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syms-things-5 · 2 years

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Case Histories - Chapter Eleven

An Andy Barber AU fic (based on BBC’s ‘The Split’)

Previous Chapter Here / Masterlist Here

Synopsis: A talented small-town family lawyer, Grace Atherton, gets the opportunity of a lifetime when she is offered a job at prestigious Boston law firm, Rothman and Hale. She decides to give up the relative comfort and ease of her current working situation in favour of following a dream she’s had since she was a young law grad, to the detriment of her family life and marriage. She soon comes into contact with old mental and one-time flame, Andy Barber. As gifted as he is handsome, it becomes clear he’s been keeping an eye on her burgeoning career from afar. Just how much will this decision cost her?

Series Warnings: Strong language, cheating

CHAPTER ELEVEN

For some unknown reason, right around the beginning of Summer, people liked to separate from their spouses.

It may only be a temporary separation but it was almost like there was an internal clock slowly ticking away in the heart of the nation’s middle classes. About half-way through the year and with the heightened addition of the hot summer sun possibly adding to feelings of discomfort and pressure, a chain reaction sets off that provokes a crisis of conscience in couples everywhere. Literally, everywhere.

It was 50-50 as to whether the separations were triggered by more husbands than wives (although Grace had her theory that it skewed more towards the former thanks to mid-life crises exacerbated by the stereotypical choices of top-down sports cars and the allure of a good, old-fashioned golf course) but nevertheless, it was a very real, very tragic, very expensive phenomenon. Law Firms up and down the country would prepare themselves for it. They would hire more staff (it was indeed true that May-into-June was an ideal time for a job switch if you were in the legal profession) and poaching caused panic all over the place.

If Grace had her time at university all over again, she would have focused on this topic for her final thesis. She could have made a fortune on the public speaking circuit, written a New York Times best-selling book-cum-self-help-Bible, and retired with millions in the bank at the grand old age of 32. She would have gone on Oprah. She would have been New England’s answer to Brené Brown.

“God, I love the smell of divorce in the morning,” sighed Jack, comfortable, happy, hands stuffed firmly into his pockets as he surveyed the locked meeting rooms that surrounded him.

“Well, aren’t you the old romantic.” smirked Grace. She followed his eyeline and could see figures busily moving around behind the frosted glass that helped privatise rooms from the rest of the public.

“You know, this may surprise you but I have never been one for marriage myself.” He started.

Grace couldn’t work out if he was being sarcastic or not. Of course Jack didn’t “do” marriage. In her mind, she filtered back through some articles she had read about him before she joined the company and she was sure she had read the words “most eligible bachelor” on more than one occasion.

“I simply do not understand tethering yourself to one person for the rest of your life. It speaks of a fear of dying alone if you ask me and quite frankly, that thought has never bothered me. You come into this world alone, you exit alone.”

Grace paused as she tried to figure out a suitable, witty response, but she was coming up short.

“Maybe one day you can explain it all to me.” He turned to face her, bringing her back into the conversation with him.

“Sure thing.” Grace nodded, half-smiling a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. How the hell was she going to do that? She didn’t completely understand it herself.

“Now here is a man who agrees with me, right Andrew?” Jack called over as Andy strode towards them with purpose.

“Agree with what?” he asked, puzzled by the two of them staring back at him, expectantly.

“That marriage is a complete waste of time? Isn’t that what you said once?”

“Um…” He glanced between Jack and Grace. “Well, not entirely. Some people manage to make it work. It just requires a certain skill set and the right person.”

Jack furrowed his brow in bewilderment, suddenly not recognising the man stood in front of him.

“You’re going soft in your old age, Andy.” Jack said, jokingly. “I hope you manage to remain as stoic and cold-hearted for the next few weeks at least while we bash these agreements out. There’s seven on your desk from this morning alone so I’d get cracking with the team and see where you land. Keep an eye open for Mark Shallcross, too. He’s on the war path and doesn’t want to budge on his offer of alimony so that might give us a few hours in court.”

“Jesus, Jack, care to tone down the cynicism for a minute?”

“I am not cynical in the slightest. I’m perfectly normal. It’s everyone else who is the problem. You can spin it however you like but marriage is simply not worth the hassle. Imagine being married and being miserable for large chunks of your life. Or worse still, meeting someone that is better for you. Then what do you do? You end up paying us hundreds of thousands of dollars to save the rest of your bacon. So, tell me, what would be normal in this scenario?”

Jack walked off back to his office so the two of them knew it was a rhetorical question. Grace was slowly learning about Jack’s foibles but they often came at inopportune times so she didn’t always realise they were happening until long afterwards.

Grace and Andy looked at each other, perplexed. She shrugged at him and he chuckled, and the pair of them walked towards the front desk to see what else and who else was awaiting them both.

“Is it really going to be as busy as they say? I mean, I know it’s a ‘thing’ at this time of the year and everything, but still.” She chanced the question at him. The look in his eyes gave her all the answers she needed. “Shit.”

“Shit….”

“Right? It’s madness and I don’t know if it’s just me or-”

“-No, I mean shit.” He interrupted her. “Christine.”

Grace quickly turned to look up at him before practically performing a 180 and seeing Andy’s ex-wife vacate the elevator.

Christine spotted him almost straight away despite being on the other side of the expansive foyer. Andy would stand out in most settings but, still, it was like Christine was magnetised by him.

“Hi Andy.” She approached them both cautiously but with a soft, familiar smile, pushing the strap of her blue handbag further up and onto her shoulder.

Grace wasn’t 100% sure if Christine had registered her standing beside them as she eventually stopped just a couple of feet from Andy. Andy didn’t say anything at first and it was at that point Grace realised she was the dreaded elephant in the room in this scenario. She hated that feeling.

“I’ll…” Grace did what she did best and tilted her head in the direction of her office before slipping away from the pair of them as subtly as possible.

She glanced back at them both just before they disappeared completely from her view as she entered her office. It didn’t look like he had moved a muscle from where he had been stood when she had been nearby. He was likely surprised and concerned in equal measure by her visit but whatever he had been feeling, he didn’t seem to be showing it in his body language. He always had a knack of hiding his true emotions and it had irritated the hell out of Grace on more than one occasion.

Nobody moved or even spoke in what felt like an age it seemed. Christine tucked her elegantly straightened, long, white-blonde hair behind her ear, keeping a hand gripped onto the strap of her handbag like it was a comfort blanket of some sort.

Grace wondered what had brought her here. Maybe a case? Maybe some distant family news she thought he would be interested in or needed to know about for some reason? Maybe seeing him again for the first time in a long time all those weeks ago brought back some fond memories she wanted to explore again. Grace supposed she could sympathise with that mentality.

When Grace spied her again sitting quietly in the lounge an hour or so later, she wasn’t altogether surprised although it was odd to find her sat alone. Grace tucked her hair behind her ear and cleared her throat so as to alert Christine that someone else was in the vicinity. Christine looked up from the article she had been reading at the table and they exchanged polite smiles before she returned her attention to the paper in front of her. Grace didn’t think she had recognised her so she set about making a cup of tea, assuming that would be the end of that.

“I take it he’s told you about me?”

Grace turned around, unsure of whether she had just heard what she thought she did.

“Um…”

“I’m the ex-wife? It seems like you two work closely together quite a bit so I just figured I’ve come up in conversation once or twice.” Christine asked, interested to know what Grace may or may not know about her history with Andy.

“Oh, not really, no.” Grace gave as non-committal an answer as she could but fully expected Christine not to believe her.

Christine sighed. “I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me either, actually. Probably doesn’t want to rake up past memories. I think the last memory he probably has of me is me screaming across a table at him in a restaurant in Paris.”

“Well, we’ve all done that.” joked Grace.

Christine chuckled appreciatively. Her shoulders slumped a little so they appeared less…tense? Was that how she was feeling? She looked down at the newspaper on the table but Grace could tell she wasn’t able to focus on the words.

“It’s Grace, right?” she asked after another quiet moment passed by.

“Yeh, it is. We met at the de la Salle hearing.” Grace was sure Christine could tell she was taken aback by hearing her name coming out of her mouth.

“I remember you. Sophie was very grateful for…everything you said to her. It really helped her a lot.” She smiled at her. “I take it you have children?”

“Two, a boy and a girl.”

“Yeh, I thought you sounded maternal. You have a warm energy about you.” She smiled again. “You don’t often find that with lawyers.”

Grace wasn’t sure what to say to that. Over the years she had become well aware that her methods were sometimes seen as unconventional; unconventional being another word for ‘kind’. Whatever it was, Christine was clearly astute until Grace remembered she had been married to Andy for a certain amount of time and she had no doubt gathered first hand that some lawyers were colder than others. Grace didn’t have sympathy for Christine listed on her bingo card for that day.

“Do you know...?” Christine started before something suddenly caused her to think twice. “Actually, never mind.”

“No, go on.” Grace encouraged, turning to face her fully as she dipped the teabag in and out of her mug. It was strong enough already but she didn’t know what else to do with her hands.

Christine sighed and considered speaking again before rolling her eyes at herself. “This is going to sound like High School but do you know if he is seeing someone?”

Grace hoped her facial expression didn’t give her away. “What?”

“Y’see?! It’s fuckin’ High School all over again! Christ, I must sound so pathetic right now.”

“No, you don’t sound like that at all! Sorry, I just wasn’t sure what to… I mean, I don’t know, really. I’m probably not the best person to ask.” Grace fumbled her way through a reply. “Do you think he’s seeing someone?”

Christine stared at the empty seat in front of her for a moment as she tried to organise her thoughts. It was clear she had some views on that question but wasn’t sure what to say to the almost-complete stranger standing near her who was listening to her speak about things she likely hadn’t even vocalised to a life-long best friend before. Or someone she knew even just one degree better than Grace.

“It was just something he said. Before. I wasn’t sure how to read it, that’s all.” She dismissed it and turned the page as though she was indicating to Grace that their conversation was over, but a thread had clearly been pulled.

“Maybe that’s something you need to speak to him about?” Grace wasn’t sure how to vacate the room much less find a way of courteously ending the conversation without looking like she was about to run away. “Are you waiting around for him?”

She seemed like she hadn’t heard Grace’s question but, soon enough, they made eye contact again.

“No. I just felt a little faint before so I thought I would sit in here for five minutes. It’s probably just the heat, though. Although that was about…” She checked the watch on her wrist. “Half an hour ago so, yes, I suppose I should be thinking about leaving.”

“Don’t leave on my account if you’re not feeling well? I can get someone to call you a cab if you need one?”

“No, it’s fine. Some fresh air will do me good.”

There wasn’t a lot spoken between them after that. Grace offered to call her a cab once more but Christine declined it once more as well. She checked her phone before chucking it into the side pocket of her handbag, and gathered up the paper before nodding her a goodbye.

Whatever it was that had transpired, whatever it was that had led to Christine sitting by herself for this short time, Grace had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last she would see of her. And, as odd as that made her feel, what right did she have to know about their relationship anyway? About what was or was not going to happen?

Those were the thoughts she found whirling around her brain for the rest of the afternoon.

She sat in her office staring at some notes she had made the night before while supervising Sam as he made them all dinner. Nothing quite like summarising a $10million settlement for a three-month long (or should that be short?) matrimony as her innocent, beautiful son made some mac ‘n’ cheese.

A direct message popped up on the bottom right corner of her screen and she inwardly groaned. She rubbed at her eyes with the tips of her fingers, steeling herself to move from the relative solitude of her office.

“What’s up?” She asked Andy as she poked her head into his office a few minutes later.

He turned in his chair to see her in his doorway and placed the file he had been skimming through on his desk in front of him, letting out the air from his puffed out cheeks.

“You think we’ve been too hasty on this McLaughlin case?” He asked her outright.

“No.” She shook her head but still pondered his question in case there was some minor detail they had both omitted from their memories. “He pretty much admitted to all of the affairs, even the ones he couldn’t explicitly remember. It was a bit odd but you said yourself that it was cut and shut.”

He tapped his fingers on the file papers on the desk. “Yeh. Yes, you’re probably right. I just can’t shake the feeling that we could have saved him a bit more cash, y’know?”

Grace shrugged. “I’m sure he’s comfortable. He seemed pretty happy with the settlement at the time unless you’re thinking about raising an appeal on his behalf?”

He shook his head unsympathetically. “No, I’m not thinking that. Sorry, ignore me, it’s been a weird day.”

Grace forced a smile through her closed mouth. She nodded before turning on her heels to leave his office again.

“Grace?” He stood up from his chair. “Could you…shut the door for a second?”

She turned back to view him warily. He walked slowly around the side of his desk before leaning back against it, his hands nervously fidgeting with something in the pockets of his trousers. She did what he asked but she wasn’t exactly thrilled about what was likely going to come next.

“I’m sorry about Christine earlier. I wasn’t expecting...”

Grace shook her head hoping it would stop him in his tracks. “Don’t worry about it.”

He looked her over but she couldn’t work out what he was thinking. Likely, he was wondering why she appeared to be so casual about his ex-wife’s sudden presence.

“There isn’t… there’s nothing there. For me.”

“OK.” She blinked. “It’s not really any of my business.”

“I just didn’t want you to think there was.”

She nodded again. She suddenly felt like she was stood in front of a Principal who was giving her some unwanted advice about something she had been forced to discuss out loud.

“Right. Well,” he tried his hardest to mask his irritation at Grace’s apparent indifference.

He looked around his office at nothing in particular. Grace scratched at the back of head.

“I’m still sorry if it made you feel uncomfortable.”

“Andy, it’s fine, honestly. You guys were married for heaven’s sake, you have a history. It’s perfectly reasonable for you two to maintain a relationship, even after…everything.”

Andy huffed to himself. “I wouldn’t say we have a relationship exactly, of any kind. In fact, we hadn’t spoken in years before de la Salle. I wasn’t sure why she came by the office today either. Still not sure what she was after even now after she’s left.”

Grace wasn’t sure if he knew Christine had lingered around in a quiet part of the floor before she left earlier that afternoon, but she decided she wasn’t going to be the one to share that little titbit with him. It wasn’t exactly her place.

“What she was after?” She asked him.

“Yeh. She’s, er, getting married again.”

Grace was snapped suddenly by his admission. Reviewing his casual stance still leaning back against his desk, he didn’t appear to be upset or even remotely saddened by the news she apparently gave him just a few hours ago. If anything, he seemed surprised.

“…And she wanted to know what I thought.”

“About the marriage?” Grace approached.

“Yeh.” He nodded at her, matching her perplexity. “I didn’t understand either. I mean, we haven’t spoken in so long, not properly at least. I wasn’t aware we had to notify each other when we started seeing other people. Christ, I owe her a lot of visits.”

Grace rolled her eyes at him. Andy never asked for permission to do anything so of course it would make perfect sense that he wouldn’t think of giving someone the common curtesy of something so minimal and thoughtful, like ‘keeping in touch’.

“She was likely just giving you the heads-up in case you found out from someone else. Boston can be a small place.” Grace said. “Did she tell you about him, the new guy?”

“She said he’s nice, he works in marketing, I think. Oh, and he likes horses.” He shrugged like he wasn’t sure why Christine made a point of mentioning that specific detail.

“That’s cool.” She chuckles and he rolls his eyes in agreement. “It’s always good to find a man who like animals. And it bodes well for becoming a parent, I suppose, if she’s thinking about kids and the future and everything.”

“Thanks, I’ll remember that.” He speaks softly. He looks down at the floor and brushes his foot over the soft carpet below before snapping back into the room. “Why are you being so nice about her all of a sudden?”

“Why would I not be nice about her? Or neutral at least. I don’t know her.”

“S’pose.” He said. “She wanted to know if we had made a mistake. In breaking up.”

For the second time in as many minutes, Grace was rendered almost speechless.

“Oh. Right.” She nodded after what was far too long a pause for either of them to be comfortable with. She wanted to know what he said to her next but evidently, he was waiting for her to ask him that question instead. “What do you think about that?”

He shrugged almost nonchalantly. “There’s only so many times you can tell a person you weren’t right for each other, that you weren’t going to make the other one happy, y’know? I don’t particularly enjoy breaking people’s hearts, despite what you might think of me. I don’t think she deserves that shit again.”

Grace nodded and looked down at the floor by his feet, to avoid looking at his face.

“So, I told her I hope she’ll be happy and I hope the wedding goes well.” He spoke again, in a slightly more cheerful tone this time. “I mean, what else is there to say?”

It was a rhetorical question, she knew that, but it didn’t stop her trying to come up with words that might bring this awkward conversation to a close. As it happened, he did it for the both of them.

“I want you to come to Chicago with me next week. For the conference.”

Her eyes widened in shock but he remained as cool as ever as though he hadn’t just posed a completely impractical suggestion.

“That’s not going to be possible. With work and everything, I can’t just up-”

“Yes, you can. Nadine can take on the Phillips and Carlson cases, I know they’ve been dragging for a little while-” Oh wow, flirting and criticising her work in the same sentence. Nice. “-and anything else can wait a day or two. If we fly out Thursday morning and come back late Saturday evening, you’ll be back before anyone realises you’ve gone. It’s easy.”

He wasn’t blinking which was a thing he did when he was arguing with someone, like being trapped under the sheer weight of his intense stare would likely cause his opponent to cave at any moment. She’d shudder to think how many times it had worked in the past, and on whom, like it was almost working on her now.

“No, it’s not easy. I can’t up and leave with no warning, Andy. Even if work wasn’t an issue, I have the kids to think about. I’m sorry.”

“What if Jack asks you to come with me?”

“What?” She narrows her eyes towards him.

“This thing is a pretty big deal, Grace, it only happens once every two years. There’ll be some speakers there I know you’ll wanna see, like that lady with the cats on the front cover. Sadie…?” He clicks his fingers repeatedly until Grace can’t bear it any longer.

“Sadie Carmichael.”

“Sadie Carmichael!” He grins. “I remember you tried making me read her thesis on animal custody in divorce.”

“Yeh, and you kept falling asleep.”

He gets up from his desk and stalks towards her but mindful of leaving a foot between them so as not to crowd her back against the office door.

“I promise I won’t fall asleep this time.”

She does give him the satisfaction of thinking it over a tiny but before she declines him again, leaving him to back away from her.

“Just…think about it. Please?” He presses. “The kids could have a couple of nights with Dan, and I get to spend some time with you.”

“I thought this Chicago thing was a pretty big deal? Won’t you be wanting to schmooze with everyone?”

He purses his lips before smiling at her. “It has to come to an end at some time, right?” He bites his bottom lip in contemplation and regards her again. “That’s one thing I realised today, when she asked if I thought we made a mistake in ending our marriage. I knew instinctively that we hadn’t, it was almost an automatic feeling in me that it was right and that I didn’t regret leaving, but it doesn’t stop me feeling regret for other things I’ve done, or didn’t do. Things that I wanna make right…”

“Andy…”

“Just…a couple of days and then we can figure it all out afterwards.” He placed his hand in hers, hanging by her side. “I promise.”

#chris evans #chris fic #fanfic #andy barber #au #andy barber x original female character #andy barber x oc #case histories #chris evans fic #evans fic #writing is hard

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im-just-a-random-fandom-girl · 2 years

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I mentioned it several days ago, but here’s my essay about the unconstitutionality of the Supreme Court’s life terms, and which proposes the more politically viable idea of limited terms (rather than packing the court). I wrote this paper 1 1/2 years ago a week before Justice Ginsberg passed away. It’s an expansion on some points made by political scientist Robert Dahl in his book “How Democratic is the American Constitution?” It’s a short, easy-to-read book and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning about the U.S. Constitution but doesn’t know where to start. I also put my citations at the bottom for a couple extra resources.

Pease do not copy my essay for one of your classes or some shit like that. Do your work.

In his work, Robert Dahl analyzes the undemocratic nature of American institutions, including the U.S. Supreme Court. The most convincing evidence in his analysis of the Supreme Court is its counter-majoritarian design. Elected officials in Congress are granted policy-making authority, yet unelected Judges can nullify the actions of those policymakers, thereby acting contrary to the majority will. Effectively, this grants the unelected body more power than the elected one. While Dahl’s argument that this structure creates a lack of accountability is true, it provides a check on the majority represented by Congress and separates the Court from the influences of the general public. A far more consequential detriment to the democratic process is the life term to which the Justices are entitled, a problem resolved by setting 18-year term limits without the possibility of reappointment.

Life tenure is, by nature, not democratic. Even if Justices were voted on by the American public, the life term removes all sense of accountability and responsibility to the American people that would have been created through the election process. It is precisely the reason why the presidential office has no life term. As Dahl states, the Supreme Court makes consequential decisions that affect the lives of millions of Americans, from abortion to LGBTQ+ rights in the workplace (55). Yet, if they are out of touch with changing times and act contrary to what the American public believes is right, the “only recourse is the nearly impossible task of amending the Constitution or waiting for some of them to change their minds or die or retire” (Kramer, “The Supreme Court’s Power”). The problem is exacerbated by longer life expectancies. When the Constitution was created, the average life expectancy was 36 years. Now it is 79. This is reflected in the average length of time the Justices have served. The nine most recent vacancies, from 1991 to 2018, were created by Justices who served an average of 26 years. Their 96 predecessors served for an average of 16 (Klarman, Strossen, Noam, Levinson, Tushnet, “Forum: What’s the Matter”).

The simple solution to the problems created by life terms is to set term limits of 18-years without the possibility of reappointment. This length provides the benefit of broadening the pool of potential candidates, which opens the possibility for more diversity. All past and present Supreme Court Justices have come from similar professional, educational, and demographic backgrounds, the last of which is a significant issue in the democratic process (Drake, Gramlich, “5 Facts”). Of the 114 people who have served on the Supreme Court, just 4 have been women, 2 have been black, and 1 has been Hispanic. Although progress has been made, diversity is paramount on the Court in order to have a variety of perspectives and proper representation. However, 18 years is not so frequent that there is a constant turnover that makes progress difficult. The inability to be reappointed addresses concerns that Justices may be influenced to make decisions of which the President nominating them would approve. Even several current Supreme Court Justices have expressed consideration and support to the suggestion (Fix the Court, “Term Limits: The Justice’s Own Answers”).

