#if you were here in the trenches back in 2016 when he was like THOSE SONGS WERE SHIT

[delicatepointofview]

#he just said this i pressed record so fast #what if this is my last straw #zayn malik #if you were here in the trenches back in 2016 when he was like THOSE SONGS WERE SHIT #you'll get me

[alwaysteveswife]

The Deal Day | Steve Harrington.

Here is the prologue 😃 I wrote it today in the afternoon and recently finished translating and editing it, I hope you like it 💕. Summary: Steve is about to get into a scandal and the only way to help him is to marry him. Warnings: Singer!Steve, Manager!Reader, anxiety issues, emotional support dogs, kind of love at first sight. Words: 3.9k

You took a breath, looking at your wet face in front of the mirror. Your cheeks were slightly reddened and, on your forehead, there were some unruly hairs that were out of your bun and were now willing to stay in that position permanently thanks to the humidity of your face.

You tried to check your image as best you could. Your perfectly pressed shirt was impeccable, your beige pants fell elegantly to your ankles where they clashed delicately with your white boots and, finally, your trench coat in the same color as your pants, which came down to above your knees. You were seriously hoping this was formal enough to make a good first impression.

"Relax, Y/N, you're a smart and capable woman, you'll be able to handle this," you said to the mirror in which you saw your mirror.

A noise behind you made you turn quickly. You felt the heat rise up your cheeks and cover your ears. Someone else was in the bathroom. You tried to grab your things as quickly as you could, ignoring the fact that your hands were shaking more than they should be. The lock on one of the doors rattled just as you exited the bathroom with a heavy sigh.

You began to walk aimlessly around the company where, as of today, you would be working. Diamond Entertainment was one of the most famous record labels nowadays, which became known in 2016 with Midnights' second album, "More Than Enough", composed of 14 songs mostly written and produced by the five members of the band. Undoubtedly one of the best works of their career, from the incredible instrument solos, to the high notes that Steve, the vocalist, had proven he was capable of.

You were never a fan of the band, to be honest, but you admired how hard they worked, and you couldn't take credit away from them either, they were very talented. That's why, when your ex-boss called you to tell you that he had managed to get you a job as his manager you didn't hesitate for a second to accept, it was practically a dream come true, a direct ticket to success.

You were practicing for weeks, contacting the former manager in charge of the group, getting information about the members, their career, their music, you wanted to learn as much as possible, you had to do it, you didn't want to disappoint anyone. Now, being here, in the fanciest facility you've ever played in with your boots that you found at a thrift store bargain, the thought of having taken this job was starting to eat you up inside.

"You must be Y/N, right?" asked a gravelly voice behind you.

You straightened up quickly, turning your whole body to the voice. You almost choked when you saw the man who had spoken to you. He was wearing black slacks and a half-tousled white shirt, his hair was slicked back and he had a slightly long beard, but, without a doubt, the most striking thing was his size. He was almost three heads taller than you, if not more. His cold stare didn't help his image much, but he didn't seem to mind either. You shook your head slightly, trying to get those ideas out of your head and concentrating on answering his question.

"Y-yes, sir."

You both stared at each other for a few seconds, seconds that seemed like years to you. You were sure a bead of sweat had slipped down your neck thanks to how nervous you were. His intimidating gaze didn't leave you for a second, you could tell from afar that he was studying you in a very undisguised way.

"Did you talk to the members yet?" he said as he hid his hands in the pockets of his black pants.

"No, sir, I arrived a few minutes ago, I was on my way to the office to meet with them," you swallowed saliva as you watched him frown slightly, fearing had done or said the wrong thing.

"Fine, I'll walk you to the office."

Before you could say anything, the man - whose name you still didn't know - had already started walking briskly towards what you thought was the office. Almost without hesitation you hurried to his side, pressing your bag against your waist. The knot under your stomach was getting bigger and bigger, you hadn't felt that anxiety since what happened at the prom.

"How has your experience been so far?" the man murmured, resting his gaze on you.

You lowered your gaze to the floor, burying your fingernails in the palm of your hand. "Pretty good, to tell you the truth" the doors became further and further apart as you moved down the hallway to the top floor, by this point there were no more stained glass windows overlooking the city, just white walls and well-kept dark wood doors. "The people have been very kind and polite, and the facilities are in very good condition. I'm glad I was able to be accepted for this job, it's a great honor."

"The honor is ours, we've heard wonderful things about your work. I only hope they are true" he murmured, causing an even greater pressure in your chest, "But relax, there is no pressure."

You tried to laugh, but only a strange noise came out that made your throat burn. For the second time that day, your cheeks were tinged pale pink. You couldn't wait to get out of here as soon as possible, you desperately needed to lie down on your single bed and caress to Muffin and Berry, your emotional support dogs.

"Ladies first" said the man, opening a large door with gold-colored hands.

You walked in muttering a slight 'excuse me', walked to one of the available chairs across from the five people you would be working with from now on.

"Well, let me formally introduce myself. My name is Jim Hopper, founder of Diamond Entertainment."

You almost fell out of your chair listening to him. What a lousy first impression you had made on your now boss.

"The woman behind the desk is Joyce Byers, co-founder of the label."

You looked at the woman. She wore a friendly smile and her hair fell loosely over her shoulders. You couldn't help but think how beautiful she was.

"And these are the members of Midnights."

You paused your gaze for a few seconds on each of them. You watched Jim cackle as he looked at the guys. Almost immediately they let out a unison sigh.

"Alex" said the girl on the left. She was the drummer in the band. Her hair was brown and short, with some purple highlights. In her hands she had two drumsticks, with which she had been "playing" the whole time since you arrived.

"William Hargrove" said Billy, the bass player, with a wink in his right eye. You shuddered slightly on the couch at the sight of him, "at your service".

"Shut up, you idiot, you're scaring her" said the girl next to him, nudging him gently. Almost immediately she flashed you a gleaming smile, "Sorry, he's usually a bit insensitive, but he's a nice guy. I'm Robin, nice to meet you."

You smiled as best you could, nodding your head. You recognized her as the pianist of the group, a very talented and outgoing girl.

"Edward Munson" said the boy next to Alex. He had his hair tied back in a low bun and his iconic Hellfire t-shirt. He was the guitarist of the band, and definitely one of the best you've ever heard. "It's nice to finally meet you, we've all been looking forward to meeting you."

You felt a warmth in your chest. Unlike what you thought, he seemed nice enough and his voice was very soft, too much so.

"Don't say that, you'll make her nervous" said Steve. Ah, of course you knew Steve, he to you needed no introduction.

You always found him attractive, you had seen some interviews and concert clips, and it was almost impossible not to fall in love with him when he was so... him. So brilliant, so beautiful, so talented, he was such a role model for you, and working with him, with all of them, made your heart melt and reshape.

"I'm Steve, it's a pleasure" he smiled, causing your stomach to flip and your throat to go dry again, "I hope we get along very well, miss."

You almost choked when you heard the nickname. You tried to hide your face by avoiding looking at him, but you knew it would be in vain. The light here was coming in too well, and he had a direct view of your face.

"And what's your name?" asked Robin. For some reason you couldn't understand, she looked too excited about this meeting.

"I'm Y/N Y/L/N" you said with a smile. Your nails pressing harder against the sensitive skin of your palms. "Nice to meet you, all of you. I hope we can make a great team. I promise to give my all so I won't disappoint you."

All the members looked at you in silence. Your nerves were growing too much, and so was your desire to cry. The thought of having made a mistake and being hated from now on made you lose your mind. You blinked rapidly, trying to make the phantom tears that were trying to leave your eyes disappear. This, you told yourself, is why you never made friends, why you were afraid to meet people.

The five of you looked at each other and, almost at the same time, began to laugh. You tilted your head to one side, frowning in confusion, you didn't understand why they were laughing. Maybe you had made a ridiculous face, maybe your presentation was too much, maybe-.

"Relax, manager," Eddie said with a chuckle, getting up from the red velvet armchair and walking towards you, "it doesn't need to be formal, after all, from now on we'll be as thick as thieves."

"Eddie is right, you don't need to be so uptight" Steve smiled warmly, as did the other members.

The urge to cry started to get bigger, but this time for completely different reasons. It had been so long since someone had smiled at you like that, someone outside of your family of course.

This time you smiled broadly, as did all of them. You also got up from the armchair you had been sitting in all this time, you looked at the five of them, hoping you could get along with each of them.

"Thank you" you said, feeling much calmer than when you entered this great company.

Inside you, deep down inside, you hoped you could be bonded with these people, have bonds you could never have before.

You looked at Steve, his brown eyes were so soft and bright. For an instant you stopped hearing all the noises around you. For an instant it was just the two of you. But that instant ended, just like any misconceptions you may have gotten when you remembered the article you read a few days ago in a digital newspaper; Steve was engaged and, in the next few weeks, he would reveal the identity of the very lucky woman.

You took off your glasses for a second, letting your weight fall onto the back of the chair. You had been working here for two weeks and you really loved it, but the person who had your position before was very... messy, so to speak. Concert schedules, scheduled interviews, collaborations, preparing the new album, you had to rearrange everything again, call hundreds of companies and labels to try to convince them to change the date and it definitely had you exhausted.

You were going over again the number of rooms to rent in Los Angeles when you heard a knock on the door.

You looked up, shouting 'come in'. You paid no attention to who came in, right now it mattered much more about the numbers you would have to dial for the next few hours, trying to make room for lunch and to check the cameras in your apartment and see your two little ba-

"Y/N,” said a tearful voice. The door rattled at the same time a sob came from Steve's lips.

You quickly got up from your seat, walking over to him and sitting him in the chair in front of your desk.

These last few weeks the guys have been very nice to you, you had gained a great appreciation for them, especially because they offered you a ride home every night so they wouldn't leave you alone so late, not to mention the times they came to your office with a snack so you wouldn't starve to death. That's why seeing Steve had you so worried. He was sweet, kind, perfect, and you didn't understand why he could be crying like that.

"Steve? What happened? Are you okay? Did something happen to a family member?" Worst-case scenarios began to run through your head as you tried to hold Steve back. You grabbed the tissues from your desk and used them to gently wipe his cheeks, completely ignoring how close you were to each other.

"I-it's Nancy," he muttered under his breath, closing his eyes tightly and licking his lips, "my fiancée, she..."

"She what, Steve? Did she have an accident? Do you need to go see her?" you said softly, holding her cheek as carefully as you could. It hurt you to see it this way.

"No, she's not hurt," he shook his head, his eyes completely avoiding you, unable to see anything but his hands, "She called me a few minutes ago. She called off the wedding, broke up with me" and burst into tears again.

Panic began to consume you. Steve's wedding was on the itinerary, not only would you have to eliminate hundreds of scheduled activities, but they would also lose the money and it would cause them problems if the media found out this happened, they would be painted as liars, of wanting attention at the expense of any false news.

"I'm so sorry" he said between sobs and, for the first time since he came in, he really looked you in the eye. His face was red, his cheeks were wet and his eyes were puffy, his hair was in disarray and his shirt had some dark marks showing that tears had fallen there. "I know you've been so busy arranging our schedule and all, now I come here to cry to you about my problems and about the wedding cancellation. I'm just giving you more work."

"Of course not!" you said before you even realized it, "Don't worry about it, Steve, that's my job, you just..." you stood there for a few seconds looking at his state, how he had to bite the inside of his lip to keep from letting out more sobs. "Go home, get some rest, I'll talk to Hopper, okay?"

"I'm so sorry, really," he said quietly, getting up and wiping away his tears. "I'll call you when I get there."

"Please," you begged him with your eyes, "ask someone to drive you, I'd hate for you to drive in that state."

He just nodded, running his hand through his messy hair and walking to the door at a slow pace.

"Steve?" you said as he opened the door, waiting for him to turn to look at you to continue, "it's not your fault."

He just put on a cancel smile, his eyes were much duller than usual. You couldn't help but feel a lump in your throat.

"I wish you were right," he said, walking out of your office and closing the door.

You took a breath and threw yourself back in your chair, closing your eyes and pressing the bridge of your nose.

"Looks like I'll be home late."

The first thing you saw when you entered your apartment were your two puppies, Muffin, the corgi, and Berry, the chihuahua. Both had come into your life when you fell into a deep depression as you started college. They were your babies, your emotional support puppies, your family. You loved them with all your soul, and you knew they loved you too.

"Hey babies, did you miss mommy?" you squealed in a childish voice, running to them, laughing as you saw them running to you too. "I missed you so much, did you miss me?"

You smiled happily as you felt them licking your face and jumping around you. You didn't know what your life would be without these creatures.

"I'm so sorry, Mommy had too much work to do, but I promise I'll be home earlier in a few weeks" you murmured, nuzzling behind Muffin's ears.

After a few minutes of cuddling your puppies, you took care of the housework. You did the laundry, took out the dry clothes, made yourself some instant soup for dinner, made your bed and washed the breakfast dishes.

All that time you were thinking of some way to fix Steve. You didn't know his fiancée, so you couldn't contact her, you didn't want to ask Steve either, and as far as you knew, she didn't get along with the rest of the group, at least not most of them, so you doubted they knew her number. You thought about looking her up online, but there were a lot of Nancy Wheeler's in the world, and you had no idea what she looked like. You also thought about taking a random girl and having her be the fake image of Nancy, since no one besides them knew her, but it was risky, too risky, you didn't know if you could trust them, so that wouldn't be an option either, and don't even think about Robin and Alex, they wouldn't accept even if they were paid a million dollars.

Tired, stressed, and with your head in a jumble, you lay down under your warm sheets and stayed there, with your eyes closed, listening to relaxing music so you could fall asleep, with each dog on one side of your head, and it was there, at that very moment when you almost fell fast asleep, that you came up with an idea that could save the situation. You grabbed your computer and turned it on, rattling your fingers on the desktop as you waited for the lock screen to appear. In less than 15 minutes you had drafted the mail with Jim and Joyce's address, waiting for the idea to be decent enough to be accepted.

You were reviewing some contracts when someone knocked on the door and walked into your office. Steve walked over to your desk and sat in the same chair as a week ago, only this time he looked a little better.

"Miriam told me you needed me, did you manage to find a solution?" he said with his cheeks red with embarrassment. He wasn't even able to look you in the face.

"Something like that" you mumbled, pulling a transparent blue folder out of your desk drawer. "We were talking about it with Hopper and Joyce" you looked sideways at Steve, setting the folder down in front of him, "it wasn't easy at all to make this decision, we took all this week to look at the pros and cons, but so far this is the best option we have."

You saw Steve's throat move as he swallowed saliva. His gaze shifted from you to the folder, almost as if he needed permission to look at it.

"It's a contract," you said, taking the coffee next to you and blowing on it, "for an arranged marriage." You didn't miss the surprise on her face when he heard the news, but you couldn't do much else. You were taking a big chance on this, it wasn't easy for you either.

"Arranged marriage? Of course not, that's a lousy idea, what if a stalker fan comes for the job and-?" Steve stopped when he saw your hand extended in his direction.

"Steve, we already have a reliable candidate" you said calmly, or at least you hoped it looked that way.

"Who?" you said with a frown, more out of confusion than annoyance.

"Me" you looked at Steve steadily, waiting to see his reaction.

"I beg your pardon?" muttered Steve with wide eyes, staring at the contract in front of him.

You sighed, taking a sip of your bitter coffee, knowing deep down that something like this could happen.

"I thought I said it clear, but I'll say it again" you set the coffee cup down on the table, your gaze fixed on Steve's dark eyes, "my proposal to solve your unnecessary drama is that we get married, you can think about it, but remember we have time on our hands."

"But..."

"I remind you that you were the one who brought the issue to light, Steven" you took a pencil out of your pocket, putting it down in front of him decisively, "and you asked me for a solution, here it is, do you accept?"

Steve looked at the contract again, running his hand through his face and hair. He bit his lower lip and looked at you uncertainly.

"Can I read the terms?" you nodded, relaxing a little more as you noticed he was willing to at least review the terms.

"We'll just pretend in front of the cameras. The wedding will be real, the expenses were already made and they weren't cheap at all" you explained softly, observing even the slightest gesture on his face, "We'll have to move in together to disguise, but we'll each have our own room. We have to go to any parties together, and we also have to answer some questions from reporters. Every so often we'll have fake dates in public so as not to arouse suspicion."

He nodded, reading the pages of the contract where the conditions you had just mentioned came out, but much more detailed.

"When does the contract end?" muttered Steve, lifting his gaze and watching you under his eyelashes.

"A year and a half after the marriage occurs."

He returned his gaze to the contract, shifting his leg restlessly. It was starting to make you nervous.

"Okay," he said quietly, taking the pencil next to the contract and signing on the line with your name on it, "if we only have to pretend for a year and a half, then I guess it's okay."

You nodded, feeling a weight off your shoulders. You got up from your chair, ready to go tell Hopper and Joyce the news, but a hand stopped you.

"What are you doing?" you passed your gaze between his hand and him, not quite understanding what he wanted to do.

"Gotta close the deal properly" he smiled nervously, reaching out his hand again.

You smiled, taking his hand gently and smiling back. "It's an official deal now, isn't it?"

"Looks like it," he murmured, giving your hand a light squeeze. "I'm sorry I got you into this, Y/N."

You shook your head, laughing softly, ignoring the glint you saw in his eyes.

"It's my job, Steve, I have to keep your image as flawless as possible, no matter what."

His gaze stayed locked on yours, causing a churning to form in your stomach. His eyes looked so dark and mesmerizing and so... beautiful.

"I promise I will make you as happy as possible during this year and a half. You won't regret signing that contract, Miss Y/N."

General Masterlist.

Midnight Masterlist.

Taglist: @alex-walker-86 @bakugouswh0r3 @dorothe13a @gaysludge @inesven @mcueveryday

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[xxblackballoonxx]

The Heart Underneath: J&M Letters 5 (Ch. 24)

***This fic is being posted simultaneously on FanFiction.net and Ao3. I originally began it in 2016, and then life was life, and now I’m bringing it back because it deserves to be finished! Rating M as of Chapter 10 ***

Chapter 23 Chapter 25 THU Masterlist

The Heart Underneath

Chapter 24: J&M Letters 5 (20 and 21)

August 20, 1916

Dear Mar,

I didn't want to write you this, but I'm going to have a scar, so I thought I better prepare you. I'm sitting in one of the hospital tents, my chin has been stitched up. Took some shrapnel to the face, but I will be fine, it will just be a scar. They’re going to keep me here for a day or two, until the wound closes up a bit more.  Arthur and Tommy are well.

It's so hot here, I'm not sure how anyone is making it through every day. Between the heat and the dust, the cut back home seems like a dream to be near. I miss our late night walks in the summer, leaving our bedroom window open. Somehow we always seem to sleep wrapped up with each other, no matter how hot it is. Here it's a daily mission to find a speck of shade.

I miss you and the kids. How many words is Will at now? I like to think of the conversations I'll have with him when I'm home. I hope Katie's not keeping you up all night. Tell them both hello for me and that I miss them and love them very much. I worry about Katie already, all the things she might have to deal with as she gets older. I'm glad she has a big brother to look after her.

I wish I was home with you right now, love. I would pay all the pounds I have for clean clothes, a good meal, and a night with you. Alone at the cottage or in our bed, no one bothering us. Listening to you reading to me. Some of your sausage rolls. Sleeping next to you. Those thoughts are what gets me through every single day here. I look forward to when I can next come home on leave. 

Stay well and I’ll do my best here.

