#so i told my colleagues about this and they gaslighted me instead saying i should have thought it through

[lostinatrainofthoughts]

please dear god just can i just take a time out from living like sincerely im so done with this job. a mediocre life a mediocre job what a joke

[pastelvampyre]

okay okay okay. so.

you actually want to support trans people with more than just your words? you actually want to help us feel comfortable? you’re willing to commit to that?

i’ve got some advice for you. some places to start.

(a note: i am a gay trans man, so most of this will be things from my experiences. some may be applicable to other orientations as well, feel free to add on if you’re trans!)

1. don’t expect every trans person to “out” themselves to you 

trans people are not obligated to tell you that they’re trans at any point in their lives. this includes trans friends, trans acquaintances, and trans colleagues. often, that’s not your information to know, and it’s not your information to ask for either.

If you learn that someone is trans, treat that information as a secret unless they have explicitly told you otherwise. This goes double if they’re stealth. this isn’t your information to share to anyone else.

2. accept our pronouns and our identities without question, regardless of appearance, transition status, background, or interests 

if someone asks you to use a set of pronouns for them, or a different name (or ANY name), don’t argue with them about it if the name or pronouns don’t “match” your perception of what a person with that name or pronouns should look like.

someone being pre- or never-hormones, having interests that correspond with their birth gender, enjoying certain types of clothes that are typically associated with their birth gender, or being ok with being labelled in the past as their birth gender, are also never reasons to refuse to use someone’s correct name or pronouns.

3. don’t try and police nonbinary peoples’ perception and presentation of their genders and their orientations 

nonbinary peoples’ relationships with gender and orientation are complex. some nonbinary people don’t want to be associated with any binary gender, and some are completely fine with it, and some are ok with it but only in certain contexts. someone can identify as nonbinary but also be gay. or a lesbian.

nonbinary people can dress in any sort of way, and they can use any set of pronouns they want, even if they’re choosing to associate themselves with a label that is typically reserved for binary people.

stop telling nonbinary people what they can and can’t do. you are not the expert.

EXAMPLE: I am transmasc and nonbinary. i use both he and they pronouns. I also identify as a gay man, and I find myself attracted to cis men, binary trans men, as well as male-leaning NB people. using the label of “gay” for myself encompasses all of that. it’s not your job to tell me that I should be using another label to describe my attraction, or that I should be uncomfortable calling myself “gay” because I am also nonbinary.

4. accept it when a trans person tells you that something is transphobic instead of fighting with them. spread that information too (but be wary of speaking over us) 

if a trans person tells you that something is transphobic, don’t argue with them. trans people are the experts on things that are transphobic, not cis people.

try not to get upset when someone tells you that something you said or did is transphobic. this includes guilt tripping, gaslighting, other emotional abuse tactics, claiming that you’re the victim, and saying things like “I have trans friends who are fine with it!” you’re not helping your case. try and listen as respectfully as you can.

EXAMPLE: if I, a trans person, tell you that [x thing] is transphobic, and you respond with “I can’t be transphobic, I have trans friends!” or “oh well now I’m the bad guy” or “no way, I’d never be transphobic”, that’s not good. your only response should be “oh, I’m sorry. how can I improve?”

5. don’t expect us to constantly be educating you on trans issues 

surprise surprise, trans people have lives too! sometimes we want to think about things other than being trans! and expecting us to constantly provide emotional labour to you and constantly be your educators is exhausting. trans people (including your trans friends) don’t exist solely to educate you, and expecting us to constantly be ready to debate or explain is unfair.

6. think critically about what types of ideas and phrases might be accidentally transphobic 

When you’re sharing information or talking about things common to the gay community, stop and reflect on whether it could be accidentally exclusionary to trans people. if you’ve said or done something that could fall under this category, apologize and avoid it in the future.

EXAMPLE: it’s a very common thing to state that being gay means there’s no risk of accidental pregnancies (especially when talking about the “benefits” of being gay). as a gay trans man who still has the capacity to get accidentally pregnant, this makes me uncomfortable. these types of statements unconsciously exclude trans people from certain communities.  

7. don’t assume that your friends are trans-inclusive, even if they claim to be 

someone can claim that they’re trans-inclusive, parrot the most basic of trans-inclusive statements, and then continue to spout transphobic rhetoric uncritically. a person claiming to be trans-inclusive doesn’t automatically mean that they are actually using their words and actions to prove it.

if you want to be around trans-inclusive cis people, you need to look past them claiming that they’re trans-inclusive. what do their words and actions indicate?

EXAMPLE: a person can say that they are trans-inclusive and say that gay trans men are men. however, if they’re also claiming that being a gay man is equal to attraction to penises, and that no gay man would ever want to touch a vagina, they are spouting transphobic rhetoric.

(another note: people are allowed to have preferences. people are allowed to prefer certain types of genitalia. however, making generalizations about a group of people based on your own personal experiences is when you cross the line to being transphobic)

8. call out people who do any of the above things. don’t leave all the work to us 

don’t expect trans people to be the only ones calling out transphobia! it’s a lot of work on our shoulders if cis people aren’t going to help us. work with us to dismantle transphobia.

[punksarahreese]

Comfort | Restart

Medtober day 3 + 4 (event by @page-doctor-bekker)

Med student!Sarah; everyone needs a real support system

Word count: 2335

CW: minor parental gaslighting/manipulation

***

Sarah had hoped no one would notice, though she quickly realized her body gave itself away all too easily. No amount of caffeine could hide the sluggishness in her movements, her limbs feeling heavier than lead. If it wasn’t that it was probably the way her voice held no cheerful tone like it usually did, instead her words fell flat and had April casting her concerned glances.

She kept to herself that day, all too exhausted to even try to be social. As long as she made it through her clinical hours she could go home and sleep, at least for a few hours. She hadn’t gotten more than six the past few days, instead pouring over her textbooks that had taken their rightful place strewn across the floor. The exam for her latest rotation was coming up and Sarah was feeling the anxiety far more than usual. That was at the fault of her mother, though the woman would say it was her daughter’s problem alone.

“Sarah, you need to stop worrying over such silly things,” she had told her over the phone, “The only thing you should focus on is school.”

“Mom…”

“Now, you know how important this is. You don’t have time for friends, it will only slow you down. My daughter will be a doctor, right? You wouldn’t let me down after all this money I’ve sent…”

It always ended like that, the passive aggressive cherry on top of narcissism. Her mother wasn’t maternal in the slightest, though she would still use her relationship to Sarah for her benefit. Sure she made certain Sarah had all the money she needed to be successful, but it all came with a price. She was expecting her daughter to make a name for herself as a doctor, which would of course leave room for bragging and manipulation on Elizabeth’s part. Sarah’s whole future rested on her mother’s money as much as it did her own success, which was an unfortunate feat she was beginning to despise.

“Reese,” if she hadn’t already been sitting down, the sudden voice on her right could have knocked her off her feet. She winced at her own jumpiness, turning to look at Connor sheepishly.

“Dr. Rhodes,” she pushed a scrap piece of medical tape into her textbook before letting it fall shut on the marked page, “Hi.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah… yes of course. Just getting some studying in.”

“Uh huh,” he looked at her for a moment and Sarah knew she probably wasn’t helping her case by looking like a whole mess, “Ava was looking for you.”

Usually a mention of her mentor would immediately grab her attention and send Sarah scurrying off to find out what she wanted. This day, however, she wanted to do the opposite. Ava could see through her in seconds and Sarah didn’t have the energy to be chastised for being spacey or distracted. She was burnt out and as much as she enjoyed being on the surgeon’s service she would much rather go home.

“Oh?” Was all she said, getting to her feet. She checked her watch, realizing it was just in time for her break to begin. Sarah gathered her textbook along with her glasses she had opted to wear that day instead of contacts. One more look at Connor preceded her reply, “I’ll go find her in a bit then.”

She didn’t look back at the fellow but she knew he was probably watching her in confusion, her attitude much different than usual. Usually she would be following after Ava like a lost puppy, so the fact that she didn’t even ask where she was was wildly out of character. Sarah didn’t have the time to worry too much about it though, a chirp from her phone letting her know her mother had more to say to her.

***

“Check on your med student.”

“What?” The look Connor got from his colleague was a guarded one, clearly she didn’t know where this was going. Connor and Sam had been pestering her for a while about her soft spot for Sarah Reese, so Ava had become accustomed to assume teasing would ensue at any mention of her.

“She looks like a mess today,” he said as he snatched a chip from the bag she had been munching on, “Bloodshot eyes and way more jumpy than usual, and that’s saying something.”

“What happened?”

Connor shrugged but couldn’t help the little smirk at how concerned Ava immediately became, “Don’t know. That’s why you should check on her.”

***

Ava found her in the locker room reserved for med students and interns, thanks to one of Sarah’s classmates who pointed their instructor in the right direction. She wasn’t sure what to expect when she nudged the door open but what she got was a bit of a shock.

Sarah was sitting in front of her locker, knees pulled up to her chest and her grey scrubs already a bit dusty from the floor. She was staring blankly at the textbook propped up on the bench, completely unfocused from the words. She mustn’t have heard Ava come in because she didn’t react, the only sound being a sniffle.

“Sarah?”

Just like Connor had pointed out, she jumped far more than she had ever before. Ava knew the medical student was on edge most days, but this seemed a bit concerning. That worry only grew when she came around the corner to face Sarah properly, not expecting quite the sight she found.

Sarah’s eyes were swollen and red, as though she had been crying for quite some time. That theory was pretty much proven by the tears tracking down her ruddy cheeks, leaving little stains where they landed on her top. Her hands shook as they worried the fabric over her knees, a rhythmic movement that must have been an unconscious thought. The med student looked like she hadn’t slept for days or like she had been to Hell and back; or maybe both.

“D-doctor Bekker,” she looked up in alarm at her mentor, very deer-in-the-headlights as if she was terrified of what she might say. Something told Ava it wasn’t a coincidence that she hadn’t seen Sarah at all that day, since the other woman looked like she had been caught red handed by just the person she didn’t want to see.

“Hey, don’t do that,” Ava was crouching beside her without a thought, “What happened to formalities making you nervous?”

“I-”

“Sarah, what’s wrong?”

The brunette’s rapid head shake sent rouge curls tumbling into her line of vision, “Nothing! I’m fine.”

“Oh yeah you definitely look fine,” she was a bit shocked with the casual way Ava dropped onto the ground beside her, seeming unlike the focused surgeon she knew. Ava should be working, not sitting on the dirty locker room floor with her medical student who had spent the whole day avoiding her like the plague. Still, she showed no signs of leaving without an explanation, which made Sarah sigh.

“My cardio rotation exam is coming up…”

“Yes and? We’ve been preparing for this for weeks, Reese. You know the content like the back of your hand.”

“I don’t… it’s not that easy,” she protested, “If I don’t do perfect on every exam from here on out I might not match into the program I want. I need to be perfect, Ava.”

“No, don’t do that. You aren’t allowed to psych yourself out like this. You will do just fine, I didn’t train you to hide from the scary stuff now did I?”

“No…”

The blonde nodded affirmatively, “Exactly. So you’ve been studying and not sleeping, I take it?”

Sarah scoffed, “What gave it away?”

“The bags under your eyes are bigger than Connor’s ego,” she teased, “Plus the fact that you haven’t put that textbook away all day and you’re shaking like you do when you’re living off of caffeine.”

“Not fair,” Sarah sighed, “Don’t psychoanalyze me; that’s doctor Charles’ job.”

“Oh I would never take his job,” Ava replied, “I have a hateful relationship with Sigmund Freud and refused to do psych after med school.”

That was what finally got a smile out of Sarah, though it was followed by an incredulous headshake. Of course Ava would say something silly or unrelated to make her feel a bit better, she always did. She shifted uncomfortably on the hard flooring, looking at her mentor cautiously.

“Why are you here, Ava?”

“Because I needed to check on you.”

“You have other things to do…”

“Sarah, you’ve been spacey and avoiding me all day. I can’t very well let my star med student blow off rounds just to sit on this Petri dish of a floor and cry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, just tell me what’s really wrong so I can help.”

“I told you… exams.”

“Yeah but exam stress doesn’t often make you look like you’ve been crying for hours straight. What happened, Sarah?”

She knew she was backed into a corner, very aware of Ava’s concerned, stern eyes watching her every move. It’s not that she didn’t want to talk to her, Ava was probably the only person she wanted to talk to about this, but it wasn’t that simple.

“Exams are coming up; I’m moving to neuro in a couple weeks.”

“Yes? What… oh.” The surgeon seemed to have a sudden realization about what really was wrong. She sighed, slumping back against the locker beside Sarah’s before replying, “Reese, are you upset you won’t be on my service anymore?”

“Don’t say it like that,” she couldn’t help the whine in her tone, “I know I’m being a baby about it, just forget it.”

“No, Sarah,” the comforting hand that fell on her knee made her jump a bit, “It’s okay to be upset about it. I know you weren’t all too excited for CT in the beginning so it’s… rather endearing that you like it so much now.”

Sarah’s cheeks flamed at that and she tried to hide them behind her hands, not replying. She hated how upset the thought of rotation change made her, especially since she never even wanted to do cardio. Pathology was going to be her specialty in the end so that’s the residency she was applying for. She had no reason to feel so attached to cardiothoracics, not to mention the gut wrenching worry that Ava would forget about her.

“Hey,” Ava nudged her gently, “Sarah?”

“My mom is on my ass,” she admitted suddenly, “She’s very controlling and our whole relationship is based on money. She expects me to only think about school and stop ‘playing around’ in clinicals because I’m supposed to go to path in the end. That’s why I wanted to hate cardio, I shouldn’t have gotten attached.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” she shook her head, “It’s irrational the way she makes me so anxious but… I need to do perfect, Ava. I can’t afford any other outcome, you know?”

“That’s far too much pressure on you,” Ava looked at her seriously, “You’re allowed to have a life, Sarah.”

“Not in her eyes. I have to be a pathologist first and a human second or my mother won’t be happy.”

“And what about you? Are you going to be happy?”

“That doesn’t… it doesn’t matter.”

The blonde scoffed, “That’s rubbish and you know it. You can’t do your best if you aren’t sleeping and you sure as hell won’t do well in something you’re not passionate about.”

“But-.”

“No arguing,” she couldn’t help the small amusement at Sarah’s immediate compliance, “Please take care of yourself, Reese. Do this for you, not anyone else, or you’ll regret it.”

Ava didn’t wait for an answer, instead she got to her feet and dusted off her dark pants. She held out a hand for Sarah, looking at her with expectant eyes. The student let herself be tugged up off the floor, though she had trouble holding eye contact for very long.

“Sarah?”

She hummed in reply, busy wiping ruefully at the tears that had started to fall again during their talk. She saw the worry in her mentor’s face and it hurt a lot more than she wanted to admit. Ava Bekker cared for her of all people and here she was spending the day sulking and avoiding her.

“Come here.”

She was a bit taken aback when the blonde opened her arms, offering a hug for the first time. She wasn’t a physically affectionate person as far as Sarah had seen, not with her students especially. Still, it had been a very long time since she had received any sort of comfort like that and she had a hard time finding a response.

Eventually she did melt cautiously into Ava’s arms, surprised by how strong and secure they felt.

The surgeon didn’t say anything, just let Sarah lean into her until she relaxed into the embrace like expected. It was clear the other woman didn’t get a lot of physical comfort and Ava felt her stomach twinge a bit at how socially distant Sarah seemed. She deserved a support system, especially in such a competitive med program, and it broke her heart to realize she didn’t have much of one.

“Listen, you are a brilliant student, even if you have trouble with confidence. Enjoy neuro, don’t waste that time being upset and instead learn as much as you can. Don’t doubt yourself or downplay your abilities just because you think you should be in a lab instead. You would make an amazing surgeon, Sarah, whether it’s in CT or not.”

“Ava,” her reply was muffled slightly by her hair, “I don’t…”

“Just put yourself first, okay? And don’t be afraid to ask for guidance. Even if I’m not your mentor anymore once your rotation is up… I’m here, I promise.”

Sarah couldn’t think of a meaningful reply, overwhelmed by it all but still soothed by the lilac scent that was so Ava. All she could do was mumble a “thank you”, but in that moment it was more than enough.

[a-very-fond-farewell]

The forbidden crack! Untamed prompts: 19/?

Wedding Planner AU [xicheng edition]: “Chickens on the Loose”

[let me have this]

Jiang Cheng doesn’t believe in love and that’s precisely the reason why he plans other people’s special day. The most extravagant, the boldest, the loudest, the better. Because if there’s something he got to accept over the years is that people aren’t willing to pay for something realistic, but for something unattainable instead. Over-compensating bland, ordinary reality with fantasy and dreams is his job and he’s well aware that no one can compete with his genius. Not with his father owning a catering and food chain company. Not with his mother being the most sought out wedding gown fashion designer on the market. They taught him everything there is to know on how to make other people’s dream come true before the inevitable envelope of a dainty, innocuous divorce application can make its way in a once happy household. Better make the satisfaction last, because Jiang Cheng will only accept advanced payments in cash, no monthly installments allowed.

His sister YanLi may have married honoring tradition over useless exaggeration, but what did her love bring aside from suffering and neglect? Marrying into the richest family in the country to the heir of a textile empire has given her nothing but sorrow and a husband too proud and distant to even visit her regularly. Jin Ling growing up without a father, spoiled rotten by the wrong side of the family who lured him into their shining world of nothingness day after day. At least Jiang Cheng’s family did rise from nothing and learned to trick the rich into relying on useless services soon enough. But Jin ZiXuan and his family had never worked once in their life and didn’t know how to take care of their loved ones. Not that Jiang Cheng’s parents could do any better, their marriage a wasteland where no love could grow, but at least they were honest about it. Better enjoy a dream while it lasts.

That is why if even Wei Ying’s marriage were to turn out to utter shit like YanLi’s, at least it will not be Jiang Cheng’s fault. Everything needs to be perfect, from the vows to the tea ceremony, from the food to the color scheme, from the seat arrangements to the music. Hell, some of his stepbrother’s requests may be too much to handle for most, but not for Jiang Cheng and if Wei Ying wants a parade and a whole week worth of celebrations, Wei Ying will have exactly that.

Hence he will not, under any circumstance, allow anyone snooping around as he plans the wedding of the century. No, not even the fiancée’s overprotective older brother asking people for blackmailing material on Wei Ying behind Jiang Cheng’s back. Not even if he pays him in nature, no ma’am.

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

Lan Huan is the best divorce attorney in town precisely because he believes in unconditional love. That’s why he doesn’t see the point of two people (or three people, on one memorable case in Europe) spending the rest of their life together if change is inevitable and something to be expected. He would much prefer to get the best deal out of it for his clients and prevent children to suffer from it in the process.

