#they couldn’t even make it the whole american continent no | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

beardedmrbean · 2 months

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“Another may have to do with the volumes of information we have and have had for a long time about the various countries and regions in Europe where as Africa was mostly split up between the desert and not the desert, learned some German history in High School but did you learn about Chad or Kenya. That's a thing that's getting better too. “

Yeah that the thing (thanks social Darwinism) for decades we had bare minimum information about Africa in the Americas which cause a identity crisis among

Now for claiming Africa, well for centuries black Americans were told that Africa was only a shithole by white supremacists and the only “African” empire that was known was Egypt

Though an extremely fetishized as AC Origins discovery tour pointed it Egyptmongy was very different to what it is now.

Actually tangent, Dave from here posted a video of black teens selling cornstarch on tik tok. I pointed it out that that been happening in my family for generations

Then he found an article saying a lot of central Africas eat mud.

…Also did my research and learn black Americans especially in the north eat corn starch because we couldn’t make the same conditions for eating mud.

Well at least I know it genetic!

Now after women king came out, I think you posted a screenshot where dna ancestry can show us what tribes black Americans with slave ancestry came from….tbh I should have realize that because Assassins Creed is based off pseudo science inspired by dna ancestry

But I notice in general that black Americans are taught a 60’s pan Africa style of African history (almost like our education system is shit) which is why a lot of native Africans complain about the look of Wakanda and why Americans think their living in 600 bc

Because…that how we were taught in public school systems. Only vauge references to African kingdoms beyond Egypt

Do you really think we would have lionized the Dahomey if the fact they are reasons my people were slaves much like Jews know about their dispora cause by Hadrian?

Are there any African tribes that worked with the French to stop the Dahomey? I got a idea

Now for claiming Africa, well for centuries black Americans were told that Africa was only a shithole by white supremacists and the only “African” empire that was known was Egypt.

Ethiopia gets a mention here and there too, been around a long time but they're just a stones throw away of the Arabian peninsula they didn't get too far south cuz malaria and such though, even Egypt didn't go too far south.

We don't get a lot about the history of SubSaharan Africa because nobody knows what it is.

MENA, most of Asia, and Europe we have written records for, stuff we can cross check with other written records if people want to start in on 'oral history' stuff which there's no concrete way to prove.

That dirt thing was new to me, if it works though why not.

I know we covered the Zulu's when I was in school, but again they're easy since not only are they kind of recent, as kingdoms go, they also were interacting with the European powers, and getting their asses handed to them at Rorkes Drift, one reason the whole we'd have had wakanda if not for colonialism dies really fast, one of the main things Europeans traded to Africans was guns and other bits of technology that they didn't have.

The Americas were still basically in the stone age portion of the global technology tree, not a lot of metalworking going on.

Iron swords and armor were a superweapon at the crossover point of the bronze and iron ages and we showed up on the continents with steel.

On the information front it would be interesting to get the oral histories collected, not that it could be taken as factual information, Bible is fairly accurate but has its issues as well, mostly embellishing the size of armies and such, but getting stories from there would be nice I think get that tossed into the world history courses.

Do you really think we would have lionized the Dahomey if the fact they are reasons my people were slaves much like Jews know about their dispora cause by Hadrian?

might have had a tougher time selling it, but remember it was a white woman that put that film together so it may well have still happened.

If they want something good with a group that actually fought for freedom against those who were enslaving them, you have to step out of Africa and into Mexico but the Yaqui Indians, the federal government of Mexico was scoping them up and selling them for $1 or less to sugar plantations that would literally work them to death.

This is after kicking France out mind you, and they were doing this up into the 20th century, because the Yaqui refused to submit to Mexican rule at least that's one reason they were sold to farmers. ___________________

That's another thing they don't teach in school for you.

Many Yaqui were sold at 60 pesos a head to the owners of sugar cane plantations in Oaxaca and the tobacco planters of the Valle Nacional, while thousands more were sold to the henequen plantation owners of the Yucatán.

By 1908, at least 5,000 Yaqui had been sold into slavery. At Valle Nacional, the enslaved Yaquis were worked until they died. While there were occasional escapes, the escapees were far from home and, without support or assistance, most died of hunger while begging for food on the road out of the valley toward Córdoba.

At Guaymas, thousands more Yaquis were put on boats and shipped to San Blas, where they were forced to walk more than 200 miles to San Marcos and its train station. Many women and children could not withstand the three-week journey over the mountains, and their bodies were left by the side of the road.The Mexican government established large concentration camps at San Marcos, where the remaining Yaqui families were broken up and segregated. Individuals were then sold into slavery inside the station and packed into train cars which took them to Veracruz, where they were embarked yet again for the port town of Progreso in the Yucatán. There they were transported to their final destination, the nearby henequen plantations. ____________________

There's more of them in the US than Mexico, in a twist of irony they came to the US to escape slavery and ethnic cleansing.

Are there any African tribes that worked with the French to stop the Dahomey? I got a idea

Ya whichever ones the Dahomey were using for slaves likely linked up with the French on that one, much like with Mexico it was Cortez and 300 Spaniards as well as 30,000 pissed off locals who were tired of having their children hauled off to be human sacrifices.

Enemy of my enemy

#zoomer huey anon

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kaitcreates · 1 year

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The Cursed Weapons, Snippet #1

I've been having fun writing short snippets for The Cursed Weapons so enjoy!

Emily really should’ve been packing. Her and her twin sister Agatha were supposed to meet their parents and the rest of their farewell party in a little over an hour to go through a portal to Los Angeles. She and Agatha had decided to go on their travel year there with Zachary and Catherine. But instead she was nervously pacing circles in her and Agatha’s room overthinking everything.

She wasn’t just nervous about travelling to Los Angeles, but also about seeing Zachary there. She knew it was stupid, but she hadn’t seen him for 3 months. WHo knew how much could change in three months? Sure they had been talking through firemessages during those months but that wasn’t the same as talking in-person. You couldn’t throw away an embarrassing sentence in a conversation like you could on a written piece of paper.

“Will you relax? All your nervous pacing is making me nervous.”

“Well, it’s a whole new continent. Who knows what to expect?” Emily was not going to tell Agatha the real reason she was pacing, Agatha already had enough blackmail on her from the time she caught Emily trying to run away to London when they were 16 after a particularly bad fight with her parents.

“Matthew told me everything I need to know about it. Flashy lights, lots of people, and some cool places for tourists to visit.” THeir older brother Matthew had visited many states and cities in the US during his big world wide tour during the late 1900s. He often told Emily and Agatha stories about his travels when they visited him in London. One of those places was Los Angeles and he had recounted the story of how he’d saved a werewolf cub from a pack of vampires an obnoxious amount of times.

“But it might’ve changed in the years since he was there. Actually, it probably has.”

With an eye roll Agatha put down the dress she had been packing into her suitcase and walked over to Emily who had begun pacing again. This time it was because of Los Angeles.

“Em, it’s going to be ok.” Agatha held her in place and forced Emily to look her in the eyes, “Even though it’s a different country, there will still be shadowhunters there to help teach us. Bloody, that’s what we're going there for in the first place. SO it’s going to be ok. Ok?” When Emily nodded, Agatha went back to her suitcase, examining it to make sure no more clothes or books would be needed for her trip. “And, another benefit, Zachary and Catherine will be there with us. So you most likely won’t be the only person confused by American culture.”

Emily felt heat rise to her face and quickly turned away before Agatha could see. When Emily finally composed herself she began to pack again. Emily scanned her closet for any beloved dresses she’d forgotten. After finding an old green evening dress that brought out her eyes she sent off to look through her vanity. She ended up finding a long forgotten makeup kit that hadn’t been used since Herondale's Christmas party last year. Emily doubted anyone would come and do her makeup for her in Los Angeles. There would probably be at least a few parties across the year and the makeup hadn’t gone bad yet. Before she put it in her suitcase she wondered if she should wear some. This was the first time she would have seen Zachary in 3 months and she would want to make a good impression on the heads of the institute. What better way to do that than by looking her best? She loosely fiddled with her ginger hair tied up into a tight braid before looking over at Agatha who had already put on her makeup for the day earlier in the afternoon.

Emily and Agatha were almost identical. They both had striking green eyes and small frames similar to their mothers. The only difference between them was that Agatha had cut her hair to above her shoulders when they were 14 and had kept it like that ever since. Agatha has always been the more confident one. She said it was part of being a good leader and Emily believed her. Agatha was much more like their mother or Matthew. More like Mother, Emily thought after further consideration. Mum had been Consul -the head of the Clave- for 30 years before she finally stepped down and the new consul Howard Lindquist had taken her place.

“Do you really need so many books?” Emliy looked at Agatha’s second suitcase, which was nearly full of books with a few dresses and hats buried underneath.

“I can buy new outfits while I’m in Los Angeles. It would be wasteful of my money to spend it on books I already have here and just neglected to bring.”

“We’re going to spend most of our time hunting demons and exploring American culture. I doubt you’ll have as much reading time as you think.” Emily watched as Agatha pushed the suitcase’s top down. “And they’ll have a library at the institute. Matthew said it was quite extensive.”

Agatha waved away her comment and began to sit on the suitcase after it refused to stay shut. “He said that about over half the institutes he visited. I strongly doubt that all of them were as extensive as he said they were. Here, come close this for me.”

With a sigh Emily walked over to her sister and latched the suitcase shut.

#tsc #the shadowhunter chronicles #shadowhunters #agatha fairchild #emily fairchild #the cursed weapons #the cursed weapons snippets #the last hours #tlh #chot spoilers #chain of thorns spoilers

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x-authorship-x · 1 year

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Alright so, my grammar and spelling will be bad due to the fact that it’s 3 am and i’m tired af– but when I saw your timeline i saw that ur years start at konoha’s founding which yeah makes sense because it's your timeline and you won't ever put what year is it on your well… fic.

But this got me wondering, what calendar system does Konoha– or well, the narutoverse use? Do all of the villages use the same calendar? Or does each village have their own calendar? If they all do use the same calendar, when was this decided on? On what day did they decide to start the calendar? How many months are in this calendar?

Do they use the ancient chinese style with the year of the rat or dragon? Or do they stick with the numbers? If they all have separate calendars, how would they meet? They all would have different days, years. How long is it in a day? Why is ___ is in year 200 while we’re in year 100?

Let’s just say.. They all do have the same calendar and they used the Gregorian calendar to make this simple– Do they use BE and CE (or BCE and CE) to abbreviate what year it is? What day do they put it on? When the last major village was founded or the first village that was founded?

If it’s the first village that was founded– which village? And well.. So on and so on until you couldn’t even remember what started this trail of thinking.

Calendar has always been the world building aspect that I get stuck on in every single fandom I'm in– but it never has been THIS bad for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because dates have always been a huge aspect in my life and that just… translated into fandom-space? Or maybe it’s because i’m obsessed with making fics that includes dates with them (i.e files, interviews, etc)

But why wouldn’t I just… make the date be like this? 1XX or 20XX like any sane person would? Is it because it sucks or what? Whatever the reason is, i;m cutting this ask short due to the fact i’ve been rambling for what? 5 paragraphs? thank you for listening to my rambling!!!

(PS this rambling may be easily debunked and all of my sleepless nights will be all for naught just because this exact question may all be shown in the anime or manga what year and what type of calendar they used which makes my 3 am rambling all for nothing. I hope it isn’t that.)

- N

N-anon, I hope you don't see this answer until you've got a solid night's under your belt 🤗

...because I do have some "bad' news

It's not ALL bad, because Narutoverse is a huge mess and continuity is very very touch and go. There isn't a Narutoverse Calendar to look up (I tried, it's all merch lol) but there are some clues that might leave you feeling a little deflated?

Naruto's milk carton had a date on it. 2.19.20. I don't know if this is the same in non-english versions because this is surely the American way of spelling dates??? I looked it up and Japan normally goes "year-month-day". So unless Narutoverse has 19 months...??? And if "20" is the year, twenty years from what???

I make the assumption that the whole continent shares a calendar and year system because of civilian record keeping, tax purposes, and the (seemingly untouched by Shinobi bullshit) rule of Daimyo and warlords. If they didn't, the logistics and reasons for this would be fascinating

XXXX dates always drive me wild tbh, they're better than most alternatives but, for example in My Hero Academia, they're also very confusing to me. Like, if it's a different world entirely, great; if it's supposed to be our world but 200 or whatever years ahead.... What about global warming, social change, and technological developments??? 😵 I can't take it seriously

Back to Narutoverse tho! Narutoverse characters seem to have their birthdays according to the Gregorian calendar (someone on Reddit has also pointed out that OG Narutoverse material has a mix of 70s/80s retro tech jumbled up with post-war Japanese nostalgia and, if you think about the ridiculous technological jumps from Warring Clans to Boruto, then... 😵) So this is where my happier advice comes in; fuck it!

All of your ideas/theories sounded really interesting and I urge you to apply the mentality of "fuck this shit, we play by my rules" to whatever in Narutoverse doesn't "spark joy"

❤️😤✨ your rambles were delightful, sleep well!

Edit: a connected ask on Narutoverse nostalgia, "crushed timelines", and mirroring RL -

And a second response to ^

#torship #torship talks #ask #anon #n-anon #narutoverse #naruto timeline #canon logistics

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allegraxnardi · 1 year

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Name: Allegra Sofia Nardi Nicknames: / Gender/Pronouns: Cis-Female, Her/Hers Age: 26 Birthday: June 11th, 1996 Zodiac: Gemini Sun, Virgo Rising, Pisces Moon Hometown: Rome, Italy Neighborhood: Williamsburg, Brooklyn Occupation: A booktuber Sexuality: Bisexual. Positive traits: innovative, fearless, reliable Negative traits: reckless, impulsive, jealous

tw: divorce, alcohol, drugs.

Born to an American mother and an Italian father in the beginning of what would be an incredibly hot Italian summer, Allegra spent first three years of her life in Rome living in a small, yet a happy family of four. If you asked her today what she remembered from those first three years of her life, she’d probably say river and all the green. However, after seven years of marriage, the happy family life was abruptly broken when her parents decided to get a divorce, so Allegra moved to the States with her mother and older brother. And New York was nothing like Rome, not even close.. but it became a home.

Her childhood was a rather normal one, as much as it can be when one parent lives on one continent, and the second on another, but between those long airplane rides between Rome & New York, Allegra had managed to find herself a great set of friends and hobbies that made her life sweeter. The girl learned how to read when she was five years old and ever since then, it has been one thing that was constant in her life.. she could never be seen without a book. So it was no wonder that after high school she had decided to enroll into NYU and study Italian literature & language. Yeah, fine, it was kind of easy to study Italian when you’re a native speaker, but one had to be a bit cunning. But she had another big love - ballet. Allegra was dancing ballet till she was seventeen years old, even dreaming of turning pro, but a sudden knee injury prevented her from doing so.. one could say she had never really recovered from that dream shattering into a million pieces.

Despite one perhaps thinking she was a lone wolf, and she was in a way, there was wildness that was running through that girl’s blood. As much as she liked being alone, she also liked being in huge crowds, always being with people.. as if she needed to be alone so she could be ready to be with people. And one could find Allegra at every damn party, from the ones she would come to surrounded with her friends all the way to those she’d come to alone, which she didn’t mind. That way, she could be whoever she wanted.. a character from the book she was currently reading, perhaps. And drinking wasn’t an enemy of hers, but a friend, just as doing drugs wasn’t unknown to her. But she had it under control, didn’t she? It was during the weekends only, and to be fair, it wasn’t even every weekend - not anymore. And perhaps she couldn’t even remember when was the last time she even took something. But how many times had she woken up not remembering anything at all?

Her life was good. Or at least it seemed so to her. After numerous copywriter jobs and what not, she decided to hop on the whole Youtube thing. Why not make money while talking about books? After all, it was all she was doing anyways. And after two years of being a part of Booktube, she had built a community of 24k followers, which wasn’t a lot, but was also pretty good - it was an income. Not the biggest one, but an income nevertheless. And sure, she was occasionally bartending and what not when money was low, but it seemed to Allegra that she was only a step or two behind the real social media career. And perhaps in the next two years she’ll be one of those Booktubers who could afford to live and work from wherever, but who knew what life would bring to her.. and besides, knowing just how her life was complicated, it didn’t seem very likely she’d ever leave New York.

#mnyc.intro

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andrewuttaro · 1 year

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Legacy of the Rhinos: a Eulogy

What is the legacy of the Rochester Rhinos soccer team?

The Rochester Rhinos were founded in 1996 with visions of soccer grandeur akin to the Lancers of NASL past. They caught fire, fought hard and forged a winning pedigree, a dynasty of six regular season conference or divisional titles, four league titles and a legendary U.S. Open Cup Championship greater than anything else. A scrappy, small-city soccer club outside the bounds of the newly founded Major League Soccer had won the domestic title.

That Open Cup title has no comparable in American sports.

The club rode the wave of their dynasty, grasping at the topflight only to fall short profoundly close but yet so painfully far. The fall began. The original dreamers who founded the organization lost it by financial mismanagement only to see their successors mismanage it every other way. The dynasty declined but the pedigree never did. They made the playoffs all but one season for the rest of their existence. Somehow, through a multi-year hiatus and a global pandemic, the club came back just long enough to change the brand, court a named European footballer, and then fall apart again only a season back from the dead.

As we carve the epitaph we can’t help but ask: What is the Rochester Rhinos legacy?

