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#i hate that I keep having to sound like a fucking conspiracy theorist in order to make sense of what happened

aoitrinity · 3 years

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The “Me Too”

DISCLAIMER: I am about to put forth further speculation about a major Destiel-related event from this season, specifically the confession scene in 15x18. This is 100% pure speculation and I do not claim to have any insider knowledge AT ALL. If you are not in a place to read such things, please go take care of yourself instead of reading this. Do not cause yourself any additional pain.

If you are here to be an asshole and call me delusional...uh...I mean, go for it, but like I really don’t get what that’s doing to make your life better? If shitting on people’s desire for understanding a TV show brings you joy then uh...that says more about you than it does about me?

With that out of the way...read below the cut for my theory about the “me too” line.

I know I just unloaded my theory about the finale on all of you the other day, and that I should probably give you all a break in between my bouts of theory-dumping, but I had to get this out here tonight.

If you somehow haven’t seen it yet these last few (painfully exhausting) days, there is a rumor going around of a cut in episode 15x18 of a specific line--a “me too” that Jensen supposedly recorded during the 15x18 sequence, which would have given us all textual validation not only that Cas is in love with Dean, but that Dean is in love with Cas. Various people have been trying to confirm or deny this rumor since it surfaced. We all figured it would have happened during the final scene, with Dean crying, alone. It would have been there in place of the crying, and we hypothesized that Jensen had to dub it over with AMR of his sobs. It was an interesting thought, but we had no real proof it ever happened. I, for my part, started to assume it was entirely false.

But then tonight, on the Latin American CW, we apparently discovered that in the Spanish-language dub of 15x18, they had taken Dean’s last line to Cas, “Don’t do this Cas,” and dubbed it as “yo a ti”--translated to “me too,” seemingly confirming to us that the line did exist!

I watched the clip of the dub excitedly, hoping for some secret new shot that we had been robbed of in the original episode, but the “me too” was simply dubbed over Dean’s line of “Don’t do this Cas,” which is definitely something Dean very clearly said in the original recording. That wasn’t a dub, Jensen said that line.

So what gives? Where the heck did the “me too” come from?

Well, as apparently I am wont to do recently...I talked @winchester-reload‘s ear off and was eventually hit with a stroke of realization.

I don’t think the “me too” went in the crying scene. I think Dean said it to Cas’s face, and we were robbed of it.

Before I go any further, I want to again remind you that this is PURE SPECULATION. PLEASE JUDGE FOR YOURSELF AND ALWAYS BE SKEPTICAL.

So.

The original end of the scene runs as follows:

Dean: Why does this sound like a goodbye?

Cas: Because it is. I love you.

Dean: Don’t do this, Cas.

*a longing exchange of looks, with Cas smiling through his tears even more broadly than he was earlier*

*the Empty appears and Dean starts to panic*

Cas: Goodbye Dean.

*Cas throws Dean out the way, smiles at him one last time, and is taken*

Now that always struck me as a sort of weird exchange because...I mean, Dean can tell Cas not to “do this,” but whatever he was going to do that would get his ass taken by the Empty, he had clearly already done. But I originally handwaved it as Dean begging Cas not to go and leave him again by dying, even though it was too late, because I was too entranced with the beauty of the scene and of the performances to imagine anything otherwise.

However, after this Spanish-language dub story broke this evening, I started to wonder if the exchange had initially gone a little bit differently.

What if the “don’t do this, Cas” was pulled from earlier in the scene?

I would have originally imagined that it actually went between the “Because it is” and the “I love you,” but in the leaked shots of script we got a few days ago, there doesn’t seem to be any line there--Cas goes straight from his “because it is” to the “I love you.” Thus I conclude one of two things: either the line it was adlibbed or added by Jensen on the spot, between the “because it is” and the “I love you,” or it was dialogue that originally came earlier in the scene.

Either way, what matters is that I think that line, “Don’t do this, Cas,” was moved to after Cas’s “I love you” in the final cut and replaced the “me too.” I think the initial episode probably followed the Latin American dub instead, and went like this (with the one line inserted where I feel it best fits, though again, it could have come from earlier):

Dean: Why does this sound like a goodbye?

Cas: Because it is.

(Dean: Don’t do this, Cas)

Cas: I love you.

Dean: ...me too.

*a longing exchange of looks, with Cas smiling through his tears even more broadly than he was earlier*

*the Empty appears and Dean starts to panic*

Cas: Goodbye Dean.

*Cas throws Dean out the way, smiles at him one last time, and is taken*

Well.

Doesn’t that all hit a bit differently now? Doesn’t it now make sense why, after Dean’s line, Cas starts smiling more broadly than he was during the entire rest of the scene? Doesn’t it make sense now that when Dean turns to look back at the Empty emerging, there are way more tears in his eyes than there were in the prior shot? Doesn’t Dean’s body language line up better between shots if we read it this way? Doesn’t it make Cas’s sacrifice hurt both more and less at the same time, because he could go to the Empty knowing he was loved in return? That he had the one thing he wanted most?

To me, at least, it does.

Unfortunately, I think that, similar to what I speculate happened with the finale...they were told by the network that they had to cut Dean’s reciprocation because the CW panicked about coming off as too gay at the last moment. You can read all about that in my other post.

Anyway, here’s more food for thought. Remember @oceaxe-ifdawn’s post about how she had spoken with a cast member about how the script for the finale was being frantically rewritten in March, the weekend after they finished shooting for 15x18? Why would they suddenly have to start tossing out their own ending in MARCH? TWO WEEKS before they were supposed to start filming the finale?

What if it was because that was the moment when the network started to pivot? If their contacts on set told them how very beautifully homosexually gay the scene was, and that was the moment that the CW decided that they couldn’t risk losing a very specific (conservative, heterosexual) part of their fanbase and needed to start toning down the gay before it got out of hand? And since they couldn’t obviously go back and reshoot anything for 15x18, given everyone then immediately went into quarantine for COVID, they had to remove Dean’s reciprocation from the script and replace it with another, earlier shot, that could have FEASIBLY gone in its place. But they couldn’t take Cas’s confession because it was entirely necessary to the whole plot of the season (and that, I think, was a fucking genius move by the writers to at least get us this much--god bless you, Bobo).

And this way, the CW could actually have their cake and eat it too--they could claim they were still being accepting of queer people (look, we let Cas confess his affection for Dean!) while avoiding the potential loss of their favorite cishet male audience (whom they really want to transition to Walker after all of this is over because MONEY) that they might suffer if that audience discovered that one of their two “traditionally masculine” lead characters was in love with another man this whole time.

The only reason they didn’t carry it all off is that, when they needed to send the script over to the Spanish-language dubbers for recording, there was some sort of screw-up. They somehow forgot to have the dialogue swapped out back in March and the lines were never replaced in the dub script.

And that is how we got the “me too” line from Dean in Latin America tonight, a line that we had heard rumors existed, but had no actual evidence of... until now.

I’m sorry to have pulled you guys into this theory with me, but... It just lines up too perfectly. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, yes, but sometimes that cigar is actually a dick. A big, beautiful, gay dick that your stupid homophobic TV network executives are censoring because they are afraid of the reactions of their more conservative viewership.

On the plus side, I think that this more than ever confirms that Destiel is and was always canon. Textually. Reciprocally. 110%.

And the CW fucking robbed us of it.

#supernatural season 15 #spn finale #destiel #destielgate #speculation #fuck the cw #trust the story #we were robbed #i hate that I keep having to sound like a fucking conspiracy theorist in order to make sense of what happened #god forbid they had just KEPT TO THE FUCKING PLAN THE WRITERS HAD SO BEAUTIFULLY SCRIPTED #that would have made too much fucking sense #and been too beautiful #and too perfect #no #we had to have some fucking executive fuckery #i hate it here

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skepticbeliever-bookclub · 3 years

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Heya! Do you have any fics where the boys are really mad at each other? Bonus points for angrily kissing☺️

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here's a few!

Beyond Love - allredpen | E, 10k, Complete

“I think I specifically asked you to stop pushing me.” Shane’s voice was quiet and deadly and Ryan swallowed against a flood of saliva.

There was a flush that started high on Shane’s cheekbones and spread across the bridge of his nose, and a bead of sweat trickled down his jaw and Ryan was thinking he might lick it off.

-

Ryan’s only asking for a little faith.

run without thinking, fall without blinking - deanwinchesterissaved | E, 8k, Complete

Ryan's eyes have gone dark, but it’s probably just a trick of the light. It's been quite a while since he spoke, Shane thinks, and it really is Ryan's turn to snap something interesting at him. A quid pro quo, if you will.

When Ryan can’t gather himself enough to speak, Shane snaps.

"Don't fucking look at my boner while we fight."

theft by finding - varnes | E, 26k, Complete

Shane looks down at the medallion in his hand. He doesn’t know why he’s kept it, all these years. He doesn’t know why he’s kept it so close, always on hand. He should have sold it years and years ago, but he never quite managed to get around to it, and now here he is, in the burning building that is his whole life, with nothing else.

Over the groaning of collapsing wood, he hears Ryan’s voice: “Shane? Shane? Shane!”

He sounds breathless, like he’s been running. Shane kicks down the cracking front door and exits to the street, tucking the medallion into his back pocket. Ryan is standing right in front of the door, as if he had been about to run inside.

“Tell you what, Ryan, you really know how to make an entrance,” he says, brushing ash off the front of his shirt and hoping that he’s managed to keep most of the bitterness out of his voice. “So was ruining my life once just like, not enough for you?”

OR: don't lie to me, you wanted an Indiana Jones AU.

everything i love gets lost in drawers - beethechange | E, 15k, Complete

“Seriously. No bullshit.” Ryan’s frowning now, his head cocked like he doesn’t understand Shane at all. He’s probably imagining himself on the back of a magnificent steed, crusading into battle, shirtless for some reason because that’s the kind of guy he is. “If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?”

“Not a single thing. Time Scout’s honor,” Shane insists, holding up three fingers. “You don’t meddle with that shit, man. That’s how you end up starting a world war or seducing your own great-great-grandmother or something. I’m not about to return to 2021 and find out I’ve got a jaw like a Habsburg.”

Or: Shane Madej has a funny new t-shirt, a decade of regrets, and a time travel dick appointment, in that order.

The Thrilling Case of the Mysterious Five - MiraclesofPaul | E, 57k, Complete

Shane has spent the last two years arguing with Agent Bergara, a crazy conspiracy theorist and believer in the supernatural. When a woman goes missing, they hit the road to investigate The Five, a cult that chases UFOs around the country.

Or

An X-Files AU if Mulder and Scully initially hated each other and constantly got into unprofessional arguments.

LOST A FIC? CHECK OUT OUR FIC FOUND TAG, AND IF YOU STILL CAN’T FIND IT, SEND US AN ASK!

#fic search #fic found #shyan #skeptic believer #sbbookclub

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asterekmess · 3 years

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S3A - E7

So, I’m starting this episode right after finishing the last one, and I’m still kinda riled up from that bullshit. Let’s get to pissing me off and breaking my heart then. Blood/gore mention warnings for this episode.

Exercise your eyes! Read More!

Let’s just jump right in:

Starting right off with forcing myself into putting the tag in. Scott literally just listened to his mother say that giving this woman something to lessen the pain of her injuries could complicate things and make it harder to treat her. This is like an important medical thing. While yes, it’s really upsetting that she would need to keep being in pain, she needs to be able to identify and explain what exactly she’s feeling to the doctor who is going to be arrive really soon (though I have no idea why the nurses aren’t able to get these people set up. That’s what they did with me? I didn’t see a doctor for like an hour, but they didn’t make me sit in the fucking waiting room before dealing with the blood.) Her pain level will have a direct effect on how quickly she’s seen. This moment is meant to show Scott being soft-hearted, but with the doctor only ten minutes away, he could literally be making this woman’s life a whole lot worse by taking away her pain right now. There is a reason why after I was given pain killers for my surgery I wasn’t allowed to be near any heavy objects. Her pain is keeping her from irritating her wound. She could fuck herself up if she stops responding to the signals her body is trying to send her. This is not the right way to make Scott look kind. He looks like an idiot who doesn’t even listen to his nurse mom.

WHo the FUCK would keep driving with a bunch of bugs in the car? She’s not even on the interstate! PULL OVER IDIOT.

I’m actually agreeing with Scott on this one. I have no idea how medically accurate what melissa just did was, but it look pretty damn cool.

WHat the hell is this conversation? First off, Ethan, you made VERY clear in the last episode that you want to bite Danny even after he said no. Even if that was the possession talking, it was based on what YOU wanted. Danny’s not safe with you. Second, what is this bullshit about knowing Lydia is the important one? Important to Stiles and ALlison maybe. Scott literally never talks to Lydia. THIRD how exactly did you guys come up with that idea when you went after them on the FIRST DAY? You sniff him on them? cus’ if so your noses are damaged.

what...what is with this ghost car shit? She was in the middle of the city, more than ten minutes away from the hospital and behind the traffic caused by the ten car pileup. How did the car drive itself ALL THE WAY here?

Ethan. you’re an alpha. you have night vision. You shouldn’t need to ask what the fucking MOTH in the middle of the driver’s seat is.

HI NOAH! I’ll be honest. I missed you. You’re a really good actor and you just make me feel all safe. WHich is weird bc I hate father figures and I hate cops. Linden Ashby is just too good, I guess.

It’s so frustrating watching Deucalion walk around with humans pretending to be blind. Because he is. He is Pretending to be blind. He’s already proved like a dozen times that he can see just fine when he turns on the Alpha eyes. Which doesn’t make SENSE because Deaton said his iris’ were permanently damaged. He doesn’t have two different sets of eyes! And it sucks, bc they put in these little things that it would’ve been awesome to see if they included an actual blind person properly. The casual use of the cane, taking someone’s elbow and the trust that implies, and even this. Having (that looks like ethan’s coat) Ethan explain what’s in front of Deucalion, describing the scene to him.

DEREK YOUR SECURITY SYSTEM SUCKS. HOW DID THEY DO THAT WITHOUT YOU WAKING UP? WITHOUT CORA NOTICING?

Also, Cora, you look amazing, can you please be my friend and can I hug you? I love your shirt.

I HATE THIS BITCH. Fuck you Julia.

uhh....why is an English teacher filling in for a chemistry/geometry teacher? That’s not how substitutes work. Making a joke out of it doesn’t make it make any more sense. SHe shouldn’t be doing that, especially if Harris has been missing for a while.

So your office can keep werewolves out, but not darach? Okay, let me go full conspiracy theorist here. we only know Deaton saw the moths because we see it. He just tells Scott that he’s going to be taken. This is a story that Scott is telling, so he couldn’t know that deaton saw the moths unless deaton told him. Julia is currently teaching a class. Are you seriously saying she doesn’t need to be involved at all in order to do these kidnappings? She can just put them on a timer and let the autmoatic spellwork do the job for her? OR Is deaton lying about being taken, and this is just a test he came up with to force Scott’s “True Alpha”ness to the surface? JUlia clearly had other plans for her sacrifice. I don’t think Deaton was a ‘distraction’ to keep Scott from finding the actual sacrifice. I think it was Deaton using the situation to his advantage.

why does deaton have a canine acupressure chart on his wall? I’ve never seen a vet’s office have that. Does he do alternative medicine for dogs??

BOYD. ISAAC. MY BOYS. I can’t tell you how much I love this. It’s so sneaky and annoying and so pack-ish I just love it so much.

BOYD YOU ARE A GENIUS BOY AND I LOVE YOU.

I swear, like ninety percent of what the ‘adults’ in this show say is ‘go back to school.’ ‘shouldn’t you be in school’ yadda yadda. Like, they want so badly to write the teens as though they never have to go to class, so they just make them constantly skip and ignore that these are fucking teenagers who would never be able to get out of school that easily, and they handwave it with someone occasionally going ‘hmm, weird that they aren’t in school’ and then just ignoring it? Truancy is like a THING that you can get in major trouble for. At least Boyd and Isaac called in sick. You know how you could have avoided all this class bullshit? PUT THE FUCKING SEASON DURING THE SUMMERTIME DUMBASSES.

It just hurts seeing Stiles beg for Scott not to make him tell his dad, and then turn right around and admit that it’s not okay for him to let other people suffer just because it scares him that he might lose his only parent. Like, he walks into that sacrifice with eyes wide fucking open and it hurts.

I’m not talking about these dumb sex scenes anymore. I’m so tired of them.

OKay, can we talk about the fire alarm thing though? It sounds like a jokey kind of thing with Aiden teasing Lydia about wanting to leave during the fire alarm but... Remember how Lydia was haunted by Peter’s burnt corpse? How she can hear the cries of the dead, and how she went wandering into the crumbling remains of the Hale house? There’s every chance that Lydia remembers the fire through Peter’s eyes. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was forever freaked by fire alarms.

Man, Cora and Lydia, together? The sass involved? If I didn’t ship Allydia so hard, I’d totally ship Cora and Lydia.

ONce again, I wanna point out that AIDEN IS A MURDERER. Literally all it would take is someone Explaining to Lydia that he is serial killer and she’d never touch him again.

Cora and Stiles together? I’m loving it. I just, wanna point out that when Scott showed up Cora couldn’t have given less of a shit. But here....Cora doesn’t remotely question Stiles’ authority here. She immediately goes along with it and when he tells her to let go of Cora she does. Even though she has no real reason to. When she asks about the spirit board, it’s a legit question and she doesn’t argue or make fun.

PLus there’s the whole ‘Well do you know any spirits” which straight up just confirms for me that ghosts and shit are real in this universe. I trust the Hales as lore sources and Cora’s matter-of-fact tone is good enough for me.

jesus christ i wanna get deucalion and Peter in a room together and watch them just...monologue random facts and trivia at each other endlessly. “Lacrosse was originally played by Native Americans.” “Do you know what a metronome is?” Guys. come on.

Exasperated Stiles is literally my favorite Stiles. “We’re trying to save lives here for the love of god” “YOU”RE SOMETHING, OKay? JUST put out your Hand” It’s so fucking good.

Someone EXPLAIN TO ME how Scott learned to do fucking gymnastics. WHEN DID HE LEARN THIS? I hate this bullshit “I’m a werewolf, so I can do anything” shit. Especially since it’s LITERALLY just Scott they let do it. Everyone else has to actually do the work to learn it.

So...how exactly does Deucalion know where Deaton is? This literally just supports my theory that Deaton set the whole thing up.

ALSO, since I already have the tag I feel no shame in pointing out that Scott didn’t even HESITATE when he learned Derek was going to die. He immediately asked about Deaton. Yeah yeah, Deaton is a father figure to him, but if that’s an acceptable excuse for Scott to use now, then it should count as an acceptable one when it’s STILES” FATHER BEING THREATENED (but I digress, we’re not there yet.)

How did I never notice that Lydia’s Left handed?

andd.....how did Lydia know that? How did Scott know that? What did Deucalion say that even remotely hints at Danny? Scott doesn’t know about Danny’s paper...what?

Fuck yeah, vengeful Boyd. I dig it.

uh....why couldn’t allison just stand next to Scott in the closet. you know, like she did while he was getting in? Also, why was Allison hiding with him anyway? It’s HER HOUSE and HER BEDROOM.

um....okay, i know that we all like the sterek fics where they have to hide in the closet and one of them pops a boner...but I’mma be real, it’s a lot more uncomfortable when I know she broke up with Scott and they’ve been in there for like ten seconds. Plus there’s the whole knowing that she DEFINITELY has enough room to move away and so does he. *shrug*

Side note: Allison where the fuck do you get these clothes? THey’re both awesome and...kinda weird? Did you buy that dress in france?

okay, i’ll admit it, i do actually kinda like the camera angle through the map, with the blacklight lighting up the symbols (though the symbols flash on and off a little too fast). It’s kinda cool.

uh, how would taking the picture help? You don’t have the blacklight over it? None of the markings are visible anymore

why does Chris keep walking in and out? AND WHY DIDN”T ALLISON DO THAT THE FIRST TIME?

Stiles in plaid and Converse? Yes. Yes. please. That’s so my aesthetic I’m so fucking jealous. He looks COMFY.

This whole interaction is just so fucking weird XD

But like, why would Stiles know to go through Danny’s stuff instead of just asking him why he might’ve been targeted??

HOW WOULD THEY KNOW TO CUT THE POWER? THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE. Why does the ALpha pack keep showing up with way more information than they should have? It’s so annoying! It’s one thing if Morrell is feeding them information, but she wouldn’t have KNOWN about this! This was a good plan and there’s NO REASON the Alphas should’ve known what Boyd, Isaac, and Derek were doing! What the fuck?

....god i love Derek’s red eyes.

....god i hate that I know where this is going.

....god i wish he’d just let them tear her apart.

I know that it’s meant to be setting up the cora/stiles thing, but I love that she doesn’t hesitate to touch him, and that when she stops him it’s with a very quiet “stop.” She’s really gentle with him, which is just fucking nice. Werewolves taking care to be gentle with Stiles is like...nice.

Since when did Scott know about the plan with Boyd and Isaac? Since when did Stiles know? Is Boyd seriously texting Cora while Derek and Kali are fighting, or did he text her as soon as the power was cut?

is this the first time we see a werewolf bounce off the mountain ash? I mean, I think so, but we also see Peter in S1 try to get past some. There’s no glowing when he comes into contact with the shield. It’s the same with Isaac and Erica in s2. I mean...I guess they’re just trying to upgrade the ash stuff? I gotta say though, I kinda prefered when there were no special effects. It seemed cooler when literally the only thing making it work was belief and having this totally invisible barrier that Peter couldn’t cross. It was cool.

....i think i’m procrastinating seeing the end of this fight. I’m gonna fucking cry.

Why...why does Isaac turn and yell ‘wait’ to Boyd when he was the one running forward to Julia? I am confusion.

Dude, if Alphas could break through mountain ash barriers then Talia Hale WOULDN”T HAVE DIED. THE HALE PACK WOULDn’T HAVE DIED.

I wanna point out here, that this fight between Derek and Kali makes sense for once. Him losing makes sense. We know that the Alphas are much older than they look, or at least Kali, Deucalion and Ennis were. Aiden and Ethan don’t show up in that flashback. ANyway, Kali’s probably in her thirties or forties. SHe’s much older than Derek and she’s been fighting for a lot longer, not to mention fighting to kill.

Seriously, someone get my boy a quarterstaff to knock her feet away.

I really really don’t understand this stuff. Why is it whenever people (I mean Derek, because it’s literally always Derek) get forced to use their werewolf claws/teeth (because again I cannot believe this is happening more than once) he for some reason can’t just...shift back? Retract his claws and fangs? Derek has amazing control, he should totally have been able to do it. With the venom it made sense, he was paralyzed. But now??

What exactly was the fucking point of having Scott break the mountain ash barrier, just to have the sheriff show up and shoot Deaton down? That was literally useless.

also, Noah is an amazing shot. Hot damn.

ALSO. LIterally all this info about true alphas is being whispered to Scott when he’s all alone? How the fuck am i supposed to trust that deaton even ever said that shit to Scott? He could totally be lying about it.

WHAT KIND OF TOTAL BULLSHIT BACKWARDS ASS PLOTLINE IS THIS? After half the season being about Deucalion attacking Derek and trying to get him into the pack, suddenly “Deucalion isn’t after Derek, he’s after you” WHAT? THat’s the STUPIDEST LAZIEST SHIT I’VE EVER SEEN.

and to end my rant BOYD SHOULD NOT HAVE DIED. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? PETER STUCK HIS ENTIRE HAND THROUGH DEREK”S CHEST IN SEASON 1 WHIL IN HIS ALPHA FORM AND THREW HIM INTO A WALL AND DEREK SURVIVED JUST FINE. WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE???

