#so i mitigated a possible concussion

[britneyshakespeare]

Funny. I was thinking just yesterday about how it had been awhile (almost a year) since I had a good old fashioned fainting spell. And the last time I had one I didn't even think I was dying like a lot of other times I've had them in the past. Well then last night (tonight? Today?) between 2 and 3 in the morning I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, was thinking "man this feels like so much effort I'm so tired" when I turned around to dry them, and then I realized I was on the floor somehow in the fight of my life with the perception of consciousness again.

[magical-mistakes-vm]

17

"No worries, Elmar, I have made challenge regarding Mahala.  As such, she will come home with me." Balor gave no one time to react before he strode quickly from the room, leaving the others to try and catch up.  He was grinning as he made his way down the hall.  It was game time.

"The fuck you will," Vollrath replied, and almost jogged after Balor.  He grabbed his brother, and brought him to a stop in the hallway.  Elmar and Baldur weren't sure if they should step in or just go grab Mahala and run.  "She is going nowhere with you."

"So, she does mean something to you?" He'd known it.  Baldur had been covering for his brother.  Balor broke out laughing, then calmed and leaned towards Vollrath.  "She needs away from emotional stress and raw power unrestrained in the air.  You're a live wire of both right now, little brother. " Balor tipped his head and raised his brows, waiting for Vollrath to try and argue. “And I still give challenge, so…she is coming home with me.” His grin grew wide.

"She doesn't even know you.  After all she's gone through she should either go home alone, or with one of us.  Do you really want to inflict Coven politics on her after what you know she’s gone through today?  Just to be a complete asshole to me?" Vollrath could not even say why he did not want her alone with Balor other than jealousy.  Unlike his two friends, it would not be beneath his brother to sabotage things with Mahala.  He was ready to resort to violence to stop his brother.

Balor led a faction of the Coven that leaned towards darker magic.  They butted heads regarding this frequently via email, but was one of the reasons it had been so long since a face to face meeting had taken place.   Not only could Balor cause a rift between him and Mahala, he could lead her down that path.  The thought of either of those made Vollrath’s heart hurt in his chest.  

"Let her decide." Balor knew he was playing with fire there, but he also wanted to make sure this was not Stockholm Syndrome or some undue influence. He'd never known Vollrath to do that, but something was definitely off with the whole situation.  If nothing was being done to cause her to choose his brother, he would abide by the female’s decision.

Vollrath didn't like it, but he also didn't want to keep fighting with him.  "Fine.  But what she decides is final." The men shook in agreement.

When the four men made it back to Vollrath’s office, it was clear Mahala was tired and really did need rest.  On the walk there, Elmar shared his suspicion that she was still suffering a concussion.   While he could force total healing, without knowing exactly what you WERE healing, you could do more harm than good.  So he had been mitigating symptoms more than anything and trying to boost her natural healing magic.

"Sweetheart," Vollrath started, and from the beginning she could tell something was wrong, "there is a possibility that you may have a concussion.   You shouldn't be alone tonight, and someone needs to keep you awake.  So, you have an interesting assortment of warlocks to choose from.  Baldur, Elmar, myself, or my brother, Balor. I believe you met earlier." 

Mahala looked at all four of them in turn.  Was this a joke?  Maybe a test? How was she supposed to decide on one of them?  After at least a full minute, she sighed heavily and closed her eyes.  What had she done to deserve such a day?  Maybe this was a hallucination and she had yet to wake up in Vollrath’s arms on his couch.  Unfortunately, she wasn’t that lucky.

"I have not totally forgiven Elmar and Baldur for their behavior earlier, " she started as she slowly opened her eyes.  Mahala wanted to fall into Vollrath’s arms, to feel his lips on hers again, to talk more as they had the night before.  However, he was irritated, and she could feel the same pressure in her head as earlier but not as strong.  As the day had worn on, she had learned to differentiate the vibration of each man, and it was Vollrath affecting her currently. 

Paying no mind to the others in the room, Mahala walked over till she was right in front of Vollrath.  Her hands slightly clasped the lapels of his suit coat.  "I need you to trust me.  You get jealous and mad after one night spent talking, and I get the migraine from hell from it.  You're doing it again." A soft sigh escaped her slightly parted lips as her gaze fell to the middle of his chest.

"Löwin, he's still getting used to you having gotten under his skin." Balor interjected, garnering looks from the other four assembled.  "He trusts you, he doesn't trust me."  His brows rose as he tipped his head towards his brother with an annoyed smirk that narrowed his eyes slightly.

Mahala looked back and forth confused.  She felt like she was being set up by being asked to choose who she was leaving with,  and she wasn't liking it.  "Then why even offer you as an option?  What is going on here?"  Vollrath tried to put his hands on her lower back as a sign of affection, but now she pushed him off.  "No, I feel pushed and pulled like this is some kind of game, and I don't like it.  You're all four fucked up." 

Pushing away from Vollrath, Mahala strode quickly from the room, tears streaming down her cheeks.  Vollrath quickly followed, not sure what he was going to say to make anything better, but knowing that he couldn’t leave her alone.  Her tears were already shredding his heart.  Fuck, what did he do now?

Balor was right behind his brother with Baldur on his heels, Elmar bringing up the rear.   None of them wanted Mahala alone or upset.   It was clear that the day's events, plus the familial issues between the brothers, had brought about a situation that needed handled, and needed handled NOW.

"Mahala, wait." Vollrath lightly touched her arm as he caught up with her in the hall.  He didn't want to grab her.  She'd been jerked around enough by Jonathan earlier, but he wanted her attention.  "I think you misunderstood."

She stopped and spun to face him, upset etched on every part of her face and laced through her voice. "Then explain. Do you trust me? Him? What is going on, Vollrath?" Her eyes searched his face, imploring him to give her an answer that made sense, to ease the ache in her heart and eradicate the feeling she'd been a fool.

He sighed, running his hands lightly over her upper arms. "Yes, I trust you.  After all we discussed last night, I would hope you would know that.  I also have no reason to demand or expect anything from you." Vollrath stepped closer, still wondering where the foreign feelings of protectiveness and possessiveness came from.  "Do I trust Balor to keep you safe and take care of you? Yes. Do I think he'd also tell you one sided truths and try to put me in a bad light?  Also yes."  One hand rose to cup the side of her face while the other found the small of her back to pull her closer to him. "We already know there is something pulling us together, little witch.  I'm sorry if my fumbling of handling it is causing you pain. I don't want that, and I don't want you pushed away." 

The other three men had stopped a few feet away.  Balor wanted to step in, not to cause his brother problems, but because he had a clearer picture of what was transpiring; and also the complications of who she was.  There were things he doubted Vollrath knew, things he needed to if he was to be with Mahala and protect her.  Unfortunately, he also knew if he even tried to utter a sentence at the moment, he would most likely end up with a broken jaw courtesy of the brother he’d be trying to help.

"I…I just feel so confused with all that has gone on.  Last night with us. Then today here, not only with Baldur and Elmar, but with Jonathan too." As she had earlier, Mahala’s hands gently held the lapels to his suit coat.  "I don't understand what is going on.  Not with us. Not with your friends. Not with any of this."  Her eyes slowly closed as she choked back a half sob.   Her heart hurt almost as much as her head.

“My brother is not easy to figure out, Löwin.”  Balor said from a distance, he might have decided to interject, but not to get in his brother’s reach.   “He’s still trying to figure it out himself, and he’s not the best with patience.”  The death glare that Balor was getting would make most men wither, but he was not afraid of Vollrath lashing out at him from a distance.  For one thing, his brother knew he was right, also, Vollrath had to be wondering what Balor knew that he didn’t.

“You aren’t helping.”  Vollrath’s jaw locked and he closed his eyes, focusing on breathing and not hitting Balor.  He would keep following Mahala if she kept trying to run away, but he would prefer not to have to.  

“I’m not trying to.  I’m trying to let her know what she’s in for.  After all, you haven’t been paying attention.”  Now Balor was just smug and all four of the others were looking at him quite annoyed.  He wasn’t going to share anything any sooner than he had to.  Watching his brother trying to figure it out was much more entertaining for him, and currently Vollrath couldn’t be much more frustrated.

Mahala took a breath, pulled away from Vollrath, turned and strode over to Balor quickly.  The sound of her hand impacting the side of his face seemed to echo off of the walls of the hallway, as the other three men stood there with eyes widening, Baldur’s jaw actually going slack as well. For his part, Balor looked no less stunned than the others that she had not only challenged him, but physically assaulted him.  He might be at least six inches taller than her, but Mahala went toe to toe with Balor and stared directly into his eyes, her face only inches from his.  Her chest rose and fell with her breath for a full minute before she spoke as she fought to get control of her own anger, fuck everyone else in the room.

“I honestly don’t give one single fuck what your problem is with your own brother, but if it concerns me then I do.  So either spit it out in plain fucking English or get the fuck out of here.  I’m losing patience with you and for some reason it seems like the other three in this hallway won’t confront you, so I damn well will.”   Her back was straight, her head erect, and she didn’t flinch from the icy blue eyes that seemed to be trying to bore a hole in her.  She wasn’t sure why Vollrath, Baldur, and Elmar were intimidated by him, but she wasn’t.  That could be a mistake, given she had no clue how powerful of a warlock he was, but it was her mistake to make.  She’d certainly made enough mistakes in the last twenty-four hours, what was one more?

[welcome-to-the-end-of-eras]

I just read through the exy rules and regulations for the first time and like. I mean this in the nicest way possible. It’s so fucking obvious this sport was made up.

1.) The goal??? Completely impractical. Goals like hockey nets or soccer nets either need to be mobile so they mitigate the risk of concussion, or be so large that there is little to no risk of injury from the goal. The exy goal is just. A wall??? And a rule that says “don’t cross this line”??? What if a player is running too fast and they accidentally collide with the goalkeeper into the wall??? What if a goalkeeper tries to dive for a shot on goal and ends up diving into the wall???

2.) Speaking of goalkeepers, their rackets are so stupid looking. Biblically accurate goalkeeper rackets look like giant fucking church fans. Or ig it’s most like a tennis racket but ??? That’s still not great??? Goalkeepers can’t catch the fucking ball???

3.) MOUTHGUARDS ARE OPTIONAL??? MOUTHGUARDS ARE NOT OPTIONAL, EVEN WITH CAGED HELMETS

4.) You can’t start from the exact spot play stopped every single time. Unless it’s like a dealer putting the ball back in play??? But it’s not really specified. A full face off can’t happen if play is stopped, say, against the wall.

5.) Why would a field player willingly choose thigh guards??? Football players have pants with built in thigh guards sometimes, but those are like full pants meant to not impede movement too severely, nobody would willingly choose thigh guards in a sport that priorities speed

This is not me hating, to clarify. I simply think it’s fun to think about the logistics of it all.

[mandana-the-service-pup]

Just a few notes:

1) These are all great questions that could really help someone if they needed it. I did not need assistance. I needed was to be left alone while I laid down for a few minutes. There are other disabilities that may also require to be left alone (both physical and psychiatric). It may seem counterintuitive but sometimes it’s the best thing for that person.

2) In a different scenario I might have asked for help. If it was hot I might have said yes to water. If my blood sugar was causing problems I might have said yes to a snack. If it was a sketchy place or if I was losing consciousness I might have asked her to stay with me or get someone to help me. If I fell and hit my head (hence the lying down part being so important) I probably would have asked for paramedics. Helping is good but if they decline help then accept that and move on. Don’t stay and keep asking them the same questions.

3) There is an important exception to this. If they don’t seam coherent, please stay and get involved if possible. There are serious medical conditions that can mimic being intoxicated. It gets people into really dangerous situations where they could be taken advantage of and even assaulted by business staff and police when they should be going to the ER for something like a stroke, concussion, ketosis, etc. So if the person is fighting you and telling you to leave them alone but you have good reason to believe they are not coherent/safe then please call paramedics so they can handle that situation safely and effectively.

4) Read the signs. I’ve been meaning to get nonverbal cards with disability specific info to hand out but I do have signs on my service dogs gear that say “GIVE US SPACE” “Medical Alert Service Dog // Please Ignore Me” “Do Not Distract” “Do Not Touch” Usually people who go down often will have specific patches or signs telling the general public what to do in those situations. They’re there for a reason. Unless the person looks like they hit their head or is having some other emergency then the best course of action is to do what their signs say. Service dogs are trained to mitigate disabilities for a reason. Let them do their job.

PSA: What not to do if you see a disabled person on the ground…

Yesterday I had a really bad medical episode in a grocery store that put me on the ground for half an hour. Because of the complexities of my disability, a lot of the typical things that would help someone don’t work for me.

There was no safe alternative to being on the ground in that moment. I made sure I was in a clean, safe area and that I was out of the way as much as possible. This was the first time I had to do this in public. I knew this could eventually happen and I fully expected people to approach me. Most people recognized that my service dog & I were in control of the situation and they left me alone. A few people came to check on me and offered assistance if I needed it but this one woman would not take no for an answer.

The gesture was kind. The execution was not. I told her I have a cardiac condition. That this wasn’t an emergency and it happens all the time. That the only thing that helps is to lay down and that I would be fine in a few minutes. That should have been the end of the conversation but it wasn’t.

Are you sure?

Can I help?

What’s your name?

What’s your dogs name?

Can I help you sit up?

Should I get a manager?

Do you want some water?

Do you want some lavender oil to calm down?

Should I stay?

I’m going to stay.

etc. etc. etc.

She was leaning over my service dog & I so she could hear me through my mask (she wasn’t wearing one). I was forced to sit up to answer her questions repeatedly. If I didn’t she would start to move closer and try to get even more involved. I was perfectly coherent and I was confident in handling the situation but nothing I did satisfied her. Ultimately, having to sit up and diffuse the situation made the crisis worse than it otherwise would have been and it took me longer to recover.

My body was telling me to lay down.

Be quiet. Be still.

But this one person was helping so hard that it hurt.

So here’s a PSA if you’re the type of person who wants to get involved. If a coherent person is telling you exactly how to handle their disability. LISTEN TO THEM.

[phcking-detective]

HC: deviants’ memories become “corrupted” and are influenced by emotion and perception just like human memories, sooo

Connor interfaces with RK900 and shares his memory files of Detective Gavin Reed, who has harassed, threatened, and physically assaulted him

RK900 activates fully prepared to [eliminate] this rogue police officer, as he wasn’t finished in time to actually receive orders to be a deviant hunter, so this will have to do instead

from the memory files transferred to him by his predecessor, this [Detective Reed] is clearly hostile, intimidating, and an active / immediate threat. yes, he lost the fist fight in the interrogation room, but that is largely due to the RK800′s superior construction versus more easily damaged human flesh (concussions, for example) and can be mitigated by military grade body armor and firepower, to which Detective Reed very well may have access, thus putting him on a more equal level (to the RK800 series, at least)

so please picture RK900 storming into the DPD, ready to Do Battle with Detective Reed [hostile  t h r e a t] and then

just

bursting out into confused computer static noises

t,he AOL dialup??

laughter

actual laughter. with pointing. because it’s like

Detective Gavin [t h r e a t] Reed in Connor’s memories:

[image description: scary screencap of Mr. X from resident evil with gavin Reed’s face shittily photoshopped on top and the text “BWA BWAH BWAH [kill bill sirens]” “as tall as Connor” “if you even scan me with your processors I’ll phcking kill you” “knew to hit Connor in the stomach bc that’s only protected by plastic, versus his face protected by metal skull, so clearly capable of tactical thinking even during acts of violence and cruelty” “androids have a habit of getting ... set on fire these days” “police brutality” “WILL point a loaded gun at your face and pretend to pull the trigger for laughs” “cool leather jacket” end description]

Gavin Reed in person:

[image description: Gavin Reed, but photoshopped to be much shorter and wider to look as ridiculous as possible, with the text: “I am just ,, widdle kreeture” “pwease yes steppy?” “I’m the birthday boy :(” “*simps*” “hrrrnggh I wanna fuck androids so bad it makes me look stupid” end description]

Nines deviates just from laughing so hard at this tiny ridiculous little man-rat his baby brother is so afraid of, you’re both so stupid, ahahahaha ... haaaa ... oh ra9

[petri808]

Hauntober prompt Ghost (sort of lol)

Bakudeku requested by @nona-inc Angst w/happy ending, AU modern times. Longer than I’d planned to write but stories go where they wanna lol.

Got the idea here

A Second Chance

In his adulthood, Izuku Midoriya did quite well for himself career-wise. He had a nice home and lived comfortably even though it was alone. Relationships had never really crossed his mind, which he chalked up to the turmoil of his childhood. It wasn’t a terribly horrible one but coming from divorced parents is never easy on young child minds. Why get close to anyone if they’ll probably leave eventually? That was a lesson bolstered by the end of primary school when his best friend ditched him for the popular kids.

It was Halloween night, and Izuku’s simply followed his normal routine after work consisting of dinner while watching a bit of television. Trick or treaters were a rarity in his neighborhood, so there was no sense in celebrating the holiday. As he waits for the news, he lets the current show drone on in the background while he scrolled mindlessly through his social media. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to what acquaintances posted and mostly looked for interesting or funny posts instead.

