#this had to be *very* close to when relations turned bitter with Patrick

[northwestofinsanity]

80s Moodies

[that-scouse-wizard]

HPHL Profile: Reuben Willows

General Information

Full name: Reuben Patrick Willows

Gender: Cis Male

DOB: 17/07/18XX

Species: Human

Blood status: Pure-blood

Sexuality: Bisexual

Alignment: Neutral Good

Ethnicity: White-Irish

Nationality: Irish

Residence: Dublin, Ireland

Later, the Llwelyn Manor

Myers Briggs Personality Type: ENFP, the Campaigner

Special ability: Legilimens

Character Summary: Level-headed though as stubborn as a mule, Reuben Willows is a natural born Legilimens. A love for all things draconic inspires the studious Ravenclaw to become a Dragonoligist. Perhaps he could use his abilities to better understand the minds of the beasts he is so fascinated with. Though he appears intimidating, just don’t voice open support of the Ministry (especially the Warlock’s Convention of 1709) around him and you’ll be fine.

Personality

Artistic: Reuben is very much fond of drawing, finding it quite relaxing, he loves drawing landscapes and people’s portraits.

Calm: Reuben is usually non-confrontational about most topics, except for how competent the Ministry really is, then he’ll absolutely tear into it.

Cocky: Reuben can get a bit arrogant about his achievements when he does well in them. It’s resulted in a few close shaves when handling magical creatures.

Competitive: As a beater on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team, Reuben always encourages a healthy sense of competition between the other houses though even he needs to be careful about crossing the line.

Empathetic: Reuben’s Legilimens abilities allows him to sense how others are feeling, often giving him insight on how best to approach them in the moment. This has gone so far as even being able to calm dragons down.

Hard-working: Work on his grandparents farm/ farm shop reinforced the ideal of hard, honest work in him. There’s no real shortcut to success in his eyes.

Loyal: Reuben has a great sense of loyalty to his grandparents and to friends who show it.

Stubborn: Reuben has the Willows’ family infamous stubbornness, it’s not often he’ll falter from his position on something.

Witty: Despite his imposing size and build, Reuben would much prefer to use brain over brawn unless he absolutely has to.

Appearance

Face claim: Hafthor Bjornsson

Voice claim:

Game appearance: TBA

Physique: Athletic, broad-shouldered, pretty much a walking wall of muscle.

Hair colour: Dark brown.

Eye colour: Grey.

Hair style: Usually keeps it cropped short.

Height: 6′1′’

Weight: 85kg (when full grown)

Scarring: Has three major ones. A bowtruckle scratch down the length of the upper side of his left forearm. One on his right elbow after landing roughly when a cow on his grandparents’ farm chased him. One on his abdomen from an especially feisty Welsh Green wyrmling (baby dragon) after it whipped him with its tail. Also has several on his back from his dad took a belt to him

Body modifications: Has two tattoos on his chest, depicting the heads of a Hungarian Horntail (his favourite dragon species) and an Irish Ironhead (an original dragon). On his upper right arm, a depiction of a Welsh Green, similarly on his upper left arm, a Norwegian Ridgeback. No piercings.

Inventory: His wand, a sketchbook, a journal, his writing/drawing equipment and most importantly, his Irish Ironhead dragon fang necklace..

Fashion: Aside from his Quidditch attire during a match and robes for lessons, Reuben tends to wear very hardy materials one would expect a farmer to wear.

Think this style: 

However, Reuben will definitely dress up well for any formal event, most likely will wear bronze and blue..

Background/History:

Pre-Hogwarts:

-Reuben was born close to Dublin, Ireland to auror parents, their only child.

-Unfortunately, the two of them desired to see Reuben gain the influence of an auror just as they had. 

-They effectively tried to groom Reuben for this career path to an abusive extent, especially to make his Legilimens abilities work as a lie detector of sorts..

-One such measure taken was severing Reuben’s contact with his grandparents when he was nine. Previously, the happiest Reuben had been was working on their farm/farm shop that provided for the local wizarding community. His parents began to feel this was a distraction which prompted the separation.

First year: .

-Despite his best efforts he just doesn’t have a knack for DADA, something that infuriates his parents.

-He meets several of his lifelong friends including the three who would make up his found family, Cledwyn Ironwood, Faith Renner and Marigold Sterling

Second year:

-He learns via letter from his grandad that his grandmother has passed away, enclosed in the letter is small, sharp, serrated tooth perfect for snipping grass and shrubs. The fang of an extinct herbivorous dragon species called the Irish Ironhead, it’s been fashioned into a necklace. One that he wears proudly whenever he’s at Hogwarts.

-Between the summer of second and third year, Siobhan Llwelyn invites him to spend some time at the dragon sanctuary, where Reuben meets his hero, Edwin Llwelyn.

Third year:

-TBA

Fourth year:

-TBA

Fifth year

-TBA:

Sixth year

-Finally after years of trying to avoid or take a sticks and stones approach to his parent’s abuse, Reuben snaps. By this point, he’s fully grown and very strong, he drags his father outside the family home and pummels him to within an inch of his life. 

-He doesn’t give his father the satisfaction of dying, instead opting to spit on his beaten, bloodied form. Then giving both of his parents a stark warning to stay away from him, he doesn’t want them in his life anymore.

Seventh year:

-Reuben’s main residence outside of Hogwarts is his grandparent’s farm, looking after his grandfather in his failing health when he can. 

-Just after he graduates, his grandfather passes away.

Post-Hogwarts:

-Reuben’s budding skills as a dragonologist come to full fruition under the tutelage of Edwin. The apprenticeship lasts for a solid three years before Edwin officially hires Reuben. 

-Two years after that, Siobhan returns from her five year long journey, staying on as a consultant but having no desire to take over the sanctuary.

-Instead (much to Reuben’s surprise) Siobhan thinks he should take over the sanctuary.

-Reuben spends the rest of his days helping to rehabilitate the dragons on the sanctuary, becoming a renowned dragonologist of the time. 

-He documents successes and failures in rearing the dragons, publishing his findings in a series of books. Occasionally being a bit scathing of the Ministry in certain passages.

Family:

Father: Declan Willows

Face Claim: Adam Pettyfer

A harsh man with utter disdain for his son’s aspirations, Declan is very much uncompromising and loathes the thought of his only child rebelling against him. His own upbringing from his father being too much of push over, seeing how it affected his family is it what turned him into the cruel, bitter patriarch of the Willows family

Mother: Sophie Willows (nee Neylan)

Face claim: Anne Hathaway

Similarly to her husband, hates Reuben’s interest in animals and magical creatures. Unlike her parents, despises the thought of being a farmer, hence why she chose to become an auror for the influence it gave.

Her strained relationship with her parents would come to a head when she forbade Reuben from having any contact with them when he was nine.

Grandmother: Aislin Willows (nee Nic Naois)

Face Claim: Judi Dench

A kind and loving grandmother, utterly devoted to her only grandson, Aislin would encourage Reuben’s love of the natural world. Something that caused further tension in the already strained relationship with her daughter Sophie, coming to a head when Reuben was separated from her and her husband, Nathan.

Sadly, she would pass away during Reuben’s second year, having not seen him face-to-face for three years. However, her last gift to him would be the fang of an Irish Ironhead she managed to acquire.

Grandfather: Nathan Willows

Face claim: Patrick Stewart

A devoted grandfather to Reuben and someone who instilled the value of hard work into him. Also fond of teaching his grandson how to bake cakes and how to run a business in the family’s farm and farm shop.

He was heartbroken when Reuben was taken from him and Aislin, but even more so when Aislin would pass away after a few years. His own failing health would sadly mean he passed away just after Reuben graduated but at least had the chance to spend his last days with his grandson by his side.

Granddaughter: Rue Willows

Face Claim: Fiona O’Carroll

Having a similar relationship to himself and his own grandparents, Reuben greatly encourages Rue’s decision to go into Dragonology. Even if it is under the employ of the Ministry as part of the Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau.

He would go so far as to gift Rue his dragon fang necklace, that she would then pass on to her son, David.

Though he would never live long enough to meet his great-grandsons, Reuben had an indirect impact on David’s life. David would befriend Charlie Weasley after the boy recognises his relation to Reuben. David is also encouraged by Murphy McNully (a Ravenclaw in David’s AU) to try out for Quidditch after hearing about Reuben’s exploits on the Quidditch pitch. David is gifted Reuben’s dragon fang necklace by Rue after their relationship improves. 

Allegiances:

Hogwarts House: Ravenclaw

Affiliations: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the Llwelyn dragon sanctuary.

Professions: Trainee dragonologist (for three years)

Dragonologist/Author: Rest of his life until retirement.

Hogwarts Information

Astronomy: E

Charms: A

DADA: P

Flying: O

Herbology: A

History of Magic: E

Potions: P

Transfiguration: E 

Electives:

COMC: O

Divination: E

Muggle studies: P

Quidditch:

Ravenclaw Beater (later captain)

Favourite professors

-TBA

Least Favourite Professors

-TBA

Best canon friends

-TBA

Love Interest

-If you’d like your MC to be Reuben’s love interest, let me know!

Best MC friends:

Cledwyn Ironwood, though Cledwyn was very much a dour Gryffindor when they first met with time, the two would form a bond as close as brothers. Reuben often acting as Cledwyn’s voice of reason.

Danny Gibson (@catohphm) a dorm mate of Reuben’s and the seeker on the Quidditch team, the two develop quite a close friendship. On the Quidditch pitch, Danny knows Reuben will keep the bludgers off his back.

Faith Renner, despite her hostile attitude for a Hufflepuff, Reuben made it a mission to befriend her after becoming quite interested in how she would make colourful fish hooks. They would become close friends, bonding a bit more in COMC class.

Leila Hellebore (@whatwouldvalerydo) A beater on the Slytherin Quidditch team, immediately marking her to be a rival. Reuben enjoys the competition with her and even finds the fact that he’s over a foot taller than her quite adorable.

Marigold Sterling, though Mary was quite intimidating, Reuben and Marigold would more often than not find themselves studying together. It would take time but she would eventually open up to him, trusting him with the secret that she was a maledictus and would later ask him to join her in helping to break her curse.

Siobhan Llewelyn (@kc-needs-coffee​) A fellow Ravenclaw and dragonologist, Reuben was initially quite endeared to her relation to Edwin Llewlyn. However, he soon broke past that, becoming a close friend to Siobhan, to the extent of being allowed to eventually take over management of the Llwelyn dragon sanctuary.

Message me if you would like Reuben to be your MC’s friend!

Rivals:

Leila Hellebore (during Quidditch)

Enemies:

-Dragon poachers

Magical abilities:

Wand: Hazel, dragon heartstring core, 11 inches, unyielding flexibility.

Hazel wands often reflect its owner’s emotional state and work best for a master who understands and can manage their own feelings. Others should be very careful handling a hazel wand if its owner has recently lost their temper, or suffered a serious disappointment because the wand will absorb such energy and discharge it unpredictably. It is capable of outstanding magic in the hands of the skilful and is so devoted to its owner that it often ‘wilts’ at the end of their master's life. Hazel wands also have the unique ability to detect water underground and will emit silvery, tear-shaped puffs of smoke if passing over concealed springs and wells.

Dragon heartstrings produce wands with the most magic power, and which are capable of the most flamboyant spells. Dragon wands tend to learn more quickly than other types. While they can change allegiance if won from their original master, they always bond strongly with the current owner. The dragon wand tends to be easiest to turn to the Dark Arts, though it will not incline that way of its own accord. It is also the most prone of the three cores to accidents, being somewhat temperamental.

Animagus: N/A

Misc magical abilities: 

Legilimens: A natural born Legilimens, Reuben has the ability to sense people’s emotional states, allowing him to gain insight on how best to approach a situation. Even developing it further to be able to see through the eyes of people and animals.

Boggart form: His grandma calling him a disappointment.

Riddikiulus form: His grandma takes out a vial of babbling beverage, chugs it and proceeds to speak nonsense, something she would do to make him laugh if he was feeling down.

Amortentia (what do they smell like): Wood smoke and brandy.

Amortentia (what do they smell): Fresh grass and cloves.

Patronus: Jack Russel

Patronus memory: His grandfather bringing him a cake for his birthday.

Specialised/ Favourite spells:

Bombarda (Maxima): Only done as an absolute last resort if he’s dealing with a dragon that he can’t calm down. A charm that he’s practiced time and again in order to concentrate into a much more potent version. 

Conjunctivitus curse: If a dragon is being aggressive but Reuben still has a way out, this his go-to spell. Blinding them can give him a chance to get out safely.

Duro: Useful for strengthening materials used in enrichment for the dragons or just making them more resilient.

Finite: Doesn’t wish to have the debilitating effects of the Conjunctivitus curse or Incarcerous be permanent, so uses this to dispel them when he needs to.

Incarcerous: Summoning ropes to bind or restrain something is always handy to have.

Incendio: Being able to concentrate it into a powerful gout of fire is one way to get a dragon’s attention.

Reparo: Always a handy spell to have when you can just repair a worn or broken piece of equipment. Reuben scarcely needs to throw out his work clothes thanks to this.

[vintagedolan]

1 on the prompt list 👀

@blindedbythelightt: Ohhh 1 with Ethan 😬😬

Name and presentation? 10. Taste? A 2, on a good day. Nonetheless, you felt quite put together with your Manhattan in your hand, newly manicured nails tinkling against the rim of the glass while you sipped at it, careful not to spill any down your dress. The wedding was crowded - the Dolan’s were a large clan after all, but close enough that everyone knew everyone enough to at least make conversation. 

