#these characters do dumb shit and I write the incident report

[chrollohearttags]

we need to bring back muse diaries. I feel like I need to share a daily monologue of these lil bastards running around in my head and every terrible thought they’ve caused.

#again I don’t write my stories #these characters do dumb shit and I write the incident report #like all my AUs interacting all at once #and if you don’t know what a muse diary is #you too damn young to be on this blog #cherry chats 🍒 #it was cringe #but damnit were we free #simpler times

[talesfromsiteredacted]

Snow Bunny

Abel is getting mopey, and when Big Brother gets mopey, unfortunately a few D-Class tend to get really really dead. I heard from Iris he'd like to touch actual snow again, this gives me ideas. Granted, my ideas might just result in my very own List, but... I've kinda always wanted to have a snowball fight with my brother, a real problem as biologically I'm an only child. No matter, I have two awesome older brothers and a equally awesome younger sister now... so, snowballs at ten paces it is!

It's Thursday, and much like a certain fictional main character in a Douglass Adams novel, I can never quite get the hang of Thursdays. Something always goes wrong. This Thursday, it was the "Oh Shit!" alarm blaring. I check my clock, it's not even 6 am. Rude.

"The following personell are to report to 076-2 Containment stat: Agent Dimitriov, Agent Thompson, and Agent Rabbit. All other staff report to your designated safe zones and await further instructions. Dimitriov, Thompson, Rabbit, get moving."

The next thing I know, I'm getting called by Iris.

"Hey, on my way now. Any idea why he's cranky this time?"

"It's really dumb, but... Dimi says he misses snow."

"Nah, not that dumb. But... grab your gloves, and tell Dimi to bring his and a pair for Big Brother. He wants to see snow? I can help with that."

"Done. I'm almost there, better hurry Sis."

I reach Containment before Dimitriov, who while complying looks confused. Iris is waiting at the end of the killing corridor, gloved and hatted. There's an awful lot of angry crashing and smashing in Big Brother's cube, better get to making it snow. I extend my left hand, and start with a light flurry of large flakes, good snowball snow. Dimitriov is both confused and amused. Meanwhile, Iris is trying to talk to Abel through the stone. By the time I'm up to my knees in snowball material, he's heading out. And is hit in the nose by Dimitriov, a braver but more foolish soul than I. The snow slides down his nose in a comic manner, causing Iris to laugh. Abel bends down, picks up some ammunition, and hits Iris in the left shoulder.

What follows is a bit blurred, turns out if Abel even lobs snowballs he's dangerous. I swear, that first hit I took to my right forehead was an ice ball. Suffice to say it was the Epic Snowball Battle of many a kid's dreams. We even dragged the MTF boys into it when Site Command sent a squad into check on us. Poor Mike got both a black eye and a concussion. The fight ended with the three of us, and the ten MTF guys left standing, pelting Abel with so much flying frozen projectiles he retreated into his cube, soaked and shivering.

"Mark my words, sweet sisters... next time we battle like this, I will prevail!"

"Against a walking snow machine? Unlikely!" I shouted at the slamming door. We're just as cold and damp, but... totally worth it. Even if all three of us have to do Keter Duty for getting the MTF involved. Commander Mike's a good sport, though. Dr. Glass walks in, takes one look at the thirteen shivering, rather moist victors, and... sends out for hot chocolate. He looks at me, winks, then walks off to write the incident report, softly chuckling. And now... I have a new nickname from Simon... Snow Bunny. I'm never going to live that down, especially now it's caught on with Dr. Clef as well.

#scp foundation #tales from site redacted #agent rabbit #scp 076 2 #abel is dangerous if in a snowball fight

[apoptoses]

DA here, reporting for duty 🫡 just finished reading Angle of Incidence and dear LORD talk about committing to the bit!! And by this I’m of course talking about Armand playing doctor with a type of intensity worthy of a former theater director. The theater kid JUMPED TF OUT. Such perfect characterization. Despite the tags (which really shouldn’t stop anyone from reading this), it very much felt like quintessential Devil’s Minion. The dynamics, how they played off each other perfectly, all the time. Unhinged and weird yet intimate and tender, always wanting to probe deeper into each other’s depths (quite literally at times). It’s always been about intimacy. Honestly I went into this not exactly knowing what to expect and even though I felt like I could physically feel Daniel’s discomfort at times (which is all on you and your amazing skills as a writer) I was 100% into it all the way through. “How he would make it worse, Daniel didn’t know”, I am Daniel, Daniel is ME lmao I was in pain!!! Armand going off on his bladder rant like he had no fucking clue Daniel had to pee sent me over the edge lmao what a little shit. “He played dumb so beautifully sometimes” sajdhksasdja pulling the puss in boots face in the middle of an ultrasound I CAN’T!!! “And you’re being a difficult patient, sitting here and swearing at me”, Daniel asking Armand if they could take the speculum home lmfaooo I could quote this all night long, I really could. Banger after banger. You truly did it again, took me on a whole psychosexual journey in the unlikeliest of ways. I would definitely be up for reading something like this again in the future!!! 🥹 P.S. Like Sugar? Pure serotonin to the brain ugh they are SO stupid in love. Despite the obsessive, unhinged nature of their relationship, you know it’s cute shit like this that keeps them going back to each other time and time again, till the rest of eternity. Loved it so much ❤️

Ahh dungeon anon, I was so curious to see what you'd think about this one and I'm so happy it didn't disappoint!

Armand is such a little drama club kid. I loved getting to let him relive his theater days and do a little roleplay, which I think was more fun for him than being on stage would ever be. He gets to roleplay with Daniel, his favorite test subject, and man he commits to the bit! He's so fun and so scary in that way.

I love that you squirmed right along with Daniel, haha that's the best kind of compliment, knowing the reader felt exactly what the character was feeling. But that's why I'm liking writing harder kinks with them in specific. It's not about the action itself, it's about the trust and intimacy and learning to let your guard down to let someone see all of you. You could sub in any kink here and give Daniel the same experience, and that's why it's so them. They're weird, they're in love, they'll do anything to get close!

Armand really is such a little bastard in this one haha He knows exactly what he's doing and he's a hypocrite! Telling off Daniel for being difficult and dramatic when he's the most difficult and dramatic little beast in town! No wonder Daniel drinks, living with this guy.

Daniel asking to take the speculum home was a favorite thing for me. Like the reveal that he loved doing something he hated the experience of just because it reaffirmed to him his trust for Armand? Huge! And I think inside Armand wonders if Daniel only puts up with this shit for the blood so having Daniel ask that made him feel good too. It confirms for him that Daniel does love to suffer at his hand.

I'm so happy you loved it!! I loved writing it, I want to take them to difficult places more often. And having the reader trust me like Daniel trusts Armand? Huge ego stroke, I feel so happy!

(and I love that you loved the cute shit too- that was fun to write, just pure sweetness and sharing an experience. Armand makes Daniel fuckin cry with a speculum and then kisses his slushie mouth on the steps- that's the duality of them, they get the full range of experience together. I love them so much!)

Thank you for the super sweet message as always ♥

#dungeon anon #armand/daniel #apoptoses answers

[apprenticenerd]

"Anyone can send me an ask with one of the titles and I’ll post a snippet or talk about that WIP!" The Acropolis, Tacet, Checklist, A Tiny Galaxy, Hearsay, Going Back, Ella Disenchanted, Making Peace, The Slashed Circle, Wake Up, Tenno, Midnight, Heliotropism, Arrhythmia, the one about Among Us, the one about Library of Ruina, the one that’s a D&D world concept. Yes, all of them. I know you wanna talk about all of them. So go, go forth and do it!

Hoooo boy, this is gonna be a long post. Lots and lots of writing snippets under the cut to avoid dash stretch!

The Acropolis - original - length uncertain - 1.4k and counting

im not ready for this im not i thought it would be yrs i thought id at least get an english degree first

omg sal whats goin on

fuckin hell whyd it have to be now i have a chem lab tomorrow

sally-tate macpherson. u never swear. ever. wtf is goin on.

ok. jess. i need u to listen really really carefully. understand?

answer the goddamn question ur scarin me

shut up and listen and this will go a lot better

fine but u need to tell me wtf is happnenig

ok. im going to tell you a bunch of stuff. not giving u advice, thats not allowed, but im gonna tell u stuff it seems like itd be impossible for me to know.

?????????????

i said shut up this is really important dont question how i know it. just go with it and figure out what to do. and dont die. bc no matter how crazy stuff seems, if u die, ur dead. here and everywhere. ok?

This is an original story coming straight from a @/writing-prompt-s prompt about a crack in a kid’s hardwood floor that they fantasized was a portal actually being one. I originally intended to write the entire thing like this, as a conversation over text, but that may not be feasible given a certain world-building detail at the other end of the portal (and the limits of my creativity lmao).

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Tacet - The Blackout Club - one-shot - 3.2k and counting

She closed her eyes again, and there it was. Hallucination? Some new science trick with electromagnetic radiation off the visible spectrum? Evidence that she was actually going insane? Whatever it was, it burned behind her eyelids in bright, incontrovertible red - and was completely invisible when she opened her eyes again. There was just the usual mess of club posters and one big one about someone’s exceedingly dumb-looking lost cat.

Eyes open, there was only Sargent Snuggles. Eyes closed, there was the normal darkness and then three lines of text where the poster had been, wavering like scarlet fire:

JOIN TBC JOIN TBC JOIN TBC

TBC? What the fuck was that? She’d never heard of any group with that acronym before. Hardly aware of the flurry of weird looks from half the other people in the hallway, she crossed the hall to examine the lost cat poster more closely. It felt like perfectly normal paper when she touched it, and there wasn’t even a hint of red with her eyes open, unless you counted the cat’s tacky pink sweater. How the hell was this even possible?

“You’re finally cracking, Bri,” she groaned under her breath, then headed for her locker. She did have to get home. Add another big fat entry to the weird shit list.

A backstory one-shot for my Blackout Club OC Briar, telling the story of how she got into the club in the first place. I’ve been stuck in the same spot for a while now, after Briar’s friend Dani explains the club to her, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the scene’s over as is. Of course, writing the next one is the tough part.

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Checklist - The Blackout Club - one-shot - 1.7k and counting

8. You still have a headache. Shouldn’t you go back to sleep and try to do this in the morning?

9. (wake up)

10. Nah, you’ve always been a night owl, and school starts criminally early, too early to get much done beforehand. It’s quiet, except for Dad snoring. Your parents are asleep already. You can stay up until this is done, and they’ll be none the wiser.

11. Your head hurts worse. It’s getting harder to think. At only 9 pm? 9:30? Whatever. You should sleep.

12. (wake UP)

13. What are you thinking? You have to read at least a little of this chapter, or there’s no way you’ll be able to bullshit your way through class tomorrow. Besides, all of a sudden, the silence feels...strange. Heavier? You can’t describe it.

14. You need to sleep. You need a drink of water or something. You need to finish this damn homework. You need to sleep. You need to sleep.

15. Stare at The Great Gatsby. It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense.

16. Realize what’s up with the silence. Dad’s not snoring anymore. You aren’t feeling like yourself. You need to sleep.

17. Something’s weird.

18. (WAKE UP) 

19. ...No. Something’s wrong.

Another Blackout Club story and another Interface Screw, as it were, this time in the form of a (very long) checklist. None of the characters have names (yet). It describes another way a kid could find themself running around at night with the Blackout Club, this time by fighting off the Song just enough to run into a club member who could wake them up the rest of the way. As with Tacet, I still need to write the suspenseful part.

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A Tiny Galaxy - Warframe - 4 chapters planned, 1 complete, 1 in progress - 7.8k and counting

Try it if you don’t believe me, the kid in the vent had said.

It was impossible. It was physically impossible. All of this was impossible. Had the Void...? Could the Void...?

The ship was at a standstill. Her mother had tried to kill her, and something had happened. She’d made something happen. There had been no holoprojector in that kid’s hand. Nothing was impossible anymore.

Jhia took a deep breath. How the heck was she supposed to do this? Was she supposed to feel something, some internal guide? Blue Hair hadn’t said. Feeling incredibly stupid, she did a quick mental checkup on herself. Nothing felt wrong, or different - but now that she thought about it…

Afterward, she would try many times to explain it, and fail every time. The best she could come up with was that once she found the Void, calling on it was as easy and as natural as breathing. She opened her hands in front of her, concentrated on that force like an extension of herself, reopened her eyes, and there it was: a riotous little ball of energy, wisps and motes of light and not-quite-light like a tiny galaxy, the Tau system in the palm of her hand, raging.

More OC backstory time! This one’s for my Tenno, a nerdy fourteen-year-old (at the time of this story, anyway) by the name of Jhia, going through the hell that is the Zariman Ten-Zero and what happened on it. This is possibly the first part of the story I actually wrote: the roll-credits moment when Jhia realizes the Void’s changed her more already than she thought.

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Hearsay - Lobotomy Corporation/Library of Ruina - one-shot - 1k and counting

"Oh? Did they investigate further?"

"They tried. Found a few fingerprints, but they didn't match anyone in the database."

"What's the update, then?"

"Reports from elsewhere in the district of someone not in uniform carrying a Zwei sword. They're slippery, good at avoiding us, which would suggest Syndicate operative to me and HQ. Except that in every one of the descriptions we managed to get, our sword thief is a child."

"What? How?!"

"You tell me, Iona. You're the one who went to the crime scene."

