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screechthemighty · 1 year ago

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So that poll did indicate that people were interested in a fanfic-only sideblog and that is something I want to do. That said, I'm a tiny bit busy (the feared Laundry Bed is back) and Ao3 has lived to fight another day, so for now, I'm gonna keep posting over here! Here's a new chapter of that Batman fic. Ao3 link will be in a reblog!

a symbol of hope - chapter four

cw: mention of injury picking, skin picking, discussion of societal abelism.

November 22:

The displaced population of Gotham had been one of the first to accept the Batman's presence. Perhaps they were grateful someone was members of the element who preyed on their vulnerability. Perhaps they saw him as a lesser threat, considering the many other things they had to deal with. It had been an interesting change of pace early in his crusade, and now an increasingly welcome one. It was, if nothing else, novel to be treated as if he were simply part of the landscape.

“You got a light in those pouches?” said the man in front of him. He was an old-timer; been on the streets for as long as the Batman had been patrolling. He went by the Duke, though his real name was Thomas Putnam. The Batman had never informed the Duke that he knew this. It was better for the relationship if he just kept referring to the man as “the Duke.”

“Those things aren’t good for you,” the Batman replied.

“Neither is living on flooded streets.” The Duke waited patiently the Batman to produce a lighter, used it to light his cigarette, and kept talking. “Arkham patients, huh?”

“They may be in danger. I don’t want to bring them back. I just have some questions.”

“What kind of danger?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” It was possible that Ben had been the only one who had been targeted, but the Batman wasn’t so sure. At the very least, other patients may have been targeted for future implants, or perhaps they had heard something while they were staying in the facilities. Maybe someone else had an unpleasant encounter with whoever Doctor Crane was. He’d passed the name on to Alfred, but he likely wouldn’t have that information until the next day. It wouldn’t hurt to explore multiple sources of information.

“Well, people don’t usually share that kind of thing,” the Duke said. He took a long drag off his cigarette and let out a puff of smoke. The Batman carefully moved away from the cloud. “But I remember one. New kid. Might be able to scrounge up some more if you give me time. C’mon.”

Those living on the street had carved out whatever safety they could among the post-flooding ruins, often occupying fire escapes and makeshift wall forts like birds building their nests on the cliffside. The Batman wondered how many of them had been housed previously, how many were simply counting down the days until a shelter opened or their home was safe to live in again. He wondered if any of them had permanently joined the ranks of the unhoused and forgotten. He could keep them safe from gangs, criminals, even dirty and heavy-handed cops, but they faced many problems he couldn’t fight. Not like this.

I need to make sure the Renewal money is going to shelters. But that was a problem for Bruce Wayne. Now, it was the Batman’s turn.

“Hey, Suzanna!” the Duke called up into one of the nests. “Got a bat who wants a word! Might be able to help with your pest problem.”

A pair of blue eyes peered down at them. Suzanna looked younger than Ben, less worn down. She was still new to all of this, if he had to guess. “Were you followed?” she asked nervously.

The Duke glanced at the Batman, who shook his head. “The professional says we weren’t. C’mon down.”

Suzanna examined the Batman sharpply, disappeared, then reappeared as she climbed down a makeshift ladder. She was wearing multiple layers on her head, enough that her face was partially obscured. “You’re shorter than I thought you’d be.” What he could see of Suzanna’s face was marred with scabs in several places, scattered among older acne scars. “Did my brother send you?”

“No.” The Batman kept his tone calm. “I need to ask you some questions. Were in an Arham inpatient facility before the flooding?”

Suzanna’s eyes widened. Her hand flew towards the back of her head, as if on instinct, but quickly encountered fabric. “Y-yeah,” she stammered. “They’re not trying to round us up, are they?”

“No. You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to. I have some concerns about one of the doctors.’

“You mean Crane?”

There was that name again. He remembered how Ben had whispered it, as if he were convinced the man could still hear him. “Crane was your doctor?”

“Kinda?” Suzanna picked at her cuticles as she spoke. “They said he specialized in anxiety and phobias and stuff. We talked a few times. He’s the one who okay’d the procedure.”

“Procedure?”

“Yeah, he said it was, um…implants to help with some kind of therapy? My parents signed off on it. I don’t remember a lot of the details.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

Oh. Not the youngest person he’d seen on the streets, but still young. He didn’t have to wonder why she hadn’t gone back to her parents. The fact that they were okay with her going through an invasive procedure wasn’t the best sign.

“Anyway, they did it right before the flooding,” Suzanna continued. “I was still recovering when everything went all…” She gestured and made an explosion noise. “Never got the stitches out. It itches pretty bad.”

“Because you keep messing with it,” the Duke interjected as he put out his cigarette. “Took you how many hats to stop?”

Nervous hands. Never a good thing for wound recovery. He knew that from experience. “May I see it?” the Batman asked.

“Sure.” She pulled down the hood of her coat, then a second hood from a sweater. First hat. Second hat. A thin scarf holding a piece of gauze in place. It looked decently clean, probably changed recently. When that final layer was removed, he knew instantly what he was looking at. Same shape, same spot on the head as Ben. Suzanna still had her stitches in, and had definitely been picking at them. She was lucky the wound didn’t look more infected.

“Suzanna, I need to take you to a doctor,” the Batman said bluntly. Suzanna’s eyes widened at the words, but he kept going. “We can help you, but you’ll need to come with me.”

“Is it bad?”

“It could get worse. And they may have lied to you about the nature of the procedure.”

Silence settled over the alley. It was broken by the Duke sucking on his teeth, then sighing heavily. “I was about to ask if anything is normal with you,” he said, “but then I remembered I’m talking to a man in a bat suit.”

The Batman felt like he should be offended, but the man had a point.

The rain finally let up, which was good. It let Clark get to the hotel roof to keep working. He could’ve stayed in the building, but he didn’t want to wake Jimmy and he needed the fresh air to think. The post-rain air smelled kind of nice, actually. Not like home, but better than the stale hotel air. He perched on one of the building’s gargoyles (they were a major selling point in the brochure) as he turned to the internet for information. He wasn’t sure what he’d find, but even a slight nudge in the right direction would be welcome.

The page for Arkham’s inpatient facilities was so sterile and unnerving that Clark wondered if the web designer had a grudge against them. They claimed to help a broad range of conditions, and had a charity program for low or no insurance patients. There were no immediate red flags that he could see, outside of the overly sanitized feeling of the site.

“Okay, let’s try…” He searched up the staff list. They seemed to have a lot of prestigious doctors, but no one by the name Crane. They did mention collaborations with “leaders in the field,” so he may not have been permanently in rotation. Clark switched to another tab. So, what do I know? Surname Crane. Psychologist or psychiatrist who talked a lot about fear…paranoia-based disorders, maybe? Or even something as simple as anxiety. He could start in the Gotham area and then expand outwards from there if he didn’t get a hit.

He always hoped for the best, but even he was a bit surprised how fast he got a hit.

Professor Jonathan Crane. Worked at Gotham University in their psychology department. His faculty bio featured a picture of a fair skinned, thin-faced man with severely short dark hair and light eyes that were just a little bit too calm. He had the face of a professor who was either shockingly fair and interesting, or exactly as terrifying as you’d expect. Clark was inclined to think it was the latter in this instance. Checking his Rate My Professor confirmed that gut instinct. Apparently, his classes were exceptionally hard, and there were multiple complaints of him asking very personal questions about his students’ fears.

It didn’t look like he was offering any classes. He could have been on sabbatical. That would definitely line up with him interacting with Arkham patients.

“Okay,” Clark muttered to himself. “Professor Crane is a real person. No definitive proof he’s been near Ben, but it’s possible. Could be worth looking into.” Or passing on to the police (slash the Batman), but he wasn’t sure he wanted to do that without more definitive proof. “What about Arkham on its own? Is that something we can follow?”

It might be. If they knew about what Crane was doing, then just exposing Crane wouldn’t actually solve much. They could just wash their hands of him and keep going.

I have to keep digging. Especially if…

He almost opened another tab. The mental image of Bruce Wayne’s wary expression made him hesitate. Pursuit of the truth, regardless of who it made uncomfortable, was part of his job. Clark knew that. But even if you removed those wounded eyes, something about the case had never sat right with him.

Martha Wayne, né Arkham, had been the sole survivor of a murder-suicide that destroyed her family. She had been institutionalized in her family’s own facilities in the wake of the loss. At some point she was released and married Thomas Waynes. The Arkhams had covered up the incident. It seemed that Thomas had wanted it to stay a secret, too.

But why? She was the victim here, a woman who had lived through unimaginable tragedy and received treatment (or, perhaps, been forced into the institute to keep her out of the public eye). Why was that so shameful that they had to cover it up? Why was it so shameful bringing it to light would risk ruining Thomas Wayne’s political prospects?

You know why, Clark. You of all people should know.

Clark’s eyes scanned the Gotham skyline. This city didn’t have the same sharp visible divide between its rich and poor that other cities had; even the wealthier areas had the same wear and tear, the same overcast eyes, the same risk of someone pulling a gun on you. But that didn’t stop people from pretending. It didn’t matter if it was in Gotham, Metropolis, or anywhere else: making it to the top meant following a set of rules. Use the right fork at dinner. Don’t marry the wrong people. Definitely don’t have a mental breakdown.

If that was the reason she’d been sent away–if her family had considered her a disgrace, if her ability to show her face around Gotham hinged entirely on no one knowing what had happened–maybe Thomas Wayne’s alleged actions had been about protecting her, not himself. Her and…

Clark didn’t want to assume. But he hadn’t missed the fact that Bruce Wayne stayed out of the public eye, that his eccentricities seemed to go beyond that of a rich shut-in. Bare minimum, there was no way you walked away from the murder of both your parents unscathed. And if anyone tried to use that against him…

He sighed and put his phone away.

Looking into the allegations against Thomas Wayne might be unavoidable one day. But for now, he decided to leave it be.

I just hope he’ll be all right out there.

November 23:

The article about Bruce was published in that morning’s edition. It had none of the lurid sensationalism Alfred had feared, nor did it engage in any needless fawning. It was straightforward and fair–in all honesty, the best outcome he could have hoped for. It was nice to have something crossed off his list of worrie.

Especially when Bruce was looking at medical files instead of eating breakfast again.

“Do I still have an invitation to the Gotham General charity gala?” Bruce asked without preamble.

Well, points to him. Alfred hadn’t expected him to ask about a social event. “I was going to decline today…unless you do have some interest after all?”

“I need a guest list if at all possible.”

Ah. There it is. “Hoping your Doctor Crane will make an appearance?”

It was the latest development in the case; Doctor Jonathan Crane. Professor of Psychology at Gotham University, currently on research sabbatical. Leader in the field when it came to anxiety based disorders. Ben claimed to have spoken to him, as had the second confirmed brain implant victim, Suzanna. It could have been a coincidence, but the doctor’s paper trail of search on medical intervention for multiple conditions painted a very interesting picture. The kind of picture worth pursuing…if you ate your bloody breakfast while you did it.

“He might be,” Bruce said as he flipped to another file. Alfred carefully nudged the bowl of yogurt closer to his charge’s arm. The sudden proximity seemed to flip a switch in Bruce’s brain, causing him to glance at it, do a double-take, and pick up the spoon to start eating. Sometimes the reminder was all it took. “Or someone who knows him, or someone who runs the facilities. The Arkham inpatient angle might be worth following, even if we can’t go after Crane.”

It was a valid point, but it still made Alfred nervous. So did Bruce’s next question: “I have a cousin in DC, right?”

“...you do. Katherine.” Alfred watched Bruce’s face carefully. “I don’t know much about her. Your mother only started speaking to Gabrielle again later in life.”

“Why?”

Bruce kept his eyes on his work, trying to look busy and casual. He was getting better at it, but he still couldn’t fool Alfred. “Gabrielle was something of a black sheep, as I understand it. Martha was forbidden to seek her out after she ran away.” It ended up being a blessing in disguise; Gabrielle may have had to disavow her family name, start over from nothing, but it had spared her life in the end. “Then after your grandparents died, Martha had other things to worry about.”

“You mean she was institutionalized.”

“Yes, that.” They hadn’t spoken about it since the story had been forced into the public. Alfred still didn’t know how much of that was avoidance versus them just not having the time. “And then she had to rebuild her life, met your father, had you…she didn’t feel ready to reach out until you were older.”

And then she’d been shot during a mugging behind a theater. Another layer of the tragedy.

“How much would Gabrielle know about all that?”

Alfred sighed. “Before I answer that question,” he said, “I want to know…how much of this case is about your mother?”

“It’s not.” Bruce finally looked his way. “It’s…not. This case needs to be solved. I just thought if I knew something more about how Arkham worked…”

Sometimes, Alfred could easily tell if Bruce was lying. Other times, it was harder. This was one of those times. He could have been lying, or he could have just been unsure or in denial. It would be easy to be in denial about something like this.

Guess I’ll have to keep an eye on that, too.

“...I doubt Gabrielle would know the specifics,” Alfred said finally. “She wasn’t there when it happened and as far as I know, they’d only made tentative contact before your mother died. She would be able to answer any questions you might have about the family, but I doubt she knows much of how the institution was run.”

Bruce nodded and turned his attention back to the papers in front of him. “Thanks.”

He went quiet. He didn’t finish his yogurt. Later, after examining the guest list, he announced his intention to go to the gala.

Definitely have to keep an eye on this.

#fic: a symbol of hope #the batman #the batman 2022

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farfromsugafanfic · 4 years ago

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Heartbreak Weather

Genre: Weatherman!Jin, Metropolis/loosely based off comic books, Rivalry, soft Enemies to Lovers

Pairing: Jin/Male Reader

Warnings: all the sexual tension lol, hurricanes

Synopsis: The rival weatherman at Channel 5 just so happens to be Kim Seokjin who you just so happened to have had a thing with in college. Sort of. When a hurricane brings the two of you back together again, the forecast calls for love and dredged up feelings.

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"Will you please turn that off?" you asked, taking a sip of your coffee. Normally, you took it with a little vanilla-flavored creamer, but much like that morning's coffee, you were bitter.

"Aw, why? Seokjin looks so cute in his turtleneck this morning," one of the writers said, fawning over the Channel 5 weatherman. "Maybe you should start wearing turtlenecks. It might boost our ratings."

You rolled your eyes as the red light came on indicating that you would soon be on camera. You set your coffee to the side and stepped in front of the green screen.

"Good morning, Metropolis," you said. "You can expect some light rain on your commute today. It should clear up by lunchtime though and it will be partly cloudy for the rest of the day. You watched as the map viewers saw at home shifted as you shifted the topic. "As you know, a hurricane is forming a few hundred miles off the coast. We are currently predicting landfall early next week. I will be traveling to Diamond Beach as the storm approaches to give you the most recent updates. Thanks for watching Channel 4 News, now here's Andrea with traffic."

The red light switched from you and onto Andrea's camera on the other side of the studio. You let out a sigh and walked back to your desk away from the main set.

"You went to school with him, right?" the same writer asked, still watching Seokjin on the screen. His station gave him more screentime because he was so well loved in the city, often they pan to him coming back from commercial breaks and whenever there was a view question or poll.

"Yeah," you said. There was only one university near Metropolis that offered a robust meteorology program and most of the city's weather people came from it. You and Seokjin had gone through together, even graduating at the same ceremony.

"Wow, was he still so stunning in college? Like, I don't think I could've focused if he was in my classes."

"Depends on who you ask."

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5 Years Earlier

"Having trouble focusing?" you asked Seokjin as you noticed his dark eyes were no longer looking down at the computer screen.

"Hmm, it's a bit hard when you look at the screen like that," he said, smirking and turning around to lean against the desk. "Tell me, what's a guy gotta do to get you to look at him like that?"

"Be a warm front." You watched as a warm front moved towards the city while a cold one moved simultaneously from the other direction.

"What if I'm a hot front?" He turned to face you, his hip still leaning against the desk, but his body was close enough that it brushed yours as he moved.

"Seokjin, stop." You clicked a few more times and turned to flip through your textbook. "It's a storm for sure. A thunderstorm or tornado. Shit, it could be anything, how are we supposed to figure this out."

"Its the weather, not heart surgery. We can be wrong fifty percent of the time and still good at our job."

"But, if we're wrong fifty percent of the time, we'll fail this class."

Jin sighed and crossed his arms as his eyes lingered down your body. "Listen, Y/N. We both know that you're going to stress about this for twenty minutes and then figure it out like you always do. Now, come on, let's take a break."

"And do what?" you asked, letting out a breath between your teeth, not tearing your eyes away from the screen.

"I don't know. I have a few ideas though" His breath was against your ear and his body heat radiated against your own.

"Seokjin, this can't happen."

"Why not?"

"Cause I need to focus on school. I'm here on a scholarship. I can't risk distractions."

Jin sighed and looked down at the weather map on the screen. "It's a thunderstorm," he said. "The currents aren't strong enough for a tornado and based on the patterns, its the most logical."

You quickly wrote down the answer and his reasoning, realizing that he was right. How he surmised the answer so quickly, especially when he was barely paying attention baffled you.

"All right, now, come on," he said. "I'm taking you out for lunch and you can't deny me that. I know you're hungry."

"Fine," you said, shutting your textbooks and allowing the computer's screensaver to come on.

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Just hours later that same night, you found yourself looking up at the ceiling of Jin's bedroom. Soft cotton sheets wrapped around your torso and they felt softer than even the best sheets you'd ever owned. His shirtless form was turned away from you and you resisted the urge to reach up and run a hand through his dark hair. He'd let it grow long recently, the ends of his hair beginning to grow onto his neck.

"Stop staring at me," Seokjin said, you could hear the smirk in his voice. He turned around to face you. His eyes were calm and soft like the sheets, but you couldn't help but feel the sadness. The knowing.

"How'd you know?" Your voice was small.

"I could feel it. Your eyes hurt, you know?"

