#so while I’m not expecting to be the first or cleverest person to say this

[elodieunderglass]

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

[allcotogorydownloadvideo]

best horror movie

[fandomscombine]

The Hargreeves Kerfuffle  Part 1 : Disastrous Childhood (Prologue)

TUA Series Part 1:  Disastrous Childhood

The Hargreeves siblings x Hargreeves!Reader (Familial Relationship)

An idea came to me at 2am after binging TUA S2 and rewatching S1 right after!

BG: The Reader is Number Eight. It follows how you fit into the structure of Season 1 and the family dynamic of the siblings.

This part follows when the young Hargreeves Siblings had their powers manifested and the development of The Umbrella Academy.

Contains: Sibling Angst and Fluff. Reginald being a crappy father but sometimes not really?

The series will consist of 10 parts. Where the reader would have a focused interaction with each sibling. (Eg. After this part, it would be Luther x Reader, then Diego x Reader and so on! –Yes Ben is included)

WC:2649

A/N: This is my first ever TUA fic and I’m doing a series. WOw ambitious I know. Anyways I hope you enjoy! And tell me how you feel about it!

>>MASTERLIST<<

>>THE HARGREEVES KERFUFFLE SERIES MASTERLIST<<

READ: [PART 2]  [PART 3]  [PART 4]

>>JOIN MY WRITING CHALLENGE!<<

~

On October 1, 1989, 43 women across the globe gave birth despite them not being pregnant when the day began. In news of this mysterious happenings, Sir Reginald Hargreeves immediately went out of his way to find as many of these special babies. He has successfully adopted 8 of these children and you were one of them.

One might think that when a person adopts not one, but eight kids would have so much love to give but they would be mistaken. Sir Reginald Hargreeves—Dad, was not a loving father. It would be a miracle for one to see the man show any other emotion apart from anger. Sir Reginald Hargreeves was distant and treated the children like they were experiments that the dynamic felt closer to a doctor/patient relationship. The children weren’t given actual names, only to be called by their numbers based on the order Sir Reginald Hargreeves had procured them. It was only when Grace, their robot mother insisted they have a real name, were the children given them. And so, the children were:

Number One - Luther Hargreeves

Number Two – Diego Hargreeves

Number Three – Allison Hargreeves

Number Four – Klaus Hargreeves

Number Five – Five Hargreeves

Number Six – Ben Hargreeves

Number Seven – Vanya Hargreeves

And finally,

Number Eight -  y/n Hargreaves

For 6 years, the only special thing about the children was that they were miraculously conceived and birthed within a day, the same day. However, on the 7th year , October 1 1996, more strange things started to happen to the children.

It first started with Ben at breakfast. Dad as usual is cold and strict more so in the early morning. ‘Sit up straight Number Six.’ He directed without even a glance up from his newspaper at hand.

‘Yes Sir.’

Beside him you place your hand on his and whispered, ‘You alright Ben? You look sick.’

He gulped. ‘Yea y/n.’ Wiping the cold sweat off his forehead.

‘You sure?’ you questioned, not buying it.

‘Umhmm never bett-----’

You expected vomit to come out but what happen next is something you would never though was possible.

Screams broke out everywhere.

You feel yourself being raised above the table. Looking down, you were 5 feet off the ground held by what seemed to be tentacles.

‘Take that!’ You hear some shout then a thud. Diego had brought down a knife to the tentacle that had suffocated him and in now laying on the floor covered in green blood.

The sight finally snapped you out of your shock, your fight or flight reflexes kicked in.

A quick sweep of your surroundings showed Five and Klaus on either side of you, they too are struggling with the ever-tightening grip of the monstrous arm.

While on the ground, Vanya and Allison are making their way to Ben in hopes of helping him control whatever all this that was coming out of his body. While Luther is fighting off the arms away from Diego who seem to have broken his leg from the fall.

Dad, Mom and Pogo are nowhere to be seen.

You move your head to the left, knowing that Klaus doesn’t do well in small spaces. ‘Klaus it’s okay buddy, Dad would find a way to fic this. Just breathe’ You choked out ‘Just breathe Klaus, everything’s gonna be alright.’

‘mmmm!’ That was Klaus’ only reply but you were thankful to see him to fidget less. He seemed to have taken your advice – how much of the second part of that advice be true, you genuinely don’t know.

You try to move your head to face the right towards Five but no dice. The arm was wrapping itself closer to your neck. ‘Five’ you call out, but it was barely a whisper. ‘five..’

‘Y/N!!’ Five’s scream was the last thing you heard before everything went black.

~

‘She’s broken a couple of ribs and sprained her neck. But’s she’s gonna be okay. Just needs time to rest.’

‘And how long would that time Pogo?’

‘She would need to say in bed for 2 to 3 months, Sir.’

You open your eyes and are greeted with blinding white light. Dad, Mom and Pogo surround your bed.

Grace tucks a stray hair behind you ear. ‘My baby, y/n. How are you feeling?’

‘Sore.’ You reply, noting the coarse sound of your voice. ‘How’s Ben? Klaus? Vanya?—’

Grace cut you off. ‘They’re all fine y/n. Though Ben is a bit roughed up.’ She says truthfully.

‘Number Six has appeared to have powers of summoning monsters with his body and he is currently under supervision.’  Reginald stated.

But something didn’t fit right. ‘But how did you calm him down? The whole fiasco back there was in total chaos?’ Voicing out all your thoughts and questions. ‘No one could get him to take back control, unless…..’ You couldn’t continue the thought. Your eyes go wide. There was no way. It was too harsh, but it was dad after all, he would do whatever means necessary to get what he wants.

Your dad smiles proudly ‘Ah yes. Y/n ever the cleverest of the bunch.’ You had observed that he had addressed you in your actual name instead of your number for the first time in your whole existence.  ‘Unfortunately, I had to sedate Number Six. You do understand that it was the only way.’

You open your mouth to argue.

‘No buts, Number Eight!’ Ah and now we’re back to number, you thought.

‘I’ll have Grace by you side whist you recover and Pogo here would relay your recovery progress to me daily.’

He was almost to your door when he faced you again. ‘Oh and Number Eight, When you feel something different or unusual. Do inform me of it immediately.’ And with that he left.

‘Pogo? What does he mean by feel different?’ Your nerves go up, worried about your siblings. ‘Is anyone hurt?’

Pogo sighs, after much contemplation he begins ‘Y/n dear. Today’s happenings uncovered that there are stranger yet special things about you children.’

You nod, not wanting to interrupt but also wishing he would hurry up and continue.

‘Ben isn’t the only one who have gotten powers today. During the kerfuffle, Diego has shown skill with a knife, Luther immense strength and Five had shown ability to teleport.’

Once again you found yourself in shock.

‘Your father has gotten the idea that you children have varying power wish are “activated” so to speak when reached the age of 7.’

‘Haha-OW’ You clutch your side.

‘Careful y/n, try not to do sudden movements—yes and that includes laughing too.’ Mom says, caressing your cheek.

‘When can I see them?’

‘I’ll try to persuade Reggie to allow them for a visit dear. But now I need you to rest.’

~

Sibling Visits are limited to 30 mins a day, right before the bedtime curfew.

All your siblings (expect Ben who was still under strict supervision and is recovering himself) came to see you the following night.

Allison was the first one through your door and ran to give you a hug. ‘Y/n! We are all so worried!’

‘Aww thanks—OW OW OW’

‘Oops sorry’ releasing you from her death grip of a hug.

Seeing that movements still hurt you. The rest opted not to hug you, Klaus and Diego held your hand, Vanya is sitting on the edge of you bed, Luther gave you forehead a quick kiss and Five being Five, greeted you with the typical sibling teasing. ‘Glad to see you not drop dead in front of me.’

Diego showed off his leg cast and asked you to sign it, which you happily did so. Signing ‘Badass as always. -y/n’ beside Ben’s note of ‘Diego is cooler than Batman’

The 30 minutes consisted recaps of what happened the day before, the gushing of the boys showcasing their powers and debating on who’s the most powerful.

And just like that, the time was up and each had to go to bed. Everyone kissed your head for goodnights, even Five.

‘You know I love you right?’ His eyes softer than you ever seen before

‘I know’

‘You really scared me yesterday when you blacked out.’ Five had his tough façade down. ‘I thought you died y/n.’

‘But I didn’t.’ You reach up to wipe his tears away. ‘It’d take something bigger, if you wanna get rid of me.’

He chuckled. ‘Night, y/n’

‘Good night, Five.’

~

3 weeks had passed, and your siblings never failed to visit you. Over that time, Klaus and Allison had manifested their powers. Klaus can conjure the dead while Allison could ‘rumor’ people to her will.

Ben came by 2 weeks later. His color is back to normal, not like the blueish tint it had the last time you saw him. Though he still had a few remnants of bruises and scars across his arms and face.

‘I’m sorry y/n.’ He said leaning on your door frame.

‘Ben!’ You exclaimed. ‘I’m so glad you’re back up and running!’

Ben was caught off guard. ‘You—You’re not mad at me?’

‘Why would I be mad at you?’ You questioned, genuinely confused at your brother’s words.

‘Cause, Cause I almost got you killed. I am a monster.’

You sat up straight at those words, your ribs hurt a bit at the sudden movement, but you didn’t care. Your brother was blaming himself for something he couldn’t have controlled.

‘NO BEN!’

Ben jumped from your sudden outburst.

You motioned for him to come closer.

‘Ben…’ looking into his eyes. ‘Ben you are no monster.’

‘But—’

‘uuh uh I’m not done’ You held his hand in yours. ‘You are no monster what happened then was an accident, nobody knew, heck nobody expected powers to just show up. It was beyond anyone’s control. It took us by surprise.’

His shoulders relaxed.

‘It wasn’t your fault. I don’t blame you for what happened.’

He gave you a bone crushing hug. ‘Thank you y/n. You don’t know how guilty I was feeling.’ Voice muffled by your shoulder, which is now wet with his tears. ‘I kept thinking about the pain I caused you and I wasn’t allowed to leave my room even when I begged dad to see you and say sorry. y/n’

‘Shhh shhh’ Rubbing his back. ‘It’s alright Ben. What’s important is that we’re all here now. Alive, Safe and sound.’.

~

You still have a month left for recovery.

Only you and Vanya are the one left who haven’t had their powers revealed.

Dad had created a group called ‘The Umbrella Academy’ in which he trained your super powered siblings. He even given them codenames to go along with their newfound powers.

Number One - Luther Hargreeves aka Spaceboy

Number Two – Diego Hargreeves aka The Kraken

Number Three – Allison Hargreeves aka The Rumor

Number Four – Klaus Hargreeves aka The Séance

Number Five – Five Hargreeves aka The Boy

Number Six – Ben Hargreeves aka The Horor

With this new training program comes with the downside of spending less time with your siblings. Your traditional Sunday afternoon sister bonding time Allison and Vanya is basically non-existent now. Sure the rest of siblings still drop by to check up on how you’re recovering but it is not as frequency as they once were- you totally understand though, it must be tiring to be part of ‘The Umbrella Academy’ but girl were you still hurt and wanted more than anything to be a part of it.

So, you spend most of your time with Vanya nowadays. You didn’t mind, it is nice to have someone along. Most of the time Vanya practices her violin in your room.

‘That was beautiful Vanny’ you commented after she finished a rendition.

‘Thanks y/n’ Her face flushed. ‘Maybe someday I’d be a famous violinist!’

‘I know you would.’ You say truthfully. ‘And I better get the best seats at your concerts okay? Nothing short of VIP treatment for your favourite sister!’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll make sure Allison would get that.’ Vanya teased.

Placing a hand dramatically to your chest ‘uhh I am offended! I thought I was your favourite sister!’

‘well... you thought wrong.’ Vanya tried to keep a straight face but failed. ‘You y/n are the VVIP guest!’

‘Now that’s more like it.’

~

That night you were tossing and turning in your bed.

In the training room, huge boulders were being tossed onto Luther’s back. He currently had 3 on him. ‘More’ he cried. It was an impressive feat to see. A 7-year-old carry the what had to be at least 5 times his weight.

It was at his 6th block when his legs start to shake.

‘Straighten up Number One!’ Reginald voice came through the speakers.

‘I-I’

‘Fix your posture! And stop babbling!’

He was trembling all over, the weight was far too much and carried far too long for just a young boy.

Any second now, he is gonna be crushed by the boulders.

‘LUTHER!’ You screamed. Cold sweat was plastered all over your face. You were still in your room- but it all felt so real.

You look over to your bedside table, 9:07

Training would have started an hour ago. You had time.

You took the stairs two at a time, bursting into the training room. ‘STOP’

Reginald stood from his seat. ‘Number Eight. What in the world are you doing here?’

‘STOP! Luther is gonna get hurt please stop it--.’ Ignoring his question.

‘Number Eight, what are you talking about? Number One is doing perfectly fine!’ He gestured towards the front.

He was right. Luther looks fine. In fact it looked like it was carrying a light backpack instead of 3 boulders. ‘But- But I saw—’ Then it hit you 3 boulders. 3 not 6.

‘More’ You heard him cried out, just like you had in your nightmare.

You stared at Luther, how could this be?

‘I saw him sir, he is gonna collapse from 6 boulders.’

At this, Reginald took interest. ‘You saw?’

‘Yes, I-I must have dreamt it.’ You slumped against the free chair, defeated. ‘but it felt so real.’

‘Let me everything you saw, and don’t miss a single detail’

And so, you did. By the time you finished, Luther was with his 6th block.

It was exactly like how things went down in your dream. ‘No No NOOOO!’

‘Release him!’ Reginald called at the last second. Standing he faced you. ‘Now y/n dear would you please come with me.’

He didn’t speak again until you were both in his office. ‘It seems to me Number Eight that your powers have finally manifested.’

‘what—’

‘A slight delay compared to your siblings, but I presume that it was due to you recovering from your injuries that your body had focus on your recovery first then powers.’

‘What about Vanya? Would she have powers?’

‘It seems that Number Seven has no powers gained.’ Standing in front of you. ‘But no matter now, what’s important is that you’ve got them.’ He placed his hands on your shoulders. ‘You would do great things Number Eight. To see into the future is a valuable asset to have indeed. For this I shall name you Foresight.’

This was it! You own codename!

Number Eight -  y/n Hargreaves aka Foresight.

‘I’m gonna be part of The Umbrella Academy?’ Overjoyed by your father taking pride in you that every other thought left your concern.

‘Yes Foresight. You will.’ Standing straight again. ‘However, your training would only start once you have fully recovered.’

‘Thanks Dad.’ Hugging him and for once showed the affection back.

You wish you could say that it was at this point where you and your siblings finally gotten a loving and healthy childhood. But you were wrong. Things only deteriorated from here on out with the Hargreeves household and by extension the dissolve of The Umbrella Academy.

END OF PART 1

READ: [PART 2] [PART 3]  [PART 4]

Taglist [All]: @gruffle1

Taglist [TUA]: @herecomesthesun1969  @ultraviolet-m​ @winterierwriter @lordofthunderthr​  @alabaster1223

[theimprobabledreamersworld]

Finally got another one shot done! This is based very heavily off of a Doctor Who scene which I absolutely adore <3 Hope you enjoy!. Read on Ao3 or under the line!

General writing taglist: @psychedelicships @jwillowwolf @red-imeanblue @lost-in-thought-20 @writerwithtoomanyships (I know you’re not on my taglist @edupunkn00b but you liked the snippet I wrote for a handwriting game, so I thought you’d like to see the whole thing! <3)

If anyone would like to be added to my general writing taglist, let me know! <3

Virgil paced around the small room with anger racing through his veins. The next time he eventually sees his ‘husband’, he is going to have some extremely angry words to say to him. Over the last ten years, he has been kidnapped by Logan’s enemies seven times. Which is fine, it comes with the paperwork when you marry an international and notorious thief with an incredible track record. He just wished that he wasn’t used as leverage by so many people. He could never be sure that Logan would save him, and this time it was certainly not a guarantee because he hadn’t seen Logan for over three years. Virgil received the occasional letter but could never respond to them as he wouldn’t put a returning address. He understands that it’s just to keep him safe, that didn’t stop him from feeling angry at Logan.

Hello, Darling.

Logan/Virgil

Word Count: 2308

Warnings: Very mild cursing and threat.

He couldn’t help but jump slightly when he heard a firm knock on the door and a timid face peered around the opening gap.

“Urm… Hi. I’m Roman. I have to take you down to the office; he wants to talk.” Virgil sighed and reluctantly walked behind Roman as they took a scenic route through the building. He had to admit, this was the most comfortable kidnapping he’s ever been involved in, and when he saw the piping hot tea sitting on an elegant coffee table, it almost felt like it was going to be a polite conversation. There were no weapons this time, which was reassuring, but the several figures lurking in the shadows reduced his confidence significantly.

All of the men stepped forward at once, Virgil gulped before he was encouraged to sit down by the man in the middle. The man smiled and Virgil felt even more concerned now, it was never good when a kidnapper smiled… he knew that from experience.

“Let’s get the embarrassing details out of the way, my name in Janus. This is Patton, Roman you’ve already met and Remus. He’s a pussy cat really, don’t let the menacing face fool you. Virgil looked at each of them in turn and curled into himself a little. He genuinely didn’t know what was happening here. He looked around him for the main exits in case he needed to run away, and he saw another person who wasn’t introduced. A butler, dressed in all black was busy polishing some silverware. This made everything even more confusing for Virgil, but if they were letting the butler stick around, at least hurting or killing him wasn’t top of their agenda.

“Come now, Virgil. I’m not going to harm you, I’m just a friend of Logan’s.” Janus smiled once again, but with a sinister undertone this time and Virgil’s brow furrowed in confusion. He gulped softly before mustering the courage to talk.

“A friend?!” His voice was full of mock surprise and Janus raised an eyebrow in return, almost as if he wasn’t expecting Virgil to engage in any kind of conversation. Remus turned his head towards Virgil growled deeply, so Janus waved a hand nonchalantly and chuckled.

“Alright, alright. An enemy then.” His eyes glimmered with malicious intent and Virgil’s eyes widened at how things had taken a turn so quickly. He put on a pretense of relief and hoped Janus would buy the bravado.

“Oh… which one?” Janus’ smile dropped and his eyes began to cloud over, apparently it was clear that the time for games was over, and Virgil was silently regretting his choices in his mind. Janus slowly spun the chair around and fell into it gracefully. The room began to darken, and Virgil knew that this was where things might get messy.

“Okay, enough games. I grow weary of this. Where is Logan?” Janus slammed his hand down on the table and Virgil realised that he could gain the upper hand in this scenario. He shrugged and darted his eyes around the room.

“Haven’t the faintest idea.” All four men looked at Virgil with an incredulous look in the eye. It’s no surprise that they don’t believe him, but for once in this scenario, he was actually telling the truth. Logan could literally be anywhere. He heard a clatter and remembered the butler who had just dropped a piece of silverware, he frantically picked it up and turned his back to the group.

Janus continued to look at Virgil directly in the eyes, as if he was waiting patiently for Virgil to crumble and break down in front of him and slyly remarks “Come on Virgil, is that credible?”

“It’s truth. Go ahead. Check whatever records you may have about his last whereabouts. You’ll probably find out more than me.” He spoke with a spiteful tone and another man stepped forward with an extremely worried expression.

"B- but you're the man that he loves!" Virgil couldn’t help but laugh at the sincerity of his statement, almost as if he was talking about them like they were some kind of fairytale. He continued to laugh in their faces. The men all looked at each other, and Remus banged in fist against the table, and it brought Virgil back to the task at hand. The longer he was involved in this conversation, the more his insecurities took over and he couldn’t stop his raised voice. "No I'm not! Logan does not and has never loved me." He covered in mouth in shock at the fact that he just shouted a very false statement. Unbeknownst to Virgil, the butler flinched in the background as well.

Patton interrupts again while Janus looks on in confusion. "So my information was correct then. You are the man who loves Logan!" There was an odd mix of confusion and triumph on Patton’s face, there was nothing wrong with what he just said, but the doubt still consumed his mind.

Virgil agrees with a new-found confidence in his voice. "I never denied it. But he's Logan after all. A notorious thief. The most meticulous criminal and the cleverest soul I've ever met. If you think that someone like him is that ordinary, to be staying in love with someone like me... then you have no idea who you're dealing with." Virgil continued to adamantly make his case, yet he still remained oblivious to the butler who had gradually put down his polishing cloth and had slowly made his way closer to the centre of the room.

Janus stands in front of Virgil completely dumbfounded at this point. This clearly wasn’t the way this was supposed to go. Virgil had to admit that he didn’t think he would stay this strong for so long, but it was working. If he bought enough time, maybe… just maybe… Logan might somehow come and save him. "I was assured that you would be the perfect bait! If you were in danger. Logan would come running!"

Despite the small slither of hope Virgil felt, he knew he needed to keep it buried deep down, or he would lose this battle. He needed to keep going, they were starting to crack, he knew it. "Oh, you are a moron then!"

Janus bowed his head and took a deep breath. He regained his composure and looked at Virgil smirking with malicious intent once again before pressing a button underneath the desk. "We both know he's probably already here, he's the master of disguises and this isn't exactly the first time he's had to save you.” He chuckled smugly as a barrage of clicks echoed around the room. Virgil tried to hide the panic in his eyes, he didn’t know what was going to happen now, but the total lockdown of the room was enough to induce all of emotions to come to the foreground and he couldn’t stop what he said next. The butler was now standing directly behind Virgil, and if he had noticed, he would have realised that Janus wasn’t looking at Virgil at all. He was looking behind him that entire time.

"No he isn't. Of course, he isn't! Go on! Look around this place, send your cronies on a wild goose chase. He won't be here! I mean, you can't miss him. Stupid polo shirt, stupid tie and the stupidest pair of glasses you’ve seen. That should be a big enough clue!" He huffed as his chest rose and fell angrily, all the rage he felt when he was first brought to this place bubble to the surface. The butler coughed lightly before calling out timidly, "Virgil..."

"God knows where he is right now, but I promise you, he's doing whatever the HELL he wants because he doesn't give a damn about me!" Virgil shouted out at the ceiling; his arms raised above his head in an aggressive stance. He silently cursed the heavens themselves as the butler tried once again to get Virgil’s attention. He stood right behind Virgil’s ear and called his name once again.

“Virgil!”

He didn’t even realise that his name was being called, he was so consumed by his emotions that he let them flow like an uncontrollable stream of consciousness. "And I'm just fine with that! When you love someone like Logan, it's like loving the stars themselves. You don't expect a sunset to admire you back. And if I find myself in danger, let me tell you... Logan is not stupid enough, or sentimental enough and he is certainly not in love enough to find himself standing in it with me!!"

The room fell silent, the butler had been waiting with bated breath for Virgil to realise that he was standing next to him, but he still hadn’t noticed. So eventually, he took hold of Virgil’s wrist lightly. Virgil took a few breaths before looking once, looking twice, then looking a final time before holding his focus on the butler’s face. Virgil stared into his eyes, and they glimmer with recognition. As he gasps, the butler smiles back softly before finally whispering "Hello, Darling."

“Oh I hate you.” Virgil smirks as he realised that Logan had been in the room the whole time.

“No, you don’t. I have to admit, that was a spectacular performance you did just now.”

“Shut up!”

“I mean, I never knew you cared that much.” Their bickering was interrupted by a timid cough coming from in front of them. Logan and Virgil looked at Janus in irritation. How dare he interrupt mummy and daddy talking?! At least it confirmed one thing in Virgil’s mind, they definitely acted like an old married couple.