I’ve pondered it a lot since I returned to the club of my childhood as an adult. I came too late. You could already read the writing on the wall before hiatus was on anyone’s lips. My parents’ generation endeared me and many others to the club of the horn-skewered soccer ball. They chanted “If you can’t join em, Beat em!” The Rochester Raging Rhinos did beat em. They beat them all. Perhaps the only thing they couldn’t beat was the shifting sands of time and a domestic soccer landscape leaping ahead itself as the rage was dropped and the club couldn’t keep up. They didn’t want us anymore and that was enough for many to lose interest.

What is the legacy of the Rochester Rhinos? They are proof winning doesn’t do anything for you if the sports business isn’t enriching the right real estate barons. Ain’t that the truth?

Legacy is something transmitted to or received from ancestors. Legacy is something of deep value beyond the immediately evident. Legacy is an intangible thing more than just championships or records on a stat sheet. Legacy is what makes history last emotionally. What makes the Rochester Rhinos last? Who sings their swan song? What does the green and gold, the black and white, the solid yellow, the Rhinos of Rochester mean beyond the obvious failings of the indifferent morality of the almighty dollar? Hope. The answer is hope.

The Rochester Rhinos won fun soccer games twenty years ago. Even then the whole thing ran on hope they’d be something awesome in a sport this country still hardly appreciates. Hope.

Once upon a time professional sports emerged from college campuses on this continent with the idea it would be a profitable venture riding on the back of civic pride. Ra-ra stuff but for those of us who aren’t attached to a ubiquitous D1 collegiate team in insert-sport-here. I still lose my mind at hockey games when they stop playing and start fighting: those guys are wearing the laundry representing my once-great rust belt city after all! Who knows what my city looks like in fifty years when I pretend to retire: I’ll always have this civic hope Kool-Aid the ruling class deemed safe for the peons. Those are memories. Those are little rays of hope that I am from somewhere at the very least. Maybe even a peak into the legendary eternal.

That was the legacy of the Rochester Rhinos. A dynasty twenty years ago and a long decline that reminded you what intangibles are and how much rich people hate your ruinous town.

Major League Soccer didn’t want us because those owners were in over their heads, and we weren’t a top fifty media market. The stadium location excuse is for white flight babies and lawyers on City Hall payroll. This team could have survived in the rough-and-tumble world of lower league American soccer with the right kind of owner. They never came. The generation that grew up watching the dynasty moved to North Carolina for more promising work just like the women’s team. Us gross soccer nerds who remained were too busy to adapt or too ultra to innovate. A good owner could have given us the right incentives and amenities. They never came. Help never comes for hometowns like ours. Hope sustains us helping each other.

Now the Rochester Rhinos are gone, and the hope remains.

It’s not the hope for yet another revival. That part is over. The hope is what it leaves with us. Hope that what we decide to keep alive in our hearts will be worth it one day in some stupid, semi-spiritual way. The greatest things in life are like that. That is what the Rhinos really were, in the good times and the bad, feast or famine: a clinic on how to hope. For that I am eternally grateful.

Hope and rage forever.

In the end that old cheer still rings out: “If you can’t join em, Beat em!” They didn’t let us join em, and eventually they even found a way to prevent us from beating any meaningful club too. Tax the rich. They never took the rage out of us did they? Hope never dies. And they only made the rage in us burn evermore. We’ll rage forever whether the plutocrats say we can or not. That is the Rochester Raging Rhinos. That is the spirit of the club that will never die.

The Rochester Rhinos forever in the hope of our hearts.

1996-2023

#rochester rhinos #Rochester New York #soccer

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ahandfulofregrets · 3 years

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so the US wanna colonize eurovision now?

#congrats america #u managed to drag me out of my hiatus by force #with ur nonsense #tf #eurovision is for EUROPE #i get it that the US is like 50 countries in one masquerading as one but like #this ain’t it chief #i mean heck it could be an amazing way to celebrate immigrant and indigenous talent but like #we’re talking abt america here #they couldn’t even make it the whole american continent no #just the US #lbh latin america would’ve drop-kicked the US to the ground and won #the US couldn’t have that lmao #this may or may not be a disaster i can feel it #anygay stan alexander rybak

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therealvinelle · 3 years

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Ok I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I'm just now copying your Norwegian Bella AU into a text translator, and if you don't already have 50 people in your inbox demanding a translation then shame on ALL OF US because this is glorious! And while Google Translate does have a certain charm (it translated "piper hun ut" as "she beeps") I'm curious to see how you'd put it in English.

Troquantary is referring to this post. In which Bella doesn't speak English.

Fun fact, you're the only one who's gone into my inbox to request this. I was so sad, had the translation half-written and everything, but I was too proud to beg. So thank you, Troquantary, for popping this ask.

As for the dictionary fuckups, sounds about right. I made a few typos, too, that made Google Translate suffer even more. (Such as managing to mix up "henne" (her) and "hendene" (hands), resulting in Aro patting Bella instead of clapping his hands. Poor Google.)

Also, there are a few cultural references and language things that would be lost in the translation, in an attempt to keep them I included notes clarifying things.

Some things, like Aro and Carlisle's very old man way of speaking, are easier said than done to translate, you'll have to bear with me there.

Additional notes are that I added a few things to this version, many of them because translating is hard, but a few because while translating I thought "oh you know what would be much funnier-" and then wrote that.

Alright, without further ado:

When Renée left Charlie she did not go to Florida, she went to Oslo. And she went all in to make her daughter a true Norwegian, hiring Norwegian nannies and making sure never to speak English around the child. Since transatlantic flights are expensive, little Bella Swan rarely got to visit her father, and as such she never did learn what should have been her native language.

She quickly forgot what English she did have in favor of Norwegian, with the exception of words like “Yes”, “No”, and “I’m Bella”.

The few trips she took to visit her father were all the more awkward than in canon since she couldn’t play with the Black kids. Let not the blame fall upon Charlie: he took Norwegian classes and speaks conversational Norwegian. He can’t speak to Renée, because her Norwenglish is incomprehensible even to Norwegians, but he can communicate with Bella.

Not that he’s had a lot of chances to do so.

Bella makes it to seventeen years old, she’s in second grade at Handels* and is a major outsider among the preps there, and then Renée marries a handsome skier**. Together they shall travel the continent all winter to participate in as many skiing races as they can, and in the summer they’ll take gigs at Hurtigruta to see the coast.

*“Handels” is the nickname for an Oslo high school infamous for its pupils being rich and beautiful blonds who are going to be CEOs when they grow up.

**Skiing as a sport is huge in Norway

***Hurtigruta is a famous ferry that travels across the Norwegian West coast

Bella, who sucks at skiing and is too young to work at Hurtigruten, takes the hint.

With dread in her stomach and dictionary in hand she goes to her father in America.

Where she doesn’t speak the language.

Faen.

Charlie gives her a car, and I wish this meta was set in the present because I could have joked about electric cars and the automat only driver’s license*, but Twilight is set in 2005 so I can’t. The car part proceeds without drama.

*An increasing number of Norwegian youth take the driver’s license for automatic cars only, and we’re the country in the world with the highest percentage of electric car purchases.

School is worse than in canon, because she is now a thousand times more sensational than if she was merely the new student. She is from another country! All of Forks keels over with excitement.

To make matters even worse, our girl doesn’t understand a word of what people are saying.

She is too awkward to let them know she doesn’t know English. It’d become a thing, and they might think she’s dumb. To be fair, it’s not good that she’s been through primary, secondary, and now a year and a half of high school and still sucks at English.

So she nods, smiles, mumbles “Hi, I’m Bella” to the new faces, and blushes heavily when anybody says anything.

People assume she’s shy. That’s a bit boring, but oh well.

She has her biology class with the redhead hottie she noticed during lunch. She watched him and his family, they were fascinatingly pretty, but she doesn’t know anything more about them. Sure would have been great if she could have asked the tiny girl (was it Jess?) about them.

Biology proceeds as in canon - Edward badly wants to eat the delicious girl, but fortunately doesn’t.

She runs into him in the office when he tries to switch to another biology lesson, but she has no idea what he’s saying so she only has the suspicion that this somehow concerns her. Which is still uncomfortable, but Bella is probably the problem here. The hottie surely can’t be.

He’s missing from school for a week, Bella finds that weird.

He returns, and to her great horror he starts talking to her.

“Hello”, he says.

Bella dies inside. He’s too handsome!

"I'm Edward Cullen," he continues, and ok, she got that. The hottie is called Edward, that’s good to know. She’s not sure she caught that last name, though, Köln?

He says something else, it’s gibberish to Bella even though she’s concentrating, and at the end there he says “Bella Swan”.

She gulps.

"I'm Bella Swan," she confirms and nods. That should be correct. God, she hopes it’s correct.

He smiles a crooked, boyish smile. She’s awed. She didn’t think it was possible to be so beautiful.

He says something else.

Bella didn’t catch it.

She blushes even harder, she hasn’t been more embarrassed in her life. Here he is, the most handsome guy in all the world, and she has nothing to say to him. Literally, they don’t speak the same language.

She should tell him.

It’s one thing to chicken out of telling the town she doesn’t speak English, but there’s something different about Edward Cullen. He deserves the truth.

But...

He’s the most beautiful person she has seen in her life. He is American, too, so the odds of him knowing Norwegian are microscopical. If he finds out she doesn’t understand a word he says he’ll stop talking to her, and selfish as she is she doesn’t want that.

So with a slightly guilty conscience (but not enough to fess up) she contributes to the conversation with enough words and smiles to pull through. "Yes", "No", "Thank you", and "That's nice".

He is surprised by several of these answers, but instead of giving her odd looks and losing interest he grows more invested in the conversation.

Class ends.

The next day the near accident happens, and he saves her. She is stunned - dear god, did he just pick up a whole car? After teleporting across the parking lot..?

Soon she’s in the ER, and more than a little bit stressed about that fact since she knows the Americans have a terrible healthcare system.

She hopes Charlie has an insurance.

An insanely beautiful man walks into the ER, and Bella is shocked. He is just as handsome as Edward and Edward’s lunch friends!

He introduces himself as Carlisle Cullen, and Bella can only assume this is someone’s older brother. Possibly related to the blonde girl.

He smiles at her, says something, and she answers, "I'm Bella Swan."

He frowns.

That must have been the wrong answer, then.

His hands return to investigating her scalp, and to her great surprise he switches to perfect Norwegian, "kjenner De* noe ubehag når jeg holder her?" Do you feel any discomfort when I touch here?

*De is the Norwegian polite pronoun for “you”. Du = thou = the French tu, and De = you = the French vous. These polite pronouns went out of use in the 1980’s, save for when addressing royal persons, and would be considered antiquated in 2005.

He hurries to add, "Norsk lærte jeg i... fjor sommer. Det var et nettkurs." I learned Norwegian… last year. Online class.

"Hvilket da?" Which one? Bella asks, because Charlie needs to hear about this. The doctor has beautiful, if slightly outdated, pronunciation.

The doctor’s smile turns uncertain. She gets the feeling there’s something he doesn’t want to say. "Husker ikke," I don’t remember, sier han etter en litt vel lang pause.

That’s a shame. And weird.

"De hadde hellet med Dem i dag, som ikke ble truffet av den bilen." You were lucky today, not getting hit by that car. he then says, noticeably changing the subject.

"Det var ikke hell, det var Edward," It wasn’t luck, it was Edward, she replies sharply.

The doctor definitely looks uncomfortable.

She continues, "Han krysset skolegården på et blunk, og plukket opp hele bilen. Jeg så det," He crossed the schoolyard in a moment, and picked up the whole car. I saw it,

The doctor laughs. "Om han kunne det hadde nok gymkarakteren hans vært meget bedre. Nei, frøken Swan*, jeg beklager å si at det høres ut som at De er litt omtåket. Det er helt normalt ved hjernerystelse." If he could do that, his PE grade would be a lot better. No, Miss Swan, I’m sorry to say you seem confused. That’s normal with concussions.

*Addressing a young woman as “frøken” is even more outdated than using polite pronouns.

Why does Bella get the feeling he’s lying?

She’s discharged.

We’ll jump ahead to her trip to La Push - that trip uneventful, since Jacob knows she doesn’t speak English. They stick their hands in their pockets and stare at the sea.

The next day she’s shanghaied to Port Angeles, because apparently she said “Yes” at the wrong time when talking to Jessica (Turns out Jess’s name was Jessica!) and accidentally said yes to a day trip to Port Angeles.

Like in canon she wanders away from the others, and as in canon she is nearly gang raped. And again as in canon she is saved at the last moment by Edward.

He buys her dinner, and she can’t believe her own luck- and misfortune. A date with the most handsome guy on the planet (hence the luck) and she can’t say a word to him (hence the misfortune)!

He says things to her, lends her his jacket, and really this is it for Bella, she’s peaked, life can’t get better than this.

(That’s a lie, it would be better if she spoke English.)

He’s so amazing.

She’s gotten pretty good at navigating conversations with him, so she nods and aha’s her way through.

In his car on the way home the tone takes a more serious turn.

He asks her about something, and it’s a serious question, that much she’s gathered. She answers in the confirmative.

He is silent.

Did she say anything wrong?

(Edward, on his end, just asked if she knows what he is. She said yes, so calmly, not even a trace of fear in her.)

A few days later he takes her out on a walk in the woods.

He shows her a meadow in the woods, and when he steps into it he lights up in the sunlight.

Bella is in shock.

She knew there was something different about him, but- holy cow. This guy isn’t human.

Is she dating a god?

She stumbles into the clearing after him, and they spend a day together where he says things, and she can barely hear any of it (nevermind understand it) because she’s so distracted by how pretty he is.

The next day he takes her to a house in the middle of nowhere. She doesn’t want to guess that this can be where he lives. Surely gods don’t live in houses?

He shows her inside the house, and introduces her for Dr. Cullen and a lady with a name she doesn’t catch.

Bit weird that these two are acting like a couple of parents, they’re far too young and divine for that.

Edward shows her around in an old-fashioned office, and she doesn’t know what to make of i when she sees a painting of Carlisle. Edward launches into a long story when he sees her watching it, unfortunately she doesn’t catch any dates or artist names. At one point she heard the word “suicide”, though, and that’s not good.

She doesn’t get much out of the story.

The baseball game doesn’t happen because Bella didn’t pick up on what Edward wanted and didn’t realize she was being invited to a thing. They spend the afternoon watching a movie instead.

The relationship continues, impeded slightly by communication problems, but she’s mostly able to cover those up.

Until her birthday comes around.

She gets a papercut.

Jasper lunges at her. Edward throws her into a glass table, and then everyone is leaving.

Carlisle is kind enough to switch to Norwegian when he’s stitching up her arm, perhaps remembering the last time she was his patient. "Jasper har ikke vært på dietten vår så veldig lenge." Jasper hasn’t been on our diet for very long.

"Diett?"she asks. She’s never seen Edward eat anything. She wasn’t clear on what the Cullens ate, honestly she thought they were above such things. She was thinking maybe photosynthesis. The knowledge that they apparently eat food astounds her, but diets?

"Dyreblod istedenfor menneskeblod," Animal blood in stead of human blood, Carlisle clarifies.

Whachasay?

Carlisle gives a slight smile. “Jaspers liv som vampyr fikk en brutal start." Jasper’s life as a vampire got off to a brutal start.

...

Vampire?!

Bella’s missed something here.

Oh dear lord, oh fy faen, she has missed something.

“Åja”, uh huh, is all she can say, and suddenly she’s very aware of the fact that she’s sitting there with a bleeding arm.

And Carlisle.

Who is a vampire.

Over the course of the following conversation Bella makes a host of discoveries.

Edward has been a vampire this whole time, and he’s a telepathic vampire. Whether Bella should be a vampire too or not has been a matter of hot debate, but due to religious reasons Edward doesn’t want that.

Carlisle also brings up how Edward died of the Spanish flu.

"Jeg var under den oppfatning at Edward fortalte deg bakhistorien min?" I was under the impression Edward told you my back story? Carlisle asks at one point, and Bella just has to ask very nicely if he’d be so kind as to repeat it.

Turns out the guy is nearly four hundred years old.

Jaha.

Jahahaha jaa ha.

That’s… a lot.

She wanders out of the house in shock, and hardly notices Edward’s strange behavior over the next couple of days.

One day he picks her up at school, and takes her behind the house.

That works out.

He’s a vampire, but he never hurt her. He is endlessly beautiful, perhaps easier to love now that she knows he’s not a god. He’s her Edward, and that’s suddenly easier now that she knows.

They can still be together.

But now that she knows this about him, it’s about time he knows something about her as well.

It’s time to finally be honest with him.

So when he opens his mouth, she opens her mouth as well, but she doesn’t get any further than to “Edward-” before he launches into a monologue.

She’ll have to wait until he’s done before saying her piece. It’s a bit embarrassing, but it doesn’t seem like he intends to stop talking anyway.

And what he’s saying seems to be serious, so it’s probably best to let him finish.

Edward concludes his monologue by kissing her forehead. Then he disappears.

Where did he go?

A big unsure, Bella goes back to the house. She’ll just have to wait until he gets back.

She doesn’t know what to think when Charlie returns from work and tells her the Cullens have all left.

Oh, god.

Edward must have found out she doesn’t speak English.

She made a mockery of him.

He has every right to leave.

Knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to live with.

Bella sinks into a depression.

The hallucinations begin, as in canon, though Hallusinward speaks Norwegian. Thank god for small mercies.

The friendship with Jacob (dictionary in hand) blooms, as someone has to help her see those hallucinations.

