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Adèle Haenel, Suzanne (2013)

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CHARACTER FOCUS  →  ROMAN. / feat. @illwriteatragedy

trained from a young age by phil, roman became an adopted son to him over the years; roman is by far one of phil's major motivating factors, something maria capitalised on in order to get phil to agree to take the director's job. phil has tampered with evidence, altered covert government files, essentially hidden roman from the governments over view in the hopes that it would offer him a clean slate if he chose to leave shield. as someone who grew up with a father who did not want him there, when roman came into his life, he had no clue what to do or how to interact with him. he treated him much more like an adult than he should have, but as the years went on, phil grew into being the father he should have been from the beginning. there is no one more important to him and nothing he would not do for his son -- even if roman doesn't want him to in the first place.

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Lauri Tilkanen in Rooli (2014)

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like it's MY fault my love language is acts of service and all i know how to do is kill

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I say she’s a tiger, she belong to me.

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Like for aster, Ridley, Andrew, Amelia, Willow, Armando

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" i'm -- " she looks down at the label on her black shirt that her friend had put. " -- i didn't really have a costume. "

"you are... what, exactly?"

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I don’t believe you. You’re lying.

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how could he explain it all? when he was a kid, he wanted to be a hero, and that was what shield had told him he would be. he would be helping the world by doing these deeds, learning these skills. maybe it had only been just before josephine that his mind had started to wander, to wonder, if what he was doing was really right. he did not believe in a higher power, but who was he to decide who lived and who died?

( what really affected him was playing this exhausting game of pretend. putting on a mask, adapting a new personality, and then taking it off. over and over and over again. he thought it would become easier, but it only grew harder. )

" i should have. " then they wouldn't be here, making dinner, letting himself get carried away into a fantasy. that he could be normal, have this normal life.

" ... i'm what shield would call a unique asset. " i'm just a weapon. nothing more, nothing less. " sometimes exfiltration. sometimes to gather information. sometimes -- " he hesitates. " -- they use me however they need me. "

josephine has never been satisfied with not knowing. she wants and needs and demands to know everything even when she does not offer it herself. the pattern with roman had been familiar: the lies, the half-truths, the keeping each other at arm's length and failing miserably, still not entirely owning up to everything. there is plenty that josephine should tell roman, most of which she knows will change this in ways she does not feel fully prepared for. they have both been playing pretend; josephine should've allowed them to continue it.

(in a few years, she will think back to this conversation, josephine wanting answers, putting pieces together that were better off left scattered. she will think of the partners of other agents, the ones who know bits and pieces and who know nothing at all, and will want to know why she felt she had to be different, what her life might've looked like had she decided not to be the exception for once in her life.)

and still –– 

"but you should've ––" roman is a good liar. shouldn't it worry her, how good of a liar he is? "–– told me."

she is devastated. but beneath it, fighting to the surface, is an old animal-fear, too.

"what do you do," young. her mind catches on that word, latches to it. "when you go."

(she'd worried, the first time roman had come back and avoided her, iced her out, that there was another woman. it had been a self-absorbed, irrational, pedestrian sort of worry, and it had never made any sense, and then she'd seen the look on his face and realized it was something else, worse. he comes back different, and sometimes it frightens her, the emptiness.)

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why would he lie? why would he tell anyone, anything, about his life -- and when did he have to? he had a few people, all involved with shield themselves. he was so immersed in this life he had that he had never though something like this would have happened. if he had not gone home with her from that bar, maybe it would have been better, to not know what having this relationship was like.

other agents had wives and girlfriends who accepted the never knowing. josephine was different -- josephine herself was someone involved deeply in matters that he had not thought about before. she was never going to simply let this be, as it was, for longer.

