#when we were re-stocking on school supplies one year

[dexaroth]

looong post about missing using backpacks and high-school experiences and personal feelings on the general 'busy/executive' look from carrying luggage and stuff. idk lots of thoughts here to summarize

theres this one hole that being done with high-school left me that's just. having a place to go. being busy, sort of..

having a backpack full of trinkets and your pencil case filled with clips and highlighters. or the rare bunches of printing and colored paper for the art projects or those mathematical rulers you used 3 times the whole year

and most importantly.. the feeling of being a Guy who has Places to go. look at all this luggage! the amount of things I need that goes beyond a simple bag! quite the work eh?

of course half of that perception is just 'wow! executive adult with responsibilities!' but not entirely, there are definitely tasks that require a lot of gear and stuff. filming crews, folks with laptops etc. and then there's the elusive Guy with a Big Bag With Wheels. thats the peak of the ideal

as with everything in my life specifically it all circles back to being disabled and having to stay at home bc I literally am not capable of physically doing anything even remotely close to what the generic student/employed person does and I think that helps a lot to the kind of romanticized view I have of this sorta thing

in a good day a majority of people would rather not have to carry and worry about a pack full of stuff or having to carry the weight of a computer and then some. but it's not that bad if you like/love what you're doing even if it requires those things yknow?

every year of high-school, even if it was the worst experience of my life that degraded me mentally physically and made me so fucked I had to cut myself in between or during classes.. I still looked up to the starting week and the feeling of a kind of new beginning. and packing everything to be super ready to whatever was to come like I was about to spend a month in the wild or climb a mountain

camping and stuff is another kind of 'look at all this shit we're packing and gadgets we have to make fire or little lanterns or makeshift homes (tents) that we have' and its just. holy shit man you sure are busy with a lot of stuff to do huh. and you've got the money to buy it all and friends to enjoy it with you. and you're going to the woods for fun and not to run away from your life because everything sucks. you've got your life all figured out! if only I could also match this unrealistic utopic vision that's sold in every sleeping bag package lol! 🙃

and the rest of this romanticized view also extends a bit to gender and self esteem in a way

of course I, a disabled person, would love to be a person that Can go places and even Has places to go and is important enough to have a complex task that needs all that luggage. and looks like a guy. maybe even a fancy guy with fancy bags and fancy clothing. it's all very important, being all that! unlike being a nobody that has to ask for a seat bc he can't stand for 2 minutes without crumpling like a wet sock because of his fucked up spine and spaghetti muscles

everybody looks up to someone who has something that they don't and wish they had or were like.. and I'm so miserable I just wish I mattered enough to be that average guy crossing the street with his bag on his shoulder. and it just so happens that's asking too much of life in my case

[astralflower-writes]

sprinkling kindness

♡ pairing: alex karev x female! reader

♡ genre: fluff

♡ warnings: none

♡ check out my grey's anatomy masterlist here

your family moved to a different town where you met alex.

sort of. your family had also moved the family pharmacy months before. and now that you're living just a few streets away. you're back at being the one who re-stocks and arranges the products.

alex tried to check out your family's store. he'd been banned from the other stores in town as he tried to sneak out the things they needed when their money wasn't enough.

"hey were not open 'till–" you said as you heard the wind chimes.

you stood up from where you were and looked at the person who came in. it was the boy your new neighbors warned your parents about.

the kid who's always stealing stuff from different stores.

"where's your medicine?" he asked. "uhh... we keep it behind the counter."

"we need to wait for my mom and dad to get one." you explained.

he was scanning the store. especially eyeing the small food section you have.

"you want some toast?" you offered him your plate which was settled beside your chair.

"just eat some while we wait." hesitantly, he took the plate from you.

you got the other chair in the supply closet and gave it to him. "what about you?" he asking while he got some on his mouth.

"im fine. i already ate enough." you replied and got back to checking the stocks on the aisle you were working on.

after half an hour your parents' arrived. "oh i see you've got a new friend." your dad said as soon as he saw alex sitting and looking around the place.

"uhh... yeah. he needs to buy some medicine, so we waited for you." you explained as you moved to another aisle to work on.

"okay! follow me kid." you dad said as your mother officially opened the store.

before he got out of the store, you stopped him.

"hey!"

you handed him an empty bag. "put the stuff in here."

he was shocked that you knew that he took some stuff from the store.

"it's fine. i'll just put those on my tab." you whispered and let out a chuckle.

"oh! and i got these for you too."

"i think you like these."

you gave him a plastic bag full of the food products you have inside the store.

"now go! before my mom sees us and gives you more stuff." you laughed.

"just come by if you need more okay?" he just nodded and ran off.

it was a start of your life with alex in it. your parents' offered him to work with you so he had extra cash. he got invited to every dinner during the holidays. you stuck with him when his 'girlfriend' from highschool made fun of his mom. the both of you went through college and medical school together.

and of course, the both of you got accepted to the same hospital for your internship.

after years of residency and fellowship. you were together. and now, you have a home and four beautiful children with him.

"mom? is it true that you gave dad toast and he since then he stuck with you?" one of your kids asked you as you made dinner.

"yeah... that's how i met dad." you replied laughing why did your kid suddenly asked you this stuff.

"why toast?" your kid then sat on the kitchen island.

"it was the only thing i had to share with him."

your kid was about to ask another question when alex came in. "what are we talking about?"

walking around to get to you. "oh he's asking me why i gave you toast."

funny thing is, you gave him toast everytime he feels bad or having a tough day.

"it was a great toast." he said kissing you on the cheek. helping you around the kitchen and your kids started to gather around.

"dad's cooking?"

"then no dinner for me!"

all of them laughed at once. "i can cook! mom's just better" alex made his defense. chasing his kids around the kitchen.

"dinner's almost ready, i need you guys to set up the table. and can someone take out the trash, please." you said as you placed the pasta you made to nice plate.

your dinner table was loud. kids were laughing at some jokes thrown and endless talk about how did alex fall in love with you because of toast.

"dad is such a sucker for mom." one chimed in.

"maybe i can give toast to mom and she'll let me skip my chores." another one said making it obvious that they don't want to do chores.

"no that won't work. it'll only work if dad will give it to mom."

"okay, okay. enough of the toast thing. you kids need to eat those vegetables i still see on your plates." alex said as he tried to feed the youngest beside him.

watching your family together like this, you couldn't ask for more. it's home.

"ew! mom and dad are kissing!"

"do it again!"

"dad stop!"

"more!"

[boldlyanxious]

Dance like no one is watching

Chapter 11

Dance masterlist

All fic masterlist

Marinette felt like she had to force herself out of her apartment when she was meeting up with friends or visiting her parents. Jason had been gone a month but they still talked every day. Sometimes they would just stay on video chat even while they both went around doing the things that needed done. They weren’t even always talking. They were just together even an ocean apart.

Marinette had even managed to keep up with her new influx of orders easily because she worked on them while she and Jason had remote hangouts. She had gotten a big bump right after the show but it fell off a bit after that. It was a little bit higher than her typical sales but she worried it would go right back down to the level it was before. She had meetings with several fashion houses to sell freelance designs to see if they were interested in funding her for her own line under their umbrella.

She turned around her place quickly and grabbed her tablet and a travel sketchbook. She was finally finding the time to catch up with Paul after they reconnected at the show, but like the fashion junkies they were, they planned to check out a new fabric and craft store and an indie fashion show that was using the opening to gain some extra eyes to see their designs. Marinette hoped to find the perfect selection of fasteners or zippers to go with the design she had for Jason’s jacket. She had some options but none of them quite seemed to fit with the pattern she created for him. She made sure to wear one of her own designs and a couple accessories just in case she was noticed and she replenished her stock of business cards.

“Damn girl, you look fabulous!” Paul exclaimed when they found each other in the crowded store.

“Seemed like a good opportunity to show off my skills,” she replied.

“You designed that? Of course you did.” He used his hand to turn her so he could get a look from all angles.

“The accessories too. A girl’s gotta get some business somehow.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t get job offers when we finished school. That’s just criminal.”

“I had internship offers. But no guarantees of ever even getting my designs seen. The pay was barely enough to live on and I need money for fabric.”

“As I said, criminal. You were probably the best in the year.”

“How is your glamorous fashion job going?”

“It’s exactly what you described. I’m fetching coffee for someone and hand sewing their creations. Sometimes I go weeks without even drawing my own designs. No one would see it anyway and I can’t sell it to anyone else until I’m not under contract.”

“That is awful. I don’t think I could manage it. I don’t always love my corporate job but it's steady and they can’t keep me from selling my designs.”

"It really is. I had to get special permission for the showcase and sign something saying I wouldn't sell the designs to another company."

They both loaded up on supplies from the store and rushed away with far too many packages so they could get a good view for the show. They didn’t end up finding seats which was awkward but Marinette still pulled out her sketchbook so she could draw whatever she thought of seeing the new creations. After the show when people were milling about trying to get another glimpse, Paul kept loudly exclaiming about her outfit or accessories if he saw anyone who noticed them. She was oscillating between laughing and blushing but still passed out business cards until she ran out and then was writing the website down for people.

---

Jason groaned when he realized he would be busy during the time Marinette was off work for the next few days. He didn’t have a whole lot planned around the times he was working but the time difference would be a struggle. He could tell she also really enjoyed their time together even if it had to be at this distance.

She had been struggling to hang up even when it was getting very late. Many nights he would insist she lay down in bed and he would read to her until she fell asleep. It had become his favorite time of day. When he first started it he had just used the book he had just picked up to read. Anything to get her in bed to rest and they he would keep at it until she was tired or feel asleep. When they finished that they needed something lighter so he picked his favorite Shakespeare comedy. He cursed the mission again. He just wanted to see her and hold her again.

He went out to his patrol and was possibly slightly more forceful than necessary due to his mood. All frustration aside, the current issues with Mad Hatter should be finished in a few days. They had leads on all the main players and should be able to finish a series of raids in conjunction with the police task force. That should give Jason time to wrap up any loose ends and head to Paris. If he didn’t sleep he could hop on a plane and be there when she got off work in a couple days.

He packed his bags in anticipation.

---

Marinette focused on work to distract herself from her frustrated feelings. Jason had missed their call last night. Which wasn't a big deal but he still hadn't responded to her text. She stayed up far too late waiting for a response. She did end up reorganizing her supplies and doing a full cleaning and maintenance in her sewing machine. That should be really helpful for when she starts working on Alya's wedding dress.

She used her grumpy mood to get through a lot of work for the morning. Calls had been scarce so she wasn't even having to refocus constantly. She jumped when a voice addressed her suddenly. She couldn't think of his name. He was part of the merger team working to find ways to keep the company afloat. She saw Tim standing in the doorway too as if he was just coming out to see her but waiting. Was her report late?

"Oh, sorry. I was very focused." she said. "I'm almost done with my report. I guess I forgot it."

"It isn't due until tomorrow,” the man said. “I was checking to see if you were going to take lunch today."

She glanced at the time. She usually would have gone twenty minutes ago. She lost track of time.

"Oh, yeah. Guess I'm late for that. Lost track of time."

She reached for her jacket and purse. He was still standing there when she turned back as if he was waiting for her. Tim was watching too but trying to pretend he wasn't. Maybe he needed something from her. She looked back at the man in front of her. He shifted slightly and took a breath.

"Would you like to go to lunch with me?" he stammered a bit as he added, "with us? There is a group of us going."

Tim looked up sharply but then back at his file. It was making Marinette nervous. She wasn’t sure if he needed her and was trying to not interrupt or if he just wanted to see what she was doing to report back.

“That would be great. I didn’t bring lunch with me today.” Marinette said. She turned back to Tim, “Did you need anything before I go?”

“No. I will see you when you get back.” Tim said.

Lunch with her coworkers definitely helped loosen her up and get her mind off not hearing from Jason. She had been withdrawn recently because she was so focused on getting everything ready for the showcase and keeping up on her commissions. Now she had caught back up and with Jason back in Gotham and Alya busy making plans she had been feeling lonely. But the group for lunch were all about her age which was a nice change since she was quite a bit younger than most of the others she worked with. Many of them had been working there for 15 years or more.

She never did figure out what Tim had been planning to say when he came out. He had several things for her to accomplish by the end of the day and the end of the week so she assumed it must be that and that she was letting her imagination run wild. Except for when Jason was leaving Paris, he never acted as if they had a personal connection. She was very grateful for that. She didn’t like being the center of gossip and she was certain that if it became widely known she had dated the son of the man in charge of the merger it would look bad for her no matter what way the relationship of the company went.

Next

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

The political possibility of cities

The coming year feels like an important one. Democrats have the chance to pass the For the People Act, which will reverse decades of right-wing voter suppression, steering the US away from the baked-in antimajoritarian characteristics of its politics

At the same time, a successful vaccine rollout (assuming variants can be controlled) will mean widespread "re-openings," most notably in cities, where we find the highest concentrations of virus-incompatible stuff: mass transit, elevators, theaters and "cozy" cafes.

Cities are of huge political significance. The rise and rise of inequality has been attended by skyrocketing rents in cities, largely driven by money-launderers and speculators who turned housing stock into empty safe deposit boxes in the sky.

Cities were also key to delivering the 2020 election: Biden took major cities by 13m votes, inner suburbs by 4m votes, and midsized cities by 1.5m votes. 80% of Biden's votes came from these three categories.

As Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic, "If you draw an imaginary beltway around almost any major metropolitan area, Democrats are growing stronger inside that circle, while Republicans are consolidating their position outside of it."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-biden-could-partner-big-cities-and-suburbs/618294/

Last summer's BLM uprising was a mostly urban affair, but even before then, the GOP was waging war on cities, with Mitch McConnell cutting maintenance and relief funds for cities, and Trump demanding quarter for ICE snatch-squads.

America's urbanization is an unbroken trend, and cities are semi-autonomous, wildly imperfect, young, diverse and economically powerful. They are also politically important, and many of the reddest states would be blue or very purple if cities were given due representation.

Brownstein's account of cities during the Trump years makes the case that a Biden focus on mayors, rather than the deadlocked Congress and Senate, or the fringe ideologues who were crammed onto the Supreme Court, is the key to making real political change.

The deadlocked legislature is not a new phenomenon. Several presidential administrations have focused on executive orders and regulations from the administrative branch to effect change, but these are flimsy political wins. What one exec order can create, another can undo.

Net Neutrality is here, then gone, then (maybe) here again. Without legislation, these policies aren't worth the Federal Register pages they're printed on. But there are methods to durably inscribe policy, and these are primarily urban.

Mostly, we remember the negative ways that this occurs: redlining, driving freeways through Black neighborhoods or skipping over parts of the city when it comes to subway access. Infrastructure is policy - and it's among the most permanent forms of policy we have.

As recent years have demonstrated, the future is a chaotic place, but as Charlie Stross has noted, the elements of the future that are indeed up for grabs are actually pretty narrow: 90% of the future is here today.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html

Most of the homes people will be living in in 10 years are on the road today. Most of the people who'll be alive then are living today. most of the cars that will be on the road are already in service today.

Even sharp discontinuities like the pandemic don't change those facts much (Stross and I did a conference presentation last week where he said that maybe all the chaos of the past five years has reduced the present's share of the future to 80%, still a commanding majority).

Cities are places where administrative policies can inscribe themselves indelibly upon the future. As LA Sustainability Czar Lauren Faber O'Connor told Brownstein, "Every building in the country is basically a shovel-ready project."

A fed solarize/winterize subsidy for buildings makes a difference for decades to come: not just the carbon footprint of the built environment, but also the baseline expectations for decent buildings. It permanently alters the balance between energy companies and the nation.

Every local government could take the feds up on this, but self-owning culture war foolishness predicts that the benefit will accrue predominantly to the large/mid-sized cities and inner burbs that delivered the election to Biden.

Vehicles don't last as long as buildings, but they are remarkably durable. Biden wants to replace the fed fleet with EVs - he could subsidize cities to do the same, creating huge efficiencies of scale for EV production and demand for permanent EV charging infrastructure.

Of course, the future is transit-based, not private-vehicle-based. Just do the math: multiply the number of people who need to go places by the amount of highway a private vehicle operates, and you'll find an inescapable Red Queen's Race.

The more road we need for those private vehicles, the further apart everything gets. The further apart everything gets, the more cars we need. The more cars we need, the more road we need. The more road we need, the further apart everything gets.

If building mass transit is "socialism" then geometry is a socialist plot (and no, you can't fix this by moving cars into tunnels; do the math). Transit permanently alters where people live and work, and what they expect from their cities. A transit subsidy is a no-brainer.

Biden can't force the states to switch to carbon neutral energy sources, but he can subsidize municipal energy facilities' voluntary switchover, again, permanently altering the economics of fossil-fuel power generation.

Red states aren't red: they are gerrymandered purple states that punish and starve their economic and population centers in the name of culture war nonsense and white supremacy. There are opportunities to permanently alter this situation.

For example, the Biden FCC could resinstate the rule banning states from limiting municipal fiber, and then subsidize 100GB/s muni networks, with emphasis on the urban broadband deserts in the majority-minority neighborhoods created by redlining.

Once cities are operating profitable muni networks that connect *everyone* to service that is 1,000-10,000x faster than the aging copper lines that cable monopolists refuse to upgrade, those networks will become permanent facts.

(as with many anti-monopoly interventions, these will do double-duty: the cable companies' lobbying ammo comes from the monopoly rents that they extract from poor people; deprive them of those rents and you cut the supply lines in the war they wage on the public interest)

There's reforms coming to the Affordable Care Act: if one of these is a change to the rule that cities can only get federal health-care subsidies if their states permit it, then cities could opt-in to health care even when their gerrymandered GOP statehouses block it.

America has 50 governors, 435 Congressional districts, 100 senators and 9 Supreme Court justices.

America has 19,000 cities and towns and 3,100 counties. These local governments are far more accountable to the people than the larger political entities.

Officials in cities, towns and counties who deliver tangible improvements to their residents' quality of life will be rewarded with high approval ratings and re-election. The Trump years left the largest of these starved for friendly federal coordination and partnership.

Biden's cabinet already includes three prominent former mayors - Buttigieg, Walsh and Fudge - and the historically intractable task of directly coordinating with thousands of local governments is made far more reasonable thanks to digital technology.

History teaches that presidents can defeat America's antimajoritarian institutions by simply bypassing them.

When the pro-slavery Supreme Court struck down Lincoln's anti-slavery laws, he passed them again...and again...and again: "Let's see whose legitimacy tanks first."

Biden could write humane, sustainable equitable future on the country in indelible ink. He could also make permanent changes in the lives and expectations of people: increasing subsidies to local schools and wiping out student debt is a change that lasts for a generation.

As exciting as this is, it's not enough. The circumstances of rural life are range from bad to terrible, and they're only worsening. Saving the cities will save the vast majority of Americans, but it will still leave nearly 60,000,000 people in desperate circumstances.

This is unacceptable. Good governments look after all people, not just the ones it expects to win re-election from.

Working with local governments is a tactic, not a strategy - a way to erode corporate power and present alternatives.

It's the beginning, not the end.

Image: The Fifth Element/Luc Besson

[leupagus]

My Stationery Box, or: The Douche Chest, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Being A Terrible Parody Of Myself

So I really love to write letters, and have since i was a kid — when i cleaned out my grandparents’ house I found a few I’d written in grade school, and my parents’ files are chocablock full of the weird collage type things I sent to them in college. 

I’ve also been a huge insufferable fucking snob about stationery since way too young (yes I did have a fountain pen phase, no it did not go well) and have been collecting fancy paper and cute cards and assorted weird writing paraphernalia forever. Up until recently, things were just kind of haphazardly stuffed in various drawers and shelves and I could never actually find any said fancy shit when I wanted it; but a couple of months ago I discovered an adorable little chest of my late mom’s that had previously housed, I think, her knitting and has mostly just been collecting dust since. And voila: The Douche Chest was born:

(Pictured with my elderly laptop and coffee with my coffee warmer, which I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE everyone to buy one day when we’re not under worldwide quarantine, seriously it will change your life.)

Keep Reading for some top tier stationerdery

First off, the stuff that helps me write! I still use my family address book, which was purchased sometime in the early 80s and has the name and address of everyone my parents ever cared enough about to want their name and address, which is actually not that many people. I keep it updated and have added a few people, but mostly rely on my phone’s address book. Mostly I like it because it’s got a lot of my mom’s handwriting.

My planner, which has a whole correspondence section where I keep a record of who I write to regularly, when I write to them, and what kind of stationery they usually get (because there are different types and you don’t want to give a correspondence an inconsistent letter-reading experience! Yes I know, I can’t believe I’m like this either) indicated by the m, s, x, l, b notations. That will be relevant later. Also yes the planner is where I scribble down both story ideas and my gratitude journal. This is what I’m saying in re: yikes.

At my own house, I have a whole huge box of letters I’ve gotten over the years, mostly organized by sender and date. Since I’m at my aunt’s house for quarantine, my correspondence is all being kept in my dad’s old... I dunno what to call it, basically it’s a trapper-keeper type thing that I literally never saw him go to work without. (A running theme of this tour is that a whole lot of this stuff is inherited from/given to me by my parents and grandparents.) Inside is also various labels that have come in handy when addressing packages etc, as well as our local neighborhood directory.

Next up is my pen bag, which is — I mean, it has my pens. I prefer writing with a black .5 tip rollerball type pen, and by “prefer” I mean “I cannot abide writing letters with anything else and will go to Staples and buy a new box rather than use a ballpoint pen except obv not right now, which makes the bag real important for keeping track of all my special pens.” Also pictured: my grandpa’s ancient letter opener that I’m pretty sure he stabbed multiple people with, and my blue Le Pen which I use to annotate my letters when I’m reading them through before sending. I KNOW.