Love you forever,

John/Daddy

John winced as he touched his chin out of habit, his whole face sore and still bloody from the ordeal he’d been through. Some kind of mine had exploded earlier in the morning, as his regiment moved into a closer position to the enemy, and he’d had half a second to pull down the two men beside him, as the sound of the mine exploding and the shrapnel flying into the air seemed to happen simultaneously. 

Arthur had pulled him up and out of a pile of the injured, dragging him backwards towards a trench. Tommy had seen from a distance and rushed over, pouring water over John's face to try to clear the blood and see how bad his wounds were. They all thought the worst. Tommy pressed gauze against John’s chin, breathing a sigh of relief to see that while it was a bad wound, it would heal.

John walked back to the medical tents on his own, hand against his chin for extra pressure, wondering if the bleeding would ever stop. A painful hour later, he lay propped up in a stretcher bed, stitched up and still covered in blood. His own and from others, he was sure.

He hadn’t put it in his letter, too afraid of what it meant, but he'd seen something out there, as he fell back against the mud from the force of the explosion. He’d always heard that in the seconds between life and death, visions from your life flash into your mind. What he’d seen was long blonde hair, green eyes, a white dress. A gold necklace against lightly freckled and tanned skin, gold rings, hands linked. A green hair ribbon blowing in the wind. He’d smelled her perfume and heard her speak his name, just once. 

Martha.

And then he landed with a thud on the ground, bodies falling on top of him and next to him, wondering if he was alive or dead. He hoped to God that if he was dead, someone would see fit that his afterlife would be peaceful moments with his family and his wife. He’d be happy to spend eternity in that house on Watery Lane, but hoped maybe his heaven would land him at the cottage instead.

It wasn’t until he heard Arthur yelling his name frantically, over and over, as he pulled John out of the pile of bodies, that John realized he was still alive.

“Can I send that for you?” A young nurse asked John, motioning to the envelope in his hand.

“Oh, yes, thank you.” John replied, smiling at her.

She leaned down and took a close look at his chin, using a damp cloth to clean the blood from his neck and cheeks. It amazed John how young most of the nurses were, how frantically the doctors worked, how overwhelmed they all were. He was silently relieved that neither Martha or Ada were involved. For as brave as every nurse and every doctor were, their lives were in grave danger, and John could only take so much stress. Looking out for Tommy and Arthur was enough.

“A letter home, then?” The nurse asked again, taking the envelope from him.

“Yes, to my wife and family. My two brothers are here with me … we try to write often.”

“You’re a Shelby.” The nurse commented suddenly, looking at the name on the envelope.

“Yes …”John replied, confused by her reaction.

“We’ve heard of you. You and your brothers. What you do out there, the men you’ve saved. Was starting to sound like a legend, but here you are, real as anything.” The nurse said, with a dazed smile.

“Well you can tell everyone I had a finest nurse in France, so thank you for that, Sister. I’m sure one of us Shelbys will be back in your care at some point.” John said with a wink and a smile.

“Your wife’s a lucky lady, Corporal. Very lucky indeed. I’ll go mail this for you, be back in a little while to check on you. Still bleeding some.” The nurse said, a blush coming over her as she returned John's grin.

After the war, the nurse would hear stories of the Peaky Blinders out of Birmingham, the Shelbys of Small Heath. It surprised her not at all that the three brothers had returned home, they were some of the bravest soldiers she’d ever come across.

It wasn’t until her grandchildren asked about her time serving behind the front lines that she told the story of taking care of John Shelby for a few days. It had been just a couple of months into her assignment in France, and the horrors she’d seen had already deeply changed her.  But to meet actually meet a Shelby brother and care for him? It somehow made her feel invincible. 

************************************************************************

Martha sank down into her chair as she read John's letter, feeling faint at the thought of him injured. She looked at the date again at the top of the letter and a cold wave came over her.

That very morning, the twentieth of August, she’d been sitting at the kitchen table. Nursing Katie with one arm and feeding Will a spoonful of porridge with the other, she’d been talking with Polly when suddenly John popped into her mind. This wasn’t unusual, she thought about him every hour of every day, but she felt the sound drop out of the room. As if someone had covered her ears, she could see Polly speaking but couldn't hear what she was saying. A fearful cold mist settled into her chest, seemingly wrapping around her soul, and all she could hear in her mind was John’s name. Her fingers went limp, dropping the spoon on the table, as she felt a hand wrap gently around hers. 

John.

And then the mist receded, the sound came back, and a sense of relief washed over her. She looked up to find Polly watching her closely.  

“Dada?” Will asked, looking around, as if he’d felt John, too.

Polly and Martha stared at Will for a moment and then back at each other.

“What did you just see?” Polly asked quietly.

“I didn’t see anything, exactly, I just felt this terrible cold, all I could hear was my mind screaming for John, and …” Martha trailed off, realizing she sounded a little hysterical.

“And then what, darling?” Polly encouraged.

“And it felt like he was holding my hand. Then the sound in the room came back, the cold went away, and so did the fear.” Martha whispered.

Polly thought for a moment, watching as Martha shakily picked up the spoon, and brought it back to Will’s mouth. The ring on her hand caught the light, and Polly watched the gold glint as Martha moved her hand back to the bowl.

“Something’s happened but he’s alright. That’s what you were feeling.”

Martha looked up at Polly, who’s voice was as sure and convincing as it ever was, especially when she talked about the things she knew without seeing or having tangible proof of. 

“Do you think it’s his ring?”

“In part, yes. But you two are almost like twins, that’s how close your souls are. You're always with each other, even if you’re far apart. The ring just strengthens that connection. He had me do the same to your ring, you know.” 

Martha looked down at the diamond and gold ring and smiled, John had purposely left that part out. It now meant more to her than ever. She looked up at Will, his small face becoming a little replica of John’s, matching eyes staring back at her. Two parts of John were with her here and now, it was what she took solace in.

August 27, 1916

Dear John,

I am so thankful that you will be alright, thank God your injury wasn’t worse. I promise you will still be as handsome as ever, no scar can take that away. I’ve included a special salve from Polly in your package, she said it will help with healing and minimize the scar to some degree. You’re supposed to use it twice a day for as long as it lasts.

Will is becoming quite the chatterbox, a lot of it is still baby babble, but some of it is understandable now. He loves to eat, so he asks for food quite a bit. And he asks for you, too. Katie is settling down into a good routine, she’s still so small but a strong girl. Her eyes seem to be turning green.

I miss our summers, too. Remember when we used to stay out late when we were little? Running through the streets with Tommy and Arthur chasing after us, your mum trying not to laugh when they finally carried us in and forced us into bed. I could live forever in a summer like that with you.

Stay safe, my love. We need you to come back to us.

We love you always,

Mar, Will, and Katie

It wouldn't be until after the war was officially over that John would talk to Martha about the things he saw in France, not just on the fields, but in his mind. He had been terrified to speak of it while still a soldier, in case whatever magic was happening disappeared the moment the words left his mouth. So he stayed silent, until he was sure that he was safely home for good.

#john shelby fanfic #john shelby #john shelby imagine #joe cole #peaky blinders fanfic #martha shelby #peaky blinders imagine #john shelby fanfiction #peaky blinders fanfiction #peaky blinders #the heart underneath

[blazefire-engine]

Rivamika Office!AU

Alright fam, I made this on January 16, 2016. I made a few tweaks since I am now in the workforce and at the time I made this fic, I wasn’t LOL 

It’s never seen the light of day, but here it is. Enjoy my fellow Ackermates.

- - -

Slurp… Ah...

Mikasa gave a delicious sigh after slurping from a steamy cup of noodles.  Her consumption resulted in the artificial, sodium-packed broth to splash on the screen of her laptop.  However, at the current time stating to be half-past noon, her dirtied screen is the least of her concerns and a grumbling stomach was her number one priority.  This was the consequence of skipping breakfast to catch the bustling 7:00 a.m. train. 

As for missing the "most important meal of the day,” her wake-up time had been pushed fifteen minutes from the usual. Another consequence for submitting a coding assignment for her graduate course in the God-awful hour of 2:00 a.m.

Thus, these chain of events culminated into a terrible Monday morning.  It seemed that the whole world was against her when the day was accompanied with dreary skies, pouring rain, and, as if to pour salt on her metaphorical wound, without an umbrella.  

She strode in the building with her short hair damp and whiplashed as tendrils stuck to her face.  The Burberry trench coat did little to shield her from the rain but performed well as a barricade from the chilly wind.  

The beige coat, that now laid on a stool next to the heater and the one she had been staring at for the past few minutes, was the trigger that made her recall the horrendous morning.

Slurping another portion of noodles, the broth now splashed on the surface of her red-rimmed glasses.

“Tch, how unsanitary."

Mikasa looked up through her splattered glasses to see an intruder in her office space.  The source of the abhorred voice was a man in a crisp navy suit with a sleek laptop clutched to his hip.  His face clearly disturbed and a grimace plastered on his lips as he eyed the styrofoam cup in distaste.  

His comment was enough to stir annoyance.

Snatching off her glasses, she plucked a facial tissue from the desk drawer.  “Don’t you have the decency to knock?” She glared at the man and resumed the task of cleaning her lens.  

The man raised an eyebrow.  He paused, giving a subtle hum as if he needed to think of what to respond. “Particularly, I don’t have to.  I can roam about any room I wish.”  He finished his response with a smirk and walked to sit on the chair prior to her desk.  

Mikasa felt her body temperature rise upon each step he took and his arrogant tone grated on her nerves.  How dare he… If she held on any tighter, the wooden chopsticks in her hand would inevitably snap into two.  

“You must be quite the asshole then.”

“Excuse me?”  He replied, feigning innocence.  

“Butting into someone’s personal space without permission is quite the asshole move.”  She snapped back, explaining to him the reason for her anger.  

“Personal?  You’re here to work.  There’s nothing personal here."

Although his words did hold true, there is always that time of day that separates work from personal life.  

“It is personal if you intrude during my lunch break.”  Glancing at her cup, she finished the last of her noodles and patted her lips with a tissue while he simply sat and waited for her to finish.  

Well, he must have gone here for a reason.  Eyeing the laptop in his hand, she released a reluctant sigh. “So, what can I do for you?” Despite their rough start, Mikasa is a woman who never refused someone that needed help.  

The man’s expression perked up, seemingly pleased with her cooperation.  “I’ve heard you’re one of the best in the IT department and I was wondering if you can upgrade my software program.”  He waved the expensive-looking laptop and placed it on the stack of papers on her desk.  

“Are you unaware of how things work around here?” Mikasa frowned. “If you have any IT issues, you’d need to submit a service desk ticket.” She grabbed one of her stack of business cards, one that contained an e-mail and call number for the service desk, and slid it to him. “That way we can track your issue and file an internal report.”

He shook his head, glancing at his wrist. “I don’t have time to waste. I’m here now, aren’t I?”

Mikasa raised an eyebrow in disbelief.  “And you think I’ll do this for you right now?” She asked almost incredulously.  

He gave an uncharacteristic snort. “I would be a fool to believe you could, but think of this as helping a colleague."

She stared at the laptop, at a loss of what to do. The sheer audacity of this man to barge in and rudely ask for her to fix something without even a shred of consideration for her time. 

“How much do you have in mind?” The man asked in nonchalance.

Mikasa narrowed her eyes at his offer.  Just what kind of person did he think she was?  “I won’t ask for money.” She said firmly.  

She could have sworn she saw a smidgen of a smirk on his face. "So is that a yes?"

Before she can conjure up a proper response, she nodded once.  “You owe me a favor instead."

“A favor?” He repeated, now his turn to be surprised.  From the sound of it, the man smiled, very interested in her offer.  “Very well, what favor?"

The ears hidden underneath her hair were surely pink. Mikasa cleared her throat, rather embarrassed and she found the lint on his pants suddenly interesting.  “I don’t know… Rain check?"

“Well then, I accept, Ms. Ackerman.”  The man placed his laptop on her desk and checked his wrist for the time once more.  “Lunch break is over and I have a meeting. It was quite fascinating meeting with you, Ms. Ackerman.  I hope we can engage in another conversation soon.”  The man turned around, threw her a rather mysterious smirk over his shoulder, and left her office.  

She stared at her doorway, wondering who the hell was that guy.  She’d never seen him in the IT department before, so perhaps he was from another department.  

But as he left, she realized she never got his name or when she would give it back.   

- - -

This’ll probably have a part 2, although I don’t know when or how that’ll go LOL. But thank you so much for those who liked my previous post; it gave me the courage to once again post rm fics. 

Also, Mikasa with red-rimmed eyeglasses was from an official art years ago if I remember correctly. 

#rivamika #levimika #OOOOH it feels good to write and post again #mikasa ackerman #levi ackerman #snk #snk fanfiction #i wrote a thing

[onlystylesangels]

Final Call

Pairing: Harry Styles x Reader

Summary: Harry & Y/N catch up 

Warnings: A bit sad. Breakup.

Word Count: 1k+

A/N: Hi my loves!!! I have a short little fic for you. I started this a couple of months back and I just now decided to post this. I hope you beauties are well and safe. I’m sending all my love to you. 💓💕💛

September 2016

"Bub, do you know where my trench coat is at?" 

Y/N was in the other room making sandwiches for her and Harry. 

"I think it's in the closet?" She asked herself. Harry walked into the kitchen and grabbed the slice of cheese that was in her hand. 

"I'll check love." He said while chewing. 

Harry walked towards the closet and looked through the coats, well more of his coats exactly. His hands smoothed over the familiar fabric of his trench coat and smiled once he removed it from the hanger.

"Where are you going again?" Y/N asked as she peeked her head from the kitchen. 

"A short music film. I haven't told you have I?"

"I believe not." She said her gaze looking down at her sandwich. 

"I'm sorry love. I thought I told you," There was regret in his voice the way his voice changed from its usual cheeriness to a slow no monotone voice. He didn't mean to not tell you. He thought he told you a couple weeks back when he started to talk to directors about the project he wanted to do, but either way he wanted to tell you. He told you everything, or so that's what Y/N thought.

"I'll be back love. Jus' don't miss me too much, yeah?"

"I don't know Harry, I miss you whenever you're not here." Y/N muttered out as she buttoned Harry's coat. "I miss you all the time Harry." 

Harry stood there staring down at his muse, his light, his everything. He adored his Y/N; he adored everything about her since the day he met her. That day when they bumped into each other as their very own romantic comedy began. Falling in love the third time that they saw each other as Harry invited her to have ice cream and have a walk at the park.

But they both had no clue that sometimes romantic comedies have their own crucial endings. They both didn't know they were going to separate.

May 2021

Memories of their past came back swirling through Harry's head. His head in his hands as he clutched his phone waiting and asking himself if he wanted to do what he was going to do right now. Would she have moved on with someone else? Maybe she was still sleeping since the last time he checked she was in the states while he was currently in England. Would it make him feel uncomfortable was his last question.

Of course he was going to feel uncomfortable; they've been separated for almost two years now. Harry released his second album two years ago and Y/N continued living her life. She finally opened up her own bakery which was a little shop in size but she loved it anyway. She enjoyed her life right now. She loved the place that she was currently in and there were times that she would think of Harry while working at the shop hoping to see him come in and ask for a pastry and a cup of black coffee. But she knew it wouldn't happen. 

Harry was hesitant. His phone in his hand as his foot tapped the floor lightly. His soft curls curved through his fingers as he finally decided to dial the numbers that he used to have saved as a contact. The phone rang as Harry held his phone closer to his ear as he waited until the other line was picked up. After those long seconds, Harry felt like minutes and hours had passed. He put the phone down so he could hang up but before he pushed that red button her voice finally answered. She didn’t answer ‘hello’ but she said ‘Harry’, as if she knew it was Harry on the other line.

“Harry?” Her soft voice answered. 

Harry didn’t answer back as he was shocked that she still kept him in her contacts. He thought that she would have deleted him from her phone but that wasn’t the case. She kept a part of him with her even though they broke it off. But sometimes when people break up, there is always a part of them that goes back to that person. A part that she loved, the person she was once in love with.

“Y/N.” He answered as his voice sounded shaky from hearing Y/N’s voice for the first time in a long time. “You kept my number.”

A sigh was heard from Y/N’s line as she tried not to show her emotions. 

“I never got rid of it, Harry.” 

Harry was so close to losing it. He wished he could be in her arms one last time but he knew that deep inside that Y/N had moved on from him. And part of him has moved on from her as well.

She never deleted his contact from her phone. She was afraid of letting him go while Harry deleted her name from his phone but he made sure that he would remember her number by memory.

“I just wanted to call because I remembered today was your birthday.” He said with a smile. His eyes started to get glossy from hearing her breathing from the other line and waited patiently before she replied back. He missed that part of her. He missed it when Y/N would take her time to answer. He missed looking at her concentrated face, eyebrows furrowed and always pinching her bottom lip. Those were the memories that he wished he cherished more when they were together, but now he knows he’ll never make those memories again.

“Yeah it’s today.” She answered as she shut her eyes from her response. 

“Happy birthday bu- Y/N.” Harry finally said as Y/N smiled to herself and finally let herself loose from keeping in those tears that were threatening to leave her eyes. She kept her whimpers quiet but tears continued to stream down her cheeks.

"Thank you, Harry." She squeaked. She clutched her chest as her sobs started to get a bit louder, she bit her lip from letting out more whimpers. Harry was quiet on the other line and he kept his whimpers quiet as well. He wanted to cry so bad from hearing Y/N cry he knew this was a bad idea but he wasn't going to regret it now that he finally heard Y/N's voice.

"I hope you spend it with wonderful people and I'm sending you all the love to you."

A silence was shared between them. Their whimpers slowly calmed and their tears were no longer streaming down their cheeks. 

"What happened to us, Harry?" She asked, her hand squeezing the mattress as if that would keep her feelings inside of her instead of letting them out.

"We made a promise that we were going to love each other. We didn't think that our jobs would eventually separate us from each other."

"I don't think we were meant to be. But I enjoyed the time we had with each other and I thank you for that, Harry. You will always have a part of my heart and that will never change. I love you so much Harry."

"I love you more love. I know asking this would be risky but could we be friends at least?"

"I don't think we should, Harry. If we do then we'll never move on from what we used to have."

Harry sighed, his head nodded at her response. She was right. If they would stay as friends then they will never be able to move on from one another. It felt wrong but they had to disconnect from each other. 

"Yeah, you're right Y/N." Harry agreed with a sigh. He had his head low, his hand gripping his thigh as his eyes were closed as he tried to imagine Y/N one last time.

"I'm sorry Harry, but I'm glad you called, I've missed hearing your voice," she added, "It's been so long and I hope you're doing well. How is everything going?"

"It's going good, love. I'm on tour for my third album and I'm just having a good time with the shows and seeing the fans." He elaborated. There was a hint of joy in his voice when he mentioned his fans. They were literally the world to him. Seeing them during his shows made him happy and emotional. Knowing that there are people out there supporting him through his successes and his failures; people that he could rely on no matter what.

There was another comfortable silence between them. They have been separated for two years and they still feel comfortable with each other after those two years of heartache. Something in them both wished that they could time travel to the past and make it their present, but that was obviously impossible to accomplish. But they wished it were possible in some way.

"I'm glad you are having a good time Harry. I can already know how much this album, and seeing your fans means to you." Y/N said, a smile slowly appearing on her face as she remembered the time when she went to one of his shows and saw the love in her section. The tears falling down their cheeks and the passion when they would sing along with Harry. 

“I wish you could go to one of the shows. But I know you are busy with work."

