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sayruq · 7 months ago

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NAHLA AL-ARIAN HAS been living a nightmare for the past seven months, watching from afar as Israel carries out its scorched-earth war against her ancestral homeland in the Gaza Strip. Like many Palestinian Americans, the 63-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher from Tampa Bay, Florida, has endured seven months of a steady trickle of WhatsApp messages about the deaths of her relatives. “You see, my father’s family is originally from Gaza, so they are a big family. And they are not only in Gaza City, but also in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, other parts,” Al-Arian told me. Recently, the trickle of horrors became a flood: “It started with like 27, and then we lost count until I received this message from my relative who said at least 200 had died.” The catastrophe was the backdrop for Al-Arian’s visit last week to Columbia University in New York City. Al-Arian has five children, four of whom are journalists or filmmakers. On April 25, two of her daughters, Laila and Lama, both award-winning TV journalists, visited the encampment established by Columbia students to oppose the war in Gaza. Laila, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English with Emmys and a George Polk Award to her name, is a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. Lama was the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award for her reporting for Vice News on the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut. The two sisters traveled to Columbia as journalists to see the campus, and Nahla joined them. “Of course, I tagged along. You know, why would I sit at the hotel by myself? And I wanted to really see those kids. I felt so down,” she said. “I was crying every day for Gaza, for the children being killed, for the women, the destruction of my father’s city, so I wanted to feel better, you know, to see those kids. I heard a lot about them, how smart they are, how organized, you know? So I said, let’s go along with you. So I went.” Nahla Al-Arian was on the campus for less than an hour. She sat and listened to part of a teach-in, and shared some hummus with her daughters and some students. Then she left, feeling a glimmer of hope that people — at least these students — actually cared about the suffering and deaths being inflicted on her family in Gaza. “I didn’t teach them anything. They are the ones who taught me. They are the ones who gave me hope,” she recalled. “I felt much better when I went there because I felt those kids are really very well informed, very well educated. They are the conscience of America. They care about the Palestinian people who they never saw or got to meet.” Her husband posted a picture of Nahla, sitting on the lawn at the tent city erected by the student protesters, on his Twitter feed. “My wife Nahla in solidarity with the brave and very determined Columbia University students,” he wrote. Nahla left New York, inspired by her visit to Columbia, and returned to Virginia to spend time with her grandchildren. A few days later, that one tweet by her husband would thrust Nahla Al-Arian into the center of a spurious narrative promoted by the mayor of New York City and major media outlets. She became the exemplar of the dangerous “outside agitator” who was training the students at Columbia. It was Nahla’s presence, according to Mayor Eric Adams, that was the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.

On February 20, 2003, Nahla’s husband, Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, was arrested and indicted on 53 counts of supporting the armed resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The PIJ had been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, and the charges against Al-Arian could have put him in prison for multiple life sentences, plus 225 years. It was a centerpiece case of the George W. Bush administration’s domestic “war on terror.” When John Ashcroft, Bush’s notorious attorney general, announced the indictment, he described the Florida-based scholar as “the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian.” Among the charges against him was conspiracy to kill or maim persons abroad, specifically in Israel, yet the prosecutors openly admitted Al-Arian had no connection to any violence. He was a well-known and deeply respected figure in the Tampa community, where he and Nahla raised their family. He was also, like many fellow Palestinians, a tenacious critic of U.S. support for Israel and of the burgeoning “global war on terror.” His arrest came just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a war Al-Arian was publicly opposed to. The Al-Arian case was, at its core, a political attack waged by Bush’s Justice Department as part of a wider assault on the rights of Muslims in the U.S. The government launched a campaign, echoed in media outlets, to portray Al-Arian as a terror leader at a time when the Bush administration was ratcheting up its so-called global war on terror abroad, and when Muslims in the U.S. were being subjected to harassment, surveillance, and abuse. The legal case against Al-Arian was flimsy, and prosecutors largely sought to portray his protected First Amendment speech and charitable activities as terrorism. The trial against Al-Arian, a legal permanent resident in the U.S., did not go well for federal prosecutors. In December 2005, following a six-month trial, a jury acquitted him on eight of the most serious counts and deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. The judge made clear he was not pleased with this outcome, and the prosecutors were intent on relitigating the case. Al-Arian had spent two years in jail already without any conviction and was staring down the prospect of years more. In the face of this reality and the toll the trial against him had taken on his family, Al-Arian agreed to take a plea deal. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to one count of providing nonviolent support to people the government alleged were affiliated with the PIJ. As part of the deal, Al-Arian would serve a short sentence and, with his residency revoked, get an expedited deportation. At no point during the government’s trial against Al-Arian did the prosecution provide evidence he was connected to any acts of violence. For the next eight years following his release from prison in 2008, Al-Arian was kept under house arrest and effectively subjected to prosecutorial harassment as the government sought to place him in what his lawyers characterized as a judicial trap by compelling him to testify in a separate case. His defense lawyers alleged the federal prosecutor in the case, who had a penchant for pursuing high-profile, political cases, held an anti-Palestinian bias. Amnesty International raised concerns that Al-Arian had been abused in prison and he faced the prospect of yet another lengthy, costly court battle. The saga would stretch on for several more years before prosecutors ended the case and Al-Arian was deported from the United States.

“This case remains one of the most troubling chapters in this nation’s crackdown after 9-11,” Al-Arian’s lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in 2014 when the case was officially dropped. “Despite the jury verdict and the agreement reached to allow Dr. Al-Arian to leave the country, the Justice Department continued to fight for his incarceration and for a trial in this case. It will remain one of the most disturbing cases of my career in terms of the actions taken by our government.” That federal prosecutors approved Al-Arian’s plea deal gave a clear indication that the U.S. government knew Al-Arian was not an actual terrorist, terrorist facilitator, or any kind of threat; the Bush administration, after all, was not in the habit of letting suspected terrorists walk. Al-Arian and his family have always maintained his innocence and say that he was being targeted for his political beliefs and activism on behalf of Palestinians. He resisted the deal, Nahla Al-Arian said. “He didn’t even want to accept it. He wanted to move on with another trial,” Nahla said. “But because of our pressure on him, let’s just get done with it [because] in the end, we’re going leave anyway. So that’s why.” Sami and Nahla Al-Arian now live in Turkey. Sami is not allowed to visit his children and grandchildren stateside, but Nahla visits often.

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 1 month ago

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by Dion J. Pierre

The campus group National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) is waging a campaign to gut Jewish life in academia, calling for the abolition of Hillel International campus chapters, the largest collegiate organization for Jewish students in the world.

“Over the past several decades, Hillel has monopolized for Jewish campus life into a pipeline for pro-Israel indoctrination, genocide-apologia, and material support to the Zionist project and its crimes,” a social media account operating the campaign, titled #DropHillel, said in a manifesto published last week. “Across the country, Hillel chapters have invited Israeli soldiers to their campuses; promoted propaganda trips such as birthright; and organized charity drives for the Israeli military.”

It continued, “Such actions reveal Hillel’s ideological and material investment in Zionism, despite the organization’s facade as being simply a ‘Jewish cultural space.'”

DropHillel claims to be “Jewish-led,” although only a small minority of Jews oppose Zionism, and the group has been linked to and promoted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters.

Hillel International has provided Jewish students a home away from home during the academic year. However, NSJP says it wants to “weaken” it and “dismantle oppression.”

The idea has already been picked up by pro-Hamas student groups at one college, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to The Daily Tar Heel, the school’s official student newspaper. On Oct. 9, it reported, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) unveiled the idea for “no more Hillel” during a rally which, among other things, demanded removing Israel from UNC’s study abroad program and adopting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Addressing the comments to the paper days later, SJP, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, proclaimed that shuttering Hillel is a coveted goal of the anti-Zionist movement.

“Zionism is a racist supremacist ideology advocating for the creation and sustenance of an ethnostate through the expulsion and annihilation of native people,” the group told the paper. “Therefore, any group that advocates for a supremacist ideology — be it the KKK, the Proud Boys, Hillel, or Heels for Israel — should not be welcome on campus.”

The #DropHillel campaign came amid an unprecedented surge in anti-Israel incidents on college campuses, which, according to a report published last month by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have reached crisis levels.

Revealing a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena, the report — titled “Anti-Israel Activism on US Campuses, 2023-2024” — painted a bleak picture of America’s higher education system poisoned by political extremism and hate.

“As the year progressed, Jewish students and Jewish groups on campus came under unrelenting scrutiny for any association, actual or perceived, with Israel or Zionism,” the report said. “This often led to the harassment of Jewish members of campus communities and vandalism of Jewish institutions. In some cases, it led to assault. These developments were underpinned by a steady stream of rhetoric from anti-Israel activists expressing explicit support for US-designated terrorists organizations, such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and others.”

The report added that 10 campuses accounted for 16 percent of all incidents tracked by ADL researchers, with Columbia University and the University of Michigan combining for 90 anti-Israel incidents — 52 and 38, respectively. Harvard University, the University of California – Los Angeles, Rutgers University New Brunswick, Stanford University, Cornell University, and others filled out the rest of the top 10. Violence, it continued, was most common at universities in the state of California, where anti-Zionist activists punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.

#hillel #campus antisemitism #jewish students #national students for justice in palestine #nsjp #antisemitism #zionists #zionism

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fortheloveofwonderland · 2 years ago

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My Reply | S.R

This one was a request from the lovely @reidsaurora-replies for my milestone celebration which got wildly out of hand. I think I damn near used every lyric of the song in this one. Also, Maeve does not exist in this universe. I felt like his phone calls with her were too similar to the letters with reader and not needed

Summary - Spencer writes his deepest tragedies down on paper for his pen pal. After ten years of exchanging letters and some divine intervention from JJ, the two of you finally come face to face.

CW - this one covers most of Spencer’s canon storylines including Tobis Hankel and his drug addiction, his moms illness, his fathers abandonment, getting shot in the knee, his headaches, Emily’s “death”, prison arc, Mr Scratch and Emily’s kidnapping, angst, interfering friends, lots of literary quotes.

WC - 6.3k

Making friends was always something Spencer Reid had been inherently bad at. He was always too young or too smart which always seemed to put people off of forming friendships with him.

When he joined the BAU, his team called themselves his friends. But Spencer knew if he’d met any of them outside of work he would have nothing in common with them.

They were simply friends by proximity, which admittedly was better than having no friends at all. But he couldn’t talk to them about everything, afraid to scare them away with talk of his mothers illness or his fathers abandonment.

And sometimes he just needed to talk to someone.

It was Garcia’s idea that he sign up for a pen pal. When she found out about his mom during the course of the fisher king case, he’d confessed that he didn’t feel comfortable talking to the team about such things.

At first she’d actually suggested talking to someone online, she had many online friends who she talked to in various chat rooms. But after almost an hour of trying to explain that to the technophobe doctor and getting little more than a deep frown in response, she changed tact.

A pen pal appealed to Spencer greatly. He already wrote daily letters to his mom and found it somewhat cathartic, getting his thoughts down on the page, but he never bothered her with the darker stuff.

The idea of a faceless person he’d never meet reading his deepest, darkest thoughts was actually intriguing to him. And so with the help of Penelope he found himself a pen pal.

In his first letter he’d just introduced the basics, his name and age, what he did for a living and that he lived in DC.

He went on to explain how hard he found it to make friends and the difficulties of talking to his already established friends about the darker parts of his life. He ended the letter with a quote from To Kill a Mockingbird.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” - Harper Lee.

He received a reply little over a week later.

Your name was Y/N and you were twenty two, three years younger than him and a grad student at Columbia University. You told him you would be happy to read whatever he sent you, that you were more than willing for him to write to you about the things he didn’t tell his friends.

You signed off with a quote of your own quote from the book Infinite Jest.

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.” - David Foster Wallace.

And so he did just as you said and he wrote another letter.

His second letter to you was five pages long. He went into great detail about his mothers illness, how he’d been left to deal with it alone at ten years old. He wrote about how he’d made the decision at eighteen years old to have her committed to a sanitarium.

He told you about growing up as a child prodigy in Las Vegas and how hard that was. You were the first person he ever told about Alexa Lisbon and being tied naked to a flagpole.

He spoke about the events surrounding Elle leaving the team and how it didn’t feel complete without her.

He ended the letter by apologising profusely that he’d wasted your time with his long winded rambles and said he hoped to hear from you soon and scrawled a quote from The Great Gatsby.

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He said he would understand if you didn’t reply. But you did.

The letter took two weeks to arrive and you explained that it was because you wanted to really process his words and give each and every one of them the time they deserved. He read the last few lines of your letter over and over again in a loop even though they were etched into his memory after only one glance.

I wish there was something I could say, to erase each and every page you've been through,

even though it's not my place to save you.

“When I get lonely these days, I think: so be lonely. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.” - Elizabeth Gilbert - Eat, Pray, Love.

He wasn’t familiar with the book and so he’d gone out and brought it and read it cover to cover within an hour.

Reading your letter made Spencer feel understood for the first time in his young life. You didn’t pass judgement on him. Spencer found that between the pages of your letters he found a kindred spirit.

The letters continued back and forth for several months until one day you didn’t receive a reply. His last letter had been penned to you on route to a case in Atlanta, which you’d responded to the day you received it. But there was radio silence from Spencer.

You shouldn’t have been as worried as you were, but you couldn’t help yourself. His letters had become such a huge part of your world, often rereading them hundreds of times just to make sure you didn’t miss any little nuance on the page.

His handwriting was ingrained within you, his scrawly, sometimes barely legible penmanship danced behind your eyelids every time you closed your eyes. His letters had rapidly become the best part of any day. And for over a year you didn’t receive a reply.

After a while you’d stopped holding out hope every time you collected your mail. Eventually you gave up ever expecting to hear from him again. Maybe he didn’t need you anymore. Perhaps he’d made a real life friend, maybe even a girlfriend and you’d been rendered ineffective.

But then little over a year after you sent your last letter, you found an envelope in your mail slot with the familiar handwriting you adored so much and the DC postmark.

Y/N,

I don’t really have any excuses, all I can say is I’m sorry. I have written you fifty three letters over the course of the last year but never mailed a single one. They are piled up on my desk, addressed and even stamped, but I couldn’t bring myself to mail them.

