#stripping citizenship is easy and final

[kkglinka]

I'm looking around at all the immigrants and naturalized citizens who voted republican because they're conservative, because they come from evangelical or catholic backgrounds and... How many of them routinely and unwittingly violate their oath of naturalization.

The biggest offender is blatantly taking advantage of their native citizenship to benefit from govt services not afforded to non residents. Part of naturalization is renouncing that birth citizenship.

For years, while trump was in office last time, my bank's website kept asking if I held dual citizenship. This is absolutely irrelevant to holding an account. That was ICE working through financial institutions to entrap immigrants.

The second biggest offender is participating in groups or organizations considered to be seditious or domestic terrorists by the FBI. Who decides which groups count? Guess! See if you can guess. Fun fact, the silly, goofy society for creative anachronism was investigated as such, years ago, and remains classified as the united states' largest (non hostile) civilian militia.

[rona-yoo]

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐱 𝐔𝐒𝐒𝐑!𝐟!𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: none. 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞: Remember that the Soviet Union is not only Russia. 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐦𝐲 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞. 𝐒𝐨 𝐢𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞, 𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐭 𝐦𝐞 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰.

First, let’s figure out how someone from the USSR could have ended up in the States. There were only two options: either you were stripped of your citizenship or you fled the country. Let’s take the first one - suppose your father was a writer and he was stripped of his citizenship because he was writing literature that was against the country’s ideology (I won’t go into details because in reality things were more complicated and scary). You don’t know how your father had connections there, but pretty soon your family got invited to the United States. The person who invited you was Mr. Noel. He also allowed you to stay at his house until you find a place to live.

He’ll probably see you for the first time when he goes to Chris with Knox to give him moral support, and if he’s hesitant, kick his ass.

You didn’t go to any school because you didn’t have the proper documents for enrollment yet, but every morning you walked Chris to her school.

"Where is she?" Charlie asked.

Knox looks at the crowd for a few seconds and points to Chris walking next to you. You stop at the entrance and she goes inside. You wave your hand at her and turn around to walk away. And Charlie stunned.

"Well, this is… Chris? You certainly have less chance than Denburry."

"I know… wait, who are you looking at?

The next day he’ll try to get to know you. Like… It’s Charlie. I don’t think he’d wait long if he was up to something. The only reason he didn’t do it yesterday was because he didn’t want to hurt Knox’s feelings. He was quite sure that charm you would be as easily as possible. However, he did not expect that you would not be very talkative. And one more thing. Obviously, your English isn’t the best at the moment, and that complicates things, too. But the other problem is that his manner of speech and his behavior… scared you off a bit.

'I’m not serious at all, and I pass no skirt by' - that’s what you’d expect from a guy like that. In the society you grew up in that kind of behavior was discouraged and considered suspicious.

So the only thing you could say when a guy you didn’t know stopped you on the street with a playful grin was quick 'Sorry, I have to go'.

And now Charlie stunned again. How is that even possible? Back at Wellton, he didn't say a word when the poets asked him how it had gone. He told them so confidently that you won't be able to resist him. So how can he now admit that you ignored him?

Of course he’ll be teased about it, especially by Cameron. "Our Nuwanda can’t pick up a girl, huh?"

"Just shut up."

Again, this is Charlie. I believe he wouldn’t give up so easily. So now you meet him almost every time you walk Chris to school. And honestly, it was pretty creepy.

But then again, he didn’t do anything… outrageous, right? He wasn’t stalking you, you two were always out in public, so if you needed help… I think it’s clear what I mean.

At first, he just said hello and asked how you were doing. Then, when you didn’t answer, he said something about himself, about how his day was, complaining about Mr. Nolan. And even though you didn’t understand half of what he was saying, over time, you got used to his company. It took a long time, but Charlie was on cloud nine when you first answered him, "Not too bad… You?"

He was so proud of himself, so that night he wouldn’t shut up. Even after Cameron threw something at him for the third time in a row, so that he would stop talking and let him sleep.

Charlie finally got your name. You’ve had no contact with any of the locals other than the Noel family, so you’re not sure how anyone would react if they knew who you are and where are you from. What’s your name got to do with it? Well, it sounds unusual at least, so… easy to guess. Anyway, Charlie only knows your first name. So far.

Before you knew it, you were waiting for him to show up. Soon you even began to answer him with short simple phrases and laugh with his jokes, if you understood them.

Poems. Well. It’d be weird if he didn’t come up with a few poems about you, right? But you’re not used to the sound of English poetry. Although it’s better to say poetry in English.

I’m not sure how to describe it, but poems in Russian are very rhythmic, they hold a permanent rhyme. They sound different. So when Charlie first read you a poem, you didn’t even get what it was. Congratulations, this is the second time you’ve broken his heart.

One day you offered to walk you home. You’ve known each other for almost two months, and you’re in a good mood today. Why not spend more time with him? And, of course, Charlie could not refuse such an offer. While you were walking, you were talking about yourself more than usual, and even though you were still afraid to tell Charlie the details, you were very eager to give him a hint.

"Was it a poem again?" you said, standing at the front door.

"God, don’t say that, you’re making my heart bleed!"

"The only thing that bleeds is my passport," you opened the door and entered the house. "See you tomorrow, Nuwanda."

The next day he’d walk you home again. You said you had to hurry somewhere, but he insisted. Actually, Mr. Noel was supposed to be taking your family to the embassy today, so when you came, everyone was getting in the car.

You wanted to say goodbye to him, but he asked, "What you meant by 'the only thing that bleeds is your passport'?"

Should you tell him now? You looked him in the eyes for a few seconds, then sighed and took your passport out of your purse and handed it to him.

"I guess now you see what I meant," you muttered with a shy smile.

Its cover is red. Yellow letters, two words – 'СССР ПАСПОРТ' (In fact, red passports were introduced only in the 1970s, but it's not an archive document and I’m not here to teach a full history lesson. So let’s pretend that in 1959 it was already red, not gray).

"Are you coming with us, miss?"

"Yeah, I’m coming." You grabbed your passport out of his hand and went to Mr. Noel’s car, waving goodbye to Charlie.

Well. When you’re a guy from a wealthy American family who goes to a prestigious private school and lives a quiet life, the chance that you meet someone from the USSR… Is there even a chance?

Anyone would be shocked, maybe scared even. But Charlie… Of course he didn’t expect it and he’s surprised. But given his personality and character, I think he would rather be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps even excited.

Now it all makes sense. That's why you avoided him at first, why you spoke rarely and why you seemed to have a slight accent. Turns out he was right about the last one.

He’s definitely gonna be proud that he’s the one who got such an unusual girl like you. He’ll tell the dead poets about it as soon as he gets back to Welton. Cameron will be the only one who won’t believe him.

After that, you became more open with him. You’re still embarrassed by your poor English, which Charlie secretly likes. You told him why you live in the Noel house and about your friendship with Chris. You didn’t tell him the details of how you got here. He asked you a lot of questions, so you had to say it is very painful memories and you’re not ready to talk about it.

Charlie wouldn’t be Charlie if he didn’t ask you to teach him Slavic swearing. He literally begged you to, so you had to give up. Now it's the best way to shut Richard up when he does something annoying. He also mutters the curses under his breath when Mr. Nolan gives a speech.

You grew up in the Soviet Union, where a working woman was a normal thing (it's a myth that there was full equality of men and women in the USSR; but again – it's not a history class). So when the question arose of how to renew your visa, you immediately began to think about how to get a job. And Charlie sincerely does not understand this. You can just get married, can’t you? It’s the simplest and seemingly obvious option.

He’ll ask you to marry him. Many times. Every time you start talking about how hard to find a way to stay in the States is. Maybe it’ll sound like a joke at first. But the embassy continues to reject your application, so he starts talking about it more seriously.

© 𝐚𝐲𝐲𝐤𝐨-𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐚-𝐲𝐨𝐨 — 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐝. 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠/𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧/𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐝.

[yves-and-scessernee]

I've been thinking about some things, and I wanted to clarify for some folks outside of the US:

When people in the United States talk about heritage, it's always with the implication of American nationality. Two friends in the US might chat casually about themselves and their families by saying "I'm Irish" and "I'm Polish." What they mean is "I'm Irish-American" and "I'm Polish-American" but, because the context of being in America is present, the "-American" part goes assumed.

That's why the "Where are you from?" / "Where were you born?" / "Where are your parents from?" questions exist. Between friends, those are casual ways to tell if someone is talking about X as a familial heritage or X as a nationality without saying outright "Hey, so are you a member of this American subculture or are you from another country?" It is absolutely rude to ask these questions without the context of friendship, but within a friendship people often share information about their heritage and nationality quite freely. Those two friends I mentioned above might go on to talk about how "My grandparents were born in Dublin and immigrated to the US, and my parents grew up together in Boston." "Oh, that's cool that they grew up together! My great-grandmother moved from Kraków as an infant with her family, but my dad met my mom through an exchange student program and she just finalized her dual citizenship."

Stripped of the context of "being in America", such statements can come off as presumptuous and deceptive. I understand that. Someone who has gotten used to chatting about their family while in America will likely default to keeping the "-American" part assumed on their behalf, which they shouldn't do. But an American saying "Oh! I'm Irish" to you when you know already that they are American is telling you this in the context of being American: what is actually being conveyed is "I'm Irish-American." To them, they're sharing what American subculture they belong to, rather than claiming participation in a different country.

And Irish-American culture in the US is alive and well! Irish-American cultural centers, museums dedicated to generations of Irish-American immigration, and festivals sharing what Irish-American families have brought to America are found all over the US. So it is with many other cultural communities. People care about the cultures they and their families brought over with them, and American subcultures are living entities unto themselves shaped by decades of history.

And of course some American families keep in touch with their parent cultures. As I write this, a friend is making arrangements with his family to spent next month with his grandparents in Mexico. My own parents just got back from visiting my sister in Ireland, where she's been studying veterinary sciences. Sometimes that's why Americans drop the hyphen in casual conversation: for my friend, where does Mexican culture end and the Mexican-American subculture within the greater American culture begin? A conversation with him actually got me thinking about this entire thing, because, for him, the distinction between being Mexican, having Mexican heritage, and being Mexican-American can be really blurry, particularly given the United States' history with Mexico.

Americans should stop assuming everyone knows the context of "having American nationality" when they talk about heritage. I agree. It can be easy to come onto the internet with the same assumptions you have in your everyday community, particularly if you're young. If you're American and you're reading this and you're just realizing that someone probably interpreted you as saying "I'm a member of this country" when what you meant was "I'm a member of this American subculture," I understand the embarrassment. This often isn't laid out clearly inside or outside the US.

But that's why I'm explaining it now. If what you mean is "I'm [Heritage]-American" and you're talking about your participation in an American subculture, you probably should start saying the whole phrase aloud. It's more polite to assume that someone doesn't know your nationality than that they do. It'll forestall misunderstandings and frustrations with friends and strangers alike.

[kamyru]

Voltage Inc characters and romantic and cliche tropes they failed miserably (Headcanons)

Author's note: Recently, I remembered that my friends and I actually lived through some cliche tropes that are usually considered romantic, yet in our cases, they failed miserably. So, this post was inspired by reality. 

Characters: Hideki Ishigami, Hyogo Kaga, Togo Daimon, Shu Hasunuma, Eiichi Matsunaga, Toshiki Kasumi

The tropes: Sharing a bed, marriage proposal of convenience, soulmates, "threesome invitation"

Eiichi Matsunaga & Toshiki Kasumi - forced proximity (sharing a bed): They visit a different city and rent a room together. The staff messes up and gives them their last room, which has only one bed. After spending the entire day busy, they return to their room to relax. Suddenly, the people in the next room start a steamy sex session with moans and moving beds. Matsunaga looks at Kasumi, who is in a relationship with MC. "Someone is having a good time," and they burst out laughing. Nothing happens. When they leave, they find out that the room they stayed in is cheaper than the original one. (Real story: The hotel my exchange colleague and I booked messed up our booking, so we had to share a bed. He was gay and in a relationship. When we returned from Machu Picchu, the couple in the next room was having steamy sex. The way we laughed was legendary. At least we paid less.)

Shu Hasunuma, Togo Daimon & MC - marriage proposal of convenience: MC came to Japan to study. She is Shu's classmate from university and friend. When Togo has to move abroad, it coincidentally is MC's home country. Shu introduces MC to Togo. MC tells him he can stay with her parents because he has some issues with the booking. MC's parents are kind to him and show him around. When Togo returns to Japan, he meets MC to thank her. "Do you want to marry me? I want to meet your parents again and visit the country more often." MC laughs it off but secretly considers it so she can get Japanese citizenship. (Real story: My friend's Japanese friend from ERASMUS wanted to visit my home country. My parents took him in and showed him around. When he returned, he asked me to marry him so he could get my country's citizenship and meet my parents again. I laughed it off, but his Japanese citizenship isn't easy to refuse. No, I'm not married.)

Hideki Ishigami & MC - soulmates: MC meets Ishigami online. He invites her to stay at his for a weekend. Without them meeting before, she accepts. They spend a lot of time together talking about their favorite books, their goals & dreams, and their past. Suddenly, Ishigami tells her that his birthday is on 09/09. MC laughs and doesn't believe him. He shows her his ID. MC takes her ID out and shows him she was also born on 09/09. They don't kiss, only cuddle. By the end of the weekend, they decide that they have to meet again. They meet again in another country a few months later. (Real story: My friend had an ERASMUS exchange. She met someone on the internet. After clicking in instantly, she found out he was born on 01/01. She shows him that she was born on 01/01/01. They decide to meet again but don't know when. A few months later, they accidentally meet in another city and another country. They have never dated, however.)

Hyogo Kaga, one of his hook-ups & Hideki Ishigami - some strange threesome porn trope: Kaga and Ishigami are forced to share a room while being on a mission when they are still in Public Safety Academy. Kaga gets to the room sooner than Ishigami and brings a girl he had met earlier in the bar. Ishigami, who returned tired and sleepy, wants to take a shower. "Can you leave the room so I can shower?" Kaga laughs in his face and convinces the girl to stay. He looks at Ishigami with a challenging smile: "Why? You can't change with someone else in the room?" The tired Ishigami, who can't take Kaga's bullshit anymore, looks at both of them and starts to strip in front of them. When he is finally naked, he goes to the shower looking at the couple, who has their mouths open. When Ishigami returns, there's no one else in the room. (Real story: An acquaintance got fed up with her roommate, who always had her boyfriend in the room. When she wanted to get changed and shower, the boyfriend refused to leave. So, she stripped right in front of both of them.)

[newsworld-nw]

Israel's blockade of those who express solidarity with Gaza: a "hunt" against Palestinians

Israel tries to stop residents from expressing their solidarity or sympathy with Gaza because it helps terrorism. Since October 7, the day of the bloodbath by Hamas in Israeli territory, the protests have led to a whole bunch of arrests, dismissals from jobs, and the expulsion of scholars from their academic establishments. Most are Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Parliament this Wednesday permitted a modification to the anti-terrorism legislation to incorporate a brand new offense and make consuming materials associated with Hamas or the Islamic State (ISIS) punishable by as much as 12 months in jail. "Zero tolerance," mentioned the Israeli police chief, Ya'akov Shabtai, and threatened to deport those that don't respect the order to the Strip. He did so last week through the physique's Arabic social media profiles, viz. tick tock is X (Previous Twitter). Activists, human rights teams, and attorneys have steered that with such measures, which they see as unlawful, Israeli authorities try to stifle freedom of expression for Palestinians within the nation—and in some circumstances, Jews—and stifle condemnation. Potential struggle crimes in Gaza Some, like activist Fida Shehad, denounced a brand new "hunt" towards the Arab-Israeli inhabitants, which represent 20% of the nation's 9.2 million residents. Social networks have become the proper fishing grounds for this oppression. Only an easy one I like is to launch a WhatsApp standing complaining gadget with verses from the Koran or the colors of the Palestinian flag, in line with the testimony gathered. The most recent person to be arrested is actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, whom police have accused of "praising a terrorist group". X is asserted by the physique this tuesday "For the reason that the struggle began, Israel's far-right apartheid authorities have capitalized on Israeli anger and nervousness to advertise oppressive insurance policies and make Palestinian residents of Israel really feel they're the enemy, within the fog of struggle," mentioned Hassan Jabarin, director of Adal:, an NGO that defends the rights of Israel's Arab minority. “When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked about the necessity of strengthening the decision inside the boundary in his speech, he's clearly sending this message to Israeli public opinion,” he added. The Knesset (Parliament) initiative represents a "brutal" attempt to regulate residents' freedom of expression and thought, condemned Adala.

Palestinian youngsters performed the final Thursday on a road within the metropolis of Lod (Israel), whose inhabitants are 80% Jewish and 20% Arab.Luis de Vega The feminist NGO Kayan, which defends Palestinians in Israel, has acquired 270 calls warning of abuse since October 7, when, usually, the circulation is 600 a month. In an announcement, they described the present state of affairs as "excessive racism and discrimination". Arab Group Human Rights Adviser Lawyer Sawsan Jaher dealt with about 60 circumstances. Amongst his and different colleagues, a whole bunch It refers back to the suspension or outright expulsion from the college of scholars and lecturers, or these being dismissed from their jobs. Many submit by Fb or different social media. On Saturday, Jaher confronted an enchantment session for three expulsions from a college middle close to Nahariya within the northwest. In lots of circumstances, the lawyer added, the method opens without the chance for the accused to complain or present particulars about what they've disclosed, as in the case of a number of college students suspended at Ben Gurion College within the south of the nation. About 60 members of its group have been killed, disappeared, or kidnapped in Hamas assaults. NGO Adalah condemned in an announcement that the deportation proposal by police chief Yaacob Shabtai was "unlawful" amid "racist and inflammatory remarks". The textual content considers that the initiative is a part of the siege on freedom of expression within the ambiance of repression created underneath the present struggle. This local weather can be felt within the Rehovot metropolis council, close to Lod, which needs to power builders to signal that they won't make use of Palestinian staff for their tasks, one thing that Adalah condemned. Maha, a law student dwelling in Jaffa, posted some Quranic verses on her WhatsApp status. Moments later, she receives an email saying that she has been expelled from her faculty. Their attorneys attempt to battle what they think is an unlawful act. Sirin, the reporter, spent the evening from Wednesday to Thursday of the final week after participating in a protest in Haifa and being accused of elevating a pro-Gaza banner, which he denies. Khetam, a kindergarten trainer, was expelled from the middle of the place he was taught by a lawyer, to whom they wrote to demand his return. The rationale was to publish the date of October 7 on his WhatsApp, standing with a coronary heart within the color of the Palestinian flag. After strain from her superiors, who first went to the police, the younger girl deleted it; however, that did not cease them from saying her dismissal. He admits that every one of his college students is Jewish; however, some dads and moms, he says, have supported him through messages. She would not suppose it was time to return to class, although her father disagrees. "It's important to battle to get it again," she says he instructed her. "When you obtain that, you resign willingly and stroll away together with your head held excessively."