This is my assorted letter-writing stuff storage box (no we’re not even at the cards yet this is TERRIBLE); please note that I sort of jerryrigged this box together myself, which will be another running theme of this tour. Glue, roller whiteout thingies, washi tape (which I don’t really use but people keep sending me?) post-its and my address stamp because no matter what I do, the fuckin’ Audubon Society refuses to send me a single donation request with cute stickers showing my address even though they’ve sent my deceased dad like three THIS YEAR. Anyway. Also please note the incredibly awesome initial stamp thing — I came up with the rough design in college and use it in place of my name a lot, but I went to leoniebunch and they transformed it into this super professional and lovely design that I want to use for the rest of my life. Not pictured: the fucking wax seal I also had made with that design, because yes, I’m like this.

WE’RE STILL NOT DONE WITH THE PARAPHERNALIA: here’s the other misc. stuff that I use on the regular. Cup with sponge because we’re not really licking envelopes these days: tons of weird stickers that I’ve collected, YET MORE PENS, including rainbow ones because one of these days I’m going to write to one of my friends with alternating rainbow colors and they’ll have to murder me. Also pictured: the letter opener which I forgot to put back in the pen bag, as well as my dog’s nail clippers and brush because that’s a handy place to keep them. Also also pictured: my dog, who does not help in any way with letter writing.

OKAY FINALLY ONTO THE STATIONERY, Jesus just writing this all out is making me both proud and ashamed.

I’m sure you noticed in the first pic how everything is meticulously, not to say monomaniacally, labeled. Some stuff might require a little bit of explanation; some stuff is pretty wysiwyg though. For example, BEAR CARDS, which:

(These are sent exclusively to my nephews, who go absolutely apeshit over them every time. Come to think of it, I have a LOT of cards/letter stock/etc that is just for one person or one set of people, which maybe I should talk to my therapist about.)

PUN CARDS are likewise exactly what you think they are; they’re the most recent addition to my hoard, having found them at Powells when I went to Portland in February. They are extremely My Kind Of Thing.

Then you’ve got things like BIRTHDAY CARDS, THANKS, POSTCARDS which like — guess what:

(Please note that of these birthday cards, all but two were actually inherited from my grandmother who passed away in 1986. See if you can guess which two are my purchases.) (Also I’m running out of thank-you cards but to be fair I am rarely grateful so this should last me another few years at least.) (Also shit, I didn’t take a picture of the postcards I don’t think? Whatever, they’re postcards that I’ve either inherited from my parents or collected over the years. There’s also a very odd collection of wolf-themed cards that SOMEONE in my family collected, and that I have been using exclusively for allighater because she’s the only one who could ever appreciate them enough.)

Then there’s the BLANK CARDS and BLANK AND WRITTEN CARDS WITH/WITHOUT ENVELOPES, because sometimes I just need to know what I’m getting into before opening the boxes. I’d say a good 50% of these were inherited from my folks, with the cutsier ones being my own purchases. The cards that these boxes originally contained are looooooooong since used up but they’re nice boxes and that meme about adulthood being an endless debate over whether or not you should keep a box because it’s a really good box is accurate as all hell. 

(There are a lot of cards in here that I bought when I was like, in college — those square ones, for example, were purchased at Faces in Northampton when I was in college and I’m probably never going to actually send them which is kind of ridiculous but see: this entire post.)

And finally, the actual letter-letter stationery! Which I also have an embarrassing amount of! First up is what’s labelled MADOC TREE CARD/LETTER because I honestly had no idea how else to describe it; it was inherited from my grandma who everyone called MaDoc (on account of her being both a ma and a doctor, go figure) and it’s really lovely. I doubt it’s the original intention, but I like to unfold the paper and use both sides of it, because I always have a lot to say. These are used only for family members on MaDoc’s side, and of those, only the ones I really like, which accounts for there still being a lot left.

Then there’s the X-LARGE paper, which isn’t actually that large — it’s just normal computer-sized — but in context is the biggest stuff I’ve got. All of this paper is from my mom, who loved using cute themed paper, and I use this stuff mostly for the friends of hers I keep in touch with (which is actually kind of a lot).

Then there’s the letterhead I use for — okay, so like, we know by now that I’m deeply weird, but this is probably just DEEPLY WEIRD, but whatever, you came this far. So I found a metric shitton of 6 3/4 envelopes in amongst my parents’ office supplies — I have literally zero idea why they had about 5 100-count boxes of these envelopes but I’m one of those people who can never, ever throw shit out, so! I gathered together all the letterhead that they’d also collected over the years from the various universities and hospitals they worked at, cut said letterhead down so that it a) didn’t have University of Tacoma or whatever still on it and b) perfectly fit a 6 3/4 envelope if folded three times. The resulting shape is a little... odd, I’ll admit, but it pleases me greatly and that’s the important thing. In fact this has been my go-to correspondence choice for a couple of months now.

(Also pictured: the cover for this hinky-ass box I made out of a Beekman 1802 box from when we went to their store for their Rose Apothecary popup shop. Zero regrets. Not pictured: the really cute pad of paper I also use for these envelopes that’s a more normal size and shape because where’s the fun in showing you normal stuff?)

And finally, my pride and joy, my Crane Stationery, some of which I have had since I was in high school and my mom bought me a box of it for my birthday (I told you, running theme). It comes in small, medium, and big; yes, I absolutely have rules as to who gets what size of these, too. The medium box kind of fell apart a few years ago so I cobbled a new one together; Crane stationery is notable for not being as exciting as that cover might imply. I’m also kind of pleased that I still have the airmail stationery that I got in college that apparently isn’t sold anymore, which I find baffling because what the fuck is the point of international correspondence if you don’t have to use special stationery? Anyway:

(In re: the lined sheets — I actually have them for every size, because I loathe lined paper but also loathe writing crooked, hence these guides that I put under each sheet as I write. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

So that’s the complete guided tour! If you aspire to have a collection as viscerally unnerving as mine, feel free to send any questions my way. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

[cozypancakes]

Since I’m obsessed with your deanjeff head cannons, can I request #25 like 10 times haha 😛

YES YOU CAN!! But prepared to actually get ten headcanons exactly, maybe. We’ll see how it goes lol

1. Let’s get the most recent one out of my head cause why not. Thinking of everyone’s Hogwarts Houses made me think of Craig as Madam Rosmerta where ever Friday night is a different outfit and dance number cause why not? And Jeff works at the Wizengamot (he’d actually be an amazing lawyer in this world because I don’t think they care much for laws as they do a pretty face and money). His friends (the study group) finally convince him to join them at the Three Broomsticks. Jeff is used to more high end bars and nightclubs. The first night he visits The Three Broomsticks, Craig does a rendition with his can-can-cancelled dress and a burlesque like dance where the huge skirt is ripped off at some point leaving Craig in essentially lingerie and stockings. Jeff doesn’t complain much about joining their bar nights after that. 

2. This may or may not end up being all the fanfic ideas I’ve had but never got around to writing. Right after Season 6, Craig and Jeffrey are kinda bored. Annie and Abed are gone, Britta is determined to graduate at some point in the next two years. Greendale is not a complete health code violation. Everything gets a little comfortable. Jeff is hanging out in Craig’s office when he remember Frankie’s vague reference to her sexuality. Next thing they know, Craig and Jeff are hiding behind bushes outside Frankie’s apartment, wondering if she’ll bring a date home. There are occasional brushes of hand and awkward turning of the head and realizing you’re much closer than you expected to be and oh, we have to duck into this very small supply closet in order to avoid Frankie noticing us and I just so happen to be pressed up against you. Suffice to say that Jeff makes some discoveries about his own sexuality. 

3. Jeff gets very comfortable with Craig painting his nails or putting eyeliner on him. At first it’s just at home but then he starts to do it daily. He learns to put eyeliner on himself but always asks Craig to do it for him cause he finds it more special that way (not that he’d ever tell Craig that).

4. Jeff and Craig buy a house together with three bedrooms. One guest room for when either Greendale students or their out of town friends use and one room that Britta/Chang all but claim for themselves exclusively. Jeff complains about their mess and the fact that they practically live there (sometimes they actually do when they’re in between apartment or jobs) but he secretly enjoys being able to host his family in the house. 

5. When they start dating, Craig either starts saying “I love you” right away or suppresses the urge to ever say it until Jeff does. There is no in between. 

6. Jeff is the one to propose. And he makes sure it’s as romantic as humanely possible because Craig deserves the most sappy proposal in the world. They coordinate their wedding day so it accommodates everyone’s schedule at Greendale and their friends. After much insisting from Craig, Jeff buys himself a red, velvet suit like the one Lionel Messi wore once (he hates futball but still watches it). Craig makes his own wedding dress. Jeff takes his turn insisting they can buy whatever Craig wants, that it’s too much stress. Craig won’t hear it. The entire study group ends up helping him finish the night before the wedding, after helping him recover from his nervous breakdown. 

7. Ignoring canon, I think Jeff and Craig were close during the time in between end of S4 and beginning of S5. Jeff may have gotten away with not seeing everyone else (they make it seem like they haven’t seen each other in a while in the re-pilot), but he wasn’t gonna ignore his persistent next door neighbor. Craig buys him a frame for his new office. He takes Jeff dinner when he’s working late. They have sporadic movie nights at his apartment. Craig doesn’t ask about the business when things start to take a turn for the worse and Jeff appreciates that. 

8. They have, most definitely, had a “someone accidentally sees the other naked”. I mean, Craig has seen Jeff naked in canon but he still gets flustered when it happens again as he’s dropping something off in Jeff’s apartment and Jeff walks out of his shower. 

9. They also, definitely, start carpooling together at some point. Craig learns to tell Jeff’s moods really well. In a matter of weeks he can tell with the set of Jeff’s shoulders if he needs silence on the trip to school or if he’s up for Craig’s morning chatter. On the more rare occasions where Craig’s mood is low, Jeff takes a detour to a coffee shop and buys Craig a blueberry muffin and vanilla latte, his favorite. The rides home are usually more spirited. Sometimes they get take out or even stop to eat somewhere. Jeff finds Craig adorable when he sings along to the radio. Craig thinks he’s the luckiest man when he gets to hear Jeff give a full belly laugh. 

10. One random night, Craig is awoken to pounding on his door. He startles awake and then rushes to the door. When he opens it to find Jeffrey perfectly healthy and in one piece, he gets annoyed. It’s 2 in the morning! Jeffrey only says “come on” before grabbing Craig’s hand and pulling him out into the hallway. Craig asks multiple times where the hell they’re going but Jeff ignores his questions. Jeff leads them all the way to the roof. It’s freezing and Craig hadn’t brought his jacket. “You have five seconds to tell me what the hell we’re doing before I leave!” he complains. Jeff grabs his hand again, and okay that buys him another ten seconds, and positions them at the middle of the roof. “Just wait,” Jeff says. He’s looking up at the sky. Craig lets out a sigh. Jeff hasn’t dropped his hand so Craig’s not about to go anywhere. That being settled, Craig notices that Jeff is smiling. Like, genuinely smiling. He also keeps shifting on the balls of his feet, a nervous energy to him. Craig is about to ask again when a flash of light crosses over Jeff’s face. Craig is mesmerized, not by the sudden meteor shower lighting up the night sky, but by the brilliant smile that over takes Jeff’s face. His eyes wrinkle in delight and Craig swear he gives a little hop. The grip on his hand tightens and Craig’s heart feel like it’ll explode into an equally impressive light show. “Amazing, uh?” Jeff asks. “Yeah,” Craig breathes out, never taking his eyes off Jeff’s face. 

[its-always-the-witching-hour]

Chapter 1 of Apocalyptic AU - Sanders Sides

This is way longer than I intended it to be, and it’s only chapter one. I don’t have a name for it yet, but I’ll come up with one soon.

Word count - 1643

Pairings - None (yet)

Warnings - (Spoilers) Zombies, blood, guts, the undead, being left alone, death, disease, summoning rituals - Tag anything I missed

Characters - Virgil Sanders, Deceit (Devan) Sanders, Remus Sanders

Next chapter

---

Everyone had called his parents crazy, and conspiracy theorists, but now they probably wished they had listened to them. It was month 4 of the apocalypse, and Virgil was probably the only survivor. The outbreak had started with what seemed like a new disease, one that was extremely contagious but harmless, and put the infected person into a sleepwalker like stupor that lasted for days. At first, things just continued like normal, with people still going to work and school, and traveling around the globe, but Virgil’s parents hadn’t bought it. They had locked him from the outside and inside in a bomb-proof bunker, stocked with enough food to last a person a year. They refused to join him, though, and instead attempted to figure out where the disease had originated from. The days down in the bunker were long, but not that boring, due to the fact that there were at least three charging points for electronic devices on each wall, and a tv to keep connected to the outside world, not to mention the bookshelf with all of Virgil’s favorite books in it. He thought that the whole thing was an over-reaction at first, but still got some pleasure out of it, mainly because he now had a valid excuse not to turn up to school, as he was locked in his crazy parent’s basement. Then the disease went into its second stage.

Everyone who had been infected once, or was still suffering from it just collapsed onto the ground. Scans of the bodies showed that their brains had just stopped functioning, and nothing that was done could bring them back. There were too many funerals that week. A week after every dead body was buried, stage three started. People walking past or paying their respects to the dead reported scratching sounds from the graveyards. The government and police dismissed it as a Halloween prank – as it was October at the time – and stated publicly that there was no point looking into it further. Then, the voices started. At first, it just sounded like the wind ripping through the leaves of trees, until people realized that there was no wind, and hadn’t been for weeks. The unexplained chattering noises became the root of many dares that week, and police had to stop many people, young and old, from doing stupid things like digging up the bodies, or chanting so-called ‘summoning rituals’ and trying to connect to the ghosts of the dead. And then, about a month after the disease was first discovered, all hell broke loose, literally.

A report to the police had told them that a man was walking strangely along the pavement outside their house, and they suspected that they were illegally drunk in public. However, when the police arrived, they found a man covered in dirt, mud and grass. Both of his hands had sizeable splinters sticking out of them, and a few fingers dangled as though they were broken, but there was no blood. He walked with a shambling gait, looking like he had broken at least one of his legs. One policeman approached him, to see if they needed to call an ambulance, and the rest, well the rest was recorded by a camera crew doing one of those police documentaries for TV. The horrifying video, which was aired on every station in the world, started off with the policeman approaching the man and asking him ‘Are you okay’. When the man didn’t respond, the policeman tried again, each time moving closer to the man, until he put his hand on the man’s shoulder. With a creepy, unhinged look, the man turned slowly towards the policeman, who seemed happy to get a response out of him at last. The man flew at the policeman, shoving him to the ground and sinking his teeth into his arm. The policeman screamed in agony, then his head flopped back against the pavement.

After that video, Virgil’s parents re-enforced the door with twice as many locks, and for once he was glad that his parents always thought the worst was going to happen. Even days after the video came out, Virgil was still having trouble sleeping, so at 3am, when it happened, he heard everything. It started off with a banging on the front door, but nobody took any notice of that, because their house was pretty old, and weird noises appeared almost every night. As soon as the groaning and mumbling bubbled up, Virgil knew his parents were going to die. He huddled under the weighted blankets of his bed, silent tears running down his face as he listened to his parent’s screams. A couple of times, the zombies banged on the door to his bunker, trying to find a way to get in, but it was built too well. They left around 5am, leaving Virgil alone in a now broken home.

That happened 2 months ago, and Virgil hasn’t heard a thing since. The TV in his room doesn’t work, because there is nobody left to air anything, and the electronic generator has been slowly running out of energy. Every book on the shelf has been read for at least three times, and food and water levels were running low. He knew that his slow and painful death from starvation or dehydration was about to begin. All he could do was just try and ration the remaining supplies he had left, and sleep. When he heard the noises, it was no wonder he thought the zombies had returned. Then, he heard their voices.

“Try this one.”

“I can’t it’s locked.”

“Oh. Well this one is empty. Looks like someone beat us to it.”

A pause, then, closer to the door of the bunker,

“Hey, look at this. What do ya reckon it is?”

“Pictures of… paranormal activity?”

“Woah. This one’s really cool. Look at all the organs on the floor.”

“I think I know who lived here…”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Those weird scientists that were convinced that the world was going to end soon.”

“Well, looks like they were right after all.”

A small bout of harsh laughter with no humor behind it caused Virgil to retreat further back into the safety of his bed, his heart pounding.

“Hey, didn’t they have a kid?”

“Yes, a son, I’m pretty sure. He went to our school, I think, but we’ve never seen him around because when anything remotely strange happened, his parents locked him up for days. Wait Remus don’t –”

A loud crash echoed through the house as ‘Remus’ knocked over something.

“I’m fine, stop fussing Dee. Was there a door here before?”

“A what?”

“Look, it’s like a safe door! But with a thousand more locks!”

“Interesting. Perhaps there’s more food inside.”

“Or bodies!”

“Why am I friends with you?”

“Because I’m the only one left alive apart from you.”

“I hate it when you’re right.”

“Aw, you know you looooove me.”

“Quit being weird and help me open this door.”

Virgil could hear them unlatching locks, and then, alarmingly, the door to his bunker began to shake. He let out an audible gasp, thankful that he kept the inside of the door locked in fear that the zombies would figure out how to open the outside locks.

“Huh, I think it’s locked on the inside as well.”

“But how, unless…”

There was a moment of terrified silence for Virgil, then the voices started speaking again, not to each other this time, but to Virgil.

“Hey, if there’s anyone in there, we won’t hurt you.”

“Yeah, we’re nice people, really, and also… we might be the only other people left.”

“Please open the door, if you need it, we can help you.”

Taking a deep breath, Virgil realized that they were his best chance at surviving, even if it meant leaving his safe haven, he would have to go with them. Steeling himself for what would lay behind it, he opened the door.

Standing in front of him were two boys of a similar age to him. One was wearing an interesting black cloak around his shoulders, fastened with a golden chain. The shirt he wore under it was plain grey, and he had jeans on. Half of his face was covered in dirty bandages, and he had a slightly surprised look, as if he hadn’t expected the door to actually open. The other boy had a dark green parker jacket on, and shorts, which made an interesting combo. His hair was extremely messy, with twigs and clumps of dried mud in it. He had a wide-eyed smile, that almost made him look crazy. Virgil regretted opening the door immediately.

“Hey…” the one in the cloak stepped forwards slowly, wincing as Virgil backed up nervously at the movement. “Don’t worry; we’re not going to hurt you. I’m Devan, but you can call me Dee, and that idiot over there is Remus.” Remus gave an energetic wave as he peered past Virgil into the bunker.

“I-I’m Virgil,” Virgil whispered, “and don’t bother looking in there for food; it’s nearly run out. I do have some medical kits if you need it.” He directed the last one at Dee, who touched the bandage on his face self-consciously.

“That… would help.” He admitted, sending an exasperated look at Remus as the energetic one glanced over at Devan, worry clear on his face, “I’m fine, Remus. It just… hurts sometimes.”

“Okay, but you need to let me know if it opens up again. I can help you, ya know.”

Unsure of what to do at this moment, Virgil retreated back into his bunker, then came out moments later carrying a bundle of blankets.

“Here,” He mumbled, offering the bundle to the other two, “This will hopefully have enough stuff to keep us going.”

“Us?” Devan asked.

“Yes, I’m coming with you.”

[doing-all-write]

don’t be a baby part 2

Pairing: Billy x Fem!Reader

Summary: After losing Billy, Reader doesn’t know what to do with herself. After receiving some news about a millionaire who’s been murdering people, she convinces Billy’s old Sky Walker crew to train her so she can take him down. But the mission doesn’t go as planned and suddenly, there’s a man offering her a position on an elite team...

Read part 1 HERE

Word Count: 14K

Warnings: Swearing, blood, fight sequences, needles, mentions of smut and talk of depression. 

A/N: HAPPY VALENTINES DAY AND HERE IT IS!!! Part two of don’t be a baby!! Thank you all so so much for your patience, I wanted to be sure this story was perfect and I hope all love it! Once again, a HUGE thank you to @itsabenthing​ who is always a wonderful source of inspiration and helps to keep me on track and to @mrhoemazzello​ for hyping me up at all times and for letting me bounce ideas off her!! And don’t worry...there will be a third part 😉

💖💖As always, likes, comments and reblogs are always appreciated! 💖💖

365 days.

That's not a long time.

A year on Neptune is the equivalent of 164 years on Earth. Bowhead whales can live up to 200 years. The Methuselah tree is 4,700 years old.

365 days is nothing.

What's one lousy year in the grand scheme of things?

Compared to one day.

24 hours to have your whole world ripped out from underneath you. To believe that up is down and down is up. To feel your feet leave the earth as you pitch forward into a tunnel where time passes both far too quickly and not quickly enough.

One 30 second phone call can feel like the longest thing in the world.

To some, 365 days may not feel all that long, but to others?

365 days is far too long.

~One Month After the Funeral~

“(Y/N)? It’s me. You doing okay?” Mark winced when he realized how dumb that question was. 

Setting the bags of food down on the kitchen table, he opened the fridge. His heart clenched when he saw the food he had put there a week ago sitting untouched. 

It had been the worst right after the funeral. When he came over on the days following the funeral she would be in the same clothes he had last seen her in, staring at the wall or ceiling. On good days her cheeks would be dry, on bad days? The tears would soak her pillow case. 

He had nicked Mary, Billy’s sister’s, number from (Y/N)’s phone. Figuring that Mary may have some professional resources she could recommend to get (Y/N) the help she desperately needed to pick herself back up. 

After a few weeks of her catatonic state, she started moving more. But it was almost worse. She was like a zombie. 

He’d tell her maybe she should shower or eat and in slow robotic movements she’d do what he asked, then crawl back into bed. Eyes empty. Flat. 

The passivity broke his heart. 

There hadn’t been a time when Mark and (Y/N) had been growing up when she wasn’t passionate about something. When that familiar light in her eyes had burned bright. 

Without it, it felt like looking at a mannequin of his sister. 

Sighing, he loaded the new food into her fridge. Taking the old stuff out he figured, if it wasn’t moldy, he could feed it to Jean, who was like a human garbage disposal. He claimed grief made him starving. 

