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deranged-ink · 3 years

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Dear editor in chief.

Yesterday I was reading a magazine -your magazine- while waiting for my coffee. I´ll admit that I was so into it that, to my embarrassment, I failed to notice the girl approaching until she left the coffee with some croissants on my table. That would be a big mistake if I were reading on the company time.

I was too involved in a single line of your last editorial:

What is your hobby? A simple and dull question, but not to my eyes. I can't help but wonder about what kind of person is asking. Is it someone intelligent? Someone with a really deep understanding of the human nature or just the typical dumb brick monkey behind a typewriter. I can assure you that one honest to god smile cameforth to your inquiry, simply because it is one of those easy-to-answer questions using a triviality, difficult to answer with The Truth.

I suppose that if you force me to answer with nothing but said Truth I would have to admit, with the proper amount of blush on my cheeks, that I like to look at the people, please take note that i am not a stalker, it's just that in order to be good at my job I have to describe myself as a rather avid observer.

I like to look at people, especially on my job. You have to understand, sitting on an uncomfortable chair for countless hours, drinking cheap coffe and killing cigars in some dirty ashtray, just waiting for the phone to ring to do my job... I would have turned crazy long, long ago if I wouldn't found a way to kill some time.

But from my hobby something really good came up.

I learned, no. I found something fascinating while observing these biological machines. Well first, I´ll confess, everything started with a game: Guess what it will do now?

From that game I discovered that all this elaborated, commercialized and consumed idea of freedom is -for most of these poor bastards- fundamentally, a lie . A lie that may or may not be true, that's the beauty of the whole subject. A liar's truth.

Before you burn your brains trying to imagine something like that, let me add something, whatever you imagine, it will be right.

If you think about it, it's a beautiful "oxymoron". Freedom is a useful farse (A dream for the most) where you must be aware of what you do and stop doing. You must fully understand each of your actions from its very root. Thats the really hard part.

Do not get me wrong, I have always said that true freedom is real, a primordial part of what reality is. The problem lies in the excuses that the lower minds uses to escape from the weight of freedom.

They fall for the supposed "unmeasurable plots" of some great powers and some others imaginary enemies (that for some not-even-god-knows reason will try to brainwash or enslave them).

They gave these plotters this divine attribute of being untouchable. And closing their eyes, they turned themselves into beings without a real opinion, without control over their lives. That's nothing short of stupidity. Themselves wrote the fairytale that they now fear, and did it in order of escaping the responsibility of knowing/taking control of their lives.

Themselves choose their imaginary chains and in the same thought, choose the more imaginary saviour that will come to brake them! Just look at those pocket warriors of the social networks, reading only what supports their ideals and burning the rest!

-Oh, traditional book burning! The irony!-

Thats how they define themselves acording their position on said system: left, right, pro-life, pro-choice, feminist, traditional, pro-system, anti-system, pious, atheist.

But what they call "the system" is just a playing field. Not some godwritten rules that will never change.

And there they meet failure without being able to realize that they act as the said system expects them to act. All the pieces on the board have a use. Even when trying to escape, when trying to think and act outside of the box, they only succeed -in a beautiful way if you ask me- to prove that they are wrong.

They do not realize that the system is not a box, but actually a box of many, each box is full of boxes and the fact that you can "get out" of the box only confirms this.

You can -with ease- point out all the poor bastards who buy a t-shirt with the face of Che Guevara (or someother communist symbol). Ironically, they are being part of a capitalist market with them as their target. The same can be said of those really patriotic friends, they really love America and they also really love their flag to be made in china. Sweet irony.

This is the same for freedom. To be free, you must be aware of what you are, truly aware, also accept what you can and can not do and that each of your actions has an effect on the great cosmic pool that is this life, each action is a small or a large stone that falls on water. You will imagine that with so many rocks that big pool is not calm at all. And thats life my friend, actions that modify our actions in one way or another. The real freedom lies in understanding this, accepting it and continuing to live.

Playing "Guess what it will do now?" I had an eureka moment some years ago. From an open window I was looking at the people on the street with my telescope, when I learned something that saddens me: "People" sold their freedom for a manual.

Life is not easy and that´s why most decide to live thinking it is. I honestly ignore the reason behind such a stupid decision. "People" gave away their freedom in exchange of beliefs, just to not question. Just to take the world as it was presented, without thinking, without asking. Only assimilating it and calling it true.

Name your manual however you want... Luck, Destiny, God, the almighty Horoscope, Reptilians or Super corporations that plan to dominate the world. It is in their hands that our world and our lives rest and not on us.

I bet that sounds better than the truth.

Everyone is free to believe in whatever they want, even when those beliefs take away their freedom.

Especially when they take away their freedom

The "manual" depends on many things, such as their upbringing, the books they had read, the books they didn't, their general education, but above all these things, of something greater, something with more force than those preconceived ideas of a man's life being the direct and ultimate result of those first twenty years of his life.

-Those who affirm that are the "intellectuals" who seek to justify mediocrity by blaming society.-

I discovered a truth, a sad truth, that goes beyond. Are you ready? Our life depends on ourselves

-Surprising, right?-.

It depends on our decisions, our actions and how much we want to be ourselves. How much do we want to be free.

For the rest the world you have that manual that handles their lives or that simply points to the people or entities that will do it. Manuals that dictate the routine of each of them, from how, when and where they go to work, to what they stop to eat and why. What they believe in, how they think, how they feel.

So many "children" blame the manual and I can only feel sorry for them.

I can only look at them straight in the eye and say: Do not blame the manual, blame yourselves for accepting it. Blame your weakness for letting yourself be destroyed to that point.

To the point of acting... In automatic, each and every one of "them" lives like this, in automatic.

I say "them" because I do not know if "you", whoever reads these words, also do it. And no, do not let the fact that you are a reader of newspapers, books and intellectual publications make you think that you are beyond this fundamental flaw of the human being. Maybe you are also, a zombie, a computer that acts according to a list of things to do. That is why I refer to them as "It" or "them", maybe you are, or not, so I consider that these words can be one of two uses for you;

1: A call to wake up.

2: A lesson in what you should never do to yourself.

"They" are predictable, "they" are stupid. A person is a completely different topic, the problem is that there aren't many individuals left, individuals are now an endangered specie. But there are many "people". There were many individuals who decided to stop being individuals to become people.

Good people. Bad people. That doesn't matter. Cuz people is predictable. And it's something that in my line of work I've learned to do, it's a fundamental part of it.

For example; Look at this guy, for the last six days I've seen he it come and go, always in the same old beige suit and dull shoes, with its eyes on the ground, dragging its feet every morning. That's when I guess it goes to work. But not so surprisingly, it walks with the same vigor when it goes back in the afternoon. Two days ago was the day of "bring your son to work" but it didn't bring anyone. I got curious so during one impromptu walk to the donut shop I passed by it and could not help noticing that it doesn't have a single ring in its hand, nor a scar, much less any characteristic feature or mark added by life experiences. It was programmed that way, throughout his life it decided to accept what the rest thought of it, from its parents to its classmates, it let each and every one of their opinions form what it is today, unfortunately those opinions were everything but positive.

If forced to guess I would said that when It was a He, was one of those people with an artistic mind, a characteristic completely undervalued by his parents, repudiated by his peers and misinterpreted by his teachers who were unable to see beyond their own mediocrity.

If I have to bet: I would say that he did not grow up in the city, he was born and raised in a dying small town, one of those that somehow still linger in the 21th century. His parents decided that the life of an artist was not for him, that he deserved better, that he had to be someone "normal". He decided to listen to them. And being a person of unique thinking is not difficult to guess that he ended up in an office job that hates, earning a pittance to make his boss buy a new car every year. Thats how He became It.

But it's not the boss's fault, it's just that It is not good at what It does, it's almost like wanting to screw a chair using a rock. The wrong tool for the task. That is why this could be the best thing that ever happened to It, it may be the wake up call that leads It to recover its life. To become a He.

We can also see the perfect opposite; with a badly rolled joint in the mouth, practically finishing learning to smoke without coughing or looking like a complete idiot: A skinny boy in a leather jacket that barely fits him, too tight jeans, expensive but too big shoes, hair full of hairspray and tinted in three shades of pink that I do not have the slightest intention or desire to learn how to differentiate.

I always see him in the same place, the alley that is right beside the donuts shop, pretending to be the most badass punk of the block for hours. Actually, that doesn't seem to be the place he choose to spend every morning, I think that it's the place that was chosen for him.

He is never alone, always accompanied by others who dress just like him, the same spiky hair but of different colors. They skip school to spend their mornings laughing at the people passing by, provoking them, intimidating them, smoking, but until now they have never said anything to the police.

- Every time a cop walked in front of them they just kept quiet hiding their eyes in their expensive last generation smartphones. They even treat the "autority" with the utmost respect! It's funny but sad.-

This is fashion. Just a trend, fighting against the system, to rebel against their parents, against society, to paint walls with messages of anarchy and rebellion. With no actual desire to do so.

Just playing to be free without accepting consequences or duties, to be free to do what you want while keep on sucking from the old tits of your mother, a whole case for Freud to write two more books. Want me to guess? He never felt hungry. He must come from a boring and average middle-high class family. His parents gave him everything he ever wanted, but never a proper slap, must be the only child or at least the youngest of the siblings. And the only reason he plays the whole punk behavior is that he is bored

That's why he came up with this whole idea of rebelling against the system or rather, copied it, like his friends, without noticing the most comical aspect of all this, wanting to be different they all became the same. Acting the same, acting from a manual.

I bet that He will run, shout, beg to the police as soon as he sees the red rush. If he is smart, he will realize that he is wrong, that the system is not the enemy, is not the monster that makes this world the shit hole it is. The actual monster is the man with the rifle.

#writers #writing #prose #books & libraries #literature #ficcion

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soyouareandrewdobson · 4 years

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Sunny Sundays: Scoob

So as not to be too negative by always focusing on dumb webartists and their lack of taste in certain media or decent opinions, I decided that at least once a week I also want to talk about something more positive on my tumblr. Something about animation to enjoy, instead of using it as a bullet point for a sex fetish disguised as social awareness unlike someone else.

As such, lets talk about a little movie that came out this week on demand about a franchise that had goten rebooted more times than a certain timelord. At least that is what it feels like.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Scoob!

Scoob is the recent major entry into the Scooby Doo franchise and weirdly enough, though there is a ton of animated movies that came out for TV and on DVD, the the first animated feature of the franchise to actually be released in theaters. ... or rather it would be, if we didn’t live in a Stephen King novel, forcing Warner to release it on the internet for demand.

Now the Scooby Doo franchise is as of now pretty damn old. starting back in 1969 and having multiple incarnations of it over the years with the last succesfull one being the highly recommended “Mystery Incorporated”, which featured of all things the group not only dealing with their typical guys in masks each week, but also an ancient conspiracy involving a cosmic terror from another dimension, cameos of other famous Hanna Barbera characters and even good old Harlan Ellison having a cameo to. But some people with no idea how a good story trumps over shipping only know the show as having Velma and a girl that smells of hotdogs being shipped. If you do not belong to that group of people, I highly recommend you to watch it because it is really good. And certainly more entertaining than the shows that followed next, aka “Scooby Doo Go” and “Here is a show all about cameos being more obvious than in the old days”.

Anyway, what I try to say is, Scooby Doo despite being rather old and having been both mocked and appreciated over the years, is still very popular and can with the right amount of care and silly fun be at the very least an entertaining ride. So did this movie deliver on that, or did it become as disappointing as “Return to Zombie Island”?

I will try not to spoil too much in this “overview” about the movie, but here is basically the deal: For starters, it is a Scooby Doo movie that misses one itsy bitsy major thing that actually makes a Scooby Doo story out on average. A mystery.

See, the movie first begins with a semi origin story for Scooby and the gang, which honestly is pretty damn adorable to watch. Shaggy meeting a stray Scooby as a pup, both becoming friends, meeting at Halloween Fred, Daphne and Velma for the first time and actually solving their very first mystery, all in the span of like 10 minutes? It is great and I would love to see an animated series about those alone. You know, a reboot of “A Pup named Scooby Doo”. Unfortunately, that is as far as we get with a “classic” Scooby Doo story as after the introduction, Simon Cowell essentially breaks the group apart and it becomes a Marvel superhero movie inspired flick.

Nope, I am not. Which btw, is actually not meant as a criticism.

Yeah see, Mystery Inc wants to be a more serious enterprise and so Simon Cowell has been brought on board to finance them, but only of Shaggy and Scooby leave. Which they do. After that dated cameo of a celebrity (Which actually feels rather in tone with the legacy of the franchise, if you think about the “good old days”) Shaggy and Scooby find themselves shortly thereafter being hunted by robots, only to be rescued by another famous Hannah Barbara character: The Blue Falcon and his trusty sidekick Dynomutt! Or rather Mark Wahlberg having to learn how to be a decent hero and the second best character in the entire movie.

The original Blue Falcon has retired and this Blue Falcon is the son of the original one who still has to learn how to be a smart hero instead of trying to be an “impressive” hero (in other words, Booster Gold’s showman aspects played up to 11) while Dynomutt has certianly become a bit of a deadpan snarker over the years.

Anywa,y they have come to help Shaggy and Scooby, who are hunted by Dick Dastardly of Wacky Racers fame, who is after Scooby for some nefarious reason, as well as the heads of demon guard dog Cerberus, which if assembled will open the Gates of Hell. As such Shaggy, Scooby and the Blue Falcon group have to stop Dastardly and save the world, while the rest of the team tries to find out what happened to them and in doing so gets involved into the entire adventure too. An adventure field to the brim with references and major on screen cameos by Hanna Barbera characters, to the point the entire thing could also just be called “Hanna Barbera Avengers assemble”.

This movie... it is weird but in some of the best ways possible. To get it out of the way, I do not think it is a very good kids movie storywise. As in, on one hand it does not have any despicable messages to it and there is actually a surprisingly high level of quality to it, on the other hand, it is not as if this movie has become the Hanna Barbera equivalent of Wall-E, Onward, How to train your Dragon or some Miyazaki flick. It is basically a Hanna Barbera crossover fanfiction as an animated feature, that reimagines the characters design wise slightly to look like ore accesable toys for kids to sell nowadays, than the orignal designs from the 70s and 80s. The plot as said abandons the mystery aspect completely for a saving the world from a comic book supervillain story, even with obligatory hole in the sky during the climax (seriously, when does Hollywood realize what kind of clichee it is) , third act break up between Scooby and Shaggy and out of nowhere “sacrifice” at the end. If you want more details on that, I recommend watching the movie or reading up on a 4chan post that goes around the net from a couple of months ago, when someone leaked the movie back then. Turns out that not everything on /co/ is garbage made up by others. Anyway, the plot is just not what you would expect from Scooby Doo. Which says a lot considering their direct to DVD features within the last years included also crossovers with the WWE and KISS. So you would expect it could not get weirder. But this movie kinda does, while also just having storystructure wise clichees to it you have seen a million times already in both better and worse features. And yet, if you like Hanna Barbera cartoons in general, I think you can find something in that movie. Not necessarily a good story from start to end, but just a entertaining Hanna Barbera cartoon, that is not quite as “dumb” as its source material but also does not try to be ultra serious and embraces the sort of humor it came from. If that however is not enough for you, and you want some very very deep story about social issues in animated form... well, I either suggest watching something not done by Disney you animation snob.

From a technical level now, I would say the movie is a bit more complicated to “review”. The voice acting is not horrible, but there are moments where the fact they got not the original cast to do the voices and instead give us celebrities like Zac Efron, is obvious. Some dialogues just don’t work as well as they should, but no one does a completely horrible job. Animation wise...

Well, it is a movie that does actually a good job getting the Hannah Barbera designs into a decent computer animated shape for the 21th century. It really feels like a Hannah Barbara cartoon on the screen. Unfortunately, when it comes to background characters....

...it feels only slightly above Miraculous Ladybug levels in my opinion. The animation is not all over the place, but you can see that it was not Pixar working on it. Which actually sorta brings up another “problem” with the movie. The problem being that as a whole it does not quite feel like it is a movie that belongs on the big screen. It is an entertaining animated movie, don’t get me wrong. But if I may be “snobish” for a moment, I think in terms of presentation and story it just doesn’t quite reach okay movie theater flick level. It is above what we should get from a made for TV or DVD production but just doesn’t reach the next level by a few inches. Which is sad, cause I think there was actually still a lot of effort put into it and a certain love of the source material. Or rather source materials, seeing how it is not just Scooby Doo here. And yet, despite its obvious flaws, including some really dated humor that made my eyes roll but is not breaking the movie for me... I recommend it. If you like Scooby Doo as a whole, I think you may like this one a lot. I just think that 20$ on demand is way too much. An animated serie sin that style however would suffice a lot Hope that piece of an opinion was helpful and that if you decide to watch it, you will have as much fun as I had (or even more) . And please don’t let me be the only one on this planet who thinks that of all the characters in it, Dick Dastardly is actually one, if not the most entertaining one. Cause heck, I liked him. And I never had imagined to see a heartfelt scene with him as a central character.

#scooby doo #scoob movie #scoob spoilers #scoob #adobsonart #adobsonartworks #western animation #animation #hanna barbera #blue falcon #dynomutt #dick dastardly #movie

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verobatto · 5 years

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Destiel Chronicles

(Vol. VIII)

It was a love story, from the very beginning.

(5x01)

Number 42 is a very Destiel number

Hello my friends, here we are now starting season 5 with this Destiel Chronicles.

I want to give special thanks to @agusvedder because she made the gifs for this meta here and discussed with me the episode. Thanks girl! 😘💕

Ok..

I can't believe you're gone

When Dean and Sam were on Earth again, one of the first things Dean said was WE NEED TO FIND CAS.

He knew they weren't alone now, they had a strong Ally be their side. And he was proud of it.

