#the host of my system can tell you exactly what chapter any given event or quote in gutters is without even looking it up. what the fuck

[hws-lceland]

5, 25, 22, 36, 14 for Iceland? ^^

Okay so first, completely unrelated to the questions, I absolutely love your artstyle.

Anyways

5. Opinions on how accurately your country is depicted?

- I'm American and honestly Alfred is pretty damn spot on. Very loud and outgoing, thinks the world revolves around him, but generally friendly. I think he'd fit right at home somewhere in the Midwest. Of course, the US is so large and varied one character can't represent all of it (of course I'm sure this applies to other countries too), like if I saw Alfred in the Pacific Northwest I'd probably assume he was a tourist and while I haven't been to the east coast I don't know how well he'd fit there either. I do wish he wasn't another blonde hair blue eyed white guy, but I have that complaint about a lot of characters.

25. Share your best sandwich recipe

- I'm an autistic picky eater and eat like 3 things. But. Pizza. But make it a sub.

22. Top favorite fanfiction(s)

Well. I. Uh. Um. Well. Ahahahaha. Maybe this is predictable but read this one in 2014 and it changed our brain chemistry.

36. if you had the time/desire what Hetalia event would you host?

- I. Would love to do a Nyotalia zine. The ladies need more love. I wish I had the time and energy to organize something like that. Otherwise maybe like, a rarepair week.

14. Assign Iceland a traveling outfit

- That would definitely depend on where he's traveling but all I can think of is that panel where he's hanging out with the SE Asian countries and is still dying of heat despite wearing his thinnest shirt.

[give-grian-rights]

Bets Against The Void (Whitelist AU)

Well.. I DID IT. This is only chapter 1. I planned on this being a one-shot, but if it was, it would take me so long to finish it. So, chapters it is.

This is crossposted on AO3. I don’t exactly stand with a lot of what it’s doing, but it’s not particularly easy to find fics on Tumblr I feel..and I will never go back to Wattpad. Not again.

@petrichormeraki Whitelist AU fic :)

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

They had just left the server to practice for MCC, that was all. Wilbur would be so proud, the two youngest would be sure, if they managed to win one. For Tommy, it would be his first win not aided by his  (Troubled, distrustful, anarchist-)  family, and Tubbo’s first-ever. 

Teams for the next MCC had yet to be announced, but it hadn’t mattered. Tommy had been invited back to every competition since MCC 2, after all- and the competition had already become accommodating to Tubbo, following the..Circumstances, of The Festival. 

The admins hosting the event were concerned, following the events they’d hear of about their server. They hadn’t known much; no one outside their world, really did. But, well..When asked about the status of Wilbur, and if he’d attend- the silence and reaction of the residents of his world were telling.

Barely a handful of players were at the server, practicing. It was calming, for the teenagers. The two had primarily stuck together, as they tended to do after the Pogtopia-Manburg war. The siblings were back together again. And they had each other- they trusted each other, unquestionably. Something more than they could say about anyone else.

By the time they made it back to the world hub, they were already exhausted. The timezone of their server would be late, they were sure. Their arms ached, and legs wobbled with every step. They both felt as if they could fall down, anytime.

Tubbo’s arm was looped around Tommy’s, content to be in the presence of his best friend, without the responsibility of the world on either of their shoulders’. Other players had barely batted an eye at the two- it wasn’t uncommon for teenagers or children to server hop by themselves. Nor for someone passing through a world hub to have outlandish and otherworldly scars. For them to both be teenagers, and scarred so heavily- well, that was a different story.

Still, not a soul stopped them as the tall blond led his friend to a nearby empty portal. As they stood still, Tubbo instinctively released his arm from the boy. Tommy kept Tubbo grounded to him as he worked, talking idly to them and inquiring about build plans. As Tubbo talked, Tommy quickly fidgeted with his communication tablet.

The thin, hovering device was pressed against the large obsidian frame of an otherwise normal, unlit portal.  Pressing out of his inventory, which by mandatory was empty, Tommy opened his server list. The individually named servers popped up. 

Some servers were empty, others grayed out and unavailable, no longer tended to. Muscle memory brought him to Dream SMP.  The status of the server was buffering- it’s availability of connection unclear. It wasn’t unusual- not for world hubs filled with tens of thousands of players at any given time.

With their SMP selected, the portal flickered for a moment- sparks of neon green rippling within, before quickly fading. The whooshes and crackling of a portal being lit, before failing, caught Tubbo’s ears.

“Uh...Is- is the portal good? Did it light? Why does it feel like it’s uh- not?” They tilted his head to the side, towards Tommy. The blond paused for a moment, blinking in bewilderment with his brows furrowed. “No- no it’s not lit..Uh.. What the shit? Hold on, Tubbo-” he huffed, pulling his tablet off the obsidian wall with ease to inspect it.

Blue eyes squinted at the screen. At the edge of the selection for Dream SMP, was an error sign, much to Tommy’s slight horror. “Fucking..Shit-” he hissed, pressing the icon. “‘Server closed for maintence’- what the fuck!” The teen spat. That got a few heads turned him, at his shouts. Most continued walking, merely giving him a wary glance.

Tubbo’s mouth dropped, scrambling for words. “Wh- why? I- I mean, I guess it makes sense- the- the server’s been acting up, and stuff- but- with what noticed?” He squawked, fumbling with their own device. Gliding their hand over the graphics, each thing he touched was read aloud to him quietly in his comm systems.

While Tubbo worked on locating his own messages, Tommy already found his. He scoffed indignantly, his hand clenching at the frame of the tablet. “The chat system for the server’s down too! Holy shit, fucking- what? Were no one fucking prepared for if we all get knocked out of the server at once? What the fuck!” Slight panic edged into his angered words as he shouted.

“Guess not,” Tubbo shrugged, pushing his tablet away, already frustrated with it. “Did Dream send out any sort of alert, for this?” Tommy only scoffed. The brunnett was sure he was rolling his eyes, as well. “Yeah, with a three-minute fuckin’ notice!  Just told everyone to figure it out for themselves, while he fixed shit! What a lil bitch!”

Glares were most certainly being sent towards them by now, Tubbo was sure. Gently pressing himself against the visibly upset and angered boy, he looped their arms back together, reassuringly squeezing his hand.. “We should get out of the way. I’m sure other people are waiting, there’s nothing we can do.” The brunett resigned himself to being the level-headed one between them.

“We can’t just fucking stay here, Tubbo! We ain’t got shit to eat, or anything. It’s not exactly like we thought of packing shit for a few hours of practicing!” The boy protested. He had just gotten L’manburg back, finally, a place he and his Tubbo were okay.

After a moment of silence, Tubbo would speak up once more. “I started installing some more, uh..Hack clients-” “TUBBO WHAT THE SHIT!” “Please, I’d really like to not get in major trouble today.” They’d wince, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. The feeling of stares lingered on his back.

“I got a client that should let me into the world last opened on a portal- which, in this case, should be Dream’s server. So we can get on there and- “Call Dream a dick.”

“Exactly. I wouldn’t think it’s dangerous, or unstable or anything to be there..I’m sure he and the rest of Dream Team are there.”

Walking back to the portal, guiding Tubbo back with him, Tommy unattached his own device from the frame. “Uh, want me to put yours on the portal? Or do you got it, Big Man?” The blond tilted his head towards the other boy expectantly.

Dipping their head in thought for a moment, Tubbo hummed. “You can do it. It’s all set up- besides I already turned my text-to-speech off, I was getting a headache from the voice.”  They decided, handing off his tablet to Tommy.

Within moments, Tommy had gotten it set up. Rather than having an individual server selected, the “Connect” button had been highlighted as seen as he reached his friend’s serverlist. 

A flurry of colors splashed within the portal, before settling on a distorting purple. Tommy squinted, glancing towards Tubbo. “That..Does not look like Dream’s server color.” Tubbo tilted his head curiously. “Well.. The site did say it could do that- It’s kinda just ripping the IP and plugging it in illigitmently- it’s incapable of displaying the correct resource, basically.” He played with his friend’s sleeve idly.

“..Fucking- alright, sure. Assuming this is safe- are you ready to hop in?” He pushed down any doubts. Really, nothing worse than what the two already lived through could happen. Tubbo grinned, nodding their head. And so, Tommy led the boy into the portal alongside him. Swirling particles filled his vision, as they flurried around the two- and then they were stumbling to the ground.

Tommy’s eyes shot opened- a dull, thudding pain in the back of his head, as he got his footing. Tubbo was doing the same, losing his hold on Tommy to lean against the portal frame to catch himself.  “...Well. Fuck.” Tommy hissed, rubbing his temple as he looked around the room.

The large portal behind them had dropped them into a large, pyramid-shaped room. The floor below them was sandy, greenery and bookshelves pressed against the walls. Tommy’s mouth dropped to the floor as he viewed ahead of him.

“W-What the fuck! What the shit these people- th-there’s just! Diamond armor!  On display - t-they have fucking elytras!  Holy fucking shit! ” He stammered out the words, his brows furrowed together in complete bewilderment.

“What? That’s insane!..This- this sounds like an ocean? Why can I hear water? Are we on an island?” Tubbo warily stepped, testing his footing.

Tommy instinctively reached back to grab his friend’s hand protectively, nodding vigorously. “I think we’re fuckin’ underwater, or some shit! There’s a water column, and- and the walls fuckin’ tilt, and then it’s all water and shit! The ceiling is just the ocean!”

..Descriptions never seemed to be Tommy’s strong suit. Nonetheless, Tubbo nodded along to the words, warily listening. All that could be heard was the crashing water overhead the water-bound structure. The boy shivered with unease at this.

“Are there any players? Did- did us joining get sent through the comm system, do you think?” Tubbo summoned his comm’s back to his hands, but Tommy must’ve already had his out. “Fuckin- i’m still connected to Dream’s. It didn’t give me the option to look at whoever the fuck’s this is. Tommy growled, uneasiness and anxiety gnawing at him.

 And then, there was a flash of light and particles. A man in a..Bee-themed, space/futuristic-Esque suit appears on the other side of the room. Another, far more mundane seeming man, manifested next to him.

The energy in the room shifted to something unfamiliar to the two teens. Tubbo shivered, desperately grasping tighter at Tommy. The blond boy had stood rigid, blue eyes cold and wary as he stared challengingly at the two strangers.

While the helmeted, bee-colored man visibly had plates of enchanted Netherite glittering on him, the human beside him was bare of any protection, defenses, or armor.   The teen didn’t know what to make of either of them.

Pacifyingly holding up a weaponless hand, the helmet man cleared his throat. “We weren’t particularly expecting visitors, or any surprise drop-ins this late to our season.” Their voice wasn’t accusatory, but it certainly edged on the skeptical side

From the yellow-tinted helmet, Tommy could barely make out a faint reflection of light in purple eyes. His throat felt full of vile, the blond boy practically growling as he held he pushed himself in front of Tubbo.

In retaliation, Tubbo gently shouldered the boy before poking out beside him, facing vaguely towards the man who spoke. “I’m sorry for him- this..This is an accident, uh, Sir.” They chuckled anxiously.

The helmeted man- who by now, Tommy had presumed was the admin- tilted his head. “While accidents aren’t necessarily uncommon on a server such as ours- one quite like this, so far into our progress certainly is.” The Southern fellow beside the bee-helmet man spoke up, his expression passive and at ease as he stared over the boys.

“You two don’t look like you’re here to give us issues- don’t you agree, X?” The helme-  X,  apparently- surveyed the two teenagers for a moment more, before nodding. “Good, then.” The human(?) smiled, dipping his head.

Tommy scoffed, glaring at the man.  “Where the fuck are we?” The blond’s eyes flickered between the two adults stood opposite of them. While the man remained unphased, glancing expectantly at X- said player took a step back, tilting their head.

“Well, considering there’s not really a way to  accidentally derp your way into here- I’d expect you’d know.” While X wasn’t unkind, his tone was expectant. Accusatory, maybe. 

Before Tommy could open his mouth to blabber and cover their asses, Tubbo put his arm out in front of the other. “It really was an..An accident- it wasn’t this server we were trying to get into- wherever we are.” He’d chuckle uneasily, shifting their weight. They weren’t sure what to make of their unknown surroundings.

“Our home-server seems to be down.. And- no one told us where to go,  so I said i knew a way we might be able to go back, and uh..It got us here.”  They’d finish, anxiety spiking as he was unable to gauge their reaction.

“Yeah- and we’re not gonna fuckin’ do shit. We don’t even know where the fuck we are. Just- leave us be!  Or send us back, or some shit-” “Alright, alright! Hey, we’re not fighting with you!” X would cut off Tommy, who’s blue eyes shot a cold glare to the slightly frazzled man.

The younger Brit couldn’t help but get amusement from the way the masked man was so visibly startled from his swears. “You two..Don’t particularly look in the condition to just.. stay in the World Hub. Do you have someplace else to go? How long have you been locked out?” 

Beside the apparent Admin, who had not-so-subtly manifested a transparent screen in front of him, the human looked in exasperated amusement at the helmeted fellow. “Forgetting something there, Shashwammy?” The Southern man spoke with fondness.

Before the admin could react, the man turned back towards the accidental intruders. “You’re in the wonderful world of hermits and crafting, my friends! Hermitcraft Seven, to be specific. I’m Joe, of the Hills variety- and this is my pal, Xisumavoid! Though he’ll likely go by just about anything you can think to call him.”

Tommy looked beside him at Tubbo for a moment, his brows pinched together as he quietly scoffed. This is gonna get really tiring if he talks like this all the time. The blond thought absentmindedly.

In the meantime, Tubbo himself was speechless- positively bursting at the seams. “Hermitcraft?! This is Hermitcraft? Oh, oh void I just broke into Hermitcraft-” They babbled for a moment, jittering as he attempted to compose himself. Tommy raised a brow, eyeing them. 

“You say that as if that means fuckin’ anything to me, Tubbo-”

“I. I’m so sorry, uh, Mr. Hills, Mr. Void!” Their voice cracked, as the words ran out of his mouth. “I swear this isn’t something we do on the regular, I’d never want to disrespect anyone, or any server- especially not Hermitcraft!” He’d continue, laughing anxiously. 

“I’m a huge fan of the work done here! Just, everything I’ve seen- uh, and, and heard, about the Hermits! Fu- frick. Uh. Sorry!”  Tubbo finished, practically panting. 

While Joe had seemed appreciative and amused, Tommy couldn’t get a read on Xisuma. Not that he particularly cared what either of them felt; he barely understood the meaning of the words from Tubbo, all that mattered was they weren’t about to belittle the other boy.

“Mr. Void.. That- that might be a new one-” The British admin had quietly chuckled easily, shaking his head. “No, no need for that. I’m Xisuma, or X. I’m glad you appreciate our work, the Hermits around here work non-stop. And we’d be glad to try and help you two, yes?”

“We don’t fuckin’ need help- We stay here, or we don’t. We don’t need pity or some shit. If you’re gonna get all fussy at the fuckin’ idea of us staying in the Worldhub, then just leave us be here, I guess. We don’t need anyone’s help or charity.” Tommy growled, his arms crossed stubbornly. He could hear Tubbo sharply inhale beside him, weakly nudging at his side.

The two inhabitants, Hermits, Tommy mused, seemingly shared a look for a moment. Tommy’s blue eyes were unyielding from them, as Tubbo’s quiet babble of scolding went through deaf ears.

Slowly nodding, the helmeted admin stepped back. “You two don’t have anywhere you could go?” He’d ask, hesitantly. Tommy glanced beside him, at the short, blinded boy. Blue from Ghostbur weakly stained his hands.

No one else outside of Dream SMP had learned about Wilbur’s fate, not yet. That certainly wasn’t a conversation either of them was willing to have yet, with anyone. Dream would be mad. Dream would be furious if word got out on the nature of his server. 

With that thought, Tommy tore his gaze away from his friend. The boy stared as close as he could to the Admin���s eyes, a challenging look in his hardened blue eyes. “Nowhere.”

Xisuma conceded, nodding. “Fine, then.” He agreed, his tone far softer than it had any right to be, from such an imposing figure. Tommy pondered for a moment if the Admin was taller than him. The possibility made Tommy feel all the more disdain towards him.

Tommy tilted his head, watching expectantly. “Well then? Can we just be- be fuckin’ left here, or some shit? We don’t need to be babysat.” “Tommy, please, don’t pick a fight here-” “Yeah, yeah, Tubbo..”

Xisuma winced, nodding. “Sure.. If you want to be left alone, that’s fine. There’s Elytras’ in the room behind us, and rockets in the chest. That’s the only way to get out, besides from the Nether. It should be linked to our Netherhub, so you shouldn’t have too big of a trouble, yeah?”

Tubbo hesitantly nodded, his grip tight around Tommy’s hand. “Alright, then.” Xisuma nodded, glancing towards Joe. Tommy had all but forgotten the man was there, the Southerner having been quietly observing them.  “Joe, you’re free to go, my friend.”

To Tommy’s perspective, Joe certainly seemed to have some reservations. Whether they were about leaving teenagers unattended or leaving strangers in their server, the blond wasn’t sure. Nonetheless, Joe accepted his fate, nodding breezily before enderpearling his way out of the spawn.

Xisuma turned back to the two, one final time. Tommy didn’t miss the way that Xisuma flinched at Tubbo’s large scars, nearly growling when he saw the admin’s reaction.

“You two have been competing in MCC.” That caught Tubbo, off-guard. The brunnett’s brows furrowed together, tilting his head. “Huh? How do you know that-”

“My Hermits have been competing there for a good while. I need to keep track of them all, I haven’t missed the team announcements.” Xisuma explained breezily, something akin to fondness in his tone. “The other Hermits said that they love MCC, and the other participants. And that they trust almost all of them- don’t take advantage of that, alright?”

Quietly scoffing, Tommy looked away. Beside him, Tubbo nodded. “We’ll try- thank you. For letting us stay here, just for now.”

Despite the situation, Tubbo couldn’t help but feel slightly giddy at the idea of being in a Hermitcraft world. He hadn’t been able to hear about, or see anything about their recent achievements in a long while.

“If you need anything, don’t be afraid to ask. I’ll add you two to the communication connection. Most of the Hermits have a..Tendency of getting themselves in trouble, quite a bit. Don’t be alarmed if someone spawns, they’re almost never here long enough to be dragged in,” He spoke casually, easily. Tommy wondered for a moment what exactly their definition of trouble was.

“Someone will be here to check on you, soon. Don’t get yourselves hurt, please. We’re happy to help here.” He continued, glancing between the two. Tubbo fidgetted, nodding numbly, as he could practically hear Tommy roll his eyes beside him.

Quiet mechanical whirring buzzed as holographic, shimmering bee-like wings expanded behind him.  “Good, then.” Xisuma dipped his head, before familiar red-and-white rockets appeared in his hands.

Before Tommy could lung to cover Tubbo’s ears, Xisuma had already taken off. White particles were left behind him, but the expected boom never came, merely a small pop and smoke. The sight of them, nonetheless, couldn’t help but leave a bitter taste in Tommy’s mouth.

While Tubbo was visibly startled, cringing and nearly tumbling over, he didn’t feel his chest constricting the way it usually would, typically. They’d both consider it a win, for now. Tubbo fell over into Tommy’s arm, as his best friend pulled him into a side hug.

They both slid down against the wall. The conversation alone had taken out all remaining energy they had left in them. Tommy’s gaze surveyed his friend for a moment. “So,” He said pointedly, Tubbo lifting his head to face him.

“What the fuck was that, and what the hell is Hermitcraft?”

[professorsnape394]

The Potions Master’s Apprentice

Chapter Sixteen: Halloween

A/N: This is the sixteenth part to my fanfiction ‘The Potions Master’s Apprentice (Severus Snape x OC)’. Chapters 1-16 can be found already uploaded on Wattpad under the same name. Feel free to leave requests in my inbox for anything Snape related you want me to write. Leave a comment below if you wish to be added to my tag list.

Pairing: Severus Snape x OC (Dumbledore’s Granddaughter)

Summary: A talented young witch is employed as an apprentice professor at Hogwarts, but who will she be working under? Severus Snape is not best pleased with his new responsibility of taking on an apprentice, however she is relentless to create a friendship between them. Will she be successful? Or might the friendship just go a little two far? With the eyes of her grandfather constantly watching over them, an attempt at a relationship might not be in the cards for Aria Dumbledore and Severus Snape.

Word Count: 5342

Warnings: mentions of sexual harassment, alcohol consumption. 

Credits to Gif Creator

"Harry Potter." Dumbledore whispered, his lip almost trembling as he read the scrap of parchment that had just been spat out from the goblet.

The hall felt silence.

"Harry Potter." He spoke louder, looking furiously around the hall.

All eyes now searched for Harry.

"Harry Potter!" Albus yelled for a final time.

Aria felt her heart pound in her chest, surely this was a mistake, he wasn't even of age. She looked to her right, hoping Severus would provide some reassurance, though he too seemed just as shocked as she.

The young Gryffindor rose gingerly to his feet, being forced up by his friends and classmates. He seemed petrified, and just as confused as everyone else.

Students heckled him as he walked through the hall, assuming he had found some way to cheat the system. Neither Snape nor Aria believed this could be the case.

Aria Dumbledore stumbled slightly on her heels as she looked around desperately for someone to correct the situation. Without thinking she gripped her hand around the potions masters arm, clinging on for dear life. "Severus." She pleaded, her eyes wide with desperation, brow furrowed in frustration. "He's only fourteen."

Snape looked down at his apprentice, the look in her eyes paining him possibly more than the thought of the young boy competing in a deadly tournament. He opened his mouth to speak, almost about to place his own hand onto hers. But froze as Harry approached the Headmaster, and the parchment was thrust into his hand.

Severus broke away from Aria, turning his gaze outward as the boy came face to face with him.

Still completely shell shocked Harry made his way out of the room, earning a reassuring motherly tap from Minerva McGonagall on the way before disappearing along with the other Tri-Wizard champions.

Instantly the remaining students were dismissed back to their dormitories while a commotion broke out among the professors.

Both Headmaster Karkaroff and Madame Maxime outraged at the mere prospect of Hogwarts having two competing champions. The resident professors however, were far more concerned with Potter's safety than having a leg up in the Tri-Wizard Tournament. Dumbledore flew from the room, Severus following at his heels, and all the other teachers not far behind. Minerva faltered for a second, falling in line with Aria as they made their way from the room, clinging to each other desperately.

"Harry Potter, did you put your name in the goblet of fire?" Dumbledore asked calmly.

"No sir." The boy stuttered, his eyes darting between the crowd of professors.

"But of course, 'e is lying." Olympe accused, towering above even Hagrid.

"To hell he is." Mad- eye moody stepped forward. "The goblet of fire is an exceptionally powerful magical object, only an exceptionally powerful confundus charm could have hoodwinked it, magic way beyond the talents of a fourth year."

"You seem to have given this a fair bit of thought, Mad-eye." Karkaroff spat in return.

While the two men continued arguing, Aria broke arms with Minerva, once again working up the courage to approach Severus. Bringing his attention away from the chaos, she wrapped both hands around Snape's bicep, forcing herself closer to him. "Please." She begged.

Severus faltered. He saw the desperateness in her eyes, as well as in his friend Minerva's. He knew they both cared deeply about the boy. But what exactly was he meant to do?

"The rules are absolute." Barty Crouch sr. spoke. "The goblet of fire constitutes a binding magical contract. Mr. Potter has no choice, he is, as of tonight, a Tri-Wizard champion."

Severus locked eyes with Aria, wishing he could do more. Slowly Aria let her hands fall, she knew now he would not intervene.

Back in the potions classroom, Aria had almost become furious with Snape for not speaking up. Severus on the other hand, was getting sick of the woman going on at him about it, and was rather more concerned with why she chose to hold him in the way she did. A thought that hadn't let his mind since her fingers left his arm.

"I cannot believe you didn't stop them, Severus. Harry is not skilled enough to compete, not to mention the competition is renowned to be deadly. I can't believe it's actually still allowed to continue."

"And what exactly did you expect me to do Miss Dumbledore?" Snape questioned flicking his cloak behind him as he took a seat by his desk. "Barty said it himself. The rules are absolute, he is contractually bound. Nothing I could have said would have made any difference."

"But you could have tried." Aria whined, slamming her palms on the desk.

"And achieved what?" Snape shot up, his tone sharpening. "You overestimate my influence in this school, Miss Dumbledore. While your grandfather may rely on me for trivial duties, that is where my power stops." He snapped, getting annoyed at the woman for consistently guilting him.

"But you must know he didn't put his own name in, he couldn't have!" She persuaded, exasperated.

"Whether I believe he did or did not is irrelevant. He is competing and that's the end of it. That also goes for this conversation. I don't want to hear anymore of it." Snape warned, his eyes piercing into her. "Take the rest of the day off." He commanded.

Given that it was Saturday he had no right to keep her there anyway, though the witch had hoped she could spend the day with him, even if it meant giving themselves more work. Now that she had been banished from the classroom the prospects of her day were low and given that it was Halloween she suspected almost all of the students would be hauled up in their dorms throwing their own private parties. She had heard from Fred and George that it wasn't uncommon for the Gryffindor common room to be host to a number of events throughout the year, today certainly wouldn't be any exception.

Thinking of the students enjoying themselves sparked an idea for Aria. If they students were having party, why couldn't the professors?

Aria dedicated her day to doing her rounds of the school inviting every professor and member of staff she could think of to a party in the staff room that evening. It appeared the professors were just as in need of a night off as the students were, by the looks of it the party planning had gone quite successfully.

* Making her way briskly through the dimly lit dungeon corridor, Aria headed for the Hogwarts staff room, hoping not to cross paths with any suspicious looking rogue students on her way. As she passed by the old wooden door of Snape's office it occurred to Aria she had neglected to invite one crucial member of staff to this evenings event.

"Fuck." She groaned, running a hand through her sleekly styled hair.

Teetering on her heels Aria debated knocking on the door. Though it was highly unlikely Severus would even want to attend her party, she knew it would inevitably be better asking him at the eleventh hour than to not ask at all.

Braving the knock, she prepared herself for the ridiculing she was bound to receive.

A moment or two passed with no response, assuming Severus was located elsewhere, Aria chose to let herself in, just in case.

To her surprise Severus Snape was sat, hunched over his desk as he usually was. Only this time his desk was no longer cluttered with papers but displayed a singular framed photograph, which seemed to captivate Snape. He was evidently deaf to the world.

Coughing lightly to declare herself, Aria gently shut the door behind her.

"Professor Snape." She announced trying to get on his good side, though a hint of surprise and embarrassment remained.

Straightening his posture, Snape extended his arm slowly, slamming the picture face first into the desk, desperate to keep it hidden.

"Miss... Dumbledore." He droned, eyeing the woman up and down. A slight look of disgust forming on his face. "What are you doing here?"

"I... I erm... I've arranged a small get together in the staff room tonight; you know, some drinks and snacks and music, since it's Halloween and all. I was wondering if you wanted to come?"

"I think not, Miss Dumbledore." He said, instantly turning away, disinterested.

"Of course: I understand." She nodded her head nervously. "It's so last minute, I doubt many people will come anyway, to be honest with you." She shrugged, shuffling on her feet.

Snape looked up from his desk, watching the woman squirm, he almost pitied her.

"Professor Flitwick informed me of your little 'get together' earlier this afternoon Miss Dumbledore." His voice dropping with boredom. "It seems the whole faculty is excited by the prospect of a party. I wouldn't worry about attendance too much."

Aria's heart practically flew out of her mouth. It hadn't crossed her mind for one single moment that Severus would have interacted with anyone besides herself today, let alone been discussing social events.

"Fuck." Aria said again, under her breath. "I meant to tell you Severus, honestly. It slipped my mind, I didn't mean to leave you out. I feel so stupid. I'm so sorry." She rambled.

"Relax, Miss Dumbledore." He commanded. "Whether I knew about your party or not has no affect on my decision. I wouldn't have come either way, I assumed you would know better than to invite me, it's a waste of time and energy for the both of us."

"Oh, I, er... I thought maybe since it was me, you might have reconsidered." The words had come out of her mouth before she had even realised what she had said. What made her any different from any other Professor?

"Don't flatter yourself, just because I am forced to work with you everyday does not mean I am willing to change my entire personality for you." Snape scoffed.

"I just meant- oh what's the point, your right, this is a waste of time, I'll leave you alone."

The witch turned to leave, one hand reaching for the door, before she heard the voice of the potions master speak up again.

"Wait." He demanded. "I'm curious. What exactly are you supposed to be?" The potions masters eyes travelled up and down the girl, inspecting her outfit for any trace of a costume.

"Oh." She stopped in her tracks. "I'm a sexy devil." She grinned, showing herself off and brandishing a pair of cheap plastic horns and a pitchfork she had been anxiously twiddling behind her back.

"Of course you are." He scoffed, rolling his eyes in disgust.

"I got them from Zonko's, it was the best I could do at the last minute." She shrugged, shying away.

Reaching again for the door handle, Aria froze, spinning back on her heel.

"Who is she?" She asked abruptly.

"I'm sorry?" Snape retorted, baffled that she dare even ask.

"You got a question, now I do too. Who is she?" The Professor nodded to the toppled over picture frame.

"How do you-"

"I just do. Who is she?" Aria pressured once more.

"A friend." He answered simply.

"Do you love her?" Aria couldn't help but pry further, though she had no idea why she wanted to know.

Severus simply looked up from his desk, his eyes connecting with Aria's. They shared a knowing look, neither of them needing to verbalise it.  

"Oh." She responded, pressing her glossy scarlet lips together. "I guess you're not as heartless as you pretend you are after all." She smirked, finally leaving the room.

