#my grandfather passed one to two weeks ago so i mean

[fortisfilia]

Promised Part 4 - Tom Riddle x reader

Info: This is a rewrite of a story I've posted on my old account years ago. If it sounds familiar, that might be why :)

Summary: In this story, Tom didn't grow up as an orphan, but with his grandfather and uncle. Reader's sister got very sick and the Gaunts offer their help. But not without asking for something in return.

Warnings: Arranged marriage

Word count: 2k

Masterpost | Masterlist | Part 3 | Part 5

Part 4 - One and the Same

As the weeks passed and the weather in late October turned colder, the halls and chambers in Hogwarts stayed warm. It also seemed that somebody specific had warmed up around you as well. Tom didn’t ignore you anymore. Not completely at least. He was still distant, but that was probably just how he was. Progress, still. Camille was sure he liked you, even if he didn’t show it. Although you didn't entirely agree with her, it was definitely a start.

He must have been impressed by your potions skills. His demeanour had changed ever since you beat him making Moonseed Poison. In fact, you had lost count of how many times you had thought about that smirk on his face and how your stomach seemed to flip whenever you did. It was almost embarrassing how many times you started daydreaming, how your mind wanted to drift off, and you let it.

You had just thought of him when you walked along the shore of the Black Lake alone. Since Avery and Lestrange hadn’t dared to even look at you for more than a moment, it was safe enough to wander around on your own again. And it was freeing to have time for yourself. To manage your thoughts in peace, while the wind howled across the water to keep you company. 

Your thoughts were interrupted by someone calling out your name and hasty footsteps coming your way from behind. You stopped and turned around to see who it was. Benjamin Hilt. The Gryffindor boy from sixth year, who had already asked too many questions. 

He was quite short for a boy of his age, but it seemed like he didn’t care about it. He didn’t care about a lot of things apparently. He wore jeans a lot. A clothing item wizards would usually not choose as their attire since it was such a muggle thing to wear. Maybe it was his way of revolting the system. A very subliminal way of showing his values. His hair must have also been part of that. That, or he didn’t own a comb. 

Not that he was unpopular, he definitely had friends. They were all like him to an extent. Loud, candid and sometimes a bit scandalising. They liked to be the centre of attention, even if that meant they would go on everyone’s nerves. They were troublemakers, but harmless overall.

“Hey,” he said, a bit out of breath once he caught up. 

“Hi Ben,” you answered and started walking again.

“Can I walk with you for a minute?”

“Sure. Did you come up with more questions for your investigation?”

He kept quiet for a moment and you grinned while looking out over the lake, where the tiniest waves rustled in the wind.

“No,” he then said. “I mean, yes. I mean… Possibly.”

“What’s your deal, Ben?” you asked. “Not to be mean, but none of this is any of your business.”

“I know. And I’m sorry. But I just can’t wrap my head around this. It kind of keeps me up at night. Doesn’t sit right with me.”

“Well if it doesn’t sit right with you, then, of course, we’re going to listen to you and throw all plans out of the window.”

“Don’t be sarcastic now. It’s a serious thing.”

“Oh really? Thanks for reminding me. Still none of your concern. And even if it was. What doesn’t sit right?”

“Two things actually,” Ben answered. “Firstly, I still don’t believe that you’re doing this of your own free will. I think he’s forcing you to marry him. And secondly, with your two families combined, Tom and his relatives will be given a whole new level of respect. And power.”

“So?”

“So? Don’t act like you don’t know what the Gaunts are all about.”

Of course you knew. Everyone did. And Ben was probably right. But what should you do about it now?

“Look, Ben,” you sighed. “I’m thankful for your concern, really. But it wasn’t forced. Tom and I… We love each other. And I’m afraid you don’t know him or any of his relatives as well as you think. They’re not seeking power. Or anything of that sort.”

Never before had you lied to someone like this. Twisted the truth a bit, yes. Kept some information secret, yes. But this was the greatest lie that ever left your mouth. And Ben knew.

“Alright,” he said slowly and raised his eyebrows. “The Gaunts are dangerous, whether you believe it or not. Who knows what they’re capable of when they get even more respected in the wizard community? I thought you weren’t like them, you know. But seems like you’re one and the same.”

It was better not to answer him right now because all you could have produced were curse words. Maybe you were like them. But what did Benjamin Hilt, self-proclaimed rescuer, know about any of it? You had your reasons and you weren’t going to share them with him. Who did he think he was?

“I see you don’t want my help,” he said. “Just know, you can always ask for it when you change your mind.”

Then he walked off. It was infuriating. Not that you had anything else to say, but the mere fact that he thought he knew better than everyone else turned your insides sour. So much that you wanted to scream. But he would have heard you. So you kept quiet and walked for a little longer.

One and the same. Sure. Like one of the Gaunts would do anything remotely similar to what you had done for your sister. What an idiot. And even if you accepted his help. What would he be able to do for you? Nothing. One and the same. If people wanted to see you like that, they should. But then, they should be as afraid of you as they were of Tom.

Elsie and your parents crossed your mind. They had sent a letter some days ago. Finally. A reason to keep going. To keep the facade. Saying that you hadn’t thought about quitting would be a lie. Now that your sister was better, you had gathered that there would be a way leading you out of the pact. But the letter reminded you there wasn’t one. And what you did it for. Who you did it for. You took it out of your pocket and read it again.

“Dearest daughter,

we are delighted to let you know Elsie is doing much better. The Gaunts were a tremendous help. Morfin brewed several potions and one of them seemed to be the cure. Her cough stopped immediately and she is on the mend. 

She is finally eating again, she even wanted to help the elves make lunch yesterday.

I think she also grew half an inch over the last week. 

It is an incredible joy to watch her laughing again. We wish you could see her now. 

And we want to let you know, again, how thankful we are for what you did. Without you, Merlin knows what would have happened. We are so proud of you.

However, Marvolo informed us that they haven’t broken the curse entirely.

He said if there will be any kind of breach or breaking of the pact, they can make Elsie sick again. And that it would be worse than before.

We hope you know what that means and what is expected of you. We wish we could take that burden from you.

All the best,

Mum and Dad”

There was a little red heart scribbled at the bottom right corner of the letter, that Elsie had drawn. It made you smile each time you saw it and reminded you of the countless times you had sat with her in the garden, where you had watched her draw random figures and shapes. She would always get angry when your drawings came out better than hers. But she never gave up trying. And you couldn’t give up trying either.

The sun went down earlier each day now, so you went back to the castle once you had walked off the anger in your bones. 

Tom sat there in the courtyard. He was alone for a change. Even though he didn’t talk much, he was usually with at least two other people, who competed for his attention. But not today.

“Hello,” you said and he nodded as you sat down at the stone bench next to him. “What are you up to?”

He looked at you for a moment, then leant forward and gazed into the distance. “Thinking.”

“Me too.”

“Really?” he asked, an unusual tone of sarcasm in his voice.

“What do you mean ���really’?”

“It didn’t seem like you thought of much when you were walking with Hilt.”

“Ben? Did you see us? Hang on. Did you watch me?”

“Does it matter? I just happened to take a walk towards the lake. Then I saw you two.”

“Okay,” you said. “Well, next time feel free to join in. Anything to keep him away. Ben gets on my nerves, you know.”

“Sure,” he said, still not looking at you.

What was his problem now? He couldn't seriously be jealous just because you were out walking with someone. “I mean it,” you said. “I’ve just told him to get off my back.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked.

“What? No. I’m just trying-”

“Listen! If you’re going to be my wife, you must not give the impression of being unfaithful.”

“And being unfaithful means walking with anyone that isn’t you?”

“You know what it means.”

“So I’m not allowed to talk to friends?”

“I thought he wasn’t your friend.”

“He isn’t. This is not about Ben but in general.”

Tom stayed silent.

“You can’t be serious,” you said. “What do you expect me to do? Only ever speak to you, even if other people approach me? I didn’t even invite him. He just happened to be there all of a sudden.”

Tom turned towards you again and came uncomfortably close. 

“I. Don’t. Care. I expect you to be loyal.”

“I am,” you said but he stood up and left. “Wait! You can’t just walk away.”

But he went. You ran after him, your frustration banging from inside your head against your temples. When you entered the hallways, quite a few people were around, some of them already looking at you. 

There he was, still walking away. You finally reached Tom and grabbed him by the shoulder, to make him look at you. He stopped abruptly and turned around, quicker than you had thought, so you almost bumped into him. A second of silence and staring occurred before you took a step back. Okay. Now was the time to get your point across.

“Listen,” you said quietly. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but I guarantee you that’s not what happened.”

“I know wh-”

“No, I said listen to me,” you interrupted him more vehemently and people’s heads turned your way, so you kept your voice low again. “Ben is not my friend. He came up to talk to me about us. I think he knows about the pact. And he wants to ruin everything. I’m not going to lose my sister because of him. So I tried to convince him. And if you think that’s being disloyal then so it be. I don’t care either. But never run away from me when I want to explain myself. And never distrust me again for no reason.”

That was the first time you witnessed Tom Riddle being speechless. So you left him standing there without another word. If people wanted to believe you were one and the same, you would make him believe it too.

Masterpost | Masterlist | Part 5

#tom riddle #tom riddle x reader #tom riddle imagine #tom riddle fanfiction #tom riddle fluff #tom riddle angst #tom riddle AU #harry potter imagine #harry potter fanfiction #voldemort #voldemort x reader #hp #hp fanfiction #reader insert #fanfic #fanfiction #harry potter #imagine #imagines #fluff #angst #x reader

[beesbeesdragons]

I-

oh. theres a certain pain in the idea of, like. amestris, if it got into a bad enough war, would definitely introduce conscription. so like. au where the Ishvalan civil war escalates into what is essentially a world war. Amestris is totally cut off from supplies and trade. its a war fought on all sides except the east. and they're running out of troops.

Consider an amestris that sticks to it's principles of being very traditional, where women are barred from joining the military. It is here that we are introduced to our two protagonists. one Riza Hawkeye and Roy Mustang.

It is 1902. one year ago, the death of an Ishvalan child trigger riots that evolved into what was first a civil war, but quickly turned into a world war; the non-aggression pact with drachma was broken when an amestrian soldier was found with a bullet in his head, right outside the Briggs fortress. Aerugo was found out to be sending supplies to Ishval. Creta bombed a small village in the west, killing nearly a hundred civilians.

they're running out of soldiers. Conscription is introduced. All physically abled men aged 16-45 are eligible. Roy, as a 17 year old, is eligible. So he's drafted. and Berthold Hawkeye, who hates the military, finds the conscription notice in the mail. In a fury, he banishes Roy from his house, ending his apprenticeship early, and stealing away Riza's only friend. Roy, who hadn't even known; the letter had been in a bundle from the post office, set on the kitchen counter for Riza to look through after lunch.

And so Roy returns to his home, with Chris and the girls. but he sends letters to Riza. and when he begins training? he keeps up the correspondonce.

It is in 1905 when he has enough leave time to visit, and it is shortly after that Berthold Hawkeye passes, from a sickness that had passed through the area.

Riza Hawkeye, newly orphaned and with no one, finds herself having a tumultuous affair with her father's former apprentice, and the two wed before Roy's leave is over.

Once Roy is called back to fight, Riza flees that tiny town, heading to Central to have the smallest modicum of support from Chris. and she gets it. she starts working at a small shop near to the apartment that Chris had helped her buy, and she's happy.

Until it arrives.

a fairly innocuous telegram. standard, by all accounts. but she's a soldier's wife. she's a working woman. and her husband...he's MIA, presumably a prisoner of war. And Riza knows, she knows how prisoners of war are treated. So she makes a decision.

she returns to the town she vowed to never return to, returns to that god forsaken house. and she digs. she digs, and she finds it. a letter, unsent by her mother, addressed to her estranged grandfather, whom riza had never met, let alone sent a letter to. but she does.

Dear General Grumman, she writes.

My name is Riza Hawkeye, and you are my grandfather. Two weeks ago, I received word that my husband, one Major Roy Mustang, State Alchemist, has gone missing. It is my understanding that he is under your command.

I know this is an unconventional way of doing so, but I beg of you. Please, find my husband. Please, return him to me. Do so and I will owe you my life, for that is what he means to me.

Sincerely, Riza Hawkeye-Mustang

All she can do after it is written is wait.

and wait she does. she waits for two years, until she receives a telegram from her grandfather.

We found him. He's coming home.

Riza and Roy reunite in a busy train station, seeing each other for the first time in three years. Roy, who had suffered as a prisoner of war, has had an honourable discharge after losing sight in one of his eyes. Riza, who had been mourning her husband for the past two years, had kept her job, had built herself a life. and they both get to live it now.

#fullmetal alchemist #fmab #fanfic #roy mustang #riza hawkeye #royai #royai fanfiction

[maxverstappensflatbrim]

Show Me Yours | Matty Healy [2]

chapter two, act one: antichrist

May 29th 2010

"You've what?"

"Changed the name of the band."

Comes the reply over the phone, "Why?"

Adam sighs on the other end, "Not sure, think Matty's going through an existential crisis again."

She snorts, "When is he not?"

She twirls the pen in her hand as she leans back, and lifts her feet to rest on her desk, "What's the name?"

"Uh, 19- sorry, the 1975."

She starts laughing, holding a hand to her mouth to hold it back, but the smile can be seen from miles away.

"He's very specific about the."

"Yeah?"

Adam hums, "Is it some kind of inside joke?" He asks, "Your tattoos? I don't get it, he won't tell anyone."

"Our little secret, Ads."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm just glad I don't have to describe to girls why we're called Drive Like I Do, anymore."

"What girls?" She teases and she hears him laugh sarcastically on the other end.

It's silent for a few moments, and she picks at a string on her cardigan, "We've got another gig lined up."

"Really?"

"Yeah, a few, you gonna come up soon?"

She sighs, "I don't know, Ads, maybe."

"Matty uh, he bought your book yesterday. Was pissed I got a free one and he didn't."

She scoffs, "Didn't want him stealing my stuff again."

Adam laughs too, "It's great, Tommie, really. You're an amazing writer, you should do something with that."

"Maybe."

"No, you should." He says firmly.

She glances to the side, the little book sitting there staring at her, 75 pages of her own work. Her writing, her words, her poetry.

"Has he, uh, has he read it?"

"About a hundred times."

"Really?"

Adam hums, "We all have. It's good, Tommie." He hesitates a second, then adds, "Song worthy, band worthy."

"I'm not-"

"Yeah, I know. Thought I'd try again."

She wants to get off topic now, and talk about something other than her work. The thought of Matty reading it, understanding it, makes a red blush rise up her neck and across her cheeks.

"Did you hear what Nan and Granch are doing?"

"No." She can imagine his furrowed brows and confused tilted head, one that makes him look so much like their grandfather.

"Moving to France, or Spain, they haven't decided."

Adam laughs, "A place in the sun?"

"All the time, I can't come downstairs and see it on tele anymore, I'm going crazy, If it's not that it's an antique roadshow making him think he can become some sort of pawnbroker."

Adam chuckles again, "I think he's bored."

"I know, being retired doesn't suit him, he's trying to convince Nan to retire but she's still got four years before she's old enough."

"Doubt she will either, she loves her little break from him once a day."

"How is it over there?" He asks then, "At the McDuff household?"

"Great, actually, great."

"Tommie?"

She hums, moving her position so her feet are back on the floor, going back to staring at her notes for her English class, "How's things at the Fern household?"

"Well, dad's pissed he lost the custody battle. But, he did turn up to court drunk four times, so... that's his own fault."

"He seen you?"

"He asked me to go to dinner with him three weeks ago, still waiting for him to pick me up."

"What time was he supposed to be there?" Adam asks.

"Three weeks ago." She repeats slowly.

She hears him sighs, can imagine the pity falling off of him, "Tommie-"

She cuts him off quickly, not wanting the pity, "Nan's calling me, think dinner is ready, I'll call you monday when I get more credit."

"Okay, bye, Tommie."

"Bye, Ad."

Adam turns away as he hangs up, opening up the door again to step back inside Matty's place. Despite the early hour, seven thirty, both Ross and George are passed out on a sofa each. Matty's curled up on the beanbag he'd brought down from his bedroom, book in hand, glasses on, leaving the armchair open to Adam.

"She okay?"

"Yeah, revising for exams."

Matty nods, not tearing his eyes away from the page, "What do you think she means by 'watch my inane tears'?"

Adam looks up, "What?"

"In her one poem, she's written, 'the consequential ignorance, as you watch my inane tears', what do you think she means by that?"

"You know, if there was a poem in there about you, she'd have told me."

Matty closes the book, sending him something between a glare and an embarrassed look, "That's not what I'm trying to find out. I-"

He sighs looking away, "Your cousin is a very private person. She only reveals things she wants to, and I'm very nosy." The other boy just raises a brow slowly, "I'm trying to understand how her mind works, she's- so, I don't know, her mind is just- amazing."

"But," Matty asks, "What do you think she means?"

"Which poem is it?"

"The art of eye contact."

Adam remembers their conversation where she talked about it, "It's about her father, ignoring her and moving on to the next child. So, I guess she means like- I don't know." Adam shakes his head then looks at Matty, "But I have a feeling you think you do?"

"Well, I had to use a dictionary, no idea what inane means, or how to pronounce it. But according to the dictionary, it means, 'lacking sense'." Matty sighs, "I think it's her saying that her tears are worthless because they make no sense, she's been holding them back for so long at this point she's crying over things she doesn't need to cry over."

He looks up at Adam, "Is she okay? When you talked to her?"

"She's fine, Matty."

"Really?"

"Yup."

He nods, then he looks down at the page again watching his scruffy handwriting in blue ink beside the printed words as he reads the poem over and over until it's engraved in his head.

The Art of Eye Contact, by Tommie McDuff

Look at me, In your condescending way, Judge how I am free, And then watch my words decay. They fall upon deaf ears, The consequential ignorance, As you watch my inane tears, And ignore our indifference. We are not the same, One man, One full of shame, No more than. A plain chaste, Woman of a child, Destroyed in her haste, But even then she smiled. Look at me, Again, meet my eyes, The baleful banshee, It's time you realise. Again, look at me, And allow me to distract, After all this is just the Art of eye contact.

⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡ ⋆

June 3rd 2010

Sixteen.

She thought maybe it would feel different but as she rolls over, noticing the yellow post-it note that's been placed on her pillow she sighs.

Happy Birthday, sweetheart. Working late tonight, see you then x

As she scrumples the paper up and tosses it into the plastic bin beneath her desk she lays back down in bed.

She thought being sixteen would be different, thought being sixteen would make her mother try and stay around for a birthday.

She sighs then checks the time, eight-thirty. She doesn't have an exam today, next one is on the eight, history and maths. She hates maths.

Hearing her grandfather tottering around downstairs forces her up, she smiles when her foot hits something and recognises her nans terrible wrapping skills lying at the bottom of her bed.

When she unwraps it she smiles at the soft fabric. A little knitted green cardigan lays inside and she lifts it up.

Her nan's been really into knitting lately, reading books on it until she perfects the little thing.

Tommie had asked for a new cardigan, the one she'd bought got caught on a door at school and ripped, she'd been heartbroken. It was her nannie's, the only thing she'd had of her after she died.

She pulls on some grey sweats, an old Stereophonics t-shirt then her new green cardigan over the top and heads downstairs quickly.

"Morning."