But when they arrived to Chuck's place... Reality hit him.

Castiel was dead... He couldn't believe it... He helped him to save his brother and try to stop Lucifer and now he was dead... He gave his life for them...

He try to give an excuse, because he didn't want to hear the truth.

But then... This happened...

That was the proof. Castiel was really dead. Because of him...

Look at Dean's face, he swallowed hard, and he looked to a side, with sadness.

Dean is trying to handle with that pain. Why? If you were going to help us? Why are you dead??

And then Zachariah arrived... With a very manipulative speech again, Dean didn't bought those words and immediately used the sigil to send them far away from there.

And he proudly said...

Giving honor to his friend.

Ruby/Sam as an early Destiel mirror

Aaand this is dedicated to my friend @poorreputation , she was always screaming about this mirror, and well... Here I found this example. Enjoy this gift girl.

When Dean and Sam were in the motel, Sam brought amulets...

SAM: Here. Hex bags. No way the angels will find us with those. Demons, either, for that matter.

DEAN: Where'd you get it?

SAM: I made it.

DEAN: How?

So yeah... Dean learned the sigil from CAS... And Sam from Ruby, a demon he was sexually attracted... Nothing to see here... 😏

Another thing I want to point here, not about Ruby, but about Meg... This happened too in this episode

Meg, the female demon, kissed Dean. I just want you to keep this image, because later on this season we will have an almost kiss between Castiel and her... You know about the indirect kiss, don't you? 😏💕 (May I point here that in season 6 CAS and Meg actually KISS EACH OTHER? Ok. Nothing to see here 2.0)

42, a very meaningful number...

They went straight to find "the sword of Michael" to the storage of John Winchester...

And here is the thing about 42, has a couple of VERY INTERESTING MEANINGS. And I will share it with you...

Is the answer to the meaning of Life, the Universe and everything, and that's because Douglas Adams wrote a book named "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in which he told the story about aliens that build a robot/machine and the machine answered 42 when they asked about the meaning of life. Of course that was a mistake from this robot, and everything was like a kind of joke. That could be related to this lie angel constructed to get to Dean and Sam. They thought they were going to find the solution for their problems with Lucifer, but they found a joke. A trap.

Talking about biblical numbers, the 42 is the number of the Antichrist... His evil efforts will last 42 months in the end time: "Then the angel gave me a measuring rod like a staff, saying, "Arise and measure the temple of God, and the altar . . . and they shall trample upon the holy city for forty-two months" (Revelation 11:1 - 2) I know we had an Antichrist later in this season, remember? But the Bible talks about the devil here, so ... Accurate with the storyline.

Ohhhhh and here comes the jam... It is too the atomic number of one element named molybdenum, you can say why the hell I'm so excited about this thing? Because if you If you go through molybdenum with light, a rainbow is born. And... You know... Dean was the molybdenum here because...

Yes! There's the light, the light from Castiel going though Dean's heart, giving born a beautiful rainbow of love 😏💕. Are you impressed with your angel Dean? He surely is happy to see him alive... And healthy...

Castiel is back, and he will protect the WINCHESTERS with his life. He carved in their bones a enochian protection against Angels. There he is, the strong Ally of humanity.

When Dean and Sam asked him about why he was alive, Cas just flew away, and the search of God began.

To conclude:

Dean couldn't believe Castiel was dead, and he could see the pain and the guilt in his face. A very early reaction to Castiel's death.

The dark relationship between Sam and Ruby, both of them sexually attracted to each other, was one of the first Destiel mirrors in the show.

The number 42 was an Easter Egg in my reading full of meanings for our delight.

The camera was focused on Dean the whole time Castiel appeared fighting as the bamf!angel of the Lord he was back then. On Dean. Focused on Dean. Again. On purpose.

Cas is now the strong Ally of the WINCHESTERS, a fallen angel, and he will protect them with his life.

Thanks to everyone for reading this. I hope you could enjoy it! C-u in the next volume!

Tagging @metafest @gneisscastiel @mrsaquaman187 @magnificent-winged-beast @emblue-sparks @agusvedder @weirddorkylittlediana @michyribeiro @castiellover20 @whyjm @koshisekisen @legendary-destiel @a-bit-of-influence @thatwitchydestielfan @misha-moose-dean-burger-lover @lykanyouko @evvvissticante @cheerstofandomfamily @drsilverfish @savannadarkbaby @angelneedshunter @trickster-archangel @dea-stiel @poorreputation @bre95611 @thewolfathedoor @charlottemanchmal @neii3n @deathswaywardson @followyourenergy @dean-is-bi-till-i-die @hekatelilith-blog @avidbkwrm @anarchiana @mishka-the-angel-of-saturday @dickpuncher365 @vampyrosa @hippyatheart80 @xsghn @foxyroxe-art @authorsararayne @anonymoustitans @mybonsai1976 @love-neve-dies @wildligia @dustythewind @wayward-winchester67

Note: If you want to be tagged on this list, please let me know in this thread.

Buenos Aires April 21th 2019 1:00 AM

#destiel meta #destiel chronicles #vol. viii #season 5 meta

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cyberdva · 5 years

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Drummer Boy Part 1 Roger Taylor X Reader

(Originally From My Wattpad Book @panicathetrash15 )

This is my first fic I’ve written that I’m posting to Tumblr and if anyone has some suggestions on how to improve my writing go ahead and spill.

Paring: Ben Hardy!Roger Taylor X Reader

Song: Rocket Man By Elton John

Warnings: None

Words: 1.6k

Main Masterlist

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

______

Y/N POV

______

"Come on Y/N! We have to sign up, it's the first year we're eligible to compete!" my fellow bandmate, Cynthia had been trying for the past thirty minutes to get our band to join a contest.

"I don't know Cynth, do you actually think we're that good to win that." I laid down the newspaper that I had been loosely reading. Nothing interesting has been going on in the news lately, just fluff like Rocket Man being Number 1 on the charts and the latest government testing with nuclear weapons.

My thoughts were cut short by Crystal, our bands singer slamming my flat's door open and shouting, "Did she say yes yet?" As she walked into the room Cynthia shook her head no.

Crystal pleaded, "Come on Y/N, this could be our big break." I was honestly torn about this.

"Dream on guys, there's no way in actually hell that we would win that."

"Stop being such a spaz, the winner gets money and a record deal, we could really use that and you know it." Cynthia mocked.

"Wait, really?! That's sick! Maybe we should at least try out."

"When are auditions?" Our bass player, and only British person in the band, Tammy was leaning on the door frame.

"Um, the poster says July 21th, that's only six days away. Are we using our own songs or doing a cover?" Cynth looked to Crystal for information.

Crystal paced around the retro carpet we had in our small living room before coming to a swift conclusion," We do a cover of a popular song and then ease into our originals," she quickly gestured to the newspaper I was reading," In honor of Elton's recent success I say we do Rocket Man for the audition."

"That's perfect!" I chanted, I was a huge Elton fan and I really dig the idea.

"That's a bloody awesome idea mate! We better start practicing if we want to in. There's a rumor that Queen may be trying out too." Tammy gushed.

"Who's Queen?" I asked, I was genuinely confused, the name seemed familiar.

My friends gasped,"You're not serious are you, if you don't know who Queen is I may just kick you out of the band."

"No, I really don't, the name rings a bell."

"You idiot, I went on a date with their guitarist Brian, I heard some of their demos they're the bomb!" Cynthia blushed.

"Ah that Queen, I've heard of them. Hopefully they don't beat us we really need that money. If they're so good why are they trying out for a Battle Of the Bands?" I questioned.

"Who knows, who cares. We need to practice, everyone go grab their stuff we're leaving in 10." Crystal cut in.

I peeled the blanket I had on my lap off my bodied, swiftly headed upstairs to grab my guitar.

-----------

We pulled into the venue, after hard days pf practicing our band was ready, we were first to preform and I was kind of stressed out about it. We all hopped out of Tammy's small car and got our gear out of the back, loading it onto a cart we all started to push it inside to set up.

Crystal was a perfectionist so we sent her to set everything up while we stay backstage prepping ourselves. As we made our way back I violently collided with a blonde haired man who looked extremely angry.

"Watch where you're going." We both said, he scowled at me and I gave him a nasty stare back, before anything escalated a man with puffy hair, who I presume is Brian carted the man/child away with an apologetic look. Oh great, the douche is in my roommate's boyfriends band. Fabulous. My attention was snagged by a man in a flashy outfit who sashayed up to me.

"Don't mind him, Roger gets extremely fussy of he doesn't have his cigarette." we both chuckled. "I'm Freddie Mercury, are you preforming also."

I nodded,"Yeah, we're going first. My name's Y/N L/N, enchanted to meet you, my friend talks about your band a lot."

His eyes glistened, "Really no way!" he said. I smiled back, nodding once more. Maybe Queen isn't so bad, but I won't let my guard down we really need to win this.

"Y/N! We're on in five." I started to feel an empty pit in my stomach, nervousness started to consume me. Freddie gave me a hug, " Don't get nervous, good luck!" He slickly walked away to check on Roger. I went behind the curtain to look for my guitar, hopefully we don't fail this audition.

-------

"First up is the band "Toxic Capricorn" preforming Rocket Man by Elton John. Good Luck Girls!"

With my guitar strapped around my shoulder and hugging my waist I trotted on stage quickly. I wanted this to end quickly and gracefully. No matter how long I've been preforming I can't shake the feeling away.

Familiar keys were played by a pianist hired by the venue and Crystal started to sing,

She packed by bag last night, preflight Zero hour, nine a.m. And I'm gonna be high As a kite by then

I miss the earth so much I miss my wife It's lonely out in space On such a timeless flight

And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Ah, no no no... I'm a rocket man Rocket man Burnin' out his fuse Up here alone

I started strumming slowly on my guitar, Crystal's voice faded away as I continued. I felt some eyes on me as I played softly gradually adjusting to the stage.

Mars ain't the kind of place To raise your kids In fact, it's cold as hell And there's no one there to raise them If you did

And all this science I don't understand It's just my job Five days a week A Rocket Man Rocket Man

And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Ah, no no no...

I opened my eyes a bit to see Roger looks at us disapprovingly and then complaining to the band about something to do with us. Just thinking about the mean words he could be spitting out made me mess up a chord or two, no one seemed to mind. I continued on just wanted to get the song over with.

And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time

Long, long, time Long, long, time

Ah, no, no, no... Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no...

We played our last few noted and most people clapped which made me feel a bit better about my playing. I brushed my hair out of my bright red face. The judges sitting in the front of us wrote something down and we stepped of stage.

Once we got our instruments out of the way we heard the same announcer from before say ,"Next up we have the band Queen also playing the song Rocket Man by Elton John. Good Luck boys!" People muttered things under their breath as I was in complete astonishment. I floated into my own thoughts as the same keys were plucked into the piano,that was now played by Freddie.

She packed by bag last night, preflight Zero hour, nine a.m. And I'm gonna be high As a kite by then

What if one of us don't make it because we chose the same song? Or worse we don't make it because of my foolish mistakes while playing from before!

I miss the earth so much I miss my wife It's lonely out in space On such a timeless flight

Queen is so much more experienced of course they'll make it instead of us. We're completely screwed.

And even if both of us make it Queen will hate us for sure since we used the same song! If we get on their bad side who knows what will happen!

And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Ah, no no no...

This isn't good, what if I have a panic attack while playing or if I faint or if I mess up even more next time! If there even is a next time!

Tammy shakes me out of my thoughts before I get deeper into my pit of despair.

"Are you ok? You zoned out for a long time."

And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time And I think it's gonna be a long, long, time

"Yeah I'm fine." No I'm not.

"Can we go get some water, I'm a bit light headed." I breathily sputtered out.

Tammy glanced to Cynthia with a worried look plastered on her face, "Yeah of course!"

She put a hand on my shoulder as we slowly walked away as the song faded out.

Ah, no, no, no... Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no...

I breathed in and out thinking about happy things, but all I saw was Roger's sour face as I played on stage and how our rivalry had just begun. I knew this wasn't the end, at least for now.

#queen fic #bohemian rhapsody #queen band #roger taylor imagine #roger taylor x reader #roger taylor x you #queen x reader #ben hardy #freddie mercury x reader #brian may #roger taylor #rogerina #imagine #roger taylor series #battle of the bands #ben hardy x reader #ben hardy x you

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obserfdom · 5 years

Text

Taylor Swift, A Real Person Inside Celebrity Attire

I wanna have a break for awhile in speculating about Taylor Swift' sexuality/relationship and dedicate this writing solely focusing on her as a person.

Honestly, I've never a big fans of her. Nor to any other celebrities out there. I am always a casual listener to any music. And very seldom I attentively scrutinizing song lyrics. But falling to Kaylors fandom inevitably forced me to dig more about Taylor Swift. I was very much surprise knowing how popular she is, or how successful she is building up an empire of 'devotees'. She is a queen in almost every sense.

But only through knowing how relatable her character is to ourselves as a non celebrity that truly inspiring and gradually takes me to grow a soft-tenderness feeling toward her. And like a teen swiftie, I can't help to echo their praise: "I love you, Taylor Swift!"

Here, I am just going to copy a relatable normal human being version of Taylor's story from many sources - mostly from people with direct interaction with her, the 'normal' people. If one still deducting flaws out of her personality, after reading these kind of testimonials - well it would speak a lot about who the person is rather than being about Taylor Swift.

***

From Rolling Stone:

We’ve been talking for a while when a boat rows up carrying three teenagers – two girls and a guy. “Oh, my God!” says one of the girls. “Today is my birthday! Can I please take a picture with you?” Swift laughs. “You can, but I don’t know how you’re going to. You’re on a boat, buddy!”

“I’ll get off!” the girl says. “I’ll find a way.” Swift and her bodyguard reach out and help her into the pavilion. “You’re going to make me cry!” she says.

“Is it really your birthday?” Swift asks.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” the girl says.

“Oh, that’s a good year.”

“I know. I’m excited.”

The girl says she lives on Long Island. She and her friends took the train in for the day. “That’s cute,” Swift says. “Are you going to dinner somewhere?”

The girl scrunches up her face. “We were going to . . . Chipotle?”

Swift smiles. She goes to her purse and pulls out a wad of cash – $90, to be exact. “Here,” she says. “Go somewhere nice.”

“Oh, my God,” the girl says. “Thank you!” She climbs back in the boat, and she and her friends paddle off.

Note:

$90 may not be a big number for a celeb like Taylor Swift with an estimated worth around 360 million USD. However, that was probably the only cash she had in hand - and Taylor gave it all to the teen girl she barely knew only cause she probably felt that she could contribute to boost this girl's happiness by adding the teen with more fund to spend on her birthday.

This was not only sweet but it genuinely a very grandeur kindnest.

***

"Is Taylor Swift actually a nice person?" - a question made in Quora:

Anonymous answered it, in May 21th 2018

This post has been a long time coming. I am answering this question anonymously for a number of reasons: 1) I do not wish to inadvertently become tabloid fodder; 2) I do not wish to capitalize on Taylor; 3) I enjoy my relatively normal life; and 4) I believe the anonymity is well-deserved on Taylor’s part. Although Taylor may be able to determine who is writing this, I do not believe such information to be of use to the public. I am sure, if she wished, she could write me a letter and reconnect at anytime. That is her choice to make.

Before Taylor hit it big, Taylor and I spent months emailing back and forth on MySpace. We were the same age with similar tastes in music, similar viewpoints on life, and similar, sarcastic senses of humor. We were both trying to make it in music and grow a fan base. We confided in each other. We trusted each other. We had an ongoing, supportive relationship that helped both of us when we sometimes felt there was nowhere else to turn. Few knew of my coversations with her - but some of Taylor’s closest friends did know they were taking place (they called me “the guy on MySpace,” as it is my understanding Taylor did not tell them my name).

The two of us, still in our teens and miles apart, began writing to each other in short messages at first. We would discuss music, school, and random jokes we would make upon the fly. As time went on, the messages (and their topics) went from short and complimentary to in-depth and personal. We would write messages to one another that, if printed, would be multiple pages long. Looking back, these were the messages of two teenagers trying to find themselves and, in the process, found a friend in one another. We never had expectations, just a supportive friendship with a member of the opposite sex we could not seem to find offline. Although our situations and backgrounds were very different, our similarities closed any gap between us.

During our time messaging, Taylor had hit a rough patch in her life. That may be easy to balk at if you see Taylor as a flawless celebrity rather than the caring and thoughtful person that she is - but the struggle she was experiencing at the time was very real and had its toll on her, a teen trying to find her place. I would do my best to encourage her from a distance and support her as the situation unfolded. Taylor did the same for me. The mutual respect and maturity shared with one another was like nothing else I had experienced. As for Taylor, I believe she felt the same.

Then, something happened. I began to emotionally struggle with the loss of a grandparent who had passed in 2002. As a young person, I had buried the pain for years and did not know how to cope. I had little in terms of a support mechanism in my “real” life. But things were just beginning in Taylor’s career. I thought that my burdens would weigh Taylor down. So, rather than turn to Taylor for support or tell her what happened, I did the only thing sixteen year old me knew how to do… I closed myself off, shut down my MySpace page… and tried to grapple with the experience on my own. To this day, I feel guilty about having left her out in the dark. But I still believe I did the right thing. Taylor had a dream we both shared and it was becoming a reality. I was not about to stand in the way by making her worry about her friend. She was too kind and sweet to me. Strapping her with that type of burden would have been unjustifiable. As fast as I had entered it, I was out of Taylor’s life. If she saw me today, it is unlikely she would recognize me as that guy who was playing country songs. That is not the path my life took.

Fast forward to today and I am a highly educated person who has been able to carve my own path in this world. By any measure, I have been successful for my age. If Taylor were not a celebrity, I believe her story would be much the same.