Final Thoughts: No. No, no, no no, no, and no. The ‘plotline’ of this episode is literally like fifteen things that have nothing to do with each other.

Admittedly, there were a few nice moments. Cora, Lydia, and Stiles was an awesome trio. Boyd, Isaac, and Derek was an awesome trio. The sheriff? Amazing. Melissa? A fucking hero. Danny, a genius saint.

All in all, I’m going to tear this episode to shreds in order to rewrite it. Get fucked, Davis.

#personal #anti-scott mccall #TeenWolf-Rewatch

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tackyink · 4 years

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Still holding onto the hope of running out of steam soon so I can work on other fics. In any case, this has a title now. It’s Degrees of Separation.

I hate this chapter solely because in my mind it was supposed to be one, then it got long and turned into two awkward chapters, and by splitting them I was left with this thing in which nothing happens. Why would you want to read this? I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to read it, even though I did. Repeatedly. To edit out all the typos I’m sure I’ve left in. I’m going to put a Golden Sun stream on the background, play Animal Crossing and drown my frustration in Coca Cola. It’s been a long week.

One last detour before Sabaody. Alex is bored, the Heart Pirates reenter the scene, and Law has an “if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” moment.

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

— — — — — — — —

Chapter 3

There was a storm.

Alex didn’t know if it was related to the Aqua Laguna that the ship had set out to avoid or it was simply one of the Grand Line’s meteorological whims, but two days after departure, the noon sky went so dark it was like a moonless night had come down early, the winds picked up, and the waves started to beat against the ship’s hull in an uneven rhythm.

The crew was all over the place, trying to steer the ship and reef the sails as they ushered the passengers inside to keep them from falling overboard. Alex had been caught in bad weather travelling before, but never to this extent. She had a hard time thinking of anything scarier than being at the mercy of a windy sea. Nowhere to run, nothing to do except wait and pray that the waters would take pity on you and let you live another day. Alex wasn’t the praying sort, so while she waited below deck with a group of people as scared as she was, if not more, she couldn’t even do that.

The nervous chatter of the passengers and the parents’ attempts to console their children were muffled by the deafening sounds of the wind, the waves, the creaking wood, and the crew’s rushed footsteps on the deck.

Alex stood the entire time in front of a porthole in the dining hall where they had gathered. It helped with the seasickness from the violent rocking of ship, it was better than to look at the other people, and, ironically, storms were her favorite kind of weather. She wondered what would be worse if they sunk, getting caught on deck and risking being swallowed by the ocean, or waiting for the insides of the ship to become a water tomb. For a long time, or at least it seemed like it, that was the main thought that repeated in her mind, until the possibility of dying felt so remote that she wasn’t even registering. Like when you picked a word and turned it around in your mouth and mind so many times that it lost all meaning. Of course she couldn’t die there. She had never done so before, so why start now?

It was absurd, but it helped. And it turned out to be right, too.

After a while, the storm subsided, and an hour later, the crew let them out on deck again. The ship wasn’t intact, but they hadn’t lost anybody, and that was as much as one could ask for when dealing with an angry sea.

In the end, there was only one major inconvenience: due to the damage, the ship had to change its course in order to dock somewhere safe to undergo repairs.

❦

Her hair had gotten longer to the point of annoyance. The tips brushed her shoulders already; long enough to get in her face whenever it wanted, but too short to tie it in a decent ponytail. Sure, she could have done it anyway, but she was vain and would have rather dealt with the hassle than solve the problem in an aesthetically suboptimal way.

The sunspots on the left side of her face were getting more noticeable, as were the dark circles under her eyes and the shy wrinkles that were attempting to come out. For someone who could spend so much time picking her appearance apart in front of a mirror, she didn’t look particularly healthy or well put together. She supposed that was part of the appeal, in a masochistic way: to find as many faults as she could, and invent some if needed.

Applying concealer under her eyes and red lipstick just for the sake of having some color on her face, she thought she needed to find herself a headband and a healthier pastime posthaste. Porta Bella was a quaint town, but there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment, and she’d had only her thoughts for company for too long.

She had been stuck there for two weeks. After narrowly avoiding disaster, the ship had been moored in the harbor for several days, and by the time it was fit enough to sail, the captain decided to go back to Water 7 to have proper repairs done. The passengers had been given the choice to remain in Porta Bella and find another ship, or to return to Water 7 with the crew. Going back wasn’t an option for Alex when Sabaody was so close that it felt like she could have seen it if she climbed on a tall tree, she didn’t trust a half-baked repair job to keep her safe, and, most importantly, someone had tried to kill Iceburg and Enies Lobby had kind of blown up in the following days of her departure from Water 7.

She didn’t want to think that the tracksuit shipwright had something to do with it, but the conspiracy theorist in her told her that it was totally his fault. That nose? Could totally be used as a murder weapon and nobody would be none the wiser.

The few passengers aside from Alex who had decided to stay in Porta Bella were already gone, leaving the inn she was staying at delightfully empty, but also making her wonder if she had messed up by not taking the first random ship that would let her sail away from there.

The island was small, so much so that Porta Bella was the only town in it, and much of it was empty. For many years there had been a migratory tendency pushing young people from nearby islands to the Sabaody Archipelago, and this one seemed to have fallen victim to it, too. The moderately long recording time of the Log Pose didn’t play in its favor, either. Five days and a half was a long time to wait when the Red Line was only a couple of days away, so not many ships stopped there. An abandoned watchtower in the outskirts of town was the only other notable location.

She left her inn room that morning, picking up a tea to go, and hoping that a good slap of early morning breeze in the face would wake her up.

Every day since she arrived, she went to the port to look for any newly arrived ships and talk to the sailors. Every time, if there was a new one at all, she was told that there were reports of increased slaver activity in those waters, and that they were headed anywhere but the Sabaody Archipelago until Marine HQ got its shit together and stopped the kidnapping crews sailing rampant. Given that the Marines must have been scrambling to recover from the loss of Enies Lobby, nobody thought they were going to get on the case anytime soon.

These series of unfortunate coincidences didn’t surprise her. Her life was often comprised of really small strokes of bad luck that were nothing more than inconvenience on their own, but that added up to really grate on her nerves. This was business as usual, so she just had to keep trying. The temporary finish line was only a stone’s throw away.

Not that human trafficking stopped at any point of the year, but she hadn’t taken into account the seasonal opening of the archipelago’s biggest auction. Thinking that not even the schedule of the Human Auctioning House had changed during her time away gave her a twisted sense of familiarity. That son of a bitch kept finding novel ways to fuck her over without even being aware of her existence. It had to be a gift, for sure.

As she walked to the half empty docks, she hoped that that was the day she lucked out. She had already decided that, if she couldn’t find a direct ship to Sabaody in the following three days, she’d take the roundabout way and sail to a bigger island with, hopefully, a wider variety of ships. She would go completely broke in the process (and there she found the thing that was as terrifying as being caught in a storm at open sea), but one had to crack eggs to make an omelette.

Ten minutes and an empty cup of tea into her stroll, she stopped in front the single newly arrived ship and thought that maybe she hadn’t lucked out, but that sure as hell life was full of weird coincidences. Because there were few submarines sailing the Grand Line, even fewer painted yellow, and she guessed that only one with that particular Jolly Roger plastered on it. Her wish of seeing it up close had been granted when she least expected it, and it didn’t disappoint. It had a curious design, half ship and half submarine. A shipmarine.

Feeling revitalized by the pun, she craned her neck and got on her tiptoes to accomplish nothing at all. She couldn’t see any of the pirates on the deck, at least from where she was standing, and what else was she supposed to do, walk closer to find a friendly face and say hi like a functioning human being would? Yeah, no. She simply stood there and stared like a creep.

The paint job of the thing was hypnotic, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment. It looked like the idea of a man who thought the peak of design was making his vehicle look like a wasp with a decal of the word ‘DEATH’ instead of stripes to look extra edgy. And okay, they were pirates, pirates killed people, it was something that came with the job – but plastering it over the ship like that was a little heavy handed, and she didn’t have any doubts as to which guy with matching tattoos had come up with those brilliant design choices. Come to think of it, wasn’t there a song about a yellow submarine? The one from those singers her mom liked when she was young… Maybe the captain was a fan, too. Maybe they sung it on board. She laughed at the thought.

It didn’t leave her indifferent, that was for sure, and that could count as a compliment, since she had seen a ton of ships throughout her life. Props to Trafalgar Law for standing out among the crowd.

If the pirates weren’t around at the moment, it had to mean they were inside of the ship or already out in town. It was early still, but she was sure it was a matter of time until she ran into them – the town was pretty small, around a hundred, counting sailors, on a good day, news travelled fast, and these guys didn’t dress unassumingly.

With that in mind, she kept an eye out for familiar faces and resumed her unfruitful rounds around the port. Another day, another set of rejections. She tossed her paper cup in a trash can and made her way to the coffee shop where she always had the second tea of the day, sometimes even the third, if she was feeling particularly down about her current predicament.

She placed her order at the counter and waited for it. The owner, a balding middle aged man whose name she didn’t know but who had started to get chatty after she showed up a few days in a row, tried to strike up a conversation while he heated the water. “Did you hear? A pirate crew arrived in town last night.”

Alex wasn’t much for conversation in the mornings, and usually her replies to his attempts were rather apathetic, but the owner had struck gold with this particular topic. “I just saw the ship,” she repeated. “Have they done anything?”

“Not yet,” he replied with the clear implication that they soon would. “But it’s a Supernova’s crew, from what I’ve heard. Their captain’s a scary guy – how do they call him…?”

She had mixed feelings about that. She’d seen scary first hand, and in her experience it came in the shape of kidnapping crews, bubble helmets, or suits and fedoras. And ultimately, it was the fedoras’ fault she was in that coffee shop in the first place.

“Surgeon of Death,” she replied. There was no doubt that with that price on his head he was a walking danger, but after their first encounter, she had a feeling he was more the selective type than the let’s wreck everything in our path kind of guy. Not that his list of attributed crimes would lead anybody to think that. “Do you have trouble with pirates often? Being close to Sabaody and all.”

“Sometimes, but they usually go to more interesting places. It used to be as easy as calling the garrison to get rid of ‘em, but with Marineford so close it’s no wonder no one wants to be here any longer.”

“There used to be Marines here?”

“Yes, at the watchtower in the outskirts, but they left after some of the rooftop caved in. Building’s condemned now. A pity, ‘cause the watchtower’s been there forever, and they’ve let it fall apart.”

“That’s a shame,” she said. “How old’s the tower?”

The water started boiling then, and he turned around to remove it from the fire and make her drink. “Tale goes that it’s old as the stone entrance, but who knows,” he said with his back turned to her. “It’s not like we have any experts to come check.” He slid her the drink over the counter. “In case, try to avoid those guys. A woman traveling alone is an easy target for criminals.”

“Yes, I know,” she replied, putting a few belis in the counter and taking the cup by the handle. “Thanks.”

She chose to sit on the terrace, next to the railing that separated it from the sidewalk, to have a good view of the street. She was in a sort of commercial district, if a main street with a dozen of shops could be called that. Most people who stopped at the island had to pass by sooner or later, so it was the busiest place in town. Not so early, though. It wasn’t opening hours yet.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched like a hawk the man who was monopolizing the only issue of the World Economic Journal and snatched it as soon as he got up to leave, so fast that it turned the heads of the other two people on the terrace.

News of the assault of Enies Lobby had been filling pages for a week already, and that day wasn’t an exception. The Straw Hat Pirates had done the unthinkable, and while in other circumstances Alex might have been watching the situation with amusement from afar, she was also pretty annoyed at them, because their stunt no doubt played into the poor supervision in the waters near Sabaody. On the other hand, she hoped that this also meant that neither Marines nor Cipher Pol would be very invested in finding her in the near future if she ended up a suspect.

She was also a little worried about Iceburg’s condition, but the newspapers hadn’t reported his death, so she had to assume he had recovered from the attempt on his life.

She skimmed over the usual columns prattling about the lack of security at sea and how worrying it was that a whole new generation of rookies with astronomical bounties were about to set foot in the Sabaody Archipelago at the same time. She didn’t think having a handful extra menaces sailing around mattered anymore, considering the state of the world at large, but the pearl-clutching sold newspapers, and she wondered about her sense of self-preservation when she realized with disappointment that, at the rate she was moving, she was going to miss the Supernova meetup in Sabaody. Her curiosity was going to bite her in the ass one day, she thought, before remembering that it already had, and that was the exact reason she was in her current position.

She skim read a few pages looking for interesting headlines, getting to the less important news that didn’t warrant spreads, editorials and pictures that took up half the page, and paled when she read the contents of an unassuming text box.

An unfortunate accident in the island of Harlun had blown up the local library while it was undergoing renovations. Nobody had been hurt, said the write-up, but the building had been destroyed in the ensuing fire and an investigation was still ongoing to determine what had happened. At least she guessed that the last part of the article said so, because she choked on her tea as she read it and spit some of it on the paper, making the ink run.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. Well, it technically could be, but no way she was buying that. The real question was if they’d be able to link the Poneglyph to her, and considering she that she was the person who spent the most time in the archive and she had conveniently left right before construction work took place, she had a pretty good chance to win that lottery. Oh, God, what if her coworkers mentioned that she used to go to the archive on Sundays, alone?

Her first impulse was to bang her head on the table and hide it between her arms, but the surface was sticky, so she ended up regretting it immediately. Instead, she put her elbows on the table, and covered her face with her hands. Her heart was beating loudly and her mind was running wild thinking of possible courses of action. She was on a timer. Getting to Sabaody as soon as possible was a necessity now. If there was a place she could hide, ironically, it was there.

“I see life’s treating you well.”

Alex’s heart tried to leap out of her mouth when she heard someone talk to her from so up close, but one of the perks of being born with a stick up her ass was that she only tensed up when she was startled, so she saved herself the embarrassment of yelping or jumping on her chair. She removed the hands from her face to look at the person, and the sight of a spotted furry hat and a yellow and black hoodie punched her in the eyes.

“Oh, hello,” she said, feeling more relaxed when she realized it was the Surgeon of Death leaning against the balustrade, not law enforcement. Her life had taken a turn for the surreal in a very short time, had it not?

His smirk faltered. “You aren’t surprised?”

“Saw your ship,” she said with some difficulty, and she drank some tea to swallowed the knot that had formed in her throat. Of all the times for him to appear... “Town’s small, we had to run into each other.”

“Hm.”

If she exerted a bit of imagination, she’d say he looked a bit disappointed. Why would he? No idea, but it was funny to think he was, and she was in dire need of funny.

He asked, “What are you doing here? This is far from your island.”

Farther than he knew, she almost said, but that was a can of worms and not relevant in the situation at hand. Feeling too overwhelmed to give long explanations, she handed him the newspaper open by the page she’d been reading. Talking could happen once she arranged her own thoughts, and only then.

“That’s…” He took it from her hands and read for a few seconds. An inscrutable expression gradually morphed into a look of pure indignation. “What’s the meaning of this?”

She was taken aback by the unexpected display of emotion. It was odd to see him react so strongly to something that didn’t concern him. “It isn’t that surprising, considering—”

“How is it not?” He retorted, annoyed. “Sora can’t lose against these weaklings!”

She stared at him in confusion. “What?” she blurted out, realizing afterwards that he was talking about the comic strip at the bottom of the page. And to be fair, she was going to tell him to look further up when the meaning of his words sunk in, but then she was the one leaning over the railing to look at the paper he was holding. “Wait, really? That’s impossible!”

“That’s what I’m saying!”

Upon reading the message under the strip, she complained, “On break until next month?” She sat back on the chair, mumbling, “I don’t even know if I’ll be alive next month,” before taking a sip of tea.

“Summer vacation cliffhanger,” he replied. “And you still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

“Read the news above.”

He looked at the paper again, and his eyes widened the smallest fraction as recognition dawned. That reaction was more appropriate. “Do you think it was…?”

“I’m sure of it. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

“Are you wanted now?”

“I don’t know. They have reason to suspect I knew it was there.” And she added with a bit of humor that she wasn’t really feeling, “If I get a bounty, I’ll say it was your fault.”

“I don’t think that’s going to do you any service.” A smirk returned to grace his features as he passed her the newspaper back. He was clearly amused by her misfortune, and that was the only good thing that had come out of it. “What do you plan to do?”

Alex let out a long exhale through her nose. She wanted to say that there was no plan, but there always was. Planning was something she did obsessively. “I need to get to Sabaody as soon as possible.” It was the only option. She could have elaborated, but again, she didn’t feel like it. Too early, too stunned to talk about serious stuff. Reality hadn’t fully sunk in. “You’re on Sora’s side? Really?”

He frowned at her. He did a lot of frowning, she thought. He was going to get wrinkles young. “Of course I am.”

“But he’s a Marine,” she said, a smile growing on her face despite herself. “Aren’t you one of the bad guys?”

“The Germa are vile,” he retorted, and perhaps realizing he was getting too much into the conversation, he went back to the other, much less fun topic. “Sabaody’s going to be full of Marines in no time, though.”

She was internally screaming, but it came out as a drawn out sigh. “Thanks to you, no doubt.”

“The merit isn’t all mine.”

“I know. You lot have been all over the news for weeks.” He looked awfully self-satisfied when she said that. “I guess you’ll be heading straight there after this place?”

“That’s the plan if there aren’t any stops in between. By the way, do you know how long until the Log Pose sets?”

“Five days, ten hours and twenty-six minutes,” she said blandly, repeating the number she had been told by several people when she first arrived to Porta Bella. It made her miserable, so of course she wasn’t going to forget it anytime soon.

“And the seconds?”

It took her way longer than necessary to realize he was messing with her. “Oh, fuck off.” She returned her attention to the newspaper so she didn’t have to look at his stupid face while he thought he was so funny. “Fishman Island’s right around the corner. Try not to drown.”

“We have a submarine.” He sounded amused still. Alex couldn’t tell if annoying her gave him that much joy or if he was having an exceptionally good day. He was pretty cranky for a while back in Duster Town, but now that she recalled, his mood seemed to improve every time he got one over her. “I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”

“Regular submarines can’t reach Fishman Island.”

He frowned again. “Why not?”

“It’s too deep. They can’t endure the water pressure.”

She could sense the levity from moments ago was gone by the way his jaw set. “But we heard ships can traverse the Red Line through an underwater route.”

“That’s why you go to Sabaody first.” She was exerting a considerable effort to give these really boring explanations that no one was going to thank her for. “You find yourself a good coating engineer to put a resin bubble around your ship and that’ll protect it.”

He seemed to study this new information from several angles before he spoke. “That’s good to know.”

“You’re welcome.”

He gave her a pointed look, but didn’t say anything about the jab. “Is it easy to find one?”

“There’s an entire section of the archipelago dedicated to it. It’s going to cost you, though. And depending on who you choose, there’ll be a waiting list.”

“Really?”

“Good coating engineers are few and far in between, and nobody wants to find out someone did a half-assed job on their sheep five kilometers underwater.”

“That’s…” He made a meditative pause. “…Reasonable.”

“I thought you were going to say something completely different.”

“It sucks too.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. Her life would be so much easier if one didn’t have to jump through thirty hoops to cross that chunk of rock. “In a hurry to get to the New World?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to, either, because she was busy contemplating a new idea that had sprung in her mind. One that she’d rather avoid if she had other options left, and she wouldn’t know until a few days passed, but... this coincidence could prove to be useful yet.

“What?” He looked at her with suspicion.

“Nothing.” And just to get on his nerves a little, she added. “Yet.”

He fixed his gaze on her face, most likely gauging her intentions. Alex was incapable of looking at people in the eye, but she was good at faking it and not flinching under pressure, so she stared back.

“Do I want to ask?”

“I don’t know. Follow your instincts.”

To her surprise, he dropped it and took a step back from the railing. “I need to go back to the sub and see if the others are up already.”

Good. “For someone with a target so big on you, you wander a lot without them.”

“I like taking walks alone,” he said, like he didn’t think much of it. Like he could not fathom how he of all people could possibly be in danger from anybody else. “See you around?”

Was that a wish, a threat, or a pleasantry? “Without a doubt,” she replied, not bothering to hide the tedium in her voice. Damn empty town and damn slavers. “This town isn’t big enough for the two of us.”

She could have sworn he smiled a little at that, but Law shoved his hands in his pockets and made his leave too fast to see.

He was far enough that he wouldn’t hear her if she spoke in a normal volume when she remembered something important, so she resorted to raising her voice before the Heart crew did something they could regret. “Go to the Old Brewery if you don’t want to die! The Silver Fountain serves piss for drinks!”

He turned to look at her with the same curiosity back when she’d told him weapons weren’t allowed in the library, but this time he nodded in acknowledgement before making his exit.

The other customers on the terrace stared at her warily, but honestly, she couldn’t bring herself to feel bad for them even when the owner immediately came out to ask if she was okay and if the scary surgeon had said anything bad to her. At least something interesting was happening.

❦

Alex had a love-hate relationship with heights.

She inevitably got queasy when she was somewhere high up that didn’t have barriers or anything she could hold onto, but that didn’t stop her from going up there, anyway. It was like a very stupid magnetic pull that one day would end with her skull split open.

(It was the wind and the view. She knew that. It was also one of the few options she had to feel taller than most people.

But mostly the wind.)

The stone arch at the entrance of the town that gave Porta Bella its name was surrounded by the remains of a stone wall. First century, she guessed by the roughness of the stone blocks and the bit of mortar she scraped from between when she inspected it for the first time. It was easily over two meters, and only because the topmost part had fallen off. The blocks that hadn’t been taken away for use in newer constructions were still next to the wall, inviting anyone who’d dare to step on them to use them to climb.

She knew she wasn’t the only idiot who had felt the temptation, because the stone was worn from use. She’d also seen kids running at the top of the wall and no one had tried to stop them, and there were worse ways to channel all the nervous energy she had from reading that newspaper article.

She wasn’t a very proficient climber, but the blocks were positioned in such a way that getting to the top was easy as pie. No doubts someone had moved them for that exact purpose. When she was high enough, she threw a leg over the wall, then the other one, and sat facing the harbor.

The wind was nice up there.

She wouldn’t stand on the wall for all the money in the world and getting down was going to be an ordeal, but that was a problem for the Alex of the future.

That day had woken up to four ships in the harbor, counting the pirates’ submarine. Two would go away at the end of the week. The third was leaving that night. No vessels on the horizon.

She sighed. If the pirates were on an adventure, they sure had the shittiest of lucks docking only in the most boring islands the sea could offer.

With nothing better to do at the moment, and trying to delay as much as possible the moment she’d regret climbing that high, she moved towards the shadow of the arch without lifting her butt from the stone and rested her back against it.

She was at a loss. Sailing further away from the Sabaody Archipelago was counterproductive, but so was staying in the same island for too long, since she had no means of protecting herself if something happened. Then again, if she ended up broke before she got to Sabaody, she’d have to stay in whatever island she was to earn money to keep travelling.

All the options sucked. Maybe she needed to sleep on it to see what the lesser evil was. She had, after all, a few days to make a decision.

She looked at the sea, tinted dark green by her sunglasses, in what she assumed was Sabaody’s direction. So close, yet so far away. The skies were clear and the water calm, and though there weren’t any sailors to be found in the harbor, she could see the shadow of a couple of fishing boats in the distance. Wasn’t there a song that went like that? I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay, wastin' time…

She hummed, looking at nowhere in particular and letting her thoughts drift with the waves.

❦

She knew better than to cut through the lawless areas alone when it was getting late, so she had no one else to fault when she split from her group of classmates after spending their free day in Sabaody Park. It was only her and her stupid pride that didn’t allow her to admit that she didn’t think this was a great idea and that she didn’t want to go back to her room alone.

