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ckbookish · 3 years

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BATMAN BINGO MASTER POST 2020

1 "I thought you were dead.": I Still See Your Ghost

Today was just not Dick's day. First he overslept his alarm and was late to work. Amy had been less than impressed at his tardiness... Then He had bungled what should have been an easy take town... But the straw that broke the camel's back was Tim. Dick had forgotten to call Tim.

2 Friendly fire: Fratricide

Jason was pissed. No, Jason was enraged. Yeah, he was enraged at the whole mess his family-- if that’s even what they were to each other anymore-- had gotten him in. It was meant to be a simple night. Break in. Torch the drugs. Maybe shoot a couple of people and go home. But no, Batman heard about his plans and decided that arson was too extreme. “Someone could get hurt.” Well someone had gotten hurt, a lot of someones.

3 Hypothermia: Weekend Commute

Dick Grayson makes his way home during the first snow fall of the year, when he finds himself confused and cold, miles from home.

Chapter two Bruce's perspective.

4 Superman: Bringer of the Dawn

The Aftermath of when the Joker shoots Dick.

Where do you go when your family tells you to get out?

5 Shot: The Gratitude Trap

Bruce finds himself in the dark, a place he never thought he would be when it came to Clark Kent and Dick Grayson. Yet here he is digging for answers, because he is too scared to pick up the phone and call.

6 Two-face: The Better Choice

How do you reconcile the man who was once your friend with the monster he has become? Bruce reflects on how the man he once called his best friend changed. How could the man who helped him foster Dick, hold that baseball bat?

7 Drowning: Omori’s Law

Deep in the sewer's under Gotham, Batman is trapped. There is no back up, no Robin. He is faced with the single truth that he tried to teach each of his partners... You have to save yourself.

8 Found Family: A Restoration from a Resilient Heart

Dick just wants to not be alone with the shadows in the house. Bruce doesn't realize he has lived with them for far to long, and maybe he doesn't have to anymore.

9 Adoption: The Irrefutable Truth

When he reached the reception, he found himself looking around a fairly empty room. There were a few call girls in the corner filling out forms, an older woman holding a dog, a kid that looked about twelve and a middle aged man who looked like he was ready to cry. He knew no one. Dick was about to turn around and head back to his desk when the on duty officer called out to him. Officer O’Conner was one of his fellow rookies, he had a thick accent. Dick thought he might be from Louisiana. “Grayson! Why didn’t you say your brother was coming to see you?” Dick looked at him with his mouth slightly open. There was no way he heard that right. “My what?”

10 Bruises: Mr. Wayne

Tim is new to this. He's only been Robin for a little over six months. It was going well. But now he was going to be fired. Batman wouldn't want a partner who got caught at school with a black eye. Would he?

11 Bruce is dead: You Have One Saved Message

Gotham gossip columns spread lies and smear good people's names. But yet Damian can't help but think maybe this mornings article was true. That despite all his claims of being the true son of Bruce Wayne, he was in fact the only unwanted one.

12 CPR: Vital Signs

Robin wakes to find him and Batman in an exploded factory. With Batman injured and the building burning around them, Dick struggles to get them both to safety.

13 Dad: Storge

Bruce could have sworn his spirit had left him momentarily. The sudden hollowness that filled him couldn’t be explained in any other way.

“Your dad must have his hands full with you.” Elizabeth Ribbons leaned forward and patted Dick’s shoulder, as he reached for yet another slice of cheesecake from a passing waiter’s tray.

Bruce fixed his eyes on the ice sculpture that hid him from view. It suddenly seemed like the most interesting design in the world. The soft lines of the ice on the otherwise insignificant over sized swan seemed like a lead shield... Because Dick would read it easily in his expression. He wanted to be Dick’s dad. But he wasn’t.

14 Stealing the Batmobile: T-Minus Six Hours

Some days Tim is sure that he’s gonna be killed. Usually it’s some luck shot or near miss that made his life flash before his eyes. Not today though. Today he was positive Bruce was going to kill him. Yes, today was the day that Timothy Jackson Drake was going to be put down. He’s not sure that even Nightwing could save him. He was going to go down in history as the first sidekick to be murdered by their mentor. Because the Batmobile was definitely not where he’d parked it.

15 Wayne Enterprises: Amidst the Absence of Meaning

Bruce is worried. He's running on less than three hours of sleep, and way too many cups of coffee. He had messed up. That much was obvious. The question was would Dick forgive him?

A gruesome night on patrol bleeds into Bruce's work day and now all he can wonder is if this is the thing that will push Dick over the edge? Had he finally seen to much pain?

16 Ransom: Sum of My Worth

The ring of the phone seemed to echo through the manor’s still too quiet long, winding halls, and everyone present collectively held their breath. Bruce lunged for the phone.

17 Secret Injury: Hiding in Pain Sight

“What?” Dick asked sharper than he meant to. He was tired.

“Nothing.” Tim said with a small smirk. “Heavy is the head.”

Dick closed his eyes, glad that Tim couldn’t see them. He was so sick of this. Tim, Jason, Damian and Cass all didn’t think he was good enough, well Cass hadn’t said that, but Dick could read her. They didn’t think he was up to the job. Well they didn’t need to tell him that. He knew it.

18 Superboy: An Interlude in Breathing

Tim looked out over the water in a daze. Bruce and Dick had gone somewhere below deck and he was alone. Well there were strangers on the ship mingling and talking excitedly--but Tim gave them no notice. Instead he watched the water lap up against the hull and crash down back to meet the dark, cold waters. They were far enough out that he could no longer see the shore. It was just endless expenses of sea and sky. Something tickled his neck and he started, only to realize he had been crying. It was only a tear slipping under his collar.

The days after the battle of Infinite Crisis

19 Betrayed: Smother

She took another drag of the cigarette, letting the smoke roll in her lungs for a long moment before allowing it hiss out between her teeth. The screams from the warehouse weren’t completely muffled by the distance, or the walls. Perhaps she was only imagining them. But then, sounds like that, she didn’t think she could dream up. She jumped after a particularly high pitched yelp. “Get a grip.” She dropped the cigarette and pulled out another. Her hand shook as she lit it. “It’s just some random kid. He’s not--” She bit back a sob. She didn’t deserve to cry. She had no right to tears, not when it was her fault.

20 Crowbar: Breaklights

The mail fell to the ground and the paper smacked the tiles hard. The sound in reality couldn’t have been all that loud, but it seemed to echo around the entryway. Bruce didn’t look at the dropped bills and the invitation to a fundraiser for the new Gotham women’s shelter. He was too fixated on the small stamp with the queen of England's head on it. Wolverhampton.

The large envelope was far heavier then it should have been. Bruce could feel bile crawling up his throat.

He had forgotten.

21 Deathstroke: Debts and Dues

There were some things that were never pleasant, getting caught in the snow without socks, losing your keys, and not being able to remember the name of a song. Having a gun pointed at your chest, Dick felt, qualified as extremely unpleasant. He stood stock still. The barrel of the gun was still hot, it burned slightly as it dug into his sternum. Even with his uniform he could still feel the heat left over from previous rounds fired. He didn’t flinch. He couldn’t flinch. “Move.” “You know I can’t.” Dick wondered if Slade had the guts to do it.

22 Mission Gone Wrong: Murmur in the Quiet Hours

Superman? Clark froze. He knew that voice. But-- he had never heard it sounding so sad. Was that-- no. Clark dove for his phone, still on the counter from when he got home last night. The screen was black. Dead. Clark swore and dropped it. He was in his coat and shoes before it hit the counter top.

23 Kidnapped: Chum

Dick trumped through the leaves, stopping his feet roughly. He relished the sound of the crunch beneath his shoes as he tread on the brown, dead leaves before him. He felt rather justified in his satisfaction. After all the world had taken so much from him, why wouldn’t he do his best to crush it in return. The woods were cool and as he went deeper into them they grew darker. The sun had long set, and the sky was quickly vanishing as the trees grew thicker. Wayne Manor was far behind him. He was never going back. He hated those pristine walls, those old floor boards. He hated the quiet. He hated the stuffy furniture and the rules and the vases and pictures. He hated his new guardian and that… that… Dick couldn’t remember what Alfred was called, but he hated it. The bag on his back felt heavy. It had everything Dick owned in it. Well and a toothbrush that Alfred had given him. But he didn’t think that was really stealing.

24 Riddler: Seeking Silence on Shortwaves

Normally Dick would be happy to listen to Tim talk. In fact, Dick thought it was one of his favorite sounds in the world. Tim rarely allowed himself to be excited about things. Hearing him speak so freely and openly to Bruce and him about his plans was refreshing. Dick only wished it wouldn’t be at the cost of his life.

Batman hadn't always been so strict about talking unnecessarily over comms. When it was just two of them it hadn't mattered, their walkie talkie system had always worked. But now that Nightwing and Robin were in Gotham, it seems insane that they never realized: if only one person can talk over the radio at a time... how could they call for help?

25 Mr. Freeze: Glimpsing the Sun While Trapped in the Rime

He almost called Bruce between his fourth and fifth class. He pulled his phone out, leaning against his locker, and half dialed his number when a warm hand fell on his shoulder. “Hey.” Dick spun around and blinked back black spots as his body protested the sudden movement. A blaze of red hair filled his vision and Dick felt a small fire build in his chest. His face split into a wide smile.

After a run in with Mr. Freeze Dick finds himself feeling odd at school, but he can't go home, not when Barbara's asked him to drive her to Betty's party after school.

#batman bingo 2020 #Master Post #Batman #CK Writes #Nightwing #Dick Grayson #tim drake #Jason Todd #Damian Wayne #Red Hood #Red Robin #robin #My Writing

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oscopelabs · 3 years

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‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing Them Softly’ By Roxana Hadadi

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ...”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It's a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

#killing them softly #andrew dominik #andrew dominik film #brad pitt #Jackie Cogan #james gandolfini #richard jenkins #ray liotta #scoot mcnairy #ben mendelsohn #american cinematographer #financial crisis 2008 #independent film #beastie boys #oscilloscope laboratories #film writing #musings

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third-rail-vip · 4 years

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20 OTP Questions

Tagged by @tarberrymentats thank you so much for the tag! <3

I’m going to tag @minuteminx @asaara-writes @pchberrytea @mayihavethisdanse @potatocrab @laurelsofhighever and anyone else who wants to, tag me because I’d love to see your OTPs!!

I might have gone a bit overboard, so I’ll put most of this under the cut…

Mac x Ivy

1. Who can outdrink the other?

Oh, definitely Mac. They learnt that the first night they met, not that she was trying to keep up it’s just Ivy is a thorough lightweight. He didn’t like questions, she can’t help but ask them, so the deal was one shot per question. She is smol and cannot hold her booze. Two centuries on ice and she seems to have lost some of the tolerance she built up in college. Magnolia had to tell Mac to make sure she got to the Rexford ok. Of course, en route she picked up multiple jobs and talked Fred into giving them 500 caps for going to Hallucigen. Mac was gobsmacked, it was the beginning of a beautiful if unexpected friendship.

These days if you give her too much, you’ll find her sat on the floor in the corner of Railroad parties with Tinker Tom talking conspiracy theories.

2. Who says “i love you” more?

Probably Mac, but not because he loves more, but because he’s definitely the more vocal of the two of them. Words are one of his main love languages. Plus, he’s lost a partner before (which Ivy hasn’t) and there were things unsaid in that relationship that he’ll always regret, so he knows the importance of telling the people you love how you feel, and telling them often. Ivy is more of a show than tell, even though she’s the type to fall first, she’s been hurt before by exactly that so she’s slower to use the words and breaks them out less often. She shows she loves him through her actions.

3. Who has trouble sleeping alone?

Very much Ivy, not that Mac doesn’t to some degree, but this is a scary new world for Ivy and she feels very much safer having someone there. She was a wreck when he was away in the Capital Wasteland and really struggled to sleep at all. She is more likely to not be able to get to sleep if she’s alone. Mac is more likely to have a disturbed night, waking up feeling an absence.

4. Who swears more?

Ivy. She may look sweet but she really can have a foul mouth. She will basically swear for Mac as well. He’ll cut himself off and she’ll fill in the blank. She resists the urge, or at least desperately tries to pick other words at the last second when the kids are about. It doesn’t always work well.

5. Who does more of the housework?

It’s shared. Ivy makes more mess though, she’s clean but untidy. She seems accumulate way more stuff than Mac does, and boy does she spread it around the house. She’s also very distractible, so he can get back and find a half-risen loaf in the kitchen, which she’ll have left, having had a thought about something she wanted to draw while it was still in her mind. So, the sketchbooks are out in the living room, but then she’ll see a sketch of Mac and remember she was going to fix the arm on his duster again. And so on and so forth. Mac isn’t without guilt, there are always comics on various surfaces, left open (taking up maximum room) to show Ivy or the boys the best bits. If Codsworth had lungs, he’d hyperventilate. She will tidy up after herself though, when she realises she’s left everything all over. I mean, nobody wants to hear a Mr Handy cry pre-recorded tears.

6. Who forgets their anniversary?

They don’t technically have an anniversary, actually getting together was a bit of a messy and protracted process. The easiest date to remember is Halloween when they first met in Goodneighbour. Maybe one day they’ll have an official anniversary for something else, but for now.

7. Who steals the duvet in their sleep?

Sometimes they can have a bit of blanket tug of war going on depending on who got into bed first. Ivy was nesh even before the war, but two hundred years on ice has done her no favours. She gets criminally cold hands and feet. If they were just sharing a bed before they got together, Ivy would 100% steal that duvet, but these days she just wraps around her mercenary and they sleep like a little two person blanket burrito.

8. Who keeps the other awake at night with their snoring?

Neither keeps the other awake. Mac is the one who snores, but they are little damn kitten snores, like his sneezes. If anything is going to keep Ivy awake, it’s him falling asleep first and her just silently going “awwwwww” at her adorable boyfriend.

