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alpaca-writes · 3 years ago

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Mystics, Chapter 33

Synopsis: Arch becomes hired on at Mystics by the strange shopkeeper Lyrem Nomadus, and everything seems to be going well. In fact, their life nearly becomes perfection; no more bullies, better grades, and a lot less stress. Soon enough, however, Arch realizes that perhaps not everything is as perfect as it seems and that Lyrem has been hiding a very dark, and troubling secret…

taglist: @myst-in-the-mirror & @livingforthewhump

CW: blood, organs exposed, bodily mutilation, torture, gore, not for the faint of heart..

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

From outside the dining hall, Arch was pacing and shaking their hands out of nervousness with a fresh apron on. They were about to remove Lyrem’s heart. Lyrem’s.

They liked Lyrem. They understood that he was dead. Paimon had to remind them of that fact, since he seemed so alive in Paimon’s realm. The removal of his heart would be a symbolic gesture. Nothing more. The so-called demon compared it to a rite-of-passage, citing the history that Lyrem had with the removal of his father’s heart when he was first working with Paimon. It was just the natural way to do business in Paimon’s mind. Lyrem always knew this day would come. That knowledge comforted Arch to a certain extent, and explained why Lyrem wanted Arch to run. He had gotten cold feet about giving up his position and didn’t want to give his whole self to his work after all.

Arch tried the door. It was still locked. Paimon said he would retrieve them when everything was ready but Arch just couldn’t seem to wait for much longer. They just wanted to get it all over with.

Their fingers fiddled with the buttons on the discman, starting the Peasants, Pigs, and Astronauts album from the beginning. Finally, they heard Paimon clicking his hooves from down the hall. He held up a black blindfold.

“Here?” Arch scrunched their face. “Now? I thought I’d be able to talk to Lyrem before we started”-

Paimon spun them around and placed the cloth over their face.

“Lyrem betrayed me by trying to take you away,” he replied, tying the knot tightly in the back. “And for that, he has lost the privilege of using his tongue for the next five minutes. Don’t worry, he’ll still be capable of speech after you’re finished with him. Alright.”

He spun them around again, and prevented Arch from playing with the blindfold with a quick removal of their hand from their face. Paimon flicked his eyes nervously towards the door, and then looked back.

“Now, timing is everything, sweet thing, so do whatever you need to, to remove his heart. There might be distractions, or you may get nervous, but as long as you do this, then you will never need to return to Earth the way you left it. You can be free to recreate yourself once again with Lyrem’s blessing and under my guidance.”

Arch blinked beneath the blindfold, hearing the rush to his voice.

“Are you nervous?” They inquired after a pause.

“No. Not at all.”

Arch didn’t believe that for a second. Their ability to detect bullshit was heightened at the placement of the blindfold. It bothered them that they could not see anymore.

“Now, we’ll start the music first. You can put your headphones on,” Paimon briefly instructed. “Take your time to get started. Once the first incision is made, I’ll time your progress. Understand?”

Arch nodded, placing the headphones over their ears. The speakers even without music were dense enough to prevent any sound from interfering. They pressed play.

A hand gripped theirs- Paimon’s, leading them forward, straight through the door. There was a momentary pause where Arch didn’t move, because their leader had suddenly left them alone without direction. The hand returned, pressing their upper back and then they found themself at the end of the dining table as they bumped into it. Paimon took both of their hands in his and then allowed Arch to feel the two objects on the table. When their hands brushed over them, they knew immediately what they were.

One was worn-out and almost warm to the touch, while the other was cold, and metallic and never seemed to age at all.

Arch took their time, feeling both blade handles over completely. Paimon wanted them to choose. They were well practiced with the bowie. It would be the obvious choice.

Paimon watched on curiously as Arch made their decision. They placed the bowie down with a sigh, and picked up Lyrem’s jeweled blade instead. Arch nodded, indicating that they had made their decision. Paimon led Arch by the hand until they stood beside Arthur. Quickly, he helped them find their tools sitting on the table nearby. A bone saw, and clamp waiting to be used as well as a handy cloth to wipe any excess blood from their hands they didn’t want.

When Arch was comfortable, Paimon left them there and took the other side of the table. He pulled a grin over the man who seemed to be realizing all too suddenly that Arch, really was going to start pulling him apart only because Paimon had told them to.

“I thought I’d let you know, that I’ve decided what I want.” Paimon declared, unbuttoning Arthur’s shirt.

“What are you talking about?” Arthur growled, enraged and equally humbled by the almost tender action that Paimon was performing on him.

“For when I win this little bet.”

“You won’t win.”

“I will win,” Paimon argued, pulling Arthur’s shirt open and baring his chest. “And when I do, I’ll make sure that Arch eats your heart, fresh from your body. Raw and make you watch.”

“They won’t”-

“Ah, ah, ah. Are you really sure you want to make another bet on that?” Paimon shot his eyes up from Arthur to Arch and then back down again. They would likely start at any moment. Arthur fell silent.

Paimon left the stage. His brow furrowed at the sight of Lyrem and Apollo’s arrival. They were now sitting in audience chairs that he had not set up for them with a look on their faces like they didn’t think they belonged either. Quite simply, Paimon didn’t summon them. Thinking it odd they would choose to be present for this moment, he glared at the two and made his approach.

Creating two more small yellow programmes for the newest arrivals, he handed them out, hoping his startled demeanor was not noticeable. He ignored the uncomfortable itch to ask how they removed themselves from the basement and sat between them both. Neither of them looked happy to have found themselves there.

“Glad you both could make opening night.” He grinned, patting both of them on the shoulder.

Arthur’s head turned towards Lyrem, waiting for some indication that there might still be rescue- a plan, at least. Lyrem shook his head and his eyes cast downward, then back up as Charlotte was addressed by her little brother.

“Char, turn away. Don’t… Don’t watch this. Please,” Arthur pleaded.

Paimon sniffed and muttered, “it’s beginning so tragically. I was hoping for an opening number of some kind. You know, to lighten the mood.”

Arch adjusted their stance over the body. No such opening number would spare the crowd from the hellish scene. Arch reached out a hand, feeling first the bare skin over a set of ribs, and then trailed their fingers higher until they found the right area. The knife came in close to Arthur’s chest and immediately, a loud shout filled with expletives ripped out of his throat as the blade started to dig into his flesh.

Arch grunted, removing the blade and pulled the discman from the belt loop of their pants. They altered the volume buttons until they were satisfied.

“No! No, Arch! Listen to me! Hear me!” Arthur shouted at them and tried his mightiest to lean up.

Arch paid him no mind. The natural reactions like screaming were simply another distraction. They would do better if they spent ten seconds to up the volume instead of pausing every time Lyrem had something new to say. They returned the system to their hip, and continued.

“Oh, see. I suppose there are some funnier parts,” Paimon mentioned off-hand and let out a quick breathy chuckle.

Lyrem turned to him with a new and profound look in his eyes.

“How can you find any humor in such gore?” he postulated rhetorically. “I am not a fan of Arthur myself, but this”-?

“Is a masterpiece,” Paimon interrupted and then he hushed Lyrem with a finger to his lips. “Just allow it to happen.”

Lyrem scanned the room for a timer, and he found one off to the side. A sandglass sitting on a wooden stool by the wall.

Arch had finished the first cut, and the blood from the incision began to pool in the center of his chest. Arthur’s jaw had been fully clenched to prevent himself from screaming as the pain ripped through him. He didn’t want Charlotte to hear him. His tears were hot against the sides of his face as they pooled into two puddles near his ears on the wooden planks. He opened his eyes during the reprieve while Arch planned the spot for their next cut. He caught sight of Charlotte who was watching every moment with steadfast terror. Her eyes were wide, and her face shined under thick black lashes.

He let out another howl as Arch found the proper point of incision and cut across. Again, they found the third incision point and finished the I shape that would soon be widened by the clamp to hold open the area for the saw to separate his breastbone. It had been two minutes. They worked quickly to adjust the metal bar to their desired length and then pulled the portions of flesh aside. They picked up the saw, giving it two quick whirs before carefully finding the correct spot to break him open without accidentally taking one of their own fingers off in the process.

Calmly and quietly, they sang to themself as the saw whirred jaggedly through the bone until it was only their voice they heard in their mind:

“-Are you glad to see how far you've come?

You're a wizard in a blizzard-

A mystical machine gun

Bwow, wowowow, benerner! Bwow”-

They felt a little silly mouthing the words and tune, but it was only Paimon and Lyrem. Surely, they would understand Arch’s need to keep calm as the guilt racked through them. The buzzing stopped, and Arch inserted the clamp forcefully. They pried open the chest cavity with a sharp crack. They leaned over their subject without any tools. They just wanted to feel around and yep, they found the heart and the aorta first in all that squishy, squelchy, softness. Arch wondered for a moment whether there would be any practical use in keeping the blood from shooting out when they remembered that they needed their knife to sever the many arteries and ventricles.

Now, where did they leave the knife? They felt around the table with a bloody hand, brushing the top of Arthur’s arm. Arch got in a bit close and the man’s hand strained just far enough to take one of Arch’s small hands into his own. Arch paused.

It was just another distraction.

They pulled their hand away, but not before something tiny, metal, and attached to a chain had been placed in the palm of their hand.

The audience watched Arch stop suddenly. They felt the small gold crucifix and held it tight. A gleam of a single teardrop rolled down one cheek.

Paimon shifted to the end of his seat, watching the sandglass pouring out of time. There was perhaps one minute left. Not much more.

“What the hell are they doing?”

“Nothing,” Lyrem answered. He too was at a loss for as to why Arch had stopped, but recognized that Arthur must have been able to tip them off somehow throughout the ordeal. “And you can’t do anything about it, remember?” He quickly reminded Paimon. The god looked like he might just launch out of his seat and shut the whole performance down.

It was all a distraction.

Arch dropped the crucifix. There was no going back now. Definitely no going back. It was a trick. Their mom wasn’t with them. She was stuck in another realm. Thinking the little gold man ended up somewhere on the man’s stomach, it had actually fallen directly into the cavity they created. They found the knife stashed near the shoulder and got back to work with maybe thirty seconds left on the clock. They searched around for the bloody tubes connected through the heart again.

Twenty seconds.

They started with the aorta first and severed it cleanly at the top. An arc of red was released through the air that nearly hit them in the face.

Fifteen seconds.

Next, the right pulmonary vein, pulmonary artery, and superior vena cava. All severed and done. Inferior vena cava and then left ventricle on the bottom: severed- though the chain from their mother’s crucifix distracted them once more as they found it sitting in the midst of all the blood and gore.

Ten seconds.

