#the number of conversations I have had with my counterpart that involve me saying

[notbecauseofvictories]

It's interesting, because at my last job my boss was good---very good---about creating and fostering relationships. At the time I was horrified, because why are you texting our general counsel? Why are you calling someone up and asking them to opine on something that's just showed up on your radar?? This is business, we need to do business-y things in a business way!!!

It took me a long time to recognize what this approach bought him. He was terrible at data entry, yes. I don't think he once ever approved my vacation time, just said "sure, put your out of office message on." (He hated approving vacation time, so he just....didn't.) But he was looped in, hooked in, always consulted. Everyone picked up his calls, because if he was calling it wasn't going to be a haranguing, he wanted to work with you to achieve both your goals, and honestly? you could call him out of the blue too. It worked both ways. He was crystal clear when things were handed down from the top (usually because we'd get a beer and he'd complain about it) and when requests were coming from him/our team. And he was always, always very clear that we were his people, and it was Us against The Company; he was consistently, unequivocally and completely on our side.

(........this did not stop The Company from pulling its shenanigans, but it always felt like he was siding with Us when it did.)

I know this, because now I'm in an organization where my boss isn't on our side, where things aren't explained---even when explanations would make the boss' requests more reasonable. I'm aware of other situations too, where members of the team have been what seems like deliberately insulted or attacked by our boss, which is frankly unnecessary.

I don't have a conclusion to draw from all of this, and god knows that bad bosses are ten a penny, each terrible in their own way. Still, I do think about it more and more, particularly as I stare down 1 year with the company.

#the number of conversations I have had with my counterpart that involve me saying #''if boss would just explain WHY she wants this I would feel much more comfortable pursuing it'' are. uncountable. #once my mother said that my setup at previous job sounded ideal; and I even agreed with her because #well my first job out of law school was. monstrous. of course job 2 was better. #but actually? I didn't even really know how blessed I was. #old boss had many shortcomings but his ability to foster connection was enviable. #no wonder the company has to secretly manipulate you

[zosonils-art]

Do you have a robot master OC (of the eight plus Drum) that you’d say is your favorite? If you haven’t done an infodump for them yet then you should do that one next

i couldn't choose a favourite if i tried, i love them all, but since you mentioned drum i thought i'd give her some new art and a proper dedicated post too! infodrump [ayyy] under the cut

drum, serial number SWN-002, is my take on the popular [????? i'm still a bit of a mega man fandom newbie i don't know hjdfn] 'wily equivalent to roll' oc template! she keeps things running at the various castles and fortresses and hideouts and whatever else her dad holes up in, whether that's by doing housework, planning schemes, or dodging taxes. whenever wily is trying to take over the world, drum acts as his second-in-command, ensuring that everything goes according to plan and ordering around the latest group of robot masters

she's every bit the edgy mid-00s teenager she looks: sarcastic, apathetic, and always talking back to her dad. she's more obedient than bass is, but she doesn't care for her job at all and will resort to any flimsy excuse or act of malicious compliance she can come up with to slack off. due to her purpose as an organiser and commander, she's a bossy control freak who's quick to anger when things don't go exactly her way, although when she's off work the worst of these traits recede in favour of more conventional teenage apathy. she sees herself as above the time and effort it takes to go out of her way to be mean to people like wily and bass tend to do, but she's equally uninterested in being nice on purpose and her default attitude is squarely on the nastier side

when she doesn't have work to focus on - and sometimes when she does anyway - drum is the lead vocalist and guitarist in a garage band, of which she is [currently - a friend's ocs get involved later, but that's a whole different post] the only member. i'm not good with music terms but she's into whatever genre stuff like wake me up inside and crawling in my skin is [i know those aren't the names hdfjf it's just the words i know people will recognise]. the sort with the crunchy guitar and the very loud lyrics about being sad and/or angry. playing or blasting music helps her to calm down when she's in a bad mood, which is pretty much all the time. the first warning sign of a new wily plot is a spike in search popularity for my chemical romance

i haven't gotten around to designing it, but drum has a non-armoured form like most of the other more explicitly kid-like robots, which she mostly uses for loitering around malls when she has an excuse to not be at home. she rarely buys anything, just hangs out and radiates an aura that makes suburban white women hurry their three kids into the next shop. drum often ends up hanging out with like-minded teens in the same vague area of the goth/punk/emo venn diagram she occupies, and makes a bit of a game out of seeing how honest she can be about her life without revealing that she's one of the world's most wanted robots. she tells herself that it's just something she does out of boredom and curiosity towards humans, but it mostly stems from loneliness and the desire to have literally any friends that aren't her brother's dog

as a sort of contrast to the healthy and positive relationship between their lightbot counterparts, drum and bass absolutely DESPISE each other and make no secret of it. each of them thinks of the other as an insufferable prick and they'll get into petty arguments over just about anything, from whose turn it is on the xbox to who treble loves more. [for the record, it's drum. she lets him hang out in the kitchen while she's cooking and sneaks him food scraps when bass isn't looking. he's the only family member she has an even remotely positive relationship with.] pretty much the only thing that can get them to stop fighting is mutual hatred of a bigger prick, and so far the only person to consistently get them to put their differences aside like this is wily himself - as much as the wily kids hate each other, they hate their dad just a little more, and have a history of teaming up just to mess with him. sometimes mega man can spark that spiteful cooperation, but drum's total apathy towards the light-wily family rivalry means she usually sees him as not worth her time and just finds bass' obsession with beating him even more annoying

drum wasn't made for combat, and as such she doesn't have a signature weapon or any fancy tricks like the copy chip. usually she just orders other robots to do the fighting for her. however, she is equipped with a standard arm-mounted buster, and can hold her own in battle with a 'fight smarter, not harder' approach if she has to. she's also outfitted with the same treble adapter that bass has, so if she's backed into a corner she can call on him for a power boost. treble is capable of supporting both adapters simultaneously, so as an absolute last resort they can all combine into treble-boosted drum & bass, who theoretically has all the combat power of bass plus the strategic thinking from drum and the boost in power from treble. in practice, though, drum and bass are so at odds with each other that they can barely hold together in the same body without either fighting for control or outright splitting apart to argue harder. again, it takes a lot of spite to get them to work together, but if something draws their combined ire and convinces them to cooperate they're an utterly terrifying force to be reckoned with

the game idea i vaguely have in my mind would feature drum as the final-not-final boss before wily reveals he was the mastermind behind it all and surprises absolutely nobody. she was put in charge of the latest world domination attempt, probably as the result of a 'why don't YOU take over the world if you're so smart' conversation, and in true drum fashion she follows a standard wily plot outline to the letter - including the blatant flaws, like all eight of her chosen robot masters forming a rock-paper-scissors wheel just begging to be exploited by the copy chip, and making a clear path from just outside the death fortress to her base of operations. after she's defeated in combat, she sarcasically wonders aloud how mega man could have possibly bested her plan and then helpfully points rock directly to wily's castle. she didn't wanna do the stupid scheme in the first place

again, i love all my ocs too much to possibly choose a favourite, but i'd say drum was the most fun to come up with if only because i had the help of some mates in a discord server. someone was like 'hey if there's bass is there a roll equivalent called drum or something lol' and i SPRINTED to microsoft paint to rough out a character design and the next entire day was just a constant stream of all of us bouncing ideas off each other and creating the meanest girl in the universe. her design changed a little bit from the initial sketch, most notably she used to have the half-shaved hairstyle that every gay person tries at some point before that changed to a midpoint between phoenix wright and sonic the hedgehog, but overall everything about her as a character flowed really well from the start. while she's fallen mostly into my hands since the initial brainstorm, she absolutely wouldn't exist without those friends' input and i feel that that's important to mention!

i'm very tired and i've been working on this on and off for the past day so i'm gonna call the infodrump finished here - thanks for giving me the excuse to talk about her! unfiltered and transparent versions of the art below as always

#i already talked about drum in my first post about her long long ago but i think she deserves a new infodump #zos draws #mega man #mega man oc #robot master oc #drum wily #zos talks #zos answers #aprofessionallurker #man there's so much art i gotta do of her. gotta draw her civilian form and her treble boost AND treble-boosted d&b eventually

[tsarisfanfiction]

Long Way From Home: Chapter 8

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Family/Friendship Characters: Scott, Tracy Family

I’m back!  Including this one, I’ve now got another five chapters written so we’ll be doing weekly updates again at least for the month of February.  For those that haven’t been subjected to my chatting about it in discord or DMs, I write this particular fic in chunks that could almost be called arcs, before chopping it up into chapters, hence the sudden backlog.  This section was only supposed to fill a small moment, not be an entire arc, but the boys disagreed with me on that so here we are.

Therefore, we have more playing around with the differences between the universes - particularly fashion, the TOS ideas of which are loosely based on the 1960s - a couple of familiar namedrops, and there’s a warning for a panic attack in this chapter, so watch out for that if it might give you trouble!  I also know basically zero about Auckland, New Zealand, or correct communications between planes and airports, so sorry if there’s any inconsistencies here.  Let’s just call it future advancements and an alternative universe!

<<<Chapter 7

The coastline of New Zealand looked more or less the same as Scott was used to when they finally arrived.  The analogue dial of Other-Scott’s watch continued to taunt him, but if he had to guess, the journey had taken somewhere between one and two hours, and had largely passed in silence.  Whether that was because Other-Gordon needed to concentrate on piloting, or simply because he was still holding up his promise of no more questions, Scott wasn’t sure, but he appreciated it regardless.

Being a passenger instead of the pilot was always an odd situation, and more than once he’d caught himself trying to shift imaginary controls in response to the clouds and air streams they passed through.  If Other-Gordon had noticed, he hadn’t commented.

“Tango Alpha Ladybird to Auckland Air Traffic Control, requesting permission to land, over.”  Beneath them, the city sprawled almost coast to coast, and Scott peered down, looking for familiar landmarks.  Some of them were there, some of them were not.  As low as they were flying – heading for the airport, no doubt – the Sky Tower should have been easily visible, but its distinctive shape was absent.

It shouldn’t have surprised him.  Sky Tower was a telecommunications tower, and he’d already discovered that this universe didn’t use the same type of technology that he was used to, so its lack of presence made sense.  But it had always been there, built sometime before the millennium and a major aspect of Auckland’s skyline.  He’d flown past it many times, and even used it as an unofficial navigation point.

For it to be not there, either destroyed or never existed in the first place, reminded him that no matter how familiar some things might be, he really wasn’t home.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, was a line famously quoted from an old movie.  Scott had a bit of a soft spot for the Wizard of Oz – old fantasy films in general – but he’d never imagined he’d ever be playing the part of Dorothy.

At least Dorothy still had Toto, he mused sadly.  If only he’d taken Mini-MAX with him on that mission, then maybe he wouldn’t be entirely alone… if Mini-MAX would even have been able to operate without a network to link into.  Most likely, he’d have had nothing but the inactive husk of the small bot. Scott wasn’t sure if that would have been better or worse.

“Auckland Air Traffic Control to Tango Alpha Ladybird, clearance granted for runway four-bravo, over,” the radio crackled, yanking him back to the present.

“Tango Alpha Ladybird to Auckland Air Traffic Control, copy that, over,” Other-Gordon acknowledged.  Scott watched him adjust their angle of approach accordingly and kept his mouth shut as the landing gear engaged and they gently touched down onto the tarmac scant minutes later.  Other-Gordon visibly relaxed as soon as they were safely down, taxiing his way carefully over to a hangar emblazoned with a large T.A.  As they entered, Scott could see several planes inside of various sizes and designs.

The one thing they had in common was the T.A. on their tails, identical to the letters on the hangar, and Scott found himself wondering what it stood for.  Other-Gordon had used the same two letters as a callsign, and he eyed the nearest plane – a much larger one than the Ladybird – as Gordon rolled them to a gentle stop.

“What does T.A. stand for?” he asked, suspecting that Other-Scott would know that and having no wish to get caught out and face awkward conversations. This was the sort of information he’d tried to get out of his doppelgänger, but either he’d thought he would already know, or it was so basic he forgot about it.

The incredulous look he got from Other-Gordon as the man paused his post-flight checks suggested it was the former.

“Tracy Aerospace,” he said.  “Dad’s company.  Doesn’t it exist in your universe?  I thought you said you were a billionaire!”

“I am,” Scott grumbled, “and it does, but it’s Tracy Industries.”

“Right,” Other-Gordon said, going back to the post-flight checks.  “Rule number one: no talking.”

“Wha-”

“You look like Scott but you don’t sound like my brother and that’s something folks’ll notice, especially around here.  The fellas on the ground know Scott well, so you’ve lost your voice.  That’s the story.”

That made sense, but how was Scott supposed to tell Other-Gordon what he was looking for if he wasn’t allowed to talk?  He asked as such as the younger man finished up the last of the checks and undid his harness.

The aquanaut just shrugged.  “What are you after?  Underpants… what else?”

Scott chose to ignore the not so subtle dig; it was getting old, but no doubt Other-Gordon wouldn’t let it go until he’d got changed, and likely not even then.

“Casual shirts, jeans and sneakers.”  He repeated the list he’d given Other-Scott earlier and watched Other-Gordon’s face at the word ‘jeans’.  He didn’t look particularly pleased, but Scott wasn’t going to back down on those.  “Should probably pick up a hoodie or two as well.  Pyjamas and shoes, too.”

“There is no way Scott said yes to a hoodie,” Other-Gordon frowned. “Hoodie and jeans?  Those are workshop clothes; do you fellas really wear those?” Scott bristled, and he raised his hands. “Look, I am all for getting items that’ll make Scott go crazy, but I don’t want to be murdered in my sleep because the media thinks he’s gone cuckoo, so give me a minute to come up with a reason that won’t wreck his public image for the next decade.”

Scott frowned, but before he could say anything else, Other-Gordon grinned and pushed at his wrist watch.  There was a dial tone for several moments before the string of numbers was replaced by Other-Scott’s face.  The other man looked concerned and a little suspicious.  Scott supposed he hadn’t been expecting the call, and an unexpected call from a younger brother was definitely cause for concern – especially when it was a Gordon.

“Hey there, Scott!” Other-Gordon chirped in a tone that immediately had Scott on edge, even though it wasn’t aimed at him.  The faux-innocent, sing-song voice meant trouble, and he felt slightly guilty for whatever chaos was about to fall Other-Scott’s way.

Other-Scott dropped all pretence of concern and frowned at him in full-blown suspicion.

“You’ve only just arrived,” he said slowly.  “You can’t have got in trouble already.”

“You underestimate me, brother dear,” Other-Gordon scoffed, before pulling a sickly-sweet grin onto his face.  Other-Scott’s expression went from suspicious to mildly horrified, and Scott couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Gordon,” he warned, loud enough for the watch to pick him up.  While he was all up for pranks, he couldn’t quite bring himself to let his counterpart be on the receiving end of one he was involved in.  It felt uncomfortably like pranking himself.

Other-Gordon huffed.  “You’re no fun,” he sulked, before turning back to the watch.  Other-Scott, Scott was pleased to see, had lost the look of horror and was back in the realms of confusion.  “Say, Scott, how do you feel about being a trend-setter?”

And the look of horror was straight back.

“What?” Other-Scott demanded.  “Setting what trend?  I’m not a fashion icon, Gordon!  Set your own trends.”

Other-Gordon hummed thoughtfully.  “That’s a fine plan, Scott, except anything I buy will be too small for him to wear, which somewhat defeats the objective.”

Other-Scott made a noise of frustration.  “I told you, Gordon.  Anything that ends up in the media is your fault.”

“Did you say that knowing your clone here wants hoodies?” Other-Gordon asked, eyebrow raised.  Other-Scott choked.  “Because he does and I know better than to try and talk him out of it.”

“Hoodies?” Other-Scott looked bordering on mortified.  “Dad would kill me.”  Something that could be guilt coiled in Scott’s gut; no matter what his feelings were about Not-Dad’s existence, the idea of Other-Scott getting in trouble with him on his behalf didn’t settle well.  Other-Scott shook his head.  “I can’t believe I’m saying this, Gordon, but what’s your plan?”

“I figured we could pass it off as experimentation,” Other-Gordon shrugged. “But you’re not well known for that so it would cause a stir.”

“You’re right about that,” Other-Scott mused, and Scott shook his head.

“I guess I don’t need one,” he offered reluctantly – he wanted one, but there was mildly inconveniencing someone and there was ruining someone’s reputation.

“No.”  Other-Scott shook his head firmly.  “We’ll make this work.”

“Well, it’s your funeral,” Other-Gordon muttered, before a grin slowly spread across his face.  “You know, fellas, I think I’ve got it!”

“Do I want to know?” Other-Scott asked dubiously.

“It’s simple,” Other-Gordon continued as though his older brother hadn’t spoken.  “We all know you wouldn’t willingly wear one, so we make it unwilling.  Scott, you lost a bet.”

Other-Scott ran a hand through his hair.  “I suppose that would work,” he conceded reluctantly.  Scott could see the logic – short term embarrassment at the hands of a younger sibling would barely interest the media, but still explained why he was still in possession of a so-called workman’s outfit. “But I’m insisting on custom made. You are not coming back with some cheap off the shelf monstrosity.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” Other-Gordon chirped in a tone that said he had been considering doing exactly that.  “We should start moving now, though.  Jones is coming over and I think he wants to know why we haven’t left the cockpit yet.”

“I can’t say I’m in a hurry to have you wrecking my reputation but you probably shouldn’t make Jones suspicious,” Other-Scott sighed.  “Hey, wait – what is this bet I’ve supposedly lost, Gordon?”

“If you don’t know, Dad can’t yell at you for it later,” Other-Gordon grinned back at him.

“Gordon.”

“What, don’t you trust me?” the ginger asked, pulling a face of fake hurt. Other-Scott scowled at him.

“With my life, yes.  Not with my dignity.”  Scott could relate to that.

“We’ll see you later, Scott.”  Other-Gordon didn’t bother responding to the veiled accusation before signing off, returning the watch to actually looking like a watch just as a young man crossed the distance between the neighbouring plane and the Ladybird. “Here we go, remember you’ve lost your voice and let me do all the talking.”

Scott had a sinking feeling that was going to be easier said than done, but obediently followed the other man out of the cockpit just in time for the man on the ground to stride over to them.

“Gordon Tracy, is that you piloting a plane?” said man called, shaking his head in amazement.  “Why, I couldn’t believe my ears when they told me it was you of all people coming in to land that red beauty of yours!”

“Gee, laugh it up why don’t you, Jones,” Other-Gordon commented dryly.  “I didn’t fly all the way here with the worst backseat pilot in the world to get flack from you, too, fella.”

The man – Jones – squinted at Scott and for a heart-stopping moment he thought the man had realised he wasn’t this universe’s Scott, before he burst out laughing.  “Scott Tracy letting someone else pilot?  Now I’ve really seen it all.  Say, how you been, old chap?”  He stuck out his hand and feeling rather like a deer in headlights, Scott took it for a firm shake.

“Ah, Scott’s not so good,” Other-Gordon intervened before the silence stretched long enough to be awkward.  “He’s only gone and lost his voice, but there’s shopping to be done so yours truly got the short straw.”  The ginger gave a theatrical wince.  “Turns out not having a voice doesn’t stop a fella from backseat piloting like crazy.  He insisted on checking over all my post-flight checks!  I ask you; you’d think he didn’t trust me with a plane.”

Scott shot him a look.  While no doubt if Other-Scott had really lost his voice that all sounded perfectly feasible, he thought the ginger was laying it on a little thick.  Other-Gordon caught the look and rolled his eyes.

“Well Mr Just Because I Can’t Talk Doesn’t Mean I Won’t Be A Pain here seems like he wants to get this over and done with,” he told Jones.  Not strictly inaccurate, Scott supposed, although that hadn’t been what he’d meant.  Other-Gordon lowered his voice.  “Truth be told, he doesn’t want to be here; lost a bet and doesn’t like the forfeit.”

Scott put a warning hand on his shoulder and Other-Gordon laughed.  Jones joined in politely, almost as though he wasn’t certain what the joke was, or if he should be responding to it.

“I’d say that means ‘hurry it up, oh favourite brother of mine’,” Other-Gordon translated.  “Lock her down for me, would you?  There’s a good man.”

“Yessir,” Jones agreed.  “Your usual car’s been prepared for you.  Mr Tracy said you didn’t want a chauffeur today?”  A chauffeur?  No, Scott absolutely didn’t want one of those – it was bad enough being piloted by a brother, or brother from another universe, as it happened.

“Not today, Jones,” Other-Gordon confirmed.  “I wouldn’t inflict Scott in this mood on anyone,” he winked, and the man gave another awkward chuckle.  “I’ll handle it all today.”  Scott jammed his hands in his pockets impatiently.  “See you around, Jones.”

“Likewise, Gordon, Scott.”  The man nodded at both of them and Other-Gordon led the way through the hangar unerringly to where a classic vintage-looking convertible was waiting for them.  With the roof down, he could see it was a right-hand drive – of course, New Zealand drove on the left; at least that was the same – so without prompting he let himself in to the front left seat and tried not to be too obvious about staring.

Plane controls might have been the same, but cars apparently weren’t. If push came to shove, he could probably figure it out – the car was at least an automatic, not stick-shift – but he was quite content to let Other-Gordon take the wheel.  Hopefully he wasn’t quite as chaotic as his Gordon behind the wheel.

He wasn’t.  At least, not by Scott’s standards.  He was, however, still the fastest car on the road, overtaking other cars with manoeuvres just shy of being classified as swerves, with a delighted grin on his face.  That, at least, was typically Gordon, and the ache that blossomed in his chest whenever any of the Other-Tracy family did something that reminded him of their counterparts – his Tracy family – made itself known again.  Scott fought the instinct to clutch at his chest, instead clinging to the door with a grip far too tight for the situation.

Behind amber-tinted shades, equally amber eyes glanced over at his death grip, but Other-Gordon said nothing.  Scott wasn’t sure if that was a relief or not – the younger man knew enough to know that these speeds wouldn’t phase him in the slightest, which meant he was drawing his own conclusions.  Scott had no idea what those conclusions might be, and any desire to ask was quashed by the knowledge that that would open the topic up for conversation.

He’d chosen Other-Gordon to avoid more of that sort of conversation.

“What are we getting first?” he asked, turning his head away from the streets to look at Other-Gordon.  With the wind whistling past their ears, the natural inclination was to raise his voice but he consciously kept his voice at normal levels.  Other-Gordon should still be able to hear him, if with a bit of difficulty.

The ginger sent him an assessing look before the grin was back, and that look was too much like Gordon’s devilish grin for Scott to not know what he was going to say, despite the man not being his Gordon.

“You can’t stay in the same underpants forever!”

Scott groaned, the hand not gripping the door catching his face – ow, he forgot about the shades.  He left it there, acutely aware that with any Gordon around in a non-professional setting, the facepalm was never far away.

“Okay, new underpants.  Then what?”

Other-Gordon laughed, looping them around another car as the bulk of the city approached, before settling into something that seemed like he might, vaguely, be taking the excursion seriously.  Whether that was due to Other-Scott’s threats – which he did seem to be wary of – or because he was actually mindful of Scott’s own wishes, he had no idea. If he had to guess, probably the former. Scott wished his Gordon respected his threats against causing chaos.

Then again, he’d never had a doppelgänger, let alone one subsequently left in the hands of his prank-loving brother.

“Francois Lemaire has a new men’s range out,” he shrugged.  “Might as well start there.”

“Lemaire?” Scott asked, his voice strangled.  Other-Gordon gave him a sharp look.

“He’s Tin-Tin’s favourite designer,” the younger man said.  “She suggested him.”

Lemaire?  Designer?  Admittedly, Scott didn’t know what the rich airhead did when he wasn’t throwing himself in mortal danger and complaining loudly when they had to rescue him from his own stupidity, but he found it hard to believe that between birthday parties in the Mariana Trench and throwing himself into the coma of a comet he was designing clothes.

“Problem?” Other-Gordon asked, and Scott realised he was scowling. Taking a deep breath, he forced his expression to smooth out again.

“He won’t be there, will he?” he asked.  “If he’s anything like the Lemaire I know, there is a high chance I’ll be losing my temper.”

“What’s wrong with Lemaire?”  Other-Gordon actually sounded confused, which was enough for Scott to cling to the hope that maybe, maybe, the man wasn’t such an idiot here.

“Birthday party in the Mariana Trench,” he groaned.  “Flying into a comet.  Hunting mermaids.”  And that was just the tip of the iceberg.  “He calls us International Babysitting Service now.”

The hiss Other-Gordon let out implied the other man found that all as ridiculous – and insulting – as Scott did.  “I guess that fella’s not your favourite human,” he observed.  “We’ve not had those sorts of problems with him.” That was a relief.  “I doubt he’ll be here, though.  Fella lives in France.”

That was another relief, although Scott wasn’t going to relax entirely until they were done with the man’s shop.  It would be just his luck that this universe’s Lemaire would be dropping by for a visit when he was there, and that was not a meeting he wanted.

“Then we might as well see if his range contains anything I want to wear,” he shrugged, realising that he hadn’t actually agreed or disagreed with Other-Gordon’s suggestion.  The younger man groaned as he pulled into a parking lot tucked behind a large building emblazoned with Lemaire.

“You’re not going to be too fussy, are you?” he asked.  Scott detected a tone of dread behind what was clearly supposed to be a rhetorical question.

“Not if they have decent clothes,” he answered, and Other-Gordon made another disgruntled noise as he killed the ignition.

“Sure.  Now, remember: you’re my brother, you’ve lost your voice, I’m doing all the talking.” Scott rolled his eyes but nodded in agreement.  “Underpants, shirts, jeans, pyjamas, shoes and a custom hoodie.” Other-Gordon still didn’t seem too happy about some of those things, even with Other-Scott’s blessing, reluctant though it had been.  “Am I forgetting anything?”

Scott shook his head and Other-Gordon jumped out of the car, casually circling around to open Scott’s door before he realised the lever needed to be pulled, not pushed.  What happened to doors opening at the touch of a button?  He was really starting to miss familiar technology.

Maybe he could persuade Other-Gordon to let him pilot back to the island.

First, though, he had to get through this shopping trip so he could stop having to borrow Other-Scott’s clothes.  Stepping out of the car, he followed Other-Gordon into the shop.

It was exactly the sort of ordered chaos Scott expected from clothes shopping.  Mannequins flanked the entrance, decked out in what was presumably the latest fashions but looked totally bizarre to Scott, while a woman decked out in equally outrageous clothes – not Gordon-outrageous, but so much fabric outrageous – bustled forwards to greet them.  Behind her, equally awfully dressed men and women were guiding around customers who just screamed ‘I’m rich’.

Scott was immediately reminded exactly why he did as much clothes shopping as he could get away with online.