“Urm, I hate to break up this touching reunion, but I believe we have business to attend to.” Janus held a hand out sarcastically, motioning for Logan to give him something and he just raised an eyebrow in response.

“Oh, where are my manners? First, get rid of your boys.” Janus raised an eyebrow with a tone that screamed why should he follow his orders. Logan looked around the room, eyeing the exits and planning in his mind. Virgil stepped back and let him work, it was the best thing to do… because they are going to regret messing with Logan.

“I don’t like being outnumbered. It makes for too much stupid in the room.” Janus frowned then nodded at Roman, Patton and Remus to leave. They reluctantly make their way to the only unlocked room in the building which was located behind Janus. Remus refused to move initially until Janus snapped his fingers and Remus growled one final time before going through the door and slamming it shut.

“Well. You’re trapped now, Logan. I have the high ground here. Give me, what I want… and I won’t harm Virgil.” Janus held his hand out once again and motioned for something from Logan. It caused Logan to laugh wildly and wipe a tear from his eye. Janus stepped forward, ready to grab Virgil in order to get what he wants.

“Oh Janus, Janus, Janus. You’ve made a big mistake my friend. There is one thing you don’t put in a trap, if you’re smart. If you value your continued existence. If you have any plans of continuing your sordid little business for many years to come, there is one thing you should never ever put in a trap.” He wrapped an arm around Virgil and began to move him away from Janus, towards the now unguarded door. Janus chuckled while being oblivious to what was going on, he was adamant that he still had the high ground after all.

“And what would that be?” Virgil glanced up at Logan with adoration, Logan smirked before pulling a small device out of his pocket and raising it in front of Janus’ eyes. When Janus noticed what he was holding, he shrunk away and pinned himself against the wall.

“�� Me.” Logan pressed the switch, and a thick smoke began to fill the room. Virgil heard Janus coughing as the two of them ran through the unlocked door. The coast was clear, and they kept running through the house until they were hit by bright sunlight. On the main road, Virgil stopped them and wrapped his arms around Logan, and he felt a tight grip around his waist in response. It was almost too good to be true but, deep down, he knew that Logan would have saved him. He kissed his cheek gently before staring into Logan’s ocean eyes.

“Well, after everything I’ve put you through. I definitely owe you a date. Dinner? My treat?” Virgil smiled and nodded. They took each other’s hands and headed to a car that was parked nearby. As Logan drove, Virgil stared out of the window smiling softly.

Despite it all. He wouldn’t change anything for the world. He was the husband of a thief, a thief who stole his heart many years ago… and he always would be.

[johannas-motivational-insults]

Jo’s Top 10 of 2020

I see lots of artists doing that thing where they post a piece from each month of the year... unfortunately my content creation isn’t necessarily consistent and it’s hard to track what month individual fic chapters were posted in, but I figured I’d do something similar and post my Top 10 pieces of content I created in 2020, what they’re about and why I love them. I actually did get a fair amount done this year thanks to the lockdown, but I’ve narrowed it down to these ten that I’d like to reflect on. (To be fair, I’m probably forgetting something huge. Feel free to leave comments if you think I passed over something important lol.)

10. Friendship in the Horde (meta): This is something I’d wanted to write for a while but finally got around to finishing in February. It’s basically a sociology paper lmao, an analysis of the social hierarchies and systems of the Horde. It was also a convenient excuse for me to gush about Catralonnie, an underrated (friend)ship. But honestly this was an important piece for me because I have always identified with the Horde characters way more than any of the rebels (other than Adora, who grew up in the Horde) and part of why is how they are in an unsafe environment and end up forming relationships that are helpful for survival but hinder them psychologically. And I think to understand the Horde characters and really evaluate their motives and choices you need to understand this first.

9. The Sting in My Eyes: On the surface this is just a run of the mill hurt/comfort oneshot, but it was a really important post-canon processing fic for me. I had a lot of feelings about Catra’s relationships with Shadow Weaver and Melog in season 5, particularly about how Catra must have felt really conflicted after Shadow Weaver told her what she wanted to hear all those years but in a way that felt unearned and out of the blue. It was really cathartic for me to write a scene where she struggles with those mixed feelings but has Adora and Melog to help her process them. And I had long associated the song the title is from with Catra and Shadow Weaver’s relationship, and the way she died trying to redeem herself really solidified that connection.

8. Hail Mary, chapter 6: This was supposed to be a short chapter mostly about the backstory between Catra and Scorpia in this au, with some Catradora yearning thrown in. It evolved into a massive, sprawling thing that is very atmospheric in terms of how the setting and vibes are described and how in the moment it feels. Hail Mary is like that sometimes but that type of narration is usually about football games rather than parties, so this chapter was a fun change of pace in many ways. It was really nostaglic for me to write too, the nerves of being a teenager at a party with your crush and how intense everything feels. And the Scorptra stuff really is delicious, it was nice seeing them have that conversation they never got to have in canon and truly make up, and the tiny sliver I added of Catra’s earlier history was heartbreaking in the best way. So this was not what I intended to write, but it turned out way better for it.

7. A Better Son or Daughter (AMV): I’ve done other Adora AMVs, but this one is really my iconic piece. The song is perfect for Adora, so perfect it’s on Noelle’s Adora playlist. The vid itself is a character study about Adora’s mental health struggles and the way she represses them, as well as a tribute to her resiliency and her eventual triumph of getting to a better place in her life. This is a song that gives me a lot of feelings and once I was making it about Adora it gave me even more, so this was a very satisfying piece to complete. I wish Noelle had gotten a chance to see it but oh well, maybe down the line.

6. Hail Mary, chapter 12: This is the chapter that much of the fic had been building to, Catra and Adora in conflict because Catra finally got the chance to be Adora’s hero and Adora shot her down. It’s painfully analogous to canon, both in terms of how (I suspect) Catra felt in Thaymor and Adora’s tendency to victim blame because she’s so pragmatic. There’s definitely some tones of Taking Control in there but Lonnie does a much better job of examining Catra’s psychology and needs than Glimmer did in canon (a writing error imo, Glimmer should have had more insight). Adora just wants to help but sometimes in her quest to do so she disenfranchises others, and this was a much needed look at that aspect of her character. It’s also an excellent illustration of what it’s like to play a peacekeeping role in an abusive household and how stressful it is trying to protect others while also protecting yourself.

5. Unstoppable (AMV): This is not my favorite Catra AMV I’ve ever done, but it might be the cleverest. The soundtrack is a song about mental illness masquerading as a song about being a bad bitch, which is basically Catra in a nutshell. The lyrics are incredibly fitting for her and her arc as it develops over seasons 1-4. The vid itself takes a hard turn in the interpretation of the lyrics, going from talking about how no one can stop Catra to how she can’t stop herself because she’s in such a terrible sunk cost fallacy spiral, and I think I got several death threats over that twist lmao. As someone who primarily deals in angst, there’s hardly a better compliment to be paid.

4. Demons, chapter 31: This one got real dark on me. The concept of this chapter was originally an examination of how comparing abuse can get really dicey but you also have to respect that other people have had different experiences from you and you have to be careful not to equate things or make it sound like you’re talking over someone else. I guess it’s also a bit of a look at how autistic people (like myself) will often explain why they can empathize so others know they understand rather than saying empty platitudes, but that can come off as insensitive or like they’re making things about them. I mean, in this case Adora kinda was making things about her, but she was provoked into it by a parade of comments insinuating she didn’t suffer at all, which was also unfair. Anyway it’s one of the more important Catradora fights in Demons and something I’d written bits of over a year prior, it was that important to the plot, but it also took a turn I was not originally planning. I finished the chapter when I was in a really bad depressive and self-loathing spiral and that bled onto the page, but it worked perfectly for Catra in this scenario... that push and pull of feeling like the world has hurt and victimized you mixed with knowing you’ve done some bad things yourself and feeling like you don’t have a leg to stand on when mourning the ways you’ve been hurt. It’s intense as all fuck but it’s excellent.

3. Hail Mary, chapter 11: Speaking of dark Catra content, this chapter... whew. It was really something else, to read and to write. I have written flashbacks in Demons that are more detailed and even include explicit violence but because those scenes are always in flashback form I never really got the chance to sit in the head of an abuse victim waiting for the other shoe to drop for an entire chapter like I did here. It’s quite different from the rest of Hail Mary stylistically and is both highly sensory and extremely internalized. It took me back to some terrifying moments in my own life so it was difficult but also extremely cathartic to write. It’s important too because it really sets up where Catra was at mentally heading into her big fight with Adora, and that chapter is in Adora POV. This chapter is ranked so high simply because it’s... polished, as @malachi-walker put it. It almost is its own story within the story and really noteworthy as a piece all its own.

2. Demons, chapter 26: This chapter is very similar thematically to Hail Mary 12, just based in the canonverse. It deals with one of the core (but highly neglected by fandom) conflicts between Catra and Adora, where they both need to feel like they can take care of and protect the other but also detest feeling weak or vulnerable themselves. It leads to Adora’s ego making Catra feel disrespected and Catra’s behavior confusing Adora and making her think she’s an ungrateful brat rather than someone who needs so badly to be needed, just like her. There’s definitely some power struggles in this chapter but finally they’re able to get to the heart of it and seeing them talk it out is so satisfying. Getting this chapter published was also important to me on a personal level because, like I said, this aspect of their conflict and relationship is rarely acknowleged for how important it is when really it’s one of the deepest conflicts between them in the series. It’s a scene I started writing pretty much as soon I knew I was extending the fic into something longer because I just needed them to have this conversation, so finishing it was so satisfying.

1. Satisfaction, chapter 3: This chapter took me a really long time to write, both in terms of time to get it published and time I actually spent working on it. It’s the crown jewel of a fic that’s really important to me and I had to get it just right, so I spent more time agonizing over every detail and rewriting things to get them absolutely perfect than I usually do (I’m a perfectionist anyway, but this took it to a whole other level). But in the end it was worth it, because this chapter is damn fine. It’s really hot, as you’d expect from a smut fic, but it’s also an excellent character study of how both Catra and Adora were affected by their abuse and trauma and the issues it raises for them in terms of sex and intimacy. Also, come on, we need more BDSM fics out there that focus on the actual point of it all (the trust involved) and promote communication and do the character work to explain why they might be into it in the first place.

BONUS (from December 31, 2019): One of my favorite pieces of 2020 technically came out in 2019, but I posted it on New Years Eve so most people first saw it in 2020. It’s an absolute banger of an AMV called I’m Not Jesus that’s all about Catra and Adora’s anger towards Shadow Weaver and their refusal to forgive their abuser. Funny enough this came out before Adora’s iconic “I will never forgive you” line, and Shadow Weaver definitely made things more complicated with how she went out, but I think the sentiment still applies.

[pilyarquitect]

2-6-18-27-51-62 McDuck and Gyro

2-6-18-27-51-62 McDuck and Gyro

“Just a few details more and it’s done.”

Five minutes later, Gyro took a few steps back wiping sweat from his forehead. It was finally done! A huge smile appeared on his beak.

“Okay, this little baby is officially one of my best inventions.”

Lil bulb looked angrily at his inventor. How could he say such a thing? It was he his best invention, not this… thing.

Gyro guessed what Lil-bulb was thinking. His little helper had a lot of bad temper after all... like him…

“I repeat, one of my best inventions, NOT the best. You’re really much better than this.”

He looked at Lil-bulb while pointing his last invention. Lil-bulb seemed convinced at least for now. Hopefully he wouldn’t try to destroy it. Something that would make Gyro really, really, really angry. He wanted to Mr. McDuck to see his invention before it explodes, get destroyed or something happens to it. Mr. McDuck… gyro was well aware he was just Scrooge’s number one scientist. He even blinked once to Magica referring at him just as a employee. This is how Mr. McDuck saw him… not even a good friend… he had nobody close he could call… friend, he only had his inventions and a rich boss.

The elevator door opened suddenly. Gyro was surprised to hear that sound. Who could be there? He knew it couldn’t be his intern, er- Dr. Crackshell-Cabrera, since the Hispanic duck was doing Gizmoduck things. Also, it couldn’t be Manny since the horse was in a Training Course. Maybe it was the red nephew. This duckling was a little science lover… a great science lover, actually.

Okay, the only way to know who was there was turning to look at the elevator. Gyro did this and who he was there, was the last person he expected. In front of his eyes, there was Scrooge McDuck, standing there and looking at him with a stoic expression in his face.

“Mr. McDuck?”

“Gyro,”

The chicken looked away, not sure of what to say next. He really didn’t expect to see his boss there. Surely Scrooge visited him sometimes, but it wasn’t usual for him to do it.

“Sorry for my daring, but what are you doing here?” he finally asked. Scrooge tiddled his head and his face showed slight confusion to what Gyro had just asked.

His eyes suddenly opened and scratched the back of his neck shyly.

“Oh, Fenton told me ye were working on a new invention, and I thought to come here and see how were ye going.” He admitted.

Gyro raised an eyebrow while crossing his arms over his chest. Scrooge McDuck almost never went down to his lab. Why was different this time?

“Really? I usually come to show my inventions to you,”

Scrooge seemed a little confused. Gyro couldn’t blame him, Mr. McDuck didn’t know what was on his mind after all.

“Yeah, well, I thought I could save ye this little travelling.” The old duck admitted finally.

Save or spend money… this is all what seemed to be important for the rich duck. Gyro couldn’t avoid to have his sarcasm shining with this situation.

“Wow, nice detail, for your employee…”

“Wait, what now?”

Gyro frowned while looking a completely surprised Scrooge. Would he have to explain even the most obvious things? Sometimes it sucked to be one of the cleverest minds in the world.

His voice came out maybe harder than he would want it to let be out.

“Oh, come on M. McDuck, you said once, I’m just your employee, not even a good friend.”

Scrooge’s eyes opened in shock, he seemed to be trying to remember when did he said that… well technically speaking, Scrooge didn’t say it, but he blinked twice to Magica! One blink, good friend, two blinks, just a employee, and Scrooge blinked two times. It was obvious what he thought about Gyro. Mr. McDuck seemed to finally remember, judging by his face expression.

“What? Wait, are ye talking of what I said to Magica when she had me prisoner in my own dime?”

Okay, at least he remembered it. Point for Scrooge. Gyro didn’t even take the time to answer his question. He just… looked away. He felt… betrayed by his boss.

The chicken listened how Scrooge walked closer to him, but he still didn’t dare to look at him until the rich duck put a hand on his shoulder.

“Gyro, I told that to protect ye.”

Gyro looked at Scrooge with a surprised look, and the old duck just smiled back at him.

“Imagine what Magica could have done to ye if I had answered ye were a good friend.”

“Huh?” to say Gyro was speechless was an understatement. Scrooge’s smile grew. He probably was having a great time thanks to the look the chicken was giving to him right now. The next Scrooge’s words shook the scientist deeply. Those were the last word he expected to hear.

“Gyro, ye’re more than an employee, more than a good friend. Ye’re family! And right now, I just wanted you to know that I appreciate you.”

“Are you serious Mr. McDuck?”

This was a joke, it has to be, some kind of trick to make him work harder in whatever Scrooge was about to ask him to work about. Mr. McDuck seemed now a little offended Gyro could doubt of what he was saying. But… to be honest, Gyro never considered himself so close to Scrooge McDuck and again, what he said to Magica – even if Scrooge assures he said that to protect him – still felt like a thorn on his heart and this was difficult to change with just a few words

“Of course, I am Gyro! Bless my bagpipes! I care about ye!”

Okay, if Gyro had doubts, he had to admit they disappeared eclipsed by the force behind Scrooge’s words. His boss seemed firmly convinced of what he was saying. Gyro studied his face for a while and couldn’t find any hint of lie on his face. So… it was true! Scrooge considered him, Gyro Gearloose, more than a friend! Gyro was stunned.

“I… I don’t know what to say… well, maybe, after what you said, just one thing, ‘If they mess with you, they’re messing with me.’”

Gyro knew what he just said was stupid, but honestly, this was a sentence he always wanted to say, and without knowing why, he thought this could be a good moment to say it… obviously, he was wrong.

Scrooge looked at him with wide eyes. He seemed… totally confused.

“They? Who’re ye referring with they?”

Gyro awkwardly scratched the back of his neck. Why did he just say such stupid think? This wasn’t in any way like him! What could he say now? What answer would be convincing to prove Scrooge he was still a smart guy? His number one scientist?

Gyro took a deep break and simply answered with the truth.

“I don’t know, whoever that dares to mess with you Mr. McDuck. You were the first person who gave me a chance when I first arrived to Duckburg. You… you… you really cared about me all those years…”

Wow, it was the first time he admitted it loudly. Why didn’t he say that before?

Scrooge smiled softly. He seemed… grated to hear those words too.

“Gyro… I’ll never stop caring about you.”

“Thank you Mr. McDuck.”

Gyro couldn’t see himself, but he guessed his smile was the biggest he did ever. Was it possible to be more joyful than he was right now? He doubted it was possible.

“Ye’re welcome Gyro.” His face showed he was proud… proud of him. The rich duck looked behind Gyro. “Now, what about your invention? Have ye finished it?”

“What? Oh yes, of course. I’ve just finished it.”

Totally unexpected for both Scrooge and Gyro, the scientist let out an extremely noisy yawn. Immediately after that, Gyro could feel his cheeks heated up, which meant that he had most likely blushed. Scrooge looked at him with wide eyes. He seemed to be studying his face very cautiously.

“Gyro, ye look really tired. Maybe it’ll be good for ye to have some rest.”

“That’s not necessary Mr. McDuck, I’m perfectly fine.”

Gyro hated when whoever it was suggested he was tired and needed rest. That was ridiculous! He could take care of himself perfectly well, thank you! But… on the other hand, he had to admit he had a tendency to not really have selfcare, which turned in more occasions than he’d like to admit that he fell asleep on his desk just to wake up a few hours later with every part of his body hurting him because he didn’t sleep in a proper place.

Maybe he should bring a bed to the lab for those occasions…

“Gyro.”

“What?” the scientist was so lost on his thoughts that he didn’t realize his boss was calling him. Oh snap, he blushed again…

“Lad, I think it’s time for you to go to bed.”

Scrooge’s voice sounded tender and plenty of concern for him. Even that, Gyro was stubborn, not even Scrooge McDuck would defeat him.

“But I’m not-”

Another yawn even more noisily than the one before scaped from his beak. Okay… maybe he was a little more tired than he expected.

“Okay, yes, I’m tired… a little rest wont’ hurt me.” Admitted trying to sound bored and that he only accepted it because he was forced to. Scrooge smiled proudly at him again.

“Good lad.”

[writings-of-dumpy]

George Weasley and the Girl in Ravenclaw: Part 1

A/N: So basically I started in Goblet of Fire, which is Fred and George’s 6th year, sooo yeah. This is going to be a long series, so buckle up! Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy!

“Come on!!” George yelled in the stands as the bunch made their way to their seats. Raven giggled at his enthusiasm and smiled to herself. She had always gone to Gryffindor’s games and even cheered them on despite being in Ravenclaw house. She’d never forget the first match she had attended between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw in her third year. She cheered on her twin best friends from the opposing team’s stands. She saw George protect Oliver from a Bludger and prevented Ravenclaw from scoring a goal and she cheered for their move despite her housemates surrounding her booing. She laughed to herself.

“Look, it’s the Irish!” Ron said from a few people away. Music blared through the speakers and a team adorned in green robes flew through the air and sparked fireworks in the shape of a leprechaun that then began to dance. It was then that Raven noticed how far up they all were.

“Oh god, don’t lean so far, you might fall!” she warned Fred.

“Don’t worry, Ven, I’ll hold onto you,” Fred said with a sly smile and slung his arm around her waist. She blushed as his large hand smoothed across her back and secured itself around her opposite side. He saw George’s eyes narrow at his brother slightly, but the three of them were distracted by the deep drum sounds of the Bulgarian team’s entrance and the crowd chanting the seeker’s name. As his face pooped up as an image across the stadium, Hermione and Ginny shared and impressed look with each other and turned to Raven, who gave them a thumbs up.

Throughout the game, Raven noticed George and Fred getting increasingly riled up and when Ireland won the match. When the snitch was caught and the game ended, Ireland still came out on top and the twins cheered and hugged Raven close between them.

After a short walk back to the massive tent, Ron started to gush about how wonderful Viktor Krum was during the match and the twins teased him endlessly.

“I think you’re in love, Ron,” Ginny mused.

“Shut up!” he said to her in return.

“When we’re apart my heart beats only for yooouu…” Fred, George, and Harry sang to the younger redhead. Raven laughed harder than she had in quite a while and caught George’s eye as he sang the lyric. Shortly after, Ron started beating Fred with a pillow.

“Stop it! Stop! It! We’ve got to get out of here. Now,” Arthur said in a rush as he came practically running into the tent. Raven quickly stuffed what she had pulled out of her bag back in and ran with the Weasleys out of the tent.

“Get back to the portkey, everyone! Fred, George! Ginny is your responsibility!” Arthur barked as flames and explosions surrounded them. An explosive spell landed just shy of her head and hit a metal beam of a nearby tent. It feel away from her and she looked back to where the spell had originated. Arthur rushed to fight off the attackers, and in the chaos, Raven lost sight of him. She pulled out her wand and prayed that the ministry wouldn’t notice if she put out a few fires.

“I’m not risking you getting hurt,” she heard George shout over the screaming from beside her just as she was about to perform the enchantment. She felt his hand grip hers and he began to pull. With a shake of her head, they ran back up the hill together with their fingers locked together.

George looked over at Raven as they reached the top of the hill with the rest of the group minus Harry to make sure she hadn’t been injured.

“We have to go back and find him, he could be really hurt!” Raven protested and dropped her sack and began to head back toward the flames.

“No!” George said sternly as his adrenaline rushed through him. “YOU could get hurt too. I’m not letting that happen. Dad’s still down there, he’ll find him. We need to get back home.”

With a sigh, Raven nodded and once again took George’s hand and followed him to the portkey.

~*~

“That’s rubbish!” Fred and George called out among the boos from courageous but underaged Gryffindors and Slytherins after the age restriction was made on this year’s Triwizard Tournament.

George was livid. The tournament sounded like something he would kill to be a part of. Eternal glory? Riches beyond wildest dreams? Dangerous tasks requiring brave and creative solutions? Sign him up. He wasn’t a Gryffindor for nothing. But he fell a year short. He’d be 17 in April, but the tournament would have been well underway at that point.

Dumbledore shushed the hall and George stopped paying attention as he was already figuring out ways to circumvent the rules, as usual. The following day, he and Fred approached Raven after their potions lesson.

“Hello, love,” George greeted with a beaming smile.

“Cleverest witch we know,” Fred continued.

“Brightest in the school, I’d say,” George complimented.

Raven shot them a suspicious smile. “What are you two on about?”

“Well I’m sure you’ve heard of the Triwizard tournament,” Fred began. “And that horrible rule.”

“The one meant to keep children safe? Seems a bit hypocritical to me,” Raven said and the trio sat on a bench in the courtyard.

“Oh?” George asked.

“If they really wanted to keep children safe, the tournament wouldn’t be held at schools,” Raven said. “Now, what about it?”

“Well, Georgie and I want in on it,” Fred said. “One of us has to be champion enough, eh?”

Raven’s eyes went wide. “You’re joking, right?”

George felt slightly guilty and looked at Fred, who pressed on, “Not in the slightest, my dear.”

Raven scoffed. “Thank Merlin you’re too young to put your name in that goblet.”

“But that’s where you come in, darling,” George said with a sweet tone, remembering his goal.