The cliff diving happens, and Alice shows up. Bella’s not sure what this is about, but she has gotten good enough at English to know that something bad happened, and Alice wants them to do something.

She’s a bit surprised to find herself on a plane to Italy, though.

Alice tells her to “Run to Edward” and ok, she got that, actually.

So she saves Edward.

After that she’s taken into the sewer, which turns out to house dozens of vampires.

Bella, Edward, and Alice are received in some kind of hall, where an unusual vampire has quite a bit to say. She understands some of what he’s saying, at least the part about “la tua cantante”. She knows a bit about Italian, see, so she knows that he’s talking about a song now.

She wishes she knew the context.

At one point he takes her hand, and appears fascinated by it. She wonders if he’s a palmreader. Not very vampirey, but what does she know.

He asks her a question.

"Yes," she says.

Saying yes has gotten her this far, after all.

But when he lights up and claps his hands together, and Edward and Alice stare at her in shock and betrayal, she knows she must have said the wrong thing.

The two are dismissed from the room before Bella can do or say anything, she’s just listening to Edward make a racket outside in the hallway.

Not good.

The unusual vampire brings her further down in his sewer palace to a basement, and she is given comfortable clothes to wear.

This is getting terrifying.

The vampire leans towards her - and she chickens out.

"Jeg snakker ikke engelsk!" she squeaks. "Non habla ingles!" I don’t speak English.

Han stanser, og ser forvirret ut. "Que- Hva behager*?" I beg your pardon? spør han etter et øyeblikk.

*A very formal, and slightly outdated (you can use it, but people will think you’re putting on airs. And they will be right) way of saying “excuse me?”

Sobbing, Bella tells him the whole story, from how she didn’t want to be the weird kid in school to how she’s now somehow in Italy without knowing why nor what she just agreed to.

When she’s done the vampire starts laughing.

"Dette forklarer jo en hel del," This explains quite a bit, ler han. "Men, kjære Bella, jeg er redd det ikke endrer noe." But, my dear Bella, I’m afraid it changes nothing.

He tells her that she has agreed to serve him and his army of undead warriors into eternity.

Well fuck.

"Du skal få slippe det, når du ikke visste hva du samtykket til - men skjebnen din forblir den samme. Loven er loven." You’re released from that promise, as you didn’t know what you agreed to - but your fate remains the same. The law is the law.

After a moment of silence, during which she looks terrified, he hurries to add, "Vi har en lov. Du må bli en av oss." We have a law. You must become one of us.

A law that Bella Swan has to become a vampire?

People are finally speaking Norwegian, and Bella is still lost. And it’s too embarrassing to keep pestering this poor, polite man with questions.

So she nods.

He gives her a glittering smile, and bites her.

When she wakes, Aro offers her an English course. A language course that, naturally, leads to her staying in Volterra. Why not learn a few more languages while we’re at it, dearest Bella?

Some time later Edward breaks into Volterra to save his Rapunzel, only to barely recognize her now that she’s a vampire who says things. Lots of things, she talks all the time now. WHAT DID ARO DO TO HER.

Too mortified to admit that she never spoke English, Bella claims she’s been brainwashed.

Aro is having too much fun to correct her, and the whole sad affair sets off a regrettable flood of rumors.

#troquantary #norwegian things #bella swan #twilight #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #evighetens kyss #evighetens kyss meta #evighetens kyss renessanse

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random-imagines-blog · 3 years

Text

4 AM {Cedric Diggory x Reader}

Requested by: Anonymous Wordcount: 3665 Summary: You’re a transfer student at Hogwarts, and all of these changes are feeling restless. You develop a late-night hobby, but a handsome Hufflepuff catches on.

Everybody needed a bit of time to adjust to new surroundings, like a new school. You took a bit of extra time, considering you were in a new continent, a new culture, a new school and a new house on top of all of it. Transferring from Ilvermorny was a tough thing to do, but you did it at the insistence of your parents, who felt that being at Hogwarts under Albus Dumbledore was far better than your old situation. Much safer, they had put it, despite the Chamber of Secrets and Quirrel and Sirius Black. But hey - safety right? At least there was the opportunity to meet new people, something that you liked doing. And maybe you could pick up a cool British accent while you’re over here. They always sounded so sophisticated, while your American accent was just ... American.

You had been sorted privately into the Slytherin house, which sounded well and good until you reached the common room. It was a bit dreary, you thought. Too much leather on these couches, not enough comfortable fabrics. You became too nervous to sit down in case the seats would squeak and make people think that you had farted. The other Slytherins weren’t the most welcoming, and they didn’t give you a hand as you brought your bags up the staircase to your dormitory. You had to use magic to get them there. The most that you had been given were a couple of side glances. This wasn’t going to be as easy as you had hoped.

On your first night, you had a lot of trouble sleeping. Tossing and turning in the old fashioned four-poster bed. In America, waterbeds were in fashion and you had gotten used to the rolling feeling rather than the roughness of a mattress. It was a good thing that you brought a couple of pepper-up potions to take in the morning just in case this exact thing were to happen.

You had carefully chosen your classes for your sixth year. You planned on doing big things with your life after you had graduated, even if you weren’t sure exactly yet what these things were. You took many of the basics, Potions, DADA, Charms, Transfigurations, etc, but also some things like Care of Magical Creatures and Muggle Studies. You didn’t plan on living among muggles, especially, but you loved the way that they did things. They found inventive ways to work around magic, and you always felt more accomplished when you did things in the muggle way. Especially your secret passion - baking.

A lot of your classes happened to be with the Hufflepuff house, who were a bit wary of you at first, but then became genuinely friendly, and much more welcoming than your own house. Despite the differences, you started to hang out with them more than the Slytherins, which didn’t make dorm life particularly comfortable at times. You still found it hard to sleep in there, and had taken to some night time wandering.

It might be the deviousness of the Slytherin house in you, but you figured out some ways to work around the patrols. If you didn’t leave the castle, you didn’t run the risk of running into Dementors. If you stayed in one place, such as a classroom or the kitchens, you were less likely to get caught by the prefects wandering the halls. You were also able to overhear Cedric Diggory, a handsome boy in your year, tell some fifth year prefects the better ways to go, so you now knew how to avoid them as well.

The kitchens were where you usually ended up going. In Muggle Studies at your old school, you learned a lot about how they baked and they cooked without magic. It wasn’t instant, the way that magic was. You buy a roast, you do a cooking spell, and boom - perfectly cooked beef every time. There were spells to whip the potatoes into the perfect peaks, spells to make icing the perfect consistency for cupcakes, even spells for chopping vegetables if you were feeling lazy. The House Elves in these kitchens didn’t use these spells, they did things more by hand, and it was fascinating to watch. You started coming in on these restless nights as they were making bread for the morning’s toast, and one elf in particular was eager to show you how she did it.

“Then you kneed it like this!” She said in a high-pitched voice, showing you with her bony hands. She moved over so that you could give it a try. The dough was surprisingly warm, and pliable beneath your own fingers. You couldn’t help but smile as the feeling of it filled you with warmth. You could see why muggle bakers woke up as early as four in the morning to do all of this. The smells of the baking loaves wafted over to you and you took a deep breath in, and then a deep breath out. You could spend all day in here, you decided. The only thing that was keeping you from doing so were your classes.

‘Why were you sneaking around last night?’

The note landed on your textbook as you were reading quietly in Transfiguration class. You hid it quickly beneath the book, looking around to try to see who sent it. Your eyes landed on Cedric, who was looking at you equally as closely. You turned away quickly, flushing. You didn’t think that anyone had seen you sneaking away from the kitchens this morning, going back to the dormitory before anyone else woke up. You had been certain that you were careful.

When McGonagall was seated at her desk, you took the note out and wrote back.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

As you signed the period, the note slipped away from under your quill, fell to the floor, whooshed it’s way to Cedric, seemed to climb up his desk and land on his own textbook. Seemed a little silly, you thought. You could have just handed it to him when the Professor was turned around instead of wasting a spell on it. You thought that the conversation was over and dealt with, when the note came right back to you again.

‘I saw you this morning, near my common room. What have you been up to?’

You scrunched your eyebrows and pursed your lips. There was a murderer on the loose, you knew that, hence the extra security measures but - did anyone really suspect you of having something to do with that? You hadn’t even heard of Sirius Black until you went to Diagon Alley for school supplies!

Rather than write anything back, you underlined the sentence that you had written before. The note didn’t seem happy with that, since it didn’t immediately rush back to Cedric. So you folded up the parchment, waited until an opportune moment, then tossed it over at Cedric. He was apparently not expecting that, because it bounced off his head and onto the floor. There were a few sniggers from other students, which caught McGonagall’s attention. Before she could see the note, Cedric had pressed his shoe over the top of it. She sniffled, then went back to reading, expecting the rest of the class to do the same.

You watched out of the corner of your eye as he slid the note towards himself. When he finally read it, he glared at you, which made you feel uncomfortable. You weren’t ready to give up your baking secret, or even to admit you were breaking the rules for it was forbidden for a student to be out of bed after hours. But still - he couldn’t really suspect you of harboring a killer - could he?

You had taken a break from going to the kitchens at night, as much as it hurt you to do so. Now that you knew that the Hufflepuff Common Room was close to the kitchens, it felt too dangerous to do it. Especially with Cedric Diggory on the watch for you. You’d noticed him looking at you from time to time, during meals or class times. It felt less suspicious than your note passing in class, and more like - studying.

After a week had passed though, you couldn’t wait any longer. The house elf that you had befriended had told you that you could help her make cakes for dessert! Now that was something that you were interested in, since you thought maybe you’ve mastered bread. Waiting until the others in your dorm were sleeping, you slipped on your darkest robe and left the common room, making for some of the lesser-used stairs to get up to the kitchens. You would still have to pass the Hufflepuff portrait, though, there was no avoiding that. You stuck to the shadows as much as you could, and stopped often, looking behind you for a sign of prefects. The coast seemed clear.

You tickled the pear in the portrait, which giggled at being touched, then opened up to reveal the busy kitchens, getting ready for the morning ahead. Your friend, a house elf that barely reached your waist and was named Daisy, waved at you from by the massive fireplace which heated soups and stews for the whole castle. You started heading towards her when a hand wrapped gently around your wrist, keeping you in place. You figured out who it was before you even turned around.

“Cedric Diggory,” You groaned, turning around. His amber colored eyes took in the sight of you, dressed in your pajamas with a dark robe covering your body. You were planning to take it off and put on one of the aprons, but he hadn’t given you the time to do that yet. “Are you stalking me?”

“You don’t get to ask the questions. What are you doing in here?” He asked, looking around the kitchens now as if he had just realized what he had walked into. A house elf whistled happily as it walked by with a big baking pan, three loaves on it nearly tottering off. But he never lost his balance. “Why are we in the kitchens?”

“I know why I’m in the kitchens,” You said, pushing his hand off of your arm. You turned around to head over to Daisy. “As for you, I don’t know. I still think you’re stalking me.”

“A Slytherin who sneaks out after hours isn’t up to any good,” He said. You rolled your eyes at the stereotype - it was getting old already.

“Technically, I’m a Thunderbird, that will be always be my home house,” You explained, still feeling much more American than you were European. “So none of that evil snake business, thank you, badger.”

You walked towards your friend, smiling so as not to show that anything was wrong. House-elves could sometimes worry too much for their own good, and it could affect their work. You did not want Cedric’s following of you to cause an innocent student some food poisoning. You took her offered apron, and switched out your robes for it, folding down the front nicely. The Hufflepuff boy had hesitantly followed. He might not have trusted you, but he had faith in the house-elves that they wouldn’t do anything bad.

“So what are we doing today, Daisy?” You asked happily, approaching her counter. She was a cute little thing, dressed in a bright yellow smock with an apron over top.

“We are making cakes!” She said, clapping with excitement. It had taken you a little while to get used to her high-pitched voice, especially when she sang, which she often did while working. “Vanilla and strawberry because it’s almost Spring!”

She set you to work mixing ingredients while she measured them. You could see Cedric hovering out of the corner of your eye, unsure of what to make of all this. “Oh come on,” You said finally, not being able to take it any longer. The batter that you were working on was enough to make perhaps three cakes, but there would have to be much more than that before the day is through. “You can help with this, you know. Or are you scared of getting a little dirty?”

You put your fingers in flour and flicked some at him. It landed on his pajama shirt. He tried to wipe it off but it just made a white smear, which made you giggle. “I guess I might as well,” He said, finally letting his guard down. Daisy found him another apron, and set him about working on his own bowl of cake mix.

“No, no,” You said, seeing how fast he was mixing. It had even alarmed Daisy, who wouldn’t dare say anything bad about it. You could just gauge by how big her eyes got. “Slowly - you fold in the eggs, you don’t just ... make it go wild like that. We want a fluffier texture. There’s such a thing as over mixing, isn’t there Daisy?”

“That’s right!” She squeaked.

Cedric conceded. He went a little slower this time, taking your direction rather well. You added in the last bits of vanilla to the mix, then helped to measure them into the pans that Daisy had taken away to put into the oven. “What now?” He asked, wiping his hands on his apron.

“We do it again - unless you’re wanting to go and get a bit more sleep,” You shrugged. “Though that means you’re going to miss the best part.”

“And what’s that?” He asked, raising one of his bushy eyebrows. He didn’t have suspicion in his eyes anymore. In fact, you might almost say it looked like he was having fun.

“The decorating! Fresh strawberries, whipped cream, enough icing to send me into a sugar coma. Oh, it’s Heaven. I’ve been waiting for this day for weeks now.” You said, your mouth nearly watering as you thought about all of the treats that you were going to make. “And then, after dinner tonight, we’ll be at our tables and voila! Cakes! And nobody knows we helped to make them which makes it feel sneaky.”

“Knew there would be a catch,” Cedric said, picking up another mixing bowl since the other one had been taken away for cleaning. “I knew you were heading out at night for some reason. I just didn’t expect it to be this.”

“Oh, so just because I’m Slytherin, you think that I was up to no good?” You asked, feeling offended by his assumptions. You picked up a new mixing bowl as well, and a clean spoon.

“Well...” Cedric said, rubbing the back of his neck. You were both in an awkward waiting position until Daisy came back to measure ingredients once more. “How was I to know it would be this?”

“You could have asked rather than accusing me by note,” You shrugged, spinning the spoon around in your hands. You could smell some of the other bakers beginning to prepare the whipped icing that would be going on the cake. It was beginning to make your mouth water. They might as well be working with ambrosia, the food of the gods.

The little house elf did come running with her measuring cups to weight out ingredients and you were finally able to get back to work. Surprisingly, Cedric stayed. He stayed as the cakes were brought out of the oven and put to freeze to make them easier to ice. He stayed as you struggled with a piping bag, and ended up with frosting all over your apron.

“Stop laughing,” You said, as you saw that he was chuckling. He turned away but you could still feel his shoulders move. You glared at him, wiped a glob off your apron and onto your finger, then flicked it right at the back of his neck. That made him stop real quick. He turned back to look at you and you gave him your widest grin. “Oops.”

“No food fights, please!” Daisy wheezed, which put an end to whatever Cedric was thinking about. He wiped it off, onto his apron, then chuckled again.

“Yeah, no food fights,” He repeated to you, as if you were the one getting the scolding. You rolled your eyes, then went back to trying to get the piping bag right. You managed, without exploding it this time, and wasting the precious icing. Still though, you took little dallops of it off your apron and stuck it into your mouth, savoring the flavor.

“Has there ever been a food fight at Hogwarts?” You wondered allowed, stepping back to admire your handiwork. You could imagine one happening in the Great Hall, given how much food was in there on a constant basis. Cedric looked a little surprise that you were asking him in such a pleasant tone rather than the snippiness that you had been passing back and forth.

“A couple of years ago,” Cedric said, smiling as he thought about it. “You know the Weasley twins, from the Gryffindor Quidditch team? They started one in their first year. Now there’s a spell on the tables where it can’t happen anymore.”

“I hope Dumbledore forgets one year. Because now, I gotta start one.” You said, thinking that you had to talk to these twins about how they did it. And maybe a Ravenclaw for counter-spells.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Cedric said, winking at you over his own creation. His was a lot messier than yours, but it would hopefully taste good, that’s what was important. “Strawberries?”

“Strawberries,” You affirmed. A house elf came over with a basket of the fresh fruit, just washed and shiny. You go to work with a knife now, which seemed a little dangerous. As you took it up to cut the leaves off, you looked over at Cedric. He already had the knife in hand and was chopping surprisingly well. He seemed to have some talent other than Quidditch and a winning smile. And - best of all, he seemed to trust that you weren’t going to attack with him the knife. Pretty big deal for a Slytherin.

When the cakes that you were making were finished, you took off the apron and stiffled a yawn. In the time that it had taken you and Cedric to make three a piece, house elves had finished a couple dozen. Yours and his weren’t as picture perfect as the others, but you were happy with your work nonetheless. “Alright, well, g’night...” You said, stretching as you went into the hallway. You could faintly see the sun beginning to rise through the window, the sky no longer black but a lighter shade of navy.

“This was fun,” Cedric admitted, turning to look at you, flour staining the front of his once-perfect robes where the apron didn’t cover. “You do this every night?”

“It’s usually just bread that I make,” You admitted. “The cake was much more fun than that. But bread is really cool, the way that it’s made with just the simplest things. I think I want to become a baker after graduating, but who knows...” You shrugged. The world was still a dark place. But surely that meant that there was going to be more of a need for baked goods to lighten the load and make people feel a little better.