9. Who finds stray animals and begs the other to let them keep them?

This is totally Ivy and cats. They have dogmeat of course, but he’s his own man and he’s always welcome with them, but he’s not really theirs. Ivy love cats, she will sneak off to play with settlement cats when she should be doing far more minutemen type activities. They are definitely slowly accumulating cats at their most regularly visited settlements.

10. Who usually makes dinner?

Ivy enjoys cooking most out of the two of them, and she’s rather good at it. Getting better all the time as well since her and Codsworth are doing their best to remember and collect pre-war recipes, or at least work out how to make equivalents. Mac is a reasonable cook, but over the years he’s generally been happy to exist on pre-war ‘just add water’ kind of food, rather than cooking from scratch, which is definitely Ivy’s jurisdiction. But if she’s cooking, and if he can persuade Codsworth to leave them to it, he loves to cook with Ivy. Even more so when the kids want to get involves too.

11. Who plays their music out loud?

Oh god, they both do. The pipboy radio is always going. Turning it right up and singing along is almost mandatory. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you might catch Ivy playing the guitar or the piano and singing. She’s usually shy about it, but she’s good. She’s performed once at The Third Rail as a birthday present.

12. Who hogs the bathroom?

Given the opportunity of a hot shower in Vault 81, you will lose Ivy for so long you’d think she’d drowned. Drenching herself in enough scolding hot water to supply a minor settlement, truly is the most self-indulgent of self-care. Mac isn’t the biggest fan but he can be persuaded. The only time he’ll hog the bathroom is when it’s time to keep that goatee in tiptop condition. He’s very particular about it.

13. Who gives the most compliments?

Like with saying ‘I love you’ most, Mac is definitely the one who lays on the compliments. He learned early on that Ivy isn’t used to being complimented like that, or at least, it’s been a very long time since she was treated that way. He’s almost made it a personal mission to set that right. How easily she blushes at them is just an added bonus.

14. Who usually starts/causes arguments between them?

They aren’t an argumentative couple, from past experience, Ivy does not cope well with that kind of confrontation within a relationship. They are more likely to snark if something has annoyed them, but are actually really good at reading each other’s body language for when something they’ve done has upset the other. But if it comes down to it, Mac is more likely to be the one to get into a more heated discussion about something that’s upset him. Ivy is the one to calm a situation. The only time they’ve had an actual stand up row was during Blind Betrayal.

15. Who isn’t afraid to embarrass the other in public?

They aren’t afraid of a bit of public bantering, and will definitely play up for an audience if they’re in the right mood. Ivy is a little more inclined to publicly tease Mac in one way or another, but that might be more because Mac suspects she can deal it out better than she can take it, rather than her being the more equipped to do it. Although when it comes to quietly flustering her in public, that is very much Mac’s jurisdiction.

16. Who gives the other cringeworthy pet names?

There’s a definite teasing edge to most of the nicknames they call each other, they’re both more comfortable with being called them when there isn’t too big of an audience around. But I guess Mac would be more embarrassed by Ivy’s habit of calling him anything beginning with ‘sweet’ – it’s not good for his tough mercenary image, you know. Mac doesn’t care who hears him call Ivy ‘angel’, he’s being calling her it for so long (way longer than they’ve been together) but he might draw the line at shouting ‘kitten’ across Diamond City marketplace. Most other names they call each other are more along the lines of compliments or abbreviations of their names.

17. Who fusses over the other when they get sick?

Ivy is definitely the more diligent medic, and a very well qualified worrier. So when Mac is hurt, she’s all over that, and he regularly jokes that she carries enough gear to set up a small field hospital with her at all times. Not that that habit hasn’t saved their asses on multiple occasions. Mac is more likely to get genuinely scared if Ivy is badly hurt or sick because of past experience. When it comes to just being a little bit poorly, Mac will milk it like an absolute drama queen. Ivy is a soft touch and will let him. But she’s also very good at telling when he’s better and is just looking for extra attention. She’ll make up ‘treatments’ to see if he’ll keep up the charade and how committed he is to being waited on hand and foot.

18. Who finds it impossible to stay angry at the other for long?

For a guy who can mature a grudge like a fine wine, Mac has never ever been able to stay mad at Ivy. Not even in those early days when she was ‘useless’ and they barely knew each other. Mac melts at those big brown eyes, even if he tries to keep the frowns on the surface, all the anger goes in an instant. It’s rare for her to get angry at him, but if the hurt is real then she can hang onto it until he’s shown that he’s earned back her trust. It took him a while to win her back after coming back from the Capital Wasteland having not sent word at all since he left.

19. Who clings to the other for comfort when they’re sad or scared?

Ivy would be the first to cling to Mac when she’s scared, in fact she was, after very early close call. That experience rather reinforced Mac as a safe place for her, bearing in mind she’s known him from just a week after escaping the vault, he’s definitely been a grounding presence for her. When something is wrong, the first place she will seek comfort is in his arms, even from long before they were together. Mac doesn’t break down until they’ve known each other for a lot longer, but he feels safe enough by then being that vulnerable with Ivy – it’s difficult because he has always had a habit of putting himself in a protector role in so many of his relationship with people that allowing himself to be seen as scared or even sad is difficult for him. But once those floodgates are open, nothing would stop him from seeking comfort from her, even when things are awkward between them.

20. Who is more ‘physically passionate’? (hugs, kisses, or maybe more…)

When it comes to big public displays, it would probably be Mac (not in the early days though, he was definitely more private then) but he likes it known that they’re together – especially to that one dude from diamond city security who keeps hitting on her. Ivy is more for subtle displays in public; holding hands, cheek kisses etc. Although there was one incident…anyway. Privately they are equally likely to be all over each other.

#otp 20 questions meme #this turned out big!#mac x ivy #then i met you #maccready #robert joseph maccready #ivy kendrick #maccready x sole survivor #maccready x f!solesurvivor #sole survivor #my art #gorgeous screenshot by mayihavethisdanse

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ejzah · 4 years

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A/N: This chapter is a little filler-y, but it felt necessary to move things along. Hope you still enjoy.

***

The Agent and the Lawyer, Part 7

Deeks settled in the low wicker seat across from Hetty, taking in the antiques and pictures that decorated her space. It was an odd, and seemingly random collection of things, but somehow it fit.

Hetty poured two cups of tea, carefully sliding one towards Deeks. She took a sip of her own, scrutinizing him over the top of her teacup. He felt the bizarre urge to fix his hair and check his shirt for wrinkles even though he’d stopped off in the bathroom to straighten up after sparring with Kensi.

“Are you happy with your current position, Mr. Deeks?” she asked abruptly.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean by that, Miss Lange,” he responded after a minute, trying to figure out what she was leading up to.

“Most people call me Hetty,” she corrected with a slight smirk. “And I’m asking if you find providing legal representation to the rich and somewhat famous rewarding.”

“I don’t know if rewarding is the right term, but I certainly appreciate making enough to live very comfortably and provide services to people who can’t afford to hire a lawyer.” He knew it was a non-answer, but it was the best she was getting for the moment.

“Ah yes, your pro bono work. I was very interested in that part of your file.” Deeks straightened, suddenly on full alert.

“Why do you have a file on me?” he asked, instantly on alert and reassessing the woman in front of him.

“Because I’m interested in you,” Hetty said as though it made perfect sense.

“With all due respect, you had no business wading through my life, just to curb your curiosity.”

“I assure you, it has nothing to do with idle curiosity, Mr. Deeks. I always run background checks on people I wish to employ.” Her tone was just as calm as before, but held a faint note of admonishment. Deeks blinked at her a couple times.

“Wait, you’re offering me a job?” he asked and Hetty nodded. “Why? I have no experience with law enforcement. I think my first and last undercover gig the other day proved that.”

“I thought you did remarkably well,” Hetty disagreed. “You exhibited many skills that I admire and in expect in an agent.”

“I have no desire to become an agent,” Deeks told her firmly, surprised when she smiled and tapped his hand. She reached into her desk drawer, pulling out an application.

“Good. Because I’m not looking for a new agent at this moment. Instead, I’m offering you a position as our legal consultant.” Hetty set the application in front of him. “All you need to do is sign your name at the bottom.”

Deeks flipped through the papers in semi-disbelief. She had filled it out, with a level of accuracy than left him feeling vaguely disconcerted and violated.

He set the papers back down, shaking his head.

“Hetty, I’m a founding partner at my law firm. There’s no way I could be here every day. Even if I wanted to.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t need to come in every day,” Hetty reassured him. “I would simply ask you to be present during cases where your legal expertise is required.”

“Why me?” Deeks asked, narrowing his eyes. There was something sketchy going on, but he couldn’t figure out just what. “I bet there are a hundred lawyers who are better qualified for this position.”

Hetty pursed her lips, regarding him for a moment.

“You have skills Mr. Deeks. You are highly intelligent, quick on your feet, and your attention to detail is bar none from what I’ve seen and heard.”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re trying to flatter me?” Deeks asked, keeping his voice light. Hetty smirked again and nodded.

“Perhaps I am, but I would very much like to have you join this team,” she admitted, then pushed the application in his direction. “What are your thoughts?”

“I think it’s insane,” he said honestly.

“Well, be that as it may, I would like you to seriously consider my offer.” Deeks huffed out an incredulous laugh and ruffled his bangs.

“Ok, I will consider it, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.” He checked his watch, muttering under his breath. “I really need to get too court now. Whatever magic you used on Dansit isn’t going to last all day.”

“Of course. I hope to speak with you again soon, Mr. Deeks,” she said, picking her cup up again and peering at him over the top.

***

“What did Hetty want?” Kensi asked, catching Deeks by the arm as soon as he stepped down from Hetty’s office and dragging him into the hallway.

“She offered me a job,” Deeks told her as the walked farther into the tunnel and apparently away from prying ear. He was still trying to wrap his mind around the last 15 minutes.

“She what?”

“She wants me to act as a legal consultant for your team.” Kensi stopped walking, leading Deeks into a small alcove and shook her head.

“But why?” she said, then hastily added, “No offense, but we already have lawyers we can consult when necessary.”

“I was just as surprised as you are,” Deeks admitted.

“Well, are you going to accept?” He shook his head, having no problem sharing his decision with Kensi.

“Probably not. I mean last week was fun and everything, but near death experiences really aren’t my thing.” He could have sworn there was a brief moment of disappointment on Kensi face, but then it was gone and she was smirking at him.

“Yeah, it’s probably for the best,” she agreed. “I mean, that hair alone is a liability.” Deeks laughed and she looked inordinately pleased with herself.

“Touché,” he said. He realized that once again they had drifted closer to each other. Kensi seemed to notice too and hastily stepped back, brushing her hair behind her ear.

“I’ll walk you out.” They took their time walking to the door, lingering just outside for longer than necessary. Eventually Kensi shrugged and said, “Who knows, maybe we’ll run into each other again sometime. It was nice meeting you, Deeks.”

She started to turn away and caught at her hand, pulling her back around. It was a risky move, but Kensi didn’t resist. She actually looked a little relieved.

“Have dinner with me tonight,” he said, holding his breath. Kensi’s eyes widened slightly and then she tilted her head, eyeing him speculatively.

“Like a date?” she asked, smirking at him again.

“No, not a date date. Just dinner between friends. I mean, unless you want it to be a date.” He realized he was rambling and wondered how Kensi Blye managed to turn him into a bumbling idiot so easily.

“Oh, so we’re friends now?”

“Something like that.” She continued to stare at him, sending a shiver up his spine as her gaze lingered on him.

“I suppose dinner with you doesn’t sound too awful,” she decided.

“Is that a yes?”

“I’ll call you when I get off,” Kensi told him, reaching for the door. “Oh, and I like Mexican,” she threw over her shoulder.

Deeks grinned, feeling happier than he had in a very long time. As he walked to his car, he pulled out his phone to call his favorite Mexican restaurant.

***

Kensi closed the door behind her and sagged against it. She’d just agreed to have dinner with Marty Deeks. She closed her eyes and pulled in a deep breath, reminding herself that it most definitely was not a date. As long as she kept telling herself that, everything would be alright.

“Kensi, you ok?” Callen asked and her eyes snapped open. She straightened up hastily, forcing a chuckle.

“Oh, yeah, you know I was just showing Deeks out,” she explained, making a vague gesture. Luckily, Callen didn’t question her explanation. He seemed preoccupied.

“Hetty offered him a job,” he said, frowning at the door. He didn’t seem pleased and Kensi tried to appear surprised by the information. Deeks hadn’t asked her to keep it a secret, but somehow she didn’t think delving into their conversation would be a good idea.

“What did he say?”

“Hetty, said he hadn’t made a decision yet.” He sighed and shook his head. “She says he would be our legal consultant, but I have a feeling she has something else planned for him.”

Kensi certainly didn’t like the sound of that, thinking of Nate Getz, the psychologist who used to be a part of their team. That is until Hetty transferred him with little warning several months ago. He’d been gone before anyone could ask questions and no one knew exactly where he was or what Hetty had him doing.

“Well, I doubt Deeks would want to work here,” she commented without thinking and Callen frowned again. “I mean, why would he want to? He makes millions a year, who would give that up?”

“Well, let’s hope you’re right,” he said grimly. “The last thing we need is to play babysitters.”

#ncis la fanfiction #marty deeks #kensi blye #g callen #hetty lange #the agent and the lawyer #part 7 #au #ejzah fanfiction

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daprec · 3 years

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Unspoken and Spoken Mat Rules At Combat Room Miramar #jiujitsufirst

Some of these were borrowed from BJJEE and Gentlemen Grappler, some were modified by me, and others are my own rules or rules that have been passed down and seen as tradition

1. Shake the hands of the black belts when you enter and when you leave the mat. Additionally, after greeting the blackbelt please greet your teammates with the JJ handshake and smile 🙂

2. If a higher belt invites you to roll, you roll. They will invite you politely, if you say no they might not ask you again (except on special situations such as injuries, necessary rest for competition and others).

