#we had to read the crucible as well but i read that last month so we're all good with rhat one

[mintypsii]

hate being told to do things id normally enjoy because this summer i was supposed to read a book for honors english and since school's opening in a week i decided to open it up and get it done with. i opened it to the first page, read a bit, and it made me so sleepy that it was the first time this entire summer that i fell asleep at a reasonable time (before midnight) (at 8 pm)

[bagog]

N7 Month, 2023 - Day 30: Last Stand

It's been real fun everybody, thanks for reading, and let me know what your favorites were!

Mshenko museum piece for the finale.

++

By mid-morning, the Alliance Military History museum was as busy as it was going to get for the day. Shepard and Kaidan, both clad in non-descript hoodies, dark glasses over their eyes, had been slowly making their way around the Shepard exhibit in the Reaper War wing of the museum. They’d avoided one exhibit in particular so far, but at last they had worked their way all the way around and only had one thing left.

There was an eye-catching sign that read ‘Last Stand’ and on a smaller sign below: “Experience the final three minutes of the Reaper war with Commander Shepard.” There were two entrances spaced wide apart, but it was clear that one was an entrance and the other an exit from the ‘Last Stand’ experience. Above the entrance was a bold ’21:13:43’ and above the exit was ’21:14:55.’ It evoked a popular symbol after the war had ended. A lot of people had a tattoo of the time—to the second—when the Crucible wave hit where they were hiding or fighting. The second the war ended.

“We don’t have to do this one,” Kaidan said, glancing at Shepard over the rim of his glasses.

“We’ve seen everything else.” Shepard’s brow was furrowed, “Might as well top-off the experience.” He turned and gave Kaidan a reassuring smile.

“I’m just saying,” Kaidan shrugged, “There’s not any three minutes of London that I’d like to relive, much less whatever three minutes they’ve picked out here.”

“What do you mean?”

“’21:13:43,’” Kaidan pointed to the exit, “That’s not London Local Time for the wave. It’s a good twelve minutes earlier.”

“Oh, Shepard nodded slowly, “the run-up to the transport beam.”

“Definitely not a moment I’d like to remember,” Kaidan said carefully, checking Shepard’s expression. Shepard had an excuse if he wanted it.

“Let’s have a look.” Shepard took a quick breath, then offered Kaidan a smile. Their audio queued when they cross the entrance threshold.

“These are some of the final moments of the Reaper War, and three minutes that would determine the fate of the galaxy. Constructed with data directly taken from a FOB monitoring Shepard’s position.”  

The audio continued to set the scene: Hammer Squad, Thannix Missiles, heroic names—Shepard nudged Kaidan when ‘Spectre Kaidan Alenko’ was mentioned—and the transport conduit. The exhibit itself was a dark tunnel, on either side a gigantic holographic layout of the broken London street that served as the run-up to the transport conduit. The conduit was represented by a holo near the exit, and where Shepard and Kaidan entered represented 550 meters south: where Hammer Team made their final charge. The audio would trip at key moments as patrons made their way through the hall. By this time, there was another group just ahead of them, but it was dark enough where they felt comfortable taking off the sunglasses.

Shepard was represented on the holo by a yellow ball with a pinging halo emitting from it. As they approached, it began to move toward the transport beam, dodging blasts and avoiding rubble the holo hadn’t rendered, resulting in a somewhat comical display. The audio was aware:

“Forty-five seconds. Commander Shepard runs straight at the beam, or as straight as the situation allowed. Harbinger began repelling the advancing forces, indiscriminately targeting both individual soldiers on the ground and also the ground and air vehicles. You can see Shepard zig-zagging back and forth, likely avoiding rubble or attempting to make himself a more difficult target.”

“Why do you think it’s only me up there? They should have data for every marine out there that day?”

“It’s your exhibit,” Kaidan offered lamely. “Plus, I don’t think seeing all those little… flickering lights go out would be a very stirring exhibit.” Shepard nodded gravely.

The yellow ball raced down the hill in real time, and after forty five seconds, stopped abruptly. It then went backwards.

“Forty-two seconds. That’s how long it took Shepard to call down the SSV Normandy and evacuate a number of marines wounded in the battle. You can see him take up a defensive position behind cover, then race forward—possibly supporting the weight of another wounded marine—when the Normandy arrives.”

Sure enough, the yellow ball ‘limped’ over to where a holographic Normandy had been generated. The ball stayed there, though, for another thirty seconds, nearly.

“Twenty-eight seconds. That’s how long Shepard lingered at the Normandy, likely ensuring as much time as possible for further evacuations. The Normandy’s cyber warfare suite was a surprise for Harbinger, and silenced, for a time, its blasts.”

They were catching up on the other group now, who were talking between themselves, bent over the holo with interest.

“Twenty-eight seconds,” one whispered to the other. “That’s forever in a battle like this, huh? Geez, makes you wonder what was going on.”

“Probably was just giving some orders or something,” said the other. “…I wonder if he thought about just… flying away?” They both chuckled, then grew quieter as they proceeded to hurry through the rest of the exhibit when Kaidan and Shepard got closer.

“I did,” Shepard whispered to Kaidan, pulling Kaidan’s hood just to the side so his lips could almost to the shell of Kaidan’s ear.

“Did what?” Kaidan turned. Shepard looked over his shoulder to see that the other patrons had drifted away.

“I did think about just getting on the Normandy, flying away,” he said, softly.

“No you didn’t,” Kaidan cracked a conspiratorial grin. “Not for long if at all, at any rate.”

“I did. I thought about leaving with you. Thought about it just long enough to make it hurt when I had to turn away.” Shepard touched Kaidan’s hand. “The exhibit doesn’t talk about it at all, but do you remember what you said during those ‘twenty-eight seconds?’”

Kaidan looked at Shepard warmly, looking through him, in some ways. “I, uh… I think I told you to let me finish the fight!” He laughed.

“You said ‘Don’t leave me behind,’” Shepard replied. He lifted Kaidan’s hand, softly ran his thumb over the man’s knuckles, his ring. “And I told you I loved you. And you said it back.”

“Yeah,” Kaidan said, voice thick. “Yeah I remember that.”

“It was the first time we’d said it to each other.” Shepard pointed at the yellow ball, lingering behind the Normandy hologram. “That’s what I remember about those twenty-eight seconds.”

“That’s sweet, Shepard,” Kaidan touched Shepard’s face, gave a little smile. “That little yellow dot is about to go through a whole lot of shit in the next 10 minutes.” Shepard nodded, aware even now of the various cybernetics implanted into his body after this battle. “I’m sorry you had to go through it alone.”

“You were waiting,” Shepard said, at last. “That’s what matters.” Kaidan looked over his shoulder once more before leaning in and kissing Shepard. Shepard leaned back with a wry smile, “I think I’ve had enough hero worship for one day, what do you say we get out of here?” Kaidan nodded and took his hand. They slipped their dark glasses on and strode out of the museum arm in arm.

[hildred-rex]

Hello, I love Hildred Castaigne! He’s such a fucked up unreliable narrator and he also reminds me so much of myself in middle school and I love him for it. What do you like about him?

First off, apologies for taking absolutely ages to answer this! Life happened and I promptly forgot tumblr existed for almost a month. Yay.

Anyhow, I think my love of Hildred is a combination of the factors you mentioned and the absolute state I got into shortly after I found The King in Yellow -- aaand here comes an essay. The last version of this got deleted, and apparently I've taken it upon myself to make its replacement even lengthier.

Hildred is a fascinating character to read and to write, and his opinions on things are (or would be) so different from mine that it's fun to try to puzzle them out. I keep a bevy of fictional characters that I can simulate reasonably well as a way to make myself consider how people get to opinions that differ from mine, and naturally he's among them.

Beyond that, I'm an absolute sucker for hints at a greater world, but only narrow viewpoints from which to try to figure out what's going on in that world.

The weird bits of The King in Yellow as a whole are superb at tantalizing you with smug allusions and tiny scraps of information about what, exactly, it is that the book is named for.

Is it a play? Is it an entity? What happened to the author? ...was the author Boris? (I don't think the author was Boris, but I won't lie that I've considered writing a fic where he was.)

I got hooked on Lovecraft for the same reason, and it's actually what put me on to Arthur Machen (favorite author) and The King in Yellow (favorite book).

Even with all that, I think my King in Yellow interest would have been a passing thing that returned occasionally, if it hadn't been the last thing I got into before my first set of high school final exams kicked my ass.

The tl;dr of freshman year is that I picked the wrong math class and it spent the semester wrecking my self-confidence (and my sleep schedule) before I finally managed to transfer to a better one. (Then I spent second semester picking myself back up.)

Hildred, notably, is self-confident to the point of it backfiring catastrophically on him. He absolutely should not have gloated to Louis, tactically speaking; in this essay I will-

Anyway. Stress is weird, so during finals season and its leadup I had quite a lot of unmarshalled energy that refused to work on what I actually needed it to do and that instead directed itself at my idle pokings at Hildred and his world.

Probably better than worrying about how my abysmal math grade was going to ruin my life.

It didn't, and I came out of the crucible with rather extensive additional worldbuilding. Since I essentially speedran getting invested in the project, I came away wanting to do more of it and... it just kind of stuck?

I mean, here we are several years later and my first impulse is still to name my tumblr blog for him. I've got a rough idea of his extended family back three generations. I have a design for that spring suit Hawberk had that was mentioned exactly once. I am the embodiment of

when it comes to this lol

_____

I couldn't find a good place to fit this in above, but Hildred was also the first time I encountered a story with an obviously intentional unreliable narrator after I'd encountered the term. Not sure how I missed it that long, lol. I spent probably half a decade looking askance at various authors and going "...do you know what you're writing there???"

I also couldn't integrate it anywhere, but I absolutely adore "The Mask." I have Thoughts on Chambers's ability to write romance more generally, the short version being that he writes Lovers™ and not characters and they're thus so wooden they're hard to read, but that he must have been in a position like the beginning of "The Mask" because holy god that is exactly how it feels.

[perianth-nixie]

Destiny 2 OC: Iberis-3 - Reference Sheet

Name: Iberis-3

Species: Exo

Sex: Male ♂

Height: 185cm /  6’1” ft

Ghost: Eva (She/Her)

Class: Warlock

Voidwalker (1st and prefferd one)

Stormcaller

Shadebinder

Broodweaver

White Light (his 'personal' subclass, only he can use this)

Nicknames:

Ibi

BeeBee

Bee

Other titles:

Hero of the Red War

Gardener

The Chosen One

(2nd) Young Wolf

Other

A love relationship with Shiro-4.

He lives among civilians.

Ikora's pupil.

More information about Iberis-3 under keep reading. I wrote a whole essay.

Short' History:

Iberis-3 is a young warlock, resurrected a few years before The Red War campaign. He was found somewhere in eastern Europe by his ghost, named much later Eva.

His 'young years' in the old Tower weren't positive. Iberis had problems with controlling his light to combat purposes, he wasn't good at the crucible and had personal problems understanding being a guardian, why him etc. There were also self-confidence issues. This annoyed his ghost so they argued a lot in Iberis early years. Eva was pissed off that he cannot be like others.

Iberis left the Tower after half a year. He didn't want to be a guardian/warlock. He didn't like his ghost. He was fed up with it all. After another argument, he parted ways with his ghost for several months. Eva stayed in the Tower with the other ghosts and the Speaker.

Iberis was homeless in the Last City for a while until he was hired by one of the civilians - Eddy. Not only that, Eddy allowed him to live with him and his family in his house for a while until Iberis became financially stable. Eddy did it because Ibeirs gave his missing dog back and saw that this exo had serious problems. For this reason, Iberis worked on the farm (not EZD farm, but in the Last City. People and guardians have to eat, k?). There started his fascination with plants and learning basics.

At this time he started getting dreams about Traveler which shows him how differently he can use his light, not-combat purposes. Iberis at this point began to understand that he could somehow control the growth of plants, but very poorly. Therefore, he began to learn the basics and requirements of plant cultivation.

Months passed. Iberis moved to a small apartment in a residential block but continued to work on a farm. He felt good in this place and made friends with other civilians. Iberis kept the fact that he was a warlock a secret because he didn't want anyone to know about it.

This time was important for him. He began to feel comfortable with who he is. I don’t mean the guard stuff but more his personality, what he likes etc. At The Farm, he met many friendly people. He didn’t feel like a total loser. I always thought that self-confidence is associated to accept who we are, well I wanted a small fragment of this in the story of Iberis. I cannot say Iberis-3 is always confident but his positive, calm thinking helps him with some problems.

Unlucky for him, his ghost again found him after this time. Ibeirs wasn't happy about it, he felt immediately as bad as in the Tower when he saw her again. He was 100% sure that she would try to make him come back which he didn't want to. His little life wasn't perfect but he feels much better than when he was the newbie guardian. To his surprise, however, Iberis's ghost didn't want to make him do it, but to talk to him. At this point, she also asked him not to call her Ghost but Eva.

Eva apologized to Ibeirs for her earlier behavior, constantly whining and scolding him for every little thing. She said she wants to stay with him no matter did he wants to be the guardian or not. Iberis reluctantly agreed to this. Luckily, he didn't regret it. Their relationship has changed dramatically to a more supportive one that finds a common understanding.

During the attack of the Red Legion, Eva convinced Iberis-3 to join other Guards to defend The Last City, but we all know how it ends. Iberis-3 saw the Hero of The Last City - Scilla-7 falling from the Red Legion’s battleship. She and her ghost didn’t survive that. They were dead. 

After losing the light he fled the city and the story is not different than the original story from the game: Helped at The Farm, his light back, helped the vanguards, and finally beats Ghaul. 

He hates when he’s called The Red War Hero because he thinks we would do nothing without the help of Zavala, Ikora, Cayde-6, Suraya, Eva and many other people. The Traveler beat Ghaul, NOT him. He just had more luck than skill. That he survived is a miracle, but you know - people don’t listen.

After The Red War, he was back to be Guardian. He still has problems at the Crucible, and still feels uncomfortable around Lord Shaxx but he's forgiving of himself - baby steps to be better. Meanwhile, Ikora helps him to better control his Voidwalker light which with her help Iberis-3 does very well, and makes quick progress in a short time. Nobody can be good at everything, right?

More of a story from a different time. It's too much, slr.

Personality:

Iberis-3 is a calm person who didn't like to show many emotions around other guardians, especially strangers-guardians. He still has trauma after his blueberry years. Iberis much easier gets in contact with civilians but still keeps his distance, and doesn't want to open for others easily.

But when he finally opens up after a long time or has a good reason, he's a nice and friendly person. He unexpectedly turns out to be a very warm person, full of understanding and not immediately judgmental. He is a passive observer. He is aware of what is going on around him, and associates with other guards/civilians but never makes contact when he doesn't have to. Usually his ghost Eva tells him what happens in the Tower cuz she's much more social than him.

Iberis is an introvert. Crowded and noisy places? Parties? Public events? No, thank you! If he doesn't have to be there, he 100% won't be there. He feels more comfortable in quiet and calm places where are not too many ppl.

Iberis is sarcastic and observant. He can also be brutally honest. He's not a fan of carefully choosing his words so as not to offend anyone.

However, in addition to these shortcomings, he also has a more witty, playful nature. He doesn't show it often unless he knows someone pretty well or if you are his ghost Eva.

Other Facts:

Iberis-3 name comes from the flowering plant Iberis sempervirens - Evergreen candytuft or Perennial candytuft, the flowers are white. He knows about this but doesn’t share this fact - candytuft doesn’t sound good for warlock.

On Earth, EDZ, somewhere around The Farm, Iberis has a greenhouse. He’s interested in flora, not only flowers but also fruits and vegetables. He doesn’t share this fact because he thinks that it wouldn’t be well received by other guards. (You, know many more dangerous, serious problems. Growing plants = wasting time).

Iberis-3 likes painting and drawing. He’s not good at this but makes him happy. Mostly he draws/paints plants ‘cuz he describes in this way unknown species from The Nessus or plants from The Earth about which he cannot find any information. 

Iberis-3 has an apartment at The Last City. (I always thought guardians live in the tower as roommates/alone or something like that). He wanted more privacy and to leave work really far away when he has a bit of free time.

Iberis has a cat. Her name is Trouble. She lived in his greenhouse in EDZ but later he took her to the city.

———————————————

Okay, that’s all from me for now.

[phoebe-delia]

Research for Fics

Thanks to the lovely @theonlywolfpants for the tag! I love this idea. CW: mention of poisoning/murder

this is me trying (12k)

Cars for Harry that would've been British and around at the time (2001); I settled on a 214 Rover Cabriolet, which they stopped making in 1996, but I think Harry could buy it used. Also, I like the design of the car for him; idk it just has a vibe.

I based the diner in the fic on a mix between a real diner I go to and a fast food place I worked at for a couple months a long time ago. I had to make sure that there were American-style diners in the UK. Also, I wanted to make a background for the diner, so I researched when the hamburger was invented/popularized/sold and stuff and wrote the backstory based on that.

The Briitish term for highway is "motorway"

This one I already knew but wanted a refresher on to make sure I was using the metaphor right: the concept of a crucible.

Whether or not it was a real thing for people to use saved up vacation time when they quit for it to count as their "two weeks notice."

Little Red (6.6k)

If you read this fic, HEED THE WARNINGS/TAGS and feel free to DM me about it if you're concerned. I had to do research about how long it takes for arsenic to kill someone.

The list of Death Eaters involved in each war and where they ended up

The Little Red Riding Hood fairytale

The healing properties of almond tea

A potter's field (no relation to Harry)

Holy Ground (4.9k)

I had to find out the location for MACUSA, and I consulted with my IRL best friend who lived in NYC about where Draco could feasibly live and work, and where he'd take Harry. I used only places I'd been to before in NYC but I haven't been there enough times to really know where stuff really is in relation to other things, so it was a lot of consulting with my friend and using Google Earth lol.

Infinity (2.7k)

Law of Conservation of Energy, and Newton's Laws of Motion.