*

"Severus couldn't make it then?" A feline-esq Mcgonagall asked, joining Aria next to the drinks table.

"No." Aria replied. "He was busy. I shouldn't have expected him to anyway, this isn't exactly his sort of thing is it?" She said looking around at the crowd of professors disguised as pirates, superheroes and zombies, casually chatting and swaying away to the  music.

"I shouldn't think it is." Minerva agreed, taking off her pair of false cat ears, giving her head a moments release. Aria couldn't help but laugh at her choice of costume, which I'm sure was professors desired reaction.

Pouring yet another drink Aria felt herself swaying back and forth in her heels, the alcohol was finally beginning to take its toll.

"Pace yourself, my dear, the night is still young." Minerva chuckled, taking a sip of wine.

"Sorry." Aria chuckled, gulping down the rest of her cocktail, completely ignoring the advice from her friend. "It's just been a while since I've allowed myself to get drunk, ya know, the side effects don't agree with me much."

"Well your still young I suppose, people your age often are out partying every weekend. I think you should allow yourself the luxury just this once, eh. The side effects are tomorrow's problem." The older woman winked.

"God, I hope not." Aria whispered, but continued pouring drinks nonetheless.

"Join me?" Aria said, clumsily pouring two very large shots, for the pair to down. "Let's get a bit more life into this party, shall we?" She announced, turning up the music and began filling a tray of shot glasses up, passing them around the room.

"Everyone gather around and let's make this interesting." The young woman mischievously announced.

Lining up numerous shots glasses and filling them with various miscellaneous liquors, Aria waited for the staff to gather round the table.

"Truth or dare. Alcohol edition. If this doesn't get us all absolutely hammered by the end of the night, nothing will." She laughed, hoping that getting these witches and wizards drunk and spilling some secrets would be a bit more fun that just standing around talking.

"And on that note, I feel this may be my cue to retire for the night." Dumbledore informed, taking Aria by the hand, giving her a reassuring squeeze. "You lot have fun." He smiled, chuckling to himself as he walked away.

One hour, two bottles of tequila and several very very drunk professors later Aria Dumbledore was satisfied with her attempts at spicing things up. The game had begun to wind to an end, with a couple of teachers tapping out, a few more passed out, and, in the case of Hagrid and Olympe Maxine, making out.

"Your turn again Aria; truth, dare or drink." Aurora Sinistra enquired. The small crowd buzzed, hyping her up as she carefully considered her decision.

"Truth!" She shouted, chickening out of yet another dare, and she truly did not think she could handle one more shot.

"I have one for you." Igor Karkaroff confessed, seemingly appearing from out of nowhere and plopping himself down in the empty space next to Aria.

"Then go ahead." She allowed, gathering her legs in a basket and turning to face him.

"How do you really feel about Severus Snape?" He breathed, his face inching closer to hers the longer she paused to think. The few invested professors fell silent eagerly anticipating her response.

"How do I feel about Snape?" She slurred, letting out a small amused laugh, as her body continued to sway towards Igor unknowingly.

"He's... curious." She began, finding her words amidst a sea of drunken thoughts. "He has the capacity for love and friendship just like the rest of us, yet he chooses to be mean-spirited. And for what? No apparent reason but his own satisfaction. He can be rude and arrogant and cruel. And despite it all I try my best try to show him kindness, but where does that get me? He calls me out in front of practically the whole school? That was so fucking humiliating, and I'm just supposed to forgive him? I think it's safe to do say I'd live a happy life, if I were to never see that man again."

"It's seems you've had a bit of time to think about this? I assumed you and Severus were friends." Madam Pomfrey commented, as the room fell silent.

"Can anyone really be friends with that man." Aria scoffed, beginning to feel uncomfortable, as it became clear to her that others did not share the same opinion.

"Admittedly Severus can be a hard man to get along with. But really he's not so bad once you get to know him." Minerva informed. "While he may not show it, he does care. Give him another chance, Aria, it takes a while to warm up to him."

Aria gave a small nod, thinking now might be a good time to wrap things up. She felt guilty for saying such bad things about Severus but it had also been some what of a release to get it all out there before she was truly able to forgive him for all the horrible things he said.

Picking up her scattered heels she had abandoned some time ago, Aria decided to call it a night.

~

Severus Snape had barely moved from the moment Aria Dumbledore had left his office. He sat frozen in time, simply staring at the picture of her. It had become routine for him at this point, every year, on Halloween, he would mourn the life of the woman he had once called best friend. He thought back to that night when he found her, murdered by the man he had put his faith in, the man he believed would spare her life, the man he vowed from that point onwards, he would help put an end to. It was on this day every year, he reminisced on his life full of regrets.

It was then he heard a small amount of commotion and scuffling echoing through the dungeon corridor. Assuming it would be a couple of excitable teenagers Snape made his way out, ready to deduct a couple of house points for disrupting his evening.

Unable to distinguish any facial features in the dark, Snape listened carefully to the drunken mumbles from down the hall. As he closed in on the pair it became clear to him that what he once assumed to be a playful make out session, was in reality an act of unwanted attention. The female was clearly drunk and struggling to dissuade the man's advances.

Illuminating the tip of his wand, Severus ripped the man away from the woman, thrusting him into the light. "Karkaroff?" Snape winced, releasing his tight grip on the headmasters collar. Slowly coming to terms with the reality before him, Snape's eyes darted towards the woman, who, seconds ago, had been pinned to the cold stone wall. Pealing away the curtain of hair from her face, Aria timidly revealed herself.

"What the fuck are you doing Snape?" Karkaroff grumbled, stumbling backwards, struggling to keep his balance.

"I could ask you the very same question, Igor." Severus seethed, pressing the tip of his wand firmly into Igor's neck.

"No need to get so defensive." Karkaroff chuckled. "Do not believe this innocent act, she wants this just as much as me. She's gagging for it, Severus, you should know that more than anyone." He burped grotesquely, making a move in Aria's direction.

Instantly forcing himself between the ex-deatheater and his assistant. Severus dug his wand deeper into the man's skin. "Do not come any closer, Igor. I suggest you leave now and hope to God that Dumbledore doesn't hear of this."

Karkaroff paused for a second, running his tongue along his bottom lip in contemplation. Slowly closing the gap between himself and he potions master, Igor Karkaroff whispered into his colleagues ear. "I can wipe her memory straight after, no one needs to know. Go back into your chambers and forget you ever saw anything. I wouldn't blame you if you did the same."

"You disgust me." Snape spat, shoving the man away from him.

Karkaroff laughed sinisterly once again, seeing no real severity of his actions. That was the last straw for Severus. Swiping his wand across his face, a small but painful cut began to appear on Igor's cheek, a tiny pool of blood quickly forming and spilling down his face.

"Go. Now. Before I regret letting you off so lightly." The potions master commanded.

Having silently witnessed the whole exchange, Aria felt her pulse racing, feeling utterly helpless in her drunken state. Half expecting Severus to simply turn and leave, Aria begun to fiddle with the hem of her dress, not wanting to see him walk away. To her surprise a warm hand rested itself on her bicep, defrosting her body from the outside in.

"Are you okay?" Severus asked sincerely concerned.

Aria nodded her head repeatedly, but refused to meet her mentors gaze. "He didn't really do anything. He... he just wanted to come in for a nightcap." She tried to convince herself.

"I think we both know what his intentions were." Snape droned, agitated by her stupidity.

"Thank you." She said solemnly, her eyes finally meeting his.

Acknowledging her appreciation, Snape turned on his heel ready to finally retire for the night.

"Wait, Severus." She spoke up, finding her voice again. "I could use some company tonight. Do you mind if I join you?"

"It's been a long day, Miss Dumbledore. I was planning on getting at least some sleep tonight."

"I understand." She hung her head, embarrassed for even asking.

Looking down at the disappointed look on the young woman's face, he did not have the heart to leave her after what had just happened. Letting out a hefty sigh, Snape made his way to his office, throwing open the old oak door, waiting patiently.

"Come on then." He offered, motioning to the empty room.

~

"Do you mind if I...?" Aria gestured to a rogue bottle of FireWhiskey. "For the nerves."

"Go ahead." Snape permitted, settling back down behind his desk, while Aria made herself at home in his office.

Truthfully Aria had found herself becoming rapidly more sober by the second and she was desperate to put an end to that feeling as soon as possible. She was already embarrassed enough without the risk of Snape asking anymore questions.

"How was your little party." Severus pondered, having nothing else to occupy him.

"Not bad. Would have been better with you there though." Aria confessed, taking a seat on the edge of Severus' desk, gulping down her glass of FireWhiskey.

"I doubt that that is true." He droned, rolling his eyes, unconvinced.

"Of course its true, you're my friend Severus. Why do you find it so hard to believe that someone could enjoy your company." She raised an eyebrow at the potions master.

"There is not much to like about a man like me, Miss Dumbledore. I simply do not see the appeal." Leaning forward in his chair, Snape averted his gaze.

"Well I do." Aria assured firmly, refusing to take her eyes off the man in front of her. "And clearly you were open to friends in the past. You speak of this woman for instance, the two of you were friends." She tried to get him to open up.

"For a while." He replied simply.

"See."

"When we were children." He elaborated, once again meeting her eyes. "And that brief phenomenon ended when the prospect of a better opportunity arose for her." Snape added bitterly.

"That cannot possibly be true." Aria scoffed, unconvinced he was telling her the whole truth.

"That, coupled with my less than amiable personality, and a few harsh words drove her away for good. And with final nail in the coffin being just that, there is no hope for a reunion any time soon." He finalised, his tone harsher and more agitated than before.

"Is that a habit of yours then?"

"Is what a habit of mine?"

"Attempting to drive away your friends by insulting them." She said it only to be playful, hoping to coax a small smirk from him, but clearly that night was still a sore spot for him, even more so than it was for her. "Why don't you allow yourself the simplest bit of happiness, Severus. I know for a fact there are many Professors who think very highly of you, if you only let yourself be liked, you would have a great number of friends."

"What makes you think I want friends, Miss Dumbledore." Snape relaxed in his chair, finally turning his full focus to the young woman. "Has it ever occurred to you I am like this for a reason. That I like to be alone. That I drive people away simply because I do not want them in my life."

"I don't believe that for one second."

"Why?" He challenged. His temper beginning to boil at the woman's unyielding persistence.

"Because you loved her, Severus." Aria Dumbledore blurted. A moment of silence filled the room, the pair both slightly in shock that she dare speak the words, that Severus Snape was capable of love, aloud. Nevertheless she chose to continue, seeing no harm in speaking her mind now. "She was your friend and you loved her. I know it broke your heart when she died. And I know your trying to protect yourself from getting hurt again. But you must let yourself be vulnerable, or else what is the point in living? I am determined to be your friend, Severus Snape. And while I know that probably terrifies you, you really do not have any say in the matter. If you truly liked being alone, you would have left me out in that corridor tonight." She finished with a sigh.

Hoping off the desk to pour another drink, Aria's mind hummed away. Something felt different between her and Severus tonight. Despite at first being thrown off, and admittedly, slightly jealous of the woman in the picture, it had given her hope. Not fully understanding what she was feeling, she decided to blame it on the booze. Whatever it was, was tomorrow's problem.

Intending to join Aria for a drink, Severus ventured out from behind his desk, meeting Aria in the center of the room. Having practically read his mind, she presented her friend with a very large glass of Firewhiskey, and began to make a start on her own. As the cold glass balanced on the edge of her lip, Aria suddenly became hyperaware of how close her and Severus' bodies were. His fingertips grazed her own as he made to take the glass from her, clearly lingering for much longer than necessary. Aria darted her eyes in his direction, wondering if he too noticed their closeness, she found him staring right back at her. With no sign of uncomfort or anxiety visible in his face, Aria felt her heart begin to beat faster than ever, and her palms became instantly sweaty. Gulping down the remainder of her drink, she slammed her glass down on the desk, turning to the door.

"I think I should go." Aria swallowed nervously, refusing to meet Severus' gaze. "Let you get some rest, finally. It's already so late."

She was panicking and rambling. It was obvious to both her and Severus. But the way he looked at her. She had never seen him look at anyone that way, he didn't look as harsh or mean or unimpressed as he usually did, and that terrified her. Though it wasn't how he looked at her that scared her, it was how it made her feel. Butterflies inhabited her stomach, her heart pounded in her chest, and her throat scratched when she spoke it had become so dry. She knew she had to get out of there before she done something she might regret.

"Aria, wait." Severus called out, placing his glass next to it's twin, though his remained untouched.

It was the first time he had called her by her first name. It felt so... intimate. She loved the way it sounded coming from him. His velvet monotone made her name sound so smooth and delicate. She could listen to him speak forever, she thought to herself. Shaking herself back into reality, Aria forced herself to turn and face Severus.

Without missing a beat Snape closed the gap between them, pulling her body close to his; one hand resting on her waist, the other cupping the back of her head. Before either of them knew what had happened the pair found themselves lost in a chaste, but passionate kiss.

Seemingly coming to his senses Severus Snape forced himself off of Aria, his face instantly flushing with colour. Averting his gaze, it was clear he was starting to regret what he had just done.

"I apologise, that was... I shouldn't have-"

To his surprise Aria cut him off, resting a cold hand on his newly warmed face. Their eyes met for a single moment, both knowing that this was what the other wanted. Standing slightly on her toes for height, Aria thrust her lips onto his, pulling him closer and tighter than before. Deepening the kiss Severus quickly regained control, letting himself lose himself in the moment. The couple found themselves drifting towards the door, using it as a support, allowing them Severus to be as forceful as he wanted. While Aria's hands roamed the whole of Severus' body, squeezing and grabbing anywhere she possibly could, Severus on the other hand, remained the perfect gentleman, keeping his hands strictly to her waist and face, and eventually settling on either side of her head, leaning against the firm wooden door.

Breaking away for a moment of air, Aria let out a satisfied groan, biting on her bottom lip seductively. Severus could not take his eyes of her, watching her every move hungrily, struggling to catch his breath.

"Wow." She finally exhaled, but instantly Aria pulled him in once more.

As the kiss continued and another second passed, the pair became hungrier for one another, and so the more passionate the kiss became. Getting almost too caught up in the moment, Aria made a move for Severus' belt buckle, hurriedly unclasping it, ready to undo his zipper.

"Stop." Severus panted, grabbing her wrist, before she went any further.

Coming to her senses Aria retracted from the situation, a wave of humiliation washing over her as she watched Severus re-buckle his belt.. Hiding her face in her hands, she moved out from between Snape and the door.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"

"No, It's not your fault." Snape tried to reassure. "I just... I wouldn't want to take advantage."

"You wouldn't be taking advantage, I was the one who wanted to-"

"I just think we need to end things here." Snape said firmly, once again cutting the woman off.

Accepting defeat Aria nodded to herself, knowing he was right. She had never felt so embarrassed in her whole life, she knew she would regret allowing herself to drink tonight, it never ended well.

"I should go." She whispered to Snape, refusing to look any higher than the man's shoes.

"Aria." He breathed, his voice full of sadness, knowing she was beginning to regret kissing him in the first place. He wanted to asked her to stay, but he knew it didn't matter what he said now to make up for stopping her, the moment was gone and so too was she about to be.

"Goodnight... Professor Snape." The witch sighed, reverting back to professionalisms and clicking the door shut behind her.

Taglist:

@ayamenimthiriel​ @lizlil​

[simsroyallegacy]

Anissa Crawford Speaks Out: That B*tch is Crazy!

Last night Lady Anissa Crawford, a Lunarian socialite best known for her stint as girlfriend to the teenaged Prince Nicky, broke her silence on her experiences with Princess Isadora of Castille. She gave an interview to famous late night talk show host Francesca Valentine, giving an in depth look into the early signs of Isadora’s troublesome behavior. The interview drew in millions of viewers to Late Night Tea with Francesca and started the trending hashtags #TheWickedWitch and #BurnIsadora after Lady Anissa let loose how the younger Castillian Princess would send people to harass the young socialite during her relationship with the Crown Prince. View the full interview under the cut!

Francesca Valentine (FV): Now that we’re back from the break, here’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for this evening my dear viewers! Tonight’s special guest is a socialite we all know and love to hate, a woman who has dabbled in fashion design, modeling, and dating very wealthy men: Lady Anissa Crawford!

The audience bursts into applause as Lady Anissa walks onto the stage and seats herself across from Francesca.

Anissa Crawford (AC): Thank you so much for having me Francesca, I’ve always been a big fan of the show!

FV: It’s a pleasure to have you here, Anissa, though it feels like you’re always on my show one way or another.

AC: *laughs* Well, I’m always happy to give you something to talk about, dear!

FV: *smiling* Tonight you asked for this to be the platform from which you speak of events kept as secrets you’ve held close to your heart for many years now, correct?

AC: Yes. I’ve kept quiet all these years on the advice from my parents and lawyers but now that some of the truth has come out about Isadora I feel like I should share my experiences with her, if only to give the people a better understanding of what poor Nicky must have gone through and by extension Princess Minerva.

FV: It’s so brave of you to do this, Anissa, truly. Let’s start with having you explain how exactly you started your relationship with the Crown Prince?

AC: Nicky and I met at a Hartfordshire Academy sports event when we were both in our junior year of high school. I attended Hartfordshire’s sister school, an all girl’s private academy right across the street from the boys. We would rarely be allowed to interact with each other anywhere but sports events were always the exception.

FV: So you caught his eye?

AC: Actually, I started talking with one of his good friends at the time, Jack Pierson. I thought Jack was cute and wanted to get closer to him and so I started hanging out with his friends which included Nicky. Anyways, long story short Nicky and I got to be friends before we started dating; we actually didn’t realize we liked each other until he invited me on his birthday trip to Selvadorada.

FV: Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Princess Isadora on that trip as well?

AC: She was. Everyone who went on that trip were Nicky’s closest friends and family at the time. Prince Gabriel, her older brother, had been his childhood best friend since before they turned eleven. He’s always been close to him and Isadora – he treated her like his own sister.

FV: What were your first impressions of her at that time?

AC: The moment she realized I was a part of the trip – before Nicky and I even got together on it – she was glaring at me and complaining to her brother about an “outsider” travelling with them. She made several passive aggressive comments about that childish nickname jealous little girls gave me back in my teens: “Easy-A”. 

FV: What did HRH say about it? Didn’t he defend you against her?

AC: He pulled me aside and told me not to take it personally, that she did this to everyone who came into their circle of friends. Nicky pitied her because of her family situation, you see, and explained part of it to me. I pitied her too after that.

FV: Oh? Care to share?

AC: I don’t think I will, sorry, but that stuff was personal to the Castillian Royal family and I’m not comfortable airing the entire family’s dirty laundry to the world. Just know that she had a seriously messed up childhood and started taking it out on others. I tried not to let her hostile behavior get the best of me on that trip but when Nicky and I announced we were a couple she started to escalate her vicious attitude.

FV: How so?

AC: When no one was looking she’d trip me up, spill things on me, hide my things; those were just petty little kid things, honestly, and didn’t bother me too much. It was when she stole my phone and texted my parents the nastiest things – she was calling my mom wh*re and b*tch and even told my father that “I” had found out about an affair my mom was having with her assistant! – they both were so angry with me! What nobody knows about that trip is the fact that my father had me sent home early because of the cheating accusation.

FV: Was there any truth to it?

AC: Absolutely not! But at the time he honestly thought it was something I had told him in confidence, he had brought all of my siblings and my mom together for a dramatic family meeting where they started fighting over it. I had tried to tell them that it wasn’t me who said those things, that it was all a lie from that little brat but neither of them believed me. 

FV: What happened during after that?

AC: My parents thought I was acting out for attention and sent me to therapy. Funnily enough, it really helped me focus on my home life and school, which were things I didn’t care too much about back then. It even ended up bringing me closer to Nicky, who was so, so supportive to me during that time. Nobody ever believed me that Isadora was the one who was using my phone to “grab attention” from my parents though.

FV: Was that the only time you had contact with her? Or were there other incidents over the years?

AC: There were tons of situations where she would straight up shove me – she even “accidentally” caused me to fall down a flight of stairs at an event I had gone to with Nicky! I ended up only spraining my ankle but that was seriously messed up of her to do – she’s obviously had a homicidal streak in her for years. It’s honestly not a surprise to me that she’s behind the attempted assassination of Princess Minerva.

AC: She would also follow Nicky around all. the. time. Honest to Watcher, she was stalking him. She’d make sure to fly out to Lunaria every weekend to see him and would become furious when he didn’t include her in his plans. She would guilt trip him constantly into inviting her along on our “dates” and when it got to the point where I’d become angry with him over it he’d pull the “she’s like my sister” card and say he’ll make it up to me.

FV: And did he make it up to you?

AC: Honestly? Yes. He was an attentive boyfriend, despite the weekly Isadora interruptance. He always knew how to make me laugh, was patient when I had my infamous diva moments, got along great with my family, and really pushed me to be better. He also bought me some pretty great gifts. *laughs*

FV: The public was in an outrage over his spending habits for your gifts, no?

AC: *snickers* He did know how to spoil a girl.

FV: If you were getting along so well, how did it all fall apart?

AC: After Nicky and I went to separate universities, we kind of took a break.

FV: Kind of?

AC: We still had every intention of getting back together in the end, but I wanted to be free during my college experience and I thought he wanted the same. He ended up rooming with Gabriel and of course Isadora constantly came around under the pretense of “visiting her big brother”.

FV: Is that sarcasm I’m detecting from you Anissa?

AC: Damn straight. I don’t know exactly what happened but she got her claws into him. Made him think I had been cheating on him for our whole relationship, – I still believe it was her who was feeding the press “exclusive” interviews about my Easy–A behavior – she also fed him lies that I was just using him for his money. 

FV: You were constantly asking him for things though...

AC: I never asked him for much more than his love and time. He bought everything he knew I enjoyed because that’s the type of person he is. He’d give the entire world to the person he loves the most if he can, that’s what makes him such a great partner. I don’t know how Isadora poisoned his mind against me like that, it’s like she was a witch or something *laughs*.

FV: *laughing* Well, she’s certainly wicked!

AC: The last straw for me was after his graduation from UBrite when those photos of him and Isadora were published. I had traveled out to see him at the home he had been given as a graduation gift, hoping to talk things over with him and see if we could salvage or relationship but...*sighs*

FV: But what?

AC: Let’s just say it was too late for us. He began dating Isadora openly after we split and I vaguely remember saying some seriously nasty things when I was cornered about our split. I feel terrible for implying that Nicky was such a selfish man, that he was only with her to “get it out of his system”. He truly loved her then, I know that. He had always loved her to some degree, platonically as children and romantically after we grew into adults. I was devastated to hear about those abuse rumors – he didn’t deserve that, no one does, ever. I’m so happy she’s been exposed for what she is: a crazy b*tch. I hope they catch her soon.

FV: Will you be reaching out to HRH now that his eyes have been opened to Isadora’s evil ways? Is there a chance you could rekindle your romance?

AC: *laughing* Dear Watcher, no! That chapter of my life is over and I’ve fallen for someone else.

FV: Oh? Who is the lucky guy?

AC: *smirks* Oh Francesca, I don’t kiss and tell. Maybe you’ll see us together on my Simstagram someday...

[dwellordream]

A Six of Crows Review: Joost and Inej I

This marks the beginning of my review of Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Before I go any further, I want to provide context for my experience/knowledge of the book and its fandom. Six of Crows was published in 2015 when I was 16. I picked it up in a bookstore and read the first few chapters idly while shopping, before putting it back down.

At the time, my dislike of what I’d read was probably primarily fueled by the realization that it was by the same author as Shadow and Bone, which I had tried to read a few years before and disliked, and because at the time I was aging out of the YA genre in general and had very little patience for many of its familiar tropes.

In recent years, Six of Crows and its companion and predecessor series, the Grisha Trilogy, have become one of the most popular YA series online. The avid fan response and promotion of it on social media no doubt led to the Netflix series being greenlit and it is obviously trending at present due to the success of the series. With all that in mind, I’ve decided to try Six of Crows again and see for myself what all the hype is about.

Some more caveats: I am 22 years old. I am aware Six of Crows is YA literature intended for a middle and high school audience. I will not be holding it to the standards I would hold an adult grade fantasy book, in terms of prose, themes, or content. I am aware that I am not necessarily the target audience for the book and these reviews are in no way intended to shame or disparage anyone who enjoys the book.

Criticism is a healthy part of any fandom and does not necessarily constitute hate. I will likely critique elements of the book in my write up. That does not mean I have a personal vendetta against the author, publishers, or the TV show. Please do not take this as a personal attack if you’ve enjoyed the book. This is just intended to promote discussion and to gather my own thoughts.

If you follow me, I am tagging this as ‘in review’ so you know what to block if you don’t want to see my posts on your dash. I will be going through 1-2 chapters per weekend. This weekend I will be looking at the prologue, aka Joost, and the first Inej chapter.

Jumping into things, here is Joost:

The prologue is our introduction to Ketterdam, the setting of Six of Crows. It’s been a very long time since I read Shadow and Bone and so all I really know is that Ketterdam is a city in an island known as Kerch, based off the map. The major countries or kingdoms of the mainland to the east appear to be Fjerda, Ravka, and Shu Han, though it is unclear how they differ from one another at this point.

Ketterdam through Joost’s eyes is a sinister and dreary place, a city under a grimy night sky and full of dangers. Joost works as a hired guard for a very wealthy man named Hoede, who keeps grishas, powerful magic users, as indentured servants. Joost is infatuated with one of them, Anya, a healer, though he knows she is not likely to return his affections and furthermore cannot wed without the permission of her owner. We also learn that grishas are at risk for being kidnapped and sold by slavers due to their value. However, the indentured servant system of Ketterdam thus far doesn’t seem to be much better than slavery, given how little freedom the grisha have.

Overall, the prologue is supposed to give us a sense for the setting of Ketterdam and interest us in the main hook of the novel, which seems to be a mysterious substance that grisha can ingest to heighten their powers for the benefit of their masters, though it has the risks of making them uncontrollable. How well is this done?

Through Joost’s perspective we can glean several things; Ketterdam is a dirty city with rampant income inequality, full of crime and corruption. Magic is an established system within Ketterdam, but the magic users do not seem to be at the type of the hierarchy despite their powers, which suggests they are a minority to the extent of which they can still be controlled by the elite class of non magic users, if they have enough money and power.

It is also very obvious through the references in the prologue that Ketterdam is heavily based off the Netherlands during the Golden Age, which was Amsterdam’s (Ketterdam… Amsterdam… not subtle) economic and cultural boom during the 17th century, aka the 1600s. Notably the world’s first stock exchange began in Amsterdam in 1602, and it was a major port and trading hub for the Dutch East and Dutch West India Companies.

It is not clear if Ketterdam is also intended to be a 1600s-esque society, timeline wise, but we know that rifles are common place and there is a thriving merchant class who rule as opposed to old aristocracy, which seems to indicate a Renaissance style setting, as well as the urban environment in general. (That said, from the advertisements for the Netflix show, they seem to have updated it to a more Victorian-era 1800s society, in terms of fashion and general aesthetics).

Overall, the prologue does its job. It gives us a vague idea of what Ketterdam is like, how the society is structured, and who holds the power. It also ends on a suspenseful cliffhanger, leaving Joost’s fate unclear. Where it falls flat is that I think a little more time could have been spent fleshing out Joost as a narrator, even if this is his only showing in the book.

His internal monologue comes across as a bit dry and mechanical, as if the author is aware he is just a means to an end to start the book off with a bang, and he quickly turns into a walking camera (just there to report events to the reader, with no internal input from him), for the second half of the prologue, as we switch to just watching Anya and Hoede through his eyes. That said, it’s not a major problem, as Joost is clearly not intended to be a main character, and his narration still effectively conveys what is happening and sets the dark tone of the novel.

What I would have liked to see from the prologue is perhaps the POV of Anya herself, or the small child she is being forced to experiment on, as that might have been a more compelling and immerse introduction to Ketterdam and its dangers rather than the fairly bland and neutral Joost, who doesn’t really feel like a character so much as a bland stand-in for the reader. If we were put in the shoes of Anya, suddenly called upon by her power hungry employer to participate in this unethical test, or in the shoes of the small boy caught up in the middle of this, it might have been both more thrilling to read and given a more gritty sense of what it’s like to be on the lowest rungs of Ketterdam’s society, at the mercy of the most powerful.

Moving onto Inej, we run into some similar problems. After Inej’s first chapter, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about her, other than that she was an acrobat as a child, that she is part of the street gang known as the Dregs, and that she intensely values loyalty. This isn’t a problem, per say, but while that’s all good to know, it doesn’t give me any sense of Inej’s actual personality, which doesn’t exactly bode well. Like Joost, she comes across more as a walking camera and occasional tourist guide as opposed to a human character with her own worries, hopes, and fears.

I think this may become a recurring problem with Bardugo’s writing - ie all tell, no show. Inej is good at telling things. She tells us where we are as we follow her to the location of a stand-off between rival gangs, she tells us that Kaz, their leader ‘doesn’t need a reason’, though she never exactly explains what that means other than that he is widely feared, she tells us that she is very fond of her knives.

But in terms of writing, we shouldn’t have to be force fed all this information via her internal monologue, which, again, entirely cuts out once the action picks up, just like Joost’s. While I don’t need her thoughts on every threat or gunshot, it would be nice to feel as if she hadn’t just vanished from the story completely as soon as the dialogue starts.

We also meet Kaz and Jesper, though I couldn’t tell you much about them utter than that Inej clearly admires, even venerates Kaz as an accomplished intimidator and chess master, and that Jesper is clearly the joker of the group.