3. If a black belt is rolling near you, stop and move. If you are a black belt and you have a stable position and the lower belts around you are scrambling or with a submission locked in, don’t be a tyrant, be humble, you move.

4. Be stoic. If you get a submission, don’t celebrate, don’t show any joy. If you are submitted, don’t show frustration, shake hands and restart.

5. If the pain is tolerable don’t stop. Don’t talk to your partner about it, don’t expect them to say they are sorry, most of the times they didn’t even realized what happened. Keep it to yourself.

6. No excuses, a tap is a tap, crank or no crank. Don’t waste time massaging your ego explaining why you tapped, focus on what you should had done instead.

7. During the explanation of a position be attentive, listen carefully. Don’t expect the full attention of your professor if you didn’t give him any.

8. Payback rule, whatever you do, it will be done to you. If you are rough we will be rough on you. If you dedicate yourself to Jiu-Jitsu we will dedicate ourselves to you.

9. Do not cheer for teammates while you watch them roll. If you are on the side watching a roll, please keep your outbursts of joy that your teammate got a sub on your other teammate. It’s not fair and doesn’t help the person who got sub’d at all.

10. No coaching from the sidelines unless you’re a purple belt or above. If you ARE purple and above, please do not coach if the head coach, instructor or Professor is coaching. Too many people shouting instructions at 1 practitioner doesn’t help anyone and it’s the Professors job to coach his/her students. If Professor isn’t there (in a tournament scenario), then the high belt coaches

11. Whitebelts are not allowed to make rules or teach. You’re a whitebelt and with all due respect, you don’t know much at this stage. Unless you’re a D1 All American Wrestler or Judo World Champion who are joining up in BJJ, you are not allowed to teach newcomers or other whitebelts, and you most certainly are not allowed to make rules on the mats.

12. Always make a bow before stepping onto the mats. This is a quick and nice way to check your mind and body onto the tatame, and focus on training, leaving your job and real world problems behind.

13. No barefeet off of the mats ESPECIALLY WHEN GOING TO THE TOILETS. If I need to explain why then you owe me 3000 pushups.

14. In general lower belts are not allowed to ask higher belts to roll. There are always exceptions but this rule must always be adhered to unless an arrangement or conversation has been had by the individual high belt. This also goes for male whitebelts asking other women whitebelts to roll. At this stage the technique isn’t there yet and we want to mitigate unintentional injury as much as possible.

15. NEVER ask when you’re going to be promoted, or when another student is going to be promoted. Instructors have their reasons why/when/if to promote a student and their judgement must be respected at all times, regardless if you understand or disagree with the decision. This is simply how it’s always been.

16. Training at other gyms. One-off training is fine if you want to visit another gym to get a different experience or have friends there. But regular training at other gyms isn’t cool for a variety of reasons. The 1st being your grading process, and the 2nd being the fact that coaches invest a lot of time and effort into your training. Training at HQ or other Combat Rooms is strongly encouraged, but you do not earn credit at CR Miramar from training at other CRs.

17. If late to class – please wait to be waved onto the mats by your Professor. This is so that he/she knows you’re on the mats to help keep track of attendance and safety. Additionally without question 20 pushups is owed as penalty for being late.

18. Forgetting your belt. Whitebelts owe 20 pushups, Bluebelts owe 40 pushups, Purplebelts owe 40 pushups + 40 burpees. Brown and Blackbelts never forget their belts because punishment works.

19. Start and finish class with a bow. As previously mentioned this is more of a handshake rather than any sort of reverence. Its more to pay respect to each other: the instructor to you, and you to the instructor.

20. Line up according to rank. (yes even in the picture) The people who have put in more mat time have not only earned this right, but also have more knowledge than the lower belts. This is attributed to the “Martial” part of “Martial (Military) Arts (Subjective Craft)”

21. Blackbelts are called “Professor or Sensei”. If your gym has purple/brown belts who are official gym instructors named by the head instructor, they are called “Coach”

22. Always have a clean gi or no-gi uniforms. “No one wants to essmell you esstink” – Rey Diogo

23. Please trim your finger and toe nails. We don’t know how to fight wolverines yet

24. Be a good training partner and/or Uke. When practicing technique with a partner, or if Professor calls upon you to demonstrate a technique, please don’t act like this is a live sparring event. Practice is practice, rolling is rolling, demonstration is DEMONSTRATION. If you resist or start defending, Professor will not call on you again to help.

25. Train in a controlled and methodical manner. We are not here to injure our teammates or “break our toys” as I like to say. Beginners don’t have the technique yet to implement this philosophy at first, so upper belts please don’t get frustrated. Help them along the way, as upper belts did for you when you were a beginner. Beginners, no one is going to kill you, so try to remain calm during a roll and learn something.

26. Please stick to the IBJJF ruleset of submissions unless you have verbally agreed with your training partner otherwise.

This means:

No neck cranks, cervical locks or heel hooks

No slamming

No footlocks or kneebars for white belts (straight ankle locks are IBJJF approved for all belts)

No fish hooking, eye gouging or grabbing fingers individually

Avoid chokes along the jaw, chin, teeth or face

ALWAYS respect the tap, and allow partners time to tap

27. Go slow when applying a submission. Most joint locks can cause severe damage, especially the arm and shoulder locks. I know it’s exciting, but please go slow enough to give your partners a second to tap or don’t apply the submission 150%

28. Tap early and a lot. Everyone taps – this is part of the game. Think of it as a game of “gotcha” rather than a game of wining or losing. Most of my taps usually end with a giggle and a “that was awesome well done”. This is how we learn. This is the realtime feedback that illustrates a mistake on our part that needs addressing. Work on your weaknesses.

29. Please invest in a mouthguard. Accidents do happen, and as adult humans our teeth do not grow back. Pay the money on a good one, it’s worth it. This is not mandatory, but strongly advised.

30. MINIMUM attendance for promotion consideration is 3 days a week. I need to see you on the mats at least 3 days a week consistently for 6 months for you to be considered for a stripe or promotion. This does NOT include going to HQ or other gyms or open mat (free rolling days). You need to be on the mats in Miramar to qualify for a promotion. If you can tap and sweep everyone in the gym but are only showing up 1 day a week then you most likely won’t get promoted.

31. Always come to class with a positive and open mindset

32. During technique practice please do NOT talk the entire time. Not only is this disrespectful to your Professor, you are wasting your training partners time as well as your own time. Technique practice time is the single most important part of class and is the only time I expect full focus from all of my students. We only get 3 hours a week to train, and only 1/2 that time to practice technique to please avoid socializing and practice the technique.

33. Do not attend class if you are sick. Please stay home until you are completely well and ready to train. Do not come to class to watch if you still have symptoms

34. Do not train injured. If you are injured please come to class to watch, but as difficult as it may be, please don’t train. Injuries can linger for YEARS if you do not take the time to heal properly. You’ve already dedicated yourself to JJ, it’s not going anywhere. Rest up, heal up and come back stronger!

35. Please remove all jewelery, earrings, bracelets before class

36. If you are on the side watching people roll, it is your job to help prevent collisions happening on the mats. Step inbetween 2 groups of people rolling and do your best to either protect their heads or if they get too close let them know they should move. The higher belts have the mat priority, so lower belts move for them.

37. High belts are responsible for the mats after class and locking up. If I’m not around to mop the mats, high belts are responsible. It’s really EVERYONES job. Make sure the mats are mopped and stacked before leaving the gym. Don’t wait for someone else to do it, please help. Also if there is no one else in the gym, the high belt (bluebelt and up) is responsible to lock up.

38. NO SHOES ON THE MAT EVER. I shouldn’t even have to type this, but sadly I do.

39. *AMENDED* Leave drama off of the mat AND out of the group chat please. If it’s mat drama please deal with it off of the mats in a kind and respectful way. If it’s chat drama please deal with it off the chat in person in a kind and respectful way.

Please keep in mind I work 50-60hr weeks PLUS teach BJJ – 2 jobs. I would appreciate it if people could figure it out among themselves. Keep in mind I’m only qualified to give you Jiu Jitsu and Motion Capture Animation advice 😊

If you find yourself consistently at the center of issues at the gym or the chat, perhaps step away for a bit and think about what the common denominator is and how you can improve/fix things and come back with a different mind set. If things can’t be settled then speak to me about a different solution, but please try the above avenues prior to reaching out to me.

All of that said I’m always here for my students and can/will help however possible, but if it’s things I don’t need to be involved in, please help me and be #mindful in that regard.🙏

40. Guys – don’t hit on the ladies. Our gym has a unique and large female presence and I want to keep it that way. We haven’t had a problem yet that I know of and it’s going to stay that way.

41. Saying “Oss” is an affirmation. This is a very traditional method of either saying “you understand”, or “I give you permission to practice on me and I on you” or just a sign of gratitude and respect. Oss is cool

42. What happens on the mats stays on the mats. I know we all get excited and our ego’s pumped when we sweep or tap out someone. But lets keep that to ourselves – we don’t need to gloat off the mats about sweeping a 1 stripe whitebelt, or how we heelhooked a 12 year old, or how we passed a blackbelts guard (who 99.99% let you anyway). We especially find it tacky and uncool posting these kinds of things on social media so keep it in the gym.

43. Beginners, yes the higher belt let you have it, unless they said you legitimately “got them”, so please hold off on launching the blimp and having a parade until you have confirmation. Its the higher belts job to help guide you along this path, and at some point you will stop being given chances.

***UPDATE 01***

44. Whatever special arrangements I’ve made with an individual apply to that individual ONLY. Sometimes there are things in life that are out of our control, and we cannot manage to abide by some of these rules. If a student has spoken directly to me about some life event or change and we need to come up with a plan specific to them, that does NOT mean it applies to everyone. Every student is responsible to speak to me about their situations.

***UPDATE 02***

45. Visiting guests from another gyms. Of course always be courteous and welcoming, but the general unspoken rule is to smoke them when rolling – usually when matched to your belt level 😃. This is a worldwide unspoken standard within BJJ gyms. The thinking is when they leave our gym and go back to their home gym, they’ll know that we practice good Jiu Jitsu and train hard. This helps keep quality and standards up within the BJJ community and increases the drive at other clubs to improve. It’s kind of a weird quality control, but hey we’re learning how to fight so it isn’t always pretty. There are ALWAYS exceptions to the rules, but this is the general “Old School” way of doing things, that as far as I know is still an unspoken standard.

46. Visiting other schools. Be respectful and courteous – mind your manners at all times. Give them a call or an email before showing up to ask if it’s OK to jump into a class. Greet the Black Belt or head coach 1st. Treat the tatami how you would treat your own school regardless if they do not practice the same etiquette as your home gym. Train hard, be technical, – don’t be a meat head.

“It’s better to know your manners and not need them instead of needing your manners and not knowing them.” – Miyamoto Musashi I think 😛

***UPDATE 03***

47. Gi and no-gi uniform. Being that we’re still in a Covid pandemic, we still must continue practicing safe hygene. This means wearing leggings and rash guards under your gi. This means wearing leggings, shorts and long sleeve rash guards for no-gi. We’ll continue this practice when we eventually are a post-Covid world.

***UPDATE 04***

48. ZERO TOLERANCE of sexual harassment. Ladies if anything of the such happens at our club, however unlikely, please bring it to my attention IMMEDIATELY. I have a 1 strike and you’re out policy and will not condone this kind of behavior from any of my students.

Other thoughts

You’re going to want to quit. Don’t worry we have all felt that throughout this journey. BJJ is hard. Some say the hardest thing they’ve ever done. The learning never ends – the same goes with life and anything else you want to master. And just as in life, running from your problems never solves anything so call timeout, recharge, and come back!

Ask yourself what kind of student do you want to be? One that’s made of rubber? Bouncing back and forth to class, disappearing for months, reappearing for months again and again? One that’s made of wood? After a couple breaks or if things get too hard they quit, never to return? Or one that’s made of steel? A student who regardless of the injuries, hits to the ego, damage to the body, never bends or breaks and always shows up ready to train.

Rubber, Wood or Steel – which are you?

For most all practicioners, the mats are a sacred space. We train because not only do we love the art, but our time on the mats is a cathertic experience. We can forget our daily lives, our jobs, families, friends, pets etc and focus 100% on ourselves, our minds and our bodies while learning something usefull and cool.

Lets not forget what this means to everyone and always give and pay the tatame and class the reverence it deserves. Oss!

*Over time this rule set can and will be amended*

Unspoken and Spoken Mat Rules At Combat Room Miramar #jiujitsufirst was originally published on davepreciado

#mindful

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troped-fanfic-challenge · 4 years

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ROUND ONE

It’s time to VOTE!!

Hey guys! It’s officially time to vote in Round 1 of Chopped Madness! The structure is simple! The fifteen (15) fics we received this round have been paired up head-to-head. Your job is to go through the eight pairings and select which author of the two fics you think deserves to move on to Round 2! The first poll, you will be asked to rank all 15 fics, the way you did in the Qualifying Round. This will help us to break any ties, and we will use this ranking to reorder the authors for the Bunker Brackets for Round 2.

At the end of the voting period, we will announce the EIGHT (8) authors who have been Chopped!! If you are not Chopped, that means you will be moving on to the next round, so keep an eye out for that post to be sure! If you aren’t sure you can always send us a message to check!

You can vote here at the updated survey!

Updated Voting Link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QM5B5TP

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Unfortunately, one of our authors was unable to write. We have included a “BYE” in the position where their fic would be in the head to head, and informed their bracket partner. The author has been “Chopped”, and their Qualifying Round fic will be revealed in our Chopping Block post after the voting has ended.

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The 15 fics that we receieved for this round can be found below, or on AO3 here! Each fic follows the Theme [Angst], includes the Tropes [Strangers to Lovers] and [Roadtrip], and has a central Character focus on [Harper McIntyre]! When you vote, please be sure to take into consideration the USE of all these elements, because, as with all other Chopped events, the purpose is to select the authors who best utilize the requirements!

into a cloven pine (Rated T) [Harper/Maya]

Summary: Maya starts sitting with her at meals, shrugging aside the judgmental looks of delinquents and Mountain Men alike. When Harper tries to delicately suggest that she sit somewhere else for her own good, Maya levels her with an icy glare and threatens to kick her under the table.