More car research. I gave Harry a 1999 Audi 4. Also, I looked in the fic to see when I set the fic, and apparently, I have A Thing for setting my post-war (non-8th year) fics 3 years after the war.

put your lips close to mine, as long as they don't touch (1.6k)

So this is specifically for the sequel. I had to look up how long leather lasts, and if it can get wet. Apparently, it's not best for it to get wet, but because we have ✨magic✨ I had Harry cast preservation charms on the bracelet so it can get wet in the shower /in general and last as long as I want it to 😌.

Gaydars of the Lost Heart (Or: Draco Malfoy and the Costume of Doom) (721 words)

To this day, the best title I've ever come up with of any fic ever. I had to do research on Indiana Jones's outfit, as well as recognizable quotes/references I could make.

Oryx & Stag (680 words)

This is, I guess, more of a canon-type research thing. But I wanted to pick a Patronus for Draco that would be complementary to Harry's but not matching because I wanted to fuck around with Patronus theory. I also chose an Oryx for him because it's a really resilient animal.

Tagging anyone who hasn't done this yet and wants to! 💛💛

[thiswasinevitableid]

54. I’m not sure what you think I said, but you start calling me an asshole and whip a ruler at me and somehow, we both end up in detention

Indruck, sfw, please?

Here you go! Content note: spiders appear at one point.

I based some of this AU--namely the concept of the Crucible and how magic is channeled--on the Carry On series by Rainbow Rowell. And Duck is trans in this, because any good wizarding school is inclusive.

After three years at Amnesty Academy, Duck is used to the objects being magically propelled through the air. But a ruler zipping through the air and smacking the back of his head is a new, unpleasant experience.

He tracks it to two chairs to his left, the new third year with the silver hair. He hasn’t even been here a day, what the fuck the is his problem?

“Hey, what the hell man?”

“You know very well what.”

“Uh, no I don’t, and I don’t appreciate bein hit with a fuckin ruler!”

“The maybe think before you insult someone next time!”

“I didn’t fuckin insult you! I don’t even know your name!”

“Ahem.” Ned, their Charms professor, looks down at them reproachfully, “gentlemen, while I know the review of Zone of Truth is rather dull, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t entertain yourselves with mindless conflict.”

“Sorry, Ned.” Duck mumbles, sending his pencil shooting below desk level to whack the other guy in the leg at the exact same moment he whips his pen at Duck’s hand.

“OW!”

Ned sighs, “I hate to do this, but-”

------------------------------------------------

“Detention! Lovely, my first day here and I’m in trouble. Thank you so much, Duck Newton, for landing us here.”

“You started it!” He growls as they take their seats. God, he hopes this isn’t one of Woodbridge’s days.

“Huh, only two.” Mama wipes her boots on the mat, closes the door behind her, “Afternoon, Duck. And…”

“Indrid.” Says his nemesis, “It is nice to meet you Professor C-” he cocks his head, “you really prefer I call you ‘Mama?’”

“Yep. Never could get behind that more formal stuff. Let some of the first years call me ‘Ms. Mama’ if they really need to feel like they’re showin some deference.”

Mama is deputy Headmistress of Amnesty. The only reason she’s not fully in charge is that she’s not a witch and some families object to that. So The Quell technically runs the school while Mama does most of the actual day to day work. She also teaches a course of non-magic practical skills because, “some things you can’t magic your way out of. Like taxes.”

Duck loves her class and, while he doesn’t understand why someone would opt into this weirdness, he admires the guts it takes as a fifteen year old human to walk into a wizarding school and declare that there was plenty you could learn there even though you couldn’t so much as send a spark from your fingers.

As he and Indrid watch the clock tick down, Mama pulls a bag from her satchel. The contents are cookies, which she offers to each of them.

“Barclay tryin’ out new recipes?”

“Course he is. Kid is gonna be the best damn kitchen witch in the country by the time he graduates. Guess he’s plannin to spend the summer drivin around and learnin the food magic of different regions.” She smiles, “bet you’ll never guess who’s goin’ with him.”

“Joe?”

“Bingo. Apparently he wants to study niche cultural magic.”

Duck’s pretty sure there’s another motive; sharing a van bed with Barclay. It sounds fun, roving the country, discovering new places with someone handsome by your side.

All that’s by his side is a glower hiding behind red glasses.

“Mama? I, ah, would it be possible for me to leave five minutes early? I’m supposed to get my pairing from the Crucible tonight.”

The older woman looks between the two of them, “Better tell me how you landed here first. Ned just said it was an argument.”

“He threw a ruler at me outta nowhere.”

“It was not, you know what you said.”

“The last thing I said before you hit me was ‘“nah, man’ when Billy offered me a pizza roll from his lunch.”

Indrid goes still, “Oh. I, ah, I misheard you. I thought you said 'mothman.' I apologize. I ought to have given you the benefit of the doubt.”

He seems so suddenly downtrodden that Duck shrugs, “Yeah, you should have. But it ain’t the worst thing that’s happened to me here. Not by a long shot.”

“No kiddin” Mama leans back on the desk, “Two of you can go at five til.”

His evening turns uneventful after that; dinner, hanging out with Juno and Aubrey, half doing homework and half fucking around on his phone in his room (the agreement between the school and the government is that a long as the students don’t post vidoes of themselves doing sick stunts with magic, the government will ignore any explosions and/monsters in the vicinity of the school).

He’s never had a roommate; when the Crucible spat out his name in fire on his first day, there was no other name with it. Almost everyone else rooms in pairs or trios. So his belongings are strewn about the tiny cabin that makes up his home away from home. Which is why, when the door creaks open at ten p.m, he sits up and prepares to fire off a spell.

Indrid stands in the doorway, one bag over his shoulder and another in his hand. He looks tired.

“Hello, Duck. Ah, I guess that one is my bed, then.”

----------------------------------------------------------------

The class schedules for Amnesty are generated by the heart of the school itself. Indrid isn’t entirely sure what that means, but the heart must not be terribly creative. It stuck him in divination class. He’s been seeing the future since he was five, managing it with his drawings since he was eight. Even the professor has no idea what to do with him, since the images come in like a garbled T.V signal when he uses a crystal ball and the cup shattered when he tried to read tea leaves.

At least Barclay gave him a conciliatory caramel while they swept up the shards. It made him feel a bit better, though whether that’s due to enchantment or Barclay being exceedingly good at cooking is hard to say.

And now he has to go to “Magical Weaponry.” Magical Defense he understands; there are still lots of malicious forces out there, or even just everyday evils that it’s good to be able to ward against. Plus, Vincent is a good professor, enthusiastic and understanding.

Professor Minerva is just as enthusiastic but twice as loud. This is their first day in the actual gym, as opposed to at a blackboard, and his visions suggest it’s going to go poorly for him. As it should; he’s not a fighter, he’s a disaster.

At Amnesty, magic is channeled through objects. Most people use wands or their hands but some, like Aubrey, use jewelry (a necklace from her mother) or another accessory.

Duck Newton uses a sword. Or he’s trying to. The sword seems to be winning.

“Exert your will on him, Duck Newton, he answers to you!”

“I answeeer to only the capable.”

“Shut up, Beacon.” Duck adjusts his grasp, but nothing happens until he drops the sword and sends a spell through his fingers. The target explodes. Indrid suddenly feels a bit better about his own probable performance.

Duck notices him, indicates the practice area next to him is clear. While they started off poorly, his roommate is doing his best to demonstrate southern hospitality. He invites Indrid to eat with him, helps him when his visions offer no help in navigating the grounds, and even lent him a blue and green shirt (Amnesty's colors) for his first Spirit Day. Duck is the best thing to happen to him in his first month here.

By the time class is over, they have six broken targets, a shredded mat, and a knife that is now a very confused frog between them. They manage to laugh about it, even as Duck scoops up the amphibian and tucks him into his shirt pocket.

It’s then that Indrid realizes he has a crush.

--------------------------------------------------

“You comin to the game tonight?” Juno measures her sapling.

“Assumin nothin comes up and nobody’s tryin to kill me, you know I’ll be there.” He loves cheering Juno on during her soccer games (hey, not everything has to be magic based, even at a wizarding school).

“Drat.”

The hissed frustration draws his attention to the far end of the work table. Indrid is trying to coax his Venus Flytraps to perk up, but they remain brown and limp.

“Need some help?”

“Please, as you clearly know what you’re doing.” Indrid tilts his head towards the sapling pine tree Duck is working on. If he does his growing spells right, he’ll be able to take it home as a Christmas Tree during winter break.

“You tend to picture words or, uh,pictures when you do your spells?”

“Images work best. The trouble is that the futures sometimes make it difficult for me to picture a spell clearly.”

“What if I try describing how I’d see it and you picture what I say?”

“It’s worth a try.” Indrid closes his eyes.

“Okay. Think about the roots drawin water up from the soil, about the traps absorbin nutrients from prey. That brown is goin green as they do, they’re stems are growin stronger…” he grins as the plant turns bright green, it’s mouths open, “hey, ‘Drid, look”

“Oh!” Indrid flaps his hands, “it worked! Now I can keep them healthy and big andohno, nono not again.”

The table cracks and collapses as the plant turns gigantic, blocking out the light from the greenhouse roof.

“Holy fuck, that’s great!”

“Language, sport, but I agree.” Thacker, the head of the magical Horticulture classes, whistles as he looks the plant up and down, “this is mighty impressive Indrid. Wonder if we could use it on some pumpkins come fall…”

“I don’t recommend it, unless you want them to chase people.” Indrid points to one of the heads, which is swaying in the air and lowering closer to him. It snaps and he leaps back, falling to a pile of potting soil. Thacker raises his walking stick and the flytrap returns to its proper size.

Duck helps Indrid up, but his friend stays quiet through the end of class and on the walk back to their room.

“You know it ain’t anythin to be ashamed of, right?” Duck flips on the light, “we all fuck up spells now and then. Hell, Aubrey is on track to be the best spellcaster this school’s ever seen and she still has trouble.”

“But mine go haywire constantly” Indrid flops, dejected, onto his bed, “forget mastering my powers, I’ll be lucky if I graduate able to keep them in check. If I graduate at all.” His hand searches the bed blindly; Duck sets the weighted, plush bat into so Indrid can set it on his chest.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never lasted more than a year at a magical school. Or a non-magical one. I started at Mt Vernon when I was fifteen. Tried Deep Hollow and Shasta the year after that. I’m powerful but I can’t seem to channel it well, and three different schools decided I was more trouble than I was worth.”

“Bullshit.” Duck rests a hand on Indrid’s knee, “you’re strugglin with somethin; that means you need more help, not less. And if anyone gets it into their heads to kick you outta Amnesty, I’ll raise a goddamn ruckus.”

Indrid chuckles, quiet and disbelieving.

“I’m serious. You know Aubrey and them would side with me, and Joe knows school policy well enough he could probably find a reason why them tryin to get rid of you was against the rule.”

“Thank you.” Indrid’s smile is a rare flower, fragile and stunning.

“You want one of those calm-down caramels Barclay made?”

“Please.”

Duck grabs the box from the cabinet of their little kitchenette, then snags a Coke and a pineapple soda from the fridge. Indrid is no longer horizontal, is instead sitting with his back to the wall so Duck has space to join him.

Under the fizz of fresh bubbles, his friend murmurs, ‘“Have people really tried to kill you?”

“Yep. Someone sent an assassin after me my first year, and there was a Dire wolf on the grounds last winter that was clearly locked on to my scent. Perk of bein a Chosen One.” He grumbles as he swigs his drink.

“...Who on earth sends an assassin after a fifteen year old?”

“Right?! Fuck if I know, they never got any information out of the guy. Fuckin prophecy I swear, I didn’t even want these powers, let alone to be some kind of hero.”

“I sympathize.” Indrid rests his head on Duck’s shoulder, “there are prophecies around my birth as well.”

Duck clunks their bottles together, “To bein’ fucked over by stuff we can’t control.”

Indrid drains his soda, then perks up, “Oh! Oh dear, you should go if you want to be there for Juno’s match.”

“Come with me?” Duck can’t get the image of the two of them sharing a giant pretzel while smushed thigh to thigh on the bleachers out of his head.

His friend grins, “Of course.”

-----------------------------------------------------

Duck hoped, after his not-great time in middle school, that a magic academy would be asshole free. But no, there are assholes everywhere, and these ones have even more tools for tormenting their targets. He’s never been one, nor have any of his friends. The one time someone tried to bully Barclay, Dani sicked three spectral hummingbirds on them until they apologized.

Indrid, odd and new, is an easy target, though he seems to hold his own just fine (and his proximity to the most powerful witch in school does scare off many potential antagonists). But three guys in their Magical Defense class have zeroed in on him.

They’re standing in line to practice against an evil eye when Indrid’s glasses, the ones he doesn’t take off even when he sleeps, hit the floor by Duck’s feet. Duck scrambles to grab them before they get stepped on, wondering why everyone is making such a fuss. Then he turns and backs up in alarm.

An eight foot tall moth creature is where Indrid should be, red eyes wide and claws clicking together anxious.

“Who let that thing in here?” Someone yells from behind him.

Indrid’s antenna flatten.

“Fuck, wasn’t expecting him to be that big a freak” one of the bullies scoffs.

Black wings twitch.

“Newton, give him the glasses back so we don’t have to look at him!”

Indrid trills, upset, and leaps into the air at the same moment Aubrey yells, “that’s enough” and Vincent shouts a reminder about no flames in enclosed spaces and also detention for you three. Duck is to busy climbing out the window Indrid flew through to pick up the details.

One two-story fall later, he’s chasing a dark shape into the Monongahela forest. While the parts of the woods near his hometown of Kepler are non-enchanted, this chunk is magic down to the moss (he plans to write his final year project on how those halves of forest mesh on an ecological level). One of the worst aspects of the enchanted portions is their tendency to re-shape around travelers. His usual way around this is to have an unwavering sense of where he’s going and pretend the woods are giving him an unchanging path to get there. But that trick does fuck-all when he doesn’t know his destination.

After two hours of searching he’s no closer to finding Indrid, it’s getting dark, and he’s debating heading back to the school for help. He hasn’t been this deep in the woods since he fled the Dire Wolf, and he knows the deeper you go into the trees, the wilder the magic becomes. Bad news for him, even worse for his friend who's out there somewhere, upset and alone.

Eight gigantic eyes glitter at him from the dirt, and he quickly rearranges who has it worse right now.

Throwing a burst of light into the trapdoor spiders eyes buys him enough time to bolt to a tree and climb. As soon as it crawls free of its burrow he freezes; if he’s remembering right, they use vibrations to locate prey.

Fuck, that thing is the size of a VW Beatle. Why is that even a thing? No spider needs to be this big!

In spite of his stillness, it spies him and sets its forelimbs on the tree-trunk. There’s nothing else for it; he draws Beacon, pictures the spider shrinking, and casts his spell.

A soft crunch of leaves signals it hitting the ground, now an unremarkable size for an arachnid. Just as he steps down a branch, a second trap door opens and an enraged spider bursts out, looking for it’s friend. When it can’t find it, it turns and snaps its mandibles at Duck. This time, Beacon does nothing, no matter how Duck commands and curses as his eight-legged doom gets closer.

A crackle of electricity and then this spider disappears as well. On the other side of the trunk, red eyes regard him with worry, “are you hurt?”

“Nah, all in one piece thanks to you.” He holds out his hand, “you wanna head back?”

“Yes, please.” Indrid flaps to the ground, Duck following him on foot and then turning them towards campus, “you did not need to come look for me.”

“Course I did, not gonna let my friend get swallowed up by the forest. Oh, here” he holds out the red glasses, “you want these back?”

“Not just yet. That is, if this form is not too alarming to you.”

Duck takes in the glossy feathers, the charming ruff, the way the face is still obviously Indrid yet excitingly new, “I’m good.”

Light flickers from black claws, stars and flowers spinning out with ease, “It’s so much easier when I’m like this. I never foresaw my disguise charm being an issue, but the older I’ve gotten the more it seems to influence my ability to control my spells. But, well, you saw how people reacted. Even you were startled.”

“In my defense, I thought you’d been eaten by, well, you.” Duck casts the same spell, vines of light chasing the red flowers, “I’m still sorry, though. You ain’t horrible like this, ‘Drid; you’re fuckin stunnin. Never seen anyone as incredible as you.”

Indrid stops, looking down at him, “Do you truly mean that?”

Duck rises on his toes, pecking his cheek, “Yeah, I do.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------

The Halloween Formal is the most elaborate event at Amnesty. Indrid feels that if there’s any day he’s within his rights to be in his true form, it’s when everyone else is dressed as monsters.

He doesn’t have a date. He thought Duck was in the same predicament. Then his friend left before he was half-done grooming his feathers, saying he needed to get flowers for his hot date.

Ah well. At least Indrid will get to see him there and spend some time with his friends.

He checks his reflection in the gleaming black walls, orange and purple lights glowing and jack’o lanterns floating above his head. He adjusts his robes, the nice red ones his father sent him, and prepares to enter the ballroom.

“Hold up.”

When he turns, Duck is standing there in his black dress shirt and green tie, looking for all the world like he’s alone.

“You got one more thing to put on” He holds out a bracelet of flowers, sized to slip perfectly over Indrid’s hand. There are matching flowers pinned to one side of Duck’s hair.

“Oh. Oh my. You really-”

Duck uses a small spell to bend Indrid into a kiss; it’s a bit messy, since their mouths aren’t meant to fit together, but Indrid would not trade it for all the magic in the world.

“Yeah, ‘Drid, I really do.” With that, Duck offers his elbow and they walk arm in arm into the great hall.

[firesongbard]

"Humanity"

A short snippet from my Post-Control longfic. Read more on AO3

H A R P E R

The procedure had not been… pleasant. Jana had done her work well—the Reaper-derived nanotechnology had taken hold without inhibiting his higher mental functions. In trials, those patients who had lost consciousness had lost the ability to make decisions without…guidance.

I’ve sacrificed more for humanity than you’ll ever know.

Jack Harper was himself, whole, and he now held the key to turning Indoctrination back against the Enemy.

Everything was falling into place. The crucible was finished, and Shepard had so kindly brought it to him. She still hadn’t realized the purpose of the device. It was no weapon, it was merely a power source. It was the key to unlock the true potential of the Citadel.