" it's not something i should just tell. " he hesitates, but turns finally, looking at her. devastation -- the first thing he sees, and the first thing he feels.

but he'll tell her. he has to, now. she deserves it. " i'm sorry. i am an agent for shield. wherever they send me, i go. it's what i've been trained to do since i was -- young. "

she wants to be wrong. she wants to be wrong, wants roman to tell her she's wrong, wants to snatch it all back. she tells herself she doesn't need to know –– whatever the truth is, he can keep it, can continue to hold onto the secrets. she realizes this will unravel everything, all of it already starting.

(she likes roman. more than she originally planned to, more than she thought she might. he is good and kind and steadfast and gentle with her even when he tries not to be. she has caught him, sometimes, trying to push her away. she has felt him try to put distance between them. she's never thought his heart was really in it enough to actually go through with it.)

josephine knows about shield in the vague, dread-inducing way she knows about a lot of things and people and places she wished she didn't. she does not understand enough of what they do or want to for her to rationalize it, separate roman from it; she can only see file folders and video footage and headlines in newspapers and the whispered rumors of a registration act, can only think of a small, white room.

"why would you ––"

she has things in his bathroom, his closet, his dresser drawers. roman knows her address and her phone number and where she works. she has introduced him to elliot. she has allowed her life to grow too large when it should have been contained, small, finite.

"why would you lie to me?"

her reaction, she knows, is wrong. she shouldn't know anything about this, but it's too late to pretend otherwise, now.

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he places everything in the kitchen on hold for a moment. plays in his head what he can see happening from here; he will give her the truth, and she will leave, and life will go back to what it was before. he did not enjoy lying to her, and doing it for so long, but he didn't want this -- whatever it was becoming, to end. but he can feel it deep down that it was going to. that all things, no matter how good, had their ending.

( if he had been able to talk about it earlier, he can't think that it would have done any better. nobody wants to hear the truth that he would present. )

" i know that. " the burner is off. he watches the food float in cooled water, their taste ruined.

there is a long, long pause. his nearly empty apartment now had josephine's things in it, scattered around. there is an ache in his chest when he thinks about going backwards.

" i work for shield. " he finally admits, still not looking at her. the government, shield, they were still wrapped up in one another. it was just easier to make peace with the former.

josephine understands that in a lot of ways, she is on her own in this. she left behind westchester and the relative protection of the professor; she traded in her anonymity, what little of it there had been, when shilah offered her the opportunity to take from the same people who had taken from her. she can only depend on so much, so many; roman's who matters less because they are all the same to her.

(it would make her sick, to think of the things roman has seen, few as they may be. what she has given him was her choice; what he knows that she has not first offered is not his to know, his to take.)

she wants, very desperately, to be wrong. about roman and all of this –– wants him to laugh and look at her a little funny and ask where she got an idea like this and it would even be fine, she thinks, if he thought it was all in her head, a little crazy, all the familiar things she has been called at one point or another, a sort of balm.

she does not think she's wrong.

"i don't think you're telling me the whole truth."

neither is josephine. they are not so different, she and roman: two people trying to be different than they are, wishing their hand in life was different than it is.

"about what you do."

(she had begged him, the last time, to tell her what was wrong. what had happened. roman had shut her out and not returned her calls for days and then apologized and made some excuse and taken her back to his apartment and she'd let it go.)

"and who you really work for."

(why had she let it go?)

"i'm not totally clueless, roman. you know that, don't you?"

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" -- no thanks. "

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he does not tell josephine many things.

he does not tell her that he's never been in a relationship. that their drunken first night together had been his first, because he had never once gone to a bar and had a drink alone. he does not tell her that he's considered all the outcomes of being bluntly honest with her, as someone who he knows to be afraid of the government.

( he does not tell her he knows what she is hiding from him, what power lies in her hands, the brief notes on her just a smidge and a couple camera angles. just an earmarked in the page, a just in case for later. should she become any more of a threat. that was how shield looked at her. )

he doesn't tell her that his feelings, as confusing as they were, were genuine.