The dog, Taffie, is the first to greet her, the little Jack Russell that's still like a puppy despite her age of fourteen.

She leans down to pat the dog's side, smiling as she turns to lick at her hand.

"Good morning."

She stands quickly turning to the settee, "Hey."

"Cute slippers."

She rolls her eyes, looking down at the little cow slippers on her feet, "What are you doing here?"

Matty grins, looking up as her nan walks in with a cup of tea in her hands, "There you go, Matty."

"Thanks, Mag."

She settles beside him and then notices her granddaughter, "Tommie, happy birthday."

She gets back up to kiss her on the cheek and she smiles, "Thank you, and thanks for my present."

"Granch has got some pancakes on."

She goes back out into the kitchen with a promise of a cup of tea for her and then Tommie goes back to looking at Matty.

"Happy birthday, Tommie."

She smiles sitting beside him, "Thank you. But seriously, what are you doing here?"

"Fulfilling my life goal."

She rolls her eyes a little and shakes her head, "Matty..."

"What?" He shrugs a little avoiding her burning gaze.

She plays with the sleeves of her new cardigan, "It's four hours here from Manchester, and it's only nine."

"Actually, it's three hours and fifteen minutes, and I've been here since eight."

"Matty."

He shrugs, "I couldn't sleep, then I thought to myself, 'Wow my amazingly talented and funny best friend has her birthday today, I should go see her'."

"Thank you," She says again, "But you didn't have to."

"But, I wanted to-"

"Breakfast for the birthday girl."

She smiles at her grandfather as he walks in, he places a kiss on her forehead, "Happy birthday, my little flower."

"Thanks, Granch."

As he hands her the plate he checks his watch, "Oh shit, I've got to go. Late to go to the station."

He kisses her head once more, "Happy birthday."

"See you tonight."

"Tomorrow," He says as he leaves, "I've got to pick up a night shift."

Her nan shakes her head, "He's supposed to be retired. Always running off to 'look after' the engines."

Her nan sticks around until lunchtime, pestering both her and Matty to make sure they eat something before she leaves for her shift at work.

"What do you usually do on your birthday?"

"Sit around, watch tele, eat, cry, eat, watch more tele, eat."

He groans loudly, "Right, get up, put some actual trousers on, and some suitable footwear, we're going out."

"Out? Where, you've been here twice before. And got lost trying to find ASDA."

"I've been researching."

"You asked, Adam?"

He blinks at her slowly, "Get dressed."

⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡ ⋆

"Gonna tell me where we're going?"

He sighs, fingers drumming the wheel, "I have to, I have no idea where I'm going." She chuckles, "I was going to take you to that ice cream place, in Brecon."

She smiles to herself, "Third exit on this roundabout."

She turns back to look at him then with a smile, "You're taking me for ice cream."

He nods, looking over at her with his own little smile, "Gonna make it the best birthday ever."

"No need," She says, leaning forward to mess around with the radio, "Already is."

"We haven't done anything yet."

She shrugs, "You're here, I've left the house and we're on our way to get ice cream," She turns back to look at him as Katy Perry fills the car, "It's already the best birthday I've ever had."

His smile only gets bigger as he keeps driving forward, taking in the beacons and the sunlight peeking through the trees as they go.

⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡ ⋆

"Where are we going?"

She laughs and keeps running, dragging him behind her through the field until finally, they stop, she turns walking backward then falls flat on her back.

He chuckles, walking closer, "What are you doing?"

"I used to do this as a kid with Granch, star gaze. He's a big constellation freak. Come here."

He sits beside her then slowly leans back into the grass, "Bet you've never seen stars like this, Healy, huh?"

He tilts his head, "They're so much brighter."

"That's 'cause the street lights in the city put all the stars to death."

"Wow." He chuckles and she turns to look at him, "How poetic of you."

"Shut up, it's true."

He sighs looking up, "Okay, what are the constellations?"

She snorts, "I don't know, never really paid much attention."

He tilts his head, "That one looks like a blunt."

She snorts, "You're such a junkie."

"A junkie wanna-be, baby."

She scoffs, "A sycophantic junkie."

He raises a brow, tilting his head down to look at her, "Really? Sycophantic? Thought I'd at least be like prophetic level."

"Since when could you see the future?"

He turns fully onto his side, "I can predict the future."

"Go on then, read me, Healy."

He closes his eyes, hovering his hand over her face and she giggles, he peeks one eye open to look down at her, "Shh, I need to concentrate."

She purses her lips, looking up at him as he closes his eyes again, his curly dark hair falling across his forehead causing him to try and blow it up out of the way.

"I see... a band-" She pushes his hand out the way but he fights back to keep it there, "And- an album. Loads of money, big houses, parties, celebrities, red carpets-"

"Wow, like living an actual nightmare."

He opens his eyes now, "You wouldn't want that?"

She shakes her head, "Not for me. I'd rather have enough money to get by and live in a little house with a dog or two alone, for the rest of my life."

"That's a sad life." She shrugs her shoulders, closes her eyes, and lays down again.

Matty sighs, shifting a little. He's the opposite of her, never one for silence whereas she thrives in it.

"What would your superpower be?"

"Um..." She sighs, brows furrowed and eyes still closed.

"Reading minds."

"Boring."

She elbows him in the rib and he dramatically cries out, rubbing the area, "Why is that boring?"

"It's such a basic answer."

"You don't even know why."

"Okay," He nods, turning to her, raising his one eyebrow in a challenging way, "Why?"

She flicks his forehead, "So I could see what's going on in there." He catches her wrist moving her hand away.

He shakes his head laughing and she laughs too, moving up onto her elbows, "What? I'd love to see inside your mind."

"Why? It's a scary place."

"Oh, I don't doubt it. But so I could see how you come up with your songs,. Like Lost Boys, ooh, and sex, where'd that one come from? I know for a fact little Matthew Healy never asked anyone to meet them in the back of his van."

"I did, actually."

"Lies." She calls him out immediately, then giggles to herself, "You sound like a paedo in that song."

"Gee, thanks."

"You're welcome."

⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡ ⋆

Matty stops the car, pulling up the handbrake then looking over at her with a huge smile. "Home."

"Thank you." She says sincerely as she shrugs off the seatbelt.

"Happy Birthday, Tommie."

"Uh, you wanna stay? I can set up the spare room, it's in the attic and a little creepy but I'm not staying in there, so it'll have to do."

He chuckles, watching her pick at a string on her jeans, "I'm okay, I've got to get back anyway."

"This late?" She asks, she glances at the little watch on her wrist, brows furrowed and he chuckles at her confusion.

"Two twenty."

"At twenty past two in the morning? You've been here since early this morning, Matty, surely that's not healthy."

"I'll be fine."

"Healy."

He grabs her hands that pick at her thumb and squeezes it, "I've gone longer and further with no sleep, at least I've had a couple of hours."

She sighs, knowing he's too stubborn and she won't win. Nodding her head she opens her door and smiles as she leans down but he jumps up, unbuckling his seatbelt, "Wait, wait..."

He runs around to the back of the car, opening up the boot and calling her over. He takes a big case out and hands it to her but she hesitates, "Matt..."

"Happy Birthday."

"I-"

"Just open it, please."

She unzips the bag slowly gripping the guitar by the neck and then looks up to him. That adorable pout and head tilts of hers staring up at him.

"Matt."

"It's the one Alex Turner plays."

"I know." She smiles and nods quickly, looking down at the Fender Stratocaster in her hands. It's a dark green colour, her favourite.

She rubs her fingers over the colouring, plucking a few strings, briefly playing what he recognizes as a tune of crying lightning.

"I can't-"

"You can, it's a birthday present, can't give them back."

"It's too expensive."

"It's not just from me, it's from all of us."

Her shoulders drop quickly, "Is this some kind of ploy to get me in the band?"

"No, I think it was Adam's idea to get you to stop stealing his when you're over."

She looks down at the guitar again, she turns and sits on the edge of the boot, resting it on her thigh, "Play me something." He requests, hands in his pockets as he leans against the side of his car.

"What?"

"Anything."

She thinks for a moment, hands moving as she plays around, plucking a few strings here and there.

She finds herself doing a favourite of hers, C'est la vie by Stereophincs, she hums the lyrics a little as she goes on.

"See? Natural." He says.

After putting it back in the case, swinging it over her shoulder and looking up at him she smiles once more up at him.

A big toothy smile that has the corner of her eyes crinkling and cheeks tinting red in the cold air of the night.

"Thank you, Matty."

He nods hands still in his pockets as he turns away from his now closed boot, "Happy birthday, Tommie. Did I do it?" She raises a brow, asking him to explain, "Prove birthdays can be good."

She shrugs, "Not really." His whole demeanour changes, shoulders sagging and his smile falls. "Everyday with you is like this. Fun, adventurous, happy..."

His head lifts again, and he lifts a hand quickly to wipe away the curly dark hair that has fallen across his forehead.

She steps closer, lifting up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, "Thank you."

He nods, watching her step back again before turning to go into her house. As he gets in he doesn't see her turn back to watch him drive away. Or hear her mutter warnings to herself about having a crush on her cousin's best friend.

Who not only lives three hours away but is a good few years older too.

"Stop it, Tommie," She says, quietly closing the door, "He's your friend."

~thanks for reading! x

#matty healy #the 1975 #adam hann imagine #matty healy imagine #matty healy x reader #the1975 x reader #matty healy x oc #show me yours matty healy

[howlingday]

Pyrrha's family but it's exactly like the one in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"

I'll to match it as best as I can from whst I've seen.

---------------------------------------------------

Jaune never felt so uncomfortable sitting across from anyone before in his life. When he proposed to Pyrrha a week ago, she insisted he meet her family. He should have met her parents, at least, but love makes you reckless sometimes, and he loved Pyrrha Nikos with all his heart, so he couldn't help but marry her as soon as he could. But he would never admit that, as the elderly gentleman across from them stood to his full eight foot glory, and cracked his knuckles, he feared he may have acted too hasitly.

"Be good to her." Her father spoke in a low rumble, like a distant thunderstorm. "She is still young." He turned away, muttering something in his old tongue.

Jaune turned to his fiancé. She gave a sheepish smile as she placed her hand over his. She was as soothing to the fears in his soul as a plate of dinosaur chicken nuggets fresh from the oven. Hey, don't judge. He knows what he is and what he likes.

"He likes you." Pyrrha assured him. "You're very lucky."

Before Jaune could respond, there was yelling in the back room. Pyrrha's older sister came out, arguing in her native tongue with her... husband? Boyfriend? Colleague? Jaune wasn't sure. He was still dumbstruck by the stark contrast between sisters, especially after meeting the parents.

Pyrrha's father was once a blond man, but time had worn his hair from a platinum blond to an almost marble white, probably the only sign of age on the chiseled statue that was her father. Her mother looked much like Pyrrha, with the two sharing many features, though height and athletic build were not among them. Pyrrha's sister, or half-sister from a previous lover, he learned, was much more athletically built, with dark, raven black hair.

"They're fine." The man spoke as he exited. He was in an all black suit with a white collared shirt and a navy blue tie. His cold, blue eyes glared across the room as he passed, as if he were observing all the possible means he could use this room to his advantage.

"I told you to train her," Pyrrha's sister said as she followed close behind him, "not put her in harm's way!"

"It's the only way she'll learn, Diana." He said calmly. "It's how you learned, and how I-"

"Don't assume you can justify this with your-" Diana, in her own suit attire glanced at the sheepish boy and her sister. With a scoff, she pushed past the man and made her way into the other room.

There was a long silence before the man spoke. "Are you Jaune?" The young man in question nodded. "Here. This is my gift. I'm probably not going to make it to the wedding." He then swore under his breath in the same language as Pyrrha's sister.

Pyrrha giggled. "Should you be saying that with my sister in the other room?"

"What did he say?!" Diana roared as she flung open the door. With how loud they cracked against the wall, he was sure either the doors or the walls were broken. She then made a 'Come here' gesture, which the dark-haired man obeyed. The only sounds as the door closed were the aggressive swearing in the old tongue he heard. Jaune didn't know the whole language, but Pyrrha at least taught him the bad words.

There was a thunderous cacophany of movement behind the two lovers. They turned, and Jaune suddenly met the rest of Pyrrha's family. If he had to describe what the family looked like, he'd say something like a stew his grandfather made, meaning there were a lot of colors and shapes that, some way some how, blended well together. But there was mostly beef in the pot.

Judging by the armor and weapons they carried, half of Pyrrha's family was made up of warriors. The other half were supermodels who giggled and fawned from behind. Her mother led the charge and drew the family closer as they all gabbed in the unknown mother tongue of Pyrrha. If only Jaune remembered the name of it.

"Is this him?" One of the men asked, peeking his head over to glimpse past the giants between them.

"Uh, hi," Jaune gave a small wave, "I'm Jaune."

"JAUNE!" The family cheered, swarming over the couple.

Soon after, hot food was served and music began loudly played. Jaune felt like he was caught in some wild fever dream. Pyrrha was whisked away by the other girls. He caught the hurried whispers of, 'Does he have any brothers?'. Thankfully, he didn't. He'd never been so grateful to have seven sisters.

He also caught the hushed words of some of the older family members expressing their surprise. Surprise at Pyrrha's choice for a groom, as well as her choice at all. They never expected Pyrrha to marry. In some of their voices, they sounded almost hopeful. Jaune wanted to get closer to hear more, but a hand gripped his shoulder.

A very large hand.

"It is impolite to listen to a conversation that does not involve you." Jaune turned to see an older man glaring down at him. His beard was great and vast, like a wild black bush. His tuxedo waa ripped at the seams, as if his bulk was too great to be contained by mere fabric. Along his face, going over his eye, was a faded red band of a tattoo trailing over his bald scalp.

"W-Well," Jaune cleared his throat, "I think... if Pyrrha is going to be attacked, I should be there to protect her."

"Do you not believe she can fight her own battles?" There was a dangerous look as the man rumbled low into his ear.

"Sh-She can," Jaune gulped, "but what kind of man would I be if I couldn't protect the woman I love?"

The man hummed in thought, pulling his mass away from Jaune. He turned away without looking at Jaune, then gave a huff. "You will suffice." He then left, leaving Jaune to be dumbfounded.

Jaune weaved his way around, over, and through the throngs of relatives. He was almost to Pyrrha's attackers, who were gabbing much louder about her, when a voice roared from where Pyrrha stood.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE NO EAT SPINACH?!" He turned to Pyrrha, who was pinching the bridge of her nose. The music stopped, and so did the gossip and chatter, as all eyes looked to Pyrrha.

"As I was saying," Pyrrha said, speaking a bit louder, "Jaune is allergic to spinach, so he can't eat spinach." All eyes turned to Jaune now, and the mass of relatives parted from him as if he had a fog of plague around him.

The older woman, who shifted her shoulders so the shawl covered her much better, glared down the open path at Jaune. Left utterly and completely defenseless, Jaune shrugged. The older wpman barked a laugh.

"Is fine! I make spanikopita!" The party then resumed faster than Jaune expected. He made his way over to Pyrrha, who seemed relieved to see him. Maybe moreso than he was. A pit bore into his stomach as he then thought something more unsettling than this family gathering.

How were the Arcs going to react to this?

#rwby #my big fat greek wedding #arkos #pyrrha nikos #jaune arc #diana prince #bruce wayne #dc #wonder woman #batman #zeus #mama nikos #greek mythology #god of war #kratos

[nadinebrooks]

Here is the link to my masterlist.

James Sirius Potter x Reader: We're Just Friends

Warning: None

"Dad is not going to be happy when he hears about you." I yelled up at my twin brother. I had been searching the whole castle for about an hour looking for him. I managed to find him at the Quidditch pitch. This was the first place I should have looked. 

I knew that Scorpius loved coming to the Quidditch pitch when he wanted to blow off some stream. It was one of the few things in this world that could calm down.  

Scorpius had always been rather sensitive. He tried to keep a lot of his feelings bottled up, but I always knew when something was bothering him. I mean we spent a lot of time together when we weren't in school.  

Tryouts were coming up and Scorpius wanted to play Quidditch just like our father. He even wanted to be a Seeker just like dad. If you ask me, I think that Scorpius should try to go off on his own path. He wanted to do everything just like our dad.  

Growing up we had always been super close. We told each other everything. I could read his emotions better than mine. But we didn't get to see each other as much as I would like us to because of the fact that we were in two different houses. It was hard to get some alone time with him just so we could talk.  

Like I mentioned earlier, Scorpius was rather sensitive. Even though he felt a lot of his feelings, he wasn't someone that liked to share all those feelings. But I knew something was off with him. I always knew when something was wrong with him. 

He followed behind directly in our parent's footsteps and ended up in Slytherin. I ended up in Gryffindor. I don't think my parents were upset about it. I mean they didn't say anything that made me think they were mad at me. I had heard the stories about how my dad treated people when he was at school. I knew that I did not want my family to be portrayed in that light anymore.  

I hated that I only got to see each Scorpius during a few of classes we had together throughout the week. We were both so busy with our schedules that it was hard to find time to talk.  

So, I decided that I would track him down if it was the only thing I had time to do today.  

"What are you talking about (y/n)?" He glared coming down from the sky on his broom. He passed me a Snitch. He didn't even have to say anything. I knew exactly what he wanted me to do. When he would practice at home, I would release the Snitch from different places around our manor and he would race to find it.  

He was letting me know that since I was here the least I could do was help him out. If this is what I had to do to get some talking time with my brother then I was more than happy to do it. 

I let the golden ball go and it flew around. Once he had caught it, he would bring it back to me. It was like a human game of fetch.  

After a little while of doing this, an owl landed beside me. I instantly recognized the owl and I felt myself get giddy with happiness. I immediately ripped open the letter. I gave the owl an extra snack that I had been carrying around to eat later. I always carried an extra snack around just for this owl. 

Meet me at our usual spot. Usual time. 

-JP  

Scorpius was riding around on the broom that my father had bought him for Christmas two years ago. Since it was a little out dated, our grandfather had promised Scorpius the newest broom model if he made the team. At first our grandfather wasn't happy at all when I had gotten placed Gryffindor. I thought he was going to disown me. Eventually he got over it just like my dad did a couple of years ago. 

"I know about Rose Weasley." I blurted out before I could even stop myself. Scorpius' head snapped towards me causing him to miss the Snitch. It flew away further than he would have liked but he flew after it and caught it with ease. Once he caught it, he slowly made his way over to me. I could tell that he was trying to decide how to approach this conversation.  

"What about Rose?" He sighed tightly gripping the broom. I could see that his face was calm but on the inside he was freaking out. I knew that face so well because I had mastered that face.  

My father and I were extremely close and I told him everything. I knew that Scorpius didn't want this little secret to slip out. Even though my dad and I were close, I would never betray my brother. I would go to the end of the Earth for him. With absolutely no questions asked.  

"I know you two are sneaking around." I grumbled. "Honestly, I'm a little offended that you didn't tell me. I thought we told each other everything." I reached over and pinched his cheek.  

"Funny that you would say that." He darkly chuckled swatting my hand away. He started packing up his equipment and then headed back towards the school. I stood there trying to figure out what exactly he meant by that. By the time I had come back to my senses, Scorpius was halfway back to the school.  

"What's that supposed to mean?" I nervously asked when I had caught up with him. I don't even know why I needed to ask. I knew exactly what he was trying to say. We had been so careful. There's no way that he knew. No way that anyone knew.  

