#happen in england!' and the way the police acted obviously made me think of what they did in the north of ireland

[mariemariemaria]

The new channel 4 documentary on the miners strike is fantastic. It covers different points of view, from the striking miners, to working miners, to the women in striking communities, to the police. It also shows how the Battle of Orgreave on 18th June 1984 was planned and initiated by the police, and how the media (BBC and ITV) covered this up and showed only the police's side, while positioning them as being the victims of miners' violence (which was very minimal to non existent in reality), who simply retaliated because the "restrained...traditional British policing way" (I have to laugh) didn't work.

I also didn't know until watching this that Gareth Peirce, who represented the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, also defended mineworkers who were victims of police brutality at Orgreave. What a woman!

#british history #working class history #miners strike #acab #im so interested in this period of history + chose this topic specifically as part of a british history module last year #so im really glad that this docuseries was made for the 40th anniversary and i hope it is never forgotten #and i often think about how miscarriages of justice against working class british people are exactly the same as #british miscarriages of justice against irish people. i was thinking this when watching #at one point an interviewee even says something like 'obviously i'd seen this happen in northern ireland but i never expected it to #happen in england!' and the way the police acted obviously made me think of what they did in the north of ireland #and the gareth peirce connection just confirmed it. but how many people saw those connections? #how many of the miners who were beaten by police saw the same things happen to irish people but didnt care? or thought they deserved it? #this isnt to blame them..they were fed lies that the irish were terrorists...but it suggests to me that this oppression is connected #also similar is how RE the post office scandal a lot of people were shocked that british justice had failed #a man in the drama even said that it was britain and he was british and that british justice wouldnt let them down #and you just think like...do you not know what british 'justice' did to innocent irish people? do you think they deserved it? #did you think you were immune because you were british? in ireland we know there is no such thing as british justice. #but british people never seem to learn this history lesson #what a better world it would be if working class british (and irish) people could recognise our similarities and joint sufferings as a #result of the british state. its quite frustrating to watch british people constantly put faith in their gov/justice system #learn from your own history!! they dont care about you!!

[phantomechospics]

Twist of Fate

Rating: Teen and Up

Fandom: Detective Conan, Magic Kaito

Relationship: Kudou Shinichi X Kuroba Kaito

Tags: Soulmate AU, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, No Smut, Black Org Takedown, Slow Burn, Happy Ending

Language: English

Word Count: 7348

Extra Notes: For my 100th follower @altumvidetur. This has also been posted on AO3, in case of formatting errors.

“Oi, KID. I found you.”

Kaito stiffened at the call of his moniker. He tried to act as natural as possible when he turned to the steely-eyed child glaring up at him. He held onto his police issue hat, as if to check his disguise was still in place, even though he knew it was. “I’m sorry little one, but I’m not sure who you’re talking to? There are no other children here and, as you can see, I am clearly an adult.”

“Yeah, yeah. And I’m the Queen of England.” The boy, Tantei-kun, gave him a very unimpressed look. “Now, either I can go tell Nakamori-keibu that one of his officers has been replaced with a wolf in sheep’s skin—or, you can hand it over.”

Kaito grimaced at the kid’s ultimatum.

Because it wasn’t a gem or stolen good the kid was asking for. It wasn’t even candy or a cup of coffee, which might also be reasonable. No, it was a small two-ounce container of KID’s special concealer mix. He used it for everything from hiding bruises and marks to blending a fake face with his natural skin tone.

And Tantei-kun had taken to accosting him every few months for a new container. If Kaito didn’t prepare the stuff by hand, he would have been out a fortune in make-up costs.

What use did the little detective have for make-up anyway? He was six, for crying out loud! How did KID end up as his black-market make-up dealer?

Kaito sighed at the thought.

No, he knew how this had happened. Or at least when it had happened.

It was the second heist with little Tantei-kun in the ring. The Suzuki Company had put out a challenge to steal the lady of the company’s jewel. KID, of course, answered the call and took the disguise of Mouri Ran in order to remain close enough to pull off the heist and still get away cleanly.

Not as cleanly as he had hoped, since the boy he now knew as Edogawa Conan, Tantei-kun, managed to corner him before he could make his escape. Instead of calling the inspector on him, though, Tantei-kun had asked him a question.

“What’s that stuff on your wrist?” the boy had asked, a field ball caught beneath his foot.

At the question, Kaito had blinked. He had been surprised the boy had even noticed the thin, dry coating that covered his Mark. After having worn it for years, Kaito had managed to blend the paste seamlessly with his skin. Like there was never a Mark to begin with.

“It’s a special concoction that can conceal any mark. It goes on like make-up and dries to the texture and flexibility of skin. It’s water-resistant and lasts for days, so long as you don’t treat it too roughly.” Kaito had held up his arm, ignoring the panicked rush that came with displaying his Marked wrist so easily.

It didn’t matter that it was concealed. It didn’t matter that it couldn’t be traced back to his civilian self. It didn’t matter that his civilian self had been ‘Markless’ for years by this point. The knowledge of what lay underneath the thin veneer of lies still caused his heart to quicken.

He dutifully kept his face blank of those fears, choosing a taunting smile instead. “I’m surprised you noticed it at all.”

“I’m observant like that,” the boy had said, gaze dark. “Where do you buy it?”

“I don’t.” KID had laughed at the unimpressed look the boy shot him. “Klepto-urges aside, I didn’t buy this. I made it. None of that commercial stuff could compare.”

The boy had given a contemplative hum, obviously deep in thought. Just as KID had secreted a flash grenade into his hand and plucked his emergency sunglasses from their hiding place, the boy had spoken. “I want some.”

KID had paused in his escape attempt. “… Heh?”

“I want some,” the boy had repeated. “Give me some, or I’ll turn you over to the Inspector.”

“… What if I don’t have any on me?” KID had asked, curious beyond measure.

“Nakamori-Keibu it is,” the kid had said and thrown back his head to call to the searching officers.

“Ah, ah, ah! Wait! Okay, okay!” KID had frantically waved his hands and pulled out a small bottle that he always kept on him. It was supposed to be for emergencies, but bargaining with a six-year-old wasn’t too far out of that territory. Plus, it meant he didn’t have to waste a light grenade. The materials to make those cost far more than the little bottle of concealer did.

The boy had looked all too pleased with the trade-off and let KID go without a complaint. Kaito had thought that would be the end of it, but oh how wrong he’d been.

Every few months since then, the boy would track him down and demand another bottle in return for letting KID escape. Now, it wasn’t to say that KID didn’t like Tantei-kun coming to his heists. He loved showing off to his little critic and making those blue eyes widen in awe at a trick the other had never seen before. It quite honestly made Kaito’s whole month, just to get the boy to smile.

But there were times, like now, where the boy was a bit too serious, saw through KID’s disguises a bit too quickly, that made KID wonder just what the boy needed the concealer for.

Though he would never get a straight answer, it never hurt to ask. “What does a kid like you even need concealer for?”

“Reasons that you don’t need to worry about.” Tantei-kun raised an eyebrow at him. “I can always go find Nakamori-keibu if you refuse.”

“I wasn’t refusing,” Kaito grumbled. “Just stalling.”

“Stalling? Really? And you’re supposed to be good at lying.” Tantei-kun scowled at him. “Now, hand it over. Ran will be looking for me soon.”

“Hold up! You didn’t answer my question.” Kaito crossed his arms with a huff. “What does a kid like you need with professional-grade concealer?”

“It’s none of your business—!”

“It is my business if you go through four bottles in a year.” Kaito frowned at him. “You know those are supposed to last twice the time, right?”

Tantei-kun glared at him. “If you don’t hand it over right now, I’ll-!”

“What? Go tell Nakamori on me?” Kaito let a grin play at his lips despite the stab of fear he felt. “Then who would you get your black-market make-up from? Your Onee-chan certainly won’t get you any, not without the same questions I’m asking.”

By the look on the kid’s face, KID knew he’d caught him. Tantei-kun tried to hold a brave mask, but seconds later, it crumbled. “Please. I need it.”

“Why?” KID repeated. “The only use you have for it is to cover up marks: ink, markers, scars, bruises…”

KID paused at that, his mind suddenly snapping to… horrible repercussions. Kaito often used the concealer to cover injuries left over from KID heists, where Taskforce officers had gotten just a little too close. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that Tantei-kun…

“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,” Tantei-kun hissed, immediately defensive. Which, again, could be indicative of…

“So you’re telling me that you aren’t being abused at home?” KID asked, voice suddenly toneless. “I know Mouri is a ‘great detective’, but that doesn’t mean he’s a good man. And you aren’t related to either him or your precious Onee-chan, that much I’ve gathered. It would be all too easy to—?”

“Mouri may be a drunk, but he’s a useless one.” Tantei-kun rolled his eyes, but his body was relaxed. There was no defense in his posture. He wasn’t even tense. “The worst he’s done was box my ears for running around a crime scene. Then again, he’s the only adult that seems to think a child shouldn’t be around a crime scene, so… I think that evens out.”

KID wasn’t thrilled with the answer, but he was sure Tantei-kun was smart enough to go to the authorities if someone was abusing or neglecting him. Or, at least, KID hoped so. (He made a mental note to check in, just in case.) “Then why?”

“I… can’t tell you,” Tantei-kun said through his teeth, like the answer had to be dragged from his throat.

“Then I can’t give you more,” Kaito said simply.

“KID-!”

“I’m sorry, Tantei-kun, but I’ve been an enabler for too long.” Kaito held up his hands in a ‘what can you do’ gesture. “If you want more concealer, you’re going to have to tell me what you want it for.”

Tantei-kun pursed his lips, eyes tracing Kaito’s face in a calculating manner. When it became apparent there was no way around it, he hissed a sigh through his teeth, dragged a hand through his hair, then threw his arms open wide. “Okay! I’ll tell you!”

Kaito straightened, eager to finally get an answer to the questions that had plagued him for months now.

“But not here.” Tantei-kun gave the empty hallways a look. “Too risky. You know where Agasa’s house is?”

“The scientist you and your friends hang out with?” KID thought for a moment. “Yeah, I know of him.”

“Meet me at his house. Tonight,” Tantei-kun ordered. “I’ll tell you there.”

“Got it.” KID nodded. Then he blinked when Tantei-kun held out a hand. “Ha?”

“I promised to tell you, so hand it over,” Tantei-kun clarified.

“Oh-ho no.” KID shook his head. “No way, Tantei-kun. I’m holding it ransom.”

“You think I won’t keep my promise?” Oh, the boy looked pissed at that.

“Promise? Yes.” KID poked the kid’s cheek. “Not call Nakamori-keibu in an ambush since you already got what you want? No.”

The kid clicked his tongue. “You’re sharper than I give you credit for.”

“I should be insulted by that,” KID said. “But now, I’m just disappointed in you. To think, my favorite critic would try to ambush me!”

“Just for that, I’m telling Nakamori to check all of his officers.”

Tantei-kun didn’t. But he did warn Nakamori that KID was waiting for rain in order to pull off his heist. In spite of the extra information, KID still managed to pull of his heist with more fanfare than usual, given it was a ‘reverse’ heist.

And that Tantei-kun thanked him afterwards, well, that was just icing on the cake.

*             *             *             *             *

Kaito found himself standing outside a large house, staring down at a little girl and floundering for words. “Uh… is… Conan-kun here?”

The girl stared for a long moment before looking over her shoulder. “Edogawa-kun! Your thief is here!”

Wha— how rude! Kaito had gone through the painstaking effort to disguise himself as Mouri Ran again. She could at least have the decency to treat him like the woman he was!

On second thought, how had she known…?

“I told her you were coming by,” Tantei-kun said, face pinched in a scowl. “Can you not dress like Ran when we talk? This is already hard enough as it is.”

“Hmm…” Kaito dropped a few smoke bombs and flash-changed his outfit. Hakuba Saguru posed on the doorstep, self-righteous smirk in place. “This better?”

Tantei-kun gave him an unimpressed look. “… I’ll take it. Come in.”

He and the little girl stepped to the side to allow Kaito in. Tantei-kun continued further in as the girl closed the door behind him.

“Concealer,” the girl ordered, hand out.

“…I’m sorry?” Kaito stared down at her.

“Haibara is working on recreating the formula for the concealer you have,” Tantei-kun clarified from the couch in the spacious living room. “That way I don’t have to rely on you to get more.”

“Aw, but then how else will I convince you to let me go?” KID whined. Still, he dug out the small bottle and dropped it into waiting hands.

“Something tells me you can get by without me blackmailing you.” Tantei-kun wrinkled his nose. “Or the other way around.”

“Hmm… that’s fair.” Kaito seated himself on the other couch, facing his little critic like the opponents they were. “Now, why do you need the concealer? And so much of it, at that.”

“For starters, both Haibara and I need it. Your comment of how it should last twice as long as it has been? Doesn’t pan out when you have two people using it. As for why I need it…” Tantei-kun inhaled stiffly and straightened his shoulders. “I need to hide my Mark. My Soulmark.”

Kaito blinked. Then laughed. “Hah! Right. A six-year-old with a Soulmark? Really, Tantei-kun, I thought we were being honest here.”

“We are. I am,” Tantei-kun said, voice agitated. “I’m not actually six. I’m sixteen. My Mark appeared on my tenth birthday, like all other Mark Soulmates. When I got turned into a child, it didn’t go away.”

“Right… and how, exactly did you get turned into a child?” Kaito couldn’t help the disbelief in his voice. Yes, Tantei-kun was quite smart for a child, but all physical evidence pointed to him being some sort of prodigy, not a sixteen-year-old turned six.

“I was investigating some shady dealings by men in black suits. They got the jump on me and forced me to down some experimental medicine. All their previous research said it was supposed to kill people, but a microscopic percentage…” Tantei-kun looked down at his hands. “Get turned into this.”

“So you’re saying that a magic drug de-aged you… and you expect me to believe this?” Kaito’s eyebrows rose at the absurdity.

“Edogawa-kun is not the only person it happened to,” the little girl, Haibara, said as she came to sit beside Tantei-kun. She had a rag in hand and was wiping at her own skin. Flakes of concealer came off on the rag until a black script could be seen. Mitsuhiko Tsuburaya was printed as plain as day. “I took the pill of my own accord, but it had similar results. Since then, I’ve found myself here, living as someone else.”

The words… looked real, but Kaito knew just how easily they could be fabricated. With a wave of his hand, he pulled out a handkerchief and a small bottle of his home-made solvent and dabbed a bit on the cloth. He reached forward, then paused. “May I?”

Haibara looked uneasy, but offered her arm.

“What is that?” Tantei-kun demanded as he watched on with scrutinizing eyes.

“An all-around solvent,” Kaito explained as he took a gentle hold of her wrist. “Works on most household stains: markers, pen, makeup, grease, et cetera. Strong enough to pull them off, but still gentle enough to not irritate skin.”

As he spoke, he worked at the black words, as if they were a difficult smudge. But after working diligently for several seconds, he pulled away the cloth to reveal the black lines, still as clear as day. They were no impermanent markings. So either someone had the insane notion to allow their six-year-old to get a name tattooed on their wrist, or… “It’s real.”

“Like I said.” Tantei-kun huffed.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” KID said as he threw the handkerchief up. It disappeared in mid-air as he secreted away the bottle of his solvent. “It is not every day, my favorite critic turns out to be a de-aged… how old did you say you were?”

“Sixteen,” Tantei-kun replied.

Kaito blinked. That was the same age as him.

“And I was eighteen before I was shrunk,” Haibara added, running her fingers over her wrist. “And I do say ‘shrunk’. If we were de-aged, then our Marks should have left too. As they have not…”

“Then time wasn’t re-wound.” Kaito got the gist of what she meant. “So you’re using the concealer to cover your Marks, so that people don’t know that you’ve shrunk.”

“That and to evade the organization that is behind the toxin that shrunk us.” Haibara looked down at her lap. “I was with them for many years before I managed to get away. They know me. They know what I look like. They know what Mark I have. If they were to ever find me, they would put a bullet through my skull before I ever had a chance to run.”

Kaito swallowed thickly and tried not to think about the snipers that sometimes took shots at his heists. He tried not to think of the men who had killed his father, or the impossible chase they were competing against him in. There was no way Tantei-kun’s organization and his could be related.

No way… right?

“As for me,” Tantei-kun said loudly and without caution. “I just don’t believe in Marks.”

That brought Kaito up short.

“Are you surprised?” Tantei-kun asked. Kaito wondered what had given him away. “You shouldn’t be. You of all people should know that some people don’t believe in the Marks.”

“I have my own reasons for keeping mine covered. Not the least of which being how easy it would be to track me down as a civilian if the Inspector was able to see my Mark,” Kaito explained. It was an excuse in every sense of the word. Even if the Inspector saw, it wouldn’t help. Kuroba Kaito didn’t have a Mark. He never had.

“Is that so?” Tantei-kun made a discerning noise before giving a shrug. “I just don’t want to subscribe to the idea of Nominative Determinism.”

KID frowned. He hadn’t heard of that before. “Noma… what now?”

“The idea that I’ll fall in love with someone just because their name is on my wrist.” Tantei-kun paused, then rolled his eyes. “Or, technically, it has to do with certain people being named certain things and then going on to follow a certain career path. Like a person named Hiro becoming a policeman or a person with the last name Bowser going on to lead Nintendo. But I think it applies to this situation too.”

“Please.” Haibara sighed heavily, like this was an argument they had multiple times before. “You just don’t want to believe in fate.”

“Some meta-physical entity that guides all people to a certain end despite the free-will people exert over their own lives is just a bunch of hog-wash.” Tantei-kun huffed.

“And the fact that meta-physical entity also knew that you preferred men over women just happens to be a coincidence.” Haibara pointed out.

Tantei-kun just scowled at her.

“So you aren’t planning to look for your Marked?” KID asked. “I have to say, this is the first time I’ve met someone who didn’t want to find their Soulmate.”

“I want to, I just don’t want it to be because of some ink on my skin!” Tantei-kun waved a hand around as if it would get his point across. “The names don’t even mean anything!”

“Oh?” KID cocked his head to the side. “How so?”

“Look at it this way. Say that the name on my wrist is something like… Okino Yoko,” Tantei-kun decided at random. “Who’s the first person to pop into your mind?”

“The famous celebrity,” KID answered without hesitation.

“Exactly!” Tantei-kun pointed to him. “But Okino Yoko isn’t the only one to have that name. There could be another Okino Yoko in Kyoto that lived her entire life as a shopkeeper or maybe one in Hokaido that is the CEO of a business. Either one of them could be my ‘Soulmate’ but because I recognized the celebrity first, I would become fixated on her, whether she has my name or someone else’s or no name at all. And that’s just one example!”

He threw his hands up in emphasis. “Think of how many people have the first name Hiro! Or over in America, the last name Smith! There are only so many last names and so many first names that people use. It is not entirely outside the realm of possibility that the name on your wrist could be shared by dozens of people around the world. That’s not even taking into account the people who legally change their names over the years.”

“And so, instead of trying to find the right one, you decide not to try at all?” KID couldn’t help a raised brow. “That doesn’t sound like you, Tantei-kun.”

“I’m not giving up.” Tantei-kun scowled. “I’m just not letting myself worry over it. If I like a person, I’ll ask them out. If I don’t like someone, I’m not obligated to go on a date just because they have the right name. I may have a name on my wrist, but I’m not going to let it rule my life.”

That was… a unique way of looking at things. A brave way of looking at things. Kaito… he wished his reason was just as good. In the end, though, he was just a coward.

“Which is why Haibara needs more samples of your concealer, so I can keep using it even when I put you behind bars,” Tantei-kun said decisively.

Kaito couldn’t help a laugh at that. “Well, you keep at it, Tantei-kun. I’m sure you’ll get me one of these days.”

“What makes you think I haven’t already?” Tantei-kun asked. Kaito froze. “Haibara, how long does it take for emergency services to respond to a phone call?”

“About eight minutes,” Haibara said calmly.

It had been seven minutes since Kaito walked in. Seven minutes since Tantei-kun had come to the door. Seven minutes since Kaito had handed off the newest sample of his concealer.

Alarms sounded in the distance.