For some reason, that makes Harper giggle and she figures that someone who makes her giggle must be alright to sit with.

So, she ignores Miller’s warning head shakes and Fox’s teary-eyed frowns and she plays footsie with Maya Vie. Life is weird.

She might as well just go with it.

I Need You (Like I Need a Gaping Head Wound) (Rated T) [Harper/Echo] *Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death*

Summary: “And that was the new track from Lou Bega: ‘Mambo No. 5' off his new album ‘A Little Bit of Mambo'. Stay tuned for Backstreet, Britney Spears, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers comin’ at’cha in the next hour.”

Harper shuts off the radio and leans back in the driver’s seat, taking her hands off the wheel and rubbing her temples. Traffic is worse than normal today, meaning she’s gonna be late. She’s already 45 minutes late getting back from lunch, meaning that Roan will probably call her into his office. That’s the last thing she needs today.

Harper nearly jumps out of her skin when the passenger door opens and a tall, brunette woman vaults into the car.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU D--”

“Drive,” the woman says, voice barely above a whisper.

venus, planet of love was destroyed by global warming (Rated G) [Harper/Monty]

Summary: In a world tainted by darkness, Harper meets Monty.

Take back my life (Prove I’m alright) (Rated T) [Harper/Monty]

Summary: Harper and Monty have been married for ten years and she is beginning to notice the cracks in their marriage. Will a road trip for a job interview be able to save their marriage?

Like dust behind the wagon (Rated T) [Harper/Monre] *Major Character Death*

Summary: Harper and her family were in search of a better life in Oregon when tragedy struck. She didn't think she would ever recover, and then she met Monroe, a lone traveler looking for a ride to Fort Bridger.

you can bloom again (Rated T) [Harper/Clarke]

Summary: Harper's always been a survivor.

She's survived an orphaned childhood, kidnapping, and torture. When a wave of fire stretches across the sky, she knows that she'll survive this, too - but when she meets a girl with a smile brighter than the sun, Harper wonders if surviving alone is what she really wants.

The Hardest Thing (Rated T) [Harper/Emori]

Summary: After shooting Baylis and escaping to the woods, Emori was utterly alone. She travelled through the lands of the Coalition, stealing from anyone and everyone. All of that changed when she met the last sky girl after the Mountain Men wiped out the rest of her people.

Harper had a map to a peaceful village across the sea, and Emori had nothing to lose.

Release (Rated T) [Harper/Murphy]

Summary: Her whole body is still tense, but this long habit of distrust has been formed in her, is not native to her, and his lazy, laconic air tempts her to put herself at ease. And she is curious. Behind them, the Detention Center is teeming, yet the desolation of the dim light and barren highway makes Harper feel as if they were the only two on the wide Earth.

Upon being released from the Arkadia Juvenile Detention Center, Harper takes a road trip to California with an old friend, his boyfriend, and another recently released delinquent.

What the Hell is a Pulmonary Embolism? (Rated T) [Harper & Clarke/Murphy]

Summary: Harper McIntyre wasn’t trained for this.

She was just a tour guide, how was she supposed to deal with the bus crashing in the middle of nowhere?

something more than momentary (Rated T) [Harper/Murphy]

Summary: The first rule of working for the Princess Protection Program was, well, keep your princess safe no matter the cost.

The second rule was don't get attached. Agent Murphy had followed that rule to the letter for years and never had an issue.

But now he's stuck in a car for the foreseeable future with a princess and a gunshot wound, and everything he's ever believed in just might be changing.

and the road gets tough (Rated M) [Harper/Monty]

Summary: It’s the end of the world and Harper McIntyre is done running. She’s done fighting against a life that relentlessly keeps pushing her down. But she has her son to worry about and she desperately wants him to have a new life and to experience it all. When they hit the road, she’s helped by a kind stranger who changes the course of things. Monty Green represents a life she wished she had been able to have, but it might still be too late.

everyone’s a different flower (Rated T) [Harper/Monty]

Summary: Harper McIntyre's life on Earth has been a simple one, and she's always been happy with that. But with a single diagnosis, her simple life is completely upended.

Her best friends think that an intergalactic trip across the universe is just what she needs to get her mind off of things. Raven thinks the change in scenery will do Harper some good. Clarke thinks the girl time will help.

(Harper thinks the cute space-botanist she meets might just do the trick.)

I wanna shoot the whole day down (Rated T) [Harper/Monty] *Major Character Death*

Summary: Tell me why I don't like Mondays...

Or Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, or any day since you left us.

Never Gonna Give You Up (Rated T) [Harper/Raven]

Summary: Unknown: Hey, Monty guilted me into a road trip with those damned puppy dog eyes and seeing as neither of you can be in the same car, I am your road trip Uber. Name's Raven.

Harper: Rookie mistake, you never look Monty in the eyes. That's how you lose.

A road trip, huh?

Macushla (Rated T) [Harper/Monty]

Summary: Harper Noelle Margaret McIntyre, Countess of Rothes, must survive the unthinkable, when the unsinkable ship hits an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic

// aka the Titanic AU that isn't Jack and Rose

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#chopped madness #chopped madness: round 1 #round 1: angst

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clansayeed · 4 years

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Bound by Destiny ― Chapter 15: The Storm

PAIRING: Kamilah Sayeed x MC (Nadya Al Jamil) RATING: Mature

⥼ MASTERLIST ⥽

⥼ Bound by Destiny ⥽

Nadya Al Jamil (MC) has been struggling from the day she moved to Manhattan, but her new job as assistant to the mysterious CEO of Raines Corp was supposed to turn her luck around. Until she finds herself caught in the middle of a war involving the Council of Vampires who secretly run the city. An evil from the birth of Vampire-kind stirs beneath, feeding on the conflict, and finds Nadya bound to a destiny she never asked for.

Bound by Destiny and the rest of the Oblivion Bound series is an ongoing dramatic retelling project of the Bloodbound series and spin-off, Nightbound. Find out more [HERE].

*Let me know if you would like to be added to the Destiny tag list!

⥼ Chapter Summary ⥽

Valdas and Isseya come to collect Nadya as a witness for Adrian’s trial. Tired of things being out of her control, she takes matters into her own hands with Kamilah.

WARNING: this chapter contains explicit sexual content

[READ IT ON AO3]

In everyone else’s defense she is just as surprised as they are by her howling laughter.

Not really the reaction one would be expected to have after getting another heaping pile of bad news on top of the garbage landfill that’s become her life recently. But the brain works in mysterious ways.

Lily, the only one even remotely qualified to try and dissect the strange being Nadya’s found herself becoming, pulls her close with a glare at the intruders. She looks rapidly between Valdas and Isseya — can’t seem to figure out which one she wants to direct her hatred at more.

“Yeah well since that’s not happening I guess you can take your leave. Buh-bye now.”

They don’t move. Literally — from here it looks like they aren’t even breathing. It makes Nadya’s skin crawl; just another weird emotion in the unstable bowl of soup inside her.

Valdas removes his sunglasses — sunglasses, underground, when he can’t even go into the sunlight; the mark of the douchebag — and cocks them in the dip of his silken dress shirt.

“This isn’t a voluntary matter. Even if it were I’m rather surprised you wouldn’t want to leap to Raines’ aid.”

His flippant tone helps Nadya calm her laughter enough to compose herself.

“Adrian’s — I mean that means he’s alive. That does mean he’s alive, right?” His curt nod makes her feel weak in the knees. “And Kamilah…?”

“If you keep standing here fretting there are no guarantees. On both the lives of your friends and your own.” Isseya yawns as she says it; like this entire ordeal bores her.

To Nadya’s surprise it’s Jax who steps around — places himself between her and the other vampires.

He reaches for the sword at his back; lets it rest on the hilt. “Is that a threat?”

The couple laugh in sync. Isseya rolls her eyes. “When we threaten you, pet —”

And witnessing such speed again makes Nadya sweat — reminds her of Isseya’s nails digging into her neck. Makes her practically crush herself against the safety of Lily’s side.

Valdas holds Jax several inches off the ground. Just enough for his boots to scrape by with the promise and denial of stability. He struggles to pry the man’s hand from his throat. Lashes out with fangs and red eyes that show no sign of deterring Valdas in the slightest.

“— you’ll know it.” He finishes his partner’s sentence. Opens his hold like one might a machine for Jax to fall and walks at a human pace back so Isseya can wrap herself around his arm.

Jax rubs his throat and makes a real move for his katana. Behind him Maricruz looks ready to jump one — or both — of them from behind.

Isseya rolls her eyes.

“Are you all really so foolish? Or is it that you hate your grimy lives down here so much that you’d use us as a way to set you free of it?”

Maricruz actually growls. “¡No mames! Shut up if you know what’s good for you.”

But before the Clanless can make a move Nadya rushes out with her arms extended.

“Don’t! Jax… don’t. You don’t know who they are.”

He scoffs. “I don’t need to. I know their type.”

“No, you don’t,” and she lowers her voice, “they’ll kill you. Just stop.” But before any more quips can spark the blaze she gives a glare to the Trinity. “Insulting my friends is probably not the best way to get me to go with you. I want to help Adrian — but they’re not wrong either. So talk.”

They look at one another without a word. Maybe two thousand years with someone erases the boundaries of language — or maybe they’re actually telepathic. The second thought feels intrusive and upsetting so Nadya pushes it aside with all her might.

“We will be happy to explain on the way.” Valdas says finally. “Is that enough of a compromise?”

Not even close, Nadya thinks, but if her stubbornness is what makes the difference between Adrian living and dying she’ll never forgive herself for sticking to her scruples.

Then Lily’s at her arm and interlaces their fingers. “No way she’s going with you creeps alone. I’m coming with.”

“Hell no.”

Mari appears at her side in a blur with a concerned frown. She cups her girlfriend’s cheek and Lily leans into it with a tiny smile.

“She’s my best friend. I’ll be fine.”

“Friend or not, mi amor, walking into a Council trial is suicide for the likes of us.”

Lily falters slightly — as if the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. “Oh.”

Jax agrees. “As it is I’m still deciding if we’re going to let you leave here at all.” Did he not just almost die for saying that stuff? Nadya doesn’t even try anymore. “The Council can’t know where we are. Not after everything we’ve done to make this place safe.”

“I don’t know which is more amusing,” croons Isseya, “that you think you could stop us or that you think we care about your menial cluster of vagabonds. You swarm like insects hiding in plain sight and call yourselves hidden.”

Her scorn dies with Valdas’ stare. “What my beloved means is that your existence; your little hidey-hole, is inconsequential to us. We are here on behalf of the Council — not as part of it.”

“Then promise not to tell the Council the location of the Shadow Den,” demands Nadya, “it’s that simple.”

Because she knows Lily and her humor she’s glad that Valdas answers, gaze locked with Jax’s, before she has the chance to make a joke about a measuring contest.

“Very well. If we’re through wasting time, then, ladies?”

The Trinity and their luxury look more suited to a runway in Paris than the Spartan lives of those in the Shadow Den. It’s no wonder every conversation stops and any witnesses stare openly while their leader and his deputy, along with the strange human girl, head towards the exit closest to the city center.

Maricruz steals Lily for one more goodbye — not a last one, just one more — with an embrace that could break bones and a kiss filled with so much longing that even Valdas looks away after several seconds.

All Nadya can think is why she didn’t do that to Kamilah when she thought it might really be the last, and not just one more.

Jax rests his hand on Nadya’s shoulder; makes her flinch briefly and actually seems remorseful over it.

“Lily knows how to contact us. The second anything seems fishy you run like hell, got it?”

“I think I know how to deal with vampires by now. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

“As I seem to recall you were being locked in a dungeon at your first rodeo.”

She huffs.

“Well I’ve learned a lot since then.”

A strange look comes over him; concern, maybe? She’s not used to it being directed her way so it throws her off her game.

“I hope so,” he replies, “but from everything I’ve seen so far…”

“Watch how you finish that.”

“Stop — please just listen, will you? Any vampire you meet is going to be stronger, smarter, faster than you. That’s just the way it works. But you can’t let that stay your hand and keep you from fighting. You have to try — even if the chances are slim to none. ‘Slim’ is better than ‘impossible’ in my book.”

She thinks back to his readiness to threaten Valdas — not just once but twice and that following nearly having his head ripped off his neck. It sucks to admit but he kinda-sorta has a point.

There’s an uncomfortable feeling inside her chest; makes Nadya frown down at her shoes before she can muster up the words.

“I’m not strong enough. You said it yourself — I’m just a human.”

“Hey, humans have been a thorn in our sides since the dawn of time, or civilization, or whatever.” He squeezes her again and she can feel it; the power lurking beneath his skin — and the restraint he shows with it, too. “Don’t underestimate yourself.”

“It’s more than that, Jax. It’s —”

“Stop.”

He interrupts her curtly. Makes her have to look him in the eyes before carrying on. “When I asked Espinoza how all that went down with Lily you know what she told me? She said that the same human who let herself be captured and rescued looked a vampire right in the eyes — looked Council member Adrian Raines right in the eyes — and told him that she wasn’t taking no for an answer. I don’t see that human right now — but I saw her back at the train station. And she’s probably shown up other times too — whenever her friends have needed her.

“We all need something to fight for. For me it’s everyone in the Shadow Den; everyone forced into a life on the run with no say in their lives. For you, Nadya, it seems like it’s your friends. So if thinking about your friends gives you the balls to tell the Council to ‘fuck off’ then start putting together a photo album or something, you know? Whatever it takes.”

Whatever it takes. The tightness in her chest isn’t gone but it’s definitely easier to breathe. Was he actually being… nice to her? Telling her how she needed to find the strength to help her friend a Clan Leader?