A mosque is adjacent to a church within the metropolis of Lod (Israel).Luis de Vega “The present crackdown has led to an unprecedented variety of arrests based mostly solely on social media posts alleging help for terrorism or sympathizing with terrorist organizations. Nonetheless, the vast majority of these publications had been expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian folks of Gaza and, in some circumstances, merely shared verses from the Holy Quran,” mentioned Hassan Jabareen. The variety of arrests occurred because the day of the bloodbath by Islamic fundamentalist militia members topped 100 final weeks, and since then, there have been dozens of extra circumstances, in line with the sources of their group. The unit to fight cybercrime, organized by far-right Itamar Ben Gavi, the minister of nationwide safety, has opened 180 circumstances accusing it of supporting Hamas or defending terrorism, the NGO added. In 93 circumstances, investigations have been initiated, and in 63, the accused have been remanded in custody. They're additionally conscious of the circumstances of 83 college students who've had disciplinary proceedings opened and greater than 40 reviews of those that have been expelled or dismissed from their jobs.

Fida Shehadeh is an Israeli Arab activist from the town of Lod (Israel).Luis de Vega "It is a hunt," Fida Shehadeh, a 40-year-old Arab-Israeli activist, mentioned throughout an interview at her dwelling within the metropolis of Lod, the place she was a councilor over the past legislature. He laments that his group lacks a voice within the Israeli media and can't express their condolences on social networks for what is occurring in Gaza. "They do not allow us to clarify what we expect or really feel," he complains, underscoring the concept that this wall of silence is one other type of discrimination. The Netanyahu-led authorities "need secession," and for its members, "everybody in Gaza is Hamas," the activist mentioned. Fida Shehada remembers her childhood between Israel and Gaza, the place her mom, Hanan Shehada, 62, arrived within the Nineteen Eighties. "Moreover, on Thursdays, once we left faculty, we might go to Gaza, the place my mom is from. It was an hour's drive. On Sunday morning (Friday and Saturday through the weekend), we come straight again to go to class once more,” he defined as he gestured to shoulder the varsity backpack. As we speak, that is unthinkable. Partitions, blockades, violence... maintain the Palestinian enclave remote and closed. She had not been there for 16 years since 2007. The activist is currently preparing for her wedding ceremony, which is expected to happen in December; however, she says she doesn't plan to turn into a mom. "I do not need to have youngsters in this setting," she remarked, twisting her face into a tragic expression. _ #Israels #blockade #specific #solidarity #Gaza #hunt #Palestinians Read the full article

[stillbandofbrothersthirsty]

1, H, and hit me with some of that lynn d. "buck" compton ❤️

This song is so sad and angsty but I couldn’t bear to give Buck more sadness so enjoy my version of fluff ;)

“Buck, hey,” Emilia reached up to cradle his cheek in her palm, “hey, talk to me. What’s going on?” He gave no response, he only continued to stare at her with that glassy-eyed look she had become all too familiar with.

This happened most evenings since he had returned to England. The friend Emilia had sent off to war had returned a totally different man. Recently, his night terrors had become so bad that Emilia had become accustomed to the knock on her door after midnight.

It would be easy for anyone who saw Buck sneaking into her room to assume that something compromising was occurring. But it wasn’t like that. They didn’t strip each other's layers, but melted into each other, creating more. The only muffled sounds were her gentle murmurs of comforting words. He would let the tears fall and she would use her thumb to wipe them away as internally clutched pieces of her own heart together.

“It’s okay,” she’d whisper as she pulled him into her chest. She leaned against the pillows and stroked his head.

In the morning, they would go their separate ways. She would attend to her official patients and Buck would participate in rehabilitation. It helped that the days were growing warmer in England. Emilia knew very few details of what Buck had experienced in Bastogne, but she knew him well enough to recognize the warmer days treated him better.

The two had met not long after D-Day when Buck had returned to England a hero among his men. He was such an imposing figure that exuded charm and confidence. If she were honest Emilia had found Buck incredibly attractive. But he had a girlfriend and Emilia was more than happy to just be his friend. Buck's energy was unmatched. He had this special talent of making those around him feel like the most important person in the room.

Emilia had never felt more confident than walking down a road with her hand tucked into the crook of his large arm. She felt brave knowing that he had her back. He had such immense respect from the other men that it transferred over to her by association and that made her feel safe in a way she had never experienced before. Buck was her hero come to life.

But in the end, the war got the better of Buck. And their relationship changed. Buck was still strong, just in a different way now. Emilia was no longer his pretty sidekick but a lifeline he needed to get through the days.

Some nights he needed to be held, but on better nights he just needed to not be alone. Emilia was happy to assist him with either.

“Come with me to California,” Buck said unexpectedly one night. Emilia’s hand froze in his hair where she had been dragging her fingertips through the short curls.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, even though something clutched in her chest.

“You’re always complaining about the cold here,” Buck said in a low voice.

Emilia sighed, “it’s a nice thought, Buck.” He rolled his head back to look at her, “I’m serious.”

Emilia’s stomach flipped as she made direct contact with those ice blue ice-blue eyes. In a look, all of her thoughts left her mind. Simultaneously, Buck’s breath caught in his throat. He had never seen her like this before. Nothing was different, not a single thing had changed and yet she seemed different to him. He had spoken without thinking but now looking up at her he realized it was exactly what he wanted, what he needed. He needed her to come to California with him.

“We’ll see,” Emilia finally said in a dismissive tone. She began drawing her fingers through his white-blonde curls again. Buck grabbed her wrist to stop her. He brought her hand down over his chest.

“Promise me you’ll think about it?” he said earnestly.

Emilia bit her lip and nodded, “I promise.” Buck raised an eyebrow. “I promise I’ll think about it!” she assured him.

Satisfied, Buck nestled back down into the cradle of her embrace, “good,” he murmured.

That was the beginning to their end, the end of their friendship at least. It was as if the invitation to return to California with him had eliminated all boundaries that had previously been founded. Each night little touches were achieved, touches that were far too intimate to be considered comfort between friends. And as the nights passed, Emilia felt Buck's strength return to him. The version of who he was before was gone forever but from the ashes of that shell of a human, a new man was emerging.

“Have you thought about California at all?” Buck asked one night. They lay next to each other in bed, his arms wrapped around her for a change. His cheek pressed against hers. There was a metallic smell about him, like fresh snow. It was clean and pleasing and Emilia felt that old familiar sense of security return to her.

“I’ve thought about it a little,” she admitted. It was true she had thought about it. But not in any real sense- the logistics were not simple. In her fantasies it was easy. California was only sunshine and meeting his family was nothing but pleasant. But in reality, there was citizenship to be approved, jobs to be acquired, and a place to live to be found. Would they be living together? Or would she have to make her own way in the world with Buck as nothing more than a friend?

“And?” Buck asked. She considered his question as he nuzzled against her cheek. She shrugged, a pointed expression that took some effort with his heavy arms wrapped so lovingly around her. “Think you’ll come?” he pressed.

“I don’t know, Buck,” Emilia finally admitted. He didn’t miss the crack in her voice.

He propped himself up, “hey,” the tone of his voice had changed to one of concern, “what’s wrong?”

Emilia rolled over in bed to face him, “I just don’t know how it’ll work. Logistically I mean…” she trailed off. Buck settled down on the bed beside her.

“What do you mean?”



“I mean, my life is here, Buck. I have a job, a house..”

She appreciated that he seemed to consider her concerns seriously. He didn’t immediately jump in with solutions but in the darkness, she could feel his eyes consider her carefully.

“It’s a lot to ask you to leave behind,” he admitted in a quiet voice, “and I’ll understand if you say no. But I really want you to come, and I’ll make sure you’re provided for.”

That only confused Emilia more: provided for? She needed him to clarify. She reached down into the very depths of herself to find the courage to ask, “as a friend or… as more than a friend?”


Time seemed frozen, unmoving as she waited for his answer. After what felt like minutes, his hand between them came up to her face. He gently pinched her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Emilia,” Buck whispered, “you have been the constant and lasting good in my life. I never want to be away from you. I love you.”

Tears welled in Emilia’s eyes, taking her by surprise. She tried to swallow but her throat was thick with emotion. All she could do was stare back into his eyes, navy in the darkness, that were set upon her with so much intensity. “I love you more than I love a friend,” Buck said in a voice that was stronger and more confident than she had heard in ages. “If you’ll have me, I want you forever.” Emilia could only nod she was so overcome with joy. Buck pulled her closer into his arms and then they were holding each other, not out of desperation or grief but in love, equally clutching each other and the hope their future together held.

[songsofacagedbird]

Is that BALIAN “BALO” DRISKELL? Wow, they do look a lot like EMILIIE DE RAVIN I hear SHE is an EIGHTEEN year old high school SENIOR. Word is they are a REGULAR student at Luxor Academy. You should watch out because they can be NAIVE and SENSITIVE, but on the bright side they can also be BUBBLY and OPTIMISTIC. Ultimately, you’ll get to see it all for yourself.

the basics //

Full Name: Balian “Balo” Grace Driskell

Preferred Name: Balo Driskell

Age: 18

Birthday: February 23rd

Zodiac: Pisces

Gender & Pronouns: Woman (She/Hers)

Sexuality: Balo doesn’t label her sexuality, she’s part of the LGBT+ community (and has canonly dated both girls and boys) but she doesn’t feel comfortable labeling it personally.

Occupation: N/A, she occasionally does commissions though (both art and in like making clothes)

Relationship Status: In a relationship with Cade Carroll (npc) since early May 

Place of Birth: Rochester, New York

Hometown: Saratoga Springs, New York

Country of Citizenship: United States

Languages Spoken: English (first) and French

deeper dive //

Hobbies and Talents:

 ○ Sketching (in particular people and animals, an inspiration board for her sketch book can be found here.)

 ○ Painting

 ○ Gymnastics (her leg is her left leg! By “her leg” I mean the leg she leads off with / does her split with for her floor routine / has better balance)

 ○ Fashion Design and Sewing

 ○ Cheerleading

 ○ Gymnastics

 ○ Yoga

 ○ Roller Skating

 ○ Scrapbooking

 ○ Dancing (a hobby, not a talent)

 ○ She can touch her nose with her tongue

Favorites:

 ○ Color: The entire rainbow, Balo has issues with picking one favorite color so she doesn’t choose.

 ○ Food: Balo’s not the biggest on food but she has a weakness for popcorn. Extra butter, light on the salt.

 ○ Animal: Cats

 ○ Drink: Hot Chocolate

 ○ Flower: Sunflowers

 ○ Book: a fairy tale collection she got from Zander when she was a child

 ○ Holiday: Christmas, to the point she’ll start decorating as early as she can. (June? Why not!)

 ○ Movie: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

 ○ Scent: Strawberries, real a bit more than the artificial but she adores both.

 ○ Place: Her “little art studio” (technically just a corner of her room with her art supplies).

 ○ Quote:

“Butterflies can’t see their wings. They can’t see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.” - Unknown

Bêtes Noires:

 ○ Color: Dark brown, although she won’t admit to it

 ○ Food: Chicken à la King

 ○ Animal: Spiders, Balo does not like spiders and would like to stay far away from them

 ○ Drink: Matcha

 ○ Flower: Nepenthes peltata

 ○ Book: The Divergent Books

 ○ Holiday: 4th of July

 ○ Movie: Rugrats in Paris, she thinks it’s practically a horror movie

 ○ Scent: Garlic

 ○ Place: The Driskell family home in Saratoga Springs

health //  

Conditions:

          ○ Anorexia Nervosa

          ○ HIV

Allergies: N/A

Sleeping Habits: Balo gets to bed usually at a good time and sleeps 8 hours at a shot.

Exercise Habits: She exercises multiple times of day, between gymnastics and cheerleading, it’s important she’s in prime shape. Dance and Yoga are her go-tos outside of practice.

Addictions: N/A

Drug Use: Very rarely. After a bad LSD trip (when she wasn’t aware she was being drugged until after the fact), she’s very wary of drugs on average.

Alcohol Use: Occasionally. Balo doesn’t have a high alcohol tolerance, she gets tipsy after one drink and if she keeps drinking, after a couple the odds of her stripping are extremely high. (It’s not a sexual thing, she overheats and doesn’t really think about the consequences).

personality //  

MBTI: ESFP

Enneagram: 2w3 (The Helper with The Achiever Wing)

Alignment: Neutral Good

Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff

Percy Jackson Parent: Iris

Pokémon Type: Dragon

Pokémon Subtype: Ghost

Winx: Nature

appearance //  

Height:  5′11” – not at fc height (I enjoy her being a few cm taller than Zander too much to put her at fc now #oops)

Tattoos: One

Scars: None

Piercings: Ears

Hair: Blonde

Eyes: Blue

Fashion:

 ○ link to balo’s closet

 ○ link to balo’s shoes

life at luxor //  

Classes:

 ○ Communications

 ○ French

 ○ General P.E.

 ○ Visual Arts

 ○ Fashion Design

 ○ Human Biology

 ○ Beginner Ballet

Clubs and Activities:

 ○ Art Club

 ○ Cheerleading (Flyer)

 ○  Gymnastics

fun facts //  

 ○ Balo has been attending Luxor since her Freshman year.

 ○ Balo’s kind of a literal ray of sunshine who believes (almost) everyone is truly good at heart.

 ○ Very easy to manipulate, please manipulate her. I’ll literally give you my firstborn.

 ○ Usually you’ll see her running around with a smile trying to brighten everyone’s day. She tries to put everyone’s happiness before herself, however, she’s slowly getting better about forming boundaries.

 ○ While it’d be easy to assume Balo’s dumb, that’s not quite the case. She only remembers the information she wants to. The issue is... most of the information she wants to learn is relatively useless. Want to know how to sew sutures? She’s your girl. Want to know the definition of cannibalism? Well, ask Jack how that goes.

 ○ She has two teddy bears and an American Girl doll living on her dresser. Duffy, Shelley-Mae, and Robin Banks. They’re decorative, but they make her happy.

 ○ One of her best friends is Logan Keller, the boy who went missing during the summer camping trip. The two are still in touch, and extremely close, so occasionally he gets mentioned here and there, but it’s still a sore spot for her (I am still in touch with the person who played him, so I run stuff by his mun when / if he comes up).

 ○ Jack’s adoptive parents recently adopted her, although she hasn’t said a lot about it. Your muse probably won’t know unless one of the two directly told them (or they heard it from Zander). It’s not a secret, she just didn’t make an announcement or anything.

 ○ In October 2019, Zander had an intervention for her to force her to get help for her eating disorder. She was in inpatient until April 2020, when she returned to Luxor.

 ○ Cheer and Gymnastics team member from Freshmen year until her intervention, and she returned to both teams this fall with the new school year.

 ○ Balo’s left handed (the only one of my muses that is a lefty)!

 ○   I’m aware Balo’s family page can be complicated, please feel free to dm me with questions. Also, please remember Balo doesn’t know she’s Daniel’s daughter, let alone the fact there’s even a chance Lance isn’t her father, which means your muse has absolutely no way of knowing this.

 ○ Befriended a stray racoon on the Lake George campus she named Reese Withercoon.

 ○ Literally only just said her first swear word this June, we’re very proud of her for finally getting that done. (#ThanksAxelAndLeo)

 ○ Balo finds the Winnie the Pooh theme song extremely soothing, which resulted in her naming a certain group chat with a set of friends the 100 Acre Woods - because she finds spending time with them soothing too.

 ○ I’m always willing to discuss my muses, so feel free to hit me up if you have any questions at any point.

a tl;dr history  //  

 ○ Balo’s home life growing up was far from perfect. Her father, Lance - is an abusive alcoholic, and while her mother tried her best to protect her children - she also covered things up without hesitation because she loves her husband. It wasn’t uncommon to see a Driskell in the ER with a lie and people willing to back up the story.

 ○ Balo was conceived during the time Lance and Cassandra were seperated the only time that her mother tried to leave. She’s completely unaware that she’s not Lance’s biological daughter (as is everyone else).

 ○ She’s been attending Luxor since freshman year, although she had to leave in the middle of her Junior year had to leave for a few months to attend extensive inpatient treatment. She came back in April, although she could not rejoin the cheerleading and gymnastic teams until her therapist confirmed she was doing well (so the start of her senior year) because of concerns about her well-being.

 ○ She was disowned following her HIV diagnosis over the fall. Over the winter, the Fieldings adopted Balo.

 ○ I strongly recommend skimming Balo’s timeline page before interacting with her. These are just the bare minimum basics, and there're more things your muse may know on there.

wanted connections //  

 ○ Friendships

 ○ Someone to manipulate her, please I beg you

 ○ Anyone who knows her from the gymnastics and/or cheer teams, or the art club

[rotzaprachim]

in secret, between the shadow and the soul 1/2

Kanej, Inej-centric. Teen ish, marriage of convenience, 3000 words 

(About 6 years post Crooked Kingdom) 

Read here on ao3

The apothecary asks her how long it’s been since she’s been intimate with her husband, and Inej almost chokes, says no, she hasn’t been in a very long time. Honesty is always difficult in her carse- dealing with her own past, own demons is hard enough without having to watch other people attempt proper emotional responses on her behalf, and maybe the apothecary senses that because she doesn’t ask more.