But she was… a singularly persistent woman.

Destroying the Reapers gains us nothing.

He stepped out onto the pedestal by the control panel. His previous attempts to convince her had been a waste of time. But now, with a little demonstration…

“I warned you. Control is the means to survival. Control of the Reapers… and of you, if necessary.” The manipulations were so very like biotic control. Nerve endings activated by learned gestures, sending preprogrammed impulses to the nano-machines, hijacking the Reaper commands.

“They’re controlling you” The good Admiral’s body stiffened as his motor functions were stolen from him. Laughable. He struggled, even now. Even when the answer was so clear.

We can dominate them, use their power, harness their very essence to bring humanity to the apex of evolution.

“I don’t think so, Admiral.” Maybe, maybe there was still hope for them. He held them both still. Maybe, now that they felt the enormity of his power, she would listen. He could make her believe.

“Controlling me is a lot different than controlling a Reaper.”

“Have a little faith.” It was pointless to argue now. She wouldn’t see reason. She didn’t have the scope of understanding. She had played at this game for a handful of months. He had walked this path for the last 30 years. How could he make them see? Make them understand how much humanity had to gain from the knowledge stored in the ancient technology?

H̷uman͢it̢y̴ wi̵ll͝ b̕e ra̛ise̴d͟ to͡ a ̴n͏ew e͠xís͘tȩnce̷.̕

Th̡ey̵ ҉f̷umb͡lę in ign͡ora͡nce̷,̴ ̧incap҉a҉b̶l͡e̵ ̨of҉ un̸d̨e͠r̷stan͢d͟i̵n̷g̕.́

“But only if we can harness their ability to control.” He tensed his body, activating a more aggressive command set. Motor control wasn’t enough. He needed to speak to their minds.

“You’re playing with things you don’t understand. With power you shouldn’t be able to use.”

You’ve been spending too much time with the enemy.

Yo҉u͞ can͝n̵o͟t conc̴eiv͏e of͡ ̢a ͏ga̴la͢x҉y̵ t͘h͟a̴t̶ b͡e͟n̴d҉s ́t̡o ̡yo̸u͠r͞ wi͏ll.͘

She was wrong, of course. She had been so wrong. He did understand this power. He had dedicated his life to this pursuit of knowledge. “I…don’t believe that. If we can control it, why shouldn’t it be ours?”

“Because we’re not ready.”

With the Crucible, we can end this.

You fig̴h̕t a̢g͏ainst͢ ͠i̷n̵e͟v̵įta͞b̵il̶i͟ty҉.͜

“No.” His nerves were on fire. The pain was exhausting, and his mind was starting to waver. Ready, or not ready, there was no choice. This was the only way. “This is the way humanity must evolve.”

There’s always another way.

H̷ǫpe͟ i͡s̴ i҉rre̴l̡ev͏ant.̴

This was the only way. Shepard’s gun went off, and Anderson only stood because Jack would not let him fall. But the old bastard was as stubborn as she was.

“He’s wrong. Don’t listen to him.”

“And who will you listen to, Shepard? An old soldier, stuck in his ways, only able to see the world down the barrel of a gun? And what if he’s wrong? What if controlling the Reapers is the answer?”

“If we destroy the Reapers, this ends today. But if you can’t control them…”

Work with me. Give me control of your resources, and I’ll stop them.

Yo̵u̵r w͘o͘rd̛s a͡r҉e ͞ás͟ ͢e̛mpty͡ as̸ ̨y̧ou̸r̢ fut͡u̵re.

“But I can” His head thrummed, thousands of tiny commands issued and held in place. Enough minuscule pieces of tech to darken the area around them. It was enough noise to drown out his own thoughts. He needed to focus, and Shepard was so annoyingly self-righteous.

S��hepard͏.̛ ̡Yo̡u ḩáv̛e ̀b̷ec͟ome ̧an ̸an҉n͜o̡y̢an̴c͠e.̧

“You can’t, can you? They won’t let you do it.”

They’re dragging you over to their side—their way of thinking.

T͏hi͏s d͠el̀a̵y͘ is ͢p̴oi͢nt̵l͟e͏s̸s̢.

“No, I’m in control.” He had to shout just to hear himself speak. The cacophony of voices—no. Not voices. It was just the thrum of the technology. “No one is telling me what to do…”

“Listen to yourself. You’re indoctrinated.”

It is that simple!

Th̀ìs͏ ͟i͡s t͢r͠ue ̛pow͠e͘r.̷

He wasn’t sure when the gun had appeared in his hand. There was so much noise. He just needed to think, needed a cigarette and a moment of calm.

“You’ve done exactly what the Reapers wanted. You’re still doing it because they control you.”

His adrenaline was spiking. That was the problem. The adrenal response accelerated cellular substitution. He just needed a moment to—

His words. He was so sure, so certain the loss of this technology would set them back. When had it come to this? He looked at her. Exhausted. Broken. Her face was streaked with blood and her skin crawled with nanotech. It wasn’t adrenaline. It wasn’t the thrum of electricity. “I… they’re too strong”

I believe that destroying the Reapers would be the worst mistake we could ever make.

“You’re stronger. Don’t let them win.”

You a̢re̶ a͏rrog͘ant̀, Sh҉ep̨a̶r̀d, ̶yǫu w̢íll lèa̵rn̨.̡

No, He had been arrogant. He had been under their influence for 30 years, and the whole time he was so sure he was in control. Was this how Saren Arterius felt at the end? Because of her?

“Break their hold. Don’t let them control you.”

I’ve sacrificed more for humanity than you’ll ever know.

What was one more sacrifice? He raised the gun and heard a cacophony of screams in his head as he held it as steady as his hand would allow.

“I… I tried, Shepard.”

[laurenhufflepuff2]

A list of fandoms I'm in (in no particular order, will probably be updated regularly. Some fandoms are more intense and some are more casual. Depending on the fandom, I could go on and on about fandom topics for HOURS. Let's get into it!)

Harry Potter, Disney, Marvel, DC comics, Miraculous Ladybug, Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra, Star Wars, Literature, Winx Club, Nintendo, Minecraft, Little Witch Academia, Voltron, Coraline

Details:

Harry Potter- I got into Harry Potter in 7th grade and now I am the resident expert in my family and in my friend group. I read all the books, watched all the movies (notably the British version), and I've seen the Fantastic Beasts films as well. I've also read Tales of Beedle the Bard (the Warlock's Hairy Heart was traumatizing) along with the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them textbook (plus an updated edition). I also read The Cursed Child script and while I mean no hate to anyone that liked it, I hated what it did to the canon. I am in Hufflepuff with some Ravenclaw tendencies (I took the Pottermore quiz 3 times, 2 out of 3 I got Hufflepuff, the other time was Ravenclaw). I had a pottermore account and I was so upset when it got converted to the Wizarding World page. I cosplayed Hermione in 7th grade complete with British accent and even monologued as her for a talent show (classmates and teachers would recognize me as the Hermione girl all the way through high school). I was obsessed and I still love it even if J.K. Rowling has gone off the deep end on Twitter... yeah... my favorite character is Hermione but I also relate to Luna

Disney- there's so much that goes into the Disney part of my fandom list. I'm excluding Marvel and Star Wars from this part as they were originally separate entities before Disney got the rights to them. I have seen almost every animated Disney film ever and often use random movie quotes in conversation. My favorite villain is Maleficent, my favorite princess is Ariel (followed by Belle, Rapunzel, and Anna). I relate to so many of the characters. I'm not sure who my favorite Pixar character is though (I love Violet, Sadness, Dory, and Piper (from the short)). My favorite Disney fairy is Fawn. My favorite characters overall are Ariel and Stitch. Disney is definitely on the list as one of my biggest obsessions. My favorite movies are Lilo and Stitch, the Little Mermaid, Inside Out, Alice in Wonderland (original), and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

Marvel- I mostly get my Marvel exposure through the MCU, other movies, and animated TV shows. I have difficulty reading graphic novels so most of my comic book knowledge comes from friends, posts, or wikis. My favorite characters are Spider-Man, Captain America, Peggy Carter, and Scarlet Witch. I also like Gwenpool, Deadpool, Spider-Gwen/ Ghost-Spider, Venom, Squirrel Girl, Daredevil, Mantis, Gamora, Black Widow, Iron Man, Thor, Loki, Bucky, Black Panther, and most MCU characters. Out of the X-men I really like Professor X, Wolverine, Mystique, Magneto, Nightcrawler, and Quicksilver (either version- MCU or Fox).

DC- this was the franchise I was more familiar with growing up but again, graphic novels aren't easy for me to read so most of my knowledge comes from information pages about the comics or from tv/movies. My earliest experience with DC came from the 60s Batman series, with Catwoman and Robin being my favorites. I also watched the Wonder Woman series from the 70s and a handful of CW shows, my favorite of which being the Flash and Arrow. I also managed to watch all 5 seasons of the Teen Titans Cartoon Network series from 2003. With that being said, my favorite characters are Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Flash, Batman, Nightwing/Robin (Dick Grayson), Green Arrow, Starfire, Raven, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and Alfred. I also like most of the bat family, and when it comes to CW I LOVE Caitlin Snow/Killer Frost and Cisco.

Miraculous- this is one of my guilty fandoms but since this is Tumblr I'm not too worried about it. I love Marinette and I relate to her on an astoundingly deep level (minus the stalking and obsession with potential lovers, that's creepy). If I had a miraculous, I'd probably want the Ladybug one, but the Cat miraculous, fox miraculous, and snake miraculous are good too. My favorite character is Marinette/Ladybug.

Atla/Tlok- I jumped on the avatar bandwagon just when it was starting to get popular, so I managed to get through the series before the memes took over everything. Same with Tlok, although i couldn't completely avoid the spoilers for that when i started it. I've been wanting to get into the comics because of the short story comics I've read, they seem easier to read than superhero comics. My favorite characters are Aang, Katara, Ty Lee, Iroh, Korra, Jinora, Asami, Suki, Appa, Momo, Naga, and Pabu. I also like Sokka, Mai, Zuko, Lin, Kuvira, Varrick, Zhu Lee, and Azula. I feel really sorry for her and while I understand that a redemption arc would undermine the importance of her corruption arc, I still wish she could have one. I would love to be a waterbender or an airbender... maybe a waterbender raised in the air nation? Obviously, being the avatar itself would be awesome. The show has taught me a lot of great lessons and put a lot of stuff into perspective for me.

Star Wars- oh boy, talking about this one is dangerous. I've seen firsthand the horrors of the Star Wars fandom but then again no one will probably see this anyway so... I've seen all the movies and I remember watching the clone wars series with my brother when I was younger but we fell wayyy behind and it's taking us forever to get back into it. I've also seen the Mandalorian and quite enjoyed it. I like the prequels unironically, in fact, the prequels are some of my favorite movies. I especially like how they switched from lightsabers being heavy weapons to light weapons that can be used for all kinds of tricks that make for epic battles like the ones we see in Revenge of the Sith. The sequels were fun to watch but when I would analyze them along side their predecessors, I came to the conclusion that, for me, they were good to watch but did not do anything good for the rest of the franchise. My favorite characters are prequels/clone wars Obi Wan and Anakin, Padme, Ashoka, Leia, R2D2, BB-8, R4-P17, the Mandalorian (Din Djarin), and Grogu. If I had a lightsaber I'd want it to be blue, but when I was little I got a purple one like Mace Windu because it was closer to pink and I was into pink at the time. I still have that lightsaber and none of my friends have a purple one so it's one of my flexes. I feel like I wouldn't make a good jedi because of attachments being forbidden, so I'd probably become a grey jedi.

Literature- this is a broad term I use to cover all the random books and stories I liked reading and have studied. So we have Shakespeare (Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet), The Great Gatsby (bored while reading, loved to analyze), Grendel (HATED reading, loved to analyze, Grendel really needed a hug and a friend), The Crucible, Fahrenheit 451, Dark Life (+ the sequel Riptide, both are by Kat Falls good reads, sci-fi and kind of dystopian), The Once and Future King

Winx Club- I think the show is trashy but I still love watching it. I haven't been able to get through season 6 though and I hated what they did with season 8 and Fate: the Winx Saga. My favorite character is Bloom along with Stella and Flora. I prefer rai to nick. My favorite transformations are magic winx, enchantix, and harmonix. My favorite member of the Trix is Icy followed by Darcy. My favorite Pixies are Chatta and Lockette.

Nintendo- mainly Pokémon above all else, followed by Animal Crossing. I have also played (mostly as player 2 or just never beat or watched my brother play) mario games, legend of zelda, pikmin, and kirby. Games I haven't played but I just liked the characters/the lore and probably learned about through Super Smash Bros. are Fire Emblem (Lucina mostly), Metroid (Samus and baby metroid), and Kid Icarus. Pokémon is where I'm most knowledgeable but you'll most likely beat me in battle. I am however great at MarioKart and I always destroy my friends at it. Terrible at fighting games though.

Minecraft- I like playing this casually. Sure, I'll play for hours and hours on end for months, but I prefer to stay exclusively in peaceful when playing Survival mode and I don't make anything too ambitious in Creative mode. I like to write, so sometimes I'll make a rough layout of the settings of my stories in different worlds. I prefer interior design and decorating when building, and when in survival mode I focus more on mining and gathering while my brother works on ambitious building projects. I just bring him the raw materials and furnish the interior when he finishes the outside.

Little Witch Academia- this takes up a smaller portion of my fandom list because there were only 2 seasons and a couple movies and I watched the whole series years ago, but I still enjoy it. At one point I wanted to cosplay Akko, and I loved the nod at Twilight through the Nightfall series. And I especially liked the twist that Shiny Chariot was Ursula, which I suspected for some time. The blend between magic and technology was fun to see, but I was so sad that the series ended RIGHT when Akko finally showed signs of magic proficiency. Also, Shiny Chariot being the reason Akko couldn't do magic was heartbreaking.

Voltron- this takes up a much smaller portion of my fandom list mainly because I haven't even finished it. I know hardly anything about Transformers aside from the Bumblebee movie so to me I just watch it for fun. It reminds me of power rangers, star wars, and star trek, and then there's just a transformer insert. But I don't know anything about Transformers so maybe the show is more rooted in canon than I think.

Coraline- I am in a love-hate relationship with Coraline. I have watched the movie several times, I've read the book, I've watched hours of theories and analyses on youtube, I've watched behind the scenes videos by Laika, and I even wrote a script for a fan film parody. I am amazed at how original the story is and how impressive the stop motion animation is but I also have recurring nightmares from it and it scares me/creeps me out to the max. If anyone asks what my scariness limit is, it's definitely Coraline.

[flowers-of-io]

#7 Beyond Stasis

Read it on AO3 here.

There had never been a worse time to be a Praxic Warlock.

Aunor seethed. Seethed when she read the reports, seethed observing Guardians hurling icy walls around the Crucible like kids playing snowball fight, seethed when she overheard people throwing stones at Zavala for his so-called cowardice and close-mindedness. She had to take a break from work to go to the gym and punch some stuff after spotting the Drifter in the Tower for the first time since his return from Europa; he had flashed her the most shameless grin and she was within an inch of knocking all his teeth out.

She used to revere Eris Morn. Both for her knowledge and bravery, as well as out of compassion for what she had been through. But the further she pushed the line between Light and Darkness, the more doubts popped up in Aunor’s head. She knew Eris was strong; balancing on the edge of the sword, tapping her fingers in Hive magic to rip them right into the Hive’s heart, she had touched the evil and tamed it long before Aunor even came to be. But not everyone was Eris Morn. Each day brought another Guardian who had dared too close, coming back dark-eyed and wild, their Ghost shuddering or weeping or, worse, corrupted as they were. Apocalyptic thoughts plagued Aunor as she sat by hospital beds, watching them bleed out the corruption through eyes and mouth, some screaming in horror as nightmares were twisting their brain. Each day was another record in the notebook, another Guardian gone dark or missing, another team sent out to keep an eye on Crucible matches or track the spoor of corruption leading out into the wild.

It was a beautiful morning, the sun hanging low over the horizon and shining through the skeletal branches of trees shedding their last leaves. The woods were within half an hour’s walk from the City walls, and Aunor enjoyed the autumn breeze on her face chasing away the frown she had been unknowingly wearing. She made her way to a clearing, now almost indistinguishable amongst the barren trees hadn’t it been for the hunched figure of Shin Malphur. Sunlight reflected off his helmet, making him seem strangely radiant even without the flames of his Golden Gun. She stopped a few meters away, and acknowledged him with a nod.

“Someone’s coming home.”

“The City has never been my home.” He took the helmet off and ran a hand through the auburn mess that was his hair, not smoothing them down in the slightest. Aunor had not seen him for only a few months, but it seemed during this time he’d grown even frailer. Sunken cheeks and circles under the eyes, cape tattered at the edges and stitched clumsily around the shoulder blades, lips dry and chapped; he was shaved clean, though, a detail clashing with his haggard appearance like diamonds with a tracksuit.

“Sightseeing, then?” She put her arms on her hips.

“Lately the Crucible is a sight to behold.” Malphur was examining one of his gloves; eventually he squinted, took out a knife and snipped a loose thread. “I heard you’re running out of bed space.”

Aunor scoffed, “Are you here to free some of it?”

“If it’s necessary.”

Malphur was still looking at his gloves with feigned interest, and she stretched the silence long enough for him to finally turn his eyes to her.

“I’m not gonna pretend I could outrun you. But if your final goal has not changed, then it aligns with ours.” She nodded slightly as if to stress the words. “I propose… cooperation.”

Malphur shoot an eyebrow up but held her gaze.

“Meaning?”

“No one can chase the Dark so well without falling themself. And we need eyes in the wild. You’ll be free to hunt the corrupted as long as you spare the Ghosts, and we will make sure these Guardians can’t endanger anyone. Including themselves.”

“You’re sticking to ineffective methods.”

Aunor clenched her fists, lighting fizzling on the tips of her fingers.

“Sometimes I wonder if you’re simply killing for the fun of it.”