She makes a mental note to buy a lotto ticket when they’re back on the surface.

“You were a motivational speaker before you were Turned,” she teases, “weren’t you?”

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I. I bet there’s a self-help book hidden in the back corner of every bookstore. What’s it called… ooh, I bet it’s something like —”

He stops her with a hand over her mouth but the mirth in his eyes is genuine. Jax may not find it nearly as funny but at least he’s not glaring at her any longer. And honestly his advice is comforting. Enough to help her find the strength to turn around and join the vampires by the service stairwell towards the subway above.

“Be safe.” Lily says to Jax and throws one last parting kiss at Mari.

The Trinity has had enough of their sentiments. Evidenced by the groan of the metal handle under Isseya’s grip. “Come. A car will be waiting for us.”

With Isseya at the lead and Valdas behind them the four begin the winding path up into the world.

Lily holds her hand the whole way — and she couldn’t ask for a better best friend.

The driver steps out onto the curb and opens their door. The rush of noise and light takes a second to get used to but it soothes Nadya like a long-lost home. Thunder rumbles up above, bounces off every building around them in a drumming tune.

She looks around the crowded sidewalk — turning this way and that to get her bearings — but quickly realizes she doesn’t have to and ducks her head to see where Valdas and Isseya remain seated.

“What’s going on? I thought you were taking us to Adrian’s trial.”

“The Council requires all those giving testimony to be in their personal hands at least twenty-four hours before proceeding,” Valdas states with boredom. Beside him Isseya picks up her vibrating phone from her lap and answers with a sultry purr.

“Impatience is an ugly thing, Priya. We’ve just finished dropping them off. You’ve saved me the blond one, haven’t you?”

Nadya recoils in disgust at Priya’s name. “That answers who you’re staying with, then.”

While his partner continues making demands on the phone Valdas gives a lazy salute to the pair of them.

“It’s been a pleasure, Miss Nadya. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow night.”

She doesn’t get the chance to respond — the driver slams the door practically in her face and when he peels away from the curb at least half a dozen taxi horns screech in protest to his blatant disrespect of the rules of the road.

That’s when the skies open up; slowly and then all at once. The first drop that tickles Nadya’s nose is soon joined by another, then another, and then the storm blankets New York in a sheet of water.

Lily breathes in the night and rain with a stretch and gusto. “God I missed this! And good riddance! I don’t know if I could have spent a whole day with them.” She looks around for the street intersections — tries to place where they are. “So… you know where we’re going, right? And is it like… safe for someone like me? Because I’m kinda hungry — if you know what I mean.”

“You know, I think I do.” There’s teasing behind her sarcasm. Nadya jerks her head to the glossy black doors of the skyscraper they were dropped in front of. “Let’s get inside.”

Lily cranes her neck up and up with awe. Nadya, though — she’s grown familiar with the view. It’s even better up top.

The same security guard lazes around at the same desk. Stops not-so-sneakily watching The Crown and the Flame on his phone as Nadya approaches.

“Haven’t seen you in some time, Miss Al Jamil.”

“Hi Doug.” She greets back and offers her best and most innocent smile. “Would you hate me if I said I left my key at the office?”

Doug gives a jovial, if exasperated, sigh. “I could never hate you, dear. I just wish you’d be honest with me and say you lost it again so we can change the code. You know how she values her privacy.” He looks over his glasses at Lily with a trained, if borderline retired, scrutiny. “Can’t say I’ve ever met you before little lady but judgin’ by that hair your name is Lily.”

“Uh — yeah…?” Lily gives Nadya a wary look that makes the guard chuckle.

“Miss Al Jamil’s told me all about you. Next time you gotta go through the proper channels though, you know that.”

Nadya nods. “I promise. It was… a sort of last-minute thing. She’ll be okay with it.”

“Welp, still gotta have you sign her in.” He taps a clipboard on the ledge in front of him and Nadya hastily writes in Lily’s name. “You gals planning on going out before dawn?”

“Yeah—no thanks.” Lily seems positively disgusted at the thought.

Nadya elbows her gently. “No, but thank you for checking.”

Doug types up Lily’s name on the computer and hits a button on the underside of his large obsidian desk. Behind him the glass doors click and begin to open automatically. He tips his hat off to them.

“Have a good evening Miss Al Jamil, and friend Lily!”

“You too, pal.”

“See you tomorrow Doug.”

Once they’re clear of the lobby, elevator button alight and calling one down, Lily gives Nadya a light shove.

“Dude!”

“What? And ow!”

“I was sort of making fun of you when I went on about your fancy life but… dude.”

“This isn’t me. This is the people I know.”

Lily takes in the luxury of the atrium around them with awe she doesn’t even try to contain. “Still… it’s a step up from a broken fire escape ladder and homophobic neighbors.”

They enter the elevator together and Lily’s whistle when she hits the ‘P’ for penthouse doesn’t go unheard.

Her eyes flick upwards to the building name in large gold block-letters on the far wall. She holds the gaze of ‘AHMANET FINANCIAL’ until the doors close them off.

“Yeah, I guess.”

Gerard has the door open before she can even give Lily the low-down on what to expect.

She greets him with a wide and genuine smile; it quickly falters when she sees him hastily dab at his eyes with his pocket hanky.

“What’s wrong, are you okay?” She hovers her hands over his arms, doesn’t know how to help but wants to, and then finds herself in a crushing hug. He smells of fresh baking with just a hint of mothballs. Like how someone’s grandpa is supposed to smell in an ideal world.

“Forgive my impropriety, Miss,” his voice wavers both with emotion and his age, “I promised I’d hold myself intact. But seeing you unharmed after everything that happened…”

Nadya squeezes him tight. Didn’t know how much she needed the comforting touch of another human being after all that’s happened until that moment.

“I’m okay, Gerard. And I’m glad you’re okay, too.”

She introduces Lily — the butler looks ready to reaffirm his ‘stiff upper lip’ mentality but Lily doesn’t give him the chance and greets him in a hug of her own. She’s told him enough about how much she missed her friend that he doesn’t particularly mind.

“I only expected Miss Nadya here — but let me get you something to warm your bones.” Gerard pauses and shakes his head; laughs at himself. “Silly me. Well — you know what I mean.”

But when he goes to lead them into the kitchen Nadya stops — looks around the penthouse with haste to try and find some small indication Kamilah’s been there.

Stupid butler keeps everything spotless, though. No, she doesn’t think he’s stupid. But a little mess never hurt anyone.

Then a weathered hand on her shoulder makes her jump a mile.

“Lady Kamilah’s gone up for a swim,” Gerard whispers in her ear, “lots on her mind — you know how she can be.”

Nadya nods; resigns herself to waiting for Kamilah… again.

“I’ll give her some time then…”

But he stops her from turning around. Fixes Nadya with a stern look.

“I rather think you should go to her instead.”

“But —”

“Don’t worry about Miss Lily. She’s in good hands. You and Lady Kamilah need one another right now, I should think. Could do you both some good.”

She’d never say it — but she needs you, say Gerard’s eyes. Nadya finds herself hugging him again before rushing out the back balcony door and into the rain.

When she was thirteen Nadya’s mother forced her to go to a two-week sleepaway camp in the mountains. It was something her mom had done as a young girl with her sister, and something her cousins had been doing since they were old enough to beg for the chance.

Nadya was never an outdoors-y person though, and dreaded every hour of her summer up until the time when she was watching her mother drive down the gravel road; leaving her behind.

She learned a lot of things at that camp — all of them useless in the long run but seemed so vital and important while there. And she only looked forward to one thing: the pool. Unfortunately that summer—the summer of her thirteenth year—Colorado had never seen so much rain.

“Why can’t we go in when it’s raining?” Asked every girl in the same whining preteen voice.

And the counselors would always reply with the same stern tone of an adult. “Because it isn’t about the rain, it’s about the lightning. That would be quite a shock in the end!” And the adults would laugh at their glorious joke and move on to something else entirely.

But every time it rained, even when there wasn’t a bolt of lightning in sight, Nadya would lean against the windowsill of the dining cabin and stare at the pool with a sigh of longing.

Though the rain tries to diminish the bright city lights it only makes everything look glassy. It clings to Nadya’s glasses and runs down in trails — she has to squint to see but can make her way up well enough.

The sight of Kamilah laying spread-eagled on the dark surface of the pool reminds her of that camp; the rules of the water driven home in her skull.

“Kamilah!”

The woman’s hair spreads in inky tendrils just under the surface of the water. Nadya stands soaked to the bone and shivering yet Kamilah’s eternal beauty is as still as it is naked.

Nadya’s voice cracks when she calls out again. “Kamilah!”

Through the rain she thinks she might catch the vampire’s eyes opening but doesn’t have a chance to call out again. Suddenly there’s a hand around her throat and she’s pinned to the stone wall near the stairs.

The corner of the brick is sharp and digs into her back and the press of Kamilah’s grasp against her neck is a hundred lifetimes of pressure keeping her from breathing. She forces her eyes up; wants to take into her memory the sight of Kamilah’s bare body but what use will it have if she’s not alive to remember it?

Kamilah’s eyes are dark and hazy. She looks both at Nadya and through her. No fangs in sight. Her hair clings soaked to her shoulders.

When she tries to say Kamilah’s name again nothing comes out. She doesn’t choke — just simply can’t find the word. What is a name compared to the creature of beauty in front of her? Instead her words surprise even her.

“I’m here. It’s okay.”

Like a golem brought to life without a purpose Kamilah stares vacant. Her hand falls back to her side; allows Nadya to take a large gulp of air and taste the salt of the rain on her tongue.

“I’m here,” she repeats; doesn’t know where or how or if to touch Kamilah in her fragile state but if she’s right, if Kamilah’s having her own response to being thrust into the void with nothing to cling to, then she’ll risk her life a hundred times over to stop her from falling.

Nadya delicately cups Kamilah’s cheeks. The rain looks like teardrops falling down her curved expression. Nadya knows better. “I’m here,” again, “I’m here… I’m here for you I swear. I’m not going anywhere ever again a-and I’m… I’m here Kamilah so—so please just… just know I’ve got you. I’ve got you — I’ve got you.”

The first time she kisses Kamilah it’s not like any of her dreams at all. Taking into account some of her more recent nightmares though… well it’s bittersweet.

It’s like kissing a statue — cradling the Venus de Milo in her hands and hoping she might have the magical affinity to turn the marble into flesh. She doesn’t stop — hopes she’s doing the right thing somewhere in the back of her mind.

Hopes—prays—that she’s right. That the rain is only acting as a curtain. That Kamilah might feel the sa—

The stone melts away and soft lips begin to kiss back. First with gentle touches. Trying to understand what’s happening, who they are — discovering something for the first time in thousands of years.

Like a waltz Kamilah steps back and Nadya moves with her — desperate to seek out her mouth, her taste. And to get away from the brick digging into her back.

Her hands rest chastely on the vampire’s bare hips. Electricity sparking in every touch and threatening to gather its own thundercloud over their heads.

This time when their eyes meet she knows Kamilah is looking at her. Not just that — but deep into her soul with that slight tick in her perfect brow and those plush lips turned down. Confusion, retaliation, denial beginning to bubble up to the surface.

Nadya doesn’t think she’d be able to survive Kamilah retreating. Her heart couldn’t take it.

“I’m here.” She whispers; a final plea. I’m here. See me. Have me. I’m yours.

Kamilah’s reply is almost lost in the howling wind.

“If you truly knew what you’re asking for…”

“Stop —” she pushes a rain-slicked palm across Kamilah’s head to move her hair out of her eyes, “— don’t. I’m here, that’s all. I’m here.”

There’s rueful regret in the way Kamilah’s expression softens — in the way her eyes roam over Nadya’s desperate face to try and latch onto one single speck of hesitation or regret and use it as a way to push them apart.

She doesn’t find any. So she leans forward and meets their lips. Marble on flesh, eternity on youth. Nadya doesn’t spare a thought to yielding.

The path back to the penthouse is a struggle not only because Nadya is clumsy even when she’s paying attention but also because sometimes movement requires pulling away — and neither of them can be fussed with a concept so awful — so impossible. Now that they’ve discovered what it feels like to kiss one another they have the same singular thought that means they have to catch up on every time they could have—should have, would have—done this before.

At this rate it might be more than Nadya’s oxygen-starved brain can handle. She’s okay with that.

Then her clothes go from sopping wet and a mild nuisance to utterly please-get-off-me and Kamilah, somehow developing a psychic tendency between the pool and the doorway, agrees. Tears her shirt quite literally off except for one lone short sleeve.

Well as long as it isn’t in the way.

The same strong grip finds her jeans and Nadya finds enough of herself to reach down and cover those hands with her own. “C-Carefu—hh,” she tries; can’t exactly manage to speak with the way Kamilah intends to suck her soul out through her mouth. But the point is made; because when her zipper catches on soaked-through denim Kamilah rips it hard enough for the clink of metal to sound off in the distance.

Nadya fumbles for purchase on anything when Kamilah’s cold hands dig into her bottoms. Find the scalding heat between her folds and drag the soft tips of her nails along Nadya’s clit. It’s too much unreleased tension at once for Nadya to even think about trying to keep her voice down but there Kamilah is ready to drink up every decibel like the best wine in the world.

The door jamb digs into her back; makes Nadya arch her spine as much as she can with a whine of complaint — until there’s no doorway under her hand, rather a pillow instead, and the soft press of a mattress bends with her and takes Nadya from Cloud Nine to Heaven itself.

Three miracles happen at once.

The first is a crack of lightning against the window-wall of Nadya’s room. Gerard’s kept the curtains pulled back — knows she likes seeing the city at night to help her fall asleep. The brightness blinds her now but who needs sight when she can feel—touch—taste all that’s atop her.

The second is the tentative exploration and press of Kamilah’s fingers inside her. Cold as ice yet slick with her arousal Nadya keens loud, unabashed. Suddenly wishes she hadn’t said a thing about the jeans because they’re too tight—too cold—they need to be gone.