----

“It’s legal more than anything. A question of economics,” Kaz said, and Inej nodded, because it's kerch and how could it be anything but? Certainly nothing as tawdry as emotion or desire, let alone love, could interfere with so large a life decision.

Only Kerch citizens can hold berths in the water, and its significantly easier to manage bank accounts and conduct major financial decisions of the kind Inej needs to make on the near daily when restocking her ships. There's one route faster than all the others to becoming a Kerch citizen.

Inej suggested it before Kaz did.

She isn’t ready for marriage, she said. She isn’t ready to be tied to a man, to be anything more or less than herself alone. The Kerch made the whole business easy by never referring to this thing they’re doing as a marriage, all the paperwork is about Economic Units, Civil Unions. There’s so many pages of jargon it made Inej’s eyes bleed. Future children held less inches of fine grey type than agreements on pigs and shipping company stocks, and were described in the same economic language.

Kaz went through the whole thing line by line until the shore she was going to call for an annulment before they’d even gotten the damned thing notarized, or else make herself a tastefully rich and very young widow.

“It’s a contract,” he said. “You should know all the details before you sign your life away.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Inej said, irritated by the last several pages about Property Division in the Event of Medium Sized or Larger Storms, Grisha Attacks, and General Flooding, “I’m not signing my life away.”

“When you get married, it might be difficult to annul if you’ve still got a legal Kerch-”

“When I get married?” she shoots back challengingly. “To who?”

“I don’t know. That fire-tongued revolutionary who writes you poetry and will make you a new world. The Kaelish tavern maid who always pours you a free beer in her bar while you sing about the plight of the repressed. Someone hopelessly moon-eyed and optimistic, who thinks the world shits rainbows and knows what you’re worth.”

“You, Kaz Brekker,” she finally sighed, “are a hell of a lot dumber than they say you are.”

---

She doesn’t tell her parents. She’s not ready for that conversation.

---

She doesn’t tell Nina. She’s not ready for that conversation either.

---

The whole thing was finished in a notary’s office in ten minutes.

Kaz’s gloves were off, more because they both need to be fingerprinted than anything else.

He swore a short, official oath of his loyalty to both her and the Kerch market, promising not to cheat in foreign ports and to provide for and any hypothetical children. She thought of the paid-off indenture and the ship and the found parents and berth twenty-two and and her room in the house in bought on the Zelverstraat and thought that maybe he’s better at doing that than he thinks he is.

She swore a shorter official oath about fidelity and staying true and all her children being her husband’s, because to do otherwise would be bad economics and make her a poor investment, a value-destroyer, on the family line. Because it’s Kerch and of course it is.

---

“What are you thinking about?” he asked her afterward in an attempt at being casual. They’d been sipping at warm lukewarm flagons of beer in one of the harbour’s more reputable establishments and looking out at the water for twenty minutes.

“I’m thinking,” she said slowly, tasting her words, “that Alys Van Eyck is a very, very lucky woman that we came around when we did.” She’s still thinking about the various punishments for women who pollute the family line, which even if motivated by economics over faith as such things would be in Fjerda, are not dissimilar in practice. She’s realising more and more the Kerch neuroticism over bastardry probably comes from having so many of the young men gone for half the year at sea.

Kaz guffawed, which was not a sound she was really used to him making. “You never fail to surprise me, Wraith.”

“How is the Vrouw Dazi”

Kaz shrugged. “Not useful to my purposes anymore. Wylan’s got her an Bajan set up in a little cottage outside Pijl with a tidy sum tied to not making too much noise.”

Sometimes she fantasized about breaking into that cottage and putting on a performance similar to the one that sent Pekka Rollins screaming from Ketterdam. She didn’t, because she didn’t subscribe to the idea of the sins of the father and thought Saartje Kazanja deserved a da with his mental pieces mostly intact. But saints take all, she wanted too.

“How’s Saartje?”

“I don’t know. Kid? Looks more like she could be ours than Jan Van Eyck’s, that’s for sure.

The tips of Kaz’s ears went red before he finished that sentence and he stared into the foam at the bottom of his glass, head turned decisively away from her.

“Fine, I think. In school now. No reason to keep tabs.”

They toasted her new Kerch citizenship. Inej swore she saw his hand shaking.

----

Her citizenship documents, stamped with a wax seal of three flying fish and a small Kerch flag came three days later, expedited by Kaz in ways she cannot begin to fathom. It’s only then she realised that they’re for the new Vrouw Rietveld, that she made her vows to Kasper Rietveld. It’s only logical- Rietveld can be the upstanding businessman who only exists on paper in a way Kaz Brekker cannot, all the better for her dowings, but it still feels like a piece of himself gifted to her.

She could forge Rietveld’s name for her own purposes too; they practiced on old betting slips that she then threw into the fire. Kerch women can legally make almost every kind of financial decision and dealing, less due to the Merchers’ Council’s upstanding opinion of the female gender than the portion of the year the men are at sea, the incredible odds they won’t come back.

(They’ve rather flipped that scenario.

“How much cross-stitch will you do do fill up the void of my absences, she chided him. “They say the old sailor’s wives used to knit lace from the white froth of the sea.” Nowadays Wealthy Kerch women waiting for their husbands to come home tended to stick to knitting hats and scarves for orphans. So saints-damned many hats and socks, and yet you could still scarcely move for the number of bare-headed, barefoot orphans come winter. It was one of Ketterdam’s greatest mysteries.

“Inej,” Kaz sayid, eyes closed, genuine concern cutting his voice. Ever more she was picking up a sailor’s sense of gallows humour.)

---

They exchanged rings at the registry. Inej’s was a simple band, no gemstones but she suspected it was solid gold. Inside was etched a wave pattern, an endless strip of open sea.

Wearing it on her finger meant something, soo she looped it onto a sturdy chain that she hid between her shirt and her beating heart. That seemed appropriate, doable. Young sailors often took the bracelets and handkerchiefs of their sweethearts out to sea as good luck tokens; Inej had a gold wedding band.

Kaz’s fingers brushed the chain in the warm dip between neck and collar as he said goodbye to her on the docks, and after she nodded infinitesimally, telling him to go on, finish this chapter of the story, he slowly pulled up the rest of the chain and found the band.

“I thought-” he said, but she looked him in the eyes, square as she could, and he halted. She doesn’t know what he thought.

“There was not and is not and will probably me a different man for me than you, Kaz Brekker.

He swallowed thickly and then slowly lifted her skin-warmed band to his lips, even though he did not believe in luck, had said he believed in nothing but her.

---

The Kerch don’t have seperate words for “husband’ and “man.”

---

“Mijn mann,” she says in response to the curious looks her crew gives her after the band slips free during repair work, and it doesn’t feel like anything more or less than the truth.

“Mijn mann,” she says tacitly when border authorities raise their eyebrows in suspicion at her Kerch passport.

“Mijn mann,” she begins her letters back to him. “Dearest Inej,” his come back, sometimes even “Loveliest Inej,” but he never uses a possessive pronoun form.

---

Having any kind of passport, official documentation, feels alien and strange. She comes from a people without a land, and for her entire childhood they Suli were denied any official documentation of Ravkan citizenship. That’s changing now, but many are still wary, and with very good reason to be.

---

The quick bureaucratic sketch to mark Vrouw Inej Rietveld as a Seetsen Van Det Kerchrepublik, looked absolutely nothing like the drawings on the three individual sets of national wanted posters that keep cropping up in seedy port cities. Absolutely none of the above get her nose right.

“I look white in this one,” she said, holding a particularly egregious example up to Aigerim, who commiserate mightily. “Look how fucking straight this nose is. No eyebrows.”

Hitting the nose furnishes very fun target practice for when her fingers itch to throw knives.

Inej wins a lot of games of darts in a lot of seamy seaside pubs tucked into a lot of different gritty port cities.

---

They dock in Pijl before Ketterdam to catch their breath and do repairs. Ketterdam’s a good place for business and to look for secrets and plan strategy but a shite location to re-sew a sail or patch up a wall, unless you like replacing your supplies every time they’re stolen. The prices of grain and barrels of water and apples are lower are lower closer to the fields as well, even if that involves bartering loudly in a Centraalmarket that smells like spilled cider and pig shit, straw crunching underfoot, rather than the hallowed halls of the Exchange.

It takes her three days to come down with the evil hybrid chest cold-stomache flu of her fucking life. Ameera shoves her back into bed with ginger tea and another blanket. The thing they don’t tell you about awesome pirate ships with awesome international crews is that you also get the full spectrum of awesome international germs.

By the fourth day, she’s putting on all three of her coats and stuffing a wad of kruge and her passport into a pocket to visit the clinic in town.

---

Other people seem to register this whole being-married business than Inej ever does. She just prefers the expedited customs lines.

The splotchy faced, matronly woman at the clinic sits her on a paper-covered table and reads through a list of questions on a clipboard. Nian loves the lab smell of pure alcohol, would probably dab it on as perfume if she could, but Inej only associates it with injury, with being patched and stitched up after a bad scrape, with the white-coated doctor who came in every two weeks to swab Tante Heleen’s girls for disease, with the brown bottle of the stuff she uses to clean blood and worse off of her knives.

“Family history of pulmonary infections?” the woman asks her. “Smoking, alcohol, jurda use?” Every question makes her squirm slightly, as if in the historyof her wheezing lunghs is some sin she’s committed and will only now find out about. Nejn, nejn, nejn. Inej forgot how much she hated being looked at.

No grisha in her family that she knows of- scribble scribble scribble- but a lot of bad eyesight.

“When was the last time you had intimate relations with your husband?” the woman asks bluntly, and that’s the question that knocks the air out from her. The woman’s thin yellow eyebrow quirks up, but Inej manages to disguise her gasp as a particularly bad fit of hacking. She knows its nothing but a bit of intrusive medical questioning, but words can have many meanings and the answers to questions can be both yes and no at the same time and a certain turn of phrase can punch like a fist and cut like a knife. So she just says “six months ago,” and gives the woman her answer for the write-up.

“Long time.”

“He’s a sailor. I cry as I wait for him to return to me.”

“Ghezen’s speed that he does.”

---

She isn’t quite sure the Kerch even believe in Ghezen as anything beyond a bit of window-dressing to their financial affairs and the punchlien to jokes. Not like she honours her saints, the small painted icon of Sankta Inej she also keeps next to her heart, her daily prayers in the dark comfort her her room. She stands with Merjan, one of her crewmates, at the grave of Sankta Mahari, Queen of Mercy and Patroness of the Lost as they read the ancient prayers together, their voices settling into the steadiness of bees. Our queen, protector of our people, give us mercy, pray for peace, pray for us, pray to bring light to the shadows of the things we have done.

Sankta Anastasia, Sankt Dmitri, Sankta Mahari, she whispers into her knuckles, her fingers moving along the prayer rope with the decisive snapping of wooden beats, pray for our safety in the storm and bring us to the shore.

---

If Inej has found her own name, written with a familar jagged hand, among the prayer-knots tied to the Zentzbridge in a plea of mercy from the sea, she will not mention it.

---

Ketterdam is ugly and bright and familiear. You can smell the rotting flesh and beer smell before you see the smoky smudge of the city on the horizon. The crew makes quick work of unfolding the grishaworked official three-flying-fish flag that gives them clearance to enter the harbour without having their decks searched by the council of tides and carefully docks at Berth 22. Considering that the berths are now being numbered out into the two-hundereds, its a plum location, but its also damn close to the action, meaning that she can already see the glimmer of plastic beads floating on the water, the dark smudges of drunkards bobbing along. A few of the crew memebrs are going to get their pockets picked right off the bat. Inej already has a slush fund tucked away for precisily this reason. She’s getting better at this, she hopes, being a leader. Predicting what will happena dn why and when. Being someone that other people- many younger and more vulnerable than her- can rely on.

“AIGERIM,” she screams as she buttons up her city coat, “only two of thsoe pink trinks with the paper umbrellas MAXIMUM. You hear me?”

“Yeah, boss.”

She sighs. She doesn’t want to be anyone’s boss. “If there’s anything like what happened with the canal and the Stadwatch last time happens again, I think I’ll find the decks need a good scrubbing.”

Aigerim gestures wildly. “Course, boss..”

She tries to take deep rbeaths to calm her nerves. Maybe she’s becoming a worried old crone forty years early, but she’s the one who survived this hellhole of a city. She’s the one who survived this far. In this world, twenty-three is a badge of honour.

---

He cuts a familar figure on the docks. THey each have their own webs now, know of each other’s doings three or four times removed, like recognising a faovrite drinking song on it’s third round of translation. The recognition of a familiar trick, hand, murder method. Kaz will read in a news paper of a mysterious storm that’s tripled the price of indigo and sweet-wood fans after a whole line of ships went missing off the Southern Pelagic Reefs and Inej will hear in a greasy Kaelish bar about the shocking downfall of an old Kerch trading family and they will each smile, privately, and admire the other’s handiwork.

But seeing him in person is something altogether different, and she still rushes over the slats of the quay, coat streaming behind her, stopping abruptly when she comes to him. They pause there for a second and then he lifts his arms and they wrap themselves together around each other, hesitantly but then warmly, firmly, sturdy as a sailor’s knot and with all the inevitability of the sea wearing stone to sand.

“I’ve missed you, Wraith,” he says into her hair and she shrugs into him, her head level with his chest. His chin rests neatly on her head now, if he leans down slighlty, and she swears that wasnt the case the first time they embraced, the first time she left Ketterdam. He denies that the Ice Court, Van Eyck, all that happened while he was a boy not finished with growing. Yet she herself’s tried on that first Wraith outfit- a costume of sorts, really, how different was it from the Scarab Queen’s glass-bead veil in the third act of the Komedie Brute- to find it no longer fit, that she couldn’t easily do up the buttons on the front. She has more of a woman’s set of curves to her hips and long, hard-earned muscles on her legs and thighs, and even if she is creating some new kind of legend it is under her own name now.

Sometimes, Ketterdam feels like that too-small jacket; it cannot fit the woman she’s becoming. So she sews herself a new coat from the fabric of the world.

“Mijn mann,” she says, because she likes the way his body flinches and then stills under her fingers with those words, sharp and unexpected as any knife. “I’ve missed you too.”

[fiinalgiirls]

GENERAL INFORMATION.

FULL NAME - ramira beatriz reyes bustamonte NICKNAMES - ram, mira GENDER / PRONOUNS - she/her DATE OF BIRTH - february 12, 1990 PLACE OF BIRTH - el paso, texas CITIZENSHIP / ETHNICITY - cuban-american RELIGION - agnostic SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS / POLITICAL AFFILIATION - upper middle class, liberal. MARITAL STATUS - single. SEXUAL & ROMANTIC ORIENTATION - pansexual. EDUCATION / OCCUPATION - horror author, librarian in some verses LANGUAGES - spanish, english

FAMILY INFORMATION.

PARENTS - diego and paola reyes  SIBLINGS - tbd OFFSPRING - none PETS / OTHER - none NOTABLE EXTENDED FAMILY - step-family

PHYSICAL INFORMATION.

FACECLAIM - jeanine mason HAIR COLOR / EYE COLOR - black / brown HEIGHT / BUILD - 5′7″ / slender TATTOOS / PIERCINGS - ears DISTINGUISHABLE FEATURES - red lips and a winning smile, long dark hair

MEDICAL INFORMATION.

MEDICAL HISTORY - none KNOWN ALLERGIES - nkda VISUAL IMPAIRMENT / HEARING IMPAIRMENT - none NICOTINE USE / DRUG USE / ALCOHOL USE - has a bit of a party problem in her past, now is trying to drink more responsibly and limit drug use to the occasional joint

PERSONALITY.

TRAITS - friendly, imaginative, enthusiastic ; a little vapid, distant TROPES - tbd TEMPERAMENT - sanguine ALIGNMENT - chaotic good CELTIC TREE ZODIAC - rowan, the MBTI - esfp HOGWARTS HOUSE - slytherin VICE / VIRTUE - tbd LIKES / DISLIKES: leather jackets and designer boots, red lipstick, the sound of a keyboard clicking, drop shots, stephen king and clive barker  /  doctor’s offices, family gatherings, ubers QUOTE:  ❝strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one.❞

FAVORITES.