He glared at her, weary eyes behind the unruly mass of hair.

“What makes you think you can save them?”

“We already are.” She stared into these weary eyes boldly, her voice sharp. “We both know the situation is getting out of control. The enemy is infecting our ranks and soon will tear us apart from the inside. You’ll never hunt them all down alone, and we’re not gonna make it any easier for you. If you’re true to your cause… we need each other’s help.”

Malphur’s lips quirked ever so slightly, “Is the Praxic Order compromising?”

Aunor crossed her arms, shooing away the sudden thought of compromising his face. “The rules haven’t changed.”

“The rules mean nothing in a lawless world.”

“Oddly, you sound like the Drifter.”

She revelled in the grimace that twisted Malphur’s features at the words. “Hire him to hunt down problematic cases if you’re so keen on extending your contact list,” he sneered, sheathing the knife still in his hand. Sunlight flickered on the blade. “Come to think of it, when he was herding them into a neat little paddock, I recall you tried to take him out.”

“If all you’ve got are condescending remarks, I’m going back to the City. I’ve wasted enough time.”

“Not that much in need of eyes in the wild now?” He called after her when she started to turn away.

“What a jerk,” Bahaghari murmured in the comms, and Aunor held back a smirk. Oh, he was. But try as he might, in his stupid, douchy core he was still a Hunter; and by the rules of Darwinian evolution, the one trait all Hunters shared was their wild hatred of being ignored.

She walked away, leaving Malphur alone in the clearing just as a stray leaf landed atop the bulk of his stupid hair, then plopped to the ground.

*

Ten hours later a letter was already sitting on her desk, neatly folded in four and unsigned. Aunor supposed physical messages were much harder to track, but she would gladly appreciate them typed rather than scrawled in inscrutable handwriting.

“Fine, have it your way. Disastrous effects are bound to surface after a month, but have it your way. 7000 Glimmer a head.”

Well, can’t have everything, she thought, blessing the eternal vulnerability of a Hunter’s pride, and folded the note.

[monstersandmaw]

Evening to ya, Ghosti✌️😆

Sorry if the wording sounds silly, but I wanted to ask if you know any rituals I could do for the New Years. 🤣 Christmas hasn't been exactly an easy time for me for various reasons and I tend to get the holiday blues pretty bad, and for a long old while New Years has felt very similar. I'm doing my best to feel hopeful and to have some faith for the new year, but it's turning out to be trickier than I anticipated. So I wanted to ask for suggestions as to do anything that could help feeling more hopeful, I dunno. :3

Though feel free to ignore this if you don't have the energy for it. I hope you had delightful holiday however you celebrated!!! 😊💖💖💖💖

Hey anon! (it’s now afternoon here in the UK, and it was morning when I started this! I got a bit carried away). I don’t know that I’m necessarily the right person to ask about this, but here are some ideas of things I’ve found helpful/centring/calming anyway which you could draw from. Other folks, please feel free to chime in with your favourite ways to put the old year to bed and welcome in the new one!

(first of all, I’m sending you lots of virtual ghostli hugs to help drive away those holiday blues. That sucks, and I’m so sorry it’s been so tough for you.)

Here’s a rundown of what’s below, and I’ll put in a ‘keep reading’ so that it’s not an incredibly long post! Some of it is more on the ‘spiritutal’ side of things, and others are just mundane and practical things.

Congratulate yourself on making it through the clusterfuck that was 2020

Make some tea and meditate on what’s been and what you wish for

Go outside, be still, and breathe deeply

Let go of negative events and thoughts by writing them down, then safely burning the paper

Disconnect from social media for a few days (or however long you’re comfortable with)

Start a bullet journal

Write lists of goals for 2021 and then refine/distill them down to 3 manageable objectives

Commit 100% to 6 months of positive change

Pick three dates/months in the year when good things will happen, and make them happen (including growing veg/fruit)

Light a candle on the full moon or New Year

Ok, so, first of all, you’ve made it through this year!! That’s no small accomplishment, given the sheer volume of absolute shite that has been flung at us from all angles, no matter where in the world you live. Celebrate that. Seriously, I’m not being flippant. Take a moment of stillness wherever you are, be ‘present’, and just think about the fact that you’re here, right now, reading this post. Not everyone is here any more for one reason or another, but you did it. Congratulate yourself and celebrate that. Treat yourself to a slice of cake (or something you really enjoy) specifically to celebrate making it through 2020.

Make a cup of tea (try a new blend or recipe perhaps, or stick with your absolute favourite), or make a comforting drink of your choice. As you pour the water into the cup, breathe in the steam and enjoy the scent of it. Try and imbue all the positive things - memories, achievements, moments etc. - that you encountered this year into the tea/drink, and think about them growing in strength as the tea steeps, and envisage them continuing on to next year too. When you drink the tea, you take the positive thoughts into yourself and they become a part of you. You could try it in the morning with a caffeinated drink (if you enjoy those) and let it fuel you for the day, or you could try a herbal tea at night to let the good vibes steep overnight while you rest. Make it part of your daily routine; a private meditation.

Go outside and find a quiet spot somewhere and either stand or sit and just soak up the atmosphere. If there’s a tree nearby, think about the way its roots are planted in the earth, its trunk stands tall, and its branches reach towards the sky. Feel that space inside you. Breathe deeply in and out, visualising your lungs filling to the deepest parts, starting at the bottom. Count to four for each inhale, and six out (or whatever you’re comfortable with, so long as the exhale is longer than the inhale). This will help to still you and calm you.

If you have something fireproof (can just be a ceramic bowl), take a piece of paper and make a moment to write down all the negative things about this year, using a pen that you’re comfortable with. If you’re not one for words, draw pictures. You can make it really beautiful or just scribble it all down - it doesn’t matter. Get that shit out. Look at it for a while and read it through, mentally letting go of each thing as your eyes pass over it, then light one corner (carefully!!!) and let it burn somewhere with good ventilation (a cooker hood is good for that, but outside is better). Visualise all that negativity being swallowed by the universe and let it go. My favourite line from the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf comes at Beowulf’s funeral when a Geat woman is singing her grief at his passing to the sky, and there’s the simple sentence: “Heaven swallowed the smoke.” How beautiful is that? The sky swallowed up her grief as she poured it out to the universe. The negativity might take some time to vanish from your life (it’s not going to disappear at the same time as the paper, sadly!), but watching it go can be the first stage of letting things go. I did this last year, and I’m only just letting go of the last things on that list, but it was a start, and it made me feel more at peace. 

Disconnect from social media. I know that with so much more happening online this year out of necessity, we’ve become even more dependant on our phones and computers, and it’s wonderful that we have this chance to connect with people when we can’t see them face to face, but social media can also act as a crucible for negative feelings. People usually post the best or the worst aspects of what’s going on for them or what they care about, so it leads to a skewed view of both the world and of what’s going on amongst our connections. It’s easy to start feeling insignificant next to someone else because of their achievements or their looks etc. and it’s also easy to start to get a bleak outlook when the news is full of terrible stories and people are reacting to it in a volatile and often knee-jerk way. Take some time off - uninstall the apps, or put the limiter setting on, or just step back - for a day, two days, a week, whatever you’re comfortable with. It doesn’t have to be forever. If you use those platforms to talk to people, tell them what you’re doing, and give them another way to reach you if they need. No need to isolate yourself completely!! Think about how you felt before you started it (write it down?) and do the same afterwards, and compare. If it didn’t work for you, then that’s fine too. 

Start a bullet journal! Now is the perfect time to start bullet journaling. I first started this year when I felt like time was slipping through my fingers and my life was out of my control, and it’s really helped me to get a sense of order back. It’s not the magic cure-all for procrastinators and time wasters, trust me, but it can help to organise your mind as well as your day, and keep track of your habits etc. It can be literally whatever tool you need it to be. There’s a trend on social media - particularly Instagram and YouTube - that shows off these gorgeous journals that are basically works of art in themselves, and while it’s absolutely fine to aspire to that if you want to, the essential point of the bullet journal is to be a tool. You can buy print-outs from Etsy if you don’t fancy doing your own spreads. But don’t get completely hung up on pretty spreads and layouts because you won’t use it fully then. If you’ve got ‘new book fear’, like I did, make your own! I literally started my journaling by folding a few pieces of paper over, slapping a few stickers on them to cheer them up, and writing some lists. I didn’t buy a ‘proper’ journal until July 2020 when I’d got the hang of what I wanted out of the tool, and how to use it. I adapted one or two things, and I’ll be changing one or two things for next year, but it was a good way to start.

Here are two ‘minimalist’ journals and styles that I found helpful when setting mine up. They focus on usefulness and practicality, rather than overwhelming, artistic spreads and cutesy designs. I’m about to do a ‘plan with me 2021’ journal video for YouTube, so I’ll put that up when I’ve finished it, in case that’s helpful. 

Elsa Rhae

Pick Up Limes

Write down the things you want to achieve for 2021. These can be more abstract concepts like ‘more organised’ ‘healthier’ ‘start a business’ etc. Then, when you’ve got as many things as you’d ideally love to achieve/accomplish/manifest (don’t hold back at that stage), take another piece of paper and choose a maximum of six from that first lot to focus on, and below that, choose just three absolutely essential things to focus on. Make those your things for 2021.  

Now, this one is a personal one for me, so it may not be applicable at all to you/others, but I’ll share it anyway. For me, I need to make some significant lifestyle changes for my physical and mental health. So, I’ve decided to commit to 6 months of really hard work to bring about those changes. Time is going to pass anyway, from January to June. Six months will come and go anyway. Where will I be in six months’ time? I could be physically and mentally exactly where I am today. That thought is super depressing to me. Or, I could devote 200% focus, commitment, and energy, and bring about those changes, and be the ‘me’ I want to be in six months’ time.

It’s like the adage of ‘given a week to write a speech, it will take you a week, but given a day to write the same speech, it will take you a day’ - your brain will tell you it takes the amount of time that you have at hand to accomplish the task, and that’s simply how long it then takes. Use those three things from the 2021 list above, and commit to making those three things happen.

As an aside, tell someone (whose opinions you value) that you’re going to do this. By telling someone, you’re helping to cement the idea in reality, and you’ve got a support to turn to if it gets rocky, someone to cheer you on, and someone to celebrate with who knew what a struggle and commitment this was to you in the first place. 

Pick three points in the year where good things will happen. Book yourself something nice, save up for something and have it delivered then, or tell yourself that you will have achieved [x] by May, or September, or December. For me, it’s a working draft of my novel, and certain health goals by October, but make it yours, and keep those points fixed in your mind. It will help 2021 not to be one amorphous mass of time, and will give it structure and form. You could also choose to grow something in a pot - lots of vegetables can be grown cheaply from seed in a pot on a windowsill, and you’ll have something tasty to eat at the end of it!!

Here’s a slightly gentler idea to finish with: 

On New Year’s Eve take a moment to yourself, go outside if it’s not raining or too cold etc., light a candle, hold it (safely) in your hands, and be still. It doesn’t have to be exactly at midnight, but it will help your focus if it’s dark. Otherwise, go to a quiet part of the house and turn the lights down so that the candle flame is your focus. As before, think about what you’ve achieved this year, and be honest, not just negative! It’s very easy to say ‘oh I didn’t achieve anything, it all sucks, it was all awful’, when there will be tiny victories tucked away in there, I promise you, even if it was the toughest year of your life. Then think about where you are at the moment, mentally and physically. Acknowledge that state of being. Look at it with honest eyes. This moment is not for anyone else, so you don’t need to colour it one way or another. It’s for you. If you’re finding it hard not to be negative, be neutral. Let those thoughts come and go, and then turn your mind to the future. Mentally feed those negative thoughts into the flame in front of you, one at a time. Say it out loud if that helps, but do what makes you comfortable. Let the light from the flame fill your mind and your heart, and think about your intentions for the new year.  

Tonight (30th Dec) is a full moon, so if that is significant for you, you may wish to do this tonight instead of tomorrow. 

I hope that some of that gives you some inspiration, and I hope that people will chime in with their own new year’s rituals and habits. Be honest with yourself but not harsh, and be positive but not unrealistic. This year has been one hell of a ride, and we’re not done yet... Here in the UK, we’ve got the highest numbers of Covid that we’ve ever had, we’re in the harshest lock down (Tier 4) and can’t visit anyone, and we’re also going through Brexit (which is proving a nightmare for everyone, especially small businesses...).

Control the things you can control, and learn and employ systems to ride out the things that are beyond your influence. And take heart - you have a family of folks on here, all across the world!

[arcticdementor]

Hindsight may very well be 20/20, but with that caveat out of the way, some events truly come across as historical in their importance even as they play out in realtime. We might not know what the results will be, but we can feel that something quite big is happening. Watching the fall of the Berlin wall was one such moment in recent history, and watching the twin towers fall was another one.

The retreat from Afghanistan should not have made the list, or least not the top of it. Yet, it has clearly already made its way there, being widely seen as something truly momentous by most if not all the people observing it. The reason it shouldn’t have had those same connotations as the fall of the Berlin wall is because it was not only planned in advance and decided upon by the 45th president, not the 46th, but because almost everyone at this point wished for the war to just end. But it is how it has ended that has really thrown back the curtain and shown the world the rot festering beneath. The Soviet Union was dying in 1989, when it completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. It still managed to do so in an orderly fashion, with a symbolic column of russian APCs crossing the bridge over to Uzbekistan. The leader of the war effort, one Colonel-General Gromov, symbolically rode in the very last BTR, and then proclaimed to the gathered journalists that there wasn’t a single russian soldier behind his back.

The American withdrawal, by contrast, is a grotesque spectacle, laid bare to the eyes of the world in realtime thanks to the wonders of modern technology. The Soviet attempt at braving the graveyard of empires could, if one was charitably inclined, at least be construed as some form of tragedy (”we tried to help, but in the end, we accomplished nothing”), and the russians did their best to make the entire thing appear somewhat dignified and solemn. Thirty years later, the scene is closer to a black form of comedy. The American consulate was evacuated by helicopter, about one month after president Biden referred to just such an evacuation from Saigon as an example of how Afghanistan and Vietnam were not comparable. The entire government collapsed within a matter of hours, not months. Throngs of people gathered around the airports, desperate to escape; American authorities had no more guidance to offer american citizens stuck in Afghanistan than to ”shelter in place” and then presumably ask the Taliban for a visa once regular flight traffic resumes. Desperate people even clung to the airframes of departing cargo planes before falling to their deaths, like a grim re-enactment of frozen and starving german soldiers trying to escape by clinging to the last planes leaving Stalingrad.

…

There may be a deeper aspect to this than a lot of people might perceive at present. On the level of pure geopolitics, the utterly embarrassing debacle of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan can only serve to make China more bold in any future confrontation over Taiwan. The American eagle is faltering, and its rivals will not sit idly by for long. But this is probably the lesser of the big consequences of Afghanistan. There is another, much more significant implication of the collapse of the American project here, one with much more acute bearing on the immediate future of American society itself. To understand why, it’s useful to reflect on a certain political and historical point made by Carl Schmitt in his by now nearly hundred year old essay, whose english name is often rendered as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. The essay is well worth a read in full today, and the reader might be surprised (or maybe not) at how relevant many of the descriptions of the ongoing political crisis in 1923 may seem to us today, nearly a hundred years later. The most relevant passage, however, deserves to be quoted in full:

”In the history of political ideas, there are epochs of great energy and times becalmed, times of motionless status quo. Thus the epoch of monarchy is at an end when a sense of the principle of kingship, of honor, has been lost, if bourgeois kings appear who seek to prove their usefulness and utility instead of their devotion and honor. The external apparatus of monarchical institutions can remain standing very much longer after that. But in spite of it monarchy’s hour has tolled. The convictions inherent in this and no other institution then appear antiquated; practical justifications for it will not be lacking, but it is only an empirical question whether men or organizations come forward who can prove themselves just as useful or even more so than these kings and through this simple fact brush aside monarchy.”

What Schmitt is saying here is very important, and it might very well end up being the true cost of the Afghanistan debacle. Every ruling class throughout history advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating claims can take many different forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted or lose their credibility, that is pretty much it.

…

What Schmitt is saying is that when the legitimating claim for a particular form of elite is used up, when people no longer believe in the concepts or claims that underpin a particular system or claim to rule, the extinction of that particular elite becomes a foregone conclusion. Once Napoleon came along, it became increasingly impossible to actually believe (or at least effect a suspension of disbelief) that kings were born to rule and had a right to rule. As such, the only argument kings were left with in order to be tolerated by their own subjects became practical in nature: look at how useful this king is, look at how well his administration runs, look at how much stuff you’re getting out of letting him sit on the throne. But once you are merely left with practical arguments of that kind, as Schmitt rightly points out, your replacement becomes a question of simple empiricism. The moment someone more useful is found – like, say, a president – out you go, never to return. The replacement of Louis XVI with a republic was a world-shattering event. The fall of his nephew, Louis Philippe I, in favor of another republic, was a mere formality by comparison. By the time of his fall, not even Louis Philippe himself believed in kings being some sort of semi-divine beings. Certainly almost none of his subjects did.

…

Moreover, on a more practical level, the war in Afghanistan became another sort of crucible. In very real terms, Afghanistan turned into a testbed for every single innovation in technocratic PMC governance, and each innovation was sold as the next big thing that would make previous, profane understandings of politics obsolete. In Afghanistan ”big data” and the utilization of ever expanding sets of technical and statistical metrics was allowed to topple old stodgy ideas of dead white thinkers such as Sun Tzu or Machiavelli, as ”modern” or ”scientific” approaches to war could have little to learn from the primitive insights of a pre-rational order. In Afghanistan, military sociology in the form of Human Terrain Teams and other innovative creations were unleashed to bring order to chaos. Here, the full force of the entire NGO world, the brightest minds of that international government-in-waiting without a people to be beholden to, were given a playground with nearly infinite resources at their disposal. There was so much money sloshing around at the fingertips of these educated technocrats that it became nearly impossible to spend it all fast enough; they simply took all of those countless billions of dollars straight from the hands of ordinary americans, because they believed they had a right to do so.