“Monsieur Tracy, Monsieur Tracy,” the woman greeted them.  “My name is Madeleine; how may I be of assistance today?”

Automatically, Scott opened his mouth to answer, but Other-Gordon jumped in before he managed to make a sound.  “Scott’s looking for a new wardrobe,” he said smoothly, drawing the woman’s attention to him and away from Scott, who inwardly scolded himself for forgetting that he wasn’t supposed to talk.  “Could we see your shirt selection?”

“Of course, Monsieur,” Madeleine replied.  “If you would follow me?”  She posed it as a question but began to walk further into the shop without waiting for a reply.  Scott and Other-Gordon stepped forwards at the same time, following the woman through a maze of clothes and other customers before arriving in a booth lined with lavish couches.  “Please, take a seat.”  Madeleine gestured to one of the couches and Scott took the invitation.  Other-Gordon settled down beside him and immediately reached out for what appeared to be a physical, gloss-paper, brochure on the table. He flipped through it for a moment before passing it over.

Scott accepted it and saw that Other-Gordon had already opened it to the shirts for him.

“Did Monsieur have a particular style in mind?” Madeleine asked after a moment. Not knowing the jargon as well as perhaps Grandma would have liked, and unable to speak without inviting awkward questions anyway, Scott shrugged.

“You’ll have to forgive my brother,” Other-Gordon jumped in before she could take offence.  “The fella’s lost his voice.”

“Oh,” she gasped softly.  “My apologies, Monsieur Tracy.”

Scott shot her a reassuring smile even as Other-Gordon waved off her apology. “Don’t worry about it.  I’m here to work as a translator.”

Leaving Other-Gordon to keep the woman occupied in conversation, Scott leant back and flicked through the brochure, eyeing the various outrageous shirts – apparently this universe’s Lemaire liked to design clothes with far too much excess fabric – before finally locating something that looked simple enough.  He’d still have to roll the sleeves up and worry at the collar until it sat comfortably, but it definitely looked like something he could wear comfortably enough.

He prodded Other-Gordon in the ribs; sharp amber eyes snapped over to him, wide in surprise for a split second before narrowing.

“You found something?” the younger man asked, after a pause that felt just a little too long.  Scott nodded, belatedly realising he had no idea if that sort of thing was acceptable sibling behaviour in this universe.  Realising he couldn’t clarify anything while he was pretending to have lost his voice, he pushed the thought aside to deal with later, and prodded at the picture on the page.

Madeleine made a motion to look over, and Scott swivelled the brochure so that she could see the one he’d chosen.

“A wonderful choice, Monsieur Tracy,” she beamed, while Other-Gordon made a sound that could be amused.  He didn’t say whatever it was he was thinking, though, instead joining in the conversation when the woman asked how many and pulled out another brochure of fabrics and patterns.

“I dare say a few wouldn’t go amiss,” Other-Gordon told her – although Scott suspected it was a prod at him as well.  He zoned out the rest of the conversation as he stared at the ridiculous variety of colours and tried to find the sensible blues.  He had no desire to adopt Gordon’s sense of fashion, or John’s for that matter.

He suspected John might quite like some of the horrors he was hurriedly passing by.  He’d never understood his immediate brother’s taste in clothes.

Finally, a nice plain blue, not too far off his favourite shirt at home, caught his eye, and after inspecting it to make sure there weren’t any hidden patterns he tapped at the glossy paper to draw their attention.

“The fella likes blue,” Other-Gordon shrugged at Madeleine as she pulled out a notepad and pen from somewhere and started scribbling down.  “But Scott, are you really only going to get the one design? That’s a lot of identical shirts.”

Regretting zoning out the conversation about exactly how many Other-Gordon had decided he would be getting, Scott instead raised an eyebrow at him, a look his younger brothers all knew meant don’t try me.  From the grin Other-Gordon gave him, he understood exactly what it meant, but was also as unimpressed by the warning as Gordon ever was.  With some reluctance, because yes, variety was nice and he suspected Other-Gordon was actually telling him that buying many identical shirts was not an Other-Scott-like thing to do, he returned to the sample images and tried to find some others that didn’t look like something John would wear – or worse, something not even Gordon or John would be caught dead in.

Fashion was ridiculous here.

He was certain his choices were being memorised by the too-sharp ginger next to him as he dug out the designs he was willing to wear and had them scribbled down by an eager to please Madeleine, no doubt being added to whatever mental databank Other-Gordon was compiling about him.  Maybe it would be worth dragging the differences between him and Other-Scott out of the aquanaut at some point on the flight back, if only to try and get a better understanding of what he was – temporarily, he hoped – going to be dealing with.

None of his training – Air Force, International Rescue or business – had ever covered what to do when faced with a doppelgänger of himself that wasn’t the Hood in disguise, and while Not-Dad was proving to be a problem, he didn’t have any plans to alienate the family.  They were his only way home; that, he knew for certain.

“Will that be all, Monsieur Tracy?” Madeleine asked when he finally decided there was nothing else he could even consider wearing and shut the samples brochure.  He wasn’t sure how many he’d selected in the end, but there was a satisfied look on Other-Gordon’s face, so he decided to call that torment to a close and nodded. Beaming what had to be a fake customer pleasing smile, she elegantly made her way to her feet, apparently not impeded by the ridiculousness of her dress.  “Then if you’d like to follow me to the fitting rooms?”

What.

Fitting rooms?

Had some formal clothes snuck into his selection or something?

Other-Gordon nudged him seemingly accidentally as he stood up.  Scott assumed that was another signal to just go along with it.  Reluctantly, he found his way to his feet and followed Madeleine’s swirl of fabric, raising an eyebrow at Other-Gordon when the other man followed.  He got a grin in return.

At least someone was having fun.  Scott missed online shopping.  He really hoped he wasn’t going to have to go through this rigmarole for every item they were buying.

The fitting room really should be called a fitting chamber.  It was at least as big as his bedroom at home, if not bigger, with plush seats and an area designed to be screened off, presumably for changing.  Hopefully, it wouldn’t be unusual for Other-Scott to use the curtains, because Scott was well aware how many scars he had from rescues, and while Other-Gordon had already briefly seen him shirtless he wasn’t sure Madeleine would be expecting that many scars on a lazy billionaire’s son.

“Please, make yourself comfortable while I collect the shirts,” the woman said, gesturing to the chairs.  “I will only be a few moments.”

Then she was gone, and it was just the two of them in the room.

“You don’t get your clothes fitted?” Other-Gordon asked, quietly, a beat after the door slid shut.  Scott took that as an indication that no-one would hear him if he spoke, and leaned forwards with a sigh.

“I normally shop online,” he grumbled.  “Much less hassle.”

“On… Line?”  Other-Gordon parroted the word with clear confusion in his voice, and Scott rolled his eyes, half at the other man, half at the world in general.  He should have known that would be another difference.

“Different technology,” he dismissed.  “You’re not telling me I have to go through this for everything, are you?”

“You’re getting a custom hoodie,” Other-Gordon reminded him.  “And designer jeans.”  Scott groaned.  “But they won’t measure you for underwear.”

“You’re never going to drop that, are you?”  It was so old it was ancient at this point, but from the grin on Other-Gordon’s face, that clearly didn’t matter to him.  Amber eyes flashed with amusement before turning serious.

“Don’t forget the curtain,” he warned.  “Scott’s scars aren’t the same as yours.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Scott assured him.  He probably shouldn’t be surprised that Other-Gordon had gleaned that from when he’d borrowed Other-Scott’s clothes, but hearing a comparison still startled him.  “I-”

The door slid open and he cut himself off.

“Sorry for the wait, Monsieur Tracy,” Madeleine greeted, an entire hangar of shirts trailing behind her on wheels.  “According to your previous custom, these should be of an approximate fit.”

Previous-?  Other-Scott also shopped there?  He supposed that made sense, even if he suddenly felt the pressure to absolutely not slip up, because Madeleine probably knew Other-Scott.  That might have been useful to know earlier.

There was a lot he hadn’t been told before this trip, and he was starting to wish they’d spent a little more time talking before leaving the island. The sensation of being out of his depth was starting to make itself known again from where it had settled in the relative familiarity of the flight over.

“All looks that way,” Other-Gordon said suddenly, and Scott realised he hadn’t given any sort of response.  He really had to get his head in the game.  “So, which one first, Scott?”

Resisting the instinct to take a deep breath in front of Madeleine, he stood and gestured at the blue one he’d picked out first from the catalogue.  She took it off the hangar for him with a large smile.

“Take your time, Monsieur Tracy,” she told him.  “Come out when you’re ready.”

Scott barely made it to the curtained off area, drawing the thick material across and shutting himself away from the other two, before slumping against the wall and taking a deep breath.  Now was not a good time to get overwhelmed.  If it was just Other-Gordon-

No, he’d done more than enough breaking down in front of other people already. He took another deep breath, looking down at the shirt gripped in his hands.  His hands were trembling, the bandages over his knuckles suddenly stark against his skin.  Visible. How was he supposed to explain away bandaged knuckles when he was pretending to be a lazy billionaire’s son? Madeleine must have spotted it.

He tore his gaze away from the fabric and instead looked up at the ceiling, feeling the hat on his head dig in awkwardly as his head leant against the wall. More deep breaths, each shakier than the last, and somewhere in the back of his mind he realised he was headed for a full panic attack.

No.  He couldn’t do that.  Not with Madeleine a single curtain away.  Other-Scott had an image to maintain and he couldn’t ruin it.  He had to-

“Is everything alright, Monsieur Tracy?”  Madeleine’s voice was close, too close.  She could probably hear his messed up breathing, knew something was wrong, knew he was falling apart the other side of the suddenly too-thin curtain, and-

“I’ll check on him,” Other-Gordon said.  “Scott?  I’m coming in.”

He’d slipped around the curtain before Scott registered his words, amber eyes falling on him and widening for a split second.  Then, like a switch had been flicked, his whole demeanour changed. It wasn’t the jovial man that had been teasing for most of their time away from the island, but nor was it the sharp, military-like edge he’d held when he was being serious.

Instead it was calm, reassuring, and with slow, obvious movements the shorter man was taking the shirt from his hands, folding the fabric over one arm. “Sit,” he instructed, quietly.

This was his International Rescue façade, Scott realised dimly as he sank down onto a stool he hadn’t even registered was there.  Other-Gordon crouched down in front of him, gently removing the shades he’d forgotten he was wearing and making firm eye contact.

“Breathe in,” he said, voice still low.  “Do you want me to count you?”

Scott took in another breath, inwardly wincing at how shaky it was, before exhaling again.  Slowly, deliberately choreographing his movements, Other-Gordon rested a single hand on his knee.  The touch was light, but grounding, and Scott’s next attempt at a deep breath was markedly less shaky.  Another, and then another, with Other-Gordon almost silently guiding him with words too quiet to be heard the other side of the curtain.

Once he had enough of a grip of himself that panic felt no longer imminent, he leant back, tension bleeding from his shoulders.

“Better?” Other-Gordon asked, and he nodded, opening his mouth to speak before a raised eyebrow reminded him otherwise.  “Should we call it?  You can come back-”

“No,” Scott cut him off, clamping his mouth shut when he realised his mistake. He shook his head.  If they left now, he’d have to come back later, and he wasn’t sure he could do that.  He certainly didn’t want to have to face Not-Dad and tell him they didn’t finish because he panicked.  Better to get it over and done with now.

Other-Gordon eyed him dubiously for a moment before sighing and pulling himself to his feet.  “If you say so,” he said.  “Let me give you a hand.”

Give-?  The blue fabric still draped over the aquanaut’s arm caught his eye.  Oh yes, he was supposed to have been putting it on. He didn’t want help getting changed, and certainly didn’t need it, but there was a look in amber eyes that said quite plainly that Other-Gordon wasn’t going anywhere.

Then again, if their roles were reversed, Scott wouldn’t be going anywhere either.

Deciding the best route was to ignore him as best he could, Scott shrugged the waistcoat off, before plucking at the buttons on the shirt he was wearing. To his credit, Other-Gordon didn’t try to actively help, only taking the clothes once he’d removed them and holding out the blue shirt for him to take.

“Monsieurs?” Madeleine called just as he was fastening the last button. “Is there a problem?”

Other-Gordon pressed the sunglasses into his hands and readjusted the hat on his head before slipping back outside.

“Nothing to be worried about,” he assured her.  “Whatever he’s caught that’s gone and taken his voice gives him dizzy moments, too.  Fella just had a spell, but it’s passed now.”

So now he was ill instead of just having lost his voice?  Scott wanted to be amused, but in reality he just felt thankful that Other-Gordon was quick at thinking on his feet.

“Oh, I understand,” she said.  Scott hurried to put the sunglasses back on and took one last deep breath before pushing the curtain back.  “Monsieur Tracy, we can hold the items for you if you’d rather come back at a later date?”

Remembering in time not to talk, Scott waved her off with a small grin. It was forced; smiling wasn’t something he felt like doing but the last thing he wanted was to have to come back.

“He’ll be fine,” Other-Gordon assured her.  “This won’t take long, will it?”

“Oh, not at all,” Madeleine hurried to promise, and Scott’s grin felt just a little less forced at that.  “If you would stand here…”  She gestured to a small step and Scott obeyed, watching as she bustled around him with pins, tugging at the fabric until it lay flat across his shoulders and hung just right.  Compared to some fittings he’d had, it certainly didn’t feel like it took too long; after what had to have been only a few minutes, she was nodding her approval and handing him the next shirt to put on.

Other-Gordon followed him behind the curtain this time, not giving him the opportunity to refuse the company.  Scott got the feeling he wouldn’t be letting him out of his sight again until they were back on the island, but where before he might have bristled at the lack of privacy, now he found himself reassured by the other man’s presence.  If nothing else, it helped keep his mind on the task at hand as he peeled the pin-infested shirt away from his body gingerly and accepted the new one while Other-Gordon hung the first on a hangar.

The rest of the fitting went in much the same fashion, Madeleine working quickly but efficiently and Other-Gordon shadowing him in a way that should have been bothersome but was somehow comforting, and before long all of the shirts – eleven, apparently – were stuck through with pins and back on the rail.

“Is there anything else you would like to order, Monsieur Tracy?” the woman asked once Scott was once again dressed in Other-Scott’s borrowed clothes. She was clearly addressing him, but her eyes were on Other-Gordon, much to Scott’s relief.  While he knew what he wanted, he didn’t know where he could get them.  For that, he was reliant on the other man.

“Not today,” Other-Gordon answered.  “When will they be ready to collect?”

“For you, we will have them done by Tuesday,” she replied.  Scott realised he had no idea what the day was.

“Perfect,” Other-Gordon grinned, before fishing out a card from his pocket and handing it to her.  She beamed and scurried off, presumably to take the payment.

Scott had absolutely no idea how much that had just come to.

Whatever the damage was, Other-Gordon seemed entirely fine with it, keeping his grin on his face as she returned with the card and a paper receipt, so Scott assumed it was within expectations.

Other-Gordon and Madeleine finalised arrangements for the shirts to be collected on Tuesday, leaving Scott with the sinking feeling he’d likely be stuck borrowing Other-Scott’s clothes for however many days away that was, before bidding farewell.  Following suit, Scott offered his own nod of thanks and farewell before finding himself being subtly guided back out of the shop and towards the car by the ginger.

Chapter 9>>>

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds are go fanfiction #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #tsari writes fanfiction #scott tracy #long way from home #gordon tracy

[blackqueerblog]

"I can’t wait to meet you, Steph. I’ve even bought you a gift!"As I minimised the WhatsApp conversation on my phone, I was filled with dread about what the next evening would bring. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas and I was going on my first date since the end of my last relationship, two years ago. To say I was extremely nervous was a severe understatement.

I’d been talking to Robert* for a couple of weeks via Bumble and then WhatsApp, and all seemed to be going well. Since the end of my last relationship, I’d been a bit wary of the opposite sex and had gone into every new dating app chat with a degree of scepticism (especially as I am plus-size – more on this later), however Robert seemed different. He was funny, very intelligent, open-minded and ambitious and more importantly, accepted and preferred the fact that I am plus-size.

It seems a bit silly to have to declare something as trivial as one's weight on an app, but due to how a large percentage of plus-size women are treated in the dating world, some of us choose to add a note about our weight to our profiles, almost as some kind of 'disclaimer'. It’s even worse when your weight intersects with something such as race or gender.

Date night with Robert finally came around and I was practically bursting into flames with excitement. We’d agreed to meet in Clapham in southwest London for a couple of drinks. I arrived at the venue early and tweeted a cute picture of myself, telling my followers that I was out on a first date. Robert arrived and the date began. We had a great time during the three or so hours we spent together – we laughed, we exchanged hilarious date-fail stories, we spoke about our families, likes and dislikes…just normal date stuff, you know? He’d even bought me a little ornament for my room as I’d told him I was still doing it up, which was sweet.

 At the end of the night, we kissed and he said he wanted to see me again.A week later, and hours of speaking on the phone and texting throughout the night, we decided that he’d come over to my flat and we’d watch a few shows while I cooked (I know, I know, rookie mistake; like I said, I’m a dating newbie). Obviously, one thing led to another and we ended up sleeping together.

That was the last time I heard from him.Cut to this week when I receive an email from a friend of his. Apparently, Robert had shown my blog to his friends for 'approval'. This friend tells me that in the interests of full transparency, he thought he should let me know that the reason I had not heard from Robert since our second date was because he had been dared to 'pull a fat chick' and – upon completing the dare – had won a sum of money his friends had pooled.

I felt sick. A wave of embarrassment and humiliation washed over me, and I went into my bathroom and cried. I had been terrified of meeting and talking to men for fear of them judging my appearance. As much as I know that I am an awesome person, I’m blindingly aware that the way I look is not what mainstream society considers to be 'beautiful', and that’s something I always have to think about and carry with me.

What should have been a lovely couple of dates – a bid to improve my confidence and self-esteem while tackling the shark-infested waters of dating – has turned into a teaching moment for me, and has definitely made me feel a lot more wary about dating in general and more importantly, trusting men.

Sadly, my story isn’t an isolated incident. We’ve all heard of sick pranks such as the 'pull a pig' game, which involves a group of men daring each other to hook up with the least attractive woman (in their eyes) in order to gain clout. There are tales as long as my arm from fellow plus-size women who have been duped or tricked in this way and frankly, a discussion needs to be had about it.

Dating as a plus-size woman, you see, is an exercise rooted more in patience and frustration than in romance. When you are not being ignored by prospective interests, you are either subjected to humiliation and abuse or you are fetishised for your weight. Either way, the abject failure to consider the feelings of the plus-size women in these situations is just another example of the ways in which we are not afforded the luxury of being treated as human beings. It highlights the lack of respect that some men have for women, particularly if they do not comply with social norms.

As plus-size women, we are not afforded the same humanity, care, love and respect as our thinner counterparts. This can force a monumental drop in confidence and either put us off dating for life or lead us to partake in more casual dating in an effort to prove our worth through sex.

Luckily (or maybe unluckily?) I had already deleted Robert’s number from my phone, after not hearing from him for a couple of weeks, so I have no way to contact and chastise him for what he did. I decided to ignore the friend’s email and used Twitter to tell my story, in the hope of opening up the conversation about the way plus-size women are treated. My aim was to raise awareness, and while I received some amazing, positive feedback, it also came with its share of trolling and horrible comments – almost all from men, who were either laughing at the situation or suggesting I change my appearance in order to be treated better next time.

I like to think that I’m confident enough and maybe numb enough to the whole experience and haven’t let it define me as a woman, but for those of us who are still on our journeys to finding self love and increasing our confidence, going through an experience where you are basically seen as an experiment can be battering.

Ultimately, what I’ve concluded is that men seem to undertake these 'pranks' as a way of gaining respect from their male friends at the expense of women’s feelings. Men, it’s time to stop being impressed by this toxic behaviour. It’s time to call it out, to hold each other accountable. Would you be as admiring if someone pulled a prank like this on a plus-size relative – on your sister, perhaps, or your cousin? Most of all, it’s time to start taking the emotions, perspectives and feelings of fat women seriously. Regardless of body shape, we all deserve to be treated with respect and basic common decency.

*Name has been changed

It's important to give such things more visibility. I think writing about it is a brave act. Stephanie is so beautiful & powerful! 💕💕💕💕💕

[halapenojalapeno]

Heart to Heart

“Professor? Do you have a moment?”

 Seteth thought she hadn’t heard him and was going to call out again when the blot of indigo blue at the end of the corridor paused. “Is it urgent?” Byleth turned in his direction but made no attempts to move towards him or away. It only served to exasperate him; he wasn’t exactly dying for her company either, but for the moment he was free to talk. Let the opportunity pass and he’d have to resort to shuffling around his schedule to find time again. “I would say so. Please, it won’t take long.” Irritation leaked into his voice, but Byleth remained stone-faced. If she’d noticed his ire she’d elected to ignore it. Seteth regained his composure in the time it took for Byleth to walk to his office. It wouldn’t do for him to get aggressive. Yet.

“Shut the door, if you would.” Seteth moved a few papers around and gestured for Byleth to sit across from him at his desk. He waited for the pair to get settled before speaking. “I’ve called you in here today because your behaviour as of late has left me… concerned, to say the least. Rather than acting on my own assumptions, I thought it best to confirm things with you.” 

“Ask away.” “Truthfully, I am troubled by your increasing involvement with Flayn. Is it true that the pair of you went fishing together last week?” A nod. It seemed Byleth wasn’t planning on denying anything like some others had. That made the conversation a whole lot easier. “Since then, you have been asking me for stories of my sister’s youth whenever you get chance. You eat all your meals with the two of us, and recently you’ve even started turning down students and faculty who invite you to tea unless it’s their birthday - with the exception of Flayn and I. Considering the fact that you and I could not be considered close, all of this can lead me to only one conclusion.”

“Speak plainly, Seteth.” 

“Very well, I will be blunt. It is not unusual for Flayn to have female admirers, though they are fewer in number than their male counterparts, but I never in my wildest dreams expected you to be one of them. I don’t think I have to tell you that your pursuit of Flayn is completely unacceptable and must be ceased immediately - and that is without considering how unprofessional, no irresponsible it is for a Professor to attempt to engage such relationship one of her students-”  “Stop. You’ve misunderstood my intentions completely.”

 Her interjection cut the momentum of Seteth’s rant dead. He deflated in his chair - when had he started leaning forward like that? - and gaped at Byleth. “I don’t understand.” Byleth looked away from him then, brows furrowed as she tried to choose the right words. “Actually, you’ve read my intentions accurately. What you’ve misunderstood is the intended target.”  “You aren’t attempting to court Flayn?” “I am not.” “Then who…?” Byleth gave Seteth her most deadpan stare and finally the gears in his head started to click. Oh. Oh.

 His assumption was backwards - and what an ass it had made of him. He suspected that Byleth was engaging with him as a way to get closer to Flayn, when in reality… A blush bloomed bright crimson in his cheeks under Byleth’s steady gaze. “I… I suppose I am flattered. Flayn knows, doesn’t she? That’s why she spends so much time with you.” “I’ve not exactly been subtle about the whole situation.” Her blank façade cracked at the words as Byleth’s face brightened to match his own, and an awkward silence descended on the pair. Byleth broke it first. “If that’s everything, I have to get going. I’ll see you later for dinner.”  “Oh! Dinner, yes. I’ll see you then.” Seteth scrambled out of his chair to open office door and Byleth sent a rare, shy smile as she left.

 Seteth watched Byleth disappear around the corner in the direction of the library. She was interested in him. Byleth. Interested. In him. He turned the thought over in his head, but it made less and less sense every time. When she first arrived at Garreg Mach, had he not treated her with complete contempt? His opinion of her hadn’t exactly improved in the months since, and yet- “You okay there, Seteth?” “Jeralt!” Seteth flinched. He was so caught up in his thoughts he’d completely missed the figure, half covered in shadow, looming in the doorway across from his. “I didn’t see you there. I’m well, and you?” “Uh-huh.” Jeralt crossed his arms and levelled him with a hard stare. “Clear your calendar for tomorrow afternoon. I think you and I need to have a little talk.”

#fire emblem #fire emblem three houses #byleth x seteth #byleth eisner #seteth #flayn #jeralt eisner #fanfiction #fanfic #oneshot #okay i couldn't resist #I wrote this whole thing for Seteth to say oh ngl #fire emblem fanfiction #also on ao3

[dercolaris]

The tea party

Hey folks. Today there is something completely different than usual. No Scriddler, surprise, surprise^^ I wrote a short story a while ago to cheer up @weyoun, but sadly only in German. I wasn't so convinced about my English skills back then and successfully shoved the translation aside for the past few months, but hey - now it's finally done! Hurray! I hope you're not too mad at me, Ronnie, that I decided to upload your story on Tumblr and Archive of Our Own.

I rarely write about Ivy and Jervis, but the two characters are on my favourite list in the DC Universe. Especially Jervis is so pleasant to write. He's the absolute mad sweetheart of the rogue gallery in my opinion. I can only vaguely remember the song I was listening to while I was writing the story, but I think it was this one from Avicii:

https://youtu.be/Qc9c12q3mrc

Thanks again to you, @weyoun. I hope you can enjoy your little story now and maybe one day come up with a new idea that interests you. My ears are always open to you and I love to write for friends. Thanks also for beta reading the story, @shin-arei. 

The red-haired beauty wandered through the deserted forecourt of the asylum and snorted softly under her breath. Escape was rarely the best choice, but on that cursed evening there was simply no viable alternative for her. Ivy growled bitterly. What were these sacks of meat all thinking, especially the male ones? The evening meal in the way too small canteen had escalated completely. After she got into a little discussion with Edward Nygma about the tasteless flower decoration of the tables, Jonathan Crane immediately got involved and gave his unasked opinion. When Harley, Harvey and Victor got on board, it was all lost. The botanist probably still had scraps of food in her beautiful hair. Her fingers slid through the long strands, actually found a loose spaghetti. She pulled out the sticky noodle in disgust and flicked it to the floor regardless. Absolutely disgusting. Ivy shook her head slowly, just stepped faster in the direction of the botanical garden. Normally she was not allowed to visit it on her own, but today it was more than safe to take this small risk and to be honest: who would stop her anyway right now? The guards were all still busy calming the food fight in the canteen. The redhead pushed open the glass doors of the greenhouse and took a deep breath. It was liberating. More than liberating. The air was saturated with the clear, filtered air of her favourites. Quieter than before, she slipped into the entrance area and let her fingers hover over the first tendrils on the sides. Fortunately, her offspring were doing well. In particular, the facility's caretaker went to great lengths to maintain the garden. A useful person. How surprising. Almost delightful. She felt the flowers and roots begin to tremble at her touch. The botanist smiled wickedly, breathed a little kiss on a loose leaf. She whispered softly: "Sweet little thing. You will grow big and strong one day, will you?” She released the sheet from her grip and strolled deeper into the long corridors. The background noise was impressive. Such a strong contrast to the typical noises from the penitentiaries. Ivy sighed softly and visibly relaxed. In this atmosphere she could completely forget all the trouble of the last hours. The redhead was just about to rest for a moment when she suddenly heard a low voice near by. She frowned and walked leisurely around the corner. The source of the noise still seemed to be hiding somewhere in the branching corridors. The words were an incomprehensible murmur and very hard to understand. After a few steps, there was also the faint clatter of dishes. The botanist was completely perplexed at this moment, but also slightly curious.