FOOD - shrimp raviolis DRINK - red wine and black coffee PIZZA TOPPING - pesto chicken COLOR - red MUSIC - dark synth BOOKS - horror, thriller MOVIES - horror, thriller CURSE WORD - tronpon SCENTS - coffee, pasta, cloves, and pine

BIOGRAPHY,

trigger/content warnings: divorce mention, horror

ramira reyes was almost a household name by the time she’d finished her third book, but only her family called her beatriz. the sound of her birth name on their lips producing goose flesh as easy as the creak of a door in a house void of people. it had been a wise, yet impulsive, decision she’d made prior to her first publication that, were she to gain any small fame at all, she might like to keep some part of herself to herself. that she might want to some day found her own world absent of perfection without them. if nothing else, she could at least have her name and that small piece of autonomy and power that came with keeping it safe someday on the lips and hearts of her siblings, even if many of them did not appreciate or understand her chosen subject matter.

diego and paola met in artemisa, cuba in diego’s dental practice. paola was a dental hygienist with dreams of modelling and diego thought she had the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen. the pair were perfection, because they were both obsessed with perfection. despite the infidelity, no one could find a single flaw between them. beatriz was born eight months later and diego thought she and paola could offer him a more beautiful life than the one he already had. no hairs out of place, no stains on white couches. beautiful enough that he left his wife, and the children he’d already had with her, bringing his new bride and daughter to el paso, texas where they could start anew.

since the very first book, beatriz devoured the written word. she read every book she could get her hands on. she read in spanish and english. she read poetry and prose. she read history and the classics and all of shakespeare’s collected works by the time she was ten. it was stories like macbeth and the raven she loved most and she searched for their peers. disturbed by their daughter’s love of the macabre, paola threw out her stephen king paperbacks as easily as she found them and diego insisted she read more sophisticated authors. her parents’ efforts did little to sway her and, as her siblings were born after her, she was able to fly under their radar a little more with each birth.

a nervous child since birth, her parents control and idiosyncrasies only served to worsen her anxieties. allowance was not freely given to be spent; purchases had to be reviewed with both parents for approval. she became afraid to step out of line and yet she stepped on every crack in the sidewalk on her daily walk home from school. not because she believed some playground rhyme, but just to spite them. just to feel the imperfection underfoot as she plastered on her wooden smile. reading was her greatest escape and the school library her only refuge. it was there she discovered terrifying covers and flawed heroes. there was comfort in the frightening fantasies spun by horror greats. whatever her worries were, they were never as intimidating as the battle of good versus evil in the stand or the serial terror of books of blood. soon she was writing her own stories–sending shivers up the spines of girls at slumber parties and earning concerned, but approving glances from her creative writing teachers.

despite their dislike of her interests, both diego and paola were loving and supportive, they told her so. there was a long list of careers they had planned for her. she could follow in her father’s footsteps, she could be a model and fulfill her mother’s dreams, she could become a doctor, a lawyer, or go to business school like her uncle. and none among the prestigious careers laid out for her included horror writer. they stroked her hair and assured her it was not her fault when they finally split during her sophomore year in high school. in some ways, it only served to make things worse, but their divorce made it even easier to pursue her passion for writing. they were so focused on sabotaging each other’s happiness, she could easily slither through the cracks. finding herself with a hefty acceptance letter to sarah lawrence, where she’d always dreamed she’d go to escape the monotony and control of life in a dentist’s household in order to become who she’d always dreamed she could be.

college never felt pointless, despite meeting some of the same attitudes shared by her parents–one of the only things they could still agree upon. the nervousness that had driven her to the macabre seemed to dissipate the more she wrote about it. the more she wrote, the more she had to keep going and her first collection of short stories–her thesis project–was published the year she graduated. touted in the horror circles as a debut success, beatriz found herself in a whirlwind and, while her parents refused to read her work they did their best to support her; they told all their friends that they’d always pushed her to write. it burned that she couldn’t share everything she loved with them. that her place in the family was largely tied to her success. even her siblings seemed more afraid of stepping out of line than they did a desire to step out from underneath the reyes patriarch’s heavy thumb. and, as her success grew with each book, she felt further and further away from them. ramira reyes was a household name, but beatriz was the name she left behind with her family.

the distance only grew with her busy schedule and, as christmas neared, she found herself unable to travel back home under the threat of a new deadline for her latest tale of terror. procrastination became seductive with every daily distraction, and she found herself caught up in movie deal negotiations and parties. parties with people who were rarely critical of her, bathing her in the afterglow of sycophantic, unconditional love. after one such night out in a string of forgettable nights, she found herself drunk and lost in a subway car that felt eerily like midnight meat train with a broken phone and lost wallet. it was that morning, when she sat in a diner with last night’s party dress and smudged eyeliner, that she decided it was time to unplug. it was time to be scared again and it was time to write.

the loft apartment didn’t take long to sublet, nor did it take much time for her to pack. ramira had no idea where she was going, but she’d seen some rumors online about the mysterious town of boot hill, arizona and it seemed like the perfect place to unplug and be inspired. she sent her mother and father an email, apologizing to them that she’d likely miss christmas this year, but would make sure to come and see them all in el paso when she’d finished her book. the words were as wooden as her childhood smiles; nothing sounded worse than another christmas back home in el paso.

the flight wasn’t too long, but she was exhausted by the time she got into the rental car. assured by several people along the way that boot hill was simply an urban legend, ramira shrugged them off. it didn’t matter really. boot hill was more of an idea to her than a real place. as long as she found some small town where nobody knew her name and she wouldn’t be tempted by new york city nightlife, she was pretty sure she’d manage. maybe it wasn’t a real place, she thought dreamily, turning the dial on the rental car’s radio as she lost service, after following the directions she’d read on reddit and finding nothing. she could swear to god there’s no southbound highway and she’s barely able to keep awake any longer without any music, even with both windows rolled down.

it seems like it’s time to pull over at the next rest stop and catch some shut eye when she sees the sign. BOOT HILL, ARIZONA. IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME NOW! the quaint kitschiness makes her exhale sharply in amusement. fuck you, creepy gas station clerk, she thinks, tightening her knuckles at ten and two on the wheel with renewed resolve. i’m going to write a new bestseller in this town. white knuckled and red eyed, she drives on with the renewed energy of a second wind.

as a small smattering of lights appear in front of her, she can hardly hear the call of something sinister in the outskirts as she drives on. her phone still doesn’t have service, as she looks for an airbnb, but it doesn’t even bother her that she can’t call anyone to let them know she’s made it safely. hell, her publisher will probably lose his marbles until she sends him a draft, but all of that can wait. there’s something so calming about the sleepy town waking up in the wee hours of the morning. there’s something so magical about the pace of this place and ramira thinks, maybe she could write all her books in this town. maybe this is somewhere she belongs.

[nagendras-blog]

The Citizenships Amendment Bill :The hindu rasthra project

The Citizenships amendment Bill 2019 which was passed in both lower and upper house seeks to give citizenship (or fast track the process )to those primarily 6 religion groups Hindu,sikh, Christian,Jain,Parsi, Buddhist who are religiously persecuted minorities belonging to 3 neighbouring country pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan. The act also reduce the residential requirements for these ppl from 11yrs to 6 and cuttoff date has been set at 21 Dec 2014.In short The bill choose to open it’s door to non muslim from 3 countries.

In both its intent and wording they brazenly singled out one community:MUSLIM

Damning part of this act is they carefully avoided “persecuted minorities” from act but in their statement in objection and reasons they say persecuted minorities will be given citizenship. They also relaxed some rules Through notification in 2015 -2016, Home ministry exempted these undocumented migrants from adverse panel consequences (making it lenient) under the passport (entry into india) act 1920 and foreigner act 1948.

If government intention is to give citizenship on humanitarian ground why they choose these 3 country only and Why not the following ppl who are also persecuted on a daily basis?

Ahmadis in Pakistan ,in thier constitution they not even consider muslim many riots killed them, infamously in 2010 where 84 Ahamdis are murdered knows as Lahore massacre.Srilanka Tamil refugee more that 55000 living in tharamangalam district of Tamil nadu who fled becoz of civil wars ,religiously persecuted by Christian/monks.Atheist in Bangladesh.Christian in BhutanRohingyas in myanmar.

CAA balantly discriminates n says we will allow this minorities but not those minorities!!. Countering this in parliament gov says “we only allowing from country who are theocratic in nature and their state religion is muslim”. In doing this they inevidently discrediting other minorities n thier suffering!

Some myths regarding this Act which I point out below

Argument 1:- Amit and modi in his speech says crores of ppl will benefit from this

Fact:- a)Before CAA lapsed in 2017 (since it failed to pass in rajya sabha on time) bill was sent to standing committee . When asked questioned how many will benefit intelligence bureau said quote “there are 31313 (Hindus 25447,sikh 5807, Christian 55, Buddhist 2,Parsi 2 Jain 0) currently living who have been given long term visas on basis of thier claim of religious persecution in Thier respective countries and want indian citizenship” unquote

B) Government of india has yet to formulate law/provision to find out how a person is religiously persecuted and not on economic/political basis.(this is also shows how hastly and without proper discussion the bill was passed).

C) This CAA will not help to even those who are currently persecuted minorities and came after cutoff date 21 December 2014 .

Argument 2:- Hindu population dropped from 23% to 2% this was claimed by many BJP seniors .

Facts:- there is little change in hindu population in Pakistan over the years, rather than systematic decline hindu population fell drastically before and after partition.

In Undivided British India in 1931, 15% hindu population constituted in Pakistan this percentage dropped drastically in 1951 to 1.3% why is that because millions of hindus migrated from Pakistan to indian side.

Hindu population was consistent through the year.

1951 :- 1.3%

1962:- 1.4%

1998 census showed there were 2.1 million hindus living in Pakistan that number grew to 3 million in 2017 census

This migration also explain sudden drop in muslim in indian side of Punjab ….54% muslim lived in indian side of Punjab State in 1941 that number came down 0.8% in 1951 post partition.

Argument 3:- There are 49 muslim majority country and muslim can choose any country but hindus has only 1 .

This is argument is farce if that’s the case why even include Buddhist and Christian ? There are 5 Buddhist majority country and more than 100christian majority country

Modi/shah will fullfill jinnah dream of two nation theory..

Amit Shah in parliament debate accused Congress that it divided India on the basis of religion and he is undoing the mistake it made in 1947 , even modi said in one his election speech “There are many children of Maa Bharti who have faced persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh… We will stand with those who are a part of India once , but got separated from us.”

The claim is that the CAA will somehow finish the unfinished business of Partition. On the contrary, it will only fullfill Jinnah two nation theory

Partition become necessary when there are two vision from different leaders who didn’t agree upon, one was Jinnah who wanted muslim for Pakistan and hindus for India… on other side Indian founders belived that nationhood is not a religious construct. It is geographical. From Islamabad to Kanyakumari, we were one people united by shared geography and history. We were united in our diversity.

Savarkar was also among the first to purpose two nation theory in ambedhad during hindu mahasabha council debate 1932

Ambedkar replying to Savarkar wrote quote “Strange as it may appear, Mr. Savarkar and Mr. Jinnah, instead of being opposed to each other on the one nation versus two nations issue, are in complete agreement about it. Both agree, not only agree but insist, that there are two nations in India—one the Muslim nation and the other the Hindu nation. They differ only as regards the terms and conditions on which the two nations should live” unquote

Gandhi wrote in his biography “I find no parallel in history for a body of converts and their descendants claiming to be a nation apart from the parent stock”

God only know which history books Amit Shah read!!

Because of this difference of opinion two country came into effect

With CAA if you are a Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian in present-day Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, you will soon be able to walk into India illegally, or overstay your visa, and become an Indian citizen in six years. To exclude Muslims from this privilege, just because they are the “majority” community in these countries, is to say that Muslims are not the children of “Maa Bharti”

In practice CAA will encourage large scale migration from neighbouring 3 countries predominantly hindus completing unfinished business of modi/shah dream of making hindu rasthra.

Hemant Sharma BJP senior Assam leader openly says he wants to give Bangladeshi hindu migrants election voter id and asking shah to expedite CAA process as soon possible before Assam 2021 state election. ( Lol I mean they not even hiding about this ).

With CAA + NRC

Modi/shah has a tool to harass muslim who are unable to proof their grand father citizenship, these will be stripped of citizenship and will be sent to detainion camps.

Hindus in(CAA) muslim out(NRC), that’s the message of this exercise it basically a way of accepting two nation theory (Jinnah would be patting modi/shah right now). Such a good way to honour 150th anniversary of Gandhi right?.

One of interesting fact about CAA nowhere it is mentioned “persecuted minorities” so saying ‘see we are helping minorities” is nothing but media spin meant to fool us ..

If ram and Rahim both residing before 31 Dec 2014 and both have been declared illegal ,ram has a easy way out he can approach United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees declare himself he/she perscuted and get citizenship through CAA and God knows what will happen to Rahim!

Even Chetan bhagat who I use to call him modi bhakt tweeted this simple explanation.

What about those who are poor,homeless, ppl from tribals area,ppl who have been displaced through floods..how all this ppl will produce legacy documents??This is not only anti muslim but also anti poor, as Kannan gopinathan (IAS officer who resigned post article 370) says this government not only evil but also dumb,

Evil because it’s target certain community

Dumb because even after creating big blunder in Assam NRC which costed them more than 1600cr (they junked it saying majority found to be hindus) says they will apply NRC through out India *demonetising human being*

Conclusion,my final thoughts..

CAA itself is discriminatory and with NRC, Modi/shah has a dangerous tool to target muslim, harass marginalized groups, polarize through plaint media ,use it has a vote bank politics and change idea of India forever which our founder fought n we cherished for 70yrs.

Past 30yr they used Ayodhya,

Next 30yr they will use CAA+NRC.

Jai hind.

[sokodiye-blog]

Hearsay, Lies and Vietnam Visa

https://tr.ivisa.com/vietnam-visa

Don't stay in the cities in the event you can stay away from it.  If you're already in the nation and wish to return, you can pay a visit to any travel agency in one of the most significant cities.  You also need to advise your bank at home when you are considering using ATMs in Vietnam, as ATMs utilize the magnetic strip as an alternative to chip and pin technology.

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So check on the Vietnam Embassy website on your country, there aren't many nationalities which don't will need to turn in an application for the Vietnam tourist visa and can get the immigration stamp free of charge.  Upon you receive an approval letter you'll be able to enter Vietnam a few days later.  It is impossible to enter Vietnam before you receive an approval letter.

Top Choices of Vietnam Visa Arranging a vacation abroad shouldn't need to come with the strain of handling visas or making certain your passport is all up to date.   Furthermore, you must learn some suggestions on the best way to take photos for visas for Vietnam for kids and infants.  Generally speaking, business visas are simple to get, but there might be a substantial difference in price versus a tourist visa.

If you're unclear about any facet of the entry requirements, or you require further reassurance, you will want to get hold of the embassy, higher commission or consulate of the nation or territory you're travelling to. Other restrictions, like requiring fingerprints and photographs, might also be reciprocated.  There are essentially two forms of tourist visas, broken up into 30-day single or multiple entry.

Some will even attempt to make the most of you.  If you're still wondering about the important factors related to rapid prototyping printing solutions, here is what you will need to continue in mind.   Ever since, using machines has been widely accepted and popularized around the world.

As soon as your application is finished, we'll return it to you via a safe and encrypted email keeping your own personal information safe. The internet process was very uncomplicated and fast.Vietnam-visa. After filling all essential information, you are going to be ask to create a payment online.

What is Truly Happening with Vietnam Visa More Fun Travel note Should you request a specific visa it's possible that you won't be issued that specific visa and your visa might be downgraded i.e. instead of a three month visa you might be issued a 1 month visa, rather than a multiple entry visa, you might be issued a single entry visa.  The exit visa may also be withheld if there are pending court charges that should be settled or penalties that must be meted out. You still need to pay the visa fee at the Dubai immigration check however, you can merely have a flight and go anytime to Dubai in case you have a valid Usa visa.

All About Vietnam Visa The process is really simple even though a small time-consuming and can't be carried out directly on entry to the nation.  There's so much to experience throughout this huge nation, you won't ever be bored!  If your house country doesn't fall into this list, then you are going to want to begin your application journey once you have your trip plans and dates finalized.

Don't stay in the cities in the event you can stay away from it.  See what vendors draws the locals which is where you would like to try.  You also need to advise your bank at home when you are considering using ATMs in Vietnam, as ATMs utilize the magnetic strip as an alternative to chip and pin technology.

Choosing Good Vietnam Visa It is extremely important that you've got the suitable visa application dependent on the point of your trip.  The fee won't be refunded in the event the applicant is refused to grant e-visa. If you would like to stay longer, you will need to make an application for a visa as normal.

Just select your citizenship to inspect requirement, there's an e-visa choice to apply if you're eligible for it. You can select to make payment by both of both payment methods out there in our site.  Please kindly try to remember that applicable fees won't be refundable in the event the visa is issued depending on incorrect information supplied by the applicants.

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Visa is among the very first things you need prior to making your visit to Vietnam.  You should remember that if your travel visa to Vietnam is expired, you aren't permitted to remain in the nation anymore.  If you wish to re-enter Vietnam again within 30 days of your final visa exempt entry, you'll need to apply to get a new visa to be able to be allowed back in.

[seldo]

Becoming American

Today I became an American citizen.

The ceremony itself is, well, very American. Me and 854 other soon-to-be citizens assembled at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, clutching our precious green cards and the flimsy single-page letter we received in the mail saying we had passed all the tests needed to become citizens. As we filed in, a choir of elderly volunteers on stage sang various patriotic songs, with more enthusiasm than talent.

At the door, you hand them your green card -- a terrifying event; my green card is a precious document that cost me 5 years and well upwards of $25,000 in fees to acquire -- and in exchange you get a tiny American flag on a stick, and an envelope. In the hallway, a massive team of USCIS officials work in parallel to process all 855 applications at once, so that by the end of the ceremony they can hand you a certificate of naturalization.

A USCIS official who had obviously done this many, many times -- there are two ceremonies per month, and he looked like he'd worked there a long time -- ran through the program. We'd hear how to register to vote, how to update social security, how to apply for a passport. Then we'd be led through the Oath of Allegiance, which is the actual point at which you become legally a citizen. He encouraged people to feel free to clap and cheer, and the audience responded enthusiastically, frequently accompanied by waving all the little flags we'd been given.

He had a bunch of little jokes, obviously time-worn. He talked about all the countries participating, and rattled off welcomes in Spanish, then French, then -- prompting gasps of increasingly impressed surprise -- Chinese, Hindi and Taglog. These corresponded to the biggest countries of origin -- China was the biggest, then Mexico, Nicaragua, India, the Philippines and Canada. He listed all the countries participating in alphabetical order and got people to stand up when their country was called.

He thanked us for coming to America and strongly encouraged us to register to vote. He skirted as close as I can imagine he was professionally able to pointing out that America has a lot of problems right now, and a bunch of new voters might go some way to fixing that.

Then somebody came on and sung the national anthem -- we were encouraged, but not required, to sing along, and the crowd enthusiastically joined in -- and then we administered the oath, which took all of 45 seconds. Then a second, even shorter oath for those who intended to apply for a passport that day. Then a video message from Madeleine Albright, talking about how proud she was to have risen from refugee to Secretary of State, a second video from Donald Trump, who unconvincingly espoused the virtues of immigration, and then another very patriotic video of multi-cultural people waving flags.