As Mark stood up, he faced the bedroom door and felt his shoulders slump forward. He knew what was waiting for him on the other side and he didn’t want to see it. He knew he was a coward but part of him just wanted to walk out the front door and pretend that his sister was on the other side, totally fine, she was just sleeping and he’d come back next week and she’d greet him with a smile and a hug. 

Something he hadn’t seen in, well, in a month. 

Feeling his shoulders creep up towards his ears as he stood outside her bedroom door, he made a conscious effort to relax them. 

“Hey, (Y/N), you awake?” 

Nudging the door open, he peered into her room, taking stock of it. It looked exactly the same as last time he had checked on her. The soft rise and fall of her side underneath her blanket the only movement. Taking a moment to capture how serene she looked, he quietly closed the door behind him, taking a minute to send up a plea that he would do anything, anything, for his sister if it just meant that one day he’d see her up and out of her bed. 

~

A buzzing by her ear woke her up. Groaning, she slapped her hand around the bed, trying in vain to stay semi-unconscious. The buzzing came faster, one right after the other, reminding her of how her phone had acted the day Billy’d died. Heart dropping through the floorboards, her eyes flew open.

Sitting up and shoving the blankets back in one quick motion only caused her to hear a loud thud. Cursing, she crawled over to the edge, allowing her top half to go limp as her bottom half stayed put on her bed. 

Pushing her hair back with one hand she turned her phone over to see what was happening. News alert after news alert was scrolling in. They all said the same thing, 

Local Billionaire Accused of Dumping Toxic Waste in Ocean. 

Her eyebrows knitted together as she read the remainder of the story. There was something tugging at her subconscious as she read. This billionaire, Chase Casewell, had a reputation for being a real prick and after using his family's money to get through business school and have his first idea fail (an app that told Influencers when the best time to post would be) he had made his millions by starting a brand that specialized in shoes, ugly beige monstrosities if she remembered correctly. 

It had just come out that he had instructed the plants that made his shoes to dump the waste into the ocean. The chemicals they’d used had poisoned the water supply, causing the fish to become infected with the chemicals. Then, the local fisherman would catch the fish, take them home to their families, eat them, then the fishermen and their families would end up in the hospital. 

Her hospital.

She sat bolt upright as she remembered the string of mysterious illnesses that had ended up in her ward a few weeks before she had met Billy that first time. If the victims were lucky, they ended up puking their guts out for a few days and, after being hooked up to an IV to re-hydrate, she’d send them on their way.

Others would linger for a few days then quietly slip away. The chemicals flowing through their bloodstream till their veins ran thick with poison, where it finally creeped up to their heart where the poisons would wrap themselves around their most vital organ. Suffocating it until it gave out entirely. 

The one that had affected her the most was Isabella, a small girl with dark braids and a love of Frozen. The only thing that’d make her smile was when (Y/N) would come in with a stuffed Olaf and have him ask her for a warm hug. She had been holding this little girl's hand, watching Frozen when her heart just...gave out. 

She had gone to the funeral but shame and guilt burned bright inside till she felt like there was a beacon surrounding her, letting everyone at the funeral know it was her fault that Isabella had passed away. 

As the pieces clicked together in her mind she felt an inferno roar to life inside her. It burned away the sadness and despair she’d been wallowing in ever since Billy left only to leave behind rage and guilt. The emotions boiled in her stomach, bile climbing up her throat as she stumbled to the bathroom

Collapsing over the toilet, heaving and retching, she knew nothing was coming up but her body worked overtime to expunge the horror she felt in any way it could. Her body spasming as waves of emotions crashed through her system. 

Several minutes passed till she finally felt the nausea start to ebb. Slumping against the wall, she hung her head over the toilet as she took steadying breaths, making sure that her body wasn’t going to rebel again. 

When she lifted her head, she had made a decision. 

~

"Alrigh', alrigh' I'm coming. Quite your bloody knocking you crazy-"

Jean's rant was cut short when he saw (Y/N) on the other side of the door decked out in black athletic gear, hair pulled back in a tight braid. Jean's eyes widened as he made contact with her own eyes. A fire could get started with the steely glint that was reflected back at him. 

"I need you to train me." 

"T-train you?" Jean's hands were instantly coated in sweat as he contemplated what she was talking about. 

"Yes. Like how you trained Billy and Mark. Train me to be a Sky Walker. I can do this." 

Jean rubbed a hand down his face, "(Y/N)...it's late. Maybe we should sleep on this-"

"NO." That one word leapt from her throat in a growl, causing Jean to step back, half shutting the door. Slamming her hand against the door she switched tactics, "Please Jean. There's this prick who's dumping toxic waste into the ocean. So many people were sick and at my hospital because of him." Swallowing thickly, her eyes grew unfocused, "They died...under my watch." 

Jean's shoulders slumped at that admission. With Billy’s death overshadowing everything, he forgot that in her line of work she saw more sickness and death than even he had seen.

But this was the first time since the funeral that he had seen her up and moving. It was the first time that her eyes held any sort of emotion. He couldn’t bear to be the one that extinguished it. He couldn’t do that to her. Or to Mark. 

Heaving a sigh he flung his hands up, "Fine. We start in the morning,” Her eyes widened and a small smile crept across her face as she stepped forward into his apartment until he held a hand out to stop her, “Now let me go back to sleep so I don't pass out on you mid training session and we both die." 

~Three Months After the Funeral~

Are you ready for it? 

The bass thumped through her headphones, as her fists made contact with the punching bag in front of her in time to the beat. Staying light on her toes, she bounded back and forth, jabbing, punching, upper cutting, swaying in and out as she danced around the bag. 

She had been here for hours. The 24-hour gym had cleared out earlier, now it was just her and other people who couldn't sleep or worked weird hours.

As the last line of the song faded she put her hands on her hips, pacing over to her backpack. 

Rooting through it, she located her water bottle, taking long pulls from it as her heart beat slowed down. 

Boxing had been one of the only things that was able to take her mind off of, well, everything. 

That and running. Everyone and their mother had told her to try yoga after they’d heard what happened, telling her it would help to "quiet her mind" but the more time she spent sitting still, the more she could feel Billy's hand slipping from hers as he walked out of her apartment for the last time. 

She gave it up when a panic attack had taken over her system in downward dog. 

Activities that let her be alone, that let her get her aggression out, were the most beneficial. 

Plus, it helped with the Sky Walker training she’d been receiving from Mark and Jean.

After she’d shown up at Jean’s door that night, she arrived on his doorstep bright and early the next morning, knowing that she’d have to knock extra loud to make sure Jean actually woke up. Which is why it shocked her that before she could even knock on the door, Jean had swung it open to reveal him and Mark standing in front of her, looking for all the world like two parents ready to scold their child for staying out past curfew. 

Smirking she shrugged, “Sorry I missed curfew.”

Mark’s mouth twitched and she knew that, with him at least, she was off the hook. 

They had sat her down, gone over basic safety information, how they practiced moves on the ground first so they could get comfortable executing them and then took them up into the air. 

Mark’s heart broke at how alert and interested she was. It was the first time in months he saw her engage with others and it killed him that this was what it was taking to bring her back from the brink. 

Ever since then, she had been training with them to prepare for this mission, to learn the necessary skills she’d need to break in, to keep herself alive. She had convinced Mark and Jean that the plan she had for Chase was a one-woman job. She told them that if she couldn’t pick up on everything in six months then she would let one of them help her on this mission. 

But she knew she wouldn’t need their help. When Mark and Jean taught her how to fight, how to dodge opponents, how to protect herself in a fight, her Nurse Brain kicked into high gear.  

When they’d break down certain tricks she was able to picture the exact muscles, ligaments and bones that would need to be strengthened, how they would need to move to be able to complete the move perfectly. 

She was even able to break down fight sequences just from observing her opponents moves. Looking at how certain muscles tensed, what foot they’d lead with, how their fist was turned, it all helped her get the upper hand in any fight. 

Knowing pressure points and which joints were the weakest were an added benefit during these training sessions. 

(After she almost dislocated Jean’s knee, he had limped away, bellowing about how she needed to seriously remember who the enemy was and it “bloody well isn’t me! I like the ocean! I’ve never even been to Sea World, that’s how much I like the ocean!” 

 All of it added up to her progressing in her training more rapidly than Mark or Jean felt comfortable with.

They couldn’t help being impressed though. She was mastering moves that had taken them years to nail down. But she took to it with a single-minded determinism that worried them, especially Jean. 

Training was all (Y/N) cared or wanted to talk about. Mark told him that she’d started working out at all hours. Lifting, running and boxing being the newest activity she had added to her repertoire and while he felt it was a smart move, he couldn’t help but be worried. Every time she was training, he’d seen a fatalistic look in her eyes. It was a look he was all too familiar with, it was a common look in Sky Walkers. But those individuals were always the highest risk cases.

Those were the Sky Walkers who didn't value their own safety. They kept pushing and pushing until mortality pushed back and said, You want to keep going? Fine. You pushed too far and now I'm going to punish you. 

The worst part was, in his experience, there was no use trying to tell those individuals to slow down. They inevitably sped up to spite the person who told them to slow down. Jean didn't want Mark to lose his sister too. 

After a particularly intense training session, he hesitantly brought it up to Mark who only snorted, 

"I already lost her."

"What do you mean?"

Mark shot him an incredulous stare, "You're kidding right? You've seen how much she's changed since Billy left. That's not my sister. I still hope like hell (Y/N)'s underneath this new exterior but...I don't know who this new woman is. And frankly, I don’t want to know who she is.”

She hadn’t told Mark but she’d heard him say that. She knew she wasn’t the same woman but this was the one thing in her life that had made her feel alive since the funeral. She didn’t want to give it up. 

They’re just going to have to get used to it. She thought as she unwrapped the bright pink wraps from her hands. Rooting through her backpack, she made sure she had everything. Slinging her bag over her shoulders, she queued up her running playlist. 

Striding toward the front door she gave the obligatory head nod to all the members still in the facility. 

Shoving the door open, the wind that had buffeted the building all night slapped her in the face. Eyes tearing up, she adjusted the straps of her backpack, hit play and started to jog back to her apartment. 

Demons!

Come on!