“You’re great at it,” Cedric complimented. Well, that was a nice touch. The Golden boy of Hufflepuff was giving you a compliment, and making you feel a bit of the honeyglow.

“Thanks.” You said. You took a couple of steps down the hallway which would lead you to the stairs down towards the dungeons, but you stopped, turning around. “Are you going to tell on me?”

“No,” Cedric said, after taking a couple of seconds to think. “I might join you again sometime, though.”

“Well that’s fine then,” You said with a smile. “Goodnight, Cedric.”

“Good morning, y/n,” Cedric said, running his fingers through his hair once more, before turning himself to go to his own dormitory. You laughed as you watched him go, then hurried yourself along to get ready for the day.

At dessert the next night, you were surprised to see not one of the picture perfect cakes that the elves had made, but rather one of the haphazard ones that was definitely Cedric’s. You couldn’t help but chuckle as you saw the uneven strawberries and the frosting dripping over the sides. The Slytherin girl next to you commented on how it looked ‘like a child had made it’ and got up to go down the table to one of the nicer looking cakes.

You eagerly took a piece. The cake itself was perfection, it was just the uneven frosting that made it look a little wonky. As you cut into it, you looked over to the Hufflepuff table to catch eyes with the baker himself. He had one of your cakes in front of him, and had loaded two pieces onto his plate. He gave you his heart-melting smile and you returned the sentiment. You stabbed a piece of the cake onto your fork and held it up as if in cheers. He did the same.

It wasn’t the same as eating with him exactly, but it was nice nonetheless. You had become restless during the nights because of how homesick you were, and you found something which could become a life-long love. And, well, you really didn’t mind that Cedric was along for the ride.

#Cedric Diggory x reader #Cedric Diggory #Cedric Diggory oneshot #Harry Potter #Harry Potter oneshot #oneshot #one shot #cedricd #request #x reader

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s1ithers · 2 years

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finally caught up on the witcher show. mostly liked it! although the ending didn’t hit. ciri was so good, i read the books between s1 and s2 and was pleasantly surprised to find the saga is really ciri’s story, despite the title, and her actress did a great job carrying the show’s heart i thought

BUT i’m gutted what they did to yennefer, my light my mom my love my best girl ;—;

salty spoilers

yen was far and away my favorite thing in s1, and that held true after reading the books. s1 had so much love & respect for this character & built out this whole great psychological arc for her, and then they just trashed her?

losing her magic is such a weird non sequitur, “who am i without my power?” well yeah her whole adult arc in s1 was “who am i even with all this power?” she already knows magic can’t make her whole!! sodden hill was her finally letting herself feel all the pain & trauma & grief she’d repressed, s2 should have been her like, integrating that. letting that experience open her heart enough to take a chance mentoring ciri and finding that love & connection that finally heals her loneliness

but instead she gets to relive her desperate schoolgirl arc bc she....hasn’t learned fuckall & still thinks she needs to claw her way up to Max Power to be worth anything ig.

except that doesn’t even land bc she actually is saying things to the effect of ‘we make our own new better purpose’ etc, right up until she gets arrested, then it’s suddenly oops, well, guess i simply must agree to the Evil Witch’s Child Sacrifice Bargain, there is just no other way~

(also! she “spent a month searching the whole continent” for a way to get her magic back then gives up so completely she’s ready to sacrifice a child. the same yennefer who spent decades chasing down every ghost of a rumor of an infertility cure??)

yen teaching ciri at the temple school is such a lovely tender passage and instead we get... recriminations & a battle scene

like i don’t love this lens but it really did read like oops, our strong female character(tm) has a little TOO much righteous anger, better slap her back down~ she goes from sodden to finishing s2 having to meekly plead forgiveness from geralt for making a stupid mistake in a situation that felt contrived af to begin with -_-

speaking of, the deathless mother addition is annoying me more and more, the more i think about it. what does she add that couldn’t have been achieved more interestingly by having the characters set their own courses? i loved the fringilla-francesca plotline, but how much better would it have been if they’d hatched their plan themselves!

the sorceresses are fun bc they have SO much agency!! they plot & strategize & manipulate events on the world stage and they all have their own strongly held reasons for doing so, some more noble than others, but to displace that onto the voleth meir, like oh actually they’re being manipulated by an eEeEevil demon~!!, who’s just a monster with no more depth than the myriapod, just...deflates them so much.

and not even just the sorceresses, even grandpa vesemir needs a fuckin ulterior motive. i really don’t want to be like ‘oh i read the books and everything’s Wrong Actually’ bc that is the wrong way to look at adaptations but. so much of the series’ charm is in the love & bonds between the characters, the main three, the kaer morhen witchers, geralt’s friendship w dandelion and the dwarves, the hansa. people choosing to take each other into their hearts despite the world going to hell around them

& the show is just like, what if we pumped every relationship full of the max possible amount of shitty drama. it’s not like the story is short on conflict! but ok, fine, we’re not allowed to show friendship on american television

geralt & jaskier’s falling out in s1 ties into this too, even show!geralt being so monosyllabic. the other witchers training ciri. you can see the kinds of relationships the show is trying to gesture at but they dwell so much on the conflict it’s left to the viewer to project most of the warmth

#happy new year have a longass w*tcher rant?#fringilla & francesca are the exception they had the most chemistry in the whole cast #tissaia & yen were sweet together too #the show really does seem to be trying to write good female characters like. as a goal. & then sabotaging itself in weird ways #the ranty-ness of this sort of belies that i did like a lot about this season haha #they did give us Hot Lambert god bless u_u #//twn critical

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cutesilyo · 3 years

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no place in the world (like manila) — an amephil fanfic

A few months after the outbreak of the Philippine-American War, Alfred falls in love with and is betrayed by a bright-eyed teenager with the prettiest smile on this side of the Orient in a single night.

This is not a love story.

Also available on AO3.

—

"Sir, I don't think it's safe for you to leave the camp," Major-General MacArthur warned. "I don't know how, but the revolutionaries know your face. They could attack you!"

"Pshaw," Alfred snorted. "I'm a nation. What could they do that could take me down, huh?"

MacArthur's mustache bristled in displeasure. "Be that as it may sir, might I remind you that you only arrived in Manila a week ago? Knowing you, you'd just get lost and I'd have to put together a whole squad of troops just to hunt you down. You could get captured, Alfred. I don't know how to tell you just how badly that would bring down morale."

Alfred just wagged his fingers, a bright grin on his face. "Look, if I get captured, I'd bust out of whatever crappy holding place they'd put me in without barely breaking a sweat! And knowing our soldiers, that's just the stuff that would make a great story to tell at dinnertime. How's that for morale?"

The way that MacArthur simply stared at him blankly told Alfred that this was not a convincing argument.

"I hate it when you do that," he groaned, slumping back on his seat. The leather was hot with the heat of the tropical sun and it stuck uncomfortably to his skin. Oh, how badly he wanted to just finally get up and leave. "I'm just saying, I can't stay inside here forever just waiting for you to dictate our next move."

"It's part of our strategy—"

"And it's boring. I'm bored, Major-General. I might as well look around." Alfred's eyes glinted dangerously. "Besides, you'll capture the whole nation for me soon enough, won't you? No harm in wanting to see what we're winning once this war is over."

The silence lasted for a few seconds before the major-general sighed in defeat.

—

Private Patton R. Wilkes was assigned to “accompany” Alfred while he roamed around Manila, but he knew that MacArthur just wanted someone to make sure he would actually return to camp instead of getting lost or, God forbid, taking the next ship back to America. Though the both of them were dressed in civilian clothing, the private carried himself with a strict stiffness that just screamed hardened military man. If Alfred wanted any chance of escape, it looked like the private would be hard to shake off.

Alfred tried to stay optimistic about the trip anyway. He hadn't paid much attention to the city while he was on the way to the American camp, but he certainly expected it to have an air of exoticness. He was a bit disappointed not to see anything like the palaces of Japan or the distinctly oriental architecture of China. Instead, he found street signs written in Spanish, the excited chatter of fast-talking brown-skinned people, and the cacophony of guitars, church bells, and the sound of horse-drawn carriages trotting along the stoned roads. Walking around Manila was like looking at a funhouse mirror version of Mexico: more or less the same, but with just enough differences to make his head spin.

"Uh, you alright there, sir?" Patton asked.

"Was just thinking about a bad memory, is all," Alfred grimaced. He's sure that Alejandro would have his head once he returned to the continent. He's been pissing off a lot of Spanish-speaking nations recently, that's for sure. "Come to think of it, the Philippine Islands must have its own personification too, right?"

The private's face darkened. "He's a force to reckon with, sire. Haven't seen no hide nor hair of him myself, but some guys in the other squadron barely survived after fighting with the kid."

"A kid?" Alfred furrowed his eyebrows. He didn't know there were still nations out there who were that young. Then again, he was only a teenager himself, and he was even younger when he fought against Arthur as well. "I don't know how I feel about fighting a kid. Couldn't I just give him a lollipop or something and this could all just work itself out?"

He meant it as a joke, but Patton seemed to take it seriously and started furiously shaking his head. "Don't think you could even try negotiating with him sir, the kid's a savage. Hacked and slashed his way through the guys with some kind of golden knife, they said. We're lucky our medics are so darned fast, otherwise, we would've been down almost a dozen men from him alone."

Something in Alfred's resolve hardened at the thought of losing his soldiers to someone so brutal. He clapped the other man on the shoulder and said, "Don't you worry, Pat. We'll end this soon, and when we win, we'll make sure that nobody from these islands ever lays a hand on any of our own."

That seemed to comfort Patton somewhat, though he was still shaking with anger. "I'll give them a good walloping right by your side, sire."

"Now that's the kind of patriotic determination I wanna see!" Alfred crowed. He then immediately scrambled for his wallet and hurriedly gave the private a wad of bills. Some onlookers openly gawked at seeing the number of dollar bills in his hand. "Tell you what, why don't you buy some booze, head back to camp, and inspire your fellow soldiers, eh? God knows we need some fun around here."

"Um," Patton blinked, caught off-guard. "I don't know if Major-General MacArthur—"

"Tell Major-General MacArthur that I'm just trying to boost morale," Alfred winked. "Also, tell him I'll back by next morning!"

He didn't get to hear Patton's response as he took off running wildly in the opposite direction. He barely registered running past the stores, wet market, and the cathedral; he just wanted to be alone and independent, exploring this new land to his heart's content. The buildings were shorter and the roads were narrower here than in his own country, but Alfred was just so glad to finally be in a place filled with people just like he was used to.

Alfred collapsed on his knees, winded. When he looked up, he was surprised to see that he had apparently made it to one of Manila's many ports. Past the numerous small fishing boats and trading boats, he could see that the sun was already beginning to set. The sky was painted in a pretty combination of pinks and oranges in contrast to the ocean's blue, the stars already starting to twinkle faintly into appearance one by one. The rhythmic lapping of the waves against the rocks seemed louder than everything else around him — a stark reminder that no matter where he went, there was always something bigger to discover.

He stood there for a moment, mesmerized when a loud grunt startled him out of his stupor.

He turned to find some kind of bull staring at him with its beady eyes, its long horns curving towards the back instead of to the front. It was pulling a wagon full of leafy vegetables that Alfred couldn't recognize, and the old man riding it looked startled to come across a foreigner.

"Hijo, padaan naman po," he said, with a strained smile.

"Oh, sorry, I don't know what you mean," Alfred tried, but the man just continued smiling at him. He was starting to think that maybe abandoning Patton, who wasn't fluent but at the very least conversational in Tagalog, was a bad idea.

Luckily, someone came to his rescue. A teenager with bright eyes approached him, an amused twitch of the lips on his sharp face. He was dressed simply: unlike the suit and tie ensemble of the richer Filipinos he'd come across or the pale blue uniform of the Philippine Army, he wore a thin white top and trousers cut just above his ankles. The scabbard on his hip would have been concerning if Alfred didn't know just how many Filipinos carried knives in their daily lives. All in all, he looked just like any other street vendor, but the red handkerchief tied around his neck was vibrant enough to make him stand out. "You are American, yes?"

"Ah yeah," Alfred flushed, a bit flustered. The way the stranger leaned in was a little too close for comfort, but he looked harmless and at least he spoke English. "Can you help me? I think that man is talking to me, but I can't understand what he's saying."

The teenager grabbed his arm to pull him to the side. The old man tipped his straw hat in thanks, and the teenager smiled, saying: "Pasensya na po, lolo! Hindi kasi taga-rito."

The two of them watched the wagon pass them by. They stood there in silence for a moment, and then Alfred blurted out, "I didn't know I was in the way, I swear."

"You did seem quite distracted." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the other boy laugh. The both of them turned to each other at the same time, a small smile on each other's faces. "Not that I blame you. I am sure you have sunsets in America, but it is different here than in other countries. I think the colors are more vibrant, do you agree?"

"Certainly takes my breath away," he admitted. "I do have to ask, how come you speak English so well? I've only been in Manila for a few days but I don't think I've met another Filipino that's as good as you are."

The teenager only laughed again and held on to Alfred's arm tighter. As he looked up at him, his eyes and grin were equally bright with mirth; and despite himself, Alfred was a bit charmed. "Us Filipinos are not as stupid as you think, señorito. Now, you say you are a stranger to Manila, yes? Come with me, and let me show you around my city."

—

They ended up hailing a tranvia, a carriage made to carry a whole group of people instead of just a pair. Alfred found it small and quaint, making an internal note to build tram lines in the city once he was able. Yet the energy that the teenager had with him was larger than life. He had apparently noticed the other passengers giving Alfred a suspicious side-eye, and immediately launched into a round of jokes to dispel the tension. Though he barely understood the jokes due to them being told in a mix of Spanish and Tagalog, the way that the whole tranvia burst into loud laughter was enough to assure him that his companion was quite the comedic performer.

When they got off, the driver even thanked them for the entertainment and told them not to pay the fare anymore. Alfred let out an excited whoo! as the teenager did an exaggerated bow.

As the carriage rode off, Alfred turned to his new friend and exclaimed, "Wow! The way you handled that was amazing! I mean, I've been through worse than an awkward train ride, but you definitely saved my ass back there."

The teenager blushed slightly. "Think nothing of it. I would rather see my companions happy and comfortable in my care than anything else."

"Still, that thing you did was certainly a swell sight." Alfred breathed in the cold evening air and let it out with a contented sigh. He looked straight into the other boy's eyes as he said, "And it's really nice that you're going through all the trouble to be with me tonight too! Like, we don't even know each other's names but you just whisked me away like some kind of fairytale hero! That was really awesome of you, I have to say."

"You are a man of sweet words," the teenager said, with a smile that looked almost bittersweet. Then, as if he had completely forgotten about his melancholy, he grabbed Alfred's arm again and dragged him towards the next street corner. "But let us not waste time talking! Most of these shops close soon, and I would hate for us to miss them!"

Helpless, Alfred let himself be strung along.

Sadly, most of the shops they went past had already closed for the day. Still, the teenager cheerily talked his ear off about what wares they sold and the local gossip about the people who ran those stores — like Pepito, owner of the clay pottery store, who had apparently given away all his lotto winnings to the next city's blacksmith. The one time that they had actually been able to buy something was when they came across a small, brightly-colored cart that apparently sold the Filipino version of ice cream. Both the vendor — Mang Tomas, as he was introduced — and the teenager had chuckled when he brought out a wallet full of dollars, so the teenager had to reach into his own pocket to pay with a few coins. As they walked past yet another cathedral, Alfred caught his friend singing the hymns under his breath. When they reached the plaza, the teenager then asked the lady standing nearby — Aling Nena, he was told — to give him a jasmine garland, the scent of the white flowers so powerful that it immediately made Alfred sneeze on his friend's face when he put them around his neck. Yet instead of getting mad like he expected, the teenager had only laughed and told him he looked handsome.

No matter where they went or who they talked to, his friend always seemed to know everyone's names. Alfred had no idea how he had the time to possibly get so familiar with all the people around him, but he certainly understood the sentiment; he loved talking with all the Americans that he came across with too. Personally getting to know the people who made his nation always made him feel more connected with them in a way that war and politics never could.

And if the Philippine Islands was truly to be his someday, Alfred knew he wanted to treat them similarly. More than anything or anyone else though, nobody in the archipelago had intrigued him most than the young man beside him whose smile was brighter than any star.

Yet all his experience in small talk failed him tonight, and not for lack of trying. Every time he asked questions about his friend, he was always diverted away from the topic.

Which part of the city are you from? was met with a vague Do you ask the flower which vine it came from? You are better off simply enjoying the whole garden.

Where is your family? had been completely ignored as his friend said You must be hungry, yes? I know a place with the best empanadas this side of Binondo.

What is your name? earned him a cheeky wink and a teasing If your mind still ventures to inane questions like that, then I am not doing very well in completely impressing you.

How old are you? made the teenager burst out into loud, hearty laughter that lasted for more than a minute. Alfred didn't even bother to try asking anything else after that, choosing to focus on his empanadas and arroz a la valenciana for the rest of the meal.

Later, when they were served a bottle of gin to share along with a bowl of peanuts, his friend had the grace to apologize for his behavior.

"I truly am sorry," he said, but the playful grin on his face made it difficult to take his apology seriously. "I simply do not think that you knowing more about me is more important than us having a good time together."

"How am I supposed to find you again if I don't know who you are, huh?" Alfred couldn't stop himself from whining. He ignored the glass in front of him, taking a swig straight from the bottle and letting the alcohol burn down his throat. His friend watched him in bemusement. "This has been the best night of my life in a long time. And if this is the last time we see each other, I don't think I'm going to forgive myself if I don't push you into giving me a hint."

