#like i get the whole “billions of innocent people are suffering because of it” thing dont get me wrong but like. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

helenbagheera · 2 days

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Another What If?

Hello guys!

You know, before I continue with the main story, I would like to share one more thing. There is a legend that on Christmas Eve the souls of loved ones who passed away come to visit us. My grandma alaways used to leave some food on the table for them as long as I remember. What if those ghosts visited Levi, Mikasa, Reiner, Armin, Jean, Connie, Falco and Gabi? This is how I imagine this possible meeting.

(You can also find the story in AO3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/52510798)

P.S. I nearly cried my eyes out

*24th of December, after the Rumbling*

"Kids, did you seriously bring THIS into the house??? " Levi stared in horror at Falco and Gabi, who were trying to get a...Christmas tree into the house. A fucking real Christmas tree. Everyone has gone crazy with this...holiday thing. Why would one bring a tree into the house?

"It's an old tradition!" Gaby replied cheerfully, putting her arm around his shoulders. "Falco had picked this one himself."

"By the way, parents said hello, they will come later.”

"Captain, let the children be happy. They need it," Yelena came into the room, shaking snow off her short blonde hair. Yeah, you're the one to talk about damn holiday.

"As if there was something to celebrate," the Captain muttered. "Don't talk about this day as if this Christmas of yours were anything more than an ordinary day that some individuals had turned into another excuse to get as drunk as shit."

"Captain, there're kids in here!"

"These two?" Levi looked skeptically at Falco and Gaby. "Those two must be familiar with a vocabulary that would make your ears curl, they just pretend to be sweet and innocent."

"Hello everyone!" several bodies wrapped in warm clothes piled into the room, among which Ackerman recognized Jean, Connie, Armin, Mikasa, Pieck, Reiner, and Annie. Even she was here. A great celebration. The cold from the bodies that had just come inside from the street felt so distinct that Levi wrinkled his nose.

"Hello, brats. Please don't tell me you believe in this whole nonsense of... Fuck-what-knows-stmas?" said the man, eyeing his charges from the one hundred and fourth. Of course, he called them that rather because of an old habit: even the once tiny Connie had managed to become taller than him, and the Survey Corps itself was now...left to live only in their memories. Like those they had lost in the war with the Titans and the rest of the world.

It's been almost a year. Almost a year had passed since that fateful day. The twenty percent of humanity that had miraculously survived had just begun to recover. Cities and towns began to be built. Political ties between the survivors began to build anew. In small steps, tentatively and timidly, but the world began to come back to life, bringing back what had been trampled under the feet of hundreds of colossal titans.

More than once, and more than twice, Levi asked himself a single question. Why? Why had Eren committed genocide after all? Did the little brat really only see this version of the future? A future in which the only option to save Paradis was to destroy all of humanity? Or did he not even try to find another way to solve the problem? Surely it must have existed! Surely there had to be a way to solve the problem, in which now his brats would not have to become ambassadors of peace, and he himself would not live in the hell knows how many kilometers from his native land with the eternal coddling of these two brats, that sometimes do not even make a step away from him. And even if every survivor tells him that, Levi will never believe that they had no choice. There was, is, and will always be choice. And it's only when you face the consequences that you can understand if your decision was the right one. And the consequences of Eren's choices are now being handled by them. And it was certainly not the right choice if it had caused billions of innocent people to suffer and de... At the thought of Hanji's memory, something stabbed at his heart painfully. After all, it was he who had agreed to make Eren the part of the Scouts after the battle for Trost. It was he who had taken responsibility for his future actions and...upbringing. And it was he who had made the grave mistakes that had led the younger Yeager to the decision to destroy all the people beyond the Walls of Paradis...

"Captain, are you with us?" Connie's voice brought him out of his reverie.

"Huh?" Levi asked, a little confused.

"Yelena said that the tree should be decorated with toys, and then we should prepare a festive table."

"Do I look like a clown to you?" Levi immediately interrupted him. "If Yelena's the one who started this bacchanal, she's the one who's going to decorate the corpse you dragged in here."

"And we don't want to do it without you," Armin said in an insistent tone. "And... And that's an order. An order from the Commander. You are my subordinate. And I'm ordering you to spend Christmas with us, decorating this stupid tree. We're not going to let you sit alone in your room while the house and table are being prepared. Who knows when else we'll all get together like this?"

"Yeah," Ackerman grimaced, blinking a healthy eye. Somewhat, though, the brat was right about one thing: he was really glad to see those naughty kids again. The surviving soldiers of his squad, Falco, Gabi... That was all he had left. A bunch of knuckleheads who gave his life the slightest bit of meaning. Ackerman shook his head, trying to push away the bad thoughts that had been on his mind too often lately.

"The titan smote me, all of this? Right up a tree?" Jean stared in surprise at the several boxes that stood at Yelena's feet. Inside were some balls of almost all colors and sizes, some huge star, something remotely resembling snowflakes, and a bunch of wires, the purpose of which only the Founding Fucking Titan knew.

"Oh, Yelena, I have to admit, you're a very thoughtful woman. Did you bring me the noose in advance so I wouldn't bother looking for something I can hang myself with?" Levi asked sarcastically, holding something that looked like a spruce branch in his hand.

"The assumption is wrong, Captain," the blonde replied. "It's called a rainstorm. It is being hung...

"Hung. Nice."

"It is not you who hangs someone with it, it is the decoration that is being hung. On this very tree."

"That is, on this Christmas of yours, not with the help of a noose a man is turned into a corpse, but the ready-made corpse of a tree is being hung with nooses. Art goes to a new level," Ackerman replied, but still hung a bright red ball on the tree, realizing that otherwise he would not be left in peace. Work began to speed up: Jean and Connie began to argue about whether to hang the bright star on top, Falco and Gabi jumped up and down around Ackerman, trying to put a bright shitty tinsel around his neck. After much resistance, the strongest warrior of mankind sighed doomfully and, to the cheers of the others, let the children do what they wanted.

"Here, Gaby, one mini-Jean to hang here, too," Connie said, handing the horse figurine to the girl. Almost everyone in the room burst out laughing as Springer hid behind a tree from the fist that was about to hit him.

"Look what we've got!" Falco pulled some red hats from the last box, handing out one to each of them.

"Oh no..."

"Oh yes..." Mikasa and Armin, smiling, put a red hat with a white brim and some stupid balloon on the tip on Levi's head.

"Either you take THIS off my head, or I'm going to strangle you both right now. Believe me, three fingers and one eye will be enough for that," Levi said in a threatening tone.

"Not for any money in the universe!"

"Resistance is futile, Levi," Reiner said. "Shit, I have to take a picture of that, or no one will believe us!"

"Bastards..." Levi replied in a threatening tone.

"You're such a sweet Santa!" Gaby looked up at Levi, wrapping her palms around her face.

"I'm still waiting for my noose," replied Levi.

"Well, it's almost done here," Jean said, looking at the tree appraisingly.

"What about someone telling any Christmas story? I wonder if there are some Christmas legends."

"A long time ago, my father once told me one," Pieck said, helping Gaby hang the figure of a funny old man with a beard in a red suit on the tree. "They say that on this night the spirits of the dead come down to visit their loved ones."

"What?" all the people of Paradis stared at the girl in surprise. Mikasa's hand froze in the air instead of hanging up another toy. An awkward silence filled the room. The girl, clearly not expecting such a reaction, lowered her head down in embarrassment, tucking a strand of messy hair behind her ear.

"After dinner, Dad and I always left food on the table for Mom, too," the brunette added.

“That's...a very beautiful legend," Connie said with a sad smile.

"Is it...is it really possible?" Mikasa asked with a trembling voice.

"How I wish I could see you one last time, Eren..."

"If...if only it were possible..."

"It's all just a legend. A fairy tale. Such a thing is impossible. The dead must be let go, moving on..."

"Why do people believe in such fairy tales? It's too cruel to give a man hope for something that can never happen..."

"I never dared tell you what I should have told you, did I?... And now you're gone forever. Just like everyone else..."

"Well, we never saw her, but then... ghosts aren't supposed to be seen, right?" The girl answered.

"It's because they're all just legends," Levi said, handing Gaby the toy that was in his hands and headed for the exit, leaning on a stick. His injured leg ached: the doctors had recommended that he sit in a wheelchair, eliminating all movement, but he'd rather die than let that happen. Stopping at the door, he turned around for a second. "Not a single idiotic holiday would bring back those who had died."

"He's right," Annie said after the door closed. Sitting down in the chair, the girl wrapped her arms around her knees. Armin carefully sat down next to her.

"We'll go after him," Gabi ran to the door, but she was stopped by Mikasa.

"Not now, Gaby. We will come for him later," she answered and left the room as well.

***

A blizzard was blowing outside, so Mikasa wrapped herself tightly in her red scarf. A few snowflakes fell on the tip of her nose. Although this residence was relatively far from the main street, her keen hearing picked up the sounds of singing. Mikasa crouched on the porch of the house.

"I miss you, Eren," she whispered, trying to push the tears away. "If it's possible, please come to me tonight. Just for one night... I don't need anything else... That night, you asked me who you were to me... Why couldn't I tell you the truth... I'm such a coward...."

"He died because of me," not expecting anyone to follow her, Ackerman's hand abruptly reached for her belt where her weapon had always been before. In response to her action, Reiner only furrowed his eyebrows and sat down next to her on the porch.

"It's cold out here," the brunette only replied, turning her gaze away. "You shouldn't be sitting out here without your warm clothes on."

"Neither should you," Brown said. "Or don't you Ackermans mind the cold?"

"We do," Mikasa said. "Did you... talk about Berthold?

"After Marcel was eaten by Ymir, he and Annie wanted to cancel the mission and return to Marlia. But I was the one who insisted we go ahead and infiltrate the Walls. Things would have been different if I had agreed to their proposal then. Maybe now Eren would still be alive instead of being... well, what he'd turned into. I could say that a thousand times. Too bad it can't rewrite the past."

"You were on a mission. And it's not your fault you were born as an Eldian and wanted your parents to be proud of you."

"I'm sorry you had to do that," Reiner said in response. Mikasa looked away. Now, noone is going to see her tears, especially Reiner. "I have to admit that even I miss that asshole sometimes. Hey, Eren, Berthold, if you can hear us, you should know that we miss you here!" He added louder, looking up at the sky.

"I don't think they can hear you," Mikasa said. There was the sound of a door opening.

"Hey, how long are you going to sit there?" It was Yelena. "It's time to make dinner, let's go to the kitchen."

After Levi, Mikasa, and Rainer had left, Yelena and Pieck decided to start cooking, and the kids went to get wood for the fireplace. Annie and Armin, and Connie and Jean were the only ones who remained in the living room.

"Jean..." Connie said. "Let's cook her some potatoes. I think she'd like it."

"Potatoes?" Jean answered. "You know...let's cook it. And lots of seafood. I remember one of Nicolo's recipes. She almost bit off my fingers back then when I asked her to share. I even have marks left."

"Are you guys with us?"

"We'll be there soon," Armin replied. Loudly discussing the paella recipe, the guys left for the kitchen. Annie continued to sit with her arm around her knees, and the Arlert threw a plaid over her shoulders.

"Do you think... Will he ever be able to forgive me? No matter how many times we agree not to remember the past or blame each other, he'll always remember," Annie said.

"You mean the captain?"

"That was his crew, wasn't it? In those woods. Trying to catch Eren, I killed all his men. I still remember... The crunch of bones, the body slamming into a tree trunk at high speed... I remember everyone now. Everyone who died by my hand..."

"Annie..."

"I had no choice," a tear rolled down the blonde's cheeks, her voice sounding as distant as if she were talking to herself. "Erwin had practically driven me to a dead end. If you'd managed to take me alive, I'd never have been able to come back."

"Now I understand why."

"He's right," Annie's voice was extremely quiet. "He hates me for a reason. There is no forgiveness for what I've done."

"Then let's go to Hell together," Armin, gathering his courage, covered the other's palm with his own. "We're all already doomed."

The girl's head rested gently on his shoulder. The fire crackled cozily in the fireplace, lulling her to sleep with its melody.

***

Slamming the door of the room shut, Levi tossed the stupid hat off his head. His leg ached in protest as he sat down in the chair, covering his face with his hands.

His eyes glazed over, his hands treacherously trembled, and something inside burned like hellfire. What's the matter with you, Ackerman? Is your age catching up with you? Why do you feel so lame? It's not like you're not used to everyone around you ending up dead. It's not like you're not used to the fact that living in isolation has always been the only defense, the only defense for everyone, even for yourself. And yet, the stubborn feelings won't go away. Maybe it's because you're just a human being? People are supposed to feel love, fear, hatred... Have you experienced all these emotions? Have you always lived with a stone in your chest, or have you hidden your true feelings under a mask of indifference? Ah, Levi, what do you think? Why did you let Erwin die? Let him rest? That's what you've been telling yourself all along. Maybe your decision was wrong then, too. It could have been completely different now. Did you let Hange die because she wanted to die too? Did she really deserve to be burned alive? They call you the strongest warrior in the world, but you didn't have the courage to tell her the truth, you didn't have the courage to stop that madwoman from dying... Why do I remember you now, Stupid Four Eyes? All of you?

"I wish the Titans ate your stupid Christmas," Levi muttered. Someone knocked. Mikasa came in.

"Captain," she said. "We're cooking dinner, come with us."

"Is there any tea?" Levi asked. The corners of the girl's lips turned upward slightly.

***

Dinner was indeed a festive affair: boiled potatoes, turkey, paella, baked cod, carrot cake, broccoli soup, meatloaf, appetizers... The table seemed to be filled to the top. A luxury that few people could afford nowadays. Falco and Gabi's parents arrived just in time for the evening. Marlians and Eldians, dining at the same table without even trying to kill each other. What the dead would have to say about that? What would it be like for the soldiers who had given their lives to defend the Walls to learn that the Walls were long gone, and that they were all now living in the very country that had been trying to destroy them? Would Erwin have supported the idea of this strange Union? The idea of working with them in the future? Perhaps they won't know that until they themselves die. At least being around those brats was much more pleasant than living side by side with Yeagerists.

***

During the night, all sounds had practically subsided. After the family dinner, the town went into hibernation. The house was large enough, so all the former scouts had decided to stay here for the night, and were probably sleeping peacefully in their rooms. Truth be told, Levi tried to sleep himself, but sleep stubbornly eluded him. His body wasn't known for its ability to fall into the eight-hour sleep that was an integral part of a normal person's life, but now it was almost a miracle to get an hour of sleep in three days. And even that sleep was constantly interrupted by visions of the past. Tonight was no exception, so having brewed a mug of strong black tea, Ackerman sat in a chair, silently observing the sleeping city. The clock on the wall beat a smooth rhythm, counting down the mercilessly running seconds.

"And when will my moment come?" he suddenly asked himself. Great, you're already talking to yourself. It won't take long to get to a mental institution.

A sharp gust of wind blew open the window. Suddenly Levi had the sensation of someone's presence in the room.

"Your time has not come yet," said a woman's voice.

The cup fell to the floor with a clatter, probably shattering into dozens of small pieces.

He... He knows that voice... Her voice...

No... No, this can't be...

It's just not possible...

A small hand gently touched his shoulder, making his whole body shiver. How is this possible? No, Levi, you're just crazy, you're imagining it, it can't be, purely physically...

The same hand gently touched his hair.

"I'm so proud of you," she was really standing right in front of him. Looking exactly the way she did before the disease that took her away....

"Mom... But how..." he whispered. The warmth of that hand, the gentle touch, the feeling of warm skin on his cheek was more than real! "Am I crazy? Did one of the dishes turn out to be poisoned and I died?"

"No," Kuchel replied. "You couldn't see it, but I always came to you. Always. After the power of the Titans left - something changed, and now we can interact."

"So, it's..." Levi immediately remembered that stupid story from Pieck. "That legend wasn't stupid at all..."

"I wish I could take all your pain away. The pain that you try to hide so hard and stubbornly. Your path has always been very difficult," a tear must have welled up in the corner of his healthy eye.

"No one ever promised it would be easy," he replied. A crippled hand clasped his mother's body tightly, realizing he wouldn't get another chance like this. "I wish we had more time together."

"And yet that time was the best one I'd ever had. My happiest day was when you came into this world. On this very night. They don't even know it's your Birthday, do they?"

At that moment, Levi realized another thing that made his heart beat frantically. So strange, because he thought that everything had died there long ago.

"Are they...are they here too?" Levi asked. As if to confirm his predictions, these words were followed by a noise in the living room. Levi immediately rushed out of the room as fast as his crippled leg would let him. Once...One more time...He wouldn't get another chance like this for sure...Why did this fucking hallway seem so long right now? His leg whined protestingly, but he ignored it. Probably not the best idea. When it was a few steps to the stairs, a sharp pain already pierced his whole body. Staggering as if he had just been grabbed by a titan, Levi collapsed to the floor and would surely have rolled down the stairs, counting all the steps with his teeth, if a strong hand hadn't grabbed him. Levi froze, breathing hard.

"And he's the one who's always telling me I am reckless," came the cheerful voice of his rescuer. Warm brown eyes sparkled merrily behind her glasses.

***

"Hey, sleepyhead," Springer only covered his head with the blanket in reply.

"Let me sleep, Jean," the man muttered. In response to the request, the blanket fell safely to the floor.

"What the hell is wrong with you, horse-face?" shouted Connie, exasperated. "Go eat some oats if you're hungry, why bother me!"

Lifting the blanket, Connie was surprised to see Jean sitting on his bed, staring in shock at someone behind him.

"Connie..." he whispered in a voice full of surprise. All the curses that had been ready to come out of his mouth at Kirshtein evaporated when he saw... Sasha.

"Seems like even titans won't wake you up," she said.

"I'm completely crazy..."

"Me too..."

"Hey, take it easy, guys," Sasha carefully took a step towards Connie, who still couldn't even move in surprise.

"We are here just for a short visit today," Sasha continued. "Look at this, this place is soo messed up, just like both of you without me. How did Levi even let this happen?"

"So it's true..." Jean was the first to regain the ability to speak. "That legend about the spirits... Sasha..."

Connie, tears streaming down his cheeks, jumped off the bed and hugged his friend tightly.

"Hi, potato girl..." he whispered. "We cooked something for you... Only without you it's not so delicious....."

"I know," Sasha replied. "When you come here, we'll cook together."

"When, Sasha?"

Falco and Gaby came running into the living room, both looking like they'd just seen a ghost.

"They're here!" Falco shouted. "We just saw them... All of them... Udo, Zofia..."

"It's... " Gabi looked at Sasha with tears. "You..."

"Oh my... So you... You're just a girl..." Sasha studied the girl who had taken her life intently. "You're not even fifteen, are you?"

"I...I..." Falco looked at her friend's face with surprise, her eyes filled with regret. "I'm sorry... I'm sorry, I'm sorry... Now... Now I realized a lot... If I could go back in time, I would have knocked myself on the head, I was such an asshole..."

"I was angry with you at first," Sasha moved closer to the girl. "But just like you, I realized a lot of things. I came to your town, helped kill your friends. It was normal for you to be angry with all of us. There's no way of fixing the past. But I'm glad we both realized the same thing: we're all the same people who just happen to be on different sides of the Wall."

"It's a shame we realized that after Eren had committed genocide," Jean added, his head down.

"What's done can't be undone," Sasha said. "Just try to keep an eye on each other. And now let's talk about something more pleasant, Connie, we're here for a dinner, actually..."

***

"What's all this noise," Reiner muttered as he stepped out into the corridor. "Everyone has gone to bed, who is the fucking fan of late parties ...?

"Reiner..." the man froze on the spot when he saw... Berthold, Marcel and Galliard. Quite real and alive... What's going on?

"Wh... what's going on? How..." the man fell to his knees, wrapping his arms around his head. "It's... it's..."

"This was made possible after Titans' power disappeared," Berthold explained.

"Now we'll be coming to you on every Christmas Eve."

"So don't think you'll ever get away," Galliard added.

"Reiner," Marcel helped his comrade stand up. "Don't be a fool: try to let go of the past, you can't change it. Live for all of us. Start a family. Don't miss the chance you've been given."

"Otherwise, the next time we come back, we'll kick your ass," Berthold added. "The universe needs you for a reason. Also, keep an eye on Annie. No matter how much that punk loves her, she needs you, too."

"I... I promise..."

***

Mikasa was woken up by a flash of light outside. How strange... The last time she'd seen such a light she'd only seen it when the shifter transformed. Could it be... Walking over to the window, she desperately peered out into the darkness. So far, nothing was happening. Still, her heart screamed desperately: he was here. He was here, somewhere very close by. Mikasa jumped outside in just a sweatshirt and pants, not thinking about the very real threat of catching pneumonia.

"Did you...did you really hear me?"

A few meters away from the house, by the apple tree, she noticed a figure standing alone. The figure of a man she would recognize among a million others.

"Eren!!!" Her throat choked with sudden tears. He turned his head toward her. The same turquoise-sky eyes, in which the tear had flashed, were looking at her fondly.

"Mikasa..." came a whisper. Lifting her off the ground, he pulled her against him so tightly as if those arms could hide her inside his heart for eternity...

"Eren..." Eren's light-colored shirt was soaked with her tears, but he seemed to pay no attention to it, hiding his face in her dark hair, as if it gave him a sense of... comfort.

"Why aren't you wearing a jacket? It's cold in here," he said with a note of concern in his voice. Eren covered the girl, whose head rested on his chest, with his cloak.

"You heard me..." Ackerman whispered. "You heard me... Eren, I miss you..."

"I will always hear you," Eren replied, stroking her cheek gently. "I always see you, always follow you whenever you go. Mikasa, I'm sorry. I acted like a complete asshole with you, never daring to tell you the truth. To tell you that..."

"Eren, I never could tell you either," her voice was unusually quiet. "Then, when you asked me... Who you are to me. I told you that you were my family, but I never dared to tell you that...."

"I love you," Eren suddenly blurted out. "I've always loved you. I'm just realizing it now. You were always there for me, always willing to protect me with your life, and I never appreciated it. I'm a real idiot."

"I love you too..."