It also feels incredibly weird that this parley between gangs in happening in front of the city’s stock exchange. Inej tells us this is because the Exchange is one of the few remaining neutral territories, but it’s also heavily guarded, which means every time a gang wants to parley, they have to pay out the cash to bribe all the guards to very pointedly ignore a meeting between rambunctious and trigger happy street gangsters on their literal doorstep.

I understand why Bardugo chose this location, wanting to contrast the violence of the gang members with the economic injustice that the Exchange and its merchant rulers represents, but it just seems a bit silly. They couldn’t meet at the docks? In an alley way? This is like picturing the American Mafia hosting a public meeting at the New York Stock Exchange with a bunch of cops twiddling their thumbs nearby.

The foreshadowing that Bollinger is the traitor (‘I’m not going to bet on my own death’) also seems very heavy handed and a little much, but I’ll let it slide.

It’s also not really clear while Inej is present at this meeting in the first place. Kaz commands her to keep watch from above, but he has also put a contingency plan in place that doesn’t even involve her, having bought out some of Geels’ men from under him. Why put Inej looking down from above if you’re not involving her in this plan? Her only role seems to be to watch, and she doesn’t even have a gun she could play sniper with. It just seems like a hamfisted way of getting Inej out of the danger zone so the author can have her as a passive spectator to the violence that follows.

This is my main problem with this chapter. It’s supposed to introduce us to Inej, but really, it’s introducing us to Kaz. Which is fine, but as he also has a POV in this book, it seems a bit lame that her own chapter is completely overtaken by showing off A. his smarts and B. how dangerous he is, despite being dismissed as a young ‘cripple’ by the likes of Geels.

Geels is also… not a greatly done villain. I get that he’s supposed to be small fry and is just a precursor to much more threatening opponents, but his every line of dialogue feels designed to show off how cool and Machiavellian Kaz is in comparison. He doesn’t seem like an actual hardened criminal who has underestimated his opponent, but a somewhat cheesy cartoon thug who unironically says things like “How are you going to wriggle your way out of this one?” with his full chest. The effect is comical, and not in a good way.

This chapter also shows off Kaz’s sadistic side in full display, which is probably one of the only interesting things about it, though it would be nice if we got any input at all from Inej on this… instead she completely vanishes from her own narration, to the point where she might as well not be present at all. Kaz has no qualms about tracking down his enemies’ weakness, such as lovers and family, and threatening them.

But the open horror and shock Geels reacts with seems incongruent, as if Kaz were the first up and coming gangster to actually consider threatening someone’s family or girlfriend. That seems pretty par for the course for violent criminals trying to claim territory and unnerve their rivals, yet Inej and Geels himself react as if no one had ever thought of sinking to the level of ‘do what I want or I’ll kill your loved ones’ until Kaz invented it. It just feels a bit silly and on the nose.

Really, my overarching issue with this chapter is that it’s not about Inej at all, it’s just an introduction to the Kaz Brekker fan club. I don’t automatically hate Kaz as a character, but his introduction is heavyhanded and comes at the cost of any establishing character moments for Inej. The most we get out of her is her brief pangs of sympathy for Bollinger despite his treachery, and her brief reference to her childhood. Maybe future Inej chapters will totally change this, but right now, it’s not a great sign of what’s to come.

I can think of about a hundred things Inej could have done or said this chapter to develop or establish her personality at all, but all we got was her briefly holding a knife to someone, and her briefly saying a prayer for Bollinger. I think it would have worked much better had this plan to catch Geels with his pants down been Inej’s invention or at least worked out between her and Kaz, rather than her just there to play lookout and admire how cool Kaz is.

Or at the very least, we could have seen the scene referenced where she searches the crime scene of the assassination, instead of that getting two lines and an entire chapter being devoted to what boils down to a pissing contest over which gangs gets rights to a certain neighborhood.

Next week, we will look at Kaz I.

[carry-the-sky]

these heavy words, your open heart

summary

“You told me once that I was honest. That I don’t lie to you. But the hospital—you asked me to start over, and I said I didn’t want that.”

Karen sucks in a breath. Frank’s eyes are still on her, wide and bright. It’s the most vulnerable she’s ever seen him look.

“I lied,” he says.

a/n: merry kastlechristmas, @kastlenetwork​​​​​​! i’m normally an angst machine, but i tried to do something a bit softer to fulfill your prompts (not sad + new year’s, hahaha). i hope you enjoy, and thank you so much for organizing this event! <3

chapter one

Frank’s in the wind, but he’s not really gone. He’s in every bouquet of flowers, each hole-in-the-wall diner she walks past on her way to meet with a source. She pictures him, bloodied knuckles and bruises smudged under his eyes, the low gravel of his voice when he tells her the war is what he wants. She hopes that no news is good news, that maybe he’s found some measure of peace and what it means if he hasn’t—

He’s been dead before. Karen blinks, and the diner is just a diner.

He’s everywhere, at first. Local gangs, exposed drug rings, a city councilman with ties to sex-trafficking—the Punisher is all over the news cycle for a solid month after his escape from police custody at Metro General. It’s a shitstorm, but Karen wades through it the same way she always has. The city’s still rotten, still reeks of corruption and scandal and bad people doing bad things, so she follows her nose. Frank’s not the only one who has a job to do.

Time soldiers on. The steady deluge of news slows to a trickle, then stops altogether. The Globe tries to regenerate some of the hype by running a story that pins a string of uptown murders on Frank, but it’s a flimsy attempt at best. New York has moved on.

Karen tries to do the same. Her schedule is more flexible now that she’s freelancing full-time, so she doesn’t feel guilty saying yes when Matt and Foggy invite her out on the weekends. She digs for stories and chases leads, writes and investigates and writes some more. It’s hard work, less than stable—looking at her bank account makes her want to cry—but it’s good. For the first time since moving to the city, she feels free.

Frank’s in the wind, but he’s not really gone. He’s in every bouquet of flowers, each hole-in-the-wall diner she walks past on her way to meet with a source. She pictures him, bloodied knuckles and bruises smudged under his eyes, the low gravel of his voice when he tells her the war is what he wants. She hopes that no news is good news, that maybe he’s found some measure of peace and what it means if he hasn’t—

He’s been dead before. Karen blinks, and the diner is just a diner.

.

Winter hits the city hard. The temperature plunges to single digits in the week leading up to Christmas, with a few inches of snow in the forecast. Karen works from home as often as she can, trading her pencil skirts for fleece-lined leggings on the days she’s out running down sources. She just barely makes the submission deadline for a piece about embezzlement in the county tax collector’s office. 

Karen hasn’t really celebrated Christmas since Kevin died, but she makes a conscious effort this year. She digs her old tree out of storage and strings cheap lights around the window and spends the better part of an afternoon making eggnog and cookies for Foggy and Marci’s holiday party. It feels almost normal, until she starts thinking about Vermont and the gingersnaps Mom used to make. Karen remembers swiping a handful of them at a time and escaping to the hall closet, crunching them extra loudly to drown out her parents’ arguing. They always fought more around the holidays.

Christmas comes and goes, and Karen dives headfirst back into her work. The new year looms, equal parts uncertainty and possibility, but she keeps herself tethered in the present. Whatever happens, she’ll roll with it. She always does.

.

There’s a dog in the alley next to her apartment. 

It’s nosing through a couple of discarded take-out boxes, but snaps its head up when Karen steps onto the sidewalk. The dog—she, Karen’s gut says—is definitely a mutt, lean like a lab with a boxy pit bull face. Her coat is brown with grime, but there’s a smudge of white over one eye, like an upside down heart. 

“Hey, there,” Karen says, crouching. She holds a tentative hand out, freezing when the dog growls low in its throat. “Easy, it’s okay. I’m on my way out, but I’m gonna call someone to come get you, okay?” 

Animal control is swamped. There’s a high volume of calls coming in, typical for this time of year. The earliest they can come out is tomorrow morning, and Karen’s heart clenches thinking about how low the temperature’s been dropping at night. She glances sideways at the dog, making a mental checklist of all the food that’s currently upstairs in her apartment. No kibble, but anything she has is better than garbage. If she could just get the dog out of the cold—

Karen takes a step towards her building’s front door at the same time that the dog bolts, scrabbling down the alley in a blur of kicked-up snow and dirt. 

“Shit,” Karen hisses, watching the dog disappear around a corner. (“She’ll come back.” Kevin—he’s ten years old, cradling a stack of lost dog flyers under his arm. “Right, Kare? We’ll find her.”)

Karen stares down the length of the alley for another second. She’s already running late for a meeting with a volunteer at the regional VA office—her one and only lead so far on this new story she’s trying to crack open—but she makes a note to grab some treats on her way home. With any luck, the dog won’t go too far.

The meeting goes well. Her volunteer confirms the rumors of negligence in the treatment of veterans across the tri-county area—understaffed facilities, falsified intake records, and in one instance, a vet dying while on a hospital waitlist. Nothing overly shocking, but it still makes Karen sick to her stomach. The system is broken, and sometimes fixing it feels like an impossible task.

“I’ll be in touch,” she tells the volunteer as she’s getting ready to leave. “Thank you again for meeting with me, Curtis—”

“Curt,” he replies, cracking a grin. “My mom’s the only one who calls me Curtis. Hey—” he gestures to the folding chairs stacked in the corner. “I host a support group here for vets in the area, and our weekly meeting is tonight. You’re more than welcome to stay, maybe chat with a few of them about their experiences with the VA office.”

“I have to head out,” Karen says, “but maybe another time?”

“Absolutely. No pressure.” Curt reaches out to shake her hand. “Take care, Karen.” 

Take care. 

Two words. That’s all it takes, and she spends the rest of the day brushing away memories like cobwebs. He’s backlit in the frame of Schoonover’s shed, he’s standing by the water, he’s pressing his forehead to hers—she closes her eyes and all she sees is Frank. 

The thing is, even if she wanted to get in touch with him, she has no idea how to. The burner number he’d given her the last time he came back from the dead isn’t good anymore, and it’s not like she can just look him up in the phonebook. She could try Madani, but Karen has a hunch that even if the newly-minted CIA agent knew where Frank was, she wouldn’t be partial to sharing.

She has some dried flowers at home, leftover stems from a bouquet that her neighbor was making for her granddaughter. They’re the only flowers Karen has allowed herself to have in the apartment since she last saw Frank. As soon as she gets home, she sticks them in an empty vase and moves them to the windowsill. Not exactly white roses, but they’ll have to do. 

He’ll come back. He always does.

[thewhiterabbit42]

Wicked Games Part 2

Pairing: Gabriel x reader

Series Summary:  When a trickster seeks revenge on Gabriel, he traps the archangel in a sex dungeon with the person he despises the most: you.  

Word Count:  2726

Written for:  @spndarkbingo​ - sex dungeon

@heavenandhellbingo​ - dark fic

Chapter tags/warnings: kidnapping, nonconsensual removal of clothing, threats of violence

Series tags/warnings (as it stands): dark fic, medium burn, kidnapping, sex dungeon, mutual pining, enemies to lovers, violence, graphic depictions of horror, dub con, non con, oral sex, it’s a sex dungeon so likely all the sex, confessed feelings, bondage, more tba

<<Part 1

“You are such an asshole!” 

You’re crouched behind - well, you honestly don’t want to think about what it is you’re hiding behind.  Your stomach flips just acknowledging the combination of wood, leather, and metal bars, let alone the variety of uses one could get from it.  

There’s a chill to the room that settles across every inch of bare skin, which happens to be just about all of you, because someone decided to outdo themselves in the giant dick department and play the douchiest prank of the century.  Possibly the last several by snapping you to some god awful place in a matching set of black lace bra and panties.

This isn’t what you expected to find walking into an abandoned hunting camp in the middle of the woods.  It has to be Gabriel’s doing.  There’s no way that faded wooden planks can disguise this much concrete, let alone double in size the moment you walk through the door. 

You know you saw windows, a little sliding glass door off the side, but the only glass you can find comes in shapes for things you’re trying really hard not to remember exist.  

“This isn’t funny!”

“Do you hear me laughing?”  The sardonic edge beneath his words becomes lost to you as you look up at the wall.  

There are rows and rows of hooks with various items hanging from them.  Floggers, paddles, canes, whips, all staring back at your wide-eyed face.

Then there's the restraining materials; ropes, chains, zip ties, leather cuffs, actual manacles, metal ones that belong in medieval dungeons.  

Given the lack of anything but wall to wall stone, you can't discount that you might really be in one.  

What the actual fuck. 

Your heart hammers in your chest, and you have to remind yourself that none of this is real;  you haven't actually woken up naked in some sort of sex dungeon.  This is just Gabriel being a shit.  

The worst kind of shit, but one nonetheless.

"Bring us back," you order, hugging your knees to your chest.  

"You need to calm down," he barks right back at you. 

Yeah, like that's helpful.  Like you want the sensation of your lungs shrinking as another windowless room starts to overlay this one.  

You try to focus on something else, but it’s hard to ignore the way your head begins to spin as you struggle to take in air, how unforgiving the lights above you are, highlighting all the physical reminders of why you hate being boxed in by concrete.  

The back of your neck begins to burn with a familiar feeling of helplessness, signalling things are about to get messy real fast.

"You need to bring us back right fucking now!" You've never yelled at him before, not like this, and he has to know how much he's messed up and snap you back.  He has to.

"I can't!"  He erupts, voice booming through the large room.  "You really think I'd snap myself naked into a place like this?" 

The unspoken with you is a given, and you're so done with everything that it takes a moment for what he’s saying to sink in.

He’s naked?

You lean toward the end of the table, curiosity making you slowly peek around the side.  A muscular thigh greets you, pale golden skin offset by meticulous black stitching that runs nearly to his knee.  He shifts his weight, and you yank your head back a split second before anything else can slide into view.  

Oh sweet jesus.

Heat sweeps into your cheeks.  Of course he’d be naked.  Why wouldn’t he be?

"You know anyone else that can pull things out of thin air?"  Your retort comes out a little less confident, though you’re still not convinced he’s not to blame.  Who’s to say he’s not smart enough to put himself in a precarious position to prove his supposed innocence?

He goes silent, and after several seconds of nothing you begin to worry.

Your second glance around the corner gives you an eyeful of firm backside.  He’s drawn up to full height, spine straight and proud as if surveying his handiwork.

What.  A.  Jerk.  

"It's got to be another trickster," he announces.

Yeah.  Like you’re going to buy that.  

Your eyes are drawn past him to the carnival-esque signs that detail what can be found on each wall, as if advertising for things like ring tosses and balloon popping rather than dildos and nipple clamps.  Not to mention how every wall of sex toys is backlit in some gaudy display, surrounded by obnoxious flashing lights you might find on a gameshow.

What really makes you suspicious is the giant wheel in the midst of it all, which is clearly the centerpiece of this freakshow.  

"You're so full of shit." And you're so so over this. “Give me back my clothes and get me out of here right now.”

Apparently, so is he.  

“Are you really that brain dead after spending so much time with the dynamic duo?”  He snarls, and it isn’t the contemptuous bite of his tone that has your stomach knotting, but the black bands you notice as he throws his arms out wide.  “Because what part of I can’t did you not understand?”  

His hands shake with his frustration, the material around his wrists flaring bright with his anger.   

You swallow, more than familiar with the types of symbols that glow a heavenly blue before fading from sight once again.  

Oh fuck.  

“God dammit, Gabriel!”  You scream, because you have to scream at something.  Someone.  Anything.  

You drop your head back hard against the metal eyelets behind it.  For a moment there’s nothing but the small flare of pain and the increasingly frantic cadence of your heart thumping away in your ears.  

You’re actually trapped.  In a sex dungeon.  With a powerless archangel who hates you so much he'd likely prefer to bury his angel blade inside you before he touched you with his personal one.   

“What the hell did I do?” 

He has the gall to sound miffed, and you cling desperately to your fury like driftwood to keep your head from going under. 

"Anyone else kick a hornet’s nest lately and now has a host of vengeful deities on their ass?”  

He at least has the decency to shut his mouth for three seconds.  

You, on the other hand, lose the ability to close yours.  “Let’s not all speak up at once.”

"Just... let me think.”  The bite beneath his words unexpectedly vanishes, and you don’t like how deflated he sounds.

Your mind starts to race, the frantic pace pushing the fringe of hysteria with how fast it whirls.

You should have seen the signs.

You should have walked away.  

You didn’t, and just like before, you’re going to pay for it.  

“Jesus Christ, kid, can you take a breath?  I can’t hear myself think with the way you’re panicking.”  

He’s not harping for once.  If anything, he might be the one panicking, but you’re beyond being able to read the subtleties of his demeanor.  All you hear is the same message he’s been feeding you for months.  

You’re the problem.  You’re always in the way.  Useless.  Useless.  Useless.

“Why is it always my fault?”  You yell.  “I’m the one that always ends up as collateral in the collective shitstorms you bring down upon yourselves.”

You know you’re not thinking clearly.  You’re falling straight down a rabbithole that has nothing good on the other side.  But your brain doesn’t see that, and it can’t do anything other than fire away with warning.

“For all the bitching you do with each other, you’re exactly the same.”  Your voice continues to rise, adrenaline saturating your system.  “You’re so wrapped up in your own agendas that you can’t see what it’s doing to anyone around you even when the damage is sitting in front of your god damn face.”

For the life of you, you don’t understand why you do it anymore.  Your relationship with Dean is so broken you’re not sure it can ever be repaired, and you’re pretty certain what shred of one remains with Gabriel won’t survive this encounter.  

The archangel says your name, but you can’t hear him.  There’s so much you’ve held back and desperately tried to bury that there’s no more space for it to go.  Everything comes barreling to the surface in a tidal wave of rage, because you can’t allow it to be what it actually is.  Hurt layered upon injustices that fester so deeply, trying to cleanse yourself of it at this point might actually destroy you.  

But hate, you can handle that.  

“I don’t need either of you or your bullshit excuses!”

For a moment there’s nothing but seething red and an overwhelming need to release it.  You don’t even know what’s happening with your foot until it slams against the pillar in front of you.  The stone doesn’t give, but your ankle does, and you growl at the explosion of pain that cuts through the whirlwind of emotions inside of you.   

“Now, now, we can’t have you damaging the goods so early in the game…”  

You can’t tell where the voice is coming from, only that it’s everywhere.  Above.  Behind.  Flooding in from every side, wrapping you within the confines of its sultry accent and sending a knot through your stomach.  It pulls your head back above the water, where you find you’re dragging in lungfuls of air no differently than if you really have been drowning.  

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”  Gabriel knows who it is, and given recent events, you’re not reassured, even if he sounds more peeved than anything.  

The air next to the cement column shimmers, and if there was any give to the object at your back, you would have shot back several feet.  The thing sits bolted straight into cement, however, and it doesn’t do much other than wiggle as your spine slams against it.  

You’re not sure what materializes in front of you.  Those are definitely human legs rising up from the floor, long and lanky, with golden bronze skin that make you think of places filled with warmth and sunshine.  The rest of it is most definitely not a person, though you’re grateful at least one member of this party comes with clothing.  

Somewhere beneath the brightly colored wrap around its waist it changes, skin giving way to a sprinkling of fur that thickens the further up your eyes travel.  It’s chest is fully covered with a coat so glossy you’re tempted to see if it really does feel as silky as it looks.  As odd as the whole thing is, it helps make the coyote head sitting on top of humanesque shoulders a little less shocking.  

You take in the regal headdress that you imagine says something about its status, the red and yellow feathers a colorful contrast to the sea of blacks, metal, and greys of the room.  Nothing about the figure jars anything specific loose from your lore knowledge, though by it’s accent and appearance your guess would be some sort of deity from Latin America.

“You.”  The archangel grumbles, accusation threading through his word. 

The creature smiles.  “Me.”  He spreads his arms wide, an exorbitant amount of pride accompanying the gesture, and it’s not lost on you how very Gabriel-esque the whole entrance is.  “How are you, old friend?  I imagine you’ve seen better days?”

His gaze drops to where you’re sitting, and his head gives a curious tilt.  “And I imagine you have too, my dear?”

“Who the hell are you?”  You don’t feel as fierce as your words would imply, and you could be wrapped from head to toe and still feel exposed with the way he drinks the sight of you in without shame.  

The thing chuckles, clearly amused.   

“Kid, meet Huehuecoyotl,” Gabriel announces.  “Another trickster.”  

You can feel the smugness permeating the space around you, bordering on hubris in a way that’s been inauspiciously absent.  You can’t help but feel like it’s an act, no different than yours, and it only makes you that much more nervous.

“Now are you going to tell me what is going on, or are you here to finish that round of twenty questions we started at the turn of the century?”  He demands.

You can just see him now, hands on his hips, boorish indifference splashing across his features.  

The whole act is just as ignored by the thing in front of you as it would with you.  

“May I?”  The trickster inquires, though he doesn’t actually wait before he reaches for your ankle with grotesque nubs caught somewhere between a paw and a hand.  

You jerk back and he pauses, letting out a soft snort.  “Ah, yes.  How silly of me.”  

An unsettling popping fills the room, and you watch as it’s joints begin to shift, tips extending into fully-formed, fingers.  The fur covering them adds another touch of surreal to the whole situation.

“That’s better.  Won’t get very far without these.” He wiggles the new digits at you, bones cracking as they shake off their stiffness.  

He’s not going to get far, period, opposable thumbs or not.  

You’ve never been so relieved to hear Gabriel open his mouth or intentionally diminish your presence.  “C’mon, Coy.  Stop wasting time with her.”  

The thing smiles, and your stomach drops at the row of long, jagged teeth that emerges.  

“I don’t think you’re in any position to tell me what to do with my time, Loki, or should I say, Gabriel.”  He draws the archangel’s true name out, rolling the r on his tongue in a way that’s intimate.  

There’s an unmistakable gleam in his gaze when he glances up, and the moment the weight of his stare shifts from you, you realize how magnificent it is. Copper hues blend seamlessly with bronze, the colors tied together with flecks of gold that sparkle more playfully than anything. 

It tugs at something in your chest, something you immediately smother.

“That was quite the trick you both pulled, making the world believe that only one of you existed.” He clicks his tongue, shaking his head.  “But we’ll get to that in a moment.”  

With a wave of his hand, the room around you fades to darkness, as the light above your head intensifies.  The sudden spotlight makes you uneasy, as does the way you can still touch the floor beneath you, but not the table at your back.

“Seriously.  Stop dicking around with her and let’s talk about this.”  Gabriel’s voice floats in on the fringes, but it’s like he’s calling across a chasm, the familiar timbre distant and faded.   

It takes all of an instant to realize what’s happening.

“What do you want?”  Your arms tighten across your chest, and you’re even more acutely aware of just how exposed you are.  

“So many things.”  You can’t begin to unpack the complexities of his statement or the ones that follows.  “Mostly, I just want to help.”

Your eyes widen at the knife he brandishes, stomach plummeting well beneath concrete as he holds the blade up in front of your face.  Power pours off the metal, prickling over your skin in a way that alarms you.  It has to be ancient, filled with something you don’t recognize or understand.  

“Sometimes, in order to make something stronger, we must first destroy it.”

You can’t help but notice the short but curved blade attached to the end or the spiked ridges along the inner edge that can’t be for anything other than tearing through flesh. 

“Pain, as a construct, is ultimately fleeting, though the weight of breaking or watching someone break can be unbearable, no matter which side of the knife you are on.”

You swallow, eyes drifting up to the handle, trying to find something you recognize.  

It’s exquisite, a combination of beautiful gems and the finest spellwork you’ve ever seen with ethereal, symbols and lettering shifting along the surface in a way that almost makes them seem alive.  There’s no rhyme or reason to how they move, not that you can tell, and you’d be otherwise fascinated with the weapon, except it’s leveled in your direction.

“Now hold still,” He instructs, his grip on your calf tightening. “I’d prefer not to hurt you more than necessary.”

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[philosophicalparadox]

Demon Splicing and Why the Clones Failed.

This is more like a research paper than a fan theory, but hey, I had fun. I’ll try to improv some citations at the bottom, but I don’t guarantee that Tumblr will let me keep them there. 

Now, this is a HUGE, MASSIVE, LONG-ASS POST, and once more it is ultra-sciencey; so if you have any confusions, questions, or want to just look the other way and just go “eh, magic” then that is totally okay. I don’t, and won’t, claim to be any kind of authority on these things; I just needed an excuse to open my computer again and I guess do some intense research into etymology (that would be the study of anything with an exoskeleton, basically. I promise it is very much relevant to this theory.). 

Summary/TLDR: Demons need specific qualities in their hosts in order to suit themselves, ergo they modify their host’s bodies by using Mutually symbiotic viruses, akin to those of the Polydnaviridae ingroup which coexists within several genera of parasitoid wasps, to alter the human genome. What we explore here is how they do so. Also, because it is intrinsically connected, we will also be dipping our toes into why, exactly, the clones weren’t “suitable” in all instances, as well as how demons may or may not select their hosts. This circles back to my previous post discussing the Twin’s and Paternity, and specifically the topic of genetic expression, though you do not need to have seen or read that post to understand what I’m talking about here. Also discussed is the matter of genes that humans lack, but which would seem to find their way in during possession; the production of feathers, the formation of additional limbs, proteins,  and such which are simply not within the power of any existing virus we know of to alter . 

One thing must lead to another however, so before we get into the biological science, we need to get into the hypothetical, cosmological stuff that is quantum physics. Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?

Demons and DNA: 

We know from that one elusive panel of chapter 44 ( I think...) that demons have genetics - they have genes, which implies that they have, at the very least, DNA. The question then is how, but more so where - where did those genes come from?. Demons don’t have physical bodies, right...? Why would they need DNA? 

Because maybe some of them do possess actual, physical “bodies”, or at least cells, that preside in Gehenna. 

The Demon Kings are quite likely to be an exception rather than a rule, considering they were the first demons to have come into existence, or at the very least the first demons to have ever attained bodies -- which is precisely how demonkind may have obtained DNA in the first place, via a phenomena called horizontal transference. 

Now, I’m going to contradict, in a sense, my other post here, and tell you to forget what you were taught about viruses in high school. Virology is a complicated school of biology, and viruses are extremely simple, and yet extremely complex organisms. Now, viruses typically contain RNA which allows the virus to reproduce once it is injected into the cells of its host by combining viral RNA with eukaryotic (for the sake of simplicity) DNA. 

However, there are strains of viruses that contain DNA, not RNA. No one is completely sure how these viruses evolved, but one theory would suggest that these dnaviruses “stole” part of their genetic material from the hosts they evolved with, incorporating pieces of lipids and proteins to turn their RNA into functional DNA; this process of one organism “stealing” DNA from another is called horizontal transference, and it is how bacteria and other asexually reproducing organisms maintain genetic diversity and “evolve”. 

But, you ask, how the bloody hell does a Virus have DNA? How does it replicate?

 When most people think of viruses, they think of mobile ones, pathogenic ones - but dnaviruses are not usually pathogenic, instead highjacking the excretory or reproductive systems of their hosts and using their reproductive cells to spread genealogically from parent to offspring. One well-studied example of this is the polydnavirus found in Ichneumon wasps, which are themselves parasitoid. They reproduce by injecting their eggs into the bodies of paralyzed caterpillars, who then feed the hatching larvae with it’s living tissues. However, one problem the wasp faces with this method of reproduction is the caterpillar’s immune system, which could kill the eggs - were it not for the polydnavirus, which produces chemical signals that prevent the caterpillar’s immune system from destroying the precious egg that is it’s host cell. As the larvae develops, the polydnavirus is replicated into the cells of the larvae, and once it hatches it is literally born with the virus in it’s body. (I’ll let you go wild with the half-demon thing there, I’m here to talk about possession right at the moment.)

Ok, ok, but what does this have to do with demons? after all, demon possession is, in a way, “contagious” since demons can go from host to host. 

Welcome then, to the world of multi-viral mutual symbiosis - fancy way of saying viruses can work together to meet the ends of one another in a host if it benefits both viruses. Demons may possess some form of this event, being somehow sentient (by means perhaps of primitive, conductive cells not unlike what you would find in a jellyfish) but ultimately composed of or utilizing not only one, but several strains of viruses to fulfil their parasitic ends, one which allows them to infect the host and modify existing DNA, and one which can incorporate it’s own DNA into that of the host to bring about desirable conditions. To that, I must add as a courtesy that those primitive conductive cells which could, in a way, offer sentience, may in fact be what comprises the physical manifestations of demon’s hearts. None of this is, of course, to explain demon magic, which is a subject I do intend to breach one of these days - but not today. Today, we do science.

 This goes away to explain why Todou sprouted feathers, a phenomena that would not have otherwise been biologically possible given the constraints of human protein structure. That isn’t to say that it would be impossible for a virus to modify via RNA transcription keratinoid proteins to form hollow attachments, which is exactly what you find in polar bears and porcupines, but the structure of feathers is, I’m afraid, just too far off the mammalian path for it to be but a 0.03% likelihood via RNA transcription alone, meaning that it would have to have been the result of DNA that isn’t human. 

Speaking of statistical probabilities: 

Cloning and the Failure Thereof

Humanity has a hollywood-induced idea that cloning organisms is a fail-less system, when that could not be further from the truth. In point of fact, only about 3% of all attempted cloning experiments with everything from fish to sheep produce viable, healthy clones. This is because cloning is done, kind of ironically, in much the same way as a virus operates; by using the  DNA and RNA of the existing mother’s cell’s to complete the chromosomal pairing up that normally happens in the zygote during fertilization. Because of this, the RNA transcribes, ideally, the same exact DNA code that the “mother” has; but here again we get into genetic expression, because though a clone is genetically the same as it’s parent, it is exactly BECAUSE it is genetically identical that recessive (and often in the case of  some experimental animals, fatal) traits and gene combinations can occur, depending on exactly how the original, zygotic DNA is copied. Even when using the RNA of the same organism, transcription errors naturally occur -- and they occur so frequently, in fact, that very few cloning attempts are ever successful; that is, they either produce genetically weak, fatal-combination, infertile, or underdeveloped offspring that ultimately can’t be re-cloned or which can not reproduce, and therefore negate the incentive to clone an organism for it’s “healthy genes”. 