What you see and hear about Taylor does not scratch the surface or come near the reality. The claims about her doing things for publicity, being an uncaring person, or using others are nowhere near an accurate description of the person I grew to know. Taylor is a kind, caring, compassionate person who wants nothing more than to love and be loved. Her acts of charity are not acts of publicity, they are acts of character. She has earned and deserves her career. Knowing her as I did, I cannot help but believe she often longs for normalcy, anonymity, and questions what it would be like if she were simply Taylor to this day - not the celebrity, but another person who lived life without being subjected to the critiques, comments, and ridicule.

I knew Taylor for Taylor, she was wonderful. In the unlikely event she reads this, I apologize for not writing back and hope she understands why I made that decision. I kicked myself for years - not because of the fame she found, but because of the friend I loss.

Taylor, I am proud of how far you have made it in this world.

Note:

Me and approximately 8.3k Quora-ers agreed that this guys story is genuine.

***

Steve Parr - a quora-er, answered this (from the same Quora page):

I’ve met Taylor Swift twice, both while I was working for Taylor Guitars.

The first time was at the Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. She was there with her father who BEGGED Bob Taylor to let her play on our performance stage. I think she was about 15 at the time. She was nervous and her songs weren’t great, but she was beaming and very appreciative of the time given her.

The second time was when she held her album release party for Fearless (2008) at the Taylor factory in El Cajon, CA. There was a nationwide contest where two people were flown from each state to San Diego to attend the party, get a meet & greet and attend a private concert for a total of about 250 people. I was heavily involved in photography, so the production company hired me to shoot the meet & greet and the concert.

When she arrived at our factory for that event, she came in through the back of our shipping warehouse. As she walked through, she greeted everyone, giving them a long, solid hug while saying “hello”. Now, some of these guys were hardcore warehouse types who were dirty and sweaty. That didn’t matter to Swift. She didn’t have to do what she did, but she did it. I thought that spoke highly of her character.

So, yeah, she’s really a nice person…

Note:

If you familiar with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, you probably remember the first few pages about "bus driver" story. This guy spread the joy with his inert kindnest. He was the example of emotional intelligence that Goleman referred to.

Reading the above testimony remind me of the bus driver. If you think Taylor Swift doesn't atleast possess a lil of EI, then I think you need to re-think about how you view the world - and start to trust humanity act of kindnest again.

***

Final thought:

Really I could copy paste dozen of testimonials out there about Taylor Swift. Esp from fans who lucky enough to meet her in person during secret sessions. They are not only being loyal to Taylor because they led by 'blindness' by Taylor's charm - but more because I could see that Taylor had touched their heart with her genuinely nice behaviours. Treating her fans as in the highest value, is one of Taylor's rare quality as human being.

Not to mention, Taylor has been involved in many charitably acts through out the years - a very good role model not only to youth but to all of us in general. I could say that her parents have raised her well and influenced her to continue being grounded.

Oh yes, I am fully aware that Taylor Swift is mere human with all the flaws and far from perfection - and I have no doubt that she awares of it too - nevertheless, if one lacking in appreciation toward others and only focus in finding every lil dirts, as haters would be, well that speaks more about them compare to the object of their rants. That just like one unconsciously noticed their own version of 'elephant in the room', but rather than face it - they cowardly projecting it to other. And public figure, esp a sweet lollipop like Taylor, sadly always an easy target achery.

Xxx

#taylor swift #swifties #taylorswift #testimonials about taylor swift #haters #taylor lurking #i love you tay tay

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the-anticlimax-that-is-life · 5 years

Text

The story of how I got disabled.

For those that don’t know me that well.. (Or maybe just for myself, to keep my story clear.. or to overshare.. or to break the silence..)

I am currently 24 and have graduated from university about half a year ago; chemistry mayor. (Oh, and I am actually Dutch.. So I may mess up my sentences every now and then..)

I have done my master’s degree at another university than where I started off during my bachelor’s, because of reasons that will soon become clear.

Even though I have successfully obtained my master’s degree in chemistry with special notes to my practical skills, I still am having quite serious issues over what I am about to tell you.

I am visually impaired, probably roughly on the edge of legal blindness, but since we don’t use the same notations in my country as basically anywhere else, I have no way of knowing if that assumption is correct. (But if the system works as I have ‘interpreted’ in, my vision is below 20:200..)

Also, I have always been sort of against calling myself ‘disabled’-> I am perfectly able of basically anything a ‘normal’ or ‘average’ person is capable of.

(Well, sure there are some exceptions, like, I would not be able to drive a car.. But cars are overrated anyway so 😊)

I can hear you asking: ‘why is this even relevant? You seem to be doing perfectly fine, having your master’s degree and all?’ – Indeed, why would it be?

—————————

So here comes a recap of the first of two Facebook posts that have become even more relevant as time passes me by..(Okay, actually it has become more of a rough translation, because I don’t like leaving stuff out..):

‘From ten to zero’ (Posted on November 10th, 2015)

The post started with a general apology for all the drama that was about to unfold, sort of admitting that I just needed to share what had been going on, for I couldn’t deal with it on my own.

Before I proceed with this recap, I want to add that during this period in my life, I have had a lot of support from friends, family and more; I don’t think I have ever felt as much love and care as I have during this period – Dear everyone, I probably wouldn’t still be here without you. (Yeah, I may have stated stuff like that before, but I can assure you that it’s heartfelt.. And I am not ashamed to admit that.)

When I wrote the post, I was in my third year of the bachelor’s. I was participating in a special minor from biopharmaceutical sciences, that was mainly focused on medical chemistry. I had chosen this minor because it included a course called ‘bio-organic synthesis’-> my life’s passion.

Before I even know about organic chemistry, stuff like that had always interested me very much and I wanted to ‘become a researcher.’ During my bacherlor’s, I found out about organic chemistry and the possibility of doing a PhD -> quite the motivator! (No, but really.. I actually put a lot of work in more courses, especially the ones I was interested n.)

Even though I have never been a ‘straight-A student,’ I definitely had potential to do a PhD. (But more about that later.. Because holy shit, let’s not derail the story into a wibbly wobbly timey wimey chaotic mess just yet.)

Okay, so back to this minor, or perhaps first some more background..

Even though I don’t like to focus on my disability, it has probably sort of always played an undeniable role in my life. Growing up ‘different’ is though. It always is. Especially when people can see something is wrong with you, even though you don’t see that yourself. (Hah! - Wait, was that the first pun? We’re what, roughly 600 words in the story? Damn, I must be really off today..)

Anyway, for all my life, I have been pushing myself to do everything as normal as possible. Normal primary school, normal secondary school, normal high-school. Sure, I walked up to the blackboard as a kid, and had special binoculars to read the board in high-school.. But that’s just the way things were – no harm in that, right? (I mean, I am not even sure who I am trying to convince here.. Is it you.. or me?)

There are a few reasons as to why I have always pursuit a ‘normal’ life.

First of all, I hate being labelled or stigmatized. My disability may make me do some things a little differently; but it does not make less (capable) than anyone else.

Secondly, which is actually linked to what I stated above; fuck stigmatization, Really, fuck that shit. I guess I have just always felt moved by the way the world works and the way society has its ways of putting down those that are different in any way. – Yes, this goes much further than just my stupid eye disability..

As a kid I wanted to become a super-hero.

During my teens, I guess, I figured that that actually was possible in a way.

By just ‘making it’- I thought - I could set an example to others; don’t let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do or who you can or cannot be, because you can do or become anything or anyone you set your mind to.

And I was well on my way of doing so. – Oh, did I shine brightly as I aced my synthetic organic chemistry final.. My one and only 10/10, all perfect score.. on university level.

This theoretical synthetic organic chemistry course was one of the two main reasons I had chosen to do this minor.

The other one, perhaps needless to say, was a practical bio-organic chemistry course given by a man called R.. During my first year at uni, we had had an argument and I felt like he sort of hated my guts.. So, I wasn’t too happy to see he would give the course. But at the same time, he didn’t seem that bad at the time I was applying for the minor. He had seen the way I worked hard for my organic chemistry courses (he assisted in the previous organic chemistry course, on which I scored 9/10..)

Before even applying to the minor, (say it was in June..) I had also spoken to him about the fact I wanted to do the course, especially because I also wanted to do my bachelor thesis in organic chemistry, (then my master.. etc..)

The only reason I sort of ‘asked for permission’ is because I have always done so. I have always been open about the fact I am visually impaired, just to make sure people know in advance. – I mean, maybe if things are out in the open, people won’t feel the need to stigmatize me so much?

R. had seen me do practical work in the first year, and he didn’t see any reason of why I couldn’t join the course. However, he did advise me to also do a computational course (rather than another practical one), just to let me try that as well.

As a bit of yet another extra layer of background, before I even joined the study itself, I have spoken with several people about all of this -> my disability and the possibilities. One conversation I can remember was with a woman called A. (some sort of study advisor.) She was very, very positive and told me she was fully confident I would do great. But, if there would be any trouble, I just have to tell her, and she would help me find a way to work around it. – I never felt the need to. You see, I have done several practical courses, all of which I passed. Sometimes barely, but that had more to do with my writing skills.. (Really, my outstanding practical skills have actually saved my grades, more than once.)

So, back to the story..

Somewhere around the end of September, I went to speak to R.. In our conversation a few months earlier (the one where I sort of asked him permission to join ‘his’ course in December) he had also said he thought it would be best if I worked together with someone during the practical course. Because I was determined to pursue a carrier in organic synthesis, I wanted to tell him that I’d rather do the course alone – to truly test my own capability. (I was pretty sure I could pull it off, otherwise I would of course not have asked, but say, as a final confirmation.)

It didn’t come to that. He started the conversation with saying ‘that there had been a problem…’ He told me that there was a chance I was no longer allowed to work on the ab, because of ‘insurance reasons’ – if I were to cause an accident, the insurance wouldn’t pay because of my disability. (The fact my disability makes me extra aware of safety and work extra securely wasn’t even considered..)

After our conversation, R. told me he was going to figure out the depths of it. He told me he was going to discuss this with all people involved, because everyone knew me as a motivated and capable student.

I thanked him nevertheless, not wanting to ‘shoot the messenger’..

Roughly a month passed, a month of silence. I could feel myself slipping down again.. Yet, I was able to hold on the hope that this had all be some sort of misunderstanding. (Also, just a month before this, I had gotten my first tattoo, which made me feel pretty powerful. Oh, silly me.. I still sometimes feel like I have jinxed it all by raising my chin like that.. >.> - Ah well, let’s no go there again, for once, let’s just not.. </3)

Fun fact, the synthetic organic chemistry course was also in this month. I t was a rough month, but I fucking aced it. And that was what I needed; extra proof of my determination. So I e-mailed R., who told me to talk to the SOC professor (the dean of the research group at which the practical course was going to be held – nice guy btw; he was still on my side and may even have remained on my side till the end..)

After being sent back and forth in e-mails between R. and that professor a few times, I talked a bit in real life with the SOC professor and he told me that it would be best if I went to see R. next Monday.

On November 9, 2015 (which was my 21th birthday) I went to have a nice and cozy talk with my bestest friend R.. (He truly is the most tactful and sympathetic man on this planet! God, I love him like I would love having my nails ripped off, well, actually I would have preferred that over this bullshit..)

He started off with saying he didn’t really have time, so he’d keep it short.

With a grin, he told me that: ‘He actually isn’t supposed to tell me what he would be so glad to tell me..’ (because he had yet to discuss it with P., the dean of the study.) I can’t remember what I asked in that brief moment of hope..

‘But it’s not looking good for you!’ – Without any space for me to think or truly speak, the conversation shifted towards the fact that I had to go and talk to A. (the study adviser) and P. (the study dean) to see what my options were to even finish my bachelor’s.. Because sure as hell was I never going to be able to do my bachelor’s thesis at ‘his’ group, not even to speak of my master’s..

The whole ordeal didn’t take much more than 5 minutes. I remember running off to the restroom as fast as I could. Never before had my make-up been smudged all the way down to my chin. (If that doesn’t paint a clear picture, I don’t know what will.)

I was really fucking heartbroken. All I had worked for got crushed like it was nothing. Did it all mean so little?

I remember being really confused a well. How did this happen? And why did this happen now? Why didn’t anyone tell me about this before?

And most importantly.. Who caused this?

‘I tried so hard and got so far.. Just to be shoved away again.

I know I have to move on, to take a different direction perhaps. To figure out a way to finish my studies nevertheless – when one door closes..

Sigh, I know I shouldn’t let this get in my way.. but right now, I just can’t..

How is one supposed to act once one’s dream gets shattered?’

—————————

Next will be the ‘recap’ of the second post, almost a year after the first. I regret not writing more in between these two posts.. But that was just because all my efforts were wasted. Just believe me when I say that I have talked with a lot of people and done basically anything in my power to figure out how things got to be the way they were. During the time in between these two posts I managed to finish my bachelor’s degree at ‘another’ university. (My luck, the educational track was shared by two universities, so I ‘simply’ hopped to the other university.. Which actually wasn’t simple, but that story is not relevant at this point.)

‘Never cross the heart’ (Posted somewhere in October 2016)

The truth; prepare for drama.

The Thursday before I wrote this post, I had been to my bachelor’s graduation ceremony. I didn’t want to go there at all, but since it was not just my ceremony but also that of my husband, we decided to go after all. (We had been asked to hand in a personal PowerPoint slide and actually decided to hand in one together, since we had gotten married that year – they didn’t bother to even mention it..)

Anyway, during that time, I had started my master’s degree at a university in Amsterdam (2-hour travel from my home..) and felt really depressed. Getting out of bed felt like a life sentence – and that was just the start of the day. Everything felt pretty fucking pointless, I mean, why even try? The whole situation at my old uni was troubling me a lot. It didn’t matter that I had provided myself with a new start; I was broken, so fucking broken. What’s the point of trying to fight a system build on ignorance and stigmatization? – I felt like I could trust no one, that even though I was given a fair chance, it would probably be taken from me again.

Even though I knew deep down that the system was just fucked, I was filled with self-loathing. ‘I mean, they were right, right? I am legally blind, who am I fooling? I shouldn’t be trying stuff like this, I am never going to be good enough. What if they were actually just trying to protect me?’ – The lies we tell ourselves..

Anyway, back to the ceremony..

We had intended to go there and just fake through it all. Just shine on and make them regret sending me away. However, hehe, I am not a fake. (Oh and trust me, I tried. I even decided not to wear my necklace, just as a way of accepting the fake fuck I planned to be.. – Oh sweet irony.)

All the stuff that had been building up in the past year.. All these unanswered questions, all the powerlessness..

The exact moment when I had to collect my degree and smile for my dad to take a picture, I couldn’t hold my tears no more..

Not wanting to make a scene, I hid my face and just sat down in order to let the further ceremony proceed as planned.

At this point, I think it’s time for some more background. During this past year, I had spoken to a lot of different people about the whole situation. I even went as far as going the university’s ombudsman.. ..who was going to help me.. ..empty words.. (I don’t think the story is relevant at this point; let’s just say he probably didn’t want this all to get out in the open because that would make a bad name for the university.. Or at least, that’s the impression I got from the way he acted,, It’s much more complicated. Ugh..)

I also went to see P., the dean of the bachelor’s study a few times. He did ‘help me’ with arranging things to get to finish my bachelor’s at the other university, but that was all he did – and probably just because I was actually a good student so me graduating without a delay would be good for his statistics. – More about him later.

I had also spoken to A. a lot about this whole ordeal. I actually trusted her, so I had also talked to her about some personal issues that had also been going on around that time. She seemed to really want to help me, yet she couldn’t help me figure out who had caused all this or the reason why.. I remember asking her if it would be possible for R. (from before) to have anything to do with this, for he was the one that told me there was ‘a problem’ in the first place.. But she almost violently denied that. She was absolutely sure, because, she told me, R. is usually the one to help students who are struggling to pass classes or get stuff arranged. – I believed her, sort of feeling guilty to let my own prejudice, my personal issues towards the man lead me to such foundationless conclusions.

I had also spoken to the dean of the master’s study, L. This is not really relevant to this story, but I do not want to leave it out because this specific conversation actually still haunts me to this day.

I went to see her to talk about the possibilities of doing my master’s at that university (the one I also did my bachelor’s.) L. knew me, she had actually given one of the courses I had taken (and passed nicely.)

In the conversation, she made up all sorts of comparisons as to why she would deny me from doing the master’s. Before all of this, I was the first visually impaired student they had ever seen at this study. But at this point, I suddenly wasn’t. For example, she had had another visually impaired student that had to stick her head in the fume hood to measure things. (I am still not sure this is even true, because someone with that little common sense would probably not even able to finish high-school..) Either way, the way she told me this was more as an attack than just information. She also told me that there was another student in her masters, and all her experiments failed. (Assuming it was due to her disability.. Experiments sometimes just fail, you know?)

To finish off what was left of my self-esteem, one of the last things she said to me was: ‘You are just trying to deny you are disabled.’ – I can’t even.

I think this is one of the most hurtful things someone has ever said to me. Especially during a period in my life where I was finally sort of accepting who I was and be open about everything..

..Enough about that.

To summarize it all, one thing became clear over time: nobody had my back. The general attitude towards me had shifted from ‘that one talented and motivated student’ to ‘the stupid disabled kid that is going to get us in trouble..’ Basically, all they were doing was trying to save themselves and each other. Again, I regret not have written down more about all the conversations I have had, because that would make this all more believable.

Because yes, I sometimes, most of the time, feel like a fraud. That is must be all in my head, that I must not be so negative, that not everyone is out to get me, etc.. – Yes, not everyone is out to get me, there are a lot of loving caring people out there, but not those pieces of shit that were involved in this. (There were some people at my old university that would probably have loved to help me.. But no-one likes to risk it all for just some student, and I can understand that..)

Anyway, back to the story..

