#the more and more I draw depressed Mayor the more and more I regret making them go through so much crap

[askblueandviolet]

Hey Mayor, you should try screaming into a pillow . Its what I do when everything feels like shit.

MASTER POST

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[sinrau]

President Donald Trump now reportedly “regrets” taking the advice of son-in-law Jared Kushner, and has vowed to not listen to anything else he says on criminal justice reform.

Sources tell Axios’s Jonathan Swan that Trump believes Kushner’s big sentencing reform bill has been a bust with his base, as it has undercut his image as a “law and order” president.

“No more of Jared’s woke sh*t,” was how one White House source described the president’s attitude to Kushner’s advice.

Swan writes that Trump’s souring on Kushner came weeks after Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whom the president frequently watches, unloaded on the president’s son-in-law.

“In 2016, Donald Trump ran as a law-and-order candidate because he meant it,” Carlson said recently. “And his views remain fundamentally unchanged today. But the president’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency almost four years ago, have been since subverted at every level by Jared Kushner.”

Swan believes that Trump from here on out will center his reelection campaign on cracking down on statue vandals while demonizing the entire Black Lives Matter movement.

Racism is all he’s got.

Everything else Donald Trump was going to run on this summer and fall has evaporated. The “booming” economy? (Which he inherited from Barack Obama in the first place.) The U.S. has the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression and the situation is about to get exponentially worse as unemployment benefits expire. And no, “reopening” is not a solution, since the data makes clear that consumers have little interest in shopping or eating out during a pandemic.

Last week, I walked over to Black Lives Matter Plaza in front of the White House to clear my head and draw some inspiration. When I arrived at the north end of the square, the line of people waiting to climb up a stepladder so they could get a better picture of “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in bright yellow letters heartened me. They were so obviously proud and energized by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s act of defiance against Donald Trump itself, but also I expect by what that act represented: That the people still own this nation and still have power to move it where it needs to go.

President Donald Trump now reportedly “regrets” taking the advice of son-in-law Jared Kushner, and has vowed to not listen to anything else he says on criminal justice reform.

Sources tell Axios’s Jonathan Swan that Trump believes Kushner’s big sentencing reform bill has been a bust with his base, as it has undercut his image as a “law and order” president.

“No more of Jared’s woke sh*t,” was how one White House source described the president’s attitude to Kushner’s advice.

Swan writes that Trump’s souring on Kushner came weeks after Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whom the president frequently watches, unloaded on the president’s son-in-law.

“In 2016, Donald Trump ran as a law-and-order candidate because he meant it,” Carlson said recently. “And his views remain fundamentally unchanged today. But the president’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency almost four years ago, have been since subverted at every level by Jared Kushner.”

Swan believes that Trump from here on out will center his reelection campaign on cracking down on statue vandals while demonizing the entire Black Lives Matter movement.

[sage-nebula]

If Alan's parents found him again after all these years how would they react and how would Alan react to them?

I’m really sorry this has taken me a couple days to reply! I was really tired so I ended up going to bed early the first night, yesterday it was too cold in this building (my work building) to type, and I was also just distracted with other things until sleep time once again, haha. But I can go ahead and answer now!

So, for reference, Alan’s biological parents are Lucia and Sebastian, and you can read all about them here. The very, very basic gist behind why they abandoned Alan is that they really weren’t ready to be parents, and that—combined with postpartum depression, anxiety and shame, and other factors led to Lucia specifically leaving Alan on a rock near Isolé Village in the hopes that one of the villagers would find him and take him in. That said, as explained in the post, even immediately afterward Lucia felt guilty about what she did (though not enough to go and take him back just then), and that’s a lingering guilt that stays with her for all the years that follow. Sebastian, too, feels guilty, though he thinks that the mayor of Isolé took Alan in as they had originally planned, because Lucia never told him that she just left Alan (or Liam, as he’s known to both of them, given that that’s what they named him) there on that rock. As such, the guilt he feels is a bit less than the guilt she does, and he tries to assuage that guilt by telling himself that the mayor of Isolé (or someone in Isolé) willingly took his son in to raise. Lucia tells herself this, too—tells herself that someone must have found him, taken care of him—but she also has that stabbing guilt of leaving him behind, as well as the nagging terror that maybe no one did find him, and he starved to death on that rock and it was all her fault.