You’d never heard of Lorenzo Dolan, or his new wife Destiny, until the save the date had appeared at the twins mailbox in LA almost 6 months ago. 

“He’s our second cousin on dad’s side, we used to fuck shit up at the family reunions in Long Beach all the time,” Grayson had explained. It didn’t surprise you, and you could picture a much younger Ethan and Grayson running down the beach alongside another dark haired boy. 

The surprise came two months later, when Ethan and Grayson were debating on whether it was too much of a ‘flex’ to wear Louis Vuitton to a family wedding. Ethan turned to you, a pair of dress pants in his hands. 

“Well, what are you gonna wear?”

“Huh?” You looked up from where you were lounging on Ethan’s bed. 

“Do you have a dress for the wedding?”

“I wasn’t aware I was going to the wedding,” you laughed, sitting your phone down on the comforter.

“What do you mean? You’re always my plus one.”

You hated the way that it made your stomach tighten, the way your blood moved faster in your veins. He wasn’t wrong. You’d been his plus one to plenty of things: Wakeheart launch parties, influencer parties, Juanpa parties. But you’d never done anything family related with him. 

“Well yeah, but this is a whole ass wedding.”

“Yeah. So you need a nice dress.” He said it so casually that you couldn’t get a read on him to save your life, though you tried. 

And that was the last it was spoken of until November, when the flights to New Jersey were booked and the suitcases were packed. Which was how you ended up at a very fancy bar at the wedding with a bitter drink in your hand, with your eyes on Ethan, who was having a hushed conversation with his twin.

“Bro. Did you leave your balls in LA or what? You said you were finally gonna tell her!”

“I fucking will bro, I just gotta find the right moment,” Ethan huffed, toying with the top of the letters on his Vuitton belt. 

“Well, Patrick has been eyeing her all night, so if you’re gonna do it you better do it soon.”

Ethan’s head whipped over to the table where another one of his cousins sat. Sure enough, his head was turned towards the bar. He followed his gaze, blood pressure rising when he realized that Patrick really was looking at you, standing there in your dark green dress, with your heels and your curls and your smile and your drink. He suddenly wished the two of you were still on the plane you’d been on the night before, where his heart had soared when you settled into your middle seat and fell asleep against his shoulder instead of Graysons. He’d been the only one allowed to look at you then, and he preferred it that way. 

It took until Patrick stood up at the sound of the first slow song for Ethan to finally go over to you. You swallowed the rest of the bitter liquid and tried not to sputter, chasing it down with some water as he walked over. 

He didn’t say a word - all he did was take your hand and lead you through the arrangement of tables and chairs until your heels clicked against the dance floor. 

“Oh, so we’re dancing now are we?” You teased him in an attempt to distract him from the blush that was spreading across your cheeks with a reckless abandon as his hands landed on your hips. 

“We’re gonna try,” Ethan laughed, and he seemed a bit breathless, eyes darting around, moving to the left over your shoulder every few seconds.

“What are you looking at?” You moved to look over your shoulder, but Ethan caught your chin gently, keeping you looking at him. 

“My cousin Patrick keeps looking at you.”

“Oh.”

“He’s creepy.”

“Gotcha. Is that why we’re dancing? You protecting me or something?” 

“Yeah.” Your heart sunk as you looked up at him, but you watched the way his brows furrowed, the way they always did when he was debating with himself. 

“And because I wanted to dance with you.”

You both swayed in silence for a moment, letting the fact that he’d actually said those words out loud. 

“As... as friends?” You asked quietly. If you hadn’t moved closer to him in the silence, he probably wouldn’t have heard it.

He paused for a moment, that little smirk that you’d seen so many times, and it spread into a wider smile that literally sparkled under the lights before he spoke.

“We’re not just friends and you fucking know it.”

You sucked in a breath, and then you were smiling too, at the way he was right there in front of you, and the way he pressed on your hips to bring you just a tiny bit closer. The way his shoulders seemed to relax as the weight of getting it off his chest began to settle in. 

You laced your fingers behind his neck, thankful that your heels put you closer to his level, close enough for him to hear you whisper.

“Prove it.”

Ethan Dolan never backed down from a challenge, but you still didn’t expect his next move, which was to turn and dip you, kissing you softly in front of everyone, with the muffled sound of Grayson cheering him on somewhere else in the reception crowd. 

[maxbegone]

Prompt #76!

#76: “I wouldn’t change a thing about you.” 

Patrick has a big family. David knew this, of course, he met a bunch of them at the wedding back in September. But there were cousins who couldn’t make it and aunts and uncles who weren’t well enough to travel. Plus he’d seen all of the photos on the mantle the first time they visited Patrick’s childhood home together.

But this was somehow much more overwhelming. They’re at the Brewer’s for a family barbecue-slash-birthday celebration for Clint. He helped Marcy in the kitchen as much as she would let him until she turned to him, handed him a glass of wine and told him to go enjoy himself as she pushed him toward the back door.

They were sitting together on the outdoor couch with two of Patrick’s cousins - Mark and…Ian, David thinks - when one of Patrick’s aunts comes over.

“Mind if I sit with you boys?”

Patrick gestures to a vacant chair. “Of course, Aunt Val.”

She gives David a tight smile when she gives him a once-over. He feels immensely out of place. Patrick must sense it because he wraps his arm tight around David’s waist and pulls him closer.

Patrick warned him about his Aunt Val that morning when Clint mentioned she was coming. She’s very set-in-her ways and very old fashioned. She didn’t even come to the wedding. David’s made a good impression on the rest of the Brewer clan - at least he thinks. But this woman wasn’t going to even let him try.

“You know, I really am just so sorry I couldn’t make it to your wedding,” she says flippantly. “My hip was just bothering me all over again, and the drive would have made it worse.”

David angles his head to look up at Patrick who’s squinting and looks a little defensive.

“Really? That’s too bad, we would have loved to have had you there.”

Aunt Val shrugs. “Yes well, I saw the pictures that William took.”

“I don’t get how Uncle Will was able to go to and leave you home,” Ian says (he has glasses, that’s how David remembers). His tone is a little sarcastic. “What if you fell again?”

She waves him off. “Eh, I was fine. Besides, he’ll never turn down a drink and a free meal. Besides, I’m not related by blood, so what does it matter?”

The wink she aimed at them didn’t sit well with David.

Patrick hums. “So, what did you think of the wedding? You know, from the pictures you saw.”

“Well you just looked so handsome, Patrick.” She turns to David next. “And Davis you looked…very nice as well.”

“It’s David,” Patrick corrects, and David pulls his cardigan tight around himself. “And I think he looked beautiful on our wedding day.”

“How’s everyone doing over here?” Comes Marcy’s chipper voice. She’s carrying a tray of raw veggies and dip.

“Oh we’re good, Marcy dear,” Val smiles wide. “We were just talking about Patrick’s wedding. I do, however, think the skirt David wore was a little…unconventional, don’t you think?”

Patrick stiffens under him. David refuses to look anyone in the eye and at this point he’s feeling really uneasy.

“Val, that’s not fair,” Marcy defends. “You have no right in saying that.”

“What, I’m just expressing my opinion! Am I not allowed to do that?”

“David is a part of the family, Val. More than you have been or ever will be.” Marcy’s tone is biting. “You may have married my brother, but have absolutely no right being demeaning to my wonderful son and wonderful son-in-law in my house. My boys looked very handsome on their wedding day, and if you don’t have anything kind to say about that then you can take your bitter, sorry self and go elsewhere.”

Val stands with a huff. “If that’s how it’s going to be, then.” She walks off clearly annoyed.

Patrick shakes him a bit. “You okay?”

David nods slowly, brows raised high on his forehead. “Mh. Yeah.” David shakes his head. “I’m going to run to the bathroom.”

He wipes his palms on his jeans as he stands. David crosses the yard as quickly as he can with his arms folded over his chest. Instead of the bathroom, he makes immediate headway for Patrick’s childhood bedroom-turned-guestroom.

David looks at himself in the mirror. He’s wearing a Neil Barrett cardigan, a white t-shirt adorned with a little red heart decal on the left side, ripped black jeans and his usual hi-tops. He rips the cardigan off and tosses it onto the bed. David opens the closet to see everything Patrick hung up and just stares at it.

Maybe he could just wear one of his sweaters and then he’d fit in better with the extended Brewer family. Even the bitter ones. It’s taking everything in his power not to tear up right now.

A soft knock comes from the door and David looks up to see his husband. Patrick closes the door behind him.

Patrick loops his arms around his waist. “I’m sorry about her,” he whispers into David’s cheek.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s really not.”

“It’s not. You’re right, it’s not.” David swallows thickly and looks up at the ceiling. “You know maybe if I dressed a little more conventionally, she’d like me. I was thinking that maybe I should just put on one of your shirts and go back outside so she doesn’t gawk at me anymore.”

“Listen to me. My Aunt Val doesn’t like anyone,” Patrick states. “And if I’m being honest, not many people like her. But my family loves you, David. I love you, my parents love you. She’s just a rude old woman who married into the family late in life and believes that she has a right to say whatever the hell she wants.”

David presses his forehead into Patrick’s shoulder with a deep sigh. “Yeah, but I married into your family, too.”

“See, the difference there is that you’re not a bitter old woman,” Patrick teases. “And hey,” he nudges David until he’s able to look him directly in the eye. “I wouldn’t change a thing about you. I love you, David. I love how you dress, I love who you are which is unapologetically yourself.”

“I’m a little apologetically myself,” is David’s deprecating response, though he’s smirking a bit.

“You know what I mean.” Patrick’s eyes are soft and warm, and David kisses him.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “I love you.”

Patrick rubs at David’s bare forearms. “Are you alright to go back out?”

He nods, “Yes.”

“Good. Now…” Patrick pulls off his green crewneck and tosses it onto the bed. He picks up the discarded cardigan. “If you’re not going to wear this,” he pulls it over his own t-shirt. “Then I will.”

David smiles disbelievingly at his husband. “You’re going to give Aunt Val a heart attack.”

“I’m sure she had one when she found out I was marrying a man,” he states and David’s a little amused. “And if you still want to be a little understated, you can wear one of my shirts.”

David instead walks over to the closet and pulls out his black hoodie with Lover spelled out in shiny red sequins across the chest. He tugs it over his head.

Patrick winks at him and laces their fingers together. “Let’s go freak her out a little bit.”

When they walk back outside hand-in-hand, Marcy and Clint are smiling at them, Marcy with a certain glint in her eye. Patrick turns to press several kisses his cheek just to spite Val who’s looking at them both disapprovingly.

Patrick pulls away. He says, “I love my husband!” loudly as he marches back over to where they were sitting before. David loves his husband, too.

send me a number my sc fics

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Character Bio: Jack Fairchild

[TW: Jack the Ripper]

Yes, he gets his own trigger warning when it comes to book related stuff, mostly just as a precaution because he gets up to a lot of fucked up stuff. Let this be your warning because at the very least his bio mentions some of the disturbing things he did.

Also, to clarify, though this gives him a tragic backstory, please don’t think this is an excuse. None of what happened to him in his life justifies what he did. Do not stan him. He may be sexy but he’s evil.

Born in 1860 to the prostitute Mary Anne Browning, Jack spent the first thirteen years of his life being smothered with affection by hi mother and being told what a great man his father was. At age 13, Jack finally was able to reconnect with his father, a surgeon by the name of Arthur Fairchild. Fairchild, seeing an opportunity, decided to take young Jack under his wing nd etach him his ways. Arthur Fairchild was a firm believer in might makes right, and that hose weaker exist to serve those stronger. He attempted to prove this by having Jack’s mother shipped off to an asylum where she would later die, which led to the beginning of Jack’s downward spiral.

Over the years under his father’s tutelage, he suppressed a lot of rage and resentment, especially towards his father. At age twenty, Jack set out into the world, hoping to get away from his father and find somewhere he could live in peace. Eventually, he found himself at Dracula’s school, and there he met Rose Milliner. He fell for her almost at first sight, and the two soon became rather inseparable. Rose often felt deep concern for him due to the serious anger he had inside him, but he promised her it wouldn’t be an issue, as he was in control.

During his time at the school, he grew rather close with Eve as well, speaking with her often whenever she decided to visit. She would often claim he would make an excellent vampire, but he wanted Rose to be the one to turn him when the time came. Eve, for her part, respected this, but soon enough Jack’s attitude began to shift as Rose began to suffer more bullying and harassment from peers after a heated interaction with Marianna Cross that inadvertently led to Rose getting the nickname “Rotbrained Rosie.” Jack began snapping at other students more frequently, getting into fights, and in general was far more belligerent and protective of Rose.

This came to a head after the Order was disbanded and Eve was weakened by Dracula and Yefim Rasputin. Going to Jack, she promised him the power to gain revenge on everyone who hurt Rose, and in a moment of anger and weakness, Jack allowed himself to be turned. The amount of venom Eve filled him with exacerbated his rage and unleashed the madness he had suppressed for years. He went forth and butchered nearly every student in Dracula’s school, as well as cornering Rose and begging her to stay by his side. When she rejected him, he snapped even further, and it was only with the intervention of Amon and Rose’s brother Rex that Jack was able to be subdued.

After regrouping with Eve, he went to Whitechapel where he would go on to become known as Jack the Ripper, although his killings were not random; he killed prostitutes as a point, one which he presented to his father. If his father’s philosophy were true, then why was the public so appalled by the so-called lowest humans in the city being so horrifically butchered? His father was unable to respond, and so Jack spent the next week slowly dissecting him while still alive, utilizing the very techniques his father had taught him. His madness had internalized his father’s old philosophies, that might makes right and the weak exist to serve the strong; now that Jack was a vampire, even the strongest mortal was insignificant compared to him.

