#she really said 'are you excited to dance' and wasnt an option to dance with

[hall0wedwyrm]

Okay I get the hype with Stardew Valley now. I understand.

when you set into the rhythm and understand what to do it's so chill. I have to get used to finding the towns folk though... some of my time has been used on wandering around hoping I run into the one I need. (I took a cauliflower to Jodi and I could not find her until I walked into Pierre's and she was just there)

(also accidentally gifted Sebastian a Geode and he literally said "...?" and I couldn't stop imagining my little character standing there like 😳)

[drkcnry67]

title: when you call my name

inspired by: When You call My Name by Paul Brandt

pairing: Jensen x reader

Kink 2020 sq: free space (voice kink)

Fluff 2020 sq: realized feelings

rating: pg

tags: fluffy romance, jensen singing, feelings coming out through song, lots and lots of flirtation…

summery: not telling!

word count (optional):

Kink 2020 Masterlist. Fluff 2020 masterlist

Love is a beautiful thing, very few ever truly embrace it. This is the story of how you went from being an assistant to one of the most eligible bachelor’s in the entire continental USA to being the love of his life.

——————————-

twas a beautiful summer morning, this be the morn that you and Jensen were to go for your normal summer routines…  taking in every single day one at a time.. arriving at his hotel room, you knock twice before using the key card…

you entered, upon doing so you hear Jensen strumming his guitar…

YN: “that sounds different from your usual cheerful strumming…”

Jensen: “its just something new im working on, ready to go on that run?“

YN: “i have a better idea.. lowkey parkor in the park… its better than running our usual half a mile and it still gets us our exercise… then breakfast and normal routine…”

Jensen finished putting his guitar down and smiled as he grabbed his vest and duffle.. following you out the door… going down to valet parking to your car… getting in you drive to the park…

Ah the sweet sights of the park… the fave place to hang out go for runs or just walk… in your case you loved to come out here and do low key parkour off the small skate ramps.

Jensen: “what else do we have planned today?”

YN: “we have to be at the studio to do some scenes obvs.. then after that well it is wednesday and we usually go to song night but if you…”

Jensen: “are you kidding me i look forward to it every single week… now where is our parkour course…”

You stop at the edge of the small skate park… Jensen stops and looks…

Jensen: “how exactly are we supposed to do parkour off of this?”

You back flip off of the edge and land in several flips off of the next few ledges… Jensen was right behind you… Following you was one of his greatest adventures.

Unbeknown to you, Jensen was falling in love with you… You were completely un aware of it… He planned to tell you at song night through his latest song… after the course you stopped at the fountain, leaning over you take a long swig of water…

Jensen stays back catching his breath but also catching a secret look at you… he was so sure of his feelings, he knew that he would be the luckiest man in the world if you felt the same way…

Jensen approached you from behind…

Jensen: “wear something pretty tonight I have a good feeling about tonight…”

YN: “i have my outfit picked out already… i know you are gonna rock the house tonight you always do… what are you singing tonight?”

Jensen: “something new… dont worry you are gonna love it… now lets go back to the car and get to the studio im sure they will be missing us…”

it was true they were missing you because you guys were now 10 minutes late… neither of you had realized it, because you both had been starring into eachothers eyes for the past almost half hour…

YN: “we should go… but your eyes are so handsome!!!”

Jensen: “your eyes melt my heart your the reason why i have a fantastic career…”

YN: “i dont want to leave your eyes!”

Jensen: “you’ve always had them on you…”

you turn away as both of you begin to walk towards the car, the silence was nice cause both of you knew what had been said, what was said and what soon to be would be if timing was right…

driving to the studio you and Jensen stop at the trailer to change and get ready to face the people… stepping out of the trailer, you both run onto set… 

Kripke: “you both are very very late.. explain one of you…”

Jensen: “we left kinda late for our morning run… we had to make up the time that we missed… but we are here now lets get the filming done…”

kripke: “alright everyone places now that everyone is here lets film what is planned for today and we will call it a day…”

jensen went and did his thing, he as always had you sit in his chair that way he could catch glimpses of your beautiful face when he could.. cause if the script said “look backwards” you were the one thing he was looking at… 

the filming time lasted several hours, it was 430pm by the time you and Jensen got out of the studio… wrapping up the time there by getting in the car and going back to the hotel, you both go inside and up to the rooms… 

Jensen: “what time does it start?”

YN: “at 7pm but that will only give us time to get ready…”

Jensen: “plus i believe its my turn to cook tonight…”

you nod…

YN: “ill be back with my stuff and my appetite…”

Jensen: “just let yourself in when you arrive… ill be waiting…”

with those words you both were in your respective rooms… you went to pick an outfit… you had no idea what the hell even to wear… then you saw it… the brand new in the bag off the shoulder striped romper you had been saving for a special occasion…

you stuck that in your bag, and decided that you would take a shower before you had to be across the hall… you stuck on your playlist and went into the shower you washed, shaved and clensed your body… head to toe you now were very clean… 

you got out of the shower and smiled, you now had a really good feeling about tonight… you now were the one with which the good feelings and butterflies were rollin’…

Jensen however was picking out his outfit as well as throwing some pork chops in the oven then went to take a shower so he could be fresh for your arrival and outing tonight…

before he got in the shower he sent you a sweet flirty text sounded like something out of a romance novel… you blushed upon reading it… you knew what was through your mind…

YN (to self): “nah nah thats crazy he is a amazing friend he cant be in love with me…”

Jensen (to self): “she is amazing!!! i hope she understands what im saying through this song tonight…”

you gathered what you needed from your place before heading across the way, you used your key just letting yourself in like usual… you dont see Jensen but you hear the shower and you hear him singing…

you think of how amazing it is to hear Jensen singing… enjoying the song so much you now were putting on your outfit… about halfway into putting it on you heard the shower turn off… you knew Jensen had to dry off get dressed and such still so you hoped to still be somewhat decent…

that of course is when your zipper got stuck… Jensen who was just coming out of the bedroom having just put on his khakis and muscle shirt saw you struggling…

Jensen: “you need some help…”

YN: “i decided to get ready but i wasnt expecting my zipper to get stuck… can you help me?”

Jensen: “of course… now hold still…”

Jensen came up behind you, his hands on your back trying to fight with the zipper, after 5 minutes the zipper went up.. 

Jensen: “there all done… you look amazing…”

YN: “you said something pretty… this was sitting in my closet this is the first time im wearing it anywhere…”

Jensen: “well it looks smashing on you… dinner will be ready soon… we will be having pork chops as well as some instant potatoes… i didnt think you would mind..”

You shake your head…

YN: “nope i dont mind… im so excited for tonight… i cant wait to hear that new song you have been working on…”

Jensen finishes preparing dinner, you finish doing your hair putting in your hair band and then going over to sit in the kitchen…

jensen: “your thinking again… arent you?” 

 you nod as you continue to stare at Jensen who turns to face you… he notices the sparkle in your eye and he smiles… he then puts on a slow song.. he comes up to you and reaches for your hand…

 jensen: “when was the last time we danced…” 

 you take his hand and walk out in the middle of the living room with Jensen who is happily gliding across the floor with you… both of you are disturbed a few moments later by the dinner timer going off… 

You were in a blushing fluster when you guys stopped dancing. It felt like nothing was changing between the both of you. This felt completely normal. Jensen and you sat down to eat dinner, the giggling and harmless shameful flirting came now from both of you. 

Neither if you realizing it, neither of you acknowledge it, cause this felt absolutely one hundred percent normal… 

Jensen: “I am ready to own the night… How bout you mi'lady?" 

Yn: "yep and your guitar is still in the car so let’s go my good sir!" 

Walking to the car you both smiling like mindless love struck idiots, you let Jensen who insisted on driving open your door for you and smiled when he had his arm around your shoulder while he drove… 

parking the car he came round to help you bring everything out of the car… the way things were looking for tonight you might be happy by the end of things...

Of all the nights to break out a new outfit you are certainly glad you chose this one... It was once said your love would come out in the open when you least expected it... 

This is what you had been waiting for... Entering the lounge you put Jensen's name on the sheet of performers, Jensen orders you both drinks... sitting at a quaint little table near the stage you and Jensen prepare for the night of your lives. 

YN: “this is amazing evening so far... we are doing what we love and we are doing everything exactly how it should be...”

Jensen: “i can’t wait to sing this new song. you are gonna love it... or at least i hope you do...”

You place a hand on Jensen’s slightly tightening your grip...

Yn: “i know i’ll love it... if its anything like your other songs i know ill love it...”

Jensen’s eyes brought a small swoon from your lips, the only person who caught that swoon was Jensen and he just smiled... his only thoughts were of how good it would feel to wake up next to you every single damn day...

your only thoughts were of how good it would be to just plant a kiss to Jensen’s lips and to sleep next to him every single night for the rest of your lives... Jensen placed his hands on your shoulders, you weren’t startled but you instead had lots of happy feelings in you... 

Jensen: “im so excited to play up there tonight... but most importantly im just happy to be here once more with you...”

YN: “im happy to be here with you too... i propose a toast to you, may tonights performance bring about many many more nights exactly like this one and may tonight be ever in our favor...”

Jensen: “wise words from a sexy and beautiful woman!”

you look at him and smile deeply...

YN: “sexy eh... hmm how bout you let me help you put on your guitar strap tonight handsome?”

just as you finished saying that last word, yours and Jensen’s ears caught wind of the announcer that evening...

Announcer: “good evening and welcome to another performance night... tonight our first performer usually doing a duet with his special lady friend tonight performs by himself something brand new tonight give it up for Jensen Ackles...”

the crowd went wild as you finished helping Jensen do up his guitar strap... he walked up on stage and sat on the stool.

Jensen: “tonight i dedicate this song to a woman who has helped me day in and day out with my entire life & daily schedule... this is for you YN i wouldnt be who i am wthout you...”

he started strumming his guitar the room went silent and all you could hear was the sound of his guitar and then his voice...

Jensen (singing): “give me a moment to try to explain it and how it has changed the man that i am, life has a way when you try to arrange it of making a fool of the best laid plans. guess what i’m tryin to say, is that you took me by surprise. one word is all that it takes, and forever’s on my mind it happens every time...”

thats when you stood up you were beginning to realize what he was saying... but you locked eyes with him as he continued singing...

Jensen (singing): “i hear the sweetest sound, my world stops turnin round, like i’m on holy ground when you call my name. it sets the sky on fire, burnin with my desire, stronger deeper higher when you call my name..”

you made your way to the stairs to go up on stage... you knew if anything he had been expecting this... but he continued singing and now you were standing beside him and he just continued through the last bit of the second verse...

Jensen(singing): “when you call my name, angels start singing most beautiful sound that i ever heard. and it starts all over again, this feeling deep inside, a blessed chain of events, a heaven set design it happens every i Love you YN...”

you stood there now in shock as Jensen stood up moving his guitar from in front of him and pulling you close he kisses you the crowd erupts in a roar of applause... 