After the ceremony, there were free drinks. (Ah, drinking! Another habit I had picked up that year..)

As we (my husband, parents and me) were standing there with our drinks, A. (the study adviser from before) walked up to me; ‘Ahhhhh, congratulations! How are youuuu? How is Ansterdaaaam?’ (I had specifically told her it was a secret that I was going to do my masters in Amsterdam, because I didn’t want anyone to ruin that for me.. But what to expect? Spineless cunt..)

With a clear face and calm tone, I told her that it was hard for me to focus on my studies, considering all the stuff that ha happened to me. She said something like: ‘Oh, that’s a shame.’ And walked off.

I felt pretty proud of myself for shaking her off like that, not making a scene, etc. I even remember ‘bragging’ about that to my husband and parents, and probably getting a ‘pad on the back’ for that. – and trust me, I felt it. I really did not want to make a scene. I truly wanted to leave it all behind me and move on..

Until M., (the new study’s dean who was completely oblivious to this whole situation..) walked u to me to have a little chat. This poor woman probably just wanted to meet me or do some chit-chat.. She got the full blow.

I told her all about what had happened the past year, how I felt depressed, and how just knew I needed to know the whole truth in order to move on with my life.. Obviously, P. (the other dean) noticed something was going on and joined the conversation. I could clearly notice I was not the only one no longer being able to control my emotions. P. got really irritated, telling me they had tried everything but couldn’t help me with unraveling the truth.

After some more of the ‘I need closure’- ‘We can’t give you these answers you are looking for’ drama, M. proposed to have a closer look at the whole situation. Based on something A. had told me before, she suggested to contact J. (some professor with a high function in the whole education thing, A. had suggested in the past that he may have had something to do with it..)

But since my part in this had started with the conversations with R., I proposed it would perhaps be best to ask him once more. Not to shoot the message, but just to start at the beginning of the source.

M. proposed to e-mail R. next week – I didn’t want to wait that long, so we decided to check if he was in the building and just meet face to face.

Long story short, he was in the building and we went to pay him a visit.

I told him about what had happened today, and how we basically wanted to ask him once more what he knew, since he was the one that told me there was a problem in the first place. I asked him if he had any who had started all of this.

With a straight face, he directly admitted that he was the one that had started this. His reason behind this was that he simply didn’t want to take responsibility for me during the bio-organic synthesis practical course or anything related to that, ‘because he wouldn’t be able to guarantee my safety.’ (He did get defensive though, stating J. was the one to eventually ‘seal the decision’ - which was of course completely irrelevant, like, anyone could ‘agree’ with any statement produced by someone with influence..)

Of course, I asked him why he had decided all of this at this point, and not before or during the time I was signing up for the course. He simply replied with: ‘I didn’t know your vision is only 0.15’ (actually, it’s even less but okay..) I replied with something like: ‘What does such a number even say? It might as well had been 0.25, 0.35 or 0.55..’ – He shut me off, stating my argument was going nowhere.

Then, I told him it simple didn’t make any sense. He had known (about) me since day one, and actually co-supervised one of my very first practical courses. He knew exactly how good or bad my vision was and what he could expect from me, working on the lab. (Really, nothing out of the ordinary there..)

Mockingly, and with a somewhat arrogant voice he said: ‘Oh, yes, I know you all too well.’ Then, he started stating some bullshit about how he had seen me work, and how my ways were just unacceptable for an organic chemist. (Like for example standing too close to a rotary evaporator.)

I told him that we are students for a reason, that we are there to learn. I was even able to come up with something that happened between us during that first practical course. How I made some (non-sight related) rooky mistake, and how he had told me that I had to do it differently – and so I did. (He didn’t actually tell me, he been growling at me since day one.. Not just at me btw..)

Again, he cut me off, stating that he could name a dozen things more, but to which he wouldn’t go into further argument over.

He also started another bullshit story about how I have always had been given a special treatment, such as working together with a partner.

I told him this wasn’t true, because everyone was teamed up with a partner during these first few practical courses. – He shut me off, stating ‘he knew for sure how HIS practical courses were.’

Eventually, my dad tried to intervene, to which R. got irritated, stating how he was through with being cussed at – he told us to leave. (Who exactly cussed at who?)

As we left the room, with a lot of irritation in my tone, I gave him the kind advice not to crush people’s dreams in less than 5 minutes (on their birthday) next time. And to maybe look after your students some more after dropping such bad news on them.

Obviously, this too got ignored. As well as all other signs of emotion, both verbally and non-verbally during all the conversations we had had.

A few moments later, as we walked down the hallway, I had a mental breakdown. I have said some things in front of my husband and parents I am not so proud of.. (I hate it when the people I care about see me in such a state..) Eventually, my vision went blurry (yeah, even blurrier than usual 😊) and I fell through my knees.

10 minutes or so passed, then guess what?

I can remember hearing me dad say: ‘oh, there he is..’

I can’t remember who spoke first, one of my parents or R. himself.

I remember his psychopathic emotionless voice say: ‘good evening’ – something snapped.

I remember screaming: ’My blood will be on your hands, motherfucker!’ – Words I am not proud of, but were, at that very moment, genuine and heartfelt.

He didn’t respond. Then, I added: ‘I hope someone will someday take from you what you have stolen from me!’ – words that are more than genuine and heartfelt even to this day.

He simply walked off – he didn’t even flinch.

Some more desperate cries I luckily can’t remember later, I remember grabbing some newspapers that were laying around and completely ripping them apart. (Honestly, I think the fact I was not alone at that moment have saved me a lot of nasty, nasty stuff..) – I am pretty fucking proud of how I handled that shit at that moment. Could have easily ripped either him or (more likely) myself to shreds.

To conclude:

I have had issues with this man from day one. But we are all only human, and I didn’t want to let my own experiences lead me astray. Deep down, I think I knew from the start that he was the cause of this all along. But it didn’t even make sense. Why would he do this?

Even to this day, it makes no sense. How can someone be that sick?

Later, I found out that R. had pulled similar (but slightly different) stuff to other people as well; probably just for the thrills. – This guy is a true psychopath.

—————————

*Sigh*

Now comes the hardest part.

Today is the Ides of March, 2019.

It’s 00:24 AM., and I just don’t know what to say.

I thought that by rewriting this, I could maybe come closer to understanding the actual damage this has done to me.

The problem is, it has been, what, 3 years? – So much has happened – it still makes no sense.

I guess all I can say is:

I am disabled.

I am disabled by means of not being able to do stuff other people are able to.

I am unable to accept myself the way I was born. (I didn’t ask for this body?)

I am unable to be myself and do things in my own way – I am in constant fear of being judged. Being rejected. Being send away. Again, and again, and again.

(Honestly. I can’t even pour some water into a beaker in front of people without freezing up..)

I have become the stigma and am unable to conquer that.

Who really is to blame, is it me or you?

The system perhaps?

Well guess what; we are all to blame.

I have let it happen. – And I will never be able forgive myself for that.

I had one fucking goal in life. – And ‘you’ took it from me.

But really, it wouldn’t be fair to blame you.

I was broken from the start, held together by stupid sharpie doodles and a little bit of ink..

This could be about so much more..

But let’s not go there. Not today.

You know what?

Fuck you. I’m done.

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houghtonfagan40-blog · 5 years

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This Is Just what Occurs When You Order Ridiculously Affordable Clothing Coming from Singapore.

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At that point incorporate ~ 2 mL from starch sign and titrate until heaven colour vanishes.

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literallyprentissstwin · 6 years

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Week 2) Monday, May 21th to Sunday, May 27th 2018

bonjour y´all and welcome to the second week of my reading list :) this is actually the second time i´m typing this down since tumblr actually decided that it wouldn´t save my last draft where i once had all typed down for the list (thanks for that!). i don´t remember what i wrote down to all the fics the first time, but guess i just start again :D i really hope you all enjoyed my list last week & left some love to the writers <3

as usual, i put together a list of (this time) 19 fics which i enjoyed reading a lot the past week! please don´t take it personal if you didn´t make it to this list, it doesn´t mean that you´re a bad writer or stuff. you are all really talented and underrated. it´s just my personal opinion and taste.

feel free to tag me in your fics or send me the links via direct message. since my notifications aren´t working properly, sending the links via message is the better option. i´m excited to hear from you:)

so, i really hope you all enjoy this weeks list and don´t forget to leave some love and feedback to the writers since this is the only credit they will get for their work :)

- aileen

1) No matter what - Spencer Reid X Sister!LGBT!Reader by @infinitefandomimagines

this is some of the cutest stuff i read all week :) spence is the perfect big brother and i really want him to have either a sibling or a child, fact. this story is everything. also the topic is so important and i´m proud you choose to write about it! <3 well done!

2) Always by @butsomeofusarelookingatthestars

yey, you´re back! i miss my daily dose of Luke fics bc you´re the best at writing them <3 also i´m a sucker for Dad!Luke fics and i also love these stories about Nessa and him, they are perfect! this one was amazing, i loved it! :)

3) Time - Chapter 1: Seconds by @spencerthepipecleaner

Okay, woow. my poor heart...wtf. this heavy angst <333 it´s heaven and very well written. but my poor spence thooo :((((( i really need to check out part 2, bc this part was perfect! great work!

4) Article of Faith - Chapter 9 & Chapter 10 by @dontshootmespence

okay, this is one of the most underrated series on here and shame on me that i have to do some catching up on it, but those two parts very amazing! i love spencer in it. this story is giving me life. i can´t wait to see where you´ll be going with it bc it´s perfect! go give it some love!

5) Why? by @a-court-of-stydia

MATT <333 okay, we def need more stories about him bc he deserves all the love and recognition he can get bc he is a pure babe and i love him so much <3 okay, back to your story: this was perfect and i´m in love. short, but sweet and i´m so glad i got to read it! thank you!

6) The Angel in the Room by @dontshootmespence

Eventhough I don´t like Alex, I loved reading this story a lot. I loved Alex & Hotchs relationship in this story as well as the bond between Ellie & Reid :) Perfect! <3

7) Talk Nerdy to Me by @multifandomfanfiction

okay this story was lit :D i´m sorry for this word, but it´s true. at the beginning i was like “ugh gideon” but then, his niece was so awesome and the tension between her and spencer and just everything about this story was so perfect and i enjoyed reading it a lot! <3

8) Dishes by @ionlyreadfivebookslastweek

again, short but sweet and ultra fluffy <3 cuteness overload incoming :) i loved reading it. also can we talk about your username? bc it is goals af. <3 great work!

9) The Reaper by @trashyficsfortrashykids

okay, wow. i´m sad i can´t remember what i wrote here the first time bc it was a pretty ass long paragraph bc this story gave me chills and everything. at first i was like “ugh another fic about this” and then when i read it I was totally speechless (this doesn´t happen often btw.): i really liked the way you wrote about the whole foyet drama happening and now i hate him even more. how can he kill an innocent little child? wtf is wrong with that dude??? i´m also a sucker for Dad!Hotch and i think you portrayed him perfectly with all this blaming himself. but OMG WTF THE ANGST WAS PRETTY HEAVY BUT I LOVED IT AND IT WAS SO GOOD AND I´M SORRY FOR SCREAMING. it´s also very well written and i´m pretty impressed (teach me how to write like this please). overall, this whole fic was a success and i´m happy that i got the chance to read it! Thank you!

10) Secret Keepers by @illegalcerebral

THIS would have been the perfect way to deal with the whole Doyle drama thingy. like uggggghhhhhh....it wouldn´t have made things complicated. why didn´t they let you write it? this was amazing and i loved the team <3 they are a perfect little family :) oh, and did I ever mention that i miss my Hotchner? ily btw :)

11) Too Much On the Line by @dontshootmespence

okay first of all, can we agree that the show didn´t pay enough attention to the Reid drug addiction story line on the show? thank you! this fic was perfect. the angst & suspense = loving it. i also love a comforting and supporting spencer and the way he tries to helpt the reader by talking about his own addiction. my heart was heavy reading this but i enjoyed every bit of it! great job!

12) In his arms by @winchestergirl23

again, short but sweet. it made me miss morgan even more :(((( it was so cute! i want a bf like him, thanks!

13) Surprise. (Pt 1/3) by @crimindsaspe

YESSSS, I LOVE IT! i love a happy spencer, he deserves all the love and happiness. do this boy some good and give him a happy storyline thanks!! i loved this part and i can´t wait for the others :) well done!

14) Paranoid // Spencer Reid by @itsmeedee

okay this is so so so so so so so good. like holy hell, the angst <3333 also i already read part 2 and jesus christ, i need a third part asap. could you please tag me in it?? this is a masterpiece. read it, y´all!!!!

15) Writing Prompt #4 - Spencer Reid Imagine by @multifandom-fics0904

awwww Spencer, my poor heart <333 i just love him so much, he is so precious and kind and caring. give him a child already. this was perfect!

16) Call Out My Name (Spencer Reid x reader) by @spencerreidreads

omg the end....no it can not end this way. i really need a part 2, please tell me you already planned a part 2?? this was soo good! please!

17) Guess You´re Not the One part one (Spencer Reid x reader) by @spencerreidreads

same here....the second part was as intense as the first part and i can not wait for more. like seriously...give me more!

18) One Wish by @captainreid

oh G, why do you have to make me feel like this?? all i want for spence in his life is a child and then this...</3 my poor heart. the angst tho <333 perfect! ily :)

19) The Thread That Holds by @dontshootmespence

awwww happy Jack and Hotch <3 my heart is swoooning, tho it makes me miss them both a lot. i really wanna see them again in S14 :))) also this is kind of the life i imagine for them both right now too. like happy and together and safe. they deserve it. great job! ily :)

20) We all Fall Down - Thirty Two by @criminal-minds-fanfiction

okay, seriouly, how can i NOT put this serie on my list? tho i still have a lot of catching up to do but this kind of is also a reminder to myself to get my lazy ass up and reread the whole fic bc it is pure perfection and def underrated. i loved this part a lot. your writing skills are on point, i´m jealous. people, go read it! i dare you! well done, great job! ily :)

so, this was this weeks list :) i really hope you enjoyed it and don´t forget to leave some love for the writers and their works. again, if you wanna be featured on that list, send me your fics and i´m gonna read them and maybe you´ll be on the next list :)

hope you all will have a great week & see you next sunday :)

- aileen

#aileen´s reading list #week 2 #restart #fandom #criminal minds #fanfiction #support

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thepalaceofsans-souci · 7 years

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can you tell me how wilde was problematic? I'm honestly just curious as I've just started becoming a fan of his work and I don't want to idolize someone who may have done some sketchy stuff if you know what I mean? Like I know he was antisemitic and slept with younger men but what else was problematic? Sorry if this comes across as rude I just found your blog and I honestly love it

Thanks I think that’s a very wise sentiment I’m tired and old but I will try answering this. So yeah, I’d say the anti-semitism and the questionable relationships (questionable both bc the men he dated were younger than him, sometimes a lot younger, and that they were working class and/or sex workers who may or may not have been forced into that industry) are the biggest issues with Oscar Wilde and honestly, I’m not sure personally how to get over it. I think it’s quite healthy to not get over it. He was also classistic af even though he himself thought of himself as a socialist and wrote passionately about his own take on socialism, and a sexist even though he thought of himself (and others though of him) as some sort of supporter of the women’s movement and he did real work for the improvement of women’s well-being and voices.

I still appreciate him though for being flamboyantly gay and being so naive and kind/angry and political that he flaunted it in the face of Victorian society. I also appreciate him for his writing and for the weird and fascinating things he said. Finally I appreciate him for actually trying to change society to the better for oppressed groups he did not himself belong to, even if he wasn’t that successful. I do believe one can both critisise and admire a person. And in the case of Oscar Wilde I feel (however, I did have three months once when we weren’t at all on speaking terms, me and Oscar) that the issues surrounding him doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person. It makes him a person I might slap in the face when I meet him in heaven. But the good he did, the good he wanted to do makes him a person i believe I will want to hug as well. (Nb not condoning slapping people in the face that’s a figure of speech)

I believe Oscar Wilde was a child of his time. It doesn’t condone him. I want to stress that. However, we are all children of our time and if we only were able to appreciate people that never said or did anything that doesn’t live up to 21th century morals, I don’t think we would be able to appreciate anyone. Right now I’m reading Sylvia Plath for instance, and what she writes is ten times as racist as anything I’ve read by Oscar Wilde. She too describes flirting with, and thinking of starting a relationships with, a man she believes is 16 (it’s a short passage in The Bell Jar but I thought I would mention it since 16 is the age the youngest man Oscar had a relationship with was). She lived and wrote more than half a decade after Oscar Wilde’s death. I still appreciate her. Again, will I slap her in the face? Yes. But I still appreciate the good she did.

#sorry for ranting #Oscar Wilde

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maries-gallery · 3 years

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Match up for @leonardhoee

Match ups are closed

@leonardhoee

Wow, so first you literally seem so cool ?? And I actually relate to a lot of things you said (crazy how you doing match ups makes you discover new things about yourself too...) Anyways !

I match you with Leonardo !

SFW :

- Okay, the two of you would click together so well. He knows how to read people and wouldn't be taken off by your intimidating aura at all. He actually sees it for what it is, a first impression. This would make him curious about you though and he'd certainly approach you right the day after your arrival. And he is really pleased with what he discovers ! You are actually very easy going and agreeable to talk to ! He is actually very amused by your cocky exterior (especially if you are to interact with Theo) but once again Leonardo is smart and mature enough to know that arrogance is only another name for insecurity. Overall he just really likes your company and the more time you spend together, the more he learns about you, the more he finds himself carried away by your energy. He is a bit taken aback by your punches though, not that it irritates him or anything but he just isn’t used to it, he’d laugh though. You are so small and he is so tall and it is laughable how he becomes a big teddy bear in your presence.