She broke into a sprint as soon as she heard the smallest rustle behind her, and that advantage proved to be essential, because someone started chasing after her. It sounded like more than one person, but she didn’t have time to look or tell how many sets of footsteps were behind her – she just ran like her life depended on it in the direction of the bridge that connected to the next grove, hoping that there would be other people there, and then—

—then she saw an open bar, a lone building in an even lonelier grove.

She rushed inside it, gasping for air so hard that she couldn’t speak, no matter how much she tried to explain to the bartender why she had barged in like that.

It wasn’t necessary.

“Don’t worry, dear, they’ve been hanging around these parts for a while,” she said, leading her to a chair with a gentle hair. “You’re safe here.” Her warm black eyes turned to someone else, and though Alex had trouble focusing on what was going on, she saw an old man with long white hair. “Why don’t you go take out the trash, Ray? They’ve driven off my clientele enough.”

“Sure,” the man replied, getting up from his stool and going outside.

Alex thought it was a horrible idea to send an old man to fight off a kidnapping crew, but that was because she didn’t know these people yet.

“Don’t worry about him. Here,” the woman gave her a glass of water. “Name’s Shakky. Rest all you need.”

❦

Footsteps approached. She shut up immediately.

“I like that song.”

Singing helped when she had too much anxious energy. It was probably related to breathing control. She had stopped anxiety attacks in the making like that sometimes.

It didn’t help at all when someone had been listening in and she hadn’t noticed.

“Oh. Thanks. Um, hi.”

“Hi,” Bepo said smiling. “I heard from Captain you were here.”

Even though she was sitting on top of the wall, Bepo’s head went past it. If he stood on his tiptoes, he could have rested his head on her legs. On one hand, it was a little aggravating that she had to climb so high up only to be marginally taller than him. On the other, Alex was filled with the urge to scratch his ears.

“Yeah, I’m stuck waiting for a ship,” she told him. “Ideally, you wouldn’t have found me here.”

“Oh? Where are you going?”

“Sabaody.”

“Isn’t that very close? How come you haven’t found a ship?”

“There’s kidnapping crews infesting the waters. You know what those are?”

“Uh… isn’t it in the name?”

Alex blinked. “Right. Don’t mind me.”

He fell into thought for a few seconds. “Why are they kidnapping people?”

“To sell. They get auctioned in the archipelago.”

Bepo frowned. “I see.”

“Hey, don’t worry,” she said, smiling for his sake. “Nothing’s going to happen to your crew. You’re strong.”

He beamed with pride. “Yeah, we are! We’ve been training for years to come here!”

Alex mirrored his expression without thinking. “Your Captain said you’ve been friends since you were kids. Did you—”

“Bepo!” Someone called out. “What are you doing?”

“Ah, sorry!” Bepo said, turning around to see the newcomer. “I was catching up…”

A woman with curly hair and a severe expression walked up to them, hands on her hips, and she looked a little confused when she laid eyes on Alex. She was struggling to place her. “Have we seen each other…?”

“On passing. I’m the Duster Town dumbass that opened the library for your Captain.”

“Oh, yeah, now that you mention it—” The confusion was back. “Isn’t this place a little too far from there?”

“I’m running away from justice.” She didn’t offer further explanation.

Bepo didn’t need it. “So are we!”

A barely contained laugh made it past the woman’s lips. “Oh well, if you’re a fellow criminal…” She extended a hand towards Alex. “Name’s Ikkaku. What did you do, keep too many books past the return date?”

“I wish.” She shook her hand. “Alex.”

“So that’s your name?” Bepo asked.

She turned her attention towards the bear. “I never told you?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Wow, I am rude,” she said to herself. “Anyway, hope you’re ready to take it easy, because you have five long days ahead of you.”

Ikkaku groaned. “I don’t mind, but some of the guys get so jittery after a couple days on land. I don’t suppose there’s a very active nightlife in this place?”

“Actually, there are two taverns in the entire town.”

“Oh, that sounds like something to keep ‘em busy.”

“I don’t think you want to go to one of them, though.” She wondered if the captain was going to pass the message or they would come to regret their choices. “There’s also an abandoned Marine outpost right outside of town, if they don’t want to be drunk 24/7.”

“Might be worth checking out, but I’m pretty sure they’ll take the ale.”

“Can’t blame them.” She was tempted to drown her sorrows in alcohol, and she barely ever drank.

She took a look around the desolate harbor, the small houses and the half-fallen wall with a disappointed look. “Well…” she began, “Bepo, we need you for the crates. He’s been waiting and he’s cranky enough already after—”

“Ah! Sorry!” He said, bowing at her and looking more upset than the comment would suggest. Maybe they didn’t treat him as well in the sub as she had assumed. When he turned to Alex, he also bowed repeatedly. “I’m really sorry, but I need to go!”

“Sure, no problem!” she said, making an effort to sound lively. She felt so fake when she did that. So customer servicey. “See you!”

As the pirates left, she tried to look at them in a different light. While it wasn’t too difficult to believe they would be mistreating the mink of the crew, even if they hadn’t been unkind while she was watching. He seemed shy. Maybe that was all there was to it? But the reaction seemed a little extreme. She would pay closer attention from then on.

❦

Her privileged observation point let Alex see a lot of things that day. She saw more of the crew coming and going, though they didn’t seem to recognize her, she watched one of the docked ships depart, and she met a cat that tried to get food from her, but after a good back scratch realized she didn’t have anything else to offer and walked away, leaving a lonesome Alex staring at the hand she’d used to pet it, wondering how many parasites it had come in contact with.

She immediately went back to the inn to wash her hands and get dinner.

The rest of the evening was spent looking at her Poneglyph folder and her mostly blank notebook. She had carried with her the transcript of the stone and copied some documentation from the library that could prove useful in deciphering it, but she wasn’t making any headway yet. Very little was known about the ancient language, even less was published, and she wasn’t a cryptographer. So far, she had identified what she thought were punctuation signs separating sentences and one of the names in the text.

In her years working in Harlun, she had seen centuries old coins from a currency before belis, and some of them had the legend around the rim written in different languages. Meaning, she knew how to write the name of the island in that ancient language. That was about it. She had a feeling the script wasn’t pure phonetic, either, and that wasn’t something she could attempt to tackle without cross-referencing.

Porta Bella was a nice place to spend a short vacation, sure, but it was impossible to find any books that might help. She had tried. The local bookstore only carried best sellers, and she would have bought that vampire novel that was getting so popular if money wasn’t so tight and she had space in her bag, but as things were, she had to fight frustration and boredom alone.

She had to face the fact that she wasn’t going to do anything useful that night, either. She took off her reading glasses, thinking that trying to sleep sounded like the best idea. Maybe next morning she’d finally have some good luck and find a ship that wouldn’t carry her too far from the Red Line.

❦

Too early for words, and wearing a flannel shirt as a jacket because it had gotten windy, she strode out of the inn with her paper cup and a new challenge. She had thought herself immune to monotony before this, but she had clearly overestimated her brain’s capability to get distracted by anything.

Instead of walking to the docks following the main road, like every morning, she made for the wall again. Stepping on the fallen rock, she reached up with her left hand to the top of the wall and placed the paper cup as far as she could from her, and then she climbed up like the previous day. Well, she tried to, because for some reason early in the morning she didn’t have a lot of hand strength, and she felt a stabbing pain in one of her knees when she stretched her leg to reach the wall.

It took two tries and the fear of having lost her first morning tea, but she got where she wanted.

Cross-legged, she sat on the wall and took sips of her drink while inspecting the docks. No new ships in sight. That time there was someone walking on one of the submarine’s decks, but she couldn’t make out their face, and she didn’t know most of the crew anyway.

The wind had driven all the clouds away, and the dark shadow on the horizon reminded her of how close she had been to getting to the New World before she had to reconsider the entire strategy.

She was about to sigh, but she sensed someone near her vicinity even before she heard the crunch of gravel, so she kept it to herself and looked over her shoulder.

That silly hat was becoming a familiar sight. Trafalgar Law looked up at her from a reasonable distance, having just noticed her. Please don’t get any closer, please—

He changed course and went towards Alex, who didn’t bother to hide how little she appreciated the company less than an hour after waking up.

“Morning walk?” she asked, or grunted, depending on who you asked.

“Yeah,” he replied, annoyingly awake. “What are you doing there?”

“Wasting time.”

Someone with a little more tact, or at least who cared about having it, would have taken a hint and left, but this was not the case. “I want to hear more about Sabaody.”

Oh, she wasn’t nearly awake enough for this, but she made an effort to not be outright rude. “Okay,” she relented. “But you ask me questions, I don’t want to think.”

That was good enough for him, it seemed. With irritating ease, and without having to step on the fallen stone, he boosted himself up against the wall and climbed it in a matter of seconds.

Something caught his attention when he looked up, and he stood up on the stone like the concepts of acrophobia and losing one’s balance were but a faraway ping in his radar. Alex’s mood was souring by the second, granted, a likely thing to happen at that hour. It wasn’t personal.

“Is that…?”

She turned to look in the same direction he was.

“Yeah. Red Line.”

“I didn’t think it was so close.”

“It’s a few days away still. It’s just that big.” She thought of the times she’d been at the base. It was impossible to see the top from its bottom. And, considering what lay up there, perhaps it was for the better. “You saw it from the other side, I guess?” North Blue was adjacent to the New World. In a sense, both of them were from the same side of the Line. How weird to think that they had anything in common.

“Yeah. We entered the Grand Line through Reverse Mountain.”

Expected, but incomprehensible to her unless he had a death wish. “Ships sink there every day. What do you want so bad that you’d risk that?”

“Wasn’t I the one asking the questions?” he shot back.

She gave him a deadpan look, then looked at the cup between her hands. It wasn’t doing much to drive away the numbness of her fingers. How many people had gone out to sea since the Great Age of Piracy began and failed because they bit more than they could chew? And they weren’t the only ones dying. For every decent man that got a ship and called himself a captain, there were ten whose only interest was pillaging villages and getting rich. Was that massive chain reaction what Gold Roger had intended with its final speech? Had it been a final fuck you to world order, or was there something else behind it?

She had contradicting thoughts about it. Roger’s last words had unarguably made the world worse, but…

Well.

The guy had been a badass. Even she wasn’t immune to seeing that. With every new pirate crew that sailed to Reverse Mountain to test its fortune, he kept proving how much bigger than life he had been. Twenty years down the line, he had become as much of a legend as the tales of gods from islands in the sky. The kind of legacy a regular person only dreams of having.

He said, I will never die.

He had been more right than he knew.

She looked at Trafalgar with renewed curiosity. “Are you trying to become Pirate King too?”

He didn’t give a clear answer, despite how easy of a question it was. “What if I am?”

It wasn’t a no. A straight yes would get many pirates laughed out of town even in a place like the Grand Line. There wasn’t a lot of room for romantic ideas of piracy when civilians lived in fear of black flags showing up one day at the port and taking away everything they had.

“Just curious.” She wasn’t feeling articulate enough to explain where she was going to herself, much less him. “Nothing wrong with dreaming big.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she felt like she had called herself out. Where was she going? After Sabaody, after crossing the Red Line, after getting to her hometown? Those were only checkpoints. But where was her purpose? Inside the bag she had in her room at the inn, or somewhere else?

An awkward silence stretched along with the horizon. For some reason, he decided not to press her for answers and sat down. A small mercy for Alex’s neck.

“After the Log Pose sets, it will point to Fishman Island. How do we get to Sabaody first?”

It was a relief to be able to give an answer she didn’t have to think about. “It should be visible when you’re close enough to the Red Line. It looks like a random cluster of trees popped up in the middle of the ocean.”

“That’s it? Is it safe to dock anywhere?”

“Mostly. The archipelago is made up of 80 groves. 60 to 69 house a Marine garrison, and that’s where the ferries to Marineford and Mary Geoise leave from, so you don’t want to be there. Other than that…” She had to strain to remember the range of numbers. “20 to 29 is the only lawless area open to sea, so you know Marines won’t go there, but since no one’s keeping watch, the competition might try to sabotage you. I don’t know, I never had to worry about that sort of thing.”

“I’m not afraid of other crews,” he said with that devil may care attitude that got pirates killed left and right. “We haven’t come this far without knowing how to defend our ship.”

She wasn’t going to argue his point. “I’m just saying what I know. You do you.” But she took note to keep her opinions to herself, lest he had the urge to express how full of himself he was again.

He looked at her like he was trying to figure out what sort of hidden meaning her noncommittal response held, but little did he know that behind the sleepy façade her prevailing thought was it’s too early for this shit.

“You said you spent some time in the archipelago.” It wasn’t worded like a question, but it was a way to probe for info. She supposed that she would have wanted to know the credentials of her sources, had she been in his position.

She hummed. “I lived there a few years.”

Taking a sip from the cup, she returned her attention towards the outline in the horizon. It had been a constant part of the scenery back then, always peeking out from behind the trees and buildings of the groves closest to the shore. A grim reminder, on one hand, of those who lived above the peasants, but at the same time, Sabaody had been… fun. There was always something happening. Moderately dangerous, but always entertaining. She had forgotten how that felt after the years of routine in Duster Town.

A question brought her out of her thoughts. “Are you from this area?”

“Oh, no,” she said, surprised that he had even entertained the idea. “No, I got a scholarship to study in one of the World Government’s academies. I’m from the other side of the Red Line.”

“From the New World?” He said with surprise, and mulled over this new piece of information until it fit satisfactorily in whatever picture of her he had constructed in his mind. “So that’s where the accent’s from.”

It was unexpected comment after unexpected comment. “Excuse me?” she replied in an incredulous tone. “You are the one with a heavy accent.”

Now it was him who got caught off guard. “That’s not true,” he retorted. He looked like he was trying to determine if she was pulling his leg.

“Yes it is,” she insisted. “Everybody has an accent. You and your crew have that typical northern one that sounds like you’re about to shank the person you’re saying hello to.”

For a moment, she thought he had offended him to the point of silence. Just for a moment, because he didn’t take long to counter with, “You sound like you’re trying to whisper through a megaphone.”

She snorted with laughter as soon as the words sunk in. It was true that she spoke in a low voice most of the time. “If that isn’t the best description of Dressrosan I’ve heard—”

She felt an immediate change in atmosphere, like an electric current shooting through the air, and shut up as a precaution.

Trafalgar has tensed up all of a sudden and was staring at her like she had grown a second head, like she was trying to set her on fire with a glare, or both. “What did you say?”

She found herself tensing up in return, even though she didn’t know what she had done. But when a dangerous guy scowled at you like that, survival instincts kicked in. Goodbye sleepiness, and welcome life danger. “Um… Dressrosan?” She eyed him warily. “My mother tongue?”

His eyes grew wider, but other than that, his expression didn’t change much. “You’re from Dressrosa?”

She suddenly understood. It wasn’t the first time she got odd reactions when she said where she was from, but it had been a while. “Oh, right.” She sighed. “You’ve heard of the whole Doflamingo thing.”

Or… maybe she was wrong. He seemed a little out of it, like he was looking past her at… who knew what was in his head.

After a few seconds without a reply, she deemed it safe to speak. “Did I say anything wrong?”

“…No. I was just surprised.” After that, he seemed to go back to normal, though his voice sounded a little strained. He was still tense. “It’s a long way there.”

Suspicious. Did he know someone from there? “It’s not so much the distance as having the Red Line in the way. Getting permission to cross it takes time.” And she figured that she had run out of it.

“How’s the country?” He asked in a way that tried to sound casual, and maybe, maybe would have worked if he hadn’t made clear already that he had a particular interest in it. “Being ruled by pirates and all.”

She made a disgruntled sound. She had signed up to answer questions about the Sabaody Archipelago, not Dressrosa. There was a reason why she hadn’t been home in ages. “It’s doing fine. Better than fine, in fact. Economy is booming. People are happy.” She delivered each sentence in a quick, clipped tone. “It pisses me off.”

“Why?”

Because she always had to be the odd one out, she thought. And this guy wasn’t getting the message that she didn’t want to talk about it. “Doflamingo doesn’t deserve that kind of credit. He and his crew should go back to the hole they crawled out of.”

He huffed. “North Blue’s had enough of him already.”

Animosity was dripping from his words, and that made her feel a little less displeased and a lot more interested in what he had to say. He could’ve seen firsthand the repercussions of Doflamingo’s actions there.

“That’s true.” She didn’t know much about the specifics, but there was a reason the North Blue was considered the most dangerous out of the four cardinal seas. “I guess he did a number there before he moved onto the Grand Line.”

“You don’t sound very fond of him either.”

Look at that, a flat out admission of having feelings about someone.

“He’s scum,” she said with more venom than she had meant to. “He dethroned the king only to take over himself, reinstated gladiator fights to death, and he has a trafficking empire. The Human Auctioning House in Sabaody displays his Jolly Roger openly. But he’s a Warlord. As long as money keeps flowing and the Celestial Dragons can buy new pets, nobody seems to care.”

“And you do? You say your country’s doing well.”

She didn’t know whether to reply honestly or not. He was trying to dig deeper than she was comfortable with answering, but she was on a roll already. “Dressrosa used to be a very poor country. I’m not blaming the people who have a better life now, but I don’t think you can build anything stable from corruption. Someone will topple Doflamingo one day, and the country will go down with him.” Her tone was increasingly becoming more determined. “And when the time comes, I hope they get rid of kings once and for all.”

“You lost me at that last part.”

“Monarchy is an obsolete form of government. How’s the world going to get rid of the Celestial Dragons if we can’t even get rid of the pests at home?”

He stared at her blankly, and that was when she realized she had talked too much and looked away from him. Ah, to be a life form capable of fusing with granite and dying in the spot…

She heard a short, muffled laugh, and glanced at him. Great, a pirate making fun of her was exactly what she needed to start her day.

“Can’t say I took you for an anarchist.” He was smirking.

“What part of ‘fuck the government’ was unclear?” she replied, still avoiding to look at him. “The more time you spend near Mary Geoise, the more you realize everything has to burn down. Then there are the Marines.” A lost cause. “It’s even their combined fault that I’m stuck here.”

“What do you mean?” He sounded relaxed again. It was like he hadn’t been acting like a weirdo through the entire conversation about Dressrosa. “Aren’t you just waiting for a ship?”

She took a long breath in preparation to give the same explanation she’d been getting every time she spoke to a newly arrived sailor. “Kidnapping crews are infesting the waters ahead. Normal ships don’t want to go near Sabaody because there’s going to be a human auction next week. Marines aren’t helping because the government benefits from the slave trade, and I assume the Enies Lobby debacle has hit them hard. I already told Bepo you don’t have to worry about it, though. They only attack pirates if they think they’re weaklings.” And trying to change the subject to something that didn’t force her to wallow in her misery, she asked, “How much was it already, Mr. Supernova?”

He looked awfully satisfied with his title. “It’s not Trafalgar anymore?”

“I’ve always liked stars.” And speaking of Bepo, she remembered something from their conversation the day before. “By the way, I don’t think I introduced myself. I’m—”

“Bepo told me. I like Librarian-ya better.”

She had an urge to fling what was left of her tea at him, but she held back at the expense of looking away and letting a strained smile show. Not worth the loss of beverage. It wasn’t going to stop him from being an early morning smartass.

The silence that ensued this time didn’t feel as uncomfortable as before, but that bar was so low, it might as well have been underground.

#degrees of separation #tried to post this draft from mobile and the formatting imploded #why is tumblr so

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flamehairedwritings · 4 years

Text

Reasons

Characters: Chief Jim Hopper x Female Reader

Words: 1,816

Rating: M, 16+ ONLY

A/N: Hello! This has been written for @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan Multi-Fandom Follower Celebration. You deserve all the love and appreciation, lovely!

I was the last person to think this would end up being mildly angst-y, but here we are, lads. My chosen trope was Unplanned Bedsharing and I decided to incorporate a ~choice~ that happened in S3 that I wasn’t too pleased with.

Summary: The end of the world can, as expected, change a lot of things.

Masterlist

Please don’t copy, steal or repost my work; credit does not count.

—

“Pull over at the next motel.”

“No.”

“Pull over, Hopper.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Sooner we get there, sooner we can turn round and get home.”

“It’s late, Hopper. You’re tired, I’m tired, Alexei’s tir—”

“I don’t care.”

Glancing at you as silence looms and finding your eyebrows raised, Jim Hopper attempts to correct himself swiftly.

“I don’t care that he’s tired.”

“Yeah, but I am. Very much so. And so are you.”

After a pause, he then releases a long, irritated sigh and you know you’ve won.

But have you? Have you really?

Hopper’s an ass, everyone knows that, but the past week he’s been even more of an ass, and you’re starting to absolutely despise being near him.

You��d worked at the Station with him for nearly three years now and you’d helped him with all the extra activity the town of Hawkins was unaware of. You’d kept El’s return a secret for him and helped him out with looking after her. You’d do anything for him, and you got the feeling he would for you, too.

Oh, and over the years, too, feelings had started to develop.

You like to think they were also reciprocated because not one month ago Hopper had asked you out for a drink, just the two of you. Then, after agreeing you’d both like to do it again, you’d finally managed to get your schedules to match up and last week you’d gone on a proper dinner date. It had been... wonderful.

You’d realised as you were sat there, sharing a bottle of wine and laughing with him, that those two dates were the first time you and he had just talked of normal things, no work, no end of the world business involved. It had been... really wonderful.

But then end of the world business had reared it’s head again and here you are, sat in the passenger seat of a car that is carrying you, the Chief of Hawkins and a Russian neither of you can understand to the home of a conspiracy theorist.

And you’re starting to hate Jim Hopper.

You’d seen him angry before, seen him raging, seen him distraught, but this was different. This was constant, unchanging, and you hated it. You could never say the right thing, it was like he was irritated to be around you. Several times you’d considered just walking away, but this was bigger than you or he. People were in danger, once again, and it was your duty to fight the danger.

So, you’d put up with Hopper, silently vowed to yourself that you’d just go back to a professional, friendly relationship, and that would be it.

You’re so relieved when a motel sign glows in the distant and he actually turns into it.

Finally, some peace and quiet and space.

You’ll insist he and Alexei share a room, I’m so sorry, you poor guy, and get one to yourself and just relax. As much as you can, anyway.

The thought of finally being alone helps you to hold your tongue as Hopper mutters under his breath after parking up and steps out, slamming the car door shut. You step out, too, and watch silently as he half-drags Alexei out of the car, the poor man blinking sleepily.

Don’t say anything, it’ll just create an argument that you don’t have the energy for.

You lead the way as the three of you head inside the quiet motel to the desk.

A man behind it looks up, unsmiling.

You, to make up for it, widen your smile.

“Good evening, we’d like two rooms,” you say quickly, before Hopper can speak.

The man glances between you all. “Sorry, miss, we only got one room.”

Are.

You.

Fucking.

Kidding.

Me.

Your smile stays fixed in place. “Right. Well. Okay.”

“We’ll just head on to the next one—” Hopper starts to say but you will absolutely not have that. This is your win of the week, as small as it is.

“Nope. One is fine. Thank you very much.” You damn near slap your hand down on the desk you’re so forcing your joviality.

The three men look at you, Alexei probably only because the other two are, but you just continue smiling.

I’d better damn well fall asleep straight away.

—

It’s the smallest room you’ve ever seen.

You can just about squeeze between the end of the double bed and the wall to get to the bathroom. After you’ve exited it, Hopper hoists Alexei up from where he’d been nearly asleep on a chair and marches him to the bathroom.

You watch as he points at the bathtub and says, “Get in”.

Alexei looks at him, then the tub.

“In,” Hopper orders, thrusting his finger at the tub again.