You've got a vision,

You're on a mission!

~~~

He almost missed her. 

The all black clothing she had taken to wearing, combined with how the last vestiges of red in the sky were quickly being overrun by the inky black of the night sky made him worried she’d left without him realizing. 

Seeing the door open, light spilling out and illuminating her form, he breathed a sigh of relief. Watching her jog off into the night, he leapt up from his crouched position on the building next door to the gym. 

Giving (Y/N) a head start, he waited a few beats before taking off after her. Keeping her in his sight but sticking close to the shadows. Every time he saw a form approaching her, he put on a fresh burst of speed; anxiety spiking through his blood at the prospect of her getting in harm's way helping him to power through. After they passed without incident, he breathed a sigh of relief. 

He had done this for a few nights now. 

One had told him they wouldn't head out to HQ for a while, something about needing to wrap things up but he didn't question it. It gave him time to check on her. 

Recently, he was getting nervous that she had started to...he hated sounding like a hippie but...she had started to sense his presence.

Like their souls burned too brightly together so the universe made it so they would never be lost in the dark as long as they were near each other’s light.   

A few weeks ago, he had been following her to her apartment after she left Mark and Jean's. He had been wearing all black, a few feet away, on the roof of a building far above her. 

She had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, tilted her head up and stared right where Billy had been standing. He’d dropped like a rock to the concrete floor of the roof, trying to stifle his breathing, which after almost passing out, realized would be insane if she could hear that. 

There had been several other times where there was no possible way (Y/N) should have been able to tell where he was and yet...

She'd look up, right in the direction of where he was and every time, he sent out a plea, See me. Please. Know that I'm here. That I love you. That I never wanted to leave you. Just, please.

Please don't think I broke my promise.

~Seven Months After the Funeral~

She thought the knuckles on her hand were going to pop out of her skin.

Clenching the steering wheel, she chastised herself for making this process so exceedingly difficult. 

Just let go of the wheel. She scolded herself, Release your finger. Just the pinky finger. It won't be too hard. C'mon, don't be a- 

She cut that thought off quickly. 

Too many memories weighed down four little words and if she wasn't careful, they would drag her into the inky blackness of depression. She couldn't risk it. Not with a mission coming up. 

The breath leaving her mouth shuddered out of her like the wind through an old house. Her chest felt too tight, like each breath made her lungs smaller, not bigger.

This isn't how he'd want to see you. 

Like a flash of lightning, the thought illuminated everything and for a second, the world was crystal clear. Her fingers slipped from the wheel only to land dully in her lap, where they curled in on themselves so they looked like dead bugs. 

Snorting, she figured it would be appropriate they looked like dead bugs considering she was in a cemetery. 

Sun shining down, the sky a cloudless blue, made it impossible to not think of his eyes and how they had looked at her in the full light of day. That one day they’d had together.

Those perfect 24 hours. 

Funny how time constricts and bends so some events pass in the blink of an eye while others pass by like a train at a train crossing when you're running late to work. 

Shaking her head, she bowed her head and closed her eyes. The darkness was a welcome reprieve. But not always.

Sleep had become the bogey man at the end of her bed. Sleeping wasn't a relaxing activity, it was prey she had to stalk and take down before it could get her. It wasn't that there were so many nightmares plaguing her, it was just one nightmare.

It was horrible enough that most nights, she didn't even fully fall asleep, it was more like a deep meditative state. The thought that that one nightmare could overwhelm her was enough to make her not want to sleep ever again. The first time the nightmare came to her was a week after his funeral:

Fog would be swirling around her, swallowing up everything in her path. Taking hesitant steps forward, Billy's form would become clearer as she moved forward. Her heart beat speeding up as she saw Billy peering over the edge of the building. 

Suddenly, realization would crash into her like a train. This wasn't just any building. This was the building that Billy had last been seen running across. Knowing that there was nothing on the other side, she would rush forward to warn him, to pull him back, to crush his body to hers and never let him go.

She needed to warn him, to save him. But no matter how fast she pumped her legs, Billy stayed the same distance away. His legs would tense and that's when she'd start screaming. Her vocal cords stretched to their breaking point as she rushed towards him. But before she could reach him, he'd leap into the air, disappear into the fog and...

That's when she'd wake up. Face wet with tears, the last of her screams dying in her throat. 

She always screamed the same thing. 

Billy! Stay!

The first few times she hadn't realized she was actually screaming those words aloud until a neighbor of hers knocked on her door, asking her if she was okay.

She never knew how to answer that question.

It was such an odd one. Mark and Jean asked her that all the time. Whenever they did, she'd grit her teeth and spit out that she was fine because how else was she supposed to answer that question? 

"Actually Mark, Jean, I'm so glad you asked because I'm not okay and I probably never will be again because the only man I ever loved and trusted, up and broke said trust! Oh, and did I also mention he's dead?"

That's how she wanted to answer their asinine question but by the time she felt like she could get those words out, most people had moved on from Billy. Because people always do.

But not her. 

Though, it hadn't taken long for her to want to sleep with someone else. She figured it would help her heal. 

At the very least provide a necessary distraction.

It was always the same. 

Normally, they'd lock eyes across the bar. Raising her glass of scotch she got every time she went to the same bar with the sticky floors, burnt out bulbs and rickety chairs, she'd lift it towards him in a kind of salute. When he'd smirk back and do the same, she'd quirk an eyebrow only to throw back the drink in one go. The thud of glass on wood signaling to the bartender to pour her another. 

Nine times out of ten, their eyes would immediately become hooded with lust (every now and again, one would take a drink at the same time and choke on his own drink at the action.) A smirk would play across his lips as he'd bring his own glass to his lips and drain it in one go.

Men. God forbid a woman out do them in anything. She always thought ruefully as she'd watch her next victim unfold themselves from the bar stool they were seated on to slip into the empty seat next to her. 

There were rules. She refused to sleep with blondes. She had one time. She had moaned out Billy's name and immediately started crying. When the man with her had tried to comfort her she had pushed him away, screaming at him to get out of her apartment.

The other rule was, no sleepovers. Having men sleep over usually meant they overstayed their welcome and she didn't want them getting comfortable anymore than she wanted to spend the night in a bed that wasn't hers. 

Once the rules had been established, it was the same shit with a slightly different dude. They'd engage in flirty banter, a well-timed arm touch, a glance up at him through her lashes, one more drink and then they'd be in the back of a Lyft, hands everywhere, and then a few hours later she'd be back in a Lyft (one time, the same Lyft driver who had dropped them off had picked her up, alone, offering a hive five as she got out of the car) to go back to her apartment.

Alone. 

Most nights she wondered why she did it. Why she was constantly hunting for that same jolt of electricity that she’d had with Billy. Every time her encounters ended, she always wondered what the point of doing this was. Why did she bother when every man she interacted with came up hilariously short? 

She had tried to make it work, to forget him, but the entire time some man would be kissing her, caressing her, touching her, there was always a part of her that was thinking of another man's tattooed, calloused hands on her body. 

A rap on the window caused her to jump, clenching her hands back into fists as Mark waved, sheepishly, at her from the other side of the glass. The flowers grasped in his fist swayed in the breeze. 

Stepping out of her car, Mark moved to hug her. Holding out her hand to stop him she growled, "I'm already on edge. Don't make it worse." Striding around him and towards the plot of land where the box that Billy was supposed to be in laid dormant under the soil.

A place holder.

Nothing more. 

Mark's shoulders sank as he watched her go. Physical contact had been difficult for her since Billy had gone. It was small, but he noticed. Every time he pulled her into a hug when she showed up at training, she'd stiffen, then it turned into her barely reciprocating until she refused them altogether. It made his heart ache, she used to hug everyone no matter if they had known each forever or four minutes. 

But then again, she'd just become more withdrawn in general. It broke his heart to see it. Watching her light fade and dim, it was like a star becoming a black hole. 

Crunching through the sun dried grass toward the plot, she kept her head down, barreling towards her destination. Figuring that if she walked faster, she could outpace her thoughts before they could catch up with her and the realization of where she was and where she was headed could crush her. 

This was the first time they were visiting Billy's grave since she’d started training to become a Sky Walker. Mark and Jean had tried to get her to go sooner but it hadn't been until Mary asked (Y/N) if she would meet her there did she finally acquiesce.  

The only memory she had of Mary was after the funeral. Watching Mary and her mother walk arm in arm back to their car, their shared grief following them like a cloud. 

At that moment, (Y/N) had envied them. They had each other. Their shared love for Billy would be a balm, it would help them try to heal. She only had herself and her memories. Neither of which were particularly warm or comforting at the moment.

"Whoa, easy." Two hands wrapped around her biceps, bringing her to an abrupt stop. 

Looking up, she was met with the same sky blue eyes that Billy had, framed by lashes that were almost as long as Billy's. Blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, Mary smiled ruefully at her, "Just trying to get this over with huh?" 

Forcing herself to swallow over the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat, she nodded wordlessly. Mary's eyes took in her form, noting how her clothes seemed to hang on her, the dull, flinty look her eyes had. Mutely, she linked her arm through (Y/N)'s, pulling her into her side. 

Taking a deep breath, they both turned to look at the headstone in front of them. Seeing his name carved into stone caused her heart to speed up. Scolding herself for being so silly for getting twitter-patted over his name. What was she, fourteen? 

But she couldn't help it. 

"It's weird." 

Humming in acknowledgment, (Y/N) didn't know if Mary meant them being here together, the fact that her brother was dead or just the world in general. 

"It's weird that that little line," Mary gestured toward the line in between the numbers that marked when he had been born and when he died, "is supposed to represent his whole life. Everything he said and did. Everyone he loved."

The emotional toll of hearing those words uttered by his sister caused all of the air in (Y/N)'s lungs to leave, her heart to splinter into even tinier parts. Wobbling, she grasped Mary's arm tightly as Mary wound another arm around (Y/N)'s waist to keep her upright. 

“(Y/N!) Easy, you okay?" 

The weight of Mark's hand on her shoulder helped ground her in reality. Her twisted reality where it wasn't Billy's hand on her shoulder. And it never would be again.

Straightening up, she tugged on the end of her coat, shaking her head, "Yeah. Yes. I'm fine. Just, it's a lot." 

Mark nodded, eyes taking in his sisters appearance, trying not to seem too shocked that this was the most she had revealed her feelings to him, to anyone, in the past few weeks.  

Locking eyes with Mary's blue ones over top of (Y/N)'s head, he mouthed a quick thank you in which she inclined her head to show she understood. 

Mark had been in contact with Mary constantly. First it was getting names of counselors and support groups to help his sister heal, then it turned into them talking and developing a...something. They had developed a relationship that neither were sure what to call but seeing her here caused his heart to flutter. 

Feeling (Y/N)’s shoulders rise and fall, he lifted his arm so she could step out from underneath them, "I'll see you guys later." 

Opening his mouth, Mark tried to protest but when he felt Mary's hand land on his bicep, he closed it. (Y/N)'s all black form grew to be a small speck on the blue horizon. 

He was surprised the whole ground didn't open up to swallow her at that moment. She looked like a specter of death. But he supposed what she really was was worse. She was a casualty of death, and there was no hope for that. 

~Nine Months After the Funeral~

A few months of intense training later, after she had executed one of the most difficult tricks Jean and Mark had designed, Jean finally told her she was ready to go after Chase. 

"Fucking finally." she groaned, wiping the sweat from her face with the bottom of her shirt, “I’m going to rinse off and change, then meet me at my apartment!” she yelled over her shoulder as she raced to the locker room. 

Jean nodded and several minutes later, hair still damp, raised a fist to knock on her front door. Before he could knock, the door swung open to reveal her laptop open and her kitchen table covered with charts, maps and blueprints of Chase’s compound. 

“What took you so long?” 

Jean whistled as he took it all in, "When did you do this?" 

"When I first read that news article about Chase. So..here's what I'm thinking." Laying out her plan, Jean couldn't help feeling impressed. It was foolproof. He was also relieved that all she wanted was to bring Chase to justice, share his personal files with the government and the entire Internet so she could expose him then get the hell out of there.

As she laid out the plan she was careful not to mention how much Chase needed to pay for all the lives he took with his negligence and selfishness. She kept emotion out of her tone, just the facts, as she walked Jean through her plan to bring Chase to justice. 

But she knew justice wouldn’t be enough. 

Justice was never enough for people like that. Because the rules of justice were skewed so men like that always got off scot free. In her heart of hearts, she knew it didn’t matter if she leaked every atrocious thing he’d ever done. He'd be back out in the public eye in a few years and no one would bat an eyelash because he had money, power and privilege. The three most essential ingredients to make any good villain. 

She wouldn't be able to live with herself if this man was able to walk away. If she didn't do right by Isabella, she didn't know how she'd be able to continue living with herself. 

"From there, I'll get the files, download them to the flash drive, hack into the mainframe, deposit them there and then get the hell out. Minimal damage, minimal casualties, maximum impact." 

"That's how most people describe having sex with me." 

"I don't have time to unpack how distressing all of that is right now but, what do you think? Is it doable? And will you and Mark help me?" 

Jean's eyes scanned the blueprints before him. He saw how her fingers were beating an erratic beat on her thighs, how her feet constantly shifted as if she wanted to take off in a million directions at once. This was the most animated he'd seen her in weeks. He knew this may be their only chance to really get her settled, let her burn off some steam with a mission and then they could get her back to her old self. 

Heaving a giant sigh, he hung his head down, "Fucking fine. We'll do it. BUT," his head snapped up and almost felt bad when he saw the smile that had slipped across her face fade. Almost. "You listen to us. Mark and I have final say in all of this. Got it? We've done this before and while you'll be the one in the field, we have markedly more experience so let us do what we do best. Got it?" 

He stuck out his hand for her to shake. Her (Y/E/C) eyes flitted over his features, seeing if he'd break or if he was just pulling her leg. When she saw nothing but sincerity looking back at her, she slipped her hand into his. "Deal." 

Jean almost started crying when a sparkle caught his eye, her thumb had a final bit of pink sparkly nail polish on it, making him wonder if he had made a terrible mistake. 

~A Week Later~

"I'm in." 

Part of her always cringed whenever she said those two words. She couldn't help but think of a shaggy haired, pre-pubescent 12-year old, huddled over their laptop, fingers clacking frantically, the glow of their computer screen the only thing illuminating the Mountain Dew bottles surrounding them.

But, it just came with the job she supposed. 

Creeping along the hall, she checked over her shoulder. Feeling the familiar flutter of adrenaline spike in her stomach, she reached for the package that was hidden in her pocket. As her fingers brushed over its cylindrical shape she felt her shoulders relax. Then, she moved her hand down further to make sure the knife she’d strapped to her thigh was still firmly in place, that really helped her to relax. 

She quickly sent up a thank you to Cassandra, wherever she was, for leaving her knife sharpening kit at Mark’s place. The linoleum underneath her feet reflected the dim red light that ran along the length of the hallway. 

"In 20 feet you're going to reach the checkpoint. Remember, there's a big ass-"

"Grid of invisible wires, yeah yeah. I know, Jean. We went over this a million times." 

"Well, with how little you pay attention during those meetings I'm surprised you can even remember the address." 

"How about you shut the fuck up and let me do my damn job?" she snarled into her comms. 

Blocks away, Jean ripped his headset off to shake his head at Mark who just sighed, eyes never leaving the computer screen where his sisters grainy form was seen lurking towards the wire netting, "I know, dude. I know."

"Fucking Billy. If only he hadn't-"

"Jean. Please. We all still wish he was here. Don't make it harder."

Huffing out a breath, Jean turned back to the keyboard, shoving his headphones back into place as he deactivated the alarms to the rooms (Y/N) needed to get in to. 

Throwing a strand of her hair into the hallway, she nodded when it settled to the floor without getting zapped. 

"You really don't trust me, do you (Y/N)?

"I trust you, I just don't trust the security protocols in this place. A fortress like this has to have backups of the backups." 

"Bitch! That's why we're here!" 

Snorting at how high Jean's tone had gotten, she continued prowling toward the door that led into Chase’s inner sanctum. He didn't let anyone but a select few into the room that was waiting for her at the end of the hallway. It was where he kept all of his documents, where he entertained foreign emissaries and got them to sign off on him dumping his toxic waste in the water because who cared about people's health when he could make a few more dollars? 

Shaking her head to straighten her brain out, she took a deep breath as she tread closer to the intimidating mahogany door that loomed before her. 

Glancing down, she saw the pad to the left of the door, they needed a retinal scan to get in. She waited as from miles away, Mark's hands were flying over the keyboard as he worked his magic. Using a close up image of Chase's eye they had captured a few weeks ago, he embedded it into the code for the lock. When it lit up green she smirked, "Thanks, big brother." 

"Don't thank me yet. Expose that fucking loser and come home safely. Then we can talk." 

Nudging the door open, she made a beeline for the imposing white desk in front of the picture window looking out over, ironically, the ocean. Rolling her eyes, she briskly walked over to his computer. Fingers gliding over the keys, fishing around in the pocket of her black athletic leggings, she cursed, "Why the FUCK do women's pockets always have to be so small."

"It's just another way for the patriarchy to keep you down. Hard on, sister."

Pausing in her actions, she raised her eyes up, fixing on a distant point as she opened and closed her mouth, ready to correct Jean when Mark's voice rang through her comms, "He's got the right spirit. Just let him have this." 

Shrugging, she bent down to the task at hand, inserting the USB, opening up files and dumping them onto the Internet and sending them to the entire UN Embassy, every government official, Greenpeace and the whole world to condemn this monster. 

As she finished uploading the last of Chase’s files to the EPA’s mainframe, she heard footsteps approaching. 

And right on time. 

"Uhh, (Y/N)? Don't mean to alarm you but Chase himself and four armed guards are barreling down on you. Get out the window NOW and meet at the rendezvous point." 

Hearing how Mark's voice shook on the last word caused her to pause for a fraction of a second, wondering if she was making the right choice. Like a flash, she shook herself from her stupor and straightened up. Pulling the USB out of the computer she dropped it into her pocket, reaching a finger up to disconnect her comms, "I know. I planned for it. Sorry boys. I’ll see you on the other side" She clicked her comms off just as she heard Jean and Mark start to protest.  

Closing her eyes, she rolled her shoulders. Reaching back into her pocket she took out the extra package she’d been carrying and set it on the desk.

Carefully, she extracted the vile and needle that was inside. 

When the door burst open, all Chase saw was a woman, silhouetted by moonlight, holding a needle up to the light, tapping it a few times. 

"Nice of you to join me, Chase. Won't you sit down?" she murmured.

"Who the fuck are you, you crazy bitch? I have the entire government on my ass, PETA has threatened with more than one lawsuit and the FBI, EPA and other three letter entities aren't far behind to pick me up and haul me off for the rest of my life. So," he stepped to the edge of the desk, slamming his palms down, "I'll ask one more time. Who.The. FUCK. Are. You?"

Watching the last air bubble pop, she smiled. She had never felt so calm in her life and when her eyes dragged from the needle to meet Chase’s, he was surprised to see a serene looking woman staring back at him. 

"You killed people. So now I'm going to kill you." 

And she lunged forward.

Her hand came down holding the needle, aiming for the largest artery in his neck. Eyes widening, he stumbled back, arms pinwheeling. Knocking the needle from her hand, she watched it twist through the air, the moon reflecting off the glass and then she lost it as it hit the plush carpet without a sound. 

She didn't have too much time to think about it because all of a sudden the four men that had come in with Chase were on her. 

Leaping onto the desk, she wrapped her thighs around the neck of the man closest to her. Thanking Mark for bullying her into never skipping leg day, she squeezed her legs around his neck as he spun wildly, trying to dislodge her. Hands scrambling at her thighs, he dropped to his knees where she unwound her legs from his shoulders, dropping to the ground and turning in one swift motion, she kneed him in the face, turning to the next man as the one on the floor tried in vain to stop the fountain of blood flowing from his nose. 

Another one was right on her as she aimed a punch right to his midsection, hearing an “OOF” leave his mouth, she kicked his legs out from underneath him. As he landed, she raced in between his legs, located his kneecap and with a twist of her wrist, dislocated it with a sharp POP. 

With a howl, he rolled around on the ground as the one with the bloody nose limped over to help. Breathing heavily she turned, only to be faced with the other two bearing down on her. 

Jesus, she thought, Star Wars always led me to believe the bad guys would come at me one at a time. Not all at once. 

It was the last thought she remembered having before she could only focus on trying to make it out alive. 

One of the men grabbed her arm, she grabbed his wrist, finding a pressure point and bore down until his fingers loosened around her wrist. Not letting up, she snapped his wrist and kicked him in the groin. 

As he slumped to the ground, the other one grabbed her ankle, yanking her leg out from underneath her causing her to face plant into the carpet. Her hands scrabbled for anything to hold onto as he dragged her body towards him. Twisting, she reached for her knife. As he reached a hand down toward her throat, she brought it up in one quick motion. 

She rolled away as the man screamed in agony as he searched for his missing finger. Scrambling to her feet, she felt something collide with the back of her head. Her vision began to swim as the carpet came up to meet her face once again. She’d forgotten about the first guard who had been attending to the second man she’d taken down. Now, he stood over her, teeth bared, blood still flowing from his nose, gun cocked and aimed right in between her eyes. 

"Wait!" 

Chase's form became clearer as he knelt down beside her, "You don't deserve to die by a bullet do you?" He cooed as he stroked a finger down her cheek. Turning her head, she tried to snap at his finger but the quick movement caused her to retch. 

Laughing softly, she heard the tap of fingernails hitting a glass vile, "You deserve to die by your own little concoction. It’s much more poetic, don't you think?" 

He leaned over her, bringing his mouth to her ear as he caressed her arm, rubbing two fingers over the crook of her elbow, "Like Romeo and Juliet but, darling Juliet" she hissed as he stabbed the needle into her arm, "This time, Romeo will live. And he'll win." He pressed the release and she felt a tear leak from her eye when suddenly, the world exploded. 

Glass fell over her form like stars falling from the sky as the bright lights of a stealth helicopter illuminated the room. The man with the bloody nose whipped his gun toward the window, firing rapidly but quickly crumpled as someone strode right up to him, and shot him point blank. 

Chase scrambled up, hands out in front of him, "What the fuck is this? Are you CIA? FBI? Listen, I have more money than God, I can set you up for the rest of your life. You'll never have to worry-"

A gunshot was the only answer Chase got. 

"More than one person can have more money than God, ass-wipe." The figure kicked Chase's body as he walked past him, his form swimming before (Y/N) as the poison leaked into her blood stream, "And besides," he knelt down by her form, fingers searching for a pulse, "I use reusable straws because baby turtles are cute as fuck."

Her head lolled to the side as she used the last bits of her strength to see who her savior was. A man with a rugged face stared back as he moved to crouch behind her, cradling her head in his hands as he yelled to someone behind him to hurry the fuck up. 

A second face looked down at her as she felt her eyelids begin to close, the hushed sounds of the man holding her head offering soothing platitudes as she made peace with the fact that she was about to die. 

As the second person rifled through the medical bag they had been carrying, hurriedly pulling out instruments, the last thing she heard was the man whispering into her ear, "Come on darling. Hold on for me. Hold on for him." 

~Three Days Later~

Bright. 

That was her first thought as her eyelids fluttered open and immediately closed upon being assaulted by blinding white light. 

For a wild second she thought she had gone to heaven. 

"I know what you're thinking. Is this heaven? No. It's not. Because if this were heaven I'd be smoking a fat blunt, drinking the finest gin while lying on a nude beach where no living person could bother me. People like you." 

The squeal of chair legs being dragged over the floor caused her to flinch. The voice that spoke was dry, making her wonder if this man ever took anything seriously. And also if he could read minds. 

"Pretty good stunts you pulled out there. You learn that shit from watching Black Widow too many times?" 

Silence. She tried to keep her breath steady so maybe he would think she was still asleep. 

"Sweetheart, I just saw your eyelids crack open a second ago. There's no way in hell you dropped back off to sleep that quickly." 

"Shouldn't I be dead?" It felt like her vocal cords were two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. The sound that was expunged from her throat was a dry husk.  

"Should be but, like Chase, I have more money than God and a crack team of experts. One of whom happens to know exactly what was in that vial and the antidote for it. You've been stable and asleep for three days now." 

He saw her eyebrows twitch, which he figured was the most reaction he would get out of her. 

Keeping her eyes closed made it easier to digest the information he was throwing at her and to keep her poker face in tact. The voice sounded familiar to her, but she couldn't place where or when, she’d heard it before.

"Is he-?" 

"Dead? Yeah. A half dose of poison most people can come back from, but a bullet right through the skull? Much like Humpty Dumpty, we can't exactly put that back together again." 

She felt her lips twitch and scolded herself for letting any emotion show through. 

"He deserved it."

"I know. And you deserve to use your skills in a better way." Her body stilled, her breath stopped for a beat and when it resumed, the monologue continued, "I have...fuck I hate sounding like Samuel L. Jackson but I have a team. And we could use someone like you." 

Another scraping sound, the soft rustle of fabric moving as the voice sounded like it was coming over her, "Think about it. And I'll contact you. Don't worry. I always keep my promises." 

Her hands clenched, the veins popping out as those five words washed over her like a cold shower.

The clenched hands were all the reaction he needed. 

Hearing his footsteps get softer she reached a hand down and felt a piece of cardstock brush against her finger tips. When the door closed, she cracked open an eyelid to look down at it, but it was blank. 

~~~

Closing the door, One leaned up against the hallway, letting his head knock against the wall of the hospital. 

Four had warned him. 

But this made things incredibly interesting. 

Or difficult. It all depended on how he wanted to view the situation. 

And what she wanted. 

After the funeral, One’d kept a close eye on Four. He knew what kind of pull love could have over a man. And Four was young. The youngest on the team in age, sure, but he let his feelings get the better of him a lot of the time which made him seem even younger. 

Which could be dangerous. And they were already in way too much danger as it was on a daily basis so he needed to nip it in the bud. 

Closing his eyes, he thought about the first time he caught Four. 

~Two Months Ago~

It had been quiet. 

The wind whistled through the various holes that littered the planes, causing sand to get whipped up along with it, tornadoes forming and quickly collapsing. 

One had been awake. He rarely slept but he had been in the Case Room, going over some files. Trying to decide what their next mission needed to be when he heard a noise. 

Keeping his body still, he strained his ears to see if he would hear it again. When he heard the floor creak, he crept to the door, peering out to see who or what it could possibly be. 

Seeing the familiar shape of Four's hoodie, he rolled his eyes. When he saw him creep into the control room, he became suspicious. He knew how tempting the draw was to check on the ones you cared about. But with how emotionally fragile Four had been since he'd joined, he didn't think this was the best idea, but he needed to confirm that’s what he was doing before he blew up on the kid. 

Pushing the door open, he walked down the hallway, being careful to tread lightly so as not to alert Four to his presence till he absolutely needed to. 

Using his years of training, he placed his body precisely so he could look into the room but Four wouldn't be able to see him should he look around. Which, he didn't think would be an issue. Four was engrossed by the screen in front of him, One didn't think a nuclear explosion would cause him to look up. 

Taking his chances, he slunk into the room. Four had footage of an apartment pulled up on the screens. Three people, two guys, one girl, standing around a table. Four had headphones on so One couldn't hear the audio but it looked like the individuals on screen were in the middle of an intense argument. 

Nibbling his thumbnail, Four's eyes were laser focused on the woman as she gesticulated wildly. Blueprints, computer screens and maps littered every available surface of the apartment and One recognized the planning stages of a mission. He got a little closer and recognized the girl on screen as the same one who had been at Four's funeral. 

Four had told him his background on the trip over to HQ. One figured the other two were the ones that were left over from his original Sky Walker crew. 

(He’d roasted Four about that dumbass name for weeks afterward.)

Shaking his head, One heaved a sigh and reached forward to snatch the headphones off Four's head. 

"HEY! Who the bloody hell-" Four's frame twisted up and out of the chair only to come to an immediate stop when he saw who had his headphones dangling from their fingertips. 

"Didn't know The Bachelorette had a new season running! Are they in the hometown segment?"

Four blinked at him, "It's really distressing you know that much about The Bachelorette." 

"What's really distressing is the fact that you're checking up on her. What the fuck do you think you're doing Four?" 

"Look, I'm sorry but-"

"No. There are no buts here. Even if her butt is really nice, you gotta put it behind you dude. Especially her."

"I know that, One but-"

One had started pacing back and forth as he warmed to the topic before him, "Do you know how much money is on the line here? How much is at stake? Our lives, our very existence, this could all blow up at any point and we could die. For real. Or, even worse, the government comes in, blows up our spot and we get sentenced to death. Or worse, jail.  And you yourself have such fond feelings of, what did you call them? The pigs?" One shot Four a disgruntled look at that statement, noting how Four's hands were clenching and unclenching in an attempt to stay cool. 

"Look, One, I just-"

Rounding on him, pointing a finger in his face One roared, "No, Four, you just. You clearly don't want to be part of this team. Clearly I made a mistake in asking you to be part of this if you can't get over the little school girl crush you have on this girl you slept with once and she sucked your dick so well that you mistook it for love-"

His air supply was cut off as Four slammed One up against the wall. The tattoos decorating his hand popped against his skin as he gripped One’s windpipe in a steel trap. For the first time since bringing Four onto the team, One was truly afraid of him and understood why he was so good at what he did. 

The look in Four's eyes cowed One immediately as Four growled out the next few sentences, "You listen up right here, right now you fucking prick," Slamming his head back into the wall One saw stars, "Her name is (Y/N) and she is worth more than any person on this damn planet. She's the best person I’ve ever been with and I’m damn lucky she even deigned to give me the time of day. She’s the reason I even joined this bloody insane operation, so show some fucking respect or I'll have no problem slitting your throat and moving on with my life." 

One's vision was getting black around the edges as he frantically nodded his head at Four’s words. Four let him go where he collapsed to the floor on hands and knees, coughing as Four paced around the room, scrubbing at the shaved sides of his head with his fists. 

After a few seconds of coughing, One rubbed at his throat as he pushed himself up, "You're fucking crazy, dude. Really glad I recruited you. That's the kind of attitude we need out in the field." 

Four shook his head as he let out a humorless laugh as One brushed his hands off, "You don't understand One. You never will." 

"Cut the emo bullshit. We're not in Twilight. We're adults, just tell me what-" He stopped as Four  swiftly turned to face him, eyes pleading,

"She became a Sky Walker, One. She's doing what I used to do because she doesn't think her life has any meaning and that's bullshit. She's my everything, okay? She's the reason I get up in the morning. She's the reason I do this damn job. She's the reason I keep myself alive out there. She's my guiding light. She's the sunshine on a cloudy day and-and” he waved his hands around uselessly as he tried desperately to pull another cliche from thin air, “I don’t know, man. She’s every other cliche you know about how someone makes your world better and she's putting herself at risk because of me" 

One stood stock still as Four took another deep breath in, the fire in his eyes going from an inferno to embers as he stared at the screen where it showed her bending over the blueprints, tracing a line with her finger, "She's the love of my life and-" taking a shuddery breath in One felt his own eyes start to get misty, "Her light is the one thing that keeps me going in this miserable world. And if she's gone, I don't know if I'll make it." A tear made its way down One’s cheek as Four admitted this last part on a whisper. 

One wasn't sure he was supposed to hear that last part but there was stillness as the room held its breath as it waited for what One would have to say, 

"Alright. What do you need from me?" 

Four's eyes snapped to One's. Stepping closer to One, his eyes roved over his face, trying to tell if he meant it, "You're not messing with me are you?" 

"Not in this regard. Probably over something else I will but, what would make you feel better?"

Four took a second to contemplate it, "If she does seem like she's in trouble with this mission, we rescue her.” His eyes widened as he took another step closer to One, “AND, you offer her a spot on the team."

"Four-"

"One it's this or you lose me for good if she-she- '' Four's voice cracked as he turned his head away. Not even able to finish that horrible thought. 

One’s heart squeezed in his chest. Christ, he thought, I’m more invested in their relationship than any bystander should be.  

Groaning, One rubbed the bridge of his nose, "Fucking fine. I'm so going to regret this but...fuck it. If it seems like things are going sideways, we'll step in. I'll offer her a place on the team." Four started to smile but One stepped forward, pointing a finger in his face, "You have to meet with her before she makes her final decision though. I can offer it to her but she gets the final call if she wants to do this thing with us. With you. Got it?"

Nodding frantically, Four closed the gap between the two of them and wrapped One in a hug, "Oh, so we talk about our feelings for two minutes and all of a sudden we're into hugs? Weird."

Four let him go and with one last look at the screens, bade One goodnight. 