This time, it was his friend's turn to take a drink: he filled his glass half-full and downed it all in one go. "You are certainly bold, señorito, I will give you that. A good friend of mine warned me about how loud and annoying Americans were, but it seems he neglected to tell me about how forward you all were as well."

Alfred resisted the urge to roll his eyes; of course, he would get deflected yet again. "Alright, I'll bite. Tell me more about your friend."

The teenager looked surprised. "You wish to know more about a man that insulted you?"

"If this is the closest I get to you telling me more about yourself, I'll take it," he shrugged. "Besides, I'd love to know how this friend of yours thinks. Americans are the greatest people in the world! He must be stupid if he doesn't know that."

The other boy laughed. "Of course you would say that, you biased brute. And I will have you know that my friend was quite smart, actually. One of the smartest men I have ever known."

Alfred felt like he wouldn't like the answer, but he asked anyway: "Was?"

All traces of laughter from his friend's face faded away into a hollow smile. "Killed by firing squad a few years ago."

Silently, Alfred poured gin into both of their glasses. They drank in solemn solidarity.

"My sincere condolences," said Alfred, and he meant it: he had lost too many friends himself over the centuries. "And I'm sorry I called him stupid."

His friend waved it off. "No worries. Pepe was incredibly intelligent, but he definitely had his fair share of stupid moments — you wouldn't believe how many times that man fell in love over the course of his short lifetime. Still, I miss him terribly and I wish he was still around. God only knows what he would have thought about everything happening at present."

"Oh, I know the feeling." Despite him dying decades prior, Alfred still longed for George Washington's steadfast guidance sometimes. He reached, a bit messily, for another drink. "It's uncanny, yeah? Some people just have this weird ability to analyze the present and predict the future. I certainly don't know how they do anything like it, really. I kind of just talk big and hope for the best."

"Funny that you talk about the future," the teenager chuckled. "Somehow, my friend even managed to predict that you would come here, Alfred. I did not believe him at the time, of course, but here you are."

"Here I am," Alfred repeated faintly. "Hold on, how did you know my—"

"Why were you all alone in my city, señorito?" His friend interrupted, looking up at him through his eyelashes. He leaned closer, close enough for the skin of their arms to touch, and Alfred suddenly forgot about all his worries. "I was very surprised to see you on your own, looking every bit like a lost little lamb. You are very lucky that I found you."

"Lucky indeed," he murmured, adjusting the collar of his shirt. It felt like the temperature in the room had risen by a dozen degrees. "Just wanted to explore, is all. MacArthur told me we had to stay low for a few more weeks, I got bored, and he let me out."

Those bright eyes were practically glittering as the teenager looked up at him, his fingers slowly tracing up his arm. "And you were alone? I always thought American soldiers traveled in pairs, but perhaps I was mistaken."

"No! No, you're right, you're definitely right," Alfred stammered out. He was sure his face was completely red by now. "I was with Private Wilkes earlier, but we, ah, got separated. He must be on the way back to Bulacan by now."

"How unfortunate," the other practically purred, clearly delighted. "Say, tell me, how did this Wilkes look like? Because I am sure that he does not look as handsome as you do."

That damned smile, now coy instead of kind and sweet, was tantalizingly close. If only he had the courage to lean down—

Alfred, trying desperately to distract himself, grabbed the bottle again and took a long swig.

There were about a million promises that threatened to spill from Alfred's lips, each one more outrageous than the other: Come with me. Stay with me. I'll keep you safe. I'll love you. Yet at the moment, he found himself tongue-tied. He didn't know if it was the alcohol or the atmosphere or the way the young boy across the table had so effortlessly allured him, but he felt like he was about to go insane. He barely registered the both of them standing up to leave, didn't question why they didn't need to pay at the restaurant, paid no heed to what his friend had whispered to the men standing guard by the door. His mind was in a muddy haze, and all he could focus on was the fact that his friend was holding his hand as he was led into the dark streets.

Dimly, Alfred thought that however striking he looked by the setting sun, he looked much more ethereal bathed in moonlight.

He must have said this aloud because the teenager laughed.

"You are a man of sweet words," he said, and there's that oddly bittersweet smile again. "And I wish we could have met in better circumstances."

"What's wrong with the way we met today? I had fun," Alfred argued. He swayed slightly on his feet, and his friend held on to him to keep him from falling. "Didn't you have fun?"

"You forget we are at war, señorito. And you forget that you are seeking to control me and my people, not find a lover." Despite the harsh words, the way his friend said this was soft and sad. Almost like he was somehow hurt. "It does not matter what we feel today if we are bound to fight each other tomorrow. Should you not know this by now?"

They walked together in silence, each supporting the other. Slowly, Alfred's alcohol-induced dizziness began to subside. It was replaced by a growing emptiness in his chest — and a heavy, heavy realization.

"You knew I was America this entire time." When his friend deigned to respond, he continued. "Then, why...?"

At this, the teenager laughed — broken and wistful and desperate, all at once. "I do not know myself. I was ready to attack you, but for some reason, the look in your eyes as you watched the sunset stopped me. I thought, if you could look at my country with such amazement, then you could see that this war is unnecessary. That if you could know my land and my people the way I knew them, full of vibrancy and color and light, then you could realize that they did not deserve to die.

"Yet as the night went on I began to realize my efforts were fruitless. It was not them you were looking at anymore, but me." Here, his friend faced him; Alfred barely catching a glimpse of his wet eyes before the teenager looked away. "Believe me, I would love to spend another night like this with you. But you have your responsibilities and so do I."

"Fruitless," Alfred repeated hollowly. The cold night wind was in stark contrast to the hot rage he felt bubbling inside him. He forcefully wrenched himself away from his friend, yelling: "You made me tell you classified information!"

In seconds, he watched the teenager's face go from shock to hurt to an angry glare.

"Do you not understand how badly I need to win this war? My people did not give their lives to free me from Spain just so you could swoop in and take over! So forgive me, señorito," his friend spat mockingly, "for trying to find whatever advantages my poor nation can get against such an imperialistic nation like you!"

"And do you not understand what we're trying to do here?" Alfred shouted. "We are fighting this war to save you! Don't you see that your country is a mess? That you're underdeveloped, uneducated, and unfit for self-rule? I was the hero who helped save your people from Spain, jackass, and—"

"—and you promised to give us independence, and yet all your countrymen seem to do is kill." The teenager finished, both his eyes and the hilt of his knife glinting golden under the moonlight. "Is that what freedom means to you, America? I beg to differ."

As Alfred stepped away from him in furious, furious betrayal, all he could think about was that the other boy looked so small.

"I thought of you as my friend," he said.

"And I thought of you as my liberator," the teenager said coolly. "I see we were both wrong."

A harsh whinny interrupted them both. Alfred turned to find Patton riding a chestnut brown horse, his face red from exhaustion but seemingly unharmed. The private stopped in front of him, dismounting without grace on the pavement. His face was red from exhaustion and his clothes looked considerably ruffled, but otherwise, he looked unharmed.

"It ain't my position to say this sire, but don't you dare ever try to run away from me like that again," Patton panted, giving a quick side-eye to the other teenager before dismissing him. "We best hurry now, because those two won't be happy about their stolen horse."

Just as he was about to ask who those two were, a pair of Filipinos with muskets turned the corner and ran towards them. He vaguely recognized them as the same two men who were standing guard at the restaurant. They shouted loudly, a mix of Tagalog and Spanish expletives that Alfred could barely recognize, and a phrase distinct enough that he felt like it was something significant: amang bayan.

Patton evidently recognized the words. He looked at him in a wide-eyed panic, saying, "Sire, we need to leave—"

And as quick as lightning, Patton fell to the ground with a sickening crack. Caught completely off-guard and his arms restrained, he was helpless against the teenager who had a knife at his throat: a knife that, as Alfred began to realize with a horrified lurch of his stomach, was engraved with golden flowers and the insignia of an eight-rayed sun.

"You must be Private Wilkes," the Philippines smiled. "I do hope you are enjoying my country."

"Get off him or else!" Alfred screamed, the combined events of the night making him feel like he was about to reach his breaking point. He reached for the pistol he kept hidden on his belt and took aim, hoping to God that the other nation wouldn't force him to shoot. Even after everything, he didn't feel like he had the nerve to hurt Philippines after the hours they spent together; maybe some other day, but not tonight.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the two men had caught up to them. They angled their muskets at him from a distance. The horse, which Alfred had been planning to use for escape, had already taken off running in the commotion.

Patton stared up at him with fear in his eyes, a bleeding gash on his forehead, and Alfred's hands began to shake.

Above all else, Philippines was still smiling: eyes bright, amused twitch of the lips on his sharp face. Slowly, he stood to approach him.

Like a switch had been flicked, his features turned soft and kind again — more like the boy that Alfred had met earlier, the boy who had dragged him around the streets of Manila with lighthearted laughter, the boy whose smile was brighter than any star. All Alfred could do was stand there, mesmerized once again, as his hand was gently pried away from the gun.

"Alfred," Philippines said this quietly, almost like he was invoking a prayer. He motioned the men to stand down. "I do not wish to fight."

"I don't want to either," Alfred admitted. Maybe there was hope... "C'mon, we can talk this through, right? Look, we haven't had a battle in months. It should be really easy to negotiate, yeah? I'll set up a meeting with your generals and mine, we'll have a civil discussion with no weapons allowed, and we'll reach a compromise."

The other nation was leaning in, and this time, Alfred took his chance. He held Philippines' cheek in his hands and they kissed, soft and quick and chaste.

"Of course," Alfred said, as he pulled away. "I would need your complete surrender—"

He was swiftly kneed in the stomach, disarmed, and shot.

"Alfred, I do not wish to fight," Philippines said, as he watched Alfred collapse to the ground. "But I have to. I hope you understand."

He vaguely registered Patton reaching out to him as his eyes closed and the blood pooled around him, but all he could focus on was watching the other nation walk away into the darkness.

—

When Alfred came to, he was already back at camp. Without thinking, he immediately trudged to the general's war office.

"Good morning, Major-General MacArthur," he smiled, bright and cheery. "Gather the troops. I want to destroy Manila immediately."

—

Notes:

This is set in October 1899, during those months when there were no battles or skirmishes between the two armies. On the first day of November, the Americans launched a major attack on the Filipinos. This attack happened in San Fabian, Pangasinan, not in Manila, but let's forget about that.

Major-General MacArthur is, of course, Arthur MacArthur Jr., who was a major military figure during the Philippine-American War. I also claim artistic license in hinting that the American camp was in Bulacan because it probably wasn't.

Alfred's comments about Manila looking like Mexico are based on a comment by former president Manuel L. Quezon when he visited Mexico back in 1937: "Everything was the same." He meant that very, very affectionately.

Here's a nifty map of modern Manila. Alfred and Patton start out in Quiapo, which is basically the heart of downtown Manila. Alfred runs all the way to Muelle del Rey, which, coincidentally, happens to be the same place where the Jones Bridge stands today. Alfred and Phili take the tranvia to Binondo, Manila's business district and home to the world's oldest Chinatown.

The names of the store owners and vendors that Phili talks about are references to assorted media in Philippine pop culture. Pepito is a reference to Pepito Manaloto, a long-time comedy show about a man who won the lotto. Mang Tomas (Mang being an informal way to refer to a male adult older than you) is the name of a popular brand of gravy. Aling Nena (Aling being an informal way to refer to a female adult older than you) is a reference to the song Tindahan ni Aling Nena, about a boy who falls in love with a storeowner's daughter.

The garland of white jasmines that Phili puts around Alfred's neck are supposed to be sampaguitas, our national flower. They're usually sold near churches and are given as a sign of respect.

I have no idea if there are actually empanadas and valenciana sold somewhere in Binondo, but let's jot that down to artistic license. But these are very much Filipino foods that were adapted from Spanish foods, which is why Phili brings it up when Alfred asks about his family.

The old friend that Phili keeps talking about is Jose Rizal, our national hero. He is primarily known for being a great writer, whose novels inspired the Philippine War for Independence, and for being killed for it. He is also known for being having a long list of lovers, many of them not even Filipino. Lesser known is the fact that he visited America, hated it, went on a train ride with an American, and hated it. He wrote a whole diary entry about how much he didn't like America and Americans. He had also predicted that out of all the world powers, it would be America who would probably take an interest in conquering the Philippines when Spain was out of the picture. Go figure. Rizal was also affectionately known by his nickname, Pepe.

I imagine Phili to be particularly proficient in arnis, which is also known as kali or eskrima. It's a kind of Filipino martial art, most easily recognizable as that one martial art where everyone is dual-wielding a pair of sticks. The sticks are actually for training. Traditionally, arnis is fought by dual-wielding knives or swords, and it's meant to be quick and efficient in defending, attacking, disarming, and killing. Phili's fictional ornately designed knife is inspired by this very real ornately designed knife. The detail of the eight-rayed sun is a reference to the eight-rayed sun in the Philippine flag.

Lastly (phew!), some Tagalog to English translations!

Hijo, padaan naman po - Young boy, kindly let me pass Pasensya na po, lolo! Hindi kasi taga-rito - Sorry, grandfather*! He's not from around here. Lolo literally means grandfather but is a general way to refer to any elderly man regardless of any actual blood relation. Amang bayan - Fatherland

#hws #hws america #hws philippines #usph #amephil #hetalia philippines #hetalia america #aph philippines #aph america #historical hetalia #mine

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alpacaparkaseok · 3 years

Text

Mine

3. Stalk me all you want, just bring refreshments.

Genre: Yoongi x OC

Warnings: some stalking lol

Word Count: 3.1k

We’ve made it to Paris by the time the first stalker finds me.

The past week has been spent in England popping in and out of interviews and press conferences. For the most part, it’s been pretty quiet. Granted, each interview never fails to bring up BTS, one even going so far as to pull up a quiz to see how similar I am to Suga.

I got 62%.

Sebastian demanded to take it as well. He got 43%. I still can’t tell if he was relieved or upset. Either way, things have been a little strange between us ever since that morning when he woke me up post panic attack. I can’t tell if it’s just because we’ve both got a lot of things on our minds or the fact that we’re back in civilization now, but I find myself seeking out the company of friends through phone calls and facetimes more often.

Stacey has been working nonstop to deflate the situation as much as possible. Truly, I owe her everything. She’s quick to remind me just that as I make my way to my hotel room.

“You know, this is very different from any other case I’ve had before. This fanbase is hard to get around.”

I roll my eyes even though she can’t see me from the other end of the phone. “You really have to stop referring to this as a case. It sounds like I’m some type of criminal.”

Sebastian passes me to go to his room while I fumble with my keycard. Stacey is in the middle of explaining the reasoning behind calling this a case when I finally open up the door and nearly drop the phone at the sight before me.

A girl sits on the edge of the bed, phone held up and hat low on her head. She stands up, walking over to me.

“Look who it is! Cara Richie!” For her surprised tone, I know she isn’t surprised at all. Stacey pauses on the phone as she picks up on the other voice. I remain frozen in the doorway, utterly confused. Did I get the wrong room?

Sebastian is the first one to react. “Keep your head down Car, and walk over here. Come into my room, I’ll get security.”

I do as he says, hesitating only a moment longer before turning my head down and heading down the hall. Stacey is demanding answers in my ear, but I can’t bring myself to answer her. Not as the girl is rushing out the door in an attempt to capture more footage.

“You think just because you’re a pretty face that Yoongi would be interested in you? He probably felt bad for your sorry excuse of a career and wanted to help. How do you feel about being a pity case?”

The words fling themselves at my back, but I focus on putting one step in front of the other. Sebastian is speaking quickly on the phone, motioning for me to walk faster.

“C’mon, c’mon…” He mutters under his breath, opening his door wide.

“I think you should know that this is live on Instagram. You look like a coward. Why would he like a coward like you?”

My feet refuse to move faster, my measly pace being the only thing I can manage. There’s a piece of me that really wants to turn around and give her a piece of my mind, but I know that’s the last move I should take. Not when she’s filming. Not when we’re just beginning promotions and my career is already barely hanging in there.

When I’m within arm’s reach, Sebastian grabs me and hauls me into the room. I just glimpse the dark clothing of security bursting out of the stairwell before Sebastian closes the door behind us.

“What was that?” Stacey demands to know. I watch as Sebastian scours the room, checking the bathroom and even under the covers for any unwanted visitors. Once he gives me a thumbs-up, I finally speak.

“I...I think that girl was stalking me.”

🌙

To say the least, Paris and I don’t get along well. Yes, the world-famous city of love. The irony of it all isn’t lost on me. I’m stuck in the city of love all the while trying my best to avoid crazed would-be lovers of some man I’ve only ever seen through a screen.

On the bright side, people who work for the tabloids are having a heyday. I haven’t managed to get my hands on any of the magazines they’re working for, but I do have a phone and said phone is in a constant state of buzzing and ringing.

One the down side I still have no clue how I’m supposed to make it through these promotions in one piece. A part of me hopes that BTS will step in and basically tell everyone to knock it off, but I have no way of knowing how their PR teams works. Either way, they seem to be very good at keeping things on their side very quiet while my side is barely holding the barricade.

We’re driving back from an interview when my phone rings yet again. Sebastian looks at me.

“You gonna answer that?”

Sighing, I yank my phone out of my pocket. No doubt it’s yet another nosy friend or reporter that got my number from a nosy friend.