Jensen: “sorry guys about the song interruption, i guess hey now is as good a time as any to make the announcement... YN i love you, i have loved you forever... this is how i want to spend every single week, of every single month of every single year with you... for the past 5 years now you and i have made a solid team of assistant and celebrity but now i feel like its time to skip one step and dive straight into another...”

Jensen places his guitar on the stand and pulls a small box out of his back pocket and gets down on one knee he opens the box as he continues speaking...

Jensen: “YN will you take this ring and make me the luckiest man on the earth and marry me?”

the ring was a 14k rose gold petite twist vine diamond ring... you nodded your head and smiled...

YN: “yes Jensen Yes Yes Yes!!!!”

Jensen slid that ring on your finger and spun you around, kissing you as both of you walked off the stage and spent the rest of the night in peaceful, happy bliss...

[skyking91-archive]

meet me in the afterglow || skam

Discord thread featuring: Sky & @samuelburton

When: 9/29/2020

Where: Sam’s apartment

Mentions: @samuelburton

Description: Sky comforts Sam on the anniversary of his parents’ death

Trigger Warnings: death mentions, maybe some self hate 

Sam

today had been rough for sam. the anniversary of his parents death was never easy for him, but this year was especially hard considering everything that going on in his life at the moment. he decided that the best way to get through the day was to spend time with his aunt mary who had always been there for him, even after he'd moved out of her house once he'd graduated. she was always so kind to him and his sister and had raised him from age 11 on. he owed a lot to her and he loved her dearly and he knew he could trust her to keep him from getting too lost in his grief. someone else who sam knew he could count on was his girlfriend and he'd missed her all day. he was looking forward to returning home to her after a long, emotionally taxing day. sky had this ability to make the stress melt away. he felt safe with her and he needed that more than anything. once he opened the door he was greeted by both bowie and kyro who were both excited for him to return home. "hey there," he grinned, dropping to his knees and petting them. they nearly knocked him over with their enthusiasm, licking his face affectionately. he stood when he saw sky, smile widening as his heart fluttered in his chest. "hey you," he said, already feeling better than he had all day.

Sky

Sky had spent the day at Beau’s, which she was now a permanent employee of. The gig with Mat paid well, but it didn’t require all of her time so she had a lot of extra time to devote to something else. Dance, of course, was one of her biggest passions — even before singing and acting — so she loved spending her time there and teaching. She knew things would get a bit more hectic once rehearsals for Rent began, but right now she had a lot of free time which meant giving more of her energy to her boyfriend. Her real boyfriend. Mat wasnt even really a friend. She was just someone she was forced to work with, and while she was thankful for the paycheck, park of her wished that she could give it all up to brag about Sam. And Sam...she knew he was having a bad day. She knew what this day was to him and she wanted to be there for him. She tried to give him as much space as possible but wanted to check in with him at the same time? She wasn’t quite sure how to properly go about it. He seemed happy though when she offered to meet him at his place. When she heard the dogs bark, she was already naked under her robe. She greeted him with a glass of wine and an affectionate kiss in this lips. “Hi baby.” She cooed, wrapping her arms around his neck to pull him in. “How are you doing? Be honest.” She asked, gazing up at him with concern. She knew feelings was a hard topic for him, but she still wanted to offer him an a chance to talk if that was walk he needed. “I poured wine.” She told him, tugging him over towards the living room where two glasses on wine were waiting for them on the coffee table.

Sam

sam sighed happily when sky wrapped her arms around his neck. his hands settled on the small of her back as he kissed her. he’d only half expected her to actually be naked when he arrived at home and seeing her standing there in her robe had him biting his lower lip as he looked down at her, pulling her body in closer against his. he leaned foreword, pressing his forehead against hers as they held each other. “it was hard. but a lot better now that i’m here with you,” he told her, leaning in to give her another quick kiss before she pulled away to lead him to the couch. he sat down heavily, leaning his head against the back of the couch as he reached out for his girlfriend to pull her into his lap. he’d had a long day and he wanted nothing more than to be close to her.

Sky

This embrace felt so intense and it made her heart swell. How had she ever lived without him before? She could stay in his arms all day, but she wanted to snuggle up next to him on the couch first. And she wanted to check in with him, and hear about his day. or just hear whatever he wanted to get off of his chest. Sky didn't know what it was like to miss two parents. She still didn't know much about her birth parents and she had been with some less than stellar foster parents while she was in the system. Sam, Tommy, Jess and some of her other friends in Kingsboro were the closest thing she had ever had to a stable family. "okay. Do you wanna talk about it?" She asked, hopefully. She just wanted him to know that he had the option if he wanted to. She squealed a little when he pulled her in. She straddled his lap and sat down on him to face him. She placed her hands on his shoulders and gave him a kiss on the temple.

Sam

sam reached up to touch her face, his thumb brushing over her cheek bone. “i guess i thought it would get easier with time, you know? that maybe i won’t miss them as much or maybe it won’t be as painful.” sam dropped his hand. seeing his aunt had been good but it was hard to think of anything but the accident the whole time he was with her. he needed a distraction. he reached for sky again, pulling her down to kiss him, his mouth urgent on hers. eventually he was going to have to face his problems instead of desperately seeking relief in others. but with everything going on, it was so much easier to block everything out and just try to exist from one moment to the next.

Sky09/30/2020

Sky closed her eyes briefly just to feel his touch on her face, humming softly. She opened her eyes as he spoke, stroking his hair in an attempt to comfort him. "Yeah..." She mumbled, encouraging him to continue. There had been a lot of things in Sky's life that had gotten better with time and there were a lot of things that didn't. She feared that this would be something that didn't get better with time for Sam. Sky's heart fluttered as he reached over for her to pull her into a deep kiss. "Mmm...Sam." She mumbled between kisses. "Babe.." She began, pulling away from him slight even though she didn't want to. She just felt like there was more he needed to talk about. At least - she wanted him to open up to her. "Are you okay? You can talk to me." She assured him, stroking his arm.

Sam

when sky pulled away sam needed a moment to catch his breath. he knew she wanted him to be open with her, honest. she wanted to be there for him. sam had been running from this for so long he wasn’t sure he even knew how to talk about it. he pulled sky close to him again, though this time he ducked his head against her shoulder and just held her for a moment. after a brief silence he spoke. “it’s been nearly 15 years... i don’t know why it effects me like this...” sam generally tended to shut down every year around this time or act very recklessly. this year had been no different. he thought back to the night he’d called eevee to come get him when he’d gotten so drunk he’d gotten lost. sky hadn’t been around for an anniversary yet and while sam was grateful she was here, he didn’t want to scare her. he knew that was foolish, but he hated having to lean on people so much. “do you think something’s wrong with me?” he asked, his voice small.

Sky

Sky just held her boyfriend in her shoulder. Her grasp was strong. Part of her thought that the harder she held onto him the more he would lean on her — be comforted by her. That was probably ridiculous and totally not true, but she would try anyway.“Baby, everyone heals differently. And healing isn’t linear. Sometimes it feels like you��re doing okay, then suddenly you take two steps back. But that’s okay. It’s a process.” She told him, echoing the words of her own therapist. She wasn’t his therapist, but  she just wanted to give him some type of comfort. His next words made her heart sink to her stomach. “Sam.” Her hands moved to cup either side of his face, and she moved his head to look into his blue eyes. “There is nothing wrong with you.” She assured him. The fact that Sam with feeling this way genuinely made her heart physically hurt.

Sam

sky’s words were comforting. he knew she was right but it was easy to get down on himself when he didn’t have someone to talk to. and he so rarely talked about it. he left out a calming breath, looking up at her with sad eyes. he was so glad she was there. he could tell that it broke her heart to see him like this and he hated making her feel that way. but he was so glad he had someone in his life that he could open up to like this again without fear of them running in the other direction. he knew that sky had a difficult childhood and while she’s told him parts, he knew he didn’t know the whole truth. he hoped that in time they could know everything about the other. sam knew that he would be there to support sky and she him. he reached up to touch her face, smiling at her lovingly. “i’m so lucky to have you in my life,” he said, stroking his girlfriend’s cheek. “i don’t know what i’d do without you.” he looked away from her then as a darker truth settled over him. “i don’t know that i’d still be here without you.” sky really had saved him the night she found him in the alleyway in more ways than one. she’d truly seen him at his lowest point and had picked him up and quite literally helped him walk again. his eyes returned to hers again. “i love you so much.”

Sky

Bedsides her therapist, Sam was probably the only other person who knew the most about her traumatic childhood. She’d probably never share the whole truth with him, fearing that he’d look at her differently after knowing all of the shit she went through. She’d spare him. He didn’t need to know all of the gory details anyway. However, she knew deep down that if one day she really wanted to tell him what happened to her, she could. If they were going to be partners, he deserved to know the truth. She’d save that for another time though. Some time way down the line. She wasn’t ready for that herself yet. “Mmm.” She hummed contently at his touch. Her smile faded at his next words. She didn’t like that sound of that. And she didn’t like the idea either. Sam had so much to live for. So many people loved and cared for him, and would be upset if something were to happen to him. “That’s not true.” She shook her head and forced a smile, letting a few moments of silence slip past them. “You, Sammy Burton, are incredibly resilient. And strong. You’d be here. I know you would.” She told him confidently after he had turned to face her again. “I love you too.” Her smile was now genuine. She traced his cheekbones with the fat of her thumb and sighed. “I could get naked for you now like I promised.” She smirked, raising her brow. She had really been in the mood since laying her eyes on him, but just wanted to make sure he was okay before jumping his bones. Fuck. He was so sexy even when he was sad.

Sam

there was a brief period of time where sam had feared things may have gone too far considering how reckless he'd been acting. while he may have been able to make it through on his own, without sky he'd be a lot worse for wear. he wanted to believe what she was saying and he thought that maybe he could, but after the day he had he was still a little fragile and a little unsure. again, he was glad that sky was here to get him through. "thank you," he murmured. her touch was comforting and sam felt himself closing his eyes as he leaned into it. he smiled at her next comment, chuckling softly. he tugged lightly at the rope bely securing her robe loosening it around her waist. he smirked, eyes still closed, feigning innocence as he continued to loosen the cincture to expose the skin hidden by her robe.

Sky

Now it was time for the good stuff. Sky wanted to jump his fucking bones from the minute he walked through the door, but she didn’t want to see like a sex-crazed fiend. even though she totally was but only when it came to Sam.  “Don’t be shy, baby.” She teased him, giggling. Sky smirked down at him before helping him take off the silk robe completely. Tossing the robe carelessly to the floor, she let her boyfriend look at her for a few brief second before starting in on his neck gently, humming on his skin contently.