Pulmonary vein on the left and the descending aorta- severed. Moving up again, their fingers found the heart slippery and difficult to grip the last of the veins and arteries that needed disconnecting. Arch grunted, trying to find the last step. Their fingers brushed the top of the left ventricle. A short strand-no several short strands of hair, or maybe fur, caused Arch to furrow their brows in confusion.

Just a distraction. It had to be.

They followed the top of the ventricle, searching for it to lead them to where the blood was supposed to flow in from the rest of the body. They cupped their fingers underneath and gasped, pulling their hand out with sudden shock.

“Ow! Fuck! What the hell was that?!”

Paimon watched the timer run until not a single grain of sand was left on the top tier.

Arthur cried with a silent relief and then stared down at his open body. He would have hurled on sight if he had anything to heave up, because he could feel something…

Something was moving inside of him.

Inside.

Inside of him.

Slowly moving, up and down, covered in red, and sticking up like spikes with some grey underneath, and then came an unmistakable purring noise. They all heard it- except for Arch who hadn’t pulled off their headphones yet. They stood against the wall, knowing they had failed miserably and cradled their scratched hand. It was a deep one.

Paimon strutted towards the table with an enraged announcement on the tip of his tongue:

“It’s over! I’m sending you all back to the Labyrinth!”

Charlotte turned toward Persephone who looked back in just as much concern and reminded herself of the deal they made. Arthur and Arch had been damaged beyond repair in one way or another.

Paimon clapped his hands, expecting the action to produce an instant portal into his realm, and none came. Apollo also stood up, and walked toward the human on the table. Paimon tried to push him back into his seat, but was unsuccessful as Apollo tried to get a look at the interruption that had saved them all. He smiled, looking down into the gaping hole and reached inside.

Arthur grunted in pain as Apollo’s hand dug into him. Soon the Sun god’s arms were filled with the weight of a familiar family member.

“Arty, it’s been ages,” Apollo muttered, as the cat looked up to her brother with eyes of steel blue. “What were you doing inside of this human, huh?”

Arch had finally had enough and ripped their blindfold down. They saw Apollo, holding a bloody Maleficent in his hands, Lyrem, frowning from the corner in confusion, their mother Charlotte and two strangers standing in a line on the opposite side of the table, and Paimon glaring, not at them, but everyone else in the room.

Then they looked down. Instantly, Arch paled with the realization of what happened; who they had been mutilating for the last five minutes without mercy. They could hardly speak.

“U-uncle Arty…”

Arthur met their eyes weakly and breathed raggedly.

“Hey, kiddo.”

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chiseler · 5 years ago

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Myrna Loy: Keeping Cool

If an actor is said to be “underplaying,” what does that mean exactly? It might mean not doing the obvious thing and not displaying the obvious emotion. Or it might mean feeling various emotions but holding them back and only sharing a tiny portion of them. This is a risky strategy, because most audiences might just think you can’t “act,” at least not in the expected way. When Myrna Loy made The Rains Came (1939), she was thirty-four years old and an established star. The film is what used to be called a “well-mounted” production, filled with dramatic incident and exotic settings and lots of extras and love crises and natural disasters. The role of Lady Edwina Esketh, a dissolute, promiscuous noblewoman who redeems herself through sacrifice and love, would seem to provide a juicy opportunity for showboating. It’s easy to imagine Bette Davis in the role, her eyes popping with restless desire. Whereas Loy had the kind of eyes that always seemed half-closed even when they weren’t.

Loy’s playing of Lady Esketh is cool, modest, almost non-committal, and this approach can seem alienating at first, but if you focus closely on what she’s doing, her under-the-radar work starts to pay dividends. The film’s producer Darryl Zanuck called her into his office midway through the shooting and complained about her performance, but Loy stuck to her own interpretation. She was known for her dry handling of light comedy, high comedy, even farce, and she refuses to play Lady Esketh full out as temperamental or mercurial, as practically any other actress of her time would have done. Instead, Loy keeps her cards close to her vest and lets her knowing attitude do the rest. Her expressive voice is light and almost fey, but very grounded, with ringing intonations, and this makes it different from a huskier yet more vacillating voice like Jean Arthur’s.

Even when Lady Esketh changes her tune, Loy doesn’t go all Noble. In fact, underneath the self-sacrifice her Lady Esketh seems to be as flip and above-it-all as ever, somehow, and this works well for the film. “I hate scenes,” she tells her lover George Brent, and this would be a laugh line for a Davis or a Joan Crawford, but Loy is an actress who actually does hate “scenes” or drama. She’s basically detached, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have feelings. It’s just that she doesn’t parade them around as other performers do.

This instinct Loy had for underplaying didn’t always work out so well. In Parnell (1937), Loy and Clark Gable do a lot of walking around and talking quietly to each other, and they come off like zombies in period dress. But her moderation in many other films was so unusual and original that Loy fashioned her very own type of screen character. She was almost never a working girl, but more usually a wife, a mistress, a lady with money and time for play, so fetching that she got away with lots of nose wrinkling and eyelash fluttering without ever seeming coy.

As a young girl, Loy had seen Eleonora Duse on the stage, and she had admired the restraint of that fabled actress. “Oh, I could have cried all over the place in many of my films, but it just didn’t feel right,” she said in her charming 1987 memoir, Being and Becoming. “The audience loses respect for the character. It seems that instinctively I’ve done this kind of underplaying a good deal in my work. That brand of acting had impressed me since first seeing Duse. She had an inner light, you see; you’ve got to have it…You can’t be thinking about how many people you’re having for dinner.” According to Loy in her book, nearly all of her leading men and many of the other men she met developed crushes on her, and that’s understandable. She had the damndest nose, turned up at the end and elaborately structured, and that reserved, hard-to-get manner that promised the deepest bliss if you could melt some of her reserve.

Loy was born in Montana, and she began her career early as a dancer in live prologues for silent films. She was an extra in the original Ben-Hur (1925), and for the next nine years she made eighty-odd movies, mostly in bits. As a maid in Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1926), Loy just walks across a room. She’s a lady in waiting to Lucrezia Borgia in Don Juan (1926) and a chorus girl in the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), and she was continually cast as vamps and tramps, often of Chinese, Latin or all-purpose “foreign” extraction.

In her first full talkie, The Desert Song (1929), Loy plays Azuri: “That name means tiger claws!” she informs us, in a hilariously BEEG! accent that she came up with herself. She’s very sexy in that movie, but she’s also making a kind of joke of sex, and this campy attitude also informs her Yasmini in John Ford’s The Black Watch (1929) and her gypsy temptress Nubi in The Squall (1929). Loy is enjoyably over the top in these roles and in some of her other vamp parts of this time, and she worked so often in this exaggerated fashion that maybe she was just all tired-out by the time she became a star in 1934 with The Thin Man, and so she made a low-key style out of this tiredness.

Loy is a hoot in The Truth About Youth (1930) as a gold-digging singer with a temper, and she was time-stoppingly lovely in her brief role in Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931). She had one promising scene with Robert Young in New Morals for Old (1932), but then the film drops her entirely. Loy steals Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) with just a couple of naughty lines, socking them home in an attention-getting way that’s rather far removed from her later laidback delivery, but she was still being cast as vixens in racist concoctions like The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), where her Fah Lo See delights in having men whipped, and Thirteen Women (1932), where her hypnotic half-caste takes methodical revenge on a bunch of sorority girls who spurned her. It must have taken much stamina and patience to wait out all these years and all these small and unworthy parts. She had a lead in a modern dress version of Vanity Fair (1932), which was shot in ten days at a poverty row studio, sometimes from 4AM to 4AM. Loy does an intriguingly subdued Becky Sharp, but maybe she was too exhausted to play it any other way.

The speedy director W.S. Van Dyke took her in hand in 1933 at MGM, and her parts began to improve. She thrived with John Barrymore in the sophisticated comedy Topaze (1933), and she fell in with her best partner, William Powell, in Manhattan Melodrama (1934), where she also tussled with Clark Gable. The Thin Man was made by Van Dyke in sixteen days, and it set up a long-running formula for Powell and Loy that proved irresistible. As Nick and Nora Charles, a private detective and his heiress wife, Powell and Loy struck up a bantering attitude with each other that still feels like a fresh and attainable ideal of marriage.

The mystery plots of their six Thin Man films were usually perfunctory, but that didn’t matter because audiences really came to see Nick and Nora verbally jousting and keeping each other entertained. Just listening to them is a pleasure: Powell with his deep, plummy voice and Loy with her bright, high, tinkling one. “They hit that wonderful note because he always did a wee bit too much and she underdid it, creating a grace, a charm, a chemistry,” observed George Cukor.

Nick and Nora are party people, and the running gag in their films is that they always want to get a rest or take a break but they never seem to, and that suits Loy’s Nora just fine. She married Nick for excitement and great sex and teasing that always goes right up to the edge of being dangerous but never topples over into hurt feelings (it did just one time, in After the Thin Man (1936), when Nick drunkenly mentions making a mistake and Nora for a brief moment thinks he means he was mistaken in marrying her because her family is so stuffy). Nora can be slightly dizzy, but she is also flexible and tough. “There’s a girl with hair on her chest!” says a cop in The Thin Man, after Nick and Nora have just gotten out of a scary scrape with a gunman and she comes out blithely crying for more action.

As she watches Nick shooting the ornaments off their Christmas tree in The Thin Man, Loy shoots Powell an only semi-loving “You are beyond belief” look, a very modern kind of juicily sarcastic look that is also in some sense unreadable. Nora’s love for Nick is a private and multi-leveled thing, and Loy will only reveal a small bit of it. They both see the fun or absurdity in practically any situation, even things that would irritate most of us. “We were married three years before he told me he loved me,” Nora says in The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), and she relates this in an admiring way, because they both like to avoid the obvious, or look askance at it.

The seven or so other films Loy made with Powell were often ordinary, but they were always redeemed by their give-and-take, their rapport, his two-drinks-in silliness and her quizzical, nearly deadpan reaction to him. Loy is at her peak in Libeled Lady (1936), playing a quasi-bitch in the first half but then softening beautifully when she falls for Powell. It’s clear that she’s a former dancer because she always moves gracefully, and distinctively: there’s a difference between the louche posture of her call girl in Penthouse (1933) and the ramrod straight posture of her rich playgirl in Libeled Lady, which suffers from unimaginative direction from Jack Conway. Loy too seldom worked with top directors. She’s at her womanly best in Test Pilot (1938) with Gable and Spencer Tracy, and she brought all of her tenderness to the smallish role of the wife in her most famous movie, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), but it seems a shame that she never worked at length for Lubitsch, or Preston Sturges, or Howard Hawks.