"You know exactly what I'm trying to say (y/n)." He took the stairs towards the dungeon and I followed. I pulled my robes tighter around me. It was always so cold down here. "I know that you and James Potter have been sneaking around. You two have been meeting each other late at night. I saw his owl (y/n). No reason to hide it."  

"I-but-we-" I stammered not sure how to make the situation any better. He had called me out and there was nothing I could do. 

"What was that you said about not telling each other everything?" He turned around and raised a pale eyebrow waiting for me to come up with an excuse. There was no need to lie to him. 

"We haven't done anything." I huffed causing his eyebrow to raise higher. 

"Oh really?" He spun around into the portrait hall, but I followed him inside. This wasn't the first time I had been in the Slytherin common room. I tried to avoid this place. The only time I would come in here was for my brother. "I don't believe that."  

"You don't have to, but I promise we haven't. I know all about what you and Rose have been doing though."  

"And what exactly have we been doing (y/n)?" He questioned flopping onto one of the couches. "I know that you and Rose are not close at all. There's no way she talked to you about us." I opened my mouth to respond, but my watch made a low buzz letting me know that I had a meeting to get to.  

"I have to go now, but this conversation isn't over." I hiked up my robes and marched out of the common room.  

"Tell James I said keep his hands to himself!" Was the last thing I heard before the entrance of the common room slammed shut. Sure James and I had become rather close over the last couple of years, but our relationship was strictly platonic.  

We had kissed once. That was a while ago and after that kiss, we decided that we should just stay friends. Well that's what James decided and I just went along with it. I had developed feelings after that kiss, but I wasn't going to tell James that. After I realized that he didn't feel the same way about me. If I couldn't have James as a boyfriend, then a friend was good enough for me.  

"Hey." I grinned when I got to our usual spot. It was in front of one of our father's favorite professors, Professor Severus Snape. 

"Where have you been?" He questioned. "I was looking for you in the common room and the library."  

"I was down at the Quidditch pitch with my brother. I was just talking to him while he was getting ready for Quidditch tryouts. Are you ready for them?" 

"Of course. No need to worry about me (y/n). My father was-" 

"The youngest Seeker in a century. I've heard you say that so many times, but that doesn't mean the position is going to be handed to you. You have to work for it just like everyone else."  

"Do your fathers know that you have been getting along so well?" We both turned towards the portrait to see Professor Snape looking down at us with this sort of amused looked on his face.  

"No." We both answered not meeting his eye.  

"Even though our father's didn't like each other doesn't mean we have to be like them." James boldly responded. 

"Your father's didn't just dislike each other. They loathed each other. Couldn't stand the sight of each other. But it's nice to see that you two aren't continuing the tradition." We stood there talking to Professor Snape for a little while longer until Fred and Roxanne Weasley came bounding the hallway. Those two were inseparable.  

"Uncle Harry is not going to be happy when he finds out about you two." Fred's brown eyes were gleaming with mischief while he looked at his younger cousin. 

"That's exactly what I said." Professor Snape sneered.  

"Stop." Roxanne giggled, "I think it's rather cute. Forbidden love."  

"We're not dating." I instantly said not wanting any of them to get the wrong idea.  

"Pity." Roxanne sighed. 

"Well on that note, we're playing Truth or Dare so c'mon." Fred said but before anyone could reply he took off down the hall with his sister right behind him. I looked and James and shrugged, what harm could there be in a little game of Truth or Dare? 

*** 

"Dare." James replied. He had done Truth two times before so it was time for something new.  

I was sitting on the floor in a large circle in the Room of Requirement playing Truth or Dare with my brother, James, Albus, Lily Luna, Teddy Lupin, and all the Weasleys. I wasn't able to meet the eye of Hugo Weasley who was staring his cousin down. This was not going to be fun. 

"I dare you to kiss (y/n)." He simply stated. "Not a quick peck. A real kiss."  

"But we're not together."  James protested. I felt my heart sink. I would think that he would have been a little happier to kiss me, but I guess not.  

"Rules are rules." Fred pointed out. I couldn't believe that out of everyone here, they hadn't picked Rose and Scorpius to kiss. Of course it ended up being the two of us.  

"Fine." James grumbled standing up and trudging over towards me. He held out a hand and helped me to my feet. "We don't have to do this if you don't want to. I'll just take the consequences." 

"No. It's okay." I sadly whispered. I was a little shorter than James so I had to stand on my tippy toes to reach him. At first it was rather cautious but then James reached up and gripped my hair. This was the first time I had ever kissed anyone like this. I was pouring every single emotion I was feeling at the moment into this kiss. James other arm reached around my waist, pulling me closer to him until I couldn't be any closer.  

I really didn't mean to but I let out a little moan which caused James to smile into the kiss. It was unlike any kiss I had experienced before. There was a wolf whistle and then an awkward cough.  

When we pulled apart Scorpius, Albus, and Fred were looked absolutely shocked. But Rose, Lily Luna, and Roxanne were beaming.  

"But friends don't kiss each other like that." Hugo had said what everything was thinking.  

"Well I guess that means we're not friends anymore." James smirked at me.  

"I guess not." I giggled reaching up and planting a quick kiss on his lips.  

"I cannot wait until father hears about this." Scorpius whispered in shock. 

#harry potter #harry potter masterlist #harry potter preferences #harry potter imagine #james sirius potter #James Sirius potter x reader

[lumiereandcogsworth]

I’ve been meaning to ask !!! Its possible you’ve already posted abt this BUT I got in an angsty mood recently and was curious, do you think Adam or Belle dies first? and how does the other cope with it ?

ooohhh i love that you Know i’m just crazy enough about them to know the answer to this question. i’ve thought TOO much about this, unfortunately! look you have one otp for six years, YOUR MIND WANDERS, OKAY?

okay so obviously in the ideal perfect world, they die at the same time asleep in bed in each other’s arms after a very long life of being so ridiculously in love. that way no one has to deal with anything (except the rest of their family, of course). that’s the ideal otp death scenario. BUT. i do have a sadder answer, yeah

so for a while i actually could not decide who would die first. it really wasn’t ideal either way because if adam dies first, belle has to go through experiencing his death TWICE in life. and if belle dies first, adam is… disaster. but ultimately, belle is by far the stronger one between the two of them, they both know it and always have, so i decided that adam would die first.

i once entertained the idea of belle dying first and adam just… oh my gosh… like they’re always very old when they die but even still it’s like… belle is the air that adam breathes… watching him lose her is so… dark. and grim. he really can’t live without her and the aftermath is far too upsetting to include it into my canon. he becomes so unwell…

now, obviously, belle is utterly heartbroken by adam’s death, and she doesn’t do all that much better than the alternative. i headcanon they both die in their 90s (no i do not CARE that they’re from the 18th century!!!!! they’re living long ass lives because i SAID SO!!!!!!) and it’s really no specific illness that takes adam. it was just his time. he was in bed for a week or so, too weak at this point to do anything else. belle never left his side, caring for him even though she had slowed down in her old age too. even as nurses and grandchildren tried to take over, she wouldn’t let them. she’d do anything for him. she’d take his place if it were possible.

he dies at the grand age of 98, surrounded by his family and loved ones, holding his wife’s hand. she can tell he’s nearly gone, but he’s fighting it. he loves his life too much now to leave it. he’s been sunbathing in happiness for over 70 years and he doesn’t want to let it go. but belle kisses his hand and tells him it’s okay, they’ll be okay. this family he’s raised, this family he’s protected, this family he’s loved. they’ll be okay. rest now, my love.

silent tears fall down belle’s wrinkled cheeks as adam turns and looks at her. though his face and body age, his eyes never changed. still the same crystal blue that she fell in love with. he looks at her and he squeezes her hand. his lips turn up in a slight smile. “my darling…” he whispers, just as his last breath escapes his lungs.

everyone knows he’s gone. he was husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, beloved king. he was rescued so many years ago, it seems none of it matters anymore. but belle remembers. belle remembers when her love was lost in the darkness. belle remembers when he accepted her light.

the following days are a blur. everyone is sad, but relieved too — in the way anyone is when an old, beloved family member passes. he deserved to die that way. life fulfilled, loved by plenty, surrounded by those who meant the most to him.

while the children (grown and old themselves, frankly) tend to announcements and letters and funeral arrangements, belle keeps to herself. she sits on the balcony of their chambers in the west wing. she watches another sunset alone. she hasn’t felt such sadness since her father died many years ago. she thought she would never recover from the deep pain she felt at his loss. but adam had been there to hold her while she cried. adam had kissed her head and told her things would be better again. and at the time she couldn’t fathom it, but she never left his arms. his warm, comforting arms. belle had never felt safer than when she was in adam’s embrace. and now… now she shivers under even the warmest of blankets.

they were old. and belle always thinks too much. she knew their time on this earth could not be much longer. and when adam could no longer get up, it was only a matter of time. what she did not anticipate was how utterly betrayed she would feel by death itself. how dare he be taken away from her? to leave her alone? she always prided herself on being able to do things on her own, but the true reality of it was devastating. she didn’t want to do anything alone ever again. she wanted her best friend back. who was she going to dance with now?

the last entry of her diary was short, but clear in how sad the queen felt. how lost she was, how high up in the clouds her head floated, with no one to keep her grounded. her heart had completely and irreversibly broken in two. she would see adam; visions of when they were young, and some when they were older. but he’d always vanish again before she could say anything to him. “where is my adam?” she’d ask her children when they found her. they would simply take her hand and kiss her cheek, asking her to come and sit awhile with the little ones.

a week after adam’s death, their children found belle in bed, having peacefully died in her sleep. they were devastated, but equally knew how much their mama loved their papa. they had always known of their parents’ grand love. and they knew this may just be too much for her. knew that dying from a broken heart was as real as it could be.

so, adam and belle were buried together, entombed in the rose garden behind the castle. their precious home. a huge, lovely structure was placed to honor them, with vines and flowers growing around it, and eloquent words on a plaque speaking of a beloved king and queen, who loved like no other.

#thanks bro made myself cry :) #i am in shambles thinking about belle seeing a vision of adam. young and healthy and rocking their baby daughter #and she smiles to herself #and then that same daughter - old and a grandmother herself now - comes in and gently sits beside her mama #and belle tells her to stay quiet. adam’s tending to their little renée. he’s so good with her you know #and renée looks over and sees nobody. her heart aches #she kisses belle’s cheek and asks her to come sit with the little ones. come be with family. don’t be alone mama #belle loses sight of adam. he’s vanished again. she goes with renée and asks where her adam has gone #‘you’ll find him again mama’ renée promises as they walk slowly. arm in arm. #alex tag #answered #batb 2017 #adelle #batb headcanons

[reasoningdaily]

The cottonfields of Georgia were once worked by the enslaved. REUTERS/Tom Lasseter

WASHINGTON

We sat in the pews of a Methodist church last summer, my family and I, heads bowed as the pastor began with a prayer. Grant us grace, she said, to “make no peace with oppression.”

Our church programs noted the date: June 19, or Juneteenth, the day on the federal calendar that celebrates the emancipation of Black Americans from slavery. The morning prayer was a cue.

The kids were ushered from the sanctuary to Sunday school. My sons – one 11, the other 8 at the time – shuffled off to lessons meant for younger ears.

The sermon, delivered by a white pastor to an almost entirely white congregation, was headed toward this country’s hardest history.

“We are a nation birthed in a moment that allowed some people to stand over others,” she said from the pulpit, light flooding through the stained glass behind her. “We’ve all been a part of taking what we wanted. White people, my community, my legacy, my heritage, has this history of taking land that did not belong to us and then forcing people to work that land that would never belong to them.”

The pastor did not know that I was months into a reporting project for Reuters about the legacy of slavery in America. It was an idea that came to me in June 2020, shortly after returning to the United States after almost two decades abroad as a foreign correspondent.

We had moved to Washington just 18 days after George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and in our first weeks back, I found myself drawn to the steady TV coverage of protests from coast to coast. I read about the dismantling of Confederate statues on public land – almost a hundred were taken down in 2020 alone. I thought about my own childhood, about growing up in Georgia. And I wondered: Had this country, which I had yet to introduce to my sons, ever truly reckoned with its history of slavery?

REUTERS/Photo illustration REUTERS/Photo illustration

I wondered, too, about our most powerful political leaders. How many had ancestors who enslaved people? Did they even know? I discussed the idea with my editors, who greenlighted a sweeping examination of the political elite’s ancestral ties to slavery. They also raised another question: What might uncovering that part of their family history mean to today’s leaders as they help shape America’s future?

A group of Reuters journalists began tracing the lineages of members of Congress, governors, Supreme Court justices and presidents – a complicated exercise in genealogical research that, given the combustibility of the topic, left no room for error.

Henry Louis Gates Jr, a professor at Harvard University who hosts the popular television genealogy show Finding Your Roots, told me that our effort would be “doing a great service for these individuals.”

“You have to start with the fact that most haven’t done genealogical research, so they honestly don’t know” their own family’s history, Gates said. “And what the service you’re providing is: Here are the facts. Now, how do you feel about those facts?”

And there was more to the project, something I needed to do, if only out of fairness. As a native of Mississippi who grew up in Georgia, I would examine my own family’s history. A passing remark made by my grandfather long ago gave me reason to believe my experience wouldn’t be as joyous as the advertisements I saw for online genealogy websites. Instead of finding serendipitous connections to faraway lands, I suspected I would find slavery on the red clay of Georgia.

But all of that was for work. It wasn’t for Sunday church, I thought, sitting next to my wife. My mind wandering, I looked down at the Rolex on my wrist.

This is the story that I tell myself: Those are things that I earned, paid for with hard work. I am a high school dropout. My mother is a high school dropout. My father is a high school dropout. My sister is a high school dropout. My first home was in a southern Mississippi trailer park. My mother was pregnant with me at the age of 19. My dad left our lives early.

I got my GED. I moved from a community college to the University of Georgia, working as a short-order cook while earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

For me, church is a place that offers a soothing sense of order, of ritual. That morning, I didn’t feel comfortable. I resented the pastor. I was there to listen to the choir and contemplate a Bible verse or two, not to be lectured. Especially about a subject I was grappling with personally and professionally.

“We would swear with our last breath that we do not have a racist bone in our bodies,” she continued. “But some of us were born in a lineage of people who take land that is not ours and enslave other people.”

Her words would come close to the facts that my reporting surfaced in the months ahead. Still, on this Juneteenth, I was done listening.

After the service, I walked to the car with my wife and sons. I didn’t talk with them about the sermon as we headed to our home on the outskirts of Washington. Ours is a street of rolling green lawns and shiny Cadillac Escalades. On the edge of the U.S. capital, a city where some 45% of the population is Black, the suburb where we live is about 7% Black. It was an inviting place for a white man to escape the pastor’s message.

That cocoon soon started to unravel. I had begun a journey that would take me back to places I held dear but had not truly known. What I would come to learn in researching my ancestors didn’t tarnish my love for family. At times, though, I did worry that I was betraying them.

It also left me with two questions I have yet to answer. What do I tell my sons about what I found, and what does it say about their country?

Introducing America

Throughout 2022, our reporting team assembled family trees for Congressional members. We connected one generation to the previous, like puzzle pieces snapping one to another, extending years before the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865. We learned to decipher census documents written in sometimes bewildering cursive. Enlisting the help of board-certified genealogists, we became comfortable with the types of inconsistencies that surface in the old papers: names slightly misspelled, ages off by a few years, children who disappear from households as they die between censuses or marry young.

For months, my attention was drawn to the complexity of the task, and I scoured websites for documents that went beyond census records: certificates of birth, death and marriage, obituaries, military service forms, family Bibles.

The work was painstaking, and a welcome diversion. Each time I thought about building out my own family history, I winced at the subject coming close. Those were my people, my history.

Eventually, I knew I had to get started.

My wife and I were born in America. Both of us are journalists. We met in Baghdad, there to cover the war in Iraq. We married later while living in Russia, had our first son in China, our next in India. After two years in Singapore, we decided it was time to take the boys home to America, a land they’d visited on summer trips to their grandmothers’ houses in Georgia and Virginia but hardly knew.

Their introduction began less than three weeks after the May 25 death of George Floyd, as soon as we rode in from the airport. As we approached shuttered stores and boarded-up windows in downtown Washington, our younger son looked at the graffiti and banners and asked what the letters BLM stood for. My wife and I spelled it out – Black Lives Matter – and told him about Floyd’s death. Six at the time, he had no idea what we were talking about. His older brother explained the protests were to help Black people. Then he reminded him that their uncle, my sister’s husband, is Black. Our little boy went quiet. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, protesters took to the streets across America.

REUTERS/Photo illustration In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, protesters took to the streets across America. REUTERS/Photo illustration

Last spring I began to trace my family’s lineage in detail. I had gone through this process for dozens of members of Congress. Now I was looking at my own mom. As I started a family tree, I did not like typing her name – it felt like I was crossing a line. I opened the search page at Ancestry.com and entered the names of her parents, Harriet and Brice.

Brice was 69 or so when he visited us in Atlanta during the summer of 1994. I was a teenager. Joseph Brice James was my grandfather, but we just called him Brice. Like my own father, he hadn’t been part of our life. He lived in Chicago and had worked as a traveling salesman. The trip may have been one last effort by him to connect. He wasn’t well and would die about eight years later.

It would be that visit – really, just one line that Brice muttered – that came back to me in the summer of 2020 and started my own personal reckoning.

My Grandfather’s Words Joseph Brice James. (Courtesy: Tom Lasseter)

Here’s what I remember: Brice wanted to see the farm where his ancestors, our ancestors, lived. My mother drove, and my sister and I sat in the backseat of our family’s aged Toyota Corolla. The address Brice helped direct us to was about an hour out of Atlanta. My mother had been there before, too, but my ancestors had sold it off, parcel by parcel, starting around 1947. We pulled over in front of a clapboard farmhouse.

I wasn’t sure why we were there, or who might have once lived on the farm. Brice, a gaunt figure with closely cropped hair and large glasses, didn’t volunteer much. I walked alongside him in silence, across a field spotted with pine trees, on the edge of a lake. Then Brice paused, flicking his wrist toward an old well and said: “The slaves built that.” A moment passed and he kept walking, offering nothing further.

Those four words stayed with me, though, in the way that happens with some white families from the South: I now knew, if I wanted to, that somewhere in my history there was a connection to slavery. The farmhouse in Georgia, once owned by the ancestors of Reuters journalist Tom Lasseter.

REUTERS/Tom Lasseter

Where to begin? Before prying into Brice’s side, I decided to look somewhere more familiar. The census shows my mother’s maternal grandmother as Cornelia Benson. I grew up calling her Grandma Horseyfeather, a nickname given her by my mother’s generation, the product of a long-ago children’s tale.

Looking at the 1940 census, there was Cornelia Benson of Brooks County, Georgia. I knew Brooks County as a place of Spanish moss, where we caught turtles and lizards in my childhood. I loved Thanksgiving at 618 North Madison Street, where a dirt driveway led to the back stairs and then a kitchen with long rows of casseroles. Grandma Horseyfeather, born in 1898, spoke in a slow, deep drawl. She wore lace to church. I adored her and I adored Brooks County.

At home in Atlanta, I felt lost at times, my single, working-class mom stretching one paycheck to the next. But in Cornelia Benson’s house, I felt at ease. My identity was simple: I was a white kid descended from generations of white people from the deepest of south Georgia.

