of their own form of pandering, a venal form of voyeuristic schadenfreude, but at least they reflect something of the awkwardness, isolation, and incompleteness of adolescence; something more than the dissociated, pornographic fantasies of adults who have long since forgotten what it was like to be powerless and ignored, or desired by people who don't even like you.

Not that CONFESSIONAL is supposed to be a work of grim realism, but it is most definitely rooted in a fantasy about college life that makes its contrived, message-y plot a lot harder to take. With almost the sole exception of "the nerdy one", every single character looks like a Bratz doll, oozing an exaggerated indecency that belies the movie's pretentious insistence on addressing the sex & gender Issues of the Day. What you get is a really good example of what happens when millennial characters are modeled, not on any actual millennials, but on other forms of marketing that are aimed at millennials, which are themselves just based on other preexisting youth-targeted commercials, et al ad nauseam. Even setting aside the deliriously slutty wardrobe choices, makeup appears to have been laid on with a trowel, coating each actor in a thick creamy layer of spackle that only makes any scars, pits, or other evidence of individuality look utterly bizarre. Accordingly, everybody preens, pouts, and generally behaves as if they're about to take off their clothes, which might be a huge relief given the profusion of chafing, cheapo mesh and straps they're laboring under.

So, ok, not every movie can have a great costume department, but the dialog here is a perfect match for the disastrous aesthetic decisions. Actually, this is the real reason I almost walked out on CONFESSIONAL. If I may ramble briefly, without substantiating any of my broad-ranging claims: Sometime in the late 90s/early 00s, horror cinema seemed to suffer a degenerative slide away from genuine thrills and chills, and into a version of the genre that is best characterized as the Slutty Halloween Costume approach. Any sense of existential dread, revulsion, or bodily vulnerability was widely replaced by a cutesy, Hot Topic-y preference for fast fashion and sex appeal, in which bloodshed more facilitated an informal wet teeshirt contest than any real fear induction. Horror's new mall goth look came with an equally shallow, boring verbal affectation: a sullen, sleazy, tooth-sucking sarcasm, that ushered in a new era in which, instead of making fun of the scummy coked-out dialog in porno movies, we now expect everybody to just talk like that, because it's hot. There's probably a line to be drawn between this unfortunate development, and the boneheaded real-world trend of identifying "sarcasm" as an important personal selling point on dating sites, but I won't try to prove that here. For now, I will just say that as soon as I heard the CONFESSIONAL characters start to speak, with their sneering, insinuating tones, with the vocal fry, with the head wagging, the jutting jaws, the smoldering gazes, the juvenile dragging-out of horny grownup words like de-bauch-er-y...I almost lost my nerve. Listening to these little creeps hissing and spitting for 84 minutes is a lot like being hit on by some barfly who continues to bludgeon you with his hot breath and corny lines without ever noticing that you've thrown up into your pint.

Uh, anyway. So what actually happens in the movie. Why would anyone ever allow someone to record video of them revealing the ugliest, most embarrassing parts of themselves? Especially a kid, for whom popularity and reputation are often a matter of life or death--literally and specifically, in the case of this story. The flimsy reason is that the late filmmaker, Amelia, was the most awesomest girl ever. Everybody loved her, because she was so sweet, and so smart, and so cool, and so nice, and so deep, and so original, and so talented, and so sexy, and just like, the bestest most perfectest girl in the whole wide world. N.B. "The greatest of all time" is, perhaps counter-intuitively, a really bad quality that makes for really shitty, boring characters. For better or worse, Amelia is rarely on screen (and when she is, she's no Laura Palmer, frankly), so it's up to the viewer to just sort of imagine a type of person who could make you act against your best interests on account of you just like them so much. After all, so many of the characters were obsessed with her in some way, that it's like they're here to help you clap your hands and believe in this seductive, compelling part of the movie, that just isn't actually there on the screen. The anonymous antihero behind the confessional booth scheme slowly extracts from each character the selfish, destructive behavior that in some way contributed to the tragic loss of the most amazing person of all time--and part of the result is, if not a very interesting excuse for Amelia's death, then a story so wacky that I really wish they had centered the movie on it, instead of on the tawdry soap opera we're locked into. Even if that imaginary movie had been really bad, and it probably would have been, at it would at least have been entertaining.

Part of what leads up to the death of Amelia is the existence of a secret school fight club, led by a stereotypically sleazy gender studies major, named Major, who is out to prove men's inherent superiority. The club is called CFB, or Cock Fights Back, which is somehow a garbled pun relating to cock fights, and Trump's famous line of "locker room talk": "grab'em by the pussy" > "pussy grabs back" > "cock fights back". CFB is different from your ordinary fight club in that the fights are always between girls and boys, and the boys are always blindfolded, in order to prove that a fully-abled female is no match for even a handicapped male. To complicate things, a new designer amphetamine is gaining popularity on campus, called "odds-on", meaning that it makes you the odds-on favorite in your CFB fight. As awkward as that is, it also seems that men are never the guaranteed winners of these fights, which makes you wonder why Major insists on continuing to host them. As much as I would have preferred to watch a stupid movie about this stupid idea, I'm stuck instead with a movie in which Major is such an aggressive MRA because he's secretly gay, and he thinks that hating women is a great way to hide that...as if that isn't what we all openly suspect about aggro MRAs. Secret gayness is a big part of this movie, involving multiple characters, although it amounts to very little other than the perpetuation of some stale, harmful cliches about how unfulfilled homosexual urges lead to suicide, sexual abuse, and murder. CONFESSIONAL is just as reliant on this grim vision of gay life, as it is on its weirdly obtuse discussion of drug addiction, for the suffocating sense of self-importance that it uses to try to elevate itself above its porn-y trappings. None of the movie's hot button issues are given any real thought, but are only dragged through the mud to create the illusion that there's a point to all this, thus relieving the film of any sense of innocence that could have made its condescending sleaziness forgivable.

Admittedly, I can't really remember all the details of the film's tortured intrigue anymore, even though I basically just saw it. A lot of its meandering revelations just left me thinking, "Why did I need to know that? Why should I care?" I do know that about half way through this ordeal, I became really anxious about whether it would turn out that CONFESSIONAL did NOT have exactly the same plot as 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE after all, and I put myself through all this for nothing. But no, I was right to begin with. The wonderful Amelia's ethically dubious film project has been picked up by the unhinged lesbian character who loved her so much she wanted to become her, and killing Amelia and usurping her confessional project was apparently the best way of doing that. I guess exposing all the dark, violent secrets of all these tangentially involved characters was just an added bonus, or whatever. Ultimately, this ugly, ignorant PSA about something-or-other only deals itself further damage by relying so heavily on the potential of its clumsy twist to blow your mind, which it does not at all.

So that was it, that's how I burned a whole afternoon allowing my mind to implode-not-explode under the ponderous force of TWO (2) movies about exactly the same exhausted cliche that is still being peddled by certain pretentious assholes as fresh and exciting, and beyond the capacity of the audience to anticipate. There's probably a whole slew of other movies that employ this overly familiar "surprise", but I don't have it in me to dig them out of my long-suffering brain. Feel free to contribute in the comments. For now, I must prepare myself for the ordeal of Blogtober, during which I will *hopefully* choose my screening selections and words more thoughtfully than I have in previous years, when this blog was motivated by just as much abject misanthropy as these movies, which do nothing but willfully insult the audience's intelligence. Maybe today's detour into degradation will help me go forth toward more additive experiences, having purged several lungfuls of meaningless venom from my system, and this season will bring with it more interesting, provocative posts than the last. Or maybe not! In any case, I promise to keep trying my hardest to make it funny.