- At first the two of you would probably be very good friends and nothing more. The both of you are just very passionate and both knowledge seekers and huge curious bugs. He loves to talk with you and spend hours rambling about anything he learned or hearing you talk about any theories you may have; all with the flicker of passion in your eyes. Luckily for you, he is also well informed on most things and very eager to answer any of your questions. This dynamic thus leads the two of you to share very long conversations in the library, often stretching out throughout the night and until dawn (Sebastian would often find the two of you napping in the library during the day as a result). You just have so much fun together and you marvel at how easy it is to be yourself around him, he just makes you comfortable beyond belief. He never judges you about your rambles, or your weird research and theory or anything truly. And gosh is this a breath of fresh air ! On the other hand he loves to have someone he can talk and have fun with, someone at his side who matches his energy to a T.

- But as your relationship evolves and as time passes he gets to see new sides of you which only spurs his blossoming feelings on. You start to open up and so does he. Leonardo is in love. He loves how supportive and caring you are when it comes to your friends and to him, he is often the one taking care of others and it is honestly cute and heartwarming how you, a human, take it upon yourself to care for him, a pure blood. Then there is your smile... How he loves it, honestly he’d take any chance he got to put a smile on those lips. It’s just so bright and light, so expressive and yet so natural for you. He also finds your temper quite cute, of course he takes your irritation seriously, don’t get him wrong, but he just loves to know that you are able to stand up for yourself ! And honestly, your banters with Theo are just hilarious. Then he always thought you were beautiful but when you tell him about your modelling experience he is just whipped and so very admirative ! He doesn’t know what modelling is but he understands it as you being a muse of art of some sort (which is kinda the case), so you might have to explain to him what it is. But regardless, this doesn’t change how he feels, you are amazing. But then again modelling isn’t the only thing you do, no you are kind of a whirlwind when it comes to your hobbies and that is amazing ! From martial arts (which reassures him in a sense, you have some ways of defending yourself and he couldn’t be more glad) to drawing, reading and singing... He’d ask you about all of your hobbies and experiences. He just wants to know everything.

- Once you get in a relationship nothing really changes between the two of you, you are still the best of partners and friends, you still laugh together and ramble on and on about whichever topics you find interesting. What does make a difference is how you are both more affectionate towards one another though. Leonardo loves to cuddle with you and nap around with you in his arms, it is just the best way for him to unwind. He is also very flirty and loves to fluster you as he knows your flirting abilities aren’t the best (he finds the blush on your cheeks so adorable, he could flirt with you all day).

- Dates ? Probably shopping trips around town or explorations of new places. He also loves it when the two of you just sit down in the library and talk for hours or read silently. He also loves when you sing to him and would accompany you with a violin or the piano. Then he’d probably ask for you to model for him as he sketches you in one of his many notebooks. But honestly, the two of you could do anything together and he’d be all for it.

- But then the two of you are also more open and more vulnerable around one another, you tell him about your past, about your social anxiety (which he had picked on) and your tendency to overthink. Now, Leonardo makes sure that you know that you can talk to him, he wants you to come to him if you one day doubt his love for you. But honestly with the way he looks at you, completely love drunk and how many words of affection he throws your way there won’t be a lot of days you’ll find yourself doubting. And if it is about something else you are overthinking, he is ready to listen and sort things out with you, to help you through it and care for you. He also wants you to know that these sides of you and your emotions are not a burden. He noticed how you tend to hide your emotions or swallow them and bury them, but he’ll have none of that. You have the right to be emotional and to lean on someone every once in a while, this does not make you weak but human. Honestly he’ll never see you as any less of a strong woman because of some tears trailing down your cheeks. So yeah, expect him to be your very own emotional coach. When it comes to your social anxiety he is also very protective of you in public, and ready to whisk you away from crowds or events if at some point it is too much for you.

- Really your relationship is just wholesome. You’re both very supportive of each other and fiercely protective of one another, Leonardo is always there to reassure you and communication is very fluid between the two of you. You made it a point to be honest to one another and speak up in case of an issue between the two of you and problems are dealt with efficiently and maturely... It is just very safe and very comfortable for the both of you, and you won’t have it any other way. You balance each other perfectly too, him being very laid back and relaxed and you being more anxious and on point. You help each other out and bring out the best in one another.

Song :

Ophelia, The Lumineers

Scenario :

The shuffling of fabric came from the dressing room, golden eyes flickering under the lights of the shop as a certain brown haired man observed the dresses around him, foot tapping at a steady rhythm in the wooden floor. He leaned back in the plush armchair, a smile curving his lips as the curtains finally drew back to reveal your form.

The two of you had been strolling down the streets, enjoying the warm sun on your skin and the cool wind caressing your cheeks when you spotted a shop down the main street. Leonardo could still remember the excitement bubbling in your eyes and the huge smile adorning your lips as you took his hand and walked to the small boutique. The two of you had spent a few minutes outside, looking at the vitrine and the shop itself. From what you could see they had a very wide range of dresses and outfits, all coming in different styles and different shapes and colours. A real candy store for the eye.

“Can we stop there ?” You had queried, eyes looking back at him, bright as the sun above you. And of course you could, he couldn’t refuse you anything, not when you looked at him like this, not ever. Plus, he really loved shopping with you and seeing you try on new outfits.

Fashion had never been his priority, comfortable and effortless looks suit him to a T after all. But when you had told him about your job back in the 21th century and your love for fashion he slowly started to look into it and found himself liking it ! Of course he didn’t have your knowledge on the matter but he enjoyed every time the two of you would enter a shop, trying on things and making your very own runways in the middle of racks and dressing rooms. This was just like you.

You walked out of the dressing room, sporting a long black dress, elaborate and breathtaking. But whether it was the dress in itself or simply your own charm, Leonardo could not tell. You looked good in everything.

You approached him, eyes holding his as you walked confidently.

“So, what do you think ?” You questioned, a side grin curving your lips. To be honest you really liked this dress.

“What can I say, Cara Mia ? It looks gorgeous on you.” He said, standing up from the armchair and walking up to one of the racks before retrieving one of the outfits hung there.

“Though you also looked ravishing in this suit.” He grinned holding up a black suit you had tried on beforehand.

And he was right, it suited you very well too and was very comfortable as well. But women in suits didn’t exactly crowd the streets in 19th century Paris...

“I agree.” You replied, a hand to your chin as you observed the fabric, it felt nice to the touch, silky and light. “Though this would earn me some glares.” You said with a chuckle.

And that’s when you saw it, his trademark smirk and the mischievous glint in his eyes. “Cara Mia would certainly shock the whole of Paris with that.” He admitted, “Though eyes are on you wherever you go already.”

He slowly approached you, arm wrapping around your waist and pulling you against him gently, eyes holding yours captive and your breath hitching in your throat. You could see the admiration he held for you behind those golden irises, the adoration and love flowing through his veins, all for you.

His lips pressed down on your forehead in a light and reverent kiss, the touch like velvet gliding over your skin. He pulled away and offered you a loving smile, your heart swelling in your chest.

“Shall we buy both ?”

NSFW :

- Leonardo is definitely dominant in bed, though he wouldn’t mind if you wanted to take the reins one day (he’d actually find it quite sexy and exciting), but yes generally speaking he is on top. He just loves having control over your body and your pleasure, loves hearing you whimper and see you writhe on the sheets as he brings his fingers here or there, his touch lighting your skin ablaze and setting off raw passion in your bloodstreams. But even so, Leonardo is playful and he loves teasing you so his favourite position has to be cowgirl. He gets to hold onto your hips, his favourite part of you, and to enjoy the view of you pleasuring yourself on him. But don’t be mistaken, he is the one in control here. He is the one to control the circles you draw with these ravishing hips of yours, the one to control your pace and movements, the one to thrust up into you, the moans you let out and the pleads for him to go faster like melody to his ears. A close second would be missionary though, he gets to see your flushed face, kiss and suck on your neck and jaw as you reach your peak.

- Pace wise sex with Leonardo is always passionate and intense, the man being both himself. And most of the time he starts out with slow languid thrusts and movements, to get you warmed up but also to tease you and have you begging for more. Then he is rough, filling you up perfectly and hitting all the right places, hands gripping your hips in a tight hold to keep you steady and in place as he pleases the both of you. Same when he goes down on you (gosh, is he good at it too), his tongue would flicker over your clit and lap at your entrance with so much fervour you actually lose your mind. He is just very skilled and sex with him never leaves you unsatisfied.

- When it comes to kinks, Leonardo is very adventurous and... kinky. So he is willing to try anything with you as long as you talk about it first and both agree on the idea. But his top favourites are overstimulation and bondage. Leonardo loves to take care of you and to pleasure you... But he also loves to ravish you and you bet one orgasm from you isn’t enough for him, he’d pull them out of you like music from a finely tuned violin, eyes drinking in the way your skin flush and your eyes scrunch close as another wave of pleasure crashes onto you, how you lose your mind over the number of times you’ve fallen over the edge. As for bondage, he loves to tie you up and simply tease you to no end, hearing your moans and pleads and seeing your body writhe under his gets him so very hard. Then he also has a non negligible daddy kink and loves to take care of his princess, or punish her, in function of how you behaved. Finally he is one for nice lingerie, a black or red set gets him on his knees for you, ready to pleasure you and give you all of him. You just look so beautiful the breath is knocked out of his lungs.

- Leonardo isn’t particularly one to moan (though the occasional times he does let some moans out of his filthy mouth these are the most beautiful sounds you’ve ever heard). But he grunts and sighs in your ears, his breath caressing your skin and sending blissful shivers down your spine. Though his favourite thing ever is to talk dirty in your ear, let you know all the things he’s going to do to you, how good you’re doing for him and how much he loves you. He is very confident in his ability to get you off with his words alone and rightfully so. However if you are to talk dirty to him he loses his mind, a flush immediately taking over his cheeks and eyes wide and brimming with unabashed desire. On another point, when he comes he tends to hold your hand and lace your fingers, head buried in your breasts or shoulder as he whispers how much he loves you against your skin.

That’s it ! I hope you enjoyed it and that it was worth the wait ! Take care of yourself :)

#ikemen vampire #ikevamp

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inktae · 6 years

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You made me super curious about that veganism essay, if you ever feel like sharing, I'd really appreciate it (no pressure though!). I gave up dairy recently because it gave me almost daily headaches and I'm considering going fully vegan (I never really ate a lot of meat to begin with), but I find it really hard to make up my mind. I feel like a lot of the information out there is very us-centric too and doesn't really apply to me, so I'd love to hear a more European/international approach ^^

I did end up translating it, so here you go! :)

a few things I need to point out: I wrote this for a middle school student, so I didn’t delve too much into scientific facts — so please take everything I say with a grain of salt and do your own research if you’re curious, because these are things I learned after reading a lot of studies from certified nutritionists and medical researches.

I also most likely got a little preachy at times (sorry) but please remember that I’m not judging anyone because that is never my intention. I wrote this while keeping in mind that this girl needed it for a school debate where she needed to try and convince people of veganism, which is exactly what I tried to do. ^^” if you are still curious after reading and want to know what kind of documentaries to watch, let me know and I’ll be happy to lead you in that direction.

There are plenty of reasons to approach veganism, or to at least adopt some of the vegan principles into your everyday life; but the most important ones are health, the industry and the planet, and ethics.

Although a healthy diet does not necessarily need to be vegan, a plant based diet can be very beneficial for your body, especially for people with certain chronic diseases, deficiencies or to simply improve your overall health. It has been long since proved that nutrition is tightly linked to the reduction of particular symptoms and the improvement of the quality of life, and a plant based diet definitely carries these benefits. Personally speaking, veganism got rid of my migraines and stabilized my (otherwise disastrous) hormonal situation. It is also proved by nutritionists that a balanced vegan diet, based in real and varied foods, can cover almost every deficiency (except B12, which I will talk about in a second).

One of the myths that worry non vegans the most is the supposed lack of proteins in a plant based diet. This does not suppose any issue at all, as plant based foods are abundant in proteins and it is quite easy to reach the necessary daily intake as long as the diet is varied. A great example are grains — chickpeas, beans, lentils (these in particular are not considered complete proteins as they don’t carry all the amino-acids, but they can easily be completed by including another food that has said amino-acid into your diet, like rice, for example), tofu, tempeh, soy, etc. Plant based proteins are even of higher quality than animal based.

When it comes to supplementation, the only one that is absolutely necessary is B12. This vitamin comes from a bacteria which animals obtain from the ground and the food they’re fed (animals do not have the ability to manufacture vitamin B12), and we would obtain it if we did not wash our vegetables (which we obviously have to do), so it is not necessarily a bacteria that comes from the animals themselves. In some cases they’re even supplemented with said vitamin.

Plenty of people might argue that taking B12 supplements means that it is not a “natural” way of living or that we are not “designed” to be vegan, but in a world where we’re surrounded by technology, where we use phones and cars on a daily basis, what is natural is very relative and what is unnatural does not necessarily mean it’s harmful. The 21th century allows us to be vegan quite easily and that’s what truly matters, not that we were carnivores in the past. It may have been true that millions of years ago it helped us evolve, but we live in a time when we can lead a completely normal life without eating animals, especially if we take into account how harmful and dangerous the industry (industrial farming) has become.

Which leads me to my next point: the industry and the planet. The industry has definitely worsened over the years, as the more it expands and the more its production grows, the quality of the food gets worse and a piece of meat of one hundred years ago is completely different to the one they might sell you today, which is filled with chemicals, antibiotics, hormones… just so the animals grow faster and bigger and taste better. All of this is harmful for the human health (which is a longterm process you might not notice until you’re of adult age. After all, deficiencies take a long time to show up) and it also affects the quality of life of the animals. Unfortunately, there are very few regulations in the industry (both in America and in Europe), which continues to destroy natural landmarks and plays a huge part in the deforestation of the planet. This occurs because the industries need insane amounts of land to be able to grow the crops that serve as food for the animals. If you think about it, it’s quite illogical to destroy so much land to feed the animals that people will then feast on as processed meat full of hormones, instead of directly giving those crops to all the poor people around the world who have no food to get by.

At the same time, it is proved by diverse studies that animal farming produces more greenhouse gases than all of the transport clumped together, which has a huge effect on the planet and global warming. It is also a completely unsustainable system, as the demand continues to rise towards insane levels that the industry can’t even keep up with, which only worsens the deforestation issue. We have reached a point where every second more than three thousand animals are killed in inhuman ways, which only gets worse overtime. All of this is proved and studied through statistics (I really encourage everyone to do their own research on this), but most environmental organizations do not raise awareness as they are sponsored by the same powerful industries (Greenpeace, for example, is sponsored).

(now I get a little graphic on the following paragraphs, please avoid if you’re too uncomfortable about animal torture. Carry on after the *)

When it comes to ethics, I believe that everyone (or most people) would recoil if they saw the living conditions of these animals. As I mentioned before, there are not enough regulations in the industry that look out for the way they live, and the abuse and mistreatment of the animals is quite normal all over the world (even though I did my research through american studies, I was surprised to see that here in Spain it is actually way worse).

These industries only care about selling meat, not the animals. They’re beaten up, tortured, locked in enclosed spaces where they can barely move, they get so fat that their legs break under their weight, the hens get their beaks cut off (they are crammed so close together, they try to peck each other due to stress), and the chicks are gotten rid off by crushing them alive or getting thrown in the trash, where they asphyxiate due to lack of oxygen. It is quite cruel, and there are plenty of videos and documentaries where you can see that this is in fact very real. Earthlings is the most famous one.

Another discussion is related to organic meat, and if it is a good option when faced against veganism. Though it might be true that some companies treat their animals better, it is hard to be 100% certain as the regulations (and advertising tactics) can be quite confusing and ambiguous. In some places of the world it can be legal to say a product is organic just because the cages of the animals are just slightly bigger. From an ethical point of view, veganism is still the better choice. When it comes to health, I have to recognize that experts accept that there are lesser risks by eating high quality meats (except red meat, which is still unadvised by nutritionists) but if you compare how much you would spend a month eating organic meats against a whole foods plant based diet (without any processed junk or vegan substitute meats - they tend to be quite expensive, and that’s where the myth of veganism being expensive comes from) then the latter option is way cheaper and more comfortable.

One last argument I have to acknowledge is that veganism is said to be too “extreme”. In my opinion, it should not be considered something extreme or negative to do something good for your own body and for the planet, where the pros definitely outshine the cons. Meat should not be considered an essential staple into your diet, or something you need to be happy — if anything, it should be something additional, and it is crazy to think how so many people view vegetables that way when it should be the other way around. It should not be extremist to base your way of living around plant based sources, not when our society has forced people to believe that meat is essential for a healthy, happy living when it is far from the truth.

It is true that each case has to be treated differently, because each body is different and certain foods will suit some people better than others, but it is something relatively easy to delve into as long as you do your extensive research and are aware of what you’re doing. Veganism is not extremist at all as long as you have the knowledge and the support of a professional, as any changes in your diet (not necessarily related to veganism) needs to be monitored by a doctor.

Veganism should not be perceived that way — because in my opinion, it is mainly focused on reducing animal suffering in the best way we can. It is not absolute. It is not giving up everything in your life. We cannot solve all the problems of the world, but we can make an effort into supporting one cause and having a positive influence in it within our possibilities. We are only human, and just because we are defending one cause in particular (in this case, animals), it does not makes us hypocrites nor insensitive to human issues. There will always be unjust situations we will not be able to solve, and it is in our hands to choose our own battles.