And the third scares her; Kamilah pulling away and the rush of air in her lungs making her dizzy but the vampiress holds herself just out of reach of a ravishing. She looks down at her prone, human form and suddenly Nadya wants to cover up — hide in the darkness and away from the omniscient quality of Kamilah’s eyes. She can see herself reflected back in them and she looks…

With a cocked head Kamilah crooks one finger inside her and Nadya stops caring what she looks like. Settles instead on how incomparable this right here is to any ridiculous notion her imagination may have had before because the real thing is leagues better. Leagues.

With desperate, high-pitched noises Nadya tries to shimmy her hips on the bedspread. Either to strip or encourage Kamilah to keep with the ripping of the clothes.

She doesn’t. Just bends her other finger and draws a lazy circle with the pad of her thumb that Nadya weeps for.

Time might keep going around them but it certainly doesn’t mean a whole lot. The world outside the confines of the bed, through the door and out of the building where Adrian isn’t safe and her friends mourn their losses and plotters of evil lurk in the shadows — it surrounds them and it’s still important but it just doesn't seem to matter.

Not when the dexterous goddess above her maneuvers a third finger in the continued pursuit of exploring all the ways to drive Nadya absolutely wild.

Kamilah’s nail scrapes along her clit again — sends shocks of pleasure-bordered-pain that she would howl into the air above them if familiar lips weren’t suddenly suffocating her.

Oh my god oh my god ohmygod — Is she saying it out loud? Does it really matter? Because Kamilah isn’t stopping and Nadya doesn’t want her to stop — not ever. Wants the rest of her life to be frozen in this exact moment in time until Death comes a-knocking.

She’s digging her fingertips into Kamilah’s back; writhing underneath her with wordless sounds and the imprint of lightning behind her closed eyelids. Everything hurts only because it’s too much and that’s the best way to be.

Slowly Kamilah peels her lips away — replaces it with a steady but soft grip on Nadya’s jaw. Her forefinger strokes along the damp curve of her human cheek.

Nadya tries not to think about the vulnerability of the moment. Of how Kamilah can see her clear as day yet she has to squint in the black to try and make out the woman’s expression — to know if she’s doing something right.

Don’t grow tired after this… Don’t become bored of me.

The hand tilts Nadya’s jaw. Urges her to the side to expose the pounding veins in her neck.

There’s a small bit of rational Nadya left in her brain and she sets off the bells and whistles while screaming with a bullhorn. Stop! Danger! Alert! Vampire!! VAMPIRE!!! She doesn’t know whether it wants her to stop or to get Kamilah to stop but it nearly wins — nearly convinces her to take a metaphorical step back and turn back to better things like kissing. Kissing was excellent.

Instead, and in contrast to everything safe, she holds her breath — closes her eyes. Lets Kamilah take the lead (like she hasn’t been already?) because not only does she deserve to be eaten if this is what everything has been leading to but she trusts the woman above her.

She trusts her with her blood. With her life.

Despite the pool of molten pleasure she’s drowning in Nadya can’t help but tense when Kamilah descends on her neck. Readies herself the only way she knows how — thinks of all the times she’s had shots or stitches in her life and tries to put them all together at once and imagines that is what being bitten by a vampire feels like.

Being bitten by a vampire feels extremely soft, actually. Then she realizes she’s not being bitten at all but instead just kissed somewhere new.

Her pulse thunders under Kamilah’s lips; trying to stop it only makes her heart race faster, her blood pump harder. Then there’s a hot breath and warm scrape that makes her cringe but Kamilah’s teeth stay blunt on her skin. The warmth of her tongue drags along goosebumps and makes Nadya briefly consider passing out to stop herself from having the opportunity to do something embarrassing.

Below her belt Kamilah’s fingers begin to move faster. Slick and sticky; warmed to the inside of Nadya’s body and eager for something very nearly in sight. She trails kisses mouthed along the human’s sweaty neck. There’s something building up inside her — but doesn’t that something mean there might be an end?

God, please never let this end. Please.

Faster and faster — there’s no way a human would be able to match that speed and if she could form words she’d accuse Kamilah of cheating. Lucky for her Nadya can’t form words. Legs trembling in oscillating waves; so violent she’s fearful of actually kicking the woman then in such small movements her muscles strain with the effort.

Kamilah’s lips stop at their goal. Playfully nip the lobe of Nadya’s ear before she noses the shell with a cat-like purr.

Desperately Nadya tries to turn her head, feels that something with one foot off of the cliff; wants to see the look in Kamilah’s eyes — or vice versa.

She’s one strangled breath away from begging for the woman’s attention when there’s a sigh in her ear. Kamilah’s voice is dark and somehow forbidden. It rasps heavy on her heart and brings up a literal geyser of emotions — all wordless in nature — that lock her limbs and god they hurt but she never wants them to go away.

“I’m here,” whispers Kamilah, “I’ve got you.”

Yes, Nadya has cried more in the last few days then she has in her entire life and yes she’s pretty tired of it. But when she literally sobs her release with shuddering hips and thighs clenching around Kamilah’s hand she doesn’t mind one bit.

Doesn’t mind the light, torturous way the woman peppers kisses down her neck to her heart hammering between her sweat-slicked breasts and kisses there, too. Right on the flat of her sternum. Piercing it like a knife to the heart.

Kamilah rides her through her orgasm like she’s taming a beast — shushes Nadya’s fumbled failed attempts at words and caresses her soaked hair with a free hand. Playfully (maybe, because there has to be some torture technique achingly similar and if anyone would know it, Kamilah would) flicks Nadya’s clit with lazy strokes of her thumb until it’s no longer an aftershock but the pain of going too hard for too long and being too exhausted to get the good things going.

When Kamilah speaks again the calm demand of her tone is gone; replaced by something that maybe—possibly—once upon a time could have been called affection.

Even now—especially now—she’s just not sure.

“I’ve got you, Nadya.”

Like a trigger pulled exhaustion falls down on her chest in a weight. Makes it hard to breathe, think, do anything other than curl into herself as tightly as she can and press against Kamilah’s solid presence.

Something that sounds vaguely like “stay” rolls off her tongue tasting of heavy cotton. Kamilah shushes her and mindlessly Nadya obeys.

“I’m here…”

The dark that claims her is warm; inviting.

Kamilah kisses her forehead.

“I’ve got you.”

#bloodbound #kamilah x mc #kamilah sayeed #playchoices fanfiction #playchoices #bloodbound mc #lily spencer #jax matsuo #mc: nadya al jamil #oc: maricruz espinoza #oc: isseya #oc: valdas #oblv: bound by destiny #oblv: new chapter

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novamm66 · 4 years

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20 Questions for 2020

I was tagged by the inspiring @lechatrouge673 and @kemvee. Thank you so much my Darlings!

1. Do you make your bed?

I use to, religiously. My grandmother was a nurse and she was the one who taught me to make a bed. I was also in sea cadets so I can do a perfect military corner too.

Now I don’t make the bed often. My partner is a very restless sleeper and since he often naps when he can, I got really tired of always making the bed and coming back to a mess. Now I leave the mess and straighten it when I go to sleep.

2. What’s your favourite number?

6. A long time ago, my dad started a family joke. Every time someone said ‘I have a question’ he would answer ‘6′ until we were all doing the same. 6 became the answer to everything.

3. What’s your job?

.I am an architectural draftsperson, focusing mainly on residential construction. I have been doing this for almost 8 years and I am now working as a subcontractor for a few companies and any independent work I get.

4. If you could, would you go back to school?

Well, I already did once. I had to redirect my career, I couldn’t work in theatre anymore, my knees just couldn’t do it, not to mention our local government cut some funding and a lot of us lost all our work (me included).

Now if I was independently wealthy and simply could go back to uni just to learn for the hell of it, (Yes, I am one of those weirdos that loved the learning portion, as long as it’s something I like) I would take every history class I could. I freaking loved the theatre history classes that I took my first time through Uni, I love how much cross over into religious history there is. I would study more of the history of architecture and fashion. GIVE ME ALL THE KNOWLEDGE!

But until I retire and I qualify for free Uni tuition I can’t afford it.

5. Can you parallel park?

I can, very well in fact. I am also skilled at parallel parking on steep ass hills. We have a lot of those everywhere.

6. A job you had which would surprise people?

I worked in a few hospitals in my time as a patient attendant. For someone who isn’t great with people, I was always really good with people who were ill I was requested to work with a lot of mentally ill people (they found me calming), car accident victim with brain damage, the homeless, abuse victims, suicidal people etc. It was a heavy and hard job but one that I took a lot of pride in.

7. Do you think aliens are real?

Yes, it’s unreasonable to believe our plant is the only one to sustain life. But if they are intelligent beings they will stay the hell away from us.

8. Can you drive a manual car?

Not really. I know how, sort of but it’s not something I have done in 20 years so I wouldn’t like to be that transmission.

9. What’s your guilty pleasure?

The flaw in this question is only one? I will never give up my Caffeine-free Diet Pepsi.

10. Tattoos?

Yes please, as many as can fit. I have 5 now and I an designing a 6th at the moment. My mom may kill me but oh well.

11. Favourite colour?

Again, I can’t pick just one! I do have colour tendencies. I tend to lean into the cool tones, green, blue, purple, but I love the warms too.

12. Things people do that drive you crazy?

Use accessible buttons to open doors, your hands are full, fine I’m ok with that. but if you are going to push the button and stand there playing on your phone while the door opens for you, then I think all kinds of nasty things.

13. Any Phobias?

I am really uncomfortable around dinosaurs. Never like them in movies (even animated and real-life (theme parks and stuff) I have gone but I enter full panic mode.

I panic in crowds if I am surrounded by people its bad. I am not good at being underground.

14. Favourite childhood sport?

I didn’t have one. Swimming was the only thing I could do without pain. So I guess Swimming but living on a boat there was no sport to be had (it was an everyday thing) and once we settled we were an hour from the nearest sports swimming pool so I could never compete seriously.

15. Do you talk to yourself?

All the freaking time. It just means I am having a board meeting.

16. What movie do you adore?

Clue, anything Mel Brooks, and Playing by heard is one of the most magnificent movies I have ever seen.

17. Do you like doing puzzles?

I do, or I did. I did them a lot as a kid but now I just have so many other things to eat up my time.

18. Favourite kind of music?

I listen to everything. I love opera, classical, kid's music, country, rock, rave, anything and everything, I will listen.

19. Tea or coffee?

Coffee, I enjoy tea from time to time but I love my coffee.

20. The first thing you remember you wanted to be when you grew up?

From the moment I saw the Little Mermaid (we were living on the boat at the time.) I wanted to be a Marine Biologist and I was stead fast in that belief. I read and studied everything I could, right up until my last year of high school, when I realized that I really didn’t like science all that much, I was good at it but I didn’t love it. My dad recommended taking Commerce which I did, with a technical theatre elective. By the end of my first year, I had the theatre bug and I transfer programs.

Tagging; @liderfin, @pikapeppa @thejeeperswife @john-cousland @alittlestarling @rhetoricalrogue @mikkinikks and anyone else who is interested.

#20 questions of 2020

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fortunatelycooltrash · 4 years

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So people love to say that America doesn’t have free healthcare because the quality would sink and the waits would go up. Now, while those are valid worries despite being no excuse for the atrociously high prices of even minior procedures, I’d like to share some bullshit that I’ve experienced involving normal US hospitals and medical branches alike.

My root canal is going to cost 2500 dollars because it is not covered by most dental plans despite it being a completely necessary procedure that directly affects my health. Absorb that then absorb the fact this plan covers some of braces. The crown alone is costing over 1200.

I almost died in a hospital waiting room because my ‘stomach ache’ that was causing me so much pain I was sick with it wasn’t severe enough to qualify for immediate attention. Undiagnosed Appendicitis.

My nephew and sister almost met their end because an incompetent doctor misdiagnosed my sister with a URI. She had type A flu.

My cousins father had a doctor who refused to diagnose him despite him coming back constantly because of lethargy. Said he couldn’t find anything wrong. Her father was poor and had really bad insurance. Finally he went to another doctor and was diagnosed with kidney cancer. He could have lived if he had been diagnosed a year or two prior before it spead but by the time he got his diagnosis, it was too late. He died, I believe, a few months later but I was young so he might have made it a year or longer.

I suffered from chronic nosebleeds as a child to the point that blood didn’t even scare me anymore. The doctor told my mother that it was coming from wounds inside my nose and I was most likely picking at it and there was nothing medically wrong with me. My mother, knowing even as a child I knew not to waste her money, took me to another doctor. Severe Anemia. Still suffer from it too this day. Have to take those horrid tasting red pills🤢.

My aunt constantly butchering her budget because she needs her insulin and it’s cost keeps getting higher despite it remaining relatively the same. Luckily my state is looking to cap it at 100 though if that will actually go into effect isn’t determined yet.

My mom, bless her, repeatedly going in for her back aching only to be told pain was normal for someone of her weight and age. Nope, she is a nurse and turned people that were 300 pounds or more. She had completely blown her back and had a pinched nerve that was so severe she could barely stand without pain. The doctor that diagnosed her was surprised she could even walk.

My sister, having a grand mal seizure in the nurses office of a high school. They told her to stop faking. That bitch wasn’t even a real nurse so this one doesn’t count but I had to mention this because why the fuck wasn’t a registered nurse hired?

My (other) aunt having minor chest pain then suffering a heart attack in the waiting room because they had her wait so long since she didn’t seem serious. I’m sure that’s going to have lasting damage that could have been easily prevented.

My sister giving birth and getting a 28,000 dollar bill for a room and care for her and the baby. She was there for a day and a half. She didn’t even have a long or complicated delivery.

My mother being told she was completely fine to continue working despite having an off feeling about her third pregnancy(about 24 years ago) the doctor told her there were no complications and she could go on as normal. She miscarried her seven month along daughter three days later because her placenta was underneath the baby and tore. That doctor is still in practice.