"Right... Jeez, if it's a kid, I guess that'd explain why Petrov thought they weren't a threat..."

"My thoughts exactly. HQ has a fair amount of hearsay to go on, but nobody can quite agree on how old the child is, or whether or not she's with a Syndicate. Most agree that she appears to be a girl, tall for a child, auburn hair, clothes and demeanor typical of a Backstreets native."

"We got a name?"

"They've heard Yeri, Kali, Redbird, Suma, Aelfin... No one knows which is her real one, or if it's even any of them at all."

"Damn. ...Say, are you going to drink that entire pot of coffee?"

"Help yourself."

This is one of those stories that turned into an accidental AU when more of canon came out. The idea behind it is that it’s Kali’s backstory told entirely in conversations in which she did not participate, showcasing the fact that a Fixer’s fame is their livelihood and Kali was about as famous as they come, before the whole L Corp thing happened. Of course, the vast majority of the headcanons here got invalidated with a certain Ruina update, so my motivation’s kinda down on this one.

---

Going Back has already been talked about here!

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Ella Disenchanted - The Blackout Club - one-shot (maybe two-shot??) - 1.4k and counting

She woke. Her stomach went through a series of panicked flip-flops as she thought something strange had done it, Dad or a little-kid-nightmares shadow beast had made noise, but no - why had she fallen asleep in the first place? Her butt and shoulder were sore where they’d been leaning on the bottom and side of the windowsill, presumably all night, since the sun was full up over the trees on Old Growth Hill. 

All night. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t fall asleep, but she did anyway. God dammit.

As she unfolded herself from her cramped ball, though, she froze. Under the comforter she’d pulled around her shoulders for warmth, she was wearing her gray jacket, a T-shirt, jeans, sneakers getting dried mud all over the carpet. 

Last she remembered, she’d been in her pajamas.

In which a Blackout Club kid’s little sister wonders where he’s gone when he runs away to the boxcar, and tries to get to the bottom of the mystery herself. Usually she’d be too young for the club to recruit, but her investigations and an incident involving SAO are more than enough extenuating circumstance. Unlike most of my other WIPs, there’s a whole outline at the end of my doc for this one.

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Making Peace - Warframe - multi-chapter - 1.5k and counting

“I…” Iksoh finally said. “Sorna, I hope you realize. I’m not into this. I never - I’m not doing this. Whatever you’re doing, I can’t.”

“I know,” Sorna said softly. The decision tore at her heart again and she almost backed out of the vent, but no. She had to go. She wouldn’t see another innocent crumple in her rifle sights. “I hope you realize. I’m not coming back.”

Behind her, Iksoh let out a long, shaky breath. “It’s taking all I’ve got not to report you right now. Sorna… the Queens’ll have my head for this. Please, please, let it be worth it. Go. Don’t let them take yours.”

“I won’t,” Sorna promised, and meant it.

Later, after her last fight for her freedom was done, on the Steel Meridian ship headed for Kronia Relay, Sorna looked out at the planet retreating behind her and thought of Iksoh. She’d just learned a new word from a Meridian soldier: vaykor tal, the defector’s spirit. Iksoh had let her go, at risk of their own life. They’d had a bit of the vaykor tal themself, even if they hadn’t known it, even if they’d thought it was just some weakness that was bound to get them killed.

“Ranre treri, duf krun,” she whispered into space, a Grineer well-wishing passed down from sergeant to tube-fresh lancer since time immemorial. May your hands be steady, and may life be kind.

This is an AU born of me and some friends wondering why in the heck Perrin and the Meridian hate each other so much in game. It’s about a group of Kavor - Grineer defectors distinguished from other Meridian members by their pacifism - who get to a Relay and start wondering the same thing. Besides Sorna (and, later in the story, Iksoh as well), there would have been Chakh, Beket, and Sydon, plus at least four of the syndicate leaders and a bunch of side-character OCs, all caught up somehow in what turns out to be a surprisingly far-reaching web of intrigue.

--

The Slashed Circle - Warframe - one-shot, probably - 429 and counting

In addition to their written and spoken language, the Grineer have a full language of hand signs. It has its quirks, as all languages do - be careful of confusing it with the Corpus sign language, in which the sign for “to pay” roughly approximates the Grineer sign for...a certain portion of the male anatomy. Among these is the common Grineer sentiment against those who defect from their ranks, baked into the sign just as much as their spoken words. 

The sign of the slashed circle, the sedashkur - a finger drawn in a circle on the chest, followed by a diagonal line - is the highest of taboos to any loyal Grineer. It shows support for such scum as the Kavor and Steel Meridian, enough so that it forms the basis for the Meridian’s battle standard. To sign the sedashkur is to betray your siblings, commit a grave insult to your superiors, paint a near-indelible target on your back. It is an object of hatred and fear throughout the ranks.

She fears it, yes, but she does not hate it, for all her life and into her death as well. It shouldn’t trouble her now, though. It is easy to hide a language, and she burned her journals before she was called to the fortress.

This is a fic about Jhia and her one (1) converted Kuva Lich, namely about the process of said Lich’s defeat and defection, that kinda never got off the ground. Contrary to this snippet, I think most of it would have been written in what are essentially space emails back and forth between Lich and Tenno? I definitely got as far as Jhia sending an audio recording of a bass-boosted dog fart, anyhow.

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Wake Up, Tenno - Warframe - one-shot - 950 and counting

“Wake up, Tenno.”

She wakes. She is - she is Tenno, right? She is a Tenno? Her mind is confused, so full of fog and dead ends - how long was she asleep?

The voice that woke her seems familiar. She might have loved the speaker, in her scrambled past life, the woman in the purple helmet, the one called Lotus in her HUD vision. Her surroundings are a ruin of some sort. Her body is—

...what?

She can move just fine. Her fingers and arms and legs respond with suspicious ease, given how long she must have slept to be this scattered upon waking up, and yet there’s some fundamental disconnect. This is her Warframe, her body, but it’s not her body somehow.

...wait, where did the term “Warframe” come from?

A Tenno, unnamed but intended to be Jhia on my end, wakes up on Earth at the very beginning of the in-game storyline. Since the tutorial has gotten an overhaul in recent months, I may have to modify even what little I have on this a lot.

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Midnight - Iconoclasts - poem - 280 and counting

been anything smaller than been anything

never been anything smaller than

“good morning, how’s miss grump doing today? i heard about that last mission...if you didn’t sleep well i can call you in sick, it’s alright-” “oh, shut up, grey”

there has never been anything

“oh, shut up, grey” “love you too”

smaller

“love you too”

than

me

A very fragmented, stream-of-consciousness-y poem meant to represent Agent Black’s failing sanity near the end of the game. The words of her famous one-liner (“there has never been anything smaller than me”) are interspersed, out of order until the end, with poetic descriptions of other characters and bits and pieces of a flashback involving Agent Grey.

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Heliotropism - Iconoclasts - one-shot - 1.1k and counting

Lily, though she’s superstitious, will have none of these self-important truths, none of these semblances of certainty when really all it is is wishing on Ivory and hoping for the best. She calls for Miss Andress instead. 

A stout but severe woman with ten grandchildren and a great-grandchild on the way, Miss Andress is perhaps the quintessential matriarch: nurturing, selfless, brutally honest. She is the one the people of 17 trust when they feel they can trust no one else. Lily needs the kind of reassurance only she can give, with the authority of ninety-one years and the wisdom of two sons, one daughter, and some five dogs raised under her care.

When Miss Andress visits House 4, she asks Polro and Lily to each bring an object they cherish the most. For Polro it’s his largest wrench, pitted with use but still polished to a brassy shine; Lily surprises everyone by pulling out a tiny, unloaded stun-gun, and surprises them more by not explaining it at all. Miss Andress doesn’t question it. She just turns the two tools over and over in her hands, head bowed, squinting at them as if trying to read the secrets of the universe in the scratches carved into them by time.

Finally she straightens up and sighs, pushing a strand of silver hair behind her ear. Her forehead is slick with sweat, though the night is cool outside. “I don’t know what she’ll do,” the wise woman says, heavily, as if delivering bad news. “I just know she’ll change the world.”

Can you tell I like backstory fic? This one is for Robin, with one short anecdote for each year of her life, up to age 17 and the events of the game. It’s also an excuse to world-build a bunch, lol.

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Arrhythmia - Crypt of the NecroDancer - one-shot(?) - 4k and counting

The creature didn’t say anything, just beckoned to the shadows. Before I could move, two other creatures came for me, sending the other humans - former humans? - scrambling away in panic. One landed a hard blow on the back of my head that sent me to my hands and knees, seeing sparks; the other said “Freeze!” and I could only watch as ice sprouted from the leaf litter, cementing me to the ground.

The one who’d hit me produced a dagger from the inside of its cloak. I tried to pull myself up, to do anything at all to keep myself from getting shanked, but it was no good. There must have been a secondary effect on that spell; my limbs wouldn’t respond. I felt the dagger tear cloth in the region of my back, and prepared for the pain.

It didn’t come. The creature cut a slit in the back of my tunic, then another. Neither one touched the skin at all. I can’t really describe what happened next - my brain was having trouble computing how my arms were in front of me, visible, unable to move, but it felt like the creature was pulling them through the gashes in my tunic, but that was wrong, they didn’t feel like arms at all.

“Holy fuck,” I heard someone say.

The ice holding me down melted into nothing as the spell wore off. I jumped back up, head spinning a little, ready for another fight, only to spot two flicks of scarlet in my peripheral vision. I spun around, but they moved with me.

I think I already knew what they were. I just couldn’t admit it to myself.

You’ve already seen this one, Nick, though I’m pretty sure it was well over two years ago. It’s a pile of old headcanons, some of them now outdated I’m pretty sure, about how Nocturna ended up a vampire in the first place and a little bit about how vampire society works. According to Google Docs, I’ve been stuck on this one since March 2018. Whoops.

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untitled (working title “adult citra meets an impostor bc what is self-control”) - Among Us - one-shot - 572 and counting

“I know. You’re stuck, aren’t you?” Having well and truly gotten their full attention, Citra continues, “God, I can barely imagine. Having to take a weird-ass host whose biology might even be toxic to you, I don’t know. Needing to get to a whole other galaxy, feeling like the only way to do that is by deception and death.” “How…?”

She sighs. “I told you, this isn’t my first rodeo. One of your kind saved my life when I was a kid. Since he’d killed Mom and Dad had been out of the picture long before, he stayed here and helped raise me afterward. It’s how I learned to pronounce...a few of your words, at least.”

“You missed the ‘H’ sound.”

“Isn’t that the one that’s literally impossible to do right with Terran anatomy?”

“Maybe. You think I know Terran anatomy all that well?”

Citra chuckles. “Fair point. You let us find your buddy and fix the ship, I’ll raise Xai when we get comms back and he can try and help you get home. Deal?”

I found an Among Us comic on Tumblr, absolutely ran into left field with it to make a couple of OCs, and then made AUs of those OCs because of course I did. This one is from a future scenario in which Citra (typically orange) meets someone rather familiar on a mission with the crew of the Skeld.

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untitled (working title “library of ruina but they adopt half the guests”) - Library of Ruina - length uncertain - 1k and counting

“And what happened to not caring about others because it’s a waste of time and heartache?”

Now it’s Roland’s turn to sigh. “I don’t care about him. I just don’t want the guilt of killing - look at him, he can’t be older than eighteen or nineteen!”

Raised eyebrow. “Finn will be twenty years old in fifteen days’ time. He is a legal adult. I fail to see why this should matter to either of us.”

“He’s fresh off his first Fixer license! I have years of experience! He had no idea what he was getting into when he signed that invitation and you know it!”

Angela fixes him with a glare that turns his stomach, his freshly remade body reacting to the memory of its sudden, and extremely painful, dismemberment. “I could quite literally hold your soul in my hands if I wanted,” she reminds him in an undertone of steel. “I must do the same for him, following the invitation’s guidance, or my entire plan will be lost, my coworkers’ sacrifices all for naught. Do not disappoint me or ask any more impertinent questions. You know what to do, and what will happen if you do not.” 

Look, some of the people you fight in this game deserved so much better, okay? I came up with an AU concept where if a guest willingly concedes the fight and agrees to stick around, you can get their book without killing them. Finn doesn’t die; neither do Tomerry or Shi Association; all the former employees realize exactly what’s going on with Philip after the Wedge Office fight and manage to calm him down, avoiding the whole Crying Children situation. (And then Gebura makes him collect his jaw off the floor by revealing herself as the Red Mist.)

---

The one that’s a D&D world concept doesn’t have anything concrete written for it yet. (Don’t read this bit if you might want to play in my campaign at some point!) Instead of your typical Forgotten Realms planar setup, the world at large would be called the Seven Spheres, each of them different in terms of climate, geography, native species and magic, etc. The First Sphere would be the most “generic” one (to our way of thinking) and the main setting of the campaign; it would also be the smallest of the Seven, its primary continent home to a former empire of dragons that spanned most of the Sphere until its mysterious fall a thousand years ago.

Now, since the empire fell, the dragons and their children have slowly been dying out. Best estimates are that there’s only a thousand or two left in the entire First Sphere, with fewer eggs hatched every decade. The player characters enter a world with pretty typical low-level quests to start with, but every so often, especially if they engage with optional story stuff (this would be a more roleplay-focused than combat-focused campaign), they get wind of changes in the air - a failed harvest here, an unusually hot and stormy summer there, a trade war once they start hitting mid-levels.