A few seconds passed before she finally found the stranger in the greenhouse. Pamela crossed her arms over her chest and examined the small man on the rusty bench in front of the bust. The blond, longer hair framed his boyish face and his contours were unusually gentle, almost delicate. Actually, the whole stature did not correspond to that of a powerful man, the small body size completed this impression. In addition to this realization, she immediately noticed the stubborn old fashion clothing. The green cloak was wrapped tightly around his narrow shoulders and the matching top hat sat a little at an angle on his head. He wore matching white leather gloves. Ivy bit her lower lip slightly. Jervis Tetch. She had overheard the guards' conversation when he was admitted in the facility. He was arguably obsessed with the story of Alice in Wonderland and had committed some unimaginable atrocities in adaptation to this book. Probably including kidnapping, rape and multiple murders. Another madman for the asylum. Ivy was just about to go the way back when the man's low voice nestled almost pleasant in her ear: "March hare, what's the point of saying this bad things? Naughty thing. We have to finish the tea first before we go back to these lewd rascals. If we go back at all. Maybe we'll just stay here and hide for the remaining eight months.” The botanist stopped dead in place, just sighed softly. That was expectable. How could it have been otherwise? There was a good chance that the young man would have trouble with the other inmates. It was his first stay in the clinic and this was always particularly tragic for most new inmates. Experienced patients weren't exactly squeamish. Luminaries like Jonathan Crane in particular broke inexperienced souls at lightning speed and the different villains had a perfidious joy in doing so. The redhead frowned. She had a big problem with the self-proclaimed Master of Fear. Jonathan was intelligent, no question about it and his expertise was certainly inexhaustible, but he went too far with his psychological games on some points. A large number of new patients had killed themselves because of him after less than five hours in the asylum. The older one always acknowledged this with a small smile, while the cleaning women cursed and had to work through the mess in the cells. Seen in this way, bets have often been made as to how long a newcomer would survive if he was put in the cell with the infamous Scarecrow. That the guards also took part in this spectacle made the botanist incredulous and very sick. The Arkham staff really wasn't interested in patient recovery - except perhaps some of the psychologists. She looked again at the young man on the bench.

After a while the redhead overcame her mental reservation and slowly sauntered towards the lonely inmate. At first he didn't seem to notice her. Ivy tried to crack up an honest smile and said carefully in his direction: “Hey. You're Jervis Tetch, I assume?” The addressee startled slightly, his eyes panicked like a deer. The botanist raised her hands soothingly and smiled a little more gently. The Mad Hatter relaxed only gradually, the opals still twitching wildly through the corridor. Apparently he was already planning his escape. Great. Two souls on the run from the large mob in the canteen. Pamela carefully came closer, made it clear to her counterpart that she did not want to harm him. As if in slow motion, she sat down next to him on the bench and continued softly: “Don't worry, I won't hurt you. Not all inmates here are barbaric fiends." Jervis looked down at his hands and played a bit with his fingers. After a short while he dared to look up, his blue eyes glittering slightly in the weak light. Finally he carefully lifted his fingers and ran two of them through Ivy's long hair. He mumbled cautiously: “My, my. You have such beautiful hair. As red as my queen's, but like silk and velvet. So beautiful. So pure. Cheshire Cat, just look. I don't even want to sew a hat for your head, that would completely disturb the aesthetics.” At first the botanist wanted to reject him more than harshly, but then quickly refrained from doing so. The expression in the blond's opals was strange. These did not contain any disreputable or even sexual intentions, as was always the case with such acts. The devotion and admiration for her hair seemed sincere. A short time later the young man added in a whisper: “What's your name? Tell me please. I need to know. The Hatter needs to know immediately. I've never seen such gentle beauty and your unique nature makes it perfect.” Pamela almost choked on her own spit. What had gotten into this guy? Or better: what got into her?

She didn't even know this man for two minutes. Nevertheless, he seemed to be familiar to her in a certain way and, contrary to her usual reason, she only smiled at his doing. His fingers were unexpectedly gentle with their easy play with the strands. Ivy replied muffled: “My name is Pamela Lillian Isley, but probably better known by my alias Poison Ivy. Eco-terrorist by trade.” The Mad Hatter smiled knowingly and only nodded slowly. He let his fingers slide out of her hair and turned away from her. The blond-haired man looked for something next to him on the bench for a moment, then suddenly held out a small white porcelain cup. It smelled suspiciously of black tea. The woman frowned, but picked up the cup and looked down at her moving reflection. Her greenish skin shimmered slightly in the pheromone-soaked halls of the botanical garden. The young man next to her whistled happily: “Hear, hear. Another participant in our small, private tea party. What a pleasure and beneficial surprise.” He took his own white service and swirled the black liquid a little, then drank the broth with relish. Ivy tried the tea too. It was bitter, but not in an unpleasant sense. Similar to a good coffee, but with a gentler after taste. The wonderland lover was certainly well read in the field and knew how to properly prepare tea. At least it tasted excellent. A certain silence fell between them, only interrupted by the low whirring of the insects around them. The redhead stretched a little and asked softly: “What brought you here in the first place, Jervis? You should be in the canteen for dinner. Not that it would bother me to enjoy your company here tonight.” To her surprise, the addressee slumped a little. The little figure appeared even a little smaller than before. The blond-haired man breathed his answer barely audibly: “They said to me that I shouldn't close my eyes tonight and if I do, the black man will get me out of the cell next to me. The lean man with the brown hair and the piercing eyes. After that I lost my appetite.”

Ivy gave a muffled sigh, resting her chin on the palm of her hand. He was talking about Jonathan. That was to be expected. So they had put Jervis in a cell with either Harvey or Edward, which were located right next to the Master of Fear. The botanist stroked the shiny porcelain. Both villains weren't exactly comfortable room mates for the first stay. Of course, that could no longer be changed. The redhead sat up and calmly replied: “That won't happen, Jervis. The so-called black man is also just a person in a silly scarecrow costume and he is locked in at night like everyone else. You don't have to worry, my dear.” The Mad Hatter blinked slightly, then sipped his tea in silence. He put the cup back on the saucer with a clatter and replied a bit lost: “What am I actually doing here? I should be outside and looking for my Alice. Now I'm going to spend eight months in these narrow corridors with other crazy people who don't even know how to make original English tea. It's sad. Almost to cry." Ivy clicked her tongue. At least the man seemed to understand that he was as mad as anyone else in the asylum and did not plead his sanity. The botanist crossed her legs, then replied calmly: “Perhaps you can convince some to learn, Jervis. Other inmates like me, for example. The tea tastes really fantastic and I would love to sit here with you more often.” The addressee perked up his ears. The cloudy eyes suddenly shone and a broad smile crept onto his unusually full lips. He refilled them both with some tea. While they were enjoying the second cup together, the loudspeakers suddenly rang out above them: “Jervis Tetch and Pamela Isley, return to your cells immediately. You have no business in the botanical garden. Especially you, Mrs. Isley, are not allowed there. You know the deal. Move!” The redhead groaned in annoyance and looked into the upper corner of the room. The small camera humming barely audibly, the red light glowed suspiciously. Without further ado, the woman rose and said quietly to Jervis: “We should go. If we don't act quickly, they'll drag us by the hair out of the greenhouse and refer us to an unpleasant electroshock therapy with the prison director Quincy Sharp.” The Mad Hatter nodded slowly, then took his picnic basket from under the bench. Where in the world had he found it? The young man carefully stowed the tea party utensils in the basket and pushed himself off the bench, still smiling happily. He took a few steps in the direction of the exit, then turned to Ivy and said happily: “Are you coming with me, Mrs. Isley? We don't have to walk the path alone and all of us would prefer your company on the way out. By the way, especially the Cheshire Cat is very fond of you. Maybe we can have tea together again tomorrow. This time in the canteen?” She couldn't help but smile again. Yeah, that wasn't a bad idea.

#DC #Batman #Poison Ivy #pamela isley #Mad Hatter #Jervis Tetch #ArkhamVerse #Friendship #Tea Party #Alice in Wonderland #For Weyoun

[sunsinourhands]

Let's talk about Felix Warren

I feel the need to preface this by saying I take no joy in Online Drama. But, I feel I've been silent about this for too long and nobody gains anything from my silence. For the record, I only hold a bachelor's degree in Psychology, so please don't consider me to be an end-all-be-all authority on the subject. I consider myself to have a barely above-average understanding--but enough to make a commentary when mental illness and accusations of abuse are being thrown around. I am not an 'influencer' or 'internet famous' and much of the interaction I have with my mutuals on this blog are common shitposts about cats or memes. I have no intentions of becoming an influencer, and thus nothing to gain by posting a wall of text instead of my regularly scheduled bird memes. I have not known either Rune or Felix long enough to say I am intimately familiar with either. But, the resulting breakup between them is one of the major reasons why I am better acquainted with Rune over Felix. My history with both boils down to I found their posts to be helpful in my own witchcraft and joined (for a time) both of their patreons. I left Felix's patreon after coming to the conclusion that I did not have spare time at that point to dedicate to his classes--unrelated to anything else going on at that time. I wasn't 'seduced' away from it. I am also the person Felix alluded to when he said a cis woman claimed girl autistics are 'better' than boy ones--which I'm not really sure what that means. As I do not have permission from every single person in that chat, I will currently not post the entire conversation. What I said was that male-presenting autistic individuals are often more diagnosed than their female-presenting counterparts--due to behavioral issues. I DID say that male-presenting autistics are often more aggressive. (And this is in the literature. You can look it up on Google Scholar. But, by that point, we were not talking about Felix. That was more me ranting about how female-presenting individuals are not diagnosed. I was not diagnosed until my late 20s--which I did mention in the conversation. )But I would hardly claim that meant one was 'better' than the other. This entire conversation began relevant to Felix, mostly regarding a question of if his behavior (aggression, obsession over his ex's, manufacture of villains for his internal narrative) was caused by autism, c-PTSD, or Major Depressive Disorder. I stated that I did not think so, on the basis of also suffering from depression, c-PTSD, and being on the autism spectrum myself. I never spoke to Felix alone, so I cannot speak to him being paranoid. I was never that close to him, and think I was only ever on a group chat with him a few times. So I cannot give a diagnosis and am not qualified to give a diagnosis. I also cannot speak to that sort of behavior or thought pattern. I can speak to Felix's aggression and obsessive tendencies. I have heard multiple stories of Felix obsessing over ex's-- ex-friends, ex-lovers--a number of people who seem to have gone from being the apple of his eye to absolute garbage in the time it takes to snap your fingers. I have also seen him write public posts about his various villains and how abusive they were--but it seems curious to me that someone who was so wrongfully abused would poke at the proverbial hornet's nest repeatedly. This is not something that people looking to escape a bad situation do. Rune's posting was on a private discord server. This also began because a number of individuals have sent him hate-mail and referenced Felix's blog. So this was a venting of current issues on a private server, hoping to find a solution and voice frustration. I will note that up until this moment, Rune asked his friends and acquaintances not to bother Felix. Rune wanted to be left alone--which is far more consistent with someone who has been in a bad relationship. Re: the term 'Psychotic.' People do not have to have a diagnosis of a Psychotic Disorder to exhibit psychotic behavior. There is a reason there is diagnostic criteria for

these disorders. People can also have one-time Psychotic Episodes--which are often brought on by severe stress. I don't feel like re-typing everything about Psychosis here, but there are articles that are easy to find. Some delusion types are referenced here. Feelings of persecution (such as by an ex(or exes) who actually tells people not to bother you, and specifically wants just to be left alone by aggressive followers) and beliefs that someone is an abusive situation when they are not (I have been on calls with Rune when he was alone in a room with internet (via discord) multiple times, and have never seen any indication of abuse or some kind of subtle code between him and his husbands,) (hypnosis, mind control, magical unicorn reiki, vampirism, which I have never heard about) both cleanly fall within the stated categories. Acting upon these delusions (from what I can tell, they are delusions) does fall into the category of Psychotic Behavior. I would also consider him calling the cops on someone to be an act of aggression--given that both of us would know that Rune doesn't care for cops. Felix would have known that fact better than me. I distanced myself from Felix at that point, mostly because I have past trauma with people calling the cops on me for suicidal ideation and using the police as a threat to get me 'locked up' when I didn't behave in a way they wanted me to. Also, I wouldn't have wanted to speak to the person who called the cops on me in that moment, either, so maybe I'm the crazy one but that doesn't seem like a sign of abuse to me. For the record, I have heard Rune complain about being hungry--but only if someone was on the way home with takeout and was taking a long time or during a period of time when he was eating mostly salads for a diet. But that was a diet CHOICE, not a sign of abuse. I have never seen any narcissistic behavior from Rune, in fact he seems self-effacing at times and seems very aware that he can and has made mistakes in the past and probably will continue to do so. He seems quite aware of himself as a flawed, human individual. I have also had experience dealing with people with NPD.

I cannot speak about any of Felix's past relationships because I was not in contact with him during that time. But, I can speak to him behaving in an obsessive way about Rune and the impact his aggressive followers have had on Rune's life. I have also seen him cherry-pick information and specifically leave out details in order to make his stories more dramatic. Thus, I can only really speak to the fact that he seems to need a villain in his life--someone for him to obsess over and smear through the mud in a public fashion--and this seems to be a repeated pattern of behavior. If he doesn't have one, he will manufacture one in order to continue playing the victim. His thoughts seem to be a bit wild and disorganized, especially in his accusations towards Rune regarding hypnosis and mind control. Especially something so absolute and complex as stated in Felix's posts. I have only seen behavior like this a few times before in person. And I understand why both Rune and @hellboundwitch both just want Felix to leave them alone. I encourage anyone involved to speak up and speak the truth.

#witchcraft #witchblr #witches of tumblr #pagan #felix warren

[autumnblogs]

Day 10: I think the true purpose of this game is to see how many qualifiers we can get to precede the word "self" and still understand what we're talking about

https://homestuck.com/story/1642

I don’t think anyone has said much about Calsprite. There’s not much to be said. I’m pretty sure, based on the Juju rules, that this Lil Cal probably doesn’t count as the real one - supposedly, any version of a Juju from a Doomed Timeline doesn’t count as the real thing? In any case, it’s a very mild comfort that this being isn’t a source of even more power for the already arbitrarily powerful Lord English.

Another thing that I think is interesting to note is that Dave’s use of iPhone technology marks him, in my opinion, as a poseur. While I am by no means advocating against buying from Microsoft’s competitors, but Mac vs. PC is one of those parts of my childhood, and as an actual IT Professional I’ve learned more than a little about the way that they brand themselves and the history of Apple’s struggle for market share - Apple doesn’t advertise its products as computing alternatives, or as productivity software, or whatever - Apple sells a lifestyle. Apple products are styled as the sexier, more cerebral, more artistic, more individualistic alternative to Microsoft’s products, a computer not for the Office Drone but for... well, the Hipster. Hipsters have stopped really being a thing, or at least, nobody calls themselves that any more.

Like the vast majority of subcultures, I suspect the hipster subculture has kind of been swallowed by time, its symbols expropriated by Capitalism, its center hollowed out and its aesthetics packaged for mass production, as the cynical and jaded approach to popular culture of the hipster, along with its more enthusiastic counterpart “the geek” (actually pretty well personified by John!) became more mainstream - both stereotypes are probably a part of Homestuck’s general commentary on fandom. Fandom is something I think Homestuck talks about, but I don’t think it’s something Homestuck is about in quite the same way that it’s about, say, Narratives, or Reproduction.

More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/1643

While Homestuck has been a story that involves some time loops, Act 4 is where it really gets off the ground as an actual Time Travel story. The thing about Time Travel stories, like the thing about Cosmic Horror Stories, is that once a story starts having Time Travel, or Cosmic Horrors in it, it’s that genre forever. This is why DND, for example, is part of a cosmic horror story, because something like 20 years ago, an adventure writer decided that there should be the Far Realm, and now it casts its sticky pall over the rest of the game’s setting.

Homestuck sidesteps this issue largely by involving all of the genres that do this to a story, and just kind of blending them all together into a genre-busting stew. Homestuck is a superhero story. Homestuck is a creation story. Homestuck is a theogony. Homestuck is a cosmic horror story. Homestuck is a time travel story. And so on and so on.

https://homestuck.com/story/1657

And so began one of the greatest partnerships in the history of Paradox Space.

Also of note is that Terezi compares Dave to fire here, not the first or the last bit of symbolism linking him to that element. It’s pretty strongly linked, in general, with The Hero, in kind of the same way that the color Red, and the Sword is in these sorts of things.

Dave fits the Classic Hero Archetype a lot better in a lot of ways than John does, and Bro has been training him for that role since birth. On a much larger scale, Lord English has decreed from his position as the overlord of Paradox Space that Dave is the Hero who should defeat him.

https://homestuck.com/story/1663

Friendship proves once again to be one of the most powerful forces in the universe, changing John’s direction, and steering him away from disaster.

https://homestuck.com/story/1667

Not much to say about this conversation, but the transition between Karkat’s explanation of the Veil and the beginning of [S]Jack: Ascend is smooth as fuck.

https://homestuck.com/story/1670

Our very first self-indulgent author self-insert; the Fourth Wall is explicitly identified as a Fenestrated Plane. 1 Point for the Narrative Contrivance hypothesis.

https://homestuck.com/story/1692

Dave actually does care immensely. Not only does he spend a ton of his time being overshadowed by cooler more powerful men like Bro, and John, now Dave even has to spend his time being overshadowed by cooler versions of himself - and that goes in both directions - both Davesprite and Dave seem to think that the other is the more real, more cool Dave!

https://homestuck.com/story/1710

As a Light Player, Rose is preoccupied with Meaning. She sees it everywhere, and she certainly sees where it is not (at least when she is not Miserable with a capital M). Meaning and Value - Fortune - is not intrinsic to this item, but it is instead bestowed upon it by the fact that Rose loves it, and by the work that Rose put into it. The Rabbit is a labor of love and a treasured belonging, and the Love in the Rabbit is the Light that the Seer Sees.

https://homestuck.com/story/1714

I’m pretty sure that John and Kanaya only talk to each other about twice in all of Homestuck, which is a bit of a shame! John and Karkat are really a lot more alike each other than either of them is comfortable admitting (which I think is probably why Dave is attracted to Karkat). By the transitive law of friendship, it seems to me that John and Kanaya would probably be pretty good friends. On the subject of the other diagonal line in the quadrangle of friendship, I wonder if Rose and Karkat talk to each other pretty much ever?

https://homestuck.com/story/1715

The clear indication here is a parallel between Dave and Sollux, but like a lot of things that probably didn’t go as intended with the Trolls, nothing much ends up materializing from it. I suppose that by fucking off to do nothing for the rest of the adventure, Sollux gets to live Dave’s dream for him, so there’s that.

https://homestuck.com/story/1720

Adorable. This is one of the happiest little moments in the comic.

So often, characters are cut off from one another by moments. They just miss each other, or literally can’t understand each other because of supernatural shenanigans, or can’t communicate with each other on screen because of the way that communication can’t happen unmediated in Homestuck.

And even when they can talk to each other, often the awkwardness and pain of communicating with other people, of trying to get them to understand you the way you actually are, instead of only seeing you one certain way, is too great, and communication proves impossible.

But here, Rose and Dave don’t need words to hang out.

They shut up and jam.

(It’s also incredibly sweet that Rose‘s actual in-person esteem of Dave is so great that she cannot restrain her own thought process. For all her joshing, she really does think Dave is cool.)

https://homestuck.com/story/1722

Also incredibly sweet that Rose’s first order of business as soon as they’re done playing around is to destroy that goddamn puppet.

https://homestuck.com/story/1754

Just missed him.

https://homestuck.com/story/1775

I wish not to contemplate the implication that Homestuck Sprite Mode Legs are actually wafer thin.

https://homestuck.com/story/1812

Nearly as soon as Rose has awoken and absorbed herself from the Doomed Timeline, she gets down to business alchemizing a lot of dangerous and powerful artifacts in preparation to fuck shit up. I’ve never thought about it much before, but I think it’s not hard to say that the memories she absorbed from the other timeline cause Rose to embrace her more reckless and less charitable side. She comments on her own dangerous pursuit of power, and then immediately ignores that train of thought.

https://homestuck.com/story/1836

Dave sure is fixated on bottoms.

https://homestuck.com/story/1852

Note to self. Come back to this.

So far, the only thing of note is the number 12, a portent related to the victors of Homestuck, if only coincidentally.

https://homestuck.com/story/1857

Dave’s sincerity senses are tingling. Maybe it’s an instinct since he and Roxy are pretty similar people, maybe it’s just because Dave himself is not nearly as insincere as he wants to be.

Dave’s anxiety about being watched is also probably best exemplified by his insistence on hiding his eyes behind glasses.

https://homestuck.com/story/1887

Adorable!

I wonder if Andrew already had the sprite designs for these squirts, and their names picked out at this time.

The hair and accessories are certainly correct.

https://homestuck.com/story/1895

Before I get too much further into this sequence, I’d like to pause and take a second to just appreciate this prose. The style is captivating.

The shipping pun is also pretty good.

https://homestuck.com/story/1903

BladeKindEyeWear has already done a pretty good job explaining what the Ultimate Riddle is, so I won’t belabor it too much more than he has here. The Ultimate Riddle itself is, “What Will You Do?” And the answer to it is, “Do What You Will.”

Do What You Will isn’t just the inscription on AURYN, it’s also an extremely old phrase intended for spiritual enlightenment, historically first formulated by Saint Augustine in his Sermon On Love, where he puts it thusly, “Love, and Do What You Will.” The Love that Augustine is talking about is not Romantic Love or even familial love, but Universal Unconditional Love - goodwill toward everyone and everything, to have one’s Heart’s Desire be that everyone should flourish and be happy.

Another formulation, the Wiccan Rede is, “An It Harm None, Do What Ye Will,” perhaps a more detached, declaration. In either case, the Will here is not talking about merely chasing simple wants, but an invitation to follow one’s true will, not to respond to simple passions, but to take voluntary action in accordance with who one is as a person.

https://homestuck.com/story/1905

threatening.............

https://homestuck.com/story/1922

Jake Harley begins a life of serial abandonment.

https://homestuck.com/story/1930

I really should have brought this up first when Rose and Davesprite went back into time, but this is about the time Homestuck starts to get lousy with all kinds of alternate selves, Dream Selves, Doomed Selves, and so on and so on, and from a narrative frame of reference, they’re actually all literally the same guy - the actions of one version of a character inform us about all versions of that character.

More on that later.

https://homestuck.com/story/1931

More Roleplaying. John has a wild imagine spot.

https://homestuck.com/story/1934

Dave stares at the blood on his hands, and contemplates his death for a long time.

https://homestuck.com/story/1936

Some immediate foreshadowing in here. Jade, I’m pretty sure, is one of the few people in Tavros’ life who shows him some genuine unconditional friendliness, so it’s no wonder that he latches onto her.

The way he does is still pretty creepy though.

https://homestuck.com/story/1940

As long as I’m mostly focusing on the emotional dimension of Homestuck, the two major emotional beats in this Flash are the Sovereign Slayer slaughtering WV’s army, revealing the source of his self-loathing and trauma, and the death of Jade’s Dream Self.

The death of her Dream Self is not nearly the beginning of Jade’s Trauma Conga Line, but it’s definitely the first in the chain of events that leads her to finally snap out of her learned helplessness and blind optimism, and to start taking her fate into her own hands. She’s been so sure of her destiny up to this point, and now things are finally starting to get out of hand.

Also, I choose to believe that the bizarre Squiddles interlude is the first moment that the Dark Gods make contact with Jade’s psyche. They know she’s about to die, and they’re starting to communicate with her.

Anyway, that’s all for today.

Yesterday’s cough turned out to be post-viral infection, since I had Covid the week of the 11th, so for now this is Cam signing off, Medicated, and Not Alone.

#liveblogging #commentary #the ultimate riddle #hipsters

[mrsrobinsong]

Surprising News

I just posted another oneshot about my Downton Abbey post-series headcanon. This one centers around Mary and Cobert.

That her mother was intent on her father from the very first moment was well known, Mary thought. But that her godfather was one of the passed over options was news to her.

Notes: This is another drabble that came to mind from my headcanon. I apologize if I made any errors. Please point them out, because english is not my first language and I can always improve. Enjoy!

Mary shifted in her chair, trying to find a more comfortable posture. A practically impossible task, considering her almost nine months pregnancy and the all present lower back pain that accompanied it. She tried to make the sigh that escaped her inaudible, but realized her failure when she heard it being unconsciously mimicked by Edith, who was sitting next to her and looked nearly as uncomfortable by the fact of being six months pregnant herself.

The heat didn't help matters. She could feel the beads of sweat concentrating on the base of her neck, as well as the perspiration that gathered on the outside of her glass as she took a sip of her refreshment. The green grass felt crisp under her shoes in her attempt to readjust once more, and she tried to keep her gaze straight forward, avoiding the glare of the sun through the white fabric of the tent. Her other senses were filled by the buzzing of the bees and by the smell of pollen that tinged the air.

Mary directed a frustrated look towards her mother, who was none the wiser. Mama had insisted on an outside brunch to celebrate the good weather of the week. And so, this morning, by the time the family was ready to start the day, the servants had already pitched a tent and Mrs. Patmore had prepared all kinds of picnic food. Mary had resisted the idea, but even she couldn't deny that the weather's conditions were perfect for such a thing. Even if her condition did make it entirely unpleasant.

"Excuse me." Isobel stood up from her own chair. "I must speak to Cora about some hospital matters." She said, heading to the direction where Mary's parents were standing together and leaving Dickie sitting in front of the two sisters.

Mary's godfather didn't appear perturbed, though, looking a bit ahead at where the children were playing, with the corners of his mouth turned up in an absent minded smile.

George and Marigold, along with Henry and Bertie, seemed content playing with buildings blocks on the towel that had been laid out for them. Sybbie, however, had just started to sprint after her father, giggling loudly as Tom pretended to be afraid of getting caught.

It may have been the large stain of dirt right at the front of her niece's pristine white dress that brought the unexpected thought into Mary's mind.