Watching him leave, One turned to the screens, watching her analyze the blueprints, writing notes on them occasionally. Leaning on the back of the rolling chair One sighed, "Oh (Y/N), you have no idea what you've done."

~~~

Reaching into his pocket, One slide his phone out, shooting a quick text to Four, 

She’s awake. And alive. Now we wait. 

Heaving a sigh, he glanced down the hallway to see Seven approaching. Making eye contact with One, he raised his arms up as if to say, Well? What's happening?

"Fuck if I know. She's insane.” At Seven’s bug eyed look he quickly backpedaled, “In a good way. I don't think she's insane in, like, a psychological way. Just grieving."

"Oh good because grief is such a good emotion to grapple with in this line of work. Oh, and by the way did we mention that the man she’s grieving is actually alive and well?" 

"You know, sarcasm is really ugly on you. Luckily, I'm not ugly so I can wear sarcasm well." 

Snorting, Seven slumped against the wall next to One, letting his own head thud softly against the wall. Crossing his arms they both stared ahead at an unknowable future.

Seven broke the silence, "What really happens now, One. I mean, I know she's good, we all saw her in action. Taking out all four of those guards? Her entire plan was foolproof. It was impressive, no doubt but this is a tricky situation, one that none of us has ever had to deal with before." 

"I know, I know." One let those four words out on a single huff of breath. Groaning he squeezed his eyes closed, "Why did I have to pick the one man on this earth who's desperately in love with a girl who so happened to be desperately in love with him and then they both went full Batman when they lost each other?"

"Because you see yourself in Four. That's why."

One's eyes slid over to Seven, "That doesn't leave this hallway."

Nodding once to show he understood, Seven pressed himself up. Twisting his body so he was facing One, his posture the only remnant to remind everyone he was once the perfect soldier, "But seriously One, what now. What can I do?"

Pressing his hands against the wall, One heaved himself up with a grunt, "Solve this for me?" The single eyebrow raise was the only answer he got, "Alright, alright. Come on. We need to go back and debrief everyone on this crazy shit. Don't know how I'm going to use small enough words to explain this to Three." 

"You're on your own for that one dude." Seven laughed as they ambled down the hall, laughter dying on his lips his face fell into a serious mask, "How do you think Four's going to handle it?" 

"If I knew I wouldn't be having this charming heart-to-heart with you." 

"Seriously man, you're not even a little bit worried?"

"I'm freaking out dude!" Seven was brought up short as One rounded on him, gesticulating wildly, "This is no man's land! Even more so than this original idea! Four's so deep in his feelings with this girl and she's clearly heartbroken about him being gone and is on a one-woman train toward self-destruction that she's determined to meet him in death and” One’s eyes widened comically, “Ooooh my god I've Romeo and Juliet-ed them. Holy shit, I'm the Nurse. I'm too beautiful to be The Nurse!" 

Gently prying One's hands from his collar, Seven looked him dead in the eye, "You have got to get a grip. You're spiraling and it's making your eyes go in two different directions."

Crushing his eyes closed, One took a deep breath in, "You're right. You're right. I need to get it together. We can handle this." Stepping back One hopped up and down on the balls of his feet, punching the air, "I need you to slap me." 

The crack of Seven's palm making contact with his cheek sent One staggering back several steps. 

"OW! What the fuck? No hesitation? No asking if I was sure?"

"I've been wanting to do that since the day you broke into my apartment." Seven shrugged as One glared at him, cupping his pink cheek.

"Fine, but it did help clear my head. So. Thanks. I guess."

Seven smirked.

"Alright, the plan. Let's talk to Four first. He needs to understand that for this to work, he needs to talk to her one on one. And it has to be her call. We can't influence her. If she wants in, fine but they need to work through their shit. And if she says no? Then we let her walk back to her life. And Four needs to respect that. He has to let her go." 

"Easier said than done. I've seen his face when he looks at pictures of her on his phone." 

"Yeah well, bet you didn't know he's also been following her? Keeping watch over her via surveillance tapes? And tracking her home?”

That brought Seven up short, "No? What the fuck?"

"I know. If it was anybody else's story I would have called the cops ages ago. As it is, it’s kind of romantic"  

~A Week Later~

"We're all ghosts down here. Except, we don't float. One because gravity's intact and two because I'm not a cannibalistic clown." 

"Could've fooled me." 

"Didn't know I recruited fucking Tina Fey over here. Anyway, here's headquarters. Or home sweet home." One said in that same drole way he had of phrasing everything.  

Walking through the punishing desert to get to the graveyard of felled planes had caused a shiver to pass through her. She did her best to suppress it but it was difficult. Passing through the giant hulking masses of steel caused her to feel like she was encroaching on the territory of ancient deities. The area felt loaded with their silence, the carnage keeping a silent watch as their footfalls disrupted the grains of sand that were being buffeted by the wind that swirled through the gaping openings in the bellies of the planes.  

It had been a week since she’d been discharged from the hospital, well, not hospital, but the private sanctuary One had kept her at while she healed.

He had come into her room the day after he had left his card, shock on his face at seeing her sitting up, arms crossed. 

"What the hell do you do and how do I fit into it?" 

The single eyebrow she raised at One prompted him to explain, in detail, everything they did and what it would entail. 

She’d been silent, eyes focused on his face, not making any sounds or moving until he finished his spiel. Then nodding, she asked one question, 

"When do I start?" 

He explained that her death would be easy to fake since she had technically almost died anyway. What he he hadn't told her was he hadn’t made it public just yet, he didn't want to make her brother and friend worry too much. Or give them a false alarm only for her to waltz back from the dead if she couldn’t handle being with Four. 

So, here she was, following One up the stairs of the largest plane carcass. Pushing aside the plastic curtains that did their best to keep sunlight, sand and bugs out, he extended an arm in an exaggerated bow. 

"I do hope it's to your liking Princess." 

"Don't call me that you prick." She murmured as she breezed past him, pausing in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the dim interior of the plane after being out in the searing sunlight. 

The main room held more computer monitors than she had ever seen. She thought Mark's setup of four monitors had been impressive but the wall of screens staring back at her made her realize how rookie their operation had been. 

A large silver table in the middle held a commanding presence and she knew, instinctively, that One felt most comfortable at the head of it, barking orders while still being able to hit the group in front of him with a sarcastic jab or two. 

Taking a few hesitant steps forward she peered at the weapons lining the back wall. Snorting, she gestured to it lazily, turning her head to pierce One with a gaze, "You preparing for the apocalypse or do I require this much of a security detail?" 

One's face broke into a fake smile as he leaned forward, placing his hands on his knees as he wheezed a few times, "Oh my god, sweetheart, oh god, please, stop, my stomach, it can't take the hilarity anymore, please, god." With that last word the smile dropped from his face and he stood up straight, crossing his arms over his chest, 

"We're a group of vigilantes that have a specific subset of skills that makes us some of the most dangerous people on the planet. We go after the people that are even more dangerous than us. You think we just talk about our feelings and politely ask them to stop committing human rights atrocities?" 

Brushing past her he shook his head, "Unbelievable." Muttering about new blood while he started down the hallway. 

Eyes dancing over the various boards lighting up, she had the unmistakable sense that someone was watching her. One had told her there were five more that she would meet so she wondered if one of them was about to jump her as a weird sort of initiation. 

But when she turned her head to the entrance, there was nothing. 

Just the wind, blowing the plastic flaps back and forth. Scanning over the area she could have sworn the darkest corners contained something that was intrigued with her. Taking a hesitant step forward, One's voice jolted her out of her paranoia, "Hey, Amy Poehler, you coming to share more of your classic wit with the whole class or are you just going to dilly dick around all day? C'mon, I'm a busy man." 

"Coming!" She yelled back, turning on her heel to jog down the hallway after him, turning her head one last time to make sure no ghosts were following. 

~

Billy breathed a sigh of relief. He knew that today was the day he’d have to face her. He and One had discussed it extensively last night. One had been adamant, don't get attached to her being on the team before she explicitly says she wants to stick around, you know the rules, I know Seven changed things a little but this is getting into a whole new territory of softness and on and on while Billy had just sat there, taking it. 

One finally ran out of steam (Billy wondered, not for the first time, if One had a coke addiction to get all the energy he needed) and Billy nodded his head, chewing over everything One had just said. He opened his mouth, preparing to show One how much he understood, how this was him only looking out for the team and adding a valuable asset. What came out of his mouth surprised him and One, 

"I love her. I need her or else I won't make it through this life alive." He lifted his eyes to One and One took a sharp intake of breath. He had never seen Billy so open, so vulnerable. Even when he had been on the brink of dying, twice. 

Searching his blue eyes, One sighed, dragging a hand over his face, squeezing his eyes shut as he scrubbed at his hair, groaning, "Fuck me, I must be getting soft in my old age. FINE. But remember. You have to talk to her. If you two can't work through your shit, she's gone. Poof. Vamoose. Got that? This is her choice. She gets to make the call if she stays, if she wants to work with you and if she leaves. Not you. Capisce?"

Billy nodded, trying his hardest to mask the eagerness he felt at the possibility of being with (Y/N) again. Being around her light, feeling that same pull into her warmth. 

So, how could anyone blame him for wanting to see her as soon as she stepped foot into headquarters? 

He had lurked in the shadows, pulling his hood over his hair, making sure his eyes were concealed. His eyes were her favorite part of him, she had told him during those amazing 24 hours they had shared together. 

Billy couldn't believe it had been 365 days since they had seen each other. It felt like it had gone by so fast. But then again, he’d been all over the world, fighting bad guys and overthrowing dictators, (Y/N) had been living her life. 

And started Sky Walker training which he was going to have to talk to her about that. 

When she walked in, Billy had shrank even farther into the shadows, biting his tongue till he tasted blood, so he wouldn’t scream out her name. 

It was still the same (Y/N) he’d fallen in love with, longer hair, more muscles but what really threw him was her eyes. They were the same color but the warmth that he had come to love was extinguished. Replaced with a flinty resolve that if anyone talked or looked at her, they would get their ass kicked. 

It was the first time that he started to wonder if maybe this was the best idea. And let himself ponder the idea that she could potentially say no. That she wouldn't want to see him. That she would never be able to forgive him.

But he needed to know. He needed to try, he needed to show up for himself and for her. To show her that he still loved her, that he had always loved her. 

Stepping out of the shadows, he pulled his hood down, making his way to the meeting room where they’d be waiting for him.  

It wasn't till he brought his hand down from his hood that he realized his hands were shaking.

~

"Hola, Papi. Who's this lovely lady sitting here? My birthday isn't until next week." Three smirked as he pulled a chair out for himself, aiming a lazy wink at (Y/N). Her months of seducing men just like him in bars kicked in and she winked back, letting a slow smile crawl across her face. 

An intimidating blonde woman kicked his chair as she sank into her own, "I meet your mother and this is the thanks I get?" 

"You know I didn't mean it mi amor. I've only got eyes for you."

"And apparently any other attractive woman in a six mile radius." She extended her hand to (Y/N), "I'm Two. Nice to meet you."

Grasping Two’s hand in her own, she shook it, impressed with the strength of the woman's grip. 

"Well, since you and Two are so happy together, this is my time to shine. I'm Seven." Seven grabbed her hand, pulling it up to his lips and pressed a kiss to it, holding her prone in his stare. He pulled back, winking at her and she felt a blush climb into her cheeks, "(Y/N). You have a much better chance than Three does at getting into these Nike leggings." 

Seven's jaw dropped as One made a retching noise and Five stepped forward, extending her hand "I don't want to get into your leggings but I’m glad there's someone else here who's trained to keep these idiots alive." 

(Y/N) shook her hand, smiling back at her, "Surprised they've lasted this long with just one doctor."

"You and me both." Rolling her eyes she turned to One, "This the one we picked up from Casewell’s joint?” 

“The very same” was One’s reply as he flicked through the folder in his hands. 

Five’s eyebrows rose up as a low whistle escaped her lips, “Shit. Well, I’m definitely glad you came around then. I’m assuming you’re the one who brought the vile of polonium?” 

(Y/N) nodded, very aware of every eye in the room assessing her, sizing her up. It was like being in a room with Cassandra but multiplied by five.

“We saw you in action. Very impressive.” Two chimed in, crossing her arms over her chest. 

Everyone else nodded as she tried her best to tamp out the flush of appreciation building in her cheeks. Snorting, she deflected, “Thanks. I guess you guys couldn’t have stepped in earlier to help, huh?” 

“Sweetheart that’s not really our style. And in case you missed the chopper outside the building, we’re very particular about our style.” Flinging the folder down on the table, One braced his hands on the back of a chair, “So, now you’ve met everyone. The whole Brady Bunch of chucklefucks before you.” 

(Y/N) had been mentally going over everyone's names in her head, when she furrowed her brow, "Hold on, either I’m dumber than I thought or your numbers are all out of whack. Where are Six and Four?"

Seven flicked his eyes to Two. Five shifted in her seat, opening her mouth when One cut her off, "Six is no longer with us and Four will be in shortly. I wanted you to meet the whole team first, get a feel for us, then meet Four and make your decision if you'd want to stay with us."

Cocking her head she flicked her eyes to One, "Why? Is Four like a 4Chan meninist who hates women? Why would he be the catalyst for whether I stay or go?" 

Since meeting him, this was the first time she had seen One at a loss for words. It made her pulse speed up, clenching her hands into fists she tried to ignore the moisture that had started to accumulate on her palms. 

One opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again, only to sigh and rub the bridge of his nose as he moved to the door of the meeting room they had been in, "It's probably easier if we just get this over with. Alright. Everyone out. C'mon hurry up." He waved his hands impatiently at the rest of the team standing around. Reluctantly they all started to move, Seven and Three grumbling about how they didn't want to miss any of the drama. Everyone stopped when her chair clattered to the floor, hands clenched at her sides as she took a step toward the door. 

"What drama? One? What's going on?" She hated how shaky her voice came out but she couldn't help it. What did they mean? Was Four their muscle? Was it a weird hazing thing? Would she have to try to kill this person? Try to make it out of this room alive? 

One was standing half in and half out of the doorway, hand closed over the door knob. Turning back, he locked eyes with her (Y/E/C) ones.  

Her blood ran cold. He looked, sorry. Almost like he pitied her. She was pretty sure One didn't  have feelings so to see this much emotion directed at her? 

She was terrified. 

"It'll all make sense. Just...do what you think is right. Okay? You seem like a smart kid. Trust your gut."

And with those cryptic words he left, shutting the door. Sealing her in to wait for this new threat to emerge. 

~

One walked out of the conference room and ran right into Billy. 

"Jesus, kid. Any closer to me and you'd need to buy me dinner and drinks before that shit."

Billy's eyes looked right through One, "Is she in there? What did you tell her? What's she like? What did she say?" 

One held up his hands to cut off the avalanche of questions, "Yes. The bare minimum by introducing her to everyone. She's like how she was a few minutes ago when you were spying on her, don't think I didn't see you, and she hasn't said anything that I would write home to my own mother about. Oh, except she did tell Seven he could get into her Nike leggings." 

Billy's eye widened and he twisted his body to where the sounds of the team were filtering back to the two of them, "I'll kill him myself if he even laid a fucking hand on her, I swear to god."

"Woah, hey kid. Easy. It was just some harmless flirting and besides, (Y/N)'s a grown ass woman who can make her own decisions. You don't get to dictate who she does and doesn't sleep with."

Billy's eyes were unfocused as he clenched and unclenched his hands. One took stock of the bundle of nerves before him and felt his shoulders droop a little. 

It was times like this that really drove home young Four was. He was the most vulnerable (in terms of emotions and in how little protection he had during missions) and after hearing how he really felt about (Y/N), well, it caused One's own shriveled heart to grow two sizes too big after hearing it. 

Even though sometimes when he heard her name, he could still feel Billy’s hand clamping down around his windpipe. 

He didn't fault Four for it. Seeing how she reacted at the sight of Four's grave almost made him cave and push Four forward, yelling at her to stop crying.

It ripped his heart apart, especially because it made him think about the family he still had out there.   

Sighing, he placed his hands on Billy's tense shoulders, feeling the muscles and sinews so tight he was surprised they didn't snap, "Hey. Hey. Look at me." Billy dragged his eyes away from the door and to One's face, "Don't go in there all freaked out. I think I already stressed her out a little bit so...be cool, okay? And remember, respect her decision. I'll give you all the space you need if she leaves but...respect her choice. That's top priority. Got it?" One gave Four's shoulders a gentle shake so he knew that Four had heard what he’d said. 

Feeling Four's joints loosen as he took stock of his words, One slapped him on the back as he walked back down the hallway, "Also, just a heads up, we will be watching this whole interaction over the feeds so just keep that in mind if you two decide to start fucking." 

~

(Y/N) had been pacing the perimeter of the room, checking for cracks, a hidden door, something so she could get out of here alive. She didn't have any weapons on her. Well, except a Swiss Army knife but that barely counted. 

Running her finger tips over the walls she felt her heart clench as she looked at her busted fingernails. They were cropped short and bare. She missed her pink sparkly nail polish. She carried it with her everywhere though. She always figured that when she started feeling better she'd paint her nails again. So far, it was still unopened. 

Hearing the door knob turn she inhaled sharply, whipping around so her back was pressed into the farthest corner of the room. Her fists clenched and her thighs prepared to pounce or run, whichever came first. Hearing her heart pounding in her chest she took a deep steadying breath as the door opened wider, allowing light to come spilling in, illuminating a silhouette in the doorway. 

She couldn't make out any features under the hood they were wearing. The light in the room was dim and compared to the fluorescent lighting in the hallway, she had to squint to try to make out any features this individual had. Her heart beat sped up the tiniest bit when she realized the figure was built like Billy. 

Then the figure cleared their throat and closed the door behind them. Taking cautious steps into the light. She opened her mouth, "Are-are you Four?" The figure stopped abruptly and nodded in response to her question. She wondered briefly if they were a mute as she ran a hand through her hair. 

Billy's heart almost fell out of his chest when he saw that her hand was shaking as she pushed her hair out of her face. He so badly wanted to be the one to do that he had to plant his feet more firmly on the floor so he wouldn’t race to her.

"They, uh, they haven't assigned me a number yet and I know you all don't do names here so, I guess we gotta wait for me to really introduce myself but I'm the new recruit. It's nice to meet you." She held out her hand, stepping forward. 

After a tense moment, Billy extended his. 

She cocked her head to the side when she noticed Four's hand was shaking. She looked up at him but she still couldn't make out his face with the lighting and his hood. She could just see his bottom lip and she was surprised when she felt her stomach clench at the sight of how full and pink it was. 

Looking down, she clasped her hand in his and felt her blood run cold. 

Running along Four's fingers were tattoos.

Tattoos that were identical to the kind that Billy had.  

Lifting her head up seemed to take an eternity to Billy. 

He held his breath as her other hand reached up, index finger extended, shaking like a leaf in a storm as she brought it within millimeters of making contact with the tattoos she had traced so lovingly during those 24 hours. 

"You bastard." 

~~~

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[keywestlou]

JOY WITHOUT RESERVATION.....I REMEMBER IT WELL

Today the celebration of V-E Day. Victory in Europe.  Germany surrendered this day in 1945.

I remember it well.

I was only 10 years old. Even a 10 year old could understand. Ever since Pearl Harbor, World War II was the talk in every household every evening.

Whose father, brother, uncle, cousin, etc. was involved. Most on the front lines. Many had not been home in 3 years.

The country cried, yelled, smiled, and laughed. All part of the joyous celebration.

It was early morning when the news arrived. I was first aware that something big had occurred when I heard the noise of pans being hit with large wood spoons and whatever else was available. The wood spoons reflect I lived in an Italian neighborhood.

People were on their porches hitting the pans, yelling, screaming and crying. Extremely emotional!

Even now I have tears in my eyes recalling the event.

There was neither work nor school that day.

My father did the right thing by me. He took me everywhere. We lived in upstate New York in the City of Utica. One hundred fifty thousand population at the time.

We were out all day and into the night. Visited different parts of the city. Many porches had dummies of Hitler hanging from them. Certain neighborhood corners had people in the streets singing and dancing. Utica’s downtown in the evening when we visited was the same. Crowding shoulder to shoulder. Hugging and kissing. Singing and dancing.

Dad took me to Church also. In the middle of the day. It was packed. People quietly praying their thanks.

Our fighting men and boys were coming home.

Key West is on the map vacation wise! Finally, big time!

Not sure it is good, but it is where we are.

The Miami Herald reported yesterday that the Florida Keys have the highest hotel rates in the country.

Key West was particularly mentioned. For an “overnight stay in Key West, prepare to dig deep to pay for a hotel room. The cheapest double room $299. A bargain! Several hotels charging $1,000 a night.”

The article made mention of another Key West distinction. Key West is in the top five most popular destination sites in the world.

Key West is changing. In the past two years has already changed dramatically. I for one am not happy about it. Most locals would agree with me. Everything expensive, traffic heavy, visitors a new type, rowdy and cantankerous might best describe them, etc.

Little Key West is on its way to becoming big Key West.

Poor Alice Reid Griffin. She was the Madam of several whore houses in Key West and Stock Island at different times in her career. Her establishments were known as Mom’s Tea Room.

The Navy had a large contingency stationed in Key West in the late 1930s and through World War II. Many were her customers. Even the police were amongst her best customers. Seemed most men liked Mom’s.

The Navy was not thrilled. The Navy considered the activities at Mom’s to be immoral and also a place where the sailors were prone to acquire a sexual disease. The Navy was constantly beating up Key West leaders to arrest Alice and put her out of business.

They arrested her several times. Did not put her out of business till sometime in World War II. She had made her fortune. She purchased a home somewhere in Old Town to spend her final years.

Why Alice and Mom’s today? It was on this day in 1941 that Alice was convicted of violation of the Mann Act in federal court. The violation popularly known as white slavery. The bringing of a woman over state lines for purposes of prostitution. Alice had imported one her  girls from Atlanta.

No matter how you look at it. Whether you approve or disapprove of her conduct. Alice is part and parcel of Key West history.

Harry Truman was born this day in 1884 in Lamar, Missouri. The son of a farmer.

He could not afford college. Was an artillery officer during World War I. Following the war, he opened a haberdashery store in Kansas City. The business went bankrupt in 1922.

He then became involved in politics. While a U.S. Senator, he developed a reputation for honesty and integrity.

I consider Truman to have been one of our greatest Presidents.

The teflon man. John Gotti was the first to be labeled the teflon man. The reason being he was acquitted in so many criminal trials.

Ronald Reagan was next. Followed by Bill Clinton.

Questionable acts slid off all three.

Trump has had hanging over his head the Stormy Daniels matter. Stormy was a pornographic actress. It was 10 days before the 2016 election. Stormy was threatening to go to the press regarding her alleged sexual relationship with Trump.

