#ill be shouting “come here” in chinese at my dog

[etchedstars]

ok ok ok i will not say much about my family BUT i will say that my mom, my brother, and i are all fluent in chinese leaving my father who is decidedly Not and so he's doing duolingo to try to achieve fluency and its so funny bc he can understand everything but he'll try to say things and he has the strongest american accent ive ever heard on a human being bc he doesnt understand the tones and its just. its just so funny idk

#ill be shouting “come here” in chinese at my dog #and three minutes later my dad will shout like . #what did you say?? #i need to take notes?? #did you say come here?????? #and then he'll try to repeat it but it just SOUNDS so distinctly white (color) i cant get over it #its so fkin funny #dying on the ground bc hes mispronounced the number 8 omg #oh the adventures of a biracial family

[suggestionsofthecaribbean]

H34v3nlie Måll: James & Elizabeth

After Elizabeth is forced to break up a fight between him and Will Turner, her relationship with James is tested.  The matter of punishment comes under scrutiny, as well as the success of their relationship.  More ominously, the atmosphere of the mall itself seems to be getting to them as they contemplate past regrets and speculate on the hope they have for their future.

CW: Long post with mild arguing, hairbrushing and reminiscing, but it’s safe to read.  Loss of a tooth comes up, as do needles (in the context of tattooing) for the squeamish, and a personally humiliating suggestion for punishment is brainstormed but soon dismissed.

The way to Macy's was far more full of onlookers than James had either expected or desired. The teens from the Pearl mostly guiltily avoided looking at him, but the non-Chinese enlistees to the Empress and even some of the Gloriana’s crew hooted and shouted vulgar suggestions of how a good dog could earn his mistress’s forgiveness, made fists and jerked their hips forward in rhythm. A few of the Chinese sailors, who had only been informed by Tai Huang that both James and Turner were up a creek with the King, but hadn't learned the details yet due to both the language barrier and Tai Huang’s disinterest in discussing the King’s love life (or even thinking about it if he could avoid it), caught the meaning of the gesture and laughed as well. One man caught his eye and howled like a dog, with a strangely languid jerk of his shaven head and his hand trailing back from brow to ear that James belatedly realized was a mockery of his own attempts to keep his hair out of his eyes while Elizabeth raked them over the coals.

Turner had to have been talking to these people. Turner would have been seen as the ideal person with whom to share every mocking thought the crews had had about a man they saw as their King's frivolous, rum-sodden, good-looking but utterly brainless professional failure of a kept man. Turner, he knew, probably took this in in silence, with the occasional pained grin of validated dislike, but it was as though James’s rival had granted the power to read minds and suddenly made it impossible to ignore a single demeaning thought that ever made itself visible crossing their faces.

He had stopped in front of them without realizing it, and quickly looked away as he hurried along.

Macy's itself was blessedly empty- Elizabeth had probably ordered everyone else to keep out.  Their bed in Macy’s, on the other hand, being empty, was more of a curse or an ill omen.  He stood there a moment, wondering helplessly if she had changed her mind, when he heard her clearing her throat behind him and turned.

Elizabeth had taken to wearing the garb of a honeymoon for him, on the nights she wore anything at all, but at the moment she was still nearly entirely dressed - she wore slippers and the first layer of her clothing, but it was not an inviting outfit.

It also did much to suggest she had not had a very excellent evening.  It was late now, and she had visibly not approached the matter of sleeping.  She stood and watched him warily with shadows under her eyes, hands on her hips confrontationally.

“Captain,” she intoned.

“Elizabeth,” he said, in such a low voice it came out breathy.

“Run the gauntlet, I expect,” she said, gruff but charitable.

“I’ve run a gauntlet before,” he said. “This was more like being tarred and feathered.”

“You see how this poses me a problem,” she said, approaching the bed, but giving him a wide berth as she did.

“If you need to punish me before them, do it,” he said. “Trust me, they won’t assume I enjoy it when they’re actually looking at it.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

“Oh, I see. Flog you for your benefit, so they will stop telling stories of how the King’s dog likes it rough-”

“I didn’t mean flogging alone. I could make a list of naval punishments, though I don’t relish the thought.”

“If it had been any other two men in a fight over some valuable, that caused mild property damage and involved toy weapons,” said Elizabeth in growing agitation, “it would be nothing and require no punishment - nothing but stern words and the mockery of the crew! But it was you. It was you and Will.  The only men on this expedition who can compromise my reputation, both of you were involved, and contextually it looks like you were fighting over me.”

And she spoke over any interruption about the heart of Davy Jones with a fierce, “And now if I do nothing, it looks like I want to encourage it!”

“You did strike me,” James said stiffly. “That could be turned into a warning.”

“I have been trying to think of a way to spin this so that nothing further must be done,” said Elizabeth, holding onto a bed post and leaning against the footboard to look at him.  “I have considered things.”

“...and?” James asked uneasily.

“I will have the two of you working together as we head out,” she said, tossing her hair and holding herself steady as possible, though she looked as brittle as she felt.  “Not in positions of command.  I expect you both feel as stupid as you should feel about what you’ve done and will manage without another squabble breaking out, and in the meantime everyone else can - and likely will - remind you of how well you’re regarded at the moment, without my having to do the  reminding.”

“How do we know he's going to stay with us? He’s not particularly nautically inclined-”

“I’m aware,” she said shortly.  “He’s here for now, and will be treated like the rest of you.”

“No passengers. I see.”

James swallowed and nodded.

“Thank you, then.”

“I’m not done.”

“Ah,” said James.

“I think some reference to our bedroom is in order.”

He frowned. “I don't follow.”

“I mean I think I have to let on that I fuck you.”

“As though they didn't figure that out before we did-”

“We haven’t exactly encouraged the rumor,” she pressed on in irritation, crossing her arms.

“I already know how they think of me.”

“If I want this to continue I have to establish that it does not unman me to do so,” she insisted.  “Do you understand what I am telling you at all?”

“I know exactly what you're saying,” James sighed. “Fine. It's only making the truth explicit anyway.”

“I would like your permission to do so!”

“Then you may have it. You didn't force me to ask for your cock as a Christmas gift-”

“I know I didn’t,” she replied indignantly, eyes stinging.

“Tell them whatever you need to, then,” James muttered. “You have my permission. I’m glad, at least, to not find myself banished from your bed altogether.”

“Oh, indeed, you seem very pleased to be here-” said Elizabeth, turning around and walking away from the bed display entirely.

“I didn’t want to try my luck,” James protested. “I had already managed things badly enough today that I didn’t think it wise to come at you melting in relief and taking you into my arms-“

She stomped back again.

“Well? Are you glad or aren’t you?” she demanded.

“I’m ecstatic,” he said, his voice fervent yet his face motionless.

Elizabeth blinked back angry tears and kissed him. James’s shoulders released with relief as he kissed her back, pulling her into his arms.  Elizabeth continued to kiss him as though her guiding passion at the moment were rage, but she clung to him like she thought he would let her go.

“I thought I had lost you,” he whispered.

“It would serve you - right, God damn you-”

“I know. I know, love-”

Elizabeth pulled him back to the bed with her, needing to feel him, to be held.  Every time the stress of this became too much she wanted him to hold her, and when he was the cause of that stress, she was too angry and lonely to think.

“Wait- I brought you something,” said James. “Fortunately, it survived the fountain, and dried just as well. It's far overdue.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out something thin and dark and bound at one end. He pressed it into her palm and curled her fingers over it.

Elizabeth looked down at it in surprise, then let out a miserable noise and buried her face against his chest.  After a moment, she lifted her hand and kissed the lock of his hair in her palm.

James kissed her forehead.

“When we're back,” he murmured, “I want to have yours sewn into my coat, over my heart.”

“Do you now,” she sighed, shutting her eyes.  It seemed to be in exhaustion, hardly pleasure.

“I hope to never be so apart from you to need the reminder, but yes. I do.”

“Rather silly, don’t you think? It’s just hair. It’ll be all split ends-”

“I don’t mind it,” he laughed. “You wear it well. You’ve seen what becomes of mine when left it its devices.”

“Oh, please, regale me with another complaint about your hair,” said Elizabeth.

He laughed. “I’m sorry. If it’s any reassurance, I’m quite pleased with it now.”

“Yeah, you said you cut it,” she said, reaching up to touch it with a pained smile.  She had moved to lay down in his lap now and look up at him; the anger seemed to have left her, at least, but it had left in its place a terrible exhaustion that made her seem delicate and weary, like a battered old love note kept in a pocket as a charm.  The light did not help.  It was eerie and dim after nightfall, making everyone look sickly.

“I wanted you to win me a toy with the claw machine,” she said wistfully.

“I would be thrilled to win you a toy from the claw machine,” he said, leaning back to hold her better.

“We’ve got to leave tomorrow.  Lord, James, I don’t know if we can really do this.”

“We’ll have to put Sparrow in a cage to pull it off,” he scoffed. “That’s the difficult part.”

“No, James. When we leave.  This king business.  I’m afraid I can’t make good on any of my promises to you - again.”

James frowned up at the tiled ceiling.

“Which parts?”

“Our wonderful, terrible reputations.  I think I am going to be remembered as a silly girl forever - Sao Feng’s concubine and Barbossa’s too if I am very unlucky - how can I rehabilitate yours if mine is going to fall apart?  I can’t keep a hold on anything; it’s like grasping at a reflection on the water.”

“Perhaps mine is not to be rehabilitated, if it is to save yours,” he said, in a low, pensive voice. “If I am to be unmanned to ensure you are not, that’s probably just the way things ought to be.”

“I don’t think that a weak and feeble pirate king - barely a pirate at all, an upstart from the governor’s mansion - is going to be much of anything to anyone just because she knows how to wield a dildo-”

She laughed, but underneath it was a terrible breath of bitterness and resignation.

“Then we'll find a target for you to conquer,” said James, “and you will conquer it. You've commanded a fleet before.”

“I just don’t think I can do this. I don’t know that I can maintain it.”

“I have faith in you, Elizabeth.”

He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“Far more, I might add, than I have in my own reputation.”

She extended her fingers to brush along his cheek.

“Mmm, you trimmed.”

“I hope you don't mind,” he said, tilting affectionately into her touch. “I may have turned pirate but I'm not about to grow some kind of sea-dog beard.”

“No, I quite like this.”

“Thank you. Someone among the men around here ought to give a damn.”

She rolled her eyes and turned her head to the side, looking out over the dim Macy’s and its displays, which took on monstrous characteristics after the lights went out.

“Thank-you, Captain Norrington, for your expert sartorial opinion, shall you inspect their nails, while you are at it-”

“That's for the armorer, with how many here use them as weapons.”

Elizabeth covered her mouth to try and stifle a giggle.  Being as tired as she was, she failed.

“I never did have much opportunity to think of these things for myself, you know,” he said wistfully. “I'm beginning to enjoy it.”

She reached up to stroke his cheek again.  He had found a marvelous balance between bearded and well-groomed; she wanted him to know she had noticed.

James smiled down warmly at her.

“How's your head?”

“My head? I’m not the idiot that got into a brawl today.”

“You've been crying,” he reminded her.

“I have not,” she said, stiffening.

“I thought you had. I'm sorry-”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Captain,” said Elizabeth, sitting up icily.

“On the contrary. It's a relief to know you have not. I mistook your few tears earlier for something else.”

She was pulling her hair to the side and finger-combing it with something too glacial to be sullenness.  “Hmm?” she interrogated, sounding bored.

“Never mind. I'm glad you're well. I thought I had done yet more unrealized damage‍.”

“Well,” Elizabeth said flatly.  “Yes, after a manner I am just fine.”

She did not sound it, nor did she have any intention to.

“After a manner,” James repeated, unconvinced.

“Well, what do you expect?” she said with a renewed stoniness, a wall seeming to come down between them in her eyes.  “After what you two put me through today - I am going to be lucky if they keep their whispers and their taunting where I cannot hear it - ”

“That’s my fault,” he sighed, “not his. Turner’s… well, the world has a very strange sense of humor.”

“I am not laughing.”

“He’s not a pirate,” James blurted, “and…” James swept his hand up toward his face in a bitter little jerking motion.

“The irony is rather thick, that’s all.”

“May the irony protect me, then, from reprobation,” she said too sweetly, with a fluid, facetious hand gesture to imitate a bow.  “I believe I’m going to go to sleep now-”

“All you need say for him is that he’s out of your jurisdiction,” he said, a little tersely. “That leaves the fault with me. He’s… he’s not coping well, Elizabeth.”

“Oh,” she said, and froze.

It was all she could think to say.  It was not a surprise, if he and James were going to brawl about it, but to hear it from James himself filled her with foreboding - like the hull of a ship fills with brackish water.  

“In Cuba,” said James, “when I thought you had gone back to him, Barbossa came and spoke to me.”

Elizabeth looked over and up at him, hands curled beneath her face half as though in supplication.  She could think of no words, not now, but the enormity of her eyes asked the question for her.

“To offer his condolences, allegedly.” He scoffed at this. “To reason that perhaps it wasn't meant to be.”

He sat and leaned forward instead, elbows to knees.

“Of course, he had another idea of how I could still serve you.”

James tipped his head toward her duffle bag.

Elizabeth’s mouth opened.

“He didn’t,” she said in anger and indignation, despair swelling in her chest like a hard intake of air, knowing full well that he had - that he had made the same suggestion to her, well before Will had shown up.

“I told him I would do no such thing unless it was by your command,” he said. “Now the situation has reversed and Turner has already made the same choice on his own. If Barbossa gets through to him- well.”

Real fear flickered across her features.

“God help me,” she said faintly.  “I couldn’t live with it.”

“That was the cause of our…clash this afternoon,” James said solemnly.

“I have to - “ Elizabeth started to leave in visible agitation, but instead of getting out of the bed, when her feet hit the floor, she turned her head abruptly and looked at James, feeling sick.  “God - what can I do?  How do I convince him?”

“We have to find a way to bargain with Jones, first of all- if such a thing even exists. Elizabeth-”

She turned her back to him, anxiously wrenching her hair over her shoulder and tugging on it in a poor imitation of taking care of it.

“You were the only one I cared about knowing I possessed the heart,” James said softly. “The only one. I swear it. It wasn't about power, it was- the way you whispered of it in bed with me-”

It took her a moment to understand what he meant by this - it was an abrupt change of pace from what her mind had been racing about.  

“You didn’t say that to him, did you?” she demanded, voice clipped.

“Of course not,” said James.

“I don’t even remember that,” she went on coolly.

“You were having a bit of a moment,” he admitted. “I don’t take it as a particular compliment outside of that… specific context, shall we say-”

“ - ah,” she said, coloring slightly.  She had not recalled it, but she could now imagine it, which was almost worse.

“You asked me how it felt to be the most powerful man on the ocean, possessing both Jones’s heart and your own. Well, I’m not,” he said, leaning back on the heel of one hand now. “That’s you, for one. But I… I did feel you loved me rather better for it, at times. That’s all. He felt it was a matter of ensuring the others tolerate me, and I daresay that’s you as well.”

“James,” she sighed, voice ragged.  All the same, a note of reluctant, aching fondness had entered her tones.  “What am I going to do with you, you’re hopeless.”

“I’m afraid it would be insubordinate for me to make any suggestions,” he said dryly, “lest they be taken as facetiousness.”

“Shall I grant you permission,” asked Elizabeth, stretching warily out on the bed, leaning on her stomach and elbows, hair falling tangled down her back.  

“You could always claim it was your idea to take the Gloriana from me. You gave it to two women to further put me in my place.”

Elizabeth groaned, leaning her face into her hands a moment in contemplation.  “You realize, I suppose, that that implies it is demeaning to lose to women.”

“Not inherently,” said James, “but most of them have guessed what we do in bed together. They would probably view it as an extension of… well, that.”

“We’ve only done that once,” she said with a snort, rubbing the side of her nose with her thumb.

“They don’t know that. Without a ship, you might even go so far as to start calling me commodore again-”

“Are you saying you want to be a commodore again?  Am I to demean you or to promote you,” she asked wearily.

“When it no longer carries any meaning, I think it becomes an insult in itself. I don’t know. Thinking about being addressed by that rank feels like putting a finger into an open wound.”

Feels like it, but isn’t.  

“Suppose it’s worth considering,” Elizabeth murmured with her eyes shut.  She leaned in to rest her face in her hands a moment.

“Or perhaps merely ‘King’s dog’,” he said, musingly.

“You’re already my dog,” she said a little testily. Her voice was muffled against her hand.  Am I to demean you or promote you?

She concentrated on the small, unsettling background noises of the storefront, and hastily refocused on James’ breathing.

It all came back to the simple, amusing little truth that she did not want to punish him, but to be lax as an authority figure where her mistress was concerned would not do very well.  She and James had wanted to be at sea and cementing their reputations by now, but they were on the Jack Odyssey and God only knew when they would be able to leave - it was imperative she maintain a grip on that authority here and now.  

“James,” Elizabeth said, opening her eyes and lifting her chin, rubbing her face in exhaustion.  “I need a public spectacle.  I need you humbled - if not humiliated.”

James had already been still, but his back stiffened, like a wary animal’s.

“What kind of public spectacle,” he asked, without much inflection.

Elizabeth moved to her hip, and then pushed herself wearily to a sitting position, reaching out to touch the back of his wrist.

“I don’t know - something that does not hurt you, I prefer.  But I cannot be seen going soft on you again. You know that Captain Barbossa intimated I should either torture or kill you if you had another misstep - and he likes me personally.  But I do not kid myself that the man who originally marooned me would defend my lovesickness over a pair of squabblings boys for very long.  Of course, there is another option,” she said uncomfortably.  “If I were to treat the matter as I would with anyone else, striking you earlier would have been enough.”

“I would rather be flogged than made to look additionally hapless and foolish in front of these people,” James said, a little more heatedly- but under the temper there was a note of pleading. He did not look at her.

“We could - we could part entirely,” she said numbly.  “I would not have to harm a hair on your head.”

“Elizabeth-”

“I know it isn’t ideal,” she said, a struggle to keep composure.  “I am not even angry anymore - how could I be angry at you and Will for behaving like reckless, silly boys?  But you are not just anyone, you are-”

“Beckett’s former admiral,” James muttered, “and your bedwarmer, useful for very little but the flesh, and a drunk-”

“My sweetheart,” she corrected him, gently, closing her hand over the back of his.

Just as he was the Admiral’s son. Of course. One always did have to bear more for such privileges, didn’t one?

“Very well,” said James, still without moving. His eyes were open, but he was not quite seeing anything, in a way that had nothing to do with the dim light of the storefront.

“Perhaps,” said Elizabeth, struggling to keep her voice steady, “you could - perhaps you should leave on the Gloriana, as - as planned originally-”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” he said. “You may have your spectacle. I understand.”

Elizabeth shook her head, and tears fell down her cheeks on account of the swift motion.

“I can’t flog you.  You must understand.  I think they expect a flogging - Barbossa offered me the use of his cat - and I think it will affect me if I don’t deliver.  God help me, I can’t do that.”

“I can bear a flogging,” he said, lifting his voice a little more emphatically.

“But don’t you see I can’t?” she asked, her voice breaking.  She gasped just once, then pulled him in sharply to hide her sobs against his shoulder.

James’s whole body jerked in surprise and he sat up, pulling her with him as he put his arms around her.

“It’s- never mind, darling, I’m sorry- please forgive me. Do- do whatever you must, all right? I’ll bear it-”

He stared over her shoulder, expressionless, but rubbed gently between her shoulders anyway.

Hideous, it seemed to her, for him to be bringing her comfort in a time like this.

“I told you,” Elizabeth sniffed; “after you arrived on the Pearl drunk as a dog Barbossa intimated that it might be better to kill you if you made a mistake again.  I’ve been up for hours thinking about what to do with you to curb their resentment, to satiate their lust to see you punished.  It would be easier if you weren’t my James Norrington, my father’s first choice for my husband and my oldest friend.  The faster I am to pardon you, the faster my position decays. You have no idea - perhaps you and you alone have some idea - how little I have to go back to if I should lose this. This - the one thing, the only thing I’ve ever had, that affords me the respect and independence, the protection, that formerly I could only have because - because you or Will would still have me in spite of my ruin - and soon I will have lost you both -”

James pulled himself back to look at her properly- eyes focused and purposeful again, brows knit.

“I won’t let it come to that,” he said, chafing her hands between his now, as though she had fallen overboard.

Elizabeth smiled weakly, but sincerely, even though her eyes were reddened and wet.

“I think you must be Commodore Norrington again,” she said apologetically.  “Even from me, darling.”

“Whatever you need-”

“Oh, James,” she said, and the smile faltered. “You. I need you -”

She pulled him into her arms, leaning her head on his shoulder again faintly.

Even if she had to - even if she had to hurt him, to keep him - it would be worth it. And perhaps he would forgive her in time, if he wanted badly enough to be kept.

“I- thank you, Elizabeth,” he said, relieved that he no longer had to keep eye contact with her.

Elizabeth lingered in his arms, contemplating the weight and the smell of him, and how much she shrank from the thought of making him suffer, yet how much she would if she lost him.

It was a tense minute that she stayed there before she pulled back and looked at him again, astonished by an idea that seemed, to her, to be a very harmless alternative.