*             *             *             *             *

That was a dirty trick Tantei-kun pulled, but Kaito really couldn’t blame him. Their little game of cat and mouse wouldn’t be nearly as fun without a little surprise every now and then.

Oh, he’d managed to get away, of course, but it told KID that he had to be careful not to let his guard down around the little detective, no matter how adorable the boy was.

(Should he really be thinking that? Tantei-kun was a child after all. Or technically, he was sixteen? But then, Kaito didn’t think his sixteen-year-old self would be categorized as ‘adorable’. ‘Dangerous’ maybe, or ‘sexy’ if Kaito was feeling generous. He didn’t actually know what Tantei-kun looked like grown up, but for as active as the boy was, he had to be a looker.)

Despite the latest failure, the boy didn’t let up. He still hounded KID for another bottle of concealer every few months—which KID handed over easily now that he knew the boy’s reasons. Tantei-kun still tried to turn him in every chance he got, despite the fact that Haibara had yet to recreate the formula that KID used to make the concealer. KID wondered, idly, if Haibara had stopped making progress on purpose.

A certified child genius, already holding a PhD in chemistry and biology? No way it took her more than a month or two to figure it out.

But she didn’t, so Tantei-kun kept coming back to him and the cycle repeated itself over and over again.

Until one day, there was a change.

On the Mystery Train heist, Tantei-kun tracked KID down again, but instead of demanding a bottle of concealer, he nearly begged KID for his help in saving Haibara’s life. Kaito ended up in a train car full of explosives for his troubles and had to ditch a fast-moving vehicle to hang-glide his way to safety, but he liked to think he and Tantei-kun came to and understanding.

That, and he got Tantei-kun’s phone number, so he could antagonize him all he wanted from a safe distance away.

Annoying text messages turned into random memes, then into angry phone calls and quiet murmurings in the middle of the night.

Kaito learned that the organization Tantei-kun was after had eerily similar goals to his own. They both sought immortality. They both worked under codenames and a strict set of ‘no-second-chance’ rules. They both worked for one, unknown individual that seemed to be pulling all the strings.

The similarities were too close to ignore.

“We might be after the same thing here,” Tantei-kun said, voicing the one subject neither had broached since the beginning of their strange alliance. “These organizations, they’re too similar.”

“Similar doesn’t always mean the same, Tantei-kun,” Kaito replied easily, though he couldn’t find any doubt to back it up. “Correlation doesn’t always equal causation. You, of all people, should know that.”

“Even so,” Tantei-kun’s tone shifted lower, as if suddenly worried someone would overhear. “I think we should keep each other posted. Something I find might benefit you and something you find might give me another lead.”

“So you want to, what? Work together?” Kaito couldn’t help the grin playing at his lips. “A thief and a detective?”

“We’re pooling our resources,” Tantei-kun said but without his usual bite. “Just… keep me updated, okay? I’ll keep you in the loop too.”

“Roger, Meitantei.” Kaito gave a little mock-salute, even though he knew Tantei-kun wouldn’t be able to see. “How about we make it a little competition, ne? See who can take down their organization first?”

Tantei-kun just scoffed in answer.

So they began to exchange information. Tantei-kun shared bits and pieces of his daily life as he tried to track down the people who had shrunk him. Kaito very carefully divulged the pieces he thought couldn’t be traced back to himself. Their talks moved from information to checking in to relaying silly tales about the day.

It was smooth. It was subtle. The way that Tantei-kun moved into his life. Kaito didn’t realize just how much it meant to have the other boy, the other teen, as an ally, (as a friend) until one question had him stopping cold in his tracks.

“Where did you even come up with the recipe for this concealer?” Tantei-kun wondered aloud. “Haibara swears there’s nothing like it on the market. It’s super practical—it barely comes off when I wear my watch over it! You must have gone through a lot of trial and error to get it to work right.”

And Kaito… couldn’t help the painfully true answer that slipped through his teeth. “I didn’t.”

“What?”

“I didn’t come up with it,” he repeated stiffly, mouth working on its own. “I… got the recipe from someone else.”

There was a long pause before Tantei-kun spoke. “The first Kaitou KID.”

Kaito gasped, eyes going wide. “How… How did you…?”

“It doesn’t take a genius to see that the KID from before the seven year gap was far more cautious than you. He didn’t flaunt his skills. He didn’t play to the crowd. Sure, he was a performer, but he was calm, cautious, had everything laid out to the point where he could literally walk through the police officers, pluck the gem from the display, and disappear,” Tantei-kun listed off. “You aren’t like that.”

“What?” Kaito let out a bitter laugh. “Are you saying I’m not good enough? Are you saying the first KID was better?”

It wouldn’t be a lie. And Kaito knew that all too well.

“Not at all. The first KID was talented, but he was there with a goal. He wanted the items he stole. He didn’t want to play up the crowd more than he had to,” Tantei-kun said quietly. “You… you take risks. Big risks. Scaling-the-side-of-a-building risks. But they always pay off. Your fans always come back for more and draw a larger and larger crowd. He would appear in the spotlight, but you… you live in it. There’s not really a way to compare the two of you, other than the First KID and the Second.”

Despite himself, Kaito’s eyes started to burn. His nose got a little clogged and his throat got a painful lump in it. Because Tantei-kun had just complimented him, had seen Kaito’s plights and acknowledged him and set him equal to the first KID—to his father, Kuroba Toichi.

And Tantei-kun would never lie about this.

“He was my father,” Kaito croaked before he could stop himself. “The first KID. He was my father.”

Tantei-kun didn’t say anything. The silence was an answer in and of itself.

“He was after Pandora too. Just like I am. He’s the reason I’m searching for it.” Kaito paused to take a steadying breath and blink back the tears. This pain was years old. He should be over it by now. It still hurt, especially since… “The organization… they killed him for it. They found out his identity, and killed him in front a crowd of people… in front of me. They made it look like an accident, and I believed that for years, and then—!”

“And then you found out the truth,” Tantei-kun finished when it got too hard to speak. “And decided make them pay.”

Kaito managed to make some noise of confirmation.

“While I don’t like the way you went about it, I can understand your reasoning.” Tantei-kun let out a tired sigh. “Looks like we’ve both dug our own holes, huh?”

Kaito let out a wet laugh.

“Your father… were he and your mother…?”

“Soulmates,” Kaito confirmed. “When he… when he was gone… it shattered her. It took weeks for her to get out of bed. Months to even start to get her life back in order. Even now, she can’t stay in the house for long because it’s where he lived. I could only do so much.”

“I’m sorry that happened,” Tantei-kun said. “I’m sorry you had to recover from that. I’m sorry you had to help her recover from that.”

“Sometimes… Sometimes I think…” he started, non-sequitur. He clutched the phone tighter to himself, spoke more softly as if it would keep the truth from escaping. “I think… that it would be better off if they hadn’t met. If they hadn’t fallen in love. If they hadn’t been Soulmates, because then… then she wouldn’t have been so hurt.”

Tantei-kun took a long moment to think before answering. “I think she would disagree. I think she would say that, even though there was pain, she had some of her happiest moments with him. Most every Soulmate says that. And besides, if they hadn’t fallen in love… they wouldn’t have had you.”

“And I’m someone special?” Kaito either laughed or hiccupped, he wasn’t sure. “I’m just a thief.”

“A thief who has done more daring stunts than anyone alive. A thief who has consistently remained out of law enforcement hands through sheer will and luck alone. A thief who is taking on an entire underground criminal syndicate in order to avenge his father who had left this world too early,” Tantei-kun said heatedly. “Calling you ‘just a thief’, is like calling me ‘just a detective’.”

“I guess you would know, Meitantei.” And this time, Kaito knew it was a laugh.

“I would indeed,” Tantei-kun said, matter-of-factly. Then his voice softened again. “Is that… why you hide your Mark? Is that why you don’t believe in Soulmates?”

“… I believe in them,” Kaito said quietly. He sniffled, trying to keep the nasally tone out of his voice. “I just… don’t know if I’m strong enough to be with one. Or if they are strong enough to handle having me as one. If I went out the same way as my father…”

The thought of someone else going through what his mother had… it was painful. For it to be someone he loved? Someone he wanted to be happy? Someone he only wished to see a smile from?

The thought was agonizing.

“… I won’t try to tell you how to act or how to think. If you want to avoid them, I won’t try to convince you otherwise,” Tantei-kun said. “But for what it’s worth? I think anyone would be grateful to have you. For however much time you gave them.”

And in spite of himself, Tantei-kun’s words really did make Kaito feel better.

*             *             *             *             *

After their talk, they grew closer in a way Kaito could not verbalize. They didn’t meet up more often. They didn’t call any more than they had (though it was a lot to start with). The subject of their calls did change from time to time, but not with any consistency.

It was as if they had fallen into some kind of routine that Kaito never wanted to end. A sort of comfort he never thought he’d have with another person—not after covering his Mark and promising to forget about the name he’d seen.

Kaito found he didn’t want to let that go.

“Would you ever tell them?” He found himself asking one day.

It was during one of their rare physical meet-ups, where he gave Tantei-kun some more concealer, even though Haibara had definitely solved the formula long before then. He knew it was an excuse to see the other, knew Tantei-kun saw it the same, but neither of them said a word. Neither wanted the charade to end.

“Tell who what?” Tantei-kun asked, confused by the off-topic question.

“Your…” What did people call their significant others if not Soulmates? “Lover. If you end up marrying someone who doesn’t have the same name as the one on your wrist. Will you ever tell them?”

Tantei-kun looked thoughtful as he paused to ruminate. “I think… I would give them the option. I don’t want to lie to them. A relationship built on a lie isn’t a relationship at all. But I know that… some people handle the truth worse than a lie. If they don’t want to know, then I’ll keep it hidden for as long as I can.”

“As long as you can?”

“I’m not perfect and I won’t claim to be. Accidents happen.” Tantei-kun shrugged. “Despite my best efforts, they will likely find out either way.”

Yeah… Kaito had often thought the same. He opened his mouth to agree, but what came out instead was, “I want to date you.”

Tantei-kun stared at him, wide-eyed. His gaze went from Kaito, down to his tiny hands, then back to Kaito. “Um…”

Kaito flushed red. “Not now! Not when we’ve got… everything else going on! I meant when you change back.”

“If I change back,” Tantei-kun corrected bitterly.

“When you change back,” Kaito repeated with determination. “I want to meet up and… I don’t know. Go to the movies? Hit an amusement park? Walk around the zoo? Whatever normal teens our age do when they go on dates.”

Tantei-kun snorted. “Because we’re normal teens.”

“By then, we will be,” Kaito said softly. “You’ll be back to your own age, I’ll hang up the mantle of KID for good and we’ll just be… two guys, hanging out. Not six-feet away ‘cause we are gay.”

“Bi,” Tantei-kun corrected, but he had his thinking face on. He looked tentative. “And you won’t be mad that… we aren’t Soulmates?”

Honestly, the thought kind of hurt Kaito a little, but he knew he would always end up in a situation like this. Ever since he decided to ignore the ink on his skin and search for other people’s happiness instead of his own. The fact that Tantei-kun wasn’t entirely focused on their Marks matching actually helped. Instead of telling the long-winded truth, Kaito just smiled and said, “Not at all.”

Tantei-kun’s soft, grateful grin was answer enough.

*             *             *             *             *

It wasn’t a happily ever after, after that conversation.

The organization got word of Tantei-kun. They started tailing him, even as KID tried to act as the distraction. He managed to pull some attention away, but it seemed like the roaches were crawling out of the woodwork.

Tantei-kun’s parents came in to stay, and with them a few members of the American Secret Services. A few insiders in the organization managed to maintain their cover and leak information as they could, but it was obvious they could only do so much.

The game had been set. The clock was ticking forward, carrying them on toward the finally fight as the momentum picked up.

It came to a head in a fiery show-down of chaos and death.

Both sides lost people. Gin and Snake and a number of other agents were gunned down or chose to turn their guns on themselves. Very few were taken into custody. Vermouth was lost to the carnage, unable to free herself of the shadows that had claimed her.

The leader of the ring, Karasuma Renya, was caught, but whether the police would be able to press charges remained to be seen. He had been skillful at keeping his hands clean as his henchmen killed hundreds of people in their wake.

Kaito made it out with multiple sprains and contusions and one (very painful) gunshot wound. But his luck had held up and he managed to survive to see another day. With a full pardon, something he hadn’t been expecting until a piece of paper was shoved into his hands by a very stoic Nakamori.

(He was grateful he had the foresight to give himself a long-term disguise and for Tantei-kun admitting him to the hospital under the name Kaitou KID. He didn’t want to see Nakamori’s face when he realized Kaito had been behind the monocle. Hopefully, he never would.)

As for Tantei-kun… well, he had never left the safety of their home-base.

Oh, he had whined and carried on and bargained with every person that went through the door, but none had let him step foot out of the safe house until the fighting was over. For good reason, too. Though he may be sixteen in mind, taking a six-year-old into battle was just asking for bad things to happen.

He did make one hell of a Chess Master though, as he kept in touch over the headsets everyone was obligated to wear. As he called shots left and right in a deadly calm voice, Kaito was reminded, once again, just how spectacular his favorite critic was.

So Tantei-kun was safe, Kaito was recovering and Haibara was reverse-engineering the toxin that had set off the chain of events that led them to where they were today. Now, it was only a matter of resting and healing from the Day of Reckoning.

That, and meeting Tantei-kun for real, face-to-face.

Kaito still remembered Tantei-kun’s promise back before the worst was over. After having survived what could only be described as the single most idiotic decision of his life, Kaito wanted to cash in on that promise.

When he was finally released from the hospital, he decided he would do just that.

Standing on the curb just outside the front doors, Kaito fidgeted as he waited for his ride. Tantei-kun was supposed to pick him up, but the area was clear, not another car in sight. That didn’t spell good things for his nerves.

Not wanting to lose his confidence, Kaito dialed a well-known number and held his phone up to his ear. It rang twice before an unfamiliar voice answered. “To your left.”

Startled, Kaito looked to his left, only to see…

The most beautiful man he had ever met in his life. Or maybe handsome was a better word? He was impeccably dressed, white button-up ironed straight and navy blue suit jacket just reaching his wrists. His blue eyes sparkled right above a wide, familiar smile as he lowered the phone and hung it up.

He was so different and yet so familiar. It could only be—!

“Tantei-kun?” Kaito whispered, scared he was wrong.

“Technically, my name is Kudou Shinichi, but yes, I am—was the little detective that followed you around.” Tantei-kun rolled his eyes and offered a hand. “It’s nice to meet you, for real this time.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” Kaito said, grasping the other’s hand firmly. He didn’t want to let go.

Then the rest of the words caught up with him.

Kaito blinked, taken aback. “Wait, what did you say your name was?”

“Kudou Shinichi?” Tantei—Kudou Shinichi frowned at him, concerned. “Why?”

Kaito hurriedly dropped their hands so he could drag his sleeve up. It took his three tries as his hands shook and he didn’t want to take his eyes off of Shinichi in order to pay attention to what he was doing.

Shinichi watched him with trepidation as Kaito rubbed off the concealer he’d covered his skin with for the last seven years. It had been days since he’d last applied it, so it rubbed off as easily as the temporary glue he used to hold on his masks.

When most of it had been scrubbed off, he held his wrist out to a now wide-eyed Kudou Shinichi who stared down at it with something akin to horror.

“No. No way.” Shinichi shook his head, then reached forward. He turned his gaze this way and that, like it would change the words if he looked at it the right way. But no, Kudou Shinichi remained scrawled across Kaito’s skin in the deepest of blacks. “That’s not—! That’s not possible! You couldn’t have known!”

“I didn’t,” Kaito said, a little slack-jawed. “I didn’t know who you were until today.”

“But that can’t—!” Shinichi abruptly cut himself off. His sharp gaze came up, trapping Kaito in its magnetic hold. “What’s your name?”

“Kuroba Kaito,” he answered, a little breathless. Because it couldn’t be. It couldn’t just work like that. Fate couldn’t be that spot-on… right?

“But that’s—! But I—!” Shinichi dropped his arm to turn around and yell at the sky. “No!” then he turned to Kaito. “No!”

Kaito wilted at the vehemence with which the word was spat. “No?”

“No, I mean, not ‘no’ to you!” Shinichi hurriedly tried to correct himself. “’Yes’ to you, but ‘no’ to Fate because that can’t—! This cannot be happening! This is bullshit!”

Kaito frowned and reached out to grab Shinichi’s flailing hands. His action was surprising enough to give the detective pause, a hesitation Kaito took advantage of as he checked his right wrist, then his left. It was when Kaito let go one and started to take off Shinichi’s watch that the detective realized what he was doing. “No, Kaito, wait—!”

Kuroba Kaito stared back at him, a little dusty from the remains of the concealer the watch had rubbed away.

“We’re Soulmates,” Kaito breathed as Shinichi yanked his hand free. He looked up, still reeling from the shock. “We’ve known each other for at least a year and we were Soulmates!”

“Things cannot work out this well!” Shinichi continued on with his rant. “The probability of having matching Marks in a world full of ‘Kuroba Kaito’s and ‘Kudou Shinichi’s is so infinitesimally small that—!”

“You didn’t know my name until two minutes ago,” Kaito said as he caught the other by the waist. Shinichi leaned away from him with obvious disapproval, but didn’t try to escape his hold. Kaito just rested his chin on the other’s shoulder. “You can’t claim Nominative Determinism when you didn’t even know who I was.”

“I knew who you were,” Shinichi grumbled, but slid his arms under Kaito’s and hooked his fingers into the back of his jacket. “I knew you were annoying and over-dramatic and… kind and smart and selfless to a fault...”

“Careful! I’ll think you’re complimenting me.” Kaito laughed.

“And egotistical,” Shinichi finished, just to be contrary. “I knew you. I just didn’t have the name to go with it.”

Kaito hummed in agreement. “Best name ever, huh?”

Shinichi let out a sigh, but answered. “Wouldn’t change it for the world.”

And for once, Kaito agreed.

“… I still don’t believe in Fate.”

“Shinichi, by this point, I don’t think you can argue against it.”

“No! Fate isn’t real! Just like Luck and Magic! It’s just a bunch of made up things to make people feel better about themselves!”

“A certain girl in my class would have something to say against you.”

“What was that?”

“I was asking if you wanted to go to the zoo? After all, you did promise me a date, didn’t you?”

A content sigh. “Yeah, I suppose I did.”

It was the best date in history, in Kaito's humble opinion. As well as every date after that.

#dcmk #dcmk fic #fanfic #kaishin #Kuroba Kaito #kudou shinichi #ai haibara #soulmate au #soulmate alternate universe #angst #fluff #hurt/comfort #shinichi x kaito

[hamletandthegang]

Reunite

Ophelia, Hamlet, Horatio, and Maggie all walked around to the far side of the castle, where there was a secret entrance they used whenever they wanted to avoid Claudius or the guards. The grass was still wet from where it had rained earlier, and they walked in silence, each lost in their thoughts.

Ophelia became more and more nervous by the second of what the reaction would be from the others. She had started feeling very guilty that she had stayed away for so long, only now revealing the fact that she was alive to her life-long friends. But she also felt like she was somewhat justified in her actions and hoped the others would understand. She mostly just didn't want to face Annalise.

Maggie was wracking her brain, trying to rapidly stitch together a plan from the pieces of the failed assassination attempt from an hour ago. She had the rebels, the police force, and now a perfect way into the castle and a clear shot to the King. All she lacked were the forces to combat the sheer amount of military and guards connected to the court…

Hamlet was still trying to process the fact that his girlfriend was still alive. He had been told she'd lost her mind and killed herself, come to find out she was alive and well and hanging out with what used to be one of his worst enemies. It had also dawned on him what he had done to her father, and suddenly her hesitation to his presence made a whole lot more sense. What had he done?

