#the other gary stuff is just all like actually literally true like we know this

[player1064]

carraville core beliefs (aka things I am Always keeping in mind when writing them)

Gary:

always busy. always talking. genuinely one of the most annoying people alive. his friends often mute him on whatsapp

easily bribed with chocolate

too rich to have any concept of what things should cost or how anything works

has a Type and that type is tall muscular men

related to his type: likes to be Held. (make of that what you will)

was in love with becks when they were young and everyone who knows him knows this

Jamie:

very much a lads lad and so probably a bit of a bastard but unconsciously acts soft around Gary

loud and over the top especially when he's joking around. VERY touchy-feely but only with people he's comfortable with

does not like sweets. does not like coffee.

loves a paycheck

doesn't have a type he's just insane about Gary. so insane about him that he doesnt necessarily have to actually like men at all to like HIM

completely utterly whipped

as a pair:

always the most insane people in any room they're in and always the most intense

bullying is their love language and they're suspicious if they're being nice to each other

genuinely stupidly fond of each other. what was it I said the other day they just delight each other so much

the reason they delight each other/click so well is BECAUSE they're always the two most insane people in any room they're in

everything is a competition and once they're together they STAY together bc they are both determined to Win at their relationship

[57sfinest]

something i’ve been thinking about is the intersection of racism & fascism with conspiracy theories/pseudoscience and the supernatural in disco elysium. it’s a well-documented phenomenon irl and i think the game is very good at easing you into the “levels” of how these things are inherently related.

on the surface you have the racist lorry driver, who literally has “racist” in his epithet and is the most out-and-proud racist-fascist you could possibly meet, and measurehead, another open racist and fascist whose nickname is given to him by his belief in phrenology. here we see these people as pretty much cartoonishly racist and very vocal about *why* they believe these things: it all comes down to pseudoscience. these are people who have been convinced that racism is just a fact, justified by science that others are just too “soft” to recognize. we all know about measurehead and his phrenology and such but the RLD also espouses pseudoscience to justify his racism:

and, in addition to this “supporting” his racist beliefs, on top of this he believes in conspiracy theories like an immigrant *Invasion* and an anti-Occidental (anti-white) “cultural victory”, which sounds suspiciously like real-life “white eradication” conspiracy theories:

okay, this is some obviously deeply racist and fascist shit. but it’s not just this. measurehead goes beyond this and believes in other conspiracy theories unrelated to race supremacy, like his thing with semen retention, which is also a real-life conspiracy thing:

i’ll tie this all up at the end, so let’s move on to the next layer. gary is explicitly identified as a cryptofascist by his epithet. a cryptofascist, for those unfamiliar, is someone whose beliefs and ideals align with fascism but who doesn’t openly identify as such because they’re aware of the social unacceptability of it. if you play the fascist route, you’ll have to play as a cryptofascist in order to maintain positive relationships with NPCs and not take constant morale damage from saying fascist things. gary also says blatantly racist things, and here’s where it gets a little deeper than RLD and measurehead: the very basics of what he says are factually true-- that seol exports microtechnology, for example, which ties them to a lot of global governments-- but these actual facts have been spun by fear and *conspiracy theory* into a load of racist bullshit:

and you can actually see in that half light line at the bottom how the fear leverages belief in this stuff! you can argue against gary this whole time and still, an appeal to *fear* can start to slip in through the cracks. gary opens with facts and logic, devolves into fear and conspiracy spinning, and we get another layer of how racist rhetoric and belief spreads. then, to add another layer to the fear angle, you have plaisance. it’s not fear of immigrants with her, though. she’s afraid of this curse-- the supernatural-- that she thinks will be responsible for ending her business, and in her fear she turned to racist caricature and stereotypes:

it’s not the same as the direct “you’re seolite, fuck you” that RLD directs at kim or the “non-occidentals are inferior” he and measurehead parrot or “immigrants are trying to take over the world” that they and gary all buy into. it’s a far more insidious thing: this is something she takes as fact, so deeply that she doesn’t even *question* it. these nonwhite people are special mystical people with magic and that’s just how it is! while it’s not quite conspiracy theory, it’s supernatural, which functions the same as conspiracy when you talk about how racism is rooted in some fundamental disconnect from reality. and this brings us to our final subject, lena. lena comes in from the same angle, a belief in the supernatural (cryptozoology) that ultimately results in racism. (the juxtaposition of cryptozoology/cryptofascism with morell and gary was not an accident!) she seems like a regular sweet old lady who likes cryptids, until you’re randomly slapped across the face with this:

she believes that seolites are a different *species*, and that’s just a fact to her. you point out the racism and she just doubles down-- no, she’s not trying to be offensive, it can be a good thing actually! that’s just nature, just like the cryptids she loves! it’s just fact! and we see this echoed by plaisance and even gary, where they’ll say something deeply racist and follow it up with “but [x group] is very intelligent/crafty/etc as well!” as though saying this somehow cancels out the racism (when in actuality, these “good traits” are part of what they use to fearmonger about these “other” groups they’re so afraid of).

in general this group of characters serves really well to demonstrate how people who are out of touch with reality in other ways (conspiracy, magic, the supernatural, and some extreme forms of spiritualism) are frequently deeply racist as well, and some of them aren’t even aware or doing it intentionally. it really just comes with the territory, and some people choose to lean into it while others aren’t even aware of it, which is why the process of recognition and unlearning is so important when considering the latter population.

[acklesterritory]

That Kind of Love Never Dies_Chapter 1

Hey guys, Now that more voted to split my fictions in 2 parts, I'm back with the first part. I hope you like it. Don't forget to leave me feedbacks. I'll always appreciate them. Love you all.

This is for writing event @tvdspngirl314

My quote is "That kind of love never dies"

Dean x Reader series (just 2 parts)

This chapter words: ~5k

Series warning:

Angst, fluf, smut, angry Dean, hurt Reader, hurt Dean, there's some more but I hate spoilers so I insist on "Angst & Hurt"

It all started with a stupid argument at home. What was it? Three months ago? Sam couldn't remember the exact date but after years, it was the first time this awkward coldness between Dean and Y/n had started to build. He could remember the first time he and his brother came across Y/n like it was yesterday, they were hunting a very nasty creature who used to kidnap young and lonely women at night, then got them wrapped in ropes and ties on a bed in a warehouse to rape, torture and feed on their blood until the victim either died or accepted to turn into one of his kind.

Sam could remember the helplessness in people's eyes too. The pain of the victims' families, the frustration and anger on cops' faces when no one could find the criminal yet, even after the sixth missing girl.

"Sammy, he just kidnapped another girl. And I think I know where he's gonna take her. Let's hunt this son of a bitch."

When Dean was saying that, Sam never expected him to fall in love with the woman they would save that night. Well, unfortunately they weren't fast enough to prevent any harm to the girl. When they arrived and Dean killed the nasty creature, Y/n was almost dead. The monster had already raped her, tortured her … and when he felt the hunters enter the place, he drank almost all of her blood, to gain more energy to fight. So as always, Dean was up to blaming himself. Of course only in his own eyes, not anyone else's.

"Call Cas to come home. Tell him it's an emergency."

Dean told his brother when he finally could get Y/n out of those ropes. And Sam knew he was right. At that point, no one could save Y/n unless God or his angels. Maybe she was not so lucky coming across a nasty supernatural creature like that but she was lucky enough that Cas arrived just on time and healed her. However, angels can only heal physical wounds. But Y/n was hurt much more than that. She couldn't just move on from the things that the bastard had put her through. Even after Cas tricked her brain to forget some certain things, she still had bad nightmares and had this dark shade of hopelessness in her eyes. Soon, she started to eat and talk less and less. And Dean just couldn't let her go. He really wanted to fix all of that for her but she kept shutting him out… until the depression hit her. It was so bad that Cas felt the need to tell them to prepare themselves for her death. Because after all those days and unlike everything else in their lives, The Winchesters were already used to her presence around them; like the way a lonely person can get used to a wounded cat more and faster than anyone else.

"I'm not gonna hunt until I'm sure she can live her normal life." When Dean stated that, Sam really thought he was joking. But after a few days he started to believe it. Dean truly would do anything to keep her alive. From cooking vegetables to laughing at his own dad jokes in front of Y/n to make her smile. That was when Sam started to feel that they can be more than a random hunter/rescued victim relationship! It felt like his brother had finally found his motivation in life: "Saving Y/n."

Gradually Y/n started to respond to this special attention from Dean with trust and smiles. Soon they became a power couple that could motivate each other so easily that sometimes Charlie would call them out. And honestly Sam had no problem with it. In fact Y/n had become his other sister.

"My God, Dean! You're burning up!" It was two day after a werewolf hunt in which Dean had got hurt. At first it was just some scratches on his arms and chest. Yet as the time passed, more symptoms started to appear: headache, pain, fever, cold sweat, even nose bleeding and before they could figure it out, Dean fell unconscious. Apparently the claws of the werewolf were poisonous. However Sam wasn't sure. The only thing he got no doubts about was the fact that it was already too late. Dean couldn't make it to the hospital. So either Sam had to do anything possible to save him or Cas should've picked up his God damn phone.

"No. no, no, no, no. Dean … Dean!!!"

That was when Sam got to hear Y/n's helpless cry and see her true feelings. She was already in love with his brother.

Luckily, unlike typical love stories; no one died that night. Sam's antidote worked. And Dean opened his eyes an hour later.

"Sammy … Y/n?" As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Y/n grabbed his face and put her thirsty lips on her beloved hunter's, letting the tears stream down on her face… and then his.

"Never do that again." She begged, breaking the kiss, her trembling hands holding Dean's face so she could look into his eyes.

Sam couldn't stop his smile remembering how cute they were. Y/n literally had Dean wrapped around her little finger, to the point he accepted to teach her how to hunt and soon she was part of their team too. Until … a few months ago. After two years of them being constantly close to each other, Sam could tell something was off when Dean started to go out without eating breakfast with Y/n. Of course she got suspicious after the third time and that was when their endless arguments started.

"Why don't you just tell me what's wrong?"

"Because nothing is wrong, Y/n."

Actually there was. Something was VERY wrong. Anyone could tell that just by the change in Dean's eyes whenever he wanted to look at Y/n. Day by day he was getting more quiet and cold. Now they didn't even eat pie together or watch movies late at night. And Sam couldn't ignore his brother being grumpy or drunk on hunts, not anymore.

"Ok man, I've had enough. You either tell me what's wrong with you or next time I won't make any excuses so you can leave Y/n out of our hunt plans. I'm serious, Dean, I'll tell her the truth." He finally said, when they were alone in the impala, on their way to do their next hunt.

"She wants more."

"More?"

"Yeah. Sometimes it's like she sees more in me. She thinks we can have a different life. There's no need for any saying, I can see it in her eyes whenever we accidentally come across some family at a diner that try to feed their kids or people's wedding photos whenever we go to talk with some witnesses or whoever during the research! Sometimes she even looks up wedding dresses or kid stuff on the net!" Dean blew his anger out of his nostrils and sighed, shaking his head.

"Wow." Sam couldn't find the proper word to say but he couldn't hide his surprised face either.

"What?" Dean gave him an annoyed look.

"I mean …" Sam chuckled. "… are you telling me you're actually angry with her for imagining the things you always dream about?!"

"Sam …"

"No, really. I'm just curious. What's wrong with you, man?" Sam asked genuinely, waiting for an answer.

"What's wrong with me?! You think something is wrong with me just because I'm the rational one in this relationship; who's actually able to see the difference between a dream and the reality?"

Yeah, anyone could take that earnest speech, but not Sam. He'd seen and knew enough about his brother.

"What's the reality? Aren't you and Y/N living that dream life already?"

"What?! No. No … that's not the same." Dean shook his head.

"Really? How is it not? It's been two years, Dean. You two are constantly with and/or around each other. Always worried when the other one is in trouble and still looking at one another like there is nothing in the world that can make you happy as much as this relationship. So … excuse me if I won't buy your pretty speech; man ." Sam said, Rolling his eyes.

"Ok, let's say you're right but ... is it gonna be like that forever? With all the supernatural crap that we have to take care of … and the constant danger and chaos in this hunter life we have… I …"

"You what?" Sam asked when Dean didn't finish his sentence. He was lost in his thoughts, staring at this unknown point in the depth of the road. Finally he blew out his despair.

"I just can't let her fall for the things I know I can't provide for her. It's not fair, Sammy. It's not fair to lock her up in this dark life with me just because she loves me … especially while I know there is a whole bright future out there waiting for her."

"Here we go, the old Dean's self-doubt" Sam thought to himself as he took a deep breath before finding the best words to wake his brother up from this nightmare

"Yeah, I know but I don't think it's your call. If Y/n wants to go to hell with you instead of living in heaven with someone else, it's her choice. Not your responsibility. Right?"

Dean shook his head while his lips curved up a little to fake a smile but he never answered or said anything about that conversation ever again. He kept his silence for like three weeks … until someone new showed up: "Gary Smith". A tall man with the most stylish haircut and the most perfect teeth and smile.

They saw him for the first time at their hangout bar, as the new bartender who almost jumped in Y/n's way as soon as they entered the bar.

"Oh my God, bunny! Is this really you?" He said, pulling her in his embrace. Like she was the long time missing piece of his beloved puzzle!

"Bonny? You're wrong. Her name is Y/n." Dean said, pretty annoyed by the way Gary tightened his arms around Y/n's little shoulders, making him chuckle.

"No, uh … it's just a nickname." Y/n said as soon as the guy let her go.

"Yeah, actually the most fitting nickname that I could think of. I mean … you have to agree. She got the most cute little ears in the world." The guy explained, chuckling and pulling on her little star earring. Well, if Sam wanted to be honest, he had to agree with him. He never paid any attention to it before but now that Gary mentioned it, he could tell Y/n's ears were truly small.

"I see … So … I guess this means you were close friends?" Dean said, already hating the way Y/n e's blushed with hearing her old nickname.

"Uh … well, no. Actually more than that." The guy grinned, ruffling his own hair while he was awkwardly laughing and looking at Y/n. Just like a proud embarrassed teen!

"We used to date." Y/n said.

*oh* Sam tried his best not to let that stupid grin sit on his lips but Dean's frown and his sudden heavy silence didn't let him do so.

"Yeah. We are kinda each other's first. Like … you know? prom date." The man added, giving Y/n a wink while Dean's gaze was still locked on his large arm around her shoulders.

"Yeah. It's been years, Gary."

"I know. But believe me, bunny. you still look the same." He said, bending to put a kiss on her right cheek.

Dean would kill him. Sam just knew that. Because his brother's eyes were already burning with jealousy.

"By the way, don't you wanna tell me who these gentlemen are ?" The guy asked Y/n, giving her his softest smile.

"Of course. This is Sam and this is Dean. My colleagues who are my friends now. I live in their place."

After they met, everything got even more complicated. Y/n, the girl who was still trying to get old-happy-days Dean back suddenly stopped whatever she used to do. No more complains, no waiting at nights to see Dean before going to bed, no more effort to get involved in hunts, no nothing. And despite what Dean had claimed before, it was making Dean even more frustrated. Day to day he and Y/n were getting colder towards each other and there was nothing he could do to fix it. That was what made him even more furious. Sam already knew all of that and he still had to live with both of those grumpy faces. So last night when they began to fight, he could see this was coming: Y/n left the bunker after Dean let some hurtful things out of his mouth, just because he didn't know how to deal with all the heartache anymore. He now was convinced that Y/n didn't love him anymore. Yet the next day after drinking whatever strong drink they had, he begged Sam to come with him. Apparently Jodie texted Dean about Y/n being in her place for that night. Just to make sure that her crazy step son won't sell his soul over a tracking spell! So Dean almost begged his brother to be there with him, cause Dean believed that as much as Y/n didn't care about him, she still respected Sam and cared about him. Like a little sister and her elder brother.

So here they were, In Jodie's living room, in front of her and Y/n.

"Considering your sleepy eyes, I think we caught you at bed time, huh?" Sam asked, checking Y/n's obvious eye bags.

"Who says that? I'm totally good, Sam."

She said with a small smile, looking much more in control and stronger than before. So Sam knew it was a lie. Y/n Just had made her peace with what had happened last night. The realization۹ kicked Dean in the gut. Y/n always used to be stronger and bolder when she got hurt.

"I'm gonna make some coffee for us. Why don't you guys take a seat till I come back?"

Jodie interrupted, to ease the heavy and sharp silence that suddenly had fallen over all of them.

Y/n gave her a smile.

"Of course."

It was so fake. Her smile didn't even curl her lips completely. She was still badly hurting.

Sam swore in his head when he looked over his brother who sank silently into the nearest seat at the end of the table like a broken shell that he was too . One of Dean's hands was in the pocket of his jacket, the other formed a fist on the table. Sam was sure Dean knew it too. He knew everything was almost past saving. "Almost". Sam tried to stick to their small chance.

"So …" He cleared his voice before he put some (semi fake) hope into his words."You're … you're gonna come back home today or did Alex and Claire made you promise them otherwise?" He laughed and tried to make it funny but the truth was he asked this for Dean's sake, knowing he already was struggling to find the words … to let Y/n know how much he wanted her back … to ask her to come back.

"To be honest … I don't think I can live in the bunker anymore." Y/n said and as Dean's head snapped up to look at her in horror, she raised her hand to stop his (likely) protests.

"I applied for a job 3 weeks ago and to my surprise they called me this morning to tell me I'd actually got it."

*What?*

No one had to ask it. The question was already hung in the air. She snored mockingly in her nose. "Perfect timing, right?"

She moved her gaze from her interlocked fingers on the table to Dean's eyes.

He didn't answer, he didn't move but he got tense. Still staring back at Y/n.

"Why didn't you tell us?" Sam asked, once again saving Dean from asking the question he was itching to ask with some other words that for sure couldn't be nice.

"I wanted to but I didn't think I could actually get it and even if I did, I never figured out how to tell you. Besides, I never considered the "move out" option before..." She looked at Sam for a second before she turned her gaze on Dean. "... But I actually appreciate that you bring it up. I think now I can take the advice. I'm gonna move on."

Sam's heart dropped in his stomach when he heard those words. Because he knew what this meant. It felt something like having to watch Dean get stabbed in the heart.

"Is this … because of that Bartender?" Dean asked, staring deadly at Y/n with his bloodshot eyes. He was already chewing on his bottom lip. And Sam knew a heavy storm was on its way to hit them.

"I don't want to answer that question."

*shit*

"Why? Because you can't just simply say no?" Dean scolded and Sam could see how it pushed on Y/n boundaries.

"No. Because it's not your fucking business and it's not Gary's business either. But at least he knows his limits."

*well, fuck*

"By "limits" you mean when he drools on you just because for God knows whatever the reason, you started to wear leather jackets when we go there?"

"WHAT?!"

*Oh, fuck* Sam thought to himself, watching Y/n rise from her seat.

"You think … you really think that I …" she laughed nervously and Sam could tell she would punch Dean in the face if she wasn't a sweet, super nice person.

"How you can even …"

"I can even what, Y/n? Are we now going to pretend like I'm a blind man who can't see how you got attracted to your ex again? Did you really think I couldn't see how your hands were shaking when his filthy face lighted up by seeing you for the first time after all these years?"

Sam wanted to interrupt him or at least leave the room but everything was happening so fast.

"So what? Why and since when you care about my private life?"

"Since you stopped drinking bunker's beers just because you rather drink those crappy poisonous cocktails he makes at the bar!"

Dean was on his feet now as well. And despite his will, Sam couldn't stop his smile. He never saw his brother this jealous before. It was fun.

"Poisonous? … You … of all people, you are the one who says this? cause as much as I know, you're the one who puts dormitives in my guest's food so the poor guy gets tired and can't spend his time with me!"

"Yeah, because your poor guy is not welcomed in MY PLACE!" Dean yelled, punching the table with so much power that made everyone almost jump out of their skins.

"Dean!" Finally Sam interrupted but as soon as he stood up, someone rang the doorbell and Sam could hear Jodie welcoming someone inside.

"Guys … I know it's not my place to interfere but you two really need to sort things out somewhere private … of course that's when both of you can be much calmer than this."

"No, we have nothing to say or to talk about, anymore. Your brother was clear enough when he said he wants me to move out, so I'll move out. And that's it."

Y/n declared, looking at Sam to resist any eye contact with Dean, probably to make him even more crazy.

"And that's it? You wanna ignore that part where you were too eager and ready to accept that suggestion and leave the bunker instantly like your pants were on fire?!"

Dean retorted while Y/n was shaking her head like she couldn't believe him.

"Whose pants are on fire?" Jodie interrupted as soon as she re-entered the room with the coffees she'd made, this time a man was with her. Y/n's guy. The famous bartender.

*Oh, No!*

Sam sighed, closing his eyes for a second so the guy couldn't read his face.

"Obviously not mine." Dean hissed through his teeth, looking first at the guy and then at Y/n with such a disappointment and rage that no one could ignore.

"Hey, what's wrong?" The guy asked, choosing the worst spot to stand on: right next to Y/n.

"My typical life I guess. Nothing's new." She mumbled in reply to him but her eyes were still on Dean.

"No, nothing is wrong with your life, Y/n. It's about your choices. That's what's wrong with you. As always." Dean said bitterly. As sharp as a knife, as cold as ice. Sam could see how it drained color from Y/n's face.

"You better watch your mouth, buddy." The Gary guy warned Dean and Sam could tell that if it wasn't for the sudden thud sound that stole everyone's attention, Dean would throw a fight right there. But …

"Y/n!" Jodie almost screamed. Y/n was laying on the floor, seemingly unconscious.

"Oh, God." Sam said as Jodie rushed to her.

"Y/n? … Y/n can you hear me?"

As she sat next to her, Gary's fingers already were on Y/n's carotid pulse point. So Sam couldn't stop himself from looking up at his brother, who was still standing where he was. In shock.

"Oh, shit!" Gary's worried voice made Sam check Y/n's pale face again but Jodie was the one to dare ask the question which was on everyone's minds.

"What? What's wrong?"

"Her pulse ... too faint." He said before turning to Dean: "Is she bleeding?"

"Bleeding?" Dean blinked and mumbled in confusion.

If it was up to Sam, he'd ask *What bleeding?* & *Why are you asking this from my brother?*

"Oh my. You still don't know. Do you?" Gary sneered.

"Know what? What's happening?" Jodie was freaking out now and Sam actually felt the same. He didn't like the way this stranger pretended like he knew her better than them. However what happened next was much more unexpected. And … rude!

To everyone's surprise, the guy reached out to Y/n's jeans and drew his hand between her legs but before anyone could react, he spread her legs open so it could be possible for everyone to see that big red stain there. Then he raised his hand. It was all wet and red in blood!

"She's having a miscarriage." He revealed.

Sam's gaze instantly caught Dean's ... Burning. Dean was burning inside with his heavy silence.

"Don't you worry. It's not mine." Gary added more fuel to that hell with such a mocking tone, staring right back at Dean's eyes.

Now Sam could feel it. The storm was there: rising in his brother's roar!

Before Sam could've moved any muscles, Gary was already pinned to the wall, Dean's hands on his now-ripped-out collar.

"Dean, no!" Sam jumped in, trying to catch his brother's arm before his fist make any contact with the guy's nose but all he could do was changing the direction of the punch which landed on Gary's shoulder, making a painful cracking sound.

"I said no … Dean, stop it." Sam had to literally cage Dean in his arms so the furious man couldn't tear Gary apart.

"Get off me, Sam. This son of a bitch has to learn his place."

"Enough!" As Dean just broke himself free, Jodie's scream stopped everyone in their tracks.

"It's enough!" Jodie warned all three men, pointing at them one by one.

"You want to fight? Not here. Not in my house!"

"But ..."

As soon as Dean opened his mouth to protest, Jodie cut him:

"And you … you should know Y/n is pregnant with your twins. So … you'll be a responsible man who will try his best to save them or you can get the hell out of here and never come back!"

"What?" Sam was too shocked to suppress his reaction while Dean couldn't even find any words to say. His confused look darted between Jodie's face and Y/n's figure while his parted lips kept moving without making any noise, just like a dying fish on the shore!

"I promised her not to tell anyone but it was a promise under normal conditions, not this." Jodie sighed, struggling to keep her emotions under control. Sam saw the worry in her frown. Like a real mother, worried for her children. However it was nothing in comparison to his brother's blank eyes and pale face.

"Dean, It's ok. We just need to take her to hospital. … it's ok, man. I promise."

He had to grab Dean by his jacket, as his brother was struggling to process all of these in his head.

"Come on, man. We got no time. Do I need to do this alone or you'll …"

"Get the car, Sammy."

It was just a simple sentence. Yet it had enough power to make Sam's heart sank. Since Dean had put the car keys in his hand saying that, Sam couldn't stop thinking about that tone. Dean never had called Baby a "car" In years. And Sam had never heard that crack in his voice since their Dad's death.

"You ok?" He finally let himself ask, two hours after they arrived at the hospital.

"I want to be." Dean closed his eyes and put his head against the cold wall, letting the dim light to darken the shadows under his eyes.

"I'm sure she'll be good. She's strong, Dean. You know that."

He smiled and Sam looked away not to watch him. He knew that smile. Dean used to give him that, whenever everything was gone so wrong that Dean couldn't promise him anything good. Like when both of them were still kids. Hungry, cold and all alone in a rusty motel room where John had left them on their own for a one day long hunt but then a heavy snow had crashed the roads and kept them apart for half a week. So Dean had to wash the dishes and do the laundry in the motel to rent the room for another day and provide some snacks so they wouldn't starve to death. But after three days, the hotel managers didn't want them to be around. And Sam could vividly remember that smile on his brother's face when he asked: *Where should we go then?*

"You were always such a father material. You know?"

Sam admitted with a broken smile on his face.

"You were always responsible, kind and caring with me as a kid. And I can't imagine anyone who deserves to be a father more than you."

Dean took a deep breath and opened his eyes without looking at him: "But I don't want ... I really can't, Sammy."

All, it certainly wasn't the response Sam had expected. He used to believe that Dean would never turn down any chance to start a family with Y/n. Especially after everything in the world was back to normal.

"Are you kidding me? You always wanted this."

"No …" Dean finally turned his gaze to meet his brother's confused eyes. "No, Sammy. Not like this. I don't want to raise another kid without his mom. I'm not that strong anymore."

Dang. Once again Sam's heart dropped in his stomach. Dean was really helpless.

"Mr. Winchester?"

Dean was on his feet as Sam just realized the doctor's presence.

"It's me."

Sam prayed for any good news as doctor took a glance of Dean and fixed his glasses on his face …

"To be continued …"

READ CHAPTER 2 HERE

tag list:

@jay-and-dean @adoptdontshoppets @akshi8278

The next and also ultimate chapter will post on Sunday, April 25. Thanks for reading.

Feedback are always appreciated.

[saby-chan]

Why the ATLA comics fail when it comes to Zuko and his family

To whom ever took their time to actually stop and read this post, thank you in advance for not skipping my post and willing to stay and read my humble opinion! I hope I won’t disappoint you!

As a relatively newcomer to the ATLA fanbase since 2020, I’ve come across a lot of interesting debates, comments and rants about the show, characters and fandom in general, but nothing has captivated me as much as the dumpster-on-fire that are the ATLA comics, more specifically: The Promise and The Search. 

On one hand we have the hardcore fans who want them to be animated or serialized into the Netflix live action, praising the comics for the new views and subject matters they’ve brought into the show’s lore, while on the other hand we have the furious Azula fandom who is really angry for the fact that best girl didn’t get the redemption arc she rightfully deserved so much after the painful event that was the Last Agni Kai and the even more angry fans of the Urzai ship (yeah, the people who actually ship Zuko’s parents unironically) who hated the retconning of the show’s cannon since the comics basically took a huge fat dump on what was previously established as official cannon, when the Search entered the scene, but between these two sides, who has the more valid point? In the end, are the comics good cannon or bad written fanfiction?

Well... Here are my two cents on this matter since I myself happen to be an Azula and Zuko fan and had huge expectations from these comics (since I wanted more from my fave hot-headed fiery siblings duo) but ended up disappointed: the comics are indeed a huge mess and actually bad written fanfiction when it comes to Zuko and his family! Don’t click off yet, because I actually documented the reasons why exactly the comics fail in this area:

1. The author of these comics is not part of the BryKe duo

Yes, I would like to start with the fact that if you actually take a second to look up who in the heck took the time to write these two books, you won’t find Bryan, nor Mike, but a fellow man named Gene Yang. This is important because while the wiki of both The Promise and The Search state BryKe as the creators, that doesn’t mean that they were the actual minds behind these comics, but rather because ATLA is their “baby” and these comics involve their characters, over which they have copyright. Mr. Yang here is the actual brain behind the plot, as the main writer, which explains why we find huuuuge inconsistencies between the show lore and the comics, especially Zuko wise.

My main issue with Mr. Yang isn’t that he isn’t BryKe specifically, but because he did an unforgivable mistake in his writing process: He projected himself into Zuko’s character, based on the relationship Zuko had with his father. This is a documented fact from an interview in which he explains that he sees himself and his dad’s relationship into Zuko and Ozai and used that when writing their interactions and built Zuko’s character in the comics. And this is wrong because when you have an already very developed and complex character such as Zuko, you can’t just come in and be like “Oh, I was an angsty teen just like him in my teenage years, fighting with my dad and whatnot, so he must have the same thought process as me!”. NO! This is bad fanfiction writer behavior! Zuko has his own personality and philosophy, which he developed over the course of 3 seasons and is not defined by only 1 unfortunate aspect of his past, so you can’t just base his whole mindset and actions off of your own personal experience just because you had the same daddy issues he had!

