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greatqueenanna · 4 years

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Why A Frozen Heart does not support a redemption for Hans.

Whenever I explore the Helsa tag for neat fanart and ideas, I always come across a post or two about Elizabeth Rudnick’s book, A Frozen Heart, and why this book supports the idea that Hans should get a redemption arc. It is no secret that I’ve talked about this book before in debates on my Hans related posts, and why I actually don’t consider this book part of the Frozen Franchise Canon.

Jen Lee and Chris Buck had no involvement in it. I cannot find any sources where Jen Lee, Chris Buck or Elizabeth Rudnick talking about this book.

There are a number of inconsistencies between the book and the original film Frozen. I4

It is labeled as a ‘retelling’ for young adults, basically telling a story differently than what was presented in canon. It’s almost a remake.

Disney Corp. doesn’t seem to consider it canon either, given the fact that they presented this image at the Hyperion Frozen Performance in 2016.

To give some perspective, A Frozen Heart was written in 2015. If it the book was 100% canon, then they would have to acknowledge the family from that book in this performance. Also, Frozen Heart talks about how some of his brothers have blonde hair, to which here they all have red.

But with this being said, because of the fact that it keeps being brought up by the Hans Redemption fan-base, I feel it is finally time for me to revisit the book - I re-read all of Hans’ chapters, and after doing this, this is my conclusion -

Hans is still very much portrayed with sociopathic traits and still does not deserve a redemption arc, as he is very conniving and evil in this book, just as his whole family. I do agree that the portrayal of him as a sociopath is not the greatest in this book, as he demonstrates fear and anxiety. Regardless, he still shows traits of being narcissistic and manipulative, and states himself that he doesn’t feel emotions, which are big traits when it comes to ASPD.

More Under the read more. *WARNING*, this section i going to be very long, sorry.

Evidence 1: Fleeting Sympathy

The first evidence of sociopathic traits comes early on, when Hans supposedly feels sympathy for his oldest brother’s wife.

She (Caleb’s Wife) looked painfully uncomfortable, and for a brief moment, Hans felt sorry for her(....)Well, at least father is kind to her. Hans acknowledged, some of his sympathy fading. (pg. 27)

Now, it is easy to misinterpret this quote as Hans showing empathy. However, the author labels this as sympathy, not empathy. What’s the difference?

Sympathy is like pity, where someone will acknowledge that someone is suffering. Empathy is when someone actually feels bad about it, and wants to help said person or see them feel better.

Here, Hans simply acknowledges that Caleb’s wife is suffering, but doesn’t feel out right sorry for her. In fact, it states that Hans only felt sorry for her for a brief moment, and this pity is fleeting. Why? Because Hans puts his own suffering above hers.

If Hans actually felt empathy for her, he wouldn’t acknowledge his own suffering, and instead just comment on how uncomfortable she looks. For example -

“She looked painfully uncomfortable. Hans felt bad for her; he knew what it was like to be ignored and her struggle made him wince.”

Or something like that. But Hans is actually saying this -

“Well, she’s suffering, and that’s sad, but my life is worse so who cares.”

Here, it clearly shows that while Hans can recognize that people can be sad, but will always put his own emotions and needs above other’s.

Evidence 2: Disrespect

Now on to how Hans treats Lars. Lars has an understanding with Hans because he used to be the younger brother, thus he’s nicer to Hans. Hans even recognizes that Lars is the only person he can talk to - but there’s a catch. Hans only wants to talk about himself.

On pg. 39, Hans states that Lars could go on and on about History. The chapter states that while Hans find his hobby endearing, he refuses to listen for more than a few minutes, often getting up and leaving without telling him anything. This shows that Hans has no real respect for Lars or his interests, and only indulges him because Lars is the only one who treats Hans nicer.

On page 60, Hans also shows disgust for the villagers giving him something in place of tax payments, showing no sympathy for their situation and finding their alternate payments disgusting.

Evidence 2 Envy for Power and Praise.

There is a moment in the book where Hans daydreams about being the only son, and getting constant attention from his father. This is on page 28 - 29.

His frustration here is not that the King is abusive, but that his father ignores him. And only him. In fact, he indirectly insults his older brother.

“Hans wondered if Caleb even appreciated his father’s attention.”

Without considering his brother’s emotions or stance on the subject, Hans shrugs away any empathy for his brother and out write states that Caleb doesn’t appreciate the attention he gets from their father.

Of course, the argument could be made that Hans’ brothers treat him poorly, so there’s no reason for him to feel pity for them. And while that may be true for some of his brothers, Caleb has never been shown to be abusive towards him. Thus, his envious comments are unwarranted. He simply doesn’t like him because Caleb receives the attention from his father that Hans craves.

It is also worthy to note that Hans does not desire love or compassion from his father. He only wants him to give him what he believes he is entitled to - praise and becoming a King.

Later on, Hans basically becomes a lapdog to his father in order to convince him to let him go to Arendelle. The author mentions this -

“Even now, when he had been given a role of some honor, he couldn’t let go of the bitterness of his past. But never mind that, he thought, I’ll show them soon enough.” (Pg. 58)

This shows that even now when he has slowly started to earn respect from his father, and gaining an honorable position at his side, it is not enough for him. He craves more power, and only becoming a King will supposedly satisfy this thirst.

On Page 85, Hans shows envy at Anna and Elsa sharing a bond.

Evidence 4 Objectifying Others

Hans feels entitled for a wife in the early pages of the book. This goes to show that Hans does not view women as people, but as objects to further his own status.

“And while he had heard the royal affairs coordinator discussing possible suitors for his brothers, Hans had not heard a peep about a possible wife for him.” (Pg. 32)

Later on, when Lars tells Hans about Elsa being single, he essentially treats her as if she’s a tool for his advantage, not a human being.

“This plan meant getting his father to trust him and convincing a woman he had never met to marry him(...)He would have to stop spending his days daydreaming and learn how to become more conniving.” (Pg. 42)

It’s so easy for Hans to just accept the fact that he would need to be conniving in order to get what he wants. He doesn’t feel bad for thinking it, nor does he try to consider what Elsa has been though. She’s just the mysterious princess who he needs to convince to marry him. Nothing more.

“No matter what Queen lay in wait for him inside Arendelle’s castle, Hans knew that he would find a way to become her King.” (Pg. 59)

Again, overall disinterest in Elsa as a human being, and only refers to her as a ‘what’ and that she is his for the taking. This is further supported on Pg. 65, when he runs into Anna thinking its Elsa.

“That, he thought, could not have gone better. Princess Elsa of Arendelle was practically his!”

Later on, after the run in, Hans is disappointed that he ran into Anna instead of Elsa, even considering running into her a joke. Pg. 71 -72. The only time he starts to consider Anna, is when he realizes that Elsa is unreachable. “Considering” is a strong word or course, as he is basically just throwing away one item and getting another, easily talking about how he wants to overthrow Elsa.

“It was all obvious now. He would marry Anna and overthrow Elsa.” (Pg. 77)

Again, Hans is so easily able to just announce these things without feeling even a bit of remorse, and treats the sisters as tools.

We’re not even half way through the novel yet, and Hans has already showed his blatant disrespect for others, objectification of others, bitterness, and entitlement for power and possessions. Not once has he shown any sort of reluctance or empathy for his actions and thoughts, and has an unquenchable thirst for power.

To avoid this getting too long, I’m going to do a “Lightning Round” of quotes that shows Hans’ terrible nature.

“Hans let a out a sigh of relief as a warm feeling flooded his chest. Now, now, he told himself. Remember why you’re here. This is a business transaction, nothing more.” Pg. 100

While throughout the novel Hans does indeed show that he actually might have some kind of admiration for Anna, and even enjoys some of her antics, he makes it very clear that he has no interest in actually falling in love with her and stops himself when he thinks he might be enjoying her company.

Next, while Anna and Hans are trying to tell Elsa about their engagement -

“Hans remembered the advice from his father(...)If you wanted to get someone to like you, you just had to act like a mirror. People love their own reflections.” (Pg. 104)

This shows that even in the novel’s universe, Hans purposefully mirrors people because he knows it will get people to like him.

This is a big one. When Hans and his men find Elsa’s beautiful grove -

“Hans had been clinging to one single reassuring thought: Elsa was a monster. (...) It was this, her utter lack of humanity, which guaranteed Hans his chance to be a Hero. If the people of Arendelle feared Elsa, they would want her to be captured and restrained. They would want her to abdicate her throne, and in turn, they would want Hans to take it.(...) All he had to was make sure that she never created anything like this again. He would destroy this glen and any trace of beauty.” (Pg. 198 - 199)

In this long passage that I summarized to the main points, Hans displays disappointment and how disgusted he is that Elsa is capable of beauty, because he wants everyone to think she’s a monster. He even states that he will destroy all evidence of Elsa’s beauty.

The book also recognizes Hans’ actions towards the chandelier.

Hans looked around the room desperate for a plan, and noticed the giant chandelier directly above Elsa. (...) True, it might kill her, but would that be so bad? One less obstacle to the throne.” (Pg. 226)

Chapter 26 showcases the darkest Hans has ever been throughout the novel. The entire chapter is filled with such hateful and entitled comments from him, it’s ridiculous. Honestly, I could sit here and quote the whole chapter. But let’s just get a couple of the worst things.

“Hans shook his head, He wasn’t there to fill a hole in Anna’s heart. He was there to win a throne. (...) The Westargaards didn’t do emotion - that was the one legacy he had been given.” (Pg. 244)

This confirms that Hans doesn’t feel emotions, something he feels he inherited from his family.

Now, this one hurts. I wanted to cry for Anna. I want this quote to really sink in, especially for those that feel that this book justifies a redemption arc for Hans.

“Did she honestly think this was one such tale? Hans couldn’t help himself. After years of bullying by his brothers, after years of taking the joke but never making the joke, after years of being the thirteenth son, he was going to get the last laugh. And he wanted to make it count. (...) She looked up at him, confusion racing across her face. At one time, he might of pretended to care. But he was done playing games.” (Pg. 244 - 245)

A few quick observations -

Later, on page 258, Hans states that the reason he didn’t like to be a murderer was because he didn’t want to be considered a brute, not because he felt anything for Elsa (or Anna for that matter).

On page 271, Hans states that he feels ‘pride’ when Elsa falls down in grief over her sister’s death.

And finally, after everything was said and done, and Hans had failed, he feels absolutely no remorse for his actions, and instead shows pity to only himself.

“If only I had acted a moment sooner, Hans had thought. Then they (the sisters) would never have known forgiveness. Never felt the love of a sibling again. Just like me. Just like my entire life. Elsa would have been dead. Anna would’ve followed soon after, and I would have taken what I deserve.” (Pg. 285 - 286)

And with that, I put this book down. While, again, there is no concrete evidence to say that this book might be considered canon, I still respect what Elizabeth Rudnick wrote here, despite that some of her facts were a little off. She was really good at being able to capture a sociopathic mind, and even able to give me chills, even if it wasn’t perfect at all times.

There is honestly no source, no canon or non-canon work, that supports a redemption arc for Hans. Even in A Frozen Heart, contrary to popular belief.

#greatqueenanna/analysis #Frozen #Frozen: A Frozen Heart #Prince Hans

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icarusbuck · 4 years

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5. unacceptable, try again

FOX! 911 | fluff, established relationship

∞

Buck stood with his hands on his hips, surveying their surroundings. He had to admit that the view was pretty great, all things considered, but he wasn't about to tell Eddie that.

There was an aging wooden picnic table a few feet away from a firepit made up of large rocks, both situated next to the gravel road they'd driven in on. The nearest campsite to them was out of sight, and if he strained, he could just make out the sound of a stream in the distance.

A stinging sensation startled him out of his thoughts, and Buck slapped at the side of his neck. "Why did we come out here again?" he asked, scowling down at his hand. It had a spot of crimson on it, along with the corpse of an insect that had eaten its last meal.

Eddie set a black tote down next to the picnic table with a grunt of effort. He gave Buck an exasperated look. "If I'm not mistaken, this was your idea."

Buck turned his scowl on Eddie and wiped his hand on his jeans. "You only chose this place because of the name," he accused. The drive had taken them a little more than two hours out of the city, and he hadn't even known where they were going until Eddie's massive truck was pulling off the highway and though the entrance. The sign that welcomed them said Buckhorn Campground.

Christopher's voice broke through Buck's thoughts. "You shouldn't fight," he said, blinking up at them from the far side of the picnic table.

Buck flashed him a smile and put a hand on Eddie's shoulder. "No fighting," he promised, patting Eddie's belly. Eddie swatted his hand away and they turned in tandem toward the truck to retrieve more gear.

"I said survival skills," Buck said under his breath as they dragged a large cooler onto the tailgate. "Getting eaten alive by mosquitos wasn't exactly what I had in mind." He slapped at his arm to stop another stinging itch, but there was no evidence on his hand this time.

Eddie rolled his eyes, ignoring Buck's grousing while they wrestled the cooler over to the picnic table. "You can't learn how to build a shelter or start a fire in the middle of Los Angeles." He picked up the axe leaning against the picnic table and held it out handle first, nodding toward the edge of the treeline. "Now go find us something to burn, fireman Buckley."

"We could have just bought some," Buck muttered, but accepted the axe anyway.

"Can I come?" Christopher asked, perking up in his seat.

Buck raised an eyebrow at Eddie. He glanced at the axe in Buck's hand, and then met Buck's gaze. Buck nodded in understanding and rounded the picnic table to help Christopher stand on the bench. Then he turned, and Christopher clambered up onto his back.

"Point the way," Buck said, adjusting slightly so he could pick up the axe again.

They entered the trees without looking back, but Buck moved in a wide arc and kept the truck in his peripheral vision. He moved carefully through the trees, hyperaware of his precious cargo. Only a few minutes passed in silence. Christopher pointed suddenly at a fallen tree that was roughly four feet in diameter.

"That one!" he cried, and Buck had to catch him as he slipped.

"I don't think we can get that one back to camp, big guy," Buck laughed. He wouldn't be able to chop through it with an axe, either. "Let's keep looking."

The next tree Chris pointed out was wider than their tent, and Buck shook his head. "We're strong, but we're not that strong."

They kept moving. It took them a while, but eventually Christopher settled on what was either a very skinny tree or a very long, straight branch. Buck bent and picked up one end of it, and made his way slowly back to camp. The addition of the tree wasn't heavy, but it was difficult to juggle it, Christopher, and an axe. He almost sighed in relief when he dropped the wood next to the circle of rocks.

The tent had been put up in their absence, and the sound of Eddie setting up bedding sounded from within.

Buck deposited Chris into a camp chair and went to retrieve his crutches, leaning them against Chris' chair so he wasn't stranded. Then he headed back into the trees, bringing back a few more bits and pieces he'd seen along their route. He assembled the logs into a small pile and started in with the axe, chopping them into varying sizes that would burn easily. The rhythmic movements made his annoyance melt away.

The early afternoon sun grew hot as he worked, chasing off the mosquitos and the last of the morning chill. Sweat beaded along his temple and down his back, and he stopped briefly to tug his shirt off. He began stacking the wood neatly a few feet from the fire pit.

Eddie emerged partway through the process, zipping the tent flaps closed behind him. He made his way over to the picnic table, pausing along the way to kiss the top of Christopher's head and ruffle his hair. When he reached the table, he started pulling bread and meats and condiments - all the fixings for lunch.

Buck's stomach grumbled at him, and he stepped back from the stack of wood with a sense of pride. He'd gone a little overboard; they had more than enough to last them the next two nights, plus a little extra. He left the axe leaning against the pile and walked over to the table, eyeing Eddie's methodical assembling of sandwiches.

Eddie picked up a plate and dumped a handful of chips onto it, then held it out to Buck. "There's a few bugs in yours," he said, nodding at the plate with a smirk.

"Unacceptable, try again," Buck grimaced. He fought the urge to swat it out of Eddie's hand and heard Christopher giggling behind him. The realization hit that Eddie was poking fun at him, and he took the plate with a huff, grumbling under his breath. He rounded the picnic table and straddled the bench while the Diazes laughed at him.

"City boy," Eddie teased further, and Buck looked up in time to see his eyes wandering.

It was then that he registered he'd never put his shirt back on, and he could feel the flush creeping up his chest, his neck and face growing warm. He scanned the campsite for it and spied it several feet away where he'd tossed it haphazardly onto a chair. The heat crawled up the back of his neck, setting his ears on fire; he looked back at Eddie almost defiantly.

Eddie licked his bottom lip, his tongue sticking at the corner; a slow smile began to spread over his face. He gave Buck an even more obvious once over, and a different kind of heat settled low in Buck's gut.

"Stop it," he mumbled, curling an arm protectively around his stomach.

"Ain't doing nothing," Eddie drawled, picking up the other two plates. He walked over to sit next to Christopher. A moment later, Buck's shirt landed next to him.

Buck glanced sideways at it and seriously considered leaving it where it was. They were in the middle of nowhere, after all; there wasn't a soul other than Christopher around to witness the looks, the easy intimacy that had developed between them. He was already used to it anyway. But they'd only brought one tent, and no matter what kind of looks he got from Eddie, he wouldn't have an opportunity to act on them until they got back to the city.

It was going to be a long two days.

