#he straight up told us we would have to write these components from memory so like. anyone who didnt study them. too bad for u i guess | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fandom-blackhole · 3 years

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Mando May 2021 Week 1 + Day 5

AN: This is the first of the Mando May prompts I will be writing for! I hope you all like this, and know that it was only minimally edited by my very tired brain and eyes, so if you see a mistake please let me know so I can fix it. Please like and REBLOG so that others can see this, and lastly I love you all :)

Prompts:

Week 1: Ke'jorhaa'i Mando'a - "Speak Mando'a"

Part of the Resol'nare (tenants defining a Mandalorian) instructs that mandalorians are to be taught or raised to speak Mando'a.

Cyare'se- loved ones

Pairing: Din Djarin x GN!Reader

Words: 1.8k

Summary: Reader walks into the cockpit to find Din teaching Grogu a language they don't recognize, but rings a bell somewhere in their mind.

Warnings?: absolutely none, just straight fluff and family cuteness! Established relationship and no use of y/n,

It had been a slow day in hyperspace. You had spent the majority of your waking hours cleaning up miscellaneous and strange stains in the belly of the Razor Crest that if you had to guess were a mixture of mainly blood or blaster residue, and fixing what wiring you could in hyperspace and what you could reach in the small spaces they were contained in, and with every stretch of your arms, you cursed Din for having such an awkward ship. You had not seen nor really heard from Din or Grogu since you had woken up and checked on them both in the cockpit making sure they had already eaten something and that they both had had something to drink and before you had left the cockpit you had made sure to lean down and give Din a quick kiss on the dome of his helmet and told him you would be doing some chores down in the hold of the ship if he needed you and with his answering nod and forehead bump you could tell that he was smiling softly, and his softly voiced affirmation reply only seemed to confirm that thought.

By this point, it had been more than a few hours at least and your arms were more than tired and sore from all the scrubbing and digging around you had been doing, so you decided that a short break to relax and recoup would be good for you. So you went and grabbed a couple of ration bars and a thing of water before heading to the cockpit, wanting to sit with your boys and figuring they might also appreciate a little snack or drink, and you just wanted to see what they had been up to while you had been busy down here.

Climbing the latter you finally heard Din’s soft voice saying something to whom you could only assume to his son, but it was so soft that you could not make out what it was he was saying. You just smiled, thinking about how happy you were that Din finally was opening up to both you and Grogu and allowing himself to speak more compared to how closed off and quiet he had been before. You knew that Din had been through so much and that he had to work through everything at his own pace, and you by no means were rushing him to show more of himself, but you remember there being days when you would just ramble and talk nonsense in hopes that he would even just speak up to tell you to stop talking, though he never did and you eventually started to think that he might actually like hearing your rambling. So now, hearing his voice so freely, yet still reserved, made you so extremely happy, and still managed to surprise you every so often, especially when he initiated conversations on his own.

It wasn’t until you pulled yourself up to sit on the edge of the latter opening in front of the doorway to the cockpit that you realized that even if you could make out what Din had been saying, you wouldn’t have had understood a second of it. The sight you were greeted with was Din, in his chair, turned to look at the secured cradle where Grogu sat eagerly soaking up his father’s attention and looking at Din with such love and adoration on his tiny face that it made your heart hurt from how much love you felt in that exact moment. You sat there and watched the two interact for a few minutes, just observing this pure father-son interaction. You listened as Din sounded out a word, again in a language that you did not quite recognize, but somehow felt familiar. You watched Din’s helmet as he nodded his head at the end of each syllable of the word, or words you weren’t quite sure if you were honest, and the whole time you searched through your memories and knowledge trying to place where the word or language came from and why it was ringing bells inside of your head. Then you were completely shocked out of your observation and attempts at recollecting by a small and higher-pitched voice, much louder than Din’s, responding in a very decent attempt at whatever Din was trying to teach, especially considering that the reply came from that small egg-shaped cradle and this was the first time you had heard Grogu try and mimic or communicate with anything past baby like chitters or babbles. And when Din praised Grogu you had to hold a hand over your chest, because your heart absolutely melted at how proud Din had sounded and how much more little Grogu’s face lit up with his ears perking up stiffly beside his tiny face showing his absolute joy.

It was then that you decided to make yourself known, and you softly spoke up saying, “That was so good Grogu! How come you never told me you two were doing language lessons….. And that language sounds so familiar but I don’t recognize it, what is it,” you ask as you slowly raise from the floor and walk over to the two boys. Din looked over at you as you approached them and as he replied you kissed the top of Grogu’s head and ran your fingers softly over his ears the way he likes.

“He is picking it up much better than I thought he would and at a fast rate. I started teaching him words here and there these last couple of months, it has only taken him a few days to learn and speak the words clearly….”

Picking up the little gremlin when he noticed and tried to steal one of the ration bars, you sat in the only open seat left in the cockpit and open the food for him and handed it to him, before looking at Din with still smiling and asked again, “And the language?”

You could feel his eyes study you for a second before he tilted his head and replied, “Mando’a, it is the language of the Mandalorian people. It is something I was taught as I was being raised by the Mandalorians, and it is very important to Mandalorian culture that all Mandalorian children are taught the language.”

Your smile broadened as he told you this. Din has never quite come out and said it explicitly that he saw Grogu has his own child, as his son. But what he just told you, and by his secret actions these last few months more than proved the bond and connection he had formed with the cute little child sitting on your lap at that moment just absolutely gnawing and destroying the hard ration bar you had handed him. The practical admittance warmed your chest and caused tears to well up in your eyes, though they did not fall. Then you replied with a whisper saying, “Wow, that is very beautiful and a great way for a child to bond with their parent or parents,” it was then that you kind of trailed off feeling nervous at the thought that popped into your head, so you looked away from the visor of the helmet watching you intently, “And, um, this only applies to the children?”

You could feel the confusion flowing off of Din after you asked this question, it was quite obvious that he was trying to figure out how to respond or even what you yourself were thinking. The two of you sat in silence for a long while, and it wasn’t until after Grogu had finished one ration bar and you had him drink some water before handing him a second that you finally heard Din’s deep voice speak up, and you would rather not admit it, but you did jump slightly when he spoke up because after such a long pause you had begun to think that he was not going to answer the question nor continue this conversation.

“Do... Cyare, do you want to learn Mando’a,” and as he asked this question you could hear an almost breathless shock to his voice that made you look up at him and see that he was almost completely leaning out of his chair in an attempt to be closer to you. Shyly you bit your lip and nod before speaking up, “I just thought that it would be nice to have something all three of us could do you know? And I have been wanting to learn more about your culture because I know it means so much to you…..”

Again a silence engulfs the three of you, and the tension was almost palpable, though Grogu acted absolutely indifferent to the thickness in the air. As the tension kept building more and more, you got more and more anxious. Eventually, it got to be too much for you to handle and you decided to speak up and take the words back, scared you had made Din uncomfortable, but Din beat you to it, “If you would like, we can start with the word I was teaching Grogu when you came up here?”

The smile that grew on your face from the excitement hurt your cheeks because they had never stretched as wide as they did at that moment. You nodded eagerly, crossing your arms more tightly around the small child you still held in your lap. Din nodded and spoke up after a moment, “The word we were working on is cyare’se, this is the word we use to say loved ones.”

You nodded and took a second before trying to say it yourself, and when you did you knew right away you absolutely butchered the word, and it just did not come out as smoothly as it did when Din had said it. You could feel the heat rising in your face from embarrassment, but then Din nodded and said, “Not bad for you’re first attempt, try again. Cyare’se, shar - AY - say.”

This time after he said the word again, he broke down the pronunciation much like he had been doing for Grogu, and if you were honest with yourself it did make it much easier to understand all the components of the word, so this time when you tried to say it, you started off saying it slowly as Din had done, before putting it all together and saying the word near perfectly. And much like he had also done for Grogu, Din praised you saying, “Absolutely perfect, cyare. I could have not said it better myself.”

Grinning widely again, you giggle and said, “That’s where I recognized the word from! That name you are always calling me, it sounds like the beginning of cyare’se. What does that one mean,” you asked earnestly and Din chuckled slightly in response before looking to the side himself, from what you could only assume to be shiness.

“Well, cyare is much like a pet name in Basic. It, uh, means loved or beloved.”

(If you would like to be tagged in the remaining Mando May prompts let me know! Not all will revolve around Din and Grogu though! Thank you for reading and all likes and REBLOGS are appreciated!)

#mandomay2021 #week 1 prompt #day 5 promt #din djarin x reader #din x reader #din djarin x gn!reader #din x gn!reader #grogu #razor crest

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factual-fantasy · 4 years

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٩(●ᴗ●)۶

I think its about time I drew Vega getting a hug. After the events of this comic, Miata’s the only person he’s close to or knows. So when he’s really struggling, its Miata that comes to the rescue.

Well, all the Decepticons that were on that ship are guilty of hurting Escort.

However.. Reaper was the one who snatched him off the ship in the first place, and he was the one who hurt him the most, and he told the other cons to use more voltage when shocking him so.. his hands are the most bloody.

I’m assuming you meant Brown Suburban. If Blue Suburban was your mood I’d be worried about you. XD

And thank you, 🥺 I’m trying my best to get my energy back. I’m glad these memes are passable, at least that’s what I think you telling me I’m doing great at. 😅

I’ve realized it now! I’m going to try and keep working on it for you!

The only thing slowing me down is that the timeline got jumbled up a little. I had a story planned but as I started writing it, I realized that the events and locations wouldn’t fit the characters or the situation very well.

So what I’m trying to do is take the same idea, but give it a more fitting play out.. which is going a little slower that I’d like to admit..

THANK YOUUUUU!!!! IM SO GLAD YOU LIKED IT!!! :}}}

That’s something I don’t actually really understand about myself if I’m being honest. Usually, my memory is absolutely horrendous. I cant remember SCRAP, no matter WHAT it is.

But with my own characters? My memory storage is endless. I can remember all of their stories, their personality builds, their favorite colors, things they love, things they hate, their relationships, EVERYTHING.

Its so frustrating that my memory is trash elsewhere, but at least its convenient for drawing my characters. Anyway, thank you again. :} It makes me happy to hear that would like to read more! I’ll keep trying to work on that one wip I’ve got going on. :D

If you pointed some kind of gun at them, Escort would freak out and run away, while Bash Buggy would just stare at you trying to figure out what you’re holding.

Also, pfft- Who needs SeLf lOvE, when they each have their own Suburban's to love them??

A contact in Antarctica? Oh well, then that person is going to have to come to us. Escort wouldn't last a minute out there in that cold.

Oh man, can you imagine how awful that would be?

I can imagine if cupcakes were falling down that fast from that high up, they could seriously hurt humans if one hit them.

Imagine how hard it would be to clean a Cybertronian that got caked in the falling cupcakes? Like, if someone was in their car form and got covered in cupcakes, if they were to transform back? Oh man. Parts of their body that were once in the outside are now on the inside. They would get frosting and bread in every crack and crevasse in their body.

The bread and wrapping would be thick enough to jam up their inner components and the frosting would totally clog up their vents and air ways. Some of the wrappings might get caught in between two sensitive internal organs and could cause great pain.

Just imagine this for a sec. Some of the bots come back from a mission just COVERED in cupcakes. At first it doesn’t seem like a big deal, just annoying, funny even.

But then Escort starts coughing. And so does Green Truck, and then Miata. People start cough up frosting and cupcake wrappers because when they transformed, it got all jammed up in between their organs and it made its way into their tanks. Green Truck may be able to handle it because his engine is so strong, but Escorts engine is very weak and Miata’s is very small.

Then suddenly Brown Suburban becomes unsteady and he says he’s starting to feel unwell. Then Red Van gets a headache out of nowhere, and Volvo starts getting light headed. Escort starts coughing violently and then collapses. Miata nearly does the same but ends up just plopping down on the floor and is unable to get up.

Having all these foreign substances on their bodies would easily make them slip into their bodies. All it takes is transforming, and then all that gunk goes right up into their vents and into their fuel tanks. At best it makes them sick and damages or shuts down an organ or two. Worst case scenario it’ll kill them.

It really makes you appreciate being a human you know? We have skin. No cracks or crevasses on our arms or legs for cupcake frosting to get into and infect.

Unfortunately, the perfect baby boy that is Escort, is not okay. 😔

And I’m glad you liked my meme! My favorite two were these ones XD

Thank you.. I.. I really appreciate that.

I feel this need to make you guys happy and draw what interests you, not me.. and making memes?.. like.. yeah, they make me laugh and get my energy back up a little but.. I feel like you guys don’t want to see that.

You guys want drawings don’t you? Not random memes that only really make sense to me right? At least that’s what I feel.

I just want to make people feel better. I want to make people happy. And drawing these characters seems to do it, so when I have no energy and do other things instead, I feel guilty.

Thank you for understanding. I’m just making these memes to help get my motivation and energy back up. I really appreciate you putting up with it and baring with me until I get my head back on straight.

Again, thank you. This means a lot to me, more than I think you know.

#my response #transformer ocs #my orignal stuff

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conceptstage · 4 years

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A Funny Trick

AO3

She doesn’t really remember meeting Bren. He was just always a part of her life. She doesn’t have a single memory of a time when she didn’t know him. His mother worked on her father’s vineyard, that must have been why she was allowed to hang out with him since usually her mother wouldn’t allow her to associate with poor kids.

During the day, while their parents were working, he would come up to the house and hang out with her. He called it babysitting but Beau called it friends.

Bren frowned and just flipped to the next page in his book. “I am just your babysitter, Beauregard,” he said in his thick zemnian accent.

“But I’m not a baby and you’re not my boss, so it’s not babysitting.” She was practicing her somersaults in the grass a few feet away from him. She was getting really good at them.

“What else would you call it when someone pays an older person to watch their child while they’re away?”

“A funny trick. You got my Mommy to pay you for being friends with me, very good idea.”

He chuckled a little and rolled his eyes. “You are five, I am fourteen. We are not friends. I care for you but we cannot be friends.”

“Why?”

“Because you are five. You should make friends your own age.”

Beau pouted and crossed her arms. “But they don’t like me!” she complained. “The kids around here won’t be my friends.”

Bren sighed and shut his book, using his thumb as a bookmark. “I am sure that’s not true. Why do you think that they don’t like you?”

“They told me.”

He blinked in shock. “I… Oh. Perhaps you just misunderstood?”

“Anne said ‘You’re stupid and annoying, go away, we don’t like you’.”

He hummed thoughtfully. “Yes, that is difficult to misunderstand.”

“So, see? You have to be my friend cause you’re the only person in the world who likes me.”

He thought about it for a long moment and turned back to his book, though it didn’t seem like he was reading it. “Maybe we can be friends when you are older, ja?”

She frowned and started kicking at the grass, angry and sad. “Fuck you.”

Bren looked up at her sharply. “Beauregard! Where did you learn that!” She grinned and laughed and started running away from him. He tossed the book away and started to run after her but she was so fast that he couldn’t catch up. “Do not say that in front of your parents! They will kill me!”

Bren babysat her for a little while longer, until he got accepted into the fancy smancy magic academy in Rexxentrum. Beau sat down on his suitcase and pouted, her arms crossed over her chest.

“You’re not going.”

Bren sighed but there was a small, fond smile on his face as he packed up his component bag. “Beau, I will miss you too, but I have to go to school.”

“No you don’t! You don’t though. You can stay here and work for me when I take over the business. I promise I’ll be the best boss ever, you can have ice cream whenever you want.”

“I do appreciate that, danke. But this is what I want to do with my life, Beau. This is important to me.”

“I thought I was important too! You told me I was your little sister!” She was valiantly holding in her tears but she couldn’t stop her bottom lip from wobbling.

He chuckled and turned to kneel down so that they were face to face. “You will always be my kleine schwester, ja? Always. But I have to go to school now. I will write you letters all the time.”

“But I can’t read.”

“Then maybe you should start learning.” He walked over to his bookshelf and dusted off a small novel hidden in the back. It was a short, easy story about a woman who was competing to marry a prince and was sabotaged by the prince’s mother who put a pea under a stack of mattresses. He walked it back over to her and handed it over and she squinted at it suspiciously, turning it over in her hands. “This was my favorite book when I was a few years older than you. You are not ready for it now, but you can hold onto it until you are and then you can send me a letter to tell me about it.”

She reluctantly got off of his suitcase when Bren’s father came up to take it down to the carriage waiting outside, holding the book tight against her chest. She refused to let go of Bren’s hand until she had no choice. He hugged his parent’s goodbye and wiped away his mother’s tears and turned to leave.

Her new babysitter was a mean older woman who used to babysit her mother when she was Beau’s age. She had a lot of rules, stupid rules that seemed designed to make Beau misrable.

Young ladies must always wear dresses, never slacks, and most certainly never shorts.

Young ladies must spend their time learning piano, or embroidery, or dancing.

Young ladies must eat with their mouth closed.

Young ladies must never have skinned knees or grass stains.

Young ladies must never call people ‘poo poo heads’.

Sometimes she hated being a young lady.

She got letters from Bren every few months. He sent them along with letters to his mother and she would bring them over to her before she started work for the day. Beau would stuff the letter into her petticoats until she could find time to hide it in her room. She couldn’t read it all yet, she understood some of the words, and she wanted to save them for the day she could read the whole thing.

Over the years, the letters got fewer and farther between. At the beginning, she got letters once a month, then they spaced out to once every three months, then twice a year, then one letter at Harvest Close. They got short too. The first letters were several pages long, full of stories from school. As she learned to read she would reread his letters every night until she knew them by heart. After a few years she had less and less to read. The last letter she got was only half a page long. It was cold and detached, wishing her a happy Harvest Close.

She knew that his mother still got letters but whenever Beau asked if one had come for her, his mother would give her a small smile and pet her hair. “I am sure he is just getting busy, little one. He will send you another letter soon.” But he never did.

She was eight when his parents died.

People said they left a fire burning in the stove when they fell asleep and suffocated in their beds.

Bren hadn’t come to the ceremony.

She never forgot about him, her first and only real friend, her brother, but as the years passed he sort of receded to the back of her mind. She was forced to leave his letters and book behind when she got shipped off to the Cobalt Soul but at that point she had long accepted that she would never see him again.

The day she left Zadash was the anniversary of the day that he left for school. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it was fate.

She looked up when someone walked down the stairs, idly listening to Jester’s story as she spoke quickly and excitedly. Fjord was watching Jester and smiling a little as she ate but he was probably too tired to join the conversation, he’d gotten really beat up the day before.

The stairs creaked as a man with long, curly red-brown hair stepped down the stairs. He was dirty, dusted with dirt and dried blood. He was wearing a too big coat and a heavy scarf that covered the lower half of his face as he and his smaller friend made their way over to the table next to them. He didn’t look up, just watched his feet as he moved.

He sort of reminded her of someone. Maybe if he walked with his back straight and his chin up high, maybe if he smiled kindly, maybe if he had his hair immaculately styled and cleaned… Maybe he would almost be her long-lost friend. She turned away from him and started listening to Jester once more. When Jester finished her story, Beau and Fjord started talking about their plans for the day and counting their money but paused when Jester suddenly leaned over to their table neighbors.

“Are you two staying here?”

