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eldritchw1tch · 3 years

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i don’t want you like a best friend: a tswift-pimms playlist

link

this is the pimms playlist i spent more than a year working on from like, 2018 to the end of 2019! as such, it only contains music up through lover, not anything from folklore or evermore. @permets-2 finally poked me into posting the liner notes, which I gave up on because tumblr formatting was fighting me, so please know i haven’t actually looked at them since 2019 and there might still be missing things? idk.

this playlist is absolutely dedicated to my beloved @faiasakura, who did her own version of an all-tswift pimms playlist completely independently (we actively avoided comparing notes, lol), which can be found here!

i don’t really go here lately but i hope this is of interest to someone!

Prologue

1. Don’t Blame Me (reputation)

for you, I would fall from grace

Just to touch your face

If you walk away, I'd beg you on my knees to stay

…

Lord save me, my drug is my baby

I'll be usin' for the rest of my life

Act 1: The Q

2. Gorgeous (reputation)

a crush

Ocean blue eyes looking in mine

I feel like I might sink and drown and die

…

You're so gorgeous

I can't say anything to your face

'Cause look at your face

And I'm so furious

At you for making me feel this way

But what can I say?

You're gorgeous

3. Treacherous (Red)

something magnetic, pulling them both in

And I'll do anything you say

If you say it with your hands

And I'd be smart to walk away

But you're quicksand

…

Your name has echoed through my mind

And I just think you should, think you should know

That nothing safe is worth the drive

And I will follow you, follow you home

4. Dress (reputation)

a shared and precious secret: love, desperate and messy and everything. But also: the scrutiny, the frenetic anxiety, the fear.

I’m spilling wine in the bathtub

You kiss my face and we're both drunk

Everyone thinks that they know us

But they know nothing about—

All of this silence and patience, pining and anticipation

My hands are shaking from holding back from you

5. Tied Together With a Smile (Taylor Swift)

the pressure builds; jack’s anxiety gets worse

Hold on, baby you're losing it

The water's high, you're jumping into it

And letting go, and no one knows

That you cry, but you don't tell anyone

That you might not be the golden one

And you're tied together with a smile

But you're coming undone

6. Long Live (Speak Now)

the glory, the playoffs, the memorial cup: the golden boys of hockey, on top of the world

Long live the walls we crashed through

All the kingdom lights shined just for me and you

I was screaming, long live all the magic we made

And bring on all the pretenders

One day, we will be remembered

…

Hold on, to spinning around

Confetti falls to the ground

May these memories break our fall

7. State of Grace (Red)

the 34 days, inside kent’s euphoria

This is a state of grace

This is the worthwhile fight

Love is a ruthless game

Unless you play it good and right

These are the hands of fate

You’re my Achilles heel

this is the golden age of something good and right and real

8. Cruel Summer (Lover)

(that golden season and its dark underbelly)

So cut the headlights, summer's a knife

I'm always waiting for you just to cut to the bone

Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes

And if I bleed, you'll be the last to know

Said, "I'm fine," but it wasn't true

I don't wanna keep secrets just to keep you

And I snuck in through the garden gate

Every night that summer just to seal my fate (Oh)

And I scream, "For whatever it's worth

I love you, ain't that the worst thing you ever heard?"

9. Haunted (Speak Now)

the overdose: kent finds jack on the bathroom floor

Whoa, holding my breath

Won't lose you again

Something's made your eyes go cold

Come on, come on, don't leave me like this

I thought I had you figured out

Something's gone terribly wrong

You're all I wanted

10. I Know Places (1989)

kent in the waiting room, holding on hope

Something happens when everybody finds out

See the vultures circling, dark clouds

Love's a fragile little flame, it could burn out

It could burn out

…

Lights flash and we'll run for the fences

Let them say what they want, we won't hear it

Loose lips sink ships all the damn time

Not this time

Act 2: The Fallout

11. The Story of Us (Speak Now)

kent goes to the draft; jack won’t answer his calls

Now I'm standing alone in a crowded room

And we're not speaking

And I'm dying to know

Is it killing you like it's killing me?

Yeah, and I don't know what to say

Since the twist of fate, when it all broke down

And the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now

…

The battle's in your hands now

But I would lay my armor down

If you say you'd rather love than fight

12. Last Kiss (Speak Now)

jack and kent, the same realization from opposite sides

So I'll go sit on the floor

Wearing your clothes

All that I know is

I don't know how to be something you miss

I never thought we'd have a last kiss

Never imagined we'd end like this

Your name, forever the name on my lips

13. Death By A Thousand Cuts (Lover)

Starting to live with the devastation and the broken heart

Saying goodbye is death by a thousand cuts

Flashbacks waking me up

I get drunk, but it's not enough

’Cause the morning comes and you're not my baby

I look through the windows of this love

Even though we boarded them up

Chandelier's still flickering here

’Cause I can't pretend it's okay when it's not

It's death by a thousand cuts

14. If This Was A Movie (Speak Now)

regrets and memories

Last night, I heard my own heart beating

Sounded like footsteps on my stairs

Six months gone and I'm still reaching

Even though I know you're not there

I was playing back a thousand memories, baby

Thinkin' 'bout everything we've been through

Maybe I've been going back too much lately

When time stood still and I had you

15. Cold as You (Taylor Swift)

the grief and pain become anger and bitterness

And when you take, you take the very best of me

So I start a fight cause I need to feel something

And you do what you want cause I'm not what you wanted

…

You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray

And I stood there loving you and wished them all away

And you come away with a great little story

Of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you

Interlude 1: Jack

16. I Almost Do (Red)

kent doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does (but jack doesn’t either)

I bet you think I either moved on or hate you

‘Cause each time you reach out, there’s no reply

I bet it never, ever occurred to you

That I can’t say hello to you

And risk another goodbye

…

Oh, we made quite a mess, babe

It’s probably better off this way

And I confess, babe

In my dreams, you’re touching my face

And asking me if I want to try again with you

And I almost do

Act 3: Coming of Age in Vegas

17. New Romantics (1989)

vegas; teammates; living in the moment; drinking, dancing, and self-destructing

We're all here, the lights and boys are blinding

We hang back, it's all in the timing

It's poker

He can't see it in my face

But I'm about to play my Ace (ahh)

We need love, but all we want is danger

We team up, then switch sides like a record changer

The rumors are terrible and cruel

But honey, most of them are true

…

Heartbreak is the national anthem

We sing it proudly

We’re too busy dancing (yeah) to get knocked off our feet

Baby, we're the new romantics

The best people in life are free

18. Begin Again (Red)

kent starts to move on

And you throw your head back laughing like a little kid

I think it's strange that you think I'm funny 'cause he never did

I've been spending the last eight months

Thinking all love ever does is break and burn and end

But on a Wednesday in a cafe, I watched it begin again

19. The Way I Loved You (Fearless)

all the drinking and dancing and dating still feel empty and hollow; he just wants to feel again; he just wants that love back

I miss screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain

It's 2 AM and I'm cursing your name

I'm so in love that I acted insane

And that's the way I loved you

Breaking down and coming undone

It's a roller coaster kind of rush

And I never knew I could feel that much

And that's the way I loved you

…

He can't see the smile I'm faking

And my heart's not breaking

'Cause I'm not feeling anything at all

And you were wild and crazy

Just so frustrating

Intoxicating, complicated

20. The Lucky One (Red)

kent parson: the loneliest boy, so alone at the top of the world

You had it figured out since you were in school

Everybody loves pretty, everybody loves cool

So overnight, you look like a sixties queen

…

And they tell you that you’re lucky, but you’re so confused

'Cause you don’t feel pretty, you just feel used

And all the young things line up to take your place

—

Another name goes up in lights

You wonder if you’ll make it out alive

21. Come In With The Rain (Fearless)

(starting to move on is not the same as letting go)

I’ve watched you so long, screamed your name

I don’t know what else I can say

…

But I’ll leave my window open

'Cause I’m too tired at night to call your name

Just know I’m right here hoping

That you’ll come in with the rain

Act 4: Implosion

22. Out of the Woods (1989)

memories he can’t escape of a love like a car crash

The night we couldn't quite forget

When we decided, we decided

To move the furniture so we could dance

Baby, like we stood a chance

Two paper airplanes flying, flying, flying

And I remember thinking

Are we out of the woods yet? Are we out of the woods yet? Are we out of the woods yet?

…

You took a Polaroid of us

Then discovered (then discovered)

The rest of the world was black and white

But we were in screaming color

23. Red (Red)

Kent decides to go to epikegster

Loving him is like driving a new Maserati

Down a dead-end street

Faster than the wind, passionate as sin

Ending so suddenly

…

Remembering him comes in flashbacks and echoes

Tell myself it's time now, gotta let go

But moving on from him is impossible

When I still see it all in my head

In burning red

Loving him was red

24. The Last Time (Red)

didja miss me? (something tentative; something a little bit hopeful on both sides)

Find myself at your door

Just like all those times before

I’m not sure how I got there

All roads they lead me here

I imagine you are home

In your room, all alone

And you open your eyes into mine

And everything feels better

25. The Archer (Lover)

kent tries to extend an olive branch but it’s still covered in thorns

Combat, I'm ready for combat

I say I don't want that, but what if I do?

'Cause cruelty wins in the movies

I've got a hundred thrown-out speeches I almost said to you

…

I've been the archer, I've been the prey

Who could ever leave me, darling

But who could stay?

…

And I cut off my nose just to spite my face

Then I hate my reflection for years and years

26. Bad Blood (1989)

jack’s answer to kent’s wounded lashing out

Oh, it's so sad to

Think about the good times

You and I

…

’Cause baby, now we've got bad blood

You know it used to be mad love

So take a look what you've done

’Cause baby, now we've got bad blood, hey!

27. Breathe (Fearless)

kent, driving away from epikegster

I see your face in my mind as I drive away

'Cause none of us thought it was gonna end that way

People are people and sometimes we change our minds

But it's killing me to see you go after all this time

…

And we know it's never simple, never easy

Never a clean break, no one here to save me

You're the only thing I know like the back of my hand

…

And I can't breathe without you, but I have to

Breathe without you but I have to

28. All Too Well (Red)

despite all the pain, there’s an irresistible nostalgia for what they had all those years ago—for when things were so much simpler

Maybe we got lost in translation

Maybe I asked for too much

But maybe this thing was a masterpiece

'Til you tore it all up

Running scared, I was there, I remember it all too well

And you call me up again just to break me like a promise

So casually cruel in the name of being honest

I'm a crumpled up piece of paper lying here

'Cause I remember it all, all, all

Too well

…

Time won't fly, it's like I'm paralyzed by it

I'd like to be my old self again

But I'm still trying to find it

Interlude 2: Kent

29. Fifteen (Fearless)

a memory, a reflection

'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you

You're gonna believe them

And when you're fifteen and your first kiss

Makes your head spin 'round

But in your life you'll do things greater than

Dating the boy on the football team

But I didn't know it at fifteen

…

When all you wanted was to be wanted

Wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now

Back then I swore I was gonna marry him someday

But I realized some bigger dreams of mine

Act 5: Moving On, Growing Up

30. Clean (1989)

finally learning to be his own person, separate from that shared past

There was nothing left to do (Oh-oh, oh-oh)

When the butterflies turned to

Dust that covered my whole room

So I punched a hole in the roof (Oh-oh, oh-oh)

Let the flood carry away all my pictures of you

…

The water filled my lungs, I screamed so loud

But no one heard a thing

…

Rain came pouring down

When I was drowning, that's when I could finally breathe

And by morning

Gone was any trace of you, I think I am finally clean

31. 22 (Red)

friends and freedom, and real joy in that this time around

It feels like a perfect night

To dress up like hipsters

And make fun of our exes, uh-uh, uh-uh

It feels like a perfect night

For breakfast at midnight

To fall in love with strangers, uh-uh, uh-uh

…

Yeah

We're happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time

It's miserable and magical, oh, yeah

Tonight's the night when we forget about the deadlines

It's time, oh-oh

32. So It Goes… (reputation)

[a doomed love can still be a good one]

'Cause we break down a little

But when you get me alone, it's so simple

'Cause baby, I know what you know

We can feel it

…

And all the pieces fall right into place

Getting caught up in a moment

Lipstick on your face

So it goes…

…

I'm yours to keep

And I'm yours to lose

You know I'm not a bad girl, but I

Do bad things with you

So it goes…

33. Dancing With Our Hands Tied (reputation)

[a doomed love can still be a good one]

I, I loved you in secret

First sight, yeah, we love without reason

Oh, twenty-five years old

Oh, how were you to know?

…

Could've spent forever with your hands in my pockets

Picture of your face in an invisible locket

You said there was nothing in the world that could stop it

I had a bad feeling

…

I'd kiss you as the lights went out

Swaying as the room burned down

I'd hold you as the water rushes in

If I could dance with you again

34. Wildest Dreams (1989)

[a doomed love can still be a good one]

He's so tall and handsome as hell

He's so bad, but he does it so well

I can see the end as it begins

My one condition is

…

Say you'll remember me

Standing in a nice dress

Staring at the sunset, babe

Red lips and rosy cheeks

Say you'll see me again

Even if it's just in your

Wildest dreams, ah-aah, haa

34. Shake It Off (1989)

At the top of his game, at the top of his sport, and actually happy at long last

I never miss a beat

I'm lightning on my feet

And that's what they don’t see, mm, mm

…

But I keep cruisin'

Can't stop, won't stop groovin'

It's like I got this music in my mind

Saying it's gonna be alright

…

'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play

And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate

Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake

I shake it off, I shake it off

Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break

And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake

Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake

I shake it off, I shake it off

35. Holy Ground (Red)

Remembering with enough distance and experience to appreciate what was, not ache from it

Spinning like a girl in a brand new dress

We had this big wide city all to ourselves

We blocked the noise with the sound of, "I need you"

And for the first time, I had something to lose

And I guess we fell apart in the usual way

And the story's got dust on every page

But sometimes, I wonder how you think about it now

And I see your face in every crowd

…

'Cause darling, it was good

Never looking down

And right there where we stood

Was holy ground

Act 6: Reunion

36. ME! (Lover)

reconnection, reconciliation, re-appreciation

I know I tend to make it about me

I know you never get just what you see

But I will never bore you, baby

(And there's a lot of lame guys out there)

…

'Cause one of these things is not like the others

Livin' in winter, I am your summer

Baby doll, when it comes to a lover

I promise that you'll never find another like me-e-e

37. This Love (1989)

an unexpected reawakening

Tossing, turning

Struggled through the night with someone new

And I could go on and on, on and on

Lantern, burning

Flickered in my mind, only you

But you were still gone, gone, gone

…

Been losing grip, on sinking ships

You showed up just in time

…

This love is good, this love is bad

This love is alive back from the dead, oh-oh, oh

These hands had to let it go free, and

This love came back to me, oh-oh, oh

38. End Game (reputation) (ft. ed sheeran as jack)

After all this time, there are things they aren’t ever going to let go of again, no matter the trouble they bring

I got a bad boy persona, that's what they like (what they like)

You love it, I love it too 'cause you my type (You my type)

You hold me down, and I protect you with my life

…

I don't wanna touch you, I don't wanna be

Just another ex-love you don’t wanna see

I don’t wanna miss you (I don't wanna miss you)

Like the other girls do

I don’t wanna hurt you, I just wanna be

Drinking on a beach with you all over me

I know what they all say (I know what they all say)

But I ain't tryna play

…

I wanna be your end game (End game)

I wanna be your first string (First string)

I wanna be your A-Team (A-Team)

I wanna be your end game, end game

39. You Are In Love (1989)

something real; something sacred; something to build a life on

You can hear it in the silence (silence), silence (silence), you

You can feel it on the way home (way home), way home (way home), you

You can see it with the lights out (lights out), lights out (lights out)

You are in love, true love

You are in love

…

You kiss on sidewalks

You fight and you talk

One night, he wakes

Strange look on his face

Pauses, then says "You're my best friend"

And you knew what it was, he is in love

40. Change (Fearless)

when the two biggest hockey players of their generation come out of the closet—together—are in love with each other—it changes more lives than just theirs

So we've been outnumbered, raided, and now cornered

It's hard to fight when the fight ain’t fair

We're getting stronger now, finding things they never found

They might be bigger but we're faster and never scared

You can walk away, say we don't need this

But there's something in your eyes says we can beat this

…

'Cause these things will change

Can you feel it now?

These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down

This revolution, the time will come

For us to finally win

And we'll sing hallelujah, we'll sing hallelujah

Oh, oh

41. Call It What You Want (reputation)

When it stops mattering what anyone else thinks

All my flowers grew back as thorns

Windows boarded up after the storm

He built a fire just to keep me warm

All the drama queens taking swings

All the jokers dressing up as kings

They fade to nothing when I look at him

And I know I make the same mistakes every time

Bridges burn, I never learn

At least I did one thing right

I did one thing right

I'm laughing with my lover, makin' forts under covers

Trust him like a brother

Yeah, you know I did one thing right

Starry eyes sparkin' up my darkest night

…

My baby's fit like a daydream

Walking with his head down

I'm the one he's walking to

So call it what you want, yeah

Call it what you want to

42. Lover (Lover)

love

We could leave the Christmas lights up 'til January

And this is our place, we make the rules

And there's a dazzling haze, a mysterious way about you, dear

Have I known you 20 seconds or 20 years?

…

Can I go where you go?

Can we always be this close?

Forever and ever, ah

Take me out, and take me home

You're my, my, my, my lover

43. New Year’s Day (reputation)

love

You squeeze my hand three times in the back of the taxi

I can tell that it's gonna be a long road

I'll be there if you're the toast of the town, babe

Or if you strike out and you're crawling home

…

Don't read the last page

But I stay when it’s hard or it’s wrong or we're making mistakes

I want your midnights

But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day

44. Daylight (Lover)

Building a new life in the daylight

My love was as cruel as the cities I lived in

Everyone looked worse in the light

There are so many lines that I've crossed unforgiven

I'll tell you truth, but never goodbye

…

I once believed love would be (burning red)

But it's golden

Like daylight, like daylight

Like daylight, daylight

…

I don't wanna look at anything else now that I saw you

I don't wanna think of anything else now that I thought of you

I've been sleeping so long in a 20-year dark night

And now I see daylight, I only see daylight

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scapegrace74-blog · 4 years

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Saorsa, Chapter 8

A/N I’m generally pretty indifferent as far as readers using their own imaginations to populate the scenes I write, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you picture (and hear) Simon Callow as the Duke of Sandringham. He transcends universes.

For those just joining the broadcast already in session, here are Chapter 1 , Chapter 2 , Chapter 3 Chapter 4, Chapter 5 Chapter 6, and Chapter 7. Or you can head over to my AO3 page and binge read the whole thing. I won’t complain! Thanks as always to my Outlander fanfic publicist, @gotham-ruaidh And to all of you liking, reblogging and commenting!

“This is really a most excellent bread pudding, my dear,” the Duke of Sandringham intoned, washing down said pudding with another generous mouthful of port. The gentleman’s florid cheeks and rounded middle-section proved that his enjoyment of good food and drink extended beyond the walls of Lallybroch.

“Thank you, your grace. Cook is a miracle worker. She transforms liabilities into benefits, like this pudding made from stale bread. In lean times such as these, it is a priceless skill.”

Claire was wearing her best burgundy dress, bought in London before the war, and her usual cloud of curls was tamed into a bun from which only a few rebellious strands escaped. Although entertaining landed nobility was the very last thing she felt like doing, she was composed and polite, playing the role Frank had cast her in as lady of a Scottish Highland estate. If she could only get through this visit, it would be six long months before the duke returned for his spring tour. With a little luck, by then she would have some idea of what the hell she should do.

“Captain Randall is well, I trust,” the Duke interrupted her thoughts. She tried to mask her discomposure and gave the answer she had prepared for this predictable question. Not quite the truth, but not quite a lie either.

“He was very well when he visited last month whilst on leave. I’ve since received several of his letters, though of course he could not provide details of his mission. I believe he was in northern Italy of late.” She swallowed the salty knot that rose in her throat and stared at her half-eaten dessert. She hoped the duke would excuse her misty eyes as the reaction of any war bride anxious over the safety of her new husband.

“Of course,” the Duke replied in understanding. “These are difficult times, Lady Randall, but it is men such as your husband who will see us through them. I cannot tell you how much I admire him for enlisting, nor you for managing this estate so admirably in his absence. I know it cannot be easy. I only wish that others in this region would look to your excellent examples.”

“What do you mean, your grace?”

“That’s right. I forget you aren’t well-versed in local matters. Suffice it to say that many Highland Scots, having no love for the English or their political prerogatives, have not rallied eagerly to the war effort. Enrollment in my Home Guard in the Highlands is half that of the Lowland counties, and there are even rumours of clan chiefs assisting men in evading conscription.”

She found this allegation surprising. Although her time in Scotland had been brief, she could not help but be aware of the strict code of honour that governed society far more rigidly than the long strings of power that extended northward from London. With many adult men away at war, the estate was mostly served by the very young and very old, but she did not doubt any of them would lay down their life for their country. Or rather, for Scotland. And perhaps there lay the issue.

“Well, I can assure you that you have my utmost co-operation, your grace. You shan’t find a draft-dodger hiding away at Lallybroch.”

“I never doubted it, my dear. We share the same sympathies, you and I. It was why King George the First awarded captured Jacobite lands, such as this estate, to his most loyal English subjects after the last Scottish Catholic Rebellion; the Randalls among them. The Scots will never rise up against the Crown again, but they have no love for the English. A strong local bulwark is always a useful tool, is it not so?”

Not waiting for her answer to his rhetorical question, the Duke rose with a groan, brushed crumbs from his tweed sporting coat and extended his hand to clasp her own.

“And now, Lady Randall, I must unfortunately take my leave. The days are shortening, and I must reach Aberdeen by nightfall to avoid the blackout. My deepest gratitude, as ever, for your hospitality. It puts me at great ease to know that Lallybroch rests firmly in your capable hands until your husband’s return.”

He kissed her knuckles, graciously accepted the bank draft for a hundred pounds that Frank had left in his study, and after a few more pleasantries, climbed awkwardly into the back of his Humber Pullman. She waved goodbye from the courtyard as his car made its way down the long drive.

As Claire mounted the stairs to her bed chamber to change into her usual work clothes, she considered that the Duke of Sandringham must be a well-connected individual indeed, if he could afford petrol and a smartly dressed chauffeur, when everyone else struggled just to eat.

#my writing #outlander

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eleanor-writes-stuff · 4 years

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let the past die (show the way the world could be) - ONE-SHOT

Five years after the rise of the New Empire and the replacement of the Stormtrooper program with a new Peacetrooper program, Beta Rose Tico finds herself being separated from her Omega partner Finn when he’s drafted to serve a year of active duty.

Worried for her partner and fuming at archaic anti-Beta discrimination laws, what’s a woman to do other than go on a galactic road trip to meet the rulers of the empire themselves and push for change? (And maybe, just maybe, learn the truth behind the unexpected fall of the First Order and the rise of the two most powerful Force-users in recent galactic history while she’s at it.)

Gift Fic #2 of my holiday giveaway collection goes out to AO3′s @dagagada, who saw me flailing about this mess of a fic that *Stefon voice* has everything, and decided to claim it anyway. (No but seriously, this fic really does have everything. Check the AO3 version for tags if you need to!)

Also available on AO3. And hey, maybe check out my Twitter or Ko-fi?

“Please rise for Their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and Empress of the New Empire.”

Rose has always found this part of the holo a bit funny, if only because the actual audience in attendance that day had been entirely comprised of the empire’s staff and soldiers, all of whom had been standing long before the imperial couple had made their appearance.

Today, though, she’s too intent on capturing every single moment of the recording to react with her usual huff of amusement. The speech had lasted for twenty minutes, starting with the usual themes the couple had been fond of at the beginning of their reign five years ago, messages of letting the past die and building something new from the ashes, something better. From there, the emperor had segued into the announcement that the Stormtrooper program was to be discontinued effective immediately, and in its place the empire would implement a Peacetrooper program which would draft every able-bodied young adult citizen of the empire into a year of service, during which they would be stationed at various points throughout the galaxy in order to maintain peace as well as gain new insight into the lives and cultures of their fellow citizens.

The whole thing had sounded good in theory at the time, but then again anything would have seemed better than having children ripped away from their families to be turned into mindless soldiers. It’d worked out decently in practice too, at least for Rose – she’d ended up being called to serve that very first year, and her time with the program had taken her far from her home planet of Hays Minor to see how other systems had suffered from or escaped First Order control, how the New Empire was slowly but surely dismantling the legacy of its predecessor in an attempt to secure a better future for everyone.

The experience hadn’t been the worst of her life, not even close – and then, on her very last assignment in Coruscant before she was due to go home, she’d met Finn.

Finn, a Stormtrooper trainee who’d been released from servitude along with all of his fellow soldiers right before he was supposed to go on his first mission. Finn, a lost boy who hadn’t touched the ground or seen the sky since he was a child and couldn’t for the life of him figure out a new normal once he was released from the life he’d been forced into, the life that had been all he’d ever known. Finn, who’d ended up leaving Coruscant and the empire’s promise of helping former Stormtroopers reintegrate into society in order to go back to Hays Minor with her and rehabilitate her home.

Finn, who’d received notice of being drafted two months ago, just a month after they’d agreed to get married.

Rose shakes off her memories of that dark day and returns her focus to the holo, to her last hope of keeping Finn safe and sound and home with her.

“We understand that this is new, and that change can be confusing and worrying,” the empress had said once her husband was finished explaining the new program, “but above all else we want to reassure everyone that this is meant to bring us together, not tear us apart. A standard year might be short to some of you and long to others, but in any case we do not intend to separate families.”

And here, she’d turned to give her husband a look Rose has never quite been able to decipher, a look that the emperor had, much to the entire galaxy’s shock, returned with a smile softer than anyone had believed the stoic former Darksider Alpha to be capable of.

The imperial couple had shared a moment then, before the empress wrapped up their announcement. “On that note, exemptions and accommodations will be made for mated couples, those with children, and more. A department has been set up within the new Peacetrooper program for the sole purpose of determining and facilitating these exemptions and accommodations, and we urge you to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.”

The thing is, Rose has reached out – multiple times in the past two months, even. And every single time, she’s been met with the same response: the romantic partnership exemption clause is only applicable to mated couples or couples raising toddler-aged children or younger. Beta-mix couples, even if married, have been deemed capable of surviving the separation without significant or long-lasting ill effects due to their unmated status.

The cold and callous response sounds so out of line with what the empress had promised that day on the steps of the newly-erected Coruscant Palace, a bright and welcoming structure that couldn’t be more different from the former Imperial Palace. Rose had had her doubts about the imperial couple when news had first spread about them, just like most of the galaxy, but in the years since she has come to grow relatively fond of them, especially the empress. The orphaned scavenger from nowhere has proven herself to be a fair, emphatic, and trustworthy ruler in the six years since she and the emperor first overthrew the First Order, long before she’d even taken up the mantle of ruler.

So if the empress says that the Peacetrooper program isn’t meant to separate loved ones, then Rose can only trust that she means it. Because someone with eyes that kind, someone with a smile that bright as she and the emperor bid their subjects farewell and disappear into their flagship, marking the end of the announcement and the holo-recording… someone like that gives Rose hope, always has since the day she first stood by her partner’s side and promised to make the galaxy a better place.

That hope had been enough for the galaxy to warily lower their weapons in anticipation of a better future then, and it’s enough for Rose to go on now.

Three days later, she calmly bids Finn goodbye, promises him they’ll be together again soon, and watches him board the transport that’ll take him lightyears away from her.

And then she goes off on a trip of her own, to meet the empress.

👑 👑 👑

Unsurprisingly, securing a meeting with one of the rulers of the New Empire is easier said than done, even for a minor politician and union leader such as herself.

Luckily, Rose isn’t doing this alone.

She starts by turning to her sister Paige, who’d spent two years serving in the Resistance prior to the First Order’s downfall and still keeps in touch with a lot of her friends from that period of time. One friend in particular happens to be her former commanding officer Poe Dameron, who now leads the coalition-controlled Galactic Peace Forces. More importantly, Poe Dameron is still close friends with one Leia Organa, former leader of the Resistance, current senator of Chandrila, mother of the emperor, and mother-in-law of the empress.

Rose’s journey is long and arduous, leading her from Hays Minor to Coruscant to Chandrila with a dozen minor stops in between to make sure she’s on the right path and heading to the right people. Nearly everyone who learns of her quest either laughs her off or suggests she’d have more luck going directly to the emperor, since he’s the one in charge of the Peacetrooper program.

That might well be true, but two things from the holo-recording convince Rose she’s on the right track: one, the emperor might be in charge of everything else, but the empress is most definitely in charge of him, traditional Alpha-Omega dynamics be damned; and two, the look in the empress’ eyes when she announced the exemptions, the emotions in her voice when she spoke of keeping families apart… She’ll understand, Rose knows she will.

Maz Kanata, proprietor of the cantina Rose drops by on her last refueling stop before she heads to Chandrila, is one of the rare few to agree with her.

“Child, have you seen that boy? You know what they used to say, back in my day?” She beckons Rose closer, lowers her voice conspiratorially. “Alphas may rule the galaxy but Omegas, Omegas rule the Alphas,” she says with a knowing wink and a hearty laugh, and Rose would bet a good amount of her credits on Maz speaking from experience.

But it’s rude to ask, and Betas lack the ability to distinguish between Alphas and Omegas by scent alone, so Rose supposes that will have to remain a mystery for now. In any case, it’s nowhere near her list of top priorities; that list reads more like this:

Secure a meeting with Senator Organa and hope she takes Rose’s side.

Hope the senator can arrange for a meeting with the empress.

Try to convince the empress in the hopes that she’ll convince the emperor.

There’s a whole lot of hope involved, but Rose thinks – rather optimistically – that that might endear her to the senator. After all, even though it’s been years since the Resistance demilitarized and transitioned into part of the empire’s new coalition government, Paige still talks about how fond the then-General Organa had been of giving speeches about the importance of hope.

As she finally arrives at Chandrila, Rose can only hope the senator still feels the same way.

It’s midday when Rose surfaces from the Hanna City spaceport, which isn’t too far away from Senator Organa’s office near the Chandrila Senate House. The coalition government is currently based on Naboo, but Senator Organa is known to spend most of her time here in Hanna City. She also makes the occasional trip to her son’s flagship, the next of which Maz had informed Rose is planned for just four days from now.

In other words, Rose has four days – well, less than that – to convince a senator that she’s not a security risk and that she has a valid reason to speak with the empress. It’s a challenge, but not an impossible one, and Rose spends the half-hour ride from the spaceport to the senator’s office rehearsing the speech she’s spent the past week preparing.

Only to find out when she arrives that Senator Organa’s already heard the whole story from at least three other people.

“You poor thing,” Senator Organa says as soon as she opens her door to find Rose on the other side, and quickly ushers her in. “It’s ridiculous that this is still happening, but I guess they’ve been too busy undoing all of the other insane laws and policies out there to notice this one. Anyway, I’m sure Rey will side with you as soon as she finds out what’s happening–”

Rose, who’s barely just settled down into a chair opposite the senator’s, nearly falls out of her seat. “Wait, so you– you’ll bring me to see her?”

Senator Organa blinks as she retakes her seat, and then laughs. “Honey, I didn’t have you come all this way just to tell you no.”

“Stars,” Rose breathes to herself, on the verge of relieved tears. All these exhausting months of worrying, all these long days of travelling and planning and hoping– “Thank you, Senator, thank you so much–”

“Just Leia is fine, dear,” the senator – Leia – says with a smile and a wave of her hand. “And you’re welcome, but I must remind you that nothing is guaranteed yet. I’m sure Rey will side with you, but she’ll still have to discuss this with my son first, and then they’ll have to go through the council and the senate and all that mess…” Leia rolls her eyes at the thought of it, no doubt familiar with (and fed up by) the complications of bureaucracy by now. Rose is, and she’s only served on city council for a term; she can’t even begin to imagine politics on a galactic scale like this.

Still: hope has brought her this far, and she’s determined for it to carry her the rest of the way.

👑 👑 👑

“How much do you know, about my son and Rey and the whole mess?” Leia asks four days later, just as they board the ship set to take them to the Spinebarrel, the imperial couple’s flagship.