Horatio was exhausted. The last three weeks had felt like years. First coming back from England, Hamlet immediately killing Polonius and being sent back to England, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern narrowly avoiding dying out in the middle of the sea, getting a concussion and being bed-ridden for a good 36 hours, and then one of his best friends losing her mind and then dying and then NOT dying. He didn't even want to process the sheer amount of emotions he felt about her appearance- he just felt utterly overjoyed. He wanted to hug her and never let go, but she seemed very sensitive to any physical touch at the moment, so that was not an option. So instead, he was left to walk along quietly, filled to the brim with a feeling of uncontainable exhausted joy.

Hamlet helped them all into the side door then himself, shutting the door behind him and knocking into Horatio. They climbed up through the bottom of the ledge that led to the small door and then stepped out into the castle hallway. They made their way upstairs and to the third-floor window where the rebels were waiting impatiently in the car underneath and unfurled the climbing ladder to let them up. After each of them tumbled through the window and filed into the least-used wing of the castle, they continued to where they knew the others would be at this time of night.

The group had taken to playing board games in the little game room near the kitchen every night, trying to find ways to act normal and pretend as if they were simply college students hanging out together. Ophelia swallowed hard as they turned the corner and could hear the low voices coming from that room and tried to prepare herself for their reactions.

Hamlet and Horatio walked in first, leaving Ophelia and Maggie behind the wall separating the game room from the two steps up into the kitchen.

"Hey! How'd it go?" Anna's cheery voice asked, and Ophelia nearly turned around and left on the spot.

"Well, we didn't get Claudius, but- uh, we have someone here to see you all," Horatio spoke, and Ophelia took a deep breath and stepped around the corner.

The silence shot like bullets.

Rosencrantz, Marc, Anna, and Guildenstern all sat there completely stunned.

"Hi, guys," Ophelia said hesitantly.

Annalise screamed, stood up, and backed around behind the chair she was sitting in as a shield. "Is this some sick joke? Are you a fucking ghost or something? Huh?!"

"Hey, hey, no it's okay. Let's just sit down and-" Horatio tried to explain, but Annalise kept talking.

"No no no no no no this can't be real- I saw your grave! I saw your grave!" Annalise shouted, beginning to get choked up. "I saw the empty bottle- I saw it! Goddamnit this isn't real-" her back hit the wall, and before Ophelia could go over to her, Guildenstern had shot up and wrapped his arms around her, nearly pushing her over. Rosencrantz was still staring, completely in shock, and Marc had his hands over his mouth, barely taking in the information in front of him.

Ophelia could feel Guildenstern shaking, and when he finally let her go, he looked almost green. He sat back in the chair behind him and pulled a hand through his hair, staring at her as if she'd disappear at any moment.

"Holy shit-" Rosencrantz finally spoke. "Phelia? Damn! You really had me!" He started laughing, and Ophelia couldn't help but smile. This was the way Rosencrantz dealt with everything- he laughed. Ophelia had missed hearing it. As a child, his home had been extremely loud and downright abusive at times, and he had quickly developed a coping mechanism of joking to diffuse situations and the ability to laugh through almost anything.

"Marc?" Hamlet placed a hand on his shoulder, and he looked up, hands still clamped over his mouth.

"Can I…?" He motioned to Ophelia's hand, and she held it out. He hesitated, then grabbed hold of it, and once he felt how completely solid and warm it was, a hesitant grin spread across his face. "Thank Christ," he breathed, then stood up and hugged her. He hadn't forgotten about the ghost of the former King that stalked the grounds at night.

Annalise had finally started breathing again and approached her cousin hesitantly. "You died, right?"

"Nearly," Ophelia smiled out of nervousness. "I think Laertes gave me something that just knocked me out for a long time so somehow I just woke up on the sand and- yeah. I don't really know what happened, but my memory was really messed up for a while afterward so after I found Maggie, I just stayed with her for a bit while I tried to recover from it all and-"

"Wait, Maggie?" Guildenstern asked.

"Oh!" Ophelia noticed that she still was standing in the kitchen and motioned for her to come in. Annalise gasped when she revealed herself, and the room went silent again.

"It's okay," Horatio interjected. "I think she's cool." Maggie shot a grateful look at him.

"Are you sure?" Rosencrantz asked him, glaring at Maggie.

"She wants to help us take down Claudius. She also apparently saved Ophelia and let her stay with her, so yeah, I guess." Hamlet shrugged.

"Alright," Annalise said, obviously still hesitant. "I'm watching you though."

"That's justified," Maggie said.

"So, you're just- back?" Marc asked, turning back to Ophelia.

"Yeah, I suppose. Is that okay?"

"Are you kidding?! Yes! Please don't leave again," Marc said, eyes beginning to shine as the emotions of the night caught up to him. He put a hand over his face and tried to keep himself from falling apart entirely.

"I'll try my best," Ophelia said, also feeling the lump in her throat return.

"What do we do now?" Rosencrantz asked.

Ophelia thought for a moment, and after no one said anything, suggested. "We could just- play Monopoly? That sounds kinda fun." She pointed to the game that they had been playing before they had arrived.

"Let's do that," Annalise nodded and sat down, reshuffling the cards so they could restart the game.

They sat in a circle around the small table the board was laid out on and reset the game to play again. They pulled up another fold-out chair for Maggie and began to play. They didn't know what else to do. What even was 'normal' anymore?

#hamlet modern au #hamlet #shakespeare #hamletandthegang #horatio #ophelia #oc annalise #guildenstern #rosencrantz #hatg1

[nowornever13587]

Mcyt Oxenfree Chapter 2

Beacon Beach

“That’s- so there’s this kid, Tubbo-- he’s the one who invited me here. He’s kinda like my best friend so don’t mess with him. Or I’ll get my vlog gun.”

“Got it, got it.” I laughed. We came to a steep cliff you had to climb down.

“Hey, Tommy the child. I hear you up there.” A gruffer voice called up the slope.

“Hey!” A different voice called as we scaled down.

“We started a fire down the way, but Tubbo wanted to play beach nanny, so…” 

As I got to the bottom, I recognized Schlatt, the easily the most intimidating person in our grade. Good thing I’d known him for a long time and it was mostly all talk. But the dude was a ram hybrid, with the silver tongue better than most politicians. Which was a fair point enough to be nervous around him.

“Everyone, this is Eret.” I said as Eret hopped off next to me.”Eret, everyone.”

“Hey.” Eret waved.

“Hi!” Tubbo waved back. The five of us kept walking. 

“He’s Fundy’s new in town, fresh as a daisy step-brother.” Tommy supplied. 

“Step-brother?” Schlatt remarked almost sourly.

“Really?” Tubbo was much kinder. I wondered what he was doing around someone like Schlatt.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a trip, right?” Tommy was still in good humor at least.

“Yup. He and his dad came from England. So, let’s show him a good time.” I attempted to follow the same vein. 

“Just the beach and some good laughs will be enough, I’m sure.” Eret was much better at this.

“Wait wait wait. You’re Eret. Eret the step-brother.” Schlatt clarified.

“Yeah, um, what’s your name?”

“That’s Schlatt, he’s-” 

“How are you his step-brother?” Schlatt cut off Tommy. “Like, what does that even mean?”

“Um, his mom is marrying my dad so…” Eret gave me a confused look.

“Well, that’s happening then. Where’s everyone else?” Schlatt was abnormally blunt and rather rude today. 

“Deo had that sports thing.” Tommy shrugged.

“Who else was supposed to come?” I questioned.

“Anyone. Everyone.” Schlatt threw his hands up.

“Schlatt, we… we took the last ferry. I thought more would show up but-” Tommy tried to explain.

“Oh my god. It’s just Fundy and his new step-brother?” Schlatt laughed unkindly. “That’s it? That’s who you brought?”

“Hey, I’m fun!” I complained.

“Listen to yourself.” Schlatt huffed.

“Wait, are you all like friends?” Eret interjected.

“I’m friends with Tubbo and I’m downgrading Tommy to creepy neighbor. And you I just met.” I did not miss the fact Schlatt refused to mention me. 

“I’m getting the picture now.” Eret muttered.

We made it down to the sands to see a gorgeous view. Nice bonfire lit and the waves looking photogenic under the night’s overcast. A few towels were laid out for those needing to sit down. My shoes sunk into the sand as I walked over to the flames. 

“Fire! Man’s great equalizer!” Tommy tried to get conversation moving again.  I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to be in a conversation with Schlatt right now but I was getting too bored to care. 

“So what’s the, um, what’s the thing to do here?” Eret looked around, standing next to me. “Other than go skinny dipping and get murdered by Jason Kuger.”

“There’s a keg?” I nodded to the thing by the rocks. No one moved towards it.

“Where does that old man live?” Eret decided that was his question. He seemed to be oddly interested in him.

“You mean Badboy Halo?” Schlatt sat on a dark green towel. “Nowhere. He’s dead.”

“Really?”

“Yup. Keeled over three days ago. It was all over the news.” Schlatt’s voice held a hint of sadness. “Local news, anyway. ‘Oldest Living Resident’.”

“Oh, that’s unfortunate.” I recalled hearing great things about the man. He was nice to everybody and my mom said she’d known him to be quite funny too. It made me sad to think such a person was gone from the world. 

“Yeah, well, we all gotta go sometime. In his case, later than sooner.” Schlatt looked back at Eret. “And to answer your previous question, the thing to do is lay on the beach and drink until you can’t remember where you are.”

“And sometimes play Truth or Slap.” Tubbo input cheerfully as he added more wood to the fire.

“Yeah! Let’s play that!” Tommy clapped his hands. “We can inaugurate Eret.”

“Truth or Slap? What’s that?” I couldn’t recall the game.

“We used to call it Hippo, until we got tired of people asking, “Why’s it called Hippo.”.” Tommy grabbed a can from the cooler.

“Because you get to yell, “you’re a dirty hippo,” before you slap someone.” Schlatt laughed. 

“You get asked a question, you have to tell the truth, but if somebody can prove that you lied the accuser gets to slap you.” Tommy motioned. “It’s a good, getting to you know somebody game.”

“Unless you lie a lot.” Tubbo pointed out.

“How can you prove that someone lied?” I wondered.

“Hearsay, rumor, conjecture… the usual.” Tommy knelt to find some stones in the sand. 

“Alright! Let’s just get on with it!” Schlatt complained. “I’ll start. Tommy, fess up. You painted Pogtopia on the school last year after I got voted President.”

“Ooh! Good one.” Tubbo giggled. “Principal Stampy was so mad!”

“I-I… It wasn’t me! It was Ant, remember?!” Tommy tried to deny it. 

“Ant voted for Schlatt.” I rolled my eyes.

“We all know it’s Tommy, but we just can’t prove it.” Schlatt huffed.

“I’m not lying!” Tommy was still laughing. We all let it slide.

“Okay, it’s Tommy’s turn, right? He gets to ask somebody something?” Eret inquired.

“Fundy, Fundy, Fundy.” Tommy turned to me, rubbing his hands together.

“Uh oh.” Eret chuckled.

“I just have to think about which nerve I want to so delicately pinch.” Tommy smirked. 

“Lay it on me.” I held out my hands confidently. 

“Okay. Stab, Punch, Kill… me, Tubbo, and Schlatt.” Tommy grinned. “Eret’s out cause he’s technically family and he has the most opportunity for revenge.”

Both Schlatt and Tubbo vocalized their displeasure at such a question. But at least it wasn’t the Marry, Kiss, Kill version. Ours was much more violent but less awkward. I frowned, thinking about it.

“I’d punch Tubbo but lightly ‘cause he’s really nice.” 

“Thank you!” Tubbo grinned. 

“Ooh, down the line. Now who’d you poke with the death stick?” Tommy teased.

“Schlatt, obviously. I think he’d kill me before I could kill him anyways.”

“Obviously? You’re not gonna call him out?” Tommy looked at Schlatt.

“No, I believe him. I mean, at least he’s avoiding the Lunch Club’s wrath.” Schlatt chuckled. All of us besides Eret nodded fervently. The Lunch Club could be chaotically terrifying when it chose a target. Like some kid last year. He’d gotten run out of the school by them.

“Wait… that means you’d kill Tommy?” Eret piped up.

“Low blow!” Tommy acted offended.

“Hey, you wanted to know!”

“But I’m your friend!”

“Cool it. Fundy’s turn.” Tubbo scolded lightly. 

“Eret.” I looked at the English man. “I heard something about you getting arrested?”

“Oh boy.” Eret groaned, amused. 

“Ooh! A bad boy!” Schlatt was surprised. 

“It was all a misunderstanding. My friend got locked out of their house so they called me to get it open. While I was picking the lock, a neighbor called the police on me.” 

We all cracked up. 

“I think it’s my turn, so… Tubbo. What’s your favourite animal? I dunno, that’s lame…”

“No! It’s nice. I really like Bees! They are really cool!” Tubbo smiled. “And Schlatt. What college are you heading to after high school?”

“Harvard. Already have my acceptance letter” The fire glinted off his eyes, making him look devilish.

“You’re smart enough for that?” Eret pointed out. Schlatt shot him a light glare while we all laughed. 

“You’re turn Schlatt.” Tommy reminded.

“Fundy… you got a new brother. Pretty exciting.” He turned to me. “I’m sure Eret is excited, or maybe excited isn’t the right word. Maybe overwhelmed with everything, you know? Unsure… It’s a lot to take in and adjust to.”

“What’s your point, Schlatt?” I looked at him. He had a dark look on his face despite his casual tone.

“I’m just saying what Eret is already thinking. That statistics show if you get divorced once, you’re probably going to get divorced again. And the fact is, your mom divorced your dad, so… Let’s put his mind at ease and hear why.”

I glared at Schlatt. He just had to bring this up now? In front of everyone? Why was he so aggravated towards me right now?

“Just get to whatever point this is getting too.” I snapped. 

“The point is… why’d your parents get a divorce?” Schlatt’s red eyes stared down into my soul. “Just so Eret can hear it from you.”

“Schlatt, I don’t really care why they got a divorce. Just that Fundy’s mom is happy now.” Eret tried to calm us down. But no. If Schlatt wanted to hear it, then he would.

“You know why. Wilbur died and it broke everything and they couldn’t handle it. The. End.” 

“Well, now you know, Eret.” Schlatt looked almost… smug. “Don’t die and everything will be fine.”

“Schlatt…” Tommy glared at the hybrid.

“What.” He snapped back.

“I’m pretty ready to do literally anything besides this game.” Eret stood. 

“Let’s go check out the caves!” Tommy bounced to his feet, dragging me along. “Schlatt and Tubbo have already seen it so they are going to stay here.”

“Like I’d want to go.” Schlatt muttered. 

“I got this.” Tubbo whispered to us as he passed. I felt bad leaving the nice kid with Schlatt when he was in such a mood. But I heard them strike up the recent prank the Misfits had done so it relaxed me some.

We went over to a fence next to our little hang out. We climbed the connected rocks, jumping over. Before us, the tall mouth of a cave loomed. There was a tunnel downwards, three groups of rocks piled outside before it.

#wilbur soot #tommyinnit #jschlatt #the eret #tubbo mcyt #badboyhalo #fundylive #mcyt oxenfree #mcyt fanfiction

[that-writer-who-never-posts]

Love at first fight (Part 6) - The final part :(

Tom Hiddleston x Reader (Special guest: Benedict Cumberbatch)

Hello! I'm so sad this series will end! I really want to write more stuff with Ben in the future. ❤ I'd like to thank everyone who read it... Shit, I'm emotional...

Like 1.1k words

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5

---

It was awkward at first. You obviously didn't take comfortable clothes to sleep in, cause not even in your wildest dreams you thought you would. So Tom was sleeping on his underwear only, while you kept your panties and stole his shirt. When you laid down on the guest's bed, you were both facing the ceiling at first. But as soon as you laid on your side, with your back turned to him, he turned to you and pulled you closer.

"God, you're clingy..." You joked.

"True, but that's what happy couples do." He laughed.

"We aren't a couple." Your stomach was filled with butterflies again.

"But what matters is that we're happy." He kissed behind your ear.

"You can say that." You hugged his arms, that were around you.

Didn't take too long for you to fall asleep. Tom watched you a bit, not being able to shut his eyes because of what you said to him. What would happen when you had to go back to your country? He didn't want to think about it, he just wanted to enjoy his time with you, but he wasn't the kind of guy that could simply have a casual hook up and easily forget it.

---

The next morning, you woke up on an empty bed. You checked your phone and saw it was 10am. You had a wonderful night of sleep, and smiled like a teenager thinking that Tom held you the entire night and you still had his clothes on. Maybe you smelled the collar of his shirt and melted as you felt his perfume. Or maybe not, he would never know.

You heard footsteps approaching the bedroom and your heart started to race. You tried to look like you just woke up and didn't even remember he was there.

"Y/N?" He called when he opened the door and saw your eyes were open. "I'm glad you're awake. I made breakfast."

You stood up and stretched.

"Good morning." You said, taking your, or his, shirt off.

"Good morning." He blushed when he saw you getting closer and wearing nothing but your panties.

"Here." You handed him the shirt and went back to get your own clothes. "Thank you for letting me borrow it."

"Anytime." He smiled.

You both got fully dressed and went to the kitchen, where you felt a great smell of pancakes. He handed you a plate and served you.

"Wow. I see what the internet is about." You said after your first bite. "Is there anything you can't do?"

"Many things, I'm afraid." He laughed.

"Resist my charm, for example." You winked at him.

"I will have to agree with that." He smirks.

"Could you imagine, yesterday when you entered this house, that you would agree with me on something?" You gasped.

"Darling, five minutes ago I still wouldn't believe it." He admited.

"I like your honesty." You continued to eat. "And the way you say 'darling'. British accent, I guess. Don't blame me, you've read the cheesy stuff I write."

"I'm still looking foward to read what you'll write inspired by last night." He said with the dirtiest smile on his face. "Darling."

"Starting to think the bed we slept on might be jealous of Benedict's, so maybe we should..." You shut up immediatly when you heard keys on the front door.

You and Tom looked at each other for a second, then ran to entrance of the house.

Benedict came in, with the most innocent look on his face and a bag in his hand.

"Oh, hello!" He smiled at the two of you. "I'm back from the market. It's not easy to find good strawberries at this time of the year."

"Oh, we totally get why it took you 15 hours to come back now." You said ironically.

"Time flies!" He acted surprised. "I hope you had fun without me, I'd hate to hear I left my guests on an awkward situation."

"Oh, come on." Tom rolled his eyes. "Tell us why did you do that."

"Because I know both of you so well." His expression changed completely, no more acting. "And I've never seen two people this perfect for each other. But when I tried to set you up for the first time, it was a disaster... I knew you would never accept to meet again and sort things out."

"So you forced us to?" You said angrily. "That's fucked up. I can't believe Sophie agreed on this."

"Oh, she's visiting her family with the kids. It was the perfect opportunity, don't you see?" He smiled.

"No." Tom sighed. "We should have called the police."

"It wasn't that bad, was it?" Benedict looked around the living room. "Nobody died here. Did you talk to each other? Did it work?"

You and Tom exchanged looks and smiled at each other. Then you went to the kitchen and Benedict followed you.

"You won't tell me?" He sighed. "Well, I can see it did work, doesn't matter what happened."

You both grabbed all your stuff to leave, and it really felt like leaving prison.

"Ben..." You stopped in front of him and smirked. "You will never know what happened here. But if I were you, I'd change your bed sheets."

"Wait... What? On my bed? Seriously?" He didn't know if he was disgusted or happy. Probably both.

But you wouldn't give him more details.

---

3 years later

---

Long distance relationship aren't the easiest ones. But was anything ever easy between the two of you? Terrible start. Complicated development. But a beautiful ending. After months of trying to synchronize your agendas, flying around the globe to meet whenever you could, you finally decided to move to England. Not like it was a hard decision, as a writer, you weren't stuck to a place because of your job, and you really loved the UK. After two years, full of arguments and sass (To always remember how this relationship started, and you wouldn't change a thing), but mostly, full of love, Tom asked you to marry him. You obviously only said yes because you would get to hear him calling you 'darling' every morning.

Now you had just said yes to him in front of your families and friends, in a beautiful cerimony. You knew you didn't say yes only to be his wife. You said yes to an eternity of hearing Benedict saying "Told you so" and "You're welcome".

But it was all worth it if it meant you'd have Tom in your life forever. I mean... Have you heard the way he says 'darling'?