“Deku...”

Izuku’s brow furrows slightly at that ancient nickname. He looks at the television characters on the screen, had one of them said it? But instead of the tv show, he finds a fuzzy, staticky screen. He grabs his remote assuming something had gone wrong with the channel or service when...

“Deku, I’m sorry...”

“What the?” Izuku starts clicking the buttons and getting no response. The screen stays stuck, yet that voice... it was a familiar voice from long ago...

“...I’ve watched you from afar for all these years, because I could never admit how much I loved you and now it’s too late. I’m so sorry Deku. You’ll always be my only true love.”

Silence. Dead silence for a flash of a second when the television loudly blares back to life and startles Izuku out of his seat into a standing position. “What the fuck is going on?!”

The show had ended, and the news is now on in its regular-timed slot.

‘Breaking news, a major four car accident on the I10 highway has left 3 people dead and one in a critical condition. The victim identified as 37-year old K. Bakugou had been transported to the hospital for treatment. Police have closed off the highway in both directions, so anyone traveling in that area should use alternative routes...’

As he watches the footage of the accident story, Izuku’s hand unconscious covers his mouth and tears gather in his eyes. “Oh my gosh....” That was the voice he’d just heard! Of course, Katsuki was the only one who ever called him Deku.

He quickly calls one of the nurses at his hospital and they confirm that the man had in fact been transported there 15 minutes ago.

“Oh! Dr. Midoriya! We were just about to call you! Yes, patient Bakugou was brought in unconscious, lacerations to his arms and chest, broken leg, possible punctured lung, internal bleeding, concussion, and brain swelling which is why I was just about to call you in.”

“I’ll be right there.”

The entire way there, Izuku struggles to rationalize the message. If Katsuki was unconscious, how could that have been his voice? Then again that’s if you believed his television had somehow sent the message in the first place! Oh, this was entirely crazy! Izuku didn’t even know why his logical mind was allowing him to believe it had happened if not for the coincidence of the news coverage.

But as a neurosurgeon, he had to put all those questions aside and focus on the task at hand. The description the nurse had given him already indicated major problems, but it wasn’t until his own physical examination that determined the true extent of the damage. Primary surgical nurse Uraraka already had set up the operating room by the time Izuku arrived.

“The patient was revived once by EMTs in the ambulance and a second time in the ER after his heart stopped. Right now, the patient is intubated and prepped for emergency surgery.”

“Thank you, nurse Uraraka.”

Along with a fellow doctor, Izuku switched into a hyper focused mode. He works to repair the damage to the patient’s brain while the other doctor simultaneously focuses on internal chest injuries. Time was of the essence to stem the blood loss and mitigate further damage if they had any hope of saving the man, because even if he made it through the surgery, only a miracle would bring him back at this point.

It was now a waiting game. They keep Katsuki in a medically induced coma for the first three weeks as his body worked hard to repair itself. Once he was brought out of the induced coma, he still didn’t wake up, was breathing with the assistance of a machine, but at least the man’s heart was functioning normally. Surprisingly, Katsuki’s parents remembered Izuku and were grateful their son was in familiar hands. They’d initially flew in after the accident, but the cost to stay for such a long length of time would be too steep. So, after they returned home, he kept them up to date.

Each day that passed by, Izuku would check in on Katsuki’s progress like a normal doctor would, but at night he’d go home and ponder the ghostly message that had come through the television. He’d told no one about it because who would believe something so crazy? It just didn’t sound like the man, or rather child he remembered. Never once was there any indication Katsuki had romantic feelings for him, especially considering it was him not Izuku that ended their friendship. They saw each other in passing though middle, then high school and still nothing. So why is he now being told this?

Some say that when you die, any regrets you have must be released or your soul cannot ascend to the next plane. Izuku wasn’t religious or spiritual and before that Halloween trick he would have said he didn’t believe in anything beyond what he couldn’t see, touch, feel, and analyze. Ugh! Maybe that’s why this was all driving him so crazy. He wanted answers but the one person who could give it to him was stuck in a coma.

“Everything okay doctor?” One of the LPN’s asks Izuku. “I just need to check on the patients vitals.”

“Do what you need to nurse, I’m just visiting before I go home for the night.”

“Yes, doctor.” The woman makes her chart notations and leaves them alone again.

Because of Izuku’s standing at the hospital, he’d gotten Katsuki a private room. The man was taken off the breathing machine a week earlier and this way he could monitor the man without being pestered. There were times he would spend a few hours just watching the man sleep, trying to study what had become of his childhood friend. Through research, Izuku learned Katsuki had moved here around the same time that he’d started his internship at the hospital. Before that the man lived in the same town as the medical school he attended. It appeared Katsuki really was keeping track of Izuku, never married, and just worked in the marketing field.

Izuku squeezes the man’s hand with his eyes closed in a silent conversation. The only sounds being the beeps and noises of the machines to break the stillness. Lost in his own thoughts, he didn’t know what to think, what to feel, just that this man was dredging up long buried emotions that part of him was afraid to open up. Hadn’t he built up a good life, albeit a lonely one, it was still by his own wit and merits whereas Katsuki always had it so easy. The man was a smart, handsome jock, popular, and had been on track to do great things. While he was the geeky kid with freckles and wild green hair who the popular kids teased.

They were so close as little kids, all through preschool and the first years of primary. Katsuki was the extroverted one pulling him along on make believe adventures to emulate a shared love of a comic book character. In fact, it was with Katsuki’s help that he’d weathered his parent’s divorce. He idolized the stronger boy and wished he was Katsuki, not a weak like little nerd... perhaps having his child’s heart broken, really was the reason he swore off ever caring about anyone else again.

Did he just?! Izuku’s eyes pop open when his hand squeeze is returned by a weak one. Katsuki’s eyes are still closed and nothing else seemed unchanged. Perhaps it was just a nervous tremor, they happen sometimes. But no there it is again! Izuku stares down as the weak squeeze slowly turns into a grasp of his hand.

“Katsuki?”

A third squeeze. That meant the man was alert enough to hear and understand! Friend or not, it was the kind of thing to get a neurologist excited! Izuku quickly moved into doctor mode again and starts checking all the stats as well as alerting the nurse on shift.

“Welcome back Mister Bakugou.”

The man squeezes his hand.

“I’m your doctor, Midoriya. You might remember me...”

The man squeezes again and tries to talk, but after being intubated for a long time the throat tends to be dry, sore, and the muscles weakened. All that comes through is so faint it’s barely audible.

“Mister Bakugou, you’ve been unconscious for almost two months now, please try not to talk just yet, everything will be fine.”

But that only makes the man angrier. Furious red eyes flashing, Katsuki grips harder to Izuku’s hand using what little strength he has to try and pull him closer. So, Izuku leans in. “Calm down, it’s gonna...”

“Ma—y...” angry growling noises. “Mar...”

Obviously, the man wasn’t going to stop until he gave in, so Izuku leans in even more until his ear is practically next to Katsuki’s mouth. “I’m sorry?”

“Marry me damnit!!”

Izuku shoots straight up. “What?!” Is the guy serious?! The first words out of his mouth is that?! Wow... Katsuki really hasn’t changed, feisty as ever even after almost dying.

“Pa-pa—per pen!”

“H-hold on, just try to calm down please! I don’t want you to strain your heart!”

Midoriya grabs the chart, flips the paper over to the blank backside, and puts a pen in Katsuki’s hand. He holds it steady as the man scribbled shakily. ‘No waste 2nd chance marry me Deku.’

“Mister Bakugou, this is...”

The man pounds his fist on the bed then scribbles more. ‘Stop call me that! nickname!’

Izuku sighs and squeezes his eyes closed for a second. He hadn’t used that name since primary just like he’d hadn’t heard Deku all these years. “Kacchan. Happy now? I-I can’t just say okay. You—y-you ditched me remember and now you suddenly pop up and expect me to marry you?! Kacchan you almost died, I get it, that’s a scary thing to deal with, but you just need time to process...”

Katsuki writes, ‘Nothin 2 think bout. No more regrets,’ Then he mouths out the rest in a whisper, “I love you Deku.”

Izuku sighs, “I’m not saying yes or no Kacchan. Just get well first okay, then we’ll talk about everything.”

“Fine.” The man closes his eyes again seemingly satisfied with the answer.

He squeezes Katsuki’s hand. “I’ll see you in the morning Kacchan.”

When Izuku leaves that evening, he couldn’t help but walk out with a flutter in his chest and a pang in his heart. There really was a lot he still needed to get off his chest, but... he felt the honesty from Katsuki. If his dying regrets had been strong enough to reach him via spiritual mail, and the first thing he wanted to talk about was love, then... ‘take the second chance Izuku.’ Not everyone gets one.

[warsmith-38]

How I would do RWBY pt.8

Season eight.

Salem knows Cinder is coming back home.

Is patiently waiting for her to arrive with Myrmidon at her side.

Cinder shows up, hoping for mercy.

Salem suddenly has an inconvenient gap in her vocabulary when Cinder says that word.

Reminds Cinder that not only did she tell them her plan, she told them how to destroy said plan.

Cinder makes her excuses, “I had to. I didn’t have a choice. We can make another plan,” et cetera.

Salem decides to give Cinder one last chance after fucking up a plan that was older than she was.

Defeat Myrmidon and she can have her old position of number two again.

Myrmidon kicks the absolute shit out of her.

Cinder keeps making little mistakes, blames her new (metal) arm, and Myrmidon exploits every opening.

Myrmidon is sadistically playing with Cinder at this point.

Cinder pops smoke and runs the fuck away.

Myrmidon is stopped from chasing her, being told that Cinder’s execution can wait.

They must finish preparing Plan B.

She does in fact owe this latest plan to Cinder in a roundabout fashion.

The dramatics in Atlas have made Salem remember a little detail that has helped her in the past.

Nothing unites quite like a war.

The free peoples of the world either need a single enemy to face together or they need a factory reset apocalypse to recover from.

Either or, Salem isn’t picky.

The people will be all the stronger no matter which problem they have to overcome.

Ozpin getting directly involved is a snag, but she’s worked around him before.

Regardless of outcome she’ll go dormant for a few generations until most people forget she existed and then it’s back to work.

Her first target is Vacuo.

She would have preferred Vale, but she’s willing to compromise.

Grimm begin to swarm into Vacuo territory.

They had their own version of The Maginot Line, for all the good it does them.

Myrmidon is leading the charge and is the one that tears a big ass hole in their defenses.

Ozpin realizes that Salem has decided ‘fuck it’ on the whole illuminati conflict thing they’ve been doing.

Open warfare it is.

Ozpin has RWBY, JN(P)R, and SSSN sent to Vacuo to see if they can help while he calls the banners with the rest of his council.

RWBY, SSSN, and JN(P)R link up with the Vacuo Defense Force.

Meet the grimm assault with an assault of their own.

Fierce fighting pushes the grimm back to The Maginot Line.

Victory is at hand.

Everyone has a moment or two for a breather and conversations.

Then the second wave of grimm arrive.

They’re not acting like grimm usually do.

They’re using actual military tactics.

Feigning retreats, denying strategic points, and attacking weak spots you wouldn’t think would be weak.

The Black Myrmidon is directing them.

RWBY and JN(P)R have a go at her.

Myrmidon is giving a good fight, but it’s still eight on one.

Penny starts convulsing then starts attacking RWBY and JNR while saying she’s not in control.

Yang’s arm stops doing what she wants it to.

Suddenly nobody can land a hit.

Reminds people of old sparring matches.

Ren dumps his pistols and goes full kung-fu badass on Myrmidon.

Knocks off her helmet.

It’s Pyrrha. (Audience was meant to know because obvious. It’s more about the in story reveal)

She may be fucked up with grimm taint and looking like a mini-Salem, but it’s very much the Pyrrha they knew and mourned.

Everyone is stunned.

Grimm are starting to lose more ground.

Pyrrha sounds the retreat.

Grimm pull back and Grimm Blitzkrieg has been halted.

RWBY and JN(P)R are reeling from events.

Nora is inconsolable and even Ren is failing to hold it back.

Jaune is just quiet.

Penny is trying to help her new teammates as best as she can, but they’re only so much that she can do.

Ask Ozpin + The Council and EMN via video call if they knew anything about this. They didn’t.

Qrow theorizes that Tyrian was a prototype of what was done to Pyrrha.

A dead huntress revived and controlled via grimm corruption that emulates an aura.

Not only still capable as she was in life, still being able to use her semblance, and still as intelligent, but also being powered up by Salem herself.

The Council shudders to imagine an entire army of that.

To take their mind off of the thing, RWBY go scouting to see if they can find any sort of intel.

On mission they find a beaten and almost dead Cinder.

Ruby says there’s nothing to see here.

WBY say that she could have intel they could use.

Ruby says there’s nothing. To. See. Here.

WBY pick up Cinder and take her back to base.

Ruby wants it on record that this was munity from WBY.

Cinder regains consciousness and is genuinely shocked that they helped her.

Finally realizes that Salem does not give the faintest shit about her anymore if she ever really did.

Doesn’t really vibe with Ozpin, but wants to fuck over Salem as much as she can now.

Ozpin says he does not trust her, but does trust her desire for revenge.

Sends EMN, who are firmly on Ozpin’s side now (if only for self-preservation), as reinforcements and to try to help keep Cinder compliant.

Cinder tells Ruby not to worry.

After Salem is dealt with they can sort things out between them.

Cinder provides as much strategic and tactical advice as she can.

Her intel wins a few engagements and saves quite a few lives.

Despite this, Jaune says that he refuses to directly work with Cinder. Nora and Ren both mirror that statement.

They say that they’ll work with her intel, but can’t be held responsible for what might happen if they are left in the same room as her.

To them, the current situation with Pyrrha is actively Cinder’s fault.

It would have been less egregious if Pyrrha was just dead and not some insane zombie.

Penny volunteers to operate as the middlebot.

Ruby is on Jaune’s side and her clout helps keep Jaune at the strategist’s table.

The Myrmidon is spotted at a forward position without a large garrison.

JN(P)R take it on themselves to go to her despite everyone saying it’s bait.

JN(P)R fight through cursory amount of grimm and get to Myrmidon.

Conversation is mired with combat.

Nora says that Ozpin might be able to help her.

Pyrrha says that Ozpin ‘helping’ her is the reason she died.

Penny says that her team still love her and miss her.

Pyrrha says that they replaced her with a robot the first chance they got.

Ren tries to appeal to her sense of logic and morality that Salem is an evil shithead.

Pyrrha says that Ozpin is no better and would rather work with the one that brought her back to life and didn’t lead her to an early grave.

Gets to the point where N(P)R is down and Jaune is the only one standing.

Their duel is hard fought, but brief.

Jaune tells Pyrrha that he knows that even with Salem’s ‘enhancements’ she still won’t kill him.

If she does, then Pyrrha Nikos is still dead no matter what magic Salem does.

Pyrrha says that that’s one of Jaune’s worst plans ever.

He tells her to shut up and do it if she can actually do it.

Pyrrha is having troubles not talking and is clearly delaying herself.

Jaune is shouting ‘do it!’ Rorschach style.

Pyrrha doesn’t. Still gives Jaune a concussion to try and take him out of the strategic fight.

Jaune, when scolded for doing something so stupid, says that he now knows there’s still enough of Pyrrha in there that he believes he can plan around her style.

Now begins the wait for the next offensive.

Cinder has moment with EMN, trying to continue as was, giving them orders and such.

EMN call her a shit and say that they ain’t got to do shit she says. Neo flips her off double deuce style.

Cinder has moment realizing just how hated she is by everyone.

Gets sad, then angry, then sad again.

Ruby and Jaune have a moment talking about their time as team leaders.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown type of thing.

The assault happens in the middle of the night.

Salem herself is leading the charge, riding a huge-ass T-rex looking grimm.

Gives a great big ultimatum to the defenders.

Surrender and join her crusade or die.

RWBY get on the loudspeaker.

Call her a bitch.

Salem does not appreciate their humor and signals the assault.

Myrmidon directing the grimm was bad enough but Salem is terrifyingly worse.

Myrmidon was connected to a sort of grimm hivemind, but Salem directly controls said hivemind.

Salem hits them like a truck on steroids.

The defenders formed a strategy, sure, but that strategy was for Myrmidon.

This was preparing for a linebacker to hit you then getting hit by, y’know, a truck on steroids.

The defensive line is swarmed, ripped apart, and overrun with little effort.

RWBY is separated by the horde.

The fighting is desperate and vicious.

Plenty of jobbers are killed or taken away behind enemy lines.

Then it stops.

The grimm just stop moving for a moment and then they retreat.

Salem then tells everyone that she did this to prove that she could kill all of them whenever she wants.

Does kowtowing sound a little more appealing now?

All the people that were just taken are released to further the point that Salem can do as she pleases.

She gives them all forty-eight hours before her next assault.

She also says that she won’t be taking prisoners that time.

Everyone has a collective moment of ‘wow, we are fucked’.

Cinder has an epiphany and takes it on herself to force a conversation with Jaune.