As a child, I did not ask what it meant to belong to a place like Brooks County. Now I wanted to know. Cornelia Benson with Tom Lasseter as infant (left); Tom Lasseter during a childhood visit to Quitman, Georgia. (Courtesy: Tom Lasseter)

A story came to mind. I was young, and the grownups were visiting at the dining table. Someone started to tell a story about life in Quitman, the town in Brooks County where Grandma Horseyfeather lived. It was about the Ku Klux Klan and its marches.

The Klan would saunter down the street, wearing hoods and sheets, thinking no one knew who they were. The story’s punchline: All the “colored boys” – meaning Black men – knew who was wearing those sheets. They could see the shoes the white men were wearing. And who do you think shined those shoes?

I remember a tittering of laughter ripple around the table.

It was a vignette I sometimes trotted out when discussing the South. I’d shake my head and show a rueful half-frown that communicated disapproval, but not too much. My Brooks County relatives didn’t quite fit the pastor’s words. I knew they had some racist bones in their body. Still, these were my people. They didn’t mean any harm.

Reading back over the story after I wrote it down last year made me wonder what I didn’t know. So I did something that had never before occurred to me: I looked up the history of Brooks County, Georgia. It did not lead anywhere good.

In 1918, at least 13 Black people were killed in a rash of lynchings by mobs in Brooks that cemented its reputation for bloodshed. A flag that hung from the NAACP national headquarters in New York City, 1920-1928 (Source: NAACP via Library of Congress). Lynchings in Brooks County, Georgia, in the early 20th century cemented its reputation for racism and bloodshed.

REUTERS/Photo illustration

“There were more lynchings in Brooks than any county in Georgia” at the time, according to a 2006 paper examining lynchings in southern Georgia. Among the 1918 victims: Near the county line, a pregnant woman was tied to a tree and doused with gasoline before her belly was slit open with a knife and her unborn child tumbled to the dirt. The woman was shot hundreds of times, “until she was barely recognizable as a human being.” And then both her and her fetus’ burial spots were marked by a whiskey bottle with a cigar placed in its neck, according to the paper – “Killing Them by the Wholesale: A Lynching Rampage in South Georgia” – published in The Georgia Historical Quarterly.

I toggled my Internet browser to census records. Cornelia Benson and her husband weren’t yet living in Brooks County as of the 1920 census. They moved there between 1920 and 1930. I felt relieved, clean. I didn’t know any of that history. No one had told me.

But the more I learned, the more I played out the possibilities, the more troubled I felt about the Ku Klux Klan anecdote.

One morning in my home office, I pulled out a cell phone to record my thoughts about those memories. As I did, I heard the wood floorboards creaking. It was one of my sons walking outside the room. I waited for him to go downstairs before starting. When I later listened to my recounting of the Ku Klux Klan story, I noticed I’d used the phrase “Black people” rather than “Colored boys.” Without thinking, I’d cleaned the story up around the edges, making it easier to tell.

‘Mules, Oxen…and The Following Negroes’

Brice died in 2001. I never learned anything else from him about that well on the property our ancestors owned. Having read through the Brooks County material, it was time to see what I might find out about Brice’s side of my family.

I knew my grandfather was born in Canada, but that his side of the family was somehow connected to that land in Georgia. Using Ancestry.com, I found a 1948 border crossing document for him, with the names of his father and mother. I took those names and found his parents’ 1921 marriage license in Fergus County, Montana.

I noticed that his mother’s maiden name was Lila M. Brice, and that her parents were Ethel Julian and Joseph T. Brice. I looked for Ethel Brice. There she was, in the 1910 census. She was living with her daughter Lila in Forsyth County, Georgia, after a divorce – back in the household of her father, a man whose name I had never before heard: Abijah Julian.

The trip to the farm house in 1994 was in Forsyth County. The old clapboard house was built in the 1800s. And the well that Brice mentioned, the one that he said enslaved people built, sat right next to the house.

From one census to the next, I followed Abijah, a name from the Old Testament.

Information about the Julian family wasn’t hard to find once I started looking.

Working my way backwards, I learned Abijah Julian died in 1921. His passing was marked in The Gainesville News by an item headlined “DEATH OF SOLDIER STATESMAN.” Placed high in the article was the fact that Abijah Julian was part of a Confederate cavalry general’s staff during the Civil War, and that in his later years he “had been a prominent figure at all the reunions of the Confederate veterans.” The piece ended with these words: “Mr. Julian was laid to rest shrouded in the Confederate uniform which he loved.” Abijah Julian, seated, was buried in a Confederate uniform. In an account by his wife, Minnie Julian, she described him returning from war “broken in health and spirit. Negroes free, stock stolen and money – Confederate – valueless.” (Sources: Historical Society of Cumming/Forsyth County, Georgia. Newspaper clipping: The Gainesville News, June 1921)

He had served in Georgia’s state legislature for three terms. I looked for more details about him and his ancestors before the Civil War.

Abijah’s father, also a member of the state legislature, died in 1858 at home in Forsyth County, according to press reports. It was just a couple months before Abijah’s 16th birthday.

Some four years later, Abijah went to war against the United States. In 1864, a year before the Civil War ended, he married a woman in Alabama, the daughter of a doctor, who moved to the Julian farm. In an account by his wife, Minnie Julian, she described Abijah returning home after the war, “broken in health and spirit. Negroes free, stock stolen and money – Confederate – valueless.” In the very next sentence, however, she noted they still had 600 acres of land.

Her words signaled that Abijah had enslaved people. But I needed more proof.

In addition to the usual household census forms, in 1850 and 1860 the U.S. government created a second document for the census takers to fill out in counties in states where slavery was legal. It’s referred to as a slave schedule, and it lists by name men and women who enslaved people, under the column “SLAVE OWNERS.” The form gives no names of the human beings they enslaved. Instead, it tabulates what the document refers to as “Slave Inhabitants” only by the person’s age, gender, color (B for Black or M for Mulatto, or mixed race) and whether they were “Deaf & dumb, blind, insane or idiotic.”

After you find a slaveholder on the household census form, matching them to the slave schedule can be complicated. In some counties, multiple men of the same or similar name enslaved people. And of course, not every head of household in a county enslaved people, so fewer names are listed on the slave schedule than on the population census. Fortunately, the households on the two documents are typically listed in the order they were counted by the census-taker – meaning if you see the same residents’ names close by, in the same sequence, you’ve likely found the same person on the two forms.

In 1860, on a slave schedule in Forsyth, I found my ancestor listed on line 34 as A.J. Julian. He was 17-years-old at the time. There were four entries for his “Number of Slaves” column – four males, ages from 10 to 18.

There was more. When Abijah’s father, George Julian, died in 1858, he left a will.

One key to unlocking the identities of those who were enslaved is through the estate records of white families who claimed ownership of them. In many cases, wills give the first names of the Black men, women and children bequeathed from one white family member to another.

In his will, George listed property “with which a kind providence has blessed me.” To wife Adaline, George bequeathed “mules, oxen, cattle, hogs and other stock, and plantation tools, wagons, carriages and the following Negros…”

There were five enslaved people left to George’s wife, the will said, with the provision that “the negros and their increase” – that is, their children – would go to Abijah after his mother’s death. George Julian also left four enslaved children to Abijah, himself a teenager at the time.

And, in a separate item, Julian wrote that an enslaved woman and three children should “be sold” to pay his debts.

The will was difficult reading. Lumped in with oxen and kitchen furniture, plantation tools and wagons, were human beings. And “their increase.”

The will listed names of the enslaved kept by the family: Dick, Lott, Aggy, Henry, Lewis, Ellick, Jim, Josiah and Reuben.

The document was dated 1858 – close enough to emancipation that I might have a chance at tracing some of them forward, especially if they used the last name Julian. Perhaps there would be a chance of finding those same names in Forsyth in the 1870 census, when, finally free, Black people were listed by name and household.

Something kept happening, however, when I looked for those names. I’d see likely matches in one or two censuses, and then they disappeared after the 1910 census in Forsyth.

It took me a few minutes of research to figure out why I was losing track of the descendants of the people George Julian enslaved. It was a history drenched with blood, and it drew much closer to mine than I had realized.

The Search for Descendants of The Enslaved

ATLANTA

In 1912, Virginia native Woodrow Wilson became the first Southerner since the U.S. Civil War to be elected president. And the white residents of a county in Georgia, where my ancestors lived, unleashed a campaign of terror that included lynchings and the dynamiting of houses that drove out all but a few dozen of the more than 1,000 Black people who lived there.

The election was covered in the classrooms of the Georgia schools I attended. If the racial cleansing of Forsyth County was mentioned, I didn’t notice.

That history explains the difficulty I had looking for the descendents of the people enslaved by my ancestor Abijah. By 1920, their families and almost every other Black person had fled the county.

From left: The Forsyth County Courthouse in Cumming, pictured in 1907. Built in 1905, it was destroyed by fire in 1973. (via Digital Library of Georgia). The Atlanta Georgian newspaper reports on the lynching of Rob Edwards, September 10, 1912. (Source: Ancestry.com). U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

They were forcibly expelled under threat of death after residents blamed a group of young Black men for killing an 18-year-old white woman in September 1912. A frenzied mob of white people pulled one of the accused from jail, a man named Rob Edwards, then brutalized his body and dragged his corpse around the town square in the county seat of Cumming. Two of the accused young Black men, both teenagers, were tried and convicted in a courtroom. They too died in public spectacle, hanged before a crowd that included thousands of white people.

There were also the night riders, white men on horseback who pulled Black people from their homes, leaving families scrambling and their houses aflame. The violence swept across the county, washing across Black enclaves not far from the farm where my ancestor, Abijah, lived at the time.

In 1910, the U.S. Census showed 1,098 Black people living in Forsyth. Ten years later, the 1920 census counted 30.

‘Night Marauders’

Until last year, I had never heard of this history. I had a dim memory of news reports about white residents in Forsyth attacking participants in a peaceful march for racial equality – not during the tumultuous Civil Rights era but in the 1980s. I watched video clips from an early episode of “The Oprah Show” – a telecast from 1987 when talkshow star Oprah Winfrey went to Forsyth to try to make sense of what was happening there. Some locals in the audience were unrepentant. Footage shows that crowds on the street and a man, to Oprah’s face, were not shy about using racial slurs on national television.

I learned about the 1912 violence in Forsyth after a genealogist who worked with Reuters sent me a note pointing out that my ancestor Abijah Julian appeared in Blood at the Root, a 2016 book that chronicled the bloodshed there. I already knew Abijah had enslaved people and adhered to the “Lost Cause” – the view that the South’s role in the Civil War was just and honorable.

About four months after the terror in Forsyth began, Abijah wrote a letter to the governor of Georgia in February 1913. He was asking for help to quell the chaos unleashed by “night marauders” who had “run off about all of the negroes.” Here’s part of his letter: A letter Abijah Julian wrote to the governor of Georgia.

(Courtesy: Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.)

During that week alone, Julian wrote, “3 negro houses” in Cumming had been damaged by dynamite. The letter did not suggest any anguish for the Black people who’d been terrorized. What concerned Abijah Julian was his fields and who would farm them.

The Julian land stretched hundreds of acres across Forsyth and neighboring Dawson counties. Abijah told the governor that large swathes of land “will not be cultivated” because “labor now can not be found to hire...”

Gov. Joseph Mackey Brown referred to the situation Julian highlighted later in 1913, in a written message to members of the state senate:

After all, the governor continued, “there is no reason why farms should lose their productive power and why the white women of this State should be driven to the cook stoves and wash pots simply because certain people blindly strike down all of one class in retaliation for the nefarious deeds of individuals in that class.”

What happened in Forsyth was not unique. White people across the South had been pushing back against political and economic progress made by Black Americans after the end of slavery and would continue doing so.

In 1906, a white mob stormed downtown Atlanta, killing dozens of Black people and attacking Black businesses and homes. In 1921, a white mob destroyed a Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma and, according to a government commission report, left nearly “10,000 innocent black citizens” homeless. The death toll was in the hundreds.

Once you begin to look, such violence stretches on and on, decade after decade.

Still hopeful that I might be able to somehow identify and locate living descendants of the people my family enslaved, I flew to Georgia last November.

‘Dick a Man, Lott a Woman’

While I was in Atlanta, I asked my mom and sister if they had time to talk about what I’d found. We sat one evening at the dining room table in my mother’s house, the same table on which we had once shared Thanksgiving dinners with Grandma Horseyfeather.

I had prepared two thick packets of documents that outlined our family tree, each with underlying records, to walk through the lineages of our slave-holding ancestors in three Georgia counties, including Forsyth.

I explained that my search began with a memory of walking with my mother’s father across some land our people used to own in Forsyth; and my grandfather casually remarking of the old well: “The slaves built that.”

“It added up from this one, just sort of little vague memory that I had of Brice gesturing at a well.”

The first question came from my sister, who is married to a Black man. Her voice was stretched thin with emotion. She asked: “Is there any possibility of doing the same for the people that our family enslaved?”

I’d found a man in Grandma Horseyfeather’s lineage who was a slaveholder and likely worked as an overseer in Jefferson County, Georgia. But neither I nor the genealogists we consulted could identify descendants of those he’d enslaved.

“So I’ve – I’ve tried,” I explained. “The issue is that the best details that we have are in Forsyth County, but in Forsyth County they forcibly expelled all of the Black people.”

There were, however, names of enslaved people who were bequeathed in the 1858 will of George Julian, Abijah’s father. At least two seemed to fit with a lineage I could trace.

Listed in the will as “Dick a man” and “Lott a woman,” they looked like a possible match for a couple living three households from Abijah Julian’s uncle in the 1870 census. Their names were listed as Richard Julian and Charlotte Julian. Was Dick short for Richard? And was Lott short for Charlotte?

I noticed that Richard Julian had an “M” in the column for Color. The M stood for Mulatto, someone of mixed race. Charlotte was 32 years old in 1870, an exact match for a 22-year-old enslaved woman listed on the 1860 slave schedule as belonging to George Julian’s widow. Richard was listed as 30 in 1870, which did not line up as neatly with an 18-year-old enslaved man next to Abijah Julian in the 1860 slave schedule.

A comparison of the 1870 census and the 1880 census reinforces that Reuters journalist Tom Lasseter is following the same family from one decade to the next. (Source: Ancestry.com)

Still, based on the mention of the names Dick and Lott in George Julian’s will, I followed the Black family’s lineage from one census to the next.

In 1880, Richard was listed as Dick. Lott was there, too, as Charlotte. And their ages were close to what they should have been – about 10 years older than in 1870. The children listed in each census gave me confidence I was following the same family. In 1870, four children were listed. There were three girls and a boy. In 1880, the oldest child was no longer there; she would have been 19 or 20 and may have married. But the boy and the two other girls were there, names and ages matching. The Julians had added four children to the family since the previous census, too, the eldest 8.

My sister’s first question after I traced our family tree that night lingered: “Is there any possibility of doing the same for the people that our family enslaved?”

One of the children in the 1880 census would provide the path.

The Shacks

The day I arrived in Atlanta, November 1, I chatted with my mom about Forsyth and our family’s history there. She’d mentioned something that took me aback.

“When we were talking about the farm, you said there was a slave shack, a slave shed?” I asked her the next day. “What was that?

It turns out my mother had visited the Julian farm when she was a kid. Someone had pointed her to a pair of shacks on the farm and explained that they were where the families of the enslaved used to live.

“It was a structure – by the time we came along it was still on the property but it was, like, a wooden structure that was falling apart.” Her voice became low for a moment. “And that’s what we were told that it was. And I think – I don’t know.” She paused. “I know my grandmother talked about teaching people how to read, or people in her family having taught some of the slaves how to read.”

My mom, a slight woman with a calm voice who works as a nurse with organ transplant patients, was uncertain about the details. “I’m not sure what the – it was just information that she was sharing, maybe to make it feel better that they had slaves. I don’t know.”

I went to dinner with my mom at a Thai restaurant the following evening. I’d been in Forsyth that morning, looking at some documents about the Julian family. She asked me if I learned anything new. I told her about two murders in the family – a pair of sisters slain by the husband of one – that had been covered in the newspapers in the 1880s.

That’s not what she was asking about. My mom looked up from her tofu dish and said, “I am uncomfortable with how little attention was paid to what that was.”

Under her breath, she continued: “The shed.” She meant the slave sheds on the Julian farm.

She said nothing for a few moments. And then she explained, “I was 11.” It was her way of saying she was young at the time. What could she have known about such things? It was the same age as my eldest son.

Why was I putting this at her feet? I thought.

What did she have to do with a white man, dead now for a century, who got rich and enslaved Black people? Where was that money? Not in her pocket. She was working late shifts and driving a beat up Toyota with a side mirror attached to the car by duct tape.

But the feeling of indignation was mine. My mother, a child of the 1960s who took us to downtown Atlanta for parades on Martin Luther King Jr Day, wasn’t being defensive. She was trying to work through what it all meant.

An Unexpected Meeting

Just before Thanksgiving last year, I reached out to a young research assistant at the Atlanta History Center. I’d heard she was tracing descendants of people who fled Forsyth.

Over the phone, I told Sophia Dodd that I was looking for people with the last name Julian. She said she had someone in mind. But first, Dodd would need to check with the person; we arranged to meet in Atlanta later in the month. There was a possibility the person would join us, she said, “but I also know they’re in the midst of traveling so that’s a little up in the air right now.”

I met Dodd at her office a few days before Thanksgiving, ready to ask her questions about Forsyth County.

And then another woman walked into the Atlanta History Center: Elon Osby. She wore a cranberry-colored top and glasses with red cat-eye frames. The 72-year-old Black woman with gray hair shook my hand and said, yes, she would gladly take me up on a cup of coffee.

I hadn’t expected her. I’d not even known her name – Dodd had protected her privacy while Osby decided whether to meet me. But there Osby was, looking at me expectantly. The three of us headed to Dodd’s office.

Without my census forms in hand, I felt exposed. Those family history packets – the ones I shared with my mother and sister – were a way to guide the conversation. And this conversation was with a stranger whose history with my family may have involved slavery. I told Osby that I regretted not having materials to give her.

Osby looked me over. She got to the point. “Is it that you feel that your ancestors were slaveowners of mine?” she asked.

Because I hadn’t done a family tree for her, I explained, I couldn’t be certain. During months of examining the lineages of American politicians, we had held to a firm standard: a slave-owning ancestor needed to be a direct, lineal ancestor – a grandfather or grandmother preceded by a long series of greats, as in great-great-great-grandfather.

As I built my own family lineage, I knew that the Julians were slaveholders. But when I worked with the genealogists on our team to trace the enslaved people named in George Julian’s will, they urged caution. What wasn’t entirely clear: Exactly who had enslaved Richard and Charlotte? Was it George, or was it George’s brother, Bailey?

I offered Osby the abridged version. If she were a direct descendant of Richard and Charlotte Julian, “they were enslaved either by my direct ancestor, George H. Julian” – Abijah’s father – “or his brother.”

As I finished my sentence, I realized the distinction may have been important to the journalist in me. But in this context, it was meaningless. What mattered wasn’t in question: Someone in my family had enslaved hers.

Osby turned to Dodd, the young white woman who’d been helping her research her family.

“First of all, let me ask this.” Osby said. “Do any of these names that he mentioned ring a bell with what you’ve done?”

Dodd answered quickly. “Yes, so I think that it’s definitely very possible that Charlotte and Richard were enslaved by George,” she said.