His anger and bitterness was not quelled until a trip to Berlin, where he picked up a young man from a bar and had a night of intense sex with him. That man, Johan “Jojo” Fuast, was also a vampire, and so Jack shrewdly asked him if he might be interested in joining his coven. Excited to meet others like him, Jojo agreed, but in the time it took him to get settled in, Jack acquired an obedience collar from Rhiannon Rhydderch and put it on Jojo, making him into a compliant slave for Jack’s sexual desires, much to Marianna and Amon’s disgust and to Eve’s indifference.

Jojo suffered for a few decades until Jack met Alexis Icke, one of the Five of the Silverwings in the 60s. The two fell in love and soon she was spouting secrets to Jack, which eventually caught the attention of her superiors. She was taken away and Jack never saw or heard from her again, once again inciting his rage. Jojo began to be tormented and abused by him again until the late 70s/early 80s, in which Jojo went off with Rex and visits from Jack became very infrequent.

Jack is one of the few vampires Eve fully considers a child, and ‘loves’ him to the extent she can love anyone. Likewise, Jack completely and utterly loves Eve and views her as a surrogate mother, and greatly admires her power. Jack is a cannibal, occasionally eating his victims so that they do not go to waste. Surprisingly, aside from Jojo, he does not engage in sexual assault. He has severe mommy issues thanks to what happened to his mother, which is just another issue on top of all his myriad of mental health problems that were exacerbated by Eve’s venom. He also has a foot fetish (this is entirely canon, I swear).

He has the power to sink into and travel through shadows. This makes him almost impossible to defeat in the dark. He is incredibly fond of knives, and has a specially made one from Rhiannon known as the Holy Nail. It is supposedly made from the nails that were used to crucify Jesus, and the knife causes incredible pain even from the slightest cut.

Jack is obviously based on the real life criminal known as Jack the Ripper. He also draws inspiration from characters like Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange and Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, namely in how he presents himself as a handsome, charming individual while being absolutely demented and vicious beneath it all.

[dogbearinggifts]

Do you have any theories or headcanons on how each siblings' relationship with Ben was like when he was still alive, based on flashbacks or the reactions they had when Ben manifested? Or maybe when he's mentioned? Thank you

I have a couple, yeah. However, of all the siblings we meet, Ben gets the least screen time and the least development (which—it has been confirmed—will change in Season 2) so a lot of these are just extrapolation and speculation.

Luther: In the comics, we get a quote from Vanya’s autobiography stating that Ben “was so eager to please Father, he was easily drawn into his and Luther’s little games—and those two simply let him die.” I tend to think this quote is less accurate recollection of what happened and more Vanya’s resentment coloring the events as she remembers them, but from this it seems Reginald roped Luther into helping with Ben’s training.

However, I don’t think Luther was as uncaring toward Ben as the quote makes him out to be; we know that Ben was not fond of his powers in the slightest. A comics quote from Reginald establishes that Ben would cry in his sleep, and from what we see in the bank flashback, it’s clear he’s not looking forward to letting the monster out. Luther would have seen this reluctance, and while I’m not sure he would have fully comprehended why Ben felt this way (enhanced strength and endurance aren’t the sort of powers that hunger for blood and make you cry in your sleep) I think he tried to sympathize with Ben as much as Reginald would allow. Maybe he gave Ben a friendly pat on the back after a training session, told him he’d done a good job. Maybe he saw there was only one creme-filled donut left during one of their Griddy’s runs and made sure Ben got it despite wanting it for himself. Maybe he’d save out books from the library he knew Ben would like and leave them at his door, or listen to Ben talk about his favorites even if he wasn’t interested. I think Luther was a lot less aloof prior to his Moon mission (four years of total isolation will wreak havoc on your ability to relate to people) and while he wouldn't have gone against Reginald and tried to argue that Ben be exempted from training—which is what Ben probably needed—I think he did try to ease the pain as much as he could. It wasn’t enough, and it didn’t prevent Ben’s death, but we know from the comics that Luther blames himself for it—and if his reaction in the bowling alley is anything to go on, I think the show backs up this characterization. 

Diego: I wouldn’t be surprised if Diego was jealous of Ben’s powers. This is the kid who was told from a very young age that he would never measure up to Luther, and who spent his adulthood trying to outshine his brother as a superhero. His powers in the show are maybe a little flashier than Luther’s, but Reginald still likely saw them as a disappointment and told Diego as much. So I can see him looking at Ben—who can produce a whole monster out of his torso—and wishing he had a power like that. The comics tell us that Reginald was fascinated by what Ben could do, and so it would make sense if Diego saw this morbid curiosity as little more than extra attention lavished on a brother who didn’t even appreciate what he had.

At the same time, though, I don’t think Diego took out too much of his frustration or resentment on Ben. That same quote calls Ben “the kindest of my siblings,” and so while I believe he was envious of Ben for having seemingly cooler powers, I also think Diego might have felt guilty if he lashed out at Ben too often. I think it happened, but I think that if he pushed too far and genuinely upset Ben, he might’ve wound up feeling like he’d just kicked a puppy. If this were the case, Diego could have become more verbally abusive toward his remaining siblings following Ben’s death, both out of grief and misplaced anger, as well as a sort of bitterness that the best of them (in his view) was gone and there was no point in holding back any longer.

Allison: From her reaction in the bowling alley, I think it’s safe to say she cared about Ben deeply and that his death was still painful for her all those years later. But I also think that of all the Hargreeves, Allison would have least understood Ben’s aversion to his own powers. She tells Luther that she used her power to get everything she wanted. Whether or not “everything” includes Patrick’s love remains to be seen, but it’s clear she grew up seeing her power as an advantage that she used whenever it suited her. So if Ben ever confided in her that he hated his power—or even that he wished he was ordinary like Vanya—there’s a pretty good chance Allison would have looked at him like he’d just spoken Czech. How could he hate his power? It let him take out four bad guys at once. It earned him more of Dad’s attention. It was interesting. How could he hate something like that?

If his powers played a role in his death, this likely would have caused her to see his complaints in a new and darker light, and possibly might have made her wonder if she could have done anything to prevent it. Maybe a rumor would have made Reginald ease up on him; maybe it wouldn’t have. But I think she’d wonder, and those questions would probably haunt her.

Klaus: I’ve seen some fans theorize that personality clashes prevented him and Ben from becoming all that close before the latter’s death, but I don’t think they’re that different. Klaus—high, drunk and grieving—gets behind the wheel of an ice cream truck that he takes careening past two highly trained assassins while “Ride of the Valkyries” plays over the speakers and all Ben has to say is “Wheeee!” Ben has a wild, fun-loving side, and I doubt it only surfaced after his death.

More to the point, however, I think the two of them bonded over a mutual hatred of their own powers. Maybe they didn’t discuss it much. Maybe they didn’t have the words to really examine what they both felt, maybe they didn’t like thinking about the things their powers made them do and see. But I think there was always that understanding between them, and I think that’s why we see them together before a mission in Vanya’s hallucination. And I think that at this point in their lives, Klaus was still hiding the depths of his growing addiction, leaving Ben unaware of just how quickly he was spiraling downward. There’s a very good chance he knew, but not that he knew how bad things really were.

If he and Klaus were close prior to his death, then that might explain some of how he treats Klaus in the present. Not only is he able to see just how bad his addiction has become, but this is his friend. The only one in that household who even came close to understanding what Ben was going through, the one who commiserated with him and probably offered whatever limited support he could, and he’s destroying himself. After his death, it seems Ben spent even more time with Klaus than he did before, and so he would’ve had a front-row seat to all the ugliness of a full-blown substance addiction. When he nags Klaus to take better care of himself, he’s probably acting at least partly out of guilt, knowing he missed too many red flags while he was still alive and capable of action.

Five: Like Allison, I don’t think he quite understood Ben’s aversion to using his powers. He could use his powers without fear, and they enabled him to have a lot of fun at the baddies’ expense. More than that, though, Five wanted to push the limits of his power. He wanted to prove himself. I think he wanted more of Reginald’s attention than he got, and he might have resented Ben on some level for taking the spotlight off him. The fact Ben didn’t want that spotlight in the first place might have mitigated that resentment somewhat, or it might have made it all worse. After Five got stuck, though, I think he might have started to feel some sort of kinship toward Ben. His disastrous attempt at time travel probably left him afraid to use his powers for quite some time, and he probably thought back to Ben’s fear of his own powers. Five might not have understood completely, and he might have recognized that he’d never understand completely, but I do think his jump to the apocalypse cleared the way for a more sympathetic attitude toward Ben’s hatred of his powers. 

However, I think there’s also evidence that Five felt fondness toward Ben—perhaps even protectiveness. When he lands in the apocalypse, he calls out for Ben and then Vanya, both of whom are ranked lower than him and behave more like his younger siblings than his older ones. In the present, Five masks his emotions far more than he shows them, so it’s somewhat difficult to tell if the notion of Ben being there with them in the bowling alley affects him as deeply as it does his other siblings, but it’s clear he’s at least curious. I think he’s long since given up on the idea that he’ll get to see Ben again, and he’s not about to latch onto this hope if it turns out to be false, but he’s open to it.

Vanya: The quote I referenced for Luther paints Ben as one of her favorite siblings, to be sure, and the sheer level of resentment that quote conveys shows his death hit her hard. She saw his kindness and loved him for it, and it seems he treated her kindly as well. However, the fact he hated his powers and she longed to have any power at all probably drove a wedge between them. He probably would have killed to be ordinary, and she would have killed to have his powers.

Ben and Vanya don’t have a lot of interaction, but I think we see a bit of that resentment when she hallucinates him and Klaus suiting up for a mission. He gives her a flat look and tells her, matter-of-factly, that “To go on a mission, you have to have a power.” Vanya sees this as intentional cruelty, but I think Vanya’s desire to go on missions probably struck Ben as insulting and more than a little tone-deaf. How could she want to go on missions? Missions are horrible. He has to put himself in danger and let the monster free, walk away covered in blood and with fresh fuel for his nightmares. Vanya gets to stay at home and play her violin, and here she is acting like going on a mission is some sort of reward. Maybe he’s tried to explain it and maybe he hasn’t, but whatever the case, I think Ben is watching her beg to come along, thinking, She doesn’t know how good she has it. And, ironically, Vanya’s thoughts in that scene probably run along those same lines. Each has what the other doesn’t, and that grass-is-greener mentality probably formed one of the biggest cracks in their relationship. 

[bligh-lynch]

And It Came To Pass In Those Days

23d December 1995, Lynch Mountain, Tempest, West Virginia For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. _________ Carl Sagan, Contact

          Throughout his life, Pappy was known by many names, but it was one Christmas Eve that he truly felt he earned the only one that really counted.

           He began as Gustavus Simeon Lynch, but was very soon Gus. His birthname was too grandiose an appellation - it was given to him in gratitude by his father, Simeon, for Gustavus Olafsen, a Minnesotan of Swedish extraction who saved Simeon's life from the debacle onboard the USS San Diego during the Great War. But it proved too highfalutin for the boy who grew into a man.

           That boy, Gus, was too often a cutup who disobeyed his Pa and had his hide tanned more times than he could count. He and his delinquent older cousin, Allen, would get drunk on badly-made shine out in the woods - they would play music together under the white oak on the other slope of the low mountain that belonged to their family, and Allen would tell him, hitting his fiddle with his bow gently to make a singular dulcet tone, Gus strumming his banjo to accompany, the old family legend that their ancestor, Patrick Lynch, had planted the great druid as but an acorn to mark his property when he came over from Ireland. Twice, Allen had kissed him passionately when they were both drunk - love, love, careless love - as Sodomites would, making him promise to never tell a soul, and though later in life Gus became concerned with both drink and sin, when he remembered those Summer afternoons underneath the mighty boughs of his family oak with his cousin, his first friend, his first love, all he could do was blush, and sigh, sad for bygone days.            Years later, Gus heard that Allen, who married a girl he didn't love and fathered a child who grew up in the family as Cousin Bobby he didn't want, ended up going crazy and ripping out his own teeth, an eerie repeat of Gus' own father losing his teeth at a young age also.            Hoping to be better than a backwoods moonshiner who did furtive and sinful things, the boy, Gus, became a man, with a new name to match: Private First Class Gus S. Lynch, Company E, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division. He and his boyhood friend from Quinwood, Ralph Pomeroy, were shipped off during the Korean Conflict, where they stuck together because their fellows mocked their thick accents and yokel way - slights that he, Gus, never forgot or forgave. But, soon enough, there was that hopeless situation at a place that history would remember as Triangle Hill - Gus was one of the key witnesses to Ralph Pomeroy's dauntless actions that led his friend to be awarded, posthumously, the Medal of Honor.            Then and there - seeing Ralph E. Pomeroy dedicate himself to something so completely larger than himself - Gus determined that he, too, would dedicate himself to something, and he fell on his knees, beseeching the sky above him, to say that he would devote his life to God.            Soon, though he wouldn't care much for it, he became Corporal Gus S. Lynch, Silver Star Medal, but he scarcely remembered those October days in 1952 - his bright blue eyes, remarked on by his superior officers, always blurred by the tears as only men put through that awful fire can understand, blinded by dust and smoke...as though possessed, he dragged what injured he could, the same men who mocked him for being a hillbilly and who would pointedly ask if he was born in a coalmine or if he wore shoes but whom he swore to protect nonetheless, back to the medic tent, again and again and again, no man left behind.            There were gruesome spectacles that would make any man doubt the sanity of the world, and still a lesser man repulsed by humans for the rest of his life, but Gus was swallowed in humility by his friend's actions and he wanted to somehow be brave himself - not for himself, but for the spirit he saw Ralph Pomeroy summon.            And for these courageous actions - that he never, not once, felt courageous for - he had a Silver Star pinned to his breast by General van Fleet.            When he returned home, honorably discharged back to West Virginia and back to the mountains, he wanted to make good on the promise he had made to the Almighty for saving him in Korea, and so he took the G.I. Bill money and crossed the border to Virginia to attend Bluefield College, where he read the Theology he would need to preach the Good Word and save souls for the Lord.            In time he graduated, and he took still yet another name: Reverend Gus Lynch - he grew the thick, handsome chinstrap beard he would wear for the rest of his life, and, taking inspiration from the travelling preachers that comprised many of his proud ancestors, he rambled up and down the Appalachians in his big white Surburban, praising Jesus and baptizing the anointed, down to the river to pray, studying on that Good Old Way.            Two fateful things happened as he journeyed from place to place, filling the spiritual needs of the wayward.            The first was in Pennsylvania and not too long after New York, because they happened so close together. There, the people gave him names too, but this time they were bigoted slurs: redneck and hillbilly and inbred, they mocked his accent and his manners and his earnestness, so that Gus found himself rather like Jonah, wishing that these Yankees, like Nineveh, would perish rather than find salvation. He never forgot how those prejudiced Northerners treated him, treated him different, simply because of who he was and where he was born - he had met kind Negros, strong in the Lord and the love of their families, down in the Carolinas, and he knew they had it far worse than he did, but that made him all the more bitter, how man could treat his fellow man, regardless of how he spoke the English tongue, or even the color of his own skin.            This led to the second event: one night at a revival in Summersville, having returned to West Virginia feeling he should go back to put down roots in Tempest - soured forever on the idea of rambling after his experiences up North - he met a beautiful little slip of a girl, dark-headed with soft grey eyes, who had a ready and sarcastic wit.            Her name was Iris - Iris McComas, named for where her people had settled in that tiny coal town in McDowell County, many, many years ago.            She was the prettiest thing in the room, with the purple-and-gold silk corsage she wore of her namesake, an iris...Gus' eyes followed her everywhere, finally, he got up the nerve, and he asked her to dance, and soon they got to talking.            "Ye were in Korea?" asked she.