Jaune is about to try (and fail) to tear her head off when she says that she might have the solution to their problem.

Fuck the grimm, fuck mitigating loss, they need to snipe Salem herself with everything they have.

They can’t permanently kill her, no, but dropping her should send a sort of mental shock to the grimm and stun them for a good amount of time and make them vulnerable.

Vulnerable enough that the large amount of experienced hunters and defense troops will have the breathing space to kill as many as possible before they even get back to their default state.

It’s not much but having a window of working space before Salem gets back up is better than nothing.

Jaune asks her how the fuck are they going to manage to even touch Salem to begin with.

Cinder says to leave that to team CEMN.

He tells her to tell him or else he’s going to call in Ruby.

The plan is to exploit Salem’s fear of Ozpin using Emerald’s hallucinations and Neo’s illusions.

Salem is rarely scared, but when she is she is panicky and rather cowardly.

Cinder has only seen it once when Salem believed that Ozpin had somehow snuck into her sanctum.

They just need her to panic for a moment and then hit her with the biggest single hit they can muster.

Jaune says it’s a longshot and with the remaining forty hours they have he’ll be thinking of a better one.

But, y’know, needs must.

The next day Jaune, having failed to think of another plan, tells everyone of Cinder’s idea.

They do not care for it.

Everyone is skeptical of Cinder’s intentions (even EMN).

Cinder reminds them all that Salem wants to kill her more than most of the people present.

Even if she lets the rest of them live, ha ha, Salem is probably going to take the time to brutally execute her just to make a point.

That or Myrmidon will.

Her intention is doing the thing most likely to keep herself alive, despite the risk.

Ruby is about to threaten her until Ozpin (via video call) tells them to go through with it.

It’s basically all they have and they can’t spend their remaining time bitching about without a plan.

With great reluctance, they begin to work out a proper strategy.

One hour remains.

Weiss and Ruby have brief conversation.

Weiss commends Ruby on her maturity of being able to deal with Cinder in a non-violent manner.

Cinder has moment with EMN telling them not to take unnecessary risks.

The plan relies on them more than it does her and if they fail/die then she does too.

She also, believe it or not, cares enough about them to not want to see them die.

Salem arrives early.

She didn’t lie about the time of her attack, she just allotted about half an hour for a speech.

She gets interrupted.

By Ozpin.

Ozpin says that it’s time to settle things.

Salem wigs out a little and shies back from the front.

This behavior is mirrored by the grimm.

Defense forces strike out.

Salem is trying to organize and fight but her terror of Ozpin is keeping her on the ropes.

Eventually gets annoyed enough to try and send grimm to attack Ozpin.

Can’t land a hit.

Gets angry enough to try and attack Ozpin directly.

Lands a hit.

The illusion breaks away, revealing Neo and Emerald.

She gets attacked by Cinder and Mercury as a distraction.

Ruby has Salem in the scope of her rifle (have we all just forgotten the sniper part of Ruby’s weapon?).

Ruby has a specialized incendiary round that she can infuse with her white fire in the chamber.

She designed and fabricated it herself.

Takes the shot.

It gets blocked by Myrmidon’s thrown shield.

Myrmidon begins fighting CEMN.

Salem realizes just what has happened.

She’s impressed. Incredibly mad, but impressed.

She orders a halt to the combat.

Says that they deserve a token chance for their effort.

She will take one of the defenders for a one-on-one duel.

She’ll even hold back on her more overpowered abilities to make it more sporting.

If they win she will end her assault (and probably go somewhere else instead or just come back later).

If they lose she will continue her swarm into Vacuo.

Ruby volunteers.

WBY say that taking more than two seconds to make the decision might be a good idea.

Ruby volunteers.

JNPR, CEMN, SSSN, and the rest all agree with WBY that-

Ruby. Volunteers.

Salem has Ruby swarmed with bat/bug/whatever type grim and carries her into occupied territory.

Deep enough that they shouldn’t be easily interrupted.

Salem tells her that what she did to Summer was nothing personal, and now with the grimm nuke failed, there isn’t any reason for Salem to be against her personally.

The Cabal could use a few more capable members.

She reiterates her points on Ozpin.

He just wants to dominate the world ‘for its own good’.

Can’t have wars if you no longer have the mental ability to think for yourself.

Offer freedoms that Ozpin could nor would never give.

Tells her that she recognizes Ruby’s personality type.

She’s in love with combat.

Ruby admits that fighting makes her happy, that kicking ass gets her engines running.

Salem offers her war eternal, the chance to be fighting and winning for all time.

Ruby, once again, calls her a bitch.

Says that fighting is pointless without a good reason, like peace, to give it a purpose.

Also says that after they’ve all finally beaten her, Ozpin’s next.

Salem thought that the offer wouldn’t work but had to try.

Salem boss fight.

Salem is able to form myriad magic weapons out of thin air and change her fighting style at random.

Ruby fights as hard as she’s ever fought before.

Salem is, to her word, holding back a good amount.

It’s not helping that much.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.

Myrmidon and the grimm were left to just awkwardly stand around the battlefield.

JN(P)R tries to approach her but she (conveniently) approaches CEMN.

She was told not to continue attacking the defensive line, not the bitch that killed her.

JN(P)R is now conflicted.

They could go and help an ally fight an enemy.

The problem is that that ally is Cinder and that enemy is Pyrrha.

Myrmidon has her hands full until she starts using her semblance.

Magnetism vs a team where two members have metal limbs, you do the math.

Cinder tells her to leave the rest of them alone. It’s her she wants.

Myrmidon says that since they got involved, they die too.

This is what prompts JN(P)R to action, saying it’s more about helping EMN than C.

Myrmidon grows enraged, turning her attention to JN(P)R in earnest.

In fact, everyone is so engaged that they don’t notice a dropship flying past them overhead.

Ruby is growing tired while Salem has quite literally godlike endurance.

Salem commends her for lasting far longer than she imagined.

She hasn’t been this worked up in ages.

But all good things must come to an end.

Tells her to say hello to Summer for her.

Right as she’s about to deal the final blow she gets cut off with a dropship ramming (crashing) into her.

WBY file out and scold Ruby for agreeing to try and solo a fucking demi-goddess.

Ruby apologizes but points at the dropship that Salem just threw past them.

Salem amends the fight conditions to welcome the new challengers.

RWBY vs Salem.

First real fight against the main antagonist.

Challenging fight, magic bullshit, brutal close combat, the whole nine yards.

Sways both ways until RWBY gains the upper hand.

Culminates in a big team hit that finishes the fight.

Salem congratulates them and begins pulling the grimm back from Vacuo.

She says that this is not over and reminds them that, no, she was not fighting as hard as she could have.

They eked out a win by the skin of their teeth mostly because of Salem’s survival of the fittest/fight smarter not harder type ideology was being pandered too.

Salem is then swept away in a swarm of bat/bug/bird/whatever grimm.

Myrmidon abruptly pulls away from the fight along with the grimm, giving JN(P)R one last glance.

Ozpin finally shows up in person, tardy to the party.

Gets reports from everyone that Salem has turned the Grimmland’s southern coast into a deathtrap.

If they’re going to get at her through Vacuo they’ll need a lot to dislodge her.

Ozpin tells them that he never said they were going to get her through Vacuo.

Season eight done.

[crazybagelbitch]

Chim fractures his skull when a patient gets a little violent.

It happens quickly, way too quickly for anyone to foresee it or at all mitigate the consequences. The patient was agitated, to put it mildly, so he and Hen were being careful with Bobby, Buck, and Eddie on standby in case they needed help restraining him, but he had finally seemed to settle down. Only to violently shove Chimney the second he let his guard down, sending him flying backwards, hitting his head against the dresser with a sickening crack.

He’s not unconscious, but far too stunned, far too out of it to speak. Just laying there, gasping. 

It’s Buck that gets to him first, with Eddie and Bobby helping Hen to restrain the patient before he can do any further damage to anyone.

“Chim! Chim, I got ya,” Buck pants, trying to force himself to stay calm. It’s jis job, and he’s seen worse than this, but it’s so much harder when it’s someone he loves. And someone his sister loves.

“Buck,” he whines, slurring a bit in a way that makes Buck cringe, “d-don’t feel good.”

“I know, I know. You hit your head pretty hard but you’re going to be fine. Get you right to the hospital and get you all fixed up.”

He groans wordlessly, lazily tugging on Buck’s shirt.

“I’m here, I’m here, I got you. I got you, Chimney. I’m not going anywhere,” he assures him, tensing up when Chimney’s eyelids start to close, “no, no, no. Awake. You gotta stay awake for me, Maddie. Hey, you know what? Maddie’s going to be really pissed at you if she finds out you passed out on me.”

“M-Maaaadddie,” he whimpers, crying a bit.

“I’m gonna call her,” Buck nods enthusiastically, “I’m gonna call her for you as soon as we get you in the ambulance. Unfortunately, uh, think you’re gonna have to ride with him, but uh, Hen’s just sedated him so it should be fine.”

“Buck! How’s he doing?” Bobby shouts.

“Bad concussion, cap, possible skull fracture. Cut to the back of the head, too, he’s bleeding.”

“Maaaaddie,” he whines again, no longer even trying to focus his limited, dazed attention on Buck or anything going on around him anymore.

“Chimney?” Hen coos in a panic, gently touching his cheek, “hi, honey. I’m gonna take care of you now. You’re going to be fine.”

“Hen. Pretty.”

“Thank you, I’m also brilliant and I’ve got you so everything is going to be fine. Oh, you’re bleeding, Chim, let me try and stop that for you.”

“Mmm. Nice. Nice and pretty.”

“Does Maddie have something to worry about?” Buck jokes, booping Chimney’s nose which is something the older man would absolutely kill him for if he were more mentally present.

[racingtoaredlight]

RTARL’s 2020 NFL Season Week 11 Extravapalooza

Holy moly, we’ve already made it to Week 11. I’m honestly conflicted over whether or not this is a good thing. In terms of basic pandemic mitigation practices, the NFL conducting its season is fucking insane. These guys are all well-compensated pros, but they’re still taking risks well above and beyond what they normally do, and I truly feel pretty shitty about that. In addition, the fact that some stadiums are allowing thousands of fans inside during games is a crime against humanity, and it really lays bare how craven and sociopathic the ghouls who own sports franchises are. 

With that said, it’s extremely hypocritical of me to be so disdainful of the NFL’s current existence, since I watch the games, set my fantasy lineup, and generally enjoy all the stuff that comes with an NFL season. I usually bristle and roll my eyes whenever a sporting entity trots out the whole “We feel like we’re helping society by providing a distraction from everything going on” line, but in this case, with where we are right now as a country...the NFL really is doing that. For me, anyway. Is the stress-relief that the NFL provides to me and millions of other people worth all the bad stuff that comes with it? I don’t know. Probably not. But, I’d be lying if I said I’m not thankful that it’s there.

My picks are in BOLD, and the lines come to us courtesy of our friends at Vegas Insider. I use the “VI Consensus” line, which is the line that occurs most frequently across Vegas Insider’s list of sportsbooks. Your sportsbook of choice may offer a different number, and if you’d like my opinion on said number A) you are insane, and B) leave a comment below and I’ll try to answer at some point before things kickoff today.

EARLY GAMES

Tennessee Titans at Baltimore Ravens (-6)

It’s odd to have a game between a pair of 6-3 teams widely considered contenders that feels like a “must win” for each scuffling side. A great man once said “Desperation is a stinky cologne,” and the Titans absolutely reek coming into this one, so I’m giving them the edge. Baltimore being down two starting defensive linemen when Derrick Henry comes to town also factors into my pick, but nobody wants to hear that nerd shit, gotta go with my GUT, baby!

Philadelphia Eagles at Cleveland Browns (-2.5)

Hey, Cleveland doesn’t have to play in the middle of a tornado this week! There will still be driving rains, though. Fortunately, the Browns are built for the slop. RBs Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt are both ridiculous, but I’d like to give a special shoutout to G Wyatt Teller, who is currently Pro Football Focus’ highest-graded player...in the entire NFL. That’s some grade A beef! DE and straight-up superhuman Myles Garrett is out for this one, which is an enormous blow for the Cleveland defense. If I had any confidence whatsoever in Carson Wentz I’d think about taking Philly, but that young man is a mess.

Pittsburgh Steelers (-10.5) at Jacksonville Jaguars

I’m once again betting on the Steelers playing down to the level of their competition. The Jags kept things close against the Packers last week, there’s fight in them thar cats.

Cincinnati Bengals at Washington Football Team (-1.5)

I’m still extremely nervous for Alex Smith the entire time he’s on the field, but I have to admit there’s something magical about him making it all the way back to being exactly as Alex Smith-y as he was before (minus the scrambling ability, obviously). Washington RB J.D. McKissic has 16(!) catches on 29(!!) targets over the two games Smith has started. If this continues J.D. is going to owe Alex a cut of his next contract, and possibly the mineral rights to his legs if the need arises.

Today is Cincy RB Gio Bernard’s birthday, so LOOK OUT LADIES!

Atlanta Falcons at New Orleans Saints (-3.5)

I’m making this pick based on the assumption that New Orleans really does roll with Taysom Hill at QB for the entire game, because that’s what all currently available information indicates will happen. I really do wonder if that’s going to be the case, though. I’ve read a couple of things speculating that the reason Hill is starting is that if Jameis plays he’s likely to reach various incentive clauses in his contract and cost the Saints a bunch of money. That seems utterly ridiculous to me, because why the hell would you bother signing him at all if this is how you were gonna roll? Then again, I’m not a Football Man, so maybe my un-browned normie brain just doesn’t understand.

Detroit Lions (-3) at Carolina Panthers

CATFIGHT!!!

The Lions are the orange kitty in this scenario, because Matthew Stafford will be playing through a torn thumb while not having WR Kenny Golladay or RB D’Andre Swift at his disposal. 

New England Patriots (-2) at Houston Texans

The concept of an “emotional hedge,” first introduced to me by RTARL commenter Beer, is in play here. I have NO idea if the Patriots are actually decent or not, and this has all the makings of a letdown game coming off of their unexpected win over Baltimore. Reigning Defensive Player of the Year Stephon Gilmore is expected to be back for the Pats in this one, which is very nice. RB Sony Michel is also likely coming back, which could muddy the backfield and take touches away from Damien Harris, which is less nice. 

The Patriots have an atrocious rush defense, but Houston’s primary RB, Duke Johnson, is far better as a receiver than as a straight-up runner, so I’m not sure they can take advantage all that much. In addition, Duke’s receiving skills are mostly squandered because QB DeShaun Watson hates checking down and seemingly prefers to take sacks while looking for throws downfield instead. Wait, why the hell am I picking Houston here??? Is this what hedging is? I don’t like it!

LATE GAMES

New York Jets at Los Angeles Chargers (-9.5)

It feels weird to lay 9.5 points with a 2-7 team, but such is the power of the Jets’ ineptitude. To New York’s credit, they were competitive in two of their last three games (against NE and BUF), but those two games were sandwiched around a 35-9 beatdown at the hands of Kansas City. We would all feel better if the cool, young Chargers steamrolled these sad sacks in a joyous explosion of big plays, and this pick is my attempt at speaking it into existence. 

Miami Dolphins (-3.5) at Denver Broncos

I don’t know why I have an affinity for Drew Lock, but I do. He probably appeals to the same part of my brain that delights in terrible movies and horrible jokes, which is the most backhanded compliment I have ever given anyone in my entire life. Drew's gonna tough it out and try to play through a rib injury this week, which is gutty and admirable and all that, but I can’t imagine it’s going to help his already shaky accuracy.

Green Bay Packers at Indianapolis Colts (-1.5)

The Packers are getting their best defensive player back in CB Jaire Alexander, which will make life more difficult for increasingly-noodle-armed Colts QB Philip Rivers. Conversely, Indy’s defense is among the best in the league, so I don’t really see a carnival of offense coming from the Packers, either. Honestly, this should be a close, well-played game between two exceedingly competent squads. The kind of game where there will be long stretches where nothing major happens, but you can point out random shit that happens away from the ball and talk about line play and really sound like you know what the fuck you’re talking about. A tremendous game for fraudulent football-knowers everywhere.

Dallas Cowboys at Minnesota Vikings (-7)

It would be an INCREDIBLY Vikings move to lose this game outright. The return of Andy Dalton is being treated like it’s something that’ll get the Cowboys somewhat back on track, but prior to his injury he looked like crap, so I don’t really know where that’s coming from. Also, while he was out with a concussion he had a bout with COVID-19 that “hit him hard.” It’s tough for me to imagine he’s going to play BETTER coming out of what sounds like a truly shitty few weeks.

SNF: Kansas City Chiefs (-7.5) at Las Vegas Raiders

A lot has been made about how pissed Kansas City is about the Raiders taking a supposed “victory lap” in their team bus around the Arrowhead parking lot after their win over the Chiefs earlier in the season, and I’m choosing to completely buy into this narrative because it’s fucking hilarious. If K.C. has already reached the “needing to exaggerate/outright invent slights to get up for regular season games against inferior opponents” portion of their reign, we’re in great shape for entertainment purposes going forward.