---

Taglist:

@spidey-holland7 @theoneanna @inlovewith3 @too-cold-for-youhere @princetale @drakesfiance @kcd15 @devilbat @Joifullyjoyfultale @partiallyinthecloset @jennacaroline726 @i-cant-remember-my-old-login @bittersweetsuffering @thejourneyneverendsx @skinny-skinny-soul @primavera-nymph @sanellv @allimenthia @sherlokiholland @comprandopelacapa @lellatron @aaminah12 @fire-in-her-veinz @atomiccharmer @sophiiev @schizophrenicstoryteller @skulliebythesea @xletmetaste-yoursmilex @godhateskyleigh @cailin-lefantasy

#loki #tom hiddleston #loki x reader #tom hiddleston fanfic #loki x you #tom hiddleston fanfiction #tom hiddleston x reader #tom hiddleston x you #loki imagine #tom hiddleston imagine #loki fanfic #tom hiddleston fic #tom hiddleston benedict cumberbatch #benedict cumberbatch tom hiddleston #benedict cumberbatch fanfic #benedict cumberbatch

[warmbeebosoftbeebo]

Why don't you get your nose out of what other people are into kink wise?? Because even anal is uncomfortable and unpleasant for people and they would consider that violating and triggering. If you don't like the things someone says or posts then fuck off and unfollow instead of shame them for what they enjoy. Kink shaming is not cool dude. I'm sure there's plenty of people that hate anal and you wouldn't like being made to feel like a freak for liking it. Grow up.

oh, boy, buckle up.

i brought it up in a new post, not naming her or alluding to her post, because it is something seen so fucking often both in this fandom and on the internet generally. she also specifically said for him to squeeze his arm around her neck till she passes out. if she had said something like “i’d like him to stroke my neck while i hold my breath as long as i comfortably can and one or both of us plays with my pussy till i come” i would barely have cared, and it wouldn’t have gotten me back on my soap box again. she responded to my post in a reblog and i responded back. she initiated the conversation between us with that reblog. and i responded back, trying to explain my views clearly albeit longly, once. 

men choking women is a common sexual act, a meme, and a threat online, and within this fandom. “if you don’t like it fuck off”? honestly, that’s telling women to leave the public square and go back to the kitchen and bedroom and laying back and thinking of england if they can’t handle “robust speech” or sexuality in media in public. i couldn’t be online or in this fandom if i couldn’t handle seeing it, or refused to see it. 

here’s another link on the dangers of strangulation https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/jpnj5x/how-risky-is-it-to-be-choked-during-sex

this whole “anti kink shaming” thing is just.. if kink shaming is terribly wrong, then we literally cannot criticize anything ever, bc everything is “kinky” (a sexual turn on, a fetish) to someone somewhere. and this is an old joke, but what if your kink is kink shaming? thought we couldn’t criticize any kinks?

the reality is, almost everyone, at least those with any ethical discernment kink shames *something.* if they couldn’t find *anything* that was shrouded in “omg hot sexy stuff” objectionable, i’d honestly be scared of them, and would hope at least that victimized people would have to deal with them.

what about all sorts of dangerous things that are eroticized? i’m thinking specifically about purposely seeking out hiv (mostly men), unprotected pia, knowingly exposing another to a significant risk of contracting hiv (also men; women simply don’t pose the same risk both re “sexual” fluids other than blood and how it is contracted sexually, receptive pia being the highest risk, followed by receptive piv). re: you can talk about choking, being choked, say vaguely that you should do it safely, but not talk about WHY it’s dangerous, what stats are on injury and death, what can happen, etc is like saying you can talk about pia and condoms, but not hiv or other risks of injury from it. i didn’t focus on the danger/risk of pia in my initial post, but it is high, way higher than people think or want to believe. should we not be concerned with those who want to infect other people with hiv, and people who want to be infected or is that prudish, immature kink shaming? 

i’m sure there’s things you kink shame. for example, let’s examine pseudo child pornography eg a 18-19 girl pretending to be and usually looking like a naive 14 years old or younger child, with a man in his 40s while they roleplay that he’s her father/stepfather/friend’s father/uncle/coach while he “introduces” her to sex, usually violently, with a focus on men “ruining” and “spoiling” “innocence.” is that fine and dandy? is a father with teenage or preteen daughters watching this and whacking off to it fine and dandy? considering the rates at which girls are abused by their mom’s boyfriends and husbands, what if a man living with a woman and her kids whacks off to this? what if he finds himself fantasizing about her 12 year old daughter?

how about necrophilia? what if a man can only get hard, turned on, come if the woman he’s with *pretends to be dead*? what if he strangles a woman “consensually” until she passes out, then either continues or starts to enter her with his penis? what if he tells women he can only be turned on if he inflicts enough violence on her that he could have killed her?

a few years ago, there was an rcmp cop in canada, jim brown, who was found to have a “kink” for the kidnapping, torture (including bondage and use of knives)  and murder of women. he had porn of it, he looked for women to roleplay it, he posted porn he had made online, etc. one news story describes it thusly: “progresses from an apparent street scene of a woman walking past Brown sitting on a wall; he overpowers her; he hog-ties her, and he imprisons her in a cage.In one image, Mulgrew notes, Brown appears to be wearing only his regulation-issue Mountie boots and is aroused carrying a huge knife while the naked woman cringes in terror.” he also worked tangentially on the robert pickton case (a serial killer who murdered dozens of women, mostly indigenous and mostly in prostitution). was he a man who should work on such a case? should he be a cop hearing women’s stories of male sexualized violence? should he be looking at photographic and other evidence of rape, torture, kidnapping?

to get more obviously back on topic, strangulation is the third leading cause of male-induced/violent death for women, second only to murder with knives and guns. strangulation is the second biggest red flag for lethal male violence, second only to him threatening you with death. imagine if we eroticized other leading causes of death for other groups of people: shooting someone during sex, stabbing them in the torso, etc. carefully and safely, of course. how about complications during pregnancy and birth in teen girls? that’s the number one killer of girls 15-19 worldwide. why not turn that into something sexy too? car accidents are also a common cause of death. let’s sex that up too. heart disease and cancer are big killers too. lets look at the leading cause of violent death for young black men: homicide. for black boys, it’s unintentional injury. why not eroticize what leads to their deaths too?

interestingly, the “rough sex gone wrong” defense came to the public’s attention in another strangulation murder case https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/nyregion/consent-sexual-assault-rough-sex.html

and here’s a recent case, a rare one in that the man seems genuine in his remorse because he quickly confessed, of a young man strangling a young woman to death in seconds. she also had an interest in it and sought it out. she died anyway. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5492075/Killer-strangled-woman-death-sex.html “the pair had a ‘shared interest’ in ‘erotic asphyxiation’ …Chloe had died in 'seconds’ after he had seized her neck during sex.”

the ads i linked to featuring men strangling women: what do you think of those? how do you feel about how it’s portrayed in pornography? is opposing those kink shaming too, because lots of people, esp men, get off on it, and the men who make that porn generally want to make such pornography and usually have a lot of hatred for women. same with those who make the ads. they find it arousing.

it boggles my mind on how things that people would get raked over the coals for if they presented as humorous, gets a free pass because some guy somewhere gets an erection from it. like that rcmp cop? can you imagine if he was telling jokes like that in a comedy club? what the same people who defended him would be saying instead? but seek out vulnerable women when you’re a white male police officer, “roleplay” with them, make porn of it n post it online n you’re the bdsm martyr of the year, cruelly punished for your private life by prudish busybodies who need to mind their own business and keep their noses out of people’s bedrooms. there’s that public vs private divide. anything sexual is private, even when public, and you cannot criticize the private. rape jokes are bad, terrible, trivialize rape and sexual trauma and misogyny, but rape play is hot as fuck. you can humor shame and speech shame but don’t dare kink shame.

now onto why i referenced anal stimulation and entry, inc pia. i did so precisely bc most females experience of it with males is rape, painful, unwanted, etc. the more it happens, the more likely it is to be rape. the increase in college age people engaging in pia is treated like a big catcally joke and proof of sexual liberation and how awesome porn is and how it’s hot sex, but it is almost universally rape for young women and girls. strangulation and choking of women is seen similarly, and women and girls are expected to eroticize, engage in, and tolerate both. i brought it up precisely bc i like anal stimulation (as outlined in that post, excluding pia) but recognize that it is profoundly harmful in how it is practiced especially for girls growing up and young women, as well as women generally. if i was glib with anal entry of women (with a penis or something smaller) in my fic or posting about what i want to do with b, i’d want people to pull me up on it. it would be contributing to this coercive, painful sexual environment women and girls are in where they don’t want it and find it painful even though they are told they should, sex should be painful for women, women are a collection of openings for male use, etc. i purposely reign myself in and keep it to myself most of the time because of this.

you cannot read panic fic, surf tumblr, etc without certain “kinks” namely strangulation (and to a lesser extent choking), and daddy kink and dd/lg smacking you in the face. similarly, if i smacked someone in the face with how i depicted anal entry of women with men, i’d hope they’d rebel against it, tell me about it, etc. by all means, kink shame away. someone engaging critically with what i post doesn’t make me fucking melt or shivel up, literally or figuratively, and if you (general you, including me) post something publicly, we can expect reaction to it, esp if it’s not a direct confrontation but a “i’ve noticed this happening on tumblr/in fic/etc…” i’d say letting undue critique roll off one’s back, or engaging back n forth as two people wish to, is growing up. and hon, i’ve felt like a freak sexually, but not for that interestingly, but for my interest in tribadism and outercourse. not severely, but it was and sometimes still is there. 

#strangulation

[nchyinotes]

Criminology Seminar Series - From Corporate Killing to Social Murder

March 1 2018

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/criminology-seminar-series-from-corporate-killing-to-social-murder-tickets-37941422817

Speaker: Professor Steve Tombs (Department of Social Policy & Criminology, Open University)

“Corporations kill in a variety of ways across diverse sites and spheres of activity. Such killing is ubiquitous, routine and widespread – notwithstanding formal attempts by states to prevent and respond to such deaths. Focusing on a sub-set of such deaths in the UK, and state attempts to regulate these, this paper argues that these should be understood as state-corporate violence, best captured by the term ‘social murder’. Grenfell Tower has come to represent many things to many people since the tragic fire on 14th June. Prior to that date, the Tower was a home to hundreds of residents – if not, according to some of them, a particularly pleasant one. The aim of this presentation is two-fold: first, to understand the reach of states and corporations into what is often represented as a private sphere, namely the home; and, second, to better understand the mass killing at Grenfell Tower, and the ripples of harms subsequently engendered, as phenomena produced by state-corporate policy and practices.”

Thoughts: Although I was obviously aware of the Grenfell Tower happenings, I hadn’t done any in depth reading or research into it, and definitely had not analysed it from a criminological lens. Gave great background information for me to learn about what actually happened, which highlighted the horrendous failings of a state to its people, and all the different harms that the victims suffered. We touched a bit on corporate manslaughter in my final year criminology module, so it was interesting on an academic level to analyse this tragedy within the framework of corporate killing or social murder, and awareness of other examples that it brought up. It was a real shame that there weren’t many people there, because it was 100% worth going to. I attended this lecture on my birthday, and it was a great way to spend my birthday imho (Funny side story - I was walking back home in a very somber mood kind of lost in thought about this, when I found one of my friends waiting outside my apartment and I was really confused. Turns out my friends and sister had planned a surprise birthday party at my flat LOL, so that was cute too!).

Notes

Critical criminology, corporate / white collar crime

Activists working for better work conditions

Experiences of survivors/residents - not based on direct contact with; not necessary in this case because massive testimonies in public domain (verbatim testimony)

Value free social science - an illusion? Not value free, politically charged.

Different ways we can look/think at it, they’re not mutually exclusive, in fact it’s all of these things.

Grenfell tower in context

1) One of the poorest places sitting in one of the richest areas

Constituency of kensington is the wealthiest in England

RBKC is the most unequal borough in England, since 2010 the inequality has widened (Coad) - by 2017, difference in life expectancy is 22 years (and this had increased 6 years)

Grenfell Tower + Kings Road LSOA (lower super output area)

2) Fractious relationship between social housing residents across Borough and the KCTMO [set up to at an arms length manage council housing]

Conjecture / opinion: Having edificies like grenfell tower + their inhabitants is a bummer because they’re barriers to gentrification. What they what is to cleanse the borough of the poor residents.

Grenfell Action Group formed in 2010 as a way of articulating / furthering rights of residents at tower, and joined Unite Community (part of the trade union) in 2015 during refurbishment

Dangerous nature of refurbishment of tower - KCTMOs decision to replace zinc cladding with cheaper aluminum panels [more flammable], saving 293k pounds

Grenfell Action Group blog post: KCTMO - Playing with Fire! (predicted 7 months before the tragedy!)

It was the cladding which contained the fire inside the inferno

Grenfell as crime (?) - yes

Can we think of what happened there as a crime?

1. Serial killer - Whirlpool

Portrait of a serial killer [Whirlpool Corporation HQ or Hot Point?? in Benton Harbor, Michigan]

Produces electrical / hot point / dryers ??

Found out something was wrong - faulty machines? Advised you just not to leave them unattended? No product recall, compensation was offered.

→ “Shepherd’s Bush tower block fire caused by faulty tumble dryer”

Still no recall, compensation, replacement

Consumer groups have been saying not to use plastic bags for electrical goods cause they’re flammable

Trigger of Grenfell was a plastic bag fridge freezer in the native hot point

1) All Party Select committee last October - slipped out by rep of Whirlpool that they knew about defects of tumble dryer in 2006. They were selling dryers which could catch fire and kill people for 9 years before they owned up to it.

2) Information requests -- 10 deaths, 100s of serious injuries, in 10 year period associated with white goods, 50%+ were associated with hot goods

Grenfell is just another series of deaths by them

Lots of attention on residents & management, some attention on contractors, but

Whirlpool basically got off scot free

2. Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act - isn’t fit for purpose?

10 years after the act, only 1 medium sized company has been prosecuted

Police claim they have about 35M documents to process on way to passing charges to CPS, last year they claimed worked through about 100k

Any charges won’t be until 2019, and generally any charges under the Act have taken 3-4 years

3. Health and Safety and/or FIre Safety legislation

2009 Similar precedent / different consequences - Southwark, 6 people died. Not sufficient evidence to proceed with (manslaughter) charge.

Southwark Council fined 650k under ^^

4. Will the prosecutions achieve justice?

Many survivors just want the crime to be considered a real crime - on par with others.

Trend in 21 successful prosecutions is: deals with individual senior managers to let them off the hook, to plead guilty for corporations.

No justice against individual people.

If successful for health and safety, it’s a fine. And the money is largely through the council (tax) / residents. So the people most hit by any fine will be the poorest residents of the borough.

Don’t repare the harms

Grenfell as social harm - via various dimensions (harms produced)

Social harm captures chains of processes or states of affairs rather than merely acts. Captures all the dimensions (ripples, synergistic, cumulative + long term effects)

Physical harms

deaths

injury (burns, head, fractures)

ill health (exposure to hydrogen cyanide & asbestos - made light of, smoke inhalation)

exacerbation of existing health problems (more dependent on drugs/alcohol; chronic conditions with those impoverished - type II diabetes, chronic heart disease, childhood obesity - no control over diet in temp housing)

Emotional / psychological harms

Survivors

Grief at loss - people, pets, possessions

Recall of horrors

Guilt at survival (self harm, suicide attempts)

Being rehoused in another high rise accommodation

For local community

Constant visibility of the tower - what the means/does to them

Emergency service workers

Other communities

Living in high rise accommodation with the same/similar cladding [to be removed] - in fear of their lives (living in limbo)

Cultural / relational harms

Relocation and loss of networks [what makes life worth living? When they need it the most] - lack of access

Bare existence of temporary accommodation - no piece of mind, waiting, uncertainty - obscure experiences

Death as a result of cost-cutting and contempt (Imogen tyler: “social objection”)

Most powerful cultural harm

Their voices were not listened to by council or management

They know their friends burnt, as it happened, because they didn’t matter

For 200k cost saving, in the richest borough

Election year: The council gave rebates to top earners, sold off 2 estates for over 4M

Lack of national and local state response

Contempt was reinforced

People had to self organise (in response)

Delays, broken promises, half truths and lies

Contempt again reinforced by ^ to survivors

Eg. rehousing, chair of inquiry, home office ‘amnesty’

→ Contempt which caused the fire is the contempt that the survivors continue to be treated with

Financial and economic harm

Financial costs to households

Costs to RBKC (plus legal costs, fines) - and thus to local tax payers

??

Grenfell as social murder - in context of a (systematic) withdrawal of social protection

Grenfell as state-sanctioned violence?

Part of the withdrawal of a system of social protection - constructed since the 1830s

Deregulation and lack of enforcement from (2004) 2010 onwards, especially at local level.

Eg. numbers of inspections decreased dramatically: in health and safety at work, food safety, pollution control, fire safety

Which was put in place to mitigate the worst effects of profit making in early days of industrial capitalism

Or to prevent, as Engels (1969) called it, social murder

Social murder is the consequence of withdrawing social protection

Questions

Greatest example of corporate murder: (Bopar) India, 1984 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Also - flint water crisis

http://time.com/4188323/michael-moore-flint-racial-crime/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/12/here-are-the-stunning-social-costs-of-the-flint-water-crisis/?utm_term=.86a634877060

Appropriate response?

Redress isn’t to be found through the law?

Workers health & safety will not be guaranteed in retrospective application of the law

Won’t change the fact that council doesn’t want those residents in the first place

Will be guaranteed by empowering workers collectively, through trade union organisation.

Relationship between state + companies?

Companies operating in more than one local authority - claim they never knew what compliance meant?

Primary authority scheme (by Blair) - it can reach a contractual agreement with one authority for it to be its primary. What happens is that newcastle city council becomes a buffer that protects Greggs from enforcement in all other areas.

Really important bc companies have lobbied for it, and totally changes the structurally shifts the balance of power

Market enforcement ? because lucrative for councils [ like the Amazon thing]

Whirlpool has been protected by its local council all these years

Esoteric piece of law?

Only reason it’s enforced is because of insurance companies?

Is the state / corporate bodies something that can be used progressively?

State undertaking limited functions on behalf of citizenry

While states can provide greater/less protections, and some contexts can be more/less harmful

Still in context of capitalism - individuals are more or less valuable commodities

The only way to stop corporate crime is to abolish the corporation (which is a criminogenic entity created and supported by the capitalist state)

Diane vaughan analysis of the challenger ??

They didn’t want to murder them, they just didn’t care about them

#criminology #grenfell #london #2018 #birkbeck #POC #activism #law #event

[qqueenofhades]

the tangled web of fate we weave: x

because no episode today and I obviously have many feelings. I am sorry that the quotes above the readmore still look messed up, because tumblr is a stupid website with stupid problems. it should be fine once you click through to the blog, or on mobile, or as a reblog. or just read it on AO3. idek.

part ix/AO3.

In any other circumstances, the fact that Garcia Flynn is presently crushed in the backseat of a vehicle that can only generously be described as “economy size” would be the worst thing about this situation. His knees are practically rammed through his chin, he may develop a permanent crick in his back from hunching, and he suspects, from catching her smirks at him in the rearview mirror, that Emma goddamn Whitmore is thoroughly enjoying watching him suffer. Except, of course, that this isn’t the worst thing about the situation. Emma is in the driver’s seat, left hand on the wheel and right hand cuffed to Lucy’s – she doesn’t have the box cutter blade at her wrist any more, but Flynn can’t try to dive forward and grab the wheel (assuming he could even get up enough leverage to move) without hitting Lucy, and then obviously endangering her in any resulting crash. If it was just him, he might take his chances, but her –

He blinks hard until the memory that has just flashed through his brain goes away, and tries to focus on the task at hand. He doesn’t know where Emma is taking them, or who they might be meeting. He’s still trying to figure out how this just went so terribly, horribly, no-good-very-badly wrong. Should have guessed that Wyatt Logan sending them a too-good-to-be-true willing Rittenhouse defector was some kind of trick – and frankly, Flynn wondered, but ignored it. Getting the files was more important. And now the files turned out to be a fat lot of nothing, and he has no idea what the situation is, much less how to get them out of it. All his training is screaming at him that this is what you avoid, you have no control, and you especially don’t want to get mixed up in it with a non-combatant. Wonderful.