It mimics real-world climate change in all but cause. As coastal cities struggle to contend with rising seas and, more alarmingly, wizards all over the Sphere start to notice their magic falter and wane, the PCs’ goal becomes getting to the bottom of this. And what’s at the bottom is...your typical Nerd fusion of science with fantasy settings.

The Seven Spheres are not planes of existence in the normal D&D sense, but seven planets in the same solar system, each with its own ancient god far more powerful than any god in any mortal pantheon; the First Sphere is so named because it’s closest to the sun. These planetary gods are incredibly large and incredibly alien, thinking in geologic time and concepts far too broad and slow for most sapient beings to comprehend. A thousand years ago, the fall of the dragon empire was caused by an ill-advised ritual meddling with the god of the First Sphere’s natural process of rebirth, causing said god to die without a replacement.

It’s taken this long for the First Sphere to feel the effects because, again, geologic time - a thousand years is a blink of an eye in this kind of time scale. But now the ancient earth-magic that had kept the Sphere’s climate temperate and its magicians in business is failing. The dragons, as beings of magic intrinsically, have been failing all along. And now it’s up to the PCs, up at level 17-20 if not higher by that point, to figure out how to fix the situation and find a new planetary god for the First Sphere before the whole Sphere burns to death.

#bulletnick #wow this got long #you're right i did want to talk about all of them though

[emotionalcello-makefanfics]

Summary :

The awkward flirting ensues on their second date. Served with a pinch of angsty heart to heart and a non-graphic spicy scene to keep it PG.

Sequel to Aaron is a Cute Name

Sequel to this Not Now, But Someday

Click title to read on ao3. Click keep reading to read on tumblr~

Words : 10k

Do you want to go on a date this weekend?

Chris dropped his phone to his marble floor. Almost dropping his chia bowl to join it.

Then he screamed. High-pitched and throaty like a pterodactyl. No, not because he just dropped his brand new Apple phone, but because Aaron just asked him on a date just two days after their first date. 

Chris is still reeling at the feeling of his cute first initiation of a kiss, and now he’s asking him on a date? How bold! And so eager, this man either interested or literally going after his life. Dare he says that Aaron also likes him too?

“Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” Chris chanted as he bends down to grab his phone and stare at his message.

There’s no way he’s replying now, not when he’s aware that he’s generating big dumb energy. Dumb shit happens when he’s on dumb bitch mode, and he needs to direct this energy to the same associate.

‘I just got a text back from the cute agent he’s asking for a second date this weekend ajsnhacdk’

Perfect. Send.

‘Haily’ glares on the screen, an incoming call.

“BIIIIIIITCH WHAT?” the woman screamed, thankfully, Chris already hangs his phone farther from his ear as he picks it up.

“I know!” Chris replied with the same excitement.

“Wow, Chris. Years I’ve been your partner and you never got any hot action, and now I’m on a honeymoon I’m missing everything!... No, honey, it’s Chris... He just hooked up with a guy!... Yeah I know right?” faintly Chris can hear Jim, Haily’s newlywed husband, congratulate him.

“Wait wait wait whoa, I’m not hooking up with him!” Chris cleared, “We’re just going on dates I guess, and I’m his first guy, so like... I’m taking it slow with him.”

“But he kissed you first right?”

“K-Kinda, he initiates and I gave the final push.”

“Okay? Just be careful with the bicurious alright? We all know and experienced what happened with my 2013 incident.”

Chris shivers, “Yeah, no need to tell me twice.” Chris looks down to his feet, covered with deep blue and black-tipped socks. There are a few drops of milk on his shirt making him groan internally, he’ll need to change before he goes to work.

“What’s wrong, Chrissy?” Haily asked after a long pause.

“I really like him, Hay. I don’t know... I just feel like... you know? Really really like him. Am I losing my marbles or what's going on?”

“You’re just whipped, dude.”

“Oh no, already?”

“You know I’m on your side, right?” Haily points out, “I was there when you gone in and out of love with everyone across the board. This is the first time you’re this excited over a date, and you know I’m happy for you! Like fucking finally!”

“I know.”

“If this one last, you better introduce me to him. He’ll gonna need my stamp of approval before he gets to marry you.”

“Yeah duh, Jim had mine, of course, I need your stamp, it’s only the law.” Chris looks at his wrist. Well shit, he’s not gonna be able to change his shirt.

“Gotta go Hay, love you doll! Have a great honeymoon!”

“I’ll see you Monday baby!”

Chris put his phone on his pocket and bolt with his bowl because he’s not gonna waste expensive organic chia seeds, completely forgetting that he left Aaron on read.

++++++

Chris left him on read for 8 hours now, and Aaron tried to not think about it too much. Keyword: tried to.

It doesn’t help that he’s not on any case for the rest of the week, so he’s been writing reports all day. He caught himself spacing out instead of his papers for a number of times he’s not proud of. It’s not his age to feel this bothered over someone leaving him on read. There must be a logical reason why Chris does so.

Their first date goes well. There’s nothing to worry about. Chris will reply sooner or later. If he’s interested in a second date, they’ll go. If Chris is not interested, then they’ll go on with their lives. Like a hook tugging in, Aaron noticed reeling in that there’s a possibility of disinterest on Chris’ behalf.

In that split moment, he felt his age, job, and life on the scale of consideration.

“You’ve been staring at that page for 10 minutes,” A comment of Reid Spencer delivered by Derek Morgan. The agent stood by the door frame with a worried look on his face.

“It’s nothing,” Hotch dismissed.

“Last time you said that you collapsed with your stab wound reopened.”

It was a habit to dismiss his condition, but this matter really is just... petty and nothing.

“It’s about Chris.”

Morgan knits his arched eyebrows, “What about him?” His voice stern and defending.

Though Hotch feels flattered by his intention to protect him –and he’s not the only one to do so– they really shouldn’t be this worried over him. Well, if that’s so, then Hotch shouldn’t be this worried over a read message.

“I just asked him on another date, and he left me on read. Really it’s nothi-”

“Pfft,” Morgan held his laugh with lips pressed tight and curled. Hotch glares at Morgan who’s having a hard time holding back his laugh.

“No need to rub salt on my wound Morgan.”

“I’m sorry I’m sorry, okay it’s all valid and all, I just don’t expect you to do that too.” Morgan walks in and sits across Hotch’s desk.

“I didn’t tell you to sit.”

“Okay, first of all,” Morgan started, ignoring his boss, “It’s normal to feel restless over these things.”

“I know, Morgan.”

“Especially since he’s your first guy.”

“How do you even know that?”

“It shows, man,” Morgan shrugged, “I’m here if you wanna ask about that stuff, ya know?”

“Was Reid your first too?”

“Nah, I was Reid’s.”

“I see.”

“So I can tell you about Chris’s perspective.”

“That’s... actually could be helpful.” Hotch doesn’t believe he’s saying that too, and how Morgan is offering it. He doesn’t know why he’s so nervous with Chris. He didn’t feel like this with Beth. “I don’t want to screw this one up, Morgan,” He found himself saying.

It caught the agent off guard. The weight of Hotch’s words settles down on him, and gone were his playful bearings. Both of them have been a team for years. Morgan, along with a few people that still stay on the team, has been there with him through all his relationships. The beautiful start and how it ends.

How it all always ends.

“Okay, layin’ it a bit too heavy on the first swing there uh, what else does he make you feel?”

Hotch takes in a deep breath, “It just feels so easy. He’s not pushing me, I’m the one that pushes. I’m free-falling, and I’m enjoying it...”

“And it scares you that you feel that way?” Morgan completed. The perk of having profiler friends, they know.

He nods, solemnly, looking down at his clasped hands on top of his last report of the day.

“Wow, all of that after one date?” Morgan flashes his playful smirk.

“I don’t know why either.” Hotch smiles back, just as pleasantly surprised as Morgan does.

“Look man, don’t worry too much. Let yourself be happy and not worry about the what if’s. He seems like a good guy, fun too. If you like him then I trust your judgment of him.”

“Thank you, he is the type of person that balances me. I surprise myself how much I look forward to seeing him again, but there is a possibility that... he might not want to see me again.”

“Oh c’mon, you don’t know that.”

“Just a possibility Derek.”

“Well, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t, you move on.”

“Yes, but I want it to work.”

Morgan raises his eyebrows, mouth agape, “Wow, Hotch... I need to meet the guy who made you his whipped.”

Just as Hotch about to ask what ‘whipped’ means, his phone vibrates. Like on cue, Kristianto Hamlyn glares across Hotch’s phone. Hotch raises his phone and gives a look to Morgan, who understands and leaves with a knowing smile.

“Aaron Ho-”

“I’m so sorry!” Chris’s voice almost deafens Hotch’s right ear. “I saw your message today, and I was... I...um... wait.” Chris cleared his throat. “It caught me off guard and I tucked my phone in because I was late for work,” his voice sounded calmer and stoic, like reading a script.

“Really?” Hotch teased, knowing that’s not the full story.

“Yeah, totally, haha,” Hotch can imagine the detective on his desk with a shy expression on his face, looking down at messy paperwork rowed and stacked there, just like what he’s doing now. “So, this weekend huh?”

“Are you available?”

“Totally! I wanna go to your town!”

“Sure, I’ll show you around this time, any preference?”

Chris paused for a few seconds, then said softly, “I don’t really have any, as long as you’re the one showing me around.” Chris cleared his throat again, “Um, and good food.”

“My yelp game is not as strong as you, but I do know my way around.”

“Oh god, that’s so... that’s so out of character of you! I wish I get to see your face saying ‘yelp game’,” Chris laughed heartily, and Hotch wished he’s there to see Chris does so.

+++++

Date day. Chris has so many things to wear but he none to choose from. It’s edging to fall, so he covers his salmon shirt with a maroon leather jacket and compliment the look with dark jeans and boots. He looks like a biker, a bad boy, the type of rebels that he arrested. He rocked the look, as quoted from Haily. He couldn’t even ride a bicycle. A shame that he’ll never tell anyone beside Haily.

His fingers feel kind of... vibrating? Just like when it’s 9 pm and he’s on his 5 th cup of coffee.

Just a date.

It’s just a date.

Like, whatever, right?

Chris would’ve laughed at himself if he’s not frozen over at the sight of Aaron, standing by the entrance of the cultural market in casual wear. The shirt he wears isn’t sinfully tight, but it complements the outline of his body, broad, sturdy, kinda like a brick and tall. Though he knows that they’re roughly the same height, but that and a tall impression left a different feel to it. He lowly hums at the sight of those legs wrapped in slim-fit dark blue trousers, topped with a leather belt and black oxfords. Light olive shirt tucked into the pants doing his body the justice it deserves. For extra damage, Aaron rolled the sleeves to his elbows.

Chris loved Aaron is his clean-cut suits, but now he hated what those suit had deprived him of.

“Hello? I don’t mind the stare but, I’m more than just a pretty face to admire on.” Aaron is looking at him, holding back a smile, and Chris felt embarrassed for staring at him from 10 meters away.

“Someone’s been practicing their lines!” Chris approaches meekly with a nervous laugh. What is he doing? He’s cooler than this, c’mon. He straightened his back, and flash his smooth playboy smile. “You just look really good.” Nice. He pats himself in the back for that one.

“You too,” Aaron says back.

“Seems fun in there,” Chris noted, looking behind Aaron. It’s a parking lot for the stadium looming over this area filled with street vendors, art vendors, food and random knick-knacks. They’re standing a bit further from the entrance but Chris can smell some hearty delicious curry and the beast inside his stomach roared.

“They’re here every weekend, I figured you like things like this.”

“Oooh, did it came with your profile?”

Aaron kind of leans back. Kind of. Everything Aaron does is always done subtlety and elegance like he’s controlling his reaction, so Chris has to look closely.

“It’s a guess,” Aaron shrugged, looking like he had done something wrong.

“Oh, c’mon I want to know what your profile says about me!”

“You sure? Some people might think it’s invading their space.”

“I can see why, but I dunno, you guys are like psychics to me. It’s cool! Like a Buzzfeed quiz telling me my mental state of mind by my choice of shampoo... or something like that.”

Aaron chuckled, oh, Chris is never getting tired of that. “We’ve been called a lot of names, but this is the first time someone compared us to a personality quiz.”

Chris wonders how long will it be until he’s immune to Aaron’s laughs. But now he enjoys it fully with all the butterflies and the blushing.

They walk around the market. First stop, lunch. They eat chicken green curry standing up beside the truck. They look at art vendors varying from paintings, pots and little miniatures. Then buying little snacks as they walk and talk and look around. Once or twice Chris would get distracted at cool pretty things and comment on it. Some vendors would greet Aaron, he said that he frequents coming here in the morning for groceries.

They were walking peacefully, still edging away from personal topics, until... a cat sculpture caught Chris’ eyes.

“Stop.” Chris holds out his hand in front of Aaron and thankfully the agent stops abruptly without spilling his ice cream.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to have that!” Chris says a little louder than average. Even the artist that sits behind the tables full of her works is startled when Chris points at the cat.