2. The whole “Promise that you will kill me if I turn out like my dad!” nonsense in The Promise

Reason number 2 why these comics fail and go under the category of “bad fanfiction” is because they fail to convey the core essence of the source material. The whole point of Zuko’s redemption was that he realized the wrongdoings of his ancestors and his own mistakes. He outgrew his desire of gaining his father’s acknowledgement in favor of choosing his own destiny. Having him worry that he’ll turn into his father is utter nonsense and feels like poor angsty drama material for the sake of angst. At this point in time, Zuko has overcame that obstacle in his life a long time ago and should be at the level where he himself is the “Uncle Iroh” for other people and in no way someone concerned of becoming their own worst enemy!

Not only that, but the whole point of Aang’s journey and the story of the show as a whole was to teach us, the viewers, the importance of forgiveness, empathy and love in life. Aang didn’t spare Ozai, aka “the ultimate evil” just to flex in front of his pals or because he is a “ 12 y/o vegan pacifist monk kid”, but because he knew that killing someone, no matter of what they did or wanted to do, wouldn’t restore balance into the Universe, on the contrary, him killing the villain would have meant perpetuating the “endless cycle of hate” that plagued the world. So having Aang promise to kill his best friend in case “they turned into an evil maniac like their dad” contradicts Aang’s whole character and it’s a nonsense that throws into the trash what we’ve learnt throughout the entire TV series.

3. Azula deserved (and was supposed) to have a redemption ark

This might still be pure speculation, but I count it as a documented reason because I’ve heard quite a few people saying that there should’ve been a book 4 in the show, aka “Book 4: Air”, and no, it wasn’t The Search, but actually Zuko and Azula’s journey as Zuko helps his younger sister heal her broken mind by being her very own “Uncle Iroh”. Sure, they prolly were going to end up looking for Ursa, but the journey should’ve ended with them actually being happy and a family again and not the bs we got in The Search where a still very unstable Azula runs away and becomes the “Next Joker”! The only problem is that M. Night had to pop up and curse the world with his movie, which forced BryKe to delay the project (and eventually abandoned it in favor of Korra).

All in all, either if BryKe had this preplanned or not, it made sense for Azula to get a redemption ark, she deserved it because she was just a broken 14 y/o child! If Katara’s mom’s murderer deserved to be forgiven, so did this poor child who had no fault for what happened to her since she had a dysfunctional family! What Gene Yang did in his poorly written fanfiction was to just antagonize a broken child, turning her into a monster for the sake of friggin angst!

4. The Search is the worst of the two, being flat af character wise

And finally, getting to the point that I personally find the most annoying about these comics: The Search. This one... This one is a mess on a hella lot many levels, and just to list a few: characters are flat as fudge, being either black as vanta black (like Ozai and Azula) or pure white like Gene’s Gary Stue OC, Mr Ikem (or how I like to call him, IKEA man) and his ‘victim’ rendition of Ursa, Azula gets to suffer more for no reason (see reason number 3 to why I find this as a no no), Ursa’s whole character sucks ass (man, I could write a whole thesis on why Yang’s version of her is terrible and doesn’t match the strong woman we got in the show) and Zuko does morally wrong stuff (my man literally used his unstable sister to bribe their dad into spitting info about Ursa... Show Zuko would never do that!;-;)

Oh boy, as a person who’s seen a ton of anime and other media and read many books, I can’t begin on how much I despise this type of writing: flat characters are the worst!

 ATLA characters in the show are nothing close to being flat! What I mean by that is that none of them fall perfectly into pure white (aka goodest of good characters with no imperfections) or vanta black (aka lowest and darkest twisted monsters out there), each of them are various shades of grey (like Aang who is a very light grey because despite being a very kind and nice character, he still isn’t a “perfect hero” since he ran away from his duties, practiced tax fraud with Toph, had insecurities and even threatened to kill people on ocassions like with the sand benders who took Appa) and this is a good choice because that prevents them from becoming what’s globally known as Mary Sues and Gary Stues (aka those either “perfect” characters with no flaws and/or unlimited power, or the twisted monsters full of flaws).

And the other reason why many other people hate The Search: it literally negates previously established cannon. And here comes my short essay on why this comic fails Zuko’s family (since we’ve already talked enough about Zuko himself).

In cannon and even interviews with BryKe, it was clearly stated that Zuko’s family was “once happy”. Where is this “once happy” family in The Search? All I see is pain, deception, lies and betrayal, nothing close to anything that resembles happiness. Okay, some of you might come in and say that “It’s because it was never the case! It was only lies and Zuko trying to convince himself that he didn’t live in hell forever!” and here is WHERE YOU WERE ALL WRONG! And why? Because, my dear fella, where were depicted the flashbacks of Zuko’s “happy family” in The Beach? Ember Island. And what do we know and had been even quoted in the show?  "Like waves washing away the footprints on the sand, Ember Island gives everyone a clean slate. Ember Island reveals the true you." (direct quote from the show). Exactly, no matter who you are or how hard you try, you can’t hide your true self when you are on the Ember Island, best example being Azula, who’s impenetrable though shell cracked and revealed the true vulnerable child that was underneath. If Azula couldn’t resist the “spell of the island”, no one can. So this means that Zuko’s family was indeed happy once and yes, Ozai wasn’t always the douchebag we got to know in Season 3 (I have a whole nother essay on my theories regarding what could be his real past story and why he’s actually the “Zuko” of his generation, based on stuff I gathered from old wiki entries and character analyses I made, but that’s for another time, lemme know if ya’ll are interested).

And what I guess is the biggest proof why The Search did this family’s past trash is comics Ursa herself. My dude, if this woman were indeed the victim of years of endless abuse and never loved her husband, I guarantee you that she would’ve been closer to what we saw in Todoroki’s mom from BNHA and Zuko would’ve gotten that scar or even worse long before the Agni Kai, not from his “daddy dearest”, but from “mommy dearest” herself, because no sane woman would be soo affectionate and attached to a child that’s the perfect copy of their abuser, sepecially appearance wise (again see Todoroki’s mom’s case from BNHA because the stories are really similar) and in no way would’ve she been willing to sacrifice her life for said child’s sake. With this ocassion, I remind ya’ll folks that according to the ancient ATLA cannon wikis on Nick’s site, Ozai was designed with Zuko’s appearance in mind, being meant to be like a “grown up scarless version” of Zuko. So yeah, remember this with a grain of salt that whenever you simp over grown up Zuko, you involuntary simp for Ozai too.

So yeah, I guess this kinda concludes my “not so short” rant about why the comics fail and are bad fanfiction. Lemme hear your thoughts in the comments and if you agree, feel free to leave a like and even reblog.

Bye bye and remember that Momo is the true strongest character of the show!

 Saby out.

[lesbianmarrow]

watched legends of tomorrow 4.13 a couple days ago it was good :) “egg macguffin” is such a funny title it made me laugh. i like how this episode is somewhat more low stakes and is more character focused rather than plot focused (at least till the climax). in that way it reminds me a bit of 4.10 which also had a decompressed low key feeling that worked well since the preceding episodes had been very action-filled and plot-heavy. 4.13 gives us a chance to take a breath, and pays off some of the subplots that have been simmering throughout the season. 

the various storylines of the episode work well together in my opinion. for the most part the moral of the story is that repressed things will never stay repressed: zari & nate have to confront their feelings for each other, ray has to deal with the consequences of his actions (getting possessed by a demon), mick has to finally come out as rebecca silver, and gary has to deal with the bitter feelings that have been bubbling up since the start of the season. a nice neat through line! 

nate/zari romance is like fine its fine its nice whatever. i do still like the new side of zari that this romance brings out but i gotta be honest ever since i jumped on the #zarlie train i just cannot bring myself to be like actually invested in nate/zari. still zari was super pretty in the dress and it was kinda cute to see them flirting. whatever. despite being the a plot this was the storyline that i found least interesting in part because i have never seen an indiana jones movie. i did enjoy the golden egg. AND the reveal that it was NOT simply an egg maguffin after all but possibly a game-changing plot element???? who wouldve guessed! 

wait i just remembered the nate/zari romance WASNT the a plot bc the a plot was ray being possessed by a demon. i have to say i had high hopes for this storyline and i was a bit disappointed. i think maybe it just isn’t very interesting to see ray arguing with himself? like you just kind of see this 1 guy in a room talking to his hand. the physical acting was very good but still i think the way neron manifested was not the most interesting or engaging choice. i did love the tension of his scenes with nate where hes trying to keep from killing him and nate is totally oblivious. the way this episode puts ray’s love for nate on the same level as his love for nora is insane like WHAT exactly are you trying to say here....i will never not be perplexed by the ray/nate pseudo-romance. 

mick. oh mick. genuinely he is a homosexual man. this episode is literally about him “coming out” as acclaimed romance novelist who uses a female pen name and he is insecure and afraid of letting everyone down but everybody loves him just as they always have. in real life i know there is a common experience of gay men relating to female characters and i think that might come into play with mick’s storyline here. but i’ll save that for another post. but literally like all the gender stuff of this storyline is so interesting. charlie can shapeshift and style herself into a woman who looks exactly how people expect rebecca silver to look but that doesn’t make her rebecca silver. only mick can channel the true rebecca silver energy because he is her. plays with ideas of authenticity and presentation we love it. 

gary reveal was fun. in that one scene transition where sara is telling ava who she thinks was the murderer in the novel and she says “it’s always the doormat” and the scene changes to gary and ray and the camera lingers on gary just a little too long.....in that moment i knew he would betray them. and i was right! this direction for gary isn’t one i was expecting but i think it works. i mean honestly i think it makes gary seem like a more rational person because if people were that mean to me all the time i would make a deal with a demon too. the nipple inching toward him was genuinely such a horrifying visual i love it so much. i like how the nipple symbolizes gary’s loss of innocence, and he wants to go back but he can’t go back but he doesn’t realize that yet. i was kinda hoping neron would possess gary just bc it would be so creepy to see but i guess not yet. well all in good time. i like that it’s constantine’s impersonal manipulative way of using people that pushes gary to the dark side. oh constantine dont you know youre on a show where they defeat the bad guys by using the power of friendship? excited to see gary go ham next episode. 

book club subplot was really lovely. first of all i love that mona and nora and ava have a book club together and second of all i love that they did the book club at nora’s bedside even though she was unconscious because it wouldnt be book club without her and third of all i love that ava doesnt actually read the books she just participates because she likes having friends. i’m glad the show picked up the friendship between these 3 women after it was established earlier in the season instead of just dropping it. it’s nice! it’s a nice friendship. we love female friendship. 

also i like that even though this episode is light on the avalance content (which is totally fair considering last episode was so focused on them) it still has these very sweet moments between them. sara committing to read the book for book club cause ava asked her to is so sweet and thoughtful. i think it does show that their relationship is moving forward in a healthy way after the events of last episode. also i was right that sara likes to read cheap mysteries and thriller novels! i was right i was right i was right

[btzone]

Commonality of Buck-Tick member names

I was thinking that if you’re not Japanese, you might not know how common or rare the various Japanese names are. For Buck-Tick, the names of the band members are fairly common first names and surnames, not really anything unusual happening there. No native speaker should have trouble reading their names. However, the most interesting thing to note is that Hisashi’s kanji is not usually how one would think to read that name, which is how it ended up that on their very first release on an independent label, his name was typo-ed as Kotobuki instead of Hisashi. (To keep that kanji and reading, it is likely to add one more kanji to make Hisashi, much like how Atsushi’s name is 2 kanji.) Our Hisashi Imai is not the only one with that kanji and name reading, but it’s not the default way to read it. This is why when you fill out forms in Japan, you not only write your name’s kanji but you also write down how to read it because you never know what combos a parent came up with.

Some basic info about their surnames, such as how common it is and where in Japan is it most common. Excluding Hokkaido and Tokyo as the majority of people who live in those two places are “immigrants”, so to speak, and not native for several generations. (If you meet someone from those 2 places, ask them where their grandparents are from.) I need you to be able to track your family history in that general area for at least 150-200 years in Japan to call you a native of that region, sorry. (If you can’t claim that you’re the 19th generation descendant of so-and-so, what is your worth?) This sort of tracking is quite easy to do in Japan because we have family registry books that note the genealogy (patriarchal because who needs to remember the names of women) and also serves as a way of establishing citizenship. It’s also fairly common IMHO for the history of a surname to be like, well 1000 years ago this person did something good for the emperor/king so they were granted a gift and the gift was this name and some land. But, I digress. (Trust me, this whole paragraph is hilarious if you’re Japanese with a sense of humor because it’s true.)

Focusing on family names here. No info on their first names as I looked up what were the most common names given to boys in the years the members were born and though their names are common enough, only one of the members have a name in the top 10 most popular boys names for the year they were born. Takashi (same kanji as B-T member; real first name of Toll) was the 9th most common name given to a boy in 1962 (same year as Takashi the drummer). Yutaka gets an honorable mention. Yutaka (same kanji as B-T member) was the 3rd most common name given to a boy in 1962 and 1963; the 6th most common name given to a boy in 1964; the 7th most common name given to a boy in 1965 (Yutaka the bassist was born in 1967). Minor note: though the kanji is different, Atsushi was the 10th most common name given to a boy in 1968 (Atsushi the singer was born in 1966). To the rest of the band members, don’t feel so bad as my name isn’t in the top 10 either! And who can even read child names today. It’s crazy, right? (mic check, um, can I get a chuckle?)

What is not so commonly shared and do not expect to ever know this stuff is the family crest. The family crest is VERY specific to the son that you descended from. Japan be like, “We can’t have each of George Foreman’s kids named George AND have the same family crest!” This ain’t no google search thing. This ain’t no ask a librarian. This is in the family genealogical book and the only people who get to see that is family. Sure, there’s crests online. But don’t think that’s your crest or your favorite celebrity crest. That’s just some common crest that made it’s way to a scanner. Also, if you study a craft, it could be that craft is from a “school” that passes on a pseudonym once you’ve mastered the craft, complete with kanji and crest so unless you know the master’s birth name, you’re not even looking in the right direction. Example, one year someone with the same family name and kanji as mine got really famous in Japan and even made international headlines. Like, you’ve probably heard of this person famous. My mom was curious if we’re related (internet says there’s only 5400 of us so maybe) and while she was visiting relatives, happened to find out that we have different family crests, thus she gave up the search and declared we are not related. (She did not want to bother to go back 19 generations or so to the story of the king who passed out names.., see paragraph 2 above.)

On to the names! For reference, all Buck-Tick members are from Gunma prefecture. Japan has a population of 126,476,461 people. The most common surnames are Satō, Suzuki, Takahashi, Tanaka, Itō, Watanabe, Yamamoto, Nakamura, and Kobayashi. Each of those surnames have over 1,000,000 people with that name residing in Japan. What’s a rare surname? Something with either 1 or 4+ kanji. (Except Hayashi.) They exist but. Really rare surnames? Well, those would be the names the Japanese government declared cannot exist anymore so those names tend to exist only outside of Japan. (Happened to one part of my family so I know this shit exists. Only 460 left. How did they get away with it? And how can I get hanko with this?)

Name info source: https://myoji-yurai.net/

桜井 (sakurai) literal meaning: cherry blossom-well (like a water well) This kanji for Sakurai is ranked #106 for most common surnames in Japan. This is the most common kanji for Sakurai. It is commonly found in Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba prefectures. (Kanto region) For cities, Takasaki, Gunma and Uonuma, Niigata have the most people named Sakurai. Roughly 172,000 people in the entire nation are named 桜井. In Gunma, almost 5% of Kanna town has this surname. Other famous Sakurais? Argh, someone in The Alfee. Better than that, Ao from Cali≠Gari.

櫻井 (sakurai) Same name as above, just different cherry blossom kanji (older version). This kanji for Sakurai is ranked #813 for most common surnames in Japan. It is commonly found in Kanagawa, Aichi, and Chiba prefectures (Kanto and Chubu regions) For cities, Takasaki, Gunma and Akashi, Hyogo have the most people named Sakurai. Roughly 23,600 people in the entire nation are named 櫻井. (The people who couldn’t be sussed to simplify their kanji.) 

今井 (imai) literal meaning: now-well (like a water well) This kanji for Imai is ranked #75 for most common surname in Japan. This is the most common kanji for Imai. It is commonly found in Kanagawa, Saitama, and Aichi prefectures. (Kanto region) For cities, Gero, Gifu and Ichinomiya, Aichi have the most people named Imai. Roughly 212,000 people in the entire nation are named 今井. In Gunma, 20% of Ueno village has this surname. Other famous Imais? Miki Imai, singer, wife to Tomoyasu Hotei. 星野 (hoshino) literal meaning: star-field This kanji for Hoshino is ranked #147 for most common surnames in Japan. This is the most common kanji for Hoshino. It is commonly found in Gunma, Saitama, and Kanagawa prefectures (Kanto region). For cities, Kiryu, Gunma and Nagaoka, Niigata have the most people named Hoshino. Roughly 137,000 people in the entire nation are named 星野. In Gunma, almost 36% of Katashina village has this surname. Other famous Hoshinos? Gen Hoshino wrote a song during the pandemic that got very popular and even Hisashi Imai posted a video of him playing along to that song.

樋口 (higuchi) literal meaning: gutter-mouth This kanji for Higuchi is ranked #132 for most common surnames in Japan. This is the most common kanji for Higuchi. It is commonly found in Fukuoka, Osaka, Niigata, and Kanagawa prefectures (Kansai to Chubu regions) but it’s safe to say it is common throughout all of Japan except for Okinawa. Roughly 146,000 people in the entire nation are named 樋口. In Gunma, there’s roughly 1,000 people named Higuchi in Takasaki and guess where our bassist is from. Other famous Higuchis? How about Yutaka Higuchi the figure skater.

Yagami...the stage name of the drummer. He never writes this in kanji but I imagined that if he did, he would write it as 八神. Or did he write it like that once so that’s why I imagine it that way? Anyway, there’s many possible kanji variations and I was surprised that the most common way to write it is actually 谷上. (For me, I’m like is that Tanuye? Taniue? because I’m Okinawan and we have weird place names.)

[popculturebuffet]

Amphibia Weekly Reviews: New Wartwood and Friend or Frobo?

Hello all you happy people! And welcome back to another week’s worth of Amphibia reviews! And we got two standout episodes today as Marcy tries to home improvement her way into people’s hearts, and Polly makes friends with a destructive but endearing robot. Find out what I thought about in full under the cut!

New Wartwood: Marcy episode! Wu-hoo! And true to the show’s current status quo, and I do love how it evolves, it’s her first day in Wartwood and she’s pumped. And true to the awkward, probably autistic like yours truly, nerd we’re dealing with.. she does not make a great impression or intergrate herself to the naturally suspcious of outsiders tow. So when questioned by Anne how her day went she gets into how the town’s carefully built on a swamp.. and how the townsfolk hate her, complete with Angry Mob. Anne disperses it but it’s still the funniest moment of the episode to me, both in how a small one sprouted up so quick.. and how polly’s there despite LIKING Marcy (”I go where the mob goes anne!”). ALso i’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Anne just.. casually blushing while talking to Marcy. There’s no catalyist or any reason she would for any other reason than being sweet on her. 

So Marcy, after fixing a statue she knocked over, decides she can earn their love faster as she dosen’t want to wait.  This does get to one of Marcy’s core issues.. while she has many, like any of us, it ties back to the fact she has trouble getting this isn’t a video game. I mean she does get the diffrence between real life and a game on an objective level, but she can’t get real life dosen’t WORK like fiction, something i’ve also struggled with and can massively relate to. So she assumes helping them, via fixing up the town a bit, will make them like her. It makes them warm up a little but they still don’t. 

So naturally, who should come in by blimp to give her a tempting offer that will end badly but Mayor Toadstool! He also has a blimp now but it keeps escaping... I think I know where it went. 

So THAT’S how he can afford those things. Naturally seeing how nice Marcy made things he has a plan to exploit the hell out of her gifts with masonry to pretty up the town as a tourist attraction to make him more money. Anne talks her out of it.. but she ends up caving in the middle of the night. I also love the touch of her staying in the Fwagon, not forgetting the plantars bought it and finding a practical use for it in and out of story now i’ts no longer needed. I also love the little signs she has on it. 

The next morning the town awakes to marble pillars in front of all of the shops to make them look fancy and Marcy and the Mayor promoting the town’s new effort,s including a golden founderss tatue and a horrifying golden clock of toadstool, with Anne warry of her girlfriend’s antics. Mostly becaue you can’t force people to like you or bribe them to. Otherwise you cause the entire town to sink into the water bellow... like now. But while Marcy is now convinced the town will never accept her she still dosen’t want them all to die, and summons Joe Sparrow.. who continues to be the best thing ever added to this cast I swear to god as he helps her save the day, removing the various new things to reduce weight, saving some villiagers from a pillar (as Croaker points out their frogs ending up in the water isn’t that deadly), and getting rid of the gold monstrosities. 

So the end result is that the town is rightfully liviid, though she does genuinely appologize.. and suprisingly.. TOADSTOOL actually tries to take all the blame. The town rightfully dosen’t let him, but it’s clear he’s somehow growing as a person. Even if anne’s assement of him as “What would happen if the Monopoly Man had a Baby with a PIece of Fried Chicken” is still 100% accurate. They do agree they’ll like her with time, just like Anne, and if supscious, will gladly give her another shot. So Marcy’s learned her lesson.. always listen to your girlfriend. And while she literally fixes her damage.. the mascot toadstool hired explodes as it’s full of bugs. 

Final Thoughts on New Wartwood: This was a fun episode. A fairly simple and predictable one, but sometimes that works perfectly and this one was just damn funny, charming and full of good character stuff. Top notch. 

Friend or Frobo?:

I have a confession to make: I fricking love robots. It’s something that really HASN’T come up before, but I love a good robot. There’s just tons of good stories to be had with artifical beings, their struggles to be recongized for who they are, their cool powers, their awkward but endearing attempts to fit in with us less than deserving humans. And ficton’s had TONS and TONS of awesome ones: The Vision (in both 616 and MCU flavors), who is one of my faviorite heroes period, Red Tornado, Jenny Wakeman, Shard the Metal Sonic, BOYD, Aya, Data, Crow, Tom Servo, Gypsy, Growler, Robo, Grimlock. the list really DOES go on into infinity for me. 

WEirdly though I didn’t pay much mind to Frobo before this episode.. but with no real personality other than endearlingly running into the same obstacle for hours, and no real background yet, I didn’t really have anything to attach to other than “Cool anne’s either going to nearly get killed by a robot or get one”. But this episode changed that using the oldest trick in the book: having a child befriend it. We’ve seen it before with Sentinels, Badniks, Autobots and Iron Giants. Now we get it again with largeish frog robot. And it is pretty damn good. 

This is a Polly episode. It’s Hop Pop’s faviorite day: Seed Store Day! Naturally Marcy has come along and naturlaly she’s just as geeked out about seeds as he is because she’s precious and I must protect her from the horrible trauma her trusted father figure is about to inflict on her. Polly naturally wants to get into some shenanigans but suprisingly.. Anne and Sprig don’t wanna anymore. THey’ve learned their lesson and decide to just play video games. So polly does the resonable thing.. and blames them for some shenanigans on her part and goes out to get into more shneanigans only to find it’s lonely without a friend. 

Enter Frobo, named that because he looks like a frog and she heard the term robo from anne’s game. And despite very limited programming... Frobo is VERY loveable. As Polly notes he’s essentially a baby: he starts by mimicing her, including his horrifying but endearing laugh, and even doing her spin dash she gained a few episodes back I didn’t mention because I forgot. That one’s on me. Sprig also did the Yooka Laylee thing on top of her spin dash then so there’s that. 

Point is it’s all fun, games and heartwarming bonding till Frobo accidently floods the city and gets mobbed and one of the mobbs makes the terrible mistake of accidently kicking polly. 

He goes into Red Eye Iron Giant HOmage mode and starts fighting everybody.. including Anne and Sprig who show up to contain things, but eventually Polly wins everyone over with a heartwarming speech as she stops him, pointing out it was her fault and while he is weird, he’s just an innocent> The town.. decides why not. As the mayor points out “We already have two freaks what’s a third”. And given Marcy nearly killed them all yesterday and they begrudginly acepted her and anne did it WAY more than once and they see her as one of them, yeah they give up. 

Naturally once they get back Marcy is an easy sell. Now she can do chrono trigger cosplay! Hop Pop is a bit till it’s shown that frobo can farm super fast, and he’s part of the family now. Sprig and Anne shrug off him having come from the factory, and this surely won’t backfire on them surely. 

Final Thoughts on Friend or Frobo:

This one was excellent. The idea of Polly having to learn repsonsiblity was a nice idea, and Frobo is as I said endearing: he’s simply an innocent being who knows nothing and is slowly learning and his friendship with polly is really fucking cute. And giving him an emotional attachment to the plantars means whatevers going on with him gets higher stakes.. and given how robots are treated in fiction i’m just counting the minutes till he tragically gets blowed up real good. But until then this episode was a standout for the season. While as I made clear the “Kid befriends death machine” trope is not NEW, the baby concept made it feel fresh. It also as usual had some good jokes. 

So all in all a top notch week, really great stuff and i’ts only going to get better next time!

Nexttime: Mayor Toadstool is tempted to leave. Kay. But more importantly MADDIE EPISODE AGAIN BITCHES. AND IT HAS MARCY IT. I’M READY. 

Next On This Blog: Final Space Yo! Quinn and Gary visit earth and Tribore leaves.. again. Be here or be... elsewhere I guess

If you liked this review, follow for more, join my patreon, and comission your own review if you want via my askbox, discord and dms. See you at the next rainbow. 

[adultswim2021]

Ephemera Week (2002)

It’s still ephemera week, and we’re still talking about John K. I said most of my piece on him in the last post, so don’t expect there to go full bore on this one, except I forgot to say he’s animation’s Jerry Lewis. His current stuff is basically Hardly Working. I will not elaborate, because I’m being mean to you0.

MARCH SPECIALS!

In March, Adult Swim advertised a run of one-off specials. A couple of them were already covered because they fell under the parameters of “Adult Swim original production”. They were Welcome to Eltingville (March 3rd) and Saddle Rash (March 24th).

Day in the Life of Ranger Smith | March 10th 2002 - 11:00 PM (Originally aired on Cartoon Network in 1999)

This was one of two specials commissioned by Cartoon Network re-imagining Yogi Bear. The artist what took this assignment was John K, who I REEEAALLY skewered in last night’s post, didn’t I?

This is about Ranger Smith harassing animals and writing them up for violating park rules, basically. It’s short! I remember liking it at the time! Okay, maybe I’m going crazy here, but I distinctly remembered a part at the end where Ranger Smith is in bed and he solemnly confides in the viewer that the noises of wilderness give him nightmares and then it just ends. Did I imagine this? It does end with him in bed, but this doesn’t happen in the version on YouTube (which is from the Adult Swim airing). Huh.

Boo Boo Runs Wild | March 10th 2002 - 11:15PM (Originally aired on Cartoon Network in 1999)

Boo Boo Runs Wild was another one of these stand-alone Yogi Bear John K specials. This one was 30 minutes long. The Ranger Smith short was a brief 7 minutes; I’m guessing they aired a couple Capt. Lingers or something to fill time.

This one is about Boo Boo reverting to his feral nature and causing BIIIIG problems! This special would later go on to be kind of a weird trolling thing Adult Swim would do where they aired it every Sunday for a few months, even promoting regularly. This was like 2006, I think? They’d also air it as part of April Fools. Is that Adult Swim admitting this special sorta sucks? Does it sorta suck? Again, I liked these at the time and REFUSED to actively rewatch these for this write-up. Sorry.

The Jetsons: Father and Son Day/The Best Son | March 10th, 2002 11:45PM (Originally aired on CartoonNetwork.com in 2001) Our John K rock block ends with a pair of Jetsons shorts, Father and Son Day and The Best Son respectively. This is kinda the same deal as his Yogi Bear shorts, but these were exclusive for Cartoon Network’s website. I remember watching them on there. They are as bad as you’d expect late-period John K internet shorts to be, though the second short is a superior version of Spielberg’s A.I. (in that it’s shorter).

Night of the Living Doo | March 17th, 2002 - 11:00PM (originally aired on Cartoon Network, 2001)

Night of the Living Doo originally aired as wraparound segments during a Halloween Scooby Doo marathon on Cartoon Network. It’s kinda like an episode of the Scooby Doo Movies, which shoehorned in a guest star each episode. Suddenly my man Dick Van Dyke be running a carnival and shit. That’s the Scooby Doo Movies. At the end of the night they played all the wraparound segments in one uninterrupted sitting, so the viewer could appreciate it as an actual full-on Scooby Doo episode. Night of the Living Doo functioned both as an extension of that series as well as a parody. The guests were Gary Coleman, David Cross, and the very cool band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. It was all very self-deprecating and had jokes about the absurdity of Scooby Doo tropes. Well trod territory by this point, sure. But this is better than most irreverent Scooby Doo things. It didn’t hurt that I was a HUGE David Cross fan when this aired. Is this where I tell the stupid-ass story about getting mad at a message board guy for not liking David Cross? Sure. Okay, yeah. When this aired on Adult Swim a guy on Kon’s (hi Kon) message board posted something about not finding David Cross funny, shrugging that he didn’t get the hype. He cited this and his appearances in the Men in Black movies, and nothing else as proof for his lackluster comedy skills. It’s kinda like deeming Eddie Murphy as a bad comedian after watching Dr. Doolittle.

