#went through his pockets like a joe but also a concerned parent

[thebeigelunatics]

catherine standish saying "river asked me to protect him" when lamb caught her lying and "what am i going to tell river?" after david cartwright escaped her flat and "river will never forgive me if i don't protect david" in the cab with bad sam chapman and "so, what do i do?" after lamb reminds her of her promise like she is so many things to so many people but she is MOTHER to river cartwright

[sweetprfct]

Is It Over Now?

Joseph Quinn x Fem!Reader

Summary: Fake dating your flatmate, Joe, should be a simple thing. It meant you get to help get his ex back, and it meant you get to stop your parents' nagging about bringing someone home for once. But what happens when fake dating turns into something unexpected? Now, what?

Author's Note: Part 2! :) Enjoy ! I actually am editing these chapters as I re-upload them so it's better but not much will change.

Disclaimer: Mention of violence, 18+

Wordcount: 4.4K

part one - part two - part three - part four - part five - part six - part seven - part eight - part nine - part ten

Joe’s head pounded the second he woke up the next morning. He slowly fluttered his eyes open, adjusting his vision from the bright light that was coming through the window. He couldn’t tell where he was at the moment until his eyes caught the sight of the coffee table and the television in front of him. He was still in the living room just like the blur memory he remembered from last night. He groaned softly, rubbing his temples and pinching the bridge of his nose to try and get rid of the throbbing headache, but it was no use. He drank too much last night, and he still remembered every detail of it. Every pain and every word that Ivy had told him. 

Shifting his eyes back on the coffee table, he found a glass of water, a paracetamol, and a yellow sticky note. Slowly, he pushed himself up from the sofa and let out another groan. God, he was starting to feel old. His body felt sore from sleeping on the sofa all night. He picked up the yellow sticky note and read:

Thought you might need it.

He knew that handwriting from anywhere and that was from you. He looked around the flat and found that it was quiet and empty. You were nowhere to be found. Taking the medicine and immediately washing it down with the water, he let out a sigh and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He could still hear Ivy’s voice echoing in his mind from last night. He couldn’t help but wonder where he went wrong in showing her how much he wanted to be with her. Pulling out his phone from his back pocket, he stared at the screen for a moment before pulling up his messages from Ivy. He hasn't seen her for two months, and he was really excited to spend some time with her last night. 

“Hey, are you okay?” He asked. 

His mind flashed back to the memory from last night. He had taken her to a nice restaurant for once and not a pub, and he wanted the night to be a special night, but Ivy hasn’t said much ever since he picked her up from her flat. To make matters worse, she also has just been sitting there across from him barely eating her dinner. He had been telling her about what happened on set for his new film, and she barely listened. She was zoning out the whole time just staring into the empty space in front of her. 

“I don’t know if I can take anymore of this, Joe.” Ivy blurted the words out, cutting off the story that he was telling her.

Joe knitted his brows, confused as to what she was referring to. He reached for her hand on the table, but she was quick to slide it away. 

“What are you talking about, babe?” His voice was full of concern.

“I mean I can’t take anymore of barely seeing you. Whenever you come back, you’re only in town for a few days, and you leave again.”

Joe knew that his job was complicated, and it even got more complicated when his career had started going up. Flying to the States, other countries and different cities for conventions and events was what was taking up his life lately. Booking a role after another and attending fashion events and shooting commercials for them was the definition of his life for the last however many months. 

“Ivy, I know it can get so hard and complicated, but I’m trying my best to balance it all. It’s hard for me too, not seeing you everyday.”

Ivy didn’t buy what he said though. Instead, she scoffed and shook her head as she took a sip of her drink. 

“Don’t even get me started with that flatmate of yours.” She added. 

Joe furrowed his brows, confused. How did the subject of you suddenly enter this conversation? What was Ivy talking about? He hasn’t even shown any interest towards you nor had he seen you in months because he was barely home. Whenever he was in town, he would stay at Ivy’s most of the time. So, what was the problem when it came to you?

“She’s just my flatmate.” Joe reassured her. “There’s nothing going on between me and her. I barely see her.”

“And how do I know that? How can I be so sure?” Ivy’s eyes were full of jealousy. “She’s pretty, and I’m sure she’s better than me right? Because she’s smart and works at a lab. A fucking chemist, and I’m just a model.”

Joe shook his head in disbelief. He couldn’t put together how Ivy was comparing herself to you. Hasn’t he shown her all this time that he only wanted her and no one else? What more could he say or do?

“Babe, we’re just flatmates. You’re the one I want to be with.” Joe said sternly.

Watching Ivy throw her napkin on the table, she got up from her chair as Joe followed her. He wanted to stop her from leaving, but he couldn’t. 

“No, Joe.” Ivy stated. “This isn’t working out anymore.”

She had made up her mind, and Joe knew when Ivy made up her mind, there was no going back. But how could she just leave like that? How could she choose to believe the insecurities that were screaming in her mind than the actions he had shown to her several times? Not once had Joe broken his promises to her nor tried to disappoint her. Even when he was away, he always tried his best to make sure they talked every single day, so she didn’t feel like she was far from him. Now, he watched her walk out that door as if what they had the last several months was nothing. 

It was over. 

She was gone. 

Joe sighed at the memory as he made his way towards the bathroom. He smelled like alcohol and cigarettes, and his head was pounding even harder the more he thought about her. What else could he do? What could he do to get her back?

The sound of the coffee mug hitting the glass table echoed softly through the room. The place was crowded with people having a Sunday brunch with their friends or families. The gloomy January weather didn’t help with the mood of the conversation you were having with your friends.

Sara’s eyes widened in disbelief as she said, “Really?”

You nodded your head, looking at her through your lashes as you took a sip of your hot coffee. The hot liquid warmed up your throat and made your body relax. It was cold and gloomy, but you never wanted to miss your weekly Sunday brunch with Sara and Abby. It was a little tradition the three of you started ever since Sara had moved out. It was something you found comfort in every week. The day of the week that you would feel more at ease because Sara tends to balance you, and Abby was the most calm person you ever met. 

When Sara had met Abby at the art gallery three years ago, you immediately knew that she was the right person for Sara. Her wavy brown hair, green eyes and soft smile definitely caught Sara’s eyes at the beginning, but it was Abby’s calmness, patience and warm persona that made Sara fall in love with her. You weren’t going to lie that you also felt comfortable and at ease when you first met Abby too. You could understand why Sara had fallen for her. Now, every Sunday, the three of you would catch up and hang out, especially because life would get busy and chaotic from time to time. 

“I don’t know.” You shrugged. “I feel sorry for him.”

You just finished telling Sara and Abby about what you dealt with last night when Joe came home. Both women had met Joe before, and they knew he was a decent guy, but he was never the main subject of most of your conversations until now. You didn’t really know what to do or to think, so you wanted to seek out some advice or opinion from your best friends. 

“Honestly, Ivy sounds sort of insecure.” Abby commented. 

Abby was right. Even if you have dealt with your own insecurities, you could tell that Ivy also had a fair share of hers because really? Jealous of you? You were literally nothing but just a normal person trying to get through life, while her modeling career was quickly rising. She had nothing to worry about when it came to you. 

“Maybe Joe isn’t showing her enough reassurance?” Abby added, shrugging her shoulders.

You watched as Sara turned to you and tilted her head, brows all furrowed. “Are you sure that having Joe as your flatmate is a good idea?”

You couldn’t help but roll your eyes with how many times you have heard that line. 

“You sound like my mother.” You retorted back.

Sara chuckled softly at your comment and said, “No, but seriously… because do you really want to get caught up in their drama?”

Drama? That was the last thing you wanted in your life, especially in a drama that involved someone else’s relationship. You knew what Joe was going through, but you weren’t about to cross boundaries. What was going on between him and Ivy was their business, not yours. 

“I’m not really caught up in their drama. That’s their own problem, you know? My name just happened to get dragged into it.” You casually said as you shrugged your shoulders.

It was the truth. You weren’t. 

“Yeah, but what if she drags you even more in her little insecurity?” Abby addressed.

You knew what was going on between them. Even if your name was dragged to their conversation last night, you weren’t the big issue here. Joe had told you that, and you knew there were other issues they were dealing with. Ivy just happened to include you into it. Maybe to cause more excuses not to be with Joe. You really didn’t know.

“I don’t care what she feels about me because I’m not doing anything to her.” You took a bite off your waffle and decided to change the subject. You were sort of over this conversation about Joe. 

Whatever was going on with him, that was his business. All you did was comfort him and listen to him, hoping you’d make someone feel better. That was all. 

“Anyway, enough about me. How are you? How is married life treating you both?” You asked, a small smile creeping up on your face. 

You watched as the two women exchanged looks before both of their lips tugged into a smile. 

“Great!” Sara replied. “We’re settling in the new place, and Abby is back to work. Though, we sort of started talking about something the other night.”

Your eyes watched as Sara and Abby held hands, giving each other a warm smile. It made you more curious as to what Sara was talking about. 

“Tell her.” Abby murmured, squeezing Sara’s hand softly. 

Your eyes widened in curiosity as you waited for one of them to tell you whatever they were planning, and you couldn’t help but feel a bit impatient as Sara tried to find the right words to say to you. 

“What is it?” You asked. 

“I don’t know.” Sara suddenly felt shy as she gave Abby a hesitant look, which in return, Abby kept giving her an approval look. “We were sort of talking a lot of things about our future last night, and we know it sounds a bit crazy…” 

You raised your brows, wanting Sara to just spat out the words. 

“Yea?”

“We sort of want to adopt.” Sara finally said. 

You couldn’t help but almost jump out of your seat from excitement as soon as Sara said those words. 

“Ohmygod.” You covered your mouth with your hand. “Are you serious?”

Abby and Sara glanced at each other with excitement. They really were serious, and you could tell how thrilled they were by just how they were talking about it. They both turned back to you and nodded their heads. 

“I’m so happy for you both.” You took both of their hands in yours. “Please let me know if I could help with anything.”

“Thank you.” Abby smiled. “We both knew we wanted this even before getting married and the fact that it’s happening, we are very excited about it.”

“Then, you both should go for it!” You encouraged them even more as you all laughed softly in unison. 

“And you should go look for a new flat!” Sara teased you, squeezing your hand softly.

“Stop it! I’m fine.” You rolled your eyes, sliding your hands away from theirs. “I’m perfectly happy with my situation, and it’s not like Joe is bothering me. They’re broken up. I have nothing to worry about.”

Abby took a sip of her coffee and a playful smile tugged on her lips. “Who knows… Maybe you’ll end up with Joe.”

Oh, here we go again. 

Why did everyone keep pushing this idea of you and Joe? He literally was nothing but just your flatmate. Just because he was a man didn’t mean that you two would end up together. A woman and a man could be flatmates together. Just like a man and a woman could be friends. 

Right?

“We’re just flatmates. That’s all.” You argued.

You just wished everyone was going to drop this subject already because you and Joe weren’t going to happen. Ever.

Coming home later that day, you found the flat quiet and empty. The sofa was back to the way it looked. Pillows fluffed, throw blanket folded and hung at the back of it. The kitchen was clean, and the dishes that Joe promised he would wash were all clean and put away. Joe was nowhere to be found, and you figured maybe he had gone out. Maybe he went to go talk to Ivy or pick up his things from her place. Who knows.

As you walked down the hall towards your bedroom, floorboards creaked, and you heard a quiet rustling that came from Joe’s room. 

Oh, he was home. 

You passed by his bedroom and paused in your tracks as soon as you saw him organizing his room. He looked better. Not his usual normal face, but he looked better than last night. 

“Hey.” You gave him a soft smile, leaning against the doorframe.

Joe never set boundaries like you did with him, but you tend to respect his own private space. He didn’t have to set rules with you because he didn’t really care that much about his own boundaries, but you respected him as your flat mate. It was his bedroom. You never tried to step into it. 

“How are you?” You asked.

Joe shut his closet doors closed and took a deep breath, turning his attention to you with a smile. 

“Good. I have been thinking a lot all morning.” 

He looked… enthusiastic?

“Oh, yeah?” You raised your brows. “How’d that go?”

Joe started walking towards you as he said, “I really like Ivy.”

You nodded your head in understanding, trying to figure out where this conversation was going.

“And you know that, right?” Joe asked as if you were out of the loop about this whole thing.

Of course, you knew. He was probably mad over her.

“Right, but Joe if she doesn’t want this anymore–”

Joe cut you off as he stopped in front of you. It looked like a light bulb switched above his head as his lips tugged into a devious smile. 

“So, I was thinking that Ivy was just being Ivy, and she just wants attention. I know she wants me to chase her.”

What the fuck was he on? 

You furrowed your brows, wondering what that mind of his started thinking all morning that all of a sudden he was saying all of these things. If he wanted her back, then so be it. It was his life, and you couldn’t stop whatever he wanted to do with his life. You weren’t his mother. Though, from the look of his expression, you didn’t think his own mother could also stop him from doing whatever he wanted anyway. 

“So, I’m going to try and get her back.” Joe continued.

Well, good for you, mate but good luck. 

“Can I ask a favor though? No, not favor… But I need your help.”

Now, you were scared–no–terrified.

You stood there without saying a word as you blinked your eyes and stared at Joe for a moment. You didn’t want to say anything or ask what he wanted because you had a feeling in your stomach that it was going to be something you weren’t going to agree on. You could just feel it. 

“What is it?” You steady your voice, trying not to stumble on your words. 

“I need you to be my fake girlfriend.” Joe said sternly, his chocolate button eyes staring right into your eyes.

Oh, fuck no.

Absolutely fucking not. 

Your eyes widened in disbelief, trying to repeat Joe’s words in your head. Did he really just said that? Did he really just asked you that? When he said he had been thinking all day, you didn’t realize that he hadn’t been thinking at all! Where the fuck did he even got this idea from? Did he put that paracetamol somewhere other than his mouth, or did that medicine went up to his brain? 

You understood that he was going through a difficult and rough time due to the fact that he liked Ivy that much, but did he completely lose his mind? Was this the situation that Abby and Sara were afraid of when they said that you really needed to look for a new flat? Because it was starting to look like your flatmate had gone mad. 

“E…Excuse me, what?!” You finally found your words as you looked at Joe in disbelief. 

“I know that I probably sound mad but–”

“Uh… yeah, you got that right!” You scoffed, shaking your head as you took a step back from him. 

Maybe your mother was right. What else was he going to do next? Stab you just like what that boyfriend of your mother’s friend’s daughter did?! 

Joe saw the horrific look in your eyes as he tried to calm you down and showed you that he wasn’t actually going mad but all you wanted to do was run away from where you were. 

Joe sighed and looked down at his feet and said, “If she saw you and me are dating, then she’d get jealous and she’d ask me to get her back.”

You really need to go find another flat. 

You shook your head and started making your way towards your bedroom. “Absolutely not! You’ve gone mad!”

Joe followed behind you, and you gave him a “don’t you dare” look as soon as he was about to step inside your room. Joe, however, caught himself and stood by your doorway with pleading eyes. 

“Please? I know that this is crazy, and you probably think I’m crazy, but I really like her. I just…” Joe’s voice was soft as he let out a sigh and said, “I really thought she was the one.”

You weren’t going to lie. You have known Joe for a year, so you knew this was just him going through a breakup. Maybe losing his mind a little but everyone loses their minds when it comes to someone they love, right? Did Joe even love Ivy? You understood why he was doing this, but you were already on Ivy's hit list, and Joe thought this was going to be a good idea?

There was no way you were going to bring yourself in this drama. You already told yourself that. You even told your friends that earlier. 

God, Sara and Abby were right. 

“If she’s the one, then she’ll come back to you without you doing all this crazy shit.” 

Joe pursed his lips and nodded his head in understanding. He wasn’t going to press you with this subject because he knew it was mental in the first place. He was just hoping that maybe you would say yes, but he also understood that you weren’t going to put yourself in a situation like this. How could he drag you into his own problem?

“I understand.” Joe murmured. “I’m sorry for making up this idea in the first place, and I’m sorry for trying to drag you into it.”

You watched as Joe gave you an apologetic look and walked away. You sighed and flopped yourself on your bed face down, letting out a small groan. Suddenly, your phone buzzed in your back pocket. You flipped yourself over, so you were laying on your back, sliding your phone out and saw that your mum was trying to facetime you.

Oh, fucking great. 

Whatever she wanted to say wasn’t really something you wanted to hear tonight. You didn’t need her to add into the craziness. You stared at your phone for a moment, hesitating on what to do, but you knew she wasn’t going to leave you alone, so you decided to answer the call. 

“Hey mum.” Your voice sounded tired. 

The second your mum appeared on your screen, you saw how she looked excited and there was a big smile plastered on her face. 

“It’s not really a good time, mum–”

Your eyes widened when a man about your age appeared next to your mum. He waved hello to you as your mum started introducing you to him. 

What the hell was she doing? Was she really trying to set you up with a stranger right now? Joe wasn’t the only one going mad tonight. Though, you retracted that thought because your mum was already mad. 

“This is Alex. He’s our new neighbor’s son. I thought maybe you two could get to know each other.”

God, this was so embarrassing. 

How could she fucking do this to you? You were 28 years old, and she was setting you up with some man you never met. Not only was it embarrassing, but you didn’t need your own mother to set you up with someone. If you wanted to date or be in a relationship, you could find a man for yourself. 

“Mum, this isn’t such a good time.” You looked at Alex through the screen and said, “It’s nice to meet you, but I have to go. I’m sorry.”

Just like that, you immediately hit the end call button and grabbed your pillow to muffle a scream. Everything was just making you so frustrated, and you were even more frustrated with your mum. Her actions were starting to get into your last nerve. You didn’t know if you could take anymore of this from her. Even if you were far away, she still managed to piss you off. 

Staring at the ceiling, your dad’s voice echoed in your mind about when you were going to bring a man home. Were you really that much of a disappointment to your family? Did you really need to marry or be with someone for them to feel proud of you? Because that was just wrong. You were a chemist for fuck’s sake. You were literally out there dealing and mixing chemicals and synthesizing DNA just so this world could find cures for illnesses and diseases and all your parents could care about was you getting in a relationship? 

You were so sick of it! 

Then, your eyes darted towards the empty hall just right outside your door. Joe’s offer echoed in your mind, and you were starting to ask yourself if you also had gone mental too. Maybe you have. 

Letting your feet lead you, you got up from your bed and slowly walked down the hall towards Joe’s bedroom. His door was open, and you quietly peeked and saw that he was just sitting there at the edge of his bed, thinking deeply with a melancholy look on his face. His hands were playing with the empty beer bottle, and you couldn’t help but roll your eyes because all of this was so stupid. 

“So…” You stood by his doorway, getting his attention. “How long is this fake dating thing?”

Joe froze where he was and stared at you in disbelief. Were you really offering an approval to his crazy idea? Honestly, you were asking yourself the same thing. 

“Just until I finally catch her attention and would want me back.” Joe answered.

You bit your lower lip, playing with your fingers nervously for a moment before taking a deep breath and said, “So, here are the rules...”

Joe’s full attention was now to you as he waited for you to continue. 

“If you get to use me as your fake girlfriend then I get to use you as my fake boyfriend at any upcoming family gathering.”

Joe set the empty bottle on his bedside table before getting up from his bed and walked over to where you were. He was trying to comprehend the offer that you just made. 

“You mean… introducing me to your parents as your boyfriend?” Joe asked, brows all knitted together. 

“Yes, that’s right.” 

“Then, you have to go to party events with me, especially if Ivy is there.”

You tilted your head, giving Joe a look. “Joe, I have a job. I can’t just ditch that for stupid party events.”

“Then, how are people going to believe we’re dating if we’re not seen together?” Joe argued. 

The man had a point but there was no way you were going to agree with this without getting anything in return. 

“Fine, but you get to pay for the dresses and shoes that I have to wear to these stupid events, and I get to keep them all.”

“Okay, deal.” Joe gave you a smile. 

You weren’t done yet. 

“And one more thing, you could only kiss me and hold me but there’s no sex.”

The small chuckle that escaped from Joe sort of insulted you, but you ignored it because this was all fake anyway. Besides, you both were using each other for both of your benefits, so you didn’t have time to feel insulted that Joe was quick to agree that he didn’t want to have sex with you. 

“No problem.” Joe agreed, reaching his hand towards you. 

You stared into his eyes as you shook his hand firmly in agreement. 

You were so going to regret this, weren’t you? 

Taglist:

@palomahasenteredthechat @sunvick @eddies-acousticguitar @demonsanddemogorgons @joesquinns @mmunson86 @ghostinthebackofyourhead @corrodedcoffincumslut @figmentofquinn @tlclick73 @browneyes8288 @bylermaxmayfield @ali-r3n @ficsbypix @capricornrisingsstuff @missonlypost @ali-in-w0nderland @amberolivia666 @lalalala-melmosworld @niallersfreckles @nanas-lasagna

[bronwiebear-brad]

i'm so happy you're writing again, can you please do a cute angst?? i love those s2

This is a part two of this thing I wrote long time ago.

His eyes didn’t left your figure following you through the crowd to the exit door. He hopelessly tought he could move from his spot and run to catch you, but his legs didn't obeyed his brain. His heart got broken in so many small peaces that it was going to be so hard to pull them back together. 

Deep down in his mind he had a small chance that you would say i love you back. He was the one who ruined everything and he couldn’t bare with that burden.

“What are you doing? Follow her!” James tapped Brad’s shoulder but he couldn’t move. Instead he stood in the same spot frozen, emotionless.

“She doesn’t love me anymore.” He looked at his friends eyes, tears already falling. "I fucked up."

He tried to abstract himself with the rest of the wedding. Also for the next few days he tried to relax and stop thinking about what happened. A few days in the countryside with friends  to take his mind off everything but everyone was with their soulmate and everywhere he looked, he could see happy couples and their perfect relationships. It was kinda hard not to feel lonely no matter how hard everyone tried. So he decided to leave.

As soon as he got back to his routine, everything went back to normal for everyone. Unless for him. He had returned to his empty house. To his cold bed. He wouldn't get home and hear the laughter, the crackling of someone who had just burned their dinner or said a really awful joke. He would return to a dark house full of memories of someone he had one day.

So he moved out. Found another apartment, on a new neighborhood. Met new people, focused on his music, on his bar, on his family and friends. He even got a new dog. Now he wasn't alone or haunted by the walls of his house.

But it didn't took him much time to realize that he was simple disguising the pain. And when he finished his day he wouldn't mind not eating, not sleeping, not showering. He started drinking more and smoking. He was no longer answering calls from his friends and soon after, from his family. And the only way they could get him out of that house was to walk his dog.

He was slowly losing himself, just as he had lost you.

"Come on, Jack, hurry up buddy. It's freezing!" he instructed to the little ball of fur sniffing around some flowers, while rubbing his hands and trying to heat them with his warm breath.

The dog was pretty unaware of the little drops of rain falling from the wet trees. It had been raining all night and it was really cold.

Brad wished he could brought a scarf, his hoodie was very nice keeping him warm such as his beanie but his neck was getting the cold breeze that blew. He took a cigarette from the white box of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Grabbed his lighter and lit his cigar. Soon he was on his journey back home, where he could just disconnect from everything.

As the next day came he opened his eyes lazily. He realized he had fallen asleep on the couch again. He watched his phone on the coffee table buzzing and noticed missing calls from his parents and friends. He tried to reach it but his body was hurting, soon his throat started to burn and he felt dizzy and sick.

"Fuck no." He said. Grabbing his phone and calling his bandmate to cancel plans onf the studio. It didn't took him long to pick up.

"Brad?!" he sounded concerned.

"hey Tris" His weak voice almost didn't let him talk. Plus he started coughing.

"are you okay?" he asked.

"I think I got the flu or something, besides that I'm fine" he lied. "I don't think I'm able to go today."

"I'll tell Joe. Do you need anything? We are so worried about you, it's like you're isolating yourself." He changed his tone. "James said you needed your space so we let you be but this is coming out of hand"

"I'm not a kid anymore, Tris. I can take of myself" He had trouble talking. Great now he was losing his voice.

"it's clearly that you can't not! Your mom called us and told that you don't eat or sleep and even didn't let her into your house."

"I'm fine, maybe next week we can start planning that tour"

"Brad, you told us that last week... You need to take care of yourself!"

"I know, I know..."

After the phone call, Brad fell asleep. Three hours later he felt he was going to trow up so he jump really fast from the couch and ran to the bathroom.

After throwing up he couldn't simple get up from the floor. His body so weak and he was about to pass out. So he just laid back on the bathtub tiles and slowly felt his eyes get heavy again...

"Brad..?" he heard his name being called from his living room and thought he was delusional.

"h-here..." He tried to talk but his voice was really low.

"Brad? Are you there? The door was unlock.." the voice was getting closer. "Brad?!"

"hel-p.." He tried to raise his voice.

"Omg, Brad!" the voice walked in the bathroom and kneeled down beside him. "what are you doing?" He knew who it was, the voice was to familiar.

"help me, (y/n)" he said not capable to move.

"I'm here, I got you" she tried to bring him closer to her, since he was white as a ghost, she touched his forehead. "you're burning!" so she grabbed a wet towel and place it in his face. She laid him down on her legs.

They stood there in that position for half an hour, she gently taping his face with the cold towel and watching his face gain a little color again. Her heart broke seeing him like this.

"(y/n)...?" he said opening his eyes slowly.

"Hi Brad." She looked down at him and sadly smiled. "how you'd been?"

"awfull" he said and tried to sit.

"easy. Here, let me help you" she helped him to sit slowly. Her hand touched his forehead again and he closed his eyes and leaned in. "The fever is lowering."

"Why are you here?" he asked.

"your mom called me." she looked at him and for the first time their eyes crossed. "I had to."

He didn't said anything. Instead he just nodded. He was to weak to fight this. So he just let himself be and be cared by her.

She helped him get up, undress and sit inside the tub. She waited until the water was warm and gently helped him get wet. She washed his hair and body, got up to get his shaving utensils and shaved his face. And wrapped him in a warm towel. Helped him upstairs into the bed, dressed him with clean clothes and even brushed his hair. While she was tucking him inside the covers he spoke.

"You don't have to do this" He looked at her.

"I want to. We swore to care for eachother."

"why? I broke that promise, I hurted you. I don't deserve it."

"You don't have to stay like this, Brad. You have to move on. You can't stay forever grieving a love that died."

"Why you don't hate me?"

"I could never hate you."

"I broke your heart"

"Yes, you did. But I can't stand watching you go down."

"I left you alone and you've always been so good to me. You're still so good to me"

"You have to accept that it was your call. You're a grown up man, things end." She spoke again calmly. "I'll make you some tea for your throat, just take these meds and try to rest. Okay?"

"I don't want you to go."

"I'm not going anywhere. Not until you're okay"

"Promise?"

"I promise."

She stood up and went to leave the bedroom. She stopped by the door and looked back at him. He was looking out the window, so small, so broken.

"Brad." She said and he looked at her. "and when I asked you how you'd been, I meant I missed you more than I've ever missed anything before."

[willymywonkers]

The Factory (5/5)

Summary: It's been a few weeks since the Factory tour, and Maude is much happier than she ever was. Charlie comes over, and tells her about his experience with Willy. She finds that he rejected Willy's offer. However, she gets a surprise visit from a familiar stranger.

A/N: the final chapter baby!!! I know it's this series was short, but I promise I will still be posting other stories with Maude and Willy, I've just got some major school shit to work out. My Masterlist should be up tomorrow.

Tagged: @holdmeicant @wonkasmissstarshine

It was a mid February day, and things seemed to be getting better for the Buckets. Harry Bucket had gotten a new job, with much better pay, and Grandpa Joe was much better.

Maude was back in school teaching. Charlie couldn't be happier to see her face again.

Maude even started a class teaching kids the chemistry behind making candy. She loved hanging out with the kids, but there was something missing in her life.

Despite being much cheerful, she couldn't get her mind off Will. She noticed Wonka's sales had been dropping. The newspaper began spreading rumors about him, but, of course, they weren't true.

The soft buzz from her door distracted her from her thoughts. Maude smiled, already knowing who it was.

Charlie smiled back at her, wiping the snow off his boots.

"Hello, Charlie." Maude chuckled, inviting him in.

"Hello, Ms. Figgle. Here, I got some extra tips from shoe shining, and I wanted to split this with you." Charlie handed her a Wonka bar from his pocket.

Maude smiled, taking the candy bar. "How thoughtful of you, dear."

She took a piece, but it didn't taste the same. It had a bitter taste, but it wasn't the chocolate. Chewing on the candy suddenly made Maude's good mood shift to a guilty feeling.

"This doesn't taste right." Maude said. The candy didn't have its velvety texture like it used to.

Charlie took a bite of the bar, and agreed.

"Did something happen with you and Will on the trip?" Maude asked, slightly concerned.

"Well, Mr. Wonka offered to give me his entire factory, but he wouldn't let me ever see my family again." Charlie explained.

Maude looked, slightly confused. "Really?"

"Yeah. I thought he was really nice at first. I guess he only cares about himself." Charlie sighed, disappointed.

Maude sighed, just as disappointed.

"Did he ever mention me? At all?" She asked.

"No, I don't think so." Charlie replied.

Maude's heart began to break. Of course, this was expected. She didn't expect Willy to remember her, and how she was his biggest influence in his life.

The cold sad guilt started to consume her once again.

Willy Wonka found himself in an odd situation. Ever since Charlie turned down his offer to live with him, he had been feeling odd. He felt guilty somehow.

This feeling greatly affected his chocolate sales, and he just didn't know why.

Childhood memories started coming back to him. It drove him nuts. He remembered the constant bullying. How he was an outcast to the other children.

Wired Willy is what the kids called him. They would pebbles at his house, taunting him.

God, how he hated his childhood. Willy sat his desk. His mind was clouded, and he could barely focus on his work.

"Check out loser Willy." The kids shouted. "He's like a turtle, slow and cowardly."

Willy couldn't stand it. He was so helpless. He remembered the kids pushing him to the ground and kicking him hard in the stomach.

He gulped hard. It was hard to make him cry, but those memories were enough to push Willy to his limit.

"Hey ASSHATS." A young girl cursed. "Leave him alone or I'll dissect you lot."

Willy remembered the appearance of a girl with messy pigtails and dirt on her face.

She threw some dead things at the kids, and all the kids ran off, terrified of the girl.

Willy wasn't terrified. In fact, the young girl was his savior. He remembered how she loved to chew gum.

"Maude." Will whispered. He felt upset saying her name out loud. She wasn't around anymore, and he hadn't spoken to her in years.

He sat with his supposed 'therapist'.

"I just don't understand." Willy said. "Why am I thinking about her now? I should be over her."

The Oompa Loompa nodded, writing something down.

"I just feel like there's something missing." Willy said, thinking. "I've been feeling terrible, so the candy's terrible. So, how do I fix that?"

The Oompa Loompa shrugged.