After downing the last of his boysenberry milkshake, Chris runs to the vendor and crouches down to look at the cat sculpture closer. It’s made of clay. Shaped like a fat and amazingly smooth upside-down egg with two triangles on the top as ears. An absolute unit. It’s painted as a black cat with neon yellow eyes. White painted on the tips on its ears and the tail’s tip on the back. And the expression, so smug and all-mighty. Even though the cat is below him and only as long as his forearms, the expression painted on the cat’s face is the look of God looking down on humanity’s downfall like Jersey Shore while eating popcorn.

Chris has to have it.

“Good day mam! Is this your work?” Chris says with wide and suspiciously excited eyes. But in the interest of her work, the artist glows in the same excitement.

“Why yes!”

“Then take my money!”

And took it she did.

Near the end of the day, they settle on the park bench eating more snacks as the sky dims with the sun on the way setting.

“You were really excited about the clay cat,” Aaron noted, biting into his second taco.

There’s burrito filling on his cheeks, preventing Chris from speaking. He chews faster to reply, “It looked like my... uh, my foster dad’s cat.”

“Oh, you’re a foster?”

“Yup, I’ve been in and out of foster homes since I was young, I think.”

“You think?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hm, did you ever get adopted?” Aaron thread lightly.

“Nope. The last place I live in before taken by my foster dad was kind of fucked up. I was seventeen when the police bust the church, and I was taken in by one of the officers. His name’s Matty, Matty Matheson. Man, what a guy he was.” Chris prayed to the darkening light gray-blue sky.

“He’s such a blast. Thought me how to cook, how to be carefree and just enjoy life, you know? Despite everything.” Chris stops there, he’s not ready for the rest, and Aaron blissfully doesn’t press on. Aaron doesn’t express any distinctive emotions, but his eyes are on Chris, focused, yet has no pressure.

“I wasn’t his only rescue.” Chris continued, “He had Rosco when I came. A black cat with white tips,” Chris pats on the cat statue wrapped in a box and brown bag between them.

“Must’ve been a good cat.”

“Oh, no. She was a bitch. She would hiss even when I look at her. Then she had the audacity to zoom onto my path and hissed when I accidentally touched her!” Chris corrected and saw how Aaron paused unsurely. “But I remembered when she acted sweet one day. I was still in my early years of living with Matty and I was crying myself to sleep pretty regularly. Usually, Matty could cheer me up instantly but he was on night shift that day. She then crawled up to my bed and sleep on my foot. Don’t know why she did that but, since then she always sleeps by the foot of the bed. Doesn’t change the fact that she’s entitled though, she would bite me when I accidentally kick her in my sleep.”

“Do you think she knows that you need her?”

“Hm, I don’t know, cats are weird.”

“Wouldn’t have known, I’ve only had dogs.”

“Dang, I’ve wanted a dog once too. Do you have one?” Chris wished Aaron say yes just so he can demand dog pics next.

“I can’t. I’m away a lot. Sometimes I need to be ready in an hour to fly over for a case.” There’s a defeated look in Aaron’s expression, but he still smiles that soft little boat like curve.

“Aw, that sucks.”

“What about you? Do you have a cat?

“Kind of, but I would feel guilty of leaving a cat at home so much. Maybe when I retire.”

“Hm, that’s a nice plan.”

Then they take a breather, pausing comfortably as they look around. The park lights are on even though there’s still light left on the darkening sky. Chris got here at 1 PM, he checked his watch and isn’t really surprised that it’s a little bit past 5 pm. Closing the end of the year, daylight is shorter. Now that he’s thinking of the end of the year...

“Hey, Aaron?”

“Yes?”

“You have plans for Thanksgiving? Going back to your folk’s place?” Chris baited, hopeful that he didn’t step on his toe.

“I don’t have a lot of immediate families and I’m not really close with my extended family. My parents died a long time ago, so I only have a brother now and again, not close. The last time I spent it with my family was when I was still married, so... around 5 years ago.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“It’s okay, it’s not a delicate subject. What about you?”

Well, it’s delicate for Chris, but Aaron opened up, it’s only fair that he does the same. “Got no folks left to eat dinner with.” He shrugged, a fact too old for him to be bothered to say, but he can see how Aaron’s expression shift to gloom. “Matty died in the field seven years after he takes me in. Since then I’ve been having thanksgiving with my partner, Haily. But she got married recently, so I bet she’ll have them at her in-laws. There’s always the office Thanksgiving dinner.”

“I have one too,” Aaron said. “If things turn to worse and we found ourselves alone in the holidays, we can always spend it together.”

only on their second date and Chris already got an invitation to spend the holidays together? Like whoa, hold up Lightning McQueen. Of course, Chris wants to, but hopefully, that’s not moving too fast, certainly not for Chris. And since Aaron is the one that suggested it, must’ve been a comfortable pace for him too, still...

“It’s only our second date, you really sure you want to spend your precious holidays with me?” Chris teased, hoping he’s not shooting himself on the dick.

“It’s only fair to spend my precious holidays with someone precious.”

If his heart can audibly scream, he would’ve deafened everyone at a two-block radius. Aaron just teased him back, and the audacity of that smirk!

“I see someone had practiced his lines, enough to earn a blush outta me,” Chris fights back, leaning closer till their shoulder touched.

“I had a great example,” Aaron looks deeply into Chris. He forgot how pretty Aaron’s eyes are, how dare he? “From this little cutie with deep blue eyes and shiny chocolate hair.”

Chris is destroyed by ‘little cutie’, “Aaaah! You win!” Chris leans back, covering his flushed face while Aaron laughed. The laugh that ended Chris once and for all.

How will he survive a relationship with this man?

Wait, will they be an item?

Suddenly, two dates are a date too many.

Chris is filled with the urge of not wanting to go home, but he knows he has to. They spent a half day together and it’s been fun and exciting even though he has to admit, Chris does most of the talking just because he generally talks a lot. Aaron seems to be having fun too. They opened up a little today, that’s a bonus.

Chris counts today’s date as a win.

They walk together to the subway and waits for Chris’s train.

“Have any plan for our third date?” Aaron asked, and Chris is way ahead of him.

“Oh, you bet I do. This time, I’m taking you where I think you’ll like.”

“Really? Did you profile me?” Aaron asked, amused.

“I have a few tricks up my sleeve, just you wait.”

“I hope it’s nothing reserved. I wouldn’t want to have to cancel you last minute because of a case.”

“... welp, plan b!”

“I’m really sorry.”

“I’m kidding!” Chris exclaimed, bumping his shoulder with Aaron’s. He’s been doing that a lot today, he needs to stop. “C’mon, don’t be sorry for doing your job. What you do is awesome!” and dangerous, the kind that reduces your life at every brush of death. He red David Rossi’s book, and man, if that’s what Aaron is really going through for every mission, he wouldn’t sleep a wink.

But hey, what can you do? Aaron gotta do what Hotch gotta do.

“You wouldn’t be saying that after I cancel on our date 5 times in a row over a case. Today we’re just unbelievably lucky.”

“Hey, I think you’re just overestimating that,” Chris scoots closer and bumps his shoulder against Aaron’s, purposely this time. “We’ll see where this goes together.”

Aaron passed him a thankful smile as he returns the gesture, bumping up his heartbeat. “I have a lot of fun today,” he said with dark eyes looking up from the subway’s grimy tiles.

Chris tightened his hold on the cat sculpture on his arms, “Same here.”

A voice-over breaks their zone and a train passes through the tunnel, bringing the wind with it. Chris looks to the side where Aaron squints his eyes and hair blown slightly. Yup, he’s so dead.

“This is me,” Chris cocks his head to the slowed-down train in front of them, “Um, goodnight.”

Aaron steps forward and Chris hits the breakfast. An arm nest softly on Chris’ waist as Aaron leans in. Chris doesn’t give the last push this time, and Aaron lands his lips softly on top of his. In the languid paced movement, everything else seems to blur. Their body awkwardly apart, blocked by the clay cat between them. Chris takes a hand off the statue and put it on the back of Aaron’s neck, grazing the skin at the nape. When he breathes in, he smelt the salsa they ate with and the hint of woody perfume.

Who knows who leans back first, but when they did, the playful air they had is gone. Like realizing that they’ve stepped into a territory with a big red sign on the outside.

“You’re going to be the death of me, Aaron Hotchner,” Chris said in lieu of the state he’s in.

“I hope that’s not true, you promised me a date.” Aaron just chuckled and slid his hands off his back, “Go before you miss the train.”

Chris steps into the train reluctantly, waving to Aaron who still ever so sweetly smiles.

+++++

Aaron was not kidding about canceling their dates 5 times. They’ve planned a lot to meet up and Aaron has been canceling on him five times in a row in addition to Chris canceling on him once because he’s assigned on night watch. Chris wasn’t upset about it, though it’s sad that it’s so hard to meet him, it was at a point where it’s kind of entertaining. ‘Now I get to know what Lois Lane felt,’ he teased one day hoping it would make Aaron sound less sorry. It didn’t work, yet Chris tried anyway. ‘I’ll wait till the end of time, my dear.’ ‘Oh, those sickos, taking you away from me.’ ‘It’s okay, send me his face with my name carved on his face. Stay safe!’ The last one is super cringy and a failed attempt on his take of an Addams Family AU.

In return, they talked a lot on the phone, every time that they can spare. Aaron will call after he finished his case, and Chris would call whenever he misses him. Aaron can always reach him, but Chris can only be so lucky if the end of the call gets through.

It’s not until two months after their second date that they meet again. Now, they’re sitting on the bench right outside the emergency room, shoulder to shoulder. The waiting hall is quiet at 1 am, and the only other people waiting there is an elderly couple at the other end of the hall.

“So, there I was, reduced down to my flower boxers, modeling for a bunch of 70-year-olds that attempted to draw a semi-nude picture of me. When nurse Abigail came, I thought for sure she would put a stop to those cheeky seniors, but she just stood and enjoy the view too! The only light of this is one of the seniors was legit good at drawing and he gave the picture to me.”

Hotch rubbed his face, the corner of his lips peeking from his hand as his chest shakes. If they’re not in a hospital right now, he bet Hotch would’ve laughed louder.

“What other hobbies you hide from me besides intervening on seniors’ home gathering .”

“Excuse me, it was a volunteering gig, and it’s fun.” Chris huffed playfully, “They’re all really nice, it’s like having dozens of doting grandparents, and now I can knit.”

“I’m not surprised.” Aaron finally cheered up.

When Chris got the call, he rushed here even though he was just getting ready for bed. Hotch was in the middle of assisting the police to hunt a serial arsonist when his friend, and Chris’ idol, Rossi is shot on his stomach. It was supposedly a small case, so only Rossi and he was handling it. The rest of his team is on the other end of the US, all the way to Sacramento for another case. Aaron called just to have someone to talk to, or so he said. There was an argument when Chris insisted that it’s okay for him to come over. Yet when he arrived, Aaron greeted him with a silent hug and they talked about anything else.

All they can do now is wait while Rossi is in the ER.

It was concerning yet endearing to get a call from Aaron when he’s still Hotch. His team is like family, and Aaron is alone, waiting for a life and death procedure of what an equivalent as the eccentric sketchy yet suspiciously rich Italian Uncle.

“What made you want to pursue this career, Chris?” Hotch asked out of the blue.

“A detective?”

“Mhm.”

“Well, Matty did. I was a teen when Matty takes me in, but he inspires me a great deal. They said the job wears you down, that you’ll see the world and all the ugly behind the crime and feel like nothing will change. Never Matty. He stays positive even though he’s on the job for 30 years. The way he sees the world was beautiful and new to me, and since him, I don’t want to look at the world like how I did ever again. And I was pretty weak when I was a kid, so I want to become stronger and be in a power that can protect people. Because I can see what the police failed to see when I needed them then.”

It’s a good feeling to remember that better part down the memory lane. Whatever that had happened had led him to here. To meet Matty, Haily, and then Aaron.

Fingers laced between his and grips tight, “I’m glad you met him. I hoped I had the chance to meet him.”

Chris clasp his hand back, squeezing just as tight. His cheeks start to tingle, he just hoped it doesn’t show.

“Me too.” Chris looks away when he sees Aaron with his cheeky smile and the lights showing the deep olive hue in his eyes. “I’m hungry, you’ve eaten yet?”

“Not dinner.”

“I’ll get us some protein bars, and a warm coffee?”

“Yes please.”

Chris brought back 4 granola bars from the vending machine and two paper cups of warm watery coffee. Both of them groaned simultaneously at the horrible taste then chuckled. They chatted some more until Hotch starting to look sleepy by the look of his heavy eyelids trying so hard to open.

“You should go home, Chris.”

“No, I’ll accompany you until the doctor’s back.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” because Chris is worried. When he came, Hotch looks deathly worried, even now he looked paler than usual, which already look vampire pale in general. “You guys are so solid, you know that?” Chris stated out of the blue. “Even I feel it when you guys were back in DC. You got a dynamic like family on a mission.”

“That’s one way to put...” Hotch yawns, “...to put it.” Then he puts down his empty paper cup on the feet of the benches. Even after coffee, Hotch still lulls his head.

“Want to lay down?” Chris pats his shoulder, feeling a little bolder.

“Thank you,” he said, it got Chris thinking it’s a ‘no thank you’, but then, Hotch scoots a little and lay his head on Chris’s shoulder. He smells like an antiseptic soap, mint, sweat and somehow, gun powder. The weight of his head feels like a cat resting there, and his hair feels like prickly grass.

He’s so glad he wears his cushiony leather jacket today.

“Chris?” Hotch called, and he hums in reply, “Have you ever feel lonely in your own home?”