Citations

Dahl, Robert. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? Second, Yale University Press, 2003.

Drake, Bruce, and John Gramlich. “5 Facts about the Supreme Court.” Pew Research Center, 7 Oct. 2019, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/07/5-facts-about-the-supreme-court.

Klarman, Michael, et al. “Forum: What’s the Matter With the Supreme Court?” The Nation, The Nation, 10 Sept. 2018, www.thenation.com/article/archive/forum-whats-the-matter-with-the-supreme-court.

Kramer, Larry. “The Supreme Court’s Power Has Become Excessive.” The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 6 July 2015, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/is-the-supreme-court-too-powerful/the-supreme-courts-power-has-become-excessive.

“Term Limits: The Justices’ Own Answer to the Broken SCOTUS Confirmation Process.” Fix the Court, 10 July 2019, fixthecourt.com/2019/07/termlimits.

#us politics #supreme court

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isabellazohreh · 2 years

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daffodil • jack bruce

warnings: mild angst; 25 years of yearning; cute nicknames; short king; bass player; etc.

a/n: this is dedicated to @jonesyjonesyjonesy because she is my partner in lust for bass players from fifty plus years ago <3

Amelia’s fingertips graced over the plasticky thistle in the field she lay in. If there was one thing she missed about Lanarkshire, it was the wide-open fields all over the county. She loved Paris, but she could only weather the city for so long before she grew homesick.

Speaking of homesickness, Amelia was waiting on the arrival of her childhood friend Jack, who had just returned to Scotland from America. He had been on a farewell tour for his band Cream, who had officially disbanded after a few months in limbo.

“Christ, and he says Ginger’s the tardy one,” She muttered to herself, though she knew she could never be mad at her friend.

The two had been born in neighbouring houses, barely a week apart. Ever since late May of 1943, the two were thick as thieves. Despite the restlessness of Jack’s childhood, the two never failed to find their way back to each other. Now, in October of 1968, the two were close as ever, although they were separated by the English Channel for much of the year. Despite their mother’s wishes, the two had never been any more than best friends, save for the time Jack’s mates had dared him to kiss her when they were six.

“Did you miss me, Daffodil?”

Amelia smiled from ear to ear as she saw her friend walking towards her holding a makeshift bouquet of helleborines in hand. His nickname for her came from a family trip to Portugal in the summer of ‘54, when the two had spent so long in the daffodil fields that Amelia had come home entirely sunburned.

“No,” She smirked. The both of them knew that was an outright lie.

“Oh shut up, you love me.”

“Do I? Or have our mums just forced us to be friends for so long that we’ve been lulled into a false sense of mutual admiration?”

“Christ, six months in Paris and you’re already a philosopher.”

Amelia giggled as Jack sat down next to her, placing the helleborines in her hands.

“These are nearly dead, Jack.”

“Can’t you just be happy to see me?”

“I’m only joking, don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

“Aren't I the one that’s supposed to say that to you?”

“If I was as petulant as you are, sure.”

“I missed you, you know.” Jack pulls his friend into a tight hug. “Brat.”

Amelia giggles. Jack hugs her tighter, just a bit tighter than usual, and then releases her.

“So how was the tour, eh? Got any salacious band stories?”

Jack grumbles. “No.” An outright lie.

“No?”

“Well, maybe, but it’s dirty.”

“I’ve hung around you three, Jack, I can handle a bit of depravity.”

Jack was deliberating whether or not to tell her. On one hand, he knew how much of a sucker for wild band stories she was, as she didn’t get to spend nearly as much time with them as she used to. On the other hand, the story involved his nemesis, Ginger, for whom his hatred was exacerbated ever since he had seen the drummer with his tongue down his best friend’s throat after a gig in Manchester.

“Okay, fine. But you have to promise not to freak out.”

“I promise.”

“Ginger and Jimi Hendrix had an orgy in one of our hotel rooms.”

Amelia’s eyes widen, and she audibly gasps as she shoots up.

“Oh my God, what? And you didn’t invite me?”

“Like you don’t get enough hedonism in Paris.”

Amelia grumbles as she lays back down.

“I don’t, actually. I haven’t had a boyfriend since that bloke you met, Michel.”

“God, he was such a pompous fuck. Idling his motorcycle outside your flat at all hours of the night like you didn’t have more important people to concern yourself with.”

Amelia smirks. “Like who?”

“Me.”

She scoffs playfully. Jack pouts like a whiny child.

“You’re so mean to me!”

“You love it.”

Jack mocks her like a jealous sibling, but lays down next to her so that their shoulders are touching.

“So how do you feel?” Amelia starts. She’s always been the more introspective of the two. Where Jack usually expressed his feelings through arguments and fits of anger (as exemplified by his relationship with his bandmates), Amelia was always the one to coax his feelings out of him in a healthier way. He missed her when he’d get angry and she wasn’t around.

“Fine.”

Amelia looks at him knowingly.

“Weird, it’s… I dunno, it’s strange. Obviously I’ve been in other bands, and I can probably join another, and the dynamic of the band certainly wasn’t optimal, but it grew quite familiar, and, I guess, I dunno, I guess I grew to like how we ar- were, in some bizarre way.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean. Calmness can be daunting sometimes. Plus, it’s like your dad used to say when we were children. We’re shit-stirrers. We thrive off of chaos.”

Jack chuckles.

“He paints such a wonderful picture of us, don’t you think?”

“Beautiful.”

“But anyways, what I was getting on about before, it’s not just the sudden calm, it’s the success too. I mean, we’re, God, we were big. I’ve grown quite comfortable in the lifestyle I have, and I don’t want the rest of my career, however it looks, to amount to nothing.”

Amelia’s fingertips start to trail between the valley of his pecs. Such touches are normal for them, but today, her touch is leaving him irreperably distracted.

“Just because you broke up doesn’t mean that you won’t have successful careers afterwards. Take… take The Yardbirds for example. They broke up, and now Jimmy Page is doing that whole thing with his new group.”

“His new group’s alright, I guess.”

“They’re quite good. They’re opening for The Who soon, we should go see them. Even if the music sucks, I wouldn't mind staring at John Entwistle for an hour or two.”

A twinge of pain stings Jack’s heart.

“I’m a better bassist than Entwistle.”

“If you say so.” Amelia giggles. “You’ve got such an ego sometimes, huh?”

“What?”

“One sentence out of me about another bassist and you’re getting all defensive.”

Jack thinks. She’s nearly found him out, and he’s not sure. As much as he’s been longing for his Daffodil to be his, he’s not sure he could bear it if she doesn’t feel the same.

“He’s not good enough for you.”

“Oh, and you’d know? You’ve barely even met the bloke”

Jack captures Amelia’s hand in his.

“Ames, I’ve got to tell you something.”

Amelia frowns in slight confusion. Jack isn't usually this precious about his secret, but she figures he may just be feeling a bit more vulnerable after all that talk about the demise of the band. She shrugs.

“Go on with it, then.”

“Promise me we’ll be okay after?”

Amelia’s brows furrow, this time in pure confusion. They’ve always been okay. More than it.

“Yeah… I promise. Jack, what’s going on?”

Jack brings her hand up to his lips and kisses it.

“Jack…” She starts.

“Daffodil, I-” The words seem to choke in Jack’s throat. Tears prick his eyes and he begins to tremble. He’s taken the stage in front of several thousand people, yet this is the scariest moment of his life.

Amelia’s other hand moves to caress his cheek.

“Jack, love, what’s wrong?”

So worked up he’s rendered himself unable to form words, Jack instead chooses to move his Amelia’s hand away and place his own on either side of her face.

He can’t hold it in any longer. He leans in quickly and captures her lips with his. Amelia has never been a daft woman, and yet, her eyes widen in total surprise at Jack’s actions. She doesn’t waste a moment in reciprocating, however.

The dam breaks and tears spill from both their eyes, but they’re tears of relief, rather than sorrow. Sometimes, when emotions have been brewing for so long, the release presents itself in strange ways.

Jack’s tongue slips into his friend’s mouth, and Amelia tastes the salt of their combined tears. With any other boy that Amelia’s kissed, the use of tongue has been solely to assert some feeling of dominance, but with Jack, it’s different. He seems to simply want to explore one of the only parts of his friend he hasn’t had access to before.

He’s completely engrossed in her, as she is in him, until she starts to giggle against his lips.

Jack pulls away with a blissful smile.

“What is it?”

“Your moustache, it tickles.”

Jack chuckles softly. He presses another kiss to Amelia’s lips.

“I love you, Daffodil. I’ve loved you ever since we were six and Glyn and Alfie dared me to kiss you.”

Amelia smiles, and kisses Jack’s lips once again.

“I’ve loved you ever since we were eleven and you let me wear your clothes because mine hurt too much with the sunburn.”

Jack kisses his lover’s forehead and revels in her serene smile.

“Our mums will be thrilled, won’t they?”

“Oh, they’ll be over the moon. They’ve been planning our wedding ever since we could talk.”

#classic rock #jack bruce #cream band #bass guitar #bassplayer #angst #jack bruce fic #confessions of undying love in a thistle field in scotland #ps dune helleborines are the county flower of lanarkshire in case you would like to know

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thescispot · 3 years

Text

I had difficulty recognizing C when she arrived.

We had agreed to meet at the on-campus burger joint and I was early. Sitting in a booth in the corner, I finished up some statistics homework as well as the last of my coffee, and although I expected C at any moment, I was nevertheless startled when she peered over my shoulder, an enthusiastic grin painted on her face.

“Hi!” she chirped cheerfully, wrapping an arm around me. I returned the hug hesitantly, partly because I was in the awkward position of sitting while she was standing, but also because it had not yet registered to me that this was, in fact, C - the very person I had been waiting for.

She slid into the seat across from me and we launched immediately into comfortable conversation, exchanging pleasant greetings, and speaking to one another with a familiar ease I had not expected. We might as well have been meeting up after two weeks, when in actuality, it was nearly two years since we last spoke.

She was wearing a sunny yellow top and had her hair tied up sloppily on top of her head, revealing a pale face with large, doe eyes and a friendly disposition. I entertained the idea that her lack of makeup was what caught me off guard and explained my difficulty in immediately recognizing her but I quickly dismissed this theory as absurd; we had once been living together, after all, so her bare face could not feasibly be considered an unfamiliar sight for me.

She apologized profusely for her inability to meet up with me for the interview on two previous occasions and I assured her it was not a problem. We lamented the difficulties of school life, such as busy schedules, relentless deadlines, and the general fatigue that accompanies the Sisyphean struggle of adulthood. She complained about how much time her job took out of her day. I complained about how the lack of a job left too much time in mine. We both agreed that we could not decide if we were grateful for the looming shadow of graduation on the horizon or not; did it promise much-needed reprieve or threaten even greater distress?

I remembered when C and I had first met, moving into our dorm in late September four years ago. After a few lazy and unsuccessful attempts at unpacking, the two of us decided to seek out cold drinks at the neighboring dormitory building, Lothian, in a desperate attempt for relief from the encroaching heat. To our chagrin, we were hopelessly lost within a matter of minutes and were left wandering in circles around the campus, the sun attacking us the whole while as if driven by a personal vendetta. The two of us trudging across the fields, full of regret, must have been a funny sight, only exacerbated by the fact that we looked to be complete opposites of one another; she pale and I tan, she short and I tall, her hair a sleek curtain that brushed her shoulders, mine waist-length and frizzy. I was average-sized but she was very, very thin.

“When did it start?”

I finally worked up the courage to begin the interview. I felt I was being invasive despite her insistence that she was perfectly happy helping me with my assignment. We had spoken about this subject many times before, but something about the academic lens I was peering through felt disrespectful somehow. Almost alienating.

“In hindsight,” she said thoughtfully, “it started when I was fifteen years old. I . . . stopped finishing my dinner.”

C claimed she had always had a large appetite growing up, that she always cleaned her plate. But as her sophomore year of highschool approached, she had fallen into an insidious routine - she made sure to always leave a little bit of food behind, to never completely finish a meal. An innocent enough habit, or so she thought at the time.

“It spiralled out of control from there?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

C nodded. She related her actions from that time in her life the way one might analyze the motives and psyche of a fictional character, like she was discussing the mental health of someone else. She had a great deal to say, but her voice and manner did not betray even the slightest hint of anguish at being reminded of her troubled past.

“The eating disorder takes control of everything it can,” she said wisely.

Anorexia, in C’s experience, was not something she felt she was “suffering” from as she underwent its horrors. She was not punishing herself by not eating, it was quite the opposite. Not eating made her feel better. Invincible, even.

“I felt superhuman,” she explained. “I felt like I was honing a skill and it made me feel good about myself, that I could go to school and handle all these things in my life without needing food. It was an accomplishment.” She paused for a moment. “Really says a lot about how our culture conditions teenage girls, huh?”

We both sighed with tacit understanding.

“What if you ate more than you intended?” I asked. I tried to hide my discomfort about the whole conversation. I felt like I was trying to play the part of a therapist and it would be painfully obvious to any third party that I was woefully unprepared to do so.

“Then it was a bad day,” she said. “I felt like I failed.”

I suddenly recalled something she had mentioned often back when we lived together. She never went into great detail, and had a way of minimizing the despair this subject caused her. But it was clear to me, and probably our other hallmates as well, that her illness was not a result of merely deciding to eat less one day. It was obvious since that night she watched a music video entitled “Till it Happens to You”, drank copious amounts of vodka, and promptly had an emotional meltdown that something more significant triggered her eating disorder.

“What about your boyfriend?” I asked. “Would you say he was the cause of all this?”

“He was definitely a factor,” C replied hesitantly. “ He was older than me and the relationship was kind of, like, secret, you know? My parents didn’t approve. He would always tell me ‘fat girls are so ugly.’ And I wanted to be pretty for him, you know?”

We were both silent for a while, trying to process how something as simple as the desire to impress a boy could derail one’s adolescence so disastrously.

“One time I called myself fat and he said ‘No, babe, you’re so pretty - I could eat cereal out of your collar bones.’” C seemed embarrassed by how much pride she had once taken out of this disturbing remark.

“He wasn’t the source,” she chose her words carefully. “But he was definitely . . . the spark.” She fell quiet and I decided this avenue of conversation had extinguished itself.

“So when did people notice?”

“We were moving,” she explained, “and my parents noticed the self-harm scars I had running up my legs. They put me in therapy for a while. Eventually, I told the therapist I was, you know, done. Just done. I told her I was going to swallow a bottle of pills that night. I thanked her for trying to help but I was just over it. I was resigned about the whole thing, didn’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other. ”

C was immediately taken to the emergency room following this therapy session. At this point in her life, she described herself as having skeletal shoulders and no stomach. She had taken to loose, baggy clothes and was especially partial to sweatshirts, even in the summertime. She only weighed eighty seven pounds.

“And the therapist didn't notice?” I asked dubiously.

“She had her suspicions, I’m sure,” C said. “But she admitted to me later that she felt unqualified to handle the severity of my condition.”

I balked at the idea that no one would see their own daughter, sister, friend, disappear steadily in front of their eyes.

“There was one person,” C remembered suddenly. When she was fifteen years old, a classmate she never spoke to slipped a book onto her desk, a book about eating disorders. Inside the book was a note, encouraging her to seek help.

“I was offended at the time. I didn’t think anything was wrong with me.”

“You were in denial.”

C reached into her bag and fished around inside for her wallet. She slipped out a piece of paper but did not offer it to me. My gaze only captured the name “Lauren” scrawled at the bottom in feminine script.

“I keep the note with me everywhere I go now,” she said soberly.

C was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and major depression, as well as obsessive compulsive tendencies in regards to her weight. She was in the hospital for a miserable two months, which she described as being like “solitary confinement.”

She believes attending “Program” saved her life.

“It finally started to make sense to me that I was sick,” C said, sounding more upbeat. “The eating disorder, it distorts a person’s thinking. I was finally educated on my condition and realized it wasn’t my fault.” Learning the science behind “ it”changed her perspective.

She happily relayed to me the structure of Program, and how she felt it helped her the most during her recovery. It was an outpatient program and she was given a meal plan as well as access to therapy for her and the people in her life. “Family night was on Tuesday,” she noted. I didn’t have to ask her to elaborate.

“My mother could be . . . unforgiving of imperfection,” she looked at me searchingly, trying to make sure she had used the right words.

“Did you feel ashamed of your condition?”

“Oh yeah, big time,” she said. “I felt like I was a burden for my family.”

C recalled how she began forcing herself to eat in an effort to gain weight as soon as possible; the hospital and subsequent program, she decided, were costing her family too much money and now that she knew what was wrong with her, why not just, you know, stop?

She threw up many times as her body was not yet adjusted, not yet ready to let go of its trauma. There were two separate occasions where her nasogastric tube was displaced as a result, an experience she implied was excruciating. An especially compassionate nurse was the one to hold and comfort her during the ensuing mental breakdowns.

“The disease pulled my family together,” C claimed. Her relationship with her mother improved significantly. Guilt was something they all had to confront.

“It was hard, but it was worth it,” C said with a smile.

According to C, stigma against mental illness was a huge factor in the initial conflict with her parents. Their words likely echo in the minds of every mentally unhealthy child of color who has made the mistake of displaying such a vulnerability:

“Why are you doing this to yourself?”

C insists now that both she and her parents understand that it was the eating disorder that did this to her.

Program was run by a man named Dr. Marr, a leading researcher in eating disorders and mental health among youth, and it took place in Rancho Cucamonga. I noted how strange it was to realize that while I was learning precalculus and writing essays on Shakespeare, a girl I would one day live with was recovering practically next door, missing out on such a formative part of her life.

C and I both reached the conclusion that while the hospital helped her physically get her weight back up, all the emotional work was done in Program.

“I grew up a lot,” she said and then added, uncertainly, “I feel indebted to it, you know? It let me see parts of myself I didn’t before. I’m stronger now and I can endure so much more. Like if I could make it through this, I could make it through an algebra test.”

“And what about your identity? Did your mental illness impact your conception of yourself?”

She thought about this for a great deal of time. “Who I was and who I was meant to be...are intact. I’m sensitive, blunt, empathetic, loud, funny, I’m so many things. The eating disorder tried but it could not warp the core of who I am.”

Recovery, C believes, is all about accepting yourself.

“This is something that’s always going to be at the back of my mind,” she explained. “It’s chronic; but I’m getting better. It’s going to get better. I know it is.”

The conversation drifted. We discussed school life, working, friends, etc. She told me about her boyfriend, Ian, and how happy he makes her. I reminded her how the two of them fell asleep while video-chatting with one another one day during freshman year. She told me about an infuriating roommate she had had to deal with the previous winter. I told her about a fight I’d had with my former best friend. She told me about her cat and I told her about my dog. She told me about the time a customer pulled a gun out at her job. I told her why I quit mine. A meetup I expected to take no more than thirty minutes managed to eat up five hours.

Finally, I thanked her for her help and willingness to share with me for my assignment.

“No problem,” she shrugged. “I’m spreading awareness, you know? I’m kind of like, the best case scenario.” She laughed and I agreed. We said our goodbyes.

I was halfway home when it finally occurred to me why I couldn’t recognize her earlier. It wasn’t a haircut, or a new wardrobe, or the lack of makeup that changed C’s appearance in the last two years.

It was the fact that she had, to my utter delight, put on quite a bit of weight since we last met.

#science writing #science #mental health #mental health stigma #anorexia #Anorexia nervosa #eating disoder recovery #eating disorder #Interview #journalism #science journalism #depression #Psychology #neuroscience

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ephemeral-afterlight · 5 years

Text

Mourning at Midnight

(UwU so Hey. i’m back with some more trash)

Word Count: 7480

Summary: It’s scary, in a way, how in moments like this one, Logan feels as if his consciousness floats away from him, leaving behind only a wave of white-hot, searing anger that drains out of him just as quickly as it comes. There’s sleet running through his veins, and his brain has frostbite, and his fingertips are numb in the face of the ringing resonance after his outburst. The pain comes next, a simmering heat blistering below his fist until it’s coated and red and the beginnings of a bruise are starting to form. He can’t help but stare helplessly in front of himself, eyes burning and filling and blazing with how much they beg to close.

He doesn’t want to look up, to face the suffocating silence that’s fallen over the room. He doesn’t want to see their faces, their disappointment, their anger, their contempt. He wants to yell. He wants to sleep.

Logan sinks out.

Warnings (could potentially be small spoilers, nothing too big, but if you don’t have any triggers I’d suggest you skip reading this!):

There are no u!sides in this, nor does anyone have malicious intent, but the other main three (Virgil, Patton, Roman) and Thomas, to a lesser extent, treat Logan unkindly (not on purpose) and don’t realize their errors. This will be resolved! Just… not yet OwO

Being ignored/talked over

Mental/emotional breakdown

An unidentified illness with symptoms including: [extreme persistent nausea (lots of mentions), vomiting (once), bile, weakness/weariness, shaking, lightheadedness, double vision (once), headache, body aches/pains, breathing difficulties]

General negativity including: [self-doubt, self-deprecation/depreciation, feeling worthless or unloveable, self-hatred]

Anger management/temperament issues

Unintentional self-harm (not anything like c-tting, Logan gets a bruise as a result of an angry outburst)

Separate small, vague allusion to self-harm, but it’s not outright and not detailed in the slightest. Could be read as not even talking about self-harm

Potentially triggering descriptive imagery (metaphors and similes to describe how a character feels or percieves a situation, not anything that actually happens) including but not limited to: [glass, sharp things, blood, injection, live wires, loud noises, screaming, general mentions of pain, masochism, sound torture, knives/blades, wounds, drowning/suffocating, pressure]

Temporarily unresolved tension between Logan/Deceit/Remus and the other sides/Thomas (there will be a happy ending in the next fic, though, don’t worry!)