Lucy sits stiffly in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, as Emma pulls out. They seem to be heading for the interstate – 95, if Flynn had to guess. They drive in silence for several minutes. Too much to ask that she at least put the fucking radio on. Then Lucy says, with admirable composure considering that this is the second time in less than six weeks that she’s been snatched by Rittenhouse, “So where are we going?”

“Just to sort some things out.” Emma accelerates up the merge ramp – yes, 95 northbound, they’re headed somewhere in New England. Flynn’s mind reels feverishly through potential Rittenhouse possibilities or important sites in the area. He isn’t entirely sure that Emma is working for them, as her statement in the library left just enough ambiguity that she could be in this for herself, or Mason Industries, or even as a double or triple agent, but it has to be deemed the most likely. “You’re in no danger, princess, as long as you cooperate.”

“Stop calling me that,” Lucy says through her teeth. Flynn could have warned her that this was a mistake; never show your enemy that they’re getting to you. “And yeah, the threatening me with a box cutter part made me feel really safe.”

“That was just to get his attention.” Emma throws an amused look over her shoulder at the fuming Flynn. “He doesn’t really do subtle. I had to prevent him from doing something stupid. Stupider, that is. It was the most direct.”

“So what was that beforehand?” Flynn barks, not that he has any expectation of a proper answer. “Show up playing the wounded fawn, run away from your evil overlords, want to go to London – that was all a lie?”

“Oh no. I want to go to London. It’s important to get our overseas operation established, just like I said. That was entirely true.”

“Overseas operation meaning Mason Industries or Rittenhouse?”

Emma gives him a demure, nasty little smirk, enjoying even more the fact that she isn’t going to tell him. Flynn curses viciously under his breath. He’s gotten himself into a lot of dicey situations, admittedly, but this ranks up there. He makes a mental note to throttle Wyatt when he sees him again – it won’t fix anything, but it will make him feel better. Assuming he does see him again. It has not escaped Flynn’s attention that Emma has promised Lucy’s safety in exchange for her cooperation, but said nothing about him. Well, he’s been a major pain in Rittenhouse’s ass for several months now, and if he had gotten a proper chance, would in fact have rushed back to the Bay Area with the intention of destroying this purported time machine, no matter what. Great way to make friends with a multi-billionaire tech mogul and all his likewise important buddies, but Flynn has never cared about making friends.

There is silence for another few minutes as they drive. Emma cuts someone off, they honk, and she raises her middle finger without looking back, in a gesture of such utterly unconcerned fuck-you that Flynn almost (almost) can’t help but admire it, considering that is how he operates most of the time. Then Lucy says, “So the turning up and promising to help us research Rittenhouse – that was strategic, wasn’t it? Get a few boxes of unimportant papers, make it look like you were really helping, find out how much we knew, and not actually give anything away. But why bring in the Nicholas Keynes stuff?”

“You might have really learned something, if you looked at those,” Emma remarks lightly. “They were mostly for your benefit, Lucy. But your boyfriend blew it.”

“He’s – not my boyfriend.”

“Oh? So when I walked in and you were about to run into each other with your faces, you just tripped and ended up that way, did you?”

Flynn can make out the flush in Lucy’s cheeks, even without her turning around. He looks down, just because whatever is on his own face, he thinks it’s better if neither of them see it. He clenches his fists, trying to forget the sensation of touching her, after diligently avoiding it for several days, since – well. And then since all his self-control went out the damn window when he did, perhaps it’s for the best, in a sick way, that Emma interrupted them. Definitely not the opportune moment, but when it comes to this, when could it possibly be?

Some interminable time passes in silence. There is obviously not a lot to gab about on a road trip with your mortal enemy, after all. They seem to be heading for New York – there have to be half a dozen Rittenhouse installations there, don’t tell Flynn that Donald Trump isn’t up to his ears in it – but Emma bypasses the city, continuing up 287. Apparently they are headed upstate, though how far isn’t clear. They can’t really do anything (or rather, Flynn can’t do anything) until they arrive, though he refuses to give Emma the satisfaction of asking if they are there yet. (It might annoy her, at least, but still.) Finally they take the freeway exit for West Point, and Flynn’s hackles go up. Are they visiting the academy? What the hell is going on there – target practice, using him? Emma’s got his damn gun. Shit.

Flynn is almost inclined to be relieved when they do not drive through the gates of a heavily secured military facility, but rather down a bumpy dirt road to a stately old house at the end. It looks like a colonial museum, handsomely restored, but the two black cars parked out front makes it clear that they’re not expecting hordes of Nikon-wearing tourists and their sticky-fingered offspring to descend. This is… not necessarily an improvement. If they disappear out here, nobody is likely to be any the wiser.

Emma parks the car and opens the driver door, swinging out. Since her right wrist is still cuffed to Lucy’s left, Lucy obviously cannot get out the passenger door, but is dragged awkwardly after her, banging her shoulder into the gearshift and getting her shoulder wrenched over her head in a way that looks painful. Flynn reminds himself that he needs to be careful, but his blood is boiling and he is sick of being careful. He’s already broken the cardinal rule, has let his enemy transport them from the scene of the crime – even basic police advice tells you that if your assailant takes you somewhere else after they nab you, they’re planning to rape and/or kill you. This is deep on their ground, and Emma has his gun. He is going to have to get that back posthaste.

Flynn yanks the door open and bursts out of the car, wrathful as only a six-foot-four man who has been packed in an orange crate to be kidnapped possibly can be. Emma jerks Lucy pointedly in front of her. “Watch it with the sudden moves.”

The whites of Lucy’s eyes are showing, but she’s calm. Coldly she says, “What was that about how I was in no danger as long as I cooperated?”

“Are you cooperating?” Emma asks – fairly enough, Flynn supposes, but he still hates this woman with every inch of him. “I’m not sure.”

“Yes, well, you people don’t really make it easy to like you, do you?” Lucy explodes. “At least Cahill tried the sweet-talking approach, get me a dream job, see the world, all the stuff that an ordinary human might like! This, now – ” she rattles the handcuff – “just went straight for the ropes and chains, didn’t you?”

“Look.” Emma seems impatient. “Just tell him not to make any trouble, and this can be a lot easier for everyone. Like I said, it’s really him we want. You just happened to get in the way. I can’t release you just yet, because you would run off and call someone and make it messy, but stop fighting me. You might not believe it, but this is the gloves on. I have orders to treat you gently. But out here – ” she waves at the house – “who knows if I do?”

A chill goes down Flynn’s spine. He’s met a lot of people in a lot of wars, some of whom like killing and some who do it because it’s their job, and he is belatedly realizing that yes, that wounded-fawn act, even if it didn’t entirely take him in, has blinded him to Emma Whitmore’s full danger. Not because she’s a woman; it has nothing to do with that. Just that she straight-up wants power (he thinks that’s Rittenhouse’s lure on her, at any rate), wants control, wants pain, and she has been given plenty of enjoyable opportunities to explore her talents. He doesn’t know what she has in there. He has to get Lucy out of this.

“Fine,” Flynn says in a growl. “I’ll play nice, for the time being.” The tone of his voice leaves it clear that if Emma takes her eyes off him for an instant, she’s dead, but she probably expected that. “Now let’s get this over with, huh?”

Emma smirks primly, then turns and starts toward the door, Lucy perforce accompanying her. She enters a code in a secret keypad, too many digits for Flynn to follow, and the door swings open, leading them into a dim, dusty front hall. An elegant chandelier tumbles crystal droplets from the ceiling, a grand staircase leads off into the gloom, and by the reverent look on Emma’s face, they might be walking into some old cathedral, some hallowed hall of power. Flynn doesn’t know what this is, but when Emma opens a glassed French door and they step into a study crammed to the brim with clocks, his stomach begins to turn. Clocks of every description, large and small, ancient mahogany grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, handsome brass navigation instruments, ornate gilded ones that look as if they’ve been ripped from a fin-de-siècle train station, fancy golden pocket watches in various stages of assembly and repair… a mad clockmaker’s lair. And the thing David Rittenhouse was known for, aside from astronomy, was –

“Yes.” Emma seems to have been following the process of realization on his face. “This is Rittenhouse’s house. You don’t realize how lucky you are, you both are, getting to see a special place like this. Ah, Millerson, Vincent. About time, boys.”

Flynn glances up to see two men, clearly the owners of the cars outside, entering the study from the other side. They both are wearing suits and have sidearms strapped to their torsos, as well as any other possible number of hidden weaponry, and they are not here to appreciate the historical value of the place. (Well, maybe, but still.) These are clearly Emma’s Rittenhouse cohorts, the muscle of the goon squad, and they come to a halt, looking at her for orders. It’s clear that she isn’t just some random piece in the system, but one of its essential and high-ranking cogs. Of course, they’d want their agent in Mason Industries, right next to the time machine, to be one of their best and brightest. Flynn feels sick.

“Got him,” Emma says briefly, jerking her head at Flynn. “It wasn’t even that hard. Like I said, don’t send a man to do a woman’s job. Boys, you take him upstairs to debrief him. We need a full and complete account of everything he knows, everyone he might have passed intel to, all his sources of information, how long he’s been on the case – everywhere. We need to make sure we have it airtight, any more leaks cut off. I know about Logan, we’ll be dealing with him, but anything else – remember you need him to talk.”

“Good luck with that,” Flynn snarls. “I’m not going to.”

Emma eyes him again, then rattles her handcuffed wrist, making Lucy’s arm shake. “Are you?”

That takes him like a punch in the gut. They can beat up on him all they want, but if they go after Lucy – and these people are exactly the kind who would do that – he doesn’t know if Emma is bluffing, if Lucy’s pureblood status (and where has he heard that before?) is enough to protect her. Lucy has rejected Rittenhouse, after all, and made things plenty difficult on her own. But if – but if –

For the moment while Flynn’s defenses are down, Millerson and Vincent swoop in on either side, grabbing hold of his arms and twisting them behind his back. They march him away – they’re good-sized gents, but it’s still taking considerable effort from them both – and up toward the stairs. He doesn’t know whether to fight. He thinks he hears Lucy yell, but then the door slams behind him, and he is in darkness.

Once the women are alone in the creepy clockmaker parlor from nightmare land, Emma undoes the cuff from her own wrist, fastens it to the old sofa instead, and obliges Lucy to sit down with a short push. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Be real,” Lucy snaps. “Like I’m drinking anything you’d give me.”

“What, princess? Think I’d give you a poisoned apple?”

“I don’t know, wicked stepsister. You might.”

“Wicked stepsister?” Emma laughs. “That’s the best you can come up with? It’s almost kind of adorable. As I said, you’re still safe, for now. But it might be a long wait.”

Lucy doesn’t answer, because she is straining with every inch of her to hear any sound from beyond the door, or from upstairs. Flynn was shot barely a month ago, she saw the wounds herself, they’re not totally healed. If they start hitting him in his bad shoulder, or pulling out the waterboard or the pliers or whatever other terrible idea they have – Rittenhouse’s idea of debriefing him is clearly not going to be a pleasant and gentle experience. This must be a major Rittenhouse black site. If she ever did get back to a godforsaken normal life, could she call someone and tell them to check David Rittenhouse’s mansion in West Point – Lucy never knew he lived in New York, what was he doing here? Or would they get here and find nothing but a handsome old historical house, all illicit tracks expertly covered, or a Rittenhouse agent waiting to shoot them and hide the corpse in the root cellar? It might be a regular Cask of Amontillado situation down there. Her heart is hammering in her ears. Oh God, oh God, this is bad. She has not the first idea of how to fight her way out of this.

“So,” Emma says at last. “You and Flynn, huh? Garcia Flynn. I suppose he’s cute in a tall-dark-and-psycho Eastern European way, but really, what else does he have going for him?”

Lucy cannot believe that Emma really thinks they will sit here and girlfriend-gossip about boys (she probably doesn’t, she’s just trying to get under Lucy’s skin) and thus maintains a dignified silence. It’s broken by a distinct thump from overhead, and Emma’s eyes swing up toward the ceiling. In that, despite the fact that she very much is still handcuffed to an antique piece of furniture, has only that Krav Maga class going for her, and is terrified out of her wits, Lucy Preston lurches (it is not nearly anything as graceful as leaps) into action.

She jumps up, wrenching her wrist in the cuff, but manages to headbutt Emma solidly under the chin, hard enough to make her teeth click. Lucy shoves a hand into Emma’s jacket and her groping fingers find the butt of Flynn’s gun, which she hauls out, trying to find the safety and switch it off. She somehow manages it, clicks the trigger to cock it, points it at the chain, and shoots.

The sound of the gunshot at close range is deafening, making her madly flash back to seeing Flynn shot in front of her in the car, and it’s like using a flamethrower to kill an ant, but it does the job. Lucy pulls her freed wrist out of the blown-apart couch, feathers floating everywhere, just in time to hear another heavy clunk, and freeze. Emma has recovered herself enough to grab a spare gun from a nearby drawer, which she is pointing dead at Lucy’s head with hands far steadier and more accurate than Lucy’s own. “I wouldn’t do that. Princess.”

The tension crackles almost unbearably as they stare at each other, as Lucy struggles with the idea of pointing it at Emma, at some vital part of her, and actually doing it. Not that there is any guarantee she’d make it, since it would be the grand total of a second time she has fired a gun and beginner’s luck is nothing to count on in this situation, but still. She feels nauseous even trying to train it on Emma’s arm or shoulder, much less her head or heart. She is not Annie Oakley, cannot shoot the gun deftly out of Emma’s grip without hurting her. And frankly – Emma has hurt them, has her thugs upstairs probably beating holy hell out of Flynn, works for an incredibly evil organization and enjoys it remorselessly – does she deserve to be treated nicely? Does she deserve to die?

Lucy can’t breathe, can’t focus, feels like she’s having a panic attack, which is obviously not conducive to firing a gun in any circumstance, much less this one. Her hands rattle hard enough to make the muzzle wobble crazily in all directions. Emma clearly doesn’t think she can or will do it, but she’s not an amateur; she’s not going to laugh off someone with motive to want her dead pointing a heavy Glock at her. Her eyes don’t leave Lucy, waiting to see what she’s going to do, what she’ll possibly –

And just then, there’s a sound at the door, it opens. One of the goons has clearly heard the gunshot and rushed down here. “Emma?” It’s Millerson. “Emma, are you – ”

“Ryan, you idiot, don’t – ”

Lucy swings around, brings the gun up, and fires in the direction of the door. There is a yell and a heavy stumbling sound, and she ducks low and sprints across the parlor. There’s another door on the far side, she doesn’t know if it leads upstairs as well – Emma is shouting, swearing – Lucy hit Millerson somewhere, he doesn’t sound like he’s dead, but she shot him, put the gun against his head pulled the trigger now he’s – no, she didn’t, he’s not, not Bohemian Rhapsody, not now, this is stupid, this is demented, this is –

There’s a staircase on the far side, which Lucy hurtles up, not sure what she’s going to find at the top and not sure she wants to, but driven on with blind panic. Halfway up, she runs very hard into someone coming down, screams (or tries – it gets choked in her throat as a gurgling squeal) and raises the gun again, just as they grab it. “Lucy! Jesus!”

She almost faints again, for a different reason. It’s Flynn, blood running down his face and shirt torn, as he wrenches what is, after all, his own gun out of her hand. This is probably a wise idea, as he can be much more effective with it, and by the looks of things, he caught Vincent in a moment of distraction after Millerson had hurried downstairs to check the gunshot. Vincent is probably soundly unconscious on the floor, if Flynn didn’t have time to do anything else, Lucy hopes he’s dead, with a savage, burning need that scares her. She hopes he's fucking dead.

There is a lot of banging and crashing behind them, and Flynn grabs Lucy’s hand, half-throws her over his shoulder (they seem to spend a lot of time escaping from Rittenhouse-owned properties in this fashion) and runs down the back corridor. They reach a door, which he wrenches open, and they spill out abruptly into the muggy spring afternoon beyond, into the thick tangles of untrimmed greenery that abut the back of the house. They bash and barge through it, branches lashing at Lucy’s face as Flynn does his best to break a path, feet slipping out from beneath them in six inches of mud. Nonetheless, they keep running, sliding down gravel and splashing through a murky green rivulet, through more trees on the far side, and finally out into an abandoned play park, which is exactly as creepy as it sounds, but looks like a warm and sunny daycare after the Rittenhouse of Rittenhorrors. Graffiti defaces the slide, the swings hang off their chains, and by the looks of things, local teenagers or junkies come here at night to get high. Lucy sways, grips hold of the monkey bar post, and goes to her knees, hoping not to stab herself on a stray heroin needle. Then she is very sick.

Flynn is likewise breathing as if they have been chased by a train, but he crouches next to her, almost but not quite putting a hand on her back, as if she is still a piece of dangerous ordnance that will explode if approached unwisely. “Lucy,” he says hoarsely. “Lucy?”

Lucy can’t answer, because she’s still throwing up, but finally spits and shudders, remaining on her knees, hair hanging loose in her face. She can feel herself shaking, a fine and constant tremor, and doesn’t know how to make herself stop. Her wrist is still in the cuff, the broken chain dangling. She feels half as if she is watching this remotely from above. Shock, she thinks. This is called shock. It’s entirely understandable, but you should have a blanket and somewhere to put your feet up. Probably also liquids and deep breathing.

All of those things seem as far away as Mars at the moment, and she retches once more, but doesn’t bring up anything except a dribble of sour bile. She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. Her voice is hoarse and deep when she speaks. “What’re… we going to do?”

“We need to get out of here.” Flynn glances edgily back in search of pursuit. If Vincent is unconscious or dead, and Millerson is shot, hopefully Emma has been delayed, but they would clearly be foolish to think it was forever, and they’re still far too close. “Can you walk?”

Lucy obediently tries to struggle to her feet, but her knees immediately give out, and Flynn catches her, swinging her across his chest as he did on their escape from the first Rittenhouse shindig back in Marin County. (That one looks much more civilized and preferable, really – maybe Cahill is not so bad after all.) She can feel him shaking too, ever so slightly, as she tucks her head under his chin and buries her face in his shoulder. There is a wet spot of fresh blood on his shirt where the thugs must have broken his scab, and she shifts restlessly, pressing her hand to it. “Garcia, you’re…”

“Shh.” Flynn doesn’t break stride. “It’s fine, it’s nothing.”

“What did they – did they – ?” To judge from that and the blood on his head, he must have taken at least a few good licks, but thank God they didn’t get enough time to really dig in and go to town. “Are they – did you – ”

“I didn’t tell them.” Flynn hesitates. “Much.”

In that, Lucy can sense that whatever he did tell them, however deliberately misleading and unhelpful, was to make it sound as if he was cooperating, so they would not have any occasion to try to hurt her. Her abused heart clenches almost unbearably. They have crossed some kind of Rubicon here, some point of no return. Rittenhouse is not going to stop. They are going to keep looking for Flynn – and for Lucy, and probably for Wyatt, by the sounds of things. They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop.

Lucy falls into a fevered half-doze despite herself, worn out with exhaustion and terror, as Flynn keeps going. Finally, she stirs as he is stepping into the parking lot of some backwoods motel, two-story whitewashed cinderblock with garish pink doors. Flynn goes in and tells the receptionist there’s been a hiking accident, his wife is hurt, they really could use a room, at least for a few hours. He will take care of phoning the emergency services, and he has a little money, but still – if she could find it in her heart –

The receptionist, clearly alarmed by their appearance and hoping this is not the start of a TV horror series, quickly agrees. Five minutes later, Flynn is awkwardly unlocking the door of the end second-story room, carrying Lucy through, and setting her down on the bed with its polyester floral bedspread. The portable air conditioner wheezes in the grey, stuffy air. He shuts the door and swears, for which Lucy can’t really blame him in the least.