#fictober20 #911 on fox #911 fox #fox 911 #911 #buddie #evan buckley #eddie diaz #buckleyevan #in which eddie takes buck camping and buck has to chop firewood

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seeaddywrite · 5 years

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give me strength so i can see (buddie; 9-1-1)

wow, okay, this is absolutely not something i should have written before i finished one of my wips, but this is what happened. i fully blame 9-1-1 & the chemistry between Buck & Eddie, because i couldn’t NOT write fic after the tsunami arc ended. this is my first foray into the fandom & their heads, so please be kind. also, this fic would not exist in its entirety without @soberqueerinthewild, who is always the best cheerleader, beta, & person around. <3 i’ve been in a bit of writing slump lately, so it feels really good to actually finish something!

warnings for self-loathing, references to depression, & excessive amounts of adverbs.

The moment that Buck sees Christopher safely reunited with his father, all of the stress and adrenaline that had kept him going for the last several hours floods away instantaneously. He collapses forward, uncaring of the hard ground that rushes up to meet him. Hen and Chimney stop him from face-planting on the floor of the emergency hospital, but Buck barely tracks their reassurances or their hands as they try to assess the damage he’s done to himself in his frantic attempts to find Christopher. Buck wants to tell them to stop, that he’s fine, that all he ever needed was to witness the scene unfolding in front of them, with Eddie and Christopher, but he can’t quite manage the words through his chattering teeth. Blood loss is a bitch, and teamed with exhaustion, Buck knows it’ll take a while before he’s fully able to interact with the world again.

Right now, that feels like a positive. The only two people he wants to talk to are half a hospital away, wrapped up in each other. Even when he regains feeling in his legs and is steady enough to leave the hospital, he doesn’t try to go near them. Instead, Buck watches from a distant cot as Christopher is checked out by a doctor and his father’s careful, assessing gaze, and slips through Chim and Hen’s guard to leave the makeshift hospital a moment after Chis is pronounced healthy, if tired and cold.

It’s cowardly for him to leave like this, he knows, without so much as an apology to the brave little boy or any attempt to make this up to Eddie, but Buck is too tired to fight, and he’s not sure he could remain standing under the direct onslaught of Eddie’s entirely justified anger that night. Buck would face up to his mistakes later, but for now, it seems kinder for all of them to slip back to the apartment that doesn’t quite feel like a home and hide away under the blankets that still reek of depression and listlessness.

It’s hard to sleep that night, despite the exhaustion plaguing him. The day’s events play on repeat in his head, waking him with a jolt every time he manages to doze off. Every mistake is so obvious in retrospect -- had he really expected a child with cerebral palsy to keep himself steady on top of a floating fire truck? If he hadn’t had to play the hero, if he’d just stayed up there with Chris, it never would have happened. Buck would have had the little boy securely in his arms the entire time. He would never have been lost, or dependent on the kindness of strangers to get him to a hospital. Buck would never have been forced to look Eddie in the eye and tell him that he’d lost his son, or watch that familiar, impossibly deep gaze fill with grief and horror and blame before Chris’s miraculous reappearance.

If Buck hadn’t had to play the fucking hero, maybe he would have finally been able to tell Eddie the truth about how he felt in the rush of victory, of survival and reunion. Maybe he would’ve finally had the guts to admit that being a best friend isn’t what he wants anymore, to say the words he’s been mulling over for what seems like forever. Maybe, just maybe, he could have discovered whether or not there was a chance for them to take things further -- but none of that matters now. The fear of being into guys -- or at least Eddie? Buck hasn’t quite figured that part out yet -- pales in comparison to the pain of losing a best friend and Christopher, who’d managed to get under his skin and cuddle in close to Buck’s heart when he wasn’t looking.

In the end, Buck gets out of bed earlier than usual, giving up on sleep. There’s a slim chance that leaving his bed will stop his thoughts from continuing on that same, downward spiral, and Buck’s nothing if not a gambler. He winds up at the kitchen table, staring out at the sunrise with a beer sitting half-empty in front of him -- just staring out as the new day begins. It’s incredible, he muses, that from here, he could almost pretend nothing catastrophic had happened the day before. The sun is still rising, the birds are still chirping, the neighbors below him are still arguing at decibels loud enough to wake the dead. It’s the same as always, and just as he had for the last six months, Buck finds himself wondering how the world outside can simply keep going when his own personal world had come to a screeching halt. Only today, it’s worse than just losing his job, his identity. Now he’s lost his best friend, too, and the trust of a child he cares about. The losses are far more grievous.

A knock at the apartment door shakes him out of the self-loathing stupor, and Buck drags his aching body out of the kitchen chair with a groan. His bad leg throbs with the addition of his weight, but Buck has a lot of practice at ignoring that, these days, so he continues on with barely a limp, and opens the door, expecting to find Maddie, with her relentless optimism, or Bobby, with yet another pep talk prepared.

Instead, Eddie stares back at him from the hallway, his hands resting comfortably on Chris’s small shoulders as the little boy totters forward on his back-up crutches to hug Buck with a wide, blameless smile. Buck stands, stiff with astonishment, and pats Chris awkwardly on the back, still staring at Eddie, trying to figure out what the other man is playing at. Old instincts make him defensive, stiff, as Eddie leads Christopher into the apartment and begins rattling off the contents of the bag he’s plopped on the table next to Buck’s half-empty bottle.

It’s hard, but Buck manages to tear his attention from Christopher, who’s sitting happily on the coffee table in front of the TV, to try to get a read on Eddie’s expression. Is this some kind of test? Is Buck supposed to play along, or is he supposed to blow up so Eddie has an easy excuse for Chris about why he’s not allowed to come over anymore? Buck has no idea, and the indecision makes him swallow harshly. He doesn’t want to fuck anything up any worse than he already has— by some miracle, he has both of the Diaz men in his home again, and God, Buck wants to keep them there. The sense of family they’ve given him in the last six months of hell is better than anything he’s had since he left home, and losing it once almost killed him. Losing it a second time, now, before he’s had the chance to say something? Buck doesn’t think he could do it.

“You want me to watch Christopher?” The words are incredulous, and not half as even as Buck would have liked, but he manages to keep his voice from cracking, so he takes the win where he can.

Eddie’s less than a foot away now; Buck has closed the distance between at some point, but he honestly couldn’t pinpoint when. There’s no waver in his dark gaze, no uncertainty or anger, and Buck has no idea what to make of it, especially when his response is teasing and light. “It’s easy— he’s not very fast.”

Buck swallows the surprised response that threatens and schools his expression into something resembling calm, but his gut churns nervously. Everything about this interaction screams too easy, and if he’s learned anything through physical therapy, it’s that if something seems too easy, it probably is. No pain, no reward, his therapist is fond of reminding him, and Buck has always agreed. Then again, he’s never feared physical pain. This? The emotional toll of facing Eddie and Chris after his failures? That’s fucking terrifying.

“After everything that happened-“

“A natural disaster happened, Buck.”

Part of Buck wants to scoff, to point out everything that had happened after the natural disaster couldn’t be blamed on nature, not unless it was Buck’s. It is in his nature to tend toward making stupid fucking calls in the heat of the moment, after all. The other part of him soaks up Eddie’s words like a plant does sunlight. He keeps his eyes averted, though, still unable to accept it, unable to even fathom the possibility that Eddie doesn’t hate him. Because he should. Buck knows, because he’s pretty sure he hates himself.

“I lost him, Eddie,” he manages, the reminder a low, defeated croak. Memories from the day before flicker in the spaces between words, broken images and impressions of the desperate search for Christopher, and Buck has to swallow once, twice, to defeat the nausea threatening to overcome him. Buck’s not a parent, isn’t sure he’ll ever be one, but he loves Christopher like his own, and the idea of losing him for good is more than enough to bring him to his knees.

But Christopher is alive. He’d made it out of the tsunami despite Buck’s hubris, and is happily watching cartoons in the living room.

The mental reminder is enough to stop Buck from vomiting on Eddie’s shoes, at least.

“You saved him. That’s how he remembers it.” Eddie pauses, like he’s trying to let the weight of his words sink through Buck’s thick skull. And it’s not like Buck doesn’t want to believe it, doesn’t want to stop seeing every moment of that horrible day on repeat every time he closes his eyes. There’s not much he wouldn’t do to stop the sinking pit of guilt in his stomach, or the squirming sense of self-loathing when he comes close to meeting Eddie’s gaze. But he can’t. The fact that Christopher made it out alive doesn’t make up for Buck’s mistake, and Eddie knows that. Buck had read the blame in his eyes before Christopher showed up at the hospital, seen the way his entire body had shifted away from Buck and into tight, tense lines that spoke of a strong desire to punch him in the face -- at the least.

It had hurt, torn open whatever parts of him weren’t already bleeding with Christopher’s loss, and Buck couldn’t forget it, so this entire conversation felt almost dreamlike, a fantasy that Buck isn’t sure he can trust, no matter how much he’d like to.

“And now it’s turn to do the same for you,” Eddie continues, oblivious to Buck’s internal conflict.

And God, Buck wants that. He wants to put the entire disaster behind him, ignore all of the ways he’d fucked up and cling to the second chance Eddie seems to be offering without talking about it -- but Buck’s played that game before. He knows how it always ends. Bottling difficult things never works for long, and the resulting explosion is usually worse than whatever the actual problem was.

So Buck trails Eddie into his living room, staying just a step behind, and shakes his head when he feels himself become the focus on that intense gaze once again. “I was -- I was supposed to watch out for him,” he tries again, stumbling over the words he doesn’t really want to say. Buck doesn’t do shy or shrinking; his entire life has been about taking up space, being unapologetically himself, but this is different, somehow. This is Eddie, whose opinion has meant too damn much to Buck since the first day they locked eyes at the station, who’s such an integral part of Buck’s life and happiness that the idea of losing him sucks the air from Buck’s lungs. This matters, in a way that nothing but firefighting and Maddie ever had, and Buck won’t screw it up again. He can’t.

“And what, you think you failed?”

Damn it, did Eddie have to sound so nonchalant about this? Of course Buck failed! Christopher had been missing for six fucking hours -- no matter how that equation’s set up, the answer is still the same.

“Buck, I’ve failed that kid more times than I care to count, and I’m his father.”

The words are layered in empathy, in a sense of understanding, that makes something constrict tightly in Buck’s chest. Eddie shouldn’t be comparing Buck’s failure to the trials of being an actual parent -- the two aren’t even remotely close. Christopher has always been safe, happy, and cared for with his father, and Buck knows it because he’s seen it. He’s seen Eddie fight for his son to have the best education, the best childcare, the best of everything. He’s seen Eddie cut himself off from dating on the off chance Christopher would get hurt, seen him leave his own home and family in order for Christopher to be closer to his. There’s nothing Eddie wouldn’t do for the boy, and knows that Eddie’s never really failed his son. Not when it counted. So he can’t help the short, instinctive shake of his head at the reassurance, because it’s just not true.

“But I love him enough to never stop trying, and I know you do, too.”

Unnamed emotion clogs Buck’s throat, and he glances down at the floor, swallowing hard. It’s been hard to play the tough, cool guy the last several months, so Eddie’s already seen him as weak and vulnerable as Buck can get -- career-ending injuries, a lack of mobility, and obvious depression hadn’t done great things for his rep around the 118, not that Buck had particularly cared at the time. Eddie’d been around the most, though, only slightly less often than Maddie, and had seen it all. So it should be easy to admit to loving Christopher, to caring more about his best friend’s son than he cared about anyone outside of Maddie and the 118 squad.

It isn’t.

Buck doesn’t get a chance to say anything, which is probably a blessing. One of Eddie’s large, work-roughened hands claps his shoulder, and warmth bleeds through the thin cotton of Buck’s t-shirt and sends a thrill down his spine. He still doesn’t manage to meet the eyes waiting on him until he hears his name, the single syllable infused with an order that Buck can’t quite ignore.

But once he gives in, Buck’s immediately lost to the intensity of Eddie’s familiar dark gaze. He’s so close, now, and the heat his body throws off is slowly seeping into the icy chasm in Buck’s chest. Maybe, he realizes, he can trust this -- trust Eddie. Because no matter what has gone on between them, no matter how much of an ass Buck has been, there’s never been any reason to doubt Eddie’s sincerity; and there’s no way he’d so cruel as to dangle forgiveness and understanding in front of Buck only to yank it away at the last minute.

“There is nobody,” Eddie begins firmly, and the open honesty in his face makes Buck shiver. Paired with the soft tapping of his thumb against the exposed skin of Buck’s collarbone, it would be all too easy for Buck to sway into the broad chest in front of him and know that Eddie would catch him. “ -- in this world that I trust with my son more than you.”

It’s the last thing he expects to hear, and Buck blinks rapidly at Eddie, trying to understand how it could possibly be true after the previous day’s terror -- but there’s no hesitation in Eddie’s stance, no hint of uncertainty or the blame Buck knows he caught yesterday at the hospital. Buck swallows again, the sound of his throat working audible in the sudden quiet. Thanks and emotional confessions jam in his mouth until he can’t say anything, and Eddie doesn’t give him a chance before he’s squeezing Buck’s shoulder and dropping the point of contact to go say goodbye to Christopher in the living room.

Though his skin is cold where Eddie’s touch lingered, Buck’s grateful for the reprieve. He turns his head and wipes at damp eyes, trying to regain some of the composure he’s lost. Eddie is too good at stripping down every defense, at seeing past all of his walls and leaving Buck open and vulnerable. It’s why he was the only one who could cajole Buck into going to PT after his last surgery, when things were looking hopeless, why he alone could drag Buck out of bed when even Bobby and Athena got shown the door -- hell, Eddie had even wound up with a fucking spare key to the apartment when Maddy didn’t even have one. And Buck is tired of being weak and vulnerable, of needing constant reassurance that he’s wanted and forgiven. This broken-down, over-emotional man he’s become isn’t who Evan Buckley is, and Buck suddenly needs to make that really damn clear to Eddie.

But Eddie’s already on his way out the door with a few teasing comments about staying in-land, so Buck lets him go with a chuckle that feels natural, even if the circumstances don’t. He pivots on his good leg to join Christopher in front of the television, only to stop short when Eddie pops his head back in the door.

“Thank you,” he says, in that same voice that’s sent chills down Buck’s spine at least twice that morning. “For not giving up.” And Eddie’s gone before Buck can summon any sort of response beyond the frustrated yearning that builds in the pit of his stomach when he vanishes out of the doorframe. Buck stares after him helplessly -- and god damn it, it’s not fair that Eddie can be so damned perfect when Buck is still reeling. He’s had months to come to terms with the fact that Eddie is ridiculously good-looking; and it’s never been a big deal that he likes to watch him work out, once in a while. So does pretty much everyone at the station. But this want, this desperation for Eddie’s approval, for his care and closeness -- that’s not normal. That’s not straight. And yeah, okay, maybe Buck’s had a few hints that he could be into guys before, maybe he’s considered and discarded the idea a few times over the years, but it’s never been like this. It’s never been so all-consuming, so impossible to ignore. It’s never been so terrifying. Not because Eddie’s a guy; Buck could care less about that. But Eddie is Buck’s best friend. Hell, outside of the others at the 118, Eddie’s his only friend. The rest have all disappeared, lost in the gaping chasm that separates first responders from civilians who could never understand the pull of the job, no matter how dangerous it might be. And then, of course, there’s Christopher -- the kid who’s still sitting in the living room in front of the TV, patiently waiting for Buck to get his shit together and join him.

Right. Crisis later. Babysitting now.

He can do this, one step at a time. Eddie’s not mad at him, and if he says that Chris isn’t either, then Buck can take him at his word. Buck drags in a slow breath, straightens his shoulders, and goes to join the child on the couch with a genuine, if small, smile.

“Hey, buddy …”

******

They spend the day in the apartment, this time. Buck wants to say that it’s because they deserve a lazy day after previous one’s mess, but really, there’s a large part of him that’s afraid to set foot outside with Christopher, no matter how slim the chance of a second natural disaster. So they spend hours on the floor of the living room building increasingly complex structures with Legos and order that pizza Eddie prescribed and devour the entire thing -- if Buck eats a little more than he normally would, it definitely isn’t because Eddie told him to. It’s light and uncomplicated, just easy camaraderie that Buck never expected himself capable of finding with anyone, let alone a little kid, and the ease of it all is enough to allow some of his anxiety to bleed away. For the first time in the last thirty-six hours, Buck is truly able to relax.

Christopher’s energy starts to wane after dinner, so Buck takes the initiative to put in one of the movies shoved in the bag Eddie packed for him. They end up in a pile of blankets and cushions on the floor -- Buck’s leg is stiff and sore after yesterday’s exertions, and Christopher hasn’t said anything, but he’s moving a lot more slowly than usual, and taking extra care when he does, so Buck guesses that he’s in some pain, too. Cerebral Palsy isn’t something he knows a whole lot about, but a lack of muscle tone is pretty obvious, and clinging to poles and other floating refuse during the tsunami had to have taken a toll on his little body. Not that Christopher had ever complained -- and that, right there, is yet another reason for Buck to be in awe of what that child is capable of.

“Buck?”

The small voice interrupts whatever animated crap is on the screen, and Buck glances down at Chris in askance. From this angle, all he can see is blonde curls; Chris has his cheek pressed against Buck’s chest, and is curled up beneath one arm. The warm weight against his body has Buck half asleep himself, but he rouses enough to ask, “Yeah?”