Judges fear him and his diplomatic smile that can never hide his tunnel vision drive for victory. His trusty private investigator Nie HuaiSang is equally terrified by his assets, but still feeds him with the juiciest details whenever Lan Huan asks for favors, discreetly requesting the younger man to do background checks on this or that subject. Settlements may be nice, but not if the (soon to be ex) husband or wife in question can be easily found guilty of adultery, gaslighting, or even violence. Not on Lan Huan’s watch.

That’s why his world gets completely turned over the moment his younger brother Lan Zhan announces his intention to marry a man he hasn’t known for a full three months yet. Truth to be told, Lan Huan had never seen him this happy: glowing with something akin to adoration, affection dripping from every pore, love spilling all over just by mentioning one name, Wei Ying. In case this rascal happens to crush his precious baby brother’s heart, Lan Huan needs to find dirt on this man and squeeze everything he has out of his dead cold hands the second his brother files a request for a divorce.

But for some reason Nie HuaiSang cannot seem to be found for the job this time around. Not unlike most of his other contacts and informants, who have seemingly disappeared at the mention of his brother’s fiancee’s name. If this Wei Ying is such a big fish in the sea to make even Lan Huan’s most loyal colleagues dissolve into thin air, then he must find the answers by himself.

And if it means to bomb the wedding preparations to get shit done, oh he will. He’s not above flirting to get what he wants, but if this Wei Ying turns out to be a good person in the end... well. Lan Huan prays things won’t get too messy to proceed with the celebrations in the end. Hopefully, that is.

[fun stuff under the cut.]

NHS went to uni with Wei Ying and he knows LXC won’t find anything on him bc WWX himself is a blackmail master and will 100% diss you in front of your children calling you out on your deepest secrets so no. NHS will not mess with that and he urges to do as much to all LXC’s informants and sources.

JC looks scary but his staff loves how dedicated he is and they make bets on when he’s going to lose it and sleep with someone out of frustration. although they think he gets more turned on by going over every point in his check-lists at times...

LXC’s colleague always ask him if he’s dating anyone, clearly to set him up with someone (who will not be of LXC’s liking, he’s sure). to which he answers by smiling and lying saying he has a terrible personality. since nobody believes him, he asked his friend Meng Yao to make a scene at the firm once: (all too pleased to mess with his bestie’s reputation) Meng Yao murder-walked into the office and demanded to meet LXC, only to cry in front of everyone and smack him across the face for cheating on him. THEN his sister A-Su made her sudden appearance and smacked LXC’s other cheek lamenting the same, ridiculous thing. the two siblings gaped in fake horror at each other before spitting on LXC and storming off of the building.

NMJ laughed his ass off for weeks after the sharade. he started dating A-Su not long after (with both JGY and LXC’s blessings) bc he was mildly impressed by her willingness to jump on the opportunity to make a fool of both LXC and her brother at once. LXC thinks they are a good match, but he worries A-Su might be too tiny and full of undiluted mischief for NMJ to be able to handle her antics.

NMJ used to date LXC, but they were too driven and competitive to let their relationship get in the way and in the end they stopped seeing each other. they still care deeply for one another, but they love their jobs at the firm too much and making things messy at the office wasn’t worth it. A-Su knows about it and doesn’t feel left out because of it, glad that they settled into their respective lives while still being loyal friends to each other.

JGY tries to set LXC up with a new woman every week, saying he would benefit from having a cute wife taking care of him. but LXC doesn’t know what business JGY has to talk about women that way when Meng Yao’s been a raging homosexual since the first time he has landed his eyes on another boy in kindergarten. too many crushes on boys to even be aware of how many hearts he has broken in his life. all those pretty girls falling for his looks, poor kids. only JGY’s younger brother Mo XuanYu could rival his victim count, but barely so.

ZiXuan is secretly keeping an eye on his half-brothers and half-sister while he works as a representative for his family company and this is mainly the reason why he has distanced himself from YanLi and Jin Ling in these past few years. he would like to approach his three half-siblings and maybe have a chance to rekindle lost relationships, but by stressing over it he is losing sight of the found family he actually has. YanLi wants him to come around, eventually, but she knows how lonely ZiXuan has been with no siblings and how secretly jealous he is of the bond that she has with her family. so she won’t pressure her husband, but she feels lonely nonetheless.

the two wangxian lovebirds are too happy to notice the mess LXC is making and they don’t even realize he’s there until like, three days before the actual wedding.

LXC may be a shark but he’s not subtle. JC doesn’t know what he does for a living but he assumes he has too much time on his hands, hence not someone worthy of his time. but LXC always causes troubles on the venue or messes up with the flower arrangements or prods for information to the wrong people and JC is over it.

“if you don’t have anything better to do help me find the sommelier so I can ask him what’s wrong with him and if he studied anything at all” or “if you have so much time to waste be useful and learn how to make flower crowns for the children to play with” or “if you can sit on your ass all day at least look over my nephew while I go look for someone to emotionally bully to let off some steam.”

Jin Ling is five and even more bossy than his uncle and orders LXC around to be his pony when JC should babysit him at work. LXC discovers the boy is JGY and A-Su and Mo XuanYu’s nephew and that JC doesn’t what any of them to interact with Jin Ling. but LXC secretly lets them hang out with the boy when JC is too busy to notice.

JC and LXC get closer the more the latter understands that there’s not much dirt on Wei Ying (aside from some questionable pictures taken during a university party back in the days, but that’s beside the point). LXC appreciates how crafty and ingenious JC is, always helping others around instead of just shouting orders...even if his temper is atrocious at times.

JC forces LXC to take dance lessons with the lot of the main family members and LXC meets JC’s mother for the first time. she is competitive about her dancing skills and Wei Ying tries to win her over by asking her to show everybody how it’s done by leading her ex-husband in a tango. after publicly humiliating her ex-husband (and making him fall in love with her once more), she insists on practicing a waltz with LXC and basically threatens him to cut off his balls if he dares to lead JC on with his charms.

LXC realizes he’s been playing and flirting too much with the man for him not to notice, but JC seems oblivious. no. he’s completely oblivious and kind and beautiful as he dances with Jin Ling and twirls him around in delight. LXC played too hard and now he’s in too deep.

the only source of drama in this would be JC finding out LXC let Jin Ling hang out with his other uncles and aunt despite the warnings. JC was starting to trust the man... and LXC stabbed him in the back. he would have much preferred not to discover it from his nephew (who let it slip that LXC “told him not to speak of his uncles and aunt to Jiujiu”), because he would have given LXC a chance to explain himself otherwise. but no. JC cannot have good things apparently and now he’s heartbroken without even knowing why.

without the lucky charm that is JC (holed up in his flat eating junk food to forget the pain of being an afterthought in other people’s lives), everything goes to shit three days before the wedding: the chef quits, the tea set for the ceremony breaks, one of the maids has accidentally torn apart one set of wedding robes and so on.

the venue gets flooded with live chickens when a truck transporting them breaks down in front of the building and the chicken escape. Jin Ling is loving every second of it, but everything gets destroyed in the ruckus and JC’s hard work is ruined.

Wei Ying is heartbroken and Lan Zhan silently accuses LXC of being the cause of this and urges him to fix the mess unless he wants to receive the cold shoulder for the rest of his days. but LXC is a cowards and spends his time actually fixing the broken things or replacing them or finding seamstresses to help with the garments and so on himself. anything but facing JC and be rejected.

ZiXuan comes to his senses and blurts out that “he really just wanted to have a loving family” the moment JGY, A-Su and Mo XuanYu come check on LXC. they hug and cry and laugh and YanLi gently reminds them that this is not about them right now and that they should help with the preparations if they have so much time on their hands. her mother is very proud of her and nods appreciatively at ZiXuan’s shocked and weirdly intrigued expression after being humiliated so boldly in front of everyone. the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree indeed.

the day before the wedding Wei Ying threatens to call the wedding off if JC doesn’t show up for his big day: not because he’s the planner, but because Wei Ying wants him close on his happiest day and he will not have it any other way.

LXC goes to fetch JC in his apartment himself the night before the wedding and they yell and they make peace and then they make love and then they woke up late the next day and they have to rush to the venue.

Wei Ying is livid until JC appears and then they celebrate the wedding of the century. A week of celebrations later Lan Zhan deadpans that they actually got married already like, one month in after meeting each other, but Wei Ying wanted a big wedding and he didn’t want to deny his husband a single thing.

JC tries to strangle his brother as the last family picture is being taken.

give me an award already.

[live-long-and-time-warp]

It’s hard to leave your toxic friends... but it’s so worth it

I don’t normally do this, but as I sat in a Saturday morning meeting thinking about all of the things I felt this past Friday, I felt compelled to share my story.

A brief background: throughout college and for several years afterward, I considered my tight-knit group of college friends as some of my closest. In addition to my best friend of 20 years, some friends from high school, my work team, and some other dear friends scattered across the globe and throughout the U.S., this group of college friends was who I considered to be my foundation. This group of friends was extremely important to me, but it was not without its bumps in the road.

In my senior year of college, I had a falling out with one of these friends, the ringleader I’ll call her. I say this because she is quite honestly the source of 95% of my problems with this group. She is a master manipulator, and an expert gaslighter. There were a few others that contributed to this too, but she was by far the worst.

I can’t elaborate on every single thing that this person said and did over our 7 year “friendship” but a brief summary would be: asking me point blank if I thought I might be a lesbian after coming out as bi (to this friend group and in her presence, I might add) only several months prior; asking me how much money I spend on books about “Chernobyl” every month with the implication that she’s concerned about my finances; telling me that my resume may not be as impressive as I think it is (I’m the deputy director of a nonprofit with both state-based and national projects and had been for close to a year prior to this conversation); would clean up the crumbs from in front of me while I was still eating and comment on my messiness; told me that one of our mutual friends doesn’t like discussing politics with me because I get too fired up (again, I work for a nonprofit that deals with social justice); telling me that crying while comforting my friend who had just lost a loved one to suicide after they began crying was weird and that I “stole her thunder” (we were slightly drunk, I’m an empath, and she was talking about some deeply personal things that moved me and crying was my natural response... and oddly, she was appreciative of my tears because I was “the only person that actually stayed with her”); and so much more that I know I’m forgetting.

There were many other things more insidious, including gaslighting me about my inclusion in several group activities and why it should have been obvious why one friend disliked me enough to not invite me to her wedding after years of claiming cluelessness.

In our senior year, I left that friend for the first time after she humiliated me at a party by commenting loudly and with condescension on my weight. When I cut ties with her, I felt as if I had just left an abusive relationship, and for a while I didn’t want to seek a friendship with her again.

But the other friends in our group still hung out with both of us, so eventually I allowed myself to be sucked back in. 

In the years after we graduated, I thought that this person had actually changed- I worked abroad for a year after college, and after returning I saw a marked difference in her demeanor and how she interacted with us. She seemed more self-aware of how her words and actions adversely affected other people, and I thought that maybe the ugliness of that horrible portion of my senior year was now just a faded scar.

But then things escalated very quickly. Over the course of several weeks at the beginning of this year, I started to feel myself questioning whether I had made the right choice in rejoining the group: I was so sure of how I felt after I left it the first time, I felt so empowered and free. So why did I allow myself to rejoin them? Was it really the right choice?

I got my answer a week after the insurrection at the Capitol. One friend who already had a history of saying hateful things about women (which I tried to put a stop to to no avail) finally went full white supremacist asshole, and instead of joining me in calling his comments unacceptable and defending me as he mansplained my job to me, the ringleader criticized me and told me that “I can work in activism and politics and be wrong”.

That’s the moment I finally woke up.

I left the chat that very moment. Every time they added me back without my consent, I left again.

Every time I got message from the ringleader that was full of gaslighting comments and false apologies, I didn’t say a word. Just deleted the message. Finally, I was able to gather the strength needed to block those toxic friends from all social media and my phone. One of these friends was someone I tried to make like me for years after I was told that she hated me for no reason, by her own admission.

Some may not agree with this approach, but I made the choice to cut contact and go radio silent on my own after consulting my friends, specifically my best friend who had been there for me during the incident my senior year.

As weeks went by, some of the true friends from that group reached out, and then immediately backed off after my polite request for space, indicating that I was welcome back at any time and they were always here for me.

The ringleader chose the opposite approach. She continued to gaslight me, made a group chat with myself, the white supremacist, and herself. She sent me messages from her second account, one that I remembered to unfriend but forgot to block. She told me that if I don’t “course correct” by a certain date she would block me on my account (too late, bro) and that “we wish you all the best”. This implies that it was on behalf of the entire group, something I know three of them would never do. However, at this point, I have had to distance myself from all of those friends so as not to give the ringleader the attention she wants from me.

I lost over half of my closest friends over night. It felt like my skeleton had been torn from my body. I considered giving in several times and reaching out to them. But now, over a month later, I understand how necessary it was to excise what was essentially a malignant tumor. The Chernobyl researcher in me wants to compare it to Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS): an unseen poison that slowly infiltrates every part of your mind and body and rots them from the inside out.

2020 was an extremely hard year for me, as it was for so many. I am so lucky and privileged to have been in the financial situation that I was and had the support of my genuine friends and family.

But it was still the worst year of my life. I have suffered from pretty bad OCD for most of my life, and while I usually keep it under control, last year it became nearly impossible to do so. I also fell very deeply into clinical depression, and worked to the point of burn out and exhaustion. The primary thoughts I had during this depression were: 

“Why aren’t you working? You’re lazy.”

“You’re a failure, you’re 26 and haven’t applied to grad school yet.”

“You piece of shit, still living with your parents? What a disappointment.”

“What is wrong with you?”

It was unbearable. I’m honestly not entirely sure how I survived it, but I think a certain 3-year-old goddaughter of mine and a few close, real friends had something to do with it.

I worked very hard with my friends, a therapist, and a psychiatrist to overcome this depression and get my OCD back under control. Now, I feel like such a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. I still have depression, and the OCD will always be with me (like a bad habit... literally?); but I am so much more happy with myself and my life, as I should be.

And I am very, very, very well aware that therapy was not the only reason I have recently begun feeling this way. It’s very hard to see that you’re being manipulated while it’s happening. Because of my trusting nature, sometimes manipulative comments would be interpreted as heartfelt guidance.

It wasn’t until I started the journey away from them that I saw just how much this group and their negativity (because even the best of them weren’t always the kindest) impacted my mental health.

The event that made me want to share this story is this: yesterday was a rough work day. As a full-time community organizer, I am pretty much burnt out all of the time. Breaks are taken, but with projects addressing issues from COVID relief to systemic racism and police brutality, it never feels like enough. 

I had to officially take a step back as a sole lead on an annual event that I organized for two years, and it was gut-wrenching.

Now, I cry often, but I don’t usually get to have therapeutic cries. You know what I mean? Like, as you cry, all of the tension that built up in your body by negative feelings is finally being released with every breath and sob?

Well, the dam finally broke in a team meeting on Friday. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. And my colleagues were so, so kind. They let me vent, they let me cry, they would not accept my apologies for crying. They told me that I was strong for setting up boundaries, and that they were here for me.

We spent a lot of time at the end of the meeting each talking about our self-care routines. And as I sit here typing this, I am actively trying not to cry at the purity of their support.

This experience has taught me what real friends are. Real friends do not put limitations on your emotions and fears.

Real friends do not give you deadlines for processing your feelings.

Real friends do not criticize you for things that, while they may not agree with, do not affect anyone’s health or marginalize anyone.

Real friends don’t marginalize vulnerable communities.

Real friends help and support you with constructive criticism (when it’s asked for) and love, not patronization and manipulation.

I thought I knew all of these things before, but I know now that I am still learning... and that that is perfectly okay. I don’t regret most of the times we shared together. I am appreciative of the positive memories that their friendships gave me.

Three of the friends in this group are actually good people, and maybe one day when the dust is settled I’ll reach out to them and establish one-on-one friendships with them (if they want to). 

And I have to thank my real friends, including @tryingtobealwaystrying, for all saying the exact same thing: you deserve so much happiness and fuck all of those guys.

So, the point of this post is to tell everyone this: you can leave your toxic friends. It’s incredibly difficult, stressful, and honestly traumatizing. And there’s no shame in needing time or feeling unable to leave those friends now. There’s also no shame in returning to those friends.

But please know, from this nerd to the reader: anyone that makes you feel any less than the beautiful, amazing human being you are and doesn’t want to help you become an even better human on your own terms is not a true friend. They don’t deserve you or the light you can bring into their lives.

And every agonizing step away from those friends is a step closer to a happier, healthier life.

[unoriginaldotdotdot]

Did I told a story about that I was stalked at my work, because I gave my phonenumber to my indirect colleague (we work for the same company, but have different occupations), and started to harass me at work? No? Well, here it goes. I never actually intended to give up my phonenumber, but after he persisted, I reluctantly gave it to him. Only after I explicitly told him I wasn't romantically, or any kind of that, interested in him. We only had mutual interest in music. That's it. But even if I was interested in him this doesn't justify his behavior. It never is. At first he was respectful, then he started to stalk me. After which I told him personally, via text and called him, repeatedly, to stop. It escalated to the point that he interrupted me at work, in front of my employer, because he wanted to "talk" with me (try to manipulate me to date him that is). I told him, in a nice way still, to go away. My employer asked him to get lost after he didn't listen. He still didn't listen. It took a severe verbal discussion to get him away. Afterwards he tried to call me, even after I permanently blocked him, and also received a very foul message from him. Not long after the incident I had to sit and talk with my employer, the supervisor of my employer and the employer of my stalker to stop him from harassing me. After the talk, he basically got a slap on his wrist with an unofficial warning. He eventually stopped harassing me, for a while at least.

Mentally I was done at this point: I didn't want to go to work. I wanted to stop. I actually wanted to call the police (but that wouldn't work too). I cried a lot. A lot. It took a huge emotional toll on me. It was awful. It's still is. Everytime I wanted to go to work it was met with so much dreadfulness. Then after few weeks of no harrasement. He did it again. He provoked me. Again. In front of other colleagues, which helped me to get him an official warning letter from human resources. He should've been laid off at this point, but instead they just let him work... eventually. My employer even blamed me for this, because I gave up my phonenumber. Because, hey, that means I must be romantically interested, right? So that is a sign to get harrased by this grown ass troglodyte. A choice that he, the stalker, knowingly made. It's not that I'm grown enough to tell that stalker that I'm not interested in the first place and that he's adult enough to understand that. Right? No. I got blamed instead, by my own employer no less. By the stalker's employer. By a few of my colleagues. Because I gave up my phonenumber. Because it's easier to blame a person not at fault. Because it's easier to blame a woman.