“Commodore Norrington,” she was putting together rapidly.  “A promotion ceremony -”

“A what-”

“Pirates- you know how they thrive on theatricals.  Putting on mock trials when they’re bored and such like.  I’ll promote you to Commodore - make a show of it.  It will hurt your pride - only your pride.  And it will satisfy them - I’m certain it will satisfy them. James-”

She had tears falling from her eyes again, and an elated smile.

“I can keep you - and keep you safe-”

James stared at her.

“Safe?” he repeated. “My God- if they wanted to kill me, they already would have-”

“From the whip- or whatever else anyone can suggest to me if I don’t act to their satisfaction. God knows-”

“I’ve been whipped before- I know what to expect, it’s fine- Elizabeth, please don’t fret about this-”

“It will be one ceremony - they’ll forget it as soon as it’s happened, it will all be, as they say, water under the bridge,” she said, putting her hand in his hair and gently combing it out.

“Will they? Elizabeth- I’ve let some of those men bugger me for drinking money-”

“Those men would enjoy your suffering whatever form it took - at least this way you will have all the outside appearance of it and nothing more. Oh, James,” she said, ruffling his hair.  “I think it would work.”

“...the outside appearance of it, yes,” James mumbled, lowering his eyes. “Of course.”

She kissed him on the cheek. James limply patted her leg. She pulled back from him and glanced down at it, with a titter of uncomfortable laughter.

“Do you know,” she asked softly.  “Did I - or anyone - tell you what Barbossa did to Will’s father?”

“I don’t pry into the personal histories of pirates unless it is to gain an advantage,” he answered, so arrogantly and automatically that it was as though she had been swept a few years into the past.

Elizabeth pulled back and looked at him in shock and no small measure of disgust. James turned his head, his eyes averted and his jaw set. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and straightened his back, which he hoped would mask how much he was trembling..

“Maybe the advantage in this case would be the benefit of some human decency,” she said shortly.

“I'm sorry,” James sighed. “I'm- never mind. I'm sorry. You never told me anything about the elder Turner’s involvement with Barbossa.”

“It seems it would not interest you if I had,” said Elizabeth, rummaging through her stash of things by the bedside.  She had dragged another table over there to rest it on, but she could not find what it was she was after.  Everything seemed to her suddenly so useless - even the box of quondams, open and spilling on its side; the three quarters full bottle of whiskey they had appreciated with some now empty soda cans the other night; a card full of strange, cheaply-made earrings she had thought looked pretty and planned to wear (she wanted nothing so poor for James when she pierced his ear - that seemed an unlikely thing now, didn’t it). Such an overabundance of frivolity and waste and jetsam when one good thing, one normal thing that might be found at a bedside was absent.  She slammed her palm down on the table in frustration.

“James, get me a hairbrush.”

“Whatever it was, I can assume it was intended to be lethal, seeing where he ended up,” James said flatly. “All that aside, where have you put it?”

“I said get me one,” said Elizabeth in irritation, pushing what seemed to her to be a particularly disgusting hank of her own hair behind her ear.  She met his eyes and finished coolly, “dog.”

“From where? Pardon me, but I’m in no mood for this dog business now that you don’t have your public to appease-

“Do you think I am appeased?  James,” she said irritably. “Get me a damn brush.”

“Have you already got one, or do you want me to fetch one from elsewhere in here too-“

“If I had one, I wouldn’t need you to fetch it, would I?”

“Good God- fine, fine. Give me a moment.”

He stormed away from the bed and wove his way out of the maze of display rooms. As he passed through something that was probably a sitting room, he knocked over a standing lamp that fell on and shattered a glass tabletop; James bit off a loud curse before turning a corner and disappearing into the darkness of the rest of the store.

Elizabeth regretted sending him, but no so much she could call him back.  She sit on the edge of the bed and willed her hands stay on her knees, far away from her hair.  She thought she might tear it out if she didn’t.

He returned around ten minutes later and dropped the brush on the bed beside her.

“Here you are. I’m going to sleep, if Your Majesty should deign to permit it.”

He picked up the whiskey bottle from the bedside table and took a few swallows to take the edge off, before pointedly setting it back down and turning to her with an exaggerated bow.

She met his eyes with guilt and reluctance.

“Brush it.”

It was still phrased as an order, but she bit her lip and rephrased it.  She’d grown brittle in the moments without him.  

“I mean I want you to brush it.”

James’s lips parted, and he blinked a little too rapidly to try to recover himself.

“Is that- a punishment or a reward? Because I’ve had my fill of the one for today, thank you, and I’m not sure now is the best time for the other-“

“It is primarily for my benefit,” said Elizabeth, her mouth feeling dry.  Her eyes sought some forgiveness and understanding in his.  “I’m afraid if I do it myself, I’ll pull my hair out.”

James didn’t move for what felt like an age, but he sighed and sat beside her nonetheless.

“Fine,” he said again. “It’s fine.”

He slowly drew her hair back over her shoulders and studied it, feeling as though he were truly seeing the knots and split ends and general damage, everything that she had always complained of as having come with that lovely sunlit blonde shade she had gradually acquired, for the first time.

James cleared his throat and began brushing- small strokes, from the bottom.

“This is not how I used to think this would happen,” he admitted, more than a little bitterly.

“Oh?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even, and drawing her legs up under her slowly enough not to disturb him.

“That is to say, when I allowed myself to think of it at all.”

All of a sudden she knew of what he meant.  She was thankful to be so turned away from him as she was.  

“I’ve never thought of it at all,” she said, truthfully.  She had thought a long time on what it might be to be married to Will, but she had never imagined him brushing her hair.  A husband might do such a thing, she supposed.  It hurt to be reminded how faithfully James had thought of her.  She felt the nails of both hands driving into her palms.

“When we leave this place, I’m teaching you how to take care of this. I haven't the patience to look after mine in that way any longer, but I have all the time in the world for you.”

“Have you?” she asked softly.

“Obviously.”

“James,” she said, clearing her throat; “if you would rather have the Gloriana than a tyrant king, I will not grudge you…”

“We would be lucky to see one another more than a few times a month, if that,” he said sternly.

“I am not confident that you will love me so much if you see me more than that number,” said Elizabeth numbly.  “I am not so confident you do not love me less already.”

“What happened to ‘I need you’-“

“Poetry, I suppose.  But I told you before I could live without you if I had to.  I would rather not, but I…”

Elizabeth swallowed.  She thought to herself about how much she did not want to hurt him as he had been by all the rest of the world, and then how much all the rest of the world might punish her if she let him set the pace in matters of his punishment.

She thought of Captain Barbossa’s ambiguous respect for her and his transparent contempt for James Norrington, and wondered what could transpire between her and the latter to make the former turn on her.  Anything, really.

And Barbossa was the nice one out of the lineup of pirate lords whose fealty she nebulously had.

But here James was, hers and hurting all the same.

What other options did she have, then, but to set him free?

“...It would be better, I think, to leave you a captain for the time being,” she said carefully, as though it were only a political matter.  “I do not think the matter will be long in anyone’s mind after we have parted - it will not be long, then, if you - if you so choose to later join me on the Empress -”

James stopped brushing and slammed his hands down on his thighs in irritation, startling her.

“For God’s sake, Elizabeth, if you don’t want me, at least grant me the courtesy of saying so-“

“Do you want to be promoted?” Elizabeth demanded, turning to face him.

“What kind of game are you playing with me?” James retorted, his voice rough with distress. “Elizabeth- I can’t live like this. I’m exhausted by trying to live up, or down, or whichever the day demands, to the expectation of how I am to best serve you-“

“Then don’t,” she said plainly, blinking a few too many times.   “It is clear what you want from me and what I can give you are two different things.”

“Do you not want me on the Empress?”

“I can’t be your wife, James,” Elizabeth said by way of an answer, the tears burning in her eyes; but she did not shy away from holding them steady on his.

“Of course not. God, imagine that lot out there calling you Mrs. Norrington. Mrs. Dog-”

“You would be taking my name,” she said as though a reprimand.

James stared at her, flabbergasted.

“You’ve thought about this?”

Elizabeth colored.  Her distress at this coming up now when they were not certain to be together very long was immense.

“If you - would have permitted it only-”

James Swann. He wanted to feel the name in his mouth, but if he said it out loud he knew he would betray himself.

“From what you seem to want,” he said, very carefully, “I don't think it matters.”

Elizabeth let out a bitter laugh, drying her eyes on her shirt.

“I don’t think I can reasonably be accused of having misled you about my intentions,” she said with a faint edge to her voice.  “I have always planned on remaining the Pirate King.  And yet you still hope I will change my mind.”

“I have never said that,” James retorted.

“And yet you continually balk at it,” said Elizabeth.  “And now I am accused of playing a game with you, because you don’t like to be my dog, as though I can make allowance for something else-”

“Why has being your dog meant my humiliation from the beginning, rather than simply my subordination?”

“Perhaps if you were not so determined to make an ass of yourself-”

“Because I wasn't about to let Turner destroy himself-”

“Then why did you not come to me?  I found the two of you brawling in a fountain-” Elizabeth cried in a rush of strong feeling.

“Elizabeth,” James sighed, “do you even love me, or am I just here?”

“I do love you,” said Elizabeth with an acute sense of despair.  “I can’t flog you. I can’t promote you.  You think I do not love you because I do not let you walk all over me?  I cannot love you less than myself and you cannot ask me to-”

“I have never asked to walk over you- I don't wish to even put you in my shadow-”

“What do you wish, then?”

James studied her a moment longer, smiling sadly.

“I want to be with you,” he said.

He took her hands in his.

“May I continue brushing your hair?”

“You needn’t, I can care for myself,” she said, feeling at last the chagrin she was due on reflection of how poorly she had treated him.

“It's all right,” he said. “Beside that, you’ll probably destroy it in the temper you're in.”

“I think all my temper is gone,” she said after a moment.  “Do you really not know that I love you?  After all of this, that you are here with me because I had the option?”

“In your grief, then. It's rather fragile, darling. And I- I’m not always certain of the…”

He lowered his eyes for a moment and looked back at her with a sad smile.

“The depth of it, perhaps.”

He still held her hands in his own, and she brought them up to kiss them and ease the pain he brought her.

“Do you, as a sailor, deny the depths of the sea, even where you cannot see them with looks alone?”

“Don't compare yourself to the sea, when I have lost so much to it.”

“Very well,” she said shortly, pressing his hands, and gently pushing them away.  “Brush my hair or don’t, it’s nothing to me.”

“All this time,” he said, “I have told myself that you chose me. You chose me.”

He looked at his rejected hands, and then away from her altogether.

“But I am forced to wonder for what purpose.”

“Yes, what indeed,” she said listlessly, getting out of bed to undress, clumsily and not for show, before getting back in again, sliding beneath the covers.  It was cooler inside the Macy’s with the lights gone out than she was fully accustomed to growing up in the Caribbean.  

He looked back over his shoulder at her.

“Come here.”

Elizabeth rolled over with a groan to rest her head again in his lap, gingerly.

“Sit up. I’m going to brush your hair, all right?”

“If you want to,” she said, indifferent with exhaustion, but sitting up just the same.  “I have given it up as ever looking well again.”

“Give it time,” he said, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, as he began again.

“And effort on your part,” she added, in softer, reconciliatory tones.

“If you want it,” James said cautiously. “I don't want you to feel I am unduly prioritizing something as frivolous as your hair.”

“It is of little consequence,” she agreed readily, but she was equally quick to admit, “but I can’t help feeling a connection between the degradation of my hair and the degradation of my moral character.  It used to be - if I may be allowed to say so - it used to be very nice.”

She laughed nervously.

“I tried not to think of it,” said James, with a weak laugh of his own.

“Because it fares the worst at present by comparison?”

“No- I meant to say, in Port Royal.”

“Ah,” said Elizabeth, nervously tilting her head back by a fraction as he worked on the very ends.  “Thank you at least for your ‘trying’; that says to me that sometimes you must have failed, and I appreciate it.”

“Often,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry it’s not what it would have been,” said Elizabeth quietly, “on our…”

She was not able to finish. James paused, mid-stroke.

“It was never truly about your hair,” he said, in the same quiet voice.

“I hope not, at this point; I would have lost your affection by now, then,” she tried to joke.

“To quote the wisdom of a very close friend, whose opinion I hold in the highest of regard,” James said as he began to brush again, “if it bothers you so terribly, you should cut it.”

He was gentle in a way that belied his words, though he hadn't spoken with much of an attempt to convince, either. It may not have been about her hair but it certainly didn't hurt.

“It did not until very recently,” she confessed.  “But now I feel as though I have neglected more than my hair.”

James swept her hair forward, over her shoulder, exposing the nape of her neck and then pressing a soft, solemn kiss to it, just below her hairline.

“Just as you are the only one to pay any attention to my hair,” she said, shutting her eyes, “I believe you are the only one between us to possess any moral strivings, today excepting.”

“The very fact of your concern shows you are better than you think,” he murmured, close to her shoulder.

“Will you - will you keep brushing it, please,” she asked faintly, as much to feel the nurturing comfort of that attention as to prevent her heartsickness at the attentions he was currently providing instead.

“Oh- yes, of course,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ll damage it-”

But he continued, nonetheless.

“Better to rip the knots out now than later-”

“I would prefer to be gentle and avoid ripping anything out,” he said, with a note of finality.

That very same gentleness that she had long misconstrued as dullness made her smile to herself now.  She knew, even as her mood had softened, that she held him at arm’s length, but she could not draw him any closer.  

“I can do it, if you prefer,” she reminded him.

“And rip out the knots?” James said dryly.

“If need be.”

“Allow me to spare you that fate. I happen to be fond of this hair.”

“A fact with which I am well acquainted,” she managed, “to my pleasure, although not my understanding.”

“It's not your hair itself so much as the circumstances under which I might have once had this kind of access to it.”

She took that remark with a vivid picture soon entering her head and draining her of some of the happiness she had just regained, until she, seemingly very abruptly, turned her head - pulling her hair from his grasp, even unto his involuntarily pulling a strand still in the hairbrush enough to hurt - and said, “Do you know what circumstances first came to my mind?  A marooning.”

“Would you have really wanted me to kiss you then-”

“No,” she said shortly; “you know my thoughts were all for Will then, and how much I feared Barbossa opening his throat.  But my hair was certainly quite down for Jack Sparrow, wasn’t it?”

She took note of her own bitterness and checked herself.

“I only marvel that that is where my head went first, that’s all.  Of course it’s a very - a lovely picture to imagine a virtuous bride letting her hair down for the first time on her wedding night-”

“There were two competing wedding nights in my mind,” James murmured. “The one in which we did everything I had hoped for, and the one in which I could not bear to.”

“James,” she said softly, with a sincere look of pain making her flinch, even as she reached up to touch his roughened cheek - the one that did not have a mark from Will’s ineffectual blade upon it.  “You know now there shall probably never be a wedding night.  Let’s not think on what might have been any longer.  Besides the specific regret, it forces me to consider other things I have lost out on - my maidenhood and my virtue, my standing, my family- I have your company, I hope for a little while more, and I have your love.  I have your love, don’t I?” she asked with real doubt and real hope.

James looked rather hurt.

“You know you do.”

Elizabeth worried her lower lip a while.

“Perhaps I can…. call you ‘commodore,’” she said doubtfully, “and have that pass for humiliation enough-”

“Really? I- oh, thank you. Thank you-”

He kissed her hands with sincerity he would later recall as embarrassing, but in the moment his relief was enough that his head swam a little.

“And keep you with me on the Empress without much judgment from the rest of them - those not on our crew, anyway.  On the Empress they won’t care.  They don’t know you or your father so well in Singapore that they have that peculiar lust to see you ground down, and you are just some man to tem.”

“And I will let the ladies have use of the Gloriana as a sign of trust,” he agreed, beginning to smile in earnest now

Elizabeth was more hesitant.

“I think I shall still have to avoid you publicly a while,” she said.  “But God knows if Barbossa will be convinced without a further show.  Oh, I can’t wait to be back on the Empress-”

“Barbossa is probably too eager to practice on Turner now that he's the weak link in our chain to notice,” James retorted.

“You don’t know much of Captain Barbossa,” said Elizabeth, a little frostily.  “You should fear him more, even if we are, as I hope, out of the range of exciting his displeasure.”

James gave her a questioning look.

“I’m serious,” she pressed him.

“I’m sure you are. Elizabeth, if you feel you need protection from him- just in case, God forbid-”

“I am the one who is meant to be protecting you,” she said heatedly. “But how can I if you strip me of all dignity and respect-”

“What happened out there?” he asked, his frown deepening. “Before he marooned you. I ultimately assumed it could not have been so terrible; you're wretchedly fond of the man-”

His surprising her with the question caught her very miserably off guard; the large solemnity of her eyes and the way that they avoided him after fixing on him for one intense, brief moment of shock was generally unlike her.

“He didn't-”

“Didn’t what?”

“...use indelicate force against you-”

Elizabeth moved to refute him, but pressed her lips together instead with a look of great exertion and turned away from him again, as though he were to continue to brush her hair.

It was only when she could no longer see him that she could make herself speak.

“I don’t know that he wouldn’t have, and that is the most honest answer I can give.  There was a certain implication of interest on his side at the start; he had me change my dress, although I can at least allow that I was abducted from Port Royal in only my nightgown and robe.  After he sank the Interceptor, he-”

This required her to chew on the inside of her cheek a long moment before she could bring herself to recount it; she had not spoken of it out loud before.

“ - it was stated,” she said delicately, “by Captain Barbossa, that I had evaded their hospitality once, and ought to return the favor, whereupon he tossed me to the crew and they -”

She could not finish saying it; even saying as much as she had gave her great pain.  She was afraid she was giving James leave to conjecture too much on what might have happened, but she could not finish.

“- Will appeared then; he had not gone down with the wreck as we had supposed; since it was his blood they needed to lift their curse, he threatened to shoot himself if his terms were not met.  His terms were that the crew be unharmed and I go free.  Barbossa agreed to them, but only in those exact words.  So I walked the plank and swam to that island, with Jack after me, and the crew, uninjured, went to the brig.”

She paused, and turned back to him with a reddened face and eyes, and then she gave him an exhausted smile.

“At least he had me strip out of the dress before I went in,” she said with a touch of laughter and a heavier touch of bitterness.  “As much as I cannot say I liked to give the men a show, wearing it I am sure I would have drowned.”

“And this man- and members of his crew,” James said slowly. “This man has been among us the entire time- taking in stray children, dispensing advice-”

“Is that all so peculiar to you?  You have forgotten your oppressively dull speech on pirates,” she said with a snort.

James put his hands on her shoulders.

“Say the word and he’s as good as dead.”

Elizabeth’s eyes rolled half through her head.

“No.”

“Elizabeth, I’ve slain dozens just like him-”

“And like me too, I expect.”

“Regardless-

“Whatever he has been to me in the past, now he is my ally,” she said firmly. “Though not yours, I admit.  If you would help me with him, please, please conduct yourself better-”

“I know-”

“After they became aware they were cursed,” Elizabeth said, abruptly, “Will’s father sent him a piece of the treasure, that they might remain so - he said they deserved it for marooning Jack.  Barbossa strapped him to a cannon and dropped him into the ocean.  An eternity of torment, that was to be.  You see how he has only traded one ill fate for another.  I don’t pretend I don’t believe better of him now than I once did; I think he is a changed man after the curse.  But that is what he is capable of.  Don’t be so foolish as you are about him.  He would be a very dangerous man to cross, James, and I do not think his threats about you are idle.”

James took a moment to consider that.

“Noted,” he said finally, very softly.

Elizabeth found herself needing him very badly.

“James,” she said.

“Yes, Elizabeth?”  

“Hold me-”

James gathered her into his arms and lay down. She fit snugly against his shoulder like this; she was not a small woman, but she felt it at moments like these, and James was overwhelmed by an aching need to protect her, even if she would probably just as quickly reassert that she could do it herself.

“I cannot say I’ve forgotten why we quarreled,” she sighed, “but I certainly don’t care anymore.  I am surprised you and Will did not come to blows earlier, to tell the truth; and I am equally certain that forcing the two of you into close quarters will serve as punishment enough, for when you don’t repeat the mistake it will be clear a lesson was learnt.  There.  I am done being King for the night, I think, which means you no longer have to be dog, if you wish it.”

“Thank God,” he said, with a tired-sounding laugh. “I am content enough to be your man.”

Her answering smile was real and vivid, and she leaned up to kiss him with all the passion she had saved for him while waiting by the claw machine.

“You never let me finish with your hair,” James laughed.

“Mm, did you want to?  I find I mind less, now that I am secure in your affection, how it looks-”

“Next thing we know, you’ll be filling it with nonsense like Sparrow’s-”

“I don’t want it in mats,” she responded indignantly.  “It would be one thing if i had hair like Tia Dalma’s - Jack’s is just dirty.  Barring mats I can’t see anything staying in my hair.  And, good God, I won’t have it said I think Jack is a style icon-”

“Then perhaps,” he teased, “you ought to let me finish.”

Elizabeth tossed her hair as she sat up, smirking at him like it was a challenge, telling him he could go ahead. James grinned back and went for the brush.