His breath stops for a split second. Maybe that’s why Hotch is here, he thought. With a feeling of melancholy, he leans his head on top of Aaron’s, hoping he’ll provide more comfort.

“Why do you think I spent my weekends volunteering in a senior home? If I’m lucky, some of them would think I’m their grandson, and I felt like I have a family. Even though the next time I cam there, most of them forgot about me.” Chris sighed a shuddering breath. He never admits that to anyone.

He’s bright, confident, and optimistic, it’s his brand. To gloom over it is not him, and telling it to Hotch who he only knows for two months is even so.

Aaron reaches for his hand and laces them together again, holding tightly as he buries his face even deeper to the crook of Chris’ neck.

Either Hotch is drowsy or he’s messing with him right now. Either way, Chris gladly slide his hands and intertwined his fingers with Hotch’s.

“My ex-wife and son were killed a few years ago.”

Chris choked on his own saliva, “Ack, oh... Oh my God.”

The Hotch has the audacity to chuckle, “I knew you’d react that way.”

“React what way? That’s... that’s awful Aaron, I-” Chrish is cut short by his sudden sob. He leans back and breathes in like he always does when he’s overwhelmed, and tried to calm down. Aaron needs him now.

“It’s a long time ago.”

“Does time even matter for things like that?” Chris cleared his throat and breathes out,  “It doesn’t go away. They’re either pushed away or they don’t age well.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Trauma.”

Aaron hums, “Are you speaking from experience?”

The question hits like a deadly jab, yet at the same time, Chris expected it. “Yes.”

“Then you’re right. It doesn’t age well. I was so used to calling home to talk to my son, on every different occasion. I was always busy, and my ex-wife got custody so he’s always with her. I always call after he’s on recitals, camp, holidays when I couldn’t see him, or even homework. Picking him up on the weekends are the things I looked forward to, then suddenly, I don’t have that anymore. I’ve been coming back to a quiet home for years, until you.”

“Until me, huh.”

It’s not his story yet it hurts to hear. Hurts to know how much he must’ve hurt. The only thing he could be happy about is how Aaron talks about it calmly like he had made peace with it.

Chris holds on to Hotch’s hand tighter, pressing his face on top of Hotch’s head and hide in his raven black hair.

Soon, Hotch fell asleep on his shoulder while Chris stays up and wait for the doctor to come out of the ER.

+++++

It was almost midnight when Hotch finally finished with his reports and heads home. As he just makes himself comfortable in his car, his private phone rings. Chris.

“Hi.”

“Hey, hot stuff.” Chris doesn’t sound so hot.

“How are you?”

“A-okay, I just wanna hear your voice.”

“Chris.”

A pause. Seconds ticks away. Then a defeated sigh.

“I swear it’s nothing. I’m just... it’s just uh, I just want to talk.”

“What is it?” Aaron leans back on his seat, “Nothing’s too minor, you told me that.”

“Pulling a reverse card like that is not fair,” so he said, yet with an amused tone in his voice.

“I got no card left on my hand.”

Chris sighed, “I get like this sometimes.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t belong in my own home, in my own skin, you know?” It’s the first time that Chris sounded vulnerable, troubled. Aaron never hears him like this, yet it’s not surprising or completely foreign.

With a tightened squeeze on his phone, Aaron says, “I know exactly what you mean.”

“Oh...” Chris paused. “I’m sorry. It feels terrible.”

“It is.” Aaron mused, then smiled as he popped an idea, "Want me to come over?”

“W-Wh... Wait, um... really?” it’s the highest tone Chris hits so far. “I, Yeah! But you just got back.”

“I got my go-bag, I’m ready to sleepover at your place.”

“Wait... you’re sleeping over?!”

“Unless you don’t want me-”

“I want to! I’ll send you the location but I have to tidy up now okay bye babe.” Then Chris hangs up abruptly.

Aaron mouthed with a smile, “Babe?”

.-.-.-.-.

“Hi babe,” Aaron leers as soon as the door is open. Chris immediately groans with a furious blush on his face.

“It slipped okay?” Chris steps sideways to let Aaron in.

“Didn’t say I’m complaining.”

Chris lives in a fairly good apartment complex. Complete with security measures such as a guard and CCTV. Hotch doesn’t know what to expect when he finally comes into Chris’s living space. The walls have a lot of photos of him with different types of social groups. He recognizes one when Chris is younger in the academy uniform, others with seniors from which he volunteered and some with his work associates. A small bookcase at the end of the room filled with books. The open kitchen is on the left, through the sofa and TV, and fairly decorated with various utensils, which means that Chris cooks at least.

The bedroom located pass the kitchen. There’s a blanket on the sofa, which means that Chris spends more time there. On top of the coffee table in front of it, rest a wine glass, a coffee cup, and the cat sculpture. In front of the cat with a condescending look, sit a framed photo of Chris in his teens and a big framed man in a police uniform, must be Matty.

“So, this is your place after you clean it?” Aaron dropped his bag beside the couch.

“Actually, I gave up halfway.”

“It’s not as bad as you said.” After looking around, he noticed Chris bending down to get his bag. “Where are you taking my bag?”

“To my room.”

Aaron smirk, recognizing his chance to tease Chris, “If you want me in your bed so badly why don’t you say just say so,” Aaron knows it’s not what Chris meant, but he can’t help it, especially how Chris would go red in an instant.

“Aaron you need to stop! You’re getting dangerously way better than me at this.”

“Why thank you,” Aaron leans in to take his bag away and slip a kiss on the corner of his mouth before dropping his bag beside Chris’ bed. “Unless you don’t want me here-”

“I do!” Chris blurted out. Aaron knocked back his head and laugh as he drops his butt on the soft mattress that bounces him lightly.

“How are you so calm?” Chris finally whispered. “You must’ve seen how I’m literally gulping down my thirst and I’m holding back...”

“Why would you hold back?”

“Because I... well, I want you, but I know it’s your first and I know I have to get into this with communication before and I go into this with you and there are like a few things you need to know and I have to prepare and I haven’t even choose the words yet and I-”

“Chris,” Aaron called when he doesn’t hear him takes a breath.

“Really just want to touch you all over and have my way with you because here you are like right in front of me looking all delicious and hot and literally the embodiment of my wet dream for the past weeks but I know we need to do it slowly and even I can’t survive if we don’t do it slowly and I just feel like I’m spilling on the edge because I miss you we rarely see each other and to finally see you I just wanna-”

“Chris,” Aaron grabbed Chris’ hand and pull slightly. “I know. I missed you too.”

Chris sucked in a breath, eyes wide at Aaron who sits on his bed as if he belonged there. No, this was not Aaron’s intention when he wants to come over, but the thought is intriguing no?

In all relationships before this one, Aaron always played the role Chris is doing now. The patient one, the waiting one, the understanding one, the leading one, the one that gives his partner the ‘go’. Now he’s on the other side of the role, and so far, he’s enjoying it.

Aaron takes off his suit.

“Oh my god, it’s happening!” Chris curled his shoulders in as if to hide, but his eyes wide open.

Aaron chuckled, “You say that as if you don’t want to see me naked.”

“I do!” Chris lands his hand on Aaron’s shoulder so abruptly that he stopped halfway of taking his tie off. “Wait, yeah, I mean... Look,” Chris kneels on the floor, grabbing both of his hands. For once Aaron doesn’t understand why Chris does the things he did.

“I...” Chris trails to a pause. In real-time, Aaron can see how the thousands of Chris’ thoughts drained down into one state of panic, “I’m nervous,” The detective finally says. No childish quirks, just a man, truly afraid.

“You think I’m not?” Aaron cups Chris's distressed face with both his hand on each side. “But I feel safe with you. Just knowing that you worry means a lot to me.”

“I... don’t understand. I’m a mess, I’m afraid that I fuck things up and... and... I just want this to feel good for you too.” Chris just explained what Aaron meant without him realizing it. A person so sweet that it made the back of his throat gulps and his mouth salivate. To his absolute surprise, he felt the smooth alcohol like a burn inside him as he looks at Chris kneeling with hands on his thighs. Those deep blue eyes look so innocent and kind as they look up to him. What a pleasant new-found feeling.

“In my previous relationships, I’m always the one leaned on, not that I mind, just wanted to say that I’ve felt the pressure you’re feeling. When you worry, I know you’ll be careful with me, I feel like I could lean on you. It’s going to be okay.”

Chris blinks, eyebrows knit together, “Of course you can, were you not able to do that before?”

Of course, he does... Wait, does he? He opens his mouth, yet his mind draws a blank.

“Oh, my pretty baby,” Chris coos, slipping his hands on Aaron’s waist and kiss him on the lips.

Aaron kisses him back, pressing his face to his as he closes his eyes. “If you want me, don’t hesitate, just...”

“Slowly?”

“Please.”

The kiss starts chaste, like their first kiss. Hotch doesn’t realize how touch starved he was until now that’s touched with hands that eagerly wants him. He has his experiences with women, but the women that made him feel like this with a kiss, was married to him, and the other dated him briefly. Strong and steady arms loop on his back and hold him tight as the man that owns them kisses him deeper. His own hands grab onto his shoulder while the other raking Chris’ brunette hair with his fingers and pulls him even closer.

The air intake in between kept short and efficient. They paced up their movement with no hurry, with Chris’ hands on his back, he slowly descends him on the mattress. A heavier weight on top of him surprisingly serves comfort at how it grounds him. Thick pair of legs snug between his, grinding teasingly slow. Chris smells of his lemongrass shampoo and his favorite lavender lush soap bar, and Aaron takes in a deep breath of that mixed with his own scent. Soft pulses beat against his hammering heart, pressing generously heavy.

Every subtle movement, even the gentlest made itself known prominently on each other’s senses. The hands cupping Chris’ face trails down to his chest, playing with the contour of his body. Chris’ arms slip away from Hotch’s back and slither down to pull the shirt tucked in his belted hips.

The one carrying the current is Chris, and Aaron is blissfully riding along like a leaf on the mercy of the water stream. It’s a self-surrender that Aaron never felt before. To receive instead of giving. To follow instead of leading. To surrender to another’s arm instead of holding onto them in his.

Whatever playful intention Aaron had –because he was here to cheer Chris up originally- had gone with the lul of this moment.

That is, until a hand slithers under his shirt. Aaron tensed and hold Chris’s hands from moving any more.

“Sorry,” Chris breathed. Thankfully, he doesn’t sound too troubled by Aaron’s sudden stop. “We don’t need to go more than this if you don’t want to.” Whatever expression he wears that made Chris said that he doesn’t like it.

“It’s not that.” Aaron gulps. It’s inevitable anyway, he’ll have to show it sooner or later, Now is a good enough time as any.

Aaron unbuttoned his shirt, wanting to look away from Chris anxious eyes but he doesn’t, for Chris. He knows the scars won’t turn Chris off, but Chris has the tendency to feel strongly to these things despite him trying not to show it on his face, but that’s not what he’s worried about. What worries Aaron was, well, himself. It’s a scar that still feels raw and open.

For every button he undid, a puzzle piece fits in the picture. Then when all the pieces are there, Chris gapes, breathless. Aaron could feel his pained eyes looking at each of the nine stab wounds on his torso.

“Oh... Aaron,” Chris whimpered, that alone makes up for Aaron’s curiosity. Hands travel upon his sides peering in yet never too far, careful not to touch the white lines across his abdomen and chest that were once stab wounds. “I... you don’t have to ever tell me about it... I just... I’m so...”

“I’ll tell you, Chris, maybe not now.”

Chris leans down his temple against Aaron’s collarbone, damp and warm with sweat that was building up. “Does it still hurt you?”

“It’s an old scar, it had healed completely.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

Aaron knows. He places his hand at Chris’s trimmed nape, raking his fingers across the prickly short half of his hair and sigh.

“Sometimes.”

Chris hums in reply, placing a kiss on his collarbone as a start, and slowly trails lower. Aaron unclenches his hand and lets Chris go wherever.

“Can I touch them?” Chris asked in a treading whisper. Aaron can feel his question against his skin, sending wavelength of warmth to his chest. No one had asked permission before, but most of them pretend it’s not there, and Aaron was okay with that. Chris is different. Everything he’s done with Chris has all been different. Yet every new territory he stepped in with Chris has been a fulfilling one.

“Yes.”

The kisses trails lower then it landed on the first keloid scar. Then to another one, then another. When Chris reaches for the scar in the abdomen, Aaron gasped slightly at the heightened feeling. Both his fist balled, pulling the sheets slightly.

“If I’m doing something you didn’t want,” Chris said, “Promise that you’ll tell me.”

“I... I promise,” Aaron whispered between the breath.

Chris kisses the last and furthest down scar while he unbuckles Aaron’s belt.

+++++

“His name is Foyet,” Aaron admits to the ceiling. Chris froze on the bathroom’s door frame with freshly brushed teeth wearing nothing but the famous flower boxer.

“Wait, we’re doing this now?” Chris hurries over Aaron’s side and lands his butt on the edge of the bed on his side, bouncing Aaron along.  “You don’t have to tell me if it brings back memories.”

The tight grip on his hand made him look at Chris, really look at him. The fear, concern, and worry that blatantly displayed in his face, and no curiosity whatsoever.

“It doesn’t, not anymore.” Not after years of therapy. Chris doesn’t look convinced. Aaron sits up, with a hand on top of Chris’. “Do you want to know?” he asked, unsure himself.