PS I actually love both FAT GIRL and WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. I’m “just saying”. 

[radramblog]

Dear Swamp-Ass... (Pink Lemonade Pt.2)

I was tempted to give up on today and use some of my backup, but I suppose it’s too early to expose y’all to such cursed content. Let’s just wrap this one up. 

6. Dinosaur Boss Battle

Dear Swamp-Ass…

(huh? That’s how we’re starting this one?)

Dinosaur Boss Battle, as its name suggests, is about luddite dinosaurs in a war with cyborgs who are after their bones. Well, the name doesn’t suggest that much, but that’s actually what’s going on here, with the Fool just kinda having this explained to him and being told to get the hell out of dodge. It’s an alternate timeline neither he nor us were expecting, and he manages to escape just as a big ol’ bomb annihilates the last of the dinosaurs, sending him spiralling once again through dimensions.

Sonically, Dinosaur Boss Battle feels a lot like a somewhat chiller equivalent to Pink Lemonade or Neoprene Byzantine, with more use of backing vocals that works really well in its favour. The slower, quieter moments of the song work really well, in particular the…bridge? The bit where everything cuts off and we mostly just have reverb and vocals (“Wanna see my prized pterodactyl?”) that builds into one of the most energetic parts of the song, with the backing vocals at their peak. The last minute of the song is also excellent, with the instruments again cutting back to let the final, almost spoken word, lyrics settle in, before a big, swaggering finale with the bass maintaining a constant rhythm as the lead guitar just kinda goes apeshit.

7. Mauerbauertraurigkeit

I looked it up, and that’s not a real word. Rather, it’s a made-up phrase from the dictionary of obscure sorrows, describing “the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends you really like”. Fittingly, the song is a lament about the Fool’s relationship with Verina, realizing his mistake in pushing her away and his loneliness floating through the space between worlds. It’s the most emotional song on the album, feeling as out of place and stranded as the lyrics imply. The vocals are really carrying the track, a subtle echo lending them an emptiness that makes the regret feel all the more real. The instrumentation is sparce, a loose, with a strangely tempo’d percussion and light guitar that eventually crescendos into an outpouring of emotion, before the quiet riffs of the song return to clean everything up. A syncopated (I think that’s what that word means) drumbeat eventually is the only thing that remains, steadily becoming more synthetic and oppressive before fading away as the church bells introducing the next track.

8. Church of the Technochrist

The other single from the album, and probably a better representative of the whole deal than Seeds of Gold. Church of the Technochrist, despite the name, is not Christian Rock, and we’re all thankful for it.

 (I haven’t actually watched/listened to this video as of writing, but I understand it’s pretty different to the album version, so keep that in mind)

In fact, the tune is basically a rocking initiation to a cult that doesn’t exist, promising and seducing with a back and forth between the preacher and the Fool, who’s doubt is questioned by sinister backing vocals. Like many of the tracks on the album, Church of the Technochrist is a psychedelic energetic banger, that steadily builds into an explosive climax- in this case, the final ravings of the preacher- and does an excellent job of doing so. This build, however, is interrupted by a slow section, in this case representative of the Fool’s realisation that the Church isn’t quite what he thought he was getting into, aborting the upload process midway and sending him once again into isolation as he is rejected by the church he turned his back on. To be fair, brain uploading religions don’t tend to go well from the fiction I’ve seen. I don’t have as much to write on this one, but it’s a banger, and probably the track to listen to on its own if you want a taste of what this album sounds like as a whole.

9. Beckon Fire

Like Mauerbauertraurigkeit before it, Beckon Fire is a sombre track, easily the most downtempo tune in the package. It’s not really one I’d listen to outside of the context of the album at large, however. It’s mostly just fuzzed-out vocals over a simple repetitive loop, supported by what I assume are strings, and I will admit a soft spot for sad strings TM in my rock songs. Calling this a rock song my be a stretch, but despite this it doesn’t feel unnatural in the listing. Actually, as I listen to it while writing this, I find myself appreciating it more than ever, and I can’t quite explain why.

Plotwise, this is the Fool’s final lament. He’s stuck in a desert wasteland, wandering, realising the mistakes of his delusional quest for enlightenment, and finally accepting the death that the desert brings him. Just as he’s about to die, and his despair is replaced with elation, his eyes open again aaaaaaand-

10. Happy Days

Oh, that’s a good sign. Ok so the Fool finds himself in the alley all the way back from Pink Lemonade, everything between then and now being a whole-ass trip from the eponymous hallucinogen. Before him is Verina, who he’s realised is the enlightenment he was searching for all along and rejoices as his quest is over and he’s found a way to be truly happy. This song, therefore, is the happy ending to this whole trip of an album.

This song is just a ball, feeling like the light side of the edgy coin that is most of the bigger songs of the album. It’s unrelenting positivity, with backing vocals here supporting rather than questioning or tearing down, like something you’d hear out of a Meatloaf song. Parts of the bridge, where you get both lead and backing vocals coalescing into a swelling high note, sound downright divine (she’s coming on home and I’m kissing the face of infinityyyYYYY). It’s a powerful theme that feels earned, a stark contrast to the melancholy of the previous tracks, and it feels like the perfect way to close the album- especially as the song ends with the guitar fuckery that’s the trademark of the band, but like, in a major key or something, Iunno it just sounds more positive.

11. ピンク レモネード (Pink Lemonade, but in Japanese)

Psyche, the album’s not over yet. This, however, feels more like a bonus track than anything, and the band’s vocalist has described as like the credits rolling for the album. It’s completely different to anything else on the album, being a chiptune of all things, with guest singers going off in Japanese about…uh… the story, I think? I don’t speak the language, obviously. The song itself is pretty adorable and cheery, but again I wouldn’t really put it on outside of as the finisher to the album as a whole.

The eerie last minute of the track is apparently (again, it’s in Japanese) supposed to be a bit of last-minute horror, as the Brahmatron yawns once again, revealing that even this level of reality is subject to its whims, and as time loops in on itself the singers argue in confusion about what the fuck is going on, before a final yawn ends the album like an old TV being switched off. I’m sure this would work better if I understood the conversation, but I sure don’t and I haven’t been able to find a translation anywhere, so I’m just going based on what the writer has explained it as.

 As a whole, Pink Lemonade is an album that I think really represents a unique point in the genre, or clash of genres. I don’t think I’ve heard anything like it, even in Closure in Moscow’s previous work, and that would be merit enough on its own, but it helps that it’s really good. Like, I don’t know how well I communicated how much I adore this album. Top 10 for sure. Give it a listen if you think you’re up for it, and if you have already, I dunno, do it again? Or maybe listen to First Temple, their first album. They were supposed to have a new project out last year, but 2020 did 2020 things, so we’ll have to wait and see. Until then. Whenever that is.