As he pushed her hair back over her shoulders in preparation for her to turn around, James stopped for a moment and gathered it in his hands, lifting it from her face.

“Do my eyes deceive me, or is this the foolhardy young lad who struck me with a rum bottle during a brawl in Tortuga?”

“This is she.”

“She? Ah, that explains why he's so pretty.”

She put her hands on his chest and moved them up to cup his face.  There was so much she wanted to ask him in the way of sentimentality and affection, but, while touching his lips with her thumb, what she in fact said was, “I’ve thought of more duties for you.”

“I thought I was done being your dog tonight,” said James, though thankfully in a decidedly non-accusatory tone.

“Can’t be helped,” she said with little remorse.  “I think I must have you do my hair from here on out.  I’d forgotten what a convenience it is - and never known it could be such a pleasure.”

James emitted a sudden bark of startled laughter.

“I’m not certain I’ll be good for more than a plait-”

“I can dress it myself. But you’re to brush it.”

His smile softened. “I would be thrilled to.”

She kissed him.

“Turn around, then- don’t keep me waiting!”

She rolled her eyes again good-naturedly, but she did so; the last he saw of her face before she turned her head again was the soft radiance of a smile meant only for him.

“You know,” he said as he began brushing, “I think if Theo were to ever find out about this, he would positively refuse to let me live it down.”

“Somehow imagine that is true of a lot of what we do in bed.”

“He gave me such trouble for the time I spent on my uniform, to say nothing of my hair-”

She remembered Lieutenant Groves from Port Royal; she had always gotten on with him very well.  An amiable man, likely given to mischief.  It was not that strange, if he was friends with James, that James should like her too.

“I like to give you trouble for those things, too.”

“Elizabeth.”

“I rather think you like to be given trouble yourself.”

“I was the Admiral’s son,” he said. “I had obligations to uphold.”

“Now you’re my lover. I like to think you still have some.”

“Is this the earring again?”

“It can be the earring.  I had given that up.  I only meant that you reflect on me now. I’m answerable for your deeds and appearance.”

She came close to renewing her complaints over his behavior of that afternoon, but enough had been said about it to exhaust her on the subject, and she did not want the office of authority any longer tonight.

“You can have the earring,” he grumbled good-naturedly. “Though I may have to challenge your notion of wearing anything dangling; that's all but asking to be grabbed and pulled on in close combat.”

He had found a snarl, and was pinching above it with one hand as he brushed from the bottom with the other, to keep it from pulling on Elizabeth’s scalp. James resolved in that moment that he would never allow her hair to return this state again.

Elizabeth winced, grateful again he could not see her face.

“Will has a hoop,” she said bluntly.  “I would rather not invite the comparison-”

“And it still dangles,” James countered, “so I think we're in agreement.”

“Have what you will,” said Elizabeth. “Let it not be said I put fancy jeweled collars on my dog like some vain Frenchwoman.”

“Oh my God-”

“The Pirate King must have a little taste.  I’ve got so many other Pirate Lords to offset,” she deadpanned.

“And I am, I suppose, a necessary accessory.”

“A bodyguard,” she said evenly.

“Ah,” he said. “Oh, that's far more palatable.”

“The kind of bodyguard that does one’s hair.  But also the kind of bodyguard that does one.  So, you know.  A lover.”

“We won't mention the matter of your hair, I should think.”

“No, indeed, that I like too much to let others know it.  Others would make something vulgar of it and I think it is very lovely,” said Elizabeth, mortifying herself with shyness.

He reached forward and let a stray lock of it fall over his finger, and kissed it.

“Is that the strand you want for your coat?” asked Elizabeth, unable to resist taking a moment too open and unguarded and teasing him for it, though the way she looked over her shoulder was devastatingly sincere.

“Any strand will do. I shall try harder not to lose this one.”

“Well, you can’t have that one,” she argued, “now that you have kissed it it is too dear to me-”

James gathered the whole sunny mass of her hair in his hands and brought it to his lips.

“Oh, dear. Now I suppose I shan’t have anything,” he laughed. “It’s all right. Better on your head.”

Elizabeth burst into unladylike squeals of laughter, leaning back on him the easier to nudge him with her elbow.  “I nearly dare to say - there is technically speaking other hair you could have - but you’ve kissed that all over, haven’t you -”

“Elizabeth-”

Now it was she that kissed him all over, turning around in his arms to take him into hers, kissing him on the chest, the throat, the face, and the lips, finally, sliding into his lap with a patient insistence that he suffer her there to touch his chin with her fingertips and kiss him again and again, not hastily or in a rush of passion but the good sense to go slowly and enjoy him.

“Mm- I haven't finished-”

“You keep tempting me away from letting you,” she said with an unfelt indignation, guiding him to lay back and let her lean over him.

“It's not my fault you’ve no sense of control,” James said, faux-accusatory, as he lay down.

“Very wrong, commodore, it is only that I best love to control others, and best love among others, controlling you, so with that in mind, put your hands back in my hair-”

“And to think I worried that you thought I loved you only for that,” James said, a little wistfully.

“It does a king good to know someone is noticing and appreciating her remaining feminine attributes,” Elizabeth snorted.  

“The rest are less concealed than you think,” James retorted.

Elizabeth rubbed one of her legs on his.  “At the moment.”

“You cut a rather delicate figure.”

“I suppose compared to you,” she said, her hand creeping up his body. “You’re as broad as a ship yourself.”

“Thank you,” he said dryly, though unoffended.

“I don’t think it registers much til you are nearly on top of me,” she said reconciliatorially.

“The Admiral has a low opinion of staying. I suppose for that I am grateful to him.”

“And so am I,” she said, with an admiring lookover.  She met his eyes and smiled.

“I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

Elizabeth erupted in laughter.

“Yes, I am sure he is so glad you ran off with the Pirate King-”

“He probably feels gratified to have twenty-five years of suspicion confirmed,” said James, with a startled, hollowish laugh of his own.

“But what a smart match I am.  The former governor’s daughter, and now I am royalty.  Elected royalty, but all the same- did the rest of your family strive so high-”

“Young Laurence is a viscount now,” he said, “so I have done my part to emulate him.”

He began finger-combing her hair.

Elizabeth leaned into it until her nose touched the palm of his hand and she could nuzzle, gently.

“Of course, Young Laurence isn't nearly so young anymore- he’s nearly of an age with your father- but relative to the Admiral-”

“James,” she asked softly.

“Yes?”

“Do you miss your family? I forget too often that you still have yours.”

His fingers slowed as he tried to think of an answer to that.

“I never knew my brothers as well as I would like,” he said, after a pensive silence. “They were both already grown when I was born. Laurence has a son two years my elder-”

“Good God, really?”

“He was twenty-five years old at the time. It's hardly unusual.”

“It’s only difficult for me to imagine.  I’ve been simultaneously the heir and the infant of my household all my life.”

“I think William- that is to say, my brother, William- I think he was more the infant than I was,” he said, with a rather sad laugh. “Heaven knows he was always my mother's favorite. She had Laurence too early, and myself too late, and suffered for us both. William came very easily and agreeably by comparison.”

“You can be my infant,” she said agreeably, ruffling his hair in a manner that did not pass as maternal.  “It can’t help but make me sad, the way you speak of your family.”

“Please don't fret on my account,” he said, though he leaned a little into the ruffling. “It's not as though I did not benefit from any of it-”

“Let me baby you,” she argued with a tone of warning.

“Elizabeth-“

“Why should I not?  You owe it to me to have my way in everything-”

Elizabeth’s concept of babying was the tenderest of touches and a good number of kisses along the jawline, while leaning back to stroke his hair and look at him every so often.

“I find it odd, at times, to realize I don't hate him,” he said, with a thoughtful frown.

Sensing some of her kisses would be unwelcome, Elizabeth turned her head to kiss his fingers instead.

“I nearly did, for some time in my youth. I thought- never mind.”

“You can tell me.”

He huffed, as though steeling himself.

“When I was very small, I can recall my mother shouting at the Admiral that her carrying me was something he had done to her. I don't suppose I need explain how I later came to believe I had been conceived.”

He pressed his lips together as he looked up at the plain tiled ceiling, rather than Elizabeth’s face.

“She departed for her health shortly after my third birthday. She said she was hardly fit for English society any longer. She could hardly face any of her old rivals, obviously, not with a mouth full of false teeth and her hair full of switches. The difficulties of a late pregnancy, you understand. Of course, once I finally brought the matter to her when I was able to visit her again in Naples as a young man, she quite kindly assured me that he had done nothing of the sort.”

He laughed a little.

“She asked me not to blame myself. I was only the byproduct, after all. She and the Admiral both thought she was past childbearing age, and- well-”

He gestured at himself. “Surprise.”

Elizabeth pressed a quick kiss to his cheek.  

“It's no matter now,” he said. “I’ve had years to grow accustomed to it.”

“You seem to be so fragile to me,” she reflected in a soft voice.  “How precarious your situation, within your family, within the Navy, and now, in all society - even among pirates you are seldom wanted. It’s as though if one thing falls out of place you will disappear.  The world is too cruel to protect such people as you; it seems it falls to me to do it.  Doesn’t seem right, does it?  I am in hardly any less precarious a placement.”

“Oh, I was quite in demand until the hurricane,” he said, rather wistfully. “I had your father's patronage, the Admiral’s name, four limbs, the usual assortment of facial features- good ones, if you will permit me to say it myself- and thirty-two teeth. Jamaica Station didn't care that my career path was less than glorious to the Admiralty. I was the proverbial large fish in a small pond, and God help me, I was proud of it all.”

Elizabeth felt some discomfort, seeing how much she had longed to leave the place, and how, when the time to do so had finally come, it had been under such misfortunes as to ensure she could never think of it without some regret.  Now she pondered her life in Port Royal, and unable to avoid it, what their life there might have been, or hers with Will - thinking about her losses, tallying them up, and subtracting them from his.

“Estrella - my maid - she deemed it a ‘smart match,’” she said, with an embarrassed titter of laughter.  “If only I had been the kind of woman to esteem a smart match.  Amelia pressed me hard to consider you before you even asked me.  She said - but nevermind.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t know that it would do you any good to hear it.  In any case, I am sure she would have used the same language as Estrella, if things had taken a different course, and I had written her a letter on your proposal before Barbossa escorted me to the Isla de Muertos.”

“Smart enough, I suppose. Had your father not been your father I suspect he would have looked higher.”

“For me?”  Elizabeth burst into laughter.  “He knew what I was. I can promise you he had no expectation of that. How often he used to say to me, ‘Much as I would happily keep you to care for me into my old age…’”

All good humor fled at the memory.  She felt a dizzying rush of pain at the cruel realization, and pressed her cheek hard against James’ shoulder, willing herself not to feel it.

“...let’s just say,” she composed herself, “I have never been eligible.”

“You always were to me,” he said softly.

Elizabeth smiled tightly.

“That was the content of Amelia’s letters, after she married, and I was increasingly desperate to convince her I could barely live without her - she had found no shortage of tenderness with her husband and felt, I suppose, that her life had just begun; mine seemed to have ended - and she did not have the patience for me anymore.  She said, if i wanted to change my situation, I had to marry.  She asserted that I knew it, and had always known it, and that she did not understand why I still clung to the fantasies of my childhood, instead of looking forward to - well, to conjugal joy, I am certain.  She spoke very well of you, you might be pleased to hear.  She thought that our formerly very close friendship in my immaturity, and your significance to my father, and your clear regard for me, would make a good basis for marriage, and was less convinced than I was that I would spend the whole of my life ‘rotting on shore’ if I married a naval officer; she thought if nothing else my powers of persuasion and your desire to please me would get me aboard with you as soon as I wanted it.  She also had some firm words to say about Will - and I hadn’t intimated that I’d wanted to marry Will!  Amelia knew before I did.  She said she did not think I would be happy marrying a blacksmith when I could have married a captain and lived at sea.  I wish I could write her now; I think it would be a very pretty irony between formerly close friends, for me to say that I became the captain and still ended up with James Norrington.  She would not begrudge me some teasing on that point, not when she was right about so much else.”

“You loved her,” said James, with fresh realization. She had said as much before, but the intensity of her words deepened her earlier comments- it had not, it seemed, been the simple flutterings he had taken them for.

Elizabeth shrugged, noncommittal with discomfort.  “As a cousin, I thought at the time.  I don’t know.  I suppose.”

“I'm sorry. I can imagine it must have been… difficult.”

“Yes,” she said distantly.  “At the time, very.”  She cleared her throat.  “Of course I was sending all of these letters that seemed immature and playful - I am certain I said I wished we had run away together before some baron could come take her away to London, and that I was crying every day, and struggling to get out of bed, and hated everyone and everything in Port Royal without her, and she didn’t take me at all as serious.  And she confided in me as he started to win her heart away, and I grew more and more miserable that she could be happy and even excited to be happier, without me in her life; I thought I was of greater consequence. She did invite me to stay on with them, and father thought I might like it, but I didn’t want to meet the man.  I kept thinking of all our schemes as girls - running away, doing whatever thing had caught our fancy - it was mostly my schemes; Amelia didn’t want to sell poultices and herb bundles in a hut, or become a highwaywoman, or - I don’t know; dress as a boy and go to Oxford with me; but it was diverting to speak of.  More than that; it was half hopeful.  For a while, after Amelia left - I actually gave it some thought, trying to get into university - they let women into university, in other places - but no one took me seriously enough to let me run the risk of trying.”

She had not thought about this in years; she had gotten fixed on Will a little more and thought of her future as little as she could, and then… But before all of that had happened, there had been this first brush with the terrors of adulthood, the inexorable passage of time that had forced her to recollect the world was not for women in any way, shape, or form.

“At the time I used to have - I would get these pains in my chest, very severely,” she said, putting her hand over her heart, “and my heartbeat would all of a sudden race, and I would be overcome by a feeling of misery or fear; it would come on strong and sudden, and be hard to shake.  I’d wake up to them and not want to get out of bed.  I would just lie there, quietly crying.  Father thought I was growing lazy because I had no friend to look forward to, and I didn’t tell him otherwise; she was the only one who knew about them, and when she was gone, they got worse.  Amelia would write me and tell me i had to find a physician or else I really might die.  And she didn’t begrudge me your affection - she never had any real hope of having you, she said; her father wouldn’t have allowed the match even if you had thought of her particularly well; and she wouldn’t like to live at sea, she had already admitted.  And she was one of the first ones to suggest to me you might be considering me; she and my father.  I thought it was normal paternal affection making the best of things when father said it, but from Amelia I was really shocked.  At first I thought it was just a little sadness, feeling that you had overlooked her for me because you knew me better, and tried to reassure her of course I thought you must like her, how could you not?  She was already giving up on it, though; she knew her father wouldn’t allow it and Amelia was more dutiful than I was.”

Elizabeth started fingercombing her own awful hair.

“It’s difficult to say really.  We did kiss; but girls do that, I believe, regardless of the degree of affection between them; they don’t all need to be Ana and Angie to play pretend with each other.  And I was as encouraging of her infatuation with you as she was indulgent of mine with Will, so it isn’t as though I could not conceive of myself as being already in love, and not with Amelia.”

James gently paused her hand with his own, afraid that she would subconsciously make good on her threat of ripping her own hair.

“To say that you couldn't live without her, though- for your heart itself to ache without her- that would suggest… a rather un-casual degree of affection.”

“I am sure I wrote some very good stuff,” said Elizabeth with a dark glimmer of laughter, dropping her hand down to rub his chest idly since he had halted its progress in her hair.  “It was very foolish for me to expect otherwise, but I felt very rough when she took it all as a funny overstatement of my misery and urged me to go dining with Felicity Whatsherface and whoever else was left in Port Royal we’d somewhat spoken to.  It was so hard at the time - her moving on to such happiness with other people, writing to me less and less, and giving me some maternal advice on matrimony when she did.  I suppose everyone goes through a similar experience - the early loss or diminishment of a close friend.”

James pushed himself up again and began braiding her hair back so she couldn't menace it any further.

“I wouldn’t know,” he admitted. “I suppose that comes of living as a sort of band for decades at a time.”

“You lost one early friend,” she said in a quiet voice.  

“That was my fault.”

“A loss all the same.”

He wasn't sure how to answer that. James finished the braid and secured it with a band from their bedside table in silence.

“There,” he said. “We shall have to get you a bundle of string or something you can worry with your hands instead of your hair. I'm not certain how much more that can take.”

“It’s only hair,” said Elizabeth, a little sullen and remorseful to lose further pleasure from his brushing it tonight.  The conversation about Amelia had brought up a lot of memories she would have rather kept buried.  Worst of all, it had been so long since she had seen her that Elizabeth no longer fully remembered what she looked like.

“It's hair you intend to keep, is it not?” he retorted.

“Right now, James, I have to admit, it seems a particularly fruitless vanity.  I suddenly remember too well what my hair once was, and will never be again.”

“Now who's regaling whom with complaints about their hair? If you care so little for it, at least let me sew the whole plait over my heart in my coat, rather than force me to watch you destroy it and make yourself unhappier.”

He followed this with a kiss to her braid, though, in hope that, as with the smaller strand, this might have made her love it a little more.

“It’s different,” she argued, then relented. “Well - maybe it’s not different.  It was my only feminine accomplishment for much of my life.  I didn’t like the harp enough to give it much study, and I didn’t like singing - nothing appropriate for company, anyway.  When I was younger - but you already know.  It was just the only thing about me that could brook no criticism and look at it now.”

James smoothed one of the little loose locks remaining from her by now long-ago half-disguise to flee from Beckett behind her ear. It seemed, he thought, terribly unfair of this place to forcibly alter his hair on arrival and not hers.

“The new growth here is not too far gone,” he pointed out, his hand lingering by her cheek. “The rest will eventually follow. And really, a lifetime of powder and curling tongs is rarely any kinder…”

His voice trailed off as he studied her for a moment longer, feeling a little monstrous for what he was thinking.

“If you can’t bear to wait for that, the only thing to really be done for it would be to cut it. I don't know how you would feel- I feel unpleasantly destructive even saying such a thing. I'm not eager for it; I love the feeling of it falling over me when we-”

Elizabeth smiled.

James stopped himself there, took another breath and continued, “But I don't love you for it. I would be here to help you to keep it from ever growing to cause you such unhappiness again. I hope you will not hold this against me for saying so. I only hate to see you so wretchedly unhappy, no matter how much I love that you have given me the privilege of brushing it.”

She smoothed his own hair affectionately.

“I’m sorry for overrepresenting my dissatisfaction with it.  I don’t miss having it done; don’t miss wearing it in public, under a bonnet; don’t miss sipping tea in salons and waiting for a rival to spy it - no; I was never, in the fashionable sense, the equal to any other woman in Port Royal enough to have a rival - but I suppose, long after I have stopped caring for any of those things, I still miss the-”

She stopped herself.  She had not thought of it so clearly until forced just now by James and his hopeless sincerity, but now that she knew herself, she could not be proud.

“ - the advantages of it,” she admitted.  “I suppose that’s all it was.  I did not love the restrictions, but somehow - I suppose it is not really surprising when it comes down to it - I do miss the privilege of being a gentlewoman.”

“I’m certainly in no place to blame you for that.”

“It makes me feel guilty,” she went on quietly.  “When I see the other girls and I think about it.  Would there have been a fleet out looking for Anamaria, to see a smoke signal on a deserted island and save her?  What leverage would Giselle have had, if she had tried to persuade a commodore to rescue a blacksmith’s apprentice?  If Angelica fainted at Jack Sparrow’s hanging - not that I think she would have wanted to miss a moment of it,” she added wryly. “You know what I am saying.  I got a taste of my loss when I fled Port Royal on the Trader and had to live as a boy for a while.  The world is a different place when you’ve got to get by on your merits, not your father’s name and your pretty face.”

“I wouldn't know,” James said darkly. “That's probably the rest of why I can't bring myself to hate him.”

She patted his arm.

“What a relief that James Norrington had the grace to stumble into ruin at the same rate I did.  It is most proper of you.  Imagine if I were no longer appropriate for you.”  

“Oh, please. You're the King. You became something, whereas I…”

He smiled grimly. It didn't last.

Elizabeth’s smile was extinguished abruptly.

“Sorry,” he said absently. “That was unkind of me.”

“I’m the Pirate King because Sao Feng tried to force me,” she mumbled.  “It is no merit.”

“I meant only that… never mind. I'm sorry.”

She took his hand.

“I know what you meant.”

“I always admired how little you seemed to care for what was expected of you,” he admitted. “It was a quality I often hoped that I might have learned from you. It shames me to know how many of your worries I did not see.”

“You weren’t often in Port Royal,” she pointed out.  “And even when you were, I hardly opened myself up to you.”

Nor to Will, she thought with chagrin.  Nor to anybody.

“I didn't ask, either,” he reminded her, squeezing her hand gently.

“Nor would you have, you were too busy stammering,” she teased him.

“And now look at you,” he said. “I worry that to love me at all will compromise you.”

“I worry for that, too,” she said - she had already acknowledged that.  “But in the end I would rather have you than this title.  I bought it at a steep price, but that does not make it sweeter.”