The stalker even had the nerve to say that every time I walked past him— A choice I don't have, sometimes, because of my job—he said that I "provoke" him. As if I'm the evil seducer, and to rub salt into the wound his crusty ass employer said the same. So because of my gender, I can't do my job? I can't walk certain areas? Because that is what eventually happened. Also, my own employer also said that I could even lose my job, since this stressful situation (or any other for that matter) can make me less productive. Not with the fact it's because I got harrased that I eventually couldn't sleep properly anymore. My employer only cares about productivity, instead of the well-being of his employees. Ironically, without its protection and safety, how will an employee be productive in the first place? But I digress. The company failed to protect their employees. Their female employees. Their POC employees. Their Black employees who are women. I can't even say what's on my mind or what I'm worried about, without jeopardizing my job, because I get gaslighted to get open up my feelings, only to get backfired as soon as I'm vulnerable.

As of now, the stalking stopped. But I can't help but think when he will start again. He will be booted out of this company if he start to harass me again, but what about my safety outside of my work? I know that he is still leering at me when, and if, I see him. He even sometimes makes a very eery smile when I see him; as if I'm some kind of demented child who would forgive his silly mischievous behavior. As if I'm nothing more than a brainless body for him to keep. As if I would have an acute amnesia about this whole ordeal and we magically would become best friends (and more than in his case), knowing that his behavior should put him in jail at the very least. I actively have to avoid him by making a detour when I want to go to a certain destination, and that is absolutely insane.

On the other side of the spectrum certain colleagues of mine are being ableist about the fact that he isn't "one hundred procent", and thus making his disgusting behaviour excusable. According to some of my colleagues I need it let is slide, because "he's not right in his head". Very ableist and dangerous, because that man —that stalker—knew exactly what he's doing.

I just hope justice will prevail very soon, because as of now society does nothing provide any kinds of justice. There's too much racism, especially against Black people. Misogyny that I deal with every Goddamn day. Ageism. Every single day. Ironically, this pandemic actually makes my job a little bit more better—Because I don't see him around as much anymore or at all and considering the circumstances, that is actually insane if I think about it.

But, I'm tired of it, people. I'm done with their fuckery.

I'm too nice for this world, it seems. And people will do anything to break that part of me. Little do they know, as much mental ordeal I have to suffer from it unfortunately, they will never, in life and death, break me. Never.

[endearinglysarcastic]

Taylor Swift’s Current Form of Hell

Some thoughts considering Taylor’s current situation. Feedback is welcome (especially if it can be added to the analysis!), but please don’t @ me to argue that she’s a bully or a bitch. I will eat you. 

Firstly, let’s talk about age. Taylor is 29. Scott and Kim are 38, Kanye is 42. Famous was released in 2016, when Taylor was 26 and Kanye 39. So, not only was it released without her permission, not only was she filmed without her permission, not only did it defame her, not only was it implying sexual promiscuity in return for fame, not only was it entirely beyond the bounds of anything she would’ve agreed to regardless of Kim’s ‘proof’, she was 26. Let that sink in. There is more than a decade between her and Kanye - think about someone a decade older that you (a cousin, uncle or friend) and imagine how you would react (me, I’d go all Tangled on them, and hit them in the face with a saucepan; and that’s my calm reaction). Then remember how you were at 19 - considering that, in 2009, when Kanye said ‘imma let you finish BUT’ she was 19.  Fast forward a little to 2016, and Kanye has 2 children, a wife and an established music career. He should be the elder, the one that understands the industry, the one that works with RESPECT. Taylor is only just older than his second youngest sister-in-law - and you best believe that if something like this happened to Kendall, Kanye would be coming after them. But this ‘feud’ was deemed appropriate, Famous was deemed ‘funny’. Scooter and Justin Bieber and various radio hosts etc have decided that all this is ‘not a big deal’. But there we were, Taylor was 26 and being TAGGED by people a decade older than her in this revenge porn horridness. Is it because we now think it’s okay to be horrible to white girls? Is that it? Is it because she’s American? She certainly isn’t a Trump fan, so we can rule that out. Maybe it’s because Kanye was threatened - maybe it’s because he was made to apologise by Queen B and he’s been looking to reassert his masculinity ever since. Maybe it’s his own past, insecurities, problems. But that in no means makes it okay; nor does it condone the behaviour of his wife and associates like Scooter. Hence, we have defamation, revenge porn and cyber bullying, all of which started when Taylor Swift, pop princess supreme, was 19, 26 and now 29.

One of the people who brought this 2016 pain about, now owns the rights to her music. Sounds a bit iffy (it still has her name on it! you cry), but let’s think about this legally. This means that if Taylor wants to work with, rerelease, remix or reconsider any of HER prior works, she has to a) work with Scooter, b) have the changes approved by Scooter and c) give a portion of the profits to Scooter. And yes, kiddies, that means concerts too. Performing her music, at her concerts, for her fans, is giving her abuser a profit. Imagine having to do that with a high school bully, or say, prior boss that you never really liked, with a report or a paper. Objectively these things are worth nothing, but you did the majority of the work; despite this, it’s technically part of their group or company, so it’s theirs too. It’s like sharing custody of your child with an abusive and absent ex. Except, that child is worth a literal fortune and took 14 years to create; and you’re well aware that your ex will completely abuse their side of the contract for their own amusement.  Furthermore, while she’s sharing those rights, we have to remember that Taylor has no legal recourse - he owns the masters by CONTRACT, that she no doubt signed at one point or another. Now while I have things to say about the lawyers that advised her to sign that contract, please remember that she was just 14 when she entered the industry and that a human female brain does not fully develop until at least 23 (men are develop by 27 but this is about Taylor so I’ll refrain from making that joke today). Business savvy she might be now, but that comes with experience and practice and a good team. People who are good at their job, understand your vision and you trust entirely are hard to find; especially when your vocation is as all encompassing as Taylor’s must be. Perhaps there was a mistake there, perhaps she shouldn’t have signed the contract; but hindsight is 20/20, and perhaps blaming Taylor isn’t the most progressive thing to do.  What is both interesting and considerably more gross, is that Taylor was offered a chance to, quote, ‘earn back’ her masters - not only is this bribery, it’s an attempt to further abuse and power over one of the biggest earners in today’s music industry. With such a power over her, there is no way that Big Machine will ever willingly let her go - perhaps they’d enter into a never-ending negotiation; for every album she produces (which would belong to Big Machine), she earns back a prior album that belonged to Big Machine. Sounds fabulous and abusive, doesn’t it? If you are so naive as to think that she was not a guiding factor on the purchase of Big Machine, please reconsider your brain. No one wants to buy the cow if you can get the milk for free - which essentially is what Scooter did, plus now he gets to kick the cow and the calf if and when he wants to. Lovely, right? However, please consider that in signing any new contact under this offer, one can see definite similarities with Kesha’s situation, though the abuse hopefully be only mental and emotional. Taylor has made an incredibly hard and painful choice; she could leave her legacy behind in favour of happier life, or continue with her legacy and ‘earn it back’ and be generally miserable. This desire to make Taylor ‘submit’ is misogynistic, horrible and really really gross. Hence we can conclude that not only has she been abused, bullied and used, we may now note that she has no way of ‘winning’ this argument - in that she may never get her masters back without paying a very serious life consequence.

Taylor has posted a 2 paragraph statement on Tumblr. (Fun reminder - I’m not even halfway done and I’ve written a longer defence that she did.) She is being called attention seeking (‘turning the the public has worked for her before’ - what my local FM radio told me), bullying, gaslighting etc etc. which are all things we’ve heard about before in relation to her. Certainly, Taylor, like other people in the media spotlight, has done things that people don’t approve of or deem problematic (because she, like all others, is just a person) but this by no means should overshadow her present situation. You don’t need to be a Taylor fan to consider this issue problematic; the facts alone are indicative enough. There is no element of like, love, favouritism or adoration that even needs to be considered here. Taylor is being judged, abused and publicly bullied as she dared to speak her mind and feelings about her own works. If Scooter had his way, we would  revert to simply calling her hysterical, and strip her of all capacity to reason - god forbid a woman in the music industry be of sane mind and conviction. Despite this, we have to note that these events, this treatment, these discussions have led to one of the most prominent and successful women of the 21st century retreating from public, and posting her defence, in her own words, on TUMBLR, which is widely considered a niche site when compared to say Twitter or Instagram. Hence, we must ask ourselves, why would Taylor choose Tumblr? She has been so widely supported on Instagram and Twitter in the past. Maybe this is where she feels supported and like she is least chance to be attacked; what does that tell you about her headspace? Maybe it’s where she sees the least tagging, comments of ownership, masters related from people who are meant to be her colleagues - cyber bullying is, effectively, so harmful because it can truly follow you anywhere. Imagine the outrage if this had been done to Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes. But it wouldn’t happen to them - not because producers and owners are incapable, but because they do not deem in necessary for them to need to show who the ‘alpha’ is. But having Taylor as the more powerful, pervasive person seems to offend many men to the core. Hence, maybe Taylor posted it is simply for herself, knowing it would be unedited and seen by people who might sympathise without yarns of criticism that related to the anatomy between her legs. Certainly, I know I would want to have my say for my own peace of mind as well as for my mental health - and I’m just a law student with 7 followers. How does someone so wildly popular feel so unsafe in the social media sphere? This. This bs is why. 

So why are we just hearing about all this now? Well that’s just it; Taylor. She has brought this to the public attention. She is not so naive as to think that there would be no backlash - she’s been the victim of that too many times. Taylor, despite knowing all of this, despite standing alone, despite the lack of media, social media, peer and male support, has said something. She has expressed her thoughts and feelings, knowing she would be labelled unstable and narcissistic - because that is the fastest way to depreciate and devalue anything legitimate or threatening that comes from a woman or girl. Taylor has, in a sense, reported her abuse; except she reported it to the public. She has been bullied, cyber bullied, defamed, indicted, disliked and gaslighted. In her position, many would be anxious, depressed, scared, paranoid, running crying to their parents (cough me cough). Instead, she has made a rational, intelligent and self-caring decision that led to a well written statement, conveying her feelings in a timely and eloquent manner. She is effectively telling us that Times Up, and it’s coming for the music industry. As always, she has handled this in the most dignified and elegant of ways, while Scooter and his supporters seem to be borderline aroused at the pain they’re inflicting. How anyone can get their kicks out of another persons pain will always be beyond me, though that seems to be the way women are accustomed to men acting. Taylor is, as she has often been, at the forefront of changing social issues and bearing the brunt of the backlash in the public eye. I hope that there are other young women and young artists that are watching and listening - she might very well break the glass ceiling - again. 

Taylor has gone through an immense amount of pain throughout her music career - she’s been labelled an attention, money and boyfriend seeking crybaby for over a decade. The behaviour of men in the music industry is neither appropriate or acceptable. I do not accept it - we, the public, cannot accept it. 

Although I know it is of little help, I will no longer be listening to or streaming Taylor’s old work in an effort to support her. I will also not be streaming or purchasing any other Big Machine productions until her work is returned to her. I will also be signing this petition in her favour. Please consider doing the same - Katy Perry already did. 

I hope Taylor is okay, I hope she is caring for herself, I hope there is some legal action she can take. I hope Lover is wildly successful and her heart is full. Remember that this is not about receipts or feuds or drama. This is about the cruel and unfair treatment of a woman in the music industry and the escalation of that when it became public information. This is about changing the conversation and changing the working conditions. This is for more than just Taylor; this is part changing a toxic culture, where cyberbulling and revenge porn and spiteful purchases for ‘funzies’ (and the torment of others) is appropriate, provided it is against a woman. Whatever you might say or think of her, this is an example of injustices that occur to women everywhere and everyday. We have proven only one thing with these injustices, and that is that you can kick Taylor Swift down are hard as you can - she has discovered feminism and she’s going to get back up. She might not be perfect, she might not be your favourite, but she isn’t a push over. Taylor Swift is taking up space and taking no shit, and I am here for it. 

Petition: https://www.change.org/p/taylor-swift-make-taylor-swift-re-release-her-6-albums 

You can find Taylor’s statement here: https://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/185958366550/for-years-i-asked-pleaded-for-a-chance-to-own-my

You can also check her Tumblr out here, though this is less related to this analysis and more if you want a good giggle: @taylorswift

[the-storyteller-and-her-soldiers]

Confessions Come Crashing Down

Title: Confessions Come Crashing Down

Word Count: 1,701

Warnings: Coming from one of my million AUs this has a LOT OF ANGST! The main conflict is infidelity so be warned there! Also cursing because of anger and I have made Aranea the antagonist so some in-character hate there! (I love her for real though!! I was just too tired to create a new villainess!)

Ship: The Storyteller and her Shield (Gladio x myself) ((Even when writing angst, Gladdy brings me comfort!)

Summary: The night was just like something out of a fairytale, although in real life people rarely receive those perfectly happy endings that come from these beloved books

The giant open floor made of monochromatic tiles shimmered from the many twinkles of the diamond chandeliers that hung high above. Even if they were dimly lit, the chandeliers bathed the rich forest green walls of the main room of the royal ball with a breathtaking romantic aura which made it perfect for the many couples that were in attendance.

One of the couples was that of the King's ever loyal shield Gladiolus Amicitia, and his girlfriend Rebecca Grace Stinheart who was making a name for herself as the belle of the ball with the way her glowing personality shone just as warm as the artificial stars above her.

The two looked like the picture perfect couple as they glided across the floor. The cloth of the young lady's midnight blue dress trailing after her small steps while lightened rose locks contrasted the pitch black of the tuxedo that they rested against. One of Gladio's large hands held his partner's waist with a protective firmness while the other had enclosed around her small hand of ivory, wordlessly guiding her.

The two had been this way since the beginning of the night, not leaving the other's company for more than a few minutes and only when it was necessary. Although it's rare that such a peaceful night end in the same way that it had begun, not without something to disrupt it, and for these two this was exactly the case.

Chaos approached in the form of a silver-haired woman draping herself on the side of the tall, mahogany haired, man. The blood-red accents of her sweeping black dress only further spelled out doom for the petite woman trapped in Gladio's hold, as the moonlight haired lady remarked, "Funny seeing you here, Pretty Boy. You should've told me you were coming, we could have had so much fun already."

Catching on to her suggestive tone, hickory pools filled with unspoken questions met with the woman's emerald ones. Rebecca then lifted her head and shot her boyfriend a raised eyebrow and questioning glance.

"Aranea." Gladio's deep voice stated, obviously not wanting to engage with her further.

"It's been a bit since I last saw you, especially not next to the prince." She replied, subtly jerking her head towards the shorter raven haired male who was laughing with some other colleagues that they all knew. "I missed you."

Rebecca's heart had been tied down with heavy weights when this mysterious woman approached. It now had sunk down to her stomach while the woman kept getting flirtier with her partner as if she didn't even notice that the young woman was there. Doing her best to shush her own impatience, Rebecca finally spoke up with a question of who this lady, Aranea, was.

"Oh, you didn't tell her?" Aranea purred with a seemingly mock surprise.

Gladio pulled back the shoulder that Aranea leaned upon, almost disgusted to have felt her touch for that long. "Now is not the time for this." His voice was dangerously calm, the only thing that revealed the true extent of his anger was the immense emphasis on the word 'not'.

"Time for what? Tell me what?!" Rebecca spoke again, this time not caring about hiding the increasing frustrations that she harbored. "Can someone please fill me in here?!"

Curiosity was a killer of many things and Rebecca would be no exception. Aranea's eyes narrowed and her ruby painted lips twisted into a vicious smirk like she was about to land the killing blow on one of the many enemies she had faced. "Gladio and I know each other as far more than just friends and have spent many dark nights together. You're a smart girl so I've been told so I shouldn't have to spell it out."

"Aranea!" Gladio reprimanded with a raised voice, pulling his girlfriend closer to him like that would've blocked out what she had said.

A breath that was caught in Rebecca's throat escaped through her lips while her heart freed itself from the heavy shackles and began to pound against its cage. Gently pulling away from Gladio's stature, she took a step back to see if her own terrible thoughts were true. With the way his bright eyes had darkened and the deep scowl that was set into his features, it was obvious that her horrid fears of her partner being unfaithful were coming to life before her eyes. Ebony eyes were already blurred from the tears that threatened to spill, met with Gladio's amber ones before they hastily fell to the hard floor under her. The subtle taste of lipstick filled her mouth the harder she bit her lip. She wouldn't make a scene here to ruin everyone else's night, and she couldn't break here, not in front of these two.

"You've been... cheating on me?" She managed to say, with her frail voice still revealing a noticeable crack.

With a triumphant confirmation from Aranea and ashamed nod from Gladio himself, all of her questions were laid to rest. Still biting her lip in a way that had Rebecca surprised she hadn't drawn blood, she forced a trembling smile upon her lips.

"I see," She breathed deeply, desperately trying to maintain composure even as she felt her sunken heart being ripped to shreds. "Well, I don't wanna keep you two any longer. I, uh... I just wished you could've been honest with me Gladiolus." Rebecca looked upwards with her teary eyes squeezed shut and the fake smile stretched across her lips.

The way she had used his full name instead of one of her affectionate nicknames was enough to have Gladio recoil. But to add the clear sight of her positive facade shattering before him and knowing he was the reason why made him sick. Gladio had wanted to explain the whole situation to his girlfriend since the first time it happened, but every night that he had been on his own when Aranea showed up made it that much harder to cut himself away from the web of lust he had created.

By the time he got over the sudden feeling of nausea, Rebecca's form was already fleeing away from the party and towards the large open doors that revealed the oncoming darkness of night. He yelled out her name to get her to stop as he followed after her. That only made Rebecca's fingertips dig into and nearly rip the soft cloth that covered her as she held it up to steady her steps.

"Rebecca, listen to me!" Gladio pleaded once they were outside and just past the grand entrance, although his words sounded more like an angered demand. His tone only caused the already shaken girl to flinch. His large hand reached out to take her hand once more but Rebecca jerked hers away, clutching it to her chest as if she were about to touch poison.

"Why?" Her chest heaved, letting go of the sobs she had suppressed. "You should be back inside fucking your mistress or new girlfriend or -- what even is she? Obviously better than I am, I know!" Gladio had heard Rebecca's venom a few times before when she confided in him about the troubles she faced. Yet having it used on himself twisted the knife deeper than any wound he had received physically. The few stray rays of light that came from inside caused the tears running down Rebecca's face to glisten as she went on, "All I ever wanted was for you to be honest with me! I told you this repeatedly! Tell me you found your happiness so I could go and find my own, someone who thinks I'm enough. BUT NO, YOU STRUNG ME ALONG AND KEPT ME DREAMING UP DELUSIONS IN THE DARK!! YOU COULDN'T EVEN TELL ME YOURSELF, THAT BITCH HAD TO! AND DON'T GIVE ME THAT, 'I DON'T LOVE HER, IT WAS A MISTAKE!' CRAP BECAUSE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE KEPT DOING IT!!" Rebecca paused to rub away the tears that froze her cheeks, muttering how she was glad she didn't wear any eye makeup because she would have looked like more of a mess than she already was.