Connecting the dots: 

When a demon is cloned, it’s human DNA is cloned; but so are the genetic modifications of the dnavirus, which is why clones seem to have human superpowers. They are no loner 100% genetically human, and that opens the door to all kinds of genetic complications and probably meant that thousands, not hundreds, of clones were “discarded”, and hundreds died before they even lived. Simply put, it’s an absolute bloody miracle that the cloning thing worked at all, much less that Lucifer was able to remotely perfect the technique. 

How he did so is not so much a mystery though; unlike what you would assume, with mammals at least, the more often you re-clone a clone, the “cleaner” it’s genetic code seems to become by phenomena of natural selection and artificial selection; clones with good genes are re-cloned, clones exhibiting bad genes are culled or die on their own, and so on and so on until you get a good sized population of identical clones. With the added fuel of the elixir to make growth happen phenomenally fast, it’s not too surprising that he has a private stock of cloned bodies to inhabit whenever he likes. (Which gave me big Orochimaru vibes, just sayin’). 

As for the RNA virus body, I suspect that is retained with the demon at all times, which makes sense because once and RNA virus stops replicating it’s RNA into the host, the host cells re-fix the “broken” codes and eventually replaces the alien DNA created by the virus with it’s own; however, a dnavirus’ DNA gets worked semi-permanently into the system of it’s host, since it has it’s own completed code which is then, reversedly, transcribed over and over by the host’s RNA transcription, which is why dnaviruses went undetected by science until about 20 years ago, and why, God forbid, if there was ever a pathogenic dnavirus, we would all be royally screwed because even the best immune system on earth can’t detect a dnavirus because our immune systems rely on identification markers dependent on RNA viruses; oddly, however, so does every other organism, meaning there literally is not a single living thing, including caterpillars and spiders who are victims directly of “pathogenic” polydnaviruses, has an immune system that could find the damn things. They utilize the host’s own RNA to transcribe their DNA, and therefore go almost completely undetected by whatever they infect.  

Speaking of which, let’s talk about:

Immunity and Prions

If Demons rely on RNA viruses to primarily infect their host, then it would make sense why some people would be more resistant than others; however, there  is a compelling aspect of demon possession which makes me think that it is the other way around - everyone is resistant, until they are not. 

Demons typically possess bodies which have weak-minded and psychologically stressed individuals behind them. Stress weakens the immune system, but it does so in specific ways; and certain viruses in real life are programmed to take advantage of these specific measures more than others. 

Right now in the US, there is a nasty epidemic of CWD, Chronic Wasting Disease, spreading through native deer populations on the east coast. This “zombie disease” is a virus that infects the nervous system of the deer (along with cattle and sheep) and forms prions - folded proteins that are then replicated, and replicated, and replicated; and like cancer of the brain, they just keep on replicating and replicating, eating up the animal’s energy reserves and drastically impacting their behavior and bodily functions, starting by supressing and outright destroying their immune system. Mad Cow Disease is a more famous example of a prion disease in the same family as CWD, except that those prions migrate; they move into the soft tissues of the animal and make every single part of it impossible to eat without also contracting the prion, which contains the virus; and MCD is not remotely picky about it’s host, since it affects a very basic protein structure. Any and everything from birds to reptiles to humans can be infected by MCD and it is completely fatal. 

My point is, that CWD and MCD both primarily infect animals exhibiting high levels of stress hormones, which is why outbreaks happen primarily during the breeding seasons for these animals. Not only that, but the virus then directly attacks the animal’s immune systems and opens them up to every kind of secondary infection you can imagine. 

However, prion diseases and even just plain old viruses can do the exact opposite as well. HIV is a common virus that kills you by making your immune system hyperresponsive, not by shutting it down; it becomes so responsive, in fact, that it attacks healthy tissues. Prion diseases which affect insects also do this, creating folded proteins in the nervous system of the bug that trigger it’s immune system to continuously flood the body with antibodies until it is just too exhausted to do so, and the insect’s body decays as a result of secondary infection. 

It could be that this is the case of demons as well. Prions would be valuable in affecting the behavior of the host, though not necessary; they would, however, make the ingestion of a possessed person almost guaranteed to infect you, since most viruses just don’t have the defenses on their own to tackle stomach acid, but a prion virus does. 

To recap: 

Demons use DNA and RNA viruses to infect and modify their host to their liking, perhaps using the assistance of prions to aid in endurance and transmissibility. Because of this, cloning is a gamble of “what DNA will I pull out of the box today” since the DNA virus’ DNA, and possibly even any prions, is left behind even after the parasitic demon leaves; however, the RNA virus is inert once it leaves a host body, and therefore is retained by the demon within whatever primitive cells they may carry in their demon hearts, which may be taken from some immutable “form” or body that they possess on the other side of the divide (in Gehenna); these alien forms may be the byproduct of their first ever possession, using, perhaps, horizontal transference to absorb some of the DNA from their first (and possibly even subsequent) host and then re-incorporate it into subsequent hosts, which is how Amaimon would be reptilian in spite of having a mammal body; because he perhaps, first possessed or found genetic favor of a reptile of some kind and “borrowed” the DNA from them via horizontal transference, since it worked for him. This can then be applied in turn to all other demons, or at least demon kings. 

DISCLAIMER:

I spent literally a week researching this stuff, but I am welcome to criticism of my shoddy work. Also, I am in no way saying this is technically right; it’s just a theory after all, and you’re more than welcome to disagree. :)

If anyone wants to add on, feel free. :) I think I’m done for the week. 

[prettywordsyouleft]

The Sex Contract - Chapter 23

Genre: friends to lovers au / friends with benefits / mature content / romance / angst

Characters: Shim Changmin x Kaia Ashton (OC)

A/N: Due to the overwhelming request I have followed your encouragement to bring back one of my older stories. This was back in a time where OCs were everything and writing one chapter in each main’s point of view was the trend. I hope that even though I have edited this drastically, that you can appreciate this story comes from my older style of writing. I definitely still read this often and find it enjoyable so I hope you will too.

Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 - FINAL

Chapter 23 – Changmin’s POV.

“You didn’t know that she was going to be one of the hosts tonight?”

The reflection in the mirror shook his head and Changmin let out a whine at Nayoung. “Why does she have to be here today?! I hate being stressed before a performance!”

“Wait a moment,” the stylist said and then tilted her head to the side. “Are you telling me that you and Kaori aren’t consensually dating?”

“Noona.” Changmin gaped at the woman and then caught her eye. “Have I ever dated someone in this manner before?”

“No, but I thought that it was because she’s like a Goddess.”

He chuckled. “More like an absolute witch.”

“This is a publicity stunt then?” Changmin nodded slowly. “Hey, this is too much. Your fans are going to be so angry if this gets out-”

“Has it yet? I’m not about to compromise the company by not putting enough effort in.”

“Changmin-ah.” Nayoung leaned over his shoulder and smiled at their reflection. “You’re going to tell noona everything after your performance, aren’t you?”

“Why would I?” Changmin challenged and she slapped him on the shoulder with the hairbrush she held. “Ow! You can be so abusive sometimes!”

“You don’t want me to bring up Kaia again, do you?”

Changmin rolled his eyes. “Didn’t you just do that?”

“Well then.” She smiled, knowing she had found a weakness. “I’m expecting to know everything. I am, after all, like a real sister to you.”

“More like a real pain in my side,” he muttered under his breath, getting up from the seat he had been relaxing in and then heading towards the door to the dressing room. Just as he reached it the door swung open, hitting him in the head. “Ow!”

“Oh, Changminnie!” Kaori cried and he groaned loudly, her voice causing more irritation than the door had. “Why were you behind the door?”

“Perhaps because I was about to exit it?” He sat down on a nearby couch, grasping his head in his hands.

“Uh, excuse me are you staff?” Kaori’s voice was thick with fake kindness and Changmin glanced up to see Nayoung slightly stunned by the Japanese woman. She nodded awkwardly. “Could you leave us alone for a moment?”

“Uhhhh-”

“Whatever you have to say, can be in front of her.”

“Please?” Kaori smiled brightly and Changmin cursed inwardly when Nayoung nodded again numbly and left the dressing room. He sighed, wishing he could think of a legible excuse to leave the room too. Kaori then turned to him, folding her arms across her chest.

“Don’t you have any MC duties? It’s a busy job to have.”

She laughed happily. “Aw looking out for me Minnie?”

“Hardly.”

“I needed to tell you something important.” She smiled and checked her appearance in one of the mirrors against the wall, irking Changmin that she once again was taking her time for dramatic effect. “There is a girl here that I’ve met before in Japan. She stood out to me because she’s not Korean.”

“So?” Changmin looked at the woman casually. “We do have foreign fans.”

“She’s a reporter. I just met her backstage.” His blood chilled as he realised that Kaori wasn’t telling him this information to be kind. “Who is she?”

Changmin coughed and attempted to stare at her unfazed. “Didn’t you just answer your own question when mentioning she’s part of the press.”

“Is she VIP for TVXQ information?”

“I guess so, she’s a staff member of SME,” he continued, getting up and going over to get a bottle of water from the table across the room. Changmin willed Yunho to get back from his meeting with their dancers. Anything to make Kaori leave him alone before she got him stuck in a bind.

“It’s funny, do you always follow staff members when out in the public eye too?” Changmin snapped his focus towards the woman, who examined her manicure for a moment before connecting her unnaturally large eyes upon his. “You didn’t think I realised? Do you not understand my interest in you Changmin? I chose you because I knew there would be a challenge involved. Now that there’s a girl in between us, well I’m really put out.”

“I have nothing to do with her.”

“Oh but I think you do. And I won’t hesitate to make it difficult on you either.” The door swung open and let out the vicious tension within the room. Kaori placed a warm smile on her face towards Changmin’s manager and Yunho, bowing lightly. “Have a good performance, I’ll be watching from the press section in front.”

She then left the room, Yunho examining Changmin’s expression. He frowned. “You okay?”

“Uh, yeah.” He tried to nod. “As best as I can be with a run in from the witch.”

“Changmin you really don’t know just how lucky you are for her attention,” his Manager stated and laughed to himself.

Luck was definitely something Changmin was lacking with Kaori Kimura.

TVXQ took to the stage towards the end of the festival, the wait making Changmin incredibly nervous. On four occasions, he had wanted to run out and find Kaia, hoping that he could find a way to get her away from Kaori. After thinking over the conversation Changmin had with the woman, he knew that she wasn’t going to be the type of person to just let the matter sit with a conversation. That was what made Changmin the most anxious, hoping he had enough time to interfere.

He looked out into the screaming crowd, diverting his eyes to down in front of him. Scanning the sea of reporters, he found the face he was after, taking a deep breath. Kaia didn’t look worse for wear, though Changmin wondered what exactly he should have been trying to decipher within her expression. Yunho nudged him and Changmin blinked rapidly, smiling weakly at Yunho and preparing for the first song. They hadn’t been given their signal yet, and so he blinked passed the harsh lights, gazing back at Kaia. An involuntary gasp left his system with the arrival of Kaori near Kaia, her eyes beckoning him to make a move. She knew she had found something to hold above his head, the power she now possessed expressed openly upon her porcelain features. Changmin was helpless to react, hearing the sound of WHY’s music finally start, forcing him to turn around and wait for the signal.

When he spun back around, Kaia’s eyes briefly caught his before falling away. She dashed off, and he clamped his eyelids shut, thrusting his arms out to the sides like an otherwise synchronised robot. Changmin had never wrestled with himself as much as he did throughout that performance, though he knew the only one who would pick up on his mistakes would be Yunho. It had almost become second nature to sing and dance without being completely aware, and Changmin was thankful that he wouldn’t cause damage to his reputation as an entertainer upon this stage. They moved onto Before U Go, and Changmin noticed Kaori was still watching on with a confident smile. He expressed his frustration through his dancing, not even caring about the ache in his weak wrist. The only thing that was on Changmin’s mind was getting off this stage.

They finished with B.U.T and with a bow, the already energetic crowd exploded with applause. Changmin didn’t wait for it to finish though, rushing off to the exit and bypassing staff members that held bottles of water and sweat towels. His focus darted about the activity backstage, wondering if he could find Kaia back here, but it was fruitless. He instantly went out into the Press bay, ignoring the fans screaming and searching for the spot he had found on the stage. The flashes of cameras were blinding him, and Changmin attempted to look through them, noticing the name on one of the girl’s passes around her neck. Smiling, he reached for her wrist and dragged her out.

“What the-”

“You come with me,” he instructed, dragging her back inside hastily and all the way to his dressing room. Changmin closed the door behind them and offered the brunette a chair to sit down in. Now that the lights weren’t blinding him as much, Changmin cringed lightly at the rash effort he had gone to. “I’m sorry for just grabbing you.”

“What the hell are you doing?!” his Manager questioned as he came through the door a moment later, Yunho following him. Yunho visibly relaxed and then ushered the irate man out of the room, telling him he needed to discuss something important.

“Uh, is there a reason you came for me?” the girl finally asked and Changmin nodded. “What?”

“Do you know Kaia Ashton?”

“She’s my colleague.” She tilted her head to the side. “She ran off when you were performing. Told me to stay and capture the rest of the data for the concert. I wanted to go after her, but my job entails me to be professional at events like these.”

“Can I borrow your phone?” She eyed Changmin warily but reached in her pocket all the same. He bowed lightly before punching Kaia’s number. The call connected after the second ring.

“Abby, I’m sorry for just leaving but I suddenly felt ill.”

“Where are you?” Changmin asked and heard the girl gasp. “Kaia, come on, where are you?”

“I don’t think I can see you Changmin, just leave me alone.”

“I’m going home, please come over, there’s something important I need to tell you.” Changmin took a deep breath. “It’s really important you come, okay?”

“I’m sorry.” She hung up and Changmin instantly recalled Kaia but she had already turned her phone off.

“Is everything okay?” Abby asked and Changmin shook his head, taking a seat heavily. “I uh, I know some details about you and Kaia because she discovered who I was dating and kept it secret for me. If I can help you in any way, I will.”

Changmin glanced at the girl and then smiled. “Actually that might be what I need.”

_________________

Part 24

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[ashlynncoy-blog]

Misfire: Recovering Part VIII

I started writing this chapter back in September before life exploded. I have been aching to share it with you all since then. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed making it for you!

 A conversation with her father had convinced Leia that waiting on her mother’s arrival to make a formal engagement announcement would be the right thing to do. But he’d also let her know that officially informing her personal staff prior to the public announcement wouldn’t be at all irregular, and that doing so should ease her mind considerably on the meddling Isolder front.

She’d taken the first opportunity to shuttle up to Rebel Dream and send a coded message to Winter. It could be weeks before she’d get it, but there was no one Leia could imagine wanting to tell more than her oldest friend.

“Thranta and Rocket to wed,” she’d typed, using the royal security code names for herself and Han. It would have to be enough; the shorter the message, the more likely it was to get through. And Winter would understand. Leia’s code name had been given to her in childhood; chosen for the creatures she was so adept at riding, and for her tendency to occasionally fly off—both literally and figuratively. Han’s had started as a rather crude joke on Winter’s part, and somehow had managed to stick.

Luke was the next to get a message, although they didn’t need sophisticated intelligence apparatus to contact him. Back in Leia’s sitting room, they sent her brother a priority holo he’d get as soon as he was back in range.

“Guess what, kid?” Han had shouted into the holocam, “your sister’s gonna make an honest General out of me!”

“I never have like that expression,” Leia told him as they switched off the recorder. “it’s like it implies relationships other than marriage are somehow dishonest.”

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Han said back with a shrug, “I’ve been saying ‘I’m gonna marry that girl’ under my breath every time you’ve exasperated me for the last four years and counting. For a while there, you were making me look like a liar.”

Leia shook her head and looked over at him.

“That long, huh?” she asked.

“Oh yeah,” he said back, standing from the chair at Leia’s desk and heading toward the sofa by the fireplace, “way before you had any idea.”

“Well,” Leia said, following him to the sofa and moving to curl up beside him, “you’ll be an honest General soon enough.”

“That reminds me,” he said, “your dad sent over the guest list for the announcement reception. We’re supposed to look it over and make sure there aren’t any oversights.”

“I don’t care if no one comes,” Leia said. “Tell dad he can invite whoever he wants. The only people I care about are either off world somewhere or considered too unimportant to be included on the official list.”

Scheduling a reception to celebrate the royal engagement to coincide with the day of the public announcement had been Breha’s idea. Bail had been the one to propose hosting it in the Chancellery. With the Chancellor issuing the invitations, he’d explained, they’d be able to approach all the New Republic’s top political figures without explaining the occasion ahead of time.

Leia, who would much rather have had a small gathering of only her friends, conceded only because Han seemed to be happy with the idea.

“Ah, come on, sweetheart,” Han cajoled, “it’ll be fun.”

“Since when have you liked being the center of political attention?” she asked. “This from the man we practically had to chase down to pin a medal on.”

“Since I get to watch everyone who was ready to sell you to the Hapans squirm in my presence,” he said back.

Leia chuckled.

“Spite,” she said. “Very in character.”

“Plus,” he added, “it’s practice for the big royal spectacle. If I can’t handle being on display a little here on Coruscant, how the hell am I gonna get through a week’s worth of royal wedding rigamarole on Alderaan?”

“And you’re really fine with all that?” she asked then.

Han had been agreeable to the point of enthusiastic at every turn when faced with the intricacies of ceremony and protocol that came with a royal wedding. As much as Leia appreciated his acceptance of even the most onerous of Alderaanian customs, she was surprised by his sudden affinity for pomp and ceremony.

“Yeah,” he said back. “It’ll be great. There’s a whole bunch of the ceremony that’s required royal stuff, so there’s a bunch of decisions we don’t have to make. And then the parts we do get to decide have your mom so excited she was willing to move up her surgery.”

“Wait,” Leia said then, straightening up her posture to look him in the eye, “Is that why you’re so into all this wedding stuff?” she asked, “because my mom is sick?”

Han shrugged.

“Sometimes you need a reason to get well,” he told her. “Not just a what, but a when, too. When I first woke up, I didn’t have any of that. Then I found out Chewie was trying to rebuild the Falcon. I was surprised there was enough of her to put back together, but that was somethin’. And then they told me I’d never fly her again—at least not like used to and… I dunno, Leia. I was in a really dark place. But then your mom asked me to come stay with her. And she sent me a ship I could fly all on my own, and she showed me what recovery looked like thirty-odd years down the line. I’d seen ‘after’ already,” he shared, “There were plenty of guys with war wounds worse than mine getting released all the time; guys with new hearts, new legs—you name it—walking out to go on with their lives. And I couldn’t figure out how they did it. I couldn’t figure out how to go on with a life that was gonna look nothin’ like the one I had the last time I was  outside that building. But your mom showed me the after-after. She told me all about what recovery was like for her, and about how her life’s been like since then. And how life may be different, but that ain’t always bad. She’s had a marriage and a family—she even climbed that mountain again.”

“She did,” Leia affirmed. Her mother’s accident had been a fact of life in their family, spoken about with no more nor less importance than any other event in the queen’s past. When Leia had chosen the ascent of that same mountain as one of her challenges to prove herself worthy to inherit the throne, no one had thought her choice to be strange or ill-advised. But when Queen Breha had insisted on accompanying her daughter up the mountain, nearly all of Alderaan had held its breath. And when the both of them had come back down healthy and happy to widespread celebration and the tears of their subjects, Leia had finally realized how close her mother had once come to dying.

Nearly as close as Han just had, come to think of it.

“She really helped me,” Han said. “I felt like I’d lost everything and she made me see that even if I had, that didn’t mean I couldn’t have anything going forward. She did a lot for me. Now I want to do that for her. If I can help give her the thing to look forward to that gets her through this as quickly and as easily as possible, then I want to do that. So now she’s got to be well enough to make the official announcement on the day we’ve planned because she’s got a hundred guests coming to toast her that night. I fully endorse that.”

Leia smiled at her fiancé. She slung her knee over his legs and shifted herself sideways until she was sitting on his lap, facing him.

“You’re a good man, Han Solo,” she said, leaning in for a kiss.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said back.

She kissed him hungrily, for a minute or more, before moving to nuzzle his neck, nipping lightly at his ear and his jawline.

Han moved his hands to her upper arms, pushing her to sit upright again.

“I really should get going,” he said then. “I have an early morning.”

Leia frowned. She stood up and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Nuh-huh,” she chided when Han tried to stand as well. “I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” she said then, “but at the very least you’re going to talk to me about it.”

“About what?” Han asked. He knew, of course, what she was talking about, but he’d been avoiding this conversation for a week now and he was hoping to avoid it a little longer.

“Han,” Leia said then, sitting back down on the sofa beside him, “it’s been a week. And you always have an excuse. Why don’t you want to go to bed with me?”

There it was.

Han sighed. He really wasn’t looking forward to this.

“I mean…” he said, knowing full and well this deflection was unlikely to work, “I did go to bed with you, Leia. We shared a bed on Alderaan….”

“Han,” Leia interrupted him, “this is not the time to play dumb. I mean it. You used to want—and enjoy—the…” she searched for the right words to say this, “physical… intimacy,” she settled on, “at least as much as I did. What’s changed? Why don’t you want me?”

There were tears in her voice.

Han shook his head; suddenly he felt like a heel for not having had this conversation before now. He turned to face her and shrugged.

“It’s not that I don’t want to, sweetheart,” he said grimly, “it’s that I’m afraid that maybe I can’t.”

“What do you mean, can’t?”

“It’s a known side effect of major trauma,” he explained, “And in my case they had to rebuild my whole vascular system. That particular function isn’t so much a priority, if you know what I mean.”

“Han,” she said softly, “do you not remember that you have…? I mean—we have….”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Leia,” he replied, “but I didn’t so much care whether you enjoyed yourself that night. So there was no pressure if things didn’t work like they should.”

“Oh,” Leia replied. She shook her head; she hadn’t thought about that. Their hasty coupling on the inbound leg of the trip to Corregnor hadn’t exactly been a tender moment between them. Han had even been so blunt as to say they’d used each other. It made sense in hindsight, but it made her sad. “Does it help you to know that I did?” she asked quietly after a pause, “Enjoy myself, I mean….”

“You did?” he asked.

“I did,” she affirmed. “It was good.”

“I notice you didn’t say ‘great’.”

“Han!” She admonished. “Seriously? Great was our second trip to Alderaan. Great was the morning we landed on Bespin. Great is a very high bar to clear for me- and nothing we ever do crammed into a bunk during a hyperspace jump is likely to clear it.”

“All right,” Han said back. His face got suddenly serious again. “Now tell me this,” he said. “You and Isolder—did the two of you…?”

“Yes,” Leia answered plainly.

“And was it great?” he asked.

“Far from it,” Leia replied. She turned in her seat to face him more squarely. “I’ll answer anything you want to ask me about that, but for the purposes of his conversation I feel like I ought to tell you this much.” She folded her hands in her lap and shrugged her shoulders. “We were attracted to each other, Isolder and I,” she explained, “it was one of the few things we had in common. But as it turns out, the bedroom is among the long list of places where we just weren’t compatible. It took a while,” she recounted, “for me to be comfortable even taking that step. So there was a lot of… tension built up. And, well, one bad encounter—that can be a fluke. It could have been the pressure or the wine; we’d had rather a lot of wine that night as I recall. You put it behind you. You chalk it up to bad timing and you try again another day. A second bad experience,” she continued, “that could be a coincidence. But three in a row constitutes a pattern and so I saw to it there wouldn’t be a fourth.”

“Let me get this straight,” Han said to her, leaning in close, his eyes narrowed and his mouth taut. “You were functionally engaged to this guy for six months and you only went to bed with him three times?”

“Correct,” Leia replied. “Three disappointing, underwhelming times.”

“Well stang, Leia,” Han said then. “I mean—you and me—sometimes we’d—three times in one afternoon.”

“I believe I just referenced that trip,” she replied, grinning at the memory. “Look, Han,” she said then, taking hold of both his hands, “I tell you this because I want to be sure you understand. Things don’t have to be exactly how they used to be in the bedroom. I just want us to be together. And if you’re worrying about what the experience is going to be like: it’s not going to take much for you to be better than my last relationship.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he allowed. “And plus,” he added, “even if everything isn’t working right the way it’s supposed to, I know a whole bunch of other ways to make things good for you.”

“And you’re welcome to try any one of them,” she assured him quietly, leaning her face in closer to his.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Anything and everything,” she assured him. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“How’s now?” he asked then.

“Now is good,” she replied.

“Well,” he said then, standing up and holding his hand out to her, “let’s see if we can make this great.”

[jlstreck]

American Punchline Ch 65

A TJ Hammond/Steve Rogers Crossover

You can find the previous chapters here (or on AO3).

Chapter 65

“You ready for this?” Tony glanced at TJ across the limo.

Grinning back at him, TJ shrugged. “As ready as I ever am for these things. The last one went really well … at least I thought it did.”

“It really did. Pep’s been quite pleased with all the interviews so far.” Tony waggled his eyebrows before adding, “This is the last one so we better not blow it.”

“No pressure.” TJ chuckled.

*~*~ American Punchline ~*~*

Glancing at Tony, TJ was relieved that the other man had accompanied him for the interview. Either Tony was an amazing actor or he was genuinely almost as excited about the things the foundation was about to do as TJ and Steve were.

“I have to ask, TJ,” their host started and TJ tried hard not to grimace. “What makes someone that could sit back and enjoy a relatively comfortable life decide to unearth their darkest memories to help others? It seems rather out of character with the TJ Hammond we’ve all seen splashed across the media for years.”

The woman smiled and TJ was surprised to find he didn’t think she was asking to be rude or hurtful.

“There are a few reasons. First, not all that long ago an amazing friend of mine challenged me to think about what I wanted out of my life. Not what others expected me to want or what they wanted from me, but what I actually wanted for myself. As I thought about that I realized that I wanted to be more than what the media told people I was. I was a child of the White House during a part of my life that would have been rough under any circumstances. That existence was made more complicated by being in the closet, preferring to be out of the spotlight, and trying to cope with an incredible level of self-doubt.”

TJ took a deep breath, wondering just how much he really wanted to admit on national television. He could feel Tony’s eyes on him. Glancing up he saw the question there and knew Tony would jump in to redirect the conversation without question at the first indication he didn’t want to continue. That silent support encouraged him to continue knowing he wouldn’t be judged by those that mattered.

“I’m not claiming to be the poster boy for how to handle stressful situations, but with the support of some wonderful friends I’ve realized that all those bad decisions, all the times where I felt like I was completely alone … I survived them all. All the mistakes and pain have taught me a great deal about what it takes to not only survive, but live. I just want to try and help others skip some of the really bad parts.”

Tony reached up to squeeze his shoulder as their host smiled warmly at them.

“From everything I’ve read about the upcoming event and what you’ve both said today, it sounds like you’re on the road to doing just that. For anyone that can’t make it tomorrow but is struggling with addiction or fallout from opening up, by choice or not, about their sexuality what would you tell them?”

“A few things. First, if you need help visit the Stark Foundation site and you’ll find a collection of resources. Second, if you’re struggling to come clean for addiction know that you have to want it for yourself not just because those around you want you to clean up. At the same time, don’t let your sobriety become tied to those around you. This includes both staying clean solely for someone else and letting the behavior of those around you push you to use when you want to stay clean. Trust me. I’ve done both. Neither ends well. For those dealing with either coming out or being pushed out of the closet, know that you deserve love and respect. Don’t let anyone make you feel like less because you don’t fit into the box they expect you to stay inside. Don’t let them marginalize your feelings or try to shove your experiences into the shadows. But also remember that for all the negativity you will encounter, there are so many wonderful people that will accept you with open arms. Seek them out so that love really can win.”

“Well said, TJ.” Tony chimed in before anything else could be added. “I can second what he said. My own experiences may not exactly mirror his, but they’ve been splashed across the tabloids enough that I’m sure you all know I speak from experience. His guidance to seek out those that will accept you with open arms is so important. No matter what challenges you’re facing you have to find the strength to walk away from toxic people and find the ones that will help you pursue the life you want to lead.”

“Clearly in TJ’s case, he found that support system with the Avengers.” She smiled. “I have to say, it’s fantastic to see the same group that protects us from aliens is also trying to help with things that hit much more closely to home for many Americans.”

“Well, we can’t fight aliens all the time.”

*~*~ American Punchline ~*~*

“Aw look, the welcome home committee is waiting for us.” Tony laughed as soon as they made the final turn toward the house.

“Surprised?”

“Not a bit.” Tony shook his head as he brought the car to a stop in front of the stairs where Pepper, Steve, and Natasha were all waiting for them. “Or at least not that those three are waiting for us. Just a bit that the rest of our motley crew isn’t out here with them.”

“I’m sure they aren’t far.” TJ grinned as he started to open his door, only slightly surprised when he felt it moving without his help. “Miss me?” He peered up into Steve’s blue eyes.

“A bit.” Steve pulled him into his arms. “Glad our little press tour is over. How’d everything go?”

“It was fine.” TJ shrugged as they turned toward Natasha.

“Just fine?” The spy didn’t look overly impressed. “Do I need to take care of anything before it airs?”

“No,” TJ stepped forward to give her a hug. “I’m sure there are people that will read into some of what I said and won’t appreciate it, but that’s their problem.” He had no doubt that some of his family would be affronted by his reference to avoiding toxic people.