The halfling(?) froze and her big eyes blinked under her bandages. “Don’t move. Tieflings can only see movement.”

The red haired man frowned. “I do not think that is-”

“No it’s true we have a very hard time seeing things that aren’t moving. But I can hear you. You should take a bath. They have baths here, you know.”

The man looked surprised. “I- What?”

“You wash yourself with water.”

“Ja, I know what a bath is.”

Jester leaked even farther and started to whisper loudly. “It’s because you smell really bad! And I would hate if I smelled that bad and someone didn’t tell me.”

The man blinked at her like he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. It was a very Bren-like expression that made Beau’s chest feel tight. “I- I have only just met you.” It was strange to meet someone else with that accent. The Ermendruds were the only other people with it that she’d met before now. Maybe this man was a distant relative.

“Hi, I’m Jester!” Jester said, reaching out to shake his hand.

The man just stared at the offered hand and kept his own hands in his pockets. “C-Caleb.”

Jester shook her empty hand. “Nice to meet you, Caleb. How much silver did I get?”

Beau looked down at the three piles in front of her. “Seven.”

“Woo!”

The red haired man finally looked up at her and met her eyes. He gave her a… curious look, like he wasn’t sure what to make of her.

“And 16 copper.” The eyes didn’t leave hers, getting wider and wider as Caleb seemed to come to a realization.

He jumped to his feet and grabbed for his little friend's arm, hauling her back towards the stairs. “It was very nice to meet you all, have a good day. Jester,” he said as he disappeared up the stairs. “Beauregard.”

“Caleb?” the halfling screeched, her voice fading as she got farther away. “What’s going on, what’s wrong?”

Beau watched him leave and exchanged a glance with Fjord across from her. He frowned and crossed his arms. “That was weird.”

“Yeah,” she said. “He looked really familiar.”

“No, I meant… You never told him your name.”

Beau frowned. Then, it was like getting hit by a train.

“That son of a bitch,” she hissed, throwing herself out of her chair and marching up the stairs after them. “I’m going to kill him! Don’t you run from me, you piece of shit! You have some explaining to do!”

#critical role #critical role fic #beauregard #caleb widogast #Empire Kids #empire siblings #disaster siblings #long post

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literallyjustanerd · 5 years

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4:51am - 80s AU (Warren Worthington III/Kurt Wagner)

Part of a series of oneshots I’ve been writing about my favourite boys in various historical settings. This is only part one of this chapter, more soon to come! Please let me know what you think, and feel free to check out the rest of my (mostly gay) writing here

This chapter: the 80s, in which Warren wears leather, gets drunk, and pours a gas can of angst over his head while thinking about various parts of his life.

11:42pm, September 1986

“Double rum and coke.” The bartender’s brow furrows, leaning across the bar with her ear tilted towards Warren. “Rum and coke. Double,” Warren says again, voice raised louder against the pounding music. She nods her understanding and pulls out a fresh glass, as Warren slumps on his elbows against the bartop, tugging at the back of his leather jacket until it once again sits comfortably against the bases of his wings. Alone and six drinks passed the point of sober, he is eager to fill himself with as much liquid distraction as possible. The goal is to stuff his mind to the brim with alcohol and nicotine and neon lights and electronic music, leaving no room for any of the many anxieties and frustrations that nag at the edge of his thoughts. No room for him, no room for them, or for that. Just drinking and dancing and forgetting. And this place, this hole in the wall set deep in lower Manhattan, is the perfect place for forgetting. The kind of place where you catch glimpses of people you know; friends, colleagues, old high school classmates; only for both of you to immediately avert your gaze and pretend neither saw a thing. The kind of place that the ostensibly-closeted mutant son of an affluent businessman should by no means be spending his Tuesday night.

The drink is poured, and Warren downs it all at once, the plastic glass skittering across the counter as he discards it. Gathering his strength, he pushes off from the harbour of the bar to venture into the ocean before him. A thundering beat penetrates his ears, bright strobing lights whirl in and out of his vision, and he dissolves into the crowd, allowing its push and pull to swallow him whole like a relentless tide. The crowd, faceless and amorphous, is eager to welcome him home. An arm collides with his shoulder, a back presses persistently into the feathers of his wing, the pressure both comforting and exhilarating. The pounding of the drums is all-consuming, and Warren is not moving so much as he is being moved by it, hanging off its every ebb and flow and gladly submitting himself to its power. Its thrall is so compelling that Warren’s very heartbeat has become entwined with it, so that when the tune finally fades out, the brief transition between songs stops his heart altogether, until a different rhythm kicks up and the ritual begins again.

2:09am Years pass in seconds, and as though being pulled from a dream, Warren is ushered out of the club along with the crowd that had become his home, thrust unwilling into the cold night air of the real world. Staggering on his feet, he drags himself to the curb, shaking his wings out in the newfound space. The people who surround him laugh, and the sound seems to echo in Warren’s ears as they pass him, sparing no glance for the drunken mutant they had just been so intimately acquainted with. The stench of cigarette smoke is somehow just as strong on the sidewalk as it had been inside and Warren breathes it deeply before sticking out a hand to try and hail the cabs circling, like vultures waiting to pick off the faded partygoers. Out here, there is more room to think, and though he tries to fight them off, Warren’s thoughts begin to trickle back in, muddled and barely coherent in his stupor.

Months had passed since that day, yet Warren still feels the rush of meeting him as though it had been that very morning. He’d only just settled into the house that Xavier built, barely begun to let down his guard to the other mutants there, the ones that called themselves the X-Men. He’d been told to expect new teammates to appear sporadically as the Professor rounded them up and offered them positions, so he wasn’t surprised when Jean had told him one morning that there was one such newcomer waiting to be introduced in the living room. No, that wasn’t surprising at all. But when he dragged himself and his morning coffee into the lounge, when his eyes had alighted on that bright, innocent smile and downright bubbly “guten tag,” he felt like he’d been knocked upside the head. By now he was good at keeping his cool whenever he felt the tug of attraction stirring up his insides. He’d learned to stay composed years ago, for the sake of self-preservation more than anything. But this, oh god, this was something else entirely.

In reality, it had taken weeks for the feelings to reach their peak, to grow to the point that Warren’s stomach knotted whenever Kurt laughed at one of his jokes and he felt like crying whenever Kurt smiled his perfect, blameless smile. But in the twisted concoction of his memories, it felt as though he’d been that hopelessly, pitifully smitten since the very first moment. And it hadn’t gone away, no matter how much Warren had scolded himself. Again and again he’d broken through the terrifying high that Kurt’s company gave him to remind himself that he was always one tiny misjudgement away from a one-way ticket to shame and alienation, the last thing he wanted after finally finding a group who he knew accepted at least one of the less media-friendly components of his identity. He still felt it, though. He still dreamt.

2:31am The cab driver does not try to make conversation when Warren collapses onto the faded leather seat. For this, Warren is both relieved and unnerved. The drone of the easy listening radio station in the front seat is hardly enough to keep his own thoughts at bay, and he turns his gaze out the window, streetlights passing in a steady rhythm, bathing Warren in a sickly glow that turns his wings from white to yellow-gold and back each moment. He steals a glance of the cab driver— older, moustachioed, eyes dark and intense. As slow and muddled as his thoughts have become, Warren still catches notice of how hard the man is gripping the steering wheel, how his mouth seems to quirk as though in deep conversation with himself. It’s because of the wings. That’s why he isn’t speaking to you. The voice snarls from deep within Warren’s subconscious, punching him in the gut. Why would he speak to a mutant? Why would he speak to a mutant he picked up from a gay bar? You’re lucky he even took your ride at all.

His breath hisses as he sucks it in through his teeth. He knows this voice well. It is the ball and chain that keeps him tethered to the ground, prevents him from ever straying too far into the foolish fantasy that he might someday be able to live without shame, without guilt. It first arose shortly after his wings began growing, and reached its loudest on the day before he took up a room at the Xavier mansion.

“Didn’t you think for even a moment about how this affects my reputation?! You can’t just do these things, Warren!” That night, the night he’d finally given up on the tenuous, volatile relationship he had with his father, was cold. The rain pounded outside, so the volume of the TV was raised high, forcing their voices higher still to be heard above it. The news story before them showed aerial shots of the city from earlier in the day: another mutant rights protest, this one surrounding the very research facility that Warren’s father owned and operated. “I was just talking to them, okay? They’re mutants, too. They know what it’s like, they say they can help me to—” “Help you? They think they can help you? There is help for you, Warren! We tried to help you, we showed you a cure, and you refused us!” “Maybe I don’t need to be cured!” he had blurted, eyes wide, angry and fearful. “Of course you do! Look at yourself, look at those godforsaken wings! None of this is natural.” “Then why did it happen?” Warren’s father made a predatory noise, a wolfish growl. His mother, sat on the other end of the sofa, had her eyes in her lap, stiff and unmoving as though she believed she could make herself invisible just by keeping still and silent. “I’ll make this simple for you, boy,” his father spat. “Only because you’re too thick-headed to know what’s good for you. Either you get your head on straight and get yourself fixed, or you get your shit and get out of this house. And don’t even think about coming back.”

Warren had moved out the next day, taken everything he could fit into the few suitcases he could carry. As unstable as his relationship with his parents had been since his mutation had manifested, he’d never expected to have to take up the Professor’s offer of a room at the school. Nor had he expected to enjoy being surrounded by others with their own weird and wonderful powers and abilities like his. As comforting as it was, though, it did little to dull the voice. It still visited him: at night, when he had nothing else to distract him from his darkest thoughts. Out on the street, when mothers pulled their children closer and sped up to walk past him on the sidewalk. When he caught himself daydreaming about running his hand through thick, black hair, smiling down into bright golden eyes. Different, it sneered. Different and wrong. Different and broken. Different and a mistake.

3:15am Warren is jostled from his reverie as the cab pulls off the road and onto the gravel driveway of the mansion. He blinks hard, though it does nothing to clear his head or focus his eyes. He digs through the pocket of his too-tight jeans and fishes out his wallet, thrusting a fistful of notes gracelessly toward the driver. As the man counts out his change, Warren takes note of the beads of water gathering on the windshield, glowing golden in the headlights. He doesn’t remember when it had started raining, but he does welcome the feeling of the fine mist against his face as he steps out of the cab. Far from the bustle and life of the inner city, the mansion is a silent, looming black mountain before him. The crunching of gravel beneath his feet feels impolite, like speaking in a movie theatre or laughing too loud in a restaurant. And yet, as he reaches the large oak doors, his eyes catch on a hint of light, past the entryway and into the living room beside the kitchen. Someone is up, someone is awake, there is life in this old house at such a late, deadened hour. And, with both a swelling and a sinking in his chest as he manages his key in the lock, he thinks he knows just who it is.

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flyswhumpcenter · 4 years

Text

Bad Things Happen Bingo! The event where you send me requests according to this marvelous card! (Red cross is the completed prompt, character headshots are prompts I’ve already filled.)

"It's an enticing nectar, laced with deceits, Piercing straight through my heart-- ARROW" -ARROW, English translation

God, it's already my 2nd-to-last square to write for? That's kinda sad... It's been a hot, what, 6 months since I've written some TC? Truth be told, I was planning on filling "Sleep Deprivation" with Derek, but then a request came along... I still plan on finishing the WIP I have lying around for it because it was really fun to throw that on a Word file. Also are y'all ready for Uncle Fly's wacky nervous angsty wild ride because I guess this is set in an AU-ish timeline where PGS was found much earlier than 2021. This is kinda meant to be set in 2020 because why not, but the one mention of the date would rather remind you of 2019. Let's just say Derek is like your truly's and born at the end of the year. Anyway! The people in the TC server were really excited for this one so I hope I won't disappoint them. I tried some new and experimental things there so I hope it won't be too distracting or too much italics. Btw, can we bring the TC fandom back to life for 2020? It's the 15th anniversary of the franchise and the year Trauma Team happens in!

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Arrow to the Heart

Summary: GUILT getting eradicated didn't mean the staff of Caduceus USA were allowed to roam around freely without risking their lives every minute. Angie, Derek and Leslie all saw that through a different lense, caught between the memories of a dire crisis for Caduceus Europe and the drops spilled all over the operation table.

Fandom: Trauma Center Relationships: Pre-rel Derek/Angie, platonic Angie & Leslie, some focus on platonic Tyler & Derek

Wordcount: 5K words

Event hosted by @badthingshappenbingo

AO3 version available here.

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As a blurry ceiling appears before her, a soft, familiar voice makes itself heard.

“Angie?”

Tilting her head to the right, struck with a terrible case of lethargy, her vision finally focuses: it’s her friend and workmate, hovering over her. She has a concerned expression on her face and a notepad in her hands, clutched against her chest.

“L-Leslie…?”

As her eyes finish focusing, she realizes she knows this place: it’s a room at Caduceus. Why she’s there is vague at best and undecipherable at worst, but her throat is hoarse and she doesn’t feel like asking questions. She can only guess she still has some anaesthetic running in her system, considering the dull pain she has on her chest and shoulder.

“Yeah, that’s me, good deduction,” she says with a soft giggle. “How are you doing?”

“I’m… alive, I suppose…”

“You can thank Derek for that. He’s stabilized you before you’ve arrived there. I don’t know how he managed to pull that out, but I guess that’s what surgeons like him can do.”

Oh, right. She kind of remembers something now…

Turns out it was all a trap.

Well, of course it was. Now that he thought about it, something really wasn’t right with how they even got there. They got called for a situation eerily similar to a possible GUILT case, assuming the patient could have contracted PGS due to the former being extinct for the past two years of so. The condition of said patient was declining by the second, so they were rushed together to the scene.

If he went in like it was business as usual, Angie had picked on the negative vibes she was getting from it all, urging him to go slower and be more cautious. Dumb and naïve as he still kind of was, he preferred running around the place, wondering where the patient could be. As he called for one, absolutely divulging they were from Caduceus (with Angie not-so-silently trying to remind him not to do that and exert caution), the only thing he found was sudden, piercing, burning pain.

“Wait… I… What happened…?”

“We wanted to ask you that,” Leslie replies in a more solemn tone. “From what little we could gather, Derek and you got shot when going for an on-field surgery.

“Ah, I… I do remember that… Turned out that…”

Turns out there had never been any patient, just a Delphi renegade, armed with a gun, few bullets and quite literally nothing left after escaping confinement from the rest of society.

“Do you remember anything else?”

Angie’s memories swim for a moment, trying to gather and brace themselves. Drop by drop, tear by tear, wave by wave, it comes back to her, slowly, surely. She clears her throat.

Before he ran out of bullets, the renegade cowered away, leaving them with nothing but contemplating their own injuries. Hiding behind the wall of a little street, not too far from the stench of the almost-full trash bins and surrounded by heavy almost-silence, they were finally safe enough to open a light. To his displeasure, as soon as he tried to see whatever’s surrounding them, he spotted two things he didn’t like in the slightest: their surgery kit on the ground, half open, and a panting Angie next to the slightly scattered tools.

The first thing he noticed were the two bullet holes she had in her left shoulder and the right side of her abdomen. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to have hurt a lot of vital components and didn’t delve too deep into her flesh. Still, if he didn’t do anything, even with help coming their way eventually, she’d die on them; and he didn’t plan on letting that course of events happen. Not on his watch, never.

He sent a distress signal from his phone to Caduceus, then turned back to her, already grabbing the gloves and antibacterial gel from the case.

“I see…” Leslie seems conflicted, to say the least. “At least, you got out alive of this terrible situation. We even expect you to make a quick recovery!”

“My wounds aren’t too bad, then?” Her voice was starting to win over the sleeping gas. Good.

“No! Again, they’d have been worse if Derek hadn’t stabilized you on the scene, but your wounds really aren’t bad. That man must have been a lousy shooter.”

“R-right… Derek tried to…”

“Angie? You’re still with me?” He asked, trying to get her to stir back to consciousness.

Dishevelled strands of hair move with her quick, shallow breathing. She was obviously suffering, but nodded anyway, the blood already pouring from the wound and staining her pink uniform.

“Okay good… I… I can’t afford to anesthetize you, right now, so… I’m really sorry for what’s gonna happen!”

Her face slowly distorted even further.

“Y… You’re not gonna do that, right, Derek…?” She had an awkward, pained smile full of disbelief on her face.

“If I don’t, you may… You may not make it!”

She shut her eyes close for a few moments, then sighed heavily, slowly. He expected a rebuttal of some sorts, despite how much blood was spilling from the bullet holes, but she instead smiled and gazed at him with drooping eyes.

“…Then, let’s start the operation, Doctor.”

“I’ll try making it as painless as possible,” he repeated to both her and himself. “I won’t let you down, Angie.”

Leslie’s lips were sewn shut by her retelling of their conversation in the little alleyway.

“To be honest with you… His job was sloppy. The bandages he put on your injuries weren’t straight. Of course, usually, we’d have had a conversation with him about that, but…”

“But?”

“Because of the circumstances, I don’t think we’re allowed to be any harsh on him for rubbing antibiotic gel improperly.”

“Oh God.”

“What’s wrong, Angie?”

“I remember that now. Vaguely, but… I remember.”

The pain in his chest was excruciating, but that was besides the point. Angie needed him, right at that moment, to be strong and do his job. He had become a surgeon to save lives and what was a surgeon if he couldn’t do so for his assistant, his most trusted friend and ally? Besides, he needed to repay her for the time she helped Naomi save him from the demons trying to tear his heart apart. With blurring vision and trembling hands, he’d do his job, fulfil his mission. Even if it were to be its last, he’d successfully conduct this operation.

It wasn’t like he was the only one in pain either. Angie’s usually soft features were distorted by the suffering he was inflecting upon her by not being able to anesthetize her. Still, as much as he desired Cybil would be there by their side to allow for such a thing, she wasn’t there with us; so it was all on him, with the little he had at his disposal to deal with this.

“I kept passing out and waking up, only to lose consciousness again. It was… terrifying. I thought we’d both die here and there, again and again.”

“When we found the both of you, you were barely conscious and your dress was half-zipped. Derek lost consciousness before he could finish dressing you back up.”

God, she must have been out of it for her not have been embarrassed to be so exposed in such a creepy context. The circumstances are all to blame on that one.

“…How is he, then?”

Leslie goes silent.

“How’s Derek?” Angie repeats, impatience and fear building in her throat.

The silence gets heavier. And heavier. And heavier.

The scene was grizzly to say the least. He had dropped blood everywhere his hands had gone for the past minutes. Angie’s vitals weren’t smiling in the slightest, her moments of consciousness getting shorter and shorter each time she couldn’t tolerate what he was pulling her through. It was for her good, only for her survival chances not to plummet to the ground.

He was getting there too: he had removed the bullet in her abdomen and patched that up with some membranes they miraculously had packed in (which, considering they had suspected PGS, didn’t make a lot of sense; but Angie still put them in just in case they’d face Deftera or Tetarti). He was on his way to removing the second one, even if his hands weren’t steady anymore and his vision was turning into a guessing game if he didn’t spend a few long seconds focusing on one object. Still, adrenaline was keeping him running, anxiety and fear of death ringing behind his eyes and in all of his nerves, so he’d manage.

Not like he had a choice anyway.