Will sat up. "Maybe I'm feeling this way because of my past actions lead up to Charlie ejecting my offer, and I should see things from outside my own perspective." He smirked over at his 'therapist'. "Oh, you're good."

The next day, Willy took a trip into town, wearing all black, in hopes of finding Charlie. He parked his large flying glass elevator in the most convenient spot, and saw the boy shining shoes.

As the boy went on a bit of a break, Willy took a seat on the bench and flipped through the local newspaper, conveniently covering his face.

Charlie kneeled down, and began to work on Willy's shoes.

"I hear that guy, Wendell Walters." Willy began to speak.

"Willy Wonka?" Charlie corrected.

"Yeah, him. I hear his chocolate hasn't been doing well. It seemed to he's a bad egg who deserves it." Willy said.

"Yeah." Charlie agreed.

"Have you met him?" Willy asked.

"I did once. At first, I thought he was nice, but then he wasn't. He also has a funny haircut." Charlie replied, trying to antagonize Willy. He caught on from the moment he sat down.

Willy tossed the newspaper down. "I do not."

"Why are you here?" Charlie got up, and crossed his arms.

"I don't feel so hot." Willy snapped. He sighed, frustrated. "What helps you feel better when you feel down?"

"My family."

"Ew." Willy winced.

Charlie started to get slightly upset. "What do have against my family?"

"It's not your family. It's the idea of-" Willy seemed to struggle on the right word.

"Parents?"

"That." Willy sighed. "And, something else."

"And, what's that?" Charlie asked. "Whatever it is, you should face what's troubling you. My teacher tells me that."

"Well, that sounds like a bunch of baloney." Willy scoffed.

"It's not. She's very smart." Charlie said.

"Then, maybe she should help me." Willy said, sarcastically. Then, he thought for a second. "Actually, that's not a bad idea. Do you think you could show me to her?"

Charlie nodded. "Sure."

Willy smiled wide. "That's great! You know, I actually have trans-"

He ran into the glass elevator face first. "I should really be careful to where I park this thing."

Willy walked into the elevator, with Charlie following behind. He pressed a single button, and they were off.

Maude was in her bedroom, playing the violin. Her fingers danced over the strings as the bow shifted back and forth, playing a calming tune. The smoothness of the instrument brought her temporary peace.

It had been a while since she touched the instrument, since she only played it when she was particularly sad. However, in this moment, she felt contentment.

It did hurt her knowing that Will completely forgotten about her, but she wasn't going to let that guilt follow her into the bright future.

Maude heard a soft knock at the door. She placed the instrument down, walking out of her bedroom.

It was Charlie, of course.

"Hello, dear." Maude smiled.

"Ms. Figgle, there's someone I want you to meet." Charlie said.

Behind him was a stunned Willy Wonka. He gulped hard, nervously smiling at Maude.

She stood there, baffled. "Come in." She spoke softly, gesturing the boys in.

Willy nodded, putting his coat and hat down.

The three of them sat in the living room. A silence consumed the room, as Will and Maude stared at each other for a few minutes.

"Hi Willy." Maude said, finally. "How are you?"

Willy smiled, slightly. "Hey Maude. I'm fine."

"Would you like some tea?" She asked.

He nodded. "Absolutely."

Maude drifted off to the kitchen. After a few minutes, she came back with tea and cookies.

Charlie looked over to Willy, and nodded.

"Ms. Figgle, do you know where the restroom is?" Charlie asked.

"Down the hall, and to the left." Maude said. Her eyes were still locked with Willy's.

Charlie took this opportunity to leave the two adults alone.

"So, you're a teacher now?" Willy reached for his tea.

"Yes, but I teach the science of candy making." Maude said, grabbing a cookie.

"That's great." He smiled. "You know, candy making does require a lot of smarts."

She chuckled. "Yeah."

Willy's smile slightly faded as he looked down at his tea. "Say, uh, would you ever want to get back into candy making again?"

She smiled, chuckling again. "Well, I would. I loved working with you in the factory."

"You did?" His puppy dog eyes were too much to bear.

Maude nodded. "Of course."

His smile soon faded. "Would you ever forgive me, Maude?"

"For what?" She asked confused.

"For coming between you and Ron. I know how much you loved him, and I just got so jealous that I pushed you away." Willy looked down at his tea, stirring it slowly.

Tears poured softly down Maude's cheek. "That's not true, Will."

Willy looked confused. "What do you mean?"

"Ron pulled me away from you." She sniffed. "I didn't love him."

"You didn't?" Willy repeated.

"No." She scoffed. "I loved you."

His eyes widened. He clenched his gloved hands, and gulped. "R-really?"

Maude nodded, wiping off any tears with a piece of paper tissue.

He leaned over to her. His gloved hand hovering over her wet cheek. Will placed a soft kiss on her quivering lips. Maude gave into the kiss, gently.

They pulled away after a minute or so.

Will cleared his throat, and chuckled, slightly.

Maude smiled, holding his hands in hers. She placed her head against Will's chest. Willy embraced the hug, holding Maude in his arms.

"I think I loved you too, Maude." He said. "Do you think you'd still might wanna live with me in the factory?"

She chuckled. "Only if Charlie says yes."

Behind her, Charlie was smiling brightly at the two.

"Charlie?" Willy Wonka began. "Would you and your family like to live in the factory with me?"

Charlie nodded. "Yes, of course."

He hugged both Maude and Willy.

Finally, it became clear to Willy about what he was missing.

This became the start of something beautiful.

[arcticdementor]

Stefanie Gray explains why, as a teenager, she was so anxious to leave her home state of Florida to go to college.

“I went to garbage schools and I’m from a garbage low-income suburb where everyone sucks Oxycontin all day,” she says. “I needed to get out.”

She got into Hunter College in New York, but both her parents had died and she had nowhere near enough to pay tuition, so she borrowed. “I just had nothing and was poor as hell, so I took out loans,” she says.

This being 2006, just a year after the infamous Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 was passed, she believed news stories about student loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She believed they would be with her for life, or until they were paid off.

“My understanding was, it’s better to purchase 55 big-screen TVs on a credit card, and discharge that in a court of law, then be a student who’s getting an education,” she says.

Still, she asked for financial aid: “I was like, ‘My parents are dead, I'm a literal fucking orphan, I have no siblings. I'm just taking out this money to put my ass through school.”

Instead of a denial, she got plenty of credit, including a slice of what were called “direct-to-consumer” loans, that came with a whopping 14% interest rate. One of her loans also came from a company called MyRichUncle that, before going bankrupt in 2009, would briefly become famous for running an ad disclosing a kickback system that existed between student lenders and college financial aid offices.

Gray was not the cliché undergrad, majoring in intersectional basket-weaving with no plan to repay her loans. She took geographical mapping, with the specific aim of getting a paying job quickly. But she graduated in the middle of the post-2008 crash, when “53% of people 18 to 29 were unemployed or underemployed.”

“I couldn't even get a job scrubbing toilets at a local motel,” she recalls. “They told me straight up that I was over-educated. I was like, “Literally, I'll do your housekeeping. I don't give a shit, just let me make money and not get evicted and end up homeless.”

The lender Sallie Mae at the time had an amusingly loathsome policy of charging a repeating $150 fee every three months just for the privilege of applying for forbearance. Gray was so pissed about having to pay $50 a month just to say she was broke that she started a change.org petition that ended up gathering 170,000 signatures.

She personally delivered those to the Washington offices of Sallie Mae and ended up extracting a compromise out of the firm: they’d still charge the fee, but she could at least apply it to her balance, as opposed to just sticking it in the company’s pocket as an extra. This meager “partial” victory over a student lender was so rare, the New York Times wrote about it.

“I definitely poked the bear,” she says.

Gray still owed a ton of student debt — it had ballooned from $36,000 to $77,000, in fact — and collectors were calling her nonstop, perhaps with a little edge thanks to who she was. “They were telling me I should hit up people I know for money, which was one thing,” she recalls. “But when they started talking about giving blood, or selling plasma… I don’t know.”

Sallie Mae ultimately sued Gray four times. In doing so, they made a strange error. It might have slipped by, but for luck. “By the grace of God,” Gray said, she met a man in the lobby of a courthouse, a future state Senator named Kevin Thomas, who took a look at her case. “Huh, I’ve got some ideas,” he said, eventually pointing to a problem right at the top of her lawsuit.

Sallie Mae did not represent itself in court as Sallie Mae. The listed plaintiff was “SLM Private Credit Student Loan Trust VL Funding LLC.” As was increasingly the case with mortgages and other forms of debt, student loans by then were typically gathered, pooled, and chopped into slices called tranches, to be marketed to investors. Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight.

When Thomas advised her to look up the plaintiff’s name, she discovered it wasn’t registered to do business in the State of New York, which prompted the judge to rule that the entity lacked standing to sue. He fined Sallie Mae $10,000 for “nonsense” and gave Gray another rare victory over a student lender, which she ended up writing about herself this time, in The Guardian.

Corporate creditors often play probabilities and mass-sue even if they don’t always have great cases, knowing a huge percentage of borrowers either won’t show up in court (as with credit card holders) or will agree to anything to avoid judgments, the usual scenario with student borrowers.

“What usually happens in pretty much 99% of these cases is you beg and plead and say, ‘Please don't put a judgment against me, I'll do anything… because a judgment against you means you're not going to be able to buy a home, you’re not going to be able to do basically anything involving credit for the next 20 years.”

…

The passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was a classic demonstration of how America works, or doesn’t, depending on your point of view. While we focus on differences between Republicans and Democrats, it’s their uncanny habit of having just a sliver of enough agreement to pass crucial industry-friendly bills that really defines the parties.

Whether it’s NAFTA, the Iraq War authorization, or the Obama stimulus, there are always just enough aisle-crossers to get the job done, and the tally usually tracks with industry money with humorous accuracy. In this law signed by George Bush, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley, and greased by millions in donations from entities like Sallie Mae, the crucial votes were cast by a handful of aisle-crossing Democrats, including especially the Delawareans Joe Biden and Tom Carper. Hillary Clinton, who took $140,000 from bank interests in her Senate run, had voted for an earlier version.

Party intrigue is only part of the magic of American politics. Public relations matter, too, and the Bankruptcy Bill turned out to be the poster child for another cherished national phenomenon: the double-lie.

…

Years later, pundits still debate whether there really ever was an epidemic of debt-fleeing deadbeats, or whether legislators in 2005 who just a few years later gave “fresh starts” to bankrupt Wall Street banks ever cared about “moral hazard,” or if it’s fair to cut off a single Mom in a trailer when Donald Trump got to brag about “brilliantly” filing four commercial bankruptcies, and so on.

In other words, we argue the why of the bill, but not the what. What did that law say, exactly? For years, it was believed that it absolutely closed the door on bankruptcy for whole classes of borrowers, and one in particular: students. Nearly fifteen years after the bill’s passage, journalists were still using language like, “The bill made it completely impossible to discharge student loan debt.”

…

The phrase “Just asking questions” today often carries a negative connotation. It’s the language of the conspiracy theorist, we’re told. But sometimes in America we’re just not told the whole story, and when the press can’t or won’t do it, it’s left to individual people to fill in the blanks. In a few rare cases, they find out something they weren’t supposed to, and in rarer cases still, they learn enough to beat the system. This is one of those stories.

…

Smith’s explanation of the history of the student loan exemption and where it all went wrong is biting and psychologically astute. In his telling, the courts’ historically sneering attitude toward student borrowers has its roots in an ages-old generational debate.

“This started out as an an argument between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers,” Smith notes. “A lot of the law was created by people railing against draft-dodging deadbeat hippies.”

He points to a 1980 ruling by a judge named Richard Merrick, who in denying relief to a former student, wrote the following:

The arrogance of former students who had received so much from society, frequently including draft deferment, and who had given back so little in return, accompanied by their vehemence in asserting their constitutional and statutory rights, frequently were not well received by legislators and jurists, senior to them, who had lived through the Depression, had worked their ways through college and graduate school, had served in World War II, and had been paying the taxes which made possible the student loans.

Smith laughs about this I didn’t climb the hills at Normandy with a knife in my teeth just to eat the debt on your useless-ass liberal arts degree perspective, noting that “when those guys who did all that complaining went to school, only rich prep school kids went to college, and by the way, tuition was like ten bucks.” Still, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the conservative position.

…

This concern about “deadbeats” gaming the system — kids taking out fat loans to go to school and bailing on them before the end of the graduation party — led that 1985 court to take a hardcore position against students who made “virtually no attempt to repay.” They established a three-pronged standard that came to be known as the “Brunner test” for determining if a student faced enough “undue hardship” to be granted relief from student debt.

Among other things, the court ruled that a newly graduated student had to do more than demonstrate a temporary inability to handle bills. Instead, a “total incapacity now and in the future to pay” had to be present for a court to grant relief. Over the course of the next decades, it became axiomatic that basically no sentient being could pass the Brunner test.

…

In 2015, he was practicing law at the Texas litigation firm Bickel and Brewer when he came across a case involving a former Pace University student named Lesley Campbell, who was seeking to discharge a $15,000 loan she took out while studying for a bar exam. Smith believed a loan given out to a woman who’d already completed her studies, and who used the money to pay for rent and groceries, was not covering an “educational benefit” as required by law. A judge named Carla Craig agreed and canceled Campbell’s loan, and Campbell v. Citibank became one of the earlier dents in the public perception that there were no exceptions to the prohibition on discharging student debts.

“I thought, ‘Wait, what? This might be important,’” says Smith.

By law, Smith believed, lenders needed to be wary of three major exceptions to the non-dischargeability rule:

— If a loan was not made to a student attending a Title IV accredited school, he thought it was probably not a “qualified educational loan.”

— If the student was not a full-time student — in practice, this meant taking less than six credits — the loan was probably dischargeable.

— And if the loan was made in an amount over and above the actual cost of attending an accredited school, the excess might not be “eligible” money, and potentially dischargeable.

Practically speaking, this means if you got a loan for an unaccredited school, were not a full-time student, or borrowed for something other than school expenses, you might be eligible for relief in court.

Smith found companies had been working around these restrictions in the blunt predatory spirit of a giant-sized Columbia Record Club. Companies lent hundreds of thousands to teenagers over and above the cost of tuition, or to people who’d already graduated, or to attendees of dubious unaccredited institutions, or to a dozen other inappropriate destinations. Then they called these glorified credit card balances non-dischargeable educational debts — Gray got one of these “direct-to-consumer” specials — and either sold them into the financial system as investments, borrowed against them as positive assets, or both.

…

Smith thought these practices were nuts, and tried to convince his bosses to start suing financial companies.

“They were like, ‘You do know what we do around here, right?’ We defend banks,” he recalls, laughing. “I said, ‘Not these particular banks.’ They said it didn’t matter, it was a question of optics, and besides, who was going to pay off in the end? A bunch of penniless students?”

Furious, Smith stormed off, deciding to hang his own shingle and fight the system on his own. “My sister kept saying to me, ‘You have to stop trying to live in a John Grisham novel,’” he recalls, laughing. “There were parts of it where I was probably super melodramatic, saying things like, ‘I'm going to go find justice.’”

Slowly however, Smith did find clients, and began filing and winning cases. With each suit, he learned more and more about student lenders. In one critical moment, he discovered that the same companies who were representing in court that their loans were absolutely non-dischargeable were telling investors something entirely different. In one prospectus for a trust packed full of loans managed by Sallie Mae, investors were told that the process for creating the aforementioned “direct-to-consumer” loans:

Does not involve school certification as an additional control and, therefore, may be subject to some additional risk that the loans are not used for qualified education expenses… You will bear any risk of loss resulting from the discharge.

Sallie Mae was warning investors that the loans might be discharged in bankruptcy. Why the honesty? Because the parties who’d be packaging and selling these student loan-backed instruments included Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank.

“It’s one thing to lie to a bunch of broke students. They don’t matter,” Smith says. “It’s another to lie to JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. You screw those people, they’ll fight back.”

…

In June of 2018, a case involving a Navy veteran named Kevin Rosenberg went through the courts. Rosenberg owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and tried to keep current on his loans, but after his hiking and camping store folded in 2017, he found himself busted and unable to pay. His case was essentially the opposite of Brunner: he clearly hadn’t tried to game the system, he made a good faith effort to pay, and he demonstrated a long-term inability to make good. All of this was taken into consideration by a judge named Cecilia Morris, who ruled that Rosenberg qualified for “undue hardship.”

“Most people… believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” Morris wrote. “This Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.” The ruling essentially blew up the legend of the unbeatable Brunner standard.

Given a fresh start, Rosenberg moved to Norway to become an Arctic tour guide. “I want people to know that this is a viable option,” he said at the time. The ruling attracted a small flurry of news attention, including a feature in the Wall Street Journal, as the case sent a tremor through the student lending world. More and more people were now testing their luck in bankruptcy, suing their lenders, and asking more and more uncomfortable questions about the nature of the education business.

In the summer of 2012, a former bond trader named Michael Grabis sat in the waiting room of a Manhattan financial company, biding time before a job interview. In the eighties, Grabis’s father was a successful bond trader who worked in a swank office atop the World Trade Center, but after the 1987 crash, the family fell out of the smart set overnight. His father lost his job and spiraled, his mother had to look for a job, and “we just became working class people.”

Michael tried to rewrite the family story, going to school and going into the bond business himself, first with the Bank of New York, and eventually for Schwab. But he, too, lost his job in a crash, in 2008, and now was trying to break the pattern of bubble economy misery. However, he’d exited Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College in the nineties carrying tens of thousands in student loans. That number had since been compounded by fees and penalties, and the usual letters, notices, and phone calls from debt collectors came nonstop.

Now, awaiting a job interview, his phone rang again. It was a collection call for Sallie Mae, and it wasn’t just one voice on the line.

“They had two women call at once,” Grabis recalls. “They told me I’d made bad life choices, that I lived in too expensive a city, that I had to move to a cheaper place, so I could afford to pay them,” Grabis explains. “I tried to tell them I was literally at that moment trying to get a job to help pay my bills, but these people are trained to just hound you without listening. I was shaking when I got off the phone, and ended up having a bad interview.”

Two years later, more out of desperation and anger than any real expectation of relief, Grabis went to federal court in the Southern District of New York and filed for bankruptcy. At the time, he, too, believed student loans could not be eliminated. But the more he read about the way student loans were constructed and sold — he’d had experience in doing shovel-work constructing mortgage-backed securities, so he understood the Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) market — he started to develop a theory. Everyone dealing with the finances of higher education in America knew the system was rotten, he thought. But what if someone could prove it?

The 2005 Bankruptcy Act says former students can’t discharge loans for “qualified educational expenses,” i.e. loans given to students so that they might attend tax-exempt non-profit educational institutions. Historically, that exemption covered almost all higher education loans.

What if America’s universities no longer deserve their non-profit status? What if they’re no longer schools, and are instead first and foremost crude profit-making ventures, leveraging federal bankruptcy law and the I.R.S. code into a single, ongoing predatory lending scheme?

This is essentially what Grabis argued, in a motion filed last January. He named Navient, Lafayette College, the U.S. Department of Education, Joe Biden, his own exasperated judge, and a host of other “unknown co-perpetrators” as part of a scheme against him, claiming the entirety of America’s higher education business had become an illegal moneymaking scam.

“They created a fraud,” he says flatly.

…

Grabis doesn’t have a lawyer, his case has been going on for the better part of six years, and at first blush, his argument sounds like a Hail Mary from a desperate debtor. The only catch is, he might be right.

By any metric, something unnatural is going on in the education business. While other industries in America suffered declines thanks to financial crises, increased exposure to foreign competition, and other factors, higher education has grown suspiciously fat in the last half-century. Tuition costs are up 100% at universities over and above inflation since 2000, despite the 2008 crash, with some schools jacking up prices at three, four times the rate of inflation dating back to the seventies.

Bloat at the administrative level makes the average university look like a parody of an NFL team, where every brain-dead cousin to the owner gets on the payroll. According to Education Week, “fundraisers, financial aid advisers, global recruitment staff, and many others grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009,” which is ten times the rate of growth for tenured faculty positions.

…

Hovering over all this is a fact not generally known to the public: many American universities, even ones claiming to be broke, are sitting atop mountains of reserve cash. In 2013, after the University of Wisconsin blamed post-crash troubles for raising tuition 5.5%, UW system president Kevin Reilly in 2013 admitted that the school actually held $638 million in reserve, separate and distinct from the school endowment. Moreover, Reilly said, other big schools were doing the same thing. UW’s reserve was 25% of its operating budget, for instance, but the University of Minnesota’s was 29%, while Illinois maintained a whopping 34% buffer.

When Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice looked into it, he found many other schools were sitting atop mass reserves even as they pleaded poverty to raise tuition rates. “They’re all doing it,” he said.

In the mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 crash, financiers siphoned fortunes off home loans that were unlikely to be repaid. Student loans are the same game, but worse. All the key players get richer as that $1.7 trillion pile of debt expands, and the fact that everyone knows huge percentages of student borrowers will never pay is immaterial. More campus palaces get built, more administrators get added to payrolls, and perhaps most importantly, the list of assets grows for financial companies, whether or not the loans perform.

…

“As long as it’s collateralized at Navient, they can borrow against that,” Smith says. “They say, ‘Look, we've got $3 billion in assets, which are just consumer loans in negative amortization that are not being repaid, but are being artificially kept out of default so Navient can borrow against that from other banks.

“When I realized that, I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They’re happy that the loans are growing instead of being repaid, because it gives them more collateral to borrow against.’” Smith’s comments echo complaints made by virtually every student borrower in trouble I’ve ever interviewed: lenders are not motivated to reduce the size of balances by actually getting paid. Instead, the game is about keeping loans alive and endlessly growing the balance, through new fees, penalties, etc.

There are two ways of approaching reform of the system. One is the Bernie Sanders route, which would involve debt forgiveness and free higher education. A market-based approach meanwhile dreams of reintroducing discipline into student lending; if students could default, schools couldn’t endlessly raise costs on the back of unlimited government-backed credit.

Which idea is more correct can be debated, but the one thing we know for sure is that the current system is the worst of both worlds, enriching all the most undeserving actors, and hitting that increasingly prevalent policy sweet spot of privatized profit and socialized risk. Whether it gets blown up in bankruptcy courts or simply collapses eventually under its own financial weight — there’s an argument that the market will be massively disrupted if and when the administration ends the Covid-19 deferment of student loan payments — the lie can’t go on much longer.

“It’s just obvious that this has become a printing money operation,” says Grabis. “The colleges charge whatever they want, then they go to the government and continuously increase the size of the loans.” If you’re on the inside, that’s a beautiful thing. What about for everyone else?

[saintheartwing]

So Why Should A Hero Be Moral?

The idea of a guy with super powers doing incredible things wasn’t invented by either Japanese anime, western comics, or some obscure 1920′s writer somewhere. No, no, it goes as far back, at least in terms of written record, to Plato’s work known as “Republic”. We find it beginning with the description of an “ancestor of Gyges”. And if you know that name...you know about Gyges’s Ring.

See, this ring makes you invisible if you slip it on. Using the ring, this man got into the king’s palace, seduced the king’s wife, killed the king with her help, and became the new ruler. This story is told to pose a question to us. “Do people actually love justice and goodness for its own sake, or do they do it because they realize if they’re unjust, there’ll be consequences for their actions?

Glaucon, the narrator, takes an “Immoralist” viewpoint. If ANY such person had that kinda magic ring, they’d behave in the same way. NOBODY would “refrain his hands from the possession of others and not touch them”. Well, this is quite the question. Would you do that? Should you do that? But it goes further. Glaucon also claims that if there were any people with special powers so committed to doing good that they’d still seek to be just, the rest of us would despise them and regard them with contempt. Why? Because if anyone who had a license to do whatever the hell they thought refused to do wrong or lay their hands on others things, the reaction would be “What the hell are you, stupid? You moron! You can do f--king anything and you’re not doing it?”

So Glaucon challenges Socrates in “Republic”. If you want to make a really convincing argument for why people should seek to BE good and not just APPEAR good, well, then show that the life of a person who is truly just but thought by others not to be so is superior to the life of someone who is ACTUALLY unjust, but has a good reputation. We have to compare the lives of people who are genuinely good vs the people who pretend to be so, but are thought of, outwardly, as good.

This is quite the challenge. So then...why SHOULD someone with superpowers or powers of any kind be good at all? Why should people, in general, be good? Not just appear good...BE good? Well, Plato presented a person, in Republic, as being someone who was thought of as unjust and suffered accordingly despite being good...and that person maaaaay have come from personal experience. After all, his beloved teacher was Socrates, a wise, brilliant and formerly well-known and cherished philosopher...who people turned on thanks to trumped up legal charges by claiming he was “corrupting the youth” and other BS claims. So a real, genuine, actual good person DID get thought of as being a stupid ignorant fool and let’s all boo and hiss him and then execute him via the state.

But we’re not in Ancient Greece, so let’s try to call on someone a LITTLE more modern. Kierkegaard the German Philosopher! He said that humans are called upon in life to, well, live a live of universal love. We are called by God to love our neighbors as ourselves, and nobody really falls outside that category of “neighbor”. It’s kinda like the idea of “We’re all brothers in Christ”.

OBVIOUSLY this isn’t even close to being an easy task, Kierkegaard says we need to overcome natural selfishness, and the inertia that pushes us toward the satisfaction of our own desires when those desires conflict with the good of others. This is the “first danger”. The first obstacle to goodness, justice and love. If you CAN overcome this, you can then face the external issue...a “double danger”. What is that?

Kierkegaard says that the big struggle involves first the person’s inner being struggling with themselves, then with the world outside. Because we don’t live in a world where it’s easy to love one another and to be just, after all.

So a moral person has to engage in a certain amount of self-denial. Only THEN can you overcome the firm pull of selfish desire. But  then we have to contend with the world because the world isn’t gonna be so nice to us. We may admire sainthood from a distance but facing real, actual virtue can be...disturbing to folks. Think of, say, figures like Gandhi or Dr. King or Harvey Milk or Nelson Mandela. Oh sure, people may ADORE them now but at the time they were alive, folks severely hated them in a lot of places. They were controversial figures who incurred a lot of criticism and in many cases for many beloved figures today...they got murdered for their efforts.

And the temptation of double danger and the like isn’t necessarily the temptation to be a supervillain. Take Spider-Man. Peter’s on his way to see MJ perform. He promised he’d see her. But...uh oh. Some guys are robbing an unfortunate in an alleyway. And...well, he’s Spider-Man! He’s got to help them! So he ends up missing her performance because he had to save people. This wasn’t a temptation to use his powers for financial gain or anything. It was a choice between using your powers for good or...well, just having a normal, private kinda life. He’s tempted to be ORDINARY, not evil. A lot of us kind of experience this. Most of us aren’t tempted to be villains. We wanna be free to pursue our own individual happiness is all.

However Peter also experiences the second danger because J Jonah Jameson, head of the biggest paper in the city, is ALWAYS shouting how Spidey is a menace. Menace! MENACE! Despite Spider-Man saving his life multiple times, AND his son, AND NYC, AND the World over and over...

But no. MENACE!

The good news is the average NYC person doesn’t seem to fear Spider-Man. Unless Joe f--kin’ Quesada is writing the story or the episode because yeah, THAT isn’t tired and played out. But such a thing is a good example of the double danger. Either they cynically refuse to believe in his goodness...or they call him a chump behind his back. Just as Glaucon said they would.

But what does Plato say in response? Well, Plato says that in the long run we’ll be happier both in life and in death, if we live in accordance with justice by turning our attention to the good. Morality reflects the true, deep character of the universe. Those who are committed to the good are committed to what is profoundly and eternally true. It’s no accident this viewpoint’s seen as religious, writers from St. Augustine to C.S Lewis have viewed his metaphysical version of the world as very much congruent to their own faith.

It’s also a matter of mutual responsibilities. Tobe a parent or a son or daughter or husband or wife or a citizen of a state means you have duties to the other. Certain obligations are just part of those kinds of relationships. It doesn’t just merely become grounds to love doing good but to enforce morality across wider stretches and turn it into duty.

For example, driving at a moderate speed is a good thing to do, but we also further enforce this as a legal obligation with speed limits. We don’t just have a moral duty to do the right thing, but a legal one at that. And that’s before we get into any kind of open religious reason for being good. Ultimately, Kierkegaard makes the argument, much like Plato, that humans have a simple reason to behave good. Because our own deepest and ultimate happiness is found by following the path of neighbor love.

But of course, now we get to an opposing viewpoint that has sprung up a lot. The concern of UTILITARIANISM. Let me paint a picture for you of a comic featuring Batman. The Joker is on trial for poisoning stamps. People lick them and they die. This time...the Joker’s found guilty and is going to death row. He is, in fact, going to DIE. And nobody could really argue that he doesn’t deserve it. Even though I’m almost completely against the death penalty...

It’s the goddamn JOKER. There are SOME exceptions to the rule. Some people who, absolutely, one hundred percent, would be too, TOO dangerous to let live and whom everyone else in the world would be better off if they were dead, who’ve proven, even if they were unarmed and had nothing but a glass of water...would smash that glass of water, cut the throats of everyone around them and then grab your gun and shoot you.

But...here’s the thing. THIS time...the Joker’s innocent. Batman knows he didn’t do it.

So...what should he do? A lot of us, and I’m tempted myself, would say, well, “Let the motherf--ker fry in the chair”.

Let’s think up another possibility. The Green Goblin has lasso’d an irritated dishwasher. He’s soaring on his Goblin Glider, the poor guy being dragged behind him, screaming all the way, he gets broken ribs and everything. Luckily, Spider-Man saves him. Now, what nobody knows is the guy was a disgrunted employee who had a gun in his pocket. He was gonna unload it into the first asshole in the diner he worked at because he was sick and tired of being underpaid by a cruel boss, picked on at work, and he just one day has decided he’s had enough. With what he WENT through now though, he gives up on his plan, destroys his gun, and signs up for an anger management course. 

So was what the Green Goblin did the right thing? Well, a UTILITARIAN would argue yes, it was. But surely that’s not correct, dragging a rando around Fifth and Main with the intention of traumatizing the guy and maybe even killing him just to use him as bait for his nemesis is CLEARLY an evil act, even if it UNINTENTIONALLY produces a greater good. 

So who do we turn to now? Let’s try Immanuel Kant. Kant maintained our fundamental duty is to act in a way that satisfies what’s called the “categorical imperative”. A formulation that states we should ALWAYS treat people as an ends in themselves, not MERELY as means. This comes down to treating people as always having intrinsic value, and never just using them for our own purposes as if they just had INSTRUMENTAL value. But remember, performing an action in accordance with the categorical imperative alone isn’t enough to make it good. You have to do it because it is your duty to do it! If an action treats an individual as an ends in and of themselves and the person performs the action regarding such individuals in way that indicates they’re following their duty of treating people appropriately, then their action is good. So treat others first as people, not as means to an end, and do it for the right reasons, not for selfish ones. It’s your duty to yourself, to others in Kant’s eyes. 