“Well, you just let me know if I need to assist in reminding them of that.” Nat squeezed him tight.

“I will, but hopefully there won’t be a need. After all, they still don’t know where this place is and it’ll be hard for any of them to surprise me at the event given the level of security we have lined up.”

“True, but you know if they get any ideas there’s likely to be a hawk lingering in the rafters. Doesn’t take much for him to get a good shot off.”

The three laughed as they joined Pepper and Tony heading toward the house even though TJ wasn’t entirely sure she was kidding.

As soon as they stepped inside, they heard the others in the kitchen.

“Come and get it!” Bruce’s voice carried into the foyer and they headed to find him. “I make no claims to compete with the fair the two of you keep cooking up in here, but I did manage to through together some spaghetti for lunch. Thought you might be ready for some food when you got home.”

“If it tastes half as good as it smells I’d say you held your own.” TJ grinned as he sniffed the air.

A few moments later the eight were settled around the dining room table chatting about the interview and the final arrangements for the following day. Despite how fast the event was planned, everyone felt confident that the day would make a positive impact on its participants.

*~*~ American Punchline ~*~* 

Hopefully my sudden reappearance doesn’t send anyone into shock. Sorry I’ve been MIA for so long. I promise I haven’t abandoned my darlings, but it’s been a busy few months. 

@steverogersnotebook @marvel-at-stucky @colorfulcandypainter@buckythetinman@dwindlingdichotomy@captainbuckybarness@readergirl1013 @purplechewbacca@eyeluvmusic21  @penny-yolo@sarahsassafras13 @lilbitmo0re@justfollowtheroad @sebstan-theman@dickpuncher365 @captaincutebutt@unabashedlyfoggybanana  @hopefulfangirlblr@katherinekittentaylor @brb-theres-cookies @sciencebeam

[anonthenullifier]

A Proposal

 Chapter 20 of Celestial Bodies

Chapter Summary: Finding the perfect moment to propose is harder than Vision anticipated.

Word Count: 7.5k

Notes: Unlike most of the other chapters in this collection, this one is a culmination of the past 19 chapters. It’ll be more impactful if you’ve read everything, but you can certainly read without those as well. You do you!

AO3 Link: http://archiveofourown.org/works/8535118/chapters/26496528

I hope you enjoy!

The feeling of being watched is curious, a prickle of unease along the back of the neck and the odd drop of the heart when attempts to catch the prying eyes only uncovers feigned indifference and all attention turned in other directions. It is something Vision has become accustomed to, experiencing the discomfort of attention whenever he leaves the compound or even in the compound when they host training sessions for new SHIELD agents, the recruits suddenly intensely interested in their freshly polished boots whenever he stares back.  What he is not accustomed to, and what creates a new weighted sensation in the pit of his stomach, is Wanda behaving in such a way.  Vision turns his head but once again finds an exaggerated look of concentration on her face as she studies the board game. “Wanda?”

The innocence of her “hmmm?” is off-putting as he watches her move her vehicle along the board.

“Is something the matter?”

“Other than the fact you married another woman, apparently can’t keep your hands off of her, and stole my Victorian house, no.” The facetiousness in her voice and the playful smirk on her face when she finally makes eye contact chip away at his unease, extracting a brief, embarrassed smile from him.

Vision studies the board, his initial yellow car (filled with three blue pegs and three pink pegs) and then his additional green car (that houses two more blue pegs) is currently ten spaces ahead of Wanda’s single red car. “Not only did I offer to sell the house to you for a competitive price, I did attempt to negotiate an alternative set of rules that did not require either of us to be forced into these seemingly arranged,” his voice falters slightly, the word needs to come off nonchalant and yet it, and the way Wanda so easily tossed it out before, leads to an arrhythmic beating of his heart, “marriages.”

If she notices the falter, it is not evident in the vigorous way she flicks the wheel. “But then how could me and my childless car demolish you?” The stuttering click of the wheel comes to a stop and he watches as her red car journeys up and over a hill and she somehow wins yet another game show on top of her Nobel Prize for a scientific discovery even though she is a rockstar, and he is, in fact, the doctor. “Something bothering you?”

Despite his annoyance at the tactic, Vision finds himself in awe of the way Wanda so easily navigates around questions she does not wish to answer, always redirecting the onus so that he is the one that must verbalize the issue. “You are making me feel as if I am at the mall.”

The hissed intake of breath means she understands the reference, fingers fidgeting with the hem of her dress as her eyes travel up from the board to his face, guilt weighing down her lips into a frown. “Sorry, I-,” now that he has pointed it out she seems unwilling to break eye contact, “I guess I didn’t realize I was staring so much.”

“I am not perturbed by your attention,” slowly he scoots his two car family along a curve, unfortunately (though it seems odd for his first thought to be about the misfortune of the space) discovering that all six of his children need him to pay for college. Vision sighs, partially at the realization that he is losing horribly at a game that requires absolutely no skill, and partially at how to proceed from here, uncertain if Wanda has sensed the shift in the air between them since returning from their undercover mission, but he has and it is stifling. Yet every time he attempts to raise the issue, dissect what he can only describe as a susurrus of trepid anticipation hanging between them, he finds his fingers fidgeting and his mind racing, concerned that he may cause more harm than good by acknowledging it. “You seem,” so he finds himself utilizing Wanda’s tactics more and more, adjusting to the unsavory process of evading and redirecting, “preoccupied lately.”

Clearly, given the narrowing of her eyes, this was not the most strategic option. “Just,” reticent is a close cousin of preoccupied, a pause in her words and her eyes focusing in on the answer, “have a lot on my mind,” a quick qualifier is thrown in, “with all the little missions and new protocols since we got back.” Then she redirects. “Why have you been so jumpy?”

The answer to that is quite easy, he’d simply describe the flutter in his heart when she sits on the bed, calmly telling her about his day while his eyes try not to stray to the spot in the mattress where he has stored her ring. He’d speak of how he can’t seem to breathe when she mentions the future, whether it’s an hour, a day, a week, or, one time, even a year. Of how he has rehearsed a speech with Sam, had it double checked and amended by Natasha, but each and every time his accomplices find a way to give them the compound to themselves, he freezes, falters, becomes jumpy, certain she can sense what he’s trying to achieve and then the worry that crashes down as he wonders if her distance since the mission is an indication that he has misread the signs.  More than anything he finds himself on edge due to the slithering dishonesty of keeping such an enormous secret from the only person who knows pretty much everything about him.  

But Vision swallows the truth, managing to place what he hopes is a confused frown on his face. “I have not registered any tangible increases in the response of my autonomic system nor in the spasming of my muscles that would be characterized as jumpy.”

Wanda’s displeasure at his answer is clear without any verbal acknowledgement, what could be construed as a snarl puckering her lips as her eyes make a long, slow revolution. Though he knows it is unnecessary, Vision gently nudges all his previous thoughts into a dark, secure corner of his mind. With a sigh she spins the wheel again, silently moving her car along the track and grabbing a LIFE tile, adding it to her collection that is already three towering, unstable stacks. “So, I was talking to Tony the other day,” another oddity of late that Vision has been unable to fully comprehend, a tenuous line of communication between the two that has not resulted in yelling or cursing or eruptions of power, yet.

The comment trails off, her fingers toying with the ring on her middle finger. “Yes?”

A rare, uncertain smirk tugs at her lips, her ring rotating three more times around her finger before she continues, “He asked if we’d prefer a single invitation for the Avengers’ Anniversary Gala or separate ones.”

Once more his breath runs from him, emptying his lungs with such force he experiences a brief moment of vertigo, the gears within his mind grinding to a halt for a reset before clicking back into action. “The Gala is not for another eleven months.”

Wanda drags out her “Correct,” head tilting as she stares at him. “He said Pepper wants to make sure she plans for enough people, Tony wants it to be a huge event.”

A logical course of action. Vision takes his turn, his car rounding the corner towards retirement. “What did you tell him?”

“That I’d ask you and get back to him.”

Evading and redirecting, but with a hopeful uptick to her voice and perhaps a slight tremor, the murmur in the air between them building, becoming more concentrated, pulsing in time with her ring continuing to circle around her finger as she waits for him. “Though it is counter to formality, given we are not married,” somehow that word or some iteration of it is in every facet of conversation lately and he cannot fathom how they always come back to it, “It would certainly streamline the process to send only one, as we will be attending together, and one invitation is far easier to keep track of than two. Unless-”

Elation blooms across her face and his breath stops for an entirely different reason. “Perfect, my thoughts exactly. I’ll let him know.”  The tension between them leaves, the air settling peacefully around them as she takes her turn, parking her car at the Millionaire Estates retirement community. Vision only needs to spin a 4 to complete his own journey, overachieving with a 10. Strategically he knows he cannot compete with the stacks of money Wanda has amassed and so he begins to inch his car towards the safe retirement option. “Don’t go there.”

“Why not? I have exactly a 0.25% chance of having accrued more money than you and will thus be negatively impacted if I do not choose Countryside Estates.”

Her hand descends on his, fingers curling over his knuckles and her thumb tucking under his palm, directing him towards her car. “If we retire in different places how am I going to convince you to be my second husband?”

“I-”

A static buzz fills the air, followed by a click and Steve’s stern voice Reminder that everyone going on the mission needs to be in the hangar in five minutes. Wanda’s smile remains as she pats his hand, “Guess I have to go.” Without breaking contact she stands from her chair. Four steps and she's able to sit in his lap, a hand to his chin guiding his lips to her own. “Love you.”

“I love you too.” Vision allows the caress of her fingers to momentarily empty his mind. “Be safe.”

Another kiss and she stands, a wicked smile on her face as she redirects him to their game “Loser cleans up.”

“I appreciate the graciousness of your victory.”

Her laugh remains in the air long after she's gone.

After the reverberations from the quinjet’s engines have died away and Wanda is gone, Vision allows himself to sit on their bed. Even though he is aware there is no conceivable way for her to be in the compound, his eyes still sweep the room three times, auditory sensors honing in on detecting any movement in the closet or bathroom. When he is completely certain she is not in the vicinity, Vision measures twenty three inches down from the headboard and eight inches in from his side of the mattress before dipping his hand inside. A relieved exhale escapes his mouth as his fingers grip the hard casing of the box, lifting it out from between the springs (he experimented with putting the box in the mattress without the ring first, increasing his density and bouncing several times to ensure the springs would not harm anything) and bringing it to rest in the palm of his hand. Slowly he opens the box and smiles.

“So guessing you didn’t do it, again.”

There was once an entire week at the compound (a week where the lack of missions and abnormally high numbers of injuries created an atmosphere of boredom that manifested in questionable bets and activities) where the team attempted to startle him. No one succeeded, Vision’s awareness of the environment and his own body far too advanced (particularly when he is cognizant of said bet). But none of them ever caught him at a moment where his nerves were so strained even a gentle breeze could snap them. The ring box slams shut as Vision hurriedly stands from the bed, arm instinctively bending behind him to hide the box.

Sam is leaning in the doorway, arms crossed with a barely contained prideful gleam in his eyes and a large, victorious smile on his face. “Gotcha.”

“I- yes, congratulations.”

Sam enters the room, hand directing Vision’s attention to the box behind his back. “Can I see it?”

Based on several books, movies, and websites it seems the tradition is to allow the soon-to-be-bride to proudly show the ring to everyone once the proposal has occurred, but, given that Natasha aided him in locating the ideal jeweler for his search and Sam has been offering invaluable help in brainstorming potential avenues of proposing, Vision decides it is likely okay for either of them to see the ring. “Of course.” He brings the box back out, carefully transferring it to Sam’s hands, and then he remains silent as he watches the man open the box and bring the ring closer to his face for inspection.

“Nice, very nice, different, but it screams Wanda.”

“That is encouraging, thank you.”

The ring is handed back and Vision turns away from Sam long enough to phase the box back into the mattress. “So, what was wrong with the plan this time?”

“It did not seem appropriate given she was about to depart on a mission.”

“Makes sense, I guess.” An empathetic nod goes along with the sound of hands rubbing together, Sam flashing Vision a smile as he tosses himself into the chair across the room, feet coming to rest on the ottoman. “Okay, so I got another idea, if you’re game?”

Since Sam is now sitting, Vision understands he should as well, so he lowers himself onto the bed, hand rising to indicate he can continue. “Please.”

“Alright, so I say we take it back to the beginning, like all the way back,” the man pauses for feedback so Vision gives him a brief nod to continue. “Helen’s bringing the original cradle back next week to do something to it, pilfer parts or something.” The purpose of the cradle coming back is determine if she can retrofit any of the debris to use in the latest iteration, an attempt to save money so she can reallocate funds to a project involving the use of the cradle in eradicating cancerous growths. “I think you take Wanda down there and just you know, be all romantic and reminiscent. It’s simple and personal, just what you want.”

As with all proffered plans, Vision must hesitantly step through the maze of pieces, analyzing every factor of the plan and anticipating any unaccounted for item that could infiltrate the airtight borders. On the surface it seems a decent suggestion, but almost instantly he can sense it falling apart, though, annoyingly, he’s not entirely certain the exact mechanism for it’s destruction, only that it feels wrong. “Is that not a bit,” words are not his friend as of late, his mind skimming through every dictionary from every language in an attempt to come up with a term that encompasses the notion of rooting your future too deeply into the past, trapping it’s momentum at the foundation instead of allowing it to branch outwards to far more exciting, unknown corners, “backwards?”  

Exasperation weighs down Sam’s words, “You’re killing, man.” Sam rubs his eyes, shrugging as a contemplative and defeated sigh breaks the silence. “How about we just drop plans altogether?”

Vision is a creature of planning, of logic, but he recognizes the biggest issue with advanced, careful planning is that all it takes is the brashness and disregard of extenuating circumstances to send the plan careening out of control, decimating every ounce of hard work placed into it. Hence why he has yet to propose to Wanda despite several well-laid out plans. What Sam is implying, he thinks, is introducing a certain amount of chaos. The concept is not altogether unappealing, as Vision has found himself softening to the idea of disorder, sometimes willingly flirting with its possibilities, but it does give him pause, uncertain if he can completely release his desire to control the circumstances. “How, precisely, would that work?”

“Well,” Sam bobs his head side to side, a clicking of his tongue that conveys to Vision he is thinking through the possibilities and will respond shortly, “you can carry the ring around and when the moment feels right just, you know, do it.”

“And if that fails?”

This time Sam laughs, standing from the chair and walking towards the bed. An amiable hand is laid on Vision’s shoulder, giving his upper body a gentle shake. “Then I’m just going to do it for you.”

The issue with waiting for the moment to feel right is twofold, first is quantifying exactly what “right” means. Is it a neurological response? A physiological response? Is it emotionally based? Socially based? Or, perhaps, is it the alignment of all four? Maybe even another facet he has not yet identified. The second problem is that once the right moment has been identified it is fleeting, a split second hesitation and it’s lost.

For instance, the room is currently dark, the compound and its inhabitants long ago quieting for the night, and Wanda is collapsed on his chest, breathing still uneven, lungs attempting to recalibrate, the layer of sweat on her skin adhering her to him, a unique, pleasant warmth trapped between their bodies. Vision runs a hand through her hair, fingers combing from the top of her head down to her nape, tips peeking out of the strands to massage her neck. A pleased, humid sigh is absorbed by his skin. Vision is aware of the influence of oxytocin and endorphins, of the high that fills his mind, amplifies his love, but that does not erase that fact that the love is true, irrevocable, and undeniable. In this moment his love for her is dizzying. “I love you.”

Her body shifts, elbows digging into his stomach, a readjustment of his ocular sensors producing a fairly clear, bluish gray image of the carefree happiness in the upward curve of her lips, her face sandwiched between her palms as her eyes stare at him, despite the fact she likely cannot make out his features. Then her smile drops and that tremble in the air forms between them, consuming his heart, a chill from the change that is quickly replaced by a smoldering ember at the way she carefully asks, “How long will you love me?”

Forever is the cliche response, but forever is unquantifiable, and Vision decides she should have an exact number. “Did you know they estimate the sun could burn out in 7.5 billion years?”

The crinkle of her forehead fills him with joy, the type that forms first in the tips of the toes and fingers, crawling up millimeter by millimeter until his entire body is blanketed in a blissful, satisfying warmth. “I did not.”

“That is not long enough,” the twitch of her lip is encouraging, her mind whirling just out of his reach, their connection having been knocked askew at some point that night, but even still he can sense the shift in the atmosphere from hesitation to excitement. It’s then that he feels the moment twisting into shape, is unable to describe exactly why it feels right, but that seems inconsequential. As he speaks his hand dips into the mattress, fingers brushing the box, gathering courage with each touch, the certainty of his love and their future solidifying in time with the words on his lips. “There are other stars left, produced in nebulous nurseries, but based on aging galaxies it is assumed even those will one day stop being created.  From there the stars will continue to burn, moving through each phase of their existence until they become inert.”

Wanda parts her lips just enough to whisper, her voice wavering slightly, an anticipation, a longing mixing with the syllables, “How long will that take?”

“One hundred trillion years,” he sits up slowly, arm wrapping around her back, holding her in place, helping her resettle, bringing their faces closer, foreheads touching, the light of the Mindstone illuminating the grin on her face. “When the last star in the universe burns out, then, and only then, will my love for you fade.”

The moment transforms, wriggles free of his grasp, a breathy, “Vizh” before her lips crush against his and he is far too enamored, far too engrossed in her presence, in the beat of her heart and the brush of her hair on his skin, the way she tastes of spearmint and salt, and the overwhelming crash of scarlet moving from her mind into his, his senses erupting into flashes of twinkling red light. He drops the box back into the mattress and loses himself in her embrace, wishing to preserve this moment just as it is forever in his memory.

The only other time that felt remotely “right” was on a mission, the rush of adrenaline from fighting mixing with the spark of their bodies meeting, finding each other for a brief moment of respite, hidden behind a tree. But that moment was promptly, and rather rudely, interrupted by Sam, who was struggling under the weight of yet another robot henchman, yelling, “Now is not the time.”

Which leaves Vision anxious, worried that perhaps there will never be a correct time unless he reverts to the prior strategy of planning, one that has already proven fruitless and rife with complications.

A foot nudges his calf, eyes sliding to the side, Natasha in the co-pilot seat, her leg pulling away from his, crossing up and over her other one. “Want my advice?”

This is unusual, an understanding between the two of them that advice is only ever given when first solicited, an understanding that goes both ways and has for quite some time. Yet the offer is quite appealing.  “Please.”

“Okay.” Natasha uncrosses her legs, leaning forward to press three lit up buttons, initiating the landing sequence as they approach the compound. “Just do it. As soon as we land find her, drop down on one knee, and go.”

The advice churns in his head as he allows his muscle memory to guide his hands in flipping several switches before gripping the steering wheel, easing the quinjet down through the wispy cirrus clouds. “Based on the preparation for our mission and Sam’s myriad suggestions, I believed the proposal was meant to be more meaningful and memorable.”

Natasha places her hands on the secondary navigation controls, bracing her muscles in case of an emergency. “I mean I don’t have much experience with getting engaged, been proposed to a few times by unwitting marks, but what you say will be more memorable than where you ask, in my opinion.”

“I-” despite his best efforts he cannot seem to find a fault with the approach.  He has always utilized fairly straightforward tactics when it comes to serious topics of discussion with Wanda and it would be logical to remain on such a path, perhaps that is why this has been difficult, denying one’s nature will never feel right. “Thank you.”

Vision is concerned. Even the threads of his straightforward, no-nonsense plan are unraveling as he searches through the rooms of the compound -- the training facility, common space, kitchen, library, billiard room, swimming pool, labs, and the roof-- and finds them all empty. He returns to where he started, a scowl on his face as his eyes take in their bedroom once more. It is eerily clean, not a single shirt thrown over the back of the chair or a damp towel bunched on the floor right next to the convenient towel hook he installed, and, most vexing, is the fact the bed is pristine. All of this would be common had he been in the compound for the past three days, but given he has not, it leaves him perturbed, his fingers curling and uncurling at a rapid pace.

Though he cannot detect any movement or heat signatures in the space around him, he finds himself resorting to questionable actions as he feels a pebble of fear forming in this amygdala. “Wanda?”

Unsurprisingly he is met with dense silence, eyes narrowing as he pivots on the balls of his feet, studying every inch of the room for signs of where she might be, which is when he freezes, head cocking to the side at a small yellow post-it note adhered to the middle of their replica of The Park at Monceau Paris.  His feet leave the ground, a cautiousness in his hovering as he moves towards the painting. Gently he peels the note from the canvas, his brow bunching as he reads it.

Don’t look so concerned, Vizh. A minuscule smile forms on his face, Wanda’s handwriting instantly recognizable with the slightly sloppy slant and rounded letters. Remember what Sam meant for you to use instead of this picture? Come and find me.

Vision folds the sticky portion of the note down before putting it into the pocket of his pants, walking towards the door and then stopping. An exploratory pat to his pocket confirms his suspicion and he hovers to the bed, hand dipping into the mattress to grab the box. Just in case.

The hallways are quiet as he floats towards the kitchen, the creak of the hinges on the pantry door echoing in the empty room as he pushes aside boxes of cereal, bags of rice, aluminum cans, and loaves of bread. Eventually he comes across a box containing one cookie and a yellow note.

Thanks for the snack, you’re too sweet. Be careful at the next stop, you might get a brain scorpion.

Vision places the note with the first, wrapping the cookie in a paper towel, unsure how long this search is going to last and not wanting it to dry out, and phases up through the ceiling until he hits humid air and feels the caress of wind on his face. The next note is exactly where he suspected, this time taped to the bench on the roof that sits directly in front of the basil plants. All this one says is, Look again.  His feet leave the ground immediately, a haze of confusion forming at why she’d be in New York City, and then he remembers Sam’s suggestion. The original cradle is in the compound currently. With a small, determined smile, Vision continues his search.

Slowly he amasses a pile of notes (moving from Helen’s Lab to the rooftop lawn to the training room to his original room) and at some point even a partner in the search, Rhodes’ curiosity and boredom quickly morphing into an infectious excitement as they search through the compound. “What do you think you’re going to find with the last one?”

“I am unsure.” His mind is attempting to temper all the extra noise of spurious thoughts and conjectures so he can focus on the current clue - You’re my planet, not my moon. “Have you found the note?”  They are standing in the common space right where it happened, his feet working through the wider orbit of a moon and then the smaller, more intimate orbit of a planet, eyes locked on the surroundings for oddities, yet there is no note and no sign of where one might be located. The couch is empty, the table is empty, there is nothing on the television or the windows.

Rhodes checks inside the remotes and shrugs. “Nope. Anything else from that night? What else did you all do?”

All Vision can easily recall from that night is the way it felt to be so close to Wanda, the sparks that singed his skin whenever his shoulder brushed against hers and the way her hand felt on his chest, the exact pressure of her palm and the odd, thrilling heat that swelled within his body. A slow, steady breath out and he guides his thoughts earlier, to when they were sitting, her feet in his lap and the excruciating decision he had to make concerning whether it was acceptable to lay his hand on her foot or if he should keep it at a safe distance. “Oh, yes,” there are only six times that he can recall losing a game and that night was one of them (well, he lost multiple times that night but he lumps them all in as one instance), “we were playing Sequence.”

“Perfect.” Rhodes disappears for several minutes, returning with the box in one hand and the lid in the other. “Found it.” The box is offered to Vision and he reaches inside to pluck the note out. “What does it say?”

This one requires him to leave the compound and Vision hopes it means he is close to finding Wanda, his curiosity surging dangerously close to antsiness. “It says ‘I’d love some tea but I’d appreciate if you don’t get the barista’s number again.’”

“How many times have you gotten the barista’s number?”

Vision folds the note in the same way as the others, sticky side tucked under and adhered to the paper so he can keep it with the rest without them tangling too badly. “Roughly every third Tuesday. She is quite persistent, even with Wanda next to me, I believe it might be a game now.”

The astonished, wide-eyed gaze of Rhodes is slightly hurtful, but Vision is not surprised by the disbelief. “Interesting. Well,” the game is placed on the table before Rhodes steps up to Vision, hand patting his back twice with encouragement, “go get her! My money’s on her proposing, by the way.”

“Oh?”

“Yep, this,” Rhodes nods to the yellow corners sticking out of Vision’s pocket, “is proposal level dedication. Let me be the first to say congratulations!” All excitement and warmth rushes from Vision, a petrification of his body at the suggestion and a vertiginous fear threatening to send him into the couch. “Dude?” This is not according to plan and yet, the conjecture is not faulty given the carefully planned revisiting of key moments of their relationship, it just had not occurred to him that Wanda would spurn this tradition despite her endearing boldness to topple antiquated customs. A hand waves frantically in front of his eyes and Vision blinks. “You okay, Vision?”

Vision shoves his hand into his pocket, gripping the box and centering himself. “I-yes. That would be…wonderful. Thank you for your well wishes.”

The concern on Rhodes’ face is shoved aside by a wide smile, clearly unable to detect the apprehension gripping Vision, “Yeah, go get her, man.”

When Vision touches down outside the coffee shop he finds himself hesitating. The flight cleared his head, slightly, a shaky acceptance of what is to come though for some reason he finds himself disappointed knowing that all of his time and thought would be for naught. But, this is what bothers him most about his irrationally emotional response, it would achieve the same end as if he proposed which is most important and there is no logical reason to be upset.

A ding from the bell above the door dissipates through the air, “You didn’t seem to want to come inside, so here you go.” Alisha, green apron perennially tied in a haphazard, skewed fashion (by now he assumes on purpose) is standing in front of him, a steaming cardboard cup held between them.

“Thank you.” The cup is transferred slowly, a carefully learned maneuver to ensure none of the scalding liquid spills out on either person’s hand.

“You know you still haven’t called me.”

“I believe I have made it quite clear I am not romantically interested.”

The woman smirks at him, “Trust me, I know, you’re just fun to mess with, Mr. Serious.” A finger pokes playfully in the air at him as she turns to leave, throwing a genuine, "Have fun with Wanda," over her shoulder as she walks back into the coffee shop and leaves him alone.

Vision pulls the tea closer, tucking his elbow into his side to reduce the chance of spilling the liquid and then realizes that he needs the clue. With deliberate slowness he lifts the cup, rotating it to find a yellow note, but there is none. What he does find, however, is Wanda’s writing on the cup. 211 Leonia Drive. There is a sense of familiarity with the address and yet he cannot recall anything from their relationship tied to the words, unless he has somehow forgotten but that is highly unlikely. He inputs the address into his gps system, discovering it is only ten minutes from the coffee shop.

Though he can fly, he decides to walk, allowing himself ten minutes of calm, giving his parasympathetic system time to override the sympathetic system, send soothing neurotransmitters to his muscles, calming the erratic pulsing that has overtaken his body. This doesn’t happen, unfortunately, but his nerves are quickly replaced by confusion and curiosity as the path to the address transforms from a relatively busy street into a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, the houses ranging from traditional craftsman to colonial to Georgian, and then his breath catches in his lungs, fingers almost dropping the tea to the ground. Vision re-checks the writing on the cup, a waiver of uncertainty in his mind that he might have inputted the wrong address, but no, he is not mistaken.

The lawn is overgrown, grass and weeds practically up to his thighs, and there is a tree with drooping branches that needs to be trimmed, but behind these sits a gorgeous arctic blue Victorian house with sapphire trim. Vision swallows, fingers tightening around the cup as his mind whirls but is quickly rendered inert by an excited, nervous, “Vizh!” His eyes immediately locate the source, identifying Wanda’s smiling face peeking out the front door. “You just going to stand there?”

Before he can respond her head is gone and he finds his feet refusing to move so he resolves to hover to the door instead, soles only touching the porch once he reaches the door and hesitantly pushes it open.

The feeling of deja vu is unique, though at its epicenter is the notion you are unaware of the original source of recognition, but even with him knowing full well that he has perused the pictures of this house hundreds of times, he still feels that uncomfortable prickle along his arms and the way his thoughts scatter, attempting to form some sort of serviceable web to function. The inside is exactly as he expected, though with no lights on minus the table of candles in the middle of the room, he is unsure if all of the trim is pristine, any flaws hidden. But his attention does not linger, drawn towards Wanda standing near the table, a half-cocked smile on her face and her fingers interwoven, a nervous swing to her arms that he has only seen during rare and particularly tense situations. “Wanda?”

The other half of her smile appears, a crescent of worried anticipation as her fingers untangle and she throws her arms out to the side. “Surprise!” Vision understands the need to respond but cannot seem to fathom the appropriate way to approach this surprise mainly because he is uncertain what exactly is happening. The lack of response is clearly incorrect, Wanda’s smile floundering as her arms descend, fingers finding each other again while her eyes follow his in studying the wood trim along the walls. “It’s,” her voice draws him back, an uncharacteristic tremble of panic thickening her accent as her eyes bore into him, “the right one, right?”

A simple yes would be sufficient, but the fact she somehow knew about this, one of his most closely guarded thoughts, builds into a swell, cresting with horror at what else she has picked up from his semi-frequent daydreaming. “How did you know?”

Wanda’s smile softens, nervous fingers calming as she steps up to him, a hand coming to rest on his bicep, thumb moving in soothing circles. “I dreamed about it, a lot,” his body tenses at the admission, “some weeks every night and it took, well,” Wanda pauses, letting out a self-conscious laugh met with a shake of her head, “an embarrassing amount of time to realize it was from you, because-” the whisper of uncertainty that has gripped the air between them returns, growing louder until Wanda breaks it with a quiet, honest, “it’s what I wanted as well, with you. But you never brought it up so neither did I.”