Alexei doesn’t say a word as he climbs in and settles down, his eyes instantly closing.

Sympathy surges within you.

Hopper emerges from the bathroom, closing the door, and runs a hand down his face.

Maybe she did have the right idea about stoppin’. Couple of hours would be nice.

He looks up at you to admit as much, the beginnings of a smile forming, when his gaze meets yours boring into him.

“What?”

“What’s going on?”

“Huh?”

“Why are you being such a dick?”

His eyebrows shoot up and irritation, fuelled by weariness, rises within him. “Excuse me?”

You’ve started so there’s no way you’re going to stop, looking at him almost in disbelief. “You’re being such an asshole, Hop. You’re just yelling all the time and a lot of it’s at me.”

He lets out what sounds like a faint scoff. “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way—”

Your voice rises instantly in indignation. “What kind of a fucking apology is that?”

“I’m trying, okay—”

“No, you’re not. You’re just so angry all the time, you’re like a child who can’t control himself. It’s not like this is fucking new to us, Hopper, we know how to deal with this—”

“That’s why I’m so fucking angry!” he shouts above you, his voice cutting through the air. You freeze, staring at him as he continues. “I want this to be over. I want to wake up in the morning and not wonder how my kid is going to be in danger! I want all this to just go away!”

For a moment, you’re stunned into silence.

A reason... but not a justification.

Licking your lips, your mouth opens then closes for a second as you consider your words. “I feel the same way, Hop. I’m worried about everyone, too, I wake up so anxious of what’s going to happen every single day but... I’m not yelling and taking it out on you or anyone else, am I.”

He looks at you and you have no idea what he’s thinking.

Shrugging, you look away and shake your head. Rage or silence, that’s all you get these days. Suddenly, you realise how exhausted you are.

“Anyway. I just wanted to get that out,” your voice is quieter as you kick your shoes off, not wanting to look at him now. “We’ll talk about it another time, I’m too tired for this now.”

You move to the bed and climb in, turn your back to him and close your eyes. You don’t care if he joins you or not. You just want to sleep and, yes, for this to be over, too.

You don’t know what the next day is going to bring, you haven’t for a long time. Hopper had always been the only constant, and now he, too, is unstable, loose, wild. You hadn’t wanted to admit that for a while but now...

Please just sleep.

Holding the covers under your chin, having to stop yourself from pulling them over your head, you just focus on your breathing. A minute probably passes before you hear him move, quietly. It sounds like he removes his shoes then removes things from his pockets, gently placing them down on the bedside table furthest from you.

You hear the light click off.

The bed covers rise off of you, the mattress dips slightly behind you and the covers fall again.

He soon warms the bed.

This is what every night of my life could have been like.

You don’t know where the thought comes from.

You don’t like it. You don’t like the regret that follows it and threatens to take over your mind.

Stop wallowing. It isn’t helpful.

“Are you cold?”

The question startles you, making you jump slightly, your eyes snapping open. Clearing your throat, you adjust your head on the pillow.

“No.”

“Good.”

You don’t respond, closing your eyes again, allowing the silence to stretch.

“You sure?”

You don’t open your eyes this time.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

He seems to take the irritated hint. Or so you think for exactly five seconds.

“I’m sorry.”

You open your eyes, staring at the thick curtains covering the window across the room.

“I know.”

“No, really, I am.”

“I know you are.”

“I just—”

“Can we just leave it.”

Please, not now—

“No, I—” He exhales a breath and you pause, waiting. He clears his throat after a moment. “... You mean somethin’ to me.”

You think you stop breathing.

“You mean a lot to me, actually,” he continues, his voice low, quiet, “and I... I don’t want anyone else I care about to get hurt.”

You bite at your lower lip, keeping your gaze fixed on the curtains.

Don’t give your heart again.

“You don’t continuously yell at people you care about,” you murmur.

“I know, I know... I...” You hear him exhale again, an edge of frustration to it this time, but you get the feeling it’s not directed at you. “I don’t... feel like myself right now. I know that’s not an excuse, I know I can’t say anythin’ that’ll take away what you’re feelin’ but... I... I just want you to know I’m sorry and I’m gonna try harder. At being better.”

You swallow hard.

You don’t know what to say. You don’t want to make promises or to hear them. You don’t want to fight. You don’t want to feel alone anymore.

You don’t want to give up on him, either.

Without a word, you draw your hand out of the covers and reach it behind you. There’s a pause. Then, you feel his hand gently take yours. As soon as he does, you lace your fingers together and pull his arm around you.

You ignore the quiet, relieved breath he exhales.

Don’t put any stock in it. Or hope.

To your own relief, though, he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he just shifts a little closer, his head above yours, and tightens his arm around you. You close your eyes, just letting his warmth and hold soothe you, for now.

The end of the world and expectations can wait for a night.

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#star's multi fandom follower celebration #chief jim hopper #jim hopper x reader #chief jim hopper x reader #jim hopper #david harbour #stranger things #stranger things fanfiction #still in my feelings about a lot of s3 #flamehairedwritings #my writing

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wordsbynathan · 4 years

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Character Profile: Neil Grant [The Psych Quartet]

Protagonist • 18 • Libra • INFJ • Fire {disaster gay//literal flaming homosexual//nature photographer//amnesiac with a desire for Justice™//often angery//mommy issues//impulsive as h*ck} [Character Tag]

Neil is a driven and compassionate person, stripped of his identity and seeking answers. His life has been split into Before and Now, which leaves him reeling, detached. He can be overly sensitive and a bit insecure, but he makes up for it in his desire to do what is right and to see the underlying beauty in the world. Though he can't remember anything about his past, he often finds himself viewing his surroundings with a photographer's eye, and he finds himself particularly drawn to the flora in the rooftop garden of Harmonium. Neil possesses a natural charm that comes through despite his capriciousness, and in his quest to uncover the truth, he finds himself drawing unwanted attention that could endanger his life in this new world.

So. Where to start with my literal biological child, Neil Grant, love of my life...

Neil’s got it rough. He wakes up in a cluttered office that reeks of coffee and some preppy French professor-looking guy tells him that his mom is dead and he’s also a superhuman. He’s had better days okay?

At first, he really struggles to adapt to this situation. After witnessing some senseless violence in the middle of his orientation, Neil is basically forced to accept the reality of his situation. It also helps that his roommate is super hot. So he says “frick it” and sticks around, because he’s got nowhere else to go (his dad is the major suck and hates superhumans; one of his mother’s final commands is that Neil be kept from his dad after his powers manifest).

The thing is, because his identity is basically erased, he’s looking at the world through a fairly unbiased lens. He sees things for what they are, and he starts to realize that there’s something sinister going on behind the scenes at Harmonium. Through some snooping and bits and pieces of word of mouth, Neil starts to put together a theory that people like him are being targeted by the weaker but larger population at Harmonium, and someone close to him could potentially be at the helm of that movement.

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Neil emits a single laugh, a sound closer to choking, and then he’s laughing, really laughing, doubled over and holding onto his own knees for fear of his body shaking apart, and once he’s able to stop and take a breath and wipe a tear away from his cheek, he says “That’s fucking hilarious,” because people don’t say things like that, and people shouldn’t say things like that to fragile boys who don’t know where their lives have gone.

Enough about the plot though, let’s talk about Neil as a character. In his past life, his Before, he was a nature photographer and a total nerd (and therefore can recite any plant’s Latin name should you need him to). He’s typically pretty soft n cute, but when you get him going his temper can really boil over--one of the downsides of being a Fire Psych.

He can be like a dog with a bone when he has a theory, to the point of pissing off everyone around him. The thing is......he’s usually right?!?!? LMAO!??!!? But he’s not the type to drop “I told you so”s even when this is the case.

Neil tends to be impulsive; he likes to keep people on their toes, and sometimes he surprises even himself when he makes these split-second decisions. Not particularly interested in preserving the preexisting social order, Neil falls in with a small group of fellow queer students who guide him through the start of his schooling. He also breaks a few hearts along the way, but it’s only out of self-preservation.

One thing about Neil: he’s a very naturally gifted Psych. His mother is infamous in the Psych community for being one of the most powerful Elite agents in years, and right from the start, Neil has the student body of Harmonium wondering if he’s going to move in and fill her recently empty shoes. He very quickly grows into his abilities, though he has qualms about using them and their potential for destruction.

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Neil draws his hands to either side of his body and holds on to the tips of each flame, allowing them to expand outward into twin ropes. He cracks them against the pavement, which launches a flurry of sparks above him. With another intentional breath, he freezes the sparks into a glittering dome, each minute star whirling in place.

Neil two major physical idiosyncrasies: the first is that whenever he feels anxious, he can’t help but chew the heck out of his bottom lip. Shit’s always chapped and gross but there are at least two (2) boys who wanna kiss him anyway??? The other is his hair; like his mother, he was born with odd gray-blond locks, the color of ash, like someone took golden hair and turned the saturation all the way down. Neil’s 5′8″, a textbook twink, and a big fan of comfy clothes and anything pastel.

Aside from being a complete conspiracy theorist (#TeamMyMomIsn’tReallyDead!!!), Neil is fairly easygoing and is really just searching for some purpose in this chaotic world he’s been thrown into. In the first book of this series, we see him come to terms with who he is. The rest of the series follows Neil and explores the conflict as he accepts what he must do.

[Tag list below! Feel free to ask to be added/removed :)]

@infinitely-empty-pages @dustylovelyrun @oddsandinks

#wip: burned #series: tpq #oc: neil grant #character profile #oc #wip #writing #mine #writeblr #writeblr character #writeblr community #idk if any of those tags actually worked oh well fuck my drag i guess #like the user tags i mean

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yourfaveisyanderematic · 5 years

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I hope you are ok with all of us obsessing over PIB. It's a really amazing stand you are super talented. I'd love to see any others you might have made!

Paint It Black is babey as fuck and I’m so happy it’s been so well received! I’m actually really attached to it; I discarded this concept bc it wasn’t in theme for the blog content, but there was going to be a period where it bullied the shit out of its user because it was being subconsciously rejected and hated that. I had this whole emotional scene thought out where the user finally apologized to it and accepted what it represented, letting them use the full extent of PIB’s abilities.

Here are some Stands I haven’t used in oneshots yet, but will eventually:

[TAME IMPALA]: A Stand based around the power of teleportation. I don’t have a real appearance for it, but one of the inspirations for it was one of those corkboards conspiracy theorists use; I like to imagine it’s got stylized thumbtacks and thread that are a visual indicator of what its power is currently being used on. I imagine this Stand user on the run from Passione for Bastard Crimes, and giving whoever’s chasing them a hard time >:)

TAME IMPALA’S Let It Happen: One of TI’s ten pins (one for each of the user’s fingers) attaches to the object the user is currently touching. Once the connection has been successfully made, Let It Happen has no maximum range, and the user can recall the touched object to themselves regardless of distance. Objects recalled in this way will usually have their contents intact, and things that are only touching them will not be carried along; you can use this to steal wallets without worrying about dragging their owners a mile away from where they started, for instance. Once Let It Happen is recalled, the pin is undone, and the user must reapply it. In addition to bringing pins to themselves, or themselves to pins, the user may connect a pinned object to another; this can be used to teleport a prisoner to a holding area, or a weapon to an ally.

TAME IMPALA’S The Less I Know: Two of Tame Impala’s ten pins, already applied to objects, become locked together. If this is applied to a hand and a wall, that hand physically cannot leave the wall; this can be used pretty effectively in a fight! The user must be careful about where on the object they apply the pin, however, because the pins will be in physical contact until dispelled.

While Tame Impala has next to no offensive capabilities on its own, a sufficiently imaginative user can do some real damage, especially to someone unfamiliar with it…

[MAN AFTER MIDNIGHT]: Requires an electronic capable of transmitting sound to inhabit; its user may prefer a cell phone for portability, though it has uses in something like a jukebox or car radio. Man After Midnight’s primary ability is to ‘tune in’ to conversations happening elsewhere, but they must be happening over or near an electronic device. Its user cannot consciously target a particular conversation or person to listen to, but Man After Midnight always provides information that is either desirable or immediately useful, even if its significance isn’t immediately obvious. Once captured in this way, Man After Midnight can replay a conversation on command, though only other Stand Users will be able to hear it.

Though the Man After Midnight almost never speaks except in the replayed voices of others, it does have a voice of its own: a 50s-style radio host on a channel that doesn’t exist, coming on only to give extremely vague ‘horoscope readings for the discerning and adventurous’. “Check your corners twice today, Scorpio! You’ll only see it the second time.”

[APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION]: This one I picture more as a villain’s stand than the reader’s, but who knows? AfoD appears once a connection of ‘Karmic Debt’ has been made; once the victim has successfully ‘accepted something’ from the user, its effect comes into play. Like Tame Impala, it has a couple of interesting functions.

AFOD’s Mr Brownstone: Physical damage or other health conditions (drunkenness, illness, drug highs) are transferred from one to the other. If Mr. Brownstone heals its victim by transferring damage to the user, the ‘Karmic Debt’ increases, and decreases if vice versa occurs. Because AFOD can affect multiple people simultaneously, its user can keep all of them ‘in debt’ by strategically giving and taking this damage.

AFOD’s Rocket Queen: Those ‘in debt’ to Appetite For Destruction’s user can be compelled to do things within their ability; you can’t force a regular person to scale a skyscraper, but the request is valid if they have a Stand ability that would allow them to. Refusing or resisting Rocket Queen can cause ‘interest’ to be added to their Karmic Debt, though Rocket Queen cannot physically force them to obey. (Given what Mr Brownstone can do, though, reducing your Karmic Debt as much as possible is advisable!) Successfully completing the order will reduce your debt to AFOD by a certain amount, though it’s very possible to accrue even more debt by needing healing or something over the course of the mission.

Appetite For Destruction’s power ends when the victim has successfully ‘repaid their debt’ to the user, though given that this is intended for a shady mob boss or loan shark, that can be very difficult to do.

#writing haze feedback #Paint It Black Adoration Hour

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not-close-to-straight · 5 years

Text

No Time Between Us (One)

Welcome (back) to the story! This is the sequel to TIME FALLS AWAY and picks up after the Battle for New York. This will be long (seriously, buckle up, this is gonna be a big fic) and feels-heavy, definitely have some sexy times, and of course, that patented Happily Ever After so stay tuned!

NTBU MASTERLIST

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Six weeks after the Battle of New York, after Loki had marched his minions through the wormhole to rain literal hell down on the streets and the newly named Avengers had suited up and fought back, the city had recovered in the way that only New York could.

The streets were as loud as they had ever been, packed full of cabs, the sidewalks choked with people. Everyone was trying to put their lives back together, the government scrambling to help with the clean up, schools reopening and the markets recovering. Temporary memorials were erected for the ones that had been lost, plans for more permanent ones in the works. Documentaries both professional and amateur flooded YouTube and the local cable channels as the city tried to cope with all they had learned in so short a span of time.

Aliens.

Wormholes.

Super-powered humans.

Science that was nearly magic.

Gods.

The city’s churches had record attendance numbers, and so did the bars. There was a new end-of-times scare every week, preachers on soapboxes warning that Loki had only been the pre-runner of the Anti-Christ, conspiracy theorists shouting about experimenting on humans to create super spies and how the Hulk was actually a mild mannered janitor who worked for Stark Industries. There were rallies for the Avengers, protests against the Avengers, all the day time talk shows could discuss was how the hell and what the hell and oh god would it happen again.

As CEO of Stark Industries, Pepper had her hands more than full with the fallout from the battle. There were press conferences and board meetings and interview after interview after interview. Phone calls to answer, emails to write, checks to hand out to various relief organizations.

Now that SHIELD was decidedly less incognito than it had been only a few months ago, Nick Fury was a constant presence in Pepper’s life, showing up at inopportune times, being silently but shockingly judgmental with his one good eye, asking vaguely worded questions that Pepper couldn’t possibly know the answer to.

The Stark Tower had been renamed the Avengers Tower just few weeks previous. It was a joke originally, an offhand question from a bubbly-but-annoying TV host about how long it would take before the Tower had Stark written all over it again. Tony had bared his teeth in what was hardly a smile and retorted, “Well, maybe the A stands for Avengers.”

It had been a joke, but the idea had gained traction and popularity and Tony had only rolled his eyes when Pepper suggested converting some of the extra rooms into living quarters specifically for the other team members.

“Whatever you think is best, Ms. Potts.” He told her. “I can always go to the Malibu house if I decide I hate my roommates, right?”

Bruce moved in almost immediately, and an empty room was set aside for Thor. Clint and Natasha worked for SHIELD full time so they were rarely at the Tower anyway, and Steve was usually gone right along with them.

In fact, for all the people that lived there now, the Tower was almost eerily quiet most days, quieter than it had been when it was just Pepper and Tony living there, and it was unsettling for a reason that Pepper couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“Welcome home, Ms. Potts.”

“JARVIS.” Partly out of habit, partly because she was just a delightful sort of woman, Pepper smiled up at the ceiling as she stepped from the elevator. “Thank you, it’s always a relief to kick my shoes off at the end of the day. Is Tony home?”

“He hasn’t left the lab all day.”

“Right.” Pepper closed her eyes for a brief second. “Of course he hasn’t left the lab. Has he eaten at all? Or Is he at least playing music?”

“No, though I have suggested he do both of those things several times.”

“Thank you, JARVIS.” Unclipping her hair, Pepper ran her hand through it a few times before shrugging out of her suit jacket and heading back to the elevator. “Take me to the lab, please?”

******************

******************

“Ms. Potts is on her way.”

“Thank you, J.” Tony cleared his computer screens with a few key strokes and turned around in his chair with a ready smile when Pepper came through the lab doors. “Honey, you’re home early.”

“Tony, that sounded remarkably fifties housewife, have you been watching Leave it to Beaver reruns?” Relieved to at least see a smile, even if it was a fake one, Pepper bent to kiss his cheek. “JARVIS says you haven’t eaten today?”

“That is categorically untrue, I had beans for lunch.” Tony forced the smile a little bit brighter. “Coffee beans ground up and ran through water with a smidge of creamer counts as eating beans, right?”

“You are a disaster.” she sighed, but snuggled into his lap anyway, noticing but not commenting when Tony tensed before relaxing a little around her. “I ordered dinner on my way home for us. From that new place you liked so much before you know--” a wave of her hand. “Before all of this.”

“What would I do without you to feed me.” Tony put both his arms around her waist, then tucked his forehead into her shoulder, breathing in her strawberry scented shampoo and hoping she wouldn't notice the tremble in his hands.

“Tony.” Damn she noticed. “Tony, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Tony held her tighter. Please please let it go. “I’m fine.”

“We need to talk about it.” she pressed gently. “It’s been almost two months now and you won’t talk about anything that happened in New York. Or Germany for that matter. You won’t talk about the team or SHIELD or--”

“I don’t need to talk about it.”

“You haven’t left the Tower in almost two weeks.” Pepper tipped his chin up, peering into the dark eyes. “You snuck out almost every night for a few weeks, and then the last morning that Captain and the others were here, you stopped leaving, stopped going outside almost altogether. You had that one interview and nearly bit that poor woman’s head off when she asked about the Stark letters, and now I have to tell everyone that you aren’t available for comment. We need to talk about this.”

“Are people saying I’ve gone crazy?” Tony swallowed, knowing Pepper could see the panic in his eyes. “They thought I was crazy after Afghanistan, they probably really think so now, huh?”

“No one thinks your crazy, Tony.” Pepper denied, gathering him close again and winding her fingers through his hair. “But they are worried about you. I’m worried about you.”

“Pepper, you don’t have to be--”

“Why do you look so lost, Tony?” Quietly, whispering the words into his hair. “It’s like when you came home from Afghanistan. Sometimes I’d look up and you would look so lost, like you didn’t know how you’d gotten home, like you didn't know that you were home. You’d talk about things as if they had just happened and I’d have to remind you that it had been months ago. It was like you were lost and it scared me, but at least I understood that time. I don’t understand this time.”

Tony was silent, and Pepper hummed something nonsensical and comforting before whispering, “It’s like you fell from that wormhole, but you didn’t come back all the way. Something of you is missing and some days I’m afraid you left it up there in space.”

“I didn’t leave anything in space.” I left it in the past. “I don’t want you to worry about me, Pepper.”

“Anthony Edward Stark, I’ve worried about you since my very first day on the job and I’ll worry about you even when you’re old and decrepit racing around in your Iron Man colored wheelchair.” She nudged him lightly, hoping to get at least a chuckle, but Tony didn’t answer.

“I’m here if you want to talk, Tony.” she finally said. “I need to clean up, and then we’re going to eat some dinner and just watch a movie together, alright? But I’m here if you want to talk.”

“Thank you.”

Tony didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to talk about any of it. He didn’t want to talk about the battle, he didn’t want to talk about the wormhole or how he fell. He didn’t want to talk about Steve and the fucking ice cream, he didn’t want to talk about anything.

But a movie and holding hands sounded doable, so Tony pulled himself from the lab and into a shower with Pepper. Dinner was probably edible, but it tasted like sand so Tony pushed it away after a few bites. The movie was something romantic and sweet and they both teared up at the end when the couple was reunited and in love and dancing to their favorite song, but Tony knew they were crying for different reasons.

“I love you Tony.” Pepper whispered when they crawled in bed, leaning close to kiss him sweetly, and Tony kissed her back and then lay down for another night of staring at the ceiling.

This was fine.

He was fine.

It was two-thousand-twelve, the arc reactor sat snug in his chest. Steve was Captain America, off to do his patriotic duty with SHIELD and James Buchanan Barnes was the only Howling Commando to not come home from the war. Missing in action, presumed killed in action, or at least that’s what the display at the Smithsonian said.

It was two-thousand-twelve and he was home and this was how it was supposed to be.

Tony lay on the bed and listened to Pepper breathe, and didn’t let himself think about the strip of pictures hidden in the very back of his very bottom drawer, the pictures of he and Bucky that had no business existing, but definitely did.

It was fine.

He was fine.

******************

******************

“You’re not fine.”

A week later, and Tony had slept in his lab the past three nights, hadn’t eaten in two, and was sitting staring blankly at the same screen he’d been staring at for hours.

“Tony.” Pepper was crying, a hand over her mouth as she tried to keep herself together. “You’re not fine. Please please just talk to me. Tell me how to understand what you’re going through. Is it-- is it nightmares like after Afghanistan? We can go to a therapist, we can see a counselor, just tell me how to help you. Or tell me--” she gestured around the lab, to the suits that hung in alcoves in the wall, the gear scattered around. “--tell me how to do this. Give me a way to go through this with you.”

“Pepper.” Guilt, rising like bile in his throat and choking him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” She shook her head adamantly. “You don’t have to be sorry, Tony. I don’t understand this, I don’t know where to start but I want to help you. Let me help. Stop pushing me away.”

“You want to help?” Tony didn’t mean to sound so harsh, but he couldn’t help himself, the frustration of the past weeks turning the words cruel. “Come here and watch this video with me, tell me what you see. If you can explain this, that would help. That would help lots. Much more than movies and counselors and--”

Pepper flinched away from the anger in his tone and Tony bit back a curse, stopping whatever else he was going to say and holding his hand out to her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout at you. I didn’t mean to say all that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.” She brushed off his apology, but her hand was shaking a little when she lay it in his, letting him pull her closer. “You’ve been stressed and not feeling like yourself. It’s understandable that you’re a little on edge.”

“Understandable doesn’t make it right.” Tony muttered. “I’m sorry. Please just look at this for me.” A few clicks on his computer and a video came on, nothing but blue sky in the lenses. “Help me make sense of this.”

“What is this?” Pepper wiped her eyes and squeezed at his hand. “I don’t understand what I’m looking at.”