Sam

sky was the most beautiful woman sam had ever laid eyes on. that was regardless of whether she was clothed or not, but in this moment, he couldn’t help but marvel at just how beautiful she was naked in his lap. today had been rough, and even though he should probably be taking his time to process everything that had happened and talk things out, it was such a comfort to just let go of everything and let sky comfort him — however she saw fit. and he’d talked some things out, let sky in, and honestly he was feeling better than he had all day. and sam was just so tired of being weighed down by everything. and so he indulged, like he often did when things got hard, choosing to brush some less than savory thoughts under the rug in favor of an evening of bliss. and sky’s lips felt so good on his neck and her body felt so good pressed against his and he really just wanted to focus on this and nothing else. his hands settled on her waist, before one snaked up her bare back and tangling itself in sky’s hair, tugging lightly as his head rolled back on his shoulders to give her better access as she continued to kiss him there. he sighed contently, letting the weight slip away from his shoulders, even if only for a moment. sam was at peace.

[legion1993]

When You Call My Name

title: when you call my name

inspired by: When You call My Name by Paul Brandt

pairing: Jensen x reader

Kink 2020 sq: free space (voice kink)

Fluff 2020 sq: realized feelings

rating: pg

tags: fluffy romance, jensen singing, feelings coming out through song, lots and lots of flirtation…

summery: not telling!

word count (optional):

Kink 2020 Masterlist. Fluff 2020 masterlist

Love is a beautiful thing, very few ever truly embrace it. This is the story of how you went from being an assistant to one of the most eligible bachelor’s in the entire continental USA to being the love of his life.

——————————-

twas a beautiful summer morning, this be the morn that you and Jensen were to go for your normal summer routines…  taking in every single day one at a time.. arriving at his hotel room, you knock twice before using the key card…

you entered, upon doing so you hear Jensen strumming his guitar…

YN: “that sounds different from your usual cheerful strumming…”

Jensen: “its just something new im working on, ready to go on that run?“

YN: “i have a better idea.. lowkey parkor in the park… its better than running our usual half a mile and it still gets us our exercise… then breakfast and normal routine…”

Jensen finished putting his guitar down and smiled as he grabbed his vest and duffle.. following you out the door… going down to valet parking to your car… getting in you drive to the park…

Ah the sweet sights of the park… the fave place to hang out go for runs or just walk… in your case you loved to come out here and do low key parkour off the small skate ramps.

Jensen: “what else do we have planned today?”

YN: “we have to be at the studio to do some scenes obvs.. then after that well it is wednesday and we usually go to song night but if you…”

Jensen: “are you kidding me i look forward to it every single week… now where is our parkour course…”

You stop at the edge of the small skate park… Jensen stops and looks…

Jensen: “how exactly are we supposed to do parkour off of this?”

You back flip off of the edge and land in several flips off of the next few ledges… Jensen was right behind you… Following you was one of his greatest adventures.

Unbeknown to you, Jensen was falling in love with you… You were completely un aware of it… He planned to tell you at song night through his latest song… after the course you stopped at the fountain, leaning over you take a long swig of water…

Jensen stays back catching his breath but also catching a secret look at you… he was so sure of his feelings, he knew that he would be the luckiest man in the world if you felt the same way…

Jensen approached you from behind…

Jensen: “wear something pretty tonight I have a good feeling about tonight…”

YN: “i have my outfit picked out already… i know you are gonna rock the house tonight you always do… what are you singing tonight?”

Jensen: “something new… dont worry you are gonna love it… now lets go back to the car and get to the studio im sure they will be missing us…”

it was true they were missing you because you guys were now 10 minutes late… neither of you had realized it, because you both had been starring into eachothers eyes for the past almost half hour…

YN: “we should go… but your eyes are so handsome!!!”

Jensen: “your eyes melt my heart your the reason why i have a fantastic career…”

YN: “i dont want to leave your eyes!”

Jensen: “you’ve always had them on you…”

you turn away as both of you begin to walk towards the car, the silence was nice cause both of you knew what had been said, what was said and what soon to be would be if timing was right…

driving to the studio you and Jensen stop at the trailer to change and get ready to face the people… stepping out of the trailer, you both run onto set… 

Kripke: “you both are very very late.. explain one of you…”

Jensen: “we left kinda late for our morning run… we had to make up the time that we missed… but we are here now lets get the filming done…”

kripke: “alright everyone places now that everyone is here lets film what is planned for today and we will call it a day…”

jensen went and did his thing, he as always had you sit in his chair that way he could catch glimpses of your beautiful face when he could.. cause if the script said “look backwards” you were the one thing he was looking at… 

the filming time lasted several hours, it was 430pm by the time you and Jensen got out of the studio… wrapping up the time there by getting in the car and going back to the hotel, you both go inside and up to the rooms… 

Jensen: “what time does it start?”

YN: “at 7pm but that will only give us time to get ready…”

Jensen: “plus i believe its my turn to cook tonight…”

you nod…

YN: “ill be back with my stuff and my appetite…”

Jensen: “just let yourself in when you arrive… ill be waiting…”

with those words you both were in your respective rooms… you went to pick an outfit… you had no idea what the hell even to wear… then you saw it… the brand new in the bag off the shoulder striped romper you had been saving for a special occasion…

you stuck that in your bag, and decided that you would take a shower before you had to be across the hall… you stuck on your playlist and went into the shower you washed, shaved and clensed your body… head to toe you now were very clean… 

you got out of the shower and smiled, you now had a really good feeling about tonight… you now were the one with which the good feelings and butterflies were rollin’…

Jensen however was picking out his outfit as well as throwing some pork chops in the oven then went to take a shower so he could be fresh for your arrival and outing tonight…

before he got in the shower he sent you a sweet flirty text sounded like something out of a romance novel… you blushed upon reading it… you knew what was through your mind…

YN (to self): “nah nah thats crazy he is a amazing friend he cant be in love with me…”

Jensen (to self): “she is amazing!!! i hope she understands what im saying through this song tonight…”

you gathered what you needed from your place before heading across the way, you used your key just letting yourself in like usual… you dont see Jensen but you hear the shower and you hear him singing…

you think of how amazing it is to hear Jensen singing… enjoying the song so much you now were putting on your outfit… about halfway into putting it on you heard the shower turn off… you knew Jensen had to dry off get dressed and such still so you hoped to still be somewhat decent…

that of course is when your zipper got stuck… Jensen who was just coming out of the bedroom having just put on his khakis and muscle shirt saw you struggling…

Jensen: “you need some help…”

YN: “i decided to get ready but i wasnt expecting my zipper to get stuck… can you help me?”

Jensen: “of course… now hold still…”

Jensen came up behind you, his hands on your back trying to fight with the zipper, after 5 minutes the zipper went up.. 

Jensen: “there all done… you look amazing…”

YN: “you said something pretty… this was sitting in my closet this is the first time im wearing it anywhere…”

Jensen: “well it looks smashing on you… dinner will be ready soon… we will be having pork chops as well as some instant potatoes… i didnt think you would mind..”

You shake your head…

YN: “nope i dont mind… im so excited for tonight… i cant wait to hear that new song you have been working on…”

Jensen finishes preparing dinner, you finish doing your hair putting in your hair band and then going over to sit in the kitchen…

jensen: “your thinking again… arent you?” 

 you nod as you continue to stare at Jensen who turns to face you… he notices the sparkle in your eye and he smiles… he then puts on a slow song.. he comes up to you and reaches for your hand…

 jensen: “when was the last time we danced…” 

 you take his hand and walk out in the middle of the living room with Jensen who is happily gliding across the floor with you… both of you are disturbed a few moments later by the dinner timer going off… 

You were in a blushing fluster when you guys stopped dancing. It felt like nothing was changing between the both of you. This felt completely normal. Jensen and you sat down to eat dinner, the giggling and harmless shameful flirting came now from both of you. 

Neither if you realizing it, neither of you acknowledge it, cause this felt absolutely one hundred percent normal… 

Jensen: “I am ready to own the night… How bout you mi'lady?" 

Yn: "yep and your guitar is still in the car so let’s go my good sir!" 

Walking to the car you both smiling like mindless love struck idiots, you let Jensen who insisted on driving open your door for you and smiled when he had his arm around your shoulder while he drove… 

parking the car he came round to help you bring everything out of the car… the way things were looking for tonight you might be happy by the end of things...

Of all the nights to break out a new outfit you are certainly glad you chose this one... It was once said your love would come out in the open when you least expected it... 

This is what you had been waiting for... Entering the lounge you put Jensen's name on the sheet of performers, Jensen orders you both drinks... sitting at a quaint little table near the stage you and Jensen prepare for the night of your lives. 

YN: “this is amazing evening so far... we are doing what we love and we are doing everything exactly how it should be...”

Jensen: “i can’t wait to sing this new song. you are gonna love it... or at least i hope you do...”

You place a hand on Jensen’s slightly tightening your grip...

Yn: “i know i’ll love it... if its anything like your other songs i know ill love it...”

Jensen’s eyes brought a small swoon from your lips, the only person who caught that swoon was Jensen and he just smiled... his only thoughts were of how good it would feel to wake up next to you every single damn day...

your only thoughts were of how good it would be to just plant a kiss to Jensen’s lips and to sleep next to him every single night for the rest of your lives... Jensen placed his hands on your shoulders, you weren’t startled but you instead had lots of happy feelings in you... 

Jensen: “im so excited to play up there tonight... but most importantly im just happy to be here once more with you...”

YN: “im happy to be here with you too... i propose a toast to you, may tonights performance bring about many many more nights exactly like this one and may tonight be ever in our favor...”

Jensen: “wise words from a sexy and beautiful woman!”

you look at him and smile deeply...

YN: “sexy eh... hmm how bout you let me help you put on your guitar strap tonight handsome?”

just as you finished saying that last word, yours and Jensen’s ears caught wind of the announcer that evening...

Announcer: “good evening and welcome to another performance night... tonight our first performer usually doing a duet with his special lady friend tonight performs by himself something brand new tonight give it up for Jensen Ackles...”

the crowd went wild as you finished helping Jensen do up his guitar strap... he walked up on stage and sat on the stool.

Jensen: “tonight i dedicate this song to a woman who has helped me day in and day out with my entire life & daily schedule... this is for you YN i wouldnt be who i am wthout you...”

he started strumming his guitar the room went silent and all you could hear was the sound of his guitar and then his voice...

Jensen (singing): “give me a moment to try to explain it and how it has changed the man that i am, life has a way when you try to arrange it of making a fool of the best laid plans. guess what i’m tryin to say, is that you took me by surprise. one word is all that it takes, and forever’s on my mind it happens every time...”

thats when you stood up you were beginning to realize what he was saying... but you locked eyes with him as he continued singing...

Jensen (singing): “i hear the sweetest sound, my world stops turnin round, like i’m on holy ground when you call my name. it sets the sky on fire, burnin with my desire, stronger deeper higher when you call my name..”

you made your way to the stairs to go up on stage... you knew if anything he had been expecting this... but he continued singing and now you were standing beside him and he just continued through the last bit of the second verse...

Jensen(singing): “when you call my name, angels start singing most beautiful sound that i ever heard. and it starts all over again, this feeling deep inside, a blessed chain of events, a heaven set design it happens every i Love you YN...”

you stood there now in shock as Jensen stood up moving his guitar from in front of him and pulling you close he kisses you the crowd erupts in a roar of applause... 