[skvaderarts]

Apocrypha Chapter Thirty Three: Leisure

Masterlist can be found Here! Thanks!

Chapter Thirty Three: Leisure

Note: Wow current events really put me behind on my schedule this week! The anxiety is real, folks! I’ll be okay though. Maybe. Also, I found out that I could actually listen to the DMC5 soundtrack through one of the streaming services and IT IS A BOP. I never realized how good some of that music is! I was too busy trying to achieve Smokin’ Sexy Style! Totally gonna be using that to write to from now on. And also, l now officially consider listening to Legacy as a form of self harm because the feels are too real!

 (-~-)

In all truthfulness, the botanist couldn’t remember the last time that she’d spent so much time around other people that she held dear, her relationships with the rest of her family having been on thin ice for nearly two decades now. Conforming to tradition at all costs was encouraged in her little corner of the world, and as such, deviating from her family’s wishes in the way that she had wasn’t smiled upon. But then again, she had never been one to do what other people thought was right, only truly able to trust her own judgement at the end of the day.

But that didn’t mean she wasn’t terribly lonely. Perhaps the crushing silence was what had made her and Vergil such fast friends back in their youth, even if their idea of friendship was a bit unconventional. Most casual passers by would probably assume that they couldn’t stand one another, but anyone who spent any meaningful time around them could tell that, at the end of the day, they had one another’s backs no matter what, no questions asked. It could be tenuous at times, especially when Vergil showed up at her door after two decades to ask her to bend the laws of creation a little to help reclaim a wayward soul, but then then that just meant that even after all of this time, she was still one of the people he knew he could fall back on. There was a part of Magnolia that was actually flattered by that idea. He was legendarily difficult to gain the favor of, and the fact that he had still been able to trust her after so long was a testament to how well they got along, at least on most days.

Magnolia took a moment to collect her thoughts as she took a peak at the skillet brownie that she and V had been working on for the past hour or so. In all honesty, she got the impression that V wasn’t accustomed to spending this much time in close proximity to others. From what she’d come to understand about him, he was more or less solitary, and that was something that she was able to relate to, albeit not due to her own preference. She was far from an extrovert, but one thing she could tell was that something had made both of them decide to just avoid people as a whole at some point. And she had a feeling that his reasons were deeply personal. Which was why she’d been so pleasantly surprised when he’d asked to join her in the kitchen. Be it a result of boredom, or out of a desire to not be alone, she couldn’t tell, and she was not going to ask. At the end of the day, she didn’t really care. She was just happy to see that both V and Vergil were starting to come out of their shells a little. It seemed that everyone in the Sparda family had unfortunate baggage, and she intended to do anything she could do to help them. She didn’t want to see another family end up like she had with hers.

“... I can get that for you.” V said almost offhandedly as he leaned against the window in her kitchen. He was so quiet that she nearly forgot he was there. In that way, he and his father were very much alike. They both had a tendency to blend into the background in a domestic setting, quietly combing through their thoughts or simply day dreaming. She couldn’t be sure. What she was sure of was the fact that there was a key difference between the two white haired descendants of the Dark Knight Sparda. While they were both quiet, V lacked the -was bitterness the right word?- that his father possessed. Perhaps despair? While Vergil was more brooding and dejected, constantly lost in what had to be less than healthy thoughts, V was just… solemn in an almost despondent sort of way as though he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Both of them had been through entirely too much in proportion to the time they’d lived, and it showed. The question was where did they both go from there? Perhaps they could meet in the middle and their pain would cancel each other out in some sort of collision of mindsets? Wherever they both went from here, she could only hope that it was better than where they'd been prior to this, physically and mentally.

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself dear! You're barely staying on your feet as it is. I’ve got this.” Magnolia said with a pleasant smile as she removed the pan from the oven. V smirked slightly at the comment, painfully aware of how true that was. Due to the lingering weariness he was experiencing, his balance wasn’t the greatest at that given moment. He was fine until he attempted to either bend over or lean downwards. Something about the shift in stance sent all the blood rushing to his brain. But aside from that unfortunate fact, he actually felt just fine, and was sure that by the next morning or so, he’d more than likely be back to normal. Or, at least what he considered normal. 

In all honesty, he was genuinely tired most of the time, but not in the same sort of way that he was now. It was more of a case of being low energy as opposed to being sleepy. Maybe he needed to move to a less dreary climate?

Ah yes, moving. 

How had he forgotten so quickly?

“While we were away, I had ample time to consider your previous offer, Magnolia.” V said as he watched her search for a knife. Surely she wasn’t actually going to try and eat that so soon? Unless her mouth had a better coating in it than that very hot cast iron pan, she was going to burn every inch of her mouth. But then again, that was her prerogative, and he wasn’t in the habit of reminding a grown woman what her limitations were.

She glanced over at him as she produced a knife and an odd shaped metal spatula that was reminiscent of a large nail file. She then began cutting segments off of the large brownie and used the second utensil to pick up two of the sections and place them into a plate, placing them on the tray next to the tea they’d fixed. She then gestured for V to follow her, picking up the tray and heading into the living room.

It had genuinely never occurred to V that she didn’t own a TV until now, the part devil taking a moment to consider the fact that she seemed to have a plethora of books but never touched digital media. In fact, she even owned a record player. It was actually interesting to him how much their tastes seemed to be in sync with one another. While he wasn’t exactly a Luddite, he tended to lean more towards more vintage solutions for things, simply enjoying their overall style and form factor. But he couldn’t say that he was very interested in watching TV, either. In fact, he couldn’t name a single show that had come on in the past… well, ever really. He honestly didn’t care.

As soon as they both sat down, a perplexed look crossed Magnolia’s face as if something seemingly just occurred to her. She practically leapt up and into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with two small glass dishes filled with a scoop each of vanilla ice cream. V resisted the urge to laugh slightly at the sight, settling instead to just smirk and be quietly entertained by the ridiculousness of the situation at hand. As foregn of a concept as it was to him, he was relatively sure that he actually enjoyed spending time with Magnolia. Her quirky yet lovable personality was comforting in a way that he found unfamiliar but welcome, almost as if he’d subconsciously been looking for something like this for a while but had never known it.

“How in the world did I manage to forget this.” She said, placing the glasses down on the tray. The botanist shook her head as if she were deeply insulted by her own actions, her entire face pinched into a disapproving squint as she scooped the frozen treat onto her brownie.” What kind of heartless monster bakes a giant brownie and then eats it dry?! Simply unheard of! I ought to be burned at the stake for the wicked witch that I am.”

At that V couldn't’ help but snicker a little. He was positive that she was more upset about this than she had been to see the amount of blood he’d tracked all over her pristine house just a few short days ago. It was pure poppycock, and he loved it. “Yes, it seems you're far overdue for a reckoning of some kind. Sins of that magnitude can’t simply be ignored.”

Magnolia raised an eyebrow, clearly amused by his statement. “Oh, so the young dearie does possess a sense of humor after all! Good thing, too. I was starting to worry!” She smiled and failed in her attempt to hold back a heartfelt laugh, shaking her head slightly as she did so.” In other news, what did you decide to do?” V leaned back slightly, exhaling before remembering that he could probably actually eat the brownie now. A soft smile briefly spread across his face as he looked at Magnolia, trying his best to make eye contact but then flaking out at the very last second.