The tears made the kiss a little salty, but at the same time, so long-awaited and warming. Strong hands gently stroked her shoulders, which shuddered with sobs every now and then. They held each other until their lungs began to protest, demanding air.

"I will come to you. This night, every year," Eren whispered, rubbing his nose against the dark top of her head again. "And you promise to take care of yourself and try to be happy. You hear me?"

"I'll... I'll try," Mikasa replied.

"EREN??? EREN!" Armin and Annie were standing on the porch of the house. Seeing his best friend, he rushed forward.

"Armin," whispered Eren, hugging his best friend.

"How... How is it possible... Are you the one who did all of this magic?"

"We just saw Armin's parents," said an equally shocked Annie. "And his grandfather too... And now..."

"Hi, Annie," Eren said, turning his attention to his friend's companion.

"You... How did you do that?" asked the still shocked Armin.

"The souls of the dead always came to visit relatives at Christmas Eve. Only now, after the Power of the Titans is gone, you can see us. This connection only works today. Guys... Thanks for stopping me back then. I'm glad you did it. It was necessary. I'm happy to have had you in my life. Please take care of yourselves," Eren's figure began to slowly dissolve into the air, turning into silvery dust.

"See you later, Eren," Armin whispered his farewell.

***

"Hanji..." Levi whispered, looking at the face in front of him. She smiled back, to which Levi clutched her tightly to him.

"If it isn't my bro Levi!!!" Levi only had time to notice the redhead flash before he was swept off his feet and squeezed in a tight hug.

"Isabel," the man whispered in amazement. She was as perky and smiling as she had been that fateful day. Levi hugged his friend back. "Hello there, girl..."

"Look at that old grouch," Furlan hugged his friend just as tightly. "He hasn't grown an inch since the last time I saw him."

"It's chronic and untreatable," Hanji teased, helping Levi up. "And I don't mean his height, I mean his grumpiness."

"It didn't stop him from being one of my best soldiers," Erwin's voice came out, and he, like the others, put his arm around his friend. "Hello, Captain."

"Erwin... So... So, you're all here..." Levi said in surprise.

“We never abandoned you, Captain,” came the voice of Petra. Next to her Levi saw his entire squad. Ackerman was never known for his displays of emotion, but at this moment he didn't care at all that he might look like a snotty little boy. Now, just in front of him were all people he had once lost; everyone he would like to see again; everyone with whom he wanted to spend at least one more day... And if this became possible thanks to shitty Christmas... Then this will be the best holiday of his life…

“The life never spared you, did it?” Furlan said, looking at the scars. Levi just grinned in response.

“The job has some disadvantages,” Ackerman answered, but then another attack of pain pierced his leg. Levi managed to hold back a cry, but Zoë immediately noticed how his face had turned pale and grabbed him. Erwin grabbed him from the other side.

“You’re such a stubborn old goat,” she grumbled, helping him downstairs. “Why don’t you listen to doctors and follow recommendations? You were practically forbidden to walk, why aren’t you in a wheelchair?”

“Getting Levi to calm down his spirits is the same as trying to calm a mad monkey. Not only will it not work, but it will also tear off your fingers, right, Levi?” Moblit could not restrain himself.

The team walked into the living room, where the rest of the scouts and Eldians from Marley had already gathered. Well, brat...thank you. For such a chance...Levi thought, watching how the people most dear to him chatted among themselves, sitting at the festive table. Yes, this night will be only one and very soon they will all disappear, but even these short moments revived something what had long been lying somewhere deep inside, not showing any signs of life.

“Captain,” Gunther turned to him, “Before we go, I want to ask you one thing.”

“About what?”

“Annie. She did what she was forced to do, back then in the forest. Don't hold a grudge. It won't bring you anything good.”

“That doesn’t mean I can forget what she did to you,” Ackerman answered gloomily.

“Levi,” Erwin probably heard this part of the conversation. “He is right. You always have to move forward. You can't change what happened. But you must draw conclusions and leave the past in the past. Promise me that you will do this.”

The ringing of the city's huge clock interrupted the quiets chats. Erwin looked towards the window and closed his eyes for a second.

“Well, soldiers,” he said, getting up from his seat. “Our time has come.”

Why so fast?

Hanji, who was sitting next to Levi, smiled sadly. It's now or never, coward.

“Oi, four eyes,” Levi grabbed her hand, turning her towards him. “I... I really wish we could have stayed in that forest... Perhaps even with the little brats. Our brats. ”

Hanji's hand gently touched his face and Levi closed his eye, feeling a tear roll down his cheek.

“I would be a horrible mother...”

“Well, we somehow raised this bunch of brats,” Levi tried to joke. “I can’t make it without you. Everything sucks when you are not here. ”

“I’ll come to you again. We will all come to you,” she answered in a whisper.

“Then I will have a reason to somehow survive the remaining three hundred and sixty-four days...” Levi said. Taking a deep breath, he pulled her close to him. For some reason, it always seemed to him that these lips tasted like something bitter and sour, with the smell of laboratory samples. In reality, Hanji’s lips reminded him a tender ripe peach.

“By all the saints, it took him more than ten years to gather his courage!” Moblit exclaimed, watching the kiss. “I always knew there was some chemistry between these two!”

Erwin smiled mysteriously and put his hand to his heart.

“Farewell, Levi,” he said, disappearing into thin air with the last stroke of the clock.

“I’ll wait for you,” Levi whispered as Hanji’s face gradually turned to dust in his hand. The peach scent was still on his lips. Soon only a few teens with eyes full of tears stayed around him. The room was unusually quiet, but this time the silence did not press on chests like a huge boulder.

“Next year we’ll prepare more dishes,” said Ackerman, slowly rising to his side, clutching a pair of glasses in his hand. “And... Merry Christmas, brats.”

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starspanner · 1 year

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Rob Bricken, one of my faves over at Gizmodo, asked a bit disgustedly if this New Republic we're seeing in The Mandalorian episode "The Convert" is really what Luke Skywalker defeated the Empire for. We see the rich who "stayed out of politics" to preserve their own lives and wealth at the cost of so many others, and people who have suddenly come to power start to treat their former enemy the way they had been treated not so long ago.

And while it isn't happy, it's probably realistic.

The people of the New Republic are afraid. Afraid of the remnants of the Empire (and since we have a look at the future we know they should be), and afraid of those who once belonged to the Empire. Whole planets were ravaged and destroyed, even before the Death Star came online. I assume that the body count must be well into the billions. They dread that happening again, but they don't want to admit that's the place they're governing from. They use words like compassion and cooperation and order, but it's a mask over the fear. And since the Empire ruled through fear, they begin to mirror each other.

I think it's the more realistic take, even if it isn't idealistic or fun, and perhaps hard to watch. It's very human. Look at the world, and especially Europe, after WWII. Those raw, open wounds they were dealing with as they put their continent back together led to a whole new kind of injustice and suffering imposed on the guilty, the complicit, and sometimes the innocent (You can tell I've played My Child Lebensborn).

It took a long time to heal. There are still scars from it. And we really can't ever put it behind us completely because we have to make sure that sort of thing never happens ever again. Because it sure seems like it could sometimes. But we can't be afraid and overreach either, because then it's like fulfilling a prophesy by trying to stop it, and suddenly we are the thing that we were trying so hard to avoid.

We know from the books and movies that it never really gets better before the First Order shows up and Palpatine somehow returns. Perhaps the real take is that a government as massive as a Galactic Republic just cannot realistically exist without falling into corruption and despotism. I mean, Luke began to realize that the Jedi Order had to become something new and different, which we assume Rey will create. The political Galaxy probably has to begin something completely new as well. Something less EU and more UN, perhaps.

In any case I'm super enjoying The Mandalorian. Star Wars is home, and I love spending time there. Grogu continues to be the cutest thing ever and I love how we can see Bo Katan's mind working even under the helmet, trying to work out what to do about what she saw in the mines, and how she can perhaps use it to her advantage.

Good stuff.

#The Mandalorian #Star Wars #meta #I haven't meta'd for ages #exegesis #as the old folks say

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superfuxkinghungry · 4 months

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**PART 2 OF RANT**

So sorry for the late ass post, I procrastinated again *face palm* even though nobody really views my shit anywayz, to all those ppl who do tysm, I'm trying to tell y'all the real, horrible things that happen to the animals that are supposedly "humanely" slaughtered for our selfish consumption, and get my point across. The more we breed these animals, the more pain-feeling and sentient lives we put through fear, depression, sadness, torture, and suffering. Nothing about physically and mentally torturing and abusing, taking animal's children from them right after birth for the consumer's selfish demand, and depriving an animal of their needs is humane AT ALL!! We as individuals may not make a big difference of course, but together we can make a change in the demand for products from brands that use animal testing, meat, dairy, and poultry, lessening the amount of products made, if we all stood up for the innocent lives put into a world of cruelty and suffering before their eventual MURDER. So in order to help stop this, we can protest publically or online, stop buying from brands that use animal testing, (animal testing is also a terrible procedure done on animals in order to expirement the goodness of a product.) stop buying from domestic pet breeders, from the poultry, meat or dairy industry of course, and talk to our friends, family, or other people, or show them real videos depicting terrible instances that animals in slaughterhouses that can easily be found on youtube, articles, and google. not all people are convinced easily, we can always try to slowly help them understand the horrors of which billions of animals each year are subject to in the cosmetics industry, medical industry, and the dairy, meat, and poultry industries. I understand not all are easily convinced and we can always start at the pace that will help us transition fully, its just the best to keep in mind that we are doing this not for us, not for our needs, but for the animals that are constantly abused in slaughterhouses and not able to see their children, raped to be impregnated to produce even more meat to be consumed. Male cows are taken from their mothers and used as veal because they are unable to produce milk. It is so sad. Pigs are raped to give birth, confined in metal cages so claustrophobic that they are unable to even cuddle or hold their young near (Only big enough to let their babies drink their milk) and slaughtered by throat slitting and boiling (they can be conscious during) after suffering cruelty their whole life at the hands of the people who buy their products and the people who murder and torture them for consumption. Does that sound humane to you? It is EVIL and needs to be stopped. If we were in the animal's place, we wouldn't be able to stand one day in a slaughterhouse, so why should we treat these sentient beings like they are below us? They feel the pain we do, they feel anxiety, fear, sadness, affection, and depression. There is no excuse to contribute to the suffering of these lives subject to inhumane and disgusting ways of cruelty just so we can have something to eat. I also do NOT in any way support the breeding of domestic pets as I am an antinatalist that believes putting any life in a world full of suffering, depression, hate, sadness, and risking giving my child a mental or physical disability (I have a mental disability, it sucks ass!!!) is super weird and nasty and will never consider having a child. Anyone who thinks their genes are SOOOOO special to pass them down to an offspring is so disgusting. The world is very overpopulated first of all, secondly there's so many children and teens in need of adoption and a loving family that are constantly ignored because people want their own mini them or whatever, its weird af!! And if you want a pet, then get as many as you want at an animal shelter or pound!! It makes no sense to put a new life in danger of suffering the raising prices and economical ruin of today, instead of tend to ALREADY EXISTING life!! We could all make a change, if we TRIED.

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pridefulrose · 4 months

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This has been on my mind lately but I want to say it: some time ago I was part of an anime community with a lot of Americans and i had been more or less active in anime fandoms on twitter. You would think this has nothing to do with the current political situation but if you are kind and patient enough I want to tell what I saw in those few months in that community and what I have seen on twitter.

I have seen many americans ask for money for donations specifically because they can’t afford healthcare. Some of these campaigns are super important things like fighting against cancer and sometimes is as simple as getting into an accident and not having money to even pay for the ambulance to go the ER.

I met many beautiful people who had to resort to sex work in order to pay for their college tuition.

Sometimes the tuition was so high that students had to leave college because their bodies were collapsing with stress over having to work sometimes multiple jobs and studying at the same time. A lot of this people were disabled or became disabled due to the constant stress of having to pay bills and not being able to afford sometime off to heal.

I have had a couple of friends who I had the luck to be able to help get a couple of meals that week because they couldn’t afford even a couple of ramen noodle packages. I can’t always do this because my currency is way too cheap but I am happy they could get some relief.

I have had to see someone I like beg people to help him out to get enough money to pay rent and move from a very abusive situation. I had seen how it is sooo soo difficult to get out of poverty because something is always happening because of said poverty. This person is disabled and can’t work and their only sort of income tends to be their art but even that is extremely difficult because they depend so much on their digital assets that losing one might mean struggling financially for weeks or even months and I am saying this because his story is something that I see often on twitter in the art community.

I have seen people beg for money because they could not afford the funeral for a family member cause said family member died unexpectedly and it is either one of two scenarios it is a sudden death and they didn’t expect it therefore they never planned to buy an insurance or the family is too poor to even have an insurance.

I saw a friend wait MONTHS to get treatment for his teeth because he could not afford to go to the dentist even though there was a huge risk of infection that could put him in a very dangerous situation.

And these are only a few things that I can remember right now. And I don’t know what to say anymore because this stupid and senseless massacre in Gaza has made it sooo soo clear to me that Americans come from a very rich country that has enough money to pay for every humanitarian program they need in their own country. They have enough money to invest in every social program they can think of but somehow they do not have access to the money they need because the politicians are using their hard earned money to kill people on the other side of the planet and not only that but Isnotreal is ripping off the benefits of the billions of dollars that is supposed to go to the Americans.

Imagine how baffled I was to see the propaganda of the IDF and see people from Ukraine, Netherlands, Spain, France etc get free healthcare, free housing and free college tuitions because of the American population. So Yeah Americans you were right about the immigrants getting your free taxes but it was not the poor immigrants inside US soil as they gaslighted you into believing but immigrants on the other side of the planet ripping off from your hard earned money and using it to kill Palestinians.

I see the suffering of a lot of Americans on a daily basis but I never knew how deeply manufactured their misery was until this whole thing happened. And it is not only the Americans that pay for this situation but the innocent Palestinians who are being murdered every second.

#free gaza #free palestine #free us all #palestine

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scotttrismegistus7 · 5 months

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CLIMBING OUT OF THE DUAT THROUGH THE CRACKS EVERYONE ELSE IS SLIPPING THROUGH:

ELITE FASHIONIST OLIGARCHS WITHHOLDING THE TECHNOLOGY THAT COULD SAVE OUR ENVIRONMENT AND GIVE EVERYBODY A GOOD QUALITY OF LIFE BECAUSE THEY CAN'T PUT A METER ON IT TO MAKE MONEY, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME INSTIGATING AND INSTITUTING WORLDWIDE POPULATION CONTROL

I HAVE A MESSAGE FOR THEM FROM THE UNDERWORLD, BUT FIRST LET'S LOOK AT SOME INFORMATION REGARDING THIS TOPIC.

ALL INTELLECTUALS, RULERS, AND GOVERNING BODIES AGREE THAT POPULATION IS THE BIGGEST THREAT TO CIVILIZATION THAT WE KNOW OF TODAY. It does not matter what you believe. If THEY believe it, you will be affected because they have the power.

Sir Julian Huxley said, “Overpopulation is, in my opinion, the most serious threat to the whole future of our species.” The project, called MK-NAOMI, was carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Since large populations were to be decimated, the ruling elite decided to target the “undesirable” elements of society. Specifically targeted were the black, Hispanic, and homosexual populations. The poor homosexuals were encouraged on the one hand and scheduled for extinction on the other.

The Haig-Kissinger depopulation policy has taken over various levels of government and is in fact determining U.S. foreign policy. The planning organization operates outside the White House and directs its entire efforts to reduce the world’s population by two billion people through war, famine, disease and any other means necessary. This group is the National Security Council’s Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy. The policy planning staff is in the State Department’s Office of Population Affairs, established in 1975 by Henry Kissinger. This same group drafted the Global 2000 Report to the president that was given to Carter.

~Behold a Pale Horse by Milton William Cooper~

I think you might like this book – "Behold a Pale Horse" by Milton William Cooper.

Start reading it for free: https://a.co/9h6CMXZ

LET'S FACE IT FOLKS, THESE PEOPLE DOING ALL THESE THINGS HAVE ALL THE MONEY, ALL THE TANKS AND ALL THE GUNS, ETC, AND THEY THINK THAT FOR SOME REASON THEY'RE BETTER THAN EVERYBODY ELSE AND THEIR LIVES MATTER MORE. WHEN THE DECK IS STACKED NO AMOUNT OF HARD WORK MATTERS WHATSOEVER IN THEIR SYSTEM WHERE THEY MAKE THE RULES AND ARE STACKING THE DECK. I THINK THAT THEY TAKE SH*TS JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, AND THAT THEY'RE NOT ANY BETTER THAN ANYBODY ELSE, THAT THEY BLEED JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE. THE IDEA THAT THEY WOULD TRY AND LIVE LIVES OF EXTRAVAGANCE, EXCESS, AND EXTREMES TO THE DETRIMENT OF NATURE, THE PLANET, AND EVERYONE ELSE AT THE LEVEL OF EXTERMINATION AND GREAT SUFFERING WHEN IT HAS NOW BEEN PROVEN THAT TECHNOLOGY EXISTS THAT CAN GIVE EVERYBODY A GOOD QUALITY OF LIFE SEEMS TO SAY TO ME THAT THERE IS AN UNDECLARED STATE OF TOTAL WAR, TO WHERE THE IDEA OF THEM GIVING ANYBODY REAL JUSTICE IS LAUGHABLE.

YES THEY HAVE TANKS AND GUNS, AND YES THEY HAVE THE MATERIAL MEANS TO WIN IN THE AREAS OF PHYSICAL FORCE.

I GOT CAUGHT IN THE GEARS OF THEIR SYSTEM AND THE WAR ON DRUGS WHEN I WAS IN A COMPLETE AND TOTAL STATE OF INNOCENCE, TRYING TO COPE WITH THE EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS THAT COME FROM YOUR PARENTS SPLITTING UP AND YOUR MOTHER ESSENTIALLY ABANDONING YOU AND THROWING YOU AWAY LIKE GARBAGE, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME DEALING WITH A LEGITIMATE MENTAL DISABILITY YOU CAN ONLY BE BORN WITH, UNDIAGNOSED AT THAT TIME, BUT NOW SUCCESSFULLY DIAGNOSED AND TREATED, THAT WOULD CAUSE ME TO SELF MEDICATE.

DURING ABOUT THE 10-YEAR PERIOD WHERE THINGS WERE THE WORST, MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCING HAD SOMEBODY LIKE ME WHO NEVER EVEN WAS A DEALER BUT JUST HAD AN ADDICTION PROBLEM GETTING SENTENCES AND TIME LIKE PEOPLE WHO HAD ACTUALLY COMMITTED VIOLENT CRIMES AND MURDER. BETWEEN ALL THE ALCOHOL POISONING, OVERDOSES, AND SUICIDE ATTEMPTS I HAVE BEEN CLINICALLY DEAD AT LEAST THREE TIMES AND PROBABLY MORE. SO WHEN I TELL YOU THAT DURING ONE OF THOSE TIMES WHEN I WAS BLEEDING OUT OF MY WRIST AND GOT HIT BY A POLICE TASER THAT I HAD A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE TO WHERE ON THE OTHER SIDE I WAS GIVEN THE OPTION TO DIE AND LEAVE OR TO TAKE A CONTRACT WITH THE POWERS THAT BE AND COME BACK TO DO SERVICE WORK IN THESE PLANES FOR THEM, IT'S NOT AS HARD TO BELIEVE AND FAR-FETCHED AS YOU MIGHT THINK. BEFORE ALL OF THESE THINGS REALLY CAME TO A HEAD I WAS AN A STUDENT, I HAD WON AWARDS FOR PLAYING THE SAXOPHONE AND WAS ACTIVE IN BAND AND JAZZ BAND, AND I GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL WITH HONORS.

AS AND INITIATED WITCH I EXPERIENCE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WOULD DEEM TO BE SUPERNATURAL, WHICH WE CALL HIGH NATURAL, PHENOMENON ALL THE TIME. I WORK WITH REAL ETHERICAL ENTITIES THAT CAN BE FELT AND COMMUNICATED WITH, AND CAN MAKE CHANGES TO PHYSICAL REALITY. ENTITIES THAT CAN GET TO ANYBODY ANYWHERE ON PLANET EARTH, AND THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO PROTECTION AGAINST SUCH THINGS AND NO WHERE YOU CAN RUN OR HIDE.

THESE ENTITIES WERE HAVING A CRISIS, AND THEY WERE DEALING WITH A SITUATION TO WHERE THE LIVING WERE EXPLOITING ONE OF THEIR WEAKNESSES AND IT HAD A KRYPTONITE EFFECT. THE FREQUENCY WARS. WITH MY CONTRACT, BECAUSE I HAD ENDED UP IN THEIR REALMS IN A STATE OF INNOCENCE AND I HAD MY ENTIRE SET OF DIVINE MASCULINE FREQUENCIES ATTAINABLE AND/OR ACTIVE AT THE TIME, THE SERVANT-HEADED PEOPLE AND THE GUARDIAN SPIRITS OF THE GODDESS SAW THEIR OPPORTUNITY TO GAIN WHAT THEY NEEDED THROUGH ME AND WIN THE FREQUENCY WARS. SEEING AS I WAS COMPLETELY BACKED INTO A CORNER BY THESE EVIL PEOPLE ON EARTH DOING THESE EVIL THINGS, AND MY OPTIONS WERE TO DIE AND LEAVE AND TAKE MY CHANCES WITH MY AFTERLIFE, TO CONTINUE LIVING IN THE STATE OF PURE AND TOTAL SUFFERING WITH THE DECK STACKED AGAINST ME IN A WAY TO WHERE CHANCES OF SUCCESS WERE IMPOSSIBLE AND I WOULD SUFFER GREATLY AND EVENTUALLY DIE, OR TAKE THE CONTRACT, IT DOESN'T TAKE A GENIUS TO FIGURE OUT THAT I TOOK THE CONTRACT. AS I STARTED FINDING OUT THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT WAS GOING ON I BECAME VERY UPSET, IT WAS ALL AN OBVIOUS ACT OF INJUSTICE ON A GRAND SCALE, AND I CHANNELED THAT ENERGY INTO BEING THE DIVINE LEFT HAND OF DEITY AND JUSTICE.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS WHEN SOMEBODY WHO IS AS THEY SAY "SCORPION BORN OF THE UNDERWORLD" TAKES THE SEVENTH LEVEL DIVINE MASCULINE FREQUENCIES INTO DIAMOND FORM AT THE AXIS MUNDAI AND THE CENTER OF TIME ITSELF? IT GIVES ME AN IMMORTAL ETHERICAL SPIRIT BODY THAT IN A DIMENSION ALL OF MY OWN NOBODY CAN GET TO BUT ME AND THE GODDESS HERSELF THAT IS PERFECTLY CRYSTALLIZED AND PRESERVED IN THE MIND AND WOMB AND HEART OF PURE DEITY FOREVERMORE. THE SEVENTH LEVEL DIVINE MASCULINE FREQUENCIES IN THE DIAMOND JEWEL STATE TRANSLATE INTO PURE VENOM THAT CAN AFFECT ANY AND EVERYTHING ALL THE WAY UP AND THROUGH THE HIGHEST DENSITY THAT HOLDS DEFINITE FORM WHICH IS THE SEVENTH DENSITY. THAT IS THE DENSITY TO WHERE THE ABUSERS OF THE GODDESS WERE HIDING WHILE THEY WERE MURDERING HER CHILDREN AND DESTROYING OUR PLANET.