So what are these “duties” though? Now we get into the weeds. There’s positive and negative duties. Positive is stuff like tending to  the sick. Feeding and clothing the poor. Negative duties are obligations to REFRAIN from doing things that harm people, like assaulting an innocent person or maliciously lying to them. By doing our positive duties, we treat people as ends in and of themselves by showing them respect, and we’re fulfilling our negative duties by avoid treating them as merely a means. 

Spider-Man dives into this sort of thinking a lot. It’s classic line “with great power comes great responsibility” is an admonishment for people to be careful with the powers they have. Those who have power have a duty and an obligation to help those in need. Boiled down simply, its answering the question of “But why be moral at all?” For one, if you fail to do your duty, there will be negative consequences that affect you, directly or indirectly. But then again, this can be questionable. Sometimes reason one isn’t convincing in a world where evil can easily bring profit and virtue none at all. So what’s the second reason?

Because it’s right. 

People like Kant and FH. Bradley, another philosopher, have brought this up. Appealing to someone’s self-interest in the name of getting them to do a moral duty is basically missing the point. Them doing it for pragmatic or selfish reasons means they’re not behaving morally at all. You have to do the right thing BECAUSE it’s right. Not for some self-interested reward. But what if we’re given very strong reasons to do the wrong thing? Then doing the right thing would be irrational. So we have to make sure we’re not being irrational in doing the right thing.

So if reason one and reason two don’t work...is there a third reason? Well, yes. Let’s go back to Plato. Plato says “It’s the only way you’ll really have piece of mind”. According to Plato, a person’s soul consists of reason, of appetites, and the “spirited element”. Reason includes the conscience, and reason MUST govern the soul or the soul is discordant, lacking in harmony. But there’s plenty of people who don’t approach life from a dominantly moral perspective, so does this idea work? After all, even many morally upright people face temptation at some point, or give in occasionally. 

Artistole had another answer. Virtue is its own reward. Being moral is a greater benefit to you than any benefit you might obtain at the expense of your good moral character. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem necessarily true,, the rewards of perfect virtue do not always compensate compared to the rewards for wrongdoing. So then what’s next? 

Reason five! Doing good pays off in the long run. Now, if you’re a religious person, you may already know about this answer. It’s very similar to reason one. But we don’t have to accept it. It calls for some strong metaphysical positions about the nature of reality. 

But then again, maybe it’s not a singular answer that IS the answer. Maybe the multitude of reasons given here are good enough. Maybe it’s a little of them all that explains WHY heroes should behave in a moral way. Why people should be moral and good. Ultimately, how you choose to answer the question”Why be moral”...that’s up to you, and hopefully, you can be proud of the answer you give. 

[belladonnaandulriched]

the artist | chapter thirty-two

“I come along but I don't know where you're taking me I shouldn't go but you're wrenching, dragging, shaking me Turn off the sun pull the stars from the sky The more I give to you the more I die.” -”the perfect drug”, nine inch nails

I had no idea what to say to my parents, especially given the fact I was all kinds of drugged up and I couldn't even so much as sit up. It also didn't help to realize that I had no idea as to what day it was. But Chris insisted that Joey, Lars, and I go back to the speakeasy, and I had been cleared to return home. I had no idea how to explain the three of them to them, either. For all I knew it was game over for me. I had to fess up. I had to explain everything to them. I had to remove my mask and show them the tip of my nose and my mouth so I could breathe.

Chris lay me down in the backseat, to which he lay my head in his lap all the way there. Lars was kind enough to drive even though he wasn't really the best driver in the world: at one point, I could hear Joey breathing hard and letting out a low whistle every so often. I didn't mind given the amounts of morphine I had been given during my stay at the hospital, but I was concerned about him more than anything.

“You alright, Joe?” Chris asked him, to which he responded by rolling down the window.

“We're almost there, though,” Lars assured him as we took that exit off towards the speakeasy. I saw Joey run his fingers through his black curls and lean the seat back to ease his stomach.

“Would you like some tea, Joey?” Lars offered him as he pulled the parking brake and killed the engine.

“Please. I gotta walk around, too.”

“I'll come along, too,” Chris volunteered. “I have to pee real bad—” He looked down at me. “You gonna be alright here?”

“Yeah, I think so—my mom and dad are here, too, anyways.”

He slid out from underneath me and the three of them climbed out in unison. Once I lay there in the back seat in silence, I closed my eyes. I couldn't even so much as sit up and open the door, and yet I had my hope that the car could be seen from there, wherever Lars had parked us at. Indeed, I heard a tap on the window over my head.

I peered up to see my mom standing there. I almost burst into tears at the sight of her and she opened the door so she could talk to me.

“Oh, my poor little girl,” she cooed as she pressed her hands to either side of my face. “Your friend Chris told us what happened. I'm glad you were wearing a helmet!”

“Yeah, I'll say—where's Dad?”

“He went down the block for a mask—his other one finally wore a hole on the inside. But I told him I would stay here once you showed up.”

I had no idea how to confess it to her, especially given the fact I was on my back and with nowhere to go. I figured it was best to just ease her into it, rather than drop it right on her head.

“I feel awful, Mom,” I started.

“Oh, don't. It's not your fault, honey, and it's not that other boy's fault, either—accidents happen. Like I siad, I'm glad you kids were wearing helmets.”

“No, I mean—I feel awful that being an artist has got me to this point. Hanging out with a bunch of boys like this...”

“Well, Holly—maybe you should consider this a good thing,” she said.

“I—wait, what?”

“You know the story of Frida Kahlo, right?”

“Yeah, she—she sustained horrible injuries in a trolley accident when she was like—eighteen, like my age. She had to undergo a bunch of surgeries and she was in pain most of her life.”

“See this as a means that you are meant to be an artist. The abuse on your body is meant to be put to good use, much like the abuse Frida felt herself. You're an only child so it's not like one of these boys are going to be like Diego Rivera...” Her voice trailed off. I was speechless and I found myself wanting to keep quiet about it all at that point. Of course! I could still make art, but I would have to rethink things. I would have to rethink the Artist move, too, given I couldn't hardly squat so much as I could stand or sit up.

“But one thing is for sure and that's we're taking you home. But these boys are more than welcome to come by and visit, though.”

“You serious?” I was stunned by what I was hearing.

“Totally serious. Like I said, Holly—accidents happen. And these boys were kind enough to take you to the hospital and help you. They like you—you're their friend...” She turned her head and I recognized Joey walking towards her with a cup of something in hand.

“Are you Chris?” she asked him, and he stood that six foot distance from us.

“Nah, I'm Joey,” he corrected her before he took a sip. “I was the dude drivin'.”

“I was just telling Holly that accidents happen.”

“Uh—yeah. They do. They definitely do.” Even though he was upside down to me, I could make out the surprised look on his face.

“I also want to thank you for being such a sweet heart,” she continued.

“Um—thank you?” He showed her a grin, and the little gap in his teeth looked even more adorable upside down. “I mean, I—I did call the medics, after all.”

“You and Chris are more than welcome to come on over any time you want, by the way,” she added.

“Aw, yer too kind.”

“Where you from, by the way? I like your accent.”

“Upstate New York, like Syracuse area, near Lake Ontario. I'm a hick who's a long way from home.”

“Oh, I love upstate! I haven't been there in forever it seems. And you're not that much of a hick.”

“Oh, no, Miss Sherman—I assure ya that I am without question the biggest hick you've ever seen.”

“I've seen worse, Joey. You're—what Holly's father calls 'humble.' Have you been to Schenectady?”

“Not lately, nah.”

“Oh, well—her father was going to go there for a job right before the pandemic, like the day before all the lockdowns, and then it fell through. He's still on call, though, so maybe—just maybe—when things lift, he can transfer that way.” News to me, but then again, I did recall my dad receiving a phone call on that last night, but I didn't hear much of it because of all the news of lockdown surrounding us and the fact my life as a teen was going to consist of being alone most of the time and I would turn to art and the music I loved for the rest of my life as far as I knew. My mom raised herself to her feet and adjusted her blouse.

“Got your mask?” she asked him.

“Right in my pocket. Why, ya wanna help me help her?”

“Like I said—you are a sweet heart.”

She rounded the back end of the car, to which he joined me there at the doorway. His standing there above my head allowed me to look right at his crotch and his thighs. He looked down at me like a prince.

“How ya doin',” he asked me in a low voice.

“Liking what I see,” I said to him.

“Not even a bit'a drugs can keep that mind of yers outta the gutter,” he teased me before he took a sip. I had a nice view of that nice slender neck of his, too.

“Holly's parents in Schenectady,” he remarked in a low voice. “Do ya remember anythin' 'bout that?”

“Vaguely. Then again, like what Mom said, it happened right before the lockdowns went down. It's tempting, isn't it?”

And he winked at me.

“Come out there an' live not too far from me—that's pretty far from home, though. Speakin' as a guy who's far from home himself.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“An' with—with—” He gestured at my laying on my back. “—this right here, it'd be a li'l hard to say as to if or when it'll even happen.”

“True.”

“But—” He peered up at the other side of the car, where my mom had walked to. I lifted my head to find she wasn't there, or maybe she was, but she had ducked down or something. Joey bowed his head closer to me. “—know that no matter what happens,” he lowered his voice to a near whisper, “I'll always like you.”

I glanced up at him.

“Y-You will?” I stammered.

“Yeah.” Even upside down, I could make out the soft look on his face. He swallowed and looked off to the side: stray tendrils of black curls dangled down from his head and towards my face. “I got a crush on you, Hahlls. I dunno if it'll advance beyond that 'cause of Chris an' Lars an' whatnot... but that's how I feel about you. And I gotta fess it up to you 'cause of the accident an' the return of the pandemic and everything. I'm not makin' sense, sorry...”

“No, no,” I assured him, “you're making perfect sense.”

A soft blush crossed his aquiline nose and those little cheekbones.

“I gotta tell ya that I'm just absolutely captivated by your art. An', not ta mention—yer perfect in my eye. You're a saint to me, even when yer a sinner. You'll pull through. If you can survive some sick bastard attackin' you on the street an' without question the worst thing that's happened this century, you can survive this nonsense. An' I'll be here.”

I showed him a smile, to which he showed me that crooked one of his. I couldn't say anything because the other door swung open and my mom prepared to help me out of the backseat without putting strain on that awful injury. I could crab walk out of the back seat but I couldn't so much as crawl into the wheel chair Chris had brought along with us. If I leaned to the side and sat with my knees way out, it didn't hurt so much, but it still hurt. Chris and Lars weren't able to see us off, but Joey helped me into the back seat of my mom's car.

“You know where we live, right?” I asked him in a low voice.

He paused for a second with one hand on the mask underneath his chin and then his face lit up in junction with the afternoon sun.

“I do,” he told me, still in a near whisper.

“Tell Chris and Lars you know where to find me.” And he winked at me before he shut the door.

I was eager to paint for Joey again. And I was eager to paint for Chris and Lars again, even if it meant having my parents within a few feet of hearing us.

[tryintheirbest]

Pain Is So Close To Pleasure - Part 2

Pairing: Joe Mazzello x Female!Reader

Word Count. 3.4k

Warnings: swearing, some fluff

A/N: Sorry it took so long for me to get part 2 out. I got super busy and then I didn’t have the motivation to write. Now that I’m writing again, hopefully I can finish this little series soon. Send me an ask if you want to be on the tag list. I hope y’all enjoy!

One of the best things about Joe is that he’s a good listener. That’s part of the reason you always went to him with your problems. You knew that he would sit quietly and wait for you to finish talking before putting his two cents in. That is also part of the reason the two of you had been best friends for so long. Although Joe was a huge dork and would always go out of his way to do something funny or stupid, he knew when to tone it down and be serious. You could tell that when he took in your appearance, his whole demeanor shifted, telling you that he was being serious. You rarely heard his serious voice, so you were a bit surprised when you heard him ask, “Y/n, what happened?” You knew you had to tell him. He was your best friend and you had gone to him after all your other breakup. Something was different this time though. You had never gone through a breakup this rough, let alone been cheated on before. You didn’t really know where to start. You took in a shaky breath as Joe let go of your arm and sat back on his bed, ready to listen. “Today was one of the worst days of my life, Joe.” You stopped, looking at the floor, trying to find the words to say. You were caught off guard when Joe, who usually didn’t talk until you were finished, said in a quiet voice, “Is it because of our argument earlier?” You quickly turned your head towards him, finding his eyes were filled with worry and a hint of sadness. You grabbed his hand, “No, not at all. That was just a stupid argument. I honestly forgot about it, but that’s not why.” Joe nodded, seeming relieved. “I’m sorry that we did argue, Joey.” He gave you a smile at the nickname, which had stuck since you were kids. “I’m sorry too, Y/n.” You gave him a small smile and squeezed his hand before letting go and placing your hand back in your lap. “So, why was today one of the worst days of your life?”

He looked at you intently, waiting for you to tell all. You took another deep breath, thinking it would be best to start from the beginning. “After I got to the college, I started to take my stuff up to my room. When I got to my room, I heard Chris inside, which didn’t make sense because he said he wouldn’t be there until later. That’s when I heard it.” You stopped again, tears welling up in your eyes. You looked down at your lap, trying to will the tears away. “Heard what?” Joe asked, trying to keep you talking. After a moment’s hesitation, you looked up and met Joe’s eyes, “A woman’s voice.” His eyes widened and you looked away again. “I couldn’t believe it. I took my stuff and ran back down to my car. I sat in the parking lot crying for I don’t know how long. I was going to leave and come back home, but I got a text from him saying that he would be there soon. I got so angry, so I went back to the dorm room and confronted him. We yelled and argued. He said that he only wanted to go to the school because of the other girl. He said...some things and I slapped him. I told him to stay away from me and I left. Before I came back here, I dropped my classes so I didn’t have to go to school with him.” You looked up at Joe, finally finished with your rant. You weren’t met with the usual sad, concerned look you got whenever you got broken up with. Instead, he was angry. He got up and began pacing.

After a moment, Joe said, “I fucking hate that guy. If I ever see him again, I’ll beat the shit out of him.” You didn’t say anything, just shifted so you were hugging your knees to your chest. “I’m glad you slapped him. What did he say that made you do it?” You looked up at Joe, realized that he had stopped pacing. You lowered your gaze and said, quietly “He called you a worthless piece of shit, so I slapped him.” You felt Joe sit back next to you and put his arms around you, pulling you into a hug. You melted into the embrace, finally feeling yourself relax a little. “You really slapped your cheating ex-boyfriend because he was talking shit about me? Don’t you think there were at least a few better reasons?” He joked, trying to lighten the mood. It got a small laugh out of you. “Probably, but I didn’t like him talking about you that way.” 

The two of you sat there, you in Joe’s arms. You kept repeating a part of the argument over and over in your head. “He said he started cheating because he thought I was spending too much time with you.” you whispered, not really sure if you had actually said it out loud. Joe leaned back, “Are you fucking kidding me? Didn’t he know that I’m your best friend?” You shrugged, “I tried to explain that to him, but I don’t think he was listening.” There was another silence, but one that was comfortable. You never had comfortable silences with Chris. It always felt like a void that needed to be filled. It wasn’t like that with Joe. You could sit in silence with Joe for hours and not feel an ounce of awkwardness. That’s was being around Joe was: comfortable. Eventually, Joe said, “I, for one, am glad he’s finally out of your life. He was a dick.” You nodded, “I’m glad he’s gone, too. It’s just weird, you know? I was with him for two years and now he’s just gone.” “Yeah, but he deserves to be gone because he made you waste two years on a fucker like him.” Joe said, earning a laugh from you. You reached up, covering your mouth while you yawned. “Why don’t we get you something more comfortable to wear and we can try to sleep, yeah?” You nodded, it suddenly becoming hard to keep your eyes open. Joe got up and walked over to his dresser. He pulled out a pair of sweats and a t-shirt. “Here, these are kind of small on me, so they’ll hopefully fit you.” You grabbed the clothes and headed into the bathroom. Once you had changed, you washed your face and brushed your teeth. When you looked at your reflection, you still had puffy eyes, but you did look better. When you went back into Joe’s room, he was already in his bed. He patted the bed and you crawled in next to him. He rolled over slightly, wrapping his arms around you, pulling you into him so your head was on his chest. His fingers began rubbing shapes onto your shoulder. This wasn’t a new experience for you and Joe, but something felt different about it. You snuggled closer to him, feeling yourself drift off, still not able to put a finger on what was different about the closeness with Joe.

When you opened your eyes the next morning, it took a second to remember where you were. It wasn’t the usual sight of your bedroom or Chris’. It was somehow more comforting knowing that it was Joe’s room. Glancing next to you, you frowned at the empty space beside you. You looked at the clock, seeing that it was 6 o’clock in the morning. You let out a groan, wondering why you were up so early. As you got out of Joe’s bed, you saw a note on his dresser across from you. You picked it up and read through it quickly, smiling as you reached the end:

I went for a run and to run some errands. I would have woke you up, but I figured you needed some sleep. There’s coffee ready for you in the kitchen. Love, Joe.

He had drawn a heart with a smiley face on the bottom of the note under his name. You put the note back down and made your way to the kitchen. The smell of coffee soon greeted you and you all but ran the rest of the way to the kitchen. After making a cup with just the right amount of creamer (Joe always made fun of how meticulous you were with how you liked your coffee), you sat down on the living room couch. You sipped your coffee, letting out a happy hum at the taste as you looked out of the window into the backyard. You smiled to yourself, remembering how many memories were made there. You and Joe chasing each other around dressed as cowboys or robots or robot cowboys. You and Joe laying on the grass, stargazing and seeing who could name the most constellations. You and Joe sitting on the old, rusted swing set as you told him about you deciding to go to college with Chris. You felt yourself frown at that memory, shaking your head to get it out of your mind. You stared out into the backyard for a few minutes, letting yourself get lost in your memories. Suddenly, your eyes went wide. You put your coffee down and scrambled off the couch to try and find your coat. You reached into the pocket and pulled out the letter. Skimming through it, you found the part you were looking for. “The time capsule is buried in Joe’s backyard” you said, smiling. You rushed back to Joe’s room and changed back into your clothes. You ran outside, to the small shed in the corner of the yard. Inside, you grabbed a bucket and a small shovel. Turning around, your eyes locked on the corner of the flower bed. You put the bucket down beside you and kneeled down. “I’m glad his parents won’t be home for a couple of days.” you said as you started to dig. 

It didn’t take much digging for you to hit something. “Thankfully we didn’t bury this too deep,” you said to yourself as you finished digging. Once you were finished, you looked down at that you had unearthed. You let out a laugh at the large, rectangular box that sat in front of you. You put it to the side and quickly filled in the hole you had just made. Standing up and wiping your hands on the back of your jeans, you let out another chuckle. “Man, I’m glad Joe’s mom didn’t have any flowers there.” You picked up the box and took it inside. Not wanting to get anything dirty, you got an old towel from the hall closet and put it on the dining room table. You set the box down carefully, as if it would break any second. You glanced down at yourself and saw that your jeans and your hands were covered with dirt. You groaned and walked back to Joe’s room, picked up the clothes he had let you borrow, and headed for the bathroom for a quick shower. It didn’t take you long to scrub all the dirt off and get clean. All you could think about was the box in the dining room, so you went faster than you usually did in the shower. You were done in what seemed like record time. You dried yourself off and threw on Joe’s clothes. You practically ran out of the bathroom, you hair still dripping slightly, making the collar of your shirt wet. You looked around, expecting Joe to be home by now. You smiled to yourself, knowing that if he was home, he would have already had the box open by now. You sat down at the dining table, staring at the box. You wanted nothing more than to know, to remember, what you and Joe had put inside, but for some reason, you couldn’t bring yourself to open it. You kept looking at the box, like you were waiting for it to open itself. After what seemed like forever, you stood up and made your way back to the living room. You made a face as you noticed that your coffee was now cold. You sat on the couch and decided to wait. “We made the time capsule together, it’s only right that we open it together,” you whispered. 

You checked the time and realized that Joe had been gone for 6 hours. You brought your knees up to your chest, wondering where he was. Before you had even finished the thought, you heard keys in the front door. You jumped off the couch and made your way to the door, getting there as soon as it opened. Joe’s eyes met yours instantly, his mouth turning upward in a grin. He came towards you, pulling you into a tight hug. “Sorry I was gone so long. How are you feeling?” You turned your head so your words wouldn’t be muffled by his chest, “I’m feeling better than I was yesterday. Where were you today?” He pulled away from the hug and motioned down towards the floor. There, on either sides of his legs, were bags that you hadn’t noticed he put down. “I know that I’m your go to guy for breakups, but I figured this one needed some extra stuff, so I got everything,” You knelt down and looked inside the bags. There was your favorite kind of ice cream, an entire bag full of Disney movies, a super fluffy blanket, a new pair of pajamas, and hot chocolate mix. You looked up at Joe who had a look in his eyes like he hoped he hadn’t overdone it. You stood up and pulled him into another hug. “Thank you. What would I ever do without you?” Joe laughed, “Not be able to survive, that’s for sure.” This made you laugh as you pulled away from the hug and picked up some of the bags. Joe was already making his way towards the kitchen with the ice cream when he stopped dead in his tracks. You were following so close behind him that you almost ran into him. “What’s the matter?” you said, peaking around his arm to see what made him stop. Your eyes locked onto the box on the table. “Y/n, what the hell is that?” You put your bags down on the couch as Joe continued to the kitchen and put the ice cream away. You took a deep breath, figuring you should tell him everything that lead to a box covered in dirt being on his dining table. 

“Yesterday, when I got home, I had a letter. When I opened it, it was from me and you,” you pulled the letter out of your pocket and held it up, “It was from us when we were kids. I read it and at the end it talked about…” Before you could finish your sentence, Joe did it for you. “Our time capsule,” You nodded, walking over to the box and sitting down in front of it once more. Joe looked out into his backyard, then suddenly turned towards you “Wait, so you dug up my mom’s flower bed?” “Yeah, but there were no flowers and I filled in the hole when I was done.” Joe let out an over dramatic sigh of relief, “Good. She would have killed us if you wouldn’t have filled it in.” You let out a laugh, “No, she would have killed you. She thinks I can do no wrong, remember?” Joe nodded and laughed along with you. He made his way over to you and sat down at the table across from you. “So, did you open it?” You shook your head. “I was going to, but I thought it would only be fair if we opened it together.” Joe smiled and reached out to wipe the dirt off the lid of the box. You both laughed when you saw, in the handwriting of your younger selves, the box said, “Y/n and Joe’s Time Capsule. For Our Eyes Only!” Joe started to take off the lid, then stopped and looked at you. “You ready?” You grinned, “Hell yeah I am.” 

Once the lid was taken off, you wasted no time diving into the contents. It was mostly filled with expired food, stuffed animals, some dinosaur toys, drawings, and a few letters. After being reacquainted with your favorite childhood stuffed unicorn and Joe making fun of his own drawing skills, something caught your eye. You reached into the bottom of the box and grabbed two letters. One was addressed to Joe from younger Joe, and the other addressed to you from younger you. You handed Joe his letter, and he silently took it. You realized this was a private moment for the both of you, so you shifted in your seat so you were facing away from Joe. You opened the letter and began to read. 

Dear Future Y/n,

I’m so happy that you found the time capsule! I hope the letter I mailed to you got there okay. Joe and I decided to write a letter to our older selves to give advice or something. I really hope you did good in school and got into a good college. I hope that you’re really pretty and have lots and lots of friends.

This made you chuckle a bit. You could picture your 8 year old self imagining what she would look like at 18. Your expression turned sad when you thought about how she would never imagine getting cheated on. How you had never imagined getting cheated on. You could feel the tears welling up in your eyes. You quickly wiped them away, not wanting Joe to see. Your eyes caught the last two sentences of your letter.

And I hope that you and Joe are still best friends!

P.S. If you ever get a boyfriend, I hope it’s Joe because he’s nice and funny and kind of cute and he’s just the best.

You read this over and over again, your brain taking a minute to process what you had just read. Your 8 year old self had thought that Joe would be the best boyfriend for you. Your mind started to play back all the times Joe had comforted you after a breakup, how he had always been there for you. You remembered all the times he had made you laugh when you were sad and all the little things he had done for you. You let out a breath you didn’t know you had been holding when you remember all that Joe had done for you after this breakup. How he had gone out of his way to do everything he could to make you happy. You set your letter down on the table and stood up. You noticed that Joe wasn’t sitting across from you anymore, but his letter was on the table. Your eyes widened as you read the last lines of his letter to himself.

I hope that when you’re old enough to have your first kiss that it’s with Y/n. And that she becomes your girlfriend one day. You’re best friends with her so it makes perfect sense.

Part of you wanted to laugh at how silly little kids were when it came to thinking of being in a relationship. You couldn’t bring yourself to laugh because you knew that younger Joe was right. Joe was the perfect person for you, and it did make perfect sense because you were best friends. You mentally yelled at yourself for being stupid and taking so long to notice it. Before you could look around to see where Joe was, you felt a hand on your shoulder. You turned and your eyes met his. “I read your letter and I’m guessing you read mine too..” You nodded, unable to speak because for the first time, you really looked at the man in front of you and realized that he was the one. “Then, I’m really hoping you don’t mind if I do this.” Before you could question him, his arm wound around your waist, pulling you closer to him, as his lips met yours. 

[blustersquall]

Only Make Believe // Chapter 34: Nightmares Are Real

So, last chapter was left on a cliffhanger. 

Fair warning: this chapter is heavy going. There’s mentions of abuse, physical, mental, and emotional. There is physical abuse in this chapter. Nothing graphic, but enough I feel it necessary to warn y’all about it. Please, as always, take care of yourself as you’re reading. Take a break. Practice grounding techniques. Breathe deep. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed, step away. The chapter will be there when you’re good and ready. 

I’m grateful to every single one of you who has been with me through this fic so far. I also have utter solidarity for every single person who has ever dealt with someone like Rick. We’re not victims. We’re survivors. And no one can take that away from us. 

Also, I ask that you please read the notes at the end of the chapter.

- The chapter is available on AO3 as well, for those who prefer it. (Link to AO3 on my blog).

Cullen hurried through the Chantry phone in hand and dodging around the visitors who were trying to find a place to get a view of exhibition curator and to hear them speak. The number that flashed up as missed was one that Cullen did not recognise; that wasn’t particularly uncommon given how he offered his services. Calls from unknown numbers were expected. That there were six missed called worried him. Six was extreme. Six wasn’t someone calling him to ask about his services. Six missed calls were more like an emergency.

Once outside, Cullen took a deep breath of the freezing air as he tapped the screen to call back. He shoved he free hand in the pocket of his jacket and began to pace along the steps, not far from the doors.

It was two rings before someone picked up.

“Hello?”

Cullen was surprised to hear a male voice answer. A voice he knew. “Josef?”

“Cullen! Thank the Maker I got you!” Josef’s tone was audibly relieved.

Immediately Cullen’s focus went to Matilda, Dante and Rowan. “What’s up? Are the kids okay?” Before he and Nevena left Haven, Josef had said he was taking them to his mother’s in South Reach. Given the treacherous and ever-changing weather, his concern was if there had been an accident or they were stranded somewhere on the road.

“They’re fine. We reached my mother’s safe and sound earlier today. The roads are pretty terrible.” Josef answered quickly, all but brushing off Cullen’s concern. “Look, I know this is a weird call but is Nevena with you?”

“Uh,” Cullen ran his thumb over the scar on his lip. “Sort of. We’re in Kirkwall with some friends of mine. We’re at an exhibit right now.”

“So, you are in Kirkwall…” Josef said under his breath. “Shit.”

“Joe, what’s going on?” asked Cullen, his hackles rising due to the questions he had and the answers he didn’t.

“I was hoping…” Josef sighed. “Ineria knows Nevena is in Kirkwall. Nevena has been checking into various locations on her Facebook.”

“Okay…” Cullen said, uncertain why this was an issue. “I can’t imagine Ineria is on Nevena’s Facebook.”

“She isn’t but Matilda is. Matilda left her Facebook profile logged in on the home computer. We left in such a hurry, she didn’t even think about logging out or anything until we got to my mother’s and I called Ineria to let her know the kids were safe.”

Cullen’s body went cold all of a sudden, and not from the snow. “Ineria wouldn’t use Matilda’s social media to track Nev, would she? And even if she did, it’s not like she can reach Nevena here.”

“Rick lives in Kirkwall!”

Cullen almost dropped his phone. The world around him slowed down to a snail’s pace.

Rick lived in Kirkwall.

Rick, Nevena’s living nightmare, lived in Kirkwall. The city they had come to. The city he suggested they go to as a safe haven and for a change of scenery. And worse, Nevena’s social media was acting as a beacon.

“Is Ineria still in contact with Rick?” asked Cullen, his voice almost robotic as his brain struggled to catch up the time around him. “Do they still talk?”

Josef sighed down the other end of the phone. “Honestly, I’m not sure. I only… When I was speaking to her, something she said made me think she is, and has probably told him that Nevena is in the city.”

“What did she say?”

“Something about Kirkwall and it being a good place for Nevena to bump into old faces.”

“That sounds pretty clear cut, doesn’t it?” Cullen pushed his fingers into his eyes. “Would she, really?”

“This is Ineria we’re talking about, Cullen.” Josef sounded weary. “If it means she gets her claws into Nevena from a distance, she’ll do whatever she can.”

“I have to go.” Cullen said, beginning to climb the steps to the entry of the Chantry. “I’ve left her alone and if he’s looking for her I can’t leave her for long. I don’t want her to have to deal with him. She shouldn’t have to.”

“Agreed. Let me know everything is okay. Matilda feels terrible.”

“It’s not her fault, I know that, and Nevena would say the same. But I’ll let you know if anything happens.”

“Alright.”

“Thanks for calling me.”

“No problem.”

Josef hung up and Cullen slid his phone into his pocket. He marched into the Chantry and through the metal detectors bypassing the security guards with hardly a glance. His heart was in his throat, and he was acutely aware of everything and everyone.

He looked over the sea of people. It was as though each person had suddenly multiplied into five people. The crowd looked so much larger than it had when he was walking through to return the call. He cursed the dim lighting, it was impossible to make out faces of the people he walked by. He didn’t really know what Rick looked like, except from a quick glimpse of him in a photo taken years ago. For all Cullen knew, the young angry looking brunette in that picture could be bald, with mutton chops and a tattoo on his face now.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t know what Rick looked like he scanned the faces of every person he went passed, searching for the face of a man looking for someone else in earnest. If he was here, if he had been informed of Nevena’s whereabouts by Ineria, then Cullen was determined to act as a wall between Rick and Nevena. She did not need to see him, not after everything he put her through. Not after the strides she had taken in the years past to get to where she was today.