“... I’ve decided to take you up on that offer.”

(-~-)

There were brief moments in the lives of every living being when they committed to a plan of action, and then immediately regretted their decisions when they came to grips with the outcome. Fleeting things that, in most instances, had far reaching consequences that even the most powerful of beings were powerless to do anything about. But thankfully, this was one of those rare instances in which the consequences were largely inopportune, but also insignificant, aside from the monumental and disproportionate amount of over-dramatic misery that they resulted in. 

In all honesty, there was no sufficient answer as to why Vergil had decided that going to a museum would be a riveting occasion. Although intelligent and well versed, Vergil didn’t really care that much for human history, aside from what he already knew. Learning from the past wasn’t one of his strong suites, but lingering in the past was, both metaphorically and literally. Somehow, some way, he’d just ended up in this place with no hope of understanding why. Aside from the fact that he’d talked himself into this mess, and didn’t really feel like being there any longer, Vergil lacked a sufficient excuse as to why he should leave, for both himself and his youngest son. 

On an impulse, Vergil had attempted to contact Nero via a phone booth near a frankly disgusting nightclub that sat just a block or so from Dante’s office before venturing to Fortuna to seek out his wayward son. The last time that he’d failed to answer the phone he’d been at Fortuna Castle with V, and the two of them had nearly gotten themselves killed. It was something that the two of them were proficient at when left unattended for long periods of time. But then again, getting several layers deep into an ocean of issues was something that ran in their family. Perhaps they were simply continuing the tradition. Regardless, the younger man had agreed to come with him, albeit reluctantly as he had other more interesting things to do like literally anything else other than going to a museum on a weekday.

A quick glance over at the oversized clock that adorned the third story of the museum wall confirmed the Darkslayer’s suspicion: there was still another hour until the establishment closed. Re-adjusting to the flow of time in the human world was proving to be an ongoing task, but despite the fact that it flowed much quicker than many places he’d occupied in the Underworld, the Darkslayer couldn’t help but feel as though time was standing still or going incredibly slow. He assumed that he was late to everything, only to find out that he was actually early, and it was starting to become taxing. 

For a brief moment, he considered mentioning this to Magnolia in an effort to try and figure out what was causing this lingering sensation of temporal displacement before deciding against the idea. He didn’t feel like dealing with that at the moment. It was probably best that he do one thing at a time and not dwell on it. His current guess was that his lack of action was what had caused such a strange phenomenon to occur. Being much more accustomed to an active and high octane lifestyle as opposed to a sedentary one, Vergil was almost positive that he simply didn’t know how to relax. What a strange problem that was to have.

“Okay, so here me out.” Nero said casually as he made his way over to Vergil, letting out a small yawn as he closed the distance between them.” This place is super boring, and I can feel myself ageing literally every second we spend here. Either this place has a spell over it, or it’s just the world’s boring museum. I don’t care either way. Your call, but I think we should leave and go literally anywhere else.”

Vergil considered Nero’s statement for a moment before giving a single nod. He agreed, this place was almost soul crushingly dull. While museums were not exactly the most lively of places to begin with, for a place to be so full of people and still be so silent was just unsettling. And that was before the approaching storm gave the entire place an extra gloomy ambience. At this point, he was inclined to agree with his youngest son. There was no compelling reason to linger in this giant, echo filled building any longer. If Vergil desired an empty space to occupy, there were plenty of options that didn’t test his sanity in such an egregious manner. After all, the city was practically overflowing with places to see. Staying where they were any longer was simply illogical, all things considered.

“I’m inclined to agree with you. I didn’t leave the Underworld just to continue to linger in hell.” Vergil glanced over at the door as Nero sighed in relief and headed towards it, not needing to hear anything further. Neither of them needed the other to spell it out for them. How in the world had Vergil even managed to locate such a desolate place?

Was he actually boring like Dante had said?

Absolutely not. Dante wasn’t allowed to be correct. There was simply no way!

The pair left the building and simply walked a ways up the road, no particular destination in mind. As long as they were not inside of the building, then they were fine. Vergil shook his head slightly at the ridiculousness of the situation they had ended up in, the almost grim hilarity of it not lost on him. Part of him wondered if the place might actually be cursed or under some kind of spell like Nero had joked. It was possible.

“Funny thing is that I actually like museums. Sometimes. It depends.” Nero said as they walked along in the direction of who knew what. He didn’t really care. At least he was out doing something and not at home. Kyrie and Nico were doing something at the orphanage with the kids, so he’d just been hanging out doing nothing of particular note. He was kind of surprised that Vergil had bothered to ask him over in the first place. From what he could tell, his father didn’t tend to like to hang out with other people, least of all in public. What had gotten into him?

Vergil listened to Nero, somewhat surprised to hear him admit that he was interested in that sort of thing. While Dante had made a passing joke about it before he’d left, the idea of it actually being true was somewhat surprising to him. It wasn’t so much the fact that devil slayer in blue was surprised that his brother might know more about Nero than he did. That was almost certainly true, regardless of whether Vergil liked it or not. No, he was simply surprised that Nero was interested in things like museums. The younger devil hunter didn’t come off to him as the sort to hang around those sorts of places.

“Is that so? I… wasn’t aware that you had an interest in such things.” Vergil raised an eyebrow slightly, genuinely impressed with this revelation. Although it was a small thing, it was something they had in common, and he derived some level of reassurance from the idea that he and his younger son were not so different after all. Perhaps if he made more of an effort to speak with him sooner, he would have figured this out already. There was a part of him that felt as though he hadn’t given Nero the time that he deserved, and he desired to change that. He just wasn’t entirely sure how to go about doing so just yet.

Nero nodded, shrugging slightly as they continued up the street.” Yea, I like that kinda stuff sometimes. Even read that whole damn book after you gave it to me to keep an eye on. What the hell is it with you two and books?” Nero trailed off towards the end, something clearly occurring to him.” … You said that V was awake. So what happens now? What’s the plan?”

Vergil’s lack of diction belied his vested interest in the conversation they were having. For once, they were actually getting somewhere. It was a refreshing change of pace between them, especially when he took into account the fact that Nero had barely been able to stand in the same room as him when he’d first returned. It seemed that he was gradually warming up to the idea of being around him, but he couldn’t quite place what he had done to help facilitate this? Had it been the incident at the castle? Perhaps when he’d saved the two of them during their tragically short vacation? Did it have something to do with V or Dante? There were certainly several possibilities, but he didn’t honestly care at the moment. The fact that the two of them were on speaking terms at all was enough for him, at least for the time being.

“You actually read?” Vergil paused for a moment, mentally kicking himself when he saw the slightly irritated look on Nero’s face. He vaguely remembered V telling him something about the way he tended to phrase things at some point during their trip, and he was starting to comprehend what he’d meant by that. He needed to find a way to make that insult less insulting.” I’m fully aware of the fact that you are not illiterate. That isn’t what I intended to convey in that statement. I’ve just never seen you actually read anything.”