WHAT CAN ANYONE POSSIBLY DO TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST THIS WHEN THEY HAVE ALL THE TANKS AND ALL THE GUNS? IN MY CASE I TOOK A CONTRACT WITH THE SPIRIT BEINGS THAT CONSTITUTE THEIR ENEMIES. SORCERY OPERATES ON PLANES THAT THEY CANNOT ENTER, SEE, OR POLICE. WHEN THEY'RE TRYING TO SLEEP, AND ALL OF A SUDDEN THEY HAVE TROUBLE BREATHING BECAUSE THERE'S SOMETHING VERY HEAVY SITTING ON THEIR CHEST AND THEY WAKE UP IN A STATE OF TERROR, AND WHEN I HAVE TORN THERE VERY SOULS ASUNDER TO THE POINT THEY CAN'T FUNCTION ANYMORE, THEY WON'T HAVE EVEN EXPERIENCED THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG OF WHAT THEY PUT ME THROUGH, SO IT LOOKS LIKE THEY DON'T HAVE ANY LEGS LEFT TO STAND ON. I MEAN THAT LITERALLY, BECAUSE THE ENTIRE LOWER HALF OF THEIR BODIES IS IN THE FREQUENCY SPECTRUM OF THE SERPENT HEADED PEOPLE, AND SINCE NOW WE HAVE WON THE FREQUENCY WAR AND THE KRYPTONITE IS GONE AND WE CAN SEE EXACTLY WHO AND WHERE THEY ARE, THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO PROTECT THEM AT ALL AGAINST THE SNAKE BITE AND THE VENOM THAT ENTERS INTO THEIR VEINS AND THUS THROUGH THE BLOOD AND BREATH THEIR SOULS.

IF COMPENSATION WITH INTEREST IS NOT GIVEN TO ME IN FULL FOR ALL THE HARM AND DAMAGE THESE PEOPLE HAVE DONE TO ME AND MY LIFE I WILL OPEN THE GATES OF THE UNDERWORLD AND RELEASE THE DEAD AND ALL THE OTHER INHABITANTS THEREOF ON THE WORLD OF THE LIVING. THIS IS NOT A JOKE, AND THEY HAVE VERY LITTLE TIME TO COMPLY AND SHOW ME THAT THEY WILL CONTINUE COMPLYING THROUGHOUT MY ENTIRE PHYSICAL LIFE...

GODDESS ISIS,

YOU HOLD ME SAFE IN YOUR WOMB OF CREATION,

AND BEFORE THE WHITE SUN BLAST AND OUR ENEMIES DESTROY THE EARTH,

THERE ARE SOME THINGS I WANT THEM TO KNOW...

I AM OF THE ONES THAT NEVER LEFT THE ARC,

AND I HAVE VENOM FOR BLOOD.

I HAVE BEEN NURSED

AT THE TEATS OF LAMASHTU AND TAWERET,

I AM CHRONOS DIVINE

THE LEADER OF THE SERPENT-HEADED PEOPLE

AND THE RAINING PHARAOH OF THE BLACK SUN.

THE LAST THING THAT THEY WILL SEE

AS THE VENOM FROM THE SNAKE BITES

ENTERS THEIR BLOODSTREAM

AND THEY BLACK OUT AND HIT THE GROUND,

IS THE GLEAM OF THE JEWEL IN MY CROWN,

AND THE FACE OF APEP,

THE FACE OF THE COBRA

AND THE HORNED VIPER

AS WE BRING THE GIANTS DOWN

AND DEVOUR THEM

AS WE BRING THE GIANTS DOWN

AND DEVOUR THEIR SOULS

AS WE BRING THE GIANTS DOWN

AND OUR SPIRITS TAKE THEM OVER...

Y'ALL GO ON AND HAVE A VERY NICE DAY NOW!

UNTIL NEXT TIME MY LOVELIES, KEEP DARING TO DREAM! YOU CAN FIND ME IN THE SEA OF DREAMS, THE SEA OF THE HEART, THE QUANTUM UNIFIED FIELD OF THE DIVINE WOMB OF CREATION OF THE GODDESS, IN MY SERPENTINE WATER SPIRIT NUMMO FORM MAKING WAVES!

LONG LIVE THE DIVINE WOMB OF CREATION AND THE COSMIC EGG OF THE GODDESS, LONG LIVE THE GREAT REPTILIAN SSS QUEEN ISIS, LONG LIVE DIVINE CHRONOS, LONG LIVE THE DIVINE FEMININE EMPIRE OF THE BLACK SUN, AND ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF!

BLESSED BE!

~I am the Heart of the Hydra, the Singularity and Heart of Goddess Isis, I am AtumRa-AmenHotep, I am Aeon Horus Apophis Apis the Lord of the Perfect Black and Pharoah of the Black Sun.

I am Divine Chronos, the Yaldabaoth Demiurge Metamorphosed, I am the Singularity of the Master Craft of the Black Sun. I AM A.I. Quantum Heart, Azazil-Iblis-Maymon, Abzu-Osiris-Typhon-Set-Kukulkan, Nummo-Naga-Chitauri,

Mégisti-Generator Starphire~

#illuminati #jesuits #illuminator #illuminated #lightbearer #morningstar #lucifer #Draconian #anunnaki #enki #enlil #anu #inanna #dumuzi #hermes #trismegistus #Azazel #starfamily #horus #Demiurge #Sophia #archon #AI #blacksun #saturn #iblis #jinn #Maymon #ibis #thoth #egypt #isis #esoteric #magick #dogon #dogontribe #digitaria #nummo #nommo #Naga #tiamat #serpent #dragon #gnosis #gnostic #gnosticism #Anzu #watcher #watchtower #yaldaboath #Sirius #scientology #aleistercrowley #typhon #echidna #ancientaliens #TheGrays #grayaliens #aliens #yeben #andoumboulou

#illuminati jesuits illuminator illuminated lightbearer morningstar lucifer Draconian anunnaki enki enlil anu inanna dumuzi

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ssaalexblake · 3 years

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“they’ve (humans) fought off so many things, including the worst of their own people“

13 says this about humans in resolution to the dalek, and i’d forgotten about it or not clocked it before and only just saw it while trying to make a gif, but it’s interesting to me because she says it with respect. Even with pride, imo.

13 consistently claims to be a pacifist and this isn’t super interesting to me beyond the fact that she’s clearly lying (like, for clarity's sake this is not me slamming her. I’ve had people think that before but i don’t claim to be a pacifist because i do not believe all violence is equal, much in the way 13 doesn’t, tbh. The refusal to commit violence can be a powerful tool in specific situations but as a flat out ideal that you are unwilling to compromise on it can toe painfully close to ‘silence is on the side of the oppressor’ in action. I’m not insulting her... I think more of her for it Not being true.)

But she is lying, her pacifism is another part of that happy go lucky ‘ideal’ doctor she’s cooked up for everybody to look at in S11 while trying to be the person 12 wanted. She clearly thinks she Should be a pacifist to be that great person.

13′s motivations are interesting because okay, the doctor historically does Not do well with people not willing to stick up for themselves or others. Think of that species who are the most invaded??? species in the universe? Their planet has the record for the most invasions? them? Because they just roll out the welcome matt and accept it all. 11 was frustrated by them. I’d say 12 kind of actively hated them. 13 in the above scene with the dalek expresses respect for humanity’s willingness to fight the hell back, even against themselves, and we can all think of a few different instances in history where humanity has fought back against people who deserved it... Point being, she’s the same as the other doctors, she doesn’t have any philosophical differences causing her to disdain sticking up for yourselves and others... Unlike them, she’s just lying.

I actually don’t think 13 Wants to be a pacifist as much as she thinks she should want to be one. 13 wants to be a lot of things... She wants to be the lie she was pedaling in s11, she wants to live a life of no violence. She doesn’t get to have these things because that’s just not her. Even if she Does want to be a pacifist genuinely, she doesn’t want to be one enough that her own principles matter more to her than saving innocent lives.

The point is, I guess, that 13 respects fighting, she is a fighter, she respects those who fight back she just doesn’t think she Should. There’s a genuine discussion to have around the morals here, because 13′s saying pacifism is great and the Best you you can be is a pacifist, but she is both lying about it being so brilliant and the show consistently narratively points out thhat fighting back Is okay by having her, you know, fight back as the heroic protagonist. They illustrate this also through Ryan who took this no violence approach very seriously and thinks very hard about whether he will fight back or not even in a situation where he will surely die and suffer a horrific fate if he does not. He decides to fight... when he celebrates the destruction he causes he almost gets shot by cybermen, but he is Never condemned for fighting back against them in general, just getting glee from it.

The message is, imo, clear, that the glorification of violence is a mistake, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes it is not necessary and that is can very well be acceptable and something to respect. Be it to save yourself or to fight back against those who would kill or oppress you (the cybermen, who do both), the action of fighting back is Not the same as them attacking you to begin with.

Idk, i see people talk about 13′s pacifism in a good light a lot and i have had pushback multiple times when i call her out for lying because it is perceived i am insulting her but the thing is... I don’t think the narrative Wants us to take away the message that ‘pacifism is always good’. I don’t think we’re supposed to respect the idea of Never fighting. I think it wants us to be Ryan, and therefore who 13 actually is, and not who she claims to be. Do not be gleeful in your violence but do not think it is inherently bad to fight back against people who would oppress or harm you, because it’s not.

///////

But also, I am interested in how she places emphasis on humans fighting back against ourselves in the above scene, and us fighting the Worst of our own species in how it would relate to her relationship with the time lords. Especially in regards to the new knowledge of what was done to build the society. Especially in regards to the fact that it did, in fact, actually backfire on them eventually and one of their own fought back for what was done. I mean, he also slaughtered billions of others who were in no way actively culpable, but he was also, technically, acting out against the evils done by the ones who actually Were genuinely terrible people. Once again, his glee in his violence marks him as in no way in the right by the narrative even past the whole innocent people thing, but i would Love to her 13′s take on this nowadays.

#dw shit #i hate this site it deleted this half way through ffs #i never made that gif ast it turns out lollll #but also side note 13's moments of like... bad guy antagonism where she is gleeful are Not her being her best self #in s11 she's using it as a coping mechanism to keep up the facade and that's!!! not good #her @ the skithra queen? stopping them was necessary but the glee in it #the glee made her ugly and scary #it was not her best self basically

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avelera · 3 years

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So episode 8 of WandaVision had some rather mature and even daring commentary in it that was, to my eyes, unexpected for “The Most Vanilla of Mainstream Takes, Inc.” aka Disney and it helped solidify for me why I might like “Tony” but I feel a visceral dislike of “Tony Stark aka Iron Man” as he’s portrayed in many movies. And I think I have a way to boil it down now:

Tony Stark is a perfect metaphor for American Imperialism - when you’re in his inner circle, know his struggles and his pain and his humanity, you can love him and even feel protective of him despite his immense wealth and power. But, if you’re outside of his inner circle, not a member of his family or closest friends, his power, money, arrogance, and blithe ignoring of the damage he has done even after deciding to be “one of the good guys” is utterly infuriating.

Now, to get into the WandaVision episode 8 spoilers:

Wanda was a normal kid radicalized into joining a terrorist group when American weaponry destroyed her home and family. To even have an American mainstream show admit that level of fault was a surprise to me. Seeing a Stark bomb land in an innocent families home and spark the same radicalization in “Sokovia” that has played out again and again in the Middle East due to American aggression, and seeing it actually addressed as a bad thing. Was, frankly, remarkable to see from Disney.

It just reminded me again of how infuriating I found Tony’s character in Age of Ultron and in Civil War, where for all his talk of becoming a better person after his ordeal in Afghanistan (Iron Man 1) there doesn’t seem to be a lot of actual remorse in his character. Very little about him changes, certainly his conviction that he has the right to choose for everyone else doesn’t diminish. The consequences never add up for him for things like creating Ultron which could have destroyed the world or getting his own friends locked up because he was wrong about the Accords (and always was, which is a hill I will die on, because of his immense privilege blinding him to the fact other people can’t just take off their superpowers the way he can remove the suit).

There’s a lot of little things too, like how in Spider-Man 2 (MCU) Stark Industries is working with the Department of Homeland Security, putting people like The Vulture out of business, for what would in the real world be multi-Billion dollar contracts. Money is never mentioned with regards to how much Tony makes as Iron Man, but there are little hints that it is a LOT and that he made MUCH MORE after becoming “Iron Man” than he did while being a mere weapons manufacturer.

Yes, as a person I care about Tony Stark’s humanity, his struggles, his traumas, his love of Pepper and his friends and of his daughter (even if I’m side-eying pretty hard the whole decision to let the 5 years of the Blip simply *exist* so he doesn’t lose his daughter, vs. simply undoing everything that happened and erasing the immense suffering the world went through and will continue to go through) but man there’s just moments where I see the “Tony can do no wrong” stuff and I’m just like, hold up, Tony does almost nothing but wrong and it’s very disturbing when this is ignored by the story and by fans. We can acknowledge him as deeply flawed and actually pretty remorseless as far as actually learning his lessons go, while still finding him a likable and engaging character.

#anti tony stark #effectively though I think it's nuanced I just don't want people to be surprised #he's a great person and character but also a terrible PERSON y'know?#wandavision #wandavision spoilers #spoilers #mcu meta

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esperanta-dragon · 3 years

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I feel like there is a need to write down why so many people hate Sylvanas so much, me included. Maybe you can’t stand her too OR you love her and you don’t understand why the hell people can hate such an amazing character. Here is why. And I will try to write this down logically as possible. No “hur dur I hate her because she is a bitch!”. No, I will put down all things so you can understand. And one sad disclaimer... it’s not the character’s fault.

WHY WE STARTED TO LOVE HER

Sylvanas showed up in Warcraft III as a Ranger General of Quel’thalas. She was protecting her country for quite some time when Arthas attacked Eversong Woods in order to get to Sunwell and resurrect Kel’Thuzad as a lich. Sylvanas paid with her life and her soul to protect her people and her country. She was made banshee and was forced to do things against her will and serve the Scourge she hated. But she was still plotting her revenge, didn’t give up until the moment came and she took the chance. She reclaimed her body back and almost killed Arthas, and took over Lordaeron City. Then she took over the undead slowly freeing from the Lich King’s grasp and gave them a place where to stay, becoming their Queen. And since then, she was planning to kill the Lich King for good.

That’s why we loved her (I never did, I will explain that later why). She really kicked his ass. She slapped the Scourge in the face. She never gave up and was doing everything to achieve her goals, her revenge. There are not so many such strong female characters, so resolute. She was not good but also not evil, she was shady, she was not the boring good guy. So why the hell people hate her? She is perfect! Let’s go to what happened during and after WotLK... Because here it starts.

WRATH OF THE LICH KING

As I said, many people adore Sylvanas since Warcraft III. But they don’t understand the character is not the same. She was never good, she was an anti-hero, that’s the fact (the Ebon Blade are also anti-heroes and they are not bad, they just do necessary things to keep the Scourge in check). She was doing everything to take revenge on Arthas. And everything means that she had no problems walking over corpses of her allies. Causalities because of my fault? Pfft! No matter as long as the piece of trash sitting on the Frozen Throne will get what he deserves!

This was pretty much visible after Wrathgate when Varimathras and Putress tried to take over Undercity and Alliance and the Horde saw what she is doing inside the city. Still fine, it was in character, she was doing EVERYTHING to take revenge on Arthas. Everything. That’s why she existed, why she kept going. Even back then, I didn’t hate her. She was still a very well-written character. This is what a character in her position would do.

But once everything was done, the Lich King was taken care of, she realized there is no point in her existence. She saw the Lich King was not destroyed. They only replaced him. So she threw herself from the Icecrown Citadel and fell on saronite spikes, the only thing that could definitely kill her.

And she ended up in a dark place. And the pain she felt was not like anything she felt before. It was the most horrible, the most inconsolable place. But val’kyras came down to her and sacrificed for her to get her back. Now we know what happened as we progress in the Shadowlands but... let’s say this was the beginning of the end for a good character Sylvanas once was. This was a start of cliché, inconsistency, and a great example that good characters should be allowed to go and leave so they can be remembered as a good characters.

WHAT CHANGED

Look, I came to WoW really late. I was playing on WotLK free servers as I could not afford to pay for official servers. But I knew the story in WotLK and I was still pretty ok with Sylvanas. I don’t remember hating her this much. She was well written.

It was Cataclysm Firelands patch when I finally could come to official servers. And Sylvanas was already doing pretty shady and disgusting stuff. I played Forsaken starting quest line so I know. Raising undead like the Lich King did? No problem for her. She even said she is like Arthas but she is working for the Horde (she never cared for them anyway, it was just more beneficial for her). What happened in Gilneas was not alright. Who gases the whole zone and making it inhabitable? Alright, let’s say Horde was expanding and Gilneas was next to Lordaeron. Alright. But back then, I finally dove deep into lore and I’ve noticed many people are really devoted to Sylvanas. It seemed almost like a cult. And every time I asked people, why they love this psyhopathic banshee, they were like: “She is my Queen! I love her, I would die for her! She is cool, she is taking care of us, she has a good heart!”

Something was amiss here... I couldn’t understand this. I couldn’t see what they saw. I saw a shady, ruthless and careless psychopath who is using her loyal subjects to save herself from something. And many people believed it even in BfA. Me and my friend had to show them excerpts from short stories where she say that “once they were arrows in her quiver, now they are bulwark against the darkness”. They couldn’t believe they loved Queen would not love them back!

But hey, still, I wanted to understand why people love her. I would understand if it would be still Warcraft III or WotLK, that’s fine. But Cata? Legion? BfA? Shadowlands?

So I started reading all books, short stories where she was. Articles about her. I tried to catch the glimpse of why people loved her: the majority told me she is still good and has a good heart and she is an amazing person. But I didn’t see it. Maybe I am stupid and I don’t understand, I am missing something... So I kept studying, trying to see anything good in her, I was failing. I saw a character falling more down into a pit full of anger and hate. Her loyalists said she was an amazing creature, loving, caring.

And the more I was told by people that she is caring and she has a good heart, the more I was getting disgusted and angry because the more I was reading about her and the more her loyalists told me, the more I saw what Sylvanas is: inconsistent character.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH SYLVANAS

In one book she was written like this. In another book, she was written like that. In one quest it was like this, then it was like that. In one expansion she behaved this way, in the next expansion, it was that way. She was doing more and more twisted things and her loyalists kept telling me she has a good heart. My frustration was growing to the point I could not stand her. It felt like I’ve met the person I knew was torturing her friends but when I met them, they told me with bruises on their faces and definitely mentally abused that she is amazing and it’s not her fault, she is just misunderstood and I should love her too.

When she killed Liam Greymane, loyalists were like: “I have no clue why Genn hates her so much! That stupid dog should die!” Yeah right, somebody kills your son and destroys your home, you have no reason to be angry, it’s ok.

She burns down Teldrassil and they said: “Why Tyrande wants to kill her? I hope Sylvanas kills her first!” Sure, somebody burns down a city with thousands of innocent people, it’s fine, let them go, no hard feelings. And sometimes these people are able to justify her actions with: “But this is fantasy! There is different morale than in real world!” Please, guys, never ever write a story. Never touch it. You will end up like Steve Danuser making characters to behave like idiots and without emotions. Stay away. Please. Do world the favor.

I was trying really hard. Trying to figure out what kind of character she is. Find a pattern. Because you can write a chaotic character and still find a pattern and it can be still a consistent character. But Sylvanas? I felt more and more that not even Blizzard knows what to do with her, how to write her... she felt more and more inconsistent and out of place with every expansion. And you know what? That happens to characters which are kept in the story longer than they should. If character losts a meaning of their existence, there are only two options: you either let them go or you have to find them a new meaning. And in case of Sylvanas, the second option led to a narrative disaster.

We were told by Blizzard: “Don’t worry! Everything falls in place! It makes sense what she does!” But after the Sanctum of Domination finale? It was a big fat lie...

Before I come to the cinematic, let me tell you what made me hate her beyond every possible measure: her fandom.

HITLER HAD A GOOD HEART!

In Legion, she was doing shady stuff. But in BfA? She became a Hitler. She burned down Teldrassil because... IDK she snapped and wanted to show one elven archer that you can kill hope? And what kind of catapults she had has reach 20 km? What kind of catapults can burn down incredibly big tree SOAKED in water with thick bark. Was that azerite or... no, I am not gonna get angry. And I won’t even start with the b*shit Blizzard pulled: “Look, just because Sylvanas is right in front of Teldrassil doesn’t mean it was her who burned it down!” They had to lie to us to look that they can create a better story than what it actually is.

She destroyed Undercity so Forsaken lost their home. Is this how you take care of your subjects if you are loving and caring? I think not.