Rose peels her eyes away from the viewport and the sight of Chandrila in all of its lush, natural blue-green glory, a far cry from her home planet even after five years of rehabilitation. “Um,” she says as she moves to sit next to the senator. “Just whatever all the holo-documentaries say, I guess. That he found her while he was still serving under Supreme Leader Snoke, and together they grew strong enough in the Force to take him out.” All accounts, whether factual or speculative, tend to be fuzzy about this particular phase of the imperial couple’s rise to power. “After that the emperor became the new Supreme Leader, but behind the scenes he and the empress worked to dismantle the First Order and transform it into something else. And then a year later, the New Empire was announced and the coalition government was formed.”

“I suppose that’s historically accurate enough,” Leia shrugs. “But it leaves out so much about the two of them as people. History tends to do that, doesn’t it?” she murmurs with a faraway look in her eyes, shoulders curling in on themselves for a moment. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, how very small Leia Organa actually is. She’s slightly shorter than Rose, a physical anomaly for an Alpha, but everything else about the senator makes her appear larger than life.

It’s only now, as Leia turns to her with a slightly sad smile, that Rose sees a person underneath everything else, all the layers of princess and senator and general. She supposes Leia Organa, of all people, would know how history and myths and bedtime stories treat their heroes.

“Is there…” Rose hesitates, wonders if maybe she’s prying. But Leia wouldn’t have brought this up unless she wants to talk about it, right? “Is there more to the story?”

Leia reaches out and pats her hand. “There always is. I’ve been watching some of them, you know, those documentaries, especially the newer ones that focus on how he had nowhere to turn, how Snoke manipulated that to prey on a scared, lonely child.” She pauses for a minute, takes a deep breath, and then smiles. “I don’t know if he’s working with them or if these documentarians are finally doing their homework, but I like that bits and pieces of the truth are out there, at least. Even if they don’t paint the best picture of my husband and me as parents.”

The question tumbles past Rose’s lips despite herself, curiosity getting the best of her. “How long had Snoke been targeting him, if… if…” If he was only a child when he became the monster we all had nightmares about?

“Ever since he was born,” Leia says quietly, solemnly. “Possibly even before that. I should’ve known better, should’ve taken my instincts seriously, but I was never one to trust the Force and all that. And in the end, that nearly ended up costing me my son. I was shaken, when I heard that he’d fallen, but when I started hearing about the sightings of him, about reports of his deeds as Kylo Ren… that’s when I nearly gave up hope. Should’ve known that’s exactly what Snoke wanted,” she mutters, “exactly why he made sure to have everything exaggerated and amplified so that I’d believe my son was lost to me even while he was still struggling with the conflict within him.”

This part isn’t exactly news to Rose; there’s been a revisionist movement of sorts surrounding the emperor’s past in recent years, reports of crimes that were never really his and horrors he couldn’t possibly have caused, all falsely attributed to him by order of Supreme Leader Snoke. But even with all of that, there’s no denying that the emperor did stray toward the Dark side, that he did commit some atrocities.

“So then how… how did he… break free?” Rose finally settles on, not quite sure how to put the emperor’s sudden change of heart and direction into words.

Leia merely smiles, the brightest one Rose has seen on her yet. “One day,” she says, her voice warm, “there was an awakening in the Force.”

Of course. “The empress,” Rose breaths, her voice near-reverent without her intending for it to be so. It makes sense now, that of course the emperor must’ve had a reason for his sudden rebellion, that he didn’t dethrone his master for no good reason and then do a complete one-eighty. But none of the stories, be they documentaries or terribly tawdry holo-dramas ‘loosely inspired by true events’, ever speculate about the empress’ role in shaping galactic fate.

Typical, really, that it’s never occurred to anyone that maybe the Omega Empress played just as big a role in these events as the Alpha Emperor.

“The empress,” Leia confirms with a nod and a fondness in her voice. “Though please, just call her Rey when we meet her. She hates all this fuss.”

Somehow, that fits perfectly with the mental image Rose has spent the last five years forming of the empress. She’s never actually seen Rey in person, save for one time from a great distance when the imperial couple made an appearance at the Peacetrooper base to thank them for their service, but a part of her feels like she knows what to expect, feels like they share more in common beyond both being orphans.

“Anyway, we should be arriving soon,” Leia informs her. “She arranged to meet us halfway, so that I can keep her company while my son is away welcoming the newest batch of Peacetroopers.”

Rose frowns in confusion, even as her heart jumps at the reminder of Finn and the induction process he’s probably going through now. “Doesn’t the empress usually go along as well?”

Leia hums. “Traditionally, but… let’s just say things are a little different this year. It’s not my news to share,” she adds vaguely with a secretive little smile.

It doesn’t take long, however, for that news to become apparent.

They arrive at the Spinebarrel not long after, and the door of the senator’s ship opens to reveal the empress waiting for them in the middle of a bustling hangar. A blinding smile lights up her face as soon as her mother-in-law comes into view, and Rose watches in stunned silence as the empress of the galaxy races up the ramp with a squeal and runs straight into Leia’s arms to be enfolded into the kind of warm, motherly hug Rose hasn’t felt in years.

There’s a moment of silence, until Leia backs away with a muffled oh as the empress straightens up into her full height. She’s taller than Rose had assumed, but then again everyone looks tiny next to the emperor, Rose supposes.

Leia looks up at her daughter-in-law with a look that can only be described as awe, and her voice is small and shaky when she asks, “Already?”

The empress smiles and places a hand on her flat stomach, and suddenly everything falls into place. She beams, her smile bright as… well, a proud mother, and curves her hand around her unborn child. “We were definitely a little surprised, but Ben mentioned you could feel him too?”

“Sure,” Leia says, “but not this early, and never this clearly or strongly.”

“Well,” the em– Rey murmurs, her smile turning fond as she looks down at her stomach and gives it a gentle pat. “Clearly we have an overachiever on our hands… just like their father.”

The two women share a conspiratorial little laugh at that, and some part of Rose’s mind registers with no small amount of amusement that they’re laughing at the emperor’s expense. A bigger part of her, however, is too busy dealing with nerves as Rey suddenly turns to her.

“Hello,” she says, eyes open and friendly.

“Oh, right.” Leia shoots Rose an apologetic smile before she gets around to introductions. “Rey, this is Rose Tico, from Hays Minor. Rose, this is my daughter-in-law and, of course, the empress of the New Empire, Rey Solo.”

The formality of the introduction, as well as the mere fact that she’s being introduced to the empress, is enough to make Rose forget Leia’s earlier words and give in to her automatic instinct to dip into her best attempt at a bow as she murmurs, “Your Majesty.”

Two warm hands instantly reach for her elbows, as a laughing empress helps her straighten up. “Please, none of that kriffing stuffy nonsense,” Rey says, her nose the tiniest bit scrunched up in distaste even as her eyes continue to sparkle with laughter.

Out of the corner of her eye, Rose spies Leia giving her what can only be called an I told you so look. “Right. Um. Well, I’m Rose. It’s nice to meet you… Rey.”

Rey’s smile widens. “It’s nice to meet you too, Rose. Now why don’t we get you both settled in, and then you can tell me all about this mess we need to fix, yeah?”

👑 👑 👑

A short hour later finds her and Rey in the latter’s office for a talk before dinner.

“We’ve been living together on Hays Minor ever since,” Rose tells the empress, having covered her initial meeting with Finn and the two weeks they’d spent on Coruscant before he decided to follow her home, “and three months ago we finally decided to get married. But then…”

Rey sighs. She’s been an attentive and emphatic listener this whole time, just as Rose had known she’d be, and now she waits with bated breath for the empress’ insight.

“Every time I think we’re doing okay, every time I think we’ve finally made a dent in the past… we just end up finding more mistakes like this. Rose,” she says, reaching out across the desk to place her hand on Rose’s, “I’m so sorry you – both of you – had to go through this.”

“I just…” Relief and sorrow war within her, at the idea that this nightmare might soon be over but also at the fact that she’d had to go through it at all. “I don’t want him to be alone again. He’s been through so much already, taken from his family and thrown into the Stormtrooper program at such a young age, and now… I know things are different now, I know you’re trying your best, but now he’s been taken away from the only family and home he has again.”

Rey is quiet for a moment, and then she gives Rose a squeeze before pulling her hand back. “I know how you two must feel, trust me. Has Leia told you the story of how Ben and I met?”

Rose shakes her head. “Only that there was an awakening, and that’s how you found each other.”

“Awakening,” Rey scoffs with a hint of amusement. “That’s a nice way to put it, I guess. What really happened was that my… employer, I suppose, had been making these vague comments about how I was so useless it was no wonder even my parents hadn’t wanted me.” She doesn’t pause, doesn’t give Rose the time to consider a reaction. “Big mistake, about as stupid as showing a Teedo something shiny. Once he’d mentioned them, I wouldn’t stop asking – and he wouldn’t stop goading me, the idiot. So I kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing, until one day something inside me said if he won’t give you what you want, then take it. And I did – I used the Force on him without realizing it, reached into his brain without even knowing what I was doing. Turned it into a right scrambled mess, but not before I found what I was looking for, not before I found the truth.”

She stops then, but Rose senses this is not the end of the story. The room is heavy with charged silence as Rey takes a shaky breath and curls one hand around the edge of her desk, digging into it so hard Rose fears she might leave indents.

Finally, Rey speaks again. “I’d known the truth, all along. I’d just buried it because I wasn’t ready for it. And that day, Unkar Plutt paid the price for that – I choked him without even meaning to, pushed my anger and hurt out of me and into the world around me instead. That wave of destruction, of energy… it rippled across the Force, and somehow…” She smiles then, a small, serene curve of her lips as the tension drains from her eyes and her fingers let go of the desk. “Somehow Ben found me.”

“That’s… amazing,” Rose says, “that you two managed to find each other despite everything.”

Rey shrugs. “The Force works in mysterious ways. It wanted us together, two lonely souls trying to find our place in the galaxy. We found it the day he landed on Jakku, the second our eyes met across Niima Outpost.”

Rose has heard stories like this before, of course. Nearly every mated Alpha-Omega couple has that story, the one in which they caught sight or scent of each other from across a crowded room and instantly knew they had been biologically created for each other. But with the imperial couple, there’s another layer to their perfect match, another element to the myth: the Force bond that allows them to live and think and fight as one, that makes them nigh undefeatable if the battle stories she’s heard are true.

“I guess what I mean is… I know how important it is: staying together, once you find each other,” Rey tells her gently. “Ben and I, we had to rewrite the stars and reshape the galaxy to make that possible. But you and Finn–”

“How?” Rose blurts out, and immediately claps a hand over her mouth in horror. That was not supposed to happen, she had not meant to ask–

Rey tilts her head in question. “How did we do it?”

“Maker, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to– And of course you don’t have to answer, that’s so invasive and rude and–”

“Rose,” Rey says with a laugh. “It’s okay, calm down, calm down. Really,” she says reassuringly, watching Rose take several deep breaths, “it’s okay. I know everyone wonders, I know they think it’s some kind of epic adventure, but really… really, it was just two desperate people using everything we had at our disposal to stay together. Ben could never hide anything from Snoke, not in the beginning, so naturally that creepy old bastard found out about me as soon as Ben did. But then he authorized Ben to come find me and stay on Jakku for a whole week in the hopes that he’d get a new protégé out of it and that… that was his first mistake. Maybe we could have walked away from each other after the first day, but after a whole week? Nothing but the Force could tear us apart by then – and Snoke’s second mistake was threatening to do exactly that.” This time, Rose spots a hint of teeth in Rey’s sharp smile and for the very first time, she sees in the kind empress a hint of the savage warrior who’d taken down all of those who tried to cut down the empire and keep the galaxy suspended in never-ending bloodshed instead.

“By then, Ben and I had months of training together under our belt. After that first week he’d somehow found the strength to start shielding his thoughts from Snoke, and he’d fed him some lie about me being a member of the Church of the Force, about how it would take time to convince me to join him but that it would be worth it, that I would be worth it. So Snoke didn’t question his regular trips to Jakku, not until a whole year had passed and suddenly he gave Ben an ultimatum: on his next trip, he was to bring me back to the Supremacy with him no matter what – either as a willing new recruit, or as a prisoner awaiting execution. You see, Snoke believed that any Force user this powerful could only stand with him or against him, and that there was nothing in-between.”

Rose furrows her brow, chasing after a memory. “But… there is an in-between, isn’t there? You and… and the emperor speak about it a lot, especially in all those holovids about training a new generation of Force users.”

“You watch those?” Rey looks surprised, as if the entire galaxy doesn’t devour every single shred of information related to their rulers’ relationship with and use of the mythical Force.

“Everyone I know does,” Rose tells her casually, and finds herself mirroring the empress’ smile without even meaning to.

“That’s great! Because yes, there is an in-between – Ben and I discovered and explored it during all those months we spent training out in the desert, and we knew this was the key to the future.”

“So that’s how you defeated Snoke?” Because it’s still shrouded in mystery, the exact events of the day two relatively young and inexperienced Force users had taken down the most powerful living Darksider in the galaxy.

Rey nods. “That was a big part of it, but really… we defeated him together. We did all of that, all of this, together.” She waves her hand across her desk and the precarious-looking stacks of datapads and flimsiplasts, documents that hold the New Empire together and determine its future. “We could never have done it apart – that’s why it matters so much to us, keeping people together.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, Rose is reminded of the look Rey had shared with the emperor in that holo of the Peacetrooper announcement. “That’s why you came up with the exemptions,” she realizes.

“I never wanted to tear people apart, not after what I’d experienced my whole life,” Rey says quietly. “But I guess that’s been happening anyway. Ben and I tried, we tried so hard with the Peacetrooper program, but those were early days for us. There were still so many members of the old guard in place, so many compromises we had to make. I’m sorry we didn’t fight harder then, but I want you to know I’ll fight for you and Finn and all the other people who deserve to stay together now.”

All this talk about fighting only reminds Rose of what Leia had mentioned before, about the council and the senate and all of that. “It will be a fight, won’t it?” she asks reluctantly. “Even with you and the emperor on board, it’s still going to be difficult to convince the galaxy to give us Betas the same rights as everyone else.”

Rey huffs. “A steaming hot load of bantha dung, is what this is,” she rants with a scowl, “how we must always have a target to pick on, how there must always be someone lesser than. First the Omegas, thousands of years ago when they treated us as nothing more than broodmares. Then the Alphas, when our societies started moving past base instincts to learn love and devotion, when Alphas started waiting on their mates hand and foot.”

That had been a relatively recent phase of galactic history, Rose supposes, the so-called Age of the Omegas, when powerful kings and ruthless warlords had been brought to their knees simply by the whims and fancies of their Omega consorts. She thinks of old Maz, of the wink and laugh that had accompanied those knowing words. But it’s been a long few centuries since then, since the Alphas were the laughing stock of the galaxy. Because today–

“And now the Betas,” Rey continues, crossing her arms in obvious displeasure. “Just because you’re slightly different than the rest of us? It’s all so karking ridiculous!”

Rose shrugs; that’s about the nicest, most polite way she’s heard it phrased. Defective is the usual go-to when it comes to describing Betas; lacking something, broken somehow, lesser than, as Rey just said.

Rey stands up from her chair, a sudden move that has Rose wondering if she’s supposed to follow suit. The empress peers down at her, and with a viewport behind her it looks like she’s silhouetted by the light of a hundred stars. “When Ben and I agreed to do this, to try and fix the galaxy, we promised we’d get rid of all past mistakes and start over, finally make things right.”

She dips her head in a determined nod, and holds out a hand to Rose. “I promise you, Rose Tico: we’ll get it right this time.”

And finally, the blind hope in Rose’s heart gives way to anticipation and faith, faith in both Rey and herself to see this through.

👑 👑 👑

At dinner, Rey gives her both good news and bad news.

The bad news is that they’ll have to wait for the emperor to return before any progress can be made.

The good news is that the emperor is expected to arrive in less than twelve standard hours, at the beginning of the ship’s day cycle.

What she forgets to mention, however, is the fact that both the emperor and the empress are suddenly and mysteriously unavailable for the rest of the day as soon as the emperor returns to the Spinebarrel.

“Never quite made it out of their honeymoon phase,” Leia says in the morning as Rose trudges over to join her at the breakfast table, having been informed of the imperial couple’s… scheduling unavailability by a passing droid. “And now with the baby on the way– Maker,” she adds with a groan, before giving Rose a long-suffering look. “Just be glad you can’t feel them through the Force.”

She’s not sure what exactly Leia means, but she finds out later that day when the happy couple finally joins them at dinner, neither of them quite capable of looking Leia in the eye as they mutter apologies.

The emperor seems nice enough when Rey introduces him to Rose, but he’s silent throughout dinner, his attention completely devoted to making sure his wife has everything she desires and more. It’s sweet but odd, seeing the rulers of the galaxy act like any other mated and expecting couple: sitting together so closely they’re practically sharing a chair, constantly making skin-to-skin contact with each other, stopping every so often to cast adoring looks at and place light touches on the barely-there swell of Rey’s stomach.

It’s a far cry from the composed façade they usually present to the galaxy, that’s for sure, especially in the case of the emperor. To her and even his mother he is relatively reserved, but one look at Rey and he lights up like a starved flower drinking in the sun.

He remains that way even after dinner, the three of them making their way to his office after bidding Leia goodnight. Behind closed doors, away from prying eyes (except hers), the emperor drops all pretenses and instantly, unashamedly pulls his wife into his lap rather than letting her sit next to him on the loveseat they occupy, leaving Rose to settle into the armchair opposite them.

Rey falls into his lap with a little shriek of glee, a sound of pure happiness that sends a little pang through Rose’s heart as she’s reminded of all the times Finn has pulled similar stunts with her, all the longing she’s buried deep within herself to focus on the task at hand.

Force-sensitive as she is, it really should come as no surprise that Rey picks up on the sudden spike of pain in the room.

“You really do love each other fiercely, don’t you?” she asks softly, leaning forward to look at Rose.

“As much as any two people can,” Rose tells her without hesitation. “I know what they say about us Betas, I know what people think about mixed couples. But… but I don’t care what they say, I don’t care that everyone thinks Finn is wasting his time with me instead of a powerful Alpha, I don’t care that everyone’s just waiting for the day he finds his ‘true’ mate and abandons me. I know that’s not us, I believe in us, I believe that our love is as strong as any other conventional couple out there.”

“So let’s prove it.”

It takes Rose a moment to realize the quiet, rumbling words came from the emperor himself, silent up until now. Rey turns in his arms to look at him, seemingly as confused as Rose is – until a smile starts to light up her face.

“Love, that’s genius!” she proclaims, reaching up to take the emperor’s face into her hands and kiss him soundly. “When it works they’ll have no choice but to acknowledge–”

The emperor laughs, and pulls away from his wife’s lips by just the slightest bit. “Sweetheart, maybe we should get Rose’s opinion first?”

“Right, right,” Rey says, and then turns back to her. “Okay, so: the big deal with Alpha-Omega couples – or Alpha-Alpha couples, or Omega-Omega couples, you get it – is that we’re capable of mating, right? And that forms this connection that makes us hyperaware of each other, attuned to each other on a whole new level. So what if we can prove that Beta-mix couples are just as connected?”

They are, as far as Rose is concerned, but– “But how would we prove that?”

Surprisingly, the emperor – Ben, Rose reminds herself, Ben – takes over. “Of all the things that get heightened after the mating process, scent sensitivity is probably the main one. If we can prove that Finn is just as attuned and attached to your scent as he would be to an Alpha or Omega partner, we can prove that you need to be around each other just as much.”

The plan, once they lay it out, is so beautifully simple.

Next week, the Spinebarrel is due to host an annual conference of the galactic senate, a three-day event during which participating senators come aboard to update the imperial couple on their planet’s latest developments and raise issues of growing interest. Naturally, with all of these additional guests onboard, a significant number of Peacetroopers will be called in to ensure everything runs smoothly. Finn, by order of the emperor, will be one of them.

At the end of the first day, all guests will be invited to a welcoming gala in the ship’s large ballroom. There, Rose and Finn will be placed on opposite ends of the cavernous room, separated by thousands of other people. Finn will be given five minutes to pick out his partner’s scent from the crowd, after which Rose will be ushered toward one of the many, many exits from the ballroom – with the hope that Finn will have caught her scent by then, allowing him to follow closely behind. From there, Rose will make her winding way toward the hangar, all the way on the other end of the ship.

She will not be allowed to look back to see if Finn is on the right trail, and he will not be allowed to call out for her to check that she is ahead. And to prevent him from catching sight of her, Finn will be blindfolded as soon as he leaves the ballroom.

The process will be challenging but if they prove successful, if an Omega manages to pick out the scent of his Beta partner in a room of thousands and follow it across the titanic imperial flagship, then everything will change. Their success will allow for the repetition of the experiment with other Beta-mix couples, and that in turn will be used as the basis for the imperial couple’s push to make amendments to all existing legislation and policies which regard Beta-mix couples as inferior to Alpha-Omega couples.

At the end of the evening, a nervous but hopeful Rey turns to Rose. “Do you think it’ll work?”

Rose is silent for a moment as she considers the question, and then she asks, “Could you two do it – what you’re asking us to do?” She’s belatedly reminded of the fact that the Alpha-Omega couple in front of her is a special case, and rushes to amend her question. “Could any other Alpha-Omega couple do it?”

Ben nods, even going so far as to offer her a small, reassuring smile. “I see it happen all the time.”

And just like that, Rose knows her answer, knows what the outcome will be. “Then yes,” she tells a beaming Rey. “Yes, it’ll work.”

👑 👑 👑

Finn arrives on the Spinebarrel the day of the gala itself, just two standard hours before things are set to begin. They’re allowed a brief, private reunion as soon as he boards, giving Rose a chance to update him on everything she’s been up to since he left and everything they’ll have to keep in mind tonight.

She worries that maybe Finn isn’t quite paying attention to her careful instructions, though, because his expression had morphed into one of awe at some point during the retelling of her galactic adventure and it’s still stuck that way. “Rose, Rosie, you absolute miracle – you actually did all of this, you came all this way and talked the imperial couple into changing the world. Maker,” he sighs, gently cupping her face before he dips down to kiss her, “you are amazing.”

Rose laughs and pulls him closer, her heart singing with the comforting familiarity of their embrace for the first time in too long. “I told you we’d be together again soon, didn’t I?”

“And I’ll never doubt a single word you say ever again,” Finn vows, just as they’re interrupted by a knock.

“It’s time,” Ben’s unmistakable voice calls from the other end of the door, and for a moment Rose thinks she might panic, thinks they’re not ready–

But then Finn takes her hand, and one look in his eyes is all it takes for her to know that everything is going to be okay.

Brief introductions are made as soon as she opens the door, with Rey surprisingly recognizing Finn as the first friendly face she’d seen upon boarding the Supremacy all those years ago, and then they’re off to the gala, Rose and Finn trailing behind the imperial couple dressed to the nines.

The grand ballroom is absolutely packed, filled with senators and their retinues eating and dancing and socializing after a day of discussions and negotiations. In the midst of all this, the four of them somehow manage to slip in unnoticed even with the striking silhouette Rey and Ben cut in their fancy clothes and regal bearing, and Rey shuffles them off to a quiet corner to run through the plan one last time.

Two people, a human man and woman, appear just as Rey finishes her explanation, more for Finn’s benefit than anything else. “These are Mitaka and Kaydel, two of our most trusted staffers,” Rey tells Rose and Finn. “They’ll be helping you find your places and make sure everything goes according to plan. Now, are you ready?”

Rose smiles at the newcomers, shares a look with Rey and Ben, and then turns to take Finn’s hand in hers once more. “Yeah, yeah we’re ready.”

Rey’s face splits into a warm smile, and she steps forward to take both Rose and Finn’s free hand. “I’d hug you, but I don’t want to throw Finn off with all of these baby hormones.”

That brings their tense little circle a small laugh, at least.

“Good luck, you two. I know you can do this.”

Ben steps forward with a nod. “We’ll be waiting on the other side.”

And with that, the imperial couple disappears into the crowd.

With Kaydel and Mitaka politely standing to the side, Rose takes the opportunity to give Finn one final kiss – for now.

“We can do this,” he says fiercely against her lips.

“Find me,” Rose whispers, and then they go their separate ways for what is hopefully the last time.

👑 👑 👑

High above the ballroom, Rey and Ben settle into a hidden viewing box that’ll allow them to keep tabs on the action within the ballroom. A projector connected to a multitude of cam droids lights up the walls, feeding them live recordings of both Rose and Finn.

The small room is silent as they watch Finn prowl one length of the ballroom, kept in place by a dutiful Mitaka as he strains to distinguish Rose’s scent from the thousands of others in the ballroom.

It’s obvious as soon as he picks it up, the lines of tension on his face and in his shoulders smoothing away immediately. “Remind you of anyone?” Rey turns to ask her husband teasingly, giggling with delight when he simply picks her up from her seat next to his and plops her into his lap in response.

Ben holds her close as they watch the first five minutes tick by, his chin warm on her shoulder as they both cradle their child.

Before long, Kaydel is leading Rose toward an exit and patiently counting down the seconds of Rose’s two-minute head-start before she notifies Mitaka that it’s time to let Finn go. He darts across the ballroom, a strong start, but Rey tenses every time it looks like he might pick the wrong exit.

“Shh,” Ben soothes her after one particularly close call, dropping a hand to her hip to draw calming circles. “Love finds a way, remember?” he whispers in her ear, an echo of the promise they’d made each other in the early days, back when it seemed like the entire galaxy was against them and their relationship.

She and Ben had burned the galaxy down and rebuilt it from ashes in order to be together. Surely Finn and Rose will manage finding each other in a ship, even if said ship is the ridiculously oversized Spinebarrel.

“Love finds a way,” she murmurs, and allows herself to lean back into Ben’s arms and simply watch: watch as Finn finally picks the right exit and Mitaka swoops in to blindfold him, watch as Rose falters once, twice in her steps but determinedly keeps her eyes straight ahead and keeps moving, watch as Finn stops to doubt himself every now and then only to close his eyes, search for Rose, and let his heart guide him.

And then finally, at long last, they watch as Finn bursts into the hangar and blindly runs across the wide, empty space toward Rose, picks her up and swings her around in his embrace before they reunite with a joyful kiss.

Rey turns her eyes away to give them a moment of privacy, and smiles at Ben. “You know what this means.”

“Indeed,” Ben muses with a smile of his own, catching a glimpse of the Beta and Omega clinging to each other for dear life in a desperate embrace that is all too familiar to him. “I suppose it’s the dawn of a new era,” he tells his wife, catching her hand in his.

Rey laces their fingers together. “We’re good at those,” she quips with a confident grin, and settles into Ben’s embrace with a happy sigh just as Rose does the same to Finn on the screens in front of them.

#reylo #finnrose #rey/kylo ren #rey/ben solo #finn/rose tico #star wars #rose tico #rey #ben solo #kylo ren #finn #fic: world could be #fic archive #my fics

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ofeliaslullaby · 5 years

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Fleabag Season 2: A Discourse on Love

Finally caved and watched season 2 of Fleabag. And I say caved as if I haven't been waiting for this show to come back for a solid 2 years...but I was saving it for a day when I truly needed something to rival my own stuff. I knew Fleabag would, because it had when the first season premiered in the US. The poetry of the show really has a way of putting some things into perspective. Season 1 seemed like a discourse on friendship, grief, guilt and self-worth. Season 2 felt like a discourse on love. There will be spoilers.

Firstly:

This season was a love story. Not the storybook, happily-ever-after love (There are no happily-ever-afters in Fleabagland, just there-will-be-pain-but-it-will-get-better-afters), but love in all it's grotesque complexity. After watching the season I took the "this is a love story" opener to not just be about Fleabag's ironic love for the Catholic Priest, but loving yourself (Belinda's monologue, Claire's haircut, Fleabag's new care for herself), familial love (Fleabag's relationship with her sister and father), Martin's love for Claire, and Claire's love for her work and Klare (Claire/Klare will never not be funny and cute). And the Godmother "loves" the Father and art but really I think she just loves attention and the idea of eccentrism.

The first episode hits you hard. It takes place over a year after we leave Fleabag at the end of season 1, and she's doing well, as is the guinea pig café. She is seemingly no longer blaming herself for Boo's death, no longer using sex as a form of escapism, and genuinely valuing herself. We once again get to voyeur through some of Fleabag's life moments. When it all kicks off we go from insufferable family dinner/engagement party for the Dad and the Godmother (who I didn't even remember were not married) with the Catholic Priest they got to marry them, brother-in-law Martin who we despise and the sister we haven't spoken to in over a year; to a tragic and intimate scene in the restaurant bathroom between the two sisters, and almost immediately back to the awkward dinner table where all hilarious hell breaks loose. This formula continues, as it did in the first. If you're not laughing, you're wanting to cry. Such is life, I suppose.

You get a little more context this season behind Claire and Fleabag's relationship. Like all relationships its complex (I feel like there were times when it felt like my relationship with my older sister), but there is love there. So much love. In the bathroom scene in the first episode it is obvious Fleabag is concerned for her sister, while her Claire is distraught, embarrassed, and eventually we come to find out relieved. When they get back to the table and Martin makes remarks that are clearly only hurting the Claire's feelings, Fleabag intervenes because she loves her sister and doesn't want to see her suffer anymore that night. Championing Claire to leave Martin (was rooting for this), that was love. It was obvious Martin loved Claire, he says as much in the scene, but they were not right for each other. Just because you love someone doesn't mean you're meant to be (something we get shown more than once in the finale). A defining moment in their onscreen relationship is when Claire says to Fleabag that the only person she'd run through an airport for is her. A few episodes before this scene we'd learned that what always looked like disdain on Claire's part was jealously and resentment stemming from her own feelings of inadequacy. By the finale I feel like Claire had gotten over some of those issues. When she leaves the wedding for the airport (guess there was someone else she would run through an airport for), I was cheering for her. Phoebe and Sian have so many dynamic scenes together that wouldn't work if the two didn't have amazing chemistry. I love them as sisters, and I love the characters' relationship.

Speaking of chemistry:

Of course, Fleabag would fall in love with the emotionally unavailable. Phoebe and Andrew's chemistry is so good. They played easily off each other's quirks and The Priest sees Fleabag in a way the other characters aren't able to (he notices her zoning out/fourth wall breaks). I could've watched this relationship play out for years. But alas, some things aren't meant to be.

It was obvious the two would end up together, just as obvious as it was that they were never going to last, as friends or a couple. When Fleabag breaks the fourth wall early on she says "we'll last a week". They're both a little dysfunctional, and we never fully get to hear why The Priest is the way he is (he always gets cut off when he tries to explain his past, only getting as far as "When I was a child..." and that he wasn't close to his mother). Through their relationship though, we see that even though it's been some time Fleabag is in fact still coping with the death of her mom and Boo. I feel like part of what she was looking for in their relationship was reassurance, as she turned to the Bible and prayer (something she would never have done previously, as an atheist), where she would normally have only turned to sex and alcohol or other ways to harm herself. When she and The Priest finally do have sex, we the invisible friend have our view almost immediately cut off. Has Fleabag ever done this? She usually narrated her sexual exploits. I feel that adds to the fact that this intimacy with the Priest was love, not a means of escape like the other times.

What I said earlier about the Godmother I say with a tiny grain of salt because I do realize that it's all subjective. We only see Fleabag's point of view. However, she's still the worst. She collects "friendships" like commodities and talks about them in terms of listen descriptors, most clearly shown when she introduced people in the finale. There is no real redeeming of the Godmother for Fleabag after she went from being the Mother's "best friend" to the Father's special someone. And it's hard to tell if the Father really loves her or if he's afraid of her/afraid of being on his own. Fleabag has a lovely heart to heart with her Dad (which acted also as a callback to a scene a few episodes earlier at the mother's funeral) in the finale where in a foreboding moment he says to her "I think you know how to love better than any of us. That's why you find it all so painful." Fleabag replies to us voyeurs tersely, "I don't find it painful". She definitely did. Look at the way she dealt with Boo's death. Yes, there was guilt, but she loved her. She loved her mother and having to see her Godmother with her Father, and being told snyly says she modeled the bust after her mom, her reaction...that's pain from love. We know Fleabag's love and grief for her mother were just as strong as the love and grief she had for Boo. In a flashback scene to after her mother's death, she tells Boo she doesn't know what to do with all the love she felt for her mom and how painful it is. Boo says to give it to her, she'll take it. Boo was a real one. I don't remember Fleabag breaking the fourth wall in these flashback moments (maybe I need to watch it again), but that got me thinking that we're probably taking the place of Boo. The person she lost who shared her laughter, her love, and her grief. We're her echo.