(And note, you shouldn’t feel bad for her because of this. She was in a tough position, sure, because teen pregnancies are never easy and she just wasn’t ready for it. However, that is no excuse for abandoning her three month old son on a rock in the hopes that someone would hear him if he started crying. He very easily could have died, and even though he didn’t, he was still subjected to five years of neglect and abuse before Sycamore found him. Abandoning him like that was not the right call and was not acceptable, and Lucia shouldn’t be pitied for the guilt she feels, because she deserves every ounce of it.)

So with that said, as I noted at the end of the original post, it’s possible that they could seek him out later in life, particularly if they see him on television during the League finals and put two-and-two together (because he looks quite a bit like them, as I describe in the post, and even though his name is different now, he’d be around the right age …). They’ve both felt guilt and regret over the past fifteen years, increasingly as they’ve grown older and more secure in their lives. They don’t have any other children (though wouldn’t that be wild, if he had younger biological siblings that he just didn’t know about—I mean, he doesn’t, but that’d be a bit mind-blowing for him), and part of this is because they feel as if they can’t have any other children when they gave up the first one they had. They’ve thought about how, perhaps if they got Liam back and built a family with him, then they could have other children—but they’d have to do something about Liam first. So they’ve always been extra careful so that Lucia didn’t get pregnant again, doubling up on condoms and birth control and whatever necessary to ensure they never had any other children.

But as I said, they’ve thought about him almost daily over the years, and so it’s entirely possible that—post-Flare crisis—they might seek him out to see if they could rebuild and have a relationship with him, if maybe they can be a family now even though they weren’t one before. If they did decide to do this, they would start with Isolé Village. Neither Sebastian nor Lucia would have any idea that Sycamore had taken Alan in, and so Isolé is the only place they would have to look. Of course, the villagers would be confused about Sebastian and Lucia asking after a “Liam” at first—they would have no idea who that is—but after Lucia comes clean and admits that she left him on a rock (and she would now be feeling terrified that perhaps they hadn’t found him, that maybe he had starved and died, and meanwhile Sebastian would be hearing about this for the first time in fifteen years and would be appalled that she had a.) done that, and b.) never told him about it), that’s when they would realize she was talking about Alan and that confusion would get cleaned up. But of course, he hasn’t lived in Isolé Village for a decade now, and they haven’t seen him in just as long. The mayor would probably tell them that Professor Sycamore of Lumiose City had taken him, and that’s the last they ever saw of him. This, too, would be rather shocking to Lucia and Sebastian—neither one of them would have ever dreamed that their son could have been taken in by the regional professor—but they’d thank the mayor for the information before departing.

(Lucia and Sebastian would probably get into a heated discussion about the fact that Lucia had left their baby on a rock, but Lucia would defensively point out that it wasn’t as if Sebastian had gone with her, and Sebastian would counter that she could have at least told him, and Lucia would fire back that “what would that have changed?” and it would go on for some time with no real winner. They’d cool off by the time they reached Lumiose, but it’s definitely not something Lucia was happy about having to admit, nor that Sebastian would be happy to learn.)

Anyway, they have no real way of knowing if Alan is still at the lab or not (though we know he is), but that’s where they go anyway. They figure, even if he’s not there anymore, Professor Sycamore might know where he is. So they go to the lab—and honestly, I do want to write a fic about this hypothetical scenario, but it will take a while so I can give you the general gist to at least answer your question—and they are perhaps greeted by Sophie and/or Cosette at first, and Lucia asks after ‘Liam,’ and when she’s met with confusion, Sebastian quickly corrects that they’re wondering if Sophie (and/or Cosette) know where Alan is instead.