“You didn’t lose me.” The simple, sleepy words make Buck’s heart seize, and he stares down at the top of Christopher’s head, trying to form words with numb lips. “I heard you tell Daddy that you did, but you didn’t.” Buck is struck speechless. He freezes, and the silence in the room seems a condemnation of his inability to speak, but Christopher doesn’t seem to mind. He presses on, unconcerned. “You found me, and I kept swimming, just like Dory, and I found you and Daddy. And I’m safe, and you’re safe, and we don’t need to be scared anymore.” The matter-of-fact, blunt sentiment is hard for Buck to swallow, but he runs a hand over Christopher’s disheveled curls and down his back, anyway.

“I’m sorry you had to be scared at all, buddy,” he says honestly, and manages to keep his voice level and calm, despite the uncertainty he feels. “But you’re right. You’re safe now, and that’s what matters.” It seems like the most natural thing in the world to drop a casual kiss to the crown of blonde hair, and Buck doesn’t allow himself to second-guess the impulse when it’s done. “Come on, kid, you’re falling asleep. Let’s get you up to bed, huh? Your dad won’t be here for another few hours, and I think we both deserve a nap.” It’s not his most graceful or subtle subject change, but Chris is young enough not to notice -- or tactful enough to let it go, Buck’s honestly not sure which.

Mock complaints and grumblings get tossed around, but Christopher clings to Buck’s neck as he carries him up the stairs and helps him settle into the bed with a minimum amount of fuss. They lay on the mattress together for half an hour, until Christopher’s breathing is slow and even, and there’s no hint of wakefulness on his young face. Buck knows better than to ruin his progress with sleeping during the day; that’s a one-way ticket back to the land of depression and hopelessness, and he refuses to fall back into bad habits. Instead, he slides from the bed, careful not to jolt the other occupant, and heads downstairs. He hadn’t had a chance to do his stretches and exercises from physical therapy that day, yet, and he knows he needs to -- firefighter or no, he’s not losing any mobility. The stretches have the added bonus of requiring all of his attention and focus, so his mind won’t wander to any dark places. Or any Eddie-shaped places, which Buck is pretty sure he should avoid, too.

So that’s how Eddie finds Buck an hour or so later, sweat-soaked and lying, arms and legs akimbo, on the living room floor. He hadn’t heard a knock, or even the door opening, over the pounding of his own heart, and Buck flails upright into a sitting position when he hears the familiar chuckle from the entryway.

“Only you would spend an entire day fighting a tsunami and still feel like you need to work out the next day,” Eddie says lightly as he enters the room, dressed in the same casual outfit from this morning. There’s a cut above his eye that hadn’t been there before, and Buck knows him well enough to read the fatigue in the set of his shoulders and the lines around his mouth. He recognizes that look from a hundred rough shifts, and can imagine what Eddie’s seen today on clean-up duty from the tsunami. He shudders, then carefully picks himself up off the ground and leads his guest into the kitchen to grab them both a beer without asking if Eddie wants one.

“Can’t slack off on PT,” Buck explains as they both settle down at the tiny kitchen table. “I may not be a firefighter anymore, but I’m not going to get stuck working behind a desk somewhere.” He can’t quite look directly at Eddie, but it’s easier now than it had been this morning to try. The sucking pit of desolation in his chest is gone, replaced by a stupid, schoolgirl flutter of nerves in his gut when they stand too close, and Buck doesn’t really know what to do with that -- but it’s easier than waiting to hear if Eddie’s decided to close him out of his and Christopher’s life for good.

“You’re not going to end up behind a desk,” Eddie says firmly. There’s a frown forming between his brows, and something distinctly unhappy in the way he’s staring at Buck. Before the latter has a chance to question it, Eddie stands up and grabs both bottles of beer from the table. Without a word, he shoves both of them back in the fridge, then turns to face Buck again with his chin raised in challenge. “Unless you keep drinking your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that is. Did you even eat today?”

Buck’s spine stiffens defensively. “Chris ate lunch and dinner,” he says carefully. There’s good reason for Eddie to doubt that Buck’s been taking good care of his son, after all, even if this morning it had seemed they were passed it. “And I wouldn’t drink when I was watching him, Eddie.”

A complicated series of emotions flickers over Eddie’s face, but it’s hidden behind one large hand before Buck can even try to translate it. “I didn’t ask if Christopher had eaten,” he says quietly, and drags his hand down his face to rest on the table directly in front of Buck. The movement has him leaning down, leaving them so close that their faces mere inches from each other. Immediately, the speed of Buck’s heartbeat kicks up a notch, and he curses himself for reacting so inappropriately to mere proximity. “I told you this morning, man -- I trust you with my son. I know you wouldn’t drink while you were watching him, or forget to feed him, just like I know you never gave up on him yesterday.”

Buck chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment, then deliberately leans back in his chair, trying to put some space between them before he answers. “Then what’s up with the third degree?” he demands, trying for some semblance of his usual bravado. “If you really thought I was taking good care of Christopher, why are you --”

“Because Christopher isn’t the only person I care about, Buck,” Eddie cuts in sharply. Frustration emanates from him in waves, and Buck wants to offer reassurance, but he’s too busy trying not to read too far into those words to manage it. Eddie cares about him. He’s known that for months -- caring isn’t the same as wanting to be with someone romantically. The two of them are friends. Best friends. And Buck needs to get ahold of himself before he says or does something to ruin that.

“What --”

“Don’t sit there and act like you don’t know what I mean!” Eddie shoves away from the table and paces in a circle around the table, never taking his eyes off of Buck as he does so. Unlike other moments when Eddie looks at him, Buck finds he doesn’t like this sort of scrutiny. It leaves him feeling like all of his weakest, most fragile parts have been put on display, and Buck’s never been good at admitting to his own problems. “It was bad enough when you were laid up from surgery, but now you’re either drinking or sleeping, or pushing yourself way too hard in PT. You’ve been losing weight for weeks, and it’s not healthy, Buck! I’m worried about you!”

Silence reigns in the kitchen for a long moment as Buck tamps down hard on the impulse to bellow that he’s fine, and no one asked Eddie to worry about him -- that’s the response of a scared man-child, not the person that Buck is trying to be. And truthfully, it’s nice to know that someone’s looking out for him. The others at the 118 and Maddy try, Buck knows, but they’re easy to reassure. A grin here, a cock-sure comment about his prowess there, a playful slug to the shoulder, and almost everyone sees him as the same old Buck who’d gotten into the fire engine the night of the bombings.

Eddie’s not that easy to fob off, and as much as it makes Buck feel uncomfortable, it makes him feel seen.

“I’m okay, Eddie,” he says instead, and lifts his chin to hold the skeptical gaze aimed at him. “I am, really.” The words feel honest, for the first time in quite a while, and Buck even manages a genuine smile. “You were right, when you dropped Chris off yesterday. Hanging out with him -- it was what I needed.” Buck shakes his head in remembered awe of the little boy and his strength. Even stranded in rushing water higher than his head, clinging to a pole for dear life, Christopher had been braver than Buck ever could be, and his courage and grace under pressure had shown Buck exactly how much work he had to do to deserve any part of the life he felt entitled to. “You and him -- even with everything yesterday -- you guys made me realize I needed to do something different, or I was going to end up somewhere I never wanted to be.” His smile thins, slightly, and Buck reaches out to touch one of the arms crossed over Eddie’s chest. “Even if I’m still not sure how you forgave me so easily, after what I did.”

An exasperated huff escapes Eddie’s mouth, and gives the impression that if this were a cartoon, he’d be tossing his hands in the air. “Buck, there was never anything to forgive!” he says, voice pitched just low enough that it wouldn’t wake Christopher. “You got stuck in a tsunami. I know you’ve got an ego, but you can’t really take credit for a natural disaster. And Christopher is fine!”

“But he almost wasn’t!” Buck interjects, tired of being the rational one in the room. If Eddie seriously wants to have this conversation, then he’s going to have to face the truth, too. “Give me a fucking break, Eddie -- those two mintues between me telling you I’d lost him and that woman showing up with Chris in her arms? You did blame me. You looked at me, and that’s all I could see, okay? You did blame me. And you were right. I messed up. I was supposed to look out for your son, and I failed, and it’s okay for you to blame me for it.”

God, Buck’s tired. He hasn’t been until this moment, but it’s like this argument and facing these awful truths have sapped every last bit of energy from his veins, and he’s not sure how much longer he’ll be up for arguing with Eddie in his kitchen. He leans forward on his elbows over the table an exhales gustily, then lifts his chin again, determined to catch the moment when Eddie finally admits the truth to himself.

But instead of the realization Buck has been expecting, Eddie’s face is only showing that same frustration. They freeze like that for a moment, Buck leaning against the table and trying hard to hold himself together, Eddie staring down at him from his position against the wall of the kitchen, arms folded over his chest, that guilt-laden frustration obvious in his expression.

Then, faster than Buck can track, Eddie’s standing in front of his chair, grabbing his elbows and pulling him to his feet. It’s a gentle yank, and Buck could have ignored it if he chose, but he’s shocked enough by Eddie’s closeness that he goes along with it. They end up toe-to-toe, close enough that Buck can feel warm breath on his cheek, and there’s nowhere to look that doesn’t end with him staring back into Eddie’s dark eyes.

“Look at me now,” Eddie tells him quietly, and Buck has to quell a shiver as two solid hands land on both of his shoulders, squeezing with just a little too much pressure to be truly comfortable. “I want you to stand here, and look straight at me while I tell you this: I do not blame you for what happened yesterday. I’m grateful to you for not giving up on him, okay? I know you love him, and I can’t even tell you how relieved I am that he has you in his corner.”

This feels like the conversation they should have had this morning, when more was being left unsaid that wasn’t, and this time, Buck isn’t going to pretend. “I do love him,” he admits, still looking straight into Eddie’s face. Vulnerability is hard, but it would be harder to keep pretending -- and Buck’s so damn tired of pretending. “And I, uh … I believe you.” Because there’s no denying reality, not when it’s quite literally staring him in the face. No matter what he saw, or thought he saw, yesterday, Eddie really doesn’t blame Buck for losing Christopher. They’re still solid, still good, and Buck’s not losing anyone.

Relief swamps him as hard as any of the waves from the day before, even though Buck had thought he’d stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop that morning. Apparently, anxiety isn’t that easy to get rid of, even when it’s not screaming in the back of his head. He shifts to take a step back, to carry himself out of Eddie’s gravitational pull, before he ends up falling into his chest or something equally embarrassing, but Eddie’s grip just tightens on his shoulders, not allowing Buck to go anywhere.

A second passes, two, and Eddie leans in a little closer, until they’re sharing the same breath. Buck swallows convulsively, telling himself over and over that he’s misreading the situation, that this can’t be what it feels like, but he can’t stop his eyes drifting down Eddie’s face to catch stubbornly on his mouth. Full lips quirk up in a smirk, and heat rushes to pool in Buck’s belly. He doesn’t know what this moment is or how they got here, doesn’t know where they’re going next, but that smirk tells him everything that he needs to know: Eddie knows what Buck wants. Knows how he feels. Probably has for a while.

And he hasn’t gone anywhere.

“I keep waiting for you to figure it out,” Eddie says in a low voice, and Buck’s eyelashes flutter before he can remind himself that he wants to be wholly present in this moment and doesn’t want to miss a damn thing. “I don’t go around telling everyone I meet that I trust them with my son’s life, Buck. Outside of my family, you’re it, do you get that?” It’s Eddie’s turn to swallow, and Buck tracks the movement of his throat with wide eyes. “You’re it.”

There’s a different meaning to the words the second time Eddie says them, and Buck feels like a kid at the eye doctor, putting glasses on for the first time. When he looks back at every interaction he’s had with Eddie since the bombs, he can see the same want reflected in Eddie’s face that has stared back at him in the mirror every day. When he runs his eyes over Eddie’s expression, he can read the same nervous hope, the same uncertainty, beneath his confident exterior.

And this time, when Eddie leans further into his space, Buck leans back.

Their lips bump together, almost incidentally, a soft kiss that’s more of a test than it is a true embrace. Buck’s heart leaps, and the anxious flutter in his stomach is back as he tips his head to correct the angle. The second time their lips meet, it’s better -- Eddie lets out a soft, surprised huff of air, and Buck takes advantage, pulling him closer with impatient hands at the belt loops of his jeans. He’s not thinking anymore, stopped sometime around when Eddie’s fingers tightened around his shoulders, and it feels so good to lose himself, to trust that Eddie will catch him as he falls.

“You could’ve just said,” Buck mutters against Eddie’s lips, his hands roaming over the forearms revealed by the style of his button-up shirt. “I thought I was going crazy.” He wants to be annoyed that Eddie’s known all this time and waited for Buck to make the first move, but he can’t quite work up to it. As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, he needed the chance to wrap his head around this new truth about himself, and if Eddie had made a move before he was ready, Buck knows he wouldn’t have reacted well.

“I’m pretty sure your sanity has been in question for way longer than I’ve been in LA,” Eddie shoots back with another teasing smirk. At some point, his hands slid from Buck’s shoulders to the planes of his back, and Buck’s not ashamed to admit that he pushes back into the touch, arching his spine like a cat seeking attention. He rolls his eyes at the joke and presses his face into Eddie’s neck, taking a long, slow breath to steady himself. The last two days -- hell, the last several weeks -- have been a riot of emotion that he’s still trying to sort, and as happy as he is in this moment, Buck knows that there’s still a lot for he and Eddie to talk about and work through. And Buck’s life is still a shambles, no matter how unexpectedly good his personal life has become.

“You’re thinking too much,” Eddie tells him, his arms snug around Buck’s waist, holding him comfortably against his chest. “The world is complicated, Buck, but you and me? That doesn’t have to be. We can figure it out as we go.” A steady hand smooths over Buck’s spine, and he relaxes incrementally. It sounds too good to be true, but Buck has no intention of giving this up now that he’s got it. And Eddie’s gone to great lengths to make sure Buck knows that he can be trusted when he says something, today -- it wouldn’t make any sense to stop now.

Buck lifts his head and smiles at Eddie with an echo of his old, rakish grin. “You’re going to have to do better than one kiss if you want me to stop thinking,” he says daringly, throwing caution to the wind and jumping headfirst into the unknown. Overthinking and panicking isn’t who Buck is, and he’s not going to let recent events change him. He’s stronger than circumstances, and Evan Buckley is more than a job title or a patient ID bracelet.

He’s a fighter, and this time, all he wants to fight for is happiness for him, Eddie, and Christopher.

“Hmm, that sounds like a challenge,” Eddie observes, head cocked to one side in a faux-thoughtful expression. “I guess I don’t have much choice but to try harder then, do I?”

Buck lets his satisfaction show on his face as he meets Eddie in another kiss. As in everything, practice makes perfect; this time, his knees get weak embarrassingly quickly, and he finds himself with his arms tossed around Eddie’s neck to keep his balance. He’s still smiling as they trade kisses back and forth, unable to quell the overwhelming contentment swelling in his chest. Eddie’s flushed and breathing hard, too, though, so Buck doesn’t waste a moment on embarrassment. They both want this; there’s no reason to start overthinking now.

“Da-aad!” The whine from behind them stops the kiss in its tracks as both men take a hurried step back and spin to face the doorway. Christopher is leaning heavily on his crutches just past the arch, a blanket draped over his shoulders and hair mussed from sleep, and staring at them crankily. “Buck’s s’posed to be taking a nap with me. You can kiss him when we wake up.”

Eddie and Buck glance at each other, and the bubble of tension - romantic and otherwise - surrounding them bursts with a synchronous peal of laughter. Christopher gives them an unimpressed look, and Eddie recovers first, stifling another chuckle to tell him, “Sorry, buddy. But everyone’s awake now, right? So maybe we can watch a movie or something, and we can both spend some time with Buck before we have to go home.” He shoots a sidelong glance Buck’s way, like he needs permission or something stupid to talk about them with his son, or to stay longer. Like Buck is going to complain about getting more time with them.

“What you think, Chris? Should we let your dad watch the rest of Hotel Transylvania with us?” Buck asks, and reaches out to grab Eddie’s hand -- just in case he’d gotten some ridiculous idea that this thing between them was going to be a secret.

Christopher isn’t the kind of kid who’s grumpy for long, even right after a nap, so he beams at them and nods excitedly. “We have to start over, though,” he says seriously. “Daddy hasn’t seen the beginning, and he might get confused.”

Buck nods his agreement, and Eddie just laughs. He tosses his free hand over Chris’s shoulders, and the three of them start toward the living room together, as a unit. As they settle together on the couch with tangled limbs and shared quips and laughter, Buck takes a second to breathe in the reality of this moment. He’s truly, incandescently happy, and he wants to take the memory and hold onto it forever -- through whatever job-related heartbreak and medical emergency comes next.

Because now, Buck’s got Eddie, and he’s got Christopher, and that’s more than enough to make him want to keep fighting.

#my fic #buddie fic #911fox fic #buck x eddie #buddie #i will put this on AO3 at some point when it doesn't sound like way too much work

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stevenuniversallyreviews · 5 years

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Episode 94: Greg the Babysitter

“We all gotta grow up sometime, right?”

Right off the bat, this episode’s greatest weakness is that we don’t see Baby Buck and the Baby Pizza Twins as we do in Lamar Abrams’s promo art. How dare we not have more baby teens?