You did know. You knew how much it hurt Jin to see your eyes wander down the shape of his torso. That the way you always reached to push his ill-fitting glasses up the bridge of his nose hurt. That knowing he couldn't reach out and sneak his fingertips underneath the hem of your sweater.

"I'm sorry."

"I know, it's okay."

"It's not, Seokjin. We need to move on. Forget about each other. It's best for our futures."

"You know that's not true."

"Seokjin, we both want the same things in life. We'd be competing with each other for every job. We'd rush to get the story before the other. It wouldn't last."

"We don't know that unless we try."

"Seokjin, I don't want to give myself the chance to hate you."

You got up from the bed and buttoned your shirt, pulled on your trousers, and tied your shoes. Seokjin watched you, didn't try to stop you as you headed towards the door. Gripping the doorknob, you walked out and back down to the sidewalk below.

Following that day, you didn't see Seokjin again. Sure, he still sat a few rows in front of you, he still presented in class, you glanced over his name in the paper when it was announced he was taking over the weather position for Channel 5. You saw him on billboards and on Reddit posts. Yet, you never met allowed your eyes to meet his again. Unless it was through the warm, freshly printed Metropolis Daily.

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Nearly no one was heading east towards Diamond Beach. Westbound traffic was full of cars heading into the city to weather the storm, while eastbound only consisted of a few cars. Mostly media and others who couldn't drop everything and run from the hurricane.

You could just make out the Channel 5 van ahead of you. Focusing down on your laptop which was tracking the conditions minute by minute, you tried not to focus on the fact you would likely run into Seokjin.

This certainly wasn't the first time a hurricane or tropical storm caused you and Seokjin to collide like convergent fronts. Every year you found yourself at Diamond Beach trying not to watch his broadcast from a few meters down the beach.

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Two Hours Later

"Hello, this Y/N Y/L/N reporting for Channel 4 news. Hurricane Roke is expected to make landfall later tonight. Most of Diamond Beach and the surrounding areas have been evacuated as Roke is currently a category four storm. I will be monitoring the storm and providing updates through Twitter throughout the night and I'll be back on the beach at 5am. This has been Y/N Y/L/N covering Hurricane Roke. Now, back to the studio."

You felt Jin's eyes on you as you gave your report. He was about two hundred feet down the beach. He wore a similar coat to your own and even with his hood pulled up you could feel the way his eyes cut through you.

Once the red light on your camera went off, the one on Seokjin's came on and he began his report. It was nearly identical to yours, Seokjin adding his own flair and charm. Like you wished you could.

Seokjin finished his broadcast and your filmographer began to pack up. "I'll see you bright and early in the morning?" she asked, her hair catching in the wind and obscuring her face.

You nodded and helped her pack up the camera and other supplies, working quickly to prevent it from getting damaged from the wind or rain. Walking up the beach and back to the hotel felt like it took forever, especially with the heavy filming equipment.

Your filmographer had already checked in earlier and headed to her room, carrying the camera and filming equipment. You kept the portable meteorological tools, already anxious to set it up in your room. Jin and his filmographer came in just as you got to the front desk.

Giving them your name, you handed them your ID and the company credit card. The receptionist furrowed her brow and glanced up at you.

"It looks like your room was accidentally double booked," she said. "I apologize, but due to the current situation, would you mind sharing?"

"Uh, sure, that's no problem. Who am I sharing with?"

The woman squinted at her computer. "Kim Seokjin."

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"You're not even going to look at me?" Seokjin asked as the two of you set up your computers. He'd let you have the desk while he took the counter of the kitchenette.

"Not until I get this setup."

Seokjin sighed and pulled out his phone. Service was already finicky, but he managed to pull up Spotify and got music to play. It was soft, as not to disturb your neighbors in the packed hotel.

You smiled as you heard the familiar tune "Dancing Queen". Jin was a fan of older music and the two of you used to listen to ABBA's Greatest Hits when studying together.

"You still listen to this?"

"Of course," he said. "It makes me happy."

It made you happy too and when you finished setting up your computer you peaked out the window. The storm was still a couple of hours from landfall, but the trees were already swaying wildly.

"It's going to be a big one," Jin said, glancing at you and catching your eye. It was the first time you'd truly looked at each other since the day you'd left him on his own. It felt like a lightning bolt skewered you in half.

"Yeah," you said, sitting down on the bed. "It is."

You traced the seams of the comforter with your index finger. The song switched and this time it was "Can't Help Falling In Love With You".

Jin finished setting up his computer. Your screen and his looked nearly identical showing a map of the coastline and the storm approaching. He sat down beside you, closer than you would've thought an acquaintance would sit.

"We should go to bed. Early start tomorrow." His voice commanded you to look at him. "Let's not fight over the bed." Placing down the two extra pillows down the center of the bed, he went to the bathroom to change.

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The storm was in full force when you made your way outside. The four of you: you, Jin, and your two filmographers tried to get onto the beach, but the sand cut your skin. Various debris already littered the beach. Mostly seaweed and tree branches, although you noticed a few shoes and patio furniture from the nearby condos.

"The hotel said we could report from outside," you said. "It'd be safer."

Jin chewed on his cheek and glanced out at the beach. The two filmographers began to set up their cameras and you did you best to ensure your hair didn't fall into your face. You stood away from the wind, finding it hard to breath with it blowing onto your face.

"Seokjin! Stop!" His filmographer yelled, abandoning his equipment, he rushed towards the other man. You turned to see that Seokjin had taken off towards the beach, seemingly want to report from there no matter the circumstances.

You looked over at your coworker and she gave you a curt nod, ensuring that she would watch over the equipment. She dragged both cameras inside the lobby one at a time. Giving her an empathetic look, you took off running towards the beach, hoping to catch up with Seokjin before he got entirely soaked.

When you came to the edge of the beach, you saw that Seokjin was already halfway out, his filmographer not far behind. You sighed and continued out, knowing he was determined to give the report from as close to the middle of the storm as he could.

The filmographer neared the middle of the beach, fearing going any further. When you caught up to him, you stopped to catch your breath, even though it was nearly impossible with the wind. Your breath was swept away as soon as you drew it in.

"He's crazy," the other man said. "I have no idea why he's doing this."

"He always has to go the extra mile," you said, rolling your eyes. "Even if it's stupid and dangerous."

Seokjin turned back to look for his camera operator, only to see him halted halfway up the beach. Seokjin was three-quarters of the way up the beach now, reaching dangerously close to the rough tide. He noticed you still running towards him and smiled before a gust of wind knocked him off his feet.

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Your chest constricted when you saw Jin get thrown off his feet. He landed a few feet away in the sand. You ran as quickly as you could, falling to your knees beside him.

"Are you okay?" you asked, looking him over.

His eyes looked up at you, obviously taking in your features. Yet, his lips said nothing.

"You crazy bastard! What the hell were you thinking? Rushing out here like that? You of all people should know how dangerous that is." You could barely catch your breath between words as you placed your hands on his arms to help him sit up. He didn't budge, however, his eyes just locked on your face.

"What are you doing?" you asked, sighing and dropping your hands from his hands, looking down to meet his eyes for the first time.

He smiled when you finally met his eyes and leaned up to connect his lips to yours. It was brief due to the circumstances, but it felt like lightning coursing through your veins.

"I ran cause I knew you would chase me."

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ckentdaily · 5 years ago

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Welcome to the World

“Gosh, I’m awful sorry,” Clark coughed, after inhaling half of the finishing powder that the makeup artist, Alice, just applied. Alice was nice. Alice only asked him questions about Bruce Wayne and whether or not the little husky mix he adopted was as cute as she seemed in the photos. After Clark had reassured her that, yes, Ace was adorable and Bruce was spoiling her, he shook her hand with both of his and thanked her twice.

The dressing room was silent again. He stood up and stretched his legs, after prying the narrow wooden chair from his hips. No one on set had expected him to be this big, which resulted in some last minute seating changes... but only once he was in front of the camera. A little discomfort now was fine. He just didn’t want to be remembered backstage for breaking a chair.

“Ok, Clark. Let’s decide who you’re gonna be today.” He squinted at himself in the mirror, not liking how the powder obscured the pores in his face. He leaned against the vanity and scrunched up his nose, then rolled his shoulders back. With his tie tucked and a confident smile, he stared at his reflection. One hand in his pocket. Feet shoulder width apart.

Too much like Superman.

He rolled his shoulders forward, higher by his ears, and let his weight shift to the right. He hunched forward and made sure his glasses were high on the bridge of his nose, with the black rim obscuring the space between his eyelids and brow. The lens were thick enough that his eyelashes would barely be seen, much less noticed.

Too much like Clark. Old Clark.

The Clark that hid from opportunities like these, and only scraped by in job interviews, scuttling through parties along the back wall until he faded into the background.

Clark didn’t want to be that Clark today. He didn’t want to be that Clark ever again if it meant he couldn’t be effective.

He straightened up, and took his hand out of his pocket, but he smiled again. Just a disarming, shy one, but enough that he didn’t look like he was prepared to jump out of his skin at any moment.

Better.

He buttoned his blazer and opened the door, just as he heard one of the crew telling Brandon, from sound, to grab the guest and bring him out.

“Showtime, huh?”

“If you’re just joining us, I’m Chuck Wilton, and as the Ukraine scandal unfolds, WGBS is bringing you an exclusive interview with the journalist, Clark Kent, who broke the story. Welcome Clark.” The introduction rolled off the older, gaunt looking man’s tongue with a practiced ease. Chuck appeared on millions of screens across Metropolis and the country for more than a decade. He was a familiar, no nonsense face in American homes.

And he was still too conservative for Clark’s liking. He could respect the man’s commitment to his work while disagreeing with his personal politics. Clark couldn’t relax entirely, even as he shook Chuck’s hand and sat down in the appropriately sized swivel chair, on his side of the desk. He knew not to close his eyes when the pitcher’s planning a curveball. Clark just didn’t know when it would come.

“Thanks for havin’ me, Chuck. I’m glad to be here,” Clark kept the drawl in his voice, as he let the button loose and set down his typed notes in front of him.

Chuck first asked about Clark’s conversations with Ambassador William Taylor, envoy to Ukraine, who returned stateside to testify in front of Congress about the President’s international transgressions. Clark answered calmly, laying out the timeline of the President withholding national aid to force another government to investigate his political opponents.

“That’s correct. President Trump asked for Kiev to investigate former Vice President Biden and would not release security aid until this was done. Requesting that a foreign government conduct a politically motivated investigation with the promise of something in return is not only illegal, but it’s not how the United States conducts foreign affairs.”

“And this single phone call, that we don’t have access to the transcript for, is enough for Speaker Pelosi to file the articles of impeachment? The testimony of a single civil servant has launched these closed door hearings in the SCIF?”

“Not just any civil servant, Chuck. Mr. Taylor is a decorated veteran who has served in nonpartisan roles under both Democratic and Republican administrations since 1985. He worked for the Department of Energy and NATO, ‘fore he began working internationally for the State Department.” Clark pushed back, still smiling, but dropping his hands to his lap to keep from gesturing as he spoke. “I think that in the coming days, you’ll see more and more folks comin’ forward, but this is on top of the previous and documented abuses of power by this administration since 2016.”

“Pelosi has hemmed and hawwed about keeping the scope narrow. If this is the event that finally lights the spark of impeachment, why couch it in the context of those other allegations? Isn’t the public ready to move on from the spectacle of the Speaker grasping at straws?” Chuck fixed Clark with a look over his glasses.

“I think that the latest Pew polls showing public support for a removal of the President from office answers that question better than either of us could. I think it can be argued that it may not have been politically viable to move to impeachment before now, ‘specially in light of the GOP’s shameful display yesterday in the SCIF.”

“Don’t they have the right to protest peacefully, as any other American group?”

Clark’s smile grew tight. “They’d have that right if it was an actual protest, but you’ve got to call it like it is, Chuck. They committed a federal crime. The two dozen or so elected officials barged into the SCIF, brought their cellphones in with them and tweeted from inside. The SCIF is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. These rooms are designed to handle sensitive materials while matters of national security’re bein’ discussed.”

“They weren’t protesting, Mr. Wilton,” Clark took a deep breath, “They were obstructing justice and protesting the very rules they put into place durin’ the era of the filibuster, under President Obama. Electronics weren’t supposed to be in that room, because of the high risk of compromise by foreign agencies. Representative Gaetz knows that."

Chuck hummed unhappily, “Even if they simply wanted to be in the room during the hearing? Isn’t that a reasonable request?”

“If they were one of the Republicans on the congressional Intelligence committees that were supposed to be there? Certainly. But the fact is that those representatives-- from both parties, I might add-- were already in the room. Closed-door testimonies were standard practice durin’ the impeachment inquiries into former Presidents Clinton and Nixon.” Clark worked his jaw and continued. “Just because our current President might act like he’s above the law, doesn’t mean that his party should feel entitled to do the same.”

“I see. It says here that you’ve been at the Planet for two years?” Chuck opted to pivot, leaning back in his chair.

“Yessir, two years this December.” Clark clasped his hand in front of him, on top of the desk. His smile brightened again.

“Where have they been hiding you? Welcome to the world, Mr. Kent.”

“Aha, thank you, Chuck,” Clark laughed nervously.

“Why haven’t we heard from you before? It says here that this is the first time you’ve written on national politics for them. The last time your name was in the news, you were the news. A puff piece from a gossip columnist in Gotham about your current relationship.”

“I’m grateful to my editor, Perry White, for giving me the opportunity to inform the American people about what’s happening on Capitol Hill. I think that they want to hear more about if our Congress is going to impeach a sitting president in an election year, than they do about my personal life.” Clark glanced away and then forced himself to meet Chuck’s gaze again. Old Clark wouldn’t be allowed to finish this interview. “Wouldn’t you agree, Chuck?”

“I would.” Chuck smiled for the first time. His teeth were straight, but yellowed. “But they would also like to know if they’re receiving their news from a reliable source. What would you say to those that might think you’re just trying to keep your name in the papers?”

“The Daily Planet prides itself on integrity. That’s been true since the paper was founded. I think that this story could have been written by any of its reporters. My answer to those folks would be simple, Chuck: the article speaks for itself. Our investigative team has complied page by page summaries of the ambassador’s testimony, cross-referenced with additional witnesses since the probe began.”

Clark paused and turned away from Chuck to stare directly at the camera.

“Stories like this aren’t meant to catapult any one person into stardom or notoriety, they’re meant to keep hard-working Americans abreast of the issues that will have profound impacts on their lives. Make no mistake, Chuck, the American people have asked for the president to be held to the same standards as any other citizen. They have a right to know that some of the men and women that they voted into office aren’t only talkin’ the talk, they’re walkin’ the walk, and they’re ready to check the Executive Branch.”

“Powerful words from a new face. I’d like to thank today’s guest, Clark Kent, from The Daily Planet. I’m sure this won’t be the last we’ll see of him.” Chuck gestured to Clark, who nodded and waved, and then a relieved looking woman with a clipboard and a large headset gave the cue to cut to commercial.

#action post.#plot plot plot.#long post

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lavendersb · 6 years ago

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Flowers Like You

Arthur Morgan x Reader

Summary: The reader has been in love with Arthur for the longest time, but has been to afraid to say it. Then everything changes. This was the story for the “Flowers” option on my last poll! See the end for an authors note.

Lavender had never meant much to you.

It was a pretty flower, one you had passed on forest trails and sprawling fields. One that dotted green pastures and soothed people to sleep when nothing else would.

If it had to mean anything to you, it would mean absolution.

Which was exactly how you felt about it now. Only there was so much more.

Purple petals painted your clothes with the remnants of the rain from this morning as the heads of lavender sprigs brushed past you. Fondly you broke a head from its stalk, acknowledging it in your hand, feeling the rain pass onto your hand, but you didn’t look at it. You didn’t need to, you had seen so much of it recently. You doubted you would ever forget what those flowers looked like.

You remembered the first time lavender held any new meaning for you.

It was an afternoon in spring, at a camp that sat high above the rest of the world. You had words diligently all morning, so you could enjoy the first truly sunny day any of you in the gang had seen for a long while.

Sneaking away from the camp you had taken your cigarettes and fled to a secluded area where you knew a rock you could relax on.

When you found it occupied, you could hardly complain.

It was Arthur, hunched over slightly and sat against the rock. He hadn’t noticed you, and for a moment you were scared to make your presence known. You paused for a moment as he worked away at his journal, you watched as he stroked the pencil to page with long broad motions and watched whenever he rotated the journal a little and continued.

Eventually you walked forwards, announcing yourself cheerfully.

“What’re you drawing?”

Arthur bristled a little, shuffling where he sat and pulled his journal defensively towards him.

“It ain’t nothing-“

“I saw you. You’re definitely drawing somethin’. No point pretending” You interjected, smiling as he let out a breathy laugh.

“Yeah, alright.” He rubbed his neck “but it still ain’t much”

He was so gentle for a man of his appearance and lifestyle, you thought, as his hair dropped over his downturned eyes.

“Still, if you don’t mind, I’d really like to see” you offered softly.

After a second of deliberation, Arthur offered the leather book up to you. The page it was open on was covered in a wonderful pencil drawing of a field, filled with flowers.

“It’s a lavender field I passed when I was riding yesterday, didn’t have time to draw it then” He comments.

“It’s gorgeous” you say, lightly touching the paper with your fingertips.

“Really,” you add when Arthur laughs to himself.

“Just don’t go off that page” he adds with a laugh, its not a joke though, so you listen.

“Course, you wouldn’t want me finding out who you’re sweet on or somethin” you tease, passing the book back to him. He takes it, shutting it and resting it on his lap, his fingers gently tracing circles on the leather cover. His head is lowered, eyes obscured by the rim of his hat.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t” Arthur murmurs softly.

Something in your chest pulls, and you almost swear you can smell those flowers.

A few months later on the wagon trail, venturing through mountain paths and fields. That’s where you remember lavender the strongest.

“Over there,” Arthur called back to you, pointing off to the side “that’s those fields I mentioned”

From your spot in the back of the wagon you turn to face where he’s pointing.