Y/N understood him and she even wished that she could buy a ticket to go to one of his shows. She wished that part of her would go back to him and live the life that she used to live. It almost seemed as if ten years had passed when they decided to break up. But dreaming about it was just dreaming which made it impossible for it to come true. 

As for Harry; he was ready for her to hang up on him. He went back to that phone call that they had a couple days after they broke up. Today; he had the same feeling. He felt that deep feeling of his love drain away from his heart and all those memories he had with her were flashing through his brain and they came after each other as if he was put under a machine.

And so they both felt content. They both went back to laughing with each other as if it were old times. Content smiles on their faces and thinking back, they probably were not meant to be in a long-time relationship. But they both enjoyed each other's company when they were together. They will always have a space for each other's love and they both will not allow anyone to take that away from them.

They both knew that they were not meant to be, but they were thankful for that time that they cherished with each other and all the love that they gave each other while they were together. Both Harry and Y/N  knew that after this final call they would be at peace and that this would be the final goodbye, well, if they would both have the courage to do so.

A goodbye that was bittersweet nonetheless.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

💓

#harry styles writing #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles short fic #Onlystylesangels writing #harry styles fluff #harry styles angst #harry styles one shot #harry styles x reader #harry x reader #my writing

[ashes-in-a-jar]

Tma relisten Episodes 6-10

(Still really long)

Alot of really important details that are going to be very relevant later on. Very facinating how early on you find these out. Relistens are good.

Episode 6 squirm

It's a good thing tma doesn't do much of sexual encounters and their connection to entities. While I'm sure that's a thing that in any realistic universe would exist avoiding it was a good choice. This statement was *shudder*

Interesting that she had no visible mark on her. Also being repulsed by police stations because the sectioned officers could have helped.

Naked in the streets after lighting his apartment on fire. What an image.

So technically the worms were in the archives 3 times: when Jane made her first statement, when Timothy hodge made his and when Jane attacked. The worms are very familiar with the magnus institute.

"This story is concerning. Not because of Mr. Hodge’s experience, although I’m sure it was very upsetting." ace Jon talking very technical about "experiences"

" though obviously it’s a tragic loss of life, etcetera, etcetera." Jon being Jon.

Ecdc are aware of Jane and corruption typical attacks which is off the bat interesting world building.

He's skeptic here because of lack of evidence but does admit the existence of a threat in Jane Prentiss

Also! He knows of her from before probably when he was a researcher. This confused me on first listen because I was trying to remember if she was ever mentioned before this. But she wasn't.

Episode 7 the piper

Wilfred kind of sounds like martin in some way but maybe it's just me assigning poetry to anyone like him.

But he hated apathy which might be very Martin like

Gentle sadness and creeping fear from the music. For violence of war... Is that what it means to immortalize it?

It's really cool that the concept of music in this podcast is associated specifically with war and unwarranted violence. There's a very strong statement in there somewhere that needs to be explored.

God this statement was intense. Lying for such a long time in that trench surrounded by violent death. But what's most interesting is that this statement doesn't feel like a supernatural one and yet... The piper was with Wilfred throughout the various battles and bouts of violence until the moment it was officially over. But in a very subtle way.

The description of the piper is really intense with the 3 faces. I think I missed it the first time but hearing that representation of war and fear is something I'm going to look for in artistic depictions now.

Wait. Who is Joseph Rayner? I know of Maxwell but never heard of Joseph.a victim instead of Wilfred? Collaborator with the Slaughter? Hmmm

I wonder how Accidental it was that the statement from 1922 was filed in the 2000s. Maybe to show that the piper never really leaves and the war never really ends. Ever.

Episode 8 burned out

Wow Hilltop Road already! I forgot how many of the first episodes were so important to the plot later on.

"That side of the road backed onto South Park with fences marking the bottom of each garden." this is wrong btw. Hilltop Road in Oxford does not run along Sount Park but is perpendicular to it, meeting it in the corner with Divinity Road which meets with Morrell Avenue which is the road running along South Park. Just FYI because I had to look this up to get a good picture. But I guess Morrell doesn't sound as exciting as Hilltop (which isn't even at the top of the hill smh)

Ivo lensik describes Raymond fielding as white which makes me automatically think he is not. Just a thought that popped in my mind.

Huh. His family had a history of schizophrenia. And his dad was obsessed with fractals. Being followed by The spiral (all the bones are in his hands) was also part of this story really interesting.

Agnes had mousy brown hair and looked like Raymond! Not red hair ( at least at first) like I pictured. Also she was a hell of a creepy child...

So did he time travel? Seeing the moments of Raymond's end? Seems like time doesn't work right in that place anyway.

Web person being devout church goer is also an interesting touch

Father Edwin Burroughs! I forgot he was here too! The knock reminded me of Mr Spider *shiver*

The priest explaining that the church exorcized demons but what not decisive if ghosts exist was hilarious. Jon dismisses paranormal but asks Martin if he's a ghost is opposite of the church.

Hmmm the web pushing him to cut the tree to uncover box from antique table...

Apple full of spiders ugh. Maybe something web was trapped in there by Desolation and ivo managed free it as Agnes was dying.

"We cannot prove any connection, but Martin unearthed a report on an Agnes Montague, who was found dead in her Sheffield flat on the evening of November 23rd 2006, the same day Mr. Lensik claims to have uprooted the tree." wow that's an obscure thing to find well done Martin!

Jon still looks for credence for this story despite the schizophrenia that could leave him skeptical.

"while I trust Mr. Lensik’s testimony of his own experiences about as far as I can throw a bleeding tree," again Jon with his special brand of jokes.

Episode 9 a Father's love

The Montauk's story! I always thought their family had one of the most tragic ones. The hunt is a really cruel patron with its forced hunger and having other entities use them as tools.

Julia telling the truth of the story to the Magnus Institute instead of the police is also heartbreaking. How desperate and alone she must have felt drowned in that awful literally unbelievable story. The magnus institute feeds off of those people too.

So many of the hunt end up in police it's just... Such a strong statement against that establishment. What do we do to make that less of a horrible, unjust, all consuming system? That feeds on the hunger of some and the abject fear of others? And it doesn't have to be supernatural. It's interesting how season five, of all seasons, is the one that gave us that perspective. The non supernatural one on the subject while the world itself is so far away from the natural. God everything about this idea is so heavy and painful.

I kind of hate Julia's fate because of her background and how much alot of its beginning was out of her control. It's like Daisy. The hunt can never be forgiven no matter how compulsive it is.

The dark that took her mother turned her into part of it? Like the dark liquid?

A dark room to develop his photos of his victims huh? A play on words here.

Oooh they put a heartbeats in the soundscape really cool actually.

So Montauk killed other dark members that tried to leave? For the ritual? Like Julia's mother?

The hunt compelled him to keep the hearts as trophies? which is very self destructive of the hunt to do. Or is it part of the dark ritual with the sacrifices that the heart had to be kept?

I think Montauk was trying to slow down the ritual as revenge that night, rendering the sacrifices he helped create useless. Which is why pitch came after them that night and dissappeared once Montauk finished his ritual.

Sourcing the Serial killer enthusiast community. Love that the archives use whatever source of info they can access.

So Maxwell dissappeared in 1994 from public eye land yet the cult kept working towards a ritual. But now in secret? Their timeline always confused me.

Episode 10 vampire killer

I never noticed Trevor came right after Julia! Oooh this is so much connecting the dots so early on!

Vampires are so disturbing here makes you ever wonder how the hell media like twilight were ever created. But hehe the monster ****er community has always been a vibrant one. Not these vampires tho.

Trevor is so sassy I love his statements. Like Julia it really makes me sad how consumed he became at the end and how awful his death was. Once again the tragedy of the Hunt.

"I taught myself to read, I read as much on the subject as I could, and it isn’t covered often or clearly in those books I have found." can you imagine what kinds of books he might have found during the sexy vampire Era? This is a hilarious picture to paint.

So vampires feed off of blood and not fear which is an interesting creature to have in this kind of universe. Although hunters are also like that but there is still alot of fear and awareness involved with that while the vampires try to conceal themselves until the last moment.

There's alot of mosquito imagery in these vampires which is... Ugh

Also interesting how many time Trevor just uses the vampire's full name. Never shortened and never talked about in another title. Sylvia McDonald this Sylvia McDonald that. Also the other vampire. They always had a name that was psychicly imposed on the victims to be remembered fully. Very Stranger behavior.

Ahhhh the one vampire weakness... Drrrugs.

It's also very flammable which sets interesting precedence to setting unnatural things on fire to make them disappear.

Alard dupont comes in a later statement right? Yeah in 56

Martin was there when the statement was given which was 2010 and in 2016 he's 29 so he worked there for a while! At least since age 23 perhaps we'll find out even earlier. And he was still scared to be found under qualified after all this time! Oof...

I wonder how draining it is to give a statement that it kills someone who is sick.

The government is in on this! Looking for the teeth Trevor gave the institute... Somehow that strikes me as hilarious in the world building of this podcast. And it really leaves Jon no choice but to concede that there is something to the statement even if he refuses to use the term vampire like Trevor did so freely.

#Pfft i was so into this one i forgot to tag #Tma #jonathan sims #Tma hiatus liveblog #magnuspod #julia montauk #trevor herbert #Jane Prentiss #The magnus archives #hilltop road

[weshallc]

Happy St. Andrew’s Day. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading Bonfire Night! I haven’t put it on the usual fic sites as I knew I would mess about, and Tumblr folk are a patient bunch. I am going to rejig it so it stretches from Bonfire Night to Christmas (probably New Year at this rate) looking back over 2020.

Thank you for the lovely comments and support from @h4t08 @fourteen-teacups @thatginchygal  @bbcshipper @roguesnitch @lovetheturners and new regular @aimee-jessica and @olafur-neal

I really don’t know what I have been doing with my time apart from washing my hands, measuring distances of 2 metres, sewing masks, swearing at the news, collecting Scotch egg and pasty recipes and building a pantry to hoard all my Brexshit preparation supplies.

Enough about me, so as it’s St. Andrew’s Day I thought I might give this another spin. 

BERNS NIGHT (Revisited, just for fun)

Call the Midwife AU (Crown Jewels/Paddy and Bernie/Poplar-on-Tweaven)

CHAPTER ONE: FAIR FA’ YOUR HONEST, SONSIE FACE

“Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the pudding-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm : Weel are ye wordy o'a grace As lang's my arm.”  Address to a Haggis by Robert Burns 1786.

“Will You Reconize me? Call My Name or Walk On By.” Don’t You (Forget About Me). Simple Minds 1985.

Monday 25th January 2016

“His knife see rustic Labour dight, An' cut you up wi' ready sleight, Trenching your gushing entrails bright, Like ony ditch; And then, O what a glorious sight, Warm-reekin', rich!”

The room was swept in darkness apart from the light of the wolf moon and the north star penetrating the cold window panes. All eyes were facing towards a wooden table and the elderly man stood behind it. He was in his 60s and wiry, small for a man, but with a silver mess of what once must have been a bonnie head of fire red hair. The body may have looked weak, but the intensity in his bright blue eyes cut through the dimly lit surroundings.

As he spoke again, his voice filled the room, cutting through the anticipating silence. It was a voice that could take a knife and slice right through a soul. The knife in his hand in turn sliced through the offering in front of its high priest. Years of performing the same action with such a passion resulted in precision. The faithful entranced by the spectacle all gasped as one as the incision was violently made. No one daring to speak. Suddenly the trance was lost as artificial light rudely brought everyone back to the present with a blast of the pipes.

“All done then, Reverend Mannion? Can I serve the Haggis now? Don’t want it getting cold now, do we, not at £15 a head.”

“Aye, Violet, the ceremony is over. It’s time for eating and drinking, something the bard would have approved of, rightly so.”

The kilted clergyman winked at an auburn-haired girl in the crowd and tipped his whisky tumbler toward her. She raised her own glass and winked back. Her companion at her table was much taller with dark hair styled in a tidy no-nonsense bob.

The tall one leaned toward the small one and asked, “If it’s already dead, why does he have to kill it?”

“What?”

“The Haggis if it’s already dead, why does he have to kill it?”

Her friend opened her mouth to speak, but she saw a tender hand take hold of Chummy’s arm and explain it was all just ceremony, it was tradition.

“Like all that malarkey at our passing out parade, the day we got our badge. That wasn’t about police work, was it? It’s just tradition.  It’s what the English do well.”

He had been doing really well up until then, but a golden raised eyebrow made him alter his stance. “It is what us Brits do best.”

The raised eyebrow whispered to the police constable. ”Peter, Chummy really doesn’t think a haggis is a real animal, does she?”

He was not the sort of man that would turn heads, but he had a kindness in his eyes and an openness in his face she thought some would see as attractive. If only Camilla wasn’t his superior, and they didn’t work such long hours together, what might have been?

She knew her friend well and sensed more queries would follow. Not sure as a Scot brought up on Tweavenside and now living in London she could provide satisfying answers. Picking up their empty glasses and heading to the bar was a strange sort of refuge for a vicar's daughter and inner-city missionary.

There was a queue, well sort of a queue. In London a queue was made up of people standing in an orderly line and the person who had been stood the longest getting served first. In Poplar-on-Tweaven it resembled more of a rugby scrum and the person who shouted the loudest being ignored, Anyone who called the barmaid by name was bunked up the order. She wasn’t familiar with busy bars, but she was bright enough to work out the system.

“Val, when yer ready hen.” The request came from someone not sure that was their own voice they had just heard yelling those words.

All her life she had been immersed in the wonders of the Bible and was still amazed at how so many miracles had been performed. She had heard all the CPR arguments regarding resurrections and all that, and was still not convinced. But, she now knew how Moses had parted the Red Sea, he had known the barmaid’s name was Valerie.

“What can I get you, chick?”

“Here! I was first.” A grumpy voice struck up.

“Oh Al, you are always first. Let me serve this lass and then I will sort you out”

“Promises, promises.”

“Yeah in your dreams, pal.”

She was starting to feel uncomfortable she hadn’t meant to jump the queue. Maybe she should go back to the table and let Peter get the drinks. A man’s voice interrupted her thoughts, it was quieter than Al’s but held an authority. It wasn’t a Tweavenside accent, but it had a northern softness.

“You serve our impatient friend Valerie, I will see to this young lady.” Then turning to his new customer, “What can I get you, pet”

“Erm a whisky and lemonade and erm a pint, please.”

“Which whisky and a pint of?”

She wasn’t sure; she nudged her bottom onto a vacant stool for security.

“Are you with the law?” The tall bartender nodded towards Chummy and Peter,

“Yes, yes, I am.”

“OK, so that’s a Grouse and diet lemonade, just a dash and a pint of Buckles Best and for you?”

He stepped back a minute. “Your Reverend Wilf’s daughter?”

“Yes, I am.” Bernie suddenly felt more sure of herself. She was never completely certain of who she was when back in Poplar.

“Bernadette?” The stranger was grinning now, his brown eyes glinting under the harsh bar spotlights, or were they green?

“Well, that’s my Sunday name most people call me Bernie, even Dad.”

“Well, since I’ve never seen you in here on a Sunday or any other day. I will call you Bernie. I am Patrick Turner, most people call me Paddy, a few Doc.”

“Oh no, you won’t have seen me here on a Sunday or any other day. I live in London now and before that, well, I am not a big drinker.”

“What can I get you then?” asked Paddy loitering near the coke and lemonade pumps.

“A gin and tonic please, better make it a double it’s quite busy, save me coming back.”

Paddy smiled. “Premium gin?”

“Yes.”

While the optic was emptying into the glass, he asked, “You must have known this old place when Evie ran it?”

“Yes, I know Evie and J..Jenny”

“Oh yes. Jen was here when the wife and I took over she was a great help. We get a text every now and again, doing well for herself now, all loved up.” He winked at her as he ended the sentence, causing her to panic slightly.

“I was sorry to hear about your loss.” She wished she hadn’t said it.

Val had seemed to deal with ten customers to Paddy’s one, and now there was just the two of them alone at the bar. He looked at her in a sort of a non-direct, sort of direct way. Under that infuriating fringe she wanted to reach out and push back.

“Loss is as much a part of love as is healing,” he replied with a hint of melancholy, but without irony.

She was stunned and tried to find a corresponding Bible verse, but she drew a blank.

She focused on what was real and what was present. Her dad had taught her to do that. What was in front of her at this precise moment was a glass of gin and ice and a twist of lime. He was now unscrewing a bottle of Mediterranean slimline tonic.

She yelped, “No!” as he lay the bottle alongside the glass.

“Sorry most people add the tonic to the gin and I cannae bear it drowned.”

“Wouldn't dream of it, surely that would be very presumptuous of me.”

“Aye well, most people I've met are very presumptuous.”

“Maybe you have spent too much time in London. if you don't mind me saying, Bernie.”

“Well, to be fair, we don’t spend a lot of time sitting on stools and propping up bars in my part of London.”

“More's the pity.”

“Can I bother you for a...”

Paddy popped a black straw into her tumbler.

“I will make sure when you come home next time none of my staff will be presumptuous.”

“Oh, I doubt you will remember me, Paddy. I only come up to see my Da. I can't imagine you will be seeing much of me in the future, hardly likely that I would ever be considered a regular.”

“Now who is being presumptuous?”

Bernie went to put the straw between her lips but paused, realizing the stranger was still watching her. She suddenly felt uncomfortable. As heat rose in her cheeks. She suddenly felt awkward on the stool, squirming to find some sort of comfortable position. The stranger smiled in a way she could not understand; it wasn’t smug or suggestive, but as if there were sharing a joke, but she wasn’t sure what the joke was.

She hopped off her seat, for a brief moment realizing her arse was in the air and prayed he had altered his gaze. Focusing anywhere but behind the bar, she grabbed her glass and bottle in one hand, put the whisky against her elbow and waist, the pint in her other hand, turned and swiftly moved toward her thirsty friends.

Shelagh Bernadette Mannion don’t you dare look back and see if he is watching you he is recently widowed with a son, Da said. He is, what do they call them now, a bloomer or something like that. God has shown you his path for you and it certainly does not include the Crown Inn, Poplar-on-Tweaven.

He is still watching me, I can feel it.

#call the midwife #wee reblog #berns night #chapter one #more to follow llater #as in llama #not alpaca #desk top doesn't do flag emoji #found a saltire #and remembered to add extra song

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Bernie Sanders almost certainly won’t win the Democratic nomination after his string of defeats in recent primaries. So the questions around how and when Sanders will end his campaign aren’t really about electoral math anymore, but are instead connected to deeper questions about policy, the Democratic electorate and Joe Biden and Sanders’s personal goals.

These deeper questions essentially are: Does Sanders have any specific goals that he wants — such as Biden taking up one of his major policy ideas — that he could essentially trade with Biden in exchange for dropping out and endorsing the former vice president? Does Biden, who is now racking up endorsements and winning primaries by huge margins, really need to negotiate with Sanders at all? Does the bloc of around 30 percent of Democratic primary voters that have backed Sanders represent a clear constituency that he actually leads, or will Sanders’s supporters be unenthusiastic about Biden even if Sanders embraces him? Will most of Sanders’s supporters vote for Biden in a general election simply to get President Trump out of office, or does Biden need to accommodate them in some way? And are Sanders’s supporters actually open to any accommodation beyond Sanders being the Democratic nominee?