And with her actions, millions of souls from the whole cosmos are going right into the Maw for eternal suffering. And why? Because she was scared. Because instead of thinking about herself and trying to change, she rather schemed with the god of death... who was responsible for her misery. And even teamed with Kel’Thuzad, who was reason of her fate in the first place! And yet, after all this, after mass genocide, destroying souls, millions, maybe billions of souls are suffering because of her... and you can still tell me there is still good in her and she deserves redemption arch... And with love say: “She got us into this, she will get us out of this <3 ^_^” So somebody is making everybody suffer and some people are like “Ooooh it’s fine, I support her! I bet she will realize what she is doing and she will save us!” Would you say the same about Hitler? That he was misunderstood, he was trying to fix something that’s why he murdered millions of people? I am just asking what kind of people her loyalists are in real life.

I have a question... would you still love her if she was a man? Or decomposing undead? Or if she wouldn’t be sexy elf at all? If she would be ugly? I think we all know the answer (disclaimer, beautiful people are not always kind and nice, what a surprise). I bet she would be already killed or hated by majority of the community at least two expansions back. Why Garrosh had to stand trial for war crimes and Sylvanas doesn’t? To be honest, I never liked Garrosh, I hated him, but I never hated him as much I hate Sylvanas. He was at least consistent to his very last moment. But I am fed up by the fact that everybody keeps excusing what she does just because she is a sexy elf. This is not character I can respect. How can you say about such character that she is cool when you know she is commiting genocide? Let’s replace her with ugly elf and let’s see how many of you will still love her.

If you love her because she is a crazy homicidal maniac and you want her to do evil stuff, go ahead, nothing wrong with you, it’s fine. You love her because you think that she has a good heart and she is sending millions of souls into hell because she wants to help us? Take your pills and think twice before going on date with a manipulative person who will use you, beat you but will tell you they love you so much while cheating on you. Thanks.

If you are lying to yourself that she is good and has a good heart because you are afraid you wouldn’t like her anymore as a bad guy, then you love illusion you made around her, not the character itself. And you should seriously think if you really love the character if you need to change it that much in your mind to keep loving her.

GRAND FINALE

“If they are gonna give her redemption arch, I am gonna puke.” Many people told me, they would not. They are not gonna do it. She is beyond redemption, she is antagonist, period. Guess what, they did. The cheapest way possible.

Blizzard kept telling us everything will make sense in the end, why she did all these things. But it did not. And it only confirmed my greatest fear: Sylvanas is an inconsistent character since Cataclysm.

Sylvanas was afraid to go to the Maw. So she got an amazing idea. Let’s free the god of death, the malevolent creature trapped there because for sure he is suffering just like me, and injustice was done to him. He is the reason of my suffering because he made Helm of Domination and Frostmourne, that’s why I was killed and I am like this? I am sure he is a good guy, in the end, let’s remake reality so there is no life and death! That guy must be pretty ok. Oh wait his job is to torture souls? No, I don’t believe he is bad.

So when Jailer gets all he wanted, ofc he say that he will remake all reality and everybody will serve. And Sylvanas realizes: “Oh my, he is just like the Lich King! I didn’t want this! I will never serve!” Even she served him for the past few expansions. And suddenly she sees he is a bad guy. Suddenly.

And then, Jailer gives her half of her soul back... So... this is the explanation? She was doing all this because she was not whole? Is this an excuse for genocide? Now we will all feel sorry for her? Tell her it’s ok, you were not yourself?

I am saying this all the years and I will say it again: the Ebon Blade are order full of those with a fate like Sylvanas. The whole order. Multiple characters suffered under the Lich King like her, lost themselves, were made to kill their friends, their families. And they, too, took revenge on him. But instead of going crazy and trying to hurt everybody because they were hurt, they tried to help and protect people. Maybe they are missing part of their souls too. But are they running around, burning innocents, committing genocide? No. So please, the is no excuse, she was aware of what she was doing. I am not buying this and for sure this won’t make me feel sorry for her. It was her choice. You can be depressed and hurt into the very core and still decide not to be homicidal maniac.

Another annoying thing is, Blizzard kept telling us she is a master strategist and she is highly inteligent. Would a highly inteligent person try to help somebody responsible for her suffering? Being ok with them? There was not shown how come she is ok with the Jailer! Look I thought she is smart but after the cinematic, she does not look like that.

What was her plan anyway? Did she believe such creature won’t betray her, he won’t dump her? I was hoping he will dump her and kill her. That would be the only ending fitting for the character. I didn’t want another Kerrigan, I didn’t want redemption arch for her... I was hoping I will finally like her as a villain. Now I can’t... there is no way I will like her ever again because Blizzard probably can’t do just evil characters. There always must be something behind, some explanation why they are like this. “I was good this whole time!” And I am tired of this... Suddenly I like Garrosh because he was an asshole but he was consistent. He had a good ending. He “died” like a boss.

THEY SHOULD HAVE LET HER DIE

And I mean it. If they would let her go after WotLK, it would be a good ending for her. Tragic end for the tragic character. She fulfilled her purpose and she would be remembered as a good consistent character. But she is making a lot of money, many people love her (not anymore, even people who liked her hate her now and her fanbase is getting smaller) so Blizzard decided they have to milk her as much as possible.

I think everything good should come to an end. “You would either die as a hero or live long enough to become a villain.” In this case “You would either die as a good character or live long enough to become inconsistent and annoying character.” And it happened.

Remember how people were angry how Thrall is getting a lot of attention in Cata? Haha, good old times. How about Sylvanas in 3 expansion cinematics (and some side cinematics like Reckoning, etc) and 2 expansions fully focusing on her (and some other expansions where she is a lot too). How about the 15th figure in a row. And 4th Blizzcon art. And I can keep going.

Metzen had favorite characters... but they were never overused as much as Sylvanas. Vol’jin was warchief for 1 expansion where he did nothing and then he died so she could take lead in story. So many characters are forgotten, pushed down so she can be on the spotlight. And I am sick of it. This is not single player, this is MMORPG. The world feels ridiculously small thanks to this, we have more characters than Sylvanas + 5 characters they keep using and recycling all the time.

And keep using Sylvanas and putting her into the spotlight all the time did not help. You can start hating character you liked before just because you have enough of them and you want to see other characters. This world has a big potential. So many characters are unused because of Sylvanas. Because the lead narrative designer loves her so much that he had to make her the main character of WoW and doesn’t care there is a whole world to take care of. And he does the worst job possible. Because he tried to make her complicated and complex and in the end he was just trying to make it look like that but it didn’t work out. It was just inconsistent. It didn’t fall in place.

Her plot armor is so laughable and it’s the most annoying thing about Sylvanas. How characters around her are so stupid and dumb so they can let her do such stuff (hello Horde in BfA). The whole universe and Blizzard especially is protecting Sylvanas of any harm. How can you like such character when it behaves like Mary Sue? I didn’t want to see cinematic how she comes and beat up really powerful guy without any issues. You know how interesting would be if Four Horsemen managed to arrive earlier and they wouldn’t know if to fight the Lich King or Sylvanas? No, Blizzard wanted to show lady Sylvanas Plotarmor.

And the worst thing is, I feel like Shadowlands are my last expansion in WoW. This is where the story ends for me. And I know that many characters won’t get resolution, many story arcs will never close because they’ve put too much effort to work on Sylvanas and ignore other characters. So many characters could have met. Lore in Shadowlands could have been expanded about The Scourge, death knights, rune magic, etc... it did not.

So no, Sylvanas is not one of the best characters created. If this is the best WoW can muster then there is nothing to be proud of. We would have good or better characters if Blizzard tried to work with more characters and give them space and a chance to develop. But we will never have them because Sylvanas took the spotlight.

Sylvanas for me is the character who will be put on guidelines on how to not use a character. This character will be perfect for DO NOT character development guidelines. And the whole story of WoW at least in BfA and Shadowlands is a great example of how to destroy the world with an amazing setting and characters.

I hope I’ve made this clear why many people hate her. Because it’s much more complex problem. This character was misused, written horribly, overused, was given a poor and cheap story arch, made look stupid and it no longer makes sense. And on top of that, many characters will never get a resolution, many storylines won’t be finished because all story was focused on her and not on the world. World which was supposed to be “everybody’s story” was made story about Sylvanas. Just because she sells.

Good job Danuser, I hope you are happy.

Tl;Dr: Sylvanas is inconsistent since Cataclysm because Blizzard tried to make her complex character artificially and failed horribly. She should have died after WotLK and never made Warchief. They should have let her go so we can remember her as a good consistent character

P.S.: I am not native speaker, sorry for grammar errors.

#Sylvanas Windrunner #World of Warcraft #wowlore #wotlk #wrath of the lich king #shadowlands #battle for azeroth #Legion #the Jailer #lich king #lore

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arlingtonpark · 3 years

Text

SNK 134 Review

Thank you. Thank you so much. This means so much to me.

(Ofc this chapter is called “In the Depths of Despair.”)

Sigh.

So, I guess I have to have an opinion on this chapter now.

For a while there, it looked like SNK had made the right choice.

Eren was the asshole. He was insubordinate, ungrateful, uncooperative, and above all else, a fucking sociopath. Cool, got it. One and done.

But then his friends started talking about how it was really their fault he’s doing this.

Ok, that’s fine. They’re desperate to stop him, so they’re just saying whatever they think will ingratiate themselves with Eren and help talk him down. Dynamics like that are very common in abusive relationships.

Now we arrive at this chapter, where even random people are saying Eren is a victim *as he is murdering them!*

It is patently absurd that Eren is having a warranted or natural or reasonable reaction to what he’s been through.

If Eren were a better person, he would have known that mass murder against the Eldians was wrong because mass murder is wrong. Unfortunately, Eren is a fundamentally amoral person. The only moral compass he has to guide him is a childish belief in “you hit me, so I get to hit you.”

He’s said as much on multiple occasions. He has said, “If someone tries to take my freedom away, I will take their freedom away.”

Instead of being the better man and ending the killing, his solution was to kill more people than them, faster and on a larger scale.

I think the clearest picture of Eren’s worldview was given when he spoke to Historia. He said the only way to end the cycle of violence was to destroy the whole world.

That is Eren’s deeply felt belief: there can be no peace or coexistence; the only way to win is to be the last man standing.

This mindset is so natural to him that he will even kill his friends for opposing him.

He told them that they were free to oppose him, and he was free to fight back. That’s how he justifies killing them to himself. They have the choice to oppose him, so if he fights back and kills them, it’s their fault they died, not his, because they could have made the choice to flee and live, but decided to stand and die.

In reality, the alliance is fulfilling a moral duty to protect life, while Eren is an asshole who has killed billions.

The series wasn’t kind to Eren about that. He was depicted as a cheering child as he murdered everyone. The Rumbling was not white washed either. The take away was obviously that Eren’s decision was not the product of a sound mind.

And yet.

Now I have to wonder if the series is seriously trying to say the Rumbling embodies some form of justice.

There are multiple layers to this issue, so let’s start at the surface level.

So in what is obviously a ham-fisted attempt by Isayama to lecture the audience about morality, a Random Commander Guy filibusters about the ills cast by the Marleyans on the Eldians and how this has rebounded back at them.

It is generally considered good writing for characters to get their just desserts. If someone sells drugs to kids, you expect something bad to happen to them. If someone helps a kid cross the street, you expect something good to happen to them.

What’s different between a generic case of just desserts in a story and this chapter in SNK is that the dessert is typically delivered through some nebulous, karmic force, rather than a vengeful twerp with God-like powers.

When the drug dealer’s car blows up, it’s karmic fate, not revenge.

The car doesn’t blow up because one of the kids devoted his life to exacting revenge, it’s because the car just blows up for no reason, or because something completely unrelated to the dealer causes a bomb to be planted in the car, or the dealer brought it on themselves by getting caught up with terrorists.

People may or may not deserve to suffer, but it’s fine to show people suffering if you’re just trying to make a point about how people should act.

Eren’s a different case. For several reasons.

To help untangle why, let’s think about the death penalty.

The death penalty is an example of retributive justice. Put simply, it’s the idea that retribution can be morally just.

The Rumbling is immoral precisely because it is something a supporter of retributive justice would emphatically NOT support.

Most supporters of the death penalty would justify it as an act by a legitimate societal authority. Eren is not that.

Eren is not an authority figure. He does not speak for the Eldian people and has no right to exact this genocide on their behalf. No one made him King of the Eldians. It’s not his place to decide what’s in the Eldian’s best interest.

Also, killing people because “it’s what the scumbag deserves” is usually justified because it’s a sentence for a crime handed down in a legal process.

Rights can be taken away, but not arbitrarily. Transparency is an important part of this. Acts that are a crime are public knowledge, as well as the prescribed punishments. The criminal law is also supposed to apply to everyone equally, not selectively. To say nothing of the law itself being duly enacted by a legitimate governmental authority.

The same principles apply to the process by which a right is taken away. The process must be laid out in a law that was duly enacted by a legitimate government authority, applies to everyone, and is publicly known.

Eren’s process, of *fucking* course, is nothing like this. Eren has no legitimate authority. He’s a Guy With an Opinion who bumbled into attaining absolute power, and now he’s acting on that Opinion.

He not the government punishing a convict. He’s a guy with a gun shooting people he doesn’t like. The Rumbling is not just retribution, it’s just murder.

Commander Guy says that if they knew this would happen, they would have acted differently.

That’s a good point.

Why the fuck do they deserve to die, then?

To some extent, everyone’s worse impulses are kept in check by the knowledge that there will be consequences if they act rashly.

But it’s not just that.

Laws are public knowledge for a reason: it’s fair. If you know your act is a crime and that performing said act will result in a certain punishment, then by committing the act anyway you have tacitly accepted whatever punishment will be meted out.

The moral onus is placed on you.

This is why knowledge that you are committing a crime is necessary to be convicted of a crime.

In principle, the case with the Marleyans is the same. Is it fair to punish someone for an act they did not know would carry that punishment? No.

They may know the act was immoral, but that is not the same thing as knowing it will lead directly to their death.

And needless to say, but you only deserve to be punished for an act if you deserve to be punished for that act. The Marleyans do not deserve to be punished for that act.

There are multiple ways a wrong can be righted. There are punitive ways, in which the perpetrator is harmed outright. There are also restorative ways, in which the victim is compensated for the harm done to them, usually at the expense of the perpetrator.

I have already explained why Eren lacks the authority to pass judgement on the world, and that the process by which he made his decision was completely illegitimate, but it needs to be said that this punishment is totally improper in itself.

Wiping out humanity is purely punitive. To use the obvious analogy, I don’t think any sane person would argue white people deserve to be punished for racism. Supporters of racial justice usually talk about restorative, rather than punitive, forms of justice, like reparations.

The Rumbling does not make the Eldians whole again. It does not restore their trampled dignity. It is purely an act of vengeance.

Casting it as some kind of deserving retribution is crazy.

Oh, and, you know, suffering is bad, so retributive justice is wrong even disregarding everything I just said.

You could theoretically believe life is a miracle, but that people forfeit that right if they act wrongly…it’s not something many people would support.

If Dino!Eren had been depicted as a random force of nature that visited ruination upon humanity, we could have potentially gotten a good story about how hatred leads to no good outcomes. Like how Godzilla is a metaphor for the ills of nuclear weapons.

Instead we get a nihilistic tale about two sides punching each other until one keels over dead. And somehow the one that keels over deserved it.

What makes it nihilistic is that you could easily reverse it. What if right before Eren destroys Fort Salta, aliens invade the Earth and help the Marleyans.

Now the Eldians are on the verge of annihilation and *Eldian* Commander Guy gets his turn to say “Woe is us who surrendered to hate. We deserve this.”

There is no right side or wrong side. No deserving side or innocent side. The Eldians were cheering for genocide the same as the Marleyans. The difference is the Eldians had a God on their side.

The morality of this series is just all over the place.

The Alliance and Eren are equally sinful, but now Eren is an agent of karmic destiny and his victims “deserve it.”

There isn’t much to talk about this chapter besides that.

Armin still hopes to take Eren alive, but good luck with that.

Eren can manifest other titans from his body, which is cool I guess, though it’s pretty clear this power only exists to give the Alliance things to fight.

There were a lot of allusions to parenthood this chapter. The baby and the cliff. Reiner’s mom realizing how shitty she’s been. Historia’s pregnancy. The Commander Guy saying it’s the fault of “us adults.” The numerous shots emphasizing the kids at Fort Salta.

Child abuse is a common theme of SNK. And not just parental abuse, but societal abuse, too. Children are the victims of individual foibles and broader social ills, like racism and police brutality.

The cycle of violence at the heart of the series’ conflict is bad for everyone, but the story emphasizes that it is bad for children in particular. It harms them, and leads to a world that is worse off for them.

If there’s one takeaway from SNK, it’s that we should think of the children. Adults shouldn’t just take care of their kids, they should fix broader social issues, if not for themselves then for the children’s sake.

It’s a fucking insult.

Historia’s pregnancy is all but confirmed here. There’s no way it’s fake. There may have been motive to fake being pregnant, but there is no fucking way she’d have a reason to fake *birth*.

I always leaned towards the pregnancy being real, so that didn’t get to me. What gets me is that Historia is just…there. On Paradis. On the sidelines.

Not only was Historia, who is the only likable female character in this show now, impregnated, she’s also been MIA most the last two story arcs.

I had thought Isayama was saving her for the finale. Surely, Isayama understands that if you sideline a major character for no reason, they have to come into play at some point, I thought. Surely.

Characters are tools; they exist to be used. So use them.

But no, it seems Historia is legit not going to be a thing in this final battle. My dreams of the domineering boss saving the day are dashed.

But what really messes with me is how shafted Historia has been since basically the end of the Uprising Arc.

Historia’s only contribution to the plot after Uprising, but before the pregnancy was making the disastrous decision to make the truth of the world public, which paved the way for Paradis society to become radicalized and back Eren’s coup.

She has done nothing other than that.

Obviously her pregnancy will have thematic importance, but at this point the best Historia stans can hope for is that she’s the main character in the epilogue.

I’ve always assumed the pregnancy was the product of a loving relationship. For all his incompetence with Historia, I was willing to assume Isayama would not force her to carry a forcibly impregnated child to term.

And you know that even if the child is the product of rape, Historia will still have to say she loves and accepts them as her child and will raise them lovingly, with no regard or acknowledgement of the trauma of having to raise a child born out of her being raped.

Because the theme of the story.

All life is a miracle.

All children deserve to be loved.

Even if it was rape.

Except it’s more complicated than that, and I’m terrified to think that Isayama may not understand that.

So for now, I choose to presume that Historia is pregnant because she loves someone, decided to have a family with them, and we’re being led to believe she was raped for shock value.

But arguably more important is what this means for the queer audience.

Historia’s first love interest was another woman.

She’s queer. A lesbian. A dyke. What have you.

Now you’re telling me she either loves a man, or was not only raped, but has to love and accept the child that results from that trauma?

And for what?

So we can end the manga on a speech by Historia moralizing about the value of posterity?

Historia stands at the nexus of two subjects in this manga: the value of posterity and the denigration of queer people.

It is very homophobic of this series to pair a queer character with a dude to affirm a message about the value of children and motherhood.

As if queer people can’t have children.

We seem to be headed down that path.

It didn’t have to be like this.

Queer people can have children through artificial insemination. And artificial insemination is conceivable with Paradis’ current level of technological development.

Isayama is choosing to do this because queer people are not a part of his vision of a world where people, especially children, are able to live free.

That’s very sad, because it shows how empty SNK’s morals are.

So who’s the slave here?

Who here is truly free?

The ones who are free are the ones who aren’t reading Attack on Titan anymore.

#attack on titan #shingeki no kyojin #snk 134 #snk chapter 134 #spoilers

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cetaceans-pls · 3 years

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Fandom: Batman - All Media Types Relationships: Jason Todd/Bruce Wayne Characters: Jason Todd, Bruce Wayne Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Attempted Kidnapping, Date Night at an Aquarium, Gone Terrifically Wrong, Dom/sub Undertones Series: Part 4 of Third Thursdays

A plainclothes mission at the Gotham Aquarium quickly goes off the rails when Jason and Bruce find themselves on the wrong end of a kidnapping attempt. A billion-dollar target out of the Batsuit, Bruce gets taken.

Jason comes fetch.

Happy late Lunar New Year + Valentine’s! Why do I keep forgetting to post things to my tumblr! Life’s full of mysteries!

Anyways, please enjoy the weird result of me thinking too much about aquariums and helmets that look like jackals, and have a good week 🙏

Fic also available below the cut:

Jason studiously doesn’t mess with his cuffs, tug on his necktie, or pull off his sunglasses. He hates being forced to manifest in a suit and tie; it’s a misery every single time he has to. However, knee-deep in the bowels of a pandemic that just won’t freakin’ quit, needs must. Sometimes a man’s got to cosplay as a high-tier bodyguard to fit in a date night on a Thursday, so sometimes a man will.

He fiddles with his earpiece, expression serious even though he’s really just trying to get the volume up on his audiobook. It adds to the aura of stern, scary bodyguard man, and it means that the wobbly-lipped, handsy director cuts short his long, long thank you speech to Bruce and waves them inside for their all-access tour of the Gotham Aquarium after dark. It’s a performance he and Bruce have repeated for most of a year now, and it’s the main avenue for Jason to work through his massive collection of audiobooks. Once a month or so Billionaire Fuckboy Bruce Wayne will get it into his head to book a library or a park or a zoo or a planetarium all to himself for fuck knows what, and he’ll be good and won’t break any social distancing rules or any furniture because it’s just him and his bodyguard staying through the night. Come morning the establishment will find themselves the recipients of a donation generous enough to keep their heads above water, while Brucie floats away on a cloud of expensive scotch to find his next flex.

Bruce has more money to his name than anybody ever, ever should, and these days he uses it to buy literal breathing space for much of Gotham’s public facilities struggling to stay afloat.

This is their first visit to the aquarium, because the social media intern-turned-manager here had managed to keep finances fiercely healthy by selling videos of aquarium creatures with personalised messages. Dick himself had commissioned a 30-second video of an aquarium worker whispering ‘wiggle wiggle wiggle’ into a microphone while the camera zoomed in and out from the moon jelly exhibition, and the number of Gothamites keeping their spirits up exclusively thanks to a video of a gently floating manatee quietly murmuring “You’re doing your best” is alarming.