"Can you imagine what Sybbie will be like in her Season if she keeps up like that?" The lightness in her tone didn't make the concern less real.

Edith chuckled dryely. "We all had very different demeanors growing up. And we can't exactly say any of our Seasons were a success." The affirmation gained her a pointed look from Mary.

"It might become a family tradition, then." Dickie intervened, making both sisters look at him with slightly confused looks. "Your mother herself was very difficult in her Season". He explained.

"Mama?" Edith's voice raised in confusion. "Why?"

"Well, she didn't give the time of day to any of her potential suitors, including me, once she met your father." He clarified with a smirk. "She was very polite and gracious about it, of course."

That her mother was intent on her father from the very first moment was well known, Mary thought. But that her godfather was one of the passed over options was news to her.

"You tried to court Mama?" Mary's curiosity won out.

"Certainly! She was the belle of the season."

"Mama?" The repetition of the dumbfounded intonation by Edith made Mary want to roll her eyes.

"Yes, well, she wasn't brash like her countrywomen." Dickie clarified, bringing his glass to his lips. "She has always behaved like a lady, if only more open than her british counterparts. Maybe it was her openness that intrigued the men so much." He leaned in, conspiringly, in mock secrecy. "And she was the most beautiful of them all."

"And she was rich." It was Mary's turn to receive a glare from her sister.

Dickie chuckled. "Yes, she was rich. But she wasn't the only one. And she certainly wasn't the richest one trying her chance with your father."

"What?" This time it was Mary who was dumbfounded.

"Oh, what was her name?" His brows creased in concentration. "Lady Anna… something. Or was it Ruth?" He clicked his tongue "Anyways, she was the daughter of the late Marquess of Lansdowne. They were one of the richest aristocratic families of the time, and she was quite taken with your father."

"And what happened?" Mary tried to relax back into her chair, feeling the strain from leaning forward.

"Your father himself was being difficult. You see, he had already met your mother." The grin on his face grew larger.

Mary blinked at her godfather. That should have been surprising news to her.

So her father had been given the chance to marry another rich debutante, saving Downton in the process. Not only richer than her mother, but English.

Certainly, her grandmother had had something to say on the matter. She'd probably fought with all the tools and schemes that Violet had been so famous for.

But that didn't make sense with the story Mary had always been told. Even if he was now ashamed of it, Papa had said on a number of occasions that it all started as a business transaction.

So, why?

She then looked at her father from where she was sitting, trying to find the answer on his face. Trying to look past the wrinkles and the sagginess that lived there, imagining how it had looked all those years ago. Perhaps, if she could catch a glimpse of the young man he once was, she would magically comprehend what had made him take such a path.

However, all that Mary was able to see in the sun-basked scene was her father, looking as he did now, standing with Mama and Isobel, while the latter two chatted about the hospital administration. He wasn't speaking much altogether, an easy smile curling his lips.

Papa didn't seem to have anything to add to the conversation, but, still, there he stayed, looking intently at his wife while she spoke. And even while she didn't.

Suddenly, the bothering heat was joined and outshined by the warmth that Mary could only associate with her childhood.

No, her godfather's words weren't surprising news to Mary at all.

I have other moments like these from my headcanon, so I might turn this into a series. It would always involve Cora/Cobert. I particularly like some ideias about Mary's relationship with them and towards them. I don't know why, but I've always been drawn to that dynamic.

Please tell me if you liked it, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, or if you are interested in more. Thank you!

#downton abbey #mary crawley #cora crawley #robert crawley #cobert #mine #downton #myfanfic #my darling cora #mary #robert #otp: i'm here darling

[ill-will-editions]

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CURRENT PANDEMIC FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF IVAN ILLICH

David Cayley

Last week I began an essay on the current pandemic in which I tried to address what I take to be the central question that it raises:  Is the massive and costly effort to contain and limit the harm that the virus will do the only choice we have?  Is it no more than an obvious and unavoidable exercise of prudence undertaken to protect the most vulnerable?  Or is it a disastrous effort to maintain control of what is obviously out of control, an effort which will compound the damage being done by the disease with new troubles that will reverberate far into the future?  I hadn’t been writing for long before I began to realize that many of the assumptions I was making were quite remote from those being expressed all around me.  These assumptions had mainly come, I reflected, from my prolonged conversation with the work of Ivan Illich.  What this suggested was that, before I could speak intelligibly about our present circumstances, I would first have to sketch the attitude towards health, medicine and well-being that Illich developed over a lifetime of reflection on these themes.  Accordingly, in what follows, I will start with a brief account of the evolution of Illich’s critique of bio-medicine and then try to answer the questions I just posed in this light..

At the beginning of his 1973 book Tools of Conviviality, Illich described what he thought was the typical course of development followed by contemporary institutions, using medicine as his example.  Medicine, he said, had gone through “two watersheds.”  The first had been crossed in the early years of the 20th century when medical treatments became demonstrably effective and benefits generally began to exceed harms.  For many medical historians this is the only relevant marker – from this point on progress will proceed indefinitely, and, though there may be diminishing returns, there will be no point, in principle, at which progress will stop.  This was not the case for Illich.  He hypothesized a second watershed, which he thought was already being  crossed and even exceeded around the time he was writing.  Beyond this second watershed, he supposed, what he called counterproductivity would set in – medical intervention would begin to defeat its own objects, generating more harm than good.  This, he argued, was characteristic of any institution, good or service – a point could be identified at which there was enough of it and, after which, there would be too much.  Tools for Conviviality, was an attempt to identify these “natural scales” – the only such general and programmatic search for a philosophy of technology that Illich undertook.

Two years later in Medical Nemesis – later renamed, in its final and most comprehensive edition, Limits to Medicine – Illich tried to lay out in detail the goods and the harms that medicine does.  He was generally favourable to the large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good food, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal etc.  He also praised efforts then underway in China and Chile to establish a basic medical toolkit and pharmacopeia that would be available and affordable for all citizens, rather than allowing medicine to develop luxury goods that would remain forever out of reach of the majority.  But the main point of his book was to identify and describe the counterproductive effects that he felt were becoming evident as medicine crossed its second watershed.  He spoke of these fall-outs from too much medicine as iatrogenesis, and addressed them under three headings: clinical, social and cultural.  The first everyone, by now, understands – you get the wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug, the wrong operation, you get sick in hospital etc.  This collateral damage is not trivial.  An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus – Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways, April 2012 – estimated 7.5% of the Canadians admitted to hospitals every year suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 die as a result of medical mistakes. Around the same time, Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggested that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is around 400,000.  This is an impressive number, even if exaggerated – Nader’s estimate is twice as high per capita as The Walrus’s – but this accidental harm was not, by any means, Illich’s focus.  What really concerned him was the way in which excessive medical treatment weakens basic social and cultural aptitudes.  An instance of what he called social iatrogenesis is the way in which the art of medicine, in which the physician acts as healer, witness, and counsellor, tends to give way to the science of medicine, in which the doctor, as a scientist, must, by definition, treat his or her patient as an experimental subject and not as a unique case.  And, finally, there was the ultimate injury that medicine inflicts: cultural iatrogenesis.  This occurs, Illich said, when cultural abilities, built up and passed on over many generations, are first undermined and then, gradually, replaced altogether.  These abilities include, above all, the willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality, and the capacity to die one’s own death.  The art of suffering was being overshadowed, he argued, by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved – an attitude which doesn’t, in fact, end suffering but rather renders it meaningless, making it merely an anomaly or technical miscarriage.   And death, finally, was being transformed from an intimate, personal act – something each one can do – into a meaningless defeat – a mere cessation of treatment or “pulling the plug,” as is sometimes heartlessly said.  Behind Illich’s arguments lay a traditional Christian attitude.  He affirmed that suffering and  death are inherent in the human condition – they are part of what defines this condition.  And he argued that the loss of this condition would involve a catastrophic rupture both with our past and with our own creatureliness.  To mitigate and ameliorate the human condition was good, he said.  To lose it altogether was a catastrophe because we can only know God as creatures – i.e. created or given beings – not as gods who have taken charge of our own destiny.

Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power – a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health.  According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power, though this character may be hidden by the claim that all that is being asserted is care.  In the province of Ontario where I live, “health care” currently gobbles up more than 40% of the government’s budget, which should make the point clearly enough.  But this everyday power, great as it is, can be further expanded by what Illich calls “the ritualization of crisis.”  This confers on medicine “a license that usually only the military can claim.”  He continues:

Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency.  He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human…Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts.

In a footnote to this passage Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation.  The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.”  There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.”  Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception - and rule in its place as the very source of law.   This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims…in an emergency.”  Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates.  But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich.  Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.”  Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped, or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies.  

Ten years after Medical Nemesis was published, Illich revisited and revised his argument.  He did not, by any means, renounce what he had written earlier, but he did add to it quite dramatically.  In his book, he now said, he had been “blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic effect: the iatrogenesis of the body itself.”  He had “overlooked the degree to which, at mid-century, the experience of ‘our bodies and our selves’ had become the result of medical concepts and cares.”  In other words he had written, in Medical Nemesis, as if there were a natural body, standing outside the web of techniques by which its self-awareness is constructed, and now he could see that there is no such standpoint.  “Each historical moment,” he wrote, “is incarnated in an epoch-specific body.”  Medicine doesn’t just act on a preexisting state – rather it participates in creating this state.

This recognition was just the beginning of a new stance on Illich’s part.  Medical Nemesis had addressed a citizenry that was imagined as capable of acting to limit the scope of medical intervention.  Now he spoke of people whose very self-image was being generated by bio-medicine.  Medical Nemesis had claimed, in its opening sentence, that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”  Now he judged that that the major threat to health was the pursuit of health itself.   Behind this change of mind lay his sense that the world, in the meanwhile, had undergone an epochal change.  “I believe,” he told me in 1988, “that…there [has been] a change in the mental space in which many people live.  Some kind of a catastrophic breakdown of one way of seeing things has led to the emergence of a different way of seeing things.  The subject of my writing has been the perception of sense in the way we live; and, in this respect, we are, in my opinion, at this moment, passing over a watershed.  I had not expected in my lifetime to observe this passage.”  Illich characterized “the new way of seeing things” as the advent of what he called “the age of systems” or “an ontology of systems.”  The age that he saw as ending had been dominated by the idea of instrumentality – of using instrumental means, like medicine, to achieve some end or good, like health.  Characteristic of this age was a clear distinction between subjects and objects, means and ends, tools and their users etc.  In the age of systems, he said, these distinctions have collapsed.  A system, conceived cybernetically, is all encompassing – it has no outside.  The user of a tool takes up the tool to accomplish some end.  Users of systems are inside the system, constantly adjusting their state to the system, as the system adjusts its state to them.  A bounded individual pursuing personal well-being gives way to an immune system which constantly recalibrates its porous boundary with the surrounding system.

Within this new “system analytic discourse,” as Illich named it, the characteristic state of people is disembodiment.  This is a paradox, obviously, since what Illich called “the pathogenic pursuit of health” may involve an intense, unremitting and virtually narcissistic preoccupation with one’s bodily state.  Why Illich conceived it as disembodying can best be understood by the example of “risk awareness” which he called “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  Risk was disembodying, he said, because “it is a strictly mathematical concept.”  It does not pertain to persons but to populations – no one knows what will happen to this or that person, but what will happen to the aggregate of such persons can be expressed as a probability.  To identify oneself with this statistical figment is to engage, Illich said, in “intensive self-algorithmization.”  

His most distressing encounter with this “religiously celebrated ideology” occurred in the field of genetic testing during pregnancy.  He was introduced to it by his friend and colleague Silja Samerski who was studying the genetic counselling that is mandatory for pregnant women considering genetic testing in Germany – a subject she would later write about in a book called The Decision Trap (Imprint-Academic, 2015).  Genetic testing in pregnancy does not reveal anything definite about the child which the woman being tested is expecting.  All it detects are markers whose uncertain meaning can be expressed in probabilities – a likelihood calculated across the entire population to which the one being tested belongs, by her age, family history, ethnicity etc.  When she is told, for example, that there is a 30% chance that her baby will have this or that syndrome, she is told nothing about herself or the fruit of her womb – she is told only what might happen to someone like her.  She knows nothing more about her actual circumstances than what her hopes, dreams and intuitions reveal, but the risk profile that has been ascertained for her statistical doppelganger demands a decision.  The choice is existential; the information on which it is based is the probability curve on which the chooser has been inscribed.  Illich found this to be a perfect horror.  It was not that he could not recognize that all human action is a shot in the dark – a prudential calculation in the face of the unknown.  His horror was at seeing people reconceive themselves in the image of a statistical construct.  For him, this was an eclipse of persons by populations; an effort to prevent the future from disclosing anything unforeseen; and a substitution of scientific models for sensed experience. And this was happening, Illich realized, not just with regard to genetic testing in pregnancy but more or less across the board in health care.  Increasingly people were acting prospectively, probabilistically, according to their risk.  They were becoming, as Canadian health researcher Allan Cassels once joked, “pre-diseased” – vigilant and active against illnesses that someone like them might get.  Individual cases were increasingly managed as general cases, as instances of a category or class, rather than as unique predicaments, and doctors were increasingly the servo-mechanisms of this cloud of probabilities rather than intimate advisors alert to specific differences and personal meanings.  This was what Illich meant by “self-algorithmization” or disembodiment.

One way of getting at the iatrogenic body that Illich saw as the primary effect of contemporary biomedicine is by going back to an essay that was widely read and discussed in his milieu in the early 1990’s.  Called “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” it was written by historian and philosopher of science Donna Haraway and appears in her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  This essay is interesting not just because I think it influenced Illich’s sense of how bio-medical discourse was shifting, but also because Haraway, seeing – I would claim – almost exactly the same things as Illich, draws conclusions that are, point-for-point, diametrically opposite.  In this article, for example, she says, with reference to what she calls “the post-modern body,” that “human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical.”  “In a sense,” she continues, “organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components.”  This leads to a situation in which “no objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; and components can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.”  In a world of interfaces, where boundaries regulate “rates of flow” rather than marking real differences, “the integrity of natural objects” is no longer a concern.  “The ‘integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the Western self,” she writes, “gives way to decision procedures, expert systems, and resource investment strategies.”

In other words, Haraway, like Illich understands that persons, as unique, stable and hallowed beings, have dissolved into provisionally self-regulating sub-systems in constant interchange with the larger systems in which they are enmeshed.  In her words, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…the cyborg is our ontology.”  The difference between them lies in their reactions.  Haraway, elsewhere in the volume from which the essay I have been quoting comes, issues what she calls her “Cyborg Manifesto.”  It calls on people to recognize and accept this new situation but to “read it” with a view to liberation.  In a patriarchal society, there is no acceptable condition to which one could hope to return, so she offers “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”  For Illich, on the other hand, the “cyborg ontology,” as Haraway calls it, was not an option.  For him what was at stake was the very character of human persons as ensouled beings with a divine origin and a divine destiny.  As the last vestiges of sense washed out of the bodily self-perception of his contemporaries, he saw a world that had become “immune to its own salvation.”  “I have come to the conclusion,” he told me plaintively, “that when the angel Gabriel told that girl in the town of Nazareth in Galilee that God wanted to be in her belly, he pointed to a body which has gone from the world in which I live.”

The “new way of seeing things” which was reflected in the orientation of bio-medicine amounted, according to Illich, to “a new stage of religiosity.” He used the word religiosity in a broad sense to refer to something deeper and more pervasive than formal or institutional religion.  Religiosity is the ground on which we stand, our feeling about how and why things are as they are, the very horizon within which meaning takes shape.  For Illich, the createdness, or given-ness of the world was the foundation of his entire sensibility.  What he saw coming was a religiosity of total immanence in which the world is its own cause and there is no source of meaning or order outside of it – “a cosmos,” as he said, “in the hands of man.”  The highest good in such a world is life, and the primary duty of people is to conserve and foster life.  But this is not the life which is spoken of in the Bible – the life which comes from God – it is a rather a resource which people possess and ought to manage responsibly.  Its peculiar property is to be at the same time an object of reverence and of manipulation.  This naturalized life, divorced from its source, is the new god.  Health and safety are its adjutants.  Its enemy is death.   Death still imposes a final defeat but has no other personal meaning.  There is no proper time to die – death ensues when treatment fails or is terminated.  

Illich refused to “interiorize systems into the self.”  He would give up neither human nature nor natural law. “I just cannot shed the certainty,” he said in an interview with his friend Douglas Lummis, “that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.”  This led him to reject “responsibility for health,” conceived as a management of intermeshed systems.  How can one be responsible, he asked, for what has neither sense, boundary nor ground?  Better to give up such comforting illusions and to live instead in a spirit of self-limitation which he defined as “courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community.”  

To summarize: Illich, in his later years, concluded that humanity, at least in his vicinity, had taken leave of its senses and moved lock, stock and barrel into a system construct lacking any ground whatsoever for ethical decision.  The bodies in which people lived and walked around had become synthetic constructs woven out of CAT-scans and risk curves.  Life had become a quasi-religious idol, presiding over an “ontology of systems.” Death had become a meaningless obscenity rather than an intelligible companion.  All this was expressed forcefully and unequivocally.  He did not attempt to soften it or offer a comforting “on the other hand…”. What he attended to was what he sensed was happening around him, and all his care was to try to register it as sensitively as he could and address it as truthfully as he could.  The world, in his view, was not in his hands, but in the hands of God.                    

By the time he died, in 2002, Illich stood far outside the new “way of seeing things” that he felt had established itself during the second half his life.  He felt that in this new “age of systems” the primary unit of creation, the human person, had begun to lose its boundary, its distinction and its dignity.  He thought that the revelation in which he was rooted had been corrupted – the “life more abundant” that had been promised in the New Testament transformed into a human hegemony so total and so claustrophobic that no intimation from outside the system could disturb it.  He believed that medicine had so far exceeded the threshold at which it might have eased and complemented the human condition that it was now threatening to abolish this condition altogether.  And he had concluded that much of humanity is no longer willing to “bear…[its] rebellious, torn and disoriented flesh” and has instead traded its art of suffering and its art of dying for a few years of life expectancy and the comforts of life in an “artificial creation.”  Can any sense be made of the current “crisis” from this point of view?  I would say yes, but only insofar as we can step back from the urgencies of the moment and take time to consider what is being revealed about our underlying dispositions – our “certainties,” as Illich called them.  

First of all, Illich’s perspective indicates that for some time now we’ve been practicing the attitudes that have characterized the response to the current pandemic.  It’s a striking thing about events which are perceived to have changed history, or “changed everything,” as one sometimes hears, that people often seem to be somehow ready for them or even unconsciously or semi-consciously expecting them.  Recalling the beginning of the First World War, economic historian Karl Polanyi used the image of sleep-walking to characterize the way in which the countries of Europe shuffled to their doom – automatons blindly accepting the fate they had unknowingly projected.   The events of Sept. 11, 2001 – 9/11 as we now know it – seemed to be instantly interpreted and understood, as if everyone had just been waiting to declare the patent meaning of what had occurred – the end of the Age of Irony, the beginning of the War on Terror, whatever it might be.  Some of this is surely a trick of perspective by which hindsight instantly turns contingency into necessity – since something did happen, we assume that it was bound to happen all along.  But I don’t think this can be the whole story.  

At the heart of the coronavirus response has been the claim that we must act prospectively to prevent what has not yet occurred: an exponential growth in infections, an overwhelming of the resources of the medical system, which will put medical personnel in the invidious position of performing triage, etc.  Otherwise, it is said, by the time we find out what we’re dealing with, it will be too late.  (It’s worth pointing out, in passing, that this is unverifiable idea: if we succeed, and what we fear does not take place, then we will be able to say that our actions prevented it, but we will never actually know whether this was the case.). This idea that prospective action is crucial has been readily accepted, and people have even vied with one in another in denouncing the laggards who have shown resistance to it.  But to act like this requires experience in living in a hypothetical space where prevention outranks cure, and this is exactly what Illich describes when he speaks of risk as “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  An expression like “flattening the curve” can become overnight common sense only in a society practiced in “staying ahead of the curve” and in thinking in terms of population dynamics rather than actual cases.

Risk has a history.  One of the first to identify it as the preoccupation of a new form of society was German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his 1986 book Risk Society, published in English in 1992.  In this book, Beck portrayed late modernity as an uncontrolled science experiment.  By uncontrolled he meant that we have no spare planet on which we can conduct a nuclear war to see how it goes, no second atmosphere which we can heat and observe the results.  This means that techno-scientific society is, on the one hand, hyper-scientific and, on the other, radically unscientific insofar as it has no standard against which it can measure or assess what it has done.  There are endless examples of this sort of uncontrolled experiment – from transgenic sheep to mass international tourism to the transformation of persons into communications relays.  All these, insofar as they have unforeseeable and unpredictable consequences, already constitute a kind of living in the future.  And just because we are citizens of risk society, and therefore participants by definition, in an uncontrolled science experiment, we have become – paradoxically or not – preoccupied with controlling risk.  As I pointed out above, we are treated and screened for diseases we do not yet have, on the basis of our probability of getting them.  Pregnant couples make life and death decisions based on probabilistic risk profiles.  Safety becomes a mantra – “farewell” becomes “be safe” – health becomes a god.  

Equally important in the current atmosphere has been the idolization of life, and aversion from its obscene other, death.  That we must at all costs “save lives” is not questioned.  This makes it very easy to start a stampede.  Making an entire country “go home and stay home,” as our prime minister said not long ago, has immense and incalculable costs.  No one knows how many businesses will fail, how many jobs will be lost, how many will sicken from loneliness, how many will resume addictions or beat each other up in their isolation.  But these costs seem bearable as soon the spectre of lives lost is brought on the scene.  Again, we have been practicing counting lives for a long time. The obsession with the “death toll” from the latest catastrophe is simply the other side of the coin.  Life becomes an abstraction – a number without a story.  

Illich claimed in the mid-1980’s that he was beginning to meet people whose “very selves” were a product of “medical concepts and cares.”  I think this helps to explain why the Canadian state, and its component provincial and municipal governments, have largely failed to acknowledge what is currently at stake in our “war” on “the virus.”  Sheltering behind the skirts of science – even where there is no science – and deferring to the gods of health and safety has appeared to them as political necessity.  Those who have been acclaimed for their leadership, like Quebec premier François Legault, have been those who have distinguished themselves by their single-minded consistency in applying the conventional wisdom.  Few have yet dared to question the cost – and, when those few include Donald Trump, the prevailing complacency is only fortified – who would dare agree with him?  In this respect insistent repetition of the metaphor of war has been influential – in a war no one counts costs or reckons who is actually paying them.  First, we must win the war.  Wars create social solidarity and discourage dissent – those not showing the flag are apt to be shown the equivalent of the white feather with which non-combatants were shamed during World War One.  

At the date at which I am writing – early April – no one really knows what is going on.  Since no one knows how many have the disease, nobody knows what the death rate is – Italy’s is currently listed at over 10%, which puts it in the range of the catastrophic influenza at the end of World War I, while Germany’s is at .8%, which is more in line with what happens unremarked every year – some very old people, and a few younger ones, catch the flu and die.  What does seem clear, here in Canada, is that, with the exception of a few local sites of true emergency, the pervasive sense of panic and crisis is largely a result of the measures taken against the pandemic and not of the pandemic itself.  Here the word itself has played an important role – the declaration by the World Health Organization that a pandemic was now officially in progress didn’t change anyone’s health status but it dramatically changed the public atmosphere.  It was the signal the media had been waiting for to introduce a regime in which nothing else but the virus could be discussed.  By now a story in the newspaper not concerned with coronavirus is actually shocking.  This cannot help but give the impression of a world on fire.  If you talk about nothing else, it will soon come to seem as if there is nothing else.  A bird, a crocus, a spring breeze can begin to seem almost irresponsible – “don’t they know it’s the end of the world?” as an old country music classic asks.  The virus acquires extraordinary agency – it is said to have depressed the stock market, shuttered businesses, and generated panic fear, as if these were not the actions of responsible people but of the illness itself.  Emblematic for me, here in Toronto, was a headline in The National Post.  In a font that occupied much of the top half of the front page, it said simply PANIC.   Nothing indicated whether the word was to be read as a description or an instruction.  This ambiguity is constitutive of all media, and disregarding it is the characteristic déformation professionelle of the journalist, but it becomes particularly easy to ignore in a certified crisis.  It is not the obsessive reporting or the egging on of authorities to do more that has turned the world upside down – it is the virus that has done it.  Don’t blame the messenger.  A headline on the web-site STAT on April 1, and I don’t think it was a joke, even claimed that “Covid-19 has sunk the ship of state.”  It is interesting, in this respect, to perform a thought experiment.  How much of an emergency would we feel ourselves to be in if this had never been called a pandemic and such stringent measures taken against it?  Plenty of troubles escape the notice of the media.  How much do we know or care about the catastrophic political disintegration of South Sudan in recent years, or about the millions who died in the Democratic Republic of Congo after civil war broke out there in 2004?  It is our attention that constitutes what we take to be the relevant world at any given moment.  The media do not act alone – people must be disposed to attend where the media directs their attention – but I don’t think it can be denied that the pandemic is a constructed object that might have been constructed differently.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remarked on March 25th that we are facing “the greatest health care crisis in our history.”  If he is understood to be referring to a health crisis, this seems to me a grotesque exaggeration.  Think of the disastrous effect of smallpox on indigenous communities, or of a score of other catastrophic epidemics from cholera and yellow fever to diphtheria and polio.  Can you then really say that a flu epidemic which appears mainly to kill the old or those made susceptible by some other condition is even comparable to the ravaging of whole peoples, let alone worse?    And yet, unprecedented, like the Prime Minister’s “greatest ever,” seems to be the word on everyone’s lips.  However, if we take the Prime Minister’s words by the letter, as referring to health care, and not just health, the case changes.   From the beginning the public health measures taken in Canada have been explicitly aimed at protecting the health care system from any overload.  To me this points to an extraordinary dependence on hospitals and an extraordinary lack of confidence in our ability to care for one another.  Whether Canadian hospitals are ever flooded or not, a strange and fearful mystique seems to be involved – the hospital and its cadres are felt to be indispensable, even when things could be more easily and safely dealt with at home. Again Illich was prescient in his claim, in his essay “Disabling Professions,” that overextended professional hegemonies sap popular capacities and make people doubt their own resources.  