“Is this going to be our life now?” she asks weakly, eyes closed. “Hiding out in shitty hotel rooms from Rittenhouse? Running from one to the next? Having to hope we don’t get caught and do it all over again?”

Flynn doesn’t answer. It’s plain that he can’t, that he has no idea, that he has not had anything to recommend him at keeping her safe – that every time he reappears in her life, trouble and danger inevitably follows. Lucy cracks an eye to see him still standing there, staring down at her. Then he sits down on the bed and carefully picks the handcuff off her wrist, smoothing his callused fingers lightly along the abrasion. “Did Emma hurt you?”

“No, she…” Lucy feels her stomach revolting again, even though there’s nothing left to bring up, and pushes herself clumsily upright. Flynn is looking down at her hand, very small between both of his, still not quite meeting her eyes. “She just. . . she said I was safe for the time being, and gloated. I… startled her, I stole your gun and got the chain off, and…” Her words stutter to a stop. “I shot Millerson.”

At that, Flynn does lift his gaze, startled and pained. He looks at her for a very long moment, the way she can’t stop her lip from trembling, the way her eyes are wet, how she feels as fragile as porcelain. It’s clear he can’t quite decide how he wants to respond to that. He lifts one of his hands as if to tuck her hair behind her ear, still not entirely touching her. At last he says, “Did you kill him?”

“I don’t think so.” Lucy’s stomach turns over once more – and then, weirdly, it stops. She should be feeling worse about this. She, like any godless liberal academic, has plenty of opinions about American gun culture, about gun control (or lack thereof), about all the ways it’s ridiculously easy to kill someone in this country even if you aren’t part of an evil secret society. And while she does feel bad, obviously, it’s a worryingly less degree than she should. She might be able to do it again. She might be able to shoot somewhere less easily mended. This is not, is not, how Lucy wants to feel about it. And yet.

Flynn glances at her under his eyelashes again, her hand still in his, which Lucy feels as if she shouldn’t remind him of in case he pulls back. Finally he says, gruff and awkward, “Well. Good – good job. Getting away from them. Someone should teach you how to properly shoot, though. In case it happens again.”

Lucy does not want to know how to properly shoot. She wants to go home to her books and her papers and the safe, ordered, settled nature of her old life, which might have had its problems but at least was not an active turd volcano. She doesn’t know why Flynn still won’t entirely touch her or why she even wants him to, doesn’t know, doesn’t know. She is the one to pull her hand loose this time, and stands up. Has an overwhelming urge to wash until her skin comes off. “I think  I’m going to take a shower.”

Flynn glances at her with a pained and haunted expression. All he can fucking bring himself to say, however, until she almost wants to slap him, is, “Should I go look for some food?”

“If you want. I’m not really hungry.” Lucy sits up, and her head reels. He automatically reaches out to steady her, and their fingers lock. His tension is clearly evident, and after a dumbstruck instant – as if they haven’t been holding hands this entire time, because he has to make everything as difficult as possible, always – he tries to pull back.

Lucy, just then, has had enough. He clearly cares about her, gave up his gun when Emma had a box cutter at her throat, and even before that, in the reading room, he wasn’t exactly cringing in horror from her ugliness. But with this and everything, she isn’t in the mood to just patiently and graciously overlook his inexplicable, yo-yoing behavior one more time. This is not really a smart or healthy thing to do, but neither has been the rest of it. Lucy leans forward, catches his chin clumsily in her hand, and kisses him.

After all this time, and their multiple near misses, it’s – well, it’s as exactly as awkward as kissing someone you can’t decide if you love or hate for the first time, angry and messed up and just off a near-death experience, can possibly be. Lucy almost misses his mouth, and their teeth scrape, their noses knock, his head is not at quite the right angle and he momentarily seems to have had a heart attack anyway. His hand floats up, ghosting over her hair. The angle gets adjusted, and she cups her free hand at the back of his neck. His lips open. It turns into a proper kiss for five or ten glorious seconds, Lucy sliding forward on her knees and leaning down into him, eyes half-closed. It feels so much better than shouting at him. Then, since he must have gone too long without making a clanking emotional gaffe, he pulls back, turning his head just enough to separate their mouths. “Lucy. . .”

“Can’t we just. . .” Lucy slides up on him again, knees on either side of his hips. She has solid evidence, if you will, that he does not mind this at all. “For once, can’t we just. . .”

Flynn glances up at her with that same expression from earlier, that almost-anguished, disbelieving, tender, adoring look, that contains all the emotion he is such utter crap at articulating aloud. “You’re not in the right – ” he starts, then stops. “You’re angry, and you’re feeling like you want to lash out, and – you need a shower, Lucy. A shower, and maybe some food, and to sleep. You do.”

This may be, and indeed probably is, entirely true. Lucy, however, is aggravated beyond belief that the one time he’s able to come up with a mature, rational emotional response is the one time she doesn’t want him to. She also can’t tell if this is the “this isn’t the right moment, but we’ll get to it later” kind of gentle shutdown, or the “you’ve definitely read it wrong and I’m trying to let you down nicely” kind. You wouldn’t think so, given everything else, but she has given up on his guessing games. Fine. This has already been the worst day of her life, what else can really go wrong at this point?

Face burning, Lucy collects herself, slides off him, and retreats to the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror until her eyes cross and the image blurs. Then she undresses and turns on the tap, trying to get it past a tepid trickle. The ancient boiler seems incapable of running properly hot, and the water pressure isn’t great either. It feels like standing under a dribble of warm spit, which is far from the soothing deluge that Lucy envisioned, and isn’t helping her tension or her frustration. She runs her hands over her face, through her wet hair, still possessed of the phantom urge to scrub. There’s a hard bar of blue soap that feels like gravel when she scrapes it over her skin. She sits down and watches the water circle the drain. She would like to think she’s handling this relatively well, but she has no idea.

Lucy remains where she is until the water has run completely cold, then gets out of the shower and dries herself with another sandpapery towel. She looks at her clothes and can’t really stomach the idea of putting them back on, doesn’t feel released or relaxed. Finally, she just struggles them back on, fingers fumbling. She doesn’t look at herself in the mirror this time. She’d rather not see.

Flynn is gone when she emerges back into the room, and she goes tense, staring out the window at the mostly-empty motel parking lot. There aren’t either of the black cars that must have belonged to Millerson and Vincent, but that doesn’t mean anything. They could have stolen the decrepit seventies RV parked at the end and turned it into a mobile surveillance unit. Did Flynn leave his gun here? No, that would be stupid. After what just happened, he will probably only be parted from it on pain of literal death. The world is turning out from under her, it feels like the walls are closing in. This isn’t nearly a small enough room to trigger her claustrophobia in the ordinary course of things, but –

Breathe, Lucy instructs herself firmly, locking her knees. You’re fine. You’re fine.

And in fact, since she is, in some terrible way, fine, things level out the next moment. There’s a rattling at the door, and Flynn enters with a brown grocery bag, probably from the general store down the road – this seems like the kind of place that has a general store down the road. He sets it down, regarding her cautiously. “Dinner.”

“I’m – not very hungry.” Lucy turns away, crossing her arms over herself. “If you were thinking of a shower, it’s terrible.”

Flynn raises one eyebrow, but doesn’t immediately respond. The tension in the room is thick as maple syrup, but much less enjoyably so. They have reached the limit of their polarities, cannot continue to be forced apart without some sort of major explosion, but it’s less certain if it would not then be a bigger one if they came closer. The way Flynn is standing just inside the door, watching her warily, is proof of that. They don’t know if they are arguing or on the verge of making out or slapping each other or sobbing (or perhaps that’s only Lucy). She feels like a rack of dishes tilted over and slammed on the floor. Whatever is in the bag smells good, but she can’t get herself worked up to actually eating.

At last, after another painfully awkward silence, Flynn penguin-shuffles closer, digs the food out – looks like a deli chicken special, some rolls, a couple prepackaged Caesar salads and two bottles of fruit juice – and sets it on the table. “Hey,” he says, in that gruff but gentle voice. “Come here, Lucy.”

She pauses, then walks closer, feeling rather light on her feet and glad to sit down. Flynn opens the chicken box and pulls out a leg, then hands it to her. Despite herself, Lucy almost laughs, as he reminds her of a concerned mother bird anxiously testing out the juiciest worm for an ailing nestling and trying to force it down her beak. She nibbles a little, just to placate him, as he stubbornly keeps up the process with torn bits of the bread roll and salad, handing her the juice every so often as if to get her sugars up. As food tends to do, it helps. Lucy’s head settles a little, she feels less fragile and off the handle, able to breathe more deeply and clear out the knot in her chest. “Thanks,” she manages at last. “Thank you.”

He inclines his head, watching her carefully. “Better?”

“Yes.” Lucy lets out a long sigh, then nods timidly at his cooling portion; he’s barely paid any attention to it, too involved with feeding her. “You should eat yours too.”

Flynn shrugs, then economically dispatches it, clearly as an afterthought. The silence has tipped toward the easier, and there is less chance of a stray spark blowing the whole room sky-high, but the conversation is still not bountiful. At last he says, “I still think this is too close, but without a car, we can’t move anywhere tonight. That piece of shit is not worth it.” He aims a disparaging look at the RV. “Tomorrow, when there’s daylight, I’ll find something else.”

By the sound of things, Lucy thinks, Flynn is going to steal a car. This is possibly something she should talk him out of, but she can’t be arsed. She eats a final bite of salad and then pushes it away. “So. . . I’m guessing interviewing at Kenyon would be out?”

“I think you should.” Flynn swigs the last of his juice and tosses it across the room into the garbage, with a casual skill that Lucy can’t help but admire. “Get out of California. Away from all this. It might be safer.”

“And you?” Lucy tries to speak as offhandedly as she can, but her voice trembles. “What are you going to do?”

Flynn’s eyes are shadows beneath his drawn brows. “I’m going to fight them.”

Lucy was afraid of that. She doesn’t know that she expected anything different, or that Flynn would be content to go back to whatever life he used to have before this, but it still turns something over cold in her stomach to hear it confirmed. “Garcia. . . this thing with the time machine, whatever’s going on at Mason Industries, I don’t pretend to understand it, but if that’s the scale of what you’re up against, how can you. . .” How can you do it alone?

Flynn looks back at her steadily, gently, very sadly. “Do I have a choice?”

Lucy doesn’t know. She doesn’t know, doesn’t know if they are both fooling themselves with the comfortable, comforting delusion that she can take the job at Kenyon and recuse herself from all of this. As if moving to Ohio would be any kind of deterrent to Rittenhouse, if they were determined to catch up to her. She could change her name (ha, like that’s a foolproof method). She could move to Australia. She could run. It’s all possible.

And yet. Lucy has tried to run away from Flynn enough times by now, for whatever reasons, that she’s not altogether sure there’s going to be any different result this time. And she doesn’t want to, she still doesn’t want. Yet going with him down this path is unimaginably dark and dangerous, so far out of her comfort zone that it can’t even be spotted with the Hubble Telescope. She doesn’t owe this to him. She doesn’t have to risk it.

And yet.

Lucy leans forward slowly and takes Flynn’s hand where it lies on the table, clenched and tense. She doesn’t know what she’s saying, doesn’t know what the answer is, other than that she wants their stars to align for a little while. She doesn’t want to try another move on him and get shut down again, doesn’t know what his problem (rather, problems) are. Just links their fingers and lets them rest together on the table. It is getting dark in the room. Headlights waver past on the country highway outside, a brief flash of illumination, and fade.

At last, Flynn stirs from his reverie, gently lets go of Lucy’s hand, and stands up. He strips off his shoes and belt, then shucks his shirt, revealing his undershirt beneath. There is more bruising around his wounded shoulder, deep in the muscle and continuing down the arm where Millerson and Vincent must have hit him, and Lucy sucks in a breath. It’s not like there’s much she can actually do for it, but she makes half a move to get up. “Garcia. . .?”

“It’s all right, Lucy.” He prods at it, and grimaces. “You should get some sleep.”

As there is again only one bed in the room, Lucy does not feel up to facing another bizarre repeat of the Sheraton incident, where he insisted on sleeping on the floor and then wouldn’t look at her. Her pulse is fluttering in her throat as she pulls off her own shoes and socks. Taking off her own shirt would leave her in just her bra, and that definitely seems a little too forward. Is he going to flip out again? He’s managing to act remotely normal right now, but who knows. It’s as if he can be a disaster all he pleases, but the instant she’s in worse distress, he somehow acquires the magical ability to pull himself together and try to support her. It’s almost cute, in a tragic way.

Tentative and careful, they get into bed, still in their clothes. Flynn is not insisting on the floor, so there is that, at least. The sheets smell slightly musty, and the pillows are not the most robust item of bedding ever produced. They lie there side by side, staring up at the ceiling, neither of them clearly getting much sleep given the way they jump at small noises. Then very slowly, Lucy lifts her head and moves it to his good shoulder, settling into the broadness of his chest. It’s more comfortable than the scanty pillow, and it makes her feel safer to be close to him (his gun has been left in easy reach on the bedside table). She listens to the beat of his heart, deep and strong and slow, and rests her hand lightly on his arm.

Slowly, tentatively, Flynn wraps his own arm around her, gathering her closer. Lucy edges close against him, curled into his side, still afraid of him going haywire again and doing something else regrettable. But for now, the fragile, unspoken truce is holding, and she could swear he presses the ghost of a kiss to her hair. If she’s not dreaming already. It’s the same way they spent last night (God, was it just last night?) in the same hotel bed, and yet something, yet again, has changed. Later. She’ll work it out later.

Lucy closes her eyes, and although she hears screaming in her head, she sleeps.

#lucy x flynn #garcy #garcy ff #timeless ff #the tangled web of fate we weave

[brajeshupadhyay]

Jack Grealish: ‘I am a footballer but I’m still human. We all make mistakes’ | Football

The challenge facing Aston Villa is to emerge from the Premier League hiatus better than they were before it. Jack Grealish accepts that applies to him more than most. Over the past couple of months he has spent time, and money, trying to prove that he does not deserve to be defined by that serious mistake he made in late March.

You know the one. The photograph went everywhere. Less than 24 hours after he publicly urged people to stay home to prevent the spread of coronavirus, he was pictured looking bewildered and dishevelled on a Birmingham street beside his damaged Range Rover, which had collided with parked cars to expose the fact that he broke lockdown to travel to a friend’s house. West Midlands Police’s investigation continues. The day after the incident Grealish acknowledged his hypocrisy on social media.

“I knew straight away that I had to come out and apologise myself, which I wanted to do; I didn’t want to hide behind a club statement,” says the 24-year-old who, since then, has donated £150,000 to Birmingham Children’s Hospital – which he has supported many times in the past – and raised more than £55,000 for the NHS by raffling of one of his jerseys. “I am old enough now and mature enough to know that I’d done wrong.

“I know I am a footballer but I’m still human and we all make mistakes and straight away I knew I’d made a mistake. I’m also a role model as well to a lot of people out there, especially young children who might look up to me. So I try to act in respectable manner but since then I have tried to keep my head down, work hard and do as much charitable work as possible.”

We had six games remaining at home, but we’re not going to sit back and moan about it

Grealish knows some people will always place the emphasis on his errors no matter what good he does. “That’s just the way things are in this world that we live in. Everyone knows when you do something it’s always going to be the bad stuff that gets out there. That’s what I have to deal with. I respect my job, absolutely love what I do, and wouldn’t change it for the world.”

On the pitch is where Grealish is most at home. Villa’s manager, Dean Smith, describes him as a “football nut” and the player admits he “missed football a silly amount” during the league’s suspension. So he was delighted to return to training last week. That joy, however, was overshadowed by the news that Smith’s father, Ron, died last week as a result of coronavirus after a long time with dementia. Grealish says everyone at Villa was devastated and has been trying to help the manager deal with his grief as best they can.

Jack Grealish says he has had a good season in the Premier League but it didn’t start quite as he would have liked. Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA

“I always used to ask him every day how his dad was getting on,” says Grealish. “Then when the news came it was devastating for him and his family. Us as players have tried to be there for him and try to help him. One good thing about football when you are having a problem away off the pitch, when you do come into training or play a match, it takes your mind off everything else. It certainly does for me. That’s what we tried to do for the manager.”

He says the death of Ron, a lifelong Villa fan, has given the club one more reason to perform better when the season resumes. “I’m sure we all want to avoid relegation even more now, for the Smith family.”

Grealish and Smith have a close bond, captain and manager respectively of the club both have supported since childhood. “The manager has been a massive influence on me,” he says. “I couldn’t give him enough credit. I see him as like a father figure to me, I can go and speak to him about anything. I feel that’s the same with him a bit; he can ask me about what I’m feeling about training, matches. For me, I could speak to him about anything, on or off the field. Since he has come in he has been brilliant. I have played the best football of my career since he got appointed.”

Smith’s decision to award Grealish the captaincy last season has been vindicated by the player’s performances. He has been the one consistent bright spot in their form this season, seamlessly transferring his Championship-dominating form to the top flight to contribute a tally of seven goals and six assists so far.

Jack Grealish credits his manager, Dean Smith, as the reason he is playing his best football. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images

“My season has been very good, though I probably didn’t start as I wanted to. I got an assist in the second game but apart from that I don’t think I got a goal or an assist for six weeks and that’s what I base my game on, what I do to help the team since then I have just thrived and enjoyed every single moment. Without sounding arrogant or big-headed I had no doubts I would come into this league and perform the way I have done.”

The task now is to stay in the league. Villa are second-bottom, six of the club’s remaining 10 games are at home, but that may not be much of an advantage with matches behind closed doors.

“I would probably say it is a disadvantage, if I am honest, only because of how much we have thrived on the home games this year. We have won a lot more at home than we have away. We had six games remaining at home. We still have a game in hand and if we win the game in hand we are out of the relegation zone. It is not something we are going to sit back and moan about. It is still in our hands. We can’t moan about the fact we might have had the fans there. We will just take it as it is because we are just delighted to be getting back.”

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On the plus side, says Grealish, the league hiatus gave John McGinn more time to regain full fitness. The Scot was sorely missed after being injured before Christmas. “Him coming back will be massive for us,” says Grealish, who says the midfielder brings “class and energy”. McGinn attracts attention from opponents, which makes life a little easier for Grealish, the most-fouled player in the Premier League this season. “Having him back will help me because he gets kicked a lot, too.”

One person from whom Grealish would welcome more attention is Gareth Southgate. Gaining a first England cap remains a dream. “That is what I have set out to achieve since I committed to England. In March I did not know what was going to happen but the virus obviously stopped everything. Who knows if I would have been called up or not [for the last England squad]? All I can do is start the way I was playing before and hopefully next season I can start strongly and when the internationals come back around I will be back in with a shout.”

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#Blogger #Aston Villa #Football #Jack Grealish: ‘I am a footballer but I’m still human. We all make m

[the-master-cylinder]

SUMMARY It is nighttime in a dark, foreboding cemetery. Inside a moss-covered mausoleum, the sound of someone chipping away at the cement crypt bearing the name of Caleb Croft can be heard.

On a nearby college campus, a party at a Fraternity house is celebrating the winning of the 1940 New England Seaboard Conference championship. A young couple, Leslie (KITTY VALLACHER) and her boyfriend Paul (JAY SCOTT), decide they want to be alone and drive off in Paul’s car for the damp and eerie privacy of the cemetery. When Paul slips an engagement ring on Leslie’s finger, she unabashedly leads him to the back seat of the car where they proceed toward love-making, unaware that Caleb Croll (MICHAEL PATAKI) has risen from the grave and is stalking through the cemetery in their direction. With more than human strength. Croft rips the door of the car, brutally murders Paul and when Leslie tries to escape. traps her in an open grave and rapes her.

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Police are puzzled: Paul’s body has been drained of blood, but there is no evidence of it in the car or on the ground where his body was found. When detectives talk to Leslie in her hospital room, she seems unable to comprehend until they show her a photograph of the man who is missing from the crypt, Caleb Croft. Leslie becomes hysterical and the woman in the next bed. Olga (LIEUX DRESSLER), screams at them to leave. Olga is a strong Id and had warned police to leave Leslie alone, stating that she was possessed. Shortly. Leslie will have complete faith in Olga. One of the policemen, Lt, Panzer (ERIC MASON) senses something of the supernatural about the case but cannot express his thoughts officially. After all, Caleb Croft was electrocuted three years ago.