Then they played "Proud to be an American", which is an aggressively condescending and arrogant song, but yet again most of the crowd sang along enthusiastically. Then the officials who'd been frantically printing certificates in the hall filed in and very efficiently handed them out. There was a lot of cheering, more flag waving, tons of selfies. And that, about 2 hours after we'd started, was that.

The ambivalent American

Growing up in my family, America was not the shining land of the free. Americans, according to my family, were definitely The Worst. They were loud, boorish, arrogant, rude, uncultured. My family, who watch every televised sporting event of any kind up to and including sheep herding trials, would not watch American football, baseball, or basketball. Liking American TV and movies was considered letting people down. As a child, even liking Mickey Mouse was considered shamefully unpatriotic.

But of course we did watch American movies and TV, because that was most of what was available. We consumed American culture while vilifying Americans all the while. There was no shortage of hypocrisy in this.

But the rest of the world and especially the Caribbean has a lot of very justifiable reasons to be unenthusiastic about American hegemony. American drug policy is responsible for political and economic disaster across all the countries south of the border. American culture is, in fact, violent, materialistic, and full of unhealthy and contradictory messages about bodies, food, beauty, religion and more.

So when my career took me to America my family were genuinely aghast. You want to move to *America*? But there are Americans there! It'll be awful! How can you stand being surrounded by Americans all the time? I tried to explain that not all Americans are like the terrible Americans who take cheap vacations to the Caribbean, and that there are many parts of America that are beautiful and cultured. My family, whose primary experience of America is visiting some relatives of ours who live in south Florida, were unconvinced. America, as far as they were concerned, was an un-ending series of strip malls, shitty chain restaurant food, and rednecks.

I arrived in the USA in 2007, and worked hard as a volunteer to elect Barack Obama in 2008. Here was a vision of America I could be proud of: diverse, caring, cultured, humble and respectful of the rest of the world. Obama's presidency had a great number of flaws, but I was a fan all the way to the end.

Having originally planned to stay only a few years, I hung around. I swapped between a few visas and, after five years and a huge amount in lawyers fees mostly paid by my employers, acquired a green card. You have to wait 5 years after getting a green card to become a citizen, so I had a few years to decide if, in far-off 2017, I wanted to become a US citizen. Then the 2016 election happened.

A flight to safety

A week after becoming president, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, usually called the Muslim Ban. Quite apart from the horrifically cruel and transparently bigoted nature of the order, it included a side-effect that was particularly horrifying to green card holders: the ban apparently applied to us too. Green-card holders were initially denied entry. Some were coerced into signing documents that forced them to relinquish their precious green cards.

After fighting so hard and so long to get our green cards, the idea that they could be stripped away was unprecedented, shocking, and filled me and my fellows with fear. There was a mad rush to apply for citizenship. Green card holders who'd been sitting on the cards for years not applying for citizenship suddenly were desperate for the additional security it afforded. Unable to apply until August 2017, I watched helplessly as the queue for citizenship lengthened from 3 months to a year. Equally fearful, I applied as soon as I could.

So now I find myself a citizen. It's a hard time to feel excited about that. The country is sliding into fascism (though in fairness so apparently is much of Europe). Inequality is rising. Racial injustice is omnipresent -- though, again in fairness, it was always there and has just recently become visible. There is much that is broken about America.

It would be easy to rationalize my citizenship to myself and my now even more horrified family as a mere administrative convenience, a security device to keep this dangerously capricious administration from summarily deporting me. But easy as that would be, it would be false.

More American than I thought

There is, as I kept telling my family, a lot to like about America. There's natural beauty, friendly people, culture. There is a sense of possibility, an openness to trying new things that I never found in the seven years I lived in the UK. There's institutions and a respect for the rule of law that Trinidad, though it will always be home to me, increasingly lacks.

There's potential to America, potential it's not currently living up to, but that remains tantalizingly close. A new generation are rising who genuinely value the diversity that makes America better, who understand that there is virtue and strength in taking from the richest to help the poorest, who realize systems like healthcare and gun laws that make America a horrifying outlier amongst rich nations can be changed for the better.

The day after the election, I was walking through downtown San Francisco and passed through one of the many spontaneous protests that were happening that week. A woman in the crowd handed me the small pink button in the picture above. It says "freedom protector". You're supposed to wear it to indicate that you will fight to keep others safe. I knew I couldn't wear it, because I couldn't fight. Even being near a protest was a risky thing for a green card holder.

But I held onto it. I kept it in the pocket of my favorite hoodie like a talisman, for the 21 long months between the nightmare of election night and today being finally safe from the whims of a dangerously unhinged executive. I was not a freedom protector, but that was the day that I decided I wanted to be. Tomorrow I get to wear the badge. Finally safe, tomorrow I can start protecting others.

I haven't become American just to stay safe. I've become American because after 11 years, Americanness has seeped into me. I'm choosing to be here because I want to help. I'm choosing to be here because I am, no matter how bad things are right now, fundamentally optimistic about the future of the country. I think America can be better, and I think I can do something about that. And that's a very American way to think. from Seldo.Com Feed https://ift.tt/2MVpmk2

[qqueenofhades]

the tangled web of fate we weave: ii

Well, in no time flat, this turned into a fic. I... should have seen that coming. I blame @extasiswings, as usual.

Part one here. AO3 here.

Garcia Flynn is woken the next morning by sunlight in his eyes, banging in the hallway – he tenses, but it sounds like the usual stampede of students out for weekend jollity – and a killer cramp in his back, which has come of sleeping mostly upright on an ancient, sagging sofa that will probably never recover from the experience. He stands up slowly, muttering under his breath and rubbing both hands over his face. Lucy probably doesn’t have any male toiletries, unless he wants to try shaving with a Dove disposable razor. Which likely neither she nor he would appreciate, and besides, he shouldn’t even be here. Should be back at his hotel, and he can’t repress a sudden stab of fear that Rittenhouse drove directly there and tore the room apart. He didn’t realize they knew quite so much about him just yet, and he came here. Now it’s his fault that Lucy’s in trouble, and he has no idea what to do next.

Flynn goes to the apartment’s small bathroom and washes up awkwardly with Lucy’s lavender-scented hand soap, gargling with the half-inch of Listerine left in the bottle, and digging without success under the sink for anything a former (or current, an unhelpful voice whispers) boyfriend might have left there. Makeshift ablutions concluded, he steps out and shoots a look at her bedroom door; she’s still asleep. Probably a good thing. Maybe it will give him some time to work out what the hell he appears to have gotten himself into.

The kitchen isn’t much bigger than the rest of this shoebox, and Flynn bangs his head on the door when he steps in. A cursory rummage of the fridge reveals almost no food; what does this woman live on, devoted zeal to academia and Red Bull? Then again, she is right in the final stages of trying to finish her dissertation, and did not need him crashing into her life like a… well. Bull.

She didn’t mind it last night, that unhelpful voice notes. Neither did you.

Flynn banishes it. He finally locates eggs, bread, and jam, makes toast and scrambled eggs, and after unearthing a canister of instant coffee, boils water and pours it into Lucy’s well-worn Stanford University mug. He’s almost finished, carrying it to the card table and setting it down, when he hears the bedroom door open. Drawn by the scent of food, Lucy comes shuffling in, hair tousled and loose, wearing pajamas and fuzzy socks, and her bleary eyes widen at the sight. “You made breakfast?”

“Least I could do, eh?” Flynn passes the plate over, and returns to the counter to whip up a second portion for himself. Lucy hesitates briefly, but accepts it. Sits down and starts to eat, as Flynn racks his brains for any light, ordinary conversation. Nothing occurs to him. Public relations and interpersonal skills have never been his forte; that’s why they send him on missions into hellhole war zones, where he can just shoot first and leave the talking for never. But the NSA is redistributing its assets these days, wants him on a few more domestic postings, dealing with industrial espionage, intelligence warfare and infrastructure sabotage, that kind of thing. It was in this capacity that Flynn came across the name Rittenhouse for the first time. His follow-up investigations have been very, very off the record.

“You don’t have any food,” he says, after he’s managed to scrape up some for himself. “Sofa’s on its way out too.”

“I’m sorry my crappy student apartment isn’t the Hilton.” Lucy gives him a cool look. “Anything else you’d like to complain to the front desk about?”

Flynn snaps his mouth shut, which he uses to chew the slightly blackened toast. They eat in silence after that, the air too tense in a way that means both of them are trying to pretend nothing out of the ordinary happened last night – which is difficult, given the sheer amount of weird shit. (That is indeed the technical term, Flynn would have her know.) Then Lucy wipes her mouth and stands up. “I need to go shopping, as you point out, and do some chores. So, for the rest of the day, are you…?”

There’s a clear question in her voice – how long is he planning to stay here, exactly? It’s valid, but he has no idea. He isn’t sure he shouldn’t already be gone. But if Rittenhouse drops by for a return visit, he knows he’d never shake that guilt. He doesn’t think they’d hurt her, even if Lucy clearly has no idea who she is. But he isn’t willing to take that risk.

Lucy vanishes to shower and get dressed, and Flynn, who has had quite enough of the sofa for forever, paces back and forth in the living room instead. God, this is surreal. He pulled her out of San Francisco Bay seven years ago, and she’s never entirely gone out of his thoughts since. He’s been a lot of places – Iraq, the Balkans, Switzerland, Egypt, and finally back home to Croatia for thirteen months before HQ directed him to the new post in the States – and yet somehow he’s ended up exactly back here. The jolt when he read Lucy Preston in the case file (he’s investigating Benjamin Cahill, a wealthy Silicon Valley businessman who plays all kinds of dirty pool, and Lucy… well, if she’d picked up that paper last night, she’d know) is one he won’t soon forget. It feels like… something. He doesn’t want to say fate, but he’s thought it more than once.

Lorena’s voice echoes in his head. For God’s sake, Garcia. Just go talk to the woman.

Flynn grimaces again. He’s known Lorena Kovac for a few years, in the rare interludes he’s been in Dubrovnik between assignments. They get on well – in fact, she’s about his only friend, as he has never been in either the right line of work or frame of mind to make them easily. He can sense that the feelings might be a little more than friendship on her part, and to be honest, if he’d met her sometime else, it would be easy for him to feel the same. Lorena is one of the only people he is comfortable with, lets down his guard, as if he can rest and enjoy himself. But with the ghost of Lucy Preston so stubbornly stuck in his head, he thinks it would be unfair to Lorena to try for anything else. Besides, ever since he started on this Rittenhouse manhunt, he’s had to cut off contact with her for her own safety. He has come across enough unexplained deaths, enough whistleblowers found hanged in their closets in apparent suicides, enough straight-out disappearances, to know what he is dealing with here. And might be the only man in the world who does.

Flynn paces a few more fruitless circuits until Lucy reappears, hair dark and damp, wearing her university sweatshirt and leggings. She grabs her car keys off the bookshelf and slings her bag over her shoulder. “I’m off to the grocery store,” she says. “See you later?”

Flynn grunts, opens the front door for her, and scans both ways before they step out into the hallway. They descend the stairs, whereupon they come across the three individuals he had a small chat with last night in re: their blatant idiocy and/or discourtesy in blasting rap music in a shared block of flats with thin walls. They all go white-faced, hasten to apologize to Lucy, and promise they will be quieter, as long as she doesn’t send her boyfriend over again.

Both Flynn and Lucy choke slightly at that, but manage not to say anything as they head out into the parking lot. As she reaches her beater of a Honda, Lucy looks up at him. “What exactly did you say to them?”

Flynn shrugs. “A word or two.”

Lucy eyes him for a moment, then unlocks her car and gets behind the wheel. Flynn thinks too late that he should have checked for a bomb underneath it before she started the engine, but she does not implode in a glorious fireball. She reverses out, not without a final glance over her shoulder, and he stands there a moment longer before going over to his own car, an unremarkable rental coupe with Washington plates. He does check for the bomb this time, earning himself a funny look from a passing power-walker, but he has more important things on his mind than whether a lot of grass-eating hipsters think he’s weird. Still, it’s clear. He gets in, turns on the radio, and drives exactly the speed limit, helped by the inevitable morning gridlock, back to his hotel in Palo Alto.

Flynn pulls in, steps out, and heads up to his room, which appears to be unmolested. He swipes in with his key card, goes to the safe, and spins in the combination, pulling out his Glock and stowing it back in his shoulder holster. He checked in here under a false name – John Thompkins – and paid in cash, but Rittenhouse knows something. Unless they were after Lucy for totally unrelated reasons last night, which is stretching coincidence but still possible. Still, Flynn doesn’t feel like taking chances. He unzips his suitcase, pulls out a pack of sterile wipes, and scrubs his fingerprints off everything he touched in the room, strips the sheets off the bed, and runs hot water over them in the shower. Housekeeping will think he’s just a nightmare guest. He is probably being paranoid.

Blanking of the room complete, Flynn goes down, checks out, and gets into the car again. Lucy has probably gone to the Safeway in Menlo Park, just a few minutes from campus, and after he fails to talk himself out of it, he heads in that direction. Turns into the shopping center parking lot, trawls up and down looking for a spot in the Saturday morning rush, and finally just manages to eke in between a giant Chevy Suburban on one side and a giant jacked-up pickup truck on the other. Fucking America. Everything has to be sprawling and enormous, arrogant and excess. Flynn works for it, and has dual citizenship thanks to his mother, but he’s spent too much time in the weeds and trenches of its imperial projects, seeing the grisly results of its policies and everything it spits out and leaves behind, to love it. He was born in former Yugoslavia in the seventies, his childhood was never what you would call luxurious, so perhaps there’s some ancestral Soviet premier inside him haranguing about the decadence of the West. Not that Flynn likes the fucking Russians any more, though he has family ancestry there too. Sired out of mortal enemies and belonging to neither. It makes a poignant kind of sense when you look at his life.

Flynn goes into the busy grocery store and gets a basket, buys a few essentials – if he is in for some sort of extended stay, he might as well provide for himself. He catches a glimpse of Lucy in the produce section, reassuring him that she has not yet been bundled off in an unmarked car, and makes sure she doesn’t see him. He hangs back until she’s bought her groceries and left the store, then pays for his and follows a few minutes later. Heads out, makes another stop at Target for a sleeping bag and air mattress, then drives back to campus and pulls in. Lucy’s car is there. He wonders if the rest of his life, or at least the foreseeable future, is going to be dedicated to checking off her whereabouts every five minutes.

Having locked the car and hoisted his bags, Flynn goes up to the residence hall, presses the buzzer to be admitted, and climbs the stairs to Lucy’s apartment. He knocks and so as not to startle her, calls, “Lucy, it’s me.”

After a pause, she opens the door and lets him in, somewhat surprised to see his purchases. Her eyebrows raise the most at the camping gear. “So you are staying?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not sleeping on that piece of shit couch again.” Flynn puts his bags down. “I could probably make do under a bridge, if I had to.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Lucy says. “I’m not making you sleep under a bridge.”

They glance at each other again, eyes lingering just that beat too long, and Lucy coughs and turns away quickly, as if to disguise the color of her cheeks. She allows Flynn to store his perishables in the fridge, his toiletries in the bathroom, and sets about her chores with an air of determined normality, scrubbing and sweeping and vacuuming. Flynn feels like a bum sitting there and doing nothing, so he pitches in. It’s pleasingly and absurdly domestic. His jacket clanks as he hangs it on the hook, and Lucy’s eyes flicker to it. “You… got your gun?”

“Yes.” Flynn double-checks the safety is on, which it is, because he’s not an idiot. Not that he thinks Lucy is going to go play with it, but it makes him feel marginally better. Trying to be comforting, if perhaps not altogether truthful, he adds, “I don’t think you’re in any danger, but better than leaving it in the hotel room, either way.”

Lucy continues to look at him. Anyone could imagine that she must still have a thousand questions about the whirlwind with which he enters her life periodically, this de facto cohabitation situation, or anything else. Finally she says, “Is Garcia Flynn your real name?”

Flynn supposes this is a warranted question given what he does for a living, some of which at least she must have guessed. “Yes.”

“And you work for the U.S. government, but you’re originally from…” Lucy tilts her head, trying to guess. “Serbia?”

“Close. Croatia. My mother was American, though.” Flynn is impressed; people usually think either Russia or Hungary, though the more geographically challenged have come up with anything from Spain to Sweden. He doesn’t look Scandinavian, but Americans are idiots. He could return the favor with some getting-to-know-you questions, but frankly, he’s already read most of the information in the public domain about her. Not because he’s a stalker (he isn’t, right?) but because this woman has no idea who she really is, and he’s starting to wonder if he’s going to have to be the one to tell her. He hopes not, but the world has tended not to care a whole hell of a lot about Garcia Flynn’s hopes.

Lucy takes that in with a brief little nod, then bends down to pull the kitchen trash out and tie it off, put in a new bag, and haul the old one to the door to be taken out. Seeing that the chores are mostly done, she wipes her hands on her jeans. “I should go to campus, at least for a few hours. I could probably finish the section.”

“On Saturday?” Flynn is no stranger to working ridiculous hours himself, but even he thinks Lucy could benefit from a chill pill. “Nothing else to do?”

Lucy gives him another look, as if she can’t see him letting her loose to wander blithely around farmer’s markets or seaside promenades or what have you, and also suggests he is woefully underestimating her present stress level (for which, admittedly, he has done no favors). “Weekends aren’t really a thing for me right now.”

“Are they ever?” Flynn, again, is not one to talk. “What’s this dissertation about, anyway?”

“History and anthropology of American political movements.” Lucy winds up the vacuum cord and shoves it back in the closet. “Studying their developments from circa 1776 to the present day. My argument is that the country’s political philosophy, and a lot of its more troubling elements – racism, slavery, economic inequality, sexism, isolationism, etc – are much less driven by common populist ‘ignorance’ than people think, but have been deliberately constructed by long-term and elite schools of thought that are very solidly in the mainstream. I mostly focus on the nineteenth century, when these narratives got established, but I work both forward and back as well. I swear, it feels like I’ve read every obscure state paper or moral essay that’s ever been printed.”