And Cosette says, “Oh, I’ll go get him!” before she turns and darts off through the lab. And while she does that, Sophie asks who Lucia and Sebastian are (though she’s looking at them, and they look so familiar …), and when Lucia nervously says they’re his parents, she comes very close to dropping whatever she’s holding, hardly able to believe she actually did hear what it is she just heard.

It’s at that point that Cosette returns with Alan (and Professor Sycamore close behind, because remember—this is post-canon, and two strangers have shown up asking after Alan, and he wants to make sure everything is okay). When Lucia and Sebastian see him there, in person … it’s a rush of emotion. There he is, the baby they abandoned, but he’s not a baby anymore. He’s all grown up now (well, more grown up—he’s still not an adult yet, but he is a teenager and that’s a huge change from the infant they remember). It’s almost surreal to see him standing there after all these years, and so it takes a second for the shock to dissipate some, but in the next Lucia no doubt crosses the room and throws her arms around him in a hug. Sebastian does the same, and Alan …

To say he’s “bewildered” is an understatement.

Alan doesn’t do very well with sudden physical contact. His experiences as a small child in Isolé Village left him unaccustomed to sudden physical contact (in the sense that if he did get sudden physical contact back then, it was bad), and the renewed surge of hyper-vigilance due to his experiences with Lysandre has made him even more averse to it, as a general rule. This is why he tenses for a moment when Manon hugs him suddenly at the end of TSME 3: it takes him by surprise, he’s not sure how to react, but then he masters himself and hugs her back. Nonetheless, there’s still that moment where his brain is just in “!“ mode when he’s hugged out of the blue, and so in this instance he immediately tenses up, and—because he’s being so tightly hugged by two people he doesn’t know—his “!” reaction increases to “!!” and he immediately starts pulling and pushing his way out of that. Not harshly, but just forceful enough to let them know he wants out. (Sycamore is about to intervene, too, but Lucia and Sebastian realize that Alan is pulling away, so they draw back, too. Sycamore relaxes then.)

“Sorry,” Alan says, even though he has no reason to apologize, because that’s how he is, “but who are you?”

“Right, we probably should have said that, first,” Lucia says, and she’s laughing a little even as she wipes away tears. “Lia—Alan, we’re your parents.”

Cosette claps her hands over her mouth, Sophie is looking back and forth between Lucia, Sebastian, Alan, and Sycamore, and Sycamore does drop whatever he had in his hands (a pencil? a pad of paper?), but he doesn’t even notice as it slips from his fingers. Alan, meanwhile, furrows his brow and asks, “What were you about to call me?”

“Liam. It’s your name—your real name. It’s what we named you,” Lucia says, and she motions between herself and Sebastian, who nods.

“It’s good to see you again, son,” Sebastian says.

Alan is still staring at them. Still frowning. Still having trouble processing this, because the name thing—that’s wrong, he feels, because his “real name” is Alan, it’s the only name he’s ever known, but— “I … what?”

There would be a lot of shock and confusion as far as Alan is concerned. He’d be completely bewildered, stunned—he wouldn’t know what to think at first. For the first five years of his life he had dreamed of this happening, had fantasized about his parents coming back to Isolé for him, about them finding him and wanting to bring him home, about them loving and wanting him. He hadn’t known their names, or faces—and even now, as he stares at them, as he hears them say they’re his parents and guesses he can maybe see some similarities between them and his own reflection if he stares at them hard enough—they’re strangers. There’s no feeling of familiarity, no instant connection like he had thought there would be when he was a lonely little boy falling asleep in a shoe closet because Maurice had sent him there for a time-out and had forgotten to let him out again. But he hasn’t thought about them for years; he stopped wanting them to come find him years ago, after Sycamore was the one who found him and took him in. After Sycamore brought him home to the lab, he had a happy childhood, and while he has longed for Sycamore to officially adopt him, that’s just it: he hasn’t longed for just a parent, in general, he has longed for a specific person to officially adopt him. It’s not just that he has wanted a mom, a dad, and a picket fence. It’s that he wants this specific dad and this specific laboratory enclosure. 