The crowds grew thicker the further into the Chantry Cullen walked. A woman was talking on a small platform elevated about a foot above the onlookers, indicating with a wave of her hand to different exhibits on display. Cullen closed his ears and tried to patiently ease his way through the people trying to get to the alcove where he left Nevena, and hoping she was either still there, or at the very least nearby and alone.

From the corner of his eye he noticed the familiar style of Cassandra’s short hair as she stood taller than most of the other women gathered. Varric was with her, and Cullen breathed a momentary sigh of relief making his way over as fast as possible.

“Cass!” He nudged her and spoke in a low, frantic whisper.

“There you are Curly,” Varric chuckled, “we were wondering where you and Freckles got off to…” he glanced around for Nevena. “Speaking of which, where is she?”

“What’s the matter?” Cassandra asked, the voice almost aggressive. Cullen realised he must have looked stricken to her in some way, despite how much he was trying to keep his calm. Nothing got passed Cassandra. Nothing, and for once, Cullen was glad of that.

“I had a call from Nevena’s brother-in-law, Josef. She’s been checking her in to the places we’ve been visiting since leaving Haven on her Facebook.” As Cullen spoke he realised he was breathing fast and a sense of panic was starting to overtake him. His chest was tighter, and his extremities were cold. Cool sweat soaked the back of his neck and trickled down his spine. He drew in a deep breath and stood straighter – he couldn’t afford to panic now. “Ineria has informed Nev’s ex that she’s here. He lives in Kirkwall.”

“What?” Both Varric and Cassandra’s eyes widened.

“Shit.” Varric said. “Alright, I’ll go grab a security guard. Where’d you leave her?”

“Over there,” Cullen pointed in the direction. “There’s a sculpture of a parent and child.”

“Okay.” Varric went off, easing through the crowd with as much speed as was possible.

“Come on,” Cassandra said, moving at a brisk pace with Cullen through the throngs of people. People who seemed to just part for Cassandra with minimal effort. Cullen kept a step ahead of Cassandra’s gait leading her through the Chantry to where he left Nevena not five minutes ago.

He swallowed back his fear and worry, hoping she would be as he left her. Alone, and safe.

Nevena jerked up from the two-seater bench and stepped out of the reach of the hands that had tightened for a moment around her throat. She touched her neck, unable to shake cold clammy sensation under her hand and tainting her skin.

It was a trick. It had to be.

Some terrible, awful, cruel joke.

How was he here?

How did he find her?

Why was he here?

There was no sense to it. It was him though. In the flesh. Standing at the same six-foot height, the brown hair a little shorter, the blue eyes as small and cold as they ever were. He stood with his hands still outstretched, a look of surprise marring his features as though shocked Nevena had dared to get away from him.

Her throat tightened. Nevena wasn’t sure if she was about to scream, or cry, or vomit. Her stomach turned, while also somehow being in her feet and she was rooted to the floor. Heart hammering in her ears, she tried to find her breath, her voice. Tried to find herself and make herself do more than stare in abject horror and terror.

“It’s good to see you, Nene.” Rick’s mouth slid into a thin smile, “I was shocked when Ineria called me and told me you were in Kirkwall. Shocked, but… pleased. You know, I’d been thinking about you a lot… Christmas was when you broke my heart.”

Ineria?

Nevena’s mind turned that information over slowly like rusted cogs in a clock. Ineria told him she was in Kirkwall? Ineria was still in contact with Rick? How did Ineria even know she was in Kirkwall? Aside from Cullen and Roselyn, she hadn’t told anyone where she was going or what she was doing. So how did Ineria know? How had she found out? Why had she called Rick?

The last question was stupid. The reason Ineria called Rick was because she knew how much it would hurt and how much he would frighten her if he found her. Which he had.

“Aren’t you happy to see me?” he began to walk towards her, circling around the bench with arms open, palms up. He looked so… unthreatening. He gave the impression of someone who was so relaxed and calm, he always did. The well-practiced lie that hid the truth of the person he was underneath the facade. Nevena glanced over his shoulder, hoping someone might look over, catch her eye and see the terror she was trying to convey. No one did. She was alone. Alone with an animal who wore the mantle of a man. “I’ve missed you, you know.”

Nevena almost stumbled into the sculpture as she backed away from Rick with every step he took towards her. She caught herself before she hit the art piece staggering away and blindly fumbling to regain her balance. A hand grabbed her left arm in a vice-like grip. In a series of motions that left her feeling as though she was about to be sick, he twisted her arm up and behind her back holding it there in an awkward position that caused pain to shoot down from her wrist to her elbow and then up into her shoulder. Nevena’s eyes started to sting. Her chest constricted around her lungs pushing all the breath from her in a rush. “You could at least say something.” Rick hissed at her, mouth close to her ear. His breath wafting over her face made her feel nauseous. A feeling that only increased when she heard Rick inhale deeply, his nose pressing into her hair. “You look great.”

“Let go.” Nevena mumbled, trying to pull her arm free of Rick’s grip – which only resulted in more pain. His hand tightened around her wrist the more she struggled. Over the years, she had forgotten how much stronger than her she was. Now was an unwelcome reminder as he held her, trapped within his grasp. “Please.” She could see his steely eyes boring into her in her periphery but refused to look.

“Who was that you were with?” he asked conversationally. His grip on her never faltered, no matter how much she wriggled and her arm, wretched behind her, was starting to go numb. She remembered times like this from before. During arguments when he would grab and wouldn’t let go until he left a mark, or she was crying. “I didn’t like him.”

“Please, let go.” Nevena tried to tug her arm again – her shoulder burned in complaint. “Please don’t cause a scene.”

“A scene?” Rick smiled. “Why would I cause a scene? We’re just talking.”

“If we’re just talking, then please let go.” Begging. She was already begging. Hardly two minutes and she was back to the submissive, frightened person he turned her into. The nightmare of him just appearing if she so much as thought about him had come true. Here he was, in the flesh, ruining everything the way he always did.

“Who was he?” Rick’s voice became more of a snarl, and he loomed over her, his face inches from her. Nevena had no other option but to look at him. The shadows cast by the low light made him look as though he was possessed. She tried to summon her voice up to scream, but nothing came out.

“He…” Nevena swallowed hard, “he’s—“

“He was touching you.” Rick snatched her chin in his free hand and pressed his fingers and thumb into her skin. He squeezed her jawbone making her wince. “And kissing you.”

Nevena clenched her eyes shut. He was so uncomfortably close she could feel his breath on her face. She was certain he was about to try and kiss her. Try and lay claim to her. Make her do things she didn’t want to do the way he used to. She tightened her lips together, as if doing so might make kissing impossible. She hated the sensation of tears stinging her eyes. All the time she’d spent trying to put her life back together. All the time she’d spent thinking she was stronger, and she could move on and that Rick didn’t have a hold on her any more – all for nothing. She was still afraid of him. He could still force her and scare her and make her do things, just because he wanted to and because he knew he could exert that power over her. All the progress she thought she’d made had been nothing but an illusion… or perhaps a delusion would have been more accurate.

The fear and panic were taking hold, blood pounding through her veins, her vision blurring at the corners, her heart thundering at an alarming speed against her ribcage while she was yanked between fight or flight. Her chest tightened even further, her ribs feeling as though they were clawing into her lungs making it impossible to get even a gasp of air. Every breath she tried to take was shorter and sharper than the one before. She wanted to run and hide, and cower in a corner, never to come out again. She wanted to be home, safe behind her locked doors, her locked windows, and her drawn curtains.

“Am I scaring you, Nene?” Rick’s voice was closer, as though he was whispering directly into her ear. She sensed movement through her closed eyes and flinched away instinctively. “You’re shaking.” She realised she was, trembling from head to foot, a scared rabbit in a fox’s den. “Are you cold?”

“N-no.” Nevena jerked away from Rick’s hand gently gliding up the side of her face from her chin. His flesh was cool on hers, and his fingers curled back into her hair. She tried to bury her head and neck down into her shoulders, like a tortoise retreating into its shell. Rick’s hand tightened in her hair and he pulled. Nevena bit back a yelp of pain. “That hurts…” Nevena managed to say, reaching up and wrapping her free hand around his in her hair. She had nails, she could scratch him – but the pain in her shoulder from the hold he had her in was now spreading across the top of her back. And even if she did try to scratch him, it wouldn’t make any difference. He would just laugh in her face at her feeble attempt to free herself.

“Does it?” he tugged on her hair again and this time Nevena did let out a small noise of protest. She didn’t know if it was involuntary, or if some deep part of her hoped making any kind of noise would attract some attention. “I thought you’d be happier to see me.”

“I-I am…”

“You’re not acting happy.” Hissed Rick. “After everything you put me through, after all the pain I experienced when you broke things off and humiliated me – I would have thought you’d at least apologize to me” Nevena’s throat constricted, further restricting the air she tried to breathe making even that feel as though it was choking her. “Why did you let your friend trick me? Why did you let her call the police when all I wanted to do was get you alone to talk to you?”

“I… I didn’t know sh—“

“Liar!” Rick pulled back on Nevena’s head. “Don’t lie to me! You must have known! Why else would you have allowed her to do it!“

“I didn’t know, I swear.” Nevena whimpered. Tears escaped from the corners of her eyes making her want to curse. Crying was what he wanted. What he liked. He liked it when she cried in the past. He enjoyed seeing her crumble into pieces. Enjoyed knowing how afraid of him she was. He enjoyed knowing that he could reduce her to nothing by doing so very little. “I didn’t know.”

“Why should I believe you?” Hissed Rick. He slid his hand out of her hair and down. Nevena shuddered. His skin was clammy and cold on hers, it almost felt leathery and she was sure she was melting, as if his touch was corroding her flesh away. His fingers closed around her throat and Nevena suddenly found herself stumbling over her feet as she struggled to keep up with Rick’s stride. His arm and then hers hit the hard stone wall, the impact almost winding her. Her head hit a moment later smacking into it with an almighty crack that ricocheted around the small vestibule.

Nevena’s head throbbed from the pain and her mind swam for a moment while she tried to focus herself. Dark spots flickered across her vision and for a terrible moment she thought she was going to be sick. Bile burned the back of the tongue before she forced it back down with a hard swallow. More tears spilled down her face, dripping on her clothes and Rick’s hand. When she sniffled and looked at him, Rick’s thin lips curled up at the corners. “What do you want?”

“What I’ve always wanted.” Rick shrugged when he answered, as if he was making a vague comment about nothing at all. His grip tightened on Nevena’s arm and she yelped when he forced one leg between hers, pressing his thigh against her. “I want what was promised to me by your useless shit of a father. I want what you promised me when I asked you to marry me. I want you. I want your family’s connections. I want your family’s money.” He pushed harder, his thigh working at pinning Nevena to the wall, all the while she could feel his blunt fingernails digging into the skin of her throat. “Most of all though, I just want you.”

“I don’t have any of that.” Nevena managed to choke out between gasps for air that were becoming more desperate with each one. “I don’t know anything about his finances or the business.”

“Do you think that matters to me?” Rick’s smile grew a little. “Someone has to take over when the old fucker dies. Why shouldn’t it be me?” Nevena’s eyes widened at that, and she stared at him, searching for any deception. Rick chuckled. “After all, that was part of what he agreed to when I asked him if he would allow me to marry you.”

“You’re lying.”

Rick snorted. “You can believe that if you want to. You’ll have to talk to daddy dearest. But, that’s beside the point right now. What I want is what I was promised. I asked you to marry me, and you said yes. That’s a verbal agreement. A binding contract. A contract that you, little bitch, broke.” His hand tightened around Nevena’s throat and she coughed against the pressure he applied.

“What I want is what any reasonable husband wants. I want to be able to fuck you as much as I want, when I want, and how I want,” with each phrase he rubbed the weight of himself against Nevena, and his lips – cold and cracked and wet – pressed to Nevena’s jaw, working along towards her mouth. “I want you to be a good girl and not fucking complain and bitch when I do. I want you to learn your place and do as you’re told, instead of always trying to fucking fight me. I’m not asking for much here, Nene. It’s not unreasonable to expect your obedience.”

Nevena’s mind was fuzzy. She wasn’t sure if it was the knock on the head, the lack of air, or the information that was being thrown at her, but she couldn’t concentrate and could barely hear. Blood thudded in her ears drowning out most sounds except Rick’s voice. Her flesh crawled under each kiss Rick applied, as if her own skin was trying to slough off and get rid of any essence of him. She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to concentrate over the pain in the back of her head, and the fear welling up inside her. Once more, she bit her lips together doing so would act as a deterrent if he tried to kiss her.

“We’re going to be really happy, you and me, Nene.” Rick said, his voice losing its edge and sounding deceptively gentle. Somehow, that softness made everything so much worse. It was the voice he used to fool everyone. The one he used to charm his way through life, while hiding his true self behind it. Nevena swallowed down hard on the sickness threatening to rise up her gullet again. The tears started falling freely and she choked on a sob. “You’ll see.” His moist and sickly smelling breath wafted over her face. Nevena retreated back, eyes clenched closed, holding her breath and praying the wall might simply let her melt into it. “Now, kiss me like a good girl, and we’ll—“

“Nev--!”

Nevena opened her eyes at the sound of a third voice. One that filled her shaking body with relief.

“Cullen!” His name fell more like a bark from her mouth, caught somewhere between a sharp inhale and a sob.

He stood at the mouth of the alcove, hair slightly dishevelled, breathing hard and red faced as though he’d been running. His eyes were blazing, more fearful than angry and he might have been the most beautiful sight Nevena had ever seen.

She watched him taking in the scene in front of him. Eyes darting from her to Rick, to his hand on her throat, his leg pushed between hers. She saw him see the tears staining her face and then his eyes glanced just to the side of her. They widened a little, before returning and focusing full fury on Rick.

“Let go of her. Now.” Cullen advanced, an icy stillness to his voice. He was taller than Rick by a few inches, but at that moment he was more like a giant towering over a mouse. Nevena watched him, noticing a moment later that Cullen wasn’t alone, that both Varric and Cassandra were flanking him with one of the security guards from the entrance. Cullen’s eyes were fixed on Rick, gauging him and checking for everything from his breathing pattern to his expression, alert for any sudden movements.

Nevena realised in the haze of her muddled brain that this was Cullen the TEMPLAR in front of her. Someone with military training, looking for the safest way to deal with the situation with minimal injuries to any party involved. That was a world he had left behind… and now he was forced to drag up that training, and everything that went with it because of her.

Rick didn’t move. He didn’t speak, but Nevena heard him take a quick breath, clearly taking stock of the fact he was outnumbered and outmatched. Cullen lifted his hands, palms facing Rick.  A peaceful stance and non-threatening. Rick watched him with sharp hawk-like eyes as Cullen continued to approach until there was only a few feet between himself and Rick. Nevena wanted to fall into him, into the safety he provided, but with Rick’s strength and his full weight pressing her into the wall, she knew moving would cause more issues than it would solve. Cullen’s gaze flickered across to her and his face hardened slightly.

“You don’t want to make this worse than it already is.” Cullen said, voice even and slow. “I know Ineria must have put you up to this.”

“She told me Nene would be here.” Rick spat. He stepped back from Nevena and the pressure between her legs alleviated when he moved. His hand was still around her throat, though he relaxed his grip a little. Her legs wobbled. “She didn’t mention she’d have company.” The sneer was unmissable, but Cullen didn’t flinch or react beyond a small twitch in the muscle of his jaw.

“Just let her go—“

“No! She’s mine! I asked her to marry me, and she said yes! That’s an agreement! A contract! You can’t just—“

“She changed her mind.” Cullen interjected, coldly. “She is and was well within her rights to do so. She never belonged to you, even if she did say yes at first because you manipulated her.”

“I didn’t manipulate her!” Rick shouted so loud, spittle flew from his mouth. “It was a gesture in front of her family!” Nevena clenched her eyes closed and recoiled from the sound of his raised voice. “She always was a good liar! Tried to convince everyone I was stalking her, and that I hurt her! I never did! She just never listened, and I had to make her listen to me! It was for her own good! I know what’s best for her!” Rick’s hand on her arm tightened and he shook her with every statement he shouted at Cullen. Nevena cowered away from the noise. “Her family owes me for the humiliation I endured. She owes me for fucking my life up so much! I haven’t had a single day since she dumped me that I haven’t thought about her!” To Nevena’s surprise, there were tears welling up in Rick’s eyes and his voice had started shaking as he ranted. He looked at her, the anger in his face cracking for a moment to show a brokenness she had never seen before. “You owe me.”

For a moment, a split second, she felt a glimmer of sympathy for him. He was not well. Never had been, and for all the time away, it seemed like he never got the help he so desperately needed. His family probably didn’t want to admit there was something wrong with him. A chemical imbalance, and psychological issue… People like them, like her family, would rather ignore a problem, than face it and deal with any potential scandal. He was sick, and Ineria must have known and manipulated him in some way. Rick was a victim, in this at least.

The sympathy conflicted so much with the fear he evoked in her, it felt strange. Strange enough that Nevena reminded herself that Rick was in no way deserving of her compassion. No matter what he had endured, no matter how he might have been coerced or manipulated into this situation by a puppet master – he didn’t deserve anything from her. She had wasted time, and tears, and too many sleepless nights, lying awake out of fear to allow her soft heart to wash it all away. Rick wasn’t a monster, he was a man. Sick, and without people around him to help, but he had still put her through hell for years. Still tormented her dreams and her waking hours. Still cornered her, attacked her, tried to take advantage of her after three years of nothing. Nevena might have felt a flicker of sympathy for him, but it was extinguished in moments by the memory of everything he put her through.

“Let her go.” Cullen said again his voice still and steady. “She doesn’t owe you anything.”

Rick scoffed, “and who are you, then? What is Nene to you? Are you her new boyfriend?”

“None of that is any of your concern.” Cullen replied, “all you need to know, all you deserve to know is that she has told me everything you did to her, and what you put her through. That if you think I’ll allow you to inflict anything more on her you are sadly mistaken. I love her, and if you dare to hurt her, it will be the last thing you ever do.”

Through the panic flooding Nevena’s senses, Cullen’s steady words broke through enough to shatter it for a moment. Had he said what she thought he said? What she thought she heard? Was he being truthful? Being earnest? Or was he saying it to get Rick to react and drop his guard for a moment? His expression was so still it was hard to tell. Something inside her bloomed with warmth, until Rick’s fingers tightened on her throat again and the reality of her situation crashed down around her.

“She’s not capable of loving someone. I proposed to her and after she said yes, she changed her mind and gave me the ring back!” Rick laughed, a high-pitched maniacal laugh that send a cold shudder down Nevena’s back. “Who does that?!”

“Looks like she dodged a bullet from where I’m standing.” Varric muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear.

As Rick reeled around to turn his ire on another person, his fingers loosened around Nevena’s throat and her arm. Taking a chance, she gathered up what strength she could and pushed herself off the wall trying to wrench herself out of his grip. Cullen grabbed her around her upper arm, his own strength pooling into her momentum. He gathered her up in his arms, and all but dragged her out of Rick’s reach. In the seconds it took for Nevena to escape, the security guard had Rick spread eagle against the wall and was cuffing his hands.

Nevena started crying. Big, uncontrollable tears and sobs that shook her down to the core as she buried and all but hid herself against Cullen’s chest. Her shaking legs finally gave out underneath her and she sank to the floor, a dead weight. Cullen caught her before she completely slipped from his grasp and he eased her down to the ground. The guard marched Rick away and through the crowds who had now gathered to see what the commotion was. Nevena heard him yelling something but didn’t catch what.

Cullen knelt in front of her, his hands gently pushing her hair off her face. He spoke, though Nevena could only catch low rumbles of words over the pulsing thunder between her ears. He took one of her hands and placed it over his chest. His heart was beating as fast as hers, but he slowed his breathing on purpose. Nevena closed her eyes trying to concentrate on the rhythm of his inhales and exhales but she couldn’t. It was too hard, and her head hurt. She started to scratch at her hands. She wanted to rub her flesh raw, scratch it with sandpaper, dig her nails under her skin and claw Rick out. Anything to get the mere thought of him off and away from her. She remembered that he’d been kissing her jaw, and that reminder sent a wave of intense nausea washing over her.

“Breathe, Nevena…” Cullen’s voice sounded so far away and disjointed to her. Like she was underwater, and he was above. She coughed so hard she retched, doubling over and clutching her stomach. The back of her head hurt and felt unnaturally warm, but she didn’t dare touch her hair. She would sooner cut it all off than touch it again. Hands held her shoulders, steady, comforting. Nevena reached up with her left hand, and her fingers interlocked with those on her left shoulder. “Slowly, try and slow down…”

She was trying. Trying to breathe easier, trying to stop the crying, the panic, the shaking. She was trying so hard not to be… this. This trembling, fearful, shameful mess that Rick turned her into. She was trying to be better.

“S-s—“ she took a deep breath, her voice and words failing.

“Shh…” Cullen gently cradled her face in his hands, coaxing her to lift her head so she could meet his gaze. It was just them. The alcove had been cordoned off and it seemed that Cassandra and Varric had made themselves scarce for the time being. “It’s okay, you’re okay. You’re safe. He cannot get you, I swear. Take your time…”

They were on the floor, and Nevena didn’t remember how they got there. Her whole mind was confused and fuzzy, small details missing. She shook her head from side to side, hopelessly hoping it might provide some clarity. It didn’t – it just succeeded in giving her more of a headache than had already started to form behind her eyes. Cullen pulled her into his arms and she all but melted into the safety and security he provided.

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that.” He murmured, stroking her back. “Had I known he was in Kirkwall I would never have suggest we come here. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Nevena tried to find her voice, but the threat of sickness kept her from speaking. Instead she shook her head slowly into Cullen’s shoulder, burying her face into the curve of his neck.

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head again.

“There’s blood on the wall…” Cullen gently ran his fingers back over her hair. “Sweetheart, you’re bleeding.” Nevena grimaced. “You need to see a first aider.”

The thought of being touched by someone else, by being poke and prodded, even if it was to help her, made her whole body go cold. She tightened her grip around Cullen and forced a hoarse: “no.”

“You might need stitches.”

Exhausted, Nevena shook her head. “No.”

Cullen breathed out very slowly, “we’ll go back to Varric’s when you’re ready, okay? Call a doctor out to where it’s more familiar if need be.”

Nevena nodded.

“Do you want to go back to Varric’s?”

She nodded again.

“Okay.” Cullen kissed her forehead, his lips lingering on her flushed and sweaty skin. She opened her eyes for a moment to catch a glimpse of him. His face, stricken with worry, and his skin almost grey. Kirkwall had been just as bad as Haven, if not worse. She squeezed her arms around him, trying to convey in her gesture that she didn’t blame him. Forming words was too hard right now. Cullen squeezed her back. “Just breathe…”

Nevena wondered if he was telling her, or himself.

The journey back to Varric’s was a blur. All Cullen could focus on was Nevena, trembling beside him, as they walked through the streets towards the town house. Her head bowed, she shrank away from everything, light, sound, even Cassandra when she guided Nevena upstairs in the house to wait for the doctor Varric called on their way home.

It didn’t take long for the doctor to arrive, in his mid-thirties with sandy coloured hair pulled into a dishevelled ponytail, Varric gestured for him to go upstairs and then joined Cullen in the living room where he was pacing.

Pacing, back and forth, wearing a pattern in the carpet, his phone in hand and words of anger burning on his tongue. Never, in his entire life, had Cullen felt a rage like this. It was as though a bloodlust had taken over his better senses, and he had nothing physical to take it out on, except the carpet and his own footsteps. His hand clenched around his phone. He thought of Ineria, back at Haven. In that big manor house, probably beside herself with glee, thinking of what her callous and cruel actions might have brought about.

What could he say to her? What could he say that could thoroughly and completely express how much he despised her? How could he properly illustrate with words just what an evil woman Ineria was? How low her tactic of sending Rick after Nevena was? Would it matter? Would she even care? He doubted it, but he so desperately wanted to say something. To give her a piece of his mind, even if he could only do it over the phone.

“--Curly!”

Cullen stopped, only because Varric stood in his path and held a mug of steaming black coffee out towards him. “What?!” Cullen snapped, drawing in a deep breath afterwards. “Sorry, Varric.” He ran his hand down over his face. His heart rate was still up, the adrenaline still pumping through his system. His mind turned over the different things he wanted to say, listing them in concise bullet points. Cullen glanced around the living room for a pen and a pad of paper.

“Sit down.” Varric said, his voice taking on a tone of authority and making the suggestion sound more like an order. When Cullen didn’t move, Varric’s expression grew harsher. “Sit. And give me your phone.”

“Why?” Cullen took the coffee and sat, but held tight to his phone, even as Varric held his hand out for it, expectantly.

“Because I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I know it’s a bad idea, whatever it is.”

Cullen squeezed his fingers tighter around it. “I could kill her.” He said in a low growl. “Ineria, I could fucking kill her.”

“That’s why you need to give me your phone.” Cullen offered no resistance when Varric slid the phone from out of his fist. “You need to calm down.”

“She sent him after her.” Cullen snarled, opening and closing his hands in his lap. “She sent him after her, knowing what he’d done. Knowing what he would probably try to do! How could she do that?!”

“I don’t know.” Varric sighed. He sat on a foot stool opposite Cullen so they were level with each other. “I don’t know Nevena’s family, or the ex-boyfriend, but I know you can’t see her like this. The poor thing’s scared to death, and if you go up there this angry and declaring you want to kill someone – even if you have the best intentions and Nevena’s safety at heart, you’re going to make things worse.”

He was right. Of course he was, Cullen knew that. He knew going and being with Nevena while he was as angry as he was, would not be a good idea. That anger would be palpable, it would make her more frightened than she already was. He didn’t want to be another Rick in her life, and he would not let that anger control him. It was the reason he wasn’t up there now with her, Cassandra and the doctor. Varric was smart enough to take him to one side, to separate him until he was calm and coherent. The last thing Cullen wanted to do was scare Nevena. He didn’t want her to ever be afraid of him. Never wanted to her to look at him the way he saw her look at Rick. The fear on her face, in her eyes, was something that would haunt him.  

“I know.” Cullen exhaled a long breath, concentrating on the sensation of his lungs emptying and the movement of his chest. “I just… I can’t understand how someone could be so cruel. Nevena isn’t to blame for anything that’s gone wrong in Ineria’s life. Any of the imagined slights… That she would do this is…”

“There’s nothing for you or her to do about it right now.” Varric explained with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. “I think the best thing right now is that you drink your coffee, and call the Josef guy, let him know everything is okay.”

“Yeah… yeah, I should do that.” Cullen nodded and Varric handed his phone back to him.

He didn’t drink the coffee, knowing it would only make him more wired than he already was. Instead, he went out into the garden, and skimmed through the numbers on his phone. For a moment, his thumb hovered over the number for Haven – he had entered it before leaving Denerim, in case he needed to call for directions. He considered tapping the call symbol and ignoring Varric’s advice. The thought of giving Ineria a piece of his mind was tempting, but who would that help in the long run? It might make him feel better for a moment, but the fallout from that would undoubtedly land squarely in Nevena’s lap, and he couldn’t do that to her. She’d been through enough at Ineria’s hands.

Skimming passed Haven’s number, he found Josef’s a little lower down the list now he had it entered properly and tapped the call symbol. After a couple of rings, Josef picked up.

“Hey Cullen.”

“Hey…”

“Everything okay?”

“Is now a good time?” He asked, slipping his free hand into his pocket and staring upwards towards the sky. There was thick cloud cover. It would snow tonight.

“Sure, kids are getting ready for bed.” Josef sounded tired, “did anything happen?”

Cullen sighed. He rubbed the five o’clock shadow on his chin, “Rick found her.”

“Oh shit. I’m sorry, I should have called earlier. I tried calling Nevena’s phone before you, but I couldn’t reach her. Maybe I have her number down wrong.” Josef paused a moment or two. “How bad was it?”

“Honestly, nothing could have prepared me. Nevena’s told me what he put her through, how he treated her. But seeing it playing out in front of me… I feel sick just thinking about it. Knowing she had to endure years of…” Cullen clenched his jaw and swallowed, hard. “How could no one in the family have believed her?”

“I don’t know. I wish… I wish I’d stepped in more. I… It’s no excuse, but you’ve seen how the family is. How they close ranks. If you speak out of turn, you’re an enemy. With the kids at stake I couldn’t risk them.”

“I don’t blame you. I can’t imagine Ineria is an easy woman to get out from under the heel of.”

Josef snorted, “You’re not wrong. She—“ he sighed, and Cullen could imagine him ruffling his salt-and-pepper hair. “I should have left a long time ago. The kids aren’t safe with her. I was a coward.”

“At least you made the hard choice and left now.”

“Yeah. It’s a temporary solution. I have to think of something long term while the legal battles are being fought. I can only hope I get full custody of the kids and that whatever trauma they endure, or have endured at her hands, we can work through.” There was a silence of a few seconds and then Josef cleared his throat. “How’s Nevena?”

“Shaken up. Terrified of everything that moves. This last few weeks has been horrific for her.”

“At least she’s had you to turn to.”

“I don’t know if I’ve been much help.” Cullen thought back to his nightmares. “I can’t talk long, I just wanted to let you know Nevena was safe now. Maybe you could let Matilda know?”

“Yeah, I will do. She’ll be relieved to hear it.”

“Make sure she doesn’t blame herself, okay? This isn’t her fault.”

“I’ll tell her, but I don’t know if it’ll do much good. Thanks for calling, Cullen.”

“No problem. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Josef hung up, and Cullen slid his phone into his pocket. His breath turned to steam in the air, and he stood in the cold for a few minutes letting it penetrate his skin. The chill chased away whatever adrenaline was still racing around his system. He was calmer than when he first came back to the house and his main thought was to go upstairs and check on Nevena. He turned and went back into the house, wiping his feet on the mat inside the kitchen. Cassandra appeared in the doorway and stood with her arms crossed.

“Is the doctor still here?”

“No, he’s left.” Cassandra replied, her tone short and clipped as though she was angry. “She doesn’t need stitches, thank the Maker, but he’s given her some painkillers for her arm.”

Cullen rubbed his face, “at least he didn’t break her arm or something.”

“I left her to have a shower.” Cassandra said. She didn’t move from the doorway, even when Cullen approached. Those sharp eyes of hers narrowed, almost glaring into him and Cullen backed up a few steps.

“Can I see her?”

“In a moment.” She walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind her. Cullen suddenly felt cornered. “Do you realise what you said? When you were confronting him?”

Cullen crossed his arms, defences rising. “What did I say?”

“You said you love her.” Cassandra’s unwavering gaze bored into him, and her expression was made more severe by the sharp angles of her cheekbones.

“I… I did?” Cullen swallowed to dampen his throat that was suddenly parched.  

“Yes.” Cassandra said with cold stillness. “You did.”