In someone else’s mouth, this might have sounded like a brag, but Lucy says it almost apologetically, as if she knows her interest and obsession is unusual and wants to reassure him that he doesn’t have to share it. Flynn, however, feels quite the opposite. There’s a certain amount of irony in the fact that Lucy Preston of all people is arguing for the conscious creation of America’s dark side – if only she knew how much, and if only she knew from (not only, but certainly more than their fair share) who. “So what?” Flynn asks. “What do you conclude from it? Do you point out all the ways in which this asshole world has screwed the vast majority of everyone who’s ever lived on it? Or just sit back and say that’s not your job?”

“It isn’t my job.” Lucy looks at him strangely. “I’m a historian, I have an obligation to create a fair and accurate reflection of the past, to de-mythologize a lot of stuff that gets conveniently glossed over or ignored, but I can’t change it. The present isn’t perfect, but it’s ours. For good or bad, this is what we’ve come to, and if I can teach people to recognize the processes that created it, we can be more proactive about what we do in the future.”

“Can we?” Flynn stares at her incredulously. Smart as she is, this seems, from his point of view, intolerably naïve. “So you’re one of the historians who thinks we have to ‘let the past speak for itself,’ as it were? The past doesn’t speak. Historians are its ventriloquists. Refrain from moral judgment in the name of some pseudoscientific objectivity, and actually think that we can teach people not to be selfish and greedy and interested only in their own enrichment? I’ve worked – well, where I do for over a decade now. I’ve seen how the world gets made. We’re scared animals making stupid choices. History is the name that’s given to our ancestors’ stupid choices once they’re far enough removed. We’re never going to remember them accurately or honestly. So if that’s all you want to do, Lucy, you’re doomed.”

Lucy’s eyes flash back at him. “What? I shouldn’t even try, because the world is terrible and God is dead? Just throw up our hands and go home and embrace the void?”

“I didn’t say that.” Flynn takes a step. “But there’s no moral impartiality in what you do. This ‘we should hear both sides’, or ‘we can’t judge’ or ‘parts of it are unfortunate, but we shouldn’t wish it was different’ – it’s bullshit. Bullshit. You’re giving it a meaning and a justification it doesn’t deserve. Just another privileged wealthy white girl sailing through on Mommy’s coattails, are you?”

This sounds even nastier out loud than it did in his head, and the instant it’s out, he wishes he hadn’t said it. Lucy goes ice-white, jerking back as if he slapped her, and he can tell it’s a sore spot. Still, much as he wants to apologize, he barrels on like a juggernaut. “Tell me. Who’s your favorite president, Lucy? Who do you think has done the most for this country?”

Lucy chews her lip. She’s clearly considering ordering him to get the hell out, and she’ll take her damn chances with Rittenhouse. Instead she spits, “Lincoln.”

“Predictable.” Flynn sneers. “He was shot, of course, yes? So if we were there, somehow, and he was alive, he was in front of you, and then I shot him – you wouldn’t care at all, would you? It was supposed to happen. You wouldn’t lift a finger.”

“Why would – ” Lucy throws her hands in the air. “Why would you shoot Lincoln?!”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? John Wilkes Booth did it. It could be him, if you want. He comes in, you’re there, you see it happening. You could change it. But apparently, you wouldn’t.”

“You asked about my dissertation!” Lucy shouts. “So I told you, and all of a sudden I’m getting a lecture on moral relativism? What am I supposed to do? I’m one twenty-something graduate student, and you come after me as if all the terrible things that have happened in history are my fault? I don’t agree with them, I don’t like that they happened, but I can’t change that they did! So yes, I try to make better sense of them, and explain how they work together, and hope that the next time can go a little better, despite all the awful stuff humanity has ever done. I’m sorry if that’s not nihilistic or cynical enough for you, but you were the one who told me to carry on with history, remember? What did you think it would be, picket lines and pipe bombs? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to the library.”

With that, she grabs her bag, keys, shoes, and sunglasses, throwing them on and storming past him to the door. Flynn is already feeling like a massive idiot by the time the door snaps shut behind her, and half-turns as if to follow and apologize, but his own pride has been stung and he doubts she wants to see him right now. Well, this is just wonderful. Finally return to the woman you’ve been thinking about for seven years, put her in danger, insult her intelligence and her morals, insinuate she’s a nepotistic freeloader, and make sure to remind her that her apartment is barely a step up from the Bates Motel. There may have been worse first impressions, but Flynn is having trouble coming up with any.

Muttering a curse under his breath, he kicks the doorstop, stubs his toe, figures he probably deserves that, and is just wondering if Lucy is expecting him to have cleared out by the time she gets back when, in his pocket, his phone buzzes. When he pulls it out, he sees to no surprise that it’s a restricted number, as are most of those that call him. He swipes to answer it and grunts, “Yes?”

“Morning to you too.” The voice on the other end belongs to a man known as Karl, but this is almost certainly not his real name. Flynn has never met him face to face, only over the phone, but Karl is his NSA handler, the shadowy source from whence Flynn’s assignments and transfers and periodic progress reports originate. The closest thing he has to a boss, in other words, and him calling out of the blue is never a good sign. “What the hell did you do last night?”

“I’m working on Cahill,” Flynn says shortly. “I’m fairly sure this doesn’t warrant a – ”

“Cahill? Benjamin Cahill? Jesus, Garcia. No. Drop that one, you hear me? Drop it.”

“Excuse me?” This puts Flynn’s hackles up. The NSA has always operated in, to put it charitably, a grey area of legality, and sometimes their targets deserve investigation and sometimes they don’t, but he can’t recall ever being ordered point-blank to close a case. There is obviously no organizational transparency, but things just go into the maw and stay milling around in there for months or years, to be pulled out again when Uncle Sam thinks they’re useful. Hell, the NSA has always thought that as much information as possible is better than too little, and Flynn definitely has a lot of nerve yelling at Lucy for compliance with the system, when this is what pays his bills. “Did you say drop it?”

“Yes. Cahill or anyone associated with him, you’re off rota.”

“Is he cleared now?” Flynn doubts it, given as he is (to the best of his knowledge) the only agent assigned to this, and he has barely started to tug at Cahill’s spiderwebs. “Or is this something else?”

“Garcia, I gave you a goddamn order. Drop the case. Destroy your phone and hard drive and anything else you have with information on it, then get a flight to LAX. Go to the Burberry store in the Tom Bradley International Terminal and ask for Winston. They’ll give you a briefcase, your new assignment will be in it. Is that clear?”

Flynn doesn’t answer. He should be welcoming this, perhaps, but every inch of him is resisting. “What new assignment?”

“I don’t think that’s important at this stage.”

“Why are you pulling the plug on Cahill?”

“Also not important.”

“I think it is.”

“Fine,” Karl says. “You wanna know? Because last night, whatever fucking idiotic thing you did lit up about a dozen Batsignals, and let’s just say, things started happening fast. Wherever you are, pal, you’re blown. I’m trying to save your ass. Get out of there.”

“If a little water on the anthill sets things in motion, that’s not bad, is it?” Flynn is not about to deny that he definitely did several fucking idiotic things last night, but the NSA does not usually react to interesting developments in its investigations by yanking its agents out of tender concern for their personal safety. Something is off about this. “It’s these Rittenhouse people, isn’t it? They’ve asked someone to make the heat die down. I didn’t know that the United States government was in the habit of taking those orders.”

In fact, Flynn knows perfectly well that the U.S. government will listen to anyone if enough money is involved, and he’s seen enough eye-popping figures to know that there are almost certainly more. If Lucy actually knew this – knew that Benjamin Cahill was her biological father, and there is an entire world that is being hidden from her – then maybe they would be getting somewhere. Not that Flynn has really done a bang-up job at presenting himself as a trusted confidante. “Who told you to do this?”

“Garcia, I’m not here to shoot shit. The briefcase will be in LAX in four hours. Text when you’ve gotten a flight.” With that, and leaving him no more time to get in a word in edgewise, Karl hangs up.

Flynn stares at the ceiling for a long moment. Then he says, “Fuck.”

Lucy has a harder time than she would like to admit getting focused enough to work. She’s opened her laptop and her notebook and taken down the books she was using yesterday, everything set up and ready to go, but she can’t type more than a few words before her concentration slips again and she finds herself reliving that stupid argument with Flynn. She is not a bad person. She’s not a bad historian. What did he expect her to do, embark on a single-handed crusade to miraculously correct all of humanity’s evil? She can’t do that, for obvious reasons. Yes, it sometimes seems trite and stupid to think that anything anyone does matters in the least, but Lucy has fought hard to hang onto the idea that it still does. She takes pride in teaching her students, in her own work, in what she is able to do. Flynn has no right to bomb back into her life and tell her she’s doing it wrong. No right.

It’s made even worse by the fact that while she was at the store earlier, she super-casually tossed the most discreet box of condoms she could find into her basket, then quickly grabbed several more toiletries she didn’t need so it didn’t look like it was the only extra thing she was buying. If she has been half-toying with the idea that there is something fated, destined, about his reappearance in her life, that romantic illusion has been swiftly disabused. He is dangerous, abrasive, elusive, obnoxious, and obsessive, and those are his good qualities. If she was going to keep him as a special memory, she shouldn’t have met him face to face.

After several minutes of staring at the screen have only made her more irritated, Lucy stands up with a huff and heads out of the library, down to the café, with her phone. She pulls it out and dials, then listens to it ring, waiting for it to be picked up. Then she says, “Hi, Mom.”

“Sweetie?” Carol Preston sounds surprised. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, fine. I just… I could use a little encouragement. This dissertation is kicking my ass, and – ” Lucy stops. It has actually occurred to her to ask if her mother has been lying to her for her whole life about her father. Just for a moment, and then it goes away. “I just feel like we haven’t talked very much lately.”

“You’ve been so busy, I haven’t wanted to bother you.” Carol pauses to cough. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to submit this semester?”

“Yeah. It’s really not that much left to do. I have to reference the last chapter, and finish it, and write a conclusion, but I can do it.” As ever when speaking to her mother, Lucy feels that she has to prove she’s doing enough work, she’s not slacking off, she really is trying her best. “Dr. Underwood thinks I’m on schedule, she’s going to be in touch with my exam date on Monday.”

“I just worry about you, Lucy.” Carol coughs again. “But if you’re sure…”

“Have you gotten that checked out yet?” Her mother has had a smoker’s hack for several years, but it seems to have gotten worse recently. “Mom, I keep telling you to go to the doctor, remember?”

“Lucy, now, don’t go fretting over me. I’m sure it’s just stress. Your sister really seems determined to stick to the sociology thing.” Amy Preston’s choice of major (and college – rather than following her mother and sister to Stanford, she’s part-timing at San Francisco State) has been a permanent source of contention with Carol. She insists that Amy will never get a job with a sociology degree, that it’s a soft option and not academically rigorous, and she just doesn’t understand where she went wrong with her. Why can’t she be more like Lucy? Lucy has had no problem being a good and dutiful Preston daughter.

“You know Amy is… Amy,” Lucy says, after a pause. No, if her mom has enough on her plate to boot, the last thing she’s going to do is add to it with Flynn’s ranting and raving. “My life isn’t really a lot to envy, and she’s always liked to do her own thing. Don’t be too hard on her, okay?”

Carol sighs. Then she says, “Is everything else all right?”

Lucy considers the answer to that question. There are a lot of things she could say to that. The one that comes out, of course, is, “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

Once she’s hung up, feeling shittier than ever for lying to her mom, she decides to grab some sustenance before heading up for another bash at her paper. She’s just collected her small latte and Boston cream donut when two men in ties and trench coats enter the café and glance around. This isn’t that unusual – Stanford is a professional workplace, after all, people come from all over the world and any number of backgrounds – but then they see Lucy. One of them strolls up to order a casual coffee, and the other drifts in her direction. “Miss Preston?”

Lucy goes tense. She can’t tell if it’s the same voice as whoever knocked on her door last night, claiming to be from FedEx, but she doesn’t like it. She offers a demure, close-mouthed smile. “I’m sorry, do we know each other?”

“Not personally. I apologize for the intrusion.” Without asking permission, Agent Smith seats himself across from her. “My name’s Jake Neville. Do you have a moment to talk?”

“What’s this about?”

“I’m from Homeland Security. We believe you may have recently encountered someone that could pose a public threat.” Neville reaches into his pocket. “Have you seen this man?”

Lucy has half-expected whose face will be on the photograph that is produced, but it still jolts her. “I – I’m sorry?”

“Garcia Flynn,” Neville says. “He’s worked for us for a while, but we have reason to believe he’s no longer listening to orders from high command, and may be increasingly turning rogue. He may also recently have approached you. This is a dangerous individual, Miss Preston, I very much need to emphasize that. Think Edward Snowden, but with extensive military training and a lone-wolf nature. If he’s slipped the leash, well…”

Jake Neville is, admittedly, not wrong, but Lucy’s hackles are up anyway. “So he works for Homeland Security?”

“Something in that area,” Neville says. “You understand the need for discretion.”

Lucy doesn’t answer. After their fight earlier, it’s certainly plenty tempting to turn Flynn over to whoever is looking for him – it doesn’t seem terribly surprising that he’s made enemies within his own department. She can’t even say what’s holding her back. But she smiles again and says, “I can’t help you. I haven’t seen him.”

Neville continues to eye her. Then he reaches into his pocket, takes out a plain white business card, and slides it across the table to her. “I’d be very interested to hear if you do.”

“What’s he supposed to have done, exactly?” God knows Flynn isn’t telling her, and Lucy isn’t above digging for a few answers, regardless of whether or not he wants to give them. Not that she’s expecting a real response, as it’ll probably be some mumbo-jumbo spook jargon. She smiles as guilelessly as possible. “Just so I know?”

“Don’t worry about that, Miss Preston.” Neville smiles patronizingly, in a way that makes her want to remind him she’s less than six months from being Dr. Preston. “Just call us. We’ll be around. All right then? We’ll see you soon.”

Lucy doesn’t know what else to say, and sits there like a lump as he gets up, rejoins his colleague in the coffee pickup area, and they roll out. The business card doesn’t have a name on it, just a number. She hesitates, then slides it into her pocket.

She scoffs down her latte and donut without tasting them, and is just about to venture once more into the breach when the library doors open again, and – she’s getting tired of this – a sleek, silver-haired man, also in a suit and cashmere scarf, walks in, looks around, and spots her. He smiles a square-toothed, white smile that probably made a cosmetic dentist in Monterey very rich and hurries over. Harassed final-year doctoral students are suddenly Stanford’s hottest commodity. “Lucy Preston?”

“Yes.” Lucy doesn’t offer her hand. “And you are?”

“My name is Benjamin Cahill.” He looks like the father in a stock photo, like a smiling middle-aged man in a prostate-medicine or erectile-dysfunction ad, explaining how Prozavaldiagra changed his life. He beckons to the black car that has just pulled up in the rotunda outside. “I was hoping we could talk.”

Wyatt Logan has now been standing an unsuspicious distance from the Burberry store in the Tom Bradley International Terminal for three goddamn hours, and something – call it his keen intuition from years of special forces training – is telling him that his target is not coming. Hell if he knows what’s going on. The brass has been even more close-mouthed than usual. Wyatt got a call this morning telling him to haul his ass up from Pendleton to LAX and be ready to capture a certain high-value mark. Said mark is dark-haired, male, about thirty-five years of age, tall, and speaks with an Eastern European accent. He is supposed to go into the Burberry store and get a briefcase, and then Wyatt is supposed to… arrest him without causing a scene and causing the terminal to go into lockdown, apparently. This is what you need Delta Force for. When he returned from Afghanistan, he didn’t think he was going to be busting small-time drug kingpins in LAX toilets. That’s gotta be what this guy is. Drugs, or illegal Russian cash, or something like that.

Wyatt shifts his weight. He has a bag and backpack, posing as a traveler whose flight has been delayed, but the departure boards are otherwise green and it’s going to look weird if he keeps hanging around. He’s made a few circuits so he’s not in the same place forever, but he doesn’t want to be out of sight of the store for more than a few minutes. He checks his phone and sees that Jessica has sent him a text of the perfect San Diego beach weather (which, to be fair, is most days of the year) that this last-minute assignment dragged him away from. They are still feeling out actually living together. They got married young like soldiers tend to do, and he’s been out of the country for most of it. This weekend was supposed to focus on reconnecting as a couple. Now he’s in frigging Los Angeles waiting for some dick who hasn’t even had the decency to turn up to be arrested, and it’s fair to say his patience is waning.

Just to be thorough, Wyatt waits another thirty minutes. One of the airport guys on golf carts drives past a few times; Wyatt hopes it is his imagination that he’s giving him the fish-eye. On the fourth round, though, it’s not. The hardworking employee of the American aviation system pulls over and says, “Can I help you, sir?”

“I’m… waiting for a buddy to get in. We were on separate flights, he was supposed to be coming from San Francisco, but I don’t know what’s going on with him. Sorry I’m holding this pillar up, but it’s cool.” Wyatt flashes a rueful smile and pulls out his military ID, which tends to work wonders. “We’re in the service.”

The employee hastens to thank him, apologize for the trouble, and motor away, which buys Wyatt another half-hour. At the end of it, however, he’s officially calling it a wash. He walks out toward the bus stop, pulls out his phone, and hits speed dial number three.

“Yeah,” Wyatt says, when it’s answered. “He didn’t show. Something’s up.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Logan.” The man’s from Homeland Security. Wyatt thinks his name is Neville. “We’ll be expediting our arrangements.”

[didanawisgi]

Naomi Wolf, author, political journalist and cofounder of DailyClout: ‘Trump didn’t do this. You did this. Your own inaction brought us exactly here’

The first 100 days of President Donald Trump: how has my life changed? First of all, there was the mourning period. Not for me, but for my fellow citizens. I was just mad. And I wasn’t even maddest at the Trump voters. I understood that the critical battle lines now are not left versus right, but the 1% neoliberal globalisers making off with all of the loot and disembowelling the middle class. So when I saw the campaign, I knew that in the US, just as in the UK, a candidate who said anything at all about people forgotten in the neoliberal race would have a solid chance.