The point of this special is that David Cross is a little wooden and stilted, like in the old Scooby Doo Movies episodes. This poster revealed that he never heard David Cross’s stand-up or seen Mr. Show, explaining “I don’t watch puppet shows” A response that still baffles me to this day. Why Mr. Show isn’t a-- WHAT IS HE TALKING ABOUT? I’m not even sure if there was EVER a puppet on Mr. Show*. David wasn’t even a guest on Crank Yankers at this point! SO WHAT THE FUCK? To this day whenever mutual pals from that board get together and watch a movie or show and a puppet appears we make a joke about this guy. Good story? No? Fuck you.

Other stuff about this show: When it originally aired on Cartoon Network it was a little bit longer than the Adult Swim version. There’s a missing scene. I think it’s David trying to play an improv game with a mummy or something. At one point I had it on tape, but I’m not sure I kept it. Sorry.

*sorry to be coy here, but I do know of at least one puppet on Mr. Show, episode 204 there is brief footage of Grass Valley Greg putting on a puppet show for his staff. This CAN’T be the source of the confusion, can it? It’s literally like, 5 seconds.

MAIL BAG

This’ll teach me to skip a day cuz this really piled up. Thanks, guys. I love all the attention. It is my favorite thing.

I never really saw oblongs as something for the hot topic set. They had Invader Zim and Squee for that kind of shit. Oblongs feel like it was always directly targeting me: the shut-in comedy nerd who would appreciate will ferrell and the sklars being in a thing. Since they ended up doing the exact same show with Janeane Garofalo and David Cross a few years later it seems like that was the goal.

Yeah, I guess that also makes sense. There were a few elements that were kinda gothy but this show was mostly just Angus Oblong ahem, clowning around (puckering mouth to stifle laughter like Chris Elliott in Cabin Boy)

What are your thoughts on the other adult animation blocks of the past couple decades? Spike's notriously failed attempt. Animation Domination. Apparently Syfy has had their own going?

Spike was irredeemably bad. People think this shit is easy. Animation Domination is sorta legit, but it’s anchored by mostly crap. That ADHD thing was kinda good and underrated. Is that still going on? I wish I were more diligent about watching/recording that. Some of them bumpers were good. Also, we mustn’t forget MTV’s oddities. They were kinda the first cable network to court Adult Animation as their thing. They deserve some kind of credit for that. I’m sure they’re doing fine.

I'm having a nice big thing of spaghetti for dinner with some chicken parm? Jealous?

I’ve never had those are they good

What does Ephemera mean? Why is this happenening? Why aren't you talking about 10 Home Movies episodes in a row like a good boy.

In dude time, my friend. In dude time

What would be your Adult Swim dream come true?

Having a complete archive of Adult Swim blocks on a harddrive like Don Giller has with his Letterman archive. Even the commercials and shit. I know of a guy who was a regular taper of the entire block from night 1 but I’m not sure he kept up with it when they went nightly. I should ask him if he still has his tapes, huh?

That or they bring back the BUILD YOUR OWN DVD thing but with blu-rays and you can make your own bumps, which was a different thing they had. THEY SHOULD COMBINE THEM. And you can master it in SD if you wanna put 10 hours of stuff on a disk.

All this is archival bullshit dork shit. Real answer: Clay Croker comes back from the dead and every block is hosted by Space Ghost. That’d be it, right?

If anyone has genuine/better answers please write in with them I wanna keep this conversation going. ‘kay?

McDonalds reintroduces limited edition Adult Swim Toys. You can get them all (plus an extra to keep wrapped for collectors purposes) but you have to spend 20 dollars at McDonalds to grab them all. This is the last day of the promotion. You have to personally eat everything you buy but you can take it home. You can only buy one of each food item. What are you getting? I know the longer the mailbag message is the quicker you are inclined to give some glib remark but indulge this one for once.

Oh wow. I’m literally going to take this seriously. I’d roll in as breakfast was ending. Get myself a McChicken Biscuit and a Bacon Egg & Cheese McGriddle, hashbrowns and a Coffee. Gobble that knob on down. Wipe my mouth with a napkin. It’s lunchtime, bitch. Big Mac, Large Fries, BIG ass soda. You feel me, dude? Lemme tally up. Okay, probably need more. 20 piece nugget. Take that home cuz I’m probably gonna have to save some for dinner. That’s probably 20 bucks right there, especially if you go to the McDonalds on Burnside where all the menu items are more expensive because of the amount of security they have to hire (did you know that different McDonalds have different prices even in the same city? I didn’t until very recently). If this somehow doesn’t satisfy my price point I get a Vanilla shake and eat it anally DURING my BIG D squirt sesh, so it’ll spend as little time in my body as possible. Wait, do I get something for this? I might do this tomorrow just cuz. It sounds like a funky thing to do

Do you think you'll open an Adult Swim mueseum at some point? You seem to be the only steward of its history.

Unless I’m hired to by a large corporation, probably not. Also I don’t think I actually have much in the way of merch other than DVDs. I stopped being a DVD completist at some point around Freaknick The Musical. Oh, I never EVER bought a Robot Chicken DVD, EVER. I literally had a nightmare once that one appeared in my collection.

Hey! Please keep us abreast any time you put more of your garbage on eBay. Maybe you can put your wedding dress on there, you big girl.

Fucking sexist/trasphobic behavior.

Check out my eBay auctions I got season 18 of NCIS up there and some other things :)

The Ripping Friends blow chunks. I don't care if a rapist or the opposite of a rapist (a virgin who volunteers, lol) made it. It sucks a high hard one like when Ozzy banged the Cheiftan's Wife in that Black Sabbath TV Funhouse cartoon. Tell me more.

Tell you more?

Name one rap song you tolerate lol. You can't say anything by weird al or marky mark.

I guess I like the song the pest sings from the motion picture The Pest

Are there any good podcasts on adult swim?

The official one hosted by Matt Harrigan is good, but I’ve only bounced around on it. I don’t know if there’s any formal recap ones. I simply don’t know!

HE'S GIVING HIGH HARD ONE TO CHEIFTAN'S WIFE? UH OH!

Buddy, you are BANNED for LIFE from my MAIL BAG! You drive me CRAZY!

[crazy-loca-blog]

Personal thoughts on Open Heart Second Year, Chapter 18

Note: As the title says, these are just personal opinions on Choices books and chapters. Of course, you may agree or disagree with them, I only use this platform to express my thoughts on what I read every week and what I’d like to see in the next chapters, because none of my friends play Choices so I have no one to comment the books with.

Last week I was so, so overwhelmed (in a good way) for everything that happened at that gala that I couldn’t even begin to write a post. My head was a mess! I had so much information on my mind that it was impossible for me to get one nice paragraph. Luckily, this means this week I have so much to say! So get ready, because this post is a long one!

First of all, let me tell you that after what happened this week, I’m betting for a 20 chapter book. It’s the only way I can see them making a proper closure to the story (with chapter 19 focused on saving Leland Bloom’s wife AND Edenbrook, and chapter 20 focused on fixing our own mess with our LIs).

I have mixed emotions on this chapter. At first, I absolutely loved it. It gave me such a rollercoaster of emotions that I just couldn’t help loving it. I went from being surprised to see Aurora back, to laughing with Zaid and Baz treating a patient together, to almost crying with the night out scene. I was really hyped! But then I replayed the chapter and I began to notice all those small details that you don’t notice when you first read it, and yeah, I have to agree with a lot of people who are as invested in this series as I am: something is not adding up after the rewrites.

As a person who’s romancing Ethan, Chapter 17 was a HUGE step in the relationship with the MC. The guy finally got rid of all his morals and his visions of what’s ethically correct dismantled the diagnostics team (aka “he’s not our boss anymore”) and decided to make things public with the MC (not “official”, but “public”). Now that I look at that moment in retrospective, I might understand the scene made sense so that the writers could finally level the field with people who are romancing Rafael, Jackie and Bryce. But this is when the first problem arises: the relationship with Rafael, Jackie or Bryce has never been public either. Sure, there has been some PDA between them and the MC throughout the whole series, but it’s not like our friends can say “oh, they’re a thing”, it’s not something evident. Why didn’t they use the gala for that? I simply don’t get it! They didn’t need to be “official”, just “public”. It was so easy, and I think it would have made things easier for the rest of the book.

And then we have this time jump… which now I’m beginning to realize it wasn’t as huge as we originally thought! Sure, we skipped Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year, and we went from winter to spring in, literally, one screenshot. So it may seem it’s been a long, long time since the gala… BUT… the book has been settled on winter since forever now (there was already snow in Chapter 13 when we returned to work!), so even though we know it’s been over a month since the gala (because, and here I quote Ethan Ramsey, “this will actually stretch our budget for much longer than we expected”), it’s not like we’ve been on that limbo for a really, really loooong time!

Of course, this doesn’t justify the fact that the relationships with the LIs were affected by this time gap. And this is where I think the writers made a huge mistake. I actually said something about it already, but the fact that we’re not staying in Boston to continue our residency (even though we know in the end we’ll stay) may be the thing that it’s delaying the fact that we’re not official with our LIs. Again, Rafael is staying in Boston… after the Panacea scandal, Jackie will go wherever she’s accepted… Bryce was looking at a hospital in Chicago… and the more I replay the chapter, the more I think Ethan is overworking to avoid thinking about his own future (yup, he is a mess and he’s delaying the inevitable… as usual). But this doesn’t mean we don’t want to know what’s going on with our relationship… like… long distance? breaking up? enjoying it while it lasts? Chapter 18 was the right moment to have “the talk” (there were at least two moments in the chapter that would have worked perfectly: those free individual scenes that we had with our LIs… or during the night out, after Ethan joined the gang at the helipad) and it didn’t happen… and yes, it’s disappointing and frustrating. They missed a HUGE opportunity.

Despite all this, this chapter gave us a bunch of good scenes:

1. The hospital scenes. This was a brief moment, but it was simply beautiful. In Chapter 17, we realized that “everything was about the mission” and that seemed to be a breaking point for everyone at Edenbrook. Seeing all of them working as the huge team they are, everyone overworking and helping each other just to help as many people as possible gave me all those community vibes that we constantly hear about in this series. I definitely need more of this in Book 3. The fact that they also connected all this madness with the closure of our interns plots was a nice detail. Can you believe that Gary Garrison was definitely the “last man standing”? Also, did you notice that Sothy and Elijah’s plot changes depending on the choices you made in past chapters? And I want to think that Sienna and Mitch finally talking about what happened will give her the peace of mind she needs and deserves.

2. Bryce’s diamond scene. I had so much fun with the Lahelas in Book 2. I love these two… I just can’t stop making puppy eyes every time we have a chance to witness such a wonderful relationship between these siblings. And Keiki leaving to boarding school was the happy ending they deserved. I’m so glad to see that there won’t be a new drama for them and that their parents agreed to send Keiki to boarding school. I loved to see how much Bryce grew in Book 2 (you know that I’ve always loved him, but now I came to consider him a “national treasure” type of guy) and how he really made his biggest effort to become the best version of himself we’ve seen so far. I’m so proud of him that it hurts!

3. Esme’s plot. It was nice to see that the relationship with her actually changes based on our choices. It still bothers me that we won’t know if she did it on purpose or not (I really hope we get to know the truth by the end of the book), but I felt proud of defending her after seeing how she seemed to be the only one who actually cared about Levi in that negotiation between his parents and the board, where everything was about “how much is Levi worth”. And I have to say that I fully agree with what Esme tells us if we don’t defend her… let’s be honest, the main reason why we got away with all Mrs. Martinez stuff was because PB was already planning a Book 2 of what Ethan did for us at the hearing.

4. The night out with our friends. We asked for it for a really, really long time. Book 2 was so focused on the hospital stuff that we missed those moments with our friends. It was so different from Vegas! It was intimate, it was emotional, there was this much needed bonding between the gang… there was a heart to heart that was long overdue! It was definitely a proper temporary goodbye to them. Besides what I mentioned before about “the talk”, I don’t think I would’ve changed anything about this scene.

By now, the final chapters of the book seem pretty obvious. I mean… Leland Bloom is a BILLIONAIRE and he loves to negotiate. Will he save Edenbrook if we save his wife? Absolutely, there is no question! We know the man is an ass****, but we also know how much he ADORES his wife and how genuine their marriage is (it’s 100% true love). She is also a caring woman, so I definitely don’t want to see her die. But how will they approach it? And here is where I want to see something HUGE happening (fingers crossed!). We know that the diagnostics team has been reduced to three people: the MC, Baz, and Ethan. BUT, at the same time, we have a full staff of people available to help (in the words of Ethan, “The other departments have taken the diagnostics team’s lead”... which leads to an inconsistency because the team is supposedly dismantled). So not only I see our team solving the case, but also everyone at the hospital involved on it. I can see Caroline Bloom taken by the paramedics to be admitted to Edenbrook, the nurses taking care of her, our friends helping to solve the case as part of the diagnostics team, Bryce, Harper and Tanaka performing some surgery, Kyra working on the paperwork… I’d love to see that, in the end, saving Edenbrook was a group effort and not only something like “the diagnostics team saved the hospital from closing”. That would be so, so nice to see and it would give every single character in this book the recognition they deserve!

[saintheartwing]

Lily’s Post about Mary Sues

Let’s analyze this. 

None of those series you mentioned have characters that could be labelled as Mary Sues

Clark Kent, Goku, Luke, Anakin, Kirk.

Okay, a Mary Sue or Gary Stu has to be, basically, either an author avatar or stand-in, they tend to be beautiful or really handsome, have unusual, or dramatic backtories, are “chosen one” types, all of the main characters in the group will love them or admire them and those that don’t are always portrayed as in the wrong for not doing so, this kind of thing. They tend to be overpowered as well and they possess unique, special powers. They’ve basically overpowered, over-idealized, beloved by anybody and if you DON’T like them, you’re clearly in the wrong. Oh, and everything they do is treated as good, and if they DO screw up, hey, it’s no big deal. Any actual flaws are negligible or nonexistent. Like being “Naive” or wearing their heart on their sleeve. 

Let’s take a look at...Superman. Well, he’s got several big weaknesses. Kryptonite, for one. And Magic. HUGELY weak against magic. He IS overpowered and he is mostly beloved by everyone...but he has made a LOT of mistakes. Especially when it comes to Batman. Whenever Batman is involved in a story with him, it’s Batman who’s right, and Superman who’s in the wrong. Pretty much all the time. “Darkseid is dead, Superman.” “You know what Bruce? You’re not always right!” But Batman WAS right, at least technically. Batman regularly beats Superman in several stories. So Clark isn’t always treated as right. On top of that, he does have some real character flaws of constantly being torn between wanting to do more and being afraid of how far he should go. And when you have GODLY strength, that’s a huge exploit, especially for supervillains. But...he does fill a lot of the Mary Sue tropes, so we’ll give Lily some credit. 

Goku? Well Goku is a moron. The story always treats his stupidity as being a huge problem. One that CONTINUES to cause issues, and has even nearly gotten his world destroyed a few times. He’s even gotten himself and his friends KILLED cuz he couldn’t think of any other way but to sacrifice himself or the like. AND he has serious anger issues. When he’s furious, he’s almost uncontrollable. The only person more so is Vegeta. He’s also a pig who eats too much but we can sorta overlook that last one because being a glutton is played more for laughs and “He needs it to keep up his strength”.  How about his powers? Well he’s DEFINITELY overpowered. Is he handsome? Well, he looks pretty good. And he’s well-liked by pretty much the whole main cast except for, of course, the villains. So we could say...yeah. Goku’s kinda Mary Sue-ish. 

Luke? Well...not really. Luke isn’t naturally gifted or talented like Goku or Superman were. Despite having the POTENTIAL to be great, his Jedi skills started out so poor he couldn’t even block blaster bolts using the force alone. He had to train for weeks if not months under Yoda just to get somewhat up to snuff and he STILL failed. “Don’t go into that cave with your weapons”. He goes in. Sees Darth Vader and...oh, wait, it’s HIMSELF he’s killed! You were put to the test and you failed. He can’t lift large objects with the Force. He’s reckless, he doesn’t think things through and he often has to rely on help from OTHERS to succeed. He only got that one-in-a-million shot on the Death Star because Obi Wan’s ghost spoke to him in his head to help guide him. He only got away from the first Death Star because Obi Wan sacrificed himself. Throughout the first two films, he’s just not good enough. He loses to Darth Vader MISERABLY, and he even loses his HAND. A real Mary Sue would have won, or at least held Darth Vader off, or tied. Worse still, he’s not just dangerously reckless and kind of whiny...he’s got a serious anger problem that rises up in the films, he almost outright gives in to the dark side. But other than that, he’s just some country bumpkin who happened to luck out at finding the right droid. All his powers, he basically earned, showing a classic heroes’s journey growth. So that, combined with the huge failures in the first few movies and even if we factor in the sequels and the stupid, dumb decisions he made...he’s not a Mary Sue. A Mary Sue wouldn’t f--k up that much. Or if they did, it wouldn’t be treated as his own fault, or as a bad thing. It’d be brushed off.

Anakin! OHHH boy. This guy is a whiny little brat. I don’t know if people realize this, but...Lily, NOBODY LIKED ANAKIN. Anakin was unlikable BECAUSE he was a Mary Sue. You DO realize this, right? He was overpowered, treated as the chosen one, and he was super whiny at that. But you know what? At least the story treated him doing awful stuff as the wrong thing. Him being reckless? A bad thing. He should listen to Obi Wan more. Him casually killing someone through the back in the Clone Wars? A bad thing, he could have just knocked the guy out or cut his arm or hand off, what he did was murder. Anakin murdering the entire tribe of Sand People that kidnapped his mom, leading to her death? Shown as a VERY bad thing because he slaughtered ALL of them, even women and children. Anakin becoming Sith and killing kids? SUPER bad thing. 

So at the very least, him doing morally reprehensible things is treated as genuinely bad. At least the story calls him out on this. 

Kirk? Uh, Kirk is just a random human. He’s not exactly super strong or super intelligent. He’s clever and he’s fairly skilled in combat, and he’s definitely good looking, but he’s no ‘chosen one’ like so many of the others. Has he got flaws? Yeah, he’s got a temper. And he  flagrantly disregards the rules. And he DEFINITELY is something of a skirt chaser. But he’s not exactly overpowered enough to be considered a Mary Sue. He hasn’t GOT enough powers at all to be counted as one. Plus, when you consider how he died? A real Mary Sue would get a far better and more dramatic death, if they died at all. So Kirk? Ahhh, not really. He’s not a Mary Sue. He’s just not powerful enough to be one and he’s no chosen one. 

But your characters? Well, let’s see. Rey is a chosen one. So is Aliana. And Aliana is descended from a LONG LINE of superpowerful Sith. She’s basically “old money”. It runs in the blood. Pretty Mary Sue right there. They’re overpowered? Yep. Very. They easily beat the crap out of Kylo Ren. Do all the main characters like them? Yeah. And any that don’t are always treated as wrong, like Leia, or enemies, like Kylo Ren. They fit the definitions to a T.

can never be wrong

“So are a lot of characters in popular culture”

Except that’s not true. Superman, as I’ve shown, has been wrong quite a lot, especially when arguing against Batman, or Wonder Woman. Superman having to kill three Kryptonians who had did a literal genocide of an alternate Earth was portrayed as VERY wrong and it haunted him for years and years. Anakin was VERY, VERY wrong. The minute you do mass murder, you kinda instantly become wrong. Kirk ends up being very wrong in the final film he’s in. He doesn’t want to leave his heavenly alternate reality, it’s PICARD who has to convince him to stop being selfish. Goku is stupidly wrong when dealing with Cell, he really screws up and it gets his mentor and a few of his friends killed because he couldn’t think of a better way to get rid of the about-to-explode Cell than to teleport him to King Kai’s moon. He could have just teleported him, say, the serpent bridge, THEN teleported back if he really thought the explosion was gonna be so big it’d take out the entire world but...nope! Then there’s how he handled Majin Buu. He THINKS he doesn’t have to use fusion with his son. After all, Majin Buu has just lost a ton of power! He and his son can beat him normally...then Majin Buu catches him off guard and claims his son. Nice going, Goku, he was weak and instead of doing what everyone told you to do, you whiffed because you assumed you could handle it. And then there was his whole “Okay Vegeta, you finish off Frieza while he’s all Golden”. Big mistake. Frieza does a self-destructive attack that BLOWS UP THE ENTIRE WORLD and Whis has to literally TURN. BACK. TIME to fix this. Thanks, Goku. You COULDA just finished Frieza off like you did last time, but noooo! You had to indulge your friend’s ego. Luke? Luke’s been wrong a ton of times. Even if we ignore the sequels and the stupid way he handled Kylo Ren and hiding off on some podunk island, he ignored Yoda’s advice multiple times, he took off to fight Darth Vader, and he lost miserably. 

Basically, every time these people do something wrong...it is, for the most part, TREATED as the wrong move by the story. That’s NOT the case for Aliana or Rey. Casually killing a guard for harassing a refugee? Cold blooded murder? Not portrayed as wrong. Overkill of guards at Canto Bight? Not even REMOTELY called out, nor the whole “mass forced suicide” thing. Killing Rey’s parents in cold blood when they were unarmed? Barely glanced over. What’s portrayed as wrong was keeping that a secret, not the MURDER thing. SHOOTING LEIA WITH ELECTRICITY? Not even REMOTELY treated as going too far. 

are always victims

“Can’t imagine why a woman who suffers from PTSD writes characters who have suffered trauma in their lives. It’s a fucking mystery.”

You realize though this makes Aliana an author-avatar/stand in though, and that enforces the whole “she’s a Mary Sue” thing, right? 

and bend the narrative to suit their needs

“If they were villains you wouldn’t complain about it this insessantly.”

But they’re NOT villains. When a story has a hero doing this, even when it has a villain doing this, that’s bad writing. Having Leia reasonably point out the fact that the Republic has every good reason to not trust a Sith and Aliana can’t just bully them into going along with everything she wants...and then having Aliana just SPONTANEOUSLY summon her own WAR FLEET to go “Sword of Damocles” on Leia and the Republic? That’s bad writing. It comes out of nowhere, no build up, and exists ONLY to tell Leia and anybody who has a problem with how Aliana’s doing things to SHUT UP I’M IN CHARGE. It’s bullying, bad writing.

Also, those other characters mentioned have other characters who will call out people like Luke or Kirk if they mess up. And Luke and Kirk or Goku will go “Yeah, you’re right, I should listen to you” and they have to change...or at least say they’ll try to. Does anybody in your story do that? Well...no. Because ANY objection to how Rey or Aliana does things is treated as BAD and WRONG because they’re the main characters, and thus everything they do is right, even if it’s morally repulsive and if ANOTHER character shot lightning at a middle-aged woman for a nasty comment, they’d be the bad guy.

Anyway, said my piece. Lily really has absolutely no self-reflection on this. She can’t handle actual criticism. All this is is DEFLECTION and PIVOTING away from your own story’s problems.  It’s very easy to crow about how popular your work is when you dismiss and delete all actual critique and criticism. 

[ritchieblackless]

[Ranking Of Cozy music eras]

Well, as many of you know, Cozy did A LOT of things with many musicians and playing different styles. He appeared on at least 66 albums and counting another session work, some hidden works (Like Supertision and Ballroom Blitz) in total is nearly 90 things that he did! (that's why it took me so long, I had to listen to all again) but always one era will be better than other so... at the request of @thespiritofvexation (and I wanted to because is a excellent idea) here are the ranking of Cozy music eras.

Note: I'll try to be objective about this but also you'll get my opinion.

9. Whitesnake.

(As you can notice, Cozy's solo album is there. I put it because is in same era. I did this with all Cozy's solo albums 'cause the poor boy didn't have the time to make a proper solo career... he didn't like that very much anyway.)

Well first thing I'll highlight about this work... is the fact that his drumming is plain, so plain... for being Cozy Powell. You know, Blues rhythm, one bass drum and tomb with a little bit of cymbal... plain. But it's alright because the album needed that type of drumming (Not pun intended of course) I'm just saying that his drumming is so plain because the songs (Blues/Hard Rock) needed that, otherwise, it would have sounded a bit Rainbow-ish. Remember that Cozy was so versatile. He had a strong style but if the song needed the opposite of his style, he was going to do it.

Whitesnake era for me is not his best but LIVE. He on stage was another story. He was amazing.

Songs with Cozy's signature: Hungry For Love.

A side from Whitesnake we have his solo album which is one of his best works. Octopuss was a successful album. We have his mix between classical music and his drumming which is mind blowing. Hard Rock tracks like The Rattler, Formula One (Good one, Cozy) and Princetown and one ballad (Because he liked... a true sweetheart.) Dartmoore.

8. Michael Schenker Group.

His work here is what I like to call "Angry Drumming"

He didn't get along with Michael Schenker so they were fighting everytime. So all he did in this only album with MSG he did it angry... that's why is so good. He was "in mourning" trying to get over Rainbow so he had no better idea that making his drumming sound Rainbow-ish (I can relate) taking advantage of the situation that MSG was a heavy rock band. Not Rainbow, but still. There are a lot of Cozy's fills and Cozy's arrangements on the songs too more than Whitesnake.

Songs with Cozy’s signature: Attack Of The Mad Axeman, But I Want More and Feeling Like A Good Thing (Live). 

Now, a side from MSG we have his second solo album. Tilt have jazz-fusion songs like Cat Moves. A  rock tracks too like The Blister and Hot Rock. And with some funky thing like The Right Side with another ballad (Because he is a sweetheart) Sunset. Tilt was an anti-commercial album with a nice success. Also, the album have two “Dark” songs which are Living In A Lie and Jekyll Hyde (Inspired of course in Mr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde... Cozy’s favourite book... such a nerdy.)

7. Brian May Band.

We know how important Cozy was for Brian May’s solo career and Brian himself... (But I’ll not going to talk about this now, because I’m focused only on his drumming.)

Basically Brian told him “Be yourself, I don’t need a type of drumming” So that is what you listen when you listen those three albums... a free, happy Cozy. So powerful as always and creative. Of course Cozy had to be powerful because he was trying to cheer Brian up (He is so sweet). Believe me when I say that this is his best work in his last days! Its amazing the heavy-hand that he still had. For moments you think that you are listening Rainbow by the power of his drumming and the songs are completely stunning. 

Songs with Cozy’s signature: Cyborg, The Guv’nor, Resurrection, Rollin’ Over.

Now, his solo album. The Drums Are Back was not a successful album with bad reviews saying that Cozy was recycling himself. I personally don’t think Cozy was recycling himself, I just think that he had his own way to do songs and make albums.In spite the bad critics and no success, the album was top ten in Japan.. HA! The Drums Are Back have really groovy songs like The Drums Are Back, Legend Of The Glass Mountain (He really never got over Rainbow..). Rock songs like The Rocket and Ride To Win. And three ballads (Because he is a sweet-... well you get it) Battle Hymn, Cryin’ and Somewhere In Time.

6. Peter Green Splinter Group. 

This album is a proof of Cozy’s versatility and still young drumming. 

He and Peter Green got along really well so their chemistry was reflected in the music and live performances (Unfortunately a very few with Cozy) Yeah, the whole album is basically blues, okay? But the thing is that Cozy, no matter how slow the blues was, he would let you know that was him playing the drums.And I need to say that: HE PLAYED BLACK MAGIC WOMAN WONDERFULLY... (just that, back to the point). 

Peter didn't tell him how to play drums in Fleetwooc Mac’s songs, Cozy just did it and he did it fantastic. Also, his drumming sounded so young, so strong and with presence. Its mind blowing really because you don’t expect Cozy at the age of 50 playing strongly but he actually did. He did his drum roll thing with just one bass drum, he was still so noisy as always (I’m so sorry just this era puts me soft)  

Songs with Cozy’s signature:Homework, Going Down. 

And his solo-... oh... right... *Runs to bathroom to cry*

5. 80s Work.

 Well, time to time (For not saying always) Cozy liked to participate in his friends’s albums when he had a little free time with the band that he was in at the time. I did this 80s work section here because I cant believe that amount of things that he did while he was playing in other bands (I mean, u r for real?)...I put the most popular ones but out there are a lot of unknown Cozy works in the 80s with several bands. I just felt that his 80s works deserved a position in the ranking. This is another proof of his versatility but, with a little of his style of course. 

Songs with Cozy’s signature: Tender Babes by Jon Lord, Night Games by Graham Bonnet, Slow Dancer by Rober Plant, Believe by Tom Galley (Phenomena) Shakey Ground by Bernie Marsden, Running from The Storm by Gary Moore and well.. ETC (and many many etcs)

4. Black Sabbath

This is when Cozy turns his “Beast Mode” on.

I don’t know why, maybe because he knew what Black Sabbath was (Tony: Join my emo band.... Cozy: okay) and what it needed..? because that is his normal drumming..? (I'm sure that is his normal drumming.) But he literally blows your mind in every- fucking *wheezes* song. The three Black Sabbath albums are filled with unexpected Cozy's fills (No matter how many times you've listened to those albums, he is unexpected.) His beat is very heavy and very exact too. He was a fan of Bill Ward so I'll be not surprised if he tried to get that heaviness! (I mean, Cozy has his own heaviness but what I'm saying is that maybe Cozy wanted to make a proper Black Sabbath sound) 

Songs with Cozy’s signature: Headless Cross, The Call Of The Wild. Basically all TYR and talk about Forbidden is forbidden... (I’m joking. Is a good album too)

3.Jeff Beck/ RAK 

Well, for start I put them together because when Jeff Beck Group disbanded, the following year he signed a contract with Micky Most and RAK. So, he was a secessionist, a well-known secessionist. He was in the circle for someone who needed a powerful-jazzy style. It’s like the 80s works really (omg Cozy get a grip). He was a really demanded drummer, everyone wanted him and he eventually worked with everyone. He had a very well-known beat by that time, you easily can tell was Cozy but he also had to be more open to the different styles that he was asked to play (Basically he can’t play like him all the time). He also had some discredited stuff, like Ballroom Blitz by The Sweet (It’s so obvious) and Superstition by Steve Wonder (I know, I know that it says Stevie played everything BUT NOT IN THIS CASE DON’T BELIEVE HIM. What you hear in the song is Cozy playing.) and more like some Suzi Quatro’s songs.