Raven raised her brow at them in a quizzical manner.

“We need some ideas about how we can get our names in there. Got to be a way to do it, and who better to ask than the most intelligent person we know,” Fred said and began to put his arm around her. She shot up and looked at them both with a disapproving and shocked expression.

“Do you honestly expect me to help you get yourselves killed? I will absolutely not help you, and I can’t believe you two would think this was even a remotely good idea. What would Molly say? I’ve already lost my mother, and you two would have me help myself to lose more people I love? No,” Raven exclaimed with watery eyes. Before George could say anything, she turned and walked out of the courtyard and presumably to her dorm. Even though she was angry with them, George couldn’t help the butterflies he felt when she said she loved them.

A while after the butterflies subsided, George felt horribly guilty. He didn’t realize the kind of pain that Raven was feeling and he didn’t realize that by wanting to put himself in harm’s way, he would hurt her. As he and Fred scoured the library for an idea, he looked up at his brother.

“Hey Freddie?” George said in a hushed tone.

“Yeah, Georgie?” Fred replied without looking up from his book.

“I’ve been thinking… Raven may have a point. Putting ourselves in danger could hurt more than help,” George reasoned.

Fred looked up. “Think about the reward, though. Not to mention how fun it could be. If we win, we’d be richer than we could imagine! Finally be able to get mum the life she wants. And I’m willing to get hurt and die for that chance, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am, I’m just weighing options,” George said. “Raven just seemed so upset. I didn’t expect that from her, I suppose.”

“She’s unpredictable, that’s for sure. Part of what makes me like her so much, I guess,” Fred smirked and turned the page.

George’s head snapped up. “You what?”

“Like her. You do too,” Fred said with a sly smile and looked at his twin. “Why else would we call her our best friend?”

George stayed silent as he tried to understand what Fred meant. He knew he was developing feelings for Raven, but was Fred? He couldn’t pick between his brother and her, it wasn’t fair.  He knew Fred had often been the more mischievous of the two and certainly a charmer as they both were, but what was he playing at?

“An aging potion!” Fred said with glee. “That’s it!”

[gumx395]

Til Death Do We Part

A (embarrassingly late) part of a Shobbs fic exchange with @unusalkitten. Hope it was worth the wait!

                                                        --

Luke walked into the large, cold room. Out of instinct, he quickly assessed the room, identifying any potential threats and recognizing all possible exits. He could never be too careful, especially in anything concerning Deckard Shaw. He knew that even in death that guy had the ability to create a world of problems for Luke.

As expected, there were far less people than one would expect at a typical wake. Luke knew Deckard wasn’t much for close friendships, and he definitely didn’t expect the Shaw family to gather all in one place. They knew better than to let themselves be sitting ducks.

Luke stood in the doorway, surveying the kind of people that had taken the time to grieve the infamous Deckard Shaw. Luke lifted an eyebrow at the small gaggle of young attractive women weeping by the casket. Of course. He held back a chuckle, remembering where he was. Luke scanned over the scattering of what he was sure were either government agents or criminal mob bosses who likely only came to make sure Deckard was actually dead. Beyond these two odd groups of mourners, the only other people there that Luke knew were the Toretto gang. At the moment they were milling around off to the side, talking amongst themselves. They all had serious, somber faces, which Luke figured was more than anyone could ask of them, considering their very…….complicated history with the Brit. Dom looked over and gave him a quick nod, and Luke took that as an invitation to join them.

Letty came up to him and gave him as tight of a hug as she could while seven months pregnant. Dom, ever the subdued man he’s always been, settled for a hand on the shoulder.

“Sup Hobbs. Sam’s not with you?”

Luke shook his head. “Naw. Didn’t wanna put her through all this. She’s staying with her Aunt Linda.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. We left Brian with Letty’s family.” Dom glances over at the casket and shook his head. “Can’t seem to wrap my head around the idea of him really being dead. A part of me still expects this to be some sort of trick.”

Letty chuckled at that. “Definitely seems like something the guy would try to pull.”

Luke shook his head. “I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t seen the autopsy report with my own eyes. Guess the Brit wasn’t as invincible as he thought he was.”

As the wake began and everyone moved to find their seats, one of the people that Luke was sure was a government agent walked to the front and began to speak. Luke ended up tuning most of it out. It was almost amusing, knowing none of these people knew anything about who Deckard Shaw really was anyways. Luke knew they were just going to repeat the same standard, vague platitudes everyone says when someone they didn’t know and didn’t like very well passed away. When everyone had heard the news about Deckard’s death and that there was going to be a funeral, Dom and Letty had asked Luke why he hadn’t wanted to speak himself, but he brushed them off, telling them he couldn’t find the words, which wasn’t a total lie. Unless he was talking smack, Luke wasn’t really great with his words, and the person he would usually talk smack with was Deckard himself. Luke found himself reminiscing about all the times he and Deckard had gone back and forth. Early on in knowing each other their smack talk was almost always done out of malice, but once they grew closer and fonder of each other it just became a way to see who could come up with the cleverest comeback. Either way, it would always somehow end with them closer than they were before.

Luke came back to the present when everyone around him began to get up and get ready to head out to the cemetery. Letty came up to him and put a comforting hand on his arm. “C’mon, you can ride with us. You shouldn’t have to be alone right now.”

Luke gave her a thankful smile and shook his head. “I’ll be right there. I think I just need a moment.”

Dom nodded, a knowing look in his eye, and led his family out of the room.

Luke slowly made his way up to the casket and looked down at Deckard’s calm, lifeless face. He had never seen Deckard’s face so still. He leaned down slowly and said,

“Get up asshat, I know you’re not dead.”

Deckard’s eyes flew open and his signature sneer came back to his face.

“Yeah, no shit Sherlock, you want a cookie for figuring it out?” Luke rolled his eyes as he helped Deckard out of the casket.

“Nice touch with the models crying over your body by the way.”

Deckard smirked. “What can I say, I tend to leave a lasting memory.”

Before Luke could respond with his own witty reply, Deckard grabbed him by the back of the neck and brought their lips together in a resounding kiss. Luke melted into it, wrapping his arms around his boyfriend. It had been a while since he’d gotten a chance to hold Deckard in his arms.

Suddenly remembering why they were there in the first place, Luke pulled back and gave Deckard a serious look.

“So you wanna let me know what’s going on and who’s after you? Is it Eteon again or something?”

“Nah, nothing big like that. Just a run of the mill drug lord I needed the element of surprise over. Still, I could use a hand if you’re not too busy, twinkletoes.”

Luke grinned, pulled two guns out of the inside of his jacket and winked at Deckard. “Why else do you think I’m here, princess?” Look nodded his head towards one of the doors. “C’mon, I caught a glimpse of an exit out the back.”

Before he could hand over one of his guns, Deckard opened up the bottom half of the casket to reveal a whole armory of weapons, from handguns to machine guns to grenades.

Luke shook his head with a smile. Should have expected the Brit to always be armed to teeth.

Once Deckard had managed to holster every gun and explosive possible onto his body they quickly moved through the back of the mortuary.

“So I take it you let the family in on the scheme?”

Deckard huffed a laugh. “If I ever die for real, they’re gonna know it. We’ve each ‘died’ at least five times by now.”

“What are you guys keeping track or something?”

“More like keeping score. I’m closing in on Owen, the little shit, but none of us have gotten close to mum’s count.”

Luke laughed to himself, entirely unsurprised at the Shaw family antics at this point. He looked through the last door out of the building and, once he was sure the coast was clear, signaled for Deckard to follow him outside.

So do you got a car waiting for you out here or something?”

“Course not. Too obvious. We’re taking your piece of junk.” Deckard said, already walking towards Luke’s truck.

“So your plan entirely banked on me figuring out that you weren’t dead?”

Deckard had already somehow managed to get Luke’s passenger side open, despite the fact that it had been locked. “I thought you’d be flattered. That’s giving you a lot of credit there, pea brain.”

Before Deckard could climb into the passenger seat Luke suddenly grabbed him by the arm. “Hey!” Deckard shot him a questioning look. Understandable, considering they had worked together on so many missions at this point that they had fallen into this easy flow.

“Thanks for not being dead.”

While Luke had figured out in his head what Deckard’s plan was pretty effortlessly, the entire time he couldn’t get rid of that fear in his chest rising at the idea that this time was the real deal and Deckard was really never coming back.

Luke knew where this fear was coming from. He’ll never forgot the first time Deckard faked his own death for a mission they were both on. That time, he had to see Deckard “die” with his own eyes. Long before Luke knew Deckard well enough to know that faking his own death was a card he liked to keep up his sleeve and wasn’t scared of using, Luke had been devastated at the thought of not being there in time to save Deckard. He had gone through such guilt and grief at the time, before he had even come close to understanding the full extent of what he felt for the Brit, and it had haunted him to this day.

Deckard, practically able to read Luke’s mind at this point, gave him a warm, comforting look.

“Hey, don’t worry huh? I’m not dying anytime soon. There ain’t a man alive that can take me down. You should know, you’ve tried several times haven’t ya twinkletoes.”

Deckard gave him a wink that Luke received with a wide grin.

They both hopped into the car, ready to take on whatever mess was waiting for them.

[docholligay]

Fx’s A Christmas Carol

This review/ramble was sponsored by @amberlilly, and has taken me quite awhile to do. It clocks in at being 6,400 words long, and oh my loving God. If you want to watch the Miniseries itself, you can find it on Hulu! PLEASE TELL ME IF YOU ENJOY

I love A Christmas Carol. This may seem strange to you, given that I am a Jew who pretty virulently hates Christmas, but it isn’t REALLY a Christmas story, it’s a moral fable about selfishness and greed and the inability to appreciate and see the softer and brighter things that bring no profit. It’s a fucking story that every asshole hoarding toilet paper needs to hear right now. It’s a favorite for always, I read it every year, and I have seen many, many versions of it, and I bring you all that “wisdom” in this lengthy review of FX’s effort this past Christmas. 

Spoiler alert: I BASICALLY PICK APART THE ENTIRE MINISERIES. 

The shortest possible version of this entire loping review: I really quite enjoyed FX’s A Christmas Carol, and that seems to be an unpopular opinion. 

In the longer form: 

“A gift is just a debt, unwritten but implied” 

I have always felt that the finest form of recorded visual media is the miniseries. We, of course, do not call them miniseries any more, but, instead, ‘limited series’ or ‘a special event’ or somet stupid thing like that, for much the same reason I imagine we are now calling a station wagon a ‘full length hatchback’ because people are idiots, and you can’t sell something to someone if they don’t it is novel.

The miniseries allows the story time to breathe, allows for lingering thoughts and ideas in the way a two hour movie does not. And it avoids the worst of the TV show problem, where a show is punished for its own success by being forced to be mined like its fucking coal shale until there is absolutely nothing left, just some ugly polluted ground where a good idea used to be. 

And so I was very delighted at the idea of a Christmas Carol miniseries. 

Tonally, in broad strokes, it is much darker than the Christmas Carol you’re used to. This is a new Christmas Carol for a new period in time, and it tries to bring a lot of the genuine problems of the Scrooges of our modern day and transport them back to Victorian England. It does not in any way try to shield you from the fact that Scrooge is a man who thinks of nothing but profit, not of any human cost, and it does not rest upon anyone’s previous affections for A Christmas Carol. In fact, it would prefer that you deposit them at the door: This is a moral ghost story, this is not some warm Christmas good time for the family. 

And I would prefer it this way! Many of my most hated versions of this story become that way by making too much light of what is meant to be a moral fable. Or centers the story too much around Christmas itself, which it is not meant to REALLY be about. Of course, the very wealthy and those who prefer to be blind to their role in the suffering of others prefer the version of the story where the main problem is “Scrooge doesn’t like Christmas” and so I can see why they would consider this version a negative. I, however, am going to immediately find a copy of this one to keep. This is the way businessmen are. This is the way the very wealthy are.

The “thesis statement” of this show, which sets it apart from many other adaptations, is something Scrooge says early on in the movie, I think it happens within the first ten or fifteen minutes (bolding, obviously, is mine): 

“Behold. One day of the year. They all grin and greet each other when every other day they walk by with their faces in their collars. 

You know, it makes me very sad to see all the lies that comes as surely as the snow this time of year. How many Merry Christmases are meant, and how many are lies? To pretend on one day of the year that the human beast is not a human beast. That it is possible we can all be transformed. 

But if it were so--if it were possible for so many mortals to look at the calendar and transform from wolf to lamb--then why not every day?

Instead of one day good, and the rest bad, why not have everyone grinning at each other all year, and have one day of the year where we are all beasts, and pass each other by? Why not turn it around?” 

I mean, I heard this and was like, “Why are you booing him, he’s right,” because he is right. I have often found that one of my frustrations with the ways people engage with a Christmas Carol is they forget the “try to keep it all the year” part of it, and it has nothing to do with fucking trees and parties, it has to do with generosity and kindness. 

And this show goes in on that! SO LITTLE of what the show engages with is about Christmas at all, it’s a narrative setup, a collective mythology used to enact a moral tale, and I absolutely love that they actually went on what I feel is the core of A Christmas Carol. 

I’ve broken this down in NOT broad strokes but categories, to try and make the most sense of my thoughts on the show and why and how I think they work. 

On the subject of the ghosts: 

I absolutely love and adore the way they handle the ghost of Christmas Past. I am never sure what I’m getting into when I’m watching a version of this story because the ghosts are handled so many different ways, and I love MANY of them, but it’s one of the most tweaked with ideas in any version. And I see why! There’s so much you can do with them. 

Christmas Past they handle by having him change depending on where Scrooge is in his life, and the implication throughout is that he changes into whatever it was that scrooge needed in that time of his life, whatever he was seeking. With Ali Baba, it was escape, with the businessman, it was business, and they did all this with great actual care, up to an including having different actors play the different versions of the ghost of Christmas past. I’ve seen something like this done a few times (and have always been very fond of it) but if I recall correctly this may be the first time I’ve actually seen them go to the length of hiring different actors.  

The sheer mockery Christmas Past makes of him is worth the adaptation in and of itself--Christmas Past feels little for him, and I’m brought to mind the scene where his father comes home drunk, and Scrooge begs, in a moment of weakness, oh please not this night, and the Ghost simply says, ‘Why not this night?” I really quite like the less nostalgic tone they took with Christmas Past versus other versions. 

Christmas Present I thought was a bit of a letdown at first, just having his dead sister be the ghost, but when I was rewatching it, I realized that I liked it quite a bit more than I had in my first watching. Present is often the “easy” ghost, generally the one that is given the most positive sort of framing, and it’s not that they remove the positive framing here with Lottie, but they do tone it down a bit, and make it quite a bit more somber to be with her because we cannot remove what Scrooge has done to these lives. There is much less of the “cheerful, noble poor” rhetoric so common in the older novels (and at the time far more revolutionary) and far more of the reckoning that Scrooge has caused so much misery, but people have found a way around it, because they understand the value of other human beings. 

I particularly love the way she takes what he’s learned from Christmas Past, the way he’s seen how he is constantly aiming to discover what the currency of everything is with his horrid and cruel behavior, what things COST people, and dismantles it, shows him wha t a fucking fool he is, and when he says she’s mocking him, she simply tells him “You mock yourself, putting a value to things that have no price” and for the fiurst time ever, it seems like he’s really getting it. 

To those who miss the over-the-top cheer of Christmas Present, I might ask: “Do you miss the fucking THRASHING he gives Scrooge in the novel when it is removed? (as it is often?) Or does that just sort of...fritter away for you?” 

Christmas Future is basically often/always the one note ghost for me and that’s to be expected given that the character has no lines and is of an amorphous shape, which writing wise is a genius move because the future itself is amorphous and can always be changed. That is, in fact, one of the lessons of a Christmas Carol, is it never too late. But of course, in media driven by the dialogue, without much chance for internal patter, it can falter a bit, and I think this is about the same here.I have no trouble with how the ghost was done, in any way, but it does not, for example, twist the spirit into something terribly interesting in the way the otherwise forgettable “A Diva's Christmas Carol” does by making it into a “behind the music” episode. 

On the subject of Ebenezer Scrooge: 

Some people seem to be really rather upset that Ebenezer isn’t played as some bumbling old curmudgeon, but is instead a callously cruel businessman who thinks of nothing but the pursuit of money. One review I read while writing this, looking for things to respond to, described him as an ‘anti-hero’ which made me extremely concerned for the human being writing the review, as I don’t think the show in any way makes Scrooge into any kind of a hero. There are certainly versions that do that by way of making him “the cleverest person in the room” (even my beloved Scrooged is guilty of this, and Mickey’s a Christmas Carol is almost inexcusably so.) but this isn’t what the show is doing here. He is a miserable man, and he delights in making others miserable, he is a man so desperate to prove that every person in this world is as miserable as he is that he orders about the world to make it so. 

If you see an anti-hero in him, I am far, far, more concerned about you than I am about anything else. 

He is more like actual billionaires than any version I’ve seen. His cost cutting, his destruction. He is perversely cruel and sees human beings as playtoys. He echoes far more than any version I have seen, the true appetites of the rich, and maybe this is why this version shines so much for me, and why so many others dislike it. It cuts to the bone, this Scrooge. 

This show goes harder than other versions in many respects, and one of those respects is in Ebenezer’s childhood. His father is cruel in the novella, but really only glancing so, we hear little of his childhood at all, other than his father sent him away, and his sister had to wait for years to ask for him back. We must remember something: Dickens was writing on a tight timeline compared to his other works. I have no idea if he would have expanded on Scrooge’s past himself or not, but I certainly know he did not have the time and space to do so in his normal fashion. 

The show does a really interesting thing with Ebenezer, in that it does not allow a monster to grow from nothing. Most monsters do not. This is by no way an excuse--I think the show makes that fairly clear--but it is an explanation. His sister gives him a mouse, a stray mouse, for Christmas, dressed up with a little bell and ribbon from one of her toys, and Ebenezer loves it, and his father, drunk and impoverished, kills it. It’s an intense and horrifying scene, and as with many of the things in this show, in accomplishes this while showing nearly nothing. The entire scene happens in shadow, but you feel the fear of Ebenezer as a child, how it affects him to this day, how he begs for it not to be this night. The show makes even more clear how central this was to his willful callousness, his desire to never be hurt, by explaining that his father did this to “Warn me against unprofitable affections” 

I am now, and have always been, a sucker for a bit of writing that can allow for a character to be a monster, and also give a seed to plant that monstrosity, without forgiving them. It can be a delicate thread to weave, even more so with the way that people take characters, that sort of knee-jerk desire for a character to be either monstrous or abused, when, it can be both. Having cruelty enacted upon you does not forgive cruelty to others. I feel like show does a fairly decent job with this, reminding Ebenezer that his hated father affected him far more than the love of his sister, Lottie, or any promise of love in the future. He has shut himself off from love, and while he cannot be blamed for the cruelties of his father or the way he essentially sold him to a pedophile for free schooling, it was Scrooge who decided that all this meant his only way forward was counting. Numbers as wealth as his only true love. 

Scrooge even tries to pull a tumblr in this way, looking at the abuse and telling the Ghost, ‘This excuses me” as if he should be let entirely off the hook, AS A GROWN ASS ADULT, for what happened to him as a child. Non non! And the Ghost sides with me in this, telling him, “You only see what was done to you, and not what was done for you” and may I please frame that? I love that they looked at this out in the script and went, “Oh, I’m gonna close that up” 

They do this a second time, but not in a tumblr way, more in a reddit way, when Scrooge protests that whatever else he did to Mary Crachit, the money he gave to mary saved Tim’s life, and so, “if you view virtue purely through the consequence of an action rather than the motivation for said action we have just witnessed my former self doing a good thing.” (Me, watching this: I’m Jewish, I don’t do that even slightly.) and as the Ghost of Christmas Past goes to leave, Scrooge asks if he is forgiven, and Christmas Past yells, “It’s not about your forgiveness!” I love that in so many ways, they tie up what a person might argue in Scrooge’s favor, but Scrooge can’t see that forgiveness is nothing and change is everything. 

Making Scrooge a venture capitalist was, to me, an absolute banner move. A new villain for a new age. Don’t get me wrong, moneylender is now and always will be a fantastic villain, but venture capitalists have ruined many things you’ve loved TO THIS DAY. They buy troubled businesses, that could be saved, and instead of trying to turn them around, they sell them for parts, get the last scrap of meat off them, and then crush them. I can think of three businesses this has happened to that I know of, off the top of my head, in my lifetime: Toys R Us, Cabelas, and Lucky’s. All could have been saved, some of them (Lucky’s) fairly easily. But that isn’t what people like Scrooge do. 

The way they have him taken into the mine, to see what the cost cutting does to people, or the factory, burning and killing so many people, it allows us to really dwell in the HUMAN cost in a way that many versions shy away from outside of the Crachits. I think it’s very easy to go “Cutting costs hurt workers” but we often don’t really dwell in that, especially considering SHIT LIKE THIS IS STILL HAPPENING IN THE WORLD TODAY. Go look up conditions in Bangladeshi factories, how much do we really deserve H&M, you know? 

A personal touch I very much loved: Scrooge cares about animals far more than people. I LOVE this is a fucking villainy trait. I think we all know that person! I hate that person! And I adore so much when Scrooge says, down in the mine that is about to kill workers, some of whom are children, that he tried not to think about the ponies, and the Ghost of Christmas Past basically goes: “Are you SHITTING ME? Did you never care about the MEN down here?” while also allowing for the fact that his covering up a cold horse in London is the only reason the ghosts believed there was something good in him at all. 

On the Crachits: 

Bob:

The first time I watched this, I was like, “Man, do I even like Bob in this?” because he’s so different from the usual portrayal of Bob Crachit as meek and mild. But upon my second watching I realized I was really only reacting to the difference in tone for Bob, and that I very much like that he is a simmering pot of resentment and hatred, serving under a terrible fucking boss who makes money hand over fist while he busts ass with no benefits or help for very little pay. WOW DOESN’T THAT SEEM RELEVANT TO OUR TIMES? 

So yes, I very much changed my mind (this is why rewatching things is sometimes helpful for me) on the subject of Bob, and I think in this case he makes such a better standin for the average worker, for the way the system chews us up and spits us out and oh my god I want to give every rich boss I ever had Covid right now. 

Mary: 

Mary Crachit becomes a main character in this version of the story and I am absolutely taken with it. The way she does whatever it is she has to for her family, the way she is willing to lie and degrade herself in order to do so, up to and including being willing have sex with Scrooge (it does not actually happen, but the scene plays out) in order to save and protect her family, and never tell them where she got the money to save Tim’s life. 

She lies to Bob about this! Forever! I struggled with where I wanted to put this because I talk more about it in relation to the storyline and the scene itself below, but I decided just to leave it with Mary herself, and the way that she really does make massive sacrifices in order to protect everyone in her family. She bears the shame and the indignity of what was done to her, what she chose to do to save Tim, without any regard for herself. Mary is the rock of the family so much more than Bob is in this telling. 

She’s also inadvertently the one who saves Scrooge, wishing for and calling upon the spirits to show him what a piece of shit he is. 

Tim: 

Tiny Tim is no less a narrative device here than he is in other versions--that’s simply the function of TIny Tim. He’s the “puppy” of the story and we kill him off in order to tweak heartstrings and encourage changed behavior. They do make his disability more clearly defined in this one, and so things make a little bit more sense than they tend to in the original framing. 