A few vulgar threats of violence (somewhat explicit, be careful) to the other sides from Remus (out of protectiveness; Remus means well but he does Not express it in a healthy way) that is not carried out or even humoured

Remus’ morning star and descriptions of its destructive capabilites

Loceit as a romantic pairing (for now…. UwU)

Sympathetic “dark” sides

That should be it for warnings! Let me know if I need to add anything!

A/N: So! This is finally done :D !! I’ve been working on it on and off for the past week or so, and although I know it could be way better, I think this is where I’ll keep it! This is technically a sequel to my other fic Tea at Twilight and it takes place in the same universe, and although you don’t need to read that before this to understand the story, I strongly suggest reading that first to get more of a feel for the dynamic!

This is inspired by @illogicallyinclined and her absolutely amazing Disaster Trio™ headcanons/au, and was prompted by this post so I just started writing! I meant for it to be a bit shorter, but of course my brain would Not let it go, even despite my ADHD, executive dysfunction, and massive amounts of writer’s block.

This is also unfinished! It is the second of three main works, all happening chronologically in the same universe. The first one is Tea at Twilight as stated previously, then this one, and there will be a third and final installment added to finish off this short little trilogy! I’ll be adding this to the series on AO3, so when the final fic is up, it’ll all be together for an easy reading experience. It is also possible that there will be other small fics in this universe (UA, as has been recently coined) that operate outside of the timeline of the main story, so be sure to watch out for that!

Thanks to Jay once again for creating these lovely headcanons that haunt my dreams every night, and for inspiring me to get back into my writing groove despite a writer’s block that’s lasted for over three years! Hope this isn’t too terrible, Jay! ilyy <333</p>

Also, a huge thank you to @illogical-anxieties for being such a good cheerleader/enabler! You really do help to keep me motivated and on track (and keep my ADHD in check), which is probably why this was even able to become a full-fledged story rather than a WIP to be buried where unfinished fics go to die T~T Love you tons <3</p>

(If I’m being honest with myself, this is just an excuse for me to live up to my IRL title of “Living Thesaurus”, coined by a friend many years ago and has since spread around to other friends and family. My title is thriving, and I suppose that means I should actually have proof of it, so there’s that.)

(Cross-posted to AO3)

(Read Part 1 here)

He can feel it building.

There’s far too much left to be desired when it comes to frustration. The natural helplessness that makes way for anger when you try so hard to do something or be something for someone and you’re pushed down by anything and everything between ignorance and antipathy. The fear that nothing you can do or say will ever be good enough. The buzzing, ticking, pinpricks upon pinpricks of heat injected into you until your blood and heart have been replaced with glass, fragile as a crumbling stone wall. It’s not as if he hasn’t had his outbursts before, spurred on by the familiar sharp pulse of rage that courses through him in a split-second whirlwind. It builds inside him, and he can feel the pressure in his limbs expand until it feels like his muscles are being squeezed out of existence and then he snaps like a rubber band that’s been pulled too taut. He’s not in denial of the fact that his impulsive, blinding reaction when met with frustration is not okay, and only detrimental to the demeanour he’s trying to retain. He knows it’s childish. He knows it’s immature, and pathetic, and wholly invigorating, at least until the adrenaline has worn off and he’s in the aftermath of his knee-jerk reaction to the tension coiled in his arms and legs and head.

It doesn’t mean that Logan is particularly in control of it though, despite his self-awareness being far above the level that most people with anger management issues are at. Maybe there’s a certain quality to it that allows for growth; it’s not as if Logan stays angry, or that he wants to hurt people. He loves the others, painfully so (as much as he loathes to admit it), to the point where he’s so desperate for their approval that he tampers down his passion, that spark that used to drive him to learn and speak and be happy just to avoid being cast out and abandoned, alone in the way he never wants to be. He wants to find a way to temper the fall into those dark, consuming waters, a way to mute the buzzing and ticking. He wants to seal those exposed live wires and release the tension to the point where he never lashes out ever again. He wants to, and he doesn’t know how to, and that fact infuriates him in an ironic, endless cycle of self-imposed and self-directed enmity.

Logan still thinks on this often, even now, wracking his brain for solutions to problems that realistically won’t be solved as easily as he wishes they would. Excerpts and quotes and data and statistics from many different studies about anger and temper management and irritability and everything in between seem to figuratively run amok through his brain, a screaming crowd of witnesses to the chaos and failure found in his ability to filter through the nonsense and come to a satisfying conclusion, any conclusion at all. He notices how his fingers tremble as they slip into the handle of his coffee mug, endures the dull ache in his mid-to-lower back from falling asleep at his desk for the majority of the day under the guise of work so important he holed himself up in his room to complete it. He ignores the way his head pounds, how he feels so dizzy that he might fall over and pass out any second from lightheadedness. He suffers through the loud conversations between the other three that are typical to the dinner routine that Logan cannot deal with today, not with this headache poking at him like figurative needles in his head.

When he senses the summons from Thomas stirring up the familiar but nonetheless odd ticklish sensation on the back of his neck, Logan can feel the tension knot up his muscles, and the combination of the two just makes him want to growl in irritation. The others, having also felt the summoning, seem to get impossibly louder, ringing and stinging and singing in his head. He still persists, despite the fact that he knows he shouldn’t be out doing anything today that’s likely to exacerbate his sickness, because Thomas is important, more so than Logan himself. No matter how much he wants to hole himself up in his room and sleep the day away, his host needs him, so Logan simply forces his mask of indifference to melt into steel. He refuses to budge, not for the first or last time, and he rises up in the real world standing straight and rigid and as put together as he’s always expected to be.

When he’s finally settled into his usual spot, as still as he can possibly be to not exacerbate the roiling nausea disquieting his stomach, he’s able to take in the other four arranged in their usual positions in Thomas’ living room, already having begun a conversation that Logan has missed the premise of entirely through his all-eclipsing, obfuscating malady. His vision doubles, like broken fractals of glass reflecting onto themselves, and then it pulls back together, merging back into something visible, something manageable.

“Well, I’m sure Danny likes you, too! You just gotta ask him, kiddo!” Patton exclaims, high voice pushing through the heavy, suffocating cotton in Logan’s ears, and the words snap the bespectacled side to attention. He needs context, needs to know what they’re talking about, needs to be able to help for once. Maybe he has to endure the bad to be able to put out the good, and this is where the climax is, the top of the rollercoaster at such a high altitude that oxygen is thin and dispersed before he shoots down the tracks in a rush of fresh air, relieving and calm and sanguine as he’s finally able to ground himself. A shiver runs through Logan’s body, between his shoulder blades and down his hip and through his leg, and his eyes flutter under the weight of consciousness. It recedes, the flow is ebbed, and his head clears to a more sustainable level.

“Oh, that’s so boring, Padre! Thomas should hire a band to play! And we can rig up streamers and confetti and there can be a cake and dancing and a party to celebrate!” Roman crows, throwing his arms and hands up into his signature pose to match his full, booming tone. Patton squeals, clutching his cardigan in his hands to pull excitedly at the sleeves as he bounces giddily on his feet. At the suggestion, as the polar opposite to Patton’s reaction, Virgil grimaces, hunching over even further in his jacket as he protests with every way he can think of that the situation could go wrong. Unsurprisingly, Roman takes personal offense to it and refutes Virgil’s points with the same intensity and fervour that’s been present in himself and his interactions with the anxious side since day one. Logan sort of understands, can infer that they’re discussing how to ask out Danny, a new friend of Thomas’ who has very quickly turned into a crush. In that case…

“If I may interrupt? While I don’t share all of Virgil’s worries, I do agree with his position in regards to the fact that there isn’t a need for such extravagance. It might embarrass Danny, for one, and for two, there are many ways such an excessive venture could backfire, such as technical difficulties or general human error. The idea is, while exciting, frankly outrageous,” Logan says, his role as the voice of reason renewed once more. It’s his job to sift through the conversations they have and get to the important parts, and he likes his job. He’s good at micromanaging, mediating the chaos, good at storing information to sort and consider and veto and bolster. It’s how he operates, how he copes. “We can think of something else to–”

“Oh, shut it, Pocket Protector. We all know you don’t care about romance, but this is important! Thomas wishes to find love with the second most handsome prince in the world! After me, of course,” Roman exclaims, in that boisterous, self-aggrandizing way of his, the way that hides his real insecurities he buries so deeply in himself he doesn’t know how to find them again. Oddly enough, it’s not Roman’s defense mechanism that throws Logan off, it’s the way that Logan stopped talking almost reflexively to allow the other side to finish his statement, as if the prince’s words were more important than his own, and it speaks as testament to how much Logan’s been conditioned (or maybe he’s conditioned himself all on his own) into putting everyone else before himself, even when it hurts him or Thomas. Logan is ignored in the face of his implicit trust, and he hates that even as it pours salt in the open wound, he finds himself taking a depraved, spiteful comfort in the familiarity of it all.

“That’s not what I–”

“Awe, c'mon, Logan! Thomas deserves to have a happy relationship and someone he can live out the rest of his life with! Doesn’t that sound nice, to grow old together with someone you love? Isn’t that romantic? Oh, it just makes me so warm and fuzzy thinking about it!” Patton interrupts, hands clutching each other over his heart as he swoons. Logan knows Patton doesn’t mean to be rude, but he still can’t help but be a little hurt by it, especially since he’s now been ignored twice consecutively. He’s just trying to help, and if that means reigning in Roman’s exorbitant ideas that border on egregious at times, then Logan knows it must be done. Although he encourages Thomas to seek a relationship to improve his mental health and provide more financial stability, there is a limit to how much he can disregard himself and others in doing so, and that doesn’t mean that Logan is the bad guy for pointing that out. He knows that. He knows that, so why does the dismissal still feel so sharp in his chest?

“Yeah, romance is cool and all, but what if it doesn’t work? What if Danny actually hates us? What if we ask and he laughs at us or says no and then we’ll be standing there like an idiot and then he’ll never wanna talk to us again because he thinks we’re pathetic and stupid and–”

“Hey, now, don’t be such a Debby Downer, kiddo! I’m sure it’ll go just fine! We’ll just ask him. The worst thing that can happen is he’ll say no, right? Shouldn’t we give it a shot?” Patton consoles before Virgil can go into a spiral. Although his well-meaning reassurances are meant to be comforting, his voice just grates on Logan’s ears, tinny and hollow and misdirected.

“That’s what I’m afraid of!”

Logan wants to keep listening, he really does, but the noise is rising to levels where it’s too much to handle. He’s already sensitive from his illness, but the discussion that is very quickly turning into an argument falls in pulses through his head, sound torture to the broken, hopeless masochist. He’s barely holding onto himself at this point, consciousness like a dangling thread that swirls and dances and twirls with even the tiniest breeze, a hint of movement sending it shivering and quivering as it spins. It wouldn’t take much for the thread to fray from the weight pulling it down, or to saw through it in a clean slice that leaves it floating feather-light upon air currents, petals spiraling to the ground.

Petals. Flowers. Thomas could bring Danny flowers! It’s perfect! Danny is especially predisposed to gardening, and he frequently talks about different flowers and what they mean based on the type and colour. His interest in botany could make this a sweet gift, to show that Thomas pays attention to what Danny enjoys, and can be the perfect segue into asking him on a romantic outing. Yes, this could work! It would appease Roman’s inclination to classic romanticism while still being practical and not unreasonably expensive, give Patton his ideal relationship fantasy (and a “warm and fuzzy feeling”, apparently), and allow Virgil a little more breathing room, so-to-speak. This is something they all should be agreeable towards, and that confidence is enough to supply Logan with enough energy to push past his lightheadedness and offer a solution. He’s proud of himself for taking the others’ feelings into account, something he knows he’s not always been the most proficient at, and for coming up with a compromise that will likely satisfy everyone’s wants and needs.

“What about bringing him flowers?” Logan asks, pleased and antsy as he feels hope well up in his chest. He doesn’t push it down this time, and he thinks maybe, just maybe they’ll finally listen to him, that they’ll tell him that he did well, that he’s being considerate and maybe even say thank you–

“How would you even know, Roman? It’s not like we just go out and hire mariachi bands every Saturday!” Virgil says with furrowed brows, and Roman huffs in indignation, and Patton sighs as he looks between the two of them, and Logan’s words fall on deaf ears. They didn’t even hear. They didn’t listen. They didn’t care they didn’t care–

“Uh, hey, Virgil, what if–” Logan tries once more to speak, nausea rolling angrily in his gut, head spinning dizzy round and round and round and round and Virgil flinches.

He flinches. Because of Logan.

Virgil hasn’t been afraid of any of them for a long time. Sure, in the beginning, when they fought one another on nearly a day-to-day basis, there would be a moment before he could pull on his figurative mask that a flash of fear would go through Virgil’s eyes, and the sadness kept within wouldn’t subside even when he growled and snapped and blustered whichever side had the misfortune of picking a fight with him during a time where his first instinct was to keep away the pain and longing and loneliness the only way he knew how. Over time, that flash of fear dulled, morphed into something more manageable, more trusting. The sadness never really went away, but it was met with warmth, a soft contentedness that danced in his eyes when he realized he had a family to turn to. He hasn’t been afraid for a long time. And yet, he flinches away from Logan, just from him speaking.

Is he really that bad?

Does even simply the sound of his voice have such a negative association for Virgil that it prompts genuine fear and discomfort? Has he really scared Virgil that much? What did he do? How can he fix this?

Maybe he shouldn’t.

Logan’s felt disconnected from the others for quite a while now. He loves them, of course he does, but he doesn’t feel like he fits. He’s the metaphorical jagged puzzle piece, the one that should snap into the final vacant space but is so broken beyond repair that it doesn’t fit quite right. He wants to belong, to feel at home whenever he’s with them, but he doesn’t. He yearns for the acceptance that Virgil earned, the support that Roman is held up by, the respect and adoration Patton seems to acquire so casually and naturally that it’s like he doesn’t even have to try. Logan wants to be like them. He wants to be loved, but… that isn’t really his place, is it?

Love is not an inherent thing. It’s something that’s earned, by doing good things and being important enough to someone that they give it freely. It’s something Logan doesn’t understand, but despite that, still desperately, painfully yearns for. He wants to be loved, the way he loves the others. He wants to be a part of their famILY, to have that implicit trust in each other that only comes from acute, profound, deep-seated love. He wants that fondness directed towards himself, that devotion borne from hapless, radiating appreciation. The humbled esteem, the maudlin, theatrical longing, the passion and yearning and helpless, acquiescent love that bursts from the seams in a manner that will never diminish or fade. He wants that. Badly. And he’s finally ready to accept that he will never have it. He’s okay. He’s okay. He just needs a moment. He just needs to breathe.

The others must have continued with their arguments long ago, seemingly unaware of anything outside of themselves. Logan supposes he shouldn’t really berate them for that since he often falls victim to getting lost in debate as well, but something is wrong with Thomas, going by his expression and demeanour and the logical side can’t ignore it anymore. It’s highly unlikely that the other three will come away from themselves for long enough to notice, and it doesn’t sound like they’re anywhere close to coming to a conclusion amongst themselves, so Logan is perfectly fine with bearing that responsibility upon himself to check up on his host and make sure he’s okay. He’s the most important one here, after all, and it’s Logan’s job to help him, guide him in his life and decisions.

“Thomas? Is there something wrong?” Although the words come out clear and precise as usual, Logan’s throat burns, and he can barely breathe. He wants to sleep, he wants to sleep, but Thomas needs him, and that doesn’t happen often nowadays, so Logan does nothing but wait impassively. His host bites the inside of his cheek, then sighs as he stares off at the wall, lost in thought. Since he says nothing, the logical side assumes he will continue to say nothing for a few more moments, and decides to give him a once-over to gather more information and any possible context. Thomas’ eyebrows are furrowed, and his posture far from adequate. His expression is troubled, and his arms are crossed loosely, a pointer finger scratching at his elbow unconsciously. There is no obvious cause for his confusion and/or upset in himself or anywhere in the room, apart from the current dilemma, but he was fine before, so something must have changed to distress him now. Logan cannot ascertain what Thomas needs simply from observing him, so he concludes that the best thing for him to do is wait.

So he does. And he does so for a minute, two, five. Every second that ticks by feels like a needle is being shoved into his eyes, his brain, his legs, his everything and it takes more effort to stand than he’s used to. Breathing is difficult, but that isn’t exactly a new development, so at least he knows how to ignore it. Eventually, ten minutes pass with only the sound of the other three arguing in the background, and it doesn’t seem like Thomas is really all there. Although the action makes him want to throw up, Logan shifts forward, moving out of his usual spot and into Thomas’ own. He still doesn’t acknowledge any kind of input outside himself, so Logan lays a hand on his host’s arm gently, which snaps him out of his trance in a slow, unhurried kind of way. Thomas gives him a glance when his logical side sighs, tampering down any audible signs of his nausea in a manner that is unbeknownst to the host, but returns to staring at the wall without a second regard.

“Thomas?” Logan murmurs, bile rising in his throat and shoving his hidden suffering even closer to the forefront of his mind, as though it hasn’t been there all along. It’s hard to think, through all of the white noise and weary irritation and the tiniest sliver of hope that he crushes immediately, but thinking is his job, and he needs to help. “Are you alright? You can talk to me.”

And then Thomas is shrugging him off, turning away as he tells him he should “just stop” with piercing words, that he “can’t do anything to help”, and the rejection feels like a metaphorical knife has been shoved into his gut. Logan can feel the pain and the heartbreak and the insecurity materialize into a cold blade, twisting and twisting just to make him hurt more. Logan is ignored for the fourth time today, by the person it hurts to come from the most, and he can feel the sun whipping and screaming in his chest. His breath is stuck, sucked down into his throat, a sharp pain localizing in his neck, and he can’t help but bring his hand up to rub at the spot with trembling fingertips as he unsteadily lurches back to his regular spot. The others don’t notice, of course, or if they did, they don’t care. Then the nausea he’s been fighting against surges like a violent wave at full force, drowning him and the hurt is forcing its way into his mouth, his throat, his lungs, and he can’t breathe–

His fist flashes down from his neck to the banister, punching the railing so hard it echoes in the reverberation created from his vicious, angry snarl.

It’s scary, in a way, how in moments like this one, Logan feels as if his consciousness floats away from him, leaving behind only a wave of white-hot, searing anger that drains out of him just as quickly as it comes. There’s sleet running through his veins, and his brain has frostbite, and his fingertips are numb in the face of the ringing resonance after his outburst. The pain comes next, a simmering heat blistering below his fist until it’s coated and red and the beginnings of a bruise are starting to form. He can’t help but stare helplessly in front of himself, eyes burning and filling and blazing with how much they beg to close.

Logan sinks out.

There’s a very short window of time where the logical side rushes into the en-suite bathroom after rising up in his bedroom, trembling legs aching with exhaustion. Barely a second passes between him falling to the floor and emptying the meager contents of his stomach into the toilet, the bile burning in his tender throat as a reminder of his failure. The floor is cold and hard beneath him, ridges of tiles pressing unrelenting into his knees through his wrinkled jeans. His head spins, unbalanced as it whirls through itself, words and thoughts and ideas that mean nothing and everything simultaneously existing hollowly in a falling echo. There is pain, and aching, and soreness, and exhaustion, and Logan wants to sleep.

It’s hard to rise to his feet, head throbbing and knees shaking as he wipes the spit from his mouth on a folded square of toilet paper. The pain nags at him, persistent and irritating in its attempts to shut Logan out, almost clear in a way that belies the foggy haze blanketing his nearly incoherent thought process. Marking a clear vantage, a faultline to anchor onto is no easy task, and all Logan wants as he stumbles over to his bed is a landmark to pinpoint and find his way back to. He careens toward the mattress once he’s close enough, finally letting his legs give out underneath him when he’s as near as he can bear. It’s so difficult to stay upright in stiff misery, pangs and twinges of sharp pain coursing through his limbs and his back as his muscles are forced together under pressure.

In another familiar, frustrating bout of anger that seizes his breath before it can escape his lungs, Logan shoves his fingers in the knot of his tie, yanking it forcefully even as the motion jerks his own head forward uncomfortably along with it. His fingers run down the length of the fabric, and it falls apart at the end of its cycle, much like Logan has, and he snaps his arm back to chuck the dark blue, silky length to the ground in a motion that does little to relieve the rage built up inside him.

He can feel it building. The buzzing, the pressure, the glass in his veins running on shards. He feels the pinpricks upon pinpricks, the fire burning in his lungs, and the stone crumbles, and tumbles down, and he’s like a rubber band pulled taut.

He cracks, shrill pressure in his knuckles and head and torso, and nothing happens.

Then Logan hears the telltale squeak of his door swiveling on mildly rusty hinges, and a familiar voice echoes right through his bubble, shatters the stone wall like a bulldozer running at full speed, and then the wetness spills over his lashes and over his stony, impassive face.

“Oh, Lo,” Deceit murmurs, sad and tender as the breath rushes out of him and Logan can’t do this. He wants to throw out his fist in a wide arc and pummel the wall next to him until his knuckles are raw and bloodied and bruised beyond repair. He wants to scream until his throat is torn and his voice is gone, lost in the uncaring, empty void that coldly swallowed up his passion. Happiness has never seemed further away, and he knows he deserves it. But then he remembers all of the times where the pressure in his limbs and the buzzing in his brain forced him to lash out, to hurt others, and he thinks that maybe it’s okay for him to hurt right now to even the score. With the last of the metaphorical wall around him in tiny pieces, fragments of a life he never wanted to live but he desperately fought to keep, he lets his guard down for the first time in years.