I asked Dodd if she had an account with Ancestry.com and whether she could print some documents. Together, we navigated to the 1858 will for George H. Julian and the 1870 census forms that showed Richard and Charlotte Julian.

Osby had explained that her grandmother’s name was Ida Julian. And Ida Julian’s parents were Richard and Charlotte Julian of Forsyth County.

Ida. Daughter of Richard and Charlotte. I would see it later. Not in the 1870 census, because Ida hadn’t yet been born. But there she was, listed in the 1880 census. Ida Julian, age 6. Ida Julian, listed in the 1880 census as a young child. (Source: Ancestry.com)

I later found a marriage certificate showing that Ida Julian married a man named WM Bagley in 1889. She was young, perhaps 15. By 1910, the census showed them living in Forsyth County, the parents of three girls and a boy.

The youngest of their children, not yet a year old, was a girl recorded as Willie M. She would go by Willie Mae Bagley, get married, and become Willie Mae Butts – the mother of Elon Butts Osby. The former Ida Julian, now Ida Bagley, in the 1910 census. Her daughter, listed as Willie M., would become Elon Osby’s mother. (Source: Ancestry.com)

After we had worked through the small pile of papers that Dodd had printed, I asked Osby what it meant to see some of those documents.

“It makes people real now. It just makes all of this more real. And it has started a journey for me,” she said, adding that there’s “no telling where it’s going to go.”

I asked her what her family said about Forsyth County when they discussed it with her as a girl. “They didn’t. They didn’t talk about it,” she said.

It wasn’t until around 1980, when Osby was about 30 years old, that she heard her mother tell a reporter the story of her ancestors fleeing the county by wagon because white people were attacking Black families.

“There wasn’t any conversation about it,” Osby said. “But she did talk about her grandfather had this long hair, straight hair, and they would comb it.” That was Richard Julian, Osby’s great-grandfather, the man listed as a “Mulatto” on the 1870 census.

She paused and stared at my face for a moment.

‘I Don’t Think You Can Get Justice’

When Elon Osby’s grandmother, Ida Bagley, and her family fled Forsyth, they left behind at least 60 acres of land, she said.

They made their way to Atlanta after 1912, the year of the carnage. There, in 1929, her grandfather, William Bagley, bought six lots of land in a settlement of formerly enslaved people known as Macedonia Park, according to the local historical society.

It was located in Buckhead, long among the most expensive neighborhoods in Atlanta. The Black residents of Macedonia Park worked as maids and chauffeurs for white families in the area, as golf caddies and gardeners.

Osby’s grandfather made money as a cobbler and local merchant. Her parents opened a store and a rib shack. Her father was also a butler for a wealthy white family, her mother a cook. The area became known as Bagley Park, and her grandfather, according to a historical marker now at the site, was considered the settlement’s unofficial mayor. William Bagley, Elon Osby’s grandfather, was known as the mayor of Bagley Park, a Black enclave in Atlanta that was later razed by the county.

(Courtesy: Elon Osby)

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, nearby white residents – members of a women’s social group – petitioned the county to condemn and raze Bagley Park, ostensibly for sanitary reasons. It had no running water or sewer system. The county, which had not provided those services, agreed, forcing the families to leave. They were compensated for the land, but it’s not clear how much, and in the process they lost real estate in what is a particularly affluent quarter of the city.

Osby’s family had again been pushed off its land. The settlement was demolished and replaced by a park, later named for a local little league umpire. Last November, the city of Atlanta restored the area’s name: Bagley Park.

In thinking about Osby’s family and my family, I found it was impossible not to compare them – and the role slavery played in our respective paths. In 1860, Osby’s ancestors were enslaved and working the fields of Forsyth County. In 1860, my ancestor Adaline Julian, widow of George and mother of Abijah, reported a combined estate value of $19,020. She was among the wealthiest 10% percent of all American households on the census that year. And that wealth didn’t include her son’s holdings. Then just a teenager, Abijah had a personal estate of $4,828, according to census records. That amount lay largely in the value of the enslaved people bequeathed to him by his father.

In 1870, Osby’s ancestor, Richard Julian – free for only about five years – was listed on the census as a farmhand, with no real estate or personal estate to report.

In 1870, Abijah Julian – despite having “lost” those he had enslaved – still had a combined estate of $4,655. That put him in the top 15% of all households in America, census records show.

Osby said her parents used the money they got from the government after being forced out of Bagley Park to buy land in a different part of Atlanta. They continued to work hard. Her father was hired as an electrician by Lockheed, and her mother ran a daycare business.

Osby spent a career working in administration. She said she started as secretary for the manager of the city’s main Tiffany & Co location in 1969, then worked in various city government offices, and now for the Atlanta Housing Authority.

After she’d finished telling me about her family and herself, I asked Osby whether she would mind me recording some video with my cell phone. I asked once again about her family’s reluctance to discuss Forsyth. She repeated that Black parents had long kept such things quiet. I noticed she added the words “rape” and “lynchings.”

But, she said, she has seen considerable progress during her life. Osby, whose family was forced out of Forsyth in 1912, was the keynote speaker in 2021 at a dedication event in downtown Cumming, where a plaque memorializing the bloodshed in Forsyth had been installed. And Osby, whose family was forced with others to leave their neighborhood in Fulton County, is now a member of the Fulton County Reparations Task Force. The group advises the county board and has sponsored research on what happened at Bagley Park, including a report documenting what Osby already knew: that “property owners in Bagley Park were forced to liquidate their real estate, a vital link in the chain of generating generational wealth.”

“There was a time when I didn’t feel that restitution or reparations was necessary” for the land taken from Black families after 1912 in Forsyth, and then what followed in Bagley Park, Osby said. 

“I just want somebody to acknowledge it and say, you know, we’re sorry. But I have come to realize, or come to feel, that we do need to receive something in the form of restitution. I think that the main thing is, if you touch people in their purses they’ll think before they let something like that happen again. I think it’s mainly about [how] we can never let this happen.”

As for her enslaved ancestors, Osby had a different outlook on reparations. “I don’t want to think of slaves as property. And if I have to give you a value for a slave person so that you can, you know, give me reparations for that – then that’s making them property. That’s reinforcing that idea that they were a piece of property for somebody to own.”

I asked her what it meant to know that history – to know more about what happened during slavery in such personal terms. To know that my own ancestors enslaved people. Osby puckered her bottom lip, paused for a moment and sighed.

She pointed her left index finger at me and said it was a question for me to answer. How did I feel, she asked, when I found out my ancestors enslaved people?

‘What Does It Mean to Know This?’

I told her the story of the old well and my grandfather. I told her about the reporting project, about finding out that my family enslaved people not only in Forsyth, but at least two other counties as well.

Finally, I stopped talking. In my mind, I had run through the right things to say. In a blur, I wondered: Should I apologize to Osby, to her family on behalf of mine?

Instead, I decided to talk about what made me most comfortable: the journalism itself. “A lot of it has been just establishing, sort of, the facts – figuring out, this is who they were, this is what happened,” I said. “I guess sitting here right now I don’t have an answer for – I don’t have an answer for my question” on the value of discovering more about slavery.

She leaned back and laughed.

At some point, I lowered the camera from chin height to the table. My hands were trembling. I was based in Iraq for three years. I sat with militants in Afghanistan. I know what mortar and machine gun fire sound like, at very close range. But at this little table, before this woman, I felt nervous.

I kept talking. I talked about how we – meaning white people – choose to know but not know. I told her about my mom remembering the decrepit former slave sheds on the Julian farm.

Osby no longer was smiling.

She began to talk about something that circled back to her comments about her great-grandfather’s straight hair, her curiosity about possible Cherokee Indian heritage. And, also, to rape.

“Black people, we’ve always known either through the movies or if you’ve learned it, you know, from your family, about the interracial relationships that happened on these plantations or whatever,” she said. “My grandmother – very, very fair skinned. I have one picture of her where she, you know, looks like she’s white. And so, you know that somebody else was there. You know?”

Somebody else was there. It was a phrase with a passive structure common to the South, a way of not assigning blame to the person sitting across the small table from you in the corner of an office. The meaning nonetheless seemed clear to me: Did my ancestor rape her ancestor?

“I’m curious, and that’s one reason why I was excited about coming to speak with you because I want to find out about the Cherokee part,” she said. “And also, if there was a white person, you know, that was, her – whatever,” she said, cutting the sentence short and fluttering her hands in the air.

I told her that I’d done a DNA test online. She said she was considering taking one as well.

After we spoke, Osby asked me to go with her to the graveyard at Bagley Park. I followed her Mazda. Its license plate read MS ELON. Her grandparents were buried there, she said, but she couldn’t say where. The gravestones had been vandalized over the years, Osby explained, looking at the broken markers.

Panic and Questions

After we parted, I drove to Forsyth County and the Julian farm. I could see across the road to the spot where my mother described the slave shacks having once stood.

The door was locked, the farmhouse empty. I stood outside the white clapboard home and stared. The leaves crunched underfoot, down at the end of Julian Farm Road. I rested my forearms on a dark slat fence and scanned the property, a utility shed to the right and a patio to the left.

I did not see the well.

I walked to the front of the house and looked for it. The well wasn’t there. I went to the back edge of the land, which now sits on the shore of a man-made lake that flooded part of what was once Abijah Julian’s farm. Nothing. The waters of Lake Sidney Lanier near what was once a farm owned by Abijah Julian. The lake, created in the 1950s, flooded parts of that farm. REUTERS/Tom Lasseter

I felt panicky. The well, the totem of my memory and the genesis of this project – “The slaves built that” – was nowhere. Was it possible I had mixed up some other memory, that it was never at the Julian farm?

I walked over to a step behind the house and sat down. My thoughts about the well gave way to replaying parts of my meeting with Elon.

Should I have apologized to her? “I am sorry,” I could’ve said. “I am sorry that my ancestors brutalized your ancestors.” What had stopped me?

The next day, I sent a text message to the man who now owns the Julian property. Did he know anything about an old well? “Yeah, there was a well next to the house that was dried up. We covered it,” he replied. He sent me a photograph of the front of the house from a 2019 real estate listing. And there it was – the well I remembered, at the far right of the picture.

I peered at the photo. I read the listing. The lake that flooded part of the farmland had created 209 feet of waterfront that now featured four boat slips, according to the advertisement for the property. It noted the farmhouse was “originally built in the late 1800’s by the family of State Senator Abijah John Julian” and added another dash of history: the Julian family was “of the Webster line circa 1590 England.” There wasn’t a word about the other side of the Julian family history: slavery.

Instead, under the section for what the seller loved about the home, was this line: “Your own private plantation.”

What Should Be Handed Down?

In the months after my visit to Forsyth, I’ve looked at a video of the church service that I attended last summer on Juneteenth, the national holiday marking the end of slavery. At the time, I had bristled at the pastor’s remarks, which centered on the need for white people to face our history, to atone.

Toward the beginning of the service, the children had been sent to Sunday school. So my sons weren’t sitting next to me when the pastor said, “We’re asked to stay home and to reflect with those who we know and whom we love – we’re asked to … have the difficult conversations about race and status and prestige and wealth.”

There was another detail that I hadn’t associated with that day’s sermon. It wasn’t only Juneteenth; it also was Father’s Day. From a 2019 real estate listing. The well is seen at the far right in this photo of the front of Abijah Julian’s house.

I’ve thought more than once about all that I had missed. About what to tell my children about everything I’ve learned in the past year. About our family’s part in slavery and the descendants of those we enslaved. About my conversation with Elon Osby.

What should be handed down, and what should not?

Getting ready for a reporting trip last year, I was sifting through online documents from an archive in south Georgia.

I came across a photograph from 1930 of white men sitting in front of an American Legion post. They each wore a medal on the left lapels of their suit jackets. I zoomed in and saw what had caught my eye. It was the cross of military service, handed out by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to World War I veterans who were direct descendants of Confederate soldiers.

In a little white box on a shelf in my home office, I have that same cross. It had been given to my great-grandfather, from Brooks County. After my great-grandmother Horseyfeather died, my family gave it to me, the ever-faithful son.

I fished the cross from its box and turned the thing around in my fingers. The cross was decorated with an X formed by two stripes of stars immediately recognizable from the Confederate battle flag. Around the edge, in the background, are a Latin phrase and two dates: Fortes Creantur Fortibus 1861-1865. The years are those of the Civil War. I Googled the phrase. It means the strong are born from the strong.

I’d had that cross for about 25 years and always associated it with my great-grandfather’s service in World War I, its dates marked in the foreground. I had never stopped to look more closely.

Peering down at it now, I realize it also meant something more: a loyalty to the South when it was a land of slavery and secession.

I was holding on to a relic of the Lost Cause, a history of savagery cloaked in nostalgia. I was holding on to something that I needed to explain to my sons, and then to let go. As I type these words, I have yet to have that conversation. The medal remains on my shelf.

Apology and Absolution

I met with Elon Osby once more earlier this month. We walked again through the cemetery at Bagley Park, where somewhere her ancestors are buried, their gravestones long gone. We stopped at a picnic table. I asked her about the last time we met, reading some of our quotes out loud and talking through what each of us had meant.

There was rain coming, with dark clouds, then lightning. I told her that I’d been nervous during our initial conversation. She asked whether I thought the guilt had been passed down: “Most white people do not have ancestors that owned slaves,” she said. I pointed out that I have at least five.

I said that I’d wondered if I should have apologized. “No,” she said, “I don’t transfer the guilt. Or not the guilt, but the responsibility of it. I don’t do that.” I said with a nervous laugh that I wasn’t asking her to absolve me.

The lightning drew closer. It was time to leave. “We’ve probably covered everything,” Osby said, gesturing to get up.

But I wanted to say more. Ignoring the rain, I reached for the words I hadn’t found during our first meeting: “I’m very sorry that it happened. You know, that all of that happened. And I feel that every time I look through those wills and the language that they used. And that 1858 will – listing furniture and livestock and then human beings. You know, I can’t help but be sorry.”

Osby stopped and looked at me. Listening to the recording later, I could hear the wind and the rain in the background. And then her voice. “It doesn’t feel good at all when you see the horses and cows and slaves. You know, it doesn’t feel good at all,” she said. “But at the same time, it happened. It happened to my people. I don’t want to forget about it.”

She pointed at the packet of genealogical material I’d brought along, mapping our families and that terrible history long ago in Georgia. “This is good enough. What you’re doing for me and my family, bringing this information to me.”

She let a moment pass, and then said: “You’re absolved.” She threw her head back and let the laughter roll like thunder. As the rain fell, we walked to the parking lot together. We paused, then hugged before parting.

“The Slaves Built That”’

By Tom Lasseter

#georgia #slavery #slave records #reuters reporter explores his slave owning roots #“The Slaves Built That” #white supremacy #Blacks Enslaved in America #forsyth county #lynching #stolen land #stolen heritage #ancestral dna

[amiramorozova]

Sun, Sea and Shadow pt. 9

I was blushing still from his words as he called me a rare flower but there was something more to this that I didn't understand. "Why would you say that?" I asked as he looked at me as if he was contemplating his words. His dark eyes looked in mine making me question if I should have asked that as his thumb lighty rubbed my cheek. "All the other Grisha girls try to get my attention, you push me away..you think that doesn't make me want you more? Your stubborn, your defiant, and you have a certain way about you that most Grisha girls do not."

I wanted to push him away and I should have but the fact I wasn't like others made me happy. "Two weeks Amira..that's all you have then you're mine. Mine to take with me and mine to claim within the little palace." Aleksander said as I glared at him knowing that it wasn't going to change my defiance. "I'm not yours yet." I retorted

My defiance only fueled his ambition to have me but that did not mean I would give up so easily as I smacked his hand away. "Keep this up and I won't go at all." I said as I turned to go inside but my actions didn't help with what was going on as he grabbed me and pulled me back to look at him. "I think you forget something, you exposed yourself to people. You have a target on your back and the King is expecting your cooperation. Now I humored your grandmother's request to wait till your eighteenth birthday but you cannot deny the King." Aleksander's annoyance clear.

Saints! he's right, my little light show in the fold has been dangerous all this time. I thought

"Fine, then two weeks..I'll go.." I said as I knew I couldn't trouble my grandmother with the enemy coming after me. I'd grown a bit too comfortable being at my grandmother's place and I always knew that it would be like this. "You'll wear the ring at your presentation.." Aleksander said as I didn't look at him as I got free and crossed my arms.. "I'll think about it.." I said as I knew the truth that I'd wear it. I'd honor my grandmother's promise that she made centuries ago. "But I'm not giving up Nico so figure out something."

When I looked seeing the annoyance as Nico was a man, a human but still another man and he didn't like it. "Good day General, I have things to do." I said as I walked into grandma's place and I tended to my grandfather I heard the sound of him leaving. I knew I was cruel but he was not winning me over that easily as I sat with them. "Amira, don't you think your being harsh..the General has been making up for what he's done." Grandfather said as I checked on him and I moved his sleeve to see his amplifier.

This is only going to last for so much longer.. I thought

"I am but I don't want him to get the wrong idea...he probably sleeps with every one of his soldiers and I don't want to be a second choice to anyone." I said to my grandfather as I knew ever since I was found Aleksander had kept coming to me. He never talked about his time in the little palace and he just wanted me. "Amira, I don't have many years left..if you're going to honor Catalina's promise do so before I die." Grandfather said as I merely looked at him.

Only a few years..Dad is older than Aleksander but still that doesn't change the fact that he's so much older than me..and the idea that grandfather's amplifier is wearing down..his life is fading little bit every year..until it'll be time he'll pass like a mortal. I thought

"What would you have me do?..if I can." I asked as he looked at me and he knew that I only wanted the best. "Marriage isn't easy but he is your Grisha soulmate. You should marry him, I'd like to see my granddaughter dressed up as beautiful bride before I die." Grandfather said as I knew that was a lot to ask. I knew that it was not going to be easy to just say things and then stand in an alter saying I do when I did not. "I'll see what I can do." I said

Two weeks went by before I knew it and my eighteenth birthday came, all my family gathered for the day as I was dressed up in a dress that grandmother had chosen and then Nico was by my side. Aleksander had came a few times during the two weeks but tonight was the best way to figure it out. We did a small celebration before suddenly I felt the feeling on my wrist and I knew he was here.

"I'll get it." Nico said as he went to my room and gave me the box. I accepted the box as I opened it looking inside seeing the ring, this ring after today was to be going on my hand. Mother came over and looked at it "That's beautiful." Mom said as I nod before I closed it. The sound of the knock on the door was evident as I walked over to my cousin Adrian as I hugged him. He hugged me back "It's ok Cousin..you'll be fine." Adrian assured but I knew better. "He's going to take me away.." I said softly

Adrian, my handsome cousin was still hugging me when I heard Grandma answer the door. "Ah, come in. She's with the family." Grandma said as I let Adrian go to turn around to see him walk in. He had a kefta on his arm that was his color but the design was my grisha power. I gulped a little knowing that it was not fair that I had to endure this but it was also not fair to everyone else to risk keeping me.