I’ve been struggling, I can’t lie to you. I can’t even lie to you through a letter and tell you I’ve been fine because I haven’t. I think you would see through my prose, know that I wasn’t being truthful. And you’ve never given me a reason to be anything but honest with you.

The case in Atlanta was one of the hardest I’ve ever worked. I’m not going to beat around the bush, I’m just going to tell what happened and hopefully this letter will end up with you and not in the pile on my desk.

I was kidnapped by the man we were hunting down. I spent two days tied to a chair being beaten within an inch of my life but a man with multiple personalities. In fact, that’s not strictly true. I wasn’t beaten within an inch of my life; one of the personas killed me.

I’m not entirely sure how long I was technically dead before he revived me but obviously not long enough to cause permanent neurological damage. Irreversible brain damage occurs after four minutes without oxygen so it stands to reason it was less than four minutes.

But during that time, my life flashed before my eyes, including every single word of every single one of your letters.

One of the alter’s drugged me in his own way of trying to save me. Drugging me was supposed to help with the pain, both mental and physical. I fought it at first, desperate for him not to stick that needle in my vein. But after that first hit, I stopped resisting.

I think you can probably already see where this is going. You’re incredibly smart and you seem to know me so well. After I shot Tobias Hankel dead I took three vials of dilaudid from his corpse.

I should have prefaced this by saying I am now ten months sober, and offered up the good news first. But there were several months that I continued using the drug in secret, hoping it would aid in erasing the memories of it all.

It took a case in New Orleans in which I met up with an old friend Ethan and ended up almost destroying my career for me to decide to get sober. I’ve had a lot of difficulties in my life, as you know, but getting clean is the hardest thing I have ever done.

And now for the first time in months I’m craving again. Maybe that’s why I’m writing to you, determined to send this letter this time. I need to know that everything is going to be ok and you are the only one that I will believe it from.

My team tries. Now it's all out in the open, they try to help. But you don’t even need to try. Your help is so effortless, so easy and I’m in real need of that right now.

His letter went on in this vein for another six pages. He also included several pages of handwritten poetry which he had copied out of a book to send you. With each word you consumed you felt your heart breaking for him a piece at a time.

And he signed off with a surprising choice of quote from The Lorax.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” - Dr Seuss.

You spent the next month or so trying to cultivate the perfect reply, but for the first time in your life, words failed you.

It was three days after Spencer received his one year sober chip that your letter arrived.

I got your letter and the poetry you sent me, postmarked in December of last year. I really hope you’re doing better, all your friends close by your side, one step closer to recovery.

I hope by the time you receive this you are close to one year sober, but if you didn’t make it you need to know that’s ok too. Life is full of ups and downs Spencer. If you didn’t make it this time you will the next time. Or the one after that.

If you relapsed I need you to not beat yourself up over it. You will be ok, Spencer Reid, for that I am certain.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

***

When he got shot in the knee, he wrote to you from the hospital. He told you how hard it was for him to turn down pain medication when he was in so much agony. But he was over two years sober now and he wouldn’t do anything to risk a relapse.

Your reply spoke of how proud of him you were and how you knew it couldn’t have been easy for him but you hoped the fact you were proud went some way to aid him.

He told you it meant more to him than you would ever know.

Then he started having headaches and the letters became sporadic. When he did write he told you how painful it was for him to try to focus on the words in front of him.

I’ve seen so many doctors and no one can tell me what’s wrong with me. It’s like they think I’m making it up, like this pain isn’t real.

On my good days it’s a dull throb but on the bad days it’s nearly paralysing. I’m so scared that this is a precursor for schizophrenia. I'm still young enough for my first break, and it is a genetic illness.

I love my mom but I can’t turn out like her, Y/N, I just can’t. I'm so, so scared.

But your letters are the greatest comfort to me. I don’t think there are words to describe how much they mean - I will try to surmise it with a quote from Charlotte's Web -

"'Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.'" - E.B White.

You could feel his fear through the pages. His handwriting was somehow even harder to read than usual and sentences often tapered off with no ending. There were whole passages scribbled out so violently his pen had ripped the paper in places. There were crude drawings of brains and dark rain clouds in the margins.

Spencer,

I am so sorry you are going through this and that no one can give you the answers you seek. But this isn’t the end for you, even if it is schizophrenia, you can still live a full and normal life.

If you'll just hold on for one more second, if you just hold on to what you have, you will wake up tomorrow. Behind every rain cloud lies the sun. As Victor Hugo said in Les Miserables -

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”

In his next few letters he seemed to be getting better, his headaches slowly dissipating until they only hassled him every once in a while. Things seemed to be looking up for him.

But then one of his best friends died.

His detailed letter told you all about Ian Doyle and Emily’s history with him and went on to conclude how she died on the operating table.

I’ve been through a lot of trauma in my life, lost a lot of people close to me but never like this. I’ve never had to bury someone I love and honestly I don’t know how to move past this.

My initial reaction has been dilaudid. It's the only thing I can think of to take the pain away.

Tell me not to do it, Y/N, please. Please tell me that this grief will get better and that using drugs again is not the answer. Please help me stay clean.

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers.” John Irving - A Prayer for Owen Meany

It took you longer than it should have done to formulate a reply. You felt pressured, like his sobriety hung in your hands. You hated that his friend had died but you didn’t think it was fair of him to put this on you. And you told him such.

Spencer,

I am sorry to hear about Emily, I know how close the two of you were. I’m no expert on grief, I can’t tell you how to deal with this.

You know full well that using dilaudid again is a bad idea, you really don’t need me to tell you that. Honestly, I’m a little frustrated at you for putting this on my shoulders.

I am always here to help Spencer, in any way I can but sometimes I think you expect too much from me. We’ve been trading letters back and forth for the better part of five years and I don’t think you’ve ever really asked me about myself aside from those first initial letters.

And it’s fine, you needed this friendship more than I did. But over time this has started to feel so one sided and I don’t always look forward to your letters as much as I once did.

I realise this is not the best time for me to be saying these things but I can’t hold back any longer. I’m glad I can be someone you can turn to but I have my own life, my own issues and I have no one to talk to about them.

You put too much pressure on me Spencer and it’s a lot to take. I’ve tried to help shoulder your misery all these years but it’s starting to bring me down. All I can say is you need to wake up, you've gotta believe; you can't give up. Time keeps going on without us, long after we're dead and gone.

And you finished it with a simple quote from After You by Jojo Moyes.

“No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.”

It was no surprise to you that you didn’t receive a reply.

***

Y/N,

It’s been two years and I’m sorry for that. Two years, one month and eleven days. The truth is your last letter was hard for me to read as you can probably understand.

The hardest part of reading it was the fact that I knew you were right. I’ve been selfish all these years. I’ve treated you like a sounding board for my problems and never once asked how you were.

It's taken me time to write this because I wanted to get to a better place before I responded. I was angry at first, I felt like I was being abandoned again and my anger would not have been conducive.

Then I was hurt, hurt that the one person I thought would always be there for me had turned their back on me. I displaced my grief over Emily’s death onto you and anything I would have written in that time would have only been the rage fuelled epitaph of a grieving man.

And then once I dealt with those emotions, life simply got away from me. Emily was alive and well, her death was faked to get Doyle off of her back. Again I was angry about being lied to by my friends but eventually I was just happy she was alive.

Then I turned thirty and had a crisis of faith I suppose. I guess with my intellect I always assumed I would be doing something more with my life and turning thirty kind of threw me through a loop.

We had some changes to the team, new agents coming and going. All in all things have been somewhat hectic.

But that’s not why I’m writing.

I am writing because I really do want to know everything about you. I want you to be able to open up to me the way I always have to you. I want to be your shoulder, your repreve. I really hope I haven’t completely blown our friendship and I hope to be the kind of person who you can talk to.

These arms remain stretched out to you and maybe someday you'll accept them. Maybe it's too late to save a young girl's heart that's long stopped beating. But I hope that it isn’t.

“You have been in every way all that anyone could be…if anybody could have saved me it would have been you.” Jennifer Niven - All the Bright Places.

You wanted to tell him it was too little too late, that after two years of silence you weren’t interested anymore.

You wanted to simply not reply, ignore him entirely like he’d done to you.

But you couldn’t. And so you replied.

It was your longest letter to date, depicting in great detail how he’d made you feel over the years and all the hardships you’d faced without having someone to vent to.

But getting to write it all down had been purifying, and by the time you were finished you weren’t mad anymore.

I am willing to give this another shot, but things have to be different. If we’re to continue this friendship then it has to be a two way street.

But I can’t pretend that I haven’t missed your letters because I have. I see pieces of you between the words, parts of yourself I’m not sure you realise you leave on the page.

I’ve painted a picture of you in my mind's eye and even after two years with no letters, I’ve carried that picture with me wherever I go.

I feel like I somehow know you better than I know myself and I hope going forward you can start to know me the same way. Charlotte Bronte once said -

“Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.” - Jane Eyre.

***

Spencer didn’t know how it happened, he only knew that it had happened. Over the course of all the years writing to you it was almost a surprise it hadn’t happened sooner. Or maybe it had and he just didn’t realise until now.

Spencer Reid had fallen in love with the woman who wrote her prose to him.

It had been ten years of letters, every single one of which he kept in their envelopes in date order in the bottom drawer of his desk at home.

Those letters were his lifelines on bad days, the one thing that kept him tethered. He didn’t even know what you looked like, even what you sounded like but he loved you. He loved you with every fibre of his being.

And he couldn’t stop himself from telling you exactly what you meant to him. Even if it inevitably destroyed what the two of you had, he couldn’t stop the words from flying across the page.

So that’s pretty much everything that’s happened these past few weeks. Mom’s doing ok but obviously it's a huge adjustment for her and I’m not entirely sure how long I can keep her living with me but for now it works.

How did the interview go? I have absolutely no doubts that you blew them all away with your presentation, you’re a hard person not to fall in love with.

Your presence in my life has brightened my every waking minute. You once told me that behind every rain cloud lies the sun; you are the sun behind my clouds. Your letters bring me back to life, your handwriting penned onto my soul.

Is it foolish of me to be in love with someone I have never laid eyes on? William Makepeace Thackery said in Vanity Fair -

“It is better to have loved wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.”

I suppose that’s as good of an answer as any.

***

Five days after he penned his love confession, he was arrested in Mexico. Once all the drugs had left his system, only after he was extradited and arraigned and placed at Milburn was he able to dwell on the fact he never received your reply.

And being trapped in a cell gave him way too much time to think about that.

It was possible you had replied, maybe even just to tell him he was crazy to even think he could be in love with someone he had never met. But he was sure you wouldn’t have even bothered to respond, thinking him a lunatic you needed to cut ties with.

After a month in prison on one of JJ’s visits she brought a letter with her which she had found in his apartment. She recognised the handwriting on the envelope from several she’d seen him reading over the years.

She wasn’t allowed to give him the letter but she offered to read it to him. At first he’d declined because he had no idea what to expect from your reply but after several long minutes he’d decided to let JJ read it to him.

Spencer,

I am pleased to hear your mom is doing well but I do think you know that this solution won’t work in the long run. You say you live in a one bedroom apartment? You and I both know that you can’t sustain having your mother live there permanently. But I know you and I know you will figure out what’s best for you both.

The interview was amazing and they offered me the job on the spot. If it wasn’t for all your help with the presentation there is no way I would have gotten it, so thank you so much for that.

As for the other thing…

For some time now I have been wondering about feelings I didn’t understand. You’ve been such a large part of my life for so long and even though we’ve never met I feel like we have, if that makes sense? I feel like in my heart I know you. My heart knows your heart.

Falling for you was as inevitable as the sun rising each morning. Perhaps it is foolish but I believe Thackeray knew what he was talking about. And I also believe Emily Bronte was talking about me and you when she said, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

Spencer had interrupted JJ then, when she was smiling from ear to ear as she read your words out loud.

“That’s enough.” He cut her off, burying his head in his hands.

“Wow, Spence, I had no idea you’d met someone.”

“I haven’t met anyone. She is simply a woman at the other end of a series of letters.”

“How long?” JJ placed the pages down in front of her.

Spencer looked up at her, a small blush on his cheeks. He didn't want to be talking about this, least of all on the other side of a plexiglass screen with his other inmates nearby but he responded all the same.

“Ten years.” He shrugged.

“Ten years?” JJ sounded incredulous. “Ten years of letters and you’ve never met? Why?”

“I, uh, it never really came up.” It wasn’t a lie, you’d never once discussed meeting in all those years.

“Is it like a distance thing? Does she live far away?”

“No,” He sighed with a shake of his head. “She’s in New York.”

“New York!” She huffed. “New York is a five hour train journey, Spence!”

“Jennifer, now is really not the time for this.” He lowered his voice as JJ’s had garnered eyes in their direction. “There is really no point in discussing this as we have no idea when or even if I’m going to get out of here.”

“Don’t say that.” She shook her head.

“It’s true.” He shrugged sadly. “I really can’t think about all this right now, ok? Just take the letter back to my apartment and pretend you didn’t see it. Please?”

If it weren’t for the desperation in his eyes she might have argued it. But she didn’t want to waste what little time she got to spend with Spencer fighting.

“Ok.” She relented with a small roll of her eyes.

“Thank you, JJ.” He offered a tight lipped smile. “How are the boys?”

JJ filled him in but she wasn’t really focused anymore. In her head, she was already penning a letter of her own…

Y/N,

My name is Jennifer Jareau, JJ, and I work with Spencer at the BAU. I’m not sure if he’s mentioned me to you or not. He hasn’t really told me too much about you if I’m honest. But I have learned that he has strong feelings for you and you for him. I’m wondering if I can make a suggestion…

***

When you received the strange letter from Spencer’s friend JJ in response to yours, you’d been initially extremely confused as to why he was letting his teammates read your secret correspondence.

But when she’d gone on to tell you that Spencer had been arrested along with all the details surrounding his incarceration and how she’d read your letter to him during their visitation, you started to understand.

But then a few days later, before you had a chance to reply to her, you received another letter from Spencer with a postmark from Milburn Correctional Facility.