He kissed her- chastely, softly- in gratitude.

“I suppose that if so many women can survive concubinage, it's only fair that I endure it,” he said, with a light touch of self-deprecating laughter.

She entwined their fingers.

“Perhaps I can entice you to finish my hair now,” she said with a resigned smile. “As little like it used to be as it is.”

“I would be happy to. Turn around, then-”

“I believe I said that to you recently,” she said with a smirk, though she did so.

“It's probably a boon to us both that you're not a man,” James said dryly as he began unraveling her braid.

“How’s that?”

“‘Any port’s as good as another in a storm’, or so they say.”

“Isn’t that a positive thing, then?”

“I don't know. Do you recall that term Barbossa suggested for a male mistress some time ago? I took the liberty of looking it up, and I think we allowed an insult to slide by us both unchallenged.”

“Which one?”

“Cicisbeo,” said James, though he didn't manage to pronounce it particularly accurately.

“I don’t speak continent, what is it?”

“In theory, a woman's lover. In practice,” he grumbled, “usually a paid invert.”

Elizabeth brightened at that.  “Maybe that’s what he thinks you are,” she said, sounding entirely too pleased with the notion.  “Now that would be a piece of luck-”

“How-”

“He might not believe that I am thinking with my parts,” said Elizabeth primly.

“Or that you are, and I'm joylessly taking advantage of them-“

“Oh, that’s much less pleasant.  Can’t he think you enjoy it a little? Perhaps turned around?”

“Oh, I’m certain he thinks I’m enjoying that,” he said, a little grimly. “Which is not to say I am not, but- look, I feel you must understand what I’m saying. I fear they think I am taking you for a fool.”

“Would you like the Gloriana.”

“I don’t want to be apart from you often enough to act as her captain.”

“Then we suffer the risk. But honestly, I do not think I am in your company in public often enough to lend to that impression.”

“Thank heavens you didn't cut your hair. I can only imagine what they would think. Probably that I had coerced you into playing at being a boy for my sake-”

“I somewhat doubt it.”

“One can only hope,” he said grimly. “My God, to be out of this place and fighting for you- I’m growing restless.”

Elizabeth wanted that too - she did.  But the reality of fighting and who they would be fighting against felt more than she could handle - right now she was no king, only Elizabeth, orphaned and on the run, feeling as frail and damaged as the split ends of her hair.  She stared hollowly into the distance and repeated numbly, “Restless, yes.”

It all seemed a hopeless dream tonight, destined to end in tragedy and humiliation.  The end of a noose for her, a firing squad for James.  She wondered which of them Beckett would force to watch the other’s execution.  James, watching hers, she thought, and he’d get in a good jab about how James ought to have impregnated her, to offer her a stay of execution; or was he incapable? She gently shook her head.

“I don’t know how much longer I shall be the Pirate King, especially if your presentiments are accurate,” she murmured.  “We’ll still have the Empress, and the heart of Davy Jones.”

There was that still - but it was not Jones she feared.  It never fully had been, even after witnessing the dreadful eldritch power of the Kraken.

“Do you really think you are supposed to have that much influence over me?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I know that none of these men save a handful of mine and the children hold me in much regard, and that’s quite aside from my history.”

He set the brush down and kissed the mass of her hair once more for good measure.

“Or perhaps it is, but not the part of it with Beckett. They find my downfall endlessly entertaining.”

Elizabeth turned and wrapped an arm around the back of his neck, pulling herself closer to him, touching his lips with the fingers of her other hand.

“Do shut up.”

“I worry only for how it reflects on you,” he pointed out. “I know I’ve no dignity to these people. What do you suppose they think of your stooping to me?”

“To be honest, I think they think I’m using you, if they think of it at all.  That’s what powerful men do with women, they use them up.  I think I come off more the man in this situation - isn’t that what you mean by no dignity?”

“I meant more specifically the spectacle of having seen me losing teeth and drinking myself sick in the gutters of Tortuga,” he said, “to say nothing of my efforts to ensure I remained drunk. Had I not fallen from so great a height, they would not rejoice so in my descent.”

She slid a little higher up on his lap, closer.

“But they can see I want you.  And surely they can also see why.  Regardless of your collapse, I don’t think I am seen as stooping at all.”

“Kiss me gently, then,” he said, half-deadly serious and half self-deprecation. “I suspect another tooth was doomed in the brawl with Turner.”

Elizabeth kissed him very gently, and slowly guided him to his back against the pillow, while she remained astride him.

“If you lose a tooth,” she could not help but say eventually, “can I have it?”

He stared at her.

“What? Why?”

“You wanted my hair, I would like your tooth - if it falls out.  Don’t try to pull it out or something.”

“I may have to, if it continues paining me as it is. Yes, you may have it,” he said, sounding resigned. “You don't need to sacrifice your hair for my sake, though-”

“I can part with a lock,” she snorted, leaning down to kiss him again.

“Let us hope that I needn’t part with more than one tooth in return,” he said, more than a little bitterly. “Hair grows back.”

Despite the gloominess of his voice, he chose to emphasize this by letting her brittle hair gently spill through his fingers. He twisted a lock of it around one of them, and lifted it to show her. The damage only began in earnest a decent distance down the strand, a little past her jaw, where her hair was long enough to toss about in the wind and grow salty. Before that point, it was less blonde, but it was also encouragingly smooth and a light burnished brown.

“Serves you right for brawling; I hope Will loses one too,” she said, not particularly kindly, in this case her good mood from the realization of the fact that they had brought some punishment on themselves and she had even less cause to play the disapproving authority figure with him. “It’s a pity you like the blond so much,” she observed.  “That seems to be the matter.”

“It's all quite sun-streaked,” James admitted. “I did not realize until today that it was quite so fragile.”

“What’s the word for that? Is that a - is it metaphor?”

“It could certainly count as one,” he conceded. “I suppose I was comparing it to my own. Even at its worst- which you have seen- it never turned quite so pale.”

“Yours is darker than mine,” she shrugged off.

“I do like the blonde,” he admitted, “but I don't think I shall mourn it as I thought when it grows out, after seeing your unhappiness.”

“James, I am fine.”

“Elizabeth, if I spoke as you did about myself in any regard, you would try to threaten me into a better opinion.”

“I am your mistress,” she argued; “I may speak in ways you may not, is that not so?”

James gave her a profoundly unconvinced look from under his eyebrows.

“You were speaking of tearing your hair out. You'll have to pardon me for taking that as a kind of self-aggression.”

“I was not! I said I thought I’d tear it if I tried to brush it.  I was in an ungentle mood.”

“Sometimes,” said James, “I feel as though in your haste to remind me of how much you need me, you forget that I need you as well.”

“Is this about my mood?” asked Elizabeth obliviously.  “I admit it is not great, but it’s improved-”

“I apologise for my mistake,” James said, a little louder, and in a very even, cautious voice that did not entirely mask his frustration, “but I had reason to believe you would hurt yourself. I hope that, at the very least, you will permit me my concern.”

“Oh!” said Elizabeth, looking troubled.  “Did it - did it seem so serious?”

“It was a degree of agitation I had not previously seen from you,” James said, as diplomatically as possible.

“I agitate infrequently,” she agreed, and lay down gently on top of him.

“At the rate you were going, I half-feared you would cut it off in a fit of pique-”

He stopped himself, blinked, and then immediately added, with a warning gesture, “Don't you say a word. I wasn't furious at the moment, it was a perfectly considered choice-”

“I never doubted it,” she laughed. “You look all the better for it - your judgment is impeccable.”

She kissed his newly-trimmed beard.

“Mm- you might as well enjoy it before I'm down a tooth,” he said, a little grimly. “Growing prettier by the hour around here, we are-”

“Is it visible when you smile? The tooth you’re going to - lose I mean-” she asked between kisses.

“I believe so, yes. The obvious solution is not to smile-“

“Oh, don’t you dare-”

“I’m trying to convince myself that it could be far worse, but I can’t say I’m enjoying the prospect,” he grumbled. “I had rather hoped that any marks this left on me would come from you.”

Elizabeth nipped him on the ear.

“Like that-?”

“It’s a start-“

“Mm, what more can I do for you?”

“I’ll let you have the damned earring,” he relented. “Dangling, if it should please you.”

“Do you know what I love,” Elizabeth murmured into his ear, continuing to tease his hair and press kisses along his throat.  “I love that I do not have to talk about things at all for you to you lie here and think of them anyway and then you acquiesce just because it is weighing on your soul that you did not already.”

“That's- I don't do that,” he scoffed, a little too automatically.

“Oh, don’t you?”

Elizabeth’s hand crept up his thigh.

“No, I don't think I- I don't-”

“I think you do,” said Elizabeth, toying with his waistband.  “I think it sincerely pains you to withhold anything from me.”

“I had a thought earlier-” he blurted.

“Let’s have it.”

“When you meant to promote me- I nearly suggested that- you should mark me as your own, as so many of them have been marked as pirates because of me-”

“With what-”

“I don't know- a knife, probably-”

“That sounds messy,” she said dubiously.

“I would rather that than a mandatory public humiliation,” he countered.

“Which was already discarded as an idea, yeah,” said Elizabeth, stubborn and somewhat injured that he would throw that back in her face.

“I know- oh, no, darling, I didn't forget-”

“Well, now that a mandatory public humiliation is off the table, you needn’t stress yourself pressing for a mutilation in its place. James, this is really unsatisfactory pillow talk.”

“It's not terribly different from having a sweetheart's name tattooed, is it not?”

“Then do that instead?”

“There are too many Elizabeths in the world,” he retorted, “and frankly I have seen too many tattoos sloughed off, which I will not describe. And darling-”

“Swann,” she insisted.  “I think it should be Swann.”

James smiled- mouth resolutely closed, but nonetheless.

“A sort of crest-”

“I wanted to get a tattoo, of a swan flying,” she admitted wistfully.  “Through gates, perhaps.  I don’t imagine it will look like anything but arrogance to most people -”

“...we’ll share it, then,” he said, immediately understanding. “For him.”

She smiled. “I would like that, if - you would.” She hesitated.  “If you think it’s wise - sloughing, really?”

“...yes,” he said. “But I’m certain if the needle were heated each pass, it might not end so badly.”

“Well,” she said doubtfully. “When we are successful and have the money to have it done properly - then I say we will.”

“I would consider that a great honor,” he said as he tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear.

She rolled her eyes, but it was a poor concealment of her smile.

“It is a pity you can't do it yourself,” James admitted.

Elizabeth laughed, but it did not fail to cover her surprise.  “James,” she said incredulously.

“I trust you more than most. Certainly more than I trust that lot out there-”

“My drawing was never that good,” she said, mollified.  “Anyway, we’ll go to someone proper when we do it, what do you take me for?  If you’re going to get tattooed you ought to get someone good.”

“I know,” he said. “Though I do enjoy the thought of looking at something and knowing it was your hand that placed it.”

“I’ll pierce your ear tomorrow,” she said decisively.  “I know there is some instrument for it at the Claire’s.”

Despite everything, this still took him by such surprise that his mouth went slack.

“I- all right. As you wish.”

“James,” she said, now exasperated.

“I didn't say no-”

“It’s your ear, if you don’t want it then it won’t be done-”

“It is difficult, at times, to adjust to how quickly all of this has happened,” he admitted. “I don't wish it otherwise, but there are moments when I struggle to recognize my own reflection. That's all.”

“Yes, I suppose the loss of that wig is aggrieving,” she snorted, before recalling that James had been in that uniform since he was a child. To her credit, she looked remorseful before he had to say anything.  “I’m sorry. I forget sometimes you have actually lost something.”

“Truth be told, I’m not yet quite used to having to think about any of this. I feel as though I’m fumbling through it, blindfolded and leaning on your arm.”

“Well, truth be told, I don’t feel any differently,” she challenged him.

“...I meant rather specifically physically,” he said awkwardly. “I live in hope of that solving everything from the outside in.”

“I wish,” she said bitterly, and then hesitated, before plunging forward with more apology in her voice than any other sentiment, “I wish after all of the years you spent waiting for me, you were happier to have me.”

“Having you is the part of this I am most pleased by,” James insisted.

“It seems to be no compensation,” said Elizabeth with a dissatisfied, crooked smile.

“I always imagined that I would be to some degree providing for you,” James admitted. “It seems an injustice that I am not able to.”

Elizabeth met his eyes, about to make out his insecurity and his tender regard for her even in the soft, dimmed lighting provided by the glow of a bedside lamp - it seemed foolish to think of it as their bedside lamp, when they would be here for so short a while.  She felt again the breach between them - she would not have even thought of this as a factor to influence his feelings about their relationship - and the uncomfortable stab of guilt she felt knowing this was something positive to her, but a hardship for him.  She wondered if their relationship would survive it, or end as hers and Will’s had.  James wanted her love to be as pure and reckless as it had been when she had given it to Will Turner, but she knew she could never love like that again.  

“I did not want you to provide for me,” she said softly.  “What you wanted with me before… those things were the reasons I did not love you.”

She spoke like she knew it would hurt, and she was sorry.

“I would still feel… better, perhaps, with the knowledge of being able to reciprocate your protection-”

“You protect me,” she whispered, pressing his hand over her heart.

“Not as well as I would like,” he said, with a sad smile.

“As well as I require, then.”

“Mm. I hope I can do better by you sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t want the prestige or the income of a commodore in the Royal Navy,” said Elizabeth gently, bringing his hand to her lips now.  “James Norrington. I just want you.”

James closed his eyes with a flinch, but they stayed shut even as his brows unknit themselves and his face relaxed. He slowly unfurled his kissed fingers and turned them to touch her cheek, rounding under her chin. He took a deep breath and exhaled just as slowly, and then opened his eyes again.

He smiled, only briefly forgetting to keep his mouth closed to hide his swollen gums and loose tooth, and kissed her.

Elizabeth straddled him for better leverage, but did not escalate things, beyond holding him snugly to her, sliding her fingers back and forth through his hair.  At this length, to glide her fingers through it took a luxuriously long while, and it still curled, too.

“I really like this,” she broke the kiss to whisper to him, with a little laugh as though at her absurdity.

“Oh,” he said, a little breathlessly. “Oh, good. Thank you.”

“I’ve liked it growing out,” of course she had, “and I liked it long, too, when we first arrived here, but I think this-”

She had to pause and catch herself, following her hand as she tucked hair behind his ear and glided down his jawline. She was not wholly unaware of what she did; she distracted herself deliberately and let him see it.  It was indeed merely a reflection of what he did sometimes with her; she knew how that made her feel, and wanted him to know she felt the same.

“- you’ve certainly found a length that suits you… Though it is not wholly even in the back; I can trim that, if you like.”

“Is it? I made something of an effort to avoid dwelling on that. I’ll let you.”

“I doubt anyone but me will ever notice, so if you don’t care, I won’t endeavor to.”

“Oh, you cannot tempt me with the idea of a little reciprocal doting and then take it away-”

“To be very frank, it is now a rather late hour, and there are better things I’d like to dote on…”

“Of course. I’m in no rush…”

She resumed the kiss.

“Mm- be gentle, love-” he admonished her, with a bright laugh.

“Your poor teeth,” she responded with a laugh of her own, and teased him with her tongue.

“If you push it out while we’re kissing, I shall have to leave the country-”

“I don’t know what country we’re in. I declare it my country, and you are not allowed to leave it,” she murmured, pushing him onto his back again.

“Be gentle, then,” he repeated, though in a softer murmur now, as he reached up to tuck her hair back.

“Does my love satisfy you?” Elizabeth whispered to him through a veil of kisses.  “The way that I love.  Is it going to be enough?”

“Mm- more than that. You overwhelm me sometimes, sweetheart-”

“I mean we sort of want different things. I just want to know if you think it’s going to be enough in spite of that...”

Her fingers traced over his cheek with longing.  To be with someone and still not know if they were there was a new kind of agony for her.

James gazed guilelessly up from the pillow at her.

“You have always been enough, Elizabeth.”

She smiled at him, but there was still pain in it.  

“Well, then,” she said, and kissed him into submission.

#potcsuggestions #pl: h34v3nlie måll #ch: firing squad #ch: her majesty if you're nasty #norribeth #long post

[bardichealing]

Little Things part 2

So for some reason my post ‘Little Things’ has been going around like crazy. Whatever, it’s not the worst thing I’ve written on this hellsite and the message is important. But it works the other way around, too. Little things can make life better, but they can also cause an awful lot of hurt.

Last week I had a real doozy of a fight with my family. My father, who does all the cooking, decided I’d put on too much weight and he would cut my meals down. Not great that he was doing it without discussing it with me, but generally reasonable since I’m not able to be as active and a side effect of my medication is weight gain.

Except he went too far.

My dad has never had a weight problem and has piled plates. My mum is actually trying to lose weight (having gained, I’d be satisfied just not gaining any more right now) and has smaller but reasonable portions - enough to leave her feeling like she’s eaten and doesn’t want to snack but not so much she ever feels nearly full. He started giving me portions a bit smaller than her and they started creeping down. Mum and I both spoke to him and told him portions the same or slightly smaller than hers would do. He got better at it.

Then last week he started rapidly decreasing them again until it came to a head on Thursday. He had a mountain of food, mum had a reasonable diet portion. I had three mouthfuls. He hadn’t even cooked less - just given himself the extra.

The most important point - this was my favourite meal.

I mean my absolute favourite. The one I would ask for if I needed to ask for a final meal. It’s a version of spaghetti carbonara that I have never seen made outside my family. Instead of a thin cream sauce, the spaghetti is boiled to al dente then everything - spaghetti, bacon, mushroom, onion, and egg - is all flash stir fried together. The spaghetti comes out coated in just barely scrambled egg and bacon grease. It’s decidedly unhealthy but it tastes So. Good. And he rarely makes it. We’re talking MAYBE three times a year. It’s a huge treat for me, especially given that he normally makes the same meals repetitively over a two or three week period.

I left the table in tears. Clearly this was an indication my father had judged me too fat to be allowed to eat. Having it be my favourite meal was just an added jab. I considered calling a cab to take me for a takeaway. I considered skipping lunch every day in a bid to lose weight faster. I considered stopping eating altogether. None of those were healthy thoughts. I know that and I didn’t act on them. But they were chasing round my head while my stomach ROARED that I had given it just enough food that it knew it was hungry.

Mum tried to come up and comfort me, but I wasn’t for it. She had nothing to apologise for and if she was here instead of him, it meant he didn’t think he had anything to apologise for. She shouted at me. I shouted back. She screamed at him. I screamed at him. He yelled back. Eventually I got an apology and a promise it wouldn’t happen again. And a promise we’d have carbonara again this week.

Dad is very rigid in his meal planning. Sunday’s are a roast, Monday’s are something (usually a curry) made with the leftovers of the roast, Tuesdays are meat, Wednesday’s are pasta; Thursday’s are leftovers from the freezer, Fridays are fish, and Saturday’s are a ready meal or takeaway so he’s not cooking. We only had pasta last Thursday because his usual Thursday evening meeting was swapped to Wednesday so we swapped leftovers and pasta. So I was sure tonight would be carbonara.

Nope. Haggis lasagna. Which was very nice. But it also means a broken promise. It means something I was looking forward to was taken away without warning.

When you’re chronically ill, you lose so much. Things you took for granted, you can no longer do. I’m not driving because I don’t trust my concentration and don’t want to cause an accident. I can’t concentrate to read a book or my friends fics. I can’t take my dogs long walks - I can’t even stay standing in a queue for long. So small pleasures, little treats, mean so much. And taking them away hurts more than it should.

I don’t know when I’ll have my spaghetti carbonara again. I’d say maybe my birthday, but it’s a Saturday so I’ll be lucky to be asked what kind of takeaway I want (Chinese, always). My mum turns 60 that week so it will be all about her that week anyway. I desperately want it. I’d cook it myself but just scrambling one egg for lunch for me drains me. Cooking a full meal for three people would be beyond me. And it won’t make up for the broken promise. If that didn’t matter, why would giving me portions enough to feel like I’d actually eaten a meal matter?

I know in my head that in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter and I have a lot to be grateful for, but it hurts. When you don’t feel you have much to look forward to, taking it away leaves you with nothing. And that’s the worst feeling of all.

#chronic illness #families

[tranxendance]

Must-watch Super Best Friends LPs: A curated list

So, I tried to get a friend of mine into bestfriends when he was in active service and didn’t have much time to sit and watch youtube. While I think you should probably watch all of the bestfriends content, aint nobody got time for that, and there are certain LPs that are just better ones. Here’s a list of what I consider to be the best SBFP lets plays. There won’t be any ‘Matt’s toybox’ or one-offs, only full LPs.