MNF: Los Angeles Rams at Tampa Bay Buccaneers (-4)

I don’t remotely trust Jared Goff against Tampa Bay’s defense. I do think this is probably our SMASHMOUTH NOSEBLEED GRIND IT OUT Game of the Week, and I can already see Tom Brady screaming at his offensive linemen at some point after he gets popped a couple of times during a single possession. Should be fun!

Last Week’s Record: 7-5-1

Season Record: 65-68-5

[bodytoflame-ao3]

falling from the start

did i write more wlw percabeth? you bet your ass i did!!!!!! i accidentally deleted the ask but for the anon who asked for fem!percy asking her mom for advice here it is :^) this takes place in the summer between botl and tlo. i absolutely want to write more in this same universe please give me more prompts omfg im begging this is so fun

Ao3 Link

“So how's Annabeth?”

Percy pushes the last few peas around her plate absentmindedly, “I don't know.” She doesn't, and she hates it. Ever since the end of summer, things had been so… weird. She didn't know what Annabeth's deal was. First off, for whatever reason, she hated Rachel. Percy didn't get it. Rachel was kind, and funny, and caring, and a really good friend to Percy (even if she was a mortal and didn’t understand some of the nuances of being a half-blood). It made her wonder what Rachel could've possibly done to upset her.

In any case, she didn’t know what she did to upset Annabeth either. Which brings her mind to the one thing she's been trying to push away since it happened: Annabeth kissing her. Because, right, Annabeth kissed her. It threatens to turn Percy's brain to mush every time she thinks about it. She daydreamed about kissing her, probably more than she should, so she should be crazy about it actually happening, but something in her gut just feels… wrong. For lack of a better description, Annabeth kissing her confuses the hell out of her. She loved Luke. She said so herself. She obviously didn't like Percy like that, so then why did she kiss her?

“I thought you were going to try to talk every weekend.”

Percy shrugs. That’s right. #2 on the list of weird things. They were. Annabeth wanted to know everything about her mom's wedding. But it’s been three weeks and she hasn’t made a single attempt to contact Percy; she’d worry she was in trouble if she didn’t know any better.

“Did you two get in a fight?”

“I don't know!” The fork clatters against the plate. She can’t stop her thoughts from spiraling out of control, and she hates herself for it.

“Percy,” her mom sits down next to her at the table and places a reassuring hand on her back.

“I don't know… I mean, there was the whole thing with the Labyrinth, and when I came back she just… she was so annoyed at me. Which, I mean, yeah that makes sense, it's totally like her to be annoyed that she thought I was dead, because that's exactly what she told me not to do, and since when do I ever listen to her?” She can't stop the flood of thoughts from coming out of her mouth. “I thought she would get over it, and she'd just tease me about it for a week like always and then everything would be fine, but then she was really mean to Rachel, even though she was just trying to help! She's never done anything to her, and I… I don't want my friends to fight. We're supposed to be fighting monsters, not each other.”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“No but… she would’ve called if she wanted to talk to me.”

“I don’t know about that. You picked a stubborn one.”

Her mom decides movie night is the best way to mitigate her worries. Percy’s always loved The Little Mermaid (Sally’s always thought that was hilarious). Yeah, it’s ironic. You don’t need to tell her that twice, she’s been teased enough by her mom. To be perfectly fair, she always thought Ariel was stupid for leaving the ocean, because duh, it’s awesome, but she loved the music, and that was enough to make a toddler obsessed with something. By the time she realized how ridiculous it was for it to be the daughter of Poseidon’s favorite movie, it was already too big a part of her.

Usually, it’s easy for her to sit down and lose herself in it. She knows every scene almost word for word, and she loves every second of it, so there isn’t anywhere her mind wants to wander to. Nothing to analyze, nothing to be confused over. Tonight, however, she can’t concentrate. That is to say, even worse than usual. Her brain feels like the static of dead air on a TV. Fuzzy. Tingling? Buzzing. Just… stuck. As much as she wants to just lay down and have a normal, quiet movie night with her mom she doubts it’ll actually happen, because the only thing on her mind is Annabeth. She thinks about way she smirks when she has an idea, how her grey eyes shine against the moonlight, and the slight change in the cadence in her voice when she’s teasing Percy.

“Mom?” Percy needs to tell someone or she’s going to explode. Possibly literally. “I think I'm in love with Annabeth.”

“Mhm?”

Really? Percy glares at her, pouting. She’s not surprised, because she’s convinced her mom can practically read her mind, and she's teased her about it to no end.

“Do you want me to act like I didn't know?” She wonders if it would be easier that way. Sally furrows her eyebrows and sighs, “Percy…”

Percy almost whispers her response: “No… I want you to tell me everything’s gonna work out.” But it’s not. It won’t. “I want you to tell me she’s not going to hate me and I’m not going to lose one of the most important people in my life!” As her frustration builds, so does her voice, reaching a crescendo as her final words echo off the walls of the apartment.

“Come here,” she pats the couch cushion, and Percy drags herself off the chair to sit next to her. “I know it’s not easy.”

Percy’s not sure she knows what easy is.

“I had a crush on one of my best friends once.”

“It’s not the same! She’s—”

“A girl?” Sally offers quietly. Percy didn’t make it a habit to talk about these kinds of things, despite how close she was with her mom. She’d be lying if she said it didn’t scare her a bit at first; it’s not like the idea of liking girls was something she came to terms with easily. But it had been a whole hell of a lot easier than grappling with the fact that she liked Annabeth.

“No… I mean yes, but… I mean… she’s Annabeth.” She’s my best friend, and she’s smart, and wise, and tough, and she’s beautiful without even trying, and she doesn’t even know it, but her hair shines in the sun like it’s dusted with gold, and her eyes could stare into the depths of your soul and you’d ask her to do it again.

It happened slowly. Sure, her first thought when she woke up at Camp Half-Blood, Annabeth’s curls hanging down into her face, was, infact, ‘wow, she’s pretty.’ (She’s still not sure if that was the concussion talking or not, she digresses), but she was twelve, and wasn't thinking about things like that, not really. Soon, 'wow, she's pretty' turned into 'wow, she's tough' and 'maybe she can help me find my mom', and then they were a team, the three of them. By the time she realized she may have a teensy tiny crush on her, they were already bantering like old friends; and Annabeth was a clingy friend, so while Percy's heart would beat a little faster when she'd grab her hand, she knew Annabeth wouldn't fuss over something so simple. She finally had a friend, a girl (because there were just some things Grover didn’t need, or want to know) who she could talk to and share her secrets with (well, not all of them), and she wasn't about to ruin that by saying something stupid and fleeting.

Percy thought it would pass, after all it was just a stupid crush. She'd get over it. That's what always happened. But this time it didn't, and it just got worse. Now there was something different in the way her breath hitched when Annabeth would lean close to her; a change in the sense that her heart now fluttered when she called her Seaweed Brain.

She hated that her brain was betraying her like this. She wasn’t supposed to fall in love with her best friend. She was supposed to save the world, not complicate it with her messy relationship drama — not that you could even call it that.

“Oh, honey,” Sally wraps her arms around Percy, pulling her close, “She cares about you. And I know you care about her.”

“But what if she hates me?”

“Do you really think she could?”

She was right. She always was.

“She’ll come around. Give her some time. And give her a call — I’m sure she misses you.”

[eisforeidolon]

Episode: Nihilism

Then: Michael gloats about how no one spent any time questioning why he previously vamoosed for no reason. It's such a clever gotcha … for the writers to lampshade their own incompetence of making the characters somehow ignore a giant plot hole anyone who isn't permanently concussed questioned endlessly. One I still question, because Michael's “plan” to leave and then arbitrarily come back to break Dean's will … somehow … makes no sense and screws around with angel lore yet again.  

Anyway.

Now: I did actually mostly enjoy this episode, aside from a few not-entirely-minor quibbles.  

First, I have to say:  Wow, the actress who plays Pamela looks almost exactly the same.  Also, this is the kind of cameo I actually really love when the show does!  It doesn't make death meaningless or have the characters accept a replacement goldfish substitute from an alternate universe as the same person (as creepy as that is).  Yet it still allows us to revisit old favorite characters.  

I liked the smug – almost gleefully so – way that Jensen played Michael.  It actually largely mitigated how easy it was for the rest of the team to capture him for me, which I kind of expected to be annoyed by.  He's exactly the kind of villain to monologue instead of just getting on with killing everybody.  It also mostly fits that he doesn't take them terribly seriously and so isn't prepared for their alternate holy oil molotov plan.  As well as how he's more vaguely interested in examining the cuffs than actually concerned when they do bind him – and not only in light of how he has his own backup plan.  There's still the slight hitch that having been in Dean's head, he should realize just how many other villains have gone belly up from not taking the Winchesters seriously?  But then, he is exactly the kind of villain that would think he's so far above all of them that he's obviously different – even when them includes an alternate version of himself.

That said, I was not impressed that inexplicably Castiel can no longer see reapers.  I swear, he gains and loses more powers on an episode by episode basis ... ffs.  Nor did I appreciate that said reaper suddenly was willing to act as a get-out-of-monster-hell free card.  Billie and the reapers wouldn't even step in to save their own from being killed in Funeralia (13.19) but now, LOL NON-INTERFERENCE?  NEVERMIND!  I mean, it just feels so lazy.  I give Yockey more credit than a lot of the current lot, and in the end it's partially a season-size pacing problem, but?  Imagine if instead they'd stretched this out to another episode and given Sam and the others the time to find a legitimate, clever way out of being trapped, with Michael taunting them all the while.  (I could happily watch a couple episodes' worth of just Michael mocking them all, tbh.)  Instead, they're cheat-teleported back to the bunker.  Heck, Yockey could have just gone with Michael being too smug to have bothered to have sufficient backup monsters!  That would work perfectly well, too.  I get maybe it was partially meant to bring reapers back to the audience's attention to prime us for the reveal at the end with Billie?  And maybe we’re meant to forgive it because the threat from the monsters is still on in the background?  But it just doesn't work for me.

Another thing that I actually can forgive because I think it fits with Michael's ego is not having enough imagination to give Dean more than one night at his fantasy bar that repeats over and over again.  Even if Cas and Sam hadn't broken in during this episode, Dean had already noticed having deja vu.  So on the one hand, it fits how smugly overconfident Michael is, on the other, it really is a stupid plan.  I did actually like that Dean's fantasy did still involve killing monsters – since I've always felt like his desire to be out of hunting was more tied to all of the issues with destiny and the apocalypse and all of that manipulation from cosmic forces and weight of the world stuff than the old-school routine of just saving individual people from individual monsters.

Ugh, Maggie.  Her being in charge for reasons here really is one of the dumbest things they've sprung on us yet.  The only good thing about the whole side meander with the AU!hunters is that I had been cringing at how, once again, I expected the mystically warded bunker to suddenly be just that easy for monsters to waltz into?  Yet instead, they actually weren't able to break in without having a turned hunter on the inside.  I really did appreciate that!

I'd seen several complaints about saying Dean “thrives” on trauma was annoying and insulting.  I kind of get that, especially in light of Ross-Leming's obtuse comment about Dean having antibodies against evil so they never have to deal with him being traumatized?  However, while I think perhaps there might have been better ways to phrase it, I think the meaning – that given something he actually knows to fight against, Dean is irrepressible – is clear enough from the context.  I did appreciate Sam figured out that's why Dean wouldn't be fighting, because he’d been put in a comfortable fake memory, as well as how he was able to identify which memory was the false one so quickly.  I thought it was a nice touch that the music went wonky in the background as Dean remembered what they were saying about Pamela was true.  As well as that it was Sam saying their code word that was the final clue slotting into place rather than Castiel's overblown speech.   While I can see where it might come off as a rip-off of the Ezekiel thing, I think the situations are sufficiently similar that it only makes sense for them to sort out in a similar way.  

Michael's imitation of Castiel was just as funny in context.  From what he said to Jack to what he said in Dean's head to Sam and Castiel, I think Michael was telling the truth, or more accurately, a version of the truth.  We all have certain nasty thoughts that linger in the back of our heads – resentments, annoyances, uncharitable thoughts – the ugliest version of ourselves.  I think Michael was picking and choosing out of that part of Dean to find the things it would hurt the most to say; not thoughts Dean never had, but thoughts that clearly didn't encompass what Dean felt overall.  Carefully chosen partial truths without context, specially tailored to hurt those they were aimed at as much as possible that would therefore also make Dean feel guilty, too.  If Michael had felt like this much of a character from the beginning...  Also, regular world Michael acted like allowing Dean to survive the experience of being possessed intact was some special boon, so this one making a point to say he's going to rip Dean apart on the way out being an additional consideration fits well enough.

While I like a good fight scene as much as anybody, if they're on equal footing because they're all just projections in Dean's head?  I actually think it should have been easier for them to take down Michael.  Sam, Dean, even Cas?  They all have plenty of experience getting their hands dirty in physical fights, whereas we've seen this Michael spend a lot more time actively avoiding them.  That, and I did actually find myself kind of mildly annoyed it was Sam and not Dean that was the one to physically shove Michael into the freezer.  Yes, the fight was a joint effort, and yes, Dean is the one actually keeping him contained in his mind when it comes down to it. However, with all that we got in the previous episode of Dean really wanting to personally strike back at Michael and how Sam had already played such a major part by figuring out how to get into Dean's head and drag him back to reality?  I felt like perhaps it would have been a more powerful moment if Dean had actually done the physical shoving as well.  I don’t think it was a big deal or anything, but ... meh.

Likewise pretty ambivalent about all of Michael's monsters just wandering off rather than continuing their attack at the end.  I get that they were all supposed to be under some kind of control, but it's just so very convenient.  When it's put on top of the teleport home earlier in the episode (and how they're such crappy monsters they couldn't even kill Maggie, dammit) …  Again, it didn’t ruin the episode for me, but after Michael was previously shown negotiating with certain monsters or offering them boons, but actually here it’s that he’s controlling them?  Michael’s plans and motivations have generally being fairly nebulous and vague all along, so this is just so par for the course I can’t even get that annoyed about it.

Similarly, while I appreciate them trying to tie the invasion of AU!Michael in as the consequences Billie warned Dean would come from universe-hopping?  It also seems like a fairly flimsy hand wave.  It's better than no attempt at all, leaving it as a hanging thread that was just dropped, but “this whole multi-versal quantum construct we live in, it's like  a house of cards and the last thing I need is some big dumb Winchester knocking it all down” seems like it should refer to the potentiality of something a little more colossal than yet another archangel with daddy issues.  Maybe that's just me.

As to the end where all the books about Dean's death have changed to have the same ending bar one?  Well, by the very concept, all the books can be changed.  So, when that one alternative to Michael destroying everything is clearly also awful, it seems the more prudent route to go would be to figure out how to make all the books change again as Plan A rather than going directly for Plan Horrorshow.  Not only have the Winchesters made a long-term habit of changing fate, but they've already done it in this specific way once – granted for the worse, but still, it's clearly possible.  

I feel like there was something else I meant to address about this one, but I didn’t make a note of it and I actually watched this a couple of days ago and I’m coming up completely blank. 

In the end, i feel like what really made me like this episode despite some obvious flaws was Jensen’s portrayal of Michael and the other characters’ reactions to him.  Which, honestly, just makes the fact that the season took so long to actually get here and give us something meaty from this storyline feel even less like any kind of reasonable choice. 

[anupamasdiggs]

SV 1

Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.

Daniel Defoe, _The History of the Devil_

I

The Angel Gibreel

1

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . ." Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.

"I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, "To the devil with your tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, "in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now."

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "Ohé, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch." At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. "Hey, Spoono," Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, "Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. _Dharrraaammm!_ Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat."

Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time . . . the jumbo jet _Bostan_, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea.

Who am I?

Who else is there?

The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also -- for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its everreasonable doubts -- mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mothertongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, _land_, _belonging_, _home_. Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other's refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered, awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation.

"O, my shoes are Japanese," Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, "These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart's Indian for all that." The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus, the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the performance), or their blast--delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of the imminent . . . but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began.

Mutation?

Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, -- because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible -- wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr. Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired.

What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a rush? So then, neither does revelation . . . take a look at the pair of them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?

That's not it. Listen:

Mr. Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta's mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr. James Thomson, seventeenhundred to seventeen-forty-eight. ". . . at Heaven's command," Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically redwhiteblue by the cold, "arooooose from out the aaaazure main." Farishta, horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats, inviolately subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin's wild recital: "And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain."

Let's face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let's face this, too: they did.

Downdown they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds.

They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha, prim, rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple bush-shirt come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and would have shouted, "Keep away, get away from me," except that something prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail, and the force of their collision sent them tumbling end over end, performing their geminate cartwheels all the way down and along the hole that went to Wonderland; while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck.