But they’re … these people … they’re his biological parents, or at least, that’s what they’re saying, and they do look like him, he supposes, and he does … have questions … he’s always had questions, has always wondered why …

So when they ask if they can take him out to dinner, so they can talk and catch up, he hesitates for a second, but then he agrees. He hasn’t thought about or longed for them in a decade now, but he wants to know why they abandoned him, or if they abandoned him and how that happened. He wants to know—everything, really, he has so many answers that he has been without for pretty much his entire life, and these are the people who can give those answers to them. So he agrees, but then he pauses and looks back at Sycamore.

“Is that okay?” he asks.

Sycamore feels like he has something stuck in his throat, honestly. He has a lot of questions, too—how dare you? for starters, and honestly that one has two parts, because part one is how dare you abandon him in a place like that, do you have any idea what he went through? and part two is, how dare you come back for him now when you abandoned him to a life like that back then?—but he also feels like it’s probably not his place to ask that right now. Not when Alan’s biological parents are back at last. Not when Alan might finally have a chance to get to know them. And that’s the right thing, isn’t it? That’s … a good thing, it’s something that should be celebrated, not something Alan should be denied, if he wants it. So Sycamore does his best to swallow past whatever is stuck in his throat, and does his best to force a smile (it feels more like a grimace) as he nods and says, “Yes, of course. Take the rest of the day—as much time as you need.”

The look on Sycamore’s face gives Alan another note of pause, but this is an opportunity for answers he can’t really pass up, so he nods. “Okay. Thank you.”

Lucia and Sebastian, of course, don’t notice anything odd. They’re relieved Alan accepted their offer, overjoyed that he’s going to, and so they’re quite happy when they leave with him. And when they do, and the door is closed behind the three of them, Cosette loses whatever chill was keeping her quiet during the proceedings and practically shrieks, “Did that really just happen?!” because while she hasn’t known Alan for as long as Sycamore and Sophie, she has known him long enough to know that he’s been an orphan for pretty much forever, so the idea that his biological parents could show up out of the blue like that is pretty mind-blowing for her.

And Sophie’s in a similar state of shock. She’s the one who points out how much Alan looks like his parents, how he has his mother’s eyes but his father’s smile—doesn’t he? When his father smiled, she noticed just how much Alan really does look like his father—

But then she notices that Sycamore doesn’t seem to be sharing in any of this excitement, and she asks, “Professor Sycamore? Is everything all right?”

Sycamore notices both Sophie and Cosette watching him, and so he forces another smile. “Yes! Everything is just fine. I have some work to get back to, though, so I should probably … head off to that.”

“Do you want some help?” Cosette asks.

Sycamore shakes his head. “No, no, you can go back to whatever you were doing before … they showed up. I’ll just be in the back.”

And by “the back” he means “the garden” because he goes outside to hang out with Gabrielle and Lizardon and the others for a while—and he feels a sudden thread of worry that Alan didn’t think to grab Lizardon before he left, but then he calms himself because it’s just dinner, and those are his parents, even though they’re not really his parents in anything but blood because it’s not like they raised him, it’s not like they were there for him, and even with this most recent crisis, where were they? Alan has been struggling, he’s been having a hard time after everything Lysandre did to him, and his parents have no idea about any of that, they don’t know anything about him—

Well, you get the idea. Sycamore is not at all happy about this development. He feels guilty about that, because he feels like he should be happy about this, that this could make Alan happy, and Alan’s happiness is one of the most important things to him. But he’s also worried, because he doesn’t understand why Alan’s parents suddenly showed up now, after all these years. They could have looked for him at any point, so what about the fifteen years leading up to this day? Where were they then? And why did they abandon him in the first place? And how can they call themselves his parents when they know nothing about him, when they were never there for him, when they never took care of him, never supported him, never did a single thing to raise him—