I also really quite loved the effect with him breaking through the ice, and how Scrooge has to see it from below, and watch it, and see TIm’s spirit and beg him himself not to die, but to stay with his parents, to no avail, I thought it was a clever take on something we’ve seen done over and over again. 

Broader story changes:

The genuine spookiness. 

This is not the only version of Christmas Carol I’ve seen that attempts to create a genuine sense of fear and creepiness out of the subject material, and it’s not even the one that I think is the scariest, but I do think it does a really excellent job of reminding you that this is a ghost story. There are good little details here and there, particularly in the lead up to Jacob’s visit, that allow for a genuine sense of fear, or at the very least the understanding of Ebenezer’s fear. 

Outside of the doorknob incident, we also have the two coins, the exact same years as the ones Scrooge put over Marley’s eyes, drop down from the fireplace. This not only a good moment of spookiness that is difficult for Scrooge to explain away later, but it also gives us an early introduction to his obsession with numbers. 

But my favorite comes after Bob leaves for the day, and on Scrooge’s ledger he sees scrawled, by no one or nothing that he knows, “PREPARE YE,” that would be enough in itself, ut then we have a lovely moment that really encapsulates the capacity for self-delusion. Scrooge looks at the clock, and asks the clock to make it four, because he refuses to leave his office early, but he desperately wants to leave. He changes the watch he carries, and then the world goes into shadow, and all of a sudden the clock chimes four. DId time move? WHo can know, but it unsettles Scrooge enough. It isn’t only creepy, either, but is a moment to show that Scrooge will not bend himself by leaving early, but instead he will remake the world as he sees it. He will change the watch and make it lie, and thus change the world. 

The human cost of industry. 

One of the greatest things I think this adaptation does, and I’m not going to go too far into here because I go into it all over the place in this look at the series, is taking into account the human cost of industry. I don’t even mean the scenes in the mines, or the scene with the factory on fire, although of course those too. I mean even scenes like where a man has just died, and they are pressing him to sell the factory at half of what it’s worth, only to immediately fire all the workers and sell off the factory for parts not but a day later. To flip it into immediate profit. 

And we’re shown that he remembers nothing but the money he made off of all of it--the Ghost of Christmas Past has little effect on him, except as stage setting--and he runs off the numbers, remembering the profit he made of every single year, forgetting the workers, forgetting the people, forgetting what that money COST him, cost everyone. 

When we see Scrooge as moneylender in a lot of other adaptations, it’s easy to forget that making a lot of money usually has a lot of human cost. People of good character often say, ‘If I were a billionaire” but if you are a person of good character, you never become a billionaire. What it takes to become a billionaire is the coldness, the selfishness, to not allow your rising tide to lift other boats, but to hoard, and to keep. There are no good billionaires. 

Women are given shit to do in this version. 

For all I love the original novella, and I do, it is a product of its time, and because it is a product of its time, the women are mostly accessories to the story. Not so with this version, which has really tried to course correct that little problem from the original. 

With Lottie, not only to they have her save her brother, but then we have her become the ghost of Christmas Present, which I thik works really well as she seems to be the one person in his life Scrooge actually cared for and valued. He, a man who believed in nothing but money, paid for her funeral, and it’s a bit implied that with her death the last light of humanity went out of him. She saves Scrooge not once, but twice, when her sole job in the novella is essentially to show up at the school. 

I talk about Mary Crachit in her own section, so I’m not going to go into it too much here, but this version made her a goddamn main character, and I love it. I think that opens up this story for so many things and ideas that I didn’t even know I wanted but clearly did, all the different expressions of love, some of which are not nice or warm. Mary is a driver of the story far more than Bob is in this version, and I absolutely love it. 

The love inherent in sacrifice, and Scrooge’s blindness to it. 

One major SWERVE this story takes is with the subject of Mary Crachit. Where, in the novella, she hates Ebenezer because he’s a fucking dick and that’s about the beginning and the end of it, in this miniseries, she hates him because he was so unbelieveably callously cruel. He used her for his own disgusting appetites, he used her to prove that all human decency has a cost. 

It, like the mouse scene, is horrifying and uncomfortable, and I am very fond of it. It could have gone full rape no stars, but it doesn’t do that. It has Scrooge humiliate her, make it known that she was ready to do this, have her removed her clothes and stand before him, clutching the stays to herself. He doesn’t have sex with her, doesn’t sexually assualt her, tells her he isn’t even interested in that. Instead he picks apart, moment by moment, that she is a good Christian woman, that she loves her husband, that she considers herself faithful, and she is willing to sell herself for the thirty pounds (That’s around 4,700 USD today). It doesn’t matter that she’s doing it because her son needs immediate medical care, and Scrooge refused her offer of a loan as a “poor investment.” It’s terrifying, it’s humiliating, and it’s sadder yet because people with money are LIKE THIS. I could see this happening now, with little trouble. And the scene makes us sit with that cruelty without making it graphic, and in some ways I think that makes it worse, as it should be. 

But, tying this to the scene where Lottie, without his knowledge, comes to get him and threatens to kill the man who is sexually abusing Ebenezer if he so much as tries to come after them, for all he sees, he does not see the love in this act. He does not see what it must have taken Lottie, after their father finally left them, to take up and come to get him, to break him out of that horrible place. He only sees that he was the victim here. In the same way, he cannot see the love inherent in Mary’s act. What it must take for her to lay down every single thing that she believes in, because above all else, she wants to save her son. 

Which goes back to what I quoted at the beginning, a line I really loved for the sheer selfish cruelty of it: “ A gift is a debt, unwritten but implied.” So much of Scrooge’s ‘redemption’ in this version comes out his ability to learn that what his father says is in no way true. Lottie gave him the gift of freedom without asking anything of him, ever, so long as he lived, never even told him what she’d done. Mary never looks upon Tim with even the slightest bit of resentment for what she had to do to save his life. 

Which sort of leads me to my next bit, which is not so much a different section as a corollary to this one: Destruction as a form of love. I could write a 2,000 word essay on this in and of itself, but this is already more than 5,000 words long, so I am not going to do that. 

Leading off from the fact that Mary breaks her marriage vows and her vows to herself in order to save Tim, she also chooses to lie about it for the rest of her given life. She has no idea that a situation is going to come down where she’s going to have to tell Bob, she simply chooses, instead to bear her shame and hurt and terror alone, on some hand I’m sure because she thinks Bob will hate her but also because she knows that it will make Bob feel all the more preyed upon, that nothing in his life can be without the evil touch of Scrooge. 

And so, she chooses this tearing, this negative thing, but she chooses it out of love, and much like when we see Lottie “like a highwayman” threaten to kill the man that hurt Scrooge, we learn that not all love is a beautiful and warm thing, and sometimes love is difficult and unlikeable and hard. Sometimes there is love to be had in the things of shadow, as well. 

And in the end, when Scrooge destroys the ice sating rink so that Tim can’t fall through, that’s the idea that he can finally encompass this, that his love is total now, and it’s not just “scrooge gave everyone money” but SCROOGE LEARNED TO DESTROY THAT WHICH WAS TERRIBLE. 

Which leads me to:

THE ENDING: 

Let’s talk about all the things they change in the ending because there are a lot of them and I fully expected to hate that but it was very much that snake comic where it goes “I don’t like that thing”...”Oh no I love it.” 

Scrooge’s ‘redemption’ doesn’t come out of him wishing that he wasn’t the one to die, or wish that everyone would not hate him so much and immediately forget him, but out of the ida that it doesn’t matter what happens to him so long as Tim is allowed to live. He finally lets go of that massive selfishness which allowed him to profit so very much, and to give himself over to whatever it is, to be tortured, to not be forgiven. 

Because he knows he doesn’t deserve forgiveness, that he does not deserve redemption. He REFUSES redemption, he says he refuses to change because he refuses redemption, he refuses to not allow himself to be punished. “If redemption were to result in some kind of forgiveness than I do not want it” He finally owns his shit, because a large part of the point this miniseries is trying to drive home is that YOU are responsible for YOU, and no amount of excuse can let stand the horrible things we might do, or the things we let pass us by. I’m very into this, in a shock to literally no one. 

The sign that he can be saved is that he does not wish to be saved at all. 

And he does more, and better, than in the original, he gives Bob 500 pounds, yes, but also encourages him to take the better job he’s been offered, because Scrooge, in a true move of understanding what his greater evil is, is closing the entire company down, He is stopping the machine of destruction entirely instead of giving money to whoever he finds deserving and letting those he does not be chomped up by the machine. It’s a far greater sacrifice, a far more meaningful turnaround, than any version I’ce seen before. 

Mary tells him it will not buy forgiveness, and he says, yes, good, I won’t trouble you. I didn’t know how badly I wanted an ending like this until I saw it before me, but it was everything I had ever wanted from this. 

And then we, the viewing audience, all get called out at the very end, and it made a chill run down my spine and tears spring to my eyes in a way that really rarely happens to me but happens to me most when I feel “got” for lack of a better term. 

Mary is looking out the window, and says “Sprits, Past, Present, and Future. There is still much to do.”

And then she looks directly at us. And the screen goes black. We are left not saying “Oh wow gee willickers, that Scrooge guy sure was nasty BUT” and instead go away with, “How have I been Scrooge in my daily life? How can I change?”and for me it was harrowing in the way I think all viewings and readings of  A Christmas Carol should be, that we should always come away with the idea that we could be doing a better job, that some cruel Ebenezer waits inside all of us and we must constantly be working to root him out. 

Very minor loves:

The idea that the greatst torture is to be locked in one’s coffin, and never allowed to die, and how one does not really require a hell in itself, as one has been conventiently provided to each man, women and child who requires it. Really clever. What is interesting in that, however, is that the show is somewhat harder on Marley. In the novella, he is driven to help Scrooge by way of their past friendship, by some humanity he’s found in death toward his old friend. In this, it’s essentially only to escape this hell. 

Changing, “If they’re going to die, they’d better do it! And decrease the surplus population” to the very simple “then let them die” is something I didn’t expect to like--on the whole I am rather attached to the original line, but I think with the way they are trying to play Scrooge as more of a straight up villain and make this whole thing less of a ‘charming Christmas tale’ it really works. 

I love the bit with Christmas past when they use the zoopraxiscope thing to project the images, and it’s his hat. There’s nothing deep about it, I just really like it as a touch. 

People can be irredeemable, in their way: Lottie and Ebenezer’s father doesn’t turn kinder, the way he does in the novella, but just leaves, and so Lottie is free to bring him home. There’s no redemption for him. (I actually think this is really weakly handled in the novella despite my loving it) 

I unfortunately have less talent for talking about visual stylings, but one thing I noticed within this movie is that it’s filmed ina lot of blues and greys, underscoring the whole darker tone of the story, and I really appreciated it.  

Thank you for this fucking line, I cherished it and it’s place in the story so very fucking much: “Given my time again, I would not reduce the expenditure on timber. *long pause* Given the time again, I would not be myself.” It’s hard to get across in writing, when one is not turning their hand to it literarily, but it’s really this beautiful admission of guilt without being entirely some sobbing ridiculousness. 

HIS THING WITH HORSES GETS EXPLAINED BY THE NARRATIVE THANK YOU OH MY GOD. I was so sure this was just going to be a sidenote thing but they remembered to follow up and I was very proud in that moment. 

“Everything in life is a lesson if you care to learn” which I should have tattooed on my body as it is my exact framework of thought. 

The observation of the Crachits and just that, “no matter what, nothing sinks them” was just something I enjoyed. (and am stealing) 

I fucking loled when Ebenezer is excitedly gesturing to the Crachits after his new life, and looks at Martha and goes “whoever you are” 

What I could have done without: 

There are always MINOR nitpicks with any version, but one thing I’ll say that I considered rather major, and did not care for in the slightest, was all the dick-fucking around in the spirit realm with Marley. We could have buttoned that up right quick, and we didn’t, and there’s a huge gap in my notes where I’m just like, “Ah okay! I guess….we’re still here?” I think some of the ideas were sound but the execution was poor. 

Sometimes I felt like the writing beat me over the head with the morality of what was going on but then I read reviews of it and was like, “Ah okay, I suppose these people are why that exists” so while for me I would like a bit more subtlety I suppose I understand why sometimes there cannot be. 

IN CONCLUSION, AFTER MORE THAN 6,000 WORDS: I really quite liked this version of A Christmas Carol. It’s not a children’s version by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t think a Christmas Carol is meant to be. I definitely will be coming back to this one, which makes it only one of a handful. It was a good recommendation for me, when I wasn’t sure I was going to watch it in the first place--there are so many versions of CC that I am still trying to get through--and I found that I really enjoyed it. 

The focus on the morality of the situation and making great pains to decouple it from the holiday itself made this a much-needed refresher of the story for me that keeps more to what I think the original was GOING for (Source: literally all of Dickens’ writing on poverty) than the way it’s been twisted by our Capitalist Christmas Culture. I loved that the women were given more to do and an equal hand in the story, and there were a number of really lovely lines that will stick with me.

[kafeuka]

[1/1] colour me blue

He doesn’t only just want the sex – he wants to hold his hands, to kiss him, to embrace him.

He wants the whole world to know.

But most importantly, he wants Taehyung to know.

(or: Detective Taehyung and Army Doctor Yoongi are best friends & flat mates. That's what they are and yet, Yoongi knows that just best friends don't look each other like that. Like they'd hang the stars and craft the moon with their bare hands.) read on AO3

Yoongi wakes up on his side and finds the bed is bigger and colder than the night before. He sits up, blearily rubbing the sleep from his eyes before he forces himself to stand up. Scratching the back of his neck, he makes his way towards the window before drawing the beige curtains.

Light floods the bedroom, and Yoongi squints his eyes as he slightly turns away. It takes him a moment for his eyes to adjust to the brightness and when he does, the morning greets him with clustering clouds and singing birds.

He half-expects to find Taehyung on his chair, still clad in his nightwear, scrolling through his phone but Taehyung isn’t there. He should have known better, but he still hopes anyway.

Yoongi’s phone is still on the coffee table where he left it. He ignores the notifications and emails, and go straight to the messages. Taehyung has left him three messages, all signed with his initial as if he doesn’t know Yoongi has saved his number from the very first day.

 ✉ From: Taehyung

Got to go to the precinct. Namjoon told me he has a case for me. I hope it’s a serial killer this time. - KTH

 ✉ From: Taehyung

Not a serial killer, but it’s quite interesting. Inheritance, distant family and a dead, rich grandfather. Oh, how marvellous. Wish you were here. - KTH ✉ From: Taehyung

We ran out of biscuits, by the way. - KTH

 Yoongi smiles, shaking his head lightly before clicking the reply button.

 ✉ To: Taehyung

Could’ve woken me up, Tae. Have you figured out who did it yet?

  Yoongi barely makes it to the kitchen when his mobile dings twice.

 ✉ From: Taehyung

Of course. It was the eldest son, it was obvious.   - KTH

 ✉ From: Taehyung

Get the chocolate ones. The mint ones makes me dizzy. - KTH

 Yoongi rolls his eyes, immediately typing in a reply.

 ✉ To: Taehyung

Alright.

 Three heartbeats later, and Taehyung still hasn’t replied. Yoongi takes it as a sign that Taehyung has reached the Lab and is most probably more invested in whatever experiment he’s currently conducting than shooting Yoongi a reply. Yoongi presses his lips into a thin smile, locking the device before grabbing the kettle. It’s only nine in the morning, but he already wishes for the moon and stars.

  -

  They met through a mutual friend who introduced them. They barely knew each other, and yet they decided to become flatmates in less than two hours. Taehyung isn’t like any other person he’s met before — direct, observant, and though Yoongi would never admit it aloud, he is the cleverest man Yoongi knows.

Their connection was instant and Yoongi finds himself being pulled towards Taehyung so naturally, like gravity.

They fit each other so well that it’s a wonder why it took them this long to meet.

It’s a bit exasperating at first, how everyone who come across them thinks of them as a couple, but with time, Yoongi learns to ignore it. There’s no use arguing with others that they’re just best mates, but it’s even more infuriating when Taehyung never seems to correct them. It’s always Yoongi who had to explain that it isn’t like that, and deep down, Yoongi knows it probably never will be.

The attraction is there, sure, because how can one not be attracted to a charming human being that is Kim Taehyung? He’s fucking brilliant in every way possible, and he’s got this mysterious aura going on that the ladies seem to like but it isn’t handsome, sculpted face or his ability to change his persona in matters of seconds that draws Yoongi in.

It’s how Taehyung trust no one but Yoongi, how he easily let Yoongi in, how Taehyung has a smile that he reserves only for Yoongi, how he steals glances when he thinks Yoongi isn’t looking, how Taehyung remembers Yoongi doesn’t take sugar in his coffee.

Before Yoongi can stop himself, he’s already falling.

And he knows, falling for Kim Taehyung is like falling into a deep well— it’s terrifyingly dark and you’ll end up drowning in your own screams and tears.

  -

  “You’re being a pushover, Yoongi. What does he want this time?”

“For fuck’s— I’m not a pushover, Namjoon. You know how he is; you’ve known him for years.”

“Yeah, I do, but it’s not an excuse to—”

“Oh, shut up. You literally let him go around the crime scene like it’s his playground. And I’m his best friend, so it’s my obligation to go when he needs me.”

“Needs you as in he wants you to make tea?”

“Precisely.”

“Jesus… the things you do for that maniac.”

  -

  When Yoongi comes back from work, he finds Taehyung lying on the couch with his bathrobe on in the same exact position when Yoongi left that morning. Yoongi shrugs off his coat, hangs it on the rack before walking taking a seat across of him.

“So…” Yoongi begins. “I take that Seokjin still hasn’t given up?”

Taehyung grunts.

Yoongi chuckles, leaning back against his chair in amusement. “You’d get paid handsomely, Tae. We can get a bigger fridge, you know. Hell, we can move to a bigger flat with the sum.”

“I’d rather have the mini fridge and stay where we are rather than work with that git, thank you very much.”

Yoongi narrows his eyes, scrutinizing Taehyung. His eyelids were shut, brows furrowed and lips are pulled downwards. There is something else that’s bothering him.

“What is it?” Yoongi asks.

“The usual.”

Yoongi raises a brow. “Not Seokjin.”

“Oh,” Taehyung murmurs, cracking an eye open to look at Yoongi. “Just thinking about the case I received earlier.”

“Yeah?”

Yoongi is aware that Taehyung enjoys having a person listen to him talk and with his new job, Yoongi doesn’t have the time to accompany Taehyung to the crime scene anymore. Taehyung would sometimes talk so fast he forgets to breathe – as if his brain is going way too fast and his mouth cannot keep up – and Yoongi is always there to remind him to slow down. Sometimes, in the middle of his rant, Taehyung’s eyes would light up and Yoongi knows Taehyung has the answer, that by then, the case is already solved.

Taehyung lets out a breath as he brings his fingertips together, placing his fingers underneath his chin. “There is nothing that connect the victims together, Yoongi. Seems like it’s done at random. But why? There are no prints, no cameras, nothing. It’s like… a ghost.”

“Ghost?”

“Ghost. No traces of the murderer. They said suicide, but it’s impossible. Three deaths in a row? This person is smart, Yoongi. They’re smart, oh, they really are.”

Yoongi’s lips quirk at the amazement in Taehyung’s voice.

“Hm. Even a smart person makes a mistake sometimes, don’t they?”

“They do, hm, of course they do. But what exactly?”

Yoongi’s eyes soften as Taehyung hums, and when his eyes brightened, Yoongi finds his heart skips a bit.

“That’s it! Let’s go, Yoongi. I’ll explain on our way!”

   -

  “God, you’re fucking brilliant, Taehyung. A fucking genius. How’d you know all that just by looking at me?”

“Now, that’s a first.”

“Sorry?”

“People don’t usually compliment me when I observe them. You’re the first one to be… impressed, Yoongi.”

“They don’t?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d they say?”

“Fuck off.”

 -

  Neither of them were drunk when their lips crashed together. When Taehyung willingly opened his mouth to let Yoongi slide in. When Taehyung’s hands were everywhere but where Yoongi wanted them to be.

It was the night Yoongi was strapped with explosives.

The mastermind behind the murders and digital crimes made an appearance that night, making himself known, no longer he desires to be in the shadows. Of course, a brilliant man like Park Jimin wants an audience. And he wants no other than Taehyung, whom he proudly declares his nemesis though it was their first time seeing each other face to face.

Yoongi saw how taut Taehyung’s jaw was, how there were flames gleaming in his midnight eyes.

Yoongi had an awful lot brush of deaths before; hailing bullets in a battlefield, knife against his throat and fists painting his body bruises but none of them makes fear crawl under his skin at the thought of Taehyung being shot first before Jimin could press the button.

Perhaps it was luck that they managed to leave the place unscathed, not even a single scratch on their bodies.

They walked back home not speaking about the incident. While Yoongi had his fists shoved in his pockets, Taehyung kept his distance a few steps behind. Yoongi resisted the urge to turn to ask, to make a conversation because the silence was suffocating him but he found himself holding back his tongue.

As soon as the door was closed, however, Yoongi mustered all his courage to speak, only for the words to remain at the tip of his tongue when without warning, Taehyung pressed his lips against his. It was a bit odd at first, a little bit clumsy, but when Yoongi managed to overcome the shock, he returned the kiss.

He pulled Taehyung closer, hands cupping his face and he remember thinking, ‘Finally.’

Taehyung’s touches were like fire against his skin, setting him alight and he found himself wanting more of his touches, more of this, more of Taehyung.

The next morning, when Yoongi woke up with marks all over his body, Taehyung was already in the kitchen sipping his tea.

  -

  “I see that my brother has decided to keep you around. Or are you a stray?”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced friendship before, but your brother’s my best friend, Seokjin. And seeing as you come and go into our flat as you please, I hope you’re also aware that we are flatmates.”

“Taehyung doesn’t make friends. He doesn’t have friends.”

“Well, he does have one now.”

“Huh.”

“If there’s nothing else, I’d like to show you the door.”

“Yoongi, wait.”

“What?”

“Look after him, will you?”

“Course I will.”

 -

  Yoongi is falling.

And he is falling hard.

It is as easy as breathing when it comes to their arrangement. They never speak of it, never discuss what they are or where they are, but occasionally they would have mind-blowing sex without uttering a single word afterwards. As if it’s natural for them to do so, as if it’s what is has always been from the start.

Taehyung likes tasting every inch of Yoongi’s skin, likes to be held close and he likes the sounds Yoongi makes and Yoongi thinks Taehyung is the most beautiful when he quivers, eyes shut in bliss as Yoongi’s name leave his lips.

It is a privilege to see this side of Taehyung, the vulnerable side of him that he keeps from everyone else and yet, he lets Yoongi in and he lets Yoongi stay.

Yoongi doesn’t have any intention to leave, never have and never will. He likes where he is but he also loves to be more, to know where exactly they stand. They don’t address each other with sweet nicknames, they don’t hold hands or hug or kiss in public, and while Yoongi knows Taehyung has a different way of showing affection, Yoongi wants more.

Despite being demanding and irritatingly meticulous, Taehyung never voices out what he wants for this, for them.

Yoongi sighs, leaning back against his chair and massage his temple. He has at least five minutes of break before the next patient enters, and the last thing he needs is a distraction.

And Yoongi frowns as a thought comes across his mind.

Is he just a distraction for Taehyung?

   -

   “You know that I’ve got an older brother. That I’ve fought in wars before. That I’m an army doctor. All by just looking at me—”

“Not just looking. Observing, Yoongi, observing.”

“Right. Observing. And you deduce all that with one glance in less than two minutes of our meeting. So, why don’t you tell me about you? It’s only fair, isn’t it?”