Jensen: “sorry guys about the song interruption, i guess hey now is as good a time as any to make the announcement... YN i love you, i have loved you forever... this is how i want to spend every single week, of every single month of every single year with you... for the past 5 years now you and i have made a solid team of assistant and celebrity but now i feel like its time to skip one step and dive straight into another...”

Jensen places his guitar on the stand and pulls a small box out of his back pocket and gets down on one knee he opens the box as he continues speaking...

Jensen: “YN will you take this ring and make me the luckiest man on the earth and marry me?”

the ring was a 14k rose gold petite twist vine diamond ring... you nodded your head and smiled...

YN: “yes Jensen Yes Yes Yes!!!!”

Jensen slid that ring on your finger and spun you around, kissing you as both of you walked off the stage and spent the rest of the night in peaceful, happy bliss...

[rawnwas]

@nunukim-182  here it is! Thank you very much for waiting, I'm sorry it took me so long.   Enjoy it!

Since the kindergarten, I have been a child with difficulties to communicating. I commented on Star Wars all the time, it was very difficult for someone to put up with me. Actually, apart from my parents and my sister Esther, only one person cared about me. Her name was Rebecca Tucker.

Red was my best friend since kindergarten. she always sat next to me at lunch, in class, we worked together at school, and we also sat together on the bus. We even brought different fruits to lunch to exchange them, we went together to the cinema and to a Casa Bonita, it was funny. But all that changed when we got to fourth grade.

in this grade, everyone tried to appear "mature" and groups (some forced) were formed to "improve the interaction". There were the populars, the emos, the ugly ones, among others. red was adjusted immediately between the "hot girls" and me, obviously, with the nerds. I thought this wasnt going to affect our friendship, but as soon as the groups were defined, she started to avoid me and left with her friends.

Although Red avoided me, I continued to observe her and I realized that all our years of friendship were not in vain. I remember one time that she suggested seeing "the attack of the clones" to her friends when they chose which movie to watch at the cinema. Obviously her friends rejected that option for being a "nerd" movie and Red smiled falsely.

Our biggest interaction was on a school trip to "Villarejo dos peregrinos" where everyone said it was 1864. Our teacher told us to make pairs, and Red grabbed my hand instantly. I was surprised, because we hadnt spoken in months. During the tour, we talked as much as we could and i enjoyed her company a lot.

I didn’t realize, but I missed her a lot. Her voice, her smell, her hair, how she played with his strands as he spoke, the freckles she tried to hide with makeup, the perfume she wore ...

all those things that I missed, were back ...

but my joy evaporated as soon as the armed men invaded the place and threatened us.

I stood in front of her when they sat us on the floor, to prevent her from getting hurt. After the men were arrested, Red was so grateful that she sat with me back on the bus, and she forgot her friends during the trip, which sadly lasted only a few hours, and we kept talking. when we arrived, there was still a lot to talk about...

I thought she would continue talking to me later, but no, she was with his friends again. Even so, all those memories would follow my memory.

Even without her, I was not alone all this time. I started sitting at lunch with my friend Bradley, who was also a fan of galaxy wars, and with whom I had many things in common. I can say that at the time Red avoided me, he was my best friend.

besides him, I started to get together with Craig, Token, Tweek, Jimmy and Clyde. Somehow, I fit into their group, and among all of them, Clyde became a close friend. I confess that I felt betrayed when he started dating Red. However, thanks to Master Yoda, his engagement didnt last long.

at some point, I even played with eric, and ended up in Somalia, on a french ship with my laser sword, a heroic moment.

Over time, my interactions with Red decreased. some of her friends discovered her looking at me at lunch, and they started bothering her with that.

one day there was a talk about yaoi art at school and they showed images of Tweek and Craig, doing things that they normally don’t do. unlike the others, I was familiar with this topic and knew very well that tweek and craig were not really gay. I mean, there are a thosands of fanarts and fanfics about obi-wan x Anakin and Spock x Kirk and they are not really homosexual ...

During this event, I saw Red. She behaved like the other girls and found everything very nice. I dont doubt that when returning home, she looked for the two previous couples.

I thought Tweek and Craig were not really gays until they both ended up in front of the whole school. I was surprised with everything Tweek said, never imagined that Craig would be capable of all those things that Tweek said. I was also curious to know who Michael was, who apparently had been guilty of the separation.

The next day, Craig lost the class and Tweek appeared, but he looked very discouraged. Red also looked sad, it was as if the relationship of those two gave her hope for something.

But the next day, Tweek and Craig arrived at school holding hands, to the astonishment of everyone, including myself. Despite the surprise, I was glad that they were together again.

¿Red looked ... hopeful? I had never seen that expression on his face before.

At lunchtime, I sat next to Bradley, as I always did since the beginning of the year. Our table was next to the girls table. I could clearly hear a conversation from Red that caught my attention.

‘’Wendy, when you sayed that every kind of love is magical… you meaned that even a popular girl and a nerd can fall in love and it would be beautiful too?’’

That was not a typical Red question, and her friends noticed it too, so she got everyone at the table to raise their eyebrows. Wendy, meanwhile, took Red's hands and answered dreamily:

"Of course, any kind of love is magic!"

Red smiled shyly and could swear she blushed.

Bradley finished eating and ran away without saying goodbye. I was confused, but I finished my meal too and went out to the courtyard. all my friends were busy doing something, so I decided to sat in a corner to observe.

But before I did, Red appeared in front of me!

‘’Kevin... can we talk?’’ she asked.

‘’of course…’’ I answered surprised.

He took my hand and led me to the most isolated corner of the courtyard.

‘’Kevin ... do you remember that dance we had last year?’’ she asked looking me straight in the eyes and smiling shyly.

Of course I remember it! I smiled widely as soon as the memories arrived.

Flashback~~~~~~

In third grade, we had a dance near the end of the year. I remember well that Red decided to dance with Token, and I was sitting, feeling excluded. No girl wanted to dance with me, and I did not want to dance with anyone else.

It was like this until a girl dressed in a vulgar manner began to kiss several boys, including Token, who left Red aside to go with her.

Red was upset and sat in the stands. I went to talk with her and ask her if she wanted to dance with me, she accepted and we danced until the end of the dance.

After the party was over, they threw us out of the gym and Red sat down to wait for her uncles, and I sat with her to wait for my parents. As Esther was playing with the snow and Craig was playing with her friends, I was alone with her.

We talked and at some point, she took my hand and told me that I was the coolest guy in the entire galaxy. I felt extremely happy and I told her that she was also the coolest girl in the whole galaxy.