…

Put plainly: managers, through the power of managerialism, were once believed to be able to mobilize science and reason and progress to accomplish what everyone else could not, and so only they could secure a just and functional society for their subjects, just as only the rightful kings of yore could count on Providence and God to do the same thing. At their core, both of these claims are truly metaphysical, because all claims to legitimate rulership are metaphysical. It is when that metaphysical power of persuasion is lost that kings or socialists become ”bourgeois”, in Schmitt’s terms. They have to desperately turn toward providing proof, because the genuine belief is gone. But once a spouse starts demanding that the other spouse constantly prove that he or she hasn’t been cheating, the marriage is already over, and the divorce is merely a matter of time, if you’ll pardon the metaphor.

I suspect we are currently witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades. Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs have obviously been multiplying over many years, but it is only now that the picture is becoming clear to everyone. When Michael Gove said ”I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss.

It is not just that the elite class is incompetent – even kings could be incompetent without undermining belief in monarchy as a system – it is that they are so grossly, spectacularly incompetent that they walk around among us as living rebuttals of meritocracy itself. It is that their application of managerial logic to whatever field they get their grubby mitts on – from homelessness in California to industrial policy to running a war – makes that thing ten times more expensive and a hundred times more dysfunctional. To make the situation worse, the current elites seem almost serene in their willful destruction of the very fields they rely on for legitimacy. When the ”experts” go out of their way to write public letters about how covid supposedly only infects people who hold demonstrations in support of ”structural white supremacy”, while saying that Black Lives Matter demonstrations pose no risk of spreading the virus further, this amounts to the farmer gleefully salting his own fields to make sure nothing can grow there in the future. How can anyone expect the putative peasants of our social order to ”trust the science”, when the elites themselves are going out of their way, against all reason and the tenets of basic self-preservation, to make such a belief completely impossible even for those who really, genuinely, still want to believe?

…

I find it very likely that most future historians will put the date of the real beginning of the collapse of the current political and geopolitical order right here, right now, at the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Just as with any other big historical process, however, many others will point out that the seeds of the collapse were sown much farther back, and that a case can be made for several other dates, or perhaps no specific date at all. This is how we modern people look at the fall of the french ancien regime, after all. Still, it is quite obvious that the epoch of the liberal technocrat is now over. The bell has well and truly tolled for mankind’s belief in their ability to do anything else than enrich themselves and ruin things for everyone else.

How long it will take for their institutions to disappear, or before they end up toppled by popular discontent and revolution, no one can know. But at this point, I think most people on some level now understand that it really is only a matter of time.

[chocolatequeennk]

Forever Timeless, 4/23

Summary: Two months after the Dalek Crucible, the Doctor and Rose are getting used to having the biggest family on Earth. As they visit Leadworth in 1996, Victorian England, a mysterious desert planet, and Elizabethan England, those family and friends often help in unexpected ways. But no matter where they go or who they’re with, it’s always the Doctor in the TARDIS with RoseTyler–just as it should be.

Ten x Rose, Donna x Lee

Betaed by @saecookie, @rudennotgingr, @pellaaearien, and @jabber-who-key

Tagging @doctorroseprompts for Doctor/Rose content

Part 7 of Being to Timelessness

AO3 | FF.NET | TSP

Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3

Chapter Four: At Last

The Doctor looked at Lee as the TARDIS spun slowly in the Vortex. “I’ve got the coordinates all set. Are you ready to see Donna again?”

Lee nodded. “Please.”

The Doctor flipped the lever, and the time rotor moved up and down with its typical grinding, wheezing sound. Lee shook his head, amazement etched across his features. He studied the TARDIS like someone who’d heard about them all his life and couldn’t believe he was finally seeing one.

“Just n-never thought I would be inside a TARDIS,” he explained when Rose looked at him questioningly.

Rose reached out and patted the central column. “Put on a good show for him, dear.”

The TARDIS lights flashed, and they spun through time and space at a dizzying speed. The ship landed hard enough to send them all to the grating. Everyone laughed, no one harder than Lee.

The Doctor jumped up and brushed himself off. “Let’s go see what Donna and Jenny are up to,” he said, jogging up the ramp.

Rose’s phone chimed, and the Doctor had a sinking feeling he knew what the incoming message said. He waited for Rose to read it, and her sigh confirmed his fears.

“Oi, Sunshine. When we said a week, we meant an Earth week, as in seven days. You’re late.”

“Oh… this is bad.” The Doctor ran his hand through his hair. He could already feel the bleach burning his scalp.

“What’s wrong?” Lee asked.

“We landed a day later than we promised to meet Jenny and Donna,” Rose said as she typed out the text and hit send. She looked up in time to see Lee smile and shake his head. “What?”

“Just imaging Donna’s reaction.”

oOoOo

Donna was in the middle of telling Jenny exactly what she planned to say to the Doctor when her phone chimed with a text notification.

“Oh, that better be them,” she muttered as she fished it out of her purse.

Sorry we’re late, Rose said. We brought something for you.

Donna snorted. “If they think some little rinky-dink souvenir is going to make me forget they actually did strand us, they need to think again.” She picked up her bag and tossed a note on the table to cover the bill. “Come on, Jenny.”

They could see the TARDIS from the edge of the park, and Donna unconsciously picked up her pace. At the moment, she couldn’t tell if she were more eager to be home, or to give the Doctor a piece of her mind. Either way, she was glad to see the TARDIS.

When they were about ten feet away, the Doctor stuck his head out of the TARDIS. “Are you coming?” he asked.

Donna stopped and put her hand on her hip. “Oi, don’t get shirty with me, Spaceman,” she told him. “What did I tell you about not leaving us stranded in Barcelona? You’re just lucky the hotel had a vacancy so we could keep our room for another night—and lucky Jenny was positive you would only be a day or two late.”  

An amused chuckle cut off Donna’s tirade, and she whirled around to tell the innocent bystander exactly where he could put his busybody nose.

But the sight of a familiar face drew her up short. “Lee!” she gasped. Then she put her hands over her mouth, for once in her life completely speechless.

“Hello, D- D- Donna.”

The stuttering broke through her shock, and she ran to him, reaching out to touch his face, his hair, anything just to convince herself he was really there.

Her hands finally settled on his shoulders, and she clung to him just as she had in their last moments together in the Library. “Oh God, oh God. Is this real?”

“You’re real,” Lee said, holding her just as desperately. “I hoped you were real.”

“I found you. I promised I’d find you, and I did. I found you.”

Donna pulled back and cupped his face between her hands. “But… how? And where?”

“I got t- t- trapped,” he explained. “Between worlds.”

“When we activated the transmat at the Library, the Reality Bomb was in full effect,” the Doctor explained.

Donna tore her gaze away from Lee to pay attention to his explanation.

“And Lee’s transmat beam, unfortunately, got caught in the Void—the space between the universes. He was literally stuck in a crack between worlds. Somehow, the crack opened up in the bedroom of a little girl in 1996, which was where we found Lee.”

A shiver ran down Donna’s spine. “I thought you said all of that was repairing itself. Closing back up like it had never happened.”

The Doctor tugged on his ear. “Strictly speaking, it didn’t happen. Not in this timeline. Mickey and Pete and Jackie were only able to hop through because Pete’s World ran ahead of ours, and things hadn’t yet—”

“I asked about Lee, not the whole bloody universe.”

He cleared his throat. “Right. Sorry. Welllll… the crack was closing when we found Lee. But he’s here now!” he said quickly, before she could react.

Donna pulled Lee into a hug. “I can’t believe I came so close to losing you,” she whispered. His hand stroked her hair, and she had to swallow back tears. “I spent so long looking for you…”

Rose caught Jenny’s eye and gestured towards the park. Taking the Doctor’s hand, she pulled him towards the trees, trusting their daughter to follow.

oOoOo

Lee closed his eyes and rested his head on top of Donna’s. Her whispered confession eased one concern he’d had—that what they’d had in the Library had all been a lie.

Up until then, he’d felt a bit like he was on a first date, sweaty palms and all. But now… “I was sent to the Library to find out what happened. Instead I found you.”

Donna stepped back half a step and looked up at him. “What do you mean, you were sent?”

He lowered his voice and leaned in. “I’m a Time Agent,” he told her quietly.

“You mean Rose was right?” Donna exclaimed.

Lee chuckled. “Yes, she was.” He frowned. “I apparently spent 100 years in the Library’s mainframe, and I still don’t know what happened.”

Donna smiled and took his hand. “Well I can answer that,” she said. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

“We were supposed to have a quiet day in,” Donna started. “I was painting my toes, Jenny was reading, and Rose was painting. Then the Doctor came in and told us to get ready to go…”

Lee listened raptly to the tale, from the message on the psychic paper to the surprise strangers arriving in the Library to the lights suddenly going out.

He sucked in a breath when Donna repeated the Doctor’s warning. “Count the shadows.”

“Vashta Nerada,” he breathed.

Donna rolled her eyes. “Of course you’ve heard of them.” She sighed. “Am I always going to be the only one who doesn’t know things?”

Lee blinked at her. This insecurity… It hadn’t been there in the Library. But maybe the program of the computer had given her the confidence she apparently lacked. It had certainly made other changes, like making his stutter even worse than it was in reality.

Donna took a breath and continued the story. “So, one of the crew was taken. Eaten, I guess. And as soon as the Doctor knew how big of a threat it was, he wanted to send me and Jenny back to the TARDIS to be safe. He dragged us into the little shop, with the transmat pad by the door.”

Lee nodded. That was when their story began, then.

oOoOo

The Doctor wrapped his arm around Rose’s shoulder as they walked the paths in the park. They’d taken off in the opposite direction of Donna and Lee, with Jenny walking beside them, telling them all about their week long holiday.

The Doctor held Rose close as he thought about the other couple and wondered how things were going for them. He remembered how devastated Donna had been when she’d gotten back from the pocket universe in the Library computer. She’d had the life she’d always wanted, but it had been fake.

Hopefully Lee can make it real this time, Rose said, following his train of thought.

He hummed in agreement. I hope so. I just… He took a moment to soak in everything they had—each other, their bond, their daughter walking with them. Donna deserves all of this, too.

Rose stretched up and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re very sweet sometimes,” she whispered.

Her phone beeped before he could reply. Rose checked the text, but all three of them had turned back towards the TARDIS as soon as they heard the chime, guessing what the message was.

oOoOo

Rose smiled when she caught sight of the couple. They were sitting across from each other at a picnic table, holding hands.

It looks like Donna’s worries that the real Lee might not care about her didn’t come true.

The Doctor hummed. Yep. Oh, I’m glad.

Donna saw them first and she jumped up. “About time you got back here,” she snarked. “Although I shouldn’t be surprised you’re late… don’t think I’ve forgotten you were a whole day late getting here.” She gestured at the Doctor’s head. “Nice platinum blonde, I think.”

“But… you…” The Doctor gestured vaguely between Donna and Lee. “I had a good reason for being late! And aren’t you glad the TARDIS took us to Leadworth to find him?”

Donna’s teasing expression faded to happiness. “Yeah. All right, you’re off the hook this time, Spaceman. But next time…” She raised an eyebrow meaningfully.

“So, are we ready to go back to Cardiff?” Jenny asked. “I bet Gran is wondering where we are.”

Rose rolled her eyes. “Mum will find something to mutter about, no matter when we arrive. But, as long as we don’t need to make any stops first…”

She looked at Donna and Lee. “You’re certainly welcome to come with us, Lee. We have a few friends who might be very interested to meet you, actually. I understand if you aren’t up for meeting a whole group of new people today, though. We could drop you and Donna off somewhere and come back after the party, if you’d rather.”

Lee shook his head. “I’ll come with you.”

“Excellent!” The Doctor, still worried about his hair, darted to the TARDIS and unlocked the door. “Come on them, what are we waiting for?”

“I was going to say that your mother-in-law’s anger at you missing the party would be punishment enough, but you’ll just natter on about how this is a time machine.” Donna pursed her lips. “And you’ll be able to get us back in time without her even knowing we were almost late. It’s almost not fair.”

“Jackie’s stubborn refusal to grasp the basics of time travel can be frustrating, but it does have its advantages,” the Doctor agreed.

oOoOo

The Doctor watched his little entourage as he and Rose flew the TARDIS back to Cardiff. Donna was watching Lee like she thought he was going to disappear again, and he had her hand clasped firmly in his own.

Jenny sat on the jump seat, watching the two of them. The Doctor tilted his head and studied his daughter. There was something… off in the way she was holding herself.

Let’s take Jenny for a trip on her own as soon as we can, he suggested to Rose.

Rose turned slightly to watch Jenny for a moment, and then she nodded.

Their landing was soft, and Rose led the way to the top of the ramp. “Time to visit family,” she told everyone. “Lee… I know you agreed to come, but  please don’t feel like you need to spend time with my mum. I love her, but she can be… a lot.”

Lee smiled reassuringly. “I’m pretty sure I’ve met people more difficult than your mum, Rose.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” the Doctor muttered under his breath.

Rose glared at him, and he smiled unrepentantly back. They both knew that the faux antagonistic vibe between him and Jackie was all for show… Well, mostly.

“All right,” he said, gesturing for them all to leave the ship. “If we don’t get out there now, she’ll be banging on the door wondering why we’re staying in this box.”

Rose opened the door and started laughing when she saw her mum halfway to them.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Jackie said. “I don’t know why you’d want to stay in that box when the party is inside.”

Rose stepped outside and moved aside so everyone else could exit the TARDIS. Jackie’s eyes lit on Lee, and Rose nodded. “Donna brought a plus one, if that’s okay.”

Jackie smiled. “Of course! Now come on, the party is nearly started.” She turned and led the way back to the front door.

A car pulled into the drive as they were walking inside, and Rose raised her eyebrows when she realised that Martha and Mickey had arrived together. The Doctor had told her about the timelines he had noticed, but she hadn’t really given it much thought.

The two groups met at the front door and entered the house together. “It’s about time you all got here,” Jack called from the living room. “I was starting…”

His voice trailed off when he caught sight of Lee. “Well hello,” he said. “Jack Harkness, and you are…”

“Not interested,” Donna said firmly. “This is Lee. Lee McAvoy. We met at the Library.”

Rose covered her mouth with her hand to hide her smile at Donna’s clever wording, but to her surprise, Jack’s gaze sharpened.

“Lee McAvoy? At the Library?” he said, emphasising the article.

Donna looked back and forth between the two men. “Oh right,” she said after a minute. “Jack used to be a Time Agent, too.”

“Yeah, and I remember hearing about an agent who was lost in the whole quarantine of the Library.” He looked at the Doctor. “You know, I actually wondered about Lee here when you told us you’d been to the Library. But I assumed if you didn’t mention him that you hadn’t met.”

He looked at Donna, then at her hand clasped in Lee’s. “I guess I was asking the wrong person,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.

“Jaaaaack,” the Doctor said, exasperated.

“You know, I’ve heard of Jack Harkness, too,” Lee interjected.

Jack leaned forward. “Oh yeah? The tales of my greatness go before me?”

Lee shook his head soberly, bur Rose noticed a glimmer in his eyes. “N-no. The tales of your…” He opened and closed his mouth a few times. “Of your nakedness.”  

The whole group burst into laughter. “He’s got you there, Captain Cheesecake,” Mickey said, pounding the man on the back.

“Why are you naked in all the stories, Mr. Jack?” a very young voice asked.

Rose bit her lip and looked down at her little brother, who had snuck into the room when no one had noticed. Oh dear, she thought, looking at the unamused expression on her mum’s face.

“Oh really?” Jackie said as she picked up Tony. “What kind of stories have you been telling my little boy, Harkness?”

She ignored Jack’s incoherent sputtering and wheeled on Pete. “And you, Mister. We’ll be talking about you taking Tony with you to work.” She swept out of the room, and everyone let out collective breath.

“I see what you mean, Rose,” Lee offered, and the tension broke into laughter.

Jenny slipped away from the group, making her way to the kitchen. Pete was pulling dishes out of the cupboards. “Can I help set the table?” she said, guessing what he was up to.

“Of course.”

They each picked up a stack of dishes and carried them into the dining room. As they laid plates around the table, Jenny felt her granddad watching her.

“Jackie tells me Donna brought a plus one tonight,” he said after a few minutes.

Jenny’s hand clenched around the knives she held. “Yeah. Lee McAvoy. They were married in a parallel universe, and we’ve been trying to find him.”

Pete nodded; he understood different universes and different lives better than anyone. “I’m glad Donna was able to find him. She’s seemed a little sad this summer.”

Jenny sighed. Donna had been sad, which made her own upset that much more selfish. “Yeah,” she said quietly.

They finished setting the table, and then Jenny followed Pete back into the kitchen. “Of course,” he said, “Lee joining your group changes the dynamics a bit, doesn’t it?”

Jenny bit her lip, then let everything she was feeling spill out. “Yeah. Mum and Dad, and Donna and Lee. And then me. Just Jenny. I’m the fifth wheel.”

She dropped onto a bench and slouched. “I don’t fit anymore.”

Pete held out a hand and pulled her to her feet. “Then you have to find a way to make yourself fit,” he said firmly. “Come on; dinner is just about ready.”

oOoOo

After supper had been cleared from the table, the Doctor clapped his hands. “All right everyone, may I have your attention!”

“Oh, we’d better listen to him, or he’ll find a way to blow up the dining room or something,” Jackie said sardonically. Everyone else laughed.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. “If you’re done taking the mick—”

“Never,” Mickey said.

“Then maybe,” he continued, raising his voice a little, “you’d like to hear my new safety resolution.”

“Oh, for—” Jackie took a large gulp of her wine. “I’m going to regret this, but let’s hear it.”

“Thank you, Jackie.” Finally, everyone quieted and gave him their full attention. “All of you have travelled with us at one time or another, and most of you have had the… let’s say the misfortune of being stranded.”

Mickey nodded. “On a spaceship in eighteenth century France.”

“Quite right, Mickey Smith. And now, we’re all going our separate ways, to a certain extent. Some of us are in Cardiff,” he gestured at Pete and Jack, “Some in London,” Mickey and Martha, “And some of you might not even live in this time.” This to Lee. “And since we all seem to find trouble more easily than most, I’d like to offer… let’s call it a safety button.”