“…He’s not woken up yet,” Leslie finally says with a heavy sigh and her hands twitching right under Angie’s gaze. “Tyler was supposed to operate on him, but he broke down when realizing how bad the damage was.”

Leslie was tenser than ever as she presided to the pre-operation conference with Tyler and Sidney. The nervous glance the former was darting towards the latter just showed he knew how wrong the situation was before she could even speak up about it. She had always hated being a bird of bad news; this wouldn’t change today.

“The patient is a twenty-seven-year old man who got shot twice in the abdomen. The bullets don’t seem to have hit anything major, only grazed them. The few things we need to be wary about are the high risk of internal and external haemorrhage, along with the possibility of him being afflicted with PGS happening as the patient previously contracted GUILT, these being Kyriaki and—”

“The fuck is that, Les’?!”

Tyler’s voice was oddly serious. The death stare he gave her made her legs shake and her arms shiver further than they had done when she had first learnt of the situation.

“W-what do you mean?”

“The patient’s name! It’s… It’s some kind of sick joke, right?! That has to be!”

“There are no “jokes” of any kind here, Dr Chase,” Sidney intervened. “If we don’t operate immediately, he’ll die. Get ready right now.”

“…Of course, Director.”

“So… Then… is Derek…?”

Her colleague takes time to find a way to answer. Her chest seems to weigh like lead threatening to snap the rope keeping it standing. During their few years working at the same place against the same threats, she doesn’t remember having seen Leslie this stressed, this anxious about anything, especially not when the life of someone they both knew was the matter. Then again, Angie wasn’t in the USA, when Caduceus Europe had to break terrible news to their American counterpart. She was right there, in the middle of the panic and the tears she didn’t want to spill. And even then, even when remembering how nauseous she’d get just thinking about what could be happening to him, what could happen would Naomi be unable to save the day —

Even with all of this considered, right at that moment, Angie feels like she’s just opened Pandora’s Box.

Tyler had tears flowing down his face, hands trembling, as he painfully removed the second bullet. It was the first time she had ever seen him in such a state, at least, the first time since Amy had gotten saved by, well… the very man they were currently trying to save, whose vitals kept trying to plummet to the ground as they watched the blood they were transfusing into his veins pour right out of the wounds. The syringe he was holding with unstable fingers had just hit the ground, breaking in a thousand shards and splattering some stabilizer around the crash site.

“What’s wrong?” She asked. Not that she didn’t have her own idea as to what was going so awfully incorrectly at the moment, but she was still surprised by how distressed Tyler was. For such a naturally talented surgeon to panic this way…

“I-I don’t know!!” He screamed, breathing hitching, hands crimson. I just… I just…”

Before he could put an end to his stuttering, a new party entered the room, dressed in scrubs and already grabbing the forceps on the surgical tool tray.

“Step aside and calm yourself down, Dr Chase. I’ll take care of it.”

He gulped, but nonetheless, Tyler stepped back from the operation table, right as she moved to dry his tears with a tissue.

“I’m sorry, Doctor, I don’t know…”

“Enough, we’re running out of time. Please monitor the vitals for me, that’s all I ask.”

“Will do, Doctor.”

“Leslie, get a syringe of stabilizer ready”.

“On it, Doctor.”

Dr Hoffman’s arrival changed the air in the OR from desperate to tense and solemn. There simply was the feeling he’d manage to pull a miracle like Derek had done so before their eyes before. In a heavy and serious tone, one that didn’t betray any panic whatsoever, he ended the conversation:

“Let’s save him, once and for all. Failure isn’t an option.”

“If it wasn’t for Dr Hoffman stepping in, we’d have lost Derek. I honestly never saw Tyler gets this wound up by anything in the OR like that before…”

“That must have been terrifying to see…”

“And it was! We went over it after the operation was over, and he confessed to me he couldn’t seeing him that way. Makes me wonder how you pulled through him getting infected with GUILT…”

Sidney suddenly entered the room, almost as suddenly as everyone was convoked here, his workplace phone in hand, eyes sombre behind his glasses reflecting part of the neon lights of their lounge. It had been a slow day until now as the GUILT epidemic had been mostly subdued, leaving them with the wiggle room and luxury to wait for a patient to come in; even if that didn’t make any of them think any less of how odd it was for them to be called here so brutally. Still, from the corner of her eye, Leslie noticed something else that was weird: Victor was there too.

Victor, who never came out of his laboratory unless forced to, was there with us, crossing his arms as he walked behind Sidney and laid back against the wall. From the gazes she exchanged with Tyler, she knew he found it suspicious too. If even Victor was there, it meant Sidney was more than deadly serious about this.

“Is everyone here yet?”

“Victor was the last person we were waiting on,” Stephen said from behind Sidney, even if the questioning expression in his eyes and on his face indicated he must have been as clueless as they all were.

“Good,” he replied as he came closer, putting his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Everyone, if I have gathered you all here on such a short notice. However, what I have to tell you is too urgent not to.”

“And what’s that urgent thing?” Victor asked.

“I got a call from Caduceus Europe.”

The sheer idea of their European counterpart contacting them now, right as they had both Derek and Angie there, and prompting Sidney to call them all in was rising all the possible red flags it could. The air got tenser with just a sentence.

“And what for?” Tyler reacted with a nervous grin on his face. “Miller can’t have possibly called you just for a hamburger recipe.”

“Would you mind taking this seriously, Dr Chase?”

“S-sure.”

“As I was saying, a few minutes ago, we got a call from Caduceus Europe. They were asking for your permission to proceed with a GUILT intervention.”

“Why didn’t they just ask Stiles to do it then?” Victor chimed in again. “He has his own agency, doesn’t he? No need to ask us all for that kind of stuff.”

“That’d be because Derek is the patient.”

The news cut through the air like a hot blade through glass.

“…You’ve got to be shittin’ us,” was all that any of them said about it, courtesy of Victor.

“I wasn’t the one operating on him directly, that must have been how… It wasn’t any easier on the nerves, that much I can tell you…”

“I’m sure it was. We were all tense that day, too… Tyler kept asking me if he’d be fine. We really weren’t sure if Dr Kimishima could… That’s her name, right?”

“It is.”

“So, yeah, we weren’t sure at all, so we all were super stressed until Sidney told us it’d be all okay…”

The door to their lounge opened again. As soon as it did, Tyler jumped up from the couch, Leslie following shortly after. Victor tried his hardest not to look like he was somewhat concerned. Appeared before them their director whom, by the look of the traits on his face, was less tense than he had been around thirty minutes before. God had time been slow and cruel on their hands…

“How’s Derek?!” Tyler immediately interrogated, running on legs that had previously trembled under the weight of his worries.

“He’s made it. Barely, shall I add, but he made it. The operation was a success.”

A collective sigh of relief happened as Tyler’s legs buckled up again, with Leslie barely managing to catch him before he’d have hit the floor. They didn’t lose anyone today and, in the end, that was all that mattered, right?

“Still, with how anxious Tyler was back then, it’s no wonder why he lost his composure when it seemed like there’d be no end to it.”

Angie’s breath caught up in her throat. The painkillers had subdued enough for her consciousness to be back to its usual sharpness, even with the lingering rests of lethargy from blood loss. The IV in her wrist was just the physical manifestation of that.

“…what do you mean by that, Leslie?”

Her workmate’s shoulders tensed as she looked away, pinching her lips, before sighing.

“We…”

“We underestimated the extent of his injuries…!” Leslie yelped as Tyler’s hands had managed to take out one of the bullets.

“J-Jesus Derek, how could you have still been conscious when there was that in your chest?!”

They both stared, dumbfounded and terrified, at the hole very much close to the heart still bleeding under their watch.

“It grazed the aorta… If it had been a little closer….”

“…he’d have been dead on arrival, yeah. Let’s… Let’s remove that bitch…”

Tyler’s voice sounded hesitant and about to let a sorrow escape.

The operation continued on with the smell of blood and gunpowder filling the atmosphere of the room. Both were too focused and with too much pressure on their shoulders to let that hinder them in their mission, even if she could notice her surgeon’s grip getting looser by the moment.

“Vitals dropping!”

“I don’t have the time for that bullshit! Inject stabilizer yourself!!”

Without a word, Leslie did as told and grabbed the syringe.

“That… That fucker just had to use his fancy voodoo powers before passing out, didn’t he…?”

“How would you even know that…?”

A familiar beep resounded again.

“V-vitals dropping!”

“…yeah, that.”

Still, his pupils regularly darted to the screen displaying the vitals. Sweat drops flowed profusely all over his face, more than any other person she had ever assisted before. The more tranquil aura he gave off compared to the failure-paranoid Derek was nowhere to be seen…

The forceps almost fell into the body when it slipped from his hands, the second bullet escaping his grasp and landing near the aorta yet again. Breathing quickening, almost wheezing, he fixed his mistake with a display of cracking down under the fears piling up on his mind. Tears started flowing down from his eyes as the vitals continued falling and falling, the third bullet still doing its damage…

“Oh my God…” Angie doesn’t have the words. She really doesn’t.

“Turns… Turns out he got shot four times. Your assailant had six bullets on him and they all hit.”

“That’s…” Her throat was knotting on itself. “That’s…”

A memory suddenly hit her.

“Wait, Leslie. You mentioned Tyler supposed Derek had used his Healing Touch on me, right?”

“Yeah. I’m still sure it’s just a hunch he had, but he did. I think it’s because he panicked when realizing the vitals kept dropping further and further.”

“It’s not just that. At least, I think it isn’t… I’m certain he did use it.”

“Why would Derek even do that? He was already injured as it is, he was lucky he didn’t pass out here and there to begin with!”

“…I suspect it’s because he… knew that.”

Her colleague stood there, dumbfounded, before her eyes grew wide and she almost bit her hand in realization.

Oh no, no, not now! It wasn’t time to pass out, not yet. Angie still needed him, he had to stay awake! Issue was, even with all the determination in the world, it seemed like he wouldn’t have the time to… That’s right! Time! He was one of the few people on Earth who could play around with its flow. All he had to do to save Angie was to draw a star and focus hard enough with what was left of his adrenaline and clarity of mind to finish the operation or, at least, what he could finish of it.

Success: time was now going at quarter of its speed. He saw everything, now: how to remove the second and last bullet, how fast he could put on the membrane and seamlessly apply it to the injured flesh with the gel, how to give Angie her dignity back now that he’d finished on her. She’d be fine, she’d be fine; he was hearing the sirens coming their way, seeing the blue lights blinking.

However, as soon as the distortion of time started fading, he felt all of his energy crash back. The world started spinning as he finished zipping her dress close, his hand giving up halfway through as it went limp and his other was too focused on rubbing his eyes under his glasses. Something drops from his mouth yet again.

It was no use resisting. The world span and span around him, blurring into one vague landscape of blacks and blues, the sounds gathering together to form a cacophonic white noise looping in the back of his mind. With the tools falling from his hands, he all but crashed on his patient, workmate and best friend all at once, eyelids fluttering as the black spots invading his sight made themselves more and more invasive.

When time resumed its course, all Derek could sense was the darkness of his vision, the coldness of his skin and the taste of copper in his mouth.

“I mean, I’ll believe you on that one, you know him and his process much more than I do…”

To be frank, after telling all of this to Leslie, Angie just wants to cry. This has all been a terrible, atrocious, hideous mess and she’d have liked it to remain buried inside her mind.

“He’s such an idiot…! He could’ve died, and yet…. And yet he still operated on me!”

Leslie remained silent, but gave her a candid smile and handed her a handkerchief.

“That’s Derek for you… I’ve heard he tried not to make you worried when he got infected a few months back too.”

“That… didn’t really work,” she remarks with a soft of snicker in her voice. “He’s such an idiot… Sometimes, I wonder what stupid things he’d do if we weren’t there…”

“Saving you, it seems. He realized his wounds were less deep than yours.”

“…where is he, by the way?”

“Wait, you haven’t guessed yet?”

Leslie seems genuinely surprised, even if her astonished expression soon gets replaced with her usual amused smile and bright eyes.

“He’s behind the curtain,” she replies as she points to the item in question with the tip of her thumb.

Angie’s entire face suddenly catches on fire and her weakened condition almost makes her head go for a spin.

“Oh God… Has he woken up yet?!”

“If he wasn’t before, I don’t think he could sleep through all of this for much longer, y’know.”

Tyler’s voice suddenly rises in the room as his hand draws the curtain open. He gets up from a chair sitting by another bed with that dumb grin of his brightly plastered on his face.

“Geez are you ladies noisy…!”

Dumbfounded, embarrassed and relieved all the same, Angie just stares in complete silence. Leslie giggles under her breath.

“But hey, at least you’ve almost awoken my patient by doing that! That guy’s been sleepin’ for the past few hours!”

Leslie and he exchange a glance, a smirk on both of their faces.

“I think we should leave the both of you alone,” she then adds. “Just be careful about your injuries, okay, Angie? You’re the more reasonable of the two on that front, so I trust you with handling them properly… If you need help, don’t hesitate ringing for a nurse!”

On that, the both of them leave, and she isn’t sure what to make of it all.

However, Angie has always been a worrywart, she knows that very much, so she still tries getting up from bed. It’s difficult and taking her ages since her legs feel so fragile and her wounds bother her, her shoulder still feeling very much sore. She pulls through the annoyances anyway, rising to her feet while supporting himself with the wheeled IV stand by her left side, gradually making her way to the other bed in the room and sitting on the chair still left warm by Tyler’s presence. Seems like he was there for quite a long time too…

Unlike whatever movie was playing back in her head, her eyes soon lie upon a peacefully sleeping Derek, whose face is still a bit too pale to her liking. She goes as far as to making sure he is doing as fine as she’d like him to: his chest is rising and falling steadily, calmly; his breathing is stable, only needed to be helped a little by the pipe in his nose; his vitals are doing just fine on the screen next to the bed beeping regularly.

Life suddenly sounds very peaceful.

Right as she settles into the seat, putting the pillow she’s borrowed from her bed on it, Derek stirs awake. It’s his eyelids slowly fluttering back open at first, then a little cough, and finally his vision coming to be, eyes locking into hers. He looks somewhat different without his glasses: even if she’s seen him before without them, it’s still an odd feeling to get, somewhat like an uncanny valley effect. They smile to each other.

“A-Ang…?” His voice is hoarse, which was predictable considering the extent of the trauma his body must have taken.

“That sure is me. How are you feeling?”

“I guess… not worse than when I got GUILT…?”

She’s heard something like that before, albeit differently…

Right as she settled into the seat, her folder still clenched against her chest, Derek stirred awake. First his eyelids slowly fluttered back open, then it was a little cough escaping his mouth, and finally his vision came to be as his eyes locked into hers. He did look somewhat different without his glasses: even if she had seen him before without them, the time he had spent three days in bed sleeping coming to her mind first, it was still an odd feeling to get, somewhat like an uncanny valley effect. She smiled to him.

“A-Ang…?” His voice was hoarse, which would obviously happen considering the extent of the trauma his body had been put through.

“That sure is me… How are you feeling?

“…like trash… To say I’m putting patients through that…”

“It’s for their good. It was for yours too.”

“I suppose you’re right, Angie…”

With relief washing all over her, she put her free hand hand on his, mindful of the IV inserted in his wrist.

“What about you never do that again? I told you that was suspicious!”

“I gotta listen to you more often… How are you…?”

He asked that before too. How are you, Angie?, when she wasn’t the one who had gotten infected by a bioweapon. That man has the most skewed priorities of them all, she swears…

“I’m doing just fine. Thank you very much for saving me, Derek. Still, if you could not die on us again, it’d be appreciated.”

He snickers. “You’re welcome…”

Still, and even with her greatest efforts, Angie feels tears running down her cheeks and wetting something under them.

“What’s wrong…?” He asks, concern lacing his tired voice.

“I… I got so scared I’d lose you!! W-when I saw you operating on me, I… I…. I wondered why you were doing this instead of sparing your energy!”

“I’m a doctor, Angie… I save people, so I saved you. I… couldn’t just sit there and watch you bleed out, in pain…”

“But you were injured!”

“And so were you… Everything’s fine, now, right? I’m here, you’re here…”

She sniffles her sorrow back in and tries giving him a smile, rubbing the early tears away from her eyes.

“You… You’re right. Everything’s fine now.”

That grants her a smile.

“Good…”

Still holding his hand, they fall into a comfortable silence, her arms resting on his mattress.

For now, there’s no point in looking back at the past and remembering how terrible things can get. She can, at least for a moment, let go of all of her fears and remain serene, in the safety of a haven she keeps rediscovering, by the side of her favourite person. There’s nothing quite like the calm that comes after a violent, red-tinted storm, nothing quite the reassurance that comes after getting terrified and nothing quite the sun which makes rainbow after the rain has stopped pouring down.

Truly, sometimes, life can be merciful and full of light, as long as it wants to shine…

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ms31x129 · 5 years

Text

MSR/other/long winded responses

@likos064

This is from another blog discussion @likos064 responses in italics and then my thoughts. The other thread was getting long and the tumblr kept timing out for me.

‘Personally, I have no interest in Mulder or Scully/Other. Regardless of whether it is before they met, during the show pre or post relationship, though I ignore any breakup because I find it redundant, even though I understand the limitations of a TV show and Drama 101. What I cannot ignore, however, are double standards when it comes to writing these Other-relationships. Generally, when its Mulder/Other, regardless of whether he and Scully are involved or not, Mulder is portrayed as the bad guy. Excepting pre-X-files, but even that might be a stretch.

Conversely when it is Scully/Other she is portrayed to be in the right, a woman who is simply being true to her desires and taking what she deserves. It doesn’t matter whether she is involved with Mulder, at the cusp or committed she is still entitled to have sex with whoever she wants. But this only applies to her. Even in fics portraying a breakup she is allowed to move on while he has to wait for her to come back, if he wants companionship. And at that point, I don’t want them together any longer.

Retrograde as mentioned above is a good example. I don’t want her anywhere near him and I find it preposterous that he is completely alone so that she can prey on him in his weakness. People can write, like and headcanon what they want. But I am disturbed by the abuse that is so often encouraged towards him. Why make her as damaging as Phoebe and Diana?’

I agree with pretty much everything you said above and perhaps that’s why the ‘break-up’ eps have bothered me, I have trouble with getting into Scully’s mind – perhaps that’s a result of male writers? And no ‘show bible?’ I am a Mulderist through and through and I try not (I might not always succeed) to ‘cut’ Scully down in order to praise Mulder.

Through the seasons I think there have been hints as to Scully wanting a relationship/family – at some point, and it’s actually hard for me to pinpoint when she really chose Mulder – although running away with him in the Truth was a pretty good statement. Jersey Devil, Revelations (her instinct with Kevin,) Home are 3 right of the top of my head. (What’s wrong with a woman who doesn’t want children?) In the back of my mind I think I could always see Scully as being the one to move on and be just another person who left Mulder.

Mulder I think does want a family, I just don’t know if he thinks he deserves it? He really is so good with children in the eps – is that due to his psychology background – maybe? He didn’t ‘bond’ with Kevin in Revelations partly I think due to the Religion aspect although he doesn’t naysay Scully when she wants to keep Kevin with them either. In Home Mulder is telling Scully a happy memory of being a kid, baseball his sister – that dialogue stood out to me as well as the remarks about the kind of home he’d like to settle down in. Cliché it is, but I think he’s was searching for the family he lost the day Samantha disappeared. Even if he hadn’t believed it was Aliens I think Mulder would have kept searching regardless.