Gladio wanted to comfort her, explain how he had felt nothing but lust and now anger towards Aranea, yet he knew that his words would fall on deaf ears. He wanted to hold her, to keep her warm from the chilling winds that whipped around them both, but what he saw in those dark eyes that he loved was a gaslight fire of negative emotions that would burn them both alive.  

"You should go back inside, don't wanna keep your princess waiting." Rebecca chided with that bitter venom drenching her words. "Just letting you know that when you go home, I won't be there so you don't have to be concerned about me ruining your fun! Have a good night, Mr. Amicitia."

Even with everything that was building up in his chest, only the sound of Rebecca stepping down the stone stairs mixed with the howling wind could be heard. Gladio couldn't even comprehend all that just had taken place. To go from having the girl he loved in his arms one minute then watching her want nothing to do with him in a matter of minutes, it all seemed like a nightmarish haze to him. He wanted to continue after Rebecca, even just to make sure she got home safe. Perhaps even just have her stay one more night where he could really show her the whole picture, yet his feet couldn't move one step in any direction. He just stood and watched his love vanish into the night and it was only after she was gone that he even felt the frigid raindrops that pelted his clothes and face. The last thing he could even remember was those sinisterly concerning green pools eyeing him down as Chaos in human form guided him back inside...

[chasholidays]

I would love a Bellarke version of While You Were Sleeping, please. And THANK YOU, as always, for being so generous with your time and skills! :D

Bellamy knows he and his sister haven’t exactly been close recently. Both of them have had a rough time year, and instead of supporting each other like he wishes they had, they sniped and bickered and picked at each others’ open wounds. It’s been at least six months since the two of them spoke, if not longer, and that’s on him as much as her.

Still, he can’t believe that her life has changed this much.

Of course, it takes him a while to get around to being able to wonder about his sister’s fiancee, because she’s in a coma, and said fiancee is also the doctor who’s treating her, so it doesn’t occur to him that it’s weird she’s around until later.

“At least she’s not alone,” his mother says, and he squeezes her shoulder.

“I know. You can go home, I’ve got her.”

“And her fiancée.”

His mother hasn’t been very healthy, these last few years, and she’s looking thinner and more worn than the last time he saw her, but still. He didn’t think she was this far gone. “Lincoln passed away,” he says, careful, and Mom rolls her eyes.

“Yes, I’m aware. The doctor. Did you not get introduced?”

He takes a second, trying to remember. Obviously, he met some of her doctors, but he was a lot more focused on Octavia’s condition than he was on anything else.

“I guess not. She’s engaged?” he adds. “Did you know about this?”

“No, but she’s always been impulsive.”

He rubs his face. “And you think she impulsively got engaged to her doctor right before she went into a coma? Where is this guy?”

Mom smirks. “It’s a woman, Bellamy, don’t be heteronormative.”

“I taught you that word, don’t use it against me. And O’s straight.”

“Isn’t sexuality fluid?”

He knew he’d come to regret telling her things. “Just point me to the doctor, okay?”

The doctor’s name is, apparently, Dr. Clarke Griffin, and when he asks for her at reception, he’s told she’s a resident, not a full doctor, and will be back shortly.

He’s not sure why he cares that she’s a resident. It doesn’t make it any less weird that she’s claiming to be engaged to his previously exclusively heterosexual sister. He’s just trying to gather all the information he can.

When a cute blonde woman leans across the desk and gets directed to him, he straightens, stands up and offers his hand. “Dr. Griffin?” He assumes he can still call a resident doctor.

“How can I help you?” she asks.

“Apparently you’re engaged to my sister.”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “If you’re Octavia Blake’s brother then yes, I am. Sorry we didn’t get introduced earlier, it’s been a busy day. Is there something I can help you with?”

His jaw works, trying to come up with a good way to ask her what the fuck she’s playing at. Because there’s just no way. His sister did not, in the last six months, go through a complete reassessment of her sexuality and get engaged. It’s just not possible.

But it would be weird to come out and say that.

“Just wondering how the two of you met,” he says, and she gives him an unimpressed look. “I’m not allowed to want to get to know my sister’s fiancee?”

“I’m at work. And your sister’s in a coma. I assume you have better things to worry about than our relationship right now.”

“I can worry about more than one thing at once.”

She huffs like he’s ruining her day, which he might be. He’s been assuming she’s lying, but if she’s not, this sucks for her too. “Look,” he says, careful. “I just want to get to know you. If we’re going to be family.”

That works a little better. “I’m done at six. We could grab something to eat after that.”

“Perfect,” he says. “You know where to find me.”

*

To his surprise, she insists on meeting outside of the hospital, which makes sense when her opening gambit at the restaurant is, “I’m not engaged to your sister, I’m committing insurance fraud.”

“Uh–what?”

She pokes at her soda, scowling. “Not in a bad way,” she says. “Good insurance fraud. I’m not trying to con her or anything. She lives in my building and has really shitty coverage. If she had an inpatient visit with her plan, she’d go into debt to pay for it.”

“I told her her deductible was too fucking high,” he mutters, and Dr. Griffin finally cracks a smile.

“I’m sorry I lied to you, I wasn’t really–your mom overheard me telling one of my colleagues, and she seemed really excited, and I didn’t really want to get into it. Not when I was–”

“Committing insurance fraud.”

She shrugs one shoulder. “Pretty much. And then your mom wanted to talk about it. She really, really wanted me to know she was cool with our relationship.”

“Yeah, that’s my fault. I came out to her in college and she didn’t even know what bisexuality was so I spent a while trying to explain to her.”

She takes another sip of her soda. “Were you coming out as bisexual or just generally educating her as part of coming out as something else?”

“Coming out as bisexual.”

“Cool, me too. But your sister is straight?”

“As far as I know. We haven’t talked much lately, so I figured she might have decided she was into women and gotten a fiancee, but last time we talked she was pretty firmly straight.”

“Yeah, we talked a couple times, it sounded like she wasn’t that close to her family. I was kind of hoping no one was going to show up and call me out on it.”

“We’re still her family,” he says, gruff. “Thanks for–whatever you did with the insurance fraud. Thanks.”

“Should I tell your mom?” she asks.

“Probably not yet. Just–keep it simple.”

Dr. Griffin smiles. “Nothing says simple like a fake relationship for insurance benefits.”

“How does that even work, anyway? I didn’t think being engaged was enough to get you on someone’s insurance.”

“I’m just pulling some strings with billing. It’s not exactly insurance fraud, more billing fraud.”

“Is that less illegal?”

“I think it’s harder to trace,” she says, bright, and Bellamy snorts.

“As long as you’re okay with it.”

She makes a show of thinking it over. “Yeah,” she finally says. “I’m feeling pretty good.”

*

It’s an incredibly surreal few days. His sister isn’t in any danger, which helps a lot; everyone seems confident she’s going to wake up and be fine. But his mother is excited about a relationship that he knows to be completely fraudulent, and she’s talking about wedding plans and shit and he wants to tell her it’s not real, but it’s not really his lie to expose.

And then there’s Clarke.

She tells him to call her that the first time he says Dr. Griffin, and then adds, “We’re going to be family,” and the whole thing really is kind of a problem. Because Clarke is–cool. She’s smart and sharp and gorgeous, and even if she’s not assigned to Octavia’s case (because it’s a theoretical conflict of interest), she’s around a lot, because she’s theoretically his sister’s fiancee and an interested party.

And Bellamy might also be an interested party. Just a little. In Clarke.

Which is stupid for a whole host of reasons. As soon as this is done, he’s never going to see her again, and once his mom finds out the truth she might sue or something, to say nothing of Octavia, and she probably isn’t interested in him and–yeah.

The whole thing is really fucking stupid, and he’d like to turn it off.

Instead, he learns Clarke’s schedule in that easy, unconscious way that he picks up on things, starts bringing her meals when he learns she forgets to eat, checking in on her in her breaks, walking to the train with her after her shifts. If they were in high school, he’d be carrying her books to class for her. That’s where he’s at.

So, of course, she calls him out.

“My coworker thinks we’re involved in some real soap-opera stuff.”

“We kind of are,” he muses. “You’re pretending to be in a relationship with my sister who’s in a coma for financial gain. That’s pretty much as soap opera as you can get without anyone having an evil twin.” He pauses for effect. “You don’t, right?”

“Not as far as you know. That’s a sweeps week reveal.”

“No offense, but I hope she’s out by sweeps week. Whenever that is.”

Her smile is all warmth and compassion, and it really does help. “I think she’ll be out in a few days. A week at the most.”

“I hope so.” He clears his throat. “So, what soap-opera stuff was your coworker talking about? I assume they don’t know you’re faking the engagement.”

“She doesn’t.” She clears her throat. “She thinks my fiancee’s brother has a thing for me.”

There’s not much safe to say to that, so he settles on, “Oh.”

“Yeah. I kind of thought she might be right.”

That helps. “She definitely was.”

“Cool. Are you doing anything right now?”

He grins. “Whatever you want me to.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

*

Clarke texts him when Octavia wakes up, and by the time he gets there, it’s already kind of a mess.

“She must have lost some of her memory,” his mother is saying, while Clarke looks kind of vaguely uncomfortable about gaslighting Octavia about their relationship and the doctor clearly wants to kick everyone out but hasn’t yet, possibly because she is also invested in the weird soap opera that’s happening right now.

“Hi,” he says. “You guys look like you’ve got everything under control here, let me take Mom to get some coffee. You want anything, Clarke?”

“Bell?” Octavia asks, vague, and a lump rises in his throat. He lets himself take a second to cross the room, find her hand and squeeze it.

“Hey, I’ll be back soon. But it’s pretty crowded in here, I figured you could use a break.”

“Thanks for coming,” she says, and he smiles.

“Wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

Clarke offers him a tight smile as he passes, and he smiles back, takes his mother’s arm and guides her out of the room and to the cafeteria.

“They’re not really engaged,” he murmurs, and to his surprise, she rolls her eyes.

“No, of course not.”

“You knew?”

“I know my son,” she says, firm. “You would never flirt with your sister’s fiancee. And you were.”

He laughs. “I was, yeah. But you were telling O—“

“I assumed you had a good reason for keeping it up. I didn’t want her to spoil it. We can fill her in later.”

He puts his arm around her shoulders and squeezes. “Then, uh, sorry I didn’t tell you. With everything else going on—“

“It’s fine.” There’s a twinkle in her eye. “As long as one of my children ends up marrying a doctor.”

“Yeah, uh, let’s not get carried away,” he says, choking on his snort of laughter. “But we can see how it goes.”

By the time they get back to Octavia’s room, the doctor has cleared out, and it’s just Clarke, sitting by her bed only slightly awkwardly. He assumes she didn’t want O to be left alone, which makes her a pretty good insurance-fraud fiancee, in his book.

She gives up her seat to his mother as soon as she sees them.

“I have to get back to work,” she offers. “I have rounds. But—“

“Did you guys get a chance to talk?” he asks.

“Yeah, all set. You?”

“Yeah, I think everyone’s on the same page.”

He can tell she wants to kiss him, and he wants it too, but instead she just nods, smiles. “Okay, cool. I’ll be back when I can. I’m so glad you’re awake, babe.”

Octavia returns the smile. “Me too.”

He takes a seat on the other side of Octavia from his mother, and she turns her smile on him.

“How are you feeling?” he asks. She’s happy to see him; it’s more of a relief than he’d like.

“Betrayed. I can’t believe you tried to steal my fiancee while I was in a coma.”

His bark of laughter is so sharp and sudden that his mother jumps. “Hey, she let me steal her.”

“She did.” She settles back in the bed, eyes sliding shut. “It’s probably for the best. It never would have worked between us.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, squeezing her hand. “This is definitely the best-case scenario.”

[00qad-ldws]

Week 3 Submissions

Below the cut are this weeks submissions. The theme was “another time period (anytime not 2010-2020)” and 250 word count max. The challenge this week was that the following names were not allowed to be used: Q, James, Bond, Alex, Danny.

These writers stepped up to the challenge and have as always provided the fandom with amazing content this week. Please consider voting and commenting here.

Voting is closed at Noon EST 7/3.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I did!

Title: Ice

Author: @themuller13

Rating: general audiences

Warnings: major character deaths

Summary: Never more.

 “We found them like this, Sir,” the sailor said indicating a small heap of what looked like limbs and clothes, now lying still and wet on the deck of the Carpathia.

The man in the expensive suit nodded before he moved slowly, cautiously towards the entangled mass. The sailor could see the dread and fear in every step the man took forward.

“We’ve tried to separate them, Sir, but—“

The sailor went silent when he saw the man bending down and carefully, tenderly unwrap a hand, an arm, and finally a young man, pale and limp. A black, unruly mess of curls lay flattened against too prominent cheekbones. The man cradled the lifeless form in his arms, turning his face up and pressed his warm lips on an unresponsive mouth.

He sobbed, defeated and grief-stricken.

Protectively, he covered the body with a dry blanket, only leaving the beautiful face bare in the cold winter night.

Then, he freed the next man. Gently, he held and petted him, before he was placed alongside the first.

The sailor stayed silent, watched with wide eyes when he saw the resemblance between the two bodies, saw how the suited man took utmost care to place the bodies as close as possible.

The damp clothes held a third body of an even younger man, his face like chiseled marble. Warm fingers trailed the cupid’s bow.

His body was now draped around the other two, in a final embrace of a love that was no more.

 Title: The Pais

Author: @iambid 

Rating: Gen

Warnings: Mentions of sexual slavery

Summary:  A retired centurion goes to market to purchase a concubine.

 “Please buy them too!”

The rich man turned angrily from his negotiation with the slaver and stared at his new purchase.  He was pretty but outbursts were not to be tolerated.  The guard behind him grabbed his dark tousled hair and forced him to his knees brutally.

“And why should I do that?”

“We were told that if we weren’t sold today we would be sent to the Games!”

He looked over at the two slaves that stood cowering at the other end of the little stage. Unsold, they would be sent to the arena to be gladiators and most likely be slaughtered.  One of them looked very much like the boy he now owned.  The other was taller and blonder.

“What if I can’t afford to buy them too?”

“Then don’t buy me!”  The young man pleaded.  “Let me go with them.  Die with them.”

He hesitated, moved by his heartfelt plea.

“Why are you so set on throwing your life away?”

“I love them.”  He whispered, tears finally falling.  “I can’t live without them.”

He’d returned from the war in Britannia to find his beloved wife Vesper had died.  After months of loneliness he’d come to the sale to find a boy to warm his bed and found these young lovers instead.  Maybe the gods were smiling on him. He turned to the slaver.

“I want all three.”  He stroked the boy’s hair.  “I should like there to be some love in my home again.” He said kindly.

  Title: Something Old, Something New

Author: @iamanonniemouse

Rating: G

Warnings: None

Summary: "I feel like I've known you all forever,” I admit.

--

They say we remember things from our past lives. Old addresses, our partner’s preferred HoloCell brand. Little things.

Until now, I’d never believed it. But looking at the slim man in front of me, I am struck with a strange sense of déjà vu.

His HoloSuit is worn, his eyes tired. Where have you been? I want to ask. I've been looking for you.

“My name's Denny,” the man offers.

No it isn't, I think. Not quite.

"My name is Joe,” I say.

No it isn't.

Not-Denny hums thoughtfully. "If you could pick any name for yourself, what would it be?”

I ponder it. “Alan.”

Not quite. But it’ll do.

Not-Denny beams. "Okay, Alan. Would you like to come to lunch with us?”

I nod. He leads me over to two other men.

“Alan?” the man with HoloLens prosthetics says as we’re introduced. “I'm your new best friend, Quinn.”

The other man snorts and extends his hand. “Brown,” he says. “John Brown.

We sit and place our orders.

“Do you have two cats?” I ask Quinn, randomly.

“No way in hell,” Brown says.

Quinn rolls his eyes. “I don’t,” he tells me. “But I’ve been thinking of getting some.”

Brown groans.

The HoloServe arrives with our meals. I watch them all as we eat. Denny’s hands curled around the fork, Quinn’s bangs, Brown’s eyes.

“Something wrong?" Quinn asks me.

I hesitate. "I feel like I've known you all forever,” I admit.

They all smile at me.

“Me, too.”

  Title: The Visitors

Author: @gwylliondream

Rating: PG

Warnings: None

Summary: He'd recognize that face anywhere.

 “They’re coming today,” the nurse chatters as she wheels my chair into the courtyard.

The strength of my hands fails me. My fists once crushed jaws, but now they only ache, fingers twisted with age.

“They…?” I ask.

“Your family, of course,” she says.

I haven’t had a family since I was twelve years old.

They arrive, three of them, walking through the gate when the buzzer sounds.

I don’t remember them. Their names, their habits, how they take their tea.

The observation of human behaviour once came easily to me. But these days, I’ve lost the skills, like a man who forgets the name of his childhood pet or the taste of his mother’s porridge.

One visitor checks his watch as the afternoon lingers. His face impassive, he’d rather be elsewhere. Instead, he’s boxed into this god-forsaken courtyard without an escape.

Another paces back and forth across the grass. His fingers itch to hold a cigarette between them. I still notice some things, despite my captivity. I haven’t forgotten everything.

Another visitor kneels at my side and presses a cheek to my palm.

The other takes his eyes off his watch long enough to notice, “He recognizes you.”

My thumb caresses the soft skin, not nearly as wrinkled as my own. A smile emerges, a blush and a dimple.

The pacing visitor stops and affirms, “I think he does.”

“I’d recognize you anywhere,” I say, remembering the warmth of a Mediterranean sun.

Green eyes flicker over my lips.

“Vesper….”

 Title: A pub is for everyone

Author: @blood-suits-and-tears

Rating: G

Warnings:

Summary: random London pub in the 1990s; they are all like 20

"Come on, Turner...we should celebrate, the two youngest and brightest members of Q-branch! The pub is just across the street..."

The grunge-y looking kid with the big glasses is leading the way and then orders them cocktails. The other, more conservative looking one is finding them a table with a good view of all the exits; the best spot is already taken by a handsome but tired looking guy in uniform.

Just as the cocktails are ready a young man stumbles in, dressed in neon colours, spikey hair, and glitter on his face, rave-y type. He looks like he had quite a night although it’s not even 10pm yet.

Everybody is sipping their drinks as suddenly Nirvana blares through the pub. Turner remembers his colleague complaining about them being too commercial now. Nevertheless, he gets up to ‘dance’, he tries to get other people to join him, so the rave-y guy at the bar gives in.

“Dance with us, army guy!”

“Navy! He’s obviously a navy man”

“Thanks, and no… not really my kind of music…”

“Turner?”

He shakes his head and gets joined by the navy man at his table.

“Not your thing either?”

“Not really, but they seem to have fun…”

“You want to try?”

There is a hesitant nod and they get up to join the other two. Later as ‘Jump Around’ comes on they all don’t hold back. None of them knowing what will become of them together in the future.