Y/N,

Maybe Thackeray and Bronte were right or maybe they were wrong, I can’t say for sure. What I can say with certainty is that I can’t carry on like this a moment longer.

Something has happened to me, it won’t be hard for you to figure out what as soon as you see the postmark. I am not willing to get into it or explain how I ended up here. But I have no idea how long I am going to be inside and I don’t want the rest of our communication to be sent through a string of guards who will pick apart each tormented sentence.

I ask you not to write me back. This has to be the end of the road my dear. This letter has to be our last. I don’t know how much longer I will continue to be able to live like this. Each day my hope dies a little more and I’m sure I won’t make it out of here alive.

I am writing simply to say thank you. Thank you for all your years of listening, for all your patience and kind words and your hopeful prose. In my darkest hours you have shown me the light, dragged me out of the shadows of my own creation.

I love you for all that you are and all that you have done but even you can’t save me this time. This really might be the end for me and I don’t want you to blame yourself. You are the only reason I made it this far in this treacherous game we call life.

Take care of yourself, continue to live your absolute best life. And in time I pray that you forget me and are able to love someone far more tangible.

All that is left to say can be summed up by a quote from The Miniaturist -

“You are the sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed. My darling.” Jessie Burton.

You replied firstly to Spencer, his heartbreaking words more pressing than JJ’s letter. You kept it short and to the point, knowing that various other prison guards would read it before it even made it to his hands.

I appreciate but can't accept this thank you note that's sealed with your last breath and I won't stand aside and listen to you give up.

You are stronger than that Spencer Reid and if I know anything about your team from all the years of hearing you speak of them it’s that they are the best at what they do and they will prove your innocence.

Just remember what Ernest Hemmingway said in A Farewell to Arms -

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.”

You will be stronger at those broken places, Spencer, I have no doubt about it.

And besides, if you don’t make it out of there, how do you propose to ever meet me?

Whilst on a role, you grabbed a clean sheet of paper and started scrawling again.

Jennifer,

Thank you for your letter. I have spent some time musing on your suggestion and I think you might be right.

I think it's time for me to take a trip to DC…

***

Spencer never opened your last letter because he had no intention of replying to it. If he didn’t read it, he could pretend you had never sent it and he wouldn’t be tempted to write a response.

Instead he stuffed it between the pages of his book and tried not to think about it.

After two and half months his team proved his innocence and he was released but he was thrown into the deep end of trying to find his mother.

And even once he found her unscathed, he was rapidly thrust right into Scratch’s web after he kidnapped Emily.

Taking the elevator back up to the BAU alongside JJ after they’d escorted Emily to the hospital it already felt like a lifetime had passed since he left prison. And all he wanted to do was chronicle all of it to you.

Maybe once the dust settled, once he’d wrapped his head around everything that happened he would open your letter and send you a reply.

But for the first time in ten years, Spencer didn’t want to drag you into his mess.

JJ was strangely quiet as the elevator made its ascent. He didn’t even want to be here, he’d planned on going straight home after leaving the hospital. He hadn’t slept in his own bed for two and a half months and he couldn’t wait to collapse into it.

But JJ had insisted that instead of him getting the metro home, if he popped back to the BAU with her to collect some paperwork, she would drive him home.

And honestly he was just too exhausted to decline.

JJ’s eyes were hyper focused on the digital floor numbers as they got higher. A few seconds after it displayed number five, one floor below the BAU, she turned and looked at him.

“Don’t hate me for this.” She blurted out.

“Excuse me?” Spencer frowned, too tired to try to understand what she meant.

“I couldn’t just let it go.” She shrugged, a guilty smile on her lips.

“Let what go?” His frown deepened.

Her eyes flicked back upwards as the number five rolled into the number six and the elevator started to judder as it prepared to stop.

“Just remember I love you and that’s the only reason I interfered.” She shrugged as the elevator stopped entirely and soon the doors were peeling open.

Spencer looked away from her and out of the open doors to where someone was standing just a few feet back.

Spencer’s eyes landed on the stranger only it wasn’t a stranger. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew exactly who this person was standing on the BAU floor.

He remembered the way JJ had read him your letter and how you’d told him your heart knows his heart.

Well his heart knew yours too. And he knew the heart beating a few feet away from him was yours.

“Y/N?” He croaked, slowly stepping out of the elevator but not too close to you.

“Spencer?” You smiled at him, the kind that reached all the way to your eyes.

Neither of you noticed JJ slipping quietly away, wanting to give you some privacy.

“What are you doing here?” His brows were furrowed and he was rolling his bottom lip between his teeth.

“You’re friend JJ wrote to me. She told me everything that happened to you. And she made me realise that ten years is too long to wait for a first meeting.” Your voice was like honey to Spencer’s ears.

Your prose was beautiful, but hearing the words from your lips as you stood in front of him in all your ethereal glory was more than any letter could convey.

“I…I am actually speechless.” He chuckled, scratching the back of his neck.

“You? Speechless?” You giggled and Spencer felt the sound all the way to his heart.

“You’ll come to learn I am much more of a wordsmith on paper. In person I am incredibly awkward and often trip over my words. I ramble when I’m nervous or clam up entirely, no in between. I spout facts and statistics rather than have a meaningful conversation. I am much more comfortable writing my words down on paper than speaking them out loud.” He let the words spill out of his mouth, proving his point entirely.

“I’ve waited ten years to hear your voice. Please never stop talking.” You smiled so brightly at him he felt like he was floating.

You were here in front of him, not just hidden between pages of letters. You were real, tangible; within his reach.

And suddenly the last thing Spencer wanted to do was talk.

He took a few tentative steps towards you and cautiously raised a hand to your cheek. You sighed in content when he cupped your face and nuzzled against his palm.

“I could talk to you about anything and everything all day long, my love.” He smiled, inching his face closer to yours. “But at this moment in time I have one slightly more pressing desire to do with my mouth rather than speak.”

“Oh yeah?” You wrapped your arms around his neck and pulled him closer.

The warmth of your body and your smile encompassed him. As he looked into your eyes, finally looked into your eyes, every bad thing that had ever happened to him slipped away.

“Love starts as a feeling, but to continue is a choice. And I find myself choosing you, more and more every day.” He quoted Justin Wetch’s Bending the Universe.

“Spence?”

“Yes Y/N?”

“As sweet as that is, I thought there were more pressing desires to use your mouth for?”

“If you insist.” He smiled and quickly closed the small space between you.

When his lips finally met yours it felt like all the pieces of the universe were falling into place.

For ten long years you’d communicated in the pages of letters, constructing replies to what felt like one sided conversations that were confined to only live on paper.

As the kiss deepened every single one of those words seemed to float in the air around you, spiralling like a tornado made of a decade worth of missives.

He swore he could hear each and every word whispered to him in the voice he’d longed to hear all these years as he kissed you like you were the most important being on the face of the earth.

And when he pulled back and mumbled I love you against your lips, it was the easiest reply you’d ever given.

#milestone celebration #spencer reid #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid x y/n #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds

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palestinegenocide · 6 months ago

Text

274 Palestinian lives don’t matter to the Biden administration

This week provided further evidence – if any were lacking — that anti-Palestinian bias is simply a rule of American politics, and today maybe the leading rule.

Yesterday Israel killed 274 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp while freeing four Israeli hostages, and the U.S. promptly hailed the “rescue”. It is beyond question that this was an indiscriminate massacre, but Joe Biden saluted the Israeli action, and so did Secretary of State, without a mention of Palestinian lives.

“As if we needed more proof of how little this administration values Palestinian lives,” Khaled Elgindy wrote.

Mainstream reporters are horrified, but politely. After the last outrage earlier this week, when Israel killed dozens of Palestinians in a school, a reporter asked at the State Department: “People might find it very puzzling that you have the leverage of $3.8 billion of defense supplied to the Israelis per year, and you cannot compel this situation to change.”

The State Department said the U.S. has prodded Israel, and there’s been progress. “We have seen them [the Israelis] take improvements over time.”

So the U.S. keeps pouring money and weapons into Israel, and the Democratic base believes overwhelmingly that it’s a genocide, and Biden keeps saying he wants a ceasefire, but won’t apply any pressure to achieve it.

Republicans are at least more honest about their policy. Nikki Haley—a possible running mate for Trump —visited Israel at the end of May and wrote “Finish them” on an Israeli shell. Even as the death count in Gaza crossed 36,000.

This disdain for Palestinian life is consistent throughout the American establishment. Variety reported this week that a Hollywood marketing guru warned her employees that they should hit “pause on working with any celebrity or influencer or tastemaker posting against Israel.”

In an email, Ashlee Margolis said, “Anyone saying Israel is committing a ‘genocide’ is someone we will pause on working with, as that is simply not true…. While Jews are devastated by the loss of innocent lives in Gaza, we are feeling immense fear over the rising Jew Hatred all over the world.”

So again, Palestinian lives just don’t matter, next to Jewish fears.

This special degraded status for Palestinians has become an area of study for Palestinian intellectuals. Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights lawyer and doctoral student at Harvard, wrote a lengthy legal argument for a new term for the Palestinian condition.

“The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination,” Eghbariah wrote –and offered the idea of “Nakba” as a legal concept to encompass that subordination.

But Eghbariah’s argument was censored, first by the Harvard Law Review, in “an unprecedented” move against a fully-edited essay, as the Intercept reported. Then, in an even more unprecedented fashion, by the Columbia Law Review this week, whose board of directors, which includes alumni with ties to the Biden administration, actually shut down the entire website when Eghbariah’s piece went up. (In the ensuing controversy, they have now restored the site).

In the eyes of the world, Palestinians only count when they are dying. That is what Qassam Muaddi wrote at our site this week, in an essay titled, “Against a world without Palestinians.”

Over the years, learning our Palestinian history, I began to notice that in order to be acknowledged by the rest of the world, we Palestinians always had to die…. It is as if in order to exist without justification, Palestinians had to intimately deal with death — they could master it, put up the best show of it, but they always had to die.

Qassam went on to explain that all that builds Palestinian character, including culture and stories, has no place in the world as it is. It must always be dismissed as terrorism or something less than human.

He actually ends that essay with hope, that the global discourse of Palestine is finally changing.

And the next day, another 274 Palestinians were killed, with full U.S. support. And Democrats wonder why democracy is in crisis.

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extremelyblackandwhite · 1 year ago

Text

pairing: dad!bucky barnes x au pair!reader

warnings: age gap (reader is 10 years younger than bucky), smut (18+, dni if under 18)

author’s note: things are picking up now xx

masterlist

and you understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars

Waking up on a Friday was also the toughest thing to do. At least, it had become an issue ever since Sadie realised that the 5th day of the week usually meant the last one at kindie before she got to spend the next two days at home. In fewer words, the two year old had learned the concept of a regular working week which is a feat considering her father blatantly disregards the sanctity of a Monday to Friday work week in favour of a messier approach. Y/N was almost sure his motto was screw work-life balance; nevertheless, Sadie made it incredibly hard to bathe and dress with all her excitement with what to do over the weekend, specially since Steve was around.

She finished brushing and braiding Sadie's hair, straightening her uniform so she wouldn't get yet another passive aggressive note from the PTA mums complaining about tidy uniforms - as if it was possible to get a 2 year old to be tidy. The two went downstairs with Sadie running to the breakfast table once she saw some donuts laying around which she was sure to only eat the pink icing of and hand Y/N or Bucky the donut itself.

There was something ... off. Bucky was silently buttering a slice of toast and Steve was staring into the further wall which Y/N knew was not that interesting.

- Who died? - Y/N asked as she sat down.

- It's Friday morning, Y/N. Sorry if we're not singing Kumbaya my lord. - Bucky replied, taking a bite of his toast.

- Thank god, you can't hold a tune. - Y/N smirked, helping Sadie place a napkin on her lap. - We're gonna need to get Sadie a new uniform, by the way.

- A new one? - Bucky looked up from his plate. - Swear we bought her that one a few months ago.

- We need to get the winter uniform. She doesn't fit the one from last year and it's starting to get chilly.

- Take the AMEX and buy it today. - Bucky fished through his wallet before handing Y/N the gold card. - Oh, get her one of those lunchbox thingies. I saw some kids with them the other day.

- Hm, now describe such lunchbox thingie, Sergeant.

- What do you mean? The thingies the kids carry along with their lunchbox for soup or water. The round thing.

- A thermos? Why would Sadie need a thermos?

- Yeah Bucky, she's a 2 year old not a college student. - Steve said, handing Sadie a donut. - She doesn't need one.

- Y/N get her one. Get one for yourself too, you eat soup right?

- I have a thermos, thank you.

Sadie, as expected, ate the sprinkles and frosting off the donut and handed the half eaten donut to Y/N. She excused her from the table, kissing the top of her head and sending her on her merry way to wash her hands and get her backpack, leaving Y/N to bring the dirty dishes to the kitchen. Bucky followed behind like a puppy, carrying some leftover pastries and fruit to put in the fridge before they ended up with fruit flies.

- Are you going to Columbia today? - he said, opening the fridge nonchalantly.

- No. I'm going to come back home after dropping Sadie. I have some online meetings booked with some experts in the UK and France about some topics in my PhD and the library didn't have any available private rooms.

- I'll ask Steve to come down with me to the office then.

- That's not necessary. - Y/N loaded the dishwasher with the plates, looking at Bucky, taking a very good look. He didn't look as put together as he usually did. His hair, usually wavy yet gelled into place, was messy and he wasn't wearing his suit yet. - I'll just go to my bedroom.

- You can use my office. - was he trying to get on her good graces once more? - The internet signal is better there.

- It's your office, Sergeant. I'm not gonna use it.

- I absolutely hate it when you call me Sergeant. - he shut the fridge, leaning against it. - Look ...

He sighed, his eyes not meeting hers.

- I'm sorry. - those words came from his lips very slowly, as if it pained to say them and if Bucky were being honest it pained him to say them. Bucky wasn't sorry but that didn't mean he wanted Y/N to hate him forever. - It's not my place to interfere with your relationship.

- I know. - she shrugged. - If you think your opinion of my love life interferes with it in any way, you're wrong.