“Oh!” I gasp. It’s an actual friend. “Bong-Cha!” I all but scream into the phone. It’s my crazy roommate from my senior year in college that convinced me to pursue another degree with her in Seoul.

“Wow, you actually sound happy to hear from me,” my friend teases.

“There’s a first time for everything. How are you?” It feels like it’s been years since we’ve last spoken.

Sebastian looks at me with a puzzled expression as I slip into Korean. I’ve never spoken it around him, but I’ve never had a reason to. In fact, it’s about time I got a call from my friend. I need to keep practicing.

“I’m...great.”

I furrow my brows as I study the Parisian streets we pass. “Are you sure about that?”

Bong-cha’s sigh carries through the phone. “Yeah, I think so. It’s just...remember when I told you before you left for the Congo that I had a really big gig coming up? Like, really big?”

The conversation we had less than a week before I left for the Congo comes back to my mind. Bong-cha and I originally went into the university to study acting. When we were both accepted to a prestigious school in Seoul she was elated and I was confused. I didn’t apply to the school. I didn’t even speak the language, why would I apply? Bong-cha took things into her own hands and filled out the application for me. It took a lot of puppy eyes and convincing, but eventually I realized that a fresh start on a new continent and even with a new language would be exactly what I needed.

The program took two years, but it only took Bong-cha six months to realize that she wanted to focus more on the music part of filming rather than the actual acting. The little punk switched programs, but we still lived together for the duration of the two years. Looking back, she made the right decision. She can weave and create a soundtrack that puts people under a spell. She even helped with the soundtrack for one of my very first indie flicks.

Thanks to her I had something of an advantage going into the world of cinema with both American and Korean acting experience. But the best part of it all was the building up a friendship that will last for decades.

“Yeah,” I come out of my walk down memory lane. Paris somehow makes me nostalgic. “What happened with that? How did it go?”

“Well, it went well...it wasn’t exactly for a movie, though.”

“What was it for, then?” I can sense the hesitation in her tone and urge her forward. “Are you releasing a mixtape or something?” We both chuckle at the notion.

“No, not that. Although I would take the world by storm if I decided to drop a mixtape. It would be pure genius.”

“Yeah, yeah. What was it for? Now you’ve made me curious.”

Another sigh. “I was working on a comeback trailer for BTS.”

My heart stutters for a moment. “You- you what?”

“I know, and I should have told you all of this-”

“Daebak!” I shout into the car, Sebastian jumping a little at my sudden exclamation. “That’s so cool, Bong-cha! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me before!”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is amazing, isn’t it? They’re kind of going for this intense dystopian feel and somebody recommended me to them because they’d seen ‘True Lies’, isn’t that great? I still can’t believe it.”

Bong-cha deserves every ounce of credit that comes her way, I couldn’t be happier for her. Then I remember my current situation, and the questions I’m dying to ask her are all jumping for attention. I bite them down, reminding myself that this isn’t about me.

“I told you that the soundtrack for ‘True Lies’ was perfect, didn’t I? See, you should listen to me more often.”

A half-hearted chuckle from the other end of the phone. “I guess I should. But Cara, that’s not the only reason I called. I think I may have screwed something up.”

If my heart keeps stuttering I may die. Trying not to jump to any conclusions, I struggle to keep the apprehension out of my voice. “Ok...what happened?”

“Well...I worked a lot with all the boys, they’re very hands on in the whole process.”

“Ok.”

“I especially worked a lot with Suga because he’s very talented at producing music and all that, so he had a lot of say in the overall vibe and feel of the piece. Anyways, as you can imagine, we had to spend a lot of time together and we actually became pretty good friends...”

A yellow bike is being parked in a bike rack painted with red flowers and vines. It’s outside of the kind of cafe you only see in movies, and a young woman sits by the window with a book in hand. She’s lost in thought, no longer looking down at her book but instead watching the cars as they pass by. One hand rests idly around her drink which is still full. We make eye contact for a single second before I speed by, and I know that I’ll never see her again but I can’t help but wish I was her.

If I were her I could sit there calmly, not worried about much except for not spilling my drink on my novel. I would admire the yellow bike in the rack, and think up bike routes that I could enjoy. I would pack my book in the little basket between the handlebars and I would wait for a sunny day to go out and read.

Just my bike, book, and me.

Jumping a little as we pass over a speed bump I’m ripped from my alternate reality and drink in the words that Bong-cha speaks as delicately as possible.

“...we talked a lot, and eventually I started talking about my friends. You know, pretty normal, isn’t it? Everyone talks about their best friends. I mentioned you, of course. Explained how we lived together for however long, like what, four years? Two in the states and two in Seoul? Anyways, I was going on about you because ‘Under Nine’ has been so huge and it’s like you finally had your big break.”

Coaxing my jaw to move from its stiff position, I form a sentence. “Bong-cha, just tell me.”

There’s a two second pause before she dives back in. “He’d seen the film, said that you seemed cool. And I just started thinking about it and I thought that you two would be so cute together. And he just seems...lonely. Is that weird? And you’re always so stressed with trying to find the next big project so I just talked you up but...I- I didn’t tell him to date you or anything, I swear! I just said that you two should be friends. That’s all, I swear.”

Somehow the spike in heart rate I was expecting never comes. Instead, I almost feel more at ease. At least I’m starting to understand how this got started. It all seemed too disconnected before, like he just picked my name out of a hat and decided to have some fun with it.

“So...do you know why he said those things in the interview? Because that wasn’t exactly a call for friendship. At least, if that’s how he meant it, he failed. Big time. And now I’m paying the price.”

I can’t keep the bite out of my voice toward the end, and Sebastian doesn’t need to be fluent in the language to understand that tone.

‘You ok?’ he mouths. I nod and roll my neck in an attempt to relax. I don’t want Bong-cha to think that I’m mad at her. If anything, I’m flattered that she even thought to act as a sponsor for me to one of the most famous rappers in the world, however misguided her intentions.

“I know. I know, trust me, I talked to him about it.”

I wasn’t expecting that. They must be pretty good friends if Bong-cha feels comfortable calling him out on this. “You did?”

She chuckles. “I know, shocking. I just feel partially responsible for all of this. Then when I saw that video in your hotel room-”

“Wait, you saw that? I thought they were able to take that down in time.”

“Well, it was live when she was filming it. So she had to stop the filming but it was already out in the world. If it makes you feel any better, most people feel bad for you. You reacted really well in the video. Didn’t even say anything. Yoongi felt horrible when-”

“Hold up, hold up.” The words tumble from my mouth before she can continue. “You’re telling me that he actually saw that? And you talked to him about all of this? What is he saying?”

“I would tell you if you would quit interrupting me.”

“Sorry.” A hint of a smile tugs at my lips, the head strong Bong-cha I know so well reappearing.

“Anyways, as I was saying he felt horrible once he saw the video. Obviously we knew that it was probably a little crazy for you, especially with interviews and stuff. But I think even the guys were surprised to hear about you having stalkers and stuff.”

“The guys as in…”

“As in the guys. Jin and Jimin and-”

“Yeah. Yep. Got it.” I’m not sure whether I should laugh or cry, so I settle for shock.

“I talked to Yoongi about it, though. They all feel horrible about it, really. I guess after I talked about you so much he got curious and started doing some research and trying to figure out who you were. You know, kind of like friend shopping.”

“Is that a thing?”

“Sure, when you’re that crazy famous it is. You have to make sure the person you want to befriend isn’t some psycho in disguise.”

I snort. “I am a psycho, though. I don’t even try to hide it.”

Bong-cha chuckles, in full agreement with me. “Trust me, I know. But I don’t know, maybe he thinks it’s endearing? I mean, look at his closest friends. Compared to the rest of the members, you’re pretty tame. They’re all nuts.”

Just from the way Bong-cha speaks about the band I can tell that she really loved spending her time working with them. It would appear they all became fast friends. I can’t say that surprises me; she’s always had a knack for making friends.

“Alright, if you say so.”

“Anyways, I guess the guys were just giving him a hard time because he was always watching your stuff. Everyone took it too far in that interview. I mean, honestly speaking, I think they want him to get a girlfriend as badly as I do, but,” she keeps chattering away as she senses my impending interruption, “they realize that this wasn’t the best way to go about everything. Trust me when I say that their agency practically skinned them alive when the interview went viral.”

I suppose it makes sense to a certain point, but there’s still one outlier in all this information. If this is purely just an innocent mistake, then why on earth would Yoongi fan the flame by inviting us to the film festival in Seoul? And publicly RSVP?

I ask Bong-cha as much, the skepticism thick in my voice. “I just don’t get it, I guess.”

Bong-cha curses on the other side, and I can practically see her rolling her eyes. “That is precisely why all of the boys have basically been in time out for the past couple of weeks. Remember when I said that the other boys want Yoongi to get moving as much as I do?”

“Yeah? I don’t follow…”

Bong-cha laughs at the situation, the sound of it only worrying me more. “That wasn’t Yoongi that invited you guys and RSVPd.”

I nearly choke at the new information. The anger I feel is red-hot. Somebody really is trying to sabotage my career, aren’t they? “W-who? Who would do that? Why haven’t they said anything about that? Clearly someone is trying to ruin my career, and possibly his as well. Wouldn’t BigHit do someth-”

“Hey! Listen to me you psycho!” Bong-cha yells through the phone, barely able to get me to shut up for more than two seconds. “Are you even listening to me at all? I just said that the others are pushing for you and Yoongi, too. Nobody is trying to destroy your career.” She pauses, and for once I don’t interrupt her. Instead I wait with bated breath for her to continue. “You should have seen Yoongi’s face when Jin told him what he did.”

Jin? Kim Seokjin? What did he do?

“What do you mean? What did Jin do?”

A sigh of long-suffering. “He’s the one that invited you guys. And made sure Yoongi would have to be there to face you by publicly RSVPing him. Got it?”

“Why would he do that?” I ask myself the question more than anything. Bong-cha still responds though, the smirk evident in her tone.

“You’ll just have to ask him in person when you get here, won’t you? Make sure you save me a seat. I want to be there for this.”

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fictionadventurer · 3 years

Note

Thoughts on "the comedy genius of the first 100 episodes of the pbs' Arthur series"?

I really, truly believe that the early seasons of this children’s show can stand among the great sitcoms of American history. It pains me to see the Internet reduce it to stupid memes, because this show deserves to be recognized for its high-quality humor. It might be aimed at elementary-age children, but it’s full of jokes that would be funny enough for any adult sitcom. The jokes range from sharp to satirical to just plain silly, but they’re never anything that’s inappropriate for the children watching, which takes talent.

Some of my favorite categories of jokes include:

The one-liners. This show is intensely quotable, and to this day, my adult siblings and I will come up with quotes fitting to any given situation. D.W. is an excellent source of these, but the show’s humor, ranging from dry to sassy to just plain silly, provides quotations from all the characters that are useful for all sorts of situations.

The background jokes. The early seasons are filled with visual or audio gags that provide extra hilarity if you take notice of it. One of my favorites was the time that Arthur’s parents watched Extreme Knitting on television, showing two old ladies knitting massive scarves beneath a digital clock keeping time like it’s a sporting event. The other major example is “D.W. Gets Lost”, where the store’s overhead announcements are unfailingly hilarious. (”Books without vowels now half-price.” “Carbonated milk. It’s the drink that puts you to sleep, and burps you, too.” “Chocolate-covered cabbage. The dessert that makes you go, “Blech.”)

The parodies. The early-season writers were masters at writing parodies that were funny even if you didn’t know what they were parodying. One of the prime examples is “Buster Hits the Books”. As Buster tries to find a book he likes, he reads things that are parodies of everything from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Dr. Seuss, which capture the spirit of the story while making a segment where the jokes stand on their own. I had no clue what “The Jolly Jollisters” was a parody of (until about a year ago, when to my great delight, I stumbled upon “The Happy Hollisters”), but that didn’t stop the segment from being funny. The parodies here are funny without being mean-spirited; they poke fun without lazily relying on references. They have heart and intelligence like all good parodies should.

The adult jokes. Not the “we secretly put some innuendo in here” type of adult jokes. I’m talking the types of jokes that fit more adult concerns; they don’t take away from the humor for the kids, but add something extra for the grown-ups watching. One of my favorite examples is the family reunion episode, when all the adults are playing charades. The team fails to guess the clues Arthur’s pseudo-intellectual uncle gives, and he says, “It’s Over the Bridges of Medieval Paris.” “We said pick a popular book.” “Well, all my friends have read it.”

That’s just jokes. What about stories? My favorite episodes to bring up when I say that Arthur can stand up against any sitcom are two Joe Fallon classics:

“D.W. Goes to Washington”: This episode is great gag after great gag.

We start out with the hilarity of Arthur remembering all the terrible vacations that D.W. has chosen before, such as “Share a Sundae with Santa”, which turned out to be a guy who put a false-front igloo on his house, comes out in a half-torn-off fake beard and a tank top, and says, “Didn’t you bring a sundae? How can you share a sundae with Santa if you don’t bring a sundae to Santa?”

Then we get D.W. snarking at every single attraction in Washington D.C. (”Oh, look, another closed door. We could have stayed at home and locked each other out of the bathroom. It would have looked just like this.”)

And we finish off with gags coming from the Secret Service. (”Her name is D.W.” “That’s it? Initials? You didn’t give the kid a whole name?”).

Yes, it’s an implausible plot, but I maintain that any sitcom would kill to have jokes this sharp.

“The Rat Who Came to Dinner”: Mr. Ratburn is staying with Arthur’s family. (Oh, the horror!). The classic plot of “Oh, no, the teacher has a life outside of school” is full of hilarity.

We have one liners: “Is it true what Arthur says about you hating all children?” (Strong contender for my favorite line in the entire show).

We have silly imagine spots as Arthur considers what it’ll be like to have the teacher there: “Are you doing homework?” “I’m taking a bath!” “I’m sliding a waterproof pad under the door. Write the names of the continents in order of size.”

We have parodies, like when Arthur desperately turns to educational television: “Today, we watch grass grow, in real time.”

We have character moments: “I couldn’t help overhearing, because D.W. handed me this juice can and told me to listen.” (He says while holding out string-and-can phone.)

It doesn’t matter that this plot is based around an elementary student’s concerns. These jokes are just plain funny.

Like any show, there are weak episodes mixed in with the strong ones, but the early seasons have a relatively high level of quality. It gets a little rockier as the seasons go on, but I’ve long considered the 100th episode to be a decent dividing line between the good and bad eras of the show. The 100th episode two-parter (which is excellent) occurs in the middle of Season 7 (aired in 2002). Some terrible episodes occur early in that season, and a few classics air after that. Once Season 8 hits, though, there’s a painfully obvious drop in quality. The good episodes stop being the norm and start being exceptions. The characters stop being endearing and start being annoying (do not get me started on the wrong done to Muffy). The parodies become lazy and trite, and the jokes are few and far between. However, the terrible decline of the show does not erase the roughly-seven seasons of high-quality children’s comedy that came before it. This was a smart show, a funny show, that also contained some good lessons for children. It really doesn’t get much better than that.

#thank you for asking and giving me the chance to talk about something dear to my heart #answered asks #ask games #arthur #pbs #iseult-blanchemains #i could have gone on longer but i restrained myself #(believe it or not)#i had to cut out my songs of praise for joe fallon and ken scarborough #i may fit it into another of the children's television questions in my inbox #but i'll have to see how it turns out

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monstrousroommates · 3 years

Text

Raspberry Morbs

(On ao3)

The Christmas season was incredibly busy. Roman’s theatre was putting on a very grand panto, and the Cairnhills wanted him to come to their holiday parties. He was very concerned that they planned to set him up with one of Patricia's friends. Probably the one who loved cerise and arsenic green. Tiffany? Something like that. She had dark eyes and a strong jaw, leaning towards handsome instead of pretty. Patrica wrote to him about her a lot, about the difficulty she was having with her season, despite her aristocratic connections. Roman wondered if revealing what he was actually doing with his time would dissuade them. Exactly how much of a social disaster would being an actor be?

Meanwhile, Remy’s correspondence heated up as he wrote back and forth with Johan, or Jean for now, setting things up for him to take his house and small staff back, while at the same time, Remy tried to decide where he was going to go next. He supposed he could get another house in town, or even move to a different part of the country. Either way he’d probably lose Roman’s company. He could go back to France, it had been a while. Maybe he could even sneak by his family’s old home and see which of his sisters had inherited it.

That didn’t appeal to him in the least, now that he’d thought of it. He couldn’t go back. That wasn’t how it worked. Besides the idea of going back to the continent itched like a healing sunburn. It was a familiar sort of itch. He’d felt it as a teenager, before he’d ended up in the army- not a place Remy was really suited to. Something was coming. Maybe not soon in a human’s life, but soon enough for him. Besides, a whole new century was coming up quickly. Maybe he should try something really different.

Remy started a new letter. Not much would actually happen until after Christmas Time, but letters took a while to get places, even with the RMS ships.

Remy was sitting in the smoking room, avoiding the crowd at the Christmas party. Ed had invited him since he was hosting it and still considered Remy a good friend, not to mention the best friend of his cousin, and Patrica was showing off a substantial engagement ring, having managed to land a third son from a titled family. As was easily predicted, she was trying to fix up the last of her brother’s bachelor friends with people she knew. Remy was slightly jealous of Ernest who had disappeared head first into academia, and was quite aimed quite happily at confirmed bachelorhood. Remy personally suspected that Louis, Ernest’s man, had an extended relationship with him. At any rate, Ernest wasn’t attending, and Remy was only hiding a little.