His eyes don’t look blue at the darkness of the room. They opened the window and the city lights were their only light, yet Aaron can feel his eyes looking at his scars. Looking up, Chris looks determined. “Yes.”

So, Aaron told him everything. Foyet, the man who took his whole world from him. How it started with him being presumed as a victim, the deal, the stabbing. It wasn’t the worst part of it. The worst part was how Foyet involved his family. His then ex-wife, Haley and his way too young son Jack were sent to protective custody. Even with that, even with the strings Aaron pulled to keep them safer, Foyet got to him and Aaron was too late. Foyet made Haley calls him as he shoots her on the head with Jack present. When Aaron reached the house, all he sees is red and the next thing he knows, he’s beating Foyet flat to the ground. Each strike he lands, even with the bone-breaking crunch, the man laughs until he died in his hands. He doesn’t know when he died, or which punch that did it, which hands. A coworker needed to pull him away from the dead body, then he ran towards his son’s room to find him bleeding out in his bed while hugging his Yoda figurine. Even after he killed him, it felt he didn’t give the man when he deserved. He didn’t even give his son a quick death, but a slow painful one.

It ate him alive for years thinking the way they died. His son must’ve been so afraid as he bleeds out and his consciousness slipping away, the fear Haley must’ve felt when she faced Foyet. Aaron promised that he’ll make it up to her for the rest of his life after everything’s done, and he still does. For a long time, Aaron doesn’t know what else to live for and found it back with them.

He never told anyone this much. The bureau’s psychiatrist had his file so he doesn’t need to say much. His relationship with Beth ended before he could tell her. In each word he says, the scar made itself known. At the end of his tale, his mouth is dry, and his heart on his hand where Chris is holding with trembling hands.

“Oh god, Aaron.” Chris sobs, but just as Aaron predicted, he’s holding back tears behind haunted eyes. “That’s horrible.” Chris held Aaron’s hand tighter.

“It is,” Aaron admitted.

“I’m glad that he died, even more knowing that you killed him, but how do you get away from the bureau with that?”

“Not without a fight and justification. I was a prosecutor, after all, I know my way around.”

“Still,” Chris catches himself after hearing his voice broke, “Ugh, the justice system is so fucked up, and I’m the justice system.”

“We’re but a gear among many.”

“I know you must’ve heard it a lot before, but I’m so sorry it happened to you.”

“I don’t actually.”

“Don’t what?”

“Not a lot of people said they’re sorry. My colleague didn’t say it, they don’t need to, I already know. Not a lot of people know about it since it’s highly classified for my sake. My ex’s family blamed me for what happened, so they’re not sorry for me.”

Chris falls into a solemn silence. His face rids of his usual playfulness or even sorrow. Just an empty expressionless mask as he stares down their clasp hands. It’s an eerie thing to see Chris slips out into this character. It’s foreign, but it’s still undoubtedly Chris, and that’s what terrifies him.

“It doesn’t happen to you anymore,” Chris says monotonously.

“Are you talking about me or yourself?” Aaron baited, and Chris finally looks up from their hands.

“For both of us.” Chris weakly smiled. “It’s just so sad, and I think I just broke there because... well, I can’t see the sunny part of it. There’s a bright side of everything, I know that. I just can’t see it in your case other than that it doesn’t happen to you anymore, and it’s never going to happen to you anymore because he’s gone.”

“You’re right.”

“Then why do you look like that?” Chris asked.

“Like what?”

“Like it’s still happening to you.”

Aaron didn’t see that question coming, even after knowing Chris’ character, sometimes the serious part of Chris often comes unseen.

“Because I never let myself forget. For the first years, after it happened, I don’t let myself forget by not forgiving myself.” The confession had been a dead weight he carried through the years. He told himself that he deserves the gaining weight he carries, even when he’s telling the bureau’s psychiatrist. Now, it’s different, because someone with teary deep blue eyes is telling him that it doesn’t happen to him anymore.

“Is that the reason why you’re always working late? Because of guilt?”

“I was, but not anymore.”

“But you still do it.”

“A habit.”

Chris hums, his eyes no longer wet in tears, but piercing and searching into him.

“I know how it feels to come home to a quiet house. I’ve lost...” Chris trails away, going quiet. Just a look at Chris’s face and Aaron knew he finally found someone that understands the loss he felt, and he’s not grateful for it. “I’ve lost more than I can handle in a short amount of time. I know how it feels, not wanting to come home, because... well, there’s no one to come home to. The empty rooms are all that I can get, though it’s needed sometimes.”

Aaron gulped. He knows Chris is right, but he never hears it loud and clear, or hear anyone says it to his face.

“We can do something about that!” Chris cheered and Aaron leans back, perplexed by the quick turn. “When it gets too quiet, let call!”

Aaron gapes for a few seconds before finally regaining his voice, “I can’t call you every day.”

“I not talking about everyday, silly. I know we’re too busy for every day, just when you have the feeling that you intentionally don’t want to go home when you should’ve, let’s call.” Chris noted the unsure look on Aaron’s face and leans closer with both his hand perching between Aaron’s waist. “Look, we don’t even need to talk, just going online on WhatsApp voice call. That way I’ll be just around the corner for small talk or even petty question.”

“You’d do that?” Hotch doesn’t know how he looked, but the way Chris smiles at him so full of compassion fills a void that’s been gaping for a long time.

“You’re not asking too much of me, I promise. I want to call too.”

After a smile, Hotch finally nodding in agreement. “Thank you.”

Chris slips his arms around Aaron’s torso and hugged tightly. “By the way, I didn’t say this before, but the scars look really sexy on you, sorry.”

Aaron chuckled, “Don’t be, that’s the first time someone doesn’t pity the scars I have.”

++++

“SSA Hotchner.”

“You’re still at the office?”

“Yes.”

“Aaron,” the voice firmed up.

That’s when Aaron finally tore his eyes away from his reports and looks at the caller ID, seeing Chris’s name.

“Just landed, this paper is last minute.”

“Uh-huh,” Chris doesn’t sound convinced. “Oh, by the way, thank you for the gift.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, I was in tears, then conveniently wiping my tears with it.”

Hotch chuckled, “Is it really tears worthy?”

“It deserves a bucket of it, mostly because of laughter, mostly because I imagine you making it. When did you even find the time?”

“I spent a few minutes before bed on it.”

“Awww, okay I’m not mad anymore, but look at the time Aaron Hotchner! I know the watch I gave you still works, it’s time to go home. I’ll read for you again if you needed to.”

Aaron looks down at his wrist. Black leather and titanium steel. Silver needle points at an 11 and a 10. “I’d like that.”

“Okay, call me when you’re home, bye hon.”

“Bye.”

The line disconnected, and Hotch looks up to see Rossi standing there with a smug smile.

“And what would that gift be, that it made a grown man cry?” Rossi steps inside and hands him a folder.

“I knit him a handkerchief with a cat on it, it’s surprisingly easy.”

“You? Knitting?” Rossi said with eyes balked, rising a tone on each word.

“It’s surprisingly therapeutic.”

Rossi shook his head and chuckles, “Look at you two! Already acting like a pair of an old married couple. I didn’t think you two will even go that far, I was skeptical, not gonna lie.”

“Me too,” he admitted, “But I really like him.”

There’s a playful glint in Rossi’s eyes, a mischievous intent, “So, what’s your status?”

“What do you mean?”

Rossi gave him a look and Aaron, for the lack of a better word, ‘got caught.’ He never thought of it before. He just assumes that Chris and he are in a relationship, but now that he thinks about it, none of them had established that.

“You’re getting rusty there boy,” Rossi smirks, enjoying Aaron’s demise.

“Well I might be, but it helps that Chris is as rusty at this as I am.”

+++++

“I know the sound of that sigh,” chirped a high pitched voice from the desk in front of him, then followed by a screech from plastic wheels scraping the floor.

Chris pushes himself to the side, away from his messy desk filled with due reports and a computer screen filled with even more words and updated evidence. Wheels from his old chair squeaks and he meets a done expression from a blond with glossy pink lips.

“Trouble in paradise?” She beats him to it.

“Nothing like that Haily, just tryna take care of my...” Chris froze. Haily arched her permanently made eyebrows, watching Chris like he just got a stroke.

Why didn’t he ever think about this before? They never established a relationship. Like who are they? Are they still in the probation period? Because it doesn’t feel that way. Now that it doesn’t feel that way, what are they gonna do now?

“Really Chris? Don’t tell me you haven’t asked him to be your boyfriend yet. I taught you better than that.” Haily’s loud voice is mercifully is on a lower side as she said that.

“I... I don’t know! I was waiting for him, and I don’t want to be the one that pushes!”

“You said you have a heart to heart a couple of weeks ago! Isn’t that the green light?”

“I think so... I mean, it has to be but I can’t be sure.”

Haily knits her eyebrows together so hard it’ almost looked like a unibrow, pursing her lips as she lands her pretty tiny face on her long manicured hands. “Did he do something that makes you second guess?”

Chris shakes his head vigorously, “It’s not that... He’s perfect, Haily. He’s the tall dark and handsome type I love. And his body! Oh my god, that fucking suit had fooled me for months! His body is an absolute unit. Like, dense and packed with full power!” Chris sighed breathlessly as he wipes a sweat on his temple while Haily rolled her eyes. “But inside that hard exterior is this dreamy soft and gooey heart. But... do you remember 2015?”

Haily dropped her frown, pale blue eyes open in surprise, “How far have you gone?”

“To the moon.”

“Chrissy,” Haily awed, pushing with her work leather heel and pushes her office chair to bump with his. “This one won’t crash and burn like the dumpster fire of 2015, I promise.”

Chris rubs his face and lay on his hand, “How would you know?”

“You gotta trust me, honey,” Haily drapes her skinny arms around Chris’ shoulder, “I’ve seen you grow, you’re more mature now and Aaron is different than her. It won’t happen again.”

“You haven’t even met him yet.”

“Shh shhh shhh, I just know okay? Though opinion may change after I see him, maybe.”

Chris just gave a weak smile, he went weak in the knees at how he’s going to bring this conversation up. They’re already comfortable being where they are now, being who they are. If Chris brings it up... what if Aaron taps out?

“Hey! I don’t wanna see those wrinkles,” Haily press her fingers between Chris’ brows. He flinched back, pouting. “What were you texting bout with mister cool and sexy anyway?” Give it to Haily to know who’s texting who without seeing. She said it’s in the typing sound, the hesitating pauses, the excited rapid punches. Chris is still learning, still doesn’t get it.

“I was lecturing him about staying late at the office,” Chris admitted bashfully.

Haily narrowed her eyes at Chris, scoffing, “And where are we at this same hour?”

“Our office...”

“Go home Chris, then call your boo.”

“Okay,” Chris takes his bag and put on his jacket, “How bout you?”

“I lost that bet with Santiago and had some extra reports, but I’m done now,” She takes her purse, “Come now baby, let’s ditch this dump!”

+++++

“Chris?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re burning the banana.”

“Oh shit!”

Chris yank the pan away and throw it to the counter beside the stove while turning it off. Poor banana... it’s burnt on the sides, sticking to the pan. Poor bacon and eggs, why are they mixed with a banana?

“Why are you searing banana with bacon and eggs,” Aaron chirped, looking down at the monstrosity Chris had created.

“I don’t know,” Chris mused, not daring to look up to look at Aaron after what he’d done to his pan, and other things too of course. “Sorry about burning our dinner.”

“Wanna eat out?”

“Yeah, I mean... we have to,” Chris looked pointedly at the pan, suddenly feeling exhausted. He just came back from work when he jumps into the train to see Aaron, who happens to just land from a case.

He thought the homey environment would make it easier to have ‘the talk’ but it’s not.

“I can hear the gear in your head turning,” Aaron bumps his shoulder against Chris, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking of places to go to.” Smooth af Chris. “I’m feeling fast foods.”

Chris turns around to get his jacket, but Aaron steps in, planting firm palms against the counter, trapping him in between. Aaron leans forward and Chris froze.

“What...” Chris blurted, the space between them and the position of him being trapped killed half of his brain cells.

“You hate fast food,” Aaron stated.

Rats! “Can’t a guy have some cravings?” not really... he hated fast food. This smooth youthful skin doesn’t clear itself. How else do you think he looked this young despite his age?

“I know something is bothering you.” Aaron squints his eyes, and Chris’ heart thrum rapidly. He’s being profiled, oh no. “You insisted on coming to my place instead, so whatever you wanted to tell me, if it goes bad, you can easily leave without making me feel bad.”

“You have to guess what I was about to say first,” Chris played along, almost glad that he doesn’t need to say it.

“You wanted to end our relationship.”

Chris gasped so loud he almost choked on his own breath. He grips Aaron’s biceps, “Wha- No! Are you crazy!”

Aaron just chuckled shyly. Chris blinks, perplexed. “I know it’s not that now.”

“I... what, you really think there’s a possibility I would want that? Aaron... maybe you’re not as good as a profiler as you thought.” Chris doesn’t mean that. It’s just that Aaron is legit a dumbass if he ever thinks of Chris ever wanting to let him go.

He’ll never find anyone like Aaron again. Someone who treats him seriously even though he tended to act like a dumb bitch outside of work even at his age and with his profession. Someone that... well, loves him back with the same intensity as him. Someone that doesn’t comment on his weird-ass hobbies and quirks... yet.