Logan’s face crumples under the weight he’s burdened his being with, body immediately drooping under the heaviness that he’s forced himself to fight through. He finally submits, and the tears come in an endless stream over his cheekbones, itchy and hot and terribly, mindlessly relieving. It feels so good to finally let the negative emotion he’s pent up inside him out, to fall out of his cage he’s lived in high above a swirling ocean of release and fear and freedom. And he’s so, so lucky because he has someone to save him from the fall.

Deceit’s kneeled down in front of him, wiping away the tears as they fall with uncharacteristically degloved thumbs, and Logan can feel the smoothness of the scales twisting and trailing down his fingers. Every so often, Deceit’s pointed thumbnails catch lightly on the skin of Logan’s cheek, and it just causes him to cry harder. The vulnerability in the room is palpable, a wispy breath of worry and insecurity and trust trailing over their skin, blanketing the room in a warmth that runs even warmer when Logan reaches up to gently lay his hand over Deceit’s own. He shows his appreciation through tactility when the words he so desperately wishes to say are lost in his throat, blocked by the barrier that separates his newfound submission and the part of him that’s still clinging to the feeble grasp at acceptance he craves so dearly.

Logan can barely tell what’s in front of him through the kaleidoscope in his vision, but he doesn’t really need to see to throw himself forward off the bed and bury himself in Deceit’s chest, of whom lets out a surprised noise but doesn’t hesitate a single second in wrapping his arms tightly around the other side. He strokes Logan’s back comfortingly and offers him whispered reassurances through the heart-wrenching sobs and broken, croaky whines that disappear into his cloak, hand coming up to cradle his head in the overwhelming reflexive instinct to keep the logical side safe and happy. It feels like a dagger has gone through Deceit’s chest at the knowledge that Logan has been suffering for so long and hasn’t been able to let it out or just simply be held, the self-preservation that is at the core of his function as a side going off like alarm bells with every sniffle. Logan curls into the first person who’s ever offered him physical affection and emotional safety, and his fists clench the fabric at the snake-like side’s shoulders as tightly as he would if he were to never, ever let go.

Logan is out of breath even as his heart begins to calm, beating and beating in his ribcage and in his lungs. The lump in his throat prevents him from speaking, but he figures it’s okay to not be heard audibly, just this once, and speak with his actions. Although he doesn’t know what he’s saying when he pulls back and wraps his arms around Deceit’s neck, laying his face in the crook of other side’s neck like a small child would, not really, he hopes that his intent still comes across in some sort of intelligible, hopeful way. Deceit seems to take this as a request, a promise, and slides his grip to a point where he can hoist the smaller side up in his hold, carrying him just like a parent carrying their kid to their bed after they fell asleep during a visit to a friend’s house. This situation is much more loaded, stained with impurities and unsure withering, but it’s just as raw, just as real, and Logan finds himself feeling safer than he ever has before.

At some point, they end up on the bed, Logan having been manhandled into a more comfortable position for both of them, which is laying across Deceit’s lap without ever having let go of his neck. The logical side feels small and vulnerable, something that he would normally hate, squash down, bury so deep within himself that he doesn’t even have to acknowledge it. But honestly, right here, right now, he’s so goddamn exhausted, and forcing himself back into the state of repression he’s been in for so much of his life would take too much of a toll, more than he already has on himself. The wetness rolls down his cheeks, bold, blue precipitation falling in droplets onto his skin and the fabric of Deceit’s cape, sinking and spreading and thinning out into airy nothingness. And the nothingness enraptures him, pulls him in even as he breaks and whimpers and spills wisps of forgotten feelings into empty space, at least until his bedroom door opens once more with a loud click, because nothing Remus ever does is truly quiet.

“Hey, are you guys having a sexy party without me? How c–… are you… crying?” Remus asks, suggestive tone split and watered down into something confused, and surprised, and angry. The younger twin kicks the door shut behind him with his foot, more out of muscle memory than conscious forethought, something that stands with nearly every action Remus executes. Logan turns his head wearily, not lifting it from where it rests on Deceit’s collarbone. The latter of the two takes that chance to clear away some of the tears that didn’t get absorbed into his clothing, hoping that since the stream is slowly dispersing, his cheeks will stay dry this time. Remus slowly approaches, body tense and eyes piercing as Logan’s face is wiped off for the nth time, offering no other sounds or words as he crouches down to examine how the bespectacled side’s skin is rubbed red and sensitive.

Logan just whines softly, stare falling to the bedsheets, observing nothing in particular as he tries to figure out why words are failing him. Something that’s such an intricate part of himself, the communication of thoughts and ideas and knowledge that defines so much of who he is and how he exists, it’s dwindled and diminished into nothing. Deceit seems to understand, he always does, and reads him so perfectly it’s a wonder the two didn’t become closer in the beginning, with how much they truly are alike. A scaled hand makes it’s way up to Logan’s head and cards through the soft, disheveled hair there, scratching lightly at his scalp in a motion that seems to draw the aching tension caused by his distress out of his body, leaving his muscles to relax and melt into the chest that holds him upright.

“Something happened before I came in here. I assume it has to do with the others,” Deceit murmurs into thick, heavy air, stale with shame and tired hopelessness. Remus’ eyes flick to Logan’s own, actively searching for some sort of confirmation or denial. There’s a beat of silence, and Logan’s eyes flutter in a fatigued attempt to stay awake, and the nausea creeps its way into his stomach once again like a predator stalking its prey. Deceit repositions himself quietly, pulling the smaller side impossibly closer, as if he knows that he’ll need the added comfort. With his body squished into a protective embrace, and his tie laying flat on the floor below, forgotten and scorned for what it represents, Logan swallows hard around the sharp block in his neck and nods through his nonverbal affliction.

At the minimal admission, something in Remus’ eyes darkens, bathing the bright craze that typically resides there in something hateful, and vicious, and dripping with chemical absolution. He shifts away, rolls onto his haunches in a way that doesn’t read as entirely intentional, as though he’s been physically forced back with the weight of the confession. There’s so much there, in the way his breath comes out shallow and gravelly and low like a beast biting and snapping at the bars that contain it, fighting against the cage it’s locked inside. Nostrils flare, and jaw sets, and fists clench white as bone, and Remus straightens up to his full height, intimidating and looming and dangerous.

“Who?” he spits, venom coursing through the single word in molten streams. It’s a protective fire, serious in a way Remus rarely is, and the storm in his eyes and aura only becomes more turbulent and intense and solid as he reaches behind himself to slowly seize his morning star from where he keeps it at the ready. Pulling it to the front of him is an unexpectedly slow event, yet still ferocious in its quiet, cold fervour. The silver weapon swings in a steady arc around the side of Remus’ body, catching the dim light in a threatening glint, the gleam alluding to its deadliness in a way that’s almost unexplainable. The spiked mace finally comes to its resting point, hovering in the air just beside the fierce side’s leg, unassuming and ready to drive its way into an unlucky antagonist’s skull.

“I’ll cut their fucking throats. I’ll rip off every single limb from their bodies until they’re nothing but a pile of flesh and blood. They’re gonna pay for this,” Remus snarls, each threat bathed in acrimony and malice and choked by fury ripping through the tempest. Logan stares through misty eyes, half-lidded and concerned but too out of it to muster much of a coherent thought. Thankfully, Deceit is still there, soft and warm and well-equipped to deal with Remus and his behaviour. The snake-like side sighs, reaching out to just barely snatch up a frilly black sleeve, tugging him closer and meeting surprisingly little resistance despite the rigidity of the tallest side’s posture. Each breath from Remus comes out like a bullet, brisk and arduous and punctuated by a pang of impermeable guilt.

Even as Deceit motions Remus to lower himself onto the bed in front of them, the latter of the two is still apprehensive, terse movements and restless eyes that flit between anything and everything they can to avoid stagnation. It’s almost fearful, in a way, primal in its aptitude to think, and cultivate, and vindicate a wrongdoing that was never his fault or responsibility in the first place. Logan hates that they need to save him, hates that he doesn’t truly believe they actually care. There’s a level of certainty with himself and with others that the logical side hasn’t reached yet, and it feels too close and yet too far, kept obscure and secluded and almost clandestine in the way it’s ostensibly unreachable.

With the help of Deceit’s hand to guide his way, Remus slowly lets go of his morning star, tossing it to the side with a pensive, trembling swallow. It clatters to the ground, metallic clang resounding in vibrations, tilde-shaped waves that bounce off the façade and yell out to one another. Muted shrieks upon perfect, flat, neutral paint, sepulchral oscillations attacking the drywall.

“You can’t hurt them. I know you’re angry. I am too. But hurting them won’t solve anything, Rem, you know that more than anyone,” Deceit says meaningfully, smiling in a way that’s sad and distant but caring and compelling and relaxing for the tension wrapped so tightly around the three of them. The snake-like side lifts the hand that’s not in Logan’s hair and reaches out to grab Remus’ own, firmly but gently as he squeezes his fingers in a way that reassures, and consoles, and reprimands, not unkindly. He admonishes, and breaks that anger and frustration, and builds up positivity and alleviation and reprieve from everything that allows that buzzing, ticking, those pinpricks upon pinpricks. His care and concern washes over you, paternal in a different way than Patton operates, and it’s why Deceit is so comforting to be around. He manages a respite from vexation, a refuge in sanctuary, discreet freedom for the flawed, defeated dreamer.

“I’m mad. I’m mad that they hurt you, Lo-Lo. I want them to feel the pain you’re feeling,” Remus mutters, frigid and defeated, head bowed and gaze distant in that transparent manner of his that easily broadcasts all of his thoughts and feelings and wishes. Logan feels the pride welling up in his chest without even realizing it, quietly delighted at the progress Remus has made in being clear and forthcoming with his emotions and impulsivity. A weary grin makes its way onto his face, predictably aggravating the soreness in his cheeks, yet he finds himself indifferent to it, unperturbed by the plight that’s ravaged his body for the day, and probably longer without his notice. He wants to reassure the younger twin, to smile and laugh and brush all of it off, but his eyelids droop, and a pathetic mewl is the only thing able to escape his lungs. Of course, since there’s something Logan wants to say, Deceit somehow knows how to communicate it, just as prompt and courteous and perceptive as always.

“We can talk about this later after Logan has slept. Don’t worry too much, Rem, and don’t do anything stupid. If you get angry again, please go to your paints instead of your legs,” Deceit instructs, more of a suggestion than a demand, but he hopes Remus will listen and be mindful anyway. The latter of the two bounces his leg anxiously, grumbling unintelligibly under his breath as he stands up in one swift, fluid motion. As Remus makes his way over to exit the room, Logan nudges Deceit’s hand with his head gently, trying to bring his attention back to the massaging motion that ceased sometime during the conversation. The snake-like side’s eyes flick downward to meet the smaller side’s own half-lidded, teetering gaze, and he huffs a laugh after a moment of searching. Logan doesn’t know what he finds, but he realizes that he doesn’t really care that much about worrying over every little interaction anymore.

Remus finally turns and glances back as he swings the door open, brows still furrowed and shoulders still hunched, but simply shakes his head and leaves. The door closes much softer than before, thankfully, so as not to be too harsh on Logan’s migraine, an unusually conscientious thought from someone that rarely shows consideration to the needs of others that the logical side appreciates that much more. As the sound of Remus’ footsteps slowly fade with his retreat down the hallway, the two of them left are bathed in silence, one that is marginally less heavy and thick than before.

A small while passes afterward, only punctuated by soft breathing and light scratching noises from nails trailing through messy hair. Logan feels like he might pass out any minute, what with the comfortable, quiet understanding the two have come to rest at, but some part of him says to wait, to push through the mind-numbing exhaustion for just a little while longer. That part of him is probably just being considerate toward Deceit, who Logan can’t imagine would be very comfortable with another side falling asleep on him and laying on him for an extended period of time, but he figures that it’s a good of a reason as any. It’s not about him feeling like a burden. It’s not.

Eventually, Deceit must start to get tired as well, or maybe he’s sore from Logan’s weight on his legs, so he sits forward, apologizing quietly for disturbing the peace, and he moves them into a more comfortable position. The new arrangement is far more snug and cozy than the previous one, Logan thinks drowsily, as his head hits the pillow across from Deceit. They lay there on top of the blankets but make no move to pull them up, just content to stare lazily at one another in the dim, ambient light cast by the desk lamp in the opposite corner of the room.

“Why?” Logan finally asks, and although he loathes disrupting the silence, he needs to ask. The words are scratchy in his tender throat, a charcoal whisper on a steel canvas that scratches and sketches away with nothing viable left to keep through the wind that blows the dark dust off the surface. “Why are you helping me? Why do you care?”

Deceit just hums, sending Logan a weak, distracted smile. He mulls over the words, tossing about the meaning and possibilities in his head and on his silver tongue, rushing in an uncertain river through valleys of golden sand.

“I am self-preservation at its core. I exist to keep Thomas safe and healthy and thriving, and that also means you and the other sides by extension. But… it’s not just that. Even though I feel physical pain whenever one of you or Thomas is hurt, I specifically want to help you because… I care about you, Logan. I love you, and want to see you healthy and happy. I haven’t really been doing a good job of that lately,” Deceit mutters, gaze somewhere on their shared pillow, and there’s a quality to his tone that’s bitter beyond the line of frustration. Although Deceit doesn’t expand on it, doesn’t offer up a single clarification despite the heavy air and his resigned demeanour, Logan gets it. He understands, and he wants to prove him wrong.

So he does.

And that comes in the form of surging forward, fighting against the current, the pinpricks in his stomach and shoulders and abdomen, disregarding the exhaustion for just a little while longer so that he can let Deceit’s lips meet his own. Logan’s so close he can feel the shocked rush of air leave Deceit’s nose, feel the vibrations through the air as his body trembles in fear and anticipation and relief. The other side eases in, sinks closer, closer, and finally moves his lips in a careful, emotional dance that leaves Logan dizzy and breathless, for entirely different reasons that have plagued him for the past day.

“Lo,” Deceit breathes, low, wanting, and he pulls back to give Logan a chance to catch up. A scaled hand comes up to caress the logical side’s cheek, a soothing, cool balm for the raw skin beginning to heal there. “I didn’t… I didn’t think…”

“I love you,” Logan breathes, the words he’s refused to say, to acknowledge, to confront welling up through his throat and for the first time, he lets them spill out. The dam has broken, debris left to descend and submerge in the depths of the sentiment crashing through in a roaring, passionate rapid at the narrowest point yet. The words come, and they don’t stop, and Logan almost can’t believe how right they feel on his tongue. “I love you, I love you, I–I love you so much, Dee.”

Logan is like a rubber band, pulled taut and still and trembling under the pressure. And maybe he’ll split, shoot apart, torn in two pieces that will never fit back together again. But maybe he won’t. Maybe instead of snapping in half, he’ll snap back, and that thought alone gives him a quiet comfort that he’s not used to allowing himself. He’s waiting, hoping, and he’s okay enough for now.

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adamatomic · 4 years

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Design of Doom Eternal

Wanted to jot down some thoughts while they were still fresh, and I hate writing threads on Twitter, so, here we are.

(Surprise! Male game designer has DOOM OPINIONS. BEHOLD LOL)

First, disclaimers: what follows is super subjective, pretty picky, and likely unjustified. I love a good mobility shooter - Doom 2016 and Titanfall 2 are the only western shooters I really enjoy, and each do super interesting things spatially, mechanically, etc. However, I’ve never worked on any kind of FPS type of game, and never worked on a AAA game, nor shipped a game during a global pandemic, and there’s a lot that I don’t understand about what goes into making this kind of thing, much less how it’s even possible. Making a followup to a well-loved and hugely successful game is also a terrifying prospect. Finally, I am about to "dwell” on what I perceive to be “negative” things about the game, which is pretty unfair, because there’s a LOT of positives (it’s fun, it’s gorgeous, the load times are crazy short, the vistas slay again, amazing accessibility options, perfect audio, etc etc). But I think this is a game where a lot of the positives are really in your face, and what again I personally perceive to be the negatives are a little bit harder to put your finger on. And this isn’t a review, and definitely isn’t yucking anyone’s yums. This is me trying to figure out why this one feels a bit different to play. Hopefully the unanimously positive reception of the game by literally everyone everywhere (including myself) balances out whatever acid might be in these queries.

OK!

Jungle Gyms Versus Canyons

Ok, so. Doom Eternal is structured a lot like 2016 in that it’s corridors linking big wave-based arenas, which is a good structure for a game about shooting all the things. Arenas can be flat-ish or tall-ish. Tall-ish arenas seem to roughly come in two flavors: jungle gyms, and canyons. Jungle gym arenas are the ones that I feel like took centerstage in the marketing and gameplay of Doom 2016, as a way of showing off the double-jump / ledge grab / launchpad vertical mobility stuff, and because they make narrative / thematic sense in the human-built oil rig environments that comprise much of Doom 2016′s level architecture. Jungle gyms are distinguished somewhat from canyons by generally having what feel like distinct “floors”, or solid planes creating multiple separated levels of combat. Canyons, even if they have some transverse traversal elements, are more open and chaotic, with less concrete divisions between elevations. I’m belaboring this essential difference because it has a bunch of second-order effects on gameplay - jungle gyms allow you to jump from skirmish to skirmish, you can use your mobility options to “interrupt” combat, while canyons are more continuous. Jungle gyms usually have more obstacles (like the aforementioned distinct floors) which make it slightly harder for long range enemy attacks to land, which reduces the overall ambient damage-soak.

The key thing about all these arenas - flat open spaces, distinct jungle gym environments, and canyon style playgrounds - is that you definitely want all of them in your game, because the strategy and tactics for playing these fights changes a lot based on these constraints. When do you want a roof over your head? When do you not? When do you want your back to a wall? These are valid and important differences for these games specifically, especially when basic resource management strategies in these encounters is pretty similar, and because the enemy behaviors and attacks have so much variety.

So far, though, Doom Eternal feels like it has a WHOLE LOT of canyons, and NOT a whole lot of jungle gyms. It’s possible that this changes later in the game, so take all this with a big grain of salt. But the first 3-4 hours of gameplay are really dominated by canyon-style vertical arenas, which isn’t necessarily ideal in terms of variety (and makes you angst a little harder for the wall-run affordances of other mobility shooters). They also tend to be slightly same-y, outdoor, rocky environments, versus the more oil rig-inspired, recognizably human-scale mining structures of 2016 (I’m sure this changes later in the game too). The oil rig-inspired stuff also lends itself to jungle gyms a lot more naturally, so I feel like these choices of arena shapes and environment types are kind of an interconnected and difficult problem.

None of this would really even qualify as a problem, either - this is nitpicking nitpicks, at this point - except relying on canyons so much exacerbates some of the “fussiness” of the combat changes (those are next). For me, anyways - I’m not sure anyone else is feeling like these are problems haha. And it’s a big game, so I’m not sure how much this stuff changes across the whole campaign yet!

Tactical Ballistics

A Doom thing I adored in 2016 and am continuing to enjoy in Eternal is the way ammo, health, and other arcade-style upgrades are thoughtfully placed around the arenas. It’s a nod to the strongest parts of Vanquish’s level design, and goes all the way back to using coins in Super Mario to lure players out to new places they might not explore otherwise. It’s a huge part of what gives the nu-Doom arenas their “chess-like” feel, and shifts the fights away from Serious Sam-style battles and makes them into four-dimensional puzzles. 2016 doubles down on this tactical approach by leveraging a kind of resource triangle of chainsaw kills, glory kills, and just plain firefights.

A lot of Eternal’s design seems committed to upping the ante on all of these strengths. Lower ammo capacities puts more pressure on the chainsaw kills. There’s a new technique called “flame belch” that turns the resource triangle into a resource square to accommodate armor. Monsters have “weak points” now, shortcuts that change their behavior or get you fast glory kills. It’s a pretty compelling jigsaw puzzle of abilities.

It also places a lot of strain on player attention and cognition, because all this is running on top of straight-up arena-wave firefights (with 7+ enemy types at a time, all with unique behaviors and optimal strats) AND beefy mobility controls (swinging, dashing, double-jumps, ledge grabs, launch pads, etc). It’s kind of a lot. But I don’t think this is necessarily the place for saying “this is DOOM, man, you got to keep it simple, just shoot the monsters, how come there’s even upgrades” or whatever. For so many reasons, but the primary of which is that most of this stuff rules, and throwing it away would suck. So what do you do?

I want to focus on two small, specific things that really stand out to me - I’m not totally sure that they’re actually “bad”, but I think they have a lot of weird secondary and tertiary effects that contribute to some perceptions of “fussiness” in some of the battles.

Weak Points

This is a big enough change that it is repeatedly tutorialized through video on every loading screen, after every game over, and after every new enemy is introduced... so I know it was on the designers’ radar haha. And it's an interesting addition - chess fights in Doom are already about hierarchies, and adding another tiny hierarchy within an existing hierarchy is a NICE bit of tension to add, it gives a kind of scrambly feeling that is good overall. The issue for me arises from an apparent or perceived damage scaling issue around these weak points. For example, the optional sniper rifle upgrade to the heavy cannon and the optional sticky bombs upgrade to the shotgun insta-wreck the arachnotron and revenant enemies’ weak points, while sustained plasma rifle fire doesn’t seem to ever do the job. Which makes sense on paper - this is a nice way of putting pressure on the player’s weapon choices and ammo, which is what it’s all about. Although I guess you could argue that it’s also all about movement, and that this particular combat pressure has a pretty tenuous relationship with mobility in general.

Either way, it means you spend a lot of time squinting at your weapon wheel mid-battle to see how many shots your shotgun still has, because you ran out of chainsaw fuel a while ago, and are still being actively bombarded at a pretty long distance (because its a canyon and not a jungle gym). I know, I need to git gud, trust me, i KNOW. But check out the weapon wheel ammo display size in Doom 2016 versus Doom Eternal:

I love the new color scheme and ammo icons in Eternal! But it’s 3-4x harder to read the actual, very important ammo counts.