- I'm just trying to look out for you. There's a lot of wolves in New York.

- I'm not a country bumpkin, Sergeant. I know how to look after myself.

- So ... are you and Chris Davis dating then?

- That it none of your business, Sergeant.

- It actually is. - he smirked. - You see, you are my employee, he is my employee which means if two of my employees are dating they should tell HR.

- You're not HR, you're the CEO.

- Maybe I multitask, how about that?

- That would be illegal and a conflict of interests, Sergeant. Besides, why are you so interested in my relationship? Are you bored of yours?

- He's just not the type of guy I would picture you with.

Of course not. Bucky had always considered Y/N would end up with someone ambitious, someone who'd crawl and give blood, sweat and tears to get what they wanted. Chris Davis, although not a complete dunce, was not that. He was smart but he wasn't innovative - what he was good at was packaging old ideals to newer audiences. He didn't come up with new marketing ideas, nothing that hadn't been done and when he did it was usually under the guide of an executive. He wasn't his worse employee but he also wasn't his best and Bucky wanted Y/N to have the best.

- Clearly. - Y/N dried her hands. - As if you have a good track record of relationships.

- Is this about Anna? Are you still pissed off because of Anna?

- You can't treat people like crap and then expect them to forgive you.

- I know but you have to understand that me and Anna ...

- You are a father first, Sergeant. You can't potentially hurt your child because you're so blinded by this stupid notion of "a real family". You and Sadie are a real family, you don't need Anna and you can't force her. If Sadie was any older she could've gotten very hurt.

- I know but if it had gone well ...

- Bucky. - Y/N interrupted him. She didn't want to be mean, she didn't want to be hateful about a woman she'd never met, specially the woman who birthed Sadie. - If you think the woman who left a baby in front of your door and has never attempted contact would suddenly change your mind, you're naive.

- You wanna know what's funny? - he moved away from the fridge to get closer to her.

Y/N almost took a step back. She didn't like being close to Bucky, it was always weird for her. Bucky, despite being her boss, was an attractive man, an attractive and imposing figure and she sometimes would find herself divided between fear of what he would say and fear of what she usually did at night when she thought of him.

- I don't think anything is funny about that situation.

- Anna would've liked you. - he said before turning around, almost happy that he'd gotten her a bit speechless for a while, happy he got to be the dominant one for a bit. - And you would've liked Anna.

- I doubt I'd like any woman who would willingly sleep with you.

- She didn't like any woman who would willingly sleep with me either. - Y/N rolled her eyes, not really understanding what Bucky was trying to get at. He was always like this, jumped over bad moments looking for some peaceful solitude in an off hand joke or confusing statement. - Are we gonna continue being mad at one another?

- Who said I was mad at you?

- Fine, if you're not mad then take my office upstairs for your meetings.

Before Y/N could reply something regarding his very flawed logic who wouldn't win him any debate, Sadie came walking through the kitchen, dragging her backpack through the floor and her yellow raincoat so Y/N could help her onto the plastic garment.

- Hey squid. - Bucky lowered down to her help, taking over Y/N to help Sadie into her raincoat. - Do you want a thermos?

- What? - she looked at him eyes wide, probably not knowing what a thermos even was. The red head looked at her au pair, looking for clues about what her dad was talking about. Y/N just smiled and shrugged. - Yes.

- See? Told you she wanted a thermos. - Bucky picked her up to kiss her cheek, directing his voice towards Y/N.

- She doesn't know what a thermos is, Bucky. - Y/N took Sadie from him.

(...)

When she returned from dropping Sadie off, buying her an overpriced uniform and a thermos which she would probably only use by the time she was 12, she found an empty house. Bucky had made good on his promise, leaving a note telling her Steve was with him as well as where to find the key to the office. The office was usually locked due to Sadie, according to Bucky, having almost gotten hurt. If Bucky's dramatic retelling was to be believed, when Sadie had started to walk she'd manage to get into the office and grab a stapler which she was keen on using until Bucky caught her. However knowing Bucky and knowing 2 year old Sadie who still struggled to reach the handles of doors, she reckoned he was overreacting or probably saw something similar in one of those "scare the parents" TV shows.

Nevertheless, the office/study had been locked and Y/N had never had been inside, yet once she got inside, it looked like what she expected Bucky to have as a work space. It was white, bright and minimalist with a few knickknacks from when he had been stationed in Italy and some first version novels which had undoubtedly came from his mother. His desk was deep mahogany, neatly kept with all contents at a 90 degree angle.

She moved to seat on his chair, putting her laptop on the middle of her desk and logging into Zoom. She waited for the right time, her eyes hoovering over everything in his desk from the gold pens, to the tape and the photo frames. He had a big photo of Sadie when she was a newborn followed by a few others, yet what called her attention were two gold circled frames - one with a photo of Sadie and Y/N when she had first started to work for them and one of Y/N and Sadie at Christmas.

She didn't allow herself to dwell much on it, she had meetings to get to. Besides, this was nothing big. It was just a photo of his daughter that he liked which Y/N happened to appear in. She had bigger fish to fry now than wondering about Bucky.

(...)

The work day wasn't any better for Bucky. Steve was being, well, Steve and to describe Steve is to describe someone who likes playing both sides to get to a decision which everyone is happy with. He knew he shouldn't have brought up the stuff about his wife, Steve would never try to break a relationship, heck he wouldn't even think it. Nevertheless, now Steve and Y/N were upset at him - maybe they can unionise and start a little "We hate Bucky", maybe they'll get branded thermos.

- Sergeant Barnes? - his assistant knocked on the door. She was pretty, very pretty and Bucky was almost certain they'd slept together ... almost. Yet today not even the pretty assistant could sort his mood out. - Christopher Davis wants to talk to you.

- Christopher Davis? - oh yes, the best way to make his day, seeing Chris Davis. - What does he want?

- He says it'll be a quick word, Sergeant Barnes. Should I send him in?

- 5 minutes. - he sighed, closing his laptop. Maybe making Chris Davis squirm would make his day, yet again, he was sure the "We hate Bucky" club would not enjoy that. Besides, it was hair washing tonight for Sadie and last time he tried, he had ended up inside the bathtub.

Chris Davis walked into the office, the mere sight of him ignoring Bucky. Did Y/N seriously find that attractive? He was so bland, so boring, the only interesting thing about him was that he was rich and Bucky was almost certain he only finished his PhD because his godmother is Professor Anderson. Nevertheless, here he was, taking a seat in one of the chairs of his office without even asking. This is the guy who gets to see Y/N naked? Life really is unfair.

- What do you need Davis?

- I know this will probably be crossing a line but I was wondering if you could let Y/N have the weekend off.

- What Y/N? - he cocked a brow at him.

- My Y/N.

- My daughter's au pair Y/N? - Bucky rested against his chair, looking down at the man in front of him. - Why?

- I was thinking of taking her to the new restaurant downtown but she said she was busy with Sadie. I wouldn't ask but it's really hard to get reservations and I got one and I would love to take her.

Oh, this was fun.

- Y/N has always had the weekends off. She doesn't work weekends unless she wants to, specially not this weekend which I'll spend at home. Besides, she doesn't have a fixed work schedule.

- Oh ...

- Maybe fix your communication issues with her before you come and waste my precious time, Davis. You can go now.

(...)

Having meeting after meeting had really wasted all energy Y/N had and to congratulate herself for not crying when someone suggested another alteration to her project with a thick French accent, she decided to cuddle against one of Bucky's many small yet cuddly cashmere blankets in the couch of the living room watching Gilmore Girls. She was close to snoozing off when the front door opened and closed. It could be Bucky, Steve or a burglar but she was much too tired to actually check.

- Oh, Y/N, do I have some gossip to share with you. - Bucky. It was Bucky and it was the first time she'd heard him say the word gossip. That couldn't be good.

He walked with a douchey smile to stand in front of the TV, sitting on top of the coffee table and staring at her, just waiting for her to question him on it and she was much too tired to avoid playing his game.

- What? Someone you fucked got pregnant?

- Someone came into my office asking about you. I didn't know that you were gonna be busy with Sadie this week. Isn't Steve taking her to Coney Island?

- What?

- You're using me and my kid as an excuse not to go out with Chris Davis? - he chuckled. - What? Is he a bad lay or something?

- Oh shut up!

- Small dick?

- This is highly unprofessional. - she turned around to face the couch.

- And sleeping on my couch isn't? C'mon, tell me, Y/N. Are you tired to pretend to orgasm or have you just figured out he's just bland.

- You're such a child! - she got up, folding the blankets so she could get away from her but he kept going after her. - Why don't you go pick up your daughter?

- Steve has her. I wanna know more, I thought everything was okay in the Y/N-Chris relationship. Is he one of those guys who cries when he cums? Is that it? Is he a crier?

- Why won't you shut up?

- Or maybe he can't find your clit. You know, he can barely find the copy room sometimes and that's way bigger.

- He is perfectly fine, I just don't want to hang out and I didn't want to hurt his feelings but because you can't lie to save your goddamn life I know have to go.

- He's taking you to Le Coucou, you may want to brush your hair before you go. The poor thing fought so hard to get reservations but obviously you prefer to eat buttered noodles with Sadie.

- I have been to Le Coucou.

- I know, I took you there. - he smirked. - And here I was thinking you'd soon start bringing your boyfriend around.

- I don't want to go. I'm tired, I need to wash Sadie's hair tonight and that will take time and I am not in the headspace to get ready.

- I'm sure Chris would love it if you came in with a soaked white t-shirt.

- You're a dick, Bucky.

Before Bucky could continue with his teasing about it, Y/N's phone started ringing. She grabbed it from the counter and put it up to her ear as she saw Sadie's school number. Bucky watched, mostly hoping it was Chris so he could tease her some more but as the colour drained from her face, he realised he wasn't. She put her phone down and looked at Bucky.

- We have to go. - Y/N looked overwhelmed, looking around fo something. - Sadie has appendicitis. They called an ambulance and she's going to the New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

- Shit. - Bucky rushed to grab his keys.

- Where's her toy, where's a toy? - Y/N started throwing pillows around, looking for Sadie's cuddly toy.

- Y/N, let's go.

- NO! - she screamed at him. - She's scared and when she's scared she needs her toy and I knew, I knew she was a bit off when I dropped her off and I should've known better and I ...

- Y/N. - he held her shoulders, stopping her in place. - I'll go find her toy, get the car going and drive there.

- But yo ...

- I'll get a cab. Now you go and stay with her, I'll meet you there with the cuddly toy. Go.

taglist: @talesofadragon @themermaidscales82 @winters1917 @vladsgirlxx @stinkerbelle007 @maybefoxysouls @blackwood-bodecker-housewife

#sebastian stan #sebastian stan x reader #sebastian stan/reader #sebastian stan imagine #sebastian stan x y/n #sebastian stan x you #sebastian stan/you #sebastian stan/y/n #bucky barnes #bucky imagine #bucky/reader #bucky x reader #bucky x you #bucky/you #bucky x y/n #bucky/y/n

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enjoythesilentworld · 6 months ago

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Wille's Month - Music (Room)

day 29 ! @youngroyals-events

Ex-Prince Wilhelm, hoping to escape the turmoil following the end of the monarchy, enrolls in university in New York City. He meets fourth-year music student Simon Eriksson in a music room on campus. AU.

read below the cut or on ao3. (T, 2k)

It’s a random Monday afternoon in September when he first meets him. Well, first sees him.

Wille has been taking advantage of the rentable music rooms on Columbia’s campus, despite not technically being a music student. One day, enjoying the general listlessness of his new life in New York, no path, no expectations, he’s playing a tune on the piano that he still somehow remembers from his childhood. He must have gotten carried away, distracted by the music, because he jumps out of his skin when someone bursts through the thick, sound-proofed door.

“Listen, I just made it to the practice rooms so,” a voice is saying in– Is that Swedish? Wille turns around in surprise as the intruder halts, quickly ending his phone call and dropping his hand to hang loosely by his side. He switches to halting English to say, “Oh, sorry, I thought I had—”

Ever used to it, Wille notices the exact moment the recognition flooded the other’s face. He braces himself, feeling a bit sick because he hasn’t been recognized yet in New York, which has been a welcome change of pace, and also because this man is the most beautiful person Wille has ever seen.

This time, the stranger doesn’t bother switching to English to say, “Aren’t you—?”

He stands up abruptly, saying “I– Just, just Wilhelm,” then gives a curt nod and starts frantically collecting his things. Hesitating for a moment, he cools his expression, trying not to stare too hard at the man’s smooth skin and silky curls. “Forgive me, I must have lost track of time. I didn’t realize anyone had booked this after me. I’ll get out of your way.”

In a matter of seconds, he’s slipping out of the room, ignoring the warmth when his arm lightly brushes the stranger’s as he passes, and fleeing down the hallway.

Feeling guilty, he thinks about it the rest of the week, hoping he’ll run into the pretty man with the brown eyes and brown curls again so he can apologize. He’s back in the music room on Wednesday at the same time and he stays a few minutes after, but no one else arrives.

On Friday, he does the same, pacing the room as the last few minutes of his reserved time tick over. Just like Monday, the same man bursts through the door, looking slightly ruffled.

“Oh.” The man stands in the doorway again, awkwardly staring.

Wille comes to a stop next to the piano.

“Hej.”

“Uh,” the stranger glances over his shoulder, like he expects to find someone else standing there. “Hej.”

“I’m sorry, I was rude last time. I didn’t expect to—” He shakes his head and steps forward, extending a hand. “I’m Wilhelm.”

The man stares down at his hand for a moment, looking shocked, before slowly extending his hand.

“Simon,” he says, brown eyes boring into Wille’s. Wille tries not to think about how well Simon’s hand fits in his. Thankfully, he’s distracted by the other man saying, “You were kind of a dick.”

“Simon,” Wilhelm repeats, feeling both a slight grimace and an embarrassed flush rise on his face. “I am really sorry.”

Simon shrugs and his perfect mouth curls into a smirk. Wille’s shoulders sag a bit at the realization that Simon might be fucking with him just a little bit. That, he can deal with.