           "I were," answered he. "Served with Ralph Pomeroy."

           "Oh my, he was a hero."

           "He was."

           "If the army had more Pomeroys we'd've won that war."

           Gus' expression turned serious. "We did have an army of Pomeroys - but y'only hear bout the famous ones."

           "What a sad thing ta say - are ye a sad man, Mr. Lynch?"

           "When the occasion calls fer it, my dear."

           "My dear?" She gasped, pretending to be offended. "How forward!"

           "Well then what would ya like me to call ye?" He gave that famous smirk, a crooked half-smile that many people knew him by. "My doe?"            She burst out laughing. "Sly, too! My word, I can scarcely tell what kind o'man y'are - are y'always like this, Mr. Lynch? A man of God but a mystery ta women?"

           "When the occasion calls fer it--" The smirk grew. "My dear."            It was mid-December and the stars outside shone diamondiferous to join with the lavender half-moonlit snow - the congregation gathered together before they dispersed to sing one more hymn:            Go! Tell it on the mountain!            Our Jesus Christ is born!            And as they stood together to sing, Iris put her hand in his.            They took to courting, and soon were married, a fairytale, and they gave each other twenty-four of the happiest years of each others' life - they moved back together to Tempest where Gus became senior pastor of Living Hope Baptist Church.            But it did not begin auspiciously.            When Gus passed his thirty-fifth year, he was beset with toothaches that would not go away, wracked with pain that no medication or herbs would seem to salve. This went on for a week straight, until - one night - and to his horror, he found his eyeteeth, both of them, were being pushed out by something new in their place...when Iris came into their bedroom she flung her hands to her mouth as he turned to her so that she could see: for in his mouth were two, long, sharpened, canine ­fangs.            Gus had always been aware of the morbid stories, the haints and the phantom creatures and the deep, shadowy weirdness that crawled all over Tempest, all over Adkins County - there were family legends for nearly each of the little clans that called this obscure corner of the Greenbrier Valley home, the Barnes and the Lightfoots and his own family, the Lynches...but he never thought that he would be privy, let alone part, of his own ghost story, his own monster-tale.            Now he understood - now he understood the story about Cousin Allen, ripped out his own teeth and had taken to the drink too hard and died pitifully young...now he understood why his own father had a set of ivory chompers rather than what God gave him.            Some malign ancestral curse had curdled in his blood and manifested itself as a hideous mutation of the mouth, something that made him look for all the world like a creature of the woods more than what he was - a man adapted for hunting and timber and subsistence living now reabsorbed by the forest he so loved to be a haint, a creature, bewitched and obscene to the world of men.            At first Iris tried to help by filing his new additions down, blunting them so people would not notice - but horrible to relate, night after night, the things grew back, sharpened themselves to points as a form of growth. Several times they tried this, panicked husband and supportive wife - several times they were thwarted, right back to where they were.            Desperate, and without recourse, they did, together, the only thing they thought left - even though he had not drank in years, Gus procured some fine whiskey from his friend, Ironside Lightfoot, guzzled it down until he was three sheets in the wind, and instructed his wife to take a wrench and do the unthinkable.            When she was done, the teeth kept in a small box under his bed to remind him that this was not some kind of hideous vision sent to him from a Hellish delirium, near-feverish with pain and drink, and his mouth full of bloody cotton gauze, he looked on his wife with tears streaming forth from those uniquely blue eyes, begging her to forgive him for whatever sin he had done that had led him to be changed, however momentarily, into a monster.            "Oh Iris - woman - what ye must think o'me - what kinda man I am--"            "Gustavus Lynch," Iris answered without hesitation, "I know exactly what kinda man y'are."            "N'what--" he was scared to finish the question. "What kinda man that be?"            She said nothing - she just hugged him tight, and reached for his hand, taking it and squeezing it close to her own heart.            They passed this crisis together as husband and wife, and with new teeth, dentures, procured from a dentist down in Roanoke, their life resumed its sunny way.            Never did they talk about it, not once, even when Gus was troubled, year after year on the same day ever since, by quare visions of icy blue streams deep underground...when he would awake, dazed and vulnerable in the dead of night when nightmares seem realest, he would feel for his wife's hand, grasping her fingers into his own to feel grounded and unfraid once again.            When they built their big house on Simeon Lynch's ancestral lands, on the day they knew their hard work was finished, she put her hand in his and squeezed it - when it became apparent she was with child, and told him the news, she took both of his hands and brought them to her belly... when she was in labor and he prayed over her, his heart full of joy and fear, she squeezed his hand again, as hard as she could - when the infant boy, who they named Gustavus after his father and so went through life as Junior, reached manhood and brought home a kind, mousey girl from Wetzel County to introduce as his fiancée, she squeezed his hand once more.            They were blessed to have lived so full and fruitful, all those years together.            But it all did not last.            After, soon after, Iris contracted cancer of the breast, and she fell very ill very suddenly, she wasted away and was in great pain, such that there was nothing the doctors in Charleston could do.            On her deathbed, she put her hand in Gus' one last time, and she said to him: "Oh, I finally know what kinda man y'are, Mr. Lynch."            And with his eyes once again blurred with tears as they had been all those years ago in Korea, Gus answered: "N'what kinda man that be - Ms. McComas?"            "Why - yer the man who loves me..."            Then her hand slackened, it fell away - Gus' hand was empty, and she was gone.            Gus knew he would never get over her and indeed he never did, and for years after would regard the day of her death - a clear, azure-skied day in October - as little short of cursed. Every year on her birthday, on the anniversary of their marriage, and to commemorate the day she died, he would pace up the side of his mountain and lay by her graveside, with space for him to be buried beside her when his time came, a bundle of her namesake, amethyst and gold ­­- iris.            One night, a year or two after her passing, driving back to the house that he and Iris had built and which now stood lonely and empty without her in it, Gus parked his Jeep that he had gotten by trading in his old Suburban on the side of a dirt road - he got out, and took a look, on a whim, above him, to the Winter stars.            He had wrestled and grappled with the questions - theologically, spiritually, even psychologically - and still he had come up empty, empty as the indigo spans that one would have to traverse to get from star to star, how to properly mourn, how to properly grieve.            And then he knew.            He just - knew, somehow, a revelation, an epiphany, that she was up there...he knew, somehow, that in the crystalline twinkling of the stars, the same stars that twinkled just the same way the night they met, that she was watching.            And - that she would not want him to be like this, not after all this time, all this wasted energy trying and wishing and praying for things that could no longer be.            So he got back in his car, laid across the steering wheel and wept, one last time, and he let the heavens have her, let her watch over him and never let him go.            Even after this the grief he felt never went away, but it was eased some after Junior had his own son, Gus' grandson, born en caul and destined for either second-sight or greatness or both, named Bligh after a distant patrilineal descendant - he had been too afraid to ask his son about his teeth, if it what happened to Gus had happened to Junior, but he was told by Susan Anne he had needed dentistry to fix some kind of abnormal growth...and knew the unspoken truth.            Too soon, tragedy roared back into his life, another October day, this time grey and rainy, when Junior and his wife, Susan Anne, died in a car crash - Junior's Eldorado had careened off a sharp turn, killing them both, with little Bligh Allen, who had just turned five, miraculously surviving in the backseat.            It was all, all enough for Gus to invoke old Job, and to have his faith, so sure even before his conversion all those years ago, shook so hard he wondered if Hell could hear it: why, why after so many years of faithful service, would God curse him so? Was it not enough to rob from his beloved, for whose touch he pined every day for the rest of his life - now his son, now his daughter-in-law too?            And if I am a Christian,

           I am the least of all--            But this was how Gus would soon become Pappy, the name that stuck at first as a tease and thereafter as how he would be known forever after, even amongst folk in Tempest outside of his own family - because his grandson Bligh, started calling him that.            Bligh had always been a strange child - the circumstances of his birth alone were the subject of some comment, not just being en caul but having to be delivered in Barnes' veterinary office because of a great and terrible storm that at last blew down that old druid that Gus and Allen would play music under, but this was joined with his oddly quiet nature, as though observing everything around him in a troublingly mature kind of way. He did not speak as other children did - when Archie Lightfoot, the latest scion of that storied family which antedated Gus' own and the son of Gus' friend Ironside had his own son, Andrew, he was, by contrast, a bright and happy child, a chatterbox whose constant babbles exasperated his father...yet Bligh remained uncomfortably quiet.            Then, one day, Junior, passing the peculiar newcomer to Gus to hold, murmured in babytalk: "Go see ya Pappy, go see ya Pappy now--" And Bligh burst out, his first words, when he was safe in Gus' arms: "Pa-pee! Pa-pee!"            Junior was dumbstruck - but Gus, Pappy, was transported with happiness.            He had been his grandson's first word.            But...when Bligh came to live with Gus after his parents died, he did not like it, and made it a point, in his own sullen preschool-age way, to let Gus know he did not like him, throwing monstrous tantrums - howling like a wolf, which Gus would shake his head the hardest at - throwing his toys, refusing to come out of his new room in Gus' house, except to hastily eat and then steal back upstairs. It was bad enough that because of this withdrawn, traumatized behavior at school it was recommended he'd be held back a year, but really it seemed like there was no way, no way at all, for Gus to get through to his grandson, damaged in his young existence by being robbed of his parents.            Weeks turned into months - Gus tried to cope the best he could, Christmastide drew nearer and he did his yearly rituals, cleaning for Baby Jesus' birthday and putting up a fresh, fragrant pine for a Christmas tree, all while his grandson remained dangerously introverted and reclusive.            And then, finally, it occurred to Gus - what had happened to him nearly a decade before, ruminating on how Iris was gone, and what Iris would have wanted, and where Iris still was.            Little Bligh would have to somehow see the same thing.            So, carrying that little hope in his heart that he could fix things that shone distant but clear like the Star of Bethlehem, with the memory of Pappy as the boy's first word, on the eve of Christmas Eve, Gus came into the boy's room, and instructed him in a firm voice to get on something warm, they were going to go outside.            It took some doing - thrice more did he have to be told, and the last time in a loud clear voice that was almost a threat - but eventually little Bligh tumbled down the steps and, his grandfather putting a guiding hand on the small of his back, they came outside. Gus made sure that Bligh followed every step he took, so that he would not get lost - eventually they came down the mountain, a gentle slope that was easy to traverse up and down, and arrived just where Gus needed them to be.            The night was a masterpiece of Appalachian Winter - silent, neither sound nor movement, with a light snow dusting the ground that made a faint crunch beneath the feet. The cold was not biting or unpleasant as there was no wind, so that there was only the rejuvenating crispness that enlivened the nerves and thickened the blood.            They came to a great, ruined, rotting tree - the big druid that his ancestor had planted, where Gus and his cousin would play music together, and where Gus had his first kiss, all those wistful bygone years before.            Gus gently took his grandson's wrist.            "Ya seen this tree here, boy?"            Bligh shook his head - Gus let go, kneeling to his level, pointing.            "This tree here fell the day ye's born...n'yer great-great--" He paused, tittering to himself. "Well let's say a feller ye n'me's both related ta, waaay back when - he planted it!"            A spark of something like recognition seemed to wash away the sulky stubbornness that had possessed the boy's face lo these many weeks.            "Someone - we related ta?" Bligh asked, his voice quiet to match the night.            "S'right," Gus affirmed with a grin. "Our ancestor - our family been here a long, long time, understand."            Bligh nodded, slowly, as though absorbing what his grandfather was telling him.            "I want ya ta see sumthin else, too--"            Using his boot, Pappy kicked part of the hollowed-out trunk of the old druid-tree hard - there, on the inside, was a cluster of phosphorescent vegetation, an unexpected symphony of fulgently radiant light hiding in the tiny cavern of the oaken log.            Bligh recoiled - he had never seen anything like it before in his life.            "Wha - wha?!"            "Walk while ye have the light," Gus pronounced resolutely. "Lest darkness come upon ye - see that there glow?"            Bligh nodded, his eyes wide with amazement.            "That there's foxfire - it shines right here on the Earth sometimes - like the stars shine up in Heaven."            "H-Heaven?" Bligh asked, his voice suddenly hushed. "Like - where Ma and Pa live now?"            Now it was Gus' turn to nod. "Yes, boy - yes indeed." He swept up his grandson to lift him up so that he could see the stars shining - Heaven - above them.            As he held Bligh up and then set him on his shoulders, he called out in his loud, clear voice that he used at Living Hope:

           "Consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained!"