All these small changes add up to something that feels like a pretty different gameplay experience compared to the more spatial (read: movement-based) and literally easier-to-read resource management stuff from 2016. Which, it’s a sequel - failing to sufficiently differentiate it is its own huge risk. And, to be fair, 2016 had its fair share of fussy (though more legible) weapon switching. But when you add this stuff up, the matrix of considerations in moment-to-moment combat in Eternal is pretty different from 2016, and I think it largely comes down to the damage scaling around the weak points. While you can technically choose to play through battles without leveraging weakpoints (thus sidestepping most of these cascading issues), this approach is heavily incentivized by the major behavior changes that happen after you hit weak points (in addition to the constant tutorializing) and the waves appear to have been balanced around taking advantage of these things. Whether or not these are even flaws, technically, whatever they are is exacerbated by the UI design of the weapon wheel AND the relatively popularity of the relatively unobscured canyon arenas. So it’s hard for me to judge weak point damage scaling in a vacuum.

Overall, these new combat options make the arenas feel more constrained and more prescribed. Design is a nightmare this way: sometimes by giving people more choices, you’re actually giving them less. My pitch for a small tweak that might engage with some of these issues would be to keep weak points, but get rid of the damage scaling and maybe make the hitboxes a little bigger. The goal here is NOT to make weak point enemies easier so much as to open up options about what weapons you can use against them, thereby reducing wheel squinting, thereby freeing up more attention to movement and all the other stuff that ruuuules about nu-Doom in general.

Also, I should clarify that it’s entirely possible that I completely imagined the weak point damage scaling, and am a big dummy with bad aim.

Flame Belch

This is a pretty small thing, there’s this new “flame belch” move, intended to complement the existing chainsaw and glory kill moves as a way of “farming” resources from combat, one of the things that really defined Doom 2016. It differs in one huge way though, in that it has to be committed to BEFORE killing a monster. Chainsaws and glory kills ARE kills. Flame belch adds a status instead, which is “cashed in” later when you do the kill. If chainsaw kills and glory kills and BFG shots are Super Mario jumps, Flame Belch is more like a Tony Hawk jump - it starts early and is carefully calculated. Which is pretty dope!! But in this environment where weak point damage scaling and canyon layouts are already putting huge strains on the player’s attention, it feels like a big ask. The “triangle button” mechanic from 2016, the BFG, was a kill move with cool-down, so really I’m just suggesting stuff they already tried anyways. There’s no way this is news to anybody, much less the developers haha.

But... I would love to play a build where flame belch was totally a thing, just it was a finishing move, not a status thing. Let it plug into that reload-replacing resource-farming punctuation pacing flow. That shit rules.

Of course, I have to wonder what the unintended secondary and tertiary consequences of these suggestions would be. Good action games are often tenuous and deeply interconnected things where results are really hard to predict. Maybe they already tried these ideas and they sucked, or they know their own game a lot better than I do, and have a big stack of reasons this stuff would suck for most of their player base.

But wait...

Where The Hell Am I?

Last section, I promise.

I am extremely not going to weigh in on whether or not Doom games need “Story” or not, or what that even means.

But...

If you are driving a monster truck, it is probably pretty fun to see a big line of cars in front of you, and know that you are about to drive all over those cars, and that at the end is a really big fancy car... and you are going to drive over that too.

The general conceit of Doom 2016, that you are on one end of a Mars base, and you need to get to the other end, and in between is a whole lot of cars demons, is a good one. It has good monster truck-ness.

So far this is something that I’m struggling to extract from Eternal. I’m not really sure who any of these grumpy folks are, or where it is that they are, or why I am going down this corridor (aside from the very Doom-like fact that it is the only corridor around).

The problem for me is decidedly NOT that I don’t understand the slayer’s emotional whatever, or that I haven’t been painstakingly expositioned into the specific hierarchies of the demon universe, or anything that I think would normally be described as a “narrative”. For me, it’s that I don’t get to sort of soak in the anticipation of the loooong line of cars I’m about to crunch.

Does Doom need a story? Idk. Doom might need a lot of about-to-get-crushed cars though.

Finally finally finally, and this is highly subjective, but I think the slayer is just more fun when he’s an X factor or a rogue agent. NPCs recognizing the slayer feels sort of weird to me? The feeling that he is a fly in the ointment I think is stronger and sexier when he’s like... outside the canon, almost. I’m not totally convinced that having him Kratos around is as fun as having a bunch of demons and priests both confused and terrified of what this dude is doing.

I need to get back to family stuff. They let me sit here and type this out, which was very kind of them. Only five tantrums so far. Either way, I’m looking very forward to playing more Doom Eternal...

...just as soon as I finish designing 17 more shirts in ACNH.

Hope everyone’s staying home and staying safe! Rip and tear, friends. Rip and tear <3

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teacupfulofstarshine · 5 years

Text

to be set in your place

this is a gift for my wonderful friend @tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors!!!! it’s inspired by their remile greek myth one-shot the sky most holy and y’all should go read it it’s amazing and so are they the end

summary: remy never wanted to see theseus again. not after what that self-centered, stuck up hero did to him. so, of course, the fates saw fit to cross their strings. (OR: remy runs into theseus in the afterlife and has some choice words for him.)

pairing: romantic remile, past romantic remy/theseus, background romantic logince

word count: 3603

(tw: brief mentions of implied past character death, theseus being an asshole, mentions of past abandonment)

read it on ao3!

Remy never thought that he would willingly go to the Underworld. He didn’t want to go the first time, hearing the desperate pleas of his husband and children around him as the world faded to black, and when Emile came for him it was the happiest he’d ever been. He had sworn to himself that he would never return to the Underworld again.

If anything was going to get him to go back there, it would be his children.

Emile offers to make them immortal as well, when their threads of fate are finally cut short, but they refuse. “You can’t make us all immortal, Papa, Olympus will be furious,” Immy tells him.

“We have each other here,” Nessy smiles. “And besides, you and Dad can’t expect to spend forever with us following you around, can you?”

“You can always come and visit us!” Missy adds, throwing her arms around her parents. Emile looks like he wants to argue, but Remy lays a gentle hand on his shoulder and shakes his head. Their children are heroes; they have achieved Elysium, just like Remy did, but they have earned it. They will want for nothing here, safe and warm and protected.

“We’ll have to ask Logan if we can visit,” Emile sighs, gathering all his children into his arms and hugging them tightly. Remy carefully wraps his arms around his family, pressing kisses to the foreheads of all of his children. They wave at their parents, and Emile carefully leads Remy to the palace of the king of the Underworld.

“If you are here to request permission to make your children immortal, I have to decline,” Logan says curtly. He sits on his throne and glares at them, but Remy takes no offense; Logan always gets grumpy during the spring and the summer, when his husband returns to the surface world and he is alone. “I cannot continue to let people waltz out of my realm with my subjects.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” Emile says gently. “I don’t want to make my children immortal, I just - I want permission to visit them sometimes, for me and my husband.”

Logan sighs. “And I suppose you are just going to pester me until I give you permission, the same way you did when you wanted to make your husband immortal?”

Emile’s cheeks turn pink. “I . . .”

“If he doesn’t, I will,” Remy says firmly. “You know you’re just grumpy right now because Roman’s not here. You of all people know how it feels when you’re separated from your family and you can’t see them.”

Logan glares specifically at Remy, and he hears Emile shuffling his feet nervously at his side but he tilts his chin up defiantly and glares right back. He will not let Logan’s bitching keep him from his children.

Finally, Logan sighs, casting a glance toward the throne next to his. Where his throne is pure black, polished obsidian, sharp and angular, the one next to his is elegant and bone-white, elaborately carved with flowers and vines. Logan reaches out and runs pale fingers over the pale carvings, and Remy wonders how he would react if he only saw Emile for six months of the year.

Suddenly, Logan’s reactions make perfect sense.

“I suppose,” Logan says, voice soft, “that I can permit you to see your children.”

“Thank you,” Emile murmurs, bowing his head.

“Thanks, Logan,” Remy says. “I know how much it sucks, to be separated from your spouse, but there’s only, like, two months left until fall happens. He’s coming back soon.”

“Yes,” Logan murmurs quietly. “That is . . . some comfort. I apologize for my short temper. I find that the absence of my husband tends to . . . exacerbate my more unpleasant character traits.” “Apology accepted. I, for one, am an absolute bitch without my darling Emile around to temper me.” Emile blushes even more and lightly smacks his arm.

“Remy!”

Logan cracks a small smile, however, and Remy counts it as a victory.

*~*~*~*~*

They visit their children once every two weeks. Immy’s husband and Nessy’s wife both make it to Elysium as well, and Missy makes fast friends with a pair of mortals named Virgil and Patton. Virgil is a musician, she eagerly explains, who charmed the rulers of the underworld into giving him a chance to win his husband back, and now they reside in Elysium together. Virgil performs for Logan (and Roman, when the prince of spring returns) on the regular, but he is always happy to perform when Remy and Emile visit.

One day, the first day of fall, Remy is on his own as he ventures to the Underworld. Emile is busy with some godly duty or another, and Remy is quick to assure him that he’ll be okay on his own.

He is not okay. He is very, very lost. Emile is typically in charge of navigating them to the entrance to the Underworld, and Emile is not here, and Remy is lost.

“Fuck!” he shouts angrily. He almost kicks a tree, but decides that today is not the day to get a dryad angry at him.

“Hello?” someone calls. Remy turns rapidly, catching sight of a young man wearing red and white, with glowing bronze skin and fluffy bronze curls. His eyes are bright, and his smile is wide, and Remy inhales sharply as he recognizes the god of spring, the prince of the Underworld. “Is everything okay?”

Remy’s brain short-circuits for a moment before he lowers his head in respect. “Roman, Prince of the Underworld,” he says, because anyone who wants to be in Roman’s good graces doesn’t dare refer to him by the epithet of God of Spring outside of that season.

“No need to be so formal!” Roman laughs, clapping a hand onto Remy’s shoulder. “I know who you are - you’re Emile’s husband, right?”

“I - uh - yeah, I am,” Remy stammers. “I didn’t realize you knew who I was?”

“Well, I am the one who convinced Logan to let Emile take you from Elysium and make you immortal.”

“I really, really appreciate that,” Remy says honestly. Roman smiles, eyes soft.

“I understand the pain of being separated from the person you love most in the world. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I don’t think Logan appreciates how easy it is for me to convince him to let his subjects walk out, but I’ve only done it twice and I don’t regret either of those occasions.”

“Are you on your way home?” Roman looks slightly shocked when Remy refers to the Underworld as his home, and for a moment he worries he has upset the god. But then Roman smiles, brilliant and blinding and utterly joyful.

“Yes. Yes, I am, I am going home to my wonderful husband. Is everything alright with you, though? You sounded . . . upset.”

“Understatement,” Remy huffs. “I’m actually headed to the same place as you are.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. My kids are in Elysium, so Em and I visit them pretty regularly, but Em’s busy with godly stuff today so I’m on my own. And because Em usually navigates and I don’t pay attention . . .”

“You’re lost?” Roman guesses.

“So far beyond lost, you have no idea.”

“Well, we’re going to the same place, aren’t we? Let’s go together!”

“That sounds amazing,” Remy says, easily falling into step with the other god. Before he knows what’s happened, he and Roman have been talking for hours and become fast friends, Remy promising to stop by and visit Roman when he visits his children during the winter.

When they approach the entrance of the Underworld, Remy spies a figure standing in the mouth of the cave. They almost appear to be searching for something, and Remy grins as he lightly elbows the other god.

“I think your husband missed you.”

Roman looks towards the cave, and his entire face lights up. He breaks into a run, waving his arms and shouting wildly. The figure is still for only a moment before moving rapidly towards Roman, and Remy takes only a moment to stare in awe at the pink and red carnations springing up in Roman’s wake before he’s hurrying after his new friend.

He catches up just in time for Roman to throw himself at the figure, which turns out to be none other than Logan himself. He catches Roman skillfully, using his momentum to spin them around, laughing gleefully. Roman locks his legs around Logan’s waist and his arms around Logan’s neck and his mouth against Logan’s. Remy smiles softly as flowers sprout spontaneously on Roman’s head, a physical manifestation of his joy. He recognizes red roses, heliotrope, honeysuckle, blue hyacinth, and morning glories among the veritable garden blooming in Roman’s hair as he kisses his husband for the first time in six months.

Remy stands there and watches them kiss for almost a minute. He wants to interrupt with his typical witty sarcasm, but he recognizes that the king of the Underworld has not seen his prince in half a year, so he says nothing.

Finally, they break apart, resting their foreheads together. Roman giggles, and Logan smiles, laughing softly. “Hello, my love,” he rumbles, voice low and impossibly soft.

“Hello, Logan,” Roman responds, rubbing their noses together. “I missed you!”

“And I have missed you. The Underworld is far less alluring without your presence.”

Only after a few more minutes of whispered affections and soft, gentle kisses does Logan notice Remy’s presence. His ears and face slowly redden, although he makes no move to put his husband down or prevent Roman from covering his face in little giggling kisses. “How - how long have you been -”

“The whole time, but don’t worry about it. It’s cute, it really is,” Remy says. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone how the great and powerful scary brooding god of the Underworld is a huge softy when it comes to his husband. I’m just here to see my kids.”

Logan looks like he wants to be angry (or at least severely annoyed), but he is distracted by his armful of happy, loving, giggling Roman. “Very well. Be on your way, then.” “Don’t forget to visit!” Roman chirps. Remy promises that he will, and begins his trek through the Underworld to Paradise.

*~*~*~*~*

Visiting his children is always wonderful. Virgil and Patton are there briefly, greeting Remy warmly before they head to the palace. Remy thinks on Roman’s poetic waxing about the music of the Underworld and hopes he finds the music satisfactory (although he does not doubt Virgil’s skill).

All too soon, Remy is standing and brushing off the thin fabric of his clothing, retying the sandals to his feet. “Do you have to go, Dad?” Immy begs.

“You know how your Papa gets when I leave him alone,” Remy teases. “I died once and he went completely off the rails! I didn’t even stay dead!” It has taken many years to get to the point where he can laughs at his own mortality, at the fact that he almost lost his husband and his children forever. Emile still has not reached that point, but he has at least stopped looking like he is the one with a javelin in his stomach every time Remy jokes about it, which is an improvement.

His children all crowd around to hug him, and he takes special care to cup each of their faces in his hands and press lingering kisses to their foreheads. “Be good, darlings. I love you, very very much, and so does your Papa.”

“We love you guys too, Dad,” Nessy says.

“Give Papa hugs for us, okay?” Missy requests.

“Of course I will. We’ll both see you in a little while, okay?”

His children wave at him as he leaves their corner of Paradise. He may not know the way to the Underworld, but he knows how to get to the palace from Elysium so that Logan can send him home. He is preoccupied as his feet retrace the familiar path, with thoughts of his children and his husband and his new friend the prince of the Underworld, and he is more than used to passing by the souls of departed heroes without much fanfare.

And then he passes someone and hears a sharp intake of breath, a wavering voice that he has not heard in decades, a disbelieving whisper.

“Remy . . .?”

Remy stops in his tracks, and for the first time since Emile kissed him and seared his mortal blood into ichor, his veins run cold as ice. He had never thought he would hear that voice again, but he never forgot it, either.

“It is you, right? You are Remy?”

Remy takes a deep breath, a breath he no longer needs, and turns around.

Theseus is exactly as maddeningly handsome as Remy remembers. He is built like a marble statue, and Remy knows all too well the way his muscles feel beneath his fingertips, the way his rough curls feel tangled in his hands, the way his mouth feels as he bites kisses along Remy’s neck and jaw. He stares into the sea-green eyes of the first man he ever loved, the man who abandoned him on that island all those years ago, and feels something inside him shatter.

Then he feels that something harden.

“Theseus,” he says coolly. “It’s been a long time.”

“Too long,” Theseus breathes. He reaches a hand towards Remy, as though to cup his face. “Gods, Rem, I’ve missed -”

“Don’t,” Remy snaps. Theseus recoils sharply, snatching his hand back as though burned by celestial fire. “Don’t touch me.”

“Rem -”

“Don’t call me that, either. You lost the right when you abandoned me on that island.”

“Rem, listen -”

“Listen to what? I loved you, and you used me. You used me to beat the labyrinth and slay the Minotaur, and for what? I abandoned my home, my family, my life for you, because you promised me a new life! Well, you certainly gave me one, but it wasn’t what you promised!”

Remy’s hands are shaking with anger, and he curls them into fists.

“Clearly you did okay,” Theseus murmurs, taking a step forward. Remy takes a step back. “You made it to Elysium. To Paradise. That means you must have been a hero when you were alive, and that means that we can spend eternity together. I have all the time in the world to apologize to you and make up for what I did, we can start over, we can -”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

Remy raises an eyebrow. “I mean no, Theseus. Did dying rob you of your ability to comprehend language, or did you lose that while you were alive?”

“I - I don’t understand. I thought you said you loved me?”

“Yeah, I did. Loved, past tense. You honestly think I could still love you after what you did to me? Or do they omit you marooning me for dead on an island when they sing the tales of your adventures?”

Theseus flinches, and Remy wonders if he is being too cold, too harsh. Then he remembers the bleakness of waking up on the island alone, the struggle to escape it and save himself, and decides that he is not being harsh enough.

“I messed up, okay?” Theseus’s voice is smaller than Remy can ever recall it being. “I - I was stupid, and full of myself, and high on the success of my mission and - and I thought -”

“You thought what, Theseus?” Remy prompts, when it becomes apparent that Theseus does not intend to finish the statement. Theseus looks at the ground, scuffing his sandal against the path. “You thought what, Theseus.”

“I thought, why should I be tied down to one prince when I would have the world at my fingertips? I didn’t want to take myself out of the game after only seeing one kingdom.” Theseus has the decency to look ashamed of himself, staring at his feet.

Remy laughs, bitter and mirthless. “So I really do mean nothing to you, then.”

“No! I loved you, I love you, I just -”

“Save it,” Remy snaps, “you dense motherfucker. You know nothing about what love is.”

“And you do?” Theseus challenges. “I was stupid, yes! I made a mistake, and I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have left you like that - even if I did change my mind about marrying you, I shouldn’t have left you on an island to die! I should have had the courtesy to at least drop you somewhere populated! But the gods granted you a life in Paradise because you helped me with the labyrinth, and now we can be together! I spent the rest of my life regretting that decision, Rem, you don’t understand -”

He reaches forward to touch Remy again. His fingers close around Remy’s wrist, and Remy steps backward, yanking his hand from Theseus’s grasp.

“I told you not to touch me!” he snaps. Theseus gapes, like Remy has suddenly sprouted a second head, which confuses Remy, because immortality may have changed him but he has always been a firebrand. “And I told you not to call me Rem, and could you be more self-centered?!”

“What?”

“I’m not in Elysium because I helped you, and I certainly didn’t die on that island. I built a raft and I sailed to the mainland and I saved myself, without any help from you or the gods or anyone at all! But I did meet a god while I was on that island where you abandoned me.”

“A god?” The indignation brewing in Theseus’s face morphs to concern, suddenly. “Did they hurt you?”

“Emile would never.”

“You - the god of madness?”

“The god of the mentally ill,” Remy spits, because no one dismisses or diminishes his husband. Not while he’s around. “He came every day, and he always offered to save me or to whisk me away, but he never did. He let me save myself. And I did. And then we got married.”

“You - you married -”

“That’s right. I married a god. I married a god, and he set my wedding crown among the stars, and he -”

Remy stops. He takes a deep, calming breath, the way Emile taught him to, and when he opens his eyes again there is still fury there but also a calmness, one that only time could grant him.

“I married more than a god,” he says. “I married someone who understands me. I married someone who loves me, someone who wakes up every morning and looks at me not like a tool to be used or a prize to be won but as a complex individual who deserves to be treated as such. I married someone who wakes up and looks at me like I am the greatest god damn treasure that has ever existed. I married him, and I had three children with him, and when I died he loved me so much that I was granted an afterlife in Elysium. He loved me so much that he came all the way down here to plead with the god of the Underworld to have me back.”

Remy’s voice drops to a whisper, because he knows that it will break if he doesn’t. “He loved me so much that the god of the Underworld said yes. He loves me so much that he made me immortal.”

“You’re . . . what?”

“I didn’t get here when I died because of you, and I’m certainly not here for you now,” Remy says. “I’m here because my children were heroes, and they’ve been granted a hero’s respite, and I want to visit them.”

Theseus is dumbfounded. He opens his mouth repeatedly, but no words come out. Remy takes a grim satisfaction in that. “I suppose I should thank you,” he says coolly.

“Th - wh - huh?”

“Yeah, I should thank you. Because if you hadn’t marooned me on that island, I never would have met Emile. Your poor judgement and honestly shitty personality led me to meet the love of my life - the love of my existence. I know what true love looks like because of Emile, and I know what it most assuredly isn’t because of you. So thank you, Theseus. I hope you have a good afterlife.”

Remy turns his back on Theseus, heading once more towards the palace. He hears footsteps speed up behind him, hears a painful, angered cry of “Remy, wait -!” and feels a hand begin to close around his wrist again, but then the hand is gone and there’s a sudden swoosh of air.

Remy turns sharply on his heel to see Emile, standing between him and Theseus, holding the stunned hero by the wrist. “I believe,” Emile says, in a voice that manages to be cheerful and deadly and threatening all at the same time, “that my husband asked you not to touch him.”

Theseus jerks his hand away from Emile, who simply smiles at him. “You should be more respectful of other people and their boundaries,” he tells him. Remy cannot see Emile’s expression fully, but he can easily picture the smile on his husband’s face. It appears perfectly normal and calm, but something slightly manic lingers at the edges, something dangerous, something decidedly inhuman.

“Shall we go, my love?” Emile asks, turning his back on Theseus and kissing Remy. He kisses Remy softly, gently, and Remy melts against him. Emile’s hands press against the small of his back and the back of his head as he leans forward, and Remy leans back. He knows Emile will keep him from falling. He trusts Emile with every fiber of his being.