“What are you thinking, Doctor?” Martha asked. “Project Indigo was completely dismantled by UNIT when the Earth was put back where it belonged.”

Jack held up the wrist that had his vortex manipulator. “I’ve got my own safety button.”

Lee reached into his back pocket and pulled out an identical device. “Me t-t-too.”

“Where did you get that?” Donna exclaimed.

Lee pointed at himself. “T-t-t…” He paused and took a breath. “Time Agent,” he said, forcing the words out.

The Doctor interrupted before Donna insisted on a full history of where he’d been hiding his Vortex Manipulator this whole time. “Excellent, the two of you are covered then. But for the rest of you, what I’m about to suggest is the next best thing.”

The soft murmur of conversation around the table stopped and everyone looked at him. The Doctor nodded and launched into his explanation.

“The TARDIS and I have been working on a little project.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out ten thin pieces of wire. “These are homing beacons. I’ll just install these in your mobile phones under the battery. If you’re ever in trouble and need us to come get you, just press and hold 9 and it’ll activate the beacon.”  

“I hate to admit it,” Jackie said, “but that’s actually a good idea.”

Everyone around the table nodded and pulled their phones out. The Doctor rolled his eyes at Jackie, but went to work on installing the homing beacons onto all of the phones, working down the line.

The last phone on the table was a plastic toy mobile. He looked down at his young brother-in-law, staring up at him with all the seriousness a three-year-old could muster. “I wanna be able to call you too, Doctor.”

The Doctor ruffled the boy’s hair. “Absolutely, Tony Tyler.” He picked up the toy and pointed the sonic screwdriver at it, letting the sound fill the room for a few seconds before he stopped. Then he handed the toy back to Tony.

“There you go. One Tony Tyler homing beacon, ready to go.”

The nanny, who had been waiting at the doorway, came in and held her hand out. “Come on, Tony, you got to talk to the Doctor like you wanted. It’s time for your bath now.”

“Night, Doctor! Night Rosie!”

“Oh, I don’t warrant a good night,” Jackie said, but the Doctor was fairly certain she sounded less irritated than usual.

Sally, the housekeeper, brought out coffee and tea and placed them on the sidebar. Jackie smiled and thanked her, then looked at the group.

“As long as we’re all making announcements, I’ve got one of my own. You’re all invited to our place for Christmas. We’ve got plenty of room for all of you, if we pull out the couches.”

Mickey and Martha both started shaking their heads. “We can’t get that long off,” Mickey said. “We’ll be doing good to get out here for dinner and back to London before we’re expected to be at work the next day.”

“Oh, come on,” Jackie wheedled. “It won’t be the same without you.”

The Doctor got an idea, and after gaining Rose’s approval, he spoke up. “There is a way we could have a holiday house party and still get everyone to work on time the next day.”

“How’s that, boss?”

Martha got it immediately, though. “If we leave the current timeline for the week, right Doctor?”

He nodded. “We could take everyone off-world for a holiday trip. Pick you all up on the 23rd, say, and then bring you back the next morning. Not only do you get a few days’ holiday, you’ll still have Christmas Day at home to catch up on laundry or whatever.”

“I’m not spending our first Christmas together in a hotel on some strange alien planet,” Jackie protested.

“But we could rent a house,” Rose told her. “You could do all the grocery shopping and bring everything with you, and then you’d still get to host the party just like you wanted.”

Jackie pursed her lips. “You’ll help him find a house?” she pressed.

The Doctor rolled his eyes, but he kept his mouth shut.

“Yeah, I’ll help him.”

Jackie looked around at everyone. “Are you all okay with this?”

Mickey nodded. “It’ll be nice to get away for more than a day,” he said. “UNIT has been working us hard for the last few months, trying to clean up the mess left by the Daleks.”

“All right then,” Jackie conceded. “We’ll go away for the holiday.” She pointed at the Doctor. “But we better not end up on the planet Zhoz.”

“I’ll have you know—”

Jackie waved him off. “Come on, everyone. Get yourself a cuppa and let’s go sit down in the living room.”

oOoOo

Rose took her cuppa and went to an over-stuffed armchair tucked slightly away from the rest of the seating arrangement. She tucked her legs up underneath herself and watched her family.

Jack and Lee were swapping stories from the Time Agency. Donna was sitting pressed against Lee’s side, and every once in a  while she’d interject with a story of her own from traveling on the TARDIS. Rose loved to see her newfound confidence—a year ago, she wouldn’t have felt like she had anything to add to a conversation like that.

A naked streak interrupted her observations. Rose jumped up when she realised the streak was her little brother, dripping wet from his bath. He shrieked with laughter as he darted through the living room.

“Oh, Lord,” Jackie muttered.

“I’ve got him, Mum,” Rose told her as she took chase.

It wasn’t hard to track the little boy. If the puddles of water hadn’t given him away, the constant giggling would have. She caught up with him just before he opened the back door to run out into the garden.

“Oh no you don’t, mister,” she said, scooping him up. “Come on, time to go to bed.”

She waved at Pete and Jenny, who were trying not to laugh. “And apologise to Dad for interrupting him and Jenny,” she instructed.

“Sorry, Daddy!” Tony shouted.

“You’re forgiven, Tiger.” Pete stood up and kissed Tony on the forehead. “Now be nice to Anna. She’s getting her exercise in today.”

The winded nanny smiled tiredly. “Thank you, Mr. Tyler.” She took Tony from Rose. “Come on, young man. It’s bed time for all streaking toddlers.”

“What’s streaking?” Tony asked as they left the room.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Rose, Pete, and Jenny burst out laughing.

When Rose reentered the living room, Jack was leaning back on the couch, a gleeful smirk on his face. “And now I’m not the only one with a naked story.”

[astrovian]

Richard Armitage & Shaun Dooley on The Red Production Company Podcast for the Stranger - Transcript

Unfortunately the video is too long/too big a file for me to post directly but the video can be accessed online here

Transcript under cut

Interviewer: Welcome to another episode of the Red Production Company Podcast. I’ve got the wonderful Sean Dooley and Richard Armitage with me. Lead actors in The Stranger. So Sean, as you’re closest to me, let’s start with you. How did – how did you get started in acting? What was the uh… path?

SD: Which camera? Straight down that one? Ah, no, joking. Well, um, I was a young child and Richard Armitage was in his twenties, and he came into my school and did a talk *Laugh* That didn’t happen.

RA: *Laugh* I’m not gonna tell you who came to my school and taught me.

SD: *Laugh* Um, er…right, basically, in a nutshell because I know we haven’t got long, um, I failed miserably at being a vet.

Interviewer: Mm-hmm.

SD: At being a – uh… or marine biology, or whatever I could go into to do with animals. Failed everything, failed my GCSEs, um, I should have gotten all the sciences and everything, and I went to put in exams, I suffered really badly with the uh… the nerves, tension, when I was going into kind of exam situations. So I would get into exams and just clam up and not be able to do anything for the – for the whole exam. Whereas my course work was all A’s and that, so I got one GCSE, um, and a C instead of 8. And um, so basically consequently my whole career trajectory was done and over. You’re gonna put violins behind this, by the way, yeah?

Interviewer: Yes, yeah, of course.

SD: Good.

RA: I’ve actually got a single tear coming down.

SD: *Laugh*

Interviewer: *Laugh*

RA: I’m just gonna wipe it away.                      

SD: *Laugh* He’s been saving that all day.

RA: *quietly* okay *sniff*

SD: And he’s heard it before.

RA: I haven’t actually, I’m fascinated.

SD: *Laugh* Um… and, uh…

RA: I’m just fascinated that you were a vet!

SD: *Laugh*

RA: You’d be really good as a vet.

SD: I’d love to be, I still wanna be! I want Attenborough to kind of go ‘He’d be quite good’-

RA: I always thought you were quite good with animals, aren’t you?

SD: Yeah, well-

RA: Yeah, stroking dogs, and – sorry, go on.

Interviewer: Stroking dogs.

SD: *Laugh* Stroking dogs.

Interviewer: Stick that on the CV.

SD: And uh, so yeah, basically the pits was shut in (?), which would have been my kind of next step, following my dad’s, grandad’s - dad’s, and grandad’s, um and… it was all gone to pot and I used to do once a week a thing with Barnsley Youth Theatre, which used to be around, y’know, once a week. And I went into them and I’d told them the week before about my – failing my GCSEs, and the following week I went in, and they said, ‘listen, we’ve had a chat. We, uh, think you should become an actor. And here is a play called The Caretaker’, that I’d never heard of, and they went ‘and this is a speech by Aston. Read this speech, learn this speech. Read the play. Get it under your belt, and we’ve got a date and time for you to audition for a B-Tech course in acting in Barnsley. And it – basically, I didn’t know at the time, but they’d handed me a life, in a way. Without that moment happening in my life, there is no way on Earth that I’d be saying – no way on Earth, it was never an option, it was never – it was never, uh, a career that somebody like me would’ve, would’ve chosen. Or thought I – I would be capable of doing, and still don’t really think I should be, but anyway. So they handed me that, I went to B-Tech, got into that B-Tech course, uh, went to my dad’s ­­­­­­---- first, and went, “listen, they think I should become an actor”, and my dad, in a very un-Billy Elliot sort of way, said, “You’re gonna be unemployed whatever you decide to do, because of the pits and everything, so you may as well be unemployed doing something that you like doing���. Basically, I was handed it by strangers.

Interviewer: Yeah.

SD: In a way. Which is amazing.

Interviewer: By The Stranger.

AR: *Laugh*

SD: Ooh, by- *gestures pulling off mask, turning to Richard* it was you!! No, it wasn’t.

AR: Ooh!

Interviewer: And then you went onto Arden-

SD: I did a degree, uh, in Manchester, and then left and was the only person to leave my year without an agent.

Interviewer: Oh, wow.

SD: So then I was like, rock bottom, totally pointless, all over, and then I did everything to get my equity card, which I was the last year that needed an equity card in order to kind of prove you were an actor, which I still think is missing today. I think should – y’know, I think something that it – it was invaluable back then, ‘cause you had to kind of graft to get there. I did theatre education for six months, I did plays in the middle of nowhere, just purely to get points. Purely to get my equity card, to then be able to say, ‘I am a legit actor, I can work’. I think it is – I do wish it was still there, I think, because it just – it means you’ve gotta graft, and if you’re prepared to graft, you’re prepared to go a little bit further than somebody who just goes, ‘oh, you know what, I wanna be famous’.

Interviewer: Mm-hmm. Richard, what about you? How did you get started in acting?

RA: Talking of Billy Elliot…

SD: You didn’t!

RA: No, I was, I was sent – for some reason, I can’t figure it out now, I was sent to tap-dancing classes when I was four. Um, so I don’t really have the memory of why I was there, um, I wasn’t very good, though I liked the music. I think I had quite good rhythm. But I was always being told “smile and look like you’re enjoying yourself”. And I got to about nine, and I – I suddenly thought, ‘why do they keep saying “smile and look like you’re enjoying yourself” because if I was enjoying myself I’d be smiling’.

So I kind of travelled on that line for a while, and I was bullied for it as well. The problem with me is that as soon as you try to push me down or say “you can’t do this” and “I don’t think you should do that”, I immediately push back. So I did – I’d decided really young that I was going to try to make a career out of it. Um, but nothing to do with film or television. It was always theatre. I joined the Scouts so I could do the Gang Show. So I ended up going to, um, like a vocational school in Convetry called Patson College, um, and then when I left that – that school, I hadn’t been to a big London school, and needed an equity card.

So I ended up joining the circus in Budapest for six months to get the points to get my card. Got to a circus, I didn’t have – I didn’t know what I was doing, I was throwing hula hoops at – at, um, skateboarders, and waving feathers around and holding onto ladders for jugglers and uh, but – but came back with an equity card, and then started going for auditions that were advertised on the back page of The Stage newspaper. And doing classes at the same time, heading towards musical theatre, which I did for probably four or five years. I was a hoofer. That’s – that’s nothing to do with animals, I know it sounds like it. *Neigh*

So yeah, I did that and then – and then realised I was still having that tiny voice at the back of my head saying “smile and look like you’re enjoying yourself”, and I’m like ‘I’m still not enjoying myself’. And that’s when I decided to kind of have like a little career shift, and I went back to drama school. Um, ‘cause I’d always been a reader from really, really young, and I’d always just devoured books, and I – y’know, I realised that it was my, it was the other side of my creativeness that was driving me, the sort of literary side.

So I went back to drama school quite late, um, at the age of 23. It’s quite late for drama school. But still, I was always focused on theatre, I didn’t in a million years think that anyone with my face and my nose, which was uh, referred to as ‘concord’ when I was a kid, belonged on a screen. So had no, absolutely no kind of aspirations to be on film in any way, shape, or form.

Interviewer: Following on from that, how – one, do you think drama school is a good place to go? And two, do you think it’s essential? ‘Cause I know a lot of young people, they will audition for drama school, audition, audition, thinking it’s the only way into the industry. So what kind of – how important do you think drama school is?

RA: I, um, first of all, I don’t think you have to go. And yes, I think it’s a good place to go. I don’t think they can really teach you how to act. But what they can do is teach you all of the skills that you need when you try to work in the industry, which is changing all the time. I mean – I think when I was at drama school, they – they taught me how to make my voice survive over, y’know, eight shows a week from a – for a twelve-week run, which, when it uh, y’know, when I did The Crucible at The Old Vic five years ago, I really went back to all of that training, ‘cause I was – I was about to lose my voice on the first preview. And uh, so all of that, those skills that they give you – but in terms of, uh, the instinct to be an actor, I don’t necessarily think anyone can teach you that.

Interviewer: Hmm. What do you reckon, Shaun?

SD: No, I totally agree. Um, totally agree. I think one of the good things about drama school is being in an environment, I ‘spose, with people who are all so, uh, y’know, striving to set off on that, y’know, that course. And also a place where you can fail, I think. I went back a bit at Arden and taught at uh, I taught naturalism and Stanislavski and all this – you wouldn’t believe that, would you? *Laugh*

RA: Stanislavski?

SD: Yeah *Laugh* And ‘cause he was my hero at drama, y’know I was a massive – and what I did love about my drama coach, and we did not do telly, we did one day, um, telly with a lovely lady called Maggie Ford, so when I did my first telly I had no idea what to do, ‘cause we were told – doing predominantly theatre, um uh… um, what we did do is we studied all the different practitioners of theatre, and we were left to then choose what you wanted to choose. And y’know you could all just pick little bits of different people, and theorists, and just take a bit from everybody you want, and hang onto that, y’know. So it was never forced that you had to be a particular kind of way. And I – I really loved that element of just finding all these, just y’know, Artaud, and-

Interviewer: A holisitic approach.

SD: -Brecht, and all these things, just going actually, ‘Oh, y’know actually’, it – it was nice to be able to have three years to be able to do that. However, saying that, a B-Tech course, I think, prepped me even better for, for life. Because in that B-Tech course we did – and do y’know what, annoyingly, I heard some kids talking, it’s become – B-Tech’s become a bit of a derogatory word now.

Interviewer: A B-Tech, yeah.

SD: And, and it’s become a bit of a thing-

RA: Is it because it’s got the letter ‘B’ in it?

SD: *Laugh* Yeah

RA: As opposed to-

SD: -A-Tech! And uh, which is really not fair, really. But uh, um in that course we did set design, lighting, and sound design, and – and across the spectrum, learnt – pretty much had a little walk in different shoes. Which was amazing. I think that, for everybody then able to leave a job, and y’know, Richard’s very similar on, on set, just to kind of go - respect for everybody else’s jobs within the machine of making something.

RA: I’m usually looking at everyone else, thinking ‘I wish I’d done your job instead of this one’.

SD: Yeah *Laugh*

Interviewer: Is there anything you’d dip your toe into on the other side?

RA: Ooh, I’m always fascinated with editing, um, but I love production design as well. I look at – when you arrive on a set and the, the detail just blows my mind. I think that’s a really interesting job, ‘cause you’re doing something similar to what we’re doing, which is creating the illusion of life which is so believable. Um, and I – I, originally, if I was clever enough, I would probably have been an architect. To look at buildings, and I look at sets, and I’m sort of fascinated.

Interviewer: So you kind of said that you like to take different bits of different methods of acting, different schools. What about you, Richard? Do you – do you do similar?

RA: Um, you know what, there are – there are, um, a couple of teachers that have crossed my path, or um, through my life, probably I can count them on one hand that I still retain um, all of the detail that they – that they teach. And I didn’t realise it at the time, but um, Di Trevis was one of them, at drama school she came and worked with us on our second term, and literally everything, everything I do now, there’s always something that she would have referenced in, in the work. Even when I’m reading an audiobook, structuring things, and uh… just, just the honesty of, of everything that you do. Y’know, it’s the two schools of, of – one is pretense, and the other is truth. And some people feel that – think that acting is turning up and pretending to do something, and the other school is to – turning up and y’know, convincing yourself that something is real. Uh, and I – I prefer to sit in – I think they’re both valid, actually! – but I prefer to sit in the one where I believe it’s real.

SD: Mmm.

RA: Um, and it, it came from that teacher, yeah. I’d really like to go back into a drama school and try and take everything that, that I’ve gained in the industry, and try and impart that knowledge to kids that, that are just starting out, ‘cause I think TV and film technique is, is something that – it’s so, it’s so kind of complex, and complicated and being able to sort of literally drop into the middle of a scene and pull out one shot from a – from a whole kind of, uh, scene of high anxiety or heart or humour, and to just find these pieces that you – you have to do it a lot on film. I don’t know where – where the technique comes for that.

SD: It’s hard, isn’t it, ‘cause you just gotta – it’s almost kind of learnt over the years in a way, isn’t it?

RA: Mmm.

SD: And it is difficult. I mean, I – we were – little daft things like hitting your mark for a, for a scene and not looking down at your feet, which you watch some of the old films, you beautifully see them walking to set and then go *looks down* and then stop.