 Title: The Favour

Author: @sunaddicted

Rating: G

Warnings: mentions of male prostitution

Summary:  you meet the people you love in the strangest ways (brownie points to whoever guessed what scandal I'm referring to)

  The carriage dipped and groaned a little when two broad gentlemen climbed down from it, their blond hair - an ashen and a honeyed tone respectively - briefly shining like saints' halos under the gaslights.

"Cleveland Street" The younger gentleman frowned, a quizzical expression on his classically cut features  "It doesn't seem like a place where we might have a mission, Commander"

"We don't" the elder confirmed, cane tapping on the concrete almost in glee at the perspective of working outside of the rules "It's a favour, not a mission"

"For who?"

 "The Quartermaster" The Commander revealed as he led his colleague down the road "He has.. an acquaintance at number 19" the tone of voice said everything about just what kind of acquaintance he was talking about - not that he was judging their young Quartermaster: they had had their fair share of illicit encounters, disguised under friendly dinners.

"A male prostitute, you mean"

"A boy he holds close to his heart and who he wishes out of harm's way" the elder specified "You must know about the brewing scandal" he murmured, pushing the door open.  

The other agent sighed "Who are we looking for?"

The Commander  looked around briefly and then nodded towards a familiar nest of unkempt hair.

"They look... The same"

The older agent couldn't disagree, the similarity was startling and he had a feeling that they would get into a lot of trouble because of them "Yes, they're beautiful"

  Title: Real Gone

Author: @lille082

Rating: Teen and Up Audiences

Warnings: none

Summary: He doesn’t go looking for trouble, honest.  But he knows where to go after trouble finds him. A 50s Diner AU

 The occupant behind the diner’s counter looked him over as he limped across the threshold before glaring at him in annoyance and concern.  Before he knew it, he’d been forced onto a stool in the upstairs flat, a plaster applied to his forehead.

“You close shop to patch a lot of cats up at 2am or is it just me?”  He smiled as he watched a flush creep into Eugene’s cheeks.

“I don’t know too many people who go out looking for a pounding, Richard.  Consider yourself special.”  He continued to dab at his split lip with a flannel, flicking his gaze up for just a moment to meet his eyes.

“Sounds like you’re running with some squares, Eugene.”

He laughed, his blush growing darker as his gaze flickered between Richard’s eyes and lips.

The door to the flat swung open and they both jumped, watching Bobby and Alan stumble in clinging to each other before seeing them.

“Oh.  Sorry to interrupt…we’ll just…”  Bobby led Alan to the bedroom and swiftly shut the door behind them.

Richard hadn’t known, exactly, but he’d had suspicions about the three men who ran the diner and the look of fear in Eugene’s eyes confirmed it for him.

“Please don’t rat on us,”  Eugene quietly pleaded.

“Why would I do a thing like that?  You calling me a snitch?” He asked, leaning forward and smiling playfully.

Eugene's eyes widened hopefully.  “Really?”

“Really,” Richard whispered, before tilting his chin up to kiss him.

[metawitches]

The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. Michael dies again, Jonas startles awake again. Claudia explains it all, then convinces Jonas and Martha to take a star bridge into space.

Adam finally goes full Nosferatu.

I had to kill her! The fate of the multiverse depends on it!

Recap Episode 8: In Which Claudia Jonas Retcons It All

Pay No Attention to The 2 1/2 Seasons Behind the Curtain

The episode begins with a return to season 1, episode 1 and Michael Kahnwald’s suicide. Then Very Young Jonas startles awake in his bed after a nightmare about his father’s death.

He goes downstairs, sniffs the milk and tells his father about his nightmare. They hug it out, while in the background Hannah makes sure that Jonas has an appointment with his counselor, Peter Doppler, to treat his ongoing struggles with depression. 

The whole series was just one of Jonas’ very vivid nightmares. He had a run in with Bartosz’s bitter old grandmother, Claudia, last week, who’s had it in for the Kahnwald family ever since Nurse Ines was instrumental in discovering that the increased cancer rate in Winden was caused by the nuclear power plant accident in ’86.

Claudia, who was the power plant director at the time, was fired and arrested when her part in the cover up of the accident was discovered. She did jail time and her career never recovered.

Old Claudia was so vicious with Jonas that he’s not sure when he’ll be ready to visit Bartosz again. Regina and Aleksander think it might be time to put her in an institution, since she’s driving business away from their luxury spa hotel and cancer rehab center. Since the power plant closed down, their spa and rehab resort hotel keeps much of Winden employed, so they’re very protective of the business.

Jonas feels much better after spending the day with his girlfriend, Martha, who he’s not related to in any way. He doesn’t dream at all that night. The End.

I can retcon the whole thing, too. If we’re going to do it, might as well go Full Dallas.

But let’s do it their way.

Recap

The episode begins with a return to season 1, episode 1 and Michael Kahnwald’s suicide. Then Very Young Jonas startles awake in his bed after a nightmare about his father’s death.

Claudia explains to Adam in 2053 that he is the dreamer and his nightmare will never end.

Unless he listens to her.

After all, listening to her has worked out so well for him in the past. It was his childhood dream to become a mass murdering, pedophilic vampire.

Jonas gets stuck on the fact that he had Claudia killed in the 1950s. I guess he forgot about time travel.

Living Past Your Expiration Date

The God particle has pickled Adam’s brain over the last several decades and he never gives it enough time to heal in between fatal accidents and suicide attempts. If he did, he would realize that many people are alive in the future after their death dates in the past. He sent Noah into the future more than a century past his technical death date.

The time periods that a traveler visits still need to play out in real time, in chronological order, in addition to the out of sync version time travelers experience. Thus, their visits to the future, no matter how long after their death date, will still play out, regardless of whether they are alive or dead in the past. And they will still meet people who watched them die. The Time Traveler’s Wife clearly illustrates this concept.

If you think it through, we already know this, because we watched Hannah die in 1911, yet her entire life prior to that was lived in the future.

Claudia tells him that he still doesn’t know how the game is played, another line they like to repeat, then scoffs at him for putting all of his energy into destroying the knot.

That would be the knot she discovered and told him was important.

She tells him that the origin isn’t in the bindings between the worlds. It’s outside the worlds. His world and Eva’s world should never have existed.

Claudia explains that their thinking is shaped by dualities – dark and light, good and evil, Adam and Eva- but the world actually works in threes. (Remember when she told Jonas in season 2 that there were two sides to the time war, and Adam was the dark and she was the light?)

He needs to stop thinking in dualities. The nature of reality requires three dimensions. Adam suddenly remembers the triquetra knot and figures out that there should be a third world.

Which should have been obvious to him from his talks with HG Tannhaus in S1, when HG essentially said that, but okay. Like I said, Jonas has clearly sustained some brain damage over the course of this cycle.

We go to HG Tannhaus in the bunker, where he’s preparing to turn on his room-sized time machine. This is the 3rd world. Claudia describes it as, “The world that gave birth to the knot, where everything originates, where a single mistake was made.” Tannhaus plugs cables into the machine then looks back at the photo of his son’s family on the wall.

“Tannhaus, in the origin world- like you, he lost someone. And like you, he tried to bring that person back from the dead. But instead, he split and destroyed his world, thus creating our two worlds.”

Tannhaus goes to the wall switches and pushes all 3, turning on the machine. This is the third version of this event we’ve been shown. I assume we’re seeing Origin world Tannhaus’ last three tries at increasing the power of the machine, until with the 4th try he suddenly went too far and blew up his whole planet timeline. But the previous two attempts could have taken place on other worlds- the time machine rig is slightly different this time.

Choose your own adventure. 

When Tannhaus pushes the red buttons, the machine reaction is much stronger than before. It has a new cylinder on top that sends out extra lightning. Tannhaus backs up against the wall in fear, just as the camera cuts away. 

Claudia tells Jonas that he can destroy the knot by preventing the invention of space-time travel in the origin world.

Didn’t she just tell him he shouldn’t care about the knot?

Old Claudia and Adam return to Adam’s destroyed lair in the Sic Mundus Temple of Doom. Adam/Jonas must have left something behind that Claudia wants. Claudia pretends she would have bothered to spare him pain if she could, as if she’s ever gone out of her way to spare anyone anything. She explains that the cycles have to remain the same until she’s ready to change them. Jonas asks if the scene they’re acting out now has ever happened before.

She says the rest has happened an infinite number of times, but this conversation is happening for the first time, because now, for the first and only time ever, she’s really truly going to tell him the truth. 

Imagine me banging my head against the wall. Then imagine it some more. Jonas’ father was the magician who taught us all the rules of magic, which I can see now were what I should have been repeating every other recap.

This show is a shell game. A very long, complicated shell game, played with Mikkel’s love of complexity, distraction and secrecy. But that’s all it is. A game to see which world ends up with the prize on it at the end. Claudia is the magician and Regina is the prize. Everything else is time wasting, repetitive, meaningless distraction that doesn’t matter to her. It’s only there to keep you from noticing what the magician is doing with the prize.

We’ve known all along that Claudia is the one who’s ultimately in charge. She’s said all along that she wants to save Regina, but we didn’t know what that would mean. 

Claudia explains that Jonas and Eva singlehandedly keep the knot alive and regenerating.

Gaslighting, Nietzsche, the Enlightenment and Guilt

Let me remind you that we have been shown multiple scenes of multiple Claudias plotting together to keep Marthas, Jonases and Noahs busy and on the correct path for eternity. Claudia maintains these cycles and creates the schemes that the others enact. Without her, the rest would immediately fall apart.

I have no idea why Jonas and Martha are the chosen ones on these worlds, if the worlds are indeed Tannhaus’ fever dreams. You’d think the emanations of his mind would choose or create a couple who are closer to him to focus on, like Charlotte and Peter, Franziska and Magnus or Elisabeth and Hanno, his granddaughter and great granddaughters.

Claudia is the one who has reasons to center her focus on Jonas and Martha, two people who are instrumental in advancing the time travel techniques she needs to move her quest forward. I think they were colleagues or rivals who she trapped in these cycles, essentially enslaving them.

And now she’s done the same to Tannhaus on another world.

But that’s just me writing a second layer into the story again. If it helps you make sense of Dark, use my headcanon. Actual canon is a series of thrown together, cool but mind numbingly repetitive ideas that build into an explosion which weirdly turns out to be a dissolve and an out of place, feel good song, all meant to illustrate the metaphor that all that matters is your own point of view.

When you add up all of the philosophy we’ve been given, this is what you get- We are each living in our own heads, on our own little planets, and the rest of the world is there for us to experiment on as we see fit. If you’re strong enough, take and do what you want, without guilt. If you’re weak, you are guilty of lowering the overall quality of the world for the strong and should leave. Or maybe you should stay, as long as you understand that your place is to submit to the Will of the strong.  The choice of genocide vs enslavement/oppression depends on which fascist psychopath you’re dealing with.

These views evolve from the biblical God giving Noah complete control over the Earth and come to fruition with Enlightenment and more recent philosophers such as Descartes, Nietzsche and the Existentialists. If the reality of the world is in question and individuals are given leave to use it as they see fit, when those ideas are combined and taken to their logical extremes, the end result is the disposable world we now live in and which Dark is showing. 

While I know Jonas and Martha’s worlds are metaphors for the worlds inside their heads and therefore theoretically it’s no big deal to erase those worlds, this is the exact same philosophy that has been used to exploit and pollute our world almost to death, so I’m not going to excuse it.

At a certain point, metaphors become reality. This is that point. We can’t throw away the timeline or world we live on and go live in another reality. Magical thinking won’t save us.

We need to throw out Enlightenment era thinking, because it’s killing everything and we only have access to one reality. Even if we could access other realities, it’s not okay to continue the habit of colonization and destruction.

Claudia will gaslight Jonas about the knot and the cycles all episode, but what she says isn’t true. I have no idea anymore if the showrunners intended to portray Claudia continuing to gaslight Jonas, or if we are now supposed to believe everything she says, but gaslighting is what’s on screen. Maybe they just hoped we wouldn’t notice that she’s lying about so many things.

Maybe this is their attempt to have it both ways- the story is real and not real. Since they never verbally acknowledge the lies, whatever they might have been attempting didn’t work all that well for me. They coyly leave it in the realm of a midsummer night’s dream, but if you don’t know Shakespeare, you miss this. In the play, everything really happened. It wasn’t a dream. The characters just wish it was, because that would erase their mistakes.

Shakespeare’s characters can start over in the morning as if the world is new and the overnight changes happened naturally. But in real life, we have to deal with the way things are. We can’t undo what’s happened, but we can admit that the rest of the world is as real and deserving of respect as we are. We can ere on the side of believing in a cosmic consciousness that has a purpose for everything instead of repeating the self-serving mistakes of the past.

Over in the Alt world, Eva is explaining to Martha that everyone has to die so that they can be born again correctly. The Unknown trio join Eva and Martha. Eva says that he’s waited a long time to meet her. All three hug Martha. 

Claudia explains that Martha and Jonas just won’t stop fighting over their kid and the knot.

They act out of love, but bring only pain and suffering.

Claudia is talking about herself here.

On screen, Martha tries not to shrink away while the Unknown touches her. She’s not excited about this baby.

Then Stranger Martha brings in the gun and clothes that Martha will use to kill Young Jonas. Eva tells her that in order for Jonas to live, he has to die, just like he always has.

Okay, now we’re back in territory I recognize. He’s the dying and reborn god again. Eva just wants to send him home to his own world without paying the time sphere fare. And Claudia probably convinced her this was necessary, for some reason.

Claudia: “Both of you have done unimaginable things on your journey, because you can’t let go of your deepest desires. You have been trying to escape what you will become, but that’s impossible. You will end up facing yourselves again and again.”

So, this right here is the breakpoint for me. As we hear Claudia say this, we watch Martha kill Jonas. And we watch Jonas die without fighting death or blaming Martha. He gives her the St Christopher medal because he loves her, but he’s able to give up his attachment to her and to his life, leaving this world behind. He leaves his deepest desires behind without a struggle.

Martha shoots him because even though she loves him, she’s able to give up her attachment to him and do what’s necessary. She also lets go of her deepest desire without a struggle. Neither of them worry about their son. Always and forever, they are the primary attachment for each other, but they both give up that attachment, and all other attachments, constantly, throughout the series and this episode.

Claudia has to constantly push them into fighting over attachments. They only become Adam and Eva because of Claudia.

The struggle to give up or protect attachments is only important because Claudia created it as a distraction.

Claudia is the one who never, ever gives up her attachments. Bernd taught her to take what she wants, by any means necessary, and that’s what she’s doing. If the showrunners wanted me to believe Claudia’s argument, they needed to make Jonas and Martha less selfless and Claudia less devious. Because what I see are two people who become evil because they are purposely corrupted and exploited by a woman who has all the information and power at her disposal. Claudia is as Machiavellian as they come- she’s proven that there are no boundaries to her ambition. 

Claudia tells Adam that Jonas and Martha and their two worlds should never have existed. He asks her how she came by this information. Especially her detailed information about the origin world.

Lol. Silly Jonas. Expecting Claudia to give a straight answer to questions like that.

She never answers the questions. We never find out.

She tells him that she’s spent 33 years looking for the answers in both worlds.

Claudia: “I’ve tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together, to understand how everything can continually be reborn from the same family tree. Until I realized that we’re not all part of the knot. Both worlds are a cancer that must have grown from something else. If you remove it, you destroy everything that was born of it. But you keep everything alive that already existed in the origin world.”

Let me point out here that  Claudia never gives any reason why the people who are part of the knot shouldn’t exist. She just says that she figured out she could get rid of them and keep everyone else alive. The knot contains all of her/Regina’s enemies and her rivals in the development of time travel.

If she gets Jonas to wipe out time travel on the 3rd world and everyone related to the Nielsens, she can save Regina, sure, but she can also reinvent time travel all by herself and take all of the credit for the scientific achievement. Taking sole credit for developing time travel, or maybe sharing it with Bernd, is much more in character for Claudia than making Regina her sole priority for an infinite number of cycles. 

As Old Claudia speaks, Aging Adult Claudia finishes decorating Prime Regina’s grave with a cross and a photo. Tronte says that he always thought Regina was his daughter. Claudia tells him that she used to wish he was Regina’s father, but it’s better this way. Since Regina’s not part of the knot, she will live.

Then she sends him off to kill Regina, who’s suffering and barely alive. She tells him that it has to be done, in order to motivate Claudia.

With the way the timelines are out of sync, Alt Regina must not be dead yet. Or we’re on a 3rd or 4th world. I can’t be bothered to make sense of the timelines anymore. They’ll all be dead or undone in a little while, so what does any of this matter? 

Wonder who Regina’s father could be? Maybe the man she inherited that giant mansion from? The mansion that should have gone to Peter when Helge became incapacitated?

But let’s go back to the first parts of what Claudia said. She didn’t tell Jonas how she figured out anything about the origin world. The magician uses distraction to keep her secrets about how the magic is done.

Claudia says she wanted “to understand how everything can continually be reborn from the same family tree.” That sounds like she’s referring to the knot and the Nielsens, but it could also be referring to the fact that cancer recurs in her family. And in fact, then she refers to the two worlds as cancer worlds that came from a cancer-free world. That’s what she’s looking for- a cancer-free world for Regina.

In case you missed it, Claudia put the pieces of the puzzle together in a way that means Jonas and Martha’s worlds are just nightmare worlds created by the time apocalypse Tannhaus created on the Origin world. She essentially likens them to tumors attached to space-time where the origin world should be or fever dreams that Time has created out of the remnants of the origin world combined with Tannhaus’ longing for the return of his son’s family.

We’re apparently going to just throw all previous time and multiverse theory out the window in favor of Claudia’s cancer world theory. It doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs to save Regina. I’m not sure why they bothered with the whole clunky and confusing Schrodinger’s cat explanation in the previous episode, if none of it mattered. You’d think the fact that they explained that theory, what, 3 or 4 times, would make it the way the universe actually works. Which would mean Claudia is either wrong or lying.

But Tannhaus is now the evil out of control villain who destroyed his own world because he selfishly tried to bring back his family members, while Claudia is the benevolent, selfless mother who’s just trying to put things back to rights. If you don’t pay attention to the fact that Claudia is destroying two worlds in order to bring her own daughter back to life, you’ll be fine with accepting this scenario.

There’s also the fact that the way she describes Jonas and Martha’s worlds as tumors doesn’t really fit the way timeline creation works, using the Schrodinger’s cat theory of the multiverse. Joans and Martha’s worlds should just be 2 alternate timelines which came from that moment, with the destruction of Tannhaus’ world being a 3rd potential reality.

If his world was really even destroyed. Without more explanation and another point of view, it’s hard to judge the truth of Claudia’s assertion that Tannhaus’ world is gone. I’m willing to believe it is, but it’s hard not to notice that we see him turn his time machine on 4 times, with no sign of planetary destruction.