The youngest of the devil hunters shrugged nebulously, less irate now than he had been a moment prior.” That’s probably because you never come over and visit or anything. I told you that you could eat dinner with us. That wasn’t a one time thing.” Nero closed his eyes for a moment as if irked by the fact that he was having to say this for a third time. He’d never met anyone this adverse to spending time with their own family before. It was as baffling as it was disheartening, and he really was trying his best.” You’d probably have to fight V for all the extra food though. He eats a staggering amount of food. It’s genuinely shocking. I have no idea where he put it all.”

It was Vergil’s turn to scoff slightly as the mental image of Nero being eaten out of house and home by literally everyone he lived with aside from his tiny girlfriend passed through his mind. Somehow he wasn’t shocked that V could eat his body weight in food every day if given the opportunity. He’d do the same thing if he lived with that friendly little woman. Her cooking was exquisite, and she did tend to make excessive amounts of it from what he could tell. That, and their inhuman appetites were not easily tamed. Dante’s frankly appalling relationship with pizza was a perfect example of this phenomenon.

He desperately needed his twin to start a love affair with some other type of food…

“... Then perhaps I will drop by as I did today more often.” The Darkslayer noted that Nero seemed almost relieved to hear this. Had he genuinely just wanted him to do so in the first place? Was that part of the tension between them? The idea that such a little thing could mean so much to him was a bit of an eye opener as far as Vergil was concerned, and he had no way of reconciling the fact that he’d overlooked this.

A small smile dared to make itself known as they crossed an intersection, still not paying much attention to their destination. At this point, they were purely on this trip for the conversation, and that was something that Vergil could see himself getting used to. He’d come to realize that talking to both of his sons made him slightly less sick than it did when he was forced to deal with everyone else, possibly because he generally chose to do so of his own accord.

“Okay then. That’s good. So where are we going? Because I’m pretty sure we're lost.” The young demon hunter glanced around them, noticing for the first time that he didn’t actually recognize any of the buildings around him. That didn’t really bother him, all things considered, but he couldn’t help but notice that they were quite a ways from where they'd started out.

For a moment, Vergil fell silent. He considered all the possible options available to him in regards to what he considered acceptable answers to that question. This had been an eye opening experience for him in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps he’d been too quick to write Nero off as uninterested in pursuing any sort of meaningful relationship with him, opting to talk to V as he assumed that they had more in common with one another than either of them did with Nero. Even if that had been the case, he still found it fascinating that his youngest son possessed a more intellectual side to him that he’d failed to notice in the past. While he hadn’t thought of Nero as unintelligent by any means, he’d never considered the fact that they might like the same things as one another. 

Now the concept of Yamato allowing Nero to wield it made much more sense to him. 

They might not be as dissimilar as he’d originally assumed. 

A part of him couldn’t help but wonder how his beloved blade would react to V if given the chance. He’d never seen Nero wield it, but considering the fact that it had bonded with him so thoroughly, Nero seemed to be relatively well versed with it. And as for V’s prospects, Vergil had the distinct feeling that he might actually be able to wield the blade, at least physically. That was, of course, if he didn’t swing it and then fall flat on his face. But the idea of what he might be capable of if given the opportunity was admittedly fascinating to him.

It was settled then. He would have to find some excuse to get V to try and use a devil arm once he was in better condition. For now, he needed to allow him to fully recover and actually build up some measure of strength. The cult seemed to be eradicated, and due to the time gap between the underworld and the human world, they had at least a few weeks before Belial could do anything, especially with the majority of his cult decimated. They still needed to visit this island that Dante had spoken of, but the urgent need to do so was suddenly less at the forefront than it had been previously. They would wait for at least a week or two and plan their next steps carefully, lest they spring a trap that they didn’t know was there. And in the meantime, Magnolia could worry over V, and Vergil could attempt to get to know his son a bit better.

The realization that he’d been briefly lost in thought suddenly hit Vergil as he stopped walking and took a moment to collect himself before speaking. Yes, he had the distinct feeling that he now knew where they should be headed.” You asked where we should go next.” Vergil watched Nero nod, clearly wishing for him to hurry up and get to the point. The sun was starting to fade below the horizon, and he was eager to get out of the light rain that coated them as they ventured up the murky streets.” … Is that invite for dinner still valid?”

Nero looked surprised for a moment before allowing a rare, genuine smile to briefly cross his face. He was surprised to see Vergil take him up on his offer so soon. It was a good thing that Kyrie always made extras. “What, you gonna make me ask you a fourth time? Sure, let's go. Since V;s not there right now, we might actually get to eat something!”

Vergil nodded and gestured towards the alley they were nearest to. He wasn’t keen on attracting unnecessary attention from the general public by drawing Yamato in full view of the now rightfully paranoid populace. At first glance, he could almost swear that it was the very one that he’d excited though when he’d returned to the human world with his younger twin brother just a month ago. Well, he’d been kicked, but that was neither here nor there, and he would never let Nero know that Dante had managed to get the drop on him.

As they entered the alley way and he drew his blade, Vergil couldn’t help but feel a strange feeling of contentment at the fact that he actually had somewhere to be for once. Perhaps this was something he could do more often if things went well. He swung the blade, making his signature mark in the air as a portal opened. The Darkslayer then gestured towards the opening that his blade had manifested as if to invite Nero to go ahead of him. The younger man nodded and stepped through, Vergil following closely behind him.

Perhaps the idea of belonging somewhere was something that he could get used to.

(-~-)

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote a chapter this long! I thought that considering current events, we could all use a little bit of hope in our lives. It’s a scary time, at least where I live. This toxic hellhole that I live in can’t get it together, but maybe the Sparda family can. I don’t know, maybe a few good moments between everyone is what I need to keep my anxiety down right now. This story is my emotional support project, and I hope it’s a safe place for all of you, too. Everyone is welcome here :D I won’t bring all that scary stuff into this. Take care everyone! I’ll see you next week. It’s gonna be interesting since I go back to work for the first time since the pandemic started on Wednesday at 4pm. I’ll try my hardest to get the chapter uploaded by then. Just gotta keep myself sane until after 8:30pm and hopefully I’ll be alright! Curse the holiday season. UG! Stay safe!

[bimboficationblues]

are there any things you think Marx was wrong about?

This is hard because a) like most people, Marx didn’t hold the same positions his whole life and was capable of holding contradictory positions at the same time, but more interestingly, b) we have like, an inordinate amount of writings from him to demonstrate exactly that. Which is not always true for political theorists before or since! 