‘You’re right she did want to be with him. However, I don’t view the desire to be the same as action though there is definitely emotional cheating on Daniel’s part. A Platonic Romance can be just as threatening to marriage as one with a sexual component. Nevertheless, the fandom interpretation takes the relationship in a direction far different from the one that Gillian intended and that’s what I thought of when you complained about Scully’s involvement with a married man.’

Hmm… I could be wrong, but I thought GA said in several interviews that she intended for it to be obvious Scully and Daniel had been lovers. Even though she knows Scully’s character is Catholic and had been brought up to respect marriage it was one of Scully’s rebellion’s? GA doesn’t have a strict religious view point, so I thought this part of AT was more GA than Scully especially since she seemed to scoff at her sister Melissa’s more open / nature new age beliefs. At the same time within the ep I could view it as did knowing Mulder allow her to open up to other religions? Ideas? IMO it would have been nice to let Mulder know that occasionally.

I will confess that I too have some reservations over her behavior in all things. According to Frank Spotnitz and Chris Carter, Mulder and Scully are already involved in all things. The scene at the beginning with Mulder in bed was to indicate an ongoing sexual relationship not the start of one. Gillian knew this and still wrote Scully as deciding to leave Mulder, per the original script, only to change her mind again.

Well unfortunately we can’t take what FS or CC says for granted. I would love to read those statements though the only one I can recall is Frank S. reminding fans that AT wasn’t the first time M&S were in each others apartments overnight. How many times were we told William is Mulder’s son. For me that rankles as just another way to hurt Mulder, regardless all those years he thought he had a son out there.

‘My issue lies more in that this confirms Mulder’s fears, something that I see him being mocked over consistently; primarily when he runs away from her in Detour. I see numerous complaints about how he waited too long, but I always interpreted it, beyond TV show limitations and the patterns that existed in the 90s, as her not being ready for a relationship. Nor did I see an invitation of wine and cheese as a guaranteed sexual offer.’

I agree with this, I also wonder how much the whole experience with Scully almost dying affected him and wanting to be more, and of course Bill’s reaction I’m sure dug a little spot in his mind too. What is dying but another form of abandonment in a sense. I didn’t like ‘3’ either, but that was much earlier in their partnership so it was a little (very little) more palatable.

‘Nevertheless, I’m curious about your aversion to Scully’s attraction to older authoritative men. I don’t understand why you think she’s too smart for this. I always saw it as a father complex, an extension of the affection and more importantly approval she so desperately wanted from her father. Similarly, I viewed Mulder’s attraction to older women as a mother complex rooted in the affection his mother deprived him of following Samantha’s abduction.’

I know my aversion is mainly from a life experience and a friend’s story. I only took one college class and you could just see the professor eyeing up every girl that walked in until it landed on my friend. She was a straight A student, she wasn’t shy or outgoing we all thought her feet were planted firmly on the ground. He praised her, but you could also see subtle ‘put downs’ – you shouldn’t do it that way only an infant would things like that some worse. And all of us were shocked when she started a relationship with the professor who was 17 yrs older I think. Long story short he was married had 3 or 4 kids, she got pregnant he dropped her like a hot potato, she got an abortion and tried to commit suicide. We ended up finding out she’d been sexually abused as a child by her father or step-father. She moved and I haven’t seen or heard from her in over 30 yrs.

I know there wasn’t any hint of that in Scully and her father’s relationship, but the whole older-man/daddy issue has just always made me angry/disgusted in general.

’I see Daniel as an authority figure as well as a teacher who values her intelligence and makes her feel as though she matters. While Jack has a more obsessive quality towards his work, like her father who prioritized the navy over her. Both would have given her approval because they were teachers and she did her assignments. She mostly met their expectations. Until she didn’t.’

I agree with some of that. Mulder is different than those two men, I don’t see that many similarities. In NA when people say Mulder was treating Scully like her boss – jerk is the term I see most. Well technically he is the dept. head and he could assign her things. When they jointly investigate cases it makes sense to split up when their particular skills are better utilized – he thinks outside the box and she provides the facts/science when possible.

I always saw it as how much trust had formed that Mulder knew Scully would handle things. When he sort of scoffs at Scully handing off the case, I don’t take it as him not trusting/believing her – I think he was looking for any excuse to come back – I could be wrong.

And as I recall Scully has made jokes about Mulder’s dating or ala Jersey Devil Mulder’s “I have a life” reply to Scully. It seems okay when she does it but when he does it’s wrong.

‘Phoebe was manipulative but her mind games could still lead to rewards.’

I’m curious what rewards do you mean?

‘Diana I see as terribly accommodating but just as manipulative as Phoebe.’

Groan – I just hate the character of Diana for so many reasons. I hate when shows just drop in a character for shock value. I can’t believe in almost 5yrs of working together Diana’s name never once came up. That Scully never saw her name in a case file. That the LG never mentioned her before either you’d think there’d have been a comparison of the two, unless DF wasn��t a ‘work’ partner.

This is the man who opens up to Scully on their 1st case together and tells her about his sister in a very intimate way - even though he initially thinks she’s sent to spy on him. Yet when DF appears – initially its just generic basics about her, she gets shot and FTF come out with the whole ‘almost kiss’ scene. I’m sure DF would be too confusing for the ‘new’ fans Fox/CC were hoping to entice.

Then the Beginning – no mention of a kiss – Mulder appears so frustrated with Scully, but he trusts her completely with Gibson and it makes sense she’s the doctor. In the other eps with DF we never see Mulder seeking her out, yet he doesn’t seem to be sharing with Scully why he trusts Diana or the audience. To me that whole season (6) was Mulder making a choice to be with Scully at work and after work on cases like Dreamland.

I think the perfect time to introduce a new set of agents would have been right after FTF, are we to believe scientists worldwide wouldn’t have gotten notice of seismographs going off - tremors in Antartica they wouldn’t be down there investigating the cause.

Maybe that’s one of the problems with XFiles trying to straddle that line Aliens – but also real world cases happening in real time?

‘In both cases, Mulder’s need to please and be acknowledged would’ve been satisfied. I feel that Mulder and Scully partly satisfy these complexes in each other. Mulder is in a supervising role and Scully does want his acknowledgment and unless the script says otherwise, see Never Again, she gets it. Likewise, Scully acknowledges Mulder and appreciates him, unless the script calls for otherwise, like in all things. And if you decide to acknowledge the season 10-11 breakup.’

Quite the difference in DD and GA’s script(s), especially in the Unnatural it’s all about learning, a connection to someone, something even though neither M or S are in the ep, but for 7-8 minutes. I know some still get mad for the ‘ticking of her biological clock’ reference, but that is a common saying and Mulder was using it in that light-hearted way. Hollywood AD was a quirky ep and one of the ones that it’s hard to put in the XF ‘case’ universe, but even it had some poingnant moments and again M & S spending time outside of work together enjoying each other’s company.

And then AT – all about Scully, more of a character study. Mulder is flirty with his projector in the beginning and she’s stabbing her salad and snapping at him. I definitely didn’t care for snarky Scully. In the whole ep the only section I like is their conversation on the couch, the way DD plays Mulder and the way he looks at her – that man is in love, period.

S10-11 Breakup = stupid. As per the ratings immediate drop from week 1 to week 2 and kept on going. The idea that Mulder had to choose Scully over going back to work for the FBI – if that’s what he wanted to do is just wrong. And Scully just happening to work for a hospital and one or more of the patrons/dr.’s happening to experiment on his own children. There would have been the perfect ‘case’ to draw Scully back to working on the X-Files with Mulder and if they’d set up those other agents in S6 who knows how the series would have ended.

One other thing that bothered me as the show progressed is what I call the dumbing down of Mulder. In Deep Throat Mulder has the line about his hotshot pilot friend and asks a technical flight question in other eps he also would pull facts both unusual and technical out in dialogue. Then it seemed that slowly faded. Was it to prop Scully up as being smarter? I don’t know I just missed those little moments of Mulder’s brilliance.

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bluewatsons · 5 years

Conversation

Paladin of Literary Agon: A Conversation with Harold Bloom, Los Angeles Review of Books (May 12, 2019)

William Giraldi: One of the abiding pleasures of Possessed by Memory is the dual meaning of the title: not only to possess literature by memory, but to be possessed, demon-like, by one’s own history, by a memory that will not stop. You’ll be 89 this year; you’ve had a most fertile and fulfilling life, one enriched enormously by friendships with the poets and critics you most admired. I think of Angus Fletcher, M. H. Abrams, Kenneth Burke, A. R. Ammons, John Hollander, John Ashbery: hauntings by them help mold this book into a glimmering threnody. Did you start out to memorialize your friends in such a way?

Harold Bloom: I did not intend Possessed by Memory to be so elegiac. But most of it was dictated to generous assistants during several years in which I spent much of my time in hospitals and in rehabilitation. It started to become a meditation upon mortality. Worst of all, almost my entire generation of critics and poets, so many of them my closest friends, died during those years. My prime mentors — Frederick A. Pottle, Hans Jonas, Gershom Scholem, Kenneth Burke — had departed earlier, all save for Mike Abrams, who lasted more than a hundred years. With the recent deaths of William Merwin and Richard Wilbur, and of John Ashbery before them, my loneliness increased. These days, whenever I read, teach, or write, I am haunted by friends who educated me--Richard Rorty, Angus Fletcher, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, John Hollander. I was very close to the poets A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, William Merwin, and in quite a different way to James Merrill. They seem to be in the room with me. They also appear in my dreams. I have never written a poem. My only gift, as I understand it, is to have learned to listen: to students and to ghosts. I could wish the book were less somber than it is.

William Giraldi: Something occurred to me on my second reading of Possessed by Memory. Your essential friendships — those that were deeply reciprocal, that helped fertilize your work as you helped fertilize theirs — have been with poets and critics and not novelists or dramatists. You told me once about the ecstasy of being found by Hart Crane’s poems at the Bronx Library when you were a small child. The Pentateuch had always been a shimmering presence in your household, but it was Crane who opened the book your life would become, who put you in touch with the font of daemonic splendor, “the burning fountain,” as Shelley has it. I know what certain fiction writers mean to you — Cervantes, Kafka, Proust (and Possessed by Memory ends with a penetrating assessment of Proust) — but the poets (Shakespeare, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Crane, Stevens) have clearly meant the most to you.

Harold Bloom: That is most of the story, yes. During the 1980s and 1990s, I spent a great deal of time with Philip Roth. There were also interchanges with Tony Kushner and the novelist Walter Abish. Hart Crane broke the vessels for me. I then read Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, the Romantics and Victorians and 20th-century poetry in English with a kind of fury that Crane had put into me. Probably my essential reading experience comes down to the Hebrew Bible, Dante, Shakespeare. I continue to read Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Stevens almost daily.

William Giraldi: Possessed by Memory begins with an epigraph by the divine Oscar Wilde from his essay “The Critic as Artist,” in which he speaks of “the highest criticism” being “a record of one’s soul” and “the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.” I think of how Wilde and Pater swerved from the prevailing critical ethos to make it new. In their departure from their predecessors, they honed their own aesthetic. You see these swervings and disruptions in English-language criticism--Coleridge moving away from Dryden and Johnson, Arnold from Coleridge, Eliot and Empson attempting to disrupt and correct Arnold while simultaneously taking from him. Your own critical program began with a focus on the Romantic poets, on making new paths from the likes of M. H. Abrams and Northrop Frye. Then you veered into the work that became your life’s mission, the elucidation of influence. To what extent were you conscious of needing to swerve from or to disrupt your own potent predecessors?

Harold Bloom: I had a bad nightmare on July 11, 1967, following my 37th birthday. I have written about this elsewhere. The next morning I came down to breakfast and began to scribble a long dithyramb that I called “The Covering Cherub or Poetic Influence.” I kept at it for another day or two, and it became, in time, much revised, the opening chapter in The Anxiety of Influence, published January 5, 1973. The original text was printed by John Hollander in his selection of my work called Poetics of Influence. I was sadly amused when Northrop Frye told mutual friends that he could not read the book because it was all about him. It is not. Nor is it about my humane mentors M. H. Abrams and Frederick A. Pottle. After years of meditation I have come to believe that the Covering Cherub, a figure out of Ezekiel and Blake, was smothering me with the massive heft of all the poems I had read, loved, remembered. If I have a potent precursor, it would have to be Dr. Samuel Johnson. I am a good schoolteacher--he is beyond me and beyond disruption. Had I followed family tradition, I would have become a rabbi. Instead, I am a secular rabbi like those celebrated by Wallace Stevens. I teach Shakespeare as scripture. When I teach Poetic Influence, in some ways I vanish, and in some modes I am exalted.

William Giraldi: I often try to impart to readers the Eucharistic component to the strongest literature, the necessity of its sacral communing. As a nonbelieving Catholic, I have no problem calling it a secular holiness, though I don’t, as you know, subscribe to the Arnoldian notion of poetry’s power to supplant religion, never mind to correct society. You’ve spent your life defending and explaining the pleasurable hardships in the strongest literature. I see this as the difference between the rare joy of aesthetic mastery in Dante and the mere enjoyment of a contemporary best seller, the difference between gravitas and gratification. In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis differentiates between strong readers and weak readers. Strong readers experience an important book as a sacral event, their worldviews revamped. Weak readers read an important book and nothing at all happens to them. Near the start of the The Western Canon, you acknowledge that reading for aesthetic pleasure and necessary wisdom has gone the way of the plesiosaur. Twenty-five years later, as the internet perseveres in the strafing of our souls, I wonder how grim is your outlook.

Harold Bloom: I regret not sharing your admiration for C. S. Lewis. After a few amiable encounters in the autumn of 1954 at Cambridge University, the distinguished defender of the faith and I fell out while sharing drinks at the Anchor Bar. Gnosticism upset him gravely. We did not speak again after that. He attacked my book The Visionary Company and I responded gently enough by writing that his A Preface to Paradise Lost was pure theology. Sometime back I published a brief book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? I concluded by relying upon Saint Augustine, who taught us all how to read strongly and how memory, time, and consciousness relate to imaginative literature, though of course the Bible was for him the truth. Oddly I begin to be less pessimistic than I was in The Western Canon. Partly that is inspired by my students, but also I receive endless emails, straight mails, phone calls, and visits from good readers throughout the world who have been kind enough to want to tell me that I have been their teacher. There is a saving remnant. Young women and men the world over read and hear the call of wisdom and the urgency of intelligence. I am pretty much a relic, yet I believe the future — if there is one — will depend upon deep readers all over the globe. Without reading Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes, and their few peers, we cannot learn how to think. And if we cannot think, then the future belongs to the Trumps of the world — that is to say, to the apocalyptic beasts from the sea.

William Giraldi: Since we must endure now the daily mauling of morality from our capital, the smiting of tact and taste and truth by such tanninim, I sometimes ponder what the state of our culture and politics would be if we had a populace educated in beauty and wisdom by Dante and Dickinson. But such considerations get quaveringly close to the erroneous Arnoldian line that comprehends literature as social corrective. From the beginning, and again in Possessed by Memory, you’ve been adamant in insisting that literature enhances and enlarges individuals only through aesthetic pleasure it grants individuals the vital discourse they must have with themselves if they are to be whole, if they are to enjoy more life and prepare for life’s end. But of course a society made up of such individuals is something to smile on. I think of your old friend Northrop Frye, “We can’t speak or think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established for us by our great writers.” Literature says with John Clare, “O take me from the busy crowd, / I cannot bear the noise!” and “Lord keep my love for quiet joys.” I’m a touch surprised you aren’t more morose about our noisome cyber lives.

Harold Bloom: It is true and perhaps sad that the highest literature teaches us how to speak to ourselves rather than to others. Reading Dante and Shakespeare may improve an individual but will not make him a better citizen. I do not have much of what you call a cyber life myself because I don’t watch television, do not have a cell phone, and have to dictate to someone at a computer in order to write. More than ever I am a dinosaur. But I have to reason outward from my students. Doubtless they are all involved in these technologies. But last week I taught Macbeth and “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.” Most of my students were delightfully agile in discussing both. I grant that I choose them from a possible group that is already elite. And yet they are as good as any students I have taught in my 63 years at Yale. As I discovered again this morning, I no longer can read The New York Times, once I have glanced at all the dreadful events. Cultural coverage is so remote from my aesthetic experience that clearly I will go on provoking tired readers. Still, if I have a public function, and I doubt it, it would have to be as a living relic of an age that could give us Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.

William Giraldi: Your age has given us also a clutch of thrilling critical voices who helped establish American literary comment as a worthy art, just as your own work has demonstrated that art and has helped complete the imaginative literature it sets out to evaluate and appreciate. Each week I go back to Wilde to be sustained, and I’m remembering now his contention, with a nod to Pater and Arnold, that “[w]ithout the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all worthy of the name.” Wilde underscores the essential and thrumming reciprocity of literature and criticism. If critics are analysts of pleasure, in Chesterton’s phrase, then their work is responsible for instigating its own pleasure, for creating its own wisdom and beauty. Mary McCarthy once defined weak criticism as “a quivering jelly of uncritical emotion” — which I suspect is an allusion to T. S. Eliot-- “The general mess of imprecision of feeling / Undisciplined squads of emotion” — and I wonder if you ever fear that our new autocracy of emotion is going to butcher the essential reciprocity of literature and criticism. What becomes of a culture that does a lot of feeling about itself but no longer knows how to think about literature?

Harold Bloom: High literature has three prime attributes-- cognitive power, originality, aesthetic splendor. Only by a disciplined harnessing of emotion can any of these three come forth. What you call our “new autocracy of emotion” is just stylized noise. It cannot touch the interdependence of criticism and literature because it is mindless. Culture is now cut off from fashion. Popular culture has become an oxymoron. Bad taste is not culture. There are still many valuable writers of imaginative works in our society. It seems to me that they prosper best when they take a stance apart from the immediate moment. Distraction is the enemy. I see no crisis in the reciprocity of literature and criticism because the culture industries are irrelevant to it.

William Giraldi: I’m reminded of your chapter in Possessed by Memory on Angus Fletcher and Whitman, in which you reference Fletcher’s Allegory and what he called “the crisis of scale.” You say that Fletcher “warned prophetically that any sense of sublime transcendence is going to vanish in our technological world. What is coming is the emptiness of allegory without ideas.” Fletcher died in 2016 and he seems to me to be a loving, guiding shade throughout this book. All along you have been not only continually in communion with poetic splendor, but continually in conversation, explicit or not, with those critics who helped cast you. Has your relationships with certain critics — Longinus, Lucretius, Pater, Hazlitt, et cetera — changed over your lifetime?

Harold Bloom: Samuel Johnson is always the rhinoceros in the room. Walter Pater taught me appreciation in all its senses. Kenneth Burke and I wandered around lower Manhattan while he taught me rhetoric and we both recited Whitman. But Angus Fletcher is the abiding presence. He is in the room as I teach, read, write. Our friendship was continuous from 1951 to 2016, and indeed he is my guiding shade. I think my relationships with mentors and friends changed only after they died. I am not an occultist nor a medium, but somehow they speak to me from the beyond. They are no different except perhaps a touch more urgent.