Peeking out from behind the trees is a sea of bright purple, nestled within green grass and practically glowing in the midday light.

“It’s just like your drawing” you say.

Arthur drops his head down and smiles, before gesturing for you to come closer. You slide over to him, resting your elbow on the back of his seat.

“I saw this group of horses when I was there. Beautiful things they were. Big and powerful looking,” He tells you, and the look on his face as he recalls his encounter makes your chest feel warm and full.

“You should head back there some day. See if you can catch one” Charles offers from next to Arthur as he collects the reigns of the wagon “If they’re as powerful as you say they are”

“If they’re as powerful as he says then Arthur could end up trampled to death!” you laugh, giving Arthur’s arm a squeeze. The men laugh a little in response.

“Yeah, after all this that would really be a way to go wouldn’t it” Arthur says with an infectious grin.

“I can see the headlines already ‘Wanted outlaw Arthur Morgan trampled to death by field pony’ ” Charles adds, sending both you and Arthur into a fit of laughter.

“Does have an interesting ring to it, doesn’t it” you say.

“I don’t want anybody but Charles to write my obituary y’hear?” Arthur says, wagging a finger at you, to which Charles laughs.

“Sure, Arthur” you smile, and he gives you a gentle one in return. He takes a shallow sigh before he speaks.

“I’m in good hands with you two,”

When the blood first came you had so many questions.

What you once thought was a persistent cold turned worse quite quickly. The taste of metal in your mouth whenever you coughed too hard was something you decided to keep to yourself. The coughs were infrequent. Nothing to worry people about.

Eventually you knew you needed to find those answers, and so riding to town under the guise of a supply run you prepared yourself for your fate.

The doctor himself couldn’t quite be sure. He had told you it was too early to make a sure diagnosis.

“Can’t you give me some sort of an idea?” you pushed, as the doctor wrote something down hastily.

“I wouldn’t want to distress you,” He says, and you shoot him a dry look.

The doctor puts his pencil down and fixes you with a stare.

“Well it could very well just be tuberculosis” he says.

“Just?” you ask.

The Doctor doesn’t respond straight away, instead he gives you a pained look.

“No,” you warn, sitting forward in your chair “I know that’s not possible”

“It might not be that, but I suggest you at least… observe your relationships. However one-sided they might seem”

Your unnamed condition affected you in so many ways, you unintentionally distanced yourself from the others at camp, worried what they might think. The thought of them pitying you for your illness urged you away from them.

Still, despite all this, you strongly denied what the doctor had insinuated. How could you suffer like that without a clear cause?

But that first evening, a few month later, where you coughed and choked so violently, you had to flee to the edges of camp proved you wrong. Shaking fingers slipped down into your throat, and gagging, you pulled the long thin flower from your mouth. You held it in your hands, whole body shaking and heaving with gasps.

And laughed.

Laughed because the flower in your palm, despite being covered in blood and saliva was clearly a sprig of lavender.

You laughed, because of course it was.

They weren’t always as bad as that first one. Usually you could hide the little bristles of purple within a handkerchief and discard of them later. Yet in a gang as close as this, nothing can be kept a secret for long.

“Can we talk?” Arthur had asked one day, gesturing to his tent.

And you did. You spoke, and you listened. You listened when Arthur told you he had tuberculosis, just as the camp suspected you did also. You simply nodded in response.

“We aren’t so different, you and I” He had said as you left the tent “not now at least”

You paused on your way out, swallowing the words that threatened to leave you.

“Sure. The same”

That night you had seen Arthur, sat in the lamplight of his tent. Propped up against the side of the ammunitions wagon, in his hands he held that pretty photograph of a lady he kept with him. You winced as you swallowed, your throat scraped raw and felt your chest constrict.

It’s a foolish thing to fall in love with a friend.

You had heard it said that this disease choked people to death. The silky flower petals and thick blooming buds coated and clogged the airways until the bearer had no choice but to die. You doubted that would be the case for you. Each time you pulled another sprig of lavender from your mouth you had to fight back tears. These flowers would shred you from the inside out much sooner than they would choke you to death.

You rode back to the doctor, asked him what could be done. If anything could be done.

“I’m afraid not,” he had said, observing the purple flower that you had hacked up not moments before. Swallowing, you prepared yourself to talk again.

“What happens now then?”

The doctor moved the bowl that contained the lavender from your view.

“I hope you forgive me for being blunt,” he said “but now, I urge you to get your affairs in order, and try to make yourself comfortable”

To that you let out a harsh laugh, your painful throat punishing you for it.

“Perhaps tell the gentleman in question. It might ease your mind” he adds.

“If I tell him will-“

“-No,” the doctor interjects firmly “It will not go away.”

You sink back against the chair. You felt lost. Without purpose. You hear the Doctor rotate the bowl of blood and flowers, observing it before he speaks.

“It’s far too serious now for him to ever love you back”

To breathe was a laborious task. To eat was torture, and to speak was out of the question. As your body thinned, so did the gang. Friends left and died, and still they had been none the wiser to the nature of your condition.

You had stopped sleeping in the camp. Offering to take up guard duty at every opportunity, resting against the trunks of trees with your gun alone with your thoughts. And your flowers.

Arthur had joined you once. Coming to sit down next to you in the darkness.

“Night is always the worst isn’t it,” he says, and he’s right. Lying down makes your chest feel impossibly heavy, and often times you find yourself scared that if you go to sleep now, you won’t wake up come morning. Worried they’d find you with a particularly large cluster of lavender in your throat that you weren’t awake to hook out in time. Worried they’d find you as blue as the flowers that festered in your lungs.

“Yes,” you rasped, not wanting to say much more through the pain.

The silence grew heavy, and tentatively Arthur pulled you to his side. You let him move you, holding your head to his chest.

“But we got each other, don’t we” he says, and it burns. The words burn your eyes and your mouth and your lungs. You allow yourself to let go, crying softly from where you are. Part of you wants to tell him. You want to yell at him, tell him what he’s done to you and how he’s killing you. But you can’t, because part of you dreams that if you tell him of your condition, he will hold you even tighter, tell you he’s always loved you and that this has all been a big misunderstanding. You find yourself dreaming, not for the first time that Arthur will make it stop. Make the pain go away.

But you don’t say a thing. That heavy feeling in your chest stays, pulls and pulls until you have to rip yourself from Arthur’s arms, turning away from him and hunching over. Coughing and gagging as your lungs try to rip themselves from your chest, Arthur rushes to you, resting a hand on your back. This hand doesn’t burn, it feels like your flesh is being seared off.

“Go away Arthur” you warn quietly.

He doesn’t move, instead pressing a little harder on your back.

“(Y/N) I-“

“Go away Arthur!” You yell, as violently as you can. Your outburst works, Arthur stills and backs away from you and you refuse to watch as he walks away.

Instead, you repeat the process you’ve become so familiar with, dipping your fingers into your mouth and pulling. From the back of your throat you pull the longest sprig of lavender yet. It’s a tall cluster of three stems complete with roots and looks like you could have ripped it from the earth. All that’s missing is the soil.

Beavers Hollow would be your graveyard, you concluded. You would inevitably starve yourself to death or collapse on the edge of camp. When the rest of the gang moved on to their next hiding spot, you would not follow and so that is why you left the next morning.

Riding out of camp with nothing but the clothes on your back, you knew exactly where you needed to be. Despite the burning pain in your chest, despite needing to stop often, you rode fast and long until you reached the place you needed to be.

Arthur’s flower field.

Once you were close enough, you dismounted your horse. Not bothering to hitch her anywhere, instead choosing to remove her saddle entirely, you said a little goodbye and left for the field.

The lavender sat a grim shade of purple under the grey sky, they moved violently in the wind, yet the weather was the last thing that scared you. It was the flowers. They beckoned you towards their ocean of blossoms and you followed. You were done fighting them.

And now, with the flowers soaking your clothes in old rain, you wandered. Oddly calm given your condition, but with no purpose. A part of you was expecting you to just stop. Stop living, in the middle of the field.

But you don’t, and slowly you wander through the flowers until you come across a small lake. So small and shallow it could almost be a pond. Settling down by the shore you took a deep breath. The scent of lavender from around and inside you was sickly, thick and suffocating, weighing on your already weak lungs.

In the water you could see the reflection of the setting sun, and you smiled. You were tired. So tired, and you hadn’t slept in so long. Sinking lower, you lay yourself down on the bank of the water and turn onto your back. Your lungs groaned in protest, threatening to give in at any moment, but you didn’t care.

From where you were, you could see the darkening sky and the heads of lavender that swayed into your vision. Letting your eyes flutter shut, you thought of him. Thought of Arthur when he first saw this field. That moment that you hadn’t even been witness to, but changed your life forever. And ended it as well.

And calmly, but not without fear, you let yourself fall asleep.

A/N: WHOOPS I WROTE ANGST. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, this is essentially a hanahaki disease au, it’s an au were people can contract this disease that causes them to cough up flower petals when they suffer from unrequited love and is often fatal. Seemed very fitting for a certain cowboy...

Also: @morstin Julia i’m so sorry I had to do this to you.... but you picked flowers!!!! not me!!!!

#I'm proud of this one #hehehehe #Arthur morgan x reader #Arthur morgan #Arthur morgan imagine #rdr #rdr x reader #rdr2 #rdr2 x reader #angst #tw: death #my writing

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vvvveta · 3 years ago

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WHO LOST AFGHANISTAN?

IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of 9/11, Americans were braying for war. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 90 percent of Americans approved of the United States attacking Afghanistan, while 65 percent of the public was comfortable with the prospect of Afghan civilians being killed. Only 22 percent thought that the war would last more than two years.

Americans wanted blood, and they got it. The United States invaded Afghanistan and spent the next 20 years making war there and beyond: in Burkina Faso; Cameroon; Iraq; Libya; Niger; the Philippines; Somalia; Syria; Tunisia; and Yemen, among other places. More than 770,000 people have since died violent deaths in America’s wars and interventions, including more than 312,000 civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Of the 10 percent of Americans who thought that war was not the answer, a small number demonstrated against the impending conflict. They marched in Austin, Texas; New York City; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; and elsewhere. It took courage to speak out against “indiscriminate retribution,” to assert that it was ludicrous to attack a country for a crime carried out by a small group of terrorists, and to suggest that the repercussions might echo for decades. They were mocked, screamed at, called scum and traitors, and worse.

Those who got it right in September 2001 have long since been forgotten. The White House, the Pentagon, and the media never sought the dissenters out for advice, comment, or counsel as the war in Afghanistan went off the rails, ending with the chaotic collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government on Sunday. Instead, those who got it wrong have consistently held sway in the halls of power. “This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” President Joe Biden, who voted for military action in 2001, admitted yesterday. “[Former Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.” Ghani was hardly alone. Biden and countless other Americans played key roles in a 20-year road to defeat that began with the United States toppling the Taliban from power in 2001 and ended with the Taliban installing themselves in the presidential palace in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, this week.

Journalist Craig Whitlock’s new book, “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” will help ensure that no one forgets the harm America’s civilian and military leaders did, the lies they told, and the war they lost.

Synthesizing more than 1,000 interviews and 10,000 pages of documents, Whitlock provides a stunning study of failure and mendacity, an irrefutable account of the U.S.’s ignoble defeat in the words of those who — from the battlefield to NATO headquarters in Kabul and from the Pentagon to the White House — got it so wrong for so long, papered their failures over with falsehoods, and sought to avoid even an ounce of accountability.

“People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’” President George W. Bush said on October 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing Afghanistan. “This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring Al Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.”

More than a decade later, the U.S. still hadn’t won the war, and an obscure government agency, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, sought to figure out why. The result was more than 400 “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted with mostly American (but also Afghan and NATO) officials as well as other experts, aid workers, and consultants. Their assessments were candid, often damning, and the government sought to keep them under wraps.

But the indefatigable Whitlock and his employer, the Washington Post, via two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, forced the government to turn over the files. These records became the foundation of an award-winning series for the Post; now, combined with several troves of documents from various public collections, these files make “The Afghanistan Papers” the most comprehensive American accounting of the conflict and help explain, better than any book yet, why so many of those who planned, guided, and fought the war failed so spectacularly.

Deftly assembling accounts thematically and chronologically, Whitlock allows America’s war managers to hang themselves with their own quotes, offering an encyclopedic catalogue of lies and ineptitude, delusion and denial, incompetence and corruption, and, most of all, rank cowardice. Again and again, Whitlock presents the pessimistic assessments and harsh judgments of officials who believed that their remarks would never become public — war makers who could have spoken out publicly but too often kept their appraisals under wraps or voiced them when it was too late to matter.

“We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House war czar under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, the Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia.

“There was a tremendous … dysfunctionality in unity of command inside of Afghanistan, inside the military,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, an early Afghanistan War commander.

“There was no campaign plan,” confessed Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who twice served as the top commander in Afghanistan under Bush. “I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could.”

These and hundreds of other officials, military officers, diplomats, and analysts could have leveled with the American people immediately or at any time in the last 20 years. Had they done so, perhaps the war in Afghanistan could have been shortened by a decade or more; perhaps following conflicts wouldn’t have been so easy to start or proved so difficult to end; perhaps more than 770,000 people wouldn’t be dead and up to 59 million forced from their homes by America’s post-9/11 wars.

Instead, Americans muddled through the conflict in Afghanistan, unsure what they were there to accomplish, why they were doing it, who they were fighting, and what they were fighting for. “What were we actually doing in that country?” asked a U.S. official who served with the NATO senior civilian representative to Afghanistan. “We went in after 9/11 to defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the mission became blurred.”

To call it confusion is the kindest possible assessment. Another is that, as Whitlock writes, the government was peddling pablum “so unwarranted and baseless that their statements amounted to a disinformation campaign.”

WHITLOCK DOES A masterful job of mining the hard-won SIGAR synopses and archived interviews to juxtapose private judgments with public comments. Bush’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently died of multiple myeloma, but Whitlock ably demonstrates that shame ought to have taken him years earlier. Of all the craven war managers who take their star turn in “The Afghanistan Papers,” Rumsfeld may come off worst. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” the late defense secretary wrote in an internal memo almost two years into the war. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”

Rumsfeld never shared his pessimism with the American public. Instead, for years, he took the press to task for pushback while publicly crowing about signs of progress and corners turned. In 2003, Rumsfeld announced that the Taliban was finished. “To the extent that they assemble in anything more than ones and twos … they’ll be killed or captured,” he boasted. If there’s any justice, Rumsfeld is currently being grilled in the afterlife about whether it’s one or two Taliban fighters who are now overrunning cities and districts across Afghanistan.

So much in “The Afghanistan Papers” reads like an unsettling echo of the American war in Vietnam. During that conflict, the South Vietnamese military that was built, trained, armed, and funded by Americans was regularly (and not always unfairly) disparaged for its cowardice and incompetence. In the end, U.S. officials couldn’t understand how a 1 million-person army with billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons and equipment collapsed in 1975. In “The Afghanistan Papers,” Americans similarly disparage the Afghan military they built or make excuses for its weakness and ineptitude. How could the U.S. be at fault when its Afghan charges couldn’t read, write, or identify colors; mistook urinals for drinking fountains; couldn’t learn basic tactics or manage to shoot straight; and were both lazy and corrupt? Left unexamined is just why a rag-tag, under-armed, underfunded insurgency drawn from the same population, without an air force or superpower backing, was able to exist, much less make consistent progress, over 20 years, ending with a blitzkrieg that took one major city after another, including Kabul, in a matter of days.

Opium is another key overlap. During the Vietnam War, as heroin use among U.S. troops soared, Air America, a company run by the CIA, transported opium harvested by farmers in Laos who were also serving as soldiers in the agency’s secret army. Following its defeat in Southeast Asia, the United States sought to entangle the Soviet Union in its own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan, where, as the New York Times reported, “opium production flourished … with the involvement of some of the mujahedeen, rebels who were supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.” By the time Americans were fighting against some of those same mujahideen and their sons in the 2000s, the United States had turned against drug production and devoted billions to eradicating poppies, but Afghanistan nonetheless became the world’s top narco-state.

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tree-evan · 7 years ago

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suburbs. // reddie

Richie sits beside you, curls barely grazing his shoulders, eyelids drooping against the dark road ahead, like he’s losing a battle with his consciousness. You entertain the idea of letting him sleep- God, he looks so tired, and he still has to drive you and himself home- but you can’t drive. Not with your batshit crazy mother still gripping your shoulder like you’re a mouse to devour. Your fingers shoot out to jab his arm, and even though it hits harder than you meant it to he merely glances at you, eyes widening. You ignore the dilation of pupils. It’s just a myth, anyways.

“What’s up, spagheds?” The way he speaks sounds like he’s trying so hard to keep up, but his body is just falling away. You shuffle against the back of your seat.

“Don’t fall asleep, Rich. We’ll crash and die.”

“Gee, wouldn’t wanna do that before our first kiss, huh, Edd-o?”

You don’t even bother making a face, just cock your head to the side to peer out at the dark, looming trees, illuminated only by Richie’s old truck’s single working headlight. Mike is supposed to help you repair that soon, since there’s no way you’re going into Derry’s junkyard to find a new one yourself, and Richie can’t be bothered. The way the branches bleed into the sky reminds you of a foreboding smile, and you grimace. Were you always this pessimistic? Or did a ten-foot tall, pale clown turn you this way?

You’re jerked away from existential dread by the radio cutting in, loud static filling the car, and Richie shakes his head and apologizes. “Guess I was blasting a station…” he mutters to himself, swapping stations. “There’s no good ones, y’know that, Eddie? Everything’s shit. No one knows how to run the radio!”

You shrug.

He turns back to the road, which has begun to wind, and you’re thankful for his intuition- or maybe he’s just been this way too many times. Frankly, you’ve only been cursed to ride through it twice with your mother, who was filled with inexplicable road rage the entire way both times. Richie, however, makes the turns with ease, and it brings you back to the way people always commented on how he’d probably drive later in life, ‘if he ever passed the test at all’. Richie is the best driver you know.