No – I was mad at my own leftwing tribe. All of January, people on the left would confront me with dazed, grief-stricken expressions, as if they had just emerged from a multi-car pileup on a foggy highway. “How could this have happened? What will we do?” I couldn’t even bear to participate in those conversations. Finally I started explaining my rage to my closest friends.

I had been screaming about the possibility of this very moment for eight years, since I published a piece in the Guardian titled “Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps” and wrote a book based on it, called The End of America (2007). Under George Bush Jr, the left had been very receptive to the book’s message about how democracies are undermined by the classic tactics of would-be authoritarians.

But once Obama was elected – “one of ours” – I had to spend the next eight years yelling like a haunted Cassandra, to a room the left had abandoned. I had yelled myself hoarse for eight years under Obama about what it would mean for us to sit still while Obama sent drones in to take out US citizens in extrajudicial killings; what it would mean for us to sit still while he passed the 2012 National Defence Authorisation Act that let any president hold citizens for ever without charge or trial; what it would mean for us to sit still while he allowed NSA surveillance, allowed Guantánamo to stay open, and allowed hyped terrorism stories to hijack the constitution and turn the US into what finally even Robert F Kennedy Jr was calling a national security surveillance state.

For eight years, under Obama, my audiences were libertarian cowboys and red-state truckers; members of the military and police forces, who were appalled by what they were witnessing; and even conservatives, worried about our legacy of freedom. My usual audience, the shoppers at Whole Foods and drivers of hybrid cars, the educated left, my people, sat smugly at home while the very pillars of American democracy were being systematically chipped away. They were watching Downton Abbey and tending their heirloom tomato patches on weekends in the Hudson Valley, because everything was OK; yeah, he may OK drone strikes, but they can’t be that bad, since he was one of “ours” – a handsome, eloquent African American, a former community organiser – in the Oval Office. Seduced by the image of a charming black man on Air Force One who talked about “change” – a white woman in a pantsuit (though highly paid by Goldman Sachs) talking about “that highest, hardest glass ceiling” – the left slumbered while US democracy was undone brick by brick by brick.

So my feeling, the first inaugural month of 2017, as the left sat shiva, was: now you are worried? Now you want action? Now that the separation of powers is a joke and the constitution has collapsed around your ears, you point a finger at Trump and say, “Sudden Catastrophe?”

He didn’t do this. You did this.

Your own inaction and willingness to be seduced by two-bit identity politics labels, without actually doing the hard work of being patriots and defending the actual constitution – brought us exactly, exactly here.

I had sought for eight years to explain to my own people, to no avail, this: it is not that important who sits in the White House if the structures of democracy are strong. If the structures of democracy are strong – you can have a madman or madwoman for four years or even eight, and then he or she is gone, and the nation’s freedoms live.

But if you take an eight-year nap snoozing through a systematic dismantling of the structures of democracy – freedoms of speech; independence of the press; separation of powers; fourth amendment rights to privacy; and allow the suspension of due process under the guise of “fighting the war on terror” – hell yeah, some day you will wake up and there will be a crazy man or a strongman in the White House and then nothing you do or say will make a difference any more.

So yeah, Month One: I had nightly glasses of red wine to dull my rage at my own feeble delusional kind, and avoided the collective liberal “mourning conversation”.

There are still shocking days – missiles to Syria, gunboats to North Korea – but we stay focused

Month Two: February was the month of OMG! Or else, WTF! I was part of it too, as Pres Trump’s new-to-us-all methods of exploding Twitter bombs, engaging in scary political theatre, committing daily acts of apparent, um, economic treason, and doing it all at a bewilderingly fast pace, demanded a learning curve from us all. It was a sense of chaos, destabilisation. OMG! He issued a travel ban. OMG! People are held en masse at Newark – New York City taxi drivers are boycotting the airport because of the ban! OMG, Uber is profiting on picking up those rides! OMG, now we have to boycott Uber! WTF! He is rounding up immigrants! OMG – he is separating families at the border! WTF – did Kellyanne Conway just promote Ivanka Trump’s clothing line? Isn’t that illegal? WTF! Are Chinese influence-mongers really lining up at Mar-a-Lago to ingratiate themselves with the president’s son-in-law? WTF – stripping the EPA of any budget to keep the air and water clean? OMG – did he just say he doesn’t believe in global warming? There was a stream of statelier edits from Congress, as the nation’s “WTF?” reaction evolved into: can he really do that? Ben Cardin, the Democratic senator for Maryland, proposed a Senate resolution that Pres Trump obey the emoluments clause of the constitution, which forbids bribery (Trump had refused to put his holdings in a blind trust). States began to pass laws, such as those protection sanctuary cities, to fight back against measures that Trump was taking federally. My day-to-day life was spent at our tech company, DailyClout, training a group of young people to write about legislation, Congress and statehouses, and putting out news stories, blogs and opinion pieces following these developments. DailyClout is incubated in a cool space in Manhattan called Civic Hall, which is funded by Microsoft, Google and Omidyar Networks, where we are surrounded by others – mostly idealistic millennials – who are also building exciting new tools for new kinds of civic engagement.

Month Three: in March, we all began to see a massive grassroots “resistance”. I personally don’t like that term, because you use that term to fight a completed fascist takeover; it gives democracy’s opponents too much power; right now we have a battered democracy on life support that needs defending from those who wish to pull the plug.

March was the month that dozens of new entities devoted to mobilising citizen action emerged from the collective shock. There were so many forms of new organising and funding: online candidate training seminars to Knight Foundationgrants for new tools to get public and municipal records to people. Existing “civic tech” sites such as PopVox and Countable were joined in March by a slew of new tools and sites put together by this powerful wave of activism. Our collective missions got boosted with jet fuel by the huge burst in ordinary citizens wanting and needing to take action. New platforms ranged from 5 Calls – which came out of the experience of volunteers in the Clinton campaign and which sends you political action steps to take in five phone calls – to DailyAction, a similar service, which emerged out of Creative Majority, a Pac that supports Democratic candidates, and USAFacts, set up by Steve Ballmer, formerly of Microsoft, which compiles and crunches federal, state and local data from government sources. My own life mission didn’t reorient, since I had cofounded DailyClout’s platform in 2010. But use of our civic engagement tools skyrocketed. Our first product, called BillCam, lets you search a database of live state and federal bills, then pop a live bill into your blog or news articles; it lets you interact with the bills in real time and share them socially. We also created RSS feeds to stream live state and federal legislation right into the websites of local, regional and national news sites, and the websites of elected officials. In March we boosted our blog stream and videos covering new state and federal legislation, and started to report on what people could do locally to push forward their issues. Our sites on social media grew by triple and quadruple digits.

I presented these tools in March to news outlets and candidates and campaigns around the country – from Maine to Ohio to Oregon. I felt as if I was rediscovering my own nation, as the people in it were rediscovering belatedly how precious and fragile democracy was, and how much it depends on an informed citizenship. We were invited to demo it in a senate office; we visited Congress too, for our first exclusive interview, with Representative French Hill of Arkansas; I had never before been inside the Senate office building, or the Congress’s Longworth House Office Building. It was uplifting and moving to me. I also saw that elected officials worried about democracy, and wanting to empower real citizens, existed on both sides of the aisle.

We got our widget embedding live bills into news outlets totalling 160 million readers. In Q1 of 2017, 113,000 people searched BillCam to look at bills that would affect them – that they could now affect in turn. There are still shocking days – missiles to Syria, gunboats to North Korea – but we stay focused.

An amazing thing happened in March. The distinguished technologist George Polisner –who quit his senior-level role at Oracle in a public letter, covered widely in the US press, in which he demurred from Oracle’s CEO’s intention of “working with President Trump” – had started “ Civ.Works, a social platform, privacy protected so citizens can organise without fear of a corporate-buyout Big Brother. Polisner and DailyClout joined forces in March. We’re working to combine Civ.Works’ power of organising with the power of DailyClout’s streaming digital updates via RSS feeds, blogs and video, about local and federal legislation. No wonder I feel excited about the future.

Am I happy about the present? I feel incredibly energised, hopeful and certain that if enough citizens, in our democracy and worldwide, wake up (as they are) and are able to get hold of real tools to use democracy – and those best-case tools are now digital and link to social and digital media – we can indeed be in the midst of what another president called “a new birth of freedom”. Where I live, every day, on the frontlines of this digital revolution, there is every reason to feel in spired. That doesn’t mean I am “happy” about where the nation is – I am extremely scared, just as I am scared about the future of Europe in a parallel assault on its democracies.

But the biggest threat in the US or the UK isn’t one political party or candidate. It is people’s ignorance about their own democracies and their till-now lack of real-life tools to protect them. DailyClout UK and DailyClout EU are next on our list of planned launches: the UK legislative database is totally unsearchable, and the UK Parliament’s own website ends in dead links when you try to find actual legislation. The EU website tells you with difficulty what bills have passed but doesn’t show you what is coming up, when you might possibly take action – it offers a feed of pointless press releases instead. This lack of legislative transparency and usability had a lot to do, I believe, with the Brexit vote.

Months Four, Five and Six will see more and more of these tools – from dozens of T-shirt-clad bespectacled tech revolutionaries, coming online. Geeks are the new patriots, and code is the new “shot heard round the world”.

Naomi Wolf recently finished a PhD at the University of Oxford and is CEO of DailyClout.io

[berniesrevolution]

THE OUTLINE

Despatch is a small town in the Eastern Cape, South Africa’s poorest province. A friend’s mother grew up in there in the ‘60s, when the apartheid regime that fell in 1994 was at the height of its power. Organized black resistance had been crushed, the legal pillars enabling systemized black displacement and disenfranchisement stood firm. The ruling National Party, which implemented apartheid when it came to power in 1948, had widespread electoral support. At her whites-only, Afrikaans speaking school, my friend’s mother was given instructions about what to do if a black person happened to be walking towards her on the sidewalk. As a white child, she was taught that the sidewalk belonged to her. If the black adult walking towards her failed to grasp this, she was taught to look him in the eye to remind him of his place, and to keep staring at him until he stepped into the road to let her pass.

A month ago, the leader of the Freedom Front Plus party, Pieter Groenewald, visited Despatch. The “FF+,” as it is known, is a white Afrikaner nationalist party formed during the run-up to South Africa’s first democratic elections 27 years ago. It currently holds four seats in parliament, elected on a platform of opposition to affirmative action, advocacy for land reform benefiting white Afrikaners, and a commitment to self-determination and the protection of “minority rights.” For the FF+, the right to self-determination means the right to establish whites-only enclaves, places where people of other races may not live or work.

It was Groenewald’s first visit to Despatch. To cheers and applause, he told the crowd that it was long past time to set down the burden of white guilt, and that he refused to take responsibility for anything that had happened before apartheid fell: "Everywhere in the world, things happened that should not have happened. These feelings of guilt have to be shaken off now… I am a white man and I am not shy about my history."

Earlier this year, in a parliamentary debate over land reform, Groenewald warned that land expropriation would result in “a civil war.” In parliament, he was booed. His apocalyptic rhetoric presumably found a more sympathetic audience in Despatch. What would happen to white people, he asked, when South Africa was “nationalized”? He wasn’t suggesting that they move to Orania (a constitutionally protected whites-only town in the Northern Cape) — or not just yet. He urged them to consider it, though, and perhaps to go even further. They needed to start thinking about establishing a tenth province for self-governance.

The crowd, presumably, cheered some more, although it is difficult to know for sure, because the incident barely made the news. I saw two articles about it, neither of which gave any information about the size of the crowd, or the nature of the event, or what Groenewald was doing in Despatch in the first place. I only heard about it because a friend sent me a link with the subject line “FF+ are finally losing the plot.” In his tenure as party leader, Groenewald seems to have chiefly confined himself to resistance to land expropriation, and making accusations of “reverse racism.” The tenth province speech was something of a departure for him.

(Afrikaner girls dressed up in traditional clothing in Orania, a whites-only town in South Africa.)

It says something about South Africa and its past that a party leader openly speculating about moving to a whites-only enclave was hardly discussed in the country, except in a mocking manner. Laughter might seem like an inappropriate response, and it is, really, but the speech had its humorous aspects. Groenewald’s address outlined his notions of the utopia that awaited white people in the tenth province: no affirmative action, satellite dishes for everyone, and a 4x4 in every driveway. He reassured his audience that none of them would be driving around in ox wagons, as if to ward off the natural assumption that this might be the case. The idea of a lot of terrible racists believing that “not traveling in a covered wagon pulled by oxen” was the apex of modern living made me laugh for a few days, and then I forgot about it, as did most of the people I know.

These discussions about ethnic nationalism and white supremacy, at least of the kinds that the Richard Spencers and Milo Yiannopouloses have made their lifes’ work in America, are nothing new to South Africans. Apartheid, as a national policy, was rooted in the idea that whites were superior, that they had a God-ordained right to the land, and that “racial mixing” would result in disaster. It’s almost inconceivable that a view to the right of that could exist, but it did. Afrikaner extremists feared that the apartheid government was too liberal, and that the only way to protect the Afrikaner people from extinction was to establish an independent Boer Republic. They believed that the land belonged to them by right of blood, and were prepared to go to war to defend it.

(Eugene Terre'Blanche addressing AWB members on October 10, 2009 in Ventersdorp, South Africa.) 

Today, Afrikaner extremism is often viewed as nothing more than an absurd spectacle. For many people, the response to bellowed rhetoric about tenth provinces is something like Can you believe these fucking losers are still at it. It’s easy to dismiss them as a joke, because they have been largely sidelined. But that fate didn’t always seem as inevitable as it does now. Eugene Terre’blanche is the clearest example of this. Terre’blanche — whose last name literally means white earth — was the leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, or AWB, a white supremacist separatist organisation which, at the height of its prominence in the 1980s, claimed to have a membership of 70,000. Terre’blanche and six other Neo-Nazis founded the party in 1973 in response to what they perceived as the increasingly liberal policies of the apartheid government under B.J. Vorster who, as prime minister, passed the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, the final step in legislative machinations which stripped black South Africans of their citizenship and made them residents of one of the nominally independent apartheid reservations, or “homelands,” in the agriculturally poorest areas of the country.

(Continue Reading)

[fucking-hell-skarsgard]

Paradise - Chapter Eight

WARNING - This chapter does include SMUT and towards the end, there is mention of SUICIDE and SELF-HARM.