Songs with Cozy’s signature: Ballroom Blitz, Superstition, Cosmic Wheels, Band Of The Salvation Army Band by Tony Ashton and Jon Lord.

Now his solo stuff: Here comes his baby, his household, his precious treasure, his (okay you get it) Dance With The Devil single. It’s a friendly instrumental which they did for a laugh but it became seriously successful... (Yes, they didn’t mean to do it but they did) Micky Most ask to Cozy if he wanted to be a single and Cozy said yes thinking that it was not going to be a big deal but *BUM* 1 Million of copies sold (Literally Cozy stayed at home two days laying looking at the ceiling because he can’t believe it) Of course they did the Dance with the devil part 2 which is Man In Black but it didn't work as well as the first one.They did Cozy Powell’s Hammer but it was kinda a fail too although the band had several tour dates. 

This is when Cozy met his lost brother (okay no) This is when Cozy tried his best to play good jazz but instead came up this.. jazz fusion-rock-weird thing. So the thing here was: Jeff didn't know how to explain Cozy what the wanted him to play and Cozy was getting mad about it (Jeff: You can do ta.. tatada tss, ts ts ta da ta... Cozy: Honestly Jeff wtf?) so he did what he thought was better for the record and Ta-Da! Rough And Ready was born. Cozy’s drumming is a bit lighter and he uses a lot the cymbals for a swing-jazz rhythm.  

Songs with Cozy’s signature: Going Down, Ice Cream Cakes, Situation, Short Business.

2. Rainbow.

(Omg Martina are you fcking crazy????) Yes I didn’t put Rainbow in the first place...A new hope for Cozy (This sounds like Star Wars movie or something)

Okay, this is one of his best eras because he was all recovered of his disappointment in music business in 1975. He literally gave up with music (poor babe) until Ritchie called him (Ritchie: Join my emo band... Cozy: okay) . He was ready and decided to show that he wasn't a poor drummer... and he did.He played all his tricks, he was so unpredictable and powerful. He actually was lead drummer (I’m not sure if that exists) He didn't played with the bass like a normal rhythm section, he played with Ritchie. Cozy live with Rainbow was so unbelievable, like the unexpected fill in Catch The Rainbow, Man On The Silver Mountain... To be honest, the first Rainbow album sounds so plain without Cozy, it’s like.. something is missing (Basically Cozy changed the band). His beat is so heavy, strong and incredible.Also his 1812 Overture which is just mind blowing. He was a happy Cozy in Rainbow, that’s why he played so brilliantly (and he was Ritchie’s goal friend... what is better than that?) Cozy did an amazing job in Rainbow... (No words...)

Songs with Cozy’s signature: Stargazer, Run with the Wolf, Mistreated (Live), Lost In Hollywood, Eyes Of The World, Gates Of Babylon, Light In The Black, All Night Long and.. all.(Literally all)

Now, his first solo work: Basically he had nostalgia for Hammer and the press still had bad relationship with Cozy saying things like “He is just Dance With The Devil and nothing more” so Cozy want to make an album so fantastic to shut them up. He called to his friends and all was ready... but they needed a bassist so Cozy took his chance and asked Jack Bruce if he can play in his album (Cozy was such a Cream/Jack fanboy.. he was almost his male crush lol.) Fortunately for Cozy, Jack said yes and they recorded it. The album had a fantastic success, extremely high success. The album had fantastic songs like Theme One (Courtesy of George Martin), The Killer, El Sid, Heidi Goes To Town and one sweet ballad (Sweetheart) The Loner (Dedicated to Jeff Beck... That is actually very cute). 

1. ELPowell

(ARE YOU JOKING?????) No, i’m not joking and i’ll tell you why. Also this is when Cozy became a prog nerd. 

The only one reason that I chose ELPowell as best Cozy music era instead of Rainbow... it’s because he stepped out of his Comfort Zone. This is the REAL proof of Cozy’s versatility. He did amazing things in Rainbow yes but in the end was rock and roll... This is different, this is progressive rock (I don’t really care about Progressive people’s discussion about 80s progressive rock... I’m talking only about Cozy) and Cozy didn’t know a THING about progressive and he still did it amazing. Of course, he took what Carl did and he simplified it to carry it to what he can do... and he did it very well. He had to learn all the ELP’s songs studying them (That’s when he accidentally listened to all elp discography and some Genesis, Yes and well... he became a nerd) He started to experiment with new percussion instruments that Carl used before.. (Like those bells that you hit them with a little hammer... no? okay) He became a KONG BOY too. He literally learned a whole new drumming style but of course with his Cozy sound. Tarkus played by Cozy is amazing, and when he is doing the Congas in From The Beginning kills me every time (That tank tee and those muscles...) and those drum solos...(Damn) they are really something else. And this is the same case of Rainbow.. he was recovering from his disappointment in Whitesnake so he was so enthusiastic about playing with Keith and Greg.  

Songs with Cozy’s signature: Touch and Go, The Score, Mars the Bringer of War. 

THIS IS THE END... GOD this took me an eternity and I explained so much i’m so sorry this is not going to happen again. This is the first and the last time that I’ll make a large post! (For my own mental health) This is so large, I didn’t mean to, sorry! Nobody will read it to the end but I don’t care... and if you do thanks very much this costed me two nights <3 (And sorry if there are any grammar errors) 

[brightstorm98]

For the Character Ask Meme, you must know I will ask about Beckett :D

But of course! For there is no character who concerns my fandom efforts more than the fair Gangrel boi-o!

How I feel about Beckett:

Well, to be fair, I kinda ignored him at first. My first run of Bloodlines 1 I wasn’t so much interested in the lore and just wanted to discover all the character interactions with the Anarchs that I could. On repeated play throughs however, he started to grow on me. One day I eventually looked up his character online and well, I took the bisexual vampire Indiana Jones bait hook, line, and sinker 😅 He’s an absolute delightful character - not a Gary-Stu (he has realistic flaws and has made PLENTY of mistakes over the years), intelligent and open to new ideas (big brains are SEXY), has a rather attractive character design (other than that phase in the 90’s where he had Jerry Seinfeld hair he’s always had long dark hair and I mean come on, who can’t swoon over that?), he’s a middle-aged character which, especially in modern media, you do not see that often (age representation FTW!), and of course...did I mention bisexual? I think I may have but just wanted to be sure I got that in there.

People I ship with Beckett romantically:

If you’ve never read any of the novels/sourcebooks that feature dear Cuthbert, he’s very popular with like...literally everyone and anyone he meets. Camarilla, Sabbat, Anarch, doesn’t matter. They all are hot for him, and based on some of the stuff in Jyhad Diary, goodness does he know it 😆 That said, he seems rather choosy with who he totally opens up to friendship wise, so the same can only be assumed to be just as exclusive, if not moreso, for romance.

For romance, out of the many candidates out in the night and based on Beckett’s canonically established sexual preferences:

Anatole for the guys, because come on, they have gay couple goals written all over them! Whether or not they have a sexual relationship is up in the air, but no one who has ever read anything between these two can deny that there is capital L LOVE between them. Anatole’s thrown parties for Beckett, misses him when they’re a part, and of course in the Gehenna timeline visits Beckett in his dreams to try and help him despite having met Final Death. Since he’s alive and well as of V20 and onwards, I hope one day we get a bit more of an in-depth look into their relationship because even if it isn’t “canon”, the seeds of romance have been sown for these two! (Honorable mentions go to Vlad Dracula ((yes you read that right and yes they canonically fucked and Beckett is a bride of Dracula and no I’m not making this up read Jyhad Diary)) and Hesha Ruhadze).

The female half of the spectrum was tricky. I think he will always be in love with Emma Blake, his love interest from the Victorian novel Trilogy, and since White Wolf likes to resurrect characters we saw die these days in lore, perhaps she’ll come back! I certainly hope so, that lady deserves a break. Beckett does best with a calm and dedicated feminine partner who balances out his impulsive and sometimes wishy-washy loyalties, and Emma is the perfect candidate for that. She inspires humanity and tenderness in him and he in turn gives her strength and courage. They’re just too cute together and I want them to have a happy ending some how, some way 😭 (Honorable mentions go to Lucita de Aragon and Carna the Tremere).

I also have to mention Sascha Vykos because oh boy, is there chemistry between these two in Jyhad Diary. They’ve reached a truce at the moment in the canon and Beckett finds them “handsome and beautiful”, so there is ample opportunity for a enemies-to-allies-to-lovers arc here. They both actually have quite a bit in common interest-wise regarding seeking out knowledge and looking for answers about what it means to be a vampire. Maybe the answer they’re looking for is with each other...

My non-romantic OTP with Beckett:

This has to go to Lucita de Aragon. They are just too good together as partners. While they may have or have had a sexual relationship, I don’t see them as true love interests because I think especially at this point Lucita is kinda done with men, at least from a romantic standpoint. They’re undoubtedly best friends and are able to tease one another, help each other out, and of course turn plenty of heads when they walk into the room together. Lasombra-Gangrel besties who can fuck you up, basically 😂 (Honorable mention goes to Okulos the Nosferatu. He might have gotten it if not for his behavior in the Gehenna timeline, and I know it’s pretty much ignored in the canon atm but it’s hard to just forget about. Sorry Okulos. Try not to be such a prick in the future).

My unpopular opinion about Beckett:

Hmm...this is a hard one. The only thing I could really think of is that he maybe needs to learn how to ask for help more often? He tries to be a one man show (possibly to keep people from stealing his discoveries like his adopted sire did, possibly to keep the few close people he has safe) and that gets him into trouble a lot. He’s gotten lucky and gotten out of a lot of jams on his own or by sheer luck that someone found him.

One thing that I wish would happen/had happened to Beckett in canon:

I wish we could have seen him interact with characters in Bloodlines that he later hangs out with in Jyhad Diary like Damsel and Smiling Jack. Would have been really cool to see and hear with Michael Gough voicing him!

[trashyazeohane]

Perforated stars

Part 1/Part 2

Summary: There was another string of silence, a sudden heartbeat that leaped in his chest, a compassionate exhale.

Then Gary interlocked their small fingers together and let their hands rest on the pillow above Little Cato’s head.

“The three of us against the world? I like that. I would like that. It sounds absolutely fricking amazing.”

Avocato ginned tiredly under his nose.

Additional comments: Fluff, Slow Burn, Angst

Not beta-read, so it may contain some mistakes!

You can also read it on AO3! Enjoy!

Part II ミ★

Avocato was confused. It was a feeling he got familiar with. Welcomed even. Comforting. Soft as a delicate hue coming from the cosmic dust. Similar to a warmness of a sun touching the skin.

But that confusion this time rested in him. In his behavior. In his way of perceiving the world. He was fairly sure he knew himself to the deepest core. He knew all the ticks, all the gears, all the hidden doors that he had shut and then had covered with wooden planks.

He thought he knew himself entirely. That he knew his needs and when he could stop.

But he was never so wrong.

He had thought that what he had been feeling had been a passing trace, a sudden momentum, a guest that had popped in for a light coffee and tea before going on its merry way. But the feeling had stayed for days, then for weeks which slowly had morphed into months.

It stayed even now.

And the feeling was getting stronger. It had found a warm, cozy home inside his heart and didn’t plan on leaving.

Avocato was confused about that.

“Everything alright, dad?”

“Yeah, uh, sure, everything is okay.”

“Are you really very much incredibly sure?” Little Cato nudged, looking up at him with cunning eyes.

“I think Gary is rubbing off on you.” Avocato sighed.

“Am I doing what now?” Gary asked, leaning above table to glance at them.

It took a lot from Avocato to not suddenly jump in place, but he did indeed feel the fur on his back standing up. How had he not noticed or heard Gary walking up to him, while he had been observing him literally ten seconds ago, was a mystery.

Damn, that sounded bad. He hadn’t been staring at Gary in any weird way, he had been just staring and Gary had happened to be in his line of vision.

(It was a lie he was telling himself everyday to feel better, but it rarely worked nowadays. It rarely had worked in the past.)

“Dad is saying that you rub off on me too much.” Little Cato said, swishing his tail back and forth and resting his paws on the table to hoist himself higher.

“And is that a bad thing?” Gary hesitantly asked, lifting his eyebrow and glancing at Avocato.

He swallowed hard.

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It’s just… he has a lot of similar to yours behaviors right now. Not necessarily bad.” Avocato sighed. He really felt like he was explaining things to kids. Which was true only in one case.

Gary suddenly burst. In the good meaning of this word. His mouth stretched in a wide grin, so wide and bright that it would shadow even the brightest sun. His hand moved to wrap around Little Cato, who yelped in return, not expecting a sudden show of affection.

“Aww our little boy is finally taking after the more handsome dad.” Gary cooed, moving his fingers through the blue locks.

“Dad, stop. ugh, you’re messing my hair!” Little Cato whined, trying to swat the attacking hand away.

“You don’t know that natural look is the latest trend in fashion!?”

“Who told you that?”

“Ash?”

Little Cato sighed.

“Don’t listen to Ash.”

“Why shouldn’t dad listen to me?”

Everyone turned their heads in the direction of the door where Ash stood, looking at them with quite bored look.

Little Cato huffed.

“Because clearly you give bad fashion advices.”

“Pff says who.” The girl snorted, grinning delicately, although a little bit maliciously. “A person who thinks that jeans with holes are stylish.”

Avocato would be a bit angry that she was speaking to his son like that, if he didn’t actually start to like her too. She had fire inside of her and he respected that. Plus Little Cato never was offended by their bickers, so why should Avocato be? His son could clearly stand his own ground when he wanted to.

“Hey, those are stylish.” Little Cato said, although his voice was a tad quieter and more uneven than before.

“In your dreams.” Ash smirked at him. “Now when we come to dreams, I walked past your room a few nights ago and I heard quite–“

One interesting thing about Ventrexians – they were fast. Lightning fast if they felt that they were in any danger. The muscles could contract ten times faster than usual after the instinct went off and the small doze of hormones got into the head.

Just like right now, when Little Cato leaped toward the door, reaching with his hands to shush Ash by clapping his paws across the mouth.

And clearly the girl knew what kind of reaction she was getting from his son. Because she was prepared for it, laughing like crazy while floating away from the common room, leaving pinkish clouds after herself and angry shouts coming from Little Cato who followed her.

So that was an interesting development.

“That was well… that was something.” Gary coughed, clearing his throat first and then glancing at Avocato.

Who wanted to look away, but found out that he couldn’t.

“Something is definitely a good word to use here, yes.”

The male laughed, a short sound that seemed to rattle the chest – a tad embarrassed, a tad hesitant, but still warm.

“Kids.”

Avocato only smiled in return.

Gary grabbed a tablet from the table and clicked a few buttons on the screen, coming up with a map of the nearest galaxy and the star systems. A soft bluish hue lighted up his face, making the wrinkles beneath the eyes and around the mouth more visible than before.

(They had to land somewhere to fill the tanks. And the ship also needed some repairs, so spare parts would be also greatly needed. Luckily currently they were far away from any enemy.)

Gary moved his fingers across the screen, enlarging a specific part of the map and looking closer at the plants inhabiting this part of the universe. His mouth moved, almost like he was speaking to himself, but no words were coming out. The eyebrows furrowed, got closer to each other and then smoothened when a sweet grin split the lips and eyes shone with happiness.

It often happened when Gary came up with a plan.

There were another several quick taps, sudden blink of the eyes, spark so bright that it could put any sun to shame, another soft snort leaving the lips, accompanying that grin which simply took Avocato’s breath away whenever he was seeing it.

It made him want to do things, things he shouldn’t be doing. Yet the traitorous images, ideas, possibilities still sneaked into his mind, making a comfortable nest there, nearby his ears, so they could whisper sweet promises into them.

A tilt to the right, three blinks, a twitch of the nose, similar to a sniff, puffed out cheeks, turn to the left, a scratch on the chin, pinched lips, confusion clearly written in the eyes, replaced quickly by an understatement.

He wondered if Little Cato caught up to Ash.

“Is there something on my face?”

“Huh?”

“You’ve been starring, so I assumed that I you know… I have something there.” Gary said, clearing his throat first and then lifting his face up from the screen.

Avocato’s brain lagged, with errors jumping in front of his eyes.

“I… no, ugh… you have nothing there. I just got lost in thoughts. And you just happened to be in my line of vision.”

It wasn’t that, but the truth was even worse. Worse than black hole pulling in. Worse than the blazing heat of the nearest star.

And it had to be Avocato’s eyes playing tricks on him. Some kind of error in the space-time line of events. Some mistake during the formation of atoms. Because he could swear he saw Gary being sad about Avocato’s answer. But it couldn’t be possible. He couldn’t be dishearten about such thing.

He simply couldn’t.

“Oh okay.”

Gary returned to scrolling through the screen.

Avocato took off the gun from his belt, put it on the counter and started to disassemble it, cleaning specific parts which were rusted due to the passing time.

They sat in the room for a pretty long time, not speaking, just being there, with Gary scrolling through the tablet and Avocato simply cleaning the gun.

Yet Avocato couldn’t simply stop himself from stealing a few glances at his companion. And whenever theirs stares crossed, his mind played another set of tricks on him as he was seeing Gary blush a bit and smiling wider under his nose.

***

Avocato wasn’t a very emotional being. Living and serving Lord Commander had been a tough life, a never ending enigma filled with cold stress that could break the bones and force the hearts into submission. Emotions had been something that had had to be kept under control.

Avocato had known the drill.

But when it came to Gary it seemed like all the lessons slipped past his mind, leaving only an empty space in the notebook. An hollow spot on the orbital after electron jumped off.

Gary made him want to do stuff he normally wouldn’t want.

Observing had been one of the most basic tasks he had had to do while being under Lord Commander’s rule. He had had to be constantly on watch, observing the situation in front of him, behind his right and left shoulder, beneath his feet and above his head, searching for any kind of anomalies. One mistake could cost him life.

Avocato was used to observing, knew for what to search, what kind of behaviors were suspicious, for what types of abnormalities to look in people, aliens and all other types.

But observing Gary had other annotations, other grounds beneath it.

He did it because he simply liked it, nothing more, nothing less. He could get lost in the time as he stared, feeling his heart beating loudly behind his ribcage, playing some strange cacophony that drummed through the bones and muscles.

He observed because it was safe. Only staring didn’t mean anything. It was just staring. Something natural. Something living beings did. And what if he was noticing things other didn’t – muscles nearby nose tensing as Gary had seen something displeasing or sudden twitch of lips as HUE was telling a joke. These were normal things. Ventrexians were perceptive, it didn’t mean much.

(Only the meaning had been set so long ago and Avocato was denying it on every step.)

Gary had one job.

One fucking job. Not getting lost. A simple job. Anyone could do it by following one of the teammates, family members even, holding onto their skirts or belts. It was an easy task, anyone could do it.

But not Gary. Definitely not Gary.

He just simply had to disappear in the middle of a fucking alien market, where the wanted posters with their faces were hanging everywhere.

“When I’ll see him I’m going to kill him so hard –“

“Not unless I’ll find him first.” Avocato mumbled, peeking into a space between the stalls.

Quinn glanced at him, but didn’t comment it.

They had been walking around the market for what seemed like hours, searching for the familiar mop of blond hair, dirty boots, brown jacket or metal hand sticking out of the crowd. With no luck.

“Seriously, you give this dumbass one job. One! Don’t get lost. Keep close to one of us and what does he do?” Quinn continued speaking with the words pouring from her mouth like atoms.

“He disappears.” Avocato gladly helped, muttering under his nose and turning his head left and right.

“He disappears, exactly!” Quinn sighed, pushing her hair away as she came to a stop at the intersection, because a wooden cart was just about to run her over. “He is probably laying in some ditch right now, with his insides out.”

The image wasn’t that pleasing, but unfortunately Avocato had to say it may be closer to the truth than they wanted.

He didn’t say anything, but nudged Quinn and they both ran forward, glancing frantically around, searching for the familiar hair, face, leg, hand, voice, just anything!

Nothing.

Gary could be already being shipped on an enemy ship towards the Lord Commander’s planet or nearby station, bound and beaten, with blood dripping from broken arm and legs. He could be laying in the dirt somewhere, already dead with ribs hollowed out by forceful kicks and covered with holes in size of bullets! He could be bleeding somewhere and they were –

“Avocato? Hey, wait up!”

Only now he noticed that he had been a good few meters away from Quinn who was now running to him, kinda out of breath.

Avocato tightened his fists.

“Okay…” Quinn inhaled deeply, touching her chest while exhaling later on. Her hands moved to a device on her wrist and brought up a holographic image of the area. “Clearly searching together doesn’t work, so we need to split up. I’ll take the north, and you’ll take the south part.” She continued, pointing at specific areas.

Avocato nodded. He liked that about Quinn, always being level-headed in stressful situations.

(Avocato usually was too, but there was something about Gary and Little Cato that made him frenzy inside. That made him suddenly hyper aware of all the possibilities that could be happening and he would be too slow, too far away, too incompetent to –)

“Hey, hey, woah, tiger, slow down your breathing. We’re going to find him! He’s probably alright, talking with some stranger about caterpillars or whatnots.”

Avocato felt her palm on his shoulder, squeezing it reassuringly.

“I know, I know.” He said, moving his hand to pinch the eyes. “You’re right.”

“I’m always right.” Quinn added, smiling to him, probably hoping for a small joke, but Avocato wasn’t in a mood for jokes. “Hold tight, everything is going to be alright.” She turned off the holographic screen. “Meet me here in an hour?”

“Sure.”

Quinn sent him another smile and then swirled on her heel to run in the other direction.

Avocato turned too, took a few deep breaths to calm his racing mind and also started to move.

Time ticked by as Avocato passed stall after stall, maneuvering around bodies of various aliens. Their chatters were getting louder in his head with every step as his senses sparked to life. His eyes moved from left to right, needing only a sparse millisecond to assess the situation in front of him.

No sight of Gary here and here and here. He wasn’t in any alley Avocato checked. He wasn’t also nearby any stall that he passed.

He just had disappeared. Avocato knew that it wasn’t possible, but he didn’t have any other explanation than Gary disappearing from the planet, atoms of his being dismantling, moving away from each other, making the coherent image lose focus.

It wasn’t possible, but right now Avocato would believe it.

It was better to believe that Gary just had disappeared than that he was being brutally punched while being on his way to Lord Commander and Invictus. It was better to think he peacefully dispersed the molecules across the universe than to imagine cold shackles on bruised wrists with blood seeping from cuts across the abdomen.

Avocato ran and searched and ran and searched and ran with no good results. The images were getting worse in his head, the possibilities, the futures that could be unfolding in front of them more terrifying than anything he had lived through before.

(The last time he had felt like that had been when Lord Commander had taken Little Cato, had snapped him from his grasp like a rag doll and had hung above his unable to reach hands.)

The hour was coming to an end and Avocato was now one hundred percent sure that something had happened, that he had been too late, that the cold eyes were now blindly staring at the universe unfolding in front of him which –

“Twenty Roxanian rubles and we have a deal!”

“I told you sir one hundred times and I’ll tell you one hundred more. One thousand Roxanian rubles and you can have it. Other way no deal!”

“Twenty one?”

Avocato halted in his steps, almost crashing into some old lady who started cursing at him, and backed away to glance into an alleyway filled with shops, randomly laying boxes, vases, buckets and more.

And there, in the middle of it, standing in front of a small alien was Gary, with red cheeks as he flipped through the money in his hands.

Avocato would be relieved if the anger didn’t spike first, taking control over the fear that had spurted inside his body, forming a new, burning star. His feet quickly took him closer to the human who still didn’t notice his presence.

“No deal, mister.”

“Twenty one and a cool looking rock?”

“I already said –“

“Gary.”

Both Gary and the vendor turned their heads to Avocato.

“Oh hey man, I was just trying to buy…” The words halted in Gary’s mouth, gluing themselves to the tongue. “Is everything alright?”

Alright? Alright?! Gary dared to ask if everything was alright after he and Quinn had spent almost two hours searching for him!?

Avocato felt like exploding.

But in the end he only grabbed Gary’s hand and dragged him out of the alleyway and through the stalls towards the meeting point Quinn had assigned, holding tightly, maybe a little bit too forcefully.

But that grasp was a promise, was a confirmation that all the atoms were there, that Gary was fine, that he was trying to keep up with Avocato’s quick pace while tripping a few times. Everything was alright, no crew member was missing. Gary was there, behind him, walking, breathing, living. Nothing happened.

“Hey, Avocato, could you slow down a bit, let a human being catch up with you.”

But Avocato didn’t slow down, only tightened the grip and moved through the crowd, pushing aliens around.

There was a small gap between buildings, allowing easily for two people or alien beings to pass through, away from the curious eyes of the guards still looking for them.

Avocato directed their steps there, finding no comfort in the voices of the crowd quieting a bit.

“Hey, hey, man come on, please stop for a moment, I need to catch a breath.”

Catch a breath? Catch a breath!? He could have been dead with lungs not being able to fill up ever again, laying in a pool of his own blood and Avocato would be too slow to save him –

“Avocato, bro, everything alright?”

He halted and then turned around to the human who was looking at him with perplexed look.

“What have you been thinking?” Avocato quietly asked, feeling the anger slowly moving to the surface. Similar to a rocket reaching the thermosphere.

Gary blinked.

“What?”

“What have you been thinking! We told you not to wander off and what do you do a few minutes after stepping out of the ship? Walk away!” It seemed that Avocato couldn’t stop, that the more he spoke the faster and louder he was getting. “You know that there are people looking for us, just waiting to chop our heads off, but no, you just walk away from us to argue with a seller! Did you even think about that! About us? Quinn and I have been looking for you everywhere for almost two hours!“ He felt the fatigue inside his bones, inside his throat, the anger and fear so audible in his voice which shook and trembled. “What were we supposed to think when you suddenly disappeared like that with the enemies everywhere around? What do you think we –“

And then there was a soft hand on his cheek, a warm, human, living palm touching his skin.

“Hey, hey, hey it’s okay. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disappear. I just saw something cool and you know… followed it.” Gary said in a quiet voice.

“You could have been dead.”

“But I’m clearly not.” Gary happily added, but quickly ducked his head when Avocato glared at him. “Sorry, that was… well that was shitty of me to do. Sorry. I shouldn’t do that.”

Avocato inhaled deeply, suddenly feeling awfully lightheaded with the fire burning in his mind. Everything was alright. Everything was okay. Gary was alive, standing right in front of him. His heart was beating and his cheeks were red and his lungs were working and everything was really okay.

So why was Avocato having problems with believing it?

“Hey, hey, bro, my man, calm down, everything is fine and dandy. See, I’m okay, I’m okay.” Gary spoke in that soft tone he often used while speaking to Little Cato or whispering tiny goodbyes to him and the rest of the younger crew at the end of the day.

Gary wrapped his own hand around Avocato’s paw, where the warmness mixed with the coldness of the metal, and he moved it through the air to rest on his chest which was slowly moving up and down.

Avocato glanced down and looked back up at Gary’s hesitant, blushing, but smiling face.

“See, I’m okay. Everything is alright.”

Avocato inhaled shakily and straightened his fingers, pressing them into the living body, spreading them and feeling the clothes rumple beneath the touch. The heat was emanating from the chest as it slowly rose and fell. Behind it was a lone echo, a beating sensation so familiar, yet strange that shook Avocato’s core, but then made it more calm than ever. A sound of a beating heart.

Avocato exhaled and flexed his hand, but not moved it away, opting on keeping it there.

Gary didn’t loosen the hold on it either.

“I’m alive. Everything is fine.”

“You could have been dead.”

“But I am not. I’m fine.”

Avocato closed his eyes and evened his breathing, letting the heartbeat reverberate in his hand.

Only after a few seconds he opened his eyes.

“Just don’t do it again.”

Gary grinned, brightly and warmly, making Avocato’s own heartbeat accelerate like a starting ship engine.

“I’ll try.”

Avocato let out a dry laugh and shook his head, keeping his hand on the chest a tad longer than necessary before dropping it.

Gary sent him another smile.

They started their steady journey back to Quinn one more time.

Only after exiting back into the loud world of the bright stalls, Avocato dared to ask:

“What grabbed your attention back there anyway?”

“Oh.” Gary said, opening his mouth a bit. “That guy there was selling Oppy and I tried to buy it.”

“Oppy?” Avocato parroted.

“Opportunity, one of the Mars rovers?”

“I have no fucking idea what that is.”

Gary pouted and started a very long explanation, describing in details exactly what he had seen back at the vendor’s stall.

Quinn was both happy and mad after meeting them and she didn’t wait a second to punch Gary hard, before sweeping him in a tight hug that almost crushed his ribs. And after getting to know the story, she even let out a broken laughter while hearing about Gary’s sudden affection.

“It couldn’t be the real Oppy.”

“Why not?”

“The real Oppy was like one and a half meters tall. And the one you saw was like what? Barely half a meter?”

“It could be the real Oppy but shrunken! Like Avocato shrank on that weird bioluminescent planet!”

“Whatever you say, Gary.” Quinn said, shrugging, clearly admitting to defeat.

Gary even argued that it had to be the real robot when they were walking back to the ship. He still did it when Avocato broke away from them, sent Quinn a quick message about his whereabouts and moved back to the stalls.

***

Avocato wasn’t a needy being per se. He clearly had his needs and things he wanted, but most of the time he could control it.

But when it came to safety it seemed like his mind was stopping working correctly, making him do things he normally wouldn’t do.