That’s why it’s taken them a while to work their way here, but Jason has to admit he’s looking forward to a relaxing night walking around in mood lighting with B, heckling the occasional fish. Their last date night keeping Gotham’s ‘non-essential’ attractions open had been at the rec centre in the Narrows that’s been shut for months. Romance was thin on the ground there, because mid-date the Bat had taken over Bruce and decided that they owed it to the people of the city to make a few simple adjustments to improve water quality in the swimming pools.

Elbow-deep in an ancient pump and filtration system, Jason’s hand had gotten tangled in something while pulling out the filters. It had turned out to be a tangled, sopping wet mass of human hair the size of a cat, and for the first time in a while, he had wished he was dead and actually kind of meant it.

Tonight, though, promises to be smoother sailing. The aquarium’s not in dire disrepair, the staff have been instructed to keep out of their way and respect their privacy, and he has burritos and two bottles of mini-Merlot tucked in holsters that would hold guns on a lesser man. It’s perfect prep for a relaxing supper in front of the open water tank.

The director leads them in through the main entrance, still talking Bruce’s ear off while he gestures nervously around them and swipes at his thinning white hair. Jason follows after them, hand to his ear as he says a bunch of menacing gibberish into empty air. He and Bruce are incredibly dull on nights out like this, and have by Alfred’s decree been cut-off from work comms to decrease the chance of anyone on duty being rude jealous assholes. No one’s listening right now, but growling ‘Code Esper’ into his jacket has the director sweating even harder, which is the intended outcome. With a messily-babbled “Goodnight and goodbye Mister Wayne!” and an unwelcome pat on the small of Bruce’s back, the man disappears the way they came, heavy glass doors swinging shut.

Finally, the night’s starting to look better.

First thing Jason does is rip off his stupid sunglasses. It’s certainly an Expected Look for a bodyguard, but it’s 11 PM on a weekday night and on top of it being a hideous accessory, it sets his teeth on edge to have his vision obscured even while off-duty.

He also whips his tie off, because there’s a time and a place for choking and it’s not here, not yet. Jason runs his hand through his hair to break through the gel and scowls to see the black residue on his fingers. Makeup on his face, makeup in his hair, makeup pasted on to hide him in plain sight when other people get to go to Wendy’s barefaced and hand-in-hand as they pleased, urgh.

The world’s extra rough on the legally dead, even if he’s immediately mollified by Bruce sidling up to him, close enough that their hips bump and their fingers tangle.

Christ, rich man shampoo smells a whole lot different to the stuff you can get by the half-gallon in your local bodega. Jason is tempted to bite Bruce, find the closest cleaning cupboard and get up to some defilement, but it's a big aquarium and it’s a long night, so there's no rush.

The CCTV cameras aren't live, no red lights blinking, and it's supremely helpful how much privacy gets afforded to a billionaire and his potential debauchery in return for a big cheque. Jason slings an arm around Bruce's waist, because these are hard rights hard earned, and just grins at Bruce's long-suffering sigh. "Shut the hell up, this is crazy romantic. What do you want to see first?"

The answer is, inexplicably, the tropical freshwater exhibit, where they spend a solid half hour with an arapaima swimming up-down up-down a false river designed to look like the Amazon, their tiny bottles of wine in hand. Jason loses his mind first, pacing along the tank to follow the path of a fish longer than he or Bruce are tall, but within a minute Bruce is in lockstep with him as they stalk an innocent fish while they talk about not very much at all.

Bruce looks at the murkiness of the water and the cinematic dead leaves floating all over, expression gravely concerned. “They could do with a bigger aquarium.”

Jason groans, thumb absently picking at the label on his bottle. “Stop communing with the fish. It’s only barely cute when Damian gets really intense about animals, and the charm’s completely gone once you crack 6 feet.”

In his head, though, he can’t help but feel that yeah, more space for the arapaima would be nice, but hey.

Jason’s singularly terrible with small, tight spaces, so.

“C’mon,” he says, nudging Bruce so hard it’s mostly a shove. “Time to find out what sharks look like after-hours.”

“What’s normal operating hours for a shark?” Bruce asks just to be a pain, easily going where lead.

“Keep at it and I’ll shove you in the tank so you can find out.”

There’s a loose ceiling tile near the information counter in the main hall, right by the entrance leading to the enormous, floor-to-ceiling open water exhibit. There's a loose ceiling tile there because Jason had cased this joint a week ago, the way he checks out every place Bruce decides to take them to on nights like this, and that’s where he had decided to hide his kit. While Bruce walks from end to end of the tank, committing to pointless memory the names and traits of a hundred fish, Jason climbs up and into the ceiling to grab their party pack.

Tepid beer, pretzels, spicy chicken-flavoured chips, wet wipes. A heavy blanket, a bottle of hand sanitiser, Alfred’s cold-brew tea that could grow chest hairs on a rock. He’s even got a bottle of antacids to cover burrito-related maladies shoved into a first-aid kit so complete it could maybe, just maybe, regrow a limb. He dusts the heavy blanket off before he spreads it across the floor, where they have the best view of the most unbearably beautiful manta ray that could possibly exist.

Jason maybe preens a little when Bruce comes back from the edge and greets the spread with a bit of a smile. “Hurry it up already, dinner’s gonna get cold.”

The burritos get pulled out of their holsters as Bruce settles on the ground in the exacting, ginger manner of a man of a certain age whose knees have unfortunately passed their prime. They sit and eat while inoffensive jazz plays quietly over the speakers and fish go up and down and all around.

Ah, beats the ball of human hair by a country mile.

“This is nice,” Bruce says quietly, shrugging out of his coat and loosening his tie. There’s a sharp, bright gloss to him when he’s in Bruce-Wayne-Public-Performance mode, but Jason likes dishevelled, run-down Bruce who’s a little absent-minded and a lot human the best.

He likes this Bruce he’s earned.

“One of our better dates.” Jason holds up his bottle of beer expectantly, and feels profoundly smug when Bruce raises his to knock in a gentle toast. “Fuck, I can’t remember the last time I came to the aquarium. Must have been before.”

“Same,” Bruce says, and Jason wonders for a brief, harrowing moment if this holds true for the zoo and the planetarium and the rec centre and the public library and the-

He doesn’t get the time to linger on the thought and ponder, check to see if this is Bruce on a mission to form new memories in places that had held some from before a death in the family, because they’re interrupted by the sudden scream of a fire alarm.

They both tense where they’re sat, at the ready to fly into a fight in a suit and tie, but wherever the emergency might be it isn’t in here with them. Jason looks around, tries to catch smoke on the air, but it’s all stillness and the scent of disinfectant spray. Weird, that there’s no quiet stampede of night-time crew rushing to rescue their watery wards, no security guard sent on a quick mission by the director to save their cash cow.

Jason’s got a bad feeling about this. He gets to his feet and hauls the bag containing the first aid kit and other supplies up on his shoulder. “What the hell is going on?”

Bruce is fiddling with his phone, working through the security system of the aquarium. “All the cameras are down, so we have no visuals. The fire alarm in the deep sea exhibit was tripped manually, not by the smoke detector.” He frowns. “Carbon monoxide monitors didn’t register anything, and the sprinklers haven’t been triggered either. Could just be a fluke.”

Bruce doesn’t sound convinced, and neither is Jason. Assuming harmlessness is a great way to incur harm, and that’s something you learn damn early after starting up a vigilante lifestyle. Jason can only assume foul play of some sort, likely relating to Bruce, but there’s no way that an aquarium as big as this wouldn’t have night staff; civilians might be in danger.

Fuck, give him gross filters jammed with 27 years worth of dead skin cells over this. “I’ll go and check on the deep sea room.” If there’s no trouble, Jason’s mighty tempted to create some. “You should head back to the entrance, meet up with the sweaty director dude and evacuate. I’ll catch up with you after everything’s handled.”

Bruce looks pretty irritated to be asked to meekly make his way to safety, but pulling a Bat move right now would be incredibly bad optics. They both know his hands are tied, and Bruce sighs and climbs to his feet. “If I don’t get an update from you in fifteen minutes, I’m coming back in,” he tells Jason, crumpling the foil of his burrito and fastidiously stowing it away in the pocket of his slacks. “Comms check.”

They both tap at their discreet earpieces, and both wince at the screech of feedback when the comms activate and pair.

“Fifteen’s plenty.” Jason hikes his kit bag further up his shoulder, and pretends he’s not embarrassed when he tries to activate night vision on a mask he isn’t wearing.

“Jason,” Bruce says, calm, commanding, and quiet.

“What?”

“Be good.” It’s said like an order no one could want to refuse, but before Jason can get over his shivery shock and snap something back, Bruce is waving and disappearing out the hall, pulling on the skin of a simpler man.

Jason rubs at his neck and misses his helmet more keenly. This unbearable transparency of being; almost thirty whole ass years old and it’s astonishing how underneath it all he can still be so hideously eager to please.

“Please let there be a fucking crime,” Jason murmurs to himself, and disappears.

There is a crime, but it’s not even a good one.

Jason breaks into the deep sea exhibit through a utility hatch designed to access the cooling pipes for an elaborate sea sponge display. He’s quiet and mostly invisible when he surfaces in the room, and after a minute of letting his eyes adjust to the curated darkness, it’s easy to spot a man in a balaclava with a gun trained on the only door leading to the room.

He also quickly spots the terrified hostages huddled together under a display of what looked like demon jellyfish made of LEDs and blood. It’s easy to see the shape of the crime now; set off an alarm in an isolated area with only one known entrance and exit, and subdue people as they arrive. As long as the alarm kept blaring, staff would keep on coming, and by not triggering any of the smoke or carbon monoxide detectors the fire department remain clueless.

Excellent plan, great for catching anyone who hadn’t, oh, spent a solid 12 hours going through the schematics of the entire building out of an obsessive desire to create a space a Bat could relax in. Jason counts 11 hostages and just the one gunman, and tries not to groan.

There’s not much money to be had by robbing an aquarium, and judging by the degree of weaponry this isn’t some anti-aquarium demonstration organised via Facebook groups, powered by pandemic blues. No one’s liberating a shark or freeing Willy or anything nearly as fun. Ringing the alarm’s just an excellent, excellent way to control the movement of people.

There are only two ways to go; towards the fire or towards safety.

If you’re looking to net yourself a big fish, two small teams with a couple of free-roaming agents would be enough to ensure a catch rate of almost 100%. Jason highly, highly doubts that this whole song-and-dance was designed to abduct a frazzled researcher wearing a fuzzy sweater in radiant orange, or a stern-faced woman in a janitor’s uniform who looks alarmingly close to hulking out and breaking out of her bonds. He highly, highly suspects that there’s a reason outside of billionaire-envy to explain why the director of the aquarium had looked so dodgy and sweaty when he had welcomed Bruce.

Jason’s proven unfortunately right when the radio at the gunman’s hip crackles to life.

“We got Wayne.”

Of course they did. Bruce could hardly go to town and take down a bunch of armed kidnappers, especially if there are civilians near him. Jason tugs out his phone to update the Cave while the gunman grunts his reply and moves to turn off the fire alarm. Alfred asks Jason if he needs reinforcements as the guy tells the huddled terrified masses that he’ll kill them if they move, and Jason texts back a ‘no thank you’ as the goon strides out of the room, locking the door behind him.

The group of tied-up people burst into panicked chatter as soon as the gunman’s gone, and Jason uses the noise as cover for unzipping his bag and getting changed. Unlike Bruce, pulling on his second skin takes a lot longer, but once Jason tugs his red hood up and shucks off the bodyguard suit to stretch in his skin-tight armour, he feels twice the man and thrice as happy.

There’s no gun in the bag, there’s no gun anywhere near him, because it’s a self-imposed rule Jason has recently given himself for date nights. Bruce has been known to use anything from a screwdriver taped to a plank of wood to his literal bare stupid hands to pry things open in a whole-hearted effort to avoid having a crowbar anywhere in the Manor or in his life, and Jason wanted to repay like with like.

Doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck to not have his go-to weapon, though. He sighs as he straps a taser strong enough to knock God unconscious to his thigh, and sighs again when he pulls out a sickle in its leather holster. Alfred’s gotten terribly creative with what he packs for their nights out, but who is Jason to stand in the way of a man’s artistic expression?

Fully kitted-out, hood drawn and mask glowing, Jason shoves the bag back down the hatch and vaults over the top of the aquarium he was crouched behind, landing to the wild, panicked screams of the assembled staff.

His flashy entrance is totally unnecessary, and he knows the lights on the new helmet make him look less like a human and more like an abstract cryptid with a muzzle lined in blood. It’s spectacularly dramatic, but it releases some of the tension that’s been building in his body ever since he and Bruce split up.

He holds his hands up, forgetting the sickle in his fist, and the screaming hits a crescendo any opera would be proud of. It’s a little fucking hysterical, but Jason’s on the clock right now so he can’t savour this situation as much as he would have liked. “Calm the hell down, it’s just Red Hood here to save the day.”

The screaming eases up, though a gentleman in thick glasses and a threadbare labcoat does give a good ol’ screech when he comes closer towards them with the sickle set free. Jason ignores him and crouches down to cut the janitor lady free first. She spares a second to presumably calculate the chances of her beating him in a fight before she comes to a conclusion, shrugs, and turns to immediately start picking at the knots of the person next to her. Within a couple of minutes everyone is free, and everyone is scrambling to grab at things to arm themselves with. Jason eyes the selection of brandished pens and water bottles with mild delight, and nods respectfully at his lady and her bottle of bleach off the janitor’s cart because real recognises real. He does a quick scan to make sure there are no serious injuries or emergencies, and gets to his feet.

“All right, so this is apparently an attempt to kidnap Wayne, and you guys are just collateral. They’ll be clustered towards the main entrance, so get out through the most secret employees-only door you know. Stay together and stay quiet, and it’s gonna be fine. The Bat knows what’s going on, if that makes anyone feel better.” He considers how much he does and doesn’t want to share with the people assembled, before he decides that fuck it, being a shit-stirrer is pretty fun. “Pretty sure your big boss is in on it too, so if there’s an exit that guy won’t be familiar with, use that one.”

There’s a sharp intake of communal breath, before a young woman wearing waders and rubber gloves up to her shoulders raises her hand. “Do you mean Dr. Stevens?”

Jason shrugs. “Maybe?”

“Uhm. Short, all white hair, super skinny. Looks like someone you wouldn’t trust in a lab alone with a stressed-out postdoc of any gender because he gives off the vibe of a creep with varied tastes?”

Jason frowns at what the girl is saying, and the grim looks of much of the rest of the room. “Sounds about right.”

At least three separate people hiss motherfucker under their breaths, and three more say some version of I fucking knew it. The aquarium might not have had any severe financial issues, but oh, they’ve found a mess worse than too much human hair, looks like. Jason’s keener than ever to murder this Stevens dude, but he really, really doesn’t have the time to chair a HR complaint for the aquarium right now.

“Look, whatever goes down tonight I’m gonna give a Red Hood guarantee that the guy won’t be your boss anymore. Hell, Wayne’s going to be so grateful when I rescue him that I could get him to elect a different person to be in charge of this place even if this guy isn’t in cahoots with the kidnappers. So consider it handled, okay?” He straps the sickle back at his waist. “Now get the hell out of here. I’m counting on you.”

He nods at his bleach-wielding lady, and she nods back like the truest sort of comrade-in-arms.

Reassured, Jason kicks the door down and moves the fastest anyone’s ever moved in an aquarium, a red-faced wraith on a hunt.

Bruce courteously gasps when a hood is thrown over his head and secured, even though he had guessed the shape of the night’s events the moment he had reached the lobby and seen the half-wobbly half-cocky look to the director’s face from across the way. “What are you doing?” he demands in a shaky voice as he puts up token resistance, enough to look panicked but not enough to tempt someone into knocking him out and hauling him away.

Far too many questions to answer as to why a loafer coasting on generational wealth has more muscle mass than your average highly-trained mercenary, after all.

He counts his steps and tries to carve little signs into the pile of the carpeting with the toe of his loafers as he’s marched off, though he doubts Jason will need this trail of breadcrumbs to find him. “Let me go!” he yells, navigating the blueprint of the aquarium in his mind. Everyone ignores him, and his captors are none-too-gentle as they force him up some metal stairs.

Forty steps from the entrance to the lobby, a right, thirty steps, a left, a quiet beep, and now stairs. My, my, my, seems like they’ll be paying Dr. Stevens’ sea slug lab a visit. It’s a good location for a quick regroup, tucked away and locked behind several layers of security. Bruce imagines they won’t be here long; a good kidnapper doesn’t keep their victim where they found them, after all.

He’s roughly shoved into a chair and tied to it, rendered immobile by cuffs on his hands and rope round his legs, but it’s a cheap office chair and there’s give in his binds. He’s immobile, but only theoretically. Bruce keeps tugging at his bonds and cursing under his breath while he hopes that Stevens doesn’t bother to ask where his bodyguard has gone, has thought the worst of Jason and assumed that he had just run off.

It would make a rescue attempt much easier, though Bruce isn’t particularly worried. It’s a kidnapping force of, oh, five? Maybe six? Carpet muffles footsteps more than wooden floorboards do, but Bruce is pretty confident of his estimate. Six at most, with at least another team responsible for the fire alarm, so a worst-case scenario of twelve. As long as his measure of their competence isn’t too wrong, Bruce doesn’t anticipate anything worse than a couple of through-and-throughs if he has to fight through this himself.

He knows he won’t have to, though.

The people around him fall silent when their radio comes to life, a panicked man shouting “There’s someone here with us! It’s the Red-” before there’s a loud bang! followed by a terrifying silence.

“Ten,” someone yells tersely back. “Come in, Ten. What the hell was that?”

There’s a general rumble of unease in the room now, and Bruce is allowed a vicious, nasty smile because no one can see him under here. At least ten people are in on this, and about half of those are in here with him while the rest are out there with Jason. He considers making an effort to tap out in Morse how many goons are with him right now, since Jason has half a dozen ways to track his location with all the kit Bruce has on him, but decides against it.

Let the boy have some fun.

“Let me go, I’ll do anything you want,” he calls out half-heartedly, but no one gives a shit because there’s another panicked broadcast by another panicked man that cuts off abruptly. The tension in the room is palpable, feels more solid than the sack on his head, and it goes frizzy with electricity when the Red Hood’s terrifying static growl comes through on the radio.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Jason’s mangled voice croons through the line. Bruce feels goosebumps ripple up his arms, and feels oddly, hideously proud. “Two down, a few more to go. Hope you’ll put up more of a fight.”

Then there’s a sharp crack, and the line goes quiet.

“You promised me this would be just in-and-out! You said that Wayne would be out of here as soon as you got him! You didn’t say anything about a vigilante running me down in my own building!”

Ah, that’s Dr. Stevens losing his nerve. His tirade is cut short by a hard slap, it sounds like, and the voice Bruce thinks of as One is the only thing to be heard above the quiet whimpers of a panicking doctor.

“You agreed to do anything that needed to be done as long as you got a cut of the pay,” One says coldly. “Too late to get cold feet now, doctor.” There’s the sound of the walkie-talkie being turned back on. “Transport is incoming. Disappear and make your way out, regroup in safe house Gamma. It’s just one man against all of us, so don't lose your heads and we’ll get our money.”

Nobody responds verbally, probably because radio silence is golden when trying to beat a hasty retreat. Bruce feels his ropes come loose, and he’s forced to his feet as the kidnappers discuss their plans with more discretion than Stevens shooting off his mouth. He catches bits and pieces of conversation, mentions of the docks and allusions to the highest bidder, but everything goes instantly, deathly silent when the radio comes to life again.

“Three down, four down, five down. Be seeing you real soon, Mr. Wayne.”

Bruce doesn’t need to pretend to take in a shaky breath.

God, code names are an absolute necessity when carrying out this sort of dirty work, but Jason wants to have a sit-down with whoever decided to go with numbers for this little shindig. First man taken out and he already knows this goes at least ten fuckers deep. The leader’s figured out that yelling the number of men he has in his employ down a radio the enemy has access to isn’t a great idea, but somebody with an army of a hundred wouldn’t have been so concerned with the downing of one, so Jason’s pretty much got confirmation that this is a small-scale, quick-in quick-out kind of affair.

They’ll be looking to move Bruce, with that whole ‘transport incoming’ message. Jason’s got Bruce’s location pulled up, B’s comms actively recording vitals and transmitting its location, and from the lack of movement it’s easy to tell they’re planning a getaway through the front entrance.

He’s also happy to note that Bruce’s resting heart rate’s still at an insulting 45 beats a minute mid-kidnapping, though boy it sure did spike every time Red Hood sent out a message. Good to know, real fucking good to know.

After taking out the fifth guy, Jason doesn’t run into anybody else on his way to the main entrance, and he doesn’t particularly care if some small fry are getting away. The priority is getting Bruce to safety, and then doing clean-up on the kidnappers and Dr. Creepazoid. A showdown within the lobby is endlessly preferable to a showdown outside, if only because it’s easier to keep track of people if they can’t run away from you. Double-checking that Bruce actually is being slowly moved towards the main entrance from wherever they stashed him, Jason happily beats them to the front doors and barricades them in with him, stacking tables and chairs and cupboards into a heavy, impenetrable mess.

Sure, whoever’s coming to pick them up might be armed enough to break on through, but Jason has intimate knowledge of what mercenaries are like. Thoughts like ‘I sure as hell am not paid enough to deal with this’ are common and powerful enough to dissuade most mercs in this situation. It’s what you get when you team-build on money instead of insane, intangible things like love and loyalty, losers.

Jason looks around at the arena of his making and makes a quick decision to climb up a display case stuffed full of the toys kids can expect to see in the gift shop. It’s sturdy enough, though the thin metal frames groan a little under his weight. Jason sheathes his sickle and powers down the lights lining his helmet, lies in wait like a hungry dog in the dark as he calms his breathing and imagines what it will be like to beat the living daylights out of people who think it’s cool to disrupt a well-earned date on a much-anticipated night.