As an older woman, Loy concentrated on progressive politics as her career wound down. She played one hilariously timed scene where she fussily picks paint colors in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), but she had little chemistry with Cary Grant, who needed a more extreme woman to react to. Loy was a mother and feminist heroine in Belles on Their Toes (1952) and she worked in a more histrionic vein in Lonelyhearts (1959) and From the Terrace (1960), proving that she could play this way if she wanted to, but it isn’t much fun seeing her argue with a nasty Robert Ryan or stumble around drunk as Paul Newman’s mother, so far from her usual context.

She worked on stage and bowed out gracefully with Summer Solstice (1981), a short teleplay about an aged married couple where she was still teasing and fun loving with her mate, Henry Fonda. They called Loy the perfect wife, but her own four marriages didn’t work out, and the second one, to rental car heir John Hertz, Jr., was particularly bad. Hertz gave her a black eye once, and surely there is a special place reserved in hell for the man who gave Myrna Loy a black eye. As so often with these stars, real life did not live up to screen life, and she herself did not get enough of the pleasure that she gave to us.

Loy was one of the rare stars who seems to have been much like the person we see on screen: tolerant, sophisticated, nice without being sugary, dignified without being rigid, treating life with amused sang-froid. She was the sexiest and smartest of role models, all the more attractive and suggestive for keeping so many things to herself.

by Dan Callahan

#Dan Callahan #The Chiseler #Myrna Loy #Keeping Cool

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sinrau · 4 years ago

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A Warning

Anonymous

Citation (Chicago Style): Anonymous. A Warning. Grand Central Publishing, 2019. Kindle edition.

Introduction

Highlight(orange) – Page 3 · Location 72

It was no secret that Donald J. Trump hated John McCain. “He is not a war hero,” Trump remarked in 2015 to a stunned audience in Iowa. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

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It was no surprise that the president was agitated by the outpouring of public appreciation toward the senator. He is flustered whenever the spotlight shifts away from him, but especially if it moves toward a perceived rival, even a deceased one.

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“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” he wrote, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” This included the president’s demand that White House counsel Don McGahn fire the special counsel, a request McGahn rebuffed for fear it would “trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre” and lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment. It probably would have.

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They will fear the costs of a reelected Donald Trump, and they are right to be concerned. Unsavory figures in his orbit have relished the possibility of another four years—not in the “we can do good for the country” way you would hope, but rather with the attitude that “no one will be able to stop us.” I share your worry.

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There are many “leaks” from this administration, perhaps more than any before it. While some officials tell stories to reporters to brag, to advance a personal agenda, or to retaliate against others, many appear to be doing so because they are alarmed at what they have seen in this White House.

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Sources decline to attach their names to these anecdotes out of fear of retribution. The reluctance is not surprising given the president’s penchant for using his position to mock, bully, berate, and punish. I have heard his words of warning to administration officials thinking about departing, and I have seen how his supporters torment those who have crossed him, including going after the innocent family members of dissenters.

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Donald Trump is fond of telling officials that he learned an important lesson in business: People are not scared when you threaten a lawsuit, but they are scared when you actually sue them. That is among his favored methods of argument—attacking critics to intimidate and silence them. He has been doing it for years.

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After I published the op-ed in the Times, Trump responded with a one-word tweet: “TREASON?” Those seven letters say it all. To the president, criticism is treasonous. I find this to be a very un-American position.

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He has suggested worse be done to his critics. In September 2019, the president issued a veiled threat against an intelligence community employee who reported the president for inappropriately coaxing a foreign government to investigate one of his political opponents. Trump said the employee was “close to a spy.” He continued, “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart, right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.” The implicit suggestion was that the whistleblower should be hanged.

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Such behavior is unbecoming of a president and the presidency. To anyone with even a modest reverence for the principle of free speech, it is also morally wrong.

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The nation’s chief executive should never under any circumstances use his office and its extraordinary powers to seek revenge against whistleblowers and political opponents. These are actions we would expect from tin-pot dictators in repressive countries and which we would openly decry as a nation. Yet it is happening in real time here at home, setting a chilling precedent for the use of executive authority.

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Some will find it disloyal, but too many people have confused loyalty to a man with loyalty to the country.

Chapter 1: Collapse of the Steady State

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“No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.”—James Madison

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“People are going to fucking die because of this,” a top aide angrily remarked. We all scrambled to figure out what had happened and what Trump’s plans were. US allies were baffled and alarmed.

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Although a long list of highly experienced Republican leaders were de facto barred from the incoming administration for being “Never-Trumpers,” those who didn’t sign their names onto anti-Trump screeds, myself included, had a shot.

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Trump carried around maps outlining his electoral victory, which he would pull out at odd times in discussions meant to focus on preparing him to take office. He would beckon his guests, as well as aides, advisors, and incoming cabinet officers, to gaze at the sea of red on the map, visual proof that he’d won. “Yeah, we know you won,” we would think to ourselves. “That’s why we’re here.”

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The slimmed-down group was comprised of White House officials and cabinet secretaries. “About a third of the things the president wants us to do are flat-out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldn’t even solve the problem. And a third of them would be flat-out illegal.” Heads nodded.

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Trump wasn’t halfway through year one, and he wanted to shut down the government because he was unhappy with congressional budget negotiations. He’d been talking about it behind closed doors for weeks. Now he was bringing it up in press conferences and tweeted that the government needed a “good shutdown.”

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We tipped off Republican leaders in Congress that they needed to take it seriously. The president wasn’t just playing a game. “He’s crazy as a lunatic,” one West Wing advisor told the Speaker’s office.

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He suggested to aides that weapons be given to all of America’s teachers so they could fight back against mass shooters. This was typical Trump. An idea was formed in the ether of his mind, and he decided it was brilliant because he thought of it. Most sane folks raised an eyebrow. The teachers we remembered tended to be gentler souls like Betty White, not Annie Oakley. We wanted to hand Betty and all of her colleagues a pistol?

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the president had no conception of what was doable and what was nuts.

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One Harvard gun violence expert summed up the public reaction: “It’s a crazy proposal. So what should we do about reducing airline hijacking? Give all the passengers guns as they walk on?”

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no one else took it seriously, much like the president’s claim that he would be the citizen-hero if he was on the scene of a school massacre. “I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t have a weapon,” he claimed. We couldn’t contain our laughter.

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when Trump suggests doing something unlawful, it’s not necessarily nefarious. More often than not, it’s because he doesn’t understand the limits of federal law.

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The president doesn’t police bad behavior in his cabinet, he encourages it. Aides have to self-police.

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At one point, Trump warmed to a new idea for solving what he viewed as the biggest crisis in American history: to label migrants as “enemy combatants.” Keep in mind this is the same designation given to hardcore terrorist suspects. If we said these illegals were a national security threat, Trump reasoned, then the administration had an excuse to keep all of them out of the country.

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The rumor escaped the confines of the White House. “Are you fucking kidding me?” one career State Department official blurted when informed of the proposal. “This is completely batshit.” Advisors worked to shut it down quickly and quietly.

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“Every time I ask Mnuchin about this, he’s got another excuse. ‘We can’t do this, we can’t do that,’ ” he said, half faking the voice of Mnuchin, a man he has known for close to two decades. “What good is he? I thought we had the right guy at Treasury. But now I don’t know. Maybe not so much. What do you think—personnel mistake?” He likes to poll the room when someone is on the ropes. People laugh or offer approving facial expressions, usually relieved that the anvil isn’t hovering over their own head. Trump will leave people in the lurch for weeks, months, or longer. He notoriously kept Kirstjen Nielsen, his homeland security chief, flummoxed about whether and when she might get sacked.

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On more than one occasion, Trump has discussed with staff the possibility of dropping Vice President Pence in advance of the 2020 election.

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Trump’s view of loyalty, of course, is self-serving to the extreme.

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Trump avoids directly firing people, contrary to his television image. Instead he takes the cowardly way out and cuts them loose by way of social media.

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Over time, a feeling of insecurity returned to the administration, and the Steady State recognized that Trump’s demeanor couldn’t be moderated.

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Senior advisors and cabinet-level officials pondered a mass resignation, a “midnight self-massacre,” as noted earlier, to draw the public’s attention to the disarray.

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At any given time during the Trump administration, there are at least a handful of top aides on the brink of resigning, either out of principle or exhaustion. Several departure timelines appeared to be converging in 2018, creating the possibility for a simultaneous walkout to prove our point about the president’s faltering administration. Every time this was contemplated, it was rejected.

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Trump’s children are his chiefs of staff. Random Fox News hosts are his chiefs of staff. Everyone is the chief of staff but the chief of staff.

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It’s no wonder people aren’t jumping at the opportunity. The high rate of turnover was a direct result of the president’s leadership. He ejected people who were willing to stand up to him. He got bored with officials who weren’t dynamic enough or didn’t defend him on television. Some escaped the administration because of policy differences, and still others departed to avoid what they perceived to be an inevitably sinking ship. For certain people, it was a combination of all of these factors.

Chapter 2: The Character of a Man

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“I don’t fucking care. Ooh ooh ‘excuses, excuses.’ Just stick it to them. I promise you, they will be kissing our asses afterwards.” “I’m hotter than I was then, okay? Because you know you also cool off, right? You do. But I’m much hotter.” “It is very unfair to me. And it’s presidential harassment frankly. You can’t harass a president.” “Sweetie, your face looked very tired on television. Have you lost weight?” “I think I’ve done more than any other first-term president ever.” “If you’re going to cough, please leave the room… Do you agree with the cough?” “I think it’s probably, uh, I want them to think whatever they think, they do say, I mean, I’ve seen and I’ve read and I’ve heard, and I did have one very brief meeting on it. But people are saying they’re seeing UFOs, do I believe it? Not particularly.” “We have the worst laws and the stupidest judges.” “This guy, have you seen him? ‘My Pillow.’ He’s unbelievable. He buys all the airtime on TV. It’s terrific. And he’s a big, big Trump supporter.” “This is one of the great inventions of all times—TiVo.” “You’re saying it’s MY fault? It’s all fucked, and it’s your fault.” These are the sounds bouncing off those rounded walls today, or on any given day of the Trump presidency. Some of these have been said with television cameras in the room and others with the doors closed. All of them reflect the real Donald Trump. Not everyone sees the full Trump, especially the one who is red-faced, consumed with fury, and teetering at the outer limits of self-control.

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“It’s worse than you can imagine,” former economic advisor Gary Cohn reportedly wrote in an email. “Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

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The sheer level of intellectual laziness is astounding. I found myself bewildered how anyone could have run a private company on the empty mental tank President Trump relies upon every day to run the government.

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In 2013, he tweeted: “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest—and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”

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Intelligence is one of those qualities that, if you insist you have it, you probably don’t.

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LMAO!! So true!