(Like buying that stupid piece of junk called Oppy Junior which now proudly roamed  the ship, not doing anything productive or necessary, but putting smiles on some faces. And well keeping people safe by simply being there.)

Avocato had to admit he always had had a problem with worrying too much and trying to keep his sparse loved ones safe. He only had noticed it after Little Cato had been born. It had only taken him a second to know that he would do everything to protect that smile or grimace.

Back when he had been under Lord Commander’s command and Little Cato had been out late, Avocato had stayed up all night, waiting for his son to come back, pacing nervously around the house.

He had seen too much not to be worried. And in Little Cato’s case it all had been justified, considering what had happened in the end. Before all of that he had been scared, but then he had been terrified and horrified. It had been only a possibility before, yet his nightmares had become reality.

The chances were against them.

They had to admit that they were living in a state of constant fear, with Invictus and Lord Commander being only a few steps behind them, breathing onto their necks with sick smiles.

Avocato was overprotective. When he wasn’t sure what was happening with his close ones he was starting to panic, losing footing beneath himself.

At the beginning it had been only Little Cato, but then the circle had grown, expanded, swallowing more and more people. Like a black hole, using the gravitational field to pull everyone in.

Avocato couldn’t imagine losing his son. Neither could he imagine losing Gary.

So sometimes he could overreact. He could feel his mind getting frenzy and heart accelerate with the sudden need striking through it to do something.

“Faster!”

“I am going as fast as I can!”

“Well then we need to go even faster!”

“The engines won’t withstand it.”

“They are gaining on us!”

Gary huffed, tightening his grip on the stick. There were a few droplets of sweat rolling down the forehead and cheeks like comets about to crash down.

“Nightfall, how are our weapons?” Avocato asked into the mic, keeping it close to his mouth and staring at the cosmos becoming a blur behind the ship walls.

There was a creak and static jumping left and right.

“Almost dead. We don’t have much time.” The woman exhaled, clearly irritated by something.

A sudden explosion nearby quickly gave Avocato insight into what she was pissed about.

The whole ship shivered in its wake, moving spastically from left to right, while rotating.

AVA’s robotic voice echoed in the room.

“We’re taking critical damage. If we don’t move away soon I think we will be –“

“Toasted?” Hue proposed.

“Yes, toasted.”

Toasted was a faint and light word to use in their current situation. Avocato would say that they were currently staring into Death’s eyes and taunting her. But she was only staring at them, with a kind smile on her lips, like they were a bunch of kids playing on the playground.

(And maybe to her they were.)

“Gary!” Quinn hissed, gripping tightly her seat and looking through the window.

“I know, I know!”

Avocato could understand being terrified and stressed. He was scared too. Even more than scared. He felt the adrenaline taking control over his muscles, seizing them, making his brain work at top speed, forcing the oxygen through his lungs at faster pace. The sweat rolled down his paws and he wasn’t even the one piloting the ship.

Everyone could feel the bitter breath of death on their necks, a freezing blow that could overtake the core, make even the brightest star die and crumble down.

Gary bit down his lip, drawing blood.

“AVA I need you to activate the dimensional drop drive on my command and then after two hundred meters light fold the ship!”

“Gary –“

“Just… on my command.” The second part was added in a quieter tone of voice, almost like a plead that was thrown to the wind.

Everyone inside the bridge quieted down and tightened the grip on whatever they could hold onto without anyone prompting them too. Everyone was conscious of the consequences. Everyone also knew what would happen if they failed.

Avocato stared at Gary – at their so-called captain who had clung tightly to the role, to the position, to this point everyone had started to respect that.

(In the whole crew’s mind, at some point of their journey, this seat had been taken by an overly enthusiastic person.)

He stared at the furrowed eyebrows, at the scared, but focused eyes, at the pinched in a tight line lips with a drop of blood gathering at the corner, at the shaking hands which gripped tightly the controls, tighter and tighter and how Avocato wished he could –

“Now!”

It all happened almost in the blink of an eye. For a moment Avocato floated in a blissful state where gravitation was an abstract, something that was only a theory or an additional letter in a formula. Everything inside of him squeezed as images of his son jumped in front of his eyes, hoping that Little Cato was alright, that even if something happened he would be able to get out, escape, move far away from here, disperse somehow.

Avocato prayed that his son was alright.

His lungs hurt and his chest swelled as he desperately proportioned energy to the segments of the barrier which now really needed it, trying to protect the most important parts of the ship in the same time.

He felt like he was floating, like he was here and not, both in the same time. He was made of matter and antimatter, mixing and swirling together as the danger licked their necks, clawed their arms and wrapped them in a cold embrace, tightening the chains on the throats –

Then there was a burst of light, a sudden gravitational force pulling and pushing, a yell somewhere, his hand tightening the grip on the console, a sudden fear, a cascade of sparks, a wind and a desperation so bright that Avocato was afraid everyone could see it.

And as fast as it all started, it was gone. The tension, the anticipation, the pressure, the magnitude, it all was gone.

They were drifting slowly through the cosmos, together, alone, alive.

“Engines are in critical condition. We are unable to move forward.” AVA said robotically above them. Then like an afterthought, very lightly added. “But at least we’re alive.”

They were alive. And away from danger.

Avocato moved away from the controls, letting the barrier drop, disintegrate into holographic pixels first and then into nothingness. His hands were shaking terribly, so much that even brushing his forehead was a task. His throat was a mess, tightened to the brim, barely letting any air pass through.

The whole bridge was dead quiet for a moment, a short, tensed moment where they all prepared themselves for the worst. But the worst didn’t come.

They were alone in this part of the universe.

“We did it?” Quinn hesitantly asked, trying to loosen the grip she had on her chair, but failing.

“We really survived?” Ash slowly whispered, holding tightly onto the wall.

AVA hummed above them.

“No sign of any enemy ship in this quadron.” A short buzz of calculations. “We’re safe for now.”

Another short spasm of time enveloped them, caressing the sweaty hairs and pecking wrinkled foreheads.

Then a long sigh left Quinn’s lips.

“I… I need a drink.”

“Count me in.” Ash added.

Quinn somehow got out of her seat, swaying as she did so while stealing a glance at the girl.

“Are you… even allowed to drink?”

“After a day like today? Definitely.”

“Fair enough.” Quinn nodded.

Both of them exited the bridge, glancing at the rest of the crew for a moment.

Avocato still needed a few minutes to defuse. Still needed a coherent thought to pop into his mind which would get rid of the dark clouds. It seemed like his mind couldn’t exactly calm down. He felt like they were still on the edge, almost tipping over.

There was a quiet whisper coming from the com.

“Dads, are you coming?” Little Cato asked.

Avocato shook his head, trying to clear it.

“Yeah, yeah, in a moment.”

A short break.

“Dad?” Their son hesitantly inquired.

Avocato glanced to his side at Gary who still clung to the controls, staring at the cosmos spreading behind the window.

A hum of machinery resonated in the space between them.

“Gary?” Avocato tried, whispering it first.

It did little to nothing. Cross that. It did nothing. Gary still stared with wide eyes at something that wasn’t there, with hands tightening the grip on the controls. He seemed frozen in time, drowning in below two hundred and seventy degrees temperature in the space-time continuum, not being conscious of anything that was happening around him.

“Gary?”

Still no response.

Avocato stood up, moved to Gary, dragging his feet beneath him and feeling his tail barely twitching in curiosity and fear of what was about to happen, and raised his hand to touch the man when –

The door swished open and Little Cato barged inside, looking around.

“Little Cato?” Avocato asked, glancing at his son.

The boy quickly moved closer, lifted his hand, but stopped midway, not even touching Gary, but furrowing his eyebrows. His ears flicked back and forth, with whiskers moving hesitantly as a pout appeared on the mouth, crossing it like a shooting star.

“Dad, can you like… go with the rest?”

“But I –“

“Please, I’ve… got it.”

Avocato wasn’t sure what was happening. He hadn’t been here, alive, long enough to know everything. He simply knew that something was off and he wasn’t sure what to do.

Even though he wanted to do something.

Yet Little Cato looked at him with pleading eyes, with resolve so strong that Avocato bent beneath it and nodded.

“Okay.”

And with that he left the bridge.

From the sounds he knew that most of the crew was in the main dining hall, moving around a bit, most likely drinking, while mostly remaining silent. There were a few shushed tries at conversations, but it seemed like no one really wanted to talk. They just needed to stop, get back onto the rails after such stressful day.

Even KVN was quiet, slowly pushing the cookies into his processor unit.

Avocato paced around the ship, trying to get the feeling back into his legs and hands, easing the stress that had taken control over his body.

He didn’t move far away from the bridge, but he didn’t eavesdrop either. He respected Little Cato’s and Gary’s privacy, so he just stayed nearby.

Mostly he was worried. He felt the sudden fear gripping his heart, squeezing it painfully and it had nothing to do with the close to death situation from a few minutes ago.

They were alive. Somehow they had escaped. A task which was getting more and more difficult with each passing day. But they had done it, they were alive for now. And this was important.

Avocato wasn’t sure what was happening in the closed room, but whatever it was he knew Little Cato got it. Avocato trusted him, he believed in him. And yet he was worried, terrified even.

So he walked around, with nothing better to do.

The door opened with a too loud swish several minutes later. Long minutes that seemed like eternities and lightyears, stretching into infinity.

Avocato snapped his head back, looking as Little Cato exited the bridge, massaging his tired eyes. In a few strides he was in front of his son, kneeling and putting both his hands on his shoulders.

“Are you okay?”

Little Cato looked perplexed at him, blinking a few times.

“Uh, sure, why wouldn’t I be?”

“The attack?”

“Oh, I’m yeah, I’m like… totally fine. A few bruises here and there, but nothing major.” Little Cato nodded, massaging his arm and looking at him.

Avocato sighed, feeling like at least half of the weight crumbled down from his shoulders, sputtering debris everywhere.

(He knew that Little Cato was amazing as a defense, operating the cannons, turrets and guns, but it was still one of the most open and unprotected position on the ship, one that could be easily blasted away.)

Avocato’s chest expanded as he took a sweet breath, letting his one hand move down, almost tracing the cold ground beneath them.

But there was still an incredible weight on his shoulders, dense, thick, invisible weight that pushed him down.

“And –“

“Gary is also okay. A little bit shaken, but okay.” Little Cato butted in, looking at him, only to glance at the ground.

Avocato opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it and shut one more time, only to nod in the end, feeling something inside of him coil and twist painfully.

(Whatever he had seen before definitely hadn’t looked okay. But if Little Cato was saying that it was okay now, he believed him. His son and Gary had a connection that ran deeper than it was visible. There was a thread somewhere inside only they could see, a language only they could understand.)

“Okay.” Avocato said, still resting his hand on Little Cato’s shoulder.

The Ventrexian looked at him.

“I’m going to grab something to eat and then I think I’m going to sleep.”

“Good, good.”

Little Cato moved and wrapped his hands quickly around Avocato’s chest, resting his head in the crook of his neck, exhaling quickly and tightening the grip.

Avocato hugged back, feeling all the pieces inside of him vibrating with fear evaporating somewhere, like a meteor disintegrating while moving through the atmosphere. It was a short moment, a heartbeat, a sudden stillness, an eternity squeezed into a second, a calmness, a familiarity, a comfort and a peace that they desperately needed.

“See you later?” Little Cato asked.

“Definitely.”

Little Cato smiled at him and then moved away, directing his sluggish steps toward the main dining room.

Avocato stayed in his spot, only moving up so he was standing instead of kneeling. His eyes jumped like electrons between orbitals, staring at the door to the bridge and the retreating form of his son.

Should he go inside or not?

“If you ask me I think dad could use a friend right now.” Little Cato said, looking at him above his shoulder.

Avocato looked at his son, opened his mouth, but then closed it and nodded. He only caught a glimpse of a smile as he turned to the door directing him to the bridge.

He raised his hand, moved knuckles closer to the door and then faltered.

Should he really do that? Maybe Little Cato was wrong, maybe Gary wanted peace, maybe Avocato shouldn’t step inside?

But then it seemed like Little Cato knew Gary more than anyone else did, so why should he be wrong?

So in the end Avocato simply said:

“Gary, I’m coming in.”

And he did just that.

The bridge was covered only in soft, sparse hues coming from the control panels and boards spreading at the very front and nearby the seats. Some lights were blinking, some were turned off and some were shining, but it seemed like the energy was toned down, conserved, giving only the minimum of power.

(Or maybe they were dimmed down on purpose?)

Avocato looked around the familiar room, quickly locating the lump sitting in the main chair.

Gary was curled in on himself with hands wrapped around his legs and head hidden in a small nest made between his arms. For a moment he seemed still, like a statue, a stone, frozen in a space void, but then his shoulders moved, dropped down an inch.

Avocato swallowed hard, feeling his heart breaking into a thousand pieces, and then stepped forward.

“Gary?”

Gary did twitch and it was the only thing which showed Avocato that he was listening and more important conscious of the things that were happening around him.

The vast universe spread in front of them, universe where the danger lurked, but thousand, if not more, light-years away. For now they were away, safe, alive. But for how long? When would be the next time their necks would be put under the guillotine of time? When would be the next time when the cold hands of Death would wrap her hands around their throats, quietly apologizing in their ears?

The future was an unknown, a terrifying unknown, a scary place to step into.

But for now they were alright. They were breathing, their hearts were beating and they could rest for a moment. A blissful moment. And this was what mattered.

Avocato clenched his fists, released the tension, tightened them one more time, braced himself and then stepped forward.

“Is everything alright?”

A dumb thing to ask about, but somehow this one question left Avocato’s lips.

For a moment Avocato expected Gary to not move, to not answer in any way. But then the head slowly moved in a shaking motion, scattering blond locks everywhere.

“Do you mind if I… sit with you?”

Another shake of the head.

They were at least getting somewhere.

Avocato slowly approached Gary and then flopped down on the armrest nearby the lump sitting on the seat. He put his hands on his lap, fiddling with them a little and glancing at Gary from time to time.

He wanted to do something, something to ease the tension, to brush away the fear that had taken hold of the heart, something to push away the bad thoughts that plagued the mind, something to help, something to just make it better.

(He didn’t have such strong feelings in a long time.)

Yet Avocato wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t know what kind of things were okay in such a situation. What would their relationship allow him to do?

(Avocato wished it was something more than a friendship, but he was happy with what he had. But there were these urges, these needs, these whispered pleads which filled his mind.)

But he was also a man of pure instinct. It didn’t mean he always acted on it. No, of course not. But he trusted it when it proposed ideas, possibilities, plans and methods. It was his savior in dire situations, his last chance to escape every danger.

His helper.

So he decided to trust it again.

Avocato slowly moved his hand, flew it across the atmosphere, feeling the gravitation of the ship taking its toll, and then landed it like a spacecraft on Gary’s palm which grasped tightly the jeans. His pads traced the skin, moving into the crook of the gripped fist.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then Gary loosened the grip, letting Avocato’s hand to sneak closer and interlock their fingers, feeling them click like two gears, a perfect combination of imperfect lives.

It wasn’t much. Just a delicate movement, a sign of trust, of familiarity, of support, of too much and not enough, of stars and planets and comets and stories about space pirates spoken in hushed whispers surrounded by dimmed light. It was love – but in different forms, yet mixed together.

Gary squeezed Avocato’s fingers.

Avocato softly brushed his thumb on Gary’s skin.

They stayed like this for a long time, with the constellations and nebulas passing them by, with their breaths evening out, with their heartbeats slowing down, with everything sparkling to life and then dying.

But not here, not right now.

Gary moved and leaned on Avocato’s thigh, resting his head there.

“Thanks.” He mumbled, not letting go of his hand.

“No problem.”

So they stayed like this for a little bit more time.

***

Some people would call Avocato a bad person. Or well, a bad Ventrexian. He could understand them. He deserved the title. He had done bad, terrible things. Things that couldn’t and shouldn’t be forgiven.

He wasn’t fine with that, but he had learned to live with it. No matter how horrible it sounded.

(From time to time it made his skin crawl with fear so deep that he barely could move.)

But he loved helping others - others close to him.

He would do everything for Little Cato. He would steal thousands stars and pass through countless dimensions to keep his son safe.

And for a long period of time Little Cato had been the only one for whom Avocato had harbored strong feelings of wanting to help. But that had changed after boarding Galaxy One, after becoming a part of the team-squad or whatever Gary called it.

Avocato found himself wanting to help others. Wanting to do something to ease the pain and let them take a sweet breath, so much needed for their lungs.

(He had to admit it that the feeling was the strongest with Little Cato and Gary.)

He had thought before that it would make him weak - having such needs. That it would break all his walls and make him lose focus on what was important. But he had been wrong. It made him even stronger than before.

“Dad, dad, dad, can I have it?”

Avocato glanced down at Little Cato who excitedly showed him a box filled with screwdrivers, laser cutters and other mechanical stuff. He felt his eyebrows raising on the forehead.

“Don’t we already have like ten of these back at the ship?”

Because the engine room was filled to the brim with such gizmos, making it almost impossible to move without crashing into a box filled with gears here and a bag of screws there.

Little Cato rolled his eyes at him.

“Yeah, but we don’t have equipment to repair things from sector 67b! What if we accidentally crash our ship and we will have to change it and we won’t have needed supplies to repair the nearby ship and we will be stuck and –“

“Okay, okay, okay, I got it!” Avocato sighed and then patted his pockets, finding a few slips of money. “Go buy it.”

“Aw thanks dad, you’re the best.” Little Cato turned on his heel and glanced at the small robot trailing next to him and the green alien glued to it. “Come on Oppy Junior and Mooncake, let’s find what more we can buy.”

The robot yipped happily and drove after the Ventrexian to yet another stall, carrying Mooncake with it.

At this pace Avocato would be broke in several minutes.

He closed his eyes and relaxed the muscles, feeling a familiar presence getting near him.

(He would recognize this smell everywhere.)

“Ha, and you told me I was too soft on the kid when I bought him the hoverboard he wanted.”

“You just bought it, because you couldn’t stand his puppy eyes.” Avocato snapped back, not even prying open one eye.

“Don’t you mean kitty eyes?”

“Don’t test me.”

Gary chuckled and leaned on the same wall Avocato had been and still was supporting for the last few minutes, letting their shoulders lightly brush.

Aliens of different races passed in front of them, talking excitedly between each other with smiles gracing their faces. Kids ran around, following each other with mouths dirty from sweets and knees covered with dust. Some vendors shouted loudly to get the biggest crowd around their merchandise, letting the curious eyes wander around until they would lock onto shining and sparkling gizmos.

Festivals – a moment of joy, a time for relaxation, a sweet pause in working to enjoy themselves.

(When Little Cato and the rest of the younger part of the crew had found out that there had been a festival on a planet nearby they had begged them to stop there. And well Gary had been quick to yield, wanting to go too. Avocato had been second to lose, making Quinn and Nightfall being the last to fall.)

“Enjoying yourself?” Gary prompted, looking at him.

“It’s not the worst.” Avocato started, glancing around. “But I’ve seen better.”

There were definitely too many aliens around. Aliens who lurked and warily looked around, aliens who sneaked past the crowd in search of something, aliens who clearly tried to find specific things or beings.

It wasn’t safe out there for any of them. But for now they managed to somehow blend with the crowd of too cheerful kids and tired parents.

In a way, he and Gary were like that too. Two very exhausted dads taking care of their kids who ran around, getting their hands on sweets and games.

(Just a few minutes ago he had had to give Fox a spare change, so he could try to win some price in a shooting range.)

“It’s actually my first time in a place like this.” Gary said, correcting his position.

It wasn’t the most comfortable place to lean on, but it was far enough from curious eyes.

“Really?” Avocato asked, raising his eyebrow.

Gary nodded, glancing around too. It seemed that after saying it, he wasn’t in a mood to prolong the topic. Or that some memories surged forward, flew up like a rocket, trying to breach the atmosphere of a planet.

“Yeah.” He said in the end. “I suppose I never had anyone with whom I could go.”

Avocato knew there was more under that. That beneath it were layers of cosmic dust, molecules and compounds so complicated, that distinguishing specific atoms would be almost impossible. But for now he accepted it as a fact, not drilling it further, letting the time work its magic and appear back on the right time.

“I suppose I didn’t see that many either. Lord Commander wasn’t really up for organizing festivals on Terra Con Prime.”

“Uh yeah, can’t imagine him doing that.” Gary quickly said, looking skeptically at Avocato, but with a small smile on his lips.

Avocato grinned too, but the dark clouds gathered around his head.

Somehow Lord Commander was back, even stronger and more dangerous than before. But was he really the same person? Or was he simply just another puppet in the hands of Invictus? A doll made of bones and muscles, with limbs and mind tied with strings, easy to maneuver around and manipulate to the pleasing of the creator?

(Before all of that even Avocato could sometimes almost see the image of the old person Lord Commander had used to be, but that someone was gone now, erased from the history and existence.)

“He only organized parades to praise his own glory.”

“That sounds more like him.” Gary snapped his fingers, laughing under his nose, replacing the sudden darkness which tried to sneak into the warm eyes.

Avocato closed his eyes and sighed, feeling the smile forming on his own lips. He didn’t want for it to appear, but somehow he couldn’t stop it right now. Not when Gary was nearby and they finally had a free day to roam around and enjoy themselves.

“So, if you never have seen any festivals, then what are you doing here? You can go out there and explore.”

To be honest Avocato felt quite comfortable like that right now. Away from the prying eyes, but with a nice company. Calm. Comfortable. Safe. It seemed almost too nice to be true.

(And to be fair there were days when he felt like he was dreaming, like he was floating in a faraway land under the influence of a sweet sleepiness that took control of his whole mind.)

Gary glanced at him and shrugged.

“I don’t know. It sounded a little bit sad doing it without any company.”

“You could always go with one of the young ones.” Avocato proposed.

Gary waved his hand.

“Nah, they shouldn’t have to hang out with a grandpa like me.”

Avocato huffed. When Gary put his mind to something, there was no way of changing it. He literally would have to disobey the laws of the universe to change this man’s mind about something and he definitely didn’t have necessary equipment for it.

(Trying to do it was like trying to get out of the black hole, only with a stapler. Impossible.)

“If you’re a grandpa then what does it make me?”

“Super grandpa?”

Avocato snorted.

To be honest he wasn’t up for walking around. There were too many aliens checking every stall, too many unfamiliar faces that could hide secrets, too many hands that could sneak into their pockets, too many securely hidden weapons, ready to blast them off.

Avocato preferred to observe the crowd from far away, searching for any symptoms of people noticing who was here exactly. Here he could clearly watch people pass him by, see the guards patrolling, but not exactly yet alerted about anything.

He definitely preferred to play safe.

But he was weak when it came to Gary Goodspeed. The man probably didn’t know that, hell, he definitely didn’t know that a small question could turn into a thousand things Avocato would do to make him smile. It had been probably a simple thought Gary had wanted to get off his chest. No higher and hidden reasons.

Yet the second the words had left his mouth Avocato had known what he had wanted to do.

He brushed softly Gary’s arm with his own and then pointed with his head at the stalls.

“So are we gonna stand here for like an eternity or what?”

Gary stared at him for several seconds, before the concept of what Avocato had proposed finally got registered by his brain. And the reaction was immediate – a smile, giant, radiant, warm formed on his lips, stretching it to almost painful for Avocato levels. Then there was a squeal leaving these lips, a high-pitched sound that could shatter the drums in every ear, but somehow sounded like a beautiful music to Avocato. And then there were hands, clumsily gripping his elbow, shoulder, hand and tugging him in the direction of the music, colorful aliens and cheerful kids.

Avocato obediently followed, rolling his eyes at the childishness of the man, but deep inside being quite fond of it. There was something endearing in the eyes sparkling like supernovas, with the cheeks burning like stars and the smile spreading like universe.

(Plus it almost sounded like a date. It definitely wasn’t a date, but who could blame Avocato if he called it like that in his head? No one, because no one could hear it. So he definitely could do it. In his head. It wasn’t hurting anyone. Maybe only his poor heart when it was met with the reality.)

Gary dragged him from stall to stall, excitedly eyeing everything aliens here had to offer. It didn’t matter whether it was jewelry, books, gizmos, part of machines or food. It all was appealing to him. Maybe the food part the most. It seemed that after snapping the invisible thread that had kept Gary at bay his mouth wasn’t shutting, but was always open, talking, chattering, whispering about everything and nothing in the same time. He was a ball of constant, never-ending energy, vibrating, shivering with so much power that it felt too much for Avocato.

But it was worth it.

It was even more worth it when Avocato managed to win a giant mascot of a Pyrruvian Exalate – something that reminded Gary of an Earth dragonfly. Only those were like twenty times bigger and more deadly. It didn‘t matter to Gary as he hugged the mascot closer to his chest, with sparkling eyes and even bigger grin.

(And if Avocato had had to intimidate the vendor to get it, then what? They were wanted criminals, it had to have some perks, right?)

“Oh my gosh, Gary, how did you get it?” It was Ash, staring at the plushie in the man’s hands which were wrapped securely around it.

“Avocato won it for me!” Gary happily answered.

“Lucky!” Ash said, clasping her cheeks and looking mesmerized at the mascot.

Gary was proudly puffing out his chest.

Avocato only sighed at that, glancing at Quinn who fondly shook her head at the antics happening in front of her eyes.

“So you won it for Gary?” Little Cato asked, standing next to him and then glancing up for a second, only to focus in the end on Ash trying to pry away the plushie from Gary’s steel hold.

“Yep, fair and square.”

Little Cato glanced at him skeptically.

“Yeah, about that. I actually saw some alien furiously pointing at your poster while talking to the guards, so you know.” Little Cato shrugged at the end, smirking.

Avocato sighed.

When the guards came four minutes later, they were already above the planet’s atmosphere.

***

Mostly Avocato spent his time working. He didn’t have that much free time and even when he did, he tried to fill it to the brim with something useful. Repairs here, steering the ship there, cleaning weapons after a fight, preparing food for Little Cato at the end of the day. No matter what it was, Avocato was doing something.

(If he stopped doing them, his thoughts would catch up and he definitely didn’t need that. He had to be in constant move.)

Avocato hadn’t felt like he had needed to spend time with others before. Before Little Cato that was. And even after Little Cato had been born he never really had felt the need to have free time to spend it with someone other than his son.

With Little Cato it was different. He hadn’t had much time while working for Lord Commander, but whenever he had had some, he had spent it with Little Cato – repairing stuff, building machines, teaching him how to shoot and other useful tricks.

For the longest time Little Cato had been the only person Avocato really had wanted to spend time with.

And then had come Gary. And somehow the prospect of having free time to spend it with him wasn’t so terrifying anymore. On the contrary, he wanted to do that. It was a selfish thing – being able to spend as much time together as he could.

(Yet if he had to choose between Little Cato and Gary, he would always chose his son. But he knew Gary would do the same.)

Avocato always found excuses to hang out with the human. Whether it was playing cards, steering the ship, planning their future steps, eating supper, helping with cleaning the engine or other things. Most of the time Little Cato tagged along and Avocato had to admit he adored those times – when there were just the three of them and the wide universe. It was a time filled with jokes and laughter, possibilities of the future, stories from the past and so much more.

(One crooked but whole family.)

Those were the precious moments filled with no worries about the world, titans, Invictus, Lord Commander, death that was threating to take them away. It was just the three of them.

But sometimes Avocato wanted some alone time with Gary too. In a different way than he wanted some alone time with Little Cato.

Spending time with Gary left his heart in a haze, drunk on emotions so deep and bright that it made him exhausted. And yet, those were one of the most calming moments of his life. He felt utterly content while talking with Gary, laughing about stuff or being submerged into a conversation so dark that even shadows scattered away from them.

With Gary Avocato felt like he could open himself fully and the man wouldn’t judge him. And he was doing it, slowly, step after step. But to be fair he wasn’t sure whether he was doing it for himself or because it seemed like Gary was happier the more he knew about Avocato.

It felt like their bond was stronger the more they shared. And the needs became bigger and mightier.

“Oh my gosh, they are so disgusting!”

“They are just kissing each other.”

“Disgusting!”

Gary snorted and then threw popcorn at Little Cato who had done a tube from his hands and was shouting at the screen where a pair was kissing.

“It’s a romantic drama, what else did you expect?” Avocato asked, raising his eyebrow.

Little Cato huffed and slumped further down on the couch.

“I don’t know, but I expected something better than lame kissing scenes.”

“Come on, Spidercat, it’s a classic back on Earth.”

“Your classics sucks.” The small boy said, reached and then grabbed a handful of popcorn to put into his mouth.

“You will love them when you’ll be my age.”

“So when I’ll be a grandpa?”

“You little –“

Gary grabbed Little Cato, heavily ruffling his blue fur at the top of the head while grumbling under his nose.

Little Cato started laughing loudly, moving his hands up and trying to swat the attacking ones away, but failing miserably due to the tremors which ran through his chest.

The hands that rested on the head, moved to the armpits and stomach, tickling every space possible and making Little Cato almost shout in short spasm of laughter. His eyes were closed tight shut. His small body wiggled left and right, trying to get away from the attacking palms, but being quite unable to.

“Stop, stop I yield, I yield!”

Gary’s attack stopped, halted in a moment and then he moved away.

“I hope that taught you something.”

Little Cato was already opening his mouth to disagree with that statement, but Gary simply lifted his hands and it shut the small boy up for good.

Or at least for another few minutes.

Avocato wasn’t really the biggest fan of romantic dramas either. Or romantic comedies. Or romantic thrillers. Or romantic anything.

Mostly because whenever he watched one, it gave him ideas, possibilities that couldn’t be fulfilled, soft moments that he wished he had and could live through. It made him miss all those simple things he yearned and wanted and hoped could happen – but knew they never would.