“I was hoping to run into you again,” he says earnestly, hoping to make up for his lack of manners earlier that week. “It’s nice to meet you. You… You speak Swedish?”

“I am Swedish,” Simon deadpans. Wilhelm’s cheeks blush pink again. “Half, at least. I was born there. We moved away when I was, like, 13.”

Wilhelm nods understandingly. At that moment, they both seem to realize that they’re still shaking hands. They drop each other's hands quickly, chuckling awkwardly. Wille feels the blush on his cheeks darken further, but he sees a slight pinkness appear on Simon’s cheeks, too, and feels a bit better.

“I have to admit, you caught me off guard.” Wille folds his hands behind his back and rocks a bit on his feet. “Most people here either don’t know who I am or don’t care.”

“Oh, I don’t care,” Simon says nonchalantly. Wille lets out a surprised laugh. “I just mean— I never really cared about the monarchy, you know. I thought it was a stupid waste of taxpayers’ money and upheld harmful traditions of the elitist class. I mean, I lived in a small town with a fancy rich-kid school. They all assumed the absolute worst of me and just solidified my theory that the upper class sees those below them as ‘less than’. The monarchy really only encouraged that mindset, I think. Rich people helping other rich people get more rich, perpetuating the gap. I wasn’t living in Sweden when the vote happened, but I would’ve voted for the end of it. Thankfully they didn’t need my vote, anyway, but—”

Trying to school his expression into something that hopefully doesn’t say I want to kiss you so badly right now – one, because that’s inappropriate and two, because they’ve quite literally just met – Wille pulls his bottom lip into his mouth and bites on it, hard.

The other man looks sheepish by the time he cuts off his own rant, then blushes and looks down at his feet. “Sorry, I just…” He trails off and Wille grins.

“It’s okay. You’re right. It was a harmful system. The vote passed for a reason.”

Simon tilts his head to the side, considering Wilhelm, which, is fair. Most don’t expect him to be staunchly against the institution that he was a part of for most of his life.

“What are you doing here?” Simon asks.

“Uh,” Wille glances behind him at the piano. “Practicing?”

The pretty man waves his hands, “No, here, in New York. But, yes, I suppose also why are you in the Columbia practice rooms?”

“Oh. I’m a student here. I wanted to escape Sweden for a bit after… everything. My, um,” Wille pauses, twisting his fingers together, “My brother and I always talked about taking a trip here when I turned 18, too. So… Here I am.”

A silence fills the room and Wille is grateful when Simon diverts the topic.

“Are you focusing on music then? What are you working on?” Simon rounds the room to look at the papers propped up on the piano. Wille feels suddenly embarrassed by the music sheets that are just messy scratches of black ink.

“It’s not really—“ Wilhelm rushes forward, collecting the sheets and shuffling them together. “I’m registered for sociology, but I haven’t really decided on a focus yet. This – the piano – is more of a… hobby. It was a hobby. I’m not really sure how I feel about it.” There’s another long pause and Wille blushes more, holding the papers to his chest. He looks down at his feet. “I wasn’t really allowed a lot of hobbies growing up, but music classes were required so I figured…”

“Right, that makes sense,” Simon says gently. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep.”

“No!” Wille bursts out, nearly dropping the sheets in the process, eager to reassure the other. “No, no. It’s okay. I’m just not very good so I…” He releases the music from his tight grip and shuffles them in front of himself, frowning slightly at the scribbles.

“I could,” Simon begins slowly, “take a look, if you want? This is kind of my whole degree. No pressure.”

Wille looks between the black ink and Simon’s face, chewing on his bottom lip again. Reluctantly, he slowly returns the paper to the music shelf. “I mean, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to steal your reserved time.”

Waving him off again, Simon slides onto the bench and begins to sort through the notes. “It’s fine. No one has this room booked after me so I can stay later. Like I said, it’s literally why I’m here.”

Simon looks up at Wille hovering over him and Wille looks down, thinking, oh fuck this is going to be a big problem isn’t it?

Before he can doubt himself any further, Simon says, “Show me how it goes so far?”

That entire weekend, this time not out of guilt but out of fascination, he thinks about Simon. He can’t help it. The beautiful man with his beautiful laugh, his snarky remarks and complete disregard for Wille’s past is the perfect storm for Wille immediately falling head over heels.

On Monday, he lingers awkwardly in the music room, praying Simon will show up. He does, much to Wille’s delight, and brushes past any lingering unease, offering to show Wille the production program he’s been learning about in class. Simon is very smart and a very good teacher, easily moving through the parts of the program and kindly explaining them to Wille without complication.

Apparently the program is rather large, because after only about ten minutes, Simon’s laptop slips into buffering mode. He frustratedly smacks the side.

“God, this dumb laptop,” Simon groans, tossing his head back. Wille does not look at the long, lean line of his neck.

Wille smiles at the dramatics, and says, politely, “I don't think hitting it will encourage it to work, Simon.”

Simon groans again and sends a scowl at him. “You don’t know what my computer likes.”

“I can’t imagine it likes being jostled around like that.”

Simon rolls his eyes and Wille laughs.

“Why don’t you leave it alone for a bit and let it work itself out?” he suggests, wanting to reach out to comfortingly pat Simon’s shoulder but not knowing if they’re to that point, yet. “We can do something else?”

Shrugging, Simon puts the laptop down on the piano and folds his arms, glaring at it like he’s willing it to work.

Motivated by the rapport they’ve established, and itching to learn more about Simon, Wille asks, “Do you like it here?” He’s embarrased by how shy and timid his own voice sounds.

Simon turns to him and studies his face.

“Do you like it here?”

Wille holds eye contact for as long as he can, before looking away to stare at his shoes. There’s something about Simon’s stare that pierces his soul and completely disarms him.

“Yeah.” It sounds a bit like a question, which it kind of is, because he’s unsure if he’s telling the truth but also doesn’t know if he’s lying. He steels himself enough to look back up to meet Simon’s eyes.

New York has been fine, a nice change of pace at the very least, but he’s still lonely. A different type of lonely, but no matter how far he flees, his brother is still dead and the monarchy is still gone and he still has no idea what his future was going to look like. (Now, though, for the first time in a long time, thanks to brown eyes and a blinding smile, he has some idea of what he might want it to look like.)

“What did you want to be?” Simon blurts, startling Wille out of his musings. “Before this. When you were a kid. Before you were… a prince. Before you weren’t anymore.”

Wille smiles slightly. “An astronaut.”

“Really?” Simon sounds surprised.

“Yes,” Wille frowns. “What’s wrong with astronaut?”

Simon shrugs. “Cliche.”

“Oh, alright,” Wilhelm quips sassily, and enjoys the amused look that arrives on Simon’s face. “What did you want to be, then, if my answer is no good?”

“A fish.”

Wille’s mouth drops open. He closes it, then opens it again but can’t seem to make any sound come out.

“Yes, exactly like that!” Simon grins widely, pointing at Wille. This makes Wille splutter, which makes Simon burst into laughter.

“That’s not– You can’t be a fish, Simon,” he gasps incredulously.

Simon continues to giggle. “Why not?”

“It’s not possible!”

“Oh and you becoming an astronaut is possible?”

“Hey, if I wanted to I could. You are a human person. You cannot be a fish.”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to be. You asked.”

Thirty minutes later, their booked time in the music room is up and Wille realizes Simon’s laptop has stopped buffering. He’s not sure how long it’s been done, he’d been too busy laughing and joking with Simon. He’s also not sure how long it’s been since he laughed like this. It feels really, really nice. Comfortable. He books the same time slot for Wednesday as they bid their goodbyes.

#another au! who's shocked #been working on this lil guy for months #music room redemption! let's go #willemonth2024 #yr fic #young royals #wilmon #simon eriksson #wille eriksson #yr fanfic

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arabriddler · 1 year ago

Note

Hey hey hey I wanna hear the Jon lore please

finally posting this for Jon’s birthday 👀

Okay! Backstory time! Tw for evil doctor things and a bit of traumatic religious experience ( nothing happens though for the latter it’s just threats ) Jon grew up in Columbia with his parents. When he was born, he didn’t cry and the doctors worried that he was dead at first before realizing he’s alive and breathing. His parents didn’t think much of it and loved him. As Jonathan grew up his issues appeared more permanent. He cried out of frustration sometimes but overall it began to look clear that he barely felt any fear. Jon’s parents, again, didn’t think much of it. He’s healthy and lovely and what if he doesn’t scare easily? It’s not that big of a problem. except the neighbors were concerned and kept offering advice or creating gossip. The most popular rumor was that it’s the doing of some demon or something, and to control the rumors since the kids wouldn’t play with Jon, his parents took him to the local church. the priest was a nice old man, but he reacted very widely to Jon and called him the spawn of Satan. He began listing ways to exorcise the evil out of his body, but as he did so, suddenly, a visiting doctor from abroad barged in claiming he knows what the problem is. the doctor introduced himself as Doctor Hugo Strange. He explained that he’s very passionate about rare diseases and disorders and Jon’s problem was rare. He offered help and asked them to come with him to Gotham. At first, the parents refused, they don’t really mind Jon’s problem, but somehow the neighborhood grew more aggressive and more alienating. Jon would be bruised all over ( unbeknownst to them, this was all carefully crafted by strange ). Eventually they agreed. Who knows maybe they can start a new life in Gotham. It seems like people are more opened up over there.

except, on the train and a long way from home, Strange explained that so he can study Jonathan’s alignment, he needs to have the boy with him for long periods of time and in isolation, often for months or years. Jon’s parents refused bedside that’s absurd, and strange, deeply frustrated, killed them. In the mix up, Jon witnessed the murder but was too traumatized to realize it was Strange. He tried to run away, he managed to escape strange but was found by the local police who admitted him to an orphanage not really putting an effort into finding his parent’s murderer. Jon took time to adjust to the new setting and deal with his parents murder. It was all very stressful he started finding some grey hairs on his head at the tender age of 8.

After three years, Hugo Strange visited. He proclaimed that he needs a student and chose Jon. So, for 5 years, he’d come to pick up Jon for a day or a week or sometimes months, there he’d study him or try to scare him or use medicines to affect Jon. None of this worked, but Jon’s psyche got worse and worse. He’d beg the sisters in the orphanage to not let the man take him, but Strange paid them well and they needed to provide for the other kids. In one of strange’s experiments, he towered over Jon in a way that triggered his memories and he remembered that Strange was the one who killed his parents. Strange was about to inject him with something but Jon tackled him and injected the serum into Strange. Strange began screaming and crying and Jon found that… interesting. It was life changing to see such pure fear and knowing he caused it.

afterwards, Jon left Strange and returned to the orphanage. He took all the kids out on a picnic while the orphanage and the staff burned up in a mysterious fire. Eventually, the cops showed up to deal with the mess. Strange was convicted of the arson, and the kids were relocated to another orphanage.

#Jonathan crane #scarecrow #bee’s art #woauhhhcthis is long

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mohtivations · 1 year ago

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youtube

[08/26/23]

1.95

four months late vlog but it’s finally come together. making this after a summer has passed makes me nostalgic. junior year was a good time. i miss everyone.

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trulyunholy · 5 months ago

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no in-between | part six

matt murdock x reader

notes & warning: mature, minors please dni ; college au, student x teacher ; age gap

word count: 4.7k

The world at 30,000 feet looks startlingly the same. It’s gray, it’s small, and it’s just as it’s always been. But it feels absurd now, this sameness. Your entire life has changed in one night, and it doesn’t feel fair that the rest of the world hasn't changed with it.

You woke up to an empty room. The pillows had been rearranged, and there was no evidence of anyone having shared the bed with you. For a moment, you think you dreamt the whole thing. It would’ve made a lot more sense, because what the fuck happened? You didn’t know where he had gone; you don’t remember him saying anything about leaving early. The only evidence of him in the room was his sweatshirt, which you were still wearing. Unsure if he was even coming back to the room, you decided to pack it and give it to him when you got back. You fought the temptation to wear it on the flight back, thinking it might have been difficult to explain that away to Annie or anyone else why you’re wearing a Columbia sweatshirt that’s two sizes too big.

So now, after your one-night stay in the Midwest, you’re back on a plane before having really comprehended the events of the night before. On the crowded plane heading back east, your head is spinning with questions that you know have no answer. What the hell happened? Was it a dream? Waking up still feeling the trace of his fingers, the softness of his lips on your skin, it certainly could’ve been a dream. But it happened, you know that.

After the conference, you had another week of classes before summer break officially started. Due to a rain delay at the airport, you didn’t arrive back home until late Sunday night. So you decided to sleep in on Monday and miss all of your classes, needing the day to recuperate anyway.

Tuesday morning, with a thick humidity in the air, your stomach felt as twisted into knots as it had upon your return from winter break. You hadn’t talked to Dr. Murdock -to Matt- since the night you had the panic attack. Honestly, the thought of seeing him again stirred up similar feelings in your chest now, an uncomfortable tightness, a feeling of a lack of air. But you push through. Unlike when you returned for the spring semester, you have a better idea now of the feelings between the two of you. Even though you have no name for it, you at least exist mutually in this odd space, this strange in-between. You aren’t sure how he’s going to react, if he’s going to say he regrets what happened or admit that it was wrong. Maybe he’ll report you for inappropriate behavior, and you’ll lose everything you’ve worked so hard for, jeopardizing not only your academic prospects but your future career.

You won’t know until you address him, though, until you talk to him again for the first time since it all happened. And you’ve got a confidence now that you hadn’t before.

The face of your watch reads 9:10am before he shows up to class. The ten minutes following the scheduled start time of class might be the tensest ten minutes you’ve ever experienced. When he does finally arrive, the anticipation of the fear you expected to feel disappears immediately. There’s a purple bruise blooming behind his glasses, and a cut splitting the corner of his bottom lip. He does not look good, and your worry spreads fast through your whole body.

None of the students have the audacity to ask what happened, and he dismisses class a mere thirty minutes in. You want to stop and talk to him immediately, but you don’t. You don’t want to risk your worry taking over your common sense. So you wait until he heads back to his office and follow close behind him.

Your knock on his office door is met with a terse answer.

“Is, uh, is this a bad time?” you ask as you push the door open only enough to walk in, the old hinges squeaking against the heavy wood.