Lack of infant variety notwithstanding, this is a great episode, if not a subtle one. Greg is no stranger to hammering out the lesson of a story, but here it’s made so explicit so often that it threatens to weaken the actual plot. Fortunately the plot does a good enough job of showing that it makes up for all the telling, but still, it’s so on the nose that Vidalia calls Greg out when he belatedly repeats the moral it in response to an unrelated statement.

(But to be clear, this is a story about growing up. Growing up is what this episode about. Gaining maturity is valuable. Emotional development is important. Taking responsibility as you age: good. Staying a kid forever: bad!)

As with Annoying Steven early in the series, this lesson is achieved by presenting us with Douchebag Greg. Douchebag Greg slums around and mooches off a single working mother, depriving her of her own food and taunting her for working to feed her child. When tasked with babysitting, he does what he wants instead of focusing on what a baby might need, and when the kid goes missing, his search includes a pit stop to the arcade to play video games.

This is the second episode where Greg is awful for the bulk of the runtime, and the first, House Guest, was so bad that it earned my inaugural “No Thanks!” rating (a brutal assessment, I know). By that metric you might think I’d dislike Greg the Babysitter as well, because boy oh boy is Douchebag Greg unlikable. But the key difference is the level of intent: even looking past the age and maturity gap between these two Gregs, the Greg of House Guest chooses to lie to his son despite seeing how hard Steven takes it, while Douchebag Greg’s actions stem from sincere cluelessness. Neither is great, and younger Greg is still old enough to know better, but ignorance is far more digestible than purposeful shadiness from this character.

Both House Guest and Greg the Babysitter stay somewhat true to Regular Greg by making him driven by love, whether it’s paternal or romantic. The problem of House Guest is that this emotional core is tainted by him wronging Steven in a way we’ve never seen before or since (compare his feigning of an injury to his negligence in Maximum Capacity, where he instead makes a mistake and is immediately regretful). Nothing in Greg the Babysitter diminishes any sense of authenticity about Greg’s feelings for Rose, because for all his flaws, he doesn’t take advantage of Rose or their relationship.

Moreover, I appreciate that his flaws come from the same character traits that kicked off this relationship, which so far has dominated his flashbacks: Greg is a dreamer and a romantic, which works great in Story for Steven, and he takes the relationship seriously, so he matures on that front in We Need to Talk, but now we see that he’s so focused on Rose that he’s ignoring every other element of life as a functioning adult.

This episode works because Greg is realistically irresponsible. His head has always been in the clouds, and now he’s in a relationship with someone that’s literally magic, so he has no incentive to reflect on himself barring a dire situation. But this episode excels because Greg’s decision to grow up has nothing to do with Steven. We get the groundwork for Rose wanting a kid, but Greg getting his act together is something he does for himself. It would’ve been so easy for this shift to be prompted by impending fatherhood, but it’s far more satisfying to see a character improve himself because he wants to, rather than out of obligation to others. It allows the moment he takes agency to be triumphant without being mixed up in a sense of begrudging acceptance of his duties.

Finally, while I still think it’s ridiculous that the Crystal Gems treat him like a total flake in Laser Light Cannon given his clear improvement since the Douchebag Greg days, it does make a little sense that beings unaccustomed to change would have a hard time getting past this first impression. If you go back and watch the second season of the series after Greg the Babysitter, it’s not hard to imagine which Greg they’re talking about. It’s a stretch, because they’ve seen plenty of evidence to contradict this impression, but if you’re looking to explain their behavior then it’s the best reason I’ve got.

Greg the Babysitter marks an unspoken milestone in the series: this is the last time we’ll ever see Rose Quartz before her web of duplicity begins to unravel. In just four episodes, we’ll learn that she bubbled Bismuth away and lied about it to everyone. In another three, we’ll hear that she shattered Pink Diamond. The veracity of that second part is irrelevant, because the truth only further proves her capacity for deceit. We’ve seen already that Rose wasn’t perfect, but this is her final appearance before the dominoes begin to fall. One last happy memory that directly leads to the creation of our show’s title character, in an episode that emphasizes how dreaming is nice, but reality will always force people to make a change.

We see way more of Rose in this swan song than we did in Story for Steven or We Need to Talk, and like Greg, her mistakes here can be attributed to cluelessness. She admits how confusing humans can be for her, particularly babies, so it’s hard to blame her for not taking good care of Sour Cream. It’s especially hard to blame her considering how excited she is for him to exhibit independence. And it’s impossible to blame her, at least for me, when she references one of my favorite dumb Simpsons jokes in regards to watching him.

The Pink Diamond revelation adds new layers to her explanation that Gems are made for specific purposes, but the funny thing is, it doesn’t add that many new layers: even before learning just how high up Rose was, we still knew she was rebelling against what she was made to do. I think the more interesting aspect of her speech is how it lines up with Bismuth’s repetition of her insistence that Gems could break away from their intended roles. Seeing Rose talk about it here, less than twenty years ago, is made fascinating by knowing she was saying the same thing thousands of years ago. For a Gem that’s interested in change, she hasn’t really changed that much. It’s one thing for her to know that and talk about it, but it’s another for us to see it in action.

I love how an episode that’s this unsubtle (about being a story about growing up, in case you didn’t catch it) manages to quietly explain why Steven exists. We see a baby, and we see Rose loves babies, and we see Rose admires the human capacity to change, and we’ll soon see that Rose herself stagnated there a little bit, but we leave it at that. Judging by the age difference between Sour Cream and Steven, it’s a few years until she and Greg make an actual decision, so it makes sense to not reference it too explicitly this early, but it’s still a direction the episode could’ve taken and I’m very glad it didn’t.

I’ve made no secret about how much I love Brian Posehn voicing Sour Cream with his regular grown man voice, so obviously the best part of this episode is his further use of that voice for Baby Cream. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, and by itself ensures that Greg’s dickishness can’t pull the episode too far down. As with Onion Friend, the strange connection between Sour Cream and Steven is left unspoken, but it’s wild to consider that this side character is a big reason why our protagonist exists. While I’d be fine with this continuing to be a quiet part of the backstory, I can’t say I wouldn’t be interested in seeing Steven and Sour Cream talk about it one day, even as a small gag.

Onion Friend was also the last time we spent any meaningful amount of time with Vidalia, and it’s neat to fill in some gaps between her debut cameo in Story for Steven and her modern iteration. Marty’s flakiness is further proven by her being a single mother from the start, but she’s clearly risen to the occasion and loves the hell out of her kid. Her patience with Greg is tested by his awfulness (and honestly makes said awfulness hard to watch, given how much is on her plate), but it speaks volumes that she’s so welcoming to the ex-friend of her ex. She’s probably the only human Greg knows in Beach City at this point, and I honestly wish we saw more of their modern relationship when we have such a vivid image of their history.

I Think I Need a Little Change might not reach the rocking heights of Comet or What Can I Do For You, but it’s catchier than either and has that wonderful twist on the double meaning of “change.” The wordplay speaks for itself, but it’s a cool trick to reveal that this musical montage is as diegetic as the other two songs: this is something he’s actually singing to people. We get a hefty break from songs after Mr. Greg, so that might be meddling with my opinions, but I think this is my favorite of the three. Puns beat electric guitar, and the song crystalizes Greg’s similarity to Steven come Change Your Mind.

And so we end Season 3, Act 2. We’ve had the aftermath of the Cluster, and we’ve had a series of slice of life episodes from this particularly magical life, but we’ll soon be back to the high-octane plotting of the Cluster Arc. It’s a bit strange that Greg the Babysitter comes between Alone at Sea and Gem Hunt, considering the Jasper of it all, but it’s nice to have this respite before we barrel towards the pivotal moment of Steven’s series-wide arc, especially when this respite tells us a lesson that’s about to become a lot more obvious in the coming storm:

Steven Universe is a story about growing up.

Future Vision!

Good thing nothing bad happened to Sour Cream, or else Greg would’ve had to pray that his space goddess's magic could bring people back from the dead. That would be a ridiculous power!

If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have inconsistencies…

Vidalia got this top from the T-Shirt Shop where she works. This top has a collar. T-shirts do not have collars. It’s unresearched nonsense like this that makes Cartoon Network put this show on hiatus so often, come on people.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

While I do enjoy this episode and stand by it being great, I don’t necessarily love things that I critically find great. Greg the Babysitter doesn’t do quite enough on the emotional level to make me truly love it, considering how much time we have to spend with Douchebag Greg. I appreciate the importance of his douchebaggery, and the importance of this episode as a whole, but this isn’t an something I go out of my way to rewatch. Sorry, Baby Cream. I still like it!

Top Fifteen

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

Keeping It Together

We Need to Talk

Chille Tid

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Catch and Release

When It Rains

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Alone at Sea

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Greg the Babysitter

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

No Thanks!

5. Horror Club 4. Fusion Cuisine 3. House Guest 2. Sadie’s Song 1. Island Adventure

#greg the babysitter #steven universe #su #steven universally #review

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imaginetonyandbucky · 7 years

Note

Hey, how about soulmate AU when you cannot lie to your soulmate? Preferably with The Winter Soldier being Tony's soulmate, not Bucky Barnes

A/N: Hey hey hey Steve didn’t know and when he found out Told Tony (Almost) Immediately. Ultron...? I guess didn’t happen. Everyone is a happy family. (And the Soldier isn't murder-happy anymore). ALSO I left this as an open ending, mostly because I ran into a writer’s block, although I love this fic. You’re welcome.

“Are you afraid of me too, мой пламя?” The Winter Soldier had been triggered. Fuck. This was the first time he had directly approached Tony, preferring to antagonize Steve or argue (converse?) rapidly in Russian with Nat.

So, needless to say, he was scared spitless. He knew what that metal arm could do. What that flesh arm could do. They had killed his parents.

When Steve had first brought the broken and terrified Bucky Barnes to the tower, he had told Tony the truth. That Bucky had told him he remembered the Starks, remembered them all. That Bucky was sorry. Bucky had apologized, too, after Tony had some time to cope, which mostly meant some alcohol and repulsor-blasting of non-essential components. He forgave him. But he still knew what those hands could do.

So yeah he was afraid. Not that he was going to admit to being scared, he was Tony Stark. “Of-” course I’m not was what he tried to say, but nothing came out. No he tried next. Still nothing.

Was there something wrong with his voice? Clearing his throat, he asked his own question. “Got bored of Spangles, snowflake?” So it wasn't his voice. His thoughts whirled. He saw the Soldier open his mouth, then close it.

“да,” the Soldier said a moment later. “He is easy to anger, but you are so fascinating, like a flame.”

Tony wasn't sure he liked where this was heading. Not a whole lot of people met their soulmates. It was statistically unlikely, given the seven billion people in the world. Still, a fair number of people met their soulmates, nearly 10%.

And apparently his was the Winter Soldier. Not James Buchanan Barnes, but The Winter Soldier. A ghost story to scare naughty spies. The (ex) Fist of Hydra. The person who had murdered his parents.

It shouldn't have even been possible. Had Bucky lived and died as normal, he would have been dead, or extremely elderly, by the time Tony had reached puberty.

But here they were.

(Watch out for the break!)

“Rogers,” he called, not taking his eyes off the former assassin. “Come get your frosty friend.”

“But we have only begun to talk, мой пламя,” the Soldier protested, pouting. Pouting, for fucks sake. He looked ridiculous. “And I cannot lie to you.”

Oh shit, he knew what that meant? Tony was so fucked.

Steve had come close enough to hear the Soldier say that. “Tony?” he asked cautiously.

“Looks like Winter here is my soulmate,” he said, trying for a cheerful tone but falling flat.

“Well, fuck,” Steve said.

Yeah. Well fuck.

It had taken a while, and several promises on Tony’s behalf before the Soldier would acquiesce to letting Bucky take control again.

Bucky looked disorientated, like he always did. Shaking his head like a dog, he looked at the worried faces of Steve and Tony. “What did he do?”

Steve hesitated, which only made Bucky look more concerned and upset.

“Looks like your murderous other half is my soulmate,” Tony said flatly. There was no way to ease Bucky into this.

Bucky paled. “What?”

Steve stepped closer, as if to catch Bucky if he fell over. “They- he- They were talking,” Steve finally managed to stumble out. “Apparently they can’t lie to each other.”

“It’s all very exciting, yes,” Tony said, still trying for calm. He was definitely not calm. He tapped at his arc reactor, an unconscious soothing motion. Still there. Still alive.

Bucky opened his mouth and closed it several times, like a guppy. “What?”

Tony held back the snarky (and frankly quite rude) comment by the skin of his teeth. It wasn’t fair to take it out on Bucky, it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t any of their faults, not even the Soldier’s. “Your other half got bored of aggravating Cap, came to talk to me. Said something in Russian - moy pluma?” He shrugged. He really needed to learn Russian. “Said I was fascinating. Not sure why, we haven’t talked before. I couldn’t lie to him, he said he couldn’t lie to me.”

“He called you his flame?” Bucky said, incredulously.

Tony frowned. “I guess?” He stretched out the syllables. “It was... kind of sweet?” Bucky looked so pale he could give a ghost a run for its money, he decided to not divulge that the Soldier had started their conversation by asking if Tony was scared. That wouldn't go over well.

“Look, obviously you need some time to... drink or put your head between your knees or something so I’ll let you stay with Captain Crunch here and I’m going to go call Pepper. And Rhodey. And probably get smashed. Not every day you find your soulmate and it ends up being half of someone.”

Bucky looked torn between grateful and pained, so Tony nodded at them both, and left.

After getting spectacularly drunk with his platypus, and blackout engineering with him, he woke up to Steve’s disappointed face hanging over him. He groaned. “What the hell, Rogers?”

“I thought you weren't going on anymore benders, Tony,” he said disapprovingly.

Tony squinted through aching eyeballs. “I think finding out my soulmate is The Winter Soldier means I’m allowed to get drunk.”

Steve sighed. There really wasn't much anyone could say to that. “Here,” he said, setting two aspirin and a bottle of water on the table next to Tony’s head.

Tony took the aspirin, and drank the whole bottle of water. “I love you,” he said gratefully after draining the bottle.

Steve looked amused. “You'll love me less when I tell you you need to get up and get breakfast.”

Tony pouted. “Why? Why can I enjoy my misery alone and in bed? It's the crack of dawn, you heathen.”

“Because you and Bucky need to talk and it's noon.”

Flinging an arm over his eyes dramatically and regretting it instantly, he groaned. “Fine. Fine! Slave-driver. I need to shower, get out.” He made shooing motions at Steve. Steve went, warning again him to be downstairs in half an hour.

After a shower and food, Tony felt considerably more human. Almost like he was ready to talk to Bucky. “J? Where's Buckaroo?”

“Mr. Barnes is in the common room, Sir.”

“Okay, great. Good. I got this.” Refilling his coffee mug, he headed out to the common room.

Bucky was sitting on the couch, staring out the window. He looked more fragile than he had in weeks. When Tony cleared his throat, Bucky startled, reaching for, no doubt, some sort of weapon, but stopped halfway. He turned towards Tony and immediately started apologizing. “God, Tony, I’m so sorry. I can stay in my room, or move out, or something. I'm so sorry, I had no idea.” Bucky looked like he was going to cry.

Tony frowned. He had never even considered any of those options. “Absolutely not, and not just because Steve would give me sad eyes for months. Have you seen those? I nearly cried myself.” He shook his head. “No, we can figure this out.” Tony sat on the chair next to the couch, giving Bucky some space.

“I-” Bucky opened his mouth.

“If the next words out of your mouth are some version of I'm sorry or I didn't know, I’ll give you sad eyes,” Tony threatened.

Bucky sighed. “I don't know what to say, then.”

Tony nodded, and took a sip of coffee. “Neither do I. But we can figure something out.”

Clutching a pillow to his lap, Bucky turned to face Tony. “I never thought I- or part of me- would have a soulmate again.”

“What happened to them?” He asked gently.

“Died.” Bucky said briefly. “Married after I was declared dead. Had three kids.”

Tony reached out to offer comfort, but stopped halfway, not knowing if Bucky would want any. Bucky took his hand, and squeezed then let go.

“I'm sorry,” Tony offered.

Bucky shrugged, clearly not willing to accept much comfort about this subject.

Clearing his throat, Tony changed the subject. “Do you and the Soldier.... talk? Or interact?”

“Not really. I get hazy memories when we switch sometimes, but mostly it's just a hole in my memory.”

Tony nodded, his mind racing about it all but it was too early to talk more about that still. Bucky was still wary of the Soldier, and it wouldn't do to prod at him about the subject - yet.

“So.” Tony paused, unsure. “How do you want to proceed?”

Bucky looked startled again. “What do you mean proceed?”

“I mean, do you want me to avoid you when you're in Soldier-mode? Do you want to go on dates as Bucky-and-Tony? Do you want to find someone else while I... feel out this thing with the Soldier? Do you want to ignore me entirely?” Tony shrugged. “I'm forty-three, Bucky-bear. I never expected to find a soulmate at this point, and it is your body. Just because half of you is my soulmate doesn't mean that I have any right to is.”

Bucky was staring at him, his mouth open.

“What? Do I have something on my face?” Tony asked defensively.