Several months later, when Leslie, now very obviously showing the pregnancy which has resulted from her ordeal in the cemetery, and Olga move into the old house Leslie’s parents have left her. Panzer is on hand to help with the luggage. His offer is spurned but as he turns to leave, he notices another man watching them from a distance. The man turns, gets into a car and drives away. Panzer follows. all the way to the cemetery and the mausoleum where he finds the empty crypt. Croft savagely kills Panzer. His secret is safe.

With Olga acting as midwife, Leslie gives birth to a boy – although doctors have told her the baby was not alive. Unlike normal babies, her baby does not cry. giggle or drink milk. Its color is a sickly grey. Accidentally. Leslie discovers nurses her son by making small cuts on her breasts where the boy feeds. As time passes. Leslie grows weaker, age’s prematurely and goes insane. By the time the boy. James Eastman (WILLIAM SMITH). has grown to manhood. Leslie and Olga have died.

James attends the local university. He is almost devoid of ordinary human reactions. In an anthropology class, he meets Professor Adrian Lockwood. the same man who earlier was Caleb Croft. He is well groomed, about 30 years old and exerts a strange control over everyone in the class. Anne Arthur (LYN PETERS). an extremely attractive girl. finds James mysteriously fascinating. Lockwood in turn has eyes for Anne. Lockwood’s lecture centers on vampires and a legendary figure named Charles Croyden. Croyden’s wife was burned as a vampire in 1846 but Charles was never seen again. James knows that the story is not legend. but fact, and that Croyden is Caleb Croll, who is Professor Lockwood.

Anita Tacoby (DIANE HOLDEN), another very attractive student. tells the class of the existence of a book which links Croyden to Croft. Lockwood finds a small town library where a copy of the book exists: to steal the book and satisfy his lust, he kills the spinster librarian.

That evening, James drops in on a party at the apartment Anita shares with Anne. Not quite at ease, he is about to leave when Anne arrives. tired and more in the mood for a quiet dinner than a party. James offers her the use of his apartment upstairs and they leave. Alone. James finds his human characteristics and emotions emerging as he and Anne fall into an immediate and passionate attraction.

Passion also drives Lockwood to seek Anne. In the middle of the night he goes to her apartment, only to find Anita, who has uncovered his secret and strangely, has fallen in love with him. She asks him to transform her into a vampire to become his wife. Lockwood agrees to comply with her request. then kills her. When Anne returns to her own apartment, she finds Anita’s body in the shower, and Lockwood is still there. Her screams send him running and bring James and other students in the building – Brian (FRANK WHITEMAN) and Tex (INGA NEILSEN). Sam (CARMEN ARGENZIANO) and Carol (ABBI HENDERSON) to the scene. Sam calls the police. Despite the tragedy, James and Anne. Brian and Tex and Sam and Carol meet the following day at Lockwood’s house for a scheduled séance. They are gathered in the room where the seance is to take place when Lockwood enters and announces that Anne will be the medium. When Lockwood tries to call upon his wife, Sarah. it is Anita who answers. She tells everyone that she will assume Anne’s body. but it is her spirit which will serve the vampire. When Anne begins speaking in Anita’s voice. Lockwood takes her face in his hands, urging her to cast Anita out. She does, and passes out. exhausted. When James takes her upstairs. Lockwood turns on the remainder of the group and announces he is going to kill them. Sam pulls a .45 and fires bullets into the professor. The bullets go right through. One by one. Lockwood drains his victims of blood.

James returns to find the doors to the seance room locked. He crashes them open and sees the blood orgy before him. James and Lockwood struggle in fierce combat, which ends when James tells Lockwood that he is his son and has but one purpose: to kill his own father. He rips a post from the banister and drives the pointed stake into Lockwood’s heart. As Lockwood dies, a strange transformation comes over James. As he realizes what is happening, he urges Anne to run away from him. While she hesitates, he feels complete emotion and glories in the evil of being a vampire. Anne screams at the sight of him and runs. James goes after her. to kill her, his face contorted. his fangs hungry for blood.

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BEHIND THE SCENES It is now a well-known bit of trivia that “The Sopranos” creator David Chase wrote Grave, his first feature screenplay. The then-neophyte had been hired by Hayes’ production company Clover Films for some archival tasks, and previously served as production manager on Hayes’ WWII action film The Cut-Throats. In an interview for the Archive of American Television, he remembered, “I was there off and on for a year. They’d hire me, and they wouldn’t have anything and they’d fire me and I had to look for work again, and then they’d have a project and I’d go back, or they’d recommend me to somebody else…it was an internship, essentially.” Hayes suggested the primary father/son vampire concept, and Chase wrote the screenplay, reportedly from an unpublished novel he’d composed called The Still Life. Both men had endured unhappy childhoods – Hayes’ parents had split when he was four and he was raised by his grandmother and an addict uncle, while Chase’s parents fostered an environment of hostility and erratic behavior that often left him physically sick – thus Grave functioned as an exploration for both of them on the effects of youth trauma. Hayes shot the film in 11 days on a $50,000 budget. Of the production, Chase said, “That was sort of during my knocking-around phase…I was starting to learn how it all actually worked. I think I did visit the set once…I wrote the script and then he completely rewrote that. I was invited to the screening, and I was aghast, it was really not what I’d written at all.”

“My last three pictures before ‘Vampire’ were made in Spain, Bolivia and Italy,” William Smith related. “When I finish this picture, I take off for Mexico City, then the Philippines. If I’m lucky, I’ll be making another film in Hollywood before this year is over.

Bill rode his own motorcycle back and forth from his Hollywood Hills home to the set every day while filming “Vampire.”

“Although we were supposed to be filming all over Texas, we seldom left the Universal back lot. And you know. it was nice to go home to your own bed at night.”

The climactic scenes of “Grave of a Vampire.”  take place in the darkly paneled rooms of a foreboding looking mansion which is actually located in one of the most elegant sections of Los Angeles.

“We needed a somber looking house where a terrifying seance and the key point of our story take place.” said producer Daniel Cady. “Two vampires go at each other’s throats, fighting up and down wide staircases and crashing through heavy balustrades. We had to have a house to match our bizarre script and we found one.”

The house which Cady and director John Hayes found is in the Fremont Place area of Los Angeles’ mid-Wilshire district near the famous La Brea tar pits. Like neighboring Hancock Park and Rossmore. Fremont Place is an exclusive residential section where the early wealth of Southern California settled. High walled and formerly guarded by a private patrol, it is an area of mansions built by millionaires. The city of Los Angeles has exploded in all directions in both residential and commercial development but Fremont Place has resisted successfully to this point all attempts at urban progress.

“Some of the mansions which were built for $40-50,000 half a century ago today are being remodeled al costs in excess of $200,000.” Cady said. “Such was not the case with our house.”

“Our” house was built in the early 1920’s and contains 18 rooms plus an entry hall big enough to hold a party of 200 people dancing to Lawrence Welk’s orchestra-using the stairway landing as a bandstand. Its present owner is a retired clergyman who also has deed to a couple of other mansions in the area. In his heyday, the reverend was a legitimate but highly controversial figure when Los Angeles was the mecca for high powered religionists of varying persuasions-and credentials.

“There was one advantage filming there,” director Hayes said. “We did quite a bit of night shooting-and we never had to worry about our leading ladies wandering very far from the cameras. The far reaches of the house at night were almost as frightening as what we were doing in front of the camera.”

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CAST/CREW Directed John Hayes

Produced Daniel Cady (producer)

Written David Chase (screenplay) John Hayes (screen treatment)

Based on The Still Life by David Chase

William Smith as James Eastman Michael Pataki as Caleb Croft/Professor Lockwood Lyn Peters as Anne Arthur Diane Holden as Anita Jacoby Lieux Dressler as Olga Eric Mason as Lieutenant Panzer Jay Adler as Old Zack Jay Scott as Paul William Guhl as Sergeant Duffy Margaret Fairchild as Miss Fenwick Carmen Argenziano as Sam Frank Whiteman Abbi Henderson as Carol Moskowitz Inga Neilsen Lindis Guinness Kitty Vallacher as the unwilling mother

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY thenewbev Grave of the Vampire (1972) Movie Pressbook

Grave of the Vampire (1972) Retrospective SUMMARY It is nighttime in a dark, foreboding cemetery. Inside a moss-covered mausoleum, the sound of someone chipping away at the cement crypt bearing the name of Caleb Croft can be heard.

#70sFilms

[findmyrupertfriend]

[If the free - for most, but apparently not all  - link does not work the article in its entirety is below. READ IT. It’s fantastic.]

The call went out to comedy’s superheroes. Armando Iannucci, the political satirist, was assembling a team. He wanted to make a film about Stalin and political machinations in the Communist Party; and he wanted to make it funny.

Steve Buscemi would play Nikita Khrushchev as a court jester whose wife writes down his jokes each night, recording which gags amused Stalin and which did not. Michael Palin would be Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s former protégé, clinging valiantly to the ideology of a man who jailed his wife. Jeffrey Tambor would be Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s terrified deputy, and Simon Russell Beale was Lavrentiy Beria, the sadistic head of the NKVD secret police. Paul Whitehouse would be Anastas Mikoyan, Stalin’s sometime foreign minister.

And who did Iannucci get for Stalin’s son, Vasily? For that he turned to a fellow who has never made anyone die laughing. Rupert Friend is better known for committing extrajudicial killings as the CIA paramilitary agent Peter Quinn in Homeland, striding about in dark collared shirts with the top buttons undone in the service of America.

Friend played the bounder Mr Wickham in the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice, the rascally young lover of Michelle Pfeiffer in Chéri, and an awkward and endearing Prince Albert in The Young Victoria. Friend’s always quite endearing on screen, even when he is busy stabbing, shooting and bludgeoning his way through a crowd.

When he first strides into a pub where I’m meeting him on Shelter Island, on the eastern tip of Long Island in New York, he is accosted by a heavyset man who looks like the bouncer. Friend is out here doing some work on a friend’s house and the big guy is one of the builders. They have what I imagine to be a rather manly chat about plumbing or plastering, then Friend buys two beers, tips the barmaid, and we walk out onto a white deck.

Friend, 36, is dressed like a builder, too, in a blue and navy striped jumper, heavy dark trousers bearing white smudges of plaster and worn brown boots. A gorsy beard is forming on his jaw. Just sitting near him, I can feel my sperm count rising.

He is a dashing, drunken and chaotic presence in The Death of Stalin. “Hairy monsters in white coats have scooped out my father’s brain and sent it to America,” Vasily bellows at one point, and Friend really sells it.

“What I loved about the process is that Armando is not a stickler for script,” he says. “It’s like, ‘ “Hairy monsters in white coats” is great, but what else have we got?’ ” Iannucci’s longtime collaborator, Peter Fellows, was on set to generate fresh one-liners. “We’d huddle down and he’d be like: ‘Let’s try, you know, “clattering fannies”. ’ ”

We first see Vasily beside an ice rink dressed as a Red Air Force officer, gulping down vodka and issuing warnings to his comrades not to mention the fact that the ice-hockey team he was in charge of was killed in a plane crash. He is hurriedly training up replacements, hoping his father will never hear of it. As anxiety and vodka overcome him, he takes to the ice himself. “I was never supposed to go on the ice and do all that,” says Friend. But the director thought he should. Iannucci followed him with a camera, encouraging Friend to flounder and crash into players as they whirled past.

Preparing for the role, he happened to speak with a friend in New York whose parents had emigrated from Russia in the Fifties. “He says, ‘You know my father went to school with Vasily Stalin?’ ” The father, Victor Levenstein, who is now in his late nineties, had been interrogated by the KGB in his teens and survived five years in a gulag. But before all that, he had known Stalin’s son.

“I phoned Victor and he was this incredible storyteller, telling me about this guy … with flaming red hair, who turns up at school in full uniform, aged 15. This is a guy who had never served, barely got an education.” And he did indeed preside over a hockey team that was killed in an air crash.

Friend was born in Cambridge, the eldest of two children. When he was eight, the family moved to a small village in Oxfordshire – “not hammer and nails rural, but definitely grow your own potatoes rural, muddy walks all the time and the same pair of trousers”.

Young Friend wanted adventure. “What was on my mind was the idea that you could make wine and build a table and throw a plate and sew a jumper,” he says. A school careers adviser, who presumably struggled with this request, “turned the Amstrad around to face me and it said, ‘There are no careers that are suitable for this candidate,’ ” he recalls.

Ideally, he wanted to be dispatched on a mission into an unknown part of the world. In his late teens, however, a friend of his parents did dispatch him to a foreign land. She owned a cottage on an Italian hilltop, which faced across a valley to another cottage, occupied by her lover. “She said, ‘We would look at each other and sort of moon over each other,’ ” Friend says. Thirty years had passed since then, and, “She said, ‘I’ll give you £200 if you go and report back to me on the state of the cottage.’ I was like, ‘I’m in an F Scott Fitzgerald novel. This is it!’

“I found the place. I had to walk up a mountain. It was four roof beams … with some bits of wall. But I was never to be deterred, because I was at that point reading Ayn Rand and I was reading, you know, anything to do with temerity.”

So Friend went off to find local builders and an architect, learnt the Italian for “roof beam” and “foundation”, and worked out that the whole thing would cost around ¤200,000. “Meantime,” he says, “bear in mind I have never picked up a hammer in my life, but I was thinking, ‘I’ll camp here and I’ll do it.’ ”

When he got back to England, his patron told him that she had bought the house for the equivalent of ¤5,000 and did not think it worth the effort. But, “I was just like, ‘This is exactly the kind of adventure I want.’ ”

The following year, having secured a place at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, he took a gap year and travelled to the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific: “I wanted to go as far away from home as I could.”

When he arrived, he ran up against a rule that local businesses could only hire locals. The owner of a bar took him to the embassy of New Zealand and told an official, “‘This young man went to Oxford,’ ” Friend says. “Which I have; I just never went to Oxford University.” He went to school there. “I never lied,” he says. “The embassy guy was like, ‘Good enough for me.’ ”

A fortnight later, as he was starting to work up a cocktail menu, he was in a serious motorbike accident. He recalls waking “in an island hospital, half my face ripped off, every bone in my ankle shattered, lacerated spleen, colon and lung, lizards crawling on the floor, dogs barking and the nurse coming”, he says. “I said, ‘I’m in so much pain, you’re going to have to give me some morphine.’ She said, ‘The boat didn’t come.’ ”

When the island doctor, who was on holiday, returned, she immediately ordered that he be airlifted to New Zealand. “She was an absolute sweetheart,” he says. As they flew to New Zealand, the doctor pointed out that they were in the first-class cabin. “She was like, ‘So, should we have champagne?’ ” he says. “I was having gas and air, my feet were up and I was like, ‘Yeah!’ ”

“You want more beers?” says the barmaid.

“Always,” says Friend. “Two more, thank you.”

In the hospital in Auckland, the surgeon told him he would have to have his foot amputated, and to abandon all hope of being an actor. “He was like, ‘You’re never going to walk again, let alone do whatever else you need to do at acting school.’ Right then I thought, ‘You’re wrong.’ ” He wonders now if the doctor told him that to stiffen his resolve, “or whether he was just a dickhead. I don’t know to this day.”

The barmaid brings us the beers: another lager for me in a tall glass, which I worry looks rather unmanly next to his tankard of ale.

“It was a formative thing,” he continues. “I was 19 and lying in a hospital bed in a big ward. If you wanted a TV it was $2 a day, which I didn’t have. I wore at the time contact lenses, which had obviously fallen out, so everything was swimming. So I would lie in bed and look at this one square of the ceiling for 20 hours a day. I couldn’t go to the toilet, I couldn’t do anything. It was a very call-to-arms moment, about never being bored again.”

Eventually, a girl from his home village came travelling through Auckland and learnt of his predicament. She got word back to his parents. “My dad is not a rich guy, so he couldn’t come,” he says. “He was an art historian in the middle of summer-school teaching, and my mum couldn’t come, either.”

Dad arrived eventually. “He’d come once a day and we’d play Scrabble, which is why Scrabble is very important to me now, because there was a time when I could concentrate on it in a way that I couldn’t on books or TV.”

We spend a long time, Friend and I, discussing his injuries, because there is really nothing better when you are in a pub with a man than repeating gory details like this. He talks of how they drained his thoracic cavity of fluid by inserting a pipe between his ribs. “When they take that pipe out, you have to work with them on the breathing, so you have to do it without anaesthetic,” he says.

To cut a long story short, he kept his foot and started drama school on crutches. Maybe it helped him, as an actor, having to adapt to a limitation?

“I think maybe it is more to do with the fact of not giving up,” he says. “It all sounds like awful T-shirt slogans, and I hate that.”

While still finishing drama school, Friend was cast in the film The Libertine, alongside Johnny Depp – a period drama set in the era of Charles II. It was intense. “Your first kind of out-of-the-blocks run at it and you’re going to be bathed in puke and mud and shit, making out with Johnny Depp, smoking a pipe, being run through with a spear,” he says.

Friend loved the fact that the producers brought in tonnes of horse manure, lining the streets with three and a half feet of the stuff. “You’re dirty to here,” he says, pointing to his thigh. He liked the story, too. “I read from the age of two. I was voracious,” he says. Growing up, he read a lot of Roald Dahl. “To me he was and in a way still is the very expression of limitless imagination,” he says.

Dahl “had a beat-up shed, which I am actually cultivating right now”, he says. “And an old rocker. He put a plank of wood over his lap and a blanket over his knees and a crappy, like, three-bar electric heater, and he called it the cockpit … He didn’t get a three-windowed corner suite off Hyde Park. He didn’t get some white-walled American Psycho office. He knew that it happened here [Friend taps his forehead].” It made him want to write and act and keep doing different things, he says. “I want to be, like, ‘Yeah, I wrote a story about a peach and now I’m doing one about an elevator.’ ”

He wouldn’t want to create a brand and stick with it, “à la Arnold Schwarzenegger”, he says. Wait a moment, I say. What about James Bond? Would you do that? It must have occurred to you.

“I don’t really think about it, to be honest,” he says. Friend was actually approached about playing Bond. Interviewed on Radio 4 a few years ago, Debbie McWilliams, who does casting for the Bond films, said that Friend was someone “I met while they were still in drama school and I knew in my bones that they were going to do really well”.

It was post-Pierce Brosnan and the Bond producers wanted to start afresh.

“They were looking for a young actor to literally make the leap from boyhood to manhood,” McWilliams said. “So everyone got very excited when I introduced [Friend]. He actually, to give him great credit, said, ‘I’m not experienced. I couldn’t possibly take on something like that,’ and he withdrew himself from the decision.” And then they abandoned the idea and found Daniel Craig. Poor old Craig: who knew he was beholden to this young blade?

It seems odd, in retrospect, that Friend doesn’t mention this. Possibly it is now drilled into all male actors of a certain cast that they must never talk about Bond, until they are called to serve.

I ask him about being in Pride & Prejudice alongside Keira Knightley, who became his girlfriend. Making this sweeping period drama with her and then dating her – I imagine it was tremendously romantic.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Pride & Prejudice was quite a compartmentalised film, the way it was made. Everyone was kept very apart.

“The simple answer to your question is no. That’s the best place to leave it, I think,” he says. “I can see that you’ve been told to ask this question.”

I haven’t, I say. We all live vicariously through our actors and sometimes, when we’ve had a few, we get carried away. But let us leap forward to 2012, when Friend was single once more, and broke.

“Not just broke,” he says. Friend had bought part of an old shoe factory in east London and was attempting to turn it into a home. “I employed some builders and very quickly ran out of money to pay them, because at the time I was doing an off-off-West End play for 300 quid a week and suddenly these bills for thousands of pounds were coming in.”

In the first week, “I said, ‘OK, fire the labourer. I’m the labourer.’ ” Not long after that, he had to fire everyone else. They had knocked down a few walls by this point, and the shoe factory was now worth even less than he had paid for it. It was “basically uninhabitable. I was sleeping in it in a sleeping bag. I had no skills and no money and was in debt to the bank to some six figures.”