You notice his face softens at the sound of your voice, but it isn’t enough to quell your worry.

“No, no, never a bad time.”

“I don’t mean to be forward,” you start, hovering close to the front of his desk, “But…what happened?”

You could have asked him half a million different things. You could have asked about what had happened at the hotel, what he meant by it and what it meant for you. But the only thing you care about right now is if he’s okay.

“Just a bad fall,” he tells you nonchalantly, standing and straightening a stack of books on his desk. “It was my fault, I wasn’t paying attention when I should've.”

“It must’ve been bad,” you tell him. “No offense, but you look like shit.”

He laughs at that, and your worry does start to dissipate a bit.

“Do I?” he asks with an amused huff “I guess I never think about how it looks, just how it hurts.”

“Does it still hurt?” you ask him, your voice softer now.

He makes his way around the desk, keeping one hand on the edge to guide him. Your eyes linger on that hand before focusing on the man in front of you again.

“It…doesn’t feel great,” he tells you, though he seems hesitant in his answer. “But I’ve gotten used to the pain.”

You step closer and reach your hand out, placing it gingerly on his forearm, a sort of warning to your proximity. Your breath stills as your fingers find a place to rest on his cheek, moving your thumb to run over the small cut on his lip. His head lowers at your touch, nearly turning into it.

“I hope it’s not too bad,” you whisper as you eye his lips and think about how nice they felt on your skin, and how badly you wanted them there again.

Instead, you clear your throat and step back as you remember the open door behind you and the possibility of prying eyes. He leans back too, and you swear you can see a blush lingering on his skin.

“Well, I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” you say, your voice still low.

He nods his head but says nothing. As you turn to head back to the door, you stop as you remember his sweatshirt, still packed in your carry-on bag at your house.

“Oh, I almost forgot. You left something back at the conference,” you start, trying hard to keep your words as vague as possible. “I grabbed it for you. If you want to come get it, I’ll be home tonight.”

The smile on his face sends butterflies to your stomach.

The sun set hours ago, and your home is mostly illuminated by several small lamps and candles. The anticipation of seeing Matt after class had waned a while ago, assuming that he would just ask for his sweatshirt some other time. So the knock on your door at 8pm startled you.

“I wasn’t sure you were coming,” you admit as you open the door.

Matt’s frame takes up much of the doorway. He’s still dressed for work, dress pants and button up shirt fitting him sinfully well. The marks on his face are less visible in the low lighting, but he’s still strikingly beautiful.

“You’ve got something of mine?” he asks with a smirk, leaving your unasked question unanswered.

“Yeah, it’s in the living room,” you tell him, inviting him in as you close the door behind him. “Thanks again for letting me borrow it.”

Instead of heading toward the living room when you put your hand on his arm, he grabs your hand and holds it, so tender it almost hurts.

He doesn’t say anything, so you take the chance to bring up what you’ve wanted to ask him since Sunday morning. But how on earth could you bring it up? Hey, we shouldn’t have done that, right? No, that doesn’t sound right. How do you feel about what happened? What were you, his therapist?

Your heart beats faster than hummingbird wings in your chest.

“Listen, I…um, I don’t know how-”

But your words are cut short as Matt’s lips find yours. His fingers tighten slightly around your palm as his other hand finds your face. The kiss is messy, it’s awkward, but there’s a passion behind it that you’ve rarely experienced before.

He pulls back after only a few seconds, and you hear yourself nearly whimper at the loss of touch. He leans in toward you, crowding you until you feel the wall against your back. He’s breathing hard, his breath hot on your cheek.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it,” he says, his voice low and quiet. “That night in the hotel, your touch, your lips. I can’t get you out of my head.”

There’s a fire growing in your belly now. His words, his touch, his breath on your skin, it’s all too much. You aren’t sure what to say. You can’t think of any words that could justify breaking your contact with Matt’s skin now. So instead of words, you show him the reciprocity of your feelings by moving your lips to his ear, placing the softest kiss on the tender skin there. He lets out a breath as you let your hands do the talking, your fingers gliding to the nape of his neck, down his back, reveling in the feeling of muscle underneath his dress shirt. Your mouth travels down his neck, feeling the beat of his pulse when you reach the pressure point there. It’s fast, maybe as fast as yours, and it stokes that fire in you, knowing that your touch has the same effect on him as his does on you.

Then, suddenly, he pulls away again. It’s a subtle move, not one that takes him away from you completely. Your hand rests on his shoulder, fingers digging in only slightly.

“Matt?”

“Should we be doing this?” he asks.

And there it is, the question you foolishly hoped you would never hear. The one you have been dreading, the one you have been asking yourself since he offered to share a hotel room with you the first time. You aren’t sure how to answer.

The logical answer, the right answer, is easy. No. No, you should not be doing this. He’s your professor, you’re his student. The two of you are breaking all sorts of professional, possibly ethical, and certainly university-standard conduct. If you were ever found out, the consequences could be serious for the both of you.

“Do you want to do this?” you asked.

Your heart is racing so fast you’re worried you might die before he answers. You aren’t sure you can handle much more of this. You don’t want to hear his answer, yet you need to hear it. Of course he wants it, you think. He may not have set the actions of last night in motion, but he certainly acted with you, and he initiated whatever this was right now.

But maybe it’s not you. Maybe it isn’t that he has any feelings toward you at all outside of being a young woman who had shared his bed. Maybe it could have been anyone in your place, and the same thing would have happened. Maybe it just happened to be you.

“Yes,” he finally answers, breaking you out of your reverie. And the word is so solid, so sure, it almost surprises you. “I want this, I want you.”

“Then how can it be wrong?”

He’s back on you in an instant, and you’re pinned between his body and the wall. The heat of him pressed into you is everything you’ve fantasized about for months. His hands move up from your hips to your waist, and there’s a shock when he makes contact with the skin underneath your shirt. His touch is electric, and it leaves you breathless as his fingers trail up your ribcage, his lips never leaving yours.

When his hand reaches your chest, your gasp is caught in his mouth as he takes it all, fervent in his actions. His hands don’t stay still for long, pulling out of the fabric of your shirt and back to your face.

He slows down, his face still inches from yours as he strokes your cheek with his thumb and whispers your name like he did several nights before. Like it’s the holiest word he knows. Then he plants a chaste kiss on your forehead, so contrasted from his hurried pace only seconds ago. He sighs your name again before placing another soft kiss on the tip of your nose. Then again, your name, and a kiss on your cheek. Your name, a kiss on the lobe of your ear. Your name, a kiss on your chin. He tugs at the hem of your shirt, a silent request for permission to take it off, and your heart is suddenly in your throat. You oblige, lifting your arms over your head as he pulls it off swiftly.

Then his mouth is back on you again, picking up right where he left off. But it’s different now. Your name is more ragged on his tongue as he kisses down your throat, to your collarbone, your breast, down your stomach, until he’s moaning your name before leaving hot kisses on the ridge of your hip. He’s on his knees, worshiping you like you’re the holiest of holy, and all he’s done is kissed you.

Jesus Christ.

You look down at him, still fully clothed as he kneels in front of you, and the sight is intoxicating.

But you stop him there. You have to. You worry that he’ll protest, since he seems to be enjoying himself so much, just feeling your bare skin under his lips. But he doesn’t. He stops the second you put a gentle hand on his shoulder. He leans his forehead into your hip, catching his breath before standing back up, and then he’s towering over you again, waiting for you to say something. It’s clear to you that he’s at your mercy.

“Matt,” you start, putting a hand on his cheek.

His eyes fall shut for a moment, and he inhales sharply before stepping back, and it’s like he’s using everything he has to pull himself away.

“I have to go,” he says, his voice raspy. “I’m sorry.”

You’re confused. A feeling similar to hurt starts creeping over your whole body. Everything is a whirlwind as he pulls you back in for one soft kiss, then finds the door handle -still only a few feet away- and opens it slowly. He looks back in your direction, and despite the forced smile on his face he looks conflicted and unsure of himself.

“Keep the sweatshirt,” he adds with a more genuine smile.

Before you can get a word out, the door closes behind him, and you’re left standing alone, your head spinning trying to process what just happened.

Wednesday morning arrived with a cool breeze, wisping away some of the humidity from the day before. You had a meeting scheduled with Dr. Isaacs, and on your way out of the building, Matt stops you.

“Do you have a minute?” he asks.

You swallow hard, your throat suddenly dry.

“Yeah, sure,” you tell him. “What’s up?”

“Can you come back to my office with me?” he asks, his voice so casual it almost takes you off guard. “I’ve got something I want to show you.”

“Oh, um, okay.”

You follow him back to his office, very aware of the small swarm of students and professors meandering through the building, buzzing about all that needed to be done before the semester was over.

He doesn’t say a word on the way. He doesn’t say a word as he shuts the door behind you, and he doesn’t say a word as you hear the soft click of a lock. The room is dim, the overcast sky not allowing much light in through the window. He motions for you to follow him, and you do so, pushing through the confusion and the tightness building in your stomach.

“So what did you want to show me?” you ask, unable to take the silence any longer.

But he doesn’t answer you. Instead, once you're on the other side of his desk, he pushes you into one of the corners of the office. His body nearly crashes into you, and his lips find yours with surprising accuracy.

After a breathtaking moment, you push him back gently, scoffing in disbelief.

“Matt,” you say in surprise, your voice as quiet as you can possibly make it. “What are you doing?”

“I think it’s obvious,” he tells you, a smirk on his face.

“What if someone finds us?”

“No one’s going to find us,” he reassures you. “Trust me. With the door locked and the lights off, no one’s going to bother me.”

“Pulled a lot of girls into your office before, huh?” you tease, your surprise finally giving away to desire.

He leans in dangerously close to you, his breath hot on your cheek as he whispers.

“Only you.”

You sigh as his mouth finds your throat, leaving a trail of fire down your neck. Your hands are on his back, taking in the way his muscles move under your fingertips as they shift under his shirt. He straightens in front of you, and you have to lift your head to find his mouth again. All you hear is his breath and your own heartbeat as he rests his palm on your throat, the slightest pressure as he wraps his fingers around.

It drives you crazy, knowing that so many people are nearby, so many possibilities of getting caught. There’s something thrilling about it, something you hate that you enjoy. His mouth is so close to you, yet just out of reach, and it’s criminally unfair, you think.

Your hands are on his chest as he closes the gap between your bodies. You can feel his heartbeat under your palms, and it races just as fast for you as yours does for him. There’s a beautiful validation in that, proof that he’s somehow equally caught up in what shouldn’t be.

You whisper his name, a plea on your lips, as he trails his fingers down your throat and to the neckline of your shirt, toying with the top button. You don’t stop him, couldn’t move your hands from between you if you wanted to. But you don’t want to. You let him flick it open and immediately relish the feeling of his touch on your chest. Even though his touch is only just below your collarbone, it feels so much more sensual, more intimate. Something about his hands, you think, his fingertips, how they explore the world around him, and how they explore you now, dancing on the small expanse of exposed skin.

A loud knock on the door stops your heart.

“Dr. Murdock?” a voice comes from the other side, feminine and sweet. “Are you in?”

You open your mouth to say something, to ask him what the hell you were supposed to do. But his finger is on your lips instantly, keeping you silent. He doesn’t move. He’s still just as close to you as he was before, one hand still on your chest.

“They‘ll leave,” he whispers, his voice but loud this close to your ear.

After thirty more seconds, you can hear soft footsteps leading away from the door. Neither of you move until you can’t hear them anymore. Only when it’s completely silent, he lets you go. Your chest deflates as you let out breath you didn’t even realize you were holding. He clears his throat once, twice, before you finally speak up.

“I should go,” you start, your words unsure. “I’ve got to…”

“Yeah, I'm, uh, sure you’re busy. You should go,” he says, shaking his head.

“I’ll see you later?” you ask as you reach the door and open it slowly, making sure the hallway is clear before you commit.

“Yeah, I’ll see you later,” he says, a shy smile on his face as he makes his way back to his chair.

Then you’re out the door. Out of the hallway, out of the building, and all the way home before you even think about trying to process what had just happened.

Thursday morning comes with a storm, the rain hitting hard on your window as the sun peeks through the gray clouds. Sleep was evasive and when you finally drag yourself out of bed, it’s only the promise of a coffee run with Annie that keeps you going. You could stay in bed all day, you think, wrapped in warm covers and not dealing with the day ahead, and not dealing with the confusion that now lies in your relationship with Matt.

You still have no idea why he left so suddenly the other night. Nothing had happened that you can figure out, and his change in demeanor was sudden and jarring. Sure, he left you with a smile, but it wasn’t his smile. It was forced, like a mask, like a facade. He told you to keep the sweatshirt, which you’re sure he wouldn’t have done if he planned on never seeing you again. But how the hell were you supposed to interpret it all? It hurt, honestly. It wasn’t fair for him to rile you up and then leave you with no explanation. And then the stunt he pulled in his office. Damn near disgracing you right there, but then you both ran away when someone interrupted. Where were you? The whole thing didn’t sit right with you. _

“I just don’t know what to do, Annie.”

You’re at the coffee shop next to campus thirty minutes later when the rainfall finally starts to lighten. You had debated whether or not to tell Annie of your struggle, but you needed help, and you knew you could trust her. Not that you were going to tell her every detail. She certainly didn’t need to know who it was about or what exactly had happened. You just told her your feelings, and how conflicted you were about it all.

“Damn, you’ve got it bad, huh?”

She takes a sip of her usual drink -caramel macchiato with extra caramel- and you nod. Your own drink is starting to cool, untouched on the table in front of you. Annie chews on her lip, her telltale sign of thinking something over.

“And you’re sure you can’t tell me who this is about?”

“Absolutely not,” you stress. “Besides, it isn’t really relevant. All that matters is, I think I’m falling for him,” you say with a sigh. “And there’s no way he feels the same.”

“Even though you two have hooked up?” she asks incredulously.

“We haven’t hooked up. We just…made out a few times, and spent the night together once. But no sex.” You run your fingers through your hair, the familiar smell of coffee in the air doing little to help your nerves. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“I’m no relationship expert, so I’m not sure why you’re coming to me. But, I am your friend, and so I’ll do my best to help you out. Is it possible to stop seeing this mystery man?” she asks.