But before we could say anything else, the car of her uncles had already arrived for her and craig, leaving me alone with my sister.

~~~~~~~

I must have been thinking about that for a long time, because when I realized, Red was calling me. When I react, she kept talking.

'' ¿So, you still think I’m the coolest girl in the whole galaxy? '' she asked, holding my hands in his.

I thought about it a little. Even after she had avoided me, she was still the coolest girl I had ever met.

‘’ Of course, you are and always will be the coolest girl in the galaxy, and the planets beyond’’ I said without letting go her hands.

She smiled as she looked our joined hands.

‘’ you know kevin ... I still thinking that you’re the coolest guy in all the galaxies and I ... I like you, you know?’’

I was shocked. I also liked her too, actually, I always liked her, even after she started to ignore me.

‘’I… I…’’ I failed to form some phrase.

‘’So ... kevin ... what if you're Han Solo and I'm Princess Leia?’’ she suggested, winking at me.

I smiled. I had not thought of rejecting her, and now, less! she used a low blow!

-yes red! she smiled and hugged me.

As we parted, she grabbed my face, pulled her close and closed her eyes. Before I understood what was happening, our lips joined in a kiss. I felt very excited, it was silly, but in the end it was my first kiss.

‘’let's Rock!’’ she said after kissing me. We ran hand in hand to the courtyard. On the way, Clyde intercepted us.

‘’So ... are you guys together, huh? kevin, I thought these things didn’t interest you!’’ he scoffed, raising his eyebrows. I wanted Clyde to be sent to the farthest planet, from the farthest galaxy.

and somehow, my wish was fulfilled, because tweek and craig passed by holding hands and Clyde ran after them.

However, as soon as he left, Bebe arrived.

‘’I always knew you liked geeks! eh Red? I want to be the godmother of your wedding!’’ she said dreamily.

I wanted her to be sent to a planet farther away than Clyde's. But unlike Clyde, she went faster, winking at us.

When we get to the swing, we take turns pushing ourselves.

From that day, Red and I continued together, as if that separation by groups hadn’t happened. She surprised me with kisses and hugs, and I take my hand, as I always wanted.

[lovehelpmewrite]

The People Who Love You [1]

A/N: This is very angsty, there's a lot of abuse!triggers, rape!triggers and the like. I was really in the mood to angst so yeah. Please enjoy at your own risk, triggers and angst ahead. Also, I didn't originally intend for it but its going to be 2 parts because tumblr only allows 100 blocks I guess... I don't know the word count because I'm on mobile, and I'm hoping my keep reading works but sorry if it doesn't. Its un-beta-d, and unedited and un-spell-checked, so all mistakes are mine. Anyways, read on.

"Yeah? Seriously? That's insane. Yeah. Yeah of course! Yeah I'll let him know. Thanks Sam. Yeah, you too. See you in a bit." I hung up the phone feeling happier than i'd been in a long while. Sam had called, asking for help on a werewolf out in Nevada. When he'd asked if I was still with Tyler I assumed thats who he really wanted on the case but I was excited to see them either way.

I walked out into the living room, seeing Tyler on the couch with a beer in hand. Out of reflex I grabbed another and set it next to his feet on the coffee table. He smiled in return.

"You're too good to me," he said, giving me he full attention for a few seconds before turning back to the TV.

"So, uh, Sam Winchester called. He and Dean have a case out in Nevada they wanted our help on. Werewolves. I told them we'd check it out, what do you think?" I asked quietly.

Tyler let out a deep sigh and I turned my eyes to the corner of the coffee table.

"I think," he paused, taking a drink of his beer, "that you should have asked before you went saying yes. And that I don't like those Winchesters, too fucking uptight, and Dean always stares at you." He threw an annoyed look my way before letting out another deep breath and finishing off his beer, getting ready to open the second.

"When do they want me?" He asked, tossing the metal cap onto the table. I watched as it skidded and slid of the edge onto the floor.

"ASAP. I told them we could be out there in a few days," I answered timidly.

Tyler let out another sigh of annoyance.

"Well, go back a bag, we'll leave tomorrow and I don't want to have to wait for your sorry ass to finish up."

I nodded and stood quickly, walking into the back bedroom and shutting the door softly. I let myself smile as I packed, enjoying the thought of seeing old friends again.

- - -

"Tyler, Y/N, good to see you," greeted Dean, pulling me in for a hug that made Tyler frown. Even so, I hugged Sam as well, enjoying their familiar embraces.

"So, where are you guys staying?" Sam asked, hands shoved in his jeans pockets.

"The Historian, on Gibson by the diner," I answered, unable to stop the smile on my face as I spoke.

This only seemed to annoy Tyler further. Quickly he drew an arm around my waist and pulled me to him.

"Yeah, she wanted to make sure we had a good view," he joked, Sam and Dean laughing as I cringed, remembering how upset Tyler was that the neon sign from the diner was visible through our window.

"You know me, only the best," I added.

Everyone laughed but I could feel Tyler's fingers on my ribs like knives.

- - -

"To a hunt well done," Dean toasted, plinking his beer bottle against mine and Sam's. We all drank and shared a small smile, me ignoring the fact that Tyler was dancing with some girl on the dance floor.

"I gotta ask," Sam said suddenly, after several tense moments. "What's with your boyfriend?"

I flicked my eyes momentarily at the girl grinding on him before turning on my stool to face solidly at the bar.

"He's just dancing, its fine," I said monotonely.

Sam and Dean shared a look.

I absent mindedly pulled my flannel sleeves down to cover the hand mark Tyler left from this morning, when I had taken too long to get ready so he gripped me by the elbow and shoved me at the door. My shoulder still stung but I could blame that on the werewolf at least.

"What thhe fuck?" Dean said suddenly. I looked at him oddly until he pointed out a still healing bruise on my sternum, visible with my shirt unbottoned. "What is that, Y/N?"

Nervously I shoved my shirt to the side so it wasnt visible anymore.

"Haven't you ever heard of a hickey, Dean?" I laughed anxiously, sipping my beer and hoping he'd let it go. He didnt.

"That's no hickey. Did he hurt you?" Dean asked seriously, his voice low.

"What?! No! He wouldn't! It... it was my fault. I was carrying the laundry basket and not watching where I was going and he accidentally bumped it into me a little hard. Its nothing," I shrugged it off.

It was from the laundry basket, from when he shoved it at me hard enough to leave a mark. "To remind me of my place," he said.

Sam and Dean just eyed me cautiously as Tyler came back from the dance floor.

"Hey babe, lets go, I'm beat," Tyler said.

I went to argue that i wanted to stay with Sam and Dean but I knew better than to speak out in public.

"Okay. See you guys later," I said, Tyler pulling me quickly away and out of the bar.

He yanked me out into the alley and shoved me against yhe grime covered bricks, pressing kisses to my neck and chest.

"Come on baby, lets do it right here," Tyler said, unbuttoning my flannel quickly.

"Ty, no, lets just go back to the motel," I said, gently pushing at his hands on my body.

"Come on, it'll be hot. You can scream for all the bar to hear," he continued, going for my jeans.

"Ty, I said no, stop it," I said more forcefully, shoving him off me.

He stood a foot away, bewildered for a moment while blood rushed in my ears. Suddenly his hand came fast and heavy against my cheek, knocking my head to the side. I held it in shock as it heated up. Tyler seemed to be gauging my reaction to it which was fear.

He sprung forward again and spun me around, pressing my shoulders against the cold brick as he undid my jeans.

"When I say I want to fuck you, I mean it you dumb prude bitch," he growled against my hair.

I stood, helplessly pressed against the bricks as he yanked my jeans and underwear down and pulled my hips back.

The only indication I gave that I felt him was the shutter as he slid into me. My whole body was numb, the slight rocking the only thing keeping me grounded.

When he was done, he came onto the ground and pushed my hips forward in disgust, making me stumble into the wall.

"Come back when you're ready to be an obedient whore," he spat, pulling up his jeans and walking away.

I felt the shake in my hands as I slowly pulled up my underwear and struggled to button my jeans. I let myself lean against the wall a moment, pressing cold hands over my eyes and smearing tears I didn't know I was making.

I sucked in a deep breath, cleared my face and stared dead ahead. Just another day.

- - -

I realized quickly I didn't want to go back to him so soon. I didn't want to seem that desperate for him. In a spur of the moment I walked to Sam and Dean's motel room, knocking on the door before I remember deciding to. Sam answered.

"Y/N? Whats up?" He asked, voice gentle and slightly tired.

"Hey, sorry to bother you guys, me and Tyler had a little fight so I just wanted to shower here for tonight if thats okay?" I asked timidly.

"Yeah! Yeah sure, whatever you need," Sam replied, letting me in immediately.

Dean was sat up on the bed reading something when he looked up and smiled at me.

"Hey, what're you doing here?" He asked, closing the book to give me his full attention.

"Just need a shower, me and Tyler had a fight," I explained. Dean grinned.

"Finally. You should really dump that douche bag," he commented, standing and walking over to his duffle bag.

"No... we just need ti work some stuff out. I dont know where i'd be without him, he's such a better hunter than me," I said absently, not thinking twice about the words coming out of my mouth.

Sam snorted behind me, Dean sniggered.

"Sure, okay Y/N," Dean said sarcastically.

"Really, I would have died on half my hunts if he hadn't been there," I tried, more to convince myself than them.

"You're ten times the hunter he is, he can barely shoot a sawed-off. But whatever you say, sweetheart. Enjoy your shower," Dean grinned, handing me one of his shirts and a pair of boxers.

As I stood under the steaming hot water and scrubbed my skin raw, I replayed what the boys had said. How could I possibly be a better hunter than him? All he talks about is how much easier it would be for him to do his job if I wasnt around.

I shook off the thought and went back to scrubbing at my thighs viciously.

- - -

I walked out in Dean's oversize Metallica shirt, picking at one of my cuticles, mulling over my options very carefully.

"He hits me sometimes," I mumble, watching Sam and Dean scrunch up their eyebrows before looking at me.

"Huh?"

"Did you say something, sweetheart?"

I turned my eyes up, forcing myself to back eye contact.

"He hits me sometimes," I said again.

I watched as Dean's jaw set and Sam's face turned to stone.

"Not often. I mean, not really anyways. Sometimes its worse than others, especially if he's been drinking," I said, finishing the sentance looking at the ratty carpeting as the nights memories came back.

"Its usually my fault anyways, I take too long, or I forget the laundry, or I get him the wrong beer," I added, trying to justify it in my head again. My face scrunched up as his words came at me as they always do.

"You'd be nothing without me. A dead whore in a ditch somewhere. You're lucky I'm here to teach you."

"He's dead," Dean said simply.

I jumped forward quickly.

"No, dont!" I said, gripping his arm tightly as he stood. "Its fine, I can handle it," I added.

Dean's hand came slowly up to my face and I winced as his fingers ran over the spot where Tyler had slapped me.

"You dont have to," Dean said quietly.

"I love him," I replied, eyes closed. Dean let out a slow breath and stepped back from me.

"Then you better get back to him," he said sharply.

"Dean," Sam interjected, eyebrows creased in disapproval.

"No, if she loves him she can head back to his room, and when he hits her again we'll come pick her up because thats what people who love you do," Dean spoke, eyes sharp and jaw set.

I stared at him a moment longer, my throat tight before I slowly grabbed my things and opened the door. I gave one last glance to Sam whose eyes were wet with unshed tears.

I shut the door behind me and let a few tears of my own fall before I made my way back to Tyler.

- - -

I woke up to the sound of beeping next to my head and throbbing in my ribs. I groaned as I turned my head, my neck stiff and sore as well.

As I looked around at the pale green walls and the bright florescent lights, I recognized the beeping as an EKG.

I panicked, trying desperately to sit up and pull out my IV's until a nurse came in.

"Sweetie, you need to relax, you're pretty banged up," she spoke, gently pushing my shoulder back and readjusting the IV tube on my arm.

I tried to relax, looking up to the ceiling and taking deep breaths to try and stop the tears burning in my eyes.

"Good news is your boyfriend's here, said he was worried when he found out you fell down those stairs. I'll send him up," the nurse spoke kindly, patting my hand before walking out and closing the door behind her.

My throat closed up painfully, tears falling back into my hairline as I thought about Tyler seeing me after what he'd done last night.

[trendingnewsb]

We should have seen Trump coming | Ta-Nehisi Coates

The long read: Obamas rise felt like a new chapter in American history. But the original sin of white supremacy was not so easily erased

I have often wondered how I missed the coming tragedy. It is not so much that I should have predicted that Americans would elect Donald Trump. Its just that I shouldnt have put it past us. It was tough to keep track of the currents of politics and pageantry swirling at once. All my life I had seen myself, and my people, backed into a corner. Had I been wrong? Watching the crowds at county fairs cheer for Michelle Obama in 2008, or flipping through the enchanting photo spreads of the glamorous incoming administration, it was easy to believe that I had been.

And it was more than symbolic. Barack Obamas victory meant not just a black president but also that Democrats, the party supported by most black people, enjoyed majorities in Congress. Prominent intellectuals were predicting that modern conservatism a movement steeped in white resentment was at its end and that a demographic wave of Asians, Latinos and blacks would sink the Republican party.

Back in the summer of 2008, as Obama closed out the primary and closed in on history, vendors in Harlem hawked T-shirts emblazoned with his face and posters placing him in the black Valhalla where Martin, Malcolm and Harriet were throned. It is hard to remember the excitement of that time, because I now know that the sense we had that summer, the sense that we were approaching an end-of-history moment, proved to be wrong.

It is not so much that I logically reasoned out that Obamas election would author a post-racist age. But it now seemed possible that white supremacy, the scourge of American history, might well be banished in my lifetime. In those days I imagined racism as a tumour that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. From that perspective, it seemed possible that the success of one man really could alter history, or even end it.