All the images he has conjured late at night rush through his mind, the house, the furniture, Wanda smiling, tiny feet pattering on the hardwood floors, and then he processes her admission, that she couldn’t tell his daydream from her own wants. And now here they stand, in the middle of a very real house. “Are you implying this is ours?”

“Not yet,” a hollow pang of disappointment fills his stomach, “but,” the pang blossoms into hope at the way she grins at him and the squeeze of her fingers around his arm, “it can be, we just have to sign some papers. I didn’t want to finalize this without you.”

He scans the room around them, awed at the gesture, at the possibilities, and he isn’t sure what to say, a bit concerned at the malfunctioning of his verbal skills, particularly when all he can manage is an incomplete question, “How?”

This seems to be a trigger for her nervousness, which manifests in a tighter grip on his arm and a rush of words that slam into him, requiring him to slow down her explanation, play it back, and analyze it to fully parse all aspects. “Tony, mainly, he’s been helping with all the loans, since neither of us are really ideal candidates, he’s been getting impatient and I’ve been antsy but I was trying to wait to tell you because I thought you were going to ask me to m- well it’s been killing me to keep this from you but you deserve a grand gesture every now and then so I wanted it to be a surprise. Do you-, do you like it? I can’t tell.”

There are so many things to acknowledge, but he determines only the last is vital at the moment, squaring his body with her own so he can stare into her eyes, “I love it, Wanda.”

She sighs, relief smoothing the creases of her forehead. “Good, want a tour?”

“Very much.”

A tendril of scarlet steals the tea from his hand and places it on the table while her hand slides down his arm, lacing their fingers together before tugging him along behind her as she shows him the house. “It needs a lot of work,” an orb of scarlet leads them, illuminating the darkened space. Vision increases the glow of the Mindstone to help as well, eyes moving along the intricate, though cracked, wooden accents and archways, attempting to accept the realization that this is not a daydream, only the pressure of Wanda’s hand in his own confirming reality. “Unfortunately the kitchen is the worst.”

The counters are cracked and there are no appliances, several cabinets are missing as well. “I do not understand, the images online showed it to be in pristine condition.”

Wanda releases an annoyed huff, grip tightening around his fingers, “Yeah, apparently it was foreclosed, the previous owners wrecked it, and the bank used the old pictures.” A shrug goes along with the explanation. “But I figured we aren’t in a rush, I'm not sure Steve would approve us moving out yet, so we can fix it up, right? Make it our own.”

“I believe our abnormally high consumption of HGTV will finally be of use.”

A gentle laugh at his side pulls the smile that’s been hovering on his face up higher, “Oh, we’re going to end up on the renovation nightmare show, aren’t we?”

Vision shrugs, enjoying the carefree air around them, a rarity in recent weeks. “I have faith in our perseverance and problem solving.”  

“Don’t get cocky, Vizh.” A tug to his arm guides him to the left where Wanda opens the back door and leads him out onto a wooden deck, their feet following the planks until they are standing under an ivy-covered pergola. “This is my favorite spot.”

In all of his daydreams this spot was always his favorite as well. “It is lovely.”

“Look up.”

He obeys her command and is met with a small, oval opening at the top of the pergola giving way to a view of the star studded sky and in this moment he cannot breathe, thrilled and yet overwhelmed by everything around him, everything that has happened, and everything that is going to happen, unable to process all of the unknowns they're about to encounter. There is one thing, however, that is not in chaos, one small, stubborn pinpoint of absolute certainty: he loves this woman more than anything else in existence.

Vision phases his hand from hers, bringing his palms to cup her cheeks, bending to rest his forehead against hers, their eyes locked. “I love you, Wanda Maximoff.” The dilation of her pupils and the scrunch of her eyes in sheer elation confirms his suspicions, traps the moment long enough for him to finally act. A deep breath and a quiet, heartfelt kiss gives him just enough time to gather his thoughts, trying to remember everything he wanted to say to her. “I- I am in awe that I can say that to you.  I never thought I would find someone who viewed me as human, as capable of love. But you do and because of you I’ve accepted my humanity as truth. You,” his voice falters slightly but the gleam in her eyes and the rapturous smile on her face urges him on, her breath shallow, bated with expectancy as she stays silent to let him continue, “are strong-willed and bold, compassionate and vulnerable, and I have never and will never encounter anyone as bewitching as you, anyone who challenges my logic, inspires me to feel, who makes me realize I am alive.” He strokes her cheek, blinks and regrets it, realizing he missed a millisecond of her stare. “You are a singular, inspiring, fascinating, and stunning woman.” Vision breaks, knows he is supposed to fall to one knee but he cannot wrest himself from her eyes, does not want to suffer the chill on his skin if he were to pull away, “Wanda Maximoff, will you please marry me?”

“Took you long enough.”

“You- does that- is that a-”

She lifts onto her toes just enough to bring her lips to his, her hands gripping his sides, “You were doing so well, stammering’s not your style, Vizh.” The implication is yes but his lungs hold his breath hostage until the word comes from her mouth and his body cannot function enough to even kiss her back, frozen, hanging on the tip of her lips for an answer.  “Yes, Vision, that’s a yes, of course I’ll marry you.”

The words vibrate against his lips and he devours them, capturing her mouth and channeling every thought, every emotion, every of ounce of his love into the kiss, barely registering the way the lingering tension between them erupts, the emptiness replaced with something intangible, ineffable, but perfectly serene, comforting, and exhilarating.  Their embrace ends and his smile matches the broad, full-bodied arc of her mouth. “I,” Vision remembers only then that there is one more part to this, his hand reaching into this pocket, “have a ring.”

He opens the box and holds it out for her, finds himself filled with worry at the burgeoning tears in her eyes, but her smile has not fallen, in fact, if possible, it has grown broader. “It’s gorgeous.”

Vision grabs the ring, positions his fingers along the outside (or so the videos Sam forced him to watch suggested this to be the best method), and slides his other hand under her left palm. “May I?”

The struggle to not roll her eyes is valiant, but it would not be Wanda if she didn’t indicate clearly when he’s asking an unnecessary question. Regardless she always answers. “Yes, Vizh.”

Gingerly he slides the ring along her finger, the process not as smooth as he would like, the ring catching on her knuckle but she continues to smile, encourages him with a wiggle of her finger until he is successful. “I hope it is acceptable. It,” he draws her hand up, thumb running over the stone and the intricate, delicate metal work of the band, “is an opal, from Sokovia, reinforced with vibranium so you can safely wear it on missions, if you wish.”

Wanda runs her hand along his cheek, the feeling of her rings not a new sensation, but this one, this one is far different, it is cold but ignites a fire under his skin, one that he knows will never die, nor grow old, nor disappear, one that he will feel for 100 trillion years. “I love it, Vizh, almost as much as I love you.”

She kisses him again and everything about this moment, about this night, about this woman feels inexplicably right.

[lodelss]

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Four: The Preacher and the Politician

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 27 minutes (7,641 words)

Part 4 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. 

I.

To get to the Kingdom of Heaven, drive a long twisting road that dips in and out of wide green fields dotted with hay bales, skim alongside a crooked river and stop at the sign that says Marble Country. A wooden ranch gate — a tall archway of timber and American flags — marks the spot. Keep going past it for 20 more minutes and you’ll leave the country altogether; drive under that gate, and in a way, you’ll leave America, too.

For nearly 30 years, speculation about what goes on beyond the threshold to Marble Country has confused, scared, and angered folks here in Stevens County — a far-flung region of thick forests and dirt roads, cow pastures and low hills deep in the northeastern corner of Washington state.

Before the first barn wall could be raised on the site of a ghost town, people were already whispering. “Religious Group Says Fear Of Cult Unjustified,” a 1992 Associated Press headline read, “Pentecostal Sect Plans To Move Into Ghost Town.”

That religious group, led by a married couple named Barry and Anne Byrd, intended to create its very own Western-themed shining city on the hill: what they termed a “Christian covenant community.” They called it Marble Country, and they built houses and a church — Marble Community Fellowship — and painted “Holy Ghost Town” on an old barn. They raised families, planted crops. It wasn’t just a new town put down in an old place, but an old place resurrected. A brochure said Marble would get into all levels of politics, offer alternative civil courts and an alternative media.

“We are committed to uniting the generations to labor together to bring the dominion of Christ in every area of life,” the Byrds promised in the brochure. 

For most of the time Marble Country has existed, the Byrds have hosted an event each summer called the God and Country Celebration. As the Patriot movement has made more and more headlines — between the standoffs at Bundy Ranch in 2014 and Malheur in 2016, and the subsequent trials — the name Marble kept popping up in my reporting. People who’d once been in the movement told me the festival was a gathering of militia bigwigs, Patriot celebrities, and politicians with extreme beliefs. It sounded like some kind of Patriot Woodstock, but it’s closed to the media, so I couldn’t go see it for myself.

In the summer of 2018, Jeanette Finicum was a “special guest” at the festival, bringing with her the message of her murdered, martyred husband. During the weekend, children in cowboy hats and jeans waved big white flags from the Marble stage bearing her husband’s distinct “LV” cattle brand. 

Finicum chose Marble as one of the first places to screen LaVoy: Dead Man Talking, a multipart film about her husband. There she delivered a speech that differed greatly in tone from the one she gave when I saw her speak in Salem, Oregon, just six months later. Someone sent me a recording of her Marble speech: She wasn’t the diminutive chuck-wagon mom I’d seen in Salem, but a pissed-off activist with a message ready for an audience who cheered her on.

“The media is not in the business of telling the truth,” she spat into the microphone. 

The Marble crowd murmured approval — yes, yes, that’s right, amen.

“Their job, their motive, their mission is to create an illusion in order to blur our reality. I was label-lynched by them as a sovereign citizen, anti-government terrorist. Profiled as a domestic right-wing extremist and judged by the American public for standing with my husband,” she said. She told them she was on a watch list. The feds monitored her home.

She never used that word — lynching — when I saw her speak in Salem, but here, both she and Mark Herr, the film’s producer, spoke it as if it were a word created for them. They have been lynched, they told the crowd, again and again. Lynched. 

The lynch mob, by their estimation, was the media: inflicting extrajudicial punishment to God-fearing freedom lovers. How dare anyone go after them?

“Your political opponents are using labels and the force of government to lynch you out of existence! What can you do?” Finicum asked. “You can make label-lynching a hate crime.” She told the crowd to lobby state legislators to make Patriots a special class. 

“We should be a protected class,” she yelled. “After all, everyone else is!”

To that, the crowd cheered so loud it was almost hard to hear her anymore. 

***

For decades, Stevens County, where Marble Country is located, has served as somewhat of a wooded, mountainous petri dish for conspiracy theories to grow, flourish, and find new hosts. For most of that time, one daily newspaper reporter was there to document the crimes committed by fringe groups who’ve found haven in the Stevens County’s sparsely populated areas. His name is Bill Morlin, and for decades he worked at the Spokane Daily Chronicle, then The Spokesman-Review. Now in his 70s, I first met him in the federal courtroom during the Bundys’ short-lived trial in Las Vegas. 

In the spring of 2019, I called him up to get a crash course on Stevens County’s right-wing extremist history. Something that may come as a surprise to people who aren’t familiar with the Inland Northwest is that the Northwestern United States isn’t all rain showers and mountains and Nirvana records, coffee shops and weed stores on every corner. 

In fact, Eastern Washington and North Idaho couldn’t be less in line with that image. It’s a deeply conservative area of the West. It’s hot and dry in the summer, cold as hell in the winter. In the past few years, some people have started to call this region the American Redoubt — the nickname survivalists and preppers have given Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, arguing that it’s a safe haven for libertarians. The term was popularized by James Wesley Rawles, who calls the people who migrated there for that reason “the remnant. Libertarians and preppers from around the country have been encouraged to make a home here. There are even “redoubt realtors” who’ll sell you a house, complete with a bomb shelter.

I came to talk to Morlin about Stevens County, but also about this region as a whole. He came prepared for our meeting with three pages, single-spaced, detailing various murders, robberies, kidnappings, and bombings committed by people from the county.

You can’t talk about the violent history of Stevens County without first understanding the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group who had a compound in nearby north Idaho — two hours from Stevens County. It was one of the first violent groups in the Pacific Northwest he recalls writing about. Morlin tells me about a 1983 cross-burning ceremony at the Aryan Nations he covered.

In the late 1970s, Richard Butler, who would become one of the most famous white supremacists in the country, had set up the swastika-emblazoned compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho, attracting racists from every corner of the country to the Idaho Panhandle. Butler allowed Morlin and a photographer to document the event, which the newspaper had been trying to cover, as a way of attempting to understand who, exactly, was gathering at the compound. 

“There was sort of a division, like do we pay these people any attention or do we ignore them?” he recalled of his paper’s coverage of cross burnings. “In fact a columnist at the other newspaper thought we were foolish for writing about the fact that there’d been a cross burning. He was of the school of thought that if you ignore them, they’ll go away, and by writing about them all you’re doing is giving them publicity. 

“I have never to this day signed on to that belief system,” Morlin continued. “Neither do major civil rights organizations. They believe that turning the lights on is the only way you can deal with hate groups.”

The cross burning was called the Blessing of the Weapons and was presided over by former Michigan KKK grand dragon Robert Miles. (In 1973, Miles was convicted of conspiring to bomb ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan.) 

“It was very uncomfortable,” Morlin said. As the group of 40 to 50 people lit three crosses wrapped in diesel-soaked burlap, “each person in the circle would walk up with with his weapon … knives or handguns or long rifles. And each of them would be blessed by the master of ceremonies. The ceremony was to signify that these people were committing to the white cause and the fight for the white race that they envisioned was coming any day.”

That night, Morlin didn’t know who exactly all those men were that had their guns blessed in the name of a white war — but soon, he would. They would become known as the Order. It was an all-white underground domestic terrorist organization established by an anti-government extremist and racist named Bob Mathews, who had been actively recruiting people to create a “White American Bastion” in the Pacific Northwest and was motivated, in part, by an extremist ideology called Christian Identity. 

It’s an ideology that relies on the belief that Jews are descendants of Cain, and people of color are soulless and “beasts of the field,” while whites are the true “House of Israel.” Some Identity adherents believe Jews are the spawn of Eve and Satan. Butler, too, preached Christian Identity from his very own church at the compound. Around the nation, neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan also believed in the radical ideology. 

Nationwide, as violent white supremacist fires flared, Christian Identity — time and time again — was the pitch wood making it burn hot and constant.

The men of the Order met at a cabin on Mathews’s Northeastern Washington property which was located in the county next to Stevens County. They “stood in a circle secretly and pledged a blood oath to each other to jointly fight this race war that they believed was coming,” Morlin told me. 

Morlin believes the men were inspired by a work of racist, apocalyptic fiction, a novel called The Turner Diaries that details a race war, and that, later, compelled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  

According to Morlin, the men at the ceremony eventually committed “a litany” of violent acts, most notably the 1984 assassination of a Jewish radio host named Alan Berg, who’d mocked a tenet of Christian Identity — that Jews were evil incarnate — on his Denver talk show. They committed a robbery in Spokane, bombed a synagogue in Boise, and robbed armored cars in Seattle. But investigators were baffled, unable to figure out who was responsible for so much violence. 

“This is in an era before the term ‘terrorist’ meant anything to anybody. I mean it’s like ‘Domestic terrorism? What’s that?’” Morlin said.

During a Northern California robbery of several million dollars from an armored car, Mathews left a handgun behind — a mistake that would eventually lead to the downfall of the Order. Mathews died in a shoot-out before the group’s 1985 trial in Seattle, which Morlin covered for the Spokesman-Review.

“A lot of the East Coast networks and newspapers had pretty much ignored the fact that the Order trial had occurred,” he says. “It was really a big deal, but it had happened on the West Coast and it didn’t get the news coverage, in my view, that it would have received if it had been in Florida or New York or Ohio or Pennsylvania.”

In fact, the Order created a new legacy for up-and-coming racists to follow: Today, violent white supremacist groups still cite an adherence to a mission statement called “The 14 Words” — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — which was coined by one of the Order’s members. 

The men of the Order weren’t exactly quiet about the ideas that drove them: Mathews and other members of the group were known to convene at a Colorado Christian Identity church led by an anti-Jewish, anti-homosexual, and racist preacher named Pete Peters. Despite its small population, by the 1990s, Stevens County was home to at least two Christian Identity churches: the Ark, near the Canadian border, and another founded by a former Ark acolyte, the Christian Israel Covenant Church. (The Ark is now called Our Place Fellowship; the Christian Israel Covenant Church disbanded in the early 2000s.)

“Those churches taught that white people are the superior race, that Jews are biologically satanic,” Morlin told me. 

The churches were small — and though the pastor at the Ark, Dan Henry, told The Spokesman-Review in 1992 that he rejected the “hate mongering” of the Aryan Nations, he also acknowledged preaching antisemitic ideas. 

But word had gotten around. People knew who was attending services. So it was common knowledge that the couple trying to start that new Christian covenant community called Marble Country — Barry and Anne Byrd — had attended the Ark for years. 

It was like the county knew what was about to happen — that this tiny bastion of hateful ideas was about to cross the rubicon, producing a number of followers who would spill blood in the name of Identity ideology all around the American West.

***

The racist services at The Ark were attended not only by adults who wanted to hear the sermons of Henry and other extremists, but also often by the children of those people, too. Chevie Kehoe fit the profile of one of those kids. Raised in part in Stevens County, his parents, Kirby and Gloria Kehoe, brought their children to services at the Ark, likely around the same time the Byrds attended. As his children grew older, Kirby Kehoe, an adamant racist, grew increasingly skeptical of the government, pulling his kids out of their Colville, Washington, public school, viewing schools “as a threat,” according to his son. In a 1999 New York Times interview, Chevie said his parents were interested in the notion of a whites-only region preached by the Order’s Mathews, and over time Chevie believed that he himself could bring the plan to fruition in the Northwest. He called the region the Aryan People’s Republic, and began committing robberies and acts of violence in devotion to the concept. 

In the late 1990s, he launched a cross-country trip to recruit people to his white region — a trip that turned into a spree of murders, shootings, and robberies.

In 1996, Chevie Kehoe robbed and murdered a man, his wife, and her 8-year-old daughter in Arkansas, then tossed their bodies into the Illinois Bayou. The next year, when police officers in Ohio pulled over Kehoe and his brother, Cheyne, and in two subsequent shoot-outs, Kehoe fired 33 bullets, seriously injuring a pedestrian before fleeing. Both were arrested after a brief manhunt, and Chevie was later sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. 

Even decades after Chevie Kehoe’s imprisonment, the whites-only nation idea that invigorated him, Mathews, and the Order before him, would keep surfacing in new ways and in new forms.

Kehoe is now incarcerated at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Fremont County, Colorado, alongside McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols and 1996 Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, who was inspired by Christian Identity to bomb abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

In 2012, serial killer Israel Keyes, who grew up with the Kehoe brothers and who also occasionally attended the Ark as a child, confessed to committing robberies and murders from coast to coast before reportedly dying by suicide in a jail cell. It’s unclear if his crimes were inspired by any sort of ideology, but during the 1990s, his father wrote a letter of support for both the Byrds and Pete Peters that was published in the local paper.

Keyes wrote that it wasn’t illegal to practice Christian Identity: “It is my understanding that the Marble Community Fellowship has very little to do with the Christian Identity Movement, but so what? Haven’t we as Americans a right to exercise a belief in God and celebrate our white heritage and Christian religion? After all, many Jews consider their race to be God’s chosen people. Is this not racism at its zenith?”

Morlin told me that he reported from a meeting of the Stevens County Assembly — an anti-government militia — in 2012, in which neo-Confederate Pastor John Weaver spoke. Weaver gives racist sermons from the pulpit — sometimes in front of a Confederate flag, sometimes wearing a Confederate flag–printed tie — railing against interracial marriage, and advocating for slavery. By the time of the meeting, he was no stranger to Eastern Washington. In the early 1990s, he appeared at a Spokane conference of white supremacists, during which he promoted his book that urged Americans to break laws should the government become occupied by Jews.

In 2015, Weaver was back in Stevens County to give another speech — this time, he was onstage at Marble Country. 

  II.

Marble’s God and Country Festival wouldn’t be what it is without a speech from a Washington State House Representative from a district two hours away. 

His name is Matt Shea. A clean-cut Army veteran with a law degree, Shea wears thin glasses, dresses in crisply ironed shirts, and smiles tightly. He positions himself as a voice of rural people, but actually represents a district that includes Spokane Valley, a largely suburban city of almost 100,000. 

Rep. Matt Shea at a January 2017 gun-rights rally in Olympia, Washington. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

Shea, over the course of six two-year terms, has become a fixture at the far-right edge of what Washingtonians consider Republican. He rarely speaks to reporters — unless they work for publications that have the words “liberty” or “redoubt” in their name. I know more people who’ve done in-person interviews with President Trump than with State Representative Shea, and for years, I worked at newspapers that covered his district. 

In order for Shea’s constituents to get an understanding of his ideas, they need to tune into his podcast. The show always takes the same format: Shea reads off some headlines from right-wing news sites, then interviews a guest, while often piping up in agreement with their outlandish theories. 

Those guests tend to hold views reflected in the bills Shea introduces in the Washington House. They’re unflinching Second Amendment advocates. This spring, a woman on the program preached abstinence-only sex education and an anti-vaccine “researcher” claimed that child immunizations are contaminated with aborted fetuses. 

Mostly, they’re conspiracy theorists and bigots with views Shea parrots. This spring, the legislator hosted a representative from an anti-abortion and homophobic group that has participated in burnings of the Quran. He interviewed a man who spouted talking points from conspiracists who believe in Agenda 21 — a theory that sustainable development is a shady plan hatched by a “New International Economic Order” to control people and take their freedom. Recently, he hosted a conspiracy theorist who believes the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were actually a “controlled demolition.” 

You could say Shea is a lot like Bill Keebler — except he wears a suit and taxpayers pay him a salary. 

Shea, for years, has seemed at home among the creators of fake news and conspiracy theories that turn violent. As early as 2009, he made several appearances on conspiracy king Alex Jones’s InfoWars show, where Jones introduced him with reverence. “Representative,” he says, “good to have you on with us.” In that February 2009 interview, Shea and Jones spoke of their belief that the federal government was setting up camps to imprison Americans. 

It seems as though in Shea’s world, the country is on the verge of collapse. People will have to fight for their lives. And he intends to be prepared: “If you do not have 5,000 rounds of .223, 5,000 rounds of .22 and a thousand rounds of handgun ammo as a minimum, you’re wrong!” he called from an Idaho stage in 2013. 

“We want to prepare for the inevitable collapse that’s gonna happen. And yes, I said that as a politician here onstage. It’s gonna happen! We all know that! The question is, and I think the question should be for all of us, what are we gonna do afterwards? What are we gonna do with that opportunity?”

Apocalypse, government collapse, anarchy — in his world, these are exciting prospects. Opportunities even. A chance at a fresh start, a time to get society back on track. 

In this fantasy apocalypse, perhaps being well-prepared and well-armed will be so necessary that the person you were in the past — in the pre-collapse — won’t matter. Money will be obsolete. Laws won’t be enforced. Maybe a violent past will suddenly be seen as an asset. 

This might have special appeal for Shea. His ex-wife, who filed for divorce in 2007, alleged that Shea grabbed her so hard during two arguments that he left bruises on her arms. In those same divorce filings, she told stories of a controlling man; by her account, he commanded her to always walk on his left side because a soldier needs to be able to draw his sword from the right. (Shea was in the Army and served in combat, but his wife said he did not traditionally carry a sword.)

Shea did not respond to requests for comment, but when asked a decade ago about his divorce by the Spokesman-Review, he denied any violence and said, “I love my wife and, when I married, I intended it to be for life. Unfortunately, my former wife didn’t and decided to pursue her third divorce.”

In 2011, Matt Shea was involved in a road rage incident in Spokane, in which another driver alleged Shea pulled a gun. In a police report, Shea told officers that as an Iraq war veteran he had to use “evasive techniques” to avoid hitting the man’s car (which Shea described as engaging in “Baghdad driving”), and proceeded to follow it. Shea admitted to officers that he had a gun in his car, that he produced it from a glovebox during the incident, and that he had an expired concealed carry permit. The other driver said he saw the handgun and was afraid Shea was going to shoot him. Later, Shea’s attorney made a deal with prosecutors that resulted in the charges being dropped.

Even now, in a time he surmises is the end of civil society, all of this has become standard Shea stuff. None of his past did real damage to his standing with voters. But it didn’t mean the things he said didn’t set people on edge. 

In the spring of 2014, a woman was eating at a Spokane Valley Mexican restaurant when she overheard a conversation between two men at the next table over. Later, she found out those men were Shea and the head of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes. 

But sitting there, hearing them, she became so concerned over what they were saying that she took their picture and called the police. According to a police dispatch, the woman overheard “a conversation from a group of males talking about snipers, Clive [sic] Bundy, and public militias.” One of the individuals, she told the police, had “thermal imaging binoculars,” and the group sounded “like they were planning something.”

Still, Shea won the election that year with 57 percent of the vote. 

If he could sit in a diner with one of the biggest militia leaders in this country and openly talk about military tactics, it seemed like Shea could be as extreme as he wanted — and it wouldn’t cost him any support. And even some of the most conservative Republicans in Eastern Washington were baffled by how Shea stayed in office. 

Two of those people are Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich and a former Republican state legislator from Stevens County, John Smith. In a three-part podcast on white supremacy in the region, the pair suggested that Shea’s involvement at Marble Country was something voters should worry about. It was a part of a deep history of racism and hate that had found a home in this region going way back.

Smith was raised by his grandparents in southern Idaho — and his grandfather was friends with people in the Aryan Nations and in the Order. Their home often had new people coming through the door. He remembered his grandfather laying maps out in the kitchen nook and drawing up plans for “an armed revolt.” 

Smith realized on his own the ideology he’d been raised around was rotten and that he had to find a way out of it. He took a job as a ranch hand when he was 16 years old, and as a young adult, he attended church at the Ark. He was later married there, though he says he and his wife have since cut their connections with the church. 

But he told me that it’s become something of a mission for him to speak up when he sees ideas rooted in Christian Identity catching on here. Stevens County has a history — he knows it, everyone does, even though racists have always been a fringe minority. And in a podcast with Knezovich, Smith hoped people would hear stories of his childhood as a cautionary tale. 

“I grew up in that environment, and that stuff doesn’t wash off you. I acknowledge that darkness might still be inside me,” he told me. He maintains that he’s constantly trying to make sure he’s free of it, that he root out any part of him that might still carry what he learned as a kid — asking friends who aren’t white, who weren’t raised around neo-Nazis, if he’s changed. 

“I actively go to them and say, ‘Look at me and tell me, is it still in me? Am I still saying the wrong things? Am I still thinking of this in the wrong way?’ I’m trying to not have that be in there anymore. And maybe part of that is standing up and saying this is not OK.” 

Smith, in the video versions of the podcast was small and diminutive next to Knezovich. The latter is a tall, hulking man with a bald head and a sidearm, who shook my hand firmly and didn’t smile once when I interviewed him in a conference room at the Spokane County Sheriff’s office last summer. 

He told me he sees Shea’s increasingly conspiratorial rhetoric and the allegations of aggressive behavior against him through a lens of one reality his department deals with regularly: that racism is alive and well in his county. He talked about getting a call one morning that KKK flyers had appeared plastered all over a suburb called Millwood, and about teenagers spouting white nationalist talking points in the hallways of local high schools. 

He also talked about threats. Since Knezovich — a member of the local Republican party and a man who twice endorsed Shea — started speaking up about Shea, he has received death threats from people associated with the legislator. 

“I’ve got my estate in order. I’ve got my will done. The kids have all been briefed. And don’t take this as me being flippant. Nobody wants to die. I came to grips with death a long, long time ago,” he says. “And there’s been more people than I that have died for this country. And if that’s what it takes for people to wake up to what’s happening around them. All right. I love my nation. And if it takes fighting these people on these terms? Bring it on.”

***

In 2015, Shea was at the God and Country Celebration again, this time next to John Weaver — the neo-Confederate preacher. The next year, many of the legislators from around the West who sympathized with the Bundys in both 2014 and 2016 showed up to Marble, too. 

In some years, Anne Byrd posted photos to Facebook of the people who came to Marble. In the caption of a picture of Val Stevens, a former Washington state rep, Byrd wrote that Marble was “blessed” for legislators to be “standing in the gap” for the people.

By the summer of 2018, in the months before the election when many legislators campaign in their districts, Matt Shea appeared alongside Jeanette Finicum at the God and Country Festival. He talked about an idea he’d been shopping for years in the Washington statehouse: He wanted to secede Eastern Washington and create “a safe haven,” a 51st state called Liberty. 

Shea insisted people east of the Cascades just didn’t agree with the values of “downtown Seattle,” so why even try to get along? “I would submit, here in Eastern Washington, we believe in the right of self defense. We also believe the constitution means what it says,” he told another crowd. Seattle doesn’t because, he says, it is filled with communists. “And communism, real communism, has killed more people as an ideology than any other ideology in this history of the world — atheist communism.” 

All this time Shea spent up here in Stevens County, far from his district, he wasn’t recruiting any new voters. But it did appear he was amassing a following for a political movement, of which he was a leader and visionary. 

I wanted to ask him about that, but last summer he didn’t respond to my email requests for an interview. In his personal security detail (having one is atypical for a state rep), Shea is known to employ a man who lives at Marble, and who once tried to bring an AK-47 onto the grounds of the Spokane federal courthouse, but he has no press liaison. 

So I figured if I really wanted to ask him a question, and get any kind of an answer, I should show up to a gun rally where he was slated to be a featured speaker.