“When I’m in one of my suits, JARVIS is constantly recording everything.” Tony pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling another migraine coming on. “And if the camera is compromised for some reason, the suit still keeps track of my vitals.”

“Okay?” Pepper felt around for a chair and sat next to him, close but not too close, and Tony hated that he was grateful for the space. “So what am I looking at?”

“This is the camera feed as I was taking the bomb through the wormhole.” Quiet, the words unsteady. “The nuke is on my back, in a second here I’m going to get through the hole and into space.”

“Oh my god.” Pepper’s green eyes widened in alarm. “Tony, have you been watching this over and over down here? This can’t be good for your--”

“Just watch.”

Pepper gasped out loud and Tony cringed away when aliens filled the screen, growling and shrieking and making all those horrible noises they had made. Space was supposed to be quiet and it was supposed to be empty, but the camera feed wasn’t empty at all. There were so many of them, aliens and machines coming from every which way and all headed towards Tony and all headed towards Earth.

It was horrifying in a surreal sort of way, realizing just how close they had all come to being wiped away, and Pepper’s face washed pale as the bomb left Tony’s hands and headed towards a massive spaceship. The screen flickered and stuttered and then there was a blinding white flash as the nuke detonated.

And then nothing.

Nothing.

“I’m falling.” Tony’s voice cracked when the screen went black. “I’m falling right here. Falling through the wormhole right towards the pavement.”

“Tony.”

“I don’t have any footage of me falling, JARVIS was offline.” A different screen full of numbers on the computer now. “This is how fast I was falling, how much the armor weighs, the added weight of the nuke, all that sort of thing.”

“Why do you need to know this?” Pepper turned to look at Tony, but he was staring at the computer, unwilling-- or maybe unable-- to meet her gaze. “Tony, why is this information important?”

“This is how much my armor weighs with me in it before I get ahold of the bomb.” Tony pointed to a time stamp, and then the weight that followed. “See that?”

“Alright?” Pepper couldn’t shake the feeling that Tony was about to tell her something terrible, but she didn’t let herself pull away, only held onto his hand tighter so he would know she was there. “What else?”

“Here is where I get the bomb.” Another set of numbers, these ones quite a bit larger. “My speed increases here as I start heading towards the sky, the extra weight is the nuke, my power reserves are running low because I’m converting all my power to flight.”

“What’s this?” Pepper ran her fingers along a different line. “A phone call?”

“I tried to call you.”

Tony’s voice was flat, but he could have been screaming the words and they wouldn’t have hurt any less. “You tried to call me?” she whispered. “I was on the plane, I didn’t hear my phone, I--”

“It doesn’t matter.” Tony interrupted. “I survived, we talked on the phone a few hours later, it doesn’t matter.”

It mattered, Christ it mattered, but Pepper let it go, hearing the strain in Tony’s voice. “Okay then. Tell me what else I’m looking at.”

“I let the nuke go right here.” A tap at the screen. “And here is where I start falling, see the weight amount?” Pepper nodded and Tony kept going to the next line. “That’s me, I’m falling. And then fifteen seconds later my armor weighs 174 lbs less, and then forty seconds later, the weight goes up again. For less than a minute, my armor was 174 pounds lighter than it usually is.”

“I--” Pepper frowned. “I don’t understand. That’s how much you weigh, right? Why does the equivalent of your weight disappear from your suit? How did you--- how is this--” She blew out a deep breath to calm herself. “Tony I feel like you’re doing that thing where you ask me a question but you already know the answer and I don’t, so could you just tell me what happened? Because it seems impossible that your entire body weight disappeared from your suit.”

“That’s what I keep thinking.” Tony finally met her eyes, just a split second before looking away again. “It seems impossible.”

“Well, it--it--it has to be a weightlessness issue.” Pepper was scrambling, trying to find an answer. “You were falling so fast that your body shifted in the armor. You were away from the sensors and the data is skewed.”

“There’s no room in the suit for me to do that.” Tony denied. “I built it to fit around me perfectly, the Mark VII is set to my body specifically, otherwise when it caught me in mid air I probably would have broken a rib or given myself a concussion when the suit wrapped around me.”

“But--”

“And even if it were a weightlessness issue--” he continued. “There’s no way I would have been weightless for that amount of time. A few seconds, sure. But not almost a minute.”

“Well if JARVIS was offline, there’s no way of knowing if it’s actually a correct reading.” Pepper tilted her chin stubbornly. “You’re reading too much into it, Tony.”

“It’s a black box fail safe, Pep.” The words weren’t so much patient as they were resigned, Tony obviously having worked through these suggestions already. “Just in case anything happens to me, someone authorized to access my system can see what went wrong. JARVIS wasn’t online enough to power my suit, but the back up info is still there, still accessible.”

Pepper blinked several times before making a cease motion with her hand. “No. No, Tony, no. Because that means that you went somewhere. That when you went through that portal, for a minute you weren’t actually here anymore.”

“That’s exactly what it means.”

“Well where the fuck did you go!?” Composure finally breaking, Pepper jumped to her feet to start pacing. “Tony, where did you go? How long were you gone for? How the hell is any of this possible, I don’t understand!”

Tony just looked up at her, spreading his hands helplessly.

“When did you realize that you had--” she pointed towards the computer. “-- when did you know for certain that whatever this is,had actually happened.”

“A few weeks ago.”

“The morning that Captain Rogers and the others headed out on their mission.” She finished. “There was something weird that happened with Steve, something about ice cream? Bruce mentioned it to me but I didn’t think anything about it. Is that when this all started?”

“I had a feeling before that.” Tony hedged, not wanting to tell her about the late night Smithsonian trips, about the pictures, about the dreams. “But yeah, that morning I figured it out.”

“No wonder you’ve been a mess.” she whispered. “As if everything that happened isn’t awful enough, you’ve been dealing with this? With disappearing? With something happening to you while you were falling?”

“I haven’t been dealing very well, have I?” Tony was going for self deprecating, but it only came out miserable. “Sorry.”

“Well you’ve never had the best coping skills.” Pepper came back to him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and tugging gently until he was resting against her stomach. “In fact, you have the worst coping skills of anyone I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Tony, no one would cope well with this.” she assured him, her heart breaking as she finally realized what he’d been going through. “I’m freaking out and it didn’t even happen to me. This is why you haven’t been sleeping, why your anxiety is so bad?”

“I uh--” Tony coughed so she wouldn’t catch the wobble in his voice. “I have a hard time going outside. The whole sky thing. Freaks me out a little bit, I keep thinking I’ll look up and the wormhole will still be there.”

He didn’t want to tell her about the way he’d panicked the first time JARVIS spoke to him after New York, the way he’d jumped and almost screamed because after two years in the past he’d forgotten what it felt like to have an AI.

He didn’t want to tell Pepper that he couldn’t listen to music anymore because he was so used to relative silence, it gave him a headache.

He really didn’t want to tell her that even lying next to her in bed felt like cheating on Bucky, which didn’t make sense at all, but then again, nothing fucking made sense so why did it matter?

So he just said-- “I always wanted to see space, but I think I’ve seen enough of it to last me the rest of my life. I don’t ever want to see space again.”

“I’m so sorry.” Pepper held him a little tighter. “Should we find someone to talk to about-- about this?”

“I don’t want to talk to anyone. How would I talk about this? Where would I even begin?”

“Alright.” She stroked slowly through his hair. “What about your Aunt Peggy? She’s someone you can talk to, someone who loves you and would believe even something this unbelievable.”

“The last time I visited Peggy, she didn’t know who I was.” And this time around I’m a little afraid of what she will say. “If I went now and she didn’t know me--”

“I still think it would do you some good to spend some time with her.” Pepper insisted gently. “Her home is a safe place for you, it’s quiet and calm, and even if she doesn't know who you are today, she will still be happy to see a visitor.”

“Pepper--”

“Mr. Stark, as your boss I must insist.” She was teasing now, trying to lighten the moment. “Consider this a stipulation of receiving your weekly paycheck.”

“You’re going to play CEO with me, Ms. Potts?” Tony’s smile was a little more real this time.

“If it would make you smile more, I’d even wear that ridiculous suspenders and pinstripe shorts outfit you bought me for Valentines day and we could really play CEO.” she waggled her eyebrows playfully, and Tony pushed back the feeling of cheating so he could pull her down for a very light kiss.

“I might take you up on that.”

***********************

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Tuesday morning found Tony at the door to Peggy’s apartment inside the retirement home, his hand raised to knock, his heart hammering in his chest.

This was a moment of truth, after all. He could stare at data and have dreams that were actually memories and hold those pictures and look too much into Steve offering him ice cream all he wanted but until someone real could tell him something real he wouldn’t ever know for sure.

He was too afraid to actually ask Steve, and he was terrified of asking Peggy but he had to know. He had to.

Before he lost his nerve, before he could talk himself into just leaving and getting some coffee and hiding back in his lab, Tony knocked loudly on the door, waiting for the quiet “Come in.” before stepping into the room.

Peggy lay on the bed, entirely too frail for how strong a woman she had always been, prim and proper in her modest nightgown, hair done and a polite expression on her face.

“Aunt Peggy.” Tony managed a smile, hoping beyond hope that she would recognize him today. “How are you doing?”

“Why Mr. Carbonell.” Peggy’s eyes sparked in genuine delight. “Imagine seeing you here.”

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SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE FIC!-- Remember if I’m nice enough to tag you, be a decent enough person to at least leave a like and a reblog, and a comment if you really loved it!

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#ncts fics #time travel #winteriron #tony stark #steve rogers #pepper potts #peggy carter #chapter one #sequel

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cassatine · 5 years

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Wait, I've been reading your posts on Macron (I'm not really well-versed in the nuances of French politics, so I may be getting something wrong here) but it seems you're saying that he's acting like a dictator, refusing to cede power, using the army to maintain his control... but when that scottish blogger cybersmith said it, you said that was wrong. Is Macron a tyrant or not? (also, I hope yor okay, some people have been hurt)

Yeah huh what “that scottish blogger” actually said, and I quote:

Does it not alarm you that Macron has announced his intention to rule your homeland and countrymen in perpetuity as an eternal dictator, even going so far as to proclaim himself a manifestation of divinity? Or do you still find this preferable to the possibility of a (humanely implemented) regime change carried out by concerned neighbour-states?

and

I did warn you about Macron. Now he has openly declared his intention to rule France as an immortal god-king.

and

He… Literally compared himself to a pagan sky-father. I’m not being a conspiracy theorist. He makes no secret of it now that he has won the election.

and

As a French person, would you be in favour of a New Reconquista to rescue the lands of Europe from Illuminati-Backed Jihadism? I am planning to ask my MP to bring this up on the House Of Commons (because of the upcoming GE in the UK) but it occurs to me that such an endeavour would necessarily start in France, and I hadn't discussed this with any French People. Do you think foreign intervention -from the Occidental nations that yet remain free- will be necessary to unseat the vile Satrap Macron?

and, from an unanswered ask because I HAVE FUCKING LIMITS.

When I pointed out that your country would be better of under a monarch, or with externally-imposed regime change, you scoffed at me. Now the aspiring god-king is readying his merciless troops to slaughter your countrymen, cementing his iron rule with a mortar of blood and tears. I was correct, from the very beginning.

I mean I don’t want to sound mean, anon, but there is a difference between "Macron & his gvt are flirting with authoritarianism by exploiting the weakness of the Vth Republics institutions and of representative democracy because he’s fucked, with on one side a population that doesn’t want his reforms and on the other the private interests that helped him get where he is (+the actually hard-to-avoid obligations that come with being part of the EU)" and "immortal god-king” bullshit.

I bolded the important parts. Look, what Macron & co are doing is gaming the system, so to speak (see first bolded part), and not to establish some kind of dictatorship headed by an immortal god-king or whatever, but because overall the french are chauvinists attached to their conception of social and economic justice who have been noping in the face of unchecked neoliberalism, and that’s no good for das kapital. Macron’s doing exactly what’s been done by many others -- he went from banking to public service, and he probably intends to go back to banking, and the point of his public stint isn’t politics or even ruling or power, it’s to enact reforms benefitting his class and open the door wide to that unchecked neoliberalism the general public doesn’t like much. His plans for Europe are in the continuity of this.

But the thing is, Macron didn’t really do anything our previous gvts. didn’t do (beyond not bothering to hide his class disdain, which certainly helped to get people against him. most politicians at least have the sense to use lube before fucking us over, but his party is amazingly shitty on that end), he’s just... accelerated the cadence. And sure he got where he is and did what he’s been doing not without some very illegal shit, but mostly because systemically the conditions were already there for him or someone like him -- there’s this old joke that everyone here knows and that says it all: we don’t have a president, we have a king.

Now don’t get me wrong, what’s going on here is shitty, and I’m afraid because it’s far from over, but we still have quiiite a way to go before dictatorship (we do have counterpowers, even the Senate got in on it), and I hate to admit it but if Macron’s refusing to step down of like, his own initiative, there is no ongoing procedure or motion or whatever that would obligate him to. As to the army, that shit is scary af but again, there’s a nuance to make -- although I’m really fucking scared that they might end up firing on people during protests and the communication around their deployment at the last protest was abysmal, the gvt. doesn’t want them to fire. I’m afraid it will happen not in the sense that they will be ordered to fire, I’m not quite there yet, but in the sense that the Sentinelle (the concerned unit) are not trained for crowd control. The gvt. also doesn’t want to use them outside of the specific context of GJ protests (and yknow, their actual duties). The Sentinelle people are an anti-terrorism brigade, and calling them specifically is part of the ongoing effort to depict GJ as... well, terrorists, or at the very least definitely dangerous.

It was also a gambit. They’re still hoping they’ll find THE thing to keep the GJ home, and the fact that they’re down to waving the threat of the army around (and again, I Worry, but that’s what putting the Sentinelle specifically where the GJ are not supposed to protest amounts to, abysmal communication notwithstanding) when people are already aware protesting might kill them (because it happened!!), among other ugly consequences is scary af, yes, but it’s also a sign that the gvt.’s options to maintain itself have dwindled something crazy. You call the army when you’re losing control, not when you have it.

Because again, our man Manu is kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he’s got the GJ and little popular support, and an actual politician would have to factor that. But on the other hand, that boy owes. He owes to those who helped put him where he is to defend their interests and who keep helping him so that he keeps doing exactly that. He can’t give the GJ what they want without losing that support, he can’t leave without losing that support, and without it he’s just plain fucked.

So basically we’re in a complicated situation! The specters of full-blown authoritarianism, plutocratic dictatorship, and who knows what other horrors loom on the horizon. But so do others, like the specter of our victory, and now that we’ve seen it...

The thing is that we’ve won a huge battle already, because Macron was supposed to deliver a success story. He was supposed to reform the unreformable! To maintain the oh so practical ‘populism’ (ie. the far right and the left -- it’s not quite the same here as in the US, but we’re seeing a similar displacement of meaning wrt. the left, the far left and the ‘center’) vs ‘liberalism’ (ie. unchecked neoliberalism basically) pseudo-opposition, in which one is the only solution to the other, the only alternative! He was supposed to be the youthful, energic face of progressism, a Mozart of finance who would deliver where traditional politicians couldn’t. He was supposed to unite ze french beyond political and social divides (and he kinda did do that, ironically enough), and a bunch of shit besides.

We fucked that up, and we fucked it up good. Most of the merit is his, though -- he got us to the current situation. He got us to people asking for his head (metaphorically), but more than that, he got us to realize what’s become a slogan: fin du monde, fin du mois, même combat -- end of the world, end of the month, same fight, and he got us talking about the relative merits of participative and representative democracy and how our institutions should work and for whom because collective intelligence is actually a thing and we realized he is a symptom and it’s the root we need to go after. Not that no one knew it before, but the trajectory from protests against an oil tax to the protests we have now, that’s a victory unto itself.

Anyway, I forgot the point somewhere, but overall, going from the symbolic “jupiterian presidency” WHICH IS WHAT TCS WAS REFERRING TO FFS to the painfully literal “Macron has announced his intention to rule your homeland and countrymen in perpetuity as an eternal dictator, even going so far as to proclaim himself a manifestation of divinity“ etc etc is still a really bad take (and I’m not Going There but “New Reconquista” is not an innocuous term). Reality is weird and shitty enough as it is, thanks.

#this has been A Rant #also in case it needs saying #i did post links to a few articles here and i retweet a bunch of them #but my politics venting posts are exactly that #venting #not the news #french things #partying like it's 1789 #anon #ask

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kingofthenorth49 · 3 years

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Enemy of the State

I woke up on November 4th allegedly an enemy of the people.

Now I didn’t do anything differently than I did on the 3rd, but that morning when I awoke I knew things were going to get weird based on what I was seeing in the media.

Now keep in mind I haven’t any trust in the mainstream media. Zero. None. Zilch. They have eroded that trust over the last decade or so for me, to the point I realize they are no longer news outlets, but rather 24 hour a day propaganda machines.

By now, many of you reading likely thought “Conspiracy theorist” or his tin foil hat is on too tight again. Didn’t you.

You don’t have to answer, I know that’s exactly what 50% of you are thinking as you read this. That’s how you have been programmed to think over the past 20 years, you are part of a cult you didn’t realize you had joined. Think about it. As North American’s (and I have to use that term because sitting here in Canada today my reference group is so enthralled with US politics they aren’t even watching what is going on in their own country) we are equally divided in our thinking.

And that is exactly what they want. A society divided is easier to conquer, and right now we are ripe for the picking. The last bastion against Marxism is fighting a death match I never believed I’d get to see during my short stint on this planet.

While the Coronavirus is real, the plandemic is not. It’s manufactured. I’m not talking about the virus, that’s beyond the edges of my aluminum chapeaux, I’m talking about the world’s approach to managing it. It’s all part of a plan to convert the world over to a One World Government.

Fear is the greatest motivator know to the human species and beyond. A field mouse being stalked by a hawk is acutely aware of everything going on around him as he literally runs for his life. Every action and reaction is measured against the knowledge that one wrong move and he becomes the object of desire of a stronger power. It’s the fight or flight response that has kept species alive for millions of years.

We’ve just had our fight response beaten out of us by those who wish to possess us, or rather possess the output of our labor.

Power is the drug of the greedy. Just look around you to see it. You only need look at the likes of Nancy Pelosi to see it. It’s for thee, but not for me. I say that a lot because I see it a lot. I see our elected officials set two levels of standards as they rule. One set of standards is for us, the working class, and the other set of standards are for them, the ruling class. Nancy’s trip to the beauty salon is one example that comes to mind. Let’s break it down for the people in the back.

For those who don’t know Nancy, she’s the 80+ year old speaker of the house, and one of the most powerful democrats in the United States. Nancy’s been in Washington a long time, she knows where the bodies are literally buried. She’s powerful, wealthy, and doesn’t give a rats-ass about you. She’s all about Nancy. So in the middle of this plandemic, Nancy needs to get her hair done for her next ice cream photo op and even though beauty salon’s are ordered closed under public health order, Nancy’s staff arrange for a salon to open to touch up the speakers locks.

Now as someone who cut their own hair for almost 3 months, I can understand the desire to have the professionals take care of things, but at the same time as a leader I understand the need to lead with integrity and not set a double standard. Nancy, not so much. Somehow a video gets released showing Nancy waltzing thought the salon between the shampoo and color, not only in direct contravention of the law shutting down these services, but sans face mask.

Now a little lapse in safety decorum amongst co-conspirators could be overlooked had it not been that Nancy had just days before been on the news berating the President for not wearing a mask and selfishly endangering the lives of others’. It was carried by every network for days.

Get it yet? It’s for thee, not for me. A double standard isn’t a double standard if your in power. They feel they are above the rest of us. But it gets worse.

When the mainstream media is forced to pick up the story a day later, the response from the Pelosi people is that Nancy was set up by the salon owner.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is how the 3rd most powerful leader in the United States responded to being caught in the act violating the very laws she enacted? The worst part of all of this was most of you all accepted it because it fit the narrative you’ve been programmed to accept. Be honest with yourself. You simply accepted that Nancy was the victim in this situation because Trump.

This is but one example of this type of entitlement. The Governor if Michigan’s husband got caught going boating during a lockdown. Prime Minster Trudeau got caught breaching ethics rules twice, and is under investigation for two more. No other sitting Prime Minister in the history of Canada has ever been chastised for lacking ethics except for the current returning resident of 22 Sussex Drive. They destroyed all the evidence of the WE scandal and it never really even made the news.

I’ll make you a bet right now, that if I refuse to pay my taxes this year, I’ll not collect $200 and I’ll go directly to jail. If you’ve ever stood before a judge accused of a crime, it’s the most sober humbling moment of your life. Our problem is getting them in front of one.

Am I making sense yet?

Hillary had a private email server. She deleted 30,000+ emails as Secretary of State. Her and her husband Bill made hundreds of millions of dollars as public officials. Bill raped a woman in Arkansas and paid her off with $400,000.00. But there’s no one holding them to account.

Barrack Obama and Eric Holder ran fast and furious. They put guns into the hands of drug cartels that eventually wound up back in the USA used to kill innocent Americans. Over a billion dollars in cash on pallets was flown to Iran in the middle of the night. But there were no scandals in his White House. Are you fucking kidding me? He used the intelligence community to spy on Trump’s campaign for Gawd’s sake, Richard Nixon had to resign as President for doing the same thing, does no one remember Watergate?

Jesus people, when will you wake the fuck up and realize you are being manipulated by those in positions of power. What is it going to take for people to stop accepting this type of behavior from those they entrust with the public purse and our freedoms.

I read The Rise of the 3rd Reich last year. It was a very sobering read to see how the Nazi party rose to power and committed atrocities against their fellow humans in the name of a better planet. I’ve seen images of the holocaust that sadden me to the very core of my being. I have always wondered how humans could treat each other like that, to strip people of their dignity, their world possessions, their families, and finally their very existence. And for what. For one persons hatred of another race. One person was able through persuasion to convince an entire population of a country to hate a group of people because they were different. They worked hard. They ran shops and factories. They worshipped together, they built strong communities. They gave back to their country and made is better. But because those in power despised them, they created hate against them and let the people turn on their fellow countrymen.

You all know the rest of the story.

Or at least I hope you do, because if you don’t, its going to happen again because it’s already happening the exact same way it did in the 1920’s in Germany. If you don’t believe me, read the book. Read the history of one example of how mankind is one of the ugliest species on the planet. Read about how they divided the country and made people hate the Jews. Hitler blamed the loss of the war, the economic downfall of Germany and the bad decisions of the Weimar Republic on Jewish capitalism. Does this sound familiar? It should.

Churchill said “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. Now while he didn’t invent that quote, he certainly had reason to use it. As the one person who stood up against Hitler (Thank Gawd he did) he understood completely the threat to humanity that existed in the ideology of the Nazi party.

Fuck we are stupid. That all happened in our generational life time. Our grandparents fought in that war. Our communities lost thousands of good men and women to the effort to combat the rise of Marxism and hate and protect the world against the likes of Hilter, Stalin, and Lenin.

Yet here we are.

I woke up on November 4th to hear people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling for a “Truth and Accountability commission” to ensure Trump and his supporters are held to account. The talking heads were spitting vitrol and hate against 72 Million Americans who voted for Trump. On example, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin tweeted that morning, “Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society. We have a list.”

We have a list? Seriously?

Hitler had a list too.

While Trump should have had a filter between him and his twitter feed, the man did nothing to rise to the level of a dictator who had women stripped naked and shot in front of their children, before they were shot next. Are you kidding me? Are people really that stupid?