           Right as Bligh grabbed hold of Pappy's head to balance, and just Pappy had finished - he sucked in an amazed breath.

           Of course he had seen the stars, and of course he had asked about them, but he had never - so like a little boy - understood, in focus, what infinity meant, what the constellations and asterisms and shapes of the heavens meant, what lay beyond his playroom and the kitchen and the trees and the backyard.

           And it was the words of King James that made him understand - the Word of the Lord that Pappy knew and practiced and had a bon mot for, sometimes clever and sometimes poignant, since that terrible day in that faraway place of Korea when he had devoted his life to the Good News.

           Bligh's eyes beheld the stars not for the first time, but for the first time that really mattered.            "Them stars up ere, boy - lookin down on us - there's ya Ma n'Pa, up ere - there's ya Mamaw Iris, who ye never met, but who - who woulda loved ye all the same..."            "They - up there?"            "That's right boy - all of em, watchin over us."            And then grandson murmured the first true words of coherence in months:            "Pappy - I wish they wudn't up yonder - I wish they was here."            "Well me too, boy - me too." He sighed, swallowing back a wave of emotion that came with the words. "But we down here, for the time bein - n'we gotta make the best o'what the Lord God gave us." He took a hand to reach up and stroke his grandson's cheek. "So happens - the Lord God gave me a little boy - a little boy named Bligh."

           A long silence followed, which Gus gently broke:            "Just like em stars bove us shine, boy - n'like the foxfire aneath the log - I'll always shine fer ye. They watch over us up ere - but down here--" He let himself grin, for the first time in he couldn't remember approaching something like inner peace. "Down here - ain't nuthin gonna happen ta ye, long as I'm around - ain't nuthin ever gonna happen ta the boy the Good Lord gave me."

           The Winter skies of West Virginia provide intangible proof in their starry voids of the ancient and the impossible, so that on a clear cold evening, with one's head tilted up to behold brumal Orion in the frigid air that turns the breath into the steamy vocabulary of Fafnir, it seems perfectly feasible that - on a night just like this - the Virgin Mary had a baby boy.

           Go! Tell it on the mountain! O'er the hills and ev-ry-where!

           And there was time enough for Lovecraft's mad spaces, and there was time yet still for Tyson's patient navigations, because there was time enough for little Bligh, already an orphan and doomed to a life against the grains of modernity, to understand the cruelty and the meanness of existence - but now he was wonderstruck, starstruck, at the cosmos that swirled above him in chilled clarity, the very Universe that Pappy's God in wisdom untold had designed and made, and so could he understand that this same cruel, mean place was also, at the very same time, full of kindness and love.            "Pappy?" he heard his grandson whisper.            "Yeah boy?"            "I'm - I - I'm sorry..."

           Now Gus - Pappy - felt that the wall that needed to come down had come down, now he knew that he could raise his grandchild and shelter him and protect him and guide him into manhood and carry on the Lynch name with honor and with pride and respect.            Now - now Pappy lowered him down so that they were face to face, so that their identical eyes, gelid, frozen-over, but warm in this and all the Winters they would share together, now met.            He pointed, down the mountain slope, the trees that twinkled with ice, and he whispered: "G'out with joy." He grinned an encouraging, knowing smile. "Be led forth with peace - the mountains -n'the hills shall break forth before ye into singin, and all the trees o'the field shall clap their hands..."            He hugged his little grandson so tight he knew he would never forget.            And right then, right that very second - everything was worth it.            There had been a road here, there had been a journey undertaken, ever since Iris had blushed to see him watching her across the room at that little church in Summersville - ever since he had clutched Ralph's body in Korea and begged for him, screaming, to get up, to wake up - ever since he would join his cousin's melody on the banjo on those fine Summer days.            They were all gone...but Bligh, his grandson, his blood, his flesh, his true legacy, was here.            And of all the names, all the titles, all the ways he was or would be looked at - none of them would ever matter as much as the one that this serious, black-haired boy would foist upon him:            "Pappy," little Bligh said again, and his eyes glimmered and became overfull with tears.            Gus - Gustavus, Pappy - grinned at him, a full and proud smile, and kissed him gently on the cheek.            "S'right boy," he whispered, but loud enough that the silent night of the approaching Christmas Eve allowed it to echo across time, space - and names. "I'm yer Pappy."

[falsedescent]

1 In The Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra (Capitol) 1955

Actually, the very first 'concept' album. The idea being you put this record on after dinner and by the last song you are exactly where you want to be. Sinatra said that he's certain most baby boomers were conceived with this as the soundtrack.

2 Solo Monk by Thelonious Monk (Columbia) 1964

Monk said 'There is no wrong note, it has to do with how you resolve it'. He almost sounded like a kid taking piano lessons. I could relate to that when I first started playing the piano, because he was decomposing the music while he was playing it. It was like demystifying the sound, because there is a certain veneer to jazz and to any music, after a while it gets traffic rules, and the music takes a backseat to the rules. It's like aerial photography, telling you that this is how we do it. That happens in folk music too. Try playing with a bluegrass group and introducing new ideas. Forget about it. They look at you like you're a communist. On Solo Monk, he appears to be composing as he plays, extending intervals, voicing chords with impossible clusters of notes. 'I Should Care' kills me, a communion wine with a twist. Stride, church, jump rope, Bartok, melodies scratched into the plaster with a knife. A bold iconoclast. Solo Monk lets you not only see these melodies without clothes, but without skin. This is astronaut music from Bedlam.

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3 Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart (Straight) 1969

The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that'll never be beat, it's a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.

4 Exile On Main St. by Rolling Stones (Rolling Stones Records) 1972

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'I Just Want To See His Face' - that song had a big impact on me, particularly learning how to sing in that high falsetto, the way Jagger does. When he sings like a girl, I go crazy. I said, 'I've got to learn how to do that.' I couldn't really do it until I stopped smoking. That's when it started getting easier to do. [Waits's own] 'Shore Leave' has that, 'All Stripped Down', 'Temptation'. Nobody does it like Mick Jagger; nobody does it like Prince. But this is just a tree of life. This record is the watering hole. Keith Richards plays his ass off. This has the Checkerboard Lounge all over it.

5 The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars (Point Music) 1975

This is difficult to find, have you heard this? It's a musical impression of the sinking of the Titanic. You hear a small chamber orchestra playing in the background, and then slowly it starts to go under water, while they play. It also has 'Jesus Blood' on it. I did a version of that with Gavin Bryars. I first heard it on my wife's birthday, at about two in the morning in the kitchen, and I taped it. For a long time I just had a little crummy cassette of this song, didn't know where it came from, it was on one of those Pacifica radio stations where you can play anything you want. This is really an interesting evening's music.

6 The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan (Columbia) 1975

With Dylan, so much has been said about him, it's difficult so say anything about him that hasn't already been said, and say it better. Suffice it to say Dylan is a planet to be explored. For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter. I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in - so the bootlegs I obtained in the Sixties and Seventies, where the noise and grit of the tapes became inseparable from the music, are essential to me. His journey as a songwriter is the stuff of myth, because he lives within the ether of the songs. Hail, hail The Basement Tapes. I heard most of these songs on bootlegs first. There is a joy and an abandon to this record; it's also a history lesson.

7 Lounge Lizards by Lounge Lizards (EG) 1980

They used to accuse John Lurie of doing fake jazz - a lot of posture, a lot of volume. When I first heard it, it was so loud, I wanted to go outside and listen through the door, and it was jazz. And that was an unusual thing, in New York, to go to a club and hear jazz that loud, at the same volume people were listening to punk rock. Get the first record, The Lounge Lizards. You know, John's one of those people, if you walk into a field with him, he'll pick up an old pipe and start to play it, and get a really good sound out of it. He's very musical, works with the best musicians, but never go fishing with him. He's a great arranger and composer with an odd sense of humour.

8 Rum Sodomy and the Lash by The Pogues (Stiff) 1985

Sometimes when things are real flat, you want to hear something flat, other times you just want to project onto it, something more like.... you might want to hear the Pogues. Because they love the West. They love all those old movies. The thing about Ireland, the idea that you can get into a car and point it towards California and drive it for the next five days is like Euphoria, because in Ireland you just keep going around in circles, those tiny little roads. 'Dirty Old Town', 'The Old Main Drag'. Shane has the gift. I believe him. He knows how to tell a story. They are a roaring, stumbling band. These are the dead end kids for real. Shane's voice conveys so much. They play like soldiers on leave. The songs are epic. It's whimsical and blasphemous, seasick and sacrilegious, wear it out and then get another one.

9 I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen (Columbia) 1988

Euro, klezmer, chansons, apocalyptic, revelations, with that mellifluous voice. A shipwrecked Aznovar, washed up on shore. Important songs, meditative, authoritative, and Leonard is a poet, an Extra Large one.

10 The Specialty Sessions by Little Richard (Specialty Records) 1989

The steam and chug of 'Lucille' alone pointed a finger that showed the way. The equipment wasn't meant to be treated this way. The needle is still in the red.

11 Startime by James Brown (Polydor) 1991

I first saw James Brown in 1962 at an outdoor theatre in San Diego and it was indescribable... it was like putting a finger in a light socket. He did the whole thing with the cape. He did 'Please Please Please'. It was such a spectacle. It had all the pageantry of the Catholic Church. It was really like seeing mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas and you couldn't ignore the impact of it in your life. You'd been changed, your life is changed now. And everybody wanted to step down, step forward, take communion, take sacrament, they wanted to get close to the stage and be anointed with his sweat, his cold sweat.

12 Bohemian-Moravian Bands by Texas-Czech (Folk Lyric) 1993

I love these Czech-Bavarian bands that landed in Texas of all places. The seminal river for mariachi came from that migration to that part of the United States, bringing the accordion over, just like the drum and fife music of post slavery, they picked up the revolutionary war instruments and played blues on them. This music is both sour and bitter, and picante, and floating above itself like steam over the kettle. There's a piece called the 'Circling Pigeons Waltz', it's the most beautiful thing - kind of sour, like a wheel about to go off the road all the time. It's the most lilting little waltz. It's accordion, soprano sax, clarinet, bass, banjo and percussion.

13 The Yellow Shark by Frank Zappa (Barking Pumpkin) 1993It is his last major work. The ensemble is awe-inspiring. It is a rich pageant of texture in colour. It's the clarity of his perfect madness, and mastery. Frank governs with Elmore James on his left and Stravinsky on his right. Frank reigns and rules with the strangest tools.14 Passion for Opera Aria (EMI Classics) 1994I heard 'Nessun Dorma' in the kitchen at Coppola's with Raul Julia one night, and it changed my life, that particular Aria. I had never heard it. He asked me if I had ever heard it, and I said no, and he was like, as if I said I've never had spaghetti and meatballs - 'Oh My God, Oh My God!' - and he grabbed me and he brought me into the jukebox (there was a jukebox in the kitchen) and he put that on and he just kind of left me there. It was like giving a cigar to a five-year old. I turned blue, and I cried.15 Rant in E Minor by Bill Hicks (Rykodisc) 1997Bill Hicks, blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.16 Prison Songs: Murderous Home Alan Lomax Collection (Rounder Select) 1997Without spirituals and the Baptist Church and the whole African-American experience in this country, I don't know what we would consider music, I don't know what we'd all be drinking from. It's in the water. The impact the whole black experience continues to have on all musicians is immeasurable. Lomax recorded everything, from the sounds of the junkyard to the sound of a cash register in the market... disappearing machinery that we would no longer be hearing. You know, one thing that doesn't change is the sound of kids getting out of school. Record that in 1921, record that now, it's the same sound. The good thing about these is that they're so raw, they're recorded so raw, that it's just like listening to a landscape. It's like listening to a big open field. You hear other things in the background. You hear people talking while they are singing. It's the hair in the gate.

17 Cubanos Postizos by Marc Ribot (Atlantic) 1998

This Atlantic recording shows off one of many of Ribot's incarnations as a prosthetic Cuban. They are hot and Marc dazzles us with his bottomless soul. Shaking and burning like a native.

18 Houndog by Houndog (Sony) 1999

Houndog, the David Hidalgo [Los Lobos] record he did with Mike Halby [Canned Heat]. Now that's a good record to listen to when you drive through Texas. I can't get enough of that. Anything by Latin Playboys, anything by Los Lobos. They are like a fountain. The Colossal Head album killed me. Those guys are so wild, and they've gotten so cubist. They've become like Picasso. They've gone from being purely ethnic and classical, to this strange, indescribable item that they are now. They're worthwhile to listen to under any circumstances. But the sound he got on Houndog, on the electric violin ... the whole record is a dusty road. Dark and burnished and mostly unfurnished. Superb texture and reverb. Lo fi and its highest level. Songs of depth and atmosphere. It ain't nothin' but a...