Predator: Concrete Jungle - Originator of Jerry the Predator, the very first bestfriends OC. Also I really like the Predator so this trash game getting ripped to shreds by the anti-hype machine makes me feel good. https://youtu.be/0wF6r-JRTvQ

Eternal Darkness - The climax of the very first Shitstorm of Scariness. Genesis of the Insanity Shotgun, marking out about recognizing Metal Gear Solid voice actors, INSANITY EFFECTS and freaking out about the bathtub scare despite knowing it was coming. https://youtu.be/lYRVeFkTvCM

Silent Hill: Homecoming - First half of the Downcoming series. ‘MY HOUSE!’ ‘Why is the knife the best weapon? Just do knife combos to them, thats survival horror’ https://youtu.be/GLgN5WSiiX4

Silent Hill: Downpour - Second half of the Downcoming series. The first time I saw the guys play a game that was brand new at the time. Pat & Matt getting upset about the downturn of one of my and their favorite series. The famous Axe Throw that launched a career is in this one too I believe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5ofoIeb8wI&list=PLAD720396A1870C8E

Resident Evil 2 - Earliest recorded footage of Pat’s stand CRAZY TALK where he claims to know a thing or be an expert and is proven unequivocably wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cgbuv3cB1Q&list=PLB8826287748EFE7C

Final Fight: Streetwise - What happens when you take a classic beat em up and try to make it cool and modern with lots of Slipknot music? It ages fucking poorly that’s what. ‘I got a receipt for my Tatsu’ ‘I’d like to return this shoryureppa’, Live footage of the bestfriends souls leaving their body in The Stiff boss fight, Some actually decent writing and lines such as ‘Feeling good about potentially feeling good’ which Matt will quote for years to come. https://youtu.be/HnRNyfzKLL8

Man vs Wild - Not so much a must-watch as it’s just the boys in their element, playing shovelware, deliberately failing QTEs to laugh at how pitiful it looks when you do, making fun of people’s accents, and much more. Indicative of the bestfriends style of sort of mst3king videogames. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1NGPAOrE80&list=PL57hJfweW_2s2jyxas78kIib9M3jGduU8

Heavy Rain - The very first game played in the Sadness trilogy. ‘Oh no, I made ze bad game’, more fucking up of QTEs when it’d be funny, Detective Shelby’s PI Gumball technique after shooting thirty rounds out of a handgun without reloading, FUTURE GLASSES, and other classics. Woolie will play this himself on a livestream, many years later, which is also a good watch. https://youtu.be/Qe-SpjInztQ

Indigo Prophecy - The first game of the Sadness trilogy, though it was played later than Heavy Rain. Space kung-fu, zombie sex with a lady you barely know, your choices don’t matter!, Slagging off of David Cage intensifies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YacYbUC_FmQ&list=PL57hJfweW_2sOt01sX9TtQRkzv5RS231f

Charles Barkley’s Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden - Seems to be originally selected as a ‘ha ha, we’re playing a bad and stupid game to laugh at it’ but then discovering it’s legitimately awesome despite being frankly ridiculous. If you can’t play the game yourself, this is a very good substitute. https://youtu.be/xNc9R1zfwM0

Beyond: Two Souls - The third game of the Sadness trilogy. David Cage creeping on Ellen Paige in real life and making her be naked in his game, E MO SHUNS, having feelings but not knowing where to put them, ‘I’ll be your Stand! ORARARARARARA’, Underwater chinese ghost base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA_VUoePgrc&list=PL57hJfweW_2ulXc25A-LxxHXMPqLOwrsf

Deadly Premonition - Swery65′s magnum opus, if only he could’ve put bicycles in the game. He totally didn’t watch Twin Peaks you guys. ‘QUIIIIIIINT!’, ‘Stinky agent’, radio fast travel stock tire screech sfx, monkey noise squirrels and a weird amount of attention paid to food. Matt named his pet cat Zach due to this game, so it’s an extra important part of the bestfriends lore. https://youtu.be/dsbfmIqP-H8

Disaster: Day of Crisis - Metal Gear Solid except the giant robots are natural disasters. Gotta get revenge on the volcano for killing my buddy. Eating watermelons while on fire. Don’t forget to take your stami-nas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sx8gqSjkMY&list=PL57hJfweW_2t-vHWWeqjY2SKH4vaqotZ6

Yakuza 4 - My first exposure to the Yakuza game series and actually a good starting point for people that don’t know anything about it. The hype, badassery, and hilarity in all its glory. Who’s ready for a shirtless fight on top of Millennium Tower? https://youtu.be/xOKx_79BEhY

Prison Break - More shovelware where they fail stealth sequences a million times, fail QTEs because it’s hilarious, and can’t show too much violence because it’s a T-rated game. https://youtu.be/TsjGGGSZabA

Resident Evil 4 HD - Get hype for suplexing priests, El Gigante, Doctor Salvatore, Isn’t that Mexican spanish not Spanish Spanish? Commando shit and the RE movie, Oops Ashley is dead again, Pat is bad at puzzles and crazy talk activates. https://youtu.be/qsazQp4VlI0

Silent Hill 2 - Everything is illness, or else its condoms! The nurses are TOO STRONG!, the boys actually just enjoying a game and (mostly) being good at it for once.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsYYIjaNPP8&list=PL57hJfweW_2vMmw0MLZp8I16DA-Qev8ec

Resident evil Revelations 2 - Re vuh lay uh tons!, Wait how’d a non mainline resi game get this good?, MOIRA MC TAGGART MC MURPHY, another co-op LP where Matt’s actual role in the game mechanics is to point out ammo and health items that Pat missed. https://youtu.be/THfgNlcNa98

Resident Evil 3 - Jill Valentine’s not actually last escape, Crazy Talk activates several times, Shitting on Hunter-D’s, being a huge coward constantly like the hero of RE brad vickers. https://youtu.be/G5pXyRhs7FM

Ride to Hell - Legendarily bad game played by canadian losers that make fun of it constantly. Source of just SO MANY bestfriends gifs including casual priest drownings, getting shot during cutscenes, and Qui-gon chi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEw04pKaVs4&list=PL57hJfweW_2srGztN1iedcFd-BV5X1Ram

Parasite Eve - It’s time for Aya Breakowski to GET HOT. It’s a squaresoft game all right, dogs with sniper rifles, finishing downloading arcana heart, and the heroest of hero cops willingly lighting on fire to give you a gun. https://youtu.be/dHY5ZBSHzyw

Danganronpa - Ultra Despair Girls - First recorded instance of being incredibly hype and getting into the cool pop art aesthetic, komaeda memes, and then all hype leaving our body, and out of context shouting KILL THOSE SHIT KIDS! https://youtu.be/qYtYp4oWBhU

Life is Strange - Liam’s rivalry with another wimpy boy, Hotdogman: Who is he?, You sacrificed everyone for your Ship? Are you Griffith?, and rewinding time to fuck with people for kicks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XZ7-wFLnfI&list=PL57hJfweW_2u1mKS5UFNgx-voVAvTlkT9

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain - Built-up hype from over one thousand years of waiting is collectively released. Psycho Mantis is OP, let the legend come back to life, GREATEST SOLDIER IN THE WORLD BIG BOSS, D-dog is the cutest and bestest of boys, and famously awkward jeep ride. https://youtu.be/505vXWYkxcw

Afro Samurai - Perhaps the shovelest of ware ever played on the channel. It’s very short, only 3 parts, about 90 minutes of gameplay, something that everyone should be super hype about but ends up being the most shitted on game since perhaps one of the Sadness games. https://youtu.be/wIXqEulMTIo

Resident Evil Zero HD - Get hyped for Oven Man mk2, math puzzles, getting pissed off at Eliminators, Rebecca! God dammit Rebecca! I love youuuuu rebeccaaaaaa, Leech Man, and playing dress-up. https://youtu.be/Mhnthhluh70

Metal Wolf Chaos - Giant robots and engrish, more than your body can handle! AMERICA!!!! Richard Hawke! OK, Lets PARTEEEEEEEY! Tons of references they’ll be using until the end of time https://youtu.be/Mhnthhluh70

Naruto: The Broken Bond - ‘Wait, this game is actually good?’ and then three parts later oops no its not. Second instance of being super hyped at first and then all joy slowly being sucked out of the boys’ body. Do your rasengan, even when you’re not playing as Naruto! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo92m-rfeHA&list=PL57hJfweW_2uIIqa3HTcbsvM5LO1ObM_5

The Punisher - Rice cookers, My family-family-family!, guessing Frank’s one-liners, violent safety PSAs, and interrogating the boat https://youtu.be/wznGw9fJNCc

Disaster Report - ‘Is this Disaster day of crisis’ sequel?’, The honeycomb-caisonne method, press triangle to HEY!, be mean to your waifu, and abandon your friends like a hero would do. https://youtu.be/UYiwWU8EZcU

Final Fantasy X - Matt talks about Lulu’s boobs a lot, BLEETSBOLL, Wakka the racist, kimahri push, Finding all the memes possible, Hype Cactaur!, ‘I’ll pay you to fuck off, okay?’, and punting a boss over the horizon. A long watch and the boys are kinda bad at the game but good for the patient. https://youtu.be/qpZeMkthdZ8

Omikron: The Nomad Soul - The secret first entry of the Sadness Trilogy, ‘Get in the slider!’, Blackface Boyz, The real final boss is david cage!, getting trapped in bug purgatory, yes this is how you should honor the memory David Bowie by playing this game, Using the power of all three bestfriends to beat the game, and having no consequences for failure right up until THE MOST CONSEQUENCES. https://youtu.be/691RrF9pnaU

Silent Hill 3 -  No talking during the cut scenes, beef jerky, a detective does a Jerry Seinfeld on Silent Hill by accident, and ‘It’s a metaphor for dicks/childbirth!‘

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4wERZf6bns&list=PL57hJfweW_2v34HsPK-4Hfqmkb22zjBWC

Tony Hawk’s Underground - Woolie lives the skateboarder life he never could for real. ‘Won’t they notice that it’s not Eric Sparrow on the video when they see a clearly black man doing that jump?’, Eric Sparrow is basically up there with Griffith for villains the bestfriends hate the most, and ‘I can do a grind all day’ https://youtu.be/3HLPS_nwHG8

Parasite Eve 2 - More of Breakowski and getting HOT, ‘This is basically a survival horror game’, The dog from Independance Day must survive or else you’re on the bad ending! https://youtu.be/JedQqaXdWLc

LA Noire - The big one, the one I always suggest for new bestfriends watchers as being emblematic of their style and sense of humor and weaknesses as players. Woolie can’t navigate this map, ‘Sometimes you’ve gotta shake the tree and see what falls out’, Shotgun man wrecks your shit!, making noises to go along with the faces that the characters are making, ‘Pedophilia? That’s a free pass in my town sir’, Stealing the worst possible cars because they thought it’d be cool, forgetting the controls for every single fistfight sequence, Cole Phelps super cop!, and LP Funsies. https://youtu.be/-bPqjD_zg5g

Policenauts - Kojima’s game from when he was allowed to work on things besides Metal Gear. It’s definitely white blood and not anything sexual, SHOOTINGU SEQUENCE, Holy crap our main character is a bigoted piece of shit!, Figure out the bomb puzzle!, We’re definitely not Riggs and Murtagh to the point where Woolie says ‘I’m gettin too old for this shit’ about 70 times, and the uncomfortable truth of cloning. https://youtu.be/kWcecAHiOys

Dead Space 2- Notable mostly for me as Dead Space 2 was the first bestfriends video I ever saw back when they were on Machinima, so I was quoting Space Rave and asking Matt if he needed a blankey to fight the monsters. https://youtu.be/1QzY-TjFGFI

Resident Evil 7 - We hate the molded as an enemy type, OOOH GOD DAMMIT JACK, He fucking exploded into goo!, What was your plan?, I can’t shoot the granny, We definitely used a pump action shotgun in world war 2 (Actually yes we did, Matt), Shadow puzzles, that part of a lady is where all the wasps shoot out, and What that guy doesn’t look like Chris Redfield who is this impostor?! https://youtu.be/SyAZ2-nijDE

Def Jam: Fight for NY - The introduction of Woolie’s OC: Rage beats up rappers, steals their girlfriends, and doesn’t understand intimacy, The full might of Matt’s hatred for Bless is brought out, and they talk about the Aki engine’s contributions to humanity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lry0SYYkvas&list=PL57hJfweW_2tWHTvp2ESXbzp1-jh6YJMQ

#super best friends play #youtube reccommendations #mod ramblings #sorta original content #youtube #long post

[gunhandsam]

You Always Remember Your First

"A while ago, Emma and I were talking as we sat about her place, perhaps curled up in bed and just sharing in the simple joy of finding a human being that one could tolerate being around.  Well, our place.  I still haven't fully made that connection of... sharing a home with another person.  I recognize the shack as home, yes, but I don't fully see it as our home.  And... 'the shack', it sounds so dismissive, no?  I ought to come up with a better name for it, it sounds like I'm speaking ill all the while not being willing to trade it for a suite at the Ultra-Luxe.  Emma's home is where I discovered there could be more to life than murder, wandering, alcohol abuse, more murdering, buying company for the evening, or what passed as evening at the time anyway, followed by more wandering."

"Anyway, as we sat or lay there, whichever it was, she asked me if I had plans on moving my stuff in, setting up ourselves up for a more permanent living situation.  I of course was nervous, as I've never even considered it, but now that it seemed that not only was I staying in the Mojave for a while, but she hadn't grown tired of me either... well, giving it some thought can't do any harm, right?  I've got the stuff down in the hole in the hills, and some in a room in Novac. Even got a little bit of kit up in Jacobstown stashed away in one of the rooms well away from the locals.  I don't like disturbing them when I pass through, but they were nice enough to let me have a place to rest in exchange for running off some trouble makers a while ago.  So yeah, you could say I'm spread out a bit."

"I plan to consolidate things, sell off what I don't need, even give to those that need more than I.  For example I've got plans for all the armor I've carted into Novac; gonna strip it down to scrap metal and lug it on over to a particularly sweet repair girl.  Last I saw her, she seemed like she could stand to have some kindness in her life.  Anyway, the whole "Why don't you move your things in, babe?" thing.  I've been more or less living out of my bag, using whatever it is I've packed and crammed in there, but for all my shuffling things back and forth, there's one thing I've never taken out of there, that one special thing I always have on me wherever I am."

He produced a slender object, wrapped in a delicate cloth worn thin from years of being jostled around during his travels.  Sam placed it on the table with a quiet reverence, and gently unraveled the cloth as if he was terrified the whole thing might turn to dust in his hands.

"You know that saying; you always remember your first?  First kiss, first love, first awkward teenage grope, first time getting laid, first near death experience, that kinda thing?  Yeah."  He smiled down at the object on the table, a simple fork, missing one of its tines.  It was well worn, most of the shine had given way to a smooth patina, parts of it pockmarked with rust.

"I remember the first time I killed someone quiet vividly.  Which is impressive, considering the kind of life I lead.  People come and go, usually go by way of gunshot or grenade, or fade from memory as nights of heavier drinking wash away those memories.  But it's even more impressive, I think, that I was nine years old at the time, and can still see it clear as day.  It was summer, during those 'dog days', when you just want to curl up and wait it out. But hanging around a house made mostly of metal down by a river in a sticky Virginia summer didn't have much appeal, so I'd go out looking for somewhere cool and safe to nap or read.  There was a little hollow, carved into a hill by the river, I'd curl up in there and watch the water go by.  Wasn't far from home, just in case a mirelurk or something showed up and I had to run home for somebody to kill the thing.

He shuddered, stifling a nervous grin.

"I hate mirelurks.  Anyway, that day I heard someone rooting around in one of the piles we kept all the scrap stuff.  Not in that kind of casual but urgent, "Where'd I put the damn Nuka bottles?" way, but this was more careless rooting around in the garbage.  I shimmied out of the hole and poked my head around, just in time to see one of the kids in town launch himself out of the pile and start booking it for town like his life depended on it.  The dude digging in the garbage looked pretty mad, then saw me peeking out at him, and jabbed a finger right at me.

"There's one!  Nab him!"  

"Couple other dudes showed up, coming around one of the vacants too dangerous to renovate and were making a beeline right for me.  I, being a child, chose to burrow as deep into the hole as I could get and expect one of the adults in town to step in and sort this out.  Nobody but these really dirty men showed up, and they kept going on about some place called Paradise Falls.  I didn't know where or what that was, but if these guys were from there, I knew I didn't want to go.  The hole was pretty tiny, just big enough for me and a small day pack, but one of the guys managed to shove his upper half inside and was grabbing at me.  I had brought lunch with me that day, so all I was armed with was a fork and a pretty dull spoon.  Fork it was, then.  And in his throat it went.  I was trying for his eye, but I was terrified and the guy was wriggling around a lot trying to grab me, adrenaline dumps do funny things to your coordination.  The fork kinda slid over the guy's skin at first, but all the thrashing around he was doing worked to my advantage, and he ended up skewering himself.  He didn't die right away, of course, and I'm wrenching on the thing as much as I can to pull it out of him cause I'm just a kid and I'm scared senseless and I just want him to leave me alone.  So for all the flailing he's doing and all the wiggling and pulling on my part, I end up tearing his throat open.  Now the blood is really flowing, and he's making this weird raspy whistle noise as his other hand shot past his side and into the hole, and it's clutching a pistol.  I figured that yeah, this is it.  I'm gonna die here cause this man is going to shoot me, so I just wrench the hell out of the fork, and the teeth must've caught him just right or something, cause I felt something pop inside and there's this really weird looking white tube starting to slide out of the hole in his neck."

"He dropped the gun and slapped at his neck with both hands while blood is just gushing all over the place, and I've got my feet on his shoulders, trying to push this gibbering bastard back out of the hole and just away from me, but I keep slipping in his blood and the dirt and I can't really get the leverage I need.  Eventually someone outside started tugging on his legs and pulled him out, and they're talking about that Paradise place.  And... I don't know, just something, a gut feeling, voice in my head, whatever you wanna call it, told me to pick up that pistol and pop the first thing that shows up.  The first thing being a similar man, all dirty and foul and angry eyed, dressed like the dude I just skewered and lips peeling back to reveal a mouth of broken yellowed and blackened teeth, and it all just came together for me.  All those lessons my mom had given me about shooting; both hands on the gun, firm grip, thumbs stacked on each other and pointing forward, pad of the index finger on the trigger, target is fuzzy but the front sight is clear as can be, center mass, keep breathing, and squeeze.

It's not pleasant, letting off a shot in a confined space, but I still hit the guy where I wanted.  It was one of those Chinese pistols, nine mil. Weird how you remember those little details.  A nine at close range tends to zip right through whatever it hits, but I tagged something important, cause that guy dropped to the dirt and went awful pale in a hurry.  His chest didn't get red, either, something black started seeping out of him.  His buddy started shouting and swearing, and just lined himself right up as the guy I had shot did, so he got it just the same."

"Everything was real quiet after that.  My ears were ringing from both the blast of the pistol and the adrenaline swirling in my veins, but nobody else came around for what seemed like hours, even though it was like ten minutes, tops.  That kid that ran home came back with some of the adults, and my mom was with 'em, clutching her sledgehammer and by the looks of things, really wanting to shatter some bones.  She was first in finding me as I crawled out of the hole and over the dead men, my front all slicked with blood and skin devoid of color.  I think she thought I was hurt, cause that's when she got really wound up and was waving one of the two town doctors over.  I said, 'No no, I'm fine mom!  They didn't hurt me!', so she starts going over me making sure I don't have any extra holes or that I'm missing something important, but aside from few scrapes on my legs, I was right as could be.  Shaken up, of course, but physically fine.  By then more folks had shown up, about six, maybe seven other people, and they're all kinda staring at me, hands over their mouths.  My mom asked me what I did, and I simply told her that I did what she told me to do.  She gave me this kinda funny look, like she wasn't sure if she should be proud or terrified, so it came out as both, and we went on home to get me cleaned up.

"Later that day, I told her I left my bag out there and it had some of my books in it, and I wanted to go get it.  She knew how much reading meant to me, so she agreed, but insisted she come with me, and even rounded up a couple of the better shots in town, just in case there was trouble.  They all stood outside the hole, and my mom tossed in a sheet so I wouldn't get dirty again, and told me to make it quick.  I scurried on inside and got my stuff, and I was started to back out when I saw the fork jammed in the dirt.  I don't know why I took it, I just did.  Like something inside me was saying "Hey.  That is important.  Keep it.", so I did.  Slipped it in my bag, then washed all the dirt and crud from it before I went to sleep.  I always kept it close, I suppose I felt like it was my special thing to keep the bad people away.  Mom had her sledgehammer and her dad's hunting rifle, some of the folks in town had their own special weapons too, it just seemed normal to me."

Sam smiled at the fork and slowly ran a finger up and down the tines before wrapping it back up, taking his time as he neatly folded and pulled the cloth in place, and placed his palms on top of it.

"You always remember your first."

#Sam mom

[anettrolikova]

When I saw this patterned irrationality, which was so extreme, and I had no theory or anything to deal with it, but I could see that it was extreme, and I could see that it was patterned, I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading, but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life.

if there’s anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa.

recognition of the power of what psychologists call reinforcement and economists call incentives.

People thinks that their relatives are innocent when the reality is usually different than they think. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it’s bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it’s a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.

a lot of the way the world is run, including most law firms and a lot of other places, they’ve still got a cost-plus percentage of cost system.

human nature, with its version of what I call incentive-caused bias, causes this terrible abuse - people you marry & invite to your family.

there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way, and that is that people who create things like cash registers, which make most behavior hard, are some of the effective saints of our civilization.