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The president frequently claims to be an expert on issues about which, in reality, advisors will have found out he knows very little. Here is a sample from a much larger list put together by astute observers: On campaign finance: “I think nobody knows more about campaign finance than I do, because I’m the biggest contributor.” On the courts: “I know more about courts than any human being on Earth.” On trade: “Nobody knows more about trade than me.” On taxes: “Nobody knows more about taxes than I do.” On ISIS: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.” On the US government: “Nobody knows the system better than I do.” On technology: “Technology—nobody knows more about technology than me.” On drone technology, specifically: “I know more about drones than anybody. I know about every form of safety that you can have.” On the contrary, I’ve seen the president fall flat on his face when trying to speak intelligently about most of these topics. You can see why behind closed doors his own top officials deride him as an “idiot” and a “moron” with the understanding of a “fifth or sixth grader.” Folks have been forced to publicly deny those specific quotes, usually with non-denial denials.

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Among many other conspiracy theories, Trump suggested without evidence that Senator Ted Cruz’s dad was involved in the Kennedy assassination, that Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered, that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough might have been involved in a former intern’s death, that a former Clinton advisor’s suicide could have been something more nefarious, that Muslim Americans near New York City celebrated in the streets after 9/ 11, that vaccines cause autism, and more. External observers can barely keep these lists of his claims updated. Internal observers are no better off. We wonder, does he actually believe these conspiracies? Does he just say this stuff to get attention? I can’t get into his head, but my guess is a little bit of both.

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Trump will wrap his arms around bogus claims like they are old friends, and he doesn’t care if the person spewing them is a fraud, as long as their words serve whatever purpose Trump has in mind at the moment.

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The president spreads false claims almost daily. He is the nation’s most prominent re-tweeter of “fake news” while simultaneously being its biggest critic.

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His concern tends to be about whether he is being treated fairly personally. “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” he tweeted after the show mocked a White House press conference in February 2019. “Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!” The president was insinuating that television networks needed to be investigated and punished for poking fun at him.

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“As you know, I have a running war with the media,” he told the audience. “They are the most dishonest human beings on Earth.” All of us watching it winced. The president was making his comments in the most inappropriate setting, not just because he was at the CIA, but because he was standing in front of the agency’s memorial wall for fallen officers. President Trump did the same four months later in front of hundreds of US Coast Guard Academy cadets, turning part of their commencement ceremony into a rant about the press.

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Giving nicknames to his targets is a favored tactic, too, allowing the president to turn attacks into instant memes. He road tests the insulting monikers with friends and is elated he has a new one to give to Dan, the social media aide. There’s Da Nang Dick (Senator Dick Blumenthal), Pocahontas (Senator Elizabeth Warren), Low Energy Jeb (former governor Jeb Bush), Slimeball (Jim Comey), MS-13 Lover (Speaker Nancy Pelosi), Dumb as a Rock Mika (MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski), the Dumbest Man on Television (CNN’s Don Lemon), and so on. Often Trump homes in on physical features, using names like Fat Jerry (Representative Jerry Nadler), Little Marco (Senator Marco Rubio), and Dumbo (for his former Secret Service director). Other acid-tongued presidents have had words for people they didn’t like, but I can’t think of any who regularly went out of their way to humiliate people with childish nicknames. If there is any silver lining, its that he typically keeps the R-rated ones within the West Wing.

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Trump is a bully. By intimidating others, he believes he can get what he wants, not what is fair. It’s a philosophy he brags about. He regales staff with stories about filing meritless claims in court against other companies in order to coerce them to back down or to get a better deal. That’s how you get them to do what you want.

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In his response, Trump made a revealing confession: “Real power is through respect. Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear.” President Trump shows no mercy.

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An investigation by USA Today found he’d been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the span of three decades, many of which included claims by individuals who said he and his companies failed to pay them. His businesses also received repeated citations from the government for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act and failing to pay overtime or minimum wage. The trail of broken contracts runs parallel to another Trump trait, his lack of generosity. Kindness and liberality are part of Cicero’s justice checklist, but they are not a part of Trump’s character. His philanthropic history is full of empty words and questionable practices. The president’s surrogates claim he has given away “tens of millions” to charity over his career, yet investigations by journalists have found the cash donations to be far less than he boasts. Most of Trump’s charitable giving was apparently done by the Trump Foundation. Rather than fund it himself, the businessman reportedly used outside donors to fill the foundation’s coffers, allowing him to write checks with his name on them without diminishing his own wealth. This is not unheard-of. Other personal foundations are boosted by outside donations. But in December 2018, the foundation was forced to dissolve after a state investigation in New York accused it of “a shocking pattern of illegality,” including “functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Trump’s business and political interests.” In one instance, he used $ 10,000 in money from his charity to buy a six-foot oil portrait of himself. So much for the spirit of giving.

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While he has sought to cultivate the image of an unselfish billionaire, he is not. Many of us who’ve joined his administration recognize he is a vindictive and self-promoting person, one who spends inordinate time attacking others to advance his interests. Those qualities translate into governing. As a result, we have all learned the hard way that the president’s modus operandi emphasizes combat over peacemaking, bullying over negotiating, malice over clemency, and recognition over true generosity. In sum, he is the portrait of an unjust man.

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At the height of the Vietnam War, when others were joining the US military to serve their country, he sought to avoid the draft. Trump received five deferments: four for education, one for medical reasons. The excuse? “Bone spurs” in his feet. The injury was concocted, according to the daughters of the podiatrist who made the diagnosis, as well as the president’s former lawyer, who recounted Trump saying, “You think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to Vietnam.” Don’t fool yourself into believing this goes unnoticed by the men and women he commands in the United States military or the veterans who didn’t have a convenient way out of Vietnam. They would have gone to war with or without an excuse, and they deserve better than the boasts of a man who stayed home.

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The president has difficulty showing restraint and lashes out without warning. His behavior is quintessentially unseemly, from crude rhetoric and vulgar jokes to immodest public reactions. There are far too many examples, so we will choose one category. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his attitude toward women. Many in the Trump administration are put off by his misogynistic behavior, which began well before the election. How does Trump talk about women? Sex appeal. Beautiful piece of ass. Good shape. Bimbo. Great in bed. A little chubby. Not hot. Crazed. Psycho. Lonely. Fat. Fat ass. Stupid. Nasty woman. Dog. Ugly face. Dogface. Horseface. Disgusting. These are the types of comments he makes. Trump did not spare his opponent—the first female presidential nominee of a major US political party—of his sexism either. “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband,” he tweeted in 2015, “what makes her think she can satisfy America?” At a campaign stop in Ohio the next year he remarked, “Does she look presidential, fellas? Give me a break.” I don’t care if you supported Hillary Clinton or not. There is no denying the smoldering sexism heaped onto these words. At times, his sentiments border on what many women today would call predatory. Trump once purportedly made the following statement, referring to himself in the third person: “Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.” (Here again I can’t resist citing Margaret Thatcher, who dealt with men like this: “Power is like being a lady,” she remarked. “If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”) In 2013, Trump opined on the tens of thousands of unreported sexual assaults in the US military, tweeting: “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” And of course, he famously described to NBC’s Billy Bush his efforts to win over a married woman and how he approached seduction in general. “I don’t even wait,” he said. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

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He condemned the vehicular homicide, but then he opined that the “Unite the Right” rally included some “very fine people” and that “the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.” The dazed, resigned look on Chief of Staff John Kelly’s face went viral; for good reason. Those of us watching it live had to pick our jaws up off the floor. What was he talking about?

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Donald Trump has been accused of being a bigot; whether it is of conviction or convenience is debated.

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When he makes statements that encourage racists and knows full well he is doing so, it is wrong.

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after Charlottesville. We felt the president’s reaction revealed an uglier side of his nature: the shallow and demagogic politician, prone to self-inflicted disaster. So many of us were already frustrated by the president’s handling of his job. Now, purposefully or not, he was channeling the views of bigots, who were in turn excited that an American leader was sticking up for them. Once people like David Duke are praising you, a normal person quickly figures out they’re on the wrong track and corrects course. Not Donald Trump.

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I scanned the portraits of American leaders adorning the corridors. One thought started to grip me and never left: Donald Trump does not belong among them. He isn’t a man of great character, or good character. He is a man of none.

Chapter 3: Fake Views

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President Flip Flops. The webstore literally sells sandals with a Trump tweet on the left shoe contradicted by a Trump tweet on the right shoe, including gems such as: his claim that the Electoral College was a “disaster for a democracy”; followed by an online post hailing the Electoral College as “actually genius” after he won the election.

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His tweet citing an “extremely credible source” with rumors about Barack Obama; followed by a warning to his followers: “Remember, don’t believe ‘sources said’… If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist.”

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He has long said he is “pro-choice,” but later while running for president, that he was so deeply “pro-life” that he believed “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions.

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declared on the White House lawn, “I am the Chosen One,” gesturing knowingly toward the heavens in front of a gaggle of reporters. He said he was teasing, but he wasn’t.

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This should be only a temporary comfort to worried Republicans. Because the base will not matter to Trump if he is reelected in 2020.

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Over the last three decades, Trump has changed his political party registration five times. He has been a member of the Independence Party, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, a registered independent, and then decided he was a Republican again. I doubt during any of these switches that he did much “studying up” on the philosophical identity of each group.

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Trump again repeated that he identified “as a Democrat” on key issues like the economy. In the years up to that point, he donated to the biggest Democrats at all levels of government—Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Anthony Weiner, John Kerry, and Harry Reid. He gave money to Andrew Cuomo, Terry McAuliffe, and Eliot Spitzer. It was only after he started to get serious about running for president as a “Republican” that he gave money primarily to Republican candidates.

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he did with his belief system what he did with any Trump product. He outsourced it for low-cost manufacturing to someone else, then slapped his name on it.

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Astoundingly, instead of a mutiny against President Trump, GOP congressmen whistled past the graveyard as they went to cast their votes on his disastrous budget deal, proving yet again that Trump has a Darth Vader chokehold on weak-willed Republicans.

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In his first three years, Bill Clinton issued 90 executive orders. In that same time period, Barack Obama issued 110. Donald Trump issued 120 before his third year was over.

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Trump suggested the military and intelligence agencies embrace torture as a tactic against America’s enemies, vowing, “I would bring back waterboarding. And I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

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The president’s impetuousness poses a danger to our military, the full extent of which will not be known for years.

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Our warriors risk everything to venture into the darkest corners of the world to hunt those who would do us harm. They deserve better for their inviolable code of duty than a man lacking a basic moral compass.