Through his attorney Michael Cohen, Trump is alleged to have paid Stormy $130,000 to keep her quiet. Not a legal payment. A violation of the Election Law.

Cohen acknowledged his involvement claiming he did it with the knowledge and consent of Trump.

Trump never has been charged., He could be now without question since he is no longer President. It is not going to happen.

The FEC announced it is dropping the case against Trump re the $130,000 payment.

As a result, Trump has joined the ranks of teflon men.

I would like to know why the FEC dropped its Trump investigation? The public should be made privy as to how it came about.

Yesterday’s blog warned of grocery costs and the anticipated sky rocketing of them by later this year. Today the cost problem involves used automobiles.

As with groceries, the price of used cars has been “spiking.” Such is causing auto dealers to pay more at auctions to restock their tight supply.

The price of used autos does not seem to go down. If the cost continues to rise as predicted, a “scary-crazy” inflation will occur. The auto dealers will be left with an excess of used cars for sale. People will have refused to pay the new expensive prices for used cars. The auto dealers’ inventory of used autos could bury them economically.

Tonight dinner with Donna and Terri at 7 at a restaurant they selected in Bahama Village. I am looking forward to be with Donna and Terri after more than a year and also to be out and about in Key West on a saturday evening.

Happy Mothers Day! Wish my Mom was still here.

Enjoy your day!

JOY WITHOUT RESERVATION…..I REMEMBER IT WELL was originally published on Key West Lou

[rotzaprachim]

in secret, between the shadow and the soul 1/2

Kanej, Inej-centric. Teen ish, marriage of convenience, 3000 words 

(About 6 years post Crooked Kingdom) 

Read here on ao3

The apothecary asks her how long it’s been since she’s been intimate with her husband, and Inej almost chokes, says no, she hasn’t been in a very long time. Honesty is always difficult in her carse- dealing with her own past, own demons is hard enough without having to watch other people attempt proper emotional responses on her behalf, and maybe the apothecary senses that because she doesn’t ask more.

----

“It’s legal more than anything. A question of economics,” Kaz said, and Inej nodded, because it's kerch and how could it be anything but? Certainly nothing as tawdry as emotion or desire, let alone love, could interfere with so large a life decision.

Only Kerch citizens can hold berths in the water, and its significantly easier to manage bank accounts and conduct major financial decisions of the kind Inej needs to make on the near daily when restocking her ships. There's one route faster than all the others to becoming a Kerch citizen.

Inej suggested it before Kaz did.

She isn’t ready for marriage, she said. She isn’t ready to be tied to a man, to be anything more or less than herself alone. The Kerch made the whole business easy by never referring to this thing they’re doing as a marriage, all the paperwork is about Economic Units, Civil Unions. There’s so many pages of jargon it made Inej’s eyes bleed. Future children held less inches of fine grey type than agreements on pigs and shipping company stocks, and were described in the same economic language.

Kaz went through the whole thing line by line until the shore she was going to call for an annulment before they’d even gotten the damned thing notarized, or else make herself a tastefully rich and very young widow.

“It’s a contract,” he said. “You should know all the details before you sign your life away.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Inej said, irritated by the last several pages about Property Division in the Event of Medium Sized or Larger Storms, Grisha Attacks, and General Flooding, “I’m not signing my life away.”

“When you get married, it might be difficult to annul if you’ve still got a legal Kerch-”

“When I get married?” she shoots back challengingly. “To who?”

“I don’t know. That fire-tongued revolutionary who writes you poetry and will make you a new world. The Kaelish tavern maid who always pours you a free beer in her bar while you sing about the plight of the repressed. Someone hopelessly moon-eyed and optimistic, who thinks the world shits rainbows and knows what you’re worth.”

“You, Kaz Brekker,” she finally sighed, “are a hell of a lot dumber than they say you are.”

---

She doesn’t tell her parents. She’s not ready for that conversation.

---

She doesn’t tell Nina. She’s not ready for that conversation either.

---

The whole thing was finished in a notary’s office in ten minutes.

Kaz’s gloves were off, more because they both need to be fingerprinted than anything else.

He swore a short, official oath of his loyalty to both her and the Kerch market, promising not to cheat in foreign ports and to provide for and any hypothetical children. She thought of the paid-off indenture and the ship and the found parents and berth twenty-two and and her room in the house in bought on the Zelverstraat and thought that maybe he’s better at doing that than he thinks he is.

She swore a shorter official oath about fidelity and staying true and all her children being her husband’s, because to do otherwise would be bad economics and make her a poor investment, a value-destroyer, on the family line. Because it’s Kerch and of course it is.

---

“What are you thinking about?” he asked her afterward in an attempt at being casual. They’d been sipping at warm lukewarm flagons of beer in one of the harbour’s more reputable establishments and looking out at the water for twenty minutes.

“I’m thinking,” she said slowly, tasting her words, “that Alys Van Eyck is a very, very lucky woman that we came around when we did.” She’s still thinking about the various punishments for women who pollute the family line, which even if motivated by economics over faith as such things would be in Fjerda, are not dissimilar in practice. She’s realising more and more the Kerch neuroticism over bastardry probably comes from having so many of the young men gone for half the year at sea.

Kaz guffawed, which was not a sound she was really used to him making. “You never fail to surprise me, Wraith.”

“How is the Vrouw Dazi”

Kaz shrugged. “Not useful to my purposes anymore. Wylan’s got her an Bajan set up in a little cottage outside Pijl with a tidy sum tied to not making too much noise.”

Sometimes she fantasized about breaking into that cottage and putting on a performance similar to the one that sent Pekka Rollins screaming from Ketterdam. She didn’t, because she didn’t subscribe to the idea of the sins of the father and thought Saartje Kazanja deserved a da with his mental pieces mostly intact. But saints take all, she wanted too.

“How’s Saartje?”

“I don’t know. Kid? Looks more like she could be ours than Jan Van Eyck’s, that’s for sure.

The tips of Kaz’s ears went red before he finished that sentence and he stared into the foam at the bottom of his glass, head turned decisively away from her.

“Fine, I think. In school now. No reason to keep tabs.”

They toasted her new Kerch citizenship. Inej swore she saw his hand shaking.

----

Her citizenship documents, stamped with a wax seal of three flying fish and a small Kerch flag came three days later, expedited by Kaz in ways she cannot begin to fathom. It’s only then she realised that they’re for the new Vrouw Rietveld, that she made her vows to Kasper Rietveld. It’s only logical- Rietveld can be the upstanding businessman who only exists on paper in a way Kaz Brekker cannot, all the better for her dowings, but it still feels like a piece of himself gifted to her.

She could forge Rietveld’s name for her own purposes too; they practiced on old betting slips that she then threw into the fire. Kerch women can legally make almost every kind of financial decision and dealing, less due to the Merchers’ Council’s upstanding opinion of the female gender than the portion of the year the men are at sea, the incredible odds they won’t come back.

(They’ve rather flipped that scenario.

“How much cross-stitch will you do do fill up the void of my absences, she chided him. “They say the old sailor’s wives used to knit lace from the white froth of the sea.” Nowadays Wealthy Kerch women waiting for their husbands to come home tended to stick to knitting hats and scarves for orphans. So saints-damned many hats and socks, and yet you could still scarcely move for the number of bare-headed, barefoot orphans come winter. It was one of Ketterdam’s greatest mysteries.

“Inej,” Kaz sayid, eyes closed, genuine concern cutting his voice. Ever more she was picking up a sailor’s sense of gallows humour.)

---

They exchanged rings at the registry. Inej’s was a simple band, no gemstones but she suspected it was solid gold. Inside was etched a wave pattern, an endless strip of open sea.

Wearing it on her finger meant something, soo she looped it onto a sturdy chain that she hid between her shirt and her beating heart. That seemed appropriate, doable. Young sailors often took the bracelets and handkerchiefs of their sweethearts out to sea as good luck tokens; Inej had a gold wedding band.

Kaz’s fingers brushed the chain in the warm dip between neck and collar as he said goodbye to her on the docks, and after she nodded infinitesimally, telling him to go on, finish this chapter of the story, he slowly pulled up the rest of the chain and found the band.

“I thought-” he said, but she looked him in the eyes, square as she could, and he halted. She doesn’t know what he thought.

“There was not and is not and will probably me a different man for me than you, Kaz Brekker.

He swallowed thickly and then slowly lifted her skin-warmed band to his lips, even though he did not believe in luck, had said he believed in nothing but her.

---

The Kerch don’t have seperate words for “husband’ and “man.”

---

“Mijn mann,” she says in response to the curious looks her crew gives her after the band slips free during repair work, and it doesn’t feel like anything more or less than the truth.

“Mijn mann,” she says tacitly when border authorities raise their eyebrows in suspicion at her Kerch passport.

“Mijn mann,” she begins her letters back to him. “Dearest Inej,” his come back, sometimes even “Loveliest Inej,” but he never uses a possessive pronoun form.

---

Having any kind of passport, official documentation, feels alien and strange. She comes from a people without a land, and for her entire childhood they Suli were denied any official documentation of Ravkan citizenship. That’s changing now, but many are still wary, and with very good reason to be.

---

The quick bureaucratic sketch to mark Vrouw Inej Rietveld as a Seetsen Van Det Kerchrepublik, looked absolutely nothing like the drawings on the three individual sets of national wanted posters that keep cropping up in seedy port cities. Absolutely none of the above get her nose right.

“I look white in this one,” she said, holding a particularly egregious example up to Aigerim, who commiserate mightily. “Look how fucking straight this nose is. No eyebrows.”

Hitting the nose furnishes very fun target practice for when her fingers itch to throw knives.

Inej wins a lot of games of darts in a lot of seamy seaside pubs tucked into a lot of different gritty port cities.

---

They dock in Pijl before Ketterdam to catch their breath and do repairs. Ketterdam’s a good place for business and to look for secrets and plan strategy but a shite location to re-sew a sail or patch up a wall, unless you like replacing your supplies every time they’re stolen. The prices of grain and barrels of water and apples are lower are lower closer to the fields as well, even if that involves bartering loudly in a Centraalmarket that smells like spilled cider and pig shit, straw crunching underfoot, rather than the hallowed halls of the Exchange.

It takes her three days to come down with the evil hybrid chest cold-stomache flu of her fucking life. Ameera shoves her back into bed with ginger tea and another blanket. The thing they don’t tell you about awesome pirate ships with awesome international crews is that you also get the full spectrum of awesome international germs.

By the fourth day, she’s putting on all three of her coats and stuffing a wad of kruge and her passport into a pocket to visit the clinic in town.

---

Other people seem to register this whole being-married business than Inej ever does. She just prefers the expedited customs lines.

The splotchy faced, matronly woman at the clinic sits her on a paper-covered table and reads through a list of questions on a clipboard. Nian loves the lab smell of pure alcohol, would probably dab it on as perfume if she could, but Inej only associates it with injury, with being patched and stitched up after a bad scrape, with the white-coated doctor who came in every two weeks to swab Tante Heleen’s girls for disease, with the brown bottle of the stuff she uses to clean blood and worse off of her knives.

“Family history of pulmonary infections?” the woman asks her. “Smoking, alcohol, jurda use?” Every question makes her squirm slightly, as if in the historyof her wheezing lunghs is some sin she’s committed and will only now find out about. Nejn, nejn, nejn. Inej forgot how much she hated being looked at.

No grisha in her family that she knows of- scribble scribble scribble- but a lot of bad eyesight.

“When was the last time you had intimate relations with your husband?” the woman asks bluntly, and that’s the question that knocks the air out from her. The woman’s thin yellow eyebrow quirks up, but Inej manages to disguise her gasp as a particularly bad fit of hacking. She knows its nothing but a bit of intrusive medical questioning, but words can have many meanings and the answers to questions can be both yes and no at the same time and a certain turn of phrase can punch like a fist and cut like a knife. So she just says “six months ago,” and gives the woman her answer for the write-up.

“Long time.”

“He’s a sailor. I cry as I wait for him to return to me.”

“Ghezen’s speed that he does.”

---

She isn’t quite sure the Kerch even believe in Ghezen as anything beyond a bit of window-dressing to their financial affairs and the punchlien to jokes. Not like she honours her saints, the small painted icon of Sankta Inej she also keeps next to her heart, her daily prayers in the dark comfort her her room. She stands with Merjan, one of her crewmates, at the grave of Sankta Mahari, Queen of Mercy and Patroness of the Lost as they read the ancient prayers together, their voices settling into the steadiness of bees. Our queen, protector of our people, give us mercy, pray for peace, pray for us, pray to bring light to the shadows of the things we have done.

Sankta Anastasia, Sankt Dmitri, Sankta Mahari, she whispers into her knuckles, her fingers moving along the prayer rope with the decisive snapping of wooden beats, pray for our safety in the storm and bring us to the shore.

---

If Inej has found her own name, written with a familar jagged hand, among the prayer-knots tied to the Zentzbridge in a plea of mercy from the sea, she will not mention it.

---

Ketterdam is ugly and bright and familiear. You can smell the rotting flesh and beer smell before you see the smoky smudge of the city on the horizon. The crew makes quick work of unfolding the grishaworked official three-flying-fish flag that gives them clearance to enter the harbour without having their decks searched by the council of tides and carefully docks at Berth 22. Considering that the berths are now being numbered out into the two-hundereds, its a plum location, but its also damn close to the action, meaning that she can already see the glimmer of plastic beads floating on the water, the dark smudges of drunkards bobbing along. A few of the crew memebrs are going to get their pockets picked right off the bat. Inej already has a slush fund tucked away for precisily this reason. She’s getting better at this, she hopes, being a leader. Predicting what will happena dn why and when. Being someone that other people- many younger and more vulnerable than her- can rely on.

“AIGERIM,” she screams as she buttons up her city coat, “only two of thsoe pink trinks with the paper umbrellas MAXIMUM. You hear me?”

“Yeah, boss.”

She sighs. She doesn’t want to be anyone’s boss. “If there’s anything like what happened with the canal and the Stadwatch last time happens again, I think I’ll find the decks need a good scrubbing.”

Aigerim gestures wildly. “Course, boss..”

She tries to take deep rbeaths to calm her nerves. Maybe she’s becoming a worried old crone forty years early, but she’s the one who survived this hellhole of a city. She’s the one who survived this far. In this world, twenty-three is a badge of honour.

---

He cuts a familar figure on the docks. THey each have their own webs now, know of each other’s doings three or four times removed, like recognising a faovrite drinking song on it’s third round of translation. The recognition of a familiar trick, hand, murder method. Kaz will read in a news paper of a mysterious storm that’s tripled the price of indigo and sweet-wood fans after a whole line of ships went missing off the Southern Pelagic Reefs and Inej will hear in a greasy Kaelish bar about the shocking downfall of an old Kerch trading family and they will each smile, privately, and admire the other’s handiwork.

But seeing him in person is something altogether different, and she still rushes over the slats of the quay, coat streaming behind her, stopping abruptly when she comes to him. They pause there for a second and then he lifts his arms and they wrap themselves together around each other, hesitantly but then warmly, firmly, sturdy as a sailor’s knot and with all the inevitability of the sea wearing stone to sand.

“I’ve missed you, Wraith,” he says into her hair and she shrugs into him, her head level with his chest. His chin rests neatly on her head now, if he leans down slighlty, and she swears that wasnt the case the first time they embraced, the first time she left Ketterdam. He denies that the Ice Court, Van Eyck, all that happened while he was a boy not finished with growing. Yet she herself’s tried on that first Wraith outfit- a costume of sorts, really, how different was it from the Scarab Queen’s glass-bead veil in the third act of the Komedie Brute- to find it no longer fit, that she couldn’t easily do up the buttons on the front. She has more of a woman’s set of curves to her hips and long, hard-earned muscles on her legs and thighs, and even if she is creating some new kind of legend it is under her own name now.

Sometimes, Ketterdam feels like that too-small jacket; it cannot fit the woman she’s becoming. So she sews herself a new coat from the fabric of the world.

“Mijn mann,” she says, because she likes the way his body flinches and then stills under her fingers with those words, sharp and unexpected as any knife. “I’ve missed you too.”

[darklingichor]

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell *Major Spoilers*

I wrote a little about this book last month, but I want to write more. This is one of those books that has been lingering in my brain so what follows will be long and rambling.

Now, I haven't read Fangirl I've been pulled more toward action adventure and humor in my fiction, for a while now. Hmm, I wonder what could have happened a few years back  that would cause a Pacific Northwest liberal to feel the need for escape? Just one of those things, I suppose.

I need to read it, if only because I wrote Harry Potter fanfic for years and sort of lost myself in it right after high school.

Anyway.

I've heard people calling Carry On an HP knock off. I don't get this. Simon Snow is obviously Fangirl's Harry Potter. That makes Carry On more of a tongue in cheek homage to HP and stories like it as well as something of a love letter to fanfic writers.

A lot of the main characters start out as your standard for this type of story. "The Hero", "The Mentor", "The Damsel", "The Enemy", "The Unspeakable Evil."

Through the book it becomes clear that our hero is well meaning but ill-suited for the role that his mentor thinks he place him in. The mentor is shown to be unhinged. The damsel is sick of screaming and doesn't want to be in the story at all. The enemy is love sick for the hero and dealing with the puberty from hell. The unspeakable evil, isn't. Its just an unforeseen byproduct of the mentor's plan, in which, the hero, is a pawn.

The book plays with archetypes and I read some of them as being fairly meta about their expected place in the story.

Agetha, especially, seems to know her role and resent it. She's who is saved by the hero, whether she likes it or not.

Baz is so certain of his role as "The Enemy" that until his role flips, he's sure his destiny is to be killed by the person he's in love with.

Simon knows his role so well, he's on auto pilot as a defence mechanism. He's either going to die, or he'll get a stock Happily Ever After. He doesn't even allow himself to think too much about what really matters to him, because he knows his life isn't really his.

I would have loved this book because of everything I wrote above, but add to it the nods to fan contribution? It was enough to make me remember my old ff.n login!

I don't know if Rainbow Rowell researched fan fiction but I figure she must have.

I mean, the things I saw played with and reshaped in Carry On, are fanfic tropes. Rowell took things that grew out of fans having fun with their favorite characters and made them canon.

Main character going out with an exchange student, pop culture references, evil good guy, and:

Four words: Draco is a vampire.

Sure, not every fic that used these were the best, but so what? Many were sincere.

What better way to go to Hogwarts as a person raised outside the UK than to live though an OC in an exchange program?

It was weird that no one in the wizard world listened to muggle music, watched movies or TV. Even the muggleborns? I'm sorry, but I was in the same age range as the characters. In fact, if Harry were real, he would be three years older than me. You can't convince me that there were not at least a couple of muggleborns who were  sending an owl a week to remind their parents to tape Friends or My So-Called Life.

There were a fair few stories where Dumbledore or even Harry turned out to be evil. Even before we found out Dumbledore wasn't a saint. It can be fun to play with expectations and Dumbledore was too perfect for too long.

The vampire thing? I mean, why not? Either Draco or Snape. It fits enough for a fic, and you can get some fun stuff out of it. Besides Hogwarts allowed a warewolf, why not a vampire?

The point is, this book reminds me of some goofy fics I read but also reminds me of some that I sometimes have to remind myself aren't canon, because fan fiction can be amazing.

Example: It has been years but I still remember a great fic that someone wrote about Uric The Oddball's years at Hogwarts. I don't remember much about it off hand but I do know that if I re-read HP, when Uric is mentioned, I think of this story like it is something that is actually in the history of the series. (Dude, I googled "Uric the Oddball fan fiction" on a whim. Popped right up: Uric the Oddball and the Wild Hunt by Ariana Deralte. Guess I shouldn't be surprised! Maybe I should read it again to see if it's still as good as I remember).

So yeah, Carry On is so not an HP knock off and has a number of things that I think make me like it more.

The first one is diversity. It is very nice to have it explicitly said in the text that characters are of different ethnicities, sexualities, and abilities. Watford is a far better representation of a population than Hogwarts is, outside of fanfic (It wasn't there, people wrote it in).

Then there is magic itself, it comes from somewhere it's in the environment, it has to do with celestial alignment, people give words power to channel that energy.

That brings me to something that made me adore the world building here.

The actuality of Simon Snow's universe is that Mages cannot exist independently without the Normals. Without the Normals giving weight and meaning to turns of phrase, rhyme and songs, the Mages couldn't do what they do. Add to that, this means that magic is ever evolving and the Mages must learn about and be a part of, to some extent, the Normal world. This makes Mages who look down on Normals seem even more ridiculous.

I also think this book handled romance better than Harry Potter. I don't know what it was but the relationships seemed awkward and strained in HP. Maybe it was because most of it was shoved into one book, like Hogwarts's water supply was spiked with hormones? I don't know.

What I do know is that even though Simon and Agetha are going through the motions of being together in this book, they still feel like two people who have been dating for a long time.

We don't get a lot about Penny and her boyfriend, but the way she is described talking about him reminds me of how my best friend would talk about her boyfriends when she was visiting me. The way she would go on, you'd think that he was on the moon instead of 90 miles away. I bought that Penny and her boyfriend enjoy each other's company.

And the biggie. Simon and Baz

I almost didn't read this book for two reasons. First: Vampire main character. I love vampires, but I lived through the deluge of Twilight, True Blood, and Vampire Diaries, not to mention that every other book seemed to be about vampires. Even though I didn't watch or read all of them, I just got vampired out.

Second: I have never been one for the whole "enemies to love interest" thing. The Harry/Draco pairing never spoke to me.  Not that I never read fics that managed that ship well, it was just not my favorite, probably because I just never liked Draco.  I tend to prefer romances that are built on friendship (Remus and Sirius dated each other at some point, and nothing can convince me otherwise).

All that being said, I like the Simon/Baz pairing.

I like that Baz freely admits to the reader that a lot of his tormenting of Simon is pigtail pulling.

I like that Simon is more or less: "I like a guy? A guy who was my nemisis? That's new, let's go for it."