“I… I didn’t realise.” He cursed his hesitation on his words. Cassandra would never believe him if he stammered or if he hesitated. He could see her mind turning over everything he was saying, her eyes watching his every move, looking for tells. “I was just trying to get his focus on me and off her. Catch him off-guard.” He added, hoping the explanation would suffice.

Cassandra gauged him in silence. He could feel her weighing him up in her eyes. Considering his words and how they contrasted with his body language. He tried to keep her gaze, but in a battle of wills, she won. “You really didn’t realise?” She took several steps towards him.

Keeping his gaze down, Cullen unfolded his arms and slid one hand into his pocket. With the other he brushed his thumb over the scar on his lip.

“Cullen…”

“Please don’t lecture me.” Cullen met Cassandra’s gaze. To his surprise it softened and the tension in her body lessened. “Please. It wasn’t the best time, I know. I didn’t mean to say it. It just-- I wanted his attention on me. I wanted to get her to safety. I wanted--” He sighed and dragged his hands down his face. “Fuck.”

“I’m not going to lecture you.” Said Cassandra. “Sometimes we say things in the heat of the moment.”

“That wasn’t the heat of the moment though.” Cullen replied, “I wasn’t shouting. I wasn’t under attack or desperate. I was completely calm and trying to take control of the situation. It wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t exactly spontaneous, either.”

“Cullen,” Cassandra sighed, “whatever you said, in whatever way I only hope you’re sure, and certain in your conviction. I don’t think Nevena can take much more, and if you retract that statement now – if she heard it… I fear that she might just break.”

“I won’t retract it. I don’t want to. It’s the truth.”

She said nothing, simply regarded him in silence and stepped to one side giving him access to the door. Cullen went towards it and reached for the handle. “You may want to rethink plans of going to Ostwick. I’m sure Varric can explain to Dorian and Josephine. They’d understand.”

Cullen threw her a quick glance. “I’ll talk to Nevena about it.”

Climbing the stairs, Cullen quickly pushed his fingers through his hair and took several slow breaths. In the conversation with Cassandra his heart started racing. It hadn’t occurred to him that other people would have heard his declaration and given Cassandra’s warnings about slowing down earlier that day it made sense that she would be the first to broach the subject with him. Warning him of how his words might have consequences. He expected more of a telling off – the kind of reprimand his sister Mia occasionally gave him when he was being particularly obtuse. Cassandra’s softness with him was welcome, even though she likely disapproved of the rash word choice, he was glad she wasn’t fighting him on it.

Once upstairs Cullen saw steam escaping from the bathroom through a gap between the door and the lintel. He supposed Nevena left it open, in case she needed to shout down for something. Walking passed, he glanced inside through the crack left open. He expected to see a glimpse of skin and nothing else, instead he saw her huddled in the corner of the shower, still fully clothed. Something inside him cracked, sending a sharp pain pulsing through his chest.

“Oh, Nev…”

He entered the bathroom, closing the door behind him. After removing his shoes, and his phone from his pocket, he went to the shower and sat down beside Nevena. She flinched away when he tried to put an arm around her. He left his hands in his lap, one open, palm up and fingers open in case Nevena wanted to hold it.

The water was too hot for him, and he was soaked through in moments. Droplets clung to his eyelashes and drenched his hair. He didn’t move or talk. The spray was too loud as the sound bounced off the walls and there was so little he could say or do that he felt would be a comfort. He noticed there were raw scratches on the backs of Nevena’s hands where she was clutching her legs to her protectively. Tentatively, Cullen reached towards her and coaxed a hand into his. He ran his fingertips along the scratches.

“Shall I see if there’s any antiseptic in the cabinet?” He asked and waited for a reply. He got it in the form of a small, silent nod. “Can I turn the shower off?” Another nod.

The silence of the bathroom was strange after the constant stream of water and the way the sound echoed. Cullen got to his feet, dripping and his jeans squelching a little when he walked from the shower to the small cabinet above the sink. He dug through various tubes, bottles and cardboard boxes until he found what he was looking for. Antiseptic in hand, he went back to the shower pausing when he saw Nevena start to rise onto her feet. She used the wall to support herself, and Cullen was quick to step in, placing his hands on her waist and leading her away from the shower to sit on the toilet seat. He grabbed a towel off the rail and started to pat her dry.

“I threw up.” Nevena mumbled, “twice.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Cullen squatted in front of her, “that’s okay.” He put the towel to one side and grabbed the antiseptic from the sink. “Can I see your hands?”

She held her hands out in front of him, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. The scratches went almost all the way up her forearms, but the worst ones were directly on the backs of her hands. Cullen uncapped the antiseptic and started to treat them with a small dab of cream. He noticed her hands were shaking. Now the shower wasn’t running the bathroom was cold, but he doubted her trembling was due to that.

“I used to do this before.” Nevena said, watching him gently rub the cream into her skin. “Sit in the shower. The sound would drown out my thoughts, and…” She clenched her fingers into fists, choking on a breath. “I just want to get him off me.” Her voice was a harsh, angry whisper and Cullen saw tears already falling when he looked at her face.

“Nev…” He put the tube back on the sink. “We should get you dry, before you catch cold.” It hurt to see her so broken, so afraid. Cullen’s chest ached and while he wanted to offer her comfort and soothing words, there was nothing he could say that would truly take away or make better what she just experienced. All he could do, all he knew how to do, was to be practical.

He guided her to her bedroom, left her with a towel and then went to his own to dry off and change. It took him all of two minutes to do, when he returned, Nevena was where he left her, still dripping and shivering. It was like Christmas Day all over again, only worse. Nevena was numb and so far out of her own head, it was like she couldn’t function.

There was little Cullen could do to help her mental state, so he fell back on what he knew, and helped her change. It was awkward, mostly due to the weight of the wet clothes but there was no sexual tension between them or arousal he felt on seeing her bare skin or when garments were removed. That wasn’t what this was. This was the only thing he could think of to do, to help. He put wet clothes in the bathroom when they were removed and left the bedroom when Nevena was mostly undressed and only her jeans and underwear needed to be removed and changed. He waited until she opened the door when she was ready.

She wore dry pyjamas and went and sat on the side of the bed. Unbidden, Cullen sat beside her. He took her hands in his and they were both silent except for their breathing. He ran his thumbs over his knuckles. Words were not his strong suit, but he could at least let her know he was there, that she was safe, and he wasn’t going anywhere with simply his own presence.

It might have been thirty seconds or thirty minutes before Nevena spoke.

“I’m never going to be rid of him, am I?” she asked. Cullen lifted his gaze to her. She was staring straight ahead at the opposing wall. “He’s always going to be there in some form or another.”

Cullen considered his words. He could offer placebos and platitudes. He could lie to her and make it sound like she would forget him one day. He could help her make believe that one day she would wake up and never remember anything about Rick, or the things he put her through. But that wouldn’t have been fair. He knew first hand that some things never left a person, no matter how much time passed. Lying would have been cruel.

“Probably.” He said, inclining his head towards Nevena. She automatically tilted her head to one side, allowing him to kiss her temple. “I wish I could tell you differently. I wish I could tell you that it’ll get easier. That one day you’ll wake up and have forgotten his face and his voice, and you’ll have forgotten everything he did to you.” His felt his throat closing as he spoke, raw emotion forcing him to swallow hard. “I wish I could erase that part of your life entirely – no one deserves what he put you through, least of all you.”

“You could tell me that.” Nevena looked at him, eyes bloodshot and tired. “You could lie to me.”

“I could,” Cullen agreed with a sombre nod of his head. “But do you really want me to? Would it help?”

Her expression grew thoughtful before it crumbled, and she pulled one hand away to stifle a sob. “Probably not.”

Cullen pulled gently on the hand he still held and guided Nevena into his arms. He wrapped her up within his embrace, resting his cheek on top of her hair as she buried herself against him. “I’ll help you through this, in whatever way I can.” He told her, stroking down her back.

“I’m getting your clothes wet with my hair.”

“It’s fine.” Cullen said, “I have lots of clothes.”

Nevena lifted her head, a small smile just ghosting over her lips. “Thank you. You really saved me today.” Cullen kissed her forehead. “Would you mind staying with me?”

“Of course not.” He spoke with his lips pressed to her forehead. “Whatever you need, I’m here.”

This chapter... went through a lot of edits. A lot of drafts. A lot of changes.

My first, initial desire was to have Nevena stand up for herself. I desperately wanted her to stand up and tell Rick 'no'. I wanted to demonstrate that she was strong, and had overcome all the trauma he put her through. But that would have been a lie. That would have been a cop-out, and it wouldn't have been sincere.

Like love doesn't magically heal Cullen's PTSD, love doesn't magically cure Nevena's, either. What Rick put her through, the trauma he inflicted on her mentally, emotionally, and physically can't be healed and overcome so easily. Is Nevena a stronger person now than she was when she was with Rick? Oh, undoubtedly. But, she's also still a person who was traumatized for years by someone. She's a person who was beaten down to almost nothing by a person. She was used, and abused, and no matter how much stronger she might be now, she still fears her abuser.

To have her stand up for herself, and have this "strong woman" moment didn't feel honest. It felt forced, and untrue to her character, and also untrue to many survivors. As one myself, I know if this situation happened to me... I wouldn't be able to stand up to my abusers. I'd want to, and Nevena wants to and maybe one day she'll be able to, but she's not there yet.

This version of this chapter did feel honest. To have her fearful. To have her tearful, and reverting back to methods she hoped would placate him. It felt - for lack of a better word - right. I'm not a fan of the damsel in distress trope. I wanted to avoid it at all costs, but in this situation... there wasn't another way to go that was true to the situation and the characters. I felt the need to write this explanation because I'm genuinely worried for the reaction to this chapter. I feel like I'll be disappointing readers, because Nevena doesn't get to give RIck a piece of her mind. I'm afraid you'll all be disappointed that Cullen stepped in, and that Nevena didn't stand up for herself. But... as I've stated, it didn't feel genuine or sincere.

I hope, despite the heaviness of this chapter, you were able to enjoy it. I might have to take March off from uploads because I'm running out of buffer chapters, and need to get some writing done - but we'll see. Thank you for taking the time to read this chapter, and for sticking with this fic for so long. I'm grateful to every single one of you. Please do let me know your honest thoughts in reblogs/comments/tags, and I'll see you in the next chapter.

[freshdotdaily]

I wrote this blog post in 2012 but tumblr deleted it.  It was called sumn like, “My main critique w/ Talib Kweli” I wasn't allowed to listen to rap or any secular music growing up. My mom did me a grave disservice in that regard. So appropriately when I came into age I began sneaking all the music I could. I liked hip-hop and wanted as much of it as possible. The first record that I got that informally changed everything for me was Arrested Development's "Arrested Development 3 years 5 months 2 days". Probably because A) It was non-violent hip-hop I could RELATE to & B) After being raised by a Puerto Rican mother I had little to no real Knowledge of Cultural self.The next albums that followed after I devoured that album were Fugees "The Score" and Busta Rhymes "When Disaster Strikes" it'd be a little while before I was able to get my hands on any new cd after those two, so I had those 3 albums for a good year or two in heavy rotation along w/ Future Flavors on Hot 97 to keep me current. I was writing my raps pretty regularly around this time and I'd graduated from performing gospel raps at my churches Youth Night to  nervously performing at little local open mic spoken word poetry nights w/ my friend Jason.The next album I got my hands on was "Mos Def & Talib Kweli are BlackStar".

That album changed EVERYTHING for me. As far as I was concerned I never needed another rap album. This was the penultimate affirmation of all the things I'd come to feel were true about myself and hip-hop and my culture. Mos was the Charismatic emcee who was forever on beat and in pocket w/ his flow and Talib was the well-read, technical lyricist. I immediate began trying to become an amalgam of them both in one emcee since I felt they so aptly represented what I felt. Reflection Eternal's "Train of Thought" album dropped and blew my head clean off my shoulders. The beats, man. Kweli was at his apex w/ that album. Raps + beats + Brooklyn being well represented. Oh, and let us not forget the Ecko advertisements. I wore Ecko exclusively for about a year and change. I mean footwear to underwear at one point. Talk about artists being brands and marketing alignment & etc.  I bought Triple 5 Soul because that's apparently what Mos Def wore, right? I bought & read Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" because Kweli made a reference to it. I read Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" because Kweli made a reference to it. I mean, this is what hip-hop, good hip-hop anyway is supposed to do, right? Spark discussion, open minds, create thought and growth, etc. I felt like I was a part of that MOVEMENT. Rawkus. The Okayplayer board. The Spitkicker site. SoulQuarians. I had all the albums from everybody. Probably TMI, but I lost my virginity in 1999, while Pharoahe Monche's "The Light" was playing in the background for some reason. smh. For crying out loud, Black Star's "Respiration" is the top song in my top five favorite songs of all time.

It gets deep, nigga. (c) Kendrick Lamar

As my writing progressed and evolved and I found my own voice eventually through trial and error, Mos Def's "Black on Both Sides" dropped. While "Train of Thought" was still my favorite of the two albums, Mos's charisma eclipsed Kweli  and he became my favorite of the two emcees. I judge rappers work against their own previous work instead of their peers, because that's fair to do artistically. So I'd never pit Mos & Kwelis work against each other because that's like arguing about which is more delicious of a fruit, apples or oranges? Two different fruits altogether, bruh. Also, at this point, I'd moved out my moms house, put out my 1st album, discovered early Eminem and Canibus and had a blossoming cd collection. Not to mention my attention was being held by a burgeoning Kanye.When Kweli's solo project "Quality" dropped, it hit me kinda like "meh". Gone was the signature Hi-Tek sound. I mean, Tek had joints on there but it wasn't the same. Dj Quick? Dj Quick is a mothafuckin' legend, sure. But his relevance at the time? Nah. Especially to a n00b EAST COAST hip-hopper as myself, it was baffling. The general consensus was Kweli used his first truly solo debut to attempt a move toward a more mainstream sound. It received some mainstream attention thanks to the West-produced single "Get By" which peaked at #77 on the Billboard Hot 100. That was Kweli's lifesaver. That album would've drowned otherwise. I did like the Kweli/Kanye connection that seemed mutually beneficial for both of them. It seemed to be going well even got him a Hov shout out on "The Black Album", in which Jay-Z rapped: "If skills sold, truth be told/I'd probably be, lyrically, Talib Kweli". Then the Strugglesome "The Beautiful Struggle" album dropped and I wanted to like it, but it too, hit me like "meh". The Neptunes, Just Blaze and Kanye couldn't save that album. The album failed to cross over into the mainstream and suffered a critical backlash. For example, Britt Robson of The Washington Post  said: "Struggle" was a "frequently awkward, too-obvious bid to exploit the commercial buzz Jay-Z created." Mos was trying his hand at rock music w/ Black Jack Johnson and dropped "The New Danger" to my disappointment. By this point I'd bought Common's "Like Water For Chocolate" and it made him instantly my new favorite emcee. I went and bought "Resurrection" and "One day it'll all make sense" in the same day and consumed those albums daily.In listening, I noticed Kweli's aging. His attempts to remain relevant by looking around him and seeing what was popular and trying to compete. I was willing to overlook his stuffing a thousand syllables into a bar and over usage of the word "like" in every rap song w/ semi-obscure literary references (that I dug, actually). I was willing to overlook the preachy tone his raps somewhat took. I was still BUYING Kweli's music. Brooklyn. over. everything, my nigga. I downloaded '"Liberation" and wasn't mad at that at all. Kweli and Madlib? Dope. I stopped there. There was too much disappointment for me to continue. I wished he'd maintained his aesthetic. Emcees like Kweli and Fat Joe will always look around and try to emulate to maintain relevance. I'm sure there's more money and more opportunity in it, but you lose that core fanbase for the possibility of a bigger, newer fanbase who's not familiar with your older work and doesn't love you the same as a fan. Whereas an artist like Ghostface or DOOM will continue to do what they do in their lane and gain cult followings. Mos learned this the hard way. It wasn't until "The Ecstatic" (and stepping the live show up by giving people what they came to see) that heads began fucking w/ him again.Eardrum? Nope. Finally, a new Reflection Eternal album? With post G-Unit Hi-Tek? It was a little too late. I bought it & reluctantly handed my money over. I'd lost my will to be be a Kweli fan. Gutter Rainbows? Nope. Idle Warship? Hell no. 

Did Kweli become wack? nah, he's still nice. I feel like it's the same problem Nas had with putting out 2 great albums out the gate and then trying to maintain relevance in a changing musical environment where the consumers are getting younger and the music is warping to accommodate. It took Nas about 10 albums to figure out how to get BACK to his original formula.I ask myself often if my critiques on Kweli came about because I rap and hold him in my influences. You know how you get older and realize your parents weren't the geniuses you thought them to be as a child? Once I figured out my stride and perfected how I wanted to rap and write, I think I began flaw finding. Flaw finding is both my nature as a virgo and my right as a consumer & fan. The power to critique constructively is also my right as a fellow artist. The biggest iniquities were the syllable cramming at the expense of flowing on-beat to get a point out as well as beat choices. But overall, I wanted that vibe back. I wanted that hi-Tek, Geology and Shawn J. Period vibe back from when I found myself as a young man and emcee. In 2013 Kweli is dropping "Prisoner of Conscious" a title derived from Talib's constant labeling as a "conscious rapper" and based on Nigerian reggae artist Majek Fashek's album "Prisoner of Conscience." I plan on purchasing it via an experiment. I'm gonna download all the albums of his I missed and see if there's been any hints or glimmers of what I've been missing that could lead up to this being his "Life is Good" album. Based on that, hopefully I can "experience dedication" and "move something", before it's "too late" for him to "get by".-F.Daily

It’s 2019 and I think Kweli is super important to raps annals and history.  Albeit his hubris and righteous stances especially on social media mixed w/ distasteful personal stories I’ve heard + how he handled ReS’s music issues have rubbed me all the wrong way. I still think there’s really some slivers of relevancy for Kweli in the current hip-hop climate. I think he’s in tune with the culture and good for hip-hop and an important voice in socio-political justice for the advancement of people of color. Ionno how good the music is for me personally anymore, but I’ll always have Reflection Eternal. 

content sourced from Talib Kweli's wiki page

[eillibsniknej]

Please Say Yes (Bechloe Fic)

Or that time Beca decided to ask Aubrey for her blessing to propose to Chloe

Beca looked nervous and it was weird.

Like, just super weird.

There had been times when she was sure Beca was nervous. Their first finals, every final after that, the worlds. But she never really looked nervous in those moments, she just became… Fidgety. Fidgety and a little bit hyper. Like a kid that had had too much sugar and couldn’t calm down. Or a squirrel that had been caught and hadn’t yet chosen whether fight or flight was the appropriate response.

She also became a bit of a blurter, saying everything that came to her mind as if keeping it just in her head would somehow ruin the performance. Which turned out not to be such a bad thing when before their second finals performance she blurted out to Chloe that she ‘loved everything about you, including your Ariel hair no matter what all those kids in your elementary school said’. Not super eloquent but that had always been Beca’s style. Besides, the sexual tension between those two was beginning to suffocate the rest of the girls. It’s not like Chloe herself was overly fussed on the delivery when she got to shove her tongue down the brunette’s throat, much to everyone else’s disgust.

But now Beca looked properly nervous. Her fidgeting had somehow increased tenfold if the three ripped up napkins were anything to go by. They were ripped up before she even got there as well, she didn’t know whether to be proud or concerned. When she shook her hand, which was also weird, it was shaking and sweaty, making her face scrunch up in revulsion. Beca must have seen her because her face paled to the point of matching her own pristine blouse before rubbing her hands along her jeans and releasing a strained chuckle that seemed anything but real.

She didn’t know what was going on, but if she wasn’t so concerned, she would almost think it was funny seeing her so put out.

She and Beca had grown closer over the last few years, though it was through no fault of their own. Originally, neither had intended to spend time with one another outside of the Bellas, but their girlfriends had other plans. As much as she loved both Chloe and Stacie, locking her and Beca in a room together with ‘conversation starter’ cue cards was not the fantastic idea the other girls thought it would be. In fact, it lead to an argument so huge that Beca ended up dislocating her shoulder in an attempt to shoulder barge the door down. Turns out the cue card with ‘ask me about my controlling father’ was not the best bonding topic. On the bright side, the two of them had a proper conversation about their fathers while she visited Beca in the hospital and ever since then they became fond of one another. Not that either of them would ever admit it.

“Okay, Midget,” That made Beca’s eyes snap up and narrow slightly. “What did you do this time?”

“Why do you assume I’ve done something?” Beca retorted, arms automatically folding in front of her chest in a defensive gesture. “How do you know it wasn’t Chloe that did something, huh?”

“Well, firstly, Chloe is a God damn angel that literally shits unicorns and vomits rainbows.” Beca smirked at both her use of language and the image, knowing it was pretty much true. “Secondly, she’s my best friend, she would have called me the second something went down between you two as usual which leads me to believe that she doesn’t even know we’re here. And thirdly, you look like you’re ready to projectile vomit across this table and I would know. So since I didn’t bring an umbrella and this is my good shirt, why don’t you tell me why we’re really here?”

Beca actually looked ready to argue that last point but seemed to fold in on herself at the last second, resigning herself to the fact that Aubrey was not too far from the truth.

“Wow, Beca Mitchell backing down from a fight, this must be serious.” She laughed while taking a sip of her coffee but frowned immediately after when Beca, once again, refused to take the bait. “Okay, now you’re starting to scare me. What’s going on in that tiny little head of yours?”

“I just…” Beca paused and looked at her hands. She hadn’t seen her look this vulnerable since the hospital. “I… You know I love Chloe, right? Like, head over heels and all that shit?”

Aubrey’s eyes narrowed at that. Taking in her anxious shifting and tense posture she came to one awful conclusion. She leaned in and dropped her voice to nothing more than a feral growl. “If you’re here to tell me that you cheated on my best friend I swear to god Rebeca Mitchell they will not be able to identify your body.”

“What!” Beca’s eyes almost popped out of her head and she was left floundering, almost unable to form the proper words to express how shocked she was. “What, no! Aubrey, no I would never… Honestly, you know how I feel about cheating after my dad and… No, Aubrey no I swear I didn’t, and never will.”

“Good.” Seeing her signature smirk plastered across Aubrey’s face made Beca want to smack her own on the table because she knew that little rant was at worth at least one year of teasing. “So how about you grow some lady balls and tell me why you’re about ten seconds away from having a heart attack.”

Beca seemed to take a big calming breath, steeling herself before connecting steel blue to emerald green. Aubrey was a little surprised by the sheer determination she found in them, especially considering how the rest of the day had gone so far. Aubrey knew this look and refrained from commenting or even talking at all as it was Beca’s ‘give me a second before I start to spill my heart out’ look.

“I love Chloe. With my entire soul and being. She’s everything to me and, if I’m lucky, she feels the same about me. I don’t know what I did to deserve to have her in my life but I swear that as long as she’ll have me I will treat her like the fucking princess she is. No matter how oblivious I was to her feelings towards me for those first few years, since then I have done everything I possibly can to keep her happy, and to keep her safe and loved. She’s my world, Aubrey, and I want it to be that way for a long time.”

“Okay?” Aubrey responded slowly, not entirely sure what was happening. “And why are you telling me this? This seems like something you should probably be talking about with Chloe.”

“Well, I am.” Beca stuttered, determination seeping out of her voice and returning to sheepish. “I mean, I will. The reason I’m telling you this is because you are probably the most important person in Chloe’s life, apart from her parents, which I’ve already done. Anyway, I feel like since you were kids, you and Chloe have shared everything together. You’ve always been there for each other and, despite our initial… differences, I think you and I have gotten quite close as well.”

Aubrey couldn’t hold in her chuckle then, half at Beca admitting their shared fondness for each other and the other half because she had never seen Beca turn so red. A quick pointed glare from the blushing girl made Aubrey mime zipping her lips together and throwing away the key. While it earned her Beca’s trademark eye roll, the girl continued anyway.

“So, I think you know that I would do anything for Chloe, and that I’m good for her. We both know that Chloe has never been happier with anyone than she is with me.”

Aubrey thought back to all the other people she had seen Chloe date and couldn’t help but nod in agreement. As much as she loved the redhead, she had the worst taste in partners. From Dandruff Danielle all the way to fuckboy Tom, Chloe always ended up snuggled into her best friend’s side sobbing over a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough. But even when the girl’s boyfriend or girlfriend didn’t treat her like dirt, Chloe had never smiled at any of them the way she did at Beca. The full grin made her look like an idiot but she looked like an idiot that was head over heels in love.

“So what I really brought you here for, Aubrey, was to ask for your blessing to ask Chloe to marry me.”

“What the fuck!” The words had left her mouth before she even fully comprehended them. And on top of that, she had just screamed profanity in the middle of a crowded café. Most of the patrons were glaring at her but the staff behind the counter just smirked. The four girls were regulars here, coming to adore the elderly owners and vice versa. Ida and Joe were two of the sweetest people any of them had ever met but also knew how to properly tear someone a new one when needed. Beca’s words, not Aubrey’s. Like the time someone had yelled ‘dykes’ at the group. The man promptly found his lap covered in boiling hot coffee that had been ‘accidently’ spilled there before Ida dragged the man up by his ear and physically dragged him out of the shop. No one would say such cruel things about their girls. Still, despite their closeness they had not seen Aubrey as anything other than calm, cool and collected. Therefore Aubrey’s screech of indignation was nothing but hilarious to the couple, which they took to mimicking almost every time they saw the blonde afterwards.

Aubrey shrunk down in her chair at the glares and saw Beca do the same. However, the other girl seemed to have curled in on herself, horror and embarrassment etched on her face much to Aubrey’s chagrin.

“No,” Aubrey immediately set to rectify her mistake. “Beca, stop doing that, you look like a kicked puppy. C’mon, you just took me by surprise, that’s all. I’m sorry. It could have been worse, I could have puked all over you.”

Beca watched her with suspicious eyes for a moment before clearing her throat and sitting up. She reached into her leather jacket pocket to produce a non-descript, black ring box. She all but threw it on the table with a disgruntled mumble of ‘I’m not a puppy’.

Aubrey opened the ring box and her heart melted at the sight. A single silver band wrapped elegantly around a light blue gem stone, smaller diamonds also speckled across the top. It was beautiful, but more importantly it was something that Chloe would absolutely love. Chloe had never liked flashy or showy rings, especially ones with massive gemstones that projected too far from the ring itself, determining them to be too annoying as they easily get caught on things. However, it was the blue gemstone in the middle that caught Aubrey’s, and she was sure would catch Chloe’s, attention the most as she could almost guarantee it was the same shade as the redhead’s eyes.

“I um, designed it.” The brunette’s voice was small and awkward, obviously having deemed Aubrey’s silence to have gone on too long. “With the help of a professional, of course. I forgot what the stone was called, but I asked the lady to pick a gem that would match her eyes properly. I gave her a picture of Chloe but none of them seemed to work. They just didn’t look right, you know? The blue was too dark or too light. I’m pretty sure the lady was ready to wring my neck. She ended up bringing me into the back room where they kept them all along with about five security guards. It took me three hours and 47 minutes to pick that one and I’m just so happy I didn’t settle.”

“Me too.” Aubrey breathed out before sliding the ring onto her finger. “It fits, which means it’s going to fit hers, nice sizing Mitchell, or should I say Beale?”

“Well firstly,” Beca started, relaxing a little at Aubrey’s teasing tone. “You have yet to actually give me any sort of blessing to move in on your girl. Secondly, Beca Beale? What am I, a comic book character? Please. I’m going to stay Mitchell if I can, I don’t really like hyphen names because then it takes too long to fill out forms. It’s up to Chloe though really. If it means a lot to her I would consider it, and if she wants to take mine that’s rad too.”

“Rad? Comic books?” Aubrey’s eyebrow quirked at the mini rant. “I thought you were a ‘badass’ not a nerd.”

“Shut it, Posen.” Beca rolled her eyes before once again turning serious. “But, just, that blessing though…”

“Jesus Beca! Of course it’s a yes!” Aubrey pulled Beca up to wrap her arms around the brunette in what was probably only their fifth ever hug. “When are you going to propose? What’s the plan? This is really exciting, Becs. Hey, the Bellas could even perform at the wedding!”

Beca cringed at the thought of drunken Bellas trying to do a drunken rendition of Bruno Mars’ I Think I Want to Marry You.

“Um, Aubrey? Hate to burst your bubble but Chloe would actually have to say yes before there can be a wedding. As for the rest of it, this Friday I’m taking Chloe to that restaurant down the street that she loves. Afterwards I got the lighting guys at the studio to help me out with some mood lighting and Fairy lights so I’m going to dress up the roof. You know, make it look pretty. Sprinkle round some flowers and add in some music and hopefully she’ll be too distracted to see me have a panic attack before I ask her.”

“You have nothing to worry about.” Aubrey replied sincerely, knowing Beca was probably only half joking about the panic attack. You were right, Chloe feels the exact same way about you. Hell I should know, she never has been able to shut up about you, even before you were dating.”

“Really?” Despite her grumblings Beca really did look like a puppy most of the time and it was adorable.

“Yes, Beca.” She smiled at the brunette in an attempt to ease the girl’s worries. “No worries. Just show that girl how in love with her you are and you’ll have her forever, just like you’re planning.”

A genuine smile leaked onto Beca’s face for a second, leading Aubrey to believe this talk not only gave Beca the ‘blessing’ she needed but also a making her a little more confident that she wasn’t about to get her heart stomped on. She was really happy for her best friend, already picturing herself losing the hearing in one ear when the red head would no doubt squeal into the phone in all her excitement. It was going to be a good week for her friends. If she could keep the secret from her best friend that is. Even Aubrey could admit she wasn’t a good liar to those closest to her so perhaps she would have to back off a bit for the next two days if she really wanted to keep the surprise.

“Thanks, Aubrey.” Once again, Beca sounded genuinely sincere. This was probably the most heartfelt conversation the two had ever had alone, usually preferring to go to the others’ girlfriend for advice. “This actually means a lot to me and I’m glad that we have you.”

“Don’t worry about it, Beca.” Aubrey replied, even going so far as to rest her hand upon the brunettes. “Besides, who knows? Perhaps one day this could be me sitting here in front of you, asking for your blessing for Stacie.”

“You want to marry Stacie?” Beca seemed just as surprised as Aubrey was when Beca first asked for her blessing.

“Well, not right now.” It was Aubrey’s turn to flush in embarrassment and Beca’s trademark smirk had returned. “But, maybe sometime in the near future. I mean, we’ve been together for just about as long as you and Chloe and I love her. I’m not there right now but the longer we’re together the more and more I picture the rest of my life. And every time I think about marriage and kids and being old and grey, Stacie is there in every fantasy and every plan.”

“Okay, Soppy,” Beca interrupted. “How about you save some of the romantic feelings crap for the speech you’ll give me next time we talk about this, deal?”