“What else was I suppose to think you’re gonna say?” he asked with the softest smile that still makes Chris turn all warm and gooey inside. “You haven’t looked at me in the eyes since you walked in.”

“I was about to ask you to be my boyfriend, Aaron, geez...” Then his breath hitched. The words just slid off his tongue. His grip on Aaron loosens, ready to bolt. But Aaron’s arms still entrapping him between his suit wrapped body and the counter, then his face mellows, not even a tinge of shock.

“Yes,” Aaron says and leans down to kiss him.

“Wait...” Chris says between kisses, “You knew!”

“To be fair, I only knew after hearing your reaction.”

“Well, fudge sticks... There goes the rest of my 5-day plan.”

“Sorry to spoil your unnecessarily long plan. Now, what do you really want to eat?”

“I wanna go to Trader Joe’s so we can make some chicken salad and pasta.”

Aaron smiled at him, though it just looks a bit different than his usual heart eyes. Sickly sweet, soft and fluffy smile. Just something else Chris can’t point out, and he doesn’t know what makes Aaron that excited for his mediocre chicken salad and pasta.

“Let’s go then.” Aaron finally lets go of his arms and wraps them in Chris’s waist instead. His face buries at the crook of his neck.

Chris wraps around his around Aaron’s shoulder. He doesn’t question as they stay there just hugging.

This feels nice. Chris wants to feel like this for as long as he lives. Whoa! That’s some heavy feelings there, maybe it’s what Aaron felt too? Well, he’s going to ask if Aaron wants to spend the rest of his days with him too someday, but not today.

Today’s menu is hugs, food, and Netflix until they sleep on each other.

#aaron hotchner fanfic #aaron hotchner #criminal minds #criminal minds fanf #Aaron hotchner x OC #aaron hotchner x male original character #contains spoilers #morgan x reid #but minor though

[3wisellamas]

Hey, remember my pet cracktheory that Darrell is a clone of Laserblast, or is somehow connected to him in some way?  I finally cleaned up and sorted out my full list of weird things I’ve noticed that they both have in common, or that otherwise support that, or are just weird about this stupid robot in general.  Because I wasn’t fucking joking about there being a lot of it.  Probably not gonna actually amount to anything, especially with not much series left, but meh.  It’s fun.  Enjoy.

---

Appearance/Body:

(Okay, I admit most of this section was pretty much killed by Darrell's canon human form in OK AU, which looked NOTHING like Laser at all.  But just in case...)

-Identical body shape/proportions to LB/SF, with wider torso/hips and very thin waist -- maybe a little smaller because he's a teen (and a robot)

-Very close head shape to LB/SF/PV:  square jaw (when it’s not exaggerated to make him cuter), similar rectangular shape and proportions if you include the braincase (since it would normally be inside his skull)

-LB's mask looks a LOT like Darrell's head, with the entire top half and most of the sides of his head covered and with circular ear...things

-That mask also tends to be quite expressive, almost functioning as a single eye sometimes

-Their big heavy boots are also kinda similar (Though honestly Darrell's boots look slightly more like Chip Damage's...)

-LB is based off of the superhero Cyclops, and Darrell is literally a cyclops

-Only robot that really seems to have an organic, human brain, and has human feet too along with Shannon -- even for just the feet, someone's DNA has to be cloned to make him, and not necessarily Boxman's.

-Darrell can grow stubble, according to that one tiny joke shot in Let's Watch the Boxmore Show; his face may be organic just like his brain and feet.  Also worth noting, the specific spots on the side of the jaw where LB's/SF's stubble shows are covered by metal for Darrell -- when comparing Darrell and LB, each character's most distinctive visible features (one eye and brain, cheek stubble) are covered up on the other!

---

Costumes:

-Darrell seems to enjoy dressing up as a HERO -- when he's in cowboy mode he plays a sheriff, and when the bots play Golden Statues he always plays the museum guard, both specifically hero roles!

-In fact, the costumes in general -- he definitely likes pretending he's someone else, rather than just being fashionable like his siblings.

-LB and SF both hide their eyes, and may have something unusual/distinctive about them, especially with Laser because of his eye-based powers.  LB!SF in particular would hide his if there was something that might immediately get him recognized as his former identity.  Perhaps only having one eye (hence the visor acting as one on occasion like I pointed out)?  (We got to see behind LB's mask once in Gar's fear sequence in Face Your Fears, with one red eye showing where the mask was broken, but there it did look like he had two.  However, Gar would never have seen what was ACTUALLY under there...)

---

Habits/Personality:

-LB was an anti-hero, willing to do some fucked-up things in the name of good, while Darrell is an anti-villain, who focuses more on just doing his job, having fun, and trying to make his father happy than crushing the heroes out of malice

-Darrell's also just a terrible villain in general.  Of course, he's directly killed another villain (or tried to anyway), and his idea of doing the most evilest thing was reporting Boxman's lies to the board and stopping him, AKA doing the RIGHT thing -- even with the betrayal, not very villainous of him, huh?

-Weird shared oral fixation?  There's a very unusual emphasis on food/mouth things with Darrell (his lowkey obsession with eating, spitting Boxman into the spitoon in his office, brushing his teeth), and LB's trademark was always having that lollipop in his mouth.

-Hugging soft cute animals, like Rippy and Fink

-Darrell writes in concrete in You're Level 100, and LB does the same using his eye laser in Glory Days (in the POINT theme song)

-Neither one is a big fan of new members of their respective teams right away.  LB refused to take junior members with him in both Glory Days and Let's Take a Moment, and doesn't seem to think much of them in either episode at all, aside from Silver Spark (and then, he still left her behind as one of his lookouts).  Darrell...just freaking HATES new siblings at first, having a problem with every single one he gets, at least the ones we've seen (we didn't get to see his and Mikayla's introduction).  He's also like this to siblings he considers inferior to him, to a point -- he and Shannon both got pretty jealous when Boxman started praising Jethro's "new moves."

---

Boxman stuff:

-Timing is correct, Darrell and the others were created right after LB disappeared according to Lad and Logic, since Boxman only drew the first three members in his original plans to attack POINT, and Gar was already building the plaza by the time Boxmore was opened.  This means the Boxbot quadruplets and KO were actually born around the same time, making them all 6-11 years old, roughly the same amount of time that's passed since the Sandwich Incident.

-Boxy was obsessed with POINT at that time (and still is, since he's kept the coordinates for POINT HQ memorized), and possibly LB himself (given his later attraction to PV)

-Boxman may also have some POINT tech and connections of his own?  First off, access to a huge supply of glorbs, the easiest and closest source of which Foxtail and Carol have been protecting and heavily monitoring, and are normally very hard for non-heroes to get their hands on.  Second, those boxes he sends the robots to attack in might use the same wormhole tech as POINT Prep's bus, since it looks a little similar both in transit and emerging at its destination, plus its driver sounds exactly like Ernesto.  And speaking of Ernesto, that one time he straight-up drew a POINT drone as part of a family portrait…

---

POINT stuff:

-There were six members of POINT before the Sandwich Incident, and LB was one of the original three, and seemed to function as co-leader alongside Foxtail.  There are six Boxbots, and Darrell was one of the original four, and kinda leads them in battle alongside Shannon, especially once he becomes CEO.

-And coincidentally, the original six members of POINT also share colors and in some cases roles with the Boxbots -- Shannon and Foxtail are orange, Greyman and Ernesto are purple, El-Bow and Jethro are blue, Rippy and Raymond are green, Silver Spark is...difficult but her hair is pretty distinctive and works with Mikayla for yellow, and of course, Darrell and Laser are red.  The robots' colors and relative ages even match POINT'S senior/junior members, with Greyman, Laser, and Foxtail representing three of the older Boxbots, and then Rippy, Silver Spark, and El-Bow representing the two newer ones and Jethro, who only recently was able to show his true personality/potential.

-"Junior Members" = "Junior Deputies"

-"Code Vermillion."  I made an entire post on this a while back, but to summarize, Vermillion is a bright, slightly orange-y red, and in most episodes is Darrell's exact color.  And Vermillion, as a red pigment, tends to darken over time into purple and black -- and SF and PV have connections to both glorbs (which Code Vermillion refers to), and to LB as well.

-Darrell has a bunch of weird similarities to Chip Damage as well, who is basically Laser's replacement at POINT, minus being the Charisma discipline rep:  Robots made right after LB got iced, green powers, special limited-edition costumes/POW cards, similar dark gray boots, the remote controls (Wisdom class blackboard for Darrell, Final Exams for Chip), possibly both made with actual brain tissue (The flashback to Chip's creation had a brain on one of Greyman's screens), etc.  Also, a dumb one, but...remember those Double-Dipped (KO and TKO?) Laser Chips (self-explanatory), that are "probably just a limited-edition" (Darrell).

---

Other assorted weird things:

-Darrell’s laser eye attachment shown in Stop Attacking the Plaza -- still being worked on in the episode (and it looks like it has been for a while, since it had been some time since Boxman was in that specific lab...), but used by a Big Darrell in the opening, where it produces a very similar (green) copy of LB's beam.

-Darrell is right-handed, in a left-handed family -- he's shown eating with his right hand in Stop Attacking the Plaza while everyone else is using their left, looks like he’s wielding a lightsaber right-handed in Plaza Film Festival, and draws with his right hand in Villains Night In.  Left-handedness is often associated with villains in fiction, so he may not be a full one?  (Definitely not as sinister as the rest of them, hehe.)  Though, some instances of Darrell using his left hand too, and other bots using their right, so I dunno how strong this particular point is.

-Line to keep an eye on:  "Just reboot yourself into a new body!  I do it all the time for funsies!" from Rad Likes Robots.  Related, Darrell reboots by exploding himself, which is how LB may have "died" and took on a new identity (if he's SF)

-Weird shit from Let's Not Be Skeletons:  Potato demonstrates a skeleton remote wearing a cowboy hat, and in addition to turning people into skeletons they remove powers, just like that red orb, and they also left Rad's and Enid's boots intact for some reason.  Darrell's also one of the biggest customers of the remotes, using his foes' weapons against them ("What do you say we snag more of them before they fall into the wrong hands?  We could even use them against our foes!")

-When we first saw TKO's power manifest in You're Level 100, it was while KO was trying to defeat a giant superpowered Darrell.  When we first saw TKO in physical form in Face Your Fears (as KO's "evil burp"), he was sent out to defeat a giant superpowered Laserblast head.  When we next saw TKO in, well, TKO (as his true self for the first time), he defeated another giant superpowered Darrell!

-Really dumb one, the letter right before C and D is B, so the acronyms LB and LCD may be a thing?

---

Turbo/SF/TKO connections, just in case those turn out to be related to Laser as well:

(Under the cut, since this is long enough already!)

-SF hints that negative emotions, particularly anger, fuel Turbo powers.  Darrell has quite a few jealousy and anger issues in general -- "Gets flustered by petty insults," HATES new younger siblings (or existing siblings showing him up and getting more of dad’s attention), etc -- and seems to be way more capable of mayhem than usual when running on these emotions.  They even gave him the power to defy his programming and (attempt to) kill Boxman!

-He can also have his power boosted by a ton in a very short amount of time, from level -4 up (down?) to level -100 and able to destroy the plaza in one shot, and for as brief as that level -100 thing was he STILL has yet to be topped as the most powerful villain in the entire series!  But, Boxman doesn't do it often -- even regular Big Darrells are implied to NOT be that powerful normally.  Perhaps he's holding Darrell back for a reason?

-A lot of emphasis on his brain, similar to TKO: the visible brain is obvious, he has the most noticeable hivemind, and he pilots Big Darrells from inside their braincases similar to how KO and TKO controlled Big KO (even the name's similar!) in TKO's House

-Also, he doesn't have to glitch or change colors with his mood like Shannon does, he can make decisions and go against his programming all on his own -- perhaps he runs mostly on that meat brain?  Or maybe his brain is actually a mass of pink glorbs like Jethro got in I Am Jethro that unlocked his intelligence and potential?  

-SF's speech to KO in TKO: "Everyone holds you back because they're afraid of your raw, natural ability.  They want you small and nice, blissfully unaware of your true potential."  Darrell in Lord Cowboy Darrell:  "Nobody's gonna hold me back."  Shannon to Darrell in Plaza Film Festival:  "Where do you think you got all that natural talent?"

-TKO ultimately came out of wanting recognition from his boss.  LCD ultimately came out of wanting recognition from his boss.

-That VERY noticeable purple glow in the "I'm the Daddy now!" scene in Lord Cowboy Darrell.  Like, to the point it seemed specially painted for emphasis, rather than the normal animation.  

-Also, Junior is pretty heavy evidence that Turbo powers do not necessarily = purple, as Junior's powers were all green (and so were Chip's Turbo-ish powerups!)  Darrell also has green powers (that even carried over to his human alternate in OK AU, despite Shannon and Raymond getting Enid’s and Rad’s exact same powers and colors), and is sometimes surrounded by Turbo-esque greenish lightning when he's angry, the best example being at the beginning of Legends of Mr Gar after being trash talked (remember that he can't take petty insults; he was PISSED there!)

-(If it looks like I’m insinuating Darrell’s secretly got more power under the hood than even he realizes, I absolutely am.)

-Darrell still has his dark hooded cloak from the pilot, which looks a little like SF's.