19 Purple Onion by Les Claypool (Prawn Song) 2002

Les Claypool's sharp and imaginative, contemporary ironic humour and lightning musicianship makes me think of Frank Zappa. 'Dee's Diner' is like a great song your kid makes up in the car on the way to the drive-in. Songs for big kids.

20 The Delivery Man by Elvis Costello (Mercury) 2004

Scalding hot bedlam, monkey to man needle time. I'd hate to be balled out by him, I'd quit first. Grooves wide enough to put your foot in and the bass player is a gorilla of groove. Pete Thomas, still one of the best rock drummers alive. Diatribes and rants with steam and funk. It has locomotion and heat. Steam heat, that is.

[freudianshade]

So I watched Logan...

...and BOY was it a raucous good time! AMIRITE? AMIRITE?????

*ugly cries as she continues typing*

Anyway. Ahem. More of my thoughts under the cut.

So I have always been interested in the X-23 storyline. If you don’t know, well now you know because I’m going to tell you, X-23 was a mutant created from the genetics of Wolverine. She was raised in a lab, deprived of love or human intimacy, and trained to be nothing more than a killing machine. There’s something very inherently tragic and sad about a person forced to grow up this way. I think there’s something very compelling when you decide to tell the story of X-23 (Laura Kinney) and how she eventually learns to relate to her “father,” a man who struggles with his own humanity.

Logan tells the story of Laura but changes it to fit an altered retelling of the Old Man Logan storyline. In this new world order of 2029, mutants are all but extinct and an evil scientist (aren’t they always?) has been growing mutant children in Mexican women in order to train them to be weapons. It is implied in this story that the Mexican surrogates are then disposed of in their own gruesome, dehumanizing ways. Dr. Rice, the man behind the plan, reveals later on that he was also the reason why mutants stopped being born. He poisoned the food supply with transgenetic corn syrup.

Halfway through his monologuing Logan shoots him square in the face. 

Because smart people are morons and evil scientists are megalomaniacs who will tell any and everyone about their stupid master plans, even if it means giving the hero enough time to kill them. It was pretty hilarious. 

Logan was like that throughout its lengthy two hour runtime. I honestly didn’t notice how long the film was because I was so gripped by it the entire time. Seriously. I was so into this movie. This film had me invested in every damn character from the big players to the brilliant Stephen Merchant as Caliban and that poor farming family who were just trying to pay it forward. It vacillated unexpectedly from character drama to laugh out loud ridiculousness, and I enjoyed every minute. The film had everything I love about action movies. Deeply felt character beats, heroics steeped in real pathos, creatively choreographed stupidly bloody violence, and kick as women. Well, little girls in this case. 

Logan might, superficially, make people think of DC in its melodrama but unlike the DC films, Logan has earned your empathy and your tears. DC tries to trick it out of you with contrived conflict, but Wolverine and the man who has played Wolverine for nearly 2 decades (my God has it been a long time) has built a relationship with his audience and deserved the tears I begrudgedly shed. I mean. Can you guys believe Hugh Jackman has played this character for this long? In all the years he’s been playing this character, I think Logan is his finest performance. It’s unfortunate that voting bodies don’t take action films seriously because Jackman turned in a truly award winning performance. You feel Logan’s fatigue, his absolute weariness at still being alive, with every word. You see it in his face. His fight scenes are visceral. This is the Wolverine we fans have been wanting since 2000 when that first X-Men movie came out. 

Logan’s R-rating means that we can finally see the carnage those claws can cause. People lose limbs. Blood is everywhere. There is a scene in which Laura literally decapitates a dude and throws his head to her enemies as a warning of what she’ll do to the rest of them. It’s magical because it is so terrifying and so absolutely ridiculous that it shocks the laughter out of you. 

Laura as a character is just pitch perfect. She was raised to be a killing machine and in that sense she is an absolute animal. She kills with screams of rage. She crawls on people, stabs them without flinching, and is both precise and deadly. The sheer violence she is capable of exacting is so preposterous sometimes that I really just could not stop laughing. Yet she is also just a child. You see how she looks at people and things with curiosity. You see how she longs for caring human interaction, how she longs for Logan to be a father to her. You see her confusion about who she is as a person and what her place could be in this world. She behaves in bursts, responding on the defense rather than the offense. Her violence comes from rage and self defense. when Logan sees her in action for the first time you know that it’s not just surprise at seeing another mutant. It’s terror at seeing this little girl reflecting back to him the animal he is always fighting within himself. Laura, after all, is not truly an animal. She is a human child forced to respond with primal instincts because the world she has been forced to live in gave her no other choice. Like Logan, she was hobbled from the start.

When Laura comes to be in his care, Logan is forced to confront his own shortcomings as a human being. There is his inability to provide intimacy. There is his absolute crippling fear of closeness both out of fear for himself and out of fear for those he chooses to love. How can he be a father to her when he doesn’t even know how to love himself? How can he teach her to be a better person when he’s a piece of shit? 

There is a part in the film where Logan, Charles, and Laura share a dinner with a family on their farm. Charles asks Logan to pause and just feel what it’s like to be in a place where people love each other, where they feel safe. Logan refuses, but in his last breaths he finally allows himself to feel that with Laura, and it is gut wrenching. The other children look on and you have to wonder. Are they sad for her? And are they perhaps a little bit jealous? After all, Laura may have just lost her father but at least she was lucky enough to spend even the smallest amount of time with him. The others have nothing. 

Professor X is another fantastic standout in this film. You know that Patrick Stewart was going to be able to handle whatever drama was required of him, but he was absolutely hilarious and tragic as the 90-years plus Xavier dying of some unknown degenerative brain disorder, refusing to take his medication, and nagging Logan with every breath. The film begs us to wonder: if the most powerful psychic mutant in the world suddenly lost control of his mind, what would that look like? Well. It’s pretty terrifying and also kind of funny. Charles has outlived nearly all of his protege. He is bitter, guilt ridden, and living from day-to-day moving from self-awareness to a foggy denial. When Laura comes on his radar, he knows this is a chance to do something good one last time. 

Logan knows it too and he is tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of living. Tired of everything. 

As a side note, that poor family’s blood is totally on Charles’s hands. He just HAD to stay for fucking dinner. Like. If they’d just kept going they would still be alive. Logan should’ve made them both shut up and kept driving. For fuck’s sake.

Another standout was Fabio Wolverine. Dr. Rice created another Wolverine (because he is the most popular mutant I guess or whatever) and that Wolverine is still firing on all cylinders and has slicked back guido hair for some reason. It’s eerie watching him face off with the real deal. Logan now greyed, dying, poisoned by his metal skeleton, and decomposing is unable to defeat himself in that final battle. The film closes out Jackman’s truly epic career as one of the most beloved comic book heroes with pointed finality. It’s funny to think that years back, people doubted Jackman could play Logan. Now we couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.

If Jackman is truly serious and this is his last appearance as James Howlett, then this is probably also the last we’ll see of Wolverine for a very long time. Well, at least a MALE Wolverine. I’d be pretty excited for a stand alone Laura driven Wolverine film where she takes up Logan’s mantle. WE NEED MORE FEMALE DRIVEN ACTION FLICKS. As for another James Howlett Wolverine? There is no way you could hire someone else to play the character, not with a swan song like that. We’ve definitely said good-bye to an era and while it wasn’t always the best, this final film certainly gave Jackman the send off he deserved.

[cryptoga-blog]

Erik Voorhees - CoinDesk

http://www.cryptoga.com/news/erik-voorhees-coindesk/

Erik Voorhees - CoinDesk

This is an entry in CoinDesk’s Most Influential in Blockchain 2017 collection.

“You’ve got invited a thinker, and the curse that arrives with that, is you have to listen to a bit of philosophy.”

And as promised, which is just what Patrick Byrne, CEO of e-commerce large Overstock.com, proceeds to give. It may perhaps be the depths of January, but Byrne is bringing his personal kind of heat to the roomful of bitcoin insiders assembled for the annual “Satoshi Roundtable” retreat in Cancun, Mexico.

Virtually two many years into a debate over how ideal to alter bitcoin’s software (and nevertheless months away from anything resembling a path ahead), significantly of the event’s itinerary centers on the issue, or as significantly as it can right before devolving into possibly acrimony or aimlessness.

Refreshing off a go away of absence from his firm, even though, Byrne provides a burst of existence to the proceedings. Having heart stage for a speech, he rifles through a brisk dialogue that equates bitcoin with the American Revolution and pokes enjoyment at key banks.

“They have not internalized how significantly they have to transform. You’ve got demonstrated up with a Ferrari and they’re insisting on placing a lawnmower in it,” Byrne quips.

This immediate speed of enjoy before long can take a pause, nonetheless, when Byrne factors to a person with his hand elevated in an effort to check with a issue. Byrne before long balks at the title. “Voorhees, the Erik Voorhees?” he asks.

On affirmation, what starts off out as surprise swiftly turns to reverence, as Byrne nods, bends at the middle and commences a shorter collection of bows. “I am not deserving,” he suggests a few instances in a sing-track tone.

Seeking back on the incident some months afterwards, Voorhees is nevertheless taken aback by the gesture. Talking from the workplaces of his startup ShapeShift, approximately a calendar year eliminated, he admits he’d by no means met Byrne right before that instant, and that he hasn’t accurately had significantly make contact with with him since.

“It was awesome, I failed to know if he understood who I was,” Voorhees remarks.

However, you will find an noticeable shared camaraderie, one particular Voorhees traces back to not just their desire in cryptocurrencies, but the way in which they have approached advocating for the technology, typically in protracted fights with U.S. regulators who don’t see eye to eye with their philosophy.

And in Voorhees, Byrne finds rare firm, as the entrepreneur’s personal battles against the governing administration stretch back many years, to a time when he was just a person defending bitcoin on message boards. But if Voorhees was an oddity then, he’s maybe much more exceptional now in that he’s remained, always a contact out of phase with the mainstream.

Irrespective of whether it truly is having still left-of-heart positions on bitcoin’s complex roadmap, how business business enterprise need to be structured to improve advancement or the nature of cryptocurrency as revenue, Voorhees remains the shapeshifting fox his company’s logo enshrines.

Then and now

One of the earliest evangelists for cryptocurrency (his on the internet posts on the make a difference day back to 2011 and 2012), Voorhees is now one particular of its most distinguished business people.

An early employee at its to start with key startup, New York-based mostly BitInstant, he afterwards started and offered a gambling system known as SatoshiDice that was so preferred it congested the bitcoin blockchain right before scaling was even a greatly acknowledged problem. However, SatoshiDice was not without its critics, such as the U.S. governing administration, who fined Voorhees for the unauthorized trade of cryptocurrency for startup equity.

If that appears acquainted, that may perhaps be since the product is en vogue these days, with so-known as original coin offerings (ICOs) doing related revenue on an just about day-to-day foundation. Because 2013, revenue of tailor made cryptocurrencies have resulted in approximately $4 billion in task funding.

“I wish tokens have been a factor back then. I went through all that threat and all that crap,” he suggests, reclining back in his corner workplace chair.

If which is the case, even though, ShapeShift’s new workplace sophisticated also doubles as a assertion on how far he’s arrive, and also how he’s always been a bit early to the long run.

Full with reclaimed wooden tables, catered lunch for staff and enough home for expansion, the workplace is a residing I-explained to-you-so to the naysayers who mocked Voorhees for remaining one particular of the few to embrace the strategy cryptocurrencies outside of bitcoin had any benefit.

Nonetheless, the advancement of his firm, which hired much more than 50 people in 2017, at the time when several early bitcoin startups are having difficulties or pivoting, is credence to his foresight.

What began as a web site that made available the capacity for customers to swap cryptocurrency without a counterparty now has five whole offerings – its eponymous ShapeShift provider PRISM (a synthetic asset portfolio built on ethereum) KeepKey (a components storage providing) CoinCap.io (a knowledge company) and Arbiter (a stealth initiative).

Anarchist blues

But for Voorhees, the success has arrive with trade-offs. Particularly, he hasn’t been in a position to be quite as obvious – and outspoken – as he once was.

“When you operate a firm, you can’t also be tremendous political. You have a focus on on your back I have to censor myself all the time,” he suggests.

For one particular, he’d like to be much more outspoken about the romantic relationship among revenue and the governing administration, the matter for which he to start with rose to renown in the business.

Before he was an entrepreneur (having difficulties or prosperous), he was a blogger, authoring extensive believed pieces on the nature of politics and revenue, and how cryptocurrencies, by proficiently moving the equipment for revenue creation back into the hands of the people, have been destined to upset this balance.

And for all there is to handle at ShapeShift, Voorhees nevertheless attempts to maintain in contact with his Libertarian roots. Scenario and place, the weekend right before the job interview, Voorhees was supposed to check out Ross Ulbricht, the founder of on the internet dim market place Silk Street, now serving existence driving bars for his creation.

While he’s by no means met Ulbricht, Voorhees likens his planned two-hour travel, delayed because of to an abrupt hand surgery, to a type of pilgrimage, one particular that acknowledges Ulbricht’s impact in developing what was fundamentally the to start with significant-scale business enterprise of any type operate exclusively on blockchain payments.

“He’s in jail eternally at minimum till we bust him out. So, I want to go talk to him and enable him know that he’s not neglected about,” Voorhees suggests.

But if all this helps make you believe Voorhees has a bit of a fetish for oppression, he pushes back against the declare. A reasonably new father, he suggests he’s eager to stay away from a related destiny.