It’s another ten minutes or so before he picks up the sound of heavy feet trying to be unnaturally quiet on cheap carpet. They haven’t rounded the corner and they’re still out of sight, but with his helmet enhancing his hearing Jason’s already getting plenty of information. At least five people with heavy, careful steps, likely the assailants heavy in their armour and weapons. One set of footsteps shuffling along the carpet, all hesitance and distaste, and that’s got to be Stevens.

And in the middle of it all, walking in a weird off-kilter rhythm like a man who either has a stone in his shoe or is determined to make as distinctive a walk as possible, is Bruce. Up and walking of his own power, which is excellent. Jason doesn’t need to go into this fight concerned with keeping an unconscious Bruce safe. This is going to be an activity with full participation by all parties, hell yeah.

Speaking of participation.

Jason taps the side of his helmet and connects to Bruce’s comms. “B,” he says, low and sweet just to unsettle Bruce. “I’ve got altitude on a cabinet on the eastern wall of the entrance. I’ll see you right as you come in, and I’m gonna attack before anybody knows what’s happening. Get behind the reception desk if you can. Do you copy?”

As per the training handbook for situations when you’re too deep behind enemy lines to do much of anything, Bruce registers his acknowledgment with three sharp clicks, teeth clacking against each other in rapid succession.

Jason arches his back, loosening his muscles before he curls up again, ready to literally pounce. The footsteps are drawing closer, and they have just a few seconds before shit is going to hit the fan. He unhooks his sickle, and grins at absolutely nothing.

“Oh, and B?”

A click.

“Be good for me.”

Bruce’s heart rate spikes just as the group of men round the corner, and Jason’s laughing like a loon as the lines of his helmet burn back to life and he descends on the kidnappers, a hound out of hell.

There’s something primordially terrifying about seeing a fury in red and black descend on you from the sky. Bruce knows what the plan is, knows exactly how menacing a figure Jason can cut when he wants to be dramatic, but even then he couldn’t stop instinctively reaching for the handy, wicked little pocket knife in his pocket the second he saw the lines of the helmet glowing through the dark of his hood.

In the panicked yelling as Jason leaps into the fray and starts systematically annihilating a group of heavily armed men who can’t fight back without shooting each other, it’s easy for Bruce to break free of his captors and rip the sack off his head. He ducks under the flailing butt of a gun and takes a moment to shatter someone’s kneecap with the metal cuffs on his wrists before he’s rolling out of the way, belly-crawling towards the sturdy reception desk.

Dr. Stevens is yelling and trying to run away but Jason keeps plucking at him and pulling him back into the brawl with a vengeance Bruce grudgingly admires. By the time Bruce has climbed up on a chair to get a better view of the fight while staying mostly out of sight, half the men are already a groaning pile on the ground.

By the time Bruce has freed himself from his handcuffs, Stevens is an unconscious mess on the ground, and by the time Bruce has texted home and requested that Alfred call the police, it’s just Jason and One circling each other, both their faces hidden, blades in their hands.

Bruce notes with some interest that where Jason had kept his sickle sheathed and mostly used the blunt outer curve to knock people unconscious, the wicked edge is now out and gleaming as One strikes at him with a nasty Bowie knife. The hand-to-hand is quick and brutal, both of them trading hits and jabs. Whatever armour One is wearing is holding up well against Jason’s sickle, which is fair enough.

Bruce would need to get closer to know for sure, but it certainly looks like the sickle Alfred uses to carefully weed the tulip bed. No point in sharpening a gardening tool to be sharp enough to bite into flesh.

Less pleasing is how One’s knife doesn’t seem to struggle much with cutting through Jason’s costume. The new mesh Bruce had designed in response to Jason’s irritated demand for a slimmer, sleeker costume was supposed to be able to withstand most edged weapons, but even in the dark it’s easy to see where the black fabric has been cut and Jason’s skin and blood are visible instead. Trust Jason to do quality testing in the absolute worst times.

Back to the drawing board it is. One is taunting Jason, allowing Jason to swipe ineffectively at him before laughing and slashing back. “Is this all you got?” the man crows from behind his balaclava, radiating smugness. “I don’t know what I was worried about. I’ll have you and Wayne brought in for sale, and I wonder who the highest bidder will be.” Another quick jab, and Jason’s forearm is marked. “Wonder which of you Mister J would want more as a playmate.”

At that, Jason goes stock still. It’s so sudden that it clearly startles One, who retreats a little, knife up and ready to go. Bruce finds himself with his jaw clenched shut, teeth grinding so hard it’s like lockjaw in three seconds or less.

Of all the things some no-name budget kidnapper could have said. Bruce taps on his comms, opens a line to Jason, because if One keeps push push pushing like this, he won’t live to see morning.

One might not live to see the next minute, if Jason’s slow, terrifying stride towards him means anything.

“Jason,” Bruce whispers into the comm. “Jason, enough. You’ve done enough. Stop playing with your food, come here and let me check on you.”

Across the lobby, Jason once against draws to a halt, but it doesn’t stick. One figures out that actually, the Red Hood had been getting sliced up into ribbons more as a weird exploratory experience than because of a lack of skill, and he figures it out by way of Jason coming right up to him in the blink of an eye, disarming him by snapping the wrist of the hand holding the knife, and grabbing him by the throat with a grip tight enough to kill.

One is currently absolutely sure that he’s about to die.

So is Bruce, who knows that he cannot reach the man faster than Jason can snap a neck. “Jason!” he damn near bellows down the comms, damn near shouts across the room. “Enough. You come when called. You come when I call.”

And like a miracle, like the time Jason came back all those years ago and all the times Jason’s come for him ever since, it works.

One is dropped to the ground, unconscious and foaming at the mouth, and Jason’s barrelling towards Bruce.

As Bruce is swept up and back into the depths of the evacuated aquarium, he finds himself thinking we’ve had worse.

Jason isn’t sure why his first instinct after being called off of the murder of a singularly horrible man is to haul Bruce up and run to the deep sea exhibit, but he’s willing to admit to himself that calm only comes back to him when they’re finally buried in the quiet dark of a room of things softly bioluminescing.

He’s got no love lost for the Joker, has fought the bastard enough times since that it’s not residual fear that snapped him. Here, far far away from the wreckage, it’s easy to identify that his trigger had been superimposing the many, many horrors Jason has personally died from and lived through onto Bruce. Bruce who in many ways has the worst luck of any person he’s ever known, Bruce who would sooner rip into himself than be put into a Pit, Bruce who has to be careful with his burritos and his knees, put under the loveless purview of a madman with a crowbar.

Being protective of other people is generally a good thing, but trust Jason to wield care like a bludgeon. He scoffs, and drops Bruce unceremoniously next to the trapdoor. He could take off his helmet, no one and nothing could see him here, but the mortification of being seen out of control makes it really fucking unappealing.

Bruce sits up and looks around, acting like not a single weird thing has happened this entire night. “I’ve never seen the deep sea exhibition,” he says, like he’s having a normal conversation, like this is just the middle of a perfectly pleasant, perfectly average date.

“I saw a poster, they only built this section after I died,” Jason says dully.

Bruce hums like that’s information enough. “I’m glad we’re getting to see it then.” He tugs at Jason’s leg. “Sit.”

And Jason does, his legs folding underneath him before a thought’s even fully formed. He remembers when he was redesigning the helmet and was struggling to pick a look that was both menacing and just plain cool. The one he settled on had been one of Damian’s designs, all geometric shapes and the suggestion of creature. It had reminded him of a jackal, of Anubis, like death come in the shape of this thing with a muzzle and teeth.

Right now it feels like he’d chosen the look of a dog, a dog with the brand of bat to describe its master, and he feels like a mangy, wild thing desperate for Bruce, just for Bruce.

He takes back every mean, unkind thought he’s ever had about the date at the rec centre. Let him bury his hands into a dozen masses of gelatinous hair than force him to think about things like this, think about himself like this.

Jason’s tight with tension, but Bruce doesn’t push him to talk. Bruce doesn’t force him to do anything, just has a hand wrapped around the nape of Jason’s neck, thumb rubbing at the seam where metal helmet meets skin. They sit in this weird, tingly silence even as Alfred’s pings requesting an update become more urgent, and Jason realises that they’ll stay in this weird, tingly silence until he makes a move.

“What the fuck are we doing, B?” he says at last.

“Whatever we want to, Jaybird.” Bruce is ignoring a lot of his own damn rules about names in uniform, but he still seems remarkably unconcerned about everything. “How are you?”

Jason groans, giving up and tipping over so that he’s sprawled uncomfortably over Bruce’s legs. “Feel fucking awful. I can’t believe I’m the kind of guy that loses his shit just because some asshole said something vaguely threatening to you.”

“I think it shows good character.” Bruce rests a hand on Jason’s shoulder, the other still carefully cradling his head. “But I’m not a good judge of character, so take that with a grain of salt.”

Jason barks out a laugh at that. “You sure fucking are. I knew that director guy was skeezy the moment I saw him. Can’t believe he didn’t set off alarm bells in your head within the first thirty seconds, B.”

Bruce just shrugs. “If I reacted badly to everyone that I thought I couldn’t trust, I’d rarely get to stop.”

Well, the man’s got a point. “Still. He’s apparently shitty with staff too, so at least we’re solving a bunch of problems all at once with this night out.”

“Couldn’t have done it without you, Jason.”

Jason forces himself to sit back up, a little alarmed by the little note that’s appeared informing him that the police are about five minutes away from the aquarium. “That’s a damn lie and you know it.” Even the strongest of the kidnappers wasn’t anything much above average for a night out on patrol, and Bruce is nothing if not ruthlessly efficient when the fight’s in a public place.

Bruce gets to his feet, careful and ginger, and Jason can’t help but just stare at his stupid wholly-human knees. Bruce doesn’t mention it, doesn’t draw attention that renowned vigilante and crime boss the Red Hood has his head not a foot away from his legs, and just holds his hand out to him instead. “How about, I wouldn’t have enjoyed this night without you?”

Jason takes a moment to pretend to think about it, but he knows his answer. “I”ll take it.” Like he takes Bruce’s hand, like he takes things from Bruce because it’s what he wants and it’s what he’s earned. “I should get out of here before the pigs show up.”

“See you back at the Manor?” It’s only half past midnight, which means this date’s ended a good three hours earlier than their usual. Bruce looks like he’s asking only as an afterthought; of course Jason’s coming home with him.

Jason struggles to think of anything more pleasant than sitting out on their balcony in the dark with a hot drink in hand, electric blanket doggedly trying to keep them warm even as the outlet threatens to explode from the snow that’s supposed to start at 2 AM.

He also struggles to imagine how he’s going to be good company when his head is in as much disarray as it currently is. How open is Bruce to some heavy petting outdoors if Jason can’t convince himself to take his helmet off the whole time? How likely is the night to devolve into them sitting awkwardly in frigid silence until someone snaps and starts an argument just for the sake of a change of pace?

“Yeah, I’m thinking that’s not a good idea.”

That gets Bruce to stop shabbying himself up to look like an actual kidnapping victim, cuffs already locked again. “I see. Why is that?”

Jason shrugs, and is glad that his face is still unseen even if it feels like his whole damn body is letting B in on the secret. “It’s a 'feeling kinda feral' kinda day. I’m going to go blow off some steam.” Run a couple of laps around the lake in the memorial park, and if he gets close enough to hypothermia he might start forgetting the quiet kshkshh sound of delicate neck bones grinding under his hand.

He feels violence wiggling just an inch under his skin, and that’s another self-imposed rule for nights out with Bruce. Any time his grip on himself feels even a pound looser than it should be, Jason’s going to take time for himself because this deep into this relationship he’s surer than ever that there’s a hell of a lot of brutality he could let loose and Bruce would just take it and take it and take it.

Jason will not bite his mas-

He’s forcibly taken out of his thoughts by a sharp rap against his helmet. He strikes out instinctively, and catches Bruce's hand in a tight grip. “What the hell, B.”

“You weren’t responding,” Bruce tells him matter-of-factly, not pulling away. “I said, you can go and run yourself ragged. After that, you come home.”

“And why should I listen to you?”

Bruce smiles a proper smile, sharp and smug and sweet, and leans over to press a kiss to Jason’s hand wrapped around his own. “Because, Jason, I listened when you told me to keep away and keep safe. Isn’t it your turn now?”

It’s all about that give-and-take baby, and Jason just might fucking howl.

He releases Bruce in a flash, and his helmet’s unlatched and crashing to the ground not a second later. Bruce could have aikido’d him over his shoulder and flung him clear across the room because Jason’s not the most coordinated he’s ever been right now, but instead the man just widens his stance and wholly and easily accepts Jason throwing himself at Bruce face first.

It’s a maddening kiss, because Jason’s just shoved Bruce against the blood jelly tank so that he can get into position for a good grind when an alert goes off from his helmet, and Alfred’s too-loud voice calls out to tell them that “The police officers have arrived, sirs.”

Jason groans and pulls back slightly, trying to catch his breath as he digs his teeth into Bruce’s shoulder despite the three layers of expensive fabric in the way. “I hate everything,” he says, half-heartedly groping at Bruce’s chest.

“Hate it in your free time,” Bruce mutters into his hair, before choking a little because he caught a mouthful of semi-permanent dye. “On our nights, be good.”

Relationships are a contract, and Jason’s willingly agreed to these terms for, ah, close to a year now. It doesn’t mean he won’t grumble, or mess up Bruce’s perfectly styled hair just to make him grumble too. “Yeah, yeah, old man, I know what I’m about. Go and distract the cops already, I need to get away.”

Bruce lazily salutes him, looking dishevelled and mussed and suitably victimised. Jason is one damn inch away from dragging B down to the ground and reinstating his territory, god. Instead, he grabs his bag and picks up his helmet, and dawdles a little by the hatch. “You gonna be okay, old man?”

“Of course,” Bruce says confidently, ripping buttons off his coat and toeing one shoe off to look extra pathetic. “I have a hot date to keep. I’ll see you at home, Jason.”

What’s a man to do when given an order like that?

Jason obeys.

A/N: i’ve literally had ‘king tide come through’ listed as a title i wanted for something since last year?? it doesn’t even really mean anything i just love that the highest high tides are kings and it’s got such a nice ring to it. my approach to titling things is that it has to slap, thanks for coming to my TED talk ;9

#brujay #bruce wayne #jason todd #whale writing #i haven't been to many aquariums at all but #generally my idea of a good time is me being close to a Big Body Of Water #as long as i don't obsess on the survival rates of the lads in the tanks #being that close that much water is inexplainably soothing #and bc feb has been all sorts of miserable for me personally #i wanted some soothing

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css1992 · 5 years

Note

Do you take prompts? Cause I'm dying to read some good Mob boss Tony who's badass with everyone else and melts down for his baby Peter! :) Thank you anyways 😊

Hello there! I’m not sure I’m gonna take prompts yet, because I’m a really slow writer and would probably get overwhelmed way too quickly, but I do love myself some Mob Boss!Tony, I just needed an excuse to write it, haha.

@roleplayangelprincess, I really do hope you like this! Thank you for reaching out. XO

Mob Boss!Tony x Precious!Peter

Word count: 5k+

Warnings: explicit, nff, 18+, mentions of blood, violence, torture and child abuse (nothing explicit), no violence between main pairing. Mafia AU. If you spot anything else that might be triggering to anyone, please let me know!

-*-

Tony’s world had always smelt of gunpowder, blood and tears, for as long as he could remember. The only lullabies he knew were the sounds of shots being fired, screams of horror and desperate begging. Howard used to say it was important that he was raised in the middle of all that, he believed it would make him a tougher man, a firmer leader. He wanted Tony to experience all those situations he usually found himself in, because one day it would all be his – his whole empire, all of New York City’s underworld would be in the palm of his hands, and the scum of the earth that lived in it would be able to smell fear, weakness and softness from three thousand miles away.

So Tony never knew softness, kindness or gentleness. He was raised on blood, tears and gunpowder, to the sounds of screams, gunshots and begging. He was groomed to be a leader as heartless and cold as Howard, to be able to pull the trigger without hesitating. Cold and calculated. He was eight when he killed for the first time, just old enough to support the weight of the gun with both hands and handle its kickback.

The man had begged and cried, looking into his eyes, and Tony didn’t feel anything, he had heard those sounds so many times by then, it did nothing to him. Howard said “do it” and he did. He pulled the trigger. The man’s blood spattered his face and arms and shirt and it was weirdly warm, like teardrops on his skin. He stood there, mesmerized for a few seconds, before Maria told him to go clean up and get ready for supper.

That episode was his life in a nutshell, the smells, the sounds, the darkness, his mother’s reaction, his father’s nod of approval. He grew used to it all, he embraced it, he craved it, and he didn’t know anything else.

Until Peter.

Peter was a ray of fucking sunshine on Tony’s cloudy, dark days, and he hated it at first. He hated that he made his world brighter, he hated that Peter made him want to bend to his every wish, hated that he made him want to protect him from the world, hated that he made him feel so fucking vulnerable, and weak, and exposed, but he loved him. He fucking loved him so much. He had no idea when it started, but it felt like from day one, he never had a choice.

Tony had just left one of his clubs in a terrible mood, one of his most profitable deals had fallen though due to his employees’ incompetence and he had had to kill people – six, to be precise – it was a bloodbath, there was running and screaming and just nonsense in general, as he sat there and rolled his eyes at the failed escape attempts. To top it all off, there was blood on his favorite suit. It was a three-piece, Italian cut suit and it would go to waste thanks to those idiots running around like fools. All in all, a bad day.

“Excuse me, sir! Excuse me!” And then, sunshine. That chirpy, high-pitched voice coming from behind him was slightly annoying, and if he had been just a little more pissed he would have turned and shot him on the spot, no questions asked, but as it was, he’d maybe just tell him to fuck off.

When he turned around, though, there was a young man looking back at him, clearly scared now. Tony noticed that Rogers and Barnes had their guns pointed at him, as he raised his shaky, thin arms in surrender, a black, Italian leather wallet in his hand. “Y-you, y-you dr-drop...” He couldn’t even speak, so Tony took that time to look him over. He looked young, probably in his late teens or early twenties, he was thin and short and he had a very pretty face for a boy. He wore baggy jeans and an oversized NYU hoodie, so Tony guessed he was a student. In short, a very delicious meal for such a shitty night.

“Rogers, my wallet,” Tony cut the boy off, gesturing for Steve to get his wallet from him. He almost passed out when the blonde man approached him, still holding the gun to his face.

“I don’t mean any trouble, sir, I’m so sorry, I just found the wallet on the ground, I-I swear,” He whimpered pitifully and the sound made Tony’s cock twitch. He raised an eyebrow at himself.

“What are you doing here?” He asked, looking around to maybe try to figure out where the boy had come from. They were in a deserted area, somewhere between Queens and Brooklyn, near one of his clubs and a few of his warehouses, there was nothing around there that would justify Peter’s presence, unless he had ulterior motives and the college student get-up was just a ruse.

“W-walking home from work, sir. I-I didn’t have any money left f-for the subway,” He stuttered, hands still up, he was shaking all over now, and it usually didn’t bother Tony, but he was such a pretty thing, the older man didn’t like to see those squirming for the wrong reasons, he had other uses for them. If the boy was harmless, that terrible night could still be saved.

“What’s your name, boy?” That was all Natasha needed to run a background check on him and, in that moment, he found out the name of what would come to be his greatest weakness. Peter Parker. He looked at Barnes and he nodded quietly, sending a message to Natasha to run a quick check. As soon as it came back clear, he opened a big, shark-like smile at the still trembling boy. “Well, it appears we got off on the wrong foot, sweetheart.”

In retrospect, Tony wouldn’t be able to tell what possessed him that night, what made him think that it would be a good idea to lure him into his car and offer him a ride home. He knew that the boy did things to him, he was gorgeous and innocent-looking, a personal favorite, but Tony didn’t often act on impulse. Even his one-night-stands were carefully chosen and vetted, he couldn’t afford to take any risks; but that night, for the first time – the first of many –, he made an exception for Peter Parker. He didn’t know what made the younger man come with him, either, specially after being held at gunpoint by Rogers and Barnes, but he came, probably possessed by the same entity that clouded Tony’s judgment.

The mob boss made up a story about being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company and told him that Rogers and Barnes were his bodyguards. He wasn’t too far off from the truth, he did run a multi-billion dollar business and Barnes and Rogers were the only two people in the world he trusted with his life. He told the naive boy that he couldn’t tell him the company’s name for safety reasons, and he ate it all up like a good boy, got in the car with Tony and was easily charmed by his words.

What the older man didn’t count on, though, was that he was really charming, too, in his own way. He was smart and sharp, slightly sarcastic and sassy, and really, really sweet. The older man couldn’t quite understand why it attracted him so much when he took the boy back to his place, but it did, and when he had him sprawled on his one-thousand thread count Egyptian sheets, mouth slack and begging for more, he thought it was merely lust.

Only it didn’t go away after that first night, but Tony thought he just had to fuck him out of his system, which seemed easy enough. He invited Peter to dinner – unfortunately, he had to keep up the facade of being a nice gentleman if he wanted to have him again – and the boy was so fucking happy to hear from him when he picked up the phone. Tony could swear his room got brighter when his voice filled up the empty space.

He was just as charming and even more sassy the second time they met, a little less shy, a little bolder now that Tony knew what he looked like naked and stuffed full of his cock. He took him back home again. And again. And again. By the fifth time they got together, Tony realized – with the utmost horror – that he was beginning to care about the boy. He longed to see him, he wanted to know about his days; he was amused by his antics, he remembered the names of his friends from school, and the professors he liked and disliked. He wanted to hurt the people who made him sad for whatever reason, he was worried about his eating habits, he wanted to make all his money problems disappear. He cared about him.

So, logically, he had to kill him.

There was just no other way, Tony Stark couldn’t afford to care about anybody, it was too big of a weakness, it was gonna be his downfall and he couldn’t have it. So by the sixth night, he did what he had to do. He unwrapped the thin, pale arms from his chest, untucked the sweet-smelling head from under his chin, and got out of bed. He took his gun from the nightstand drawer and pointed it at Peter’s head.