If you read the psychology texts, you will find that if they’re 1,000 pages long, there’s one sentence.

the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort.

the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard.

if you make public disclosure of your conclusion, you’re pounding it into your own head.

It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.

The Chinese brainwashing system,They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they’d slowly build. That worked way better than torture.

in economics we wouldn’t have money without the role of so-called secondary reinforcement, which is a pure psychological phenomenon demonstrated in the laboratory.

Pavlov the dog salivated when the bell rang. 

3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company. They want to be associated with every wonderful image, heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with Presidents’ funerals and so forth.

Persian messenger syndrome- He didn’t hear one damn thing he didn’t want to hear. People knew that it was bad for the messenger to bring Bill Paley things he didn’t want to hear. Well that means that the leader gets in a cocoon of unreality, and this is a great big enterprise, and boy, did he make some dumb decisions in the last 20 years.

nobody wants to bring the bad news to the executives up the line. But here’s a few hundred million dollars you thought you had that you don’t. And it’s much safer to act like the Persian messenger who goes away to hide rather than bring home the news of the battle lost.

ordinarily there’s a correlation between price and value, then you have an information inefficiency. And so when you raise the price, the sales go up relative to your competitor. That happens again and again and again

Where you see in business just perfectly horrible results from psychologically rooted tendencies is in accounting.

people who have loose accounting standards are just inviting perfectly horrible behavior in other people.

an institution that gets sloppy accounting commits a real human sin, and it’s also a dumb way to do business

Theses 6 principles are reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. “I think the power of persuasion would be the greatest super power of all time.” Persuasion as a superpower is very much within reach.

three times the success by just going through the little ask-for-a-lot-and-back-off.

the human mind, on a subconscious level, can be manipulated that way and you don’t know it, I always use the phrase, “You’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

you tend to act in the way that other people expect, and that’s reciprocation if you think about the way society is organized.

what you think may change what you do, but perhaps even more important, what you do will change what you think. And you can say, “Everybody knows that.” I want to tell you I didn’t know it well enough early enough.

everybody looked at everybody else and nobody else was doing anything, and so there’s automatic social proof that the right thing to do is nothing.

the power of reinforcement, after all, you do something and the market goes up and you get paid and rewarded and applauded and what have you, meaning a lot of reinforcement, if you make a bet on a market and the market goes with you. Also, there’s social proof. I mean the prices on the market are the ultimate form of social proof, reflecting what other people think, and so the combination is very powerful.

Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

taking advantage of your contrast type troubles and your sensory apparatus

people are manipulating you all day long on this contrast phenomenon.

If you throw a frog into very hot water, the frog will jump out. But if you put the frog in room temperature water and just slowly heat the water up, the frog will die there.”

If it comes to you in small pieces, you’re likely to miss, so you have to … if you’re gonna be a person of good judgment, you have to do something about this warp in your head where it’s so misleading by mere contrast.

Over influence by authority

Ordinary people subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies.

Envy/ jealousy an enormously powerful thing, and it operates to a considerable extent at a subconscious level, and anybody who doesn’t understand it is taking on defects he shouldn’t have.

Chemical dependency the tendency to distort reality so that it’s endurable.

Skinner's theory - learning is a function of change in overt behavior. Changes in behavior are the result of an individual's response to events (stimuli) that occur in the environment. ... Reinforcement is the key element in

Machines for poker and gaming computers were created by people who understands human psychology in order to ruin the society.

incentive caused bias

Once you realize that you can’t really buy your thinking down.

Availability does change behavior and cognition. If you have Coke available you will drink it all the time.

It isn’t just the lack of availability that distorts your judgment. All the things on this list distort judgment.

these psychological tendencies make things unavailable ’cause if you quickly jump to one thing and then because you’ve jumped to it, the consistency and commitment tendency makes you lock in, boom, it’s there. Number one.

You want to persuade somebody, you really tell them why. And what did we learn in lesson one? Incentives really matter. Vivid evidence really works

common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse. Then I’ve got mental and organizational confusion from the say-something syndrome.

What happens when these standard psychological tendencies combine?

the combination greatly increases power to change behavior, compared to the power of merely one tendency acting alone. Examples are: Tupperware parties. Tupperware has now made billions of dollars out of a few manipulative psychological tricks.

What you should search for in life is the combination, because the combination is likely to do you in.

Or, if you’re the inventor of Tupperware parties, it’s likely to make you enormously rich if you can stand shaving when you do it.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, a speech given in 1995 by legendary investor Charlie Munger, opened my eyes to how behavioral psychology can be applied to business and problem-solving.

Munger, for those of you who haven’t heard of him, is the irreverent partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. He’s offered us such gems as: a two-step process for making effective decisions and the work required to have an opinion.

And this talk on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is one of the best you’ll ever hear.

My nature makes me incline toward diagnosing and talking about errors in conventional wisdom. And despite years of being smoothed out by the hard knocks that were inevitable for one with my attitude, I don’t believe life ever knocked all the brashness out of the man.

… I have fallen in love with my way of laying out psychology because it has been so useful to me. And so, before I die, I want to imitate to some extent the bequest practices of three characters: the protagonist in John Bunyan’s Pilgram’s Progress, Benjamin Franklin, and my first employer, Ernest Buffett.

Munger made extensive revisions to The Psychology of Human Misjudgment in Poor Charlie’s Almanack because he “thought he could do better at eighty-one than he did more than ten years earlier when he (1) knew less and was more harried by a crowded life and (2) was speaking from rough notes instead of revising transcripts.”

Transcript

I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment, and Lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it. I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with. When I saw this patterned irrationality, which was so extreme, and I had no theory or anything to deal with it, but I could see that it was extreme, and I could see that it was patterned, I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading, but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life.

Fairly late in life, I stumbled into this book, Influence, by a psychologist named Bob Cialdini, who became a super tenured hotshot on a 2,000 person faculty at a very young age. And he wrote this book, which has now sold 300 odd thousand copies, which is remarkable for somebody. Well, it’s an academic book aimed at a popular audience that filled in a lot of holes in my crude system. When those holes had filled in, I thought I had a system that was a good working tool, and I’d like to share that one with you.

And I came here because of behavioral economics. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it? And I think it’s fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved, and so if there’s anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa. So I think the people that are working on this fringe between economics and psychology are absolutely right to be there, and I think there’s been plenty wrong over the years.

Well, let me romp through as much of this list as I have time to get through.

24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment

First. Under recognition of the power of what psychologists call reinforcement and economists call incentives. Well, you can say, “Everybody knows that.” Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes, but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.

One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The heart and soul of the integrity of the system is that all the packages have to be shifted rapidly in one central location each night. And the system has no integrity if the whole shift can’t be done fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the thing to work. And they tried moral suasion, they tried everything in the world, and finally, somebody got the happy thought that they were paying the night shift by the hour and that maybe if they paid them by the shift, the system would work better. And lo and behold, that solution worked.

Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course, when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine.

And here at Harvard, in the shadow of B.F. Skinner, there was a man who really was into reinforcement as a powerful thought, and you know, Skinner’s lost his reputation in a lot of places, but if you were to analyze the entire history of experimental science at Harvard, he’d be in the top handful. His experiments were very ingenious, the results were counterintuitive, and they were important. It is not given to experimental science to do better.

What gummed up Skinner’s reputation is that he developed a case of what I always call man-with-a-hammer syndrome, to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. And Skinner had one of the more extreme cases in the history of Academia, and this syndrome doesn’t exempt bright people. It’s just a man with a hammer and Skinner is an extreme example of that. And later, as I go down my list, let’s go back and try and figure out why people, like Skinner, get the man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

Incidentally, when I was at the Harvard Law School there was a professor, naturally at Yale, who was derisively discussed at Harvard, and they used to say, “Poor old Blanchard. He thinks declaratory judgments will cure cancer.” And that’s the way Skinner got. And not only that, he was literary, and he scorned opponents who had any different way of thinking or thought anything else was important. This is not a way to make a lasting reputation if the other people turn out to also be doing something important.

My second factor is simple psychological denial. This first really hit me between the eyes when a friend of our family had a super-athlete, super-student son who flew off a carrier in the north Atlantic and never came back, and his mother, who was a very sane woman, just never believed that he was dead. And, of course, if you turn on the television, you find the mothers of the most obvious criminals that man could ever diagnose, and they all think their sons are innocent. That’s simple psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it’s bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it’s a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.

Third. Incentive-cause bias, both in one’s own mind and that of one’s trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call agency costs. Here, my early experience was a doctor who sent bushel baskets full of normal gallbladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And with that quality control for which community hospitals are famous, about five years after he should’ve been removed from the staff, he was.

And one of the old doctors who participated in the removal was also a family friend, and I asked him, I said, “Tell me, did he think, here’s a way for me to exercise my talents,” this guy was very skilled technically, “And make a high living by doing a few maimings and murders every year, along with some frauds?” And he said, “Hell no, Charlie. He thought that the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough.”

Now that’s an extreme case, but in lesser strength, it’s present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behavior. If you make sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses, I’m 70 years old, I’ve never seen one I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth. If you want to talk about the power of incentives and the power of rationalized, terrible behavior, after the Defense Department had had enough experience with cost-plus percentage of cost contracts, the reaction of our republic was to make it a crime for the federal government to write one, and not only a crime, but a felony.

And by the way, the government’s right, but a lot of the way the world is run, including most law firms and a lot of other places, they’ve still got a cost-plus percentage of cost system. And human nature, with its version of what I call incentive-caused bias, causes this terrible abuse. And many of the people who are doing it you would be glad to have married into your family compared to what you’re otherwise going to get.

Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way, and that is that people who create things like cash registers, which make most behavior hard, are some of the effective saints of our civilization. And the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And Patterson knew that, by the way. He had a little store, and the people were stealing him blind and never made any money, and people sold him a couple of cash registers and it went to profit immediately.

And, of course, he closed the store and went into the cash register business. With results which are … And so this is a huge, important thing. If you read the psychology texts, you will find that if they’re 1,000 pages long, there’s one sentence. Somehow incentive-caused bias has escaped the standard survey course in psychology.

Fourth, and this is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency, bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.

Well, what I’m saying here is that the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort. And here again, it doesn’t just catch ordinary mortals, it catches the deans of physics. According to Max Planck, the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard.

Instead, a new guard came along that was less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. And if Max Planck’s crowd had this consistency and commitment tendency that kept their old inclusions intact in spite of disconfirming evidence, you can imagine what the crowd that you and I are part of behaves like.

And of course, if you make public disclosure of your conclusion, you’re pounding it into your own head. Many of these students that are screaming at us, you know, they aren’t convincing us, but they’re forming mental change for themselves because what they’re shouting out they’re pounding in. And I think educational institutions that create a climate where too much of that goes on are in a fundamental sense, they’re irresponsible institutions. It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.

And all these things like painful qualifying and initiation rituals, all those things, pound in your commitments and your ideas. The Chinese brainwashing system, which was for war prisoners, was way better than anybody else’s. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they’d slowly build. That worked way better than torture.

Sixth. Bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making. I never took a course in psychology, or economics either for that matter, but I did learn about Pavlov in high school biology. And the way they taught it, you know, so the dog salivated when the bell rang. So what? Nobody made the least effort to tie that to the wide world. Well, the truth of the matter is that Pavlovian association is an enormously powerful psychological force in the daily life of all of us. And, indeed, in economics we wouldn’t have money without the role of so-called secondary reinforcement, which is a pure psychological phenomenon demonstrated in the laboratory.

Practically, I’d say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company we’re the biggest share-holder. They want to be associated with every wonderful image, heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with Presidents’ funerals and so forth. When have you seen a Coca-Cola ad, and the association really works.

And all these psychological tendencies work largely or entirely on a subconscious level, which makes them very insidious. Now you’ve got Persian messenger syndrome. The Persians really did kill the messenger who brought the bad news. You think that is dead? I mean you should’ve seen Bill Paley in his last 20 years. He didn’t hear one damn thing he didn’t want to hear. People knew that it was bad for the messenger to bring Bill Paley things he didn’t want to hear. Well that means that the leader gets in a cocoon of unreality, and this is a great big enterprise, and boy, did he make some dumb decisions in the last 20 years.

And now the Persian messenger syndrome is alive and well. When I saw, some years ago, Arco and Exxon arguing over a few hundred millions of ambiguity in their North Slope treaties before a superior court judge in Texas, with armies of lawyers and experts on each side. Now this is a Mad Hatter’s tea party, two engineering-style companies can’t resolve some ambiguity without spending tens of millions of dollars in some Texas superior court? In my opinion, what happens is that nobody wants to bring the bad news to the executives up the line. But here’s a few hundred million dollars you thought you had that you don’t. And it’s much safer to act like the Persian messenger who goes away to hide rather than bring home the news of the battle lost.

Talking about economics, you get a very interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over again in a long life. You’ve got two products, suppose they’re complex, technical products. Now you’d think, under the laws of economics, that if product A costs X, if product Y costs X minus something, it will sell better than if it sells at X plus something, but that’s not so. In many cases when you raise the price of the alternative products, it’ll get a larger market share than it would when you make it lower than your competitor’s product.

That’s because the bell, a Pavlovian bell, I mean ordinarily there’s a correlation between price and value, then you have an information inefficiency. And so when you raise the price, the sales go up relative to your competitor. That happens again and again and again. It’s a pure Pavlovian phenomenon. You can say, “Well, the economists have figured this sort of thing out when they started talking about information inefficiencies,” but that was fairly late in economics that they found such an obvious thing. And, of course, most of them don’t ask what causes the information inefficiencies.

Well, one of the things that cause it is pure old Pavlov and his dog. Now you’ve got bios from Skinnerian association, operant conditioning, you know, where you give the dog a reward and pound in the behavior that preceded the dog’s getting the award. And, of course, Skinner was able to create superstitious pigeons by having the rewards come by accident with certain occurrences, and, of course, we all know people who are the human equivalents of superstitious pigeons. That’s a very powerful phenomenon. And, of course, operant conditioning really works. I mean the people in the center who think that operant conditioning is important are very much right, it’s just that Skinner overdid it a little.

Where you see in business just perfectly horrible results from psychologically rooted tendencies is in accounting. If you take Westinghouse, which blew, what, two or three billion dollars pre-tax at least loaning developers to build hotels, and virtually 100% loans? Now you say any idiot knows that if there’s one thing you don’t like it’s a developer, and another you don’t like it’s a hotel.

And to make a 100% loan to a developer who’s going to build a hotel. But this guy, he probably was an engineer or something, and he didn’t take psychology any more than I did, and he got out there in the hands of these slick salesmen operating under their version of incentive-caused bias, where any damned way of getting Westinghouse to do it was considered normal business, and they just blew it.

That would never have been possible if the accounting system hadn’t been such but for the initial phase of every transaction it showed wonderful financial results. So people who have loose accounting standards are just inviting perfectly horrible behavior in other people. And it’s a sin, it’s an absolute sin. If you carry bushel baskets full of money through the ghetto, and made it easy to steal, that would be a considerable human sin, because you’d be causing a lot of bad behavior, and the bad behavior would spread. Similarly, an institution that gets sloppy accounting commits a real human sin, and it’s also a dumb way to do business, as Westinghouse has so wonderfully proved.

Oddly enough nobody mentions, at least nobody I’ve seen, what happened with Joe Jett and Kidder Peabody. The truth of the matter is the accounting system was such that by punching a few buttons, the Joe Jetts of the world could show profits, and profits that showed up in things that resulted in rewards and esteem and every other thing that human being. Well, the Joe Jetts are always with us, and they’re not really to blame, in my judgment at least. But that bastard who created that foolish accounting system who, so far as I know, has not been flayed alive, ought to be.

Seventh. Bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect. Well here, again, Cialdini does a magnificent job at this, and you’re all going to be given a copy of Cialdini’s book. And if you have half as much sense as I think you do, you will immediately order copies for all of your children and several of your friends. You will never make a better investment.

It is so easy to be a patsy for what he calls the compliance practitioners of this life. But, at any rate, reciprocation tendency is a very, very powerful phenomenon, and Cialdini demonstrated this by running around campus, and he asked people to take juvenile delinquents to the zoo. And it was a campus, and so one in six actually agreed to do it. And after he’d accumulated a statistical output he went around on the same campus and he asked other people, he said, “Gee, would you devote two afternoons a week to taking juvenile delinquents somewhere and suffering greatly yourself to help them,” and there he got 100% of the people to say no.

But after he’d made the first request, he backed off a little, and he said, “Would you at least take them to the zoo one afternoon?” He raised the compliance rate from a third to a half. He got three times the success by just going through the little ask-for-a-lot-and-back-off.

Now if the human mind, on a subconscious level, can be manipulated that way and you don’t know it, I always use the phrase, “You’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” I mean you are really giving a lot of quarter to the external world that you can’t afford to give. And on this so-called role theory, where you tend to act in the way that other people expect, and that’s reciprocation if you think about the way society is organized.

A guy named Zimbardo had people at Stanford divide into two pieces, one were the guards and the other were the prisoners, and they started acting out roles as people expected. He had to stop the experiment after about five days. He was getting into human misery and breakdown and pathological behavior. I mean it was awesome. However, Zimbardo is greatly misinterpreted. It’s not just reciprocation tendency and role theory that caused that, it’s consistency and commitment tendency. Each person, as he acted as a guard or a prisoner, the action itself was pounding in the idea.

Wherever you turn, this consistency and commitment tendency is affecting you. In other words, what you think may change what you do, but perhaps even more important, what you do will change what you think. And you can say, “Everybody knows that.” I want to tell you I didn’t know it well enough early enough.

Eight. Now, this is a lollapalooza, and Henry Kaufman wisely talked about this, bias from over-influence by social proof, that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress. And here, one of the cases the psychologists use is Kitty Genovese, where all these people, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 of them just sort of sat and did nothing while she was slowly murdered. Now one of the explanations is that everybody looked at everybody else and nobody else was doing anything, and so there’s automatic social proof that the right thing to do is nothing.

That’s not a good enough explanation for Kitty Genovese, in my judgment. That’s only part of it. There are microeconomic ideas and gain/loss ratios and so forth that also come into play. I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn’t understand both is a damned fool.

Big-shot businessmen get into these waves of social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company? And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn’t know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil, and vice versa. I think they’re all gone now, but it was a total disaster.

Now let’s talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact one of the economists who won, he shared a Nobel Prize, and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn’t quite as efficient as you think, he said, “Well, it’s a two-sigma event.” And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas, better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.

If you think about the doctrines I’ve talked about, namely, one, the power of reinforcement, after all, you do something and the market goes up and you get paid and rewarded and applauded and what have you, meaning a lot of reinforcement, if you make a bet on a market and the market goes with you. Also, there’s social proof. I mean the prices on the market are the ultimate form of social proof, reflecting what other people think, and so the combination is very powerful.

Why would you expect general market levels to always be totally efficient, say even in 1973, 4 at the pit, or in 1972 or whatever it was when the Nifty Fifty were in their heyday. If these psychological notions are correct, you would expect some waves of irrationality, which carry general levels to … ’til they’re inconsistent with the reason.

Nine. What made these economists love the efficient-market theory is the math was so elegant, and after all, math was what they’d learned to do. To the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. The alternative truth was a little messy, and they’d forgotten the great economist Keynes, whom I think said, “Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

Nine. Bias from contrast caused distortions of sensation, perception, and cognition. Here the great experiment that Cialdini does in his class is he takes three buckets of water. One’s hot, one’s cold, and one’s room temperature. And he has the student stick his left hand in the hot water and his right hand in the cold water. Then he has them remove the hands and put them both in the room temperature bucket, and of course with both hands in the same bucket of water, one seems hot, and the other seems cold because the sensation apparatus of man is over-influenced by contrast. It has no absolute scale. It’s got a contrast scale in it, and it’s scale with quantum effects in it, too. It takes a certain percentage change before it’s noticed.

Maybe you’ve had a magician remove your watch, I certainly have, without your noticing it. It’s the same thing. He’s taking advantage of your contrast type troubles and your sensory apparatus. But here the great truth is that cognition mimics sensation, and the cognition manipulators mimic the watch-removing magician. In other words, people are manipulating you all day long on this contrast phenomenon.

Cialdini cites the case of the real estate broker. You’ve got the rube that’s been transferred into your town, and the first thing you do is you take the rube out to two of the most awful over-priced houses you’ve ever seen, and then you take the rube to some moderately over-priced house and then you stick ’em. And it works pretty well, which is why the real estate salesmen do it. It’s always gonna work.

And the accidents of life can do this to you, and it can ruin your life. In my generation when women lived at home until they got married, I saw some perfectly terrible marriages made by highly desirable women because they lived in terrible homes. And I’ve seen some terrible second marriages, which were made because they were slight improvements over an even worse first marriage.

You think you’re immune from these things, and you laugh, and I wanna tell you you aren’t. My favorite analogy, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of. I have this worthless friend I like to Bridge with, and he’s a total intellectual amateur that lives on inherited money. But he told me once something I really enjoyed hearing. He said, “Charlie,” he says, “If you throw a frog into very hot water, the frog will jump out. But if you put the frog in room temperature water and just slowly heat the water up, the frog will die there.”