Aleksander walked over to me as he looked at me in the dress, despite the looks dad was giving and my mom holding my father back he seemed to like what he was seeing. "Happy Birthday Amira." He said as he opened the kefta and then offered it to me but I did not take it. He saw the box in my hand as he adjusted the kefta on his arm but took the box out of my hand and then put the ring on my finger. "Perfect fit." Aleksander said

"You're sure this is the best choice for her?" My mother asked as she seemed to see I wasn't ready to do this. Nico walked over as he saw that too and had gotten between Aleksander and me. "You're making Mira uncomfortable..can't you see that." He said as Aleksander seemed annoyed. These two were very close in height that they stood literally eye to eye and yet Nico was a human. "We're in Poliznaya, she has till tonight and the carriage is outside." Aleksander said as he seemed to keep his composure. Nico though didn't move as his look challenged Aleksander's and I grabbed hold of Nico. "Don't..you stand no match against him." I said softly

Nico knew that I had no choice, I'd gone on that skiff because I knew the risk of being exposed and yet it wasn't my fault that it'd came to that. It was one of our units fault for lighting that lantern! Despite his anger Nico did back down and we enjoyed the party, the first army soldier noticed Nico never left my side and even Aleksander did too. Out of the corner of my eye I could see he was..annoyed.

Night time came as I knew it was time and I hugged my family members knowing this would be the last time I see them for some time. They could visit me but now I was under the protection of my betrothed. We walked out as Aleksander had me change out of the dress into comfortable clothes and then put the kefta on for my safety. When we got in the carriage he put his arm around me as if protecting  me as Nico and the other first army sat beside us. "To the first army camp." He ordered

The travel was quiet to the first army area where I'd been found out nearly a year ago and once we arrived he opened the door to the carriage. He looked at the first army soldier by Nico "You get out here." He said as the first army soldier looked confused then at Nico "What about him General? He's first army too." The soldier asked as Aleks's arm seemed to tighten around me. "I have need of him at the little palace, out." Aleksander said, his tone was clear as my terms were set out before he'd even tried to get close.

The first army soldier got out as the door closed and he tapped on the carriage to get it moving again. Nico looked confused as Aleksander's arm did not relax around me "Amira made her terms clear, to get her I had to find a way to bring you." Aleksander said but the look alone told me he didn't want to. That he hated it that I was so close to another man but this was my best friend of many years. "You'll do tasks, simple ones that won't risk your life..but you'll look out for Amira as you have. By the promise and the ring on her hand,  she's mine." Aleksander said

Nico wanted to object that it was not my choice yet to do so but he didn't knowing we were still close to the first army camp. Aleksander could easily change his mind if he so wished to and I was hoping he wouldn't. My bag that was packed had the small things my family gave me except the one in my hair..a hair pin that my grandma was adamant about saying that it was from Sankt Ilya and she'd prefer me to show my roots.

The ride was quiet and this time I could not escape him or outsmart him to stop this so after so long we arrived at the little palace. Aleksander must have felt how tense I was cause he was rubbing my arm as if to comfort me but as the door opened he let me get out first and had Nico get my bag as I got out and Aleksander got out beside me. "Welcome to the little palace Amira." Aleksander said

It's just like mom described.. I thought

TagList: @lifeisingrey​,  @houseoftoomanyfandoms​, @mizelophsun11​, @budugu​ ,   @wheresthesunshinesblog  

#SunSeaandShadow #Nicolas Stark #Amira Silina #aleksander morovoza #general kirigan #darkling #Team Darkling #the darkling #darkling x oc #Grishaverse #shadow and bone #shadow and bone fanfiction #fanfic #shadow summoner #sunsummoner #tidemaker #ben barnes #original story

[dailyaudiobiblechronological]

10/7/22 DAB Chronological Transcription

Mark 2

Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible Chronological. I'm China. Today is the 7th day of October. Welcome. So great to be here with you today as we are a full week into the month of October. Welcome. Hope you have had a great first week of this month and that you are having a great day. And if not, just take a few moments to take some deep breaths and to slow down the fast pace of days. And it's so easy to get totally just side swiped by something or to be so laser focused and we just forget to take some deep breaths and forget to just shake out some tension. So let's take a couple of deep breaths. Just drop your shoulders, unclench your jaw, shake your head to the right. On the left. On your head, yes. No, on your head. No. Just take a few deep cleansing breaths and let's come around the word of the Lord today. Today we are in the book of Mark. We are in chapter 2 and we’re in the New International version.

Commentary:

We have a super short reading today, but honestly, so much goodness packed into today's reading. And if anything, I just love that Jesus is a man who is I mean it's true. We find this in every part of scripture that we read that he is fully God and he is fully man. And I'm so impressed that that could even happen, that that could even be a reality. And he handles being questioned with grace and with poise and with certainty and with identity. And honestly, I've had this conversation with my dad so many times where it's kind of like I think Jesus is a prime example of what maybe was the plan all along to go all the way back to Eden and to have him be this supernatural figure of this is what was always available to us. This is perfection, this is God with us. Like this is what was available to us. And so to read about the nature of Jesus is so oh man, I don't know if I have the right word for that. It makes my heart long before like full face to face communion with God and at the same time it makes my heart ache for man, we could have had we could have walked in the coolness of the day with the Lord in Eden and the reality is if it wasn't Eve, it would have been someone else. I just really believe that and we've all been in that situation too. I mean, heck, we just came out of a whole testament of people choosing knowledge, choosing something other than community and communion and fellowship with the Lord. And so when Jesus is questioned, when people just have legitimate questions because they're like, wait, could you actually be the Son of God? Wait, could you actually be the Messiah? The one that we have been waiting for, the one that my great great great great great great grandfather has been telling me about or has passed down for me to hear about or are you just being blasphemous? And there's always two different part motives and it's kind of like which one is it? Who's going to have the questions that are in a place of Lord, I believe I help my unbelief, or from a place that is rude and with an ulterior motive. And again, I just love how Jesus handles himself. It is with poise and with identity and with so much excellence.

Prayer:

So Father, I thank you for your son. I thank you God, that we have read the Bible and all the way up to this point we have seen that there is a great need for a savior. And I think that you saw that we were in need of a savior. You didn't continue to let us have kings of long, long ago and to keep up with that system that wasn't only going to fail us and that we were going to fail you. I think that you have sought after a way for us to be reconciled back to you. And I think you that it was your son. And as someone who is a parent, I cannot imagine sacrificing my child. And I just think what a gift and what a the greatest act of love is for us. And I pray that we would see that in your son's actions before we get to his betrayal, his beating, his crucifixion. I pray that we would see it in his responses, in his interactions with your people. And I thank you again Lord, when we seek you, when we seek you out, when we find you in your word, I just thank you that that is our reward. There is no greater reward than finding you when we seek you with our whole hearts. And so I pray that we would continue to seek you with our whole hearts. And it is in your name we pray. Amen.

Announcements:

Dailyaudiobible.com is our website. That's the place of connection. It is where you can see what is happening here in the community. So be sure to check that out. You can also go to Facebook.com dailyaudiobiblechronological. It's always a mouthful. I'm like, Can I get every word right? And that's also just another great place for you to connect and connect with other believers. So be sure to check that out. That is all for today. I'm China. I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer Line:

Hi DABC family. This is Pamela. I've been previously going by Refined by the Fire from Pennsylvania. But recently I have experienced the most incredible thing. Complete healing body, soul and spirit of every affliction that the enemy has given me and that I have agreed with and allowed to have placed in my body, soul and spirit. So I am celebrating and dancing around and putting behind me the more than 20 years of disability, pain, oppression and everything that the enemy was putting against me. I am praising our Lord and moving forward into everything he has for me. Excuse me. So my new name, my new moniker is Living Life Victoriously. Praise our Lord. And I also wanted to just pop on here and encourage China and thank you, China, for obeying the Holy Spirit and starting this chronological channel on here, because I never fully comprehended the word of God until I started doing this chronologically. It makes so much sense to me. Thank you, China, for your faithfulness to the Lord and to all of us. I love you, God bless you, and may you be healed completely. In Jesus name, amen.

Hey, DABC. It's Renee from Florida. Excuse me. I just wanted to lift up a couple of people that called today for prayer for John, who is still struggling with his family and looking for jobs. Father God, just ask right now that you help them to keep the faith and to keep going and to keep looking, and that you would intercede and help them to find the right type of job. Lord Jesus, we know that you can help, and we're asking in Your mighty name to help them to find the right resources and the right job to provide you or our provider, Father God, let them keep the faith and find something, please. I also pray for Dee, who called in about depression and sadness and that she's actually a functioning depressive person. Sometimes I feel like that you're not alone, but we want to encourage you to keep up the faith, and you do have a purpose. We all have a purpose. One of our purposes is to worship God, to thank Him, to praise Him, to show that we can keep going with Him, not with our strength, but with his strength. All things to Christ who strengthens us. So be encouraged and know that we're praying for you. Kingdom Seeker Daniel, we love when you call in. I agree with your prayer for Jill, and I'm so thankful that China is back on the air. I pray that her husband and Reagan are doing well, too, and that Jill will be completely healed of bell palsy. Lord, be in that circumstance and healing her in Jesus name. We love you all. Have a wonderful week.

Hi, DABC, it's Emmy from Illinois, just calling in with more prayers. In this roller coaster life of drama I have these days, marriage is still kind of in the same space we're still together. Whenever my husband gets mad, he likes to throw out that we shouldn't be together and we should get divorced card, but doesn't ever want to follow through on any of that. So it's just kind of sitting in limbo. But even bigger right now, my 15 year old stepson and my husband have been having major conflicts, and apparently on the way to school this morning, they decided that he was going to live with his mom permanently and not come over. I don't know if that means he won't ever visit. I know my stepson already said he didn't want that to be the case if he did stay at his. He just needed space from my husband, which, personally, I think is a good idea, just not a permanent solution good idea. So if you could just pray for us, pray that God will use this to really get a hold of my husband. I don't know. I don't want to control what God is supposed to do. I just really wish we could get in a good place where we're not constantly fighting and we're not quitting on church. That's the other thing. My husband has decided that there's no churches available that he likes. He doesn't want to go to the one that we were going to. And so now we're doing church online, which is good, but that means that if anything else comes up and we're not feeling like it, we just don't do it, which is what happened this weekend. So just prayers that we can finally find God in all of this. Thank you. Bye.

[diamondangelkitten]

Vierapril Day 7: Celestial

“Let me see them!” “I’m sorry Madam, but we cannot let you do that.” “Do you know who I am?” “Yes, and I’m afraid that still doesn’t change my answer.”

Annabeth wakes to a very irate Alira yelling through a door. As she turns towards the sound to answer, a familiar hand stops her, “You’re awake!” “Gaius, yes I, Gaius! Wait, you’re here? In,” she casts a glance around the room, “You’re here in Sharlyan with me?” He nods, “Yes, Lucia and Maximus were able to get Aymeric to vouch for me coming here. Are you alright? Are you in pain?” Now that she is properly awake, she takes a moment to survey her injuries. “I think I’m alright? I do have some dull aches, but nothing terrible.” “Annabeth!! Are you up?! Please let me in.” Gaius sighs, “She’s still mad at you for sending her away first. Terribly grateful too, in all honesty, when she held Sibbie again, but still mad.” Annabeth chuckles, “Aye, we knew that would happen.” She raises her voice, “You can let her in!”

Alira bursts through the door, letting the poor doctor who unlocked the door fall to the floor. “Oh my gods, you’re alive! I’ve had no idea how any of you are! I mean, I saw you back on the ship, and oh gods, Alinea, but I’ve been so worried about you all.” At the mention of Alinea, Annabeth freezes. Then before Gaius or Alira can stop her, she swings her legs off the bed and tries to jump up. “Alinea, where is she? She sent me away too! Damn it!” She falls to the floor as soon as she tries to put weight on her legs. “Will you all stop misbehaving? You’re the damn warriors of light, not school children?!” The doctor clamps a hand over his mouth at his outburst. Annabeth sees Alira’s eyes flash with anger, and she starts praying for the doctor’s safety.

Alira turns to the doctor, slowly stalking towards him. “Yes, sir, you are correct. Yes, we should be protecting ourselves and listening to you to ensure we heal for our later years. However, we four have been through hell and high water together, and we do not know how one, nay two, of our own are because you have kept them from us. Do I understand this is for their wellbeing? Yes, but at the same time, I have not been separated from these girls for more than a week, a week, do you understand me? And that is when I was laid in bed after having a child?!” The Sharlyan doctor is properly cowering now, but Annabeth has to agree at Alira’s outburst. It has been the four of them for so long that they can’t help but be protective of the others. And if they’re not allowed in Aurora or Alinea’s rooms… How bad are they?

The doctor sighs, “Come along then. Maybe there is something that we can do.” Alira nods and walks back to Annabeth, “Here I’ll support this side, Gaius you take the other.” He nods and they support Annabeth as they walk along the hall to the room next to Annabeth's. They pass Sid in the hallway who just looks at Annabeth and nods as she walks by. She can only imagine how hard he’s been trying to keep Alira calm. The doctor stops outside the next door. “This is Aurora Calypso’s room. There are already guests in there, which is why we won’t let you in, but let’s ask for Y’shtola’s help." He taps a linkpearl in his ear, and within moments, Y’shtola is at their side. The doctor runs through his plan with for doing magic to the wall to allow it to be translucent, just enough for Alira and Annabeth to see what’s on the other side. Y’shtola gives them a warning, “She is the one far worse for wear.”

Sid has come to stand alongside Alira and places a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Y’shtola and the doctor cast their magics and they see Aurora, so small and tiny, covered in bandages. Her father, and grandfather, are keeping watching over her. “There’s been no change since she’s arrived a week ago. She’s made no movement or anything. She’s breathing all on her own, but she’s in a coma. We’re not sure if she’ll make it or not.” Alira’s grateful that Sid is beside her as her own legs give out underneath her, almost causing a painful slip for Annabeth, but Sid is there and he keeps them both steady. Tears run down Annabeth’s eyes, but she doesn’t say a word. The doctor and Y’shtola end their magic and go down to the last room in the hall.

“Alira saw a bit of this as it was happening, but Alinea is the most changed for her journey to Ultima Thule.” Y’shtola says. Annabeth feels Alira tense up, but nothing could prepare her for what she sees. Alinea is covered head to toe in the most beautiful celestial markings she could ever imagine. There’s not a bit that escapes her, not her fingers or her face. She seems to be breathing peacefully, but as if she senses them, her eyes open and they shine brighter than ever before. “Even her hair glows now.” Annabeth looks and sees that Alira is right. Alinea looks over to the side and seems to say something though they cannot make it out. A few seconds later, Estinien opens the door and says, “She wants to see them. Let them have some time together.” He leaves as Annabeth and Alira go in. 

They stay with Alinea until the sun starts to set and the doctor shoos them back to their own rooms. Annabeth’s legs have gradually gotten stronger and she can eventually hold her own weight. She turns to Alira, “I’m not tired yet and I’ve got something I want to do. Break out of here with me?” Alira laughs, “I thought you’d never ask. Cover for us will you boys?” Sid and Gaius have no say in the matter for Alira and Annabeth head out of the hospital and go to the hill near the Noumenon, overlooking the harbor. They take a seat and cuddle in together.

“Thank you Thaliak, for keeping Alinea safe. Thank you Nymeia, for keeping Aurora alive.” Annabeth then turns to look at the stars. Alira follows her gaze skyward noting the constellations that she can now find on her best friend. “Thank you Hades and Hyth for giving Alinea the chance to come back. Thank you all for staying around for us and for giving us the opportunity to continue on as we have.” Alira now has tears running down her face after listening to the words Annabeth has said. “Please,” Alira begs the stars, “Please let Aurora come back to us hale and whole.” They both see that the stars seem to twinkle more earnestly, before a shooting star crosses their view. “They’ll be okay. I know they will.” “They better be. They’re the only ones who’ll bother to res me when I do something stupid.” Annabeth laughs. “We better go back. Someone will be missing us.” Alira sighs and starts to get up, when they hear Gaius say, “You know, a lot of people say fresh air is good for healing. One must be warm and not get a chill however.” They turn and see that Gaius and Sid have brought warm bedding and hot soup to drink. They spend the night tracing the stars and praying for their friends, before falling asleep. 

#vierapril #ffxiv #alira thorne #annabeth rose #callback to day four

[castle-dominion]

castle 7x9 last action hero

the action movie episode liveblog

hard kill garbage earbuds sus person running person dead person!! Love the music btw talking out loud to himself

Aw I love 90s beckett's style Oooh allclads are a good brand! But bex is right, some pans just Work Better, you can't just live life with a full set of one, you need a couple mismatched ones thrown in there too. & it has pictures in it.

Cousin sofia! Nice Bex offended mr kuniak XD ofc he never said anything, that'd be impolite

Hohhhh her puppydog sleeves <3

raises crime scene tape uwu He's that guy! Esposito's face of "Really castle? HIM above any of the OTHER action heroes?" RC: Ex-Navy Seal Zen master Rico Cruz? With the catch phrase “Time to hit Cruz control”? JE: Yeah, I was never a fan. KR: Me either. What’s he done lately, anyway? JE: Yeah, right? RC: (seriously) Beat leukemia. KR+JE:

Lanie <3

LP: Cause of death is clearly strangulation by ligature. KB: A narrow ligature, from the looks of it. KR: Made by a thin wire tied to two wooden dowels? KB: KR: CSU found this in a dumpster. KB: A garrote? Who would use one of those? JE: Special forces will sometimes, when they want to kill quietly. RC: The bigger question is how they got the drop on Lance Delorca. KR: Uh, Lance played an action hero, Castle. Doesn’t mean he was one. RC: Au contraire, mon frère. Thank you transcript for actually saying that, screw you captions. I speak French, I want to see the words. If hearing bilingual people can understand the french, Ddeaf/hoh ppl should be able to have that same opportunity. RC: Lance was born in Spain where, before he became an actor, he was a member of the CNI, the Spanish Intelligence Agency. He was black ops. This man was a lethal weapon. Me then: Wow, that's so fake, he wouldn't become an american actor. Jon Huertas: *was in the military, poor guy, before becoming an actor & is literally Esposito in this very show* But then again, I have a friend from Israel/Sri Lanka (I think he grew up in israel but was originally from sri lanka, idk) & he was in the air force for thirteen years but I met him as a cheap cafe sandwich maker in the banquet cold kitchen. I mean he left that job a couple weeks ago for private security but other than that. My point is, being n the military does not denote your future, you can escape your past.

Love the music btw

*Knows it word for word* RC laughs. He notices KR+JE’S looks. RC: I was raised by a single mother. Hard Kill was how I got my brotime. KR: That explains so much. JE: Mmhmm.

JE: Yeah, the guy from The Indestructibles movies, where all the badass action heroes band together for one last mission. KR: Before they die of old age? JE: Hey. That’s a great film. And so was the sequel. Sequels are never good bro KR: (sarcastically) Yeah.

KR: The redhead, she’s an archaeologist? That strains credibility. (XD casually sexist) JE: Yeah, in a good way. KB: Hard at work investigating, I see. They all turn around quickly. (Love her)

Castle being sort of helpful while just watching movies *pushes esposito out of the way a bit* why garroute, not garawt? KB: I know what her name is. While you were having your B-movie festival, I tracked her down. She’s in New York. She’s shooting a film and she’s on her way in now. *Esposito's face lights up & Castle accidentally hits ryan*

love the music XD but bex, let Castle find girls pretty in the past tense, he had her poster on his wall when he was younger & def before he met you that is ok.

oh no Another indestructibles? before they all die of old age? Yay friends Wow guns Cheesy is not bad KB: The real miracle is how a girl like that’s hanging out with a bunch of guys old enough to be her grandfather. She's not wrong

RC: Hi, Mr. Harmon. Huge fan. Huge fan. (he holds out his hand for a shake) I – I’m – it’s an honor – honor to meet you. Brock Harmon: The honor is mine. I’ve passed many an hour in the john reading your books. (in the washroom but still, he reads em! Love it when two celebrities are fans of each other lol)

Sometimes they say first names, sometimes they say last names.