You shake your head again, finally daring to pick up your coffee and taking a sip, the bitterness barely even registering on your tongue.

“Impossible,” you tell her. “He’s…well, I see him all the time. And I don’t have any way to avoid that.”

“So it’s somewhere here, then, at the college.” You shoot her a look that warns her to stop guessing, and she busies herself with another drink. “Sorry. So, you can’t avoid this person. But maybe you can just… don’t know, stop talking to them?” she suggests.

“Annie-”

“I mean, I assume this is someone that you talk to a lot, since I’ve neve known you to fall for someone you don’t actually know. Which is a little weird, honestly, because everyone has celebrity crushes, but-”

“Annie!”

“Okay, okay, sorry. But seriously, could you just stop talking to this person? Just because you have to see them doesn’t mean you have to actually interact with them, right?”

You mull it over.

“I mean, it’s a possibility,” you say. “But it’s not what I want to do. I like him, I like seeing him and being with him. Cutting that off would hurt like hell.”

“Girl, unless you end up getting together with this guy -which you have dressed is not a possibility- then any ending to this situation is going to hurt. You just have to decide which hurt you’re willing to live with.”

Sometimes she was so right it was frustrating.

“But why isn’t ending up together a possibility?” she asks.

You take a drink, hold it in your mouth a little too long before swallowing, doing anything you can to delay your response.

“Because- because it just isn’t. And like I said, I don’t see the feelings being reciprocated anyway. Just because he wants to make out with me doesn’t mean he wants to be with me.”

“With all due respect, you’re not always the most observant when it comes to the finer points of romance,” she tells you.

You chuckle, because you know she’s right. You never liked romance books, you couldn’t stand rom-coms, and you’d barely been in a serious relationship before. You’ve never been good with this kind of thing. To you, that’s just another reason to shoot it down before it goes any further.

“I just can’t handle it,” you admit, hiding behind your coffee cup the best you can. “The idea of being hopelessly in love with…this person, but knowing it’s never going anywhere. I don’t think I can do that.”

“Woah, love?” Annie asks. “You didn’t mention the l-word before. So, this is like, serious serious then.”

“Yeah,” you agree, keeping your eyes focused on the marks on the wood of the table. “I guess it is.”

“Well, if you want my honest advice,” Annie says as she stands up and slings her bag across her shoulder, “cut it down now. It’ll hurt, but it’ll hurt a lot less than if you get any more involved.”

She’s right, you know she is. But you don’t want to admit it to yourself. All you want is another chance to see Matt, to talk to him about everything and figure it out together. But as much as you’d love that, you know it won’t happen. Even if he somehow does reciprocate your feelings, he can’t do anything about it. At best, the two of you will continue to exist in this strange in-between. Not quite strangers, not quite friends. Not quite friends, not quite lovers. You aren’t sure where the two of you land, but you know where you want to be. You want to be with him, you want to be by his side. But does he want you there, too?

That’s where the confusion lies, and you aren’t brave enough to ask, because you know it will only end in hurt. And you can’t keep existing in the in-between, for your own sake and your own sanity, you have to be on one side or the other. You know you have to do something about it, and you have to protect yourself. It’s what you’ve done your whole life, protected yourself from family who only did you harm, protected yourself from people who became false friends, and now you have to protect yourself -and your heart- from the inevitable pain that that this path will lead to.

So you decide. Something has to be done. So you’re going to do it. You’re determined. There will be no in-between.

tag list: @cloudroomblog

#no in-between #Matt Murdock x reader #matt murdock reader insert #Matt Murdock fanfic #daredevil fic #daredevil fanfic #daredevil x female reader #daredevil x reader

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fromchaostocosmos · 6 months ago

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At Drexel University in Philadelphia and the University of California, Santa Cruz, pro-Palestinian protesters have demanded their universities cut ties with, or “terminate” the presence of, the schools’ Hillel chapters. The Drexel protesters also demand that the university “Immediately terminate Drexel Chabad,” an outpost of the Hasidic outreach movement.

“Hillel receives millions from organizations financed by the Israeli apartheid state whose existence is reliant on Palestinian death,” Jews Against White Supremacy UCSC, an anti-Zionist student collective that supports the Santa Cruz encampment, wrote on Instagram earlier this month. Meanwhile, the Drexel Palestine Coalition urged its school to “immediately terminate Drexel’s chapter of Hillel,” describing it as “a global zionist campus organization, whose primary purpose, funding and operations are to facilitate birthright trips to Occupied Palestine.” The demands have led to bipartisan condemnation, with major Jewish groups citing them as evidence of the encampment movement’s antisemitism. “Calling for a ‘complete boycott’ of and to ‘cut ties’ with Hillel — the center of Jewish life on most campuses… is antisemitic. And ridiculous,” Amy Spitalnick

Weeks before Oct. 7, a Rice University LGBTQ group cut ties with its campus Hillel, citing its support for Israel. After the attacks, a student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst was arrested for punching a Jewish student at a Hillel-led vigil for Israel. And in February the student union at the University of British Columbia briefly considered voting on a ballot measure that would have booted its own Hillel from campus. Last week, an undergraduate at the University of Delaware was arrested and charged with a hate crime for vandalizing Holocaust memorial signs put up by that school’s Hillel. Drexel’s encampment sprouted up over the weekend and has prompted a quick condemnation from the school’s president, who ordered the campus shut down Monday before partially reopening Tuesday. He also specifically referenced the Hillel and Chabad demands as “unacceptably targeting… two Jewish campus organizations” in a campus-wide memo. And while UCSC’s encampment has been around for weeks, it’s gained renewed attention amid a strike by graduate student workers objecting to the UC system’s treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters. Both encampments have also been the sites of extremist language, including chalk at UCSC calling for “Death to Israelis” and “Glory to Abu Obeida,” the spokesperson for Hamas. A sign at Drexel read, “Resistance is Justified.” Adam Lehman, Hillel International’s president and CEO, told JTA that targeting Hillel was “deeply antisemitic.” Lawmakers from both parties have also picked up the thread, with California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna calling the demand “wrong and discriminatory” and tweeting that the group “serves as a hub for Jewish students at colleges across America, celebrating culture & tradition.”

The directors of Chabad Serving Drexel University, meanwhile, said they weren’t fazed by the call to “immediately terminate” them. “We don’t take them seriously,” Moussia Goldstein, the Chabad center’s co-director, told JTA. “It’s so transparent how these things are antisemitic in nature.” Her husband, Rabbi Chaim Goldstein, called the demand “laughable” and “literally the joke of the town.” They are both encouraged by Drexel’s quick condemnation of the encampment, as well as by what they said is its relatively minimal presence in a corner of campus.

“It’s becoming more and more clear, from their own words, how ‘Jews’ and ‘Israel’ are synonymous,” Moussia Goldstein said. “They’re correct, actually.”

#antisemitism #leftist hypocrisy #leftist antisemitism #judenhass #it just about antizionism not antisemitism bs #do you think we can't tell what is going on

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columbiauniversity-schoolboard · 2 months ago

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Columbia University brings you to, NYC's own Fall Festival!

🍂 𝑱𝒐𝒊𝒏 𝒖𝒔 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒂 𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒌 𝒐𝒇 𝒇𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒇𝒖𝒏 𝒐𝒏 𝑴𝒐𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒎𝒑𝒖𝒔! 🍂

Columbia University is proud to host its Fall Festival, a week-long celebration of autumn. From October 1st to October 7th, join us for a variety of exciting activities that capture the spirit of the season—all to support Columbia's funding campaign. Here's what's waiting for you:

🎃 Pumpkin Carving, Face Painting, Bean Bag Racing, Apple Bobbing & Hayrides

All led by Columbia student Kate Perugini ( @lucifers-box )! Experience classic fall activities while enjoying the beautiful campus setting.

🌽 Corn Maze

Challenge yourself to find the way through this intricate maze, perfect for all ages!

🐴 Pony Rides

Managed by Javier Vargas ( @javier-el-viento ) this activity is sure to be a hit with kids and adults alike.

🎨 Caricature Paintings

Get a personalized caricature by none other than Oscar Monet ( @claud-e-monet )—well, an artist bringing his style to life just for this event!

🍊 View the Incredible, Scientifically Modified Giant Tangerine

Brought to you by Columbia professor Helena Ziegler ( @bioonewithnature ), witness a marvel of modern science!

🎺 Music & Dance

Music instructor Osami Daishi ( @daishisensei ) and his very own class will be in charge of performing ambient tunes for the festival.

🥧 Pie Eating Contest

Put your appetite to the test under the supervision of Columbia's own culinary arts instructor, Nathan Frost ( @chef-de-cuisine ).

🎭 Abraham Stoker Presents: Sleepy Hollow

Get into the spooky spirit with a play authorized by Abraham Stoker ( @abraham-stoker ) himself, featuring the timeless tale of Sleepy Hollow.

🍫 Other Fall Fun

Enjoy s'mores, a hot cider bar, ring toss, a photo booth, scarecrow arts and crafts, and much more!

⛺ Special Program Admissions

While you're at it, there will be enlistment entries for a camping Archeology & Anthropology Program to be hosted this Fall Semester for students interested in extra credit, ran by Professor Nahla Elmaleh ( @explorinaireoftheseas ) and Professor Iona Swanson ( @lost--to--time ).

𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬: October 1st – October 7th

𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 & 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠: 10AM – 10PM

𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Columbia University's Morningside Campus

🌰 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐧, 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐚'𝐬 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞! 🦃

#announcements #academic calendar #nahla elmaleh—[ art history class ]#iona swanson—[ cultural anthropology class ]#nathan frost—[ culinary arts class ]#helena ziegler—[ biology class ]#kate perugini—[ student ]#osami daishi—[ band class ]

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 4 days ago

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by Dion J. Pierre

A Columbia University organization which calls itself the “Palestine Working Group” (PWG) is waging an aggressive campaign to gut Jewish life, calling for the abolishment of the campus’ Hillel chapter in a recent statement.

“Hillel is complicit in manufacturing propaganda and consent for the Zionist entity’s imperialist and colonial projects,” PWG said on Monday, issuing its invective on the Instagram social media platform. “The program works directly with Israeli universities and provides Columbia and Barnard students with funding to vacation to ‘Israel’ — an ethnostate responsible for the murder of over 180,000 Palestinians in the last year alone. Sever all ties with Hillel. Academic boycott now.”

Reputed to be the largest Jewish collegiate organization in the world, Hillel International is a “home away from home” for the 180,000 students at over 850 colleges who avail themselves of its religious services, relationship building opportunities, and recreational activities. PWG’s assault on it appears to have been prompted by an upcoming event at Columbia, in which Israeli journalist Barak Ravid will speak as a guest of the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life — where the Hillel chapter serving both Columbia and Barnard College students is located — and the Institute of Global Politics (IGP).

“The Institute of Global Politics and the Kraft Center will be hosting Barak Ravid, a Zionist, pro-Trump journalist to discuss the ‘Israel-Hamas War,’ PWG said in its statement. “Evidently, Columbia doesn’t believe the Zionist entity’s demolition of Beit Lahia and the blockage of Khan Younis, in just this past week alone, justifies the use of the word genocide.”

PWG has since deleted the statement from its Instagram page, but not before it was widely shared on social media, where it has been lambasted.

“Hundreds of thousands of Jewish students visit Hillel to celebrate Jewish holidays, connect with their Jewish identities, and safely gather in community,” Jewish on Campus, a nonprofit organization, said about the outrage. “When students single out Hillel and attempt to exclude one of the lone Jewish organizations from their campus, their Jewish classmates are denied their right to live as Jews. A call to push Hillel off campus is antisemitism, plain and simple. We won’t be silent.”

#hillel #campus hillel #columbia university #palestine working group #barak ravid #kraft center for jewish student life

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cuttergauthier · 2 years ago

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New Jersey One

Jack Hughes x Female Reader

This is chapter One of Four

Warning: Ex, fluff, cursing, Non supportive parents? Let me know if i missed any.

This has been in my draft for a while, I finally finished it.

word count: 1.7k

let me know what you guys think🤍

She was tired of the life she was living back home, the boy she loved broke her heart when he left to follow his dreams. She had gone to university in her hometown instead of going to the one of her dreams. Her parents didn’t want her to leave, but she couldn’t stay there anymore.

She decided to apply for a transfer to Columbia University, her dream university in New York. Thing is she hope she could stay away from her ex who moved away to New Jersey. New York and New Jersey are both big cities, right? There’s no way they would run it to each other, or so she thought.

Will her parents be mad at her for moving to New York, or will they be happy for finally living her dream.

Y/n wanted to start her own Clothing company, ever since she was 11 years old, she’s been designing clothes, planning outfits, she loves it and what better way to start her own company than New York. Now she’s 19 years old, still living in Michigan with her parents and a student at the university of Michigan, alongside some old friends.

She was ready to start living the life she wanted, not what her parents wanted. Even if that meant being closer to her ex-boyfriend, her first love. Her and Jack were childhood best friends, their moms were also best friends, so when they had kids, it was obvious they were also going to be friends. Her older brother James was the same age as Jack’s older brother Quinn, they had both played hockey together since before they could walk. Now Quinn, James, and Jack were all following their dreams of playing in the NHL. If her older brother could follow his dreams, why couldn’t she?

...

Today was the day I was finally going to tell my parents I wanted to move to New York. I have always wanted to go to Columbia University in New York, but when I had told my parents this when I was in high school, they told me it would be better if I stayed in Michigan and go to University of Michigan.

They didn’t want me to leave, even if they always encouraged me to follow my dreams. My older brother James was drafted in the NHL he moved to Ottawa Canada, since I was the baby of the family my parents didn’t want me to move away since they had already lost their first born.

Ever since I was 11 years old, I have always been drawing clothes, my dream was to start my own clothing company, my parents have always encouraged me to do so, they just didn’t want me to move away.

Columbia University has always been the place I wanted to be, I wasn’t happy being at Michigan anymore, I was miserable, sure most of my friends had decided to stay in Michigan after high school but that was their decisions not mine.