“I don’t want to close up in a cell,” he provides.

It can be the to start with of several statements in which Voorhees appears to see himself as another person sure to his beliefs, at once optimistic they will be vindicated, but also ready to settle for the final result of their adherence.

Imply and horrible

On windswept streets, this predilection is on display screen yet again as Voorhees commences tearing into the meat of the matter we have been dancing all-around, his position in the business in 2017, one particular that was generally (publicly at minimum) outlined by his assist for failed bitcoin scaling proposals.

Like several other business people, he signed a assertion of assist for the Segwit2x software improve that would have altered bitcoin’s code to boost its block size parameter. The backlash was shift, and without wide assist, several CEOs pulled out over buyer grievances and normal in-fighting.

On the matter of how he emerged from that nevertheless highly regarded – if voting on our ‘Most Influential’ poll is any indicator – it truly is very clear he’s a bit bitter about the insinuation at all, contacting it “absolutely absurd.”

“What was most tragic about the calendar year was that all these people who have been on the identical aspect and they concur on 99 % of points became not just opponents in a debate, but like vitriolic hating enemies of each individual other,” he argues.

Seeking back, he’s sympathetic to his friends, like early trader Roger Ver, who have mostly borne the brunt of fierce internet trolling. To Voorhees, it truly is an illustration of how “mean and horrible” the debate bought over what he thinks was a well-intentioned, and in the long run important, transform.

Voorhees, like Ver, maintains his placement that bitcoin’s 1 MB block size needs to be elevated for the software to succeed, and he remains taken aback by ideas that the events served as a referendum that discovered developers staking a distinct path ahead.

Asked to retort common criticisms of the Segwit2x proposal, Voorhees is brief to tear down arguments that have seemingly grow to be accepted mantra.

“Are you saying bitcoin was not supposed to be utilized as a peer-to-peer cash program? It can be the sub-title of the white paper,” he suggests sarcastically.

However, he does appear to refuse what appears to be the mainstream consensus, that bitcoin is now an asset much more akin to a electronic gold. To Voorhees, bitcoin can’t just be an asset class, or even a store of benefit, since it truly is primary utility is just not to be held, but to be spent.

“I’ve by no means baffled price tag and utility. The only motive that the price tag need to increase is if much more people are acquiring it practical,” he suggests. “Keeping is a derivative use case, it only applies extensive expression if you will find some thing else the factor is practical for. In this case it was benefit transfer.”

Sly fox

From there, the issue is pressured even more, to the place in which it truly is maybe far too onerous to condition the quantity of conditionals I use to prod at his preconceptions. But to this barrage, Voorhees holds the line, and over the study course of the dialogue, his positions grow to be a bit much more outlined.

He thinks bitcoin are not able to succeed as just a store of benefit (and that greater scaling is essential), that the growing tide of competing cryptocurrencies is just not probably to be overwhelmed back (by any bitcoin advance) and that, this aside, bitcoin remains truly worth fighting for as it truly is the ideal probability for the cryptocurrency notion to be certainly understood.

It can be maybe this past purpose that appears to most encourage Voorhees and his continued visibility in bitcoin, in spite of ShapeShift’s embrace of a much more realistic product that focuses on several protocols.

In fact, if Voorhees proves absolutely nothing else in discussion, it truly is that he’s maybe uniquely in a position to see both equally idealism and practicality as two independent suggestions to be embraced.

Time just after time, he defends the strategy that “magic internet revenue” can’t be silly or arbitrary, no make a difference how several there are, going so far as to struggle against the strategy that cryptocurrencies only have benefit when measured against a fiat currency.

“If it was not, why would anyone be fascinated in it? Other than some cryptographers,” he suggests.

But he remains devoted to bitcoin since he wants to see the earth cryptocurrency unleashes quicker than afterwards.

“The issue is that of all the work and effort going to build bitcoin today, if it gets surpassed or wrecked, it delays the full task,” he suggests.

The hanging wire

This mental recreation of fox and the hound now over, we retreat back to ShapeShift’s workplaces, both equally maybe not sure of what to make of the discussion.

Somewhere at a coffee store, we determine on a title for the dialogue – “The philosophy of transform as it relates to bitcoin and cryptocurrency” –and before long just after contact it a attract. While, you will find a sense of disorientation that remains.

Seeking at a twin pair of fox paintings on the wall, my perceptions blurs. Made of a million black and blue brushstrokes, I recall you will find no these factor as colour at all. The photos I am observing usually are not even proper aspect up, they appear to say.

Voorhees stops to correct the photo.

A minimal to the proper, a minimal to the still left.

“It might just be the wire,” he suggests at past.

Do I see what he sees? I linger on the way out, stepping back, altering viewpoint, seeking at the images from distinct angles. Stepping into the elevator, I solve that if they’re off, I can’t explain to.

But it truly is a testament to Voorhees that I really feel like they need to be.

Want much more? Listen to Erik Voorhees talk about his philosophy toward electronic belongings.

Authentic artwork by Luis Buenaventura II, creator of the CryptoPop web site. Click below to check out much more by the artist, and to examine out the official CoinDesk Most Influential T-shirt.

Video by Ali Powell at 40 Intruders Films 

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[bligh-lynch]

And It Came To Pass In Those Days

December 23d, 1996, Lynch Mountain, Tempest, West Virginia For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. _________ Carl Sagan, Contact           Throughout his life, Pappy was known by many names, but it was one Christmas Eve that he truly felt he earned the only one that really counted.

           He began as Gustavus Simeon Lynch, but was very soon Gus. His birthname was too grandiose an appellation – it was given to him in gratitude by his father, Simeon, for Gustavus Olafsen, a Minnesotan of Swedish extraction who saved Simeon's life from the debacle onboard the USS San Diego during the Great War. But it proved too highfalutin for the boy who grew into a man.            That boy, Gus, was too often a cutup who disobeyed his Pa and had his hide tanned more times than he could count. He and his delinquent older cousin, Allen, would get drunk on badly-made shine out in the woods – they would play music together under the white oak on the other slope of the low mountain that belonged to their family, and Allen would tell him, hitting his fiddle with his bow gently to make a singular dulcet tone, Gus strumming his banjo to accompany, the old family legend that their ancestor, Patrick Lynch, had planted the great druid as but an acorn to mark his property when he came over from Ireland. Twice, Allen had kissed him passionately when they were both drunk – love, love, careless love – as Sodomites would, making him promise to never tell a soul, and though later in life Gus became concerned with both drink and sin, when he remembered those Summer afternoons underneath the mighty boughs of his family oak with his cousin, his first friend, his first love, all he could do was blush, and sigh, sad for bygone days.            Years later, Gus heard that Allen, who married a girl he didn't love and fathered a child who grew up in the family as Cousin Bobby he didn't want, ended up going crazy and ripping out his own teeth, an eerie repeat of Gus' own father losing his teeth at a young age also.            Hoping to be better than a backwoods moonshiner who did furtive and sinful things, the boy, Gus, became a man, with a new name to match: Private First Class Gus S. Lynch, Company E, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division. He and his boyhood friend from Quinwood, Ralph Pomeroy, were shipped off during the Korean Conflict, where they stuck together because their fellows mocked their thick accents and yokel way, slights that he, Gus, never forgot or forgave. But, soon enough, there was that hopeless situation at a place that history would remember as Triangle Hill – Gus was one of the key witnesses to Ralph Pomeroy's dauntless actions that led his friend to be awarded, posthumously, the Medal of Honor.            Then and there – seeing Ralph E. Pomeroy dedicate himself to something so completely larger than himself – Gus determined that he, too, would dedicate himself to something, and he fell on his knees, beseeching the sky above him, to say that he would devote his life to God.            Soon, though he wouldn't care much for it, he became Private First Class Gus S. Lynch, Silver Star Medal, but he scarcely remembered those awful October days in 1952 – his bright blue eyes, remarked on by his superior officers, always blurred by the tears as only men put through fire can understand, and blinded by fire and dust and smoke…as though possessed, he dragged what injured he could, the same men who mocked him for being a hillbilly and who would pointedly ask if he was born in a coalmine or if he wore shoes but whom he swore to protect nonetheless, back to the medic tent.            There were gruesome spectacles that would make any man doubt the sanity of the world, and still a lesser man repulsed by humans for the rest of his life, but Gus was swallowed in humility by his friend's actions and he wanted to somehow be brave himself – not for himself, but for the spirit he saw Ralph Pomeroy summon.            And for these courageous actions – that he never, not once, felt courageous for – he had a Silver Star pinned to his breast by General van Fleet.            When he returned home, honorably discharged back to West Virginia and back to the mountains, he wanted to make good on the promise he had made to the Almighty for saving him in Korea, and so he took the G.I. Bill money and crossed the border to Virginia to attend Bluefield College, where he read the Theology he would need to preach the Good Word and save souls for the Lord.            In time he graduated, and he took still yet another name: Reverend Gus Lynch – he grew the thick, handsome chinstrap beard he would wear for the rest of his life, and, taking inspiration from the travelling preachers that comprised many of his proud ancestors, he rambled up and down the Appalachians in his big white Surburban praising Jesus and baptizing the anointed, down to the river to pray to study on that Good Old Way.            Two fateful things happened as he journeyed from place to place, filling the spiritual needs of the wayward.            The first was in Pennsylvania and not too long after New York, because they happened so close together. There, the people gave him names too, but this time they were bigoted slurs: redneck and hillbilly and inbred, they mocked his accent and his manners and his earnestness, so that Gus found himself rather like Jonah, wishing that these Yankees, like Nineveh, would perish rather than find salvation. He never forgot how those prejudiced Northerners treated him, treated him different, simply because of who he was and where he was born – he had met kind Negros, strong in the Lord and the love of their families, down in the Carolinas, and he knew they had it far worse than he did, but that made him all the more bitter, how man could treat his fellow man, regardless of how he spoke the English tongue, or even the color of his own skin.            This led to the second event: one night at a revival in Summersville, having returned to West Virginia feeling he should go back to put down roots in Tempest – soured forever on the idea of rambling after his experiences up North – he met a beautiful little slip of a girl, dark-headed with soft grey eyes, who had a ready and sarcastic wit.            Her name was Iris – Iris Jones, whose family name had been something else afore her great-granddaddy had renamed them from an unpronounceable jumble of Cumbrian letters for a tiny coal town in McDowell County where the family had all settled many, many years ago.            She was the prettiest thing in the room, with the purple-and-gold silk corsage she wore of her namesake, an iris…Gus' eyes followed her everywhere, finally, he got up the nerve, and he asked her to dance, and soon they got to talking.            "Ye were in Korea?" asked she.

           "I were," answered he. "Served with Ralph Pomeroy."

           "Oh my, he was a hero."

           "He was."

           "If the army had more Pomeroys we'd've won that war."

           Gus' expression turned serious. "We did have an army of Pomeroys – but y'only hear bout the famous ones."

           "What a sad thing ta say – are ye a sad man, Mr. Lynch?"

           "When the occasion calls fer it, my dear."

           "My dear?" She gasped, pretending to be offended. "How forward!"

           "Well then what would ya like me to call ye?" He gave that famous smirk, a crooked half-smile that many people knew him by. "My doe?"            She burst out laughing. "Sly, too! My word, I can scarcely tell what kind o'man y'are – are y'always like this, Mr. Lynch? A man of God but a mystery ta women?"