Bucky shut his mouth with a click, and shook his head vigorously. “No, no, I just- what would you want with a half-brainwashed assassin, or a traumatized ex-sniper?”

“Because that murder strut of his is hot? Because he called me his flame?” Tony shrugged. “Because I like the idea soulmates, or at least attempting at it.” And he looked very serious now. “And you, Buck-a-roni, you're worth a chance too. You're sweet and attractive and, let's be honest, everyone here is messed up. And that's a good enough place to start from for me.”

Bucky looked at him for a long minute, long enough for Tony to start wondering if he had come on too strong, but then Bucky nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, let's all try this.”

“Are you sure? An... open relationship between me and you and me and the Soldier?” Tony asked again, making sure.

Bucky nodded. “I'm sure.”

Tony nodded slowly. “I should probably... talk to him,” he said, not wanting to force Bucky to be someone he hated but needing to make sure everyone was on the same page.

Bucky nodded again. “Figured,” he huffed, sounding resigned. “Guess I'll be him more.”

“Wait!” Tony cried. “Not more,” he told Bucky, trying to make Bucky understand. “Never more him than you. I don't want you to lose yourself.”

Bucky gave him a genuine smile. It was small, but real and warm. “I just meant more than I am now, but thank you.”

Bucky closed his eyes, and then the Soldier was there.

“Приве́т, мой ма́ленький,” the Soldier said. “I see you have talked to him.” He sounded pleased.

Tony’s theory was confirmed, but he didn’t want to talk about accepting your other half in order to remember things right now. “What did you see?”

The Soldier was much more tactile than Bucky, and patted the couch. “Come, sit with me, and I will tell you.”

Tony rolled his eyes but was secretly pleased. He was very much a tactile person, and wanted to cuddle as much as possible. He got up and sat on the couch next to the Soldier. “Now tell me, Soldier.”

“That he and I are to share you, мой ма́ленький, and you are very noble, offering to avoid me for his comfort.”

Tony nodded. “That’s the gist of it. So... thoughts?”

“My little one, you have come up with a very good compromise. I am fine with this, although I would prefer to see you more often,” the Soldier said, looking a little troubled.

“Hey, I’m not little!” Tony exclaimed. Ignoring the chuckling assassin, he continued. “I just want both of you to be comfortable, and he’s.. not when you’re out. It takes him back, mentally. But maybe we can go on dates, once a week or something like that.”

The Soldier thought it over, before agreeing. “I will agree to this, but when he his better, I would like more equal time with you.”

Tony took his hand. “We can re-negotiate whenever we need to, Soldier.” He paused. “What should I call you?”

The Soldier cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“Your name. I can’t keep calling you The Soldier,” he said, emphasizing the capital letters.

“Яков,” he decided. “Or Yasha.”

“Yakov?” Tony asked. “Yasha, I think. I dated a Jacob, and that sounds too similar.”

“Very well, мой ма́ленький,” Yasha said. “Yasha.”

(bad?) Russian translation/history

мой пламя - moy playma - my flameДа - da - yesПриве́т - privét - hi (informal)мой ма́ленький - moy malen'kiy - my little one (I stitched this one together)Яков - YakovJames/Jacob is from Hebrew YAAKOV (James was derived from Jacob) and the common diminutive/nickname from Яков is Yasha, which is why you see a lot of Yasha in fics. (I wanted to be different ok)

#winteriron #tony x bucky #tony stark #bucky barnes #soulmate au #soulmates #tony x winter soldier #open ending #prompts #mariesbookblog #keepfacepalm

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junker-town · 4 years

Text

The Spurs have finally joined the modern NBA, all thanks to one player

LaMarcus Aldridge is finally shooting 3s, and the Spurs are thriving. So why’d it take so long?

As San Antonio Spurs fans prepared to watch their resurgent team take the opening tip against the Boston Celtics on Wednesday, a FOX Sports graphic flashed onto the screen. “You see this note?” chirped longtime play-by-play man Bill Land. “Thirty-plus three-point attempts in five straight games. Longest streak in franchise history. The other night, they were 19 of 35!”

When Land finished his sentence, Sean Elliott, his passionate-yet-cantankerous partner for 17 years of Spurs games, chuckled. “We’ve officially joined,” he began before pausing for dramatic effect, “the rest of the NBA.”

Maybe it’s come while kicking and screaming, but it’s also long overdue. Over their last eight games, the Spurs are 5-3 while scoring nearly 121 points per 100 possessions, the best in the league over that stretch. A month ago, it seemed like their incredible 22-year playoff streak was ending. Now, the Spurs are the West’s No. 8 seed.

The catalyst for that change is obvious. Up until Dec. 23, the Spurs attempted just 26 threes a contest, the fewest in the league, while making only 35 percent of said attempts. Since Dec. 23, they’re taking nearly 31 threes a game while making 43.5 percent of their shots from downtown. That difference has been made up almost entirely by one guy who appeared to have an epiphany sometime just before Dec. 23.

Prior to that date, LaMarcus Aldridge was one of the last of a dying breed of automatic mid-range shooters that wouldn’t take a step back to get an extra point. His reasons never made much rational sense, but it’s hard to teach an old dog with Aldridge’s historical pedigree new tricks. Even the Spurs seemed to accept that he’d never change.

Until all of a sudden, he did. Who is this guy?

Seriously, did a previously reformed Stretch 5 like Brook Lopez or Marc Gasol inhabit Aldridge’s body? Should we call him LaMarc Gasoldridge now? (Shoutout @BallFromGrace for that one).

Since Dec. 23, Aldridge is firing up 4.2 threes a game while hitting a whopping 60 percent from out there. To put that in perspective, Aldridge never shot more than 1.5 threes a game in any of his previous 13 seasons and was only taking 1.7 a game before Dec. 23. He’s still picking and popping for jumpers, except now he’s actually standing behind that spherical line painted on the court.

Aldridge won’t keep making 60 percent of his threes, but the religion he’s discovered to finally start taking them has a significant cascading effect on the rest of the Spurs. His willingness to stand beyond the line has opened the rest of the floor for San Antonio’s other retrograde star, DeMar DeRozan. As Pounding the Rock’s Bruno Passos noted, DeRozan is suddenly sizzling inside the arc, shooting 64 percent from the field since Dec. 23 despite taking only five total threes in eight games.

That hot shooting probably won’t last, but DeRozan’s game is significantly enhanced when he has all that space to make his moves. Say what you want about DeRozan, but he is still one of the league’s toughest covers when he doesn’t have to worry about opponents shrinking the floor on him. His downhill power becomes far more dangerous when Aldridge is pulling the opponents’ biggest help defender away from the basket.

Aldridge’s willingness to pop all the way to the three-point line also creates more mismatches for DeRozan to exploit. Because Aldridge can fire away from 27 feet away, opponents will often switch DeRozan-Aldridge pick-and-pops so their bigger defender doesn’t have to leave the basket area. That’s barbecue chicken for him, especially with players like Derrick White, Bryn Forbes, Trey Lyles, and Rudy Gay also spacing the floor.

Indeed, Aldridge’s floor spacing is contagious. Even less proficient shooters like DeJounte Murray have internalized the importance of only having one player standing inside the arc at a given time. If Aldridge is willing to step away to open the paint for DeRozan, so can anyone else. That’s given the Spurs’ other guards more room to drive themselves.

It may seem wild that a small sacrifice like Aldridge standing a few feet further from the hoop can do this much to change San Antonio’s fortunes, but it’s solved a fundamental problem with the Spurs’ roster. Up until this recent eight-game stretch, the Spurs’ two best players simply did not make the team better when they shared the court. The reason is simple: Aldridge and DeRozan kept bumping into each other because both wanted to go to work in the same space inside the arc. Spurs lineups with both out there played about even last year and were getting outscored significantly this season prior to Dec. 23. That’s necessitated some creative rotation choices to keep them apart as much as possible, which worked last year but not this year, for reasons I wrote about earlier in the season.

But all that changes now that Aldridge is standing somewhere else on the court. Now, the Spurs are a juggernaut when their two best players play together, outscoring opponents by 85 points in 229 minutes over the past eight games. Their ability to actually complement each other clarifies the rest of the rotation. Murray can now rediscover his game slowly, Walker can get chances to experiment with an open floor, and reserve big man Jakob Poeltl can be funneled into spacier lineups where his lack of offensive skill isn’t as glaring. Snap the main pieces into place, and the rest of the puzzle becomes much easier to solve.

The obvious question is why it took so long for Aldridge to make this transformation. (Assuming he’s made it for good, of course. Even now, he’s downplaying its significance publicly). As Elliott’s bemused comment at the top of the Celtics broadcast suggests, pleas for Aldridge and San Antonio to embrace the “modern NBA” and shoot more threes are nothing new. So why now? Why was this simple change so hard to make?

It’s hard to say, but I have a couple theories. One is a psychological concept I referenced last year when discussing Brook Lopez’s transformation from brutish post player to long-range floor spacer: the paradox of expertise. As I wrote then:

Psychologists refer to this as the Paradox of Expertise: the more immersed one is in a particular subject, the harder it is to spot new solutions that would seem clear to outsiders. This explains why industries get disrupted, and why expert forecasters are often no better at predicting the future in their respective fields than novices. The more one learns about a subject, the more they develop mental shortcuts that process new information through the prism of what they already know.

Gregg Popovich is arguably the most successful coach in NBA history. He’s also been famously grumpy about the proliferation of the three-point shot. Even now, he’s framing Aldridge’s transformation as one he had to make due to the rules and norms of today’s game. As brilliant as Popovich is — and kudos to him for at least recognizing his own bias against threes — he wouldn’t be human if the same core beliefs that helped him become so successful didn’t also sometimes make it difficult for him to adapt quickly.

I also suspect Aldridge’s natural disinclination to shoot threes in the past may have to do more with status than strategy. As Seth Partnow of The Athletic (and formerly the Milwaukee Bucks) has repeatedly noted, the “lost art” of the mid-range shot is really the lost art of the assisted mid-range shot. Those attempts have been converted into threes, but the mid-range shot that stars tend to take — off the dribble in a situation where they are the designed playmaker — is still alive and well.

It’s not that the mid-range itself is dead in today’s NBA. It’s more that it’s become the exclusive domain of a certain level of scorer. By contrast, anyone not in that special club helps their team more by standing behind the line, giving those lucky enough to have mid-range privileges more room to operate while getting an extra point for their trouble.

When framed that way, calls for Aldridge to embrace three-pointers can come off as asking him to sacrifice his place in the star club. That’s not always easy for a player of Aldridge’s pedigree to accept, even if it seems obvious that doing so helps his team improve. Sometimes, it takes time for that message to sink in. (For another case study, see Simmons, Ben).

Remember when Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle vehemently argued against TNT broadcasters’ calls for Kristaps Porzingis to post up more? Carlisle is obviously right that posting Porzingis up more makes the Mavericks worse, both because Porzingis isn’t good at it and because the Mavericks as a whole have benefited tremendously from Porzingis drawing his defender away from the basket. But he also understood that the undercurrent of those comments wasn’t about the efficacy of Porzingis post-ups, but rather that he belongs in the select club of stars that should be bestowed the right to take those shots in today’s game. Carlisle needed to fight back against the subtext of the post-up complaints to maintain the harmonic, Luka Doncic-centric environment that’s caused Dallas’ incredible offensive success.

The Mavericks’ opponent on that TNT night? That’s right: LaMarcus Aldridge and the San Antonio Spurs. Six games later, the Spurs “officially joined the rest of the NBA,” to use Elliott’s words. The timing’s a hell of a coincidence.

0 notes

spotlightsaga · 7 years

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Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews... F is For Family (S02E03) The Liars Club Airdate: May 30, 2017 @fisforfamily Ratings: @netflix Original Privatized Ratings Score: 8.75/10 **********SPOILERS BELOW********* One thing I've never been accused of is being un-empathetic, at least not since a bit after high school anyway... It is quite possible I may have had some sort of horrible God complex like most did in their early stages of adulthood. I often question why I treated people certain ways or did things that I did. Not knowing any better really isn't a good answer. Sure, empathy is a trait you hone and grow into as you age and experience life's many different heartaches, but its also true that it does come naturally, eventually anyway. Sometimes there's just something inside you that literally allows you to cosmically switch shoes with someone in a blink of an eye... At times I can be so sensitive to other people's energy that I adopt their general mood or disposition. I know I'm not the only one, but I think there's a select few of us that had a very distinct opportunity to experience as much as humanly possible and it shapes the way we see the world. As a young, developing adult, I wanted to be as street smart as I was book smart. For me, you couldn't just have one without the other or else you opened yourself up for great windows of ignorance. I purposefully put myself in awkward and dangerous positions. Sometimes I'd even travel great distances with nothing but a few hundred bucks in my pocket and an eagerness to connect with others in any way possible, hoping it would somehow shape my maturity, worldliness, and understanding. I'd end up homeless, reveling in it, attempting to draw as much as possible from the experience instead of focusing on removing myself from a bad situation. Homelessness wasn't the only thing... I had to see, feel, and try everything I could, because for me, perspective was everything... And even as a wiser adult (with still so much to learn), it still is. There was a large stint in my life where I was unemployed like Frank (Bill Burr). I allowed my core values and self-importance to destroy good things happening in my life. I always tell people this who are thinking of quitting their job on a whim or reacting off of strong emotion, or even those needing a dose of reality in confirmation form. When you have a job, everyone wants you. It's easy to find work when it's not a necessity, but when you find yourself in a position, like Frank where you're forced to take what you can get, suddenly nobody is in a giving mood. It's one of life's dirty little tricks, and if you don't believe me... Try it out. No, no, please don't, seriously. I wouldn't wish what Frank is going through on my worst enemy. I've been there and it doesn't feel good. Frank has been blacklisted by his boss throughout most airlines as an undesirable, no matter how qualified for the position he may be. Sure, there is pride involved. I saw a commenter call it 'toxic masculinity'. I understand the concept of 'toxic masculinity' and the harmful psychological effects it has on men and women within society. Even though this particular string of events happen p in the 70's, a better, more accurate example of 'toxic masculinity' would be the misogyny that Sue (Laura Dern) is dealing with in her stifling, unhealthy office space... Not Frank's unwillingness to break down and accept a handout from the government, or filter through jobs that he deems compromising or humiliating to his experience and very specific set of skills. I don't think there's anything 'toxic' about the drive to provide for your family... Or the desire Frank has to actually do what he's trained to do, what he's good at, and what he can potentially make the most money doing. If anything this is human in nature, not exclusive to the ideals of masculinity. When we talk about ego, there's definitely a split on how both genders handle things... Why each gender may protect certain aspects, attack issues in a particular manner or prioritize ideals more than they do others; but ultimately as human beings, at the end of the day, we all want to count. We all want to do our part in protecting and providing for the ones we love. Even in the 70's, where male ignorance and patriarchal control reigned supreme, as continuously displayed in Sue's ongoing story arc... i.e. 'I'd like to put some mustard on her sandwich', Sue is now head of her household and must assume the role of lead 'bread winner' and only working spouse. She wrestles with earning the respect of a group of men who rule over her company like a bunch of primitive primates and a woman who gives into the ideas of that sexually charged, insult driven, 'toxic masculinity' to maintain her position by acting like 'one of the boys'). Ultimately, they don't even deserve Sue's respect. We are seeing Sue, as a character, show signs of defying what a woman's role is in the 1970's. Honestly, this is one of the most endearing spots of S2 so far, Sue's drive is inspiring... Even though she's constantly pulled down and made to feel less than human, she wades through a cesspool of humiliation and depression because her family is counting on her. Sue pushes on because she must. She knows she has no choice, but this isn't about that... This is about maintaining her family, and clearly Sue is not afraid to step up to the plate, though it does take a lot out of her emotionally and physically as well. She looks to Frank to do the same, and as hard as everyone wants to be on Frank, I have to put my hand out here. I find it hard to believe that this many people have never found themselves in a situation even remotely similar to Frank's. His embarrassing breakdown during Maureen's (Debi Derryberry) 'Honeybee Troupe' meeting was comical and a great way to tackle these sensitive subjects with a cheeky wink and irreverent humor... But don't let that waggish satire cloud that sense of relatability and empathy with Frank. The follow-up scene that contrasts that similar humorous moment with an embarrassing private period of candid vulnerability where Kevin (Justin Long) catches his father sobbing and verbally exclaiming that he 'fucked up' as he breaks down on the living room floor had me torn. This is almost like an instance of 'talking to god', where you're completely letting your weaknesses and insecurities boil over to where you're simultaneously falling apart and attempting to find a way to cathartically push on... And then boom... One of the people that you go out of your way to always make sure they see you in a position of control sees you completely helpless. Frank springs into action and attempts to show Kevin he's still a man who can solve problems by attempting to create a space for Kevin to have private moments for himself, freedom to grow without being cramped by his younger brother, Bill (Haley Reinhardt), his constant hovering and a instinctive drive that is very similar to that of Sue's that annoys Kevin's apathetic teenage sensibilities. Kevin is gracious towards his father at first, but he hears Frank lie to his mother... And that doesn't exactly sit well with Kevin, especially since it was Kevin who was outed for skipping school and Frank then used his authority to keep his own lie going about keeping with his assumed responsibilities at the Unemployment Office. Any headway Frank made with his eldest son was destroyed in that moment. Kevin remains silent and allows the moment to remain uncontested, but the damage has been done. Obviously animated series rarely inspire this sort of impassioned article from me. 'F is For Family' is an extremely special and 'one-of-a-kind' show that really takes all my favorite elements of any type or genre of series and turns up the existential volume to full blast. Michael Price and Bill Burr have literally created my dream series in animated form. With each episode, I become more and more appreciative of what this show is at it's core. When people put their heart & soul, their blood, swear & tears into their work, it shows. People see that, they react to it, even if they don't completely understand it's value right away. I continue to take my time w/'F is For Family'. Netflix has already renewed the series for S3, there's no longer a need to rush through the episodes, and to be honest... Rushing through a show this earnest and intricately nuance is only doing it a disservice. Netflix may have reinvented the way we watch television, allowing for binge sessions, and all-night marathons... But 'F is For Family' provides us an exceptional antidote for that new style of consuming entertainment, calling for the series to be sipped like a fine wine, even promoting repeat viewings of episodes so that the series can truly be honored for everything that it is. Great job guys, I can't praise this one enough.