I lived in the USA during Trump’s four years. I also lived there during Obama’s eight. By any measurable metric Trump’s four years brought more prosperity to the average American than Obama’s double term, and even if you take the economy out of the equation, Trump still made life better through his approach to governance. He got three noble prize nominations for crying out loud

But no one sees that.

But this isn’t about Trump, it’s about us.

We are failing as citizens to hold our leaders to account, and when you fail to check power, well, you get what you deserve. Our leaders, both elected and self-appointed (Think Zuckerberg, Gates) are running amok and have contempt for we the people. I believe in the next 6 months those in power are going to use the pandemic as a tool to move their agenda forward and attempt to go full Marxism around the globe under the guise of a One World Government. We are already seeing our own governments in Canada moving towards that end, the death of Freedom of Speech is just one indicator. Don’t believe me? Prime Minister Trudeau recently told the country “Freedom of expression is not without limits. We do not have the right, for example, to shout ‘fire’ in a movie theatre crowded with people.”

Well dumbass, actually we do, or at least we did. The cornerstone of any free person is the right to say what ever he/she/(Insert your preferred pronoun here) wants. If you cannot say whatever you want, you are oppressed. It’s just that fucking simple. He was wrong, but he wasn’t apologetic about being wrong. He thinks he is right, and his ideology supports that, which is the ideology of the left. You can say whatever you want as long as it agrees with our ideology, otherwise we will cancel you. We will public shame you. Call you racist, a bigot, etc until you shut up.

This is where we are today, a society afraid to speak up in fear they will be cancelled, ridiculed, or shamed. This is right where they want us, in fear, alone, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Wear your mask, stay home, be a good citizen. Make sure you keep an eye on your neighbor to ensure they are being good citizen’s too. After all, we are all in this together, at least until we aren’t.

Maybe I’m wrong, and I hope I am. Maybe AOC really meant those lists were to send out holiday cards thanking all those 72,000,000 American’s for doing their civic duty by voting for the person they best perceive to leader their collective ideals, to further democracy and make their country the best it can be.

It’s just too bad they picked the wrong horse.

Or did they. Will we ever know for sure? I doubt it.

In the end, a polite society who are open to freedom of speech, even if it flies in the face of our beliefs is critical to a progressive society. If we suppress thought, fail to encourage debate, and dismiss the ideas of differing opinions we will fail as a society, and when a democratic society fails, tyranny rises.

When tyranny rises, the cost to humanity is great. We cannot afford this journey again.

Anyway, I need to go spend some time with my dog. I’m pretty sure he’s a liberal, but I love him just the same. I feel the same way about my liberal friends, they just don’t drool on me as much.

Enjoy the day, but think about what you are willing to accept from our governments. If we remain quiet we have no one to blame but ourselves. Sometimes yelling fire means things are actually burning.

#trudeaumustgo Agenda21 maga plandemic

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himbowelsh · 6 years

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Who in Bob ships has messy quirks and who has pedantic quirks? Sounds like an obvious question but I want to see your take on it.

WINNIX

nix is kind of a mess, but he can be quirky about some things. like his alcohol -- he’s a big drinker, but he refuses to get drunk off cheap liquor. he likes dressing for comfort, but catch him in polyester when he’s dead -- he prefers silk shirts. he really does shave every morning -- you wouldn’t know it, but he gets a little on edge if he forgets to shave that morning.

he’s not good at keeping the house clean, but if he doesn’t have a clean bathroom??? awwww no. he’ll clean the entire bathroom himself (and he NEVER cleans anything) just because something like that grosses him out. he can’t pee in a place he’s afraid to sit down.

he’s not the most rigid, but he has things that he Needs.

dick doesn’t have a lot of quirks either -- but he’s a routine guy. not to say he’s incapable of improvising, he’d just really rather not to.

if everything is going according to plan, that means nothing is wrong. things are going smoothly, and that’s all he can ask for.

he holds himself to a daily schedule, and doesn’t like many deviations. it’s self-discipline, which is really important to him. when everything is going according to plan, he feels in control.

SPEIRTON

lip is a lot better at rolling with the punches than ron is. granted, ron’s probably the one doing the punching, but that doesn’t mean he likes them coming out of nowhere at him.

ron does not like other people touching his stuff. he touches everyone else’s stuff, but no one is allowed to touch his. even when lip cleans up his stuff without his permission, it hits his nerves. lip is understanding, and doesn’t do it.

ron also likes keeping the house cool. he sleeps with the air on, just because he feels more comfortable. he still completely covers himself with blankets.

lip gets weird when his food touches. it’s the stupidest little thing, but he dOESNT LIKE IT. whenever ron cooks for him, he makes sure to keep everything separate.

sometimes lip will sing to himself -- in the shower or under his breath. he doesn’t realize anyone’s overhearing him (and if he did, he’d be so embarrassed) but whenever ron overhears, he falls a little in love.)

no one else is allowed to do the dishes. lip HAS to do the dishes. he loves his washing machine, but whenever he’s stressed he’ll start washing by hand. it’s a major stress relief for him, and he doesn’t know why, because it’s not like he’s a compulsive cleaner. he just LIKES doing the dishes.

BABEROE

gene’s a little pedantic about... well, about a lot. he’s stressed out all the time, okay? he needs a few things.

he doesn’t like messes. he prefers to keep his own area clean, and would really appreciate it if others did the same. unfortunately, other people... don’t. pretty frequently gene finds himself caught in the middle of someone else’s mess, and it annoys him.

he’s also particular about his personal space. there are very few people he’ll let into his bubble. he has to trust them enough, and he trusts very few people this way.

he has a tendency to mutter under his breath to himself when thinking hard, in french or english.

and then there’s babe, who’s just... a mess all over. like, he doesn’t KNOW what he’s doing.

he hates it when people clean his space. it’s all messy for a REASON, okay? he needs it to be just the way it is. he functions best in chaos, because there’s an ORDER to it, he’s just the only one who gets it.

he’s very physical, and he likes physicality in turn. he doesn’t realize he’s doing it, he’s just a naturally touchy person. he gets antsy going without physical contact for too long.

he doesn’t clean a lot, but when he does, he makes it fun. he dances, he jumps around, he sings at the top of his lungs -- he reenacts classic romantic movie scenes with the vacuum. (dancing around the house is just a Thing he does anyway. he doesn’t need a reason.)

somehow, his and gene’s personal quirks mesh well together.

WEBGOTT

webster is an organized mess. like, he’s a disaster, he’s just good at PRETENDING he isn’t.

the one thing he’s very pedantic about is grammar and spelling. he’s a WRITER, okay? it’s a matter of principle.

“no, joe, it’s erroneous. erroneous, see? E-R-R-O-N---”

he’s criticized his own grandmother on her spelling errors.

he’s not even nice about it.

however, his work space? total mess. he leaves coffee cups out, he makes a disaster zone of the kitchen, he leaves clothes lying around -- he’s ridiculous. he forgets to shave some days, and winds up looking like a scruffy zombie by the end of the day. (lieb’s not crazy about the messy, but he loves when web looks all sloppy.)

lieb isn’t that neurotic either, but he’s got his own Things. he curses when he’s anxious, or annoyed, or just bored. anyone who’s got a problem with this can fuck right off.

he’s also somewhat of a picky eater. he doesn’t trust food made by other people. while he’ll eat it, he’ll go through it, and is always really suspicious of stuff made in restaurants.

lieb’s got the secret belief that one day all machines are going to turn against them and take over. (he’s also a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but he keeps that WAY on the down-low.)

he’s the one who usually has to clean the house, because webster is bad at keeping things clean.

LUZTOYE

joe appreciates organization, especially when he’s living in the middle of Hurricane Luz.

joe cleans when he’s stressed. he vacuums, he mops, he scrubs the kitchen, he reorganizes the bookshelves and cabinets. he tends to alphabetize things. joe is the only thing keeping their house from descending into the seventh circle of hell.

he gets weird if he eats too much junk food. he feels really gross, and has to go on a sort of cleanse. lots of fruits and vegetables, staying away from junk foods. it makes his body and mind feel a lot better, even if he knows it’s mostly psychosomatic.

george is a LOT less pedantic. he’s got his own quirks, but they’re more... well, luz-ish.

whenever luz has a lot of pent up energy, he’ll exercise in the middle of living room. he’ll put a dance video on the laptop and just jam along to it, or do like a whole calisthenics routine. he just needs to do SOMETHING.

he kind of likes commercials?? like, he likes watching them, almost as much as the actual show. he’ll pay rapt attention to the commercials, and it confuses people.

he always talks while brushing his teeth. he can’t NOT talk while brushing his teeth, and sprays toothpaste all over the mirror and sink.

sometimes he’ll just practice voices/accents to himself out loud, and it’ll give joe a heart attack because he thinks there’s someone else in their house.

#headcanons #luztoye #webgott #winnix #speirton #baberoe #Anonymous

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stargleeksil-blog · 7 years

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Criminal Minds s01e21 Secrets and Lies review

Episode 21 – Secrets and Lies

Oh snap! Now this episode sounds like something worth watching! Secrets and lies … wonder whose secrets are going to be covered by lies?

Let’s see what happens.

Ooh, Baltimore. I honestly can only think of Hairspray when I see the name Baltimore. Sorry.

Why is that lady bringing her kids out into a weird place in the middle of the night? It’s seriously freaky.

Lady, he’s saying he’d help, let him! I think … though if past is prologue this isn’t such a good idea after all. Let’s see what goes on.

Oh snap! That big guy just got sucker-punched. Damn.

Oh he just had his neck snapped. Fuck. That poor guy.

Oh god, he is now stationed by two people as having committed suicide in a patriotic act? That is the most messed up thing ever to do to a guy.

Who is Gideon calling?

Gideon knew the guy? Aww, baby.

So the guy was a CIA agent, this guy Gideon is talking to is working with the CIA too (I think, he might be FBI, I’m not really sure), and now someone suspects that someone in this guy’s team killed the first one. Oh god, my brain is dizzy.

Hell yeah, they need the team. This guy is really annoying with his strict rules.

Damnit, I want to see Kirsten on the roster already! I can’t stress this enough.

Albert Einstein: “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why albert Einstein was a weird genius. I don’t necessarily believe this sentence to be true, but it is composed in such a brilliant way that I love it.

Lol, they’re all creeped out at being called into the office at 2am. Aw, babies.

“Call me a cynical, but considering it’s 2am, it can’t be good,” “You are a genius.” JJ, you are one sarcastic lady.

I don’t want to think how Morgan knows about the wound patterns, that’s seriously freaky.

Oh my god, Penelope’s shock at Gideon being inside the CIA (not officially) is the cutest thing ever. Also, conspiracy theorist in the making, anyone?

So they did background checks on all of them? Ugh, creepy.

Kruger Spence looks like one of those creepy guest stars on Castle, lol. I love recognizing them.

“If I may ask, sir – I don’t know your name, Nathan – the thing that I don’t get is our team’s there, why can’t we go to Langley? Do I look like a threat to national security? Seriously.” “Your name is on our list.” “List? What list? I work for the FBI, and you’re telling me I’m on a list that says I can’t go to the CIA?” “You’re on a list.” And bam, she’s on a list! Fuck! Oh boy, my baby has been tagged as a cyber threat? Oh no.

“You do know what this means?” “What?” “We’ll be able to find out whether Princess Diana’s death was really an accident.” “I think that’s exactly the kind of thing that got you on their list.” Oh sweetie, I knew it! She’s a total freak for conspiracy theories! Oh honey!!!!

Oh I love how the CIA agents totally intimidate them. I love how they portray them in this show. And I just realized that I use the word ‘love’ a lot, and I ain’t even sorry.

Oh snap. They’re in some serious business now if Gideon tells them to trust no one but him. Frack.

Wait, why has Gideon met with Summers three days before he was killed? What the fuck is going on here?

So they have four suspects, which are the four top spies in the unit, one of them is Bruno Hawks who worked with Gideon, Gina Sanchez that feisty lady whom Gideon recommended be taken off the field, Kruger Spence who looks deranged as fuck and Olivia Hopkins who is seriously smoking.

Wow Spence is a dick. Not Spencer Reid! Kruger Spence is the dick. Okay? I’ll never describe my baby like that.

“Whoa, it’s not all about profiling. I get my fair share of action.” “Mm, I bet you do.” Ooh, Sanchez you teasing my chocolate Adonis?

Hahahah that’s where Morgan lives. And he has a dog named Clooney. I love Derek so much! He’s such a cute softy!

Is he seriously trying to goad her into confessing? Ooh, he’s good.

Elle, I love you. She’s trying to provoke her into admitting something because she’s a strong independent woman into confessing. I love those BAU lovelies.

Wait, Spence and Hopkins were having an affair? Damn. And he left in the middle of the night? What a dick. I mean, I guess he had to keep up an appearance to the wife, but come on! That’s a dick move.

Wait, are they seriously going to kill Olivia now? Oh boy. Oh fucking hell.

Fuck! That was beyond brutal.

I literally jumped in my seat.

Why would they lie about Olivia being killed? And why are you suddenly denying it, Spence? Are you somehow involved? I mean, that’s low.

Wait. Did Hawks seriously just show no emotion about Olivia’s death and just express anger at it? That is some cold-heartedness.

“Morgan, your girlfriend’s back.” Oh honey, I don’t even want to know what you told Sanchez to ask for Derek. I’m just laughing too hard right now.

Summers ordered his own psych evaluation? Not really making any sense here.

That woman is so brave, but I feel bad for the kids that they have to stay alone so much when they’re so young.

Wait, so John Summers was seriously paranoid? Oh boy.

I love JJ and Garcia so much. They are both geniuses. Summers’ cover in Saudi Arabia was a shipping company, so he put Aaliyah and the kids in a shipping containment box. Love you!!!

Someone just tapped into Garcia’s feed and found out where Aaliyah is? Oh fuck.

Gideon just vetoed Gina as the mole and he’s sending her with Morgan? Oh boy. I’m not really sure about this, putting my baby in danger like this is seriously doing nothing for my frayed nerves.

But why is Hawks suddenly opposing this? Control freak. Damn it.

Wait. They still think it’s Kruger? Okay … he just looks seriously too lame to betray his country.

Fuck. That crazy Hassan found them. Shit. He’s going to kill Aaliyah. I just hope he doesn’t hurt the kids. Fuck.

Good the found them. Please help them.

Oh! Morgan just schooled Hassan! Damn!

He tried to pull the diplomatic immunity card, and the container hasn’t passed through custons so it’s not part of the US soil and bam, said the lady! They can arrest him! Whoo!

Wait. What. The fuck? Why is Gina putting her gun to Morgan’s head? What the fuck is going on here? And how can I stop this? Shit! Put the gun down, Gina!!!!!

So she now wants to kill Hassan? Why the fuck did she put her gun on Derek beforehand? I’m confused.

Why would she kill someone in front of kids? Fuck. That was awful.

Wait. It was Bruno all the time? Fuck!

Oh, I love her! She just made sure that Bruno was the mole by pretending to shoot the guy and always has been in touch with Gideon? Oh god, Gina you are amazing lady.

Bruno you fucking dick. I hate you. Go to hell. Is there any other way to express my anger? Hmm, I’ll think of something.

Oh my god, Garcia is looking for Prince William’s phone number? And she found it? I LOVE PENELOPE GARCIA!

She accidentally shut down everything. Oh my pretty little puppy. I love you. Kirsten is the best thing that ever happened to TV. I love her so much. Aww!!!!

Wait. Did Gina just flirt with Derek? Back off, that guy is clearly saved for Penelope. Enough!

George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And that is why I love this guy! Oh my god, I’m so happy they quoted two amazing geniuses that I know and love.

Okay, so this episode was just a clusterfuck to my brain from start to finish, but it was so brilliantly written and so amazingly conceptualized and thought-out and had so much going on and humor interspersed in it that it was hands-down one of the best episodes of the season. Which is ironic, because it’s the penultimate episode and I’m kind of freaking out that I’m about to finish season 1 and I’m not really emotionally ready to see what comes up next in the upcoming season. Fuck. I’m rambling. Alright, I’ll leave it here and see you all tomorrow! Mwaaaaah! Tons of virtual hugs and kisses

#criminal minds #s01e21 #secrets and lies #aaron hotchner #thomas gibson #jason gideon #mandy patinkin #derek morgan #shemar moore #elle greenaway #lola glaudini #jennifer jareau #aj cook #spencer reid #matthew gray gubler #penelope garcia #kirsten vangsness

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after-skies-ananthology · 5 years

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I'm an undercover journalist investigating the President’s space force

BLACK SKY WARS

the third part

approx. 5 yrs ASE

It can be pretty difficult to decide on the kind of story you want to do sometimes. I hadn’t expected the popularity of Slice to grow the way it did. But, well, it did. I was just doing what I had always done since I was a little girl. Getting myself into trouble, getting myself out of it, and in the process acquiring that which I desired. Information. Ever since I could speak, people have been wanting to keep things hidden from me. I suppose it means I’m still childish if I admit that I can’t handle being told no, but it’s true. Dangle something in front of me so tantalizingly mysterious like that, and you’ll soon find me obsessed with it. That’s why I started Slice, it was originally just a little blog I wrote on using my old see-through Mac as a teen. I used it as part diary, part National Enquirer for my neighborhood. Basically, a lot of people in my home town who were aware of it became addicted to it. Others, well... they fucking hated it. Understandably I guess. But, I mean, it’s their fault for making themselves so... interesting for lack of a better word? I guess I’ll leave it at that. I’ll spare you the boring details of how it led me to the kind of life I wallow in now. One of a contradictory ‘shut-in by day, extrovert Renaissance woman by night’. Does that sound pretentious? It should, because it is. Those aren’t my words, but that of my co-editor and business partner, Philip. Publicly, I have him run the company side of things. Legally, he’s both the chief editor and founder, in order to conceal my preference for anonymity. I have two things that make me a better journalist than what you see out there in the pool of filth they call media these days. 1) My legs (and a good set of heels I suppose), and 2) the fact that those I deceive into narcing on themselves have never seen my face before.

Last week, Philip had texted me out of no where in the middle of the night. He wasn’t interrupting my sleep or anything. I had been up since four in the afternoon and still had that exhausted disheveled look on my face, staring at my computer screen meticulously researching random unimportant shit and generally wasting my own time. Me and him had been debating back and forth for a while now on what angle we should approach the upcoming IACS seminar from. You know, the same one where Monterrey decided to turn the whole thing into “Let’s See If I Can Start WW3: The Movie”? I opened my phone, and read his message as the light from the array of screens assaulted my retinas and danced over my face in the depths of darkness that was my apartment bedroom.

“So, try not to react badly to this but...” His text message warned. “Maybe we should explore something tangentially related to the seminar, rather than the seminar itself?”

I let out a small cackle and shook my head in disbelief. I had been trying for a month, to no avail, to get a job as a hostess where the seminar was being held. Under a pseudonym of course. For the last few weeks I’ve been consistently told by the employer that all positions are currently filled. This flies in the face of what numerous former employees of the hotel told me when I contacted them. They informed me that about two thirds of the wait staff were abruptly let go without warning a day after it was announced to them that the seminar would be held at their establishment. That’s why I even tried applying in the first place. Hearing this lie told to me, I decided to check in at that very hotel for a night to see if it were true. And to my disbelief, it was. The hotel was being run smoothly, almost, surgically. The new staff seemed nice. In a dystopian kind of way. It kind of felt like they were smiling at me only when I was actually looking at them. I had this strange sense they were scowling at me when my eyes were averted.

Let me help you understand why this doesn’t make sense to me. They fired all the waiters except those with the most time with the business. They fired all the cooks. They fired all the valets except for two. They fired the general manager of the hotel itself. I was told about the mass layoff the day it happened by a source. I applied a day after that. Within a day, they had already filled all of those positions to their satisfaction. No wanted ads, seemingly no interviews, no listings on job search sites, etc. Nothing. It was as if these new employees just showed up to work out of nowhere and started waiting tables or cooking steak. I had spent the last few nights putting together a new fake identity so I could try getting another room on the last night of the seminar next week. I had paid a lot of money to people on the dark web for this fake driver’s license and Canadian passport. And now, Philip was asking me to give up and write about a ‘safe’, ‘tangential’ topic vaguely related to space militarization.

I texted him back, “Sometimes I can’t fucking believe you.“

He did that thing when you’re texting someone and they’re typing this big ass message but you don’t realize it and as soon as you’ve hit send they hit send and... God it’s really annoying. Philip’s still a Boomer you have to realize. He doesn’t “get” technology yet. Or maybe he willfully refuses to understand it like most old people. Hmm. Either way, his giant wall of text he sent me tried assuaging my anger.

“I’m not trying to stop you from pursuing the story you want. I would never do that Clem. I mean, not anymore. Look, trust me I learned my lesson with that whole fight we had over you narrating the weekly recaps. BUT, I think I have something better than the seminar itself. I might just have the reason behind that whole hotel staff business. Will you hear me out?“

I texted him back as I let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Fine. What?” And then I sent him one more. “And it seriously better be good or I’m blocking your number for a week again.”

His reply read, “I have this guy in Needles, California. Ever heard of it?”

I told him, “No but it sounds like one of those crappy little towns between Barstow and Vegas that no one ever visits.”

Philip confirmed in response, “Well, it is one of those crappy little outskirt towns. But that’s not the point! There was this whole supposed UFO crash and some sort of military helicopters came and took it away and blah blah blah.”

“Philip I AM NOT doing a UFO story.” I told him.

“I know I know“ his message read. “That’s not the point! There’s this conspiracy theorist guy from Nevada, you know one of those Coast To Coast types? Anyways, he’s been telling me that he has some sort of bombshell information that connects the Needles crash with your seminar shadiness.”

I groaned, resigning myself to at least let him tell me. “I’m listening. What is it?” I asked.

A picture appeared on my phone. It was an airliner sitting on a tarmac at dawn painted lily white with a single red stripe along the fuselage, with no company branding or logos. “What’s with this airliner?” I asked him in my text.

“Did you know that a Janet Airlines flight arrived at a private airport near Santa Rosa the night before everyone was fired, and offloaded the exact number of people needed to replace everyone?” Philip informed me.

I was silent for a small moment. I looked at the posters on my wall drenched in neon-purple light, taking inventory of what was just said to me. I texted him back one more time, “Philip, you know I love you right?”

Flash forward to the next day, I had tried sleeping off some of my insomnia from 6 to 10 AM. I tried getting up at 10:15. Not having it. Then I tried 10:45. Again, absolutely not. So I did what I always do when I’m in a bind to meet with a source and my Circadian rhythm isn’t cooperating with me. Don’t judge. I mean, please don’t judge. I mean... Hmm, well. I did a line. I’m not proud of... well, no. Fuck you, I am proud of it. I mean I’m not, I mean... not, fuck you? Look, either way when a story like this is in front of me and my insomnia is in the way, I...

I don’t have to justify this with you. And I’m not going to.

After the white lady had gotten me out of my funk I finally took a shower, got dressed, and hopped in my car and headed down the road to the Silver State. Philip gave me the guy’s address and phone number as I left the Southland. “Frank Monterrey?“ I said to myself out loud as I read the text. I pulled over and texted Philip back, “Is that... really his name?“

“I guess so. No relation obviously. Just one of those things in life.“ He said in reply.

I continued on my journey northeast along the I-15, passing highway patrolmen, smart cars, and meth-lab RVs along the way. Noticing the run down watering holes filled with cheap signage set in contrast to flashy over priced watering holes with pretentious signage, all posed against the backdrop of the California desert and its Joshua trees. Every now and then, I would take a peak at the day time moon piercing through the blue firmament gazing back at me. I wonder, how hard would it be to get approved for a visit to Armstrong? I doubt I have the money though. I kept glancing at it, wondering to myself, are you looking at it too Will?