I can’t really answer any of these questions confidently, and despite what you will read or hear on TV, I’m not sure anyone else knows the answers to these questions either. But one way to think about this is through history. Every competitive nomination process ends with a winner, at least one person who can claim to be the runner-up and some bloc of the party that has lost. So here are some models for how the Biden-Sanders primary could be resolved. These are ordered from the least to most favorable for Sanders:

Sanders and the left get basically nothing

Parallel: The 2000 Democratic primary between then-Vice President Al Gore (winner) and former Sen. Bill Bradley.

Bradley didn’t win a single caucus or primary and earned just 21 percent of the popular vote, so he was obviously in a weaker position than Sanders is now. That said, many Democrats view Trump as an existential crisis and now America has a crisis (the novel coronavirus) that could last until November or beyond. With those concerns, Sanders may have less room to get much from Biden because the growing pressure to leave the race and back Biden may at some point become too strong for him to continue.

So Sanders could get nothing, according to Mark Schmitt, who was a top adviser on Bradley’s 2000 campaign. “Not ‘Godfather II’ nothing, but nothing wrapped in a lovely bow of recognition and respect,” Schmitt said.

Sam Rosenfeld, an expert on party politics who teaches at Colgate University, said, “Biden’s victory came so quickly and with so little in the way of extended trench warfare that it’s true that he likely feels less need to assuage Sanders substantively than HRC [Hillary Clinton] did four years ago.”

In this scenario, Biden would pick a running mate, like Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is similarly resistant to more left-wing ideas. Biden would basically refuse to adopt any of Sanders’s policies and might block their insertion into the Democratic Party’s official platform at the party’s convention, which is currently scheduled for July 13 to16 in Milwaukee.

Changes to the party platform

Parallel: The 2016 Democratic primary between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (winner) and Sanders; the 1976 Republican primary between then-President Gerald Ford (winner) and former California Gov. Ronald Reagan.

In 2016, Clinton and her allies allowed Sanders-backed provisions, including the abolition of the death penalty and a $15 minimum wage, into the party platform. A generation earlier, Ford and his camp used the platform to placate supporters of the more conservative Reagan.

The Democrats put some of Sanders’s less controversial ideas into the platform four years ago. In the 2020 process, he has pushed four far-reaching ideas in particular: a wealth tax, Medicare for All, the mass forgiveness of all student debt and free college for all Americans. The party platform in theory speaks for all Democratic candidates, even ones in swing districts. Those Democrats want to appeal to more moderate voters and are wary of Republicans linking them with socialism (and Sanders). So is there a compromise on the wealth tax or the mass forgiveness of college debt that satisfies Sanders’s allies and, say, more moderate House Democrats? That’s not easy to see. How far will Democrats go, with a GOP eager to cast the entire party as socialists?

Formal policy and/or appointment promises

Parallel: The 2016 Republican primary between Trump (winner) and Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

In May 2016, as some establishment Republicans were still thinking of ways to prevent Trump from winning the nomination, Trump released a list of people he would consider for Supreme Court seats. Neither Neil Gorsuch nor Brett Kavanaugh1 were on the initial list, but it was full of conservative legal figures. That list served as essentially a promise to the party’s establishment and conservative wings that Trump would appoint conservative judges to the bench, a key priority of the party. (He has followed through in spades.)

Biden has already promised to pick a woman as his running mate and a black woman as a Supreme Court justice — both attempts to placate other important constituencies in the party (black voters and women). And Biden recently announced that he supported tuition-free public college for Americans in households with incomes of $125,000 or less, moving toward Sanders’s position.

Will he go further? In theory, Biden could promise to appoint some prominent liberals to his administration (Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sanders himself or some of their allies, for example). He could promise not to appoint people that liberal activists strongly dislike, such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg or basically anyone affiliated with Facebook or Wall Street.

In terms of policy, could Biden, in a general election, commit to some kind of tax on the wealthy that is akin to a wealth tax? (The wealth tax is fairly popular with Americans overall.)

Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at John Hopkins University who focuses on political parties, argued that the left will demand a major federal government response to the coronavirus pandemic if Biden is elected — so the disputes between the party’s left and center-left wings might look much different than they did during the Democratic primary.

“The big left asks of Biden will be on the scale and permanence of government interventions more than on any of the issues in the primary,” Schlozman said.

“Biden is very old and his instincts really do just stem from a different and much more cautious era for [Democratic] domestic policymaking,” Rosenfeld said. “That’s going to matter. That said, it’s important to note that the establishment has itself moved significantly since 2008 … The center of gravity on policy questions has shifted left.”

A leftist vice-presidential nominee

Parallel: The 1996 Republican primary between then-Sen. Bob Dole (winner) and conservative activist Pat Buchanan and businessman Steve Forbes; the 2012 Republican primary between former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (winner) and former Sen. Rick Santorum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; the 2016 Republican primary.

Some in the GOP’s more conservative wing doubted that Dole, Romney and Trump were sufficiently right wing in each of their respective primaries. So all three chose running mates — former Rep. Jack Kemp for Dole, then-Rep. Paul Ryan for Romney, then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for Trump — deeply trusted by more conservative Republicans.

This route would be complicated for Biden. In theory, the former vice president could excite the younger and more liberal parts of the Democratic base by picking a running mate who is not Sanders but shares many of Sanders’s positions. But few people close to, or as liberal as, Sanders are governors, senators or otherwise serve in positions that might make them natural candidates for the vice presidency. The most obvious figures, Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Warren, would require Democrats to remove a sitting senator and hope that the party can win a special election to keep that seat.

Let’s focus on Warren for a moment. She presents some obvious advantages for Biden in terms of her policy knowledge and high favorability ratings among Democrats. At the same time, Biden’s campaign messaging has been about electability. Would he choose a left-leaning senator from the Northeast like Warren over a more centrist senator from the Midwest like Klobuchar? Also, can a 77-year-old candidate pick a 70-year-old running mate? Can a Democratic Party that is nearly 40 percent Asian, black or Hispanic run an all-white ticket? Also, it’s not even clear that Sanders’s supporters would be super excited about Warren as the vice-presidential nominee.

Sanders is the vice-president nominee

Parallels: The 1960 Democratic primary between then-Sen. John F. Kennedy (winner) and then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson; the 1980 Republican primary between Reagan (winner) and former CIA Director George H.W. Bush; the 2004 Democratic primary between then-Sen. John Kerry (winner) and then-Sen. John Edwards.

The history of the second-place candidate becoming the vice-presidential nominee illustrates one of the challenges for Sanders — he’s not really viable for arguably the biggest prize a runner-up can reasonably expect. Being second on the ticket is potentially incredibly valuable — Johnson and Bush not only served as vice president but ultimately won the presidency themselves (Johnson obviously in very unusual circumstances). But it’s really hard to imagine Biden choosing Sanders, an even older white man (Sanders is 78), as his running mate.

I don’t think it’s worth trying to predict which of these precedents the Biden-Sanders race will follow — I would expect something more than nothing and less than the vice presidency. But this process is worth watching closely, because it won’t happen all at once. Sanders’s exit from the race, the Democratic convention and the time between Biden’s election (if he wins) and the start of his presidency are all potentially points of negotiation between Biden and Sanders, and the center-left and left wings of the Democratic Party. It will take some time to assess what concessions Sanders and the people who support him come away with.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

[brooktrout96]

The World is Waiting for you, The Warrior of Light Who Will Light up The Dark Night! Part 2

Chapter 5 of The Deeper The Darkness The More Dazzling The Light Shines! 

AO3 is Here

Monslive: Darklops Zero!

Shit!” Zero mumbled as he dodged the Nomu’s attack as far away there stood a black and  version of Zero’s Ultra form stood where Mari once was. “Izuku!”

Yeah!” Izuku appeared as Zero turned to look at him.

Let first take care of this monster first.” Zero gestured to the Nomu as he dodged another one of it’s attack.

Right.” Izuku and Zero turned to the Nomu and they began to run at it with One For All’s green sparking around them

Detroit Smash!”

The duo each sent a downward punch with enough force that the wind pressure sends the Nomu flying far away from the USJ and those on the outside watched as the monster went flying. Zero had a smile on his face as he turned Izuku. “Are you ready to transform?”

Zero returned to Izuku as pulled out the Ultra Zero Eyes NEOS from a hidden pocket of his utility belt. “Yeah, let’s do this.” He put it to his face as he clicked a button as he spreads his arms outwards as Zero's body forms via incoming ribbons of light.

Zero landed as Darklops Zero went to attack the students with a beam attack as he created a emerald green colored shield to protect the student using Ultra Zero Defensor. The two tumbled around as Darklops Zero was getting the upper hand as Zero’s Color Time turned from blue to red

Shit! Izuku, there should be something in your pockets that should be able to help us.”

Izuku was searching in his many pockets of his belt as he found two weird device and four weird capsules. “What is this?”

It the Zero Riser, the Knuckle Loader, and the New Generation Capsules. First load the Ginga and Orb Capsules and then scanned them using the Zero Riser. Ginga is the one with the crystal on his head and Orb is the one with a ring shape Color Timer.”

Right. Ginga!” He then slotted it into the Knuckle Loader. “Orb!” He slotted in the Orb capsule and then he scanned it with the Zero Riser

Ultraman Ginga!

Ultraman Orb: Orb Origin!

New Generation Capsule Alpha!

Now the other two.”

Right, Victory!” He slotted in the Victory Capsule into the Knuckle Loader. “X” He then slotted in the X Capsule into the Knuckle Loader and scanned them.

Ultraman Victory!

Ultraman X!

New Generation Capsule Beta

Now put the other two capsules into the Zero Riser and then attached the Ultra Zero Eye NEO to the Zero Riser and then scanned the capsules again.”

“Right.” Izuku did what Zero told him to do as he attached the Ultra Zero Eye NEO to the Riser. “Ginga! Orb!” He slotted the first capsule into the Knuckle Loader and then he slotted the other capsule. “Victory! X!” He then scanned them with the Zero Riser

Neo Fusion Rise!

I have no limits!” He put the Riser up to his face and click the trigger.

New Generation Capsule Alpha, Beta!

Ultraman Zero Beyond!

In a flash of light, there stood a pure silver being with blue crystal on it as the students and heroes all looked on in shock. The two began to fight, and now the match was even as Zero and Darklops Zero tumbled on the ground and fought. Zero finally got clearance and a moment to breath. He releases eight energy cores from the crystals on his arms, then he stretches his arms to the side and proceeds to fire beams from those energy cores destroying Darklops Zero and sending Mari flying away. Zero took off to the sky and into space to recharged before detransformed back to Izuku

Zero and Izuku detransformed as Zero as Shin reappeared and pocketed the Spark Doll for safekeeping and then disappeared back to Izuku (Support groups really don’t need to figure out that Spark Doll are living creatures) as Izuku slipped the Ultra Zero Eye NEO into a pocket of his utility belt .

Izuku, where are you? Kero!” Tsuyu was yelling for him, Zero disappeared and reappeared in his spirit form as the frog woman hopped over to the clearing

Over here, Tsuyu!”

Are you alright? Kero.”

Yep as far as I can tell but I’ll probably have Recovery Girl check me over before I leave today.”

Okay, kero. Let’s get back to the others, Aizawa-sensei and Uraraka are worried about you.”

~***~

“Ow.” Mister Hands groan as he pulled himself threw the portal. “I can’t believe that the vigilante got both of my arm and legs. We were completely defeated and not by All Might. Our underlings were routed instantly even the kids were strong. You were totally wrong, Sensei.”

“No, I wasn’t, I was just simply overly optimistic. Hmm but you know, it seems that they underestimated us. I’m glad that the League of Villains’ name is so cheap. Incidentally where is Mari and the Nomu’s body, did it not get retrieved.”

“Mari was dealing with remaining heroes using Osamu’s gift and I don’t know about the Nomu.”

The door to the bar slammed as Mari entered all disheveled looked and covered in slowly repairing injuries. “The Nomu was sent flying away by Zero and then I was bodied by him when I was using the Spark Doll, it seemed that he has a Gigantification Quirk. I don’t know what happened to the Nomu though” Mari shrugged her shoulders.

Even though I loaded the Nomu with Quirks to rival All Might. Oh, well, can’t be helped, what a shame.”

Power like All Might’s… that reminds me. Mari that one kid.”

Boss, are you talking about the greenette that was fighting off the small-fries as I and the Nomu delt with Zero?”

Yeah, his speed was comparable to All Might’s.”

There’s no use crying over the failure of this mission! After all, it’s not as though today was entirely in vain. Let’s gather a new group, handpicked for efficacy, and let’s take all the time we need. Remember, we can’t move freely and that why a symbol like you and Mari are necessary. Shigaraki Tomua, next time you must show the true world the true horror of your existence!”

~***~

Fatgum was wrapping up Aizawa’s injuries. He was talking to Aizawa as he was doing it. “Wow, that villain and the vigilante did a number on the USJ.” Fatgum said as he looked around the destroyed courtyard as the students trickled back to the courtyard as the police arrived to arrest the small fries as Iida and the rest of the teachers made their way in.

The students recounted what happened to the police officers as Tsukauchi walked up to the two pro heroes.

This was a daring attack, wasn’t it?”

It was and if I hadn’t been tipped off it possible could’ve been worst if it was only me, Thirteen and the students.”

Tsukauchi turned to look at the underground hero with a confused look on his. “What? You knew about the attack?”

Yeah, I was given information from an informant and then I relied it back to Nedzu, hence why Fatgum was here today as he is one of the best heroes when it’s comes to multiply same time villain capture. We’re expecting the small fries but we were attacked by a villain-for-hire named Mari. Zero made an appearance and fought her and then she transformed into a giant orange and black version of Zero and then the giant from three month ago appeared.”

I have business to attend to. Sana, you see to the rest!”

Affirmative!”

Nedzu was pondering to himself, “So the information that Zero gave Aizawa was true then but my only question is how did he get here to help out.”

So, what are we going to do, Nedzu?” Midnight asked the principal

Well we’ll have to focus on fortifying our security across the board.”

Tsukauchi hadn’t even left when a officer came in. “Detective Tsukauchi! Word has came in, sir! We’ve apprehended the suspect thought to be the monster that attacked Eraserhead.”

What’s his condition?”

No external injuries, sir! He’s not showing any signs of resistance, either. Moreover, he’s unresponsive to stimuli and he’s not uttered a single word.”

Tsukauchi turned to Nedzu. “Nedzu, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to investigate  every nook and cranny of this campus. “

Oh yes, yes, of course! I realize the police are often buffeted by less than civil remarks these days, but we recognize their jurisdiction over these matters is higher than ours! When it comes to investigations that is your gentlemen’s field of expertise! Please, by all means conduct yourselves as usual!”

~***~

It had been a long day for Aizawa, dealing with the villain attack, the appearance of Zero at the USJ and then the villain and Zero no Shin turned into a giant proving that Shin and the Zero from three month ago were the same person.

Aizawa, good you’re here. We need to talk.” Aizawa set down as Nedzu poured tea for the two of them as he picked up a tablet in his paws.

What’s up Nedzu?”

I found out more on our mysterious vigilante. You said our villain-for-hire called him a Ultraman?”

Yes, she called him Ultraman Zero and according to Mt. Lady the giant she corner three month ago said that it’s name was Ultraman Zero.”

What do you know of the Pacific Records?”

The Pacific Records are supposedly ancient texts from the time before Quirks that holds information about ancient kaiju and some prophecies pertaining to them.”

Well the prophecies part is true. There is evidence that eight prophecies in the Pacific Records have came true in the past.”

Nedzu pulled up a website called SSP. “This is a website that has been active since the mid twenty-tens and in 2016, it posted these video.”  Aizawa watched each video in shock.

Are we sure these videos aren’t doctored?”

We’re sure, I even talked to the owner of the website.”

That would be me. Ello’ there.” A voice said as Aizawa turned around and saw a short black-haired woman standing at the door. She was wearing a brown trench coat with blue and red band with the word SSP and below it was Something Search People. “My name is Nadia Yumeno, my 10-times great-grandmother, Naomi and her friend posted those video.”

I called her here as her family has been studying the Pacific Records since those video were posted.”

My family also have studied the incidents in Ishtal Civilization and Rusalka since they are tied to one of the prophecies in the Pacific Record.”

Which one?” Nedzu asked as he love trying to put together a puzzle

Maga-Orochi and the Lord Monsters of Elements. Grandmother Naomi theorized that the myth of Yamato-no-Orochi and Susanoo stem from Maga-Orochi and the Ultra that fought it but enough of that, that’s not why I’m here. You said your mysterious giant and our mysterious vigilante were called Ultraman Zero?”

Yes, even the villainess call him that when she saw him.” Nadia pulled out a large binder out of her bag and began to search threw it but not before she looked at the two who had a confused look on their face.

What, oh the bag. My best friend and I work support and right now they’re focusing on making it easier for both normal people like the police and pro-heroes to keep their equipment handy without taking up space and I’m their beta tester.” She then flipped it to a page, it was a photo of a black, silver blue and red giant

This is the Ultra that my grandmother Naomi saw, she called him Ultraman Orb and he’s in one of his form changes that she called Emerium Slugger. It’s said that this form was granted by a father and son duo of Ultras.”

Aizawa stared at the Ultra. “Aizawa are you alright?” Nadia asked him in confusion.

Yeah but Zero looks a lot like this but not this Ultra.”

So, it seems that the Ultra you’ve met isn’t the one that my family knows of but it one of the Ultras that make up one of his form. I’m going to have research this but for sure I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

The three lights have bonded, now, stand up! The three lights have bonded, now, stand up!"

Nadia frowned as she pulled out a phone out of the pocket of her jacket. “Ello’ hey Jet what’s up?”

What? Send me the design, I think the people that I’m talking to might find this information useful.” She ended the call as she turned back to Nedzu and Aizawa. “That was the person who created and designed my bag. You see, Jet and I are the owner of the SSP Support Company and the main Support Company that designs most of the heroes uniform for the Heroes Schools like Yūei.” She pulled out a tablet.

“Well a week or two ago, I talked to a Heroic student and his original costume was destroyed in a training exercise, he had a new idea for his costume and we’ve been very quite swamped with repairs and redesigns since the hero school just got back in session. So, Jet just got to the design the student sent just a moment ago and well I think the design says it all.”

She showed the three the design. Aizawa noticed that it was similar to Iida’s uniform except it was sleeker and more armor like but Aizawa froze since the design looked like Zero’s giant form except as armor

So, who commissioned this hero uniform?” Aizawa asked as Nadia type into her tablet.

Let’s see.” She typed a few more thing into her tablet. “A Yūei student by the name of Izuku Midoriya.”

Aizawa let out a sigh. “It just had to be my Problem Child.”

So, you think Midoriya is our mysterious Vigilante then Aizawa.” Nedzu asked the 1-A’s homeroom teacher.

No, I don’t because I saw both Midoriya and Zero at the same time during the attack on the USJ. I also got to see Zero with his hood down and the face staring at me could’ve been Midoriya but there was small differences like for instance the color of his eyes weren’t the emerald green of Midoriya’s but they this orangeish yellow that seemed to glow and that seem to be hiding something.” Aizawa paused and looked at Nedzu.

He gave me his age and name, he said that he was eighteen and his name was Shin Moroboshi and  I looked to see what his Quirk is and to see if he was using a fake name. There is no one at all with that name.”

Nedzu then piped in. “Well, we shall confront Midoriya after the Sport Festival and see what he has to say.” He turned to Nadia. “Make him that uniform and well see what happens from here.”

Right!” Nadia said with a smile as she began to type away on her tablet. “It will happen right away, Nedzu.”