William Giraldi: My memory is all loops and lacunae. The poetry I have locked in me took lots of work to get there and takes lots of work to stay there. I once described your memory as a great bear trap, but let’s revise that, because I recently heard a cosmologist say that at the other end of every black hole is a white hole... nothing truly disappears but is born anew in another cosmos, at the other end. There’s poetic splendor in that, a Nietzschean eternal recurrence that pleases me. Your memory for poetry is a vortex birthing fresh light. I think of Robert Graves’s poem “On Portents,” in which he writes of “tourbillions in Time made / By the strong pulling of her bladed mind.” But I wonder if a pulling memory such as yours is ever a woe... it gives in verse but takes in tears. There must be morose moments before the bruising dawn when you wish you couldn’t remember with such vividness.

Harold Bloom: Memory can be a consuming fire or it can please like the taste of fresh fruit. From about 4 a.m. on, I am not happy about my memory though it keeps me going anyway. I surprised myself the other day by quoting swaths of Edmund Spenser to myself. At first I could not remember who it was, but that came soon. It is much easier to remember poems than to remember people. If I allowed myself to brood on all the people I loved who have departed, then I would never be able to go on reading, writing, teaching. In me memory has become cognition.

William Giraldi: Your combined work on Romanticism, influence, memory, Shakespeare, and religion amounts to a constant, branching dialogue--your books sing to each other under the light of literature. You long ago came into possession of your own influence, and I wonder what you ponder now when glancing back at your tremendous output, if you’d like to be remembered as the explicator of literary agon, as fervent Bardolator, as defender of the Canon, or if you see your different stages as I do, as a single stage that progresses as your thinking progressed, from your first book on Shelley to this latest on memory.

Harold Bloom: I have been publishing books and essays from 1957 until now in 2019. I continue to write and to teach. I can hardly remember what it was like to be 25 or 27. I would like to be remembered as a teacher. Essentially I am a schoolteacher. I do not know whether I have developed or just unfolded. It seems to me dubious that any of my writings will survive. They were extensions of my teaching. Insofar as they have taught strangers, they have done their work. The work of teaching is never over. It has taught me how to listen. When I was young and middle-aged, I was a bad listener. Now I listen very closely as my students discuss Shakespeare or Wallace Stevens with one another. I think when I depart that I will think of myself as a secular rabbi. One reads to the congregation yet also to oneself. Yahweh bewilders me. I cannot accept him. I cannot reject him. The God of my mother and my father cannot be just an old story. I do not trust in the Covenant, but I cannot deny the transcendental and extraordinary.

#harold bloom #interview #literature #classics #critic

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taww · 5 years

Text

Review: Wells Audio Commander Preamplifier & Innamorata II Amplifier

With everyone and their extended families wanting to be audio reviewers, we have been inundated with volumes of positive commentary. As a reviewer, you are dependent upon manufacturers to provide you with equipment to audition and write about. If a writer wants to be around after that initial written review, the pressure is great to submit something popular to the publisher, specifically, coverage that will keep the review sample spigot flowing. After all, what manufacturer seeking to gain a foothold in the industry is going to send their precious product to someone they think may disseminate component coverage less than favorable about them? That’s a question I need not answer on your behalf…

The days of writers like Pearson, Holt and Aczel are, unfortunately, gone. And while I may long to once again profit from their pearls of audio wisdom, only their memories exist. From my first published review in January of 1989, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered how Harry would describe a particular sonic quality, how Gordon might compare one component to another or in what manner, like Peter, I may employ my use of words so efficiently as say what others could not, but in half the space. What those great writers of the past had, which we see none of today, was the self-assuredness not to fear penning the critical review…after all, they were known as critics.

Wells Audio

Jeff Wells is a kindly gentleman that has been in the business of audio retailing for better than 16 years. Not a classically trained electrical engineer, Jeff has obviously picked up considerably knowledge during his years in the trade, either directly, or by osmosis. He also knows where to go for good advice as he has chosen Scott Franklin as a mentor. Scott is considered a bit of a tube guru, having credited to his name any number of well known and respected tube designs. I expect that the basic tube circuits in the Commander have the Franklin touch, with Jeff choosing the parts list and the overall appearance of the preamp and amp. One thing is for sure, you are not going to mistake the Wells Audio gear for anything else made today, or yesterday for that matter. Warranty for both products is three years, including parts and labor.

Commander Preamplifier (USD $3,999)

The first thing one observes when seeing the Commander for the first time is the large round viewing window smack dab in the middle of the face plate. Behind it is what many call “a magic eye” vacuum tube. It glows green and changes with the adjustment of the volume control (which I did via remote). I could not discern what value the magic eye might be of, but it looked pretty enough.

The young ones, persons not old enough to remember the turn of the century, call it “steampunk.” That’s exactly how I viewed the appearance and operation of the Commander preamp. At a time when smooth operation and silky feel to controls are the key descriptive terms being used with todays’ high-end audio electronics, along comes the Wells Commander preamp that seems to have no end to its unique appearance and odd noises that emanate from it. With every change of volume comes a “clickity” sound that I’ve never heard before as part of a high-end component. Initially I thought that I might have broken it, but everything seemed to continue working, so I didn’t worry about it. Furthermore, @miy-taww assured me that some units simply work that way. (Yup, this is the sound of an attenuator based on conventional mechanical relays. The exact nature of the clicking depends on how the control logic is implemented. @miy-taww)

As far as I know, the acrylic exterior of the Commander is a first. The black reflective surface shines like a polished black mirror, making picture taking a real task. I like the fact that acrylic resonates much less than the standard metal exterior plates found with most amps and preamps. On the other hand, acrylic affords the component no effective RFI/EMI shielding.

Commander Pros: Setting the preamp up was cake, basically plug and play…the remote even came with batteries in it. Another positive was the ability to use a set of balanced inputs in addition to the standard RCA inputs. The unit also had balanced output jacks, coming in handy for use with my balanced Pass XA30.5 power amplifier.

The Commander is a solid imager with good depth of image, all placed upon a wide and panoramic stage. Tone quality, especially in the mids, is true and natural. And while this is a preamp utilizing tubes, tubes it does not sound like. The softish, melodramatic approach promoted by some tube products is completely missing here, as the Commander, instead of being soft, has an ability to capture, as well as anything I’ve heard, the transient speed of a plucked steel stringed guitar. This leading edge quality is also apparent in percussive strikes and snare hits, yes it can be an exciting experience listening with this preamp. Listening to rock and roll as well as jazz, on more than one occasion the transient speed of this unit compelled me to query if perhaps Wells alone had gotten this aspect to reproduction correct.

Lastly, when one looks under the hood of the Commander, and then considers the price of it, in light of the unconventional use of parts and construction layout, the obvious question becomes, “How did they do this for the price charged?”

Commander Cons: I enjoy using remote volume controls, however, this unit’s clunky nature and lack of responsiveness was a turn off to me. Sometimes, when moving the volume up, the actual output would first go down and them up.

Musically, the frequency extremes were rather odd and not wholly to my liking. These two things, I think, are related: The speed and attack heard in the midrange also resulted in an upper octave that was in many cases more forward than I am attracted to while striking me as grainy. I described the highs with the Commander to one friend as “crunchy.” The bass, it seemed to me, was similarly flawed, but in different ways. Listening to recordings with a healthy amount of bass in them, it was all there, i.e., I felt that I could hear all of the bottom three octaves frequency wise. At the same time, however, the bass lacked deep down energy.

Initially, I wondered if my choice of power cords was pushing the preamp in the directions just described. I tried cords from Audience, JPS, DH Labs and Twirling Gerbil. Though I heard changes in the performance, none of those cords locked in with the Commander. Finally, I went with the factory supplied cord, which performed as well as any of the above; forming the basis for the comments here and above.

Lastly, while I had great success using the balanced jacks on the back of the preamp, the standard RCAs didn’t always work consistently. This needs to be looked into by Jeff and in my opinion, simplified internally. The some days the jacks would work, some days, not, drove me crazy.

Conclusion. In my opinion, the Commander preamplifier from Wells Audio is not a finished product, bugs need to be addressed. The potential to be a stunning performer is all there, particularly when the Scott Franklin influence is considered. I consider it a diamond in the rough. I look forward to observing the progress Wells Audio makes with this product. Presently, I cannot recommend it.

Innamorata II Power amplifier (USD $7,000)

Taking the same visual cues as the Commander preamplifier, the Innamorata II is a large, heavy power amp. Rated at 150 wpc into 8 Ohms, the amp is said to put out 210 wpc into 4 Ohms. The amp is a beautiful gloss black, with a single round meter located dead center on the faceplate. Centering the meter is a large gold bezel that you will love or hate, all depending on your fashion sense. Jeff told me of his plans to make the amps’ exterior parts completely out of acrylic materials, everything save the heatsinks. I think Wells may be on to something here as fabricating may be less expensive that way, the product will weight less and the appearance can be pretty stunning in any color you desire. Finally, even though the sibling preamplifier has balanced outputs, the power amplifier cannot accommodate balanced connectors (which struck me as odd).

Innamorata Pros: Lots of power delivered effortlessly. Power cords were not an issue with the amp. Regardless of what I used, this amp forged a straight line forward sounding good under all conditions. I ended up using the Twirling Gerbil amp cord, the combo performing in a positive manner that was in every instance musical.

What I generally like about a well designed solid state power amp is its unflappable performance with a variety of loudspeaker loads. And so I can report that I listened to this amp with a variety of speaker loads, all the way from 4 Ohms, to a small monitor with a wandering load of 8 to 16 Ohms. As you know, all speakers present an amp with a variety of impedances depending on frequency. With many speakers, things can get a little hairy at resonance, the Innamorata stayed tight and fast in the bass, while never sounding washed out. Pace and bloom were actually strong parts of this design. You know an amp has something going for it when during listening sessions you keep asking yourself. “What’s it going to do with this album? I’ve got to hear it with this other album.” This amp had me anticipating what new positive twist it might put on a recording heard many, many times before.

Another positive aspect of this amps’ performance was the natural and organic way it handled vocals. Voices at the front of the stage did not jump forward; instead they sounded real, and usually within an aura of natural ambiance. Backup as well as background vocals were similarly tangible and pleasant to listen to.

Innamorata Cons: My biggest complaint with amp is the fact that it quit working after the first listening session. I had been listening to it in one system and enjoyed the results obtained. I then wanted to insert the Wells amp in a second system. I have a tall four wheeled cart that allows me to pick up the amp, put it on the cart and then wheel it off without having to bend over. I moved the amp one day to see how it would perform in a new listening environment. When I sat it down in the new system the right channel refused to come up. I sent it back to Jeff. He told me that an internal cable had come loose and he merely had to put it right and all was well. Solder the connection and the problem does not arise.

Musically, there’s not a lot to complain about. For more money there are better sounding solid state power amps. I take that position not because the Wells does much wrong, but because some amps are simply exceptional in one regard or another. Those exceptional amps may have slightly more air then the Wells, or a little more bloom upon the stage, but for the money, this is a good amplifier, though not in the same sonic class as the Pass XA30.5 that I compared it to.

Conclusion. I enjoyed using this power amplifier. A no-surprise design, it is quiet when you turn it on, and when you turn it off there are no driver threatening burps or releases of DC. In other words, don’t worry if the power is, for any reason, discontinued. It does concern me that the right channel went down during my auditioning period. A consumer electronics device that retails for $7,000.00 has an obligation to operate in a worry free manner. Audio components are meant to be enjoyed, as they are necessary to the playback of music in the home. A power amplifier situated in the home of an audiophile is not a tool in the manner of a tone generator or scope, it is something more, very much more. And, as the price of a component increases, the obligation of a manufacturer to produce a glitch free product increases in a linear fashion. That said, no one is perfect, making mistakes is human, and the error which lead to the failure of the right channel in this case was nothing other than a contact coming apart – nothing blew, no sparks, no fried resistors, and I have no doubt that that Jeff Wells remedied the situation so as to never have this happen again.

I, therefore, must conclude that when a person lays down their hard earned dollars for a new Innamorata II, he or she will have an amplifier well worth the outlay, and one capable of bringing home the heart and soul of the music in a way that will bring years and years of musical satisfaction and pride. A power amplifier done well.

#review #amplifier #preamplifier #tube #solid state #wells audio

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goforwardgreenwriter-blog · 6 years

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The Worm Reads: The Assassin’s Blade, Ch 23-24

Sorry this took so long but this book is fucking exhausting

Celaena and Ansel knew their little escapade with the Asterion horses would have consequences. Celaena had at least expected to have enough time to tell a decent lie about how they acquired the horses. But when they returned to the fortress and found Mikhail waiting, along with three other assassins, she knew that word of their stunt had somehow already reached the Master.

But how? Who told him? Who the hell saw them steal the horses and somehow got back to the fortress before them?

So, get this. The Mute Master has them alone in his chambers, no doubt about to get furious at them for pulling such a stunt, right? And then Celery pulls this fucking shit.

And suddenly, as the memory of that day echoed through her, she remembered the words Sam kept screaming at Arobynn as the King of the Assassins beat her, the words that she somehow had forgotten in the fog of pain: I’ll kill you!

You’re about to be possibly kicked out of a training fortress that you need to receive a letter of approval from in order to be allowed home and now you’re suddenly splooging over a guy because he... didn’t want you to be hurt? Like any decent fucking human being? God I fucking hate you, Celery, you stupid piece of shit.

After Celery finishes drooling over Sammy wanting to kill Arobynn for hurting her, she at least has the good sense to take the fall for the idea since this is Ansel’s home and getting in trouble would extremely affect her.

Apparently the Mute Master is fairly chill with them stealing horses and Ansel tells Celery she can go tomorrow for her first private lesson. Jesus Christ, finally, this story is going somewhere.

Their punishment next morning is cleaning animal shit out of the pens.

Another benefit was that they didn’t have to go running. Though after four hours of shoveling animal droppings, Celaena would have begged to take the six-mile run instead.

Not really a benefit then, is it?

Celery goes to the Master’s hangout on the roof for her first lesson.

Celaena cleared her throat again, and the Master finally turned. She bowed, which, strangely, was something she felt he actually deserved, rather than something she ought to do.

Celery learning that diplomacy is a thing?? She really does grow stupider as the books go on, since in E0S she threatens and attempts to stab the people in a political meeting that don’t agree with her viewpoint.

The Mute Master gives her a basket with a snake inside and tells her to observe its movements, so she spends the lesson moving with the snake and copying its movements. It’s actually really cool and more interesting than generic swords training.

SJM describes some more cool training in passing about how Celery has to study the movements of other animals like bats and rabbits. So let me get this straight; a whole page in the market scene was dedicated to Celery crying because she wanted new shoes, and that’s plot important, but you skip over her training which was the whole point of her coming to this place.

I’m.... speechless. Utterly speechless. It isn’t often you see someone fail so badly at all aspects of writing, but SJM has done it. She has officially failed at a basic component of storytelling. And her books are New York bestsellers. Truly, the world isn’t a fair place.

And every day, Celaena went to sleep after lunch and dozed until the sun went down, her dreams full of snakes and rabbits and chirping desert beetles. Sometimes she spotted Mikhail training the acolytes, or found Ilias meditating in an empty training room, but she rarely got the chance to spend time with them.

Ilias I kinda get, but you’ve spoken what, five words to Mikhail? You have no relationship with him lmfao.

There were quiet moments also, when she wasn’t training or toiling with Ansel. Moments when her thoughts drifted back to Sam, to what he’d said. He’d threatened to kill Arobynn. For hurting her.

Ask me if I give a fuck. Seriously, I don’t. I don’t feel this chemistry at all and I’m dreading when we return to Arobynn’s assassin joint and we have to read multiple paragraphs of Celery splooging over how hot Sammy is.

Next chapter opens up with Celery putting make up on Ansel because it’s apparently her birthday.

“What?” Ansel said. Celaena shook her head. “You’re going to have to wash it all off.” “Why?” “Because you look better than I do.” Ansel pinched Celaena’s arm. Celaena pinched her back, laughter on her lips.

Girls being friends? Pure and wholesome. Too bad SJM ruins it immediately after with this.

She hadn’t even dared ask the Master for her letter yet. But more than that … Well, she’d never had a female friend—never really had any friends—and somehow, the thought of returning to Rifthold without Ansel was a tad unbearable.

Hmm... it does raise the eyebrows a little that Ansel is super masculine and a “stronk female character’ like Celery and she is the only girl Celery has ever considered as a friend.......almost as if... it’s sexist towards girls who aren’t masculine like Celery.....hm...

At the party people are dancing with no music, which is whack af to Celery.

Though she loved, loved, loved parties, Celaena would have rather spent the night training with the Master. (...) But he’d insisted she go to the party—if only because he wanted to go to the party. The old man danced to a rhythm Celaena could not hear or make out, and looked more like someone’s benevolent, clumsy grandfather than the master of some of the world’s greatest assassins.

Hey, you leave him alone. He’s one of the few good characters in this shitty ass story, and if he wants to dance like an old grandpa, then let him.

Celery sees Ansel dancing with Mikhail and makes it all about her own feefees for Sammy, as usual.She gushes over how Sammy is totally in love with her and how she totally busts a nut every time he looks at her or some stupid shit like that.

Someone touched her shoulder, and Celaena looked up from her empty wine goblet to find Ilias standing behind her. She hadn’t seen much of him in the past few days, aside from at dinner, where he still glanced at her and gave her those lovely smiles. He offered his hand.

Poor Ilias, man. Obviously Celery doesn’t owe him anything, but.... you deserve someone so much better, Ilias. Imagine if it were Sammy here instead of Celery. I want that fanfic, someone write it.

Ilias and Celery eventually ditch the party since Celery’s feet hurt from dancing.

What would he say—that is, if he could speak—if he knew that Adarlan’s Assassin had never been kissed? She’d killed men, freed slaves, stolen horses, but she’d never kissed anyone.

God, we’re really going there, aren’t we... god I’m so tired....

First off, good job on shaming any older teenagers because they’ve never kissed someone before, as if that makes them weirdos. Makes me feel fucking amazing as an 18 y/o who hasn’t kissed anyone yet. Thanks, SJM.

Second, who gives a shit?? In fact, Celery, you have a good excuse for not kissing anyone; you’re an assassin. If you told Ilias, he’s probably just assume you’re too busy with work to settle down with someone. Like, do you think he’s really gonna make fun of you for not having kissed anyone before? Does SJM know how human beings function????

Anyways, Ilias does try to kiss Celery, but immediately stops when she backs away. Man, a male character who respects boundaries?? In MY SJM book?? Never thought I’d see the day.

“I—I can’t. I mean, I’m leaving in a week. And … and you live here. And I’m in Rifthold, so …” She was babbling. She should stop. Actually, she should just stop talking. Forever.

You really should. Sadly, Celery doesn’t take her own advice.

Ilias is just like, “whatever, that’s cool fam,” and goes to his room. I can’t believe SJM is making me praise a character for respecting personal boundaries but holy shit, that’s how low the bar is with her characters.

Alone in the hallway, Celaena watched the shadows cast by the torches. It hadn’t been the mere impossibility of a relationship with Ilias that had made her pull away. No; it was the memory of Sam’s face that had stopped her from kissing him.