The final scene is heartbreaking to watch play out. You kind of know it's coming especially during his wedding speech, which he seemingly recited to her. The whole season spanned such a short period, but there is an immediate investment in what could be between these characters, and for the Priest this was the only real way this could end. There was no way he was leaving the priesthood. He warned her and thus we were warned, but we don't listen when it comes to the things we want. I was sad for her and him, but as Brittany Howard sings out to the credits (and The Priest's fox-foe pursues him); with a shake of the head that says "you don't need to follow me" and a wave goodbye we, the invisible friend, are reassured she's going to be alright. This was a wonderfully poignant way to end the series. It basically ended as the pilot ended, Fleabag on her way with the stolen bust of her mother in hand. I don't think it could've ended any better.

*I've had this in my drafts for maybe six months, started a new blog, decided to finally edit and post it. If you're reading this I hope you enjoyed it. -S*

#Fleabag #Fleabag x the Priest #Phoebe Waller-Bridge #Andrew Scott #Olivia Coleman #Amazon Prime #Sian Clifford #love #grief #friendship #TV

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savrenim · 5 years

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To Stare Into Darkness: The Infestation Incident Of Black Lotus Labs

As Told By Four Letters Unsent, Three Letters Sent, And The Official Report Drafted By Acolyte Consecrate Iria Strell

For those of you who have been following the gay murder elf bachelorette campaign (official title, In Their Footsteps We Shall Follow) (or have not been following but have become interested considering the number of memes I've been spanning of Book 5 of it), it has the backstory and narrative crafting of a full series of novellas more than a DnD campaign, and the fourth book recently came to its magnificent conclusion. (hence the Book 5 memes). Which means, of course, that I have to write a novella about it.

gay murder elf bachelorette tells the story of Iria Strell, a Caedic elf and solid villain of this setting considering the Caedic Empire is an aggressively expansionist empire whose magic is fueled and religion is centered around blood sacrifice. It is equal parts Iria Strell being evil doin’ her cool evil things and Iria Strell falling in love with every pretty girl who crosses her path, so a lot of fun.

there exists a Book 2 and a Book 3 summary as well, if you haven’t read them either feel free to read them or just have fun here with context clues, this one stands alone pretty well and is a lot more readable than the others because I had to actually seriously think about what parts of it made a Good Story out of the....nearly 33 hours of recording that were made of the six chapters. and I think a Good Story did come out! so if you’re willing to stick with me, boy do I have a wild ride for you consisting of: friendship, gayness, twisted emotions of wondering if you’re good enough, coping with the slow loss of mobility from an old injury while adjusting to civilian life, mad science, more gayness, and the friends you make and bonds you forge while dealing with a surprise zombie-coral-crystal-parasite-fungus attack together at your mad science lab.

(tw very mild body horror-- third paragraph of the first (unsent) letter to Talvus, midway through second to last paragraph of the first (unsent) letter to Maldai Varricon, and third paragraph of the official report. also a mild amount of stabbing scattered throughout, but this came from DnD so what do you expect, and a large amount of stabbing in the final battle, which hopefully should be fairly obvious when it begins, also in the official report.)

_______________________

Dear Talvus,

There’s no way I’m going to send this letter, considering you disappeared without saying goodbye, let alone leaving a mailing address; but I’ve been stuck in bed for three days with a broken leg and am supposed to stay put for another two, which means I’ve really got nothing better to do than write.

So I left for Black Lotus Labs, in Insul. I work for the Department of the Craftsman now. I’m a junior researcher in Summer Division, which I was a little confused about at first, considering Winter Division is the Division doing all of the research regarding developments for the Army, but it immediately became very clear that I was assigned to Summer. I’m like a dragon amongst lizards—a scientist, not someone in the guard division, but who has active combat experience. The expedition that I was assigned to certainly was dangerous enough to merit that, hence the broken leg, although the fight with the dryad may have been the least dangerous part.

There’s something here called the Misery. It’s strange and fascinating—not magical in and of itself, we don’t think, just a stage in the life cycle of the moths. It starts out as a cloud of thick mist, although you can see the maggots on the trees before you get to the mist proper. The maggots materialize on color, and leech it away to a stark white. That’s why we had to wear these large, unwieldy full-body suits with a breathing apparatus and mask that filtered air through black cloth; otherwise, the maggots would form in our lungs. They eventually transform into moths, which eat flesh. Very unpleasant, but not particularly deadly, they don’t travel in large numbers and they die when you swat them same as normal moths.

But what the Misery was caused by—well, we call it the Catalyst. It was an artifact in some ancient temple; Talvus, the temple alone is something worthy of years of study. It had working magical wards in the walls and the floors, and it must have been abandoned for centuries. Think of what we could do if we could store spells in objects—powerful spells—that showed little to no decay, that activated on a trigger without needing a mage to activate them.

(I know, my motives are painfully clear. Can’t let the mages have all the fun. One day technology will catch up with you, just you wait.)

But the temple—two or so years back, an expedition found it, and they found the Catalyst in the center of it. They did something, and it exploded. Lux Maelius, our Senior Research Lead, and Ovir Arbutus, a Research Lead now but he was only a guard at the time—they were the only two survivors, because they were outside in a courtyard when it happened. So they managed to make it out. Then there was a hurricane of magical energy that raged for months, then it settled down into the Misery.

We set up makeshift labs in the heart of the Misery, near the ruins. We spent a few days studying it, running tests. I was able to figure out some things about Green magic and life magic that might be adaptable into better healing potions. Two researchers joined us partway—Vennikus, you remember her from when she visited us on the front?, and a friend of hers, Chaera Canth. I tried to jump in a little bit on some of the bugswarm intelligence projects Vennikus was doing, because it seemed slightly more exciting than staring at mist, but I was making more progress staring at mist so eventually I went back to that. This sort of research isn’t really my forte and I was thrown right in with barely an hour to drop my stuff off in my rooms before I was told the expedition was leaving, and I was informed about the Misery as we walked through it. It’s not like it was a waste of time, by any means. I did contribute some things. Suggest some experimental setups. But the real reason we were here became evident when Arbutus and Lux started arguing. Arbutus wanted us to bring the Catalyst out of the Misery, so that it could properly be studied. We took a vote on who would be willing to risk themselves to fetch it. I, of course, volunteered. I know she said why would you seek it, but, well, the Wolf said that to the both of us together and you weren’t here. Besides, it was Serae that was half blown off the map, not Insul.

So we went into the ruins and we set up another makeshift lab around the Catalyst. It is not particularly impressive in appearance: a large, dark, opaque crystal, perhaps the size and shape of a forearm, floating above the pedestal. More notable was how it felt, even to me, rooms away. Like something was just off. Like that twinge in your stomach right before you get nauseous, and it only got stronger the closer we got. And if that was my reaction, well, I’m sure you’d hate it. It has these sparks that seem to interact in my favorite way with life and magic and the stability of energy, namely, by exploding. We’ve tested it against leaves and small bugs—it will annihilate them completely. Felt a little bit dangerous to be doing all the tests considering we weren’t sure what made it explode into the Misery in the first place, but we managed to conclude “don’t let it touch living things and it won’t explode too much.” And we had to, in order to properly design the container to take it back. Arbutus argued and won that we couldn’t just leave it. We made a makeshift case and packed it up with the rest of our stuff to head back to the main labs.

The dryad attacked us a little bit after we got out of the Misery, so at least we could breathe properly again and had the suits half off. It made these golems that went for the carts, but we had three other ex-military folks of some kind or another on the expedition, so I left them to deal with that and leapt straight into the grove of trees and thorns that it summoned around itself, and then we just…fought it out. I was close, I was so close to taking it down. But it got a really good hit in that cracked my femur and then decided it wasn’t worth it and booked it, and delivering the Catalyst to Black Lotus Labs was more important than going after a single native resistance fighter. Although I still have no idea whether or not it was attacking us for the fun of attacking us, because we’re Caedic and this island has decided it hates all things Caedic, or if it actually knew something about the Catalyst. I tried asking it—her, maybe?—you know how chatty I get when fighting—but I’m pretty sure she didn’t speak our language, as all she did was scream incomprehensibly back at me. So now I’m here after my first successful week sitting around in the med bay with a philosophy book Vennikus brought me and some security reports and a couple of interesting research papers, killing time until I’m allowed up and about and back to the labs where I can start working on the healing potions and merging of Green magic and ritual magic properly.

Let’s see, what else is there. I’ve been making friends. There’s Arbutus, who first told me that I didn’t need to act all formal because we weren’t in as strict a hierarchy as the military when I gave him a whole rundown before the expedition about my combat abilities and drawbacks and what I’d be like in a fight because I let Silvanus down when we were attacked on the way from the ships to the labs by a satyr—Saren according to the report the guards here have on him—and these great terrible lizards called dinosaurs he had gathered, because I fainted when I shouldn’t have. After the fight where I kicked all their asses but, well. I still went down. So Silvanus has seen me faint but she was on the “let’s get the Catalyst” side and does seem to at least give me credit for my skills. She has a spear, she’s really cool. I’m still really gay. I think she thinks I’m cool. Please don’t make fun of my attention span. Anyways, Arbutus might be mad at me because a few days after his whole speech about there being no ranks here I gave a fairly impassioned rant in front of the whole expedition about how if we were going to bring the Catalyst out, we couldn’t bring it back to the labs, a separate bunker had to be made until we knew what made it explode or we’d be putting all the Empire’s research at risk, and he told me that first of all, I was right and they’d build a bunker, and second, okay there still kind of were ranks here and I should never speak to him like that again.

Who else. Vennikus is here, and possibly flirting with me. She has a friend, as I mentioned, Canth, so hopefully that’ll go over fine, Canth seems to tolerate me without any problems. And I met Lia Bassus and Talia Aurelia on the ship over, Lia Bassus is trying to do magical transportation and so came with us into the Misery, and Talia’s working on this project that looks into other planes. As in entirely other realities superimposed over our own. There's this weird strange grey realm that she showed me, (perhaps the Arcane Other?), and though it was full daylight when she ran the experiment, through the window of the little room her team had cobbled together, I could see the distant stars of a different sky. Neither her nor Lia Bassus seemed particularly impressed by my altar when I mentioned it on the boat, so I’m pretty sure I’m not at all exceptional for what the expected level of creativity and craftsmanship is here. I guess I’ll be joining everyone for normal day-to-day research as soon as this leg heals.

I miss you, a lot. I hope you’re having just as much fun as me, wherever you are. Hopefully not with the broken leg. Still, totally worth it.

Love, Iria

———

Dear Talvus,

So I work in Winter Division now. Remember Galen Torus? The Exarch who was there when we were presenting the delayed explosive designs to Professor Acari? He showed up and requested me and just me for a special secret Winter Division project. And then promoted me to Senior Researcher on the spot because he was annoyed that I wasn’t being immediately given full access to things for the project because of my Junior Researcher status, which is one way to climb the ranks here, I guess.

There was this…mechanical contraption, found wrecked in the jungle. Some sort of war machine, we think. It looks like a humanoid—it has arms, and legs—but its interior entirely consists of clockwork. Galen and I have spent a few days examining it and nothing magical animated it. It’s just metal. But it moved and it fought and we’re going to figure out what made it tick.

He says that this work is of upmost importance to the Empire, and he’s stayed at the labs to work on it himself, but he still hasn’t pulled anyone but me for the project. I don’t know if it’s because it’s more efficient to work alone, or if the project is more secret than it appeared to be, or if I’m more useful at these kinds of things than I thought. Mechanics make sense to me.

I’ve been working as hard as I can to try not to disappoint him. I stay in the labs the entire day, except unlike you, I grab extra rations at breakfast so I can go through lunch without skipping the actual eating part. I hope that you’re remembering to eat.

Love, Iria

———

Dear Talvus,

So everything’s gone to shit, as it does.

It was just another normal day at the labs, and then the dryad and the satyr and a whole bunch of dinosaurs made the first actually organized attack. Galen and I were working on the construct when it happened. We heard it first. I had a prototype of a weapon from the construct that I was able to strap on in time for the first dinosaur that burst into the room, which at this point I was very efficient in dispatching of. Then the dryad that came after it, which I had a bit harder of a time dealing with. I fought it to a standstill, but it wasn't enough without a proper pair of weapons to gain any sort of upper hand, and all it took was a stumble for the thing to slip past me and attack Galen. I stared in horror as blood spurted from him and he was pushed backwards—only he didn't fall, and the blood didn't flow, it condensed into the shape of a sword and he flicked it out and it cut with no resistance through a large portion of the dryad's hand. She stepped back, in shock, and then turned and fled. Galen turned to me, his back straight, his face hard, his eyes bright. He tossed me the sword. I caught it.

"Finish it," he said.

I grinned and turned to chase the thing.

The rest was...it was both crystal clear and a blur to me, Talvus. I've never gone so deep, so cold, there was something bubbling inside of me like some sort of rage, a perfect insanity. The only thing that remained in my mind were Galen Torus's orders, echoing, Finish it. I know that this sounds like...like there was some sort of compulsion associated with those words, but there wasn't. It's just—he's been this untouchable, unreachable figure. I've worked with him day in and day out for over a month and I haven't been able to get any sort of read on him, or on whether he thinks my work has at all been adequate. I was so ready, Talvus. I was so ready to be responsible, to stay and guard the construct, to admit that it was no longer my role to bring enemies of the Empire to the sharp end of my blade. But in my heart of hearts, I wanted to fight. And there was Galen Torus, showing the closest thing I had seen to an emotion from him in the vicious tilt of his smile, throwing me a sword made of his own blood and ordering me to do the one thing that I wanted to do more than anything else.

In that moment, I would have done anything for him.

I tore through two—maybe three?—of the smaller raptors sprinting along the destruction the dryad had left in its wake. They barely slowed me down. I was getting to a part of the facility that I was unfamiliar with. The dryad's path led to a larger open room with cots, almost like a medical bay, which was strange, because there already was a medical bay and not really enough people getting hurt here day to day to need another. Some guards were off in one corner fighting off more dinosaurs. The dryad was in the other corner, and I lurched forwards, ready to Finish it, when someone in Senior Research Lead robes and a cane got absolutely mauled by one of the larger dinosaurs across the other entrance. I absolutely would not have cared, except with one motion of his hand he magicked his guts back together, finished speedwalking across the room, threw healing on me (which in hindsight, was much appreciated), then wheezed, "I trust from the look on your face that you're rather more of a fighter than I am. I'm going to stand behind you now, if you don't mind."

I absolutely did mind, there was now a very large dinosaur between me and my intended target, but it seemed rude to abandon the Senior Research Lead right after he'd healed me, and besides, the combination of his rank and the power he'd so casually wielded made me think that there was a slight chance that he was an Exarch too, and I couldn't risk disobeying an Exarch's orders. So I tore through the dinosaur in four angry hits, and then as there were no more dinosaurs on my side of the room, abandoned the maybe-Exarch in the corner and finally closed the last of the distance to attack the dryad.

It was a difficult fight. But it—she—could not stand against me now that I was properly armed, and certainly not with the maybe-Exarch throwing magic of every kind at me to strengthen me as I cut her to pieces. And then, as I could still feel that strength roaring in my blood, I caught sight of the satyr Saren halfway up the wall on the other side of the room and just charged him. I had to jump, leveraging myself up a wall to reach him and I plunged the sword into his gut, impaling him. He lost his grip on the wall and the two of us slammed into the ground, driving my—Galen's—blade even deeper into him. He pushed up, scrambled back, tried to run away, and had his back to me, a cowardly death, as I whipped Galen's sword around again and decapitated him. It gets a bit hazy after. I'm pretty sure I charged the remaining live dinosaurs across the room, but at that point I'd put Bishops know how much strain on my injury, and I blacked out.

I awoke in the same room, on one of the cots, with the Senior Research Lead standing over me. Up close I could see he was nowhere near as old as I'd assumed; the cane was some sort of tool of the trade. Looking at his face, he couldn't be much older than you.

He spoke first.

"I must say, you might be the best person to hide behind in a fight that I've ever met. It doesn't really take much hiding when everything goes down in a spray of blood in a matter of seconds."

I wasn't quite sure what to say back, so I just replied, "Happy to be of service."

"You should be fine to stand. I've fixed all your injuries, and that old wound, well, your muscles have cleared for the moment. It's been long enough that they've unlocked."

His robes were still in tatters, and there were bodies of guards and dinosaurs still in the room, so not much time could have passed. His wounds were totally healed, although with his robes in pieces instead of buttoned up higher than most people around here wear them, a huge, roughly circular scar across his throat was visible, which would explain the wheeze. He helped me up.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Iria Strell," I said. It felt weird to introduce myself without rank, but what was I supposed to say? My robes denoted me as Senior Researcher. Consecrated Acolyte—right, Galen Torus consecrated me, I guess he decided that I'd done enough work—still, Consecrated Acolyte didn't really seem to apply, we didn't really...go by clergy rank here. Even though it's been months since we left the Army, I settled with, "I was a Corporal Specialist before here." I guess old habits die hard.

He wasn't wearing enough jewelry for me to judge where in the nobility he would lie, and the Black Lotus Labs uniforms don't include pips on the collars, so I had no idea where in the clergy he ranked, but he was wearing gold, so he was nobility, which meant no matter what I was bowing, and he'd been throwing around a ridiculous amount of power so even if he was too young to be an Exarch, well—he'd totally saved my hide, so I went with the deepest waist bow. I know you don't care, but then he said:

"Qaedius Galseii."

Galseii.

I had nearly snubbed someone Bishop family and had just... luckily guessed that I should do the most respectful possible bow that someone from my station would give someone from a station above me because he'd been good at healing and I didn't recognize that he was Bishop family and just. Thank the Bishops, Talvus, I nearly snubbed a Galseii, I know you really really couldn't care less but that moment was more terrifying to me than the entirety of the fight had been, in an instant of ignorance I could have made enemies of someone who now I think has a great deal of professional respect for me from the abilities that I demonstrated and I didn't because I was lucky enough to guess that hey, maybe I should show more respect than might be necessary to someone with such powerful magic. Well. It was really fucking necessary.

(We've actually been professional acquaintances since, I made the mistake in our second interaction when he politely asked me about how I was and I thought he meant my research not how I was healing and I got overly excited when delving into an explanation of the mechanics of the hand razors, because the hand razors are cool! which he shut down with an "oh just because I'm personal with my patients as my patients doesn't mean we should be overly familiar in any other context" and I just wanted to die but I held my tongue and apologized at the end of the conversation with a "sorry I just get super excited about research" and I think he indicated that he understood and Talvus, it is a snakepit ever having to interact with any other noble ever. I'm bad at this. I'm bad at it and I hate it. But at least I don't think I messed this one up. And either way, I'm still the best person to hide behind in a fight that he's ever met. Haven't lost that yet.)

But anyways. Woke up in the cot, not dead. Qaedius continued, "And, well, I don't know what lab policy regarding this information is going to be going forward, but now that you're conscious, it's probably best if you left Spring Division."

Which I suppose answered the question of where I was. We have a secret Spring Division, not just Summer, Autumn, and Winter. How fun is that!

Things have settled down again. I couldn't move at all the next day because of the strain I'd put on my injury, but the day after I was walking again. I went back to research with Galen. Well, of course, because I couldn’t not, I asked Galen as politely as I could where he learned to make a sword like that from his blood and where I might try to learn it because I would never assume that I could ask him to teach me but maybe if I knew where I could study it I could figure it out on my own. He said it was a technique that only he and the person who developed it—a mysterious her—knew, so it wasn’t something I’d be able to learn or find easily. I thought it that was that, and then I came the next morning to find him clearing tools off of tables. I was worried for a moment that our project had ended; I asked if he was leaving, and he said no, this was maybe the most important work we could be doing for the Empire, just that he needed the space if he was going to teach me. Which just flabbergasted me of what, I was worth an hour off of the most important work we could be doing for the Empire? We’ve been practicing ever since. It’s hard, I can barely make my blood take a shape, let alone reach the metallization stage, but maybe one day I’ll be able to make a sword out of my own blood. Never catch me unarmed at a party again.

And now things are back to normal around here. The rhythms of research. Spring Division, which was entirely secret, has been joining us in the mess hall considering most to all of their buildings were destroyed, and now they’re somewhat less secret but we’re all quietly pretending we don’t notice for the time being and until someone higher up decides what to do about the whole involuntarily declassified thing. I’m working with Galen every day on the construct. Qaedius usually sits with me at meals. As I said, professional acquaintance, but an acquaintance enough that I can talk about my research sometimes because he's actually sitting with me and that is the only thing that is discussed at tables because we're all nerds. Vennikus thought that it was very impressive that I fought as well as I did. She always sits with me. It’s fine. Everything is fine. I wish it were fine.

It took me a day before I could walk again, Talvus. I couldn’t get up the morning after. I can walk again now but it feels worse. Like something in my back has torn. All I can think of is there’s going to be a fight that’s going to be the last time I’m able to fight in any serious capacity, I don’t know when it’s going to be, I’m probably not going to know until after the fact, I just…it feels like I should be weighing every battle I go into with an “is this worth it, is this worthy of being the very last time I’m ever able to fight,” and under that scrutiny a dryad and a satyr that the guard could have dealt with themselves—I don’t know if it was worth it. I don’t want this to be the last time I ever fight. That Galen is wasting his time on me teaching my how to shape my blood into a weapon because how much longer am I going to be able to use weapons? What would you do, if you knew that every spell that you cast might be the last needle you had the power left to thread? How would you…stay you? How do I stay me when the one thing that I was really good at, the one thing that I ever really wanted to do, is not only irresponsible for me to keep doing, but one day it’s just…going to be gone. I don’t know if I can handle it being gone.

I’ve been doing some pretty fantastic science, though. I keep developing things. The hand razors I mentioned. Qaedius didn’t think it was cool. You probably wouldn’t care much either, but the mechanical contraption we found, it had weapons hidden in its arms. I’ve been able to make modifications to these bracers with hidden blades in them, combat spurs that I can use for interception and different vectors of movement. It’s…it feels like hope. This thing has to move so much differently than we move, it weighs so much more, but if I can adapt bits of its structure, maybe I can come up with a different fighting style. One that I’d be able to keep at, even as more and more bits of me start to fail. There are all the official parts of my projects that I’m working on. Trying to make mechanical magic and all that. But I can keep hoping for an entirely new way of approaching combat in the spare time that I have.

I bet Lex will think that my hand razors are cool. He actually answers my letters. He actually told me where to send letters in the first place. You better not be dead.

Love, Iria

———

To Vilum Lex Department of the Doctor Veteris

Dear Lex,

You’ll never guess who showed up out of the blue today. Our mage friend. The big dummy, he didn’t warn me he was coming, I don’t even think he knew I was here. I still missed him so much that I can’t be mad at him. I totally rescued him from some raptors before he even got to the lab proper, so things are back to normal. Just as stressful sitting next to him wondering who he’s going to terribly offend today, although he’s high up enough in the pecking order that I no longer have to worry about him getting in too much trouble for it. And he’s doing what he always does. He immediately jumped onto Talia’s project just hearing it described at lunch—still partially bleeding from wildlife ambush wounds, mind you, but hey, at least he was eating lunch—elbowed his way in past the project supervisor to run his own test and impressed absolutely everyone by pulling a breakthrough out of thin air. And didn’t get in trouble because it was such a great breakthrough. It’s like something has been righted in the world, I can breathe freely again, I know that he’s alive and well and still…him, and he’s back next to me.

So you’ve got to take my side on this, you appreciate sharp pointy things. I have made these absolutely revolutionary bracers that look perfectly normal, you could probably even get them to look decorative, I’m working on a new pair with lined backsides so you can’t even immediately tell if someone takes them off to examine them what the payload is, and all it takes is a directed wrist gesture and out pops a concealed, specially sharpened blade. No one here cares. And then our mutual mage friend got here and he also could not see the appeal of it other than oh, another sharp thing! Like, does he have any idea how much work went into miniaturizing the mechanical contraption to get that all to fit in a bracer? And the spring-loading, in a manner that you don’t have to take it apart to re-load it? And the way you have to temper the metal so that it’s just as strong as a conventional blade, and the attachment mechanisms of the bracer have to be such that it’s just as steady as if it were something that’s being held the way you hold weapons, which let me tell you, was a non-trivial problem to solve. And did I mention I came up with a new sharpening technique? Which I’ve been applying to everything, including the hand razor blade. That’s cool, right, and useful? It’s already saved my life once because the corridors here are too small for it to be reasonable for me to carry around a pair of scimitars all the time, but bracers are easy to just wear and don’t interfere with range of motion when doing research and anyone who thinks I’m paranoid can tell that to the trail of dead dinosaurs and Fae I’ve been carving through here. But you think they’re cool, right? Please tell me you think it’s cool. I am surrounded by scientists who only appreciate things that stab when it’s all that’s between them and toothy death, but it is objectively cool. I will show you my new knife-sharpening technique if you tell me you think it’s cool.

Unfortunately, Vennikus and I haven’t gotten any further in testing the health potion, but I do think it’s still an active project? I’d have to check with her, I’ve been moved to another division. Actually, I’ve been working on another project that might eventually make its way to the Department of the Doctor, there are these mechanical seals that are a bit hard to prepare, but once you’ve got them prepped it’s foolproof, slap them on a wound and they’ll automatically deploy: it’ll both physically bind to the body and act as a bandage, as well as it imparts magical healing. I haven’t had time to test them in the field yet but I’m pretty proud of them, they’ve worked in all the lab trials I’ve run. I’m working to try to develop them further, make them easier to store, easier to prepare, less expensive to prepare, that sort of things. Right now the design includes rubies, and I don’t think there’s an easy way to get rid of that without disrupting the energy flow of the whole thing, but, of course, that’s a significant barrier to mass production. If you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

I hope things have continued going well for you. Let me know if there’s any interesting Capital gossip. It’s all very quiet here, everyone is extremely friendly and gets along with no drama whatsoever, because drama would be a distraction from research; which is great, it means no petty fighting that gets in the way of progress, but I hate being out of the loop. I spent three years in the Army being out of the loop, I have so much catching up to do.

With sincerity, Iria Strell

———

To Celsus Strell The Strell Estate Veteris

Dear Celsus,

I refuse to fall out of contact with you just weeks after I finally got to see you again. Black Lotus Labs is a touch far for visiting, and I’m doing such important work here so I’m not sure the next time I’m going to be home—which means letters it is. I’m a Senior Researcher already. And a Consecrated Acolyte. I am doing absolutely fascinating research here, a lot with military applications, because of course, that’s my specialty, but we’re not really supposed to talk about research much.

But by the Bishops you would not believe how much drama has been going down.

So there’s a researcher here—well, I guess technically she’s an Instigator, she is in charge of starting new projects, she was a Senior Researcher when I met her out when I was in the Army—there was a Fae font that we discovered while mapping out land near the Surrian border, and she came to take samples, and we hit it off, killed a Fae construct together, and I made a joke about if she had any more potions that she wanted to test in the field, well, I’d be happy to test them for her because she gave me a really cool potion that let me shoot fire from my eyes while we fought the thing and then even though it was totally a joke and that was not a good week for trying to get Arcadia to laugh at my jokes, anyways I joked that if she had any other potions I was happy to be a test subject and she just…handed me another potion she’d been working on and said yeah great I should write and tell her what it does. So I guess it did kind of fall flat. The joke. The potion worked great, it helped me and Talvus get a lot less injured than we might have when we were ambushed by a party of Rat Clan orcs coming back from the Highlands. Anyways, I wrote to her and she wrote back and I wrote to her again and she sent me this really cool beetle that let me see magic that was absolutely instrumental in trying to test my altar designs and she was just a really good friend, so I was excited that I was going to be at Black Lotus Labs because even if everything else was horrible, at least I was going to have one friend here, right? Vennikus Callo, my brand new friend. Right?

Wrong.

Well sort of right, I’m pretty sure we are friends, she was waiting by my bedside for me to wake up after I broke my leg in a fight with a dryad and she lent me her favorite philosophy book to read so that we could talk about philosophy together and she’d said that she was really glad that I was a researcher even though she originally thought I was here as a guard because she thought I was smart and could do a lot of good doing research here and she was actively nice to me in all of our written exchanges before I got here, like, really really nice, she didn’t have to be, I was just the soldier that led her to the Fae font and did my job of stabbing the thing that tried to attack her and nothing remarkable beyond that. And then here I was an entry-level scientist with absolutely no background in magic or higher schooling, and she still finds me interesting and wants to spend time with me. Which makes us friends. I think. It’s sometimes so hard to tell, I guess I still have trouble trusting if people really are my friend. But I’m pretty sure that Vennikus Callo is my friend. Actually, I think people don’t really make friends too much here, they don’t tend to socialize out of their research groups, but I’ve been pulling anyone and everyone who wants to come to morning practice to either spar with me or I’ll teach them how to spar—so I’ve gathered Talia Aurelia, whom I met on the ship ride over and has been a morning practice and mealtime buddy ever since, Vennikus, of course, Alexis Corinthian, who is great and ex-Army so by default the most reliable to spar with—and then the breakfast table is sometimes joined by Chaera Canth and some friends from another department, which I think means that my table is the single most cross-divisional table in the mess hall. It’s a really great table. Plenty of friendly acquaintances to go around for everyone.

Anyways. Vennikus Callo. I don’t know how to describe her to you. She’s really sharp, and has an incredible wit. Her memory is insane, she can recite entire passages from books and I’ve seen her listen to information being recited at her and have it down all in one go. She’s really good at fighting, she practices with me sometimes, and she’s holding back, I can tell. Maybe not a trained soldier, but she’s fast. And she just…holds herself with this poise. She conducts herself in a manner around the labs that seems…approachable. Amiable. Easy to work with. But there are tiny bits and places where you can tell that is a conscious choice, that she would have no trouble navigating the highest circles of nobility; I suppose she just does not see it necessary, or perhaps not efficient, to run a lab like that. She is an incredible project manager. She’s actually made a couple of jokes about starting projects in areas that I have expressed interest in, which on the one hand I do think they would be interesting projects but on the other hand I was too busy at the time to jump on anything else, and it felt a little bit like trying to use my friendship to get an advantage, which, also, while she technically wasn’t my personal supervisor when I was in Summer Division—that was kind of Canth, we were partners on a project but I was the Junior and she was the Senior Researcher—but she was still kind of my superior. Although there totally was a time where I had just figured out this way to combine Caedic blood magic and Green magic in this ritual that drained the life force from a plant and then could be used for various things and we were all talking about it at dinner and she seemed really really interested in it and I was like “listen, why don’t I show you, it’s only half an hour or so” and she was like “right now? after dinner?” and I was like “unless you have evening plans?” because there are usually a few hours after dinner before sleeping and people don’t always go back to their labs and she said great and we finished eating dinner and were heading out of the mess hall and she was like “sooooo….my room?” and I was like “oh does your room have plants in it? because we need a plant?” and we just. stared at each other for a moment. As I realized that I was a fucking idiot and Vennikus was definitely interested in me and I’d just been propositioned to and Vennikus realized that I had been 100% serious about just showing her the plant thing and hadn’t been propositioning to her. And it was terrible and before I could say “your room is also fine” she said “right, we should probably do the lab.” Which she also really was interested in the plant thing, we went to the lab, she only had to see me do it once before she was able to reproduce it herself which was pretty incredible and it was definitely not an evening wasted, we both had fun.