“We shall.”

flower meanings!

pink carnation: i miss you; you are unforgettable red carnation: admiration; i miss you red rose: love; i love you heliotrope: eternal love honeysuckle: bonds of love blue hyacinth: constancy of love morning glory: affection

taglist below! (if you want to be added, send me a message!)

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#starshinewrites #remy sanders #emile picani #remile #logan sanders #roman sanders #logince #tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors #a gift for vi!#i love you sm babe i hope that you like this

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kristinarambles · 5 years

Text

Cheeseburger Backpack

Analysis Four

Two more players are introduced in this episode, Jamie the Postman and the Cheeseburger Backpack!

"Hey Mr. Postman bring me a post, bring me the post that I love the most" I love that Steven sings all the time. Me too man, me too. Waiting is always easier with some music lol. Obviously his love of music mostly comes from Greg, last episode he sings along with his CD so enthusiastically even though Greg is kind of embarrassed. Considering later on Steven says that Jamie is the only one who knows where he lives I wonder at what exactly his address is, and how Jamie found it in the first place. We know Barb is also a mailperson and the way she talks there must be other mailpeople around even though we only see Barb and Jamie.

Jamie's sense of humor leaning towards the dramatic is apparent even this early in the game, pretending like he doesn't know what package is for Steven lol. I guess he could just be messing with him because he's a kid, but I like to think that Jamie just knows that he can be himself around Steven. He does have a way of drawing people in and making them feel comfortable. Jamie is absolutely right that it's reasonable that the Gems want Steven to learn to control his powers before he helps out but I don't think he realizes just how real it is. The people who live in Beach City are pretty used to weird things happening, and the Gems being a part of that, but I don't think they realize that it's global. Part of that is probably because the Gems generally like to track down the corrupted ones in the wild before they find the temple, thus keeping them away from people as much as possible. The rest is probably just the general centrism most of us humans are guilty of. We get our first mention of Barb here, in the context of her being Jamie’s boss. I was just as shocked as Steven when I found out she was Sadie's mom, but that's another analysis. I love that little exchange though "Do you know how you can save my world?" Plus Steven's signature with the stars? So cute. And he really must be comfortable with Steven to tell him Barb yells at him, you don't just talk about your boss like that casually, even if it's true and she would probably laugh at you for sharing it anyway. Barb isn't exactly easy going, but she's pretty accepting and she's got a good sense of humor. Jamie is definitely surprised to see the warp pad go off, but not concerned enough to say anything about it, he just wants to know what a Whacky Sack is.

That egg that Amethyst has got opens up my questions about gem reproduction again, Centipeetle had her centipeetle babies and now we have a giant bird that we assume was also a gem that lays eggs? No naturally occuring birds lay eggs that have stars on them, and none that large. I'm leaning towards thinking it could be a gem creature similar to the crystal shrimp we see later in this episode or the lizards that Lion eats regularly. After all there are feathers everywhere and generally when a Gem, corrupted or otherwise, poofs it completely disappears with only the gem remaining. We don't see a bubbled gem either, although it could have already been sent into the temple. I also have to wonder why the bird had the Moon Goddess statue if it wasn't a real Gem. It makes me think of the bubble bird we see later in Giant Woman, who collects other gems and gem artifacts within itself. So many questions about something we never even actually see. And Amethyst's fake caution in getting that egg in the fridge never fails to entertain me.

The Moon Goddess statue comes with a whole other set of questions. I've wondered, and mentioned before, if gem tech was powered by poofed gems for a long time, and there is for sure something to that after what we've seen on Homeworld. Is it a gem that is trapped in a statue, held in its tiny hands? Is the statue perhaps growing out of the gem from the bottom? It's obviously tied into keeping the Lunar Sea Spire intact. I've seen speculation as to why the Gems would even have a goddess of any kind considering they answer to the Diamonds and those are their supreme beings, but I'll talk about that in a little bit. I think there's pretty good evidence that all gem structures have some sort of lodestone, so to speak. There's the Crystal Heart, this statue, there's a large gem powering the hand ship that Peridot uses. Even the gem that kind of takes over the lighthouse. The warp pad even looks like a huge gem that's been embedded in the ground. Not to mention all the walls we saw on Homeworld. I hope this is something they address in Season Six.

This conversation with Pearl about the statue and the Spire has so many hints about both the future of the show and the past from before Steven was born. Pearl is so expressive that we can glean a lot from that short little speech. First she supports my lodestone theory in saying that without the statue the Spire will fall apart, although it would seem it stood mostly okay for quite some time without it, and I wonder how the statue was removed from it in the first place [I think it was removed during the rebellion and if the bird was in fact a corrupted Gem it stands to reason that she's the one who removed it]. Then another hint that the Gems are aliens in her saying the Spire was an oasis for gems on earth. She shows us her power of holograms/projections to give him a visual of what the Spire used to be, including a statue of what appears to be a cross gem fusion since it has two sets of arms. Which, what the heck, cross gem fusions are supposed to be illegal. Her tone of voice when talking about how the Spire used to be is very similar to how she speaks about Rose and is in stark contrast to the flatness in her voice when she says it's abandoned now. It says that she still loves Homeworld in some way and misses the Gems she used to be around, although I'm sure mostly Pink. It's highly probable that it was with Pink she was at the Spire during it's heyday. She wants to save it so bad, and share with Steven it's history. Clues galore about her partnership with Pink and her desire to tell Steven the truth about his mother and himself, but none that we could put together or even fully understand until we actually knew the truth.

We know now that the Spire was a test, I think they probably discussed it thoroughly while Steven was packing his cheeseburger and I really like Amethyst being the one to suggest bringing him along because it would be educational. This is the first time outside of the theme that we actually see the warp being used, as well as getting an idea of what the warp stream really does and the fact that you can leave it, and I have to say that Amethyst in the warp is probably the most elegance she ever shows. Gorgeous.

Seeing the Lunar Sea Spire is pretty impressive, and time really does mean very different things to the gems. A hundred years isn't much to Pearl at all, and yet the last fourteen have changed her more than all the thousands before. The spire probably degrades faster closer to it's deadline to return the statue, although we really have no idea how long it's been removed despite my theory that it happened during the rebellion.

Garnet has to be so careful with what she says so as not to give away the fact she can see the future. She's "sensing" structural instability, it must have been so much easier for her to just say as little as possible even though we get a signature shades adjustment. It had to have been difficult knowing that it was keeping her from bonding with Steven on a deeper level though. Pearl too, keeping Pink's secrets the way she did when she wanted to share, to expose Steven to his heritage. The little nod to Full House was fun though "You got it, dude", and Pearl having no idea what he's talking about. I guess Steven watches reruns lol

It's pretty interesting how Garnet became the leader even though Pearl had been with Rose/Pink the longest, although we didn't know it back then. There's really so much to unpack in the Pearl/Garnet relationship. Some of why Garnet has moved up to being the leader has to do with how Rose was following her, as put forth in Now We're Only Falling Apart, but I think some of it was subconscious on both Pearl's part and Garnet's herself. Sapphire is an aristocrat and at least partially used to being in charge, and even though we've seen no hint of it it's entirely possible she's even had her own pearl at some point. This is both tempered by Ruby's lower class and station being used to being bossed around and exacerbated by her impulsiveness. Then there is Pearl's feelings of being inadequate by herself, needing someone to tell her what to do. Both of them later address and begin to handle these issues, but we see how their former lives seep into their current ones. That comes into play with how they choose to educate and expose Steven as well. They are who we get most of our information on who and what the gems are in the beginning, but they're informed in very different ways. I'm sure there's some former knowledge on Garnet's part just from what Sapphire and Ruby what have seen and experienced before they were and since they’ve been together, but I also think that her future vision plays a large part in the details that she knows. It is the hand with Sapphire's gem that Garnet lifts when she tells the others to stop before they attempt to cross the whirlpool [after touching her two hands together briefly though], and although most of her actions are purely Garnet and not Sapphire and Ruby taking turns or whatever you can see their separate personalities occasionally in the things she does. Like eloquently explaining about the magic that sustains the Spire and then throwing a rock into it to demonstrate. Pearl however doesn't have a magical way of knowing any of this information, she only knows what she's directly experienced and only has one consciousness of memories to draw from. Being a Diamond's personal pearl she had access to a lot of information, managing Pink's day to day activities and working her screens and stuff, but even that is limited and after what happened to the original Pink Pearl Pink Diamond didn't share as much with our Pearl as she could have, and being a Pearl I'm sure no one else thought to explain things to her. Our Pearl couldn't even work the doors at the Zoo.

Before Steven uses his sweaters to jump he gets diamond eyes, and I wonder if that has any significance. I've noticed too that a lot of the backgrounds have diamonds, and not just the architecture like above the arches when the first enter, but throughout the whole show just like, representing light and whatnot. He's so eager to prove himself though, and it seems like Amethyst has more faith in him then the other two.

After the jump Pearl freaks out, Garnet does the hair ruffle I love so much, Amethyst bumps him with her shoulder, and then Pearl compliments him. All of them showing him affection and pride in their own ways, which for Pearl means talk talk talking lol. She goes on quite a bit about the damage, we see on the walls what appears to be tigers because of the stripes but are definitely cats of some kind. Lots of diamond and triangle imagery, statues that are falling apart. The one with the crystal shrimp climbing on it looks very much like another fusion statue. Typing this now I'm formulating a rough theory that they were cross gem fusions that were punished maybe? I don't know exactly how they would statue-ize them, but I suppose it's possible considering what they did to Lapis and the wall Gems we saw on Homeworld. Although, I suppose then Pink would have heard more about cross gem fusion other than that it's unheard of. I don't know, something to think about anyway.

Now, those damn crystal shrimp. Besides Steven continuing to ace his test so far, every time we see some of these gem creatures [not monsters] I start thinking again about how they came to be and am driven crazy. How do they know what to call them, are they like the centipeetles, and if so then why isn't there a mother around? If the mother were to die would all the babies, because the drill gem babies didn't work that way. Peal calls it an infestation. Are they just regular creatures that mutated due to proximity to the Gems magic? I suppose that could solve the lizard dilemma as well as explain Rose's moss. Oh geez I'm kind of getting off the plot of this particular episode, but there's just so much still left unanswered. And here people though that Change Your Mind solved everything. Ha.

Steven starts a downslide with the raft, good idea in theory as evidenced by everyone's reaction [also, how cute are Amethyst and Pearl chanting "cheeseburger backpack"?] but executed badly due to the rapid water. But that's not nearly as bad as realizing he left the statue at home. I said earlier I would talk about why the Gems needed a goddess later and I would like to address that now. I think that it's more of a title than anything. Operating under the assumption that the statue holds a sentient gem of some kind, or is at the very least modeled after one, it obviously has some sort of magical tie to the moon. We know that Gems get their energy from light, so I think this particular one gets special energy/magic from the moonlight. Thus it is referred to as a moon goddess, the fact that it's the lodestone for this particular spire is why it's the Lunar Sea Spire. I do wonder if Garnet really didn't know what would happen or if she was just letting Steven try it to encourage him somehow. I know that's what Amethyst was trying to do in telling him his ideas succeeded 50% of the time, and obviously Pearl was trying to make him feel better. I thought the raft popping back up was a nice touch though.

This time the star closed in on Steven with his tongue out lol, and it's still instrumental Love Like You

#steven universe #su theory #su thoughts #su spoilers #cheeseburger backpack #garnet #pearl #amethyst #lunar sea spire #moon goddess #su rewatch

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orbemnews · 3 years

Link

America wasn't ready for Covid-19. These newsrooms helped guide the way They each have wildly different origin stories: One is STAT, a five-year-old health and life sciences news site, launched as a sister publication to The Boston Globe. The other is The Atlantic, a 163-year-old brand known for its storied print magazine. “I think we were uniquely positioned to cover this in an authoritative way and stay ahead of the curve,” Rick Berke, STAT’s executive editor and cofounder, told CNN Business. “This isn’t the kind of story you can throw a reporter on, and they’ll suddenly learn how to interpret clinical trial data or efficacy data.” Yet in many newsrooms, that is exactly what happened. Journalists who covered sports, entertainment, politics, business and other subject matters had to become public health experts almost overnight. Many journalists had to face this new reality with the all-too-familiar backdrop of layoffs and diminishing newsroom resources, which was exacerbated by the pandemic’s effect on the economy. To make sure the public saw this flood of reporting, paywalls were taken down, leading to traffic surges. Some readers hungry for reliable information converted to paying customers, giving the local news industry a much-needed boost. Television news and legacy newspapers like The New York Times (NYT) benefited too. The journalism from STAT and The Atlantic stood out. Rather than race to break news or go for quantity of stories, they each focused on explanatory pieces about the realities of the pandemic. They also produced prescient stories that predicted the pandemic’s impact and continued to do so after it took hold in America. The leaders of both newsrooms used the same word, multiple times, to describe the source of their success: ambition. “We are here to tell stories that matter and make a difference and help people,” said Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. “We want to run toward complexity and maximize ambition.” From Boston, with authority The Boston Globe owner John Henry launched STAT in 2015 as a separate site dedicated to health and science coverage. He was inspired by the belief that the field is undercovered and that Boston has the advantage as the industry’s epicenter, said Berke. They have since assembled a team of nearly 40 reporters and editors who have built a following of loyal readers in related industries and academia. But the vision for STAT was always to appeal to a larger audience; the pandemic just helped STAT get there. STAT’s site was averaging 1.5 million unique readers a month until last March when that number skyrocketed to 23 million. Now, the site is averaging more than 7 million uniques per month, Berke said. “We had reporters in place who had spent years building sources, writing about drug development, writing about infectious diseases, writing about vaccines,” Berke added. STAT reporter Helen Branswell is one of the in-house experts on infectious diseases, having covered Ebola, Zika and SARS. Branswell was one of the first journalists to ring the alarm on the potential impact of Covid-19. She was awarded the George Polk Award for public service in February. “I remember Helen told me when we were still in the office that she and I should consider starting to work from home. The idea of not coming to work because of the disease still seemed foreign to me,” STAT reporter Andrew Joseph told CNN Business. “She was way ahead.” Joseph has since spent the past year working from home, collaborating with Branswell and other colleagues on pandemic coverage. They recently co-bylined a piece with headline, “The short-term, middle-term, and long-term future of the coronavirus.” My stories are “not beautiful pieces of writing, but I think people have found them helpful and useful,” Joseph said. “It’s helpful for people to get their heads around what might be coming or why things are happening the way they are.” What to know next The Atlantic similarly focused their attention on explaining what’s next, as Ed Yong did with his March 25 piece “How The Pandemic Will End” Other prescient headlines in 2020 were “Coronavirus Is Coming—And Trump Isn’t Ready” on January 30, “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus” on February 24, “Cancel Everything” on March 10 and “The Pandemic Seems to Be Hitting People of Color the Hardest” on April 6. “It was really this posture of not what do we need to know this second, although also that, but what do we need to know two weeks from now, a month from now,” LaFrance said. “We wanted to be able to help people make good decisions, to keep themselves safe.” Yong, who was awarded the George Polk Award in the science reporting category, told CNN Business last April that his editorial mandate was to “swing big and take your time.” Among The Atlantic’s early reporting efforts was uncovering data on the virus: how many people were being tested and how many were infected. That led to the launch of The COVID Tracking Project, which The Atlantic reporter Alexis Madrigal co-founded and spoke extensively with CNN’s Brian Stelter earlier this month about the conclusion of the project. Data “really was this Achilles’ heel of US pandemic preparedness, which was considered to be the best in the world,” Madrigal said on CNN’s Reliable Sources podcast. “It was all predicated on good data, which then turned out not to exist.” Insights gleaned from The COVID Tracking Project were used for The Atlantic stories, and Madrigal said that will continue to be the case even as the data tracking stops. “I think it was a bold move to let us run with something that really required a ton of freedom,” Madrigal said. “The Atlantic showed a tremendous amount of faith, and I have all the respect in the world for that.” Good for business Both STAT and The Atlantic saw a boost in subscriptions over the past year, even when they put much of their Covid-19 coverage outside their paywalls. The Atlantic accumulated 36,000 new subscribers in March alone last year. In September 2020, one year into its paywall, the company announced it added 300,000 subscribers. The Atlantic has now gained more than 450,000 subscribers since its paywall went up in September 2019. LaFrance said The Atlantic’s launch of a digital paywall put the publication in an ideal position to cover the pandemic. She saw the spike in subscriptions as a “signal” that their content was resonating with readers. “It’s always nice to have your colleagues in the industry praise your work, but where it really felt most meaningful was just getting flooded with comments from new subscribers saying they couldn’t make it through the pandemic without us, that we helped them get through this difficult time and make good decisions and that our writing is beautiful,” LaFrance said. STAT’s subscriber base grew 56% over the past year, Berke said. He declined to disclose STAT’s total subscription numbers. STAT also started accepting contributions on March 5, 2020. One person donated $100,000, but most ranged between $25 to $150, Berke said. “The total doesn’t change our revenue stream in a huge way, but it’s helped,” Berke said. “I think it made people feel good about what we were doing and about the journalism.” Berke said back when he attended in-person conferences people told him they loved his media outlet or had not heard of it. Now, he expects more people will have heard of STAT. “We’re not stopping here,” Berke said. “We’re going to keep growing, keep expanding, keep pushing ourselves with ambitious journalism.” Source link Orbem News #America #Americawasn'treadyforCovid-19.Thesenewsroomshelpedguidetheway-CNN #Covid19 #Guide #Helped #Media #newsrooms #Ready #wasnt

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dipulb3 · 3 years

Text

America wasn't ready for Covid-19. These newsrooms helped guide the way

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/america-wasnt-ready-for-covid-19-these-newsrooms-helped-guide-the-way/

America wasn't ready for Covid-19. These newsrooms helped guide the way

They each have wildly different origin stories: One is STAT, a five-year-old health and life sciences news site, launched as a sister publication to The Boston Globe. The other is The Atlantic, a 163-year-old brand known for its storied print magazine.

“I think we were uniquely positioned to cover this in an authoritative way and stay ahead of the curve,” Rick Berke, STAT’s executive editor and cofounder, told Appradab Business. “This isn’t the kind of story you can throw a reporter on, and they’ll suddenly learn how to interpret clinical trial data or efficacy data.”

Yet in many newsrooms, that is exactly what happened. Journalists who covered sports, entertainment, politics, business and other subject matters had to become public health experts almost overnight. Many journalists had to face this new reality with the all-too-familiar backdrop of layoffs and diminishing newsroom resources, which was exacerbated by the pandemic’s effect on the economy. To make sure the public saw this flood of reporting, paywalls were taken down, leading to traffic surges. Some readers hungry for reliable information converted to paying customers, giving the local news industry a much-needed boost. Television news and legacy newspapers like The New York Times (NYT) benefited too.

The journalism from STAT and The Atlantic stood out. Rather than race to break news or go for quantity of stories, they each focused on explanatory pieces about the realities of the pandemic. They also produced prescient stories that predicted the pandemic’s impact and continued to do so after it took hold in America.

The leaders of both newsrooms used the same word, multiple times, to describe the source of their success: ambition.

“We are here to tell stories that matter and make a difference and help people,” said Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. “We want to run toward complexity and maximize ambition.”

From Boston, with authority

The Boston Globe owner John Henry launched STAT in 2015 as a separate site dedicated to health and science coverage. He was inspired by the belief that the field is undercovered and that Boston has the advantage as the industry’s epicenter, said Berke. They have since assembled a team of nearly 40 reporters and editors who have built a following of loyal readers in related industries and academia.

But the vision for STAT was always to appeal to a larger audience; the pandemic just helped STAT get there. STAT’s site was averaging 1.5 million unique readers a month until last March when that number skyrocketed to 23 million. Now, the site is averaging more than 7 million uniques per month, Berke said.

“We had reporters in place who had spent years building sources, writing about drug development, writing about infectious diseases, writing about vaccines,” Berke added.

STAT reporter Helen Branswell is one of the in-house experts on infectious diseases, having covered Ebola, Zika and SARS. Branswell was one of the first journalists to ring the alarm on the potential impact of Covid-19. She was awarded the George Polk Award for public service in February.

“I remember Helen told me when we were still in the office that she and I should consider starting to work from home. The idea of not coming to work because of the disease still seemed foreign to me,” STAT reporter Andrew Joseph told Appradab Business. “She was way ahead.”

Joseph has since spent the past year working from home, collaborating with Branswell and other colleagues on pandemic coverage. They recently co-bylined a piece with headline, “The short-term, middle-term, and long-term future of the coronavirus.”

My stories are “not beautiful pieces of writing, but I think people have found them helpful and useful,” Joseph said. “It’s helpful for people to get their heads around what might be coming or why things are happening the way they are.”

What to know next

The Atlantic similarly focused their attention on explaining what’s next, as Ed Yong did with his March 25 piece “How The Pandemic Will End” Other prescient headlines in 2020 were “Coronavirus Is Coming—And Trump Isn’t Ready” on January 30, “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus” on February 24, “Cancel Everything” on March 10 and “The Pandemic Seems to Be Hitting People of Color the Hardest” on April 6.

“It was really this posture of not what do we need to know this second, although also that, but what do we need to know two weeks from now, a month from now,” LaFrance said. “We wanted to be able to help people make good decisions, to keep themselves safe.”

Yong, who was awarded the George Polk Award in the science reporting category, told Appradab Business last April that his editorial mandate was to “swing big and take your time.”

Among The Atlantic’s early reporting efforts was uncovering data on the virus: how many people were being tested and how many were infected. That led to the launch of The COVID Tracking Project, which The Atlantic reporter Alexis Madrigal co-founded and spoke extensively with Appradab’s Brian Stelter earlier this month about the conclusion of the project.