First off, that semicolon is making me wince when a comma would’ve sufficed better, so jot that down. Second, unghhhh I don’t care, I don’t give a shit about Celery’s sudden crush on Sammy! He deserves someone who will treat him right!

Ansel arrives late next morning to shoveling shit duty because she slept with Mikhail. Again, ask me if I give a fuck.

Out of the blue, Ansel gets all pissy and jealous of Celery training with the Mute Master. It’s so literally out of nowhere and so obviously shoehorned in just so there can be conflict. SJM looking up basic writing tips and was like, ‘Oh shit, my story has no conflict and I need a falling out before the final climax! Uhhh Ansel is mad at Celery, yeah okay.”

Celaena’s throat tightened, and she cursed herself for feeling so hurt by the words. She didn’t think the Master felt that way at all, but she still hissed, “Yes, my glorious fate. Shoveling dung in a barn. A worthy task for me.” “But certainly a worthy task for a girl from the Flatlands?” “I didn’t say that,” Celaena said through her teeth. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

Jesus Christ, Ansel, I think I hate you almost as much as I hate Celery. Ansel is one of those fucking assholes who twists around words of others and reblogs someones post with a shitty “So you’re basically saying you hate all of (x) people, are you OP?” guilt trip.

Celery is like ‘whatever, nobody cares about you reclaiming your shitty homeland even though it has nothing to do with our conversation and I only brought it up because the author wants us to hate each other now” and Ansel stomps off. Riveting Drama, this is, these characters are so well developed! I totally care about how this conflict will resolve itself!

#the worm reads: tab #the worm talks #anti sjm #anti targaryen #anti tog

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saferincages · 6 years

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I was writing this as a private message to @mothlissa because she is the most lovely and patient, and has been listening to all my ramblings and happy memories and beloved feelings about Star Wars for the past week, but I was inspired to post it instead. (I actually thought I told this story once a long time ago, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere on my blog?)

when I was a senior in highschool, I took a drama class that was open to everyone, so there were students from all four grades in it. (I was deeply into my passion for LOTR at this point, and was writing my AP thesis on Tolkien’s trilogy, so that was a major omnipresent part of my identity right then, as I did research and collected scholarly sources and pored over chapters repeatedly. you could probably find me wearing my Evenstar or at least my Nenya on any given day, because I have never been anything less than a parody of myself). anyway, I had a huge binder, it was white, and it had those clear plastic coverings on the front and back, and to further reduce myself as a nerd stereotype, I made collages of a bunch of my favorite characters and covered the whole binder in them, underneath the plastic.

so one day we were working on scenes, and I pulled my binder out, and a freshman in my class got excited because she saw Anakin and Padme as part of this collage, and she started telling me how much she loved Star Wars and the prequels were her favorite everything, and it made her so sad because kids were mean to her about it.

she was a special education student, she had some learning disabilities and a little bit of a speech disorder, along with a physical component. (I don’t want to be ableist in ANY way in describing this, but it’s important to relay for the sake of the story.) she was incredibly sweet. cohesion/concentration was hard for her sometimes, but she told me she never got bored or had trouble understanding Star Wars. kids, because unfortunately they can be super mean, told her she looked/sounded like “an alien.” Star Wars made her feel better about it.

I worked with her a lot, she was genuine and likable and it killed me that other students (particularly in her grade) bullied her, and sometimes if we had free moments she would ask me about LOTR and what my necklace was etc, because those movies/books were too much for her, but she was so curious and she wanted to KNOW. gosh typing this up makes me tearful remembering it

at some point in the class we were assigned to bring an object of comfort/importance in our lives to class and write (then read aloud) about it. as it turned out, she had a doll of Jar-Jar Binks that she'd cherished for years, and most days she secretly carried him with her in her backpack, like a talisman against the unkind words that were thrown at her, and she was SO FREAKING BRAVE she did her scene about it. imagine this for a moment. the MOST mocked character, maybe of all-time, and she expressed her love for him in front of an entire class in a blackbox theatre. she said he made her feel less “weird” - his eyes protruded too! he got overly excited and hyper, he had trouble with grammar and sentences and sometimes didn't relate to/understand the people or events around him! but he was still brave and he had a job in the SENATE and he had helped save his people! I legitimately sat in awe of her doing this, just straight up defying ridicule and basically proclaiming - I LOVE this, and I don't care if everyone else hates it, because it means something to me!

is he obnoxious to many? well...yes. but. I haven't been able to see a single word or joke against his character since without thinking of her, and I really do not care if every other person on this earth who has seen TPM derides him, his existence is important, because he gave this ONE little girl solace and hope in a world that treated her badly simply for being different.

that, my friends, is an example of why stories and fictional characters matter. it may not be “real,” but the impact it can have on our lives, the strength and consolation it can bring us, the way it can help to shape our identities, the way we carry that love as a source of joy, even (perhaps especially) during hard times, that is undeniably, indelibly, powerfully real, and true, and good, and beautiful.

#thanks for coming to my ted talk #anyway i love the prequels #/#//#///#star wars #jar jar binks #the phantom menace #bubble wrap around my heart #maybe tbd

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imaginetonyandbucky · 7 years

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Imagine JARVIS never stops hacking into SHIELD files after Avengers first movie (Obie taught him a lesson and he wanted to protect Sir after the nuke was sent out) and of course after a while discovers Hydra, the files of the Winter Soldier and of course the mission report of December 16, 1991. Tony has time to come to terms with the fact, therefore searches for Bucky, destroying Hydra on the way, gets rid of the mind control (BARF) and later they fall in love.

prompts, winteriron, tony stark, bucky barnes, tony x bucky,February,2014

“Wakeup, Daddy’s home.” The lights in the workshop flickered to life,but it seemed empty without DUM-E and U coming to greet him.

“Goodevening, sir,” JARVIS said. “And may I say what a relief it is tohave you home. Again.”

“Thanks,Jay,” Tony said. He dropped into the workstation chair and rubbedabsently at his chest. It was strange, not to have the arc reactoranymore. Helen -- you could call your doctor by their given name oncethey’d literallyhadyour heart in their hands, right? -- Helen had done an amazing jobwith the reconstructive surgery.

“ShallI contact the usual suppliers to see about having the Malibu houserebuilt?” JARVIS asked.

Tonyconsidered it. It would take months to rebuild the place, while therepairs and upgrades to Stark Tower had been completed months ago.Bruce was already here; Tony might as well just move back to NewYork, finally get around to issuing invitations to the rest of theAvengers. “Not yet,” he said. “Arrange to have the bratsrecovered and I’ll drive out and bring ‘em back here.”

“Verygood, sir,” JARVIS said. “If you have no urgent business, I’veuncovered some information that you might wish to review.” Adisplay screen came to life and began spitting up windows ofinformation.

Tonyfrowned. “What am I looking at?”

“Whileyou were in recovery, sir, I took it upon myself to do some digging.Surmising that you would wish to know why SHIELD was not already incontrol of the Mandarin situation, I re-activated the backdoor codewe inserted into their mainframes.”

“Thesefiles are way older than that,” Tony said, flicking through them.“These go back decades.”

“Yes,sir,” JARVIS said delicately. “It appears that SHIELD may becompromised. I do urge you to particularly review the files that I’veflagged for your attention. And, sir... I’m sorry.”

[mobile readers, ‘ware the read-more!]

March,2014

“Whatthe hell, Rogers,” Tony demanded, before he’d even pushed all theway through the hospital room door. Steve’s new guy, Wilson, boltedupright in the terrible visitor’s chair. Good reflexes. The instantWilson realized who Tony was, his eyes went big and round. Fast onthe uptake, too.

“You,I like you,” Tony said, clapping Wilson on the shoulder. “Come toNew York soon, we’ll get you some new wings.” He turned back tothe bed. Christ, but Cap was a mess. “I repeat, Rogers: what. Theactual. Hell.”

Stevecracked an eyelid -- the one that wasn’t surrounded by a mass ofbruises and stitched shut around the occipital bone. “Nice to seeyou too, Tony.”

“Youdon’t call, you don’t write,” Tony complained. “Bruce and I,we’re hurt, you didn’t invite us to the party.”

Stevetried to laugh and it turned into a weak cough. “C’mon, Tony, youknow I’m not gonna call the heavy hitters for the little stuff.”

“Thelittle stuff, like our purported leadership being riddled withHydra?” Tony challenged. “Or stuff like their number one assassinbeing your old right hand man?”

Thehumor fell off Steve’s face in a hurry. “You knew?”

“Onlyfor a couple of weeks,” Tony said. “JARVIS was vacationing inSHIELD’s systems and stumbled across some red flags. I tipped Furyoff that something was rotten and he asked me to keep it under my hatwhile he set up a sting. That bastard plays things so close to thechest that his own ribs can’t see the cards.”

“Youknew about Bucky,” Steve said, sounding even more breathless.

“Yeah,well, it took me a while to figure out what to do about that, soyou’ll have to excuse me for not texting you right away with myreview of the videofootage of him murdering my parents,”Tony snapped.

Stevewent even paler than he already was. “He-- Shit, Tony, I’m sorry.Zola told me Hydra had them killed, but I didn’t realize they’dused Bucky to do it.”

“Soit looks like we’re both guilty of holding back information,”Tony said. “Were you going to tell me?”

Steve’smouth tightened. “I’ve been a little busy, the last few days,”he said. “Hadn’t quite worked it all through yet.”

“Well,you’re you,”Tony said, more lightly than he felt. “I’m sure you’d havedecided to do what was right.” He glanced at Wilson, then lookedback at Steve. “Romanov says you’re planning to go after him.”

“Ofcourse I am,” Steve said, because of course he was. “Tony, it...it wasn’t him.You know that, right?”

Tonyhad to close his eyes. “Yeah,” he sighed. “If I’d had him infront of me right after I found out, I don’t know what I would’vedone, but... Once I calmed down and thought it through, I knew. Dadrecognizedhim,and he didn’t even--” Tony had to stop, to swallow around a tightthroat.

Stevelooked grim. “I’m sorry, Tony. I am.”

“Yeah,”Tony managed. “We’re going to make those assholes pay, though.”

“Damnright we will,” Steve agreed. “For your parents andforBucky. And undo whatever they put in his head.”

“Well,I’ve got some thoughts about that,” Tony said. “A littlesomething Bruce and I were working on together. You work on findingyour boy, and I’ll see what we can do about bringing him back.”

July 2015

“It’scalled Binarily Augmented Retrofitted Framing,” Tony said. “BARFfor short, and don’t say it -- we’re working on a new acronym.”

Atthe other end of the table, flanked by Steve and Sam, Bucky Barnesstared at his hands where they were clasped in front of him. “Hydrahad a device, too,” he said, almost too quiet for Tony to hear. Heswallowed, licked his lips, swallowed again. “It... hurt.”

“Yeah,I’ve seen the specs,” Tony said. “They were literally burningout chunks of your brain. The initial concept for BARF was traumarecovery -- specifically, I was going to use it on myself,and I am very attached to alltheparts of my brain, so while it’s not exactly a skip through thepark, it’s not going to cause any physicaldamage.The way this works...” Tony considered ways to explain how thememory retrofit worked. None of the men at the other end of the tablewere lacking in intelligence, but they weren’t geniuses, either.“You ever been in an argument, and then hours later, thought of theperfect thing to say, too late to actually say it? And you keepreplaying that conversation over and over in your head, wishing you’dthought of it at the right moment, to the point where sometimes thatreplay is a stronger memory than the actual event? This is like that,but a hundred times stronger and faster. It can’t change what’shappened, obviously, but it can adjust your responsetoit, let you rebuild the lesson that you took away from it.”

“Andit will fix me?” Barnes said, intent. “It will take theselandmines out of my head?”

“Ibelieve so,” Tony said. “You’re a special case, so we won’tknow for certain until we give it a shot, but I feel pretty confidentabout it.”

Barnesworried at his lip with his teeth.

“Youdon’t have to do this,” Steve said, earnest and sorrowful.“You’ll have to witness the worst of the things they did to you.I can’t imagine how unpleasant that would be. We can find anotherway.”

“WhileI just while away my days in the Hulk Room?” Barnes said, not quitesharp. “Maybe it shouldbeunpleasant. Maybe that would be the smallest amount of justice forthe lives I took.”

“Buck,”Steve said. Tony could hear the crack in his voice from across theroom. “That wasn’t you. I keep telling you--”

“Itwas my hands,” Barnes said. He turned his hands over, as ifsearching for evidence of the blood they’d spilled. “I did it.Maybe I didn’t make that choice. But I did it anyway.” He lookedup at Tony, and it wasn’t until that moment Tony realized, with astart, that it was the first time Barnes had met Tony’s eyes sinceSteve had brought him to the Tower.

Barneshad pale blue eyes, almost the color of silver, and that gaze wassteady. “I’ll do it. Set it up.”

Theyset it up in the Hulk Room, in case Barnes was triggered. No one elsewould be able to see what he saw, Tony promised. Tony had done aprojection for the presentation at MIT, but that wasn’t a necessarycomponent of the system. And Tony figured, some things a man wantedto keep private.

Onthe other side of the glass, all Tony would be able to see werevitals and brainwave patterns, adrenaline levels and involuntarymuscle responses. Because Steve was hovering like a nervous newparent, Tony went through a session himself to show them what itlooked like from the outside, with Bruce at the monitoring station.

Hetook himself through the wormhole again, made himself stare up intothe black space and count the alien ships in their thousands. Iwill survive this,he told them, andwe willdefeatyou.

Tonylasted about five minutes in that memory, and came back to himselfpanting and dizzy, and outside the heavy glass of the Hulk Room,Bruce looked resigned and Sam looked worried and Steve looked grave.And Barnes...

Barneswas pale as a sheet, but his jaw was set and his eyes were locked onTony’s face. When their eyes met, he nodded, once grim.

Barneswas in the first memory for all of about ninety seconds when heripped off the goggles and fell to his knees, retching.

“Bucky!”Steve yelled, banging on the glass. “Bucky, what happened? Are youokay?”

“Ohgod,” Barnes gasped. “It’s so fuckin’ real...”He rocked back onto his heels and flapped a hand at Steve. “Stopthat, Rogers, you’re makin’ it worse.” He took a few deepbreaths, then looked straight at Tony, ignoring the way Steve waspractically pressed against the wall. “Let’s get this cleaned up,and get me a bucket or something for the next run.”

March 2016

Buckywas waiting for Tony outside the Hulk Room, just like always, leaningagainst the wall with his hands stuffed in his pockets. “Mornin’dollface,” he said without looking up. “Ready to dance?”

Theflirting had started a couple of months ago. Progress was slow, withfrequent setbacks, and the situation needed a little humor from timeto time. Tony could only helplessly admire his determination anddrive.

“WhySergeant Barnes,” Tony gasped, firing up the monitoring equipmentone-handed, “are you getting fresh with me?”

Buckygave him a wide-eyed look. “I wouldn’t dare try it, not with youbein’ so far outta my league,” he said. “All I want’s a danceor two.”

“Yousay that now,” Tony said. “But I know what you’re reallyafter.” He tapped the last code in and the pneumatic seal on theHulk Room’s door released with a hiss.

Buckyflinched -- his work with the BARF hadn’t stopped him fromdeveloping new pavlovian responses, and that sound was guaranteed tomake him pale and queasy. It didn’t stop him, though. He scooped upthe goggles and headpiece and stepped through the door without anyhesitation.

Asthe door swung slowly shut, Bucky slipped on the headpiece, adjustingits position with the ease of long practice, and covered his prettyeyes with the VR goggles. “Maybe this time,” he said, so quietlythat Tony wasn’t sure he was hearing it right, “I’ll make youproud enough to say yes.”

May 2017

Buckyhad gone pale when they’d walked into the room with the scanner, somuch blood draining away from his face that his lips had taken on ablueish tint, and his hand had trembled in Tony’s grip. But hedidn’t hesitate, even for an instant. He climbed into the chair andvery deliberately curled his hands over the ends of the armrests, hiseyes locked on Tony as he licked his lips.

“Areyou certain you wish to remain?” T’challa asked. “If he is notfully recovered, you will be in great danger.”

Tonylooked away from Bucky only for an instant, to let T’challa see thedetermination in his eyes, and then shifted his gaze back to Bucky.“I’ve been putting my life in the hands of my tech for more thana decade,” he said firmly. “He’s clean. This is only aformality.”

T’challawanted to argue; Tony could feel it hanging in the air. Tony wasready to tell him where to stick it -- Steve hadn’t been permittedto attend this review, and it was only after some rather franticnegotiation that the U.N. had agreed to let Tony come along forBucky’s moral support.

Finally,T’challa bowed his head, accepting. “Very well,” he agreed, andturned to the Wakandan neuroscientist and the team of expertsassigned by the U.N. who would be verifying Bucky’s mental state.“You may begin.”

Acomputer technician approached and Bucky closed his eyes tightly.“Try to relax,” the neuroscientist said, a heavy Wakandan accentlending music to the syllables. “The process should be painless,but a thorough mapping will take some time.” She used a vividlyblue gel to attach several electrodes to Bucky’s face and neck, andspoke to the technician in Wakandan, which Tony didn’t speak, butbased on the way the screens on the computer bank flickered to lifeand began displaying graphs and numbers, they were going through astartup sequence.

“Mr.Barnes,” she said after a moment, “we will present a number ofimages to you, some still, some short scenes. The complete collectionof possible images is quite large; no one will know precisely whichimages you see, though there is an algorithm that ensures certaincategories are among those chosen. I -- and the analysts -- will seeonly your measured responses, as compared to the range of responsesfor that image already acquired. You need do nothing but allow theimages to appear; your subconscious response will be measured almostinstantaneously. Do you understand the procedure, Mr. Barnes?”

Buckynodded without opening his eyes.

“Doyou consent to the procedure?” she asked.

“It’swhy we came all this way,” he said, voice husky. “Might ‘swell.”

Thescientist looked tolerably amused, but pressed, “I must have aclear affirmative before we begin, Mr. Barnes.”

Buckyhuffed. “Yes,” he said. “I consent.”

“Thankyou.” She nodded at them both. “I will be watching from theobservation room,” she told them. “If you need to call a halt,you need only say so.” She left the room, very carefully closingthe door behind her.

Whenthe heavy bolts shot home, sealing them in, Bucky’s eyes flew open.“They didn’t strap me down,” he said.

“Noneed,” Tony said lightly. “You’re going to be fine.”

“I’mscared,” Bucky admitted in a whisper.

Tonytook Bucky’s hand in his own. “I’ll be right here the wholetime,” he promised.

Buckystarted to answer, but then frowned slightly, his eyes goingunfocused. It had begun.

Unableto see the images that Bucky was getting, his outward responses weresomewhat mystifying to Tony. His breathing and heart rate sped andslowed, his pupils dilated and contracted, muscles all over his bodytwitched. He smiled, he frowned, he grimaced. His skin flushed andthen faded. Once he choked out, “No!” Some time later, hewhispered, “Please,” but he sounded... happy?

“Arethey showing you porn in there?” Tony teased.

Buckycocked his head, eyes flicking around in sightless confusion. Itfaded again after a moment, and Tony kept his mouth shut after that.