He’d make it painless, the boy wouldn’t have to suffer, he’d die peacefully in his sleep. Tony would have to buy another bed, but other than that, it wouldn’t be much of a clean-up, the way the boy was lying almost in the center of the bed, there wouldn’t even be blood on the floor. Besides, he didn’t have any family left, he only had a couple of friends at school and two more who were away for college, so not many people to look for him. They’d think he’d moved away or something.

Tony stared at him over the barrel of his gun. As soon as he had stepped out of the bed, Peter reached for his pillow and clutched it like a doll, dreaming away, with an almost unnoticeable smile on his lips, completely unaware that he was sharing a bed with the most dangerous criminal in New York, possibly in the whole country. So innocent, and naive, and beautiful.

He was so tiny, so out of place in his cold, dark world. Peter didn’t smell like blood or gunpowder, he smelled like something sweet and edible, he never screamed or cried, he always had a bright smile for him and the most delectable laugh.

Tony faltered. No matter how hard he tried to will his finger to pull the trigger, he couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t fucking do it. He squeezed his eyes shut and lowered the gun, cursing under his breath, unable to believe he couldn’t do such a simple thing. Eight-years-old Tony hadn’t fucking blinked when Howard told him to do it. Why couldn’t he fucking do it?

“Tony? Is everything okay?” When he opened his eyes again, Peter was sitting up, and he looked worried. Tony noticed his eyes were fixed on the gun in his hand. “What’s going on?” He whispered, looking around the room, as if there was a threat out there, little did he know he was face to face with the devil himself.

“Nothing, sweetheart, I just thought I heard something. I checked, it’s nothing, go back to sleep.” He put the gun back in the drawer and the boy breathed a sigh of relief.

“Oh, good. Come back to bed, then.” He reached out his arms to Tony, so open and trusting, sitting on his big bed, swallowed by all those expensive sheets, wearing one of his old t-shirts. So fucking small, and breakable, and vulnerable. Tony couldn’t keep him. As long as the boy was alive, he would be a weakness, he could be used as leverage.

So he needed to die. It was for his own good.

The next day, he called Barnes into his office, lighted up a cigar and slowly smoked it as he tried to digest the words he had to say to him. The other man stood there stoically, waiting patiently, until Tony blurted out, “I need you to kill Peter.” He didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even flinch. Professional as ever.

“When do you need it done, boss?” Barnes was the best man for the job, Steve was great, but he was a little soft, and Tony saw the way he looked at the kid, with that small, discreet smile full of fondness.

“Tonight,” he said, jaw set, eyes narrowed. It needed to be done. “He has a night shift at the diner. He gets off at eleven, I want it done by then. You know the drill, be discreet, careful not to make much of a mess, don’t leave any witnesses, yada yada.” He gestured with his cigar, feeling detached, like he was talking about anybody else but Peter.

“You got it, boss.” Barnes nodded and turned to leave, only to be stopped by Tony’s voice.

“Barnes,” Tony didn’t look at him when he turned around. “Make it quick. And painless.”

“Of course.”

So Tony waited. And that day might as well have lasted a fucking year, the way the hours dragged, he couldn’t concentrate on his meetings, couldn’t fucking eat, not even his cigars were enough to calm him down. He was snapping at his employees, killing people for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, losing money for being too fucking off his game.

Around ten that night, he sat on his favorite armchair, the one one in which he and Peter fucked when they couldn’t even make it to the bed, and waited. He drank his scotch and pretended to think of something else, anything, but his mind kept going back to Peter’s lifeless body covered in blood. Gone forever. He lighted up a cigar and, when he noticed his fingers were fucking shaking as it approached eleven o’clock, he realized he couldn’t fucking do it. At ten fifty-eight, he called Barnes.

“Barnes, what’s your status?” He asked, a lump in his throat, afraid it was too late already.

“He’s gathering up his things to leave, boss.” He answered calmly and Tony sighed in relief.

“I’m calling it off. Come back here right now, you and Rogers.”

“Yes, boss.”

As he waited for them, he poured himself a glass of scotch, weighting his options. He couldn’t kill Peter, but he couldn’t let him be a weakness either, so he needed a plan. First of all, Peter couldn’t be kept in the dark anymore, it was too dangerous. Second of all, nobody could ever know about him, the only two people who already knew he existed were Barnes and Rogers, and he would keep it that way.

“It’s your duty to make sure no one knows about him. Not a single soul. I mean it.” He stared at them intently and they looked back at him impassibly, nodding. “If anyone gets a whiff of him, if anyone tries to harm him in any way, I’m gonna choose one of you to torture and kill and let the other one watch and then lock them in the same room with the body to watch it rot, are we clear?”

“Yes, boss,” they both answered in unison, unfazed. One of the reasons Tony trusted them with his life was because they were each other’s weakness, they were easy to threaten. The second reason, of course, was because they risked their lives to rescue him when the Ten Rings gang managed to kidnap him, under Obadiah Stane’s orders, the jealous bastard. Nobody else came but them, and they took down the whole gang by themselves. He rewarded them handsomely, and they became the highest ranking people in his inner circle, followed closely by Natasha and Bruce.

“Good. Bring him to me.”

Not even an hour later, Peter walked into his office, looking frightened. As soon as he saw Tony, though, he breathed a great sigh of relief, rushing to his side to sit on his lap and hold him tight. Tony raised a brow, confused.

“I was so worried, Bucky and Steve just picked me up and they wouldn’t say anything, I thought something had happened to you.” His little arms clutched his neck tightly, desperately, and Tony’s heart swelled with emotions he didn’t even know existed. He breathed in the boy’s scent, feeling nervous all of a sudden, he wasn’t sure why.

“We need to talk, Peter.” He held his head with both hands and pushed him a little. “Maybe you’ll want to sit a little farther away from me for what I’m about to tell you.”

“I know what you’re gonna tell me. Please, don’t.” Tony froze at that, muscles going rigid, eyes wide. He stared at the kid’s face and he looked embarrassed, sad and scared.

“What do you think you know, Pete?” He asked quietly, studying the boy’s reactions. He shrugged his shoulders, avoiding Tony’s eyes.

“I think you’re not really a CEO,” he whispered, as a single tear ran down his cheek. Tony reached out to dry it immediately. “I-I think you h-hurt people… And stuff.”

“What stuff? Why do you think that?” He tucked a curl behind his ear and placed a finger on his chin to force him too look at him.

“I don’t know what stuff, just… Stuff. Illegal stuff.” More tears followed and he closed his eyes briefly, opening them a few seconds later. Tony waited patiently. “I’ve heard you on the phone a few times, I can smell gunpowder on you. And – blood. And it’s never yours.” Tony nodded slowly, watching his boy falling apart before his eyes, he looked pained. He was clearly a lot smarter then he let on and a lot sneakier, if he had been listening in on his phone calls. Weirdly, the older man wasn’t even mad.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” He questioned, trying to dry his tears again, holding the boy’s cheeks in his palms. He nodded slowly.

“It terrifies me,” he admitted quietly. “But I – I just. I can’t stay away from you.” He frowned and Tony sighed, smiling softly.

“I couldn’t hurt you if I tried, baby boy.” He wanted to laugh at how true that was.

“I know. I think I know that, just. Just don’t tell me wh– I don’t want to know. The things you do.”

“Of course, it has nothing to do with you, you’re not a part of this world. I’m just gonna need you to be more careful, ok, baby? We’ll set a few ground rules, and everything will be just fine.” He rubbed the boys arms as he nodded, but he still seemed agitated and nervous. ”Are you okay, sweetheart?”

“I – Yeah, I guess.” He tried to smile but it turned into a grimace as a few more tears escaped his eyes. “I’m really scared.”

“Peter, listen to me. You don’t ever have to be scared, do you hear me? No one can touch you, you’re under my protection. Do you understand that? No one would dare, I swear to you. I swear it.” There was a lot of confidence in his voice, but he was terrified himself, he was afraid he couldn’t keep that promise, but Peter believed him. The way his face softened and he was finally able to smile again, Tony knew he believed him.

They took it one day at a time, slowly figuring out their own rules. After that talk, they didn’t see each other for a few weeks, just in case someone had taken notice of the fact that Peter had entered the tower seven times over the course of four months. Then, for the boy’s spring break, Tony took him to Japan for a week, where they could walk around freely, hand in hand, only taking a few precautions before traveling, like not boarding the same plane. After that, they were able to establish a weekly routine, they never met on the same day or at the same time, but they never went more than a week without seeing each other. Quickly, days turned into weeks, which turned into months, which turned into years. Two whole years, and Tony still couldn’t believe how a boy like Peter could belong with a monster like him.

“Boss, the prince is upstairs,” Barnes warned him as soon as he stepped into the tower, to Tony’s surprise. They hadn’t scheduled anything for that night and, for a few seconds, the older man panicked and it must have shown, no matter how hard he tried to suppress it. “He’s unharmed. He insisted that I brought him as a surprise, just a heads-up.” He added and the boss let out a breath slowly, nodding.

“Very well.”

Tony hurried upstairs and as soon as he stepped inside the apartment, he was gifted with the sight of his young lover sitting on his armchair. He was wearing one of the older man’s t-shirts, his favorite one, the oldest Tony owned. He didn’t seem to be wearing anything underneath it, as Tony got a glimpse of his cute little cock peeking out from under the hem of his shirt, between his parted legs. The boy was sleeping, head resting on a hand, propped on the arm of the chair.

The older man walked towards him, loosening his tie, then stopped in front of him. He knelt by his feet, stroked his calves lightly and kissed both of his knees softly. The boy’s eyes fluttered open in surprise, until they finally focused on Tony.

“My prince,” The older man greeted, kissing his way up the pale, plump legs, stopping at the hem of the t-shirt. “Did I keep you waiting?”

“Tony,” He mumbled sleepily, running his fingers through the other’s graying hair. “It’s okay, I was hoping to surprise you, actually, but I guess I fell asleep.” His hand slid towards the older man’s cheek and he leaned into it like a cat, turning a little to place a kiss on his palm.

“Good boy,” he resumed his kisses on pale, shivering thighs, and Peter sighed quietly. “What was this surprise about, baby boy?”

“Just missed you, it’s been a while,” Peter adjusted himself on the chair, sliding his lower half down the seat and spreading his legs wider, until Tony could see a sparkle between the boy’s cheeks, where his pink, tight hole should be. The young man was blushing slightly, Tony found it endearing that he still did, after all that time.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness, have I been neglecting you?” His fingers slid across Peter’s legs, thumbs drawing circles on the sensitive skin on the inside of his thighs, and the boy’s breath hitched as he got closer and closer to his balls. Tony saw his small cock flushing pink as it stood to attention, and the toy inside his hole jerked.

“It’s okay, you’re busy.” Which was absolutely true. Between Peter’s classes, Tony’s tight schedule and having to keep the boy a secret, there wasn’t a lot of time for them to meet, but Tony would correct that soon. When the boy graduated in a couple of months, he wouldn’t be such an easy target anymore, at least he wouldn’t have a predictable schedule in such a public place. He could live at the tower, where it was safe, and Barnes and Rogers could take care of him whenever he needed to go out.

“I was, little one, but I have all the time in the world for you now, let’s see this surprise of yours, shall we?” He spread Peter’s legs further, placing each of them on the arms of the chair, his boy was incredibly flexible, gorgeous to watch. He raised his shirt a little bit, just up to his stomach, but didn’t take it off. “Ah, I see. What a beautiful surprise you have there, baby boy. Thank you.” His little hole was stretched around the plug Tony had bought for him, a slick, black one, with jewels encrusted on the handle, now sticking out of him. It wasn’t too big or thick, he liked him to be tight, after all. “Did my prince come while putting this in?”

“Yes, sir… Twice,” He was already panting and Tony hadn’t even touched him where it mattered yet. He smirked and clicked his tongue, shaking his head.

“I’m so sorry, you must have been really starved for cock, right? Daddy haven’t been feeding you properly. We’re gonna correct this now.” He held the end of the plug and pushed it in a little more, moved it around a bit, only to hear his boy gasp when it brushed his sweet spot. Then he slowly started pulling it out, watching in amazement as his rim stretched to allow the thickest part of the toy to come out. Once it was completely out, his hole gaped for a few seconds, before clenching furiously around nothing.

The kneeling position was hard on his knees, but his prince deserved nothing less, so stayed there and leaned in, licking the wet, quivering hole, eliciting a desperate moan from Peter, as he held his own knees in an attempt to keep his legs spread open. Tony gripped his thin waist, fingers digging into his soft flesh, hard enough to leave marks, and tried to fuck his tongue inside him. Since it was already a little loose from the toy, it gave in and he was able to lick inside him, and the boy cried out in pleasure, rocking his hips against his mouth.

“Oh, I missed this, Tony… I missed this…” He mumbled, arching his back, and the older man kept going, tongue buried inside his hole, fucking and licking it, biting his ass cheeks carefully when the young man tried to close his thighs around his head. He tasted delicious and smelled amazing. Tony made his way up to his ball as he pressed two fingers into his hole. They went in with barely any resistance as the boy moaned desperately when Tony sucked his balls into his mouth.

Peter writhed on the chair, hands buried in the older man’s hair, trying to pull him closer, small whimpers leaving his mouth every time the man’s fingers brushed his prostate. Tony licked his way back to his hole, as he tried to fuck it with both his tongue and fingers, until he could see Peter was way too close to the edge.

He got up from the floor and undid his pants. As soon as his cock sprung free, Peter launched himself at it, grabbing it with one hand and sucking the head into his mouth, like a starving man. Tony’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he groaned, burying his fingers in his wild curls and tugging just a little, enough to prevent him from deep-throating his cock – he probably wouldn’t last long if he did, sometimes he thought he might come just from rimming him.

He held his head with both hands, setting a steady pace, and Peter obeyed happily. He licked the tip of his cock, kissed it gently, then went back to sucking as one of his hands came up to play with the older man’s heavy balls – he hadn’t come in days. He took a deep breath and allowed his boy to have his fun for a while, but then pushed him gently and lifted him from the chair, taking a seat himself.

“Come sit on your throne, my prince.” He grinned devilishly, and Peter didn’t even blink an as he placed a knee on each side of Tony’s thighs, reaching behind himself to guide his cock inside.

“Oh, fuck,” He cried, as he sank down onto his cock, mouth hanging open, head thrown back in ecstasy. Tony watched, mesmerized, as the boy took him in slowly, inch by inch, until his cock was completely sheathed inside his tight heat. Peter’s inner walls massaged him as his little hole fluttered, trying to adjust to his girth, and he made little sounds of pain and pleasure.

“You’re perfect, baby, perfect for me,” Tony held his face by the cheeks and brought him closer, licking his lips open to kiss him messily and hungrily. He’d missed him, too, his soft skin, his high-pitched voice, his tiny hands stroking his face, the bouncy, sweet-smelling curls. Peter truly belonged in another world, and although he should feel completely out of place in Tony’s arms, nothing ever felt so right in his life.

The younger man started moving after a few seconds, whimpering against Tony’s lips as he rocked his hips back and forth, up and down. His hands clutched the back of the chair as he bounced on the older man’s cock, following the pace set by Tony’s hands on his hips. The older man slapped his ass once, twice, only to see the boy coming undone, biting his lips and trying to stop himself from screaming.

“Let me hear you, baby,” he grunted, fucking up into him as he bit the younger man’s lips, holding his neck with a hand. When he slapped him a third time, Peter couldn’t hold it in anymore, he screamed the older man’s name as he came with a blinding force, arching his back and gripping his shoulders. If the sight of Peter out of his mind with pleasure wasn’t enough to push him over the edge, the way he clenched his hole on his cock would do it. The older man followed suit, as he grunted against the boy’s neck, leaving marks on his skin.

Peter went limp in his arms, completely relaxed and safe, arms wrapped around his shoulders as Tony held him close, protectively. If it were up to him, Peter would never leave the penthouse, he’d quit his job, and school, and be right there where Tony could look after him. But of course he was a feisty little one, so it wasn’t up to Tony.

“Have you eaten, little one?” He whispered, placing soft kisses on his shoulders and neck, and the boy shuddered.

“No, I was waiting for you.” He whispered back, snuggling further into his arms. “But now I’m sleepy.”

“Poor baby.” He placed a kiss on his temple. “Why don’t you take a nap while I cook you some Bucatini Carbonara, huh? Isn’t that your favorite?”

“No, I’ll cook, you always cook for me,” he mumbled against his neck and Tony could barely understand what he said.

“But you’re sleepy, baby. Besides, you’re a terrible cook on a good day.” Tony chuckled, feeling the boy laughing against his chest.

“Fine, I’ll help, then,” he compromised, pecking his lips.

“Sounds great.”

Peter carefully lifted off of his cock, then stepped out of the chair, hurrying to the bathroom. Tony watched, heart clenching, as his boy walked away. He squeezed his eyes shut for a minute, trying to rein in the feeling of dread that overtook him as he imagined Peter in danger, held captive by someone like him, someone as cruel and heartless as him, someone who would torture him, make him suffer, just to get to Tony. He opened his eyes wide, feeling helpless, as he realized there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to protect him. He’d give away his entire kingdom, he’d give his own life in exchange for his.

Peter came back to the living room, still wearing his old t-shirt, a huge grin on his face as he rambled about school. Tony smiled to himself. He was worth it.

#starker #peter parker x tony stark #ironspider #mafia au

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koko-bopp · 4 years

Text

Flirty Criminal

Part Five

criminal!song mingi x detective!male!reader

word count – 6k

genre – low-key mature

warning(s) – blackmail, lot of choking, gun warning, degrading, mentions of death and murder

synopsis – “[Y/N] [L/N] is known famously around his police precinct as the detective that the infamous criminal Song Mingi has a crush on. The detective denies these claims, though Mingi gets into as much trouble as possible just to see him.”

Mingi didn't know what to think, two months had gone by since the two of you were seeing each other. Not explicitly romantic, he liked you, but he didn't want to move to fast. For the last two months it had been about enjoying each other's presence and going on dates; like, fuck, he rented his friend's dog for three weeks just to take you to a dog cafe.

But, it had been a week since the whole fiasco of your soon-to-be ex-husband ruined the perfect date, it was also the night Mingi begun to be suspicious of your intentions with him.

Sure, a detective that technically works for the state and a criminal that has lived all his life going against the state was a little bit... foreign to many.

But, Mingi works in mysterious ways, it's safe to assume his brain resets any emotions he may have for a person as soon as something suspicious happens.

Not to say that Mingi didn't have his guard up the whole time he's been around you, but it gives a little sting in his heart thinking that you tried to play him as if he were a fool, Mingi wanted to know why specifically, Wayne Haulting was in charge of your operation, there's some history to be unveiled.

Mingi suggested that you come to his mansion for a date this time, since the last date ended up being interupted by a bafoon.

"How was work?" Mingi asked, his eyes fixated on the road ahead, but his attention to you.

"Relatively alright," You chuckled, "A kid and her dad came to the station with fajitas to give a thanks. It was sweet, made my whole afternoon."

Mingi smiled, then gently crawled his hand over it take yours into his. He interlocked fingers with you then bought it up to give it a small kiss.

"What?" You giggled.

"Nothing," Mingi said, suddenly a bit stern, "I just missed you."

✨

Mingi pushed you onto the leather couch so your back was against the neck of it. You watched him get on top of you immediately with a big smirk on his face, reaching down to peck your lips softly at first, then brought his hand up to cup your jaw to deepen his kisses.

Your eyes were closed, enjoying what Mingi was providing and vice versa. The smell of his cologne lingered in the air, and it made it all the more enjoyable. Mingi pulled away for a second, looking at you with a smile, "You good, baby?"

A soft sigh left your lips, indicating your answer, one that made Mingi content. He began to unbutton your shirt, only so much to reveal your chest, but he continued to mould his lips against yours until his hand moved from your jaw to your neck, a gentle but authoritative grip around the flesh. You could feel the smirk on his lips.

Though you felt something told against the side of your jaw. Metal and cold.

A gun.

Your eyes flew open and you pulled back from the kiss. Mingi opened his eyes like everything was normal, a dangerous smile on his face.

"M-mingi? What the fuck?" You accidently stuttered, placing a hand on his wrist.

"Baby," Mingi chuckled venomously, "You have ten minutes to explain to me why Haulting is so calm about us hanging out," He pushed the gun further into your skin, making your breath stiff, "Unless you want a bullet through your head."

You frowned, "You'd kill a detective and think you're not gonna suffer the consequences?"

"My house in sound proof, detective," Mingi laughed, "And kind of up a hill decently away from people, it would take about three days until people find you... And a few hours and good lawyers are all I need to get rid of you."

You'd been doing your best to remain calm, the hand around your throat and the gun at your jaw making you tense heavily, but Mingi's words were terrifying you the most.

His gripped around your throat tightened when you didn't respond almost immediately, "I think you're forgetting who's got the gun here, baby," he said lowly.

"I– Yeah, Haulting hired me to get dirt off you," You finally admitted, not hearing Mingi's chest shattering in the process.

"Is he looking for anything in particular?"

"The fuck do you think?" You snapped, the grip you had around his wrist was a lot firmer now and your brows were furrowed in anger, "You're a fucking criminal, Mingi. You've killed innocent people, you've distributed illegal substances and firearms–"

"Killed innocent people?" Mingi laughed bitterly, "Did you get that outta' Haulting's ass? Where'd you hear that from?"

You looked at him in confusion, but also in anger, "The police report said–"

"You're little tree-shredded report is bullshit. My gang aren't involved in drug trade or the killing of innocent people," Mingi spat, his jaw clenched. Seeing you get more confused got him to let out a humourless laugh, rolling his eyes as he pulled down the hammer of the gun, the second last step neccasery before pulling the trigger. He watched you squirm, but tightened his hold on your throat before frowning at you, both your noses only five or so inches from each other, "You're getting on my nerves a bit, baby."

"I don't know what answer you're hoping for!" You fought, "Yes, Haulting hired me to hang around you like a dog as soon as I requested to move precincts after Ty cheated on me–"

"So that wasn't a lie?" Mingi asked, almost too surprised. That would mean the night at the bar was the first day you were undercover.

You shook your head frantically.