The coke’s getting to me at this point I think. I focus my attention to other things, turning the radio up. Let’s see. Talk radio? “You simply don’t know what you’re fucking talking about! Explain to me exactly how it ain’t socialism you dick! If it’s government, it’s socialist! That’s why the founding fathers gave us social security, to teach us responsibility.”

No.

Umm, pop? I pressed down on the seek button. The tired “Millennial whoop” burst through the speakers of my car. People who are 35 pretending to be 15, dressed in neon clothes reciting their modern chant to their contemporary God. Nothing. Safe, marketable, unoffensive, nothing.

Where is this guy’s house? I double checked my GPS. It wasn’t working suddenly. I hadn’t paid attention to it for a bit. It was flickering back and forth between my car’s position and where my destination was. Doesn’t make any difference, I’m near the exit anyway. The satellite radio I was listening to began screwing up as well. I couldn’t understand what the lyrics of the song were trying to say anymore. They were verbalizing something, but it was all mushy. I turned it off, as it strangely made me feel drowsy. Don’t want to fall asleep at the wheel. I glanced back at the daytime moon again.

What is that? I thought to myself. There was this black speck gliding along the rim of Luna’s spherical shape. It’s not a bug. It... can’t be an airplane. This is Nevada I suppose, I’m liable to see a UFO at some point. I returned the view of my eyes back to the road, and finally took my exit. His “house” was a beat up RV, not unlike the meth labs on wheels I mentioned earlier. He had encamped himself on a slice of desert in an undeveloped part of North Las Vegas, not far from the gate to Nellis Air Force Base. I parked behind it and began texting Philip to let him know I was here, just in case this guy decides to chop my head off. If that happens, at least Philip will know where to find the skin suit he’s going to make out of me. As I hit send, I heard a bang on my wind shield. And then a dozen more in quick succession. There he was, fat, receding hairline, broken sunglasses, dirty polo shirt, and openly carrying a 9mm. “Hey! Hey! Hey! You’re here! You’re the girl? You’re the girl! From the news people thing? Come on, hurry up we got to go! Come on! Come on! Come on!” He screamed at the top of his lungs. I slowly got out, somewhat regretting not bringing my own sidearm with me. I guess that’s why you shouldn’t take a hit of cocaine to wake you up in the morning. I felt a sharp edge slightly press into my chest as I stood up out of my car seat. Good. I thought, at least I have my knife with me. Hidden in the one place he (hopefully) won’t try to grope. I stuck my hand out to shake his as the car door shut. “Nice to-”

He man handled it like a maniac before I could finish. “Yep! Great great great! We really gotta go doll face! They’re gonna be there any minute!” He spouted off.

“Who?” I asked.

“Air Force Special Activities Center! Illuminati enforcement bureau. Really high level dinosauroids. Far higher level lizard people than even the Governor.” He shouted as he got into his RV’s driver seat and started the engine. Or attempted to. Several times.

I was silent. Dumb struck. “You’re Frank Monterrey, right?” I asked him.

“Shhhhhhh! Don’t say it out fucking loud! Have you even run an evasion and recovery op like this before? Quite clearly not!” He shouted. The engine finally turned over and breathed life into the vehicle.

“I have... no idea what you’re talking about.” I said as I reluctantly climbed into the passenger side. I texted Philip real quick to tell him that I hated him now. As the man shifted into drive, I looked behind me into the interior of the RV. You know that meme from Always Sunny with Charlie explaining all the crazy shit on his wall and how its all connected? Yeah, I should convince this guy to let me take a picture of him doing the exact same thing in front of all that stuff back there because it would be a one for one. As implied, the RV’s walls and windows were littered with a collage containing pictures of some spade-shaped aircraft, portraits of some women in Space Corps and Navy uniforms, a group photo of a few astronauts in their space suits in front of an American flag, grainy photos of a bizarrely shaped... satellite? Hmm. Finally there was an old Polaroid of a woman with an 80s-style hairdo in a wedding dress holding hands with someone in a gorilla costume. The entire quote unquote ‘modern-art masterpiece’ was interspersed with the occasional classified military document and incoherently linked together with red string and thumbtacks.

“We’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming now you pricks.” He said as the RV turned onto the road heading north. He continued to say something under his breath, “Bitch, Su, you bitch, hag, you hag you’ll finally see what choosing Squatch over me really means.“

My jaw hung out for a few seconds as I just took stock of what I drove over four hours to get out here for.

I just met a mentally-ill stranger who uses the President’s name as a pseudonym, stepped into his run down RV willingly so that he can take me God knows where so that we can recover something from the government in order to steal his crush back from the Sasquatch...

I checked my phone again to see if Philip had replied yet. I was going to tell him when I see him again I’ll be giving him a castration. But he hadn’t responded to my last text, or to the one before that for that matter. I turned to ‘Frank’ and asked, “Listen, does this have anything to do with that airliner you told my business partner about?”

He cut me off before I could finish. “Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah.” He motored off. “We’re gonna get it, yes yes. We’re gonna get IT. Oh man, haha! You won’t believe how we’re gonna get it.“

“Uhhh, ok. How are we going to get ‘it’?” I asked politely.

He then proceeded to pull his pistol out of its holster and wave it around in my face with the safety off. “Good old American freedom! Hail Odin for the Third Amendment.”

I corrected him, “Second.“

He began to talk over me. “Tenth. Anyways, you women never know when you’re wrong especially when it’s that time of the month so to speak. Just like Su. Ahhh, yes. My lovely old Su.“ He looked over at me in that creepy old man I’m about to sexually harass you kinda way. My hand drew closer to where my knife was hidden. “You remind me of her. Oh yes. Oh yes.“ I now regretted the choice of clothing I made for that summer day. My legs pulled away and slammed into the door as he tried to place a hand on my thigh. I reached under my shirt and pulled the knife out reflexively. Before he could bring his hand back to where his holster sat on his hip, I instantly lunged over and pressed the blade just above it directly into where his kidney would be without breaking the skin.

“Keep your hands on the fucking wheel bitch!” I screamed at him, my eyes tearing up in rage, my head and chest pounding from the adrenaline. The RV slowed down on the empty road we had traversed to.

It was quiet. The RV stopped. He began to laugh. “Ahhh Su. Our famous lover’s quarrels. We’re not officially married until we have a few of those I suppose.”

I looked at him in confusion and disgust. “What is your problem old man? I’m not your wife, or who ever you’re talking about. I’m from the news group? Remember?”

A tear ran down his cheek. He suddenly lunged towards me and started to shout at the top of his lungs, “Su, please God just love me and not that ape!” He tried kissing me as his free hand pulled my torso into him. I stabbed into his side with the knife. And then again, and again. And then one more time until he stopped moving. He was lifeless on top of me now. I pushed him off, some of his blood gushing onto my shirt and shorts. It was so thick that when I stood up out of the RV, it escaped the fabric of my clothes and ran down my leg. Not a good look. I collected myself, thinking about where I was. On a back road in Nevada, a few miles away from my car. I could walk back to it, I thought to myself. I folded my arms as I leaned onto the door jam, staring at his body, trying to get myself to stop shaking. I didn’t cry. But I should have.

“How did you even come across that airliner?” I said out loud, and lingered on the thought. I recalled the collage of conspiracist fuel he called wallpaper inside. “Yeah. How did you come across it?” I said again, out loud. I pulled my phone out and texted Philip before I climbed in the back of the vehicle, “I need help. Now. Philip I really need your help now, please. Call me.” The message said. I started rummaging around all his stuff inside. There was a strange version of the American flag draped on a small plastic table. It was white with blue stars and vertical stripes. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t place my finger on it at the time. I looked underneath, finding a print out of a map. It showed a route from North LV to Needles to Santa Rosa, California and back. Did he actually go there? Did he take the picture himself? How did he know it would be there? I put it down and turned my attention to all the stuff on his wall. Who were these military women? Who were these astronauts? I unpinned the photo of the spade-shaped airplane from the wall and studied it, after a while glancing up to the grainy picture of the strange object and letting it catch my attention. I pulled it down next. It was shaped like... how can I describe this? It’s like I’m looking at a 3D image without 3D glasses. I pulled down some of the documents, beginning to think that this may have actually been worth it - kind of. If the red string was anything to go by, the document I was looking over right now had something to do with the uniformed young woman with glasses.

It was a transfer order of some sort from a few years ago. I’m not sure what the military would call it. It basically said this woman was to be released from the Air Force so that she may become a member of Monterrey’s new Space Corps. It said that she was to be promoted from 1st Lieutenant to Captain in doing so. It said her parent organization at the time was an intelligence squadron. Next to that it listed her weight and height. Next to that, her social security number. Next to that her last then first name.

Hayek, Poinsettia.

As I pondered over her significance, I heard the fake Frank’s phone go off. I walked over to the driver’s seat from behind his slumped over corpse, and struggled it out of his pocket. It was a text from someone named Will, which forced the image of the Will I know to the front of my mind, making me zone out. Another notification sound snapped me out of it. “Where are you? They’re almost here! This is the last chance for the We The People revolution if we miss this window! I State This Emphatically As Will Williamson, Individual, Sovereign, Citizen Of The Republic of Nevada, Independent AND Sovereign. Electronically NOTARIZED (Documented Permanently) In The Year Of Our Lord In Accordance With Common Law AND NOT ADMIRALITY LAW.”

After reading that bit of nonsense I went and scrolled up into the conversation they had over messaging and found the map coordinates of the destination fake Frank was supposed to meet him at before I stabbed him... to death. I decided that, well, since I killed him it might as well be worth it to at least see what he was taking me to. I collected everything off the wall and the table save for the flag and piled it together. I laid them on the passenger seat, got out and went around to the driver’s side. I pulled his fat, smelly, stiff body out of its place with all my strength, nearly pulling my back out in the process. After he fell onto the asphalt of the road, I leaned over and removed his pistol from his holster. I checked the magazine. It was full. Placed it back in, putting the safety on. I got into the driver’s seat he once occupied, and sped off to the location provided by his fellow freak.

It took me another thirty minutes to get there. Civilization was far from here now. I was almost certain this had to border some sort of military range or government land of some type. As I arrived I noticed a beat-up sedan with a faded paint job to the side of the road behind one of the safety barricades. I pulled up behind it and put it into park. I stared at it for a minute, seeing if anyone was there. After a while of inactivity, I got out to take a closer look. There was no one inside. There were more documents and folders in the back seat however. Then I heard a voice call out to me.

“Hey! Hey!” He shouted. He was dressed like a hobo, standing by himself far away from the road in the middle of the desert facing away from me. I squinted my eyes and realized he was urinating. He finished, turned around and began walking towards me, neglecting to put his... thing away.

“Umm, hello?” I replied.

He shouted back. “Who is you?” I could make out his crusty, sun burnt face now.

“I’m a friend of Frank. I think.” I said back.

“Who’s Frank?” He asked.

“You don’t know who-“ I looked down and realized it was still hanging out. “Oh my God. Hey look, your... member is still out.”

He looked down and made an embarrassed face. “Ooopsies. I’m sorry.” He said in a strangely childish way as he fixed himself. I got the feeling he was a bit slow or low-functioning. As he finally made his way over to me and came around the front of the car, he saw that I had a gun in my hands and began to panic. “What!? Who is you! Why you have that!” Then he saw the dried blood on my leg and stains on my clothes. He began to scream. “Oh my Jesus! You... you killeds Will! That’s why he ain’t been back! Get aways!”

I put the gun down on the roof of the car and tried calming him. “Listen! Shh! Shhh! It’s okay, listen. I didn’t kill Will okay? Someone tried to hurt me, and I... stopped them from doing that, alright? But it wasn’t Will. Okay?”

He relaxed slightly, trying not to look at me, keeping his eyes on the gun as he muttered “Okay...”

“Listen, can you tell me who Will is or what you’re doing out here all alone?” I asked him in a concerned tone.

He kicked some rocks at his feet and put his hands in his pockets. “Well... Will said we was going to stops the dinosaur guys, take the rocket ship back and start the We People rebelution.”

I put my arm on his shoulder and questioned, “Okay, and where did Will go?”

“He says he was gonna get the other American heroes and that he’d be back.” The poor man informed me.

“How long ago was that?” I asked him.

“Since the... um, the sun come up before the the last time it was down and up. I think.“ He said, possibly alluding to yesterday morning.

“You’ve been out here for two days?” I said, shocked.

He shrugged his shoulders, and said “I guess” as though he were a confused child separated from his mother.

Before I could ask him what his name was, the sound of thundering engines broke through from over the horizon. Down the road we could see a convoy. Three black SUVs. A white pickup. And a semi-truck bearing an oversized load sign on it. On its trailer sat a large object, which I first thought was saucer-like in shape. However the closer it got to us I realized that was only from the front, as it was much more spade-like from the side. “Wait, is that the thing he was talking about?” I said out loud.

The poor confused man in front of me got jumpy again all of the sudden. He pulled out a torn piece of line paper and read from it. “This is, this is what Will says would be happen! I got to do the revolt thing, for Will!” Before I could say anything, he grabbed the gun from off the roof of the car and ran out into the road, almost tripping over the barricade and falling on his face. He stopped on top of the median, and raised the pistol to the sky and tried firing off a few rounds before he realized the safety was still on. As he tried to figure out how the thing works, the semi-truck pulled up in front of him and stopped. Two of the black SUVs flanked around the truck aggressively and stopped in front of it. Suddenly, hatches opened on each of their roofs, both revealing a Gatling gun turret manned by what I assumed to be soldiers in black masks and tan helmets. A man got out of the passenger side of the SUV in front of me. He didn’t have a mask on, but he was equipped with the heavy-duty version of the military’s new powered exoskeleton. I knew this, because some more mainstream journalists I’m acquainted with had been invited to a closed door demonstration of it last year. It looked just like the one in the few photos they were allowed to take. If my memory serves me right, the program that developed it was known as “INVICTUS” which stood for something though I can’t exactly remember what.

He stepped forward in his suit towards the confused man. The torso of the suit resembled something an EOD might wear (in fact I think those bomb disposal suits were the inspiration for it originally). A plate of Kevlar jutted out from the chest area, protecting the man’s neck and covering up his lower jaw. This plate of Kevlar had a black and white American flag sticker placed upon it, with some words etched into it that read “NOYFB”. Around his stomach area sat a small hollowed out compartment built into his armor that provided a place where things like extra magazines and smoke grenades could be easily accessed by the wearer. From the right side of his body there was a black tactically dressed up 12-gauge hanging in the air via parachute cord. The weapon dangled carelessly near the grip of his palm with each step he took. From the pictures I saw, I recalled that the wearer is usually supposed to be sporting a helmet of some kind possessing all the night-vision accessories you’d expect to see on a commando like this. However, this man did not have his with him. I could see his face from the mouth up. Head shaved. Either Black or mixed-race. Hazel eyes. It sounds cliche, but he had a prominent scar running down from his temple to the corner of his mouth. He stopped about 6 or so feet in front of him. His right hand became itchy, the servos in the exoskeleton girding his arm quietly revving up and down as if they were imps begging their master to let them slaughter something.

One of the men on the turrets called out to my confused acquaintance. “Move or be moved!”

I could tell the poor guy had a lump in his throat at this point. He tried reading from the piece of paper he had, gun still in hand. “We the pe... We... People. Demands, uhhh.“ He said through the nervousness consuming his face muscles.

As he fumbled with his words I could see the man on the turret was now becoming agitated. He shook his head, and exclaimed to the man in the INVICTUS armor - “Well then I guess you gotta move him!”

Suddenly he gripped the trigger group of his shotgun, pulling down on it and breaking the parachute cord that held it. And then he did something I hadn’t expected to see that day. Remember how in certain Westerns or movies like RoboCop, when the hero un-holsters his weapon he spins it around in the air as he brings his arm parallel with the ground? Yeah, he did that. One handed. With a shotgun. The 12-gauge did one full rotation until it returned to its original position, the soldier quickly steadied it and fired a slug off into the poor confused man’s face killing him instantly. The recoil barely forced his arm up. The confused man’s body hit the ground with a loud thud, relinquishing the pistol and his torn piece of paper from his grip. I watched as the breeze carried it away into the wasteland of southern Nevada. That’s when the soldier, or commando, or security guard or whatever he was turned his attention to me.

He calmly walked towards where I was, stepping on top of the safety barricade that previously separated us. He pumped his weapon with the assistance of his other hand and proceeded to point it at me now. I stood there, frozen. He asked in a cold tone, “Who the fuck are you?”

The man in the turret spoke, “We don’t care! We’re on a schedule, pump one into her and let’s go!”

I tried bargaining with them for my life. “Hey... hey... Listen.” I said in a soothing, somewhat sexual tone in an attempt to put their guard down. I then fucked it up with “Please” as my voice cracked out of fear. I tried seeming cute and aroused to them. I forced a flirtatious smile out through my terror, bent my unbloodied leg at the knee towards him, and pulling my shirt down by the collar revealing a portion of my bra. “Tha-that’d be such a waste, Sir.” I said that bit with as much suggestive energy as I could muster considering the circumstances.

He didn’t buy it.

He smirked, chuckling a bit. “Hahaha... wooow. Really?”

I nodded as my breath became shorter. “U-uh huh.” I said nervously, still smiling like an idiot.

“Well... nah.” He replied, a nasty smile covering his face. His index finger gripped the trigger. I turned pale, collapsing into a ball, covering my head with my arms in terror.

I shouted, “No please!”

Then, I heard a click. And nothing happened. I looked up from where I had been cowering. He was still pointing that thing at me. He spoke. “Well, would you look at that? All out of rounds.” He laughed at me.

The man in the turret threw his arms into the air in frustration. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He screamed at his compatriot. He turned the barrels of his weapon towards me. “Move, I’ll do it.” He commanded the soldier in front of me. My eyes widened, how the hell do I get out of this?

As he stepped down off of the barricade, he looked into the sky behind me as if something suddenly set his internal radar off. He squinted his eyes, looking past me, and pointed once he finally found it. I turned to see what it was. A small, faint gray dot off in the distance flying in front of some clouds. I heard the man in the INVICTUS armor say - “Shit, they’ve been following us.” He yelled at the man in the turret. “I told you not to stop!”

Suddenly they were all in a panic. They retracted their turrets back into their SUVs, the soldier running back over to the one he got out of and slamming the door as he got back in. The semi-truck started its engine back up, and the convoy sped off leaving me to be showered by the dust they kicked up. The semi flattened the dead man still laying their like roadkill as it escaped. I stared as they disappeared down the road. I pinched myself just to make sure I didn’t dream that part.

“What the fuck is going on here?“ I said out loud to myself, and to my dead friend over on the road. I turned around to see what could of scared them off. The gray dot was bigger now, a lot bigger, actually it wasn’t a dot at all. More like a boomerang or something. Was it... a drone? Maybe, I know they fly them out of the middle of Nevada somewhere. It must be a drone, because I can hear its jet engine now. The drone was directly over head of me now, banking left to make a turn. Just then, I noticed something gigantic appear in my periphery vision. It was a large... blimp I guess? I’m not sure, but I couldn’t hear anything coming from it so it had to be a blimp I assumed. It was painted all black but wasn’t shaped like a traditional blimp however, more triangular than oval. It emerged from inside a massive nimbus cloud, where I assumed it must have been hiding all this time. Was this what they were running from? Soon it completely escaped the ivory clutches of the cloud and I could discern a series of turbofans mounted on the end of it.

And that was the last thing I can remember before I woke up here.

That’s right. I blacked out. I don’t remember what happened after that. I have a splitting headache now though. Probably from all the adrenaline and fear that day, but also probably from whatever drug was used to knock me out. If I was really knocked out that is. Whoever it was that drugged me left me here in the terminal at McCarran Airport south of Vegas. I was cleaned up. My blood stained clothes were replaced with some jeans and a button up blouse I had packed in my car for the trip. I shuddered at the thought of anyone undressing me while I was incapacitated. I looked around me. My computer bag I had left in my car was there next to me. My purse was no where to be found however. I had a Combined Airways ticket in my hand. My phone began to vibrate in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was Philip’s intern.

“Hello?” I answered it.

“Hey boss, did you get through security yet?“ He said over the phone.

“Umm... I don’t, yeah. Wait, what’s going on?“ I asked him, still groggy.

“What are you talking about?“ He sounded concerned for me.

“Listen, I’m sorry about how weird this must sound but can you just tell me what’s going on?“ I demanded.

“Uhh, sure. I guess. You’re about to take a flight home to SoCal because your car was stolen.“ He explained.

“And what else? You may not believe me, but I really have no idea what’s going on.” I sounded desperate.

He reassured me. “Ok ok. Calm down. You called me yesterday night and said the conspiracy theorist guy never showed up and that Philip wasn’t answering his phone. Remember?”

“I remember Philip not answering my texts...” I ran my finger through my pastel hair, losing my mind.

He continued. “Well I tried calling him but he wouldn’t pick up for me either. And he wasn’t at the office or his house today. On top of that, his girlfriend said she hadn’t seen him since he left for work yesterday. I’m kinda concerned actually. Anyways, after I got done talking to her, you called me and said you were mugged after getting some Burger Paladin last night. You said the muggers stole your car and your purse.“

I was floored. “Burger Paladin? I never eat at Burger Paladin. I hate that place.”

“Well, I mean I thought it was a little weird. I don’t know many people who go there myself.” He reasoned. He went on. “Anyways, after that you had me go buy you a ticket so you could come home. Man, I hope Philip’s not missing.”

“Me too...” I said nervously. “Look, I need to do something normal to clear my head. Can you send me the script for the recap? I have some time before my flight starts boarding.”

“Sure, I’ll email it to you now.” He affirmed.

I thanked him and hung up. My heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to pass out again. I needed something to eat. The food court was right in front of me. As I stood up from the bench I realized I had been sitting on a folder the entire time. I picked it up and opened it. My happiness returned for a fleeting moment. It was the stuff I had taken out of fake Frank’s RV, and if I’m not mistaken the stuff that was in that confused individual’s car as well. Why would they leave this with me?

I ordered a few tacos from Hornet’s, and a slice of pepperoni to boot. I sat down at a table and collected myself, opening my laptop as I crunched into the shell. I felt like crying. I started recording the weekly recap, beginning it with my signature line. “This is Slice. This is your week. This, is the world’s week.” It didn’t take me that long to finish it, they’re not that extensive usually. Never lasting more than five minutes. Things weren’t looking too good in the world. A bunch of people were taken hostage in the Indian Ocean. The government was fighting itself instead of solving it. The IACS seminar had ended earlier than expected because of Monterrey’s announcement. The Chinese were telling the world they’re prepared to wallop the U.S. in space if they tried anything. I suppose the Space Corps, if it works as advertised, will solve the problem it created.

I lingered on that thought. Space Corps. Who was it that I know in the Space Corps? That’s right... that Captain Hayek woman. I reopened the documents I had with me. I went over her transfer papers again. I found another document detailing her reassignment to the “Air Force Special Activities Center” after she joined the Space Corps. Now didn’t fake Frank mention something about that? I studied the files of these other two women. Both enlisted. One who was transferred from the Air Force into the Corps. The other from the Navy. Horace, Jessica. Gregory, Amanda. Miss Horace was promoted from a Technical Sergeant in the Air Force to Space Systems Sergeant when she switched. Miss Gregory’s transfer hasn’t happened yet but is scheduled for this upcoming week. What do these people do? What’s their job? I searched for their unit’s name on the internet. Interestingly enough, I came by a thread on a dormant BBS forum from the early 2000s. The author of the thread claimed that the AFSAC were the originators of the “Men In Black” urban legend going all the way back to the 50s. I almost screamed in fright in the middle of the food court as I read the poster’s username. Frank_Monterrey.