I’m mostly going to note the problems that I think are still present in his post-1852 work, because I have very little interest in his 1840s output these days. If I expanded this to the 1840s output, we’d be here all day (stagism, teleology, Whig historiography…)

1) The biggest thing I disagree with Marx about is a certain, shall we say, overconfidence (others might say “faith”) in the working class as agent of emancipation. I think Marx abandoned any lingering proletarian fatalism by the time of Volume I, but he still held a conception of human freedom that suggested people would, if equipped with the right tools and opportunities (e.g. the climate of class struggle), liberate themselves and in the process liberate everyone (the “universal class”). I mean, I think this is true in the contours, but in concrete terms there are all kinds of major hindrances in that path - the state/capital alliance, imperial structures, ideologies and desires and interests that keep people locked into otherwise detrimental relationships of domination. Marx wasn’t unaware of these, but I think they’ve proven to be more difficult barriers than many have realized. I’ll leave it to Geoff Mann, who puts the pessimism I lapse into lately much better than I can:

“The historical logic upon which Marx made his wager offered a guarantee. That guarantee is not a function of his supposed belief that ‘historical necessity’ was equivalent to inevitability. Contrary to a century and a half of misreading, he did not believe that at all. He knew history does not just happen, it has to be made. Instead, the Marxian wager—the salto mortale—was based on the guarantee that however long it might take, unrelenting struggle will eventually be rewarded. In other words, when Marx urged the proletariat to make history, he did so by positing—through analysis, not prophecy—a light at the end of the tunnel. For reasons both material and ideological, this guarantee is not possible at present and may never be again.”

2) He can be read as overly “progressive” on technology and overly humanist (in a vulgar sense**)  on the human relationship to nature, both of which would be ecologically and philosophically unsound. I’m not entirely convinced that either of these were his actual position, at least during the period of his work I’m most interested in (i.e. after 1852). And even if they were, I think such things can be purged from the framework fairly easily without fundamentally breaking it (in fact, I think this is basically Deleuze and Guattari’s move by going back to Spinoza, and J.B. Foster has done stuff to resolve this via the theory of the metabolic rift). But I get how he can be read that way and when he comes off that way (like when he talks about Luddites in Capital), I think it’s a deficiency.

** Lately my preferred term is “human-exceptionalism” (though I guess “anthropocentrism” works too), which I think cuts closer to the problem with what is commonly called “humanism” without going down the anti-humanist Renegade path, which tends to lapse back into exceptionalism either by positing that humans are uniquely evil because of x/y/z (the misanthropic variety) or uniquely capable of transcending animality and the rest of nature, “an empire within an empire,” as Spinoza puts it (the “liberatory” variety).

3) Even though his fundamental project was a critique of capitalism by way of critiquing political economy, he had some difficulty shedding the assumptions of capitalism’s “science of management.” As such Heinrich thinks he never fully broke with Ricardo, and I’m inclined to agree.

4) I used to disagree on his (cursory, underdeveloped) analysis of religion but I’m more and more sympathetic these days, tbh. I have mixed feelings about his ultra-skepticism towards ethics, but then again I’ve spent the last few months devoted to reading Volume I ethically (albeit probably not in the way you’d think), so that should hardly be surprising.

5) The usual problems that you get with so-called Dead White Males, though it’s hard to say which exact one is most infamous and I don’t want to end up making a callout post (though, frankly, some of this is overstated for political reasons: Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins is a good run-down of Marx’s relationship with race, nationalism, and colonialism). But these are things that I think can be corrected within the basic critical framework he developed, in a way that they can’t within liberal political philosophy without adopting increasingly radical conclusions and abandoning liberalism in the process, or flinching and “taking refuge in a hypocrisy that is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.” [Charles Mills, who has been a great influence on me, is an interesting example of a liberal who does the latter.] 

It’s also worth acknowledging that at least some of the problematic language Marx used (e.g. “fetishism” and “despotism”) is in what I take to be a prophetic mode, where he seizes upon the negative traits that his society or opponent projects onto an Other (be that European Jews, West Africans, or Middle Eastern states) and then argues that these traits are not only present within the “civilization” of capitalist society, but fundamental to them - tarring capitalist society’s “model citizens” with the same brush that they would prefer to reserve for their “inferiors.” Of course, the problem with this is that it doesn’t necessarily question the category as it was being applied to the Other in the first place.

These are just a few things, and if I gave more thought to it I’d probably think of more, but these are the most obvious ones to me.

[dragon-writer]

I just got done watching Manhunt: Unabomber and I just want to put it out there that if I ever move into a cabin with no electricity or running water and become a homicidal, bomb-making luddite hermit because "fuCk wIFi" ... Feel free to plead insanity.

Even if I tell you I'm not insane, don't listen to me. All it means is that I have poor insight into my condition.

And even in a general sense, if you know a person who quits their job or drops out of school to become a luddite hermit because they think machines are trying to enslave them, please, try to get them some mental health help. Even if they tell you they're trying to lead a cultural revolution of anarchy, resist the urge to think they're being quirky and eccentric.

[hereticaloracles]

TNO Watch: Eris

Helios on Eris– So, somehow in my accounting of the Transneptunians, I managed to overlook the biggest, most prolific of them all (however not the first to be discovered past Pluto!)- Eris! Now I can’t rightly finish off the archive without her, now can I? So without further ado, let me formally welcome back the most controversial dwarf planet back into the party! Gird your loins, y’all

The Astronomy– Eris is the most massive and second-largest (by volume) dwarf planet (and plutoid) known in the Solar System. Eris was discovered in January 2005, and in September 2006 it was named after Eris, the Greek goddess of strife and discord. Eris is the ninth most massive object directly orbiting the Sun, and the 16th most massive overall, because seven moons are more massive than all known dwarf planets. It is also the largest which has not yet been visited by a spacecraft. Eris was measured to be 2,326 ± 12 kilometers (1,445.3 ± 7.5 mi) in diameter. Eris’s mass is about 0.27% of the Earth mass, about 27% more than dwarf planet Pluto, although Pluto is slightly larger by volume.

Eris is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) and a member of a high-eccentricity population known as the scattered disk. It has one known moon, Dysnomia. As of February 2016, its distance from the Sun was 96.3 astronomical units (1.441×1010 km; 8.95×109 mi), roughly three times that of Pluto. With the exception of some long-period comets, until 2018 VG18 was discovered on December 17, 2018, Eris and Dysnomia were the most distant known natural objects in the Solar System.[

Because Eris appeared to be larger than Pluto, NASA initially described it as the Solar System’s tenth planet. This, along with the prospect of other objects of similar size being discovered in the future, motivated the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to define the term planet for the first time. Under the IAU definition approved on August 24, 2006, Eris is a “dwarf planet”, along with objects such as Pluto, Ceres, Haumea and Makemake thereby reducing the number of known planets in the Solar System to eight, the same as before Pluto’s discovery in 1930. Observations of a stellar occultation by Eris in 2010 showed that its diameter was 2,326 ± 12 kilometers (1,445.3 ± 7.5 mi), very slightly less than Pluto, which was measured by New Horizons in July 2015.

The Myth– Eris is the Greek goddess of strife and discord. The most famous tale of Eris recounts her initiating the Trojan War by causing the Judgement of Paris. The goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite had been invited along with the rest of Olympus to the forced wedding of Peleus and Thetis, who would become the parents of Achilles, but Eris had been snubbed because of her troublemaking inclinations.

She, therefore (as mentioned at the Kypria according to Proclus as part of a plan hatched by Zeus and Themis) tossed into the party the Apple of Discord, a golden apple inscribed Ancient Greek: τῇ καλλίστῃ, “For the most beautiful one”, or “To the Fairest One” – provoking the goddesses to begin quarreling about the appropriate recipient. The hapless Paris, Prince of Troy, was appointed to select the fairest by Zeus. The goddesses stripped naked to try to win Paris’s decision and also attempted to bribe him. Hera offered political power; Athena promised infinite wisdom; and Aphrodite tempted him with the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta. While Greek culture placed a greater emphasis on prowess and power, Paris chose to award the apple to Aphrodite, thereby dooming his city, which was destroyed in the war that ensued.