This person had, however, no time for such "high falutions"; was, indeed, incapable of faluting at all; having just seen, emerging from the swirl of cloud, the figure of a glamorous woman of a certain age, wearing a brocade sari in green and gold, with a diamond in her nose and lacquer defending her high-coiled hair against the pressure of the wind at these altitudes, as she sat, equably, upon a flying carpet. "Rekha Merchant," Gibreel greeted her. "You couldn't find your way to heaven or what?" Insensitive words to speak to a dead woman! But his concussed, plummeting condition may be offered in mitigation

. . . Chamcha, clutching his legs, made an uncomprehending query: "What the hell?"

"You don't see her?" Gibreel shouted. "You don't see her goddamn Bokhara rug?"

No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don't expect him to confirm. I am strictly for your eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig excrement, my love. With death comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names.

Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha: "Spoono? You see her or you don't?"

Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced her alone. "You shouldn't have done it," he admonished her. "No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing."

O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high moral tone, that's a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded his ear, seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight, who hid behind a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love.

He became afraid. "What do you want? No, don't tell, just go."

When you were sick I could not see you, in case of scandal, you knew I could not, that I stayed away for your sake, but afterwards you punished, you used it as your excuse to leave, your cloud to hide behind. That, and also her, the icewoman. Bastard. Now that I am dead I have forgotten how to forgive. I curse you, my Gibreel, may your life be hell. Hell, because that's where you sent me, damn you, where you came from, devil, where you're going, sucker, enjoy the bloody dip. Rekha's curse; and after that, verses in a language he did not understand, all harshnesses and sibilance, in which he thought he made out, but maybe not, the repeated name _Al-Lat_.

He clutched at Chamcha; they burst through the bottom of the clouds.

Speed, the sensation of speed, returned, whistling its fearful note. The roof of cloud fled upwards, the water-floor zoomed closer, their eyes opened. A scream, that same scream that had fluttered in his guts when Gibreel swam across the sky, burst from Chamcha's lips; a shaft of sunlight pierced his open mouth and set it free. But they had fallen through the transformations of the clouds, Chamcha and Farishta, and there was a fluidity, an indistinctness, at the edges of them, and as the sunlight hit Chamcha it released more than noise:

"Fly," Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. "Start flying, now." And added, without knowing its source, the second command: "And sing."

How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Is birth always a fall?

Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

When Mr. Saladin Chamcha fell out of the clouds over the English Channel he felt his heart being gripped by a force so implacable that he understood it was impossible for him to die. Afterwards, when his feet were once more firmly planted on the ground, he would begin to doubt this, to ascribe the implausibilities of his transit to the scrambling of his perceptions by the blast, and to attribute his survival, his and Gibreel's, to blind, dumb luck. But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls.

"Fly," it commanded Gibreel. "Sing."

Chamcha held on to Gibreel while the other began, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity and force, to flap his arms. Harder and harder he flapped, and as he flapped a song burst out of him, and like the song of the spectre of Rekha Merchant it was sung in a language he did not know to a tune he had never heard. Gibreel never repudiated the miracle; unlike Chamcha, who tried to reason it out of existence, he never stopped saying that the gazal had been celestial, that without the song the flapping would have been for nothing, and without the flapping it was a sure thing that they would have hit the waves like rocks or what and simply burst into pieces on making contact with the taut drum of the sea. Whereas instead they began to slow down. The more emphatically Gibreel flapped and sang, sang and flapped, the more pronounced the deceleration, until finally the two of them were floating down to the Channel like scraps of paper in a breeze.

They were the only survivors of the wreck, the only ones who fell from _Bostan_ and lived. They were found washed up on a beach. The more voluble of the two, the one in the purple shirt, swore in his wild ramblings that they had walked upon the water, that the waves had borne them gently in to shore; but the other, to whose head a soggy bowler hat clung as if by magic, denied this. "God, we were lucky," he said. "How lucky can you get?"

I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence and -potence, I'm making no claims at present, but I can manage this much, I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta did what was willed.

Which was the miracle worker?

Of what type -- angelic, satanic -- was Farishta's song?

Who am I?

Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes?

These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: "Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you."

Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears.

2

Reincarnation was always a big topic with Gibreel, for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies, even before he "miraculously" defeated the Phantom Bug that everyone had begun to believe would terminate his contracts. So maybe someone should have been able to forecast, only nobody did, that when he was up and about again he would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his old life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!, like a trick, _into thin air_.

The first people to notice his absence were the four members of his film-studio wheelchair-team. Long before his illness he had formed the habit of being transported from set to set on the great D. W. Rama lot by this group of speedy, trusted athletes, because a man who makes up to eleven movies "sy-multaneous" needs to conserve his energies. Guided by a complex coding system of slashes, circles and dots which Gibreel remembered from his childhood among the fabled lunch-runners of Bombay (of which more later), the chair-men zoomed him from role to role, delivering him as punctually and unerringly as once his father had delivered lunch. And after each take Gibreel would skip back into the chair and be navigated at high speed towards the next set, to be re-costumed, made up and handed his lines. "A career in the Bombay talkies," he told his loyal crew, "is more like a wheelchair race with one-two pit stops along the route."

After the illness, the Ghostly Germ, the Mystery Malaise, the Bug, he had returned to work, easing himself in, only seven pictures at a time . . . and then, justlikethat, he wasn't there. The wheelchair stood empty among the silenced sound-stages; his absence revealed the tawdry shamming of the sets. Wheelchairmen, one to four, made excuses for the missing star when movie executives descended upon them in wrath: Ji, he must be sick, he has always been famous for his punctual, no, why to criticize, maharaj, great artists must from time to time be permitted their temperament, na, and for their protestations they became the first casualties of Farishta's unexplained hey-presto, being fired, four three two one, ekdumjaldi, ejected from studio gates so that a wheelchair lay abandoned and gathering dust beneath the painted coco-palms around a sawdust beach.

Where was Gibreel? Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked expensively. See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links -- only nine holes nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant weeds, or, let's say, like tombstones marking the sites where the torn corpse of the old city lay -- there, right there, upper-echelon executives, missing the simplest putts; and, look above, tufts of anguished hair, torn from senior heads, wafting down from high-level windows. The agitation of the producers was easy to understand, because in those days of declining audiences and the creation of historical soap operas and contemporary crusading housewives by the television network, there was but a single name which, when set above a picture's title, could still offer a sure-fire, cent-per-cent guarantee of an Ultrahit, a Smashation, and the owner of said name had departed, up, down or sideways, but certainly and unarguably vamoosed . . .

All over the city, after telephones, motorcyclists, cops, frogmen and trawlers dragging the harbour for his body had laboured mightily but to no avail, epitaphs began to be spoken in memory of the darkened star. On one of Rama Studios' seven impotent stages, Miss Pimple Billimoria, the latest chilli-and-spices bombshell -- _she's no flibberti-gibberti mamzel!, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite_ -- clad in temple--dancer veiled undress and positioned beneath writhing cardboard representations of copulating Tantric figures from the Chandela period, -- and perceiving that her major scene was not to be, her big break lay in pieces -- offered up a spiteful farewell before an audience of sound recordists and electricians smoking their cynical beedis. Attended by a dumbly distressed ayah, all elbows, Pimple attempted scorn. "God, what a stroke of luck, for Pete's sake," she cried. "I mean today it was the love scene, chhi chhi, I was just dying inside, thinking how to go near to that fatmouth with his breath of rotting cockroach dung." Bell-heavy anklets jingled as she stamped. "Damn good for him the movies don't smell, or he wouldn't get one job as a leper even." Here Pimple's soliloquy climaxed in such a torrent of obscenities that the beedi-smokers sat up for the first time and commenced animatedly to compare Pimple's vocabulary with that of the infamous bandit queen Phoolan Devi whose oaths could melt rifle barrels and turn journalists' pencils to rubber in a trice.

Exit Pimple, weeping, censored, a scrap on a cutting-room floor. Rhinestones fell from her navel as she went, mirroring her tears. . . in the matter of Farishta's halitosis she was not, however, altogether wrong; if anything, she had a little understated the case. Gibreel's exhalations, those ochre clouds of sulphur and brimstone, had always given him -- when taken together with his pronounced widow's peak and crowblack hair -- an air more saturnine than haloed, in spite of his archangelic name. It was said after he disappeared that he ought to have been easy to find, all it took was a halfway decent nose . . . and one week after he took off, an exit more tragic than Pimple Billimoria's did much to intensify the devilish odour that was beginning to attach itself to that forsolong sweet-smelling name. You could .say that he had stepped out of the screen into the world, and in life, unlike the cinema, people know it if you stink.

_We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye_. The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel Farishta's penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas skyscraper on Malabar Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the highest ground in the city, one of those double-vista apartments from which you could look this way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that way out to Scandal Point and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to prolong their cacophonies. FARISHTA DIVES UNDERGROUND, opined _Blitz_ in somewhat macabre fashion, while Busybee in _The Daily_ preferred GIBREEL FLIES coop. Many photographs were published of that fabled residence in which French interior decorators bearing letters of commendation from Reza Pahlevi for the work they had done at Persepolis had spent a million dollars recreating at this exalted altitude the effect of a Bedouin tent. Another illusion unmade by his absence; GIBREEL STRIKES CAMP, the headlines yelled, but had he gone up or down or sideways? No one knew. In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the sharpest ears heard anything reliable. But Mrs. Rekha Merchant, reading all the papers, listening to all the radio broadcasts, staying glued to the Doordarshan TV programmes, gleaned something from Farishta's message, heard a note that eluded everyone else, and took her two daughters and one son for a walk on the roof of her high-rise home. Its name was Everest Vilas.

His neighbour; as a matter of fact, from the apartment directly beneath his own. His neighbour and his friend; why should I say any more? Of course the scandal-pointed malice-magazines of the city filled their columns with hint innuendo and nudge, but that's no reason for sinking to their level. Why tarnish her reputation now?

Who was she? Rich, certainly, but then Everest Vilas was not exactly a tenement in Kurla, eh? Married, yessir, thirteen years, with a husband big in ball-bearings. Independent, her carpet and antique showrooms thriving at their prime Colaba sites. She called her carpets _klims_ and _kleens_ and the ancient artefacts were _anti-queues_. Yes, and she was beautiful, beautiful in the hard, glossy manner of those rarefied occupants of the city's sky-homes, her bones skin posture all bearing witness to her long divorce from the impoverished, heavy, pullulating earth. Everyone agreed she had a strong personality, drank _like a fish_ from Lalique crystal and hung her hat _shameless_ on a Chola Natraj and knew what she wanted and how to get it, fast. The husband was a mouse with money and a good squash wrist. Rekha Merchant read Gibreel Farishta's farewell note in the newspapers, wrote a letter of her own, gathered her children, summoned the elevator, and rose heavenward (one storey) to meet her chosen fate.

"Many years ago," her letter read, "I married out of cowardice. Now, finally, I'm doing something brave." She left a newspaper on her bed with Gibreel's message circled in red and heavily underscored -- three harsh lines, one of them ripping the page in fury. So naturally the bitch-journals went to town and it was all LOVELY"S LOVELORN LEAP, and BROKEN-HEARTED BEAUTY TAKES LAST DIVE. But:

Perhaps she, too, had the rebirth bug, and Gibreel, not understanding the terrible power of metaphor, had recommended flight. _To be born again,first you have to_ and she was a creature of the sky, she drank Lalique champagne, she lived on Everest, and one of her fellow-Olympians had flown; and if he could, then she, too, could be winged, and rooted in dreams.

She didn't make it. The lala who was employed as gatekeeper of the Everest Vilas compound offered the world his blunt testimony. "I was walking, here here, in the compound only, when there came a thud, _tharaap_. I turned. It was the body of the oldest daughter. Her skull was completely crushed. I looked up and saw the boy falling, and after him the younger girl. What to say, they almost hit me where I stood. I put my hand on my mouth and came to them. The young girl was whining softly. Then I looked up a further time and the Begum was coming. Her sari was floating out like a big balloon and all her hair was loose. I took my eyes away from her because she was fallIng and it was not respectful to look up inside her clothes."

Rekha and her children fell from Everest; no survivors. The whispers blamed Gibreel. Let's leave it at that for the moment.

Oh: don't forget: he saw her after she died. He saw her several times. It was a long time before people understood how sick the great man was. Gibreel, the star. Gibreel, who vanquished the Nameless Ailment. Gibreel, who feared sleep.

After he departed the ubiquitous images of his face began to rot. On the gigantic, luridly coloured hoardings from which he had watched over the populace, his lazy eyelids started flaking and crumbling, drooping further and further until his irises looked like two moons sliced by clouds, or by the soft knives of his long lashes. Finally the eyelids fell off, giving a wild, bulging look to his painted eyes. Outside the picture palaces of Bombay, mammoth cardboard effigies of Gibreel were seen to decay and list. Dangling limply on their sustaining scaffolds, they lost arms, withered, snapped at the neck. His portraits on the covers of movie magazines acquired the pallor of death, a nullity about the eye, a hollowness. At last his images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers of _Celebrity_ and _Society_ and _Illustrated Weekly_ went blank at the bookstalls and their publishers fired the printers and blamed the quality of the ink. Even on the silver screen itself, high above his worshippers in the dark, that supposedly immortal physiognomy began to putrefy, blister and bleach; projectors jammed unaccountably every time he passed through the gate, his films ground to a halt, and the lamp-heat of the malfunctioning projectors burned his celluloid memory away: a star gone supernova, with the consuming fire spreading outwards, as was fitting, from his lips.

It was the death of God. Or something very like it; for had not that outsize face, suspended over its devotees in the artificial cinematic night, shone like that of some supernal Entity that had its being at least halfway between the mortal and the divine? More than halfway, many would have argued, for Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career incarnating, with absolute conviction, the countless deities of the subcontinent in the popular genre movies known as "theologicals". It was part of the magic of his persona that he succeeded in crossing religious boundaries without giving offence. Blue-skinned as Krishna he danced, flute in hand, amongst the beauteous gopis and their udder-heavy cows; with upturned palms, serene, he meditated (as Gautama) upon humanity's suffering beneath a studio-rickety bodhi-tree. On those infrequent occasions when he descended from the heavens he never went too far, playing, for example, both the Grand Mughal and his famously wily minister in the classic _Akbar and Birbal_. For over a decade and a half he had represented, to hundreds of millions of believers in that country in which, to this day, the human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one, the most acceptable, and instantly recognizable, face of the Supreme. For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist.

The fans, yes, and? How about Gibreel?

That face. In real life, reduced to life-size, set amongst ordinary mortals, it stood revealed as oddly un-starry. Those low-slung eyelids could give him an exhausted look. There was, too, something coarse about the nose, the mouth was too well fleshed to be strong, the ears were long-lobed like young, knurled jackfruit. The most profane of faces, the most sensual of faces. In which, of late, it had been possible to make out the seams mined by his recent, near-fatal illness. And yet, in spite of profanity and debilitation, this was a face inextricably mixed up with holiness, perfection, grace: God stuff. No accounting for tastes, that's all. At any rate, you'll agree that for such an actor (for any actor, maybe, even for Chamcha, but most of all for him) to have a bee in his bonnet about avatars, like much-metamorphosed Vishnu, was not so very surprising. Rebirth: that's God stuff, too.

Or, but, then again . . . not always. There are secular reincarnations, too. Gibreel Farishta had been born Ismail Najmuddin in Poona, British Poona at the empire's fag-end, long before the Pune of Rajneesh etc. (Pune, Vadodara, Mumbai; even towns can take stage names nowadays.) Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, _star of the faith_; he'd given up quite a name when he took the angel's.

Afterwards, when the aircraft _Bostan_ was in the grip of the hijackers, and the passengers, fearing for their futures, were regressing into their pasts, Gibreel confided to Saladin Chamcha that his choice of pseudonym had been his way of making a homage to the memory of his dead mother, "my mummyji, Spoono, my one and only Mamo, because who else was it who started the whole angel business, her personal angel, she called me, _farishta_, because apparently I was too damn sweet, believe it or not, I was good as goddamn gold."

Poona couldn't hold him; he was taken in his infancy to the bitch-city, his first migration; his father got a job amongst the fleet-footed inspirers of future wheelchair quartets, the lunch-porters or dabbawallas of Bombay. And Ismail the farishta followed, at thirteen, in his father's footsteps.

Gibreel, captive aboard AI-420, sank into forgivable rhapsodies, fixing Chamcha with his glittering eye, explicating the mysteries of the runners' coding system, black swastika red circle yellow slash dot, running in his mind's eye the entire relay from home to office desk, that improbable system by which two thousand dabbawallas delivered, each day, over one hundred thousand lunch-pails, and on a bad day, Spoono, maybe fifteen got mislaid, we were illiterate, mostly, but the signs were our secret tongue.