So I ended up transferring to another division and for a while I was taking meals in the mess hall less, like, just grabbing food at breakfast to take me through lunch and then a late dinner from the kitchens, which meant we were only really seeing each other at morning practices, I hold those before breakfast. Still can’t shake that Army scheduling of rising with the sun. Anyways, so Vennikus was coming to a number of those, and there was a blood magic thing that my….supervisor? mentor, maybe? —okay this is a total aside, but there’s an Exarch who took interest in me during the Trials at first because of a delayed explosive that Talvus and I developed but then he said that he looked forward to what I was going to do with my altar so I had to do something cool with my altar which was most of the reason why instead of just trying to design a functional altar I designed an altar with bronze needles physically threaded with blood that could cast arcane magic—and I’m pretty sure that he was the one who got me the job at Black Lotus Labs. Apparently it’s not that common around here to get recruited directly after passing the Trials. I guess I showed enough promise? He also had me transferred from Summer division because there was a project he wanted me working on and I’ve been working under him and it’s—it’s great. I’m doing so much more here than I was doing before. It’s just the two of us on this project, and we’ve made so much progress. I couldn’t be more exhilarated. I am serving the Empire here possibly more meaningfully than I have served anywhere else in the entirety of my life, and that’s what matters, you know? I just can’t help but feel that I owe everything in my career to this Exarch. I wouldn’t have done anything special with my altar if it weren’t for him encouraging me, I wouldn’t be here at Black Lotus Labs if I hadn’t been noticed by the Department of the Craftsman for that even if he didn’t specifically recommend me for the job, he was the impetus behind the altar and that had to be what got me noticed. And I was…mediocre at best in my previous division. And now I’ve been promoted to a Senior Researcher and I’m working on something that I’m really, really good at but I wouldn’t have been pulled for this project if he hadn’t specifically pulled me. At least in the Army with Varricon once it became obvious that they were going to keep me in their unit, well—Maldai was Dad’s friend. And I knew what they were training me for, to be a tactician, to continue a career in the Army. I have no idea what this Exarch has singled me out for, or if I’ve even been singled out as much as it was just I was the person at the facility who had the most relevant skillset and was working on the least important things and none of it is supposed to mean anything. But it still sort of feels like he’s mentoring me. Let’s stick with my supervisor because it’s safer and that bit I’m sure about. So— there was a piece of blood magic that my supervisor gave me to practice, mostly to build up my skills because I’m not particularly experienced in that regard, and I was just getting up a quarter of an hour early to practice exercises on that before morning practice. And Vennikus, who didn’t always come to morning practice, did start coming to those because she’s good at blood magic because she’s good at everything and just. She was there to give me tips and spot me, I guess, make sure I didn’t mess up horribly and hurt myself. I was using my own blood, after all. Anyways it was just one morning like any other and we were going through the exercises and Vennikus said, “Hey. Strell. We should hook up.”

And so of course my concentration breaks and there’s blood on the floor and I tried to play it all cool and I think I said something like, “Yeah, sounds good to me.”

And then she maybe said “Great” back and all I could think of was how utterly ridiculous and not suave I was sounding so I tried to re-gain control of the situation by, like, leaning back against the wall to look cool and I tried to say “your room or mine?” except my blood was still on my floor and it was slippery and I definitely slipped in it and fell flat on my ass. And she just. Came over and looked at me. And said “you know, if I weren’t already decided on the matter, you wouldn’t be doing a very good job at convincing me right now.” And I just sat there gaping in a pile of my own blood until Talia came in the room for morning practice and Talia was like “what happened?” and I was just. Still staring after Vennikus and had a moment of oh shit, what do I do, because I had no idea how public Vennikus wanted to be, and I had no idea what Talia’s feelings for me were either, like, I think I’m her closest friend? Outside of my morning practice and thus meal group, I don’t really see her interacting much with anyone? and I wasn’t really sure what my feelings for her were because, like. She’s a really sweet person. A bit shy. Really passionate about her work. And we’d gotten close. Just, I knew Vennikus and I knew I really liked Vennikus and Vennikus just…has this way of being so bright and sharp and multifaceted and makes everyone look graywashed in her wake. But also I…my feelings towards Vennikus weren’t really the romantic sort? Just. She was someone who was already my friend. And I already liked. And she is really really hot.

So I didn’t want to hurt Talia’s feelings but I also didn’t want to lie to Talia, you know? So I just kind of. Kept staring after where Vennikus had left, and then finally got out, “it’s fine, I’m just a gay mess” because that was vague enough that it didn’t actually pin anything to Vennikus if she didn’t want to be associated with me but it was also entirely the truth. And Talia stared at me, and then turned and looked to the corridor Vennikus had gone down, and then turned to me again, and said, “Oh,” and I really couldn’t read the expression on her face but at least she didn’t look….actively upset? And then we just continued morning practice and it was fine.

Oh, the answer was Vennikus’s room, which led to my second big question of so am I supposed to dress up and try at all to look pretty, or do I just go right after I get out of the lab in my uniform and not care? And I was really torn because I have been given solid advice from several sources that I should really try harder to actually look like a noble and bother caring about my appearance, but also, we were all really busy researchers and was Vennikus going to care whether or not I bothered to waste my time and hers trying to put on makeup and I decided screw it, Vennikus had known me for a few months, she knew what a complete mess I was and what she was getting into and if I thought a little bit of eyeliner was going to change her opinion now, I was definitely being stupid, and that the wasted time bit would have been a bigger insult. Which, thank Bishops, was finally something that I was right about, this wasn’t a “put on something a little bit pretty after work and we’ll go on as best a date as we can make happen” thing, she’d already changed into her nightwear, it was a fling, pure and simple. And that bit I can do. Behind-closed-doors flings seem to be my specialty.

And then, just through—bits of conversation, I guess, who’s passing who in hallways, allusions, maybe just instinct—over the two weeks, I became almost positive that Vennikus was also seeing Chaera Canth.

So Chaera Canth. I met Canth on my first week, when I was working on a project out in the field and Vennikus and Canth came to join a few days in. She and Vennikus seemed pretty close? They had exactly the sort of “why are you doing this dangerous thing” “because I’m me? next” dynamic that you only get when you are actually legitimately fond of someone. So I figured that Canth and Vennikus were at the very least pretty good friends if Canth was watching out for her like that, and I really didn’t want the same thing to happen with her that happened between me and Impera Casque during the Trials—namely, Impera Casque decided the moment that I met her that she absolutely loathed me and everything I did, and I’m still not sure why, because I didn’t get up and leave when she and Helena sat at my table or something?—anyways, if Canth and Vennikus were already friends I wanted to make sure that I was playing nice with Canth so that I didn’t have a co-worker who hated my guts next to someone that I was trying to spend time with. And then we were assigned to work on the same project about the connections between Caedic magic and Green magic and we were cooperating just fine as co-heads and I genuinely liked working with her. I invited her to my morning practices when it looked like we were trying to develop a combat application for one of the things we were working on, and she has the background of a ritualist and cleric, not that of a warrior, and so she had been showing up to those every once in a while. She was pretty good, too. And she was one of the regulars at my table during mealtimes. And she’d sometimes catch me and pass on messages to me after morning practice even when she didn’t come when I was hurrying off to get a head start on research skipping breakfast, because that’s the sort of reliable, solid person she is, who would look out for her colleagues. But anyways. We worked together for a while. She apparently really liked my altar design for Craftsman, we had a conversation one morning in our lab with her slamming down papers in front of me and going “Strell, what is this!” and I was really terrified for a moment and this was before Vennikus so I didn’t even know what I did to make her mad except maybe flirt terribly too much and then realized that it was just notes on my altar from the Trials and I kind of shrugged and went “my altar?” and she was all “why didn’t you tell me?” and I shrugged again mostly because everyone here had been working on things and didn’t really seem to care so I didn’t think she’d find it interesting and she went “how did you even do this it’s impossible” and I was like “because I didn’t know enough about arcane or ritual theory to know it was supposed to be impossible?” and she laughed and knocked me on the shoulder and said okay, fair, that was how a lot of discoveries were made, and I really thought we were friends. Think we are friends. I still do. Think that, I mean.

But she’s a good person. She’s a fantastic researcher and an accomplished ritualist and genuinely considerate and at this point it really wasn’t “I want to suck up to Vennikus’s friends so that I can spend time with Vennikus without it being awkward” anymore, I really liked her. And she and Vennikus clearly knew each other and clearly had history from well before I came into the picture even though I definitely did not know that they were seeing each other when I started seeing Vennikus and it was one thing if casual flings were the sort of thing that happened at Black Lotus Labs, I was fine with that, but if it wasn’t—I didn’t want to ruin a long-term serious relationship that Vennikus had if she was serious about Canth and Canth didn’t know about me, but also, I couldn’t help Vennikus cheat on someone who was a genuinely good person, which means I had to try to track down Canth and see if I could…subtly ask, or something?

Celsus I am so bad at subtle. I regret so much skipping out on those tutors that Mom and Dad got for us about polite interactions, because maybe I would have figured out how to be even slightly subtle. Of, you know, tracking down someone out of the blue in a corridor that definitely wasn’t in my segment of the labs to ask “soooo how are you doing” like it was just normal smalltalk and I hadn’t obviously tracked her down for something instead of catching her at or before breakfast and when that only got a “fine,” to “sooooo how have things been going in the division” to which I got a quick update on how the research projects were going fine to “soooo how is everyone doing?” which still didn’t get me the answer of whether or not she and Vennikus were a thing or a thing-thing and at this point I’d already made a scene so I just kind of went “so, you and Vennikus?”

To which she said, “Oh, Vennikus didn’t tell you about it yet? I thought she had weeks ago. Yeah, don’t worry.” I think. Might have been worded slightly differently. That gist got across. I was already retreating (okay, fine, running away) down the hallway blurting something along the lines of “ohgreatthankBishopsIjustwantedtomakesureIwasn’thelpingcheatonyou”. Which also probably was the worst thing to say. I have stared death in the face multiple times and I don’t think any of that was as terrifying as the moment before Chaera answered that question when she was just. Staring at me. Slightly quizzically. And I had no idea whether or not I had just detonated the biggest interpersonal bomb the labs and ever seen and was about to ruin absolutely everything within the tentative web of friendships I had formed or if it was all okay and turns out it was all even more okay than I thought, she knew about us from the start.

So anyways. I think me and Canth are still friends. She’s been acting like we’re still friends. The same table of us all usually get meals together. Nothing has changed, me and Vennikus are still seeing each other and it’s still great. Quite frankly Vennikus might have actually been dropping hints on purpose of “this is not an exclusive thing, I’m seeing Canth too, you get it, right?” and I accidentally signaled that I got it but it just went completely over my head because I’m so new to this. Big exciting false alarm. I wonder if Talia and Alexis think that I’m flirting with them still. Honestly just Vennikus is enough in terms of sheer time management, there’s just so much work to be done with our research. But yeah. Me and Vennikus Callo. Score for Iria Strell. Well. More score for Vennikus Callo, I was pretty useless in the entire process.

Don’t tell Mom and Dad, or rather, specifically, don’t tell Grandmother, I don’t want her getting any sort of expectations that I’ve been forging some sort of web of social connections or Bishops forbid any ideas about me marrying up. It’s just so nice to have friends my age again. I had Talvus in the Army, but Talvus was Talvus and my best friend and that’s never going to change, but is also a guy, and even if it wouldn’t be weird to like Talvus in all his Talvusness I don’t think I like guys in that way, and here I am surrounded by a group of like-minded geniuses who do the coolest science, are down to give morning defense practices a try, even if I’m teaching more than sparring with half of them, and are also all so pretty. So pretty. It’s great. I would happily spend the rest of my life here, if it’s how I can best contribute to the Empire. I guess I had Arcadia in the Army too. I have no idea what we are to each other. Did any letters from her arrive for me at the family estate?

Anyways, I know it probably sounds like I haven’t been getting a lot of work done, but I assure you, I have been making a lot of fantastic progress on a lot of fronts and I will do our family proud. I should probably get back to said work, I feel like I’m on the cusp of a huge breakthrough. Although it’s all so new and exciting that everything is the cusp of a huge breakthrough. I hope that your work has been exciting and fulfilling as well.

Love, your sister, Iria

———

Dear Maldai,

I've been working at Black Lotus Labs, for the Department of the Craftsman. I mean, I guess you know that I've been working here. Or at least as much as I could tell you in my last letter. The letter that I actually sent. Or I guess that actually reached you. I know that I cannot send this letter for a lot of reasons, but I wanted to write it all down, before I forget a single detail.

I met the Bishop Lucan.

There was a fairly serious attack—a dryad and a satyr stirring up some local forces—and I played an instrumental role in fending it off, I killed a number of their forces then both of them—but the damage to the facility had been enough that the Department of the Architect was taking personal interest in helping us rebuild. There were rumors that the Bishop was coming. And then one morning there were rumors that She had arrived. I made sure that I was wearing the best clothes that I had, but more than that, what do you do when there is the chance that you might run into a Bishop in the hallways of your workplace? Prostrate yourself on the floor solidly out of the way when She is walking down an adjacent hallway turned out to be the answer.

(Talvus…tried to copy some of Her needle design. While She was still in the hallway. She paused for a moment and I thought we were both going to die having utterly disgraced ourselves and our names because Talvus couldn’t keep it together for one minute when we were passing one of the Eleven Bishops and then She kept walking.)

The morning went much of the same way, Galen and I continued working on the research we had been working on, which at this point I had managed to develop mechanical wands that mages could store simple spells in. After an hour or so, he sent me away. I went to make myself useful in Summer Division, as I knew my way around their main labs, and I kept myself busy for another hour. Then there was a message spell, red light and Galen Torus's voice, telling me to return to our lab.

I could feel it before I got there, radiating through the door, the air, my veins. The Bishop Lucan — She was there. I had been ordered to enter, so I entered. She was sitting in a throne-like seat woven of red light, the same needles that had been around Her that Talvus had tried to copy, I couldn't — not that I would try to look at Her, but I couldn't see Her, couldn't see any more than a silhouette and the raw radiating power.

Galen was standing off to one side. I dropped prostrate on the ground, and then She — She looked at me.

It was like my mind, my soul, my self was a knot and there was a tug and it unraveled. Every — every memory, every smallest aspect of me laid bare, there wasn't even a me anymore and I could feel Her looking through it. I do not know how much time passed. It stopped rather abruptly. I was still on the floor, trembling. I could tell that She and Galen Torus were exchanging words, but I couldn't catch what the words were. I saw Galen Torus walk over to our workbench, and put the prototype of my — our — mechanical wand down. He turned back to Her.

Everything snapped and I was — I was more myself again.

The voice resounded, thrumming, around me, inside me, everywhere.

"A promising project."

Then She rose and the throne unravelled, shifting and fading into the larger network of Her magic that Talvus said had been suppressing Her full power and who-knows-what-else, and She moved past my prone form and out of the lab.

I met the Bishop Lucan, She looked at my mechanical wands, and She said "a promising project."

I—I knew that I was in over my head, working with Galen Torus. I knew that—that the project I was working on was of vital interest to the Empire. I knew how lucky I was to have caught the attention of someone so important, to work on something so important. But everyone here is doing important things. Talvus is the one—Talvus always was the one—who knew how to do important things, who was supposed to be doing the important clever things. I was supposed to be in the Army, training to maybe be a Captain, maybe a Legionary Captain one day. I was learning to be a Captain one day. This is—it's so beyond anything I ever thought I'd be doing, and while the politics are beyond me, the science, it seems, is not. I'm good at this. I'm as good at this as I ever was at tactics. Maybe not as good as I was at fighting, but a Captain can't decide that the solution to a tactical situation is that they go and fight the entire enemy army themselves because they're the best fighter and I—I guess I never really learned not to do that. So maybe I wouldn't have made a good Captain. Maybe it's better that I'm here now, working on science, technology, weapons for the Army to deploy. Galen Torus is still the mastermind behind this project, and I might not be a soldier anymore, but I know how to be a good specialist, a good tool, I know how to be wielded to do incredible things. And I can't say that it's mine, but some of it was mine. Some of it came from the delayed explosives Talvus and I developed in the Highlands. And not just the wands. The Arcanum cannons. We've—I've—successfully adapted it, created our own. The Rose Gun, we call it. Lined with rose gold. It's smaller, more compact than the Surrian Arcanum Cannons were. Enough that one strong soldier alone could carry it. The payload is not quite as powerful, I'm not sure if we'll ever make it quite as powerful, we're still in the most preliminary of testing stages—but the tactical applications are entirely different. This doesn't need to be planted on top of a hill on a battlefield and defended because it's too large to move. This—this is far more versatile.

There's a part of me that's just waiting for another disaster to happen. Talvus is here too, which means—well, you never got the letter, where I told you about the Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands, or what she said. How scared she was of us, and not for killing her. I don't think there's anything related to anything she saw here, nothing matches any of the charcoal drawings we took from her tent, but it's still—it's too quiet. I keep waiting for something to ambush us. At least in the Trials, things kept going wrong. There was no letting down your guard. Maybe I just...got too used to war, but I don't trust that the fighting is over. I can't trust that it's over. Things have been quiet since the dryad's attack, and it feels wrong, but there's nothing to indicate that anything is at all wrong. I guess one of the researchers in Autumn Division committed suicide a fortnight ago, and people have been a bit shaken up about that. He dug out his own teeth, which means every time I wake up with my teeth even slightly aching, I get paranoid all over again. I'm running morning practices still, same as I did during the Trials and the journey before that. Alexis Corinthian shows up to nearly all of them, she's a friend of mine from Winter Division, ex-Army, so she's good to practice with. Vennikus Callo comes mostly to watch and sometimes to test a move or a spell, but she's a much better fighter than she's letting on, I don't know why she's hiding it. Talia, who's been practicing with me from the very beginning, literally since the ship we took out here—well, she's alright, but she's not good, it's clear that the way that I'm showing her to move isn't natural to her. Which is—I mean it's to be expected, she's a civilian, and she's more a mage than a fighter. She's improved, but I don't think I'd tell her to do anything in a fight other than stand behind me or run. Not that I'm expecting anything horrible to happen, it just seems...overdue.

My injury is getting worse. It's the natural progression of things, and I have to accept it. I'm learning to accept it. It’s not like I can’t still do important things to serve the Empire. I hope yours are getting better. I hope that if—when—the Rose Guns go into production, maybe then I’ll be able to tell you it was me, I was the one who figured out how to meld magic and mechanics, I was the one who built the first prototype, I was the one who developed the theory. I hope that you’ll be proud of me.

Be well, Iria Strell

———

To Maldai Varricon 3rd Legion’s Meridionalis Barracks Serae

Dear Maldai,

I am writing because your blades have been lost. I cannot tell you why or how, just know that it was in decisively defeating an Enemy of the Empire the likes and scale of which were unprecedented. As I still have the ability to fight, I was hoping to gain from you the knowledge of how you had them specially balanced, that I might commission my own pair.

I hope that you have been healing well, and that the Empire is triumphing on the Surrian front.

May that you be well, Iria Strell

———

Official Report On The Black Lotus Labs Infestation Incident Drafted For Filing Iria Strell, Senior Researcher Acolyte Consecrate

The following is a report of the attack on Black Lotus Labs by the Infestation, and the actions taken by myself, Senior Research Lead Talvus Zhale, Senior Research Lead Qaedius Galseii, and Instigator Vennikus Callo to contain it. While the end result was rather extreme, it remains my tactical opinion that the measures employed were matched to the severity of the threat this Enemy presented; not just to Black Lotus Labs, but to the Empire as a whole. I include at the end of this report all relevant information from the months prior that might pertain to this Enemy, such that a proper assessment can be made.

On the night of the incident, I had stayed late in my lab to work on a personal project as many of the researchers do. As such, I did not take the fastest route back from Winter Division to the sleeping quarters, but rather a more roundabout way that passed near the kitchens, that I might grab rations to make up for a skipped dinner. I mention this because the route passed a corridor which connected to Autumn Division, and it was in this corridor that I encountered my first instance of an infested body. I could see a figure lurching towards me, half falling against a wall as its stumbles extinguished a candle. All behind it was darkness.

I hurried forward to try to help, and I first perceived what I thought to be Senior Researcher Lia Bassus of Autumn Division. I caught her before she fell to the floor. It felt like she was shivering in my arms. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness that I assumed had been accidental in her wake; the first sign that something greater was at play. What the dimness of the remaining candlelight revealed was as if from a nightmare: the back of her head had been caved in, as if by a blow that I would presume to be fatal or near-fatal on a battlefield. Her hair matted with blood. One of her eyes—part of her face—was gone, and there was a strange, bone-like structure growing from the cavity in its place, spines curling into the flesh of her cheek. Some of her teeth had been dug out, much like Hieronymus Acari's body had been found—the Autumn Division researcher who had apparently committed suicide a few weeks prior.

Bassus raised an arm and struck me, cutting into my shoulder, and it became clear that her hand had been replaced by crystalline spurs jutting from her forearm, a strange shade of teal that seemed greenish-black in the flickering candlelight. I could not tell whether or not she was dead; it had felt like she was still breathing. As such, I did not want to harm her if there was a way to extract this thing without killing her. Yet I could not leave her alone and run and fetch a medic, lest she wander somewhere unknown, or cross the path of another without the advantage of my combat training. So I began to lead her towards the common room off the sleeping quarters, where even at this hour it was likely I might find someone I could send running for help. She shambled after me mindlessly, all I had to do was walk slowly enough for her to keep pace.

I abandoned this plan as I reached an intersection with a corridor that led to Summer Division; there was a shout, and I saw a guard running before he stumbled and fell, and was immediately overwhelmed by three creatures that were more bone-like crystalline growth than mismatched corpse. I immediately updated my assessment of the situation: that this was not an isolated incident affecting only Lia Bassus, but rather a full-scale attack. I left what I now believe to be Bassus's corpse to run to my sleeping quarters and retrieve my weapons and armor, that I might better respond to the crisis.

When I exited my room, armed, I nearly ran into Senior Researcher Chaera Canth, woken by the distant but rapidly spreading sounds of fighting and shouts of panic. As she was a non-combatant, I instructed her to stay behind me as I escorted her to the common room as established by the new emergency procedures. There, I decided, I could take stock of which researchers had made it to relative safety. We encountered none of the crawlers or infested along the way. However, in the common room, I noticed several prominent researchers missing, and resolved to comb the living quarters armed as I was for more survivors. Senior Research Lead Talvus Zhale of Spring Division caught me before I could go and agreed to come with me. We had served together in the same specialist unit in the Army, and as such we were familiar with fighting side by side. He was not nearly as enthusiastic as I was about returning to the unsafe territory of the sleeping quarters or corridors beyond, but we encountered no enemies to or from the sleeping quarters, nothing save the last living stragglers who were evacuating. None of the researchers that I wished to find were in their rooms, so we returned to the common room, Zhale attempting to talk me out of searching Summer and Autumn Division labs alone for those who were missing.

As we turned into the common room, my senses began to fail me. Zhale said something that I could not comprehend, yet I could hear whispering across the room with perfect clarity. The walls seemed to re-orient to a tilted frame. All I could concentrate on was what felt like a point of gathering focus on the opposing wall.

Then all hell broke loose.

A thing burst through the wooden barrier, trailing infested corpses and crawlers in its wake. Everything seemed to emanate around it, to warp from it. I leapt into action, running across the room even as Zhale shouted something at me that I could not understand. The Thresher was humanoid—a strange silhouette, with the jagged bonelike spikes coming from it, the unnaturally long and thin limbs, the crystalline spikes growing everywhere, but especially at the end of its claw-like arms, its deep purple coloring in the dim lighting, a triangular armored head with no eyes but dozens of small clicking feelers beneath it—but it was humanoid and it was moving so I assumed that it could bleed; and I was not yet used to my blades failing me.

The Thresher ripped through a researcher in a single blow, and the crawlers fell upon others. I attempted to join the melee, and an old injury affecting my spine that I had received in my tenure in the Army flared, and I collapsed. A few seconds later I was able to push myself to standing, and tried to attack again, and it flared again. I blacked out. When I came to, the room was partially evacuated, and there was a crawler over me. I shoved it off, and joined those who were fleeing, the guards forming a line behind the researchers as they held a defensive retreat.

As I wasn't running particularly fast anyways, I joined the guards without hesitation. The infested caught up with us as we held out in the hallway. I had dropped both my blades as my injury had dropped me, but I was wearing a prototype of a swift-deploying hand razor within a bracer, so I activated that. The things were upon us. I turned to fight. Yet as I lunged to strike my first blow, there was a sharp twist of pain within me, and I could feel something tear in my back. Guard Captain Saturninus Strabo leapt over my prone form, and struck the blow that I could not. Another guard dragged me back and along with the civilians, and so I was delivered to the Winter Division central complex, as Winter Division seemed to be the least infected and thus the safest place we could barricade ourselves. He deposited me in a chair, then joined the guards who were fortifying the room.

Guard Captain Strabo and most of the guards who remained in the hallway did not return.

After about a minute, I attempted to stand and found that I could not. I could still feel my right leg, but it was limp, and it could not hold my weight. I fell to the ground. This caught the attention of Senior Research Lead Qaedius Galseii, amongst those who had escaped the carnage and had gathered for holdout of evacuation here. Senior Research Lead Galseii had treated injuries of mine in the attack on the labs by Saren and the dryad's forces a little over a month prior, and was familiar enough with it to immediately locate a detached muscle and perform impromptu surgery to return me to my feet.

Research Lead Ovir Arbutus took command of the situation with the poise and authority that his prior experience as Guard Captain proffered him. We did not have the manpower, weapons, or fortifications to hold out against this infestation in any room within the labs, even the relatively unaffected Winter Division central laboratory we were in, for any substantial period of time. He ordered the full and immediate evacuation of the laboratories; to move all personnel to the docks and vacate the island, until the Army could return in force. He asked for volunteer runners to attempt to locate any other survivors in the laboratory and spread the news of this evacuation, and the rest of us would make our way out through corridors we believed to be least overrun, with all who could fight holding the edges of the formation. I could not run; it was a testament to Galseii's skill as a surgeon that I could stand at all, so there was never any question of which of these two groups I would be traveling with. I had the time to duck into the private lab where I had been working, to grab the most important of my notes, and prototypes of mechanically deploying bandages (both standalone and the lightweight underarmor woven of them that I designed). My second generation hand razor prototypes were not near enough ready for combat to be of worth taken, and the partially inlaid barrel of the Rose Gun prototype was too heavy to carry in my injured state, so I left them.

The group was already organized into its leaving formation by the time I returned. I joined the makeshift collection of combatants along the rear. Zhale and Galseii were within the group. We made it a large portion of the way out through emptier corridors, but there were too many of us to move swiftly enough to avoid confrontation, and these things seemed to be tracking us through more senses than our own. They came from the back and from the sides: the crawlers, partially consisting of scattered bits of corpses and held together with wild crystalline growths. The guards and volunteers began to fight them, and it became evident that these things could rapidly regenerate, that cutting them apart did little to slow them down.

Recalling that the corpse of Lia Bassus had been putting out candles, I suggested that we use fire against these things. After a brief scramble to get a torch from the center of the group to the fighters on the outskirts, we tested my hypothesis to great success. We pushed forward with no casualties until another Thresher burst through one of the walls. Research Lead Arbutus moved to cut it off, and I to support him, when a huge crystalline monster, well larger than the largest of the dinosaurs that attack, smashed through another wall. The Thresher's aura was warping my perception of reality, but I saw it slit across Arbutus's throat, and Arbutus fall; so I leapt forward and slapped one of my mechanical bandage prototypes across the wound. The crystalline monster was simply too large and too strong to fight. I was able to kill the Thresher that had attacked Arbutus, but its warping field did not disappear; it instead felt as if to strengthen more as more Threshers began to attack the back of the column. There was no hope fighting, I lost sight of everyone but Arbutus and the guard to his right. We hoisted his body between us, and ran.

We made it outside, as did a number of the others. I blacked out shortly after from the exertion. I came to on a makeshift cot a few hundred feet away from the laboratory complex, with Senior Research Lead Galseii standing over me and tending to my injuries. A brief assessment of the surroundings indicated that Senior Researcher Alexis Corinthian had taken over organizing the survivors to move to the ships at the docks, as Research Lead Arbutus remained alive but unconscious.

Senior Research Lead Talvus Zhale and Instigator Vennikus Callo were the two who had noticed, and were discussing, the larger implications than immediate escape. There had been strange, small, coral-like growths that had appeared extremely intermittently in various locations around the laboratories over the past few months, and Callo alone took the chance to study some instead of immediately purging them. They had seemed to grow from nothing, in a sealed and sterilized container, and Callo had discovered little more than that they must have been feeding upon some outside source, and that they were remarkably resilient, before the worry of contamination led her to dispose of the samples in fire. She made the connection that these growths had been precursors of the Infestation, and that they were not merely feeding upon and incorporating all living things that they could consume, but that there must be a larger unidentified force, presumed magical in nature, supplying them with the power to expand exponentially and with nothing material to feed on. By her calculations, they would overrun the entire island well before the Army would be able to return, and the evacuation itself might still be in imminent danger.

The mention of an outside force supplying the energy for growth gave Senior Research Lead Zhale the idea: that he might be able to erect something based on the principles behind the Warding Wall, that could keep the Infestation from drawing on this power. It would be an immense undertaking, and for it to work, he would need both to lay a ritual anchor and cast the spell separately. As he did not have the raw power and blood magic expertise to lay the ritual anchor in full, he turned to Senior Research Lead Galseii, a frequent collaborator of his, for assistance in this plan. Instigator Callo indicated that she believed she could invert a Green Magic spell she had reverse-engineered over her studies in Summer Division in order to mask the life force of the casters, which she concluded from her research was what the Infestation was using to see and track its surroundings, allowing the casters to recuperate overnight. She suggested the bunker where the Catalyst was being separately kept and studied, far enough away from the main laboratory complex to ensure it would not be threatened in the case of another Misery event, as the ideal place to spend the night; after all, even hidden from the Infestation, the jungle held many dangers.

After ensuring that what I had salvaged of my research notes would make it to the ship, I volunteered to stay behind and provide martial support to the casters. No other guards could be spared. Corinthian agreed after a brief conversation with Callo that she would hold the ships from leaving until the next morning, but longer than that if she had not received a signal from us she would not risk the lives of the other survivors.

The laying of the ritual anchor went essentially as planned. Despite my injured state I was able to hold off the onslaught long enough for Zhale and Galseii to finish. I blacked out again briefly during our escape and retreat to the Catalyst bunker, and came to safely laid in a cot.

The mages—Zhale and Callo—slept immediately. Galseii and I discussed our options, as there is a stiffness in my injury that develops after extended periods of rest, and it was likely that if I tried to sleep I would wake up the next morning immobilized for hours. We concluded that it was priority that I be able to provide emergency support for the casters in the case of Callo's charm wearing off during the laying of Zhale's Warding spell or during our final retreat through the jungle, and that the two of us would remain awake. Under his supervision, I performed a number of exercises to ward off the stiffness, and in the intervening time, I finished incorporating the mechanical bandages into the underarmor I had brought along, and Galseii a series of bloodrunes that he would apply to himself to cause a continuous damage to all surrounding enemies the next morning.

Zhale and Callo arose a little after dawn. In the light, it was clear that one of the stationary growths that had precipitated the arrival of the Infestation had appeared in the corner of the bunker. Upon its pointing out, Callo stated to the group that she worried that the makeshift Warding Wall spell would not do enough; that it would cut these things off from magical continued growth, but only within the radius of the spell, and that it would mean nothing for that which was already here and could consume naturally the life around it. Furthermore, that if any remained in any corners of the island when the Army came back in force, that it might come back, again and again, never truly eradicated. And that was assuming it did not manage a way to get off the island before then.

I was the one who suggested it. After all, we were right there, and I do not believe that I ever saw the Catalyst as anything other than first and foremost, a weapon. It seemed tactically relevant to think of all possible ways to make a thing explode.

"What about the Catalyst?" I said. "Can we set it off? Make another Misery big enough to destroy this thing?"

The idea stopped Callo short. Of all of us, she had been following the research on the Catalyst, and could speak to how it worked: that it disassembled life, and the energy field from that disassembly, if it encountered more life, would destabilize in a further chain reaction, expanding until there was no life left within the field. If it were set off in the heart of the Infestation, the deepest point within Black Lotus Labs, the growth-density ought to be enough for the explosion to reach the treeline, and the blast would overtake the entire island, giving a guarantee that units of soldiers fighting through the underbrush could not of the ending of this threat for good.

As a military strategy, I recommended it to the others as perhaps the only way, given Callo's modified calculations, to secure the island even after casting Zhale's Warding Wall. But for the potential of loss of knowledge and unique abilities of those gathered within this room was also a great consideration, not when all that was needed was for one to wait behind until the others had reached the ships, push their way as deep into the complex as they could, and detonate the thing as they were overrun. Callo was just expressing doubt that any one of us four would not be able to make it in deep enough to trigger a large enough chain reaction, when Zhale woke up.