The measures mandated by “the greatest health care crisis in our history” have involved a remarkable curtailing of civil liberty.  This has been done, it is said, to protect life and, by the same token, to avoid death.  Death is not only to be averted but also kept hidden and unconsidered.  Years ago I heard a story about a bemused listener at one of Illich’s lectures on Medical Nemesis who afterwards turned to his companion and asked, “What does he want, let people die?”  Perhaps some of my readers would like to ask me the same question.  Well, I’m sure there are many other old people who would join me in saying that they don’t want to see young lives ruined in order that they can live a year or two longer.  But, beyond that, “let people die” is a very funny formulation because it implies that the power to determine who lives or dies is in the hands of the one to whom the question is addressed.  The we who are imagined as having the power to “let die” exist in an ideal world of perfect information and perfect technical mastery.  In this world nothing occurs which has not been chosen.  If someone dies, it will be because they have been “let…die.”  The state must, at all costs, foster, regulate and protect life – this is the essence of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics, the regime that now unquestionably rules us.  Death must be kept out of sight and out of mind.  It must be denied meaning.  No one’s time ever comes – they are let go.  The grim reaper may survive as a comic figure in New Yorker cartoons, but he has no place in public discussion.  This makes it difficult even to talk about death as something other than someone’s negligence or, at the least, a final exhaustion of treatment options.  To accept death is to accept defeat.

The events of recent weeks reveal how totally we live inside systems, how much we have become populations rather than associated citizens, how much we are governed by the need to continually outsmart the future we ourselves have prepared.  When Illich wrote books like Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis, he still hoped that life within limits was possible.  He tried to identify the thresholds at which technology must be restrained in order to keep the world at the local, sensible, conversable scale on which human beings could remain the political animals that Aristotle thought we were meant to be.  Many others saw the same vision, and many have tried over the last fifty years to keep it alive.  But there is no doubt that the world Illich warned of has come to pass.  It is a world which lives primarily in disembodied states and hypothetical spaces, a world of permanent emergency in which the next crisis is always right around the corner, a world in which the ceaseless babble of communication has stretched language past its breaking point, a world in which overstretched science has become indistinguishable from superstition.  How then can Illich’s ideas possibly gain any purchase in a world that seems to have moved out of reach of his concepts of scale, balance, and personal meaning?  Shouldn’t one just accept that the degree of social control that has recently been exerted is proportionate and necessary in the global immune system of which we are, in Haraway’s expression, “biotic components?”

Perhaps, but it’s an old political axiom which can be found in Plato, Thomas More, and, more recently, Canadian philosopher George Grant that if you can’t achieve the best, at least prevent the worst.  And things can certainly get worse as a result of this pandemic.  It has already become a somewhat ominous commonplace that the world will not be the same once it is over.  Some see it as a rehearsal and admit frankly that, though this particular plague may not fully justify the measures being taken against it, these measures still constitute a valuable rehearsal for future and potentially worse plagues.  Others view it as a “wake-up call” and hope that, when it’s all over, a chastened humanity will begin to edge its way back from the lip of catastrophe.  My fear, and one that I think is shared by many, is that it will leave behind a disposition to accept much increased surveillance and social control, more telescreens and telepresencing, and heightened mistrust.  At the moment, everyone is optimistically describing physical distancing as a form of solidarity, but it’s also practice in regarding one another, and even ourselves – “don’t touch your face” – as potential disease vectors.  

I have said already that one of the certainties that the pandemic is driving deeper into the popular mind is risk.  But this is easy to overlook since risk is so easily conflated with real danger. The difference, I would say, is that danger is identified by a practical judgment resting on experience, whereas risk is a statistical construct pertaining to a population.  Risk has no room for individual experience or for practical judgment.  It tells you only what will happen in general.  It is an abstract of a population, not a picture of any person, or a guide to that person’s destiny.  Destiny is a concept that simply dissolves in the face of risk, where all are arrayed, uncertainly, on the same curve.  What Illich calls “the mysterious historicity” of each existence – or, more simply, its meaning – is annulled.  During this pandemic, risk society has come of age.  This is evident, for example, in the tremendous authority that has been accorded to models – even when everyone knows that they are informed by little more than what one hopes are educated guesses.  Another illustration is the familiarity with which people speak of “flattening the curve,” as if this were an everyday object – I have even recently heard songs about it.  When it becomes an object of public policy to operate on a purely imaginary, mathematical object, like a risk curve, it is certain that risk society has taken a great leap forward.   This, I think, is what Illich meant about disembodiment – the impalpable become palpable, the hypothetical becomes actual, and the realm of everyday experience becomes indistinguishable from its representation in newsrooms, laboratories and statistical models.  Humans have lived, at all times, in imagined worlds, but this, I think, is different.  In the sphere of religion, for example, even the most naïve believers have the sense that the beings they summon and address in their gatherings are not everyday objects.  In the discourse of the pandemic, everyone consorts familiarly with scientific phantoms as if there were as real as rocks and trees.  

Another related feature of the current landscape is government-by-science and its necessary complement - the abdication of political leadership resting on any other grounds.   This too is a field long-tilled and prepared for planting.  Illich wrote nearly fifty years ago in Tools for Conviviality that contemporary society is “stunned by a delusion about science.”  This delusion takes many forms, but its essence is to construct out of the messy, contingent practices of a myriad of sciences a single golden calf before which all must bow.  It is this giant mirage that is usually invoked when we are instructed to “listen to the science” or told what “studies show” or “science says.” But there is no such thing as science, only sciences, each one with its unique uses and unique limitations.   When “science” is abstracted from all the vicissitudes and shadows of knowledge production, and elevated into an omniscient oracle whose priests can be identified by their outfits, their solemn postures and their impressive credentials, what suffers, in Illich’s view, is political judgment.  We do not do what appears good to our rough and ready sense of how things are down here on the ground but only what can be dressed up as science says.   In a book called Rationality and Ritual, British sociologist of science Brian Wynne studied a public inquiry carried out by a British High Court Judge in 1977 on the question of whether a new plant should be added to the British nuclear energy complex at Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast.   Wynne shows how the judge approached the question as one which “science” would answer – is it safe? – without any need to consult moral or political principles.  This is a classic case of the displacement of political judgment onto the shoulders of Science, conceived along the mythical lines I sketched above.  This displacement is now evident in many fields.  One of its hallmarks is that people, thinking that “science” knows more than it does, imagine that they know more than they do.  No actual knowledge need support this confidence.  Epidemiologists may say frankly, as many have, that, in the present case, there is very little sturdy evidence to go on, but this has not prevented politicians from acting as if they were merely the executive arm of Science.  In my opinion, the adoption of a policy of semi-quarantining those who are not sick – a policy apt to have disastrous consequences down the road in lost jobs, failed businesses, distressed people, and debt-suffocated governments – is a political decision and ought to be discussed as such.  But, at the moment, the ample skirts of Science shelter all politicians from view.  Nor does anyone speak of impending moral decisions.  Science will decide.

In his late writings Illich introduced, but never really developed, a concept that he called “epistemic sentimentality” – not a catchy phrase, admittedly, but one that I think sheds on light on what is currently going on.  His argument, in brief, was that we live in a world of “fictitious substances” and “management-bred phantoms” – any number of nebulous goods from institutionally-defined education to the “pathogenic pursuit of health” could serve as examples – and that in this “semantic desert full of muddled echoes” we need “some prestigious fetish” to serve as a “Linus blanket.”  In the essay I’ve been quoting “Life” is his primary example.  “Epistemic sentimentality” attaches itself to Life, and Life becomes the banner under which projects of social control and technological overreach acquire warmth and lustre.  Illich calls this  epistemic sentimentality because it involves constructed objects of knowledge that are then naturalized under the kindly aegis of the “prestigious fetish.”  In the present case we are frantically saving lives and protecting our health care system.  These noble objects enable a gush of sentiment which is very hard to resist.  For me it is summed up in the almost unbearably unctuous tone in which our Prime Minister now addresses us daily.  But who is not in an agony of solicitude?  Who has not said that we are avoiding each other because of the depth of our care for one another?  This is epistemic sentimentality not just because it solaces us and makes a ghostly reality seem humane but also because it hides the other things that are going on – like the mass experiment in social control and social compliance, the legitimation of tele-presence as a mode of sociability and of instruction, the increase of surveillance, the normalization of biopolitics, and the reinforcement of risk awareness as a foundation of social life.  

Another concept that I believe Illich has to contribute to current discussion is the idea of “dynamic balances” that he develops in Tools for Conviviality.  This thought came to me recently while reading, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a refutation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s dissident position on the pandemic.  Agamben had written earlier against the inhumanity of a policy that lets people die alone and then outlaws funerals, arguing that a society which sets “bare life” higher than the preservation of its own way of life has embraced what amounts to a fate worse than death.  Fellow philosopher Anastasia Berg, in her response, expresses respect for Agamben, but then claims that he has missed the boat.  People are cancelling funerals, isolating the sick and avoiding one another not because mere survival has become the be-all and end-all of public policy, as Agamben claims, but in a spirit of loving sacrifice which Agamben is too obtuse and theory- besotted to notice.  The two positions appear starkly opposed, and the choice an either/or.  One either views social distancing, with Anastasia Berg, as a paradoxical and sacrificial form of solidarity, or one views it with Agamben as a fateful step into a world where inherited ways of life dissolve in an ethos of survival at all costs.  What Illich tried to argue in Tools for Conviviality is that public policy must always strike a balance between opposed domains, opposed rationalities, opposed virtues.  The whole book is an attempt to discern the point at which serviceable tools – tools for conviviality – turn into tools which become ends in themselves and begin to dictate to their users.  In the same way he tried to distinguish practical political judgment from expert opinion, home-made speech from the coinages of mass media, vernacular practices from institutional norms.  Many of these attempted distinctions have since drowned in the monochrome of “the system,” but the idea can still be helpful I think.  It encourages us to ask the question, what is enough? where is the point of balance?  Right now this question is not asked because the goods we pursue are generally taken to be unlimited – we cannot, by assumption, have too much education, too much health, too much law, or too much of any of the other institutional staples on which we lavish our hope and our substance.  But what if the question were revived?  This would require us to ask in what way Agamben might be right, while still allowing Berg’s point.  Perhaps a point of balance could be found. But this would require some ability to sustain a divided mind – the very hallmark of thinking, according to Hannah Arendt – as well as the resuscitation of political judgment.   Such an exercise of political judgment would involve a discussion of what is being lost in the present crisis as well as what is being gained.  But who deliberates in an emergency?    Total mobilization – total preoccupation – the feeling that everything has changed – the certainty of living in a state of exception rather than in ordinary time – all these things militate against political deliberation.  This is a vicious circle: we can’t deliberate because we’re in an emergency, and we’re in an emergency because we can’t deliberate.  The only way out of the circle is by the way in – the way created by assumptions that have become so ingrained as to seem obvious.  

Illich had a sense, during the last twenty years of his life, of a world immured in “an ontology of systems,” a world immune to grace, alienated from death, and totally convinced of its duty to manage every eventuality – a world, as he once put it, in which “exciting, soul-capturing abstractions have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.”  Such a view does not readily lend itself to policy prescriptions.  Policy is made in the moment according to the exigencies of the moment.  Illich was talking about modes of sensing, of thinking, and of feeling that had crept into people at a much deeper level.  Accordingly, I hope that no one who has read this far thinks that I have been making facile policy proposals rather than trying to describe a fate that all share.  Still my view of the situation is probably clear enough from what I have written.  I think this tunnel we have entered – of physical distancing, flattening the curve etc. – will be very hard to get out of – either we call it off soon and face the possibility that it was all for naught, or we extend it and create harms that may be worse than the casualties we have averted.  This is not to say we should do nothing.  It is a pandemic.  But it would have been better, in my view, to try and keep going and used targeted quarantine for the demonstrably ill and their contacts.  Close baseball stadiums and large hockey arenas, by all means, but keep small businesses open and attempt to space the customers in the same way as the stores that have stayed open are doing.  Would more then die?  Perhaps, but this is far from clear.  And that’s exactly my point: no one knows.  Swedish economist Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, made the same point recently in defence of Sweden’s current policy of precaution without shut-down. “The theory of lockdown,” he says, is “untested” – which is true – and, consequently, “It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.”  

But, to say it again, my intention here is not to contest policy but to bring to light the practiced certainties that make our current policy seem incontestable.  Let me take a final example.  Recently a Toronto newspaper columnist suggested that the current emergency can be construed as a choice between “saving the economy” or “saving granny.”  In this figure two prime certainties are pitted against one another.  If we take these phantoms as real things rather than as questionable constructions, we can only end up by setting a price on granny’s head.   Better, I want to argue, to try to think and speak in a different way.  Perhaps the impossible choices thrown up by the world of modelling and management are a sign that things are being framed in the wrong way.  Is there a way to move from granny as a “demographic” to a person who can be nursed and comforted and accompanied to the end of her road; from The Economy as the ultimate abstraction to the shop down the street in which someone has invested all they have and which they may now lose.   At present, “the crisis” holds reality hostage, captive in its enclosed and airless system.  It’s very difficult to find a way of speaking in which life is something other and more than a resource which each of us must responsibly manage, conserve, and, finally, save.   But I think it important to take a careful look at what has come into the light in recent weeks: medical science’s ability to “decide on the exception” and then take power; the media’s power to remake what is sensed as reality, while disowning its own agency;  the abdication of politics before Science, even when there is no science; the disabling of practical judgment; the enhanced power of risk awareness; and the emergence of Life as the new sovereign.   Crises change history but not necessarily for the better.  A lot will depend on what the event is understood to have meant. If, in the aftermath, the certainties I have sketched here are not brought into question, then the only possible outcome I can see is that they will fasten themselves all the more securely on our minds and become obvious, invisible, and unquestionable.

FURTHER READING

Here some links to articles which I have cited above or which have influenced my thinking:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/why-draconian-measures-may-not-work-two-experts-say-we-should-prioritize-those-at-risk-from-covid-19-than-to-try-to-contain

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/17/listen-cbc-radio-cuts-off-expert-when-he-questions-covid19-narrative/  (This story is misheaded – Duncan McCue doesn’t cut off Dr. Kettner – it’s because Kettner gets to make so many strong points that the item is valuable.)

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronavirus-panic/

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ (Agamben’s view can be found here along with a lot of other interesting material.)

Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness  (Anastasia Berg’s critique of Agamben)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-lockdown-please-w-re-swedish  (Frederik Erixon)

#Illich #COVID19 #Agamben #biopolitics #ethics #vitalism

[assad-helovescoffee]

3/3/2021. “The Opening!”

I think it’s astonishing that the mind, not only has the ability to make connections that one could never have perceived as being connected, but even more impressive - perhaps - is its ability to finally establish a link that was seemingly evasive to the mind itself.

That’s a mouthful! We may have to read that again.

Istanbul gravitates a certain aura of mystery and adventure around it - at least that’s how I see it.

It’s a city with deep history and many opportunities. So when I was asked to accompany my friend [uh let’s say his name is Hayat for the sake of simplicity] to the famed city for a business trip - I couldn’t have turned down the opportunity. Every time I had come to Istanbul before, there was a deeply rooted reason attached to it. This time around, the trip felt carefree and more of a vacation for me - even though there was a serious objective laying ahead of us. Business!

Like in all trips that I ‘rarely’ have, I carried a sketchbook and a 2B pencil to accompany me during the boring travel hours - To note down and/or sketch my new observations during the trip.

The trip was standard; nothing out of the blue was happening. Well aside from noticing that my sketching skills had dramatically improved overnight. Wow, “modest much!”.

I paid no attention to it - the trip being nothing special that is. To be honest I was beaming because of my newly acquired ‘advanced’ sketching skills.

The trip felt too calm. But maybe that’s how it was meant to be. Maybe that’s what was special about this trip, that nothing had to be special about it. But you guessed it, it was merely the calm before the storm brewing within the small tea cup that is my life. Run the cliché “little did I know prose”...

Little did I know I would end up with a face full of tears on the night leading to 3rd March 2021.

But what had happened ? It all started with a causal conversation with my counterpart - Hayat. Genuinely, I picked the name Hayat inspired by a crunched-up bottle of water in my sight as I edit this blog. To my Turkish speakers, it is not a double entendre to mean “life” , as if I was having this conversation with myself or life. No! I’m not that deep and this conversation really did happen with a living breathing dragon... I meant human being.

The two of us shared a hotel room with twin beds. Obviously we were economising as any good business strategist would. Causal talk moved on to deep conversations which eventually led to the moment that broke me, but yet, built me up in a way I could never have expected.

It was a phoenix moment. Bursting into flames only to emerge from the ashes. Not quite simultaneously I must add. The moment I poetically burnt lasted a while and did a number on me.

The topic of conversation (I wish not to disclose due to personal reasons) involved me and my long term goals. Anyone who knows me knows that I love planning, and I think about the future perhaps more than I should - but just as much as I should (according to me at least).

My counterpart had shared some news/philosophy which was more than just a bitter pill to swallow. It had numbed my future plans and expectations for a good few minutes.

It felt like an attack on my future , at least I thought, only to later understand that it was an opening. Any chess player knows well that any move almost always simultaneously leads up to an opening. The cliché one closed door opens another couldn’t be more true.

And if cliché stuff were to run, mine would be the fastest.

As chess would have it, sieges often lead to openings. And at times being checked often opens up an opportunity that you couldn’t have seen unless, well... you are checked.

On my end, the “bad news” I had received stop seeming like a wasted move, and beautifully formed into what I call a ‘hidden move’ (which shall be discussed in a later blog post about my self preserved eloquence in chess). My feared defence led to a calculated attack. It’s safe to say that after the news I ended up more motivated than I was before. Maybe one day I’ll share more about it - “the revelation”. The tears that clouded my vision were in fact refracting me to my path. Recalibrating my vision for the future. Besides, it gave me a good and healthy cry from it.

Nothing beats a teary eye and chess parallels in a blog post! This is the start of something beautiful.

#istanbul #businesstrip #AssadHeLovesCoffee #coffeelover #chesslover

[lizzybeth1986]

Quick Thoughts on The White People Waambulance, Chapters 18 and 19

• Sorry this QT is coming out so late, guys. I regret to say my heart wasn't really in this one...and it hasn't been with regards to my QTs for a while. This one might be my last, unless we count me finishing them off for the (not rewritten) Book 1. It's been two years since I began, and the last two books made the process honestly really exhausting.

• I clubbed the two finale chapters together because I really couldn't be bothered to do separate ones for both.

• In fact...I won't be doing any of what I have been doing for my QTs so far. I'll be honest to you: I usually do multiple replays, the last few in tandem with the other routes on YouTube. I go through the scenes one by one. I keep note of differences and variations and carefully choose screenshots that will reflect the gist of the scenes.

But I couldn't be bothered to do any of that this time. I pressed the "continue" and then the "end book" buttons as soon as I finished my first run of those chapters. I'm drained, guys. And I don't think I'll be coming back to the TRH series at least, not even for Liam or Hana or Kiara. Maybe my mind will change by the time the second book comes out (update from present-day Lizzy: no it didn't) but I'm not counting on it. And you'll probably know why by the time this QT ends.

• TW: Discussions on racism, both fandom racism and from within the narrative. The last section of this QT is going to be...pretty heavy, guys.

There's also going to be a lot of anti-Drake, anti-Olivia, anti-Madeleine and anti-Penelope content here, so if you like any of those characters...well, you've been warned.

The ensuing post is going to be LONG, and I know a lot of you have good reasons not to deal with long posts, so here's a tldr:

1. The TRR writing team stick to their weird obsession for jobless whiny white men.

2. Read this book once and you'll feel like you're drowning in an ocean of white tears.

3. WOC continue to get scraps from the writing team, even as they boast of being diverse and inclusive. In fact, they're regularly treated as mere tokens, exotic eye-candy or non-entities, while their behaviour is measured on standards that are very different from their white counterparts (this happens in other books as well).

...okay I wasn't expecting for the tldr to be long too 😅

• Me @ my QTs then:

Me @ my QTs now:

• I'll probably be finishing off my TRR Book 1 QT series when I'm a little less burnt out, but for now this is where it ends, I guess.

• So...here is to summarize the last two chapters: Accident happens. LIs mad. Paparazzi sad (but largely get away scot-free). MC and baby safe. At the Council meeting Kiara slam dunks the murderer of Liam's mother with the style and elegance this fandom still refuses to acknowledge her for. The MC is nice to her for like half a second. Last Apple Ball. New clothes for everyone as if they had a Diwali bumper sale the week before or something. Godfrey is somehow responsible for the security (who thought this was a good idea) and seeing the Auvernese Royal Guard outside our doors is SO not-creepy.

We get to see if we impressed our Auvernese and Monterriso allies enough. Bradshaw compliments Kiara for like half a second. Olivia sees the dude from the Q&A session (Jin) at the Ball and (if you pay) you get to see her catch, interrogate and lowkey flirt with him.

Leona and Bianca make it to the ball (where is Bartie Sr. Where are Xinghai and Lorelei. Where is Regina) and this time the narrative makes sure to shoehorn a plot element into their presence here: Leona is there so we can do something about the reveal that she constantly ratted us out to the press for money. ("oh look! Walker Ranch was plot related after all! We have a reason (albeit a flimsy, paper-thin one) to set 9 whole chapters in Texas. Even though we had to literally come up with this bit in the last minute, because really - all we wanted to do as a writing team was nut collectively over Drake Walker")

(I also can't believe that between the time I wrote this line and the time this QT finally came out - they literally found a way to re-fucking-write Book 1 so they could nut collectively over Drake Walker earlier)

• Why were we required to dress down in Texas for these assholes when they couldn't even bother to dig up their Sunday best for this ball??? Oh right, they're Walkers. Hypocrisy runs in the family.

• Good thing is you can choose to banish Leona if you want. She's angry about it for a second then accepts it and leaves. But like what is the point of banishing her when she hardly even bothers to come there in the first place? She's not going to be bawling her eyeballs out saying "boohoo, they threw me out of this country that I spent like five minutes in and never even wanted to visit in the first place".

• Bianca is present at the end of Chapter 18 mainly to deliver to us a plot point at the very last minute: a clue about where we could find proof about Queen Eleanor's murder. Bianca mentions conversations Jackson had with her, and a secret room somewhere. Her leaving the palace and abandoning her children is addressed, and the MC gets to berate her. It's...short.

• Why this important piece of information was given to Bianca when idk LEO could have pitched in and spoken about it, no one knows. Oh wait. I keep forgetting. Bianca is Drake's mother. That's why.

• Okay so Amalas valiantly found out about Leona's involvement in this and gave us tangible proof via photographs. But we're kiiiinda forgetting that the scrutiny and privacy invasions were happening even before we hauled ass to Walker Ranch? Who was responsible for those? Who was the "source" that the Chapter 17 paparazzo was referring to, the one that mentioned they would triple the price for more photos of the Queen/Mother of the Heir (Coz like why would she do that. She's already broke)? How did Amalas come by this information so easily and why was she really that invested? Why is no one asking these questions? Why isn't the group asking these questions? Why are they stupid. Jesus, they're all so stupid. HOW ARE YOU SO STUPID, SQUAD.

• Shortly after they get rid of Leona and Bianca, the rest of the group give the happy couple a choice of toys for the nursery - and that's our final nursery purchase. You can either go for the corgi - which is on brand for the series by now I think - or the lion, which is seen as very Cordonian.

• More party shenanigans. We're nice to Kiara for another half-second. Kiara arranges a photoshoot for us. The team can't pretend to give a fuck anymore about its fans so they will ask us to pay for an edit that I've seen millions of edit-creators in the fandom do wayyyy better. Like let's be honest - compare the engagement shoot pics (messy as they were) to the shoots we eventually got this book. You can see the difference. You can tell which one required more work.

• Anyway, if you choose this scene you wind up going back to the ballroom, dance with your spouse, aaaaand it's time for another diamond option. This time your spouse gives you something you've been craving (mousse parfait for the Liam MC, chocolate chip cookies for the Hana MC, handmade chocolates for the Maxwell MC and a choice between bacon and a veg version of it for the Drake MC. Damn, team TRR. Your favouritism is showing). The couple also writes a letter to the baby that the child can read growing up, in a bit of a parallel to Eleanor's letter to Liam that we see at the end of the chapter.

• After this, Liam reveals he has been pondering over what Bianca said, and wants to find out where they could find that secret room. Cue Liam's own flashback scene for free. Godfrey bringing to Queen the same goblet that the RoE MC found in a flea market in Book 2 for Regina (or perhaps just a similarish one). Liam and Eleanor reciting a rhyme that turns out to have clues for the secret room.

• To give the team credit, they seem to have (finally) put some thought into this. Like this actually feels like Liam's scene. Not one that delivers information about his family but is really about another character. They seem to incorporate all the things Eleanor seemed to be known for - things that were hardly addressed in the books when it came to talk of her. She is shown with a love for books given that books and poetry form an important part of the clues she leaves for Liam. One of the books is about foraging, which is unsurprising considering her love for gardens that was established in Book 1 of TRR.

• So...like...nice job but why was practically everything about Eleanor (including the way she'd stand up to Constantine, her displeasure at the sound of Godfrey and Bartie's names, her nature that Liam not only inherited but also learned) left only for your finale? Why no buildup? Why was I seeing you lot constantly pandering to Drake's family the entire time? Why do I know way, way more about Jackson than I do about Eleanor whose story this WAS? Why is she and her son suddenly getting this burst of attention at the tail end??

• They still manage to push young!Drake into a scene focusing on Liam and Eleanor, so we can see how Eleanor's teaching of how to be a responsible royal began to make inroads into Liam's way of thinking. It's the ultimate irony, that Liam took his mother's advice so much to heart that he lets Drake stay in his home, eat his food, and complain about those dastardly nobles to his heart's content for free.

Poor Eleanor in her grave is like

• Very fitting, how Constantine's proposal to Eleanor happens in the hedge maze, very much like Liam's first declaration of love in Book 1.

• If you're married to Liam, you get an extra letter that's addressed to Liam's future wife. She clearly knew her days were to be numbered by the time she gave birth to that second child at least.

• Lmao @ how the team somehow managed to remember that Eleanor would have been Leo's stepmother too. He's mentioned a couple of times. They didn't have enough time to develop a sprite for young!Leo but somehow had all the time and resources to make one for young!Savannah who had literally no purpose in Drake's flashback scene? Hmm. Hmm.

• They somehow manage to find the twin to the RoE MC's gifted goblet that Godfrey gave Eleanor the night she died, and Liam reveals that he's been obsessed with poisons enough to know that it wasn't the drink that was poisoned, it was the cup itself. Everyone is shook.

• Love that extra little detail about Liam's obsession with learning about poisons and how it's a sign of how deeply Eleanor's death affected him. But tell me honestly if you remember this plot point coming up even once before in any significant way. Even during the one time a person is poisoned in the previous book (by the laws of karma, the victim in this instance is Godfrey's only daughter) Liam shows very few signs of this "obsession". At a time when he has also lost a father. Convenient how something that could have added more depth to Liam is kept aside until there's a scene where his knowledge is required. Convenient indeed.