" -- what do you mean? "

he does not want to tell her about a little boy who had nothing, got everything, and lost it again. how he became the person that he was right now -- someone that he wasn't sure he was proud of. especially, he does not want to tell her that all of him was just this: a weapon for shield, nothing more, nothing less.

@withbeasts / roman

josephine begins to doubt, and then that doubt turns to suspicion. i work for the government sounds fine and boring and dull and she pictures a boring gray cubicle and old computers and uninteresting data and the same monotony day in and day out. it sounds fine and boring and dull and she tells herself it doesn't matter that he has never elaborated or introduced her to any of his coworkers or even mentioned them by name. it sounds fine and boring and dull and the routine is what roman likes, she convinces herself, the suits and the ties and the early mornings and the strange hours and why does he have strange hours, with this cushy office job, with such boring, boring work?

it sounds fine and boring and dull until he says he has to go out of town for a little while and won't tell her where he's going or where he's staying or how long he'll actually be gone, even. when he comes back and they finally see each other, there is an ugly purple bruise mottling his ribs and he is quiet and withdrawn and telling her sorry when he turns his head away from her when she tries to kiss him.

it sounds fine and boring and dull until he doesn't want to answer questions –– simple, easy, softball questions! –– and josephine thinks at first he's just trying to ice her out, make her be the one to leave, feign some normal-guy-bullshit about not being ready for anything serious because she has started spending the night more often than she doesn't, this becoming Real, whatever that means.

but then, she starts to worry. and wonder. and doubt. and it is such an easy, slippery slope into a familiar sort of prickling fear, a paranoia she can't shake. he leaves; he comes home a little different; he is distant; he is hurt. he won't answer her questions, any of them. he tells her it's all fine. he keeps shrugging her off.

josephine convinces herself there is more to this –– more to him, and she thinks of phil and his equally strange stories, numbers she was meant to memorize and call if she ever needed anything –– and then talks herself out of it. she doesn't want her mind to go there. she won't let it. she tells herself she is smarter, more self-aware. surely she would know if something was wrong, if roman was playing some sort of long game, if he was ––

no, she tells herself. roman is a normal man with some strange quirks and there is nothing to be afraid of, no reason to think this could be anything else.

but. but. but.

it makes her antsy. agitated, worried. she thinks of all she has so willingly shared with roman –– not everything, but enough of the real parts, the important ones –– and all that he has kept from her in comparison and feels like she has been somehow backed into a corner without ever realizing one was there in the first place.

one night, at roman's, she feels suddenly suffocated by it. he is leaving at the end of the week and the not-knowing taunts her.

she watches him cook dinner, his back to her. she can picture the scar on his shoulder, the scrape of pink skin, the easy lie he'd given when she'd asked where it had come from, same as she had with her own: an accident. i wasn't paying attention. i never saw it coming.

"i think," she feels like she could come right out of her skin, humming with it, what if she's wrong, what if she's right? "you're hiding something from me."

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Happy Halloween I have no costume but enjoy this terrifying pic of my mom and her siblings in the early 70s

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‘Agamemnon,’ Aeschylus (translated by Anne Carson)

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❝ I have to place duty first. It's what is expected of me. ❞ adnrew stella

arranged marriage.

if there is one thing a knight understands, it is duty. andrew bragin has been sworn to it from the moment his small hands could hold a wooden sword, to the day he left his family as an ambassador to his kingdom. it was duty and honor that kept him pushing forward, but if there was a lesson he had been taught first, it was love.

he saw it in his parents, in people around him. he saw it in the kindness of others and the smile from a child. he saw it now, felt it, in stella herself. if he allowed anything to come before duty, it was going to be love. even if it involved the politics and bureaucracy of a kingdom they were so tense with. even if her father, the king himself, declined it.

( he was hesitant to push her further, though. to have her come to despise him. and for this reason, and this reason only, he bows his head. )

" then i am by your side. nothing more, nothing less. "