“Why? What is it that you want to know?”

“Everything, I suppose. Why you’re so adamant on not working with the government. Why you have a love-hate relationship with your own brother. What’s your mummy and daddy like.”

“Nothing interesting.”

“Come on, Taehyung. We’re mates, aren’t we?”

“Alright. First, I don’t want to work with the government because Seokjin is there. Secondly, Seokjin is always competitive ever since we were younger and though he never admits it, he sees me as an archnemeses. And mummy and daddy? They ship us both to boarding school by the time we turn seven so they didn’t have to deal with children.”

“Wait, Taehyung… I’m so sor—”

“Right, we’re here. You do bring your pistol with you, yeah?”

  -

  Taehyung usually has two moods:

1)      Silence – being so deep in his thoughts that everything around him needs to be quiet. A bit infuriating, really, because he’d shoot Yoongi a glare even if Yoongi sneeze.

2)      Loud – Desperately trying to stop his brain from working too much so he resorts to mindlessly consuming crap shows, which usually ends with him shouting at the telly.

Yoongi isn’t sure which one he prefers better, but after four years of living together, Yoongi learns the best way to handle the situation is to leave Taehyung to it. Sometimes he’d find himself shouting too, and sometimes he’d find himself meditating by the window. It isn’t all that bad, really, because he knows Taehyung.

He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like.

But there are still bits of Taehyung that he still hasn’t uncovered, bits that Taehyung purposely hide and not ready to show Yoongi. A mysterious piece of him that he keeps only to himself and while Yoongi is fine with it, he can’t help but wonder – what is it that Taehyung is so afraid of?

  -

  “For fuck’s sake, Taehyung. You don’t just fucking jump in front of cars like that! You don’t fucking run off somewhere without me, and not explain shit to me! Do you know how bloody worried I was? What if you’re jumped on? What if… what if you’re dead?”

“You were right behind me, Yoongi. You always are. I have nothing to worry about.”

“But what if I wasn’t? What if I couldn’t keep up? What if I lost you?”

“You wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t. Have some sleep, Yoongi. They’ve all been caught and we had a long day. You’re exhausted.”

“Fucking hell, Taehyung, listen to me—”

“Have some rest, please.”

  -

  Taehyung doesn’t have that many friends and it’s not that difficult to guess why. He can be a tad obnoxious sometimes (though Taehyung would defend himself by saying he was simply blunt, not mean) and Taehyung absolutely detest dull conversations.

So, it’s a bit curious that Taehyung and Yoongi become best friends. They are not exactly alike, but they are not exactly different either. Yoongi doesn’t mind listening to Taehyung prattle on and on about experiments and the chemistry journals he finds intriguing and Taehyung, on the other hand, doesn’t mind Yoongi feeding him and forcing him to go for walks in the park.

Despite the sign saying not to feed the ducks, Taehyung would always have some bread crumbs in his coat to give the ducks. Yoongi supposes it’s one of the things Taehyung come to enjoy – that doesn’t have anything to do with science or critical thinking – and Yoongi often find it difficult to tear his gaze away when Taehyung is this calm.

Sometimes, they would talk about anything and everything.

Sometimes, they would sit in silence side by side, simply existing.

Taehyung did admit that Yoongi is his only best friend, and while he felt warmth tingling all over his body, he also felt something akin to sadness as he heard Taehyung uttered those words.

There is a vast void inside of Taehyung. Yoongi can see it in the way Taehyung’s eyes would flicker when he spots a family, couples in honeymoon phases and a group of friends enjoying themselves. Yoongi knows that although Taehyung grew up surrounded by people – nannies, butlers, housekeepers – he does not seem to have any connection with any of them.

Yoongi can’t help the pang in his chest as he thinks of young Taehyung, all alone in the library, flipping through textbooks to keep him company.

As insufferable Taehyung can be sometimes, Yoongi knows he would never want to leave him. He chose this life, chose to be with Taehyung.

But having got a taste of Taehyung, Yoongi craves for more.

He doesn’t only just want the sex – he wants to hold his hands, to kiss him, to embrace him.

He wants the whole world to know.

But most importantly, he wants Taehyung to know.

  -

  “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t change anything, Taehyung. It won’t change the fact that I thought it was my fault. It won’t change the fact that for two fucking weeks, I blame myself. I mourn for you, I cried for you. I fucking prayed, Taehyung, and I don’t even believe in God. You couldn’t fucking text? Couldn’t fucking phone me?”

“I can’t risk it, Yoongi. Jimin’s men… they’re everywhere.”

“So what? I’m just supposed to think you’re dead?”

“I can’t bear to lose you, Yoongi. That’s why I had to do it. I’ve come back now, haven’t I? I’ll always come back.”

  -

  Taehyung always say “thank you” after they had sex.

As if Yoongi is doing him a favour.

He doesn’t even thank Yoongi after Yoongi made him tea.

  -

  Taehyung never stays. He waits for Yoongi to clean both of them up before he thank Yoongi and walk out of the room without looking back.

Yoongi knows of post-coital bliss, it’s the part that he looks forward to the most; the relaxed limbs, the sleepiness that comes afterwards – but with Taehyung, Yoongi finds himself fiddling with his fingers, mouth open but no words leaving, hand reaching out to someone so distant.

He doesn’t sleep well after he made Taehyung moan his name.

   -

   “You impress me, Min Yoongi. A man like you, saving my brother from himself. Who would’ve thought?”

“Have you ever actually not spoken in riddles, Seokjin?”

“You may be best mates, but don’t ever think for a second that I will let you hurt him even the slightest.”

  -

  It is a miracle that Taehyung, the cleverest man in possibly the whole world, does not use his intelligence for murder or something similarly horrible. But there are times when Yoongi think the man will be the cause of his death one day.

Like when Taehyung overdoses himself, and would have been buried six-foot underground if it weren’t for Yoongi who found him stranded in an abandoned building with all the other users.

Yoongi had been disappointed and terribly angry, but most of all, he was utterly terrified.

Seokjin was in the waiting room with Yoongi that day. His usual collected demeanour was replaced with evident anxiety, his foot tapping restlessly against the tile as he gnawed on his bottom lip. Any other day, Yoongi would have said something snarky to rile him up but he couldn’t find the energy to even speak.

He knew both of them were thinking of the same thing and have the same fear: will Taehyung ever wake up again?

  -

  “Bastard. You gave us a scare there. I really ought to raid your room one of these days to throw that horrendous stuff away.”

“Yoongi, is that… is that you?”

“’Course it’s me.”

“You’re back?”

“I suppose you can say that, yeah.”

“Took you a while.”

“… Taehyung.”

“Don’t.”

“Why are you using again?”

“I think I’d like to have some rest now. That alright with you?”

  -

  Taehyung’s touches are agonising, the sweetest torment, and Yoongi finds himself wanting more, more and more.

Taehyung is riding him, head thrown back and lips falling, looking like an angel as his skin glistens in the afternoon light. His fingers grazes Yoongi’s neck before they rest on Yoongi’s shoulder, and it takes all Yoongi’s willpower not thrust vehemently into Taehyung.

Instead, he reaches out to Taehyung’s hand on his shoulder and brings it to his mouth, kissing the palm lightly once. Then, twice.

Taehyung looks down on him as he does so, hooded eyes filled with lust but there is something else in his eyes. Yoongi can’t really tell what it is, too distracted with Taehyung clenching around him. He cups Yoongi’s face, and Yoongi feels the tingles all over his skin again.

“You…” Taehyung manages before he grunts, increasing his speed and his hands find Yoongi’s shoulder for support.

Yoongi doesn’t get to hear the rest of the sentence as it ends with Taehyung whimpering before his body gives in to the pleasure, limbs quivering and eyes squeezed shut. He collapsed against Yoongi then, his hands gripping onto Yoongi so tightly that Yoongi’s sure it would leave marks.

But Yoongi doesn’t mind.

If it’s Taehyung, he is always fine with it.

  -

  “You… shot a man for me.”

“That’s what mates do, right?”

“Yoongi, you—”

“He was going to hurt you, Taehyung. I won’t let that happen to you.”

“Well then.”

“Well.”

“… Thanks.”

“No worries. It’s like, we’re indestructible together, aren’t we?”

“You’re saying that as if we’re super heroes.”

“Maybe we are. I did just save you from that man though.”

“Well, I’m not. A super hero, I mean. But I am starving. How do you feel about Thai food?”

  -

  Taehyung is utterly and devastatingly beautiful like this — when he writhes underneath Yoongi, letting Yoongi touch every inch of his golden skin, lips spilling the most obscene yet wonderful noises, trusting Yoongi and only Yoongi to take care of him.

Taehyung comes first, back arching and thighs trembling as he paints his stomach and chest white. Yoongi pulls out, knowing how terribly sensitive Taehyung is and touches himself. His elbow is propping him up on Taehyung’s side, knees on the mattress in between Taehyung’s legs.

“Let me,” Taehyung pants, hand enveloping Yoongi’s cock. “Let me help.”

Yoongi groans when Taehyung begins to stroke him, eyebrows furrowing in concentration as he buries himself in the crook of Taehyung’s neck. He kisses the skin there, inhaling Taehyung’s scent, restraining himself from biting as he knows Taehyung hates having marks on his body.

He moans Taehyung’s name like a mantra, and he is unable to stop himself when he feels it coming.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” he murmurs against Taehyung’s skin and for a moment, Taehyung’s hand stills.

He collapses on top of Taehyung when he comes, kissing Taehyung’s jaw before forcing himself to move to the side. His chest is heaving, lungs desperate for oxygen and when his breathing is steady, he swallows before turning to Taehyung.

Taehyung has his gaze glued on the ceiling, but Yoongi knows his mind is somewhere else.

He takes the chance to go to the bathroom and wet the towel to clean both of them before he wears his shorts.

He waits for Taehyung to say his usual thanks and leave, but he doesn’t.

There’s a small spark in Yoongi’s chest. Hope. Maybe Taehyung wouldn’t be so quick to leave this time

Yoongi sits on the bed, looking at Taehyung whose brows are furrowed in concentration. He’s thinking. Deducing. Yoongi rakes his brain for the cases Namjoon handed to them this week and wonder which one is so challenging that it made Taehyung stay rooted in bed after they had sex.

Yoongi’s about to leave Taehyung to his thought, when Taehyung voices out, “Stay, please.”

There’s the spark in his chest again. Growing bigger this time.

Yoongi stays.

“I can’t, you know.”

“Sorry?”

Taehyung still has his eyes on the ceiling, refusing to look at Yoongi. When he does turn to Yoongi, he swallows before saying it again, “I can’t.”

Yoongi narrows his eyes, confusion written all over his face. He waits for Taehyung’s usual, “Think, Yoongi! Use your brain!” but it doesn’t come. It must be a miracle that Taehyung is holding himself back from scolding Yoongi. He is about to ask when it hit him.

Oh.

There’s a lump in Yoongi’s throat, and he tries to blink the wetness away from his eyes as long as possible.

“I can’t lose you, Yoongi.”

“You won’t, I promise.”

“No, it’s not—” Taehyung sighs, sitting up. He looks much younger like this, worries etched in his brows and lips parting slightly. “Don’t promise me, Yoongi. Please. I…”

There is a flicker of vulnerability on his face as he looks away and Yoongi sees the fear that he tries so hard to hide.

What is it that you’re so afraid of?

“Do you… not feel the same way?” It comes out as a whisper, and Yoongi internally winces.

“No, no. I do. In fact, I really do. But,”— And there it is, the but — “we can’t. You don’t want me like that.”

Yoongi isn’t aware that he’s holding his breath until he feels the need to inhale. He was not sure of Taehyung’s feelings before – the man rarely shows emotions unless it’s frustration or anger – but after Taehyung admits it, he feels a small wave of relief washing over him but it is red that Yoongi sees.

Just as it comes, the spark of hope in his chest vanishes.

How dare Taehyung tells Yoongi what to feel?

“I do want you like that. I’m,” Yoongi stops to take a deep breath, his fingers twitch on his thigh as Taehyung looks up. He fights the impulse to run his fingers through Taehyung’s curls. He swallows, voice on the edge of pleading as he says, “I’m fucking in love with you.”

“I’m not the one you want to be with, Yoongi.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Yoongi’s shouting now as he stands up from the bed, startling Taehyung. “You don’t get to tell me who I want to be with, because I know. Because I know it’s you. For a clever person, you can be so daft sometimes. How can you not fucking realise that I’ve been in love with you since forever?”

Taehyung’s jaw tightens, scrutinizing Yoongi’s move. Yoongi waits for him to reply, burning rage hissed through his body and he realise that he’s panting.

“I know…” Taehyung answers, voice so soft that Yoongi is slightly taken aback. He’s always clear when he speaks, and hearing his voice being lowered to a whisper causes a pang in Yoongi’s chest. “It dawned on me when you kissed my hand. That day, on your armchair. I see the way you look at me, Yoongi. When you think I’m not looking. I… I see you too, you know.”

Yoongi’s voice breaks as he asks, “So why?”

“I’d get bored of you, you know how I am. I’d grow to hate you for holding me back. I’d hate you with my whole being for being such a waste of my time.”

“You bloody liar,” Yoongi chuckles, but it’s laced with pure dejection. “You’re lying to me, Taehyung. You’re slipping into one of your fucking personas. I’m not a victim, Taehyung. What the fuck are you lying for?”

Yoongi sees how Taehyung’s adam’s apple bobs, and yet he can’t seem to find it in him to relish this rare moment where he manages to properly shut Taehyung up.

“You desire having a family. I can’t give you that.”

“Can’t we think of that when the time comes? I do love a family, yeah, I do but that’s not important now.”

“Not ever, Yoongi. I can’t— I can’t.” Taehyung slumps his shoulders in defeat, pleading eyes looking up to Yoongi.

Yoongi manages to restrain himself from holding Taehyung’s face, from peppering kisses on his cheeks, from embracing him. He looks much younger, the vulnerability evident in his face.

“You deserve that, Yoongi. Just not with me.”

“I love you,” Yoongi whispers, feeling the tears in his eyes. He doesn’t realise that he’s already sitting down again, fists gripping on the sheet of the mattress.

“I know.”

“Can’t we… make it work?”

“One day, you’ll decide you don’t want me anymore. One day, you’ll realise how dull your life is. You’ll decide that you’ve had enough, that I’m not enough. One day, you’ll leave me and I… I can’t take it. You’ll break me, Yoongi. You’ll… you’ll destroy me.”

Yoongi’s breath hitches, the words he wants to say get caught in his throat. He reaches his hand out to caress Taehyung’s cheek, and when Taehyung opens his eyes, he sees longing and fear there.

“I won’t, I promise. Hey, we’re indestructible together, remember?”

Taehyung huffs a weak laugh, there’s mistiness in his eyes now. With a smile, he murmurs, “How can we, when you’re the only one who can destroy me?”

Yoongi’s lips part slightly, the words that leaves Taehyung’s lips knock the breath out of Yoongi’s lungs. And there it is, the truth. The thing that Taehyung is so afraid of.

Taehyung holds his hand that’s still on his cheek, before pulling it away.

“Thank you, Yoongi.”

Without looking back, Taehyung walks out of the room, leaving Yoongi alone to collect bits of his shattered heart.

   -

  ✉ From: Kim Namjoon

Is Taehyung OK? He’s not replying to any of my messages and he hasn’t pestered me for cases at all

  -

  Taehyung doesn’t come out of his room for three days. His bedroom is locked, and he doesn’t answer when Yoongi knocks. Yoongi still has work, so he wakes up in the morning as he usually does. He used to love the mornings, but now he dreads it. The living room is too quiet, and Taehyung isn’t there.

The kitchen is the same as it was three days ago; Taehyung’s microscope and experiment jars are still on top of the counter. Yoongi doesn’t dare move them, not after he and Taehyung had a row that one time Yoongi moved a beaker slightly to the left.

He’s worried that Taehyung isn’t eating, but after seeing the cups and plates on the dishwasher, Yoongi surmises that Taehyung does feed himself while Yoongi is away.

On the fourth day, however, Taehyung finally comes out of his room.

Yoongi is surprised, but mostly relieved when he sees Taehyung in his chair, seemingly to be deep in his thoughts.

“Morning,” Yoongi greets as he puts the kettle to boil.

He supposes that he might as well pretend that nothing happens, knowing that Taehyung hates bringing up the past.

“I had agreed to be involved with government matters from now on.”

Yoongi raises a brow, opening the cabinet to grab two teacups. He clears his throat, putting a teabag in each of them. “That, um, great.”

“It requires training. It’ll take months. I’d be relocated somewhere far after it ends.”

“Sounds confidential,” Yoongi replies, pouring hot water into his cup. “Seokjin must be thrilled.”

“There’s a chance I am never to return back home. Ever.”

Ah.

Yoongi freezes, finally piecing it all together. He nearly wants to laugh at the irony of it all— how Taehyung gladly accepts a job offer he’s been pressured to take for years, just so he could leave Yoongi. Just so he could fucking leave Yoongi first.

Yoongi placed the kettle back down on the stove with more force than necessary before swivelling to face Taehyung, one hand on the counter and another on his hip. He feels the anger rising inside him again, and the memories from the past few days emerges, making his chest clench.

“Fuck you.”

Taehyung closes his eyes as he inhales.

Tea forgotten, Yoongi stomps towards Taehyung, his blood catching fire with rage and knuckles turning white on his sides. “You’re such a fucking coward. A bloody idiot. An asshole,” he fumes, rage coating every single syllable.

“I’d be gone in the afternoon,” Taehyung informs. He isn’t looking at Yoongi as he does so. “The rent will be paid in full every month, so you’d still be able to—”

“For fuck’s sake!” Yoongi groans exasperatedly. “For once, can you stop being a dick for a second?”

Hearing Taehyung letting out a sigh only makes Yoongi’s blood boil even more. But he should have known that he can never stay angry at Taehyung for too long, he learns that he’s just unable to. Yoongi unfurls his fists as his eyes softens, the raging fire in his chest dissipates, and all he feels is the weight of despair threatening to crush him to the Earth’s core.

Don’t go, please.

Yoongi swallows down the pleads that are working their way to his throat, willing the tears he feels forming to not fall.

What Yoongi wants to say is this: “Stay, please, I need you here.”

But instead, what comes out his mouth is, “Do as you please.” Yoongi’s voice is brittle, and he abruptly turns to leave before he could let the pressure building behind his eyes break him.

   -

  ✉ From: Kim Seokjin

Min Yoongi, I’ll have you know that my brother is in good hands. - KSJ

  ✉ From: Kim Seokjin

I will make sure he’d be back unharmed and not for long. It might take a while, but do not worry about it. - KSJ

  ✉ From: Kim Seokjin

I must say I am impressed how you manage to convince him to finally put his skills to good use.

For that, I thank you. - KSJ

     -

   Yoongi moves out of their shared apartment a week after Taehyung left.

He can’t bear to sleep in a room that smells like Taehyung, can’t sit in his own living room because even if Taehyung is not there, he is there— his armchair, the bullet holes he put inside the walls, his collection of limited first edition books, his microscope, his experiments and even his damned violin. There are still two toothbrushes in the bathroom, Taehyung’s hair products are still taking up space in the cabinet, his expensive fruit scented wash is still at the edge of the tub.

How dare Taehyung leave all his stuff lying around, as if he’s going to come back?

He always does come back to Yoongi, he knows. But not this time. Yoongi knows Taehyung is never coming back again.

   -

  Days move slower without Taehyung and slowly, Yoongi pieces himself back together. Work is a perfect distraction, now that he moves to a hospital where he has his own office and perform a couple of surgeries in a day.

He tries not to think about Taehyung that much, but there are nights where even the littlest thing reminds him of Taehyung.

He doesn’t want to count the days he spent without Taehyung, because as much as he hates it, he knows a small part of him still hope that Taehyung would come back. Finding Yoongi would not be difficult; Seokjin has control over the security in the country, and from the texts he sends, it implies that Seokjin knows exactly where he is.

But still… still, he locks that piece of hope in a box and buries it deep down.

No use crying over spoilt milk.

Over a person who’s scared of their own feelings.

Over a person who leaves without a proper goodbye.

Over a person who leaves because they’re afraid to be left first.

  -

   Yoongi’s Sunday morning is interrupted by the buzzing doorbell. He’s about to do the paper’s crossword puzzle when he hears it. He assumes it’s Namjoon, but Namjoon always text before he comes over. He stands from his chair and hope that it’s not his date from Friday. He had forgotten to inform her that it just won’t work.

But the person standing in his doorway isn’t a petite girl with luscious brunette locks.

It’s a man with ridiculous, branded coat. His curly hair is a tad longer now, almost reaching his shoulders but Yoongi can spot him from a mile away.

Yoongi’s heart stutters, and Taehyung has the audacity to give him a small yet apologetic smile.

“I’ve done calculations,” Taehyung begins. Yoongi nearly chuckles, his heart already soaring from the eccentric greeting. At this point, it doesn’t even faze Yoongi anymore. “I’ve run all the possibilities in my head, and there’s not… there’s not one where I didn’t see you there.”

Yoongi folds his arms, shaking his head and gives Taehyung a long look. He should be angry, shouldn’t he? He should start throwing punches and hurl Taehyung down the stairs. It’s what he ought to do, it’s what he should do. Instead, his heart swells twice its size, the warmth in his chest spreads all over his body.

Taehyung doesn’t say it, but Yoongi knows what he means.

I love you.

“Good morning,” Yoongi says. “How long has it been?”

The reply comes in a heartbeat, “A year, three months and four days.”

Yoongi tries to tamper his smile, but fails as it reaches his ears. Taehyung always comes back. Always.

“Come in.”

   -

   ✉ From: Kim Seokjin

I believe my brother is safe with you? - KSJ

 ✉ To: Kim Seokjin

He always is when he’s with me.

   ✉ From: Kim Seokjin

Good. Even the other agents cannot stand his sulking and brooding.

Your absence has affected him rather greatly. - KSJ

  ✉ From: Kim Seokjin

I don’t usually say this but thank you. - KSJ

[furtheradvofsanta]

Santa Claus Letter 2019

Every year for Christmas I write a story for my nephew in the form of a letter from Santa. I recognize this is after Christmas, but we’re exchanging presents late this year, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This time I was inspired by how much I hated The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Enjoy!

-----------------------------------------------------

Santa’s Workshop

Beyond the Riphean Mountains

Beyond the North Wind

True North Pole

December 20, 2019

My dearest [name],

I am sending you this letter on the occasion of your fifth Christmas, but I worry it may arrive to you late. You see, I’m not sending it from home, despite the return address I have attached at the top. I worry the mail here is not quite as efficient as it is at home, so this letter might arrive well after Christmas, for which I apologize. It’s something of a long story, which I think you will soon come to understand.

Anyway, you won’t believe the year we’ve had here at the workshop. You wouldn’t expect that after our troublesome visit from the gremlins last year that we would have another problem that threatened to keep Christmas from happening on time for a second year in a row, but sometimes things just happen that way. I hope we don’t make a habit of it. This time, at least, nothing surprised us at the workshop that almost blew us all up. Our home was safe this time, but we had to travel far away to make sure everyone else was safe, too.

I believe I told you last year that I take every chance that I can to visit my friend the Man in the Moon, but I don’t think I told you anything about him. I’m sure you’ve seen him; he’s just up there in the sky hanging out most of the time. But I’ll bet you didn’t know he has a name and a wife and a dog, and I’d guess you don’t know how he got up there in the first place. Well, I’ll tell you, and you won’t have to wonder anymore.