Aizawa let out a sigh, every class that he had that was never fully expelled only partially always had that one student that was his Problem Child and it seems that Midoriya was this years Problem Child alongside this Morobosh

#my hero academia #boku no hero academia #my hero academy fanfiction #my hero fanfic #ultraman #ultraman zero

[fairfieldthinkspace]

Can the Trauma of War Lead to Growth, Despite the Scars?

By Phil Klay 

When we speak of trauma, it is usually as something to be avoided at all costs. But the suffering that war brings can be a strange and terrible blessing.

This article is part of a series on resilience in troubled times — what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences.

The French weapon deployed against Spanish troops in 1521 was, contemporaries said, “more diabolical than human.” The rapid-firing light bronze cannon shot iron balls that crushed battlements, careened wildly and sprayed shards of stone in all directions. At the Battle of Pamplona, one cannonball twice injured the leader of a small Spanish garrison defying calls for surrender, nearly killing him, first by striking one leg with stone shrapnel, then in the other leg by the cannonball itself. His name was Íñigo López de Loyola. The effect on Loyola was not only physical, but also spiritual: Today, he is better known as St. Ignatius.

Back then, he was no saint. One biography describes him as “a rough punkish swordsman who used his privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes committed with his priest brother at carnival time.” But this near-fatal injury changed him, along with a few religious books he read during his exceptionally painful convalescence, in which his bones had to be broken again and reset, and where he came so close to death he was given last rites. He went on to found the Jesuits and send disciples all over the globe, in what the British historian Dom David Knowles suggested was Christianity’s “greatest single religious impulse since the preaching of the apostles.”

When we speak of trauma, it is usually as something to be avoided at all costs. “Interest in avoiding pain,” wrote the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, is among “the most important human interests.” And yet soldiers like St. Ignatius, who found in their suffering a strange and terrible blessing, are not rare. Senator John McCain, brutally tortured at the Hanoi Hilton, famously declared himself “grateful to Vietnam” for giving him “a seriousness of purpose that observers of my early life had found difficult to detect.”

His might be an extreme case, but the expectation of exposure to some trauma has long been part of the draw of war. “The law is this: no wisdom without pain,” wrote the ancient Greek playwright and military veteran Aeschylus. “Wanted or not by us, such wisdom’s gained; its score, its etch, its scar in us goes deep.” Perhaps that’s true, but it leaves us with an ugly and, to some, offensive question: Can suffering be a gift?

In the early 20th century, the German writer Ernst Jünger, who had proudly served four years in brutal front-line fighting in World War I, declared the answer was a resounding yes. “Tell me your relation to pain,” he claimed, “and I will tell you who you are!” Civilization before the war had slid into bourgeoise decadence, he thought, fleeing from self-sacrifice and prioritizing safety. But the war heralded a new sort of man.

“Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame,” he wrote of himself and his fellow soldiers, “we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favored.” Postwar Germany convinced him that the industrialized world these men returned to, which happily destroyed workers’ bodies for the construction of railways or mines, was ruled by the same cruel logic as the trenches. Men would have to rise to the challenge by accepting pain, and accepting the cruelty of the age. This is toughness and callousness elevated to a first principle. Unsurprisingly, many of Jünger’s admirers became Nazis.

One of their victims was an Austrian of Jewish descent named Jean Améry, who after the war forcefully rejected, in the starkest terms, any notions of suffering as a gift. Likewise, notions of stoic detachment born of the trenches were absurd to a man who had been tortured by the Gestapo before being sent to Auschwitz. Améry experienced pain beyond description; he was hung by his arms until they ripped from their sockets, and then horsewhipped. For the tortured man, he wrote, “his flesh becomes total reality.”

More lasting than the pain, though, the experience destroyed his ability to ever feel at home in the world, which requires faith in fellow men. Humans are a social animal, our inner self in constant outward search for communion. Torture inverts that expansive, capacious self into a collapsing star. Whatever you thought you were — a mind, a consciousness, a soul — torture reveals how simply, and casually, that can be destroyed. “A slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough,” Améry wrote, to turn a cultured man into “a shrilly squealing piglet at slaughter.” There is wisdom here, though of a dark sort. “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured.” Améry committed suicide in 1978.

Where does that leave those who suffer? For the medical community, the safest option is addressing symptoms, not metaphysics. The writer and former Marine infantry officer David J. Morris has described his own therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in Iraq, during which he was urged to retell the stories of his trauma, practice breathing exercises, and reframe his cognitive responses to his environment and his traumatic memories.

But he was not encouraged to grow in response to what he had gone through; when he would try to speculate on how his experience might be converted to wisdom, psychologists would admonish him, he reported, “for straying from the strictures of the therapeutic regime.” One senior psychologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs told him that notions of post-traumatic growth were an insult to those who have suffered. For a medical community grounded in science rather than spirituality, and rightfully leery of telling the Amérys of the world to look on the bright side, suffering is no gift.

But another current can be found in theories developed during the Vietnam War. The study of psychological trauma suffers from what the psychiatrist Judith Herman has called “episodic amnesia,” in which periods of active interest, frequently following wars, are followed by “periods of oblivion.” But the generation of soldiers disaffected from war during Vietnam organized and demanded the first systematic, large-scale investigations of war trauma’s long-term effects. In addition to a medical diagnosis — PTSD was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s official manual in 1980 — many of these same veterans and their allies argued for the spiritual and moral significance of their condition.

Psychiatrists like Robert Jay Lifton and writers like Peter Marin argued that the suffering of Vietnam veterans was not simply neurosis, but appropriate moral response to horror. “All men, like all nations, are tested twice in the moral realm,” Mr. Marin wrote. “First by what they do, then by what they make of what they do.” Rather than numbing themselves to pain, they needed to sensitize themselves, to become alive to the “animating” guilt they supposedly lived with. Guilt forces the suffering consciousness outside of itself, the theory goes, sparking empathy and a drive to make reparation.

Whether guilt results in healing, though, is debatable. Some of the most fascinating research on growth after war trauma emerges out of a four decade-long study initiated by Zahava Solomon, which followed the PTSD trajectories of veterans of the 1982 war in Lebanon and the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War. A 2016 analysis of Israeli P.O.W.s from the 1973 war, who faced systematic torture, deprivation and social stigma, did find that those who reported the most guilt about their experience also reported the most growth. However, those veterans also had greater reports of PTSD symptoms as well. As Aeschylus warned, the wisdom they felt they had gained came with deep scars.

None of this would likely have surprised Ignatius of Loyola. In his tradition, suffering was at best a mystery: God never really answers Job, and Christ’s prayer to “let this cup pass me by” goes ungranted. As a Jesuit friend recently told me, suffering is never a gift, never truly willed by God; suffering is real, and awful, and not to be forgotten. “Consider how the Divinity hides Itself,” Ignatius’ followers have been directed to ask for hundreds of years, “how It could destroy Its enemies and does not do it, and how It leaves the most sacred Humanity to suffer so very cruelly.” But of course, that doesn’t mean that we cannot respond to such suffering with grace.

Phil Klay is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, a visiting professor at Fairfield University and the author of “Redeployment,” winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, and the forthcoming novel “Missionaries.”

#St. Ignatius of Loyola #Phil Klay #Fairfield University #The New York Times

[enigmaticxbee]

✖️ 10x01 My Struggle

The one where... 8 years after IWTB Mulder and Scully have apparently broken up and get pulled back into the world of the X-Files by a right-wing conspiracy tv show host and an unnecessary retconning of the original series mytharc.

Best: In 2016 I was just so happy to see Mulder and Scully back on my screen together that I was willing to put up with some bullshit - today… I have no time for this.

Worst: Where do I even start? The unexplored breakup. The diatribe monologues. The retconning of the mytharc. The catch phrase dialogue. CSM seriously? The decision to bring back CSM when we saw his face explode in the original series finale long after he had outlived his usefulness on the show… it’s emblematic of CC’s fundamental misunderstanding of what this revival could have been.

❌ Flashlights

❌ Woods/Desert

❌ Slideshow

❌ Autopsy

✔️ Evidence Disappears

✔️ Scully Misses It

✔️ Mulder Ditch

❌ Sunflower Seeds

✔️ Voiceover

✔️ Catch Phrase: Mulder (TTIOT), Mulder & Scully (IWTB)

✔️ Scully is a Medical Doctor

❌ Mulder is Spooky

❌ Scuuullllaaaaayy! Muullllderrrr!

✔️Dana

✔️ Inappropriate Touching (that I am here for)

❌ Casual Scully

✔️ Casual Mulder (grey tshirt my beloved)

❌ Trench Coats

❌ Bad Tie Watch

✔️ Glasses Watch 😎

✔️ Taking! It! Personally!: Mulder & Scully

50 States: Virginia x19 & DC x101 (44/50)

Investigate: Together & Apart

Solve Rate: 0% (starting over for the revival era)

✔️ Bechdel Test: It does pass with Sveta, but also why does Scully call the nurse “Nurse” and not a name like a considerate human being would do with a colleague she clearly works closely with. It’s not like we wouldn’t be able to tell she’s some sort of medical professional in those scrubs if Scully called her Kate…

MSR: 🐝🐝

Goriness: 👽

Creepiness: 👽

Humor: 👽

Rewatch Thoughts:

William check-in: Scully: … because we have a child together… Exposition alert! Exposition alert! I think Mulder’s aware. But yeah, if you need to give them a reason to continue to fight the good fight after all this time and everything that’s been done to them that’s actually a good one.

Break-up check-in: When I first heard that Mulder and Scully were going to be broken up in the revival it was incomprehensible to me - WHY would CC do that? And then do nothing WITH it, except inject some unexplained tension between the characters... It made me so sad. Now, after several years and having read fanfic that actually explores the fissures in their relationship that might have led to a breakup it makes more sense to me - but on the show it still feels like an attempt to recreate a dynamic from the original run that’s decades out of date, and like a fuck you to shippers who in CC’s eyes watch the show wrong. Because we care about the emotional lives of the characters and not about incomprehensible mytharc rambling 🙄

The episode title My Struggle makes me think first of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s Nazi manifesto - based on an interview I read CC said the title was a reference to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novels of the same name and referring to what Mulder’s going through but he can’t have been unaware of the Hitler association and it just puts a bad taste in my mouth... Secondly, the Struggles are aptly named for what they put the viewers through - and this is probably the best of the Stuggle episodes 😬

I get that there’s some exposition that needs to be communicated but did the intro need to be SO expositiony? The show is returning for a highly anticipated limited series 6-episode revival and CC starts off not with a cold open to draw you in to the story but with Mulder monologuing while someone slaps visual aids down on the table?

OG title sequence woohoo! 🎉🎉🎉 With Skinner added yay! (Wish that actually meant we got lots of good Skinner this season but alas)

Scully’s still at creepy ass Our Lady of Sorrows booooo…

Scully: He doesn’t know how to reach you, Mulder. I barely know how myself. Wtf does this mean - they’re talking on the phone and she knows where he lives! Emotionally speaking she doesn’t know how to reach him? Just exposition to let us know they aren’t in regular touch? It’s not like she hesitates to call him or go with him to meet Tad O’Malley when he asks.

Revival Scully first impressions: The wig isn’t great, and the color isn’t red enough. She seems more brittle, stiffer in the way she talks. Maybe it’s a conscious acting choice on GA’s part - and I can come up with plenty of character reasons why the 14 years since the show ended, or even the last 8 years since IWTB, might do that to her… but honestly it just feels like GA hasn’t quite found Scully yet. Or maybe it’s that I see more of her more recent roles like Stella and Bedelia in this Scully so it’s harder for me to see her as Scully now.

Revival Mulder first impressions: I like the stubble. And maybe it’s just that I haven’t watched DD in anything else recently but he’s just instantly Mulder for me. Petulant Mulder lol.

Wouldn’t it have been so much more interesting if Sveta was actually a character from a case from the original run? But tbh they didn’t actually investigate that many straightforward abductions. I’m trying to think who it could have been - Ruby from Conduit in season 1?

Classic scoop mark scars? I don’t remember those ever being a thing in the original run. And wouldn’t Scully have them too? Ugh here comes the retconning.

Why does Mulder call Scully Dana in that moment at Sveta’s? It seems designed to needle her - when it’s always been used in moments of intimacy before. Why does he feel the need to poke at her while they’re talking about abductions, and bodily violations, and stolen fetuses - things he knows she has personal experience with…

Ugh, Sveta’s exposition about their relationship and breakup and child - so clunky. And this is all the explanation we ever get to my recollection! I guess we’re supposed to take it as true, or true enough, based on Scully’s reaction.

Sveta says Mulder suffered from “endogenous depression” - which is defined as occurring without an obvious stressful event or trigger… I don’t doubt that Mulder might suffer from depression (we saw him going through depressive episodes in the original series) I’m just unclear why the show wanted to define it as “endogenous” when there are so many traumatic events in his life that must continue to affect him (like uh, losing his entire family, being abducted and tortured, dying and being resurrected, getting sentenced to death and going on the run, being isolated and presumably seeing no one other than Scully for years, losing his son - just to name a few…) - but sure, those experiences have no influence on his mental health or why they might have broken up 🙄

So is Scully a surgeon or not?! In IWTB she was leading an experimental neurosurgery and now she’s just assisting surgeons? Although maybe she got demoted for getting her surgical info from google 😂

Scully is a grown woman and can go for a champagne limo ride with a smarmy guy like Tad O’Malley if she wants - but I HATE it. I can headcanon that she’s just going along with him to try to figure out what his agenda is - and her line later about him being a charming man full of charming BS supports that - but she still thinks he’s charming and is flattered by his attention and blesdfhhvdj it grosses me out.

Why is Mulder so shocked that Sveta was abducted by men when LITERALLY the same thing happened to Scully?? Like, we’ve done this ‘maybe it’s all a big hoax/conspiracy’ storyline before. Also two things can be true!! Humans may be using alien technology against humanity for their own reasons, but that doesn’t mean aliens don’t exist (the opposite actually) and it doesn’t invalidate the things they saw on the X-Files. I get why the show might want to say lalala supersoldiers who/what now? but invalidating the entire original run of the show just seems like an incredibly hamfisted way to go about starting this revival - annoying at the least, if not insulting to original viewers!

Why is Mulder still so distrustful of Skinner after all these years? Skinner’s little hint of a smile when Mulder gives him his number 🥺

Look, they’re at their most dynamic in that scene on the porch and emotionally there’s a lot to unpack - but the fact that Mulder’s this fired up over what seems like nothing we haven’t seen before and we’re back to the Scully trying to rein him in routine is just exhausting and I don’t have the energy for it.

Scully’s expression sitting on the couch listening to Mulder and Tad O’Malley’s rant is me this entire episode 😂 - I hate all of this. Scully: It’s fearmongering claptrap, isolationist techno-paranoia so bogus and dangerous... You tell ‘em Scully!

So are you telling me that CSM somehow reconstructed his skull after it exploded but still needs to smoke cigarettes through tracheostomy tube? Sure.

#xf rewatch #xf fanart #my struggle #msr #the x files #the xfiles #thexfiles #xf #txf #xf mytharc #i want to believe #truth is out there #xf review #10x01

[formeitsalways-haylor1989]

We Come Back Every Time

Author's Note: Here we are again, another story in a space of a week woahza! Originally I was going to make this more than one chapter but since I’m only just getting back into the writing game I figured let's not make it too difficult for ourselves. ‘Cause of this, I’m sorry if the start is very in depth and the rest feels kinda rushed. I originally didn’t mean to go that deep and detailed to the start but it just happened. Anyway this starts of in the 1989 era and moves into the Reputation era with mentions of Calvin/Adam, Tom and Joe. I really really hope you enjoy this. The idea was one I originally had back in 2015 for a one shot that was going to turn smutty but like I said, it’s been a while. A smutty one may be coming up next before I take One Night can Change Everything. Anyway, you know the drill. Comment, vote, like etc. It really inspires me to write more when I know people are reading and enjoying my stuff. This is also the longest fic I’ve written in a LONG while.

*insert line break*

August 2016

Taylor scrolled through Instagram looking at fan posts while the car drove down the busy streets of London. They pulled up to a red light, at the same time receiving a text from Adam that read “ Goodnight beautiful.” She smiled, not responding to the message.

The car began to move again, taking her the remaining distance to the hotel that Adam was currently staying in. He was in town for some festival and Taylor was sad she couldn’t join him originally. With some work by her team, they were able to shift things around so she could surprise him on a last-minute flight to London.

The pop-star wore a trench coat and a pair of heels with a black lace dress underneath. She managed to get changed on the jet before stepping into the awaiting car. Pulling up to the Ritz-Carlton, she grabbed the Louis Vuitton duffle bag and made her way to the reception desk collecting the key that her team had already called ahead for. Taylor made her way up to the 14 th floor, excited and eager to surprise her boyfriend, little did she know that she was the one in for a bigger surprise.

After a good 5-minute walk from the elevator doors, she inserted the white key waiting for a click and its accompanying flashing green light. Taylor quietly opened the door, hoping not to wake Adam just yet but was surprised to see the main light on in the room. Gently closing the door behind her, she walked further into the room to reveal a sight she never hoped to see.

“Adam!?” she asked in shock and surprise.

There, on the bed was her boyfriend of just over a year on his back with brunette’s legs wrapped around him, naked.

“Taylor?” he said in complete surprise, trying to remove the girl who was bouncing on top of him.

“What the fuck Adam?!” Taylor’s voice was getting louder. “I loved you! How could you do this to me?” she asked while tears were running down her face.

“T I’m sorry,” he said while trying to grab his underwear. “I never meant to…”

Taylor scoffed, tears still flowing, “Never meant to what? Get caught!?” She shook her head.

The brunette began to move from her position on the bed, reaching for her clothes.

“No, don’t. You stay. I’ll leave,” Taylor said, wiping the tears off her face with the back of her hand.

Picking up her bag, she took one last look at Adam. Shaking her head again she spoke, “And after all that, I told you. How I felt, what I’ve gone through. For you to do this to me. I can’t believe you would stoop this low. If you wanted me out of your life, you could’ve just said it.”

Walking to the door, she didn’t look back. She didn’t want Adam to have the satisfaction of seeing her cry even more or how her heart was now broken into two. Slamming the door behind her, Taylor made her way to the elevator with her head held high.

I will not break down in this elevator. I will not break down in this elevator, was the mantra she said to herself over and over again.

In her hurry and daze, Taylor realised she hadn’t called her driver when she made it to the lobby. She was in too much pain to pick up her phone and wanting to get far away from the hotel as quickly as she could. It was at that moment, a London cab pulled up dropping guests. She made a b-line to the opened car door and placed her bag on the seat next to her.

“Where to miss?” the driver asked in his North London accent.

“I don’t know, just drive. Anywhere.” Taylor handed him $200 pounds.

The driver stared at her through the rear-view mirror, shrugged and started the engine.

*insert line break*

Sitting in the back of the taxi, Taylor thought about where she could go. She could get a room somewhere, that was always an option but she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. She needed a friend. A distraction. She mentally ran through all of the people she knew in London. Ed was currently on tour in Australia and Cara was walking some runway in Belgium. The only person she knew could potentially be in the same city was Harry.

Taylor gave the driver the address of what she hoped would be her final destination for the night. She considered texting him in the 35 minutes it would take for her to reach his place. They had become friends again in a way. They texted each other from time to time. Saw each other here or there. She knew that Harry would always be there for her and she would for him too. They didn’t talk much but the little speaking they did do, became even less when Taylor started dating Adam. She didn’t really understand why.