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ciceroprofacto · 7 years

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35 or 38 lams!!

38-“You fainted…straight into my arms. You know, if you wanted my attention you didn’t have to go to such extremes.”

35-“You heard me. Take. It. Off.

After the Battle of Monmouth, the boys blow off steam…and other types of blowing. [EXPLICIT]

Camp teeters somewhere between vigilance and celebration, men still posted at their cannons in case one last round of shots tries us from across the hill where we’d driven the British. There haven’t been explosions for hours now, but as proof that discipline in camp has tightened, no one tries to celebrate prematurely.

It’s too dark to continue a coordinated battle, but as we stand, Washington should feel confident for the morning. With Cornwallis whispering in Clinton’s ear, stories of Brandywine and Whitemarsh, we’re all sure he’ll fall to the same hubris as Howe. He’ll wait to make another attack, thinking his victory is assured. And if their camp still remains come first light, we’ll be ready to finish this.

“-if he hadn’t occupied me all evening with planning our water distributions for tomorrow, I would’ve helped him draw up the formations. He probably hasn’t drawn them himself- instead, I bet he’s still raving at Gilbert like the boy can do anything more than he can to see Lee’s punished for this.”

Hamilton had been sulking while I’d raged to him about Lee’s retreat from the field. It seems, after my considerable goading, he’s finally joined me in my anger, but I’ve exhausted my supply of complaints about General Lee for today.

“I’m sure Gilbert’s returning his fury in equal measure,” I say, squeezing out the cloth we had been washing up with. The sound of water hitting the basin momentarily drowns out the noise of crickets outside and the voices of the soldiers and the camp, fully awake. “And, with this heat…cooling the men down will be just as important as removing musket balls and wrapping wounds.”

“It’s not that hot.”

He’s being petulant for having quit the field and I give him an unimpressed look, “Not now,” I agree, “but at midday, we were dropping like flies. Nearly as fast as they were. A hundred men died from heat.”

“Because they failed to judge their own limits.”

He must be joking. I smirk at him, “You fainted…straight into my arms. You call that judging your own limits?”

“When I felt myself fading, I knew exactly where to go.”

His tone is defensive, but too petty to be genuine- only for show. I stop my hands wringing and sit back, grin at him fully, and see where he’s teasing- his usual deflection against embarrassment. I take him where he’s opened it up for me to frisk him with wit, “You know, if you wanted my attention you didn’t have to go to such extremes.”

“But, swooning into your arms has made you so much sweeter to me today,” he says and grins back. As if he doesn’t know why I’ve kept him closer…after the battle we had.

I swat at him with the washrag but he catches it and laughs. “Tell yourself whatever you need to,” I say. “You fainted.”

He throws the back of his hand up to his head and rolls his eyes back, “Oh, Laurens,” he sighs, arcing dramatically backwards until he falls into our pallet in a heap. “Help me- I’ve fallen off my horse and it’s hot.”

I stand from the stool I’d perched on to wash up, following him onto the blankets and wrapping an arm around his shoulders- to shove his face into the pallet. Making light of the dangers this war presents to our lives has become a familiar game with him and one that I think we’ve learned to mutually indulge for our own benefit. He injects humor into the idea of his own death, a subject that fails to elicit an acceptable response, a dull compliance that would have me furious with him if he expressed it. And I pretend he’s sparked my temper before he can actually do so with his callousness, so that he can laugh at himself with the full understanding that he’s walking on thin ice.

He kicks a leg up and sweeps mine out from under me, effectively initiating. And then we wrestle over the pallet for several minutes, knees and elbows knocking on soft spots, already bruised from a hard day’s battle. We push at each other, grunting and laughing in turn until it hurts too much to ignore those aches and injuries and we make a mutual surrender, more honorable than awaiting a hard-won victory both of our bodies would regret.

After several long minutes of catching our breath, he says, “Remember when we were so impressed that General Arnold was shot and trapped under his horse and fought from the ground?”

I roll onto my side to look at him. “Are you saying we’ve made ourselves as impressive as Arnold today?” It’s a vainglorious implication, but I don’t imply I disagree. When Alex doesn’t answer, just shrugs and stares up at the ceiling of our tent, I say, “When you were in Albany…I watched Joseph Reed fall off his horse, surrounded. Cadwalder stood and defended him by the sword. Seeing you trapped under your horse…”

He sits up on one elbow, “I’ve told you- I don’t need protecting.”

I imagine a world where he can read my mind- what a blessing and curse that might be. “Still…” I say. By the time I had made it to his side, he’d had three dead redcoats bleeding out on the ground where he’d fallen. But, “I wanted to run to you and defend you. Give you the time to get up and fight. I wanted you standing beside me.”

“Where I should be,” he says, smiling easily. Like it’s devastatingly simple. Though I know him- and I know what it means for him to align himself with anyone else, that sort of trust and vulnerability. And he says it like it’s simple.

When my eyes shy away from him, he rolls over to tuck himself at my side and lifts my arm to place it around himself, shimmying until his back’s aligned to my chest. It’s still too warm for this- the air humid and sticky. But he’s open and hopeful and honest in this moment. And God, I’ve always seen the difference between his lies and his truth, but should it really be this easy? When did we become so weak to each other?

He talks about the battle and compares it to an epoch, dredges up our old stories and poems, the fantasies we’d shared to get through the winter of being ancient heroes or outlaws, in places more free than this. Places where adventure required less paperwork.

He moves too much when he speaks, and I think he must know this, but with his body so firmly pressed into mine. I wish he’d heed the effect that it’s having on me. Just his presence so near is enough to keep my body keyed up, finely tuned to some emotional response just shy of the rush felt in battle, anticipation of the charge, something I can’t bring myself to act on without orders.

When he deliberately leans back into my lap, I push my hips forward against him, let my nose rest in his hair.

What am I doing? I think.

His hips press back more firmly and I know he must be aware of my predicament now, but he moves slightly against me as if to confirm it. A discrete little dance that presses his arse into my lap just to test me. I grab his hip and hold him there. Playing with flame just to feel the singe. “If you’re intentionally creating a problem, you should offer a solution…”

“…You’re flirting with me, Laurens,” he warns.

“Am I?” I have been all day. It’s painfully obvious, even to me. Maybe it was the rage of the battle, the fury of Lee’s betrayal or the panic to see my friend in so much danger, but I had been shamelessly drawing myself to him, inviting him closer with words and allusions and touches that bordered on frantic. We’ve had this discussion before, and I’ve been careful not to hurt him with words, tempting things I couldn’t promise. But, there’s something to be said that he hadn’t stopped me- or complained of it until just now when my words have already transgressed propriety.

And I still am. Tempting him. I can see it, fully aware that my grin is teasing- bordering on salacious, I like the way it feels on my face. Alex seems to war with himself, hesitant to hope even as he leans towards me and starts to mirror my own eagerness, voice barely above a whisper, “Do you…intend to?”

He’s warning me to stop and consider what I’m offering if I plan to turn him away again. But…“Well, you’ve said I flirt with everyone, so if you chose to feel that what I said was an overture, really you’re doing so at your own discretion with full knowledge of my character. You ask me, do I intend to flirt with you,” I smirk fully now, feel my teeth exposed, “I’d say you’re a clever man. Figure it out.”

He stares, then seems to decide his answer. “Take your pants off.”

So blunt, I baulk, “What?”

“You heard me.”

He tugs off his boots, and begins loosening his belt, and I feel compelled into motion just to keep up with him. He unbuttons his shirt at the neck, unties his cravat and loosens his clothes for mobility, but undresses no further. His eyes stay fixed on me, watching my hips shimmying out of my trousers.

I’m still half-hard from his wriggling, growing firmer under the scrutiny when he stares at my cock. He moves to me as if he can’t help himself, going down to his knees and grabbing my bare thighs, spreading them without ceremony. I don’t resist when he pulls me forward, laves the length of my cock with his tongue. I gasp, feel myself stiffen more.

His eyes flick up to me, half-obscured under his lashes at this angle, he kisses the head wetly with an open mouth, alternating between sucking gently and letting his tongue glide along the tip and the notch below the head.

He takes the head into his mouth fully and sucks hard, and I swear without thinking. My hips buck and he grabs them more firmly, nails digging into my skin. I think to apologize, but he swallows more of me, pushes his head down, and when I touch his face, I feel the swell of my own cock in his cheek.

It’s surreal. Too physical and impersonal. The times we had helped each other with hands and hips, we had always been so…ourselves, talking and laughing, making crude jokes. This…all I can hear in this is the wet sound of his throat, the words his tongue traces along the underside of my cock. Beyond the pleasure, I’m reading every twitch of his brow, watching his eyes fall closed in concentration, sure that he’s mapping the flavor and texture of me for his own purposes. It’s disastrously obvious he’s done this before. This act reserved for whores. He’s enjoying it more than he should. I want to enjoy it too- to stop thinking completely, but I can’t. I’m panting, breathing thin and forced, trying to quiet myself as the voices outside our tent seem so loud and intrusive.

The only person who’d have reason to disturb us would be Lafayette who’s interrupted such touches before without notice- then invited himself in to share our tent. But, he’s still with the General. He won’t disturb this.

Then Alexander pulls off entirely, drops his nose along my length, licks a wet stripe between my balls, and I don’t care about the voices at all. His hand works my length. I need to breathe, but I can’t- not quite. I grab at the back of his head, so he sucks one of my balls into his mouth and I gasp. He seems to be so far beyond himself, and as he rolls me over his tongue, he draws me further and further from myself.

I finally crack, “Ah…oh god, Alex…”

His eyes open, looking up at me with unrestrained mirth, laughing as he pulls back and touches my hand on his head. I take that as permission and guide him back onto my cock, press him forward- but he beats me to it and pushes down at his own speed. I plunge down his throat, torturously slow, and he pulls back, presses his head into my hands like a nuzzle- goes back down in another slow stroke.

This is the quietest he’s been all day. Spent every conversation interrupting me and my ranting anger to interject his own opinions, but his mouth is thoroughly filled, throat making obscene noises as he swallows me too slow. I push in, impatient. He forgives it, moves with me and accommodates.

Easy, teasing slowness gives way to momentum and with a fluid move of his neck, we’re moving in tangent. I relinquish my control to shift my hips in compliment to the bobbing motion of Alexander’s mouth. Beside myself, I’m dangerously close to finishing and losing control of my breathing, all wanton sighs and muffled noises of pleasure- a quiet chorus of please and yes and Alex.

I watch his shoulder move and realize he’s palming the front of his breeches; he grabs his kerchief and opens the flap to touch himself. Then, he’s groaning around my cock, breathing hotly over wet, sensitive skin. It’s all too much and when my friend sucks at me sharply, takes me even deeper, I practically sob, try not to moan aloud. I move to push him off before I lose myself, but he persists, calms the twitching of my legs, squeezing the muscles of my thigh with one hand and groping at my arse with the other, pushing me forward and deeper into his throat, taking me with unbearable intent. I jolt, clamp my eyes tightly shut and sob dryly, coming down his throat.

There’s no mess when I open my eyes, Alexander holding my cock up as it softens and licking at it until I’m sticky with only saliva. He sits back on his feet, chest rising heavily as he catches his breath, and reaches over to grab my pants and hand them back.

He looks at me again, expression uncharacteristically nervous for a moment as he holds out my clothes.

I take them and stare back at him. His lips are wet and look tender and soft. A small drop of my release escaped his tongue and sits at the corner of his lip.

I wipe it away from his mouth with my finger. The motion feels tender with him staring like this. But he closes his eyes, and before I pull my hand away, he catches it, draws it back to his lips and pulls my finger into his mouth. He licks it clean and lets go. “Thank you…” he breathes, and I don’t think he means for wiping his mouth.

I almost dismiss it- ask why in the world he would be thanking me. But, he looks too relieved to question it. And, I consider, there’s not many people he might be able to do this with.

So, I smooth his hair and slide my fingers down his back, pulling him close so his face falls into my neck, breath humid and sticky on my skin. We lie back, and I stroke his hair until he falls asleep.

It’s too warm to stay this close.

#not for Liberty Kids #ficlet #SOA #Song of Alexander #this is weird in first person #Seriously don't read this unless you're of-age #I know a lot of you nasty teenagers are following me but I'd like to sleep in peace thinking I'm not sharing my smut with the youths

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dorkforty · 5 years

Text

So it’s time to get back to the funnybooks. After two weeks of talking movies, I’ve got a nice little backlog piling up, including the conclusion of Heroes in Crisis, the beginning of the end for Ed Piskor’s X-Men: Grand Design, and new issues of Stray Bullets and Criminal. But first, the comic I enjoyed most from the last two weeks…

The Green Lantern 8 by Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp

Y’know, just about any issue of this book is likely to be filled with ridiculous fun. But this one… Holy crap.

From the cover alone, you know you’re in for a wild ride. This issue is an homage to the classic Denny O’Neil / Neal Adams run of Green Lantern / Green Arrow, complete with Liam Sharp doing his best Adams impersonation throughout. But once you start reading the actual story, you swiftly realize it’s WAY crazier than that.

First, we’re introduced to Hadea Maxima, a (possibly other-dimensional?) hell-planet inhabited by a race of space demons for whom murder is not a crime, but an accepted cultural norm. One of the leaders (I guess?) of this place is a demon space-mobster named Lord Brotorr (!), who’s very very angry that rival demon space-mobster Glorigold DeGrand (!) is cutting in on his profits with a new drug that’s connected in some way to Earth. So Brotorr orders the murder of not just his rival, but also of THE ENTIRE PLANET.

Cut to Earth, where Green Arrow’s dealing with a deadly new street drug that leaves its users in a blank, zombie-like state. Green Lantern shows up to help, and we’re off to the races. Before it’s all done (without getting into too many spoilers), we’ve had twists, turns, psychedelic trips, drug dealers in pointy black hoods, and what may be only the second-ever appearance of Jack Kirby’s Xeen Arrow (the Green Arrow of Dimension Zero, which is of course an other-dimensional world inhabited by telepathic super-giants).

It is complete insanity, a frothy mixture of Silver Age goofiness and 2000 AD attitude that somehow manages to maintain the heroes’ dramatic dignity while still playing things for laughs. It’s a tightrope walk of an approach, and it’s not easy to pull off. Too far one way, and it all gets too cute for its own good. Too far the other way, and you’ve got the idiocy of a Rob Liefeld comic. But when you hit that sweet spot in the middle, you’ve got a potential classic.

And though it’s not perfect… Though sometimes Morrison’s scripts lean so far into dream logic that they don’t quite make sense even as comedy… I’m leaning toward this being a classic.

Immortal Hulk 18 by Al Ewing and Joe Bennett

Another classic in the making is Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Immortal Hulk. This one’s been gathering quite a buzz, picking up readers as it goes along, to the point that the early issues (which had low-expectation print runs) are now going for a pretty penny on the collector’s market. I’m sure the prices will eventually level out, but it’s nice to see a comic going for big bucks on the basis of actual reader demand, instead of the usual “it’s worth this because we say it is” reasons for that sort of thing.

The buzz it’s getting is deserved, too. Al Ewing’s horror take on the character has been quite a bit of fun. It dragged a bit during the Hell storyline a few issues back, but otherwise this has been great stuff. Joe Fixit (aka the gray Hulk) recently reappeared, and this issue we discover that he’s been in control of Banner’s body for quite some time. It’s not entirely clear how long, or what he’s been up to, but he’s definitely had time to amass a little money. And grow a mustache.

As the story moves on, we also get a crazy new version of the Abomination WHO HAS A FIST FOR A FACE.

So, yeah. This one’s a lot of fun, too. Not as good. But a lot of fun.

X-Men: Grand Design: X-Tinction 1 by Ed Piskor

My favorite X-Men book since Grant Morrison left in a huff has begun its final chapter here. If you’re not familiar, Grand Design is Ed Piskor’s attempt to cover the history of the X-Men as if it was all one long story that was planned out from the beginning. The first volume covered the original series, and the second covered the first 100 issues or so of Chris Claremont’s long run.

This time around, he’s really got his work cut out for him, because he’s covering what might be the absolute nadir of the Claremont run: the Trial of Magneto through Inferno. This was the period when I started losing interest in the book, and finally stopped reading it entirely. These stories left a bad taste in my mouth that’s still lingering 30 years later, and I found that I didn’t enjoy revisiting them any more than I enjoyed reading them the first time through.