Thecomplete process took hours,but Bucky never asked for a break, and perforce, neither did Tony. Bythe time it was done, Bucky was soaked with sweat and shaking like aleaf. The scanning equipment powered down, and Bucky’s eyes slowlyfocused on Tony. “They done?” he asked, his voice a hoarse rasp.

“Thinkso,” Tony said. “You okay?”

“Hell,no,” Bucky said. “That was... that was rough.”

“Yeah,”Tony agreed. “But you did great.”

“We’llsee, I guess.” Bucky didn’t look too confident.

Tonyglanced toward the door -- it would be just like those petty U.N.officials to draw out their deliberation just because they could,making Bucky sweat out of a sense of power. “Hey, after they cut usloose,” Tony said, trying for distraction, “how about dinner?Wakandan cuisine is really something, and it’s hard to come by ifyou’re not actually in Wakanda.”

“Youaskin’ for a date, gorgeous?” Bucky managed a wan smile.

“Well,if you don’t have a more pressing engagement,” Tony said, liftinghis eyebrows, “yes.”

Bucky’seyes went round. “Wait, really?”

Tonyheld out his hand, palm up, offering. Slowly, Bucky took it, and Tonyclosed his fingers around Bucky’s, smiling. “For the record,because I didn’t think you’d believe me until this was allsettled, I’ve been proud of you since the first time you said you’dtry it. And I’ve wanted to take you out for months.”

Thelight and wonder in Bucky’s eyes was worth all the heartache andwork it had taken to get to this moment, Tony thought. “I neverthought,” Bucky whispered, “never thought I’d--”

Thedoor opened to reveal T’challa, the doctor and the U.N. committeehead behind him. He met Tony’s eyes, then Bucky’s. Slow, like asleepy cat, he smiled.

~ @everyworldneedslove

#prompts #winteriron #tony stark #bucky barnes #tony x bucky #everyworldneedslove #steve rogers #t'challa #Anonymous

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wumbleberry-fc · 7 years

Note

Chai, Flowering Tea, Blueberry-muffin Tea, Kombucha

Chai: Where do you want to travel next?

I would like to visit Canada, since I’m going to live within 60 miles of the border real soon, and I would also like to visit more states in the US, as I have been in 20 states now (not including only being in an airport).

Flowering Tea: What is a movie you can always watch?

I am always down to see the movie Airplane! It’s hilarious I recommend it with high regards.

Blueberry-muffin Tea: Tell me a memory that makes you smile.

This is the story of June 2nd. (WARNING: VERY LONG)

So, the last assembly of the school year is dedicated to the senior class, and it’s known as the Senior Assembly. It features speeches by a couple students, final performances by senior drillers and senior cheerleaders, a performance by ‘Man Drill’ (where some male juniors dress up and perform in a hilarious parody of what regular drill might do, meme style), performances by any senior soloists or groups of senior students who wish to play something for the class (2016 featured a lovely original jazzy performance by all the senior brass, and then some students sang ‘Fix You,’ among other things), announcements of the staff who will be leaving with the seniors, department honors, and then there is a moving up thing where each class transitions to the next class, and the seniors go into the middle of the gym and watch a slideshow of whatever pictures the students sent in, and then the band plays the alma mater for the last time for them (also, they play at the entrance procession as well).

This year, it was combined with Gordy Games, which is a day where pretty much classes are super short, and then it’s a fun, casual day, with food trucks on campus, bouncy houses, a dodgeball tournament, video games, a movie, and yearbook distribution, where anybody can go wherever they want and nobody cares what you do, so long as it’s legal. It’s the one day where no administrator even semi-actively tries to enforce the no underclassman off-campus policy, and it’s just a super easy day to not worry about the end-of-year stress and just be kids for a day.

Well, this year, I was one of the three seniors who gave a speech. Back in late April, word was sent that they were looking for seniors interested in speaking at graduation. One student would speak at graduation, a couple would speak at the Senior Assembly, and one would speak at the Last Lesson.

Only a total of 7 of us even bothered to draft a potential speech. A week after writing the draft and presenting it to a panel of teachers (on May 1st), I found out that I was one of those chosen for the Senior Assembly (which was the one I wanted).

Flash forward a bit: Three days before the assembly, I was pulled from my last period and told to report to the principal. When I got there, she told me that a meeting should’ve happened way earlier but she was swamped. She then told me that there was no flow in my speech at all, there seemed to be no clear point, and it needed to be completely rewritten, and so I promised that I’d have a brand new speech written with a point and a flow by lunch the next day (Yep! 21 hours to rewrite from scratch a 5-minute speech).

The next day, which just so happens to be my birthday, I had my new speech printed out and ready, and I was a ball of nerves as I walked into her office at 11:30. She had me read the new speech, and she said “This is a million times better, thank you. I approve of this speech,” and I was so relieved oh my goodness.

Now onto the day of the event and the happy memories!

It was a late start Friday (8:50 instead of 7:20), but we had to be there by 6:30, which was fine. We did the run-through of things, and when us three speakers finished, we were able to go, and I joined the philharmonic orchestra in a zero period rehearsal to practice our combined pieces for the concert the week after, and then we had 12 minute classes.

The entrance was long but I loved walking in to the sounds of everyone cheering for our class with the band playing some pep tunes and it was great! There was a greeting, the drill performance, the first speaker (who was alright, not very emotionally stirring or anything. It was... speechy.), the cheerleaders, the Man Drill, and then it was my turn.

I went up to the podium, and gave this speech:

Hello. I am Alex Walter, and I have one thing to say:

I love Hazen.

Well, I have more to say than just that. I stand here before you today representing the senior class. I am not a Representative of the class, I am not the four-year three-sport varsity athlete, I am not the most popular guy in the class—I am a regular, run-of-the-mill senior student. Except for one thing.

I love Oliver M. Hazen Senior High School. After 4 years, not many of the 388 of us can say the same. While I don’t hold the belief that ‘Hazen is whack,’ I do understand where it comes from.

It began four years ago, when 368 of us sat in these bleachers for the first time as a Hazen student. At our orientation, we were oriented to Hazen, told the rules and guidelines, and given our first warning about our culminating project. Immediately after, we forgot our way around, nobody remembered to not clump around in major hallways and stairwells, and were told not to put off our culminating project. Four years later, and we still don’t know the bell schedule, where everything is in the school, how to keep walking in the hallways, and what the culminating project is.

Furthermore, thanks to No Child Left Behind, we were privileged to have the opportunity to take all these BRAND NEW Standardized Tests. Wasn’t that Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium fun!? And how about that new version of the SAT WITH Essay?!

Miscommunication, though, is one of the biggest reasons Hazen isn’t always kept in the highest regard. I miss the days where the food services accounts emailed about a low balance $5.00 before overdrafting, instead of $5.00 after. I’m waiting for the day when the system finally marks excused absences as excused. Especially when I was in the Lecture Hall all day. And speaking of the Lecture Hall, as I pointed out there during the Constitutional Convention, it took three and a half years to find out how to check how many detention hours I had. Luckily, despite not being the best student, I didn’t have any.

Beyond all of this, though, we must keep in mind that, just like life, Hazen is more than a few things. Hazen has many layers, just like onions, ogres, and all of us. We are more than our grades and test scores. We have our special interests, hobbies, priorities, and lifestyles. Our beloved Assistant Principal Mr. ____ is more than a strict disciplinarian. He is a loving father, a fantastic dancer, and the best reader of Green Eggs and Ham that I have ever met! And Hazen is more than kids who don’t listen, government-mandated and -implemented educational standards, and faulty electronic systems.

Hazen provides amazing acceptance and diversity in both opportunities and activities. Seriously, last year we formed a club where we would literally sit around and play Super Smash Bros. Brawl for an hour and a half each week. And that is on top of D&D club and Gamer’s Guild club.

We have a Gay Straight Alliance, a Black Student Union, an Asian Student Coalition, and a Latino Student Union. We have the Yearbook, the Kilt, and Lit Mag, which all feature superb writing and artwork! We have a drama department that puts on an astounding two shows a year, or in the case of this year, eight! We have top-class, state championship-winning FBLA, Drill, Cheer, Choir, Orchestra, and Band programs! WE HAVE A MARCHING BAND!!!!! We have a school store operated by DECA that introduced me to the wonderful world of bagels. We even have athletics!, who, while they might not win all their games, they win spots in our hearts.

I personally don’t participate in all of these activities and groups, as, well, it’s hard to be an active member in seven groups who all meet at 2:15 on Thursday. But the ability to have so many choices to pick and choose from is brilliant.

It’s these choices that define our Hazen experience. For me, I chose to join the band. I joined a group that not only gets to make music, but gets to support our school and our community. I got to scream, or cheer, to my heart’s content and dance like nobody was watching at games. I got to play stand tunes and pop songs for you all. I got to grow as an individual in both musical maturity and emotional maturity. I gained an accepting environment filled with friendly people. And by marching this year, I even got the athletic component in and did some physical exercise. I got the full Hazen experience, all in one.

It’s our choices that characterize and embody Hazen as a whole, and, I have to say that I don’t want to leave. You make me proud to be a Highlander. You make Hazen a place I want to be at. You make Hazen a place I love.

I’ll miss you.

(I know at least two people who recorded my speech, but I still haven’t seen either of them so I can’t provide that for you guys, but it was beautiful!)

After that, it was a Orchestral Quartet, the final senior speaker (who’s speech was sad and deep), the senior dances, the farewells to the departing teachers, the moving up, the slideshow, and then we left for Gordy Games.

At Gordy Games, I kept receiving compliments on my speech, and I hung out with my three greatest friends. We ended up bailing the school, and went an got Thai food at a place about a mile from campus, and then walked over to a park another mile away and had a picnic and it was my first ever picnic type thing and we just sat there for over 2 hours eating and talking and hanging out and it was like the best ever, and then we walked another 2 miles back to one of our houses, and departed from there at around 5, after 4.5 hours together.

And every time I think about that day, my face just brightens up completely, because it was the four of us, together, completely happy on a stress-free afternoon being best friends and I love them all and that is one of the happiest days of my life!

TL;DR: A speech that I had to rewrite last-minute for a school-wide assembly went brilliantly well and afterwards I hung out with my 3 favorite people (that I’ve met physically) and had an even better time, for one of the best days in my life.

Kombucha: What do you order on pizza?

Either an all meat pizza, an all meat stuffed pizza, a cheese pizza, a sausage and green pepper pizza, or what I just found to be good, a chicken bacon ranch pizza.

-----

Thanks for the asks!!!

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cxncordia · 5 years

Text

The Box:

In most Kunihiko Ikuhara directed anime we can see tons of icons being reused in similar fashion, this is called a motif. One of the constant motifs that he uses is boxes. Boxes to Ikuhara represent a sort of repression or rejection. In particular, Sarazanmai uses boxes to represent repression of shame, of things that we either enjoy/desire/want but that we have to repress or keep hidden in order to connect with others (which is actually the counterpoint to the anime’s premise, because the basis of the show is that you can’t connect without being fully honest).

Taking that into consideration I wonder what’s in the box each of my characters carry around? So here’s the response:

Enzo carries a box filled with magical girl merchandise. Even though he’s this suave and well-groomed guy who will sweet talk you into anything, he truly enjoys and adores magical girl anime. Mainly because it reminds him of his mother (both used to watch show together), mainly because it reminds him of a time where he thought magic was flashier and gentler. Truth is, magic is addictive, aggressive and requires too much pain to work, a reality that he tries to dissociate through watching pretty girls in frills.

Valerian carries a box filled with photos of himself taken by an older uncle when he was a kid. While Valerian wasn’t necessarily abused by an older man, there was an erotic component to the way this older uncle of his saw him and the way it made him feel. It makes him feel dirty to even accept that one of his first erections came when he was in front of the camera, partially naked, exposed for an older man.

Virgil carries the Rosary bead given to him by his aunt Rosario. When he was a young boy, aunt Rosario was the one who took care of him after being abandoned by his parents. His father tried to cross to the states and his mother went to work the fields almost every month, so he was left to the care of aunt Rosario. Though Rosario never neglected Virgil, her religious view did instill in him, constantly mentioning that he could become the next Pope or even be the first Mexican Pope, an idea that got so ingrained in him that he tries heavily to follow after it, even if he himself doesn’t believe in God after finding the dinosaur hatchlings.

Julio carries in the box a broken mirror shard. When he was a young boy and was enjoying his time with his family one Christmas, the younger cousins got together to play around a large mirror that once belonged to Abuelita. The mirror itself dated back to times before the Mexican Revolution and it was a family heirloom. While they were playing in the attic with all these memories, Julio found a small doll that he picked and, for picking the doll, another cousin began taunting him. The taunt didn’t sit well with Julio, who already carried the internalized shame of being gay, and began fighting with the boy. They ended up tipping the mirror in their fight and breaking it. One of the shards entered his cousin’s eye, leaving him blind from one eye, while Julio remained unscathed (because of his latent mutant power). Ashamed for what he did to his cousin, he keeps one of the mirror shards to remind him of the problem.

Andrew carries an unhatched egg. Before his Mother was killed by his Father’s family for being a witch, she told Andrew about how Phoenixes still exist in our everyday life and how they can, sometimes, lay eggs in people’s heart. A person of strong and noble heart can carry an egg and the day of it’s death, the egg will hatch and leave in a magnificent Phoenix, carrying with it the soul of the deceased. However, if the person is killed before it’s time, the Phoenix egg will rot and never hatch. When Andrew survived the pyre that killed his mother and him, among the ashes of his mother’s corpse, laid a single pristine golden egg, which he carries with him and has been trying to hatch desperately... if only he knew that the egg will only hatch when he has learned how to forgive those who killed his mother.

The old Vico carries a box filled with failed exams. The reality is that, despite how good he is at taking care of others, at noticing diseases on plants, at taking care of animals, Vico carries an immense guilt at not being good enough academically speaking, because it was the way his family measured their worth: being the son of two intense and bright individuals comes with a heavy burden. The thing is that Vico never needed the exams or tests to prove his worth, but he doesn’t know it and it breaks his heart. Also, I say “old” Vico because this is a character that may also face a rework soon.

Kaeus carries with himself an old Cameo from his Mother. One of the ways the Emperor betrayed Kaeus was by using his family against him. Not only did he convinced his Mother that he should conquer one of the poorest planets in the sector (that had not a single mean to defend against the Jovian invasion or technology), but he also made sure to spouse his Mother after his father’s passing (or more like, killing him, though he doesn’t know that). The only thing missing here to make Kaeus a Hamlet figure is the Emperor being his uncle. When pressed, the cameo projects a video of the time the three of them were a happy family, one of Kaeus biggest memories, and also, one of biggest shame because it’s the day he pledged loyalty to the Emperor and enrolled in the Jovian Army.

Victor carries with himself his Father’s old typewriter. (That shit is heavy, but Victor’s got the muscles, so it’s okay). Before Victor enrolled in the Army, he had the desire to follow on his Father’s footsteps on being a reporter, working for the school’s paper and even taking on photography. However, his true hit was taking an elective class on writing and discovering his desire to write poetry. From there on, he decided to be a writer, to which his father supported and he pursued for his last year of High School until his Father was sent to cover an armed conflict in a foreign country and was reported as MIA. With debts piling up and the desire to obtain money quickly, he changed the writing for the war, a shameful act for him because it’s the very same thing that killed his Father.

Garrett carries nothing in his box. And that’s the problem that troubles him: there should be something there. But he can’t remember it all. In all reality is a gift that he can’t remember what was once there, the used underwear of a young crush. When Garrett became involved with magic, and arrogance got the best of him, he summoned an old God of Pleasure, who gave him power unlimited so long he accepted to be his lover. And how could he deny himself that when he looked like everything he had wanted? And the first thing he did with that power was to bend the will of an old “straight” guy who rejected him. At first, he took his used underwear as a kink or a fetish, but the more his downfall continued, the more it became apparent that the underwear was a shameful act and that he had coerced a man the same way the deity had coerced him. How the box became empty, it’s another story itself.

Harper carries his expulsion notice from Brakebills. Though possibly one of the smartest and greatest magicians who ever set foot on Brakebills, his expulsion was quite the scandal. When a series of spells were impossible to be understood or followed, he decided to pursue a Sphynx to request for their help. There should be a better method to memorize it all, right? And there is, but it requires committing a great crime and that is scalping a Sphynx and using it’s mane as a talisman. So he went and did that, but killed not an old Sphynx, but a young recent born. This was a serious crime given that Sphynxes take centuries to be gestated and born, and a crime that was taken to the God themselves, who requested his expulsion and with it, Harper’s memory removal... a thing that would have happened if the boy would not have taken countermeasures. Now banned from using magic, he has come with clever ways to still use magic (like remove his own organs and substitute them with those of magical fauna). However, the expulsion notice pursues him everywhere and will keep on pursuing him, being always within his view as punishment for his deeds.

Alvaro carries the first knife he used to take a life. Though he still does it and he is paid for it, the reality is that Alvaro doesn’t take pleasure from it and the knife marks the exact moment of his change, where he went from this Latino boy and was turned into a ruthless killing machine. He hates it and deep down, he wishes he had never turned this way but what else can you do when poverty strikes you hard?

#hc:enzo #hc:valerian #hc:virgil #hc:andrew #hc:julio #hc:vico #hc:kaeus #hc:alvaro #hc:harper #hc:garrett

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pv02 · 7 years

Photo

018

...

< Prev | From the Beginning

Kinda sparse visually this week, I have a lot of work to do, and this was meant to be more of a written update anyway.

Check below the break to access the logs!

DECRYPTION IN PROGRESS...

DECRYPTION COMPLETE

13 files unlocked

Accessing...

DR. INARA VOCIS

ENTRY001

It's been one month. I feel like I'm committing a grave sin by keeping you preserved as you are. I can't let you go.

I know I can find an answer. Everything, even organic life, can be broken down into basic machine components.

I've started these logs to keep my memories straight. To remind myself of where I've been and what I'm doing. And maybe to stop myself from making mistakes.

I'm not ready to say goodbye. I just hope that what I'm doing is right.

ENTRY002

I've been considering Dr. Hivewell's offer. His personality remains a turnoff. But, he's among the most qualified to research imprint protocols along with myself.

Of course, a full transfer of one's conscious is drastically more complex, as prior tragedies and tests have proven.

I don't understand his total apathy to the moral argument of the process, however. There's been talk of banning further research on the topic, and yet he’s completely unphased.

ENTRY003

It’s been 3 days since I last wrote. I've since contacted Hivewell and accepted his offer. I haven't told him about Piper yet. I suspect he may have a suspicion, but it might explain the timing of him reminding me of his request.

We're to set up in a remote facility. Despite the research being legal here it still meets with a lot of opposition and protests.

It’s a privately funded facility, funded from his corporation. We should have access to all the equipment we’ll need.

ENTRY004

I've moved Piper's remains on-site, into a stasis container. Everything is stable. I've settled on a comms frame for her surrogate body, modified more to her body type. I’ve dubbed it ‘PV,’ based on her initials. Hivewell is pushy and tends to ask too many questions, so I’d rather he not take notice of it. Hopefully it should be innocuous, since we’re both robotics researchers, for there to be a random android model in one of our offices.