_Bostan_ circled London, gunmen patrolling the gangways, and the lights in the passenger cabins had been switched off, but Gibreel's energy illuminated the gloom. On the grubby movie screen on which, earlier in the journey, the inflight inevitability of Walter Matthau had stumbled lugubriously into the aerial ubiquity of Goldie Hawn, there were shadows moving, projected by the nostalgia of the hostages, and the most sharply defined of them was this spindly adolescent, Ismail Najmuddin, mummy's angel in a Gandhi cap, running tiffins across the town. The young dabbawalla skipped nimbly through the shadow-crowd, because he was used to such conditions, think, Spoono, picture, thirty-forty tiffins in a long wooden tray on your head, and when the local train stops you have maybe one minute to push on or off, and then running in the streets, flat out, yaar, with the trucks buses scooters cycles and what-all, one-two, one-two, lunch, lunch, the dabbas must get through, and in the monsoon running down the railway line when the train broke down, or waist-deep in water in some flooded street, and there were gangs, Salad baba, truly, organized gangs of dabba-stealers, it's a hungry city, baby, what to tell you, but we could handle them, we were everywhere, knew everything, what thieves could escape our eyes and ears, we never went to any policia, we looked after our own.

At night father and son would return exhausted to their shack by the airport runway at Santacruz and when Ismail's mother saw him approaching, illuminated by the green red yellow of the departing jet-planes, she would say that simply to lay eyes on him made all her dreams come true, which was the first indication that there was something peculiar about Gibreel, because from the beginning, it seemed, he could fulfil people's most secret desires without having any idea of how he did it. His father Najmuddin Senior never seemed to mind that his wife had eyes only for her son, that the boy's feet received nightly pressings while the father's went unstroked. A son is a blessing and a blessing requires the gratitude of the blest.

Naima Najmuddin died. A bus hit her and that was that, Gibreel wasn't around to answer her prayers for life. Neither father nor son ever spoke of grief. Silently, as though it were customary and expected, they buried their sadness beneath extra work, engaging in an inarticulate contest, who could carry the most dabbas on his head, who could acquire the most new contracts per month, who could run faster, as though the greater labour would indicate the greater love. When he saw his father at night, the knotted veins bulging in his neck and at his temples, Ismail Najmuddin would understand how much the older man had resented him, and how important it was for the father to defeat the son and regain, thereby, his usurped primacy in the affections of his dead wife. Once he realized this, the youth eased off, but his father's zeal remained unrelenting, and pretty soon he was getting promotion, no longer a mere runner but one of the organizing muqaddams. When Gibreel was nineteen, Najmuddin Senior became a member of the lunch-runners' guild, the Bombay Tiffin Carriers' Association, and when Gibreel was twenty, his father was dead, stopped in his tracks by a stroke that almost blew him apart. "He just ran himself into the ground," said the guild's General Secretary, Babasaheb Mhatre himself. "That poor bastard, he just ran out of steam." But the orphan knew better. He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

Babasaheb Mhatre sat in a blue office behind a green door above a labyrinthine bazaar, an awesome figure, buddha-fat, one of the great moving forces of the metropolis, possessing the occult gift of remaining absolutely still, never shifting from his room, and yet being everywhere important and meeting everyone who mattered in Bombay. The day after young Ismail's father ran across the border to see Naima, the Babasaheb summoned the young man into his presence. "So? Upset or what?" The reply, with downcast eyes: ji, thank you, Babaji, I am okay. "Shut your face," said Babasaheb Mhatre. "From today you live with me." Butbut, Babaji ... "But me no buts. Already I have informed my goodwife. I have spoken." Please excuse Babaji but how what why? "I have _spoken_."

Gibreel Farishta was never told why the Babasaheb had decided to take pity on him and pluck him from the futurelessness of the streets, but after a while he began to have an idea. Mrs. Mhatre was a thin woman, like a pencil beside the rubbery Babasaheb, but she was filled so full of mother-love that she should have been fat like a potato. When the Baba came home she put sweets into his mouth with her own hands, and at nights the newcomer to the household could hear the great General Secretary of the B T C A protesting, Let me go, wife, I can undress myself. At breakfast she spoon-fed Mhatre with large helpings of malt, and before he went to work she brushed his hair. They were a childless couple, and young Najmuddin understood that the Babasaheb wanted him to share the load. Oddly enough, however, the Begum did not treat the young man as a child. "You see, he is a grown fellow," she told her husband when poor Mhatre pleaded, "Give the boy the blasted spoon of malt." Yes, a grown fellow, "we must make a man of him, husband, no babying for him." "Then damn it to hell," the Babasaheb exploded, "why do you do it to me?" Mrs. Mhatre burst into tears. "But you are everything to me," she wept, "you are my father, my lover, my baby too. You are my lord and my suckling child. If I displease you then I have no life."

Babasaheb Mhatre, accepting defeat, swallowed the tablespoon of malt.

He was a kindly man, which he disguised with insults and noise. To console the orphaned youth he would speak to him, in the blue office, about the philosophy of rebirth, convincing him that his parents were already being scheduled for re-entry somewhere, unless of course their lives had been so holy that they had attained the final grace. So it was Mhatre who started Farishta off on the whole reincarnation business, and not just reincarnation. The Babasaheb was an amateur psychic, a tapper of table-legs and a bringer of spirits into glasses. "But I gave that up," he told his protégé, with many suitably melodramatic inflections, gestures, frowns, "after I got the fright of my bloody life."

Once (Mhatre recounted) the glass had been visited by the most co-operative of spirits, such a too-friendly fellow, see, so I thought to ask him some big questions. _Is there a God_, and that glass which had been running round like a mouse or so just stopped dead, middle of table, not a twitch, completely phutt, kaput. So, then, okay, I said, if you won't answer that try this one instead, and I came right out with it, _Is there a Devil_. After that the glass -- baprebap! -- began to shake -- catch your ears! -- slowslow at first, then faster--faster, like a jelly, until it jumped! -- ai-hai! -- up from the table, into the air, fell down on its side, and -- o-ho! -- into a thousand and one pieces, smashed. Believe don't believe, Babasaheb Mhatre told his charge, but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don't meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.

This story had a profound effect on the consciousness of the young listener, because even before his mother's death he had become convinced of the existence of the supernatural world. Sometimes when he looked around him, especially in the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the visible world, its features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air: people, motor-cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their reality concealed from his eyes. He would blink, and the illusion would fade, but the sense of it never left him. He grew up believing in God, angels, demons, afreets, djinns, as matter-of-factly as if they were bullock-carts or lamp-posts, and it struck him as a failure in his own sight that he had never seen a ghost. He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of greentinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

From his mother Naima Najmuddin he heard a great many stories of the Prophet, and if inaccuracies had crept into her versions he wasn't interested in knowing what they were. "What a man!" he thought. "What angel would not wish to speak to him?" Sometimes, though, he caught himself in the act of forming blasphemous thoughts, for example when without meaning to, as he drifted off to sleep in his cot at the Mhatre residence, his somnolent fancy began to compare his own condition with that of the Prophet at the time when, having been orphaned and short of funds, he made a great success of his job as the business manager of the wealthy widow Khadija, and ended up marrying her as well. As he slipped into sleep he saw himself sitting on a rose-strewn dais, simpering shyly beneath the sari-pallu which he had placed demurely over his face, while his new husband, Babasaheb Mhatre, reached lovingly towards him to remove the fabric, and gaze at his features in a mirror placed in his lap. This dream of marrying the Babasaheb brought him awake, flushing hotly for shame, and after that he began to worry about the impurity in his make-up that could create such terrible visions.

Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him that required no more special attention than any other. When Babasaheb Mhatre took him into his home it confirmed to the young man that he was not alone in the world, that something was taking care of him, so he was not entirely surprised when the Babasaheb called him into the blue office on the morning of his twenty-first birthday and sacked him without even being prepared to listen to an appeal.

"You're fired," Mhatre emphasized, beaming. "Cashiered, had your chips. Dis-_miss_."

"But, uncle,"

"Shut your face."

Then the Babasaheb gave the orphan the greatest present of his life, informing him that a meeting had been arranged for him at the studios of the legendary film magnate Mr. D. W. Rama; an audition. "It is for appearance only," the Babasaheb said. "Rama is my good friend and we have discussed. A small part to begin, then it is up to you. Now get out of my sight and stop pulling such humble faces, it does not suit."

"But, uncle,"

"Boy like you is too damn goodlooking to carry tiffins on his head all his life. Get gone now, go, be a homosexual movie actor. I fired you five minutes back."

"But, uncle,"

"I have spoken. Thank your lucky stars."

He became Gibreel Farishta, but for four years he did not become a star, serving his apprenticeship in a succession of minor knockabout comic parts. He remained calm, unhurried, as though he could see the future, and his apparent lack of ambition made him something of an outsider in that most self-seeking of industries. He was thought to be stupid or arrogant or both. And throughout the four wilderness years he failed to kiss a single woman on the mouth.

On-screen, he played the fall guy, the idiot who loves the beauty and can't see that she wouldn't go for him in a thousand years, the funny uncle, the poor relation, the village idiot, the servant, the incompetent crook, none of them the type of part that ever rates a love scene. Women kicked him, slapped him, teased him, laughed at him, but never, on celluloid, looked at him or sang to him or danced around him with cinematic love in their eyes. Off-screen, he lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what women looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and desire, he studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything; and the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces, and young boys dreamed in impossible detail of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with precious stones. He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the small hours of his insomniac nights, that he was full of something that had never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer it to.

His big break arrived with the coming of the theological movies. Once the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got his or her chance to be a star. When D. W. Rama scheduled a production based on the story of Ganesh, none of the leading box-office names of the time were willing to spend an entire movie concealed inside an elephant's head. Gibreel jumped at the chance. That was his first hit, _Ganpati Baba_, and suddenly he was a superstar, but only with the trunk and ears on. After six movies playing the elephantheaded god he was permitted to remove the thick, pendulous, grey mask and put on, instead, a long, hairy tail, in order to play Hanuman the monkey king in a sequence of adventure movies that owed more to a certain cheap television series emanating from Hong Kong than it did to the Ramayana. This series proved so popular that monkey-tails became de rigueur for the city's young bucks at the kind of parties frequented by convent girls known as "firecrackers" because of their readiness to go off with a bang.

After Hanuman there was no stopping Gibreel, and his phenomenal success deepened his belief in a guardian angel. But it also led to a more regrettable development.

(I see that I must, after all, spill poor Rekha's beans.)

Even before he replaced false head with fake tail he had become irresistibly attractive to women. The seductions of his fame had grown so great that several of these young ladies asked him if he would keep the Ganesh-mask on while they made love, but he refused out of respect for the dignity of the god. Owing to the innocence of his upbringing he could not at that time differentiate between quantity and quality and accordingly felt the need to make up for lost time. He had so many sexual partners that it was not uncommon for him to forget their names even before they had left his room. Not only did he become a philanderer of the worst type, but he also learned the arts of dissimulation, because a man who plays gods must be above reproach. So skilfully did he conceal his life of scandal and debauch that his old patron, Babasaheb Mhatre, lying on his deathbed a decade after he sent a young dabbawalla out into the world of illusion, black-money and lust, begged him to get married to prove he was a man. "God-sake, mister," the Babasaheb pleaded, "when I told you back then to go and be a homo I never thought you would take me seriously, there is a limit to respecting one's elders, after all." Gibreel threw up his hands and swore that he was no such disgraceful thing, and that when the right girl came along he would of course undergo nuptials with a will. "What you waiting? Some goddess from heaven? Greta Garbo, Gracekali, who?" cried the old man, coughing blood, but Gibreel left him with the enigma of a smile that allowed him to die without having his mind set entirely at rest.

The avalanche of sex in which Gibreel Farishta was trapped managed to bury his greatest talent so deep that it might easily have been lost forever, his talent, that is, for loving genuinely, deeply and without holding back, the rare and delicate gift which he had never been able to employ. By the time of his illness he had all but forgotten the anguish he used to experience owing to his longing for love, which had twisted and turned in him like a sorcerer's knife. Now, at the end of each gymnastic night, he slept easily and long, as if he had never been plagued by dream-women, as if he had never hoped to lose his heart.

"Your trouble," Rekha Merchant told him when she materialized out of the clouds, "is everybody always forgave you, God knows why, you always got let off, you got away with murder. Nobody ever held you responsible for what you did." He couldn't argue. "God's gift," she screamed at him, "God knows where you thought you were from, jumped-up type from the gutter, God knows what diseases you brought."

But that was what women did, he thought in those days, they were the vessels into which he could pour himself, and when he moved on, they would understand that it was his nature, and forgive. And it was true that nobody blamed him for leaving, for his thousand and one pieces of thoughtlessness, how many abortions, Rekha demanded in the cloud-hole, how many broken hearts. In all those years he was the beneficiary of the infinite generosity of women, but he was its victim, too, because their forgiveness made possible the deepest and sweetest corruption of all, namely the idea that he was doing nothing wrong.

Rekha: she entered his life when he bought the penthouse at Everest Vilas and she offered, as a neighbour and businesswoman, to show him her carpets and antiques. Her husband was at a world-wide congress of ball-bearings manufacturers in Gothenburg, Sweden, and in his absence she invited Gibreel into her apartment of stone lattices from Jaisalmer and carved wooden handrails from Kcralan palaces and a stone Mughal chhatri or cupola turned into a whirlpool bath; while she poured him French champagne she leaned against marbled walls and felt the cool veins of the stone against her back. When he sipped the champagne she teased him, surely gods should not partake of alcohol, and he answered with a line he had once read in an interview with the Aga Khan, O, you know, this champagne is only for outward show, the moment it touches my lips it turns to water. After that it didn't take long for her to touch his lips and deliquesce into his arms. By the time her children returned from school with the ayah she was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and sat with him in the drawing-room, revealing the secrets of the carpet business, confessing that art silk stood for artificial not artistic, telling him not to be fooled by her brochure in which a rug was seductively described as being made of wool plucked from the throats of baby lambs, which means, you see, only _low-grade wool_, advertising, what to do, this is how it is.

He did not love her, was not faithful to her, forgot her birthdays, failed to return her phone calls, turned up when it was most inconvenient owing to the presence in her home of dinner guests from the world of the ball-bearing, and like everyone else she forgave him. But her forgiveness was not the silent, mousy let-off he got from the others. Rekha complained like crazy, she gave him hell, she bawled him out and cursed him for a useless lafanga and haramzada and salah and even, in extremis, for being guilty of the impossible feat of fucking the sister he did not have. She spared him nothing, accusing him of being a creature of surfaces, like a movie screen, and then she went ahead and forgave him anyway and allowed him to unhook her blouse. Gibreel could not resist the operatic forgiveness of Rekha Merchant, which was all the more moving on account of the flaw in her own position, her infidelity to the ball-bearing king, which Gibreel forbore to mention, taking his verbal beatings like a man. So that whereas the pardons he got from the rest of his women left him cold and he forgot them the moment they were uttered, he kept coming back to Rekha, so that she could abuse him and then console him as only she knew how.

Then he almost died.

He was filming at Kanya Kumari, standing on the very tip of Asia, taking part in a fight scene set at the point on Cape Comorin where it seems that three oceans are truly smashing into one another. Three sets of waves rolled in from the west east south and collided in a mighty clapping of watery hands just as Gibreel took a punch on the jaw, perfect timing, and he passed out on the spot, falling backwards into tri-oceanic spume. He did not get up.

To begin with everybody blamed the giant English stunt-man Eustace Brown, who had delivered the punch. He protested vehemently. Was he not the same fellow who had performed opposite Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao in his many theological movie roles? Had he not perfected the art of making the old man look good in combat without hurting him? Had he ever complained that NTR never pulled his punches, so that he, Eustace, invariably ended up black and blue, having been beaten stupid by a little old guy whom he could've eaten for breakfast, on _toast_, and had he ever, even once, lost his temper? Well, then? How could anyone think he would hurt the immortal Gibreel? -- They fired him anyway and the police put him in the lock-up, just in case.

But it was not the punch that had flattened Gibreel. After the star had been flown into Bombay's Breach Candy Hospital in an Air Force jet made available for the purpose; after exhaustive tests had come up with almost nothing; and while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood-count that had fallen from his normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital spokesman faced the national press on Breach Candy's wide white steps. "It is a freak mystery," he gave out. "Call it, if you so please, an act of God."

Gibreel Farishta had begun to haemorrhage all over his insides for no apparent reason, and was quite simply bleeding to death inside his skin. At the worst moment the blood began to seep out through his rectum and penis, and it seemed that at any moment it might burst torrentially through his nose and ears and out of the corners of his eyes. For seven days he bled, and received transfusions, and every clotting agent known to medical science, including a concentrated form of rat poison, and although the treatment resulted in a marginal improvement the doctors gave him up for lost.

The whole of India was at Gibreel's bedside. His condition was the lead item on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national television network, and the crowd that gathered in Warden Road was so large that the police had to disperse it with lathi-charges and tear-gas, which they used even though every one of the half-million mourners was already tearful and wailing. The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta's bedroom, holding the actor's hand. A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? In the mosques and temples of the nation, packed congregations prayed, not only for the life of the dying actor, but for the future, for themselves.

Who did not visit Gibreel in hospital? Who never wrote, made no telephone call, despatched no flowers, sent in no tiffins of delicious home cooking? While many lovers shamelessly sent him get-well cards and lamb pasandas, who, loving him most of all, kept herself to herself, unsuspected by her ball--bearing of a husband? Rekha Merchant placed iron around her heart, and went through the motions of her daily life, playing with her children, chit-chatting with her husband, acting as his hostess when required, and never, not once, revealed the bleak devastation of her soul.