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I have to admit, it’s knee-slappingly hilarious to watch Trump tackle this issue. In late 2015, he said his wall would “be made of hardened concrete… rebar and steel.” At one point in 2017, he proposed that the wall be solar-powered to generate clean electricity. A month later, he said that “you have to be able to see through it.” The wall was no longer a concrete slab, but “a steel wall with openings.” Then the wall became “artistically designed steel slats.” Then, in 2018, the president claimed he could have “a steel wall—or it could be a steel fence—but it will be more powerful than any of the concrete walls that we’re talking about.” At the end of 2018 he said “an all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED, as has been reported by the media,” only to tweet less than a week later that “We are now planning a Steel Barrier rather than concrete.” Midway through 2019, he flipped again, touting the “brand-new” “high steel and concrete Wall” that he’d already built and previewed that there was much more to come.

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“We get these women coming in with like seven children,” he told his listeners, briefly attempting a Hispanic accent. “They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”

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His convoluted view of economics is beyond repair.

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Trump is acting like a dictator. At one point, he tweeted, “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China.” That’s not how a democratic system works, Mr. President. You can’t “order” American companies where to make their products. The markets have been spooked by his increasingly unhinged behavior on the matter, and top CEOs have warned the president he needs to reverse course.

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Republicans should bring more people under the tent, the authors wrote, but instead they were ostracizing them.

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“Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country,” the document declared. “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.”

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If you’ve been at least half-conscious during the Trump presidency, you probably know the president has followed virtually none of this advice. In fact, it seems as if he’s deliberately written a counter-playbook, flagrantly dismissing the RNC’s recommendations and alienating the populations the GOP needs to reach. On Donald Trump’s watch, the party has become less fiscally conservative, more divisive, less diverse, more anti-immigrant, and less relevant.

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if there’s a theme to Trump’s life—in politics, business, or family—it’s that he’s disloyal.

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Republicans gave the keys to the kingdom to a man who paid hush money to shut up a porn star he’d been sleeping with while married to his third wife, who’d recently given birth to their son. Are we surprised he’s run afoul of the party’s most cherished ideals? If elected to a second term, he will cheat on naive Republicans over and over again.

Chapter 4: Assault on Democracy

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Trump’s little hints are in fact improper demands masquerading as innocent suggestions, and the administration’s history is strewn with them.

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Donald Trump has abused his power to undermine all three branches of government, at times flagrantly and at times in secret.

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In an interview with The Hill newspaper, Trump said he avoided it because “it sounds so conspiratorial.” He added, “And believe it or not I’m really not a conspiratorial person.” This was like the Marlboro man saying he wasn’t a smoker. It wasn’t remotely believable.

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Trump is out of his mind.

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Which means that members of the “Deep State” really are just people whom Trump doesn’t like. Once he likes them, they aren’t in it anymore.

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We are losing talented professionals every single day because of the president. The result is that our sprawling government is often run by a skeleton crew of partisans. Important issues get neglected with regularity.

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Good advice is getting ignored because it isn’t being sought in the first place.

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“I mean, give me a break. They’re political hacks.” That’s one way to describe people who would give their lives for the country.

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Trump suggested a president doesn’t need daily intelligence briefings. “I get it when I need it,” he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace. “I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.” When he does sit down for a briefing on sensitive information, it’s the same as any other Trump briefing. He hears what he wants to hear, and disregards what he doesn’t.

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His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience.

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Here was a man who was apoplectic at the (completely false) theory that Barack Obama had his “wires tapped” at Trump Tower, but who was more than happy to tap those of the people around him.

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“Can we just get rid of the judges? Let’s get rid of the fucking judges,” Trump fumed one morning. “There shouldn’t be any at all, really.” He went a step further and asked his legal team to draft up a bill and send it to Congress to reduce the number of federal judges.

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Trump continued complaining anyway. “I’ve only won two cases in the courts as president. And you know what one of them was? A case against a stripper.” Eyes widened at the reference. He would later repeat the comment, undoubtedly to get the same reaction from a new set of captive listeners.

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Once again, for the record, that’s how you know Donald Trump is not joking—when he sends someone out to say that he was joking.

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The president claims the bureau is an untrustworthy breeding ground of Deep-State conspirators. Over and over again, he calls the FBI “crooked” and disparages its employees. “Tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels,” “a tool of anti-Trump political actors,” “politicized the sacred investigative process,” “tainted,” “very dishonest,” “worst in history,” “its reputation in tatters.”

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No external force can ameliorate his attraction to wrongdoing. His presidency is continually jeopardized by it, and so are America’s institutions.

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After wildfires devastated homes and properties in California, Trump insisted that federal funds be cut off to the state. No emergency dollars should be flowing to Californians, the president told staff.

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he has turned the government of the United States into one of his companies: a badly managed enterprise defined by a sociopathic personality in the c-suite, rife with infighting, embroiled in lawsuits, falling deeper into debt, allergic to internal and external criticism, open to shady side deals, operating with limited oversight, and servicing its self-absorbed owner at the expense of its customers. We should have seen this one coming.

#IFTTT #WordPress

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wandering-chronicler-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Trial of Power

A continuation of this piece!

The wind whipped at his sides as he clenched the rope in his hands, watching the other boys crawling down the cliff face. Link glanced back up as he repelled carefully, remaining in the middle of the others. His foot slipped a little as he continued down, hearing one of the others shout at how they were in the lead. He could see to another part of the mountains and a small clearing. There he saw his mentor, Alfonzo, watching. He saw someone else walking up the path behind him then, but turned his attention back to his descent.

Alfonzo didn’t look back from watching the potentials on their trial as Impa came up from behind him. He lowered the telescope from his eye and glanced back over his shoulder. "Prince Daphnes wants to know how they're doing," she asked him. "Any stick out?"

“Well,” he began with a small smirk.

“Other than your charge. We both know you have a soft spot for the kid.” The sheikah folded her arms as she watched him.

“Hey. You do too. Was anyone else you caught having snuck off with Zelda, you'd have put 'em in the stocks for a day or sent them out to the woods for a month.”

Her eyes narrowed a little before she took the telescope out of his hand and brought it to her eye. “Just answer the question.”

“You alright?”

Impa lowered the telescope and looked back to him. The unamused glare was one he was quite familiar with from having worked with her for so long, but there was something in her eyes that was different than when she’d grown tired of his antics or someone’s idiocy. “Something with Impa the Elder?”

“Yes,” she briskly replied, looking back to the potentials on the cliff. “And Sheikah politics regarding Holodrum.”

“This has to do with the jarl who died, doesn't it?”

Impa slowly nodded as she took the telescope from her eye. For a moment, she glanced down at the long wooden bridge below them that connected them to the other side of the pass. It would be a quick way for them to get across if something went wrong. “It does,” she admitted. “She has ordered agents into Holodrum to monitor the situation. There is fear that Jarl Hulninn will invade with or without the support of the others.”

“And nobody wants a war.”

“Exactly.” She handed the telescope back to him then, pushing a strand of hair out of her face as the wind whipped around them. “And this act may inflame hostilities. Last time a jarl raided Hyrule I was still learning to read. It was short but bloody.”

Alfonzo nodded grimly before glancing at the ones on the cliff. “And if that happens, Robin may just ask us to put all those boys through The Change.”

“Would Robin order it?”

“If we suffered heavy enough casualties, probably.”

Impa shook her head a little at his words and closed her eyes. She didn’t know all the details of what The Chosen carried out in their tower nestled in Northwestern Hyrule. Even The Sheikah weren’t permitted to know all of their secrets, just as a Chosen would never learn all of her tribe’s traditions. “Let's hope it doesn't come to that.”

“Yeah. I still remember my Trial of Grasses.”

There was a term she’d heard before, even if she’d not heard a lot of details about them. Supposedly it awakened the Hero’s Spirit within the ones who passed all the trials. The truth was far darker. Only due to her position as a member of the personal guard of the Royal Family did she even know what she did about The Tower’s most secret ritual. “Read the old accounts. Never been to one though.”

“And you probably won't. No one other than Tower staff is supposed to be there for it.” He looked down at the telescope she’d handed back to him. “But Korin. One of the kids who was a Chosen of Din like me. Just before the chemicals made me pass out I saw his eye pop out of its socket while he fought the restraints on his table.” His eyes became unfocused and his hand began to shake slightly. His right hand reached back and gripped his sword’s handle to steady it. “Heard... Heard the bones cracking too. Something had gone wrong...”

“By Din...”

With a deep breath and sharp exhale, he looked back at her, composed once more. “I was last to come to. But Eagus never lost consciousness. He’d seen the whole thing. He was in tears with Albert and Storin. We always thought the five of us could accomplish anything. That we'd look out for each other.” He became quiet then, hand letting go of the sword’s grip and returning to rest at his side. “Me and Eagus are all that's left from that year. Albert got caught in a grapeshot from a Labrynnan frigate during the war and Storin...”

“I was with you two,” she interrupted with a sympathetic tone. “I know.”

“Yeah...” He stuffed the telescope back into a pouch on his belt and reached up to inspect the charm around his neck. It was a simple red crystalline stone with the Mark of Din etched into it. His thumb ran over the indentation carefully before he let it fall back on his neck. “Heh. Week later we found Link.”

“We did?”

“Yeah. Him and his sister.”

She smiled a little remembering the entire event. Seeing the boy going up against such odds for his sister was something impressive, even if a piece of her felt that he had been a bit too violent. “Aah.”

“Yep. “

“How's he doing?” she asked.

Alfonzo smiled at the question. It almost looked as if any lingering memories of the prior part of their conversation had vanished. Impa knew of course how he’d answer, but was glad to see his reaction anyways. “Very well,” he admitted. “He's happy. Ecstatic whenever he gets a letter from Aryll or they come up to Kasuto. He'll come find me and the read it aloud with the biggest grin on his face.” He chuckled a little as he raised a finger. “And then. Then he goes to find the twins and reads it to them.”

She laughed a little with him. “Oh?”

“They're usually busy or in the girl's dorm. So, he shouts for them at the top of his lungs, still grinning as he does!”

“And how do they take it?”

“Cia shouts his name back at the top of her lungs. Lana ignores him for the first couple shouts. Then she makes this long annoyed noise and goes to see him.”

The two began to laugh a little. She was sure it would grow annoying, but the images and sounds of the boy shouting for his friend was amusing and amazing to see how much he’d grown since they’d first found him.

“She loves hearing about it I'm sure,” Alfonzo continued, “but the fact Link does that just to aggravate her I think annoys her to no end.”

“So he does do it on purpose.”

“Of course!”

“Heh.” She glanced over to the cliff face to see how the boys were doing. They were still climbing down at a steady rate. “We never were really allowed to interact with the seers in my clan. Officially we were told it was because we were to be ready in case we needed to cull them at The High Inquisitor's order.” She sighed at remembering her upbringing. “I pray such am order is never given again.”

Alfonzo gave her a sympathetic pat in the shoulder. She smiled a little at the gesture and looked back to him. “Let's get back to the kids,” he offered.

“Gladly.” She watched them for a minute in silence with him. “What's Darunia think of them?”