His name is Cain, a name that unfortunately bears a rather bad history, and this Cain was a bit of a troublemaker himself when he was still on Earth. Oh yes, he was once a regular Earth person, but that’s been many years ago now. One night--a Christmas Eve, in fact--Cain was out with his dog gathering sticks for the fire when he passed a neighbor’s garden that was full of cabbages. His head should have told him that stealing was wrong, but he couldn’t hear it over the sound of his empty belly telling him that cabbage soup would make a fine Christmas dinner.

He shifted all the sticks he was gathering into a bundle on his back and began loading up his arms with stolen cabbages. He was so excited about having soup for dinner that he didn’t notice that a handsome man in a fine suit was now standing in the garden watching him.

“Would you rob me on Christmas?” the man asked Cain.

“Christmas on Earth or Monday in heaven makes no difference to a man in need of supper,” Cain replied.

The man thought about this for a moment and then asked Cain if he would rather burn in the sun or freeze on the moon. Cain laughed at this, because it seemed an impossible question, but he supposed he would rather freeze on the moon.

“Then may it ever be a Moon-day in heaven for you,” the man said, and he wished Cain to the moon, bundle of sticks and stolen cabbages and all. He’s been there ever since, because Death doesn’t know to look for him there. He’s not the first Man in the Moon--before him there was a man sent to the Moon by Moses as punishment for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, and then there was the shepherd Endymion who was beloved by the Moon--but he’s the only one now.

At least he’s not completely alone up there. He has his dog Phoebe to keep him company as he shines down on Earth and eats cabbages. There’s also a large rabbit constantly pounding rice into rice cakes, and a number of other strange things I notice every time I go to visit. They say the astronauts who have landed on the Moon have never seen these things, but explorers who have gone to the North Pole have never found my workshop either, so perhaps they just don’t know how to look properly.

You might be surprised to learn that the Man in the Moon is married. It’s true! He has a wife, but he only sees her once a year, at--you can probably guess--Christmas. The rest of the time she lives in a cave near the border of France and Germany, where she is greatly beloved and known affectionately by the people as Auntie Harry. Every Christmas, the great goose-footed fairy Auntie Harry leaves her cave and takes her donkey Marion to visit the good children of her region and leave them toys, candy, and treats (especially if they have left a snack of hay or turnips for Marion). When she has finished her task, she and Marion fly up to the Moon, where she and her husband Cain renew their wedding vows every year.

They say that if you know when to look, you can catch the Man in the Moon turning around once a year, on Christmas Eve, and that is true! He is turning around to see his wife, Auntie Harry, flying up to see him. He misses her so much during the year.

At any rate, it was Auntie Harry who tipped us off to all the trouble this year, and I am thankful for it! I don’t know what we would have done if she hadn’t been looking longingly up at the Moon from the mouth of her cave in France and noticed something was wrong. Something that looked like a long, bumpy, squirming tentacle, she said, appeared as if it was stretching its way up from the Earth to the Moon. We took a look with our most powerful telescopes and, sure enough, there was something like a tall, wiggling tower growing up out of what appeared to be eastern Germany.

I decided I needed to take a closer look, so I had Rupert, our farmhand, prepare the sleigh with my fastest reindeer so I could go see what this strange and alarming mass was. I knew, however, that I would have to be careful, as this part of Germany was under the protection of the small blonde angel whom they call the Christ Child (not to be confused with the actual baby Jesus). While the Christ Child is a loving gift-bringer and protector of children to much of Europe, she does not care for me very much, and she doesn’t appreciate it when she feels that I’m intruding on her territory, which she is very protective of. So I knew I would need to stay high in the sky to avoid being seen by her, lest she send against me her frightening companion, the walking scarecrow, Hans Trapp. Fortunately (in a way), the mysterious tower had grown far above the ground and up into the sky, so I didn’t have to get too close to the actual city.

You will never guess what I found, not if you had a million guesses. Was it a giant finger? No. Was it an enormous carrot, stretching out for the Moon Rabbit to nibble on? Oh, if only. Was it one billion marshmallows, hoping to escape into space? No. You will never guess. This miles-high tower that was now, I would have to guess, nearly halfway to the Moon was in fact a giant pile of squeaking, squirming, black-eyed, long-tailed little mice, all stacked on top of each other as if trying to turn themselves into a stairway to heaven.

What could be the cause of this? What could be the reason for it? I had no way of knowing, so I pulled the reins of the reindeer and told them to fly up so that perhaps I could see what was at the top. I have never seen so many mice in one place, and I could hardly guess where they had come from. If you have not seen any mice this year, it is probably because they left their home in [state] to join this tower of mice above Germany. How did they all get there? I can only imagine the number of mice sneaking across the ocean in boats and planes, following some irresistible order that only mice could hear. I shudder to think of it, frankly.

When I arrived at the top, I saw something that should not have surprised me. Which is a thing that should surprise you, because the thing I am about to describe is in fact quite surprising, so the fact that I shouldn’t have been surprised tells you the amount of surprising things I see on any given day.

What I saw was a mouse much larger than all the others, who stood on his hind legs and wore a long, purple military coat with a sabre strapped to his side, and a broad, fur-lined cloak over the top. At the top of his body rose seven heads, hissing and squeaking orders at the mice below him, and each gray head had a shining golden crown on top. This was, perhaps needless to say, the Mouse King.

You might have heard of the Mouse King, as his misdeeds are fairly well known, especially the uproar he caused at the Stahlbaum household so many years ago, but you may not know how such a scoundrel came to be. His mother was, of course, the Mouse Queen, and he inherited more than just the Kingdom of Mice from her. Her name was Madame Mouserinks, and in addition to being a queen, she was also a powerful sorceress, and a troublemaker of some renown, to boot.

You see, many years ago in a kingdom far away, a queen (a human queen) was making her husband the king’s favorite dinner of sausages, when Mouserinks tricked the queen into letting her eat all of the lard the queen needed to make the sausages. This made the sausages too dry, which made the king very angry, and so he swore revenge on the Mouse Queen. He summoned the court inventor, a rather ingenious clockmaker named Drosselmeier, to make the cleverest possible mouse traps to capture Mouserinks and her seven sons.

The traps managed to capture the seven Mouse Princes, but the Mouse Queen escaped unscathed, and she swore her own revenge against the king and queen for the loss of her sons. As it happens, the king and queen had just had a child of their own, a beautiful princess named Pirlipat. Knowing that Mouserinks would like come after her child due to the capture of her own, the queen assigned seven nurses to sit in Pirlipat’s room and hold seven cats--the famous tomcat Herr Schnurr, as he was known, and his family--in their laps, constantly petting them to make sure they were ever awake and alert to look out for Mouserinks and her sons.

But, as happens to people when given a boring job, or as happens to cats whenever they feel like, all seven nurses and all seven cats fell into a deep sleep. And so it was that they missed the moment that Madame Mouserinks used her magic to transform the beautiful princess into a very strange creature indeed. Where once Pirlipat had had the face of an angel, now she had a huge head attached to her tiny body, with large staring eyes, a large toothy grin, and a shock of white hair.

The king was outraged and set the task of curing his daughter on the poor court inventor, Drosselmeier, threatening to cut off his head if he could not solve this problem in a mere thirty days. Even a clever man like Drosselmeier was worried he wouldn’t be able to solve such a riddle in such a short time. And so he went to visit his friend the court astronomers to see if there was any help to be gained by observing the stars.

From this visit, Drosselmeier was able to determine that the princess could only be cured by eating the meat of the great nut Crackatook, the hardest, most delicious nut in the world. How would one go about cracking the hardest nut in the world, you might ask, and that would be a fine question. It turns out the only way was for a young man who had never yet shaved nor worn boots to crack open the shell with his teeth and hand the princess the nut with his eyes closed before taking seven steps backwards without stumbling.

This, as you might imagine, was a difficult mission even for Drosselmeier’s genius. Well, to make an already long story somewhat shorter, Drosselmeier traveled the four corners of the Earth--plus a previously undiscovered fifth corner that he called “zorth”--only to discover both the nut and the young man were to be found in his hometown of Nuremberg in Germany.

He found the great nut Crackatook in the shop of his brother Christoph, the greatest dollmaker in all of Nuremberg (which is no small feat, as Nuremberg has long been famous for its toymakers. Some are even almost as good as I am. I would say the Drosselmeier brothers are the closest anyone has ever come to the quality of my workshop, so I am glad they are my friends and not my rivals!). Also in that shop, he found his nephew, the seventeen-year-old Nathaniel Drosselmeier, who had never shaved and never worn boots. What’s more, the young Drosselmeier was so good at cracking nuts that the impressed young ladies of Nuremberg had taken to calling him Nathaniel Nussknacker, a name that means “nut-cracker.”

With quite a bit of to-do that we can skip over for now, Nathaniel Nussknacker was presented with the chance to crack the great nut Crackatook and rescue Princess Pirlipat and earn a great reward for his uncle and marriage of the princess for himself. He managed to crack the uncrackable nut in his teeth, handed the meat to the princess with his eyes closed, and began his seven steps backwards. As he did so, the princess ate the nut and was returned to her normal, beautiful self: lily white skin, eyes of azure blue, and golden curls in her hair! The king rejoiced, trumpets blared, drums rang ou! But at his seventh step, young Nathaniel Nussknacker stepped on and crushed Madame Mouserinks, who had just come crawling out of a hole in the floor! The boy stumbled, and in an instant, he had transformed just as the princess had: a huge ugly head with great white teeth, huge round eyes, and hair and beard of cottony white. If you have ever seen a nutcracker, you can picture how the young Nussknacker was changed.

No need to worry, though, as young Nathaniel did eventually find the true love that returned him to normal through defeating Madame Mouserinks’s seven sons who had been reborn as the seven-headed Mouse King and saving the Stahlbaum household. When young Marie Stahlbaum promised to love him despite his looks, she broke the curse on him, and the two traveled together to the Kingdom of the Dolls, where they were married and live as king and queen to this day.

And so you can see why I was so concerned to see that the Mouse King had returned and was planning to make trouble for the Man in the Moon. I suspected that the Mouse King had heard that the moon was made of green cheese (perhaps you have heard this, too) and thought that he and all the mice on Earth could climb to the moon and eat cheese to their hearts’ content without worry of cats or mousetraps or shrieking people swatting them with brooms.

I was also concerned because the presence of the Mouse King meant that the base of this column of mice was certainly in Nuremberg. Nuremberg is perhaps the city where the Christ Child is best known and at her greatest strength. There was no way I could go there, either to inspect the base of the mice column or--more importantly--to go talk to my friend Drosselmeier and his nephew Nathaniel Nussknacker to see if they could help me defeat the Mouse King, as they had done before.

Likewise, most of my toughest companions would likewise be recognized and unwelcome in Nuremberg: the Krampus, Belsnickel, and the Klaubauf would all be detected immediately. Rupert and Father Whipper would likely be more welcome, as the two of them sometimes help the Christ Child, but both worried about possibly coming into conflict with the terrifying Hans Trapp: Rupert is too kind-hearted to fight, and Father Whipper is too cowardly. And while Pete is my most trusted apprentice, this job was too dangerous for him and his brothers, no matter how much they might beg me to go to the moon.

As there was no way I could go on my own--in any of my many disguises--there was only one choice left: my wife, Mrs. Claus, a fearless woman who is definitely sturdy enough to handle the cold of the moon. The only question was how she would get there. My reindeer, horses, and donkeys were just as likely to be recognized as I was, and she needed something that could fly her to the moon, and fast. There was only one real choice: our fierce and loyal ally, Lunicursor, king of the griffins of the Riphean Mountains.

Once he had agreed to help us, Mrs. Claus and the griffin king headed out for Nuremberg. I myself had a number of quick stops to make myself before I could head to the moon. First, I wanted to make sure that Christmas would be taken care of if I somehow found myself trapped on the moon. Stranger things had happened before, and I have found myself captured by less powerful foes than the Mouse King, and time was running short before the big night.

As such, I made the quick trip from the North Pole down to the small nation of Iceland and out to the vast lava fields were Iceland’s many trolls live. There I found the thirteen troll brothers who love to make trouble for the children of Iceland at Christmas time by gobbling up their Christmas treats or slamming doors when they try to sleep, but they also delight the children by filling up their shoes with toys and candy, not just one night, but thirteen nights, one for each brother. They are called the Yule Lads, and they live in the lava fields of Iceland with their mother, a hideous ogress who likes to gobble up naughty children, and her cat, an enormous beast who looks for kids who did not receive new clothes for Christmas. (Next time you get socks for Christmas instead of a toy, be grateful, not sad! It’s better not to have the Yule Cat after you, I promise!)

By the time I got to the lava fields, the first few brothers had already set out for town, where they would bother families by drinking all their milk and scraping all the good leftover bits out of the pan with stubby little fingers. Luckily, the fourth brother--who is known as Spoon Licker because of his tendency to lick all the spoons in a house, hoping that there’s delicious sauce or cake batter left on there--was still to be found. I was able to get him to stop licking a spoon long enough to promise that he and his brothers would make sure presents got delivered to all the children of the world if I didn’t make it back in time. The Yule Lads could be hard to predict, but they weren’t nearly as naughty as they used to be before I taught them that helping children was more fulfilling than teasing them, and with thirteen of them plus help from Pete and Rupert and the elves, I thought surely they could manage to do the job I normally do in one night by myself.

I also had one other favor to ask them that I will tell you about momentarily.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Claus and Lunicursor had made their way as quick as lightning to Nuremberg, where they managed to slip unnoticed to the home of the clockmaker Drosselmeier. They immediately recognized him by his eyepatch, his shabby frock coat, and his shocking wig made of spun glass. He welcomed them warmly and promised to help as much as he could, as he was shocked and concerned to learn about the Mouse King’s return.

Soon Drosselmeier led Mrs. Claus and Lunicursor to a wardrobe with folding doors that was full of traveling cloaks lined with fox fur. Hiding above a large cape fastened to the ceiling of the wardrobe by a piece of lace was a ladder made of cedar wood. Climbing this ladder was the secret entrance to the Kingdom of the Dolls. You may have heard of similar secret doors in other wardrobes; some wardrobes are just that way.

Mrs. Claus and Lunicursor emerged with Drosselmeier in the Field of Sugarcandy, where everything was made of candied orange peel, burnt almonds, and sugared raisins. Soon they passed through the Forest of Christmas and over the River of Orange Juice, past the Village of Sweet Cake, along the River of Rose Essence full of golden dolphins, through the Wood of Preserved Fruits, and finally, to the capital, the City of Candied Fruits.

The capital always carries the scent of roses and has a slight pink glow to it, which comes from a lake filled with silvery pink waves on which swim silver swans with golden collars and jumping fish that shimmer like diamonds. It was on the other side of Rose Lake, past the noisy and bustling capital city, that the three came at last to Marzipan Castle. They found the king and queen--Nathaniel Nussknacker and his wife Marie--inside waiting for them.

Mrs. Claus quickly informed the young king--handsome in his coat marked with a giant golden spider, a sign of his membership in the knightly Order of the Golden Spider, which he had been awarded for saving Princess Pirlipat--that the trouble-making Mouse King had returned and that we at the North Pole required the help of the only man who had defeated him before.

Unfortunately, Nathaniel Nussknacker told Mrs. Claus that he would not be able to help us this time, as he had received word that the infamous giant Sweettooth had awakened and was returning to the capital with the goal of eating up Marzipan Castle. In the past, he had done great damage to the castle, eating the top of one tower and beginning toward the castle’s great dome before the people of the capital promised him the city’s Almond and Honey District in exchange for leaving the castle alone.

Likewise, when Mrs. Claus asked if the king had any word on the whereabouts of the descendants of the cat Herr Schnurr, who had frightened Madame Mouserinks in the past, he told her that he had unfortunately lost touch with that famed cat since taking up the throne in the doll kingdom.

Mrs. Claus was disappointed that King Nathaniel would not be able to join her in battle against the Mouse King, but she understood that he needed to protect his home against the giant. As she was preparing to get on Lunicursor’s back and fly back out of the Kingdom of the Dolls, however, Nathaniel Nussknacker stopped her and offered her the one bit of help he could: the use of the great sword Crackatook, which he carried strapped to his side at all times. The sword was named after the hard nut, as the shell of that great nut had been coated in gold and placed at the sabre’s pommel, where the name Crackatook could be seen carved into the shell in Chinese characters. The magic of the nut passed on to the sword, ensuring that its blade would never break or grow dull. It was also the only sword that had ever defeated the Mouse King before, as it was the same cavalry sabre that had previously belonged to Queen Marie’s brother, Fritz, who had lent it to the Nutcracker for his finally duel against the Mouse King.

Mrs. Claus thanked the king and his uncle for their great help and promised to return the sword in good condition (which is always important when someone lends you something that has great meaning to them). She strapped the sword Crackatook to her side, and she and King Lunicursor sped over Rose Lake, out of the Kingdom of the Dolls, out of the wardrobe, out of Nuremberg, and up to the moon!

All of this was accomplished while I myself was still meeting with Spoon-Licker in the lava fields, so it was of some importance that I make my way to the moon as quickly as possible so that I could aid Mrs. Claus and help protect the Man in the Moon from the Mouse King’s ravenous armies of mice. However, even my fastest reindeer--more rapid than eagles though they may be--are not as fast as King Lunicursor when he races to the moon, and so I knew I would need to take a shortcut. And so I planned to make my way to the moon by way of the stars.

I flew my sleigh at all speeds back up to the North Pole, where I called out to my dear friend, Callisto, the North Polar Bear. She lives most of her life among the stars above the North Pole, where she and her son Arcas help remind people which way is north. After I called out her name, she and her cub--both bigger than houses--lumbered down from their place in the sky. I explained the situation to her, which was not a surprise to her, as she had seen the pile of mice reaching up into the sky herself. She understood the urgency of our situation immediately, and of course offered to carry me and my sleigh up into the Star Land, especially once I promised to reward her and Arcas with large vats of their favorite soda once I had returned.

The Star Land is the home of the Star Man, who is the Christmas gift-bringer in western parts of Poland. He lives up in the mystical Star Land together with the Little Star, who is the star that the Three Kings saw at the first Christmas, and who brings gifts herself to children in southern Poland. Together with them are large numbers of Star Boys, who spend the Twelve Days of Christmas wandering around singing carols and welcoming the Three Kings, and a host of small angels, who also help deliver gifts. Normally, the gate between the Star Land and the Earth only opens on Christmas Eve after a child has seen the first star in the sky, but access between the worlds is easy when you live among the stars like Callisto and Arcas.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to speak with my friend the Star Man, but I spoke with him enough to explain why I was passing through his land so that I wouldn’t appear rude. I promised him I would return soon for a longer visit, during which I would bring some pierogi, herring, and poppy seed noodles for us to share.

With that settled, I quickly re-entered my sleigh and set off for the moon. You might know that there are no stars between the Earth and the Moon, and that is true, but the Star Land is a magical kind of in-between place that people with calculators and telescopes mostly don’t have the ability to see anymore. Fortunately, if you do know the way, the trip from the Star Land to the Moon is quite quick.

When I arrived at the Moon’s surface, the scene was quite a mess! The moon was simply covered with mice, so that it looked like it had a wiggly brown carpet on it. There were some empty patches, however, that were not covered in vermin, and it was in those patches that I could see my friends: the Man in the Moon, Cain, fighting off mice with the thorn branches he usually carries on his back, and his little dog Phoebe barking and snapping at them; the moon rabbits abandoning their rice cakes to smash at mice with their hammers; and of course, Mrs. Claus and Lunicursor fighting valiantly against the mouse hordes with beak, claw, and the unbreakable sword Crackatook!

Though they were doing their best, they were greatly outnumbered, so I knew something needed to be done soon. And so I called out “On, Dasher! On, Dancer!” and, well, you know the rest. And at top speed I circled around the Moon, light side and dark side, until I finally spied the hideous, seven-headed, seven-crowned Mouse King, spurring on his army to swarm the Moon.

I lowered the sleigh to hover near to him and called out to catch his attention.

“Mouse King!” I shouted. “Call off your armies! You can’t eat the Moon, we need it! It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to everyone! Besides, the Moon hasn’t been made of cheese for hundreds of years!”

“Bah!” called the Mouse King with seven voices at once. “The Moon is mine by right of conquest! If you want it, you should fight harder for it! I know you’re hiding the cheese somewhere!”

I hadn’t really expected that reasoning would work with him, so I knew I would have to use my backup plan.

“Mouse King!” I shouted again. “Nice purple cloak! Is that new?”

I could tell now that the Mouse King was annoyed with me. “No, you fool! This cloak has been in the royal family of the Mouse Kingdom for generations! New clothes are for peasants!”

“That’s what I thought you might say,” I replied, reaching back to open my magic sack. “I have someone who might want to meet you, then.”

Remember I told you I asked Spoon-Licker for one more favor? Besides asking them to cover for me in case I didn’t make it back for Christmas, I also asked if I could borrow their cat. You know, the enormous, shaggy cat that hunts down those who didn’t get new clothes for Christmas?

Well, once I opened the mouth of my sack, the Yule Cat, who had not particularly cared for being cooped up in a magical bag, leaped out as if he had been in a bathtub where the water was too hot. He made straight for the King of the Mice, and the King’s once fearless army soon found themselves scattering like their feet were on fire. The mice scrambled in hordes and jumped back to the Earth, many splashing in the ocean, some crashing onto the land, some going who knows where. It may be generations before all the mice find their way back home.

I’m not sure what happened to the Mouse King in all the chaos. All I could find was a pile of seven crowns and a tattered purple cloak. The Yule Cat can’t speak, but I’m not even sure he would tell. All I know is that he seemed much more contented when he went back into the bag.

Anyway, the Moon is safe again, for now. I will need to return the Yule Cat to Iceland, and Mrs. Claus will need to return the sword Crackatook to the Kingdom of the Dolls, but even with all that, I hope to still have Christmas ready in time and without many mistakes.

I hope this letter finds you well, even if not on time. I hope you have or will have had a merry Christmas! Maybe a happy New Year as well! Hopefully we both have an easy time of it in the coming year. Until then, I remain:

Your friend,

Santa Claus

P.S. I am sending along to you a book with more of the story of Marie and the Nutcracker so you can learn more about how the two of them met. It’s somewhat different from what I told you in this letter—which is not surprising, as there are many different versions of this famous story; sometimes they even call Marie Clara instead, or leave out the story of the hard nut Crackatook altogether—but I promise I told the story to you just as it was told to me by Godfather Drosselmeier. I also sent along small toys of myself and the Christ Child that I hope you will like.

P.P.S. If you have the book The Alphabet of Christmas, you can see pictures of some of the different people from this letter, like the Christ Child (under C), Father Whipper (F), Star Man (G), Krampus (K), Rupert (R), Auntie Harry (T), the Yule Lads (Y), and Pete (Z).

[enchanted-prose]

#3 To Stress A Tobias

This occurs simultaneously with #2 Joust!

Word Count: 2317

Characters: Amarinda, Imogen, Jaron, Tobias, Jolly (Original Character)

Notes: Just a little fun piece! 

No Editing, We Die Like Men. ENJOY OR ELSE

The sun was gleaming in a cloudless sky for the first time in several days. It was difficult to find the motivation to move out of the sunlight. Light poured in through the large windows peppered throughout Amarinda's room. Occasionally, the light reflected off of the many glass bottles lining the far wall, creating a flash of color.

Beautiful displays of light caused by different colored glass bottles filled with who-knows-what.

An unknown perk of being married to a physician in training.