As you can see, there’s some jealousy there, too—unexpected jealousy, for him, given that he’s generally not a jealous person, but jealousy nonetheless. (And remember, jealousy is a fear of losing something or someone, whereas envy is coveting something you don’t have. So in this case, Sycamore is jealous because feels, even if he has never said it out loud, that if anyone has the right to call themselves Alan’s father, that’s him. Alan is his son. And the idea that Lucia and Sebastian could just swoop in and take him when they were never there for him and might not have his best interests at heart is … really upsetting to Sycamore, who loves this kid to pieces. He very strongly feels, “No, he’s my son, back off,” but he feels it’s not right for him to say that, so it’s a cocktail of negative feelings that have thrown off his entire day, to be honest.)

Meanwhile, at the restaurant, Alan does ask his questions, and he gets his answers, and at the end of everything Lucia and Sebastian do say that they want Alan to come live in Anistar City with them. And he, of course, is flummoxed and near speechless once again because—-what? 

“We know we haven’t always been there for you, but we want to be,” Lucia says earnestly. “We’ve missed you so much, baby.” 

“I … I have a job here,” Alan says. “I’m the Professor’s assistant—”

“You can commute,” Lucia interjects.

“We saw your charizard on TV, during the League broadcast,” Sebastian says, and he grins. “No doubt he could fly you back and forth quickly enough, given how strong he is.”

“And it wouldn’t have to be every day,” Lucia says. “We wouldn’t ask you to quit, or anything, especially since we wouldn’t want to put Professor Sycamore out after everything he’s done for us—but we do have enough money to take care of you. You could go down to part-time. You wouldn’t have to work every day, you could just take some time to rest, and … and get to know us.”

“We just—we’re just asking for a chance, that’s all,” Sebastian says. “We know this is a lot to ask, given—given everything, we know we owe you so much, but that’s what we want to give you. We just want a chance to give you everything we should have back then, to be the family for you that we know we can be. We just want a chance to be a real family, together with you.” He smiles. “Think you can give us that chance? Please?”

And Alan doesn’t know what to say. They’re practically begging him for a chance here, and he thinks … is that the right thing to do? They want to make an effort, they want to be there for him—would it be wrong to turn them away? To say no? To deny them the chance they’re asking for? They are his parents, or at least, his biological ones. Does he owe them the chance to make things right? Is that his responsibility? 

“… I’ll think about it,” he says finally, quietly, and while that’s not a “yes” it still makes Lucia and Sebastian happy. They’ve made so much progress compared to what they thought they would find when they first left Anistar. They’re quite thrilled about this.

They return to the lab with Alan, and when Sycamore asks how dinner was, Alan simply mumbles that it was fine and then says he’s going to go flying on Lizardon for a while. Sycamore is concerned about how down Alan seems, but Lucia and Sebastian have stuck around because they want to thank Sycamore for all that he has done for Alan over the years.

“With all due respect,” he tells them, “I did that for Alan, not for you.”

“We know,” Lucia says quickly. “But we’re still grateful nonetheless. You’ve taken care of him for us—”

“No,” Sycamore interjects, “I took care of him for him.” 

“Right,” Lucia says, and she’s feeling more than a little awkward now. “That’s what I meant, but—”

“We’re still grateful,” Sebastian says. “So thank you.”

Sycamore hums a little, to acknowledge what he’s hearing, but also because he can’t quite bring himself to say “you’re welcome” when, in honesty, he doesn’t feel an ounce of warmth toward them.

They don’t tell him that they offered for Alan to come live with them, and when Alan returns home from flying that night, he doesn’t mention it, either. Lucia and Sebastian go stay at a hotel in the city (they had told Alan previously they’d be back to see him again the next morning), and Sycamore is dying to know how Alan’s dinner with his parents went, but he had already asked and received a noncommittal “fine” and figures he probably shouldn’t pry more than that. If Alan wants to open up about it, Sycamore knows, he will.

But he doesn’t, and so by the time they both go to bed that night, Sycamore still doesn’t know.