Pulling up at the house, she thanked the driver before handing him another $300 pounds.

“Thanks for this sir. Also sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused. I’d also really appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone about tonight.”

“No problem. I’ll take your secret to my grave.”

Taylor smiled at him, thanking him once more before exiting the cab. Walking the stone driveway, she was grateful to see lights on. She also hoped he didn’t have company. Or if he did, it was someone she knew. Taylor didn’t want to walk in on two people in one night. Tentatively knocking on the door, she waited for what felt like forever until it opened, revealing a shirtless Harry Styles with his hair up in a bun and a toothbrush in his hand.

“Taylor?”

“Hi,” she said quietly. Clearing her throat, she continued, “I’m really sorry to do this to you, and it’s late and unexpected…”

She began to ramble, which gave Harry the chance to look at her face. She had been crying. He knew what Taylor looked like after she was upset all too well. He was sometimes responsible for those tears.

“It’s ok,” he said, stopping her from rambling on further. He motioned for her to come inside. “Is everything ok? You look like you’ve been crying.”

“Is it that obvious?” she asked while dropping her bag in the corner.

“Not to everyone, but to me it is.”

Harry stared at her, he could tell she was trying to put on a brave face.

“Taylor, you know you can always talk to me, right? My guess is, you needed someone to talk to otherwise you would’ve found yourself a hotel room.”

She looked at him and gave a small chuckle trying to put on a brave face. However, it didn’t last long. She felt Harry’s green eyes knocking down her walls and began to cry again. Tears started streaming down her face again. Before she could say or move Harry was beside her, scooping her into his arm and holding her tightly. He felt her hot tears on his skin, running his hand up and down her back in an attempt to soothe her.

He didn’t expect that his night would turn out like this.

The tears begin to subside, she’s no longer shaking his arms.

“I walked in on Adam cheating on me,” she reveals by pulling away from the hug to look at his face.

“Tay,” he says in a whisper. He moves the hair that has fallen in front of her face behind her ear. “I’m so sorry.”

“He said he loved me you know. For him to go and do that! I mean, I gave him a hit single for goodness sake. I loved him and that’s how he repays me!” Taylor starts to shout out of anger and disgust about what happened. Harry heads over to his bar to make her an Old Fashioned in an attempt that it will calm her.

He hands her the drink and she downs it quickly.

“Thanks.” Taylor wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She takes a seat on her couch and stares at the artwork on his wall. There’s silence between the two for a while.

“Thanks for letting me in,” she says. Her eyes had moved from the artwork to her fidgeting hands in her lap. “I just needed someone to talk to and I don’t know a distraction. I figured I shouldn’t be left alone with my thoughts in case I decide to do something stupid like wait for him to fall asleep and go back and chop his balls off.”

Harry chuckles at the mental image.

“It’s no drama, Taylor. You’re welcome here anytime. You are my friend after all.”

Taylor smiles at him. “Yes, that you are. And friends, don’t let friends drink alone at times like this.” She makes her way off the couch over to his bar to begin making a drink for both of them.

Harry laughs and watches from his spot of the couch. He notices that despite what she’s just been through, Taylor still looks beautiful. Her gorgeous face, beautiful blue eyes accompanied by her signature red lipstick she wore. He eyes the black dress she wears that was obviously meant for Adam’s eyes only. He notices the way it clings to her and how painfully thin she looks. She wasn’t the same Taylor he dated years ago. Granted, he wasn’t the same Harry. She seemed like a ghost of her past self.

Taylor makes her way over and hands him his drink. She holds it up to toast, “To friends being there for friends during shitty times”.

Their glasses clink and Harry took a sip before getting up to grab a shirt.

Taylor was a little disappointed at the view that had just disappeared.

“The bedroom is through there,” he said, pointing to the right of the corridor.

She shakes her head, “Harry, this is your house. I don’t expect to show up in the middle of the night and for you to sacrifice your bed for me. The couch is just fine.”

Harry looks at her and figures it’s best not to argue with her.

“Fine,” he says picking up his glass. “Just don’t complain to me in the morning when you have a sore back.

Taylor gestures a zip and locking a lock next to her mouth.

Harry laughs before he decides to get up and grab a beer for himself and a glass of red wine for Taylor.

She thanks him for the drink before he sets off down the hall and comes back with a scrabble board. Harry figures while she’s here, he might as well have a worthy Scrabble opponent.

They play well into the night in between making cocktails and light conversation. Taylor gets changed into a pair of sweatpants and borrows one of Harry’s many white t-shirts.

They fall asleep next to each other on the couch, with Harry’s arms wrapped tightly around Taylor. It’s the best sleep Harry’s had in months.

*insert line break*

The next morning Taylor extracts herself from Harry’s arms and makes breakfast as a thank you for letting her stay. Harry laughs when he wakes up, realising that it’s such a Taylor thing to do.

She makes arrangements for her driver to collect and take her to the jet, wanting to get home to the company of her cats and eating all the ice cream and chocolate she can find in her New York apartment.

“Thank you again, Harry,” she says while pulling away from another hug. “It means a lot.”

“I’m here anytime you need me. Remember that. After all, we’re friends.”

“Friends,” Taylor replied with a nod and smile on her face .

Harry watches the car until it’s no longer in sight.

*insert line break*

The two start to talk more and more as the days go by. Facetime video calls and text messages back and forth about anything and everything. From cats to music, Harry even facetimes her on the set of the movie he’s staring in.

“Am I going to see you up there winning an Academy Award one day?” Taylor asks while turning the camera around so he can see Olivia doing her classic Meerkat pose

“Ha. I don’t think so Tay but who knows.”

They talk the longest when they’re in a crisis. She vents to him about her problems with Tom. How her team is wanting them to make everything so public. Taylor’s ears are open anytime whenever he and current girlfriend are having dramas. They figure they’re the only two that truly understand what it’s like having their respective partners get thrust into the spotlight. Taylor was all too familiar with it while Harry experienced it himself during his career.

Meetups happen as much as they can, though they’re sparse. With constant traveling on Harry’s end to Taylor’s current reclusiveness from the media, it’s hard. The majority of the time it’s in London, usually hanging out with Ed and Cherry.

He’s one of the first to find out apart from Ed and Selena that she’s got a new boyfriend. Another English actor only this time he’s younger than her. Harry’s happy for her as much as he can be, his true feelings for her being pushed down as much as he can so they can remain friends. Harry came to the conclusion that he wanted Taylor in his life. If he had to have her only as a friend, then so be it.

Harry released his debut album and Taylor is the first to send him flowers and a congratulatory bottle of champagne. “I’m so proud of you,” the note read in her cursive handwriting. “ I always knew you could do it. P.S. Kiwi is a killer track.”

He shoots her a message thanking her for the gift. He never tells her outright that Two Ghosts and Woman were about her. It was self-explanatory.

*insert line break*

July 2018

Harry’s wearing a black Reputation Stadium Tour hoodie and jeans, standing the sound booth watching the crowd go wild at FedEx Field.

He hadn’t physically seen in her a while but that was normal for them. However, Taylor’s calls and sending of memes grew less frequent by the day. He thought nothing of it but it occasionally chewed at the back of his mind.

Taylor’s glowing all over, not just from the body glitter she has on nor from the thrill and adrenaline from performing on stage. She’s glowing just in general and notices how she’s filled out. No longer is she painfully thin but she looks like the Taylor he dated at 18 just a little older.

He heads backstage to see her, congratulating her on a fantastic show.

“Thanks Harry, I’m glad you came.” Taylor hugs him tightly. “Thanks for taking the time to come see the show. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to make it out to one of yours.”

“Not to worry love,” he responds while pulling away. Harry sees a blond haired man walking towards them.

The blond wraps his arms tightly around Taylor’s waist. “Great show tonight,” he says before giving her a chaste kiss to the lips.

“Thanks babe.” She turns to face Harry.

“Harry, I would like you to meet Joe. Joe this Harry.”

The two Englishman shake hands and exchange pleasantries.

“Nice to meet you, big fan of the movie you did,” Joe says with an awkward smile on her face.

“Thanks mate, nice to meet you too.”

Taylor thanks Harry again before giving Joe a quick kiss on the cheek before heading off to change for Rep Room. The two boys stand there awkwardly in the hallway backstage of the stadium before Harry’s phone buzzes telling him that his driver is here.

“Nice to meet you again,” he says before giving him another awkward handshake. “Tell Taylor I say bye and to enjoy the rest of her tour.”

“Will do.”

Harry can feel a set of eyes burn a hole in his back as he leaves.

*insert line break*

“She’s keeping the conversation to a minimum ‘cause it’s interfering with her relationship apparently.”

Ed tells him over a glass of whiskey.

“What do you mean interfering?”

Ed shrugs, setting down his glass. “Don’t know man. I’m guessing it’s more coming from Joe than from her.” Ed grabs the bottle of whiskey and starts pouring them both another drink. “She told me that she was happy when you started talking again. Despite knowing that you’re not responsible for her happiness, I know that you haven’t been happier since becoming friends with T again.”

“Well, it’s not my fault if he feels so insecure about his relationship that our friendship should impact it.”

Ed stares at him. “You are her ex, mate.”

Harry just sits there not knowing what to say. Ed was always the one friend they both shared that helped and understood their relationship. Ed was always in Harry’s corner but he would never admit it to Taylor.

“Who told you this?” he says sipping on a drink.

“Selena.”

Harry looks up in confusion. “Selena? Since when did you two start being all buddy buddy.”

“Well we always have been somewhat friends, but it was ‘because she was here with Niall the other day.”

“Wait. Selena and Niall?”

“Yep,” Ed responds, taking a sip from his drink and ignoring the cat brushing up against his feet.

“I’m not entirely sure what they are. I found it too awkward to ask.”

*insert line break*

Taylor doesn’t know what to do. The one person she would normally talk to about this was off limits, as it involved him. Taylor was a little heartbroken when Joe approached her after the night of the concert in the car to the hotel.

“I don’t really feel comfortable with you talking to him, to be honest.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s your ex, Tay. It’s not that I don’t trust you. I just…”

“You just what?” Taylor asked, a little annoyed.

“I don’t trust him. Look, you said it yourself when we talked about things early on when we were getting to know each other. He was a big part of your life and how am I supposed to know he’s not here trying to win you back?”

“Harry’s my friend Joe. What am I supposed to do?”

“I’m not asking you to not be his friend. Can you maybe keep the conversation light? Don’t go messaging him constantly and meeting up with me? Please? For me?”

Taylor stayed quiet for a moment before nodding her head. “Ok,” she replied quietly.

Joe kissed her on the cheek, “Thanks babe.”

*insert line break*

Taylor decided to confide in Selena. She thought about talking to Ed but figured he would have a more bias opinion with Harry being one of his best friends and all.

“I don’t know what to do Sel. I love Joe. I’m happy with him. But he’s asking me to do something big that doesn’t feel right.”

“Well, he’s not asking you to not be Harry’s friend T.”

Taylor switches the phone to her other ear.

“No, but he’s asking me to keep it a minimum. Harry and I don’t talk much to begin with. Just here and there, I send him a meme or a funny tumblr post about him on occasion. It’s not like I spend every night staying up late talking to him.”

Selena stays silent.

“It feels like he’s asking me to not be his friend without saying the words.”

Selena doesn’t respond.

“Come on, I know you. Spit it out Gomez. Give it to me straight.”

She hears Selena sigh. “Ok, I love you just know that. I also love that you’re happy and I love that Joe makes you happy. I mean he’s a great guy, got no doubt about it. I mean he’s holding the record for not getting in my bad books yet but…”

“Buuttttt…” Taylor responds trying to coax an answer out of her.

“I’ve always felt that guys shouldn’t dictate a girls life. I know from experience after everything happened with Justin. In my opinion, I don’t think Joe has the right to say who you’re friends with, who you’re not friends with and who you’re talking to. By all means, it’s not like you’re one of those crazy girls who constantly ask their boyfriends who they’re talking too and trying to read all their messages. He should pay you the same respect that you give him T. I mean if he asked you to not be friends with me, would you?”

Taylor remains silent.

“I think you have your answer babe.”

*insert line break*

Joe goes away for a week to promote his latest movie when Taylor has time to truly think.

She knows she shouldn’t throw away the wonderful thing she has with him over a friendship. A friendship with her ex. The one who inspired a whole album. The ex who she always felt like would be the one to run in and stop her wedding, whoever was up with the alter with her. Screaming out her name and asking to give him another chance. The guy who after all this time was still writing songs about her.

It was during her week alone that Taylor came to the realisation why Joe’s response hurt her so much. She loved Harry. Having him as a friend instead of a lover made it easier for her. No reason to get angry at him or no reason to doubt him. There were no obstacles in progressing their relationship further as there was nowhere to go. Taylor didn’t have to risk her heart being broken by the same hand twice by just being friends with Harry.

The real question was, was he worth taking the risk of having her heart shattered into a million pieces again?

*insert line break*

“We need to talk,” was how the message began that he received from Taylor at 2 am.

“I don’t know when I don’t know where but we need to talk. I’d rather do it face to face.”

He responded, “I’m in LA at the moment. I’ll be in New York next week.”

Harry figured she’d prefer to let him down and break their friendship in a more personal and polite way than just ghosting him altogether.

“Are you decent?” she sent back. Before he could respond he saw the white cloud of bubbles appear at the bottom of the screen. “‘Cause if you are, I’ll come over right now.”

Harry responded with a simple “ok” before getting up to grab a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.

Before he knew it, there was a knock at his door.

He turned on the lights on his way down the stairs, greeting her and letting Taylor enter.

She was the only person he knew who still managed to look presentable at 2 am in a Law and Order t-shirt and cat pajama pants.

“I’m sorry for kinda springing this on you.”

Harry shrugged, “It’s ok. If I recall, our favourite time to do stuff is either 2 am or midnight.”

Taylor laughed and smiled wide at him. Her smile causing a chain reaction on Harry’s face.

“You wanted to talk?”

“Yeah, um….”

She stood there awkwardly, not knowing where to start. She had it all planned out mentally but as she was standing in Harry’s living room, all words escaped her. “So first off, I’m sorry that I haven’t been speaking to you as much.”

Harry nodded, sensing the slight nervousness in her tone. “It’s ok.” He wanted to tell her he knew but didn’t want to rat out Ed or Selena.

“No, it’s not ok Harry.” Taylor took a seat on his couch while Harry decided to sit on the armrest.

“Joe asked me to kinda stop speaking to you. I guess he was worried about what might happen between us. He knew how much you meant to me and how our relationship was a big part of my life and help me define who I am today.” Harry stays silent while Taylor looks at the ground.

“I was honestly really hurt. I already kinda started to speak to you less when I started going out with him so he had nothing to feel insecure about, but I guess it didn’t really help.”

“So is this your way of apologising and telling me our friendship is over at the same time?” He asks, a little bitter. He honestly would’ve preferred a text.

She shakes her head, “Quite the opposite actually.” Taylor removes her eyes from the floor to Harry’s face.

“When Joe implied that I break our friendship, I didn’t understand why I was so hurt. I mean yeah ok I found it a little controlling. I never asked him to stop talking to people or checking his messages to see if he was talking to other girls. I realised that he shouldn’t really have much of a say on who I can and who I can’t talk to.”

“Well, I’m glad you came to that conclusion. For both our sakes. I’d miss my facetime chats with Olivia.”

Taylor smiles at him, “I also realised why it hurt so much.” She stands up from the couch and makes her way closer to where Harry is sitting.

“I realised that letting our friendship go meant a big part of who I am would disappear. Our relationship may have not worked out the first time but it made us into better people and I’m thankful for that.” She was in front of Harry, placing her hands around his neck she continued, “Having you as a friend was the next best thing to being in a relationship with you. We got everything apart from you know, the intimate parts, without having to worry about screwing up, what the media or fans thought or risk getting our hearts broken again.”

Harry looked up at her, “So what are you going to tell Joe?”

She stared into his green eyes, a small smile on her face. “I don’t have to tell Joe anything.”

Harry shook his head.

“Some people are worth the risk of having your heart broken for a second time.”

Harry stood, Taylor’s arms remained in place while he wrapped his around her middle.

“Do you mean?” he asked quietly, his forehead resting against hers.

Her blue eyes closed before nodding her head. “I love you Harry Styles. Always have, and always probably will.”

Harry smiled wide before leaning in to kiss her. His arms tightened around her waist while Taylor’s hands made their way into her hair. Pulling away, Harry finally responded, “I love you too Tay. After all, we come back every time.”

#Haylor #haylor fanfiction #Haylor fic #harry styles #Harry Styles fanfiction #Taylor swift #Taylor swift fanfiction #Taylor swift fan fic #harry styles fan fic #my babies #OTP #longest thing I've written yo #across the eras #my writing #haylor swyles #swyles

[rwbyconversations]

Why has Adam proved controversial after Volume 6?

Fandom is a culture that is constantly changing. It’s a culture effectively built around self-sustaining itself through fanart, music videos, fanfiction and discussion theories about the content the fandom is built around to tide them over until the next big release. Taking the RWBY fandom for example, it’s a fandom that’s really only alive for less than two fifths of the average year, from October to January when the volume itself airs. The rest of the year, RWBY’s fandom has to keep itself afloat through self-generation of ideas and the sharing of the aforementioned means of content to tide people over until October comes back around and the season starts anew. Headcanons and fan theories become commonplace and can become exponentially more popular than ever intended thanks to the gap in seasons giving it time to form and gain weight as a theory before canon can prove it wrong. 

What that long period of downtime means is that you can see previously loathed characters come back from the brink and gain a lot of fandom support and approval in the turn of a season. Or alternatively, popular characters can take a swan-dive in popularity, being reduced to joke status that they never recover from. People who swore up and down that “this character is trash and I don’t care what they do with them” suddenly next hiatus are on the other side of the trenches. One season can do a lot for a character in either direction is what I’m saying. 

Because that’s what’s happened the past two years to Adam Taurus. 

Adam after Volume 5 was a turbulent wreck of a character. Humiliated at the end of the season and forced to run with his tail between his legs, while his character lost much of the appeal that it had garnered over the prior four volumes, making him resemble a whiny child LARPing as a doomsday villain. It was a pathetic display for his character, one so infuriating it inspired me to begin writing analysis essays after a heated Discord discussion, and that essay struck a note with many of the people who read it and agreed with the contents therein, especially in regards to how much Haven damaged Adam’s threat factor. People simply weren’t scared of him appearing like they were prior to his smack from Blake, several comments even derisively writing off Blake and Yang’s rematch against Adam in advance because “they made him job before, they’ll do it again.”

 And yet interestingly, within the span of a year, the tides partially turned. With Volume 6 Adam wasn’t widely derided as a joke anymore, but in spite of that, the discussion around him was just as heated as it was last year. Adam was still the core topic of the argument but now the battle lines had been redrawn thanks to his death in the climax of Volume 6. Now it’s become commonplace for RWBY’s discussion communities to deride many of the dime-a-dozen posts about Adam and his “wasted potential” that have been arriving nearly daily like reinforcements to batten at a wall. But why? What changed in just one year that changed the entire argument around Adam? Why are his fans and critics embroiled in a new war to enter the hiatus?  

That’s what I’m trying to set out and accomplish in this essay. I am going to hopefully explain the primary reasons for why Adam is a controversial character following Volume 6, in particular why his fans are dissatisfied with the way his characterization was taken over the course of the show. Keep in m ind that parts of this essay touch on Adam’s abuse so if that’s a thing you’d rather not see, avoid going further. 