Saints, was this how a cat felt when sleeping on a rock? Doused in sunlight and colorful reflections?

"Is it wrong that I'm more excited for this afternoon than I've been for weeks?" Imogen asked, lacing up both of her boots. "I know I shouldn't find it fun, terrorizing Tobias like this."

Amarinda grinned. She plucked at the loose strings on her borrowed pages' tunic, "I love terrorizing Tobias. Usually because he ends up giving a lecture and then breaking into the widest grin. I think he secretly likes being the one to make sure everybody's still alive after anything remotely enjoyable happens."

"He certainly doesn't seem that way," noted Imogen.

"Ah, I felt the same way too."

Imogen laughed, which made Amarinda laugh. It was easy to be herself when dressed as a petty thief. It was easy to let herself smile when preparing for an afternoon of fun with her best friend.

Oh, Tobias.

Truth be told, Amarinda didn't expect herself to fall head over heels for Tobias all those years ago, she'd expected to marry into the Carthyan throne.

But fate had a different plan for her, and Amarinda certainly wasn't complaining.

"Right, well," Amarinda stuffed her long brown hair into the ugliest cap she could find. "I've got a whole list of things that I want to get done before you and Jaron have to, ah, attend business."

"I don't like that devilish smirk, the only business being taken care of is completely official," but the pink tinge to Imogen's ears gave her away.

It was no secret that Jaron had made a sport of squeezing in, ah, personal business affairs into his busy schedule whenever he could.

Though it was definitely a secret that Imogen was the one encouraging Jaron.

Unable to stop herself, Amarinda began to fan her face, imitating Jaron to the best of her ability, "Oh Imogen, this joust is simply delightful. I love sitting down. Let's be completely behaved. And afterwards, we can go to the chapel and pray."

"Oh, shut up! You know how much of a chore it is to get Jaron into any kind of church!" Imogen's frustrated tone melted into a laugh. She grabbed a pillow, and hurled it at Amarinda's head.

It didn't take much effort from Amarinda to catch the pillow.

Even if Imogen had thrown the pillow with the intention to hit her target, Amarinda would've been able to catch it.

Sometimes being the princess from one of the strongest kingdoms in the realms paid off.

Amarinda could hold her own in a fight, no matter how much the other women in court tried to deny it.

The door creaked open, and Jaron slithered his way in. He'd already begun to smirk.

There'd be no getting rid of that smirk until Tobias had lectured the trio and then blushed when he realized that they enjoyed giving him a hard time.

"I've sent Roden, Mott, and Lord Feall off to search for the bandits. The Faola," Jaron said as he shamelessly tugged his tunic over his head and replaced it with a worn down shirt. "I don't know if I should wish them luck or tell them that this is becoming a wild goose chase."

"Roden won't stop until he knows why Feall was attacked," Amarinda pointed out. She made her way over to the massive bench resting in the sunlight.

"Maybe there's no underlying reason for the attack, though, and that's what I'm trying to get Roden to realize by sending him off."

Amarinda snorted.

Ever since the attack, Tobias brought up the Faola whenever he was near Roden or Mott, and he always tried to paint them as the good guys.

Tobias looked for the best in people.

It was one of the many things Amarinda loved about him.

At one point, Tobias began explaining the Faola to her. Of course, he was unaware of the fact that Amarinda knew much more than she let on.

Much more.

But she didn't have the heart to crush Tobias's ideas.

And she knew that maybe there was more to the Faola's story.

If she was correct with her assumptions, then Amarinda knew exactly why Feall had been attacked.

If she was incorrect in her assumptions, then Amarinda was grasping at Bymarian straws.

She would wait to give her information. She would wait until she had proof of her beliefs.

Until Tobias recognized that the Faola were just another gang.

Or that he'd been right the entire time.

"-and apparently there's going to be flavored ice, which I thought was a winter thing," Jaron was tugging on a holed boot.

Had she really been so trapped in her own thoughts as to not notice the conversation around her?

Wouldn't be the first time that happened.

"Amarinda came up with a list for all of us," Imogen said with a smile. "I think I'm the most excited to see the performers."

"Ah, but you'll want to be careful, some people are ridiculously good at picking pockets," interjected Amarinda.

"I'm excited for the food," Jaron kissed the top of Imogen's head, and followed the sweet gesture by flinging her braid over her face.

Imogen swatted him away, "Shoo! Shoo you starving boy!"

"No! Speak to me kindly! My heart bruises easier- ow!- than my skin!" He laughed, dodging Imogen's giggling blows. Jaron caught her by the wrists, and spun her into an embrace, "Now, what do you two say to leaving through the windows? Tobias will never see it coming. . ."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was only one instance where they nearly got caught.

Jaron insisted that he knew where one of the best troubadours in the realms was. He lead Amarinda and Imogen halfway across the festival grounds to one of the most elaborate temporary buildings they'd seen before.

Somebody had really gone and set up an imitation of a castle.

Amarinda couldn't believe it.

"Don't worry, he's a friend of mine," Jaron insisted as he stepped into the temporary castle, which turned out to be a massive tavern.

"Have you told me about him?" Amarinda asked.

She had a sinking feeling that she knew exactly who Jaron was talking about.

"I haven't told you," he shrugged his way past a pair of massive Gelynians. "But I have told Imogen. Even got him to come play while you and Tobias were out and about."

"He has the most wonderful voice and the cleverest songs," Imogen gripped Jaron's hand, and then reached out to Amarinda.

She took Imogen's hand, determined not to be lost in the crowd, "This troubadour, he doesn't happen to have a song in his repertoire about Roden, does he?"

"Oh, he definitely does," confirmed Imogen.

"It's actually really funny, it's not what I was expecting, that's for sure," Jaron added. "Ah, there he is! Hey! Jolly! Over here!"

All it took was one glance at the peacock green tunic, and Amarinda knew.

She knew Jolly all too well.

"Ah! Your, uh, my old friend!" Bellowed Jolly. He was strumming a loot. "It's good to see you! Have you brought me company?"

"This is my wife, Imogen, and my dear friend, Amarinda."

Jaron's wink nearly went unnoticed. However, Jolly nodded, and pushed the black haired girl next to him into the crowd, "Get me a drink, Merry, and don't come back unless it has cream and a cherry. Ah ha! Merry, cherry. My lyricism is a divine gift."

"I can tell," Amarinda didn't mean for her tone to suddenly become so dry.

Jolly was bad news wherever he went.

“I’ve written a new,” Jolly hiccuped, “-song. You’ll have to let me come sing it for you.”

“A new song?” Jaron’s eyes were glimmering with mirth when he looked back at Imogen and Amarinda.

“You’ll have to come sing it for us,” Imogen said. “Is it a happy one?”

“I suppose so, I wrote it about a bandit king from Bymar. Or maybe I should change it to bandit queen, that’s more true to the story.”

“True to what story?” Jaron asked, his grinning face sinking into a frown.

The tiny slip gave Amarinda’s suspicions even more traction. She remained silent, waiting for Jolly to explain himself.

“The story of- Merry’s coming back!”

“True to what story!?” Jaron repeated, but even he had to be aware of the fact that Jolly was no longer interested.

He got that way when he was drunk, Amarinda knew that much.

"Oh! Captain! The captain’s here too!" Jolly called, waving his hand. "Captain Harlowe's-"

They were gone in the blink of an eye.

Roden didn't impede on Jaron's tendency to cause trouble while disguised, but he did tend to tell people things that he wasn't supposed to.

Specifically Tobias.

They simply couldn't risk being caught.

"I didn't know that your friend was Jolly of Angelmarr," Amarinda said as soon as they were out of the temporary tavern.

Jolly was Bymarian, a native to the city Angelmarr.

He frequented Queen Danika's court.

Rumors followed him.

Rumors that were unfortunately mostly true.

"I didn't know you knew him," Jaron shrugged. "He's a fun bloke to be around."

"I suppose so, he's quite flamboyant."

"All the more reason to enjoy his company."

Amarinda was preparing to explain her distrust for Jolly, when Imogen squeaked in excitement.

Right there, in the middle of a grass arena, was a group of dancers in scarlet suits and headdresses made of ribbon.

They were breathing fire.

So, Amarinda bit her tongue.

She didn't have it in herself to spoil Imogen's obvious delight.

But she'd definitely point the situation out to Jaron later that evening.

The fire breathers swallowed torches, showed them to the crowd after they'd been extinguished, and then opened their mouths to the sky.

Fire leapt into the air.

If it hadn't been for a flash of a navy blue physician's coat, they would've stayed there longer, mesmerized by the fire breathers.

Imogen was still talking about it even after they'd run into other performers doing sill tricks with their pet monkeys.

Queen Danika had a monkey at one point, Amarinda barely remembered anything good about it. All the monkey did was shred fabrics and grab at people.

A little frightening for a young girl.

Tobias nearly caught up to them several times after the fire breathers.

And each time they managed to escape. . .

Until they met their fate at the hands of a toothless old woman.

Oh, Amarinda couldn't resist. She knew that she'd regret her actions the next day, and yet, not even that knowledge would stop her from what she was about to do.

Just an hour ago, Imogen took control of the trio, and dragged both Jaron and Amarinda to a rickety wagon manned by a rickety woman.

She had a single tooth hanging over her cracked lips.

Turned out she had a wicked sense of humor. She later told Amarinda she enjoyed pretending to be a fairytale witch at festivals.

She also confirmed that her trade had gotten her into boiling water before.

Literally.

The wagon was decorated like something out of a fairytale. Gilded cages held shimmering twigs inside, which the rickety woman insisted were fairies when children asked about them. The rickety woman sat in a chair near a cauldron.

A boiling cauldron.

Every so often, the woman would lower a veil over her face, turn her back to the crowd, and lift a large spoon from the cauldron.

She never revealed what she was making. . . Until she deemed the crowd large enough.

The rickety old woman was making the best miniature apple pies Amarinda had ever eaten.

And Amarinda had eaten some very fine pies before.

"I'm doing it," Amarinda said, patting the extra coin purse she brought. "I'm buying a dozen more."

Jaron belched, "Am- Amarinda we've each had at least four. Aren't you- don't you-"

"Feel sick?"

Oh dear.

Their babysitter found them.

Tobias stood with his hands on his hips, obviously trying his best to scowl, "I've been looking everywhere for you three! There's a threat of bandits! Thieves! You could have at least let a guard trail you! All I ask is that- oh dear."

Amarinda hid her smirk as she trailed her fingers through Tobias's thick, dark hair. That would soften him up. She shrugged, "We only wanted to have fun, Tobias."

"It's different when you're left to fend for yourself," Imogen muttered, biting into her fifth apple pie.

"There's no point in having fun if it's not safe," countered Tobias. But the drooling grin he was fighting away was all too revealing.

"Would you feel better if you came with us?" Amarinda reached out to grab Tobias's hand, and rolled her head to the left.

If Jaron was clever enough, he'd seize this opportunity to melt back into the crowd.

“I’d feel better if you came with me,” Tobias mumbled. “Would you, un, would you-?”

“Spend the afternoon with my husband?” Amarinda glanced over her shoulder, and sure enough, Jaron and Imogen had managed to slip away.

Good for them.

Amarinda rattled her coin purse, “Care to get sick from too many apple pies?”

Tobias’s eyes lit up, “You’re asking me to do something foolish.”

“That’s right, I am.”

“I’d gladly eat myself sick from pies with you, Amy.”

“And that’s-,” Amarinda pressed a kiss to Tobias’s still open mouth, “-what every girl wants to hear from her noble love.”

[haledamage]

Hug prompts: 1 for Marii/Theron and/or 13 for Ves/Jorgan

13. Goodbye hug (Ves/Jorgan)

“I should be going with you, sir.”

“We’ve been over this.” Ves bit back a sigh as she turned to face Aric, dropping her hand away from the door panel to exit the ship. He glowered at the door like it was responsible for their current predicament before turning that intensity back on her. 

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” He grabbed her elbow and leaned close, voice low and urgent. “If not me, then Dorne. Or hell, even Vik. You shouldn’t be going over there alone.”

“Aric, I’ll be fine.” She put a hand on his chest, though he wouldn’t really be able to feel it through his armor. She added pointedly, hoping he’d hear what she wasn’t saying, “It’s not Marr and his people I’m worried about. Stay on the ship, keep it warm for me, and keep an eye out.”

“Ves…”

“That’s an order, Captain.”

“Yes, sir,” he said automatically, but he managed to fit a lot of frustration and concern into those two words. He pulled her into a crushing hug and they stayed like that for a while, only parting when her comm gave a warning beep that she was running late. Aric let her go, but then pressed his forehead to hers. “Watch your back.”

“You too.” Ves kissed her husband, but didn’t let herself linger. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

She opened the door and stepped through it before he could stop her again. She nodded at him and then turned to face her Imperial escort as the door to her ship hissed shut behind her.

(the other is much longer (and also less angsty) so it’s under the cut)

1. Hug from behind (Marii/Theron)

Marii opened her eyes, glancing around her dark, barely-familiar bedroom for what dragged her from her sleep. She was aware of three things: first, that she was in the Alliance base on Odessen; second, that it was very, very late; and third, she was alone.

She rolled over anyway, like she expected to be wrong about that last point, but the other side of the bed was still untouched. Wherever Theron was, it wasn’t here. It was nice to know some things never changed.

She’d only been with the Alliance for less than a week, after Theron and Vesiya found her in the lower parts of Zakuul. Long enough for it to start to feel familiar, for everyone to get back to work, but not enough yet for them to find a job for her to do. She spent her days wandering the base looking for people that needed her help - not much different than what she’d been doing on Zakuul, actually, but now with a greater purpose behind it.

Staring at the empty bed did not, unsurprisingly, make her boyfriend magically materialize next to her. With a sigh, Marii sat up and threw on some clothes. Theron’s jacket hung on a hook by the door, the red a bright flash of color in the dim lights. The fact that it was there meant he had at least considered coming to bed at some point, before some priority message no doubt called him back to work.

On a whim, she pulled the jacket down and slipped it on. She loved wearing it any chance she got, loved the weight of it, the way it was just a little too big on her, the way it smelled like him. It felt like belonging. Even after all these years, it was still a bit thrilling to advertise their relationship so publicly.

The halls were dark and empty except for a few night guards, the hum of life and activity now muted and serene. Somewhere deeper into the natural caverns they’d built the base into, she could just make out the sound of dripping water, and past that, the familiar whirring of Teeseven’s servos. In the opposite direction, pale light filtered down the hall, flickering on the stone and durasteel walls. Her footsteps made no noise as she followed the light toward the Alliance’s command center.

Sure enough, there he was. Theron was hunched over one of the consoles in the otherwise empty war room, the blue light making his face look pale and drawn, the angles too sharp, the shadows around his eyes too dark. Still, he was beautiful. Her heart fluttered in her chest like it always did when she looked at him. It had been months since they’d seen each other outside of holos, while he’d been busy helping build a rebellion against the Eternal Empire and she’d been sowing unrest and being hunted as a terrorist by Emperor Arcann. It was nice just to enjoy the sight of him for a moment.

She padded quietly up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist and hugging him tightly, leaning her head between his shoulder blades.

“I really hope that’s my girlfriend,” Theron said dryly, not looking up from his work, “or you’ve got some explaining to do.”

“Hey, you,” Marii murmured fondly into his shirt, kissing his shoulder.

“Hey.” He didn’t exactly relax at the sound of her voice, but he let his guard down a little. Enough that she could feel how tired he was, how happy he was to have her here. “What’re you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Looks like I’m not the only one.”

“Yeah.” He covered her hands with one of his, giving them an affectionate squeeze, though his other hand was still typing something into the console. “I just had a couple of things to finish up really quick.”

She slipped under his arm to stand in front of him, arms still around him. He smiled at her, though he didn’t take his eyes off his work. “Theron, it’s 3 in the morning.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He pressed a sweet but distracted kiss to her forehead. “Go back to sleep, Marii. I’ll be there soon.”

“How can I help?”

“What?” That seemed to finally get his attention, at least.

“It’s pretty clear I’m not getting you back until you’re finished with whatever you’re doing, so I’m going to help.” She could feel him digging his metaphorical heels in, ready to disagree with her, even if only just for the sake of disagreeing. She put a finger under his chin, gently but firmly dragging his eyes away from the console, if only for a moment. “Theron, you are the smartest, cleverest, and hardest working man I’ve ever met.”

“You forgot handsomest,” he deadpanned.

She smiled, but continued as if he hadn’t said anything. “You are also stubborn as a ronto and so self-sacrificing you could make the Jedi jealous.” She slid her hand up to cup his face, sweeping her thumb along his cheek. “You are not the only person keeping the Alliance running. You don’t need to set yourself on fire to keep the rest of us warm. So either you let me help you or you point me to someone who can.”

Theron closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. Marii could feel the moment he gave in barely a second before he let out a long sigh and said, “Okay. Tomorrow you, me, and Lana can sit down and see what needs doing.”

“Good. That’s a start.” She kissed the corner of his mouth.

He curled his hand around the nape of her neck and pressed his forehead to hers. “I don’t deserve you,” he whispered.

“I wouldn’t go that far.” She kissed the other side. She could feel his smile widen as she did. 

“I’m lucky to have you,” he corrected easily, like he always did.

“Better,” she replied, like she always did. This time, she kissed him properly. He melted into it, work all but forgotten. “I love you. You don’t have to do this alone.”

“Maybe tomorrow, I can take some extra time for lunch.” She couldn’t help the wide smile at that offer, and he took it as the encouragement it was meant to be. He pulled her closer and added, “We can go for a walk or something. Spend some time together, just the two of us. I can finally give you a tour of the base.”

“I’d like that,” she murmured against his lips. “You know what I’d like better?”

“Hmm.”

“Come to bed.”

Theron laughed, “All right. Fine. You win. Just give me five minutes.”

“That’s fair.” After one last kiss, she slipped out of his arms in an effort to stop distracting him and turned to head back down the hall. At the door, she turned back around with a grin. “Oh, and Theron? Handsomest too.”

The pale light did a remarkable job at highlighting the way he blushed at that. “You don’t have to–I was just joking.”

“Well, I’m not.” Theron was so charming, but he was delightfully easy to fluster. Marii took advantage of that fact every chance she got. “You should have heard some of the things I told Kira, after I first met you.”

He ducked his head, but it didn’t hide the pleased little smile on his face. “What, uh, what kind of things?”

She beckoned him to follow her. She could feel how much he wanted to. “Come to bed and I’ll tell you.” With a wink, she disappeared back into the darkness of the hallway.

[virtual-lara]

Irish Times - Cyberbabe Gets Real

Article appeared on the Irish Times website, dated to 23rd June 2001, and was written by Steven Poole, author of 'Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames'. Article features a look into the history of Lara and what she is as a character.

It's Valentine's Day, 1968. In a hospital in the south London neighbourhood of Wimbledon, a daughter is born to Lord and Lady Henshingly-Croft. The girl has a drawerful of silver spoons in her mouth. Between the ages of three and 11, she is privately tutored at home; she then attends Wimbledon High School for Girls and Gordonstoun.

At the latter, she discovers a passion for rock climbing in the mountains of Scotland. (She also takes up shooting, but is soon banned for showing "too keen an interest".) By the time she is 18, everyone can see she has a wild streak, but her parents believe she can be thoroughly civilised - and eventually married off to the Earl of Farringdon - after three years at a Swiss finishing school.

While in Switzerland, however, the young woman takes to extreme skiing and spends a holiday pursuing the sport in the Himalayas.

On the return journey, her plane crashes deep in the mountains, and she is the only passenger left alive. Somehow she survives and, two weeks later, staggers into a mountain village. By this time, the course of her life has changed. She feels truly alive only when travelling alone. Lara Croft has decided to become an adventurer.

Or you could look at it this way: Lara Croft was born on the screen of a computer in an English video-game studio in 1995. First, she was a pencil sketch on paper, then a series of more detailed illustrations. Next, her vital statistics were plotted on a VDU screen. Thousands of triangles meshed together to build a computerised outline of a female form.

At this stage, Lara would have looked like a sculpture in chicken wire. Then the figure was "skinned" - wrapped in shaded, coloured surfaces to approximate a clothed human being. Lastly, she was animated: taught to walk, somersault, run and pull herself up on rocky ledges. Virtual worlds were also built around her to test her physical abilities to the limit.

Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider franchise are the products of Core Design - the game-development studio where Lara was born - and Eidos Interactive, its British parent. The man who fathered her was an artist in his early 20s called Toby Gard.

"When I came up with the idea for Tomb Raider," he says, "it wasn't necessarily going to be a female character. We wanted a real-time cinematic game, and I designed a couple of characters; one was a girl, one was a bloke. Eventually, we realised there was going to be a lot of story element in the game and we couldn't keep both the characters, so it was back down to one." So which should they choose? At the time, a female lead in a game was almost unheard of, Gard says. "There was resistance from marketing quarters, saying that female characters never sold."

Eventually, Core chose Lara as a refreshing antidote to the muscled meatheads that usually populated video games. And boy, did she sell: 26 million units, and counting, earning about $1 billion gross in retail sales.

Having turned her back on the upper-class society of her parents, who terminated her monthly allowance in disgust, Lara metamorphosed into a modern-day Indiana Jones.

For her first commission as a professional tomb raider, she was hired to retrieve the three parts of a mysterious artefact known as the Atlantean Scion. Hurtling through Peru, Rome and the lost city of Atlantis (well, it wasn't lost any more), Lara negotiated booby traps and shot a variety of wildlife, including rats, tigers and, alarmingly, a tyrannosaur.

In later quests, she travelled to Venice, Tibet and the Great Wall of China, snuck around the US military institute Area 51 and battled goons in the London Underground. Along the way, Lara was constantly learning. On the trail of a weird dagger that could turn you into a dragon, Lara discovered that she could climb walls, flip through 180 degrees while jumping or swimming, and wade into shallow pools of water.

By the time of her next adventure she could even get down on her hands and knees - in order to negotiate low tunnels and ventilation ducts - as well as monkey-swing from walkways and run much faster than she ever had. She could even blink. The programmers at Core extended Lara's capabilities with each new game, exploiting the fact that she had become a star.

Every year, another sequel popped up just before Christmas and went straight to the top of the video-game charts. Meanwhile, Eidos, Lara's parent company, was becoming a stock-market darling. In 1998, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, named the British firm the world's fastest-growing company, and in the summer of 1999 Eidos's share price was trading at a delirious high of $18.20.

Lara Croft, we must note, has brains as well as beauty. She is said by her biographers to have penned several travel books, including A Tyrannosaurus Is Jawing At My Head and the follow-up, Slaying Bigfoot. But she clearly does not read the newspapers or watch television, for in none of her adventures do we see any awareness on Lara's part that she has become an international media darling.

The first wave of Lara coverage came shortly after the game's 1996 release, with David James, the Liverpool goalkeeper, explaining to the London Times that he was playing badly because he had been staying up late playing Tomb Raider. In 1997, U2 used specially commissioned digital footage of Lara in action on their Popmart tour.

Lara appeared in comics, and plastic action figures of Lara sold like hot cakes. The original game had appeared on both the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation consoles, but Sony soon signed an exclusivity deal that meant episodes two and three would appear only on PlayStation.

Then came the acme of media acceptance: Lara on the cover of the Face in June 1997. Not only was this the first time the style magazine had used a digital person on its cover, it was the first time it had allowed an image to interrupt its red masthead. Newsweek, Rolling Stone and Time soon followed suit, and a video for the German pop outfit Die Artze, featuring Lara fighting with members of the band, went heavy-rotation on MTV.