(How Gary didn’t catch him glancing almost every minute at him was a mystery.)

Gary seemed enamored by the movie, so Avocato said nothing and simply watched it.

After some time Avocato sensed a stable weight being put on his shoulder and glanced down to see his son lulled to sleep.

Little Cato had his mouth open a little, with a bit of drool rolling down his cheek. His chest was moving steadily, raising up and falling down – oh, so precious movements – with one ear flicking from time to time.

Avocato smiled fondly and leaned to brush the saliva away, scratching the cheek in the process.

“Did he doze off?” Gary whispered to him, moving to grab a remote control and stop the movie.

“Yeah, he did.” Avocato nodded.

“Ah, the movie had to really bore him then.”

And yet he stayed.

Avocato moved his palm through the tuff of hair at the top and when his son didn’t wake up, he moved to gently scoop him up, letting the legs hang limply in the air.

Little Cato did little to no movement, letting his head loll to the side and rest on Avocato’s shoulder.

“I’m going to take him to his room.”

“Okie dokie.” Gary said, twirling the remote control in his hand. “Are you planning on… coming back?”

Avocato’s heart skipped a beat as he stared at Gary’s pleading eyes.

In the darkness of the main room they looked like two moons, reflecting the light of the nearest star. There were swirls, galaxies of emotions moving through them and Avocato wasn’t sure he could name all of the feelings. He had a vague sensation of knowing some of them, but it could be wishful thinking.

So in the end he opted for a selfish answer.

“Yeah, I’ll be back baby.”

Gary nodded at that, smiling to him like the sun.

Avocato carried Little Cato back to his room, laid him down on the bed and then covered thickly with a quilt. He patted the head and kissed the nose, whispering a sweet good night into the ear.

Little Cato snuggled further into his bed, throwing the quilt almost over his head, making Avocato smile under his nose.

(He would blame Gary for that later on, but he also moved to Fox, laying below Little Cato, and brushed his forehead softly, wishing a good night sleep too.)

His steps back echoed loudly in the silent ship drifting through the space. One, two three, four and so on and so more. The sounds and vibrations were accompanied by his heavily drumming heart. It was an otherworldly cacophony inside his veins, inside his body. It was a weird feeling. They had spent time together a lot of times, losing sleep while playing games, steering ship, repairing stuff or simply while talking or sometimes not even doing that.

But now, weirdly, he couldn’t calm down. It seemed that there was a fire beneath the fur, a sudden tornado and storm, rattling his nerves, making him twitch with anticipation.

(Anticipation for what? He wasn’t sure. It wasn’t for anything specific, it was just there, moving through his veins like black matter.)

Gary sat in the same position Avocato had left him, looking through the tablet which was laying on his lap.

“Oh, you’re already back.” Gary said, glancing up at him as Avocato flopped down.

“Should I have taken longer?” Avocato asked, raising his eyebrow.

“No, no, no of course not. Pfff what are you even thinking?” Gary quickly clarified, not clarifying anything at all. But that was a part of him.

(A part Avocato clearly adored.)

Gary grabbed the remote, almost dropping it in the process, and then moved it closer to his chest.

“Should I?”

“Go on. It’s a stupid movie, but I’m kinda curious how it’ll end.”

Gary nodded, beaming to him and clicking a button.

It was kinda true. But to be fair Avocato wasn’t sure whether he wanted to see the end because of the plot or because of Gary. Maybe he wanted to see the end to be able to sneak a peek of how Gary would behave while seeing it.

Even though he had said he had already seen it at least seven times.

Observing Gary while he watched a movie was always an intriguing experience. One Avocato clearly loved. He adored looking at the small changes on the face, sudden gasps, bewildered whispers, mouth spread in a wide grin after a joke or eyes filled with tears during a heartbreaking moment. It was a never-ending compilations of movements and emotions, cinematic show filled with vivid animations.

Avocato observed, cataloguing every emotion passing through the façade, wondering for how much longer he would be able to look at them like that, freely, alive.

Then there was a change, a sudden sparkle of life, a supernova coming, spreading the heat, a small open movement of the mouth, wide eyes, sparkling and needing, gravitated or pulled towards the screen. There was curiosity, clear, astonishing, childish even, bright, so radiant curiosity that it almost hurt to look at.

Avocato glanced at the screen to check what got Gary so interested.

Oh, the pair was dancing, looking at each other with adoration. The music swam slowly around their bodies, hugging them delicately and whispering into the ears, making them smile.

It looked awfully cheesy. But well cheesy was what Gary adored.

Avocato glanced at the pair, moving their hips gently, looking like the whole world didn’t matter, and he felt this sudden need. This sudden urge and longing, yearning so deep and heavy that it almost crushed his lungs. The echo of a heartbeat moved through his chest as a sudden stutter appeared in his brain.

Avocato stood up and reached his hand toward Gary.

“What… are you doing, my dear friend?”

He felt the heat rise to his cheeks, but he pushed all thoughts aside and simply answered:

“Are you going to let my hand hang in the air till the song ends?”

Gary opened his mouth, glanced at the screen, back at Avocato, one more time at the screen and then it seemed that what Avocato had been implying finally was interpreted by his brain.

He grabbed Avocato’s hand and let the Ventrexian haul him up.

They almost bumped into each other, due to the stress running through his limbs, but somehow he managed not to rip Gary’s hand off. Then for a moment they stood in front of each other, staring and not really being sure what to do.

Avocato hadn’t planned so far.

He just had wanted that, so he had done the first thing that had popped into his mind.

But at this point the song would be over soon, so they had to act.

Avocato quickly checked the position the people on the screen were in and tried to imitate it in the real life. He rested his one hand on Gary’s hip, holding the other at their shoulders’ level.

Gary quickly caught on, moving his prosthetic to rest it on Avocato’s shoulder, letting the coldness seep in through the material of his shirt.

Another short glance to check what other things they were doing. Swaying their hips while making small steps. This was easy. He could do that.

They tried recreating what the people on the screen were doing, moving, stepping around while stealing glance after glance at them. And it was of course a recipe for disaster. Gary managed to stomp on his foot twice and Avocato almost made them stumble into a table, but in the end managed to save the day by only hitting his knee on it not so softly.

Gary laughed at that.

“We’re pretty bad at it.”

“Yeah, quite terrible even.”

Avocato glanced at the screen and then huffed.

“You know what, let’s just ignore what they are doing.”

“Right after you, big cat.”

With that in mind the whole process was definitely easier. From time to time Avocato had to glance down to check whether he would step on Gary’s foot or not, but other than that it was okay.

It felt actually really nice. Being able to dance slowly through the main room, moving and swaying their bodies to the delicate beat which thrummed in the air around them. Being able to feel the presence and the warmness seeping into his body. Being able to sense the heat of a burning star in his hands. Being able to admire the sight of the galaxies swirling in these eyes. Being able to enjoy the gravitation pulling him in.

It was a moment filled with warmness and peace. A serenity that moved through the atmosphere, precipitating in form of sweet happiness on their eyelashes.

Gary looked up at him, smiling softly.

And too soon the song ended and they were left standing in the middle of the main room, looking at each other.

They stood there for an eternity and for a second more, until Gary opened his mouth:

“Would it be incredibly stupid of me to rewind the movie so we could do it one more time?”

Maybe for some people it would be stupid. Maybe they would argue that the magic of the moment would be long gone, that it would flee away, sailing away on the imaginary ship to the other worlds.

But Avocato didn’t want the moment to end. His heart beat so loud, so hazy, so strongly in his chest that he couldn’t, didn’t want to let it go yet.

“No, it would be just the right amount of stupid.” His mouth managed to say.

Gary grinned and with one hand blindly searched for the remote control. In the end he managed to go back in the movie to the beginning of the dance.

So they repeated it.

They swayed and danced and floated and it all was too beautiful to be really true. But it was. Avocato could feel his every nerve touching Gary’s body, he could sense every smell that was getting into his nose, he could see the blond curls standing in weird directions on top of Gary’s head.

It was too much and not enough, both in the same time.

Near the end, Gary delicately rested his head on Avocato’s chest.

He said nothing about it, only let their bodies sway together more.

In the end, they replayed the song three more times.

***

Avocato thought of himself as a man of logic. Every movement was pre-calculated inside his head. Every possibility thought through at least two times. Every situation laid out in his mind as a plan. He clearly thought then did things later.

Other way he wouldn’t be able to live for so long.

But there were and had been a few exceptions. With Little Cato he was never sure how he would act. There had been several times when he had burst into a shouting match with his son due to the sudden fear ripping his chest apart, especially back when he had still worked for Lord Commander. However there had been other times when he had been doing things without thinking, like hugging and kissing the top of the head and staying beside the bed till the late hours just to admire the soft rises and falls of the chest.

Little Cato made him act irrational. So did Gary. But due to totally different reasons.

Gary made him do things without consulting them with his head. His heart simply would take the lead, marching forward on its mission. He would say and do things which were normally unnatural to him. He didn’t regret them, but it would be nice to have some kind of warning before he felt that his heart and mind could combust due to a close proximity or something similar.

It was an amazing, soaring sensation and yet similar to falling down into the epicenter of a black hole.

“Oh my gosh, what do we do, what do we do?”

“Calm down, Gary.”

“I’m calm!”

He definitely didn’t look calm and Avocato wasn’t planning on trusting him anytime soon.

Gary paced around the small room, grabbing his hair and almost pulling them out, with the heavy droplets of sweat rolling down his face. His cheeks were flushed with stress and the overwhelming nervousness.

Avocato would laugh, if it didn’t make Gary so furious. And he knew it did, because he had tried before.

“Yeah, if pacing around you call being calm, then yeah, suit yourself.” He said, shrugging.

Gary opened his mouth, closed it, opened and then furrowed his eyebrows.

“Okay, maybe, just maybe, I’m not ca–“

“You definitely can be a little bit quieter.” Little Cato whined, glancing at them from behind the cloth that had been put on his eyes.

It was like a switch being flipped. Gary immediately jumped to the bed, kneeled down and brushed his hand across the blue patch of fur on the top, now glued to the ears and forehead.

“Sorry, Spidercat, my fault. How are you hanging little buddy?”

The small Ventrexian moaned as he turned on the bed, looking at the human with red eyes and runny nose which he brushed with the end of the quilt after he had sneezed.

Avocato quickly moved to grab a tissue which he then moved towards their son’s nose.

Little Cato took the offered gift and blew his nose loudly.

Gary smiled at that, scratching the boy behind the ear.

“I’ve been better.” Little Cato finally said, making a ball from the tissue and throwing it in the direction of the trash bin, but failing quite a bit.

(Avocato can pick it up later.)

“Can I get you anything? Water? Blanket? Ice cream?”

“We have ice creams on the ship?”

“Not really, but I’m sure I can think of something.” Gary admitted.

Little Cato laughed, but it made his entire body shudder terribly with the coughs rattling the bones and chest, making the poor boy sit up to fill his lungs with sweet, delicious air.

Gary frantically moved his hands around, in the end resting them on the kid’s back and massaging it slowly to help with the shudders running through the body.

“Thanks, dad.” Little Cat wheezed at the end, flopping back down on the bed. “I think I have everything.”

“But if you need more you can always tell me.”

“I know.”

“Just a word. Nothing more. And I’ll get it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So don’t strain yourself and just rest and let me take care of anything you may–“

“Dad, I’m really okay.” Little Cato whined, rolling a little on the bed, so he could face Gary who was kneeling in front of the bed. “Don‘t worry.”

“I can’t help, but worry!” He yelped.

Avocato smiled and put his hand on Gary’s shoulder.

“Gary, it’s okay. It is just a common Ventrexian cold. Little Cato will be fine in no time.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, dad.”

Avocato could see that Gary wanted to fight him on that, but zipped his lips and patted their son’s cheek softly. He smiled tiredly under his nose, grabbed the bucket filled with, well, with vomit and took the cloth that had been resting on Little Cato’s eyes.

“I’m going to wash it and bring you a new one.”

“Thanks.” Little Cato tiredly mumbled.

Avocato exited his room, sighing softly in the corridor, inhaling the empty of any smell air around him. It was a little bit stuffy in the room, with the terrible smells and scents mixing together. He definitely didn’t mind that, but now that he was outside he really noticed how foul odor was actually floating in his room.

As promised he went to the bathroom, washed the bucket, soaked the cloth in the cold water and then walked back.

The lights in his room were as dimmed as he had left them, but he could see the lump kneeling in front of the bed, caressing softly the cheek.

Little Cato was breathing, kinda heavily, but steadily and calmly. It seemed like during those short few minutes he had been taken away from the world of awake and into the sweet dream-filled land.

It was good, sleep was the perfect remedy for someone who was sick.

Avocato put the bucket down nearby the bed, delicately as not to wake up their son and then moved to place the cloth on Little Cato’s eyes and forehead.

The boy moved a little, but other than murmuring a few words under his breath he didn’t do much.

Gary was kneeling in front of the bed, resting his head in the small basket made of his arms. It was tilted a little bit, so he could observe the hesitant, but steady rises and falls of the boy’s chest.

Avocato glanced down.

“Are you planning on staying here for the whole night?” He asked.

“I was.” Gary answered, voice muffled by the material of his shirt. “But if you’re kicking me out I can totally –“

“No, no, no, I’m not kicking you out.” Avocato quickly clarified, gathering the last remaining tissues from the floor and throwing them into the trash bin. “I just thought you would feel more comfortable on the bed?”

“But Little Cato is on the bed.”

“He is.”

“And you were planning to sleep next to him.”

“That is correct.”

“On the same bed.”

“I’m inviting you for a sleepover and you’re refusing? Are you the real Gary?”

Gary quickly moved away from the bed, waving his hands in front of him.

“No, no, no, I’m definitely not saying ‘no’. It’s totally a ‘yes’. Yeah, like super cool and all that.” He whisper shouted. “It’s just –“

Avocato leaned and grabbed Little Cato’s blouse that had welcomed the ground after he had started feeling too hot.

“Just?”

“Isn’t this bed a little bit too small for three people?”

Avocato glanced at the bed. It wasn’t the biggest one, it definitely could fit two people more or less comfortably. Three could be troublesome, but then Little Cato wasn’t that big and Gary was incredibly flexible.

Or maybe that wasn’t that. Maybe Gary was simply searching for excuses. Reasons that could be used to escape the situation. Tiny mistakes and errors that he could exploit. That could be it.

(Avocato hated how that thought made his heart drop. How it made his breath still and crash down.)

“Gary…” He started, trying to find something to hold onto and failing. “If you don’t want to stay–“

“No, I want to stay.” Gary quickly said, raising up to his feet and almost falling down when his legs got mingled beneath him.

“Then stay.”

“But are you like super okay with that? Because if not I can totally sleep on the ground or you know, grab a blanket, make a fort, lit some scented candles –“

Okay, what the heck was he babbling about? It seemed like the words simply poured from his mouth, mixing, forming something new, something intangible.

But Avocato had to put a stop to it. Somehow.

“Gary, if I wasn’t okay with this, I wouldn’t ask, okay?” He said, pushing words aside to add his own, a little bit tired, voice.

Apparently he had had to say something good, because it immediately shut Gary up. And that was an incredible feat.

Avocato wasn’t sure what Gary saw in him, but it had to be something, because he quickly looked away and mumbled a simple:

“Okay.”

Avocato nodded and then glanced at the bed where Little Cato was sleeping, letting out a few pained snores from time to time. His fur was glued to the skin beneath and it seemed tangled at some parts, forming swirls of galaxies. There was a hue to his cheeks, too deep to be called healthy, which moved as a groan left the chapped lips.

“You want a spot near the wall or near the edge?” Avocato asked, like it was the most normal question that could be asked.

“Near the wall, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure, okay.”

Avocato tried to sound confident. But to be honest he was a mess inside. The cables were sparkling and crackling inside his veins. His brain was a mushy mixture, a reaction filled with the steam and heat and vapor so dense that he couldn’t exactly see the reasons and consequences of his actions.

At first he had proposed the idea because he had known that no matter what Gary would insist on staying by Little Cato’s side and he hadn’t wanted his best-friend to lay on the ground. But only now, the after-effects were reaching his brain and heart.

Had he seriously asked Gary to sleep with him? In the same bed!? What was wrong with him? His poor heart couldn’t take it. It didn’t have any additional armor around to protect itself from the harm and cardiac arrest.

But he couldn’t back down.

(Not that he really wanted to. Or wanted Gary to sleep on the ground.)

So bracing himself, Avocato simply said.

“Get yourself comfortable, I’ll get us some blankets.”

And with that he went out to go to the storage room. He didn’t even look back, just darted through the door, letting it close behind him.

The cold air around the ship once again calmed his racing heart and buzzing cheeks.

Nevertheless he didn’t want to be out for too long, in fear that something could happen to his son. He trusted Gary, of course, but he wanted to be near when Little Cato needed him. So the trip to the storage room and back took only around five minutes, maybe even less.

He stepped into his room and immediately glanced at his son.

Gary actually had climbed onto the bed and had pushed himself between the wall and Little Cato, who had moved to the biggest source of heat currently occupying the space. He was staring lovingly at the small boy, petting the cheeks with the back of his hand.

Avocato exhaled slowly and then moved closer to the bed.

“Here, for you.” He said and then passed one scratchy blanket.

Gary raised his head at him and leaned forward to take the gift.

“Thanks.”

Avocato nodded.

He didn’t really need to change his clothes as he was already wearing casual ones. Plus they were dirty with Little Cato’s sweat, snot and, well, other substances – gladly, not so smelly. It would be counterproductive to change clothes, when the state of them would be soon the same.

So that left only laying down.

The hardest part.

But he could do it.

Avocato slowly sat down on the slice of bed that was secured for him, nearby the edge, straightened the blanket, then laid down and at the end threw the material across his body.

Like a robot.

Okay, okay, he got it. He was just laying with the person he really, really liked in the same bed, with their son between them. There was nothing weird about it, totally not. It was normal. Maybe not fully, but still kinda normal in Gary’s world.

Avocato could live through it. He had lived through worse things under Lord Commander’s rule. He could do it.

He turned on the bed, so he was facing Little Cato and Gary.

Little Cato was currently turned towards Gary, curling under the quilt and shivering like a leaf on the wind.

Gary was patting their son’s cheek softly, but when Avocato moved, he raised his head up a bit, so he was able to look at him.

Avocato felt like his breath was punched out of his chest.

“So… we probably should try to fall asleep.” Gary murmured, barely raising his voice to be audible.

“That would be the best choice here.” Avocato nodded.

“Great! Let’s just do that. Together. But separately. Sleep.” Gary continued, nodding alongside. “Perfect. Sleeping right now. Going to do that.”

Avocato huffed at that, but he did close his eyes, hoping for the sleep to take his hand and guide him away.

He was incredibly tired. Today had drafted the energy from his body, leaving only a few drops at the bottom. A barely visible spectrum of strength inside his mind. He felt empty, like a shell, a conjuration of something that should resemble a body.

(Little Cato being sick did worry him. He knew it wasn’t a terrible illness, quite common one, but still he couldn’t help but worry.)

He tried to fall asleep, as he was incredibly, astonishingly tired. But no matter how hard he tried, how much he calmed his breath and emptied his mind, he couldn’t do it.

Seconds moved, minutes ticked, forming an hour in the end. Still with no sleep.

It seemed like one of those nights.

Avocato laid some more on the bed, listening to the uneven breaths of Little Cato, the small coughs and sniffs escaping his mouth and nose, the rustles of the blanket or quilt whenever someone changed position and the delicate murmurs of the machinery around them.

Until he turned on the bed and opened his eyes.

Little Cato had turned so he was facing Avocato now, still curled into a ball.

Gary was laying with his head resting on one hand. The second one was settled on Little Cato’s arm.

It all seemed so peaceful, like there were no worries in the world. Like there were only them, drifting through the cosmos, dancing across the string of the universe, playing cards with the fate and winning, in the end pulling the coins towards themselves.

(But for how long could they keep winning? They were running out of luck, precious luck that gave them life. Avocato knew that sooner or later it all would end. He knew that at some point he would lose this small slice of time filled with serenity, calmness and pure happiness. He knew that it all was a matter of time, but he hoped that he could hold onto it for just a little bit longer.)

Avocato corrected his position, resting his head on his arm, mimicking Gary’s position a bit.

And then Gary opened his eyes.

“Can’t sleep?” He asked, whispering the words.

Avocato shrugged, feeling his heart suddenly hammering inside his chest.

“Something like that.” He murmured.

“Me neither.”

“Clearly.”

Gary frowned at that a little, but the look quickly smoothened, probably due to the exhaustion dancing and skidding in his eyes.

A funny thing, both of them were incredibly drained, but couldn’t fall asleep.

Avocato did feel bad about snapping like that, but before he could focus his mind on opening his mouth to say something, apologize, the human beat him to it.

“His fever stabilized.” Gary whispered, moving his hand across the forehead of their son.

“That is a good thing.” Avocato mumbled, copying Gary and resting his paw on the forehead.

The skin was quite hot, but still less so than two hours ago. The medicine had to be working.

“Yeah.” Gary grabbed the quilt and moved it to cover Little Cato’s trembling shoulders. “I hope he will feel better in the morning.”

“It’s not his first Kylmäkissa flu. Definitely also not the last.”

It was in the end a quite common illness among Ventrexians and Tryvuulians – so Fox had to stay away from Little Cato for the time being.

“Still…” Gary started, then moved his head, laying it flatter on his hand and resting the other one on their son’s arm once again. “It has to suck.”

“It does.” Avocato admitted. “I’m sure you humans also have colds. Or something similar.”

Gary hummed, nibbling on his bottom lip while closing the eyes for a moment.

“Yeah, we do. And it’s always a pain in the ass.” Gary sighed. “But it’s the first time I’m taking care of someone sick.”

The concept was a tad weird at the beginning, but the longer Avocato really thought about it, the more he could actually understand it.

“I never tended to anyone before Little Cato either.” Avocato said, blinking a few times when a wave of tiredness hit his eyelids. “I didn’t have a real family before him to be honest.”

Gary tilted his head a bit, looking at him.

“Really?”

He nodded.

It was weird, opening up to someone. He rarely did it. Or like he couldn’t remember the last time he had done that. He knew he had done that at some point of his life – probably while being drunk – but now every memory about such occurrence was fogged in his head.

“Yeah, I had to learn everything from the beginning. How to change diapers, how to hold him, how to put him to sleep, how to make him stop crying and also how to take care of him when he was sick.” Avocato moved his hand and slowly caressed Little Cato’s cheek, finding pleasure in the small movement of whiskers answering the touch. “Just like right now.”

Little Cato let out a soft sight and then moved further under the quilt, almost covering his face and making Avocato smile softly.

“It always has been just the two of us against the world.”

Little Cato had been the center of Avocato’s life the moment he had laid his eyes on the small baby. His very own Galactic Center. Everything he had done in his life had been for him. He had been the reason he had woken up in the morning and had gone to sleep at night.

But that had been before all of this had happened. Before his mind had expanded like a universe. Before his heart had been shattered into a million pieces and had been glued back together.

Now he had more people he cared about, who rotated on the orbits nearby the center.

(He also had Gary now, a burning star that sizzled and sparkled, warming his face and chest with one radiating smile. Smile that could tear him apart and build anew.)

Avocato glanced up, catching Gary’s gaze for a moment, before the man directed it elsewhere.

There was a hidden, saddened undertone to his eyes. A darkness that swallowed the light which tried to escape it. A vantablack covered the irises, not allowing anything to pass through.

There was a small crease on the forehead, a twitch of the mouth, sudden movement of the nose similar to a sniffle as Gary bit the bottom lip.

“That sounds nice.” He admitted in the end.

“That is nice.” Avocato agreed.

Gary curled in on himself, staring at the back of Little Cato’s head and the ears perking up to find the source of every noise on the ship.

Avocato moved his one hand, straightening it above his head first and then slowly sneaking it towards Gary’s one. The material whispered beneath his palm, creasing and wrinkling with its every movement.

There were a thousand things he wanted to say to Gary. A million things he wanted to ask about. A milliard things he wanted to do.

The feelings he had harbored had found a comfortable and cozy home inside his chest. Something that had been unbearable some time ago now was a never–ending companion on his space journey. Reassuring even.

Avocato slowly brushed his hand against Gary’s palm.

“But I think that the three of us against the world sounds even better.”

Gary snapped his head up, staring at him like Avocato hung every star on the sky just for him.

(And if he could, he totally would do that.)

There was another string of silence, a sudden heartbeat that leaped in his chest, a compassionate exhale.

Then Gary interlocked their small fingers together and let their hands rest on the pillow above Little Cato’s head.

“The three of us against the world? I like that. I would like that. It sounds absolutely fricking amazing.”

Avocato ginned tiredly under his nose.

They didn’t talk after that. Gradually both of them let their eyes slip shut, allowing the exhaustion of today to slowly lull them to sleep and take care of their minds.

Their hands stayed connected on the pillow.

Until around three am, when Gary woke up Avocato with a simple, hoarse word.

“Bucket.”

Avocato wasn’t sure what it meant after being suddenly ripped away from the dreamland. He simply added the imaginary meaning to the real one, in one swift movement reached for the said bucket and pulled it up to the bed, pushing it towards Little Cato.

Who shot up and then leaned above the quickly placed bucket, emptying the barely eaten content of his stomach into it.

Gary slowly massaged their son’s back.

Avocato kept the bucket in place, not allowing it to slip through Little Cato’s trembling palms.

When the heavy shudders stopped, the small Ventrexian lifted his hand and brushed his mouth with the back of it.

“Absolutely disgusting.” He mumbled.

“You still look better than me while being hungover.” Gary said.

Little Cato hoarsely laughed.

And maybe it had been the three of them for a very long time.

***

The terrible thing about the stability was the fact that it could disappear in a spare second, not even leaving any trace after itself.

Avocato had been a lonely man. He had preferred the solitude of being alone, than being surrounded by people, aliens, different races and other humanoid or not things. He had preferred the empty nights, than the ones replete with bodies pressed together. He had liked the calm mornings filled with warm drinks, accompanied by nothingness – more than someone taking the empty spaces.

Like with all things in his life, Little Cato had changed that.

He was his son, his friend, his precious boy. It had been the two of them during breakfasts, during days, during dinners and during night-times. For some time Avocato had felt that it had been enough for him to be happy.

And he was still happy. Gosh, how delighted and ecstatic he was to be able to still be with his son.

Their family of two wasn’t missing anything. And yet Avocato felt like he wanted to add another member to it

Avocato wanted Gary to be here through good and bad, through the storm and calm sea, through Little Cato starting a rebellious stage of teenage years and through him turning into an adult.

Avocato wanted him by his side till the end of the world.

No matter when it would happen.

But in the end he was a coward. Somewhere deep inside he hoped he had more time, he had more days, more weeks, more months to tidy up the mess in his head, to find the courage to let the words out. He had lived in a comfortable life between worlds, not exactly moving in one or other direction. He had been afraid that if he had moved forward, he would break something fragile that had grown between them and he couldn’t imagine himself ever stepping back. So he had stayed where he had been, gripping tightly to the in-between which had harbored his heart.

He had thought he could live there for long enough time to be able to show without words what he was feeling.

Only he hadn’t noticed the crack on the hourglass, making the sand slip away way quicker than intended. And before he could even say a short word, the container was almost empty, letting the last few particles slowly drip down.

“You are not going!”

“Little Cato listen–“

“No, I won’t listen! You are not going there! This is like super obvious trap! They are going to kill you!”

“Well if I don’t go, they will kill all of us and I don’t want that to happen! I have to save you all and Mooncake!”

“Gary, calm down.” Quinn quietly said, putting her hand on Gary’s shoulder.

It seemed like he wanted to say something more, but shut his mouth and looked down at the ground.

There was silence between all of them. Heavy silence that precipitated in the form of invisible dust on their shoulders and weighed them down. Hollow silence that crushed the lungs. Cold silence that gripped the throats and squeezed, preventing from taking a breath.

How it all had gone so wrong so quickly?

“I’m sure there is a way out of this.” Fox hesitantly said, fiddling with his fingers and looking at everyone.

“Both our engines are dead. The turrets are out of ammo. The energy is at seven percent and the oxygen filters are disrupted.” There was a clear hesitation, before AVA continued. “I don’t think… we can escape this one.”

Everyone knew their luck had to run out at some point. They couldn’t escape forever. But somehow, deep inside, each and every one had hoped that they could pull it off one last time, that they could still outrun the chasing hands.

That didn’t happen.

They stood nearby the edge, feeling the heels of their shoes slipping down into the abyss that just waited to consume them all.

The silence spread further around like a disease, burning the skin and taking away breaths. It cradled them in its arms, caressing the hairs and petting the cheeks, keeping safe and yet as prisoners, locking them away.

Avocato tightened his fists, feeling his heart falling apart.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not like this. Never like this.

“There is only one way out of it.” Gary continued, but quieter, looking at everyone. “I’m going there. Alone. And you keep your butts here. Safe. On the ship.”

“And what? Are we supposed to watch you die too? Bring popcorn? Take bets which limb will be ripped off first?”

Gary flinched, biting hard the inside of his cheek.

“Little Cato, stop.” Nightfall whispered, raising her eyes at him. “We know your point of view.”

“My point of view? Are you all seriously siding with Gary right now?”

“No, we’re not.” Quinn bit back, gripping her own shoulders in a cold embrace. “But shouting doesn’t help anyone.”

It was true.

Everyone was agitated, angry, tired and above all scared.

Little Cato shut his mouth and glared at the woman, tightening the fists hanging near his sides.