Roman sat down across from Remy ungracefully. Remy looked up from the book he was pretending to read.

“So, it turns out admitting I’m working as an actor is exactly scandalous enough that they’re worried about me, but not enough for them to abandon me, when they could find me more appropriate employment. And a wife.”

Remy couldn’t help it. He snorted with laughter.

“What would you do with a wife?”

“Give her a good dress allowance, I suppose.” Roman shrugged, and ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up wildly. “And probably her own bedroom.” He shook his head. “That … sounds familiar somehow.” he grumbled under his breath in a language Remy didn’t speak; probably either Greek or Egyptian, Remy hadn’t bothered to learn the difference between them.

“Her name is in fact Tiffany, by the way.” He sighed, and brought his feet up on the couch beside him, a habit Roman only exhibited when he was distracted. “She’s a lovely dancer. Dark hair, dark eyes, good family.” Roman rolled his hand. “Apparently her father was an officer in India, and got himself forcibly married to a local girl. Sort of.” He sighed. “I’m sure if I don’t escape, I’ll get the less romantic version.” Roman shook his head. “Ah, buggerment, what time is it?” he pulled out his watch. “I’ve got to get off. Would you cover my absence?”

“I’ll throw a cloth over it.” Remy agreed. “Pussy stays in the sack.”

“You’re a grand pal.” Roman flashed a winning smile and kissed Remy’s cheek before heading out.

Technically, bringing a few of their friends out to a Panto wasn’t telling them where Roman was. Remy had already bought the tickets and arranged it ahead of time, so it wasn’t as if he could back out at that late juncture. It was hardly his fault if Roman hadn’t been listening when he told everyone. At least everyone had a good time, and it did Ed some good to cut loose as he used to, even with a wife on his arm.

It was a pretty good show, to boot.

In late February, Remy had gotten his answers, and was making plans. Jean would be showing up in the spring, and he’d warned Marié and Albert. While they were both fond of Remy, they appeared to be glad that he’d be returning in their lifetimes, Johan being the one to initially employ them. Beyond that, he was more of a homebody, and there would be a greater staff to the house. Remy took most of his enjoyment outside the house, and had rarely thrown parties, the one where he ‘met’ Roman being something like unusual.

He was sitting at the desk in his room, glasses off and pinching at his nose. Going far enough he wouldn’t actually need to alter much, but things were bound to be different.

“Remy?” Roman stuck his head in, and finding his friend came in to sprawl on an armchair. “You’ve been busy of late.”

“And you?”

Roman sighed. “They hired a new director, and he does not appreciate my talents. I have been shoved from the limelight and given no reason for it!”

“Dreadful!” Remy shook his head, and rested on his elbow. “Nothing so terrible for me. I’ve been working up to reset.”

“Ah.” Roman’s face looked a bit sad. “That means you’ll be leaving, doesn’t it?”

“I’m heading to America.”

“Ah! Quite the change I’m sure. Good plan.” he curled up into the chair for a long moment, then looked up at Remy, and smiled. “... There is theatre in America.”

“Yes?” Remy put his tinted glasses back on and turned to look at Roman.

“I’m not quite ready to part your company.” Roman said fondly. “Let’s go together. Besides, I hear the Americans are doing marvelous things with photography.”

“Are you sure?”

“Better to leave now, before I end up with a wife, or someone notices my continued good looks, hrm?” Roman smiled. “Ah!” he came to his feet and struck a pose. “I will tell my darling aunt that I have taken her words to heart, and am heading to America to make something more of myself than a mere thespian,” he struck a pose.

Remy leaned back in his chair and burst into laughter.

“Tops, Pidge! Let’s do it!” He leapt up himself and gathered Roman into a hug spinning them around. “We’ll take the colonies by storm, the two of us!”

Roman started laughing as well.

“It’s my pleasure to continue as your companion!”

“And I won’t even make you travel in a box!” Remy teased, squeezing the other man close. “Owch!” he laughed. “I’m the one who bites things!” he teased.

“Well you shall suffer the curse of this mummy’s company.”

“A fate worse than death- oh wait.”

It wasn’t anything Remy had expected, but he was so glad to keep Roman’s friendship.

#Monster AU #TS Remy #ts roman #sanders sides fic

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alovesongshewrote · 4 years

Text

Almost A Thousand Years - 1700/1800 | Hisirdoux Casperan

Plot: You’ve known Hisirdoux Casperan for almost a thousand years. You’ve hated him for almost a thousand years. And for almost a thousand years, you’ve been cursed to feel each others pain. But somewhere in that time, things changed. [Hisirdoux Casperan x Mostly Gender Neutral but Probably Female Presenting Based on How Historical Men Treat Them!Reader]

Word Count: 3,898

Warnings: jack the ripper, reader is called a whore and a wench

A/N: tis my longest chapter yet!

Back | Next

You hid away for most of the eighteenth century.

You healed when you could, but what happened to Douxie scared you a little more than you’d like to admit.

So you hid.

You found ways to entertain yourself. You read more, painted a little, continued your medical practice, and learned more about medicine whenever the knowledge became available. You continued to keep tabs on other immortals. It was pretty boring except for that time the Americans revolted. You had to admit it was fun to keep tabs on the scrappy rebellion. You couldn’t say it out loud as you still lived in England, but you gave a little cheer every time they fought off the British. You didn’t like authority. Neither did they.

On the other side of the continent, Douxie did the same things he always did. Music, magic, work for Merlin. He also read the book you’d given him. He liked it.

It was a century of hiding, waiting, and having nothing much to do. The next century would be the exact opposite.

Jack the Ripper was a dick.

You really didn’t like him.

Douxie didn’t like him either.

And Archie didn’t like him.

So, like in every good piece of media that has a chapter in the nineteenth century, you protagonists teamed up to take down Jack the Ripper. It was super effective!

You met up with your partners in the fog-filled streets of the White Chapel district soon after the second murder. In your hands, you held a newspaper covering the recent events. You approached the wizard and his familiar, but they didn’t see you. They were caught in a conversation with someone you’d never seen before, a stocky man dressed in a dark overcoat and hat. The stranger hadn’t noticed you either.

Silently, you hid in an alley between two nearby buildings. You couldn’t hear them, but from the stranger’s body language, he seemed a bit defensive, maybe even a little angry. You sincerely hoped Douxie wasn’t doing anything stupid.

About a minute later, the man stormed off, leaving Douxie and Archie behind. They still hadn’t noticed you, so you took the opportunity to sneak up on them.

“Hey!”

“Aaaaahhhh, jeez (Y/N)! Don’t do that! There’s a killer on the loose!”

“And he’s only killed prostitutes so far, so you should be fine. Unless there’s something you aren’t telling me?” you joked, raising an eyebrow.

He gave you a small shove, too small to be malicious, “Very funny. Have you learned anything new?”

“Mhmm, but first,” you turned to Archie, giving him a pat on the head, “Hey Arch, how are you?”

“I’m fine, thank you for asking,”

“That’s good! That’s good, anyway, you know they think it’s a doctor, but they received a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper,’”

“Very fun nickname,”

“Indeed, but it still isn’t much to go off of, the police already doubt it”

“(Y/N), remind me again what your sources are?” the familiar was right to be suspicious, but you knew your sources were solid.

“I’ve told you Arch, a forensic doctor, he’s a friend of mine and he works with the police,”

“And how do you know you can trust him?”

“I don’t, but they’re publishing the letter soon, so you’ll see it then. You guys got anything?”

“Not much,”

“Huh. That isn’t great,” you took a moment before speaking again, “By the way, who was that man you were talking to? He seemed angry,”

“Oh, him? He’s just a resident of this area. I’ve been talking to him for a while, I thought he might know something, but every time I even mention it he gets, well…”

“Like that?”

“Yes, like that,”

You looked out the way the man had gone, “You think he’s a suspect?”

“Oh yeah, absolutely,”

Archie nodded in agreement.

“Well then,” you said, returning the eyes to the face of your accomplices, “Keep an eye on him. See you next Thursday?”

“Sounds good,”

By next Thursday, another girl was dead.

You met with your team in a (very) shady pub to discuss this development. Thanks to some connections, you’d snagged a private room where no one else could hear your detective work.

“God DAMMIT, guys, how did we miss this?” you said, pacing. Your hands were on your hips, eyes fixed on the floor. You seriously could not figure out how you missed this.

On the wall behind you, you’d attached some photos and newspaper clippings to the wall, red yarn connecting them. You were very ahead of your time.

“I really don’t know,” Douxie was sitting, upside-down, in a chair across from you. He threw the ball of yarn up in the air, letting it fall, and catching it over and over again. Archie didn’t answer, he was focused too hard on the yarn.

You stopped pacing and glared at your conspiracy wall. You followed the red string with your finger. It lead nowhere. You groaned and ran your fingers through your hair, something that Douxie found alarmingly attractive.

Ever since you saved his life in the sixteen hundreds, he’d developed a bit of a soft spot for you. It wasn’t something he was proud of. But it was fine, you’d developed a soft spot for him too.

“Hey, it’ll be alright, love,” he said, sitting up properly, “We’ll find this monster, so don’t worry yourself too much,”

You took a deep breath, leaning against your crime wall, “Thanks Doux. I appreciate it,”

Your voice was slightly sarcastic, but you both smiled still. Archie frowned, the yarn wasn’t moving anymore.

“So,” you said, turning again to examine the mess of photos and yarn, ”He isn’t an official suspect, but I think this guy, this James Maybrick, seems a little suspicious,” you pointed at his photo, “He’s going to be at this ball thing on Friday. If we go, we can ask him if he plans on traveling, he lives in Liverpool, and-”

“I’m sorry, he lives where?”

“Liverpool, Arch, pay attention-”

“(Y/N), why do you think he’s coming all the way out to White Chapel to murder these women?”

“Well it isn’t his area, that makes him less of a suspect, and all of the murders have been on Saturdays and Sundays, which gives him time to travel,”

“You might be onto something,” Douxie said, standing and letting the yarn fall to the ground where Archie chased it around, thoroughly distracted, “We can go check it out, but how do we get in?”

You bit your lip, deep in thought, “My doctor friend, he knows the hostess. He might be able to get us in,”

“Fantastic!”

“There’s just one thing,”

“Yes?”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll have to pretend to be my fiance,”

There was a moment of silence while Douxie considered this.

You tried to explain yourself, “I-It’s not my first choice either, but high society doesn’t approve of-”

“I’ll do it,”

“And I know it’s inconvenient, but-”

“(Y/N)?”

“Yes?”

“I said I’ll do it,”

It was your time to consider, and you considered yourself super lucky to have an accomplice like Douxie.

“Oh my god, thank you!” you exclaimed, throwing your arms around his neck, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,”

You couldn’t see Douxie’s face, so he had no idea that he blushed before wrapping his arms around you softly.

“No problem (Y/N), no problem,”

Two days later, you were wearing fancy clothes, and freaking out a little.

This was nothing compared to Douxie who was freaking out a lot. Mostly because you looked absolutely stunning, but also because there was a possible murderer inside the building. You know, typical stuff.

The two of you stood outside the manor, looking up at the vast estate. It was beautiful but intimidating. You turned to your partner in crime-solving, “You ready for this?”

He nodded.

You closed your eyes, swallowed back your anxiety, and linked your arm with his.

“Let’s do it,”

The manor was, simply put, dazzling. The size of it reminded you of the smaller cathedrals during the sixteenth century. The floors were marble, the ceiling decorated with a mural, just like the cathedrals you now reminisced. The room was lit with a large chandelier, the warm light covered the whole room in a glow the colour of honey. Columns, the same marble as the floor, stood strong around the perimeter. On one side of the space, an orchestra played. The center was full of people dancing. Some people stood at the side of the room speaking, others just observing everything else. It was a crazy party, but only by Victorian standards.

The sheer amount of activity made you panic a little. As if Douxie could sense your anxiety, he found one of your hands and squeezed it reassuringly. You smiled a little, once again thankful for such an amazing partner in crime.

The two of you made your way around the dance floor, checking faces, looking for your suspect. You didn’t see him. You and Douxie made a full circle around the room, not seeing your guy. You were about to suggest finding a higher viewpoint when the hostess of the party stopped you.

She was a plump, elegant woman, draped in the finest of silks. Her hair shone, and her eyes sparkled. She was perfectly gorgeous, and perfectly in your way.

“Ah, fuzzbuckets,”

“Oh, my dear (Y/N)! It is so good to see you, darling!”

“It’s good to see you as well, my Lady,” you returned, bowing slightly. Douxie followed your lead.

“‘Tis a pity the good doctor couldn’t be with us! He works so hard, you would think he would come out and dance for an evening! Just to relax!” The woman laughed as if wishing the doctor was here was the funniest thing on the planet. Maybe it was to her Victorian sensibilities.

You laughed an appropriate amount, plastering on a fake smile, and biting your tongue at the irony. This was the least relaxed you’d been all century.

When the Lady stopped laughing, she noticed Doxie, “Oh, (Y/N), dear, you must tell me who this dashing young gentleman is! How in heaven did you find such a match?”

“My Lady, this is my fiance, Mr. Casperan,”

“It’s lovely to meet you fair Lady, and might I say that the moon and stars dull in comparison to your eyes; even a goddess of beauty could not hold a candle to your visage,”

You tried to keep cool, but you felt your eyes widen a bit. You had never heard Douxie speak like that before. You weren’t sure how it made you feel yet, but clearly, the Lady enjoyed it. A blush covered her face as she gushed over the wizard for another two minutes. You spent that time subtly searching the crowd for Maybrick.

Clearly, you were not as subtle as you thought.

“Oh, dear, I see your partner is eyeing the dance floor,” the lady said, her face still painted with a blush. Her words called you to attention.

“Ah, yes, my apologies my Lady,”

“No worries at all dear child, now go! Dance the night away!”

“Thank you,” you said, once again bowing.

“It was wonderful speaking with you, my Lady,” Douxie said, following your actions before leading you to the mass of dancing guests.

“She’s watching us,” Douxie whispered to you through clenched teeth, “Can you dance?”

“Not super well, but enough to survive,”

“Just follow my lead,”

Douxie could dance pretty damn well, something you weren’t too surprised by. He’d spent a lot of time learning music throughout the centuries, you’ would've been a bit surprised if he hadn’t known how. He was so good, in fact, that you were almost certain he was making you a better dancer just by being near you. You’d be lying if you said this wasn’t the most fun you’d had in a while.

“So, where’d you learn to flirt like that?” you asked, your voice low so that no one else could hear you.

“I’ve picked some things up over the years,” he said, spinning you out and then back in again.

“I have to say, I was quite impressed. I didn’t see that coming,”

He faked a gasp, “Why I’m offended! You don’t think I can flirt?”

“Well, I didn’t until tonight. But I stand corrected,” he dipped you, “You can flirt extremely well Hisirdoux Casperan,”

“Thank you, (Y/N) (L/N),”

You both smiled continuing the dance, scanning the crowd for the face of the killer. And in between that, just staring at each other.

You almost regretted finding the suspect.

You hated to admit that a small part of you had hoped to just dance with Douxie for the next few hours, pretending that you were a couple and that you weren’t magic, and you weren’t immortal, and you hadn’t seen pain and suffering the world over, and he hadn’t been tortured two centuries before. You just wanted to dance.

But you saw him.

And the good of the humans came before the things you wanted.

“Doux, I see him,”

“Where?”

“To your left and back behind you. Don’t look at him. We’ll get off the dance floor, and I’ll question him,”

“Are you sure?” Douxie thought about elaborating. About telling you that he didn’t want you to get hurt and that he too, wanted to keep dancing.

But he didn’t. And you were sure.

So, you left the dance floor and made your way to the suspect. You made sure Douxie stayed far enough behind you for his presence to be non-threatening, and made your approach.

“Wonderful party isn’t it Sir…?” you waited for him to give you his name.

“Maybrick, Mr. Maybrick,”

“Mr. Maybrick. A lovely name,” internally, you cursed God for giving Douxie all of the charm and leaving you none.

“May I ask where you’re from Mr. Maybrick?”

“I’m from around here, Liverpool. May I ask who's asking?”

“I-”

“(Y/N), dear! Where have you put that lovely boy of yours! I have some friends he simply must meet!”

You could not believe that the hostess was interrupting you yet again. This time, Maybrick actually ran from you. You cursed under your breath. The Lady was far enough away that you could pretend not to hear her. You could still catch the suspect, you just had to run a little. In the outfit you were wearing, it would be next to impossible, but you really didn’t want to talk to the hostess again, so you gestured for Douxie to follow, and you chased after Maybrick.

You ran through the ballroom, dodging patrons and maneuvering around dancers. It felt almost like a fairytale; Cinderella if the princess had to chase down a dangerous serial killer instead of just flee the ball.

The suspect ran out the front doors, and you followed him, Douxie close behind. The night air was cool on your skin, a nice contrast to the warmth of the ballroom. You lost a shoe, and your hair was slowly turning into more and more of a mess, but you didn’t care, you wanted to catch this guy.

You did not catch that guy.

A horse-drawn carriage was waiting for him at the end of the lane. There was no way you could compete with that. Not unless Archie would shapeshift into a horse for the sake of catching a possible criminal.

A black stallion pulled up beside you.

It was Archie, shapeshifted into a horse for the sake of catching a possible criminal. You manifested your hot girl mystery-solving arc.

“Get on!” both Douxie and Archie exclaimed, Douxie offering you a hand up. You took it, jumping onto Archie’s back, wrapping your arms around the wizard's waist, and riding after the carriage.