The closest thing to destruction we see is the creation of an Einstein Rosen bridge, which might create a shockwave, but we’ve already seen planets survive similar events- the apocalypses made life difficult, but they didn’t destroy Time or the planet. Maybe something in the power plant data leads to the conclusion that the original accident was actually on a 3rd world and then reverberated out into its clone worlds.

Why is she keeping so much information from Jonas? Because she’s still gaslighting him. His and Martha’s worlds aren’t cancerous tumors. They’re just alternate realities created in a destructive moment. Claudia wants to destroy them for her own purposes, so she needs to wind Jonas up.

I’m not sure if that’s what the show is trying to say or not, but it’s the logical conclusion, based on the canon that’s come before.

Claudia acknowledges that she’s also caused pain and suffering in others in her quest to save Regina. Everything she’s done has been part of her search for a way to break the chain of cause and effect. Her search to understand how everything is connected led her to the realization that their two worlds were created from a 3rd world and Regina will always die in the secondary worlds. Regina can only live in the primary world- Tannhaus’ world. 

Claudia admits that she lied to Adam and Eva to keep the knot in place. She had to keep everyone else from finding out the truth and keep everything happening the way it always has, maintaining the chain of cause and effect in both worlds.

So, in her search for a way to break the chain of cause and effect, she had to make sure no one broke the chain of cause and effect? Because otherwise cause and effect would break all by itself? And it was imperative that only she perform this investigation, without any help from all of the intelligent scientists, police officers, etc. around her? In fact, she decided that the most effective way to perform the investigation was to declare herself supreme ruler of the universe, who was making changes all along in her attempts to save Regina.

Claudia tells Jonas that there’s no free will in either world. Everyone always automatically does what they’ve done before.

OMG. Then why does she have to work so hard to make sure that they do what they’ve done before???????

On screen, Alt Ulrich finds Adult Helge at the cabin. This is juxtaposed with scenes from S1 when Prime Ulrich found Child Helge at the mansion. The two scenes play out in a similar manner, ending with Ulrich murdering both Helges by beating their heads with rocks.

Really didn’t need to see the child murder again, never mind the murder of Adult Helge, but it reminds me of something. Somewhere in Ulrich’s adventures with stalking Helge, he tells Helge that he has to stand up to his bullies even if they’re bigger than him, or they’ll never stop. Ulrich says that Helge should bite the bigger boys to make them leave him alone. Following this advice, Child Helge bites Ulrich as Ulrich is murdering him, which doesn’t slow Ulrich down a bit, proving that it’s wrong to blame the victim when a bully attacks them.

But maybe I had it wrong. Maybe the showrunners’ point was that Helge deserved to lose because he couldn’t find a way to beat a grown man. And even as an adult, he’s not as large or smart as Ulrich, who’s a trained police officer. Maybe the point of Dark has always been to encourage taking what you want, ensuring survival of the most ruthless and physically strong. And to come up with a good story to fool anyone who might find another way to stop you.

Helge will eventually win, by waiting Ulrich out, sneaking up on him, bringing a bigger blunt object and using his fictional foreknowledge of events/being prepared. I’ve argued many times for the use of stealth techniques such as those of the femme fatale, which is what Helge uses.

But Helge really wins because he has a foreknowledge of events, so he knows to bring a better weapon. It’s the escalation of defensive tactics that wins the day.

So let me ask- are they arguing for a nuclear arms race? Because I thought these creators were against the use of nuclear devices? The events of this episode flip the message of the previous 25. As long as the nuclear devices aren’t close enough to Regina to give her cancer, it might be a good idea to keep them in reserve, right? Who cares if they give someone else’s kid cancer? We’ll just blow up  bury  discredit silence dissolve those neighborhoods when they get too polluted.

The inconvenient troublemakers who get in the way of success will become a dream, one way or another.

Alt Ulrich drags Adult Helge’s body down to the time chair room, which has bright yellow wallpaper in the Alt world. Claudia continues to babble on. She says, “No one can escape their fate.”

Alt Ulrich stands over Adult Helge’s body, admiring his work. Old Helge comes up behind him and says, “It was you!” He hits Ulrich in the head with an iron crow bar, knocking him out, then hits him a few more times to make sure he’s dead.

Guess what? Helge the Holy just escaped his fate.

In the Prime world, Helge and Ulrich have the opposite fates. Both live to be old, but Old Helge dies a violent death while attacking his adult self. The current scene negates everything Claudia is saying in her voiceover about everything always working out exactly the same in both worlds and finding its proper place, blah, blah, blah. It only happens that way because she makes it happen that way, so that she can tell Jonas this story.

And so that she can achieve her scientific goals. Never forget that this is the woman who watched her father die so that the passage, as the greatest scientific discovery she’d ever encountered, would remain under her control- not so that Regina could live.

If she didn’t manipulate events, Jonas and Martha’s worlds would diverge into two normal timelines.

Helge takes back his pennies.

Prime Claudia comes into the yellow room and takes in the situation. Adult Helge comes back to life. (His pennies signify that he’s a version of the ferryman who escorts souls to the Underworld. Prime Helge escorted all three dead boys right back to the Winden of Jonas’ world. You do the math.)

Ulrich does not come back. Claudia knows what happened to Helge and Ulrich on the Prime world. She gets an idea about the Power of Three to get things done.

The 3rd Helge broke the chain of cause and effect that was supposedly written in stone. She can work with that- an old man who’s so determined to get back what’s his that he’ll break all the rules, the bunker, time travel, lost children, worlds that are out of control- the story elements are all right there in that room.

Old Claudia changes the focus of her story and tells Jonas that the real loophole is during the nanosecond of time that the world stops during the apocalypse. It momentarily breaks the chain of cause and effect. Claudia says that Eva uses this moment in time to send her younger self off in different directions. Claudia also used it for this visit to Adam. She takes out the sphere. Now she wants him to use the nanosecond loophole to send Jonas in a different direction, so they can break the cycle forever.

Claudia: “Jonas and Martha are to blame for everything happening over and over again. You must send them to the origin world, so they can finally put an end to this.”

Back to the moment of Prime Martha’s death, at the end of S2. Jonas promises to make everything right. Adam has just left. He walks back in. Jonas yells at him. Adam says they need to leave, right now, then they can talk. Jonas throws a hissy fit over the sphere, since this Jonas has never seen one before.

They reappear in the Alt world caves. Adam tells Jonas that he can avoid becoming Adam. But he has to trust Adam. 

Jonas should have broken out into hysterical laughter here, since he’d just watched Adam kill Martha, narrowly avoided a panic attack, gotten turned into golden glitter and now this. A little hyperventilation would have been appropriate, at the very least.

But, next thing we know, JONAS HAS LURED THE VAMPIRE OUTSIDE! Before the weak sunlight burns him to ashes, Adam instructs Jonas to hurry up and save Alt Martha from Bartosz and Magnus and Franziska saving her. And saving him. 

I haven’t been this worried about a vampire since True Blood ended. Geez, I really thought episode 7 had put me off the older Jonases, but NosferAdam is getting all tender with Jonas now. And that coat is still sharp, even when it’s muddy.

NosferAdam: “All these years, I thought that I alone had to change things. But it’s just as much her fault. You are two parts of the same whole. Only together can you return to the origin world. What we know is a drop. What we do not know is an ocean.”

Jonas: “What are you saying?”

He’s saying that in the 5 seconds he was away from Jonas, he’s mellowed and moved on from murder to kidnapping, but Martha is still his favorite victim. And planetary destruction is still the ultimate goal.

And Young Jonas will still do whatever anyone tells him to do. His main desire in life isn’t really Martha. It’s to follow orders and be absolved of all responsibility. Law and order are everything. The real problem with the knot is that it symbolizes chaos and the breakdown of traditional societal values.

Alt Old Helge and Ulrich come through on their way to the cave and murdering each other in 1986. Jonas and Adam hide behind the family stalking tree while they pass. Adam explains about the apocalypse and the nanosecond loophole and original sin and soulmates and having to repeatedly kill the thing you love until it stays dead… He hands Jonas the sphere and says this is really, really the last time Jonas gets to save the world by destroying it, okay?

It’s a bad habit to get into. Mass destruction is never the answer. It just feels satisfying at the time.

Meanwhile, back in the Prime world, in Adam’s destroyed lair, probably in the 2050s but who really knows, Old and Aging Claudia have one last meeting. Old Claudia fills Aging Claudia in on her day. As she talks, she closes her backpack and we get a glimpse of a rectangular time machine with a golden handle, that we’ve never seen before, probably made from the design Eva passed to Claudia for Tannhaus.

This must be how Claudia travels to worlds we’ve never heard about, where she found the “origin” world. Aging Claudia doesn’t seem to know about the machine. Old Claudia is supposed to be going off to the 50s to die now, so you’d think she’d leave it with her younger self. How many secret lives does she have? Maybe she drops it off with Adult Bernd while she’s in 1954. A bunch of his problems suddenly get solved around that time.

I really like the idea of Claudia and Bernd traveling the time universe together, like a pair of Indiana Jones, if only they would use their powers for good. Or not for evil.

They hug goodbye and Aging Claudia asks Old Claudia to tell their dad, Egon, she’s sorry. Old Claudia reminds her, “If all this works, Regina will live.”

Old Claudia does visit Adult Egon in 1954 to deliver the apology. He has no idea who she is or what she’s talking about until 32 years later, when she watches him die in 1986 without calling for help.

Back to the forest road scene. Bartosz peddles his bike for all he’s worth. Jonas runs to meet them. Old Franziska and Magnus stop Bartosz and Martha. Jonas hides behind a tree and watches.

He’s the Jonas they’re convincing Martha to go save. Did a replacement Jonas already pop into existence to grieve Prime Martha? If Jonas misses her at this junction, and she doesn’t go with Bartosz once she’s outside the house, it would be really awkward for her to find her own dead body alone on the floor when she goes inside. Would she then run to the basement and become a Stranger Martha who zapped the cosmic egg with Claudia for 30 years?

While Martha decides whether to stay or go, Jonas winds up the Time Snitch, puts it in his pocket and runs toward her at full speed. They disappear together just as he reaches her and grabs hold, reappearing in the middle of the bus stop intersection.

Martha is stunned, then extra stunned when she realizes it’s a live Jonas- but not the Jonas she just lost. He’s having his own moment, taking his first good look at Alt Martha. They go through the usual let down of each being a soulmate, but not the soulmate the other one was hoping for.

Jonas explains that they’re on the Prime world, June 21, 1986, the day that “his” world created their worlds.

Jonas: “Tannhaus the clockmaker will open the passage for the first time today. We don’t have much time. We have to stop it from ever happening.”

He looks over at the power plant stacks, then runs into the woods, toward the caves.

Martha: “Wait! What does that mean?”

Words are still bouncing off of ears, though to be fair, no one ever clearly tells anyone the whole truth.

And everyone rushes around, saying there isn’t much time, as if they don’t have time machines in their pockets.

Back to the Alt world. It’s finally the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Adam stands in the Erit Lux HQ, gun in one hand and a lit torch in the other. That’s right. It’s time to burn those poor tortured masterpieces.

Why go through with it, when Adam knows everything is changing? Why not, I ask you? There hasn’t been near enough symbolic fire in this show to suit my tastes (lightning just isn’t the same), though I’d rather see buildings burn than priceless works of art. Burning down the church and Bernd’s mansion every cycle might’ve reduced the tension in town and opened up some productive lines of communication. It always does wonders for the story in 19th century novels. 

Anyway, Painting Adam and Eva take the hit. Adam goes back to Eva’s God particle room and prepares to return to his world. Then he pauses, looking thoughtful.

On the Prime world, Jonas and Martha reach the entrance to the cave. Martha asks where they’re going. Jonas says they’re bringing someone back from the dead. She asks what that means. He says it’s hard to explain.

These two need to learn to mindmeld.

He says they need to reach the person they’re saving before they die, a recurring theme. Martha grabs his arm, also a recurring theme between them. And asks again what exactly it is he plans to do. 

Jonas finally slows down and treats her like a person, sort of. He doesn’t tell her the whole story. But he does make a more direct appeal, using language he knows she’ll respond to. He turns and stands face to face with her, looking her in the eye. “You and I- we’re the reason that all of this happens, time and time again. Because you can’t let go of what you want and I can’t let go of what I want. But we are the glitch. The glitch in the matrix.”

Martha: “You’re saying that they never existed. Your world and mine. That we never exist.”

He nods his head and turns toward the cave.

This is the truth that the characters haven’t wanted to see and hear, all season long, every time they’ve asked what someone was really saying. This is why the Unknown doesn’t have a name- because he’s simply representative of Tannhaus’ missing granddaughter, whose fate is- unknown. This is the nightmare that’s been underneath all of the other nightmares, from the first episode- the fear that nothing is real. That the origin is a nightmare and the end is nothingness.

What happens, in an existentialist universe, when you discover that you are nothing more than an object in someone else’s world? What if, like Ariadne, you accidentally took center stage, believing you deserved equal time? Do you listen to the one who tells you it’s their world and you need to get out or do you fight for the right to exist?

In the world of Dark, you move over and allow that person to become the star of the world. And then, you allow them to convince you that your entire world should never have existed, because they need to destroy it to save their own world, which they messed up.

In other words, 2 worlds become disposable so that a 3rd world can survive.

Does it actually matter how the 2 worlds were born? They exist now. Why do they matter less than the one world where Claudia wants her daughter to live a beautiful, cancer-free life? In season 1, Jonas’ world wasn’t any more unfixable than ours.

There are real world implications here- this is what happens when poor regions are colonized and polluted so that wealthy regions can maintain their lifestyles without compromising their own environments. This show is encouraging our current model of late stage capitalism that destroys the planet and maintains social inequalities while trying to hide what’s happening behind a poof of golden glitter.

Martha takes a moment to accept the totality of the planetary death sentence Jonas has just shared with her. Then she follows him. Fascism and elitism win again.

Adam walks back into Eva’s lair. She’s waiting for him, since this is how their game usually plays out. He’s decided to mess with her one last time, rather than dying alone. Their love has become a toxic addiction, but it is still love. Fire and lightning burn, but they are still Light.

Try as she might, Claudia has never fully removed them from Love or Light. That’s why they are the ones to cross the bridge, not her. Her connections aren’t True in the same way, not even to herself. The knot may be chaos, but it is also a deepening of familial connections that refuse to be broken. It’s an intensifying of everything that families and love are, creating unbreakable bonds. Claudia’s method is to erase bonds, even within her own family.

We have never seen Regina with her father.

Adam strolls over to Eva, gun in hand. She says she knows why he’s here, and she’s excited to become Young Martha again.

Joke’s on her.

Adam stares at her silently. She tells him to shoot her, reminding him of the steps they take at this point in the cycle. She even pulls the trigger for him, but, like Noah before him, he’s cleverly removed the bullets.

Martha is stunned. It’s as if she doesn’t know that changes can be made in the cycles. 

Adam assures her that they’ll both die, along with everything else.

Does NosferAdam ever die, in the normal course of things?

Martha asks what he did this time to screw up her life. Or, actually, her death.

I’m going to transcribe this speech for old time’s sake, because S1 Stranger Jonas is the best of all the Strangers. I will always remember him and Young Jonas as they were on that bench in the graveyard, a pair of sweet guys remembering their beloved dad.

At least Mikkel wasn’t retconned into someone terrible. He is the Sun King to the end.

Adam: Life is a labyrinth. Some wander around inside it until their death, in search of a way out. But there is only one path and it leads ever deeper inside. Only when one reaches the center, will they understand. Death is incomprehensible. But one can reconcile themselves with it.”

Next is the part that normally encourages the listener toward self reflection. That’s not going to happen here, because we are now living out a lie. Apparently we have been for a while, depending on what interpretation you want to take away from the whole thing. As a minotaur and the twisted king of the dying light, Adam goes for the extreme guilt and self-loathing that Claudia and Bartosz spent almost 7 decades instilling in him.

It’s a lovely thing, being a selfless, self-sacrificing person, which Jonas, Martha and Mikkel all have in common. Until a psychopath comes along and exploits you and your lover into becoming suicide bombers who take out a couple of planets. Y’all should go look up Stockholm Syndrome and Patty Hearst.

“All that we’ve done will ultimately be forgotten. We are responsible for this never-ending deja vu. And we’re the ones who have to end it. We are the mistake. You and I. Both of our fates are bound together in eternal damnation. Across both worlds. Everything is cause and effect. Every pain tempts us to act, shapes our will.”

While Adam speaks, Jonas and Martha make their way to the center of the passage. Adam continues, telling Eva about the car accident that drowned Tannhaus’ son and his family. (We’ve never been shown a river in Winden [the body of water is a lake]. The one bridge we’re frequently shown goes over railroad tracks. I don’t know what to make of the idea that their car went off the bridge and into a river.)

Adam: “Jonas and Martha must take his pain away so that he never looks for a way to undo everything. They must go to the origin world and prevent our two worlds from ever being created.” 

Notice how this is phrased, at least in English- Jonas and Martha aren’t saving lives. They’re taking away the reason Tannhaus invents time travel and they’re stopping the creation of Jonas’ and Martha’s worlds. 

Taking away all of Claudia’s rivals. 

We’re shown a 4th version of Tannhaus preparing to start the time machine.

4 attempts to invent time travel=4 worlds?

Part of my 4 worlds theory comes from the triquetra. It has 3 fins and a center space- when it’s used as a Venn diagram, the center is the part that shows what all 3 outer parts have in common. Is the origin world one of the fins or the center world? Or a world that shouldn’t be part of this diagram at all? Did Claudia force it into the mix in order to make it the new Prime world, so she could give it to Regina?

There is a case to be made that Franziska was a chosen one in S1, then she was marginalized and eventually even her voice was taken away, which would make her the 4th chosen one. Martha, Franziska and Bartosz have each taken their turn with red as their color. I don’t think Jonas has worn true red, though he’s associated with burgundy, his painting and with fire. That would make him, with his OG yellow coat, the true Prime, center world.

But the show never went anywhere with the hints about Franziska, such as the bird necklace (equivalent to the St Christopher medal/birds are the equivalent of souls), the box buried under the bridge and her fake death, so never mind. It’s all just Chekov’s blue balls.

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Meanwhile, back at the bunker, sweet old Tannhaus is about to destroy his good world and create two evil worlds, because he’s just too attached to his loved ones. His Will is out of control.

Jonas: “This is the moment the passage was first opened in any world. Tannhaus wanted to travel back to a world in which the death of his family never happened… Anytime now, a bridge will come, connecting all 3 worlds.”

He explains that they need to travel to Tannhaus’ world, back to the moment when his suffering began. As they sit side by side in the passage and wait, he asks her what the Jonas in her world was like. They both cry a little, but she doesn’t tell him that he was supposed to be the Jonas in her world.

Tannhaus turns on the machine again.

Back to to the bunker. Little time sparkles stream through the bunker. This has happened before, during major Time events. The bottom of the time machine sends out a time laser which cuts into the rock below, creating the passage. 