“Eddie. Pull open my CD case?”

Your thumb pulls at the glove compartment, and you struggle for a second as you always do. It’s always jammed. When you drag the black case out, he instructs you on page numbers and weird codes. His CDs are an odd combination of the popular and obscure, littered together despite his claims that he’s organized it particularly. He probably only says that so you or Stan don’t organize it for him. On the fourth flip, without looking, he says, “that’s it”, and you slip it in the slot without much mind.

The catchy song from a year ago, run down by its popularity polling that lead to it being played on every station for months, stutters from the speakers.

“What? What’s this?” You turn in your seat to face him. “Didn’t you say you hated this song? It was too ‘mainstream’ or something?”

He nods, a smirk pulling at the edge of his lip. “Yeah, but it’s not mainstream anymore.”

“You’re such a fuckboy.”

He cackles, clearly waking up some more, and presses his pointer finger against the radio, finding the skip button with some difficulty. A tense love song with a thick, low beat makes the car bounce a bit, even though its not loud at all.

“I love this song.”

His long fingers return to the wheel to drum against it to the beat, and you fight the urge to smile. You can’t help but watch the way he moves, the way his mouth curls upwards, his chipped nails, his long lashes. You have to force yourself to look away, and you hope he didn’t notice. If he did, he’s kind enough to not say a thing.

The both of you settle back into what’s mostly comfortable silence, other than the shuffling tracklist. Richie skips back to the song at least five times within the hour he drives you home, and by the third, you squint at him. “We’ve heard this one three times.”

“Twice. Don’t be so skeptical.”

“I’m not.”

“Do you not like it?”

You’re cut off by a sudden urge to look at him, and he’s looking back at you. His eyes are dark and unreadable, and the music seems to run up the goosebumps on your arms (“and I like you, I like you, I like you”) until you must turn beet red and quietly respond, “no, I do.”

You swear you see a blush settling on Richie’s cheeks too before he turns back and his knobbly shoulder gets in the way. “I knew you had good music taste, Eds,” he says, his voice wavering a little too much. You smile. You only got into music because of him, after all, with his walkerman that he always kept in his jacket pockets. A witty comeback settles on the edge of your tongue and stalls until it’s too late, and the moment’s gone. Your eyes fall to your lap. You clutch the cold bottle of orange juice tighter.

Richie wakes you up with a gentle nudge against your shoulder, whispering, “Eddie, wake up, we’re here.” You groan against the need to wake up, sleepy haze engulfing you, and you think for a few minutes that you can fall back into it safely, Richie giving in. But he shakes you again, and chuckles when you whine.

“I don’t want to go in,” you slur, and he’s soft as your eyes creak in.

“C’mon, you gotta. You know how Sonia gets when I don’t return our dear, sweet little boy in a minimum setting of one piece.”

“Let me go home with you.”

He falters, his hand still on your shoulder, and it slides into yours. You can hear his breath become shallower in his throat, and in that moment you really come to, eyes blinking widely up at him. You’re only vaguely aware of the situation- of what you just asked. It’s not an abnormal request, after all, but you flush at the way he’s looking at you. Your heart labels it “longingly” even when you beg it not to.

He wants to kiss you.

You think this as you squeeze his hand in yours.

He’s going to kiss you.

You think this as you mutter, thanks, Richie.

He loves you.

You think this as you swing the car door open and jog to your front door, slamming it closed behind you.

#reddie #it 2017 #heres a quick thing i wrote

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promisedangel · 7 years ago

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PredatorShift- Chapter 22

First

Final

The end of this story is nigh. But with it, I will return to the Fresh Meat timeline for a spin-off and a sequel! You all have two weeks to cast your vote in the Story Details Poll if you have not done so!

Chapter 22- Of Crushing and Convincing

Frisk and Gaster returned to the rooftops of New Home in an instant. Frisk clearly heard the monsters below. Some were confused on the sight of their king thrown into a wall. Others fled New Home with what little energy they could spare. Frisk used one of the disembodied hands and floated it over the rooftop to see the panic below. They nearly gasped. The main streets were packed with the fleeing monsters and those who stood confused yet captivated by the event.

Gaster’s inner voice commanded Frisk’s attention, ‘He’s recovered.’ Frisk turned their attention away from the citizens. Their now numerous eyes all focused on one thing. The mad king.

From the center of a hole in the side of a building, Sans emerged from the rubble. He stood on all fours and seemed to slowly grow in size. His gaze turned to Gaster and Frisk. What was once an abyssal eye socket became another glowing eye. This one yellow, but it did not ignite akin to a flame. It simply glowed, even as its blue twin began to grow into a roaring inferno in comparison. Gaster kept his guard up. His tail curled inwards, ready to strike or allow movement.

Sans disappeared in an instant. Gaster teleported to another building the second he saw Sans disappear. In the spot where Gaster once stood, Sans’s maw chomped deep into the stonework. Sans grumbled and spit out the rocks off the side of the building. The rocks descended to the crowd below. Frisk did not have time to check if anyone had been injured. Before they could check, Sans had teleported to them and swung his claws at them. Frisk and Gaster both reacted and summoned a barrier. It easily defended against Sans’s claws. Gaster and Frisk didn’t even have to stand their ground much to keep the barrier up. Sans roared and teleported to the side to avoid the barrier. Gaster easily moved it before Sans could attack. Gaster smirked and used three of the disembodied hands to fire beams rapidly. Sans dodged the beams defensively, which drew him away from the barrier. Gaster lowered the barrier and smirked, ‘We are more powerful than him. We can defeat him!’ Frisk felt a new sense of determination well from within their shared soul. At first, it overwhelmed Frisk. They struggled to keep control of their half of the soul for a moment. The determination then focused on the task at hand.

While Frisk was distracted, Gaster focused and began to control three disembodied hands. He continued to have them fire and slowly move them towards each other. The beams began to combine and spiral out slightly for a wider spiral beam. Sans was hit with these beams and let out a cry of pain. He teleported away into the distance slightly. He summoned two blasters to fire at Gaster. Gaster seemed to dodge the blaster beams easily. Sans roared and summoned many more blasters that quickly fired off towards Gaster. Gaster simply teleported behind Sans. He chuckled and gave a victorious smirk, “He’s on the defensive.” Sans noticed Gaster had teleported behind him. Sans quickly turned towards Gaster. Sans lowered his stance and clenched his jaw tight. A low growl constantly emanated from his form. His back arched heavily and he slowly backed away from Gaster. Gaster summoned a few blasters around Sans and fired them. Sans dodge them and fired his own, many more than Gaster. Gaster teleported to dodge. He slowly moved in towards Sans and began to laugh, “He’s desperate!”

Sans growled and he began to claw out towards Gaster occasionally. The miasma between his bones began to flare and flow with intensity. Frisk felt a chill. They were able to focus once more on the flight. They saw Sans’s body language. They saw this before; a wild animal cornered. They stopped their feet and forced Gaster to stand still for a moment. Frisk pleaded, ‘Don’t!’ Gaster grunted as he struggled to move, ‘You idiot child, we have him cornered!’ Frisk continued, ‘That’s exactly it! When wild animals are cornered, they-’ Frisk noticed something head for them, ‘Look out!’ Frisk flung Gaster and themselves out of the way. Sans’s tail crashed down into the stone below. The building shook. Various loose rocks plummeted below. Nearly a corner of the building they stood on was loose but stayed still. The full damage unseen by the combatants. Gaster growled, ‘You nearly had us killed!’ Frisk was undeterred, ‘He would have done worse if you kept taunting him like that!’

Gaster was ready to retort when he noticed something about Sans. He seemed short of breath, and the miasma had begun to fade. Sans dug his claws deep into the stone below to support himself. He paused. He heard the screams of the monsters down below. Both Frisk and Gaster’s minds went to the same thought. Their eyes widened. Gaster gritted his teeth before he roared out, “I will not let you eat another monster ever again!” Gaster summoned beams from all five hands. They fired upon Sans, whom swiftly dodged and jumped off the side of the building. Frisk gasped, “No!” Gaster and Frisk heard the screams of panic first. Second, they heard Sans crash into the stone road below. Gaster would not let this go further. Gaster teleported down to the streets of New Home. Gaster and Frisk saw Sans already had a cat monster pinned with his claws. The monster shook and began to beg for their life. Sans ignored their pleas. His neck arched up slightly before his jaw opened and practically flew down towards the pinned cat monster.

Gaster acted quickly and summoned a disembodied hand just above the cat monster. He fired a beam directly into Sans’s maw. The beam ran through Sans’s skull behind his maw. Sans roared out in pain he stood on his hind legs for a moment to reel back. In his reeling and trashes, the cat monster was set free. The monster immediately ran but gave a quick nod to Gaster as they passed him and Frisk by. All other monsters in the area scattered. Their screams of panic and confusion could be heard in the distance. Some foolhardy or curious monsters peaked from behind corners to watch the events unfold.

Gaster tried to fire beams at Sans as he reeled, but Sans’s thrashing about made it difficult to aim. Sans thrashed into the building he, Frisk, and Gaster once stood on. Bits of debris fell. Nothing more than small stones fell onto Sans. Gaster noticed most of the debris landed directly on Sans. He looked up and saw the corner that had been loosened by Sans’s attack. The gears clicked in his mind and a new idea arose. Gaster immediately spoke to Frisk, ‘I see a way we can end this.’ Frisk perked up, ‘What?’ Gaster began to explain, ‘Take the hand beams and blasters and let that loose piece of building fall.’ Frisk seemed unsure, ‘Won’t he dodge it?’ ‘I will distract him, now go!’ Frisk hesitated but did concede the body after a moment. Their vision now only came from the five disembodied hands. They floated then teleported away from the main body, which was now under Gaster’s full control. Frisk began to examine the loose corner for ways to make it fall. They found that there were still ways to support the structure from the top and bottom. Frisk focused beams and decided to work on the top first and work their way down.

Meanwhile, Sans had ended his thrashes. His attention turned to Gaster. He opened his maw wide. Energy welled within Sans’s maw and fired out towards Gaster, a much more powerful blaster. Gaster teleported to dodge and found where he stood was a large crater. Gaster teleported in between the building and Sans. Sans turned and attempted to cleave Gaster with his tail. Gaster jumped up and clawed at the side of Sans’s head to little effect. Sans turned his head quickly to clamp down on Gaster. Gaster barely dodged. He quickly teleported behind Sans. Before Gaster could strike Sans’s tail, he heard Frisk shout in their shared mind, ‘Move!’ Gaster looked up to see the loose corner finally break free from the building. Gaster waited for a second as Sans turned around and loomed over him. The rubble of the corner began to split off and hit Sans’s back and head in large chunks. Gaster waited until the last second to teleport away to safety. The rest of the rubble came down at once, the majority of it on Sans. A large dust cloud covered Sans’s figure, obscuring him. Frisk returned their gaze to the main set of eyes as the disembodied hands returned to float around the main body. Frisk spoke in worry, ‘Did we get him!? Did it work?’

They saw slightly rustling within the debris. A low, pained groan emanated from the pile. Gaster saw through most of the smoke and saw Sans. Sans’s eyes glazed over and only glowed a little. He was in a daze. His neck and most of his back was exposed while the rest of him was piled in the debris. Gaster’s eyes widened. He saw his chance. Gaster jumped up and readied his tail. He focused his energy around it to create a thin barrier of energy. Gaster wasted no time and brought his tail down straight down on Sans’s neck. The neck bone was cut cleanly away from the body. Sans made no sound, but his eyes widened, and his maw opened. A quiet sound came from Sans. The glow in his eyes slowly faded as did the miasma in between his bones. Some of the rubble began to shift as Sans’s form began to shake and slowly disintegrate into dust. Sans’s body relaxed, as did Gaster and Frisk slightly. A low, husky chuckle emanated from Sans just before his head disappeared into dust. From the top of the pile of rubble, Sans’s soul emerged. It shook for a few seconds before it cracked and ultimately shattered and disintegrated. The mad king was no more.

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

Chara was on guard. They began to hear screams, roars, and crashes from outside the Last Corridor. The screams were far, but the crashes changed position constantly. They held the worry in the back of their mind that the fight would come back to them.

New footsteps distracted them from the discourse of New Home. They echoed from the way Chara had entered the Last Corridor. Chara hid behind a pillar close to the entrance and readied their knife. Their eyes locked onto the entrance just before the monster had come into the room. The monster immediately noticed Asriel and gasped. It was familiar to them. The familiar voice spoke quietly, but enough for Chara to hear, “Asriel…” Asriel seemed undeterred. Chara relaxed and calmly walked out from behind the pillar. They spoke quietly, “It would be unwise to disturb him, Father.” Asgore turned his gaze to Chara and gave a relieved smile, “You are alright!” He waked up to Chara and kneeled down. Chara sheathed their knife. Asgore calmly pulled them into a hug. Chara reciprocated with a smile. Chara spoke with a slight somber, “I had to push him after all…” Asgore pulled away and frowned, “That is…. was Frisk, is it not?” Chara nodded and spoke calmly, “Do not worry, Dr. Gaster recovered their soul before Sans could.” Asgore stood tall and sighed, “They are fighting out there. The monsters in New Home are running for their lives.” Chara muttered dryly, “Better than becoming his food.” Asgore appeared downcast, “I… yes… that would be a worse fate...”

Chara raised a brow. They suspected something about Asgore. Chara spoke curiously, “Is something wrong? Do you not have faith in your boss’s plan?” Asgore hesitated, “…He is not my boss anymore. I quit.” Chara raised a brow, “Why?” Asgore paused and scratched his head, “I… I did not see this situation as safe. He could have teleported you three away when Sans chased you.” Chara mused, “He most likely calculated that Sans was too close for that to be viable.” Asgore nodded, “But… he promised to keep you two safe and-“ Chara quietly shushed him. Chara spoke tactfully, “It does not matter now. While I wish things were better, I cannot dwell on them. All that matters is that Gaster has his souls, and Asriel has finally embraced his instincts.” Asgore did not respond. He hugged himself and looked away, his expression crestfallen. Chara saw this and sighed, “However… if I could change one thing… I would have hoped to save Mother.”

A tear escaped Asgore’s eyes. He covered his face and let out a deep, sorrowful, sigh. Asgore finally spoke, “After so long… I thought there was no way save her.” Chara pointed their thumb towards Asriel, “It is the same way we had to save Asriel. It was part of my plan.” Asgore sniffled as a few more tears escaped his eyes, “Your plan? You… never told me your full plan, Chara…” Chara relaxed slightly, “My plan was simple. I would find the last human and kill them within the confines of the lab. While Gaster left with the soul for his business, I…” Chara frowned, “I would have locked Asriel in a room with the corpse.” Asgore matched Chara’s frown, “And you would not let him out until he ate.” Chara nodded before they continued, “Once Asriel returned to his sanity, my plan was to gather the rest of the corpse in a sack and deliver it to Mother. I concluded the scraps would be enough to snap her out of her insanity, if only for enough time for her to properly hunt on the surface. In addition… I knew Asriel would not be able to eat the entire corpse.”

Asgore wiped his tears away, “I am sorry you had to come up with such a plan, and that you felt the need to keep it secret from me all this time.” Chara crooked their neck slightly, “I simply thought it best for you to focus on your work with Dr. Gaster. Was I wrong?” Asgore shook his head, “No, you are right. Besides, it is as you said; we cannot change the past.” Chara gave a small smile, “But we can change our future.”

Chara paused to gather their thoughts. Yet, something was different. They no longer heard noises of chewing, slurping, and squishing. Chara turned towards Asriel quickly. Their hand instinctively went to their sheathed knife. Asriel was still on his knees. He had stopped eating. He held some half-eaten entrails within his grasp. His eyes were locked onto them. His mouth and eyes were wide with shock. Small squeaks echoed from him. Tears began to well in his eyes. He dropped the entrails onto the floor. A loud squish echoed throughout the Last Corridor. Asriel started to panic. He began to hyperventilate. He sobbed. His voice squeaked, barely heard, “No… I… I…” Chara and Asgore ran over to Asriel. Asriel heard their steps and turned his gaze towards them. Asriel squeaked out, “Chara… dad…” Chara reached Asriel first. They went to his right side and kneeled down, “Rei-“ Asriel panicked. He cried out, “No!”

He shoved Chara away. Blood hand prints lightly stained their jacket, put there by Asriel’s push. Chara landed on their side, not prepared for Asriel’s reaction. Asgore quickly helped Chara up without a word. Asriel sobbed, “I… I … I ate them… I’m… I’m-“ Chara quickly interrupted, “A monster.” Asriel looked over at Chara in shock. Chara only smiled before they continued, “And there is nothing wrong with that fact.” Asriel shook his head in disbelief, “But I ate a friend! I… I don’t want to eat them- I didn’t want to!” Chara remained calm and walked up to Asriel, “And as long as you keep your belly full, you won’t have to worry about that ever again.” Asriel paused, his expression calmed slightly. However, he sounded unsure, “So, I have to eat humans… to make sure I don’t hurt my friends?” “Rei, my mirror was dead, and their soul absorbed by Dr. Gaster before you even touched that body. You never hurt them.”

Asriel’s eyes widened in realization. They pondered for a moment before they looked up at Asgore with a pleading gaze, “I-is that true, dad? If their soul was gone… I never hurt Frisk?” Asgore blinked. He was surprised Asriel had calmed down so quickly. Asgore evened his expression and spoke calmly, “Yes… that would be correct. I did not see the event personally, but if what Chara says is true, then yes. You did not harm Frisk by… eating their former body.”