When castle said that I just thought "Jon huertas was drawing on his past as an airman to play a detective (who used to be a green beret)" but also I miss the days when Castle said smart stuff

Just so happens that everyone they need is in new york i love it

I know why they are "stonewalling" her heheh oh yeah she has "guys" in washington now!

Why Hard Kill of any of the ppl he's played?

KR: (reading the tagline) “Time to hit Cruz control.” Maybe that’s what I need, a catchphrase. (he lowers his voice) Time to meet hard justice. Time for prison time. (nOOO I HATE IT MY FACE IS CAUGHT BETWEEN A CRINGE & A SMILE JHDSKJHSDFJ) XD on second thought: don't. clipping.

Oh yeah I remember this stuff. Man's a regular little robotics high school student!

Oh yeah sobriety. Loev the set behind them too lol

Ooh I noticed the commotion in the background this time! Man holding his face!

Classic action movie other wife XD

{But Castle couldn't tell that this man was NOT ex-cni? He got beckett's entire life story so why is this like this?} btw I want a fanfic where castle pulls the same trick he did on beckett to learn abt esposito & ryan's lives

espt layers upon layers isexy

Enrique Gomez: He needed a bodyguard. Somebody he could trust. And I know such people. But none of them were available on such short notice, so I couldn’t help him. I mean yeah no yeah that's how things go

At least he ASKED his friend I mean Tavi was a sheep herder too! But then he became an operative! & wanted to be a lawyer! & then became captain of the army! & then became the king of the entire nation!

Aww castle so depressed deeply personal XD Tori *pops out* *pops back in*

Earology XD but also acupuncturists might know a lot, I feel like that could be a plot point in a future episode & the shows the little animation XD like girl why not just say "I have an ID" & give the ID & if they ask say "I compared her ear shape to pictures of women connected to Lance DeLorca" & show the green pic of the scan but since you already compared it, you don't need to compare it to any more (which is where we got that pretty ear shape animation from)

not quoting, rather clipping, but the captions are incorrect so beware

I like how dark the obs room is in comparison to the inter room but the box is still so dim

set smth right! Words we've said before!

RC: My opinion is not affected by her skimpy outfit. I’m speaking as an objective investigator. Someone who has set their personal feelings aside. KB: Along with your poster? RC stops abruptly. RC: Who told you? It’s Ryan, wasn’t it? Apparently everyone knows ryan as the blabbermouth. "She's going away with her boyfriend!" "It only proves that Ryan has a big mouth" like girl this is a minor character trait for him at this point

Yay I'm hopefully getting my meds filled! I went to the hospital for self harm & suicidal motives on wednesday & I still haven't gotten my meds yet *goofy face emoji* but now I am yayay

why does ryan say "except for her story is still holding up" instead of "except that her story is still holding up" but ig it's better "except FOR the fact THAT her story.."

slaps ryan's mouth XD

her fridge is EMPTY

THANK YOU! Thank you Lanie for giving us all this information, all the reminders of the past, the explosion, the best apartment ever! Also I totally thought that they were going to kiss & then I forgot this isn't fanfiction. Btw we need more femslash in fandom. Straight women, we need you! Lol wine in ceramic mugs

Ooh Ryan's outfit! It was good yesterday but now it is also good today!

Hollywood style one at a time fight, castle's face, espt's face, castle's face, espt's nodthe MUSIC, man he did a great job choosing the right instruments for this!

Reminds me, I was in martial arts as a kid (& I wish I could go back but college is awful & nobody should have to work more than five hours a day /gen /revolution /ubi) & some friends of mine got into a fight at mcdonald's & they TOTALLY should have asked for the security footage!

btw, kicks are low not for their face

You get sides of pork, not sides of beef. Cattle are cut into quarters. Sorry lol I took a meat fabrication course in college

Standing in a very fenton oconnell type way there huh

JE: AD says his name is Ernest Howe. He’s playing ISIS militant number twelve. KR: Not for long. You know what time it is? It’s Ryan time. KR walks, JE follows him. JE: Please. Just stop. KR: Name’s Ryan and I hate lyin’. (he flashes his badge) JE: Oh my god KR: Ernest Howe! NYPD. not clipping too embarrassing KR: Oh, you’ve got trouble. Ryan trouble. JE hangs & shakes his head EH, softly & deeply: I don’t know what that means.

add to 1x7 when esposito & ryan were about to fck "moot" btw love espt's outfit. "put the hurt on all of you" sounds like irish, "there is hurt on me" or "there is hunger on me" is how irish sentences work

wait then why were you there beating on him in the alley? Or maybe they couldn't connect him to any of the assaulters, he just looked kind of like them

Ryan mr narco didn't notice? well ig it has been like 9 years since then...

love a good old middle aged dude

RC: I’ve learned that every good fiction contains a kernel of truth. Mr writer

BH: Say, the gang and I are going out for drinks later tonight. How’s you like to come with us? RC: RC: BH: Castle?

RC to KB: You are my boyhood dream.

XD that little run! He's a teen girl I love him!

There is NOT enough space for three broad shouldered adlult men to sit in a caar together

BH: Somebody takes out one of our own, we take him out. Valid ig? but castle is right: Oh, guys. Hey. Listen. If your plan is to go to the club and steal that slot car, no, that would – that would taint the evidence. Rolf Magnus: Actually we can compel the DA to consider it, since the car technically belonged to the victim, Lance. Wow actually smart lol

Where is Castle? Oh wait that's him. When did Castle change? Cool guys don't look at explosions

Love the heist comp XD. & they call him el jeffe XD I love the triframe but castle is conspicuous Lol always check, esp if you don't want to create a distraction Now get gone he's only on his way you can still get gone! Pull the fire alarm! Oh good for her lol

KB: You’re telling me that this was handed to you by a concerned citizen? RC: Uh … yes.

KB: And reward you for your []illegal behavior? (she shakes her head) I think not.

& then she livetells him anyway?

They be f*ckin' /j "omg this is not what I expected to be listening to"

yk what trey, that's valid. But also dude maybe ask for help yk what the DA might feel bad for you but also girl go to the authorities at that point maybe except that yk how cops are but at least theyd arrest boothe for conspiracy to commit murder

What did the blood bone marrow donor have to do with all of this?

he's your real dad & blood bone tests showed that?

ryan weird with the vest half open tbh

Ohhhh his son that's how this was involved!

WOAH THE JEWELRY WIRE IS THE SAME!?!? I don't think Lance was trying to ruin things, just trying to build a connection with a kid he's met a few times, his friend's kid, who just so hapens to be HIS kid.

Gates said good job to castle XD!

RC: I was just going to suggest the exact same thing. We’re starting to think alike now! As if they haven't been doing this since s1 XD KB: (laughing) That is horrifying. Okay, go cue up the movie, open up a bottle of wine. I’ll be home in a bit. I’ve just got a stop to make first. (& make popcorn!) RC: Well, if I’m thinking what you’re thinking and it’s to pick up a sexy archaeologist costume, don’t worry. (he drops his voice to a whisper) I’ve already got the whip. KB: *surprised pikachu*

but girl that's nice wood! & that is too good of a carving tbh

cinematic <3

Mkay so it's 17 & I started watching at 13.30 so that's 4.5 hours & 3 hours is already double my allotted time this was triple my alotted time which means it took me sextuple times the episode... then again a lot of it WAS spent trying to upload stuff to tumblr, at least 30m.

#castle 7x9 #the action movie episode #castle 7x9 spoilers #castle 7x9 quote

[inslo]

I’ve been having trouble sleeping the last week (and had a wild dream last night which I will be writing about), partly because I’m very upset about my October vacation.  I always take off the first two weeks of October and that is my annual “reset”.  I unsync my phone from work email.  I take a trip somewhere for the first week, and the second week is a stay-cation where I start getting my yard ready for the winter.  Also my birthday occurs during those two weeks.  I try to enjoy the last of the temperate weather, and ‘long’ daylight hours.  (I would prefer taking one of those weeks off in September, but I am banned from taking Vacation in September as it is our busiest month)  Well as it turns out, this will be the first year in 16 years that I will be working on my birthday.  All the way back in March, my supervisor alerted me that my October vacation may be slightly interrupted.  He had a family wedding the weekend of Sept 30/Oct 1st and it would likely just be a long weekend.  When I touched based with him in August, the wedding had moved to October 7 and it was turning into a multi-workday-off ordeal, but had no details.  As of this very moment, he still doesn’t know exactly when he will be off, but I have been banned from taking vacation Oct 4 – 15th as of the moment until he figures out his plans.  I have three days off next week and am still unsure about the rest of the 7 business days I would like to take off.  If things were as he said back in March, it would be an annoyance, but do-able for me.  But as things stand…its formed beyond annoyance and is now anger.  What is supposed to be my happiest, most enjoyable  and most relaxed part of the entire year has turned into anger

Because of the restless night, I had a ‘wild’ dream.  By wild, I mean just all over the place.  In an alternate reality, one in which grandpa passed away before his house sold, my brother and I inherited the house.  My brother wanted to keep it and I wanted to sell it, it is NOT in a good area of town.  For some reason I had a lot of my own personal stuff at his house including papers and an old computer.  I worked on removing my items.  But also was hungry and looking for a snack.  My brother had been using his middle bedroom, and in the bottom drawer of the dresser that was in the room, grandpa used to keep candy.  I went looking for candy, but only found my brothers stuff in the drawer. 

I also dreamed I ran into mom (who passed away 24 years ago) and she had not aged a day since her passing.  She looked young (she was 52) and beautiful, I gave her a big hug as I had missed her. 

Finally in another part of this dream, I was at a dinner party with friends, some who I had not seen in a while.  People who know me, know I am horrible remembering names and faces….yes, it’s not just names, I can’t remember faces either.  One of the friends at this dinner party came up to me and started talking to me.  She said that we had often cuddled at cuddle parties in Chicago.  I said I missed her and the cuddle parties so much and we got into a hug and I started to tear up on her shoulder. 

EDIT: After reading this a few times, I realized that all three parts of this dream had to deal with death in some form. The passing of my Grandfather, The passing of my mom, and the long absence or seeming death of cuddle party....though I know one person in Chicago trying to bring Cuddle Party back. Very interesting.

[letitgo2016]

Dear Cousin,

Look, I know you’re hurt. And I wish I could talk to you about it. I wish my DAD would talk to you about it. I TOLD him to talk to you about it.

But he’s stubborn. Just like our grandfather. He doesn’t usually seem stubborn, but it’s definitely there.

I don’t like where you two are, either.

It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that he cares a LOT. And he sent you a large sum of money awhile back and he didn’t receive any acknowledgment from you. That pissed him off. (I don’t blame you. Some of that is on him for giving a gift and having expectations.) I told him, “what if they didn’t even receive it?” And encouraged him to ask you. I even volunteered to talk to you about it because I knew it was bugging you, and even though he’s stubborn, he’s super-non confrontational, too.

He told me I could tell you what was wrong. I planned to do it when you visited last year (earlier this year? Time means nothing anymore). And then a few days before you arrived, he changed his mind.

I’m sorry. It sucks and I think he’s wrong, and I’m sorry.

But the man is having a fucking triple bypass right now and I’m sitting in the hospital where my mom died as I await word that all went well.

So your text was unwelcome.

Your timing sucks and I can’t even deal with you right now, so sorry, but I don’t know if I can respond for a bit. If you’d just sent well wishes, I’d totally be talking with you, but you had to add that little “I know he doesn’t care about me…”

So, no. Nope. No.

Call Gramma for an update because I can’t even with you right now.

I do love you,

Me

***

Dear You,

You’d better hope today ends on a positive note. Because I haven’t heard from you. You have failed to acknowledge what I’m handling here. And it’s fucking weird, man.

You’re fucking weird.

It’s one thing to continue to put shit on my plate (granted, I can acknowledge that you said, “only if you have time” and I can acknowledge that you did acknowledge that this is a BIG DEAL. But that was a WEEK AGO.), but it’s another thing to be one of the few who knows exactly what’s up and for you to say nothing.

I’ll probably forgive you. Again, if all goes well.

But I know myself, and I know how I grieve and I can guaran-fucking-tee you that if it goes south, that anger is gonna be directed at you.

You’ve got a few more hours, you should probably text me. (Or fucking acknowledge it over on the Wordle thread because you SAW Katharine do exactly that!)

You’ve got a lot on your plate, too, but I’ve been there for you every step of the way. And I am freely acknowledging that I do get something from that.

But a day will come when I will absolutely require more from you. And I doubt you’ll pass muster.

I wonder how I will feel about you tomorrow…

- me

***

Dear You,

You’re sitting beside me, reading, as we await the next update.

You are a gift and I am so fucking grateful for you!!

I love you.

Always,

Me

[queennicoleinboots]

King Bruce Ice Has Spoken

(sequel to Mourning Again)

King Bruce Ice growled loudly. He looked at me, pointed, and said, "You! I appoint you as my senior advisor!" King Bruce Ice was a boat mechanic who also led the Secret Royal Society of Sexually-Frustrated Goats, Secret Royal Society of Sexually-Frustrated Bears, and the Virgin Islands Chapter of The Sexually-Frustrated Mechanics. He and his family recently moved to the Virgin Islands to get away from the bullshit of the mainland.

"WHAT?! I have more experience in advising and organizing chapter meetings than Nicole does! What is the meaning of this?!" Queen Megara Ice shouted with a growl.

"I don't REQUIRE experience! I require OBEDIENCE! I have spoken!!!!" King Bruce Ice shouted before he growled.

Duke the Ace of Dodging and Riley the Ace of Riddling barked repeatedly.

King Bruce Ice stared at his dogs for a few seconds before he shouted, "SILENCE! Go lay down."

Duke the Ace of Dodging and Riley the Ace of Riddling laid down and looked at King Bruce Ace. Riley the Ace of Riddling barked one more time at King Bruce Ice.

"RILEY! DO NOT TRIFLE WITH ME!" King Bruce Ice shouted as he beat the podium with the gavel. The shouting and sound could be heard from a planet away.

Riley the Ace of Riddling stared at King Bruce Ice and whimpered out of fright.

"Riley! Shut up, Riley!" King Bruce Ice shouted. He beat the podium with the gavel and damn near broke the podium.

The rest of us at the meeting laughed. Queen Megara Ice snickered.

Riley the Ace of Riddling folded his front paws over his arms and looked up at King Bruce Ice intently.

"Thank you," King Bruce Ice said to Riley the Ace of Riddling.

"You are welcome," Riley the Ace of Riddling said in a deep voice.

King Bruce Ice's widened. Riley the Ace of Riddling had not spoken English in a while, so when it happened, the big brown bear was shocked. "Hot Damn. Anyway, we have gathered here today for Angelina, Captain Joebearcow's older sister's funeral. She passed away a few weeks ago, and we are here to honor her life and times."

Captain Joebearcow let out tears, and I held him in my arms. Queen Megara Ice stared at King Bruce Ice solemnly. Two elder bears had their heads bowed. One was gray and tall, and the other was golden and short.

"Angelina was a great pirate on the high seas and had traveled many galaxies. She was a Nebula and a Gamora," King Bruce Ice said. "She was an artist, singer, and a scientist!"

"She also wrote a paper about the molecular structure of cotton and its many uses. It resulted in us having cotton toilet paper on the Green Planet," Captain Joebearcow added as he stepped up to the podium next to King Bruce Ice.

"She was an inventor of great renown who followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, Carmichael Campinelli, the inventor of color TV, neon signs, the primitive model of the GPS, and Green chili pasta sauce!" King Bruce Ice shouted as his voice boomed in the meeting hall.

"Actually, my grandmother, Rosa Caccicarro, invented the Green chili pasta sauce. But you are correct about everything else regarding Carmichael Campinelli. He was the Rocket Raccoon before he became Rocket Raccoon," Captain Joebearcow said.

"Holy Shit! Your grandfather was a RACCOON?!" Dereck, a normally quiet taupe bear shouted in disbelief.

"Yes," Captain Joebearcow said as he stared directly at Dereck.

"Then how did you... become a black bear?" Sorcerer Banana asked as he scratched his head. He was still mostly an outline because he was transparent. He shows up to these meetings less frequently than he used to.

"My grandmother was a black bear," Captain Joebearcow answered as he stared at Sorcerer Banana's outline.

"So the dominant gene was the bear gene?" Sorcerer Banana asked to clarify.

"YES! YES! Everyone who took Biology 101 knows about dominant and recessive genes. Brown bears are the most dominant while black bears are the second most dominant. And fuck the rest of it!" King Bruce Ice shouted. "Can we get on with this funeral please?!"

There was a knock at the door. Duke the Ace of Dodging and Riley the Ace of Riddling barked.

"I guess not! What is it?! I am conducting important business right now!" King Bruce Ice shouted as he ran to the toilet near the back of the stage and pooped with a sigh of relief.

"I'm sorry, Uncle King Bruce Ice, but I have a question that needs to be answered immediately," Isabella Ice, one of King Bruce Ice's nieces, said as she opened the door. She looked to be a teen bear between the ages of 18-19.

"Oh shit not this again! What is it this time?! I'm in the middle of conducting a funeral service!" King Bruce Ice shouted over his loud pooping.

"When is the next chance you will be able to lead the Virgin Island Society of Young Cubs?" Isabella Ice asked.

"Are you serious?! I am nowhere near my calendar! And can't that wait until after I finish the funeral service!? Come on, Isabella. This is disrespectful!" King Bruce Ice shouted as he was still doing business on the toilet.

The other bears growled in agreement. King Joebearcow's growl was the loudest.

"I don't mean to intrude on your business, but Martha Mae Bear needs to have an emergency meeting as soon as possible! I can't handle a meeting of this caliber, Uncle King Bruce Ice! Literally every bear on the Virgin Islands has to attend this meeting, even the gray bears!" Isabella Ice shouted.

The tall elder gray bear growled at Isabella Ice and bared his teeth. He wore glasses over his light blue eyes. His left eye was lazy.

Martha Mae Bear, the elderly gray bear standing next to Isabella Ice, nodded to the taller elderly gray bear with a smirk and 'What can you do?' shrug.

"Holy Shit! All of the gray bears?! This shit is serious!" King Bruce Ice shouted as he farted and flushed the toilet. He then walked over to his calendar. "Excuse me, King Joebearcow. I am trying to take care of her so that we can get back to business."

"I can understand that," King Joebearcow said as he stood there.

King Bruce Ice was marking stuff down on his calendar like crazy, poking his head with the pen, let out a growl, and stared at said calendar. "Friday, March 3!"

"Are you serious? That's when the Virgin Islands Senior Youth Bears are starting Spring Break! What about Thursday, March 2nd...??" Isabella Ice asked frantically.

"I have a doctor's appointment then. Can we try Monday, February 27?" Martha Mae Bear asked.

"I HAVE MY GYNECOLOGY APPOINTMENT THEN! SORRY!" Isabella Ice shouted.