"There's another way out," he said. "Deep in that building. Deep, deep in that building, there happens to be a window into a probably-not-going-to-explode arcane realm. Big enough for a person to get through, or several persons if they're not dead."

After that, it was unanimous amongst the four of us. With the Warding Wall cast, the Infestation would lose its regenerative powers. With my fighting abilities, emergency support and alchemical prowess from Callo, consistent healing from Galseii to prop me back up, and Zhale conserving his energy for the portal to the Arcane Other that he believed using the scaffolding Autumn Division had created, he could cast — the four of us judged the likelihood of our success and our survival to be well worth the risk of the undertaking.

It was our duty.

As there was little more to discuss, we set out to return to the main labs, the Catalyst with us in its portable protective casing. The first sign that this occurrence was different than originally judged became evident as we reached the clearing in front of the complex where we had laid the ritual anchor: despite the rapid spread of growth the night prior, there was no sign of the Infestation having spread beyond the buildings.

The immediate priority was the casting of Zhale's Warding Wall spell. I can report no technical details on what he did: he wove large and incredibly complex three-dimensional needles, using his own blood to stabilize the structure, then asked that the rest of us first hold magic in place, then contribute blood to increase the complexity of the spell. Callo added her blood first. I added mine second. Galseii added his third. Upon adding my blood to the needle, I could feel a connection to the spell, and could indeed both feel and see the increase in complexity that Zhale spoke of; upon the casting, I could feel a pressure, something outside trying to push itself in, but the spell held strong and Zhale's Warding Wall cut it off.

Callo and I plotted what we believed to be the most efficient route to Autumn Division, given what had been observed the night prior with the route taken to escape through Winter Division; what Callo had seen when she had volunteered as a runner; the assumption that the Infestation had started and was concentrated in Autumn Division and had spread evenly throughout the facility; and prioritizing routes with fewer ambush points or connecting hallways so that the casters would remain as safe as possible and could rely mainly on my martial expertise to push forward, instead of dealing with attacks from multiple directions. This route ensued entering through Summer Division. The assault went with few hitches. That which is notable, I report here: besides the infested corpses, Thresher, and crawlers we had fought the day before — we did not encounter another crystalline Destroyer — we encountered crawlers with tendrils that they used to attempt to grapple, pin, and pull in prey; infested corpses of the local fauna, namely raptors and dinosaurs, indicating that the Infestation had spread the night before then pulled back to the facility; and Threshers with vine-like appendages with a reach of well over thirty feet that they used to attempt to snatch and pull in their prey while fighting. There were also stationary growths on the floor that made no active attempt to engage in the fighting nor did they show any sentience or signs of moving, but remaining standing on these growths one would begin to sink into them, become ensnared, and their insides contained both an acidic substance and many small spines. Zhale's Warding Wall cut off the ability of all of these things to regenerate, but it otherwise did not seem to slow them down. We must have fought between a dozen and a dozen and a half of all of these creatures, myself taking the brunt of the attacks but Callo protecting Galseii and Zhale with a remarkable aptitude from behind, Galseii providing healing and some magical support, and Zhale carrying the Catalyst and conserving his energy to cast for our escape.

In the final room between Summer and Autumn Divisions, we encountered our third sign that the Infestation was being guided by some form of overarching intelligence. The ground was covered by a swarm of strange beetles. Upon lighting and sweeping a torch near them, they scattered somewhat, but more poured from cracks in the wall and the floor until we were wading through them. We stuck as close as we could to the edges of the room, when we were struck by the strong mental pressure against going right; so we eased around the left side of the room. We had gotten perhaps halfway across the room in these conditions when the beetles suddenly swarmed together to form a massive column in the center of the room. The column lashed out and specifically targeted Zhale, and pulled back with the case containing the Catalyst, leaving Zhale on the floor. I had to leap into the column myself to grab and retrieve the case; otherwise the Catalyst and the entire plan would have been lost.

We were very close to Autumn Division once we had made it through the laboratory that had been overrun by the bugs. We turned into the final hallway, to which we saw a humanoid figure, slumped slightly; its weight somehow wasn't right on its feet.

Zhale moved forward and the small light spell he'd been holding cast away the gloom. It was Talia Aurelia.

I was standing in front, so it saw me first.

"Iria?" it said.

"Talia. Rough night?" I asked.

"Not terribly," it said. "It all went well, all told."

At that point, I readied my blades, and drank a refined prototype of a potion for increased strength and speed that Callo had given me. Zhale pushed the light further into the hallway, and it became clear why it was slumped strangely: it wasn't putting any weight on its feet because extending from its back and arching over its shoulders were articulated pointed growths and limbs made of the strange mix of crystalline outcroppings and pieces of corpses. Some were lumpy but many were jointed, clean — an enormous form, something between a centipede and a mass grave.

"So did the Infestation get you, or was this you the whole time?" I asked it.

"There never was a Talia Aurelia. There is only us," it said.

Beyond it, the room was dug out, which huge, person-sized insectoid creatures crawling constantly over and around one another, a roiling sea filling the pit of their own making. The room that we needed to get to, the metal chamber, for Zhale to cast the spell that would allow us to escape — it was more than forty feet up a sheer vertical wall.

"What was it that you thought you were going to accomplish?" I asked the thing in front of me.

It lunged, sweeping with two huge claws that loosed a spay of crystalline needles.

"To pave the way."

Galseii cast something on me as I kept fighting, kept trying to hold its attention so that the others could go around and begin to set up for our escape.

"What for?"

I got three good, solid hits in, but it did not nearly slow the thing down — it plucked me up with one of its claws, articulated spines piercing into me where it grabbed me.

"Come on, we're friends, you can tell me," I said, and thrust up through the chest where the heart would be and ripped the blade out. It looked down at me, smiled, a bit of blood dotting the side of its mouth, and flung me into the pit.

Callo took over the more martial aspects of the fight at this, pulling out a silk scarf that she began to whip around, magic sharpening the end. It took me a few seconds to climb out of the pit, at which point the thing had begun to attack Galseii, and was trying to peel his head apart. I dismembered the limb that was holding him, and took the attention of the Infestation once more.

It was at that point that I was hit by Callo's blade. Her eyes were open wide and shaking, as she slashed it across my throat, resisting but failing to resist some sort of telephysical control. I was impaled twice partially through my torso by the monster. Zhale barreled across the room, as fast as he could run still carrying the Catalyst, and tackled Callo, making up for lack of skill with pure momentum.

She came to again, and shouted, "Legs! Go for the legs!"

I turned away from the front of the thing and ripped underneath it, cutting out five or six legs' worth of musculature. Callo pushed herself up and severed another leg.

That which had called itself Talia, its body tattered and ripped to pieces, chunks of lung and the remains of what was a heart mixed with other viscera, leaned over me.

"I know you though, Iria," it said.

It slammed another of the limbs that it had been trying to use against Galseii into me, knocking me onto my side, and a row of teeth dug into my back and ripped into connection points of the musculature of my spine. The places that were weakest from my injury.

It ripped.

I regained consciousness about twenty feet in the air, in a cradle of silk carried by a massive summoned spider. Galseii and Zhale were next to me. Callo was single-handedly holding the monster off, severing leg after leg with her scarf. The three of us made it to the door in the wall, and tumbled into the compartment. Once we were safe inside, Callo started climbing.

"I need more time!" Zhale said.

Recalling once more these things' original distaste of fire, I dragged myself to the edge and set the webbing that remained on the wall on fire, and the silk hammock that had carried me as well, to throw at the monster. Callo easily dodged the burning bits on the wall, and made it through and into the room. We shut the metal door, and there was immediately a great force slamming into it, spines piercing partially through. Zhale finished his preparations, using my discarded sword to smash through the glass window that had previously been used for viewing in this chamber, and cast the spell. Galseii finished doing something that allowed him at least to prop me up.

The original plan had been for me to be the last through the portal; the one who waited, who could wait and hold fighting who-knows-what while the others got as far through the portal and away from a potential blast radius as they could. This was no longer possible. Galseii and Zhale took me, an arm around a shoulder each, and half-carried me through the portal. Callo stayed behind. When we had hobbled far enough to hopefully be safe; or perhaps when it became clear that the chamber door would hold out for no more abuse, Callo kicked the door open, opened the protective casing, threw the whole thing out, turned and dived through the window, and began sprinting towards us.

There was a booming roar, although muffled; everything was muffled in the Arcane Other, gray, strange. There was the strange sensation of the ground shaking, yet far away, or perhaps a concussive front from the mass explosion occurring right through the window reached us before the eruption of the strange flickering red and green sparks that characterized the destabilization field, blooming out like a poisonous cloud. In its initial expansion it was faster, covering the distance Callo had covered much more rapidly, and it seemed as though all would be lost; but in the Arcane Other, there was no life to fuel this outcropping of the reaction, and it seemed as though all might be well; but the cloud clipped Callo and threw her forward with a force as it began dissipating. The window snapped shut.

Galseii left me with Zhale and ran towards Callo's prone form, even as she shouted for him to stay back; but the red and green sparks that sunk into her were not quite enough to set off a new reaction. She lost her eyes, as she stabilized. Galseii tried to pull from the Caedis healing magic to treat all damages to her, but could not reach anything. Callo waved him off and stood on her own, and without her eyes, pointed us in a direction.

We walked, for what must have been nearly an hour, Callo giving small corrections when necessary. The distance felt similar to the distance that we might have walked from the laboratory complex to the ships; although I am not sure if I could report more exact details, as the exhaustion of nearly two days' without sleep, the exertion of the previous night and morning, and the injuries that I bore meant that remaining upright and moving forward took most all of my attention.

Finally, Callo stopped us. Zhale took several attempts to pull and stabilize a needle, but he did, and we saw through once more into our world: the deck of a ship, for Callo's navigation had been flawless. Galseii all but dropped me through the window, and he and Callo followed. Zhale attempted to step through as well, but had been so exhausted by the amount of casting he had done that he lost hold of the needle, and the portal closed before he was fully through, severing a part of his leg. Galseii moved to cast healing, and Zhale to stop him, but Zhale was a moment too late—alterations that Zhale had made to his blood during the Trial of the Architect to allow him to use it more freely in needles meant that it reacted poorly to the healing spell and lashed out, destroying the hand that Galseii had used to summon the magic. Healing magic was cast on Galseii, and mundane means to stop Zhale's bleeding were employed. The ship, now with all expected passengers, departed with haste to carry the survivors and this news back to Veteris. This concludes my report of the events surrounding the Infestation incident.

I believe that this Infestation represents an unprecedented threat to the Empire. It has not been eradicated, it has been pushed back, and we have no measure of how much this defeat cost it. Its advance force had in-depth research on the Empire, enough to create and impersonate a noble, infiltrate Black Lotus Labs, and to know enough about our language, culture, sciences, and magic to fit in seamlessly in both social interactions day-to-day for months and in its research team. The appearance of Talia Aurelia could not have been a magical construct whatsoever, as it sat and interacted multiple times with Senior Research Lead Zhale, who has perhaps the most sensitive passive magical senses in the Empire and would have immediately picked up on any magical influences in the appearance of its body. It cast simple Caedic needles needed for its research multiple times, and once in front of Senior Research Lead Zhale, indicating that it was not merely parroting but had discovered how to fully reproduce Caedic arcane casting. It knew beforehand of the Capital and the protections in the Capital such as the Warding Wall; Talia Aurelia attempted to engage me in conversation about the mechanics of the Warding Wall when we first met, as well as the research and capabilities of the Academy, and was only thwarted by the fact that I knew little on either topic.

The mechanism with which it used to invade Black Lotus Labs is unknown, other than that it was partially blocked by a spell based on the Warding Wall. The reason why Black Lotus Labs was targeted is unknown; it is my instinct that the project that Autumn Division was researching that Talia Aurelia personally joined was perhaps something that the Infestation planned to use to more completely manifest in this dimension. This postulate is drawn from the facts that Talia Aurelia did choose to focus on the project involving dimensional observation for months and actively contributed to research for the team, that Black Lotus Labs was targeted despite being a well-guarded Caedic stronghold instead of some easier unoccupied place to manifest, and that within the labs most of the concentration and actions of the Infestation were in Autumn Division near the viewing room of Project that Talia Aurelia had been researching and that Senior Research Lead Zhale used to construct the portal for our escape. However, I do not believe there is any evidence present that could lead us to assume that the room and project were needed in the first place for the Infestation to invade, just that it was necessary for the second stage of the invasion.

We must face the very real possibility that we do not know how many other Caedic elves are currently being impersonated or have been created entirely by the Infestation, or that might be in the future. We must assume that the Infestation has the ability to begin a second invasion anywhere in the Empire or in the world that is not currently protected by a Warding Wall, and its advance force alone—that which was sent to pave the way—was enough to destroy in near entirety a high-security Caedic stronghold with a large military-trained guard force specifically present and on the outlook for foreign threats.

I can still feel the connection to the Warding Wall spell Zhale erected. All four of us can. The force that was pressing against it remained pressing against it, with purpose, after the detonation of the Catalyst; it was only hours after the destruction of the advance force that the pressure withdrew. If anything tries to enter the island of Insul with Black Lotus Labs, we will be able to alert to Empire immediately. Senior Research Lead Zhale states that he expects the spell to hold for the span of a month to a few months. The Catalyst now lies in the center of a storm of magic. If its last event is anything to be judged by, the storm will stabilize within the year, allowing for the Catalyst to be fetched or secured at the Will of the Bishops. As for this Enemy and the threat it represents, the actions taken by myself, Senior Research Lead Zhale, Senior Research Lead Galseii, and Instigator Callo put an end to this incident. I can only re-iterate the words that it spoke to us: that it was here to pave the way for something greater. There is more of it out there, more which survived, which ostensibly now also has all of the research that Talia Aurelia collected for months on the very thing it needed to more fully invade. We merely stopped this outcropping, and we know not when it will be back.

———

to do list before reaching Veteris

-- check report one more time for anything missing. make sure no bias. they don’t want your opinion, just the facts. -- reconstruct rest of notes of Project Pendulum for Galen. do not assume any excuses will be accepted. cannot return empty-handed, especially not after destruction of the construct and prototypes. -- Talvus prosthetic design work in mechanical wand parts so can be used for spell storage too worried it might explode (coward). work in snack secret compartment instead -- work on possibility of designing Qaedius a working magic-mechanical hand prosthetic? probably impossibly/ beyond any theory work on it anyway. mechanical anchor based on construct—try non-magical scaffolding version first to model. if works, ask someone who knows better if offering to design with Qaedius would be insult -- visit Vennikus? would she want to see you she has Canth with her, not like she’s alone. still visit, make quick, show no pity or guilt you wouldn’t want anyone to pity you -- take notes on pain in exercises every morning. mobility in attempts to get through sword forms is improving. do not push or strain. not worth it. -- practice being better noble. greetings, dialect, personal presentation. do not write off any aspect. will need.

#gay murder elf bachelorette #dungeons and dragons #my writing #we finally did it folks I've finished writing up Book 4 #I'm very tired so I hope it comes across as coherent

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jenna347-blog · 3 years

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Chapter 6(Koopa kingdom Fanfiction Draft)

Chapter 6

(Jennifer’s point of view)

“I’m right here baby! Ran so fast you’ve thought I was the Flash. Thank you Ludwig, Kamek, and King Bowser for allowing to speak and also to team up with you guys to make that Fawfull would stop line of terror of Bean beam, Mushroom, and Koopa Kingdom for decades. All I wanted to say is I know that I’m a foreigner but I would make sure to keep go aside Ludwig, King Koopa, the Koopa army. (the crowed started to cheer even louder) But I think it’s time to allow your King to have his chance to shine also to put his 2 cents in, plus I must get back to castle to work on my next mission with my dear Ludwig(wink). Now my dear I need truly need to fix my transporting device when Midbus and Fawful kidnapped me, Midbus had pour water on in. So, I need Iggy to at least help me with replacing the boards. Not just that I really need to get back home, so my mom she wouldn’t think I went missing, and then after that I’ll pack up my things and move in your universe. I hope you don’t mind my dear love?” Explaining while we walked towards the castle. “Do what you need to Jennifer, I’ll be waiting for you once you come back to me (kissing the back of my hand) let me escort you to my brother’s room. (25 mins later Ludwig knocks on Iggy bedroom door). Iggy, Jennifer needs your asstiance by fixing her teleportation device.” “And why should trust a human Ludwig, for all we know she could’ve help kill Fawful for the Mushroom Kingdoms gain. She could’ve an undercover spy, so I’m not bloody helping you two figure it out on your own.” Before he had the chance to close his door I slammed it back open putting my hand on his neck slamming him against the wall. “Now you listen here Iggy, if it wasn’t for me or Ludwig. You’ve been bloody dead, and to me you need our help. So, basically you owe us this bloody ass favor if you like or not. Not just that why would I work for Mario for, he probably wouldn’t been able to afford a chick like me/Lira, and not just that I can’t stand Mario anyways. Like or not I’m here to stay and going to make sure nothing happens to you koopalings, King Koopa, and the rest of the Koopa army.” “Yea okay, I’ll do it for you and you’re right. Just let me go, damn I thought that Roy, Ludwig, and Larry was crazy but you’re just as bad. I don’t need to cross you Jennifer, come with me to my lab. Okay, give me the item please and thank you (hands it to him), I never seen anything like this before. Its amazing workmanship, you have to show me one day how you did it, you know what I was wrong about you, because even the Mushroom Kingdom couldn’t make such a device including yours truly.” Me and Ludwig just wanted him to get this over with. “Well, thank you, but we can’t waste any time with this, because this may take a day or two. Both of them agreed, telling them that we needed to give this bad boy an upgraded teleport arm device. Iggy do you have a 250 gb Hard drive and a better mother board?” “I don’t have one, me or Ludwig may have to magically give them to you.” “Iggy you know more about this then I do you know that, but I’ll try to help the best way that a true leader can.” Iggy just sighs trying to be easy towards Ludwig, I kind of giggle at Iggy. “Ludwig and Iggy, I guess should’ve gave you guys the blue prints to my invention right. And I know you guys are going say you should’ve gave us that from the start, but I wasn’t thinking that my equipment was going to get damaged.” (Pulling my blueprints from my backpack). “Only thing is we can’t do it here because all the work we have to do, but don’t worry about it I know where we should go that nobody knows about. So, please don’t tell anybody about this location, if you do I’ll make sure you both will regret it for sure.” Explaining while transporting us to an unknown location, and it looks like a CIA type laborty very fancy and high tech. “Wow Iggy! This place is a lot nicer then the places I seen before, not even NASA could have a lab such as this.” “It’s nothing really, but we do need to get to work Ludwig, I know you don’t want to do anything technical anymore we do need your help with this.” “Oh I would love to lead this project and you can’t no Iggy, just like you said I’ll do the same thing if you try me and telling me what to do or give me a negative type comment.” “Ludwig, please relax that, save that attuide for later my love, I need your and Iggy brains and handy work to make sure we don’t waste any time, so please will you both please help me. Explaining while trying to gathered all the equipment that I need. Okay, Iggy, I need for you to build me a those gigabytes and SSD (soft drive) please and thank you.” “Only thing about this would be that you need an upgrade, 20x the amount, if you want to this hand part of an armer. Maybe, we could built you a full body gear, but that’s if you’re willing to go with my brand new project. Replying while walking towards his suit collection wall. Now see, I was going to wait til the time was right, but didn’t think it would’ve been this soon, these suits were supposed to be for us Koopalings/Koopa army. But I guess you need it as well, just to make an extra one and good thing this is a custom fit… “How long would this take Iggy?” Ludwig you know I have a wand as well if you want it super quick right.” “Great let’s get this done, because I really need to go back to my universe to gather my items then head back here. Just hopefully your father still isn’t pissed off from me coming here and wonders that I’m a spy for the mushroom kingdom, but like I mention you couldn’t pay me enough to pretend that princess peach was being kidnapped.” “What a minute you knew she wasn’t really being kidnapped and they were both in love, Ludwig, did you tell her about that?” Iggy wondered while looking at Ludwig. “No, I never told her that, I’m just finding this out.” “Okay, Ludwig, remember when I told you that I didn’t expect for this kingdom to be real, so in my universe this place is part of a Nintendo gaming series very well-known one. This kingdom and Bean Beam Kingdom are enemies to the Mushroom kingdom, Mario is the hero that saves Princess Peach and Daisy, but sometimes you guys work with him including Luigi, not just that Mario Kart and Mario tennis. There’s so many games that were based from you universe. So, basically we all know about you guys just don’t know who’s your real parents except for Ludwig real mother that was in one of the paper Mario games I believe in Nintendo 64. But any who we don’t need to worry about this just get me back home, we can talk about this later. My mom is probably worry about me knowing her I already know she called the police on me by now or thinks I’m six feet underground.” “What do you want me to do Iggy and Jennifer, so it doesn’t seem like I’m just standing around, I feel bored right now and useless you make me in charge of the whole thing.” “Only problem with that would be is this is my lab, you don’t get to own me when we’re here just because your little girlfriend is here doesn’t mean anything, so let’s back to work brother. Explains while unlocking a suit chamber. Here you go try it on Jen to see how you like it, and don’t worry about it nobody has worn it not even Morton. It fit like a beautiful glove. So, how you like Ms. Jennifer?” “Oh Iggy, I love it, I think we’re going to be best friends, but you Ludwig is going to be my deadly lover more than ever. You know damn well I couldn’t live without you. Iggy I just need to know how we’re going to fix this multi verse thing, maybe one of you guys could just use some of the items here and magically make it possible.” “Oh crap forgot all about that Ms. Jen, Ludwig I actually need your help with this, you know what spell I’m talking about right.” “You mean that same spell we did when we were kids and it was meant for King Bowser?” Iggy nods yes, as they all the items that I needed and the show they preformed their music show, it was something I could ever dream of was so damn beautiful. “Okay Jen, all fixed up and not you should be able to go back home now. And just wanted to tell you that I shouldn’t had judge you before getting to know you, hopefully you forgive me.” Saying while holding his hand out. “No problem Iggy this person never helds a grudge dude, and baby I can’t wait to come back to you (kisses) my dear love.” “I can’t wait either, but I’ll wait for you till the dawn of time my deadly princess.” Says after kissing my hand. Putting in the couration to bring me back home, pointing it to wall and this was a lot better system then my old one, gave them a last goodbye before hopping into my bedroom. “MOM, I’m home! Where are you?” “Oh my god, Chanel, I thought something had happened to you.” She said while holding me tight, just like I thought there was cops around. “Can me and my mom talk alone please.” “Sure, ma’am we’re been looking for you for a month now. We’ll leave you guys alone for now call us if you two anything from us.” We both agreed while showing them to the door. “You better tell me where you been at for a month.” “It’s been a month, that couldn’t been that long, I was been go atleast a day or two at the Koopa Kingdom. Look I know you didn’t want me to go there, but I was so curius and it was the most amazing thing that I ever experenise. I had to kill one of their enemies and also was kidnapped, but I’m fine, only came back so you wouldn’t worry about me. But I guess a day there It’s a month in this universe, as I was saying I need to pack up and go back to the Koopa Kingdom promised them to come back there and help them protect the kingdom from the other enemies that may wanted to cause harm towards them.” “If it wasn’t for the fact I saw it for myself, would never had believed you, but if you need to go back to help someone in need go right ahead. Just glad that you’re in one piece, and about the suit where you get it from let me guess the Koopa Kingdom.” “I can’t tell you that supposed to keep it a secret, but I do have to go now going to miss and always love you mom no matter what. Giving her the biggest hug that I could give her after I finish packing didn’t have that much to grab. But I’ll come back on your birthday, mothers day, and every other day, even if you say no still going to do so.” After doing this another time thought it wouldn’t happened a second timing, checking every place that they could’ve ran off to, found Ludwig went back into his room, guessing that Iggy did the same thing. Waved here goodbye. Oh my Ludwig, everytime I leave your side feels like my world was going to end, even though it wasn’t a minute.” “Oh, my dear princess couln’t wait for you either it was killing me inside my cold heart. Saying this while kissing my arm going towards my neck. Your love is driving me wild and you’re the only human that understands and completes me… (Knocking) Who is it?” “It just us Ludwig, the rest already know about your girlfriend.” Iggy replied while opening the door. “Oh Ludwig who’s your girlfriend?” “I’m Jennifer and you must be Wendy O’ Koopa right?” “Bingo girly, and you probably already know the right of the Koopalings.” “Morton wants to know if you have any food on you?” “No man I don’t, didn’t know I was going to feed a big ass dude. And you must be Larry, how are you doing kiddo?” “I’m doing fine ma’am, and it’s great to have you on the team, if Ludwig likes you we do too. Only problem is Ludwig if our dad would accept her you know how King Bowser is including Kamek.” “Oh trust me he has to accept my deadly princess, and if he lays a hand on her I’ll make sure he’ll never gets to see his bloody son ever again and drag his corpse on the kingdom streets.” “I love the sound of that my dear love and I’ll help you on that sadistic killing and support you every step of the way my Ludwig.” While saying this they all looked at us like we were beyond crazy, but I didn’t care how they felt about our sadistic love affair, only person I should care about is my dear Ludwig, and I love the way he thinks and act. “I can’t believe I’ve met someone not just beautiful but deadly aswell, and Jennifer, I’ll make sure to you more of a better deadlier woman then you already are.(kisses my arm while they all watch) What you morons never seen how a real man treat his princess?” “It’s not that, bro. Just that you guys are freaking us out, plus we’re not morons, maybe Morton but not the rest of us.” “Nice one Larry.” Iggy and Wendy had replied. You can tell it “Hey! Morton isn’t a moron, Morton is smart. If you insult Morton… Then Ludwig interrupts him buy going between them. “Shut the hell up! You’re going to drive me insanse one damn day, and Lemmy don’t say “I’m already insane” and I have to say about that I’m not just a dark and edgy gentleman who’s trying to keep take the throne for myself.” “I guess if you become King we may just drink English tea and listen to some classical music.” Roy jokfully said while placing his hand on Ludwig’s shoulder. “You have up to 2 to get off my shoulder or I’ll hurt your arm so damn bad till the point you’ll be eating your food throu a tube. Now Koopalings, I think me and my Jennifer need to be alone I’ll let you guys know if we have a meeting or have to invade Mushroom Kingdom, and how we supposed to train that brat Junior. Explaining them this as he shows them the door. Now please don’t come to my room unless you fixing to die, I’m sorry my dear love about those imgrates. “We all can hear you asshole.” They all said this while walking around and also laughed at him. Get the fuck out I swear to god, you going make me turn you morons into a 3 course meal for me and my love.” (Sigh) “Ludwig, don’t let those ungreatful Koopas get to you, because they’ll see your greatness soon enough my dear.” “I hope so my princess, because they’re hold me back for my place in the throne including that brat, Junior. That brat has ruined my chances on ever allowing me to set foot on that throne, only way I could every take it from him if he was never born. But I know that’ll never would happen, unless we could use that device of yours to go back in time to make sure Bowser never met Juniors mom,” “But Ludwig, you know if we do this, there’s a chance that it may go wrong with my universe. And when I mean by that I wouldn’t been born my dear love, don’t want that to happened, we need to make sure that we do this in a safe way that your world including mine wouldn’t cause any serious damage to our timeline. Not just that also get away with it, make the long story short don’t want anything to happen to you/your clan, or me. But I’ll be there by your side no matter what, includes Lira you thought I wasn’t going to include her aswell.” “You have a point there Jennifer, maybe should think of a better plan. Just don’t know how, maybe if we get the rest of the Koopalings invald in our mission to take over Koopa kingdom. The only problem is that I know some of my team would snitch to that ratchet King. “Why would you think that?” You don’t know them like I do, mostly Morton, Iggy, Larry, including Wendy would diffently how you humans say “snitch” on one of another…” “But maybe they’ll change their minds soon enough, like they always say it’s better to be patence then rush perfection my dear love and not just that I don’t want to lose you Ludwig. (Kissing him so deeply)I know you don’t want the others to help us out, but we do need to make sure that the others will be on our side, you ust need to presade them to follow your lead. I know you can my dear Ludwig.” (Knocking) “Ludwig, may I come in it’s very important? If you must know just Iggy, so don’t worry. Iggy what do you want now? I’ll tell you but not in the hall way. Okay, what’s so damn important to the point you have some to interrupting us. (Iggy pulls out a chair) Well, all I have to say is when you guys killed Fawful and Midbus(sigh), let off a chain effect and not in a good way either. When I looked at the Koopa scanners and reports with the other Toopas, Fawful Kingdom figured the whole thing. Guess I’m trying to say is once a bee dies the whole connay comes behind and attack the enemy, so what I’m trying to say that we need to make sure that we’re ready also we need Jennifer/Lira help.Wait a minute is Bowser and Kamek still having that meeting with the Goombas and Koopa troopas right? “The last time we check they sure were, we just same came from there. But they probarly left already Iggy, only way we can get their attention if we did some type alarm and you have to give a anounment about the soon to be invasion. Maybe this is me and Lira fault we should never had come here, if I could guess Fawfall wasn’t supposed to die including midbus. My dear princess it’s not your fault, guess I made my hate towards him get to me and didn’t want him to harm my beautiful princess.” I don’t want to ruin this touching moment, but we do have prepare for a battle between kingdoms. Iggy, maybe we should call Bowser, Kamek, and the gang to make sure they stay behind to make sure we could make another meeting about the invasion.” Yea, sure I could text Kamek to see if their still at the office meeting. (Texting Kamek) “Hey Iggy, yes we’re still here, guessing you guys needed to say something. I’ll make sure to let them know about you guys joining in aswell, even though Bowser may not like it.” Okay, Kamek is going to try to keep them busy. Let’s get this battle over with. (at Koopa Inc. office) “Iggy you better explain yourself on why you need Kamek to keep us here? Look Bowser I know you guys are very tired and wanted to go back home but this is very important that the Koopa army needed to hear. The Bean Beam Kingdom is going to invade our kingdom, because what we did Fawful and his bodyguard. If we don’t prepare for battle we all going to end up 6 feet underground, the only reason how I know about this his King and Queen had sent me a message and it was legit checked it so many damn times till the point I lost count. They may come by next week.” Kamek and Ludwig, grab the rest of the Koopalings and prepared for battle.

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xfanfics · 4 years

Text

Destiel Fic Rec List Part 4

Last Updated in October 2014. Posted in May 2020 for posterity. Header graphic used with permission.

This list contains: 33 fics.

Other Destiel Rec Lists: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.

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Casturbatus Interruptus by gaugbrojotr

E | 6k | Canon!verse, Hot, , PWP

post-9.01, in a slight AU wherein Cas comes to live with the Winchesters at the Bunker. Written before 9.03. Crossposting from Tumblr. Written for a prompt from hightopsandsharpies: "Okay, so Cas is a virgin, and has no idea what pleasure is and Dean decides to show him and Cas gets all cuddly and needy afterwards. Dean walks in on Cas masturbating. He’s doing it all wrong, but when you’re a bazillion-year-old virgin, that’s to be expected. Dean decides to lend him a hand in a totally platonic, non-romantic way. Things get a little out of control.

that awkward moment when... by highermagicv

E | 7k | Hot, wing!Kink

All in all, with a full tank of gas and his radio turned up loud, Dean was in a pretty damn good mood. All that vanished into shock and concern when the sky lit up like daylight, as though someone had decided that black was so passé for nighttime.

This Temporary Flesh and Bone by misachan

E | 5k | Canon!verse, h/c, wing!kink

Castiel doesn't serve Dean, fine, Dean has no problem with that - he just wants to know why Castiel's showing up in his dreams again.

What a fabulous little Fic. Very emotional. S4 cas is my FAVORITE.

Only Fools Rush In by baka_sensei

E | 18k | Canon!verse, soulbond

Dean does something and in angelic tradition that means he's become Castiel's fiancé. Dean doesn't know if he wants to get married, but he doesn't want to let Castiel down either. Cas lets his feelings run away with him, Gabe is a total dick, Sam is concerned, and Dean has to make a choice.

Learning Curve by blualbino

T | 1k | Fluff, Canon!verse

Cas has nice lips. They’re soft looking. Plush even. Dean can do this.