“Isn't so sure about a couple of them,” Alfonzo admitted. “Says if Groose learned to keep his mouth shut he'd be a fine warrior once he's grown.”

“Think he will?”

“Probably not.”

“Why? He's ahead in the trial so far. Completed the strength testing portion well before anyone else. And he’s currently in the lead for the rappelling. I’m expecting he’ll do okay in the mock battle section as well, even if his tactics will leave something to be desired.”

“No, I mean he prolly won't learn to keep his mouth shut.”

“Oh.” She laughed a little then.

Alfonzo had to laugh a little too. The boys got along only some of the time, but he wasn’t sure if it was because they were just enjoying antagonizing each other a little or if there was actually a disdain for the other. “Had to break up a fight between him and Link the other day actually.”

“Really?”

“Yep. In the mud of Kakriko. Link said he threw a dead baba bud at him. Just old enough to have developed its teeth and start feeding on passing rodents.”

“Oh...”

He glanced back at her then. “Paya found me before it got too bad but still.”

“That's good.” She smiled a bit at the girl’s mention. “She'll make a fine agent one day.”

“Oh?”

Impa smirked a little. “Don't let that timid exterior fool you. She is the best hand-to-hand fighter in her entire class. And incredibly good when it comes to observation.” The smirk faded as she recalled a victory of hers in the sparing ring; one that had she been there and in training she’d have been ecstatic about. “Whenever she fails though she's incredibly hard on herself. All because of being the elder's granddaughter.”

“She push that girl too hard?”

She shook her head. “No harder than I was when in the training. But I am sure it's because of the blood relation. And she'll...” Impa leaned to her left, looking back to the boys on their descent. Her eyes narrowed as she noticed how one of the ropes was waving oddly.

“Mmm?”

“Something's wrong.” She pointed to the cliff.

He pulled the telescope back out and quickly scanned the cliff. “Where?”

“Topside. That boy didn't secure his ropes well enough.” She grimaced a little, already thinking of the worst case scenario. “Signal Darunia. It could come free.”

Alfonzo raised a hand, curling his index and pinky fingers into his palm. A spout of sparks and flames shot from them into the sky several feet. They saw a pair of gorons quickly rushing to the top of the cliff. One had a hammer, but it was too late. The spikes used to secure the rope ripped out of the earth and flew away. The boy began to fall.

“Alfonzo!” Impa shouted.

Through the telescope, Alfonzo saw another boy fall, his rope still secure. The small figure slid down, causing some dirt and shale. The first boy’s fall slowed as the other grabbed the rope. He was only a few feet from the ground now, while his savior was still well above the ground. The spike and rope that the first boy had been using landed then, the spike barely missing them both. “Those spikes topside aren't strong enough to hold all that…” He saw them both fall. The first landed and moments later the second did on both feet, a loud cry from him cut short from a hard landing. Neither waited then. Alfonzo didn’t even pocket his telescope and bolted for the bridge. Impa was right behind him. The second rope whipped and the spike dug into the earth. By the time they got there, the first boy was leaning against the cliff face, catching his breath and shaking. The other was curled in a ball.

“By Din. Link!” Alfonzo cried. He knelt down and gently rolled the curled boy over, finding his charge with tears in his eyes and hurt on his face, but he did not cry. He was fighting to not show any sort of pain.

Impa went to the other boy. “Are you hurt?” she immediately asked. Her tone might have been sharper than she’d wanted, but there was still the others above.

“N-no. I'm okay,” he replied.

“HEY!” someone shouted from above. Alfonzo and Impa looked up to see Darunia looking over the edge. “Everyone still breathing down there?!”

“Alfonzo's charge is hurt!” Impa called back. “Seeing how badly now!” She turned her attention to the other potentials on the wall. They’d all stopped to see what had happened. “Continue down! You're still on the clock!” She looked to the other boy as the others slowly started climbing back down. “Can you help me clear the ropes? “

He nodded quicly before assisting the sheikah in clearing the ropes. As they did, Alfonzo took Link in his arms and carried him back across the bridge. Within minutes they had finished and started across the bridge. Impa had the ropes coiled and on her shoulder as they walked. By the time she’d gotten back across, she saw others had joined them. A tower mage in a blue and black robe was on her knees carefully looking over Link. A boy and apprentice to the mage stood next to her, watching the work.

“How badly is he hurt?” she asked the Chosen.

“Miraculously no broken bones,” Alfonzo said. “Sora just said he's hurt both his ankles, but they'll be able to fix them in an hour.”

Impa let out a long sigh and pushed the long braid of hair out of her face. “You alright?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.” He laughed a little then. “I’m used-to seeing Link not think things all the way through by now. And yet he gives me a heart attack every time he does still.” Something bumped his arm. When he glanced in that direction, he saw her offering him a canteen. He took it and a long drink.

“Well, I’m sure Rauru said the same thing about you when you were being trained.” She looked to the mage as she began her work. A soothing blue light filled her hands and she gently started to move them along one of Link’s ankles. The apprentice next to her held the potential’s boots and watched silently. For his part, Link remained quiet and watching the sorceress’ hands. There were more tears in his eyes, but still he did not sob and he fought to keep a neutral expression.

Alfonzo swallowed, finishing off the water and had to nod a little. “Maybe I’m getting too damn old for this too.”

#Legend of Zelda #Zelda Fics #Link #Impa #Alfonzo #The Wolf of Farore #AU #Writing #Fanfiction

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glitteringconstellations · 7 years ago

Text

Beacon, Chapter 8: it’s no more men i’m afraid of

Despite the dire circumstances, seeing the Castle of Lions bustling with life once more made Coran’s heart swell with happiness.

It’d been more than a millennia since so many people roamed these halls at once. Even just in the trek from the hangars to the bridge upon their return, he’d spotted human crewmembers of the Stations intermingling with the ever-growing number of rebel fighters from the reinforcement fleet. Discussions of upkeep procedures for the new engines and stories of varied and distant planets echoed through the corridors, easing slightly the weight that came with the looming severity of the situation.

It’d been as long since he’d seen such a diverse group of people grouped on the Castle’s bridge. The Paladins stood near their stations, and the crew of the Renegade milled about between them. At the helm of the controls, maps of Earth and the surrounding galaxy were marked with notes provided by the Commanders of the Lunar Stations.

Seeing the convergence on the bridge, Coran couldn’t help but wonder what the late king of Altea would think, if he could have seen where his legacy would lead. He hoped they were doing him proud.

Alfor, my friend… are you seeing this from wherever you are now?

Still, there were more pressing matters at hand. The journey back had been long due to their stopping to pick up the Marmora leaders, and Coran was weary, he would admit. But rest would be in short supply in the coming days, and he had to be a hundred and ten percent focused on their plan. He was not too humble to admit he played a crucial role in all of this. He used that happiness as a boon against the tension and turned his attention back to the conversation with a shake of his head.

“…crewmembers can handle the repairs from here,” Pidge was saying. “The work is almost done, and more and more rebels are showing up to play defense. We’ll have plenty guarding the civilians and then some to spare for the mission.”

“Splendid,” replied the Princess. “That is one burden eased from our shoulders, then. I trust the civilians are in good hands. Which brings us to the main concern at hand…”

“Actually taking back Earth,” said Shiro solemnly, his arms crossed tight over his chest. “We can’t go at this half-cocked. The Galra have a planet’s worth of hostages they can and will use against us and we want to make sure there are as few casualties as possible.”

Coran took the opportunity to look to the guests he and Keith had acquired. The Marmora leader stood between Keith and the Princess with his mask and hood removed as a sign of respect, though his companion did not. The uneasy looks at their presence exchanged between the rebels present did not escape Coran’s notice, and he bit back a sigh.

“Kolivan, I’m aware you’re unfamiliar with Earth and its galaxy, but perhaps you could provide some insight as to the Empire’s movements?” he suggested instead.

“Negative,” Kolivan responded, his expression grim. “Our losses during the last confrontation were great. Although Thace’s actions ensured the success of the mission, they also exposed the Blade’s efforts to the Empire with absolute certainty. Our information has all but ceased. We must operate under the assumption that all of our sources on the inside have been detected and compromised.”

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“If you had to hazard a guess, then,” Coran pressed, trying not to let his optimism falter in the face of such staggering odds. “What would be your recommendation for the next course of action that would minimize the risk to the humans?”

Kolivan frowned. “Ideally, reconnaissance. Stealth is our greatest ally in this instance, and the Blade’s greatest strength. If my people could identify where the strongholds are, we could strike before they have the chance to fully establish themselves.”

“We don’t have that kind of time, though,” Keith chimed in, his brow deeply furrowed. “I get not wanting to run in there blind, but a full reconnaissance would take way too long. It’s already been weeks since the first ship landed. We don’t know if they’ve already started rounding people up.”

It was a fair point, Coran thought, and even their calm and collected Black Paladin seemed troubled by the idea of waiting any longer than strictly necessary to initiate a counter-assault.

“What if we started somewhere with the highest probability of Galra occupation?”

All heads turned toward Matt, on Pidge’s other side, as he rattled out something on a keyboard off to the starboard side of the bridge. With a swipe of his hand, a three-dimensional projection of Earth appeared over the Princess’ pedestal, several points of light beaming from various points on the planet, and Matt turned to rejoin the group.

Pidge’s eyes lit up in understanding. “Those are—!”

“All fifteen of Earth’s major aeronautical bases, and where all of the evac shuttles departed from, according to the Commanders.” Matt pointed out to one light in particular on the southwestern portion of a large continent, this one lit up in red where the others gleamed yellow. “Except the Garrison. We have to assume that’s ground zero.”

“Why there?” the Princess asked. Coran could tell she was frustrated by her lack of insight into the Terra Firma Quadrant and Earth, because he shared that frustration. He felt so helpless—and it made him more determined than ever to rectify that ignorance when all of this was said and done.

“Because when the Garrison got the comms running on that Galra pod, they likely triggered a kind of homing beacon,” Pidge offered, continuing when Matt nodded. “Plus it’s closest to where we found Blue. If they’re tracking any residual quintessence from where she sat for over ten thousand years, that's where it’d take them.”

Hunk hummed in agreement. “The Garrison was the central hub for all intergalactic communication on Earth. It’s not too much of a long shot to say that if they did take the Garrison, they’d use it for the same purpose. Just, you know, for resurrecting an evil tyrant instead of exploration in the name of science.”

Lance straightened from where he’d been leaning against his chair, hope lighting up his face. “So if we go back to the Garrison and the Galra have taken it over, all we’d have to do is take them over and we could essentially reverse-track the homing beacon out to any ships they have stationed there!”

“Back to where this all began…” Shiro murmured. He peered up at the red light, the look in his eyes utterly unreadable. Then he turned to face Kolivan, determination a fire flashing in his eyes that almost took Coran aback.