Being vegan does not mean torturing yourself for it, it does not mean to stop enjoying life or getting obsessed with food just to “live a few years longer”. One argument I always see is that we will die sooner or later, so we have to live the way we want to and in the best way possible without worrying too much about those causes or the way we nourish our bodies. But if you truly want to lead an optimal, happy life, and leave a good print before you leave this world, should it not mean giving your body good, delicious and healthy foods that affect positively both your health and the animals, so you can lead an even better life? it is quite disappointing to see that veganism and a healthy plant based lifestyle are so related with “unhappiness” or “obsessing yourself” when it is the complete opposite. When it is done for the right reasons, when it is done right, it does not suppose any major struggle and it can turn around your life for the better. A well balanced plant based diet can even give you a better emotional wellbeing (scientifically proved), which inevitably comes with more happiness.

It is not extreme, it is simply making an effort (which can obviously be hard at first, but easily becomes natural as long as you do it right). Even just going to a restaurant and ordering the vegetarian menu instead of the one with meat does so much good, because you’re creating demand for those kind of products and are showing the world that there is growing interest in this kind of lifestyle.

And I have to add that even though I do defend veganism, I also defend small steps, and that being conscious of these situations and trying to approach some of the ideals of veganism (like meatless mondays, for example), is already beyond incredible in itself, and it is something anyone could easily do. I am sure that a lot of people would genuinely consider the entire transition if they at least tried some of these small steps and saw how easy and fulfilling it is. The sensation you get when you know you’re doing something good (for yourself and for the planet) when there is no meat on your plate is quite indescribable, even more pleasing than the act of eating meat. There are just too many advantages to this kind of lifestyle, and I promise it is truly worth it in the long run.

#no hate pls #just peace and love #messages #Anonymous

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cycyno · 6 years

Text

Excuse me while I scream a bit

I’m usually not one to rant like this, but the fact that Disney bought 21th Century Fox is bugging me.

Okay. Don’t get me wrong. Sure, Disney does good things. It makes great movies and what not.

But Fact is: Marvel and Disney work as good together as water and an open electricity source.

I’ve been a Marvel Comic Fan for AGES. I’ve read dozens of comics, I know hundreds of different characters that aren’t even in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and for that I am - as it currently stands - pretty grateful.

But what is it that bugs me so much?

For starters: Black Widows sudden change of character. She goes from a super badass agent (who is ALSO a woman) to a desperate woman in the need of love (who is ALSO an agent). She gets oversexualized and is far too emotional for what we have seen from her so far, in comics AND movies. She is suddenly super vulnerable, wants to settle down with Bruce (of whom she was afraid since their first meeting)?? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me for a woman, who is basically the born agent and even says in her comics that NOONE in this business should have kids or family EXCEPT if they are Luke Cage. Also, what’s wrong with Bruce? Sure, he wants a normal life but why does HE have to be the one to speak sense into Natasha? Why does he have to be the strong one when Natasha is actually the one that is always collected, keeps her emotions hidden and is strong. God, this woman is usually so strong. Then: Quicksilver. Tell me, why again did you kill him off? Sure, there is maybe a chance he’ll come back but how are you going to explain that?

Next: Spiderman. The whole Spiderman-Origin is just thrown away and everything that Peter usually discovers for himself is now covered up by Tony? Tony is suddenly a saint and has to tell people how to do right? Why doesn’t Peter get it himself?? That’s what makes him a hero, that’s what always made him a hero! He didn’t just want to be part of the avengers and became a hero because of that. No, he became a hero because it was the right thing to do and THEN he wanted to join the avengers after figuring everything out himself. The side-characters are just there to cheer for Peter. All of them have as much character as a cooked potato and have the significance of a little dust on a counter. They are just there to make Peter look great and human. No personality, no depth. Just plain blank paper with nothing written on it except: Peter Parker. Flash Thompsons whole character changed from badass and mean bully-jock who always beat up peter to a loser in some science class? Since when was Flash smart? Aunt May just gets younger and younger by each passing day as it seems. Maybe a Benjamin Button case. Who knows. Dermatologists hate her. Basically there for the sex-appeal. Who was that girl peter was in love with anyway? Ah, nevermind. She’s gone. Mary Jane was just super annoying and nothing like we know her. What the actual fuck. (I could go on forever about this movie but I won’t.) AND NOW I GET TO THE POINT: So. There’s Disney. Trying to be super family friendly (yeah, we get it, you also use swear-words and what not blah blah blah) and now they have Deadpool and the rights of X-Men in their hands? So, tell me, how is it going to go with Deadpool? Sudden change of character? Is he now super family friendly and all the blood is covered up so that NOONE in the damn audience will even get a glimpse of how Deadpool is really like in the comics and former movies? What about cable? Ryan Reynolds said something about having a Boyfriend for Deadpool in the movies. Since Deadpool is pansexual and Nathan Summers aka Cable is basically his ultimate man-crush, even in the comics. Is Disney going to ignore that and just throw a random other romance in for the upcoming movies? Like they did with Natasha and Bruce? Or Steve and Agent 13? (Yes, they had something going on in the comics, but there was much more story behind it than just talking to one another TWICE) Heteronormanity is a giant problem, and I don’t know how Disney wants to handle that. Or how it wants to handle R18 Stuff anyway. Let’s see. For now, I’m pissed and super done with everything. Might as well dug into some old comics now, since Disney doesn’t seem to care much for the origin of characters.

Rant off.

(Friendly reminder that this is my opinion. Agree with it or don’t. I just needed to let go of some steam)

#marvel comics

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ii-thiscat-ii · 7 years

Text

Hey, do you remember my horribly self-indulgent Hogwarts AU? Well, now there’s more of it. 10k words of prequel, in fact. On the upside, I think I won against my writers block. It took half a year, but I did.

On Ao3

At a corner table of the outdoors section of a small London café one summer afternoon relatively soon after the turn of the millennium, a creature of incomprehensible power haphazardly folded into the shape of a young man approximately two decades of age sat reading a newspaper in which the pictures moved. He talked as he read. An outside observer might think he talked to himself, and maybe he did.

“Wizards,” he muttered, turning a page apathetically. “Such boring, unchanging creatures. Stuck centuries in the past of everyone else.”

But things have been changing recently, haven’t they? It’s the 21th century. With the advent of the internet, you know muggle-borns won’t accept their antiquated practices as superior much longer. Not with the way the world is changing. And the world is changing. Things are starting to get more interesting.

He turned another page and paused at a headline. A small smile crossed his face.

“Maybe, maybe. I nothing else it could be interesting to watch the stubborn old buggers be forced to confront the world progressing.”

Considering all their spells are still developed on principles that reject modern technology as a matter of nature. It will be a tough transition.

His smile widened as he read the article. “They’d have to finally admit that theirs is not the only kind of magic. Yes, that might be interesting to see. Maybe I do want to give them that push. A wizard, huh…”

You have been wanting to try this for a while.

A woman’s voice cut through his muttering. “About time, isn’t it?”

He looked up from the paper to see the owner of the voice stand by his table with a new cup of tea and a paper of her own. Her skin was lightly coloured and her hair was long and unwieldy, tied back to keep out of her face.

He put the paper down without closing it, displaying the title, ‘New Law Passes! The Definition of Human Redefined?’

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a victory for basic logic, sure, but as far as I’m aware, there doesn’t exist anyone yet who will actually be affected by this one.”

“That’s not the point!” she said. Then she smiled a little sheepishly. “I’m sorry, may I sit down? I should’ve asked.”

He gestured for her to sit and she did. “Then what is the point?” he asked.

“Well… it’s a first step. It seems like such a small thing, right? It’s just saying that anything that is indistinguishable from a human in any way must be treated as a human, and that’s not a difficult thing to agree with, especially since no homunculi that good have ever been created, but it’s about the change in attitudes.”

He sat back with an expression of polite curiosity and tilted his head as she took a deep breath to continue.

“It’s not that far, mentally, from ‘you don’t need human parents to be human’ to ‘you don’t need to be human to have human rights’. Not really, not if we play it right, and that’s really what we’re trying to do, right? Make sure what you’re allowed to do and what people are allowed to do to you depends on your capacity for understanding and not whether you belong to this particular species. This is the first step towards that, and we can build on it.”

He picked up his own cup and smiled into it, while she had set her down to gesture. “I admit I wouldn’t mind human rights,” he said.

She froze and closed her mouth with a click. “Oh,” she said, and instinctively ran her eyes over him.

His smile widened. “You couldn’t tell, can you.”

“Ah, no I-” she said, faltering. “I’m sorry, I was just surprised. Do you mind if I ask?”

He gestured for her to continue with a wave of his hand.

“Werewolf?” she asked tentatively.

“Really,” he said. “You of all people should know werewolves are just as human as the rest of you.”

“Well, not all people think so,” she said with an apologetic smile. She fidgeted with her cup on the table, and suddenly she was not quite sure where to look. She might have been staring a bit. “I’m sorry, I just- I honestly can’t tell, and I can’t think of any non-humans that can pass that convincingly.”

He took a sip from his cup and chuckled. “I’m not surprised. There’s more between heaven and earth than you wizards are aware of.”

“Oh,” she said, and went back to studying him.

He gave her a strange feeling. It was like unrest, made her fidget on her chair as if she should be moving, walking away. His eyes, following her every movement, were filled with amusement. Every part of him looked utterly human, and she could not quite understand what about him made her so convinced he was telling the truth. It took her a minute to realize he was not blinking.

“Technically,” she said with a dismissive snort, trying to calm herself down a little. “I’m a witch, not a wizard.”

His amused smile stayed the same, but he raised an eyebrow. “What’s the difference?”

“Well, I’m female, for one.”

“Still can’t see a difference,” he said, draining his cup.

She paused for a moment. “Was that some kind of insult?” she asked.

He laughed, and closed his eyes as he did so, which made him look a smidge more human. “It was mostly a comment on human gender norms,” he said, “but if you want to know the truth, ‘witch’ was a word wizards stole some eighteen hundred years ago when they didn’t want their women to be called the same as themselves anymore.”

“Stole from who?” the woman asked, blinking.

“The witches, obviously,” he replied with a grin.

She gave him a dry look.

His grin widened before he continued. “Again I’m not surprised. There weren’t many of them in the first place before your predecessors exterminated them, and they weren’t quite as… loud… as you tend to be. It wasn’t too difficult for them to hide the records of their actions from history.”

A minute or three passed in horrified silence. Well, she was horrified. She had a feeling that if anything could horrify him, she did never, ever want to see it. She thought. He turned a page in his newspaper and chuckled at a notice in the margin.

“If you don’t mind,” she said, eventually. “How do you know this, if they erased it so well?”

“Hm?” he looked back up. “I was there. It was worth seeing.”

“Oh,” she said again, then, quieter, “I imagine you don’t have the best impression of wizards, huh?”

He shrugged. “Eh, it’s human nature. You’ve been getting a lot better lately.” He indicated the article that had prompted her into approaching him in the first place. “I can’t really dislike you too much when you give me opportunities like this.”

“Uh-huh?” she said. Her hands were shaking. She forced them flat on the table. “What opportunity, exactly?”

“There doesn’t exist anyone for this law to apply to… yet. Right?”

He grinned sharply. As she processed the implications of his statement, he neatly folded up his paper and put it down on the table. Then he got up.

“Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, Ma-am. I enjoyed our conversation, but if you don’t mind, I have places to be.”

She could only nod dumbly at him, and then he was gone.

It took her a few moments to convince herself that he had in fact been there. The newspaper folded up on the table beside the empty cup, along with her own nearly untouched cup indicating a conversation partner proved it.

It just felt like he had never been there.

One moment he was, and another he was gone, the moment in-between conspicuously missing.

She drew a deep breath and drank her cooling tea.

She had a lot of thinking to do. There was research to be done, things to set in motion. The world was moving and she wanted to be one of the people moving it.

She had a strange feeling they would all have to be ready to run sometime soon.

---

The creature shed his disguise once he came into the confines of his own home. Still, he snickered.

“Ah, that was hysterical,” he said to himself and whoever else might be listening. “I’ll never get tired of doing that to people.”

She did stop talking very quickly.

The creature laughed at that for a few more minutes before he calmed down. “Well,” he said. “If I’ve decided to do this I might as well get started.”

A few movements were made in a dimension any human present would have trouble processing, and a bright point of light started growing in the middle of the space. The creature fuzzed at it and poked at it as it grew. Soon it faded, losing the glow to reveal a red, fleshy lump, and still it grew.

It started taking shape, and move around a little under its own power, and the creature grinned and hummed a melody that shore through the fabric of sanity with a single piercing note. He was happy with himself. The lump growing, floating in the air did not seem to notice.

It settled, eventually, pushing at the membranes confining it with small, chubby hands, and the creature reached up with a pair of hands of his own, momentarily almost human-like, and caught it as it ripped free.

“Hello there, little one,” the creature said.

“Nyah!” said the baby.

The next grin the creature gave once again had a veneer of humanity, if a flimsier one than he had shown the woman at the café.

“You’re going to need someone with more specific human experience than I have, aren’t you?” he asked the baby.

The baby sucked its thumb in reply.

The creature considered this. “Five years, maybe?” he wondered, and then his human shell solidified, and at once he was a child, barely big enough to hold the baby in his arms. Another adjustment and they stood on the floor of a small, empty apartment.

You have a lot of hard work ahead of you.

The child looked down at the baby he held and smiled. “Hard, maybe,” he said, “but I bet it’ll be interesting.”

---

A few years later, a certain woman walked down a block of apartment buildings. This was not the first home she had visited this week, and it would not be the last, but it was important work, so she could deal with being a little tired.

Double-checking the address, she walked up to an apartment on the third floor and knocked on the door.

A boy of about eleven years opened it, and something about him make her pause for a couple seconds before she smiled at him. “Hello,” she said. “Are you Tyrone Evergreen?”

The boy tilted his head, looking up at her, and then smirked. “Yeah. Are you from the school?”

“Ah, yes,” she said, caught off guard. “Well, I don’t actually work for the school, normally, but this is a busy time, so they called me in to help out. Are your parents at home?”

“No,” the boy said, still smirking. Then he opened the door all the way. “You can come in though.”

She thanked him and followed him into the apartment. He led her to a couch and then walked towards where the kitchen had to be.

“You want tea or something?” he said.

Something about the way he moved put her off. Something about his face, or in his voice. She could not quite put her finger on it, but it made it impossible for her to relax into the couch properly.

A quick glance around the apartment revealed a couple of chairs and a table, frames on the wall with the default pictures from the store still in them, and a few scattered items, but it did not really look like the home of a family. It struck her as lacking something, as if it was fake, constructed by someone who almost knew what a house should look like, but who had not lived in one for any large amount of time.

“Hello?” Tyrone said, and she realized she had not answered his question.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Could you repeat that, you think?”

Instead of complying, he studied her for a few seconds. “What are you worrying about?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I thought maybe you look a little familiar. Have we met before?”

She said it with a joking smile, so when he grinned and said, “Sure,” it took her by surprise. “Six years ago, at a café a few miles south of here. You were excited about legal reforms and I was reading a newspaper.”

A cold chill ran down her spine as she remembered, and it took her half a minute to remember how to breathe. “Oh,” she said, and he grinned.

“So, do you want tea?” he asked.

“I think I might want a drink,” she muttered.

He laughed and walked into the kitchen. “Oh please, I’m eleven. Do you really think I have access to alcohol?” he said as he pulled a bottle of gin out of a cupboard.

A few minutes later, they were situated on opposite sides of the living room table, with her on the couch and him on a cosy chair. She held a glass of gin and he had a cup of tea.

“So,” she said, voice shaking. She coughed a bit and tried again. “So, I assume you know why I’m here?”

“I’m on the lists for the school and they don’t have any records of my parents,” he confirmed, “so they sent someone to have a chat and make sure we know all the important parts.”

She nodded, then she asked, “Can I ask, how did you even get on the list? You’re not… really… a child, right?”

“Right, well, I’m not gonna claim it was easy,” he said, adjusting his position. “Unless anything else is specified, the Hogwarts registry is enchanted to find and record any child with magical ability within a fairly large range. All I had to do was to make myself similar enough to a wizard child for it to notice me, which was tricky, but not impossible.”

“I see,” she said. “You were right, by the way. About the witches.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You found records of it?”

“I’m not gonna claim it was easy,” she said with a small smile. “it was a long time ago, as you said, and while it was buried pretty deep, no one really cared about hiding it anymore. You gave me a date to start looking for, so a bit of digging through the Ministry’s archived gave me enough to confirm it.”

“Colour me impressed,” he said, and took a drink from his cup.

She had a taste of her own glass, because she had a strong feeling she was going to need it, and that she was going to need something stronger once she got home.

Before either of them said anything else, a small shape ran up to Tyrone’s chair. A shape that on closer investigation was actually a small child. The child whispered something to Tyrone, and Tyrone said something back. The woman’s breathing stalled again as she realized what was going on.

“Ah,” she said. “About six years old?”

The child looked at her and grinned, adorably and far more human than his… family member ever had. “Yeah!” he said.

“Alvie?” Tyrone said, ruffling the kid’s hair. “Do you mind leaving us alone to talk for a bit? There’s cookies in the closet if you want.”

“Okay!” the kid said, and then he ran off, beaming.

The woman stared after him. “You really did,” she said.

“I did,” he replied. “He’s on the list too, in case you’re wondering. I didn’t need any tricks to manage that, it just found him in the usual way.”

She looked back at the… child, in the chair, and took a long sip from her glass. “This is why you’re doing this, isn’t it? For the kid?”

“Oh, you are smart,” he said, grinning. “Yes. He’s my son, after all. I owe him that much.”

She almost laughed. “That’s a little disconcerting to hear from an eleven-year-old, you know,” she said.

The man sitting in the chair across from her was at least halfway through his twenties. She was confused for several seconds before she caught on to what had happened, and after that, the knots her brain tied itself into by trying to remember what had just happened were painfully familiar.

She closed her eyes. “Okay just… stop. Please. Stop doing that.”

When she opened her eyes, he was eleven again, looking at her with a smile on his face. “Okay then,” he said. “Why don’t we have the conversation you came here to have in the first place?”