The night was dark, and the carriage moved fast. Archie kept up pretty well for a familiar with two people on his back. He went so fast that all you could do was cling to Douxie for dear life as the dark world blurred around you. It was not for a lack of trying, but eventually, you lost them.

“You did good Arch, you did good,”

“Thank you, Archie,” you said, forehead buried in Douxie’s back.

“I appreciate the thanks, but it isn’t over yet. We left all of our stuff back at the manor, so we should return,”

“That’s probably a good idea,”

The journey back showed you how far you’d gone. Needless to say, you were super proud of Archie. You’d have to remind yourself to get him some fish later.

When you arrived back at the manor, the party was still going. You could hear the music from the outside. You dismounted Archie and leaned against his side.

“All of this,” you groaned out, “for nothing,”

“Well it wasn’t exactly for nothing,” Douxie said, stretching his arms above his head, “Maybrick ran from us, that’s suspicious. I think we can officially call him a suspect. Here,” he threw your missing shoe your way, “You dropped this,”

You smiled, leaning on Archie for support as you slipped it back on, “Thanks,”

“My pleasure,”

You laughed. The stars above you caught your eye. They were so beautiful tonight. The music was nice too. Everything was so peaceful.

It reminded you of another night, centuries ago, when you’d been allowed to rant and rave, and the wizard just listened to you.

“Hey, Douxie?”

“Yes, love?”

You hesitated, trying to think of something to say. Eventually, you came up with, “We’re still enemies after this, right?”

He laughed a little. It sounded kind of sad, “If you want us to be,”

At that moment, you didn’t know what you wanted.

That’s a lie, you wanted to kiss Douxie.

But you hadn’t figured it out just yet, so, for now, you just stared at his lips, wondering what that feeling was, and listening to the song end.

“We should head back,”

“I guess we should,”

Neither of you were satisfied with this outcome.

You wouldn’t be satisfied until you caught the killer, or as it turned out, killers.

You’d been back at the pub, obsessing over the crime wall, tracing the red yarn over and over again. Doux and Archie were starting to worry about your health. Then you cracked the code.

“What if,” you said, turning from the wall, “There’s more than one,”

“More than one?”

“Yeah, more than one killer. There’s more than one person involved here,”

The wizard and his familiar exchanged a look. Maybe you were sleep-deprived and in need of a nap, but maybe you were onto something, “Go on,”

“Think about it, we’ve got multiple leads, some doctors, some live in the area, some have the motive, some are just suspicious, but none of them have everything they need to commit murder. What if they’re working together?”

“Keep talking,”

“Look, here,” you said, pointing at a photo of a suspect, “Johnson Druitt, he lives in the white chapel area and has the anatomical knowledge,” you moved to another photo, this one a sketch, “Barnett, his roommate works the streets, he’s in love with her and we know he hates her job. If he killed those other women to scare her, he has a motive,” you moved on again, “And Maybrick,” you stopped, trying to piece together his role in this grand conspiracy.

“He’d have the funds to cover it up, plus the interest in the case,”

You spun around to face the wizard, “Douxie, you’re brilliant!”

You took a step back from the wall, taking in your work, “So, what do we do now?”

“Simple,” Douxie said, resting an elbow on your shoulder, “We go after him,”

You didn’t mind being bait. Really, you didn’t. But you did find it boring.

You’d been walking around this general area for two hours now, this disguise was uncomfortable, and you just wanted something else to do. Then your wish came true!

Two men approached you from the front, both short in stature with well-kept moustaches. You hid a smile, the three killer theory proving itself correct. You walked forward, your peripheral vision focused on the men.

The three of you kept walking.

You passed between them.

“Lovely night, isn’t it?”

They stopped, you continued on.

“Excuse me, dearie?”

“Yes?” you purred, turning to them.

Then you were grabbed from behind. Fortunately, you expected that little trick, grabbing the stranger and flipping him over your body. The man landed on the pavement with a thud. You grinned as the three men looked at you, faces full of shock. Unfortunately, it wore off, and the three advanced.

The first one threw a decent punch, but you dodged, forcing him to punch one of his partners. You swept the legs out from under the third.

The first two had recovered and were coming at you again, this time with blades. It was this moment when you noticed the blood on their coats. It wasn’t theirs, or yours for that matter. Yep, these were definitely your guys.

The first blade missed you, the second one just grazed your side. You bit down a cry of pain, sincerely hoping that blade was clean. You could see Douxie emerge from his hiding place; clearly, he’d felt the sting of the metal too.

But you didn’t have time to focus on Douxie, you had to fight.

You threw a few punches of your own, knocking the duo back into the street and closer to the wizard.

“Gah, you wENCH!!” one of them exclaimed.

“Kill the whore!!”

You could see the rage in their faces, but that wasn’t as important as the fact that you could see their faces. Maybrick and Druitt. Your theory was right! Your excitement fell away as they advanced.

Then they both fell into limbo.

The portal down glowed blue around them. Douxie stood behind the gateway, looking very proud of himself.

You would have laughed at their misfortune and Doux’s pride if you hadn’t been grabbed from behind again.

You cried out in surprise, catching the attention of the wizard.

“(Y/N)!”

“Don’t come any closer!” you felt the cold of a blade on your throat. This wouldn’t end well.

“Come on now, don’t make any rash decisions,” Douxie’s hands were raised in surrender, his eyes never leaving yours.

“I’ll kill the wench! I’ll do it!”

“Hey, don’t-”

“My Mary is dead! There’s nothing left! I’ll kill her!”

“Wait, who's dead?”

“My girl,” the man sobbed, his grasp on you weakening, “My Mary Kelly, I’ve lost her! She’s gone!”

You may have felt bad for this guy if he hadn’t been absolutely insane. You took his distracted state as a chance and broke from his hold, pushing yourself away from him.

“Douxie! Now!”

The portal to limbo opened under the man. He had no time to react as he fell into the other dimension.

You looked down into the gateway, a blue pool in the middle of a dull cobblestone street. You sighed with relief as the blue magic sealed itself shut, leaving the night dark again.

“Nice work,”

“Thanks,”

Lights came on in the windows around you. In the distance, you heard shouting.

“We should get out of here,”

“Good idea. See you next century?”

“Oh, absolutely. Say goodbye to Arch for me,”

“Will do,”

And you slipped away into the night, excited by this latest adventure, but still wanting more.

#hisirdoux x reader #hisirdoux casperan x reader #douxie x reader #douxie imagine #hisirdoux imagine #almost a thousand years #jack the ripper #fluff #victorian era #fake dating #aaty #hisirdoux casperan #hisirdoux #douxie #toa hisirdoux #toa douxie

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

Note

Hi there, I really liked what you had to say about the upcoming election. I was wondering if you have published any articles recently in regards to that? I know you said you were a historian.

Aha, thank you so much, this is very flattering. Alas (?), the book that I have just published is about the crusades, as I am a medieval historian by training. However, one of my main research interests is the role of the “imagined medieval” in modern culture, I have written a book chapter about the role of the crusades in post-9/11 political and cultural rhetoric, and I am developing a research project that examines the current crisis of public history through a medievalist perspective. That, however, is still in draft stages.

That said, I absolutely DO have a mini reading list for you (and a lecture to go with it, because as noted, I am an academic and this is how we function!) The topic of today’s class is “Why Accelerationist Ideology Is And Always Has Been Horrifically Racist and Genocidal Throughout History, and White Americans Only Like It Because They Don’t Live In Countries Where It Was Done (By America).” Not very snappy, but there you have it.

The reading list, to start off, is:

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow

The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia by Michael Sells

These are all hefty books (though the Maddow and Sells books are shorter) but they’re accessible and written for the layperson, and we always have time to educate ourselves. Why are they relevant to the 2020 election, you might ask?

First: the Cold War book lays out in great, GREAT detail the consequences of a global world order absolutely gripped by a competing standoff of ideologies (American capitalism vs. Soviet socialism) and how these two forces gulped up the politics of the rest of the world, destroyed numerous satellite states, and tried to rebuild them from the ashes into new ideological utopias -- precisely what a lot of people are suggesting now with the ridiculous “just burn everything down and it will magically fix itself!” theory that is somehow presented as the Moral Alternative to voting for Biden/Harris. You know what this caused during the Cold War? Yep. Human suffering on a massive scale, and absolutely zero utopian perfect states, whether capitalist or socialist. It also makes the extremely salient point that in the 1930s, German leftists and liberal democrats were infighting among themselves as to who was Less Morally Pure, and couldn’t agree on a candidate or a moral imperative to oppose the other guy, and figured that their flawed liberal idealists were “just as bad” as said other guy. Was that guy’s name Adolf Hitler? Why yes. Yes it was. Is there a lesson here for us? Who can say. Seems hard to figure.

Leaving aside the tragedy and pointlessness of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, both fought as proxy battlefields between Americans and Soviets, let’s consider the Great Leap Forward, in China (1958-1962) under Chairman Mao Zhedong. The idea was to dismantle traditionalist Confucian Chinese society and rebuild it as a modern socialist state, which was the goal of a lot of twentieth-century old-school socialist/Marxist “people’s republics.” Mao took this exact “burn conservative society down and rebuild it according to Enlightened Leftist Principles” approach and it was... a disaster. A total and epic disaster that caused both short and long-term suffering to the Chinese people and, wouldn’t you know it, did not result in a utopian Chinese state. This is also the reason you cannot say anything complimentary about Fidel Castro, especially if you want to win Florida, no matter how “good” you think his socialist principles were in the abstract, because: Cubans and Cuban-Americans fuggin’ hated the guy. You know why? Because he also destroyed their lives.

Obviously, there is a ton of distance between old-school Communism in the 20th century and 21st-century modern democratic socialism such as that run in Norway (and the Scandinavian countries in general), no matter if your racist uncle on Facebook insists on conflating the two and howling about the Red Menace like it’s still 1962. But the point is that radical leftist accelerationist theory hasn’t changed from 1962 (or frankly, from Karl Marx) either. It still figures that by some miraculous principle, the entrenched systems and ideologies will either just disappear or be “torn down,” the Peasants will Rise Up and Overthrow the Aristocracy, and something something socialist utopia. Except that was tried multiple times in the 20th century and it always failed. More than that, even if it was supposedly “leftist,” it inflicted just as much suffering on its own people as fascist right-wing dictatorships. Americans have always been infused with the triumphalist confidence that they “won” the Cold War because socialism was bad, and it was the inherent flaws in socialism as a world order that doomed it to defeat, unlike rah-rah Red White and Blue American Capitalism. So capitalism, ignoring its own fatal flaws, went hog-wild in the 80s and 90s, establishing Reaganite deregulation as the core and unimpeachable tenet of the market, and we’re all living in the increasing wreckage of that economic system now. Obviously the right wing uses “socialism” as a bugaboo to scare us that Things Could Be Worse, but I haven’t seen the faintest trace of historical context or awareness from the particularly deluded breed of hard leftists who still cling onto the magical theory that a Perfect People’s Uprising Will Fix Everything.

On that note, let’s move to Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine lays out in similar excruciating detail how the U.S. systematically destroyed the economic systems of countries particularly in Asia and Latin America (and the entire shameful history of Uncle Sam in Latin America should be required reading for EVERYONE) and sold them a bill of goods about “free market economics” in the Keynesian model. Guess what resulted from this attempt to destroy entrenched societies overnight and rebuild them in the name of Ideology? If you guessed “massive human suffering and ongoing generational devastation and dysfunction” you’d be right again! This was accompanied with constant political interference from the CIA and the State Department to support right-wing dictators and military takeovers in a way that have left the politics and institutions of Central America in permanently broken disarray, because it turns out it’s a lot easier to keep exploiting those brown people in governmental systems that don’t allow dissent or democracy, no matter the exalted principles you like to preach about Freedom and Liberty. The U.S. likes to act as if the Central American refugee crisis is this unwarranted invasion of these dirty immigrants, as if it didn’t play a DIRECT AND LONG LASTING EFFECT in destroying the infrastructure of these countries to the point where they’ve become incapable of functioning as healthy democracies. If you think “banana republic” is the name of an upscale clothing store, I beg you, research the history of that term.

This hasn’t even gotten to the absolutely horrible history of Africa’s treatment at the hands of white Europeans (see the Kendi book for obvious anti-racism education and also how those racist ideas are directly built into the ideological infrastructure of America). Somehow white leftists, while professing to be allies of Black Lives Matter and proclaiming themselves Woke, have managed to overlook this, and I don’t know how??? (Answer: it’s racism Jan.) First it was the transatlantic slave trade and the large-scale kidnapping, sale, and chattel bondage of generations of people. Then it was 19th-century colonialism and imperialism, where Europe thought it could “civilize” the “Dark Continent” and rebuild it to an “enlightened standard.” This was not a right-wing project; this was solidly mainstream and it was enthusiastically advocated by many liberals and intellectuals who busily composed an entire academic and “scientific” literature to support it. Did the European wholescale destruction of traditional societies in an attempt to build a Perfect Ideological Utopia result in... massive human suffering, by any chance? Leopold II of Belgium might have something to say about that. Then when an overstretched Europe was finally forced out of its overseas colonies in the aftermath of World War II, guess what resulted? Did African society spring from the ashes and remake itself in a perfect image? Nope! It became subject to decades-long civil wars and bloody military dictators because its infrastructure had been so crippled (very deliberately so) by its departing colonialist overlords that it likewise had no sustainable model for development. It turns out when you break things out of the idea that they’ll magically fix themselves, they just stay broken and they get worse. Now we once more have the West acting like Africa is a hotbed of Primitives while ignoring its own role in destroying it (and the situation in the Middle East, but that’s a whole OTHER can of worms! So many cans! So many!)

The Peter Frankopan book is an excellent exploration into the flourishing medieval trade networks across the East, the function of the Silk Road in bringing culture and commodities across the known world, and how Europe’s intervention and eventual ascendancy was marked by profound violence, the destruction of these networks, and the outright pillage of non-white people and riches. Which we know, but... read it. Europe and its heir (America) started the crusades, colonialism, imperialism, two world wars, and other conflicts that always contained a virulent aspect of spreading Ideology and getting people to Believe The Right Thing. These cumulative conflicts have devastated the planet repeatedly and we are still feeling their effects right up to this minute. They were all connected to Establishing Supreme Ideology and Supreme Whiteness (and Supreme Christianity). I’m detecting a pattern. The Rachel Maddow book explores how from the 1980s onward, America went absolutely hog-wild with the military/military ideology as a central way to solve its problems, which was tied to the Cold War, capitalism, and extreme individualism. All of which are tied to our current mess today.

Obviously, the most extreme examples of putting ideology above people result in outright holocausts, which is why you should read the Michael Sells book about Bosnia. Everyone knows about the WWII Holocaust of the Jews (and we have already seen how that is busily being denied along with the return of anti-Semitism, which never goes away), but the Bosnian holocaust was happening while most of us were alive. The West deliberately ignored it, because it was framed as the “last crusade” against Muslims in Europe and they needed to be removed in order to create a Pure Christian Europe; hence the Bosniaks were apparently an acceptable sacrifice in achieving this. I have some words on my tongue, I think they start with “massive human suffering,” and how that is constantly what results when an existing society, no matter how flawed, is attacked by ideological zealots who see huge amounts of death as an acceptable price to pay for their brave new world, as long as it’s not theirs (and sometimes even when it is). In fact, the accelerationist theory of social change is so profoundly racial and genocidal (and is indeed being used in exactly that way by the neo-Nazis and white paramilitary elements today) that it’s even more shocking to see supposedly progressive and moral people advocating so enthusiastically for it. It is a white supremacist Nazi wet dream of an ideology in which all the “flawed” people just vanish (spoiler alert, they don’t vanish, they are brutally murdered or allowed to die from deliberate and arrogant negligence) and the Aryans cavort in paradise. Just replacing that with some socialist jargon buzzwords doesn’t change the underlying framework.

And this is STILL NOT GETTING to America’s own history, and you know, the fact that this continent was occupied when white settlers arrived, declared it “terra nulla” or “empty land,” and set about slaughtering the existing advanced civilizations and their people in the name of! You guessed it! SUPERIOR IDEOLOGY! Funnily enough, destroying the Native Americans “for their own good” didn’t result in utopia for them. It resulted in.... yeah, I think we get it by now, but just in case, one more time: MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING.

Tl;dr: The accelerationist theory of social change (just destroy everything and it will magically rebuild according to our preferred ideology) is a racist and genocidal fantasy of orgiastic destruction that has caused untold damage throughout history. White Americans whether on the right or left are fond of it, because they have never lived in a country where this has been repeatedly and horribly done to them (often by America itself) and which has cost uncountable Black, brown, Muslim, Jewish, Latin American, Native American, etc lives. The deliberate or deliberately negligent destruction of society does not lead to regeneration. It leads to long-term and unfixable damage, and the people who profit the most from deliberate disaster are the capitalist corporate overlords that the left professes to hate. This country is a racist garbage fire and nobody denies that it needs to change or die, but buying into this theory about how you should just stand back and let it burn/obstruct efforts to work within the system and mitigate the damage IS BULLSHIT and RESULTS IN MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING AND DEATH. Which, so far as I know, wasn’t supposed to be a progressive value, but hey, I could be mistaken.

Learn some history. Wear a mask.

Don’t be a whiny pissbaby that makes the rest of us die.

Vote Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 2020.

#history #american history #history of racism #politics for ts #long post #anonymous #ask

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