• I kind of understand why Liam acts on impulse, okay. The man just discovered who murdered his mum, at least some amount of irrationality is allowed (esp considering he hardly got to express ANYTHING when his goddamn father died). But you'd think Liam's friends would hold him back and help him think this through? Convince him that there are more effective ways to confront and get a confession out of Godfrey who after is in charge of security at the moment? You seriously think charging into the ballroom and suddenly stripping this man of his titles is going to actually work??? You couldn't figure out how to make him vulnerable instead so that he wouldn't be able to escape???

• I mean like, sure, one could always rationalize it all as "well see Lizzy, they needed a dramatic end to this story and they needed to wrap this mystery up quick". But there were other ways they could have spread it out than make it all sound so...so random. And you bet we all know why the narrative had to scramble around last minute to solve this. It's because we spend half the damn book in a dilapidated ranch with a shit family!

• Anyway, Godfrey escapes...and the MC tells her spouse that she's going into labour after...two contractions? Um. Okay.

• So. That ends Book 1 of this new series. And with it my QTs, for this series at least. My QTs for Book 1 (the OG, not the rewrite) might continue, but I'd need to repeat my failplay again because I lost most of those screenshots 😭

General Thoughts on the Book:

• So far, this is what I can see as happening in the next book:

- The birth, obviously

- Any extra perks from our purchases (ie. the nursery and the garden)

- Subplots involving the LIs' conflicts regarding parenthood and their own childhoods

- The mystery behind Eleanor's death isn't quite over yet, nor is the truth behind the constant paparazzi presence in TRH. Leona was the scapegoat this time around, but how did Amalas get all this information so quickly?

- Where is Eleanor's other child? Olivia's investigations may or may not lead to that answer. I'm pretty sure Jin might be involved as well.

- Another possibility is that Madeleine may give us important information since she was potentially aware that Eleanor was pregnant at the time.

- The mystery behind Jackson's death and what he knew regarding Eleanor's condition.

- What part did Bartie Sr have to play in all this? How involved was Constantine in the murder (if in fact he was)? What more dark secrets will we learn about Constantine, Godfrey and Bartie Sr during this time? What ultimately caused the breakdown in Constantine and Jackson's relationship, since Drake mentions Jackson being around when Regina was Queen as well?

- Speaking of Regina, how involved was she in any of this? We know she was Godfrey's cousin-in-law and Bartie Sr made a comment on her during the announcement about the heir, and that she married Constantine a couple years after Eleanor's death, but was she aware of any of this or was she largely out of the major plot and brought in later to cement Godfrey's position and power?

- I'd mention the possibility that Lorelai could know something, but they didn't really give anyone connected to Hana any time at all, so I have my doubts.

- Operation Swan, and possibly a visit to Monterisso. Liam's younger sibling must be in one of these places but my guess is on Monterisso.

- I'm guessing the team will write a nice wedding for Penelope and Ezekiel next book, while Kiara continues to get scraps from the same team.

- Drake and Olivia will continue to eat into the plot. Madeleine will join this unholy trinity as well because they've set the stage for her to have plenty of angst.

With that over, these were my thoughts once this book was finished:

WHERE ARE THE DUCHESSES?

Remember how, back in Book 3, we all marvelled at the number of women in this country who were in positions of power? Adeleide and Emmeline were powerful duchesses while their husbands were secondary figures, and Joelle though married into a noble family is an influential artist and - according to Liam - the embodiment of King Fabian's values. It seemed like, despite the underlying sexism and racism in the story, women were at least at the forefront of Cordonian politics.

This is virtually gone in TRH1. Godfrey (who wasn't even interested in Krona in the first place, much less Cordonia) and Landon (whose only concern seemed to be Penelope, leaving Emmeline to manage the duchy) have a seat in the Council. In fact we never even see either of these woman in the book. I can maybe understand the logic behind not appointing Adeleide, but the fact that Emmeline is passed over for her far-less -qualified husband is a mystery to me!

Also, has anyone noticed how white-male-centered the whole Eleanor story is? Notice how we never see Eleanor's friends, besides Jackson? We never see any of the courtly ladies of that era? She's the Queen. She'd have her own court. I find it impossible that Eleanor would have no interactions of importance among her own goddamned court, that Joelle, Emmeline or Adeleide wouldn't even be mentioned in her story thus far. It's fascinating that forget being part of her story - these women are largely forgotten in the book itself.

(Note: It's also important to add that none of Kiara's family - besides Zeke - makes an appearance this book. At all. One member of Penelope's family and one member of Madeleine's family is in the council, but we never really see or hear anything from Kiara's, even though Hakim was Constantine's old friend and Joelle could have easily been connected to Eleanor, given that Eleanor was exactly the kind of ruler Joelle would have loved and respected.

While we're on that subject, Lorelai could have been connected to Eleanor as well - considering that we know next to nothing about her years in Shanghai. There were ways Hana's story could have been tied into the overall plot as well that were largely ignored. The fact that both the main and secondary WOCs presented opportunities for better plot and story, and despite that they were largely ignored in the books...I think that says a lot. But I will get into more of that in detail in a different section).

LI SPACE AND STORY

• Now...as we all know, The TRR/TRH series is primarily a romance-focused book first, with an underlying plot about royalty and politics. So it makes sense to evaluate the book based on what it gives its love interests. That includes the number of scenes they get, and the kind of focus their story is given. So...here's the rundown of how that goes in TRH Book 1:

Liam: Overall, not too bad. He gets one individual scene, a free and paywalled childhood scene (though the free one is essential for the group's realization of who killed Eleanor). The letter his mother writes to Liam includes an extra section towards the end, meant for the MC who marries him. However, we must note that a lot of this "attention" was thrust into the very final chapter of this book, and 99% of the same book didn't exactly make an attempt to explore his inner thoughts on anything - his mother's death, the dealings with the foreign countries, his political activities. Eleanor being pregnant came from a scene that made Olivia the center of attention, the MC had the opportunity to ask him how he was feeling only once or twice, and most of the time the narrative relegated it all to "the matter is still being investigated". It's a slight improvement from the absolute lack of concern the MC and the narrative showed about Liam's emotional state post his father's death in Book 3, but not much.

Variations wise, the team did step up on the basic ones for most of the LIs, so clearly we've moved past the days of seeing cut-paste scenes and the likes of Liam and Hana saying "I'm so dumb in love with you". However, in playthroughs where the MC is Liam's wife and Queen of Cordonia, her lack of genuine concern for her country and lack of curiosity about the place she's ruling, sticks out like a sore thumb. The fandom loves to highlight how the plot is "written for Liam" or is "easier in Liam's playthrough", but besides his own child being the heir, nothing else from Book 3 onwards seems like it was particularly written with him in mind.

Drake: Hoo boy. So 2019 was clearly the year that many people didn't believe me about Drake eating up space, and the year they had to eat their words because in TRH it was too obvious to be ignored. On an overall scale you cannot avoid the extra perks even his LI scenes got - his Valtoria scene in Chapter 4 was longer, set in a different place and he was allowed to expand on his decision to say yes to Liam's request in a way Hana and Maxwell never were. We learned way more about his familial relationships and dynamics than all the LIs combined. His childhood scene was the first to be given variants depending on whether the MC was his wife or not. His sister's wedding takes up almost half the book, leaving little to no space for either the intrigue, or even the pregnancy that was supposed to be THE most important part of the book.

An insane amount of retconning was done to emphasize strongly on the "marshmallow" part of his personality, having him state time and again that for the MC he can even "sport a tutu if you said you had a thing for the Sugar Fairy". Part of these changes could be attributed to the backlash the team got for having him call a pink cake "girly".

There is a strong possibility that Jackson might be explored further in the second book, and it's no surprise considering that he's the one parent that is most talked about in the series. The book looks like it was truly written with Drake in mind, with a heavy dose of Olivia, and everyone else was added as a bit of an afterthought.

Maxwell: Pretty awful treatment for a character that the head writer of the team claims to like. He has no individual character scenes, and one childhood scene where his older brother Bertrand is given more focus. Ironically, Maxwell was more wary of Bartie Sr in TRR Book 2 than Bertrand was, but somehow they changed this little detail so that Maxwell could be written out of his own story.

His LI scenes were also not given much effort - some were badly written, and some scenes (like the free ones) showed little to no variations between the friendly and romantic playthroughs. One that comes to mind is the baby announcement photoshoot, which was so poorly done it added nothing of value to the character or the relationship.

Like the last book, Maxwell isn't allowed much development in TRH1, and he's still forced into a largely "court jester" role in the story. This reflects very poorly on him in certain situations, such as the chapter where we finally get glimpses of his book. The aim was to be humourous and light about the events of the series, but he comes out of it sounding thoroughly insensitive towards his friends, none of whose consent he took to write this self-centered pile of garbage.

However, there is hope that they might do things a bit better for him next book, if the rewrite of him in TRR 2.0 was anything to go by. However, it would be awful if they tried to do a better job of him and then left out Hana. Speaking of which...

Hana: I'm going to begin this section with a comparison to another character, someone who should have been treated as a secondary character - Olivia.

Olivia in this book has 2 character scenes (they're very plot driven, but they also explore her outside of her friendship with the MC and dynamic with the group). The spy scene with Auvernese royalty, and the scene with Jin, the Auvernese spy. An entire chapter is spent in her duchy (by now we've seen Lythikos four times and I'm now sick of the place), and she winds up taking over Maxwell's Q&A scene as well.

So that's technically 2.5 scenes AND a childhood scene that revolves around her even though it's about Liam's mother. In addition to this, Olivia also gets her own mini-book, The Royal Holiday, that revolves (again) around her duchy and has the group clamouring to give her attention when no one else wants to.

Here are the stats for Hana, who by virtue of being an LI, is also a potential co-protagonist in the series:

Nothing.

Zilch. Zip. Zero. Nada. Nothing.

She has one childhood scene that is part of the group's scenes - a beautiful, heartbreaking one that serves as a slap in the face to anyone who'd dared to be dismissive of what she went through earlier - but none after that, and no individual scenes either. The team - in one of their most offensive choices this book - force a storyline where she has fertility issues just so the MC can be the one carrying the child, and the same MC can opt(!!) to ask about her well-being after two days. The same MC has the chance to whine about not getting pregnant soon enough in front of Hana.

There have been a few efforts made to make the MC appear more caring towards Hana: she can angrily defend Hana against Isabella's jibes, and she can make Hana relax for once during the baby shower (unlike the wedding reception where the same MC treated her like a bridesmaid). The MC even gets to tell her wife that she should never consider herself secondary or unimportant.

All of these are nice, but at the end of the day they're all scraps. I'd equate it to how we're allowed to give Kiara compliments on the final two chapters, but the white women around her still get a far bigger chunk of space, story and attention dedicated to them. The team have a pattern of adding these tiny tidbits that will temporarily satisfy stans while still maintaining the status quo, and that's precisely what's happening here. Its important for us to understand this. Underneath all this surface concern and all these scraps, Hana is still getting dust in place of actual story and characterization. And given that they made ZERO major changes to Hana's scenes in TRR 2.0, I'm not expecting that to change.

As for the book in general...I don't have to go into why this book is a mess, do I? We all know. We've all witnessed how disproportionate the writing has been and while I'm glad more and more people recognize what I've been seeing since Book 3, it's sad that it took 9 whole chapters in Walker Ranch for so many to understand exactly how much space Drake has been eating up for no good reason.

BLACK HOLES AND WHITE TEARS

I'll begin this section by talking about Drake Walker. He's the most prominent sign of the larger problem.

Drake Walker is what I call a Black Hole LI. And yes I mean black hole as in the one that exists in space (Beckett from TE also fits into this category). He is the kind of LI that sucks up everything. Love. Light. Joy. Common sense. Other characters' spaces.

He is the kind of love interest that will have Liam's traumatic experience centered around him. The kind of love interest for whose problems - largely created by his mammoth ego - we have to resolve in Shanghai, the home of the lone female LI. While that same female LI gets nothing, and then disappears in a subsequent chapter. The kind of love interest whose love confession can take precedence even over the MC's own issues (remember the Beaumont House chapter in Book 1? The one that took place the day after Tariq nonconsensually kissed the MC? 98% of the dialogue revolved around Drake's feelings. Not about the faulty lock, not the possibility that the MC's security had been tampered with - Drake's feelings). The kind of love interest that was given an entire extra wedding and artwork for his mother in Book 3 itself - none of which were given to any other LI.

A Black Hole LI is totally the kind of LI that would get 9 whole chapters in their home while we have never even visited the homes of the others since the early books of the previous series.

This wasn't something that began just this book. It's been a constant since Book 2, and you can even see signs of his story gaining way more importance in Book 1. It's also not something we can - in all honesty - blame simply on finances and fan popularity: the writers confirmed Drake to be one of their favourites, and attempts to give his scenes additional perks (eg plot elements pushed into both the Whiskey scene and the Beaumont Office scene) happened long before they could make any conclusions about his popularity. I bought the Beaumont Office scene to find out more about that family. I bought the Marshmallow scene so I could find out more about Liam and Hana's conversation post Coronation (remember - Hana was never even allowed to speak about her return to Cordonia because that scene was given to Drake). I bought the Italian Restaurant scene to learn more about Liam's assassination. The funny thing about all these three is that these were their stories to tell, yet Drake is the focus. Quite a few of Drake's initial scenes sold because the team consistently made the effort, consistently ensured that the information from his scenes would benefit us in the long run. The narrative allowed for Drake to have his own story, and additionally let aspects of his story overshadow that of the other LIs' (see the examples I've given above). Even though he has very little of value to contribute to the larger story (no job, his friendships are shallower than a wash-basin, and no genuine communication with any commoner in the story - only endless whining).

The treatment Drake gets that no other LI does, is a problem in itself, but it also is a small part of an even bigger issue. He isn't the only white character who gets this sort of attention and detail to his story.

Take Olivia, for example. Started out as a rival to the MC, before her sad sad childhood and her genuine love for Liam was revealed in the Book 1 finale. Over the course of the story, her role changed from petty rival to Warrior Duchess to reluctant bff. Over the course of the original series, Olivia became one of the most prominent characters in the story, on par with the male LIs. I'm not sure how many people realize that Lythikos is the ONLY duchy in the kingdom we've seen thrice (four times if you count Holiday). To give you an idea of how big a deal that is, here's how many times we've visited other duchies besides the capital and Applewood:

Fydelia - 2

Portavira - 1

Castelserraillian - 1

Ramsford (the home of our sponsors!) - 1

Hana's mother's home - Never.

Lythikos has a detailed familial and cultural history, and I wouldn't be lying if I said we know more about this one region than we know about the entire country of Cordonia. And honestly for me, the obsession with this one duchy has reached saturation point. Lythikos is not Cordonia. Lythikos is not all there is to Cordonia or even the only place that should matter. Yet it seems the team is more than eager to flog that horse until there's nothing of interest left.

Olivia is the only character who gets an entire mini book that revolves around comforting her and making her feel better about her background and origins. I don't think we've ever given Hana this much attention when she left her home for us. Or when she was being bullied by Madeleine. Or when she was the other bride in that grand wedding. Or when we received the news that carrying a child to term would be dangerous for her body. Or --

We were given an entire mini-book to comfort Olivia - the woman who continued to call Hana "damaged goods" and " a failure" for not marrying a man, while Hana's friend/wife stood by and watched. The woman who didn't have to think twice before making snide remarks about an equally skilled courtier who never did her any harm, only because she could get away with it. Istg when I heard that most of the court snubbed her during that first event in Holiday, this was my reaction:

Like girl I feel bad for you but at least now you know how it feels to be held responsible for shit beyond your control!

Hana, in the meantime, is forced time and again into situations that would break most people - but with very little payoff. Her arc with her parents was given a resolution that confirmed that Hana could only be considered worthy if she was useful. She was made to interact time and again with the woman who harmed her with such glee in Book 2. The MC - as a friend or as a wife - is at best neglectful of her issues and at worst someone who uses and discards Hana as she sees fit. And now...in her romantic playthrough she's given a storyline that doesn't allow her to bear children easily, and the MC spends less than two minutes to actually check on her. Hana is one of the co-protagonists, yet a side character given the treatment she should be getting. One could technically blame finances for the way she's being treated too, but keep in mind that the bad treatment goes as far back as the Applewood chapters in Book 1. Technically a time when she was bringing in money.

I get it. Olivia is a fan favourite. Many in the fandom wanted her to be an LI, the writers didn't, so they carved out this middle path where she'd have a major portion of the story anyway. But keep in mind that a lot of this attention came - and is still coming - at the cost of Hana. The team pretty much gave Olivia what they'd been refusing to give Hana all along.

On a smaller scale, you see similar patterns with the secondary characters - especially the women of the court. Madeleine and Penelope had elaborate backstories designed to make people forgive and sympathize with them, and Kiara - even though her backstory in Book 1 was inherently tragic and deserved to be handled sensitively - was given validation with great reluctance from the team, and with no consequences if we treated her cruelly. Even now, the team has only tossed Kiara a couple of scraps in the final chapter, while already setting the stage for Madeleine to get her own tragic "patriotism" arc for TRH Book 2, and a possible wedding for Penelope in the near future.

The difference here doesn't just lie in who gets attention and who doesn't. It lies in how the MC is supposed to view these women as well. A lot more sympathy and understanding is automatically extended to the white women, and the MC faces consequences if she fails to acknowledge their pain. Far less sympathy is offered by default to the black and the Asian woman - the MC may be friends with Hana but a huge chunk of their relationship is mostly about the MC benefiting from Hana's skills without giving much in return.

Even though their misdeeds are acknowledged and spoken about, both Madeleine and Penelope are written in such a way that the problems they're currently facing matter more than anything they've ever done in the past. Hana is made to sweet-talk Madeleine despite being bullied by her in a previous book. The MC herself never gets ANY opportunity to directly address what Penelope put her through in Portavira, because what the MC went through matters less than Penelope's condition.

Compare this to the relatively small scale of Kiara's "misdeed" (being honest about not continuing with an alliance - I'm surprised people think this is an actual thing to be offended about!), and the way the MC is allowed to mistreat her sans consequences afterwards. We're even allowed to call Kiara a snob in the books - which isn't at all true if you look at any of her scenes in canon - and constantly make fun of her desire to learn (in fact, if anyone in the series could be called a snob, it would be Olivia). If I were to sum up how a woman of colour is spoken about in the books, vs a white woman - this screenshot would do the trick:

(Notice how none of the options to speak about Penelope allow us to speak rudely of her, yet in Kiara's case we're allowed to make judgements on her as a person. In Hana's case, while we don't exactly drag her the way we can drag Kiara - we get precious few opportunities to actually defend or support her when others talk rubbish about her).

When you explore the series overall, it's impossible to ignore the casual racism that makes disrespecting people of a certain race/colour easier than on another. It's impossible not to see where the narrative chooses to give consequences to an MC who treats a white woman badly, and where it allows the very same MC to suspect, and then (optionally) gaslight, a woman of colour a couple chapters later. It's impossible not to see which people are meant to be respected despite their bad behaviour, and which people can still be treated badly despite their better behaviour. It's impossible not to see a pattern emerging.

This is not even a problem that plagues only the TRR series. From TCaTF to ACOR to Platinum to even MoTY, there is an ongoing pattern of discrepancies between the way white people and people of colour - particularly women - are treated. Many POC characters are placed in situations where it's easier for them to suffer/die/be shown disrespect, than it is to show them kindness or mercy. MOC are regularly either exoticized (Prince Hamid is the most glaring example of this) or placed in very traumatic situations for which the payoff isn't always going to be that great (I know this happens to Dallas, but I don't know about the payoff for Syphax).

WOC particularly suffer quite a bit in a lot of PB novels, in comparison to their white counterparts. Rowan Thorne of TCaTF, as a character, didn't deserve for her death to be made easier than her survival (in contrast to Diavolos, who was given far more opportunities AND will live simply by virtue of allying with Kenna), any more than Kiara deserved to be interrogated by the people who should have been concerned for her safety or Xanthe deserved to be shipped to slavery. All this, while a Vanessa (who is in a position of power and who plays an active role in rendering the MOTY MC financially helpless) gets a diamond scene where she "explains" her situation and a Madeleine doesn't even have to hear about her bullying from her victims.

The fandom, too, has contributed to this on a number of occasions. Speaking specifically of TRR, how many times have we seen Hana being dragged on Olivia posts? (also, if we were really measuring Olivia by the impossible standards that we held for Hana's characterization, Olivia would appear pretty damn one-note too: after all, 80% of her characterization consists of knife jokes). How many times was Hana being looked at with disdain for either her niceness or the poor writing for her, while the same fandom would regularly coo over a nice-presenting Penelope (whose characterization is one of the most inconsistent in the series)? How many times have we seen Kiara being called a creep/obsessed for merely looking at a man, while almost no one judges Olivia for kissing a man without his consent? How many times have people forgiven a traitorous Penelope and hated on a far more innocent Kiara in the same breath? How often did the fandom hate on Liam for accepting the MC's advances after she rejected him, yet not say a word when Drake did the same thing? How many times has Maxwell been loved for his humour and childlike nature while people of colour with a similar personality (Lily from Bloodbound, for example) were hated on instantly? Clearly, there have been more instances of people in the fandom sympathizing automatically with the white character, than with characters of colour. Time and again, brown and black characters - particularly women - have been required to match up to impossible standards (if they're nice they're boring. If they don't like the MC they're <insert every gendered sexist insult you can think of here>). The standards are far more relaxed for white characters, and they're often given more breathing room and to most of what they want without the constant judgement that black and brown women get. The standards set up for both are grossly different.

Racism is a beast that assumes many forms - and not all forms of racism will appear obvious to some, especially when such stereotypes are so normalized in media and popular fiction that we almost accept it at first. Almost. To get to the root of why there's such an imbalance in this series - among others - we need to first acknowledge the sexism and racism that are such a vital part of its narrative, and that its fandom regularly buys into and (sometimes unwittingly) promotes.

At this point, it's important to understand that having queer characters or characters of colour simply exist in the books isn't enough. Token rep can be found in PB's books by the dozens, but at the end of the day it means nothing if there is a constant reluctance, over and over and over, to treat those characters with the same care and sensitivity that they treat their white ones (or their "exoticized brown" ones).

• Like I mentioned earlier, I won't be playing TRH from this point forward, but I do hope to finish my TRR QTs soon. I have a LOT of thoughts! If you'd like to be tagged on those, do tell me!

#long post #tw: racism from pb #tw: fandom racism #trh quick thoughts #trh qts #king liam #hana lee #maxwell beaumont #anti drake walker #anti olivia nevrakis #anti trr madeleine #anti trr penelope #trr kiara

[theawkwardterrier]

Though It's Called Dancing (to me it's romancing)

A Steggy Secret Santa gift for @plumandfinch​! Here’s some WWII Steggy for you - hope you enjoy, and have a very happy holiday and a great year ahead. 😁✨🎁

Summary: Five times Steve and Peggy almost danced, and one time they did.

AO3 link here.

i.

The girls trust Steve to hold them up for the finale and he hasn’t let them down yet, but after three shows where he either almost gives a showstopping topple tripping on his own feet or steps on one of theirs, they tell Martin the show manager that they’re quitting unless Steve gets some help.

“You have anything to say about this?” Martin grumbles incredulously to Steve, who just shrugs and replies, “Hey, if they listened to me, you’d already be dealing with a union.”

He’s actually glad that someone’s mentioned his clumsiness, his lack of coordination, and come up with a suggestion for how to help him: he came to the theater today with his shoes flopping on his feet because he tore out another pair of laces while trying to tie them. The serum might have fixed a lot of things for him, but it’s changed them as well, and in some alarming ways. It isn’t too likely that he could have been involved in the dance number even before his body got expanded to its new awkward, confusing size, but at least then he knew how much space he was taking up, how much force to exert for simple tasks. He should have just asked the girls for help sooner, but he’s still shy with them.

They don’t let that stop them from putting together a curriculum to help him ease into the new body. Soon he’s stopped having to sew the buttons back onto his shirts, and he doesn’t keep stabbing his fingers with the needle if he does. He can help with the hair before shows if the dressing room doesn’t have a mirror and the others are rushing around worrying about their own costumes (well, he doesn’t expect to be the first choice, at least not yet).

One night after they’ve just arrived in Chicago, Steve and a group of the dancers go out to a late dinner in Chinatown. Steve shows off his use of chopsticks, something that he didn’t even know how to do before the serum.

Sheila, who’s been working on her education degree by correspondence, says thoughtfully, “I just worry that we’ve focused too much on your fine motor skills—”

“I’m happy to focus on any of Steve’s fine skills,” Erin cracks, and Steve, immune to such remarks at this point, just rolls his eyes at her.

“—and we’ve neglected the gross motor skills,” Sheila finishes, glaring at Erin across the table.

“So what does that mean, She?” asks Jackie, leaning her head against Sheila’s shoulder.

Sheila rests her head atop Jackie’s for a moment then sits up straight and grins. “I think it means dance lessons.”

Steve turns down the suggestion that they find a nightclub (he doesn’t particularly feel like showing off his lack of skill in public) and they all turn down Erin’s suggestion that Steve prove he’s truly mastered his fine motor skills by picking the lock on the theater. But the next night, they simply don’t leave after their evening performance, sitting around smoking cigarettes and chatting as the stagehands take down the trappings of the Star Spangled Show. Martin sticks around to confirm that the props and costumes are boxed up for tomorrow’s drive to Cincinnati (or is it Columbus? Or maybe Cleveland). As soon as the last crate is checked off of his list, he gets his hat and coat and heads back to their hotel with an admonishment that they’ll be leaving at 8 AM sharp, which he seems not to care to really enforce.

Susie has already snuck into the theater manager’s office and brought back a portable record player. Steve isn’t sure what they would have done if the man hadn’t had one around; danced to a faraway radio, or someone humming probably.

Jackie takes Steve’s hands in hers and leads him out of the wings toward the stage. Susan puts on a Benny Goodman record at full volume, shimmying her hips a little as the drums and horns start up. Steve suddenly feels nervous, a little wrong, and he isn’t sure that it’s only because the song is faster than he expected, or because the others have started dancing and even without choreography they’re much better than he could ever hope to be. He just...these are his friends, but this isn’t how he imagined going dancing for the first time.

“I don’t know that I—” he starts, but then he hears a throat clear behind him.

“Well, this isn’t precisely what I expected to find, Private Rogers.”

He turns. “Agent Carter,” he says stupidly. He forgets to salute or even stand particularly straight; it’s as if his brief stint of doing something actually military had never even happened. She smiles at him anyway.

“I was taking meetings at Camp Atterbury,” she says, as if he’s done the normal, conversational thing and actually remembered to ask what she’s doing around here. “And I heard that there was quite the entertainment to be had in town. Unfortunately, we were delayed, so I wasn’t quite able to catch the show.”