Dinner At Katz's by nanoochka

E | 2k | Hot, canon!verse

Dean might have to teach Cas how to have a When Harry Met Sally-esque orgasm, but he certainly doesn’t have to fake it.

Free With His Hands by watermaline

E | 2k | canon!verse, handprint!kink

The first time it happens, Dean chalks it up to…well, he doesn’t chalk it up to anything, he’s too busy coming his brains out in his jeans with Castiel’s hand on his shoulder.

Desecrate that Sanctuary by brokentoy

E | 3k | Hot, Alt!Canon Verse

Dean develops a fascination with Cas' bones.

What Once Was Sacred by saltandbyrne

E | 55k | Hot, AU, Cop Dean, DJ Cas

Los Angeles detective Dean Winchester works tirelessly to atone for the sins of his father one case at a time. When his best friend Charlie drags him to visit Sam at his new job, Dean stumbles onto a bizarre string of deaths that brings him uncomfortably close to his past.Dean can't stop thinking about Castiel, an enigmatic DJ who plays the sexiest music Dean's ever heard. A chance encounter at Castiel's house reveals that Castiel is an incubus, and Dean must face the lies and the reality of his childhood as a hunter. Dean comes to see that he and Castiel have more in common than he thought, and that guilt can be the hardest thing to cast aside.

Freefall by LastKnownWriter

E | 128k | Hot, Fluff, AU, Teacher Dean, Firefighter Cas

AU. The most exciting kindergarten teacher Dean Winchester's life ever gets is when he plays mechanic in his uncle Bobby's shop on the weekends. That is until a birthday party goes tequila-nova and he trips into a one-night stand with an incredibly hot firefighter named Castiel. Dean's life gets a lot more exciting after that.

The Best Years of Our Lives, My Ass ❤ by ireallyhatecornnuts

E | 110k | Hot, Fluff, HS AU but not really,

AU after Season 8, episode 6, "Southern Comfort." Dean goes to sleep in a motel room in Texarkana, and he wakes up 17 years old, in his childhood bedroom in Lawrence, Kansas, 1996. He has no idea how he got there, why his parents are still alive, why his brother is an adorable freshman with no memory of his adult life, and why the only ally he has in this place is the angel he left behind in Purgatory – somehow also 17 years old. They have to get out, that's the important thing. Only, falling in love with his angel wasn't a part of the plan....

It's like a HS AU... but better! I love how Dean is given a second chance at growing up, and Cas gets to engage with his humanity is painfully familiar ways. Some homophobia from non-central characters.

deus ex nihilo by Valyria

E | 7k | AU, dubcon, god cas

Lost on an uncharted island, Dean Winchester is captured by the local villagers and offered up as a sacrifice to their winged god. Castiel takes one look at Dean and decides he wants him for a mate.

Twist and Shout ❤ by gabriel

E | 97k | Angst, AU, Main Character Death

What begins as a transforming love between Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak in the summer of 1965 quickly derails into something far more tumultuous when Dean is drafted in the Vietnam War. Though the two both voice their relationship is one where saying goodbye is never a real truth, their story becomes fraught with the tragedy of circumstance. In an era where homosexuality was especially vulnerable, Twist and Shout is the story of the love transcending time, returning over and over in its many forms, as faithful as the sea.

Do I really need to say anything? Twist and Shout is one of my favorites simply because it made me bawl. Didn't love the characterization, but I still liked it overall.

Angel Slayer by emwebb17

E | 138k | Jensen/Misha, Mystery, AU

FBI Special Agent Jensen Ackles tracked a serial killer dubbed the Angel Slayer for six months in Washington, DC—the murderer was vicious, depraved, carved the names of angels into the victims’ chests…and eluded capture. Over eight years later, a murder in small Elton, NH has too many similarities for Jensen to ignore. Paired with a green agent, Jared Padalecki, Jensen travels to Elton to solve the case that has been haunting him for nearly a decade. In the course of the investigation the agents come across a local police officer named Misha Collins—who may have a deadly connection to the Angel Slayer.

Carry On ❤ by TamrynEradani

E | 148k | Hot, AU, Sub!dean, Dom!Cas

When Sam gets into Stanford, Dean needs a bigger paycheck than Bobby's garage can give him. Luckily, he knows a guy.

Forget 50 Shades of Grey, they should make this fic into a movie! Even if you are not a fan of Sub!Dean, give this fic a shot, because it is nearly perfect.

Glasses by Samanthapin

E | 9k | Fluff, High School AU, punk!cas, nerd!dean

Teasing turns flirting turns dating turns grossly soppy boyfriends

beer and bacon happy hour by outpastthemoat

G | 2k | canon!verse, s8

The problem is that Dean’s been having good ideas all night. “No one insults the trenchcoat,” Dean says, and drives his fist into the other dude’s face. Dean figures he was bound to run out of good ideas eventually.

Hard Road ❤ by aleishapotter

E | 54k | Canon!verse

Dean discovers a few truths about himself when he and Cas are forced to go undercover on a hunt to the very last place Dean ever thought he'd find himself: a gay resort called "Last Hope" that is geared towards helping troubled homosexual couples repair their relationships. This fic is hilarious and hot--my favorite things.

Dean Smith Verse by TamrynEradani

E | 17k | Hot, BDSM, AU, Sub!Dean

Dean Smith is a man of routine. Castiel takes him apart.

Bratishka: Little Brother by Valyria

E | 33k | Cop AU, Cop Dean, Lawyer Cas

Dean thinks he knows pretty much everything there is to know about his best friend Castiel Novak - he's a smart, gorgeous DA who probably lets Dean get away with more than he should to see the bad guy locked up - but it turns out Cas is hiding some dark family secrets.

the way to a man's heart by mkhunterz

M | 15k | Fluff, Canon!verse

Dean teaches Cas to cook, and other things as well.

Branded by garrisonbabe

E | 12k | | canon!verse, soul bond, marking/claiming

Michael mocked Castiel, telling him he'd never get Dean the way he truly wanted. No matter the mark on Dean's soul, he'd never get him the way the archangel could take him. Dean finds a ritual that fixes that and a few other issues.

Our Bodies, Posessed by Light by obstinatrix

E | 39k | canon!verse, sastiel bromance, Fluff

Purged of all his souls, Castiel is a changed being, stronger than an angel and too powerful for Jimmy's body to contain. Happily, there's an archangel's vessel on hand, and he could use fixing, too. Dean isn't too happy about the idea of his brother acting as a vessel for Castiel, and Sam can guess why, but it isn't until Castiel gets inside his head and they learn to share the vessel -- and their thoughts -- that Sam realises Cas is as in love with Dean as Dean is with him. It's unfortunate that there's nothing much to be done about it now, but Castiel will get another vessel soon. The Winchesters will make damn sure of that. In the meantime, it's up to the three of them to establish their own strange accord, and Dean realises more fully than ever that it's Castiel, and not his vessel, that he loves.

So Glad We Made It ❤by scaramouche

M | 16k | Fluff, AU

At twelve years old, Dean makes a friend, who becomes his best friend, who will eventually become the love of his life.

Oh, the best friends who grow up together AU. I have a soft spot for fics like these-- comes with pining, awkward misunderstandings, and a good basis for a realistic relationship.

Shut Up (Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is) ❤ by kototyph

E | 23k | Fluff, college au

Dean's done some pretty stupid things, but getting drunk-hitched in Vegas to a colleague he barely knows might just take the cake. His surprise husband, Castiel, is a little weird but likable despite that, and Dean figures they’ll go back to Boston, get a quiet annulment, and go their separate ways. Six weeks later, he’s still married to one of the strangest, most genuine and definitely most dangerously lov-- likable guys he's ever known. Dean doesn't know why or really even how it’s happening, but it’s getting harder and harder to remember that he has divorce papers to file.

FLUFF EVERYWHERE! This is definitely a feel-good fic and I love reading it when I'm sad. Or just you know, whenever.

But the Fire is So Delightful by kototyph

E | 5k | Hot, hate then love, College AU

Apparently, it’s been snowing all day. [Dean is a Douchebag Fratboy with a Cherry Ass, Castiel is Angry and Aroused]

Stitches by askance

T | 23k | Fluff, h/c, blindness, Canon!verse

Castiel survived Leviathan--but only barely. Vessel mauled and eyes destroyed, Cas is barely clinging to what's left of his grace when Dean finds him naked and alone on the reservoir's edge; in a panic, Dean brings him home to the cabin where he and Sam have been holed up off the grid. What follows is the slow process of the angel's recovery and the unexpected changes that come with his being blind, and in the three months this takes, their little family slowly begins to patch itself back together in forgiveness, love, and darkness.

When Charlie Met Cas by riseofthefallenone

E | 25k | Fluff, canon!versE |

Charlie is back in all her glory. The Winchesters have showed up on her doorstep and she’s making the best of it the only way she knows how. By being the little sister Dean never wanted and shipping the shit out of Destiel.

The Curious Case of Wee Baby Cas Things by tracy_loo_who

G | 4k | Gen, crack

In which Dean and Sam get saddled with a herd of Cas-like baby animals. Meanwhile, Castiel just wants a hug.

The Life After the Morning After by saltyfeathers

T | 17k

Dean and Cas get uber drunk on their last day of University. They end up married. Neither of them seem to mind.

The Girlfriend Experience ❤ by Rageprufrock

E | 15k | Hot, Canon!Verse, First time

While it's not like Dean hasn't had a couple of truly regrettable hit-and-runs in his sexual history, this is probably the saddest fucking thing that has ever happened to him.

Classic Casturbation fic. Complete with steamy sexytimes, hilarious dialogue, and fed up and clueless Dean. Perfect.

Asunder by Rageprufrock

E | 23k | Sam/Ruby, Hospital AU Fluff,

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Matthew 19:6)

Hands, From Which All Things Are Built by MajorEnglishEsquire

T | 14k | Canon!Verse, s8

Castiel travels with the angel tablet and without the Winchesters. One day, Dean gets a text from some anonymous number. (They speak in the language of need.)

#destiel #deancas #destiel fic recs #supernatural #spn #*#list

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prettywitchiusaka · 7 years

Text

2016 In Retrospect

Hello, everyone.

Let me get this out of the way, first; Happy belated New Year, everybody!

Sorry for not being on here the last few days, I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts on some tv shows and movies I’ve seen, but me being sick kind of prevented that from happening.

Seriously, there’s some weird flu bug making its way around. My cousin’s kid was sick on Christmas, then I got nauseous from constant overeating during the Holiday season (as you do), and now my mom has a serious case of stomach flu (although she’s feeling better, now).

Heck, I ended up being sick again when I semi-homemade myself some poutine on Tuesday and spent the next few hours up-chucking my dinner. Although I think that was more a case of me cramming too much junk into my system in too little time ( a second cup of coffee, a refresher my mom bought me, a bottle of coke, and then poutine).

I’m feeling better now, but I’m still sort of nervous about eating too much. Thankfully, I went back on Weight Watchers, so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem, now.

Anyway, let’s get back to a post I meant to make last Saturday, a retrospective of my time in 2016.

I’ll be honest, 2016 was not a good year for me all around. Don’t get me wrong, there are some good things that happened that I’ll get to, but it just seemed like this year started off good and then went south from there.

Or perhaps, maybe I had too high of expectations for this past year.

You see, I wanted 2016 to be my year. Not only did it mark the 10th anniversary of some of my favourite tv show episodes and movies (mostly Operation ZERO), but it also marked the 10th anniversary of when I started my career as a fanfic writer.

I was hoping against all hope that maybe this year would be just as good as it was ten years, ago. And when the year started, it seemed like that was going to be the case.

Sure, I was bumped to hear that Wander was getting cancelled, sad to hear Alan Rickman had passed away, and was sad to say goodbye to Gravity Falls. But at the same time, I had a good paying term position, my cousin gave birth to another little girl, and I even managed to drag my brother to the theatre to see Deadpool (he’s usually busy that time of year with school). All in all, I felt happy.

But once I term position ended in late February of last year, everything just felt like it went downhill. Sure, I was unemployed for six months, but I’ve been unemployed before and just kept searching while making good use of my time. Or at least trying to.

But after awhile, it just felt like things got worse and worse. I fell back into my old habit of overanalyzing every thought I had (which lead me to some pretty awful conclusions), and became really paranoid about objectivity vs. subjectivity (something that’s been building up these past few years, honestly).

And to really add insult to injury; my other two temp. jobs this year didn’t pan out, I let myself go weight wise again, kept getting terribly nauseous as a result, and I kept spending money I didn’t have to burn.

And probably the big one; I started getting paranoid about shipping again and what makes a good ship, primarily because of my own history with Twilight and my own fears about some of my favourite pairings. But I’ll get into that another day.

That being said, a lot of good things happened to me this year too. Among them being;

- I started writing more short stories

- Finally got my new office up and running

- Watched ten different anime series (four of which were on air, this year)

- Watched at least eight or nine anime films (including The Wind Rises, finally)

- Started a Writing Group

- Became more actively involved with the Writer’s Guild

- Made some new friends and reunited with old ones

- I actually cosplayed for the first time at a convention

- Added quite a bit to both my Anime DVD Collection and my Pop Collection

- Finally found a copy of Evangelion on DVD

- Started selling some old items on Ebay (and has been very successful at it)

- I got into Battle Royale, The Loud House, and American Crime Story (can’t wait for Season 2!)

- Watched both Stranger Things and World of Winx (can’t wait for their next seasons, either)

- Hung with my cousin’s kid some more

- Got to visit my family in Alberta, again

- Started rough drafting the first few stories for my Agent Goddesses series of comic books

- Started actively blogging here, on Tumblr

And probably most importantly;

- I actually tried sending out my short stories and and actively trying to get them published.

So yeah, 2016 was not a good year for me. But at the same time, there was a lot of good that happened, so I can’t complain too much.

As for 2017? Well, so far it’s been good. With the exception of the nausea I suffered on Tuesday, the first few days of this year have been great so far.

My New Years Resolution is to try and work more on my own writing in addition to my fanfics. And with the exception of yesterday where I was resting from Tuesday night and indulging in my fandoms, I’ve held up to that so far.

I’m actually working on writing up a few stories for my Nomadic Ninja series of novellas. Sure, they’re rough drafts. But hey, at least it’s something. Then on Friday, I’ll be heading down to the library to work on editing an old fairytale I’ve been working on on and off for the last few years.

Anyway, that’s my 2016 in retrospect. Here’s to 2017 being better!

#story of my life #Prettywitch #2016 in Retrospect

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ecotone99 · 5 years

Text

[Sf] let's go

PROLOGUE I don't know how it happened. Only that it was a slow process. First the weak, the young and old, the Ill and poor. They were the first to show signs. They slept more and more which wasn't that noticeable because they sleep all the time anyway. However we noticed the problem when they stopped waking up. Then the average people and even the well off started sleeping. This went on for the next six months. No one could figure out how to wake them up or to stop people from falling asleep. At the end of the first year all the people who were still awake moved everyone else to a central city. The sleepers were put in pods that kept them alive providing them with nutrients and other basic needs. The pods monitored them and recorded data in hopes of finding some answers. Every one else was also give a pod in preparation for the worst. Luckily the city runs itself so all we had to do was research and by the end the computers were doing that too. By the end of the second year I was the only one awake. Which I question every day. Why me? Of the millions in the pods why am I awake? CHAPTER 1 : AWAKE I started recording this as a precaution, in the case that I do become a sleeper or if someone wakes up I can fill them in on what happened. This camera is powered by solar panels with a backup plasma battery so I never really need to worry about it dying. ..... Dying that's something that you forget about when you have an entire world that just fell asleep. For two years now I haven't thought about death. Sleeping seemed so much more likely. The fear of going to sleep and not waking up. The ever present possibility of a necessity becoming a prison. That seems more real. Every day I do the same thing. I wake up it gets a little later daily, two years ago I woke up at nine am, a year later it was ten today eleven. After awake up I check the pods, I know the alarm will sound if anything happens. High pitched if a system failed. Low pitched if someone wakes, but I check away. Then I eat, the auto farm produces enough to feed everyone but I carbon freeze the rest for reserves. After breakfast I play pokemon go. It's dumb but it passes the time I carry two phones and play against myself, valor verses mystic, I take the gyms and hit the pokestops one day and the next I switch to the other phone. I helps me feel like it's the good old days. Not to mention it helps me stay active. I come back for lunch around two and after lunch I conduct my research. I'm not a scientist but you pick up a few things when there are ten people awake in the world and the other nine are fading fast so I learned everything I could and now I do the research while they sleep. Five o'clock is quitting time I eat dinner and shower then bed by seven. Then repeat over and over. When I'm lying in my bunk trying to sleep but being too afraid to let it happen, I often think of the days before. They seem like a dream now so surreal that it couldn't be the truth. That life had to be nothing more that a dream. CHAPTER 2 : DREAM I was a handyman before. Nothing special, not a man of science or a politician. Just someone to call when you needed a carpenter or a plumber. My dad always said that's something that will always be needed. They may have computers for everything else but they can't duplicate the human touch. The craftsmanship. So I followed his words. I served in the army first though. The draft for the war with Russia had just kicked off when I turned eighteen and sure enough three months later I was at Fort Benning, Georgia for basic training and infantry school. I served two tours in Siberia as forward forces against the attack on Alaska. When the sleep started taking people I thought it was the Russians attempting some kind of biological attack. But when most of Russia fell asleep I knew I must be wrong. I'd give anything to be back on that battlefield now. At least then I had allies around me and a clear objective. Now the gun shots are silent, the battle cries are only echoes in my head and the died are only sleeping. So it's my job to them wake up. I've had to become a scientist and put down my hammer spending hours researching book after book to find an answer that's never been found. Now instead of fighting with a rifle my fight is one of the mind. CHAPTER 3 : MIND I've been completely alone for about two months now. I have a routine which makes me feel safe. However I can feel my mind slipping. Talking to sleepers, talking to myself, Talking to walls. Desperate for something to talk back. To help me focus I've begun to play my recording back each night. Not to mention pokemon go actually really helps. I pretend that the other phone is someone else and I'll look at some of the other phones, if they have it I use them too. As a "guest appearance". CHAPTER 4 : APPEARANCE There is a lure! A pokemon lure! I didn't place it but it's there. I opened the app and there it was twenty five minutes left on a pokestop maybe 7 miles away. Someone else is here. Not me and not a sleeper but another person who is awake! They know I'm here and that I play pokemon go. So they've probably been watching me for some time now. Do I go to it and see what they want? Do I start building defenses and prepare for them to attack? If I get captured or killed there will be no one to protect the sleepers but this lure could be an olive branch and I have been extremely lonely. That settles it I'll go. I am taking a rifle and sidearm though, just in case. *The man moves out of view as he turns the camera around and straps it to his helmet* let's go see if it's friend or foe. CHAPTER 5: FRIEND OR FOE *The man rides his bike check the phone every few minutes to make sure he's heading the right way, once he gets close he drops his bike. He pulls up his rifle and starts moving forward, slowly moving his head back and forth between buildings scanning for danger* OKAY I'M HERE! What do you want? *A second voice answers from the shadows *"I'll answer with another question. What do you want?" I want to know who you are and why you've been watching me. "Is that all you want? How boring." Answer me and show yourself. " I am the reason your friends are asleep and I have been watching to understand why you are not yet asleep. I wanted to place the 'lure' to see how you would react. I will answer nothing else at this time. Goodbye" wait! I have more questions. *silence* Damn, what the hell just happened. *biking back as fast as he can the man arrives to the pods and does his checks* no harm has come to the pods so why draw me out? Was that really the voice of who ever was responsible for all the sleepers. If so how. A virus? A poison? What could it be? And who are they? Most importantly what happens next? CHAPTER 6: NEXT For the last five days I've rode back to the pokestop where the voice was but nothing else has happened. I'm more paranoid than ever now. I've built fortifications all around the area, trip wires that trigger alarms, and pit falls. However if they really have been watching they'll know exactly where to step. Other than to check the stop I don't leave camp. No more casual pokemon go. Who ever that was they definitely have pushed me closer to insanity. CHAPTER 7: INSANITY Its been a month since the event. A week since I checked the site. I have been hearing voices from the pods. The sleepers I think they are trying to tell me something. .... maybe if I close my eyes I can focus on the words. Yes I hear them. They know the secrets. They say they'll tell me. *the man sits quietly for a few minutes eyes closed face still. He then falls forward dropping the camera. As he lays there asleep foot steps are hear from behind the camera.* "finally the last one falls"

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The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam.

After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short days of R&R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last said goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his actions in one battle, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had spoken only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam.

Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of extending his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines.

Ann was understandably ill at ease about the prospect. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t be a Marine wife for much longer. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of combat, and later that year Mueller found himself assigned to a desk job at Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There he discovered something about himself: “I didn’t relish the US Marine Corps absent combat.”

So he headed to law school with the goal of serving his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high positions in five presidential administrations. He led the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, overseeing the US investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and the federal prosecution of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He became director of the FBI one week before September 11, 2001, and stayed on to become the bureau’s longest-serving director since J. Edgar Hoover.

And yet, throughout his five-decade career, that year of combat experience with the Marines has loomed large in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps deemed me worthy of leading other Marines,” he told me in a 2009 interview.

June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the black comedy of Trump’s Washington, as an epic tale of diverging American elites: a story of two men—born just two years apart, raised in similar wealthy backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their fathers, both star prep school athletes, both Ivy League educated—who now find themselves playing very different roles in a riveting national drama about political corruption and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of almost diametrically opposed goals—Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit.

Those divergent paths began with Vietnam, the conflict that tore the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960s. Despite having been educated at an elite private military academy, Donald Trump famously drew five draft deferments, including one for bone spurs in his feet. He would later joke, repeatedly, that his success at avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating numerous women in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

Mueller, for his part, not only volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to heal so he could serve. And he has said little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was leading the FBI through the catastrophe of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crushing stress, saying, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other times his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight home from an official international trip. They were watching We Were Soldiers, a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early battles in Vietnam. Mueller glanced at the screen and observed, “Pretty accurate.”

His reticence is not unusual for the generation that served on the front lines of a war that the country never really embraced. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d avoided talking about Vietnam until recently. Joel Burgos, who served as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long conversation, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.”

Yet for almost all of them—Mueller included—Vietnam marked the primary formative experience of their lives. Nearly 50 years later, many Marine veterans who served in Mueller’s unit have email addresses that reference their time in Southeast Asia: gunnysgt, 2-4marine, semperfi, PltCorpsman, Grunt. One Marine’s email handle even references Mutter’s Ridge, the area where Mueller first faced large-scale combat in December 1968.

The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of discipline and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He once told me that one of the things the Marines taught him was to make his bed every day. I’d written a book about his time at the FBI and was by then familiar with his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I laughed at the time and said, “That’s the least surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persisted: It was an important small daily gesture exemplifying follow-through and execution. “Once you think about it—do it,” he told me. “I’ve always made my bed and I’ve always shaved, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve put money in the bank in terms of discipline.”

Mueller’s former Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls recalled how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little patience for subordinates who questioned his decisions. He expected his orders to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been on the battlefield. In meetings with subordinates, Mueller had a habit of quoting Gene Hackman’s gruff Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide: “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it.”

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Discipline has certainly been a defining feature of Mueller’s Russia investigation. In a political era of extreme TMI—marked by rampant White House leaks, Twitter tirades, and an administration that disgorges jilted cabinet-level officials as quickly as it can appoint new ones—the special counsel’s office has been a locked door. Mueller has remained an impassive cypher: the stoic, silent figure at the center of America’s political gyre. Not once has he spoken publicly about the Russia investigation since he took the job in May 2017, and his carefully chosen team of prosecutors and FBI agents has proved leakproof, even under the most intense of media spotlights. Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr, on loan from the Justice Department, has essentially had one thing to tell a media horde ravenous for information about the Russia investigation: “No comment.”

If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his team, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the pace of indictments, arrests, and legal maneuvers coming out of his office.

His investigation is proceeding on multiple fronts. He is digging into Russian information operations carried out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. In February his office indicted 13 people and three entities connected to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that allegedly masterminded the information campaigns. He’s also pursuing those responsible for cyber intrusions, including the hacking of the email system at the Democratic National Committee.

At the same time, Mueller’s investigators are probing the business dealings of Trump and his associates, an effort that has yielded indictments for tax fraud and conspiracy against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea on financial fraud and lying to investigators by Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates. The team is also looking into the numerous contacts between Trump’s people and Kremlin-connected figures. And Mueller is questioning witnesses in an effort to establish whether Trump has obstructed justice by trying to quash the investigation itself.

Almost every week brings a surprise development in the investigation. But until the next indictment or arrest, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks.

Before he became special counsel, Mueller freely and repeatedly told me that his habits of mind and character were most shaped by his time in Vietnam, a period that is also the least explored chapter of his biography.

This first in-depth account of his year at war is based on multiple interviews with Mueller about his time in combat—conducted before he became special counsel—as well as hundreds of pages of once-classified Marine combat records, official accounts of Marine engagements, and the first-ever interviews with eight Marines who served alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They provide the best new window we have into the mind of the man leading the Russia investigation.

Mueller volunteered for the Marines in 1966, right after graduating from Princeton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant leading a combat platoon in Vietnam.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Robert Swan Mueller III, the first of five children and the only son, grew up in a stately stone house in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. His father was a DuPont executive who had captained a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected his children to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the worst sin,” Mueller says. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.”

He attended St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the all-boys classes emphasized Episcopal ideals of virtue and manliness. He was a star on the lacrosse squad and played hockey with future US senator John Kerry on the school team. For college he chose his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and entered the class of 1966.

The expanding war in Vietnam was a frequent topic of conversation among the elite students, who spoke of the war—echoing earlier generations—in terms of duty and service. “Princeton from ’62 to ’66 was a completely different world than ’67 onwards,” said Rawls, a lifelong friend of Mueller’s. “The anti-Vietnam movement was not on us yet. A year or two later, the campus was transformed.”

On the lacrosse field, Mueller met David Hackett, a classmate and athlete who would profoundly affect Mueller’s life. Hackett had already enlisted in the Marines’ version of ROTC, spending his Princeton summers training for the escalating war. “I had one of the finest role models I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the name of David Hackett,” Mueller recalled in a 2013 speech as FBI director. “David was on our 1965 lacrosse team. He was not necessarily the best on the team, but he was a determined and a natural leader.”

After he graduated in 1965, Hackett began training to be a Marine, earning top honors in his officer candidate class. After that he shipped out to Vietnam. In Mueller’s eyes, Hackett was a shining example. Mueller decided that when he graduated the following year, he too would enlist in the Marines.

On April 30, 1967, shortly after Hackett had signed up for his second tour in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed by more than 75 camouflaged North Vietnamese troops who were firing down from bunkers with weapons that included a .50-caliber machine gun. According to a Marine history, “dozens of Marines were killed or wounded within minutes.”

Hackett located the source of the incoming fire and charged 30 yards across open ground to an American machine gun team to tell them where to shoot. Minutes later, as he was moving to help direct a neighboring platoon whose commander had been wounded, he was killed by a sniper. Posthumously awarded the Silver Star, Hackett’s commendation explained that he died “while pressing the assault and encouraging his Marines.”

By the time word of Hackett’s death filtered back to the US, Mueller was already making good on his pledge to follow him into military service. The news only strengthened his resolve to become an infantry officer. “One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps,” Mueller said in that 2013 speech. “But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of Princeton. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of battle as well. And a number of his friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.”

In mid-1966, Mueller underwent his military physical at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; this was before the draft lottery began and before Vietnam became a divisive cultural watershed. He recalls sitting in the waiting room as another candidate, a strapping 6-foot, 280-pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was ruled 4-F—medically unfit for military service. After that it was Mueller’s turn to be rejected: His years of intense athletics, including hockey and lacrosse, had left him with an injured knee. The military declared that it would need to heal before he would be allowed to deploy.

In the meantime, he married Ann Cabell Standish—a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence—over Labor Day weekend 1966, and they moved to New York, where he earned a master’s degree in international relations at New York University.

Once his knee had healed, Mueller went back to the military doctors. In 1967—just before Donald Trump received his own medical deferment for heel spurs—Mueller started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia.

For high school, Mueller attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a senior in 1962, Mueller (#12) played on the hockey team with future US senator John Kerry (#18).

Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/Getty Images

Like Hackett before him, Mueller was a star in his Officer Candidate School training class. “He was a cut above,” recalls Phil Kellogg, who had followed one of his fraternity brothers into the Marines after graduating from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Kellogg, who went through training with Mueller, remembers Mueller racing another candidate on an obstacle course—and losing. It’s the only time he can remember Mueller being bested. “He was a natural athlete and natural student,” Kellogg says. “I don’t think he had a hard day at OCS, to be honest.” There was, it turned out, only one thing he was bad at—and it was a failing that would become familiar to legions of his subordinates in the decades to come: He received a D in delegation.

During the time Mueller spent in training, from November 1967 through July 1968, the context of the Vietnam War changed dramatically. The bloody Tet Offensive—a series of coordinated, widespread, surprise attacks across South Vietnam by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in January 1968—stunned America, and with public opinion souring on the conflict, Lyndon Johnson declared he wouldn’t run for reelection. As Mueller’s training class graduated, Walter Cronkite declared on the CBS Evening News that the war could not be won. “For it seems now more certain than ever,” Cronkite told his millions of viewers on February 27, 1968, “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

The country seemed to be descending into chaos; as the spring unfolded, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Cities erupted in riots. Antiwar protests raged. But the shifting tide of public opinion and civil unrest barely registered with the officer candidates in Mueller’s class. “I don’t remember anyone having qualms about where we were or what we were doing,” Kellogg says.

That spring, as Donald J. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and began working for his father’s real estate company, Mueller finished up Officer Candidate School and received his next assignment: He was to attend the US Army’s Ranger School.

Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death.”

Mueller knew that only the best young officers went on to Ranger training, a strenuous eight-week advanced skills and leadership program for the military’s elite at Fort Benning, Georgia. He would be spending weeks practicing patrol tactics, assassination missions, attack strategies, and ambushes staged in swamps. But the implications of the assignment were also sobering to the newly minted officer: Many Marines who passed the course were designated as “recon Marines” in Vietnam, a job that often came with a life expectancy measured in weeks.

Mueller credits the training he received at Ranger School for his survival in Vietnam. The instructors there had been through jungle combat themselves, and their stories from the front lines taught the candidates how to avoid numerous mistakes. Ranger trainees often had to function on just two hours of rest a night and a single daily meal. “Ranger School more than anything teaches you about how you react with no sleep and nothing to eat,” Mueller told me. “You learn who you want on point, and who you don’t want anywhere near point.”

After Ranger School, he also attended Airborne School, aka jump school, where he learned to be a parachutist. By the fall of 1968, he was on his way to Asia. He boarded a flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to an embarkation point in Okinawa, Japan, where there was an almost palpable current of dread among the deploying troops.

From Okinawa, Mueller headed to Dong Ha Combat Base near the so-called demilitarized zone—the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, established after the collapse of the French colonial regime in 1954. Mueller was determined and well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death, more afraid of being found wanting.” That kind of fear, he says “animates your unconscious.”

For American troops, 1968 was the deadliest year of the war, as they beat back the Tet Offensive and fought the battle of Hue. All told, 16,592 Americans were killed that year—roughly 30 percent of total US fatalities in the war. Over the course of the conflict, more than 58,000 Americans died, 300,000 were wounded, and some 2 million South and North Vietnamese died.

Just 18 months after David Hackett was felled by a sniper, Mueller was being sent to the same region as his officer-training classmate Kellogg, who had arrived in Vietnam three months earlier. Mueller was assigned to H Company—Hotel Company in Marine parlance—part of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, a storied infantry unit that traced its origins back to the 1930s.

The regiment had been fighting almost nonstop in Vietnam since May 1965, earning the nickname the Magnificent Bastards. The grueling combat took its toll. In the fall of 1967, six weeks of battle reduced the battalion’s 952 Marines to just 300 fit for duty.

During the Tet Offensive, the 2nd Battalion had seen bitter and bloody fighting that never let up. In April 1968, it fought in the battle of Dai Do, a days-long engagement that killed nearly 600 North Vietnamese soldiers. Eighty members of the 2nd Battalion died in the fight, and 256 were wounded.