“It can’t be.” I quickly dove back into the documents splayed out in front of me. All of it was crazy. After action reports of AFSAC monitoring the daily routines of NASA astronauts. Commander’s authorizations for invasions of privacy, including the taping of the astronauts’ phone calls, breaking into their homes and installing spyware onto their electronics. A request asking for enough AFSAC agents to replace the wait staff at the hotel I tried getting at job at. Details of the government’s dissatisfaction with this “Blackstar” program - the aircraft I had seen all those pictures of, one document calling it the ‘XOV’. And then this thing... this ‘object’. What the hell is it? It creeps me out to look at it too long. There were additional photos of a damaged Chinese spacecraft. These labeled “inadvertent shoot down“. Wait a minute, shoot down? I double checked to make sure where exactly this spaceplane was when it was shot at. I recognized the unfinished habitats behind it. Everyone in the United States had seen these paraded around by Hood Fisher in a bunch of different soft drink and fast food commercials throughout the year. It was New America. The future space colony. But that doesn’t make any sense. I checked and re-checked the script I had been sent for the weekly recap. Last paragraph - “PLA officials also announced this week that an accident of some type has taken place at the site of the future State of New America near Lagrange point 5 that required the emergency reentry of a small group of space vehicles. No further elaboration on the details of this event has been given at this time.“

I sat back in my chair and took stock of what the evidence was telling me. We shot at the Chinese in space, just after the President announced to the world that we would no longer accept the presence of anyone else’s military in said space. And now the Chinese are covering it up? After threatening the President right back?

I looked down and let my hair drape over my face as I rubbed my forehead trying to mull this over. The headache was still getting to me. I resolved to get something more than just what I had in front of me. I sent Philip’s intern my finished recording of the recap and asked him to file a FOIA request about this shoot down near New America. As I sent the email I heard an airplane taxiing outside the window in front of me at the food court. A Janet flight. That’s not funny. That’s really not funny. Fuck you, you’re what started all this. I watched as it approached the runway and began to take off. All I could think about was how much I hated this airliner, how much I hated not knowing why the Chinese were covering up the shoot down, how much I hated that man I killed and how much I hated myself for killing him. And I thought about how much Will would hate me.

I picked up the picture of the damaged spaceplane once more. “It can’t be.” I said under my breath.

“Oh, but it can be.” I head a voice say. I looked up as a balding old white guy in a dress shirt and sunglasses sat down in front of me, closing my laptop as he did so.

“Umm, excuse me asshole.” I said indignantly. “Who the hell are you?”

“Well my dear Clementine. Ah, Clementine Forrester that is. I’m... a snake person or a lizard I guess.“ He revealed my own name to me as he laughed in my face. I watched two cops in plain clothes sit down on the table behind him, seemingly not paying any attention to us.

My heart began to pound again. I was silent for a few seconds. “How do you know that? How do you know my name?“ I asked.

He expounded. “Well, I mean, how couldn’t I know? I am the one who sold that passport to you after all. In fact, I’m the one that set you up with ‘Frank Monterrey’. And I’m the one that gave him all that shit you’ve been blowing your mind with for the past few minutes. And to top it all off, I’m the one who’s gonna get you on board one of those Janet flights so you can do some ‘personal’ journalism for me.“

I narrowed my eyes and steeled my resolve. “And tell me exactly why I would do a fucking thing for your ass?”

He cackled as he stole my slice of pizza, taking a bite of it. He swallowed and threw it back down onto my plate, leaning in as he rubbed his hands together and explained. “Well my dear, because I’m the only one who can get your business partner out of the proverbial and literal hole he’s in.”

A shiver ran down my back.

“You didn’t think he could just aide and abet a known national security threat like yourself and get away with it, did you?“ He asked me.

Well, at least I have my story now. I thought to myself.

I'm an undercover journalist investigating the President’s space force

#after skies #black sky wars

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afrosocialism · 7 years

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7 Reasons why the Left is dead in America.

As we know, the left is in serious life support in America. It wasn’t what it was then in the 60s and 70s or the era of the Industrial Revolution. There are many reasons for its downfall, but I’m gonna give seven.

#7: Internal in-fighting between ideologies and sectarianism.

One of the major problem that befell the left is the constant antagonism between state and libertarian socialists esp. in the case of MLs/communists and anarchists/ancoms. We are fighting over what ideology is right and wrong, ideas from this revolutionary will set us free, which leader is better, what is or what is not socialism, and all that jazz. Both anarchism and communism have its problems, but we need to realize this: they’re both tenants of socialism that is made to fight against the capitalist state. We have no connection with each other just squabbling. Despite that, there are groups that are cult-like or secretarian that think their ideas are better and others aren’t. Avoid em. Anyway, look at the left in Latin America, as it consists of different ideologies working to fight against capitalism and imperialism.

#6: Over reliance on old leftist theorists and a cult of personality.

I see this a lot in leftists and it annoys me that we still got people who are over dependent on works from leftist theorists like Bakunin, Marx, Kropotkin, and Lenin. They are so optimistic that if we just keep following their ideas, we’ll be free rather than adapting to the reality of now and see we need more than that to survive. Anarchist Panther Ashanti Alston Omowale said that anarchism is pitiful if it relies on the work of its European figureheads, rather than the experience of actual struggle and revolution. That can apply that to forms of socialism. If we rely on leftist dogma, we ain’t gonna progress. Another thing is that a lotta leftists wanna create a cult of personality around their favorite theorists than learn from their ideas and flaws. We refuse to adapt to the situation that capitalism created. Look at Communalism. It’s based off of experiences of revolutionary organizing and action. It was made for how to create self governed municipalities to survive from the vampiric nature of capitalism. We need to learn from recent experiences of revolution and struggle and the ever changing nature of capitalism.

#5: How it treats anti-oppression and intersectional politics. One problem with the left is that it refuses or fully adapt anti oppression and/or intersectional politics. Some of them may claim that they are anti-racist/sexist/transphobic etc. but don’t do nothing with it. Sometimes they make their opposition towards oppressive behaviors about themselves or invade marginalized folx spaces and police them. On the other hand, there are some that dismiss them as identity politics and call them divisive and believe that they are a distraction in fighting class conflict. The revolution will be intersectional or it will not be a revolution. What they don’t understand that these identities intersect with class and that class itself is an identity. Also, there are those that practice oppressive behaviors in their spaces (I’ll get into that more) and resist to understand how they benefit off of whiteness.

#4 Over reliance on electoral politics and entrance to the state.

The left believes that to succeed is to elect people into state politics. Even though this been a long practice with limited success, but those leftists groups also had revolutionary organizing. Here’s the thing: we ain’t got that now. We’re so fixated in putting our ideas to the state, that we forget the necessity to organize. At this point we should see the reality of electoral politics by these facts:

A. The state is essentially capitalist as it is a system ran by the ruling class.

B. Electoral politics are controlled and operated by the state.

C. Electoral politics are centered around an elephant and a jackass.

D. Any chance that the radical left getting elected into state politics is slim.

E. In order to succeed into the state, you must soften your views or assimilate into their political thinking.

I may sound anarchist saying this, but I know that there are state socialists who agree that compromises with the state is surrender. That’s how Bernie Sanders was made. He came out left, but when he worked with the state, he didn’t bother to oppose the capitalist state, worked with the Dems and stood by or be silent of their atrocities, spoke nebulously for milquetoast reforms, and appealed to middle class white millennials than the working class and poor he claimed he’s standing for. We should never sell out to the state because the state will never be for our interests.

#3: Engaging in a lotta pacifism.

I know people that are nonviolent, and I’m like okay, but I think we really need to transcend from that. Pacifism has a lot of problems, mostly that the only way to fight against institutionalized violence and corruption is to be nonviolent and it implants that idea towards oppressed folx. It is ignorant towards the history that this country (and many other settler nations) was founded by violence, that nonviolence alone is futile without armed wing to back it, and that it’s necessary to retaliate with violence against an illegitimate state. A lotta leftists have completely abandoned armed resistance and rejected violence as a tactic to fight against capitalism and oppression. They won’t even bother to fight the right, believing that they’ll change through debate and compassion. However, they don’t know that the right can and will exert violence on whom they hate. Many believe that nonviolence will produce better change, not realizing that the state has a monopoly on violence and can exert it at their own will. Also, pacifism is toxic as fuck as it tells us that we shouldn’t fight back while our oppressors plot our destruction.

#2: Too many liberals (and some reactionaries) in our movement.

One major issue why the Left is struggling because liberals (and some reactionaries) has invaded and flooded our movement. Main reasons for most of the aforementioned reasons are because liberalism is infecting our movement. They’re the main reason for why we won’t fight fascists/bigots as they humanize em, defend their actions as free speech, justify their existence. When the right gets stronger, they'll come out their doldrums and defend their existence, and let them kill us. Liberals push pacifism and electoral politics on leftists and claim that these ideas are radical. They distort the fuck outta history and the true meaning of socialism, into their view and pandering to the right's dismissive view of it. I see a lot of so called leftists engaging in liberalism rather than radicalism, that they’re deserving of questioning. I also see that a lotta liberals call them leftists and claim that they are the standard bearers of leftism and make leftism about being anti-conservative, yet pro liberal and liking leftist figures without even understanding their principles. They also flood the movement with conspiracy theories, something that isn't leftist. Let’s be honest, liberals aren’t our friends and not even left because they have a history of destroying and crushing leftist movements and leaders. Most of them are working with the Democrats and are double agents of the state as they exist dilute radical ideas and movements and assimilate them to the capitalist state. These people wants to push the left into the capitalist state and the Democrats. These people justify or be silent on neoliberalism and imperialism as long it’s a Democrat. These people also encourage or even gaslight other leftists to engage into shitty liberal beliefs. Most of them also engage in oppressive behaviors (mostly transphobia, racism, classism, sexism, and ableism). Speaking of that, reactionaries have also taken over the left, mostly in Facebook groups. They engage in the aforementioned behavior just as worst as the liberals and defend it as left. These are what I call the "alt left". The main reason why the left is dying too many damn people with reactionary or revisionist mindsets coming in infecting our movement with their shit.

And #1: AMERICA.

What could be at fault than any of the other reasons for the left's demise? Simple. It's America. Many people like to blame the left dying because the right going strong, identity politics, or being too soft, but they refuse to look at how much America fucked up the left. America (with occasional help from other Western nations) has spent years in dismantling, weakening, and suppressing leftist ideals, movements, leaders, and nations through the Red Scare, McCarthyism, espionage acts, police, imperialism, violence, propaganda, the FBI, CIA, NATO, unjust laws, betrayal, coups, neo-colonialism, installing puppet leaders, and war. America is the greatest enemy of the left, and will make sure we die a slow or fast death. America will never adapt to leftism because it is a white imperialist capitalist settler nation that was founded by the genocide of the Native Americans and the slavery of Africans. America is capitalist and will not give up its capitalist state without fight. You know why the left is dying here? Because America has killed it. America will do anything to destroy the left in here and in other nations.

Even though I said the left is in struggle in the USA, It has been slowing recovering with the election of President Donald Trump and the concurrent rise of fascism in this nation. However, the left got stronger in some nations of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

#leftism #socialism

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junketsonasadplanet · 4 years

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A Field Guide to Journalism

The Fourth Estate - journalism - is a central pillar for modern democracies now that the internet age is no longer a “flash in the pan,” research tool, or means of communication but instead an entire digital alter-ego for a generation. A means and medium of expression; a boundless, dangerous sea new to human experience whose swift movements change our perception of information. More placid waters no longer entice, the slow-moving panopticon of democracy’s policy-making needs to be translated and emphasized against a torrential flood of amusement.

Start by making a Twitter account. No one uses Facebook for news, only fucking boomers use Facebook. “I use the ‘Book,” some fucking boomer is saying while wearing sandals and flipping a burger on the grill, “it’s how I keep in touch with my grand-kids!” A CNN editor rubs their hands together. That’s what they’ll run with, “the ‘Book is how today’s grandparents stay in touch!”

That’s perfect because CNN/FOX/MSNBC - pick your poison they’re basically the same - are competing for the main demographic of long term coma victims and retirement homes leaving the channel on the TV in the day room. “It’s how I keep in touch with my grand-kids!” is echoing under humming fluorescent light to an audience of failing kidneys, lung cancer, and stroke victims who are staring at each other. Imagine knifing two Vietnamese in a tunnel and forty years later you’re getting abused by your Dominican nurse who steals your pocket change and slaps you when you don’t take pills. People don’t hate boomers because they ran the planet and economy into the fucking dust they hate them because they’re pathetic.

We’re still talking about how to find a good news source so hang on. The generation of unbridled wealth and power fucked up everything they touched and are slackjawed now staring at the desert of reality, either that or Facebook. Your grandson OD’d because he mixed Oxy and Everclear? Hit that share button saying you’ve got an angel waiting for you in Heaven. People shit themselves when they mix like that. Imagine an Angel in its gown with shit running down its leg. CNN doing 24/7 coverage of Zuckerberg during the Cambridge Analytica trial in Senate with a well-hidden earbud. Now look concerned. No, little more deeply concerned, avoid some eye contact and unfocus your eyes while staring at the ground. Okay, now start to look determined. Look at the Senate - do not smile - look at each Senator in turn and tell them you are taking action to prevent fake news from spreading on your platform.

Zuckerberg is taking classes on how to look more human/relatable, catastrophically failing. We had to get a remote operator with a Berkeley M.S. in psychology to feed him cues. The dude cannot understand how to express emotion. It’s crazy. We tried showing him shock footage and he got a hard-on. A full blown mast watching a guy get beat to death with bricks.

Zuckerberg cannot convey basic human emotion and gets a boner knowing he employs vast amounts of people whose only job is to screen “offensive content” on Instagram and Facebook. Contractors in Phoenix, Arizona, some in Hollywood, Florida and Austin, Texas who are paying rent watching cartel executions and child porn. Automated systems immediately flag undistorted footage so the uploaders distort it or create new footage. If you’re reading this and waiting to hear about modern journalism then so is a contractor now watching the same footage of someone get their head beat in.

At the Phoenix branch of Facebook, Inc, they have a sign for “Days Since We Saw the Funkytown Execution Video” that never goes to 1. Some ingenious motherfucker will reverse the video or overlay it into an anime AMV and upload to Instagram while tagging every “social influencer” he can. I spoke to him once, he told me the most popular was “Redbone but you’re Mexican” where the Funkytown song in the background as they hack a man’s hands off while injecting him with methamphetamine so he can’t pass out so his stumps try to touch his face while some cartel goon peels the skin off his head is instead replaced by the muffled sound of “Redbone” by Childish Gambino.

Facebook is breeding an ingenious mutt race of some very efficient serial killers, conspiracy theorists, but mostly of people who will claim PTSD and join lawsuits against the Zuck so they can claim peanuts while the tort lawyers bring half a billion home and masturbate on Twitter that they have taken a major stand against a worldwide corporation that they use to try to talk to their grand-kids. No one who is a lawyer or social media influence or Mark Zuckerberg has a soul so they sleep pretty well.

Now, back to Twitter. You may have an account already. Undergo basic SMS verification if not and follow @MaggieNYT.

Don’t read any article she posts or retweets. It’s all the same beltway circlejerk anyways. You, as an elite member of an inner circle, are there for the comments. Most of @MaggieNYT’s followers are caught in a hate cycle of following her and insulting her in comments. You enabled Trump, they shout. Yeah, a liberal Brooklyn Jew is the reason why Donald Trump was elected. The ADL is legislating for hate crime laws protecting Jewish public figures and important journalists, whose Venn diagram is a circle.

Full disclosure: I’m saying this as a Jew. I’m attempting to define how to find #GOODNEWS in a world of #FAKENEWS which is fatally important in order to preserve our democracy. This is an important conversation we must undertake in light of historic persecution of my race. No one likes Haberman but she #PERSISTS despite being a punching bag.

@MaggieNYT’s Twitter is single-handedly the cause for a significant rise in anti-Semitism. You show an average person Henry Kissinger enthusiastically masturbating to child porn while authorizing the overthrow of democracies and the sale of weapons to fascist governments then lock them in a room where their only content is @MaggieNYT’s tweets and see which one wants 2020 to look like 1940 quicker.

The good news is that journalism is being rapidly overtaken by Markov-bots which dissect the salient #BUZZWORDS and generates a publishable text. That’s the future of journalism. Not just Markov chains of seemingly deep insight but they’ll innovate by having attractive women half-naked and bleach blonde narrating the whole thing. That’s the future. Naked News is already a thing, God bless, but pretty soon the whole world will look like Twitter. Nude women talking about viral pandemics and religious insurrection while they lightly press a vibrator between their legs and wink at the camera.

Are you upset by this future? You live in it, but it’s okay to have your opinion. We’ll have a body dysphoric person as part of the Markov chain designed to make you feel better. You can watch a larger women masturbate while she tells you that Hubei is a ghost town. Or a trans-woman, a white/black/latino male, a Muslim. That is how you distinguish #REALNEWS from #FAKENEWS. Maggie has little chance in the oncoming environment which relies on a degree of sex appeal and brevity. Most of her readers are actively imagining how good her lipstick would look on a curb.

It would be a shame if someone activated a ***** **** {redacted} in New York or Los Angeles or Palo Alto. The land would be uninhabitable for a decade at least. You would see a vast steppe land of disintegrating buildings and corpses. How terrible if someone found how easy it was to make […] {redacted, jfc get on track, we’re talking about modern journalism}.

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saladforchimps-blog · 7 years

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My College Campus’s LGBT Community

Recently in my multicultural education class, we had a question and answer session with our campus’s LGBT community. Most of them looked exactly what you would expect them to look like: fat and ugly. Or visually repulsive, as I like to call them. If I saw any of these gargoyles on campus, I would immediately know that they’re gay, or whatever they identify as this week. My gaydar is spot on. Not only are they fat, but they look like disgusting monsters, and none of them could ever create a friendship outside of their abnormal club. Now, I don’t hate gay people, and I support them to live their lives however they see fit. However, the LGBT community is full of radical queers who try to control everyone else, and they live in their own delusional world.

When they first shuffled into the classroom, they all wrote their names and pronouns on the whiteboard. All of their pronouns were feminine. The lard asses, plus the semi-sexy half-dyke, then encouraged us to always tell people our preferred pronouns when we meet them. This is absolutely autistic for a number of reasons. First of all, trannies only make up around 0.3% of the total population; that means that 99.7% of the population identifies with the gender they were born with (dailycaller.com). So, policing 99.7% of the population’s language in order to never offended 0.3% of the population is completely absurd. I will refer to someone as a “he” if they’re male, or a “she” if they’re female, and will not first ask what their pronouns are upon meeting them. I will, however, use whatever pronouns someone would prefer me to refer to them as, I just won’t ask everyone I meet what pronouns they prefer.

They’ve changed the name of their community of freaks too. I don’t know if they did this themselves specifically on campus, or if the name just got longer everywhere. Apparently now, it’s: LGBTQAAP+2s. I shit you not, they fucking added 2s into it. 2s means two spirited, and its origins come from Native Americans; hundreds of years ago, or whatever, some Natives believed that they possessed the spirit of both a man and a woman. Basically, how they explained transgenderism back then. So, the buffet addicts of today added that into their long list of letters for some reason. Although, I highly doubt anyone in their toilet community identifies as 2s, or maybe all of them do just to be trendy.

One of the cows was asexual. I refer to her as a cow because she was literally grazing during our class. Granted, she was only eating almonds and not a greasy cheeseburger, but still eating nonetheless. That’s something I’m still shocked by: that she literally had to stuff her fat gullet during an “informative” period. I was informed, informed about how much more mentally diseased these people are than I could have ever imagined. She also had an odd haircut that made her look extremely dyke. These people try to look like outcasts, and they’re doing a wonderful job. Probably the only wonderful job they’ve ever successfully accomplished. One of the biological girls said something about how she tries to stand out from most people and look gay. I can’t remember exactly what she said, I wasn’t paying that much attention to what she was saying, nor did I give a shit. So, they marginalize themselves, then get offended for being marginalized. And who’s always at fault? The straight white man. Fascists.

The tranny, oh my fucking god, the tranny. Absolutely horrifying. My group’s social justice project is on sexism against men, and I could tell that they were triggered by the looks on their faces when we mentioned it to them. Two of my group members asked these things about their illogical opinions on our subject, and their answers were exactly what one would expect from people who should have been diagnosed with down syndrome. My group members said something about how men’s lives are considered less valuable than women’s and children’s because it’s women and children first in survival situations. The semi-sexy half-dyke’s answer was that men just think of women and children as weaker, and unable to take care of themselves. Women and children absolutely are weaker than men. Then, they tranny said that it was because of the patriarchy. No facts were brought up about the patriarchy, or given a proper explanation of what it is, it just simply is there is oppress women. Even though women clearly have the same rights as men do, at least in Western countries.

I didn’t enjoy sitting in a room with them at all. I had a slight headache, and the semi-sexy half-dyke was wearing some strong perfume that smelled like ass, and it made me feel even worse. I forgot to mention that the semi-sexy half-dyke isn’t fat, I’m not attracted to the obese. So, not only were these people visually unappealing, but they: sounded like shit, smelled like shit, and didn’t have properly functioning brains. They were unappealing to three of the five senses, and had a 75% obesity rate. Ok, maybe not all of them were technically obese, but they were still pig people. Still, they portrayed an accurate representation of the lesbian obesity crisis. A study conducted by the National Institutes of Health found that 75% of lesbians are overweight (washingtonpost.com). That’s 25% higher than straight women, and double the blubber rate for gay men. So, lesbians are just really fat people, generally speaking. There are some hot lesbians, who have their waistlines under control.

Now, allow me to critique the bisexual bitch (the semi-sexy half-dyke). Immediate when she walked in, I thought that she must be, and was hoping, that she was bi. Correct again; my gaydar is never wrong. She talked about how she hates it when straight boys ask her if she likes threesomes. Then, my professional victim professor had to single me out, and then my entire table because I admitted to the class that it’s hot when two lesbians are making out. Let me be clearer, this week we were learning about homophobia, and he wanted to know if the guys in the class were attracted to lesbians. Nobody was answering this obvious question, so he called on our table because it was made up entirely of men; my response was “it depends”. If two girls are attractive and kissing, that most certainly is a sexy sight. Although, not all lesbians are created equal, some, most of them, are way too fat to be considered attractive by heterosexual men. (Again, look for the link in my sources if you need further convincing). She should take it was a compliment that so many guys ask her that. It means guys think that she’s a hot lesbian. If she wasn’t, nobody would even be talking to her in the first place, let alone ask her about her sex life. Besides, the closest thing most lesbians get toward sex is KFC. That reminds me of what the cow said, in a desperate attempt to try to be funny that failed miserably, “who needs sex when there’s cake”. Fat logic is evident with that one. She probably has sex with cake. I don’t have any evidence to back up that claim, but it’s my non-obese gut feeling.

Another odd thing these sub humans do, as if they could get any weirder, is snapping their fingers. In an attempt to keep our classroom a “safe space”, they snap their fingers when they disagree with each other, I believe. Randomly when one of the dykes was talking, another one would snap their fingers, and nobody would say or do anything about it. It was so weird.

So, the LBGT community is full of: fat, ugly, stupid, ignorant, perpetual victims, and conspiracy theorists. Nobody should take them seriously, and they should all just fuck off.

Sources:

Hicks, Josh. "Why the federal government spent $3 million to study lesbian obesity." The Washington Post. WP Company, 02 Sept. 2014. Web. 04 Apr. 2017.

"Exactly Zero Point Three Percent Of Americans Are Transgender." The Daily Caller. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2017.

#LGBT Libtard MAGA Gross

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