“Good thing you’re catching us now,” Erin cracks as she dances past. “I think this is actually our best side.” She’s kicked off her shoes, and spins away barefoot, skirt ballooning wide, with what Steve can only describe as joy.

“We’re trying to teach Steve some rhythm,” Jackie explains quietly. “And how to move those big feet of his.”

Steve adds sheepishly, “I’ve told them I’m perfectly happy just tapping my toes on the sidelines. Even I can manage that.”

Agent Carter tilts her head. “I think you can aspire to a little more than that.” Steve suddenly remembers her standing with Erskine on the field at Camp Lehigh, the two of them walking to the mess beside each other. He’s felt a lot of different things since he was declared a failure and sent here, anger and regret and shame at once again not being fit to serve, able to help, but now he feels guilt: Erskine gave his life for Steve to be what he is, and he’s wasting it.

The relentless beat of the song dies off, and Martha trades out the record because she’s the closest. Despite the brassy blare of the opening, the music is slower this time. Steve thinks he recognizes the melody vaguely from some picture show years back.

He clears his throat. “I can probably manage this one,” he tells Jackie, but even as he says it, he notices the way she’s glancing over at Sheila, who’s still twirling by herself in a more sedate solo dance rather than pairing up like some of the others. “Unless you’d rather—”

“I could step in if you—” Agent Carter says at the same time, clearly having noticed as well.

Jackie flashes a smile at the two of them. “Thank awfully,” she says quickly before she twists between the dancers and slides her arms around Sheila.

Steve watches them for a moment before he turns back. “We don’t have to,” he says. “I mean, I think this was more about letting everyone blow off some steam, maybe have a bit of fun. Being on the road all together can be sort of rough - working all the time, and under each other’s feet. Not that there aren’t good parts, and of course we don’t have it as bad as some, obviously, not nearly, but this is just—” Agent Carter is staring at him with a bit of a smile, but Steve assumes that it must just be a politely automatic sort of thing at this point; for all he knows she’s wishing she’d missed not just the show but all of this too. He takes in a breath. “Anyway, we don’t have to dance if you don’t want to.”

“And if I did?”

The simple question stuns him. He almost doesn’t know what to say. Then: “Would you join me, Agent Carter?” It’s a little startled, not particularly suave, but he knows that it’s sincere. He holds out a hand.

When she smiles at him, it is like a secret. “It’s certainly been some time since I had a little fun, so I thank you for the invitation, Private Rogers.” She places her fingers in his.

“You can...You can call me Steve,” he says as they walk over to join the others swaying dreamily. “If you want.”

“Hmm. I well might.” She places a hand on his shoulder. He knows he’s meant to wrap his arm around her waist - he’s watched enough dancing for that - but it takes him a moment to decide exactly where to slide his hand, a moment to gauge the correct angle and force, a moment to actually begin what he came here tonight to do...and in that moment, there’s a familiar whistle followed by the inevitable shout.

“Alright, break it up, there.” The police sergeant here looks nearly the same as his Brooklyn counterparts with whom Steve is familiar: not just the uniform, really, but that bit of smug power to his face. “We’ve had a call from the church about noise coming from in here far too late at night, so break it up, ladies—oh, sorry, didn’t see you there, sir.” There’s a bit of a mocking edge to the tone; Steve is wearing civilian clothes instead of the getup he’s usually forced into onstage, but these days a seemingly able-bodied man still hanging around is something to comment on, especially one who doesn’t seem to be doing much good.

Steve would stand up to him (probably more easily now that they can actually stand nose to nose) but the part about them being here when they aren’t meant to be isn’t wrong. Still, he can’t help but feel the sting of disappointment. Agent Carter is still planted firm and warm beside him. What if things had been allowed to continue, at least a few moments longer?

“Alright, we’re going, keep your socks on,” Erin yells back as Agnes takes the needle off the record. Susan runs it back to the office it came from while the rest of them scramble around, finding shoes and jackets and hair ribbons. The officer seems content to keep an eye until they’re all safely gone.

Steve stands on the side with Peggy. Her uniform is still perfectly put together; there’s nothing for her to gather. The two of them don’t speak until the whole group is ready to go. They allow themselves to be swept out of the building, watching as the cop locks up the theater and stands in front of the doors as if they might try something with him. Instead, they all turn and begin walking in the crisp midnight air.

Steve puts his hands in his pockets. The others around them are walking arm in arm or twirling gently through the streets, taking one night where they aren’t worried about whether the touring company will decide to close up shop or if they’ll hear something terrible from their brothers and beaux overseas. They hum their way along, still lit up from an evening of dancing not for work but only for themselves, and it gives sanctuary for Steve to speak. He doesn’t quite look up at the woman walking next to him, more over to the side of her, when he offers, “We’re on to Ohio next. If you want to see the show there.”

She laughs gently. “I’m afraid that my engagement here isn’t much longer either. I’m expected elsewhere tomorrow evening.”

“Of course.” That’s honest - he isn’t surprised, of course she has bigger, better things to be doing. He does his best not to sound disappointed, though. Then he remembers that he fumbled two of his lines in yesterday’s matinee (when they’re written right there in front of him, for Pete’s sake) and - despite the best efforts of his teachers and his own improvements - nearly pulled the curtain down early when he overbalanced coming in on his cue, and is a bit glad that she won’t be sticking around.

The streetlight where she’s stopped throws her face partway into shadow. “I do have to thank you for the opportunity to dance. It’s been quite a long time for me, and even if it was interrupted, it was—Thank you, Steve.”

“Of course,” he says again, and that’s honest too.

“Next time, I do hope that there won’t be any members of law enforcement to interrupt,” she says, and disappears around a corner before he can ask, with hope or astonishment or both, “Next time?”

ii.

They’ve moved most of the paintings from the National Gallery, but Steve doesn’t know when he’ll have another free day in London so he goes to see what he can see.

When he’d manage to scrape together entry fare (or sneak in) to one of the museums in New York, he’d always get disapproving stares from docents and other visitors for his fraying clothing and aching cough, the generally held knowledge that he did not belong here. And he would manage to put it out of his mind by focusing on the vivid detail on a Japanese drum or how Monet made blurriness into beauty.

Today, people stare at him for a different reason and he ignores them all the same, eyes focused forward to the canvases displayed. So much of it is about the war, ruined buildings and bomb shelters, and Steve concentrates on the brush strokes or crosshatching instead, the clever use of shadow.

He has managed this so successfully that he doesn’t even notice the line forming nearby until it is a dozen or so people deep. When he asks one of them what they’re waiting for, they look at him not with pity for his not knowing but with delight that he will now learn: “It is nearly time for today’s concert.”

Luckily, he has British coins in his pocket, so he pays his shilling and walks in with the rest. The program advertises some Chopin piece. He doesn’t recognize what it is or the player - according to the others around him, Dame Myra Hess, who began organizing these lunchtime concerts at the outset of the war, has herself played here over one hundred times but not today - and he’s never considered himself a musical expert of any means. But he finds that he is drawn in by the tired ripple of excitement that hovers over the crowd as they file in.

And then Peggy Carter seats herself at the end of his row.

He tries to focus on the playing as the concert itself begins, on the slow, spare beginning and all its promises, but he can’t keep himself from glancing toward the last seat on the row.

Ten minutes in, she starts to cry.

Since he arrived, he’s seen other Londoners shedding occasional tears on the buses and street corners (and no wonder, with their city destroyed, so many loved ones dead and the country still soldiering wearily on) and he doubts anyone would judge her for it. But she stands from her aisle seat and sees herself out anyway, quietly, her tears silent and even the click of her heels barely audible over the music

He follows her. (It is much more noticeable.)

Outside, she is leaning against a wall, her hands covering her face. He waits for a moment before actually approaching: though he followed her, had to follow her, he isn’t sure whether she will be exasperated that he has done so, embarrassed that she was even seen by anyone more than strangers. But he can’t just stay frozen watching her forever (surely that must be worse?) so he takes a step forward.

“Agent Carter,” he says softly. “Is there anything I can do?”

She sobs aloud, once, uncovering her face to wipe at her tears with her fingertips. It’s a bit beyond that. He digs around in his pocket to find a thankfully clean handkerchief (you were right, Ma). She accepts it and dabs at her eyes again, glancing up at him only briefly.

“If you’re going to see me in this state,” she says, “you should probably call me Peggy.” She takes in one last decisive sniff, crumpling the handkerchief in her hand.

“Peggy, then.” He tries to say it like any other name instead of with the softness that is his instinct. “Can I help?”

“It isn’t anything—” She smiles but it breaks in a moment. “It isn’t anything that can really be helped.” A sigh. She looks down at her hands. “I had a brother. His name was Michael.”

“I’m sorry,” says Steve, because he doesn’t know what else to tell her. “I’m sorry that you lost him.”

I understand, he could add, or I know it’s hard, it always is but he thinks about whether he would have liked to hear someone say such things to him, and he keeps his mouth shut. She looks at him with care, and he can’t help but admire the way she can evaluate him even through the remains of her tears.

Apparently she makes a decision, because she says, “It happened several years ago now. And it isn’t any sort of anniversary, I was just listening to the piano and...He played. Michael did. Just a bit, when he was young. And he never played that particular piece, but just listening to it, I had the most sudden memory of his picking out carols on our aunt Hester’s piano, making faces at me all the time. Now I know that he was mostly mucking about with it all - he certainly never could have pulled off Chopin - but back then he was the most talented player in the world. I was always following him about and for years he acted as older brothers tend to toward younger sisters. But when it counted, I was able to depend on him. There was a time when he saw me clearly when no one else did, myself included.”

“And now he’s gone.” Steve tries to say it gently, a fact laid before them, but he knows she might hear the words as cruel, regardless of his intentions.

She does, in fact, begin crying again, but more quietly. “Now he’s gone,” she agrees, once again attempting to mop up her tears. “But I know myself again, and I have him to thank for it.”

“Then I’d like to thank him too.”

She regards him with something bordering on caution, not because she is a fearful person but because she is a sharp one and because she recognizes, as clearly as he does, that whatever tender thing is growing unspoken in the silence between them, it will be ill-regarded in the middle of war, in the middle of the work they are meant to be doing together.

“Is he bothering you, dear?” The woman’s voice - pointed and piercing - startles him. He turns to find a glaring, gray-haired lady behind his shoulder. Her stout form is wrapped in a plum wool suit and she grasps a black umbrella with which it seems she would happily stab him. Instead, when he brings his eyes to meet hers, she asks, “Are you bothering her, young man?” drawing herself up as much as she can and glaring imperiously.

“No, ma’am,” he manages. “We were just—” He flounders there: talking about her dead brother, or having another one of these moments that we try to pretend away won’t work very well.

“Going to dance,” Peggy inserts smartly.

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, yes.” Peggy speaks as if this is the most natural response in the world, as if she isn’t even now tucking a damp handkerchief into her pocket. “Captain Rogers saw how lovely I found the music, and as we aren’t able to see the concert ourselves, he wondered if we might take advantage another way.”

“Really.” The woman watches Steve suspiciously, as if he might be controlling Peggy through marionette strings or a gun pressed to her back. If only you knew, he thinks wryly as Peggy brushes her hair behind her ear and subtly elbows him in the process.

“May I?” he says in hasty reaction, holding out a hand. She puts hers into it graciously.

“I do wish the piece were a bit better for dancing,” Peggy says as they step away to a free space farther from the wall, though they are still being observed. More quietly she adds, “And I do wish we’d perhaps had time at least to practice before we were put under the microscope, as it were.”

He certainly wishes for that practice too, or even that they didn’t have to be in this situation at all. But there is also...if he’s going to be forced to dance, he would like it to be with Peggy.

And then with a few last flourishes, the music draws to a close. There are applause from within the hall. Steve doesn’t quite let go of Peggy’s hand.

“Well,” says their overseer, giving a couple firm taps of her umbrella against the floor, “it seems that you will have to return for tomorrow’s concert. Or perhaps find a more appropriate venue for dancing than a national museum.”

Peggy says magisterially, “Of course. Thank you for that advice. For next time.”

Next time. Steve knows that she’s just making the next move in the charade, but as she gestures for Steve to join her for the walk back to headquarters, the words play over in his head: next time.

iii.

“Non!”

This is why, Steve reflects, shaking his head, they had not allowed Dernier to have a baton to use while directing his lessons: he would have certainly used it to literally smack Dugan into shape by now.

“Never mind about all this,” Dugan growls, picking up the hat that had fallen on the ground when he had been too ambitious with a turn in his last attempt. “The ladies will just have to accept that not every man can waltz and satisfy themselves with all my other talents.”

Morita holds out his hands again, palms up. “Come on, you haven’t even really tried.” He wiggles his fingers enticingly. “Dance with me, Dugan.”

“I’d do it,” advises Gabe. “No lady should have to...satisfy herself with a badly brewed cup of coffee or the same six Irish songs performed off-key. Good to have at least one usable skill in the pocket.”

“I’ll have you know,” Dugan says, drawing himself up, “that those are ancient family ballads.”

“I’d have brought up a few positive reviews of past performance rather than defending the Irish songs,” Monty says mildly. “But that could perhaps be just me.”

Bucky, chewing on a blade of grass, eyes closed as he lies on his back facing the sky, says with drowsy vehemence, “Well, you are an English bastard.”

Steve, sitting with his back against a tree, laughs at them all. They’ll be moving out soon - they know that there are enemy troops in the area and Peggy had arrived just after dawn with more precise new target coordinates for them - but they can’t go until she’s had at least a couple of hours rest, so in the meantime: dance lessons.

Morita attempts a bit of a tap pattern in the grass and says, “How’m I going to learn now if my partner’s decided to retire?”

“Don’t look at me,” says Gabe. “My dancing talents would only embarrass you in comparison.”

“And while Jones here might take the prize in more modern dances, I was taught to waltz before I could grow chin hairs,” Monty adds.

But Dernier is already charging forward in a spew of delighted rapid-fire French, of which Steve understands perhaps one word in ten, though there’s only one that’s important anyway: “Capitaine!”

“I don’t—” Steve starts, except Dernier’s already hauling Steve to his feet, continuing his flurry of instructions? advice? as he positions Steve’s hands around Morita. Bucky must actually have truly nodded off after his night on watch, or else his radar for teasing Steve would be on alert. (Steve can't help but be grateful, both that he isn't watching, and that he's apparently finally been able to sleep.)

“Well,” Jim says, snickering, “I guess you’re leading.” Steve shakes his head, trying to puzzle out any of what Dernier’s telling him; if he’s going to do this, he doesn’t want to look like a complete fool.

“He says that you should loosen up your hips. You’re holding yourself too stiffly.”

Steve wants to cover his eyes. He’s managed to have several months of entirely normal conversations with Peggy, and now he’s back to embarrassing himself in front of her.

He looks over to where she’s standing to the side, her uniform and hair only slightly mussed (an accomplishment considering she’s had three hours’ rest on the bare ground, and a pup tent isn’t exactly anyone’s idea of luxurious accommodations). “I guess we might be making a habit of this,” he says ruefully and she smiles at him. “And somehow I still haven’t turned into a dancer.”

“Listen to Dernier and perhaps he’ll succeed with you yet.”

“Maybe,” Morita says, teasingly dubious. “So far, no offense, Cap, it’s like holding hands with a concrete pillar.”

“Perhaps I could take a turn trying,” she says, holding out her own hands in offer. She meets Steve’s eyes, but only briefly, turning her gaze over to Monty and saying archly, “Some of us who were taught early are generous enough to want to help others.”

Falsworth waves a hand toward her - go on - and she steps forward to take Morita’s place.

“You really do need to relax a bit,” she says. Even if it's the same sentiment as earlier, now that she’s close to him, it is different. One of her hands rests, ever so lightly, on his shoulder, and he feels as if he can recall the echo of it from months ago and months before that.

“It’s a little hard,” he says. “To relax.”

“Oh?” Those red lips, upturned at the very corners.

“Well, it’s—”

“Shit!”

In the moment of the first gunshot, a million things happen at once: Dugan dives to the side, cursing alternately at the hole in his hat and the fact that they’re being shot at in the first place; Bucky wakes and jumps immediately into a crouch, icy calm instead of frantic; Monty scrambles for his rifle, Morita for Steve’s shield; Gabe scopes out cover; Dernier, bent low, moves toward his explosives.

“Over there,” Peggy says. Her hands are out of Steve’s, pointing, finding her own pistol. He is beside her, focusing on the spot she’s indicated, nodding firmly once.

“Guess we’ll have to write off the lessons,” he says.

“Perhaps,” she offers, “just a postponement.”

“Alright,” Steve says to his own surprise, and he catches the shield Morita tosses him, and puts dancing out of his mind, for now.

iv.

Steve really only shows up at Rainbow Corner looking for a haircut and, if he’s being honest, a doughnut. He gets the first and is headed to the basement cafe for the second, an ASE novel in his pocket, when a hand shoots out of the dance hall and pulls him in.

“Dance with me,” Peggy says, a hiss that he somehow hears over the booming music, the rhythmic stomping of feet, the chatter of the other dancers .

He takes her hands automatically, but before moving further onto the floor he focuses on her face. She’s flushed and looks...perhaps not panicked, but aggravated.

“Can I get you something to drink first?” he asks. “It’s hot in here.”

Something flashes across her face and he thinks for a moment that she will snap a no at him and find someone else who will just dance with her like she asked with no questions asked, but instead she nods. “Only briefly.”

He starts leading her over to the corner where the bar is. It’s slow going through the crowd, and he stays close so they don’t lose each other. She isn’t wearing her uniform tonight, instead in a green dress with a swinging, silky skirt for dancing; the fabric brushes his legs as they walk. “Am I allowed to ask what you’re doing here? Or at least why it was so important that we finally have that dance?”

“Two questions with one answer, actually.” They join the back of the line. Peggy turns her back to the bar, scanning the dancers instead. He bends toward her, both for privacy and so he can even hear her over the band. “We’ve received reports of a GI who might be a spy," she says against his ear, "reporting to the Germans and perhaps even to Schmidt himself. According to our information, he’s come here tonight, and I’ve been trying for the better part of an hour to spot him and cut into his dancing. I’d like to apprehend him quietly before anyone tips him off or he’s able to do the same for anyone he might be in touch with.”

Steve nods. “And you stick out less when you actually have someone to dance with.”

“I haven’t had much luck thus far, trying to crane my neck around everyone without seeming too suspicious. It is helpful to find a partner who won’t storm off when he doesn’t receive my undivided attention.”

For a moment he wonders if he should be insulted, but then he hears the real sentiment, the trust in him, something more than a partner for a single dance would ever get. He ducks his head against a smile.

They have reached the front of the line and she orders a mineral water despite the lengthy menu.

“I’m absolutely longing for something with a little more flavor, but I am still working after all,” she says once she has drained half her glass. “Though it was kind of you to remind me to refresh myself a little, considering how beastly hot it is in here.”

“Why I don’t usually find myself in this part of the building,” he nods.

“Is that the only reason?” She tilts her head. In the dimmed lights, he watches a tiny trickle of sweat makes its way down to her collarbone.

He clears his throat as she takes another sip of water. “The kind of partner that I’m looking for isn’t usually around here.”

“Oh? I see a variety of lovely ladies here tonight, and I’m sure that any number of them would be interested in dancing with you.” She gestures around, drawing his eye for just a moment to all of the beautiful women in their careful hairstyles and pretty dresses, their smiles bright and delighted. Then he turns back to her.

“I think I need a particular teacher,” he says. “You’d know that better than most.”

But she hasn’t turned back to face him, caught instead with her eyes gleaming predatorily on a man laughing as he twirls a tall brunette into the song’s finale. Steve thinks he might recognize him from the hallways of SSR headquarters, but really he looks as if he could be one of a thousand soldiers.

Peggy turns quickly to Steve. “I apologize for dragging you in here and leaving you standing, but—”

“Go. Do what you do.”

She leaves him with a fleeting smile and her empty glass. He watches as she cuts in with a neat gesture, a nod, a flourish of skirts, then sets the glass onto the bar and, sliding his hands into his pockets, goes to finally track down his doughnut.

She’ll be busy for the rest of the night, no need for him to hang around bothering her. And they’ll have other opportunities to actually get that dance, he’s sure of it.

v.

Peggy can so clearly picture how it would all have gone. There would have been preparation first, powder and cream, holding dress options up before herself in the mirror to choose between the red or the blue, no, perhaps the green, and then landing back on the red. Tracing her lipstick on last, just before she went out the door, sliding the tube into her clutch for touch-ups, just in case.

She would likely have arrived before he did. Imagine the debrief he would have had to go through - it would be a wonder if he had a chance for a shower and shave. But somehow he would have made time, his hair still a little damp, the scent of soap on his skin. He would arrive wearing his dress uniform, and it would have made her realize that he hadn’t been home since the serum and likely didn’t own much else that would fit his changed form. She might have even had the urge to offer her services in a shopping expedition (the uniform fit him quite well indeed, but couldn’t be worn at all times, and certainly not once the war was truly over).

He would have taken her hand with care, and she would have held fast to him. It would have been new, the two of them touching like that without worry of being seen or commented upon, no one teasing around them, and there hadn’t been years of official courtship to accustom them to it besides. But that time had instead been for them to learn each other, time for things to flower quietly between them, and it would have given some familiarity. She wouldn’t have felt apprehensive about allowing herself that flashing vulnerability.

Supper first, most likely. They both enjoyed good food - he especially - and the military didn’t quite match up to a professional kitchen, but the meal itself wouldn’t have been of real importance. This would have instead been a chance for sharing stories without the threat of gunfire or Colonel Phillips interrupting, for finding new shades in her hair revealed by the candlelight, for learning what his laughter sounded like pitched soft and close above a white tablecloth.

One of them would suggest dessert, but the other would say to wait. The band would be playing something slow, and he would nod toward the dance floor. (“Sounds like our song,” he would say, or maybe, “I’ll try not to step on your toes,” or maybe nothing at all.)

They would stand among the other couples, and it probably wouldn’t be dancing as much as swaying, but that wouldn’t matter. Fancy maneuvers or fast footwork, showing off, that wouldn’t be the point at all. The dancing itself wasn’t what was important; it was about the chance for renewal and discovery, a moment to reflect on all the pain and lessons on the path here and the possibilities for the future, a time to ask all the questions and have them answered yes and yes and yes, always yes.

But no matter how clearly she can picture it, none of that happened, hadn’t and can’t and won’t. And so Peggy sighs and straightens her shoulders and walks herself onward.

+1

It’s not every night, or even every other. They are busy people, she especially, and don’t always have the time or the energy. Sometimes they have had an argument, or one of them wants to finish a book, or it's been a long day, or they aren’t quite in the mood. Those are all gifts too, in their way, the opportunity not to have to grasp every moment, to have a life sprawling out before them, to appreciate even the mundane bits of it all.

But once a week, or maybe more, they find themselves like this. In the sitting room just after she’s come home from work, or after supper, or before bed, on a Saturday morning in the kitchen surrounded by the scene of bacon and pancakes from the stove, in the midnight dark of their bedroom with the baby cradled whimpering between them. The radio, or a record, or no music at all. The specifics don’t matter and matter so entirely that they will be remembered for the rest of their lives.

Palm against palm, fingers interlocked, an easy rhythm to their steps.

“I should probably go take in the laundry. I think it’s dry enough, and it might rain tonight,” he says, and she replies, “Hmm,” but neither of them break apart.

“We have a surveillance team in the field and I should check in soon,” she remarks, knowing that he recognizes and respects the importance of her work, but they just continue to make their slow rotations.

They take these moments just for themselves, a reminder of where they’ve been and what they’ve lost, where they are and all they’ve managed to find. A moment to think of the dances that they didn’t quite get, the ones that brought them here, and to be grateful for the ones they have: this dance and all the others, a lifetime of the two of them wrapped up in each other, dancing all the while.

#Steggy fic #steggysecretsanta #plumandfinch #Steve Rogers #Peggy Carter #Steggy #I tried to infuse it with WWII specific stuff - historical notes on AO3 #open-ended last segment - is it post-Endgame? is it found Steve? you decide

[thetriggeredhappy]

hello! do you take sniperspy requests? if it's okay with you can i ask for something soft between them? not romantic or sexual but i mean Soft™ and intimate moment maybe some kind of inside joke they only understand idk. thank you!

me, speaking into the mic, my mouth exactly zero millimeters away from it: what if spy and sniper..... were best friends

my girlfriend from the back of the auditorium: (absolutely apeshit bananas applause)

-

Spy sauntered out the door and into the shade of the base, pointedly moving to stand more comfortably even as he kept an amount of distance between himself and the wall for the sake of his far-too-expensive suit. He took a cigarette from his case without needing to look, lit it in one smooth motion, took a puff, and exhaled. Then, and only then, did he turn his head to acknowledge Sniper, lounging against the wall a few feet away.

“Your fifth smoke break of the day, mon ami,” he observed neutrally. “I can’t help but wonder if something might be bothering you.”

Sniper didn’t reply verbally, but there was a muscle in his shoulders that went lax when Spy finally spoke. He took a drag of his own cigarette.

It was something that the team had commented on, once or twice. The fact that Sniper’s greatest enemy on the battlefield was the other team’s Spy, and Spy’s the other team’s Sniper, and yet with the counterpart on their own team, there was no great tension or rivalry to speak of. Instead, their relationship was entirely professional, even somewhat warm. And they took care to have the team think they were merely professional, as strictly speaking, friendship was looked down upon in their line of work, but also because with the aforementioned rivalry, their being good and well-trusted friends was something that would surely be questioned and prodded at and neither of them cared for such theatrics.

Well, Spy did ever-so-slightly, but he knew that Sniper loathed such attention, and so took care to be discreet.

“Am I being that obvious?” Sniper asked after a brief silence between them, voice a deliberate kind of calm and easygoing and level.

“Non, I’m simply being observant,” Spy replied easily, and took another drag before he elaborated. “Usually you only smoke this much when your scores are down or we’re on a losing streak, but you’ve been performing in an entirely standard and average way all week. You seem to be coping with a stress that simply doesn’t seem to be there. And so, something is bothering you.”

“Social mathematician, you are,” Sniper huffed, rolling his eyes.

“I might not have noticed, if not for the fact that you forgot your cigarettes at work and had to ask me for one three separate times and didn’t seem to remember it,” Spy admitted.

Sniper nodded at that, eyes drifting to look back out at the landscape stretching before them again.

“So?” Spy prompted, voice a bit quieter. “What is bothering you?”

Sniper reached up to knead at the bridge of his own nose, eyes falling shut, needing to push his glasses up out of the way to do so. “Not sure I’d like to talk about it, t’be honest,” he said, tone falling in parallel.