David Harris, who arrived in Vietnam in May, joined the depleted unit just after Dai Do. “Hotel Company and all of 2/4 was decimated,” he says. “They were a skeleton crew. They were haggard, they were beat to death. It was just pitiful.”

By the time Mueller was set to arrive six months later, the unit had rebuilt its ranks as its wounded Marines recovered and filtered back into the field; they had been tested and emerged stronger. By coincidence, Mueller was to inherit leadership of a Hotel Company platoon from his friend Kellogg. “Those kids that I had and Bob had, half of them were veterans of Dai Do,” Kellogg says. “They were field-sharp.”

A corpsman of Company H aids a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Second Lieutenant Mueller, 24 years and 3 months old, joined the battalion in November 1968, one of 10 new officers assigned to the unit that month. He knew he was arriving at the so-called pointy end of the American spear. Some 2.7 million US troops served in Vietnam, but the vast majority of casualties were suffered by those who fought in “maneuver battalions” like Mueller’s. The war along the demilitarized zone was far different than it was elsewhere in Vietnam; the primary adversary was the North Vietnamese army, not the infamous Viet Cong guerrillas. North Vietnamese troops generally operated in larger units, were better trained, and were more likely to engage in sustained combat rather than melting away after staging an ambush. “We fought regular, hard-core army,” Joel Burgos says. “There were so many of them—and they were really good.”

William Sparks, a private first class in Hotel Company, recalls that Mueller got off the helicopter in the middle of a rainstorm, wearing a raincoat—a telltale sign that he was new to the war. “You figured out pretty fast it didn’t help to wear a raincoat in Vietnam,” Sparks says. “The humidity just condensed under the raincoat—you were just as wet as you were without it.”

As Mueller walked up from the landing zone, Kellogg—who had no idea Mueller would be inheriting his platoon—recognized his OCS classmate’s gait. “When he came marching up the hill, I laughed,” Kellogg says. “We started joking.” On Mueller’s first night in the field, his brand-new tent was destroyed by the wind. “That thing vanished into thin air,” Sparks says. He didn’t even get to spend one night.”

Over the coming days, Kellogg passed along some of his wisdom from the field and explained the procedures for calling in artillery and air strikes. “Don’t be John Wayne,” he said. “It’s not a movie. Marines tell you something’s up, listen to them.”

“The lieutenants who didn’t trust their Marines went to early deaths,” Kellogg says.

And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out.

Today, military units usually train together in the US, deploy together for a set amount of time, and return home together. But in Vietnam, rotations began—and ended—piecemeal, driven by the vagaries of injuries, illness, and individual combat tours. That meant Mueller inherited a unit that mixed combat-experienced veterans and relative newbies.

A platoon consisted of roughly 40 Marines, typically led by a lieutenant and divided into three squads, each led by a sergeant, which were then divided into three four-man “fire teams” led by corporals. While the lieutenants were technically in charge, the sergeants ran the show—and could make or break a new officer. “You land, and you’re at the mercy of your staff sergeant and your radioman,” Mueller says.

Marines in the field knew to be dubious of new young second lieutenants like Mueller. They were derided as Gold Brickers, after the single gold bar that denoted their rank. “They might have had a college education, but they sure as hell didn’t have common sense,” says Colin Campbell, who was on Hotel Company’s mortar squad.

Mueller knew his men feared he might be incompetent or worse. “The platoon was petrified,” he recalls. “They wondered whether the new green lieutenant was going to jeopardize their lives to advance his own career.” Mueller himself was equally terrified of assuming field command.

As he settled in, talk spread about the odd new platoon leader who had gone to both Princeton and Army Ranger School. “Word was out real fast—Ivy League guy from an affluent family. That set off alarms. The affluent guys didn’t go to Vietnam then—and they certainly didn’t end up in a rifle platoon,” says VJ Maranto, a corporal in H Company. “There was so much talk about ‘Why’s a guy like that out here with us?’ We weren’t Ivy Leaguers.”

Indeed, none of his fellow Hotel Company Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. Most were from rural America, and few had any formal education past high school. Maranto spent his youth on a small farm in Louisiana. Carl Rasmussen, a lance corporal, grew up on a farm in Oregon. Burgos was from the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised on a cotton plantation. After graduating from high school, David Harris had gone to work in a General Motors factory in his home state of Ohio, then joined the Marines when he was set to be drafted in the summer of 1967.

Many of the Marines under Mueller’s command had been wounded at least once; 19-year-old corporal John C. Liverman had arrived in Vietnam just four months after a neighbor of his from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been killed at Khe Sanh—and had seen heavy combat much of the year. He’d been hit by shrapnel in March 1968 and then again in April, but after recovering in Okinawa, he had agitated to return to combat.

Hotel Company quickly came to understand that its new platoon leader was no Gold Bricker. “He wanted to know as much as he could as fast as he could about the terrain, what we did, the ambushes, everything,” Maranto says. “He was all about the mission, the mission, the mission.”

Second Battalion’s mission, as it turned out, was straightforward: Search and destroy. “We stayed out in the bush, out in the mountains, just below DMZ, 24 hours a day,” David Harris says. “We were like bait. It was the same encounter: They’d hit us, we’d hit them, they’d disappear.”

Frequent deaths and injuries meant that turnover in the field was constant; when Maranto arrived at Hotel Company, he was issued a flak jacket that had dried blood on it. “We were always low on men,” Colin Campbell says.

Mueller’s unit was constantly on patrol; the battalion’s records described it as “nomadic.” Its job was to keep the enemy off-kilter and disrupt their supply lines. “You’d march all day, then you’d dig a foxhole and spend all night alternating going on watch,” says Bill White, a Hotel Company veteran. “We were always tired, always hungry, always thirsty. There were no showers.”

In those first weeks, Mueller’s confidence as a leader grew as he won his men’s trust and respect. “You’d sense his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his demeanor,” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.”

The members of the platoon soon got acquainted with the qualities that would be familiar to everyone who dealt with Mueller later as a prosecutor and FBI director. He demanded a great deal and had little patience for malingering, but he never asked for more than he was willing to give himself. “He was a no-bullshit kind of guy,” White recalls.

Sgt. Michael Padilla (left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario (right), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla

Mueller’s unit began December 1968 in relative quiet, providing security for the main military base in the area, a glorified campground known as Vandegrift Combat Base, about 10 miles south of the DMZ. It was one of the only organized outposts nearby for Marines, a place for resupply, a shower, and hot food. Lance Corporal Robert W. Cromwell, who had celebrated his 20th birthday shortly before beginning his tour of duty, entertained his comrades with stories from his own period of R&R: He’d met his wife and parents in Hawaii to be introduced to his newborn daughter. “He was so happy to have a child and wanted to get home for good,” Harris says.

On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new operation: to retake control of a hill in an infamous area known as Mutter’s Ridge.

The strategically important piece of ground, which ran along four hills on the southern edge of the DMZ, had been the scene of fighting for more than two years and had been overrun by the North Vietnamese months before. Artillery, air strikes, and tank attacks had long since denuded the ridge of vegetation, but the surrounding hillsides and valleys were a jungle of trees and vines. When Hotel Company touched down and fanned out from its landing zones to establish a perimeter, Mueller was arriving to what would be his first full-scale battle.

As the American units advanced, the North Vietnamese retreated. “They were all pulling back to this big bunker complex, as it turned out,” Sparks says. The Americans could see the signs of past battles all around them. “You’d see shrapnel holes in the trees, bullet holes,” Sparks says.

After three days of patrols, isolated firefights with an elusive enemy, and multiple nights of American bombardment, another unit in 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, received the order to take some high ground on Mutter’s Ridge. Even nearly 50 years later, the date of the operation remains burned into the memories of those who fought in it: December 11, 1968.

None of Mueller’s fellow Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had.

That morning, after a night of air strikes and artillery volleys meant to weaken the enemy, the men of Fox Company moved out at first light. The attack went smoothly at first; they seized the western portions of the ridge without resistance, dodging just a handful of mortar rounds. Yet as they continued east, heavy small-arms fire started. “As they fought their way forward, they came into intensive and deadly fire from bunkers and at least three machine guns,” the regiment later reported. Because the vegetation was so dense, Fox Company didn’t realize that it had stumbled into the midst of a bunker complex. “Having fought their way in, the company found it extremely difficult to maneuver its way out, due both to the fire of the enemy and the problem of carrying their wounded.”

Hotel Company was on a neighboring hill, still eating breakfast, when Fox Company was attacked. Sparks remembers that he was drinking a “Mo-Co,” C-rations coffee with cocoa powder and sugar, heated by burning a golf-ball-sized piece of C-4 plastic explosive. (“We were ahead of Starbucks on this latte crap,” he jokes.) They could hear the gunfire across the valley.

“Lieutenant Mueller called, ‘Saddle up, saddle up,’” Sparks says. “He called for first squad—I was the grenade launcher and had two bags of ammo strapped across my chest. I could barely stand up.” Before they could even reach the enemy, they had to fight their way through the thick brush of the valley. “We had to go down the hill and come up Foxtrot Ridge. It took hours.”

“It was the only place in the DMZ I remember seeing vegetation like that,” Harris says. “It was thick and entwining.”

When the platoon finally crested the top of the ridge, they confronted the horror of the battlefield. “There were wounded people everywhere,” Sparks recalls. Mueller ordered everyone to drop their packs and prepare for a fight. “We assaulted right out across the top of the ridge,” he says.

It wasn’t long before the unit came under heavy fire from small arms, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. “There were three North Vietnamese soldiers right in front of us that jumped right up and sprayed us with AK-47s,” Sparks says. They returned fire and advanced. At one point, a Navy corpsman with them threw a grenade, only to have it bounce off a tree and explode, wounding one of Hotel Company’s corporals. “It just got worse from there,” Sparks says.

In the next few minutes, numerous men went down in Mueller’s unit. Maranto remembers being impressed that his relatively green lieutenant was able to stay calm while under attack. “He’d been in-country less than a month—most of us had been in-country six, eight months,” Maranto says. “He had remarkable composure, directing fire. It was sheer terror. They had RPGs, machine gun, mortars.”

Mueller realized quickly how much trouble the platoon was in. “That day was the second heaviest fire I received in Vietnam,” Harris says. “Lieutenant Mueller was directing traffic, positioning people and calling in air strikes. He was standing upright, moving. He probably saved our hide.”

Cromwell, the lance corporal who had just become a father, was shot in the thigh by a .50-caliber bullet. When Harris saw his wounded friend being hustled out of harm’s way, he was oddly relieved at first. “I saw him and he was alive,” Harris says. “He was on the stretcher.” Cromwell would finally be able to spend some time with his wife and new baby, Harris figured. “You lucky sucker,” he thought. “You’re going home.”

But Harris had misjudged the severity of his friend’s injury. The bullet had nicked one of Cromwell’s arteries, and he bled to death before he reached the field hospital. The death devastated Harris, who had traded weapons with Cromwell the night before—Harris had taken Cromwell’s M-14 rifle and Cromwell took Harris’ M-79 grenade launcher. “The next day when we hit the crap, they called for him, and he had to go forward,” Harris says. Harris couldn’t shake the feeling that he should have been the one on the stretcher. “I’ve only told two people this story.”

The battle atop and around Mutter’s Ridge raged for hours, with the North Vietnamese fire coming from the surrounding jungle. “We got hit with an ambush, plain and simple,” Harris says. “The brush was so thick, you had trouble hacking it with a machete. If you got 15 meters away, you couldn’t see where you came from.”

As the fighting continued, the Marines atop the ridge began to run low on supplies. “Johnny Liverman threw me a bag of ammo. He’d been ferrying ammo from one side of the ridge to the other,” Sparks recalls. Liverman was already wounded, but he was still fighting; then, during one of his runs, he came under more fire. “He got hit right through the head, right when I was looking at him. I got that ammo, I crawled up there and got his M-16 and told him I’d be back.”

Sparks and another Marine sheltered behind a dead tree stump, trying to find any protection amid the firestorm. “Neither of us had any ammo left,” Sparks recalls. He crawled back to Liverman to try to evacuate his friend. “I got him up on my shoulder, and I got shot, and I went down,” he says. As he was lying on the ground, he heard a shout from atop the ridge, “Who’s that down there—are they dead?”

It was Lieutenant Mueller.

Sparks hollered back, “Sparks and Liverman.”

“Hold on,” Mueller said, “We’re coming down to get you.”

A few minutes later, Mueller appeared with another Marine, known as Slick. Mueller and Slick slithered Sparks into a bomb crater with Liverman and put a battle dress on Sparks’ wound. They waited until a helicopter gunship passed overhead, its guns clattering, to distract the North Vietnamese, and hustled back toward the top of the hill and comparative safety. An OV-10 attack plane overhead dropped smoke grenades to help shield the Marines atop the ridge. Mueller, Sparks says, then went back to retrieve the mortally wounded Liverman.

The deaths mounted. Corporal Agustin Rosario—a 22-year-old father and husband from New York City—was shot in the ankle, and then, while he tried to run back to safety, was shot again, this time fatally. Rosario, too, died waiting for a medevac helicopter.

Finally, as the hours passed, the Marines forced the North Vietnamese to withdraw. By 4:30 pm, the battlefield had quieted. As his commendation for the Bronze Star later read, “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk were instrumental in the defeat of the enemy force and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.”

As night fell, Hotel and Fox held the ground, and a third company, Golf, was brought forward as additional reinforcement. It was a brutal day for both sides; 13 Americans died and 31 were wounded. “We put a pretty good hurt on them, but not without great cost,” Sparks says. “My closest friends were all killed there on Foxtrot Ridge.”

As the Americans explored the field around the ridge, they counted seven enemy dead left behind, in addition to seven others killed in the course of the battle. Intelligence reports later revealed that the battle had killed the commander of the 1st Battalion, 27th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, “and had virtually decimated his staff.”

For Mueller, the battle had proved both to him and his men that he could lead. “The minute the shit hit the fan, he was there,” Maranto says. “He performed remarkably. After that night, there were a lot of guys who would’ve walked through walls for him.”

That first major exposure to combat—and the loss of Marines under his command—affected Mueller deeply. “You’re standing there thinking, ‘Did I do everything I could?’” he says. Afterward, back at camp, while Mueller was still in shock, a major came up and slapped the young lieutenant on the shoulder, saying, “Good job, Mueller.”

“That vote of confidence helped me get through,” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t go through life guilty for screwing up.”

The heavy toll of the casualties at Mutter’s Ridge shook up the whole unit. Cromwell’s death hit especially hard; his humor and good nature had knitted the unit together. “He was happy-go-lucky. He looked after the new guys when they came in,” Bill White recalls. For Harris, who had often shared a foxhole with Cromwell, the death of his best friend was devastating.

White also took Cromwell’s death hard; overcome with grief, he stopped shaving. Mueller confronted him, telling him to refocus on the mission ahead—but ultimately provided more comfort than discipline. “He could’ve given me punishment hours,” White says, “but he never did.”

Robert Mueller receives an award from his regimental commander Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the office of Robert Mueller

Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his career was as challenging as leading men in combat and watching them be cut down. “You see a lot, and every day after is a blessing,” he told me in 2008. The memory of Mutter’s Ridge put everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into perspective. “A lot is going to come your way, but it’s not going to be the same intensity.”

When Mueller finally did leave the FBI in 2013, he “retired” into a busy life as a top partner at the law firm WilmerHale. He taught some classes in cybersecurity at Stanford, he investigated the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, and he served as the so-called settlement master for the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal. While in the midst of that assignment—which required the kind of delicate give-and-take ill-suited to a hard-driving, no-nonsense Marine—the 72-year-old Mueller received a final call to public service. It was May 2017, just days into the swirling storm set off by the firing of FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted to know if Mueller would serve as the special counsel in the Russia investigation. The job—overseeing one of the most difficult and sensitive investigations ever undertaken by the Justice Department—may only rank as the third-hardest of Mueller’s career, after the post-9/11 FBI and after leading those Marines in Vietnam.

Having accepted the assignment as special counsel, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America.

In January 1969, after 10 days of rain showers and cold weather, the unit got a three-day R&R break at Cua Viet, a nearby support base. They listened to Super Bowl III on the radio as Joe Namath and the Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts. “One touch of reality was listening to that,” Mueller says.

In the field, they got little news about what was transpiring at home. In fact, later that summer, while Mueller was still deployed, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon—an event that people around the world watched live on TV. Mueller wouldn’t find out until days afterward. “There was this whole segment of history you missed,” he says.

R&R breaks were also rare opportunities to drink alcohol, though there was never much of it. Campbell says he drank just 15 beers during his 18 months in-country. “I can remember drinking warm beer—Ballantines,” he says. In camp, the men traded magazines like Playboy and mail-order automotive catalogs, imagining the cars they would soup up when they returned to the States. They passed the time playing rummy or pinochle.

For the most part, Mueller skipped such activities, though he was into the era’s music (Creedence Clearwater Revival was—and is—a particular favorite). “I remember several times walking into a bunker and finding him in a corner with a book,” Maranto says. “He read a lot, every opportunity.”

Throughout the rest of the month, they patrolled, finding little contact with the enemy, although plenty of signs of their presence: Hotel Company often radioed in reports of finding fallen bodies and hidden supply caches, and they frequently took incoming mortar rounds from unseen enemies.

Command under such conditions wasn’t easy; drug use was a problem, and racial tensions ran high. “Many of the GIs were draftees; they didn’t want to be there,” Maranto says. “When new people rotated in, they brought what was happening in the United States with them.”

Mueller recalls at times struggling to get Marines to follow orders—they already felt that the punishment of serving in the infantry in Vietnam was as bad as it could get. “Screw that,” they’d reply sharply when ordered to do something they didn’t want to do. “What are you going to do? Send me to Vietnam?”

Yet the Marines were bonded through the constant danger of combat. Everyone had close calls. Everyone knew that luck in the combat zone was finite, fate pernicious. “If the good Lord turned over a card up there, that was it,” Mueller says.

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn. Colin Campbell recalls a night in his foxhole when he turned around to find a North Vietnamese soldier, armed with an AK-47, right behind him. “He’d gotten inside our perimeter. He had our back,” Campbell says. “Why didn’t he kill me and the other guy in the foxhole?” Campbell shouted, and the infiltrator bolted. “Another Marine down the line shot him dead.”

Mueller was a constant presence in the field, regularly reviewing the code signs and passwords that identified friendly units to one another. “He was quiet and reserved. The planning was meticulous and detailed. He knew at night where every position was,” Maranto recalls. “It wouldn’t be unusual for him to come out and make sure the fire teams were correctly placed—and that you were awake.”

The men I talked to who served alongside Mueller, men now in their seventies, mostly had strong memories of the type of leader Mueller had been. But many didn’t know, until I told them, that the man who led their platoon was now the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election. “I had no idea,” Burgos told me. “When you’ve been in combat that long, you don’t remember names. Faces you remember,” he says.

Maranto says he only put two and two together recently, although he’d wondered for years if that guy who was the FBI director had served with him in Vietnam. “The name would ring a bell—you know that’s a familiar name—but you’re so busy with everyday life,” Maranto says.

At the makeshift landing zone getting briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto

April 1969 marked a grim American milestone: The Vietnam War’s combat death toll surpassed the 33,629 Americans killed while fighting in Korea. It also brought a new threat to Hotel Company’s area: a set of powerful .50-caliber machine gun nests that the North Vietnamese had set up to harass helicopters and low-flying planes. Hotel Company—and the battalion’s other units—devoted much of the middle of the month to chasing down the deadly weapons. Until they were found, resupply helicopters were limited, and flights were abandoned when they came under direct fire. One Marine was even killed in the landing zone. Finally, on April 15 and 16, Hotel Company overran the enemy guns and forced a retreat, uncovering 10 bunkers and three gun positions.

The next day, at around 10 am, Mueller’s platoon was attacked while on patrol. Facing small-arms fire and grenades, they called for air support. An hour later four attack runs hit the North Vietnamese position.

Five days later, on April 22, one of the 3rd Platoon’s patrols came under similar attack—and the situation quickly became desperate. Sparks, who had returned to Hotel Company that winter after recovering from his wound at Mutter’s Ridge, was in the ambushed patrol. “We lost the machine gun, jammed up with shrapnel, and the radio,” he recalls. “We had to pull back.”

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn.

With radio contact lost, Mueller’s platoon was called forward as reinforcement. American artillery and mortars pounded the North Vietnamese as the platoon advanced. At one point, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. The incoming fire was so intense—the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard—that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t immediately notice. Amid the combat, he looked down and realized an AK-47 round had passed clean through his thigh.

Mueller kept fighting.

“Although seriously wounded during the firefight, he resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force,” reads the Navy Commendation that Mueller received for his action that day. “While approaching the designated area, the platoon came under a heavy volume of enemy fire from its right flank. Skillfully requesting and directing supporting Marine artillery fire on the enemy positions, First Lieutenant Mueller ensured that fire superiority was gained over the hostile unit.”

Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the battle. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam.

Mueller’s days in combat ended with him being lifted out by helicopter in a sling. As the aircraft peeled away, Mueller recalls thinking he might at least get a good meal out of the injury on a hospital ship, but he was delivered instead to a field hospital near Dong Ha, where he spent three weeks recovering.

Maranto, who was on R&R when Mueller was wounded, remembers returning to camp and hearing word that their commander had been shot. “It could happen to any one of us,” Maranto says. “When it happened to him, there was a lot of sadness. They enjoyed his company.”

Mueller recovered and returned to active duty in May. Since most Marine officers spent only six months on a combat rotation—and Mueller had been in the combat zone since November—he was sent to serve at command headquarters, where he became an aide-de-camp to Major General William K. Jones, the head of the 3rd Marine Division.

By the end of 1969, Mueller was back in the US, his combat tour complete, working at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. Soon thereafter, he sent off an application to the University of Virginia’s law school. “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam,” Mueller said years later in a speech. “There were many—many—who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”

Over the years, a few of his former fellow Marines from Hotel Company recognized Mueller and have watched his career unfold on the national stage over the past two decades. Sparks recalls eating lunch on a July day in 2001 with the news on: “The TV was on behind me. ‘We’re going to introduce the new FBI director, Robert … Swan … Mueller.’ I slowly turned, and I looked, and I thought, ‘Golly, that’s Lieutenant Mueller.’” Sparks, who speaks with a thick Texas accent, says his first thought was the running joke he’d had with his former commander: “I’d always call him ‘Lieutenant Mew-ler,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s Mul-ler.’”

More recently, his former Marine comrade Maranto says that after spending six months in combat with Mueller, he has watched the coverage of the special counsel investigation unfold and laughed at the news reports. He says he knows Mueller isn’t sweating the pressure. “I watch people on the news talking about the distractions getting to him,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor at WIRED and author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror. He can be reached at [email protected].

This article appears in the June issue. Subscribe now.

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samanthasroberts · 6 years

Text

The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of extending his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines.

June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

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If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his team, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the pace of indictments, arrests, and legal maneuvers coming out of his office.

Almost every week brings a surprise development in the investigation. But until the next indictment or arrest, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks.

Mueller volunteered for the Marines in 1966, right after graduating from Princeton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant leading a combat platoon in Vietnam.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

For high school, Mueller attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a senior in 1962, Mueller (#12) played on the hockey team with future US senator John Kerry (#18).

Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/Getty Images

Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death.”

A corpsman of Company H aids a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

“The lieutenants who didn’t trust their Marines went to early deaths,” Kellogg says.

And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out.

In those first weeks, Mueller's confidence as a leader grew as he won his men’s trust and respect. “You’d sense his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his demeanor,” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.”

Sgt. Michael Padilla (left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario (right), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla

On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new operation: to retake control of a hill in an infamous area known as Mutter’s Ridge.

None of Mueller's fellow Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had.

“It was the only place in the DMZ I remember seeing vegetation like that,” Harris says. “It was thick and entwining.”

It was Lieutenant Mueller.

Sparks hollered back, “Sparks and Liverman.”

“Hold on,” Mueller said, “We’re coming down to get you.”

“That vote of confidence helped me get through,” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t go through life guilty for screwing up.”

Robert Mueller receives an award from his regimental commander Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the office of Robert Mueller

Having accepted the assignment as special counsel, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America.

At the makeshift landing zone getting briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn.

Mueller kept fighting.

Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the battle. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam.

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor at WIRED and author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror. He can be reached at [email protected].

This article appears in the June issue. Subscribe now.

Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app.

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If Trump is laundering Russian money here's how it would work

Spot the contraband in these airport baggage x-rays

How a DNA transfer nearly convicted an innocent man of <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/?mbid=BottomR

Source: http://allofbeer.com/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/

0 notes

allofbeercom · 6 years

Text

The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of extending his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines.

June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

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The White House Warns on Russian Router Hacking, But Muddles the Message

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Garrett M. Graff

Robert Mueller Likely Knows How This All Ends

If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his team, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the pace of indictments, arrests, and legal maneuvers coming out of his office.

Almost every week brings a surprise development in the investigation. But until the next indictment or arrest, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks.

Mueller volunteered for the Marines in 1966, right after graduating from Princeton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant leading a combat platoon in Vietnam.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

For high school, Mueller attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a senior in 1962, Mueller (#12) played on the hockey team with future US senator John Kerry (#18).

Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/Getty Images

Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death.”

A corpsman of Company H aids a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

“The lieutenants who didn’t trust their Marines went to early deaths,” Kellogg says.

And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out.

Sgt. Michael Padilla (left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario (right), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla

On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new operation: to retake control of a hill in an infamous area known as Mutter’s Ridge.

None of Mueller's fellow Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had.

“It was the only place in the DMZ I remember seeing vegetation like that,” Harris says. “It was thick and entwining.”

It was Lieutenant Mueller.

Sparks hollered back, “Sparks and Liverman.”

“Hold on,” Mueller said, “We’re coming down to get you.”

“That vote of confidence helped me get through,” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t go through life guilty for screwing up.”

Robert Mueller receives an award from his regimental commander Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the office of Robert Mueller

Having accepted the assignment as special counsel, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America.

At the makeshift landing zone getting briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto

Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn.

Mueller kept fighting.

Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the battle. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam.

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor at WIRED and author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror. He can be reached at [email protected].

This article appears in the June issue. Subscribe now.

Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app.

More Great WIRED Stories

If Trump is laundering Russian money here's how it would work

Spot the contraband in these airport baggage x-rays

How a DNA transfer nearly convicted an innocent man of <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/dna-transfer-framed-murder/?mbid=BottomR

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/

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the-connection · 6 years

Link

One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant worded Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was controlling in from the Eastern coast with the couple’s babe daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never encountered. Mueller had made an aircraft from Vietnam.

After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short-lived eras of R& R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last did goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for courage for his actions in one combat, and he’d been airlifted out of the forest during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had told only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam.

Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of giving his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines.

Ann was understandably ill at ease about the prospect. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t be a Marine wife for much more significant. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of fighting, and later that year Mueller detected himself to be given to a desk undertaking at Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There he detected something about himself: “I didn’t bask the US Marine Corps absent combat.”

So he headed to regulation institution with the goals and targets of sufficing his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high posts in five presidential administrations. He guided the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, overseeing the US investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and the federal prosecution of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He became administrator of the FBI one week before September 11, 2001, and remained on to become the bureau’s longest-serving chairman since J. Edgar Hoover.

And yet, throughout his five-decade busines, that year of engagement ordeal with the Marines has tower enormous in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps regarded me are worth extending other Navals, ” he told me in a 2009 interview.

June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.

Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/ AP

Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the black slapstick of Trump’s Washington, as an epic fib of differing American privilegeds: a narrative of two men--born merely two years apart, raised in similar prosperous backgrounds in Northeastern municipalities, both deeply influenced by their fathers, both superstar prep school athletes, both Ivy League educated--who now find themselves representing very different capacities in a riveting national theatre about political corruption and Russia’s interference in the 2016 referendum. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of almost diametrically opposed goals--Mueller a life of patrician community service, Trump a life of private profit.

Those diverging routes began with Vietnam, existing conflicts that sobbed the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960 s. Despite having been informed at an nobility private armed establishment, Donald Trump famously selected five draft deferments, including information for bone stimulant in his hoofs. He would later joke, repeatedly, that his success at avoiding herpes simplex while dating numerous women throughout the 1980 s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

Mueller, for his part , not only volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to regenerate so he had been able to suffice. And he has said little about his time in Vietnam over its first year. When he was heading the FBI through the disasters of 9/11 and its consequence, he would brush off the crush stress, remarking, “I’m coming a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other occasions his the staff members of the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight residence from public officials international trip. They were watching We Were Soldiers , a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early duels in Vietnam. Mueller glanced at the screen and mentioned, “Pretty accurate.”

His reticence is not rare for the generation that served on the front lines of a combat that the country never truly cuddled. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d forestalled speak about Vietnam until very recently. Joel Burgos, who acted as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long discussion, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.”

Yet for nearly all of them--Mueller included--Vietnam differentiated the primary formative knowledge of "peoples lives". Roughly 50 year later, many Marine veterans who served in Mueller’s unit have mailing address that invoke their time in Southeast Asia: gunnysgt, 2-4marine, semperfi, PltCorpsman, Grunt. One Marine’s email handle even invokes Mutter’s Ridge, the region where Mueller first faced large-scale action in December 1968.

The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of penalize and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He formerly told me that one of the things the Marines learnt him was to induce his berth every day. I’d written a work about his time at the FBI and was by then familiar with his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I laughed at the time and articulated, “That’s the least surprising happen I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persevered: It was an important small-scale daily gesture epitomizing follow-through and execution. “Once you think about it--do it, ” he told me. “I’ve ever acquired my bunk and I’ve ever shaved, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve gave fund in the bank in terms of discipline.”

Mueller’s former Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls remembered how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little persistence for subsidiaries who interviewed his decisions. He expected his degrees to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been participating in the battleground. In joins with subordinates, Mueller had a dres of paraphrasing Gene Hackman’s crabbed Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide : “We’re now to continue republic , not to practice it.”

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Garrett M. Graff

Robert Mueller Likely Knows How This All Ends

Discipline has certainly been a defining peculiarity of Mueller’s Russia investigation. In a political era of extreme TMI--marked by rampant White House divulges, Twitter harangues, and an administration that disgorges jilted cabinet-level officials as rapidly as it can constitute brand-new ones--the special counsel’s power has been a locked door. Mueller has remained an listless cypher: the stoic, silent illustration at the center of America’s government gyre. Not once has he expressed publicly about the Russia investigation since he took the job in May 2017, and his carefully selected squad of prosecutors and FBI operators has proved leakproof, even under the most intense of media spotlights. Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr, on credit from the Justice Department, has essentially had one thing to tell a media horde ravenous for information about the Russia investigation: “No comment.”

If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his squad, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the tempo of indictments, arrests, and law movements coming out of his office.

His investigation is proceeding on multiple figureheads. He is delving into Russian report procedures carried out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media pulpits. In February his office indicted 13 people and three entities connected to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that allegedly masterminded awareness-raising campaigns. He’s too pursuing officials responsible for cyber intrusions, including the hacking of the email system at the Democratic National Committee.

At the same time, Mueller’s inspectors are probing the business dealings of Trump and his associates, great efforts that has yielded summons for tax fraud and scheme against Trump’s onetime safarus chair, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea on fiscal fraud and lying to sleuths by Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates. The team is likewise looking into the innumerable bilateral relations between Trump’s people and Kremlin-connected chassis. And Mueller is questioning evidences in an effort to establish whether Trump has clogged right by trying to annul the investigation itself.

Almost every week fetches a bombshell development in the investigation. But until the next prosecution or detain, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks.

Before he grew special advise, Mueller freely and repeatedly told me that his wonts of judgment and person were most shaped by his time in Vietnam, a stage that is also the least inquired period of his biography.

This first in-depth report of his time at war is based on multiple interrogations with Mueller about his time in combat--conducted before he became special counsel--as well as hundreds of sheets of once-classified Marine combat accounts, official accountings of Marine engagements, and the first-ever interviews with eight Navals who provided alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They equip the best brand-new opening we have into the mind of the man preceding the Russia investigation.

Mueller volunteered for the Marine in 1966, right after graduating from Princeton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant producing a combat team in Vietnam.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Robert Swan Mueller III, the first of five children and the only lad, grew up in a stately stone house in a prosperous Philadelphia suburb. "His fathers" was a DuPont executive who had captained a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected "their childrens" to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the most difficult guilt, ” Mueller articulates. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.”