RA: *Laugh*

SD: Yeah, but it’s beautiful, it’s really lovely. But uh, first – first time I was asked to hit my mark, I was scared for – I had to lose my mark if it keeps me in the job. Joke.

Interviewer: I only learned to split the difference about a month ago.

SD: Did you?

Interviewer: Yeah, I was – I had no idea what it meant.

RA: Split the difference? Brilliant. Do you know what, my first class, if I was to go back into drama school, and I’d be like – so the title of my first class would be ‘Hitting Your Mark on a Horse’.

SD: *Laugh*

RA: Yeah, I’d be – I’d be like, ‘bring your own horse and then hit your mark on horse’, so you had to get the horse’s feet on the mark so you’re in the right place.

Interviewer: That does sound like a skill that-

RA: I’ve had that a few times.

SD: I’ve heard that recently on The Witcher.

RA: Me too! ‘Cause you’re like trying to get their horse to hit the mark.

SD: And they say, “you can ride, can’t you?” I said, “Yeah!”

RA: Put the sandbag down for the horse.

Interviewer: So, um, is there kind of, any kind of specific advice you would say for someone who’s done loads of theatre, that wants to do screen, or is it so kind of… a myriad of things that… if they want to cross over. ‘Cause I know a lot of people want to do more screen stuff, but have come from a theatre background.

RA: I don’t think there’s – I don’t think there’s a crossover.

SD: No.

RA: ‘Cause I don’t-

SD: I think it’s just volume, yeah. I think it’s a volume thing. I think you still have to go – I mean, the beautiful thing about – God, if you could put them together, the beautiful thing about theatre is having three weeks, if you’re lucky, if you’re unlucky three weeks, which is what I’ve normally had, or if you’re lucky, six or seven weeks, to find the character, to develop the character, to work on the character, to find the through lines. Look at absolutely everything in minutia, and then get rid of it for theatre, that’s why I think we all love doing theatre. Whereas telly, you’re basically in your hotel room doing it, or you’re on your own. We – we, y’know, it don’t happen very often, we, we met up before big nights of filming to work together on stuff, but quite often you – you don’t work on stuff, there’s no place to fail in television, is there any more? We used to work with – when you first started you’d get rehearsals, but for me, I think it’s the same technique, you’re just still striving to sort of get that truth, still striving to be believable, and for yourself to believe what you’re saying, and to listen to what – somebody else talking, and how they’re effecting you. But it just happens, you’re on a stage, you’re doing that *gestures arms wide* more than that *gestures hands close together*, I think.

RA: Yeah, you’re right. It’s just the truth, but at a – at a larger scale. Something that I, that I struggled with really early on when I, um, starting out, when you’re a little bit unsure of what you’re gonna do, and what you’re capable of, and um, because I was always in a rehearsal room, ‘cause I was a theatre actor, there was – there was always this voice at the back of my head saying, ‘You’ll do it on the day’, or ‘You’ll do it when – when there’s an audience in’, or you’ll – and actually, something that I’ve, I’ve taken from TV back into the rehearsal room for theatre is that, in a way, television is like one long rehearsal. So every take is just another rehearsal that you commit to fully, so that when I’m in a rehearsal room now, I , I work as if we’re filming everything, and everything’s usable, even if, even if we’re not – there’s no audience in the room, you’re trying various versions of the scene. All of them are correct, none of them are wrong.

Interviewer: Yeah.

RA: Um, and I think if you – I think if you, you – you work in that way all the time, no matter where you are, um, but yeah, volume is – it’s, it’s – you still um, I think on stage you still can work in close-ups, because there’s somebody sitting three feet away from you, but also you have to – you have to gauge your body movement a bit more. If you put than on film, then someone would be like, “Whoa! What are you doing?! Back off!”

Interviewer: You’re probably out of shot by that point, yeah.

RA: Yeah.

SD: But also I think as well, in, in this sense that when you’re on stage, and I might be wrong here, but this sense that when you’re on stage you’ve got a – Stanislavski called it a concentration – you’ve got another circle that’s encompassing the audience, and where you’re stood and how you – where your physicality is, to where your body is blah, blah, blah. You’ve got a camera, which is one audience member looking at you, and I think that’s some of the technical psychobabble, and I – I don’t look at that and go, ‘that’s an enemy’, I, I enjoy – it’s always a third – y’know, we’ve got the scene, it’s always a third person that’s in the scene in a daft way, and I like the fact that technically we have a little dance around this, around this inanimate object that is, is one audience member looking at you. And I, I really like that. There’s a lot of people who it, uh, I think the thing is, if you kind of go all method blah, and shut that out, that’s like going on stage and going ‘Kadush!’ and putting a curtain down, and it kind of y’know, I don’t know. I’m probably talking bollocks, but-

RA: No, not at all.

Interviewer: The, the idea, it’s the implied narrator of the scene, is the camera. So, and – and that viewpoint impacts the – how the scene is played out, y’know. I did think about the idea, if you set up a 360 camera in a room to film a scene, it’d be completely different because you wouldn’t be having that snap viewpoint. Um, I think it could actually be impossible, but y’know, I thought with something like Twelve Angry Men, you could theoretically, ‘cause it was based on one long take, and see what happens really.

RA: It’s also – it’s very nice when you work with um, y’know, we get exposed to so many different types of actor in the career, but when you with with people that come from theatre, they, then – they never stop the work when the camera’s not on them. They’re – they’re always in the world, and um, I just didn’t – I really enjoyed that. And that’s the one thing about theatre that you don’t necessarily get on film, is that you’re far more in control of it, so when the play starts, you know that you’re driving it and you will continue doing this for the next two and a half, maybe three hours sometimes, maybe four hours. And um, on film there’s always someone else that will say cut and you think, ‘Ah, I was just about to have a moment!’

SD: Yeah!

RA: Um, but to be in the driving seat is actually quite satisfying.

Interviewer: Just moving on, as we are strapped for time, um, ‘cause you sort of said, you – you were the one that didn’t leave with an agent out of your drama school, how important do you think an agent is, especially early on? Is it get one as quickly as you can, or…

SD: It’s so hard – I think it’s so hard for people, this, the – the number of people who’re in drama colleges has upped, the number of charlatan agents that are out there who get kids who don’t have very much money to pay monthly so that they can be represented, which I think are just scum, to be honest with you. And take the money when you’ve earnt it, or take the money off these kids before they’ve earnt it is not fair. It’s a message to any of you out there, who may be listening. Um, sorry, I got a bit angry there. Uh… what was I saying?

Interviewer: Is it important to get an agent at the start, kind of as quickly as you can? Kind of a – a good agent, anyway.

SD: Oh, it’s so hard. I don’t know.

RA: I think-

SD: It’s the aim, ain’t it?

RA: -y’know what, I’ve seen many of my friends and colleagues, I’ve seen people function in the industry without an agent, um, it’s much more difficult. I think it – I think it’s crucial, really, to um, to creating a long and healthy career. You just – you do need somebody guiding you, because you – most of the time you can’t even get in the door without, without someone on your behalf knocking on it, with the right people. In a way it was – going back to drama school, one of the – there were two reasons why I went back to drama school. Because I didn’t have the confidence to, to move into an industry without the – in a way, the qualification, or the – the certificate, but I also knew that I couldn’t function in the industry without an agent. And drama school was the only place to really cultivate that, I think.

Interviewer: Yeah. Is there anything that you feel has changed dramatically from the start of your career towards the point now, is there anything that surprised you on the way?

RA: My face! I mean *laughing*, please, can I just like pick it up off the floor! It’s really hard to age on screen. Over, over twenty years. It’s really hard when you look like a-

SD: Can still see it, yeah, I know

RA: -my goodness. You’ve really got to embrace that side of it, y’know.

SD: I used to be the youngest on set! Always, for like ages, I’m always the youngest on set.

RA: Do you behave differently now though? Still behave like you’re the youngest?

SD: Yeah! *Laugh* I do! Um, what’s changed? What’s major things have changed?

Interviewer: Something that surprised you that you weren’t expecting about the industry when you kind of started out.

SD: I think we’re moving in a better direction now, towards more… is the word ‘inclusivity’? Is that a word?

RA: Yeah.

SD: Um, which I think is sadly lacking in our industry, and needs to be wrestled with – should’ve been wrestled with a long time ago – and different jobs, people being educated with different jobs, that’s starting to, starting to open up now to different people from different backgrounds, and I think that’s – as far as I’m concerned, the more you open up, the more talent you’re gonna get. And it’s as simple as that really. It’s nothing to do with where you’re from, or what you’re age – it’s y’know, you open up, you open your search wider, you’re gonna find better, better people. And um, so I’m glad about that. That’s a really good, positive thing. And even daft things, like the amount of female directors I’m now suddenly being directed by, and it’s just – it’s great, it’s really nice, ‘cause different people bring different things, and different backgrounds, different experiences, life experiences – they bring that to the table and they can’t help but make you - make it all better.

RA: Actually, there was something I wanted to add to what Shaun said, about inclusivity, is that um, no matter how – how much confidence you have or how, in my case, lack. Y’know, I always felt like a misfit, or an oddball, or that I didn’t belong. But I always – I always told myself that ‘you exist in the world, so therefore there’s a place for you in this industry’. I think anybody who feels like, “I can’t become an actor because…” – you exist. And, y’know, the job of filmmakers is to write about our life and society, and if you are a part of that, then there’s a place for you in the industry.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

photo credit Jim Huylebroek for the New York Times

* * * * *

Michael J. Tallon

“I've been thinking about Afghanistan over the past few days, as many of you have, as well. It's obviously a crazily complex and chaotic system right now, and it would be hard to predict how things play out in the coming weeks or months. There could very easily be a confrontation between Taliban forces and US/Coalition forces in Kabul. That really depends on unit cohesion and chain-of-command durability on the Taliban side - with the big question being, "How far can we push them during the evacuation?" 

After a hideous day or two at the airport about a week ago, it seems that something like an orderly evacuation is in process. Sure, it's crazy. Sure, there are thousands of people outside the airport, desperate to get in. But no one is flushing onto the runways. That happened in an understandable panic when the Ghani government fled (with hundreds of millions of dollars in their luggage), and the Taliban emerged from all over Kabul. Note this: You never saw video of an army triumphantly marching on the capital city. Why? Well, eerie as it may be, it's because they were already there. 

As of two days ago, C-130 flights have been leaving on the hour, and we're clearing about 5000 people a day. Given that we've set a schedule of last-wheels-up for August 31, that means we'll move about another 50,000 allies and vulnerable families out of the country, and to make sure we are maximizing those efforts, it appears that some forward actions have been taken. French forces went and grabbed some of their people two days ago from a house in Kabul. Yesterday, a Chinook helicopter hopped over to the Baron Hotel, a few hundred meters from the airport to grab some folks. More of that will likely happen, which might - just might - cause a reaction from Taliban forces on the ground. That could get very ugly, very quickly, and I'd imagine there are lines of communication open between Taliban leadership and US military leadership to prevent that from happening. Oddly, as politics make strange bedfellows, the Biden Administration, the US Military, and the Taliban all want the same thing right now. They want the US out of Afghanistan, and can likely be marshaled in that direction. Still, near-term chaos could ensue if someone on the ground gets pissy. 

That stuff is all really unclear. But blow the perceptual lens out a bit - to the next few years - and things get a little clearer. 

1) Very soon, western military forces will be gone from the country, at least in sizeable formations. Never doubt the penetrative capacity of US Special Forces, but the force presence will likely be down to dozens, rather than thousands. 

2) The Taliban will need to figure out how to run a country. They clearly have some capacity for taxation and enforcement, but the rest of it - maintaining a power grid, providing water and electric infrastructure, some semblance of healthcare - will be an enormous challenge. Also, as they'll be attempting to fund a state, they'll need significantly more resources than they have required so far for the support of an advancing army. The 2019 GDP of Afghanistan was about $20 billion dollars. For comparison, the GDP of New York State is $1.5 trillion. So, it's not a rich country, and for the past 20 years, a sizable percentage of that wealth came in from US military largess - and most of THAT got siphoned off to a corrupt cadre of elites who managed to be such awful people that their countrymen would rather have the Taliban in charge - and that's something. 

The GDP of that troubled nation is going to take a massive hit this year, on top of which, the Biden Administration has recently frozen about $10 billion dollars of Taliban funds that they had secured in US banks - which is mindblowing in and of itself. 

So, how do they get that money back? How do they entice other foreign investors to provide the needed resources? How do they do that in a region of the world where there are predators on all sides? It's gonna be mighty tricky, but one potential way forward would be to TRY and reform their most brutal of practices.

No one has any illusions about the Taliban becoming liberal adherents of Enlightenment principles, but maybe there will be a push for fewer public execution festivals in the town football pitch? Maybe rather than banning all women and girls from reading, they'll keep the schools open, but demand the girls dress in burkhas. I don't know if that will be the case, but there are at least some early signs that some "moderate" Taliban will lean that way.  This leads to the next likely scenario a year or two out. 

Civil War. 

3. Go back through your history of radicals taking over as governing forces. The French Revolution is the most commonly used example of what happens when purists are put into the position of actually running a state. Though you could also look to Ireland in 1922-23. This is admittedly analogy as history and might be completely wrong, but my sense is there's a real possibility of the Taliban fracturing along "reformist" and "purist" wings. IF the Taliban leadership tries to live inside the rules of the community of nations; if they try to moderate their practices to encourage investment and growth, THEN you might very likely see the rise of a revanchist faction who really, truly believes the world should be returned to the fashion of seventh century Saudi Arabia. 

Add to that potential chaos the reality that small fiefdoms of well-armed local leaders with significant self-interest in controlling the flow of limited resources will emerge all over the country, and these past years could end up looking rather peaceful by comparison - which would bring us to the next point - Afghanistan is in an ugly, ugly neighborhood for geopolitics. 

4. Afghanistan is bordered by four major geopolitical forces. Pakistan to the south, Iran to the west. China to the east, and Russia (under its regional proxies, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan) to the north. For the past twenty years, the United States has been on the ground, and that served to limit (but not stop) their influence in the region. Of the four major players, Pakistan has been particularly active in supporting the Taliban and allowing them to have cross-border safe-havens which made defeating them practically impossible. 

But how in the hell will those four power centers resolve the coming decades in what will likely be a very chaotic, poor, corrupt, and broken land? Russia and China will both be working hard and brutally to blunt the spread of militant Islam on their borders. Pakistan will now need to deal with its violent attack dogs as a neighboring government, potentially destabilizing the political reality of Pakistan itself. As to Iran . . . my Lord, I have no clue. All I know is that the Taliban are Sunni and the Ayatollahs are Shi'a - and that's its own 1000-year-old can of worms. 

-----

I've been writing this now for an hour or so. I do that sometimes just to try and think through the complexities, and I end where I began. No matter how ugly these past few days have been, I think that Biden both made the right choices, and is doing a pretty damn good job, all things considered. The pressures on Afghanistan are brutal - the poverty, the corruption, the geopolitical crucible in which it sits, the religious divisions, the tribal rivalries, the forces of modernization and radical revanchism, the international finances. Ugh. 

Back in 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to John Holmes. The subject was the Missouri Compromise which threatened to destabilize the nation by expanding slavery to the West but kept it whole by allowing Maine to join in the East - thereby balancing the interests of Northern free-staters, and Southern slavers. He understood that slavery ultimately would provide to great an internal pressure to keep the country whole - and he feared the day those forces would eventually tear us apart. He wrote of slavery that "we have the wolf by the ear, we can neither safely hold it, nor safely let it go." 

That's been the case with Afghanistan since we first invaded nearly 20 years ago, and as the fourth President who had to make this choice, Joe Biden finally accepted it was time to make Afghanistan someone else's problem. Yeah, he got bit by the wolf. Yeah, a lot of people are going to suffer. But when you look ahead at the absolute horrorshow of Central Asia in the next fifty years, my sense is that history will determine he made the right terrible choice.  

Love to you all.

Thanks to Michael J. Tallon

[n7inky-fanfics]

One Day at a Time

The destruction of the Reapers did not mean galactic peace. While the treaties Shepard had brokered during the war remain mostly intact, there is no shortage of pirates, criminals, gangs, and terroristic organizations bent on creating chaos and destruction. The Council began directing their Spectres towards overseeing and protecting reconstruction efforts and maintaining peace. Now that scientists are close to unlocking the key to repairing the mass relays, the galaxy has settled into unease. No one knows if crime will get better or worse with the relays back online. All factions are getting agitated, and more fighting is breaking out.

Sometimes, Kaidan pities the poor soul on the wrong end of Shepard's gun. More than once, he has heard all sorts of people shout something along the lines of "Oh shit, it's Shepard!" as they realized they were about to die. Shepard is a skilled soldier who dominates the battlefield with equal parts strength and grace. Fighting alongside her can be almost beautiful in an odd and violent sort of way, especially when she used her biotics. It took her almost a year of practice fighting on her military grade prosthetic leg, but she has now found that grace on the battlefield again. In the end, her skills and her career could not be taken by the Reaper War. The galaxy kept its greatest protector.

Today, they are both back on Mars, of all places, fighting a remnant of Cerberus that is attempting to steal more data from the archives. If intel is correct, their goal is to find weapons they can use "for the betterment of humanity", which is their way of saying anti-alien terrorism. Kaidan does have to admit that some part of him enjoys taking down pieces of Cerberus. After all the horrible things he's seen them do, including all that they have put Shepard through, he's glad to eliminate every last cell in the galaxy. It's a worthy career goal.

As the smoke clears, Shepard begins checking the bodies for data pads, hoping to find anything to indicate how many of them are at the archives and what their exact plans are. After all, if this was just an outdoor lookout team, there's bound to be more already inside. She freezes as she reads one of the data pads. Kaidan can barely see her face through her helmet, but her reaction to the data pad can't be good. "Shepard, what is it?"

She clears her throat and says calmly "It's not pertinent to the mission. Let's move on." She drops the data pad and continues towards the entrance. Kaidan trusts Shepard, but curiosity gets the better of him and he glances down at the data pad as he passes by. It currently displays the owner's profile. He can see an image that he guesses matches the body they found it on and a name. "Andrew Mason".