Spy shifted on his feet, looking into the distance as well for a moment. After a second or two, he spoke again, changing tactics. “Perhaps some long-lost love, or the glory days of youth?” Spy asked, intentionally melodramatic. “Pondering what all was, or perhaps what once could have been? Have you been assigned a quest by some supernatural or religious force that will surely involve mortal perils?”

“Bugger off, Spook,” Sniper deadpanned, but there was an undeniable twitch at the corner of his mouth as he fought the urge to smile at the theatrics.

“I’m only this curious because more often than not, I’m the one being dramatic and glaring at the horizon line, mon ami. Melancholy is a new look on you,” Spy admitted, dropping the joke.

“It’s... hard to explain,” Sniper finally said, and the hint of a laugh was gone.

“You’ll find I’m patient,” Spy replied easily.

Sniper was quiet for another few moments. He looked at the stub of a cigarette he had left and gave up on it, crushing it out against the wall and then grinding it into the sand beneath his heel. “It’s not... it’s not your joke about the ‘long lost love’ buggery,” he said, doing halfhearted air quotes. “It’s more... in general, the idea of...”

Spy didn’t interrupt or make any jokes, simply waiting patiently for Sniper to decide on a sentence to finish.

“...I’m just, I’ve never done any of this right,” Sniper finally said, sighing hard at himself. “Grew up too scrawny, too clever and cared too much about books when I was young and then wasn’t clever enough when I started getting older, learnt to shoot rather than fistfight, ended up a mercenary rather than a... a scientist or a rancher or any other respectable thing. And I never... never went out, never got along with anyone, and, after a while you can’t help but wonder if you’re just not meant for people. If maybe it means something that dating never once appealed to you beyond being some big strange idea of a thing that eventually you’re meant to get around to, or...” He hung his head, dragging a hand down over his face. “...I don’t know. It’s... I had it for a moment.”

Spy hesitated for a few moments, looking at him. Considered his words. Stepped over to clap a gentle hand to Sniper’s shoulder, exhaled when that made Sniper relax in some small way. “If it’s any consolation, I can assure you that you are not the only person in the world who feels that way, and perhaps even not the only man on this base who feels that way,” Spy said finally. “It takes a particular kind of person to willingly go live in a cramped, terrible experimental military base in the deserts of New Mexico being killed practically on the daily. I’m sure that is a sentiment you will find in great supply among the other men here, should you ask. And for what it’s worth, even if you are not meant for regular people, you are well liked and very much respected by your coworkers and by me.”

Sniper nodded in a way that meant he heard and understood what Spy was saying, even if he couldn’t quite formulate a verbal response to it, which was such a specific thing to read into a nod that for a minute it caught Spy by surprise and he lost track of what he’d been planning on saying next. He took a moment to try and remember it.

“What I think might help, more than expediting your inevitable lung cancer and getting a replacement set from the Docteur,” he said, gesturing pointedly with his own cigarette, “is taking one of those... what do you call them, hunting trips?”

“Just camping, usually, more than hunting,” Sniper corrected lightly.

“Oui, that. You haven’t taken a break in quite some time, and it’s terrible for morale. You were talking about the, the Rocky Mountains being the place you were hoping to see next, since last time you went to the Appilachia?”

“Appalachian Mountains, yeah,” Sniper nodded. “You’d know that if you, er, ever bloody well agreed to go with one of these times.”

“I simply do not see the appeal of camping,” Spy said airily. “It is not to my tastes. There is value in quiet cabins and inns in countryside or less populated places, but camping itself simply does not appeal to me.”

“What, never been?” Sniper asked lightly, mouth quirking up on one side.

Spy scoffed, well and truly offended. “I take back absolutely everything I said about you being respected,” he said firmly.

Sniper started to snicker outright. “Oh, go on, why’s that?” he prodded.

“You do not get to use ‘never been’ for camping. That is not allowed,” Spy said firmly.

“You’ve used ‘never been’ for bloody wine tastings, you absolute cheat!” Sniper pointed out.

“Less so the wine tasting and more the region itself,” Spy huffed, posture straight, head held high. “But you do not get to use ‘never been’ for camping.”

‘Never been’ was one of their pettier jokes, to be fair. It had started when Sniper had challenged Spy’s claim to being the most well-travelled individual on the team, and when Spy had asked where exactly Sniper had travelled to, he’d begun bringing up locations outside of largely English- and French-speaking regions, and ended off his list with a rather cocky “What’s the matter, have you never been?” It had kicked off them each naming place after place in stories when around the team, saying the place in passing then lightheartedly saying “never been?” in an entirely and increasingly ridiculous and elaborate manner for more and more specific locations.

As they ran out of stories and places, they began to argue semantics more and it became clear that the joke wasn’t even truly them trying to make fun of each other so much as them bonding over the concept of traveling in their own way, and they found it coming up more in conversation in the wake of the joke.

“Fine, can I at least use it for the mountains?” Sniper laughed.

“No, because I have been, thank you very much,” Spy huffed, turning up his nose at the very thought.

“You’re ridiculous.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, you’re just ridiculous.”

“Are you going to go camping or not?” Spy challenged.

Sniper rolled his eyes, even if his mood had visibly improved, his posture straightening out, less tension in his brow. “Not scheduled to have a break for a long while.”

“We do have vacation days, however,” Spy pointed out.

“I don’t do that,” Sniper said without hesitation. “I’m not leaving you blokes alone to deal with the other Sniper so I can go build a bonfire near some trees, awright?”

“Would it not be convenient, though, if something were to mysteriously happen to him and he just so happened to miss work for the exact number of days that you were gone?” Spy asked lightly, examining his cigarette case with too much interest.

“Do you want him to hate you more, Spook?” Sniper asked dryly. “You can’t just sabotage the man so I can go see slightly more bloody birds than usual.”

“I’m not saying I would sabotage the man! I’m just saying it would be a funny coincidence that would be entirely unrelated to me and nobody would ever be able to prove otherwise,” Spy said, just as lightly as before.

A pause. “...What kind of mysterious something would happen to him, just out of curiosity?” Sniper asked, tone flat.

“Oh, how on earth would I know such a thing, mon ami? I have no idea. But if I were to venture a guess I would simply say that he would be hired on a contract to protect some random citizen in a faraway city who is in absolutely no danger in the first place by some mysterious but concerned source,” Spy shrugged airily.

“...And you’re sure you don’t want to go camping too?” Sniper asked, tone back to normal and vaguely conversational. “Really, it’s not all that bad. You might enjoy it.”

“I am more than fine,” Spy assured, dropping the joke for a moment and shaking his head. “But thank you for the offer.”

Sniper nodded vaguely, considering it. “...Might just take off next Thursday and Friday, make a four-day weekend, two days to camp and a day’s travel and packing on either end,” he mused aloud. Paused. “...Thanks. For... you know.”

“I do,” Spy agreed easily. “And it is of no issue, mon ami, I can assure you.”

“Right.” Sniper stood there for a moment, lost in his own thoughts again. Paused. “Well, bugger off now, Spook. Go... drink wine, or, or whatever the hell else you do.”

“But of course,” Spy laughed, and crushed his own cigarette into the sand. “Bonne nuit, Bushman.”

“See ya, Spook,” Sniper said easily, even as Spy cloaked and walked away, his eyes still locked on the horizon line.

#sniperspy #tf2 #team fortress 2 #my fanfiction #shut up me #everybody talks #the fiendship tag #had fun with this one anon #sometimes..... you just gotta comfort your coworker abt his place in the world and what hes meant to do with his life #and thats okay

[canyousevmyheavydirtysoul]

Bodyguard IV: Vegas Lights (Chapter Six) (B. Urie x Reader)

"DAMN BOYS," Ambrose wolf-whistled, letting his gaze wonder up and down as he approached you and Brendon at the bar with Reigns and Rollins in tow, "Have you ever seen anyone so attractive? So undeniably sexy?" He bit his lip and nodded appreciatively, then looked at you and gave a big smile. "Oh hey, (Y/N). You look good, too."

Unimpressed and unamused by his colleague's teasing, Brendon delivered a death stare in the Hound's direction before softly clicking his tongue and downing the remainder of his drink.

"Back so soon; I guess that means that the mission was successful?" you queried, arching a brow as you addressed the towering agents.

"Well it was definitely... eventful," Rollins answered. Your bodyguard's jaw tensed at the choice of words.

As Rollins and Reigns stepped around to properly greet you, Brendon took the opportunity to grip Ambrose's jacket and yank him closer. He growled lowly into his ear.

"The fuck are you guys doing back? And be warned that there's only one acceptable answer to that question."

The agents were so close to one another that Dean could smell the bourbon on Brendon's breath, and feel the vibrations of his voice on his skin. The blond gently shoved him back and smoothed the creases Brendon's fist had created in his jacket.

"Ease up on the suit, dude – it's a rental," the Hound complained, maintaining a perfectly jovial expression despite the furious one adorned on his counterpart's face, "And to answer your question... we're back because we got a lead."

Brendon frowned. "What kind of a lead?"

"The kind that-"

"Ambrose!" Your voice pierced through the air and halted their conversation, prompting them to both look to you expectantly. "Your friends are wusses. Wanna do tequila shots with me?"

Behind you, Reigns and Rollins stood vigourously shaking their heads and mouthing the word 'NO' over and over. As always, the third Hound totally disregarded his friends' instructions and proceeded to do his own thing.

"Fuck yeah!" He strutted over and picked up the salt shaker from the bar top. "When in Vegas..."

Cheering, you picked up a second shaker and the two of you went through the motions of taking a tequila shot. You were busy downing the alcohol when Rollins sidled up next to a seething Brendon.

"You wanna explain to me what the hell is going on?"

Puffing out his cheeks and exhaling, Rollins turned to face Brendon and began speaking in a hushed tone.

"Alright so, two things... one, we got a lead for this 'runaway-couple' mission and that's why we're back."

Now properly irritated, Brendon had to physically grip the edge of the bar to keep from lashing out. He'd given them explicit instructions to not return until they'd done what they were supposed to, and yet, return is what they did.

"You couldn't have called?" the brooding agent grumbled. "(Y/N) and I could've handled it. You had more important things to take care of."

Pushing himself away from the bar stool he'd been leaning against, Rollins straightened himself up and pointed at the other agent.

"Which brings me to thing number two – we didn't find Mason. BUT," the Architect made sure to elaborate as quickly as possible, "we're pretty sure that he's dead."

Red.

Red was all that Brendon saw.

However, for the sake of not drawing attention and blowing their cover, he suppressed his rage.

"Prettysure?" he echoed, voice eeriely calm, "You're prettysure? Do you have any idea what I will-"

"Before you bring the place down..." Rollins held his hands out in an attempt to combat the hostility radiating off of Brendon. "We have it on good authority that he's dead."

Taking a step forward, Brendon leaned in and narrowed his eyes. His tongue darted across his bottom lip. "And whose authority would that be, exactly?"

"A friend."

The Hound's face was earnest; he was clearly wholly convinced that the information he'd received was correct, and upon realising this, Brendon relaxed ever so slightly. He trusted the man in front of him, and would take his word as truth.

"Okay." Standing down, Brendon nodded slowly. "Okay. Good."

The sound of what was your and Ambrose's fourth tequila shot glass clinking against the top of the bar reverberated through the area, immediately drawing the attention of the two agents. Reigns was trying to prevent you from going in for another, but was failing miserably.

With frustrated sighs, Brendon and Seth made their way over and wrestled the shot glasses away from both of you.

"Will you quit it?" Rollins scolded his friend, knocking the plate of lemon slices away with a scowl. "We can't follow through with the plan if you're wasted."

"And the plan is what, exactly?" Brendon queried, furrowing his brow as he wiped the grains of salt off of your hand.

The three Hounds shared an unreadable look, then all stared at Brendon uneasily.

"We think it's a solid one," Reigns explained, stuffing his hands in his pant pockets and cocking one brow, "But you're not gonna like it..."

✧✧✧

Twenty minutes later. The music lounge.

"Just tell me what the plan is," you groaned, tugging on Brendon's arm while you had a hand wrapped around it.

The Hounds had explained what the lead was – according to their source, there was a concealed area of the casino that the kidnappers operated out of and wherein the abducted couples were held until transport. This 'lair' was reportedly accessible through the back area of the music lounge.

As far as leads went, this one wasn't particularly plausible, but it was the only one any of you had conjured up so far, and all of you were firm believers that any and all leads should be followed up on.

Your bodyguard and the other three agents had rudely excluded you from the earlier discussion of what exactly the plan involved, so as you shuffled along the carpeted lounge floor, you were entirely in the dark about what was about to go down.

"Nope."

"Why the hell not?"

"Because you're drunk." He looked at you disapprovingly. "And we can't take any chances. So you'll just sit right here," he led you to one of the couches and gently guided you into the seat, "and let us handle it."

Rolling your eyes, you scoffed. "Typical men. Always thinking you're better because you got the muscles and the charm and the-" you made a disgusted face "-testosterone. I could totally pull off this plan, you know!"

"Of course you could, babe." Glancing over his shoulder, he motioned something to one of the passing waiters before refocusing on you. Sticking his hands in his pockets, he tilted his head to the side and raised his brows. "But not like this."

You clicked your tongue and waved one hand dismissively. "I'm fine."

"You most definitely are not. And I must say, I'm crazy disappointed in how low your tolerance is."

"Whatever," you mumbled, slouching back into the soft couch and gazing out across the lounge.

Moments later, Brendon placed a ginger ale on the table in front of you. "Drink up. It'd be nice if you were at least slightly sober for this."

You obliged, and with the straw dancing across your lips, you frowned up at him. "For what?"

"This."

The alcohol coursing through your veins had slowed down your brain's processing abilities greatly, and it was only once Brendon was standing on stage with a microphone in his hand that you fully comprehended what was going on.

"Oh... my... god."

The opening notes of a song you didn't recognise blared through the speakers scattered around the lounge, garnering the attention of every person in the room and drawing their eyes toward the stage. The stage on which your bodyguard stood, face as emotionless as ever, but hands gripping the micstand with familiarity.

You stared, wholly captivated, watching as his hands slowly danced along the shaft of the mic, his fingers tapping along to the music that sounded through the air. As the gentle beat in the opening picked up, it was joined by a guitar riff, and when the drums jumped in soon after, your eyes practically bulged out of their sockets as you saw how Brendon reacted to it.

His usually perfectly quiffed hair bounded out of place as he banged his head back and forth, rocking out to the track with such vigour that you were completely convinced that the man that stood up there was not your stone-hearted, icy bodyguard.

But then he started singing.

And you knew that it most definitely was.

"Cross my heart and hope to die, burn my lungs and curse my eyes," he started, silencing everyone and everything in the room.

"I've lost control and I don't want it back; I'm going numb, I've been hijacked," he sang, slightly bumping up and down to the melody, "It's a fucking drag..."

He locked eyes with you, peering deep into your soul, and proceeded to sing his heart out.

"I taste you on my lips and I can't get rid of you,

So I say damn your kiss and the awful things you do,

Yeah, you're worse than nicotine,

Nicotine,

Yeah, you're worse than nicotine,

Nicotine,

Yeah..."

Stepping down from the stage, he ran a hand through his hair to push it back and swaggered over in your direction. Heart hammering in your chest, all you could do was sit there and watch; you couldn't speak, you couldn't move, you couldn't even think.

You were entirely puzzled as to why he was doing this, especially since he'd so often reminded you that he "doesn't sing." But you didn't dare question it. It was far too magical.

His voice was so powerful yet so angelic and each time he started singing again, you were drawn back in. You watched, entranced, as he commanded the room in such an effortless manner it was unreal.

Diverting his path, he turned to the right of you and began singing to the lady in red sitting alone at a table.

"It's better to burn than to fade away, it's better to leave than to be replaced,"

She blushed, clearly flattered, and you scoffed under your breath. Before the jealously could really set in though, he pulled away and strutted over to another table. This one had a group of girls around it – all of whom were shamelessly gawking at the gorgegous man performing in front of them.

"I'm losing to you,

Baby, I'm no match,

I'm going numb, I've been hijacked,

It's a fucking drag," he serenaded each one of them in turn, and they were practically drooling over him.

The intial shock and elatedness at hearing him sing had worn off now – mostly due to his show of obnoxious flirting – and you sat back in the couch, unimpressed.

Thankfully, he moved away from the girls before any of them could grab onto him. Now, he sashayed across the dance floor and towards the bar with each and every pair of eyes in the room focused on his every move, all of which were incredibly graceful and showman-like.

Reaching out to grab the edge of the bar top, he used it to spin himself around as he delivered the pre-chorus for the second time.

"I taste you on my lips and I can't get rid of you,

So I say damn your kiss and the awful things you do,"

In a movement so fluid and quick, he darted his eyes over to the far end of the lounge. It was so subtle and undercover that you were the only one able to catch it; and that was merely because of your heightened senses and agent training.

Knitting your brows together, you looked over to where he had and noticed something you hadn't before – a door, secluded and hidden in the dark but nevertheless surrounded by two bouncers.

At face value, they could've passed as regular patrons of the casino, but their burly nature and stiff body language told you that they were more than that. Although, judging by the tapping of their feet and slight bobbing of their heads, they were enjoying Brendon's performance just as much as everyone else.

And then it dawned on you.

Straightening up in your seat, you turned back around and watched wide-eyed as Brendon climbed atop the bar in one swift movement.

This was a distraction.  

"Yeah, you're worse than nicotine,

Nicotine,

Yeah, you're worse than nicotine,

Nicotine,

Yeah,"

The agent leapt off the bar, pressing his feet to the backrest of one of the stools and using it to slide down to the floor. Your eyebrows raised and you couldn't help but smile at his smooth moves.

Yet again, he approached a woman. This one, however, was with a partner and as a show of respect, Brendon didn't spend toomuch time serenading her.

"Just one more hit and then we're through,

'Cause you could never love me back,"

He turned his attention fully on you, as he started taking slow steps to your table. The two of you locked eyes again, and your lips parted slightly as he got closer.

"Cut every tie I have to you,

'Cause your love's a fucking drag,

 But I need it so bad," he closed his eyes and shook his head lightly, now practically right in front of you.

"Your love's a fucking dra-a-a-ag,

But I need it so bad."

He ran his fingers along your cheek and you leaned into his touch. Preparing to belt out the final chorus, he took one step back and ran his hand through his hair.

"Yeah, you're worse than nicotine,

Nicotine,

Yeah you're worse than nicotine,

Nicotine,

Yeahhhhh."

Pulling you up and out of your seat, Brendon gripped you flush against his body and  as the audience in the lounge gave him a standing ovation, hegave youthe most passionate kiss of your life.

So passionate, in fact, that you nearly passed out.

"Hey," he whispered, steadying you as your knees buckled, "You alright?"

You nodded. "Yeah," you were breathless, both from the kiss and from his performance.

"Good." He looked over his shoulder, noting that the two bouncers were now gone. "Let's get out of here."

_______________________________

Thank you for reading x

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[quakinginmystilishboots]

Not Her Nature

Read on AO3

Unwrapping the MRE with the outdated, from her perspective, S.H.I.E.L.D. logo, Daisy couldn't help a little grimace. She was hardly a fussy eater – growing up in the system, living in a van and now dealing with a semi apocalyptic crisis every Wednesday really taught the value of adaptability – but the damn things had enough bad associations to make her regret not spending a few more minutes in the pantry, digging for something else.

They looked exactly the same as the ones they had found in storage in the Lighthouse when they had traveled back from the post-apocalyptic future to their then present, which was actually their past now, but in the future, except maybe not anymore, and wow, if that train of thought didn't do a number on her already developing headache.

Time traveling-induced headache or not, the field ration was just as tasteless as its decades old counterparts they'd had around those very frayed weeks she really preferred not to think about.

It hadn't been the years, then. Just their nature.

Noticing the coffee pot in this new but actually old Lighthouse's command center was cold, she casually used her powers to heat it up in seconds and poured herself a cup.

“So that's your gift.”

Daisy jumped. Some super spy she was. Good thing May wasn't here to see it.

Her mother was standing behind her, a serene expression on her unmarred visage, with just a hint of curiosity and amusement. God, this was weird.

“Forgive the intrusion, I didn't mean to startle you.”

“No, it's alright. I'm supposed to guard you, anyway”. Daisy shrugged, sipping on her newly re-heated coffee. Almost as bad as the field ration. She fished for more sugar.

“It didn't help the taste, did it?” said Jiaying, with the faint of a smile. Daisy chuckled.

“Nope. I probably should have made a fresh batch. There's tea, though...I can heat up the water if you'd like?”

“How do you do that?”

“It's vibrations. I can sense them and manipulate them”, she explained, keeping it basic, because it was a fair bit more than that.

“You vibrate the water molecules and that produces heat” her mother nodded, understanding not quite replacing curiosity. She didn't follow up on her offer of tea, so Daisy went back to her unappealing meal. Jiaying's presence wasn't improving it.

Logically, she understood, and better than ever now, how what her mother had gone through had broken her... but, five years later, the betrayal still felt raw. As the nagging doubts. Her biological parents had been monsters. She had told herself they had become that way, that it wasn't their nature and therefore not hers, either. Yet the part of her that never really dealt with heartbreak and just run away from it, sometimes literally, hadn't fully moved past it.

“Any word from your friends?”, Jiaying asked, bringing her back to their present situation, hunkered down at the Lighthouse while the team was flying to Afterlife.

“Not yet. They should be landing in about an hour”.

Worry and frustration revealed the lie of Jiyaing's serene countenance.

“I wish we didn't stay behind. My people are in terrible danger and I'm hiding”. She said, as much to Daisy as to the empty room.

“Generals don't fight on the front lines.”

“We are not an army.”

“We were meant to be.”

As soon as she said it, Daisy mentally kicked herself. She shouldn't even be mentioning any of this but the entire situation was throwing her off balance and then some. Meeting her own mother, five years before she was supposed to be born. Her own mother, who she had wished for the first 26 years of her life. Her own mother, who had tried to kill her. Her own mother, whose skeleton she had dug up in a desperate attempt to save the person dearest to her. Sometimes, Daisy seriously wondered how her life was even real.

She was also not a fan of the “staying behind” thing. As she had told Mack. Repeatedly. Unsuccessfully.

She refocused on Jiaying.

“It's not what we chose to be. Our people have lived secluded for centuries. We have kept ourselves from the world, never involving in its troubles. The world is not inclined to return such courtesy, it seems.” Her mother's piercing gaze found hers again. “You and Elena, is that what you are, though? Soldiers?”

“We help people.” If the older woman recognized the defensiveness in her tone, she didn't comment on it. Her eyes once again turned to the room that was buzzing with 1980s computer noises and a cacophony of contrasting vibrations Daisy was becoming acutely aware of.

“When I was younger – Jiaying started, her tone more wistful than Daisy ever remembered – I thought our gifts should be shared, used to help the world. We can do so many wonderful things.... but they are also dangerous in the wrong hands, and there are always wrong hands. Yet, it is comforting – she added, looking back to Daisy with a smile – to know that our people can be warriors for the benefit of all”.

Daisy felt herself nodding. That sounded...nice. Or maybe it did because of who was saying it. Jiaying's smile turned pensive.

“I have lived a long life and I could live an even longer one. Experience is important but so are new perspectives. My daughter... when she was born, I had wished it for her. To one day lead our people where I couldn't take them. I feel so naive now. I did everything wrong”.

Daisy wondered idly when it had become so hard to control her heart rate. Or breathe.

“I don't think you should blame yourself”, she offered tentatively.

“Shouldn't I? I wasn't able to help her control her gift and I couldn't make her believe she was safe with me, that I would protect her, that I loved her too much for anything else. It is my failure. It is my responsibility”.

“People are responsible for their own choices.” Daisy shot back brusquely, perhaps too much so. If the conversation had been uncomfortable before...

“What if the choice they have isn't fair? Her gift hurt her when she kept it inside and hurt others when she couldn't. What would you do if that was your choice?”

Daisy bit her tongue, holding back the snarky reply – I wouldn't follow a sadistic bastard looking to destroy everything – on the tip of it. She stared at Jiaying, seeing the pain of a parent who feels they have failed their child. A whirlwind of conflicting emotions – bitter hurt, anger, hopeful relief, longing – engulfed her and almost overwhelmed her. Compassion won out.

“When I first got my powers, I wasn't able to control them and it would hurt me to try. My... family... they didn't know how to help me. Eventually I found people who could – and she was my family, too – but they weren't as... well-meaning... as I had thought – you manipulated me, lied to me – I was blind to it for a time – until someone had to die for me to see the truth – but it wasn't too late – not for me, at least – it's not too late for your daughter, either”.

“Thank you, Agent Jones. You have a kind heart”.

Daisy felt herself staring again, rooted in place, her meal forgotten. The blaring of sirens broke the spell.

“We've been breached”.

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

Nathaniel Malick was dead. His body, twisted, broken and shriveled, was currently stored in a black bag, in the Lighthouse's morgue. The battle had been brutal, laced with a yearning to hurt her foe Daisy hadn't felt since facing Hive. In the end, she hadn't killed him. Towering over him, his limbs broken, she had hesitated, questioning her reasons. Then Jiaying, who she had thought he had murdered, had touched him. And it was over.

“This is how I heal”, she had explained, apologetic. Daisy had just nodded, focusing on slowing her heart down.

Later, before the Afterlife survivors were flown to the village in Hunan where Jiyaing had been born and where Daisy would, too, if the events of the past few days hadn't irreparably altered her mother's life trajectory, they met again – for the last time? – in the Lighthouse's hangar.

“I knew your gift felt familiar”, Jiaying told her, no physical trace of her recent brush with death. Malick had spilled the beans, one last attempt to fuck with her life.

“I'm sorry I lied to you. We are trying to protect the future” What's left of it, anyway.

“I understand... but I am glad to know the truth. And to have met you. Your story, about your powers...”

“I made it up”, Daisy replied, too quickly. “I'm sorry. And please don't ask me... anything else. ”

“You were being kind. Thank you. And I won't. It's enough to feel hopeful again”.

Daisy stayed very still, willing her face into the kind of unemotional mask May was a master at but she had never quite managed.

Jiaying didn't question it, letting her eyes linger on her surroundings. “I had never taken an unwilling life before. It's... worse.”

Daisy understood that feeling. “The world is better without him. Believe me.”

Her mother nodded, mirroring her conviction. “I do. Your sister... I won't ask you what I know you cannot promise me. Just... she is young and she is lost.”

“I know. I will try.”

“Thank you.”

Watching the Quinjet take off, Daisy felt a measure of hope, too. It wasn't nature. And maybe not being born wouldn't be so bad if it meant it wouldn't be life, either.

#aos fanfiction #agents of s.h.i.e.l.d. #daisy johnson #jiaying #aos 7x10 promo spoilers #aos spoilers