Aubrey wasn’t used to seeing this side of Beca, but she felt that their relationship had grown over the past half an hour. While the conversation started about Chloe, it was the first time they had willingly shared their feelings without force or serious injury. And while this didn’t mean they would be having sleepovers and sharing secrets, Aubrey felt comfortable knowing that if she ever needed anything that she couldn’t talk to Stacie or Chloe about, Beca would be there for her. And she would be there for Beca too, of course.

Now all she had to do was secret keep for a few days and then she could go out celebrating with her two best friend and her long-time girlfriend. Then again, Beca was right in saying that Aubrey and Chloe shared everything. If Beca and Chloe weren’t planning on eloping anytime soon, they might even be able to make it a double wedding.

[patriotsnet]

How Many Presidents Have The Republicans Tried To Impeach

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-presidents-have-the-republicans-tried-to-impeach/

How Many Presidents Have The Republicans Tried To Impeach

The Trump Administrations Treatment Of Immigration Exclusively As A Criminal And National Security Matter Is Inhumane Impractical And Must End The Bernie Sanders Campaign Wrote As President Bernie Sanders Would Make Undocumented Immigration A Civil Matter And Fundamentally Reform The Government Agencies Tasked With Enforcing Immigration Law In A Way That Views Immigration As A Historically Valued Process Thats Woven Into Our Countrys Fabric

 Hey Bernie — those who are here by less than legal means are breaking the law. That is a criminal matter, not a civil one.

And, for the record, many of the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks on our country had overstayed their visas and were in violation of our immigration laws, thus additionally making it a matter of national security.

But you probably already knew that. You just don’t care.

  Sanders has released an immigration plan that would impose a moratorium on deportations, “break up” existing immigration enforcement agencies, grant full welfare access to non-legal immigrants and welcome a minimum of 50,000 “climate migrants” in the first year of a Sanders administration.

According to Fox News, the plan effectively establishes Sanders at the far left of the immigration debate, as he aims to energize a base that helped drive his 2016 primary campaign amid competition from other liberal candidates in the field this time around.

Bernies Dangerous Open Borders Agenda Would Incentivize Illegal Immigration And Continue The Flow Of Illegal Drugs And Criminals Into Our Country Spokesperson Michael Joyce Said Meanwhile President Trumps Steadfast Leadership On This Issue Has Resulted In A 63 Percent Decline In Illegal Immigrant Apprehensions Since May

Trump has previously indicated that he believes liberal immigration policies from his opponents will help him win in 2020.

When a number of Democrats raised their hands in June to a debate question about whether those not in the country legally should get health care, Trump declared it “the end of that race!”

While most of the Democratic nominees are pushing similar agendas on immigration, Joe Biden has not yet committed to the same level of reform.

Immigration Is Not A Threat To National Security His Plan Says It Is Long Past Time We Break Up The Department Of Homeland Security And Refocus Its Mission On Keeping Our Country Safe And Responding Effectively To Emergencies

Part of his plan disbands both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection . Matters to do with deportation and enforcement would return to the Department of Justice, while customs matters would be sent to the Treasury and naturalization and citizenship to the State Department.

Instead, border enforcement would focus on “stemming the flow of firearms and drugs at ports of entry that have contributed to the opioid epidemic and stopping human trafficking.”

  He would abolish measures such as DNA testing and facial recognition technology for immigration and border enforcement.

For those immigrants, legal or not, who are in the country, Sanders accelerates the call to include ALL in welfare programs and other government services such as health care. Under Sanders, everything is on the table for everyone in the country regardless of immigration status.

The things that Sanders wants to offer independent of immigration status: Medicare-for-all, College-for-all and free universal school meals .

Sanders is also pushing for Congress to pass Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Embrace Act, which opens all welfare programs to all immigrants, legal or not.

  Sanders also wants to streamline legal immigration channels, reduce fees, and provide funding to unite immigrants who are stuck in backlogs.

The Republican National Committee on Thursday called the plan “dangerous.”

Devin Nunes Says Gop Majority In The House After 2022 Midterms Could Spell Trouble For New President As Fringe Conservatives Seek Retribution

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Related video: Sean Hannity attacks Trump’s ‘lacklustre, meandering’ impeachment defence

Republicans could face significant pressure to impeach Joe Biden should they win back a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, California congressman Devin Nunes has warned.

Speaking to Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, the Donald Trump loyalist suggested the GOP’s right-wing fringe could use any newfound power in Congress to push for a revenge impeachment against President Biden after his predecessor became the first commander-in-chief in American history to be impeached twice by the House.

“Republicans have a good chance of taking the House in 2022,” Mr Nunes said. “Now, if that happens, and let’s – for example, we don’t know what’s gonna happen to Hunter Biden’s laptop. We don’t know what’s gonna happen with the Durham investigation . But I could see the pressure would become great for us to actually have to impeach Biden.”

“Now look, I don’t want to do that, but you’re going to have people that are going to be saying that,” he added.

His allusion to the computer owned by the president’s son refers to a pre-election story popular among Trump supporters concerning the device being handed over by the owner of a Delaware repair shop to prominent Republican lawyer Rudy Giuliani. 

Interesting Fact Did You Know Democrats Have Tried To Impeach Every Republican President Since Eisenhower

The site had made the proclamation that the information delivered from the meme shared online was “Mostly False”, but when reading the rationale behind why they made such a claim revealed aspects that erred toward being more truthful. The Snopes article read:

What’s True

Articles of impeachment were introduced against five of the six Republican presidents who have served since President Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

What’s False

Articles of impeachment were not introduced against President Gerald Ford; a handful of Democratic politicians filed articles of impeachment against President George H. W. Bush Sr. and President RonaldReagan but their efforts did not receive the backing of the entire Democratic party; and the impeachment efforts against President Richard Nixon received bipartisan support.

So, the infamous debunking website had claimed that this was a mostly false statement since that only five of the six Republican presidents had articles of impeachment brought towards them while in office.

Yet, the real kicker is that they failed to mention that Gerald Ford wasn’t even an elected president and had only stayed in office for slightly over two years.

The circumstances of Ford’s appointment were stemming from the Nixon’s fall from grace and his original vice president resigning over the disgrace of the Watergate scandal. With all the country had been through at that point, impeachment on the appointed president Ford would have been insufferable.

My Father Came To America As A Refugee Without A Nickel In His Pocket To Escape Widespread Anti

Sanders’ plan was written in conjunction with several immigrants who were shielded from deportation by former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

  In the plan, he promises to extend legal status to those eligible under the DACA program, as well as to grant relief for their parents. He also promises to use executive authority to allow immigrants who have violated our laws by living in the U.S. for five or more years to stay “free from threat of deportation.”

Sanders wants to provide a “pathway to citizenship” via Congress for all undocumented immigrants living in America — which he says is currently around 11 million — and would ensure that “old or low-level contacts with the criminal justice system” do not prevent illegal immigrants from walking along that path.

As president, Sanders says he would also decriminalize illegal border crossings, instead making it a civil violation. He would also end detention for those without a violent crime conviction.

Upon being sworn in, a President Sanders would halt all deportations until there was a full audit of “current and past practices and policies.”

He would also end the Trump ‘Muslim travel ban,’ as well as other Trump policies such as the Migrant Protection Protocols and defunding of sanctuary cities.

They are called public defenders. 

  You mean, like the corruption, repression and poverty in Venezuela, caused by the very socialism he wants to bring to America?

Did You Know That Democrats Have Tried To Impeach Every Elected Republican President Since 1960

Threat title:Did You Know That Democrats Have Tried to Impeach EVERY Elected Republican President since 1960?Of course there was no Republican POTUS elected in 1960, because Kennedy was elected. Nor was there one in 1964 when LBJ was elected. 1968 did see a Republican POTUS when Nixon squeaked in, but no impeachment was introduced against him until after the 1972 re-election. And when it was, it was supported from every side. So here already the OP has padded his specious claim by twelve years. And counting. 1976, no Republican, Jimmy Carter elected. Finally in 1980 and 1984, Reagan the Republican elected and re-elected and Henry Gonzalez filed impeachment articles that went nowhere. OP has padded his dates by 27 years. In 1988 HW Bush was elected, Gonzalez again files article, again goes nowhere. 1992 and 1996 was Clinton, who did face impeachment but ruh-roh, he’s not a Republican. So apparently, somebody filed articles against Dubya.The Cliff’s Notes to cut the bullshit.SFX: sound of emptying balloon

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”– Albert Einstein

Gop Sen Collins: Trump Incited An Insurrection To Prevent Peaceful Transfer Of Authority

From CNN’s Clare Foran

GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who was among the Republicans who voted to convict former President Trump, spoke on the Senate floor explaining her vote, saying Trump “incited an insurrection with the purpose of preventing that transfer of power from occurring.”

“Instead of preventing a dangerous situation, President Trump created one. Rather than defend the Constitutional transfer of power, he incited an insurrection with the purpose of preventing that transfer of power from occurring,” she said.

Collins said that Trump’s “actions to interfere with the peaceful transition of power – the hallmark of our Constitution and our American democracy – were an abuse of power and constitute grounds for conviction.”

“The record is clear that the President, President Trump abused his power, violated his oath to uphold the Constitution and tried almost every means in his power to prevent the peaceful transfer of authority to the newly elected President,” she said.

“My vote in this trial stems from my own oath and duty to defend the Constitution of the United States. The abuse of power and betrayal of his oath by President Trump meet the Constitutional standard of high crimes and misdemeanors and for those reasons, I voted to convict,” she said.

Most Senate Republicans Back Measure Saying Trump Impeachment Trial Is Unconstitutional

Dareh Gregorian

Senate Republicans voted Tuesday for a measure that would have declared the impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump unconstitutional because he is no longer in office.

The motion, by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was defeated by a vote of 55-45, showing that Democrats have an uphill climb to secure the 67 votes needed for a conviction. Among those who voted for the motion was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has said he is undecided whether to convict Trump and who worked on the trial calendar with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

McConnell, when he was majority leader, rebuffed Democrats’ efforts to hold the trial while Trump was in office.

Senators were sworn for Trump’s second impeachment trial earlier Tuesday, a day after House impeachment managers delivered to the Senate the article of impeachment accusing Trump of incitement of insurrection in the Capitol riot this month.

The senators were given the oath by Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the president pro tempore of the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of Donald John Trump, former president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws, so help you God?” Leahy asked the assembled senators.

Leahy is presiding over the trial instead of Chief Justice John Roberts because Trump is a former president.

Stacey Plaskett Addresses Emotional Toll Of Seeing Black Women Used In Trump Defense

“Those 43 who voted to acquit the president did so because they were afraid of him, because they were more interested in party and in power than they were in our country and in duty to their Senate oath,” she added.

Plaskett said Trump “will be forever tarnished” by the impeachment.

“I think it leaves him for all history — our children and my grandchildren will see in history that this was the most despicable despot attempting to become a fascist ruler over a country that was founded in democracy,” she said.

President Biden said the attack on the Capitol “has reminded us that democracy is fragile.” Above, Biden speaks during a visit Thursday to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Evan Vucci/APhide caption

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President Biden said the attack on the Capitol “has reminded us that democracy is fragile.” Above, Biden speaks during a visit Thursday to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

President Biden responded to the Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump on Saturday by reminding Americans that truth must be defended, saying the impeachment of the former president was a stark illustration of the danger posed to democracy by lies, misinformation and extremism.

And Biden said that although Trump was acquitted, his actions in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection were not “in dispute.”

New Report Suggests Most Scholars Are On The Other Side; Trial Could Start This Week

WASHINGTON—The political fate of President Trump, and any ambitions he might have for reclaiming the White House in 2024, could be settled by who wins a debate over whether a president can be convicted through the impeachment process after leaving office—a matter on which the U.S. Constitution is silent.

The House impeached Mr. Trump last Wednesday for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for conduct culminating with a speech exhorting thousands of his followers to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and “fight like hell” against congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

“Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed…unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts,” the impeachment resolution, which won support from 10 Republicans, alleges.

The Senate could take the next steps—trying Mr. Trump and voting on his guilt—as soon as this week. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote by senators present; assuming perfect attendance, 17 Republicans would need to join all 50 Democrats to find Mr. Trump guilty.

Trump Lawyer: His Call To Georgia Officials To ‘find’ Votes Was Taken Out Of Context

Trump’s lawyers largely sidestepped Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked during the question-and-answer session: “Are the prosecutors right when they claim that Trump was telling a big lie, or in your judgment did Trump actually win the election?”

Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen shot back, “My judgment? Who asked that?”

“I did,” Sanders replied.

“My judgment is irrelevant,” van der Veen said.

“You represent the president of the United States!” Sanders yelled back before Sen. Patrick Leahy, the presiding officer, gaveled the chamber back to order.

Trump’s rhetoric about widespread fraud and a stolen election was false, dismissed by many courts stemming from dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and allies across several key states.

After Speaking Out On Impeachment Herrera Beutler Heads Toward Clash With Her Party

“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,” he said, “and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”

McConnell rebuked Trump for his actions after the insurrection as well.

“He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed and order restored,” he continued.

“No. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded,” he said. “Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger.”

But McConnell said that the process of impeachment and conviction is a “limited tool” and that he believes Trump is not “constitutionally eligible for conviction.”

“The Constitution gives us a particular role. This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal,” he said.

He said that the text of the question of constitutionality is “legitimately ambiguous” and that he “respects” his colleagues for reaching either the conclusion to acquit or convict.

Seven Republicans broke ranks with their party in voting for a conviction.

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Michael van der Veen, defense lawyer for former President Donald Trump, gives closing arguments during Trump’s second impeachment trial on February 13, 2021.

Trump’s Defense Closes Its Case By Saying Impeachment Trial Is A ‘complete Charade’

Manager Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado rebutted the defense’s argument that Trump has been denied due process.

“We had a full presentation of evidence, adversarial presentations, motions. The president was invited to testify. He declined. The president was invited to provide exculpatory evidence. He declined. You can’t claim there’s no due process when you won’t participate in the process,” he said.

He noted that impeachment is separate and distinct from the criminal justice system.

“Why would the constitution include the impeachment power at all, if the criminal justice system serves as a suitable alternative once a President leaves office?” he asked. “It wouldn’t.”

Neguse also sought to address an allegation raised by defense attorneys, that the impeachment trial was rooted in hate. He turned to a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“This trial is not born from hatred,” said Neguse. “Far from it. It’s born from love of country. Our country. Our desire to maintain it. Our desire to see America at its best.”

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On Saturday morning, senators voted to hear from Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler as a witness in the impeachment trial. Later, an agreement allowed a statement by her into the record without calling her.

The Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump won’t be hearing from witnesses after all.

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If Convicted Removal From Office Possible Disqualification From Government Service

If a president is acquitted by the Senate, the impeachment trial is over. But if he or she is found guilty, the Senate trial moves to the sentencing or “punishment” phase. The Constitution allows for two types of punishments for a president found guilty of an impeachable offense: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

The first punishment, removal from office, is automatically enforced following a two-thirds guilty vote. But the second punishment, disqualification from holding any future government position, requires a separate Senate vote. In this case, only a simple majority is required to ban the impeached president from any future government office for life. That second vote has never been held since no president has been found guilty in the Senate trial.

Trump Lawyer: His Call To Georgia Officials To Find Votes Was Taken Out Of Context

Trump’s lawyers largely sidestepped Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked during the question-and-answer session: “Are the prosecutors right when they claim that Trump was telling a big lie, or in your judgment did Trump actually win the election?”

Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen shot back, “My judgment? Who asked that?”

“I did,” Sanders replied.

“My judgment is irrelevant,” van der Veen said.

“You represent the president of the United States!” Sanders yelled back before Sen. Patrick Leahy, the presiding officer, gaveled the chamber back to order.

Trump’s rhetoric about widespread fraud and a stolen election was false, dismissed by many courts stemming from dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and allies across several key states.

Mcconnell: Trump Is Practically And Morally Responsible For Provoking Capitol Riot

From CNN’s Adrienne Vogt

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the Jan. 6 Capitol attack a “disgrace.” 

“They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth. Because he was angry. He had lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” McConnell said.

“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President,” he added.

McConnell said there were “wild myths” about election fraud, but he said he defended Trump’s right to bring any complaints to the legal system.

“As I stood up and said clearly at that time, the election was settled. It was over. But that just really opened a new chapter of even wilder, wilder and more unfounded claims,” he said. “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”

Trump “did not do his job” to end the Jan. 6 violence, McConnell said.

McConnell called the Trump defense team invoking Trump’s voters during the impeachment trial “as a human shield against criticism.”

Watch:

Democrats Use Video Of Capitol Attack To Remind Senators Of Purpose Of Impeachment

Senators were brought back to the day of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol when Tuesday’s Senate trial opened with a 13-minute video containing clips from that day, from the president’s exhortation at a rally near the White House that his followers should go to the Capitol to the ensuing attack.

The video included footage of rioters breaking windows and chanting “stop the steal” as they disrupted the process to certify the 2020 presidential election results, falsely believing Trump’s claims that President Joe Biden won due to widespread fraud.

Members of Congress were shown in the video being escorted out. One clip showed the moment a Capitol Police officer shot Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old woman who had joined the rioters trying to get into the House chamber.

The clips were followed by Trump’s words on social media, directing the rioters to “go home with love and in peace.”

“Senators, the president was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on Jan. 13 for doing that. You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution? That is a high crime and misdemeanor. If that’s not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing,” said House impeachment prosecutor Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.

“They don’t need to show you movies to show you that the riot happened here. We will stipulate that it happened, and you know all about it,” he said.

Stacey Plaskett: Trump Trial Needed ‘more Senators With Spines Not More Witnesses’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and West Virginia GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito both cited constitutional concerns in their decision to vote to acquit Trump.

Virgin Islands House Del. Stacey Plaskett, another impeachment manager, told NPR’s Weekend Edition that they didn’t “reverse course” on witnesses but instead succeeded in adding Herrera Beutler’s statement describing a conversation between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Trump as the attack was ongoing.

“I know that people have a lot of angst and they can’t believe that the Senate did what they did . But what we needed were senators, more senators with spines, not more witnesses,” Plaskett said.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a close ally of President Biden, reportedly urged House managers to relent on witnesses. He told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that spending “months fighting over witnesses” wouldn’t have been worth it.

“What the House managers needed wasn’t more witnesses or more evidence, what we all needed was more Republican courage,” he said. “This was the most bipartisan verdict in American history, a strong rebuke to President Trump, but frankly at the end of the day, the trial had reached its natural conclusion.”

Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump, after 10 GOP House members voted to impeach Trump for inciting the mob that breached the U.S. Capitol.

Republican Who Wanted To Destroy Bill Clinton During 1998 Impeachment Has Regrets

A former Republican congressman who led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998 said he paid a visit to the former Democratic president a few years ago to ask forgiveness for his role in the affair.

“I hated Bill Clinton, wanted to destroy him, asked to be on Judiciary Committee so that I could impeach him,” said Bob Inglis, R-S.C., in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast.

Inglis visited Clinton a few years ago at the former president’s office in Harlem, he said, in what he described as a “very interesting” meeting. Inglis informed Clinton that he joined the Judiciary Committee as soon as he was elected to Congress in 1992, the same year Clinton was elected president, with the intent of impeaching him.

“I hated you so much that I wanted to impeach you,” Inglis told Clinton.

Clinton “sort of flinched,” Inglis said. “I said, ‘Yeah, I know you hadn’t done anything yet, but so much did I hate you.”

“I told him that it wasn’t good for my soul, it wasn’t good for the country, for me to have that level of animosity toward him,” Inglis said. “He didn’t say the words that you would hope to hear, which is, ‘You’re forgiven.’ But in every way he has expressed that to me. He’s been very kind to accept the apology for sure.”

Inglis left his seat in Congress in 1998, the same year the Republican-controlled House impeached Clinton, to run for the U.S. Senate. He narrowly lost to Democratic incumbent Sen. Fritz Hollings, who had held the seat since 1966.

_____

[echelonlab-blog]

Reigning Madness – Chapter 13

Masterlist

Disclaimer: Fiction.

Warnings: None for this chapter

Tagging: @hazeleyedleto @msroxyblog @letojokerownsme @miss-shannanigans @snewsome756   @maliciousalishious   @nikkitasevoli@meghan12151977 @mindlessselfindulgence88 @sanellv@ambolton@jayded-reality @bradlea23 @spillinginkwithlove @alexis7215@dezmarz@pezziecoyote @whoistheprettiest @avaj99

I arrived at Caroline's place and knocked on the door, not expecting what I would see on the other side. She was in jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt. Her long hair was up in a ponytail and she smiled, "Punctual, I like that."

 I tilted my head and stuttered, "Y-you do realize that we have a date tonight?" Normally when I pick up a woman for a date, they are in a dress and are all made up. Care was really throwing me off tonight.

She raised her eyebrows and folded her arms. The black baseball cap hanging from her fingers completed her little outfit. "Uh, yes I do, and if I'm not mistaken, you promised that I get to pick what we are doing. I have quite the date planned, so you better get ready." She snatched the keys from my hand, "Ooh, can I drive?"

  I loved her feisty attitude and I walked back to my truck laughing to myself. "No problem." She buckled up and waited patiently for me to do the same. "You wanna tell me where we're going?"

 She stared straight ahead and grinned. "Not really, but feel free to guess."

 "Honestly, you are so unpredictable, I have no idea." I loved the way she took charge but wasn't bossy about it. Cynnamon liked to call the shots sometimes, but she was a little more hostile than Caroline. Cynn would also never go on a date without wearing some kind of low cut, extremely revealing dress, not that I was complaining, she had a smoking hot body.

 "I promise you will have fun, at least I hope you do." She stared at the road. I was beginning to grow concerned, realizing that we were actually leaving the city. "Relax, I'm not kidnapping you, too many people know about this date."

   I wasn't expecting the almost hour ride and when she pulled into the parking lot of an old-school amusement park, I couldn't hide my excitement. "What? This is where you wanted to come for our date?"

 She slid out and pulled the cap on, tugging her ponytail through the back. "What's wrong, you scared?"

 "Me?" I asked, with a laugh. "Oh, sweetheart, you have no idea how much I love this shit!"

  She smirked, locking the truck and walking around to toss me the keys. "Good, I just hope you can keep up with me." I slid the sunglasses on my face even though it was dark and she nudged me with her elbow. "You don't actually think those are a disguise, do you?"

Shrugging, I took her hand and we entered the park. It was crowded, but dark, so I hoped we wouldn't be stopped much. Surprisingly, I was only recognized a few times and Care patiently stepped aside while I posed for a few photos. I finally took the sunglasses off and shoved them into my pocket. We had a blast, riding each attraction more than once.

  Cynnamon would never want to do anything like this. This was a laid-back and less classy date. Cynnamon was more into fine dining and going places where she could dress up. I didn't mind, but it was nice to do something adventurous for once.

   We stopped on the pier to look at the water and some kids came running by, accidentally shoving Caroline. I caught her in my arms and we locked eyes. The intoxicating scent of her perfume was enough to make my brain swim. It was like slow motion and I swallowed hard, unable to deny my attraction to her. Just as my lips got close enough to touch hers, I came to my senses and backed up, steadying her. Immediately, I regretted what almost happened and watched her turn toward the railing. "I'm sorry, Jared."

  "No, don't be. I had a great time tonight, but it's getting late. We should probably go."

         -Caroline's POV-

   I watched Jared as we stood by the water. He looked completely relaxed and smiling, more than I had seen him in a while. I think that, at least for a little bit, he had forgotten all the drama going on in his life and was just simply in the moment. It was exactly what I wanted to give him with this date. I was about to comment on how happy he looked when something hit me from behind, sending me off balance and knocking the wind out of me. Suddenly I was in Jared's arms, smelling that clean, soapy scent of his as his bright blue eyes stared into my own. There was something in the way he looked at me, the way he swallowed slowly while he looked at my lips that set off alarm bells in my head. He's not yours, Caroline, they told me. You know who he belongs to....

      -flashback to high school-

   “Look out loser!” A gaggle of cheerleaders and their court of popularity drones shoved their way in front of me, apparently to their minds far too important to wait in the lunch line with us unwashed masses. I watched them as they made their way along, giggling and sneering and tossing around ponytails festooned in ridiculous amounts of ribbons. I sighed. It wasn't worth trying to fight them over. Life was easier when I was invisible to their type anyway.

   Once I had my lunch tray I searched the cafeteria for my boyfriend, I located him and sat down across from him with a very different kind of sigh. Jason was probably the cutest boy I had ever seen. He was certainly the cutest boy that had ever paid attention to me. He looked up at me from his sloppy Joes and flashed me a dazzling white smile and I just melted.

   “Are you coming with me to the party tonight?” he asked, popping a tater tot between his perfect lips. Jason was on the football team, it was Homecoming, and the popular crew was throwing a big bash at the home of someone whose parents were out of town. It was every teen cliché in the book. I shrugged and looked over at the table where the psycho pep squad was now sitting. One of the girls, one that I particularly had difficulty with, was already looking my general direction and caught me, making that obnoxious “L” thing on her forehead and sneering. Jason noticed where I was looking. “Pfft,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Don't worry about Susan. She just puts on a show so she can fit in. She's not like them."

   “No,” I said, poking at my fruit cocktail. “She's worse.”

   “I'm telling you, it's all for show. She's just trying to keep up. You know her family doesn't have any money right? Her dad's like some chronically unemployed loser. It's sad really.”

   I remembered all the grief, Susan had given me from the minute she rolled into town. She had just started this year, we weren't even up to Homecoming yet and she had already singled me out for the worst of her treatment. When I tried to ignore her, when I hadn't fought back, she had labeled me a mousy little loser and made sure her entire crew knew it. I wasn't popular, but I wasn't exactly a pariah before either. I was the girl that studied hard, listened to too much music, wore nothing but band t-shirts and jeans and mostly minded my own business. Susan Evans was vain and shallow, never did any homework that I could see, dressed to the nines every single day and chased popularity like it was air. I didn't know how she dressed like that if she was poor, I had heard she had a shoplifting habit, but frankly, I didn't care. Susan's backstory was not my problem. Her treatment of me was. “The only thing sad about Susan is Susan,” I told Jason.

   I don't know what made me decide to go to the party that night. It might have been the cologne Jason was wearing or the way he made my 17-year-old insides melt when he flashed me those big dark blue eyes of his. But I after the game I had given in to his wishes, following along after him, clinging to his side while he talked to his buddies about tricked out Celicas and crappy obscure rap genres. I lost track of how many little red cups of beer he handed me as I lurked but after a while, I wasn't feeling very good, and I went to lay down on one of the lounge chairs by the pool.

   Of course, I wasn't left unmolested. Guy after guy passed by, stopping to hit on me and test my level of drunkenness. When they assessed that I was too sober for date rape or whatever else in the hell these entitled assholes got up to at parties they would wander off, leaving me in peace until the next douchebag played through. After about an hour of this, I'd had enough and went to go find Jason to see if he would take me home.

   For years afterward, I could close my eyes and conjure the next scene perfectly. I had stumbled through the house until I found the kitchen, a traditional affair with white wood cabinets and gray and white granite counter tops. There were bowls of chips and pretzels sitting out on the butcher block island and large bottles of cheap vodka and grain alcohol littering the countertops. There were four different couples in there, all necking. Robbie Fenton had his hands up Teresa Kiplinger's cheerleading sweater, and next to them Kitty Marquez had her hands down Chase Miller's pants. Nadia Keane and Alex Barber were exchanging saliva. And in the corner, Susan Evans had her legs wrapped around the waist of Jason Caldwell, Jason Bradley Caldwell, my Jason, with his number 23 football Jersey and tight blue jeans, while he groped her and ground against her. I ran out of the room and threw up.

    -End of flashback-

   And now here we were. This was Susan's boyfriend. He wasn't mine. And as he blinked his eyes and his lips got closer I realized I had the perfect opportunity for payback. But I didn't want payback. I didn't want to be her. And I didn't want to use Jared like that. I quickly turned away and grabbed the railing. “I'm sorry, Jared,” I told him. I just wanted the past to stay there. I guess was still a mousy little loser after all.

[dnd-vigilante]

Vigilante Game Five: "We Were Wrong! They Can Fight!"

The hope of being joined by the same party from last week was a lost cause. Tonight our party consisted of June, our nature loving monk, Martin, our fearless leader, Hilda, who returned after going to GenCon (Paladin), Oranoak the half-elven cleric, Ereden the quick speaking bard, and two new people: Rosdove, another bard who said she was a wizard and Sora, a Dragonborn Barbarian.

We set up camp outside of the forge building. Sora and Rosdove set up for the first watch while the rest of us got some sleep following our eventful encounter with the dog Automatons. Time passed, Sora slowly walking the perimeter of our camp thought she heard something. She walked over to Rosdove and asked if she heard anything odd. Sora continued to listen and tells Rosdove she was clearly imagining things (Rolled a 3 on perception). Rosdove listened, subtle whispering seemed to be coming from the passageway. She launched dancing lights down the passage and she heard someone say, “Hey they are still alive! Be quiet!”

Sora rushed over to the rest of us, tripping and falling on top of Hilda making all sorts of unnecessary noise. This does get everyone else’s attention, we jumped to our feet and grabbed our weapons. Six figures illuminated by the dancing lights carried heavy crossbows. They all fired, most going wide, Oranoak received one directly in his chest and one pierced June’s arm. June ran towards them jumping into the air with a kick, she completely missed them… one of the bandits said, “uh, they don’t look like fighters to me.” Ereden cast bane on two of them, and since it didn’t hurt them they continued to believe we were not fighters… Oranoak let out a blast of holy energy healing the party from our fight earlier in the day. Sora wanting to redeem herself ran forward and cleaved one of them open. He yelled as blood streamed down his chest, “We were wrong! They can fight!” Martin blurry eyed and annoyed he had been woken after such a short period walked forward cutting one man in half, and decapitating the next. “No, Steve and Steven!!” The other bandits looked at Martin and decided it was best to attack the others first. Apparently, Martin is just too scary. A crossbow bolt caught Martin in the shoulder but he shrugged it off. A second bolt caught June on the side of her head and she fell to the ground. A sudden pressure appeared around Martin as a robed figure emerged from the passage who looked kind of like a bard but was clearly a wizard. With an iron force of will, Martin shook the feeling off, “Nah man, that ain’t me.” Clearly annoying the Wizard that was not a bard. Rosdove pointed at the Wizard and yelled: “Don’t fuck with me, I’m a wizard!” (She was not. She was a bard.)

Oranoak let out a battle cry, “Screw Steve!” And blasted the robed figure with holy fire. The robed figure looked displeased but mostly unphased by what just happened. Ereden rushed over to June and stabilized her.

June: “I get knocked down! But I get up again!” (If only she knew how true that statement was about to be.)