But when the going gets tough, the tough get grouting. “I was like, ‘This is where you learn how to plumb and … lay floors, and you learn how to weld.’ So I did, and I loved it.”

By night, he walked the boards; by day, he laid them. In the midst of these labours, his agent called, asking him to shoot a brief video audition for the producers of Homeland. “I set up a stack of books and a little point-and-click camera and I filmed myself,” he says. The producers kept responding with requests for additional footage. His younger sister, who is a photographer, played the show’s heroine, Carrie Mathison, in one of these tapes. He also got a friend of his, a carpenter, to play her. And, “A guy from round the corner read with me,” he says. “By the seventh one I was like, ‘F*** this. You clearly don’t know what you’re doing, so good luck to you.’ ”

He had no real idea of the part he was supposed to be playing, and he is not sure the producers did either. “I got to North Carolina with exactly the same amount of information,” he says. “One scene, no script, and here we are five years later.”

His financial problems were solved in short order. But what would he have done if he hadn’t got Homeland?

“You’ve known me for about an hour,” he replies. “Do you think I would have given up?”

Well, no. But some people never give up and never get out of the shoe factory.

“Listen, there are lots of actors who are not working today who are way better than the ones who are,” says Friend. “Eighty per cent of it is, when you get that ‘no’ back, you can’t give up. Because the number of times I’ve heard ‘no’, you would not believe.”

Meanwhile, Friend has directed a short film starring Colin Firth and written the lyrics to a jazz album. He says he’s also written, and is preparing to direct, a film about the legendary boxing trainer Cus D’Amato, starring Anthony Hopkins and Liv Ullmann. They’re going to shoot it next year in the Catskill Mountains, he says. And he hasn’t entirely abandoned plumbing and plastering, either. “With the help of YouTube I have just taught myself Venetian plastering, which is the sort of thing that sounds terrifying,” he says. “Now I sort of run my hand on it and I’m like, ‘You can do it.’ ”

Doesn’t Paul Whitehouse plaster? This is all I can contribute to a plastering conversation.

“Yeah,” he says. “Paul is one of the reasons I did The Death of Stalin.”

He drops into an impression of Ralph from The Fast Show, the awkward English aristocrat in love with his Irish gardener: “The thing is, Ted, I just wanted to see you naked.” Growing up, Whitehouse “was a comedy hero of mine, because of the versatility”, he says.

When Friend arrived at the large manor house where Iannucci and all the other comic geniuses had mustered, “They’d been doing it for a week or two,” he says. On his first day, he was to shoot a scene in which Stalin’s son addresses a grieving multitude in Red Square.

“Paul comes up to my trailer and knocks,” he recalls. “He goes, ‘Everyone’s been doing very well. Yeah, they’ve all been knocking it out of the park. Comedy legends every one. And you’re not known for comedy, are you?’ I said, ‘No, not really.’ He goes, ‘Must be scary, eh? It’s your day today.’ ” Then Whitehouse clapped his hands together, grinned and said, “Anyway, good luck.”

What a bastard.

“It basically set the tone,” Friend says. “I hadn’t been doing anything in England for a little while and that’s what I actually miss: that the way you say ‘I love you’ in England is to f*** with somebody. Whereas Americans are more sincere, and while they’ll eventually get there, they would never dream of doing it from the outset because they’d be afraid of throwing you off.”

Friend is now married to Aimee Mullins, a retired American Paralympic athlete, model, actress and inspirational speaker. They wed last year, in “a compost shed” behind a restaurant in upstate New York. The shed “smelt like all my favourite memories”, he says. “I love the smell of compost and I love silage as well.” It probably reminded him of Johnny Depp.

They were married by his oldest friend from back home, a chap named Ed Atkins. The careers adviser who couldn’t find a job for Friend told Atkins he ought to be a fishmonger. Instead, he became a very successful video artist. “He was opening a show of his own in the city … and he extended his stay, ordained himself as a minister online and wrote the most beautiful love letter, which he read to us as our wedding blessing,” Friend says. The maître d’ of the restaurant snapped pictures on her iPhone, and the best woman, a designer named Betony Vernon, made the rings.

“These rings come apart,” he says, showing me his. I can see grooves in the band. “They were forged as one piece, so Aimee’s is the same.” They can be joined together again.

The sky is darkening now and the moon has risen above the trees. From where I’m sitting, it’s just above Friend’s head. His hair sticks up a little in places, which makes me think he has ridden here with no helmet on a motorbike. Or possibly bareback on a wild stallion. I can absolutely imagine that. “Bareback wild-stallion riding sounds terrifying,” he would say, with a rakish smile. “But with the help of YouTube, I have worked it out.”

But then his phone rings and it turns out he has someone coming to collect him. As he gathers himself, I ask if he ever finds it hard to be married to Mullins, who is a TED-Talk giver and an inspiration to millions. I mean, how do you live up to that, on a daily basis?

Of course, he has no idea what I’m talking about. Why would anyone find that difficult, he asks. “Why wouldn’t you want a woman that was as awesome as you are?”

Then he bids me goodbye and strides out of the pub: part man, part T-shirt slogan. But you have to admit, he wears it awfully well.

The Death of Stalin is in cinemas now

#interviews #Death of Stalin #2017 interview #the times #2017

[chocolatequeennk]

To Bring Them Home, 3/6

Losing Rose only a month after they bonded hurt more than the Doctor could have imagined. Then he discovered he’d lost more than he’d realised, and he was determined to bring them home–Rose and their unborn baby. But how could he do that, without two universes collapsing?

Ten x Rose, pregnancy fic

This story is part of The Course of True Love, following With This Ring. 

This was written for the remember drabble prompt on @legendslikestardust​, and the general Doomsday reunion prompt on @doctorroseprompts​.

Betaed by @lastbluetardis​.

AO3 | FF.NET | TSP | Ch 1 | Ch 2

The Doctor tried to brace himself when the image of the beach flickered. He clenched his hands at his sides to keep from reaching for Rose, and a moment later she disappeared, along with the windy beach she’d been standing on.

Pain replaced her soothing presence in his mind as the bond tore for a second time. The Doctor pressed his hands to his temples and moaned, while his knees struggled to keep him on his feet.

He took a few deep breath, then pushed himself upright and dashed around the console. “You made your choice a long time ago, you said,” he muttered while twisting dials and turning levers. “You said you were never going to leave me. It’s time to keep my promise now. I told you I would always come for you—I’m not leaving you there, Rose.”

The TARDIS hummed loudly in protest as he set the transdimensional coordinates. Going through the Void was always a possibility. The only thing that had stopped him were the consequences. But even though she’d put on a brave face and promised him she would find a way home, he’d felt her agony clearly over the bond, and that drove every other thought from his mind. They were meant to be together, and he would make sure that happened.

The Doctor’s hand was on the dematerialisation lever when he felt a shift in the air on the TARDIS. He sighed and looked up, ready to ignore whatever his ship had done to distract him.

He didn’t expect to see another person standing on the other side of the console.

“What?” he asked, staring dumbly at the veiled woman.

She spun around, and her mouth fell open in a squeak of surprise. “Who are you?”

“But…” The Doctor shook his head, trying to grasp how this woman had ended up in his TARDIS.

“Where am I?” she demanded.

“What?”

Her voice rose to a shout. “What the hell is this place?”

“What? You can’t do that. I wasn’t…” The Doctor glanced at the console and the time rotor, then back at her. “We’re in flight,” he exclaimed, his voice rising in pitch on the last word. “That is, that is physically impossible! How did—”

“Tell me where I am,” the woman interrupted. “I demand you tell me right now—where am I?”

The glower on her face was almost frightening, and the Doctor rocked back on his heels. “Inside the TARDIS.”

“The what?” she asked, turning her head as if to hear better.

“The TARDIS,” he repeated.

“The what?” she asked again, her voice louder this time.

“The TARDIS!” The Doctor bent over the controls, trying to figure out how this woman had gotten into the ship. His hearts clenched when he spotted the coordinates he’d just set—if the interloper had been just a few moments later, he would have been on his way through the Void to Rose.

“The what?”

He shook his head and moved away from the navigation panel to the sensors and started a scan. “It’s called the TARDIS.”

The woman took a deep breath, drawing her shoulders back before she shouted at him. “That’s not even a proper word. You’re just saying things.”

The Doctor massaged his forehead. He already had a horrific headache from the bond tearing, and her shouting wasn’t helping. “How did you get in here?” he asked, hoping to get her on her way and back to where she belonged.

She rolled her eyes and sneered at him. “Well, obviously, when you kidnapped me. Who was it? Who’s paying you? Is it Nerys?” She looked up at the ceiling and rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, she’s finally got me back. This has got Nerys written all over it.”

The Doctor rubbed at the back of his neck. “Who the hell is Nerys?”

“Your best friend,” she hissed viciously.

“Hold on, wait a minute.” The Doctor looked the woman up and down, finally noticing her attire. “What are you dressed like that for?”

“I’m going ten pin bowling.” She gestured to her white satin gown. “Why do you think, Dumbo? I was halfway up the aisle!”

The Doctor had to clench his eyes shut to keep tears from spilling over. His own wedding had only been four months before, and while Rose hadn’t worn satin, the white dress reminded him of the sundress she’d worn when they’d exchanged their vows on the beach.

His eyes flew open when he realised the woman had just accused him of drugging her. “I haven’t done anything!” he denied vehemently.

“I’m having the police on you!” she hollered as she circled the console. “Me and my husband, as soon as he is my husband, we’re going to sue the living backside off you!”

The Doctor blocked her out again as he worked with the TARDIS, trying to get her to let him take the ginger bride back where she belonged. Even if he couldn’t go after Rose, at least then he wouldn’t be reminded of what he’d lost.

A glimmer of a memory, of a moment, teased the edges of his mind. He’d lost so much… why did he feel like he was missing even more?

The sudden realisation that five seconds of silence had passed for the first time since the woman had shown up in the TARDIS jolted him out of his thoughts. His head flew up and he spotted her running for the doors.

“No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Don’t!”

He was too late. She already had the door open, and the Doctor sighed and walked over to join her, looking out at the nebula. Normally, the flickering pinks and yellows and blues would have looked beautiful to him, but today, they just reminded him that earlier, he had been in orbit around a supernova. This nebula was what was left of his last connection to Rose.

“You’re in space. Outer space. This is my… space ship,” he told her, wincing when the TARDIS objected at the word. He patted the doorframe apologetically. “It’s called the TARDIS.”

“How am I breathing?” she asked, her voice soft for once.

“The TARDIS is protecting us.”

“Who are you?”

And finally they were getting to the important bits. “I’m the Doctor. You?” He looked at the woman, and she slowly turned towards him, her face a mask of shock.

“Donna.”

He studied her for a moment, then asked, “Human?”

“Yeah. Is that optional?”

“Well, it is for me,” the Doctor mumbled, not feeling the same impish glee he usually did when he told people he was alien.  

Donna sighed, and seemed to slump slightly as the air escaped her. “You’re an alien.”

“Yeah.”

They stared out at the nebula a moment longer, then Donna said, “It’s freezing with these doors open.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes, then slammed the doors shut and ran back to the console. “I don’t understand that and I understand everything. This this can’t happen!” He spun around and looked back at Donna, waving his hand for emphasis as he spoke. “There is no way a human being can lock itself onto the TARDIS and transport itself inside.” He shook his head and reached into the tool belt draped over the console for an ophthalmoscope. “Some sort of subatomic connection?” he muttered as he studied Donna’s eyes. “Something in the temporal field? Maybe something pulling you into alignment with the Chronon shell. Maybe something macro mining your DNA within the interior matrix. Maybe a genetic—”

Donna slapped him, and he wheeled back and gaped at her.

“What was that for?” he asked indignantly.

She drew herself up, then bellowed at him. “Get me to the church!”

The Doctor stared at her for a second longer, then tossed the  ophthalmoscope down onto the console. He’d been trying to get rid of her since she arrived anyway. “Right! Fine!” he snapped. “I don’t want you here anyway! Where is this wedding?”

“Saint Mary’s, Hayden Road, Chiswick, London, England, Earth, the Solar System.”

The Doctor nodded as she spoke, his hands moving rapidly to set the coordinates. Donna was a puzzle he and Rose would have loved to solve together, but if he couldn’t have Rose, he just wanted to be alone.

Donna paused, and when she spoke again a moment later, the accusatory voice was back. “I knew it, acting all innocent. I’m not the first, am I? How many women have you abducted?”

The Doctor looked up and froze when he saw her waving Rose’s purple blouse around. It was the same blouse he’d wept into the day he lost Rose. He felt himself trembling and he tried to look away from it, but he couldn’t.

His throat closed up, and he had to swallow twice before he could say, “That’s my wife’s.”

“Where is she, then?” Donna demanded. The hand still holding Rose’s shirt went to her hip. “Popped out for a space walk?”

The Doctor grabbed the console, picturing Rose on the beach where he’d left her less than ten minutes ago. “She’s gone,” he answered curtly.

Donna rolled her eyes. “Gone where?”

The Doctor leaned on the console and closed his eyes, getting the tears under control. “I lost her,” he mumbled, without looking at Donna.

“Well, you can hurry up and lose me!” she snapped.  

The Doctor sucked in a breath and pressed his hands to his eyes. He could see it again, Rose slipping from the lever and falling towards the Void. Pete catching her, and the last look of love she’d given him before she’d disappeared.

The silence apparently got through to Donna, because her next words were much less strident. “How do you mean, lost?”

The Doctor opened his eyes, aware that his eyelashes were wet. Donna put her hand to her mouth and set the shirt down.

“I’m sorry, Doctor.”

The empty space in the Doctor’s mind cried out for Rose. She was supposed to be here with him—she’d promised him forever. He could feel the pull of the Void again as he remembered the hope on Rose’s face when she’d first seen his projection. She’d thought he was bringing her home, but instead…

He ground his teeth together so hard that his jaw hurt. “Right, Chiswick!” He flipped the lever and sent them hurtling towards Earth—towards Earth, and away from Rose.

It soon became clear the day wouldn’t be as simple as just dropping Donna off and going back to the Vortex where he could grieve on his own. The Doctor grumbled under his breath as he chased the robot Santa who had kidnapped Donna down the motorway, but he had to admit the TARDIS’ distraction was helping.

Until Donna looked at him and asked if Rose had trusted him. Of course Rose trusted him. She’d had enough faith in him to think he’d found a way to bring her home even though he’d told her more than once that travel across the Void was impossible.

So why had he felt a glimmer of deception over the bond during their last conversation?

The Doctor shook off the realisation as soon as it struck and focused on getting Donna into the TARDIS. The sense that Rose hadn’t been wholly honest probably just meant that she’d been trying to put a brave face on their bleak situation.

Still, the sense that there was something he was missing niggled at him all day. He let one corner of his mind work at that problem while he devoted most of his attention to saving the planet one more time. But he still hadn’t figured it out when everything was resolved and he could take Donna home.

It was a bit awkward, standing with her in the street outside her parents’ home. This was when he would normally invite his new friend to travel with him, but today, he was desperate to be left alone to grieve.

He pulled out the sonic and scanned her quickly. “All the huon particles are gone,” he told Donna when the results came back clean. “So I think I’ll be off.”

Donna looked over her shoulder where they could see her parents hugging through the front window. “Yeah, I’d better get inside. They’ll be worried.”

The Doctor smiled. “Best Christmas present they could have.”

But instead of turning around and going into the house, Donna tilted her head and studied him. “Tell you what,” she said after a moment. “Christmas dinner.”

Christmas dinner, with family and crackers and the funny hats… He remembered the way Rose had smiled at him when he’d entered the flat, how they’d all laughed together when they’d put on their paper crowns… He shook his head quickly. He wasn’t ready for those memories.

Donna must have seen his answer on his face, because she nodded towards the house, an inviting smile on her face. “Oh, come on.”

“I don’t do that sort of thing,” he said, as firmly as possible.  

“You did it last year,” Donna pointed out. “You said so. And you might as well, because Mum always cooks enough for twenty.”

The Doctor remembered the meal Jackie had managed to pull together with less than twenty-four hours notice, and he wondered what the Tylers would do for Christmas in Pete’s World. “Donna I just—I can’t,” he said, his voice breaking a little. “The last time I celebrated Christmas, I was with Rose and I can’t. Not without her.”

“Rose.” Her eyes lit with comprehension. “Is that your wife’s name?”

He swallowed hard and nodded. A cold wind blew down the street, and when Donna brushed her hair out of her face, the Doctor remembered Rose doing the same thing on Bad Wolf Bay.

“Where is she, Doctor?” Donna asked, her voice softer than he’d ever heard it. “You said she’s safe and alive, but why can’t you bring her home? You obviously miss her.”

The Doctor shoved his hands into his pockets. “She’s trapped in a parallel world,” he said, his voice raspy. “And I can’t get there. If I tried, two universes would collapse.”

As he explained the situation to Donna, he remembered the look on Rose’s face when he told her the same thing. She’d been so desperately hopeful when she’d asked if he could come through properly, and he’d known exactly what she was thinking—it didn’t matter which universe they were in, as long as they were together. The bleak look in her eyes, the way she’d brushed her hand over her belly as she waited for his answer…

The Doctor froze. The feeling he’d had all day that Rose had kept something from him suddenly fell into place.

“No!” He staggered back until he was leaning against the TARDIS and shoved his hands into his hair. His fingers grabbed and pulled at his hair as he tried to convince himself he was wrong.

Instead, he remembered the determined set of her jaw when she’d said, “Mum, Dad, Mickey, and the baby.” The way her chin had wobbled a moment later when he’d tried to ask if she were pregnant. The patently fake smile she’d given him in response.

He slid down until he was crouched in front of the TARDIS, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands supporting his head as a band tightened around his chest, making it difficult to breathe. Rose was pregnant. In a parallel universe, without him. He’d left her to fumble through an inter-species pregnancy alone, and he would never see his child.

“Doctor?”

He flailed when a hand touched his shoulder, and when he looked up, Donna was standing a few feet away from him.

“What’s happened, Doctor? What’s wrong?”

He scrubbed viciously at his face, wiping away tears. Then he jumped to his feet and shot her a manic grin. A plan was already forming—he would go through and get Rose.

“You’re right, Donna. I should go get her.”

Donna blinked. “But you said two universes would collapse.”

The Doctor waved his finger at her. “Nah, ‘cause I’m brilliant. I can go get her.” He sighed when Donna raised an eyebrow. “Rose is pregnant,” he explained curtly. “I am not abandoning my pregnant wife to a parallel universe—I don’t care what the consequences are.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “And I suppose you think destroying the universe is going to win you Father of the Year?”

Her acerbic voice cut through the madness the Doctor could feel threatening at the edges of his mind. What good would it do to bring Rose home, only to have the universe shatter around them?

He looked at Donna, his eyes burning with unshed tears. “I can’t just leave them there,” he croaked. “I can’t.”

She pursed her lips. “Of course you can’t. But you need to find someone, Doctor. Someone as clever as you who can help you find a way to make it work. And…” She only hesitated a moment before ploughing on. “Someone to stop you. Because right now, you’re one bad dream away from breaking all the rules to bring them home.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor sighed. There wasn’t anyone as clever as he was—he would have to find a way to get Rose back on his own. He tugged on his ear and finally gave her a weak smile. “Thanks, Donna.”

Her compassionate smile nearly broke him. Desperate to leave before he cried in front of her, he pushed open the TARDIS door and stepped inside. Donna called his name just before he closed the door, and he looked back at her.

“When you get them back, bring Rose ‘round for a visit so I can meet her.”

Tears swam in Doctor’s eyes, and he blinked rapidly. “Yeah. Of course,” he promised.

But once he closed the door behind him and took the TARDIS back into the Vortex, every thought left his mind, save one: he had to find a way to bring them home.

#ficandchips #ten x rose #doomsday month #legendslikestardust #doctorroseprompts #cq's fic: to bring them home #angst #bloody Doomsday #Doctor Who #donna noble #in which we finally see the title and description begin to make sense #fic by Nancy