There's none of that "Hate turns to love" shit that I personally can't stand.  None of the "I am evil, yet his light draws me" or "His darkness is so seductive"

Baz isn't a villain needing to rethink his position. He's a slightly snobby guy with a lot of family pressure, who is in love with a dude who has been set up as opposition, by the adults in his life.

Simon isn't a good guy wanting to be bad. He's a guy who is following the path set out for him without giving context to his feelings with thought, because he doesn't think. So, when Baz doesn't show up at the first of the year, Simon knows 3 things for sure:

Baz is his enemy

His enemy is not there

He feels very uneasy about it.

Why?

See numbers 1 & 2

This equals out to "plotting" in Simon's mind because that's what enemies do.

It doesn't dawn on him that he was actually missing Baz and that he has romantic feelings for him until later

I also like the interaction between them. Again, I buy that they like each other. The simpler moments, like sharing food, or being flirty. It also makes sense that Baz is so nervous and guarded about the relationship. It fits that they would bicker and argue while trying to figure every thing out.

The relationships feel authentic.

In fact all of the relationships between  the characters feel authentic.  The sibling relationships between Ebb and Nicky, I know siblings that close. The interaction between Baz and his little sister, I know people like them too. The Friendships; in my opinion, too few friends in fiction are depicted messing with each other or being lovingly annoyed by each other.

I've known my two best friends most of my life. Not a day goes by where one of us doesn't say something that if it was said by anyone else, it would lead to a fight. Said by us, it's funny, or at least something we can't argue with.

So I related when Baz's friend complained that he had wasted his childhood hating Simon now that Simon and Baz were no longer enemies and Baz said: "What else were you going to do with your childhood?"

I spent my 20's with my friends seemingly taking turns crashing at my apartment. I spent most of my time ossulating between wishing they would go home and being glad they were there.

So at the beginning of the book, when Penny won't leave Simon's room? I saw myself in the way Simon felt about it.

That authentic and relatable quality was what I really liked about the quiet - if not Happily Ever After - then the Attempting Normal For Now ending each character got.

Well, as normal as you can get with a story involving  mages, vampires and powerful Elton John songs.

I am a dodecahedron of geekdom, btw and the classic rock side jumped up and down clapping hands at all of the music references (and giggled when Carry On was fallowed by Wayward Son which will be followed by Anyway The Wind Blows). 

And now we come to the reason I have not read the sequel even though it is sitting in a bag with the rest of this year's Powell's haul.

From what I have read, Wayward Son is, at least in part, about what happens after Happily Ever After and ends on a cliffhanger. 

After Happily Ever After with a cliffhanger and no release date... Yeah, that will drive me crazy. I haven't even read the second book and I'm already thinking about the third. Aw man! Who dies? Who breaks up? Who becomes evil?

So, even though road trip stories are right up there with time travel stories as one of my favorites, even though I love the idea of showing a character battling depression, even though I love these characters, period; Wayward Son will stay unread until I run out of new books to read, or the next book's release date is close. Whichever comes first, because I want to think of the characters in their quiet ending ending for a little while.

[lo-lynx]

The Nordic influences in His Dark Materials

TW: Eugenics, racism, sexism

Spoiler warning: The whole His Dark Materials book series (but mainly The Golden Compass/Nothern Lights), minor spoiler for La Belle Sauvage, very minor spoiler for His Dark Materials the tv-show.

 When one of my favourite podcasts Girls Gone Canon announced that they were going to start covering the His Dark Materials novels in preparation of the launch of the TV-show this fall, I got very excited. I had read the first novel, The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, as a child but remembered very little so I decided to re-read the entire series. Reading the novels now, as a nerd in my twenties that’s working on getting a master’s degree in gender studies, and is born and raised in Sweden, I quite quickly got very interested in some aspects of the series’ worldbuilding. Namely, the way “The North” and its people are portrayed. Phillip Pullman’s story takes place in several different worlds, but we start out in what I’ll call “Lyra’s world”, a world similar to ours, but also quite different. Over the course of the first novel our heroine Lyra, travels with a group of gyptians (a people that seems to be inspired of our world’s Roma people) to “The North” to recover children that a corrupt religious government agency has kidnapped. Now, exactly what counts as “The North” is slightly unclear, but the group’s first stop is the town of Trollesund in Lapland. In our world both Trollesund and Lapland exists, but Trollesund is most definitely not in Lapland. The northern most states/regions in both Sweden and Finland are called Lapland.  On the first map bellow Trollesund is marked out, and on the other two the states/regions of Lapland in Sweden and Finland are marked.

Regardless of exactly where Trollesund is, I’ve always assumed it to be in a Swedish speaking area based on the names given to characters and places in the novel. These are for example Martin Lanselius and Einarsson’s Bar (Pullman 2007, 179). These names definitely sound more Swedish than Finnish. Lanselius could possibly be Norwegian as well, but the Norwegian version of Einarsson should be Einarsen (I have no specific source for this… but Swedish last names are often constructed as [name]sson, and Norwegian ones as [name]sen.). In the television adaption of His Dark Materials Trollesund seems to be in Norway however (Cremona 2018). Now, even if I’ve tried to figure it out, it remains unclear exactly where the Lapland of Lyra’s world is, but my guess is that it’s somewhere close to the Laplands of our world. It should be pointed out that in Pullman’s other novel that takes place in the same universe, La Belle Sauvage, a character visits the town of Uppsala (also a real town), which is stated to be in Sweden (Pullman 2017, 45). So, the state of Sweden seems to exist, and be separate from the state of Lapland. Now, why do I care about this so much? Am I just curious because this is “my neck of the woods”? Well, partly yes. But I also find it very interesting that Pullman has decided to create a separate state of Lapland and have several important parts of the plot take place there.

In our world, the word/name Lapland (or Lappland in Swedish) means l*p land/country. What does l*p mean you might ask? Well, it is a derogatory term for the Sami people, a people indigenous to North Norway/Sweden/Finland/Russia. Their own name for this land is Sápmi. The Sami people have lived in this area for several thousands of years and have traditionally (and still today) used that area for reindeer husbandry, hunting, and fishing (Samer, n.d. a). For a long time, they have been a nomadic people, which has been exploited to claim that they have no claim over the land, even though they have dwelt there. To write an exhaustive account of the exploitation of Sami people is beyond the capabilities of this essay, but I recommend the site www.samer.se which is a site run by Sametinget (the parliament representing the Sami people in Sweden, that also functions as a state agency), which can be translated into English. However, it should be noted that this exploitation has been sanctioned by the Swedish state pretty much since the time of the unification of Sweden in the 16th century (Samer, n.d b). At the same time the missionary work of the Swedish church started in the area and by the 17th century Sami people were forced to attend church (Samer, n.d. c). By the end of the 19th century racist ideas of eugenics/racial biology started gaining traction in Sweden, which also impacted Sami people:

It began being claimed that the Sami were born with certain "race characteristics" that made them inferior to the rest of the population. Therefore, they could not live as "civilized" people in real houses. If they did, they would become "lazy" and start neglecting their reindeer. That would result in all Sami people having to become beggars because they did not have any skills besides reindeer husbandry. The [Swedish parliament] decided in 1928 that the Sami who were not reindeer herders would not have any Sami rights either. For example, they were given no special right to hunt and fish in the areas where their ancestors had lived. In this way, the state drew a sharp boundary between the Sami living on reindeer husbandry and those who support themselves in other ways. The Sami schooling was also affected by racism. A law about a special nomad school came in 1913 which stated that teachers would wander around the mountainous regions in the summer. There, the youngest schoolchildren would be taught in the family's cot for a few weeks each year during the first three school years. The rest of the school time consisted of winter courses in regular schools for three months a year for three years. The teaching would only cover a few subjects and it had to be at such a low level that the children were not "civilized". Children of nomadic Sami were not allowed to attend public primary schools. 

[my translation] (Samer n.d. d)

This eugenics movement did, however, not just result in substandard schooling and rights in general. I have previously written about the ideas of eugenics, as well as the way the Swedish state sanctioned them, but some aspects of it is specifically relevant to highlight in relation to the Sami people. In 1922 The State’s Race Biological institute (Statens rasbiologiska institut) was created in Uppsala in Sweden, by the “scientist” Herman Lundborg (Hagerman 2016, 961). He wished to research the Swedish race, and the mixing of races in Sweden. This was done in several ways, both by looking at records of marriages and birth (often supplied by church officials who had access to so called “church books” that recorded this), and physical examinations of people. He, and other “scientists”, travelled around Sweden to examine the Sami people and other groups that were considered inferior (such as Finns, Roma people, Jews, disabled people etc). The physical examination of Sami people often happened in collaboration with local churches or schools (Hagerman 2016, 984). Another part of the eugenics movement in Sweden that is worth mentioning here is the forced sterilisations that took place during this time.  As Hübinette and Lundström writes:

(…) a sterilisation law to hinder the reproduction of the lower classes, and simultaneously to increase the birth rate among the ‘better stock’ (…) The sterilisation program was in effect between 1934 and 1975, and turned out to be one of the most effective in the democratic world, resulting in the sterilisation of over 60,000 people. Moreover, it was both racialised, gendered, classed and heteronormative, as national minorities like the Travellers and the Roma were proportionally more targeted than majority Swedes, and as 90 percent were women, mostly belonging to the lower- and working-classes, and many deemed to be sexual transgressors of the patriarchal order of the day. (Hübinette & Lundström 2014, 428)

So, in conclusion, these eugenic practices had profound consequences for several groups of marginalised people in Sweden during this time. These “scientific” practices were state sanctioned and supported by officials from The Swedish Church.

Now, lets get back to His Dark Materials and Lyra’s world. I want to start by pointing out some more “obvious” parallels between people and custom’s in Lyra’s world and the Sami people and culture, and then move on to some more theme-based comparisons. Firstly, if one compares a map of Sápmi with the map of the Witches’ land in Lyra’s world, there are striking similarities:

(Nordiska museet n.d.)

(His Dark Materials Wiki n.d.)

So, geographically there seems to be similarities between the Witches’ lands and Sápmi. But it’s not exactly the same, just as the Witches obviously aren’t exactly Sami people. However, they do also seem to have partly the same religion. The Witches (at least Serafina Pekkala’s clan) have a death goddess that they call Yambe-Akka (Pullman 2007, 305). This figure also exists in Sami religion (Oxford Reference n.d.). Her name can also be spelled Jábbmeáhkko (Samer n.d. e). Furthermore, the Witches in general seem to be very close to nature, and not as focused on material wealth etc as other humans (Pullman 2007, 299). This seems quite similar to a sort of stereotypical view of Sami people and indigenous people in general. On multiple occasions the books also describe how the Witches live close to the veil between worlds and can hear the undead whispers from beyond it (ibid, 174). This seems similar to the Sami beliefs in how a nåjden/noajdde (a shaman) could communicate with the spiritual world, including communing with Jábbmeáhkko (Samer n.d. e). However, there is no mention of actual Sami people in His Dark Materials. This seems somewhat odd, considering how other peoples from our world are called out, such as the Samoyed and the Tartars. Nevertheless, their culture does seem to have inspired Pullman’s depiction of the Witches.

I now want to look at some more comparisons between the North in Lyra’s world and Nordic/Swedish history in our world. In the story Lyra travels north to free children who have been kidnapped by The General Oblation Board (GOB) and taking to the station Bolvangar (Pullman 2007, 169). At Bolvangar the children are subjected to different medical studies and experiments. The children who are kidnapped seems to mainly come from lower classes and/or ethnic minorities (such as the gyptians). This is sadly very similar to the groups of people targeted by The State’s Institute for Racial Biology in Sweden. In both cases it was easier to experiment on people who had less power in society. As I outlined before as well, many Sami children were studied at schools and in collaboration with church officials. This seems very similar to a religious government agency taking of children to The North to experiment on them. Another thing I want to highlight is the comparison between the severing of children and dæmons, and sterilisation. In the books, children’s bond to their dæmons (their soul) are severed by the GOB in order to prevent “Dust” settling on the children (Pullman 2007, 275). Dust is considered dangerous and sinful, something that according to the church started infecting humans after their fall from the garden of Eden. Sterilisation in our world, on the other hand, took place in order to make the population “cleaner” and of “better” stock. Groups who were in different ways considered degenerate were targeted, including women who were perceived as promiscuous/sexual transgressors. In Lyra’s world a spiritual connection is severed by the Church in order to curb sinfulness. In our world a biological connection is severed by “scientists” (in collaboration with the Church at times) to control sexuality and reproduction. There is a definite similarity here.

Quite a lot more could probably be written about the similarities between the North in Lyra’s world and ours, but I have to stop somewhere. What I have tried to show here is how Pullman seems to have been inspired both by Sami history/culture, and Nordic history in general when describing the North of Lyra’s world. He also seems to have pulled quite a lot of the racism targeted against ethnic minorities in this area. However, neither of these influences are as explicit as they could have been. In the case of the Sami culture I feel like this is a shame, especially since he chooses to call a country/state Lapland. One would think that since he seems to have done some research on the Sami people, he could have chosen to call it Sápmi instead, or even just include mention of the Sami, as he does with other ethnic groups. However, many of the parallels between the experiments that takes place in the North in Lyra’s world and the experiments that have been taking place in our world are interesting, as well as horrible. I want to end this text by being clear that the sort of discrimination, exploitation and racism that I have described here is not just a product of history. Similar things still happen throughout our world. In the United States latinx children are kept in terrible conditions in concentration camps by the border (see for example Sacchetti 2019). In Chechnya there have been reports about concentrations camps for LGBTQ+ people (see for example Steinmetz 2019). In China reports state that Muslims are being kept and tortured in concentration camps (see for example Ioanes 2019). And in Sweden Sami people are still being denied rights to their land (Torp 2016; Jonsson 2018; TT 2019). We need to stay vigilante and keep fighting.

EDIT: Since Girls Gone Canon mentioned this in their excellent episode about episode 4 in the TV-show I felt compelled to make this small edit. In Trollesund we also meet the character of the sysselman. This post seems to be based on the office of “sysselmann” that exists in parts of Norway and the Faroe Islands, which is sort of like a sherrif. I didn’t consider this until after the last episode because when I re-read The Golden Compass I did so in Swedish, and the word didn’t stand out as non-Swedish. I also confused it with the Swedish word “syssloman” (which is more similar to an attorney). After realising that it wasn’t translated in the English version of the story I looked it up and realised that the word was actually Norweigan, but with a slightly more Swedish spelling (sysselMAN instead of sysselMANN). This seems to be in line with my other analysis that Trollesund has both Swedish and Norweigan influences, while Lapland as a whole also has Finnish influences. So basically Lapland seems to be a mix of Scandinavia and Sápmi... 

EDIT 2: I recently realised that in Nothern Lights/The Golden Compass they mention that the “Norroway” government has influence in Trollesund (Pullman 2011, 170). Once again, this hints at the fact that Trollesund is in what in our world is Norway, as well as makes me even more confused about which states exist in the North. But I still think that Lapland is some sort of mix of Sápmi and other parts of Scandinavia. 

References

Cremona, Patrick. 2019. “Where was His Dark Materials filmed?”. Radio Times. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-11-18/his-dark-materials-filmed-location/

Girls Gone Canon. 2019. His Dark Materials S1E4: “Armor”. https://girlsgonecanon.podbean.com/e/his-dark-materials-s1e4-armor/

*Hagerman, Maja. 2016. ”Svenska kyrkan och rasbiologin”[The Swedish Church and the eugenics]. In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska Kyrkan och samerna: en vetenskaplig antologi [The Historical relationships between the Swedish Church and the Sami people: a scientific anthology], eds. Lindmark, Daniel & Olle Sundström. Skellefteå: Artos och Norma bokförlag [accessible online here: https://www.svenskakyrkan.se/filer/770f2627-57e5-4e06-b880-4ca6c4f94799.pdf ]

His Dark Materials Wiki. n.d. “Lake Enara” Accessed November 22, 2019. https://hisdarkmaterials.fandom.com/wiki/Lake_Enara

Hübinette, Tobias & Catrin Lundström. 2014. ”Three phases of hegemonic whiteness: understanding racial temporalities in Sweden”, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 20 (6): 423-37. [accessible online here: http://www.tobiashubinette.se/swedish_whiteness_2.pdf ]

Ioanes, Ellen. 2019. “Rape, medical experiments, and forced abortions: One woman describes horrors of Xinjiang concentration camps.” Business Insider. October 22, 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/muslim-woman-describes-horrors-of-chinese-concentration-camp-2019-10?r=US&IR=T

Jonsson, Berno. 2018. ”Stor oro bland samer när kommunen säljer mark.” [Large concerns among Sami people when the municipality sells land] SVT. October 8, 2018. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasterbotten/stark-oro-bland-samer-nar-kommunen-saljer-mark

Nordiska museet. n.d. “Vem är same? Vem är svensk? Varför vill du veta?” [Who is Sami? Who is Swedish? Why do you want to know?] Accessed November 22, 2019. https://www.nordiskamuseet.se/utstallningar/sapmi

Oxford Reference. n.d. “Yambe-akka”. Accessed November 22, 2019. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803125245136

Pullman, Phillip. 2007. Guldkompassen. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Natur och Kultur [this is the Swedish translation of The Golden compass]

Pullman, Philip. 2011. Northern Lights. London: Scholastic

Pullman, Phillip. 2017. La Belle Sauvage. New York: Knopf

Sacchetti, Maria. 2019. “1,500 more migrant children separated from parents at US border than previously admitted, ACLU says” Independent. October 25, 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-us-mexico-border-family-separation-migrant-children-aclu-a9170636.html

Samer. n.d. a “Sápmi.” Accessed November 22, 2019. http://www.samer.se/1002

Samer. n.d. b “Drömmen om outtömliga rikedomar i norr.” [The dream of inexhaustible riches in the North] Accessed November 22, 2019. http://www.samer.se/1229

Samer. n.d. c “I Guds tjänst” [In the service of God] Accessed November 22, 2019. http://www.samer.se/4441

Samer. n.d. d “Samepolitik i rasismens tidevarv” [Sami politics in the time of racism] Accessed November 22, 2019. http://www.samer.se/1042

Samer. n.d. e “Kontakt med andarna” [Contact with the spirits] Accessed November 22, 2019. http://www.samer.se/1139

Steinmetz, Katy. 2019. “A Victim of the Anti-Gay Purge in Chechnya Speaks Out: 'The Truth Exists'” TIME. July 26, 2019. https://time.com/5633588/anti-gay-purge-chechnya-victim/

Torp, Eivind. 2016. “Girjasmålet – rättsprocessen” [The Girjas case- the trial proceedings] Accessed November 22, 2019. http://www.samer.se/4997

TT. 2019. ”Tvist mellan sameby och staten avgörs i HD” [Dispute between Sami village and the state to be determined in the Supreme Court] Aftonbladet. September 2, 2019. https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/e8XrOl/tvist-mellan-sameby-och-staten-avgors-i-hd

*this is a chapter from The Swedish Church’s white paper about its treatment of Sami people.

[captawesomesauce]

Thoughts at midnight...

This was a conversation I had today with a very close friend of mine. The topic was not just how I see things in the next few weeks but how it plays out longer term....

Me: The next few years are going to be hell. Between the economy and the fact that covid isn't reacting the way people thought it would... So far there is no indication of immunity and the vaccines aren't showing any progress. We're now seeing strokes in middle age people and Kawasaki disease in children and infants. Trying to get a job is going to be nigh impossible, and I don't see reopening being possible until a vaccine is out and about. Winter is going to be really bad when you have the cofactors of a bad flu season, natural disasters, and another covid flare.

But seriously, you know I've spent my entire adult life studying global health and worrying about this shit. I knew one was coming, i warned people, it was one of my big fears. 

But this isn't working out the way it was supposed to. We're not developing antibodies the way people should... which helps create a herd immunity that delays reinfection... We're not seeing it only affect a single system, like respiratory... instead we're seeing it affect resp and circulatory by causing an autoimmune response that is causing inflammation (covid toes) and strokes and kawasaki disease in all ages. Seriously, I don't see the world coming back to normal or re-opening until we get that vaccine. There will be no more disneyland, no more sports, no more schools. There just can't be. What will happen is that when we do open some more stuff, we'll see another spike of infections and deaths and shit will go to hell real fast, and I expect that'll happen around july/august.

Job wise, the best thing any of us can do is start looking at shit we can do from home, remotely.

(He asked “Do you think the stay-at-home orders are slowing antibody development?”)

Absolutely not. Because it's a Worldwide thing and stay-at-home is patchwork. You have places like sweden that hasn't enacted it at all, and global south places like africa and brazil that have had their own policies as well.. what we're seeing is that there is no sign of immunity build up. The data is also showing that testing is still so incomplete and inconsistent that we're seeing signs of recurrence and dormancy/latency where the patient recovers and then gets sick again. We're also seeing it impact so many organs and body systems that some people who are asymptomatic aren't. By that I mean that we attribute covid to the respiratory issues and the fever and the dying, but we're finding there's a slower inflammation and blood clotting issue occurring in adults with no other symptoms as well  that leads to sudden strokes or covid toes.

Here's the big quote: “Coronavirus is causing the blood of sufferers to form large clots and create strokes in people in their 30s and 40s with no underlying conditions.the majority of them had no COVID symptoms at all and didn't even know they were infected”

You have children getting kawsaki's, you have 30s-40s getting strokes, you have elderly outright dying. in 6 weeks there are more people dead in the US than US casualties in 10 years of the Vietnam war. But ya know... reopen the economy and shit because rich people in mansions need their stock portfolios to be healthier than workers.Oh and our president is a very stable genius

All predictors show that the new 2 to 4 years are going to be awful... really fucking awful. We're not getting out of this one unscathed as a society or world.

Remember sars and mers mutated multiple times each time it came back... covid will too

“Looking back at the SARS pandemic in 2003, people who had SARS had a strong supply of SARS antibodies for about 2 years, providing them immunity against the virus. After about 3 years, those SARS antibodies tapered off" that's what they were hoping for with COVID. 