He’s at least shared with me his findings so far, which is uncharacteristic for him, but I suppose it’s in his best interest either way.

As much as his personality can come off as me as pretentious, I must admit, the two of us are probably among the most qualified individuals to conduct this research. At the very least he’s competent.

ENTRY005

I noticed Dr. Hivewell has been browsing through my personal logs. He wasn’t doing a very good job of covering his tracks, but i wouldn’t’ve suspected anything if he had mentioned he was worried about being “pushy.”

I confronted him about it and threatened to walk out. He claims he wanted to confirm what happened and what I was planning with Piper, having known of her death. Why he didn’t ask directly is beyond me.

I told him about the virus, the treatments, how she had to abandon her career once her health took a turn. She was only 20. I still struggle to write these events down.

He understands that I have a personal stake in this research. He swore he’d help however he could, that we’re doing the right thing. It was uncharacteristically soft-spoken for him. I’ve never seen genuine sympathy from him before. First time for everything.

Still, I have opted to move my personal files to an older terminal for safekeeping to keep them off the network, as well as password protect them. I don't appreciate him reading my logs.

ENTRY006

The transfer is in a few days. Piper has been preserved for 63 days now. I hope that hasn't affected her mind to the point of interfering with the procedure.

Imprinting is already a difficult process, and it only mimicks part of the human brain via a non-invasive manner.

Meanwhile, modern approaches to mechanization merely inolve a human brain within a mechanical body--essentially an advanced cyborg. This however requires the individual to be alive during the process, and maintains mortality. It can’t bring someone back from the dead.

To fully move a mind into a digital form, and for it to be compatible with a robotic interface has been assumed to be an impossibility. The basic logic behind machines and humans is too different. I have a description of the process on the main server--it’s too much for a log entry.

In theory, however, there should be a way to make this work. If this is successful, I'll have defied the impossible, and I'll be able to speak to my daughter again.

If I fail, it's not like she'll be any more dead, right?

ENTRY007

The transfer was today.

Piper opened her eyes.

I've made a mistake.

Hivewell is estatic. He's begun drafting up a body and plans for himself, excited by the prospect of immortality.

Piper keeps repeating she feels cold. She doesn't feel that body is hers, despite its similarities. She experienced what it was like to die, and has perfect memories of that moment that she can't shut off.

She’s claimed she’s experiencing a perpetual sensation that she can’t really describe. It feels foreign--like the way her mind now works completely defies human thought. She says every second feels heavy and slow. Without need of sleep or food, she can’t “shut off.”

She's also raised a valid point: is she really my daughter? Or is she a machine that simply contains a perfect copy of my daughter's memories? I'm starting to doubt myself.

I've told her I can help. I can perfect her senses. I can actually make her feel better via inhibitors and adjustments. Regardless, she resents me for what I've done.

ENTRY008

It’s been one month. Hivewell has successfully transferred his conscious to a robotic frame. He hasn't exhibited the same symptoms as Piper--he claims he feels great. He's not phased by the possibility of essentially being a mere copy of his now-defunct human body.

His organic remains are disturbing to look at. How he can look at his old body without feeling a thing is unnerving to the point of suggesting he’s lost his humanity.

He's able to access information like a computer now, even control other systems. He's attempted to describe the sensation to me, and the way his mind experiences the world now. I am legitimately interested, but it's not something that an organic can easily comprehend. We've concluded it's like trying to describe color to a blind person. He also claims that the passage of time feels altered, but immediately he developed a module to help adjust that to, as he put it, “allow him to perceive time at a more familiar rate.”

I’ve provided the same hotfix to Piper, just to relieve some of her stress, along with a “sleep” function. I can’t imagine she’s enjoying her time in the lab. It feels like I’m holding her hostage.

Still, we’ve been recording everything we can. I would have done so with Piper, but I don’t think she’s in the appropriate mental state for testing.

ENTRY009

It’s only been one day. Hivewell can control other robots, even more complex AIs. He took control of Piper, even if it was briefly.

She feels violated. I'm furious. I feel like I've resurrected my daughter into a hell. I've immediately begun work on a second body for her, one with countermeasures and a more unique system to prevent him from doing so in the future.

Hivewell has apologized, though it feels just as disingenuous as ever.

ENTRY010

Hivewell can research and develop projects at an alarming rate never seen by man or machine. His mind doesn’t fatigue like a human brain would.

One of his first projects has been a flexible tool called the 'AMP,’ or ‘Automaton Morphing Peripheral.’ It's a module that allows for hard light projection, similar to a shield generator (though with much more detailed results), and rapid reconfiguration of mechanical parts. It allows an AI to essentially transform or modify themselves on-the-fly, as long as the information for the transformation is available and have enough power to maintain the transformed state.

More importantly, I should be able to modify it to act as a security measure to keep him out of my daughter's mind, like a firewall. It'll be ready before 02.

ENTRY011

Piper is dead.

I had equipped her with the AMP. She protested its necessity.

While resuming work on her new body, she intentionally attached herself to a voltage source far beyond what her frame could handle.

Her internals have been fried.

I've lost my daughter twice now.

I’m a horrible mother. I’ve secured my place in hell.

The only thing that survived of her mind was the personality core.

ENTRY012

What am I doing

What is wrong with me

This won’t be my daughter

ENTRY013

Final entry

Leaving

Hive says the IFS is heading here to investigate

What was he doing that prompted this?

I need to leave PV02 behind

Piper is gone. There's no point in trying further

#pvquest #pivot #words words words #yay act 1 and prologue are done

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pomrania · 7 years

Text

Perspective

((part of the Little by Little AU))

Primary overall objective: preservation of self and CaptainHeraSyndulla.

Currently satisfied.

Secondary overall objective: preservation of mental wellbeing of CaptainHeraSyndulla.

Subset thereof: preservation of organics associated with CaptainHeraSyndulla, including particular levels of mental wellbeing.

Unable to fulfill secondary objective. Unable to fulfill subset of secondary objective.

***

The volume of conversation on the other side of the door was below that which Chopper's auditory sensors could clearly pick up. Detected patterns of pitch and amplitude were within predicted values for the expected subject matter. No noise levels had yet been detected which would indicate negative emotional outbursts, although it had been calculated as a potential occurrence in the situation.

Cessation of conversational noise, fitting parameters for the end of a discussion plus, with that duration, an awkward pause. Sounds resumed, with greater clarity. Speech able to be resolved into words within acceptable margins of error.

"...nk of anything else I should know," the door opened to reveal the current speaker, CaptainHeraSyndulla, "please make sure to tell me."

Her voice was modulated in a fashion previously noted as an item of concern, her posture was more rigid than average, and slight lines were expressed on her face, therefore CaptainHeraSyndulla was exhibiting signs of concealed distress.

"Yeah. I'll do that." EzraBridger moved past her, stopped just outside the doorway, and shifted his weight. His optics were directed away from her and his manipulators tensed, therefore EzraBridger was exhibiting signs of poorly-concealed distress.

"So... well, that's it then." EzraBridger departed the vicinity with increasing haste. When he was partially down the corridor, the middle joint on his upper extremity made sudden contact with a corner. He emitted a short high-pitched sound, stumbled, and moved beyond range of optical sensors.

CaptainHeraSyndulla sharply sucked air in through her teeth, and her facial muscles briefly contracted. Her body then relaxed -- correction, the movement went beyond normal bounds of relaxation, it was a sign of negative emotional response and lack of energy rather than release of tension.

She appeared to notice Chopper for the first time. "Were you waiting for me? Do you need help with something?"

He inquired as to the outcome of her discussion with EzraBridger.

She paused. She exhibited again signs of concealed distress. "I will need to get my thoughts straight if I'm ever to write anything helpful," she said. "We can go over what I learned in my quarters, if you're willing to help this time."

He gave a quiet beep in the affirmative.

***

Impaired functioning of optics in EzraBridger.

Maintenance algorithm: if malfunctioning, examine, then repair, else replace.

Repairs impossible. Replacement impossible. Maintenance algorithm unable to be carried out.

***

CaptainHeraSyndulla walked and turned in a repetitive manner within the room.

"That's the overview of the syndrome, prognosis and timeline, night vision, peripheral vision... had there been anything else that I told you needed to be put up front?"

Negative; she had not said anything else fitting that parameter.

She slowly exhaled through her mouth. "Cybernetic replacements," she said. "Or organ transplants. And why they wouldn't work. Why... nothing would work." Her manipulator wiped at her optics.

"Optic nerve deterioration. I'll need to get this right, so nobody will misunderstand and have false hope. Can you call up the textbook again? Start with the section on cranial nerves."

***

Comforting stimuli to organics: physical contact, nourishment, warmth within specific range dependent on species, yielding surfaces.

Intended recipient currently in motion, therefore physical contact contraindicated.

If required instrumentation for a called-upon subroutine not available at current location, relocate elsewhere.

***

"Chopper, I'm glad you're here. Listen, I think I might have accidentally broken something... can you take a look at it?”

Despite his mission, Chopper inquired as to the problem. Questions and answers occupied minimal time, and sometimes proved useful or entertaining.

KananJarrus directed his head away from Chopper. “I don't know exactly what it was; I was training, a crate slipped and hit the wall, and now it sounds like something's... I don't know, kind of 'flickering' is the best I can describe it.”

That was rather careless of KananJarrus.

"Yes, I know, and I'm working on dealing with that, but I can't see to fix whatever it was, if it needs fixing, and Hera already has enough to deal with right now. Are you going to help?"

The statement was accurate. CaptainHeraSyndulla was currently occupied and in mild distress, and examination for potential repairs did not require her presence or her awareness of such. What was the location in question?

"Follow me, and I'll show you."

On approach, optical sensors indicated that a panel was dented. Irregular high-pitched sounds were detectable at the outer boundaries of what Chopper's auditory sensors could pick up. Further analysis impossible without close inspection.

What were the circumstances surrounding the impact?

"This is... ugh, I should be beyond this by now, this is embarrassing, but I wanted to make sure I knew exactly what I could do with holding objects up with the Force, how much control I could exert over them individually, before working with Ezra on that. I guess I -- wait. You're recording this, aren't you."

Affirmative.

KananJarrus covered the upper regions of his face with his manipulators. "I remember when I thought I'd be safe from this just because I wouldn't be able to watch your videos of me looking stupid," he said in a low voice. "I was so naive back then."

The dented panel was removed, and the damaged inner workings were exposed. Repairs were impossible. Replacement was possible, but the required components were not currently available.

***

If maintenance algorithm unable to be carried out, reroute necessary functions around damaged system.

If attempt to reroute necessary functions fails, attempt alternate method. If alternate method fails, attempt another alternate method. Continue until successful or until attention required elsewhere.

***

The subroutine secondary to the maintenance algorithm applied to the current situation, but would also apply to the earlier instance of the maintenance algorithm unable to be carried out. Necessary functions of the system in front of him were easy enough to identify and address. The situation of EzraBridger was more complicated.

"Chopper? You've been quiet for a while; how bad is it? Do we have to tell Hera?"

Negative.

"Can you fix it then?"

The connector in question was unable to be repaired, but continuous flow could be preserved with a simple adjustment to bypass the malfunctioning area.

The lips of KananJarrus moved slightly upwards at the corners. "I suppose that's good," he said. "Thanks." He left. His movement did not exhibit any hesitation or uncertainty.

KananJarrus had successfully rerouted necessary sensory functions around his damaged optics. He could maneuver, identify surroundings, participate in combat, and function independently. It was possible.

In some instances a large amount of effort and/or time was required. Calculations were imprecise with regards to the duration elapsed for the adaptation of KananJarrus. A significantly shorter duration was given if only the time spent actively attempting to progress was taken into consideration. Reasoning behind the earlier inactivity of KananJarrus was unclear and likely unknowable. Organics were not sensible.

Data from how KananJarrus had proceeded would likely be relevant to the situation of EzraBridger. Previous successful attempts at a given task provided useful data, even if the circumstances were not identical.

To reroute necessary functions around a damaged system, two areas of knowledge were required: understanding of both the necessary functions, and of what other systems were available to compensate. Human and twi'lek sensory systems were similar enough that Chopper had an adequate understanding for most domains; exception: "the Force".

Unable to personally acquire data on sensory aspects of "the Force", and not enough relevant information was stored in memory, therefore KananJarrus was a necessary element of the process, despite the insufficient mental resources due to being an organic.

Supervision of lessons between KananJarrus and EzraBridger was likely required, given prior examples of both organics avoiding unpleasant necessities, to ensure that work would continue on rerouting sensory functions. Data from N0151-A indicated that they had one to three years available for the task, but ideally it would proceed as soon and as rapidly as possible, to minimize distress experienced by CaptainHeraSyndulla.

Immediate comfort for CaptainHeraSyndulla was still required. The situation of EzraBridger could improve -- it would, and Chopper would do everything in his capacity to make sure -- but it was incredibly improbable for that to occur within the next few minutes, and she was still experiencing unpleasant emotional responses.

Once the present damaged component was dealt with and no longer a problem, Chopper ran a memory search about potential comforting stimuli for CaptainHeraSyndulla, heavily weighted towards those available in the vicinity.

***

Memory: inanimate feline replica = "plush tooka" held by KananJarrus when experiencing distress after damage to optics. Memory: "plush tooka" held by CaptainHeraSyndulla when experiencing distress at the condition of KananJarrus.

Last known location of "plush tooka": room occupied by KananJarrus.

Retrieved.

Current location of "plush tooka": room occupied by CaptainHeraSyndulla.

***

"Where were you, Chopper, what -- is this Kanan's -- did you steal Kanan's plush tooka?"

Negative.

***

TheGhost is property of CaptainHeraSyndulla, therefore all objects within are property of CaptainHeraSyndulla; listed exceptions: lightsaber of KananJarrus, bo-rifle of GarazebOrrelios, armour of SabineWren, lightsaber of EzraBridger. Designated organics allowed to use property of CaptainHeraSyndulla, exception items listed "personal property": (KananJarrus, GarazebOrrelios, SabineWren, EzraBridger) = "Ghost crew".

***

Results of library search: "delivering item to its owner" not synonymous to "theft".

CaptainHeraSyndulla seated herself and directed her optics at Chopper. The "plush tooka" rested untouched on the bunk beside her. "There are so many questions, but... first of all, why did you feel the need to bring that here?"

Her confusion did not make sense. Comfort for CaptainHeraSyndulla had been required. The "plush tooka" provided comfort.

"I don't...." She rotated her head from side to side. "Even if I was having a problem, I'm sure Ezra would be feeling worse. If you insisted on stealing -- I don't care what you say, that's stealing -- Kanan's tooka to help someone, shouldn't you have delivered that to him instead?"

Chopper did not navigate against the wall in frustration. That would not aid CaptainHeraSyndulla. She was intelligent, for an organic, but sometimes she simply did not grasp the obvious.

The location of EzraBridger was often unknown in recent days, and there was no reason to believe that he was still on the ship, therefore nothing could easily be delivered to him. Additionally, CaptainHeraSyndulla was the greatest priority when all other factors were equal, and since EzraBridger was not in immediate danger, the mental wellbeing of CaptainHeraSyndulla was more important.

She slowly exhaled. "He has been going off on his own a lot lately," she said. "I guess it only makes sense though. He doesn't want to think about it, and it's hard to pretend nothing ever happened when he's with people who know."

Incorrect. That did not make sense. EzraBridger should be occupying himself with learning to reroute necessary sensory functions around his visual system, so that he could succeed as soon as possible, and his mental wellbeing would be back to an acceptable level.

"Reroute -- I suppose that's one way of looking at it." She shifted, and the side of her lower extremity made contact with the "plush tooka". She did not appear to notice. "It's not always that simple for us organics though. I...." She rested her face in her manipulators. "I don't know if I can explain it for you. Even if we know that avoiding something won't make it go away, we still try. Unless we can't. Sometimes even then."

CaptainHeraSyndulla was not avoiding anything. She was working on a resource to assist with EzraBridger.

"I've been mostly giving abstract and theoretical information; for anyone in general, avoiding as much as I can anything specific to him because I don't want to think about how he...." Her optics did not seem to be focused on anything. Chopper waited, but she did not continue to speak. Her optics became more reflective than usual, matching situations of increased tear production.

He retrieved the "plush tooka" and extended it towards her, and indicated that she should hold it. He had memory records of her doing the same for comfort. She complied.

"I guess I did need that," she said with decreased amplitude. "You should probably put it back before Kanan notices, though." She made no move to relinquish her hold, therefore the request was of low intensity.

Chopper stated that it was unlikely, as KananJarrus rarely had contact with the "plush tooka" except to share it with CaptainHeraSyndulla, and also was probably busy training at the moment.

"Well then. I should probably get back to work...." She did not do so.

On the subject of "work", he wanted to help EzraBridger and KananJarrus stay on track. If he attended training sessions, he could make sure that they were actually working, provide objective feedback, and remind them of anything they might have forgotten.

"You should ask first before doing that. They might find you distracting, or it might be really personal and they wouldn't want anyone else to be there."

That did not make sense.

Her shoulders briefly lifted, then returned to resting position. "Some things don't make sense. Many things, if you think about it. We have to work with that anyways."

He asked whether the "plush tooka" was indeed providing comfort to CaptainHeraSyndulla.

She softly dragged her manipulator against Chopper's outer casing. "I think it is, and I guess being able to talk with you also helps. Thanks for taking care of me."

She stirred. "There are probably other ways you can help with Ezra," she said. "Apparently you had given him some light when he needed it, that was useful, and if you ask Kanan, he can find something for you to help with. No tripping Ezra though, that is a direct order. I've said it before, but I'll make sure it's clear. Unless you have been specifically instructed to try and trip him, and I have explicitly confirmed that, intentionally tripping Ezra is strictly forbidden."

She paused.

"Kanan is fair game though, if you can manage it. Same with Sabine and Zeb. Once Ezra's back on the same level as the others for noticing things, then we can talk about lifting the ban."

Chopper expressed that CaptainHeraSyndulla was the best organic.

The corners of her mouth lifted. She reached for her datapad with the upper extremity not holding the "plush tooka".

"I know you don't have medical programming, and mostly just learned basic first aid with us... so if this makes sense to you, it's probably something that the others can understand. Could you read it over, and tell me what you think?"

***

Mental wellbeing of CaptainHeraSyndulla: improved.

Secondary overall objective: in progress.

***

Situational awareness had been previously mentioned as an element of using sensory aspects of "the Force". Further development of that skill was required for EzraBridger. Formal practice with KananJarrus would likely be helpful but insufficient.

The object grasped in Chopper's manipulator was soft, light, and reasonably aerodynamic. It could be accurately projected at a target. It would not cause damage if it impacted an organic at speed, but it would be noticeable and mildly unpleasant. That would provide motivation to not get hit.

It was an alternative method of helping. It was not a prank. CaptainHeraSyndulla had explicitly banned attempts at tripping EzraBridger, but had said nothing about throwing objects at him. So long as she remained unaware, the activity would not be forbidden.

Chopper subvocally expressed pleasure, and watched his projectile fly through the air towards the unsuspecting EzraBridger. Sometimes being helpful was fun.

#star wars rebels #chopper #hera syndulla #kanan jarrus #ezra bridger #writing #little by little #original content #not a reblog

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