The nurses in my mothers delivery room ignoring both her and the monitor. Which, if they had been looking at, clearly desplayed my older brother with his umbilical core wrapped tight around his neck. He lived because my moms main doctor walked in and had a conniption fit when he noticed the vitals dropping. He’s the doc my sis uses now. A good man.

(Same bro)My older brother turning blue everytime he cried being brushed off. Hole in his heart that has since closed.

When I was younger, I slipped in the shower and hit my head so hard against the metal lining of it(stall shower) that the skin split open and abscessed. My doc treated the abscess but did no further testing after a 4 hour wait. As we were leaving, I don’t remember much of this week my mom told me, I vomited and passed out in the parking lot. Had a concussion.

My brother being misdiagnosed with the flu, strep, and a few other things over the course of a few weeks before one doctor finally tested him for HIV. It was positive. Luckily he only had one partner. Unluckily, the partner was the one that gave it to him via cheating on him.

Me, almost dying of a violent case of strep throat because they said I had a sinus infection. My fever peaked at 104 then, blessedly, broke. I do not remember this as the memories of the days I was sick are incredibly fever burned but I remember wrapping blankets around me because I was so cold.

The strep attacked so quick and harshly that if I had lived alone it probably would have killed me since I wouldn’t have been able to get help and I would’ve kept trying to get ‘warmer’ and helped raise my temp over 106. You typically don’t come back from that one unharmed. If at all.

My older bro(cord baby) being told suffering from auditory hallucinations was a common thing(not wrong but they should have actually asked about his family history and idk, did more??) he had undiagnosed bipolar disorder. He is medicated and much happier now.

Me breaking my gotdamn pointer knuckle and the x-ray person getting blurry x-rays that she used despite the fact that they weren’t accurate. Thank you bitch, now my abnormally short pointer finger clicks because it began to set wrong.

Theres a few more but I’m currently giving my bro a hard time for texting me a text meant for his bf so imma bounce for now. May add more later. The whole point to this was to show people that don’t want free health care because the ‘quality would go down’ or the ‘wait would be too long’ that the wait is already long enough for you to die anyway and the quality already sucks ass if you’re poor because they will not diagnose you correctly.

Or They will misdiagnose you then blame YOU when you sue(happened to my mom in that miscarriage one but because he hadn’t wrote a release back to work she had no actual proof he’d told her she could.)

Or They will overcharge you for things that have a far cheaper value simply because they can and you can’t do anything about it because you need that procedure or medicine to keep your health good.

I can understand things like heart surgery or transplants, you know, the big major stuff not being free because yeah that shit takes a fuck ton of resources and care so I get it, I do. I can reasonably say “Yup that should cost thousands.” I mean, I’m don’t even avocate for fully FREE healthcare, I just want a limit on their overpricing bull shit to where it matches with economic standards.

You can’t expect someone with an average 7-4 job that pays 10/hr(oooh ya, y’all think I’d go higher? Guess what, young people starting out their careers also get sick!) to drop thousands upon thousands of dollars for whatever. The sad thing is I can say ‘whatever’ and you can actually think of multiple things that aren’t that major or that resource draining yet still cost thousands.

Even someone making 15/hour couldn’t do that and I’d be hard pressed to say even 20-25/hr could do that. They may have it better and be able to pay it off faster but they’d still be in debt for a while or have to work years after their planned retirement to make up for the lost savings if they were lucky enough to have them.

I’ve also heard people complaining about it raising taxes but you’ll spend way more getting something done at a hospital then you’d spend on those taxes in a year.

Besides, if you’re so pissed about taxes then to even it out protest the stupid taxes. Your house? Taxed. Your inheritance that you gain but also leave behind to care for your family? Taxed. Your property that you bought 100% full price paid? Taxed every year. Your car? Taxed.

How bout getting pissed about those instead of getting pissy about people getting their health fixed? There are plenty of ridiculous taxes so I don’t know why people are so against having one that actually helps people.

Sorry for this rant, I know it’s not centered around my profile theme but I am majorly pissed off that I’m about to have to let a tooth rot out of my head because my insurance decided that: covering something cosmetic like braces? Yeah! Covering a completely necessary surgery that can actually harm/kill the person via infection if left untreated? Nope, that costs us more!

I can’t drop two fucking grand on dental surgery. It’s just not happening. I don’t know anyone who can do that shit. Anyone who gets pissed off about me posting this: go slam a hammer against your tooth until it cracks down the middle, exposing your nerve to the harsh unforgiving world then let it develop a cavity around it.

Afterwards, try to eat literally anything: hot, cold, hard, soft, it doesn’t matter. You’ll cry, I promise. Now imagine being told the only way to fix that is to cough up over two grand and if you can’t well then oh fucking well? Kinda hurts ya a bit. Not nearly as much as the tooth but still.

Hell, I know dental probably wouldnt even get covered if they made healthcare reduced or free but this whole situation has reminded me just how fucked you are if you get anything remotely wrong with you in the U.S

#freehealthcare #no i dont plan on having kid too many bad genes #america #americanhealthcare

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hayleyconway129 · 5 years

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My Experience with BPD

I’ve contemplated writing something like this for quite some time. Thinking about what I would say, how I would word everything, what people would think of me. I wouldn’t have the first clue about writing a blog or writing a story, but here we go.

In 2011 – following a suicide attempt when I was 15 years old, I was diagnosed with depression

In 2016 – I was also diagnosed with anxiety on top of the depression.

in 2019 – I was also diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia. I wasn’t surprised.

See I’d always suspected there was something more. More than just depression and anxiety, something that didn’t sit right. I am a relatively self-aware person, yet I was continuously finding myself in situations out of my control. My emotions could go from happy, content and energetic to irritable, angry and snappy within a matter of minutes. It could be anything, a changed plan, a minor inconvenience, someone looking at me the wrong way. anything could send me into a downward spiral.

As I got older, I found myself avoiding social situations more and more. I was once a bit of a party girl, I lived for the weekend and getting dressed up, going out and having fun with my friends. Now. I can’t even remember the last time I had a night out that didn’t end up in a panic attack or meltdown. Actually - at this point I don’t even remember the last time I even ‘wanted’ to go out. I isolated myself more and more, I wouldn’t leave my apartment for days on end.

I’d involved myself in a lot of unhealthy relationships growing up, and was subjected to a lot of emotional abuse, because of this I fell into a pattern of doubting myself. I thought I was the problem, that I wasn’t worthy of being respected or treated well. I thought that my trust issues and insecurities stemmed partly from these scenarios, and that if I ever found someone who loved me, everything would be okay.

It wasn’t until getting into a healthy, supportive relationship that provided me with all the comfort and reassurance in the world, that I realised I was still second guessing everything. ‘Why is he with me?’ ‘He will leave as soon as he gets a better opportunity.’ ‘He is too good for me.’ Accompanied by completely invading his privacy in fear that he was ‘doing something wrong.’ Worrying every time he would leave my sight – I was terrified of being abandoned. Sometimes I would act out, cause a scene, abuse him, be aggressive and hostile over the slightest thing, to the point where at the end of the outburst I wouldn’t even really remember what it was about

And then came the guilt, OH the horrible, debilitating guilt. Every time I would snap or have a meltdown, I’d come out the other side of it drowning in guilt and shame. ‘Why couldn’t I have just handled that situation better? ‘Why am I like this?’ ‘No wonder everyone hates me and wants to leave me.’

Now comes the inability to hold a job. Throughout my 23 years of life I’ve had a billion different ideas regarding ‘what I want to be’ and each time I tried something, I would get dissatisfied and then immediately be done with it. If I have a colleague that I don’t like or get along with, I take it personally. If my superior criticises me, I’ll go cry in the bathroom. If I have a disagreement with a customer, I’ll have a panic attack. I don’t even remember the last time I properly resigned from a job; most have ended in me walking out mid shift because I couldn’t cope anymore. I know it all sounds so black and white, like stop being so sensitive right? My thoughts exactly. I began thinking ‘Maybe I am just lazy,’ ‘What if I am just a shit person?’

With all of this comes financial stress, like how are you supposed to budget when your income fluctuates constantly. ‘Oh no that impulse spending I did to try and cheer myself up has now put me in more debt and I just quit my job what am I going to do?!’ ‘Maybe my partner will leave me because I can’t hold a job and provide for this $400 a week apartment we’ve moved into.’ ‘He deserves someone who can hold their shit together.’ ‘My mum is going to hate me, I’ve failed, and she is bailing me out of a bad situation once again.’

I was always wondering why I had trouble maintaining friendships. Why I was so sensitive to everything everyone around me did. ‘Oh, she cancelled plans on me today, I guess she fucking hates me.’ - Why sometimes if I spent too long in a social setting, I’d become easily agitated and angry. Maybe I just hate people yeah? Why is it, one day I like someone and appreciate them, then be annoyed and devaluing them in my mind the next day?

Well my friends, I introduce you to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD.) If I wanted to go into depth about which traits I most identify with and how, we could be sitting here all day. For each person it varies, and some of the traits can be easily confused with order disorders.

· Fear of abandonment. People with BPD are often terrified of being abandoned or left alone.

· Unstable relationships.

· Unclear or shifting self-image

· Impulsive, self-destructive behaviours.

· Self-harm.

· Extreme emotional swings.

· Chronic feelings of emptiness.

· Explosive anger.

I’d done a bit of research on BPD before for my official diagnosis. I knew people that had been diagnosed, I personally thought I identified with some, if not all the 9 traits. But as I am not qualified to self-diagnose and a bit of a hypochondriac at the best of times, it took a Psychiatrist and a Psychologist to confirm what I had suspected.

I had already kind of prepared myself and knew enough to know that it is something that can be treated. But that it would take hard work and time.

Fast forward a few months later and I’m still in I guess what you would call ‘recovery,’ I am on my fourth job for the year and still struggling of course, but I’m seeing a psychologist, my medication dosage was adjusted, I’ve done more and more research into my condition and most importantly, the people around me are aware of what is happening, for so long I felt like everything was all in my head and that I was just a drama queen, so I assumed everyone else felt this way about me. But I was wrong, since opening up and asking for help, my family, boyfriend and friends have been amazing. I’ve received so much love and support and not one single bit of judgement, which is what I was most afraid of.

Now that I know what I am dealing with, I have answers and I know what I need to do to get where I want to be, it’s a long road and it scares the shit out of me. But I didn’t come this far to let an illness overcome me.

#borderline personality disorder #bpd #mental health

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asia247 · 5 years

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In this part of the breakdown, I am giving a timeline of everything that happened with Burning Sun after the assault of Kim, which includes the discovery of tax evasion, drug use and distribution, and the sexual assault and prostitution of women.

February 4th: Dispatch Reports On Possible Prostitution At Burning Sun

Dispatch releases a complete report on Burning Sun and the organization of the company which includes how employees made money. It is confirmed that the owners of Burning Sun are CEO Lee Sung Hyun (Not Seungri) and Lee Moon Ho, directors are Kang XX and Lee Seung Hyun (Seungri), and inspectors are Kang Hyun Sook (Seungri’s mother) and Kim Gun Ho.

The clubs organization chart, the hierarchy is also revealed. Top rank are the CEO, 2nd ranks are Directors, Manager, and VIP, and third are merchandizers referred to as MD. Their are responsible for bringing customers, and for every woman they get paid between 20,000 and 50,000 won, and for men they get between 15% and 20% of their alcohol sales. A MD told Dispatch the way to attract women customers is to get a “homerun” which is to bring a drunk woman to rooms. These women were referred to as “mulge” for beautiful customer. MD’s earn money by bring women to VIP rooms where they would be sexually harassed, raped, assaulted.

MD 1: The VIP room is looking for a female customer.

MD 2: OK. I’m looking.

MD 1: I’m looking everywhere. Hurry up and help me find a female customer.

MD 1: It’s not necessary a beautiful one. Just a drunk girl is OK.

MD 2: Let me see if I can find any “snails”.

MD 1: Help me to get the “homerun”.

Director “A”: Now look into the room.

Director “A”: They’re doing it.

MD 1: How did you see it?

MD 2: Oh ~ It’s real.

MD 3: Having fun at Burning.

A video recording of the sex scene in the VIP room was confirmed by Dispatch as well as that it was passed around by employees.

Additionally, an employee was quoted by Dispatch saying:

If VIPs have a happy night, they will almost certainly come back. So some MD also sneakily give them ecstasy because female guests will lose consciousness for a moment. There is also the possibility of sexual harassment after that.

Also discussed are “hi-passes” where if a minor was deemed “qualified” meaning pretty enough they would be allowed to enter the club without ID

“Harassment, violence? Just blame the customers for it. Drug? Just say it’s due to the customer’s fault. However, letting minors into the club is different. It is completely the responsibility of the club. The biggest reason for keeping good relations with the police is the report on minors.” -Burning Sun Employee

Director “A”: The guests that have problems with ID cards, Just get the pretty kids.

Director “A”: Don’t look for those ugly kids who don’t have ID cards. So annoying.

Director “A”: Too ugly to be allowed in and they don’t even have ID cards. Do you even think?

MD 1: Yes! I got it.

In 20 Burning Sun was reported for having underage people in the club, the club manager stated:

“The police were mobilized. There were one female and two male police officers”, “They did not come in to search for those minors but (went to the door and) returned. The senior staff of the club went out and confronted the police. They said that it could be information fabricated by other competing businesses. They said they had checked the guests’ ID cards very carefully and the police just left. At that time, I thought ‘how can it be’.

The police responded to Dispatch about this on February 1st:

Today (1/2), there are personnel dispatched there. People who have been there before are not currently here.

More chats were released

MD 1: (send pictures taken without permission) They stretched the girl’s arms and legs.

Director “A”: The skirt is up.

MD 2: Her body is nice, but her face is ugly.

CEO “C”: If it isn’t high-class, I won’t use it.