“Do you think it’s feasible for your people to infiltrate all sixteen locations at once?”

Amid the shocked exclamations from both the Paladins and the rebel crew, Kolivan blinked in surprise. “It is possible, yes, but I would not advise it. We would be stretching our already limited forces dangerously thin.”

“What if Keith and I came with you?” Shiro pushed on earnestly. Coran looked to the Princess, raising a confused eyebrow at her. She merely shook her head, not understanding what Shiro meant either. It was one of those times where Coran really wished he knew more about humans. But even Keith looked like he wasn’t quite following.

“What are you planning, Shiro?” he asked.

“We don’t have time to do a full recon mission, that much is clear. But there’s too much at stake here to make guesses and just hope for the best. If we cover all of the bases, we better our odds at being able to disable as many ships as possible before they cotton on to us.”

“But why just you and the Red Paladin?” asked Nox, face twisted in bemusement. Shiro grimaced, glancing down at his arm, and Coran couldn’t help but feel uneasy.

“We’re the only ones besides the Marmora who can interact with Galra technology without hacking,” Shiro answered vaguely, focusing on the hologram projection. “Once we take out their power, we can focus on rescuing any prisoners and then bring Voltron in to wipe out the Empire there.”

“It’s a solid plan, Shiro,” Princess Allura said slowly. “I’m just concerned about the risk of splitting up.”

“We could join you,” Olia suggested. “We rebels are used to stealth missions. If we split up into groups and pair up with at least one Marmora per team, we could—”

“No.”

A hush fell over the room at the sharp word. Coran almost didn’t believe he’d heard truly, until heads started turning toward Friel, the Unilu flight engineer from the rebel crew. Both sets of his arms were crossed over his chest, his expression darkening more and more with each passing second.

“I don’t like it. We can’t trust them,” he said, nodding brusquely in the direction of Kolivan and his soldier. “They’re Galra.”

Kolivan’s only reaction was a slightly more downward turn of his lips, but Keith stiffened, his face betraying a sting of hurt for a brief moment before he reigned it in. Coran immediately felt a swell of indignant anger on behalf of their Red Paladin, something he could see mirrored in the faces of the rest of his team.

“Uh, were you even listening to Kolivan before?” Lance asked incredulously. “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation without the Marmorites, because Zarkon would still be at full power. We’d have lost Keith if it weren’t for them.”

“Because he’s one of them, is he not?” Friel stared down Keith in a challenge. Keith did not rise to his bait, opting to look away at anything but him. Friel scoffed. “I thought as much.”

“Hey! That’s uncalled for,” Hunk said angrily, drawing himself to his full height. “Are you insinuating that the Blade wouldn’t have done the same thing if it wasn’t Keith?”

“Are you so sure that they would have?” Friel retorted.

“Yes, we are, because they have done just that on multiple occasions,” Coran said, his voice dangerously low. It was only years of training in diplomacy keeping him from losing his temper here, now. “The Blade of Marmora has more than proven their loyalty to Voltron. I should think our word would be enough.”

Nimern clicked her tongue disapprovingly at her teammate. “Now is not the time for you to act on old grudges, my friend.” She made to put a hand on his shoulder, but he batted her hand away.

“Mahfaeraak hokoron Galra. Grah-zeymahzin ni kos,” he hissed to her. Once upon a time Coran might have been able to work out what he’d said, but it’d been centuries since he’d heard genuine Unilu being spoken. He didn’t really need to know the meaning of the words, anyway—the tone spoke enough for itself.

“Stand down, Friel,” Olia ordered, her voice coming out in a growl.

“Daar bah aus. Zu beyn aav krif,” Friel continued, as if his captain had said nothing.

“Look, the Marmora are on our side, whether you believe it or not,” Shiro snapped, clearly losing his patience. Friel sneered at him.

“Dukaanvos. Hun daar, Kaal—”

“Faaz nah, Friel! Ahzaal grik zul!” Matt roared. He looked absolutely thunderous, and his hands shook with barely-suppressed rage. "Don't you ever call him that again!" Friel appeared taken aback for a split second, his mouth opening with a retort, before he seemed to think better of it.

Pidge took Matt by the crook of his elbow gently, shock and concern and residual anger warring on her face. Matt seemed to let the touch ground him, and he took a deep breath before speaking again. “Bah folaas. Bo nah gut. We’ll discuss this later.”

Friel set his jaw firmly, squaring his shoulders. But at length, he bowed his head. “Krosis," he muttered, before turning to march from the room. His glare caught Kolivan’s eye, and he made a point of bumping Keith’s shoulder roughly as he passed.

When his storming footsteps had faded, Olia heaved out a groaning sigh, running a hand down her muzzle. “I apologize for the actions of my engineer. Friel has a… particularly thorny hatred for the Galra.” Kolivan’s grave expression never faltered, but he nodded his head once in acknowledgement of the apology.

The Princess, who had been quiet up until now, hummed in displeasure. “Allies in this war are few and far between, but our common enemy unites us,” she said quietly, clasping her hands together before her. “We will need to lead by example in moving past any prejudices we may have.”

She turned to Keith, sending a meaningful, almost sorrowful look his way. Keith bristled and crossed his arms tight across his chest without a word. Coran picked up on Allura’s line of thought, and continued for her.

“We have all made many sacrifices for the cause. We have all lost much. But we must let nothing hinder us in our fight against the Empire.”

A long moment passed in silence, no one quite sure what to say in response to that.

Blessed, blessed Hunk was the one to break the silence. “So,” he started lightly, though the strain in his voice betrayed the tension. “Matt. You speak Unilu?”

“Ah—yeah, I do.” Matt cleared his throat, shifting on his feet. “I speak the languages of all my crew, and I taught myself some Galran while I was in prison. It’s why I’m in charge of communications.”

“That is wise,” Kolivan commended, and Coran nearly jumped. He hadn’t expected the Marmora leader to speak anytime soon, not after that outburst. “Galran has been the official language of the Empire for the last 10,000 years. Comprehension is an incredibly valuable skill to have.”

“But we have communicators?” Lance said, the question clear in his tone.

“Comms can be compromised,” Matt explained. “They generally work by intent. If someone doesn’t want you to understand, you won’t. Hence…” he trailed off, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of the door. “Or they can be hacked, or destroyed. But if you have the language in your head, it doesn’t matter if they want you to understand or not. The mind can never be hacked.”

“So you learned, what, six languages? Seven? In the span of two years,” Pidge said, awed. Matt nodded.

“Pretty much. Just whatever you do, don’t ask me to pronounce Nox’s full name,” he finished. “Elyxion is a bitch to speak.”

“What is it?”

“I just told you not to ask me that!”

“It’s Noxqokukxokxaht,” said Nox matter-of-factly.

“All right, all right, let’s get back on track,” Shiro said sternly, though Coran could see the relief in his eyes that they seemed to have put the rockiness behind them, for now. Coran himself was more than happy to let Shiro and the Princess reign in the discussion.

His eyes fell on Keith, who hung back from the group where they’d reconvened around Allura’s pedestal. While the others were pointing up at the various lights, hashing out a plan of approach, Keith seemed to curl in onto himself. A moment later, he turned and slipped quietly from the room, leaving through the door Friel had left wide open.

Coran watched him go with a heavy heart, wondering if perhaps he should have stopped him, instead.

---

When Keith needed to get away, there was really only one place in the Castle that he knew most of the others dared not follow him, and that was Red.

He was perched atop one of Red’s massive paws, hands stained with polishing wax when Red gave the first grumble, alerting him that someone was approaching. He could feel her questioning probe into his mind, seeking out if he wanted her to put up her particle barrier to keep anyone out or not. At first, Keith was tempted to let her. But considering he had left the briefing before hearing the finalized plan, it probably wasn’t the best idea to leave himself completely closed off. There was time for that later.

“It’s fine,” he murmured, gripping the rag a little tighter. The only person he could think of that would be awake at this hour besides himself was Pidge, though, with the earlier commotion, he wouldn’t be shocked if anyone else had trouble finding sleep, too.

He was shocked, however, to see none of the Paladins walk through Red’s hangar door, but Matt. The usual rebel fighter suit had been replaced with a mint green sweater Keith could have sworn he’d seen Pidge wear once before, and the boy had tucked his hands into the front pocket. Matt looked nervous, Keith observed.

When Matt spotted him, he hesitated, before coming to stand on the ground beside Red’s paw. Keith said nothing, continuing his long, even strokes of the polish, giving Matt the opportunity to speak first. It was clear he had something on his mind, and Keith wasn’t the type to fill the dead space with meaningless words like Lance did.

At last, Matt spoke. “Hey, uh, how’s it going?”

“Fine,” Keith replied, because it was. Going fine, he meant.

“What’cha doing?”

Keith raised an eyebrow at him, his arm pausing mid-stroke. Matt coughed awkwardly. “Right, you’re uh, you’re cleaning up Red.” He gave the great lion a long look-over, whistling in awe. “She looks good.”

At that, Keith pinked, slightly. “Thanks.”

A brief silence lapsed between them, then, Matt shifting his weight from foot to foot briefly while he worked out what he wanted to say. “Listen, I’m sorry about Friel—”

“Don’t,” Keith said, his voice coming out snappier than he meant it to. Matt’s mouth snapped shut, guilt marring his face, and Keith sighed. “You don’t have anything to apologize for. It’s not like you made him do it.”

“I’m his superior officer,” Matt replied forcefully. “I knew he hated the Galra and I suspected he’d take working with the Blade badly, but I had no idea he would be so hostile towards you.”

“It’s not your fault you didn’t know that I’m part Galra. I don’t exactly broadcast it.” Matt still looked conflicted, and Keith suddenly wanted to put a stop to that line of thought. He leaned over and grabbed a spare rag from his pile and the bottle of polish, tossing it down without a word. Matt squawked, scrambling and just managing to catch them. Keith gestured to the side of the metal paw he hadn’t gotten to yet, and Matt got the hint.

For a while, the two of them worked in silence. Not until Keith finished up his section and leapt down from the top of the paw did Matt speak again.

“I regret it, you know.”

Keith stopped, blinking owlishly at Matt. “Huh?”

“Not getting to know you at the Garrison, before all this happened. I regret it.” He kept his gaze focused on the rag, not daring to meet Keith’s eyes. “Shiro raved about you all the time. About how well you were doing, how proud he was of you and of being your mentor…”

Keith’s stomach lurched unpleasantly. Shiro had been committed to helping him learn during his Garrison days, despite knowing Keith’s reputation of being irritable and impossible to work with. But even he hadn’t realized that Shiro had so much faith in him. No wonder he kept insisting on Keith becoming the leader, if anything happened to him.