           "When the occasion calls fer it—" The smirk grew. "My dear."            It was mid-December and the stars outside shone diamondiferous to join with the lavender half-moonlit snow – the congregation gathered together before they dispersed to sing one more hymn:            Go! Tell it on the mountain!            Our Jesus Christ is born!            And as they stood together to sing, Iris put her hand in his.            They took to courting, and soon were married, a fairytale, and they gave each other twenty-four of the happiest years of each others' life – they moved back together to Tempest where Gus became senior pastor of Living Hope Baptist Church.            But it did not begin auspiciously.            When Gus passed his thirty-fifth year, he was beset with toothaches that would not go away, wracked with pain that no medication or herbs would seem to salve. This went on for a week straight, until – one night – and to his horror, he found his eyeteeth, both of them, were being pushed out by something new in their place…when Iris came into their bedroom she flung her hands to her mouth as he turned to her so that she could see: for in his mouth were two, long, sharpened, canine ­fangs.            Gus had always been aware of the morbid stories, the haints and the phantom creatures and the deep, shadowy weirdness that crawled all over Tempest, all over Adkins County – there were family legends for nearly each of the little clans that called this obscure corner of the Greenbrier Valley home, the Barnes and the Lightfoots and his own family, the Lynches…but he never thought that he would be privy, let alone part, of his own ghost story, his own monster-tale.            Now he understood – now he understood the story about Cousin Allen, ripped out his own teeth and had taken to the drink too hard and died pitifully young…now he understood why his own father had a set of ivory chompers rather than what God gave him.            Some malign ancestral curse had curdled in his blood and manifested itself as a hideous mutation of the mouth, something that made him look for all the world like a creature of the woods more than what he was – a man adapted for hunting and timber and subsistence living now reabsorbed by the forest he so loved to be a haint, a creature, bewitched and obscene to the world of men.            At first Iris tried to help by filing his new additions down, blunting them so people would not notice – but horrible to relate, night after night, the things grew back, sharpened themselves to points as a form of growth. Several times they tried this, panicked husband and supportive wife – several times they were thwarted, right back to where they were.            Desperate, and without recourse, they did, together, the only thing they thought left – even though he had not drank in years, Gus procured some fine whiskey from his friend, Ironside Lightfoot, guzzled it down until he was three sheets in the wind, and instructed his wife to take a wrench and do the unthinkable.            When she was done, the teeth kept in a small box under his bed to remind him that this was not some kind of hideous vision sent to him from a Hellish delirium, near-feverish with pain and drink, and his mouth full of bloody cotton gauze, he looked on his wife with tears streaming forth from those uniquely blue eyes, begging her to forgive him for whatever sin he had done that had led him to be changed, however momentarily, into a monster.            "Oh Iris – woman – what ye must think o'me – what kinda man I am—"            "Gustavus Lynch," Iris answered without hesitation, "I know exactly what kinda man y'are."            "N'what—" he was scared to finish the question. "What kinda man that be?"            She said nothing – she just hugged him tight, and reached for his hand, taking it and squeezing it close to her own heart.            They passed this crisis together as husband and wife, and with new teeth, dentures, procured from a dentist down in Roanoke, their life resumed its sunny way.            Never did they talk about it, not once, even when Gus was troubled, year after year on the same day ever since, by quare visions of icy blue streams deep underground…when he would awake, dazed and vulnerable in the dead of night when nightmares seem realest, he would feel for his wife's hand, grasping her fingers into his own to feel grounded and unfraid once again.            When they built their big house on Simeon Lynch's ancestral lands, on the day they knew their hard work was finished, she put her hand in his and squeezed it – when it became apparent she was with child, and told him the news, she took both of his hands and brought them to her belly… when she was in labor and he prayed over her, his heart full of joy and fear, she squeezed his hand again, as hard as she could – when the infant boy, who they named Gustavus after his father and so went through life as Junior, reached manhood and brought home a kind, mousey girl from Wetzel County to introduce as his fiancée, she squeezed his hand once more. They were blessed to have lived so full and fruitful, all those years together.            But it all did not last.            After, soon after, Iris contracted cancer of the breast, and she fell very ill very suddenly, she wasted away and was in great pain, such that there was nothing the doctors in Charleston could do.            On her deathbed, she put her hand in Gus' one last time, and she said to him: "Oh, I finally know what kinda man y'are, Mr. Lynch."            And with his eyes once again blurred with tears as they had been all those years ago in Korea, Gus answered: "N'what kinda man that be – Ms. McComas?"            "Why – yer the man who loves me…"            Then her hand slackened, it fell away – Gus' hand was empty, and she was gone.            Gus knew he would never get over her and indeed he never did, and for years after would regard the day of her death – a clear, azure-skied day in October – as little short of cursed. Every year on her birthday, on the anniversary of their marriage, and to commemorate the day she died, he would pace up the side of his mountain and lay by her graveside, with space for him to be buried beside her when his time came, a bundle of her namesake, amethyst and gold ­­– iris.            One night, a year or two after her passing, driving back to the house that he and Iris had built and which now stood lonely and empty without her in it, Gus parked his Jeep that he had gotten by trading in his old Suburban on the side of a dirt road – he got out, and took a look, on a whim, above him, to the Winter stars.            He had wrestled and grappled with the questions – theologically, spiritually, even psychologically – and still he had come up empty, empty as the indigo spans that one would have to traverse to get from star to star, how to properly mourn, how to properly grieve.            And then he knew.            He just – knew, somehow, a revelation, an epiphany, that she was up there…he knew, somehow, that in the crystalline twinkling of the stars, the same stars that twinkled just the same way the night they met, that she was watching.            And – that she would not want him to be like this, not after all this time, all this wasted energy trying and wishing and praying for things that could no longer be.            So he got back in his car, laid across the steering wheel and wept, one last time, and he let the heavens have her, let her watch over him and never let him go.            Even after this the grief he felt never went away, but it was eased some after Junior had his own son, Gus' grandson, born en caul and destined for either second-sight or greatness or both, named Bligh after a distant patrilineal descendant – he had been too afraid to ask his son about his teeth, if it what happened to Gus had happened to Junior, but he was told by Susan Anne he had needed dentistry to fix some kind of abnormal growth…and knew the unspoken truth.            Too soon, tragedy roared back into his life, another October day, this time grey and rainy, when Junior and his wife, Susan Anne, died in a car crash – Junior's Eldorado had careened off a sharp turn, killing them both, with little Bligh Allen, who had just turned five, miraculously surviving in the backseat.            It was all, all enough for Gus to invoke old Job, and to have his faith, so sure even before his conversion all those years ago, shook so hard he wondered if Hell could hear it: why, why after so many years of faithful service, would God curse him so? Was it not enough to rob from his beloved, for whose touch he pined every day for the rest of his life – now his son, now his daughter-in-law too?            And if I am a Christian,

           I am the least of all—            But this was how Gus would soon become Pappy, the name that stuck at first as a tease and thereafter as how he would be known forever after, even amongst folk in Tempest outside of his own family. his grandson Bligh, started calling him that.            Bligh had always been a strange child – the circumstances of his birth alone were the subject of some comment, not just en caul but having to be delivered in Barnes' veterinary office because of a great and terrible storm that at last blew down that old druid that Gus and Allen would play music under, but this was joined with his oddly quiet nature, as though observing everything around him in a troublingly mature kind of way. He did not speak as other children did – when Archie Lightfoot, the latest scion of that storied family which antedated Gus' own and the son of Gus' friend Ironside had his own son, Andrew, he was, by contrast, a bright and happy child, a chatterbox whose constant babbles exasperated his father…yet Bligh remained uncomfortably quiet.            Then, one day, Junior, passing the peculiar newcomer to Gus to hold, murmured in babytalk: "Go see ya Pappy, go see ya Pappy now—" And Bligh burst out, his first words, when he was safe in Gus' arms: "Pa-pee! Pa-pee!"            Junior was dumbstruck – but Gus, Pappy, was transported with happiness.            He had been his grandson's first word.            But…when Bligh came to live with Gus after his parents died, he did not like it, and made it a point, in his own sullen preschool-age way, to let Gus know he did not like him, throwing monstrous tantrums – howling like a wolf, which Gus would shake his head the hardest at – throwing his toys, refusing to come out of his new room in Gus' house, except to hastily eat and then steal back upstairs. It was bad enough that because of this withdrawn, traumatized behavior at school it was recommended he'd be held back a year, but really it seemed like there was no way, no way at all, for Gus to get through to his grandson, damaged in his young existence by being robbed of his parents.            Weeks turned into months – Gus tried to cope the best he could, Christmastide drew nearer and he did his yearly rituals, cleaning for Baby Jesus' birthday and putting up a fresh, fragrant pine for a Christmas tree, all while his grandson remained dangerously introverted and reclusive.            And then, finally, it occurred to Gus – what had happened to him nearly a decade before, ruminating on how Iris was gone, and what Iris would have wanted, and where Iris still was.            Little Bligh would have to somehow see the same thing.            So, carrying that little hope in his heart that he could fix things that shone distant but clear like the Star of Bethlehem, with the memory of Pappy as the boy's first word, on the eve of Christmas Eve, Gus came into the boy's room, and instructed him in a firm voice to get on something warm, they were going to go outside.            It took some doing – thrice more did he have to be told, and the last time in a loud clear voice that was almost a threat – but eventually little Bligh tumbled down the steps and, his grandfather putting a guiding hand on the small of his back, they came outside. Gus made sure that Bligh followed every step he took, so that he would not get lost – eventually they came down the mountain, a gentle slope that was easy to traverse up and down, and arrived just where Gus needed them to be.            The night was a masterpiece of Appalachian Winter – silent, neither sound nor movement, with a light snow dusting the ground that made a faint crunch beneath the feet. The cold was not biting or unpleasant as there was no wind, so that there was only the rejuvenating crispness that enlivened the nerves and thickened the blood.            They came to a great, ruined, rotting tree – the big druid that his ancestor had planted, where Gus and his cousin would play music together, and where Gus had his first kiss, all those wistful bygone years before.            Gus gently took his grandson's wrist.            "Ya seen this tree here, boy?"            Bligh shook his head – Gus let go, kneeling to his level, pointing.            "This tree here fell the day ye's born…n'yer great-great—" He paused, tittering to himself. "Well let's say a feller ye n'me's both related ta, waaay back when – he planted it!"            A spark of something like recognition seemed to wash away the sulky stubbornness that had possessed the boy's face lo these many weeks.            "Someone – we related ta?" Bligh asked, his voice quiet to match the night.            "S'right," Gus affirmed with a grin. "Our ancestor – our family been here a long, long time, understand."            Bligh nodded, slowly, as though absorbing what his grandfather was telling him.            "I want ya ta see sumthin else, too—"            Using his boot, Pappy kicked part of the hollowed-out trunk of the old druid-tree hard – there, on the inside, as a cluster of phosphorescent vegetation, an unexpected symphony of fulgently radiant light hiding in the tiny cavern of the oaken log.            Bligh recoiled – he had never seen anything like it before in his life.            "Wha – wha?!"            "Walk while ye have the light," Gus pronounced resolutely. "Lest darkness come upon ye – see that there glow?"            Bligh nodded, his eyes wide with amazement.            "That there's foxfire – it shines right here on the Earth sometimes – like the stars shine up in Heaven?"            "H-Heaven?" Bligh asked, his voice suddenly hushed. "Like – where Ma and Pa live now?"            Now it was Gus' turn to nod. "Yes, boy – yes indeed." He swept up his grandson to lift him up so that he could see the stars shining – Heaven – above them.            As he held Bligh up and then set him on his shoulders, he called out in his loud, clear voice that he used at Living Hope:

           "Consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the Moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained!"

           Right as Bligh grabbed hold of Pappy's head to balance, and just Pappy had finished – he sucked in an amazed breath.

           Of course he had seen the stars, and of course he had asked about them, but he had never – so like a little boy – understood, in focus, what infinity meant, what the constellations and asterisms and shapes of the heavens meant, what lay beyond the playroom and the kitchen and the trees and the backyard. 

           And it was the words of King James that made him understand – the Word of the Lord that Pappy knew and practiced and had a bon mot for, sometimes clever and sometimes poignant, since that terrible day in that faraway place of Korea when he had devoted his life to the Good News.

           Bligh's eyes beheld the stars not for the first time, but for the first time that really mattered.            "Them stars up ere, boy – lookin down on us – there's ya Ma n'Pa, up ere – there's ya Grandmamma Iris, who ye never met, but who – who woulda loved ye all the same…"            "They – up there?"            "That's right boy – all of em, watchin over us."            And then grandson murmured the first true words of coherence in months:            "Pappy – I wish they wudn't up yonder – I wish they were here."            "Well me too, boy – me too." He sighed, swallowing back a wave of emotion that came with the words. "But we down here, for the time bein – n'we gotta make the best o'what the Lord God gives us." He took a hand to reach up and stroke his grandson's cheek. "So happens – the Lord God gave me a little boy – a little boy named Bligh."

           A long silence followed, which Gus gently broke:            "Just like em stars bove us shine, boy – n'like the foxfire aneath the log – I'll always shine fer ye. They watch over us up ere – but down here—" He let himself grin, for the first time in he couldn't remember approaching something like inner peace. "Down here – ain't nuthin gonna happen ta ye, long as I'm around – ain't nuthin ever gonna happen ta the boy the Good Lord gave me."

           The Winter skies of West Virginia provide intangible proof in their starry voids of the ancient and the impossible, so that on a clear brumal evening, with one's head tilted up to behold cold Orion in the frigid air that turns the breath into the steamy vocabulary of Fafnir, it seems perfectly feasible that – on a night just like this – the Virgin Mary had a baby boy.

           Go! Tell it on the mountain! O'er the hills and ev-ry-where!

           And there was time enough for Lovecraft's mad spaces, and there was time yet still for Tyson's patient navigations, because there was time enough for little Bligh, already an orphan and doomed to a life against the grains of modernity, to understand the cruelty and the meanness of existence – but now he was wonderstruck, starstruck, at the cosmos that swirled above him in chilled clarity, the very Universe that Pappy's god in wisdom untold had designed and made, and so could he understand that this same cruel, mean place was also, at the very same time, full of kindness and love.            "Pappy?" he heard his grandson whisper.            "Yeah boy?"            "I'm – I – I'm sorry…"

            Now Gus – Pappy – felt that the wall that needed to come down had come down, now he knew that he could raise his grandchild and shelter him and protect him and guide him into manhood and carry on the Lynch name with honor and with pride and respect.

           Now – now Pappy lowered him down so that they were face to face, so that their identical eyes, gelid, frozen-over, but warm in this and all the Winters they would share together, now met.

           He pointed, down the mountain slope, the trees that twinkled with ice, and he whispered: "G'out with joy." He grinned an encouraging, knowing smile. "Be led forth with peace – the mountains –n'the hills shall break forth before ye into singin, and all the trees o'the field shall clap their hands…"

           He hugged his little grandson so tight he knew he would never forget.

           And right then, right that very second – everything was worth it.

           There had been a road here, there had been a journey undertaken, ever since Iris had blushed to see him watching her across the room at that little church in Summersville – ever since he had clutched Ralph's body in Korea and begged for him, screaming, to get up, to wake up – ever since he would join his cousin's melody on the banjo on those fine Summer days.

           They were all gone…but Bligh, his grandson, his blood, his flesh, his true legacy, was here.

           And of all the names, all the titles, all the ways he was or would be looked at – none of them would ever matter as much as the one that this serious, black-haired boy would foist upon him:

           "Pappy," little Bligh said again, and his eyes glimmered and became overfull with tears.

           Gus – Gustavus, Pappy – grinned at him, a full and proud smile, and kissed him gently on the cheek.

           "S'right boy," he whispered, but loud enough that the silent night of the approaching Christmas Eve allowed it to echo across time, space – and names. "I'm yer Pappy."