Another story of Eris includes Hera and the love of Polytekhnos and Aedon. They claimed to love each other more than Hera and Zeus were in love. This angered Hera, so she sent Eris to wreak discord upon them. Polytekhnos was finishing off a chariot board, and Aedon a web she had been weaving. Eris said to them, “Whosoever finishes thine task last shall have to present the other with a female servant!” Aedon won. But Polytekhnos was not happy by his defeat, so he came to Khelidon, Aedon’s sister, and raped her. He then disguised her as a slave, presenting her to Aedon. When Aedon discovered this was indeed her sister, she chopped up Polytekhnos’s son and fed him to Polytekhnos. The gods were not pleased, so they turned them all into birds.

Eris has been adopted as the patron deity of the modern Discordian religion, which was begun in the late 1950s by Gregory Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley under the pen names of “Malaclypse the Younger” and “Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst”. The Discordian version of Eris is considerably lighter in comparison to the rather malevolent Graeco-Roman original, wherein she is depicted as a positive (albeit mischievous) force of chaotic creation.

A quote from the Principia Discordia, the first holy book of Discordianism, attempts to clear up the matter: One day Mal-2 consulted his Pineal Gland and asked Eris if She really created all of those terrible things. She told him that She had always liked the Old Greeks, but that they cannot be trusted with historical matters. “They were,” She added, “victims of indigestion, you know.” Suffice it to say that Eris is not hateful or malicious. But she is mischievous and does get a little bitchy at times.

The story of Eris being snubbed and indirectly starting the Trojan War is recorded in the Principia and is referred to as the Original Snub. The Principia Discordia states that her parents may be as described in Greek legend, or that she may be the daughter of Void. She is the Goddess of Disorder and Being, whereas her sister Aneris (called the equivalent of Harmonia by the Mythics of Harmonia) is the goddess of Order and Non-Being. Their brother is Spirituality.

Discordian Eris is looked upon as a foil to the preoccupation of western philosophy in attempting to find order in the chaos of reality, in prescribing order to be synonymous with truth. Discordian Eris teaches us that the only truth is chaos and that order and disorder are simply temporary filters applied to the lenses through which we view the chaos. This is known as the Aneristic Illusion.

Why She Matters– Okay, its no secret that Eris is fantastic and I love her. Yes, Eris is chaos, but you know what? So is life. You can try and plan and make things nice and neat, but then the Universe comes through like a toddler who just learned how to walk, hellbent on getting to the other side of the room- consequences be damned. Eris is that universal action. Make no mistake, she is a destroyer and lives for the battlefield, but she also loves to dance, finding the beat in the deaths of men clamoring to prove that they are right to unseen forces (but most of all, themselves). If Mars ever did drag, she would look like Eris (and you bet your ass there would be death drops and shablams like you’ve never seen before!)

When people (read: hecklers) try to come at me with proof that astrology works (but who don’t have their birth time handy for me to utterly eviscerate them) I point to Eris. I remember when she was discovered, and the excitement that her unveiling brought to all of us. And then I remember, quite vividly, the fallout from the IAU decision after she was named but then relegated to dwarf planet status. It was a repeat of the Judgement of Paris myth! She was snubbed, yet again, by the authority, and Pluto was caught up in the fallout as collateral damage just because she was bigger than him (men and size issues, amirite?). And the authority paid for it in the end! Even total luddites who don’t follow the whirling and twirling of the planets (dwarf or otherwise) have a strong opinion about the decision. It made people care about these crazy space rocks, which brings me great happiness.

We aren’t all running around fighting all the time in this modern age, so how do we look at Eris now? A primal force of chaos doesn’t really mesh with our modern sensibilities- or does it? One of the more enlightening views on Eris comes when we consider her in terms of Justice, especially against any kind of oppressive authority. This can be seen in almost every major social movement to demand better treatment, to deny an oppressive ruling class its ability to exploit those below it- Stonewall, May Day, Ferguson, Rodney King, The Arab Spring…. Hell, even the Boston Tea Party! Eris is that urge we feel to stand our ground and refuse to roll over to the bad guys. Eris is the urge to fight for our rights. Yes, it can get violent- but better short violence that changes things for the better than the long, slow violence of inaction. Far better to live boldly and bravely. More commonly though, Eris spurs us on to fight with our racist uncles on Facebook or send petty gifs in the group chats calling out our friends for being slutty… but like, in an endearing way. In fact you could solidly call Eris the Goddess of Shade. Hey, not every action can be a revolutionary one after all- sometimes you just want to get brunch with your girls.

Eris isnt just Chaos, by the way- she also represents Strife. More specifically, what you are striving for. What do you want out of this life? If you are lost, look to Eris and she can help you find your way when you’ve lost it. Mind you, you’ll be in for a HELL of a trip with her (more Thelma and Louise than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas- That’s solidly Arawn territory) and you might not survive, but at least you’ll know!

Now, we all have all of these planets and asteroids SOMEWHERE in our chart, so in you is the seed of chaos- even the most holier-than-thou Libra. As with all of the Transneptunians, look at her house placement, not necessarily the sign, to see her effect. To find out where she shows up in your chart, go to astro.com, put in your birth details and in the extended options, all the way at the bottom of the next page, there will be a menu of additional objects. Under that is a blank space where you can enter the number 136199, for Eris. Once you have it entered, generate the chart! Where does Eris affect your life? Let us know in the comments below!

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TNO Watch: Eris was originally published on Heretical Oracles

[inventedworld]

THE PROBLEM WITH BIG DATA

To be effective, stories must trade in specificity. Stories need to let us know how things feel, how they taste, what they look like, how they smell. The moments we remember are often the sensual ones. Certainly there are intellectual discoveries that can shock us to new levels of consciousness like Frankenstein's monster being hit by lightning. But most of the stuff that captures our attention and our imaginations resonate when we feel them. As John Keats put it, “…axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” It’s arguable that even the brainy thrill that comes from suddenly discovering a profound scientific or mathematical insight is, in itself, made memorable by the quickening of one’s pulse. The insight into a technical truth makes itself real to us by the feel of our beating hearts and quickened breath.

This, however, is an era defined by data. Rather than walk lazily through a riparian meadow, you’re more likely going to just Google some pix. It’s less work, faster, and your fridge is nearby. Click “images”: instant meadow. 

But perhaps you’re feeling expansive. If, perchance, you’re actually standing in the middle of a sun-kissed glade, the long shadow cast by the ubiquitous Cloud likely extends over you anyway. You’ll probably reach for your ever-present battery powered appendage and post a picture to the platform of your choice, chockablock with meta-tags. Suddenly your own day in the meadow becomes yet another database byte in the field of pixelated mountain flowers. You’ve fed the big data maw with one more, and in so doing, you pulled yourself out of the actual experience for a moment and back into the flat glass of your phone. 

Shall I compare these to a summer’s day? Depends on whether there’s good cell signal, apparently.