“I didn’t take the time to see what he saw in you,” Matt went on. “Hell, I didn’t even recognize you when I first saw you out here.”

“To be fair,” Keith deadpanned, “you had more pressing things to worry about. Namely Pidge and Shiro.”

Matt threw his arms in the air, only barely managing to keep hold of the rag. “That’s exactly what I mean! I should have recognized you! I really should have, and I didn’t. Just because I had some petty jealousy against you back in the day, I shouldn’t have…”

Jealousy? Matt had been jealous of him?

Matt took a shaky breath, finally lifting his head to meet Keith’s eyes. “Did you know you were supposed to be the pilot of the Kerberos expedition, not Shiro?”

Keith’s eyes widened, his jaw falling slack. “What?”

Matt wrung the rag in his hands tightly. “They were going to graduate you early and send you instead. Shiro was all for it. You were clearly a capable pilot, and he wanted you to have that opportunity as your first mission. But I threw a fit, because that was my first mission, too. I wanted it to be him up there with me and my dad. So he relented.”

Keith’s heart pounded in his chest. Before his racing thoughts could catch up to his mouth, Matt glanced up at Red and continued talking. “And after… when I was in prison, I was mad at myself for it. My selfishness got Shiro captured, and my weakness got him thrown in the arena.”

Words failed him still, and Keith swallowed thickly in search of them around his dry mouth. “Why are you telling me this?” he managed at last.

Matt let the rag go, tossing it into a pile with the other discarded ones, and turned to face Keith fully. “I guess… with this mission coming up, and with what happened earlier… well, I guess I figured I shouldn’t leave anything unsaid. So, I wanted you to know that I’m sorry. And that, you know, if we make it out on the other end of this unscathed, I want to make it right. I don’t know how yet, but… yeah.”

He put a hand on Keith’s shoulder, remorse clear on his face. Even though his mind still felt like it was sprinting at a hundred miles an hour, he thought he ought to say something. Anything. Apology accepted or something. But he honestly still didn’t understand exactly what Matt was apologizing for. Not being his friend? Stealing the chance to go on the Kerberos mission from him? Stealing Shiro?

If he had gone on that mission, he would have been the one captured with the Holts. And though he was loath to admit it, the thought terrified him—he was nowhere near as strong as Shiro was. He doubted he’d have been able to sacrifice himself to the arena for Matt, doubted he’d have survived even half as long as Shiro had.

And Matt had inadvertently spared him that.

So instead of accepting Matt’s apology, he said, “Thank you.”

Matt stared at him, slack-jawed. Whatever he’d been expecting Keith to say, that wasn’t it. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, before he forced out a quiet laugh. He clapped Keith’s shoulder a couple times for good measure, before letting it fall.

“Get some rest. Princess Allura said we’re setting off when the Castle tickers strike the twelfth varga, which was as of two vargas ago. So you’re looking at more like ten vargas or so.”

“Sure thing.”

Matt left him with his thoughts, then, and he stood there beneath the watchful eye of his Lion for a long time, her purring at the back of his mind trying to calm his churning mind. Only when the chime of the ticker rang out another varga did Keith finally clean up his things and start making his way back to his room.

The walk seemed longer from Red’s hangar to his room. What was he supposed to do with this new knowledge? Should he ask Shiro about it? Did Shiro resent him, or wish that Keith had been the pilot on Kerberos after all? No, that wasn’t like Shiro at all… but still, he couldn’t help but wonder…

So absorbed in his thoughts was he, that Keith didn’t notice the presence when he stepped through the door into his darkened bedroom until there was a blade pressed to his throat and a pair of arms wrapped around him in a vice grip. He sucked in a sharp gasp, an aborted shout dying on his lips as the blade pressed tighter, digging painfully into his skin and drawing blood. He heard the figure behind him shift, felt the puff of warm breath on his ear as they leaned in.

“Krii lun aus.”

---

“We’re sorry, but your call could not be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again…”

The tinny operator’s voice chirped at him for the eighth time in four minutes, the young man cursed, throwing the phone down in the passenger seat and pushing a little harder on the gas pedal.

“Shit, come on, come on…” he muttered, peering into the darkness of the deserted highway. It was hard, looking for the turnoff by the light of the full moon, but he didn’t dare use his headlights. Driving at all was a risky gamble, but he was banking on the dense thickets of trees lining either side of the winding road to muffle the sound of his engine, throwing the noise all over the hills.

Phone reception had been in and out over the last few weeks, ever since the invasion began. First it was major cities, where the population was most dense. Then it spread to the suburbs, and then to the countryside.

Only one of his many calls had successfully gone through to his parents since then, and even then, he’d only gotten a breathy sentence out before it dropped.

“Stay where you are. I’m coming to get you!”

Honestly, he didn’t know which he hoped for more—that they’d listened to him, or that they’d gotten out to one of the evac shuttles somehow and that they were safe.

His parents only lived a few hundred miles away in a quiet, sparsely population pocket of the country. It was less than a half-day’s journey under ordinary circumstances, easily traversed on a full tank of gas. But these were anything but ordinary circumstances. He’d taken to traveling by night, mostly in short spurts when the cloud cover allowed the absolute minimum visibility to see.

He’d hardly slept the last few days, parking his car somewhere out of the way during the daylight hours and dozing upright, still belted into his seat in case he needed to make a quick getaway. This long into the invasion, people who hadn’t been captured already were likely holed away in hiding, but he still didn’t want to risk detection, human or otherwise.

It made his stomach turn. He wasn’t sure what would’ve happened if he’d stayed in his apartment in the city—he didn’t want to think about it.

He cursed again, tapping his thumb irritably against the steering wheel. He needed to focus. He was getting close to the turnoff now, he was sure… And then from there, it was just two lefts and a right, just a few more miles. He could see the little one-story ranch with the ivy crawling up the side in his mind’s eye…

It happened so fast.

A deer sprang from the darkness, and in the split second he had the young man could only think to do one thing—he swerved.

”Shit!”

There was a deafening crash as the car collided with a tree, shattering glass raining down on him as the metal of the car crumpled inward. The air left him all at once as the airbag slammed into him and then—

Darkness.

A ringing in his ears brought him to, along with a high-pitched whining noise. He groaned, a blinding pain shooting up his left arm. Warm blood trickled down the side of his head and into his eye as he blinked the world back into focus. The cabin of the car was flooded with a red light—the brake lights, shit—and he belatedly realized the whining noise was the horn blaring, loud and steady like a claxon.

He needed to get out of here.

Rolling flat onto his back, the man took a minute to get himself oriented. The car lie on its passenger side, and he couldn’t hope to climb out the broken driver’s side window with a busted arm. The windshield had cracked, but not shattered.

That was his only option, then.

He braced himself against the cockeyed seat, drew his legs up to his chest, and kicked with all the force he could muster. It took three tries, but the windshield finally gave way, the cracked safety glass flying back as a whole sheet and finally shattering on impact with the pavement.

Crawling from the wreckage and wincing at the glass digging into his arms and knees, the man righted himself, swaying unsteady on his feet. The deer was long gone, and he was fully and completely alone on the empty highway. For now. He had no way of knowing how long he’d been out.

So he started running. Stumbling at first and gaining more speed, he cut through the trees he’d run through so many times as a child. Though it was difficult in the dark, he’d know these woods if he were blindfolded. He cradled his injured arm against his chest gingerly as he ran, trying to keep from jostling it too much.

The sky was beginning to lighten on the horizon when he finally turned the last bend to cross onto the road where his parents lived. The next house was half a mile down the way, but on any given night, flood lamps above the garages lit the road all the way down until it curved into the underbrush.

Tonight the street was pitch dark, illuminated only by the waning moonlight that filtered through the canopy of trees.

Dread settled heavy in his stomach as he hastened toward the house. His parents’ car still sat in the driveway, though it was covered in a layer of pollen and dust that had to have been at least a few days old. Although the house seemed calm and undisturbed, the man couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly, terribly amiss.

His eyes scanned the front porch, landing on a single flowerpot, and he hurried to it. The spare key was still hidden there, and he sent up a prayer of thanks. He fumbled for it, his hands shaking violently with the adrenaline coursing through him.

“Come on…”

Finally, he wrenched the door open, almost falling in past the threshold. The house was as dark as the woods outside, and flipping the switch inside the door did nothing.

“Mom? Dad?” he called. He wished he’d thought to grab the flashlight from his dashboard before abandoning his car. The rising sun cast long shadows into the house, barely setting it aglow with an increasingly crimson light. He searched the front room and the sitting room first, the fireplace sullied with ashes long gone cold.

“Where the hell are they…”

A quick search of the bedrooms yielded no sign of his parents, although the kitchen stunk with the stench of rotting food. Charred lumps sat curdled in a pot on the stove, and the landline phone lay in shattered pieces before it. Clearly, his parents had left in a hurry.

But where had they gone without their car? Their keys still sat in the misshapen ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter.

Bile threatened to rise in his throat, and the man racked his brain for a logical explanation. Maybe they’d gone to the neighbor’s house down the road. The Coopers had a storm cellar they could have taken shelter in…

A sharp chill ran down his spine and the hair on his neck stood on end as he was suddenly overcome by the feeling he was not alone. Without a second thought, he grabbed the keys from the bowl and turned to leave the house as quickly as he’d come.

He was barely through the door when he stopped dead in his tracks.

A strange cat unlike any he’d ever seen sat a few paces from the front porch, stock-still and staring at him, unblinking. Wrong, wrong, something’s wrong, his mind screamed at him, but he found himself unable to move, unable to even draw his gaze away from the cat.

“Looking for these fellows?”

Shadows shifted beyond the trees, and five beings moved into his line of sight. If he could, he would have screamed—these creatures were most certainly not human. They towered over him by at least foot, all of them.

His eyes were drawn to the largest one, massive and bulking and menacing. But more than that, his eyes were drawn to the two people the creature held by the throat in either hand.

His parents.

They were boneless in the creature’s grip, and the man could see their pallor from where he stood. Tears sprung to his eyes and fell unbidden, unable to blink them away. The smallest of the bunch gave what could only be described as a gleeful chuckle as her comrade carelessly tossed their corpses to the dirt.

“Now, now, Zethrid. That wasn’t very kind of you,” said the creature in the center—the one who’d spoken before. It was said with a sneer that belied just how little he cared for kindness, and he alone stepped forward to approach the man where he stood frozen on the doorstep. Despite the inexplicable paralysis, the man felt himself begin to tremble from head to toe.

The creature grinned as he leaned forward, his face inches from the man’s. “You are a very hard man to find, Ryou Shirogane,” the creature said. “I must say, you do look remarkably like your brother.”

#fic: beacon #voltron #fanfiction #voltron: legendary defender #chapter 8

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