Data “really was this Achilles’ heel of US pandemic preparedness, which was considered to be the best in the world,” Madrigal said on Appradab’s Reliable Sources podcast. “It was all predicated on good data, which then turned out not to exist.”

Insights gleaned from The COVID Tracking Project were used for The Atlantic stories, and Madrigal said that will continue to be the case even as the data tracking stops.

“I think it was a bold move to let us run with something that really required a ton of freedom,” Madrigal said. “The Atlantic showed a tremendous amount of faith, and I have all the respect in the world for that.”

Good for business

Both STAT and The Atlantic saw a boost in subscriptions over the past year, even when they put much of their Covid-19 coverage outside their paywalls.

The Atlantic accumulated 36,000 new subscribers in March alone last year. In September 2020, one year into its paywall, the company announced it added 300,000 subscribers. The Atlantic has now gained more than 450,000 subscribers since its paywall went up in September 2019.

LaFrance said The Atlantic’s launch of a digital paywall put the publication in an ideal position to cover the pandemic. She saw the spike in subscriptions as a “signal” that their content was resonating with readers.

“It’s always nice to have your colleagues in the industry praise your work, but where it really felt most meaningful was just getting flooded with comments from new subscribers saying they couldn’t make it through the pandemic without us, that we helped them get through this difficult time and make good decisions and that our writing is beautiful,” LaFrance said.

STAT’s subscriber base grew 56% over the past year, Berke said. He declined to disclose STAT’s total subscription numbers.

STAT also started accepting contributions on March 5, 2020. One person donated $100,000, but most ranged between $25 to $150, Berke said.

“The total doesn’t change our revenue stream in a huge way, but it’s helped,” Berke said. “I think it made people feel good about what we were doing and about the journalism.”

Berke said back when he attended in-person conferences people told him they loved his media outlet or had not heard of it. Now, he expects more people will have heard of STAT.

“We’re not stopping here,” Berke said. “We’re going to keep growing, keep expanding, keep pushing ourselves with ambitious journalism.”

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thebridgebeyond · 3 years

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Lorebook: Pawsteps over the bridge: Onwards to Issuhiro

This is a historic event for the zhuardarian species- one of which tells of the last Monarchs deeds. It would go on to be a history lesson told to pups and those who were unaware of how their species ended up in the realm of Issuhiro. It tells of a shared kinship with humans that was not lost although the relationship between the two remains strained.

______________________

There were several bloodlines of zhuards on earth that allowed themselves to meld into a human guise and a human way of life for several generations after the War of Wills. It was what they were originally assigned to do…however, they began to forget their past with each generation.

Zhuards at this current state had amassed domruku energy fitting such a synchronicity with humans overtime that they could share their genetic makeup with them, but also began to age and die like them as well. They began to mimic human functioning, right down to biological structure- it was a symptom of being designed for the sole purpose of ‘blending in'. Perhaps it was a feature natural of zhuards that worked too well.

Most zhuards who adopted human life and mates served to create a dilution of their origins in both a biological and energy-leeching fashion.

One monarch who had lived through the War of Wills grew discontent with this realization. She had watched, believing under her Taiber'su masters that this was supposed to happen eventually. That the changeling species was supposed to merge with another. She had refrained from using her energy to influence other zhuards for so long.

While she had lived relatively unchanged, she watched others die without realizing that they were not supposed to die so ‘young’. This was not right to her, almost abhorrent and violating. Under this thought she began to make her own decisions regarding her seemingly endangered species that changed it forever.

She subtly revealed herself to be a monarch through dream walking in the zhuards that were closest to her proximity and location. She never outright said the obvious and merely asked questions about how they felt with their life. Were they happy? How did they feel about those around them? When she compiled enough answers, she stopped dream walking and thought about possible consequences of her actions for many months.

She did not want to bring forth another war, especially not with zhuards who knew nothing about themselves. Instead, she was much more subtle, emitting a far reaching but low frequency of energy. It was low enough to not be completely disruptive. The humans with zhuardarian bloodlines simply felt ‘off' during their day to day. It was a feeling that wasn't described well when the monarch decided to dreamwalk again a few years later. She was rather unpleased- the exact reason why is unknown- and blurred the memories of those dreams.

The monarch allowed that frequency to settle for some time afterwards, and then she had raised it, but still ever careful. The energy flow was felt for miles around- those closest to the monarch felt it much sooner. This signal was a wake up call which caused confusion, some more profound than others. For some, who never recovered from the first wave, they felt that their mind began to clash with humanity in such a way that it was deeply disruptive. It was a question of behavior, morale and willpower-- those who were more susceptible to the monarch no longer felt like they were in control of their thoughts or behavior.

Everyday activities that were done for years felt strange. For some, controlling urges that seemed primal and animalistic were an issue. For others, it was a slow disconnect with societal implications. These were merely seen as character flaws, mental turbulence or illness. This was the frequency the monarch felt best fit for the time being. It was enough to incite immediate reaction and change from within that certain traits and subtle abilities arose and resurfaced.

Those with zhuardarian bloodlines could sense, and in many cases smell it on others (senses were the first thing to fluctuate). There was a desire to seek one another out through the confusion, just to talk about commonalities. Bonding through the experience, there were those who continued their zhuardarian lines unknowingly with others.

When the time came for the possibility of portals to Issuhiro, there were many of those who opposed bringing the typical agenda of resource mining and more in favor of exploration and coexistence. It was a movement in which the ideal for a world in which war won't ravage was shared. It was during this voyage that the monarch called together many of those who were under her with a message that crossed the minds of many in a manifestation as an urge to leave the area. Not all heard this call but for those that did (most likely those with stronger zhuardarian bloodlines- unbeknownst to them), they decided it best to travel with part of the current population to Issuhiro.

At the time of settlement, the monarch saw Issuhiro as an alternative in which her species could better thrive. Although she acknowledged the adaptability of some alternative paths. In such a new existence of landscapes why should they be confined to walls, physical or manipulative? It had been several years now since she had to think about an additional call, and it would be dangerous in the wake of a new dawn on both sides. However, she wanted that freedom more than she cared about potential conflict. She put forth another call, although short, the third one that affected nearly all of the individuals who had came to Issuhiro.

Those closest to her proximity were forced into their true zhuard form and either fled out of the developing city or went on a feral rampage within. Those on the outskirts were still in their human form, but their mind was not. They too were exacerbated by the volatile, mixed signals and were promptly restrained. The outer development was unaware of the chaos in the inner section though the news spread. The outer city's medical wards were skeptical, calling the epidemic a disease from the new world, given that all patients showed progressive, similar symptoms and since the War of Wills, the masters of the zhuards were unable to reach out of their realm. It couldn't have been them. It had taken the humans and the fleeing zhuards a while to pick up the pieces and fully describe what had happened. It had felt like a drawn out surreal dream.

As the monarch felt a sufficient amount of zhuards flee far from the city and into the new world, she had decided to end the call. She looked on from a distance feeling the liberation through others- such a freeing weight off her shoulders and mind- this was her own calling. She did not need the Taiber’su to uphold her destiny. It had been fulfilled, but as consequence her very bones shook with a mysterious fever.

Those from the outskirts away from the new city were now reportedly and spontaneously symptom free of any and all their primal desires. As such with time they were a very small minority, their ancestry dried up and their zhuardarian bloodline was phased out. For those who wanted comfort in a human way of life should have it. Only the bravest and daring fled or met their demise in retaliation on city grounds.

A powerful voice rang out in their minds at once:

This body is a gift, not a curse. It is a powerful weapon and a versatile defense—it is up to you to learn it. Grow! Seek that of which the masters intended for our kind. You will know true strength and power by using these vessels. Your journey begins now!

The monarch kept her eyes on the human’s development for a while longer before disappearing and going into a very deep hibernation. One that she had not stirred from since as her physical body writhed away.

For the zhuards who fled, they were left in horror and hysteria with not a clue on how to survive such a new world. Families moved together and strangers often struck out alone or in loose associated groups- even following the strong leaders that lead them here and there. The zhuards had separated, forging their own stories as to what exactly happened in the city. Some of the zhuards with the lowest bloodlines were cursed to forget everything and revert back into a primal state- nothing more than empty cavities of their former selves, with deeply ingrained servitude to instinct. Others continued strongly, keeping their intelligence as the monarch allowed them to have it, as a reminder of humanity.

#Thebridgebeyond #Lorebook #story #zhuards

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oliveraaliyah1994 · 4 years

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0 notes

easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Farm Workers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs

Hector Mata/AFP via Getty Images

Farm workers work, live, and travel in crowded conditions, and are being allowed few if any safety measures against COVID-19 — which puts them and the food system at risk

This story originally appeared on Civil Eats.

Late last week, Yazmin Alvarado set out for the strawberry fields near Oxnard, California anxious and afraid of catching the novel coronavirus. Part of a crew of more than 100, she knew she was at high risk.

Members of her crew work and take breaks next to each other. They lack access to soap, water, and gloves, give each other rides to the fields in overloaded cars, and many share apartments with multiple families. As a ponchadora —the person who inspects fruit quality and records each harvested box — Alvarado has constant physical contact with others.

What’s more, she and her co-workers don’t qualify for sick pay, most lack health insurance, and they desperately need the paychecks, so they don’t have the option to stay home, she told Civil Eats. And yet, Alvarado’s employer, a large California berry company, hasn’t offered any training about COVID-19, nor taken any measures to protect the crew, said the 26-year-old worker. To top it off, the government and state health departments are offering little to no information in Spanish.

“We don’t have enough information. And we’re afraid to speak out… [we] don’t want to lose any hours,” said Alvarado, whose paycheck supports her 5-year-old twin girls and unemployed husband. But the fear of contracting the virus is pervasive.

“What if someone gets sick with the virus and still comes to work,” she asks.

While California has ordered all of its residents to shelter in place to stop the virus’ spread, Alvarado’s crew and more than 800,000 other agricultural laborers in the state are exempt. Many continue working, with few or no protections, to power California’s $54 billion agriculture sector and supply the nation’s empty supermarket shelves. And while no farmworkers have been confirmed to be carrying the virus, many agricultural areas have seen confirmed cases.

While most Americans stay at home, farmworkers continue to work, designated as “essential workers” by the Department of Homeland Security. But advocates and organizers are sounding the alarm: Agricultural workers are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. Nearly half lack legal work authorization and residency status, making them ineligible for essential benefits that could help them stay home when sick.

And yet the value of the agricultural labor force, which has long lived in the shadows, is also becoming much clearer to Americans than it’s ever been. While there is no evidence of COVID-19 spreading through food or food packaging, if (or perhaps when) it spreads among farmworkers, farmers say workforce gaps in the chain could exacerbate pre-existing labor shortages and lead to disruptions in the food supply.

Although consumers and government officials have now deemed immigrant workers “essential,” few resources have been dedicated to help them stave off the virus. The workers say they are confused, anxious, and unsure of how COVID-19 will impact their health, employment, and livelihoods. And with many schools suddenly shuttered, some farmworker families are also facing an impossible choice: continue to work or quit and take care of the children.

“Some farmworkers are panicking,” said Elvira Carvajal, lead community organizer in Florida for Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “There are no safety measures, there are no benefits. Families can’t afford to pay for childcare. They’re leaving [children] alone at home or taking them to the fields and leaving them in their cars. This is very dangerous.”

Risks at work and at home

Across the U.S., about 2.5 million farmworkers, most of whom are Latinx, toil on American farms. In addition, a growing number of foreign guest workers, most hailing from Mexico, are brought to the U.S. every year under the H-2A visa program. More than 250,000 were certified nationwide in 2019, though the State Department last week decided to suspend visa processing at the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Mexico, so that only returning guest workers will be allowed to come into the U.S., potentially leaving some growers short.

In some parts of the country, these workers are already busy harvesting produce—whether it’s strawberries in Southern California, citrus, asparagus, and kale in the San Joaquin Valley, or tomato, eggplant, and guavas in Florida. Others are pruning and thinning trees, training vines, transplanting, or weeding. Harvesting typically ramps up later in spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into fields and packing houses.

Some work shoulder-to-shoulder, while others are spread out in the fields, depending on the speed and the crops. Working outside may minimize the risk, experts say, but that’s not the case for packing houses and canneries, since the virus is spread by respiratory droplets and can survive on surfaces for up to three days. Those who work alone on machines seem to be the least exposed.

And while the average age for field workers is just 38 years old — and older adults and people with serious underlying medical conditions seem to be at the highest risk for severe symptoms from COVID-19 — if young farmworkers get infected (with or without symptoms) they can become vectors for the virus.

Advocates say it’s the conditions outside of work that place farmworkers in most danger. Many workers carpool to work — with four to six workers sharing a single car — or are bused to work on packed buses. And their crowded living conditions pose perhaps the biggest challenge, said Norma Ahedo, community health worker coordinator for the Salinas-based Center For Community Advocacy.

Earlier this month, Ahedo said, she did a health check at an apartment in Salinas where four farmworker families — including seven children — were living in three small bedrooms and the living room. It’s typical for an entire family to live in a room, she said. It’s also not uncommon to see two families sharing a single room with a divider down the middle, she said.

“These are small spaces, very closed in, with few windows and many people living on top of each other,” Ahedo said. “And if someone does get sick, where will they go?” (Medical experts recommend that people sick with coronavirus use a separate bedroom and bathroom, or even just maintain the safe distance of six feet.)

H-2A guest workers also live in shared grower-provided communal housing camps or cheap motels where they can easily spread the virus to each other. When a few guest workers got the mumps in Washington state last spring, the entire labor camp had to be quarantined.

Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images

Celery harvesters work in close proximity on a farm in California

High anxiety, food insecurity, lack of childcare

In addition to the threat of physical illness, advocates say the virus is causing huge emotional stress in the farmworker community. Ahedo said she’s worried for the families who have to shelter in place for long periods in overcrowded living conditions.

“This is causing high anxiety in both adults and children,” she said.

Though some workers may not fully grasp their risks or know how to prevent the spread, many are very worried about how the virus will affect their jobs and livelihoods. Already, some farmers who have lost markets due to restaurants, farmers’ market, and schools closing, have reduced working hours.

Farmworkers’ financial instability is compounded by the fact that many have family members who work in other low-wage, hourly jobs hard-hit by coronavirus closures, especially in the food service industry, said Daniel Gonzales, executive director of the Center For Community Advocacy. “It’s a time of great insecurity and much anguish and anxiety for these families,” he added.

Food scarcity is also looming as several rural communities in California and Washington are reporting a lack of basic necessities, said Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. “They’ve told me, ‘We have nowhere to get food. The corner markets and dollar stores have empty shelves (and they aren’t restocking).’ This is creating anxiety and despair.”

An open letter to growers: Help protect your workers

Last week, the United Farm Workers (UFW) sent an open letter to agricultural employers and organizations urging them to take “proactive steps to ensure the safety of farm workers, protect buyers and safeguard consumers.”

The need for action is dire because most non-union farmworkers do not have health care coverage or other benefits, said Armando Elenes, the UFW’s secretary treasurer. The California Farm Bureau Federation says it’s working with ag employers to “adjust on-farm practices to account for social distancing and other measures” to assure the safety of their employees.

But a poll the UFW just completed on its Spanish-language social media platforms showed more than 90 percent of the farmworkers who responded had not been advised by their employers on best practices to resist the virus. And a UFW Facebook Live event last week attracted 18,000 views, with hundreds of farmworkers commenting that their employers had provided no information at all.

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes.

Language is a major barrier to accessing information about the virus and its prevention, said Elenes. Many workers speak only Spanish, while some primarily speak Indigenous languages such as Triqui and Mixteco. And since they’re not getting information from their employers, workers turn to social media, which is ripe with conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus.

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes, said Elenes. Three states—California, Oregon, and Washington — currently offer farmworkers a limited number of sick-pay hours, he added. Despite these laws, many growers and labor contractors require doctors’ notes from workers, making it difficult for workers to access the benefit, he said. And some flat out refuse to give workers sick pay.

“If they stop working because they’re feeling ill, they no longer have a job. The growers do not guarantee their positions,” said Treviño-Sauceda. Some, she added, may also avoid doctors because they fear questions about immigration status or the Trump administration’s new public charge rule, which bars people who use certain benefits, including Medicaid, from converting their temporary immigration status into a green card.

The UFW’s open letter advocates extending state-required sick pay to 40 hours or more and removing the caps on accruing sick pay, eliminating the 90-day waiting period for newly employed farmworkers to be eligible for sick pay, and placing workers who are infected or whose family members are infected with COVID-19 on paid administrative leave for the duration of their illnesses.

The letter also asks growers to provide basic information and training to workers, such as encouraging them to wash their hands and avoid touching their faces.

Training offered to some, others are on their own

Some farmers are starting to provide training and are instituting additional safety measures. Last week at Del Bosque Farms on the west side of Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley, grower Joe Del Bosque and his wife held a tailgate meeting in Spanish for about 60 workers in his asparagus harvest crew to discuss coronavirus prevention and food safety measures. The grower said his company received resources from AgSafe, a nonprofit in Modesto that provides health and safety training.

Del Bosque, who farms about 2,200 acres of mostly organic produce — including several kinds of melons and asparagus — said his employees are his greatest concern. His business, after all, depends on them showing up.

“We’re an essential industry, at this time and always, so we need to make sure our workers are comfortable knowing they can come to work and still be protected,” he said.

Del Bosque’s company offers clean restrooms with fully equipped hand-washing stations. It advises workers to regularly scrub their hands with soap, to sneeze into their elbows, and to stay home when ill — measures that have been part of the company’s food safety program since before the pandemic. In addition, Del Bosque said he has instituted new social distancing measures and a rule about not touching other workers.

“We understand how diseases can be transmitted not just from one worker to another, but also through the produce,” he said. “We simply want to reinforce what we’ve already been doing for many years.”

Del Bosque said rows of asparagus are spaced 5 feet apart, but the workers harvest at their individual speeds and can maintain the required 6-foot social distancing guideline in the fields. In June, when the melon harvest begins, he may have to add more distancing measures, especially for the packers.

Del Bosque can’t prevent his workers from car-pooling because many have no other way to get to work. He can’t tell them to live with fewer people either. And while the company asks workers to stay home when sick — farmworkers in California can acquire between three and eight sick pay days per year, depending on the hours they work — sick leave doesn’t kick in for three months, so some new members of the crew aren’t protected.

Del Bosque said he offers Obamacare-level free health insurance to both his seasonal farmworkers and year-round crew after 30 days. Some also qualify for MediCal, California’s version of Medicaid, which is available to legal residents or U.S. citizens.

According to workers and their advocates however, other employers aren’t nearly as diligent.

California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) told Civil Eats it continues to respond to complaints and serious injuries and illnesses of field agricultural operations during the pandemic. Inspectors verify compliance with the field sanitation requirements and personal protective equipment, if applicable, said spokesman Frank Polizzi. He encouraged workers to call in complaints and said Cal/OSHA plans to post guidance for agricultural employers and workers on preventing the spread of COVID-19, in English this week and soon after in Spanish.

On Friday, after Monterey County issued a shelter-in-place order with sweeping exemptions for agriculture, officials in the region issued a farmworker protection advisory that was applauded by the area’s agricultural industry. And in North Carolina, another state with many guest workers and migrant workers, the health department has also issued guidelines for ag employers.

Few other counties or states have followed suit, but many workers have begun taking their own protective actions.

Alvarado, the Oxnard farmworker, said she and the others cover their faces with bandanas when they cough and buy their own gloves. After work, she changes in the car so as not to bring her clothes into the house. To learn more about COVID, she tunes in to Spanish-speaking radio stations. Last week, when she came down with a dry cough, she immediately went to the emergency room, where she was told it probably wasn’t the virus.

“I hope they can find a solution that would let farmworkers with coronavirus symptoms stay at home without losing the day’s salary or our jobs,” she said.

Education in the time of social distancing

Organizations that work directly with farmworkers have also been working on education campaigns. But the organizations are struggling with how to reach the workers because most immigrant farmworkers prefer face-to-face conversations to online ones, and some are illiterate or lack access to the internet.

For now, UFW, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, and the Center For Community Advocacy have all been turning to social media, including Facebook Live and apps such as Skype and Zoom. They’re also working with local legislators and doctors to provide more information in Spanish.

Radio Bilingue, a national Spanish-language radio network headquartered in Fresno, has been running information spots in Spanish, English, and Mixteco about coronavirus protection, COVID-19 symptoms, and what to do when a person falls ill, said broadcasting director Maria Eraña. The network has also dedicated its flagship talk show program, Linea Abierta, to discussing the pandemic, as well as producing regular updates for its public affairs talk shows and newscasts.

“Our main message,” said Eraña, “is that it’s not the time to panic. It’s time for prevention. And it’s not the time to be afraid of going to the doctor.”

• Farmworkers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs [Civil Eats]

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Farm workers work, live, and travel in crowded conditions, and are being allowed few if any safety measures against COVID-19 — which puts them and the food system at risk

This story originally appeared on Civil Eats.

“What if someone gets sick with the virus and still comes to work,” she asks.

Risks at work and at home

Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images

Celery harvesters work in close proximity on a farm in California

High anxiety, food insecurity, lack of childcare

“This is causing high anxiety in both adults and children,” she said.

An open letter to growers: Help protect your workers

The fact that many farmworkers are undocumented means they can’t file for unemployment and won’t benefit from the aid package Congress passes.

The letter also asks growers to provide basic information and training to workers, such as encouraging them to wash their hands and avoid touching their faces.

Training offered to some, others are on their own

“We’re an essential industry, at this time and always, so we need to make sure our workers are comfortable knowing they can come to work and still be protected,” he said.

According to workers and their advocates however, other employers aren’t nearly as diligent.

Few other counties or states have followed suit, but many workers have begun taking their own protective actions.

“I hope they can find a solution that would let farmworkers with coronavirus symptoms stay at home without losing the day’s salary or our jobs,” she said.