She nodded, and then she paused. “Do you even need it? I mean, you have your-” No, in fact he did not. She reached into her pocket and pulled out his letter, which she should have handed him to begin with, but had gotten distracted from. She gave it to him now, and he immediately opened it and started reading. “Your list of necessary school supplies, additional information and your ticket for the train. I’m supposed to ask if you need monetary help from the school, but…”

“Yeah, money isn’t an issue,” he said without looking up from the letter.

She nodded again. “I think,” she said, “it’s safe to assume you know where to get it, and don’t need school-provided supervision?”

“Reasonably safe, yes.”

She finished her glass of gin and was grateful for the buzz calming her down. She watched him read the letter and she bit her lip in worry.

He looked almost entirely human like this, head bowed so the hair of his bangs covered his eyes. She thought he might be mouthing words as he went. Then he looked up at her.

“Was there anything else?” he asked.

She considered the question before she answered. “I think I found you in the history books,” she said. “I think I might know what you are.”

His eyebrows went up. “Really? Well now I really am impressed,” he said. “My kind rarely bother with humans as it is, and it’s been ages since any of us bothered with wizards specifically.”

“There are always records,” she said. “Notices. Illustrations and mentions. Myths. Very little specific, and nothing that’s known to be fact and not just ramblings of diseased minds, but I’ve found you there.”

“And?” he asked. “What are you planning to do about it?”

She chewed her bottom lip and thought about her wording. “I don’t think I could stop you even if I wanted to, but I just need to make sure, absolutely sure, that it’s safe to let you loose in a school. You understand?”

“Of course,” he said. “I’d expect nothing less.”

“Is it true that you follow agreements religiously?” she asked.

He put out his hand and tilted it back and forth to indicate ‘more or less’. “Eh. I never break a deal if I can help it, but religion doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I see.” She thought a bit more, and then said, almost to herself, “A deal. Okay, I can do that. How about this?” She raised her voice again. “For as long as you, or anyone you’re directly connected to, attends the school, you promise not to harm anyone that belongs to or is under the protection of the school, and in return I will promise not to tell anyone about your true nature.”

He looked her in the eyes, unblinking, and finished his tea. “You’re not too bad at wording,” he said, eventually. “Anyone I’m connected to?”

“I won’t insist on that including anyone else than your…” she waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the door Alvie had left through, “creations. And possibly anyone you can expect to follow your orders if you feel like giving them.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Almost literally anyone will follow my orders if I really feel like giving them.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“I do, but wording is important.”

She nodded in response. “Subordinates, then. Of any kind.”

“That is fair,” he said. “And by ‘harm’, you mean what exactly?”

“Permanent, long-lasting or otherwise serious damage to mind, soul or body, caused directly or indirectly on purpose.”

“I can tell you’ve been writing laws,” he said, making her smile. “Alright, one last thing. You ‘won’t tell anyone’ means what, exactly?”

“It means I won’t act in any way so that someone other than myself is likely to learn of it. Is that acceptable?”

He leaned his head against the back of the chair, apparently thinking it over before he said, “Yes, I think so. I believe we have a deal.”

He reached his hand out to her over the table.

She hesitated for a moment before she shook it.

“Then, unless there was anything else…?” she fished, leaning forward preparing to get off the couch and really hoping there was not, so that she could leave.

“No, I think that was all,” he said, going back to perusing his letter. “Busy week?”

“Oh, you know,” she said, trying to make small talk as she got up to leave as quickly as politely possible. “Lots of muggle-borns this year. Lots of conversations. They had to call for people like me from outside the school to help, and the workload is still heavy.”

He walked her to the door. “I’m glad it happened, then. It’s been a pleasure to see you again.”

“Likewise,” she replied weakly as she walked out, and if she had drunk a little bit less gin, she never would have said the next line. “I truly hope we never meet again.”

He grinned, and closed the door.

---

Hersheba Hutton-Ollivander had worked at her father-in-law’s wand shop for five years, and officially been his apprentice for three. She fit well into the place, tall and rail-thin as she was, with ghostly pale skin, long black hair that hung in front of her face, not quite hiding her large, too-dark eyes that blinked too little. She finished the look by keeping her nails long, her head bowed slightly, and by wearing a simple, light grey dress. Even people who had known the dusty shop for decades had trouble believing she had not always been lurking in a corner of it.

The shop fit her too. The work delighted her, the precision and, yes, the creativity of it. The way she could spend hours, days in her half-lit workroom, breathing life into something few considered alive. She took to it like fish to water, and these days she could almost always match a wizard to a wand on her own with only a little trouble. This year, her mentor had decided to stay in the upstairs workshop, hidden behind a shelf in the storage, instead of helping her at the desk, even at this time of the year, when the children passed through by the dozen to get their wands.

The flow of customers distracted her from her beloved slow and steady work, but it held its own pleasure. Her fingers tingled with warmth each time she successfully found a wand’s child, and the first time a child was chosen by a wand of her own making, her usually small smile could almost be called a grin.

She had rightful faith in her own abilities.

Yet, when the door opened to reveal a boy walking in the door hand-in-hand with a child of maybe six, she listened to the change in the hum in the air, and immediately called for her mentor to help.

“I hope you don’t mind Alvie tagging along?” the boy said, with a hand on the head of the child, who smiled innocently. “He wanted to come with me.”

“All are welcome here,” Mr Ollivander said.

The boy introduced himself as Tyrone Evergreen, and they began the process of finding a wand that wanted him.

Spruce, phoenix feather, twelve inches, average flexibility. “It has a personality, this one. It needs confidence from its wielder, or it may betray you.”

As the first few wands refused him, Hersheba began to worry, which was unusual. Almost no wizard matched with the first wand they tried.

Laurel, unicorn hair, eleven and a half inches, very flexible. “A powerful, trustworthy wand. Well suited for a wizard with ambition.”

It might have been the hum of the wands in the air. They were agitated, growing more so, slowly but surely, and as they were, so was she.

Chesnut, unicorn hair, thirteen inches, flexible. “This wand will learn to suit its wizard. In the right hands it would be an exceptionally reliable wand.”

The child looked at the growing pile of wands with wonder and curiosity. Evergreen absentmindedly ruffled his hair.

Ebony, dragon heartstring, ten and a half inches, rigid. “Suited for powerful spells. This wand could decide the outcome of many duels, though relying on it above your own skills would be a mistake.”

Evergreen himself did not seem to mind as it dragged on, though it might only feel to her as if it dragged on because of the oppressive air developing. He smiled and patiently tried wand after wand, even as one or two of them unusually began to complain with electric shocks to his handling.

Sycamore, dragon heartstring, fourteen inches, very flexible. “This is an unusually powerful wand, ill-suited to a wizard that is anything less than exceptional. However, you must beware the sycamore. It is always looking for something new, and if you allow it to grow bored, it may combust.”

Mr Ollivander was smiling too, a smile she recognized as one of elation. This challenge excited him, and he walked through the storage shelves as fast as his old legs could carry him, picking out increasingly unusual wands. She thought he was searching for something, triangulating from reactions from the wands that she was yet too inexperienced to sense.

Dogwood, phoenix feather, eleven and a half inches, flexible. “This wand will choose a wizard who is likely innovative and mischievous. This one wants to have fun.”

Then, before Evergreen could even reach out for the next wand, the familiar rush of warmth of a wand choosing its wizard rolled through the room. Mr Ollivander froze, new wand half extended. Hersheba squinted at both of them, confused, and Evergreen started, before he laughed, and looked down.

The child had grabbed the sycamore wand from the pile, and now he grinned up at them, hair standing on end. “Oops?”

“Fascinating.” Mr Ollivander leaned in close to the child and adjusted his glasses. “I have never seen a wand match a wizard under the age of nine. Indeed, I was convinced it was impossible for one so young.”

“Does that mean I can keep it?” the child asked, clutching the oversized wand to his chest and looking up at Evergreen with large eyes.

Evergreen smirked, and answered, “If you don’t break anything before we’re done here, we’ll talk.”

The child beamed at him and nodded, and Evergreen looked back at them, holding his hand out for the next wand to test.

Hawthorn, dragon heartstring, twelve inches, unusually flexible. “A powerful wand with a contradictory nature. You might find this wand to excel or fail at tasks that should be all but identical. This is not a simple wand to use.”

Eventually, after an increasing number of violent rejections, Mr Ollivander picked out yet another wand. This time he hesitated just a little before he handed it over.

Hazel, unicorn hair, eleven and a half inches, rigid. “This is a sensitive wand. It will pick up on your thoughts and emotions more easily than any other, but may react badly to… extremes.”

For the first moment after Evergreen took the wand, nothing happened. Then, with a crack, it shattered, splitting lengthwise into several long splinters and leaving a shallow, bleeding cut across Evergreen’s palm.

Hersheba drew a horrified breath at the sight, but Mr Ollivander’s face gained another level of fervent enthusiasm. Evergreen let the pieces of wood and a single fluttering unicorn hair drop to the floor, looked blankly at his hand with an eyebrow raised and absently raised it to lick the blood off his palm.

“I see,” Mr Ollivander whispered, elated. Then he started down the lines of shelves and called out, “Follow me, if you would please.”

He led them to the back of the room, through a door hidden behind a shelf and down two ladders into the sub-basement. There was a storage room here, where raw materials for wands were kept carefully contained. Further in were other things, tools of the trade that the public had never seen, failed experiments and projects that might be dangerous to use or destroy, and other things, stranger things, gathered through a long life of searching for the most potent magical materials obtainable, things that were stored because there was nothing else that could be done with them.

It was out of this collection of items that Mr Ollivander picked a simple wand box.

“When I was young,” he said, carefully running his hand over the lid of the box. “When I was… much younger than I am now, I travelled many places in search of the best materials for wandmaking.”

Evergreen listened politely, and Hersheba intently. She had heard stories beginning like this before, and she had learned to always listen, for they would not be repeated. The child with a wand a third his height in one hand clutched at his relative with the other, and he listened too.

“I don’t remember where I was, exactly,” he continued, beginning to ease the lid off the box, but making no move yet to show them its contents. “It was a forest, somewhere on the continent. Far away from any people at the time.

The room was deathly silent aside from the dry sound of Mr Ollivander’s fingers brushing over the box. Even the hum from the wands seemed distant here.

His eyes were distant too, watching the box, but, she though, watching it as it had been when he first hid it away.

“At some point,” he said, “I contracted a rather serious fever. I became delirious, convinced I was moments away from finding something for which I had been searching for years. As I was alone on my trip, with no one present to stop me, I walked out into the forest in search of it, though I was too ill to walk straight.”

Finally working the lid off the box, he paused, looking into it with a look on his face she could not decipher. Carefully, he put the lid down without taking his eyes off the contents of the box, and then he lightly ran his fingers over its rim.

“I found something, that day. When I searched again later, I could never locate it, but as I remember very little of the trip itself or what I saw when I arrived, it might be my memory failing me. What I do remember is a tree, vast enough to reach the sky over the canopy, leafless and black as soot, yet as alive as any tree can be.”

He stilled his hand and seemed to return to the present, if only a little bit.

“When I woke, from my fever dreams, some days later, there were branches in my tent unlike any I had ever seen before. After some work, I found it to be the single most difficult kind of wood I have worked with in my life, and that is still true today. It rejected any form of wand-core I tried to give it, and eventually I had to settle for making it without one, hoping the wood’s own magical qualities would be enough. Of the wands I did finish, most did not work right. They did not function as sticks, let alone wands for living creatures to touch, or use. They were cut wrong, or they lay wrong in the world, I could never figure it out. I finished, in the end, one single wand of my fever-wood, but before today I did not believe I would ever meet someone capable of wielding it.”

He showed them the contents of the box then, finally.

In it lay a single wand, black as ebony, but not, carved with shallow, intricate patterns that flowed against the grain and seemed to extend beyond the edges of it, or…

She blinked, several times, to make sure there was nothing wrong with her eyes. She heard the child give a sharp intake of breath, but she did not look.

It was hard to tell how long the wand was, or whether it lay in the middle of the box or not. It was hard to tell whether the patterns covered it completely, and if not, which parts they did cover. It seemed to move around itself without ever moving, like something out of a dream. If this was the wand that lay right in the world, she shuddered to think how thoroughly wrong the others must have been.

Mr Ollivander picked it up, sliding his fingers in from the sides of the box rather than attempting to judge where it was to take it directly. Hersheba flinched as his fingers touched the wood.

He held it out, and Evergreen considered it for a moment. Then he picked it up.

Just like that.

Like it was easy.

And all of a sudden it was. Like it fit into a track, the instant the wand touched Evergreen’s skin, it stopped looking wrong. Suddenly, it was just another wand, long and dark with intricate engravings. It fit in his hand as if it had always belonged there, and he twirled it once, traced a glowing golden line through the air, and smiled.

“It suits you,” said the child.

“Thank you, I think so too,” Evergreen replied.

And that was it.

There was no warm rush of recognition and approval, but there did not have to be. None of them could imagine any better pairing than this boy and this wand.

They went back up to the first floor at a different pace.

The hum of magic in the air, once they walked back around the store’s counter, had calmed down to normal levels, and Hersheba composed herself.

They hesitated just a moment at the counter.

“I didn’t break anything,” the child said.

“That’s true,” Evergreen said. “If you promise to keep that up until you start school, I guess I’ll have to let you keep it.”

The child grinned wide and nodded, and so Evergreen took the sycamore wand and held it out together with his own.

“…Legally, we are not allowed to sell a wand for a child under the age of ten,” Hersheba said, hesitant to deny any wizard a wand that had already chosen them.

“Then of course we will not,” said Mr Ollivander, a smile on his face. Then he fixed Evergreen with a stare. “You came here to buy a single wand for yourself, yes? But I don’t believe your wand was even mine to sell. You can take it, but I will not take payment for it. I will sell you a single wand today, and if you choose to use another, that is not on me.”

The child giggled into his hands. Evergreen grinned gleefully, paid eleven galleons for the sycamore wand, and left the shop

The two people left in the shop silently began to put the discarded wands back into their places. It was simple, methodical, calming work, and it was over far too quickly.

“I think I will retire,” Mr Ollivander said eventually. “I believe you still have work to do.”

She nodded acquiescence and turned towards the front door when he had left to see yet another set of parents with their first-year-age child in tow walk in the door. For once, she thought as she stalked in from among the shelves and startled the family, the chatter of the outside world might even be welcome.

---

Thomas was giddy. More than anything else, he was giddy.

Having received final proof just a few weeks ago that not only did magic exist in the world, he was one of the people who could use it, Diagon Alley was what made it feel real.

All the little things, the ruined books he cried over that were just fine the next day, the school bus that stalled at the stop just long enough for him to catch it, the cockroaches that never touched his stuff even when the house was infested with them, those things he could rationalize. He could imagine he had imagined them, or that there was some rational explanation. Even the frazzled woman calling herself a witch appearing on their doorstep with a letter written on parchment and a long and fascinating explanation was hard to believe. Over the time since then, Thomas had repeatedly asked his parents whether it had actually happened just to make sure it had not been just a very vivid dream.

This though, the undeniable magic of this place made it all settle in his mind. He stared through the windows of a shop selling beetle eyes and pickled slugs, and the lump in his throat informing him that he was just going insane dissolved. Diagon Alley was colourful and gorgeous, and he stared and stared and stared.

Bookstores with titles that seemed too fantastical to be true (he glimpsed one in black leather that said ‘Bones in Potions and Alchemy’, and he knew he would want more money for things in this place than he was likely to ever have,) people selling protective charms on the street, creatures that were definitely not human weaving through the crowd, a woman with a fish on a hat that sang sea shanties. They stopped in front of the most intimidating bank building Thomas had ever seen, though to be fair, he had only ever seen one bank before and was not quite sure what was the norm.

His dad stopped, swallowed deeply, and asked for a minute.

If Thomas was giddy, Theo was anything but. He was a muggle to the core, and while he would support his son in anything, he was still reeling from the first shock of finding a witch at his doorstep. The thought of casually walking into a building that all but threatened to kill thieves at the doors… well, he needed a moment to gather himself.

Thomas was fine with waiting. It gave him more time to watch, though he also wanted to go see what Gringotts was like on the inside. He could just barely see the… goblins, she had said it was that worked there, from where he stood, and he wanted to look closer.

As he was craning his neck to see if he could get a better view, the boy approaching him went unnoticed until there was only a meter left between them.

“Hey, you guys need help?” the boy said, and Thomas damn near jumped out of his skin.

The boy was probably around Thomas’s age, though a little shorter, unremarkable appearance, with brown fluffy hair and a plain white T-shirt that still somehow managed to look more expensive than Thomas’s own. The look in his eyes was intense, his smile was sharp, and the tilt of his head put Thomas in mind of the side alleys he had glimpsed on the way to the bank that were dark as dusk despite the gleaming sun. The boy also stood hand in hand with a young child, who grinned like the sun itself.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said, looking back at where his dad looked decidedly pale. “I think we can manage?”

“Hmm-m,” the boy hummed. “Muggle-born, first day in the magical world?”

Thomas grinned sheepishly and scratched his neck. “Is it that obvious?”

The boy grinned back, sharply and slightly off. “You were staring and your father looks like he’s just been dragged through a spell specifically trying to make him forget its existence. You could’ve just never been in the city before, but this time of year this is a better guess.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Thomas said. “You’re also here for your school stuff, or…”

The boy nodded. “Yeah, just gotta get some more cash first. You’re exchanging yours for a currency that actually works, I figure.”

Thomas nodded slowly and glanced back at his dad again, who seemed to be calming down a little. Part of him wanted to grab his dad’s sleeve and drag him along as fast as possible, and another desperately wanted to know everything about what felt so weird about this boy.

The boy suddenly thrust his hand out. “Right, ‘scuse me, I’m Tyrone Evergreen, and this is Alvie.” He gestured to the kid, who looked like he might have just elbowed him in the side. “Nice to meet you.”