Now I don’t know whether that’s true about a frog, but it’s sure as hell true about many of the businessmen I know, and there again, it is the contrast phenomenon.

These are hot-shot high-powered people. These are not fools. If it comes to you in small pieces, you’re likely to miss, so you have to … if you’re gonna be a person of good judgment, you have to do something about this warp in your head where it’s so misleading by mere contrast.

Bias from over-influence by authority. Well, here the Milgram experiment is it’s caused … I think there have been 1600 psychological papers written about Milgram. He had a person posing as an authority figure trick ordinary people into giving what they had every reason to expect was heavy torture by an electric shock to perfectly innocent fellow citizens. And the experiment has been … he was trying to show why Hitler succeeded and a few other things. So it has really caught the fancy of the world. Partly it’s so politically correct and …

Over-influence by authority has another very … you’ll like this one. You got a pilot and a co-pilot. The pilot is the authority figure. They don’t do this in airplanes, but they’ve done it in simulators. They have the pilot do something where the co-pilot who’s been trained in simulators a long time. He knows he’s not to allow the plane to crash. They have the pilot to do something where an idiot co-pilot would know the plane was gonna crash, but the pilot’s doing it, and the co-pilot is sitting there, and the pilot is the authority figure. 25% of the time, the plane crashes. This is a very powerful psychological tendency.

It’s not quite as powerful as some people think, and I’ll get to that later.

11. Bias from Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed but never possessed. Here I took the Munger dog, a lovely harmless dog. The one way, the only way to get that dog to bite you was to try and take something out of its mouth after it was already there.

Any of you who’ve tried to do take-aways in labor negotiations will know the human version of that dog is there in all of us. I had a neighbor, a predecessor, on a little island where I have a house, and his next-door neighbor put a little pine tree in that was about three feet high, and it turned his 180-degree view of the harbor into 179 and three-quarters. Well, they had a blood feud like the Hatfields and McCoys, and it went on and on and on. People are really crazy about minor decrements down.

Then if you act on them, you get into reciprocation tendency because you don’t just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity. And the whole thing can escalate, and so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you’re losing or almost getting and not getting.

The extreme business cake here was New Coke. Now Coca-Cola has the most valuable trademark in the world. We’re the major shareholder. I think we understand that trademark. Coke has armies of brilliant engineers, lawyers, psychologists, advertising executives, and so forth. And they had a trademark on a flavor, and they’d spent better part of 100 years getting people to believe that trademark had all these intangible values, too. And people associate it with a flavor, so they were gonna tell people not that it was improved ’cause you can’t improve a flavor. If a flavor’s a matter of taste, you may improve a detergent or something, but telling you’re gonna make a major change in a flavor, I mean … So they got this huge Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome.

Pepsi was within weeks of coming out with Old Coke in a Pepsi bottle, which would have been the biggest fiasco in modern times. Perfect, pluperfect insanity. And by the way, both Goizueta and Keough are just wonderful about it. They just joke. They don’t … Keough always says I must’ve been away on vacation. He participated in every single … he’s a wonderful guy. And by the way, Goizueta’s a wonderful, smart guy, an engineer.

Smart people make these terrible blunders. How can you not understand Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome? But people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Now maybe a great Bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that’s a trained response. Ordinary people subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies.

Bias from envy/jealousy. Well, envy/jealousy made what, two out of the 10 commandments. Those of you who’ve raised siblings or tried to run a law firm or investment bank or even a faculty. I’ve heard Warren say a half a dozen times, “It’s not greed that drives the world but envy.”

Here again, you go through the psychology survey courses. You go to the index: envy, jealousy. In a thousand-page book, it’s blank! There are some blind spots in academia. But it’s an enormously powerful thing, and it operates to a considerable extent at a subconscious level, and anybody who doesn’t understand it is taking on defects he shouldn’t have.

Bias from chemical dependency. Well, we don’t have to talk about that. We’ve all seen so much of it, but it’s interesting how it always causes moral breakdown if there’s any need, and it always involves massive denial. It aggravates what we talked about earlier in the aviator case, the tendency to distort reality so that it’s endurable.

Bias from gambling compulsion. Well here, Skinner made the only explanation you’ll find in the standard psychology survey course. He, of course, created a variable reinforcement rate for his pigeons, his mice, and he found that that would pound in the behavior better than any other enforcement pattern. He says, “Ah ha! I’ve explained why gambling is such a powerful, addictive force in civilization.” I think that is, to a very considerable extent, true, but being Skinner, he seemed to think that was the only explanation.

The truth of the matter is the devisers of these modern machines and techniques know a lot of things that Skinner didn’t know. For instance, a lottery … you have a lottery where you get your number by lot and then somebody draws a number by lot? It gets lousy play. You get a lottery where people get to pick their number, get big play. Again, it’s this consistency and commitment thing. People think that if they’ve committed to it, it has to be good. The minute they’ve picked it themselves, it gets an extra validity. After all, they thought it and they acted on it.

Then if you take slot machines, you get bar, bar, lemon. It happens again and again and again. You get all these near misses. Well, that’s Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome, and boy do the people who create the machines understand human psychology.

And for the high IQ crowd, they’ve got poker machines where you make choices, so you can play blackjack, so to speak, with the machine. It’s wonderful what we’ve done with our computers to ruin civilization.

But anyway, this gambling compulsion is a very, very powerful important thing. Look at what’s happening to our country. Every Indian reservation, every river town, and look at the people who are ruined with the aid of their stockbrokers and others.

Again, if you look in the standard textbook of psychology, you’ll find practically nothing on it except maybe one sentence talking about Skinner’s rats. That is not adequate coverage of the subject.

Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s own kind, and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone liked.

Disliking distortion. Bias from that. The reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked. Well, here again, we’ve got hugely powerful tendencies, and if you look at the wars in part of the Harvard Law School as we sit here, you can see those very brilliant people get into this almost pathological behavior, and these are very, very powerful, basic, subconscious, psychological tendencies or at least partly subconscious.

Now let’s get back to B.F. Skinner, man with a hammer syndrome revisited. Why is man with a hammer syndrome always present? Well if you stop to think about it, incentive caused bias. His professional reputation is all tied up with what he knows. He likes himself, and he likes his own ideas, and he’s expressed them to other people, consistency and commitment tendency. I mean you’ve got four or five of these elementary psychological tendencies combining to create this man with a hammer syndrome.

Once you realize that you can’t really buy your thinking down. Partly you can, but largely you can’t in this world. You’ve learned a lesson that’s very useful in life. George Bernard Shaw said, and a character say in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” But he didn’t have it quite right because it’s not so much conspiracy as it is a subconscious, psychological tendency.

The guy tells you what is good for him, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gallbladders. He believed that his own idea structures will cure cancer, and he believed that the demons that he’s the guardian against are the biggest demons and the most important ones. And in fact, they may be very small demons compared to the demons that you face. So you’re getting your advice in this world from your paid advisor with this huge load of ghastly bias. And woe to you!

And only two ways to handle it. You can hire your advisor and then just apply a windage factor like I used to do when I was a rifle shooter. I’d just adjust for so many miles an hour wind. Or you can learn the basic elements of your advisor’s trade. You don’t have to learn very much, by the way, because if you learn just a little and you can make him explain why he’s right. And those two tendencies will take part of the warp out of the thinking you’ve tried to hire down.

By and large, it works terribly. I have never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with the following paragraph: “What this situation really needs is more management consulting.” Never once! I always turn to the last page. Of course, Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t hire them, so … I only do this in sort of a lawyer-istic basis. Sometimes I’m in a nonprofit where some idiot hires one.

17. Bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deals with probabilities employing crude heuristics and is often mislead by mere contrast. The tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychological rooted mis-thinking tendencies on this list when the brain should be using the simple probability mathematics of Fermat and Pascal, applied to all reasonably attainable and correctly weighted items of information that are of value in predicting outcomes. The right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays Bridge. It’s just that simple.

And your brain doesn’t naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows to play Bridge. Now you notice I put in that availability thing, and there I’m mimicking some very eminent psychologists … Tversky, who raised the idea of availability to a whole heuristic of misjudgment.

You know, they are very substantially right. Ask the Coca-Cola company, which has raised availability to a secular religion, if availability changes behavior. You’ll drink a hell of a lot more Coke if it’s always available. Availability does change behavior and cognition.

Nonetheless, even though I recognize that and applaud Tversky, Kahneman, I don’t like it for my personal system except as part of a greater subsystem, which is you gotta think the way Zeckhauser plays Bridge. It isn’t just the lack of availability that distorts your judgment. All the things on this list distort judgment. And I wanna train myself to mentally run down the list instead of just jumping on availability. So that’s why I state it the way I do.

In a sense, these psychological tendencies make things unavailable ’cause if you quickly jump to one thing and then because you’ve jumped to it, the consistency and commitment tendency makes you lock in, boom, it’s there. Number one.

Or if something is very vivid, which I’m going to come to next, that will really pound in. And the reason that the thing that really matters is now unavailable and what’s extra vivid wins is … the extra vividness creates the unavailability. So I think it’s much better to have a whole list of things that cause you to be less like Zeckhauser than it is just to jump on one factor.

Here, I think we should discuss John Gutfreund. This is a very interesting human example, which will be taught in every decent professional school for at least a full generation. Gutfreund has a trusted employee, and it comes to light not through confession but by accident that the trusted employee has lied like hell to the government and manipulated the accounting system and was really the equivalent to forgery. The man immediately says, “I’ve never done it before. I’ll never do it again. It was an isolated example.” Of course, it was obvious that he was trying to help the government as well as himself ’cause he thought the government had been dumb enough to pass a rule that he’d spoken against. And after all, if a government’s not gonna pay attention to a bond trader at Salomon, what kind of a government can it be?

At any rate, and this guy has been part of a little clique that has made way over a billion dollars for Salomon in the very recent past, and it’s a little handful of people. So there are a lot of psychological forces at work. You know the guy’s wife, he’s right in front of you, and there’s human sympathy, and he’s sort of asking for your help, which is the form which encourages reciprocation, and there are all these psychological tendencies are working. Plus the fact he’s part of a group that has made a lot of money for you.

At any rate, Gutfreund does not cashier the man, and of course, he had done it before, and he did do it again. Well now you look as though you almost wanted him to do it again or God knows what you look like, but it isn’t good. And that simple decision destroyed John Gutfreund.

It’s so easy to do. Now let’s think it through like the Bridge player, like Zeckhauser. You find an isolated example of a little old lady in the See’s candy company, one of our subsidiaries, getting into the till, and what does she say? “I never did it before. I’ll never do it again. This is gonna ruin my life. Please help me.” And you know her children and her friends, and she’s been around 30 years and standing behind the candy counter with swollen ankles. In your old age, isn’t that glorious a life? And you’re rich and powerful and there she is. “I never did it before, and I will never do it again.”

Well, how likely is it that she never did it before? If you’re gonna catch ten embezzlements a year, what are the chances that any one of them, applying what Tversky and Kahneman called baseline information, will be somebody who only did it this once? And the people who have done it before and are gonna do it again, what are they all gonna say?

Well in the history of the See’s candy company, they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never gonna do it again.” And we cashier them. It would be evil not to because terribly behavior spreads. … You let that stuff … you’ve got social proof, you’ve got incentive caused bias, you got a whole lotta psychological factors that will cause the evil behavior to spread, and pretty soon the whole damn … your place is rotten, the civilization is rotten. It’s not the right way to behave, and …

I will admit that I have … when I knew the wife and children, I have paid severance pay when I fire somebody, for taking a mistress on a extended foreign trip. It’s not the adultery I mind. It’s embezzlement. But there, I wouldn’t do it where Gutfreund did it, where they’d been cheating somebody else on my behalf. There I think you have to cashier, but if they’re just stealing from you and you get rid of them, I don’t think you need the last ounce of vengeance. In fact, I don’t think you need any vengeance. I don’t think vengeance is much good.

[a-dancing-bear]

He killed the one he loved the most

[Note: original article in Chinese here]

2016-10-31 20:49:13

Author: Zhang Juanfen

Ardent supporter of Taiwan's “Society for the Abolishment of the Death Penalty”, active for many years in social movements, closely follows gender and capital punishment issues.

----

Gaoxiong Detention Facility was located in Gaoxiong county, Yanchao village. Like so many other small towns, the most lively place in Yanchao was one particular street, but of course the detention facility wasn't located there. Rather, it was on the outskirts, in a place where it wouldn't be an eyesore. I walked 15 minutes from the friend's house where I was staying to the Gaoxiong station and rode the northbound train for two stops up to Nanzi, then took a taxi to the detention facility. The trip took an hour.

The detention facility's visitor center was somewhat deserted, because morning visitor registration was only until 11am; all that was left was the last batch of waiting relatives. The counter on the left was the in-person meeting registration area, and the right was the gift inspection area. Both had already closed up for lunch. Only the counter at the center remained open; it was where relatives could purchase various items. This purchasing area was occupied by a white cabinet showing various food items and daily necessities; when you added the blue metal chair in front of the cabinet, the space looked like the psychiatric department of a hospital.

The purchasing area's prices were fairly reasonable: a large bottle of soda for 45 NTD (New Taiwan Dollars), instant noodles for 50 NTD, fruit for 70 NTD. There were also a few more fashionable items, such as green tea and some more expensive fruits. The most luxurious item was an eight-inch birthday cake for 400 NTD.

I thought, “I wonder when Deng Wugong's birthday is.”

I then promptly abandoned the idea. That wasn't necessary.

1

While copying down the prices at the purchasing counter, I suddenly caught sight of a cookie tin filled with many identical slips of paper. I figured they were receipts or applications of some sort, so without a word I stole a bunch of them and, acting as if I had done nothing out of the ordinary, retreated to a corner to examine them more closely. They were receipts for money brought by relatives. When meeting with the inmates it was not permitted to exchange any items or cash, so any money one wanted to give to an inmate would have to be recorded on these slips and surrendered at the counter. One receipt for 2000 NTD, two for 1000, and then one for 500. The receipts were printed on brown paper, thick and coarse. I sighed; how could this wife come to all the way to this desolate place to visit her husband and only give him 500 NTD?

At 12:10, the tenth batch of visits to the male ward began. All the relatives swarmed a small doorway; in less than a minute they poured out once again and mobbed the purchasing counter. Shut away in prison, so close to the outside world and yet so far away, the inmates were counting on their relatives to satisfy their needs.

According to the display case on the right, the inmates ate tilapia and pickled vegetable soup for lunch that day. The previous night, they ate diced curry chicken and fried banana fish with soup made from Job's tears and mung beans. The total number of visitors in a single morning was about 220 people. Based on what I saw, about 80 percent were female; their social status was apparent from their taste in clothes. None of them were dressed in a particularly ostentatious way, but many had a preference for sequins. Judging from the ashtray outside the building, these relatives smoked like chimneys and were habitual betel nut users.

The gift inspection area had a scale, basically identical to the ones in supermarkets, very Taiwanese in style. The weight limit for items was two kilograms, and a sign stuck to the counter warned, “Please do not conceal illegal items inside gifts. Inmates will be penalized upon discovery.” Most people brought food they made themselves, like soups and broths, so the gift inspection area also sold plastic bags for 2 NTD each. A woman with a harelip brought a package of food that happened to be a bit over the weight limit. In frustration, she walked outside and dumped some of the soup into a flower bed, remarking stubbornly, “How about I give these some flavor.”

Afternoon visits started at 2pm; as the time grew near, almost a hundred people came onto the scene, filling the air with restlessness. Workers shouted out numbers in hoarse voices; meanwhile, those in front of the counter whose numbers had not yet been called refused to budge. Everyone was crowded together anyway, they must have figured. I vaguely recalled that Taipei used to be like this in the old days, before it became civilized and emotionless. Those who had waited for a long time ceaselessly shuffled their registration forms, using the rustling sound to heckle the workers at the counter: hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.

I lined up with everyone else to wait for a “normal visit”, but my form and ID were automatically transferred to the neighboring counter for “television visits”. When I went to the gift inspection area so they could approve a book I brought, the worker wanted me to write the inmate's name and number on it, so I quickly wrote this information on the title page. The worker growled, “Where did you write it?”

“The first page.”

“Write it on the outside.”

In that moment I understood that I had entered a world with no sense of aesthetics. I picked up the thick marker on the counter and crudely wrote on the cover of the book. It was like the book itself was barking out: 405, Deng Wugong!

2

Now it was my turn to walk through that small door, which as it turned out led me to a room in the basement of the place. After passing through a corridor that had never seen the light of day, I arrived at another, iron-barred door and once again turned in my registration form and ID. This was a long, narrow room with two rows of people lined up back to back. On one side was the “normal visit” section, which had about 12 windows; the other side was the “television visit” section with roughly five seats. There were not many people waiting for a “television visit”. It seemed that for the most part friends had been moved to that section, though the person next to me was here because the inmate they were visiting was ill.

There was a roll-up metal shade over each window. As each prisoner arrived, the shade was pulled up, but there remained three metal bars in the center of the window, as well as a type of forest-green window screen I hadn't seen since I was a child. The “television visit”, on the other hand, consisted of facing a 15-inch computer monitor. A video camera was positioned about three feet overhead, and you spoke into a phone receiver, just as if you were video chatting with a friend online. The only problem was that because the camera was so high up, every person looked like a big-headed dog. But at any rate, if you got a “normal visit”, every person's face was tinted green and had three black lines on it, so relatively speaking, looking like a big-headed dog wasn't half bad.

A bright dot blinked on the center of the monitor and Deng Wugong appeared. After the usual pleasantries, I asked him why he didn't want any help. He said it wasn't that he didn't want help; it was just that he wasn't good at expressing himself, so he hoped I could go see the director of their ward and have him set up a special visit so he could talk with me face to face and explain his situation.

I felt a little awkward; it seemed that asking the director to set up this visit was his only desire and an overly optimistic one at that. But he continued, “This is a democratic age; our director is good to us, and he really cares about us. Last time he visited, he asked how things were for us here, and I told him we were all doing well.” Then he repeated his plea for me to go meet with the director.

His green-tinted face filled the screen before me; there were three wrinkles on his forehead. As I looked at him, I imagined I smelled the scent of betel nuts. My Minnan language wasn't terribly fluent, but this was actually for the better. The fact that I spoke so poorly made him less nervous. Actually, I felt he seemed not the least bit nervous, nor was he introverted or shy around strangers. He asked and answered questions glibly, his tone even eager at times.

I explained to him that our association could help him make a special appeal or request a “pardon”. He felt there was no hope of a “pardon”, and I was just grasping at straws. I started to feel a little nervous myself; if he didn't show repentance, what could I do?

“Haven't you still got three children? Where are they? With your older brother in Yunlin?”

“I don't know where they are. My brother told them to come back and they didn't come. Do you know the terrible things they said about me in the police investigation records? The way I see it, I sacrificed so much for this family, I raised you, and then you do this; well, enough is enough, I give up. So I had my brother tell them to forget about coming here.”

“So how are they going to survive?”

“My wife had an insurance policy. It was originally supposed to be divided among four people; now it's only split among three, over 700,000 each. Their uncle got the money out for them.”

I got the sense that my earlier feeling of foreboding had been proven true. Maybe his attitude wasn't self-righteous in itself, but he appeared to believe he had no choice but to do what he'd done. He had written a memoir in which he described his case, and although I had not yet read it, I could guess that it was mainly explaining how he had no other alternative. It was like he was anticipating the day when his children would know better, read it, and thereby understand his suffering. He was still full of hatred, and still proclaiming to the world that his hatred was justified.

I asked him the address of his home in Pingdong county, and he replied, “Jiuru town, Sankuai village...Sankuai village...I forget. I've just been trying to forget these things. I'll look it up tomorrow and tell you.”

I exited the detention facility into the fresh air of the southern Taiwan afternoon with a heavy heart. I thought back to that woman with the harelip. Nobody would bring home-made meals to Deng Wugong, would they? Nonsense. The only person who might bring him food had already died by his hand.

3

I really wanted to read the memoir Deng Wugong had written. The 30 minutes allowed for a meeting were limited indeed; perhaps his memoir would allow me to more fully understand his mental state. It wasn't necessarily factual, but it could still serve as a map of his mind. I decided to seek out the director and see what I could do.

The director's last name was Zhong. He was tall and powerfully built, with a large ring of keys at his wrist. He said that when Deng Wugong first arrived he had violent tendencies; he would often fight with his fellow inmates—the word they used was “classmates”—and he was always trying to kill himself. Now, he was much more stable. Nobody ever came to see him.

“I saw that the purchasing area has fruit and things like that. If no relatives come, what can he do?”

“He depends on me for that.”

Deng Wugong had already been here for three years. “What about you?” I asked.

“Me? I've been here five or six years. In this time my hands have sent off ten death-rowers. It's really kind of sad to talk about it. I never treated them like they were on death row; I never treated them like criminals. They all like me, but I will be leaving next month. I've been promoted, so I'll be moving to central Taiwan. Now they're all nervous because they don't know what the next director will be like.”

His choice of words shocked me. What did he mean by “my hands”? I asked, “What role do you play in the process of carrying out the death sentence?”

“Psychologist, consultant, and executioner.”

I was stupefied. I had asked him a simple, concrete question, and he had given me an abstract response!