He recovered.

The recovery was as mysterious as the illness, and as rapid. It, too, was called (by hospital, journalists, friends) an act of the Supreme. A national holiday was declared; fireworks were set off up and down the land. But when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith.

On the day he was discharged from hospital he went under police escort through the immense crowd that had gathered to celebrate its own deliverance as well as his, climbed into his Mercedes and told the driver to give all the pursuing vehicles the slip, which took seven hours and fifty-one minutes, and by the end of the manoeuvre he had worked out what had to be done. He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, the pork sausages from Wiltshire and the cured York hams and the rashers of bacon from godknowswhere; with the gammon steaks of his unbelief and the pig's trotters of secularism; and then, standing there in the middle of the hall, while photographers popped up from nowhere, he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth.

During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to _thin air_, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.

He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away.

"Don't you get it?" he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments from the corners of his mouth. "No thunderbolt. That's the point."

She came back to stand in front of him. "You're alive," she told him. "You got your life back. _That's_ the point."

He told Rekha: the moment she turned around and started walking back I fell in love with her. Alleluia Cone, climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest, blonde yahudan, ice queen. Her challenge, _change your life, or did you get it back for nothing_, I couldn't resist.

"You and your reincarnation junk," Rekha cajoled him. "Such a nonsense head. You come out of hospital, back through death's door, and it goes to your head, crazy boy, at once you must have some escapade thing, and there she is, hey presto, the blonde mame. Don't think I don't know what you're like, Gibbo, so what now, you want me to forgive you or what?"

No need, he said. He left Rekha's apartment (its mistress wept, face-down, on the floor); and never entered it again.

Three days after he met her with his mouth full of unclean meat Allie got into an aeroplane and left. Three days out of time behind a do-not-disturb sign, but in the end they agreed that the world was real, what was possible was possible and what was impossible was im--, brief encounter, ships that pass, love in a transit lounge. After she left, Gibreel rested, tried to shut his ears to her challenge, resolved to get his life back to normal. Just because he'd lost his belief it didn't mean he couldn't do his job, and in spite of the scandal of the ham-eating photographs, the first scandal ever to attach itself to his name, he signed movie contracts and went back to work.

And then, one morning, a wheelchair stood empty and he had gone. A bearded passenger, one Ismail Najmuddin, boarded Flight AI-420 to London. The 747 was named after one of the gardens of Paradise, not Gulistan but _Bostan_. "To be born again," Gibrecl Farishta said to Saladin Chamcha much later, "first you have to die. Me, I only half-expired, but I did it on two occasions, hospital and plane, so it adds up, it counts. And now, Spoono my friend, here I stand before you in Proper London, Vilayet, regenerated, a new man with a new life. Spoono, is this not a bloody fine thing?"

Why did he leave?

Because of her, the challenge of her, the newness, the fierceness of the two of them together, the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on its right to become.

And, or, maybe: because after he ate the pigs the retribution began, a nocturnal retribution, a punishment of dreams.

3

Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care -- it had taken him several years to get it just right -- and for many more years now he had thought of it simply as _his own_ -- indeed, he had forgotten what he had looked like before it. Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face, a voice whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted disconcertingly with the sawn--off abruptness of the consonants. The combination of face and voice was a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his home town, his first such visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should observe, of Gibreel Farishta's film stardom), there had been strange and worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down.

It started -- Chamcha, allowing fingers and thumbs to relax and hoping, in some embarrassment, that his last remaining superstition had gone unobserved by his fellow-passengers, closed his eyes and remembered with a delicate shudder of horror -- on his flight east some weeks ago. He had fallen into a torpid sleep, high above the desert sands of the Persian Gulf, and been visited in a dream by a bizarre stranger, a man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire body and begged Saladin to help him, to release him from the prison of his skin. Chamcha picked up a stone and began to batter at the glass. At once a latticework of blood oozed up through the cracked surface of the stranger's body, and when Chamcha tried to pick off the broken shards the other began to scream, because chunks of his flesh were coming away with the glass. At this point an air stewardess bent over the sleeping Chamcha and demanded, with the pitiless hospitality of her tribe: _Something to drink, sir? A drink?_, and Saladin, emerging from the dream, found his speech unaccountably metamorphosed into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and so long ago!) unmade. "Achha, means what?" he mumbled. "Alcoholic beverage or what?" And, when the stewardess reassured him, whatever you wish, sir, all beverages are gratis, he heard, once again, his traitor voice: "So, okay, bibi, give one whiskysoda only."

What a nasty surprise! He had come awake with a jolt, and sat stiffly in his chair, ignoring alcohol and peanuts. How had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver arc of muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to _go home_, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing was bound to be a disaster.

_I'm not myself_, he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly. After all, "les acteurs ne sont pas des gens", as the great ham Frederick had explained in _Les Enfants du Paradis_. Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

The seatbelt light came on, the captain's voice warned of air turbulence, they dropped in and out of air pockets. The desert lurched about beneath them and the migrant labourer who had boarded at Qatar clutched at his giant transistor radio and began to retch. Chamcha noticed that the man had not fastened his belt, and pulled himself together, bringing his voice back to its haughtiest English pitch. "Look here, why don't you. . ." he indicated, but the sick man, between bursts of heaving into the paper bag which Saladin had handed him just in time, shook his head, shrugged, replied: "Sahib, for what? If Allah wishes me to die, I shall die. If he does not, I shall not. Then of what use is the safety?"

Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won't get your hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back.

Once upon a time -- _it was and it was not so_, as the old stories used to say, _it happened and it never did_ -- maybe, then, or maybe not, a ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the Street outside his home. He was on the way home from school, having just descended from the school bus on which he had been obliged to sit squashed between the adhesive sweatiness of boys in shorts and be deafened by their noise, and because even in those days he was a person who recoiled from raucousness, jostling and the perspiration of strangers he was feeling faintly nauseated by the long, bumpy ride home. However, when he saw the black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and grabbed, -- opened, -- and found, to his delight, that it was full of cash, -- and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets and international exchanges, -- pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away. Dazzled by the thick wad of foreign currency, the boy raised his eyes to make sure he had not been observed, and for a moment it seemed to him that a rainbow had arched down to him from the heavens, a rainbow like an angel's breath, like an answered prayer, coming to an end in the very spot on which he stood. His fingers trembled as they reached into the wallet, towards the fabulous hoard.

"Give it." It seemed to him in later life that his father had been spying on him throughout his childhood, and even though Changez Chamchawala was a big man, a giant even, to say nothing of his wealth and public standing, he still always had the lightness of foot and also the inclination to sneak up behind his son and spoil whatever he was doing, whipping the young Salahuddin's bedsheet off at night to reveal the shameful penis in the clutching, red hand. And he could smell money from a hundred and one miles away, even through the stink of chemicals and fertilizer that always hung around him owing to his being the country's largest manufacturer of agricultural sprays and fluids and artificial dung. Changez Chamchawala, philanthropist, philanderer, living legend, leading light of the nationalist movement, sprang from the gateway of his home to pluck a bulging wallet from his son's frustrated hand. "Tch tch," he admonished, pocketing the pounds sterling, "you should not pick things up from the street. The ground is dirty, and money is dirtier, anyway."

On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a ten-volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm owing to the deep-seated prejudice against books which led Changez to own thousands of the pernicious things in order to humiliate them by leaving them to rot unread, there stood a magic lamp, a brightly polished copper--and--brass avatar of Aladdin's very own genie-container: a lamp begging to be rubbed. But Changez neither rubbed it nor permitted it to be rubbed by, for example, his son. "One day," he assured the boy, "you'll have it for yourself. Then rub and rub as much as you like and see what doesn't come to you. Just now, but, it is mine." The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself.

Salahuddin Chamchawala had understood by his thirteenth year that he was destined for that cool Vilayet full of the crisp promises of pounds sterling at which the magic billfold had hinted, and he grew increasingly impatient of that Bombay of dust, vulgarity, policemen in shorts, transvestites, movie fanzines, pavement sleepers and the rumoured singing whores of Grant Road who had begun as devotees of the Yellamma cult in Karnataka but ended up here as dancers in the more prosaic temples of the flesh. He was fed up of textile factories and local trains and all the confusion and superabundance of the place, and longed for that dream-Vilayet of poise and moderation that had come to obsess him by night and day. His favourite playground rhymes were those that yearned for foreign cities: kitchy--con kitchy-ki kitchy-con stanty-eye kitchy-ople kitchy-cople kitchyCon-stanti-nople. And his favourite game was the version ofgrandmother's footsteps in which, when he was it, he would turn his back on upcreeping playmates to gabble out, like a mantra, like a spell, the six letters of his dream--city, _ellowen deeowen_. In his secret heart, he crept silently up on London, letter by letter, just as his friends crept up to him. _Ellowen deeowen London_.

The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it will be seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the lions of Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the Brabourne Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game's creators to defeat the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be maintained. (But the games were invariably drawn, owing to the featherbed somnolence of the Brabourne Stadium wicket; the great issue, creator versus imitator, colonizer against colonized, had perforce to remain unresolved.)

In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at Scandal Point without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba. And one day (it was so, it was not so), he strolled out of the house, that ample, crumbling, salt-caked building in the Parsi style, all columns and shutters and little balconies, and through the garden that was his father's pride and joy and which in a certain evening light could give the impression of being infinite (and which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because nobody, not his father, not the gardener, could tell him the names of most of the plants and trees), and out through the main gateway, a grandiose folly, a reproduction of the Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and across the wild insanity of the street, and over the sea wall, and so at last on to the broad expanse of shiny black rocks with their little shrimpy pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks, men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the blue horizon. In a hollow of black stone Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool. Their eyes met, and the man beckoned him with a single finger which he then laid across his lips. _Shh_, and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy towards the stranger. He was a creature of bone. Spectacles framed in what might have been ivory. His finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When Salahuddin came down the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and forced his young hand between old and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone there. The dhoti open to the winds. Salahuddin had never known how to fight; he did what he was forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him and let him go.

After that Salahuddin never went to the rocks at Scandal Point; nor did he tell anyone what had happened, knowing the neurasthenic crises it would unleash in his mother and suspecting that his father would say it was his own fault. It seemed to him that everything loathsome, everything he had come to revile about his home town, had come together in the stranger's bony embrace, and now that he had escaped that evil skeleton he must also escape Bombay, or die. He began to concentrate fiercely upon this idea, to fix his will upon it at all times, eating shitting sleeping, convincing himself that he could make the miracle happen even without his father's lamp to help him out. He dreamed of flying out of his bedroom window to discover that there, below him, was -- not Bombay -- but Proper London itself, Bigben Nelsonscolumn Lordstavern Bloodytower Queen. But as he floated out over the great metropolis he felt himself beginning to lose height, and no matter how hard he struggled kicked swam-in-air he continued to spiral slowly downwards to earth, then faster, then faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down towards the city, Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedlestreet, zeroing in on London like a bomb.

o o o

[your-dietician]

What Increases Dementia Risk? | WTOP

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/what-increases-dementia-risk-wtop/

What Increases Dementia Risk? | WTOP

The possibility of future dementia isn’t just a matter of fate. Modifiable dementia risk factors are those that can be…

The possibility of future dementia isn’t just a matter of fate. Modifiable dementia risk factors are those that can be reduced — and for which you can make positive changes to stave off mental decline in your own life.

It’s not too surprising that boxing careers or decades of heavy drinking raise the likelihood of developing dementia. But hearing loss in middle age, social isolation and even air pollution are significant contributors, too.

Genetics and dementia family history are beyond your control, and other influences are too complex to confront on an individual level. Social determinants of health, environmental factors and widespread health inequities represent larger challenges for change.

Even so, you can help yourself by incorporating health and lifestyle practices that mitigate against known dementia risk factors now.

[See: Questions Doctors Wish Their Patients Would Ask.]

Key Risk Factors

Modifying 12 risk factors could delay or prevent up to 40% of dementia cases, according to an evidence analysis in the updated “Dementia Prevention, Intervention, and Care: 2020 Report of the Lancet Commission.”

These are key risk factors — many arising later in life, but some sooner — for dementia:

— Less education in early life.

— Hearing loss in midlife.

— Traumatic brain injury.

— High blood pressure.

— Alcohol (moderate to high weekly use).

— Obesity.

— Smoking.

— Depression.

— Social isolation.

— Physical inactivity.

— Diabetes.

— Air pollution.

Excessive alcohol consumption, head injury and air pollution are the risk factors most recently identified in the Lancet Commission’s evidence evaluation. Hearing, education and smoking are the three biggest risk factors.

Education comprises aspects such as literacy, schooling and more. “It appears that it’s not just education at a young age,” says Dr. Gill Livingston, who heads the report committee. “Doing things to stimulate your brain as you get older also makes a difference.” For instance, she says, being involved in an occupation that keeps you mentally alert seems to be protective of your brain.

“Smoking is the next one that makes a difference at a population level,” says Livingston, who is a consultant psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry of older people with University College London. “The good news about smoking is even reducing smoking when you’re older seems to begin to reduce your rate of having dementia.”

Hearing Loss in Middle Age

Inability to hear now can affect your dementia risk later. “What people often don’t know, and I didn’t know until we started doing all of this work, is that the biggest potentially modifiable risk factor for dementia is hearing impairment in midlife,” Livingston says. “If you know people 15 to 20 years before the age where they were likely to develop dementia, those who have hearing impairment have twice the risk of developing dementia than those who don’t.”

To change that dynamic, other research groups have been doing important work to prove how much difference hearing aids make, Livingston says: “And it seems that if you use hearing aids, then your risk drops down to the rest of the population.”

Among nearly 115,000 people older than 66 newly diagnosed with hearing loss, getting a hearing aid reduced their risk of being diagnosed with dementia or depression — a dementia risk factor in itself — over the next three years, in a University of Michigan study published Sept. 4, 2019, in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

[See: Best Foods for Brain Health.]

Traumatic Brain Injury

Research has been building on the multiple harms of head trauma by causes ranging from wartime blast injuries to sports-related concussions or multiple impacts. Evidence increasingly points to dementia as another potential consequence, and risk increases with each episode, according to a recent study.

“We found that a history of a single prior head injury was associated with a 1.25 times increased risk of dementia — and a history of two or more prior head injuries was associated with over two times increased risk of dementia compared to individuals without a head injury,” says Dr. Andrea Schneider, a physician with Penn Medicine and an assistant professor in the department of neurology at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

The evidence encompassed 25 years’ worth of data on more than 14,000 participants from a long-term study on the risk of atherosclerosis. Researchers interviewed participants and reviewed their hospital records related to head injuries. In particular, head injury after age 45 in was associated with an increased risk of developing dementia, in the study published in March 2021 in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

The findings suggest that “the number of head injuries sustained matters, and there is an important need for future research focused on prevention and intervention strategies aimed at reducing dementia after head injury,” Schneider says.

Genetics or family history of dementia and aging are among major risk factors for dementia that cannot be modified, Schneider notes. But, she adds, “One common misconception is that dementia is inevitable with aging — this is not true. Dementia is not a normal part of aging; however, the risk of dementia does increase with age.”

[See: Drinks That Give You a Buzz and No Hangover.]

Alcohol

Although a limited amount of drinking may be good for the brain, even moderate alcohol use can raise the risk of dementia.

“Alcohol does make a difference,” Livingston says. “Drinking a little, seems to be, if anything, protective. But drinking a lot, even what people might call social drinking, makes you more likely to develop dementia.” The risk of young-onset dementia — dementia that develops before age 65 — in particular has been connected with significant alcohol use.

In general, consuming what amounts to more than 14 servings (in U.S. measurements) of alcohol weekly increases dementia risk, Livingston says. “That number is quite easy to (reach) if you have a drink or two with dinner or socialize,” she notes. “It’s an amount you could easily drink without being drunk or without being dependent. So go out and have a drink some nights, but not every night.”

Health/Lifestyle

Managing your blood pressure — whether through lifestyle measures such as weight loss and exercise, medication or a combination — can help prevent high blood pressure from becoming a dementia risk factor. Blood pressure is among multiple factors in brain health for primary care providers to address with patients, according to a scientific statement from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association published in June 2021 issue of the journal Stroke.

“It’s keeping your blood pressure down,” says Ronald Lazar, director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine and a statement author. “It is keeping your cholesterol under control. It is eating properly; a good diet. It’s making sure that you don’t get overweight, sleeping properly, keeping yourself socially engaged with the rest of the world. It’s managing your mood state, so that if you’re depressed, it’s being addressed.”

Reducing inflammation is a common thread. “In many ways, what a lot of these lifestyle behaviors and risk-factor management do is minimize inflammation,” Lazar says. “Inflammation in the body, for different kinds of reasons, can influence inflammation in the brain, as well as directly causing inflammation in the brain by itself.” The connection between the gut and brain health is increasingly recognized, he adds, and with it, the need to minimize gut inflammation.