Chara snapped their fingers, “I think I, at last, have a way to explain it.” Asriel blinked and crooked his head, “Huh?” Chara calmly explained, “Remember the garden we made in Waterfall? The one we made because the monsters who lived next to the old snail farm had died?” Asriel nodded silently before Chara continued, “Say a vegetable in the garden is a soul. Once you pick the plant and put it in a basket, it is no longer in the garden, correct?” “Y-Yeah?” “Then we till and change the land to fulfill our needs. We change the land, but the vegetables are already gone. It is the same as a soul and a human body.” Asriel narrowed his eyes slightly. He scratched his chin with a confused look. He groaned slightly, “I… I think I get it? Golly, we… often changed which vegetables we planted to try out new things.” Chara snickered, “And you stumble across a metaphor for reincarnation.” Asriel puffed his cheeks and spoke childishly, “I still don’t understand that reincarnation thing at all.” Chara relaxed, “Perhaps another time. But for now, do you understand? Do you think you can keep your promise to me?”

Asriel remembered something and jumped slightly in shock, “Oh! Your locket!” He looked down and saw both lockets were covered in blood. He frowned, “They’re both covered in blood.” Chara cradled the lockets around Asriel’s neck in one hand. They smiled and found one that had one chain over the other. They calmly removed the locket and whipped the blood off both sides with their thumb. They saw the familiar ‘C’ on one of the lockets’ faces. They calmly put the locket back around their neck, “Nothing a quick wash and polish will not fix.”

Asgore was about to say something, but before he could, a loud crash sounded in the distance. Much louder than any of the crashes and screams that came before. Asgore, Chara, and Asriel looked around curiously before they found the noise came from New Home. Silence followed. No loud crashes. No loud sounds of magic. Nothing loud enough for them to hear across New Home. Chara raised a brow, “I believe the deed is done. The mad king has been slain.” Asgore sighed in relief, “His plan worked… I… I almost cannot believe all of our work has come to fruition.” Chara’s relaxed gaze turned serious, “Then we do not have much time. If I have a chance at survival, we must leave when the barrier breaks.” Asriel blinked, “We?” Chara nodded, “I told you I would take you to see the stars one day. And now I will be able to fulfill that promise.” Chara took Asriel’s hand and the three of them slowly began to walk towards the throne room, with the barrier not far beyond it.

#predatortale #storyshift #predatorshift #undertale au #fanfiction #fanfic #chapter 22 #frisk #w.d. gaster #gaster #sans #chara #asgore dreemurr #asriel dreemurr

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Headlines

Pandemic retools diplomacy as world leaders gather virtually (AP) With COVID-19 still careening across the planet, the annual gathering of its leaders in New York will be replaced this year by a global patchwork of prerecorded speeches, another piece of upheaval in a deeply divided world turned topsy-turvy by a pandemic with no endpoint in sight. As U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it: “The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis unlike any in our lifetimes, and so this year’s General Assembly session will be unlike any other, too.” This is the first time in the 75-year history of the United Nations that there will be no in-person meeting. Gone will be the accompanying traffic jams, street closures for VIP motorcades, stepped-up security to protect leaders and noisy crowds in the halls of the sprawling United Nations complex overlooking New York’s East River. Only one diplomat from each of the U.N.’s 193 member nations will be allowed into the vast General Assembly hall. All will be socially distanced and masked. World leaders are not barred from coming to speak in person. But presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and ministers travel with large entourages and at a time of pandemic and quarantine requirements, including in New York City, the General Assembly members agreed that crowds needed to be avoided.

U.N. chief says no action on U.N. Iran sanctions due to ‘uncertainty’ (Reuters) United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council on Saturday he cannot take any action on a U.S. declaration that all U.N. sanctions on Iran had been reimposed because “there would appear to be uncertainty” on the issue. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month that he triggered a 30-day process at the council leading to the return of U.N. sanctions on Iran on Saturday evening that would also stop a conventional arms embargo on Tehran from expiring on Oct. 18. But 13 of the 15 Security Council members say Washington’s move is void because Pompeo used a mechanism agreed under a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, which the United States quit in 2018. “There would appear to be uncertainty whether or not the process ... was indeed initiated and concomitantly whether or not the (sanctions) terminations ... continue in effect,” Guterres wrote in a letter to the council, seen by Reuters. “It is not for the Secretary-General to proceed as if no such uncertainty exists,” he said.

Ricin Is Said to Have Been Sent to White House (NYT) Letters sent in recent days to the White House and to local law enforcement agencies in Texas contained the lethal substance ricin, and investigators are trying to determine whether other envelopes with the toxin were sent through the postal system, a law enforcement official briefed on the matter said on Saturday. The letter to the White House, which was addressed to President Trump, was intercepted, as were the letters to a detention facility and a sheriff’s office in Texas. Ricin, which is part of the waste produced when castor oil is made, has no known antidote.

Southern California wildfire grows, burns nature center (AP) The destruction wrought by a wind-driven wildfire in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles approached 156 square miles (404 square kilometers) Sunday, burning structures, homes and a nature center in a famed Southern California wildlife sanctuary in foothill desert communities. Firefighters were, however, able to defend Mount Wilson, which overlooks greater Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains and has a historic observatory founded more than a century ago and numerous broadcast antennas serving Southern California, from the Bobcat Fire. The Bobcat Fire started Sept. 6 and has already doubled in size over the last week. It is 15% contained as teams attempt to determine the scope of the destruction in the area about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of downtown LA. Thousands of residents in the foothill communities of the Antelope Valley were ordered to evacuate Saturday as winds pushed the flames into Juniper Hills.

Sweden spared surge of virus cases but many questions remain (AP) A train pulls into the Odenplan subway station in central Stockholm, where morning commuters without masks get off or board before settling in to read their smartphones. Whether on trains or trams, in supermarkets or shopping malls—places where face masks are commonly worn in much of the world—Swedes go about their lives without them. When most of Europe locked down their populations early in the pandemic by closing schools, restaurants, gyms and even borders, Swedes kept enjoying many freedoms. The relatively low-key strategy captured the world’s attention, but at the same time it coincided with a per capita death rate that was much higher than in other Nordic countries. Now, as infection numbers surge again in much of Europe, the country of 10 million people has some of the lowest numbers of new coronavirus cases—and only 14 virus patients in intensive care. Whether Sweden’s strategy is succeeding, however, is still very uncertain. Its health authorities, and in particular chief epidemiologist Dr. Anders Tegnell, keep repeating a familiar warning: It’s too early to tell, and all countries are in a different phase of the pandemic.

Hackers leak personal data of 1,000 Belarusian police on weekend of protests (Reuters) Anonymous hackers leaked the personal data of 1,000 Belarusian police officers in retaliation for a crackdown on street demonstrations against veteran President Alexander Lukashenko, as protesters geared up for another mass rally on Sunday. “As the arrests continue, we will continue to publish data on a massive scale,” said a statement that was distributed by the opposition news channel Nexta Live on the messaging app Telegram. “No one will remain anonymous even under a balaclava.” Security forces have detained thousands of people to tackle a wave of protests and strikes, their faces often obscured by masks, balaclavas or riot helmets. Some protesters have physically torn off the masks of some officers.

In South Korea, Covid-19 Comes With Another Risk: Online Bullies (NYT) The scandal that riveted South Korea’s online busybodies began when Kim Ji-seon checked into a beachside condominium in February. A 29-year-old office worker planning a June wedding, she had nothing more salacious in mind than meeting with members of her church to organize a youth program. Then Ms. Kim tested positive for the coronavirus—and the details of her life became grist for South Korea’s growing culture of cyberbullying and misinformation. Using sophisticated digital tools, the South Korean authorities publicly revealed Ms. Kim’s age, gender, church name and recent whereabouts. Extrapolating from these details, online trolls accused Ms. Kim of belonging to a religious cult. They matched her itinerary with that of another church member who had tested positive and concluded she was cheating on her fiancé. “I was flabbergasted,” said Ms. Kim, now 30, in an interview. “How could they make fun of people who were struggling for their lives? But with an IV stuck in my arm, I could not do much about it from my hospital bed.” Governments around the world have grappled with misinformation and outright lies about the coronavirus. In South Korea, that struggle has become uniquely personal. South Korea owed much of its relative success in finding those infected with the virus to its aggressive use of surveillance camera footage, smartphone data and credit card transaction records. But it has also empowered trolls, harassers and other 21st-century scourges.

Singapore—a poster child for globalism—is taking a nativist turn (Washington Post) When Internet users circulated the LinkedIn profiles of ethnic Indian employees at Singapore-based financial institutions and accused them of stealing jobs, Rindo Ramankutty quickly set his account to private mode. The 36-year-old Indian national has lived in this majority-Chinese city-state since 2011 and feels at home. But over the past decade, the tech worker has witnessed increasing vitriol online against his compatriots. Although officials have condemned the abuse, a thread of nativism has entered mainstream discourse as Singapore, which has ambitions of supplanting politically troubled Hong Kong as Asia’s financial hub, takes a hard look at how open it wants to keep its borders. Unlike in Europe and the United States, where immigration debates generally revolve around undocumented or low-wage labor, middle-income professionals are the source of anxiety here. The perceived number of Indians in finance “is particularly sensitive to Singaporeans who want to work in those jobs,” said Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, a sociopolitical commentator who has been critical of what he calls Singapore’s “growth at all costs” policies. He added that many countries would face a larger backlash if their middle-class populations had similarly high concentrations of expatriates. Racism is undoubtedly a factor behind some of the nativism. About 49 percent of ethnic Indians in 2019 said they faced discrimination in the housing rental market. Nonetheless, race-based violence is almost nonexistent and outrightly xenophobic politicians have been repeatedly rejected at the polls.

Deadly airstrike in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians, 30 Taliban fighters despite ongoing peace talks (Washington Post) While Afghan government and Taliban negotiating teams talk peace in Doha, the two sides continue to carry out deadly attacks leaving dozens dead in Afghanistan itself. On Saturday, two airstrikes carried out by Afghan government planes in the northern province of Kunduz killed at least 10 civilians and more than 30 Taliban fighters, according to local officials. South of Kabul in Paktika province also Saturday, two local officials were assassinated, including the deputy police chief. No group claimed responsibility for the killings, but Afghan officials believe armed groups linked to the Taliban are behind a string of similar attacks. Peace talks, launched last week between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Doha, were hailed as a historic opportunity to end decades of war. But while the two sides have met a handful of times, they haven’t agreed on the basic format of the negotiations, including what exactly will be discussed and in what order. Statements from both delegations stressing the need for “patience” suggest neither side expects a quick resolution to the talks.

US sends mechanized troops back into Syria (Army Times) Bradley fighting vehicles have headed back into eastern Syria, the Pentagon announced Friday, a move that comes after a tense encounter with Russian forces left four U.S. troops lightly injured last month. The return of mechanized units also comes as the U.S. military deployed Sentinel radar and increased the frequency of fighter jet patrols over U.S. forces in that part of Syria, according to U.S. Central Command spokesman Navy Capt. Bill Urban. U.S. and Russian officials traded blame in late August after troops from both countries collided in northeast Syria while on patrol. A Russian vehicle sideswiped a light-armored American one, injuring four U.S. troops, while two Russian helicopters flew about 70 feet over top the altercation, U.S. officials said following the incident. For their part, Russian officials said U.S. troops were blocking their ground patrol and Russian military police “took the necessary measures to prevent an incident and to continue the fulfillment of their task.” Russian forces are in the country backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and have long called for U.S. troops to leave.

#headlines #news

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i-write-shakespeare-not-disney · 7 years ago

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Roses are Red- Solangelo

Disclaimer: This story will revolve around abuse in future chapters.

I come from an abusive household. I lived through domestic abuse for eight years, and its impact continues to affect me a little over a decade later. I felt the necessity to give a voice to the people trapped in an abusive relationship, to show what it entails and what it does to a person. As a writer, I always vowed to myself that I would write so in a way so raw and honest, it would list my novels under banned books. I would write the reality people are afraid to write. I would write the voices that have been silenced. So that's what this story is. It will show the development and the struggle of an abusive relationship so that everyone can understand the fear, the hurt, the pain. So people will stop asking, "Why didn't you just leave them?" or "What did you do to provoke them?" and start standing up for the victims instead. This story will contain violence and sexual abuse in addition to emotional abuse. I don't write this because I find pleasure in it, but because I believe it's important for people to understand what this is like.

After a poll on Tumblr, this story has been molded to star Will and Nico from the Percy Jackson series. In reality, you can put any faces you want on these characters. It's the story that matters.

I also decided making this an LGBT novel because LGBT people are silenced further when it comes to abuse. Not only because of the previously mentioned questions but because many don't believe women are abusive nor are men abusive to each other. It's just a matter of fighting back. That is not true.

If you or someone you know need help in regards to domestic abuse, call National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233 with more than 200 languages. All calls are free and confidential. Online chat is also available on their website between 7am-2am central time at www.thehotline.org

(Click OP if read more link doesn’t show.)

Feedback is appreciated!!!

It’s funny how time works. How every precise second is a factor in your life. A moment earlier, a moment later, and your life can change completely without you realizing it. It seemed like time was constantly the reason behind everything. This fabricated illusion created by humans to measure their uneventful lives to the point of panic or stress had managed to be the molder of lives.

That was all Nico could really think. That single second that had sent him barreling through the classroom door his first day of college until he was toppled over another student with bright eyes and clusters of freckles. That minute it took him to gather his things and leave the coffee shop on campus resulting in Nico running into the same student- though not literally this time- as he walked in at the same time Nico was going to walk out. That single half-second glance that resulted in running a red light, slamming the brakes too hard, and going to a hospital because a single second later another car had swerved into them.

The minute of traffic that had caused them to get to the club past the hour that 21 and under were allowed. The moment of frustrated hesitation that led to someone offering help, sneaking them through the back. The three minutes in which Nico left to get a drink, the single second it took for him to turn and find Will in the crowd, talking to someone.

Life had changed for the better and for the worse by mere seconds. Moments which, had they happened a little earlier or later, would have led their lives down completely different paths.

Nico hated time.

***

There was an incessant tug at his arm. “Nico, come on, we’re going to be late, and we’ll have driven there for nothing,” Will sighed. “We have to go.

“Give me two seconds, man I’m almost done,” he said, peeking up at the mirror, his hands running through his hair, trying to spread the gel just right. Will rolled his eyes and leaned against the counter, watching Nico through the window. His eyes flickered over to him, suddenly uncomfortable. “Dude. Stop staring, you’re making me nervous.”

“I’m thinking maybe if I intimidate you enough, we can leave already.” Nico rolled his eyes and turned to him.

“Ever heard the expression ‘a watched teapot never whistles?’”

“You’re not a teapot,” he pointed out, smirking, raising an eyebrow. Nico snorted and shoved him playfully. “Finally,” he breathed as Nico left the bathroom.

Together, they left Nico’s on campus apartment and started for Will’s car. Since Nico crashed his, he hasn’t been able to fix it, rendering it useless. He glanced momentarily at Will knowing that on his right side, there were twenty stitches. Will was rocking the side shaved look, but knowing it was Nico’s fault made it painful to look at him sometimes. The hair had grown out enough, the stitches healed so that there was only a faded, jagged, light scar obscured by dirty blond hair.

“You can stop looking at me like I’m a lost puppy, Neeks. It’s been four months.” Will always knew when Nico was thinking about the accident. “I’m perfectly fine. Look at me, ready to get hammered and grind on strangers at a club! Plus, this haircut makes me look edgy. Very attractive.”

Nico offered a smile, but his chest still constricted with guilt. It was his fault. And though Will kept saying anyone could’ve run a red light, Nico knew it was more.

It wasn’t just the mistake of running a red light, and slamming the brake when he probably should’ve sped up to get across before cars drove into them. It was the fact that he had been driving and he had let himself get distracted by Will, blond hair flying back in short waves since the window was down, singing happily along with the radio, lips curled into a smile, hands drumming against the dashboard because Will swore he could figure out the drum beat.

He had been selfish, trying to soak up his presence, completely forgetting the road until Will shouted that there was a red light.

Nico hit the brakes without thinking. A jolt hit the front right side, another the back left, the impact shaking his bones, an icy feeling spreading through him as it registered that he’d just crashed. Will’s airbag had burst out, the window shattered, and Will was groaning lifting his head, the right side of his face smear with blood. And Nico’s head had hit the steering wheel hard enough to give him a headache, but he was fine and that wasn’t fair because he was the one driving, it had been his fault, so why had it been Will who got hurt so badly?

Suddenly an arm draped around his shoulders, and he pulled into the scent of Will; cotton and vanilla shampoo and minty toothpaste and Old Spice cologne. “It’s okay, Nico. Stop beating yourself up about this.” Vaguely, Nico wondered if it was possible to be in love with someone he never even dated. “We’re going to dance, we’re going to drink, and we’re going to have some fucking fun.” He shook Nico’s shoulders gently. “Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Nico said. He smiled and remained under Will’s arm until they reached his car.

Of course, the traffic was bad. It was a Friday night, and everyone was dying to go out into the city and get stupid drunk only to regret it the next morning and do it all over again by the time the sun set.

They had just barely reached the club in time before they refused anyone under 21, and stood in line, pulling out ten bucks each and their IDs. When they reached the bouncer, he checked the IDs and shook his head. “Sorry dudes. No more under 21.”

Will gaped and scoffed. “We’ve been in line for like five minutes. It’s like two minutes past the hour, come on.”

The guy rolled his eyes and gave their IDs back. “Get here earlier next time then.” Nico winced at that, guilty again because he knew his getting ready had made them later.

“What a dick,” Will mumbled under his breath, turning away with Nico. “That’s ridiculous. It’s just fucking ridiculous! We have our money, we’ve been in line, and it’s not like we could get drinks anyway with the exaggerated exes they put on our hands. That shit takes days to wash off, dude.”

“Well, Thursdays are always 21 and under. We could come next week. Why don’t we get a pizza or something and watch a movie at my place?” he suggested. “I’ll buy,” he added, knowing this was all his fault.

Will let his head fall to the side, kicking at the ground. “That does sound tempting,” he said with a smile. Nico smiled back, but before they could turn away, someone walked up to them.