Director Zhong explained, “Every afternoon I go down to chat with them. Sometimes I only get notified after 3pm that I have to carry it out on that day—but I just talked with that guy! It really gets to me.”

“You find out at 3pm?”

“Only I know, because I have to do a lot of things in preparation. We bring the guy out from his cell; they don't want to come out, so I have to go in and bring them out myself. At their last meal, they don't want to eat, so I have to urge them to eat. Once they've eaten, they don't want to stand up, because once they stand up an officer will lead them out, so I have to make them stand up. When it's time to carry out the sentence, the warden has to be there, as well as the deputy warden and the managers of the general affairs and the personnel office. There are more than 20 people at the scene, but in the eyes of the convict, it's just him and me.”

All this time, this “four-star” police officer had not relaxed his guarded attitude towards me. I inquired about how Deng Wugong would be moved from his cell when it came time for his execution; he evaded my question with the excuse that he had business to take care of, standing up from his chair. When I started to walked back out to the visitor area, he muttered as if to himself, “So you're going to make a special appeal for him...very well then, see if they can commute it to a life sentence...” I turned back to say goodbye and found that he was already standing in front of a gleaming silver door, turning one of the keys on that large keyring at his wrist in the lock.

The taxi that took me back was driven by a grinning man named Ah Bai. He was just like the one who brought me here; the drivers always tried to pretend that I had come to do something else—do I have a friend who works here? Am I here for a meeting? Anything was better than coming to visit a criminal. I was dressed rather shabbily, not “Taiwanese” enough, so I didn't look like a relative. At any rate, this well-intentioned misunderstanding proved that the family members of criminals were a target of discrimination. This cheerful Ah Bai brought passengers here every day, so he must have seen a lot—I planned to test his cheer.

“I just went to see someone on death row.”

“Huh?” In the rearview mirror I could see Ah Bai's benevolent air vanish; after a moment's shock, his face seemed to darken, and his speech became cautious. “What's he in for?”

“Murder.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

Ah Bai was silent for a moment, then asked, “Who is he to you?”

“I don't know him.” Ah Bai seemed relieved to hear this, letting down his guard towards me.

I told Ah Bai that I was part of a public interest group that came to visit inmates and see if they needed anything, because in many cases nobody else would come to see them.

Ah Bai said, “Huh. So you ask them if they want to donate their organs?”

4

The next day, I went to the detention facility to meet with Deng Wugong again.

“Did you know that I went to see Director Zhong yesterday? Has he told you?”

Deng Wugong smiled. “Yes, he laughed at me.”

“What was he laughing about?”

“Uh...he just was laughing at me, I guess. If our director is in a good mood, it's all good. He makes all of us laugh.” He spoke of Director Zhong in a tone full of reverence and gratitude.

Today's conversation was more relaxed than yesterday's; Deng Wugong was no longer as worried that nobody would understand his case. He said that when he turned himself in, he didn't want to be alive anyway, and it was in this state of total resignation that he was questioned and sentenced. It was only later, in jail, with the prison instructors and Director Zhong's constant guidance, that he stopped wanting to die so badly.

When I asked him how they got him to change his mind, he didn't know what to say. “I guess they...just helped me reason things out,” however, “right now I still have that idea, I feel there's no point; anyway, I was going to walk this road sooner or later. My family's broken; I don't have any reason to live.”

“Now, when you think of your wife, how do you feel?”

“I'd say my heart seems to 'harden'; it's very painful. I often think of how we were before. We married for love. From the time I met her when I was a soldier, to the time that the incident happened, that was exactly 20 years. I was so good to her...”

“What about the man?”

“Relatively speaking, I don't think of him much. He destroyed my family and brought chaos into our lives; he deserved to die. I didn't want him to die, though. At that time I was really pissed at my wife, totally 'out of control', I really wanted her to die, but I didn't want that guy to die. He died later after going to the hospital.”

“Afterwards you settled out of court with his family, right?”

“Right.”

“How much did they settle for?”

“1.57 million NTD.” I lowered my head to write down this number, and he automatically added, “Not  paid.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it's not paid yet. They went and checked on the land I owned, it's my ancestors' property. They tried to auction it off, but it didn't sell, so they'll be trying to auction it again.”

“Who came to negotiate the settlement?”

“Lawyers. The relatives didn't come. It was settled in the first court hearing. I didn't have a lawyer, so it was just me representing myself.”

“Okay, I have one more question to ask. You previously had a case in which you were accused of intentional injury resulting in death, and you appealed that. But I see that you only appealed that case after you were convicted on this homicide charge. This seems really strange to me. Why would you go to the effort of appealing this injury charge when you were already sentenced to death?”

I had found his criminal history by searching online. 1995, drug offenses; 2002, interference with personal freedom; and then a few months later, this double murder. In the “interference with personal freedom” case, he had referred a drug dealer to a new buyer. The outcome of the meeting was that the buyer shot the dealer. Eager for revenge, the dealer sought out Deng Wugong to get people together. Deng Wugong had no choice but to go with them to strike back against the buyer. After stabbing the man a few times, they left him on the side of the road, where he later died. Deng Wugong was at the scene but he hadn't done anything, so he was charged with “interference with personal freedom”.

This case was a real can of worms, as it may have been a prelude to his subsequent crime of passion. One of the accomplices testified that after the attack, the dealer “invited” everyone to shoot heroin as a thank-you for their help, and nobody said a word about the man they'd left bleeding on the side of the road. Could it be that this experience showed Deng Wugong that human lives were worthless, and therefore, not long after, he decided to kill his ex-wife?

Deng Wugong's face was full of confusion. It seemed like he was making a great effort to think back to that time and see if anything was missing in his memory. This shook me a little. We had met twice, and he always answered questions quickly and lucidly. Didn't he just say that man deserved to die? This other affair was a simple case of interference with personal freedom, so why wouldn't he admit to that? Could it be that it wasn't him?

“Do you have any previous criminal offenses?”

“I don't. There was a car accident in Jiayi, but that was settled. I also sued someone in Jilong because he hit me when he was driving.”

“Huh? So the case I mentioned wasn't you?”

“It's not me! I've never done drugs. That wasn't me.”

It wasn't him! So I had to start from zero in my evaluation of him. He hadn't done drugs, he was never a middleman, he had never committed interference of personal freedom...I had to completely rethink this man, and erase the shadow of that other Deng Wugong.

This Deng Wugong was straightforward and honest; in our 30 minute talk today, he candidly admitted many negative things about himself, never trying to conceal the truth or evade my questions. For instance, he admitted the settlement wasn't paid, and that he wanted a victim to die. There was also the thing he'd said yesterday about his wife's insurance, that it was “originally supposed to be divided among four people; now it's only split among three”. It was as if he was imagining his own share of the payout. He wasn't tricky or clever; you could say he was a plain dealer.

When I received Deng Wugong's memoir from Director Zhong, that was even more of a shock. Deng Wugong was a big-headed, coarse, strongly built middle aged man, but his memoir was written in characters as small as grains of rice. The few sentences of formulaic pleasantries which Director Zhong said to me were as guarded as his words yesterday, and he didn't even sit down, departing in the blink of an eye.

5

Deng Wugong started dating Huang Jinling when he was a soldier. Family members opposed their relationship, but the two married anyway.

Deng Wugong was from Yunlin, while Huang Jinling was from Pingdong, both of which were rural areas. Deng Wugong thought the only opportunities were in the city, so he went to Taizhonggang and became a tow truck driver. After he had earned a bit of money he was able to become his own boss and started a small business. He also bought a house, which was registered in Huang Jinling's name.

He worked long hours, spending the whole day away from home. Meanwhile, Huang Jinling stayed at home taking care of their three children. She often suspected that Deng Wugong was seeing other women. Sometimes Deng Wugong would go to dinners or parties, but he said this was part of doing business, and he always did his best to get home as soon as possible. The parties had “hostesses”, but he did not have any dealings with these ladies, and the ladies had never spent the night with him. Basically, the couple were constantly fighting, so Deng Wugong ultimately decided to leave this line of work, moving the family to Jiuru village in Pingdong county.

That was Huang Jinling's hometown, and her two older brothers lived there. The oldest worked in the marble industry. The family rented a house from this brother and Deng Wugong started fresh, learning how to cut and process marble. He felt he had sacrificed a lot for his wife; he had been demoted from boss to inexperienced apprentice.

After a few years, they took out a loan and bought a house in Jiuru village. They also started their own independent marble processing operation, with both husband and wife working together. But the economy was unstable, and so was business; likewise, the couple's relationship had its ups and downs. Later, when it became apparent that their income wasn't improving, they had no choice but to close up shop. Deng Wugong went back to being a wage slave, driving an oil truck, while Huang Jinling went to work at the fish market run by her second-oldest brother.

Comparing their present situation to the past, Deng Wugong felt frustrated. If he had known it would turn out like this, he would have just stayed in Taizhonggang, where at least he had the connections he had worked for ten years to establish. Now he was back where he started, and it was like all his hard work had vanished into nothing. Moreover, he was surrounded by his wife's family members, which may have contributed to his sense of psychological imbalance.

The couple's old problem reared its head once more. He was driving more than ten hours a day, and his wife worried he was having affairs. A new problem also came into being: now, Huang Jinling was a career woman, and she experienced her own developments and changes. She started smoking, and her job at the fish market gave her the chance to socialize with male customers. Deng Wugong was angry and jealous, and he began to doubt his wife's faithfulness as much as she did his.

They had married young and their three children were almost grown up; the oldest daughter already had a job. Deng Wugong and Huang Jinling's earnings, added together, amounted to over 80,000 NTD, which in fact was more than enough to live comfortably. Around this time, Huang Jinling decided to get a second job. At the fish market she had met a customer named Chen Qinquan who was the foreman at the Guotai Leather Goods Factory, and he invited her to work the night shift there. Deng Wugong was furious. He was convinced this man had bad intentions. Furthermore, the family was not wanting for money, yet Huang Jinling insisted on taking the job; she was certainly interested in him as well.

Deng Wugong's bitterness kept accumulating. His job wasn't working out, he felt trapped among his wife's relatives, and his wife was quite possibly sleeping with another man. He placed the blame for all these things on Huang Jinling's head. Deng Wugong couldn't keep himself from imagining the Guotai Leather Goods Factory in the dead of night. Besides the security guard in the booth at the entrance, in that massive workroom it was only the two of them, Huang Jinling and Chen Qinquan. Chen Qinquan was the foreman; if the two did no work for the entire night, nobody would be the wiser. So what were they doing?

Deng Wugong was not a man with a good temper. It wasn't just his wife he was on bad terms with; his three children weren't close to him either. In the fights between husband and wife, the children were more likely to side with their mother. The oldest daughter once swore at Deng Wugong, which angered him to the point of grabbing a kitchen knife and trying to kill her. He was stopped by the leader of the village. Once, when arguing with Huang Jinling, Deng Wugong had also smashed the family's wine cabinet and used scissors to tear holes in his wife's clothing. His pent-up resentment would boil over in the form of violence. He tried to kill himself many times, each time prevented by relatives.

Huang Jinling was set on getting a divorce, and Deng Wugong felt like even more of a failure. The family was broken. It was like investing for years in a company's stock and then seeing its share price drop to nothing, losing everything you owned. He signed his name to the divorce decree on paper but not in his heart. Huang Jinling, for her part, didn't move out. Their life continued on much as it always had; a certificate of divorce did not bring any significant change. They had always fought among themselves anyway, and now they fought the same as before. They also continued sleeping in the same bed.

About 40 days after the divorce, Deng Wugong decided he would go back to his family's home in Yunlin to find an acquaintance who was a notary. He would sell his ancestral estate to this acquaintance and take the money to the mainland. After spending it all, he would just go somewhere to die. He gathered together some clothing. From the bathroom he could hear the sound of gurgling water. He opened the door and, to the familiar yet blurry figure amidst the rising steam, said, “This is the last time I will see you take a shower.”

The November night must have been cold as Deng Wugong drove off. By the time he got back, it was 8 o'clock in the morning. He was stunned to discover that overnight, Huang Jinling had taken all her things and left. Greatly upset, he rushed immediately to her parents' house to implore her to return, despite the fact that he had already gone three days without sleep. But Huang Jinling had had enough. Her twenty years of marriage ended here, and she wanted nothing more to do with him. Huang Jinling's oldest brother and sister were there; every word they said sounded to Deng Wugong as if it was full of thorns. Once again he found himself trapped; everyone seemed to be against Deng Wugong, and he felt like they had all ganged up to bully him.

All he could do was go home, but in his heart he knew he had no home anymore. He couldn't sleep; he stared blankly at nothing, crying, smoking, drinking. When his children came back at night, he explained to them matter-of-factly, “After today you won't see your dad anymore. You'll have to look after yourselves, plan for yourselves.” Then he went to the Guotai Leather Goods factory.

6

He was honest, but he wasn't trustworthy. What he recounted was Deng Wugong's version of the story, while Huang Jinling's version died by his hand. He said she was always “finding an excuse” to get on his case about inconsequential “little things”, but in Huang Jinling's version, those things may have been a big deal. On the other hand, the fact that she started smoking cigarettes, and was even brazen enough to smoke in front of Deng Wugong's relatives, was a big deal to Deng Wugong, but in Huang Jinling's version of the story this may have been trivial: my smoking is none of your damn business.

I maintained a guarded stance towards his interpretation of events, but on the whole I trusted the specific details he provided, because in the two interviews I'd had with him he had always given me one feeling: that he held nothing back. When I asked him the address of his family home in Pingdong and that of his wife's parents' home, he told me both of them, never once asking me, “Why do you want to know?”

His memoirs did not start with himself; rather, he began by writing about the time when he and Huang Jinling had met, and the focus was always entangled in the relationship between the two. It was like if one didn't mention Huang Jinling, there was no way to define Deng Wugong.

This was a love letter written too late, a dying testament written too early. Throughout it Deng Wugong was murmuring: I love her so much, I do this for her, and that, and that too; but she still hurt me like this! It was as if he had written it in a trance, forgetting that he had already killed Huang Jinling.

Deng Wugong's memoirs were his verdict against Huang Jinling, and killing her was how he carried out her sentence. Because he had never caught her cheating on him, he also used his memoirs to...prove her guilt:

--He told her not to take the job, but she didn't listen; something is fishy here.

--The job demanded long hours for little pay, but she still wanted to take it; something is fishy here.

--Night shift with only one man and one woman in the factory; something is fishy here.

--She bought snacks for the foreman to eat every day; something is fishy here.

--She always knew where the foreman was; something is fishy here.

--She wouldn't answer her phone or say where she was; something is fishy here.

--While on the road, she twisted her ankle and called the foreman, of all people, so he could come rescue her like a knight in shining armor. Obviously fishy.

--She asked for a divorce, and if that's not fishy, nothing is!

The last third of the memoir was verbose and depressing, because in it Deng Wugong was constantly imploring Huang Jinling to come back, incessantly calling her, going to her parents' house, running over to the factory to plead with her. This behavior seemed like obsession to me, but Deng Wugong saw it as him offering tolerance, giving her another chance. If he had read Ouyang Xiu's works, he may have learned one line: “I want to find a way for us to live, but I'm powerless.”

Deng Wugong was still immersed in his hurt feelings; regret had not yet arrived.

“Although you could say I took both their lives, maybe there was also some justification for what I did. After enduring stress and attacks for so long on my own, exhausting myself psychologically beyond repair, I had to go through still more humiliation. This was beyond what any person should have to bear; what should I have done to face it? With regard to what has already happened, of course it's not what I wanted, and even more so, I never wanted to walk this road. I always hoped we would grow old together, living a normal life, and now I'm grieving over her. This was fated to happen.”

What happened after the incident at the Guotai Leather Goods factory was this: Deng Wugong drove to Yunlin to find his older brother, to which he explained what had happened. He then went to his aunt's general store, grabbed two bottles of Gaoliang liquor, and got in his car to leave. His older brother told him he should turn himself in and not worry about anything. He shouted back at his brother, “If I turn myself in I'll get a lighter sentence. Don't worry about me, I'll take care of things myself.”

He drove into the mountains in Nantou, where he stopped and drank one bottle of liquor. He sliced his left wrist. When he awoke, he felt greatly disappointed; how was he not dead? He would have to go back and get the courts to hurry up and sentence him to death. It was in this state, only desiring his own self-destruction, that he headed back to Pingdong and turned himself in.

The police evidence records were quite thorough. The murder weapon was a 30-centimeter sashimi knife whose paper cover was also found at the scene of the crime. The blood on the knife was Huang Jinling's and Chen Qinquan's, and Deng Wugong's fingerprints were on the paper cover. Black gloves were left at the scene, as was a full-coverage safety mask. Huang Jinling died at the scene of the crime; her windpipe was almost completely severed. She was 38 years old. Chen Qinquan, severely wounded, had fled to the security guard's booth for help. He was taken to the hospital, where he later died. But before his death, he managed to get his testimony into the police records: the culprit was Huang Jinling's newly-divorced ex-husband.

After two retrials, Deng Wugong was convicted and sentenced to death. Some people came to the detention facility to teach introspection and meditation; Deng Wugong copied down a few of the scriptures, but when he thought of Huang Jinling who he had spent most of his life loving and hating, his heart still “hardened”. It was extremely painful for him; “I was so good to her; how could she do this to me?”

His two daughters and one son had no sympathy for him; in police records, they always described him as a terrible husband and father. The son said he once beat Huang Jinling after drinking. Hearing this angered Deng Wugong to no end. He swore he had never hit his wife; in the worst fight they'd had, he wanted to get out of the house for a bit to cool his head, but Huang Jinling wouldn't give him his keys and refused to let him leave. After a struggle, he held her on the ground and grabbed the keys from her, then got in his car and zoomed off. It was possible that the son saw this and assumed his father had hit his mother. The more Deng Wugong thought, the angrier he got. His wife was disloyal; his children were disrespectful. To hell with all of it, why not give up! He told his older brother and sister to relay the message to his children: “Don't come to see me!”

But he still quietly wrote a 13,000-word memoir, using ruled writing paper and glue to assemble a handmade book. His writing was careful, neat, and very very small; if you divided each line of the writing paper into nine smaller lines, his letters would fill the center line exactly.

7

Deng Wugong was arrested in Pingdong county, Jiuru village; the place he was now being held, Yanchao, was just across Gaoping Creek. He committed murder on the eastern shore, and was imprisoned on the western one. He still had thoughts of giving up from time to time, awaiting the day death would come to bring him across the river. His life was not yet at its end, but the end had already been determined; in the words of Yang Zeshi, his “life was not worth living”.

He had already been held on the western shore for three and a half years. Director Zhong was his guiding light; he looked forward to their chats every afternoon, but he knew there would be a day when the director would have to lead him to his execution.

And on the eastern shore, things had already changed completely. Huang Jinling's two brothers were long gone; people said they were fleeing creditors. The son had gone off to be a soldier, while the two daughters never kept in touch; he didn't where they were now.

I was going back to Taipei soon, so I went to say farewell to Deng Wugong. I didn't want him waiting expectantly every day, thinking I might return.

Today I planned to ask Deng Wugong a few more penetrating questions.

“The police found the knife, the mask, and the gloves that day. Why did you wear gloves?”

“Because I was driving. When I drive for a long time, my hands get sweaty, so I always wear gloves.”

“You mentioned in your memoirs one time when you fought with your wife; she hit you and you hit her back. What was the worst beating you ever gave her?”

He used a Minnanese verb in his reply that I didn't understand. As far as I could tell, it wasn't “hit”, nor was it “strike” or “struggle”. I asked, “Did you say you 'pushed' her?” Deng Wugong explained that it was when the two of them were struggling and he snatched the keys from her hand.

“In the newspaper, it said you divorced because you had a girlfriend?”

“Miss Zhang,” Deng Wugong's tone carried a faint note of indignation. “Think about it. If I had a girlfriend, wouldn't I have left soon after the divorce? Why would I stick around that place?”

As I walked back through that underground hallway that had never seen the light of day, I wondered if there would ever be a day when Deng Wugong's children would come through this same corridor.

Seven court transcripts, 90 minutes of conversation, and a 13,000-word memoir. This is the sum of my knowledge of Deng Wugong. I can't, nor do I plan to, claim I understand him. There are surely many more things in his life that I know nothing about.

It was only after I returned to Taipei that I read Deng Wugong's “pardon” request. A presidential pardon seemed unlikely, but the Society for the Abolishment of the Death Penalty thought it best to try anyway. So, the Society prepared a draft of a message to the president, leaving the lower half blank so the convict could explain in his own words why he felt himself worthy of a pardon.

This is what Deng Wugong wrote:

“I want to fully understand, what is love? I love my children; I love my family. I spent day and night riding the highways, driving all over the country. I poured out my heart and soul to support my one and only family. A wise man once said: 'If a chaste woman goes astray, a lifetime of virtue is forfeited; if a harlot settles down, a lifetime of sin is forgiven.' How did someone who never harmed a soul become the disciple of evil? Why did a man who couldn't bear to kill a chicken end up a murderer? Do I feel sad? Do I feel regret? – 'Without knowing why, without feeling, the tears flow down.'”