Piskor does his best with them, though, condensing and conflating events in a way that streamlines some of Claremont’s more over-extended plotlines, and completely skips the more forgettable stories in favor of the stuff that continued to have repercussions down the line. His one misstep in that regard, I think, is the short shrift he gives to the Trial of Magneto, which I’ve always though of as the real climax of the first half of Claremont’s run. But I suppose that ultimately had more of an impact on the New Mutants book than it did X-Men proper, so maybe he was right to only mention it in passing. This is really Storm’s issue, and he rightly focuses things on her character arc (which might be the one really interesting thing from this period of the book).

Still. Holy crap. The latter two-thirds of this issue is concerned entirely with demons and Mr. Sinister. And just when you think you’re done with the demons, MORE demons show up. It’s interminable. And there’s only so much even Ed Piskor can do to save it.

Still, though, I have high hopes for the next issue. Because I have no idea whatsoever where X-Men goes next, and I can only think it would have to be better…

Ed Piskor’s Grade for Trying Hard:

Chris Claremont’s Grade for Writing Such Execrable Source Material:

Heroes in Crisis 9 by Tom King and Clay Mann

On the one hand, it’s comforting that this book died the way it lived: telling a story that I liked in some very important ways, but hated in others.

On the other hand… DAMMIT, Tom King! Why do you have to be so good and so bad at the same time?!

I don’t care enough to go into great detail on what I liked and didn’t like in this final issue. So I’ll just hit the highlights. On the down side, King engaged in some time travel shenanigans to change the solution we already saw to his locked-room mystery, and that feels like a cheat.

But on the up side, that cheat gives us an ending that’s messy but life-affirming, rather than neat but tragic. And that ending, unsatisfying as it is from a narrative perspective, feels very real. Because life is often messy and unsatisfying. “Nothing ever ends,” as Alan Moore once told us. But this ending also fits the book better than the neat ending would have. Because the ending we got (Wally West lives) offers a chance at healing and a hope for redemption. Which is what Heroes in Crisis has been about from the outset.

So I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

But I do.

Because, dammit.

Stray Bullets: Sunshine and Roses 41 by David Lapham

With the Lodger side project over, David Lapham gets back to his (or maybe my) first love, Stray Bullets. And, holy crap, things are really getting out of control.

click to embiggen

It would take far more time than I have tonight to explain the vast web of plots that are coming together here. So suffice it to say that the entire huge ensemble cast, which Lapham has spent the last 40 issues meticulously establishing, is finally converging, and I have no idea how any of them are going to survive.

Except that I know most of them do.

Because this entire series essentially takes place between issues seven and eight of the original Stray Bullets series, published more than 20 years ago. And I know what happens afterwards. In most cases, that would take some of the… excitement, I suppose… out of seeing how it’s all going to end. But not here, really. Lapham’s done a sufficiently good job putting this story together that, even though I know that Beth, Orson, Nina, Spanish Scott, and so many other characters will be surviving this bloodbath, I want to know how they’re gonna do it. And then there’s a handful of other characters who seem conspicuously absent from future events, and I’m dreadfully worried about all of them.

Or, if not worried, per se, at least really curious.

Because honestly… Annie probably deserves whatever she’s got coming. Unless, of course, Lapham finds a way to make her fate even worse than I can imagine. He’s good at that…

Criminal 5 by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

This fifth issue begins what Ed Brubaker has said will probably be the longest Criminal story arc to date. Which is a little weird for a series that he’s also said would feature more short pieces. But Brubaker’s a criminal at heart, as we’ve already learned, so you kind of have to take his proclamations about this book with a grain of salt.

Anyway. This new arc’s called “Cruel Summer.” It’s set in the summer of 1988, and it involves a private detective being hired to find a woman, but getting in a little too deep. Pretty standard noir premise there, and though the story’s well-told, I won’t tell you that Brubaker and Phillips really offer that much in the way of new twists on it. Where things get interesting is at the end, when Our Hero gets whacked on the head with a wrench by none other than Teeg Lawless.

That’s the same Teeg Lawless around whom every story in this current volume of Criminal has in some way revolved. Or if not revolved, INvolved. Even if it’s only in a spectral, influential sort of way. And next issue, we’re told, is all about Teeg. And, I would presume, this mysterious woman we meet this time around.

Which is just a really long-winded way of telling you that this story’s much like all the others in this series: clever, well-constructed, and more complicated than it looks on the surface.

A Walk Through Hell 10 by Garth Ennis and Goran Sudzuka

Garth Ennis’ searing look at the horrors of the Trump era continues, with an issue that calls into question the value of empathy when you’re dealing with people who have none themselves. It is not a cheerful or especially pleasant read. But it is a compelling one. It questions liberal values even as it presents the rich and powerful in a very ugly light. While it’s clear who the biggest monsters are, it doesn’t let anybody off the hook. Which is horribly unfair, but there’s also a grain of truth in it. Maybe more than a grain. Maybe. Probably. Maybe.

It’s into that opening of doubt that Ennis shoves his pry bar, and starts applying pressure. And that’s where the real horror comes from. This is a story about evil men taking advantage of people’s doubts. But they have those doubts for a reason, and sometimes that’s enough to break them.

And that is Hell.

Or at least, that’s my reading of the book at this point. I withhold the right to change my mind in light of future evidence.

And on that cheery note, it is time to bid you adieu.

Xeens and Things: FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!! So it's time to get back to the funnybooks. After two weeks of talking movies, I've got a nice little backlog piling up, including the conclusion of Heroes in Crisis, the beginning of the end for Ed Piskor's X-Men: Grand Design, and new issues of Stray Bullets and Criminal.

#A Walk Through Hell #Al Ewing #Criminal #David Lapham #Ed Brubaker #Ed Piskor #Garth Ennis #Grant Morrison #Green Lantern #Heroes in Crisis #Immortal Hulk #Liam Sharp #Sean Phillips #Stray Bullets #Tom King #X-Men: Grand Design

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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THE FINAL PASSAGE of Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here contains one of the finest analogies I’ve ever read. The eponymous protagonist, whose stepfather has just died, is working one of her last shifts in his diner before she heads off to college:

People say it’s so awful that I only had a real father for less than two years and then had to lose him. I wish like anything he was still here, but it’s like getting an extraordinary meal after you’ve been eating junk food for a long time. The taste just sweeps through your sensibilities, bringing all-out contentment, and the sheer goodness of it makes up for every bad meal you’ve ever had.

Hope Was Here was published in 2000, and since then I’ve searched, mostly in vain, for novels that washed away the taste of poorly written contemporary fiction that did nothing for my mind, even less for my soul. Not one, but two new exemplary short story collections have renewed my faith in American fiction. Sweet and Low by Nick White and Fight No More by Lydia Millet employ a seldom-used conceit: the stories revolve around a cast of characters, and each collection is devoted to a specific geographic locale. White’s incisive exploration of the South — you can practically hear the scrape of a wooden chair across a dusty floor, the rustles of swampy groves, the flies buzzing over a dead dog’s carcass — is beautifully tempered with sincerity and irony, while Millet, choosing present-day Los Angeles for her tightly woven trove of adults and teenagers slowly losing and finding their minds, breathes more life and texture into life into sun-baked Southern California than anything since Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.

A central shtick that alters the expectations of short stories can be a clever method for soliciting a reader’s respect; for example, the minimalism of Lydia Davis’s short stories netted her adulation and a Man Booker Prize. Melded narratives and characters is a tricky feint, but when done well it allows characters to blossom and expand the ways in which they relate to one another and the reader. In fairness to White’s and Millet’s work, neither collection demands that the reader sit down and trace the presence of each story’s DNA in the tale that follows. Both authors are aware, however, of the richness embodied by each of their characters, and if you do grab a pen, as I did, and map out how and where the people in their stories overlap, you’ll be rewarded.

While the first four stories in Sweet and Low do not partake in the central universe conceit, they do share one important, and fatal, story arc: knowledge is power, and more than a little knowledge has the power to unmake you. (“Bird-Headed Monster,” a taut and mordant tale in Fight No More, follows a similar path: a young woman is touring a house in Los Angeles when she learns that her wealthy boyfriend is buying it not for them, but for himself and his fiancée.) Rosemary is the widow of Dr. Arnie Greenlee, and in “The Lovers” she runs into a young man named Hank in an airport. He promptly faints due to low blood sugar — a result of his diabetes, which was first diagnosed by the late doctor, who had also begun an affair with Hank, and took the latter’s grandfather’s watch to be repaired. But Arnie died before the watch could be restored to its owner. Only the reader and Hank know about the affair; Rosemary only knows that her indifference in the bedroom following their only child’s birth helped her grant Arnie permission to have affairs. She does not, however, know about her husband’s fondness for male sexual partners. A meandering terror wraps itself up in White’s prose:

She drives on, thinking.

At the airport, he mumbled something about a watch. Her brain makes some connections. A month or so after Arnie’s death, she was in the bathroom cleaning out his cabinet. […] If she remembers correctly, initials had been carved into the back of it, but she couldn’t make them out, which frustrated her.

[…]

Home from following Hank, she retrieves the watch and holds it in the palm of her hand. It ticks. There are things in this world, she decides, you keep for no particular reason, the things you haven’t yet found a language for.

Arnie’s secret bisexuality isn’t nearly as much of a shock to the reader as the terse, oblique hypothesis about Rosemary’s dual nature, the same nature that happily permitted Arnie to have affairs without her needing to disclose that:

Say, just for conversation, there once lived a girl who was one person — one complete person, not a person for the world and a person for herself. They were one and the same. Then, let’s say, it’s her first week at college, and a boy she trusted, a boy from her hometown even, pushed his way inside her bottom-floor dorm room while her roommate was out. Say he did things to her that split her in two. Right down the middle. Years later, this same girl met a boy who was sweet and unassuming and never curious about the other girl behind the girl, the one she hid so fiercely.

Hank and Rosemary are two very different people bonded by a loss, but there’s just enough precarity in their incipient acquaintance that they lose sight of one another, and ultimately, must seek closure on their own. White has a profound talent, one writers decades senior to him frequently lack, for imbuing his prose with bombs of shock that land with ferocity and precision, leaving a devastation far greater than might be successful in longer stories and many novels. The reader may feel no pity for Pete in “Cottonmouth, Trapjaw, Water Moccasin” — he’d “run off his faggot of a son” many years ago — and that he’s trapped under his lawn mower after a fall, “one leg crushed under the back end” of the machine feels like karma for a bigot. There are, however, horrors in Pete’s own childhood that caused me to stop reading and draw a deep breath before I could continue. After Pete’s mother died, Pete’s father would take him snake hunting:

He was lucky being a boy — his sisters, after their mother died, had to deal with things much worse […] This usually happened late on summer weekends when his father was high on corn whiskey. His sisters slept in the room next to his, and on those nights, he could hear the terrible grunting coming through the walls.

That a snake slowly slithers into the crevasse in which Pete is pinned feels like the literal manifestation of his failure to defend his sisters and accept his son. He tries, in vain, to aim handfuls of soil at the snake, but it remains unmoved, “refusing to be anything but predator.” Dying is easy. Staring down near-certain death is much harder.

The title story — which also opens the latter two-thirds of the book, a section titled “The Exaggerations” that focuses mostly on the Culpepper family, emigrants from Illinois to and residents of an unnamed town in Mississippi — posits a simple but ambitious theme: our families influence, and often dictate, everything about us. Forney Culpepper’s father Reuben died of a heart attack — weak hearts run in the family — so his widow Felicia decides to give stardom a shot with her beautiful voice. When she prepares to audition for a talent scout in Memphis, a 10-year-old Forney finds himself at the helm of a quest for self-awareness:

The two of them — mother and son — gaze at the reflection of themselves wearing their new getups. Like different people, Forney thinks. Happier people. But is he happy? Or on the way to happiness? This singing stuff makes her happy, and he guesses he’s happy that she’s happy. But is he?

In the six stories that constitute most of Sweet and Low, the perils of being a writer are given attentive, and often hilarious, consideration. Buck Dickerson, Felicia’s music teacher and a sugar-addicted radio host, reveals to Forney that his son, a member of the Peace Corps, harbors literary ambitions: “My son says he wants to be a poet. Can you believe that? I didn’t know people decided to be poets. […] Thought it just happened to them, or something, like a car wreck.”

White unfolds the tales of Forney’s Aunt Mavis and Uncle Lucas with such care that reading about them is one of the purest abject pleasures in the book. Told in the first person, the story picks up once Forney lives full-time with his aunt and uncle, after his mother leaves for Nashville to pursue stardom full-time: “We were, for better or worse, a family. We had long dinners together […] we saw plays and ballets in Jackson […] took weekend vacations to Biloxi and Memphis and New Orleans.”

But for all their cultural excursions, the Culpepper family has its share of disappointments too:

In her younger days […] [Mavis] fancied herself something of a poet. She […] had plans of attending graduate school, but after graduation, my grandfather suddenly died, so she stayed behind to “see about things” for a while. Twenty years later and she was still seeing about things and remained single.

Nina the real estate agent is single too; she is our foyer into Fight No More. In “Libertines,” she is showing a house to a group of three men, one of whom, she thinks she was told by a colleague, is an African dictator. Millet has a knack for two specific, brilliant devices. First, infusing her prose with the part-confident, part-bored, part-ironic intonation of upper middle-class conversation in Los Angeles:

Had the person who lived in the house died?

Well yes, in fact, she’d wanted to say, because that’s the only way anyone ever leaves a house this stunning.

Second, trading from the beginning on the necessary maintenance of fact as fiction. Business cannot be conducted if apparent flaws are pointed out with loudspeakers and fluorescent flags:

This house always seemed to be waiting for the mudslide that would drag it down the cliff, snagging those giant, spiky plants as it fell. Chunks of frame and plaster would be dangling off plant stalks as beds and espresso makers tumbled down the hillside. Till that day came: 2.8 million, if you don’t mind.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” might be one of the best short stories I’ve read in the last 10 years. Millet dances between first and second person in the story, an interesting effort given the speaker is Jeremy, approximately age 16, who has decided to cut school and openly masturbate in his bedroom, knowing the real estate agent will be bringing a family on a tour through his house. For all his boorish antics, Jeremy’s internal musings are peppered with Latin, and he is concerned about his mother, who is reeling in the aftermath of the boy’s father leaving to start a family with a younger woman. Still, he celebrates when Marnie and the prospective buyers walk in on him during his orgasm, then rush out: “Murmurs outside the door. He felt a grin spreading. Reached for the Kleenex. There you go. Veni, vidi, vici. Julius Caesar shit.”

Later, Jeremy starts to roam the empty house. At his mother’s vanity, he does something he tends to avoid: he lets himself reach for a memory. Millet’s prose here is charmingly graceful, a turn from the obscenity-laced monologue from moments before:

He used to watch her put up her hair. Like in the movies: rich kids watched their mothers get ready. Good feeling. Dinner parties and evening wear. She’d been so deft with bobby pins it looked like sleight of hand. Magic, he called it then. He flashed to one time when her long hair, in the space of a few seconds, was transformed into a great shining round atop her head.

That shit looked elegant. Audrey Hepburn. “Magic mama.” She picked him up and twirled him. He’d been so small. Hard to believe.

Jeremy’s actions and their consequences create a breathtaking paradigm for Fight No More. One of the buyers, who sees right through his bullshit and tells him so, causes him to look back on his childhood, which in turn exposes a brief glimpse of his truth: there’s a difference between anger and hatred, and what he felt was anger at the “paterfamilias […] sowing his seed in younger soil.” The sardonic humor of the teen boy masturbating as a stunt is not forgotten, because Jeremy, in order to do something nice but not melodramatic for his mother, decides to use her credit card to fill the house with flowers. When his new stepmother — pregnant with his soon-to-be half-sibling — invites him to dinner, he is forced to examine the reality of his new existence. Being a teenager, Jeremy masks exploration of a new family dynamic as “a movie [that] could really crack you up,” but each step he takes as a new stepson, the child of a newly divorced couple, the grandson of a woman exhibiting signs of dementia, he reconsiders. Millet isn’t out to provide redemption, but she is interested in how people change when they finally come to terms with change. Jeremy remembers a cousin’s baptism he’d attended:

In the church she was dressed in a snow-white robe and smiled without end. She beamed. His whole life, he could swear, he’d never seen anyone look that happy.

Do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?

I do.

“I renounce him,” he muttered under his breath […]

And all his works?

I do.

Jeremy wasn’t alone in his bedroom when Nina and her clients walked in. He was getting off to a cam girl named Lexie, living in Carpinteria, almost certainly underage. The small degree of respect he affords her — “She wasn’t dumb” — is important because, in “Stockholm,” the reader receives a visceral look inside Lexie’s mind. Her stepbrothers are meth dealers, her mother a drunk, and her stepfather has been raping her since she was 16. There is something astonishing, even electrifying, about Jeremy’s offer for her to come to Los Angeles and be au pair to his new stepsister; it energizes the book. Lexie’s other duty will be to keep an eye on Aleska, Jeremy’s paternal grandmother, a retired professor of the art and propaganda of fascism, who is selling her home to live in the guest house on her son’s property. “Jem” gives the new babysitter a quick rundown about Professor Korczak:

[D]on’t be fake Christian, she’s Jewish, well, kind of, but she was raised by some kind of missionaries so she’ll see through it. Tell her about your trashy family. I mean, don’t mention the Internet sex biz […] just try to be a straight-shooter. She won’t mind the white-trash part, as long as you’re smart and not rude. She likes an edge but she really doesn’t like rudeness. Treat her with respect, she’s had a hard life. Her whole family died in the Holocaust when she was six.