“Hey. I heard you guys were struggling with the bouncer.” Nico looked at the guy uneasily. Never trust anyone you don’t know this late in the heart of the city.

The guy had a lazy posture, tufts of brown hair in tousled waves, and he was rolling a large M&M in his mouth, looking at them with a cocked eyebrow, head tilted to the side.

“Yeah,” Will answered, glancing at Nico. “We’re under 21, but we were in line for a while. He didn’t want to let us in.” He shrugged.

The guy tilted his head back upright, biting down on his chocolate as he looked at Will and smirked. “I could get you guys in. There’s a back door, my friend’s the bartender. He has access to the door.” He gestured over. “Come on.” Will looked at Nico with an excitement Nico couldn’t bring himself to quell.

They walked over, Will walking with ease and Nico with enough tension for both of them. They stood by a door, the ground reeking of piss, trash, and who knows what else for a few moments before the door opened, revealing a guy with a ponytail and wide gages in his earlobes. “Yo, Sebastian. Who’re they?”

“New friends,” he answered. “They’re with me.” They guy nodded and let them in.

The club was packed, and that was an understatement. Bodies could hardly move, but that didn’t stop couples from grinding against each other slowly to the booming beat of the bass or the drunks from shoving past people like the dancefloor was theirs, their drinks spilling onto people or themselves. The song was good, Nico had heard it on the radio, but it was nearly drowned out by the constant club-beat of the bass they’d remixed it into. The song changed, along with a video on the small screens hanging from the ceilings. The beat remained the same, only the lyrics changing.

Nico saw different hair colors, heard shrieks of laughter and people singing along. He saw girls and guys with their hair matted down with sweat against their foreheads as they rocked their hips together, hips swaying sensually, not matching with the beat, but that obviously didn’t matter. “Come on,” he heard a faint shout. He looked over and Sebastian was leading them over to a smoke area where people could sit and take a break.

Will looked absolutely elated. Nico wished he could match his enthusiasm instead of dragging along like dead weight. “I’m Sebastian,” the guy shouted, though this time Nico heard him better.

“I’m Will. This is Nico. Thanks for getting us in!” He flashed a sincere, open smile. God, Nico loved that smile. It held all the warmth in the universe, and it was always honest and it was always special even though he always smiled. Anyone who received a smile from him was blessed for the rest of the day.

“Of course,” he chuckled. “So, you two together?”

Nico’s eyes went wide, his heart stuttered. It wasn’t the first time they’d been asked. People always assumed they were a couple. But each time always made Nico’s heart flutter with fear and hope.

Will laughed good-naturedly and wrapped an arm around Nico. “No, he’s my best friend. We’re both single.” The answer made Nico’s stomach twist, even though he knew it was true. But something changed in Sebastian’s expression. His smile widened slightly, his eyes focused on Will, and Nico had the absurd urge to pull him away and leave the club. Leave the grinding bodies, the boring bass, the messy flashing lights.

Sebastian looked over at Nico and smiled. “You guys want some drinks? Jack won’t ask your ID he knows you came in with me.” Nico looked at him suspiciously, and Sebastian seemed to understand because he laughed. He pulled out some money and handed it over. “You can get them. I know the number one rule of a club is not to take a drink from someone else.”

Nico relaxed and looked at Will. “Can you bring me a Jack and Coke on the rocks?” Nico nodded and pleaded with his eyes for him to stay in the same spot. He didn’t want this guy whisking him away.

While Nico left to get Will’s drink and a beer for himself, he couldn’t help but scan the crowds. It was getting more and more crowded. His eyes flitted over to where Will and Sebastian were waiting.

His stomach dropped.

Sebastian was close, about the same height as Will. His hand was in his hair, on the shaved side. Nico knew he was touching the scar. He knew it, and his stomach churned at the idea. But Will seemed completely at ease. His eyes were lidded, his sweet smile morphed into a sensual smirk, head tilted nearly brushing Sebastian’s nose with his own.

Nico was rushing back, spilling most of his beer, eyes set on the two of them. When he reached them, Will looked his way, but remained close, shoulder brushing Sebastian’s. Nico gave him his drink and Will thanked him. Sebastian whispered something in his ear and Nico fought the urge to hit him.

Then Will leaned over, his whiskey-tinted breath warm in Nico’s ear. “You mind if I go dance?”

His heart dropped to his stomach. “No, go ahead,” he answered lightly.

Will smiled and nudged him. “You should dance too. It’s a club, go meet someone.”

But the only person I want is you, he thought to himself. But he just smiled and nodded. “Yeah, totally will if I grow enough balls.” Will laughed and punched his shoulder lightly before walking away with Sebastian. Nico noticed with a nauseating lurch that his hand was intertwined in Sebastian’s.

Staying in the smoke area, Nico watched with a twisting heart as Will wrapped his hand around the back of Sebastian’s neck and curled closer to him, careful not to spill his drink. Sebastian’s hands didn't hesitate to roam up and down Will’s torso, fingers searching greedily. Nico dared him to go too far. Too slip his hands too low, to push into him too hard, to do anything that would make Will push him away and turn back to Nico. But he didn't.

Three songs later, he was still painfully watching Will twist in Sebastian’s arms and press against him, head tilted back in a joyous smile as Sebastian tentatively leaned down, encouraged by Will exposing his neck further, and licked the skin there.

It was something Nico had been dying to do, and very nearly did a few times when he was too drunk. And watching Will melt against him, reveling in this stranger's lips at his throat, Nico felt something cold clench his heart until it was too painful. He looked away and wished he had had the gall to tell Will what he felt. Even if Will didn't like him back, at least he wouldn't torture Nico by blatantly flirting and feeling up strangers in front of him. Will would never do that.

Instead he remained seated, sipping lukewarm beer, and wishing more than anything that they’d started walking away a few seconds earlier. Then they wouldn’t have met Sebastian, and they’d be in Nico’s living room watching a movie and throwing pepperoni at each other.

Nico was getting cranky. He was sleepy, hurt, and he felt invisible in the seating area watching couples grope each other. He wondered how many of these people had just met. How many of these were just doing what Will and Sebastian were doing?

His eyes returned to Will and Nico felt the earth shatter beneath him as everything fell away. There was an uncomfortable tightness in his chest, a pain in his heart so strong it became physical.

They were kissing. They were pressed as close as they possibly could be, kissing almost viciously. Even from a distance, Nico could see their tongues probing into each other’s mouths, teeth biting at lips, fingers tangled into locks of hair. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. He wanted to, God he wanted to. He didn’t want to torture himself like this, watching someone adore the person he loved the way he’d always wanted to.

But no.

If Nico had the chance, the kiss wouldn’t be so primal. He would kiss him softly. He would kiss him slowly. He would admire and bask in every sensation, from the warmth of his lips to the way his lips would part slightly to the texture of his tongue pressed against Nico’s own. He would relish the kiss, live in it, cherish it with everything in him.

Knowing that he never would while watching the scene unfold in front of him, the two of them stumbling between dancing people until they were near a wall, pressing into it like they wanted to mold into it, Nico finally had to tear himself away.

The look of pure ecstasy on his face was unfair. Knowing that Will enjoyed what he was doing hurt Nico further. It reiterated that he never stood a chance.

He staggered to the bathroom taking ragged breaths. He splashed his face with water, trying to calm down, trying to quell the hurt, the agony that was trying to bubble and burst through his chest.

He just wanted to go home.

He wasn’t sure how long he took refuge in the bathroom, scrolling through his phone until it was down to 10% if only to ignore the memory pawing at his brain. He didn’t pay attention to the time. But it was nearly three in the morning when his phone rang with Will’s face, contorted by a Snapchat filter, and Nico yelped, nearly dropping his phone. He answered and stuttered out a, “Hello?”

“Don’t hello? me!” he snapped. “Where the hell are you? I’ve gone all over this place looking for you! I came outside and I can’t go back in. Baz’s friend is off his shift. Are you still in there?”

“Looking for me?” he questioned. He blinked and shook his head. “Um, sorry.”

“Are you drunk right now? Where are you? Are you okay?” Nico’s brain was struggling to catch up, but it was more due to the emotional overflow and mind numbing scrolling he’d been doing while inhaling the disgusting scent of the bathroom. “Nico?”

“I’m okay, sorry. I’m-” Suddenly there was no static on the line. He looked at his screen and cursed when he saw it was completely black. It died.

He cursed under his breath and left the bathroom, then the club. It was still relatively full, but not as asphyxiatingly packed as before. There were several people on the sidewalk, waiting on Ubers or friends or trying to maintain their balance long enough to stay upright for two seconds.

He wasn’t sure where Will was, but if he could just go to where they’d parked, he would be fine.

He started walking, and that’s when he heard a relieved cry in the form of his name. He turned and saw Will barreling into him, his arms wrapping around him. Nico yelped and awkwardly hugged him back.

“Where the hell were you?” he asked, pulling away.

Nico tried and failed to ignore the purple marks along his neck and the plump swell on his nearly red lips. “I was in the bathroom,” he grumbled.

“The whole time?” he asked incredulously.

Nico felt his face flush and shrugged his hands away. “Yeah. I think the beer might’ve made me a little sick or something. I wasn’t feeling well, and I didn’t want to force you to go home, so…. I just hung out in the bathroom. I’m sorry I forgot to text you.”

“Nico,” he breath exasperatedly. But before he finished, Sebastian was beside him, an arm snaking around Will’s waist.

He had marks on his neck too. But he had a few bite marks too.

“You found him,” he said. “You okay, dude?”

“Yeah, just feel a little sick,” Nico said, forcing a smile.

“I’m going to take him home,” Will whispered. “Get in, Neeks.” He opened the door for Nico get in, and he did so awkwardly. He could hear the muted murmurs just outside his window. “Thanks for helping me look for him.” Something unintelligible. “I had fun tonight. Text me?”

“As soon as you get in the car.” Nico could see through the side mirror as Sebastian neared Will, his arms wrapping around him. It wasn’t greedy this time. It was soft. Gentle. “Promise I’ll see you again.”

Will’s face tilted toward him, and Nico knew they were kissing again. He furrowed his eyebrows and curled into his seat shutting his eyes. A few excruciatingly long moments later, Will opened the door to the car and got it, starting the engine. “Nico?” Nico didn’t respond. He kept his eyes closed. He could pretend to be happy for him. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. “Neeks?” His hand rested on his arm. “Hm. Maybe you did get sick.” He heard him fumble with something and Nico noticed the air vents weren’t blasting in his face anymore. It was subtler and the air blew gently against him, enough to keep him from sweating, but not so much to make him freeze. The radio switched between stations for a while before Will settled on an Indie station and left it at a low volume.

Will hated Indie. He put it for Nico. So he could unconsciously listen in his sleep. It made Nico want to burst into tears and confession.

Instead, he kept his eyes shut and pretended to sleep the entire way back to campus.

Click Here for Ch. 2

#solangelo #au #you voted

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useunknown · 8 years ago

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Why I’m Afraid

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.” Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, Harpers, 1964.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings” and “consider the end.” But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn’t, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.“ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Reason #1: Because I’m a White Liberal Coastal Elite Unaccustomed to Losing

We joked the race would be called for Clinton by the time our election-watch party started at 6:30. Which was fine, because who wanted to watch Wolf Blitzer stall for five hours while vote tallies streamed in? A gleeful gmail thread counted down to the party. Who was bringing the kleenex? There would be tears of joy to mop up. We wondered if Clinton would find a maze on the inside of Trump’s head when she scalped him. A Trump piñata was going to be on hand.

We gathered at a friend’s Echo Park home, “I Voted” stickers slapped over our hearts, half-surprised the election wasn’t yet in hand. Trump and Clinton were still tracking even in Florida, but needless to say that would change when the urban areas started reporting.

We were graduates of good universities, many of us working in or around Hollywood, who yes, read The New Yorker, and had been listening to Keepin’ it 1600 and joked about Donald Drumpf and told everyone they had to see Moonlight because it’s just incredible. We wanted more diversity at the Oscars and used the right pronouns when we talked about transgender people, and talked about firewall states and paths to 270 electoral votes and how as soon as Clinton won Florida and North Carolina, it would be over.

We flipped between CNN and MSNBC, watching stables of pundits on expensive sets dance around touch screens as they tried to divine the arcana of obscure suburbs. Trump was winning in counties Obama had won in 2012. The pundits scratched their heads– the polls were getting some things unnervingly wrong. Every so often they’d give a projection, a picture of Trump appearing on the screen with his smug smile, a check mark under his name. The map kept getting more red, Trump’s electoral tally creeping towards 270. We looked at each other– what the hell was happening? We poured more wine as we realized Clinton wasn’t going to win Florida, or North Carolina, or Ohio, or Iowa. Even New Hampshire seemed to be in doubt. I pulled up pathto270.com on my phone and did the math... Wait a minute: if Clinton didn’t win Michigan, she was finished. We broke out a moments-away-from-being-legal pre-roll to take the edge off.

And then Wisconsin started to turn red. And then so too did Pennsylvania. Suddenly it was Clinton who needed to surge ahead in five different states. We changed the channel to Fox News because we suspected that MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki wasn’t being entirely upfront with us. Sure enough, they had already called Michigan for Trump. "It’s over, isn’t it,” someone said despondently.

Those fucking deplorables, in their fucking baskets. Did they realize what they had just done to our country?

We looked at the Trump piñata in the corner. We were too devastated to go near it, or acknowledge how wrong we had been. I don’t think a piñata’s ever had the last laugh at a party– but it was that kind of night.

Reason #2: Because I’m Sheltered from Injustice and feel Entitled to Happy Endings

All around me, in communities real and online, in group-texts with friends and conversations with strangers, there’s an unquantifiable sadness. At a hip Silver Lake coffee shop the day after the election, baristas had become de facto grief counselors, each customer arriving at the cash register with a sorrowful sigh.

“How are you?”

“Oh... you know.”

Sigh. “Yeah.”

I was in Los Angeles on 9/11. The mood on November 9th, 2016 was bleaker.

Losing elections is one of the despairs of living in a democracy. Every few years you’re liable to feel like your country has been wrested away from you, and that you’re powerless to stop it. But Trump’s victory left us feeling far more bereft than if McCain had won in 2008 or Romney had won 2012.

Part of it is the dissonance between where we thought our country was and where we’ve found it. We had our phones out, ready to record the moment when we burst through the glass ceiling into an era of a more tolerant, cosmopolitan, liberal, inclusive America. After 43 white male presidents, we’d have an African American and now, a woman. John Oliver had joked during the campaign that if Democracy was a computer game and Clinton was completing women’s 100 year-quest to get the oval office, Donald Trump made for a fitting final boss. We could endure his white nationalist chauvinist worldview and categorical unfitness to be President when it seemed like his campaign was a gross-out Farelly Brothers comedy and his defeat was an afterthought.

We had believed in a myth of the teleology of liberal progressivism and placed faith in the ultimate goodness of “the American voter.” Clinton’s victory would be the triumph of forward progress over restoration, togetherness over division, high roads over low ones, love over hate.

So it’s no surprise we were crushed. When a Republican beats a Democrat, that’s politics. When it seems like the forces of evil have triumphed over the forces of good, that can feel like tragedy. Especially to people not used to the world treating them with indifference. Perhaps we’d been standing upside down the past eighteen months– the glass ceiling we thought we’d been looking up at was actually a floor, and we’d just fallen down through it.

But there’s also something more sinister in the air. A cosmic foreboding. A greater trauma has taken place, something menacing and chilling that makes you think “something’s different this time.” My body is tense, an epigenetic voice that’s seen demagogues and persecution in another life, warning me to be on high alert because somehow, I know how this one ends. It was only a hundred years ago that my grandfather bribed a boarder guard and dressed like a girl to flee pogroms in the Soviet Union.

Reason #3: Because I’m Being Reactive and Underestimating America

Cooler heads will cite America’s resilience: “We’ll survive because we always do.”

We’ve had bad presidents. It hasn’t meant the end of the republic. We’ve emerged from wars, economic downturns, and attacks on our freedom. We’ve seen demagogues, and rebuffed them. If a president’s terrible, he won’t get reelected. Everything’s cyclical. The system can be slow and ugly, but it reacts and corrects.

This is by no means the first time a party has controlled all three branches of government. Republicans did it in 2000. They proceeded to lose Congress in the 2002 midterms, and narrowly lost their senate majority in 2006. They may have charged into a few ill-advised wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and ballooned the deficit and accelerated global warming and brought moral shame upon us with secret torture prisons and warrantless wiretapping and aggravated wealth inequality with tax cuts for the rich and the deregulation of banks and fostered conditions for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression along the way, but that whole mess brought us Obama, and the republic survived.

And when Democrats took the White House and a majority in the house and senate in 2008? Republicans curled up in an obstructionist ball for two years, and took back congress in the 2010 midterms. It is the greatest gift the founding fathers gave us– a system that errs towards gridlock, which has protected us against the forces of tyranny for some 240 years.

The Cooler Heads will cite reasons why this will be the case for Trump. They cite the fact that Trump’s Republican coalition is unwieldy at best. That Trump isn’t even really a Republican– his campaign was against Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment as much as it was against the Democrats. Once the Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy, appoint a few conservative judges to the courts, roll back Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the Clean Energy Act, Trump’s coalition is going to start to fracture.

Trump didn’t win the election because he broadened the Republican coalition and attracted new voters to the Republican party– he won because voter turnout was down. Trump had a million more votes than Romney in the states he won that Romney lost– Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (with Wisconsin virtually the same), but total voter turnout was lower than it was in 2012 in all of these states (except for Florida, where voter turnout was up 8% from 2012 and Trump outperformed Romney by 11%). Longterm demographic trends still favor the Democrat’s coalition, and if Trump governs as poorly as we fear, democratic voters will be ignited to turn out for the midterm elections in 2018 and to take Trump down in 2020.

The Cooler Heads will also note there are mechanisms for the minority party to obstruct the governing one from getting things done. The Republicans don’t have the 60 votes they would need to force things through the senate. Democrats will copy the Republican playbook from the past eight years and at the very least, they’ll manage to stop Trump from doing anything that puts the country in existential danger.