It was a hot August day — a dry heat, as people in Eastern Washington like to say. The rally was to be held at a large, grassy green park on the northside of Spokane — much closer to his district than Stevens County, but still not in it. A place where people play softball and lay out picnics. On this day, a small crowd gathered. For the most part, they wore shirts emblazoned with proclamations of love for guns and freedom, but several wore militia gear and carried militia flags. Several carried AR-15s.

I listened to Shea give a speech,  one that would go on to make headlines around the West, in which he called journalists “dirty, godless, hateful people.” The small crowd — which included leaders and members of the 63rd Lightfoot militia and a local politician who once stomped on the United Nations flag in front of Spokane City Hall — loved it. They cheered Shea on as he yelled, wide-eyed, pumping his fists. 

When he was finished, I trudged across the grass, introduced myself, and said I was hoping to ask him some questions: about this 51st State idea and his affinity for speaking at Marble each year. To my surprise, he agreed to talk. 

When we spoke — Redoubt News filming it all at Shea’s request — it was hard to track what he was saying. He said a lot of words, but none of them made much sense to me. When I asked about the idea for the state of Liberty, he responded by talking about Irish penal codes. When I asked about the rumors of racism at Marble, he talked about his wife being persecuted for her religion in the Soviet Union. 

He said that whatever I’d heard about Marble — that maybe it was a home for Christian Identity believers and white supremacists — was a bunch of lies. 

Later, I asked Bill Morlin about Shea’s plan for a 51st state — if that felt similar to what Bob Mathews once wanted, what Chevie Kehoe thought he could bring to life. “Richard Butler wanted a whites-only homeland in the Northwest, which isn’t that much different than a 51st state, because the 51st state that Matt Shea’s talking about, the demographics of it would be mostly white,” he says. 

In fact, Morlin says lots of things he heard Butler speak about from the pulpit at the Aryan Nations have become things politicians around the country are now repeating. Butler, he says, talked of “mongol hordes” streaming over the Mexican border. 

“What I heard Richard Butler talk about and espouse and preach about 40-some years ago,” he says, “I’m now hearing from the White House.”

***

In October 2018, a couple of months after I talked to Matt Shea in the park in Spokane, he was back in the news again. Some guys who used to work for him leaked a document to the local media: an outline titled “The Biblical Basis for War.” They said Matt Shea wrote it.  

“Make an offer of peace before declaring war,” it reads. It says the enemy must “surrender on terms of justice and righteousness: stop all abortions, no same-sex marriage, no idolatry or occultism, no communism, must obey Biblical law.” 

It concludes: “If they do not yield, kill all males.”

The man who turned the document loose to reporters is named Tanner Rowe. He’s a big guy who looks like a linebacker, and when I pull up to his mother’s Spokane Valley home to chat, his motorcycle is parked out front and he’s in the garage hammering away at a broken barstool. At one point in our interview, he rolls up his sleeve to show off a “Don’t Tread on Me” tattoo. He says he most identifies with libertarians, but he hates political labels.

Rowe used to be a bouncer, and he was hired by a guy in Shea’s camp — a man named Jay Pounder — to work the door at Shea’s 2016 election night party. He says Shea and his entourage were worried antifa might show up. They were looking for people like Rowe, he says, who were handy with a gun.

In fact, the event went off without incident. But one night of work was enough for Rowe; he says it was “strange” — says the fervor and excitement around the Trump victory bordered on some kind of religiosity. Like a revelation had come true. Like their problems had suddenly turned to vapor. It all left him with a bad feeling.

As it was, Rowe left town soon thereafter — took a job roughnecking in the North Dakota oil fields, splitting his time between there and Spokane. But he’s on Facebook, and he kept seeing chatter about 51st state meetings happening up in Stevens County, where he has friends. Shea, he says, was the guy leading the idea. 

Rowe admits: He kind of likes the concept of a new state — at least he used to. Like most Western states, Washington’s politics often sway toward the votes of its few cities. States in the West are big, with tons of wide-open space and sparsely placed cities with large populations. For people in rural counties in Washington or Oregon or Nevada, it can feel like their votes don’t really matter — like, no matter what, the big cities always get their way.

So, initially, Rowe was interested. But then, he says, he started seeing concern among his friends — particularly over a flyer handed out at one 51st state meeting, detailing what “Liberty” would really look like. 

“No gay marriage,” the handout read. “No legalized marijuana.” The state would have no department of ecology, no conservation district. The flyer quoted the Old Testament, the Book of Joshua: “Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, to the land which I am giving to them — the Children of Israel.”

“Blessings be upon each of you who are willing to stand in the gap between God and Country,” it concluded.

The religious references bugged Rowe. He and some libertarian friends wondered what all this Bible talk was about, all this exclusion and rollbacks of things when, all along, they’d been thinking a new state would just shelf unnecessary regulations and adopt the rugged culture of Washington’s eastern half.

So Rowe decided to ask some questions. He got on Facebook, posted comments to Shea’s page. “I asked him, ‘Well, so, like, is this going to be like a theocracy?’” he says. “If you’re gonna sit here and tell me it’s for liberty, but it’s only going to be for the liberty of the people you agree with and the lifestyles you agree with, that isn’t liberty. Right?

“His immediate response was I am a part of the ‘deep state,’ I’m an antifa subversive,” Rowe says. Then Shea blocked him. 

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Shea’s message — to Rowe and any dissenters — came through loud and clear to Rowe: “If you don’t agree with Liberty State, or if you even have questions about Liberty State, you’re essentially fighting against it,” Rowe says, paraphrasing Shea. “You’re an anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-liberty godless heathen.”

Not long after the online scuffle with Shea, Rowe heard from Jay Pounder again. He’s the guy who recruited him to work security in 2016.

Pounder showed Rowe the “Biblical Basis for War” — that screed about holy war. Rowe agreed to release it to the media while Pounder stayed on the sidelines, concerned about his family. He knew Shea better than most and was concerned how he might react.

But in public, Shea scoffed at the leak: “First of all, it was a summary of a series of sermons on biblical war in the Old Testament as part of a larger discussion on the history of warfare,” Shea said in a Facebook Live video shortly thereafter, where he didn’t back away from the document. “This document, in and of itself, was not a secret,” he said. (When Pounder showed me the document in the summer of 2018, metadata showed “Matthew Shea” as the author.)

Shea says it was notes on “just war theory.” But, I talked to a few theologians at Shea’s alma mater, Gonzaga University, about that, and they said the “Biblical Basis for War” doesn’t even resemble just war theory; it looks more like a scorched-earth war plan. And the Old Testament explanation doesn’t hold up either: There was no communism back when the Bible was written. 

People like John Smith saw the document as a reboot of the plans his grandfather and other Aryan Nations acolytes would refer to back when he was a kid. “I know what my grandfather was talking about all those years ago. And when I see other people mimicking or utilizing his same talking points today, that whole violent takeover things, it concerns me,” he told me last fall. “If they’re sharing a few of the same talking points, maybe they share all of them?

“I can tell you that outline? That would have been meat and potatoes at a Christian Identity gathering,” he says. “That document so closely mirrored so much of what my grandfather and his buddies talked about on a regular basis.” 

But, ultimately, releasing the document didn’t have any effect. Donors requested the campaign to return a few thousand bucks — but he still won the 2018 election with 57 percent of the votes. That is, by more than 10,000 votes. 

“I’ve had death threats, and Tanner’s had death threats,” Pounder tells me, months later, in the winter of 2019, when we meet in the lobby of a downtown Spokane hotel. He’s a bald guy with glasses who dresses sharp and works for a Christian college. By then, he was public about his concern over Shea. “It was hard for me to walk away from those guys. Because yeah, I considered the man a brother. I really did.”

In April, Pounder released a new bombshell to The Guardian: group texts from 2017 with Shea and other far-right figures who also have been featured guests on the Marble stage. In one group chat, some of the men fantasized about violence against liberal protesters: talking of slamming peoples’ faces into concrete barriers and hanging them from flagpoles by their nipple rings. And Shea, amidst that chatter, reportedly chimed in with an offer to background check anyone the men suggested.

In another text thread, in which some of the same men discussed mailing a wolf’s tail and testicles to an environmental activist who showed up at Malheur to protest the occupation, Pounder offered up the man’s home address. 

But it was this twisting of religion that got to Pounder. He explains that he’s a devout Christian, and so when he saw Shea using the 51st state idea to advocate for a theocracy, taken in tandem with his frequent appearances at Marble, he felt he couldn’t stay quiet. 

“Over time, it almost seems like his belief system has changed,” Pounder tells me. “And it’s become more radical. So the more he has regressed into this dominionist position he’s taking, the more radical he’s become in the way he approaches things.”

That word — dominionism. It’s an evangelical belief system: “More of a world view than a discrete set of tenets,” Sara Diamond wrote in the definitive 1995 book Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. She explains that the idea became more widely appealing to Christians after Pat Robertson, a televangelist, ran a failed campaign for president in 1988.

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

“Essentially, dominionism revolved around the idea that Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns,” Diamond writes.

One point of origin for dominion theology was a 1981 book called A Christian Manifesto, penned by evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who argued that America began as a nation rooted in biblical principles, but as the country changed, politics and laws became dominated by humanists — godless people who valued human agency over Christian dogma. Schaeffer argued that abortion and nonreligious teachings in public schools would become the norm if Christians didn’t fix things. Get society back on track. Refound the country.

The ideas pushed by Schaeffer were popular among some Christian Reconstructionists, a group of evangelicals who envisioned a rebuilt America as, essentially, a theocracy ruled by Old Testament law. One Schaeffer acolyte, Jay Grimstead, formed the Coalition on Revival (COR) and created religious-based education curriculum to be used in public schools. Grimstead, later, would briefly live at Marble Country and become close friends with the Byrds.

One preeminent scholar of dominionism was Rousas John Rushdoony, who believed society should be governed by the laws of the Old Testament Israel alone, and by his estimation, a society governed by the Bible would allow for the execution of anyone who violated the Ten Commandments. Dominionism, to him, appeared to be something like a Christian Taliban. The death penalty would be used to kill gay people, adulterers, children who curse a parent, and anyone who committed one of a host of crimes that appeared to violate Bible teachings — not unlike what was spelled out in the “Biblical Basis for War.” 

“Death was necessary in these cases because each crime asserted the sovereignty of humanity over God’s law,” writes Michael McVicar in his book on the man, Christian Reconstruction: RJ Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism.

As Rushdoony saw it, humanists had weaponized schools and the government to wage “religious war” against Christians. 

These ideas were also appealing to Christian Identity adherents who were already skeptical of schools and government, and who believed there would be a great apocalyptic battle before Christ’s return. 

Seeing Shea use Christianity to justify violence was too much for Pounder to stay quiet. It reminded him of what he’d seen at Marble. “As a practicing Christian, I can’t go along with some of these ideas,” he said. “It’s scary.” 

When the “Biblical Basis for War” document came out, Shea explained it away, saying it was sermon notes — which made me wonder what kind of preacher was giving sermons advocating for war and death? Killing all males?

If the document was actually the result of Shea jotting down notes he’d heard in church — whoever that preacher was, calling for war from the pulpit, had suddenly found, in Shea, a pipeline into mainstream politics for their far-right, dominionist ideas.

Maybe, all this time, Shea was somebody else’s puppet. Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t talk to the media. The day after Donald Trump was elected president, Shea called a special guest — someone he welcomed onto his podcast with reverence — and asked him how he should process this victory.

“I want to introduce my guest today, who is a very good friend of mine. You have to go kind of far in America to find someone more slandered by the mainstream media than me,” Shea giggled, “and that’s actually my guest today: Pastor Barry Byrd.”

Byrd chuckled too. “It was great to spend that evening with you when we watched America change,” he said.

“It was great to be together on a very historic night,” Byrd said. 

“Where do we go from here?” Shea asked the pastor. “How do we get to a refounding? What is it going to take to get us there?” 

“Well, we’re gonna have to begin to restore a providential, a Biblical and providential worldview,” Byrd responded. 

So if Eastern Washington — under Shea’s Liberty State plan — was to become a Christian homeland populated by members of the Patriot movement, led by Shea, maybe Marble would be its nerve center. The Byrds are supporters of the secession plan, and attended a Liberty State fundraiser in May 2019 during which pies and desserts were auctioned off to fund the new state.

I asked Pounder and Rowe what they thought about me going there, to Marble. Showing up, asking questions, trying to talk to the Byrds face to face, just like I did with Shea. I’d reached out to them for an interview, but never got a response. 

“I would not go in unarmed. And I wouldn’t go in without my body armor on,” Pounder said. 

Rowe cautioned me further. He asked if I’d watched The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV show inspired by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, in which women are enslaved in a neo-Puritanical society and forced to give birth. 

He says that’s similar to what he’s heard about Marble — though he doesn’t know for certain. It’s just something people have said.

If I go, Rowe said, I shouldn’t assume people I speak to in Stevens County don’t disagree with Marble’s teachings. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t turn down any side roads. 

“There’s weird stuff that happens up in those mountains. I mean, it’s just, there’s nothin’ up there,” he said. “I’d hate to see something happen.”

  Up next, Chapter 5: The Remnant

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2XMYVCA via IFTTT

[michaelfallcon]

Build-Outs Of Summer: First Avenue Coffee In Spokane, WA

We love having repeat visiting to ye ole Build-Outs of Summer and that’s what we have going on today. Kind of. Spokane, Washington’s First Avenue Coffee is a sister company to Roast House, whose coffee kiosk inside My Fresh Basket we profiled a year ago almost exactly to the day. So let’s skip the rigamarole and jump straight to the good stuff, the lovely new First Avenue Coffee in Spokane, Washington.

As told to Sprudge by Aaron Jordan.

For those who aren’t familiar, will you tell us about your company?

First Avenue Coffee is a sister company to Roast House. Roast House values and sources only organic and ethically traded coffees from reputable and sustainable sources. Both locations are in the process of becoming Zero Waste and Green Certified.

Owner Deb Di Bernardo’s coffee education began while working for a local Spokane roaster. It was during this time that she started dreaming of a more sustainable and ethical model of coffee production and retail—one that she believed was vital to our health, our environment and our coffee community. Within a few years of Roast House’s inception, Aaron Jordan came on as an apprentice roaster. This is where life truly became transformational. Deb insisted on Fair Trade, shade grown, certified organic coffees, and Aaron met those criteria, coming back with higher quality green coffees along with much more expensive, crazy delicious coffees from the Cup of Excellence and single cultivar separations. The Roast House tasting room was born of a need to guide and educate consumers through the value of these exquisite coffees. Visitors now find their way to the industrial area that houses the roastery to take advantage of tasting the wide array of seasonal and core offerings.

First Avenue Coffee is an opportunity to take the Roast House experience to the broader public, and create a new coffee experience for the people of Spokane. We hope that by modeling a cafe focused on sustainable coffees and business practices, other local businesses will be encouraged to do the same.

Can you tell us a bit about the new space?

First Avenue Coffee opened this past July in the historical 1912 Music City Building. Music City Pianos, who occupied our space and for which the building is named, has given us a player piano on “permanent loan.”

Our suite is long and narrow, 3,000 square feet with north facing windows and a 450-square-foot mezzanine. With respect for the age and historical value of the building, our design incorporates the rough cut 100-year-old beams, ceiling joists, original maple wood floors, capitalizing on the drama of 20-foot ceilings.

Our goal in opening this retail location is simple—move more of these small lot coffees, assuring them/our world their long term viability. Our commitment to these producers transcends from roasting through the exacting brew recipes employed for the best representation of their beans. It’s our job to make people fall in love with these coffees. We believe that each time we put a cup in someone’s hands it’s an opportunity to change that producers world.

Starting with the concept of a soft curving bar at the front of the house (developed by roasters Aaron Jordan and Kyle Siegel), we built a 40-foot-long C-shape bar, three support islands, and a 30-foot-long back bar. We chose to play off the heavy wood and beam structure with the very clean and classic neutral palette of stainless steel and white solid surfaces—creating a very streamlined look.

Pour-Over Station: The “top” of our C-shape counter—the first visual looking in from the street features four chrome, Modbar pour-over systems with countersunk drip trays spaced evenly across this first eight feet of stainless steel. Immediately behind the pour-over modules on the first “island” are four Baratza Forte BG grinders, featuring seasonal single origins, and one darker roast option. Behind those grinders and mirrored on the island at the end is a 4-Faucet Kegerator system where we serve our F-Bomb nitro, a rotating single origin nitro, chai nitro, and a carbonated tea option which is currently a Cascara Soda from Las Lajas, Costa Rica.

Retail Station: We dropped the height of this station for easy customer access to the POS system, retail items, and pastries. These locally sourced pastries (vegan, grain free to fully leaded gluten) are featured in this first curve of the C, immediately across from the entrance door. Behind this station on the first of three support islands we stage brewed coffee, with a BUNN H5X water tower, ICB brewer, and G3 retail grinder set up on the back bar.

Espresso Station: Moving into the long curve of the C, we’ve layered white solid surface over the stainless for a visual change to showcase the following nine feet of Modbar AV espresso taps, steam wands, a countersunk refrigerated well, and pitcher rinsing sinks. Modbar AV is the newest release from Fort Wayne, Indiana-based Modbar, makers of modular undercounter brewing equipment. Modbar AV was developed in partnership with La Marzocco over the course of more than two years of collaborative R&D and manufacturing.

We configured our bar into two work stations, each with two Modbar AV’s and one steam wand to facilitate volume and efficient barflow. The two systems are separated by the countersunk refrigerated well to allow two baristas to work seamlessly during events and rushes. We chose Modbar systems for their unique design which encourages engagement, interaction, and education between our crew and our guests. Modbar’s support and help throughout this buildout has been incredible. Thank you to Will, Chanelle, Nancy, and Lena for all that you do. This project came together because of your sage wisdom. Immediately behind this station is the center island, where we placed three Nuova Simonelli Mythos Clima Pro grinders, knock boxes, undercounter freezer, and double refrigerator. We chose the Mythos for its consistent particle size, dose, and extraction, providing our customers the same anticipated experience day after day.

Slow Bar Station: After the last Modbar espresso tap we’ve set up a station similar to that of a cocktail bar. A small selection of bar seating allows for guests to sit down one-on-one with a barista and enjoy a selection of seasonal drinks from our slow bar fresh sheet. Over the last several years, we’ve gleaned inspiration from the rich history of the cocktail world. While coffee will never be an exact representation of the spirits in cocktails, taking the versatility of single origin coffees and pairing them with a variety of ingredients in mixed drinks keeps things fresh. Ultimately, we wanted to create a piece of our menu that allowed us to experiment and create a unique coffee experience for our local area. The menu currently features a Nitro Fashioned using our F-Bomb nitro, orange and aromatic bitters, and simple syrup garnished with a Luxardo cherry and orange peel like any good Old Fashioned. The Cold Brew Sour combines our single origin nitro from Ethiopia with lemon juice and house-made chamomile grapefruit syrup—perfectly refreshing on a hot summer day. If sweet is more the guest’s speed, our Cherry Bomb combines cold brew concentrate with Luxardo cherry syrup, shaken and served frothy and neat in a coupe glass. As the seasons change so will the menu. We plan to roll out a lot of fun drinks in the coming months.

Our occupancy is approximately 140, covered with a variety of seating options. We offer a 13-foot live edge walnut slab community table, live edge 12-foot wide wall mounted walnut “buddy bars”—to accommodate those wanting to throw back a quick espresso, check their messages, and run. For people watching, the window bar overlooking the street and two balcony bars overlook the cafe from the back of the space. The mezzanine also features comfy soft furniture. We plan on utilizing all this space, hosting special private events as well as coffee industry specific events.

Cupping Kiosk: The final element in the very back of the space is a beautiful 2.5 kilo matte white Diedrich Roaster surrounded by a curved cupping bar with a 5’ x 5’ SCA Flavor Wheel next to it. This space will be used to sample roast for green coffee purchasing, and to host classes and public cuppings.

Okay, that’s it. That’s the whole space…we promise. No more.

What’s your approach to coffee?

Roast House was founded on a firm commitment to only sourcing and supporting producers growing sustainably certified farms. We’ve worked with Rainforest Alliance, USDA Organic, and UTZ since the beginning. As we roll out a new chapter, opening a retail cafe, those values will not change.

Roasters Aaron Jordan and Kyle Siegel spend a lot of time evaluating and working with our sourcing partners to find the most delicious offerings available. Green quality is paramount to the success of a guest’s experience with the finish product. We roast on a 12-kilo Diedrich Roaster approaching each coffee to showcase the qualities we found on the cupping table. A house blend is featured on espresso and batch brew alongside a more developed blend option for our dark roast fans on pour-over. The remaining offerings are single origin, roasted to highlight their terroir. Highlighting those qualities means we roast on the lighter end of the spectrum. Although structure and sweetness are a big deal to us when it comes to roasting lighter, so we preserve flavor clarity and acidity while still providing a chuggable cup of coffee.

From there, the coffee is sent to our amazing team of coffee magicians. Using the Modbar AV’s and automating flow on the Modbar pour-over systems allows dialing in to be approachable and efficient. Leveraging integrated scales in the drip trays and a simple interface to adjust espresso yield has been a lot of fun to work with. Our pour-overs are brewed via Kalita 185‘s, with Modbar’s spray tip and extraction adjusted for the Forte BG grinders. The replicability of this system is really important, especially because specialty coffee is not an inexpensive commodity. We want to ensure that when our guests pay a premium for a quality product it is the best it can possibly be.

Any machines, coffees, special equipment lined up?

4 Modbar Pour-Over Systems 4 Modbar AV Espresso Systems 2 Modbar Steam Systems 1 BUNN ICB Batch Brewer 2 BUNN H5X Hot Water Towers 1 BUNN G3 Grinder 4 Baratza Forte Brew Grinders 1 Baratza Sette 30 Grinder 3 Nuova Simonelli Mythos Clima-Pro Grinders 1 Diedrich IR-2.5 Roaster

What’s your hopeful target opening date/month?

July 13th, 2018

Are you working with craftspeople, architects, and/or creatives that you’d like to mention?

Design: Uptic Studios Branding: Hampton Visuals Construction: Mauer Inc. Wisdom and all things involving flow: Will Frith, Modbar

Thank you!

Thank you for the opportunity to share our space.

First Avenue Coffee is located at 1011 West First Avenue, Spokane. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

The Build-Outs Of Summer is an annual series on Sprudge. Live the thrill of the build all summer long in our Build-Outs feature hub.

The post Build-Outs Of Summer: First Avenue Coffee In Spokane, WA appeared first on Sprudge.

Build-Outs Of Summer: First Avenue Coffee In Spokane, WA published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

[epchapman89]

Build-Outs Of Summer: First Avenue Coffee In Spokane, WA

We love having repeat visiting to ye ole Build-Outs of Summer and that’s what we have going on today. Kind of. Spokane, Washington’s First Avenue Coffee is a sister company to Roast House, whose coffee kiosk inside My Fresh Basket we profiled a year ago almost exactly to the day. So let’s skip the rigamarole and jump straight to the good stuff, the lovely new First Avenue Coffee in Spokane, Washington.

As told to Sprudge by Aaron Jordan.

For those who aren’t familiar, will you tell us about your company?

First Avenue Coffee is a sister company to Roast House. Roast House values and sources only organic and ethically traded coffees from reputable and sustainable sources. Both locations are in the process of becoming Zero Waste and Green Certified.

Owner Deb Di Bernardo’s coffee education began while working for a local Spokane roaster. It was during this time that she started dreaming of a more sustainable and ethical model of coffee production and retail—one that she believed was vital to our health, our environment and our coffee community. Within a few years of Roast House’s inception, Aaron Jordan came on as an apprentice roaster. This is where life truly became transformational. Deb insisted on Fair Trade, shade grown, certified organic coffees, and Aaron met those criteria, coming back with higher quality green coffees along with much more expensive, crazy delicious coffees from the Cup of Excellence and single cultivar separations. The Roast House tasting room was born of a need to guide and educate consumers through the value of these exquisite coffees. Visitors now find their way to the industrial area that houses the roastery to take advantage of tasting the wide array of seasonal and core offerings.

First Avenue Coffee is an opportunity to take the Roast House experience to the broader public, and create a new coffee experience for the people of Spokane. We hope that by modeling a cafe focused on sustainable coffees and business practices, other local businesses will be encouraged to do the same.

Can you tell us a bit about the new space?

First Avenue Coffee opened this past July in the historical 1912 Music City Building. Music City Pianos, who occupied our space and for which the building is named, has given us a player piano on “permanent loan.”

Our suite is long and narrow, 3,000 square feet with north facing windows and a 450-square-foot mezzanine. With respect for the age and historical value of the building, our design incorporates the rough cut 100-year-old beams, ceiling joists, original maple wood floors, capitalizing on the drama of 20-foot ceilings.

Our goal in opening this retail location is simple—move more of these small lot coffees, assuring them/our world their long term viability. Our commitment to these producers transcends from roasting through the exacting brew recipes employed for the best representation of their beans. It’s our job to make people fall in love with these coffees. We believe that each time we put a cup in someone’s hands it’s an opportunity to change that producers world.

Starting with the concept of a soft curving bar at the front of the house (developed by roasters Aaron Jordan and Kyle Siegel), we built a 40-foot-long C-shape bar, three support islands, and a 30-foot-long back bar. We chose to play off the heavy wood and beam structure with the very clean and classic neutral palette of stainless steel and white solid surfaces—creating a very streamlined look.

Pour-Over Station: The “top” of our C-shape counter—the first visual looking in from the street features four chrome, Modbar pour-over systems with countersunk drip trays spaced evenly across this first eight feet of stainless steel. Immediately behind the pour-over modules on the first “island” are four Baratza Forte BG grinders, featuring seasonal single origins, and one darker roast option. Behind those grinders and mirrored on the island at the end is a 4-Faucet Kegerator system where we serve our F-Bomb nitro, a rotating single origin nitro, chai nitro, and a carbonated tea option which is currently a Cascara Soda from Las Lajas, Costa Rica.

Retail Station: We dropped the height of this station for easy customer access to the POS system, retail items, and pastries. These locally sourced pastries (vegan, grain free to fully leaded gluten) are featured in this first curve of the C, immediately across from the entrance door. Behind this station on the first of three support islands we stage brewed coffee, with a BUNN H5X water tower, ICB brewer, and G3 retail grinder set up on the back bar.

Espresso Station: Moving into the long curve of the C, we’ve layered white solid surface over the stainless for a visual change to showcase the following nine feet of Modbar AV espresso taps, steam wands, a countersunk refrigerated well, and pitcher rinsing sinks. Modbar AV is the newest release from Fort Wayne, Indiana-based Modbar, makers of modular undercounter brewing equipment. Modbar AV was developed in partnership with La Marzocco over the course of more than two years of collaborative R&D and manufacturing.

We configured our bar into two work stations, each with two Modbar AV’s and one steam wand to facilitate volume and efficient barflow. The two systems are separated by the countersunk refrigerated well to allow two baristas to work seamlessly during events and rushes. We chose Modbar systems for their unique design which encourages engagement, interaction, and education between our crew and our guests. Modbar’s support and help throughout this buildout has been incredible. Thank you to Will, Chanelle, Nancy, and Lena for all that you do. This project came together because of your sage wisdom. Immediately behind this station is the center island, where we placed three Nuova Simonelli Mythos Clima Pro grinders, knock boxes, undercounter freezer, and double refrigerator. We chose the Mythos for its consistent particle size, dose, and extraction, providing our customers the same anticipated experience day after day.

Slow Bar Station: After the last Modbar espresso tap we’ve set up a station similar to that of a cocktail bar. A small selection of bar seating allows for guests to sit down one-on-one with a barista and enjoy a selection of seasonal drinks from our slow bar fresh sheet. Over the last several years, we’ve gleaned inspiration from the rich history of the cocktail world. While coffee will never be an exact representation of the spirits in cocktails, taking the versatility of single origin coffees and pairing them with a variety of ingredients in mixed drinks keeps things fresh. Ultimately, we wanted to create a piece of our menu that allowed us to experiment and create a unique coffee experience for our local area. The menu currently features a Nitro Fashioned using our F-Bomb nitro, orange and aromatic bitters, and simple syrup garnished with a Luxardo cherry and orange peel like any good Old Fashioned. The Cold Brew Sour combines our single origin nitro from Ethiopia with lemon juice and house-made chamomile grapefruit syrup—perfectly refreshing on a hot summer day. If sweet is more the guest’s speed, our Cherry Bomb combines cold brew concentrate with Luxardo cherry syrup, shaken and served frothy and neat in a coupe glass. As the seasons change so will the menu. We plan to roll out a lot of fun drinks in the coming months.

Our occupancy is approximately 140, covered with a variety of seating options. We offer a 13-foot live edge walnut slab community table, live edge 12-foot wide wall mounted walnut “buddy bars”—to accommodate those wanting to throw back a quick espresso, check their messages, and run. For people watching, the window bar overlooking the street and two balcony bars overlook the cafe from the back of the space. The mezzanine also features comfy soft furniture. We plan on utilizing all this space, hosting special private events as well as coffee industry specific events.

Cupping Kiosk: The final element in the very back of the space is a beautiful 2.5 kilo matte white Diedrich Roaster surrounded by a curved cupping bar with a 5’ x 5’ SCA Flavor Wheel next to it. This space will be used to sample roast for green coffee purchasing, and to host classes and public cuppings.

Okay, that’s it. That’s the whole space…we promise. No more.

What’s your approach to coffee?

Roast House was founded on a firm commitment to only sourcing and supporting producers growing sustainably certified farms. We’ve worked with Rainforest Alliance, USDA Organic, and UTZ since the beginning. As we roll out a new chapter, opening a retail cafe, those values will not change.