June was then shot with another crossbow bolt and instantly passed out. Sora let out a sudden draconic roar and blasted three of the bandits with lightning. Quickly following the surprise of this, Martin ran two more of the men through on his glaive. “Couldn’t have let us sleep just a little bit?” Their names were Joe and Steve, wow another Steve… someone's parents weren't very inventive. The last few again yelled, “They can fight!” Another man fell, apparently named Roy. The last man ran for his life. Yelling, “this is not what we thought we were getting into! Get away from me!” The robed figure was out the door faster than the bandit. Clearly, things were not going as planned at all. As they retreated up the passageway Rosdove ran forward and yelled again, “See! Don’t fuck with the Wizard!”

We revived June once again... and walked back to our camp. Being even more exhausted, we decided to attempt to camp again knowing that they could easily come back.

Martin: “June, my kill count is now eleven. What are your kills to getting knocked out ratio now?”

June: “I’m dead even at three and three.”

Ereden: “Why does a kill count matter?”

Martin and June just looked at him… “Bragging rights.” As if this was the most obvious thing in the world. The party managed to take a full rest and felt a hell of a lot better for doing so. It was now day three of being inside this ruined tower and it was getting old. We gathered up our supplies and began our trek out of the tower, hoping we wouldn’t have any issues getting out.

Going through the passageways and caverns under the tower weren’t any issue, we appeared to have cleared out anything bad which could cause us any harm. We reached winding staircase which lead from the spider web covered eye room back to the entrance where we had struggled with the “OPEN TRAPDOOR” puzzle. Before reaching the top, June told us to stop. She heard something above us, she advanced slowly peeking out over the edge of the trapdoor. She looked around the room and saw the remaining bandit, the Wizard and the two Ogre we had tricked into running away from the tower. Her eyes locked with the Wizards. They stared at one another for less than a second before June was out of the trapdoor rushing towards the wizard, snapping his neck before anyone else could move.

This clearly alerted the guard and Ogres. The last of the bandits looked at June and ran out the door. The first Ogre raised his club above his head and swung at June, smashing her to the floor. Once again, June was knocked out… The second Ogre shuffled towards June’s body and clubbed her… apparently making sure she was down. Finally, the rest of the party acted! Ereden jumped out and used Tasha's hideous laughter on the first Ogre, it fell to the ground rolling over June laughing hysterically. The second Ogre turned to the first, “What funny? You laugh but no fun.” Ereden ran passed the Ogres and out the door, clearly, self-preservation was on his mind. Rosdove succeeded in distracting the second Ogre by scaring it, also running passed June and the Ogres out the door. The plan it seemed, was to run and fight another day. Sora and Hilda ran for the door completely ignoring the Ogres. Oranoak ran for June lifting her body over his shoulder and running for the door. Martin stood there for a second and thought about what to do… “I suppose I won’t be Ogre slaying today…” He headed for the door then hesitated and grabbed the body of the deceased wizard. You never know, maybe he has something important concerning these damn cultists we keep encountering.

The party sprinted across the field heading towards the nearby woods. Ahead of the group ran the last of the bandits, clearly terrified. Oranoak quickly revived June once again, supplying a theme song to June in the future, ‘I get knocked down… and I get up again!’ realizing the situation we were now in, June sprinted after the last bandit. She managed to pin the man a lot more quickly than we thought. Seeing as she had probably lost a lot of blood in the past day from collapsing three times. We tied him up and headed for the trees, those Ogre were not going to let us get away that easy. With our combined efforts we managed to hide, remove the parties tracks and set up several spike traps with caltrops and alchemist fire in the surrounding area. Martin switched from his plate armor to leather to reduce noise and we waited. After some time we heard the Ogres near us, they seemed to be confused and lost. They passed us by without any encounter.

Oranoak carried our captive. We asked him who he was and why he had attacked us. He told us his name was Stu of the Stevenson Brothers gang.

Oranoak: “Oh, I’ve heard of you. You’re from Bastion as well. Why are you working for that robed guy? Also, I have a crossbow bolt with your name on it.” Oranoak pulled out the crossbow bolt that had been stuck in his chest from our previous fight and twirled it in his fingers. Ereden asked Stu how on earth did he have Ogres helping him and his friends. Stu said the robed guy, he never got his name, threatened the Ogres with the wrath of the Sharpfeather Clan. Because of this, the Ogres went along with whatever the robe guy wanted. Oranoak then got a little too comfortable with Stu for the rest of the evening, the rest of us attempted to ignore it rather unsuccessfully.

Martin looked over the body of the robed figure, finding some gold, rations and other things. He also found a folded up piece of cloth, opening it Martin discovered the sketches of two keys. Pulling out the Key from the wizard tower he compared the three. He showed Ereden what he had found, Ereden pulled out his notes he had taken on the book. They determined the two other keys might have other properties concerning the anvil, just like the one they found. Clearly, this robed figure was after the book and key we had found. Rosdove walked over and looked at the body of the Wizard, “Shame someone else killed you, I wanted to show you that I was the better wizard.” She noticed something shiny on his finger, she pulled off a ring. Holding it she felt it have some kind of magic within it. It wasn’t clear what it did but she happily pocketed it. (Once we got back to the town she found a fellow adventurer in another group and had it identified. This was the first instance I had seen of the parties interacting apart from the Dream Council and I’ll get into that later.)

We slept without any disturbances and made it back to Bastion after two days of slow walking. We headed directly to the Guard House to report our findings to the Captain. He greeted us in his moody way, we finally found out his name! Roger the Guard Captain was pleased we made it back and very pleased that we had found a lead. The news that the Sharpfeather Clan and the Cultists were possibly working together worried him. The Sharpfeather Clan had been one of the leading forces that attacked Bastion during the battle for Bastion a few months ago. Several pockets of the destroyed city were still inhabited by the Goblins. If they are allied with the cultists then something needs to be done sooner rather than later. That is your next mission, search out the Sharpfeather Clan and continue to investigate the goings on of the cult. Bring any information you gain back to me and we will continue from there. For now, you will need to head to Lord Aethern’s guild office. There you will finalize your guild and receive an official adventuring charter.

So we found ourselves at the Guild office, we officially became the Multiplying Electrified Direbears. Martin was elected Guild Leader after a small discussion and some small insults towards Ereden from Rosdove. The office presented a Dream Stone to Martin, explaining that as long as he was within the range of an active dream tower he would be able to access the Council of dreams where all of Bastion’s Guild Masters meet and report to one another the findings and happenings of the region.

Dream Council Meeting: Martin arrived at his first Dream Council a little concerned since he had never experienced anything like this before. Looking around he was sitting at a long wooden table, every chair was filled by another guild leader. We went around the table filling each other in on what had been happening in the world. After Martin finished telling the tale of the Wizard Tower, two of the Members a brother and Sister named Jean-Ralphio and Mona-Lisa suddenly attacked each other. Apparently, it wasn’t normal and other members of the council stepped in and knocked them out, making them fade from the dream. The rest of the council looked around becoming aware of a dark aura permeating through the dream. A dark figure was at a distance, we approached carefully. Before us stood a humanoid body with an octopus-like head.

Martin: “That is an Illithid… I am way out of my element…”

The rest of the Council attacked and after a few strikes, the creature vanished from the dream. The Council seemed distressed. They believed that their meetings here were safe from prying eyes. Defenses would need to be set up in the future in case of further interference. We continued our updates. The most significant thing to happen was the discovery of a thieves guild called The Whisperers. They are apparently active in all three major cities in the area: Bastion, Aehra Hakesh (The Radiant Oasis), and Adorak (The City of Shadows). We also learned that Lord Aethern in Bastion was under investigation for the murder of the old Sultan of Aehra Hakesh… So these were things to consider going forward.

End of Game Five.

Thoughts on the game: We finally made it back from our quest to the wizard tower. Great, it’s always nice to finish a small adventure. It did only leave us with more questions that desperately need answers. Quests leading to bigger quests! Finalizing our guild contract opens us up to finally interacting with the other guilds. I don’t have all of their names yet but I know two of them are called Bardaritaville and Adventures AF. I’ll get the rest of them in time. The highlight of the night was the Dream Council. Getting insight into the larger story of Vigilante is awesome and really makes me want to keep at it. Oh! I’m level three now! Huzzah!

Again I’ll explain the game, the games at Vigilante are a combination of several D&D groups all active in the same world and all of them influence the events of the town of Bastion and surrounding area. I have a better idea of where this will lead but there are still a ton of things to do and uncover. The guilds allow everyone to exchange items and it also allows players to switch parties to pursue different quests and be part of events. Overall, I think it will continue to work out and I’ll keep posting updates of my weekly games!

[hungarianmudkip69]

weird things/stories about my dad’s family (mostly his mom’s side)

(note: I don’t want to list last names here for privacy but I always call the two sides by the last names so for clarity, my dad’s mom’s side will be called the B Family or the Bs and his dad’s will be called the M Family or the Ms)

-the only name that runs in the B Family is Simeon. I don’t know why. I had a great great uncle named simeon who had three wives who were all named Elizabeth (not at the same time) (Well, there are also a couple people named Earl, but Simeon is the more common one afaik)

-i have two great uncles named William on opposite sides of my dad’s family (Bill B and Will M), both of whom have crashed some type of flying vehicle (Uncle Bill crashed a plane in the Air Force and Uncle Will crashed a helicopter.) If I have any descendants named William i will never let them be a pilot

-my great-great-grandpa (who everyone at the family reunions is descended from) had 13 kids and my great-grandpa was the only one to go to college. This trait somehow kept going through the generations which led to people in my branch of the family having kids later on average which means there are people at the reunions the same number of generations away from our common ancestor as me who have grandkids and i am not even 18 for another 10 days

-my great-grandpa became kind of delusional when he got old and wrote a book called “The Tenacious Bs” about the “history” of our family which it is generally agreed should be classified as fiction, although he believed it to be 100% true. i have been trying to get my hands on this book for years. my uncle bill apparently has 2 copies and has promised to give me one at the family reunion this summer. never have i looked forward to reading a book more

-in that book at one point it lists family members and their occupations. My Uncle Bill is listed as a dentist. My Uncle Bill is currently on his 7th profession including multiple medical professions. None of them have been dentist.

-this book was written before I was born yet when my grandma showed me the list of names when I was like 8 i was upset that I wasn’t listed

-my dad has a cousin named Earl English B. English is one of his names. Why.

-my grandma is named Anne and she was best friends with another woman named Anne growing up. That Anne later married my grandma’s brother, Richard. This means that the son of Uncle Bill (who is my grandma and Uncle Richard’s brother) has two Aunt Annes which apparently gets confusing

-my cousin who is the son of Uncle Bill has the same name as his dad, William Earl B, but everyone calls him Web because those are his initials. In medical school people called him Web MD. Uncle Bill spoke at his graduation and said, “He’s not Web MD. I am. He’s Web MD Jr”

-My cousin Web does fencing. A teenager once tried to mug him on his way to fencing class with a pocket knife. He fought off the teen with his fencing sword, to which the teen said “I should have brought my gun.” My cousin Web said “If you’d brought your gun you’d have my wallet right now and I’d be at home” moral of the story don’t bring a pocket knife to a sword fight

-my great-aunt anne once commented on a vent post on facebook in which i used the word “fuck” precisely once “needs more swear words”

-my great-great-grandpa and his kids built the house in west virginia that my uncle richard and aunt anne live in in the summer and that we visit them at every year. we call it the home place. there’s a giant pile of rocks in a nearby field. we call it the rockpile

-there are cows at the home place. they aren’t my aunt and uncle’s cows. they just let some other guy keep his cows there

-my cousin joe’s first name is actually simeon. it turns out joe is his middle name, which people call him by to avoid confusion as simeon is also his father’s name. i didn’t know that joe wasn’t his first name until last summer. i’ve been seeing him almost every summer for many years now

-one year ben and joe both had bb guns for some reason and they shot a cow pie and it exploded

-last summer there was a snake in the house and my aunt anne was upset that we removed it from the house because it had probably been eating the mice

-my uncle richard and aunt anne grew up in texas and every summer when we stay up there my entire family starts gaining a slight texas accent just from being around them constantly

-my uncle richard once got a chainsaw stuck in a tree

-luckily he had another chainsaw which he could use to get it out

-because west virginia

-that’s a very brief summary of what I like to call the Great Chainsaw Adventure but that’s too long a story for this post (feel free to send me an ask if you want me to tell it tho lol)

-one time my mom left a pot full of water in the sink to soak and the next morning there were two dead mice in there. they’d fallen in and drowned. none of the other mouse traps (all no-kill traps, by the way) caught any mice in the entire two weeks we were there

-i always assumed that my dad’s dad grew up here in the land of corn but no he grew up at a boarding school in the himalayas because his parents were missionaries to burma. this was the single most shocking revelation of my life

-while the B Family is eccentric we don’t really talk to the M Family. We have one good M Cousin: Shanta. She grew up with my dad I think and lives in california and every year sends us these scented lotions or something that her husband makes. when she visited and saw i was playing world of warcraft she was concerned about the violence and asked what education it had

-one of my dad’s cousins on the M Family side went to jail for child porn apparently this is kind of representative of the M Side in general

-honestly if my last name was the same as the B Family instead of the M Family I’d be perfectly happy with that

[sapphyrelily]

Home Without Words

Based on The Quiet World by Jeffery McDaniel.

Warning that this is like 10.5k words, so it’s definitely under a read more.

If you prefer to read it on AO3, here’s the link.

i. Before Frank

It was harder to do it in Ormond, to live by the government’s new stupid rule of one hundred and sixty-seven words per day. Harder, because everyone knew each other, or thought they did. And with less expressed words, you couldn’t quite bring your feelings across as easily, couldn’t quite explain things as well with pen and paper.

It made for a living nightmare, but also a walking dream. Keeping your mouth shut, only nodding and saying things if you absolutely had to. Learning sign language for the times you didn’t want to write, or didn’t have writing implements on you.

It was Susie’s hell.

Nevermind that hell was supposed to be a burning fire pit; hell was the frozen wasteland of Ormond, never quite there, never quite enough.

Every day that she stayed, looking into the silent faces of her parents over dinner, the clinking of cutlery against plates drove her a little closer to the edge. A little closer to understanding why Julie wanted out.

“But where would you go? Surely the rest of the world is silent too.”

Julie took the pencil from her, scrawling a reply on her book.

“Does it matter? Anywhere. Far away from Ormond is all I want. It’s too small, and the quiet gets to you.”

Susie felt like she understood that.

Julie tapped the pencil against her chin. Added a few words below her last sentence.

“It’s like it’s creeping in on you, you know?”

She did. Susie really did.

 ii. Frank

She heard it first in murmurs, which was shocking in itself. No one wasted words on murmurs, anymore.

But she also saw their hands, and in the flashes that she could catch, she worked out enough to pique her curiosity.

Julie would want to know.

-----

Julie already knew.

She had a whole paragraph written out by the time Susie found her, and it took a while to read.

“Mr Andrews got a foster son! Imagine that! Didn’t take him to be the fatherly sort. You think he’s in it just for the money?

“Do you think the boy’s our age? Maybe he’ll come to our school too! It’s boring as hell, hopefully some new blood will spice things up around here.

“Should we go to the office and find out? Sneak over to his place after school?”

Her hand was pushed off the page, and Julie wrote something else down.

“Let’s skip out and go look for him.”

The horror of being caught made Susie's breath catch, and it came out in an equally horrified, “Jules!”

Julie’s head shot up. Everyone else snapped around to look at them.

Susie’s face burned, and she pulled the neckline of her hoodie up, over her nose and mouth. She couldn’t look at any of them. She wanted to disappear.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Julie lean back in her seat, casually resting her arm on the back of her chair. Saw her tip her chin upwards. Susie knew the look everyone else was now receiving; a cold, hard glare, one that dared them to keep looking, to keep staring.

Heads slowly swivelled back to the front of the room, and Julie turned that glare on her.

Appraising. Demanding. Bewildered.

Julie dropped her chin, lips pressed into a line, unimpressed eyes looking at her from beneath a raised eyebrow.

Really, Sue?

Susie’s hands dropped from where she was clutching her hoodie, twisting in her lap. Sorry.

A hand covered hers; cold, as all hands were in Ormond, frozen by the persistent winter. She raised her eyes, but Julie’s gaze flicked to the book, her last sentence underlined twice.

Susie didn’t know how she found the courage, but she shook her head. Reached over and tapped a different sentence on the book. The second last one.

Julie huffed a sigh and pulled back, her chin dipping briefly. Fine. After school, goody-two-shoes.

Susie’s hands felt even colder than before Julie touched her.

-----

Clive Andrews lived in a small bungalow on the edge of Ormond, same as everyone else. Maybe just a little bit further out than the rest of them.

There was no car in the driveway when they snuck up to it, their own vehicle left somewhere down the road. Their footsteps were silent in the snow, and the house looked more and more ominous as they approached.

Susie wanted to turn back, but Julie was holding her hand in a vice grip, pulling her along to the windows at the side of the house. The weak sunlight barely illuminated the rooms they peeked into, and they saw nothing out of the ordinary. Plainly dressed rooms with boring furniture and drab coloured walls, not even a fire burning in the fireplace.

“Mr Andrews sure is boring.”

The spoken words made her heart jump – Susie had to convince herself it was the shock of hearing spoken words, not because Julie’s voice made her stomach flutter.

“Mm-hmm.”

They’d learnt long ago that affirmative humming didn’t count as words. Susie had plenty of words left, but it was habit, now.

Chilled fingertips dug into the back of her hand as Julie squeezed, tugging her along to the next window. They trekked around the house, peeking into every room they could see, but there was no sign of anyone home. Only the garden looked recently disturbed, the top layer of snow scraped off, an abandoned shovel next to it. Clearly, whoever had tried gardening found that the ground was too frozen for that.

Julie slipped her hand from Susie’s, pointing at the shovel. That’s got to be the new guy. Everyone who grew up in Ormond knows better.

Or, Susie signed, he’s just weak.

That earned her a short bark of laughter, and Susie smiled.

They continued round the house but found nothing of importance. Shivering and breaths fogging, they trudged away and back to Julie’s car.

A cold pinpoint kiss on her cheek made Susie glance up – it had started snowing again. That was good – it would cover their footprints before Mr Andrews came home, and no-one would be any the wiser of their trip.

Susie was quietly relieved that they didn’t find anything, but she wasn’t about to tell a grumbling Julie that.

-----

Life went on in Ormond, though it now had bits of interesting news.

An obscene doodle on the bookshop’s wall. Little candy thefts from the grocers. The younger kids telling of someone big and scary who stole their corner booth at the family restaurant.

No one thought any of these petty crimes were anything important, not when there were better things to be doing. But it did spice up boring old Ormond, and Susie was happy to listen to people complain about something other than the cold or homework for once.

An arm sliding around her shoulders startled her from her thoughts. Susie glanced up at Julie, before her gaze slid back to her signing hands.

Party on Friday night. Mum and Dad are going to the next town for some business thing.

Susie nodded. She never did anything at the parties, but as far as Julie was concerned, she was the fire extinguisher of the duo. She kept things under control if anything happened to go wrong. She was the straight-laced one, the quiet one who worked the shadows while Julie worked the spotlight.

It worked out well for both of them and made party cleanup so much easier.

Susie tapped Julie’s hand. Who’s coming?

The same. Everyone’s invited, we’ll see who turns up.

Will Joey be there?

Julie rolled her eyes. He brings the tunes, he has to come.

Susie grinned, but the smile wouldn’t fade though Julie tugged on her hair teasingly.

She wondered if Joey would bring her some new music like she’d asked.

-----

Susie never liked the parties, but Julie always got the best sorts of drinks. Most people wanted the cocktail spiked with vodka or rum or whatever sort of alcohol she could sneak, but Susie thought the fresh fruit juice in her fridge was the best thing. She didn’t usually get juice at home, and nobody else at the parties wanted it, so there was more for her.

Well, almost nobody else.

Her second favourite person in the world loved juice.

The music had started and was pounding through the house. It was only then that she gathered up enough courage to sneak out of Julie’s room. Pausing at the top of the stairs, she peeked down at the sea of bodies, groaning quietly.

Why are there always so many people at these things?

The blasting music meant her second favourite person in the world had arrived, but she wanted some juice first. Susie pulled her hood up over her hair, tucking the strands inside. She snuck down the stairs, sidestepping some particularly messy dancers, and inched towards the kitchen, determined to get her sugar fix.

Before she could reach it, a voice called over the music, “Susie!”

She cringed and froze, rotating slowly on one foot to face the speaker. The rest of the room had already split in two to make a path for her, and a wave of the speaker’s hand sent them all back to their activities.

This was probably the biggest reason why Susie hated the spoken word limit. Every word you spoke drew attention to you, and if there was anything she hated, it was attention.

He knew this, and he still did it to her. Ugh. Why did she put up with him?

The person who had called her pulled something out of his pocket, waving it over his head. Susie’s eyes grew round, her annoyance forgotten. Her feet tapped frantically against the carpet as she sped down the cleared path, pushing others out of her way.

A laugh greeted her as she bounced up, trying to snatch the cassette tape from his hand. “What, no hellos?”

He must have saved a lot of words that day, if he was willing to spend them on her. “Hi Joey. That for me?”

She beamed up at him and he shook his head at her, an answering grin on his lips. He lowered the cassette to her, SUZIE spelled on it in bold marker. “Who else do I make mixtapes for?”

Susie grabbed it and stuffed it in her hoodie pocket, jumping up to hook her arms around his neck. “Thanks, Joe. Love you.”

Sturdy arms pulled her into an answering embrace. “Love you–” His words cut off with a choked breath, and Susie pulled back to see Joey’s face contorted.

She felt her expression fall. Pulled her hands free to sign, You used your last words for me?

His answering smile was weak. I thought I had enough.

Susie punched his shoulder and dove in for another hug. She knew he could feel her fingernails digging into his back, her words clear. You idiot.

She felt him turn, and something light touch her hair. She didn’t know her hood had fallen back.

Only for you.

Hushed whispers spread quickly through the room, and they pulled apart, curious to see what it was that sparked the word flurry.

Who it was.

A tall, lanky figure stood in the doorway, face obscured by the shadow of their hood. Susie saw Julie break off from the group she was standing with and head towards them, and she made to follow.

A hand on her elbow held her back, Joey signing for her to approach slowly. She nodded, but her smaller stature made it easier to duck around people, and she reached Julie long before Joey did.

It was just as well, because Julie signed to her immediately. How many words do you have left?

Susie counted. About a hundred and thirty?

Julie nodded. I’ve got enough to introduce myself, but you might have to translate for me. She tilted her head towards the guy – he had removed his hood now – and said to him, “Welcome. I’m Julie.”

“Frank Morrison.” He nodded, eyes taking Julie in with a quick glance, before returning to linger on her face. His hands were still firmly entrenched in his pockets – strange behaviour, for a society that now depended on them to communicate. His voice was deep. Not as deep as Joey’s, but still pleasant to listen to. As his Adam's apple bobbed, Susie made out a shadow on his throat. A tattoo?

His eyes slid to Susie, then above her shoulder. She glanced up to where Joey had stopped behind her and was giving Frank the once-over, arms crossed over his chest.

“Susie. Joey.” She gestured at herself and Joey in turn, and at Julie’s signing, added, “Haven’t seen you around before.”

She didn’t voice what they were all thinking. There aren’t any Morrisons in Ormond. There weren’t any, before you.

Frank’s lips turned up at the corner, his eyes still on Joey. “Clive’s my new dad.”

Susie saw Julie’s eyes sparkle, and a knot of dread sat heavy in her stomach as realisation crept in. She knew that look. She didn’t like where this was bound to go. But Julie was gesturing to the kitchen, so she said, “Would you like a drink?”

His eyes slid back to hers, then to a smiling Julie, a hint of surprise in them. “I would.”

Julie beckoned to him, and he took his hands out of his pockets, trailing after her. Joey put a hand on Susie's shoulder before signing, He seems like a badass. And cool.

You sure? Her hands twisted together after the sign. I’m worried.

You always worry. He put his hands on her back and pushed her towards the kitchen, where there were drinks and snacks and a giant whiteboard to write on.

Julie had already started on the whiteboard when they entered, making her apologies for running out of words. Frank was nodding along as he sipped a glass of the cocktail, occasionally putting it down to make clumsy signs.

Julie caught Susie’s eye as she was pouring herself a drink. She sighed and put her glass down, where it was immediately snatched up by Joey. She shot him a glare, but all he did was lift the glass to toast her, and she rolled her eyes. Keeping her back to him, Susie grabbed herself another glass as she addressed Frank. “Can you sign? Or read them?”

Frank turned to her, surprised again. “Some. Didn’t bother to learn.”

Susie read Julie’s hands, translating, “We can teach you. Much easier than writing when you run out.”

She watched as Julie turned a lazy, suggestive smile on Frank, and her stomach flopped nervously. She really didn’t like where this was going.

“Sure.” Frank took a deep draw from his glass. “But not tonight. Aren’t we gonna have some fun?”

-----

Frank, as it turned out, was very good at basketball. And knife tricks. And doing dangerous, stupid things.

He was older than them, been kicked out of many schools, many homes. But he was tough and confident and indomitable. Completely unafraid and dashingly handsome. A badass, as Joey has so succinctly put it.

Julie was enraptured. Joey worshipped the ground he walked on. Susie was terrified.

But where Julie went, she also went, because this was definitely a fire waiting to happen, and she was their fire extinguisher.

And because she had loved Julie for as long as she could remember. She had to be there for her, no matter where she went. No matter what she did.

It took a while, but Frank had come to accept that Julie and Susie were a package deal. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to steal Julie away whenever he could. Where he couldn’t steal her away, Julie convinced Susie to let them go, with whispered promises and fluttery breaths against her skin.

How could Susie say no? She’d watched Julie’s back for years, and she knew she always would. All that she had, she’d give for Julie.

Julie knew that, and wasn’t afraid to exploit it, sometimes.

Susie wasn’t as slim and tall as Julie was, but all her parents needed was an assurance that there was a female silhouette sleeping in her bed. Susie spent too many nights in Julie’s bed and not her own, but her parents didn’t care. They didn’t mind turning their daughter over to the richer set of parents. They didn’t care about the exorbitant amount of ‘sleepovers’ the girls seemed to have, despite the fact that they were much too old for sleepovers.

Susie wanted to complain, and she did grumble to Joey about it. The other boy had laughed at her and expressed his wish to be part of their adventures. Frank and Julie had all the fun, and they weren’t afraid to brag about it.

Susie didn’t want their sort of fun. Julie had been sent to detention too many times because she’d been caught skipping class to hang out with Frank. They’d nearly suspended her a few times, but Ormond was small, and Julie’s parents were rich. So they kept dodging the line, toeing way too close to it, while Susie lay in Julie’s bed and fretted.

Not that she was complaining too much about that. She got to wear Julie’s pretty nightdresses and breathe in the scent of her. She got to lie in her warm, comfortable bed, surrounded by Julie’s scent, and imagine that Julie would kiss her.

Kiss her with the sort of passion she used to kiss Frank, not the sort of kisses they shared because they were ‘practicing’.

Her only consolation was that Julie came back at the end of the night, chilling her with wind-frozen fingers. Her reward was the reassurance that she was safe, as Julie laid her head on Susie’s chest to sleep.

Sometimes, Julie brought her gifts. Tiny shiny things that she had acquired when she was with Frank, tiny things with price tags that even someone with Julie’s allowance would balk at. Susie suspected she knew where they came from, and hid them carefully in her treasure chest, ignoring the implications for the businesses that had lost them. At least Julie had thought of her, remembered her enough to bring her something.

Susie appreciated the thought, she really did.

Susie didn’t know if it was Julie or Joey, but one of them convinced Frank that they should be allowed to come along on their gallivanting.

The first time they went out, Susie was afraid. So afraid, that she refused to set foot in the store they were raiding and insisted on playing watchdog. Joey had shaken his head at her and ducked into the store. Julie shrugged and left – she knew Susie too well, and forcing her would just cause a scene.

But Frank had tilted his head and looked at her with surprise and curiosity. He seemed to do that a lot. Looking at her as if he was seeing her for the first time. Seeing that she could do something for him.

Then he had nodded. Told her to whistle if someone was coming, right before ducking into the store. Susie never got to tell him that she didn’t know how to whistle.

Thankfully, she didn’t need to whistle that night. Or the next night. Or the one after that.

She got used to watching the darkness, tuning her ears to footsteps that didn’t belong to the other three. When she needed to signal them, she snapped her fingers. Tapped her foot. Clicked her tongue, if it really came down to it.

Joey teased that she was treating them like animals, calling them with clicks and snaps. But she couldn’t whistle, and it was the closest thing she got to a quiet alarm.

Frank didn’t mind. He loved her watchful eyes and sharp ears, and the smooth honey of his voice always showered her with praise. She shouldn’t listen. She couldn’t. But he was charming and confident and brave, and she wanted to be like that too.

She wanted Julie to look at her the same way that she looked at him.

Like he was the sun, and she was a flower opening its petals to greet him.

It was several months after their first meeting, and Frank had started getting better at the signs. Susie no longer had to translate his poor signs for others, or spend her extra words explaining signs to him. Not that he didn’t try, sometimes, to convince her to be his mouthpiece. He swore too often. It was funny, how one hundred and sixty-seven words disappeared when you let out a cuss word or two every few minutes.

It was interesting that he’d noticed that she always had the most words left, of anyone in their group. Joey used his words up quickly, but he worked in a shop. When customers refuse to look at you, you have no choice but to address them verbally. Julie didn’t usually have many left, but she spent her words keeping the remnants of her popular clique in line. Or explaining her every movement to her parents. Or, Susie suspected, talking to Frank.

Susie was small and invisible and had no one but the three of them to speak to. She was good at signing, and that only saved her more words.

No one had to know that she was really saving her words for Julie. For a day when she would be brave enough to whisper to her all the things that she loved about her. The word allowance didn’t carry over into a new day, but as long as Susie kept enough of them, she’d be able to work through her list eventually. That was the plan, at least.

Frank couldn’t know what her plans were – surely she wasn’t that obvious – but it was still interesting that he was beginning to see her. See her as more than just Julie’s shadow, her tag-along, her source of extra words. There were a total of two people in Ormond who saw her as her own person, and Susie was pleasantly surprised that she was able to add one more person to that list.

Perhaps the newcomer to their little town wasn’t a bad thing, after all.

They spent more and more time with each other as a group. Doing the worst things – illegal, law breaking things – but also the best things. The small things. The normal, day to day teenage things. Playing cards, watching snatches of television when there was enough service. Sneaking into the movies when there was something good playing. Attempting and failing to do their homework, and copying Susie’s afterwards. Playing pranks on each other, because what sort of friends were they, if they didn’t make each others’ lives awful?