1) Headcanons were proven wrong

No one likes being wrong. Just look at students who get fail grades in exams, they’re usually despondent. It’s never something you lose as you grow up, in fact, Being wrong just sucks, to put it bluntly. 

Remember how I mentioned at the beginning that because of the content droughts fandoms experience, headcanons and theories can grow far further than anyone intended? Adam is an example of that happening for three years. 

Adam’s first appearance was in the Black Trailer, released on March 22nd, 2013. He wouldn’t make a significant appearance in the show until Heroes and Monsters, the penultimate episode to Volume 3, released on February 6th of 2016. His only significant appearances between those two dates was a cameo in the Volume 2 finale and V3C7, Beginning of the End, released on January 2nd. 

Adam’s initial appearance left much of his personality vague, barring that he was Blake’s superior, a stoic swordmaster and that he was fighting to liberate the Faunus from humanity with the full intent of taking a pound of flesh from humanity for what they’d done to the Faunus- to quote From Shadows: 

From Shadows, we’ll descend upon the world, take back what you stole, from shadows, we’ll reclaim our destiny, set our future free.

As such, the mental image of Adam that the fandom was given had nearly three years in real life to set in stone, that he was Blake’s former mentor who had fallen into extremism and terror attacks. Some even suspected going off Oobleck and Blake’s interactions in Volume 2 that Adam would receive a redemption from his wicked ways to show as an example of how Blake would redeem the White Fang from its own muck-filled past, or that Adam would need to die in an alternate variant of that story to show how far down the dark path he’d gone. Tauradonna was even a fairly high-profile ship in the early days of the show, being on roughly the same level as Blake/Weiss.

The headcanons were only given further room to grow thanks to adaptations of the Black trailer and early RWBY not taking the time to more properly setup Adam’s true character, in particular the Shirow Miwa adaptation. Miwa’s version of the scene, or at least the localized version, was released across two chapters in April and May of 2016, with the full book getting a physical print in the West in August 2017. Adam in the Miwa adaptation is far more talkative than his canon counterpart and even makes several dry quips throughout the fight:

When they first see the AK-130 guards (”Looks like we’re doing this the hard way” in the trailer): “Looks like all the seats are taken Blake.”

When asked who they are (Adam doesn’t have a line here): “We’re thieves.”

Upon seeing the Spider Droid for the first time: “Tch! He’s one serious baggage clerk.” 

Adam’s dialogue is also softened from his original dialogue to boot: 

“Buy me some time!” “But-” “Do it!” instead now is “Blake, buy me some time.“ “But that’s-” “I just need a second.” Blake also gets to make a quip that “You know... You’re fairly high-maintenance.” 

When Blake’s barrage ends, she says “I did all I could,” and Adam thanks her with “It was more than enough, get back.” All Adam says in the animated version of the scene is “Move!” 

The manga makes a significant addition to the aftermath of the battle, where Blake chides Adam for the ambush being sloppy. Adam initially just smiles as “that’s what you’re here for,” before Blake quickly rebukes him, cutting the train car as she says that the White Fang “not lower itself to bloodshed.” The last we see of Adam in the manga is him standing on the train carriage, pondering to himself “You think this is wrong Blake?” 

A similar change is And “Perfect. Move up to the next car, I’ll set the charges,” is now “There’s at least 5,000 cases. All right, let’s kill the engine.” “What about the crew?” Adam is silent and when Blake presses him for information, the Spider Droid attacks 

Prior to the train attack there is a scene added by the Manga where Blake says that the Dust will be redistributed to Faunus in need. She asks Adam to confirm this and he looks back over his shoulder, lips parsed, and says “Of course.” However the next page has a black box of him saying “Don’t overthink it Blake.”  

The point of this extended summary of the Black Trailer in Miwa’s adaptation is to show that even in adaptations of the trailer, RWBY didn’t do much to dissuade people from forming the headcanon that Adam was simply a fallen revolutionary. In fact the manga smooths out Adam’s rougher edges, making his dialogue less harsh and more sarcastic. Remember as well that these were initially released soon after Volume 3 wrapped and before the commentary confirmation of abuse, meaning that these gave Adam fans one last bit of material to bolster their ideas of what Adam was. 

Obviously, all of these ideas and theories went out the window with Volume 3 Chapter 11 and the subsequent reveal by Miles and Kerry in Volume 3′s commentary track that Adam was in fact an abuser. A lot of his fans didn’t take to this reveal well, which I’ll return to in a future section of this essay, since in part it shot down all of their theories about Adam and made him an irredeemable monster. Adam’s potential redemption was destroyed the moment he slapped Blake. 

It is telling that most of Adam’s more passionate fans are from the early generations of the RWBY fandom who were around since the early trailers, since there’s a sharp divide between those fans and the more common Adam fan reaction of “I like him in spite of the abuse or explicitly only work with AU stories where he isn’t as bad.” Again, no one really likes being wrong, especially when it means accepting you were wrong for nearly three years.

2) The abuser twist

Something that I’ve never liked about Adam’s turn as an abuser was how looking back at Volumes 1 and 2 for evidence of the twist in advance, it’s difficult to find anything concrete. I had this discussion on a server lately where looking at all of Volumes 1 and 2 along with 3′s first half, there was really only one agreed upon sign of abuse prior to V3 in Volume 2- Blake’s flinch when Yang goes to hug her in Burning the Candle. But the problem with that is that even this can be taken into a different context, as one of my friends pointed out. As she reminded the chat, Yang had already shoved Blake several times by that point in the conversation and Blake may have flinched instinctively when she saw Yang’s arms raise again. 

Of course given the context of Adam’s abuse, Blake flinching may in fact have been foreshadowing, or it may have just been her instinctively preparing for another shove. We just don’t know, and that vagueness around Blake’s past and the abuse twist is partly why a lot of fans argue that the abuse twist was never planned in the early stages of the show and was an idea introduced during production. This is not a concept new to RWBY- Monty came up with the Maidens one day while working on Volume 3 after all- but it does mean that for sudden character turns like Adam’s abuse, the question will be raised of “was this always planned or was it just something you added as the story flowed along?” 

Much of the cited evidence that Adam was planned to be an abuser from the early show is in a similarly murky place. Blake speaks of Adam in Volume 2 as a mentor (”I had a partner... more of a mentor actually”), Monty himself called Blake the “apprentice” in an interview after the Black trailer, and much of her subdued behavior compared to her more affectionate self seen in Volumes 5 and 6 can be simply explained as Blake keeping a low profile to avoid Faunus discrimination and the attention of the White Fang. 

Even in Volume 3 Chapter 7- Adam’s last scene before Chapter 11 and the confirmation of his abuse- things are kept vague. Adam even sharply rebukes his Lieutenant when he offers to hunt Blake down following the Black Trailer, saying “Forget it.” Adam’s plan is to go to Mistral without a care for Blake, which goes against his obsessive behavior seen later in this very season. 

Much of the evidence given for Adam’s abuse- him gaslighting Blake in the Adam short, Blake talking about him in Volumes 5 and 6 to Sun and Yang, his dialogue during the Volume 6 battle- is all retroactive evidence, which does not solve the initial problem of the initial seasons poorly setting up Adam’s turn. Much of the evidence for and against the twist is shady at best, and reaching at worst due to how vague the wording is around Adam. Blake only ever speaks of him as a partner or mentor, never belying a romantic connection outside of the volume 2 premiere with the drawing of him in her notebook. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight some may find evidence in Volumes 1 through 3, primarily that Blake is simply an unreliable narrator, but I still feel like the lack of clean foreshadowing to such a large part of Adam’s character it weakens the twist, and some of Adam’s fans remain bitter that his character underwent a drastic 180 out of relatively nowhere.

3) Simple preference

Being blunt, a lot of Adam’s fans just prefer the Adam shown in the early seasons to the one the show closed out on. This idea is often mocked by some that his fans just wanted to see a Vergil knockoff, but for some of Adam’s fans it just came down to wanting to see cool fights. After all, RWBY was built on the initial idea of well-designed characters having well-choreographed fights. The show advertised itself initially as “From the maker of Dead Fantasy and Haloid,” which to surmise, weren’t shows that lured people in for their narrative quality. Monty’s loyalist fans who followed from his freelance work and from Red Vs Blue followed for cool fights, and Adam’s fighting style and design made him an instant fan favorite. It has only been from Volume 3 onwards that the show has advertised itself more as a drama than an animation showcase, and as such some of Adam’s fans don’t care less for his character turn other than that it makes him whiny and edgy and they’d like to see him swing his sword a bit more.

While the idea of preferring Adam as a revolutionary over his Yandere self seen from V3 is also a mocked concept as it tends to be used by people less well-versed in expressing critique of Adam’s character and makes for a popular strawman tactic, a morally gray villain may have worked well for RWBY. Especially as Adam and Cinder both show in different ways that the series should stay away from villains with no redeeming qualities. 

Though I suppose at least unlike Cinder, Adam actually has a backstory, so I should count my blessings. 

To surmise, for some of Adam’s fans it was a purely physical love affair

4) Adam’s death and its connection to Bumblebee

Blake and Yang’s final confrontation with Adam in Volume 6 marks a significant step in their relationship, which means if you like Bumblebee then the emotional climax of the volume hits home for you. If you shipped literally anything else then at least the choreography was good, but if you didn’t ship Bumblebee and never liked the Adam abuser turn... hoo boy. 

Being blunt, a fair few Bumblebee shippers don’t mind the abuser twist since in the long run, it helped their ship and gave Blake and Yang plenty of angst to work through both alone and as a pair. I’ve said before that Blake’s recovery arc made for some good content in Volumes 4 and 5 barring the Sun slaps, and Yang’s PTSD arc, while bare-bones in Volume 4, was some of the more consistently good material that year when shown. And as such, Adam being made a one-note psycho who wanted to kill Blake suited them well, as it gave a clear villain for Blake and Yang to overcome while developing past their respective traumas. The problem of course being, Adam’s fans not appreciating this turn and definitely not appreciating the names they were called when they expressed this dissatisfaction.

This led to a litany of hot takes- “Adam’s fans only cared for the show and the character as an outlet for a male power fantasy,” “Adam’s fans were entirely made of sexists who just hated women,” “Adam stans are abuse apologists.” (Like 40% of the Adam fans I know are actual abuse victims so fuck yourself on the front of trying to use their trauma as a low blow) And to be fair, Adam’s fans responded with their own disappointing share of bad takes involving the dreaded words “wasted potential,” alongside murder and nerfing, but I go over those later. 

(also you know genuine homophobics but trying to avoid braindead reasoning here for my own sake)

Getting back on topic, I quite obviously detest this lumping in of all criticisms. For one it means that simply shipping something that isn’t Bumblebee and disliking the fight can get one labelled with accusations of homophobia. A disgusting tactic on its own, to say nothing of how some people use it just to deflect criticism. Liked Adam? Then you’re an abuse apologist now. It’s interesting to compare the response to Adam last year and this year, where suddenly the fandom went from dismissing Adam after Haven to suddenly being very insistent that his death was well done and that only bigots opposed it; a naturally insulting statement to any members of the LGBT community or racial minorities who took umbrage with the handling of the Faunus.

And speaking of, my largest gripe with Adam’s turn personally is how it overshadows his previous commitment to the Faunus. Even though Adam’s short shows him fighting for the Faunus, to the point where Lionized and From Shadows are both expressly about how the Faunus are subject to inhumane treatments, it all gets tossed aside for the sake of Adam’s obsession with Blake and I’ve always found the almost-retcon of “Adam only truly cared for his own equality” a bit.. hard to get a read on? Since the original reason for his fall was because of his rabid devotion to his cause/getting vengeance on humans. Adam in-setting had been prepped as a Malcolm X style analogue before most of these traits were pushed over to Sienna. I feel like there is a lot that could be said about how RWBY handles its racism narrative, especially when it pertains to Adam given his own placement in the narrative, but that such a thinkpiece would likely be hit with accusations of homophobia or abuse apologism likely curtails that idea in anyone’s head. Some voices in the fandom have even come forward and expressed their dissatisfaction at how the arc depicting racism got curtailed for a romance. Adam rather sadly could have been part of a cornerstone on a narrative about the natural consequences of violent extremism, but instead the writers went with a far shallower option in my opinion.  

Also being blunt the whole “Adam was just a secondary character for Blake and Yang’s arcs” feels a bit like revisionism of weak writing. 

5) Damaged goods

Adam lost a lot of fans thanks to Volume 5. You can argue about this all you want but the facts don’t change that the volume was overall one that shot his character in the leg. Alongside having him go completely bananas out of nowhere with the “THE BELLADONNA NAME HAS BROUGHT ME NOTHING BUT GRIEF” scene, Adam’s humiliating head smack from Blake that knocked him out for an entire episode and his Naruto run escape from the Battle. Put bluntly, people didn’t give a shit, especially after CRWBY’s own attitude was to mock Adam, further undermining any threat factor Adam was meant to have.

It’s quite obvious in hindsight that Adam’s short was made quickly, and was almost certainly damage control made to counter the backlash from the Battle of Haven episodes. Sienna’s inclusion has eve been admitted by Miles on RWBY Rewind to be done as pure fanservice for the fans who wanted more from her design, and it shows with how Sienna dominates the back half of the short. But the short’s nature as damage control, while ultimately well received, still marked it as a fix job for Haven. Even last year fans wondered what was the point of trying to hype Adam back up as a threatening villain given he would almost certainly lose any future battles he fought in. 

Ultimately, a lot of people just didn’t care about Adam. The damage had been done by Haven, and even a lot of his own fans wrote off him being allowed to be even half as competent as his Volume 3 self again. With even his own fans having written off his chances of being a fearsome combatant again and the crew openly reviling Adam, not to mention his own voice actor despising him, a mood of “why should we care if the crew don’t?” began to settle in for Adam’s fans. Some even looked forward to his death since it would mean at least in death, Adam was free of being written as a psycho Yandere. For some of Adam’s fans, his writing had been so schizophrenic that death seemed like the only way forward instead of dragging it out.     

6) “Wasted potential”

This is a point I don’t entirely agree with myself, but as this is an essay about why Adam has been controversial after Volume 6 I only feel it fair to include it, even if solely for the purposes of rebuttal. Wasted potential has become a set of dirty words to portions of the fandom thanks to the many, many, many arguments about Adam post-season. 

A rather large complaint is that Adam “jobbed” for Blake and Yang, despite neither of them really having gained much experience onscreen since Beacon. I disagree with this notion since it does take some details out of consideration for this angle- B&Y were both tired from earlier fighting in the day, Blake was shocked to see Adam out of nowhere and that’s why he overwhelmed her, Adam still actually defeats Blake at Argus and it largely comes down to Yang to win the fight, and V5 had actually set up her changing her fighting style to better combat Adam’s own style. 

One idea of potential for Adam that I will admit to liking is the idea of Adam as an ideological villain to Blake. Adam and Blake could have both represented the differing sides of the Faunus debate and how to achieve results, perhaps even going for a scenario where neither side was truly correct or wrong. Such a plot would have even had the benefit of tying the Faunus narrative into the wider stakes of the show while also humanizing it on a base level through their struggle. But at this point, this is becoming me wishing the show was something else. I’m sure a great fanfic could bloom from this idea in the future and I hope I get to see it one day. 

There’s also the entire idea that Blake and Yang “murdered” (it was self-defense) Adam since apparently this is a big deal. I dunno fam, you just ignoring all those White Fang goons RWBY killed in V2 by leaving them in the tunnels? The ones they smacked around during V3? All those people Yang probably killed in the Yellow trailer? Now seems like a bit of an odd time to draw a line in the sand about the RWBY girls killing someone. 

7) Conclusion

To conclude, there’s a lot of controversy surrounding Adam, and a lot that will surround his character for years. I feel like arguments around him will still be going by the end of the hiatus, if not for years to come. Adam has attracted a fandom from varying walks of life, but one thing I’ve noticed with some regularity is how many of of them themselves have histories with abuse. What unites a lot of them in their reasons for liking the character is the tragedy of how Adam is a person who has been persecuted then gained the power to bite back, but in his blind rage winds up lashing out at someone he is supposed to love. With permission, they let me share their accounts so I could put them here:

Be it purely visual/choreography appreciation, falling for fan theories and headcanons, his allusions to the Beast, the mystery of his mask and later branding, his potential as an ideological rival for Blake or for personal reasons, Adam gained a fan following from all walks of life over the past six years, who may not have learned everything they wanted to about him but who wanted to learn more regardless. Even if they only liked him just to watch him fight, Adam has a small if passionate fanbase, and I hope I’ve explained some of their grievances with the show as a whole now, particularly following Volume 6. Adam might have been a scumbag, but ironically his fandom has actually been quite pleasant to talk to, so I hope I’ve presented their more accurate or personal issues in a fair light. 

Thank you for reading. Please consider sharing the post around if you enjoyed it or think someone you know would. 

#rwby #adam taurus #blake belladonna #yang xiao long #rwde #Sienna Khan #fandom #rwby analysis #fandom analysis #rwby critical #shirow miwa #rwby shirow miwa manga #from shadows #lionized

[foliea]

Rubber Band - Tyler Joseph Imagine

Paring: Friend!Tyler x Fem!Reader

Word count: 1,630

warnings: brief mention of self harm, a bit of angst but mainly sweet

authors note: this has been plaguing my mind for days now. And honestly it’s probably my favorite fic i’ve written ever. I’m super proud of this and I hope you all like this as well. Also I spent like two and a half hours writing this, it’s 4 am I’m tired.

March 17, 2006

as I walked down the halls on my way to the gym, I tugged down the sleeves on my hoodie. Insuring no one would see what tortures I put myself through. 

Just as I rounded the corner into the next corridor I felt someone run right into my chest. “Uh, sorry...” I muttered as I stuck my hand out to help the girl, who had fallen to the floor. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

She took my hand and hoisted herself up. “No harm done.” She smiled while dusting off her jeans. She slowly looked me up and down, eyes lingering on my arm. I quickly looked down only to see that my sleeve had been scrunched up near my elbow.

The girl sighed as I yanked the sleeve down. There was a brief slapping noise before she extended her hand out to me. In it was a singular rubber band. “Here take this. And uh when ever you feel the need to...” She trailed off looking to my now covered arm. I nodded understanding what she meant. “Just pull it back and let it go. Keep doing that until the feeling goes away.”

Hesitantly, I took the rubber band from her. “Thank you...” I looked up realizing I had no idea what her name was.

“Y/N.” She smiled.

“Thank you Y/N.” I quickly pulled the rubber band onto my wrists, just as the warning bell rang. 

“I’ll see you around...”

“Tyler.” 

“Tyler.” She repeated with a small nod before walking off.

Over the next few months Y/N and I swapped numbers to keep in touch over summer.

July 6, 2011

As I walked into the small coffee shop, a bell signified my entry. Despite living in Columbus my whole life, I had still yet to come here. “I’ll be right with you!” A small yelp was left out slightly after.

I walked up to the counter and stood there awkwardly waiting for the girl to appear from the back of the shop. As I stood I inspected the store. There were two other people there, an elderly couple, sitting by the window.

“Okay sorry about that.” The girl appeared behind the counter with a grin on her face. She seemed familiar. “What can I getcha?” 

I froze realizing I had no clue what I wanted. Hesitantly I looked up to the chalk board behind the girl. As I searched for something that I knew would please me I fiddled with the rubber band on my wrist.

“Ya know I gave you a rubber band in our sophomore year of high school not thinking too much about it.” Suddenly it hit me.