Roasters Aaron Jordan and Kyle Siegel spend a lot of time evaluating and working with our sourcing partners to find the most delicious offerings available. Green quality is paramount to the success of a guest’s experience with the finish product. We roast on a 12-kilo Diedrich Roaster approaching each coffee to showcase the qualities we found on the cupping table. A house blend is featured on espresso and batch brew alongside a more developed blend option for our dark roast fans on pour-over. The remaining offerings are single origin, roasted to highlight their terroir. Highlighting those qualities means we roast on the lighter end of the spectrum. Although structure and sweetness are a big deal to us when it comes to roasting lighter, so we preserve flavor clarity and acidity while still providing a chuggable cup of coffee.

From there, the coffee is sent to our amazing team of coffee magicians. Using the Modbar AV’s and automating flow on the Modbar pour-over systems allows dialing in to be approachable and efficient. Leveraging integrated scales in the drip trays and a simple interface to adjust espresso yield has been a lot of fun to work with. Our pour-overs are brewed via Kalita 185‘s, with Modbar’s spray tip and extraction adjusted for the Forte BG grinders. The replicability of this system is really important, especially because specialty coffee is not an inexpensive commodity. We want to ensure that when our guests pay a premium for a quality product it is the best it can possibly be.

Any machines, coffees, special equipment lined up?

4 Modbar Pour-Over Systems 4 Modbar AV Espresso Systems 2 Modbar Steam Systems 1 BUNN ICB Batch Brewer 2 BUNN H5X Hot Water Towers 1 BUNN G3 Grinder 4 Baratza Forte Brew Grinders 1 Baratza Sette 30 Grinder 3 Nuova Simonelli Mythos Clima-Pro Grinders 1 Diedrich IR-2.5 Roaster

What’s your hopeful target opening date/month?

July 13th, 2018

Are you working with craftspeople, architects, and/or creatives that you’d like to mention?

Design: Uptic Studios Branding: Hampton Visuals Construction: Mauer Inc. Wisdom and all things involving flow: Will Frith, Modbar

Thank you!

Thank you for the opportunity to share our space.

First Avenue Coffee is located at 1011 West First Avenue, Spokane. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

The Build-Outs Of Summer is an annual series on Sprudge. Live the thrill of the build all summer long in our Build-Outs feature hub.

The post Build-Outs Of Summer: First Avenue Coffee In Spokane, WA appeared first on Sprudge.

seen 1st on http://sprudge.com

[insert-witty-comment]

Hello everyone.Last time on Hawkins Book Club, we learned what synchronicity actually is, time-traveling Neo-Nazis are sticklers for freshly cut grass, there was once a guy who flew around the US in a flying saucer with eight women to look for gold, the KKK uses magick, MK-Ultra actually was connected to Montauk, why the Demogorgon was attracted to Eleven, JFK’s brother liked to trip out on LSD with Nazi rapists, skinheads are actually kind, experienced aura-readers, Mark Hamill is literally the reincarnation of an alien from another universe, the Star Wars films are documentaries, there were Hitler-clones in existence, the Third Reich tried to access the Upside-Down (meaning that we could have had Stranger Things be about the Demogorgon murdering SS Stormtroopers and Hitler clones), Cthulhu and the Elder Gods are real, there could be a whole bunch of UFO-flying Nazis camped out in Antarctica and inside the Earth, George Bush’s dad was insane and there might be a good chance that Brenner is Eleven’s father.First of all, I would like to apologize for not updating this little review column thing last week. There wasn’t an E-book version of this book available, so I had to order a physical copy from a rather… um…. let’s just say “colorful” individual in Wisconsin. To my surprise, when it finally got here I discovered that it was signed by the author himself, so that’s a neat bonus. Speaking of which, the primary author of 1998’s Montauk: The Alien Connection is a new member to the Montauk Party; a guy named Stewart Swerdlow. Without further ado, let’s reconvene the Book Club and jump in.Our old friend Peter Moon writes the Introduction. Here he states that our education system has lied about the nature of space and time.“The biggest secret of time and space that has been unlocked is that these very components of our physicality can be manipulated. This is still a novel idea to conventional scientists, scholars and news media who are manipulated from birth. Manipulation of consciousness comes under the heading of ‘mind control,’ a subject which has never been fully embraced by major media.”Jesus Christ Moon, just let it go. I can’t believe that he’s STILL bitter over being blocked from television. Anyway, he says that mind control is integral to understanding space and time.“The human brain is actually a perfect computer which is fully capable of serving as a tool for cosmic enlightenment to its host. The problem is that this response in mankind has been short-circuited due to any number of various factors. These could include aliens, ancient priesthoods, religious indoctrination, youth groups and the CIA’s documented mind control project known as MK-Ultra. MK-Ultra was a 20th century ‘modernization’ of ancient techniques such as those employed by the ancient Assassins, a Middle Eastern cult during the Middle Ages who programmed subjects to kill through the use of hashish.”I’m starting to think that Ubisoft should be cutting this guy a check too. Anyway, Moon then goes on to claim that not only do truth serum drugs force people to spill their secrets, they also “can be used to tap the collective unconscious”, meaning that someone injected with them would suddenly have omnipotent knowledge about the entire universe… somehow. Moon suggests that we start asking people injected with truth serum about God, evolution “and the very nature of reality” because of this. He also touches on the head of MK-Ultra, Dr. Ewen Cameron and the LSD experiments, interestingly enough. He also states that Preston Nichols now believes that there were “Montauk Girls” in addition to the Boys and that there are literally hundreds of these programmed people all over Long Island. This leads into Moon introducing Stewart Swerdlow, the guy who was given the pseudo name of “Stan Campbell” in Montauk Revisited. You may remember him as the guy who shot Jesus in the face. Regardless, Duncan Cameron helpfully chimes in to say that this guy is an even more powerful psychic than he is. I didn’t know there was a sliding scale of psychic powers, but whatever.Chapter 1 talks about the 1943 Philadelphia Experiment which I’m sure you’re quite familiar with by this point, but it comes with a twist. It focuses on a Nazi named Johannes von Gruber. Why is he there? Well it turns out the Nazis were helping out the Americans with their teleportation.“Such an accomplishment would eliminate war on Earth because whoever controlled this technology would be invincible. The major governments of the world – the United States, Germany, Britain, Russian, and France – would then band together to eliminate the lesser powers and races of the Earth. They planned to beam vast conquering armies anywhere in the universe they desired. The new world government rule the known universe! For this the Reich was willing to unite with the United States. Because of the contacts that the Reich had with a certain group of ‘visitors,’ the United States was also willing to lay aside ideological differences. Each side believed that it would eventually control the entire plan.”………………………………………………………………………………There are so many things wrong with this paragraph alone that it would take an entire post just to point them all out. So I’m going to just move on.Anyway, the experiment actually starts and the shit immediately hits the fan; equipment starts sparking, men start falling overboard, people literally start melting into the floor. So von Gruber decides to jump overboard himself. He woke up at Montauk in 1960 and was immediately accosted by an American military officer and two grey aliens. They strapped him to a chair, gave him a brief update on how that whole “World War II” thing panned out, and another alien came in, tried to comfort him, and then immediately electroshocked him to death. He then rocketed up toward Heaven, complete with angelic guides (because I guess Heaven allows Nazis in now). He then experienced a life review,“Then he was told that he had to complete something on Earth. He was shown a woman in labor in a brand new hospital. The next thing he knew, he was inside a tube of light heading toward her.”Oh God, please tell me this isn’t going where I think its going.But of course, my prayers go unanswered. So cut to a woman named Eleanor giving birth to the author, Stewart Swerdlow. In an interesting synchronicity with Stranger Things, this guy was born on November 5th, 1956.Yes, you read that right, 1956.Somehow, the aliens or angels or whatever sent the Nazi back four years from 1960 to be reborn. No, that doesn’t make any sense, and I’m not going to even try to explain it. So while you’re trying to wrap your head around that, Swerdlow then claims that Yakov Sverdlov was his great-uncle. So how does the first Chairman of the Soviet Union relate to a reincarnated Nazi in the body of an American kid? Well, his grandfather helped form the Communist Party in America and his father worked on military projects in the Southwest. His mother was the daughter of a Gypsy in central Europe who had this experience;“When my grandmother was a little girl in Austria, she was playing outside with two cousins when she glanced up and saw the image of a man who looked exactly like the Jack of Spades in playing cards. Quickly, she told her cousins to look up at it. Immediately, they fell dead to the ground.”Way to go Grandma.“Shortly after that incident, my grandmother was sent to America to live with relatives. Amazingly, nearly a century later, I was involved with a group of government related individuals who were trying to understand the meaning of a message from hyperspace. Beamed from outside the Earth, the message was an image of a being who resembled the Jack of Spades!”Hey aliens, next time can you try making a message that doesn’t kill little girls? And maybe one that actually makes sense? Anyway, the rest of the chapter is just Swerdlow’s turn to recount his shitty childhood, and it’s somehow even worse than that of Nichols and Moon. First off, he said that he saw the spirits of the dead all over the place, there was a constant ringing in his ears, colors “flashed in his eyes” and he had glimpses of the future events that always came to pass. He was constantly frightened and suffering from nightmares. In addition;“Although brilliant in school, I found it slow-paced and boring. Usually I stayed home pretending to be sick, entertaining myself with psychic and mental games. Practically friendless, I found people my own age to be childish and stupid. Instead I preferred the company of the adults, particularly the elderly. For some reason, I enjoyed hearing stories about the old days, especially the 1930’s and 1940’s. I loved watching war movies, but I was ashamed to tell anyone that I always privately cheered for the Germans because my background is Jewish. Interestingly enough, I also cheered for Indians in Western movies.”So I guess this poor boy was still being influenced by his past fanatical beliefs and memories from his time as a loyal officer of the Nazi Party who was also psychic who could see the future, dead people, auras and “mind-patterns”. This seems like something that Stephen King would write, and to be honest I would probably read it. It got even worse for the poor kid as he was constantly being abducted by aliens and exposed to painful experiments by them.Chapter 3 describes one such abduction he experienced when he was six. So the aliens took young Stewart on a quick tour around the world and then brought him to an alien fleet and a council of aliens. Here, a giant butterfly telepathically explains that its species used its DNA to create Earth’s butterflies which are used to “monitor magnetism and know how to adjust it so that it has a beneficial effect on the environment (yes, really). Moths were created as a negative aspect of this by the “dark side.” The butterfly also explains that its species hitchhikes with humanoid aliens in order to populate other worlds and to adopt humanoid “spiritual students”, one of which was Stewart.“Finally, it said that it was time for me to communicate with the other beings, but it wanted me to know that for the rest of my stay on Earth, it would send Monarch butterflies to greet and comfort me. Whenever I saw a white butterfly at an opportune moment, there was a message for me. As the grand butterfly communicated with me, pulsating glows emanated from its beautiful wings.”Next time I see a butterfly, I’m crushing it to fend off these aliens. Stewart is then approached by a big white praying mantis which scares the hell out of him, and a fish person who states that humans had “marine origins”. He then passes out and re awakens in a chair surrounded by more aliens. First a lizard person explains that he is a defector of a massive empire trying to take over the galaxy. He states that thousands of years ago his people came to Earth in a ship that is now the moon. Another ship would come before the end of this century and reawaken the army currently in stasis underground after being defeated by the “Lyraen Empire”. These “reptilians” also maintain bases on Venus and other moons, reproduce mostly by cloning and state that Stewart will eventually convert them to “the Light” because his soul was already an emissary to them long ago. Next up is an alien literally described as looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He claims that his people were the original inhabitants of Earth but were devastated by humans and aliens. However, pockets of them still exist in the deepest parts of the oceans, and they worked as liaisons between the Atlanteans and the whales and dolphins. Apparently these sea mammals are advanced races from another galaxy. I don’t know how advanced they could be if they are so easily hunted down by Japanese whalers, but whatever. Anyway, the Gill-men were transported to Neptune by other aliens.“Continuing, he told me that I have dolphin DNA; therefore, I could learn to communicate with his species in order to help mankind and the dolphin/whale systems.”Oh, so I guess Swerdlow will be the one giving us the heads up when the Vogons get ready to demolish Earth. Next, a Thin Man introduces himself as a representative of “the Federation of Planets”, which is composed of 120 member civilizations, and that they’ll let Earth join if we successfully fend off an invasion by the reptilian empire by ourselves. So I guess their membership requirements are a tad bit more stringent than the UN. He also explains that all of the alien races were speaking to young Stewart because they all contributed DNA to his creation, which his “soul-personality” already agreed to and traveled to other galaxies and alternate universes as training, and that there would be further conditioning in his new life. Seeing as how Stewart is getting all of this dumped on him at the tender age of six, he responds by vomiting all over the alien ambassadors (seriously). This didn’t really seem to faze them as a grey alien then steps over the puddle of vomit to inform the terrified boy that they will be regularly abducting him to check on him, because his body contained chemicals that the greys needed. He also informed Stewart that if his mission fails, then the other alien races would probably fight amongst themselves and bring their war to Earth. Again, Stewart was six when they told him this. At the same age you were worrying about your first day of Kindergarten, this kid was being told that if he screwed up, he would kick off an intergalactic war.So you know, no pressure!So then a Ethereal) identifies himself as a Sirian and tells him that the Sirians created the Egyptian civilization and gave the Torah to the Jewish people. They also created the Crystal Skull, so I guess this means that yes, there actually is a reason for aliens to exist in the Indiana Jones movies. They also possesses the most advanced technology in the universe and intentionally create conflict between the various races to foster evolution. Also, Stewart’s “soul-personality” came from them, so he’s simultaneously both a reincarnated alien and a Nazi. This particular Sirian said that his and the poor boy’s soul-personalities were linked, and he would serve as a guide. As Stewart got older, more memories of his past lives would emerge, and when his “alternate selves come together”, his mission would begin. Stewart was then unceremoniously dumped back in his bed, where he understandably woke up screaming in terror.After this, Stewart would have nightmares about the incident and began developing his psychic abilities. Some strange force compelled him to watch literally everything in the science-fiction genre and read about space travel.“My frustration grew as I realized that there was absolutely no one on the face of the Earth with whom I could converse. Invariably, I wanted to speak about my knowledge of what lay beyond physical reality but was afraid of others’ reactions. In those days (the late 50’s and 60’s), UFOs were still considered to be from the land of the mentally ill.”You know, as opposed to now where they’re accepted as scientific fact. When he got older, he started getting abducted almost every night to be instructed about “physical reality”, time travel and other topics. He woke up extremely exhausted the next morning each time. Because of this, in school he excelled in everything, but was bored and had no patience for other kids and people in general. One day when he was eleven, he was abducted by three greys and taken to a small room with a screen showing a conveyor belt. The aliens telepathically told him to watch pictures appearing on the screen and meat slices corresponding to them and asked to determine if he would eat it or not. This test went on for a bit with all sorts of creatures appearing on screen, and every time he would answer “yes” to something, the taste of it would appear in his mouth. He eventually got incredibly sick because of this and the aliens dumped him back in his bed, pissed because he didn’t finish the test. Stewart was disturbed as he realized that the aliens would have had to kill all of those creatures to get the meat, and one of the pictures was of a man.Chapter 4 talks about his teenage years. His family moved from Brooklyn to Suffolk County Long Island (My home county) and the abductions increased, but in an astral form. He frequently woke up naked in a large room on a bench with a group of other humans and they were educated on their roles as soldiers for the aliens. When Stewart was thirteen, he started “dreaming” about being abducted to a government facility where he was chased by military personnel. When he woke up, he would always see “the face of a blond man surrounded by red light” laughing at him from his bedroom window. He felt like the man was related to him. Also at this point he started undergoing some horrifying examinations by the greys, which are so fucking disgusting that I will not be retyping them here.At this point, he started having a “deep longing for children” and felt that he was a father who missed his kids. This feeling was confirmed when at seventeen he woke up strapped to chair (fully clothed instead of naked for once) and was approached by a grey and a “blond alien”, while two humans in military uniforms watched. He was shown a baby girl that was a hybrid between a human and grey, and was informed that she was his child cobbled together from his genetics. In fact, he fathered multiple children; some of which died and the others were taken to a “safe world”. He was shown this child because the aliens wanted to see if he would form a bond. He did, so the aliens kicked him back to Earth. After this he had the uncontrollable urge to heavily exercise and keep his body in peak condition. The aliens also put in a chip in his eyes that turned them into cameras and gave the aliens some control over where the eyes were directed, which in turned messed with his eyesight. They also started broadcasting his thoughts and past memories onto a screen in order to determine what his future would look like based on his “mind-patterns” during their abductions. The chapter closes out with Swerdlow revealing that the aliens started dumping him in Camp Hero at Montauk.Chapter 5 describes what he did there. It turns out he was dumped there since he was a prepubescent child, during which he was strapped to a table where he was “examined, mentally scanned for my brainwave signature or sexually abused in ways that stored my energetics and magnified them by computer. This went on until puberty.” Seeing as how he only tried to escape once and survived the testing, he was “promoted” by being placed in charge of the younger boys.“The preparation of the children included teaching them to implicitly obey orders, without any questions whatsoever. I taught them how to mentally focus on command so that their bodily energies could be removed by the psychic/mentalist to whom they were assigned. I instructed them on how to know what colors and symbols to mentally use to facilitate any given experiment. They were also taught how to relinquish their bodies and allow themselves to die without the innate defensive reaction of resistance inherent to all living beings.”This is horrifying. He also explains that there’s a difference between psychics and mentalists; the former can only read minds, but the latter can manipulate them. The kids were used to boost the energy of both types of people. The best subjects for this were in the three to twelve age range because their minds were “pure and uncontaminated”. However, their fear led to “scattered and disjointed energy outputs” that were useless to the scientists. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they were sexually abused by various project workers. You’d think the people running this place would prevent the pedos from having access to them because all of this drove many of the kids insane, and so they had to be “terminated”. So instead of giving the kids painless lethal injections, the scientists instead inexplicably shoved them into small chambers were they starved to death, and their bodies were dumped in the ocean. This just seems so unnecessarily evil and inefficient as hell. However, some of the staff would occasionally “adopt” a boy by reprogramming his memories and changing some of his physical features.Some of these boys were the children of politicians or military leaders who were abducted from their beds. They were treated differently from the other kids, and were always returned home, but not before getting implants placed in their eyes and programmed to fulfill unique tasks, which always included “tagging” other boys for use in the Project.The majority of the “expendable common boys” were taken from outside of New York, to alleviate suspicion over the disappearances. They came from all over the country.“Taken from families where they would not be missed as much as others, they were the children of prostitutes, drug addicts, and alcoholics, or they came from poor rural families with many children.”Holy shit, Monty Python was right too!Anyway, if for some strange reason the parents didn’t want to give their son up to bunch of sadistic aliens and Neo-Nazis, then Project people would arrange for an accident, ranging from cars driving into a river to house fires to full on natural disasters to fake the kid’s death. They also grabbed runaways off the street.In addition to the kids, they also grabbed a bunch of homeless people as well to travel through time and space. This tended to be a bit hit-and-miss as many of these people were lost in transit. So if someone did get through, they set up receivers to make transit easier by acquiring “vibrations”. These pathways were opened up by Duncan Cameron, and the Project people literally harnessed the kids’ imagination to boost his powers. When a boy “burned out” from being a living battery, they were exposed to a “fear program” that kicked their adrenaline into overdrive, which got a bit more energy out of them until they either died, went insane, or both. After that, their bodies were handed over to the greys, who proceeded to extract their organs and body fluids into large vats, in which they swam around in like the universe’s most fucked up pool to extract nutrients. Before humans just started handing over kids to them, Swerdlow claims that the aliens created vampires and chupacabras to extract nutrients for them. Occasionally reptilians would show up to watch the mind control experiments. Of course, Swerdlow feels completely awful over his role in all of this and is still plagued by guilt.Chapters 6-8 describe his travels around the Middle East. But first, he described how he hated with a passion, yet studied accounting because he was programmed to do so to help manage the Montauk boys. Also, he nearly died after being injected with sodium pentathol during a wisdom tooth removal. He believes this was because the anesthesia is used in truth serum as well.So he was “compelled” to take an overseas trip “sponsored by a Zionist organization that sought to bring volunteers to Israel and promote colonization of the arid land there.” Essentially, he was going to work on a communist farm called a “kibbutz”. On the way there, he stopped in Italy where the volcano at Pompeii unlocked some his memories of a past life, and a “French woman with Italian citizenship” randomly decided to try and convince him to become a medical doctor and marry her daughter, as one does. When he arrived in Tel Aviv, he was overcome with emotion, but found himself starting at departure board for Teheran, Iran for nearly an hour. He was then compelled to look at departure boards for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Nairobi, Kenya and Johannesburg, South Africa until his kind-of-an-asshole program companion got his attention. They waited with three women for a while until a guy came to pick them up. He drove them to Jerusalem where the women were dropped off at a youth hostel and Swerdlow and his companion were dumped at an old, empty British army barracks, where they told to sleep in a cell. When Swerdlow fell asleep, he woke up back at the airport, boarding a plane to Teheran. What follows is a series of flashes in which Swerdlow finds himself in a cave, more naked examinations, a “hyperspace subway system that circled the globe”, a shitty Nairobi bathroom, more examinations and a Sirian who told Swerdlow that he was an ambassador to the Israelis as their ally. Finally, he woke up back in Jerusalem.The next day, a van drove him and his companion to a poor kibbutz called Gvar Am in the Gaza Strip. The trip there was awful, because in Swerdlow’s own words; “Israelis do not drive their cars, they aim them.” He slept in a crappy house and worked in pear groves until the afternoon, “but not before some of the Scottish volunteers became exhausted and passed out from the heat.” He also made a friend with a British guy, whom he later found was an agent for both British and Soviet intelligence. How that’s supposed to work, I have no idea. Regardless, Swerdlow then decides to go meet some relatives in the town of Holon. His bus driver dropped him off, but he had no idea where his relatives actually live, so he wandered around until he literally stumbled into the house of the husband of his grandmother’s cousin.Chapter 8 describes how while wandering the Negev desert, Swerdlow was abducted by the Sirians. They told him that the Hebrews were created by them, and that they were currently trying to “purify” the modern Israelis by altering their mind-patterns. They examined him yet again and showed him his true identity. He was then taken to Mars, where he saw a large group of human men shackled together and digging with shovels. A Rigel alien explained to them that seeing as how they fulfilled their service on Earth and Mars, they would be examined for transportation to Rigel. If they failed the examination, they would be “eliminated.” This whole event was apparently orchestrated just for Swerdlow. He was then taken to the Sirians home world of Khoom, a frozen and snowy world devastated by an ancient war. Here, nine beings called “the Ohalu Council” inform him that he originally sent his soul-personality to Earth and that there were nine other people on Earth like him, each directed by a council member. They remind him of the upcoming war with the reptilian Draco and reveal that just like the CIA in Afghanistan, they also gave weapons to the Draco, who proceeded to use the weapons against them. Swerdlow also discovered that the Ark of the Covenant was actually a communication device between the Sirians and the Hebrews. The Sirians then dumped him back in the desert, three days after he left.“I believe that the Sirians are trying to undermine the plans of all factions involved on Earth; the New World Order, the Draco, the Greys, the Tall Blonds, etc. Their agenda is to bring all events to a climax, then usurp all power, possibly via the Israelis. This is only speculation on my part. Time will tell.”I’m sure it will. Chapter 9 discusses his return to the U.S. Here he reveals that as a young man one of the experiments he was a part of was “The Marriage Project”, which was designed to mate the Montauk boys with specific girls to produce specific children. So the twenty-two year old Swerdlow was matched with a fourteen year old Mia from Massachusetts who “was part of my own frequency”, because their soul-personalities were once one and split off long ago. They then proceeded to have sex while a literal crowd of people watched. Two years later, this happened;“One evening, when Mia was sixteen and I was twenty-four, we were brought together in a clinical environment under the watchful eyes of scientists. Here it was explained that our genetics were perfectly aligned with sequences that were reciprocal to one another. Mia had more Pleiadian genetics; mine were Sirian. This combination would produce a child of unusual abilities. Brought naked into a white room, we made love three times in succession. The entire episode was dreamlike and almost a blur. At the end, I knew inside of myself that Mia was pregnant.”This is so fucked up.So this produced a girl named Jaime, which Swerdlow was prevented from seeing in order to “avoid contamination of her mind-patterns”. She can see the future and “all possible alternate realities”, but at the time of the time of the writing, she was a teenager who didn’t know about her potential. Swerdlow is currently trying to guide her, while she understandably tries to avoid him.Chapter 10 describes how Swerdlow got a job as an internal auditor with a pharmaceutical company. Somewhat hilariously, he actually starts complaining that he has to get up for work in the morning during one of his abductions. During this, his captors tell him that his “marriage” with Mia was over, and that he should go out and live a “conventional life”. So he met with a secretary in the company named Michele, who he detested because she was “nasty and opinionated” with a short temper. However, they were both mind-controlled to marry each other after only a month. They also aborted a child they produced because Michele “did not want to look pregnant when she walked down the aisle.” Swerdlow is sad that he didn’t stop her, and gives the “truth” about abortion;“I now believe that abortion is wrong unless the mother’s life is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape. I also understand that the soul-personality does not enter into the body until the first breath, but it is that soul-personality, and no one else, that must decide whether or not to continue the life-stream. People who do not want children should take the proper precautions before the pregnancy, not destroy a possible life-stream after it is created. Although this may sound fundamentalist to some, it is what I know to be the proper way.”Ah, so it shouldn’t being the choice of the mother, the father or the government as to whether a fetus should be aborted, but the choice of the fetus itself, of course!This book.The two had more fights after this and wanted to call off the wedding, but Swerdlow received a telepathic message saying that the marriage would not be permanent, Swerdlow already agreed to it, and “This woman had agreed to be the vessel for the entry of my children into the physical plane.” I have no idea why Michele agreed to marry him, but they did marry and moved to Patchogue, Long Island.Chapter 11 talks about the strange events that occurred at their house. For whatever reason, they usually happened when Swerdlow’s in-laws were staying over. Their house was broken into, but only things that had little value were stolen, they were constantly hearing footsteps in their house, young children tried to break into the house (which he responded to by setting up a six-foot tall fence and alarm system), he saw shadowy figures in the house, the abductions continued and a wire was shoved into his penis, two disembodied robot heads had a conversation over his bed, you know, the usual. He also describes how during one of his abductions a human/grey hybrid young girl was shown to him, and he was told that she was his daughter. His house was also “attacked” several times by black military helicopters that didn’t really do much other than mess with the electronics and radios in the house. His wife was also having dreams of abductions as well, during which she was checked for pregnancy. Every time she had this dream, she became pregnant soon after.This brings us to Chapter 12, which is about Swerdlow’s children, all of whom were delivered via Caesarean-section. The first, Matthew was born in 1983 and was constantly crying, and his parents both had dreams of him being abducted. A couple of months after his birth, Swerdlow was informed during an abduction that his children were “not under my jurisdiction” because they were part of the experiments, and he would have to hand them over. Swerdlow actually grows some balls for once and tells them to fuck off. However, by the time Matthew was seven, he began talking about how a tall, red-eyed man dressed in black came into his room at night and telepathically said that he came from the underground, and that Matthew came from the underground as well, and that his parents were being monitored. Matthew described to his father about how there were cities underground and was able to describe a relay system. He was also abducted by grey aliens, who handed him a space bazooka and told him that he would use it in that upcoming intergalactic war, and that he would get dragged into the same genetic experiments as his dad. Swerdlow also reveals that Matthew was the only kid who inherited his psychic abilities. His second son, Jeremy is probably the most normal person in the entire family, the only strange thing that happened to him was that a grey alien would occasionally come into his room at night and take some of his toys.Next came Daniel. During the pregnancy, the doctor informed his parents that he may be born with Down’s Syndrome. After that, Swerdlow had an abduction during which this happened;“A female grey came into the room holding a small bundle. No one told me that she was female. I simply knew that ‘it’ was a she. As she approached, a male voice said that she wanted to show me something. Slowly unwrapping the top of the blanket, the female revealed an adorable blond-haired baby. The male voice said that it was mine, and asked if I wanted to hold it. Replying that I did, the female started to unwrap the whole baby, revealing an octopus-like torso with legs instead of a human body. Screaming and crying at the same time, I told them to take it away. The same voice said that it was going to an aquatic world and that I would never see it again. Waking up in my bed, I prayed with all my might that Danny would be a normal child. I cannot describe my relief when the doctor called with the positive test results.”So Swerdlow essentially disowned one of his children just because it looked like a complete abomination against God. What a dick.“When Danny started to talk, he told me about a man with a clown face who came into his room at night to take him flying. He said that when the man put a magic wand in the middle of his forehead, they immediately were in a place that had balloon lights of different colors.”So underground inhabitants, aliens, clowns with magical powers, balloons…..…Are the Swerdlow kids getting stalked by Pennywise?)Anyway, the clown took Daniel to see his “baby sister”, who ended up scratching his face with claws. Also, the kid can talk to angels. Not aliens masquerading as angels, but real, honest-to-God angels who tell him the future. This is just casually tossed in on the last paragraph as an afterthought with no elaboration.Chapters 13-14 are about Swerdlow’s CIA application, which was already covered in Montauk Revisited, so I’ll just breeze through it. He simply answered a “Help Wanted” ad in the newspaper, was told that he would be valuable due to his knowledge of ten languages, was asked a barrage of questions during the events described in Montauk Revisited and was declined by the CIA because he was a security risk.Continued in Part 2 via /r/StrangerThings