But who am I kiddin’? This ain’t no polemic! I love my tech as much as you do. It’s true, it’s true: I’m a geek through and through. The issue here is that the lure of big data can impede on experience and sensation. Big data asks us to add, to add, to add. Big data doesn’t ask us to discern. If you’re standing in a meadow, rays of sun illuminating blossoms and birds alike, you might consider fully immersing yourself in that singular moment rather than millions of others like it. This moment is your own. The bottomless well of data asking you to tithe one more digital bit cares not a whit for what you see, what you smell, what you feel when the rising afternoon breeze kisses your skin.

The Luddites effectively proved their own flaws, even as they simultaneously made important philosophical points by rejecting modern solutions to preserve anachronistic jobs.  I understand the power of big data. Some insights are simply invisible without it. Try to describe the apparent chaos of high-velocity atmospheric winds and you’re immediately lost like a stringless kite. See those winds visualized by mathematically precise vector fields, and the breathing Earth suddenly appears. The problem here is not the data itself. The problem is not in deep understanding either, even if that may take some work to achieve. The problem is the growing belief that data itself is the singular highway to deep truth. More data doesn’t make something more meaningful. This is not an either/or proposition. Some data yields its secrets because its deeper meaning only emerges when placed into a gigantic context. Big data can offer insights by showing patterns or trends that require thousands of measurements for them to appear, patterns that would be otherwise invisible in anything smaller than a massive tranche. 

In stories, we don’t necessarily need to hear “more”. We need to hear what matters. There’s always more story that could be told. There’s always more paint that could be applied. There’s always a wider lens or a busier stage or more complex notes that could be played. Artistic quality may be a topic of timeless debate, but one thing is clear. Artistic quality comes by making choices, some invested in limitations as much as from expansive inclusions. Where Neal Stephenson presents hundreds of expository pages to create the space for his stories, he still selects which aspects to include. Nicholson Baker, conversely, tells his stories in miniature, but his precise selections define the cosmos of his creations. 

This is to say, “I’m listening.” 

Tell the story again about how it felt that afternoon when you went skinny dipping in the lake.  

Breathe slowly and whisper about the day the soldiers came dragged your townsfolk away.  

Remind me how you lost all sense of time when the doctor placed your new baby daughter in your hands, sixty second old.

More data doesn’t make these stories better. Big data will not improve a great first date, even if you swiped right one night looking for Mister Right. 

Choices make life real. Data simply describes reality. The problem with big data is that it urges us to believe it’s the best way to arrive at optimized quality, solutions that stand the test of analysis and repeatability. Sure, there’s value in big data. There’s a ton. But some of the best moments in life writ big and small happened without regard to direct measurement, and with life as fleeting and fragile as it is, I would hate to miss the chance to experience any one of them simply because the statistical trend line tell me where things are headed.

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[dower]

GOING HYBRID - MY 18 MONTH UPDATE

INTRODUCTION Back in late 2015, I ordered a BMW i8 - a plugin hybrid supercar thing with futuristic styling, technology, construction, and different spin on client service. It was a massive departure from my usual choice of car.

Arriving in March 2016, I have now had my i8 for 18 months and 9,000 miles. It’s my only car.

LOW COST SUPERCAR The car is averaging over 50mpg and over 50% of my journeys are completely emissions-free electric. Even longer journeys (see pic) see over 40mpg which may seem average when compared to a regular 2 litre TDi rep mobile, but the BMW i8 is an exotic GT car, complete with carbon-fibre tub, dihedral doors and stying to die for.

It’s been rock solid - there has been no service costs, no warranty claims, no problems, no VED/RFL, and no consumable costs - aside from £60 per month on fuel and about the same on insurance. I’ve traveled into central London without paying the congestion charge - on-street parking and charging in Westminster is free! (for now)

Despite the £111k purchase price, with the BMW deposit contribution, LEV subsidy, and the 100% WDA the net-to-me-cost is around £50k (and it’s probably still worth £65k).

With some prudent tax planning the car has actually cost net zero to run so far.

So, aside from having to fund the upfront purchase, and including the balancing tax charge I will have to settle when I sell, it is by some margin, the lowest cost of ownership of any car I’ve owned in the last 20 years at around 50p per mile.

Compare that with a high of £3 per mile for my Aston Martin, and even my cheapy Porsche Cayman cost £1.20 per mile. Yikes!

Anyhoo, enough history and dull talk about cost savings - it’s been 6 months since my last update - so what’s new?

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED Transportation will change more in the next decade than it has in the past 50 years and the age of the internal combustion engine (ICE) is coming to a close. Much of the world is moving away from a reliance on fossil fuels and towards EV and hybrid vehicles.

The UK government has stated that by 2040 latest there will be no new ICE-only cars on the road. As a lifelong confirmed petrolhead, and recent convert to PHEV, this has raised a lot of eyebrows, questions, debate, and downright argument.

With diesel car engines now shown to be a dead duck in all but a few edge cases, many manufacturers are committing to switch even sooner (Volvo by 2020), we’re likely to see the death of mainstream diesel cars in 5 years and petrol cars in 15.

ELECTRIC CARS FTW? So, electric is in, and the traditional ICE is dead?

Erm, not quite. (PH)EV is still on the early adopters curve (read: for the well off, or mad). The Tesla might have outsold the BMW 7 Series and Mercedes S Class collectively in the US but it’s still a relative rich mans choice.

Over the last 15 years, regulation, policy, and technical development has driven the cheaper-end of motoring towards diesel. As diesel is now mostly dead, and petrol development stunted, the current investment in passenger car powertrains is all about hybrid and pure electric. But, it will take time for these developments to work their way through to the average motorist.

We’re unlikely to see folks trading their 5 year old Ford Fiestas in for Nissan Leafs anytime soon. The cheapest new EVs are now around £15k, yet you can still buy a new petrol car for less than half that. Worse still is the secondhand market, £5k is the cheapest you can find an EV, and that’s more money than many people spend on their car today.

Also, EV doesn’t entirely fill the gap that the death of ICE is going to cause. We’ll need wholesale changes to mass transit, charging availability, how/where we work, and economies of manufacturing scale to see universal adoption. But, it’s coming - and quicker than you might imagine.

I’M LOVING IT I jumped a little early in PHEV, and chose an expensive way to dip my toe in the water. I had a pretty decent budget that could have stretched to all sorts of nice exotica, but elected to buy an innovation flagship from a mainstream manufacturer.

Leaving the ICE world was most definitely a jump into the unknown, but after 18 months I don’t regret one bit. In fact, its the best car choices I have made in the last 15 years, or maybe more.

I’ve never had, or seen a car that attracts quite as much positive attention as the i8. Folks stop and stare, take photographs, slow down to pass, let me out of junctions - mostly they gawp in awe and amazement. And despite the model being on the market for over 2 years, they are still achingly rare, much rarer than some exotica I could have bought.

After 18 months, I still have no urge to change it (unusual for me) - in fact, I can’t even think what I might change it for. It really is that good - its not perfect; longer electric range, bigger boot, slightly narrower, better resolved stereo, and adaptive cruise are all on my wishlist.

But don’t take my word for it - go and take one for a test drive, ignore the luddites who look at raw stats like engine size or number of cylinders.