“Y/N?” 

“That’s my name don’t wear it out.” She let out a light chuckle at her own joke. “How are you these days, Tyler?”

“Honestly? Pretty good. My band has our CD Release party in a couple days. Well I say band... It’s really just me and my friend Josh on stage singing and playing drums...”

“Sounds like a wonderful time. Maybe I’ll show up.”

“Really?” she nodded with a toothy smile on her face. 

“Now, have you decided on what you want?” 

I quickly ordered my drink and handed her the money, making sure to leave a little extra in the tip jar.

Maybe I’ll have to come back to this cafe more often.

July 8, 2014

I nervously stood in front of the mirror when there was a knock at the door. “Come in!” 

“Hey, Ty.” Y/N smiled. “Ready for your big day?”

Although on the inside I was screaming yes. I still shook my head. “No... What if she walks out on me?”

“Tyler there is no way in hell that Jenna is going to walk out on you. You two are so in love its disgusting.” We both chuckled.

There was another knock at the door. “Tyler, Y/N c’mon we gotta go.” Quietly, we both stood up. She patted my shoulder giving me one last reassuring smile before running off to find Josh.

Ever since I had introduced the two, Jenna and Y/N became inseparable. Meaning that when it came time for Jenna to pick her bridesmaids, Y/N had to be on the list. And of course Josh would be one of my groomsmen.

----

“And yeah I know I probably should have ‘practiced’ my speech but I felt like wigging it would be better...” as josh when off on a tangent about how he didn’t practice his speech and everyone was listening intently, my mind wandered to how incredibly lucky I am. I just married my best friend and along with her, I have two of the greatest other best friends.

“Okay it looks like it’s my turn to talk.” Y/N let out a dry chuckle as as stood up. “The first time I ever met Tyler, I was on my way to chem, totally dreading it cause I had a test, when all of a sudden I run right into someone’s chest.” As she retold the story her face would falter only to perk of at certain points. “... It’s crazy to think that I made three life long best friends because of a stupid rubber band...”

She passed the mic onto one of Jenna’s other bridesmaids as she sat down, hands fiddling with something in her lap. From the distance I was at I couldn’t see but the look Josh had given me said it was something familiar. 

August 25, 2016

Josh and I quickly ran off stage only to be greeted by the open arms of Y/N. “You boys did amazing.” We smiled pulling her into another hug.

“Couldn’t do it without our number one fan cheering us on!” Josh laughed poking her stomach

“Cheering? No. Taking the best concert pics you’ll see in your life? Yes.” All three of us laughed again walking back to our dressing room to gather out belongings.

As we packed I could see Y/N’s smile falter while she quietly pulled at something on her wrist. “You boys... and girl... ready to hit the road?” Our tour manager asked, peaking his head through the door slightly.

“Yep!” Y/N jumped up off the couch quickly, turning to us. “I’m gonna head out to the bus to get ahead on editing these photos.” and with that she walked out.

December 28, 2018

“I remember the day pretty well for it being twelve years ago.” Slowly I told the story of how Y/N and I met, how I invited her to our CD Release, how she comforted me when I got nervous before my wedding, how she would take photos for us on tour. 

I could see her family crying in the front row, Josh quietly wiping his tears away as he held onto her little sister. Jenna was staring at me, silently encouraging me to finish. 

“But most importantly I remember the last time I saw her. There was something broken behind her E/C eyes. Something that I knew was too late to fix.” I sighed. “I didn’t think too much of it at the time though, I thought maybe she had spilled coffee on herself this morning, or maybe she was stood up on a date. I just wished I would have noticed that she was grabbing the rubber band on her wrist just a bit more than usual.” 

I rubbed my hand over my face, messing with my own rubber band. “I’m sorry.” I swiftly put down the microphone and ran off the to bathroom.

September 30, 2019

“Hey Y/N. Sorry I haven’t talked to you in a while. Tour, you know how it is. Anyways I thought I should say hi since it is you’re birthday and everything. Life’s been hectic recently. Josh and I just finished the final leg of the Bandito tour. The fans love it, they miss your photos by the way. Like a crazy ton. We’ve already started working on our next album. It’s gonna be better than any of our others. Okay maybe not Regional since that’s always been you’re favorite- actually scratch that, it will definitely be better than Regional. Everyone misses having you around. Especially Josh, but he’s been doing better recently. Jenna misses having another girl on tour with her. Oh that reminds me, Jenna designed our newest tour bus. Its awesome. Or I guess in Twenty One Pilots fashion, sick as frick. My mom misses you as well. She says I need someone around to convince me not to get anymore tattoos. I still have that uke you made me. The one with the art from each album. Don’t get mad at me but I added yellow tape so that Trench fits into it as well. Wait I almost forgot, Jenna and I have a kid coming soon, we don’t know if they’ll be a boy or girl but we decided that if it is a girl we’ll name her after you since you mean so much to us. I still have all the Polaroids you would take of me, you, and Josh. It’s crazy to think of how long it’s been since those were taken. It’s getting pretty late so I think I should go... Bye Y/N.” I slowly stood up brushing the dirt off my pants. I started to walk away before stopping in my tracks and turning around. “Wait I was going to sing for you... one sec.”

I sat down again pulling my ukulele out of my bag before starting to play Truce. “Take pride in what is sure to die.” I sang as I strummed the last cord. Silently I removed the rubber band from my wrist and gently placed it on the ground. “I’m sorry friend.” I said turning away from the grave.

#tyler joseph #tyler joseph fanfiction #tyler joseph imagine #tyler joseph x reader #twenty one pilots #twenty one pilots fanfiction #twenty one pilots imagine #twenty one pilots x reader #josh dun #josh dun fanfiction #josh dun imagine #josh dun x reader #sophies writing #sophies favorite alien boy #sophies favorite skeleton boy

[fenthyr]

A complicated world (Bucky x reader) marvel x supernatural *

Summary: (y/n) lost everyone in the snap. Bucky, Dean and Sam, all of them gone with the snap. After Tony sacrificed his life for everyone else’s and losing one of her best friends Nat, she tries to restart her life. While Bucky and Sam go on a mission (y/n) decides to visit Sam and Dean.

 (y/n) helped the Winchesters on hunts and they became family to her. In 2016 she accidentally stumbled upon a certain avenger, Steve Rogers. She helped them in civil war and took care of Bucky. After she was certain Bucky was in good hands she left and went back to the Winchesters. Some time went by and she got a call from Cap saying that Buck is doing well and that he is awake so she visits him in Wakanda. There she gets the news of a titan wanting to kill half the universe. She stayed with Bucky and while waiting for the titan to approach she fell in love with the one armed man. Thanos came and she lost him in the snap. When she returned to the bunker Dean and Sam were both gone. Nowhere to be found and all their stuff still in the bunker. After searching for a long time she realized they were gone and Castiel only confirmed that. The souls didn’t go to heaven or hell, they were just gone.

5 years went by and (y/n) gets the news that they found a way to reverse the snap. She helped the avengers to gather all the stones. That’s when she lost Nat, she didn’t return with Clint. She gave her life for all those who lost it. Finally the moment is there. Banner snapped his fingers and suddenly the birds start singing. Everything feels back to normal. BAM. Everything goes bright and as quickly the light came it left. She woke up, fought Thanos with the avengers but they could win he was to strong. Then circles of light appeared. People stepped out of it. Armies joining each other to become one great army. (y/n) couldn’t find Bucky in the mass of people and Steve yelled. After fighting for a long time she saw Thanos fighting Tony, Steve and Danvers. Thanos already had the stones and before he could snap his fingers (y/n) grabbed his the gauntlet. He was to strong and threw her aside but her plan worked. Tony had enough time to regain strength and launched at Thanos grabbing to stones. He sacrificed himself and all enemies disappeared. Pepper and Peter ran to Tony. Everyone approached and that’s when she saw him. Finally after 5 long years she finally saw his face again. He hugged her, he face filled with sadness but also hope. Everyone kneeled and when she lifted her head she saw someone standing away from the mourning people and gesturing to her to come to him.

Now

You walked up to the man in a trench coat. He smiled softly but his eyes were also filled with sadness knowing that Tony meant a lot to you, to everyone. You cried even harder remembering Sam and Dean, hoping for good news. “hey, Cas.” “Hi,  (y/n)” he said quietly. “They are fine.” “Are, are they back?” “Yes, they are. I would take you to them but I guess you aren’t done here yet.” He stated looking over my shoulder. I turned my head, looking at Bucky and then at Tony. “ I guess I’m not. I’ll come by when I’m done here.” “ We will take care of him you know, in heaven.” “Thank you Castiel.” You gave him a sad smile and returned to the crowd who were now returning. Steve walking over to Tony and lifting his body from the ground. You walked over to Bucky who almost couldn’t hold his tears back. “He knew Buck, he doesn’t blame you.” “I killed his parents, I never even had the opportunity to say that I’m sorry, that I didn’t mean to.” You laid a hand on his shoulder as a sign for him to stop walking and turn to face you. “He knew it wasn’t you Buck, he knows it wasn’t you.” You hugged him and he returned the gesture, desperate for your warmth an comfort. “I missed you so much.” You whispered to him while the tears rolled down your cheek.

At Tony’s funeral

Everyone was there when the arc reactor was placed in the water. Even Harley was there, a boy who met Tony years ago. It was quiet and the closest to Tony all went inside to watch Tony’s final message to the people he loved. A flutter of wings came from behind you and you looked back seeing Castiel walking over to you. Bucky followed your gaze and saw the celestial being approaching. “I visited him, he’s doing fine. He saw his parent again and everyone else he lost.” Bucky turned his head at the mention of Tony’s parents. “can you tell him that I’m sorry, I never meant to kill the people I killed. I didn’t want him to lose his parents, I didn’t want to kill the man who helped to save my life.” Bucky asked looking at the ground and then to Cas. “I will tell him.”  “Can you talk to his family about how he’s doing so they at least know here he is now?, they are inside.” You gestured to the house and Cas nodded. Steve opened the door when you knocked and gave you a confused look when you entered with the angel. Everyone around the device that had just played the hologram of Tony. They looked at you, confused about the strange man in a trench coat standing next to you. “ hi everyone, this is Castiel. He’s and..” “I’m an angel of the lord.” Everyone looked even more confused. “I came by to tell you than Tony is doing fine. He’s in heaven with his parents.” Castiel explained some more about heaven and Tony and when everyone was on board Pepper asked a question. “ Can you tell him something?” Cas nodded. “Can you tell him that we’re alright and that we miss him?” “I will.” Before Cas could leave a little voice caught our attention. “ can you tell him I love him 3000?” Morgan spoke. “I’ll tell him.” And with a flutter of wings Cas disappeared.

A few weeks later.

Steve brought the infinity stones back and stayed with Peggy to live the life Tony suggested him once. Cap’s shield was given to Sam and he and Bucky now worked together. You all lived in a nice apartment and had a beautiful view. One morning Bucky woke you up by giving you a kiss on your forehead. “hey doll, it’s already 11 am, id didn’t want to wake you but Sam found something and we are going to check It out. We’ll be gone for a few days.” You opened your eyes and looked at him. “well have fun, i’ll be at Sam and Dean’s place, I still haven’t been able to visit them, call me when you need me.” “I will doll.” He kissed you and left. After you showered and packed your stuff you headed for the bunker. It was 3 pm and you decide to eat something because you ate breakfast late. You stopped in a city and searched for a store when you saw 2 very known men in a suit talking to a woman. Who could not recognize the tall long-haired man and the blond brother. You parked your car and walked up to them when the woman left. They turned around and saw you. “hey guys” you say feeling your eyes tearing up. “(y/n)!” they both yelled and grabbed you in a tight hug. “God I missed you guys.” They let you go and you saw their eyes starting to water. “so, what are guys doing here. Another case?” “uhm yeah. Some people disappearing and some of them turning up dead with bite marks.” “So vampires?” “we guess.” “you know where they hide?” “no not yet, hey care to join for old times sake?” “ I would love to join the hunt. It’s been a while since the last time I killed some of those bastards.” “great lest go.”

After a day of research you and the guys go to a bar. “So (y/n), how is it gong with the guy you left us for a few years back?” Sam laughed. “Great actually, he was gone with the snap to so that’s why I didn’t directly came to you guys, he came back and his best friend left and a guy died before he could say sorry to him for doing something terrible that wasn’t even his fault. He went through a lot, I couldn’t just eave him like that.” “don’t worry we get it. But what the hell is this guy’s name you never told us.” Dean yelled playfully and Sam nodded in agreement. “James ‘Bucky’ Barnes. But everybody just calls him Bucky or Buck.” You smile at the thought of him. Wondering how his mission is going. “ You really like him, don’t you.” Sam askes eventually. “Yeah I do he’s awesome.” Is smile even more. “ Yeah well if he ever hurt you, you should know that I will kill him and it wont be a slow death.” Dean said and you all laughed.

After another day you finally got a lead. One of the people you where going to question ran and brought you to the safe place of the creatures. Dean, Sam and yourself got ready and entered the place because they would probably run or attack. it’s quiet and dark, they know we are here. All of the sudden 3 of them appeared but their eyes were snake like, not something a vampire has. “not vampires but vetala’s I yell as they attack. I quickly grab my silver knife and start to fight the monster that attacked me. I manage to stab it in the heart and twist my knife. The brother also manage to kill their attacker and Sam helps Dean stand up. “I totally forgot about those son of a bitches.” Dean grumbled. We slowly march forward and see a few hallways. “Let’s split to cover more ground.” I suggested and they agreed. I entered a room and started to look around for secret hiding spots or anything else. There is another door and I open it up. more vetala’s attack and I fight them off.

Meanwhile

Dean entered the back room and stumbled upon some vetala’s. he started fighting but they were to strong. Suddenly he hears a window crashing and gunshots appear. Some of the vetala’s follow the sound and Dean was able to fight the remaining ones. When he entered the room with gunshots he sees a man with a beard and long brown hair trying to fight the creatures of. “Hey, stab them in the heart with this and twist 1 time.” He yelled and threw a spare silver knife at the strange man. They both fight the monsters until they are all death. Then they hear a scream.

Back to reader

They are to strong and only more of them appear. Sam already came to your aid but was dealing with some vetala’s himself now. The unknown man appears first and runs up to the vetala’s attacking you. He throws them off of you. You stab one of the creatures and twist. A grunt was heard beside you and then you recognized the man who just saved you. ‘Bucky?’ He was on the ground, a vetala burying his nails in his shoulder and back. You kill the creature and push him off of Bucky. “Bucky, you okey? What are you doing here?” you ask him while helping him up. “the mission want faster then expected so I tracked your phone to surprise you.” He grumbled. He had a big claw wound on his back and was also bleeding from his shoulder. “I heard fighting and came in to help.” Dean and Sam stood behind you. “so this is the famous Bucky we heard so much about?” Sam said with a smile on his face. “you know after seeing you attack some creature you didn’t even know existed just to help our little peanut here, I think I kind of like you.” Dean stated also smiling. “yeah well I would do anything for my doll.” Bucky noted in a low voice while looking at you. “come on let’s get you to the motel and patch you up.”

We arrived at the motel and Dean and Sam could stop asking questions about Bucky and the avengers. While entering the room Dean had another question. “So wait every avenger has some kind of ability like Thor is a god an (y/n) had special training but what is yours?” Meanwhile Bucky sat himself down with a grunt and took his jacket, gloves and long sleeved shirt off so I could take care of the wound. “ow that’s awesome dude.” Dean yelled as soon as he saw the metal arm. Bucky chuckled and flinched when I disinfected the wound. “How did you get that?” Dean was amazed by the arm while Sam was interested but didn’t show it to much, listening to the conversation while grabbing some supplies to take care of his own wounds. Bucky explained the whole story about HYDRA capturing him, escaping and his time in Wakanda. “and that leads to now.” A flutter of wings was heard and Cas appeared in the room. He saw Bucky’s back and walked over, healing him. “ if I knew you were coming I wouldn’t have wasted half of the stitches.” You laughed while Bucky just looked shocked. “How did you do that.” “I have healing powers, the wounds would have taken days to heal, even with your fast healing.” Cas stated but Bucky just looked confused. “What are you doing here Cas? Is something wrong?” Sam asks “I found out that some demons are acting out. I wanted to ask you guys if you would want to go and make sure they are dealt with.” “sure but it’s 2 am can we catch some sleep first?” “Call me when your awake.” And with that he was gone. “So demons, those exist?” “yeah, there is a lot you don’t know yet buddy.” “We’ll tell you all about it tomorrow but for now I need to take a nap and dream about some delicious pie.” You laughed and left Sam and Deans room and went to your own. You and Bucky laid down in your bed and Bucky hugged you from behind. “this world only gets more and more complicated with the minute.” “it does.” You chuckled.

Buck started to massage your stomach and his hand crept lower and lower. He kissed your neck. “ you know,” kiss “ We are in a motel.” Kiss “ and  no one is here to disturb us.” kiss his voice went lower and his breathing heavier. His hand crept lower and under you underwear. He pulled you closer to him and you could feel his member pressing against you ass. You moaned at the touch and he started to grind against your ass. His fingers still going lower and eventually playing with your clit before sliding a finger inside you. You opened your hips a little so it was easier for him to touch you. Moans escaped yours and Bucky’s mouth. “Fuck I missed you.” “I missed you to.” You moan while sliding your hand behind you and rubbing his member through his pants.  He moaned and you took this opportunity to turn around and straddled his hips. Bucky groaned at the feeling and placed his hands under your shirt. You took it off and started at his pants. soon you were both in only your underwear and you started to grind against Bucky. He sat up and captured your lips with his moaning into it. You broke the kiss and started kissing along his neck pushing him back onto the bed. You went lower and kissed his torso until you reached his boxers. You slowly slipped them of and let his hard member free. You started pumping him while keeping eye contact. Bucky was a moaning mess under your touch and you take him in your mouth. Taking him until he hit the back of your throat and pumped the rest you couldn’t fit in. swirling your tongue around his member and giving extra attention to the tip. Soon he started thrusting his hips into your mouth. “aah, aah, shit, you feel so good, uh. Fuck I’m mhg I’m gonna cum.” You stopped your motions and he grunts at the los of contact. “Not yet baby” you kissed his lips and took your panties and bra off. Bucky sat back up and started to attack your breasts. Taking a nipple in his mouth and the other between his fingers. You moaned at the touch. “shit, I need you inside me Bucky.” “ then take me.” You grabbed his member and lead it to your entrance. Both of you moaned while you took him in and after adjusting to his large size you started rolling your hips. “Fuck you’re so tight aah.” Bucky then attacked your neck and kissed every single spot and leaves your sweet spot for last. He starts kissing, sucking and biting it. he rolled you ever so you were on your back and started thrusting into you in a loving but hard pace. “Fuck I won’t last long. Tell me your coming.” “Yes almost. Aah fuck bucky you feel so good.” He buries his head in the croock of your neck and starts slamming into you in a faster pace. “aah Bucky faster, please.” And so he does. His rhythm become sloppy as you feel your own high approaching. “I’m gonna cum.” “so am I doll.” He slams into you and you came hard on his cock. A few more thrust and he came too. He rides out his high and slowly pulls out. Both of you out of breath and he walks to the bathroom and comes back with a washcloth to clean you. He lays down next to you and you lay your head on his chest. he kisses your forehead. “I love you doll.” “ I love you too, Buck.” And like that you fall asleep.

#Bucky Barnes #buckyxreader #bucky x reader #supernatural #marvel #crossover #supernatural x marvel