I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language as though he actually trusted them and believed in them. It was not my language. It was not even a language I was much interested in, save to understand how he had come to speak it and its effect on those who heard it. More interesting to me was that he had somehow balanced that language with the language of the south side of Chicago. He referred to himself, unambiguously, as a black man. He had married a black woman. It is easy to forget how shocking this was, given the common belief at the time that there was a direct relationship between success and assimilation. The narrative held that successful black men took white wives and crossed over into that arid no-mans-land that was not black, though it could never be white. Blackness for such men was not a thing to root yourself in but something to evade and escape. Barack Obama found a third way a means of communicating his affection for white America without fawning over it. White people were enchanted by him and those who worked in newsrooms seemed most enchanted of all.

But I could see that those charged with analysing the import of Obamas blackness were, in the main, working off an old script. Obama was dubbed the new Tiger Woods of American politics, as a man who wasnt exactly black. I understood the point Obama was not black as these writers understood black. It wasnt just that he wasnt a drug dealer, like most black men on the news, but that he did not hail from an inner city, he was not raised on chitterlings, his mother had not washed white peoples floors. But this confusion was a reduction of racisms true breadth, premised on the need to fix black people in one corner of the universe so that white people may be secure in all the rest of it. So to understand Obama, analysts needed to give him a superpower that explained how this self-described black man escaped his assigned corner. That power was his mixed ancestry.

The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But when he was a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half. Ancestry isnt even really necessary. My wife, Kenyatta, was the only black girl in her Tennessee gifted and talented classes from age six. She could dance and double dutch with the best of them. Her white classmates did not care. Youre not really black, they would say. They meant it as a compliment. But what they really meant was to slander her neighbours and family, to reorder the world in such a way that confirmed their status among the master class. And if Obama, rooted in the world of slaves, could rise above the masters, all the while claiming the identity and traditions of slaves, was there any real meaning in being a master at all?

Denying Barack Obama his blackness served another purpose: it was a means of coping with having been wrong. Those of us who did not believe there could be a black president were challenged by the sudden prospect of one. It is easy to see how it all makes sense now in every era there have been individual black people capable of defying the bonds of white supremacy, even as that same system held the great mass of us captive. I will speak for myself and say that before Obamas campaign began, the American presidency seemed out of reach. It existed so high in the firmament, and seemed so synonymous with the countrys sense of itself, that I never gave the prospect of a black president much thought.

By the summer of 2008, it was clear that Id made an error. Two responses were possible: (1) assess that error and reconsider the nature of the world in which I lived; or (2) refuse to accept the error and simply retrofit yesterdays reasoning to this new reality. The notion that Obama was a different kind of black allowed for that latter option and the comfort of being right. But some of us had not wanted to be right. And when we asserted that America aint never letting no nigger be president, we were not bragging. Instinct warned me against hope. But instinct had also warned me against Obama winning Iowa, and instinct was wrong. And if we had misjudged Americas support for a black man running to occupy the White House, perhaps I had misjudged the nature of my country. Perhaps we were just now awakening from some awful nightmare, and if Barack Obama was not the catalyst of that awakening, he was at least the sign. And just like that, I was swept away, because I wanted desperately to be swept away, and taking the measure of my community, I saw that I was not alone.

There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that very racism, pinned into ghettos, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born. And so we struggle out of fear for our children. We struggle out of fear for ourselves. We struggle to avoid our feelings, because to actually consider all that was taken, to understand that it was taken systemically, that the taking is essential to America and echoes down through the ages, could make you crazy. But after Obamas election it seemed that perhaps there was another way. Perhaps we, as Americans, could elide the terrible history, elide the national crime. Maybe it was possible to fix the problems afflicting black people without focusing on race. Perhaps it was possible to think of black people as a community in disproportionate need, worthy of aid simply because they were Americans in need. Better schools could be built, better healthcare administered, better jobs made available, not because of anything specific in the black experience but precisely because there isnt. If you squinted for a moment, if you actually tried to believe, it made so much sense. All that was needed for this new theory was a champion articulate, young, clean. And maybe this new champion had arrived.

That was one way of thinking about things.Here was another. Son, my father said of Obama, you know the country got to be messed up for them folks to give him the job. The economy was on the brink. The blood of untold numbers of Iraqis was on our hands. Hurricane Katrina had shamed the society. From this other angle, post-racialism and good feeling were taken up not so much out of elevation in consciousness but out of desperation.

It all makes so much sense now. The pageantry, the math, the magazines, the essays heralded an end to the old country with all its divisions. We forgot that there were those who loved that old country as it was, who did not lament the divisions but drew power from them.

A Confederate flag with the name of US president Donald Trump, North Carolina, May 2017. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

And so we saw postcards with watermelons on the White House lawn. We saw simian caricatures of the first family, the invocation of a food-stamp president and his anticolonial, Islamist agenda. These were the fetishes that gathered the tribe of white supremacy, that rallied them to the age-old banner and if there was one mistake, one reason why I did not see the coming tragedy, why I did not account for its possibilities, it was because, at that point, I had not yet truly considered that banners fearsome power.

The opportunity for that consideration came by coincidence. The eight years of Barack Obama bracketed the 150th anniversary of the civil war Americas preeminent existential crisis. In 1861, believing themselves immersed in a short war, the forces of union thought white supremacy was still affordable. So even in the north the cause of abolition was denounced, and blacks were forbidden from fighting in the army. But the war dragged on, and wallowing in white supremacy amid the increase of dead was like wallowing in pearls amid a famine. Emancipation was embraced. Blacks were recruited and sent into battle. Later they were enfranchised and sent to serve in the halls of government, national and statewide. But in 1876, with the hot war now passed, and the need for black soldiers gone, the country returned to its supremacist roots. A revolution has taken place by force of arms and a race are disenfranchised, wrote Mississippis Reconstruction-era governor, Adelbert Ames.

They are to be returned to a condition of serfdom an era of second slavery The nation should have acted but it was tired of the annual autumnal outbreaks in the South The political death of the negro will forever release the nation from the weariness from such political outbreaks. You may think I exaggerate. Time will show you how accurate my statements are.

So there was nothing new in the suddenly transracial spirit that saw the country, in 2008, reaching for the best part of itself. It had done so before and then promptly retrenched in the worst part of itself. To see this connection, to see Obamas election as part of a familiar cycle, you would have had to understand how central the brand of white supremacy was to the country. I did not. I could remember, as a child, the black nationalists claiming the country was built by slaves. But this claim was rarely evidenced and mostly struck me as an applause line or rhetorical point. I understood slavery as bad and I had a vague sense that it had once been integral to the country and that the dispute over it had, somehow, contributed to the civil war.

But even that partial sense ran contrary to the way the civil war was presented in the popular culture, as a violent misunderstanding, an honourable duel between wayward brothers, instead of what it was a spectacular chapter in a long war that was declared when the first Africans were brought chained to American shores.

When it comes to the civil war, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone With the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding African slavery. That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilisation, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honoured through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.

The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this countrys history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that it was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face this truth or forge a national identity out of it?

For now the country holds to the common theory that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive, a fraught and still-incomplete resolution of the accidental hypocrisy of a nation founded by slaveholders extolling a gospel of freedom. This common theory dominates much of American discourse, from left to right. Conveniently, it holds the possibility of ultimate resolution, for if right-thinking individuals can dedicate themselves to finishing the work of ensuring freedom for all, then perhaps the ghosts of history can be escaped. It was the common theory through its promise of a progressive American history, where the country improves itself inexorably and necessarily that allowed for Obamas rise. And it was that rise that offered me that chance to see that theory for the illusion that it was.

Immersed in my reading, it became clear to me that the common theory of providential progress, of the inevitable reconciliation between the sin of slavery and the democratic ideal, was myth. Marking the moment of awakening is like marking the moment one fell in love. If forced I would say I took my tumble with the dark vision of historian Edmund Morgans book American Slavery, American Freedom. Certainly slavery was contrary to Americas stated democratic precepts, conceded Morgan, but in fact, it was slavery that allowed American democracy to exist in the first place. It was slavery that gifted much of the south with a working class that lived outside of all protections and could be driven, beaten and traded into generational perpetuity. Profits pulled from these workers, repression of the normal angst of labour, and the ability to employ this labour on abundant land stolen from Native Americans formed a foundation for democratic equality among a people who came to see skin colour and hair textures as defining features. Morgan showed the process in motion through the law rights gradually awarded to the mass of European poor and oppressed, at precisely the same time they were being stripped from enslaved Africans and their descendants.

It was not just Edmund Morgan. It was James McPherson. It was Barbara Fields. It was David Blight. Together they guided me through the history of slavery and its cataclysmic resolution. I became obsessed and insufferable. Civil war podcasts were always booming through the house. Id drag Kenyatta and our son, Samori,to the sites of battles Gettysburg, Petersburg, the Wilderness audiobooks playing the whole way. I went to Tennessee. I saw Shiloh. I saw Fort Donelson. I saw Island No 10. At every stop I was moved. The stories of suffering, limbs amputated, men burned alive, the bravery and gallantry, all of it seeped up out of the ground and enveloped me. But something else accompanied this hallowed feeling: a sense that the story, as it was told on these sites, as it was interpreted by visitors most of them white was incomplete, and this incompletion was not thoughtless but essential. The tactics of the war were always up for discussion, but the animating cause of those tactics, with but a few exceptions, went unsaid.

Former slaves working as labourers for the Union war effort at White House Landing, Virginia, 1863. Photograph: Andrew J Russell/Medford Historical Society Col

By then, I knew. The history books spoke where tourism could not. The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the civil war, represented an inconceivable financial interest $75bn in todays dollars and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60% of the countrys exports. In 1860, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River valley, where the estates of large planters loomed.

Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime the generational destruction of human bodies and all of its related offences domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances of the perpetrators of that crime and overhearing it in their whispers and watching these people, at best, denying their power to address the crime and, at worst, denying that any crime had occurred at all, even as their entire lives revolve around the fact of a robbery so large that it is written in our very names. This is not a thought experiment. America is literally unimaginable without plundered labour shackled to plundered land, without the organising principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered.

White dependency on slavery extended from the economic to the social, and the rights of whites were largely seen as dependent on the degradation of blacks. White men, wrote Mississippi senator and eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill the position here occupied by the servile race.

Antebellum Georgia governor Joseph E Brown made the same point: Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men. He blacks no masters boots, and bows the knee to no one save God alone. He receives higher wages for his labor than does the laborer of any other portion of the world, and he raises up his children, with the knowledge that they belong to no inferior caste; but that the highest members of the society in which he lives, will, if their conduct is good, respect and treat them as equals.

Enslavement provided not merely the foundation of white economic prosperity, but the foundation of white social equality, and thus the foundation of American democracy. But that was 150 years ago. And the slave south lost the war, after all. Was it not the America of Frederick Douglass that had prevailed and the Confederacy of Jefferson Davis that had been banished? Were we not a new country exalting in Martin Luther King Jrs dream?