It was terrible, really, but Susie felt more and more at home with them. She’d never had many friends before, and somehow, a fourth made them a group of friends. Before Frank, the three of them had never felt quite right together, not when Joey was busy working and Julie had the other kids at school dogging her heels. Even when it was just Julie and herself, all they did was talk. They didn’t do anything exciting, ever.

Her parents never let her hang out with Joey. He wasn’t allowed to come over, and she wasn’t allowed to see him, because they thought the colour of his skin would rub off on her. The only times they could meet was at the library, because the librarians didn’t care who read the books, only that you returned them after you were done.

It was a wonder they stayed friends, when they saw so little of each other. But it was the way they had to work, and they were always comfortable around each other, no matter the amount of time they spent apart.

Frank was the glue that brought them together. Held them together. He turned their mundane lives into something more. More than just quiet teenagers left on a shelf to collect dust and rot. More than the silence and cold that defined everyone in Ormond.

It was novel and different and exciting. Susie could appreciate why Julie was drawn to Frank and his outrageous actions. Even if Frank’s mad ideas tended to make Susie very afraid of the law.

One night when Julie’s parents were away and they were sitting around her fireplace, Frank suggested making masks, especially for when they went out on dares. Much easier to stay blank, he said.

Anonymous? Joey had suggested. It was a running joke that Frank was awful at signs.

Too complicated a sign, Frank replied. He flipped Joey the bird anyway, to let him know he knew exactly what he was implying. Susie pinned Joey’s hands before he could say something ruder back.

But anonymous it was, though it was also to make themselves look bigger and scarier. What was the point of dares – especially intimidation dares – if you couldn’t intimidate anyone?

It took them a while to make their masks, and it was to be a surprise.

Not that it really was a surprise, when you were Susie. People just told her things.

Julie copied Frank’s initial mask idea, planning on making a massive grinning mask, for smiling in the face of adversity. She scrapped it later, going for something that resonated more with her instead. A mask with its mouth crossed out. Zipped up. It depended on how you wanted to see it.

Susie saw what she was doing. A silent mask, for the girl inside. The girl inside who was silenced, because children were meant to be seen, not heard. Because girls were pretty centrepieces, but that’s all they were. Ornamentation.

Now the silenced would be the silencer. Susie couldn’t deny Julie that liberation. She rather admired her for it.

Joey wanted to be the face of death. He combined a half mask of a broken skull with a black bandana, the latter tied around his neck. It looked kind of strange to have a mask extending down like that, but Susie could understand why he made it that way.

The bandana covered his neck and jaw, and the mask covered his face. Added to the gloves and full-length clothing, he’d be completely anonymous when he wore it, his distinctive profile hidden behind folds of fabric. He would just be another teenager causing trouble, rather than a black teenager causing trouble. It was safer for him, especially when people in Ormond were still racist and believed blacks should be their slaves.

Joey was so much better of a person than the rest of them. They should be his slaves, Susie thought.

Hearing about their masks, Susie began to come up with her own ideas. She wanted to craft something that was uniquely her, that conveyed the essence of who she was.

She made a cracked mask, for her cracking façade. For the shell of who others thought she was, and the braver, bolder form of herself peeking from behind the cracks. The mask was held together by her old braces, a reminder of many things. One – the person she was before she had gotten them, someone whom others bullied because her teeth weren’t straight. Two – an old life of hiding, a life of walking around in shame. It all seemed like fog, to her. It felt like so long ago, when she’d spent all her time hiding behind Julie. It felt like so long ago, when she used to lie in Julie’s bed and pretend to be her while Julie was out with Frank. Now it was the four of them, and she couldn’t help but admit it to herself – she liked it. She really liked it, that feeling of belonging.

The mask reveal went better than Susie expected – given that hers was the only one that had been a secret. Everyone else didn’t know how to keep their mouths shut around her.

Julie thought hers looked cool, though Joey teased her for being edgy. That was his job, he said. Susie had jabbed him in the side.

But Frank looked at it and nodded, his crooked grin holding approval. Not even a face for people to look at and relate to. Blankness is intimidating, isn’t it?

Susie hadn’t even thought about it that way, but it sounded good.

It felt good, to have Frank’s approval.

When they put on their masks for the first time, sitting in the pale light of the fire in the abandoned lodge on Mount Ormond that they’d claimed as their own, they weren’t just Frank, Julie, Susie and Joey.

They were more. They were a group tested in scores of intimidation dares, the quick work of spray paint and light fingers. They were the phantoms that stalked the night, that did whatever they wanted, uninhibited and free.

They were anonymous, unafraid and strong.

They were the Legion.

 iii. The Legion

Susie never stopped being afraid, but she didn’t deny that it was liberating to put on her mask and not be her boring self, if only for a few hours.

They were quick and efficient. Few ever caught them. It was refreshing to let loose, to pour out the rage and suppressed emotion she’d squashed into a corner of her mind.

They should not have needed them, but Frank insisted they have weapons. For protection against the wild animals up by the lodge, he insisted. Better safe than sorry.

You just want to scare people more easily, she signed, but Frank turned away, as if he didn’t see.

That response nagged at her, and a large part of her didn’t quite believe him. So she didn’t get a knife like the others. Frank told her he could get her a generic knife, but he had gotten himself and Julie a pair of pretty custom-made ones, and Joey had gotten some fancy knife himself – a karambit?

Susie liked being anonymous, but not like that. She didn’t want to be generic. She wanted her own identity, but she also didn’t want something that would hurt people too badly. She truly didn’t believe the knives were just for 'protection against the wildlife'.

So she took a broken wooden ruler and taped some compass needles she found to it. Her teachers said math couldn’t kill anyone. Now, it might. Or at the very least, it’d scare someone off.

Julie had laughed at her makeshift knife, but agreed that it was fitting. Susie wasn’t bold like them. She’d never carry a real knife.

Susie had laughed with her, but her chest hurt, as if Julie had stabbed her with her nice, new hunting knife. She could be brave. She wanted to prove she could be brave. She just didn’t believe Frank on this. This was her way of being brave, but also cautious. It was a step out from the shadows that she usually hid in. Surely Julie could see that. They’d known each other for years.

Joey only partially understood.

“She’s not wrong, Sue.” Joey’s words were soft, hidden by the crackling of the fire and the scraping of metal against wood. “You’re softer than the rest of us. ‘S not a bad thing.”

Susie hugged her knees closer to her chest, tucking her chin in. “I don’t wanna be soft. ‘M just being careful.”

“Careful’s fine. But soft isn’t weak.” He lowered what he was crafting and looked at her. “Soft is a mask. It’s your disguise.”

She thought about that. About fooling others into thinking she was weak and vulnerable, and striking them when they expected it the least. They'd be so blinded by her façade, they’d never see it coming. It was a satisfying thought.

It was a crazy thought. Where had it come from?

She didn’t want to attack people. She was trying to be cautious.

The scraping sounds stopped. There were several puffs as Joey blew the dust off, and held it out to her, handle first. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “Jules is wrong about one thing.”

Susie raised her eyebrows in question. She still felt too weak to make a sound, and she didn’t want to sign.

He nodded towards what he was holding out – her makeshift knife. “It’s a real blade. You’ll do some nasty damage with that.”

She reached out, took the blade. Her fingernails slotted into the grooves that Joey had dug out of the wood, each etching spelling out a word.

A movement caught her eye. She looked up and Joey began signing.

Any cut made with that knife isn’t going to be clean. It’ll scratch and bite and tear. It’s like a wild animal, ripping a bite out of you.

Susie felt a weak smile lift her lips. She opened her hand and looked at her weapon, at the fresh wood shavings clinging to her fingernails. At the dull and sharp compass needles sticking out at angles. At the serrated, splintered edge of the ruler. At the thick roll of duct tape that held it all together.

SUZZIE :)

The freshly carved name grinned at her, and it looked right, sitting on the handle. The smiley looked dangerous – unassuming but sarcastic, and it promised pain to any who crossed her.

She had wanted a harmless blade, because she didn’t want to hurt people. But Joey was right; what she had made was bound to leave a nasty scar, instead of the clean wound a regular knife would deliver. Maybe it wouldn’t cut as deep – rulers aren’t the strongest, after all – but it would still hurt to be hit by it.

She had made it. It was her blade, and she would own it and the consequences that came with it.

She would be the wild animal that stalked people. She could claim that identity. She could be brave.

Susie slid over, wrapping an arm around Joey’s back, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Thanks, Joe.”

An arm slid over her shoulders, tucking her against him. The familiar weight of his head rested against hers – reassuring, affirming.

“Always.”

-----

Susie wasn’t the fondest of her job of watchdog, now that she too felt the thrill of the illegal activities. Of the quiet satisfaction when she watched the fallout, the discovery of what they had done. The others always got all the fun, with the theft and vandalism. She still didn’t like the bullying that much; it reminded her too much of what she had gone through before she’d met Julie.

But they were nice about it. Joey always swapped places with her, saving her the finishing flourish of their hastily painted murals. Frank always let her pick some candy or extra snack to steal.

Julie still held her hand, and told her she was strong when she was terrified.

Sometimes she kissed Susie and told her she was brave and bold and getting better all the time.

Susie wasn’t sure what those kisses meant, not when they didn’t have to practice, not anymore.

She should have gotten used to the mini heart attacks by now, but she didn’t think she ever would. She loved Julie so much that it hurt.

She wished she could kiss Julie forever.

It was madness. It was fun and awful and made her blood pound faster than one of her favourite songs. This, Susie thought, was what belonging felt like.

They were the Legion. They were her Legion, and she would do anything for them.

Which was why, she thought, she was stuck in this situation now. Perched on Joey’s shoulders, his hands clamping around her calves. White paint coating her fingers and splattered in her hair, throwing out lines on the mural they’d been asked to do.

A few strokes here, another few there, all while trying to keep her balance. It was a bit too late to wish they’d hauled a ladder up to the lodge – she’d have to make do with the Joey-stepladder, and hope she wasn’t too heavy.

Susie put her closed fist on the wall and leaned back, looking over her brushstrokes. It looked alright. Not her best work, but it was as close as it got to the sketch.

Susie tapped Joey’s hand, pointing down when he turned slightly to look. Gently, slowly, he lowered her to the ground, and she stumbled off, flattening herself against the wall, arms spread out like eagle wings. She heard a snort behind her, and half-turned to grin at him. Joey shook his head at her and walked away, rolling his shoulders and stretching out the chinks in his neck.

Susie stuck her tongue out at his back before bending to pick up the sketch. The top half of it was completed – thanks to Joey’s assistance – and now she had to work on the bottom half. Glancing up at the wall, she pictured it in her mind, then smiled and dipped her brush in the paint.

Joey might not get too long a break, after all. She’d need him back to finalise the details.

-----

Frank was delighted with the mural. He actually picked her up and spun her around, and spared a few words to tell her that it looked better than the artist sketch he’d gotten. “Have I ever told you that you’re brilliant, Sue?”

Susie grinned when he put her down, lifting a hand and tilting it from side to side. Sometimes.

Behind him, Julie leaned against a stack of boxes, a smug grin on her face. “Didn’t believe me then, did you, Morrison?”

Frank flipped her the bird without turning around. It only made Julie’s grin deeper.

Susie caught her eye and threw her arms out towards the mural with a flourish. How is it?

“Spectacular.” Julie’s head tilted to the side as she looked at the mural again, a gentle smile pulling her lips up. “You’re so talented.”

Susie’s heart felt like it was glowing with all the praise. Spoken praise was always so much better than just signed or written praise.

Julie’s praise made her heart sing extra loudly.

“Really solidifies this place as our base.” Joey was looking at the mural, arms tucked into his armpits. He glanced down at Susie, a grin splitting his face. “Gotta do something to celebrate.”

Harass the cinema for popcorn? Susie signed.

Frank laughed, the sound startling her. When she met his eyes, they were alight with a maniac fire.

Yes, let’s do that. His grin was sharp, approving, his signs eager. Good idea.

She’d been joking, but it didn’t matter. Together, the four of them could do whatever they wanted. They were invincible.

They filed out of the lodge, and Susie spared a glance back at the mural on the second floor. The white paint shone against the dark wall, sharply cut letters reminding everyone of who they were.

The Legion.

 iv. Slipping up

It was an accident. It had been an accident. She didn’t expect it to be a fatal one.

She was watching the front door, because that’s where people usually walked past. That’s where they had come in.

Joey usually scoped out the back, but he had been too full of rage and indignation. He’d forgotten to check.

Susie had just caught Julie’s signal that she was going to check the back and nodded back. Then she was gone.

And discovered.

Her cry had stabbed Susie, a sharp bolt of terror lancing through her being.

Susie hadn’t thought. She left her post and sprinted towards the sound, crouching in the shadows to peer around the corner.

Julie’s hand was tugging at the hand over her mouth, the other trying to push off the arm around her middle. Her cries were muffled now, desperate and panicked. There was a skittering sound as her foot connected with something, and Susie vaguely recognised the oblong white shape as Julie’s mask. It must have been knocked off when the person grabbed her.

A similar scene flashed into Susie’s mind: hiding under the bed, hands over her mouth. Julie being picked up by her father in the same way, hand over mouth and arm over middle to stifle her cries and struggling. A thump as the bodies hit the bed above her, the heavy bulk of her father pinning her thrashing legs.

“You better keep your mouth shut.” The harsh whisper came from above, a guttural growl that made Susie tremble. “You tell anyone what you saw, and I’ll kill ya, you hear?”

Susie couldn’t know what Julie said back. All she heard was whimpering. Whether it was hers or Julie’s, she didn’t know.

The sharp slap reverberated through the room, and the mattress springs creaked as Julie’s father got off the bed. Then a thump and crack so loud, Susie thought she saw the bedframe shudder. Finally, the sound of footsteps shuffling off the carpet. The door slammed.

Susie didn’t realise she couldn’t see because there were tears blocking her vision.

She crawled out from under the bed, pulling herself up to look at Julie. Her friend had her blanket stuffed in her mouth, fists clutching big handfuls of the material.

The moonlight was dim, but Susie could still see the shine of dark liquid on Julie’s forehead.

It was happening again. Susie was frozen in place, like all those years ago. Fingers curled into fists, every muscle locked. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move–

Julie’s assailant cried out, and she stumbled forward. Her chest was heaving, hands covering her mouth. Susie knew there were tears streaking her cheeks even before she caught her and her hands cupped Julie’s face.

Familiar hands slid around her waist, Julie’s head dropping onto her shoulder as Susie held her close. One hand on Julie’s back, one tangled in her shorn hair. Feeling the wetness on her neck, the strangling vice of arms crushing her torso. Her head resting against Julie’s, until she realised her mask was digging into her. Susie tore it off, pushing her hood back.

And saw what Frank had done.

It was the cleaner, she realised. The cleaner at the store – this store, where Joey had worked at, up until that day. He was a calm man who was friendly to her and gave her gum when she couldn’t afford new music.

It was the cleaner who had grabbed Julie. Who had been trying to stop thieves or vandals. Who had gotten them instead.

Who had gotten Frank’s knife in his back.

(They were the Legion. They never failed.)

“Finish it.” Frank stared down at them, glancing at the man on his knees, groaning.

It was serious. Frank was being serious. He wouldn’t speak if he didn’t truly mean it.

For the limit that was one hundred and sixty-seven, it was surprising how many words they saved for each other. How many words they sequestered and hid and shared together. But the words she just heard weren’t for jokes and laughter. These words didn’t imply harmless fun.

Susie couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t. But– But–

She saw him move first. The pooling shadow at her shoulder. Joey. Her Joey, who had worked at this store, who knew this man, who was the worst at the dares because he knew what it was like to be oppressed. Joey. Joey–

He took the knife from Frank’s hand, punched it into the cleaner’s side. The man cried out as the blade slid in and out of his body, but Joey’s face was turned away. Susie could see the line of his jaw; he, too, had taken off his mask, and his jaw was tight, tighter than he’d ever clenched it. Tighter than she’d ever seen it clenched, even when the terrible bullies in their town had been punching and kicking him for being black.

Susie knew that first-hand, because she had been there. She had pushed the boys throwing the punches aside, flung herself on top of Joey to protect him.

It worked. They got in trouble for kicking her, because some of them hadn’t stopped in time, hadn’t seen her appear.

Joey’s jaw was swollen then, and he had clenched it against the ice that his mother held to his face. Clenched against the pain, of what was hopefully not a broken jaw. They wouldn’t get the treatment for it, if it was.

Joey. She couldn’t believe it. Joey had listened to Frank. Susie listened too, but not now, not when they were hurting someone purposefully to the point of death.

They shouldn’t be hurting people at all.

Susie couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t do what Frank asked of her, not this time–

She stared at the knife Joey held out to her. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t meet his eyes.

“Damn it, Sue, do it!”

Frank’s words shocked her; her fingernails dug in, and Julie winced. Susie loosened her grip in apology, but Julie had already pushed out of her arms and taken the blade. She knelt in front of the man, both hands grasping the blade, and slid it into his heart.

Susie felt the floor under her hands. No. No. Not Julie too–

She was hauled up, Julie’s fingers wrapping hers around the slick handle. She caught a glimpse of her face; contorted with the grimace that came with holding her tears back, the dark streaks on her cheeks showing where she had tried to wipe the tear tracks away. Frank loomed over her, his hand wrapping around her trembling ones, steadying her.

Steadying. Her.

His other hand was on her back, pushing her whole body forward, until the knife pierced the man’s throat.

She hoped the cleaner saw her apology on her lips. She was so sorry.

She was horrified. It had been so easy. The tiniest bit of resistance, the faint pressure. Then Frank pushed, and the knife slid in like she was cutting warm butter. Except butter didn’t splatter onto her hands, didn’t gurgle like the dregs of bathwater in the drain. Didn’t fold forward and pour out onto her hands – hot and wet and saturated with guilt.

Frank pulled her back, pinched the knife from her limp hands and wiped the blade on his jacket. “Clean up. Fast. Joe and I will take the body out.”

“Where?” Susie’s voice was a whisper. A hoarse, hoarse whisper.

“Mount Ormond.” They all looked at Julie, her face clean of tears now, though blood streaked her face. “No one ever looks there.”

Frank nodded. Gestured to Joey. They picked the body up by the arms and legs and dragged it away, while Julie helped Susie up.

Susie couldn’t say anything. Everything was foggy, and there were blanks in her memory. She looked at the mop. Julie had given it to her. She saw her friend hauling a bucket of water towards her, and something clicked in her mind. She began to scrub at the drying blood on the floor. Slowly. Then faster. Faster. She scrubbed the floor vigorously until it was clean. It terrified her that she knew well how to clean up bloodstains.

“Sure reminds you of my dad, doesn’t it?” Julie’s low chuckle reached her ears. Susie walked over to dunk her mop in the bucket, not saying anything. But her stiff, bloodied fingers trembled on the handle, and she knew Julie could see that.

A bandaged-wrapped hand covered hers. Hid the blood, however momentarily. She looked up; Julie’s mouth was set, her eyes downturned at the corners. “We’ll get away, Sue. We always do.”

Susie opened her hand under Julie’s. Their fingers laced together, squeezing briefly. There was a slam from outside; Joey’s trunk. They looked at each other, fingers releasing, pulling apart quickly.

Too quickly. It was a terrible thing, but Susie wanted to keep holding Julie’s hand, even in that situation.

They picked up the mop and bucket and ducked into the bathroom. Threw out the dark water, rinsed the cleaning implements. Susie washed her hands, but she couldn’t get the feeling of blood off her. She scrubbed viciously, nails tearing at her hands. Julie had to take her by the elbows and pull her back, tell her it was time to go.

She had to get the blood off her hands, out from under her nails. She didn’t want to remember it.

It was warm, like the comforting heat of hot water over cold hands. It was hot, but it wasn’t water. A part of her had liked it.

She didn’t want to like it. It was murder.

Julie stopped her on their way out, piling their discarded masks in her arms. They couldn’t leave any more of themselves behind. Susie wished she had been the one to remember, but she had been too distracted, too preoccupied.

They got into the car, and she caught a glimpse of herself in the rear-view mirror. Susie’s expression hadn’t changed from when she looked into the bathroom mirror earlier; she didn’t think it would. She remembered what Julie said to her, and how she couldn’t find the signs or words to respond.

She hoped Julie read her face and meaning, because she was too afraid to say it out loud. Too afraid to respond to her.

Will we really get away, this time?

 v. The Fog

The drive up to Mount Ormond was too quiet, broken only by the crunch of wheels on the icy ground. Susie thought she was too scared, but the slowing of the vehicle stirred her back to awareness, and she realised, Oh. I fell asleep.

Then, I was tired enough to fall asleep.

Perhaps murder wasn’t too awful on the conscience after all, if she managed to rest after it.

Beside her, Julie lifted her head, pushing back her hood and rubbing the heels of her hands over her eyes. Her hair was sticking up in all directions, and Susie wanted to smooth it down.

It really wasn’t the time for such thoughts.

They got out of the car, Frank and Joey taking the body while the girls took the shovels. There was a patch of earth not far from the lodge, a place that was once a garden bed. Frank ordered them to start digging there, so they did. It was hard work, even for those of them who knew best how to break up the muddy ice and snow.

Susie wasn’t sure what it was, but Frank stopped all of a sudden, hand going to his knife. He glanced back at them and signed, Saw something. Be right back. Then he took off into the darkness.

The rest of them kept digging. Frank knew how to take care of himself. Didn’t he prove that, just a few hours earlier?

Susie was hot, but her hands were frozen by the time they finished digging. Frank hadn’t come back yet. Together, the three of them hauled the body over and dumped it into the shallow grave, scraping the icy soil back on top.

They looked around. Still no Frank. Susie began to feel a thread of terror for him – they all knew how vicious the wildlife could be, how silent and efficient. By the way Julie was wringing her hands, she was nervous too.

They shone their torches in the snow, looking for footprints. Julie found them first, whistling sharply to call them over. Together, they followed Frank’s muddy prints into the forest, but their torches seemed to grow weaker with every step, the lights barely piercing the fog.

With frustrated sighs, they cast the torches aside – what a time for the batteries to die! – and followed the trail they had found. They huddled together as the cold crept through their jackets, linking arms as their feet clomped along. The path grew darker, the faint moonlight more eerie. The fog seemed to thicken around them, and Susie didn’t dare to look into it for too long. But still they walked, drawn forward by some unknown pull. Perhaps they were just too afraid to turn back.

Susie didn’t know how long they walked for, but the fog got less dense, the light brighter. It seemed like they were following footprints again, and Julie tugged on her arm excitedly to point them out.

Then they were crunching on snow, and the lodge of Mount Ormond was just ahead. But it was bright, as if it was day – surely they hadn’t been walking in circles the whole night? It certainly didn’t feel like they’d walked the night away.

A figure came around the side of the lodge. A familiar figure. Julie’s grip on her arm loosed completely, and she broke into a dead sprint, launching herself at what was undoubtedly Frank.

Susie couldn’t believe her eyes, but she was also frozen stiff, and she knew the lodge had a fireplace. She just wanted to be warm. Joey tugged her along, and she stumbled after him, her knees nearly giving way. Perhaps they had walked the whole night, after all.

Frank released Julie as he saw them approach, sheathing his knife to sign. I followed the trail, and here we are. It’s not our lodge.

Three incredulous stares met his statement, and he beckoned them to follow, walking backwards so he could keep signing. I checked it out. It’s similar to ours, but there are some minor differences. It’s like Spot The Difference. The changes are pretty subtle.

How can you tell? Julie asked this.

Frank nodded towards a man-sized red cupboard next to them. Things like that. Don’t know what they’re for, but you could probably hide a person in there.

The inside of the lodge looked familiar, but also…wrong. Off. There were things about it that weren’t quite the same. Susie couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

Frank waved under her nose, raising his eyebrows when she looked at him. See? It’s different.

She nodded. It was.

There were two claps from the other side of the room – where the registration counter was. Joey waved them over, putting four familiar looking things on the countertop. He raised an eyebrow. What are these doing here?

Their masks. Hadn’t they left them in the car?

Susie reached out to hers, tracing the metal studs. It looked different, too. Older. More weathered. Dirt streaks and odd, rusty brown. She couldn’t quite make out what it was.

Everyone else had taken their masks, pushing back their hoods to put them on. Watching them, Susie felt an odd need to do the same.

She had barely adjusted it so she could see when she felt it. A tug at her brain, a coaxing in her heart. She felt compelled to step outside.

Frank was doing just that, his knife sliding free from its scabbard. Julie followed behind him, fingers flexing on the grip of hers. Susie reached into her hoodie pocket for her blade, the sharp edges of the handle comforting in her hand. Behind her, she knew Joey was doing the same, spinning his karambit on its finger ring.

They followed Frank, tugged along like puppets on a string. Moving of their free will, yet not. Heavily compelled, but still aware of their actions. They spread out in a semicircle around what appeared to be a meat hook, its blade shining darkly with old, crusted blood.

Surprisingly, the sight didn’t make Susie feel like puking.

Black tendrils burst forth from the top of the hook, dark reaching tips curling in on themselves like a deranged hand. Susie watched with detached curiosity. There was nothing to be afraid of. She knew this thing, even though she didn’t.

She was quietly pleased that she was not afraid.

“You are the Legion. And now you are mine. Serve me willingly, and you will not be punished.”

Susie’s fingers clenched around her weapon, dark ambition flaring in her chest. Yes… She would serve. She would do anything for this being.

She saw Frank step forward, sheath his blade. Saw him sign. How to serve?

“Speak freely. I am not like your foolish mortal leaders. You will need not words to serve me, but your speech will not be impeded whilst you are amongst yourselves.”

“How?” Frank's voice was harsh, like one whose vocal chords were severely underused. They were. None of them had spoken freely in a long time. “How do we serve?”

It felt to Susie that Frank, the strongest willed of them, had the compulsion as well.

“I will call you into trials. Hunt down the flies that seek the light. Present them to me on these hooks. Bring them all to me willingly, and you will have free reign.”

“What if we don’t want to?” Frank was bold, to say such a thing.

There was a chittering as the tendrils – claws – clicked together. Susie thought it was their form of laughter. “You will want to. Do you not feel the thrumming in your blade, that sings for blood to feed it?”

Susie looked at her weapon. It looked sharper now, the splintered edges sturdy, the compass needles blunt and rusty. She smiled. It would do great damage.

“Feed me first, and I will give you gifts. You will be stronger and faster. You will be the hunters and never the prey. You will take from those who ought to bow to you. Serve me first, and I will gift you your own kills.”

That shocked Susie back to herself. She wasn’t sure she wanted to kill. Her knife looked ugly, now; a terrible weapon for pain and hurt, to draw out others' misery. She wasn’t sure she could do it.

“Did I say to doubt? Your first calling is to feed me. You are responsible for none of the kills yourself. Not until I grant you the right.”

Susie’s fingers relaxed. That was right. She didn’t have to kill them herself. This entity would do it. She was only the messenger.

Something pulled her hood back, tapped the edge of her mask. She looked up and saw a tendril pointing at her, and it reached under her chin to tilt her head back.

Odd, how human and caring the action felt.

“Feed me first. You will get all the time you want. All the words you want. Pursue the desires of your heart, but only second to when I call you.”

Susie would have nodded, if she didn’t think she might cut herself on that sharp tip.

She knew what it was offering. Time. Words. An eternity with her friends, her Legion. Her Julie.

She would take it.

The tendril drew back, and she pulled her hood up, gazing at it. She could just make out the others looking at the entity as well – her mask didn’t have great peripheral vision. The claws clicked together a last time and disappeared, and they were left alone with the meat hook and the newly falling snow.

 vi. In between trials

There were so many words to be said, and yet none. Every trial was hard, but they got easier, and sometimes, they went days without one.

The Entity took them one at a time, and every trial was different. Every survivor they met was a little different. A little changed, from the last time they met.

It wasn’t those that mattered to Susie. She was unstoppable in trials, the bloodlust of the Entity charging her, sending her hunting. Every time she did a little better, and she found a little gift back at the lodge to help her with her next trial.

Yes, those were nice, but they didn’t matter to Susie. What mattered was the time she got to spend with Julie, sometimes for ages, just sitting by the fire, falling asleep on each other’s laps and shoulders. Sometimes they talked about everything and nothing: about their past lives, about the trials they were in, about the survivors who thought they were so smart.

The Entity had described them accurately: flies. Pests.

Sometimes the Entity dropped other killers into their tiny home, and they had interesting discussions about how to deal with this and that person. It was never boring, and the newfound stream of words just made it better. Liberating.

Funny, how she didn’t mind being branded a killer now. Even though she never really killed, except when the survivors pissed her off spectacularly, and she felt the Entity’s dark hand granting her the strength to take them out herself.

It wasn’t really killing if someone else was guiding her hand, was it?

But for all her confidence in trials, Susie still wasn’t as brave outside of them. Sometimes she found the courage to hold Julie’s hand for no other reason than she’d wanted to. Sometimes Julie would squeeze her hand back; sometimes she’d just smile and shake her head.

But on a very rare sort of sometimes, she’d kiss Julie on the cheek, and Julie would turn around to cup her face and press their lips together, tongue darting out to taste her. Not really like how they used to ‘practice’, because Julie had so much more experience now. It was like discovering her for the first time. For the second time. Learning all the hidden crevices that Julie hid parts of herself in, teasing out half-truths and little confessions, and tasting the perfume of her. It was intoxicating.

Frank didn’t seem to mind that much, the first time he saw them tangled up together when he had come back from a trial. He just said that it was his turn, and pulled Julie away.

He did return her later, to Susie’s puzzlement and delight.

Frank learnt to share, after that.

Time flowed weirdly in the Entity’s realm, but it was a long time later that sometimes became oftentimes, when Julie began to care less about appearances. She began to say she didn’t mind when Susie bounced up to her for a hug, or called her pet names in front of the boys.

She minded less and less when Susie told her she loved her. When Susie told her that she was in love with her.

Sometimes, she reminded Susie that yes, she did love her too.

It was then, on the rarest form of sometimes, that Julie would seek her out to kiss her first, announcing that she was sick of Frank and he could kiss Joey instead.

Susie was sure Joey wouldn’t mind that at all.

She did catch them kissing once, and it made her face hot to see how passionate they were about it. It took a lot of coaxing to get her out of the red locker she’d hid in.

She never let Joey live it down, of course.

It was an odd sort of life, an odd sort of limbo. But it was infinitely more interesting than the Ormond they’d left behind, because now, she got to do thrilling bad things all by herself. She was encouraged to do it, with no repercussions.

She also got to kiss Julie, cuddle with Joey and watch Frank cuss the roof down when Julie beat him at cards. She had all the time in the world, and her favourite people to spend it with. What more could she ask for?

Susie wasn’t sure she left anything important behind when they got taken – when they were called. She had everything she needed, right here. They didn’t even need to eat. It was great.

They were four parts of a whole: Frank, Julie, Susie and Joey. They were called together, and their abilities were the same. They were stronger together.

They were the Legion, and now they would live forever.