As for Trump’s campaign of intolerance and the wave of white nationalism he rode into office, cooler heads will argue that while he may hold views that are racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic, he’s more empty vessel than ideologue. His rhetoric during the campaign was designed to make the election about identity. But it was a cynical marketing strategy, not an ideology.

The Cooler Heads might even pontificate that a Trump presidency might not be all bad. I think they’re wrong, and getting there requires a cocktail of denial and privilege, but they might reason that while Trump’s a demagogue and a narcissist with designs to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family, perhaps he’ll have a business man’s savvy about running the government. Maybe he’ll pass a big infrastructure bill that doubles as a stimulus, with Democrats ensuring its inclusive and a chastened media monitoring for corruption and graft. He’ll promulgate business-friendly policies that enrich banks and corporations and increase wealth inequality, but the American economy hums as high corporate profits propel the stock market upwards.

Mike Pence and Paul Ryan try to push through a radical Republican agenda, but run into gridlock. They don’t have the 60 votes they need repeal Dodd-Frank, they repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation but delay when the repeal goes into effect because no one can figure out how to replace it, as Republican voters realize through a haze of misinformation that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing, that repealing it would mean no longer being able to afford their cancer treatment, and that everything they don’t like about Obamacare was the result of Republican obstructionism and sabotage. Republican lawmakers stop short of Trump’s craziest proposals, which do indeed prove politically unworkable. If Silicon Valley keeps innovating and a policy of isolationism keeps America out of a clash between Europe and the Middle East, Trump could even end up being remembered as a middling President, a tier above George W. Bush and Millard Fillmore.

Reason #4: Because the Real Best Case Scenario is Actually Terrible

Even if Trump was a normal politician, his platform would be dangerous. His incompetency and illiteracy and the fact that he processes the world like a five-year old child is enough to spell disaster.

Trump’s stance on climate change alone could be, by definition, apocalyptic. If he walks away from the Paris Accord, it could be a decade before the world cooperates on climate change again. We could look back on his presidency as the moment when we accelerated environmental degradation and doomed the planet.

Trump’s complete ignorance about diplomacy and geopolitics could also rapidly throw the world into turmoil. He’s exhibited minimal understanding of how the world works or America’s place in it. He’s volatile, reactive and vengeful in a fragile world that manages order only through predictability and diplomacy. Our allies are frightened they can no longer rely on American support, and if we drive them away, they’ll find protection elsewhere.

Trump’s belief in protectionism will cut economic ties that foster cooperation and American soft power. Trump’s plans to walk away from the TPP will cripple American influence in Asia Pacific, and cede influence in the region to China, and his plans to declare China a currency manipulator and use Taiwan as a bargaining chip could escalate tensions with China and make Sino-US relations openly hostile.

Trump and the alt-right’s categorical condemnation of Islam and hardline approach to fighting terrorism, including a Muslim immigration ban, the astonishingly unconstitutional Muslim registry, the resumption of torture and black sites, and even the semantic obsession with saying “radical Islamic terrorism,” threaten to alienate moderate Muslims and foster more extremism, while compromising American values and diminishing our standing around the world. Trump could be the buffoon who brings the clash of civilizations to fruition.

Trump’s volatile temperament is at this point well-documented. He’s reactive and vindictive, prone to late-night Twitter rants that spew invective without any basis in fact. What happens when he takes aim at a foreign leader? What happens when he decides to escalate a Twitter War into a real one? U.S. foreign policy has never been in more reckless hands, and the possibility for a misstep that threatens our security, weakens our standing in the world, or triggers an international crisis have seemingly never been higher.

There’s a current of fear sweeping America and Europe, as white people without a college educations outside of major cities who are culturally and economically alienated from the forces of globalization, who never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and in whom a fear of Islam and terror have been ingrained since 9/11, are turning to right-wing nativist movements that promise a return to a more prosperous past. Countries across Europe are being strained by the influx of refugees, and nationalist parties in Finland (18% of the vote), Denmark (21%), Austria (35%), Hungary (21%), France (14%), and Switzerland (29%) are gaining support on the back of anti-immigration platforms that call out Islam by name.

This is the sentiment that loomed over the Brexit referendum, which saw British voters upend polling expectations and vote to leave the European Union. On the day of the Brexit referendum polls showed a 3-4% lead for “remain” that was within the margin of error, only to have an unexpected victory for “leave” that was spearheaded by the turnout of non-college white people in the heartland, who longed to reclaim some imagined “past greatness,” felt the loss of “national identity,” and scapegoated immigrants for taking jobs and straining public services. Five months later, the US election has followed the exact same script.

Trump spent the campaign stoking fears that America was hurtling towards the apocalypse. Now that he’s the president-elect it’s tempting to invoke the same kind of hyperbole. I’m nervous Trump’s administration is going to be one of unprecedented corruption and division, that serves one part of the country at the expense of others, that brings out the worst in us and represses what’s best.

But even in this scenario, the country would survive. Our system, our principles, our resolve have always allowed us to weather these storms. Progress doesn’t move in a straight line. We’ll survive this and come out stronger on the other side, because we always do. Sure the idea that Trump could be the end of the 240-year American experiment is the thinking of the paranoid conspiracist.

But god, if there was ever a moment to wonder if we’re in uncharted territory, it’s now. Because there’s something dangerous about the “we’ll survive because we always do” axiom: it holds true until it doesn’t.

Because this Time’s Actually Different

There is a critical difference between the 2016 Presidential election and the 57 that came before it: we’ve never elected a demagogue like Trump to the office of the President.

Of all the demagogues that have emerged in the course of US history–Huey Long, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Charles Coughlin– Trump is the only one to seize our highest office. We’ve watched him closely for 18 months. He’s not bound by any norms, or decency or sense of shame. His politics are dangerous.

In Trump, we’ve elected the tyrant our founding fathers feared and designed our democracy to defend against. The populist who could rise to power by appealing to base emotions and making promises to the working class that couldn’t be kept. Soon-to-be-boycotted by the alt-right founding father Alexander Hamilton warned that it was democracy’s greatest vulnerability in Federalist #1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

A vengeful narcissist who believes he’s above our norms should not be in the Oval Office. Trump’s campaign followed a demagogue’s playbook– drumming up fears of terrorism and national decline, scapegoating minorities and immigrants, shamelessly lying and promising the impossible. He’s announced intentions to jail his opponents and sue his accusers, incited violence at his rallies and shown a preference for confrontation and vengeance over compromise or resolution. He’s declared the rights to freedom of speech, religion, and assembly to be annoyances he could do without.

The institutions and norms that were supposed to keep a demagogue out of the White House have already failed us. This puts the United States in uncharted territory, and the possibilities of a Trump presidency should be considered in that light.

Trump’s consistently demonstrated a belief that the rules don’t apply to him. For 25 years as a private citizen, he stiffed contractors and creditors, committed infidelity and sexual assault, and evaded taxes. Most disturbing, Trump maintained during the campaign he wouldn’t accept the election results if he lost, a statement he modulated but never retracted. The peaceful transition of power is the most fundamental and singular political feat of American democracy. It’s the reason any of this works. If Trump was prepared to challenge these precedents as a candidate who was expected to lose, what might he do when he’s in office? It seems not a matter of whether Trump will abuse power– it’s how brazenly and destructively.

Trump plans to have his children run the Trump Corporation while he’s in office, and has put his children in charge of the transition team that will make all key hires for his administration, an unconscionable conflict of interest. I’m not about to pretend that U.S. politics haven’t always involved horse trading and corruption. I’m sure the alt-right has corruption anecdotes about the Clintons and the Obamas– but what Trump’s trying to get away with is unprecedented.

Never before has there been such an obvious channel for directly bribing the President of the United States. Foreign leaders with holdings in foreign companies could award lucrative deals to Trump Corp to influence U.S. policy. Trump’s recently opened hotel in DC seems poised to become a direct channel for foreign countries to bribe Trump, and puts him in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Trump’s children headed his campaign and have chaired his transition team– there is no separation between them and Trump. The idea that a “chinese wall” could exist between Ivanka Trump, who heads Trump Corp, and her husband Jared Kushner, who Trump has challenged anti-nepotism laws to bring into his administration, is ridiculous.

When a company or foreign government meets with Trump Corp, it will be hard not to imagine it’s also dealing with the United States government. It’s a dangerous line that at best opens the door to unprecedented corruption and at worst leads to Donald Jr. igniting a cyber war when he threatens a well-connected Chinese Developer. As Matt Iglesias reasons in one of the most chilling articles written since the election, given Trump’s philosophy of rewarding loyalists and punishing his rivals, Trump could turn the U.S. into a post-Soviet style kleptocracy. A pay-to-play system in which fealty to Trump’s administration is necessary for doing business, while businesses that voice dissent find themselves on the wrong side of regulations, losing government contracts, or embroiled in federal investigations.

He’s already begun to set the stage for this kleptocracy, with his deal with Carrier “to save a thousand jobs from being shipped to Mexico.” The narrative on the right is that Trump met with Carrier and convinced it to keep a plant open in Indiana, thereby saving a thousand jobs before he’s even arrived in office. Obama would have been pilloried by the right if he ever boasted about “saving jobs from leaving.” He can’t even get credit for creating 16 million jobs during his presidency. No matter that 6,000 Carrier jobs are still leaving, and that Trump has merely slowed the inevitable. This isn’t an economic policy– it’s a precedent for companies to hold the government hostage– “cut our taxes or we’ll leave.” But of even greater concern, Trump has taken the first step towards his kleptocracy, and disguised it in a triumphant and politically-difficult-to-argue-against story about saving manufacturing jobs. A world where he picks winners and losers, singling out private companies to reward or punish on a case-by-case basis. Like the most dangerous demagogues and paranoid psychopaths, Trump keeps a list of his enemies. He has shown no hesitation in using his Twitter account to attack them and seems to relish the power his tweets have to move markets.

As for Trump’s unwieldy Republican coalition– I want to believe there are reasonable Republicans that might serve as a check on Trump. That party cooperation with Trump’s agenda will slow after they’ve implemented the top agenda items of the Republican establishment and done their best to erase any trace that Obama was in the White House. But if Republicans were too spineless to condemn Trump during the campaign, how can we expect them to stand up to him when he’s returned them to power, touts a voter mandate, and uses the oval office as a bully pulpit?

These are the same Republicans that began undermining our institutions earlier this year, when they abdicated their constitutional duty to give a hearing to Merrick Garland. A week before the election, Republican senators were vowing to obstruct any Supreme Court nominees appointed by Clinton, abandoning any pretense that this was ever based on even the most rickety of precedents. Our institutions are all that hold our country together. When they cease to transcend any one person or party, our entire republic is threatened.

Normally the losing party regroups after an election and begins to work towards winning back legislative control in the midterm elections. Bush lost his Republican majority in the house and senate in the midterm elections of 2002, and Obama lost his in 2010. But while a lot can change in two years, the 2018 midterm elections don’t seem to offer democrats that possibility. Republican gerrymandering will aid Republicans in holding the house for the foreseeable future, with many Republicans more afraid defeat will come from “getting primaried” from the right than from a Democrat challenger. In the senate, only eight Republicans are up for reelection, seven of them from solidly Red states, while 25 Democrats are up for reelection, ten of whom are from states won by Trump.

Even more than gerrymandering or specific senate races though, the Democrat coalition faces a longterm structural and geographic problem. Democrats enjoy a voter majority, but their support is inefficiently distributed in a system that awards political power based on geography. For the second time in five elections, the Democrats won the popular vote and lost the electoral college. Clinton won California by 4.3 million votes, and won its 55 electoral votes– Trump won Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina by about 800,000 votes, and won 108 electoral votes. Representation in the senate is also geared towards geography– the 40 million people in California get the same number of senators as the 600,000 people in Wyoming. The arithmetic of congress and the electoral college was set up to create a buffer between voters and their elected officials and to prevent any one region from becoming too powerful. But with democrats clustered in cities and on the coasts, the arithmetic currently cedes disproportionate representation to Republicans, and even as demographic trends favor the democrats, it could be a while before demographics catch up to geographic distribution. Add to that the fact that Trump can appoint a partisan crony to chair the federal reserve in 2018 to grease monetary policy in the run up to the election in 2020 and that Republicans will delay the repeal of ACA until after the midterms, and the Republican hold on power could end up increasing in 2018.

Trump’s early cabinet moves also portend an Orwellian state, rendering every department’s name into cruel irony. The Environmental Protection Agency will be led by a fierce climate change denier who works for the oil and gas industry, the Department of Labor will advocate pro-business policies that aid in worker exploitation, the Federal Trade Commission will encourage monopolization and consumer exploitation, the Department of Justice will condone civil rights abuse and exact revenge on Trump’s opponents. Trump has appointed a white-nationalist anti-semite to a Bismarckian role exempt from congressional approval, and seems intent on filling most other positions in his cabinet with plutocrats and alt-right loyalists. Instead of emptying the swamp, Trump’s filling his cabinet with muck from the bottom of it. People is policy, and Trump’s administration is shaping up to be an intersection of the Christian right, white supremacists, Trump loyalists, and cronies of the oil and gas industry.

And what happens when a demagogue who doesn’t play by the rules decides he doesn’t want to relinquish power? For now, a 60-vote supermajority is needed in the senate for key appointments and legislation, which will allow Democrats and key Republicans to moderate Trump’s agenda. But what happens when Trump grows annoyed with the filibuster, and pressures the senate to blunt the tools of minority opposition? And makes dangerous appointments with a 51 vote majority approval that turn the courts from a check on his power to a rubber stamp? And declares war on the the press, limiting White House access to conservative media of his choosing, and expanding on the precedent set by his friend Peter Thiel in the lawsuit that ruled against the first amendment and led to the shuttering of Gawker? And helps the passing of discriminatory voter suppression laws (the 2010 reinstatement of which already helped to sway the election for Trump) under the guise of addressing voter fraud, and deregulates campaign financing, while making Breitbart a state-sponsored TV Channel to be transmitted to every home and be built-into every American-made iPhone, which by the way, will now transmit all of your private information to the Department of Freedom. On one hand, it sounds unthinkable. On the other, everything that’s happened since Trump declared his candidacy has seemed impossible– until it wasn’t. It may be time to assume the worst about him and prepare accordingly, rather than being surprised with every new offense that pushes us incrementally closer to an autocratic kleptocracy.

This is all without even mentioning Russia. At the very least, it appears Russia hacked the DNC and leaked information in an attempt to sway the election towards Trump, with the Trump campaign taking advantage of the leaks that dogged Clinton throughout the campaign. Remarkably, Republicans who used to call themselves patriots are now happy to condone interference in an American election by a hostile foreign power. Which is insane. But at worst, all of this goes much deeper. Multiple intelligence agencies seem to believe that Russian intelligence taped Trump getting peed on by prostitutes when he visited Moscow in 2013, giving Russian intelligence blackmail to wield against him. This theory would hold that the Kremlin systematically coordinated with and funded the Trump campaign, working through Paul Manafort, who took over Trump’s campaign over the summer of 2016 before disappearing back into the shadows and whose ties to Moscow are well-documented, and it would mean Russia has a puppet in Washington DC for the next four years. Trump’s consistent pro-Russian stance, his obsession with Putin, and his nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO and Russian Order of Friendship Recipient Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State further suggests treasonously deep ties between Trump and Moscow. Trump continues to deny all of this, even the universally agreed upon fact that Moscow hacked the DNC. If there’s unrest in Latvia in the next few years, and Russia blocks security resolutions to intervene but moves in unilaterally as a peacekeeper, and Trump doesn’t do anything about it, we’ll know the tape is real.

Because This Could Go From Bad to a This-Is-The-Darkest-Period-In-American-History Worse

There was speculation during the campaign that Paul Ryan and Mike Pence were more ideologically extreme than Trump. “Sure, Trump’s got some crazy in him,” the thinking went, “but at least he used to kind of be a democrat.” If Trump was to end up being impeached, be it due to allegations of treason, perjury, violating the constitution, or demonstrating with finality that he’s unfit to hold office– or if he succumbs to a heart attack because of his incredibly poor health– there was an idea that the devil we knew might be better than the devil we didn’t. It was Pence, after all, who backed a law in Indiana that would force women to have a burial for their aborted fetuses, and spearheaded the charge to leverage Hurricane Katrina to pass policies that lowered labor standards and gave handouts to oil and gas companies.

I’m offended by most of their politics, and would no doubt look upon their agenda in horror, but I’d accept this was our democracy playing out. Red vs Blue, D. vs R., hollywood liberals vs bible belt conservatives, with a lot of filibustering, fundraising, and shouting at each other on Sunday shows on the way to relative gridlock. But I would believe that no matter the appearance of corruption, religious fervor, or even bigotry, that they believe in democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law.

But in Trump, we’re faced with a new set of concerns. I’ve spent a lot of words talking about alarming implications of Trump’s temperament, his policy views, and his incompetence. But the only scarier thing than Trump’s blustering incompetence is that he, and more likely Steve Bannon, are in fact maniacally competent.

For the past eight years, Democrats and Republicans have had a philosophical battle over whether our system worked. Obama tried to navigate unprecedented partisan gridlock to pull levers that nudged the country in the direction of a progressive liberal agenda, even if the movement was sometimes slight. With the nomination of Hilary Clinton, Democrats continued to stake out a belief that change could be affected within the current system. The Republicans, radicalized with the ascendence of the Tea Party, became the party of revolution– they decided they didn’t believe the current system worked, and they wanted to overturn it. This made the Tea Party well-suited to be an opposition party, because it was always ready to play the game of chicken. Either it would get its way, or it would lose and take the whole government crashing down with it– and it was perfectly fine with either outcome. The Democrats would never have risked jeopardizing America’s credit to gain a policy victory, as the Republicans did when they threatened sovereign default unless Obamacare was repealed. But instead of being thrown out of power for needlessly threatening to throw the global economy into chaos, Republican lawmakers expanded their hold on both federal and state legislatures over the past six years. There was a time when conservative Republicans could at least be counted on to be patriots and believe in upholding the constitution, but Republicans have become the party that is willing to abandon those tenets for other ideological gains.