King Bruce Ice sighed. "You're going to interrupt a funeral service to have an emergency meeting about God Knows What, but you can't postpone Spring Break or doctor's appointments. That makes a lot of sense," he muttered as he marked on his calendar again. He then walked the door to the meeting hall and growled loudly. The whole neighborhood could hear him. "MONDAY, The 6th of MARCH!"

Isabella Ice smiled and nodded at her uncle as her ear drums were probably ringing by then. "Thank you. You have spoken, Your Grace," she said.

"What time?" Martha Mae Bear asked.

"8:30 A.M!!!!" King Bruce Ice shouted loudly.

"Holy Shit! Blow our ears off why don't you? We're going to be deaf by the time Monday rolls around!" Queen Megara Ice shouted at her husband.

"YOU CAN PUT YOUR EARS TO GOOD USE BY LISTENING TO ME!" King Bruce Ice called to her as he slammed the door of the meeting hall. He growled loudly and beat on his chest like a bear. He then walked back up to the podium and stared straight at the wall in front of him. He managed to burn a hole in it.

Duke the Ace of Dodging and Riley the Ace of Riddling sat on the floor quietly and stared at him. They were afraid to speak.

King Bruce Ice shuddered. "Just another thing. The world's coming to end. Angelina passed away. My niece's now graduating young senior bear school! And now there's another meeting about shit I have no idea about," he spoke. "The world is on my bear shoulders."

"That's a lot of pressure, Your Grace," I said.

"Absolutely. This world is not easy to live in, especially if you are a male brown bear. We have entirely too many responsibilities. Every morning when I wake up, I have to make an important decision of whether or not the forests catch on fire. I have to ensure my family has enough food to hibernate for the winter. I have to ensure that bears have their needs met or they dismantle camping grounds. IT'S JUST TOO MUCH!"

"I am honored to be your senior advisor," I said.

"Thank you," King Bruce Ice said as he stared at the wall with softer eyes. "There are days I don't come in this meeting hall and when I hibernate from everyone but my four daughters. But they are wonderful cubs. I gave taught them to fend for themselves in the wild. I couldn't be more proud of them."

I shed a tear at his pride for his cubs. Duke the Ace of Dodging and Riley the Ace of Riddling shed tears and howled in his honor.

King Bruce Ice growled with pleasure.

A phone call came in on my phone, and it was a ringtone of an executive bear growl. Isabella Ice and Martha Mae Bear jumped at the ringtone. The other bears sighed.

"ANSWER THAT PHONE!" King Bruce Ice shouted.

I answered the phone, "Hey Chrissy, Queen Drama Llama Mama of 47 hungry pups of 477 titles. It has been a while!"

King Bruce Ice then growled a growl to remember. I was bleating loudly. I was honored to be in the presence of great wonderful bears and Chrissy, Queen Wolf Bitch Mama of 47 hungry pups and 477 titles.

Chrissy, Queen Wolf Bitch Mama of 47 hungry pups and 477 titles spoke, "Well, thank you for that splendid greeting. I want to know what positions everyone has. There have been many changes to our group since we last got together. 2022 has had several upheavals in general and in our group. I need to know the changes to the group. I'm sorry I was not able to attend Angelina's funeral, may God Bless her soul. I'm currently tied up at the moment. Ha ha ha!"

"Hahaha. King Joebearcow is King Bear; King Bruce Ice is the Chancellor; I am Queen Goat and senior advisor; Queen Megara Ice is the treasurer and accountant; and of course thou art the secretary," I said with an excited bleat.

"She is the true group organizer!" King Bruce Ice shouted with a growl.

King Joebearcow growled in excitement.

Chrissy, Wolf Bitch Mama of 47 hungry pups and 477 titles responded, "And what position is the glorious Peter W. Parker?"

I cleared my throat. "That's a good question. He was the mascot, but he hasn't come to a meeting in months," I said.

"Oh that is quite the shame! When did you last speak to him?" Chrissy, Wolf Bitch Mama of 47 hungry pups and 477 titles asked.

"Like... almost a year ago. Things have been very insane lately," I said.

"Indeed they have. I'm not sure when this drama will calm down," Chrissy, Drama Llama Wolf Bitch Mama of 47 hungry pups and 477 titles said with worry in her voice.

"Ohayo has had two chemical spills and a power plant explosion this month," Pauno, The Greek God of food, wine, partying, technology, fertility, and wisdom added. "Not that I am trying to minimize the importance of Angelina's death. It's all crazy."

"Yes! It affects us deeply on the Virgin Islands. When I finish this funeral, we'll discuss evacuation and refugee plans immediately," King Bruce Ice said before he took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed SOMEONE. He then sang a bear song that summoned Peter and Chrissy, Drama Llama Wolf Bitch Mama of 47 hungry pups and 477 titles to the meeting hall.

---------------------------------------------------------

The meeting hall then turned into a room that was like Bobby's World, but instead of Bobby being on the tricycle, it was King Bruce Ice. He was floating around. I knew King Bruce Ice was different from other bears, but I was baffled on how we ended up here.

King Joebearcow, Peter, and I floated around. King Joebearcow was freaking out and pawing at the air. Duke the Ace of Dodging and Riley the Ace of Riddling were barking and floating.

"How the fuck did I get here?" Peter asked.

"I have no idea," King Joebearcow said as he stared at Peter.

King Bruce Ice appeared on a television screen that existed on the meeting hall wall. "HELLO!" he shouted.

I tried not to crack up completely as I waved to him.

"What am I doing here?" Peter asked as he scratched the curls on top of his head.

"Peter Parker, can you sing a song of cheer for us?!" King Bruce Ice asked.

"Um. Yeah. I can sing a song of cheer. I've been practicing in my spare time" Peter said with a grin.

"Good! We need you to sing that song to lift our spirits!" King Bruce Ice shouted.

"Okay. What am I supposed to sing about?" Peter asked.

"Perseverance and the honor that Angelina gave to us when she was alive! We must sing of her adventures as a pirate of the high seas!" King Bruce Ice shouted.

Peter blinked. "What?!"

"Angelina, my sister passed away a few weeks ago," Joebear clarified.

"I'm sorry to hear. Why was I chosen to sing this song?" Peter asked as he raised his right eyebrow.

"BECAUSE THE SEXUALLY-FRUSTRATED Kool-Aid Man needs a jingle for his new commercial AND to honor the life of Angelina at the same time!" King Bruce Ice shouted in a booming voice. Bear shit literally dropped from the ceiling as a result of King Bruce Ice shouting.

Peter's eyes literally widened behind his glasses as he got pooped on. "But why me, specifically? Couldn't you hire some major music artists to sing those jingles?" he asked.

King Joebearcow also took a dump and opened up a portal between the dead and living.

I completely laughed my head off at this point and took a nuclear dump in that portal.

King Bruce Ice blinked as he stared at Peter. "Because I don't want to PAY them to sing that song," he said.

"Okay. But the last time I tried to sing a jingle for someone, I almost killed a man. But that was before I began practicing on a regular basis. Second, why couldn't the Sexually-Frustrated Kool-Aid Man sing his own song?" Peter asked.

"That's a very good question, Peter," King Joebearcow said with a growl as he stared at King Bruce Ice. He scratched his butt.

"And why are we covered in shit?" Peter asked while shaking his fist. Some poop flew off Peter's hand and into the air. Riley the Ace of Riddling swam over and ate it.

"Welcome to my asshole! It's like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, but there is less bullshit here," King Bruce Ice said in a booming voice.

"But there's a lot more bear shit in here," a shorter, fatter version of King Bruce Ice said in a squeaky voice. The crown was over-sized on his head.

"Yes! Now, remember! The mascots never wrote their own jingles, unless they are Peter Parker," King Bruce Ice said as he stared straight at Peter Parker.

"Why not?" Peter asked as he threw his hands in the air.

The smaller, fatter King Bruce Ice then called the Sexually-Frustrated Kool-Aid Man. We heard beating and slapping of asses, "OH YEAH KOOL-AID'S HERE!!!!," women moaning and laughing, cars revving up their engines, Peter Killmeyer on YouTube talking about GM motors using Mexican labor to build the car parts, and DarthSydePhineas saying "I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING!!!!" for five minutes before the smaller, fatter King Bruce Ice hung up the phone with a mentally-scarred look on his face.

Peter's eyes almost popped out of his head. "Oh!"

"That's effed up effed up," King Joebearcow said as he stared blankly into King Bruce Ice's gaping asshole that was larger than the Milky Way.

I was suppressing laughter.

King Bruce Ice continued, "We must honor the dead! We must honor bears, goats, ducks, geese, cats, dogs, and Marvel comic book characters! Now go forth and sing that song! Incoming!!!"

A massive flood of shit just flew out of the ceiling and covered the whole meeting hall. King Joebearcow's Mama, who was a white bear with blue eyes, then appeared as she floated around in the meeting hall.

"Mama!!!" King Joebearcow shouted and swam over to hug her.

Mama Bear then held King Joebearcow and scratched his head. She then looked at him. "Did you get the mail?"

"No," King Joebearcow said. "Why? Were you expecting something? And Zoomers give me a headache."

Mama Bear then growled and said, "NO! In fact, there are days when I am tempted not to even go to the mailbox! Everyone gives me a headache!"

King Bruce Ice and I burst out laughing. Miss Oreo and Oreo, Sr. then meowed loudly.

Peter then sighed and said, "Dammit. I forgot to get the mail!" He walked on air and stared straight ahead.

"Don't do it! It's bad for your mental health!" Mama Bear shouted.

Peter chuckled as he walked away on air.

King Joebearcow then lost it and started laughing in high-pitch while crying.

"DON'T FORGET TO SING THAT SONG!" King Bruce Ice shouted as he took a shit on the other side of the screen.

King Bruce Ice has taken a shit, and King Bruce Ice has spoken!!

[multifictional]

A little “me” moment because I needed to write it.

Read if you want, it would make me so happy but you’re not forced to of course <3

This year has been the worst year I’ve ever lived.

It all happened last July. That month, I lost three of the most important thing I’ve ever had.

I lost my first dog, which I had for the last almost 14 years, and in that very same day, I lost one of my two internet best friend.

We used to talk a lot every day, we role played, talked, helped and reassured each other. She literally knew everything about me. My worst fears, my biggest dreams and passions, my family issues and so on.

So when I lost her, on the same day, it was the end of me. I was already broken for my dog, this made things worse. And even after a year, I can’t get over it. Because we didn’t have closure.

I’m not going to explain our “fight” because I don’t want to annoy anyone, just know that I texted her in any social for the next three days, asking her to forgive me and apologising, even if I didn’t know what I was apologising for, and to talk about it together, give each other our perspective civilly like adults, but she left me on read. And never heard of her again. After three years of laughters, roleplays, tears and nights full of messages into nothing.

Needless to say I was in pain. I fell into a hole, and even if I had my childhood friend trying to help me out, it just hurt so much.

Then there is my other best friend. My parabatai (who follows shadowhunters, know what I mean).

Nothing happened with her. We didn’t fight. But after what happened I didn’t have the strength to talk to her, so I left it here. We were that kind of friends who knew we could pass months without speaking and never would change.

Just, it changed.

Few months later, I tried to reach to her, explaining what happened and why I didn’t write to her, that I wasn’t in a good place. She never read, so I tried again on her bday, but still, never.

I didn’t know if she read it or not because sometimes she erased the option of the blue ticks that confirmed the other person read the messages.

It was some weeks ago that I saw the blue ticks.

And here I lost all my hope.

—

Some months ago, my grand father sold his boat.

That’s another thing that left me empty.

I literally grew up on that boat. I went in family vacation every fucking year, until I was eleven, then we went back one last time in 2016.

I dreamed of getting my own boat license and sailing on that same boat, making my grandfather proud. And I wanted to. I couldn’t apply to boat license yet, because I was studying for my driving license, but I got information for the price and I was so sure about it. I would have tried this autumn. But this changed when he told me that he sold it and something broke inside me.

Then when the day arrived and I saw the boat leaving my garden, I had a breakdown. My memories, my childhood, my purposes, gone. And worst thing is the fact that I will never get them back. Neither with another boat. It will never be the same again.

I can always get a license and a boat in the future, I know, and I’m so sure I will one day.

But my memories on that boat will forever be gone. That day, a piece of me left with it.

—

Here’s the thing: something changed some days ago.

Recently I read a book I fell in love with. I liked it that much, that gave me inspiration. Then I started writing down the ideas, and I kept getting inspired.

These three things that happened this year turned out to be my inspiration, especially the boat one. Of course I changed things, but that’s not the point.

I tried to write more than once something that was original and not fanfiction, but I always stopped because 1. I wasn’t inspired and forced and 2. I always stick around fanfiction.

But I tried. And everyday, I’m more inspired. I have already a general idea, and this really is something I never thought possible.

So I hope that perhaps, writing these things in my story will help me find the comfort I never found and maybe, just maybe, help me get over it and try to let it go.

People say to turn your insecurity and what hurt you into strength. Maybe it will happen sometime, because I don’t feel strong at the moment, the contrary.

But maybe it’s true that all of this will turn out into something good at the end.

Just, not the way I hoped and expected. But maybe that’s better.

-

Okay. First of all, if you arrived here, thank you for the attention. I rarely talk about myself, but this time I just needed it. I hate the attention, so if you think I’m an attention seeker just get away, please.

If you’re not, again thank you.

I wrote this, in case someone else who might read this isn’t in a good place either.

You’re not alone. And I know it’s easy to think that and just wishing to die. I know what’s that like.

Okay, there are more serious and problematic things in the world and I do know that. But what is nothing to someone, could be everything to someone else.

I always appreciated the little things, for example.

I really hope that writing my own romance will help someway.

You see, I realised thank to this that things happens in the less expected moment. I didn’t expect inspiration when I finished reading that book, but that book and the thoughts of what I lost this year put together, made the inspiration sink in.

I’m scared to start writing my own piece. But I’m also excited.

I decided to listen the excitement rather than the fear.

So here is my message: take any chance the world offer you. It will not be easy, life is not easy, but in this world we aren’t alone. We just need to find the right person, the right drawing, the right song or poem.

For me it was the right character that gave me the right inspiration, in the moment I needed it the most, even if I didn’t know that yet.

But now I know.

#writing #venting #best friends #memories #life #losing friends #losing someone #losing hope #finding my way #insecurities #helping #dogs #dog loss #boat #dreams #romance #book #writer #wow #didn’t expect that

[blazeofbrownie]

Becoming East and West

It's crazy how a single moment changed our lives. There we were, two ten year olds, sitting in our respective classes, listening to our teachers drone on about fractions or something, I can't quite remember, but then our names were called out over the PA system, requesting us to make our way to the principal's office.

I assumed the worst, something had happened to Mom or Dad, I remember slowly rising from my chair and trotting to the hallway and there you were, exiting your own class.

“Why do you think Ms Hall wants us?”

I simply shrugged my shoulders as we walked side by side to her office. My assumption grew when the secretary put her arms around us both and ushered us in to the principal's office. I wondered whether you thought the same as I did? Whether our twin telepathy, that always worked when we least expected it, made us think the same thing? I never did ask you.

We took our seats in front of the desk, I caught a glimpse of Ms Hall, speaking to a uniformed man and that's when I knew, something had indeed happened. My hand reached for yours, needing to give you the support and needing it myself. I couldn't bring my eyes up until Ms Hall sat before us, her expression was sad and then she broke the fateful news to us.

“Antonio, Arianna, there's been an accident, I'm so sorry but both of your parents are no more.”

Your hand returned the squeeze my hand gave, I could feel my eyes welling as I dropped my gaze to my lap, I could hear you mumbling and sniffling so I turned to put my arm around you. We sat there crying until a social worker appeared, telling us we'd have to be taken in to foster care until our next of kin could be located.

But that was an issue wasn't it? We didn't have any next of kin, Mom's parents had passed away some time ago, so had our grandmother on Dad's side. No one knew where our grandfather was. No aunts or uncles, not even a godparent. We were alone. Alone but together. She began explaining the processes involved in getting us housed with a carer, what would that mean for us? Would we remain in foster care until we turned 18? She never hid the statistics of a ten year old child getting adopted, which were dismal, so the chances of twins being adopted were slim to none, especially not by the same family. What would happen to us? What if we were separated? What if I lost you and became truly alone? My thoughts had made me cling to you, I couldn't lose you too, and I knew you thought the same because you held on to me just as tight, and they could see it too, they had to, they had no choice.

A silent prayer of two orphaned children was answered. We'd been in foster care for all of three weeks when the social worker showed up at the door, I'd thought she was there to take us to another place, because we hadn't settled in this home properly. We weren't eating, we sat quietly together when doing our homework and even when we weren't, we didn't talk to the other kids, even when they wanted to play with us. Maybe they'd had enough of us? I was mistaken.

We were being adopted, both of us, and not just by a single person but by a couple who already had two older children. I couldn't help but think why? Why would someone who had children already want more kids? More importantly, why did they want us?

The answers didn't matter in the end. We were escorted out of the foster home to the driveway and there they were, Ezio and Valentina Falco, the people who wanted to adopt us. I remember I looked over at you and you'd looked at me, and you voiced what I was thinking.

“If we don't try then we won't know.”

The Falcos took us to their home, and it was a big home, they sat us in their spacious living room as they filled out the necessary paperwork with the social worker, it wasn't until she left that they finally sat in front of us, they looked at us rather warily if I admitted. It was Valentina who spoke.

“We know you're scared and you probably don't trust anyone but that's okay, we will do everything we can to give you the best lives ever.”

She looked over at her husband and it seemed like they were exchanging silent words, Ezio cleared his throat then spoke.

“We’re not your average family, and we can't have you be part of the family without us sharing our biggest secret. See we're…vampires, but you don't need to be afraid of us, we don't kill and we drink from blood bags. Our…children are half vampire too. If this secret gets out, who knows what can happen. If we wanted to, we could force you to keep it, but we don't want to that, we want you to decide on your own.”

The look on their faces was enough to know they weren't lying, and it begged more questions, why would they tell us that? Why not just hide the truth and pretend? Then it bought me back to my original question, why did they want us? I looked over at you, and I wondered what you were thinking. They left us alone to think about it. Maybe we should say no? Go and live with another foster family, a 'normal' family, but then you spoke the voice of reason as your hand reached out for mine.

“If we say no then we won't find this again Ant, no one will want to have two kids who refused adoption especially since we can't tell the authorities their truth, it isn't our place and really, what do we have to lose?”

I couldn't answer because two people entered the room, we looked over at them, they were children but there was also something different about them. I deduced that these were the Falco children. The boy stood in front of us, he smiled the warmest smile I'd ever seen, as his hand stayed on his sister's shoulder.

“I'm Dante, and this is Serafina. You don't need to worry about anything, we'll look after you.”

We both stood up and as I looked up at him, I knew he was telling the truth, I knew we could trust him, so I turned to you and just nodded my head.

Dante's mother…our new mother entered the room again, one hand reached for Dante's shoulder while the other rested on yours.

“We’re a family now, and it will be the best decision you've ever made. The four of you will always need to stick together. I already had two points on the compass of my heart but now it's whole. North and South…”

She looked from Dante to Serafina then from you to me.

“…East and West. As long as you're together then you can accomplish anything.”

She left us alone and I looked over at Dante and at that point I knew that we'd never be alone again.

So if you lost a sister, someone's lost a mom, and if you lost a dad then someone's lost a son, and they're all missing out, yeah they're all missing out, so if you get a second to look down on me now, Mom, Dad I'm just missing you now

https://t.co/lYnETIOlYH