I was never quite that far gone. But I had been wrong about the possibility of Barack Obama. And it seemed fair to consider that I might be wrong about a good deal more.

But the same year I began my exploration of the civil war and the same summer I finished American Slavery, American Freedom, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested. Gates was returning from a long trip. He was having trouble with the lock on his front door and so was attempting to force his way into his home. Someone saw this and called the police. They arrived and, after an exchange of words, Sgt James Crowleyarrested, charged and jailed Gates for disorderly conduct. It caused a minor sensation.

Henry Louis Gates, Sgt James Crowley and Barack Obama drink beer in the White House garden, July 2009. Photograph: The White House/Getty Images

Commenting on the arrest, Obama asserted that anyone in Gatess situation would be pretty angry if they were arrested in their own home. Obama added that the Cambridge police acted stupidly. He then cited the long history of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. I dont know why I expected this would go over well. I dont know why I thought this mild criticism from a new president in defence of one of the most respected academics at our countrys most lauded university in a case of obvious but still bloodless injustice might be heard by the broader country and if not agreed with, at least grappled with.

In fact, there would be no grappling. Obama was denounced for having attacked the police, and the furore grew so great that it momentarily threatened to waylay his agenda. The president beat a hasty retreat. He apologised to the police officer, then invited Crowley and Gates to the White House for a beer. It was absurd. It was spectacle. But it cohered to the common theory, it appealed to the redemptive spirit and reduced the horror of being detained by an armed officer of the state, and all of the history of that horror, to something that could be resolved over a beer.

And now the lies of the civil war and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave. America had a biography, and in that biography, the shackling of black people slaves and free featured prominently. I could not yet draw literal connections, though that would come. But what I sensed was a country trying to skip out on a bill, trying to stave off a terrible accounting.

Adapted from We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which will be published by Hamish Hamilton on 5 October at 16.99. To buy it for 14.44, got to go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2xFC7UL

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2fQQy3T via Viral News HQ

[viralhottopics]

A Definitive Ranking Of Girl Scout Cookies By Betchiness

About this time every year the entire country (or maybe the whole world, IDK) freaks the fuck out over Girl Scout cookies. Weird kids who like camping and being nice come to your door in creepy-ass uniforms and the mom posse at work sends mass emails about ordering on time. And then a passive-aggressive fight breaks out over whose kid you’re going to order from, and then Debbie stops getting invited to the after-work happy hours and you all have to pretend it’s not weird, and … wait, where was I? Oh yeah. While normally all that pestering would annoy the shit out of me, when it comes to Thin Mints and Tagalongs you can spam my inbox all fucking day. So to get you ready for cookie season (which cruelly comes right before beach season, WHY), were ranking all of the treats by betchiness so you know which ones to buy and which ones are total social suicide.

12. Do-si-dos/Peanut Butter Sandwiches

Look, its a Girl Scout cookie so its not like its bad or anything, its just not great. First, let’s talk about these names. On the one hand, you’ve got Do-si-do, which makes me feel like I’m at a square dance. Also, I’m not sure what hoe-downs have to do with peanut butter and oatmeal. Speaking of, your alternative name is “Peanut Butter Sandwich”real inventive. Then you get to the cookie, which is just two (chocolate chip-less) oatmeal cookies with peanut butter in the middle. Whatever you call these, theyre fat and lumpy and ugly. Kinda like you will be after you eat a whole box of ’em.

11. Trios

Another oatmeal cookie. Bleh. The Trio has chocolate chips in it, though, so it beats out the Do-si-do. But really, if you’re going to spend $6or whatever ungodly amount they’re charging these dayson some fucking oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, it’s time to look at your life, look at your choices.

10. Smores

“Crunchy graham sandwich cookies with creamy chocolate and marshmallowy filling” sounds pretty good and all, but we fail to see how these differ from Oreo S’mores, which you can literally buy for half the price at Target. you say. Ok. Fine. On a less cheap note, these things are the newest to the cookie roster and youve gotta pay your dues before you get to sit with the plastics classics.

9. S’mores

That’s not a typo; there are two s’mores flavored cookies that are both creatively named “Girl Scout S’mores”. Like, what? You mean to tell me Tagalongs have two different names depending on what region of the country you’re in, but you couldn’t come up with a separate name for a whole other cookie? Normally I’d admire that type of commitment to not doing work, but that shit is just laziness. Do better, Girl Scouts. Anyway, this shit is essentially a graham cracker that’s dipped in “crme icing” aka fake marshmallow shit and then covered in chocolate. Anything that’s covered in chocolate is a definite yes in my book (future lovers, take note), but Girl Scouts really shot itself in the foot with the description on this one. “WHOA!”? Really? Does this really warrant an all-caps WHOA? The person who wrote this description is the type of person who talks about how “naughty” they’re being when they order fries at a restaurant instead of a side salad. I cannot, in good conscience, award this cookie any higher of a place on the betch scale.

8. Trefoils/Shortbreads

Trefoils are kind of like that teacher at your high school who only does the bare minimum and you wonder how they’re still there when you go back to visit for your 10th year reunion. The answer, for both the teacher and this cookie, is tenure. Trefoils are a pretty good option when you want to eat dessert but also partake in some cognitive dissonance, i.e. False. It can be that bad, because I’m sure these things are straight butter. Look, there’s even a sugar cube next to it in the picture! So anyway, while I’m sure we’ll have to pry these cookies from Juliette Gordon Low’s dead hands, Trefoils are actually pretty basic and not that great.Plus, the Girl Scouts have gone fucking ham with flavored shortbread cookie options lately (well get to those later) so you might as well branch out and not be a dud.

7. Toffee-tastics

There’s not much else to say about Toffee-tastics. I’ve never heard of them in my life, and they’re a regular-ass shortbread cookie with some toffee thrown in for a little excitement. They’re kinda like, the Danielle M. of Girl Scout cookies. Bonus betch points awarded for being gluten free, though.

6. Lemonades

Meet the lemon version of a Trefoil. Its not gluten free so youre probably wondering why its higher up than Toffee-tastic, and thats because unlike the Grammys we here at Betches appreciate Beyonc and the creative genius that is and want to show it some love. Beyhive for life (please don’t come after us).

5. Thanks-A-Lots

Finally the last shortbread. Someone in the kitchen is the fucking Gretchen Weiners of shortbread, and Girl Scouts really needs to get out more and come up with some new ideas. Shortbread? For cookies? Groundbreaking. Anyway, this one is at the top of its friend group because its dipped in chocolate (see my previous note). But it’s not higher up on the list in general because it’s called a Thanks-A-Lot. Like bitch, what are you thanking me for? You’re thanking me for eating you? That’s like your friend Karen who catches her boyfriend cheating, only to end up apologizing for “not appreciating him enough.” We don’t like Delusional Daters or delusional cookies, so the best these are gonna get is the middle of the pack.

4. Savannah Smiles

Is this what that girl from was talking about when she said she wanted to bake a cake of rainbows and smiles?? Whoa. I think I’m onto something here. Savannah Smiles are cute little tea cookies dusted in powdered sugar, and they look like something you snacked on at cotillion class before your Deb Ball. V betchy. Theyre also not going to make you (as) fat because there are only 140 calories in five cookies. And if youre eating more than five in one session, you need therapy. Or Jesus.

3. Tagalongs/Peanut Butter Patties

First things first, wtf is a Peanut Butter Patty? Just no. I am ride or die for Team Tagalong. You can put that on my gravestone. If I had to guess, TAGALONGS are like 50% of the populations fave, and it’s easy to see why. Its peanut butter on top of a cookie and then the whole thing is covered in chocolate and sprinkled with hopes and dreams. It only loses points for being one of the unhealthiest cookies, but fuck it. I said I was ride or die, and I choose death by Tagalong.

2. Samoas/Caramel deLites

God these are so fucking good. Theyre covered in caramel and dark chocolate and coconut, so its safe to say theyre the most sophisticated of all the cookies. Samoas are def the most inventive in terms of shape, texture, and flavor combination. Also, they have a hole in the middle which allows us to pretend they’re less calories than the other fully circular cookies. The only reason Samoas aren’t number 1 is because we’re not sure if the name is vaguely racist or not. Are you still allowed to say Samoa?

1. Thin Mints

Fucking duh. The day they get rid of Thin Mints will be the day hell freezes over. Actually, given that our country is run by a moldy fascist clementine and New York City’s weather forecast is a page out of the screenplay, that’s probably not such a good metaphor. But you get my point: Thin Mints are amazing. You can eat them plain. You can freeze them and crumble them on ice cream. You can make alcoholic Thin Mint milkshakes. The limit on your fatness truly does not exist when Thin Mints are involved. And in case their versatility wasnt enough, theyre veganbut we bet you didn’t even know that because they’re not constantly broadcasting it. All hail Thin Mints.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2m9swif

from A Definitive Ranking Of Girl Scout Cookies By Betchiness

[trendingnewsb]

We should have seen Trump coming | Ta-Nehisi Coates

The long read: Obamas rise felt like a new chapter in American history. But the original sin of white supremacy was not so easily erased

I have often wondered how I missed the coming tragedy. It is not so much that I should have predicted that Americans would elect Donald Trump. Its just that I shouldnt have put it past us. It was tough to keep track of the currents of politics and pageantry swirling at once. All my life I had seen myself, and my people, backed into a corner. Had I been wrong? Watching the crowds at county fairs cheer for Michelle Obama in 2008, or flipping through the enchanting photo spreads of the glamorous incoming administration, it was easy to believe that I had been.

And it was more than symbolic. Barack Obamas victory meant not just a black president but also that Democrats, the party supported by most black people, enjoyed majorities in Congress. Prominent intellectuals were predicting that modern conservatism a movement steeped in white resentment was at its end and that a demographic wave of Asians, Latinos and blacks would sink the Republican party.

Back in the summer of 2008, as Obama closed out the primary and closed in on history, vendors in Harlem hawked T-shirts emblazoned with his face and posters placing him in the black Valhalla where Martin, Malcolm and Harriet were throned. It is hard to remember the excitement of that time, because I now know that the sense we had that summer, the sense that we were approaching an end-of-history moment, proved to be wrong.

It is not so much that I logically reasoned out that Obamas election would author a post-racist age. But it now seemed possible that white supremacy, the scourge of American history, might well be banished in my lifetime. In those days I imagined racism as a tumour that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. From that perspective, it seemed possible that the success of one man really could alter history, or even end it.

I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language as though he actually trusted them and believed in them. It was not my language. It was not even a language I was much interested in, save to understand how he had come to speak it and its effect on those who heard it. More interesting to me was that he had somehow balanced that language with the language of the south side of Chicago. He referred to himself, unambiguously, as a black man. He had married a black woman. It is easy to forget how shocking this was, given the common belief at the time that there was a direct relationship between success and assimilation. The narrative held that successful black men took white wives and crossed over into that arid no-mans-land that was not black, though it could never be white. Blackness for such men was not a thing to root yourself in but something to evade and escape. Barack Obama found a third way a means of communicating his affection for white America without fawning over it. White people were enchanted by him and those who worked in newsrooms seemed most enchanted of all.

But I could see that those charged with analysing the import of Obamas blackness were, in the main, working off an old script. Obama was dubbed the new Tiger Woods of American politics, as a man who wasnt exactly black. I understood the point Obama was not black as these writers understood black. It wasnt just that he wasnt a drug dealer, like most black men on the news, but that he did not hail from an inner city, he was not raised on chitterlings, his mother had not washed white peoples floors. But this confusion was a reduction of racisms true breadth, premised on the need to fix black people in one corner of the universe so that white people may be secure in all the rest of it. So to understand Obama, analysts needed to give him a superpower that explained how this self-described black man escaped his assigned corner. That power was his mixed ancestry.

The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But when he was a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half. Ancestry isnt even really necessary. My wife, Kenyatta, was the only black girl in her Tennessee gifted and talented classes from age six. She could dance and double dutch with the best of them. Her white classmates did not care. Youre not really black, they would say. They meant it as a compliment. But what they really meant was to slander her neighbours and family, to reorder the world in such a way that confirmed their status among the master class. And if Obama, rooted in the world of slaves, could rise above the masters, all the while claiming the identity and traditions of slaves, was there any real meaning in being a master at all?