As they enter the archive, they happily find a distinct lack of civilian and scientist casualties. This time, intel learned of the plan early and decided to evacuate the scientists and ship in more soldiers. Unfortunately, Cerberus still puts up a good fight and many of the Alliance soldiers were injured or killed before the Spectres arrived (travel between systems takes more time now that the relays are gone). Shepard hops on to the nearest terminal and accesses the system logs. "Ah, here it is. Someone opened an archive five minutes ago. We can take the tram there."

"Perfect. Maybe this time we'll make it through without getting shot at." Immediately after making the joke, Kaidan winces at the realization that bringing up their last mission on Mars might not be a good idea. Sure, they've worked everything out, but it still could be a touchy subject. He was pretty cruel to her last time, before he almost died in front of her.

"Doubtful." Shepard laughs lightly as they board the tram.

They ride quietly for a moment before Kaidan asks "So, will I get to know who Andrew Mason is?"

"Maybe later. Now's not the time."

"Fair." Kaidan says. He smiles at her, hoping she can see it through the helmet. His is much more open and visually blocks less of the face. Shepard's preferred gear usually allows less visibility, but it also has fewer structural weak points. He noticed a change in her treatment of her armor not too long after he got back on the Normandy, but he's never said anything. Without asking, he already knows why Shepard chooses armor with the most reinforced environment system, and why she carefully and almost obsessively maintains it. He would, too, in her shoes.

He refocuses himself on the task at hand as they begin approaching their destination. They've almost made it when a Cerberus soldier begins firing at the car. They both take cover behind the wall and the dance begins yet again. As the car docks, Shepard throws up a barrier and runs out, shooting at several men in a row as she charges to cover. Kaidan focuses on the heavy trooper slowly approaching from a distance and Reaves. Together, they feed off each other's energy. The can move in sync, watching each other's sixes and supporting each other throughout the entire battle. Before long, the docking zone falls silent as the battle ends.

They take turns clearing doors until they finally get to the archive. They take cover on either side of the door. He opens it carefully, and Shepard immediately swings around to cover him with her pistol. The immediate entryway is surprisingly empty. Shepard gestures for him to follow, then slowly and quietly moves inside the room until they reach a sharp turn. She takes cover against the wall and peers around the corner, gun at the ready. As soon as she does, she is thrown backwards by a large biotic force. Her gun fires before she even hits the wall. Kaidan swings around and unleashes a singularity that pulls the target into the air. Shepard fires again, making several headshots that eventually pierce the armor and hit their mark.

"Thanks for the cover, Alenko." She says, her smile coming through in the sound of her voice. She pats him on the back and pushes further into the room, where the target had been collecting data onto a drive. She plugs the data into her omnitool and runs it through analysis softwares. Liara would be able to tell them more, but it appears that intel was correct. They had been here for advanced weapons blueprints. Shepard begins forwarding the information back to the Normandy, then turns to head back to the LZ. Kaidan follows her.

Getting back to the Normandy and conferencing with Admiral Hackett is no big deal. After the verbal debriefing, they retire to her cabin to write their mission reports. Kaidan's ship, the SSV London (named for the Battle of London that ended the Reaper War), is still getting it's final touches before he'll be able to take it out on a shakedown run, so he rode along with Shepard for this mission and their last several. As they settle into the couch with their tea and data pads, he can't help but smile. This is a good life, one he hadn't expected to attain. Every day, sometimes several times a day, he still finds himself thankful that they had found Shepard after the Crucible. When the Alliance had formally declared her missing in action, with the caveat that she was most likely dead, Kaidan refused to lay down and wait for them to declare her death. He contacted Hackett with an emergency QEC on the Normandy and told him that until they found a body, Shepard was to be considered alive and in need of assistance. They all owed that to her. Seeing her here and now, living her life with him, is something he is grateful for every day.

As Kaidan is putting the final touches on his report, Shepard sets her data pad on the table and walks to her shower, stripping off articles of clothing as she goes. He fumbles over the keyboard, leaving a line of text that reads "ghdhshgdg" as he watches her go. Knowing that he's watching, she calls "finish your report first, and then you can join me." He deletes the line of typos, hurriedly wraps up the report, and follows her for an enjoyable interlude.

Their activities eventually end with them cuddling in her bed. She lay with her head resting gently on his chest, her hand absentmindedly rubbing circles on through his chest hair. He has one arm around her back and gently brushing strokes down her upper arm. He can feel her back subtly rise and fall with her breath. They lay this way for a while before he feels a slight dampness on his chest, where her head is. "Hazel, are you okay?" he asks, looking down at her. Her face is buried in him. She stifles a sob, and he feels the shift in her breathing as she forces herself to cry silently. He wraps his arms around her tighter. "Sweetheart, whatever it is, I've got you." Slowly, she pulls herself back and looks at him. He reaches up to her and gently wipes the tears from her cheeks. She pulls herself into a sitting position against the headboard, and he follows so that they are sitting side by side.

She leans her head on his shoulder and quietly says "You asked about Andrew Mason?"

"Yeah. Do you want to talk about it?"

"I knew him... from before the Alliance." she ends the sentence at barely a whisper. Her shoulders tense and she looks down at the floor. "He was one of the younger kids in the Reds before I left." He gently reaches for her hand and takes it in his as she continues. "I heard he'd gotten out, that he'd joined the Alliance some time after my death. I had hoped he'd do well and go far, but it didn't work that way. I checked his records when we got back to the ship. His team got ambushed by some pirates about seven months before the Reapers invaded. He was discharged honorably for medical reasons, for PTSD. I guess that's when Cerberus got to him."

"Hazel, I'm so sorry." he says.

"The hell of it is that I can see myself in that kid. In what he came from, in his escape. What if I somehow influenced his decision to leave like that? How many kids joined after hearing fantastical stories about my life, only to be swooped up by Cerberus when the Alliance didn't live up to their expectations or to die in battle before they got the chance to reconsider?"

"Hey, stop that. It's not your fault, Hazel."

"How many people died because of me? Will continue to die because of me? Because I failed?" Her voice cracks and she lets out a shuddering breath.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Backup. Failed at what?"

"I couldn't save them all. I can never save them all."

"Hazel, stop. Look at me." He gently places his hand under her chin and guides her to look at him. "You are not responsible for every person in the galaxy. You've spent far too much of your life fighting galactic wars practically on your own. Enough is enough. We stopped the Reapers. Now, we just do what we can to make things a little better. One day at a time, okay?"

She nods and he pulls her into a tight embrace. "One day at a time." She sniffles.

[pindaleng]

Title: But I Knew You

Pairing: Avatrice

Chapters: 1/1

Wordcount: 2270

Summary: College AU. Beatrice is Ava’s favorite person. Ava loves being around her in a way she can’t explain. She wants to do everything with her, from studying to partying to walks outside. Which is completely normal for best friends.

Getting flustered by close contact and fake flirting is also definitely a super normal friendship thing.

Read on AO3 or below.

“I don’t get it.”

Beatrice sighed from her desk. “You don’t have to, it’s organic chemistry.”

“But I feel like I should. Like, this is the structure of living things right? I’m living, so I should understand how it works.”

“You use the internet, but you don’t know how that works.”

“Good point.” Ava shut the thick textbook in front of her. She didn’t really want to learn anyways. “You done yet?”

Beatrice sighed again, turning in her chair to face Ava, who was sitting on her bed. “We’ve only been working half an hour, and I specifically said I was spending the entire day studying. Which you should be doing too, since I know you said you have an exam Monday.”

“Fine Ms. Studious.” Ava made a big show of loudly unzipping her backpack and finally pulling out her laptop and notebooks. “I’ll…study,” she said, punctuating her last word with air quotes.

Beatrice narrowed her eyes, definitely looking skeptical, but turned back to her own pile of schoolwork.

Ava opened up her Google doc notes on her laptop, and simultaneously picked up her phone to check Twitter. Beatrice was right to doubt her; she practically never did any work on Saturdays. That’s what Sundays were for.

And yet, every Saturday, she showed up at Beatrice’s room under the guise of studying, just so she could hang out with her favorite person. Beatrice was one of the few people Ava felt comfortable in silence with, maybe due to all the death glares she’s received from Beatrice when she’s being too distracting.

Either way, she found comfort in it, even if they’re just sitting in the same room together, focused on their own activities. Beatrice studying, and Ava scrolling through social media on her phone, occasionally typing a paragraph or two for a paper due the following week.

They’re pretty much polar opposites, and Ava often wondered how they stuck as friends. Probably due to the weird crucible of living on the same freshman year dorm floor. People got to know everyone really quickly, for better or worse.

Luckily, it turned out for the better with everyone Ava met. A few of them with rooms in the north wing bonded fast, and they rented a house together for their sophomore year. She loved them all: Mary, Lilith, Camila, and Beatrice.

But especially Beatrice.

Beatrice was smart, kind, and witty, and honestly the best listener Ava’s ever met. Ava unabashedly talks a lot. Like, a lot. And being like that, people can lose interest as conversation and friendships progress.

But Beatrice still gave Ava her full attention after a year of Ava talking her ear off. Which was still impressive every time.

It’s cool.

It’s cool that she has a solid group of friends when there was no one back home to keep in touch with.

She really loved it here.

There were so many things to do and people to meet, sometimes she still got overwhelmed by it all.

And the best place to get the full experience? College parties.

It was the midst of midterm season, but honestly all the more necessary to have something to blow off stress. And to be real, midterm season lasted from the second month of school to the end of the semester. So, no better time than the present.

After Ava got kicked out of Beatrice’s room for being too distracting, she spent most of that evening helping the rest of her housemates set up their party. Mary was in charge of getting alcohol, having the most connection with older students. Lilith put Ava and Camila in charge of cleaning and setting up, which basically meant that Lilith didn’t trust Ava to actually do the work well. Ava would have been offended if she didn’t enjoy spending time with Camila so much. The girl was a ball of literal sunshine, yet also unexpectedly, full of dirty jokes.

So, setting up the apartment with Camila was a party in itself, full of fun banter and deep life discussions.

Ava just finished putting out the snacks and booze, when the first people arrived. She cracked open a bottle of Fireball, and downed a double shot.

Ava happily shook out her body as the the liquid warmed her up. It was going to be a good night.

———

Ava’s in the middle of laughing at some stranger’s story when she caught sight of a figure coming down the stairs. She grinned.

“Woo! Life of the party’s here!!!” She yelled across the room, startling the people around her, and drawing Beatrice’s attention towards her. If Ava was sober, maybe she would have cared more that Beatrice looked slightly (very) embarrassed, but Ava definitely wasn’t sober. She half skipped and half jogged across the room, undoubtedly spilling her drink on herself and several bystanders.

She hugged Beatrice tightly when she reached her. God it felt nice. Like sinking into a bed of clouds. Or something similarly soft and fluffy and comforting. “I missed you.”

Beatrice laughed softly, close to Ava’s ear. The best sound in the world. “You just saw me a couple of hours ago.”

Ava pulled away and pouted. “Still.”

Beatrice smiled, in a perfect way that made her entire face brighter. Holy hell she was beautiful. “Well, I finished up for the day and I’m here now. Any chance you can show me where the party is?” Her eyes sparkled with playfulness.

Ava looked at her in disbelief. “Wait seriously? You wanna join?”

“I can’t be a dud at a party in my own house, can I?”

Beatrice had definitely sat out on many parties they’ve hosted, but Ava ignored that. For now, she was going to enjoy this win. She led her to the kitchen, where various bottles of alcohol and sodas crowded their dining table. Beatrice shrugged when Ava asked what she wanted, so she just made a vodka cranberry. It was a crowd pleaser drink in her opinion. Plus, some rich kid brought Grey Goose, which was probably double or triple the price of everything else on the table.

Beatrice took a sip. “Not bad.”

“I may not know much,” Ava tapped her index finger a couple times to her temple, “but I do know my liquor.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, you also know how to get on my nerves.” Beatrice said teasingly, voice devoid of any malice.

Ava took a overdramatic bow. “Thank you, m’lady.” She refilled her own cup with a mixture of vodka and sprite. “Shall we?” Ava offered her hand to the other girl.

Beatrice rolled her eyes, but put her hand in Ava’s.

Ava led them back to the main room, navigating through groups of bodies to eventually land them at a couch, which was miraculously unclaimed.

From there, Ava launched into basically non-stop talking, wanting to entertain Beatrice in the best way she knew how. She shared stories of all the people she met during the night so far, with Beatrice supplementing the conversation with appropriate reactions and commentary. Ava recounted one guy that recklessly challenged her to shotgunning a beer against him. Spoiler alert, he lost miserably. Ava watched Beatrice’s eyes as much as she could while she was talking, entranced with their intenseness, openness, and expression. Did they always look like that?

The eye contact felt so personal, like it took away everyone else in the room, ignoring the raging party and loud music around them.

And the music was definitely loud, though the song choices were good. Mary knew how to set up a playlist. Ava got banned from music duty when she un-ironically added in Friday by Rebecca Black.

No regrets.

After exhausting all the tales from that night, she moved to discussing and speculating with Beatrice on the backstories of all the partygoers. People watching with Beatrice was always fun. As strait-laced as she appeared, Beatrice was also incredibly creative. Whatever wild stuff Ava theorized, Beatrice could match or do better.

At one point, a couple joined them on the couch, pushing Ava into Beatrice, pressing their sides together. The couch was much too small to comfortably fit 3 people, much less four.

“Shit, sorry.” Ava tried her best to back up and give Beatrice space, but there was nowhere to go.

Beatrice put a hand on her thigh and smiled. “Ava, it’s fine.”

Ava suddenly found it hard to breathe. Probably due to being surrounded by two more people.

“You okay?” Beatrice furrowed her eyebrows.

“Yeah, think I just need to get out here for a bit. Wanna take a walk?”

“Sure.”

There was a nice, cool breeze outside, a welcome relief from the humid air inside. It was also much quieter.

Beatrice suggested getting ice cream from Mcdonald’s and Ava emphatically agreed. Beatrice really knew her.

Fifteen minutes later she was contently humming to herself as they walked back to the house. This was the best party ever. She had an ice cream cone in one hand and somehow Beatrice’s hand in the other. A perfect night. Ava’s pretty sure this is the happiest she’s ever been in her entire life.

———

Ava groaned as she slid back into consciousness. She felt grimy, which was not unusual for her after a night of drinking.

She did a quick self inventory to assess the damage.

She was in her own bed, which was good. Boxers? On. Shirt? Also on, but in her sleep shirt instead of the button up she was wearing last night. Interesting. No bra. Also interesting.

She felt around to her right and left. No body in the bed with her. Good to know.

Minimal pounding in her head. She sat up, breathing a sigh of relief that she didn’t feel like throwing up.

She noticed a glass of water and a couple of Advils on her nightstand. Definitely Beatrice. No one else would be nice enough. Okay maybe Camila, but she still had bets on Beatrice.

She quickly washed down the pills with water and slipped on shorts and a pullover before making her way downstairs to the kitchen.

Mary was sitting at the table eating, and Beatrice at the stove pouring batter into a pan.

“Pancakes, oh my god. Bea you’re the best.” Ava gave Beatrice a tight hug and overdramatic sloppy kiss on the cheek.

Beatrice playfully pushed Ava away and made a show of wiping the kiss off her face. “Yeah yeah I know, now eat it while it’s still hot.”

Ava saluted. “Got it chef.”

“Dork.”

“You love it.”

“No comment.”

Ava’s in the middle of inhaling her fifth pancake when Mary said something. Beatrice left the room about a pancake ago, so it could only have been directed at Ava.

“What?” Ava momentarily stopped chewing.

Mary got up and started rinsing her dishes in the sink. “I said, you should really tell her how you feel.”

Ava knitted her eyebrows together. “About what?”

Mary stared at her for a while, long enough to make Ava to feel uncomfortable. Her mouth was still full, and Mary has perfected the gaze that made her feel like a kid in trouble.

“Never mind,” she said, as she put her dishes in the dishwasher.

“About what??” She repeated. Mary ignored her and walked out the kitchen. Ava swallowed the rest of the food in her mouth. “Asshole!” Ava yelled after her, eliciting a middle finger response.

Beatrice appeared in the doorway. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, just Mary being cryptic and messing with me.”

“Sounds about right.”

Beatrice sat down at the table. “How are you feeling?”

“Surprisingly… not bad. Seriously thank you for the food and Advils,” Ava remembered her state of dress when she woke up. “And…probably also for helping me out of my clothes.”

“Oh um, right, it was nothing. Didn’t want you sleeping in an uncomfortable, sweaty shirt.” Ava noticed Beatrice’s cheeks turn a little pink. Shit, she didn’t mean to embarrass her. She could fix this.

“Did you see something you like?” Ava wiggled her eyebrows, trying to lighten the mood, but it only made Beatrice blush harder. Oh my god Ava you’re so bad at this. She felt herself digging herself into a hole. Of course fake flirting with her is going to make it worse.

Ava was about to say something (probably dumb) to attempt again to save the situation, before Beatrice spoke.

“How could I not? You’re beautiful.”

For once, Ava was speechless. The incredibly reverent but casual way Beatrice said it completely took her breath away. There was something magical about how soft Beatrice’s eyes were, and how vulnerable it felt. Half of Ava felt calmed, while the other half of her was a raging mess. Ava felt the need to do something. She wasn’t sure what, but she needed to do something. She started racking her garbled brain for any ideas.

Beatrice’s smile slowly slid into a smirk, “Got you.”

The spell of the moment was broken. Ava laughed to dust off any lingering weird feelings. “Wow, got a taste of my own medicine. I’m impressed.”

“I had a good teacher. You should have seen your face.” Beatrice mimicked a “deer in the headlights” look for a brief moment before grinning again. She got up from the table. “Now hurry up and finish your food so we can get to the library. I’m not going to let you forget about studying for your midterm tomorrow.”

“Right. Yeah.”

“Cool.” Beatrice slapped Ava’s arm playfully before leaving the room.

Ava watched her go, wondering what in the living hell just happened. Fuck. Was she about to kiss her best friend?