When I was 16 years old, I fell in love with my best friend Jack and he felt the same way, thing is when he’s an amazing hockey player just like his brother, so when he was 18 he was drafted in the NHL to New Jersey. When he moved to New Jersey so he could play for his team we broke up, I was going to be staying in Michigan while he was leaving, it was a mutual decision, but it still hurt when he first left.

When I got the letter saying I got accepted at Columbia university I was excited because my dream were finally going to be coming true, I was just afraid I might run in to Jack when I was in New York since we haven’t talk in over a year, but New York city and New Jersey are big enough I probably wouldn’t be running into him, but I was still scared.

I am 19 years old, it was time to finally do what I want to do, and to stop listening to what others want me to do. My acceptance letter came in the mail last week and I still couldn’t get the courage to tell my parents, thing is I had to let the university know before tomorrow morning, so my decision had to be made tonight. Christmas is a few days away, my parents are in a happy mood, what better time to let know I wanted to leave to go to Columbia.

I made my way downstairs to the living room where both my parents were sitting watching a Christmas movie with a fire on. I walked slowly and stop in front of them.

“Mom, dad can we talk” I asked playing with my neckless, It was a habit I always did when I got nervous.

“of course, honey is everything okay?” my mom asked worriedly

“No, everything is fine, I have some news I would like to talk to you about.”

“sure honey, you know you can tell us anything” my dad said this time giving me a small smile.

“I know since James moved to Canada, you guys didn’t want me to move away, but I don’t love the university of Michigan, my dreams have always been to go to Columbia” I told them

They both looked at each other, then back to me.

“If that’s really what you want, and if you really aren’t happy here at university, we can talk about you maybe going to Columbia next year” my mom said remaining calm

“That’s the thing… I applied for a transfer, and I got accepted, I need to give them my answer by tomorrow”

“what? Why didn’t you tell us this before?” my dad asked

“I was afraid of what you guys would say, this is my dream and I really want to go” I said, I really wanted them to understand that this was my dream university, it where I always wanted to be.

“We really wish you would have told us this before honey…” she said looking at my dad for some help then back at me.

“Please, mom I’m begging you, please say yes, this is what I want” I begged

My dad looked at my mom before looking back at me.

“We really wish you would stay here honey, but we understand, if this is your dream you should follow it. We have always encourage you and your brother to follow your dreams, were sorry we stopped you from doing that” my dad said resurging me.

“Thanks dad, mom?” I asked looking at her

“Does this mean you’ll be leaving after Christmas so you can be there for next semester?”

“Yes, I’ll be leaving December 28th if I say yes”

“Well if this is what you really want to do, then say yes” she said standing up and hugging me.

My eyes started watering; my dad joined our hug making us chuckle.

“We are so proud of you honey, your dad and I will come visit you, and you’ll be close to Jack again” my mom said happily

“Mom I haven’t talked to Jack in almost a year, I was away this summer, and I was hoping I wouldn’t run into him” I said nervously.

My parents along with his have always thought that Jack and I would be together forever. My brother and his thought the same, and honestly so did I, I’m just afraid of getting hurt. He’s a famous hockey player now, there’s girls everywhere wanting to date him, and what’s to say he didn’t move on, he could have any girl he wanted, why would he want me.

“I have a feeling you guys will run into each other” she said smiling.

Christmas had passed and it was now December 28th, the morning I was leaving for New York. My parents had told the Hughes family about me leaving so they were supposed to come over so they could say goodbye, the Hughes family are my second family.

I am going to miss them, especially Luke, he will be going to university of Michigan next year, the second he found out I was transferring to Columbia he texted me saying he was mad we weren’t going to be going to the same university next year, but that he was happy I was following my dreams. He was also happy that I was going to be closer to Jack same with his parent’s.

I was finally all packed up and ready to go, it’s only 10 a.m. and my plane is leaving at 2 p.m. so the Hughes will be here in a few minutes to say goodbye before I must leave to go to the airport.

“hello, were here to see our favorite girl before she leaves” I heard from the living.

I looked up and saw Ellen smiling at me, making me rush over and give her a hug.

“oh honey, I am so proud of you. Now I’ll be going to New York more often.” She said making me laugh

“Thank you, it means the world, I can’t wait to see you when you visit.” I said relishing the hug and going to Jim.

“Congrats honey, always follow your dreams” he said smiling

“Thank you, Jim,”

“I’m not going to miss you” Luke said, which made Ellen slap the back of his head.

“Awe Luke I’m going to miss you too” I said chuckling and giving him a big hug

“Please, go annoy Jack for me” he said

“I’ll think about it, deal?”

“deal, just know I’m going to ask every time we facetime” he said smirking

“I wouldn’t except anything else” I said laughing making him smile.

“I hope you have the best time in New York, and you better tell me all about it”

“You know it”

“Honey you ready to go? We need to get to the airport” my dad asked me

“Yeah, I am” I said happily

My parents dropped me off at the airport and said their goodbye and promised they would visit soon enough.

Just like that I was looking at down while we were landing in New York.

I couldn’t be happier as an uber driver was driving me to my apartment close to campus.

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capybaracorn · 7 months ago

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‘We won’t stop’: How Columbia’s students etched a new Gaza protest legacy

Inside a movement that took over a university building and lost its encampment within 24 hours – yet refuses to die.

New York, United States — At about 10pm on Monday, April 29, I thought I would call it a night.

My student journalist colleagues and I had stayed late into the night on Columbia University’s campus the previous couple of days, reporting on a story that had grabbed the world’s attention: the pro-Palestine protests and encampment that had inspired similar campaigns in schools across the United States and globally.

As I slung my camera bag on my back and began to leave campus, walking by the camp, I got a tip from a passing protester: “I would stick around till about midnight,” they said. “Maybe go home first, though.”

Got it. I went home to charge backup camera batteries and grab spare memory cards before leaving for campus again.

Back at Columbia, it appeared that more than one of us had gotten the tip. Crowds of student journalists, all of us with matching paper badges and blue tape on our clothes, waited next to the encampment for whatever was to come. Our journalism faculty stood by our side, as they had been doing throughout.

Protesters grouped into “platoons”, and while we didn’t know what to expect, we kept eyes on different corners.

We split up to make sure different spots were covered; a few of us stuck by Pulitzer Hall, the home of Columbia Journalism School, where a small number of protesters had convened, while some others stood ready with cameras and recorders by the encampment.

That is when it all began. Campers began walking their tents off the lawn. One group began chanting. Another at the opposite end of the lawn sang protest hymns. I was with a small cohort of journalists who followed the tents to another small lawn, a clever decoy – whether intended or not – that meant many of us missed the moment, at the opposite end of campus, when protesters entered Hamilton Hall.

By the time we had run over, tens of student protesters had gathered to link arms outside the building, which their predecessors had taken over in 1968 to protest against the Vietnam War, and in 1985 to demand that Columbia divest from firms tied to apartheid South Africa.

Two of my colleagues were in the middle of the scrum, up against the doors watching two counter-protesters attempt to stop the occupation before being pushed out. Protesters rushed metal picnic tables, wooden chairs, trash cans, and planters to the doors where they were zip-tied together, effectively forming a barricade.

Two masked individuals appeared from a second-floor balcony to cheers and applause. They unfurled a hand-painted sign, “Hind’s Hall”, a reference to the six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed with her family in their car in January as they tried to escape Israel’s military assault in Gaza.

That night, I fell asleep on the floor of a sixth-storey classroom in Pulitzer Hall to the echoes of song, one lone voice amplified through a megaphone, coming from Hamilton Hall: “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me … the world can’t take it away.”

Student protesters playing music at the Columbia University encampment in New York City [Yasmeen Altaji/Al Jazeera]

The final offer

The morning before had felt very different. Columbia University’s South Lawn was packed, and the little protest village in the heart of the campus – dozens of tents and tarps comprising the “Gaza solidarity encampment” – was bustling with life, two weeks since its erection.

The protest is rooted in a decades-long movement for Palestinian rights in their homeland, and to hold Israel accountable for its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. The current campaign against Israel’s war on Gaza – in which more than 34,000 people have been killed – also aims to pressure Columbia to divest from Israel-linked companies, just as the university did in the case of apartheid South Africa after similar protests four decades ago.

In my time covering the protest, the sounds at the encampment varied. Some days, you could hear the (Islamic) adhan, or the chants of (Jewish) Passover prayer. Or the sounds of the dumbek (drum) and sharp violins echoing microtonal hymns of Palestinian folk music and classical Andalusian muwashshah. Speakers amplified the melodies of iconic musicians like Abdel Halim Hafez and Fairuz.

Protesters shared donated hot meals – pizzas and samosas, bagels and eggs, sacks of mandarins and tubs of crackers, muffins and cookies spread on a tarp aptly called the “cornucopia”.

One camper had set up a makeshift nail parlour, painting red, white, black and green manicures matching the Palestinian flag. Cardboard “street signs” named the tight spaces between rows of tents “Walid Daqqa Road”, after the Palestinian novelist and activist who died of cancer in April, while in Israeli custody.

In the lawn’s centre, organisers routinely updated a whiteboard to reflect the day’s programmed activities: Dhuhr prayer and Shabbat dinner, with jazz in the mix, too.

In a corner of the lawn near the main campus walk, an “art guild” was buzzing with protesters painting signs, drawing patterns of the keffiyeh, decorating and personalising tent spaces.

But that Monday, campers received a final offer from the university administration under President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik: evacuate now, and evade suspension. Campers defied the order.

And by Monday night, the morning’s bustle had died down to a hum, then a whisper, before the eruption that culminated in the takeover of Hamilton Hall. At the encampment site, the zipper flap doors of empty tents billowed in the breeze. Blankets lay crumpled beside pillows still dented from a nap; a sole LED lantern left lit on the ground, a paintbrush crusted with dried red and green acrylic lay stuck on a paper plate.

It’s a community that student journalists like myself at the Columbia Journalism School had closely observed for days at a stretch, unlike the “outside media” who were only allowed on to campus in daily two-hour windows since the encampment went up. Joining us were undergraduate peers at student publications including WKCR and the Columbia Daily Spectator.

A community that, through the intensifying attention on its members, had been trying to emphasise that they weren’t the story. Signs planted across the lawn read: “All eyes on Gaza.”

But in the 24 hours that would follow, the world’s gaze on Columbia would only sharpen.

Students were trapped inside the entrance vestibule at John Jay Hall in Columbia University in New York on Tuesday, April 30, 2023 [Yasmeen Altaji/Al Jazeera]

The raid

Tuesday morning started eerily quiet. The camp was empty, save for a few protesters, and Hamilton Hall was sleepy, the only movement coming from a banner reading “INTIFADA” hanging off the side of the building.

Just a few days prior, far before the occupation of Hamilton Hall, the Columbia administration had sent a notice arguing that “to bring back the NYPD at this time would be counterproductive, further inflaming what is happening on campus, and drawing thousands to our doorstep who would threaten our community”.

The note was met with mistrust by protesters: After all, the university had already called the police to campus for the first time in more than 50 years in April to try to clear the encampment. More than 100 students had been arrested.

Instead, I heard organisers advise campers to pack their belongings in trash bags and write phone numbers on their arms in case of arrest.

By Tuesday night, their apprehension would turn into reality. The NYPD entered Columbia’s campus shortly after 9pm on Tuesday (01:00 GMT on Wednesday).

Students linked arms and sang together in anticipation before the harmonies of “We shall not be moved” merged with the march of hundreds of police officers making their way, in formation, to Hamilton Hall.

Calls through long-range acoustic devices (LRAD) to disperse or face arrest, echoed across the campus square, all the time weaving in and out of the floating tunes of the protest hymns, earworms that anyone who’d been on campus had likely come to memorise.

Protesters outside of Hamilton braced for arrest. But officers turned away from them upon arrival, and instead turned towards us – onlookers and press.

Officers instructed us to vacate the area. We walked backwards to get everything on video. “It’s easier if you face forward,” one officer said. “Turn around so you don’t fall,” another yelled repeatedly in a collective command. “Time to go inside,” another said. “Back to your dorms.”

While our backs were against the door of a building at the end of the courtyard where Hamilton was, the doors opened, and officers raised their batons, giving one final push until we were all inside. There was a moment of disorientation before we realised where we were: inside an undergraduate dormitory called John Jay Hall.

It’s where the student health centre, a dining hall, and a late-night campus eatery are. But we couldn’t see any of that. While police guarded the doors into the entry vestibule of the building in front of us, campus security guarded the rest of the building behind us, restricting access to dorm residents.

With about 30 or 40 of us squeezed into the small entry vestibule, ventilation was poor. We wouldn’t reach the bathroom. Red arrows pointed towards the emergency exit but the doors were blocked by officers. Phone batteries were dying. And most pressing, for the journalists among us: we couldn’t see Hamilton beyond the bodies of officers standing at John Jay’s glass doors.

For about three hours, students kicked at the front doors, slouched on the ground against the wall, and slept with their backpacks as pillows. One student sat cross-legged on the floor, sobbing softly while her friend comforted her.

Three hours passed in that hall before we were let out, officers directing us to dorms and buildings they did not know the names or locations of. “We know you want to get out of here. We’re doing you a favour,” one said.

As I left campus at about 1:30am, I walked past a crew hauling the tents off the South Lawn and into a garbage truck that crushed them on the spot.

[See embedded video in the article]

The remains

On Wednesday, the tension wasn’t palpable, only disappointment. The campus was quiet, but not calm. It was completely empty. No one, aside from residents and essential staff – which the journalism faculty ensured we were viewed as, as student journalists – were allowed past campus gates.

Where the encampment once stood, there were only marks of discoloured grass in the shape of rectangular tent bases.

But the movement seems anything but a ghost; on Wednesday, protesters hosted a “light show” beside the campus, projecting titles onto the public-facing side of Hamilton Hall that read “Hind’s Hall forever.”

Every year, on the eve of exams, students gather to let out what is known as a “primal scream” on campus. On Thursday, they took that tradition to Shafik’s house, shouting outside her door.

On Friday, protesters again lined the street outside of Columbia’s gate. And the words still rang through the neighbourhood: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”

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