Lights flicker in Eva’s lair. Adam and Eva are excited and hug.

The time sparkles flow in 3 separate streams- the past, present and future? Everything whites out for a second, as Time saturates the passage. When Jonas opens his eyes, he is in the Time bridge- there is nothing around him but the time stream. (I thought for a second it was the Speed Force and he was now The Flash.) He calls for Martha, then looks for her. Martha is doing the same.

One end of the time bridge opens up for each of them. At first, it’s blank space. Then, Jonas sees Toddler Martha’s closet gradually materialize. She sees him in the back of her closet, as if he’s somewhere deep in Narnia. Katharina, who is pregnant with Mikkel, asks what Martha is doing. Martha says she sees a sad boy.

Martha sees Toddler Jonas watching her in his basement closet. Adult Mikkel/Michael asks what Jonas is doing. Jonas tells him he sees a girl in the back of the closet. Jonas is wearing a yellow raincoat. Katharina is in red. Both Marthas are in black.

Once the closet doors are shut, Martha and Jonas back up through the time bridge until they find each other. It’s a three way, Y shaped bridge, like the passage. Instead of waiting for the connection to the third world to open up, Jonas takes out the time sphere and sets coordinates. He and Martha walk toward the third arm, disintegrating as they go.

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It’s 1971 in Tannhaus’ clock shop. His son, Marek, is complaining that he always brings up the same things and never listens. “No wonder Mom couldn’t take it anymore.”

Tannhaus says, in a bewildered voice, that he thought Marek would want the store, if not now, then eventually.

Marek: “Your endless lecturing… Big Bang, Big Crunch. Have you ever asked Sonja if she’s interested? In all these years, have you ever asked if I’m interested? Or what I want?”

Tannhaus: “It’s raining outside.”

It’s raining, it’s all HG’s fault, too much science, bad relationships, what are you saying?

Very efficient. That was the entire series dismissed in about a minute.

Wait- Baby Charlotte is wrapped in a red and black blanket. The shop walls are teal. There’s a yellow clock. Here comes the secrets, oceans, and unknown child. 

Marek: “You told me the world outside is full of secrets and that what we know is a drop in an unending ocean. At least you were right about that. You may know everything about black holes and Einstein Rosen bridges, but about me- you know absolutely nothing about me.”

Marek walks out. HG tells Sonja he thought they’d stay longer. Sonja assures HG that his son will cool off.

This scene gives you everything you need to know about the mysteries of Dark. Time took a two minute argument in the clock shop and repeated it ad nauseam for 26 episodes. My work here is done.

Okay, I’ll let the angels do the work of the white devil first.

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Marek and Sonja drive away in the rain, toward the bus stop. Sonja tells him he was too hard on his dad. He complains that she has no idea what it was like to grow up with a father who was only interested in big ideas and never really saw him. Sonja reminds him that he can’t choose his family. Marek says he chose her. Sonja says she chose him, too, and they kiss. While Marek is driving the car and Sonja is holding the baby. In the pouring rain.

Jonas and Martha materialize in the middle of the road, next to the bus stop, just as Marek and Sonja reach the intersection. Marek and Sonja are still kissing. He swerves and barely misses Jonas and Martha. He stops the car and gets out to yell at them for standing in the middle of the road.

They stand stiffly and don’t respond immediately, as if they aren’t fully in this world yet. Then Jonas tells Marek that the bridge is closed because of an accident. Marek starts to walk away. Jonas says, “What we know is a drop. What we don’t know is an ocean.” Marek pauses. Martha tells him that his father loves him and would do anything for him. 

Marek goes back and asks what they said. At the same time, Sonja gets out and asks what’s going on. They all look at each other, then Marek tells Sonja that the bridge is closed. She hurries him back to the car, since Baby Charlotte is crying and wet. Once they’re back inside, Marek tells her she was right- they should wait to leave until the next day.

Martha and Jonas watch them drive away.

HG is surprised to see them back at the shop. Sonja tells him that Marek thinks he saw a pair of angels. Marek tells her not to mock him. He says he suddenly had this… feeling. HG hugs him and says he’s glad they came back. Marek takes their bags upstairs. Sonja lets HG hold the baby while she follows Marek.

It stops raining. Jonas and Martha are still in the street. Martha wonders if it worked, since they’re still there. Jonas tells her he saw her, as a child, when they were in the light. He thought she could see him too. Martha remembers seeing him in her closet.

Martha: “That was you? It wasn’t a dream.“

Jonas tells her no, it wasn’t.

She wonders if any part of them will be left behind or if they’re just dreams who never really existed. He doesn’t know.

Now that they’ve completed the connections between the worlds by acknowledging their own connections, they begin to slowly dissolve into gold glitter. Jonas steps closer to Martha and says, “You and I are perfect for each other. Never believe anything else.” They hold hands.

The camera reveals that there is no nuclear power plant on this world.

Gosh, what a coincidence. How convenient for Claudia.

One last montage. Versions of Jonas and Martha on all three worlds slowly dissolve while What a Wonderful World by Soap & Skin plays. Once they’ve killed the parasites who saved their lives, everyone else will finally get to live happily ever after without those ugly knots dragging them down.

Adam and Eva hold hands and face the paintings. They don’t have to fight Claudia’s war anymore. Unscarred Stranger Jonas sits on his bed, holding the St Christopher medal. He won’t become Adam this time. Stranger Martha and her chalk family tree disappear from the bunker. The knot is erased. Aging Claudia and her version of the knot on the Prime world also dissolve. On the origin world, the last remnants of Jonas and Martha float into the air. Fade to darkness. 

Not light.

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What Just Happened? The Timestream as the Light 

That looked to me like a soft reboot, or non-violent cycle change, instead of a hard reboot or violent cycle change, like we usually see, since it didn’t appear that any actual worlds were destroyed and only a few people were involved. They very pointedly showed that all three worlds remained behind- only certain people were removed, including Claudia, who didn’t think she was part of the knot.

Relationships which were connected to the events of the series were erased, regardless of whether Claudia had decided the people involved were genetically part of the knot. But that doesn’t mean the people were erased forever, because by Claudia’s own reasoning, many of the people on her board weren’t part of the knot and shouldn’t have been erased if that was the case.

This suggests to me that the natural order of things was being restored and/or a larger cycle was ending so that a new one could begin, similar to the end of a decade instead of a year. And that the characters’ overall existences are not necessarily tied to the existence of the knot. Instead, they are oversouls who travel within this larger cluster and will continue to be reborn together in various configurations.

But what do I know? 

The space bridge that appears is an Einstein Rosen bridge, or wormhole, as discussed by Tannhaus and Jonas in season 1 and mentioned again by Marek. Tannhaus mentioned that Einstein Rosen bridges go in 3 directions through space-time, which this one does.

In one of his TV segments, Tannhaus noted that scientists didn’t know how to get a human through a wormhole. Claudia figured it out. You saturate the humans in the timestream, bind them to their own timelines/worlds and human connections, and bind them to each other’s worlds, so they are immortal chosen ones on their worlds- connect them to True Love and Light.

I’ve previously discussed chosen ones and the various soul connections between characters over time. In the season 2 episode where Martha and Jonas have sex for the first time, Katharina and Mikkel are lying in bed together in the next room, while Ulrich and Hannah have sex downstairs. I suggested then that we were being shown the true soulmate bonds. It appears they are also a soulmate cluster, with Ulrich and Hannah on the periphery.

Though Hannah isn’t on the bridge, she gets the last visual and last word of the season- she is still the all-mother goddess of this universe and her son won’t be denied his place in it. Zeus/Ulrich is represented by the lightning and thunder storm. Just what does he want Torben to continue hiding from the others?

Katharina, Mikkel, Jonas, Martha and the Unknown are all present in the Time bridge. (Martha is pregnant with the Unknown.) Katharina and Unknown are each only represented once, so they are the next closest bonds to Jonas and Martha, which is comforting in the case of the Unknown, given the way those relationships appear in the material world. All 5 characters sacrifice their lives for others. Katharina dies for Ulrich and Mikkel. Like his parents, the Unknown dies a savior’s death, destroying himself and the worlds to save them.

I expected the bridge to go to 3 worlds and that there would be a 3rd person on the bridge with Martha and Jonas. I’m surprised that it’s Mikkel, but now that he’s there, it makes complete sense for it to be him. He’s close family to both Martha and Jonas and has a close, loving bond to both. He died so that Jonas could live on the Prime world and Martha and Jonas conspired to keep him alive on the Alt world.

Like Charlotte in season 2, in season 1 Jonas was sure that the repeating time loops were about him and Mikkel. Maybe they were, before Claudia tampered with them. The fact that Fetus and Adult Mikkel are at the end of 2 arms of the bridge suggests that the 3rd arm should connect to his world, since Toddler and Young Adult Martha and Jonas are shown. Jonas and Martha make Ariadne’s thread type connections with each other’s worlds. It makes sense for them to also be connecting to the Mikkel of 3 worlds.

The bridge opened up for them when they were in the passage and the connections to each other’s worlds opened up by themselves. Logically, the connection at the end of the 3rd arm should have also opened up on its own, given a little more time, and shown them Mikkel. Maybe their alternates would also have been there, at a time when all 3 looked in a closet together. Then they would have completed the connections between the 3 worlds and a portal would have opened to Mikkel’s world.

Instead, Claudia’s machinations were all so that she could hijack this 3rd connection away from the world it naturally connected to. Claudia set up a stable wormhole, then switched the connection to the new, cancer-free world, probably when they use the sphere instead of the portal at the end of the 3rd arm to exit the bridge.

It might have taken the energy of both the bridge and the sphere to get both travelers to the origin world and secure the time energy connection in the way Claudia wanted, since the origin world isn’t similar enough to Jonas & Martha’s worlds to be nearby in the timestream/multiverse. Which is part of why I doubt it’s really the origin world in the way Claudia described. I think that’s a story Claudia made up to sell this mission to Martha and Jonas and the creation of the passage is more like a divergence point with many potential outcomes. By 2020 or 2053, the timelines would have diverged even further from each other and created more branches/timelines.

Once they’re on the 3rd world, Jonas and Martha make emotional connections with Marek, Sonja and Baby Charlotte. When Tannhaus holds Charlotte and then Jonas and Martha acknowledge the new connections, the process is complete.

We know Claudia is a form of the Devil or an opposition goddess, even though she’s seized control. The Unknown wrote the Bible, is the son and willingly sacrificed himself. He’s on the Time bridge in spirit, if you will, as an embryo, and the characters see him as the father of the knot on two worlds. He’s set up as the father/son God to oppose Claudia’s devil/dark mother, but he remains in the background.

In order to write the triquetra diary, which is what Claudia originally followed, the Unknown had to have a form of his own omniscience, observing the entire cycle, every cycle. We are shown that he makes changes and it’s not always clear who he’s working for. Claudia eventually moves beyond him and it’s implied that she visits many other worlds, but her worldview is determined by what she learns from him and she still needs to return home and use the Unknown to enact her final plans.

But, in the end, he remains a mystery. We have no idea what the Prime world was like in the beginning, before time travelers tried to fix it.

Dark is influenced by German Expressionism, an abstract early 20th century style in art and especially film making that leaned toward pessimism and turmoil as themes, using light and shadow, visual distortions and hyperrealism, especially in the expression of emotion. The horror genre has been particularly influenced by German Expressionist films. 

But I believe the key to understanding the series as a whole lies in the 1930 German film The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings. The film made Dietrich a star and was the first of many collaborations between her and the director, the most to date between any actress-star and a single director. It was the beginning of the end of Emil Jannings’ career as a star. He eventually died in a Nazi concentration camp, in a chilling case of life imitating art.

Critics debate whether the film is a true example of German Expressionism. It appears to be so on the surface, telling the Faustian story of a middle class professor who becomes so caught up in his desire for a cabaret singer that he walks out on normal life in order to marry her and join her troupe of traveling entertainers. She’s a femme fatale who can’t be satisfied by one man. Eventually, the protagonist is reduced to working as a clown and living as a public cuckold. When the cabaret troupe returns to his hometown, he visits his old classroom and dies from intensity of the living he’s done.

In this masterful review, Mike Prokosch shows that there is a symbolic layer of Romanticism underlying the film’s pessimistic surface. Though he dies, the protagonist is ultimately better for having pursued his dream, loved and lost, and followed the light in his own way, than he would have been had he allowed himself to continue as a tool of the bureaucratic machine:

“Janning’s pursuit of light, though it leads him into humiliation and death greatens his soul. Sternberg’s emphasis on light-attraction over darkness’ terror, on personal triumph in the middle of degradation, are Romantic themes whose Christian roots are fundamentally opposed to German Expressionism.”

This is what we ultimately find at the end of Dark. Everything the characters do, no matter how dark, they do in pursuit of the Light, the greater good as they see it, to save their loved ones and their own souls from eternal torment or a violent world. In the end, Jonas refers back to the Time bridge, which is made up of the timestream and flows like water, as the Light. He’s able to return to the beginning, when he understood that Love and connection to Light are all that’s necessary.

Along with a little patience.

Claudia doesn’t win. She temporarily hijacks a connection which still exists. I guess she just wanted to see the Promised Land of a world where Regina doesn’t get cancer? You will never convince me that Claudia is able to destroy every world in the multiverse where Regina doesn’t live to 100.

What would be the point, if Claudia understands the true nature of the universe? (I don’t think she does- I think that might be the point. She’s so caught up in her own ambition that she doesn’t understand the nature of the cosmic consciousness, reincarnation of the soul rather than the persona or the world outside Plato’s Cave. She figures out some of the the mechanics, but nothing more.)

Regina is always going to die eventually, then be reborn. Which is why I think Claudia’s underlying goal was to steal credit for inventing time travel, then enjoy the control and accolades that brings her, with the side benefit of watching Regina live a longer life, removing Claudia’s guilt for being a neglectful mother who kept Regina’s father from her.

I have a feeling the Unknown reset a few things of his own, but we’ll never know. Except for that dream Grandma Hannah has…

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The lights come back up on a stormy night in the origin world. A group of friends is having dinner at Hannah’s house, which is now Regina’s house. Regina has a photo of herself with her parents, Claudia and Bernd, on a side table. They look like a close, happy family. Regina is a teenager in the photo.

Katharina, Peter, Benni, Torben and Hannah toast to Regina. Benni thanks Regina for the invitation. Everyone looks great. Hannah is pregnant. Torben (whose name means “the thunder god’s bear”) has scarring under his eye, but otherwise he seems intact. The others ask him to explain what happened to his eye. He starts to say, “Last summer…” But his voice is drowned out by thunder and the lights go out.

Hannah is spooked by the thunder. She stares at the yellow raincoat by the stairs and says she had deja vu. All of this is just like a dream she had last night- the storm, the lights, the darkness… “Then the world had ended. It was dark and never became light again. It felt good for everything to end and to be free of everything. No wants, no needs. Unending darkness. No yesterday. No today. No tomorrow. Nothing.”

Benni tells her she should see someone about it. Hannah tells Benni it’s just the pregnancy hormones.

Regina asks what they would wish for, if they only had one wish at the end of the world. Katharina says she’d wish for a world without Winden. They all drink to that. The lights come back on.

Katharina asks what they’re going to name the baby. Hannah says she’s always liked the name Jonas.

Sounds like Jonas is happy where he is. He finally found the exit.

Or did he? There are blue butterflies on the lampshade next to the yellow raincoat, symbols of resurrection since ancient times. Maybe Jonas has left yellow and green behind, ascending into blue.

Now it’s Bartosz’s turn with the Yellow Raincoat of Fate. (Regina and Aleksander will find each other in every timeline, come what may. Never believe anything else.)

Or maybe the raincoat and butterflies are meant for Regina. She has 3 red candles/Ariadne’s red threads behind her head and she asks for her friends’ wishes. Is she Fate on this world?

1986 Ulrich first wished for a world without Winden in season 1, episode 3, while sitting in the Bus Stop of Fate with Hannah, 5 months after the power plant accident, the day after Mikkel came back from the future. 

Have a video of Marlene Dietrich singing Falling in Love Again from the film The Blue Angel, instead of the recently overused and tonally out of place Wonderful World. And then a mini playlist for the heck of it. 

In my mind, Adam and Eva slow dance and sing Falling in Love Again to each other as they dissolve. And then somehow we transition to Lorde’s version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Claudia’s theme song.

Commentary

Images courtesy of Netflix.

          Dark Season 3 Episode 8: The Paradise Recap- Michael dies again, Jonas startles awake again. Claudia explains it all, then convinces Jonas and Martha to take a star bridge into space. The End. #DarkNetflix The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. Michael dies again, Jonas startles awake again.

[inseparable-and-unbreakable]

I think I get it now. Maybe. I’ve been selfish and I’ve been immature, I let myself get caught up in my own issues and didn’t realise that you were struggling too, and that I wasn’t being mindful of your feelings at all. For that I am sorry. But that never gave you the right to be such a jerk to me. To make me feel so small, to lie to me, to be so cruel. You knew it was gonna hurt, and yet you decided to parade yourself in front of me, on my best friend’s birthday. You pushed everyone away, you didn’t try with anyone, and somehow it was always my fault, I was the one turning them against you, when your own actions were brining these consequences. Fine, make me your villain all you want, but I just hope you don’t wake up one day and realise how terrible you’ve acted. Because I fear it will be too late. Cheye and Alessia are already done with you, and it’s got everything to do with how you just gave up on trying to be their friend. They’ve made it clear so many time that they’re not on anyone’s side, that they’re both our friends, and they’ve been so hurt an disappointed when you just turned your back on them. 

But maybe I’m just projecting my anger. I really can’t tell anymore. I used think I knew you so well, but I really don’t know if I ever knew you anymore. I almost refuse to believe that the nice and kind and caring guy was just an act. But you did the same thing the first time we broke up. I just brushed it off on you being confused and me not voicing things clearly enough. But I told you since. I told you it hurt me when you brought Terri to work, I asked you even back then to keep it out of work. And I don’t know if you just don’t care, don’t give a fuck, think that I don’t care, or you’re just getting revenge by making me suffer, but this time it felt spiteful. And my god, the way everyone tried to wrap YOU in bubble wrap when I was suicidal about your little beau being a threat to my mental safety at work. When it had nothing to do with you. Anything I was doing, even if it had nothing to do with you, just her being a horrible person who outs people. you took it personal. Which was hilarious when you were the one that gaslighted me when you told me I need to be careful because anything I will complain about will be seen as being a very personal thing when it comes to us. 