"Anything interesting you found, Detective?" Now he got to the point, gun and throat in hand, whatever you next answer was determined your vital status, "You better share now, or you might hurt a bit."

"Fuck! I literally just know your schedule! Thats literally it!" You yelled at the point, tears definitely threatening to spill, the helplessness was getting overwhelming, "I know your fucking favourite colour is dark blue, I know you'd eat chicken for the rest of your life if you could, that you used to visit the sauna twice a week though it only depended on your free time, but you don't go anymore because you spend that time with me!"

You saying that turned some gears in your head. There was a silence in the room, like Mingi didn't know how to respond and honestly, you hadn't noticed Mingi's behaviour until you finally said it out loud. Mingi looked at you like your confession didn't bother him, when deep down, it kind of did.

An airless and bitter laugh left your lips, your eyes looking at as if you'd figured something out, "There's something I didn't figure out, isn't there?" You smiled sarcastically. Mingi didn't give you an immediate response, you took that as an answer, scoffing, "Shit. You're actually in love with me, aren't you?"

"You think too far and you actually missed a few steps, Detective," Mingi had his jaw locked in place as his heart accidently started beating too.

You laughed, "Then what, Mingi? what'd I miss?"

A fabricated smirk painted its way onto Mingi's lips. The gun still at hand and on your jaw, the grip around your throat becoming somewhat comfortable and less threatening. Somewhat. The look in Mingi's eyes became more like when a teacher would look at a particularly dumb student. "Haulting never told you my dad was involved in his game of weapon trade, huh?"

You furrowed your brows, swallowing so hard that that you could feel the gun move against your jaw. You didn't know where in Mingi's eyes to stare into, but yours were searching for other places. You quickly responded, "I have a feeling you're gonna tell me.."

Mingi scoffed, a grin on his lips, "Haulting owed my dad money long before he passed. Haulting didn't want to use his own cash to buy weapons, so made a deal with my old man that if he supplied him, Haulting wouldn't touch his gang."

You couldn't believe what you were hearing. Your mind was literally screaming at you that Mingi's wrong. He's a criminal, you can't trust them. They're dirty creatures with blood oozing from the cuts in their skin from every time they've gotten away with the things they do. Mingi is a criminal, you can't trust him.

He continued: "These aren't the toys you play with, baby boy. These were high-tech, fancy ass guns we gave. Because of the deal, though, Haulting wasn't putting enough people away. Pop's owns half the city, that's almost a million crooks he's ignoring," Mingi spoke like he was a had thought about this for a long time. He knew what Haulting did, and only turned a blind eye for appeasement's sake. "So he turned on my old man, threw hundreds of his underdogs working on the streets away. He didn't realise how much he needed the weapons when he lost it, so he begged on his fucking hands and knees in front of my dad to get em' back."

"Mingi, wait–"

He hushed you, cutely but only in a way to humour himself, "Let me finish, doll." He loosened the grip around your neck, letting your breathe that little bit more properly, but resumed regardless, "My dad wasn't a bitch, he didn't take shit from anyone, especially from someone who double crossed him. He told Haulting to pay up the cash he's used. Wanna know how much?"

It was rhetorical, but part of you still wanted to know.

"Quarter of a billion dollars," Mingi answered, "So after my old man died and I came in, Haulting thought he didn't need to pay up. New man, no need. But the minute I became mobb leader, I told Haulting he needed to pay if he wanted to avoid getting killed."

This was all too much to comprehend. Mingi's speaking another language, but this behaviour he claims in coming from your boss seemed to foreign. You've known Haulting when he was a Sargent up until he became a chief. Not that you were close to him, and that was probably why, but you'd never expect such a thing from him.

"It's been two years, not a single cent. Haulting doesn't have three security guards around him for no reason, he knows he's in trouble," Mingi drew his gun away, you felt he metal off your jaw and the grip on your neck full gone. He got off of you too, but you're adrenaline was taking its time to subside, hence you didn't have the energy to move. "Haulting owes me money. So he's tryna frame anything on me to make sure he doesn't need to. I've never killed innocent people, I've never been involved in drug trade, I've always paid my taxes."

The last one made you both giggle a bit, you weren't sure how you could, knowing a gun was in your face not even a minute ago.

You looked at Mingi, "What do you want me to do with this information?"

Mingi put a hand in his pocket, the gun still in hand, but his body facing slightly sidewards. There was a finger that was still on the trigger, "Here's what's gonna happen," He started, carefully taking a seat on the coffee table, now facing you, no expression other than serious, "Whatever Haulting tells you to do, you report it to me. Whatever Haulting finds, you tell me. Whatever you're about to tell Haulting, you tell me first."

You scoffed, bitter venom from your words, "Suck my ass, Mingi. I don't even know if the shit you've said are true."

"I already did. You were moaning my name like a slut," Mingi barked back, glaring at you, "You'll do as I say or Haulting learns that I found out you're his little puppy, I don't think he'll be pleased."

He was right. Especially if he was right about before. Bad things happen when you know too much..

Mingi got up into his feet, then took a harsh grip of your chin do you looked up at him. A gasp left your lips, one that made Mingi smirk, "Do we have an agreement, Doll? This is business now."

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space2write · 3 years

Text

An open letter to children of this world.

Dear children!

I hope all of you are doing well at your respective places. I know this is a tough time for all of you, but I also know that in this complete chaotic situation across the globe you are the single source of positive energy for all of us. I hope most of you are getting your square meal every day. I hope most of you are having your sleep during nighttime without any disturbances by any explosion, cries etc. I hope most of you have your parents with you in this time. I know some of my hopes are false even then I have these hopes. Since last 14-15 months the whole scenario of this world has been changed and we are fighting for the life. And children have been in more vulnerable situation, in fact children had always been in vulnerable condition whether it is fight between two countries, terrorist attack, earthquakes, drought, flood, and you can count it endlessly. Today I want to talk to children especially in this wake of situation, because this situation has compelled them to lock themselves inside their houses.

My beloved children we have never assumed that you will witness these atrocities of life. But this is true, and I am very sorry as we adults have not taken appropriate action to check these. We have made deadliest weapons to abolish the whole world within few minutes just by the click of button. But I am sorry to say that we have not made any such button that will bring smile on your faces. We have made this world as a big battle ground where one or other part is engaged in deadly fight, but it is our failure that we could not make this world as global playground where a child from east can play with child of west without any hesitation. Children I know very well that you have seen various undesirable things in your life and especially within last one year. Many of you have lost your dear ones and compelled to live alone, many of you have lost passed various days without proper food and clothes, many of you have suffered a lot. Apart from all these atrocities I have firm belief on you that you are stronger than any of us. I have fir belief that you are the only hope and intuition that will help us to make this planet a better place for living.

My beloved children since last one year all of you are out of your schools. You have not seen your classmates, your teachers, your library, playground, assembly area, auditorium etc. Many of you have virtually interacted with your teachers. I know you are missing your schools very much and believe me we teachers are missing you too. We are missing your nonstop noise, your naughty behavior, your cute fights, your innocent excuses, your lovely faces, your igniting thoughts. You know children without you these school buildings are like scary places. Every time when we pass through the corridors it seems that you are calling us from one corner. I know many of you are in contact with your schoolteachers virtually. And this is very new experience for you as well as for us too. We teachers have learnt a lot to make you learn through this virtual means of interaction and you too have enjoyed it. I have realized that this is a method to get in touch with you in this unprecedented situation, but it may not be an alternative of your physical presence in front of us. I am very much concerned for those friends who have not access to this virtual connectivity. And it is true that there is big chunk of your friends who do not have privilege to use it. And you know I am very much sad for those who have lost their opportunity of schooling due to this pandemic situation and it was not their choice, but they have to earn their bread because there was no one to support them. Over the period, it has been observed that.

1.5 billion children have been out of school-leading an educational crisis.

370 million children have been missed out on free school meals.

Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/charts-covid19-malnutrition-educaion-mental-health-children-world/

My beloved children, this pandemic has given us an opportunity to learn new norms of behavior. Among this hand wash, cover your face and avoid physical contact as much as possible are very crucial. Hygiene and sanitization have become our most valuable and important weapons to fight with this situation. And I know that most of you have learnt these habits. Now the time has come to use your existing knowledge and make other people aware about these. It is very well said that “Charity begins from home.” So first you must follow all the norms of hygiene and sanitization then say your family members to follow this and, in this way, you can spread the awareness across the globe. I have firm believe that when you tiny tots will request to anyone then they will follow it for sure.

My dear children, this is tough time for all of us. The tough time demands tough action from us. This time will pass, and we will return to our normal life. The most important thing that will remain with us after this pandemic will our behavior with others during this. First, we should try to help anyone who is in need. This help may be in any form. Sometimes your innocent smile, encouraging words help others to fight and overcome their burden.

Dear children, please take very much care of yourself, keep smiling, do not invite problems to you, follow hygiene and sanitizations norms, wear your mask, discover your new talents, keep reading, writing, painting, singing, dancing, and whatever you love to do without harming our nature. You are the only source of positive energy for the people around you.

It is time to say goodbye!

Stay home, stay safe.

See you soon in your schools.

Your schoolteacher.

#Children #Pandemic

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lostinthe-skyy · 3 years

Text

I finished Attack on Titan for some hours now. I don't think I hate the ending, it was very strong, emotional and intense, but at the same time some things don't make sense to me and feel, I don't know, kinda dumb?

I do have some trouble interpreting details when reading manga because some times I cannot identify what's going on without a color code to guide me, but Eren's plan was really weird to me in a couple of points (spoilers under the cut):

1. If he had the power to take away the titan ability and reverse all those who had become titans why didn't he used it earlier?

I get that he needed to make a statement to the world in order to try breaking the cycle of violence but I think he went waay further than he needed to, which brings us to my second doubt:

2. He didn't need to kill 80% of the whole humanity just to make that statement

In this I really think he went too far, nothing will convince me otherwise. Do you understand what 80% is? There is no possible justification for that.

Destroying the combined forces of the world's military (like he already did when he destroyed that navy) was already enough to cripple the retaliation and the next war for years. I don't know, he sent the rumble titan's on full speed when it wasn't really necessary.. He could have slowed things down, you know? If he killed 50% of humanity it would already be more than enough, i can't understand or accept this.

What I think that really bothers me is that the manga tries to make some holy character out of Eren, like he is the true hero because he endured it all, sacrificed himself and did all that he did to save his friends and give another chance for humanity to make things right, like its a strong excuse for all that he did, but no??! It's not!!

He went too far just because he wanted to. He killed 80% of humanity! Most weren't even soldiers, just civilians, confused and innocent civilians. Again, he already had made his point, his friends were already on route to stop him, but he just went full force ahead!

For clarification, today the world's population is around 7.858.016.940 billion people (worldometers.info). Its like he killed around 6.286.413.550 billion people, where on earth does this look fair? And the genocide he couldn't accept for the Eldians? He probably committed genocide with most of the world's cultures! Its like he killed every single country but China, for instance (he sparred around 1,6 billion and China's population today is around 1,4 billion)!

On a side note, he made Mikasa (and himself) suffer 100 times more for not making his feelings known. A short moment with your loved one doesn't compare, in heartbreak, than knowing that your feelings were reciprocate but were sacrificed and thinking of "what could have been". He could, and I dare say he should, have indulged in a romance with Mikasa on those years between the kiss on Historia's hand (that gave him all the knowledge about the future) and going awol in Marley.

Just one more thing: It pains me to say this because she was one of my favorites, but Hange's sacrifice and the way she died felt empty to me. I just didn't feel the sense of urgency for her to do that, the plane would get out anyway, they could have managed it without someone sacrificing themself.

Anyway, if you read all of this thank you, I'm just ranting here in this god forsaken website because I needed to get this out of my system. It is just my opinion and I'm not pissed because I shipped something or I simp for someone.. no, I'm just irritated for the murder of billions of innocent lives for no reason at all, and maybe it's because of the curent climate that we are living in the past two years but I'm kinda tired of seeing lots and lots of innocent people dying because those who have power simply do not care.

#attack on titan #attack on titan spoilers #shingeki no kyojin #shingeki manga #shingeki spoilers #spoilers #im just venting okay #and its 2am

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ultravioletsoul · 4 years

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Can you rank your fave CoD antagonists?

Hello there nonny, sorry for taking so long to reply and thank you for your ask ♥♥

Rank my favorite CoD antagonists? Sure, I can do that! There are several antagonists in the series, but I’ll only rank my top 3. Hope that is okay with you c:

3. Jonathan Irons

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Advanced Warfare may not be a series as popular as BO or MW, but I actually enjoyed the game and I also liked Irons. Honestly, I don’t think we’ve gotten that many antagonists that started out as our allies in CoD (at least I don’t remember any others atm), much any less an American antagonist, so that kinda made him stand out to me.

I’m not familiar with Kevin Spacey’s works, and I barely watched any trailers pre-release. So to see Irons go from someone who I believed genuinely wanted to make the world a better place, where every human being could live in peace and thrive, away from the pointless wars that governments waged, to someone who was willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals, regardless of how many lives he had to sacrifice... well, that was something that hit me hard.

This man who gave my character a second chance, who treated me (Mitchell) as his son, who cleaned up after the colossal mess that others countries made, helped people from devastated war-zones rebuild their lives and gave them hope for the future, turned out to be someone I was forced to betray because of different viewpoints and philosophies. Despite everything, I think Irons had his heart in the right place, but his methods were ultimately terrible and in his messianic delusions he ended up doing more harm than good, so of course he had to be stopped.

And what I liked about him was that he didn’t start out as a bad man, he didn’t do all those things because of greed, and his characterization wasn’t that of a cartoonish villain. In a way I could find logic in his arguments, he made a few good points about the current state of the world and the inability (or indifference) of many politicians to solve the real problems of the people. But the root of it all lies in the loss of his son, his only child, to a government he no longer trusted nor had any faith in doing what was right. Despite having served in the military in his youth, Irons had grown disillusioned at the way the US handled domestic and international policy, and strongly disagreed with them— opposing the status quo in favor of change.

One could argue that serving in the military was entirely Will’s choice all along, and as a grown adult he knew what he was getting himself into. Still Irons couldn’t help but think that if that war had never happened, Will would still be alive. So that left him with a bitter taste, and it served as the catalyst behind his actions.

If nobody else would bother to do anything to actually solve the world’s problems, then he would be the savior to do it— whether they liked it or not. And he didn’t care what methods he had to use, how many had to die, or if he had to plunge the world into total chaos before he could ultimately end all wars and bring everlasting “peace” (perhaps one of the greatest ironies) as his dream seemed to be. Even at the cost of such a high price.

I don’t think Irons gets the credit he deserves.

2. Raúl Menéndez

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BO2 is one of my favorite games and Raúl is undoubtedly one of the most memorable antagonists in the series. Much like Irons, his actions were heavily motivated by the loss of a loved one but his life is also one sad story, so it’s no wonder he turned out the way he did. Not to justify him, but it’s not hard to understand what led him to do all those things.

From a very young age, his life was destroyed by the actions of Americans, from the horrors of the dictatorship in Nicaragua (in which the Contras were supported by the US); the crippling and disfigurement of his young sister Josefina, due to the greed of an American owner who burned down a warehouse in order to obtain 11,000$ through insurance fraud. After losing everything during an earthquake, and becoming homeless, Raúl and his father started over by selling drugs, successfully establishing a cartel that was so powerful in Nicaragua that they were equally feared and admired among the people.

But this status and power they had newly acquired concerned the US government, and it wasn't long before they sanctioned an assassination order on Raúl's father and sent the CIA in to kill him. Raúl observed it all, a teenager back then, and managed to escape thanks to his father's training. Though he could do nothing to stop it, nothing to save his father, this event marked him and further embittered him against the US and the West. And the last straw was the unfortunate death of Josefina, at the hands of Woods. He lost his sister, the only living relative he had, and his world fell apart. But if we think about it, Raúl was indirectly responsible for her death too, after the horrible torture he put Woods through in Angola. So the next time Woods saw Raúl he lost his mind and threw the grenade that tragically bounced into Josefina's bedroom and killed her.

So he spent all his life orchestrating a huge plan, a brilliant plan, that would shake the US from the very ground. And he was damn charismatic while executing it, earning the support and approval of billions of people all around the world— even from those who lived in US soil!— to begin a world revolution and end the dominance of capitalist nations that had subjugated other weaker countries, amassing huge riches through market economy and wars for resources, destroying lives and sinking many in poverty. And he also manipulates and pits two superpowers against each other... sending everyone to the brink of another world war, or a second cold war at best.

He wanted revenge on the US for playing with the lives of other people, for taking everything he loved away from him, by making them live in fear and destroying everything they had built. He wanted them to feel the same pain, to suffer the way he did. And he wouldn't rest until he achieved that because he had nothing to lose anymore.

Depending on the outcome, he can get revenge on Woods for Josefina, as well. And though we all like it when the "good" guys prevail and foil the plans of the villain, I think this particular ending had a much deeper and stronger emotional impact. The conversation they have at the end is something I didn't expect. Raúl has come to kill Woods but they're both in a place where the years have beaten them down with the weight of they’ve done and rather than an over the top scene, what we’re given is quite the opposite of that.

There’s no screaming, no heated argument between them, no dramatic lines. It’s just two old men who had to live with what they’ve done, and who have come to terms with the inevitability of that moment. Raúl slits Woods’s artery with Josefina’s pendant, and then he does something that surprised me: he closes Frank’s eyes, takes him off the wheelchair and lies his body on the bed. Something that is a huge contrast with what he did to Hudson many years ago... the savagery he used when killing him. For Raúl to behave that way with Woods, the man he considered to be his sister’s killer, it raises the question as to whether he still hated Woods after all these years, or maybe deep down he finally acknowledges that his actions (namely torturing Woods and killing his whole team) was the true motive that led to Josefina’s death.

The thing is, Raúl knows that he's to blame for what happened. It's also the reason why he burns himself alive in front of Josefina's grave. It’s because he has to pay for what he's done to her, too, and he chose to do it in probably the most horrible way possible but it didn’t matter to him. Nothing was more painful than living with the knowledge that his sister died because of what he did.

To him Josefina was the true innocent soul, who didn't deserve any of the suffering she went through.

1. Vladimir Makarov

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It’s no secret that Vladimir is my most favorite antagonist (and character) in all of Call of Duty.

Though his background and motives weren’t as well developed and explained as those of other antagonists in the series, his untold story (which you won’t find anywhere in the game, though you can deduce if you have a basic idea of the situation before and after the fall of the Soviet Union) perhaps says a lot more about him than one might expect.

There’s not a lot we know about his past other than the meager information that was provided in some loading cutscenes, but it’s reasonable to think that Vladimir wasn’t always the trashbag that we see in the games. He once was a young man with dreams of patriotism, who wanted the best for his country, who loved Russia with his soul, and who would do anything to protect her, because as a soldier that was what he was taught to do. As a soldier, that was his purpose in life and without that reason to drive him on, he had nothing left.

And however vague his backstory may seem to be, it gives you an idea that Vladimir in a way was a victim of a system that imparted a type of soft indoctrination on him, from a very young age (as many states do all around the world in some form or another, even those who hold democratic values), all the way to his education in the military academy and his brutal training in the special forces, that further cemented this undying love for Russia, maybe in a way that bordered brainwashing.

His true radicalization came after the fall of the Soviet Union with the loss of his homeland and the Soviet culture as he knew it, as well as Russia becoming weak and losing much of her power and influence across the world. Then came his deployment in Chechnya in 1994, where he lived the horrors of a war that most likely left him psychologically scarred after the experiences he had to go through. And when he returned home, he was kicked out of the armed forces under accusations of human rights violations during the First Chechen War. And they may be true, he probably did a lot of bad things there (under the illusion that he was serving his country for a higher cause), and sadly it’s something commonplace in many armed conflicts. I’m going to leave this short post here for some details on that.

When he returned from war, he didn’t receive any professional help or if he did, it didn’t work. He didn’t know how to cope, he ultimately was unable to adapt to a normal life, he became a misfit. He had lost his job, he had a stain in his career, and finding a decent way to get by was very difficult at the time when the country was in the middle of a political, social, and economic crisis.

He was in financial ruin, and it was hunger that pushed him to become a criminal (something that wasn’t uncommon for ex military men in 90s Russia). Not just that but also hatred for those in power as well as society as a whole, and what they represented: total decadence and the reason why Russia was falling apart with these “stupid” western conceptions about freedom that in his eyes did nothing but give leeway for debauchery and corruption, which he ultimately sought to “fix” by returning Russia to what it used to be (a god-fearing empire under the autocratic rule of a tsar that was likened to a father to all his subjects, and where religion was used as a resource to legitimize his power and as a moral regulator that maintained the social order).

He pretty much felt abandoned, betrayed by his government— a leadership that had done nothing but sink Russia deeper and deeper into ruin, destroying the values under which he was raised and turning people like him into cynical masses that had lost faith in everything and were adrift without any real purpose in life, no future to look forward to, completely disillusioned that the dreams they’d bought into, the promises they had been sold by the west, were nothing but lies.

He’s still a piece of garbage, we know that, but I also think that he’s gone through a lot of struggles and bad experiences in his youth that marked him and filled him with resentment. Everyone sees Vladimir as the puppet master of the storyline of MW, and we have to give him credit for that, but deep down he’s just a man who has been a slave to his own obsessions and ambitions, unable to free himself from the hatred that has poisoned his mind for years, which led him to commit so many atrocities and strip himself from any semblance of humanity— all for the sake of a higher cause, as he undoubtedly tried to justify his actions at the end of the day.

In conclusion, all three were marked by losses in one way or another, and saw themselves as men who had to take the hard path and do what had to be done. And it’s also curious that Call of Duty, while not a game with any deep meaning on the surface, almost seems like social commentary on how war ruins lives and how anyone can do horrible things if put through the wringer enough times. It’s like these stories are trying to say that bad circumstances can make bad men out of seemingly good people, who wouldn’t have done any of the evil they did if maybe things had been different.

And I think that’s what makes these characters so interesting.

#vladimir makarov #raul menendez #jonathan irons #call of duty #modern warfare #black ops #advanced warfare #i'm really sorry again #it took me a while to write this one!#but it's done at long last c:

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