They had been at this since the battle – which had lasted several hours – had ended. The lost battle. The devastating battle. The fight during which with every passing moment their hopes had been crushed, destroyed and disintegrated.

Invictus and Lord Commander had caught up with them. They had taken Mooncake. And now they were surrounded by the enemy with their own dying ship being their tomb. There was no running away, there were no escape routes that could save them all.

Lord Commander and Invictus had given them two options – either they all were going to die or Gary could give himself up and the rest of the crew would be spared.

Both options sounded terrible. Horrifying.

It had been easy to guess which way Gary had picked, not even paying any mind to the other option. It had been almost natural for them to disagree with it. And the fight and war had been storming around since then.

Nightfall sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. There were dark shadows, spirals of dust, around her eyes.

“It’s getting us nowhere. Not even one of us is thinking straight.”

It wasn’t really late, but at this point they were up for more than thirty six hours and neither of them could think clearly.

“So what do you propose?” Ash quietly asked, brushing her now dirty fringe away, letting her trembling fingers rest on the forehead.

“Sleep first and then let’s all of us think it through tomorrow. We have till midnight to decide. So let’s meet again in eight hours.”

Avocato nodded at Nightfall, showing that he agreed with her plan.

“Sounds reasonable enough.” Quinn added.

“Same here.” Ash said, dropping her hand

“I’m okay with it.” Fox mumbled.

“I also think this is a good idea.” Hue robotically said.

Nightfall turned to Little Cato who still angrily looked at the ground.

“Little Cato?”

The Ventrexian tightened his fists, letting the hair on his back stand up for a moment, bristling them, before finally letting go of the stress.

“Fine.” He snarled.

The woman turned her head to Gary who still didn’t speak. Similar to his son he was staring at the ground with lips pinched in a thigh line. But there was something in his eyes, some hidden depth, galaxies swirling, turning and circling, an ocean moving with a storm, sputtering white foam everywhere.

“Gary?” Nightfall started. “Do you agree with the plan?”

Gary didn’t answer.

Everyone turned their eyes to him.

“Gary?” Nightfall furrowed her eyebrows.

A beat of silence echoed, shimmered and sizzled in the charged atmosphere around them, making the hairs on the arms stand up, taking breaths away and gripping the throats in a delicate, yet firm grip. A touch that was there, threating, but not doing anything just yet.

“Okay.” Gary said and then stepped back.

Everyone exhaled, dropping their shoulders.

“So we’re set.” Nightfall straightened her back. “I advise you all to get some sleep. We’ll deal with it all later on.”

And that was the cue. Everyone slowly shuffled away from the destroyed main room, dragging their feet on the dusty ground, covered by the faint, barely shining lights above their heads. They held tightly onto consciousness for just a few more minutes, before their heads would land on the pillows, allowing their red eyes to rest for several restless hours.

Avocato hugged Little Cato, kissed his matted hair at the top and sent him to his bed.

The small boy obediently stepped into his room, letting the door close after him while glancing back at Avocato.

That went better than expected to be honest.

He wondered for how long it would stay that way.

Avocato was exhausted. He felt it in every atom and particle of his body, a heavy weight that pushed him down, more and more, making it harder to put one foot in front of the other. The tiredness clung to his bones, wrapped his muscles and seized him up, dragging towards the bottom of the black hole.

But he couldn’t rest.

Not yet.

He knew something was coming. It was tiptoeing forward, sneaking behind the corners, crawling in the vents, waiting for him to turn his back, so it could simply get past him.

But Avocato knew he had to wait for it, had to hide and wait for the moment of its mistake. He had known it the moment the words had left the mouth, he had known it the second he had heard the demands, he simply had known it since the very beginning.

(It had shattered his heart and had stolen his breath, sending the corpse into the space.)

He had to wait.

So he did.

Avocato spent the time in the hangar, staring at the space spreading in front of them, staring at the enemy ships that threatened their lives with weapons ready to attack, at the bits and pieces of their ship floating around, reminding him of the moving time, of the air slowly, but surely escaping the metal protection around their bodies.

Life was a fragile thing. He knew that. He accepted that. It was a knowledge he had forged in his mind.

And yet, whenever he was meet face to face with it, it surprised him nevertheless.

(But before he always had felt that there had been a spark of hope of escaping the situation. But not right now. Right now there was a hollow void inside his heart, inside his chest. Somehow he knew they were on the verge, hanging above the darkness trying to consume them all, being pushed forward on the plank of their ship, with the guns pointed at their backs.)

Avocato waited, counting the time in his heartbeats.

Then there was a shuffle, a small movement in the space-time continuum, a shift of an invisible silhouette.

Or at least a silhouette which tried to be invisible.

But Avocato was prepared for it. Yet he let the invisible invader believe it for a few more minutes, opting for staring at the shadow creeping along the walls, glancing warily around, checking if anyone beside their lost soul was around.

Avocato waited and observed, letting the shadow feel safe. And only then he pounced.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Gary shrieked and jumped in the air.

“Avocato, man, what the hell? You scared me!”

He raised his eyebrow, slowly stepping out of the shadows which concealed his entire posture.

“Not my fault that you were loud like a Loxodon.”

“Uhh like what?”

“Very loud.”

“Ah I strongly disagree, my dear friend.” Gary puffed out his chest. “I’m quite certain I was super amazingly sneaky and quiet. Like a ninja! It’s not my fault you Ventrexians have some crazily sensitive hearing.”

It was the truth, but Avocato wasn’t going to yield.

“I’m exhausted, sleep deprived and I was hit in the head twice. And I still heard you.” Avocato said, crossing his arms. He cocked his eyebrow, feeling that he was winning the fight when Gary’s eyes started to jump all over the place. “So no, you were not sneaky.”

“There goes my plan of being a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ long lost brother.”

What the heck? Avocato’s brain couldn’t deal with it right now. He was too tired to be dealing with it all. He just wanted for it all to pause, to halt, to stop spinning, circling and moving.

But he knew it wasn’t possible.

“So if finding me sneaking very sneakily around was your only goal, then please pardon me my friend and allow me to resume my merry trip.” And here Gary turned on his heel, planning on going further into the hangar, right towards the only available ship which could still fly. A one-person ship.

“To where?” Avocato asked, stepping after him.

“To visit my dear old friend. Yeah, you know we didn’t see each other in forever. We have so much stuff to catch up on. Stories to tell. Jokes to laugh about.”

Avocato hummed.

“An old friend.”

“Uh totally. A good friend. You know all this fighting got me missing them, so you know, I thought I would pop in for a moment, right now, when everyone was sleeping, not counting you. ‘Cause you know we have a lot to talk about and you know –“

“I know you’re going to Invictus and Lord Commander.”

Gary stopped in the middle of the hangar, but didn’t turn around to face Avocato.

There was a brief, dense silence that moved around and between them, pinching the muscles and breaking the bones.

Avocato could see Gary stiffening. It was a sudden spasm that contracted all body parts, locking them in place for a short moment. Almost like he was getting prepared for an attack, an ambush, a strike.

Avocato wasn’t going to attack.

“You won’t stop me.” Gary finally whispered, raising his shoulders. “I have to do it.”

Avocato knew it would happen. He knew Gary would do that. He had known it the moment they had been given their instructions. Every part, every compound, every atom in his body had been conscious of the possibility.

He also had known what he would do from the very beginning too. And it had broken his heart.

“I know.” Avocato said and he felt like he was crumbling, disappearing, disintegrating right here, right now. “I’m not stopping you.”

Gary swiftly turned on his heel and stared at him with wide, terribly scared eyes.

“You can’t go with me either.” He said, breathed out, croaked it even like there wasn’t enough oxygen around.

And maybe there wasn’t. The tanks and filters were broken, disturbed, leaking the precious atoms.

Avocato was collapsing like a star, he was decaying like a tree, he was deteriorating like a machine. He was living and breathing, but it felt like there was a hole in his body, an empty space from which his life was escaping.

Avocato slowly shook his head.

“I’m not going with you.”

What a terrible thing to say. But a thing he had to say.

He was slowly turning into a shooting star, right now, right here. Right in front of Gary.

The man stared at him with beautiful orbs, which were twitching, shivering and trembling in fear, fear so deep and genuine that it hurt Avocato almost physically to see them.

But he couldn’t go and he had to let Gary go. Even when it pained and destroyed him inside. He had to let Gary do it, if they wanted to have any chances.

(They had to keep Little Cato and the rest of the younger part of the crew safe at any cost. Something they both had agreed on with no words spoken between them.)

“Okay.” Gary said, then turned on his heel and stomped forward.

Avocato followed.

Their steps echoed in the empty, hollow hangar, jumping off the walls, leaping, running after each other, playing a game of tag.

Gary was walking and even though he wasn’t getting farther away from Avocato, the Ventrexian felt like he already had lost him. Maybe he had lost him the moment he had heard those words, when his heart had said a simple ‘oh’. Maybe he had lost him the moment he had heard the footsteps, even when some part of him had hoped it would not happen. Maybe he had lost him long time ago, even without having Gary there in the first place.

Maybe in the end Avocato was never supposed to actually have him.

Avocato felt like he was disintegrating, like someone was picking particle after particle from his real body and letting them float in the space, leaving only an empty shell behind, something that once upon a time resembled a living being.

Gary slowly approached the only available ship and looked up at it.

Now when Avocato could take a closer and longer look, he noticed that Gary didn’t take anything with him. It was just him, his usual clothes and the never-ending goodness that was masked under layer and layer of crystallized comedy. It was just him, his trembling hands and mind that was probably a tangled mess.

Avocato stopped next to Gary and stared at the ship. At the dusty metal plates. At the rusty bolts. At the crooked bow. At the wheels touching the ground, but seeming almost permanently glued to it.

It was a good ship.

“Avocato I…” Gary suddenly started, but closed his mouth when Avocato turned his head.

His eyes were directed forward, but it didn’t seem like they saw anything there, anything in front of them.

Avocato wasn’t sure any words could describe this moment. Because how could any words even show the pure, terrifying sadness that seeped from the minds and hearts, crushed the lungs and stole the breaths away?

What kinds of words could be used when one person was on the verge of taking the step into the other world, crossing the line of the living beings? There was no place for hope. Everything was filled to the brim with the dark fear that consumed every particle.

Avocato didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure if anything could be said right now.

“I’m… I’m really glad I… met you.” Gary finished, inhaling deeply at the end, letting his chest expand, only for it to collapse a second later.

It seemed like a simple message.

But Avocato was afraid that it held more than simple words. That there were galaxies, other worlds hiding inside, memories intertwined together, forming threads that could make a whole universe or be thrown on a tired body to warm it during a terrifying and dark night.

Avocato wasn’t ready to let go. He wasn’t ready to let the precious life slip past his fingers, watch the guillotine falling down, ready to snap the neck and tear a soul away.

“You know usually when someone says such things, the other person says something in return and you know, doesn’t let the other one hanging. I mean if you don’t want to say anything that is totally fine–”

“Gary.” Avocato whispered and somehow this one word could break the curse.

Gary still didn’t look at him, but swallowed hard.

Avocato wanted to say something, anything that would lift the spirits in this terrible situation, but he found out that he couldn’t find the perfect words. No, he couldn’t find any words in his mind, in his chest, in his heart that could be said out loud. Or maybe that was wrong too.

There were too many things which needed to be said and so little time, too many possibilities of outcomes, each and every one worse than the previous one.

Avocato slowly reached his hand, letting it float in the air for a moment, hesitant and unsure of the fate and future in front of it, before it grabbed Gary’s palm, gripping it softly.

Gary twitched, but other than that didn’t look back at him.

“Hang on tight, we will come for you and Mooncake.”

It was probably one of the worst things Avocato could say, but the words had left his lips before his mind could catch up with them.

They rang in the empty space between them.

It sounded like a lie. Not because of the meaning, because that was the honest, harsh and loving truth. The lie was hiding in the outcome. Outcome he was too terrified to admit was most likely to happen.

But Gary lied too as he answered:

“I know.”

In the end they were both white liars, hoping to make the other one feel better.

When the Death was staring straight at them, peeking into their eyes, raising her hands gently while getting closer and closer with every passing second, the words started to lose their meanings, leaving only empty shells after themselves.

(Something that once upon a time had been beautiful stars, but now were filled with tiny black holes.)

Gary gripped Avocato’s hand back and it seemed like too short time had passed before he stepped forward.

Avocato desperately wanted to hold onto that warmness in his palm for a little bit longer, but it took only one step for their hands to stop being connected.

Avocato’s heart squeezed, desperately beating for a release.

Gary slowly approached the ship, no bag, no backpack, and he grabbed the handle to thrown open the door. It hissed lowly, tiredly, making space to form a dark hole which only led inside into the unknown.

It seemed like a final line, a last stop, the moment of no return.

Avocato wanted the time to stop, he wanted to shout and scream, rip out the cables of the universe to let it all reset, but know he couldn’t. He could only hopelessly stare at his friend stepping into the ship that would bring him to his death.

(A price that had to be paid so the rest of them could live.)

Gary stopped, one hand on the door, one foot already in the ship.

There was a part of Avocato which hoped that the man changed his mind. That he would turn around and step back to stand right next to him, where he belonged.

(But the other part knew the truth. Knew what was the most important right now and it wasn’t Gary nor Avocato.)

“Avocato?” Gary softly whispered, voice barely audible above the hum of his heart.

“Yeah?”

“I know it will sound stupid, but this… really feels like the end.”

Avocato swallowed hard, feeling as the air escaped his lungs in quiet hisses.

“Yeah… yeah it does.”

Gary exhaled, a trembling sound left his lips as he gripped tighter the metal handle that had helped him hoist himself into the ship.

But he didn’t step inside. It seemed like he was mulling over some idea inside his head. Something was preventing him from fully going inside. Like there were tendrils, cosmic hands holding him in their wake.

He turned on his heel and looked at Avocato with some kind of resolve shimmering in his eyes. He opened his mouth, ready to say what was on his mind.

And no sound came out. Then he tried it again, still with the same result. He tightened his fists, looked down at the ground, inhaled through his nose, rose his head and opened his mouth, but also this time the only thing that left it was:

“Avocato, I…”

And no more words.

It almost seemed like he was put under a spell.

Gary tried two more times, letting his eyes jump all over the place, barely even now landing on Avocato.

He whined, frustrated with something and then closed his eyes, inhaling deeply.

Avocato wasn’t sure what was happening, but he knew that there was a big internal fight, a war inside Gary’s mind and he didn’t want to interrupt to not tip the scale toward one side.

Then there was a simple whisper leaving Gary’s mouth, barely audible and probably not even supposed to be heard by Avocato:

“Okay, here comes nothing.”

Gary looked right into his eyes, stepped down and in just a few strides he was in front of Avocato.

Avocato had a brief moment of coherent thoughts which tried to make heads and tails of Gary’s behavior, before he felt a warm sensation on his lips.

And his world stilled to a halt.

Avocato could feel the heat in his chest, in his heart, in his mind, wrapping itself around him like a warm blanket made of constellations. There was a ramble and a deafening silence inside his skull, when his brain connected the impulses with the images, coming up with a quite simple deduction.

Gary kissed him.

The weight on his lips stayed for a moment, a brief tick, a short pause, a tiny bit, a slice of time snatched away from the reality. It was like a familiar breeze, like a warm light of a fire on the cheek, like a comforting taste of coffee in the morning. It was everything and nothing in the same time.

Avocato’s heart jumped high in his throat as his mind simply gave up trying to understand what was happening.

He could feel Gary on his lips, a hesitant touch, barely even there. He could smell the typical scent of the human, clouding his nose and making him lose focus. He could sense the heat of the body, being near, but not close enough to bring him pleasure.

And after a short moment, terribly too short moment, Gary moved away, letting his cheeks burn brightly in the darkness of the hangar with the eyes sparkling in shame.

“Ah uhh I mean… I know I shouldn’t do that, like it was totally uncool and like… but you know… I know… it’s just… I wanted to do it for so long… and well… I’m sorry… I shouldn’t… you can punch me if you want… but I didn’t want to die without –“

Avocato didn’t want to listen to Gary. The world swirled in his head, tumbled, rolled down the hill, disappearing in the black hole of his already messed up mind.

He wasn’t sure what was happening. He wasn’t sure about a lot of things. He wasn’t sure whether he was doing a good or a bad thing by not stopping Gary. He wasn’t sure whether he was a good person in the end. At this point he wasn’t sure about almost anything.

But in this very small moment, he was sure that it was Gary who had kissed him and this mere thought, this simple idea burst like a star inside his chest, consuming every intelligible thought that was left, letting his heart decide for his fate, allowing it to take his hand.

So he stepped forward and shut Gary up by kissing him.

The silence that appeared between them was lost in his loudly beating heart which hammered and rang and stormed inside of him, ready to fall apart.

Avocato felt like he was crumbling down as his lips touched Gary’s ones, giving it a comforting weight, stepping close enough to feel the heat, but far away enough so that the man could step away if he wanted to.

(But Avocato wanted to step forward, wanted to get even closer, sense the warmness on his own body, be able to trace it with his own fingers, map it inside his head, write it down as a sweet memory to remember.)

There was a beat, an echo, a sudden emptiness when nothing happened, when the world moved, but still stayed in one place.

And when Avocato was ready to pick up the discarded pieces of his heart, Gary tilted his head, pushed forward a little bit and moved his one hand to Avocato’s shirt, gripping it tightly, bringing him forward, closer, nearer, even closer, letting their chest touch, smash together, fit and click like they always belonged there. The other palm sneaked across his arm, resting on a shoulder to trace Milky Ways on his neck, curling around the fur desperately, needy and lovingly to this point Avocato was sure he could faint any second now.

(For someone who could conquer entire Galaxies, his legs quite quickly turned to jelly.)

Every small bit of space between them was too big for Avocato as his heart leaped happily.

Avocato pushed forward, almost smashing their mouths together, trying to feel more, get more, touch more, map the paths and trails in his head, sense the typical shivers of Gary’s mouth on his own as he moved his hands to the human’s waist and back. He held onto him tightly, feeling the fear so wildly burning in his bones that he was almost sure Gary would disappear if he let him go.

(Maybe something like this would happen. He was too afraid to check it.)

Their mouths moved, astonishingly delicately against each other, like they were afraid of what may be in front of them. Two timid space companions, astronauts floating in the wide universe.

Avocato slowly opened his mouth, only to bite down on Gary’s bottom lip, dragging it with his teeth, probably leaving two dark points where his canines should be, getting a small gasp in return and a tighter grasp on his neck.

(He probably should tone it down, but it felt like every barrier was broken and he could only count on his needs and emotions.)

Avocato could feel the purr climbing his throat, spilling out like a cosmic wave around them, reverberating in his chest, when Gary slowly pried open his lips, breathing heavily against Avocato’s mouth.

For a moment he was afraid that the man would move back, stop it there, but oh how wrong he was, because Gary gripped him tighter. He wrapped his hands around Avocato’s neck to bring their faces incredibly close, kissing like there was no tomorrow.

(There probably was no tomorrow for Gary.)

Feeling already addicted to something he still didn’t taste, Avocato tilted his head and sneaked his tongue inside, letting it slide across, feel whatever it could. He sensed the heat pooling in his stomach, fireworks going off in his mind, planets spiraling in his chest as Gary’s tongue quickly moved to brush Avocato’s one, almost like he wanted to steal something precious from him.

There were several collisions of the teeth, awkward tilts of the heads, weird movements, noses smashing together, small breaks for a gasp here and there, saliva almost dripping down near the corners of the mouths, fingers getting caught in the fabric, moans and hums.

It was clearly an inexperienced moment. But a moment filled with so much love and warmness that Avocato felt drunk with sweet adoration that he harbored for the man, the human he wanted to hold close for as long as he could, keep him safe in his arms, where there was no wrong, no fear, no danger and no pain.

Unfortunately eternity for them ended in less than a minute, when Gary suddenly moved away and hid his face in Avocato’s chest and neck, holding tightly onto him.

And in this very moment the whole world stood in front of Avocato, reminding him of all the wrong and good that he had done. Of all the bad and good that was happening around. Of the happiness and fear that consumed their hearts.

And simply as that, Avocato felt like he was pushed underwater. Like dark hands wrapped themselves around his throat and pushed and pushed, clenching harder to prevent him from taking a breath.

He wanted to flail, but the only thing he could do was hold onto a lifeline and hug Gary closer, sensing the trembles and shivers running through his spine, feeling the heat, warmness and sweet life still in the body while whispering a simple:

“I’ve got you, baby, I’ve got you.”

Like some kind of a spell. Or maybe a curse.

Gary embraced him tighter and, in the stillness of the universe, he simply whispered, right into his neck:

“I’m scared, Avocato.”

Fear. A family to some people. A greatest enemy to the others. But for them it was like a friend, although the one which could stab them with a knife in the back when they weren’t looking, looking remorsefully at the falling down corpses.

“I’m scared too.” Avocato said, moved his one paw to Gary’s hair and brought him even closer, finding some kind of comfort in the sensation of the blonde locks between his fingers.

“I don’t want to die.”

“You won’t.”

“Please, don’t lie to me.” Gary sniffed. “Not you.”

Avocato wasn’t sure how to answer that. What more he could say?

He probably couldn’t say more. Everything that needed to be said had been already lost to the time which had passed them by, without them even noticing it. Time that was ticking, bringing them closer and yet further apart.

“Okay.” He said in the end.

So they held each other, close and even closer, feeling the warmness spreading through their bodies, listening to their hearts beating together in some kind of a sad dance, swirling, moving, twirling when the cue was ringing above them.

They held and tried to remember this moment, etch it in the minds.

Then – too soon – Gary slowly moved away, untangling himself from the embrace.

And Avocato let him do it, let his hands slip down, losing the sparks of ember that had glided across it just a few seconds ago.

Then Gary made a step back – a step back that felt like light–years between them – and looked back up at him with a soft smile.

“Will you open the hangar doors for me?”

“Of course.”

Gary opened his mouth, closed it, but then leaned forward and pecked his cheek.

(Just like he had done so many months ago.)

It was a sparse touch, a freezing chilliness and a burning fire, that still scorched the skin, even after Gary had moved away.

“Take care of Little Cato and the rest.” He said.

“I will.”

Gary smiled and then turned on his heel to walk towards the ship.

Even though it broke his heart and destroyed his bones, Avocato turned around too and exited the hangar, letting the door close behind him with a hiss. It echoed loudly in the emptiness of the ship, even when Avocato looked back and glanced into the hangar through a small window.

Avocato could hear rushed footsteps behind him, getting closer and closer with every passing second.

Gary tapped several buttons on the console, changed something on the radar and then inhaled deeply before turning to him and showing him a thumbs up from the pilot cockpit.

Even from so far away, he could see the red circles around the eyes, the shivers running through the hands and the sudden hollowness in the irises. He could see the destruction that laid beneath their feet and the trail of blood they had left behind.

And in this very moment he wondered if the fate simply liked to play with them, tugging on the strings tied to their bodies to let them play on their own theatrical stage, finding pleasure in their misfortune.

Avocato flipped a handle and observed as the pressure in the hangar dropped, moving towards the red colors on a circular scale.

“Dad, no, wait!”

Gary was staring forward, but if Avocato wasn’t mistaken, there was a tension to his shoulders, almost like the man could hear Little Cato’s cries from the corridor.

(But that was impossible, was it?)

“Please wait!”

Avocato glanced at the small window, at the silhouette of Gary sitting in the pilot seat and then, before Little Cato could catch up, pressed the button.

The hangar doors opened

“Dad, no!”

Avocato turned around, observing his son running towards him through the silent ship. There were unshed tears in his eyes, small crystals accumulating near the corners and threating to fall down.

Their stares crossed and Avocato felt like the worst of thieves.

Little Cato turned his direction and leaped towards the console, reaching with his hands and hoping to mess something, to close the gate and prevent it all from happening.

Avocato moved forward, grabbed his son and in the same time they both heard engines bursting to life behind them. A sudden snap, a giant roar, a pained cry and then the ship shivered when Gary left the hangar.

“No, no, no, no, dad, let me go. We need to stop him.” Little Cato shouted, struggled, pushed, threw his hands around, trying to escape the hold Avocato had on him. “Dad please!”

But Avocato only clung tighter, feeling that he was crumbling inside. He was afraid he might do so, if he didn’t hold onto something real, something meaningful.

His chest was being emptied, leaving only a black hole behind, void, emptiness that resembled something, maybe beautiful worlds that had dried out.

Little Cato fought bravely, fought diligently, fought strongly, trying to escape, trying to twist his body, trying to run away, trying to brush him away, trying every small and big trick known to him to get away. But after a few minutes of struggle, his hands fell down, limply hanging near the sides.

Avocato felt his own strength leaving the body and he fell to his knees, holding tightly onto his son.

“Dad?” Little Cato said, voice hoarse and croaky, crooked due to all the wrong reasons.

“I’m sorry.” Avocato whispered, hiding his face in Little Cato’s body, embracing and hugging him, bringing him closer to feel the warmness that once had swum in his body, trying to find something to hold onto. “I’m so sorry.”

Little Cato stiffened for a moment and then crumpled down with Avocato, hitting his knees hard on the cold floor beneath them.

Soon there was wetness, terrible wetness on Avocato’s chest, heavy shudders that crackled and thundered around them, inside their chests, a pain that squeezed the hearts. A star of remorse exploded inside, destroying everything in its wake, letting them only hold onto each other, hoping for some kind of warmness, but finding vacuum of coldness instead.

They stayed like this for long enough that the enemy ships started to drift away, leaving their own ship alone, in the middle of nowhere, with destroyed oxygen tanks and engine that couldn’t move them forward. Left them to fend for themselves.

But they left them alone.

And in this loneliness, holding Little Cato tightly to his chest, Avocato looked up and saw a small dot behind the window, falling down and leaving a sparkling tail after itself.

Gary would call it a shooting star. Although from astronomical point of view it wasn’t that. Neither a star, neither a falling one.

(Maybe in the end it was only a perforated belief.)

Avocato knew it wasn’t possible. It had to be some kind of a meteor, burning in the atmosphere of a nearest planet or a comet drifting by. He knew it couldn’t be a shooting star. He knew it simply couldn’t be true.

Yet his heart whispered a silent wish.

(Although wasn’t it a little bit horrible? Trying to get one last wish from a poor, dying star?)

Avocato stared at the universe and hugged his son tighter, listening to his cacophonic heartbeat and feeling it resonate in his own perforated chest.

 the end

 “I'm coming wait for me

I hear the walls space repeating

The falling of our feet and

It sounds like drumming

And we are not alone

I hear the rocks stars and stones meteors

Echoing our song

I'm coming”

- Anaïs Mitchell

is it?

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Random Review #3: Sleepwalkers (1992) and “Sleep Walk” (1959)

I. Sleepwalkers (1992) I couldn’t sleep last night so I started watching a trashy B-movie penned by Stephen King specifically for the screen called Sleepwalkers (1992). Simply put, the film is an unmitigated disaster. A piece of shit. But it didn’t need to be. That’s what’s so annoying about it. By 1992 King was a grizzled veteran of the silver screen, with more adaptations under his belt than any other author of his cohort. Puzo had the Godfather films (1972 and 1974, respectively), sure, but nothing else. Leonard Gardner had Fat City (1972), a movie I love, but Gardner got sucked into the Hollywood scene of cocaine and hot tub parties and never published another novel, focusing instead on screenplays for shitty TV shows like NYPD Blue. After Demon Seed (1977), a movie I have seen and disliked, nobody would touch Dean Koontz’s stuff with a ten foot pole, which is too bad because The Voice of the Night, a 1980 novel about two young pals, one of whom is a psychopath trying to convince the other to help him commit murder, would make a terrific movie. But Koontz’s adaptations have been uniformly awful. The made-for-TV film starring John C McGinley, 1997′s Intensity, is especially bad. There are exceptions, but Stephen King has been lucky enough to avoid the fate of his peers. Big name directors have tackled his work, from Stanley Kubrick to Brian De Palma. King even does a decent job of acting in Pet Semetary (1989), in his own Maximum Overdrive (1986) and in George Romero’s Creepshow (1982), where he plays a yokel named Jordy Verril who gets infected by a meteorite that causes green weeds to grow all over his body. Many have criticized King’s over-the-top performance in that flick, but for me King perfectly nails the campy and comical tone that Romero was going for. The dissolves in Creepshow literally come right off the pages of comics, so people expecting a subtle Ordinary People-style turn from King had clearly walked into the wrong theatre. Undoubtedly Creepshow succeeds at what it set out to do. I’m not sure Sleepwalkers succeeds though, unless the film’s goal was to get me to like cats even more than I already do. But I already love cats a great deal. Here’s my cat Cookie watching me edit this very blog post. 

And here’s one of my other cats, Church, named after the cat that reanimates and creeps out Louis and Ellie in Pet Sematary. Photo by @ScareAlex.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not keep reading if you plan on watching Sleepwalkers and want to find out for yourself what happens.