-Darrell's the only one who wasn't invited to Junior's funeral, and doesn't give half a shit, instead using it as an opportunity to betray people and take on a new identity.  Possibly like LB faking his own death, therefore not attending his own funeral, and taking on a new identity as SF?

-Sneaking through the vents = sneaking through the pipes (SF, maybe how LB survived given that pipe in Let's Take a Moment)?

-Weird broken halo imagery shared between both Darrell and SF in TKO.  (Not my observation actually, pointed out by @david-yells-about-cartoons )  Darrell's cloud halo thing in that episode also looks almost exactly like the clouds swirling above KO as he shoots a power fist for the first time at the end of Let's Be Friends…

#ok ko #ok ko let's be heroes #ok ko darrell #ok ko laserblast #ok ko shadowy figure #emtheories

[chronicas]

A lot of people followed me for Salem and he is one of my favorites in the Main 14 so I’m gonna infodump about him a little bit.

Here’s my first real drawing of him! I came up with Salem while listening to Touch Tone Telephone, because the shit slaps and I wanted to run a Monster of the Week campaign. For the campaign I needed a character that would aid the players in solving the mysteries and bringing all their characters together. The first two characters I made for the campaign were Salem and Danial Cedarwood (who was inspired by Stan Pines and Ned Chicane) Originally, Salem was a Terran radio host and monster hunter. He was supposed to have a contract with the Greater Forest Spirit, Astacagoth (Mothman) that would lend him some of the spirit’s strength. So in the beginning he was just a regular human man who had a contract with a forest spirit. There was also another unnamed NPC who had the same setup as Salem but with Bigfoot, he was scrapped in the end but was still neat.

At the time I had just started listening to TAZ Amnesty and hadn’t met Indrid yet, when I did meet Indrid and Griffin discribed him having the iconic red tinted sunglasses I thought “hm maybe it would be more fun if Salem was literally just Mothman” It was something I had already considered but I wanted to make sure Salem wasn’t like Indrid. I turned away from Salem’s original more mysterious personality and decided to make him incredibly cocky with a very good heart. He became the guy who always put himself between his friends and danger and also was just an absolute himbo.

Salem’s backstory was about Astacagoth, a tired spirit who couldn’t be killed, being hunted by monster hunters who saw him as a threat. After being slain many times, he desired to move on instead of being resurrected over and over again. Helaphiel was an angel and a friend of Astacagoth’s, he asked her to help him move on. Since spirits exist as something between the realm of the living and the dead, they can’t really die. So to allow him to die, the energy in his soul, his essence basically, needed to be repurposed. One night, 13 year old Salem Graves was exploring the woods during one of Astacagoth and Helaphiel’s meetings. Helaphiel agreed to take a portion of Astacagoth’s soul and give it to Salem. So Astacagoth became a mortal soul and moved on while Salem was basically upgraded from mortal to Greater Forest Spirit. Becoming Mothman.

When I started to flesh out his backstory I remembered one of my abandoned characters, Rian. Rian has been at least 3 different characters. Her name, appearance, and personality stay the same every time, but her story changes. I decided to finalize her as Salem’s younger sister. With this new family dynamic I created the two’s backstory. The two were orphaned when Salem was 10 and Rian was only 3. Rian and Salem were half siblings, sharing the same father, they were both raised by Salem’s mother and their father, Rian never knowing her biological mother. Originally, the two shared a mother because Rian’s father was Satan. However I thought it might be fun to put a twist on antichrist by making her the opposite of Christ. You have the Son of God, God being the Father, and the Daughter of Satan, Satan being the Mother.

With Rian as the antichrist I was able to more properly tie in Helaphiel to the story. Rian is one of many antichrists, one of Helaphiel’s sacred duties was to keep an eye on these children and keep them isolated from the devil, postponing the apocalypse. Angels and Forest Spirits tend to get along, so originally the only reason Helaphiel had anything to do with the Graves Siblings was that they happened to live in Astacagoth’s territory, but with Rian in the mix it became a bit flipped. Helaphiel was there for Rian and she would happen to run into Astacagoth from time to time. After Salem became the new Mothman, Helaphiel decided to adopt them because she felt guilty for what she did to Salem. Her original thought was that by making Salem a powerful spirit, he could protect his sister from the demons that would inevitably come to influence her, totally did not consider that she would be turning a 13 yo child into a big scary monster.

Helaphiel is also a member of the High Magic Council of Genesis, at this point in the timeline, Agael Stellarune is the Emissary of the Goddesses of Magic and head of the Council. My girl Lumaria has not been born yet. Salem has no connection to the Council yet.

Fast forward 5 years after Salem’s incident, Salem is 18, Rian is 11. At this point Salem has just graduated High School and Helaphiel leaves Salem alone to take care of Rian so she can return to her job at the Council full time. Salem starts working for the local paper after his online blog starts to grow in popularity. He basically writes stories about the strange happenings in his hometown, of which there are many. He uses this as a way to get information from people so he can better do his job as a Forest Spirit. (Which is to protect his territory and everyone who lives on it)

At this point the war with the Izebellian Empire has begun, Izebel herself is only 8, but by the time she was 5 she was a worthy vessel of Circe’s curse. Ageal forms the New Genesis Alliance as a response.

Three years later, Ageal is murdered by the knight September. Despite the Council assuring her that she doesn’t need to take the position because she’s literally only 10, Lumaria Stellarune takes her mother’s place as Emissary due to her already strong connection to Ashtia and Arcadia.

Under Lumaria’s lead (with Helaphiel, Xoul, and Madam Veronica acting as her closest advisors) Salem begins working closely with the Council as a Terran operative. In this same time, the Vandals move to West Virginia to help with the increase of spiritual activity near Point Pleasant. One night, Qwynn and Anastasiya Vandal encounter Salem and lesser forest spirit, Vistrag, while Salem is in his true form. Qwynn, eager to prove herself as an amateur monster hunter to her parents, makes a familiar contract with Vistrag.

Which is super helpful to Salem when the Vandals move to Valewood, Colorado. /s

After having to move out of his designated territory (something a greater forest spirit hasn’t ever really done before) along with 50+ lesser forest spirits just so one (1) idiot teenager can keep her familiar, Salem moves into the adjacent town, Aderdeen, and starts working at the radio station. There he continues his same gig that he had as a journalist except now he’s a radio show host. Him and a group of college students (of which includes local cryptid enthusiast, Susan Monroe) create a show called The Valewood Night Watch. The actual Valewood Nightwatch consists of Salem, Rian, and local (normal) hunter and bastard Danial Cedarwood who finds out Salem’s secret while hunting one night and decides to help protect his town.

Then my MotW campaign starts. The campaign kicks off with the death of Jack Harper, who was out hiking at night with his best friend Jessica North. The next day Jessica calls the Valewood Night Watch and reports that the thing that killed her friend was some kind of large creature with black leathery wings and tall deer antlers. This will be the hook that will bring together a group of unlikely heroes that will eventually start a forest fire, fail to save the local weatherman from Zombie Jack Harper, get a local sheriff abducted by the Men in Black, and other dumb shit that I love them for.

I don’t know how the campaign will end, but nothing will happen that will drastically change the canon timeline. Everything else is spoilers for the start of Unorthodox ;)

#infodump #mothman #array of cicadas #salem graves #rian graves #qwynn vandal #(she’s mentioned anyways) #shut up kellington #my ocs

[porchenclose10019]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS

[rtscrndr53704]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS

[repwincoml4a0a5]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS

[stormdoors78476]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS

[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS

[repwinpril9y0a1]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS

[grgedoors02142]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS

[pat78701]

Press Secretaries Get Paid To Clean Up Flubs. But Sometimes Even They Screw Up.

Before the words were even completely out of the mouth of his boss, Stu Loeser knew he had screwed up.

It was 2010, and as New York City recovered from a massive snowstorm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been giving regular televised updates to New Yorkers about storm cleanup efforts. Many people were canceling their Broadway theater tickets due to the snow, and Loeser, Bloomberg’s press secretary, advised the mayor to say on live television that New Yorkers should buy tickets amid the disaster.

The plug was meant to be a simple boost for Broadway. But the problem was that the city was still struggling to get the streets plowed in many neighborhoods, and the comment fed the perception that Bloomberg was out of touch with regular New Yorkers.

The comment was carried live on nine local television stations and several cable networks. As Bloomberg spoke, Loeser noticed many of the reporters in the room writing down the timestamp.

“At the time, we had ambulances stuck and streets that weren’t getting cleared as quickly as usual, so I wasn’t really focused on the Broadway line even though I saw reporters almost physically responding to it,” recalled Loeser. “When you have potential loss of life, focusing on the damage you may have inadvertently done to yourself seems secondary.”

But the outrage about the comment was swift. Peter Vallone, a city councilman from Queens, fumed about the comment in the New York tabloids. Bloomberg eventually apologized for the city’s snow response.

A press secretary’s main job is message discipline. They are paid to spin political agendas and minimize distractions, and to act as a shield, ensuring their boss never looks bad in the news. But every so often, press secretaries screw up. They botch the messaging or say something that doesn’t align with the perception they’re trying to create ― and then it’s the press secretary who’s in the spotlight. When that happens, there aren’t a lot of options for damage control other than to offer a full mea culpa.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer found himself on in this situation earlier this month when he told a room full of reporters that Hitler wasn’t as bad as Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people, and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.” It became immediately obvious he had majorly messed up ― an MSNBC chyron posted below Spicer’s televised speech fact-checked him in real time, noting Hitler gassed millions and videos of reporters looking baffled quickly went viral.

He appeared on CNN several hours later to apologize. “I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have, and I screwed up.”

Spicer talked about the scrutiny he faces as the chief spokesman for the president of the United States in a panel discussion at the Newseum the following day.

“No matter what you do, what you wear, it gets amplified to a degree that you couldn’t imagine,” he told moderator Greta Van Susteren.

Sometimes, however, the only way for a press secretary control the damage is to leave. That’s what happened to Kurt Bardella, the former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). In 2011, Politico broke the news Bardella had shared email exchanges he had with other reporters with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich for a book Leibovich was writing on Washington culture. Bardella was fired over the incident shortly after.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Bardella said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “As it’s going on and you’re breaking news on every outlet, and every story at that point in time is being written about your downfall and how you’re ambition and ego got the best of you, while people go on background and talk shit about you, it’s one of the most unpleasant professional situations you ever find yourself in.”

Bardella said his conversation with Issa about his future employment following the incident was “pretty brief.”

“At the end of the day, you still have a responsibility to serve your boss to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t take a lot of time to realize that the best thing you can do for your boss is to be removed from that situation,” Bardella said. “It was a pretty immediate conclusion given the situation. This wasn’t a long, drawn out, strategic thoughtful process. It was ‘well it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna have to fire me.’” (Bardella ended up being hired to work for the House committee Issa chaired later that year.)

Bardella said the episode showed him who his real friends were. The night he was fired, 14 friends showed up at his house with beer, pizza and Trivial Pursuit.

“I think most people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity to redeem yourself,” Bardella reflected. “If anything, I think what can compound a mistake is doubling down on it and not facing it directly.”

Mike McCurry, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 to 1998, had his own run-in with infamy. In an October 1995 White House press briefing, McCurry accused Republicans of wanting to kill seniors because they wanted to cut Medicare.

“Eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors too. If you think about it. Oh, that’s too far, that goes beyond the point,” he said at the time.

McCurry later recalled that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was furious over the comment ― which seems almost benign by today’s standards of political discourse ―  and threatened to stop negotiating with the White House on the federal budget unless McCurry was fired. There were backchannel negotiations between Gingrich’s chief of staff and the White House, and the dust up ended with McCurry apologizing from the White House briefing room and burying the hatchet with Gingrich.

“I sent the speaker a note saying that I quickly realized I had made a mistake and I apologize for that. And hope he understood that I did not intend to impugn his character,” McCurry said at the time.

When McCurry left the White House a few years later, Gingrich sent him a crystal decanter and four glasses so he “could enjoy some Jack Daniels in retirement,” McCurry recalls.

“Moral of the story: all press secretaries say stupid things,” McCurry, who is now a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, wrote in an email.  “It works out better when you ‘fess up quickly.”

A fast apology is essential, said George Arzt, who served as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. As he was leaving City Hall one day in the late 1980s, Arzt heard from the police that a bear at the zoo had mauled two zookeepers and possibly killed one. He told reporters to check with the police about the incident, but one paper ran the story on its front page without verifying it. In fact, only one zookeeper had been injured, and only slightly. The paper ran a correction that blamed Arzt for the error.

“I still apologized for any miscommunication and decided never to give out half-assed information even if I was going off the record to help out reporters,” Arzt said. “You just have to show that it does not bother you ― even when you are in pain ― and life goes on.”

In a crisis, Arzt, said, a press secretary can never show frustration and must remain unflappable.

“Reporters have great pressures dealing with deadlines, competition and dumb editors asking dumb questions. They need someone to believe in,” he said. “If the press secretary has no credibility, reporters will seek someone out who can give them credible information and that usually is not good for the administration.”

The necessity of a quick and clear apology seems to be anathema to President Donald Trump, who has shown an extreme aversion to admitting he was wrong. Trump has made all kinds of untrue public claims and unfounded allegations ― that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election and that he was wiretapped in Trump tower among them ― and refused to back down when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

In a 2015 interview, Trump suggested that he never apologizes because he’s never wrong: “I fully think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qekgmS

#DIYS