The country’s susceptibility to autocracy is made more challenging by the “post-truth” environment in which we now live. The fact that “post-truth” is now a term we throw around and accept is itself ludicrous and dangerous, but seems to be the only way to adequately describe the current political and media landscape. The polarizing impact of social media networks, the death of the local newspaper, the erosion of civil society, the divide between people with a college education and people without, between secular liberals in the cities and religious conservatives in the heartland, have made it so that Democrats and Republicans no longer inhabit the same reality, and have no mechanism for even communicating with each other. As of 2016, 72% of Republicans still doubted whether Barack Obama was born in the US. Over 60% of Republicans still didn’t believe global warming was due to human activities. If we can’t agree on objective facts, we open the door to unspeakable horrors, with no way to hold those who propagate them to account.

Republicans have denounced every news outlet that follows basic journalistic standards as an ideological arm of liberal elites. Meanwhile, many Trump supporters get their news from Breitbart, the propaganda organization of Trump’s top advisor, Steve Bannon. No US President has ever had a news organization for directly misinforming his supporters. State-run news organizations are hallmarks of autocracies.

The Great Con of the Republican party is that it relies on the support of people its policies don’t particularly help. It’s not just democratic campaign rhetoric that Trump wanted to cut taxes for the wealthiest 1% and deregulate banks and enrich businesses at the expense of their workers– that’s really the crux of their plan. Trump added a populist spin that won him the election– but I’m against his policies because I’m confident they’re going to leave the country worse off.

So the scary part of a Trump presidency happens when his policies fail to make a difference in the lives of his supporters. When it turns out that fixing health insurance wasn’t as simple as selling plans across state lines. When protectionist policies increase the prices at Walmart. When putting tariffs on Mexico doesn’t bring back post-WWII manufacturing jobs, but rather accelerates the pace of automation. When the Affordable Care Act is repealed and people can no longer pay for their cancer treatments. When Americans realize they’re worse off, and Trump faces a rising tide of disapproval and charges of incompetency, and begins to scramble to deflect his failures from his administration and place them somewhere else.

This is the point when a lot of presidents would lose reelection. But this is where Trump and his demagoguery set up a different dynamic. Trump has proven uniquely adept at speaking to his supporters, and distracting them from policy by fanning the flames of intolerance and xenophobia. He has a strong cult of personality and commands blind allegiance from a base that puts faith above reason. They have perhaps been failed by our society-- left behind by our economy and education system, they are unequipped to understand their own self-interests or confront ideas that challenge them-- as Errol Morris mused, the "a stupid person is a person who treats a smart person as if he is stupid.” Their shame leaves them angry, their resentment leads to tribalism. Those bright red Make America Great Again hats recall a tactic used by other fascist movements to identify their supporters– badges of allegiance that serve as a mechanism of deindividuation and embolden those wearing them to express their most base and intolerant beliefs.

But it may not just be a matter of incompetency. Trump has expressed his admiration for Putin’s regime, and Steve Bannon subscribes to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory that every 80 years America has a major crisis, when the system gets remade. Trump and Clinton were both viewed so unfavorably that the 2016 election was often framed as a contest between the lesser of two evils. But we may have actually seen the triumph of a deep-seated white-Christian authoritarian world-view. Trump might be inviting crisis.

I’m afraid we’re about to see the most cynical version of disaster capitalism. Employed by the Bush administration after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (and documented by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine), where the Trump administration welcomes disasters and leverages them to implement policies that roll back our freedom, weaken our institutions, enrich government contractors and cronies, and try to remake the world order. I’ve already mentioned why Trump’s bluster towards Islam is strategically flawed– we risk alienating moderate Muslims we need as allies in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism, and ending up in some sort of clash of civilizations. But there’s another, scarier scenario– given Trump’s clear racism towards Muslims, the many mentions he made of killing terrorists and their families during the campaign, and his belief that the mistake in Iraq was not securing the oil– I wonder if Trump is seeking out this clash. If he’d invite another terrorist attack on American soil, blame Obama for being too soft on terror, and use it as an excuse to partner with Russia to create a white Christian world order that wipes parts of the Middle East from the earth. Scarier still, I’m nervous his supporters would welcome it.

It would seem I’ve assuredly veered into the realm of paranoia and conspiracy that I set out to avoid. I hope we’ll laugh about it one day– I’ll be happy to get a boozy, yuppie brunch in Silver Lake with all of my liberal elite hipster friends in two years, after the Democrats retake the house in 2018, a Sunday edition of the New York Times on the table with a headline “Trump Card: Congress to Begin Impeachment Hearings,” as Trump sits at 18% in the polls. We can laugh about how I was a directionless millennial– a “whiny loser,” as Trump would say– who was prone to conspiracy theories and didn’t have enough faith in American institutions, which truly do always win out in the end.

But I can’t help but watch what’s happening and think we’re living through that fateful, chilling, divergent moment that will appear in history books. The kind of moment of which historians will ask, how did this happen and why didn’t anyone stop it?

#donald trump #trump #election 2016

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jenniferasberryus · 5 years ago

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The 25 Year-Old Japanese Game Getting an Improbable French Sequel

In 2020, a group of French developers are launching a sequel to Windjammers, a Japanese arcade game first released in 1994. It’s an improbable story, even before you get to the fact that this obscure title nearly faded from history - with what seemed like little chance of a re-release, let alone a follow-up - before a small, fanatical community of players nurtured it back to health, and helped raise it to new heights of popularity. But, for the uninitiated, what even is Windjammers? I’ll let a panel of (French) experts answer that for you.

Cyrille Imbert - CEO, DotEmu: “Windjammers is a mixture between Pong and Street Fighter.”

Kévin ‘Keikun’ Creff - Windjammers Pro: “It really is the Street Fighter 2 Turbo of Pong.”

Arnaud de Sousa - Head of Marketing, DotEmu: “The game is crazy. It’s like muscular dudes throwing frisbees with fire, and it’s crazy fun.”

Romain ‘Pyrotek’ Godart - Windjammers Pro: “It’s crazy.”

Édouard Ardan - Musician and Windjammers Fanatic: “It’s a crossover between a Street Fighter game - with Kamehameha, Hadouken, things like that - but the game, it’s a Pong game. But with dynamic fire!”

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/01/08/a-full-match-of-windjammers"] Windjammers (or Flying Power Disc in Japan) was released for Neo Geo MVS in February of 1994. Described as a Battle Sports Game, it took an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master approach, adopting the fundamentals of Pong, adding the technicality of Street Fighter 2, and slapping on the looks of some kind of California spandex muscle beach fever nightmare. Because of the sheer cost of the Neo Geo home console and its cartridges, you’d find it most commonly in arcades, its clean neon looks contrasting with the explosions and gunmetal on neighbouring attract screens. It went down… just fine. No one really went crazy for it, but (and I may be editorialising here) no one could truly dislike a game this vibrant, silly, and easy to pick up. The exception to that relative disinterest came in France, where a community of players began to take notice of this arcade oddity.

Édouard Ardan: “25 years ago [on] the arcade game, the Neo Geo MVS. You know, the big one? And I remember there was Metal Slug 1, Metal Slug 2, and I saw the Windjammers game with, again, the cool powers, visual effects. That was amazing when you were a child. And 10 years after, I worked for 6 months to save a lot of money to buy a Neo Geo AES with Windjammers. That was a crazy thing to do. But now I’m cool, I have the game. I’m a big fan of this game.”

Romain ‘Pyrotek’ Godart: “I think I was 12 or 13 with a friend on the Neo Geo CD.”

Arnaud de Sousa: “[At] every tournament there was Windjammers. It’s like, yeah, it’s the game in the corner you look at it: ‘Oh looks nice, but I have my tournaments to do, so maybe another time’. And [then] you see people get excited and you say, ‘OK, I need to play that game.’”

Such was its popularity, that some I talked to weren’t fully aware that it was such a French phenomenon. When I start to tell Ardan that it never really made an impact in England, he interrupts me:

Édouard Ardan: “What? No, I can’t believe that.”

[widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=windjammers-2-concept-art&captions=true"] Uncaring of the rest of the world, that little French fanbase kept growing, and getting more and more fervent. Kévin ‘Keikun’ Creff - who’d go onto become one of the world’s highest-ranked Windjammers pros - tells me he bought a Neo Geo cabinet, and hired vans to drive it to fighting game tournaments across the country. He didn’t do it for any reward other than introducing people to the game. Eventually, some of those fans organised - Windjammers France was born, a community with the sole, virtuous purpose of helping people learn and play the game, long after Neo Geos had disappeared from shop shelves.

Cyrille Imbert: “There was this association called Windjammers France, they started to gather people around, because the game is really cool to play. So it was, kind of, I would not say easy, but it was not that hard to gather people around. And then [...] the founders of the association just decided to go all the way into the game, and because of that people saw the level of complexity and depth that Windjammers could bring. Basically, because of a small team of French players, they started to really nail the game and understand all its core mechanics and show people the possibilities behind it - and other people gathered around it and developed a whole culture around this game.”

Kévin ‘Keikun’ Creff: “Yeah, we’re a big part of the coming back of Windjammers, and what Windjammers is today, and it’s part of that French love.

The community only kept growing from there, to the point where it became as much a talking point as the game itself - the first time I was ever told about Windjammers, it was introduced to me as an amazing game with a weirdly big following in France. If you want to know how much some people like Windjammers, Édouard Ardan is a founding member of Powerdisc, a band inspired by and named after the game. Seriously: [youtube clip_id="jpmCx6g5H7w"] All of this leaves me with a major question. Why is this odd little game quite so popular with French players?

Cyrille Imbert: “It’s a very good question. I think it’s a bit random. Video games are really big in France, particularly video games from Japan. France is one of the biggest markets for Nintendo in Europe, contrary to other consoles. So, I think there was a fertile background for Windjammers, I would say.”

Édouard Ardan: “It’s cool in France because we love the California vision from the '80s - you know, the frisbee, the dog, the girl, the sunshine. That’s cool, that’s a cool vision.”

Arnaud de Sousa: “Maybe we’re super-competitive, so that’s why, maybe, French people really thought it was cool to build a community around it. For me it’s more like a fighting game than a sports game - there's a lot of debate around the office about that - but for me it’s more like a fighting game, so there’s a lot of mind games, stuff like that. And we love our fighting games in France, there’s a huge community.”

Édouard Ardan: “Windjammers, it’s magic. I don’t know why. Because, again, the frisbee.”

[ignvideo url="https://uk.ign.com/videos/2016/12/03/windjammers-psx-reveal-trailer"] But no matter how much some people liked the game, a true revival for Windjammers seemed highly unlikely up until recently. Developer Data East ran into financial troubles not long after the game’s release, stopped making games in 1999 and, by 2003, had filed for bankruptcy. Its properties and trademarks were systematically sold off, primarily to mobile game company G-Mode. But not Windjammers. Aside from a Japanese-only Wii Virtual Console release, France’s favourite power disc game seemingly disappeared altogether, with emulation the only meaningful way of playing the game on modern machines. That is, until French retro gaming experts DotEmu went looking:

Arnaud de Sousa: “Bringing back the first one was a big surprise, because everybody thought the rights were lost. And it kind of was, actually - they were a bit lost. The game was released in '94, and wasn’t released until the release on PlayStation 4 which was in 2017, so it’s almost 25 years. The rights holder never thought about bringing it back [...] But we thought differently.”

Cyrille Imbert: “So I said, ‘OK, let’s find who has the license and let’s try to do something with it.’ I don’t remember exactly how we tracked it down but usually what we do is we do some research on the internet - very basic research - and then with our contacts in Japan we try to ask around: And basically we narrowed it down to Paon DP, which is the actual owner of the license, because former employees of Data East joined this company at some point. And so we met Paon DP four years ago I think.

“We explained that there was a huge community in France, that we were ourselves playing a lot of Windjammers in the office, so they kind of felt that we were the right people to take care of that. They really saw that we had passion for it. Because it’s not a super-famous game, right? It’s famous within the fighting game community, it’s famous within the Neo Geo fans, but it’s not that famous, so they kind of knew that we were not there to have an easy cash grab, you know? It was more about something that we were passionate about, and that we wanted to spread a bit more because the game really deserved it. And especially because we had this long-term strategy of not saying, like, we’re just going to do a simple port of the game and that’s it.”

Windjammers, somehow, was back. In its 2017 port for PS4, PS Vita and, later, Switch, DotEmu created a game that looked and ran exactly as the original did in ‘94, primarily by digging into Data East’s code to perform digital archeology. The only major addition came in the form of online play, finally allowing people to play Windjammers across continents without emulation. It played perfectly into DotEmu’s goal to spread the game to more people. Across the world, people began to talk about the game - helped massively, it must be noted, by some tireless campaigning by the team at Giant Bomb. Some even began suggesting it deserved a place among the great and the good of the fighting game community. In 2017, Windjammers unexpectedly broke into the upper echelons of the Player’s Choice poll for games at Evo, the world’s biggest fighting game tournament. The next year, it would do even better.

Cyrille Imbert: “So of course it got into the loop because we were relaunching it and people were hearing more about it. So were like, OK, we need to push for that. We did a full campaign called ‘Road to Evo’, where we tried to kind of spam Evo with, like, ‘Hey, let’s have Windjammers at Evo!’ and everything. And then AnimEvo, which is like a side tournament for fans and smaller games, they were super interested in it, until we got in basically.

“The whole idea behind it was to first get people more familiar with the license, with the original games, with the exact same game, but with online multiplayer so that people can compete online and the community can grow around this competition. And the second step was Windjammers 2.”

[widget path="global/page/imagecomparison" parameters="comparisons=%7B%22comparisons%22%3A%5B%7B%22caption%22%3A%22%22%2C%22images%22%3A%5B%7B%22id%22%3A%225e15baa2e4b065e1d37b54ae%22%2C%22label%22%3A%22Windjammers%22%7D%2C%7B%22id%22%3A%225e15baa4e4b065e1d37b54af%22%2C%22label%22%3A%22Windjammers%202%22%7D%5D%7D%5D%7D"] Part of DotEmu’s pitch to the license holder was that, after it recreated Windjammers, it would get to create a sequel too. Windjammers 2 - which arrives on Switch later this year - is aiming to add extra complexity to the game, without ever losing the core formula. Its biggest change is in its looks, which swap pixel graphics for a '90s cartoon style that aims to emulate the original game’s boxart. And who better to test whether those changes worked than Windjammers France, the community that helped keep the game alive for all these years?

Arnaud de Sousa: “The first time I heard about maybe bringing Windjammers [back] at the office, I was like ‘Yeah I know the guys at Windjammers France, that little community that are really into the game, so it could be nice to have them try the game, tell us if it’s good and just help us bring the best Windjammers possible.’”

Cyrille Imbert: “So right from the port of Windjammers, the first one on console, we included people from Windjammers France. It’s super practical because they’re around - they’re not all in Paris, but they’re in France, and it’s easy to make them come. And they’ve been super nice, and given us a lot of feedback. So we’re making sure that the emulation was pixel-perfect on console. That was the first step. And then, little by little, we kind of revealed that we were working on a sequel - because we didn’t tell them from the beginning.”

Arnaud de Sousa: “Of course there’s pressure. There’s a lot of nostalgia for it. So of course they’re waiting for something - they want something new but also something that is close to the original.”

Kévin ‘Keikun’ Creff: “We’re kind of patriotic, so yeah, we’re really happy. And for us it’s also reassuring to be able to talk to the devs to give ideas on how we see the game.”

Cyrille Imbert: “So we do a lot of playtests with [Windjammers France] because, for us, they’re the best players in the world, and they’re the ones that would be able to break Windjammers 2 [...] The developers of Windjammers 2 here at DotEmu are really good at Windjammers, but they’re not the same level - these guys have being playing for years, they, like, read The Matrix in the game. So that’s what we really want to do, and it's super exciting to see them playing with this new toy, trying new strategies and trying to exploit new stuff. So that gives us a really good idea of what’s the right way of doing it.”

[ignvideo url="https://uk.ign.com/videos/2019/08/22/windjammers-2-10-minutes-of-gameplay-gamescom-2019"] It’s not just behind-closed-doors testing - DotEmu recently held the world’s first Windjammers 2 tournament at Ultimate Fighting Arena 2019 in Paris, with two-time Evo champion Romain ‘Pyrotek’ Godart taking home this crown too. The developers probably couldn’t have wished for a better confirmation that they’re on the right track.

Romain ‘Pyrotek’ Godart: “It has a lot of options, it forces you to be more aggressive because if you stay at the back you’re going to lose. You really feel it’s Windjammers just like the first one, but there’s more - just more dynamism to it.”

Arnaud de Sousa: “It’s the community that help make a game, you know? If the people don’t play the game it won’t go to Evo, so it’s like we all have our part to play in bringing back Windjammers and making it really crazy.”

So the pros are happy, and the devs are happy. But surely the most important group are those regular French fans, the people who quietly loved this odd little game for a quarter of a century. How do they feel about getting a sequel - a French sequel no less - after all this time? I ask Édouard Ardan, the man who saved up for a console to play Windjammers, made a band based on it, and smiles literally every time he talks about it. He drums his hands on the table, a sheer physical reaction to his happiness: “Yeah! I am so happy with that! It’s amazing.” After 25 years of simmering delight, it feels like sheer French enthusiasm has helped summon a new Windjammers game out of nothing - some kind of emotional alchemy. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK Deputy Editor, and he will jam at a moment's notice. Follow him on Twitter. from IGN Video Games https://www.ign.com/articles/the-25-year-old-japanese-game-getting-an-improbable-french-sequel via IFTTT from The Fax Fox https://thefaxfox.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-25-year-old-japanese-game-getting.html

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