Director “A”: The girl at table O doesn’t look well. Tell her to go away.

Guard 1: Confirmed.

Director “B”: Female guest that I’m about to take away is touched by someone. Where’s the guard, hurry up?

Guard 2: Confirmed. It’s been handled.

And just like that, problems happen and are taken care of.

MD 1: Director “A” hit a woman.

MD 2: Why?

MD 1: For refusing to go home with him.

Sources: Dispatch, Asian Junkie

February 11th, 2019: Seungri Resigns from his Ramen business

Source: NetizenBuzz

February 13th, 2019: Seungri Is Seen In Photo With Chinese Woman Thought to Be Burning Sun Drug Distributor

A photo surfaces of Seungri with a Chinese woman known as Anna, who is believed to the drug distributor at Burning Sun. Some reports identified her as the woman who sued Kim Sang Kyo. Seungri denies any affiliation:

I was at the club and she asked me for a photo, so I agreed. I don’t remember when we took the photo or who she is. There are countless photos of me and fans on the internet, on social media, and in online communities. When I’m at the club, there are a lot of people that approach me and ask for a photo, and I usually accept.

Source: NetizenBuzz, Soompi

February 15th, 2019: Burning Sun Is Raided by Police

Police raided Burning Sun, 32 investigators removed four boxes of potential evidence.

youtube

Le Méridien Hotel hotel, where Burning Sun was located, move to terminate contract and request the club to leave the property:

We signed a lease agreement last April, and there are still many years left on the contract. We requested that they terminate the contract, and we’re waiting for their reply

Police make statement on opening an investigation on Seungri:

We are considering opening an investigation into Seungri as he was listed as the executive director of Burning Sun at the time. We have plans to expand the investigation to the entire Gangnam Club to include MD’s and directors.

Source: Koreaboo, Asian Junkie

February 16th, 2019: Seungri Makes Statement About Burning Sun at Concert, “Seungri 1st Solo Tour The Great Seungri Final in Seoul”

I wish to speak about the recent controversy. I feel like if I don’t, the people who have come today will feel uncomfortable. I am very apologetic to all those who care for me. I’m sorry for causing disappointment for so many people, and I am reflecting on what has happened. Despite there being a controversy, I did not act in a responsible manner. Despite the fact that the controversy took place in a location that I have publicly spoken about, I did not act in a responsible way and for that, I am ashamed and regretful. It is all due to my negligence. As I am a celebrity, I will think and act more carefully from now on. I want to apologize for not showing modesty and for acting carelessly. For the past year, I have been doing my best to bring you all happiness. But I have brought you disappointment, and for that, I am ashamed. I want to apologize once again, and I will take all of your words to heart.

I’ve put a lot of preparation into this. I will be grateful if you can enjoy the concert. I think that would make me feel like all my work was worth it.

Source: Soompi

February 17th, 2019: The Investigation Into Burning Sun Expands to Other Nightclubs & Results In Drug Crackdown

Following the Burning Sun investigation, police widen crackdown on drug in clubs. The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency release this statement:

In addition to Burning Sun we have widened the scope of the drug investigation to clubs in the Gangnam area. It is inevitable to broaden the investigation as club promoters that receive a commission for attracting customers work with a number of clubs at the same time.

Sources: Korea Herald

February 18th, 2019: Burning Sun Employee Is Arrested

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Department receive a warrant to search the home of an employee of Burning Sun who is suspected of using and trafficking drugs. They found ecstasy in his home, and he was arrested. Additionally a travel ban is placed on Anna, the Chinese woman thought to be supplying drugs to Burning Sun. Police also make a statement on expanding investigation to include Seungri:

We haven’t ruled out the possibility (of Seungri being questioned). If it’s necessary, (he) could face an investigation

Source: Korea Herald, Asian Junkie

February 20th, 2019: Burning Sun Shutdown is Halted By Police

Police in order to prevent the possible destruction of evidence halted the process of Burning Sun leaving the Le Méridien Hotel hotel. They released this statement:

Le Meridien hotel agreed to stop the pullout of Burning Sun. The hotel asked for the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency’s opinion about the pullout on Monday, and police requested a stop to the move due to evidence that might be destroyed

Source: Korea Herald

February 22nd, 2019: Actress Park Han Byul’s Husband Is Revealed To Be Seungri’s Business Partner

February 25th, 2019: Katalk Chats Reveal Seungri requested Prostitutes For High Profile Clients

SBS funE reported uncovering texts dated December 6, 2015, at 11:38 pm KST.

We have obtained a KakaoTalk (mobile instant messenger) conversation between Seungri, singer C, Representative Yoo of Yuri Holdings (an investment company Seungri was preparing to establish), and an Employee Kim.

Translation:

Employee Kim: Two spots in the main area with guards…we’ll take good care of them

Seungri: And the girls? Ones that give it well

Employee Kim: I’m calling them but I don’t know if they’ll give it well. I’m calling cheap ones first

Seungri: Anyway, do a good job.

Representative Yoo: I’m getting the prostitutes ready right now, so when two prostitutes come, you (Employee Kim) guide them and make sure they get to the hotel room safely

Employee Kim: Yes. I sent the two men [to the room].

YG Entertainment responded with this statement:

Hello, this is YG Entertainment. Here is our statement regarding today’s article about Seungri. Upon checking with the artist himself, the text messages in the article are fabricated and not true. In addition, just as we have always done, we inform you that we will take strong legal action against the proliferation and reproduction of rumors and fake news.

Source: Soompi

February 26th, 2019: Police Launch Investigation Into Seungri Prostitution Claims

Police release statement announcing the beginning of investigations of Seungri for engaging in prostitution:

We have launched an investigation into the escort service claims that have been reported on by the media.

Park Han Byul’s Agency Makes Statement

It is true that Park Han Byul’s husband worked together with Seungri as business partners, but because he is a non-celebrity and because it is his private life, we are in a situation where we currently do not know all the details of the inside story. Moving forward, please refrain from [releasing] any speculative reports regarding Park Han Byul and her husband. There are no plans for additional statements. What we have already mentioned before is everything there is.

Yuri Holdings Makes Statement In Response To Prostitution Claims

Recently, Yuri Holdings has been in the news, since the Burning Sun incident.

Firstly, we take responsibility for the issue as one of the companies holding stocks in Burning Sun.

However, we feel the need to release our official statement regarding the facts surrounding Yuri Holdings as we can no longer sit back and watch articles written on claims and suspicions.

The text messages that have become an issue are all completely false, and we believe someone with malicious intent towards Seungri and our company has fabricated these text messages as a grudge and sent them to reporters. This is fake news that has been published without being confirmed.

Not only do we not have any foreign shareholders in our company, but the text messages were released on a newly-created image based on content submitted by a tip rather than actual screenshots of the conversations themselves. We cannot stay silent on the matter anymore and have decided to give our statement.

We plan to request an investigation into the individual who fabricated the text messages and submitted them to reporters, and we will take legal action to reveal the truth.

Executive Director Lee Hong Gyu

Journalist Kang Kyung Yoon Responds To Accusations Of Fabricating Texts

There is no reason to fabricate or edit the reported messages. There was absolutely no fabrication or editing other than filtering some severely despicable expressions, and everything is true. If a request is received from the investigative agency, [I] will actively cooperate

Seungri Releases Statements Regarding Prostitution Allegations

We are relaying Seungri’s statement that he sent us yesterday evening.

For the last month, regarding the unsettling issues and news that have been brought forth about him, Seungri has continuously expressed his apologies to everyone. Though it’s small, Seungri has revealed that he wishes to, as soon as possible, submit to drug tests as well as actively cooperate with investigations on all the allegations surrounding him.

YG Entertainment is of the same stance as Seungri, and our legal team will be contacting investigative authorities this morning to relay Seungri’s wishes to go into the station soon to cooperate with investigations.

We hope that through thorough investigations by the police, the truth of the indiscriminate rumors will be revealed, and if there is even the slightest issue, Seungri will have to accept the legal consequences.

Conversely, if the rumors are proved false, we will, in addition to requesting a police investigation, be preparing all routes of legal action.

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Photos Of Seungri Allegedly Take Nitrous Oxide or “Happy Balloon” Surface In Vietnam

After the problematic photos of him at the club spread on the internet, Seungri’s Instagram account is being spammed by [Vietnamese] fans telling him to return to Korea.

YG responded with this statement:

Upon checking with Seungri, the photo was taken from a misleading angle. He said he has never inhaled nitrous oxide. The reports from Vietnam are clearly false reports, and he feels very falsely accused. He is arguing that it doesn’t make sense for him to inhale nitrous oxide in an public place like a club.

Seungri Volunteers to Take Drug Test

I will voluntarily go to the police and take an extensive drug test

Source: Soompi 1, 2,3, | Netizen Buzz 1, 2

February 27th, 2019: Seungri Submits To Questioning

Before entering for questioning Seungri made this statement:

This morning, I submitted a petition asking for a thorough investigation into myself. Once again, I apologize for causing concern and anger with the various controversies and accusations. I will earnestly cooperate with investigations so that the truth can be revealed as soon as possible.

After eight and a half hours of questioning Seungri made this statement to press:

Questioning for all allegations has been finished. Regarding drugs, I underwent all drug tests requested by the narcotics unit. Many people are angry about the various controversies, and I will cooperate with police so that all suspicions can be dispelled. I ask that you wait for the results of the investigation. If the police require anything else, I will return for further questioning.

Seungri Tests Negative For Drugs

Seungri’s lawyers make statement regarding his drug test:

According to the police, there were no issues with the first round of drug tests and [Seungri] was tested negative. Because a hair follicle testing will be able to detect drugs up to two to three years prior to the test, it has been sent to the National Institute of Scientific Investigation. We were told to expect the results one or two weeks later. We are anticipating the truths for many allegations to be revealed shortly.

Disposal Trucks Are Spotted Outside YG

Reporters see disposal truck outside of YG Entertainment resulting in questions over the agency destroying evidence. At truck was seen arriving at the building at 6:35am and told Chosun.com it was their first time at the building. When reports started to take data their were told by five YG employees “You can’t take photos here.” a second truck arrived at 7:55am. They both left at 8:43 a.m. When asked by Chosun.com the drivers said:

They told me to come again later.

There were boxes, paper bags, and suitcases, and judging from the weight, there seemed to be electronics like computers as well.

We usually [start working] at 9 a.m. We also work at dawn when the client requests it, but most clients avoid doing so because they have to pay extra money. But companies in the public eye like entertainment agencies or news outlets often [request] that the work be done at dawn. We not only destroy documents but also other things like smartphones or computers.

YG released this statement:

It was a periodic document destruction process we undertake every month or quarter

Police made this statement:

There is no way we would have known about YG destroying their documents. [Even if we had known,] there is no justification for stopping them from destroying their documents when a direct connection between YG and the Burning Sun incident has not been found yet.

youtube

Source: Soompi, 1, 2 | Netizen Buzz

February 28th, 2019: Seungri Halts All Activity

YG released this statement:

Hello, this is YG Entertainment.

Seungri has unfortunately canceled his upcoming concerts in Osaka on March 9 and 10 and in Jakarta on March 17. We ask for the generous understanding of many people who were waiting for the concerts.

Seungri voluntarily arrived at the police station at approximately 9 p.m. yesterday and diligently participated in the police investigation regarding the suspicions for about eight hours and 30 minutes.

Seungri earnestly requested for the police to especially investigate the suspicions regarding prostitution services rigorously.

Not only the concerts, but Seungri will halt all other scheduled activities and actively cooperate with all upcoming police investigations.

As they are suspicions that many people are curious about, we hope that all of the suspicions and truths are unveiled as quickly as possible through speedy and rigorous investigations by the police.

Source: Soompi

March 1st, 2019: Police Confirm They Have Not Obtained Original Texts From Seungri From Reporter

We requested the KakaoTalk messages from the reporter who was first to report on the sexual escort services claims involving Seungri. However, we have not received them yet.

Source: Naver News

March 4th, 2019: Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission Receives Texts

Source: Netizen Buzz

March 5th, 2019: Burning Sun Is Investigated For Tax Evasion

Source: Asian Junkie

March 7th, 2019: MBC Releases Evidence That Seungri Was More Involved With Burning Sun That He Has Suggested

Initial Investment documents for Burning Sun, found by MBC, show that of the 2.5 billion won (approximately $2.2 million USD) total investment, Seungri invested 225 million won (approximately $198,600). He is also listed in documents as orporate promoter, a role of someone typically involved in the formation of a company. He is also listed as an executive along with Lee Sung Hyun, Lee Moon Ho, and Kang XX.

He is listed as co-CEO with 20% holdings, and an employee was quoted as saying:

It is certain that Seungri was definitely an intial investor, and it appears that this was reported as it was shared with major shareholders and people of [major shareholder] Cheonwon Inc.

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Source: Soompi

March 8th, 2019: It’s Revealed YG Owns Love Signal Club Thought To Be Owned By Seungri Is Owned By Yang Hyun Suk

YG Announces Enlist Seungri’s Enlistment for March 25th

Source: Asian Junkie | Netizen Buzz | Korea Herald

March 9th, 2019: Seungri Is Booked On Violation Of Anti-Prostitution Laws

Police made this statement:

We booked Seungri and changed his status to that of a suspect in order to issue a search and seizure warrant and clear [Seungri] of the suspicions [surrounding him].

In addition, three to four other people who were in the Katalk are being investigated. A warrant was issued to search Club Arena for evidence, and searched from 11am, March 10 until 2pm. KST, and it was reported evidence was found.

Sources: The Chosun Ilbo | Soompi

Complete Breakdown of Seungri Scandal Part 2: Katalk Chats

Complete Breakdown of Seungri Scandal Part 1.5: Burning Sun- Tax Evasion, Drugs, Sexual Assault & Prostitution In this part of the breakdown, I am giving a timeline of everything that happened with… 3,400 more words

#asia 24.7 #asia247 #bigbang big bang #burning sun #seungri

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