Because vaccines are just that, antibodies... antibodies work on a system of memory. Once your body has the disease, you have a memory of it and you dont get it again. Vaccines tell your body you had it, and you dont get it again. Thats how measels, mumps, rubella and polio vax's work, and the flu shots work. MMR's work so well because the mutations are so minimal/slow that one shot works for life, flu's change so much you need a new one every year and because our bodies memory for it is short. What we're seeing with Covid is that the mutation is not very rapid, but our memory is very very short. We're just not building antibodies. It'd almost be better if it was rapid mutating because we could hope it'd mutate into something less transmittable, or weaker, and disappear magically like Trump said. Instead it's sticking around, and our bodies aren't building any immunity. That doesn't bode well for a vaccine in some regards. Also these treatments are also 'red herrings'... people aren't making full recoveries. Like the gilead one. They're saving people from death, but the people are almost wishing they had died. They're permanently fucked. They're going to suffer permanent lung, circulatory, mental, and other disorders, and need life long care, if not end up in full time care facilities for life. They're now saying some of these people may only live another 20 years, even the ones who are in their 40s because of stroke and other risks. Its polio and people on crutches and spine braces and dying all over the place.

I feel for kids... anyone who grows up now or in the next decade... they're going to grow up in an economic depression, in a societal upheaval, in the aftermath of a pandemic and still have to face the effects of climate change which is going to be a super fucking mess.

[stopforamoment]

Grocery Shopping with Rinda

TRR after Book Three Bastien Lykel and OFC Rinda Parks Word Count: 1,489 (sorry, Enna!) Rated E for Everyone but TRIGGERS: Mention of a pet’s death and pet owner grief. Obligatory Disclaimer: Bastien Lykel belongs to Pixelberry, but Rinda and Henry Parks are all mine! A/N: This is for @emceesynonymroll second wacky drabbles challenge, “this is what I deal with everyday.” I modeled this after shopping for groceries in the United States, and a variation of these things have happened to me at one time or another. I think I need to work on my resting bitch face so people don’t randomly approach me, LOL. This takes place when Rinda and Bastien are still working together, before they started dating. Bastien still doesn’t know the full crazy train of Rinda Parks. TRIGGERS: Mention of a pet’s death and pet owner grief.

Grocery Shopping with Rinda 

“Mom, we don’t have time for this.”

“Ten minutes, Bug. I just need brown sugar and chocolate chips to make cookies for tomorrow.”

Bastien raised an eyebrow when he saw Henry sigh loudly and shake his head. “I’m telling you, we won’t have enough time.”

They walked into the store and Rinda grabbed a shopping basket, but she immediately got distracted by the wall of sales. “Oh, canned vegetables are on sale. Hold on, we can stock up on those. Let me grab a cart.”

She turned around and Henry was already there with a cart, his hand out waiting to take the basket from his mother and return it.

Bastien watched, an amused expression on his face, as Rinda began hoarding cans of food. But she opened up the child seat of the cart and put half of the cans in the seat area, and half in the basket portion of the cart.

They walked into the produce section, and Rinda saw a father with small children looking over the fresh fruits and vegetables. One of the children asked for strawberries, but the father said they were too expensive.

After the family walked away, Rinda put the strawberries in the seat portion of her cart.

They made it to the baking aisle, but an elderly gentleman was looking at cake mixes in utter confusion. He locked eyes with Rinda, and she smiled and began walking over as he began to ask, “Can you help me?”

His wife needed him to bring a cake mix home. Just a basic cake mix like she always made for him. He knew it wasn’t chocolate, but he wasn’t sure which one. Rinda asked if the cake normally looked white or yellow. It was yellow. Rinda quickly stopped the man from grabbing a lemon cake mix, and instead steered him toward the yellow cake mix. His wife might have preferred the golden butter recipe, but at least he wasn’t going home with white or lemon cake mix.

Now a young woman approached Rinda, wondering what bakers cheese was. Rinda double checked if it was for a cheesecake. It was. It was hard to find dry ground bakers cheese anymore, but Ricotta was a good substitution. Where was Ricotta cheese? The refrigerator section. Here, it was just easier to show the woman.

Rinda turned around to Henry, who had already put the brown sugar and chocolate chips in the cart and was waiting patiently to follow his mom. Bastien trailed behind, still observing their interactions.

They found the Ricotta cheese, but it took a little bit longer as Rinda looked over the recipe and made a few suggestions. The girl wanted to make it for her boyfriend. It was a family recipe, and his mom emailed the recipe, but Rinda wanted to double check if there were any typos, since it made a difference if you used an upper-case T for tablespoon or a lower-case t for teaspoon. Fifteen minutes later Rinda knew the dating history of the couple and how the young woman was still worried if his mom liked her or not (Rinda reassured the young woman that if his mother gave her a family recipe, then mom definitely liked her).

Bastien wished the young girl good luck as she walked away, and the woman beamed, oblivious to Henry’s impatient foot tapping.

Then it happened. What Henry was most dreading. A child from school recognized Mrs. Parks and wanted to say “hi.” Then what Rinda most dreaded happened. The child’s parents wanted to ask school-related questions about a long-term project their child was working on. Even though Rinda didn’t have time for this discussion, she patiently smiled and re-explained the assignment for the child--and the parents. When the parents asked questions about whether or not their child was doing the assignment correctly, Rinda politely ignored the helicopter parents’ questions and instead asked the child what he was doing and what questions he had. Then she reassured the child that he could always his teachers questions if he wasn’t sure about something.

When that discussion was squared away, Rinda politely reminded the parents that they needed volunteers for an upcoming fundraiser. Could she could on them for help? The parents squirmed but said “yes.” Rinda smiled warmly and thanked them for being so generous with their time. The school couldn’t do it without dedicated parents like them. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the father with the children headed toward the checkout, and she quickly excused herself and made a beeline for the self-checkout. Henry whipped the cart around and struggled after his mom, but Bastien was caught talking to the parents for a bit longer about their concerns for their child’s safety. It was traumatic for children to take part in school safety drills.

Dammit, Rinda! Where are you? This is your area of expertise.

By the time he extricated himself from the parents, with a promise that he’d have Rinda talk to them with more details, he didn’t know where she was. Their cart was off to the side near the checkout area, but Henry and Rinda were nowhere to be found.

Henry came running from behind a checkout line, a happy smile on his face. He saw Mr. Lykel standing by the cart and said his mom was in the pet supply aisle. Bastien had a look of pure confusion on his face. Rinda and Henry didn’t have a pet in Cordonia. Their dog was still in Wisconsin. But he did notice the strawberries were no longer in the cart, and Henry turned to give the father and his children another goodbye wave.

Rinda was on the floor in the pet aisle, holding a sobbing woman who had to put her cat down only days ago. Between racking sobs the woman was telling Rinda all the wonderful stories about her cat. Toonces was twenty years old. She had Toonces since she was a child, and she held Toonces in her arms and felt that last shudder when the vet . . . Rinda made gentle shushing noises. She knew what the woman meant. She did the same thing when her cat was old and in pain. And Rinda knew Toonces felt safe and loved at the end. He was in his fur mama’s arms, getting kisses and gentle scratches behind his ears, just the way Toonces liked it. Of course Toonces understood why his mama had to say goodbye.

Bastien knelt on the floor next to the woman and gently pressed a handkerchief into her hand. Rinda smiled at Bastien’s gesture. He was so kind and thoughtful, and she loved that about him.

When the woman was finally able to stand up, she and Rinda looked at the box of cat treats in her cart. That’s what started the woman crying. It was her first time shopping after her cat died, and without thinking she went into the pet aisle to buy Toonces’ favorite treat. When she dropped the treats into the cart it hit her, and she fell to the floor crying. That’s where Rinda found the woman on her way to the self-check out with Henry, and Rinda quickly gave Henry some cash to buy the strawberries while she went to see if she could help the woman.

The woman stood still, unable to move. “May I?” The woman didn’t respond, so Rinda slowly, gently took the treats out of the cart. She paused, waiting to see if the woman would react. She didn’t, so Rinda put the treats back on the shelf. Then she squeezed the woman’s hand. “Will you be okay? Is there anyone I can call for you?”

Bastien took the woman’s other hand. “Please. Let us help you to the checkout and then we’ll be sure you have someone to take you home.” Rinda and Henry went through the check out, and she was going to add the woman’s groceries to her own bill, but Bastien shook his head and paid for the woman’s groceries himself. Rinda nodded and made sure the check out worker put the cans from the child seat into separate bags, and those were placed in the food donation bin on their way out. Meanwhile, Bastien helped the woman with her grocery bags. When they were outside he helped the woman call a friend, and Bastien, Rinda, and Henry patiently waited until the woman and her groceries were safe in the friend’s car.

It was over an hour since they entered the store, and Rinda looked at her watch and sighed. “We don’t have time to bake cookies. I have to go back inside and buy some from the bakery.”

Bastien’s eyes widened in alarm. They’d never get back to Rinda’s house and get any work done if she went back in there again, but Henry calmly shrugged. “This is what I deal with every day.”

[hellevator-mp3]

how it all went wrong (and what went right) || Part 3

Pairing(s): Seongsang, Woosan, Yungi (platonic for now!) 

Genre: as usual, mild fluff, slight gore, and also slightly ~suggestive~ content

Word Count: 1400+

Warnings: none for this part! (i don’t think, anyways)

Author Note: here’s part 2 of chapter two! 

“perhaps falling in love in the apocalypse isn’t such a bad idea” - probably yeosang, during the apocalypse

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once again, just like the day a short week before, yeosang awoke to the sound of banging and yelling at the door.  he could faintly hear his name, but the only thing that mattered in that moment was the absence of seonghwa.  the other was nowhere to be found, and yeosang couldn’t even hear him clattering around in the kitchen.  the pounding grew more frantic, and yeosang was quick to arm himself as he crept to the door, peering out the peekhole and feeling a sense of deja vu as he looked at the people outside his door.  when his eyes caught sight of the familiar platinum blond hair he was used to waking up next to, he gasped and wrenched the door open.  yunho was immediately pushing past him with seonghwa in his arms, the latter groaning as he clutched at his stomach.  mingi was quick to follow, and then in rushed four more people.  yeosang quickly recognized wooyoung and san, but ignored the two newcomers in favor of rummaging through the bathroom cabinet for the first aid supplies.  when he emerged, yunho had made quick work of seonghwa’s shirt and left the other bare chested on the couch, letting yeosang kneel down next to him and peel his hands away from his stomach.  a decent sized gash curved over his belly button, steadily dribbling blood down his sides.  “get a towel, quick, from that closet!” yeosang vaguely gestured in the direction of the closet in question, watching for wooyoung to return with a towel so he could begin applying pressure and hope that the wound would stop bleeding so heavily.  

he quickly soaked through that towel and requested another one, that wooyoung quickly tossed at him, seeming to have been prepared.  about halfway through the second, the flow seemed to slow down slightly, and yeosang pulled the towel away to take a look at the wound.  it wasn’t deep enough to warrant major concern, but he would have to stitch it up.  

thank the government for his one semester of nursing school, where the first thing they learned was how to stitch someone up.  

as he rummaged through the first aid kit, he pulled out the supplies that he would need and urged any of the weak stomached people to leave the room as he worked.  nearly half the group moved to the kitchen, leaving him alone with wooyoung, who kneeled next to him.  “what do you need?” he asked quietly, almost afraid to disturb yeosang’s concentration.  yeosang murmured for him to slip on a pair of gloves so he’d be able to hold seonghwa’s gash together, after it was sanitized.  seonghwa hissed as yeosang made quick work of disinfecting the wound, before it was like the world faded and yeosang was brought into a mode where nothing could bother him.  he knew seonghwa was wincing at every pierce of the needle, whining in pain but doing his best to hold still.  

he couldn’t hear it, though, his brain set on the task at hand.  

wooyoung played his part well, making it easier for yeosang to stitch up the wound and cover it with a thin layer of a cream that was supposed to help seonghwa heal faster, then wrapping him in bandages.  when yeosang had covered seonghwa up with one of his own shirts (seonghwa swears on everything he didn’t blush at the thought of wearing yeosang’s clothes), he called the others out and wooyoung was the one to introduce the newcomers as yeosang was fetching ibuprofen for seonghwa.  the shorter of the two with the angular face and long hair was hongjoong, and the taller with the plumper face was jongho, who was his student.  yeosang greeted them politely, before informing them that they had no room for anyone else.  hongjoong and jongho both smiled in response, responding that the other two couples had already informed them of that, and that they would be moving on as soon as possible.  

however, with a glance at seonghwa, yeosang couldn’t find it in himself to kick them out now, and force them to find somewhere else to stay.  “there’s an apartment next door that’s been empty for years, and the landlord - for whatever reason - let me have the key, so maybe the eight of us can split up into two groups and we all stay in this building?” he suggested, watching as the six of them began to talk amongst themselves.  he and seonghwa exchanged looks, the blond grinning slightly at him in response to the suggestion.  “we can do like, shifts for runs and stuff so that we never leave the apartments fully unprotected.”  he added quickly, his head already churning at the thoughts that began to gather.  there was a collective noise of assent as they finally came to a decision.  yeosang beamed for the first time in what seemed to be a lifetime, scurrying off to his bedroom to find the key.  

it wasn’t long before yunho, mingi, hongjoong, and jongho were getting settled into the other apartment.  it was furnished very sparsely, only a bed and a couch filling the space, so they decided that yeosang’s apartment would be the meeting area for meals.  they had also moved seonghwa into yeosang’s bedroom, so that wooyoung and san could take the couch - which they discovered folded out into a bed, something that yeosang himself didn’t even know.  yeosang stocked the other apartment with blankets and emergency supplies, before walking five feet down the hall and re-entering his own apartment.  a comfortable silence greeted him, until the yell of “uno!” broke the quiet.  yeosang ventured into the living room to find it empty, and the noise seemed to be radiating from his bedroom.  

it wasn't long before the four were gathered on the bed, shouting when someone cheated.  time passed quickly, and soon enough dinner had come and gone, leaving yeosang to feed seonghwa so he didn't disturb his new stitches.  they were silent for the most part, until yeosang accidentally slid the spoon across seonghwa lip and left a streak of sauce there.  he wiped it off absentmindedly with his thumb before sucking it off without thinking about it.  when he looked up, seonghwa was looking at him with a strange expression, that yeosang quickly ignored in favor of finishing feeding seonghwa his portion.  when he was done and had tossed the can, he came back to join seonghwa in bed, stepping around the folded out couch and trying not to disturb san and wooyoung.  seonghwa was dozing idly against the wall when yeosang closed the door, and soon enough the two of them were laying face to face.  well, seonghwa was laying on his side with his face to yeosang, but it was the thought that counts.  

yeosang noticed a little bit of sauce that had gathered in the corner of seonghwa lips, wiping his thumb across seonghwa lips without a second thought.  

that is, until seonghwa’s lips parted and yeosang's finger dipped inside, where seonghwa suckled on the tip of his finger gently, using his tongue to clean the pad of yeosang’s finger.  when he released it, he sent the younger a look that made all the heat in his body rush south, and suddenly he was as close as possible with his lips locked with seonghwa’s.  

they were like that for a bit, passing heated kisses like it would be the last chance they ever had.  

and as seonghwa explained why he had been gone that morning, yeosang realized that he was lucky to have this one chance.  

he had noticed they didn't have something specific, so he had gone out on a quick run to find it for them, so yeosang wouldn't worry.  (“and what’s so important that you almost died for it?” “....i don't even remember”)  he was attacked by a raider, and was hit once before san, wooyoung, mingi, and yunho found him.  on the way home, mingi had spotted two people surrounded by a horde of the undead, and took san to free them.  those two were hongjoong and hongjoong, and they were lucky that they were in the right place at the right time, or else they'd be dead.  

yeosang had scolded him properly for sneaking out, but pressed a soft kiss to his lips.  

“I'm just glad you came home.” he whispered as they drifted off to sleep, their fingers intertwined between them.  

[alexsmitposts]

Food Stamp Cuts – Western Capitalism & “Useless Eaters” Donald Trump recently announced changes to the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called “Food Stamps.” This program enables low income Americans to buy food. As a result, 750,000 people will immediately lose their food assistance, while it is expected that as many as 3 million will be deprived of their benefits in the near future. Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg, former New York City Mayor, has announced that he is running for President of the United States as a Democrat. Many are revisiting his leadership of New York City and the many controversial things he did. Among them is was a subway advertisement campaign intended to discourage teen girls from becoming mothers by shaming them. The ads, showing a small child with the words “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen” had the obvious, though unstated goal of increasing abortion among low-income New York City residents, many of which are not white. Unemployment in the USA is low currently, and despite numerous projections that things could get bad soon, the stock market numbers and other measurements currently look somewhat better than most of the last decade. So, why cut food stamps? Eliminating “Useless Eaters” To Save Capitalism Those who equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany overlook many very key differences between the two countries and their political systems. One of the most obvious is this: the Soviet Union worked very hard to expand its population, while the Nazis worked very hard to reduce their population. As Stalin’s Five Year Economic plans created huge steel mills and power plants, and new universities sprung up across the Soviet Union amid the abolition of illiteracy, a special prize called “Mother of the Soviet Union” was given to any woman who had more than 10 children. The Soviet government wanted more people to be born and to join in the project of building and developing a new, strong socialist country. However, Nazi Germany did the opposite and began forcibly sterilizing people. In 1934, just a year after the Nazis took power, 300,000 to 400,000 people were forcibly sterilized. A law was passed in 1935 making it illegal for anyone to get married if any kind of hereditary ailment could be passed on to the children. Following the sterilizations came the exterminations. The Nazi government began referring to disabled people as “useless eaters” and executing them in gas chambers. Eventually, the Nazi state began exterminating Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and Political Dissidents. The justification for this “final solution” was belief that all social defects were hereditary and needed to be eliminated from the gene pool. The Nazis were big believers in the concept of “overpopulation,” though this was a concept they did not invent. The term comes from the work of Robert Thomas Malthus, the British economist who blamed the French Revolution and the social unrest of the 1790s on the population growing at a faster rate than the food supply. John D. Rockefeller, the billionaire and founder of Standard Oil (now Exxon-Mobil)  was a big supporter of Malthus and his economic theories. Eventually Rockefeller bankrolled the Birth Control League of Margaret Sanger, now known as “Planned Parenthood.” The organization pushed for the legalization of contraception and abortion. One of the posters used to raise funds for the Birth Control League was a poster of a starving child holding out an empty bowl begging for food. Though Margaret Sanger had once been a socialist, as she became the voice of the “Birth Control” movement she published explicitly racist books and pamphlets and spoke at Ku Klux Klan events. She also began using phrases like “the cruelty of charity” arguing that the social welfare state was immoral because it encouraged inferior people to breed. When Margaret Sanger traded socialism for sex, and abandoned class struggle in pursuit of sexual liberation, she stopped advocating for the working class. During the 1930s depression, the Communist Party USA organized “Hunger Marches” saying “Don’t Starve, Fight!”  The Communist Party USA said the great depression pointed toward the need for the US economy to reorganized in a rational way, to serve the people, not the irrationality of profits. However, Margaret Sanger took the opposite approach, working to reduce “overpopulation” by eliminating “useless eaters.” Automation & The Crisis of Capitalism The causes of the Great Depression were rooted in the technological advancements of the 1920s. Henry Ford’s assembly line innovations and other breakthroughs made it easier for radios, cars, and other commodities to be churned out more efficiently than ever before. Soon the market was glutted with more products than ever before, produced more efficiently than ever before. However, across the western world millions of workers were left “outcast and starving” because they had no place at the assembly line. They could not afford to buy these products, and soon banks failed, corporations collapsed, and the US experienced an episode of mass malnutrition. The 2008 financial crisis was the opening explosion of a long-term crisis rooted in the same problem, decades later. The innovations of Henry Ford and the 1920s factory owners were child’s play compared to the continuing computer revolution, marching forward at a rapid pace since the 1980s. Andrew Yang, the maverick Democratic Presidential candidate continues to highlight the looming threat of mass unemployment due to technology. He told the New York Times: “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society…we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college. That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.” Among Silicon Valley forecasters, the alarm bells about automation are going off, and proposals such as “universal basic income” are being raised. The underlying basis of the discussion is the same as Malthus, Sanger and Rockefeller’s discussion in times past. The voices raising alarm about the crisis of automation are all essentially asking “Soon millions and millions of Americans will have no place in the economy. What do we do about all the useless eaters?” Western capitalism has entered a stage where it views the population not as an asset, but as a burden. Instead of seeing each citizen as capable of creating a contribution to society, and making the country better, the population is viewed as a problematic horde that must be carefully managed and prevented from causing further problems. “Populism” is presented as a great evil, because it involves the rabble asserting political aspirations deemed by the elite to be unacceptable. Even much of what passes for “socialism” in 21st Century America, addresses the question in the same manner. The “Democratic Socialist” current argues that as technology eliminates jobs, more money should be spent to provide healthcare and education to the population. At the same time, however, the “Democratic Socialist” voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders advocate reducing US living standards and consumption in the name of environmentalism. They argue that Americans consume too many resources, and in the name of climate sustainability, the population should transition to a lifestyle of less extravagance. However, the basic solution to this long standing problem seems to be ignored. Karl Marx’s magnum opus, the economic textbook called “Capital” discusses the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation and workers competition with machines, pointing toward the only real way to resolve this contradiction. The banks, factories and industries must be operated in a rational way. The economy must not operate on the basis of profits. In a centrally planned economy, in which profits are no longer in command, automation would increase the wealth of society, and abundance would not result in poverty. The pessimism of the 21st century western world is rooted in the economic reality that under the rule of profits, technology and historical progress continue to point toward great catastrophe. It is only by re-opening the question of whether or not socialism is a viable alternative that this pessimism can be overcome.