“In terms of a single lifestyle practice, exercise benefits all others,” Lazar says. “It’s probably first among equals.” Although aerobic exercise is the best in this context, he says, resistance training also has supporting evidence.

As far as a healthy diet, “The thing is to eat appropriately and avoid high fats,” Lazar says. “You really don’t want to create atherosclerosis in any part of the body, including the brain.”

Balanced diets such as MIND, Mediterranean diet and DASH are among eating plans that cover those bases. The MIND diet was created specifically to reduce dementia risk, and recent evidence is encouraging.

[See: Exercise Equipment for Seniors.]

Social Determinants of Dementia

Air pollution is a recently identified dementia risk factor that isn’t so easy to escape. Stress is another complex problem that may indirectly affect dementia risk, making stress reduction important.

“There’s pretty good evidence now that stress causes inflammation,” Lazar says. “So, disparate communities, disparate populations have the highest risk for stroke and dementia. One reason that’s the case is because of the stress that often exists in individuals who are struggling to make ends meet, have family burdens and the environments in which they live create stress as well. This is one of the impacts of adverse social determinants. And stress is not good for the body and, in turn, not good for the brain.”

Steps to Stave Off Dementia

Depending on your individual circumstance and any medical conditions, you can lower your risk of developing dementia — or possibly delay dementia onset for years — by incorporating these brain-friendly practices:

— Controlling your blood pressure.

— Having your hearing checked.

— Using hearing aids if needed.

— Managing your blood sugar if you have diabetes.

— Avoiding head injury and using helmets for protection.

— Exercising regularly.

— Social interaction — seeing other people.

— Ongoing education and mental stimulation.

— Eating a healthy diet.

— Stress reduction.

— Maintaining a healthy weight.

— Smoking cessation.

— Therapy for depression.

Your primary care provider should be talking with you about promoting lifelong brain health. “We want to create more mindfulness in the conversation between patients and their providers,” Lazar says. “And if the providers don’t bring it forth, then patients should serve as their own advocates and start asking questions.”

More from U.S. News

Ways to Boost Your Immune System

Foods to Eat and Avoid — or at Least Limit — on an Anti-inflammatory Diet

How 16 Fruits Boost Your Health

What Increases Dementia Risk? originally appeared on usnews.com

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[macgyvermedical]

Hi! I'm wondering if you can answer a question. I have a character who dies in a car accident, but I don't want him to die right away. I want him to be in the hospital for say 12 hours before he dies, and I'm thinking head trauma is the best bet here? Is this reasonable? Would there be surgery in this instance? And would his family be allowed to see him at all? Thanks so much!!

Head trauma is definitely a possibility here!

Death by head trauma comes either directly due to immediate and irreparable physical damage to the portions of the brain that maintain life (this would probably be called at the scene if it was obvious, like a gunshot wound), or by way of swelling or hematoma, both of which can take a while (usually in the range of hours to maybe a day) to manifest lethally. Swelling and hematoma are both injuries that are possibly treatable in a hospital setting to prevent that lethality, so if you wanted a patient to die in an ICU,  would be a realistic injury to get him there.

Since the brain is in an enclosed space (the skull won’t naturally expand to accommodate a larger, swollen brain), pressure in the skull increases until blood can no longer enter the brain’s blood vessels, which starves the brain of oxygen and glucose, eventually damaging the portions of the brain responsible for breathing, temperature regulation, and other life support functions.

That’s when death occurs, assuming no medical intervention.

Here are three posts I’ve done previously on head trauma: Concussions, Grading Concussions, Hematoma Evacuation with Burr Holes (Scorpion Episode Explanation)

(Something extra whumpy about swelling/hematoma is the possibilty of a “lucid interval” in which the person appears “normal” just after the injury, before undergoing changes in mental status or other indications of increasing pressure in the skull)

Now, we have ways of mitigating this process and possibly saving the person provided its caught early enough and they respond to the treatment.

First, medication-wise there are drugs like mannitol that draw water out of the brain tissue and into blood circulation. This frees up some space in the skull so blood can continue to enter at a reasonable pressure. Corticosteroids can also decrease swelling and free up some of that space.

If that doesn’t work, surgical intervention may be considered. Surgery for brain swelling usually involves taking a flap of skull out, which gives a lot more room for the swelling to run its course. Obviously this is dangerous, as it exposes the brain to more damage and possibly infection, but it could also be life saving because it would immediately lower the pressure in the brain. Surgical intervention for a hematoma is similar, but involves removing a pocket of blood (the hematoma) somewhere in the brain to provide the extra space.

If these treatments are still failing (or work but damage has already been done), there are ways to support life in the hope that eventually things heal up enough on their own to allow the person to survive. Among these are mechanical ventilation and cooling blankets, as well as medication to correct blood pressure abnormalities and heart rhythm if needed.

As for the last part of your question, family is usually able to visit patients in an ICU setting, provided they are not actively being coded or in surgery. Family is not usually allowed in PACU (surgical recovery) either, but this may be different depending on the rules of the particular hospital.

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[transcriptroopers]

How would a character (with military training) deal with getting flash-grenaded? If they saw it thrown into the room, would they have time to recognize it, turn away, and cover eyes/ears? Would this help mitigate the effects of the flash-grenade? If not, how do they recover the quickest, minimizing their own vulnerability?

Grenades in general are fickle little beasts. You can have all the training in the world on them and they’ll still probably surprise you now and then. They’re more likely to dud than traditional grenades (for some reason) so there’s always that hope.The M84 flashbang or stun grenade is supposedly supposed to go off within about one and a half to two and a half seconds after deployment. When an object is falling/traveling to a location, those miliseconds can be really critical. You might have that split second or two to react or you might have no time at all. It’s really up in the air. If you’re being flashbanged outside, that’s better odds for you. If you’re being flashbanged in a closed environment, there’s very little you can do to avoid the effects completely; the best you can do is make efforts to not be permanently disabled from it. Flashbangs are considered non-lethal, but they’re most certainly not non-damaging. There’s a misconception that flashbangs are mostly harmless and are only used to distract, (thanks, CS:GO) but actually they can cause permanent hearing damage/deafness/tinnitus (ringing in the ears) eye damage, brain damage, limb loss, severe burns, and in the right circumstances they can straight up kill someone. Flashbangs caused fires during the 1980 Iranian Embassy Siege in London, and there’s been cases of people losing limbs to close contact with flashbangs.Hubby remembers flashbang training better than I do so the rest is all basically his doing. In addition to its titular “flash,” flashbangs work by releasing a wave of concussive force, basically a wave of high pressure. This is why you can’t really “avoid” a flashbang in a closed environment because there’s no defensive maneuver you can do to avoid pressure. The most important thing to remember when being flashbanged is that you open your mouth. Flashbangs go off at about 170 decibels, which is 20 decibels more than the amount needed to rupture your eardrums. The chart I saw said that a jet taking off 25 meters away at 150 decibels would rupture your eardrums; imagine 20 decibels more than a jet engine taking off five feet from your head. 

There is nothing you can do as a person to protect your ears from this. The pressure will affect your ears no matter what, so your body needs to both release the pressure and try to recover equilibrium after getting hit by the wave, because the blast will disturb the fluid in your ears (the stuff that maintains your sense of balance) and make you all wibbly-wobbly fuckity-uppity. If your mouth is closed and you cover your ears or plug your ears, your eardrums will be very wrecked and you may be brain-damaged as a result of all that concussive force having no escape route. The flash of a flashbang basically turns on all of your photoreceptors so that your eyes are just like, 100% all the light, so the flash seems more intense and blinding. Even closing and protecting your eyes, your eyes are still sensitive to pressure, so if the flash doesn’t get you it’ll still send a wave of concussive force through your face and your eyes will still be like “why.”Hubby says if we were to encounter a flashbang, we should cover our eyes, face away from the grenade, and open our mouth. Since there’s nothing we can do about our ears and plugging them would actually make the aftermath significantly worse, at least this will prevent major damage to your eyes, even though they’ll still be affected. Depending on proximity you may be deaf for a few seconds to a few minutes, although depending on eardrum damage your hearing might never fully recover. In an enclosed space you’ll probably be bleeding from the ears. Even if the flashbang goes off in another room, you might avoid the blinding effects but the concussive force would still hit you and at least disorient you/make your ears ring. Even if you took cover like behind a wall or something, you’ll still be affected, although not as severely. (fun fact: indoors the flashbang can blow out windows)Your eyesight should return within a minute but it’ll be not very good for about/up to an hour after contact. You’ll be so stunned, blind, deaf, and off-balance that you honestly might not be able to do...anything. I don’t think there’s actually anything you can do to recover quickly from a serious flashbang encounter. Equilibrium is so incredibly important and having been stripped of that you can’t walk, run, crawl, climb, possibly even hold your weapon.Obviously the actual effects depend on the proximity, the enclosed space, the soldier themselves, like...too much to count. You might be lucky enough to be up and moving again in a few minutes or you might be out for the count. Flashbangs are damn dangerous. If your character gets flashbanged and needs to be moving again quickly, either they need to be 1) Outside, several meters away, preferably behind cover2) At least a room away from where the flashbang went offI hope this is all helpful information! I’m sorry it took so long for me to answer this question.

-Kingsley

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[ignis-scientia-estrogen-brigade]

How about Ignis is bed bound for a week after a hunt gone wrong and his s/o has to take care of him. Funny and nsfw please.

[ISEB Author’s Note: The last longer fic I wrote based off a prompt completely got away from me (surprise, surprise), so I hope you don’t mind that I abbreviated your Ask into a headcanon, dearest Anon. Also, if I’m not mistaken, I think Ignis actually resides in Lestallum according to Talcott, but he somehow ended up in Hammerhead for the purposes of this fic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Very mildly NSFW, but I’m throwing it under a cut just to be safe.]

The strategist might’ve forgiven himself for stumbling onto the occasional oversight, considering he didn’t have the luxury of sight period; Red Giants rarely spawned in numbers greater than two outside of Leide, so when he got the call from hunter headquarters that a few had been sighted terrorizing a shipment of beans intended for Takka’s Diner, he seemed to recall a dozen elixirs being more than enough to take a couple of them down on his own.

But when he had arrived at the location of the mangled freight truck, he found himself face-to-face with not two, not three, but four of the colossal-sized daemons. It was only a small measure of mercy that Prompto happened to be in town at that very moment—the blond marksman scarcely passed up the opportunity to drop by and visit the Grease Monkey Goddess whenever a reasonably legitimate excuse presented itself—although the verdict was still out on whether his ‘assistance’ had truly been a blessing, or if Ignis had perhaps made an error in logic by squandering all twelve of his curatives to aid his helpless friend, rather than simply leaving his destiny in the hands of the nearest Astral and hoping for the best. Ultimately, he had decided that preserving what was left of the Brotherhood was more important than the fate of a few measly legumes; the two had managed to hightail it back to Hammerhead with their dignity—and limbs—mostly intact, but not before the blind strategist had taken a gargantuan fist solidly to the back of his skull.

It’s not that he’s unappreciative of his paramour’s medicinal ministrations; Ignis is not a prideful man, and although he’s adapted remarkably well to his ocular disability over the years, he isn’t so proud as to turn down the generosity of others when offered. It’s just that his lover has a propensity for being somewhat overeager to prove their devotion to him at times; administering a hi-potion at the top of every hour is certainly a useful strategy when striving to mitigate the nauseating effects of a concussion, except when it directly interferes with his pursuit of an afternoon of entirely uninterrupted rest. Likewise, the visor he wears specifically for the purpose of filtering out the bright artificial lights his right eye is painfully sensitive to is admittedly not necessary when the curtains of his bedroom are drawn, but the strategist grudgingly surmises he will be confined to his chambers for a good while to come when he hears the sound of frosted glass shattering on the floor after his partner had attempted to place them out of the way on a shelf.

But it’s not all sleep deprivation and crushed spectacles; his paramour knows their way around a kitchen well enough, and Ignis finds his appetite finally returning when the delectable aroma of Creamy Milk Risotto swirls in his bloody and scabbing nostrils. Indeed, the rich flavor of sautéed Malmashrooms served over steaming Saxham rice helps to quell the dull throbbing in his temples, and he conveys his everlasting gratitude to his lover for their domestic offerings while he is incapacitated—although he can’t quite seem to place the queer hint of tartness agitating his taste buds.

It’s only when his gut has abruptly curdled not long after consuming his meal that Ignis begins to suspect the sheep’s milk used in his partner’s recipe might’ve possibly been expired; determining who was at fault for the severe lapse in judgment is completely irrelevant at this point, because he barely has enough time to lock the restroom door behind him before his stomach is expelling the putrid toxins from his body with the heat and ferocity of the Infernian’s wrath. As he hangs his head above the commode in wretched prayer to the porcelain Astrals—his paramour pacing back and forth nervously just outside the door—the strategist can only hope that the sharpshooter’s recovery is going about as swimmingly as his own.

He knows his lover is only trying to help—broken glasses can be replaced, and anyone with a functioning set of eyes could’ve easily mistaken the number three dated on the dairy label for an eight—but even Ignis reaches the limit of his patience at times. So he summons the last vestiges of civility his shivering and aching body can muster and politely requests for them to fetch a fresh carton of sheep’s milk from the local Coernix Station in an effort to get them out of his hair for a while; momentarily relieved of their incessant worrying, the strategist lowers himself gingerly onto his bed, and his head scarcely has time to hit the pillow before he is falling blissfully toward unconsciousness and dreaming of better days when the flavor of risotto still appealed to him and acute food poisoning was but a distant memory.

The six hours of unbroken sleep he manages to accrue might’ve worked wonders for his healing wounds, but the wheels in his mind begin to race when he realizes his paramour has not yet returned from their shopping excursion. The service station was within spitting distance of his residence, and even a shortage of pasteurized ovine product necessitating a detour down to Longwythe Rest Area ought not to have taken them this long. The strategist resists the urge to bolt out the door sans spectacles in a panicked search for his missing other half, resolving instead to exercise the pragmatic side of his brain by dialing up a few of the locals. But the curious scent of lavender filling the air stays his hand when he reaches for his cellular, and the floral fragrance is soon followed by the sound of his partner’s familiar footsteps passing through the front door.

He can’t quite suppress the bewilderment in his voice when they find him trembling with alarm. Did they not understand the dangers prowling just beyond the radius of the street lamps? Did they not know the risk they were taking to their life by stepping foot outside the safety of Hammerhead’s wrought-iron fences? Of course they knew, they explain, but they couldn’t very well let him suffer in agony for days on end, and Gladiolus had mentioned to them once that lavender contained therapeutic properties that might help to sooth the worse of his headaches. And besides—they feel positively terrible for the misery they inflicted inside his abdomen with their faulty risotto recipe, so perhaps a few drops of lavender oil in his Ebony will ease his queasiness as well.

Measured thought was clearly applied to his lover’s actions, but what was less obvious to them was just what their life meant to the strategist. It’s likely his own fault, he thinks, for deeming them a nuisance, for dismissing their charity, for being too frugal with his outward displays of affection. But as long as they’re here with him now, as long as the Draconian was willing to turn a blind eye just this once to their foolhardy escapades, there’s still time to rectify his mistakes; Ignis does the only thing he can think to do and draws them close in a fierce embrace, then takes them by the hand and gently leads them toward the bedroom.

The strategist generally avoids partaking in any intimacy whenever he acquires fresh wounds from particularly grueling daemon hunting expeditions, since strenuous activity while still injured served only to slow the body’s natural healing process. But there’s a time and a place for caution, and the scent of lavender swirling in the air is admittedly working wonders on his migraine; he ignores his lover’s pleas for him to be reasonable, and silences them altogether with a passionate kiss. It’s only when he’s made it abundantly clear that he has no plans to yield to their opposition anytime soon that they finally acquiesce to his tender probing, but strictly under the condition that he allow them to take the reins of their relations so as not to strain himself further.

An agreeable strategy, to be sure, and because Ignis is not a prideful man by any stretch of the imagination, he has no objection to assuming a relaxed position on his back for the duration of their lovemaking, where he can entangle his long fingers in his partner’s hair when their lips journey down between his legs, can run his scarred cheeks across the soft and velvety smooth skin of their belly, can offer a source of balance and support when they’re straddled across his slender hips and riding him like a feathered steed off into a nonexistent sunset. And he finds that the endorphins presently coursing through his veins as he and his lover inch toward mutual ecstasy appear to improve his aches and pains far better than any consumable remedy or ether he might have purchased at a convenience store.

Evidently, Prompto has yet to enlighten himself on that particular discovery, because he finds his freckled friend resting uncomfortably in a lawn chair outside of Cid’s Garage the next day, moaning feebly to anyone within earshot while he pops the lid off his fourth hi-potion in as many hours. Ignis stretches out his shoulders—there is still some tension there, but nothing warranting any verbal complaints—and greets the marksman jovially; the younger man ponders aloud with mild irritation at how the strategist could possibly be feeling well enough to sound downright cheerful after nearly having their heads handed to them on a silver platter. Ignis cracks a few vertebrae in his neck and shrugs; “None the worse for wear,” he says, “although I can attest to the numerous benefits of physical therapy.”