September 26th - Stockholm, Sweden

Bill POV

~~~~~~~~~~

After her meds, Eva didn’t even wake or flinch at the noise around her. The boys tried to be quiet, one of them would make a noise and the other two would shush whoever made the noise. Dad had snuck a picture of both of us. The last picture was of me frowning at the camera. About 40 minutes later Sam wandered into the living room.

“Dinner's nearly ready.” He whispered.

I stroked Eva's cheek to wake her up. She stirred and rubbed her eyes. “How long was I out?”

“About 30 minutes. Dinners ready.”

Between Sam and I we managed to get Eva standing. Once she had her balance, we made our way slowly to the kitchen with my arm around her waist for support.

Kolbjörn patted the chair next to him for Eva to sit. She sat between him and Lucas, I was the other side of Kolbjörn. Dinner was soon served and Eva giggled when she saw what was in her bowl. She had animal shaped pasta, tomato sauce and meatballs. The portion was about the same size as Kolbjörn’s dinner.

Megan winked at her across the table. “Sam said your meds can make you a bit funny. So I made something easy to eat.”

Eva smiled at Megan. “Mum makes this for me whenever I’m not well.”

We began eating. I hadn't seen Sam in a long time. We caught up on what had been happening. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lucas holding up his carrots to Eva who would blow on them, then he'd eat them with a giggle.

Dad noticed and caught my eye smiling. One by one we all watched Eva interacting with Lucas. It wasn't till she looked up that Eva noticed us all watching.

She frowned and looked at us, “What?”

We all burst out laughing. Sam stroked his son's head. “I've never seen him eat his vegetables that willingly.”

“Oh, should I have not done that?”

“No, you're fine. I might have to do it when he's being fussy.”

Dad wiped his eyes, “She's had enough practice with babies. Eva is now the baby master in this house.”

Sam smiled. “You will always be the baby master dad.”

Eva laughed. “It just comes with practice.”

Megan smiled at her, “14 is a lot of practice.”

Sam nearly choked on his water. “14 siblings?!”

“Yeah Dad’s Italian and was raised Catholic, Mum’s from Kiruna and she had a big family anyway.”

“But 14?”

“Yep 14, including three sets of twins, so mum’s had 11 pregnancies. Dad likes to joke that he’s magic. Mum just puts it down to the long, dark winter.”

Everyone laughed.

Eva went back to her pasta. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they had one more.”

Sam looked at his son's head. “If you don’t mind me asking how old is your mum?”

“She turned 47 in June.”

This time we all did stare at her. I couldn’t believe her mum was that young. I knew she wouldn’t be as old as dad seeing as she was the oldest sibling but that was crazy. Dad was 66 and mum had just turned 60 this year.

Dad lent his elbow on the table. “And your father?”

“He’s 51. They got married when mum was 18. I was born 3 months after she turned 19. Dad likes to joke he’s a sugar daddy, even though mum earns more than him.”

“I didn’t think they your parents were that young.”

“I suppose everyone had babies young in my family. Grandma’s only 67 and mormor is 89.”

Sam and I caught each other’s eye and burst out laughing. Eva had an inkling about what we were laughing about. Sanna and Megan got the joke soon after.

Eva looked at dad and beamed at him. “You are literally old enough to be my grandpa.”

We all laughed harder at the statement while dad sulked.

“Okay enough with the age talk. Let’s change the subject.”

Sanna turned to Eva. “So where were you born.”

Eva was feeding Lucas the rest of his vegetables. “England actually. The first four of us were born in Suffolk. At my Nana’s house. Dad was born there. We all have dual citizenship.”

“Wow. When did you come back?”

Eva counted on her fingers. “Beginning of ‘94 before my next brother was born. Dad got a transfer to Stockholm University. Plus mum refused to come back before, he finally managed to convince her.”

“Why didn’t she want to come back.”

Eva eyed the children. “Maybe a story for later. It’s not nice.”

Sanna nodded. We finished dinner, Eva tried to help clean up before Megan shooed her from the sink. Instead, Eva fed Ragnar his supper and let him run around the garden. I joined her and we both had a cheeky cigarette. I could tell Eva was high because she kept giggling at everything. I had to help Eva climb the stairs to use the bathroom. I sat on my bed looking at her stuff in my room. She wasn’t the type of girl where she conquered every inch of room. Everything was organised neatly alongside my things. This was something I could get used to. She came out of the bathroom and stumbled into the door frame. She came over and kissed me.

“Thank you.”

I frowned, “What for?”

“Everything. For being so amazing. You always take care of me.”

I smiled at her. God, she was high. “Well, you look after me when I'm sick.”

Eva snorted. “Yeah, that’s cause you’re a big baby when you’re sick.”

I laughed. “And there goes you being cute.”

She placed her hands on my shoulders, pushing me down onto the bed. She climbed onto of me and began kissing my neck.

“Woah girl. I’m not doing anything while you’re drugged.”

She leaned over me and pouted. “Fine. Spoilsport.”

She climbed off me and nearly fell back when she stood. I managed to wrap my arms around her waist. I lay a kiss on her stomach before standing. Ragnar who had been watching the whole time just gave me a look. If he could roll his eyes I'm sure he would of. I lead Eva downstairs, she followed behind me with her hands on my shoulders. Now I understood why she lived in apartments with lifts or houses with the master bedroom on the ground floor. We all sat in the lounge Lucas and Kolbjörn were either side of Eva, she was showing them pictures again on her Ipad. Ossian was finishing off his homework. Dad and Megan joined us soon after. I helped Eva join her iPad to the Tv, she was showing everyone photos of her home. I could see them falling in love with it. I was shocked by how beautiful it looked. When it was covered in snow it looked like something from a Christmas card.

“Eva that looks like heaven.” Sanna sighed.

“All of you are more than welcome to visit. There’s more than enough room for everyone.”

Dad laughed. “You’d need fifty rooms to get everyone in.”

Eva paused, you could see her mentally counting. “Well, technically there’s only five of the younger ones at home. My brother is staying because his wife just had another baby, so his three are staying. One of my twin sisters lives nearby. The rest are either at school, university or left the nest.”

“So when are you all together?” Megan asked.

“Christmas always, sometimes in one of the school holidays and if a baby has been born.”

Sanna turned to Sam. “It would be lovely but you don’t have much holiday left.”

Sam nodded. “Only the next two weeks.”

Eva shrugged. “Mum would be more than happy if I brought people home. She keeps telling me the house is too quiet.”

“Oh no, we couldn’t.”

Stellan motioned to them and pointed at the boys.

Megan stood. “Okay boys bath time.”

She took all three boys upstairs. I heard her whispered in dad’s ear.

“Fill me in later.”

Once the boys were out of earshot we all turned back to Eva.

“Would it be a problem?” Dad asked.

Eva giggled. “The house used to be a hotel so there’s more than enough rooms and space.”

Sanna looked at Sam. “It would be nice. Lucas hasn’t seen proper snow.”

“All it would take is one phone call to mum.”

A picture flicked up on the screen. It was the family portrait Eva had pinned on the kitchen board. It looked like the extended Weasley family. There were two people with blonde hair and one with black. There were staggering 27 people in the photo.

Sanna cooed. “Is that your family?”

Eva nodded. “That’s everyone. Mum, dad, all my siblings, partners and nieces and nephews.”

Sam let out a whistle. “Holy hell. I didn’t realise you were all ginger.”

Eva smirked. “Yeah, the ginger is strong in this one.”

Dad finished the wine in his glass. “Okay, I have an idea. We’ll wait till everyone gets here then we’ll see who wants to go. Hows that?”

We all nodded in agreement. Even if no one wanted to go, I’d follow her home. We chatted about a few different things until Megan came back downstairs with all three boys, now dressed in pyjamas. With their son now clean and ready for bed Sam and Sanna took Lucas home, with a promise of checking up on my tomorrow. Megan put the boys to bed and we were now lounging around the living room again. Stellan had caught Megan up on our plan and was more than happy with it. She said she’d do some secret packing tomorrow.

I could Eva get heavy on my shoulder. Dad tried not to laugh. She had started to doze off. I gently squeezed her hand to wake her up. She opened her eyes, they were glassy and unfocused.

“Let’s get you to bed.”

She just nodded. I helped her stand and climb the stairs. Ragnar followed the black pouch hanging from his mouth by the strap. Eva sat on her bed and I helped her get changed into an overly large t-shirt and tiny shorts. Placing her into bed before stripping and climbing in myself. I turned the TV on and found something for me to watch. Ragnar lay on his own bed that Eva placed in front of my dresser, he happily chewed a bone knowing that I would take care of her.

“Ragnar just needs letting out later.”

I kissed the top of her head. “I know, I have looked after him before. Just rest, I’ll wake you later for your meds.”

She got herself comfortable and fell asleep quickly. I tried not to nod off for the next hour. Before waking Eva for her meds I took Ragnar downstairs. Dad and Megan were cuddling on the sofa.

“Is she alright?” Megan asked.

“Yeah, she's asleep. I'm just going to give her some more when I go back up.”

“Will you be okay?”

I nodded before venturing into the kitchen. I let Ragnar out and stole one of Eva's cigarettes while I was out in the garden. On my way back in a grabbed a glass of water for Eva. Upstairs I gently woke Eva, she didn't seem as spaced out as before.

She sat up. “What time is it?”

“Nearly 10.”

“Can I pee?”

I helped her out of bed and she limped to the bathroom Ragnar happily followed her. I got the black pouch out of her bag and laid it on my bed. It was full of medical equipment, I only recognised some of it. I heard the toilet flush and the bathroom door open.

Eva stood beside me, looking at the pouch. “It's a lot isn't it.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay, what should I do?”

With my help, Eva laid on the bed and talked me through every single step. It wasn't as complicated as I thought. The only things I had to worry about was flushing the line, making sure I had the correct dosage and make sure there was no air in the syringes. Once we were done I put the rubbish in the bin and the pouch on the bedside table just in case we needed it in the night. As per Eva's instruction, I filled out her tiny record book. Eva was leaning against the headboard letting the drugs relax her body.

“Feeling okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Thanks for being my nurse. Was Ragnar alright?”

“I like being your sexy nurse. Yeah, he's in his bed now.”

We settled down into bed again. Eva resting on my chest.

“Eva…”

She hummed in response.

“I promise I'll do anything I can to help you. I'll learn whatever I need too.”

She let out a happy sigh. “I love you.”

I kissed the top of her head. “And I love you.”

~~~~~~~~~~

The next morning I woke to the noise of someone being sick. The bathroom door was shut but the light shone through the gap at the bottom. The bed was empty beside and Ragnar wasn't on his cushion. I checked the time, it was a little after 8. I got out of bed and grabbed the black pouch. I gently knocked on the bathroom door

I heard Eva groan. “I'm fine.”

I was about to open the door when I heard scratching and it swung from my grip. Ragnar's nose peeped round the door and opened it further. In the bathroom, Eva was propped against the wall by the toilet.

She glared at Ragnar. “Traitor.”

I grabbed a washcloth and wet it. Handing it to her so she could clean her face.

“I really don't want you seeing me like this.”

I grabbed a hair tie out of her washbag by the sink. I tried my best to pull her hair into a ponytail.

“How many times have you looked after me.”

She half smiled. “Too many times.”

Suddenly she grabbed the toilet and was sick again. I rubbed gentle circles on her back. Once she was finished I flushed the toilet and grabbed the black pouch. She leaned back against the wall with her hand resting on my knee. I carefully measured out the right amount of medication and gave it to Eva.

“Thanks.”

“How long should it take.”

“Minutes.”

“Okay.”

I rinsed the cloth and gave it back to her.

“I'll go get you some water.”

She just nodded wiping her face with the cool cloth. I went downstairs dad and Megan were sat at the table talking, Kolbjörn was sat on dad's lap colouring. They looked up when I entered the kitchen.

“Morning. Everything alright?”

I filled a small glass with water. “Eva's been sick.”

“Is she okay?”

I nodded. “I just give her some of her meds.”

Megan nodded and stood. “I'll make her tea.”

“I'll think she had some of her tea bags in her case.”

Megan smiled. “I brought her some when we went shopping last.”

Dad looked up from the newspaper. “I remembered from London. It's not every day you forget about someone who carries their own peppermint tea bags.”

I smiled. It was a little thing but it meant a lot to both of us. I was glad they liked Eva. “Thank you.”

I took the water back upstairs. Eva had managed to stand and was now sat on my bed, Ragnar at her feet. I handed her the glass.

“Thanks.” She slowly sipped the water. “I won't have coffee, I'll take my tea bags down.”

I sat beside her. “Megan got you some.”

“She did?”

I nodded. “What do you want to do today?”

She sighed. “I want to go outside. I’d like to get some things in town.”

“Okay. We can take Ragnar to one of the parks “

“That sounds nice.”

“Shall we go downstairs?”

She nodded. I helped her slip my hoodie over her head. She grabbed a bag of Ragnar’s food before shuffling downstairs. Kolbjörn helped Eva feed Ragnar before sitting next to her at the table. Megan presented her with a mug of peppermint tea.

“Thank you.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I'm okay now thanks. The meds have kicked in.”

“So what are you doing today?”

I made myself a cup of coffee sitting the other side of Kolbjörn.

“Eva wants to go out, do shop shopping then let Ragnar have some play time. So we were thinking of one of the parks.”

Kolbjörn squealed. “Can I come.”

Eva smiled at him. “It's up to mummy bud.”

He looked at Megan.

“Only if you can be a good boy.”

“Yes, I promise.”

“As long as Bill and Eva don’t mind. You must listen to them.”

I ruffled his hair. “It’s been awhile since I spent time with you.”

“Thank you. I'll pack you a picnic. You can use my car it already has his car seat in it. And the chairs are covered so Ragnar can go in.”

Eva smiled “Thank you, Megan.”

Eva had managed to drink most of her tea. Megan made toast for everyone, making sure Eva ate something. After breakfast we went upstairs to get dressed, Eva packed her handbag and a backpack with her medication, equipment for Ragnar and a few toys. I was coming out of the bathroom after shaving when I saw Eva bent over the bed in just a tiny pair of panties and a sports bra. My heart fluttered in my chest and I felt myself grow hard. I crept up behind her and ground myself into her pert derriere. I saw her claw onto the bed sheets.

~~~~~~~~~~

Eva POV

Feeling Bill's hard length being pressed into me made me realise that I was still horny from when I tried it on with Bill yesterday.

I shook my head. “Bill we shouldn’t.”

“You shouldn’t bend over in just your underwear.” he ran his hands down my back.

I turned to face him, pressing myself against him. Letting my hand slid down his chest into his unzipped jeans. “You are insatiable. Turn the shower on and you have to make it quick.”

Bill almost ran to the bathroom, trying to undress on his way. I slipped my underwear down my legs. Bill came back in just his boxers. He laid me down on his bed and pushed my legs apart so I was laying spread eagled at the edge. He began to kiss down my legs towards my core. He slipped my good leg over his broad shoulders. A small nip on my thigh made me clench and I tried not to make any noise.

He lapped up my wetness and swirled his tongue around my sensitive clit. He slipped two fingers in, I had to bite my hand to stop me from crying out. Bill knew every little trick to help me get off. He began curling his fingers inside me and quickening his pace on my button. He pulled away and looked up at me. His pupils were blown and his mouth sparkled with my wetness.

“Take it off and let me see you.”

I quickly pulled my sports bra over my head. My pierced nipples hardened against the cool air. Bill dove back down between my legs and carried on where he left off. It wasn't long till I could feel myself tightening around his fingers.

“Please don't stop. I'm so close.”

I could feel him smirk against me. I dug my heel into his back pushing him closer. My hips bucked and he put an arm across pinning me down. My hands dug into the sheets and I had to bite my lips as the tidal wave crashed over me. Bill didn't stop as my walls clenched around his fingers. In the end, I pushed him off with my foot. I lay on the bed panting trying to catch my breath. Bill stood in front of me and I watched him as he licked his fingers clean.

“Du smakar så bra.” {You taste so good.}

“Jag vill att du ska knulla mig.” {I want you to fuck me.}

He smirked, eyes darkening. He almost looked like Roman for a split second. “Oh, darling. I intend to.”

He helped me stand on shaking legs. He bent me over the footboard giving me something to hang onto. I heard his boxers hit the floor. He slid into me in one slow thrust, letting me get used to his size. Even after all the years, we’d been sleeping together the feel of him inside me still made my toes curl. I tried my hardest to keep quiet as Bill thrust into me. He grabbed one of my hands placing it between my legs. I knew he wanted me to come again. It didn’t take long till I felt the band tightening in my stomach. Bills thrusts became more erratic as he got closer. His fingers wrapped themselves through my hair. A sharp tug was enough to push me over the edge with Bill seconds behind me. He didn’t pull out right away, staying inside me to catch his breath. He traced his fingers down my spine making me shiver. He hissed as I clenched around him. He pulled out and turned me to face him.

“I love you.”

I pulled him closer and placed a kiss on his lips. “I love you too.”

I limped into the bathroom trying my hardest not to let his seed spill down my legs. I heard him snicker behind me, I flipped him the bird and shut the door. I turned the shower off and tried to clean myself up as best I could. Two minutes later there was a knock at the door. I opened it and Bill was stood the other side with my underwear.

“Thanks.” I pecked his cheek as we swapped round.

When Bill was in the bathroom I got dressed as quickly as I could. I nearly tripped trying to pull my jeans on. I sat on Bill’s bed when he came out the bathroom.

“You look sexy.”

I snorted. “I’m wearing jeans”

He stood in front of me in just his boxers. “I love it when you dress up, I can’t keep my hands off you. But even in jeans and a hoodie I still think you're sexy.”

I stood and kissed him. “Thank you. Now please get dressed so I don’t attack you.”

I grabbed my bags and Ragnar’s harness before I made my way downstairs. Stellan was helping his son tie his shoelaces while Megan was making sure he had some things to do in his tiny backpack. Ragnar stood when he saw his harness and wagged his tail. The harness meant he was going outside which was one of his favourite things to do.

Megan looked up. “Ready?”

I nodded. Bill came down the stairs behind me and picked up the keys.

“What time do we need to be back by?”

Stellan stood. “Alex should be the first home. About 3.”

Bill picked up our bags and Ragnar’s lead while I held onto Kols hand. I buckled him into his car seat while Bill secured Ragnar. Kol was happy to have a back seat companion.

Bill turned to me. “Ready?”

I nodded securing my seat belt. “Let’s just pray you’ve gotten better since last time.”

“Hey!”

~~~~~~~~~~

We parked the car in town and walked around the shops. Kol held onto both our hands while carrying his tiny backpack. After buying some things for my baby sister I left the boys in the ice cream shop. After countless times telling Bill I would be fine, I went on the hunt for a certain shop. After buying Megan and Stellan a present. I returned to the boys. Bill had just brought us coffees to go after Kol had finished his ice cream. We moved the car closer to the park and ventured in to find the playground.

It was quieter here and Kol walked just in front of us. Bill and I had agreed we wouldn’t kiss or hold hands around him so he didn’t get confused. We sat on a bench with the basket watching Kol run around and climb the frames. Being a school day there weren't many children around, so it was easy to keep an eye on him. Ragnar was happily laid on his side in the sunshine. Bill and I talked about what the two of us were going to do about telling people, or what happened if we got photographed together. After half an hour Kol came back complaining he was hungry. We found ourselves a nice secluded spot far away from the populated areas. Bill lay down a large blanket that had been in the car. We dug into the picnic Megan had packed for us.

After lunch, Kol sat in my lap while I read one of his books to him. I could feel him grow heavy so I lay him down covering him with my hoodie. Ragnar moved to lay beside him. Seeing as Kol was asleep Bill snuck closer to me. I laid flat on the blanket looking up at the sky, while Bill laid facing me tracing my tattoos with his fingertips. He started on my bicep and moved down towards my wrist. He froze when he felt the slightly raised scar running down the inside of my forearm. He sat up pulling my arm towards him to get a closer look.

“Eva...”

I pulled my arm away from him. Slightly ashamed that he had finally noticed after four years. I had the scars on both arms. After they had healed I had covered them both up with two Mandala pieces. The detailed patterns helped hide the raised lines.

“Yes, they are what you’re thinking. And it was a long time ago.” I sat to face him.

I held out both arms for him to see. He traced the lines on both arms and studied them in intently.

“Why haven’t I noticed them before?”

“Well the tattoos help hide them, they’re old too so that helps. The surgeon tried to make the scar as flat as possible.”

“When?”

“About a week after my 21st birthday.”

“Why?”

“I was fed up of being in pain, it was nearly two years after the accident, the healing time was a year to 18 months. I should have been better but I was still in tremendous pain. I just had enough. I used a razor, mum found me in the bathtub. 102 stitches later, I spent 4 days in the hospital, before I came home mum made me promised I'd never do anything like that again.”

“Oh Eva.” he pulled me close.

I rested my head in the crook of his neck.

“That’s why I didn’t want to be on the set when you were filming the season 1 finale. After seeing you like that I was sick. I finally realised what my mum had seen. I called her and cried down the phone apologizing.”

He cupped my face between his hands, he had tears in his eyes. “Just promise me you won’t ever leave me.”

I smiled resting my forehead on his. “I promise Bill.”

Swedish Translations

Mormor - Grandmother.