Another thing I can’t decide if you did it knowingly or not. I don’t want to believe you would knowingly gaslight me, that you would manipulate me that way. But you did very little to help your case otherwise. I have this hope in my heart that this is all a misunderstanding or that you were very badly coping with whatever was going inside yourself, but all the people who have objectively watched this from the sideline say otherwise. Did you plan it? Did you know that by telling me everyone would think it’s personal, you’d make sure that I would be too afraid to put you in a bad position, so I would shut up even when I genuinely had an issue? Was it your plan to silence me until I either give up and quit or what? Maybe it’s the anger in me talking, but I didn’t realise just how many small little cuts added up until I started talking about them. I let you get away with so much professionally, and I can’t tell if you planned it like that. If you even realise what you’ve been doing, if you did it intentionally. If you were ever sorry for it.

_____

I sincerely don’t know what would’ve happen if it wasn’t for this pandemic. Looking back at what I wrote here in March but never finished, I’m conflicted. I was at such a low point, my god. I’m not sure I would have survived this year unscratched. I was angry a lot when lockdown started. We truly were a ticking bomb about to explode, and by some miracle we got a second chance. Thing is, I’m lost. I’m not as angry as I was, I’ve had time to reflect on the situation, and I’m just disappointed mostly. I have days when I’m really angry, and I just wanna see you so I can slap you so hard. But then I have days when I just want a reset button, to Eternally sunshine you out of my life because I simply don’t care anymore. There are days when I genuinely hope we can put all this mess behind us and be colleagues and friends again. I don’t know what’s gonna happen when we go back to work. Should I still be angry? Should I simply ignore you? Should I try extend an olive branch and act nice? Would you even care? We can’t ignore that I made an official complain against your girlfriend, one that I intent to see through. Will you understand it has nothing to do with you? 

I’ve learned a lot of things about myself and who I want to be during this time. I feel like I healed a lot of wounds inside myself, but at the same time you post a picture and it sends me into a spiral of anxiety about how we’re going to deal with what’s been left on hold. I think my biggest take during this time is that we left quite a mess between us, and for once, instead of reopening my wounds by trying to fix every single broken piece just for it to be broken again and again, I’d rather try to fix the broken bits inside myself. I think I made some progress. I cried a lot when quarantine began. I was so tired, so drained by how messy everything was. I was having panic attacks whenever I had to deal with anything having to do with you, even if it was in my own mind. I think I’m content now. What’s gonna happen will happen. I still wonder if I’m ever going to get my questions answered, but I reached a point where I just don’t care anymore. I guess I’m still tired, but it’s a different kind now. I know I still feel things deeply because my BPD makes me more susceptible to it, but I have come to terms that you don’t have this experience, and by being angry about it, I just hurt myself for no reason. But little by little I’m getting to a point where it’s manageable. I just wonder how it is for you, to just stop caring, and to put everything behind you so easily? How does it feel to be in a world where almost a year later you don’t think about someone still, so poignantly? To not care about unanswered questions and loose ends? 

[punksarahreese]

Separation | A Chance Meeting (Twice Over)

Nosdecember day 19 | @neworleansspecial

Teen!AU; Years after Sarah had to cut off contact with Ava

CW: brief narcissistic abuse mention

***

“So,” April started as Sarah came up to the nurse’s station. Sarah rolled her eyes playfully; she knew that look all too well. Nurses loved their gossip and her friends in the ED were no exception. If Sarah wanted to know about someone or something, April or Maggie would be the person to ask.

“So?”

“There’s a new CT fellow,” April nodded in the direction of the doors that led to the hallway, “And someone is pissed.”

Sarah followed her gaze, watching Connor speaking to Will with a rather annoyed look on his face. He was ranting, or so it seemed, and he looked even more disheveled than he had before. Of course, new competition would be a big hit to Doctor Rhodes’ ego, even Sarah knew that. Plus everything that was going on with Robin at the moment, she could imagine he was feeling overwhelmed to say the least.

“Poor Connor,” Sarah sighed, “He was Doctor Downey’s protégé. He’s used to being the only CT fellow, right?”

“Yeah. He’s mostly pissed because Latham doesn’t treat him like a prince, I think. Also this new fellow? She was his first choice so I think he feels threatened.”

“She?” Sarah smiled a little at that, it was nice to know there were more female doctors around. Surgery staff especially were lacking in gender equality at Gaffney, so it was always pleasing when new, talented female doctors stepped up in the ranks.

“Mhm,” April was typing away at the computer but still kept up the conversation, “She’s from somewhere pretty far apparently; really pretty accent.”

“Oh, interesting.”

Maybe April was going to say more but before she could, Natalie tapped on Sarah’s shoulder. She apologized lightly when that made the resident jump, forgetting how easily startled she could be.

“Hey, just wanted to check in. How is Robin doing?”

“I was just about to go check up on her,” Sarah replied once she regained her composure, “If you wanted to talk to her yourself.”

***

Sarah was just leaving Robin’s patient room in the CICU, thoughts focused on going home for some rest. The day had been long and hard for everyone, though she knew Doctor Charles and Connor had the worst of it. She wasn’t too close with Robin, obviously as her doctor that wouldn’t be recommended, but she cared about her. This whole situation was tough and scary, while she was glad to see a physical explanation for her psychosis she was still worried about her prognosis. The episodes could still come back and Sarah wasn’t sure how much more Robin could handle psychologically.

She mustn’t have been paying enough attention because one second she was walking down the hall and then next she was on her ass. She heard annoyed muttering before a hand was held out to her, tugging her to her feet before quickly letting go.

“What is it with residents in this hospital not watching what they’re doing?”

That made Sarah a bit peeved, smoothing down her coat before looking up at whoever this woman was. She was looking at Sarah with an unreadable expression and the psychiatrist couldn’t figure out if she was expecting an apology or a thank you. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back from her face and she was clad in the black scrubs indicative of a CT staff member. Paired with her low and admittedly beautiful accent, Sarah realized this must be the new fellow that April had told her about.

“Maybe we should both pay more attention, Doctor…”

“Bekker,” the hand was held out again, this time for a shake, “Ava Bekker.”

That had Sarah stopping in her tracks, not letting go of her hand but unable to properly shake it. It couldn’t be her; not here, not now. This had to be some kind of joke. How did she not recognize her? Staring at her now, Sarah realized how obvious it was. She still had that confident posture and unwavering smug smile. Her voice hadn’t changed, still alluring and music to Sarah’s ears. Not to mention she still wore the same perfume, a familiar lilac scent that Sarah hadn’t realized she missed so much.

“You are?” She was watching Sarah in confusion, trying to prompt her to reply. She didn’t recognize her; of course she didn’t, it had been ten years. Ava probably moved on and would want nothing to do with her. Not after Sarah cut off contact so suddenly.

“Um, Doctor Reese… Sarah.”

The realization must have hit Ava because she pulled her hand back, shock crossing her sharp features. She searched Sarah’s face silently for any indication of a lie but found nothing. The resident didn’t know how to reply, what could she even say in this situation?

Before she could even think of how to continue, Ava had grabbed her hand and dragged her across the hall to the CT lounge. She was confused and maybe a bit anxious; actually more anxious than she had been for years. The girl she used to love more than anyone was here and was holding her hand again, ten years later and in a whole new city.

“Ava, I-”

Once again Sarah didn’t get a chance to speak. This time it was because she was suddenly yanked into a hug, something she hadn’t properly had in ages. The way Ava wrapped an arm around her shoulder and the other hand came up to protectively cradle her head made Sarah want to sob. This was what she needed so badly a decade prior, the comforting promise that Ava wouldn’t let go of her. Even now, when they might as well be strangers, something felt so right about being in her arms.

“I thought…” The way her voice wavered surprised Sarah, “I thought I lost you.”

The simultaneous pain and relief in those words had Sarah almost crying for real; the last thing she had wanted was to hurt Ava. She couldn’t respond right away, instead just tightening her arms around her waist and holding her even closer. In that moment it didn’t even feel like months had even passed, let alone ten years. Everything felt right again, like the world had finally continued turning after it stopped back with her mother’s manipulation and abuse.

“I… I’m s-sorry,” Sarah’s words were muffled by Ava’s white coat but the older woman heard her just fine. She shushed her gently, promising it wasn’t her fault. She wanted to believe Ava, she really did, but Sarah had yet to be able to heal from the years of gaslighting. Everything was her fault, it had to be, her mother never let her believe otherwise.

“It was,” Sarah shook her head, “I was careless and mom found my letters. She burned them, I didn’t- I couldn’t read your last one.”

That answered the one question that had plagued Ava for ages and the amount of relief she felt was overwhelming. She had been terrified that she had scared Sarah off or upset her in some way. That last letter she sent had taken so much courage to even seal shut, much less send it. They had spoken about feelings before but that was the first time Ava officially asked Sarah to be her girlfriend. When no reply came after two weeks, she began to worry. When it reached two months of silence, Ava was convinced Sarah hated her. She never did get an answer and it left her distraught for years. She hated knowing Sarah was most likely punished for their letters but knowing she didn’t ghost her on purpose was the most reassuring thing Ava had ever heard.

“Sarah, it wasn’t your fault,” she promised, “I’m so sorry you had to live with her. I should have figured out how to get you back to me when I had the chance.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Sarah reasoned with her, “Besides, we were both young. It was a messy situation.”

“I couldn’t protect you. I should have, I hate that couldn’t be there.”

“I know, but I’m okay now,” Ava couldn’t help but melt into the hand that rested reassuringly on her cheek, “I’m out of there and it’s okay.”

Ava nodded, though Sarah could tell she wanted to apologize regardless. They fell into silence, still standing in a half hug in the middle of the cardio lounge. They both knew someone could walk in and be utterly confused at any moment but they didn’t care. This was what both women had wished for for over a decade, just one more hug and a promise that things would be okay.

“Has it really been ten years?”

“Yeah, too long.” Sarah sighed, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” the shyness that crept into Ava’s voice was unlike her and it brought a smile to the other woman’s face. Oh how Ava had missed that smile, so unlike the sad, angsty teen Sarah had been when they met that first day on the beach. She hoped Sarah was happy now, at least, safe from her mother and well on a path to a good life.

“You work here now?” Sarah knew she must be the new fellow but some part of her brain was insisting this was still a dream.

“Yes,” Ava nodded, “Doctor Latham invited me. I’m finishing my fellowship here.”

“This can’t be happening,” Sarah breathed, still shocked that any of this could be real. It felt like the universe had been against them since day one. They shouldn’t be together, Sarah had thought back then; she was only toxic for Ava. Yet here they were, grown adults in a new place, colleagues. This must be a chance to restart, to be close to each other again. Had the universe finally stopped working against Sarah? Did she have a chance at happiness again?

“It doesn’t feel real,” the blonde agreed, “But I promise I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’re not… mad at me?”

“Sarah, don’t be daft,” the words made her smile despite herself because they sounded so Ava, “None of this was your fault.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you…”

“I know.”

Sarah sighed again, feeling like her head was spinning with everything that had just happened. She let Ava pull her close again, knowing they both needed the quiet comfort and reassurance that the other was really there. She relaxed into the hug, hearing how rapidly Ava’s heart was beating when she leaned against her shoulder.

“Can we go somewhere to talk? Unless you’re still working but I just… We should talk, I think.”

“Yeah,” Ava’s hand smoothed down her unruly curls as she spoke, “That’s a good idea.”

“You could come over, if you wanted.”

Sarah wasn’t expecting the teasing look she received but the low laugh that accompanied it was enough to make her think she fell in love all over again. God how she had missed that laughter; the borderline giggle contrasting Doctor Bekker’s seemingly no-nonsense attitude.

Ava pulled back a little, nodding, “Well I certainly can’t turn down a pretty girl inviting me to spend the evening with her, now can I?”

[keepherkingsjane]

I’ve been thinking about this comic a lot lately. For the first time I publicly share it and vague statements about an abuser within my academic community.

I was in London at a speaking event. Afterwards everyone moved to a pub. I was new and trying to make friends and it was my first time out at a pub and I kept up with the rounds but then I was very drunk and had missed the last train home. A friend, I thought, someone within my academic community and who I knew from Twitter lived nearby and he said I could crash on his couch if I wanted. I took him up on the offer. I don’t remember getting there. I do remember walking into his flat and it feeling like it was all one big, dark hallway. What I remember next is realizing we were having sex. I remember asking myself, what is happening? how did this happen? I don’t remember anything in between arriving and coming to. I don’t know if he took off my trousers or if I took them off and collapsed into bed. I wear dresses 99% of the time and find trousers to be uncomfortable and I could see myself removing them in one quick move before collapsing onto a bed. I’ve done this other times. Mostly when alone. But once with someone. He didn’t touch me. Did I imply to this person I wanted to have sex with him? By taking off trousers to sleep? I had a crush on him. The way I have a crush on nearly any remotely attractive scientist who is within 10 years of my age. But at this point, at 23, I had never slept with someone the night I had met them. The fastest I ever slept with someone was 5 days - the guy I met on the plane from Pisa to London, who I got into a relationship with 14 hours later, who was already convinced he was in love with me, and he flew back to Italy to see me again 5 days later. That’s who I am. I had only had drunk sex twice during the college. The first was with someone I already was dating, already had sex with. He thew frequent parties. It wasn’t a hookup. Then there were times that Alex made us margaritas and we fumbled in bed together, but it was that drunk where you feel softer and giggle and you are so aware. There was almost a time between these two men. A boy in my art history class who liked me. We were working on a project together and I was craving breakfast, so we made breakfast and drank and I kissed him and before we had sex I asked him to stop, and he did. He left me in his bed and slept on the couch. I’m grateful for his kindness and decency. But this isn’t what happened in London. I’m not sure if I flirted. I’m not sure if I said yes or no. Maybe I said nothing. What I do know is I had never been that drunk before or been that drunk since. I couldn’t legally consent. This small part of me wonders if it was all just alcohol. I accepted an offer from someone I thought was trustworthy to crash on their couch instead of pay for an expensive cab ride across the city. The next morning when I left I saw that there was no couch in that flat. Not one. Nowhere. Many flats in London have their living rooms converted to bedrooms. There was never a couch. I was never meant to sleep on a couch. He offered a lie.

It has taken me a couple years to process it. At the time I convinced myself that I was just drunk, I must have said yes. I went home hungover for the very first time, showered, went to school, and accepted his LinkedIn request that came later that week. I later found out he had a girlfriend. He flew to Argentina the afternoon after with her to a conference, with scratches from my fingernails on his back. I haven’t scratched up a back since the first person I had sex with. We were 16 and fumbling around to do things right and I was being performative. I thought that is what you did when you were having exciting sex. I’ve learned a lot since. I’ve dug nails slightly into backs, I’ve left a scratch or two, but not dozens. The morning after he had dozens. I drew blood even. I don’t remember that. Was I just that drunk that I regressed to some very heavy, performative fucking? Or was I trying to hurt him to get off me? I don’t remember. I’ve never had that large of gap of no memory.

What I hate myself most for is what I did afterwards, how I interacted with him. How I flirted with him at the next event, because I wanted it to be OK. I wanted to have wanted it. Girls don’t flirt with their rapists. Over the years I kept him within my professional network. We spoke on Twitter. I saw him at conferences. I interviewed him for my MSc dissertation and his interview formed a very crucial part of my thesis. I once asked him to participate on a project. People don’t collaborate with their rapists. He was cruel and nice to me during all these times. He is a popular person in my academic community. I knew if I created a problem for him, it would have a ripple effect. So, when he was cruel to me, when he yelled at me over my feedback and ideas, I just froze and cried and tried to hide. I said thank you softlywhen he messaged me to inform me months that he had chlamydia. I went to the doctor, got tested, and was negative. They still gave me antibiotics that affected me so greatly I passed out within 30 minutes. It is only now that I’m trying to remember if he used a condom but I have no memory to tell. But what I hate about myself the most is I slept with him again months later. As if I could undo it. I wanted it to be OK. I want to vomit every time I think about it now.

I never told anyone about that night until almost two years later when a female colleague, a friend I deeply trust and had known for years and had offered my Very Real and comfy couch to crash on during a local conference, was talking to me in my new Texas home. I told her about the project, with him and 4 others, that failed to get selected. She told me things she had heard over the years about him. Varying degrees of harassment and abuse. And for the first time, I told someone. I’ve had a few similar conversations with other women since. They reported various types of abuse. The inappropriate statements he made. I slowly started to think I didn’t do something wrong that night. I watched in awe when two of his ex-girlfriends publicly called him out for his mentally abusive behavior, his cruelty and gaslighting, and watched it not matter when he publicly dismissed them. I watched him still get accepted to speak at conferences. I watch him get scholarships and awards I had applied to and didn’t get. I dealt with him bringing up sex with me to a colleague at a conference. I am a loud person. I yell and argue and don’t back down. But he makes me feel small. I am quiet around him. And I hate it.

This year I was on a scholarship committee for a conference. His name was there. He was the highest rated applicant. I asked if we could make comments on applicants, particularly because some that are not high rated could benefit greatly from attending and I wanted to highlight that. And I wanted to comment on him. So, I did. I said it would be my strong recommendation to not provide him a scholarship because there have been numerous reports on abusive behavior from him to members of the community. I’m not sure if he was given it or not. A few days ago someone suggested him as a speaker for a webinar. I responded simply it would be my strong recommendation not to have him speak. Someone followed up for details. I said first that the webinar is for this field and he is adjacent and we should be giving speaking opportunities to the early career folks in our exact field, but then also shared his abuse. It made me feel sick. It affected the rest of my day and I kept crying. She agreed with the decision. He won’t be speaking. She didn’t know. I thought it would make me feel powerful to have some control, to prevent him from having more power. It doesn’t. I feel sick and scared every time I do it. But I want so desperately to prevent other women he could harm or has harmed from seeing him further succeed, to having to encounter him at another conference he is speaking at or was given a scholarship to attend.

A couple weeks ago a good collaborator and friend was visiting. He was crashing on my couch while we were both attending a conference that was nearby to my. I’ve known him for years. He has hosted me before. He has given me a couch to sleep on for a week when I was kicked out of my first London apartment. He has arranged a guest room for me when I came to London for graduation and he was living in a communal living situation for tech folks. He is kind and trustworthy and I am so thankful to know him. I didn’t mean to tell him. We were driving home and somehow that night got brought up, specifically the speakers we were there for, and then I let my story slip out. I was offered a couch. There was no couch. I don’t really remember it. It was the first time I breathed a word of it to a man. And he didn’t argue with me. He didn’t say I drank to much. He said he was sorry and that he has learned in recent years that this man shows a systematic pattern of abuse. I’m not the only one.

I vaguely talked about this struggle the other day after having to send an email off to a relative stranger to prevent him from speaking on the call. I wanted to vomit. A few very close colleagues messaged to ask that if I was comfortable telling them, they’d like to know so they can speak up whenever they see his name. I told them. My situation is grey and confusing. I haven’t named it because I’m not sure. I almost wish I was all alone so that I could believe it was OK, but all the stories I have heard from other women about this man who displayed varying degrees of abuse toward them shows that he is an abuser. He has hurt women and there is plenty of evidence to show that he would continue to. And I’m not going to be alone in speaking up when his name is in consideration anymore.