Aleska has experienced other losses too, namely her husband to suicide. It’s unclear when this happened — later in the book it’s hinted that Paul was still a child — but his widow does not dwell on what cannot be changed. In many ways, “Gram” is the hero of Fight No More. Her wry, self-possessed manner, her request for stiff cocktails in the evening, her general determination to keep track of her marbles before biology takes over and slowly sends them spinning off, one by one, into the darkness of senility, is nothing short of fearless. Some of the book’s best dollops of humor come from a woman whose framed posters of swastikas unnerve her new daughter-in-law.

Members of Lexie’s family, residents of Carpinteria, turn up in Los Angeles too. A content warning should be issued for “I Can’t Go On.” I don’t fault Millet or the publisher for not providing it, but anyone who has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a relative/family friend should proceed with caution.

Both White and Millet are keen observers of the interpersonal expectations between people who are sure of themselves and people who aren’t. The chasm that separates fully functioning adulthood and reality is often invisible to characters in both books. “The Men” in Fight No More is a dizzyingly paranoid but mildly comic tale about a group of male midgets who are performing repairs on a house. Its resident, a production executive who “otherwise leads a normal life” but whose husband has left her, becomes unnerved “when the midgets grew into regular-sized men overnight.” Nina, the agent selling the house, wonders if she’s become “a magnet for eccentrics” in the aftermath of a lover’s death. The unnamed narrator of “Break” in Sweet and Low is befriended in college by a girl named Regan and her boyfriend, Forney Culpepper. The latter is by now an aspiring poet, but hasn’t written any poems yet. “Instead, he spent his mornings retyping the work of other poets — Ginsberg, Stevens — on a sky-blue IBM Correcting Selectric II […] When I asked him about it, he said, ‘I’ve not found the right words for me yet, so I’m using other people’s until then.’”

Very rarely in modern American literature is the reader afforded an opportunity to so fully absorb a character that it feels like he’s sitting right next to you. Forney Culpepper is such a creation. I understood his confusion when he glimpses Uncle Lucas kissing his best friend Buddy Cooper’s neck. I respected his reluctance to hear Aunt Mavis untangle the truth from the exaggerations, but appreciated his need for facts. I teared up for him during “The Curator,” White’s tour de force and the penultimate story in Sweet and Low. If you’re from a certain part of the South and you’re immersed in literature, at some point you have to contend with William Faulkner. His name doesn’t appear in White’s book, but we can safely guess that “the Author,” referred to only by that title and capital A, as the force manipulating lives in an unnamed Mississippi town where Forney lives as an adult, is a stand-in for Faulkner’s towering presence as the literary legend associated with the South.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles and I was partly raised in the South, so I appreciated the lack of myopia in both White and Millet’s prose. Both areas function as characters because everyone in “The Exaggerations” is stagnating, paralyzed by circumstance and expectations lowered over time. Aunt Mavis never went to graduate school; Uncle Lucas moved out, took a trip to Canada, died of a heart attack. Homosexuality — repressed, concealed, unidentified — is as common in the South as ostensibly cool and collected facades are in Los Angeles. The sun hangs heavy over both sets of stories, only the one in the Delta is intimidating, and bossy, and the one in Southern California is part of the glossy psychological veneer of the region. And both books end with the yearnings of elderly women.

Sweet and Low and Fight No More share a brutal lesson about human frailty: we are flawed because we want so much more than what we have. This want, this hunger — financial, sexual, physiological, emotional — turns into a blind spot, and often our Achilles’ heel. Attempting to meet that want can take a lifetime, and even then that feeling, the comforting realization that overtakes you as gently as a cotton sheet over your body on a summer night, that we’re sated and at peace, may never come. The only reassurances we’ll ever get are momentary. Fleeting precious seconds of calm and security. By the time we learn this, it’s too late.

Nandini Balial is a writer and copy editor whose work has appeared in the AV Club, the New Republic, Vice, The Week, among others. She lives and works in Texas.

The post Resurrection of the American Short Story: Nick White’s “Sweet and Low” and Lydia Millet’s “Fight No More” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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mama-ghostie-61542 · 6 years

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Awakening Ch. 2

Rated M for Mature

If ya recognize it, it ain't mine.

Chapter 2

Doc’s POV

I heard male voices reaching into the blackness that surrounded me.

“I don’t understand why…All her vital…normal…Other than…nothing’s wrong, Leo.”

I felt something soft against my cheek and I blinked. As I started to push myself up I heard;

“Guys, she’s waking up,” one said in a small but excited voice.

“Shit,” I whispered as I wiped and rubbed the sleep from my face with the heels of both hands, “Nathaniel Joseph, you ever hit your mother like that again and you will have a butt blistering like you have never seen. You don’t hit yer grown-ups, and ya sure as shit don’t kick this one in the face because ya got told no,” I sighed, my drawl getting heavy. “Now where the hell are my specs, kid? You know yer old mama is half blind.”

About that time I felt someone tap me on the shoulder with my glasses.

“Thanks,” I shot back over my shoulder.

To which a male voice answered, “No problem.”

It didn’t register then, but a second later, a man laid his hand on my forearm and his tenor voice in front of me asked if I was ok. When I looked up into golden eyes framed by taped up, tortoise shell glasses and purple t-shirting it hit me like a ton of bricks. Here was the face in all of my dreams.

“Oh, Holy Fucking Shit! Oh, fuck! Fuck me running.”

“Do you know your name,” he asked, his gentle voice holding concern as he caressed my forearm.

I nodded. “I-I,” I stumbled out as he gently grasped my hand, instantly calming me. I drew a deep breath and forced myself to slow down, “I know my name, and I know WHO you are, and where I am. However, how I got here is beyond me. I am not supposed to be here. Where I come from you guys are in comic books, cartoons and movies. You four are the subjects of nearly every nerdy girl’s wet dreams. God, I can’t be here; my kids.”

Leo stalked off to make a call, but came back shortly after.

“Really,” Mikey piped up, “they dream of us?”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I could really use a coffee and a smoke at the moment. This is some crazy shit,” I growled as I buried my head in my hands.

A deep voice from behind me asked gently, “How do you take it? Your coffee, I mean.”

From in front of me, Donnie laughed as his gentle, golden eyes held my blue green ones. “Dark roast; Medium and light roast is for pussies.”

I chuckled. “Agreed; black with four sugars.”

“FOUR,” Leo grumbled.

“It takes the edge off the bitterness,” Donnie answered for me. “Thanks, Leo.”

“No problem,” he answered and patted my shoulder as he strode past me and thru a doorway.

“I have some gum. Will that help?”

“It should,” I answered, looking up to see Mikey rushing off.

“Ya know, smokin’ will kill ya,” Raph chuckled as he sat one butt cheek on the back of the couch, to the left of me.

“Yeah, but so will breathin’,” I quipped back as a large three fingered hand splayed across my right shoulder. As I looked, there was Leo, holding out a steaming mug. “Thanks again, Leo,” I whispered as I gratefully accepted. As per normal for me, I took a deep whiff before my first sip, and groaned in pleasure as the sweet heat enveloped my tongue. “Good job,” I said after I swallowed.

Just then, a shiny, wrapped, flat stick of Wrigley’s was placed in my field of vision. “Thanks, Angel,” I said as I set my mug down and accepted the stick of gum.

“Angel,” he giggled, smiling as he put his hands on his hips, ”Well no one has ever called me that before.”

“I have always called you that, ever since I was a kid. Ask yer brother,” I smiled as I tapped Donnie’s foot with my bare toes.

“So,” Donnie said from where he was crouched down by the edge of the couch, “What is your name, Babe? In all this time, you have never told me your name.”

“Doctor Leigh Taylor, Traditional Naturopath and Master Herbalist.”

From beside me, Leo shifted and piped up, “Hold up. You’re a doctor!”

“Well, I have the degree, but lack the credentials. And that is merely a problem of funds. My tests cost a grand, and that’s a thousand bucks I ain’t got. And as for my smoke, Raph, I generally roll my own with pipe tobacco, which has fewer additives than cigarette tobacco, and I add in maypop, valerian, and evening primrose. It ends up working in the same fashion as a mood balancer. This is good when you consider that my sons are both special needs. I do have one question. Where is Pop?”

Donnie smiled at me, his eyes brimming with mirth while his hands were as gentle as his heart at the name I had called his father since I was 14.

“Our father is visiting some friends, but he should be home,” Raph started.

“Now,” finished a wise voice from the doorway. “Who is this, my sons?”

I stood up and turned to see a six foot tall Master Splinter standing behind the couch and eyeing me with a curious look on his face.

“Pleased to meet you, Master Splinter,” I said as I held out my hand; which he shook warmly, ”I am Dr. Leigh Fuller; Traditional Naturopath, Master Herbalist, and somewhat unwilling sojourner in this world. I say ‘unwilling sojourner’ because I was rather unceremoniously dumped on your living room floor after my autistic son kicked me in the face and knocked me out.”

Splinter had a look of disbelief on his face.

“It’s the truth, Dad,” Leo said. “We were here watching a movie and suddenly there was a light and she hit the floor. We picked her up and put her on the couch. Donnie checked her out and said she was no worse for wear. Then, she came to maybe 10 minutes before you came home.”

The Elder Rat, knowing that his eldest son couldn’t lie to him, got a contemplative look and while he pulled at his beard, said, “Hmm. Maybe we all have a lesson to learn here. Tell me, my Dear; where are you from?”

I sighed and answered, my eyes steady, “I am from a world where all of this,” I said as my finger waved everywhere, “is the imaginations of two men named Eastman and Laird. This place has been the subject of many different comics, at least as many cartoons, and no less than six movies. In my world, these boys are chronologically ten years older than me, and you, dear sir, are old enough for retirement. You and your family have come into being at least three different ways that I know of.”

“This is crazy,” Raphael shouted.

Splinter nodded, “Yes, my son, it is crazy; however, she is not lying. Tell me, Miss, about the ways we have come into being.”

“In the first, you are Hamato Yoshi, recently widowed and moved here to heal. You bought four newly hatched turtles as your late wife loved turtles. From here, there are many different versions. One of the most evident is that you and the boys were mutated by the same ooze at the same time,” I said as Donnie wrapped his hand around mine.

I smiled at Don and continued, “The second is that you were Splinter, the pet rat of Hamato Yoshi, and followed his killer, Oroku Saki, to New York. Finding refuge in the sewers, you came upon the boys already in the ooze and while gathering them into an old coffee can, you yourself were covered in the ooze.

The third is that you were lab animals used in experiments and saved from a fiery death by April O’Neil. The experiments were cause of the mutation. In this arc, rather than learning from or having already been a master of ninjitsu, you learned from a book.”

He paled, but nodded. “I see. Well, the truth is an amalgam of the second and third. They regularly swept the sewers to feed their need for testing animals. I was picked up on one such foray. April is much too young to remember my shadowboxing. As I had no other training but ninjitsu, I taught the younglings. Imagine my surprise to find them all boys.”

“As a parent, myself, I can imagine.”

“May I ask about you?”

I smiled. “I am 34 years old, mother of 3, and a widow. My oldest son, who is 7, has autism. My younger son is 4 and bipolar, and my daughter, age 2, is normal. Well, normal for my family. I understand that normal is a relative term. He and I had been married for 5 years when a trucker fell asleep at the wheel one morning and crossed the center line. I thank god it was quick and painless. I was barely pregnant with our daughter at the time. It was the hardest thing I have ever done to bring her into the world by myself.”

Splinter winced. “I am sorry for your pain. I remember the feeling of my loss. It’s a pain that lingers long after the scars have healed.”

“Nah,” I said as I remembered some of the other things I had been through. “There are worse pains in the world, trust me. There are still bad days and survivor’s guilt but they don’t hit like they used to.”

Just then, Leo smiled and said, “Well, guys, we do have to patrol tonight. Don, could you stay here with Doc?”

Donnie nodded and went to make some coffee and tea.

As the others left, Splinter asked, “Dr. Taylor, would you care to answer a few more of my questions?”

All I could do was nod as my mouth was full of a second cup of sweet and strong coffee Donnie had brought me.

Dons POV

As I set down a second cup of coffee for Wolf, a cup for myself, and a tea for my dad, he asked if he could talk to her some more. She agreed and I stood up to go to the lab for a minute, I looked at Dad over her, and pointed while mouthing, ‘It’s Her’. And then, aloud, I followed it up with, “Darling, you said Passionflower, Valerian, and Evening Primrose, correct?”

“Yes, dearie,” she answered a sweet smile on her face, her slight drawl washing over me and sending a shiver down my spine.

“Formula,” I somehow managed to croak out.

She arched her brow and answered, “Four ounces Black Cherry pipe, 3 ounces Passionflower, 4 Tables of either Evening Primrose or Wild Rose, and 2 Teas of Valerian. Speedwell or Heartsease if Valerian is unavailable. Is that what you wanted, Dearie?”

“Exactly that,” I said as I let myself into the lab. I knew I still had that can of pipe tobacco in here somewhere, and as for the papers, I could just snag Leo’s out of his hitter box. A band roller was easy to rig up quickly, and I had all of the other ingredients. Unbeknownst to my family, I had kept a jar of the mix just to smell when I got frustrated with the distance.

A few moments later, I heard my father excuse himself and she joined me in my lab. I could barely tear my eyes from her long ass legs. The way the smell of her and her soap mingled in the air around her with the aroma of her coffee smelled like heaven. I could imagine that with her mix and sunshine, it would smell like home.

Out of the blue, as she walked behind me, she came to a dead stop. “What is that scent you are wearing?”

“It’s a soap that Raph and I came up with since almost all store bought soaps irritate our skin. Raph and I both got a nasty rash from everything but Dial when we hit puberty. It never affected Leo or Mike, but we almost had hives.”

“I bet that hurt,” she said.

I glanced at her, “Hurt is an understatement, Darling. So, what soap do you use?”

She smiled and blushed a little, “I use baby soap. It’s Johnson’s Bedtime Moisture Wash. See, baby soap. And just so you know, baby soap is the only kind that doesn’t irritate my skin.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the expression on her face. “We never thought to try baby soap. It makes sense. Baby soap is made for baby skin, which is generally sensitive.”

“That soap smells really nice,” she smiled. “Let me guess; Cedar, Sweetgrass, and Prairie Sage with Hunters Dream Scent Blocker?”

“How did you,” I trailed off, as she looked at me over her glasses. It was all I could do not to grab her. I threw caution to the wind as she began to walk around, taking in all of my equipment. I grabbed her elbow and hauled her up to me, feeling her soft skin pressed firmly against me, and I smashed my lips to hers. She immediately softened and purred against me. I admit, it was a heady feeling. But what really set me off was the feeling of her nails just barely grazing the tender skin on the back of my neck. A shiver ran up my spine and I nipped her bottom lip, begging to explore her, to plunder her mouth. The taste of her was something I had only dreamed about.

Just as my hands started to roam over her perfect figure and our kiss started deepen; igniting the both of us with a passion we had only ever had in dreams, we were interrupted by a cleared throat from the doorway. I was sure in that moment, if Usagi hadn’t have stopped us, I would have taken her right there, on my desk, in my lab.

I growled in frustration as I removed myself enough to rest my forehead on hers. We were both panting already. My hands slid to her hips and held her steady for a moment, allowing my heart to steady and my blood to cool slightly. I looked at Usagi with a snarl and a sneer before turning my attention back to the woman in my arms. I placed my lips at the side of her neck and barked like a dog, eliciting a laugh from my goddess as she cupped the back of my head in one hand and held onto my nuchal shutes with the other.

Usagi POV

I was told by Leonardo that there was a Doctor here who required my special skills. When I arrived, Master Splinter filled me in on the events of the day and directed me toward Donatello’s laboratory. I felt slightly embarrassed by the tall turtle, who was palming and kneading a woman’s hind quarters. I cleared my throat to get their attention. Watching them part however; I saw the look of annoyance on both faces. I heard Sensai Splinter whisper from behind me;

“They are fated souls, Usagi; ones that have spent who knows how long apart, and are merely strengthening their bond.”

I nodded at Master Splinter and asked, ”Leonardo said you have a mission requiring my talents.”

“When the boys return from their patrol, you, Leonardo, and I will be going to Dr. Taylor’s universe to retrieve her children. She has three, two special needs sons and a regular daughter. While there, we will quickly pack two bags each for the family.”

I nodded and hoped Leonardo would return soon. I had a sudden idea. “What if I went on ahead and packed while we waited.”

Stroking his long beard as he thought, Splinter eventually agreed. “I should come with you, it may well be morning before Leonardo returns and the children need food and sleep. We can return to pack the house later, if need be.”

A/N--Exact same as on ffn.

#tmnt leonardo #tmnt raphael #tmnt donatello #tmnt michelangelo #tmnt splinter #tmnt usagi #tmnt leo #tmnt raph #tmnt donnie #tmnt mikey #tmnt bayverse #tmnt 2016 #tmnt 2k16

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