Denying Barack Obama his blackness served another purpose: it was a means of coping with having been wrong. Those of us who did not believe there could be a black president were challenged by the sudden prospect of one. It is easy to see how it all makes sense now in every era there have been individual black people capable of defying the bonds of white supremacy, even as that same system held the great mass of us captive. I will speak for myself and say that before Obamas campaign began, the American presidency seemed out of reach. It existed so high in the firmament, and seemed so synonymous with the countrys sense of itself, that I never gave the prospect of a black president much thought.

By the summer of 2008, it was clear that Id made an error. Two responses were possible: (1) assess that error and reconsider the nature of the world in which I lived; or (2) refuse to accept the error and simply retrofit yesterdays reasoning to this new reality. The notion that Obama was a different kind of black allowed for that latter option and the comfort of being right. But some of us had not wanted to be right. And when we asserted that America aint never letting no nigger be president, we were not bragging. Instinct warned me against hope. But instinct had also warned me against Obama winning Iowa, and instinct was wrong. And if we had misjudged Americas support for a black man running to occupy the White House, perhaps I had misjudged the nature of my country. Perhaps we were just now awakening from some awful nightmare, and if Barack Obama was not the catalyst of that awakening, he was at least the sign. And just like that, I was swept away, because I wanted desperately to be swept away, and taking the measure of my community, I saw that I was not alone.

There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that very racism, pinned into ghettos, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born. And so we struggle out of fear for our children. We struggle out of fear for ourselves. We struggle to avoid our feelings, because to actually consider all that was taken, to understand that it was taken systemically, that the taking is essential to America and echoes down through the ages, could make you crazy. But after Obamas election it seemed that perhaps there was another way. Perhaps we, as Americans, could elide the terrible history, elide the national crime. Maybe it was possible to fix the problems afflicting black people without focusing on race. Perhaps it was possible to think of black people as a community in disproportionate need, worthy of aid simply because they were Americans in need. Better schools could be built, better healthcare administered, better jobs made available, not because of anything specific in the black experience but precisely because there isnt. If you squinted for a moment, if you actually tried to believe, it made so much sense. All that was needed for this new theory was a champion articulate, young, clean. And maybe this new champion had arrived.

That was one way of thinking about things.Here was another. Son, my father said of Obama, you know the country got to be messed up for them folks to give him the job. The economy was on the brink. The blood of untold numbers of Iraqis was on our hands. Hurricane Katrina had shamed the society. From this other angle, post-racialism and good feeling were taken up not so much out of elevation in consciousness but out of desperation.

It all makes so much sense now. The pageantry, the math, the magazines, the essays heralded an end to the old country with all its divisions. We forgot that there were those who loved that old country as it was, who did not lament the divisions but drew power from them.

A Confederate flag with the name of US president Donald Trump, North Carolina, May 2017. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

And so we saw postcards with watermelons on the White House lawn. We saw simian caricatures of the first family, the invocation of a food-stamp president and his anticolonial, Islamist agenda. These were the fetishes that gathered the tribe of white supremacy, that rallied them to the age-old banner and if there was one mistake, one reason why I did not see the coming tragedy, why I did not account for its possibilities, it was because, at that point, I had not yet truly considered that banners fearsome power.

The opportunity for that consideration came by coincidence. The eight years of Barack Obama bracketed the 150th anniversary of the civil war Americas preeminent existential crisis. In 1861, believing themselves immersed in a short war, the forces of union thought white supremacy was still affordable. So even in the north the cause of abolition was denounced, and blacks were forbidden from fighting in the army. But the war dragged on, and wallowing in white supremacy amid the increase of dead was like wallowing in pearls amid a famine. Emancipation was embraced. Blacks were recruited and sent into battle. Later they were enfranchised and sent to serve in the halls of government, national and statewide. But in 1876, with the hot war now passed, and the need for black soldiers gone, the country returned to its supremacist roots. A revolution has taken place by force of arms and a race are disenfranchised, wrote Mississippis Reconstruction-era governor, Adelbert Ames.

They are to be returned to a condition of serfdom an era of second slavery The nation should have acted but it was tired of the annual autumnal outbreaks in the South The political death of the negro will forever release the nation from the weariness from such political outbreaks. You may think I exaggerate. Time will show you how accurate my statements are.

So there was nothing new in the suddenly transracial spirit that saw the country, in 2008, reaching for the best part of itself. It had done so before and then promptly retrenched in the worst part of itself. To see this connection, to see Obamas election as part of a familiar cycle, you would have had to understand how central the brand of white supremacy was to the country. I did not. I could remember, as a child, the black nationalists claiming the country was built by slaves. But this claim was rarely evidenced and mostly struck me as an applause line or rhetorical point. I understood slavery as bad and I had a vague sense that it had once been integral to the country and that the dispute over it had, somehow, contributed to the civil war.

But even that partial sense ran contrary to the way the civil war was presented in the popular culture, as a violent misunderstanding, an honourable duel between wayward brothers, instead of what it was a spectacular chapter in a long war that was declared when the first Africans were brought chained to American shores.

When it comes to the civil war, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone With the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding African slavery. That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilisation, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honoured through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.

The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this countrys history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that it was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face this truth or forge a national identity out of it?

For now the country holds to the common theory that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive, a fraught and still-incomplete resolution of the accidental hypocrisy of a nation founded by slaveholders extolling a gospel of freedom. This common theory dominates much of American discourse, from left to right. Conveniently, it holds the possibility of ultimate resolution, for if right-thinking individuals can dedicate themselves to finishing the work of ensuring freedom for all, then perhaps the ghosts of history can be escaped. It was the common theory through its promise of a progressive American history, where the country improves itself inexorably and necessarily that allowed for Obamas rise. And it was that rise that offered me that chance to see that theory for the illusion that it was.

Immersed in my reading, it became clear to me that the common theory of providential progress, of the inevitable reconciliation between the sin of slavery and the democratic ideal, was myth. Marking the moment of awakening is like marking the moment one fell in love. If forced I would say I took my tumble with the dark vision of historian Edmund Morgans book American Slavery, American Freedom. Certainly slavery was contrary to Americas stated democratic precepts, conceded Morgan, but in fact, it was slavery that allowed American democracy to exist in the first place. It was slavery that gifted much of the south with a working class that lived outside of all protections and could be driven, beaten and traded into generational perpetuity. Profits pulled from these workers, repression of the normal angst of labour, and the ability to employ this labour on abundant land stolen from Native Americans formed a foundation for democratic equality among a people who came to see skin colour and hair textures as defining features. Morgan showed the process in motion through the law rights gradually awarded to the mass of European poor and oppressed, at precisely the same time they were being stripped from enslaved Africans and their descendants.

It was not just Edmund Morgan. It was James McPherson. It was Barbara Fields. It was David Blight. Together they guided me through the history of slavery and its cataclysmic resolution. I became obsessed and insufferable. Civil war podcasts were always booming through the house. Id drag Kenyatta and our son, Samori,to the sites of battles Gettysburg, Petersburg, the Wilderness audiobooks playing the whole way. I went to Tennessee. I saw Shiloh. I saw Fort Donelson. I saw Island No 10. At every stop I was moved. The stories of suffering, limbs amputated, men burned alive, the bravery and gallantry, all of it seeped up out of the ground and enveloped me. But something else accompanied this hallowed feeling: a sense that the story, as it was told on these sites, as it was interpreted by visitors most of them white was incomplete, and this incompletion was not thoughtless but essential. The tactics of the war were always up for discussion, but the animating cause of those tactics, with but a few exceptions, went unsaid.

Former slaves working as labourers for the Union war effort at White House Landing, Virginia, 1863. Photograph: Andrew J Russell/Medford Historical Society Col

By then, I knew. The history books spoke where tourism could not. The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the civil war, represented an inconceivable financial interest $75bn in todays dollars and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60% of the countrys exports. In 1860, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River valley, where the estates of large planters loomed.

Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime the generational destruction of human bodies and all of its related offences domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances of the perpetrators of that crime and overhearing it in their whispers and watching these people, at best, denying their power to address the crime and, at worst, denying that any crime had occurred at all, even as their entire lives revolve around the fact of a robbery so large that it is written in our very names. This is not a thought experiment. America is literally unimaginable without plundered labour shackled to plundered land, without the organising principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered.

White dependency on slavery extended from the economic to the social, and the rights of whites were largely seen as dependent on the degradation of blacks. White men, wrote Mississippi senator and eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill the position here occupied by the servile race.

Antebellum Georgia governor Joseph E Brown made the same point: Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men. He blacks no masters boots, and bows the knee to no one save God alone. He receives higher wages for his labor than does the laborer of any other portion of the world, and he raises up his children, with the knowledge that they belong to no inferior caste; but that the highest members of the society in which he lives, will, if their conduct is good, respect and treat them as equals.

Enslavement provided not merely the foundation of white economic prosperity, but the foundation of white social equality, and thus the foundation of American democracy. But that was 150 years ago. And the slave south lost the war, after all. Was it not the America of Frederick Douglass that had prevailed and the Confederacy of Jefferson Davis that had been banished? Were we not a new country exalting in Martin Luther King Jrs dream?

I was never quite that far gone. But I had been wrong about the possibility of Barack Obama. And it seemed fair to consider that I might be wrong about a good deal more.

But the same year I began my exploration of the civil war and the same summer I finished American Slavery, American Freedom, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested. Gates was returning from a long trip. He was having trouble with the lock on his front door and so was attempting to force his way into his home. Someone saw this and called the police. They arrived and, after an exchange of words, Sgt James Crowleyarrested, charged and jailed Gates for disorderly conduct. It caused a minor sensation.

Henry Louis Gates, Sgt James Crowley and Barack Obama drink beer in the White House garden, July 2009. Photograph: The White House/Getty Images

Commenting on the arrest, Obama asserted that anyone in Gatess situation would be pretty angry if they were arrested in their own home. Obama added that the Cambridge police acted stupidly. He then cited the long history of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. I dont know why I expected this would go over well. I dont know why I thought this mild criticism from a new president in defence of one of the most respected academics at our countrys most lauded university in a case of obvious but still bloodless injustice might be heard by the broader country and if not agreed with, at least grappled with.

In fact, there would be no grappling. Obama was denounced for having attacked the police, and the furore grew so great that it momentarily threatened to waylay his agenda. The president beat a hasty retreat. He apologised to the police officer, then invited Crowley and Gates to the White House for a beer. It was absurd. It was spectacle. But it cohered to the common theory, it appealed to the redemptive spirit and reduced the horror of being detained by an armed officer of the state, and all of the history of that horror, to something that could be resolved over a beer.

And now the lies of the civil war and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave. America had a biography, and in that biography, the shackling of black people slaves and free featured prominently. I could not yet draw literal connections, though that would come. But what I sensed was a country trying to skip out on a bill, trying to stave off a terrible accounting.

Adapted from We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which will be published by Hamish Hamilton on 5 October at 16.99. To buy it for 14.44, got to go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2xFC7UL

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2fQQy3T via Viral News HQ