Stephen King saw many of his novels get adapted in the late 1970s and 80s: Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, Christine, Cujo, and the movie that spawned the 1950s nostalgia industrial complex, Stand By Me, but Sleepwalkers was the first time he wrote a script specifically for the screen rather than adapting a novel that already existed. Maybe that’s why it’s so fucking bad. Stephen King is a novelist, gifted with a novelist’s rich imagination. He’s prone to giving backstories to even the most peripheral characters - think of Joe Chamber’s alcoholic neighbour Gary Pervier in the novel Cujo, who King follows for an unbelievable number of pages as the man stumbles drunkenly around his house spouting his catch phrase “I don’t give a shit,” drills a hole through his phone book so he can hang it from a string beside his phone, complains about his hemorrhoids getting “as big as golfballs” (I’m not joking), and just generally acts like an asshole until a rabid Cujo bounds over, rips his throat out, and he bleeds to death. In the novel Pervier’s death takes more than a few pages, but it makes for fun reading. You hate the man so fucking much that watching him die feels oddly satisfying. In the movie, though, his death occurs pretty quickly, and in a darkened hallway, so it’s hard to see what’s going on aside from Gary’s foot trembling. And Pervier’s “I don’t give a shit” makes sense when he’s drilling a hole in the phone book, not when he’s about to be savagely attacked by a rabid St Bernard. There’s just less room for back story in movies. In a medium that demands pruning and chiseling and the “less is more” dictum, King’s writing takes a marked turn for the worse. King is a prose maximalist, who freely admits to “writing to outrageous lengths” in his novels, listing It, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers as particularly egregious examples of literary logorrhea. He is not especially equipped to write concisely. This weakness is most apparent in Sleepwalkers’ dialogue, which sounds like it was supposed to be snappy and smart, like something Aaron Sorkin would write, but instead comes off like an even worse Tango & Cash, all bad jokes and shitty puns. More on those bad jokes later. First, the plot.

Sleepwalkers is about a boy named Charles and his mother Mary who travel around the United States killing and feeding off the lifeforce of various unfortunate people (if this sounds a little like The True Knot in Doctor Sleep, you’re not wrong. But self-plagiarism is not a crime). Charles and Mary are shapeshifting werewolf-type creatures called werecats, a species with its very own Wikipedia page. Wikipedia confers legitimacy dont’cha know, so lets assume werecats are real beings. According to said page, a werecat, “also written in a hyphenated form as were-cat) is an analogy to ‘werewolf’ for a feline therianthropic creature.” I’m gonna spell it with the hyphen from now on because “werecats” just looks like a typo. Okay? Okay.

Oddly enough, the were-cats in Sleepwalkers are terrified of cats. Actual cats. For the were-cats, cute kittens = kryptonite. When they see a cat or cats plural, this happens to them:

^ That is literally a scene from the movie. Charles is speeding when a cop pulls alongside him and bellows at him to pull over. Ever the rebel, Charles flips the cop the finger. But the cop has a cat named Clovis in his car, and when the cat pops up to have a look at the kid (see below), Charles shapeshifts first into a younger boy, then into whatever the fuck that is in the above screenshot.

Now, the were-cats aversion to normal cats is confusing because one would assume a were-cat to be a more evolved (or perhaps devolved?) version of the typical house kitty. The fact that these were-cats are bipedal alone suggests an advantage over our furry four-legged friends, no? Kinda like if humans were afraid of fucking gorillas. Wait...we are scared of gorillas. And chimpanzees. And all apes really. Okay, maybe the conceit of the film isn’t so silly after all. The film itself, however, is about as silly as a bad horror movie can get. When the policeman gets back to precinct and describes the incident above (”his face turned into a blur”) he is roundly ridiculed because in movies involving the supernatural nobody believes in the supernatural until it confronts them. It’s the law, sorry. Things don’t end well for the cop. Or for the guy who gets murdered when the mom stabs him with...an ear of corn. Yes, an ear of corn. Somehow, the mother is able to jam corn on the cob through a man’s body, without crushing the vegetable or turning it into yellow mash. It’s pretty amazing. Here is a sample of dialog from that scene: Cop About To Die On The Phone to Precinct: There’s blood everywhere! *STAB* Murderous Mother: No vegetables, no dessert. That is actually a line in the movie. “No vegetables, no dessert.” It’s no “let off some steam, Bennett” but it’s close. Told ya I’d get back to the bad jokes. See, Mary and Charles are new in town and therefore seeking to ingratiate themselves by killing everyone who suspects them of being weird, all while avoiding cats as best they can. At one point Charles yanks a man’s hand off and tells him to "keep [his] hands to [him]self," giving the man back his severed bloody hand. Later on Charles starts dating a girl who will gradually - and I do mean gradually - come to realize her boyfriend is not a real person but in fact a were-cat. Eventually our spunky young protagonist - Madchen Amick, who fans of Twin Peaks will recognize as Shelly - and a team of cats led by the adorable Clovis- kill the were-cat shapeshifting things and the sleepy small town (which is named Travis for some reason) goes back to normal, albeit with a slightly diminished population. For those keeping score, that’s Human/Cat Alliance 1, Shapeshifting Were-cats 0. It is clear triumph for the felis catus/people team! Unless we’re going by kill count, in which case it is closer to Human/Cat Alliance 2, Were-cats 26. I arrived at this figure through my own notes but also through a helpful video that takes a comprehensive and complete “carnage count” of all kills in Sleepwalkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmt-DroK6uA

II. Santo & Johnny “Sleep Walk” (1959) Because Sleepwalkers is decidedly not known for its good acting or its well-written screenplay, it is perhaps best known for its liberal and sometimes contrapuntal use of Santo & Johnny’s classic steel guitar song “Sleep Walk,” possibly the most famous (and therefore best) instrumental of the 20th century. Some might say “Sleep Walk” is tied for the #1 spot with “Green Onions” by Booker T & the M.G.’s and/or “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris, but I disagree. The Santo & Johnny song is #1 because of its incalculable influence on all subsequent popular music. 

I’m not saying “Wipe Out” didn't inspire a million imitators, both contemporaneously and even decades later…for example here’s a surf rock instrumental from 1999 called “Giant Cow" by a Toronto band called The Urban Surf Kings. The video was one of the first to be animated using Flash (and it shows):

So there are no shortage of surf rock bands, even now, decades after its emergence from the shores of California to the jukeboxes of Middle America. My old band Sleep for the Nightlife used to regularly play Rancho Relaxo with a surf rock band called the Dildonics, who I liked a great deal. There's even a Danish surf rock band called Baby Woodrose, whose debut album is a favourite of mine. They apparently compete for the title of Denmark’s biggest surf pop band with a group called The Setting Son. When a country that has no surfing culture and no beaches has multiple surf rock bands, it is safe to say the genre has attained international reach. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many bands out there playing Booker T & the M.G.’s inspired instrumental rock. Link Wray’s “Rumble” was released four years before “Green Onions.” But the influence of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” is so ubiquitous as to be almost immeasurable. The reason for this is the sheer popularity of the song’s chord progression. If Santo and Johnny hadn’t written it first, somebody else would have, simply because the progression is so beautiful and easy on the ears and resolvable in a satisfying way. Have a listen to “Sleep Walk” first and then let’s check out some songs it directly inspired. 

The chords are C, A minor, F and G. Minor variations sometimes reverse the last two chords, but if it begins with C to A minor, you can bet it’s following the “Sleep Walk” formula, almost as if musicians influenced by the song are in the titular trance. When it comes to playing guitar, Tom Waits once said “your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they’ve been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don’t explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing.” Not only is it comforting to play and/or hear what we already know, studies have shown that our brains actively resist new music, because it takes work to understand the new information and assimilate it into a pattern we are cogent of. It isn’t until the brain recognizes the pattern that it gives us a dopamine rush. I’m not much for Pitchfork anymore, but a recent article they posted does a fine job of discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.

Led Zeppelin’s “D’Yer Maker” uses the “Sleep Walk” riff prominently, anchored by John Bonham and John Paul Jones’ white-boy reggae beat: 

Here it is again with Del Shannon’s classic “Little Town Flirt.” I love Shannon’s falsetto at the end when he goes “you better run and hide now bo-o-oy.”

The Beatles “Happiness is a Warm Gun” uses the Sleep Walk progression, though not for the whole song. It goes into the progression at the bridge at 1:34: 

Tumblr won’t let me embed any more videos, so you’ll to travel to another tab to hear these songs, but Neil Young gets in on the act with his overlooked classic “Winterlong:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV6r66n3TFI On their 1996 EP Interstate 8 Modest Mouse pay direct homage by singing over their own rendition of the original Santo & Johnny version, right down to the weeping steel guitar part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_PwXjCqqs The vocals are typical wispy whispered indie rock vocals, but I think they work, particularly the two different voices. They titled their version “Sleepwalking (Couples Only Dance Prom Night).”

Dwight Yoakam’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere” makes cinematic use of it. This song plays over the credits of one of my all-time favourite movies, 1993′s Red Rock West feat. Nicolas Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dennis Hopper, and J.T. Walsh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu3ypuKq8WE

“39″ is my favourite Queen song. I guess now I know why. It uses my fav chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaFU 

Blink 182 scored their first hit “Dammit” with a minor variation on the Sleep Walk chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0g16_LQaQ

Midwest beer drinkin bar rockers Connections scored a shoulda-been-a-hit with the fist-pumping “Beat the Sky:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSNRq0n_WYA You’d be hard pressed to find a weaker lead singer than this guy (save for me, natch), but they make it work. This one’s an anthem.

Spoon, who have made a career out of deconstructing rock n’ roll, so that their songs sometimes sound needlessly sparse (especially “The Ghost of You Lingers,” which takes minimalism to its most extreme...just a piano being bashed on staccato-style for four minutes), so it should surprise nobody that they re-arrange the Sleep Walk chords on their classic from Gimme Fiction, “I Summon You:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teXA8N3aF9M I love that opening line: remember the weight of the world was a sound that we used to buy? I think songwriter Britt Daniel is talking about buying albums from the likes of Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, any of those grunge bands with pessimistic worldviews. There are a million more examples. I remember seeing some YouTube video where a trio of gross douchebros keep playing the same progression while singing a bunch of hits over it. I don’t like the smarmy way they do it, making it seem like artists are lazy and deliberately stealing. I don’t think it’s plagiarism to use this progression. And furthermore, tempo and production make all the difference. Take “This Magic Moment” for example. There's a version by Jay & the Americans and one by Ben E King & the Drifters. I’ve never been a fan of those shrieking violins or fiddles that open the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bacBKKgc4Uo The Jay & the Americans version puts the guitar riff way in the forefront, which I like a lot more. The guitar plays the entire progression once before the singing starts and the band joins in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKfASw6qoag

Each version has its own distinctive feel. They are pretty much two different songs. Perhaps the most famous use of the Sleep Walk progression is “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers, which is one of my favourite songs ever. The guy who chose to let Bobby Hatfield sing this one by himself must have kicked himself afterwards when it became a hit, much bigger than "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiiyq2xrSI0

What can you say about “Unchained Melody” that hasn’t already been said? God, that miraculously strong vocal, the way the strings (and later on, brass horns) are panned way over to the furthest reaches the left speaker while the drums and guitar are way over in the right, with the singing smack dab in the middle creates a kind of distance and sharp clarity that has never been reproduced in popular music, like seeing the skyscrapers of some distant city after an endless stretch of highway. After listening to “Unchained Melody,” one has to wonder: can that progression ever be improved upon? Can any artist write something more haunting, more beautiful, more uplifting than that? The “need your love” crescendo hits so fucking hard, as both the emotional and the sonic climax of the song, which of course is no accident...the strings descending and crashing like a waterfall of sound, it gets me every fucking time. Legend has it that King George II was so moved by the “Hallelujah” section of Handel’s “Messiah” that he stood up, he couldn't help himself, couldn't believe what he was hearing. I get that feeling with all my favourite songs. "1979." "Unchained Melody." "In The Still of the Night." "Digital Bath." "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" "Interstate." "Liar's Tale." “Gimme Shelter.” The list goes on and on. Music is supposed to move us.

King George II stood because he was moved to do so. Music may be our creation, but it isn't our subordinate. All those sci-fi stories warning about technology growing beyond our control aren’t that far-fetched. Music is our creation but its power lies beyond our control. We are subordinate to music, helpless against its power and might, its urgency and vitality and beauty. There have been many times in my life when I have been so obsessed with a particular song that I pretty much want to live inside of it forever. A house of sound. I remember detoxing from heroin and listening to Grimes “Realiti” on repeat for twelve hours. Detoxing from OxyContin and listening to The Beach Boys “Dont Worry Baby” over and over. Or just being young and listening to “Tonight Tonight” over and over and over, tears streaming from my eyes in that way you cry when you’re a kid because you just feel so much and you don’t know what to do with the intensity of those feelings. It is precisely because we are so moved by music that we keep creating it. And in the act of that creation we are free. There are no limits to that freedom, which is why bands time and time again return to the well-worn Sleep Walk chord progression and try to make something new from it. Back in 2006, soon after buying what was then the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I found myself playing the album’s closing track over and over. I loved the chorus and I loved the way it collapses into a lo-fi demo at the very end, stripping away the studio sheen and...not to be too punny, showing its bones (the album title is Show Your Bones). Later on I would realize that the song, called “Turn Into,” uses the Sleep Walk chord progression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exqCFoPiwpk

It’s just like, what Waits said, our hands goes to where we are familiar. And so do our ears, which is why jazz often sounds so unpleasant to us upon first listen. Or Captain Beefheart. But it’s worth the effort to discover new stuff, just as it’s worth the effort to try and write it. I recently lamented on this blog that music to me now is more about remembrance than discovery, but I’m still only 35 years old. I’m middle-aged right now (I don’t expect to live past 70, not with the lifestyle I’ve been living). There’s still a whole other half life to find new music and love and leave it for still newer stuff. It’s worth the challenge, that moment of inner resistance we feel when confronted with something new and challenging and strange sounding. The austere demands of adult life, rent and routine, take so much of our time. I still make time for creative pursuits, but I don’t really have much time for discovery, for seeking out new music. But I’ve resolved to start making more time. A few years ago I tried to listen to and like Trout Mask Replica but I couldn’t. I just didn’t get what was going on. It sounded like a bunch of mistakes piled on top of each other. But then a few days ago I was writing while listening to music, as I always do, and YouTube somehow landed on Lick My Decals Off, Baby. I didn’t love what I was hearing but I was intrigued enough to keep going. And now I really like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMnd9dvb3sA&pbjreload=101 Another example I’ll give is the rare Robert Pollard gem “Prom Is Coming.” The first time I heard this song, it sounded like someone who can’t play guitar messing around, but the more I heard it the more I realized there’s a song there. It’s weird and strange, but it’s there. The lyrics are classic Pollard: Disregard injury and race madly out of the universe by sundown. Pollard obviously has a special place in his heart for this track. He named one of his many record labels Prom Is Coming Records and he titled the Boston Spaceships best-of collection Out of the Universe By Sundown. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a Captain Beefheart megafan but I can hear that the man was doing something very strange and, at times, beautiful. And anyway, why should everything be easy? Aren’t some challenges worth meeting for the experience waiting on the other side of comprehension or acceptance? I try to remember this now whenever I’m first confronted with new music, instead of vetoing it right away. Most of my favourite bands I was initially resistant to when I first heard them. Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Guided by Voices, Spoon, Heavy Times. All bands I didn’t like at first.  I don’t wanna sleepwalk through life, surrounding myself only with things I have already experienced. I need to stay awake. Because soon enough I’ll be asleep forever. We need to try everything we can before the Big Sleep comes to take us back to the great blankness, the terrible question mark that bookends our lives.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT MADE IN YOUR MIND

This will come as a surprise to a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different. I use the number of times each token ignoring case, currently occurs in each corpus. David advocated. I've just described is an acquisition by a public company. I went to my mother afterward to ask if this was so. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. I think if I look closer I'll be able to find statistical differences between these and my real mail. Possibly. Peter Mayle wrote one called Why Are We Getting a Divorce? Even others that seem quite distant. And what, exactly, is hate speech? Being profitable ensures you'll get at least the average of the acquisition market—in which public companies do behave as pooled-risk company managers, you need a brain that can go anywhere.

Another thing I may try in the future there is a static obstacle worth getting past, spammers are pretty efficient at getting past it. It was astonishing to learn later that they'd both been serial womanizers, and that as I made the filters stricter I got more false positives. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are true, or at least wished that computer science was a branch of math. That would have saved me in all three cases. That's why movies like The Matrix have such resonance. I've found that you can filter present-day spam acceptably well using nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the useful and the bizarre. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt.

But what happened to Reddit didn't happen out of neglect. To be jaded you have to do a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. The user doesn't know what it means, but worse still, neither does the developer of the filter is in the individual databases, then merely tuning spams to get through them. Letters, digits, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs to be part of tokens, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. Here parents' desires conflict. They may be trying to make sales would be a good idea. Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to stop getting spam. When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. It would be pretty straightforward to make a list of the fifteen individual probabilities, you calculate the combined probability thus: let prod apply #' mapcar #' lambda x-1 x probs One question that arises in practice is what probability to assign to words that occur in one corpus or the other, and the transformation was miraculous.

A probability can of course be mistaken, but there is little ambiguity about what it means to be biased. Hacker News who actually took the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, look at the page. Second, I think. Plus Reddit had different goals from Hacker News. Adults have a certain model of how kids are supposed to behave, and it's different from what they expect of other adults. If a self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd. 08221981 supported 0.

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. To launch a taboo, a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Just write whatever you want, not to say what you want, and then sit around offering crits of one another's creations under the vague supervision of the teacher. It's hard for us to feel a sense of urgency as adults over something we've literally been trained not to worry about running out of money and b they can spend their time how they want. Here parents' desires conflict. This may well be a better plan than the old one of putting them in their place, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. That's an extreme example, of course, the test you use to measure performance must be a valid one. Sorry about that. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking I'm reading Ulysses as they do in the real world: they're small; you get to start from scratch; and the problem is before you can solve it.

It seems to be a single long stream of text for purposes of counting occurrences, I use the 15 most significant. We did. If someone submits a lame article, the other end seems especially far away. 8747 From free 0. To see fashion in your own time, though, my filters do themselves embody a kind of virtual town square. Hacker News is definitely useful. If we could look into the future it would be easier if the forces behind it were as clearly differentiated as a bunch of evil machines, and one sent to me in the belief that I was someone else.

Which means applicants of type x. You meet a lot of work, and the history of science, architecture, and the result is what we can't say, what do you do with it? If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. Most people go through life with bits of packing material adhering to their minds and never know it. 30 startups that eminent angels have recently invested in, give them each a million dollars each to move, a lot of kids who grew up in. 07972858 color 0. 75%.

Yes, of course. How can we find these too? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to solve the problem with fairly simple algorithms. I scan the entire text, including headers and embedded html and javascript, of each message in each corpus. Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. That's why movies like The Matrix have such resonance. The reasons parents don't want their kids having sex are complex. This is too big a problem to solve here, but certainly one reason life sucks at 15 is that kids are trapped in a world designed for 10 year olds. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions. One of the most premeditated lies parents tell. Here parents' desires conflict.

[jokerhappylover]

With Arthur when he gets fired

You usually get up from bed feeling lazy and today wasn't different. It was about 8 AM, you woke up still feeling kind of tired, then you went to the kitchen to prepare your breakfast. After eating you went back to your bedroom to watch the news.

Subway murders. That was the fisrt new. It happened last night at Wall Street's subway station, the victims were three young men, and the most curious thing about it was that the suspect was someone wearing a clown make up or mask.

You fisrt got worried when you heard the word "murders", it's really sad and worrying that things like that happen in the city, but at the clown part you just heard yourself saying "what?", like, was that what they actually said?... Sometimes you think that you've seen everything in Gotham, especially crimes, Gotham was a rough and violent place unfortunately, but a killer clown? That's new.

Speaking of clowns, you had to start getting ready to work or otherwise you could get late. You worked at Haha's as a party clown, your clown name was 'Lovely', you wore pink clothes and make up, and pink roller skates, the children loved your character and you usually had someone else with you at the parties and places you'd visit. Carnival, his clown name was Carnival. The person under the make up was your favorite person at Haha's, Arthur Fleck.

You got ready and left the house, and you had no choice but taking the subway, it was something that you did everyday but today it felt a little different.

You arrived at Haha's, you got there a little later than usual, but no one seemed to notice, your boss Hoyt was at his office and the rest of the guys didn't even see you entering the place. All of your coworkers seemed already there. Randall was half-dressed as a clown and sitting with Gary, and other guys were around a small table drinking coffee. Then you see Arthur near the lockers, you were already wondering if he hadn't come yet, but he was there, and seeing he was there already made you feel better, he was speacil, unfortunately the clowns at Haha's wouldn't treat him so well.

You started putting your things on a table and you hear noises of things falling, when you look around you see some of Arthur's things on the floor, you first thought that maybe they had fallen from his locker, but then you realized he was taking them from the locker by dropping them on the floor, did something bad happened? Why was him doing that? Maybe it was nothing but you had a bad feeling, you were worried about him.

Then you heard Gary saying "Hey Art, I heard what happend - I'm sorry man". Gary seemed a good person and it was nice from him to say that, but you was just getting more worried, what happened after all?!?!

Then Randall says "Yeah, doesn't seem fair, to get fired like that"... WHAT? FIRED? You couldn't believe those words. Why?! How?! No, please no!! It couldn't be real, your eyes were already watering.

Arthur looked hard at Randall for a moment. Randall had always treated Arthur like if he liked him, saying Arthur was his boy and stuff but he didn't sound so real, it didn't sound like he actually cared Arthur got fired, and you were already thinking he was being fake, not only now but all this time. Maybe it wasn't nice from you to think that about other people, but Arthur had so many nicknames there, they would make fun of him... You didn't like the way he was treated for no reason.

Arthur kept cleaning his locker out, now he was stuffing all of his clown gear into a brown shopping bag. You were feeling so bad, it hurted even more to see him taking all him stuff to leave... Forever... It was almost too bad to be true.

Then one of the clowns said "Did you really bring a gun to the children hospital? Why would you do that for?" Wait, what? A gun? What's even going on here? You were getting confused and more worried.

Then you hear "So is that part of your act? If your dancing doesn't do the trick, you just gonna shoot yourself?" and a lot of laughters. The guys there were so rude and ignorant, not even when Arthur gets fired they would stop making fun of him.

Then Arthur finally says something.

"Why don't you ask Randall about it? It was his gun."

"What?" Randall said.

"I still own you for that, don't I?" Arthur answered.

Wait, you remembered of something. Some days ago while you were getting into your clown look, Arthur was sitting next to the lockers alone and Randall came, and you saw him giving something to Arthur, he laughed, it seemed like Arthur didn't want to accept it and it was a secret between them. Was that it? A gun? It all seemed to make sense.

Randall didn't like what Arthur said, he seemed really upset about it and asked Arthur to stop, he was already leaving and made a noise with his trumpet and dropped it.

You were so upset about all this situation.

Arthur came back saying "Oh no, I forgot to punch out!" and literally punched the clock and it fell on the floor, Arthur laughed. It was obvious that he wasn't okay, but you loved his attitude and couldn't help but smile after he did that and give a little laugh.

But it was a serious situation, and you were already at Arthur's side, you've always been. You take his trumpet and follow him.

He's already outside the building. "Arthur!!", you call him. He stops walking and looks at you, you got closer, with a sad look at your face. .

You show him his trumpet which he had left behind, you were giving it back to him like if he had forgotten it.

"You left this" You said. You didn't even know what words to say, you knew that he left it behind on purpose, you just wanted to be there for him, you wanted him to know that he was not alone, you were on his side

He looks at it for a second, takes it saying "Thank you" and put it in the bag. "But I guess I don't need these things anymore." he said.

You were really upset at Randall and the rest of the clows for acting like they did, but the most important thing to worry about was Arthur, and it made you really sad to think of how he was fired while being such a good clown. You just loved seeing him dancing, he was the cutest and best clown you've seen, and also the fact that he said he was always told his purpose in life was bringing joy and laughter to the world, and he knew since he was a a little boy that he wanted to be a comedian, and he's always put so much energy in bringing happiness... His story as a part clown couldn't end like that.

"Don't say that. This is not the end of the story, Arthur, we're gonna solve this problem."

He looks at you for about three seconds. He seemed to feel like you cared about him, but wasn't sure or didn't know why, he didn't have anyone close to him, someone to support him, so that was kind of unusual to him.

"Y/N... I'm fired, okay? I messed up and I'm fired, it's over."

"No, it's not. I'm not gonna let this end like that." you gave a pause and completed "I can talk to Hoyt and..." he interrupted you.

"He would never hire me back, he was really angry and yelling at me when he fired me after the children hospital thing. I'm 100% fired". He seemed hopeless. "I'm a party clown with A GUN" he completed.

"You mean Randall's gun?"

He just looks at you, like if he was surprised by the fact that believed him, that he wasn't alone.

You take a breathe and says "Look... I know it was his gun, he gave the gun to you, didn't he? I saw everything, I know it's all Randall's fault".

He just looks at you once again, this time with a little smile/smirk at his face, starting to realize you two were together at this, you two against them. Then he looks at something behind you, you turn around and you see Randall next to you, he came right at the moment when you said that.

"Nice, Y/N is on your side! Look Arthur, what was all that about? Why would you say that?" Randall said.

"What?" Arthur asked

"That it was my idea about the gun. That subway situation ain't no joke, you know, they got sketches of clowns on front of every newspaper-" Randall answered.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Randall" Arthur said.

Randall answered with "Right. Okay. I just want to make sure you got your head on straight".

Arthur looked at him and smiled. "My head's right there" he said.

Randall nodded saying "Good, I don't even know if you did it but there's no need to draw any attention to yourself. Y'know? Or we both are in trouble".

Arthur asked "What are you worried about? You didn't commit the crime at the subway did you?"

"Of course I didn't" Randall answered.

"You didn't shoot one point blank in the head, the other one twice in the chest, before chasing the third one down and shooting him three times in the back, right?" Arthur completed. He gave so many details that worried/scared you a little bit.

Arthur puts his fingers forming a gun to Randall's head, and stares straight at him. Then he leaves singing 'Send in the Clowns'. You've never seen him like that, it was like a mix of being upset and confident at the same time... something feels different. He seemed so upset about all that, it made you really sad, you'd definitely do something about it.

Randall just looks at you, he doesn't really know what to do or say, only hopes you don't do anything against him.

Then Hoyt leaves the building too and found you and Randall, also sees Arthur, already far from Haha's building. While you watch Arthur far away, slowly disappearing, you hear him asking "Why are you two here when you both should be inside the building, already in full clown look? What's going on here?"

"Nothing." Randall answers and enters the building again.

"What about you, Y/N? What you doing here? You didn't even put your clown clothes yet or started applying you make up" Hoyt asks you. You don't even know what to say.

"I was.. I was just... Trying to figure out what happened to Arthur..." You answered.

"Well, not your business. Now go get ready" he answered, he's usually not patient.

"I'm sorry Hoyt, but I have to talk to you about it. Arthur didn't do anything wrong sir. I know what happened but it wasn't his fault, it was Randall's gun"

"Look Y/N, blaming Randall in order to defend Arthur is ridiculous. I get if you two are friends but to be against Randall because he told me more about Arthur is wrong of your part, you know that."

"What did Randall told you?"

"Arthur tried to convince me it was a prop, but that's bullshit, and also, Randall told me Arthur tried to buy a .38 off him last week"

"No he didn't! He didn't buy it, he didn't even want the gun-"

"Y/N, stop it. Don't make me fire you too."

You felt almost hopeless... He just doesn't listen. But then you hear yourself say:

"Well... If you're not going to give Arthur a second chance, then fine, fire me. We two or any of us."

That was wild and risky... You knew that your clown was children's favorite, also, the only roller skater clown, and for those reasons you were important and you belevied maybe Hoyt wouldn't want to fire you, you were very good at what you do and it'd be hard to find another clown like you, but in fact you were risking losing your job, but it was for Arthur, you did that for him, and for you too 'cause you were tired of Hoyt, Randall and all the rest of the people at Haha's.

"This is ridiculous Y/N." he said.

"It's up to you to decide. But if Arthur is really fired, I am leaving too". Your heart was racing while saying that.

Hoyt didn't know what to do, he didn't want to loose the only roller skater clown, also the most successful one, but he would not give Arthur a second chance. He lost his temper and gave you his answer.

"Okay, if that's how you want it, fired."

You close you eyes, take a breathe and answers "Okay" with a little smile on the face, not sure if it's a positive or sad one.

Then you entered the building, took your stuff and left the place to go home. You had just lost your job, it was for a good cause and you were proud of standing up for Arthur, but you knew you loved being a clown and it'd be hard to find another job like that, it'd be hard to simply find another job.

At home you tried to call Arthur during the afternoon but he didn't pick up, so you tried later at night.

"Y/N?" He finally picked up.

"Hey Arthur, how are you?". You didn't even know how you'd tell him what you did.

"I'm calling to tell you that I talked to Hoyt". You completed.

"You did? And how did it go?" he asked you

"I... I'm... Fired too". You answered

"What?". He thinks it's his fault, he knew that talking to Hoyt wouldn't solve the problem, but he couldn't believe you had lost your job because of that, and he felt guilty.

"Y/N, I... I'm sorry if I made that happen, this is really unfair, you didn't had anything to do with this, why would Hoyt do that? I-" he completed. He couldn't believe it ended up like this to you, and it sounded like he was upset or/and angry at himself because he thought it was his fault, you defend him and gets fired too.

"No Arthur, it's not your fault!! I made him fire me". you said

"You.. You what?" He doesn't understand why you'd do that, he's confused

"I told him that if he wasn't going to give you a second chance, he would had to fire me too. I made him choose between me AND you or none of us".

Arthur stays quiet for 2 or 3 seconds, he couldn't believe you actually did that for him. Then he says "W-why? Why would you do that? Y/N... You lost your job because of me!"

"I know, and I did this because I'm on your side, and I'm tired of Hoyt and all those guys being like that, and of all these unfair situations. And we WILL gonna find another job, another agency or something like that, okay? Together"

"Y/N, I... No one has ever done something like that for me or even supported me, I don't know what to say... Thank you so much".

You smiled at him and said "Maybe we could even do some presentations at the streets until we find a job. What do you say, Carnival?"

"I think it's a great idea, Lovely!"