Education in the time of social distancing

“Our main message,” said Eraña, “is that it’s not the time to panic. It’s time for prevention. And it’s not the time to be afraid of going to the doctor.”

• Farmworkers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs [Civil Eats]

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floridaprelaw-blog · 4 years

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Maya Moore: A Star On The Court And In The Courtroom

By Matthew Ginsberg, University of South Florida, Class of 2021

March 21, 2020

Maya Moore is indisputably one of the greatest women’s basketball players to ever step foot on the court. Attending UCONN on a four- year, full ride scholarship, Moore finished her college career with 2 NCAA championships, 4-time first team All- American awards, and a 150- 4 record. After her final season at UCONN, Moore was selected in the first round of the 2011 WNBA draft to the Missouri Lynx as the first overall pick. Since joining the WNBA, Moore has maintained her dedication to outwork her competitors and has accelerated her path to a Hall of Fame career; having won 4 WNBA championships, 3 All-Star MVP awards, and 2 Olympic gold medals in less than 10 years. Moore’s rein to stardom on the court has made her a global icon… but her commitment off the court toward fighting racial discrimination and disparities in the criminal justice system is what truly separates Moore from her competitors.

Maya Moore first met Jonathon Irons the summer after her senior year of high school. Moore’s godparents (who had known Irons for several years prior from a prison ministry outreach program) decided it would be a great learning experience to bring Maya to the Missouri State Penitentiary and introduce her to Irons. Irons had been convicted at 16 years old for burglary and assault with a deadly weapon in 1998, serving a 50- year maximum sentence. Like so many African Americans, who in many instances get wrongfully accused and convicted in the criminal justice system; Irons had no corroborating evidence that tied him to the crime. But in a capitalistic system that prides itself on equality for all, it seems quite possible that Irons sentence was racially targeted, signifying a major flaw in the system that minorities unjustifiably pay the price for. As a minor, Irons received a 50-year sentence by an all- white jury in Missouri, without any conclusive evidence to justify the sentencing. Moore, who was only 18 years old when she was first introduced to Irons, knew she had a responsibility to help defeat inconsistencies in the criminal “justice” system. Unfortunately, as a soon-to-be college freshman, Moore did not have the power or public support to help Irons fight his case. Now, one decade later, Moore has separated herself on a public platform, becoming one of the most successful WNBA players in the history of the game. So, with fame, fortune, and an opportunity to become the greatest WNBA player of all time, why did Maya Moore in 2019, at the age of just 30 years old, decide to step away from the game in the prime of her career?

In February 2019, Moore formally announced she was stepping away from basketball to focus on ministry and criminal justice reform. Coming as a surprise to many, Moore knew she wanted to leave a legacy that went far beyond her contributions on the court. Maya felt she had a moral obligation to use basketball as a platform that exacerbated mass public attention and national news recognition; creating an avenue for public support to help counterbalance a system that has consistently betrayed and marginalized minorities. Before formally making her decision to pursue the case head on, Moore did her research and quickly realized that, “There was no physical evidence. No DNA, footprint, fingerprint, nothing to directly connect Irons to the scene.” It was clear from that point forward that if Moore wanted to actively support Irons release, she would have to redirect her priorities and focus her sole attention on trying to get an appeal granted. The WNBA being a time constraint would be a direct conflict for an athlete, who understands the level of commitment necessary to achieve goals and overcome obstacles. Irons, who had already served 23 years of his sentence, had appealed his case 4 times, pleading that he was innocent in each hearing. But to the dissatisfaction of Irons and his supporters, the court has upheld their initial conviction each time, reasserting the inconsistencies established in Appeals Courts, who have consistently maintained set precedent and ignored the possibility of a wrongful conviction.

When Moore formally announced she was taking a temporary leave of absence from basketball, she knew getting Irons released from prison would be nothing short of a miracle. After leaving the WNBA, Moore began visiting Irons weekly, reminding him always that, “I’m here because I care.” In a news conference with TIME magazine, Moore opened up about why this case meant so much to her, explaining that “He’s like a son to my godparents, so he’s family. He wasn’t bitter, violent, or angry, that’s the opposite of how he carried himself; my visits and phone calls with him were so inspiring.” After numerous discussions with Irons about his previous appeals getting denied, Moore realized that what Irons' case desperately needed was a top defense attorney. She hired Kent Gipson, the highest rated defense attorney in Missouri, who immediately requested that the case be reopened to reexamine the evidence and allow for new expert testimony. Judge Daniel Green was assigned to the case to determine if the appeal would be granted, which would allow a new hearing for Irons. Although Irons was not allowed to attend, Moore and her family sat in the courtroom with clear angst and silent optimism. Judge Green analyzed the evidence presented and determined that the case would reopen in October 2019, but not to discuss whether Irons should be freed, but rather “To hear arguments about the prosecutors claim that the case should remain closed.” Although initially disappointed by the verdict, Moore knew Irons still had a chance if the court decided to reopen the case. She spent the following months working with attorneys and posting about the case on her social media accounts, electrifying an inspiring response of 100,000 signatures supporting Irons release from prison. As public attention grew, all eyes were on the trial in October 2019 that would either grant or reject Irons case being retried with new expert testimonies.

When trial day arrived, Irons stepped foot in the courtroom, with Moore there to support him, sitting “court side” in the first row. “I was overwhelmed to say the least. That’s my family up there.” Moore admitted. “But I was so grateful that his story could be told the way it really happened.” she explained. The judge determined that the unidentified fingerprints from the crime scene did not match Irons, signifying that the case needed to be reopened. Overcome with emotion, Moore knew she had to maintain her courageous drive to help get Irons exonerated and released from prison. The case resumed on March 2, 2020 with an opportunity for Irons to be permanently freed, if the judge found that the evidence presented by the prosecution failed to conclusively connect Irons to the crime scene. The case went on for several days, with attorneys on both sides working 24 hours a day defending their clients. After both sides had given their closing testimonies on March 9, 2020, there was nervous emotion expressed by Moore and her family, who appeared to be shaking in their seats as Judge Daniel Green began revealing the final verdict. After reviewing a 37-page order, Judge Green ruled that “the prosecutors had suppressed evidence in the burglary and assault case against Johnathon Irons.” He continued, “The prosecution presented a very weak case, which was circumstantial at best.” Due to the whole case being “dotted with inconsistencies,” Judge Green believed authorities targeted Mr. Irons, explaining that “authorities failed to turn over a fingerprint report that would have bolstered Irons’ defense.” Based on a lack of evidence and failure by the prosecution to prove Mr. Irons fingerprints matched the fingerprints left at the crime scene, Judge Green overturned the initial verdict and dismissed the case. “It was the most surreal moment of my life.” Moore said after leaving the courtroom. “I couldn’t stop crying, so much hard work, so many tears of joy.” she said. Although Irons was not formally at the trial, on an over the phone interview, he said “I began crying, jumping, and shouting as soon as I heard the news. Maya saved my life. I would not have this chance if not for her and her wonderful family.” Moore has won several battles on the court prior, but this was her first big victory in the courtroom.

The Johnathon Irons case is symbolic of the hypocrisy and brutality embedded within the United States criminal justice system. Living in a country where perpetrators are supposed to pay the price of time for wrongful action, it’s clear that in many instances the system fails, because law enforcement would rather put an innocent African American behind bars than accept the reality that there simply isn’t a clear perpetrator. And while everyone wants criminals detained for their heinous and selfish decisions, it seems quite counterproductive to put innocent men behind bars for crimes they did not commit, thus further exacerbating the problem at hand. African American represent 13% of the general population, yet make up nearly 50% of the prison system. This signifies that law enforcement racially discriminates and alienates African Americans by using them as prime targets in criminal cases, when in many instances they are not at fault. In a study done by Michigan State University, the researchers found that, “African American prisoners, who were convicted of murder, are 50% more likely to be innocent than other convicted murderers.” This fact reaffirms that there are thousands of African Americans currently serving time for crimes they did not commit. Living in the most powerful country in the world, you would think that law enforcement would have the cognizance to treat all citizens equally. But from slavery, to separate-but- equal legislation, we have seen clear instances where minorities are treated unfairly simply due to the color of their skin. Living in the 21st century, many of these problems continue to escalate daily, even though the system claims that all citizens are supposed to be treated equally. To help combat the discrepancies in the criminal “justice” system, it’s imperative that public figures like Maya Moore continue to step up and use their platform to counteract the unfathomable behavior of law enforcement.

________________________________________________________________

Bates, Josiah. “MO Man's Conviction Is Overturned with Help from Maya Moore.” Time, Time, 10 Mar. 2020, time.com/5800147/missouri-man-conviction-overturned-maya-moore/.

Burke, Minyvonne. “WNBA Star Maya Moore to Sit Out Season and Olympics as She Advocates for Inmate's Release.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 23 Jan. 2020, www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/wnba-star-maya-moore-sit-out-season-olympics-she-advocates-n1121441.

Henry, Allison. “Judge Tosses Convictions in Case Championed By WNBA's Maya Moore.” WTNH.com, 9 Mar. 2020, www.wtnh.com/sports/judge-tosses-convictions-in-case-championed-by-wnbas-moore/.

Maloney, Jack. “Minnesota Lynx Star Maya Moore Helps Overturn Conviction for Innocent Missouri Man.” CBSSports.com, 9 Mar. 2020, www.cbssports.com/wnba/news/minnesota-lynx-star-maya-moore-helps-overturn-conviction-for-innocent-missouri-man/.

Miles, Linsey. “Maya Moore Enjoying Time Away from Basketball, Focusing on Social-Justice Work.” Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo!, 18 Nov. 2019, sports.yahoo.com/maya-moore-minnesota-lynx-not-ready-wnba-return-wrongful-conviction-jonathan-irons-020717702.html.

Nelson, Alisa. “WNBA Star in Missouri Courtroom to Help Imprisoned Friend Score 'Win with Justice'.” Missourinet, 10 Oct. 2019, www.missourinet.com/2019/10/10/wnba-star-in-missouri-courtroom-to-help-imprisoned-friend-score-win-with-justice/.

Photo Credit: www.citypages.com www.nytimes.com

Stelloh, Tim, and Blayne Alexander. “Judge Overturns Conviction in Case Championed by WNBA Star Maya Moore.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 10 Mar. 2020, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-overturns-convictions-case-championed-wnba-star-maya-moore-n1153736.

Stevenson, Henry. “African-Americans More Likely to Be Wrongfully Convicted.” Research at Michigan State University, 11 Aug. 2018, www.research.msu.edu/innocent-african-americans-more-likely-to-be-wrongfully-convicted/.

Streeter, Kurt. “Maya Moore Left Basketball. A Prisoner Needed Her Help.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 June 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/sports/maya-moore-wnba-quit.html.

Yang, Avery. “Maya Moore To Skip Another WNBA Season to Fight For Criminal Justice Reform.” Sports Illustrated, 22 Jan. 2020, www.si.com/wnba/2020/01/22/maya-moore-miss-second-straight-season-jonathan-irons.

Zheng, Lina. “Good Morning America: WNBA Star Maya Moore Helps Free Man Behind Bars.” ABC, 9 Mar. 2020, abc.com/shows/good-morning-america/video/most-recent/vdka17000257

Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull

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alluratron · 7 years

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Voltron seasons 3 and 4 review

I rewatched the two seasons in one go so as to see how much I’d like it as one single season as it was originally meant to be and I did actually prefer it that way. So I’ll talk about the good aka what I liked and enjoyed, then about what I was kinda “meh” towards, before talking about what I disliked.

The good:

Allura. I love seeing Allura in the thick of things, hence my love of episodes like “Collection and Extraction”, and the confrontation with Haggar and the druids in “Blackout”. I was rather disappointed in s2 by how much of Allura’s screentime was to do with opening wormholes or sitting around waiting (although I did prefer that to her supposedly being ~racist~ -.-) so to see her always involved in the action this season was very satisfying for me.

Her pink paladin armour is glorious and watching her wield her whip bayard is magnificent. So many Wonder Woman comparisons made valid and I love it.

By “Code of Honor” she’s back in a co-leadership position with Shiro, where Shiro seems more of the battle strategy leader and Allura more of the coalition diplomacy leader.

HER MAGIC LITERALLY LIFTING VOLTRON UP!!!! They were actually going to be crushed by gravitational pressure but Allura saved them all on her own and that’s amazing. She’s explicitly untrained and yet she has so much raw power. I truly believe she’s some sort of Chosen One or something.

Lance’s insecurities not just brushed under the carpet after Shiro’s sharpshooter comment in season 2. It definitely seems like he’s going to have the longest running arc. We saw him attempt to use the black lion to ~cure~ his insecurities with the whole “this is your moment” thing.

We also learn that he worries that not only is he the least useful member of the team, he doesn’t even deserve to be on the team at all. As the viewer we know this isn’t true and this is especially highlighted this season, with Lance fighting at the forefront a lot more.

Evolution of Lance and Keith’s dynamic. I think it’s super interesting how Lance stepped up when Shiro was gone, consoling Keith and supporting him when Keith felt most alone, but seemingly steps away from that role when Shiro returned.

Lance was never afraid to call Keith out and somehow is able to get through to him and that made him the perfect balance to Keith.

The relationship didn’t just skip to BFFs though, because even though Lance is good at supporting Keith, Keith sucks at it and as such there’s still problems to address for them to grow.

Evolution of Lance and Allura’s relationship. Lance didn’t flirt ONCE with her!!!! In 13 episodes!!!!! Their relationship is so much more profound now. I made a post about this, but I love the contrast between “Red Paladin” where Allura motivates and encourages Lance to believe in himself and says why the red lion has chosen him, and then in “A New Defender” Lance motivates and encourages Allura to believe in herself and her abilities and says the blue lion chose her for a reason. I love mutually supportive friendships. Also, Lance checks in to see how Allura is doing in Blue. He also genuinely compliments her for taking out a bunch of sentries.

Shiro back in the black lion. I still have my doubts as to whether this is the same Shiro from seasons 1 and 2, but either way I’m glad to see his face in the lion. The more paladin armor in the matching lion the better imo.

More emphasis on how badass Hunk is. His piloting skills have come so far since season 1. He also elbow dropped someone in the face like daaaaammmmmnnnnnn son.

More emphasis on how loyal Hunk is. He wanted to form the head with the yellow lion 😭😭😭. He loves his lion and I love him. He also is very loyal to his friends. He split off and went back for Allura when she fell behind.

More emphasis on how smart Hunk is. In season 2 there was a tendency to downplay his intelligence (and everyone else’s) to make Pidge seem smarter. This season, however, Hunk was very much involved in the nerd talk, with him and Pidge (and Matt when he joined) bouncing ideas off each other.

Speaking of, Matt. I really didn’t want that storyline dragging out any longer so I’m glad Pidge found him finally. They have a lovely dynamic and he’s so sweet and supportive of her. I know some people are saying his personality is basically the same as Lance but I don’t see that. Sure, he flirts with Allura but if you think flirting is Lance’s most defining trait then uhhhhh. Well. Also Lance doesn’t really do puns. Also also Lance isn’t a nerd.

I saw spoilers so I knew Matt wasn’t dead but they still had me thinking Matt was really dead???? Had me tryna rationalise future Matt scenes like maybe that Matt is from an alternate reality. Really well done episode. I didn’t cry but I only cry for Allura so eh.

GROUP HUG!!!!!!!!!! It was so pure and cute and Keith looked so happy. I wonder if he’s been in a group hug before. Pidge crying that they’d miss Keith when she was the first one who ever tried to leave the team shows how close they’ve grown since season 1.

I know this a kids show and they aren’t going to kill any of the main cast but damn if Keith didn’t get me. I was in SHOCK, wondering if maybe Steven Yeun didn’t want to be part of the show anymore lmao. Props to them for actually making that really convincing.

The generals turning on Lotor “for Narti”. We see that they really are friends with each other. Ezor looked very upset after Narti’s death. Zethrid looked upset too. These girls care for each other.

The “meh”:

“The Legend Begins”. I’m really glad it happened because it was about time we got some backstory. I did enjoy certain aspects of it (Alfor’s “oh dear” and Zarkon’s “i must go” are big winners to me) and I especially enjoyed red paladin Alfor confirmation (because I’m petty and I hated how people acted as if it was canon confirmed that he was yellow).

But some aspects fell flat for me. I would’ve liked more female paladins, or for the one female paladin to not be in the same lion as the girl on our original team (bc really they could stand to mix things up once in a while). I would’ve loved Blaytz to be female and a lesbian, flirting with a female galra servant.

The queen of Altea’s design and role was a big disappointment. It was extremely lazy to just give her all of Allura’s features just with a different dress. She also doesn’t speak a word nor have a name. What happened to her? Who knows. Maybe we’ll find out in future episodes but I’m sceptical.

I’m not keen on how Alfor made a joke out of it when Zarkon was reinforcing class separation. It makes me wonder if that was present on all the planets, just not as enforced. I do like that Zarkon was already classist and power hungry before he died in the rift. It made it feel less like they were trying to excuse his tyranny and more like they were saying “he was a dick but quintessence exacerbated his dickiness”.

I love Honerva’s character, but I don’t like how she had a small, pointy nose before and once she turns evil she gets a hooked nose.

“The Voltron Show”. I know it’s supposed to be meta and make fun of itself/the fandom à la “Ember Island Players” but it just fell a bit flat for me. There were some really funny bits, like Coran sayin Shiro is the most popular character and telling him to put on a tight shirt, and I still don’t know whether I love or hate Pidge complaining about saying fake made-up science words.

But the “Humorous Hunk” thing was really not funny. Not because “oh boo more fat jokes, this time about farting” but because the episode was supposed to be this self-aware thing, parodying the show itself and the fandom and thus going over the top with everything. But them parodying using their fat character as comic relief doesn’t sit right when they continue to do just that outside of the parody. There’s a video called The Adorkable Misogyny of The Big Bang Theory and it talks about ironic lampshading (from around 13:04 if anyone’s interested). That’s what sits wrong with me about Humorous Hunk. They parody the fat comic relief character as a way to show that they’re aware that it’s an unsavory trope, yet continue to use it. I put this in the “meh” because I don’t actually know if they’ll continue to use it. Maybe they’ve finally heard the fans and will stop with the fat jokes. We’ll see next season.

Keith missing from 3 episodes. Don’t get me wrong I’m not upset about that at all, considering there was plenty of him in the first 8 episodes. But I was curious as to what this weeks-maybe-months-long mission would entail. I wouldn’t have minded, like, a minute long segment for Keith in those episodes showing us what exactly he’s up to. Even better would’ve been to show us him missing the team. They could’ve had a short scene of him watching the voltron show and smiling wistfully before he gets called away to the mission. Something like that would’ve had more people emotionally aligned with him.

The Bad:

“Hole in the Sky”. This whole episode a nightmare. Evil Alteans? Really? Is your writing that bad that you’re incapable of showing nuance without going down that route? Allura is apparently too clueless and idealised in her view of Alteans to understand what is going on by the time Keith yells “you’re taking away their will!” Keith has to be some sort of moral compass to her.

Allura saying “you’re no Altean” as if Alteans can’t be morally corrupt. As if she didn’t meet Haggar just last season finale. I know they wanted to make it hard for Allura by presenting her with the option of an idealised society, but they don’t have to make her stupid for that. I’ve come to the conclusion that any and all storylines involving race on vld are going to be badly handled and should thus be scrapped. I’ve had enough.

Lion ranking. The emphasis on Black as leader and Red as second in command feels like it’s devaluing the whole theme of voltron as 5 essential components by assigning greater worth to certain lions. Keith moving to Black and Lance moving to Red were portrayed as upgrades or promotions. Also, does this mean Lance is now Shiro’s second in command? Wasn’t discussed at all.

Allura in the Blue Lion. When Shiro was away, Allura should’ve been in the Black Lion. That’s the only rank that was established right from the beginning as leader and Allura is a great leader. She’s described in the show as the decision maker, and the black paladin is the decisive head of voltron. It’s clear she best fits the role. It also isn’t fair to have her taking orders from people she used to outrank. To rank her below Keith is bad enough, but with the second in command stuff as well, Allura ends up ranked below Keith and Lance. Depowering your WoC is not a good look.

When Shiro comes back though, the second in command thing seems to fly out the window and Allura is back to giving orders despite being in Blue so I guess they’re just inconsistent lmao.

The black lion refusing to let Shiro fly it for a grand total of 2 episodes. Seriously, that lasted 40 minutes. And 22 of those minutes we were learning the backstory. What was the point of that?

Lotor killing Narti. Hoooo boy I’m really mad about this one. It was completely unnecessary. The only reason it happened was for shock value. Lotor realised Haggar was watching him through Narti so he killed her. That makes no sense though, because Narti doesn’t fucking have eyes! She sees through Kova! So if anything, Haggar was seeing indirectly through Kova and Lotor could’ve killed the cat instead! Why he has to kill anyone anyway is a mystery to me. He could’ve knocked her out and left her and Kova there while he and the other generals leave with the ships. How is Haggar going to watch him through Narti if he isn’t even with Narti?

The whole scene was just really unpleasant. Killing off a disabled character never sits right. And there was so much more to her character that could’ve been explored. How did she come to meet Kova? Why did she join Lotor? And mind control! She could’ve used that on characters fighting in or with team voltron! Some quality angst material right there! But nope, she’s dead.

Possible redemption for Lotor. Soz pals, unnecessarily killing your comrade puts you in my shit books.

I don’t actually think he’s going to be redeemed - I think he’s just going to use team voltron while they benefit him and then turn on them as soon as they don’t - but I’m mad at the writers for making me have to sit through endless posts of fandom woobifying his punk ass. “Space Zuko!” they cry. I gaze weakly towards a hypothetical camera as though I am a character on renounced TV show, The Office. “Why.” the word is barely a whisper as it leaves my mouth. I am Tired.

#vld analysis #voltron meta #voltron #vld #vlds4 #vld spoilers

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