He attended St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the all-boys categorizes accentuated Episcopal paragons of virtue and manliness. He was a starring on the lacrosse force and played hockey with future US senator John Kerry on the school crew. For college he choice his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and entered the class of 1966.

The expanding battle in Vietnam was a repeated topic of discussion among the elite students, who spoke of the war--echoing earlier generations--in terms of duty and service. “Princeton from ’6 2 to ’6 6 was a completely different macrocosm than ’6 7 onwards, ” read Rawls, a lifelong acquaintance of Mueller’s. “The anti-Vietnam push was not on us yet. A time or two eventually, the campus was transformed.”

On the lacrosse discipline, Mueller encountered David Hackett, a classmate and contestant who would profoundly affect Mueller’s life. Hackett had already enlisted in the Marines’ version of ROTC, devoting his Princeton summers training for the escalating struggle. “I had one of the most significant role model I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the honour of David Hackett, ” Mueller recalled in a 2013 pronunciation as FBI director. “David was on our 1965 lacrosse team. He was not undoubtedly the best on the team, but he was a determined and a natural leader.”

After he graduated in 1965, Hackett began training to be a Marine, making top honors in his officer applicant class. After that he shipped out to Vietnam. In Mueller’s gazes, Hackett was a shining example. Mueller decided that where reference is graduated the subsequent year, he too would enlist in the Marines.

On April 30, 1967, soon after Hackett had signed up for his second tour in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed by more than 75 camouflaged North Vietnamese corps who were firing down from bunkers with weapons that included a. 50 -caliber machine gun. According to a Marine history, “dozens of Marines were killed or wounded within minutes.”

Hackett set the causes of the incoming barrage and billed 30 gardens across open floor to an American machine gun team to tell them where to kill. Times later, as he was moving to aid direct a neighboring team whose officer had been wounded, he was killed by a sniper. Posthumously gifted the Silver Star, Hackett’s commendation explained that he died “while pressing the onslaught and encouraging his Marines.”

By the time word of Hackett’s death filtered back to the US, Mueller was already making good on his pledge to follow him into military service. The information merely supported his resolve to become an infantry polouse. “One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would reason strongly against following in his strides, ” Mueller said in that 2013 lecture. “But many of us assured in him the person or persons we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a commander and a role model on their areas of Princeton. He was a governor and a role model on the fields of battle as well. And a number of his pals and teammates affiliated the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.”

In mid-1 966, Mueller experienced his military physical at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; this was before the draft gamble inaugurated and before Vietnam became a controversial ethnic watershed. He recalls sitting in the waiting room as another campaigner, a strapping 6-foot, 280 -pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was governed 4-F--medically unfit for military service. After that it was Mueller’s turn to be rejected: His years of intense athletics, including hockey and lacrosse, had left him with an disabled knee. The armed announced that it would need to salve before he would be allowed to deploy.

In the meantime, he wedded Ann Cabell Standish--a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence--over Labor Day weekend 1966, and they moved to New York, where he deserved a master’s severity in international relations at New York University.

Once his knee had healed, Mueller went back to the military doctors. In 1967 -- just before Donald Trump received his own medical deferment for heel spurs--Mueller started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia.

For high school, Mueller listened St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a major in 1962, Mueller (# 12) toy on the hockey crew with future US senator John Kerry (# 18 ).

Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/ Getty Images

Like Hackett before him, Mueller was a star in his Officer Candidate School learn class. “He was a cut above, ” remembers Phil Kellogg, who had followed one of his fraternity brethren into the Navals after graduating from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Kellogg, who went through teach with Mueller, retains Mueller hastening another applicant on an obstacle course--and misplace. It’s the only occasion he was able to remember Mueller being bested. “He was a natural competitor and natural student, ” Kellogg tells. “I don’t think he had a hard date at OCS, to be honest.” There was, it turned out, merely one thing he was bad at--and it was a miscarrying that would become familiar to brigades of his subordinates in the decades to start: He received a D in delegation.

During the time Mueller spent in training, from November 1967 through July 1968, different contexts of the Vietnam War changed significantly. The vicious Tet Offensive--a series of coordinated, widespread, surprise attacks across South Vietnam by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in January 1968 -- dazed America, and with public opinion souring on existing conflicts, Lyndon Johnson affirmed he wouldn’t run for reelection. As Mueller’s improving class graduated, Walter Cronkite declared on the CBS Evening News that the campaign could not be earned. “For it seems now more certain than ever, ” Cronkite told his billions of observers on February 27, 1968, “that the cruel experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

The country seemed to be descending into chaos; as the spring unfolded, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Cities spewed in riots. Antiwar complains raged. But the shifting tide of public opinion and civil unrest barely registered with the polouse nominees in Mueller’s class. “I don’t recollect anyone having queasiness about where we were or what we were doing, ” Kellogg says.

That spring, as Donald J. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and began working for his father’s real estate company, Mueller finished up Officer Candidate School and received his next undertaking: He was to attend the US Army’s Ranger School.

Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown, ” he supposes. “More afraid in some ways of collapse than death.”

Mueller knew that only the best young men went on to Ranger training, a strenuous eight-week boosted the competences and leadership curriculum for the military’s society at Fort Benning, Georgia. He would be spend weeks practicing garrison tactics, slaughter assignments, onrush programmes, and waylays staged in submerges. But the implications of the assignment is likewise sobering to the freshly minted man: Countless Navals who delivered such courses were designated as “recon Marines” in Vietnam, a racket that often arrived with a life expectancy measured in weeks.

Mueller credits the training he received at Ranger School for his existence in Vietnam. The instructors there had been through jungle combat themselves, and their narrations from the front lines schooled the candidates how to avoid several mistakes. Ranger trainees often had to function on time two hours of residue a night and a single daily snack. “Ranger School more than anything learns you about how you react with no sleep and good-for-nothing to eat, ” Mueller told me. “You discover who you want on time, and who you don’t miss anywhere near point.”

After Ranger School, he likewise listened Airborne School, aka leap institution, where he learned to be a parachutist. By the come of 1968, he was on his course to Asia. He boarded a flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to an embarkation site in Okinawa, Japan, where there was an virtually tangible current of dread among the deploying troops.

From Okinawa, Mueller headed to Dong Ha Combat Base near the so-called demilitarized zone--the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, proven after the collapse of the French colonial regime in 1954. Mueller was determined and well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown, ” he adds. “More afraid in some ways of default than fatality, more afraid of being found wanting.” That kind of dread, he alleges “animates your unconscious.”

For American armies, 1 968 was the deadliest year of the crusade, as they beat back the Tet Offensive and contended the duel of Hue. All told, 16,592 Americans were killed that year--roughly 30 percent of total US fatalities in the combat. Over the course of the conflict, more than 58,000 Americans died, 300,000 were wounded, and some 2 million South and North Vietnamese died.

Just 18 months after David Hackett was felled by a sniper, Mueller was being sent to the same region as his officer-training classmate Kellogg, who had arrived in Vietnam three months earlier. Mueller was attributed to H Company--Hotel Company in Marine parlance--part of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, a storied infantry legion that marked its causes back to the 1930 s.

The regiment had been fighting almost nonstop in Vietnam since May 1965, paying the nickname the Magnificent Bastards. The grueling duel made its charge. In the drop of 1967, six weeks of debate reduced the battalion’s 952 Marines to really 300 fit for duty.

During the Tet Offensive, the 2nd Battalion had encountered embittered and bloody crusade that never let up. In April 1968, it engaged in the battle of Dai Do, a days-long date that killed practically 600 North Vietnamese soldiers. Eighty members of the 2nd Battalion died in the fight, and 256 were wounded.

David Harris, who arrived in Vietnam in May, connected the spent force just after Dai Do. “Hotel Company and all of 2/4 was ravaged, ” he replies. “They were a skeleton crew. They were haggard, the latter are flog to demise. It was just pitiful.”

By the time Mueller was set to arrive 6 months later, the human rights unit had rebuilt its grades as its wounded Marines recovered and filtered back into the field; they had been tested and surfaced stronger. By coincidence, Mueller was to inherit leadership of a Hotel Company platoon from his friend Kellogg. “Those kids that I had and Bob had, half of them were veterans of Dai Do, ” Kellogg adds. “They were field-sharp.”

A corpsman of Company H aids a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Navals, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives

Second Lieutenant Mueller, 2 4 years and to three months aged, met the brigade in November 1968, one of 10 brand-new policemen assigned to the unit that month. He knew he was arriving at the so-called pointy objective of the American spear. Some 2.7 million US units served in Vietnam, but the great majority of casualties were suffers from the individuals who crusaded in “maneuver battalions” like Mueller’s. The fight along the demilitarized zone was far different than "its been" elsewhere in Vietnam; the primary antagonist was the North Vietnamese army , not the loathsome Viet Cong guerrillas. North Vietnamese troops generally operated in larger divisions, were better trained, and were more likely to engage in preserved engagement rather than defrosting away after placing an attack. “We crusaded regular, hard-core horde, ” Joel Burgos supposes. “There were so many of them--and they were really good.”

William Sparks, a private first class in Hotel Company, recalls that Mueller get off apache helicopters in the midst of a rainstorm, wearing a raincoat--a telltale sign that he was new to the struggle. “You figured out fairly fast it didn’t help to wear a raincoat in Vietnam, ” Sparks articulates. “The humidity merely condensed under the raincoat--you were just as rain as you were without it.”

As Mueller went up from the operations zone, Kellogg--who had no idea Mueller would be inheriting his platoon--recognized his OCS classmate’s gait. “When he came rallying up the hill, I laughed, ” Kellogg tells. “We started joking.” On Mueller’s first night in the field, his brand-new tent was destroyed by the wind. “That thing faded into thin breeze, ” Sparks speaks. He didn’t even get at spend one night.”

Over the coming eras, Kellogg overtook along some of his sense from the field and explained the procedures for announcing in cannon and air strikes. “Don’t be John Wayne, ” he responded. “It’s not a movie. Navals tell you something’s up, listen to them.”

“The lieutenants who didn’t trust their Marines was just going early deaths, ” Kellogg says.

And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out.

Today, military units often train together in the US, deploys together for a designate amount of season, and return home together. But in Vietnam, rotations began--and ended--piecemeal, driven by the vagaries of gashes, illness, and individual action safaruss. That signified Mueller acquired a cell that mixed combat-experienced veterans and relative newbies.

A platoon consisted of approximately 40 Marines, often led by a lieutenant and divided into three forces, each was presided over by a sergeant, which were then divided into three four-man “fire teams” led by corporals. While the lieutenants were technically in charge, the sergeants raced the show--and could start or transgress a new polouse. “You land, and you’re at the relief of your staff sergeant and your radioman, ” Mueller says.

Marines in the field knew to be dubious of new young second lieutenants like Mueller. They were mocked as Gold Brickers, after the single amber saloon that denoted their rank. “They might have had a college education, but they sure as hell didn’t have common sense, ” enunciates Colin Campbell, who was on Hotel Company’s mortar squad.

Mueller knew his humanities dreaded he might be incompetent or worse. “The platoon was petrified, ” he echoes. “They wondered whether the new green lieutenant was going to jeopardize "peoples lives" to boost his own career.” Mueller himself was similarly scared of expecting realm command.

As he settled in, talk spread about the curious brand-new team chairman who had gone to both Princeton and Army Ranger School. “Word was out real fast--Ivy League guy from an affluent clas. That set off horrifies. The affluent chaps didn’t go to Vietnam then--and they surely didn’t finish up in a rifle squad, ” announces VJ Maranto, a corporal in H Company. “There was so much talking here' Why’s a chap like that out here with us? ’ We weren’t Ivy Leaguers.”

Indeed , nothing of his fellow Hotel Company Marines had written their college thesis on African territory disagreements before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. Most emerged from agricultural America, and few had any formal education past senior high school. Maranto expended his youth on a small raise in Louisiana. Carl Rasmussen, a lance corporal, grew up on a farm in Oregon. Burgos was from the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised on a cotton plantation. After graduating from high school, David Harris had gone to work in a General Machine factory in his house nation of Ohio, then assembled the Marines when he was set to be drafted in the summer of 1967.

Many of the Marines under Mueller’s command had been wounded at the least once; 19 -year-old corporal John C. Liverman had arrived in Vietnam simply four months from a neighbor of his from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been killed at Khe Sanh--and had discovered heavy combat much of the year. He’d beset by shrapnel in March 1968 and then again in April, but after recovering in Okinawa, he had agitated to return to combat.

Hotel Company instantly came to understand that its new platoon supervisor was no Gold Bricker. “He wanted to ask as much as he could as fast as he could about the terrain, what we did, the waylays, everything, ” Maranto says. “He was all about members of the mission, members of the mission, the mission.”

Second Battalion’s mission, as it turned out, was straightforward: Search and destroy. “We stood out in the bush, out in the mountains, simply below DMZ, 24 hours a day, ” David Harris does. “We were like bait. It was the same meeting: They’d reached us, we’d reached them, they’d disappear.”

Frequent deaths and injuries meant that turnover in the fields was constant; when Maranto arrived at Hotel Company, he was issued a flak shell that had dried blood on it. “We were always low on workers, ” Colin Campbell says.

Mueller’s unit was constantly on garrison; the battalion’s chronicles described it as “nomadic.” Its racket was to keep the antagonist off-kilter and disrupt their afford lines. “You’d march all day, then you’d excavate a foxhole and expend all light alternating going on watch, ” announces Bill White, a Hotel Company veteran. “We were always tired, ever thirsty, always thirsty. There were no showers.”

In those first weeks, Mueller x27; s confidence as a president ripened as he won his men’s confidence and respect. “You’d sense his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his manner, ” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.”

The members of the platoon soon got acquainted with the qualities that would be familiar to everyone who dealt with Mueller afterwards as a prosecutor and FBI director. He challenged a great deal and had little patience for malingering, but he never asked for more than he was willing to give himself. “He was a no-bullshit kind of guy, ” White recalls.

Sgt. Michael Padilla( left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario( right ), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge . div>

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla

Mueller’s unit began December 1968 in relative placid, providing security for the prime military locate in the area, a glorified campground known as Vandegrift Combat Base, about 10 miles south of the DMZ. It was one of the only organized frontiers adjacent for Marines, a locate for resupply, a rain, and sizzling meat. Lance Corporal Robert W. Cromwell, who had celebrated his 20 th birthday shortly before originating his tour of duty, entertained his friends with fibs from his own period of R& R: He’d assembled his wife and parents in Hawaii to be introduced to his newborn daughter. “He was so happy to have a child and wanted to get home for good, ” Harris says.

On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new running: to retake control of a slope in an notorious domain known as Mutter’s Ridge.

The strategically important piece of ground, which raced along four mounds on the countries of the south hem of the DMZ, had been the place of fighting for more than two years and had been overrun by the North Vietnamese months before. Artillery, air strikes, and container onslaughts had long since denuded the crest of greenery, but the surrounding hillsides and depressions were a forest of trees and vines. When Hotel Company touched down and fanned out from its landing zones to prove a bound, Mueller was arriving to what would be his first full-scale battle.

As the American sections boosted, the North Vietnamese retreated. “They were all pulling back to this big bunker composite, as it turned out, ” Sparks pronounces. The Americans could see the signs of past debates all around them. “You’d watch shrapnel gaps in the trees, missile loopholes, ” Sparks says.

After three days of patrols, isolated firefights with an elusive foe, and several lights of American assault, another cell in 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, received such succession to take some high ground on Mutter’s Ridge. Even roughly 50 year later, the appointment of the operation abides burned into the retentions of those who fought in it: December 11, 1968.

None of Mueller x27; s fellow Marine had written their college thesis on African territory contraventions before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had.

That morning, after a nighttime of air strikes and cannon volleys "ve been meaning to" slackened the opponent, the men of Fox Company moved out at first light. The onslaught croaked smoothly at first; they abducted the western some parts of the bank without resistance, dodging just a handful of mortar rounds. Yet as they continued east, heavy small-arms shoot started. “As they pushed their channel forwards, they came into intense and deadly attack from bunkers and at the least three machine guns, ” the regiment afterwards reported. Because the vegetation was so dense, Fox Company didn’t realize that it had stumbled into the middle of a bunker composite. “Having fought their direction in, the company felt it extremely difficult to maneuver its way out, due both to the ardor of the foe and the problem of carrying their wounded.”

Hotel Company was on a neighboring mound, still feeing breakfast, when Fox Company was attacked. Sparks remembers that he was drinking a “Mo-Co, ” C-rations coffee with chocolate pulverize and sugar, heated by igniting a golf-ball-sized slouse of C-4 plastic explosive.( “We were ahead of Starbucks on this latte bullshit, ” he laughter .) They could discover the gunfire from all the regions of the valley.

“Lieutenant Mueller called,' Saddle up, saddle up, ’” Sparks adds. “He called for first squad--I was the grenade launcher and had two bags of ammo strapped across my chest. I could just stand up.” Before we are able to even reach the foe, they had to fight their highway through the thick-skulled touch of the valley. “We had to go down the hill and "re coming" Foxtrot Ridge. It took hours.”

“It was the only plaza in the DMZ I retain meeting vegetation like that, ” Harris announces. “It was dense and entwining.”

When the patrol ultimately crested the top of the ridge, they challenged the horror of the battleground. “There were wounded people everywhere, ” Sparks recollects. Mueller succession everybody is descent their bundles and preparations for a fight. “We aggression right out across the top of the crest, ” he says.

It wasn’t long before the unit came under heavy fervor from small arms, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. “There were three North Vietnamese soldiers right in front of us that jump-start right up and scattered us with AK-4 7s, ” Sparks supposes. They returned volley and advanced. At one point, a Navy corpsman with them threw a grenade, merely to have it bounce off a tree and explode, wounding one of Hotel Company’s corporals. “It just got worse from there, ” Sparks says.

In the next few minutes, innumerable humankinds went down in Mueller’s unit. Maranto remembers being impressed that his relatively green lieutenant was able to stay calm while under affect. “He’d been in-country less than a month--most of us had been in-country six, eight months, ” Maranto says. “He had remarkable calmnes, targeting ardour. It was sheer terror. They had RPGs, machine gun, mortars.”

Mueller realized instantly how much disturb the team was in. “That period was the second heaviest fuel I received in Vietnam, ” Harris adds. “Lieutenant Mueller was sending congestion, positioning parties and announcing in air strikes. He was standing upright, moving. He perhaps saved our hide.”

Cromwell, the lance corporal which has recently become a papa, was film in the thigh by a. 50 -caliber bullet. When Harris construed his wounded pal being hustled out of harm’s acces, he was funnily relieved at first. “I determined him and he was alive, ” Harris reads. “He was on the stretcher.” Cromwell would eventually be able to deplete some time with his wife and new child, Harris figured. “You luck sucker, ” he pictured. “You’re going home.”

But Harris had miscalculated the seriousness of his friend’s trauma. The missile had nicked one of Cromwell’s arteries, and he bled to extinction before he reached the field hospital. The fatality devastated Harris, who had sold weapons with Cromwell the darknes before--Harris had made Cromwell’s M-1 4 rifle and Cromwell made Harris’ M-7 9 grenade launcher. “The next day when we reached the idiocy, they called for him, and he had to go forward, ” Harris answers. Harris couldn’t shake the feeling that he should have been the one on the stretcher. “I’ve simply told two parties this story.”

The battle atop and around Mutter’s Ridge feelings for hours, with the North Vietnamese ardor coming from the encircling jungle. “We got hit with an waylay, plain and simple, ” Harris articulates. “The brush was so thick, you had hassle hacking it with a machete. If you got 15 meters away, you couldn’t construe where you came from.”

As the fighting prolonged, the Marines atop the ridge began to run low on gives. “Johnny Liverman propelled me a container of ammo. He’d been shuttling ammo from one back of the ridge to the other, ” Sparks echoes. Liverman was already wounded, but he was still resist; then, during one of his runs, he came here under more fuel. “He got hit right through the psyche, right when I was looking at him. I went that ammo, I crawled up there and got his M-1 6 and told him I’d be back.”

Sparks and the other Marine sanctuary behind a dead tree stump, trying to find any armour amid the firestorm. “Neither of us had any ammo left, ” Sparks recollects. He crawled back to Liverman to try to expel his friend. “I get him up on my shoulder, and I got shot, and I went down, ” he answers. As he was lying on the floor, he heard a shout from atop the ridge, “Who’s that down there--are they dead? ”

It was Lieutenant Mueller.

Sparks bitched back, “Sparks and Liverman.”

“Hold on, ” Mueller supposed, “We’re coming down to get you.”

A few minutes later, Mueller emerged with another Marine, known as Slick. Mueller and Slick slithered Sparks into a device crater with Liverman and leant a battle dress on Sparks’ wound. They waited until a helicopter gunship passed overhead, its guns clattering, to confuse the North Vietnamese, and hustled back toward the top of the hill and comparative safety. An OV-1 0 onrush airplane overhead drooped smoke grenades to cure shield the Marine atop the ridge. Mueller, Sparks alleges, then went back to retrieve the mortally wounded Liverman.

The deaths prepared. Corporal Agustin Rosario--a 22 -year-old father and spouse from New York City--was shot in the ankle, and then, while he tried to run back to refuge, was kill again, this time fatally. Rosario, extremely, succumbed waiting for a medevac helicopter.

Finally, as the hours legislated, the Marines pushed the North Vietnamese to move. By 4:30 pm, the battlefield had hushed. As his citation for the Bronze Star later read, “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, vigorous initiative and unwavering devotion to responsibility at great personal threat is also contributing in the rout of the adversary thrust and were in keeping with the highest lores of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.”

As night descended, Hotel and Fox impounded the ground, and a third firm, Golf, was were put forward as additional reinforcement. It was a remorseless era for both sides; 13 Americans vanished and 31 were wounded. “We framed a pretty good hurt on them, but not without immense rate, ” Sparks pronounces. “My closest sidekicks were all killed there on Foxtrot Ridge.”

As the Americans inquired the field all over the bank, they counted seven enemy dead left behind, in addition to being able to seven others killed in its implementation of the battle. Intelligence reports later revealed that the engagement had killed the commander of the 1st Battalion, 27 th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, “and had practically devastated his staff.”

For Mueller, the combat had proved both to him and his followers that he could pas. “The minute the shit hit the devotee, he was there, ” Maranto says. “He accomplished singularly. After that night, there were a lot of chaps who would’ve sauntered through walls for him.”

That first major showing to combat--and the loss of Marines under his command--affected Mueller deeply. “You’re standing there deliberation,' Did I do everything I could? ’” he pronounces. Afterward, back at camp, while Mueller was still in outrage, a major came up and swiped the young lieutenant on the shoulder, supposing, “Good job, Mueller.”

“That vote of confidence cured me get through, ” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t follow through life guilty for clamping up.”

The ponderous toll of the casualties at Mutter’s Ridge shook up the whole section. Cromwell’s death affected extremely hard; his feeling and good nature had joined the unit together. “He was happy-go-lucky. He ogled after the brand-new chaps when they came in, ” Bill White recollects. For Harris, who had often shared a foxhole with Cromwell, the deaths among his best friend was devastating.

White also took Cromwell’s death hard-handed; overcome with affliction, he stopped scraping. Mueller tackled him, telling him to refocus on members of the mission ahead--but ultimately added more ease than punish. “He could’ve devoted me punishment hours, ” White tells, “but he never did.”

Robert Mueller received a bestow from his regimental commandant Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969.

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the bureau of Robert Mueller

Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his career was as challenging as producing servicemen in duel and watching them be cut down. “You learn a good deal, and every day after is a praise, ” he told me in 2008. The retention of Mutter’s Ridge gave everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into view. “A lot is going to come your route, but it’s not going to get the same intensity.”

When Mueller finally did leave the FBI in 2013, he “retired” into a hectic life as a top partner at the existing legislation house WilmerHale. He educated some world-class in cybersecurity at Stanford, he analyse the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, and he helped as the so-called accommodation surmount for the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal. While in the midst of that assignment--which required the type of delicate give-and-take ill-suited to a hard-driving , no-nonsense Marine--the 72 -year-old Mueller receives an final call to public service. It was May 2017, just days into the swirling tornado start out by the firing of FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted to know if Mueller would serve as the special counselor in the Russia investigation. The job--overseeing one of the most difficult and sensitive investigations ever undertaken by the Justice Department--may merely rank as the third-hardest of Mueller’s career, after the post-9/ 11 FBI and after heading those Marines in Vietnam.

Having accepted the assigning as special admonish, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America.

In January 1969, after 10 days of rain showers and cold weather, the unit got a three-day R& R snap at Cua Viet, a nearby substantiate locate. They listened to Super Bowl III on the radio as Joe Namath and the Airplanes demolished the Baltimore Colts. “One touch of actuality was listening to that, ” Mueller says.

In the field, they went little information about what was transpiring at home. In actuality, later that summertime, while Mueller was still positioned, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon--an occurrence that people in the world watched live on Tv. Mueller wouldn’t find out until daytimes subsequently. “There was this whole segment of biography you missed, ” he says.

R& R ends is likewise rare opportunities to potion alcohol, though there was never often of it. Campbell says he drink simply 15 brews during his 18 months in-country. “I can retain drinking warm beer--Ballantines, ” he supposes. In camp, the men traded periodicals like Playboy and mail-order automotive catalogs, realizing the cars they are able to soup up when they returned back to Country. They guided the time toy rummy or pinochle.

For the most part, Mueller bounced all these activities, though he was into the era’s music( Creedence Clearwater Revival was--and is--a particular favorite ). “I recollect several times marching into a bunker and seeing him in a corner with a record, ” Maranto says. “He read a lot, every opportunity.”

Throughout the remainder of the month, they patrolled, noticing little linked with the antagonist, although abundance of signalings of their attendance: Hotel Company often radioed in reports of experiencing precipitated bodies and secreted ply caches, and they are usually took incoming mortar rounds from unnoticed enemies.

Command under such conditions wasn’t easy; drug use was a problem, and racial tensions flowed high. “Many of the GIs were draftees; they didn’t want to be there, ” Maranto says. “When new people rotated in, they wreaked what happens in the United States with them.”

Mueller recalls at times struggling to get Marines to follow orders--they already felt that the reward of serving in the infantry in Vietnam was as bad as it could get. “Screw that, ” they’d reply aggressively when was necessary to do something they didn’t want to do. “What are you going to do? Refer me to Vietnam? ”

Yet the Marines were ligament through the constant danger of being subjected to engagement. Everyone had close calls. Everyone knew that luck in the combat zone was finite, fate hurtful. “If the good Lord gyrated over a placard up there, that was it, ” Mueller says.

Nights especially were filled with fright; the adversary elevated sneak onslaughts, often in the hours before dawn. Colin Campbell recalls a light in his foxhole where reference is turned around to find a North Vietnamese soldier, armed with an AK-4 7, right behind him. “He’d went inside our bound. He had our back, ” Campbell articulates. “Why didn’t he kill me and another chap in the foxhole? ” Campbell hollered, and the infiltrator bolted. “Another Marine down the line shot him dead.”

Mueller was a constant attendance in the fields, regularly reviewing the code mansions and passwords that recognized friendly divisions to one another. “He was quiet and earmarked. The planning was meticulous and detailed. He knew at night where every arrangement was, ” Maranto recalls. “It wouldn’t be exceptional for him to come out and make sure the barrage units were correctly placed--and that you were awake.”

The beings I talked to who sufficed alongside Mueller, husbands now in their seventies, predominantly had strong retentions of the kind of ruler Mueller had been. But many didn’t know, until I told them, that the man who led their team was now the special counseling analyse Russian interference in the election. “I had no idea, ” Burgos told me. “When you’ve been in combat that long, you don’t retain honours. Looks you remember, ” he says.

Maranto says he only put two and two together recently, although he’d meditated for years if that guy who was the FBI director had served with him in Vietnam. “The name would ring a bell--you know that’s a familiar name--but you’re so busy with everyday life, ” Maranto says.

At the makeshift landing zone get briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera . div>

Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto

April 1969 recognized a terrible American milestone: The Vietnam War’s action death toll outran the 33,629 Americans killed while engaging in Korea. It likewise created a new threat to Hotel Company’s arena: a provide of strong. 50 -caliber machine gun nests that the North Vietnamese had set up to harass helicopters and low-flying aircrafts. Hotel Company--and the battalion’s other units--devoted much of the middle-of-the-road of the month to shooting down the destructive weapons. Until they were found, resupply helicopters were limited, and flights were abandoned when they came under direct flaming. One Marine was even killed in the landing zone. Finally, on April 15 and 16, Hotel Company overran the opponent grease-gun and forced a hideaway, showing 10 bunkers and three handgun positions.

The next day, at around 10 am, Mueller’s platoon was attacked while on garrison. Fronting small-arms ardor and grenades, they called for breath aid. An hour subsequently four criticize ranges touched the North Vietnamese position.

Five days later, on April 22, one of the 3rd Platoon’s patrols started under similar attack--and the situation speedily became desperate. Sparks, who had returned to Hotel Company that winter after recuperating from his weave at Mutter’s Ridge, was in the waylaid garrison. “We lost the machine gun, jammed up with shrapnel, and the radio, ” he recollects. “We had to pull back.”

Nights particularly were filled with dismay; the opponent preferred sneak onslaughts, often in the hours before dawn.

With radio contact lost, Mueller’s platoon was called forward as buttres. American artillery and mortars pounded the North Vietnamese as the team boosted. At one point, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. The incoming attack was so intense--the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard--that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t instantly notice. Amid the fighting, he looked down and realise an AK-4 7 round had transferred clean through his thigh.

Mueller hindered fighting.

“Although seriously wounded during the course of its firefight, he resolutely maintained his position and, aptly aiming the shoot of his squad, was instrumental in demolishing the North Vietnamese Army force, ” speaks the Navy Commendation that Mueller received for his action that day. “While approaching the designated area, the platoon attained under a ponderous publication of enemy fervor from its right thigh. Skillfully requesting and targeting patronage Marine artillery fire on the antagonist ranks, First Lieutenant Mueller guarantees that shell predominance was gained over the unfriendly unit.”

Two states members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the fight. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam.

Mueller’s days in combat conclude with him being filched out by helicopter in a strap. As the aircraft rind apart, Mueller cancels contemplating he might at least get a good dinner out of the hurt on a hospice send, but he was delivered instead to a field hospital near Dong Ha, where "hes spent" three weeks recovering.

Maranto, who was on R& R when Mueller was wounded, remembers returning to camp and hearing command that their commandant had been shot. “It could happen to any one of us, ” Maranto says. “When it has come to him, there was a lot of sadness. They experienced his company.”

Mueller recovered and returned to active job in May. Since most Marine officers spent only six months on a combat rotation--and Mueller had been in the combat area since November--he was sent to serve at word installation, where he became an aide-de-camp to Major General William K. Jones, the head of the 3rd Marine Division.

By the end of 1969, Mueller was back in the US, his engagement safarus complete, working at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. Soon subsequently, he referred off an application to the University of Virginia’s law school. “I consider myself extremely luck to have drew it out of Vietnam, ” Mueller said years later in a communication. “There were many--many--who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always detected compelled to contribute.”

Over the years, a few of his former colleague Marine from Hotel Company discerned Mueller and have watched his profession narrate on the national stage over the past two decades. Sparks recollects devouring lunch on a July day in 2001 with the bulletin on: “The TV was on behind me.' We’re going to introduce the new FBI director, Robert ... Swan ... Mueller . ’ I slowly formed, and I inspected, and I supposed,' Golly, that’s Lieutenant Mueller.’” Sparks, who speaks with a dense Texas accent, says his first thought was the running pun he’d had with his former commander: “I’d ever announce him' Lieutenant Mew-ler , ’ and he’d remark,' That’s Mul-ler . ’”

More lately, his former Marine comrade Maranto says that after spending six months in engagement with Mueller, he has watched the coverage of the special admonish investigation unfold and chortled at the news reports. He says he knows Mueller isn’t sweating the pressure. “I watch parties on the information talking about the distractions getting to him, ” he speaks. “I don’t think so.”

Garrett M. Graff ( @vermontgmg) is a contributing editor at WIRED and author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror . He can be reached at garrett.graff @gmail. com . em>

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