“Thomas,” Thomas answered, and took the hand. “Thomas Strange. Nice to meet you too.”

Tyrone tilted his head to the other side and furrowed his brows, and Thomas sighed internally. He was more than familiar with people teasing him about his name, but Tyrone just said, “Are you sure you’re muggle-born? Because that is a very wizard name.”

“Oh,” Thomas said, and then he remembered to pull his hand back from the handshake, which had honestly gone on for a little too long. “That’s good. I mean, are weird names common here, or…? Er, I mean, no, definitely muggle-born.”

Tyrone laughed. “Oh, you have no idea.” Then he addressed the kid at his side. “What was the name of that woman we met last year, again?”

“Lizabella Scorpelflee,” the kid answered, and giggled. “Her hair was full of bugs too.”

“You see?” Tyrone told Thomas. “You’re basically normal here. Hell, people might assume you’re from some old wizarding family and you’ll end up facing less discrimination than you would otherwise.”

“Who knows,” Theo said, having regained some colour, though his smile was still rather frail. “Maybe we are, and just lost the spark. Would explain a few things.” He briefly ruffled Thomas’s hair.

“You never know,” Tyrone said. “So anyways, you want to go with us to get your stuff sorted out? It’s a busy time of day, and the goblins are always happy to get to do two trips at once, to cut down on time.”

Theo nodded almost a little too quickly and gratefully at the offer.

Thomas wondered for a moment if his dad could even sense the weird, dark feeling he got off Tyrone, or if this was another magic thing, or just something he was imagining, but he found himself grateful too when they finally started moving and the hall beyond the doors of Gringotts came into view.

The hall was huge, ceiling domed far above them. Dozens, maybe a hundred doors along the walls opened and closed regularly to admit people through. Ahead of them, a single long counter ran the length of the room. The marble floor was smooth beneath their feet, and their shoes made clear tapping footsteps against it that Thomas suspected would have echoed against the walls if not for the noise of the crowd.

Beside the room, the crowd was the most interesting thing. Hundreds of people of all kinds of interesting shapes and sizes walked back and forth, lined up by the counter and being lead around by the goblins, and the goblins were something else again. One had bowed them in by the door and Thomas had caught himself too late not to stare. They were all business, working diligently at the counter and regarding their clients with the same cold efficiency they did their piles of actual gold coins and other valuables. Here and there, he glimpsed what looked to be non-goblin employees, but the vast majority of them were goblins.

His dad held his hand in a vice grip, obviously feeling very far out of his depths, but Tyrone walked with a casual confidence that made it easy to follow him.

They walked up to a goblin behind the counter who seemed busy idly reading a document, but was otherwise unoccupied. Tyrone stopped in front of… him? All the goblins appeared male, but they looked strange enough that it was hard to tell. Tyrone stopped in front of the goblin and waited politely

The goblin noticed them after a few moments, and looked up. The moment he saw Tyrone, his eyes widened and he hastily folded up the document and put it down.

“Ah, Master Evergreen, forgive me the distraction,” he said. “We have been expecting you.”

Tyrone grinned. “Ominous as always, Pirkratt. I hope you have; I did give word we were coming, after all.”

The goblin nodded gratefully. “Then tell me, what can we do for you today, sir?”

Thomas glanced around the room curiously. The goblins behind the counter seemed mostly cold and professional, efficiently directing people around, but this one, Pirkratt, was smiling. Admittedly a smile filled with small, sharp teeth, but a smile.

Tyrone was smiling too. His teeth were flat, normal human teeth, and they did not suit him at all. “Oh, nothing big,” he said. “We need to get down to my vault, is all. I was wondering, though. Think you could help these guys exchange their money while you’re at it?”

“Certainly.” Pirkratt threw Thomas and his dad a brief, calculating look. “If it will not trouble you?”

Tyrone casually waved him off. “Nah, we’re not busy. Take your time, don’t worry.”

Pirkratt then turned his attention to Theo, and Thomas felt the grip on his hand jolt in surprise before it loosened, and his dad started nervously discussing their money with the goblin.

Tyrone was talking to his little brother, saying something or other in a low voice with a smirk on his face. The boy laughed in response, and Tyrone ruffled his hair.

Thomas showed his hands in his trouser pockets and looked around at the transactions going on along the counter once more. “They’re very polite to you,” he noted.

“Hm?” Tyrone looked up at him.

“I mean…” Thomas gestured vaguely along the counter. “They seem kind of… They’re a lot more polite to you than they are to everyone else.”

Tyrone shrugged. “I have a few titles.”

For some reason the little boy giggled.

“Really?” Thomas said.

“Yep.” Tyrone nodded, and then he said, “Noble titles are actually pretty common among old wizarding families. They don’t really mean anything, and some of them are dirt poor even with them, but they’re a thing.”

“Cool,” Thomas said. “You’re, er, from an old family, then?”

Tyrone looked him straight in the eyes, and a shiver ran up his spine. They were blue eyes, but a dark, solid colour that did not seem quite natural. “We’ve been around for a while,” Tyrone said.

Thomas broke eye contact first, looking over at his dad, who was just handing a small stack of money over to Pirkratt. He had looked into those eyes for no more than three seconds, yet it felt as if it had been a staring contest. One he had lost.

“Yeah?” Thomas said, still looking away and pulling at the collar of his shirt. It abruptly felt a little too small. “How long?”

“Well…” When he looked back, Tyrone was smiling again, and the worst of the feeling had passed. “Our vault is one of the oldest ones in the bank.”

“You’re serious?” Thomas asked, eyebrows raised in surprise and curiosity despite the cold sweat inexplicably running down his back.

“Completely. We helped build it, though you won’t ever hear any goblins admitting that. Anyways, I think we’re about ready to go.”

Thomas looked to his dad again to see that another goblin had materialized next to them, standing on their side of the counter this time.

“Kark will accompany you down to your respective vaults,” Pirkratt said. “Unless you would prefer separate rides, sir.”

“That is perfectly acceptable. Thank you,” Tyrone said, nodding to the goblin behind the counter.

The new goblin, Kark, bowed and gestured them towards one of the walls full of doors. “If you would follow me, Master Evergreen.”

Tyrone gave a little wave and they walked out the nearest door, and the mood changed abruptly. Where the hall had been bright marble and golden embellishments, they were now in a dim, cold stone passage with a set of rails coming out of a torch-lit tunnel.

With a snap of his fingers, Kark summoned a cart that came hurdling up the rails and screeched to a halt in front of them. Tyrone almost immediately walked up and lifted his little brother into it.

“Come on guys. This’ll be an interesting ride.”

Thomas glanced at his dad, who glanced back. The cart did not in any way look safe, but, well, magic. It probably was.

Once they had all climbed aboard, Kark followed them, carrying what looked like a storm lamp. He left it unlit at the floor of the cart, and then they suddenly shot off at breakneck speed.

Thomas broke out laughing, mostly from terror, as they flew by twists and turns more quickly than he could count them. “Where are we going!?” he shouted over the wind.

“Vault 966!” Tyrone shouted back. He sat casually leaned back against the cart as if it was a lounge chair. “It’s one of the ones they keep the bank’s money in, so you can get your exchange!”

As quickly as the trip had started, it stopped, the cart nearly throwing them all out as it screeched to a stop in front of a pair of imposing doors.

“Please stay here wile I get your money,” Kark said. He nimbly leapt out of the cart and walked over to the doors. He spent a moment doing something they could not see, and then he disappeared through the doors.

Thomas’s dad stumbled out of the cart seconds later, then leaned on it with a shaking arm and tried to catch his breath without losing his lunch. “That,” he said, swallowing. “That was bad.”

“It’s awesome!” the kid exclaimed. “It gets even better deeper down. Sometimes they have loops!”

Theo had no answer for that, and so just stared numbly.

“Why would they want loops?” Thomas asked, slightly dubious.

“Security measure,” Tyrone shrugged. “If people are dizzy and throwing up, they’re not about to steal anything. Don’t worry. They almost never take those routes unless they’re worried you’re a thief, and you don’t look like one.”

“That’s good,” Theo said weakly. “Anything else horrible I need to worry about?”

The kid chewed his lips and looked up, visibly thinking. “Umm, I don’t think so, ‘s long as you don’t fall. They don’t even have dragons in here anymore.”

“Dragons?” Thomas sat up, all nausea forgotten. “Really?”

“Yep,” Tyrone said. “They really did stop using those for guards, though. After someone used one of them to break out during the war. Tore down the whole facade on the building.”

“You’re kidding,” Thomas said, almost laughing from glee.

Tyrone gave a predatory grin. “I’m not. It is technically possible to break into this place, but it’s almost always spectacular when it happens, and it never happens twice the same way. This one’s probably in your history books, so you can check that out when you get them.” He tilted his head a smidge. “I actually think I heard that one of the guys who did it is a substitute teacher at the school sometimes, so you might even get to meet him.”

Thomas could only laugh at that. Either way, this was when Kark came back and handed his dad a bag full of gold, and so easily ended that conversation.

“And now to the Deep Vaults, yes?” Kark said, ominously.

“Yes please,” Tyrone answered. “The Lightedge Vault, deep levels.”

Kark nodded, everyone got back in the cart and they set off again.

The pace seemed slower now, but still too fast to be reasonable under any circumstances. Thomas’s dad was white as a sheet, gripping the sides of the cart until his knuckles whitened. Thomas himself hunkered down and gripped the cart almost as hard, straining to watch the rails ahead of them. The little boy stood on his tiptoes, enthusiastically leaning out over the edge and whooping at every turn, with only Tyrone’s hand firmly hooked into his belt to keep him from falling. Tyrone, like Kark, was entirely unbothered.

The rails had been sloping downwards from the beginning. As they passed through the maze and the turns and intersection became less frequent, the slope increased, until they seemed to be falling as often as they were driving. They passed by vaults with intricate carvings on their doors, over ravines into a void below, and through passageways so narrow the cart threw sparks where it hit the walls (Tyrone casually pulled his brother closer.) Still they plunged deeper.

They passed through a stretch where the stones looked less like walls than they did teeth, reaching for them, and Kark lit the storm lamp. Soon after, there were no more torches to light their way, and they could only see by that one, flickering light.

The trail wound down and down, the forks in the road thinning out and the cart slowing down. Soon they were going slowly enough that talking without shouting would be viable, yet no one said anything.

The caves around them were dark as night, the light from the lamp only occasionally reaching walls and heavy, unused vault doors. The rails levelled out, and they passed through expanses that sounded from the echoes like vast, empty caverns, knife-edged crystals growing from the floor around them. They turned a bend and were suddenly rolling alongside the shoreline of a dark lake.

The cart did not screech to a stop this time. It let its momentum bleed out until it parked neatly just at the end of the rails.

“Whoa,” Thomas breathed.

In front of them, a pair of huge doors looked to be embedded in the rock, more as if they had been halfway excavated out than built into it. There was a symbol carved across the top half of them, one that implied sharp things and water, the chill up your back on dark, lonely nights and the sight of glowing eyes in the forest. It slipped from his mind the second he looked away. The mere presence of those doors in his vicinity made something in him scream ‘danger’. He wanted desperately to see what was on the other side.

Tyrone climbed out of the cart and turned around to stop the kid from doing the same. “No,” he said.

“But Tyrooone,” the kid complained. “I want to come too!”

“You stay out of that vault until I know you won’t touch anything that’ll vaporize you,” Tyrone said. Then he continued when the kid opened his mouth to retort, “And don’t argue with that after what happened at the wand shop.”

The kid closed his mouth with a click of his teeth and sat down, pouting.

Thomas saw a chance and took it before he could think too hard about it. “Um, can I come?”

Tyrone blinked, and looked at him. “What?”

“Can I-” He took a deep breath. Well. He had already said it. “Can I come with? To see the vault? I promise I won’t touch anything.”

Tyrone considered him, expression blank. “Well,” he said, eventually. “If you really won’t touch anything unless you’re absolutely sure it won’t hurt you, and your father says it’s alright, I guess that’s fine.”

Thomas immediately turned to his dad while behind him, the kid complained again. “What? Come on! You trust him more than you trust me?”

His dad looked dubious. Behind him, he heard Tyrone answer. “That’s not it. For one thing, I know for sure you can’t be trusted with this, which makes him more likely to be trustworthy by default. For another, if you’re vaporized, it’s my responsibility and I’ll be really sad, because I love you. If he’s vaporized, it’s his own responsibility and also I won’t care.”

Thomas’s dad looked at him and raised a concerned eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

Thomas glanced back at where Tyrone looked impassively at him, then at the doors that seems to have walked right out of his most implausible fantasies. Then he looked back. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure. I’ll be careful.”

His dad closed his eyes and sighed. “Alright. Just- Be really careful.”

“Let’s go then,” Tyrone said, and started walking towards the doors again.

Thomas got out of the cart and scrambled after him.

The doors had no visible opening mechanism that Thomas could see, but Tyrone licked his middle finger and traced a circle across the surface, then he laid his hand flat in the middle.

A ripple of something seemed to spread out across the doors, something in the black surface inverting itself and then turning back. The next thing Thomas thought was that he could not understand how he had not seen the plain, normal-sized door embedded in the larger doors before. Tyrone turned the handle and they entered.

Somehow, the collection of bones longer than Thomas was tall standing just beside the door was entirely unsurprising. Tyrone walked purposefully deeper into the vault, and Thomas lingered by the door, looking at everything, but careful not to touch anything.

There were tables stacked high with items of various kinds, bookshelves with books and scrolls with titles he mostly could not read, one giant, empty cage standing on the floor. It looked like something had tried to scratch its way out of it, and almost succeeded. There were weapons hanging on the walls, from intricately carved spears to a collection of machine guns that looked like they had last been used in world war one.

He leaned closer to a table to see a miniature pyramid, apparently lined with gold and built out of teeny tiny pieces of rock. A simple picture frame showed a man standing on the edge of a cliff in a sunset, and only the faint movement of his hair in the wind showed that it was indeed a magical picture. A cup filled with pens, each topped by an ornate animal head in what looked like bronze. Among them were several whose needle-sharp teeth had dark stains.

What finally caught his attention was something that looked like a snow globe. It was a smooth glass ball on a stand, within which something was floating; a spherical, dark, gently wobbling something, flecked with pinpricks of light so small he was not entirely sure they were real.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Tyrone came back into view, tucking a small moneybag into his pocket. “That?” he asked. “That’s a universe. A small one. It’s probably safe to touch, though if you break it, our own universe might just fall apart.”

Thomas’s fingers were halfway to the glass when he yanked them back. “Oh,” he said.

Tyrone smiled at him. It looked sharper than it should be. “It’s very unlikely, of course. The casing isn’t easily breakable, and even without that it’ll probably just dissolve away, but still. Should we go?”

Thomas just nodded.

The trip back to ground level passed quickly and haphazardly. The goblins bowed at them as they went, and then Tyrone bid them farewell, the kid waving at them before they were both gone in the crowd.

Thomas and his dad stood at the bottom steps of the bank for a few minutes, not saying much at all. Then Theo cleared his throat and unfolded their shopping list.

“So,” he said. “Should we just start at the top?”

Thomas nodded mutely and followed him down the street as he looked around, looking for the signs of the stores they had been recommended.

In the privacy of his own mind, Thomas thought that he would at least try not to have too much to do with the Evergreens if he could help it. He also had a feeling that it was a battle he had already lost.

---

Tyrone Evergreen had a train compartment to himself. He did not mind it much. In fact, he hardly noticed it. People walking through the train looking for empty seats glanced into his compartment, got a funny feeling they should be somewhere else, and left.

If he had remembered that this behaviour was unusual, he might have tried to fix it, but for now, he figured he would make enough friends once he got to the school, so he kicked back and covered the empty seats in candy wrappers.

At times, he talked to himself, unless he was talking to something else, invisible to human eyes. At times, he leant back, unfocused, as if he was somewhere else entirely. Not that being two places at once was difficult for him, but it could be distracting at times. The landscape passed by his window and the sky slowly turned black.

He shared a boat across the lake with a girl named Elizabeth, who did not say a word to him and kept throwing him suspicious glances. He might have purposefully unnerved her with a smile or two, but certain temptations are irresistible.

Then came the hall. And the Sorting.

Elizabeth was sorted Slytherin, and she looked at him as if he was the venomous snake from her seat at their table once he walked up to the stool with the hat on it.

“Oh,” said the voice in his ear. “This is new.”

‘Problems?’ he thought at it.

“I’ll say,” said the hat. “I will sort any student that puts me on during the Sorting Ceremony, no matter who or what they are, but I do need something to work from. It seems I cannot see any of your memories.”

‘Yes, that would be problematic, wouldn’t it?’ he thought at it. ‘Hmm. Okay, I think I know what the problem is. Give me a second.’

Quietly and as quickly as he could, he collected a random selection of his own memories and organized them neatly before he converted them into a form that was a little closer to human.

‘Is that better?’

“Oh yes,” the hat said. “This should be more than enough. Now, let us see… You are presumably brave enough for Gryffindor, though I must question what bravery means when you have nothing to fear. Loyal, certainly, to those you choose, but I believe a Hufflepuff needs a certain amount of… cordiality. Still, someone like you could blossom in Hufflepuff.”

The hat chewed on its thoughts for a while.

“No, maybe not. You are cunning enough for Slytherin, but you have neither the personal ambition nor the willingness to use people. Ah, well. I suppose, in the end, you did come here to learn, more than anything else. In this case, it must be RAVENCLAW!”

Tyrone stood up and removed the hat from his head, let the chosen memories sink back to their proper places. He walked down to the table that had just broken out in applause, looked around at the countless number of students and thought, Yeah, this could be good.

#transcendence au #My writing #TAUwarts #victoryyyy!#whoop whoop

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