Marks & Spencer produced a range of Tomb Raider III merchandise. Douglas Coupland, the writer of Generation X, contributed to a fey devotional tome entitled Lara's Book. In November, 1998, Tomb Raider and its first sequel were awarded Millennium Product status by the British Design Council.

In 1999, Lara - or rather Core Design, won a BAFTA for her "outstanding contribution to the interactive industry". In 2000, filming began in England on the imminent Tomb Raider feature film, budgeted at $100 million and starring Angelina Jolie. You can now, if you wish, clothe your children in nattily miniature Tomb Raider threads.

Perhaps the cleverest marketing coup was the association, begun in 1999, between Lara Croft and Lucozade, the orange liquid that used to be thought of as medicine for the sick but reinvented itself through the 1990s as a sports drink.

The latest advert has Lara pausing for a friendly Lucozade with her enemies while the player's back is turned. This summer, in order to tie in with the feature film's release, Lucozade will be labelled "Larazade".

They probably call this "synergy", but it works because Lucozade is a product one can imagine Lara using, even if it is unclear where she might find a bottle in a dusty tomb. Jeremy Heath-Smith, the managing director of Core Design and head of global development at Eidos - who, despite Eidos's financial difficulties, was last year paid $3.5 million thanks to a long-standing royalty agreement - says: "The fact that it's a health-giving energy drink matched Lara's profile exactly. I'm not sure Irn-Bru could have the same effect, as nice as Irn-Bru is."

Lara is careful about who she's seen with, for obvious reasons. We can be confident that she would never endorse fruit-flavoured alco-pops, or depilatory creams. But the Lucozade partnership is a marvel of mutual reinforcement: association with Tomb Raider and Lara helps to sell Lucozade.

In his novel Idoru, cyberpunk writer William Gibson imagines Rei Toei, a Japanese-engineered virtual celebrity who rebels against her makers and plots to find herself a physical body. In fact, the Japanese did have a virtual media star in 1997. Software programmers collaborating with Japan's leading modelling agency, Horipro, created Kyoko Date, the world's first digital pop singer. But sales of her debut CD did not live up to expectations. Why? Her face was a combination of features mapped from photographs of famous models; her singing voice was taken from one woman, her speaking voice from another; and her dance moves were digitised from the performances of real dancers. She was far more detailed and "realistic" than Lara Croft was at the time - but in a sense, Kyoko Date looked too real.

Our idoru does not fall into this trap. Lara Croft is attractive because of, not despite, her glossy blankness - that hyper-perfect, shiny computer look. She is an abstraction, an animated conglomeration of sexual and attitudinal signs - breasts, hot pants, shades, thigh holsters - whose blankness encourages the viewer's psychological projection.

Beyond the bare facts of her biography, her perfect vacuity means we can make Lara Croft into whoever we want her to be. If the computer-generated Lara Croft ever became too photo-realistic, too much like an individual woman, says Heath-Smith, "you'd lose some of that feel for her". The plans to finesse the character design for the next-generation Tomb Raider game, coming to Sony's far more visually powerful PlayStation2 some time next year, are "to smooth her off without changing the aesthetics that work".

But will these aesthetics be influenced by the performance of Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider film? Lara's creator, Toby Gard, rather approves of the casting. "Yeah, Angelina Jolie certainly looks the part," he says. "She has that certain wild quality which is important - that's what I had in mind." Jolie, we are told, performed most of her stunts; emulating the acrobatic, gravity-defying grace of her digital counterpart in the unforgiving real world resulted in injuries to her knee and shoulder and torn ligaments in her foot.

Bear in mind Lara has already been impersonated by several flesh-and-blood women without danger to her virtual hegemony - the models and actresses Rhona Mitra, Nell McAndrew, Lara Weller, Lucy Clarkson and Vanessa Demouy have all stepped into the boots for promotional appearances. Lara Croft, the virtual character, is the Platonic ideal: a human actress can give a better or worse account of that ideal, but she can never embody it fully, still less outstrip it. In that sense Lara is more like a creature of time-fogged legend than a contemporary "personality".

The rise to ubiquity of Lara Croft came as a surprise to her digital dad. "I never expected to have that happen," Gard says. "You know, as a designer, I'd gone through my life making sketches for these characters, and you think they're yours - then you realise they're not yours at all."

It was the massive success of Lara, in fact, that prompted Gard to leave Core Design and set up his own company, Confounding Factor, before the second Tomb Raider game appeared. "Other people were just doing things with her I didn't agree with," he says, guardedly.

He is working on Galleon, a game he promises "will have the same effect as Tomb Raider had in terms of how far ahead of everything else it's going to be".

It will be interesting to observe how Lara Croft ages. If the franchise is still going in 2020, will she be raiding tombs at the age of 42? There seems no reason why not. What allowed Lara's extraordinary success, after all, was the fact that Gard had created not a singular female character but a new archetype: an image so fluid and malleable that she can cross media barriers without appearing to whore herself.

Odd as it may seem, Lara has never been a primarily sexual being. In the immature world of video games, Lara was a revelation. In contrast to the standard near-pornographic portrayal of helpless women characters, Lara was a Germaine Greer of video games. Sure, she showed some skin, but her wardrobe was practical, rock-climbing, tomb-raiding stuff: shorts, hiking boots, vest, backpack. Gard says this was a deliberate reaction to the digital representations of women around him at the time, which persist today: spangly thongs, S&M corsets, strange spirally metal bras.

"I wanted to make sure it wasn't the thigh-length boot-style stuff," he says. "You can't get emotionally involved with a character like that because it has been objectified. Lara, I felt, had more dignity." It wouldn't make any sense, you understand, to describe the dignified Lara as a sex symbol.

Because "sex symbol", if that overused phrase means anything at all, must mean a person with whom you can imagine having sex - however improbable that may be. Angelina Jolie may be a sex symbol. But Lara can't be. It is in principle impossible to have sex with Lara Croft: she is always and forever unattainable.

And, as we have seen, there are far more overtly sexual depictions of women in video games. So all the prurient fans' artwork - the notorious "Nude Raider" images created by boys disturbingly skilled in computer-aided imaging and posted on the net, and all the leering over Croft's breasts in the chat rooms - these are incidental, a predictably perverse subculture of the fan base, not its raison d'etre.

It seems probable that men who like Lara don't want to have her; they want to be her. That's why they play the game. Lara is a symbol, if anything, of aspirational gender reassignment. In both directions. Men who like trying on a female persona, or women, such as Jolie, who like doing what is usually thought to be men's stuff. To paraphrase Damon Albarn of Blur, Lara works for boys who do girls, or boys who like girls who do boys, or girls who do boys.

And perhaps it is this all-things-to-all-people, don't-you-dare-try-to-pin-me-down quality that has ensured her longevity. For it is axiomatic that the jumping, rolling, sprinting Lara Croft is physically inexhaustible. What is surprising is that over the five years of her career so far, she has also proven inexhaustible as an icon.

All rights belong to Irish Times and/or their affiliated companies. I only intend to introduce people to old articles and preserve them before they are lost.

[thenugking]

Grand Academy For Future Villains, Chapter 1: Introduction. A commentary for Three.

Because no one can stop me.

Here’s the important decisions, and other things it feels relevant to comment on, from Three’s playthrough. Contains spoilers for GAFFV, obviously, and there’s a few references to the sequel, although nothing I’d really call a spoiler. All game text is copied from the text files, found here.

General CW for the whole thing: parental abuse, internalised dehumanisation as a trauma response. Three’s not doing well.

Specific CW for this chapter: misgendering, transphobia

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9

***

Rathna hisses with satisfaction, takes you by the wrist, and pulls you after her through the archway into the blackness.

It feels a bit like doing a belly flop into a pool of cold mercury. (And you would know; the exercise facilities back home were very well-appointed.) When the ringing clears from your ears and the fuzziness from your eyes, you're standing in a subterranean chamber. The walls are dripping. The lights are flickering. The screams are echoing.

An icy voice echoes in your head, making your ears sting. "Prepare yourself…to be screened."

"Oh, I am prepared," you assure Rathna the Soul-Flenser. "I trust the Academy! And if they say I need additional screening, I'm sure that's something that really is necessary for everybody's safety!"

How would you classify the expression in her dull metallic eyes? Quizzical? Startled? Pitying?

"Your faith," hisses the cold voice after a moment, "is… touching to me."

"Speaking of touching," you say cheerfully, "we'd better get to the screening part, right? The sooner I get screened, the sooner I can be reconstituted by, who is it, the fourth-year Resurrections class?"

There is a long pause. "No..." Rathna says. "You have passed the screening already. You are a true student of the Academy."

Nonplussed, you head up the stairs in the direction she indicates. As you glance back, you could swear she's wiping away one dishwater-gray tear.

Three’s entire introduction is them being a Good Student - it doesn’t even occur to them not to wait in line, or to try hiding their many, many weapons, or to try and get out of additional screening. They pick Rathna because they’re pretty sure Phil will mess it up and not screen them properly, which means they’re messing up too. 

Phil, in Three’s opinion, clearly has zero discipline or competence, and they dislike him instantly. With his utter lack of commitment to the screening process, he’s off to a great start as Perfect Student Three’s unintentional narrative foil.

Rathna, on the other hand, they develop a mutual respect for in this scene. They don’t interact again in-game, and aren’t going to go out of their way to hang out with each other, but I like to think they get along well whenever they do see each other, and are at least friendly acquaintances. (I was very offended when the second game told me Rathna was my enemy, but I like Miriel Bloodshrike, because neither of these things are remotely true for Three.)

VERY WELL, THREE. BUT I KNEW YOUR MOTHER ONCE. AND SHE GAVE YOU ANOTHER NAME. YOU WILL BE THREE AT THIS SCHOOL, BUT TO MAEDRYN THE QUANTUM-WITCH, ONE OF OUR PROUDEST ALUMNAE, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE...

It's true. Your mother named you

#3.

Hardly a name at all.

I mean, Three’s life revolves around keeping their mother happy. They’re not going to throw away the name she gave them. They only changed it from the number to the word because of the massive bureaucratic hassle that trying to input your whole name as 3 was. And what would they change it to anyway? It’s not as if they have an identity outside of Maedryn, is it?

(This does, of course, result in a lot of funny experiences in-game, where people try and psych me out by knowing my birth name and Three’s just, “Yes, that is my name, are you feeling all right?” It’s not impossible that these still take place, even with Three using their mother’s name; in the very next scene, Xi reveals they can hear how people spell things. I’m sure there are some people in the Academy who would deliberately say 3, rather than Three, and hope that Three hears the insult. They don’t.)

As for gender… I think Three at this point still mostly identifies as female. They come out as agender part way through their first year, feeling more confident after meeting a lot of non-binary people at the Academy. They don’t tell their mum. While I’m glad that the game doesn’t have Maedryn misgender you, the fact that she consistently deadnames you and gets angry at you changing “her” body if you become a monster makes me feel it would be very in character for her to do. I’m sure she hears Three is using they/them pronouns now at some point, but has better things to do than remembering to use them.

If asked about their pronouns, Three will tell you that you are welcome to call them whatever you wish, and their closest associates usually use they/them. Expressing their own preference would be far too close to acting like a person with their own desires and feelings, though. Luckily they can easily justify being agender as, “What does a weapon need a gender for?”

“Let's get to know you, Three. What do you hate most?"

 #Incompetence and idiocy.

And right now, Phil’s incompetence and idiocy in particular. Three is already up to 75% competence at this point, by the way.

Well, that's your mother. How do you feel about her?

#I'm proud to be her child. But I plan on choosing my own path- while keeping her as happy as I can.

The actual answer here is a lot more complicated. Three certainly doesn’t plan on choosing their own path, they exist only as a tool of their mother’s and are well aware that being anything more would not make her happy. They think Maedryn’s achievements are incredible and that she’s the cleverest person they know. They think they might be proud of her, if not of themself. They love her.

They’re also far more aware than they let on that she’s abusing them, and that they’re never going to get the love and approval that a part of them buried deep down still wants. While they absolutely keep it to themself, they dislike the way Maedryn’s destroyed worlds that could have had so much to offer, and believe she should treat her goons and servants (themself excluded) better.

And they have no intention of ever letting her know they've ever thought anything negative about her, because they value their life too much.

"Excuse me. I'm Three, and I-how did you do that? What were those wires, and all that stuff you were saying about humanity?"

"Nice, isn't it?" says Xi with pardonable pride. "Like I told you, I'm the ultimate fusion of human and computer. Instead of veins-" their voice is suddenly coming out of the speakers again "-wires course the length of my body, running directly from my mind to the Network."

"Oh! Computers!" the other student breaks in. "Whyever would you want to be all tangled up with those...things?"

Xi narrows their metallic eyes contemptuously at him. "I'm a cyberpunk villain. It's what we do. Wait- who are you again?"

The student draws himself up proudly. "Aurion Umbrator Malisar, Scourge of the Universe, Bane of Virtue, Shadow that Swallows the Light, and I-"

Xi sniffs. A shower of sparks falls from one of the wires. "This is the first time you've ventured outside your genre, isn't it? Let me guess, spawned in Fantasy, and now you're here expecting everything to be the same magic and mush you grew up with?"

"Well, that would explain things," Xi continues. "Trust me, pitiful lump of flesh, computers are the way to go. Why, the true power in this school, DarkBoard--no matter what any other genre says--is an artificial intelligence, one who has truly ascended beyond the tether of matter and mind-"

"That's the problem!" Aurion protests, waving his schedule again. "It will not heed my bidding!"

"Well, of course not, if you're talking to Them like that." You can hear the reverence in Xi's voice when they speak of DarkBoard. Odd, since as far as you can tell, the Grand Academy's administrative AI is basically a glorified secretary.

And Three gets to meet their best friends! They’ve been given permission to ask questions about something very cool! Even if they would never be caught using the phrase, “All that stuff,” and would much prefer a, “Would you elaborate further on your state of being, please?”

This also forms the very early seeds of their friendship with DarkBoard. They believe everyone deserves respect, and they know how easy it is to underestimate someone as being a tool. The majority of their previous knowledge on DarkBoard came from Maedryn, who they also know underestimates people she considers below her notice, so they’re very willing to take Xi’s opinion on DarkBoard over Maedryn’s. And if Xi calls DarkBoard a They, rather than an It, They is what Three will use too, because secretary or not, it’s only polite.

Xi sighs. "You've got to organize yourself, pitiful lump of- Aurion. Make some choices. Look. What do you want to do?"

"Have legions of darkness, take over the universe, slay the proud and noble, bring about a black reign of terror on the land, cast evil spells from my fortress, shoot out wires from my hand like that, seduce the pure and innocent, callously waste human life, destroy the world with a word, blow things up, have great men fall before the slightest motion of my hand, manipulate people's minds, be able to call up balls of fire, beat up the heroes, have Ultimate Weapons of Destruction, and wear a nifty cape!" rattles off the aspiring Scourge of the Universe breathlessly. "And more things, too, if they teach them."

Xi looks as if the student's enthusiasm has overloaded their circuits. You step in.

#Tell Xi I'll help Aurion with his schedule. That should earn me some points with the RA.

I mean, if Three had circuits, they’d be overloaded by Aurion’s enthusiasm too, but if there are two things they like, it’s sorting out schedules and making people in positions of authority happy! This encounter doesn’t make Three and Aurion friends, that comes later, but they gain a small amount of respect for each other, at least.

Sidenote - I’m not sure how close Aurion and Xi are supposed to be, they don’t interact much after this in-game, but I love their interactions here, and I really enjoy Three, Aurion and Xi as a group of friends.

#Better get Xi to advise me on this. Isn't assistance in their job description?

You stick your head out into the hall. "Xi? Can you help me with something?"

After a moment, Xi appears, expressionless.

"I need to get my books," you explain, "so I need to access my money. Can you tell me how to make DarkBoard do that?"

One of Xi's wires cracks like a whip. You hope that means yes.

Three might value self-sufficiency, but they also value making use of the resources available to you, and when someone’s job is to provide you with help, it would be arrogant and foolish to rely solely on your own conjecture.

They are also an eighteen year old who’s never spent much time with people their own age suddenly discovering that they find cyborgs in control of wires they grow out of their fingers really hot.

#Get a quick fund refreshment from Mom.

It won't make your mother happy to have you draft her account like this--she prefers more face-to-face groveling, as you've had plenty of chances to observe--but you know that you can make a quick transfer from the Student Security Deposit. A few words to DarkBoard, and the money is yours, with a little extra cushion to cover you in case of emergencies.

I mean, Three’s definitely going to call Maedryn up for a proper groveling session later tonight, and hope that helps a little. But she’s also expecting them to get perfect grades, and they’re worried about their chances of doing that without all the equipment available. Anyway, that’s their first day at the Academy finished!

[mautadite]

june book round up

18 books this month! this is late because i just couldn’t find the time to sit down and write it but it’s finally here! and i completed my reading challenge! whoo! mostly e-books and audiobooks once again, and also a good few arcs. (i’m still so proud to be able to say that lol.)

the 7 1/2 deaths of evelyn hardcastle - stuart turton ⭐️⭐️⭐️ a murder mystery/thriller that takes place in the midst of a house party. kind of a groundhog day thing; the same day repeats over and over, and one of the guests wakes up in the body of a different guest EVERY day, and will do so until he solves the mystery. this was one of the cleverest books i’ve ever read, seeing everything come together was so good. but the last reveal left me kinda like... was THAT the point of all of this?? also one part of this book is grossly fatphobic.

breeze of a spring evening and other stories - yu dafu ⭐️⭐️⭐️ collection of short stories written and set in 1920s china/japan. there was a lot of examination of men’s desire towards younger women which bored me. but the writing was good, and i really enjoyed when the writer talked about being chinese and living in japan; that feeling of isolation of loss of self and country,

her lady’s honor - renee dahlia ⭐️⭐️ first arc of the month! historical f/f romance set after wwi. one character is a vet (in both senses of the word, she served as an animal doctor during the war) and the other is the daughter of the first character’s old captain. i wanted to like this a lot more than i did but the writing was dull, needed a better edit, and the structure/plot was just all over the place. the characters were fine, but not hugely compelling, and i didn’t fall in love with their romance.

his cocky cellist - cole mccade ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ really good m/m romance about a cellist/masseur and a young billionaire who end up becoming entangled. fictional billionaires are the only good ones. this had really pretty prose (sometimes a liiiiiiiiiiiittle bit purple), great characters, great chemistry, and just a lovely romance overall.

his cocky valet: after story - cole mmcade ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ cute coda to the first book in the series. a HEA in a way that works for these specific characters.

night owls and summer skies - rebecca sullivan ⭐️⭐️ another arc, another book i sadly didn’t enjoy much. this is ya f/f, about a girl who is sent unwillingly to the camp that she attended in childhood. the bare bones of the writing was fine, but it tried to be a romantic comedy in ways that just didn’t work. a lot of the humour was a total miss. and the book dealt a lot with bullying, while also letting the love interest get away with some truly shitty stuff. 

arms wide open - donna jay ⭐️⭐️⭐️ contemporary f/f romance about a married couple going through some rough patches, who decide to try to spice things up by inviting a third person into their bed. it was cute, not spectacular. while i liked the characters a lot, because the book opened with them already in love (having problems, but never OUT of love) this book was missing what i love about most romances: the falling in love bit!

my heart’s in the highlands - amy hoff ⭐️⭐️⭐️ another arc and oh man this is an extremely generous rating for a book that really wasn’t that good, but hit the spot for me in specific ways. it’s historical f/f time travel romance about a woman from the 19th century who travels back to the 13th century and falls in love with a gruff highlander warrior woman. this is not very well written, has so many unexplained plot points, (how did a woman from the 19th century build a time machine? none of our damned business) didn’t seem too concerned with historical fidelity, and had some dubcon, which, bleh. but i still REALLY liked parts of this. i’m just so weak for historical f/f romance.

when all the world sleeps - j.a. rock and lisa henry ⭐️⭐️⭐️ contemporary m/m romance between a chronic sleepwalker who lives in fear of the things he does when he’s sleeping, and a cop. this was fine. sometimes sad and sweet, sometimes weird and overdone. the police character was fine most of the time, but he also reminded me of why i don’t like reading romances with cops. especially In These Times. every tiny abuse of power made me want to snap. the actually romance was good, but i’ve read better.

yellow jessamine - caitlin starling ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ another arc! fantasy sort of horror with some f/f leanings. really wonderful prose, AMAZING characters, and really lush, unsettling horror. i don’t read/enjoy a lot of horror but this was great. i adore complicated women so much

where the forest meets the stars - glendy vanderah ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ on a genre scale i guess this is contemporary/mystery? a moving novel about a biologist (who’s a breast cancer survivor) who meets a little girl claiming to be an alien who comes from the stars. it didn’t go the way i was kind of expecting it to, and i enjoyed it. it had an m/f romance that i liked... mostly? there were some tropes i coulda done without, and it was really lazy in the way it addressed trauma.

silver ravens - jane fletcher ⭐️⭐️⭐️ yet another arc! i really enjoyed fletcher’s celaeno series so i was excited to be approved for this f/f fantasy/adventure novel. an out-of-work IT professional is swept into fairy world with fae and mystery and intrigues aplenty, and a mercenary captain she falls for. the writing was fine, but some of the world building really bugged me, and there wasn’t enough romance imo.

second nature - jae ⭐️⭐️⭐️ f/f paranormal romance about a writer who’s begun to have strange dreams about a society of animal shifters, and the liger shifter who’s been tasked with finding her, and if need be, killing her. this could have been a great book (i especially really liked the characters and how they were described, and the plot) but the writer did one of the things i really hate: giving us the pov of the villain from the very beginning, letting us know his plans, motivations, EVERYTHING. it felt like we spent the entire book waiting for the protags to catch up, and it just wasn’t entertaining.

dragonoak books 2-3 - sam farren ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ the last two books in the dragonoak series, an f/f high fantasy series. they were too long, the plot was shaky, and there were some irksome bits but holy crap, i loved these books so much. SO MUCH. they have some of my very favourite characters and tropes EVER. lots of queer ladies, lots of trans characters, necromancy, batles, found families, friendships, damaged characters, REALLY EXCELLENT ROMANCE.. the book had flaws aplenty but i’m ready to forgive them all. (

when i was you - minka kent ⭐️⭐️⭐️ i don’t usually read thrillers, but i decided to try this out on a whim after seeing the cover and it was... fine. it helped that i didn’t read the blurb, bc that meant i had no idea where it was going. after the first huge twist it did become kinda meh tho.

the hole -  hye-young pyun ⭐️⭐️⭐️ psychological horror about a man who survives the car cash that killed his wife. he ends up paralysed, and is living with his mother in law, and one day he looks out the window and sees her digging holes in the garden. this was an EXTREMELY slow book. it took ages for anything to really happen. there were a lot of flashbacks and internal monologuing. the absolute best part of this book came at almost the end, where there was a big sorta revelation and the writing became really crisp and cutting and just really good. it had a really fitting end.

the silvers - j.a. rock ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ m/m sci-fi romance. humans are in search of water for earth, which is running out. they come across intelligent life on a new planet: a race of people called silvers. the captain of the mission and one of the silvers develop a close relationship... this was really good; i loved what it had to say about humanity and nature and the ways we can and do hurt each other. very interesting, i don’t think i’ve ever read anything like it.

and that’s it for june! i ended up reading a fair few things out of my usual comfort zone. for july, i think i’m going back to a majority romance; i’ve missed that. currently reading to have loved and lost.